Top Ten Reasons to Buy Teen Titans Spotlight: Cyborg - TODAY

The Top 10 reasons to buy my Teen Titans Spotlight: Cyborg trade TODAY:

10.He’s black. You’re not. Racist? Do the math.

9. Find out what’s underneath those steel underpants.

8. This Cyborg not in a wheelchair.

7. tCyborg trade: Man vs. Machine theme not explored enough Battlestar Galactica

6. You don’t need to read Final Crisis to understand it.

5. Surprise crossover with Marvel – he rapes Machine Man Iron Sheik style.

4. @Shaq promises to follow up his Steel performance when movie made.

3. Real reason for Vic's cybernetics – hit with bottle at Comicon

2. Cyborg trade: Sonic disruptor replaced by Sybian.

1. Cyborg trade: Vic finally cured…of being black!

All meant in jest...hope you'll pick it up if you weren't able to pick up any or all of the single issues.

Newsarama, CBR and Comics on Comics on Unthinkable; and On Decompression

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Particularly now, with the announcement of Unthinkable, I should be posting here like it was Twitter (which, incidentally - I'm on under "marksable"...that's been quite a drain on my time). But I've not only been writing Unthinkable and writing/managing the ARG (Alternate Reality Game), but doing everything I can to promote Unthinkable. From interviews to podcasts to cold-calling retailers.

Speaking of interviews, You can see Mark Waid interview me at Newsarama and read a great interview with Jeffrey Renaud at CBR. Finally...I did an audio podcast with the funny folks at Comics on Comics. I say audio because they also do video podcasts, one of which I was lucky enough to do last year.

The Newsarama piece features the 1st five pages of Unthinkable #1 (of 5). To keep to our exclusive arrangement, and take up the entire blog, I'm just going to show you Page 2:





Why not Page 1? Well, it's a splash, and you've seen those before. But the first 3 pages - 2 and 3 especially - are part of a really amazing opening sequence. I basically asked (Unthinkable artist) Julian Tedesco to cram pages worth of material into a variation of the nine-panel grid. He was able to do so without sacrificing detail. It's probably the single hardest thing I've ever asked an artist to do and he pulled it off effortlessly.

One thing I haven't talked about in the interviews is that Unthinkable is a really dense book. Not dense in the "inpenentrable" sense of the word, just dense in that, I wanted to tell a lot of story in 22 pages. For better or for worse, we're living in an age of decompression. But this is an epic, even if it's told in 5 issues, and I want it to feel that way.

Quite frankly, I don't believe the majority of comics right now are giving you the bang for the buck that other media are. Most comics don't tell a complete story...so you wind up paying $3.99 for what would be an act of a 4-act TV episode...when you can get an entire TV episode for $1.99 off itunes.

At the same time...decompression happened for a reason. While the comics of 2o or more years ago told a complete story...much of it was filled with redundant exposition.

In the past, I've written my creator owned books at closer to 32 pages than 22 pages, and I've done so at great expense to myself - both in terms of paying my collaborators and giving up ad space.

I'd think to think I've found an artist who can help me deliver the kind of density of great books from The Dark Knight Returns to The Wintermen, without heavy handed exposition. Ultimately, that means more story for you.

UNTHINKABLE - READ THE COMIC, PLAY THE GAME!

I'm proud to OFFICIALLY announce UNTHINKABLE, my latest, and I think greatest, creator-owned comic book series, coming this May from BOOM! Studios (and available for preorder NOW).

UNTHINKABLE is edgy spy thriller with roots in a controversial, real-world government initiative. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the Defense Department commissioned "think tanks" comprised of some of America's most darkly imaginitive writers. Since the 9-11 attacks seemed like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, the Pentagon asked these writers to come up with worst case terrorist scenarios. Their hope was that if our best writers could come up with these nightmare plots first, we could devise defenses before our terrorist enemies thought about, let alone planned, the next 9/11.

UNTHINKABLE tells the story of Alan Ripley, a (fictional) writer who joins this real life think tank, only to find that the devious terror attacks he imagined have started to come true. Realizing someone is using his imagination as a blueprint for terror, it's up to Ripley and his fellow Think Tank members to stop these unthinkable attacks they unwittingly planned from becoming reality.

With covers by GROUNDED artist Paul Azaceta:


And DMZ's Kristian Donaldson:

...interior art by rising star Julian Tedesco , and edited by Mark Waid (Kingdom Come) and Matt Gagnon, there's a dream team of creators helping me bring to life a story I've been researching and dying to tell for for years.

If my pitch isn't enough to convince you, than I'm hoping that THE UNTHINKABLE ARG (Altered Reality Game) will. An "ARG" is an interactive, online game that uses the real world as a platform. The UNTHINKABLE ARG, created by myself and a marketing team headed by BOOM!'s Chip Mosher, is the world's first ARG for a comic book.

Starting now, by going to http://www.wolfpackpmc.com,/ you can sign up to apply for an intelligence position in The Wolfpack, a (fictional) Private Military Contractor. Next week, those of you who are accepted into the Wolfpack's training program will be tasked to search the internet for clues that can help them apprehend the dangerous characters in the book. At the very least, the ARG is a way to get the kind of supplementary material found in books like Watchmen to readers for free. More than that, it gives you a chance to interact with UNTHINKABLE'S fictional players in a very real way. I've spent nearly as much time crafting the game as I have the comic, integrating the world of UNTHINKABLE into our own.

It's completely free to play, and there's a tangible prize for the winner(s). You can sign up for the game NOW at http://www.wolfpackpmc.com/ by clicking the "join" button.

I have had the privilege of working with many talented people on a wide variety of projects, but I can say without hesitation that both the comic and the game are the best work I've ever been involved with.

I hope you'll ask your retailer to pre-order the first issue by giving them the pre-order code of MAR094127.