The game is afoot! Comic Con Express, Mumbai - Cosplay Chaos and Coolness!!

Dear Addicts,

Click to view in it's full-sized glory!

If you thought that Batman, Scarecrow, Wonder Women, Wolverine, Jafar, Joker and all the other awesome character - wonderfully donned by our very sporty Cosplayers in Delhi - were good, then you're in for a joy ride my friend, coz Comic Con Express Mumbai has declared the gaming season!

If the response in Delhi was a pleasant surprise for you, this one will be nothing short of Brahmic Bliss.

Mumbai's first ever Comic Convention - Comic Con Express has announced the Costume Contest open!!!

Click for full, glorious detail!

Oct-22 and 23, 2011, Mumbai will be the culmination of the glorious cosplay culture from all across India.

You will not only get to meet like-minded geeks, fellow fanboys (and girls, of course), be popular and cash in your 15 minutes of fame - as Mr. Warhol predicted - and overall have super fun, you can ALSO win some totally mind-blowing PRIZES!!!

Yes, you heard me right! So if you yell Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and break into a jiggy jazzy dance, I wouldn't really blame you. I'd have done the same, if I wasn't dance impaired!

So take out those threads, those sewing needles and machines, spandex rolls, capes, hats, overcoats, swords, guns, claws, lasers and anything else you have been stashing for years and get down to it, coz one thing is for sure! None of us Addicts are going down without a hell of a fight!

Wonder Bai and I'll see you there Bub.

Yours,
Fellow Addict. 

MARVEL NEWS: The Return of Soldier-X himself!

Welcome back to more wandering and wayfaring folks, its good to be back bringing you the slices of random awesomeness!

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I wanted to ease back into this after a month spent tirelessly and chaotically chasing down copies of the DC New 52 hot-off-the-presses and reviewing them after each week's Wednesday release – whoah was that a ride! Never did we think (me and my cohort, Anubhav – take a bow man!) that we would actually have to make ourselves read comics just to get through them to review them on time!

But now it is past, and while we here at Comic Addicts will keep on bringing you news from whats up with the new DCU, today we're venturing into other realms – more specifically Earth-616, or to the unfamiliar: The Marvel Universe.

Our topic for today is the impending return – in the centre of the next big Marvel-wide story arc – of arguably one of the most popular and definitely one of the most divisive and controversial characters among fan-dom. He has been known by many names: Nathan Winters, Soldier X, Nathan Summers, Nathan Dayspring Askani'Son, Priscilla (shout to to Deadpool fans!), etc, etc... but to most of the comic-reading and cartoon watching world-at-large he's simply Cable.

I'm not going into the character history and all that – its way longer and more intense then I can commit to just this one column/article/whatever, so just follow my link above to his bio over at Marvel.com and check it out for yourself at your leisure.

In the meantime, down to business!!

5 QUESTIONS with New Zealand Illustrator, Michel Mulipola

5 QUESTIONS is were I asked 5 questions of New Zealand Comic Book Creators, Writers and Artists.
This week I got a hold of Samoan Artists, Michel Mulipola and asked him the 5's. I met Michel through the local comic shop where he works in Auckland. Aside from being professional illustrator, Michel also wrestles in the local Impact Pro-Wrestling NZ. His character Kid-Liger's mask's adorn t-shirts. His illustration work is viewable on Kid-Liger. 

EXCLUSIVE: From the desk of Vivek Goel...

AMAZING!! 

Dream a dream...

The only word that comes to my mind when I think of the Indian comic convention is “Amazing”. Trust me when I say this, Comic conventions are probably the best thing that have happened to the Indian comic industry in the last 10+ years.

Project Ravanayan and the minds behind it were totally unaware of it during the 1^st Comic Con at Delhi and we, along with so many of our peers from outside Delhi, were not planning to visit it. But things totally changed as out of the blue an invite came to team Ravanayan (Vijayendra Mohanty and me) to attend the Comic Con and to conduct a workshop and an autograph signing session there. I spoke to my partner Vijayendra and decided that this is probably the best platform Ravanayan could ever get. I did not have any firm plan worked out to start Holy Cow Entertainment (HCE) by that time, I mean it was a bit dicy… I can now proudly say that it was the one of the few but best decisions that I took, that changed my position in the world of comics.

Manga Madness and the Big Cats.

