Best known for his many Doc Savage paperback covers, James Bama: American Realist looked at these and much more of the artist’s work. Brian M. Kane wrote the text, and there was an Introduction by Harlan Ellison and a Foreword by Len Leone.
The subtitle of Steve Starger and J. David Spurlock’s Wally’s World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, the World’s Second-Best Comic Book Artist pretty much summed up the life of its subject. A deluxe hardcover edition included an extra sixteen-page portfolio.
Amphigorey Again collected a number of previously unpublished illustrations and unfinished work by the late Edward Gorey.
Origins: The Art of John Jude Palencar featured more than 100 paintings and drawings by the artist with a Foreword by Christopher Paolini and an Afterword by Arnie Fenner, who edited the volume with his wife Cathy.
As usual, the Fenners also edited Spectrum 13: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, which contained more than 400 pieces of art by some 300 different artists. Among those represented were Michael Whelan, Bob Eggleton, Brom, Leo and Diane Dillon, Donato Giancola, Adam Rex, Todd Lockwood and Thomas S. Kuebler, along with a profile of Grand Master Award winner Jeffrey Jones.
Ray Bradbury’s classic story The Homecoming was issued as a picture book, profusely illustrated by Dave McKean.
The Illustrated Dracula featured artwork by Jae Lee, and included Bram Stoker’s missing chapter, “Dracula’s Guest”, plus various non-fiction appendices by Marvin Kaye.
Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich and Other Stories You’re Sure to Like, Because They’re All About Monsters, and Some of Them Are Also About Food. You Like Food, Don’t You? Well, All Right Then was the full title of Adam Rex’s beautifully illustrated children’s book featuring poems about all the classic creatures.
Mommy?, written by Arthur Yorinks with art by Maurice Sendak, was a pop-up picture book about a little boy searching for his missing mother who encountered many of the classic monsters.
Poet Laura Leuck teamed up with artist Gris Grimly for Santa Claws, a frighteningly festive tale about two boys at Christmas.
From Fantagraphics Books, Beasts! was subtitled A Pictorial Schedule of Traditional Hidden Creatures. Conceived, designed and edited by Jacob Covey, the attractively-produced hardcover volume collected artwork from ninety of the best visual artists from the worlds of comics, skate graphics, rock posters, animation, children’s books, and commercial and fine art.
London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, which still holds the copyright to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the EU, protested at the publication of Lost Girls, an erotic graphic novel by Alan Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie featuring the sexually explicit adventures of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz on the eve of the First World War.
The hospital, which was bequeathed the rights to his books by Barrie, claimed that Moore’s title would need their permission or license to publish. In response, the author told the BBC that “It wasn’t our intention to try to provoke a ban”. Lost Girls was subsequently issued as a three-volume deluxe hardcover set in the US by Top Shelf Productions. When pre-orders exceeded the 10,000-copy first printing, the book went into a second edition before publication. However, following discussions between the publisher and Great Ormond Street Hospital, publication of the book in the European Union was delayed until 2008, when the Peter Pan copyright expires.
Avatar’s George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead comics series launched with a special introductory issue, “Back from the Grave”, written by original creators Romero and John Russo and set in 1968, prior to events in the first movie. The launch edition was available in six variant editions with alternate covers by artists Jacen Burrows (“Regular” and “Splatter”), Sebastian Fiumara (“Rotting”), Juan Jose Ryp (“Terror”) and Tim Vigil (“Gore”). A special “Foil” edition came packaged with a poster signed by Romero and was limited to just 600 copies.
Many of Marvel’s superheroes turned up as the walking dead in writer Robert Kirkman’s Marvel Zombies five-issue series, with gruesome covers echoing classic comic book images of old.
Dark Horse Comics’ Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror contained reprint graphic versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, along with a new painted cover by Eric Powell.
The Dark Horse Book of Monsters featured a new “Hellboy” story by Mike Mignola, Kurt Busiek and Keith Giffen presented a tribute to Jack Kirby’s creature comics of the 1960s, while Garry Gianni illustrated William Hope Hodgson’s “A Tropical Terror”.
IDW Publishing adapted Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show as a twelve-part series. Designed as a homage to the old Warren comics magazines, IDW’s Doomed featured graphic adaptations of stories by, amongst others, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and F. Paul Wilson.
Reprinted by Headpress as a large format paperback, The Complete Saga of the Victims by “Archaic” Alan Heweston and Suso Rego originally appeared in the early 1970s in the Skyward horror comic Scream. A tale of two sexy women kidnapped and tortured by all kinds of monsters, the graphic novel included the previously unpublished sixth episode.
The “Best Sellers Illustrated” series featured Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest illustrated by Dick Giordano and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue illustrated by Frank Brunner.
Also available was a young adult graphic adaptation of Dracula, written by Gary Reed and illustrated by Becky Cloonan.
Disney’s exuberant if self-indulgent sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest smashed Spider-Man 2’s opening record of $114.8 million in America with a three-day take of $132 million. It went straight to the #1 slot on both sides of the Atlantic, became the second-fastest movie to ever pass the $400 million mark (forty-five days) and was the top-grossing film of the year in the UK with a box-office take of almost £52 million. The film also became the fastest-selling DVD ever in the UK as, during the run-up to Christmas, one in four DVDs sold was a copy of Dead Man’s Chest.
Despite their success with the Pirates sequel, Walt Disney announced that they would cut 650 studio jobs to concentrate on creating blockbuster franchises over more adult subjects. Film output would be reduced from around eighteen titles a year to a dozen, with about ten being released under the Disney name and those under the Touchstone banner being cut back to two or three releases a year.
James Wong’s silly but stylish Final Destination 3 was held off the top spot by the long-delayed remake of The Pink Panther in America and Disney’s animated Chicken Little in the UK. Following the premise of the earlier entries, a group of teens who survived a roller-coaster disaster discovered in various gruesome ways that they couldn’t cheat Death (the voice of Tony Todd). The DVD release included a new interactive feature that let the viewer change the course of the plot. (So much for the auteur theory.)