Woah trippy. I hope this isnt yaoi.

Far away, across mists of time and space. Perhaps in a different world or simply in a different time there exists a land of golden Savannah. It is flanked by a dense forest, but its plains are vast and glow with the warmth of the sun. Proud are the lions who call this place their home. Humans and cats alike. Welcome to the Land of Lions, home to a proud warrior race. A lion is fierce and strong and defiant till the last, few can look a lion straight in the eye and hold its predator's gaze. Fewer still can walk away to tell the tale.

Read more »

I smell yaoi... -_-

Cassandra Jean's delightful fantasy webocomic/webmanga series caught my eye quite a while back actually. However on finding only three chapters available I simply filed it away as interesting in my memory and moved on. I recently rediscovered this gem and was greatly pleased to find stoic progress in the storyline. The story itself is the tale of the Knight Errant retold in the artist's own delightful mystical cloud. The lions are tall and strong, their hair golden and air proud. The Panthers who are their neighbors are dark haired with a thirst for knowledge. And surrounding these nations are other animal kingdoms. Gators and Crows, Oxes and Jackals and many more. The narrative follows Faris, First Knight of the Lions and his companions. They seek the Cup of the Gods to heal their king. Sound familiar?

Indeed good sirs and ladies it should. A tale of the round table is redrawn and reborn. However as I often say it is in the telling of tales that true magic lives. And in this telling Cassandra Jean excels. The neo tribal style and innate psychedelia of her art shines out, does wonders for the telling. Allowing for a vivid narrative with a deep flow. Although not proper manga this particular series is comic book brilliance and deserves to be recognized as such. You will be hooked, you will be wanting for more. And at the end of the day, that is what makes a true manga.

YAY no yaoi! (So far)

It is a combination of many things that make this comic worth your time. Its the tribal take on humanity's many conflicts, it is the simple tale of a Knight Errant made rich and complex by the sheer variety in characters possible. There are even Snails in the this land, short in stature and bad at fighting yet excellent at music. Inadvertently the mangaka has given birth to vast world limited only by the reader's imagination. For we know nothing of the Falcons or the Rhinos and the mysterious Tigers with their tattooed faces. We know nothing of the spirits that guide our heroes.

We know not what lies beyond the land of Crows? And we have yet to see the Ocean.

Oh and its not a scanlation, Land of Lions is a webcomic and is available in ebook format on Amazon.com. So those of us lacking a pirate's black hearted soul may rest easy. A great series, highly recommended to all Otakus. Land of Lions and everything else by Cassandra Jean, find it, read it, buy it.

Unlocking Locke & Key

It's October and that means it's time to get spooky. There is a demand for horror comics and yet there doesn't seem to be that many of them around. So what is a comic geek to do when they want a good scare? Luckily that's why we're here, to help out fellow comic addicts with dilemmas such as this. If you're looking for a good spooky read we recommend Locke & Key by Joe Hill.

Locke & Key is a series about a family named Locke. The father gets killed right in the beginning forcing his wife and three kids to move back to the old family homestead. Once there the youngest, Bode, starts to discover these keys that do fantastical things. His two older siblings, Tyler and Kinsey, also know about the keys, but they keep mom in the dark. Mom has become an alcoholic since her husband was killed and has one bad leg from when she was ravaged by the same perps.

The Con is on!

Hello everybody and welcome to Mumbai’s first ever Comic Con. Not exactly, though, that’s a better part of the month away but for me, it can’t come soon enough. And now, let me explain why.

When I was a seven year old kid, somewhere in streets of Mumbai, I read in a newspaper about Superman’s death. Now, I wasn’t deluded --- I knew that Superman is a fictional character; I wasn’t deluded into thinking that a real person had died. But he was real enough to mean something to people; so real that his death was news. And why not, if a man can fly, evade speeding bullets and melt lead with his eyes, doesn’t that make him human? Well, at least the papers thought so.

A year later, at a second hand book store, I found two issues of that storyline. I was elated! Inside that issue was a subscription form. Not knowing what a dollar is, I gingerly filled out the subscription form in that issue, and gave it to my father, who then told me about America, dollars, old subscription forms and shipping. There was another ad – for something called Chicago Comic Con (to the best of my memory) which advertised itself as the largest comic convention in the country. Whatever hopes I had of attending one of those were promptly crushed.