Emanata: Ten Comics We’re Still Waiting For

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We’ve been making note of some of the major comics projects due out in 2011–keep an eye out for a preview of what’s coming up next year on Techland in a couple of weeks. But there are also a handful of projects we’re dying to see that have been in the works for months or years, and aren’t officially scheduled yet. Here are a few extra-long-view coming attractions.

Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Thompson’s been working on his mammoth graphic novel about love in the world of Islam since Blankets, basically, and that was 2003. He’s said that he’s already drawn and redrawn thousands of pages of it, he’s been posting progress reports at his blog Doot Doot Garden (where he posted in September that the book was finished, although there’s still some post-production work to go), and the pages he’s shown in public so far are stupendously beautiful. The only thing missing is a date when the rest of the world gets to see the whole thing.

(More on Techland: Emanata: Adam Hines’ “Duncan the Wonder Dog”)

Alison Bechdel’s Love Life: A Case Study. The Fun Home cartoonist’s long-in-the-works follow-up is a memoir about about self and other and her relationship with her mother. She gave up her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For to work on this one, and given the way Fun Home batted it out of the park, it sounds like it’s going to be fantastic.

Paul Pope’s Battling Boy. Pope’s been doing lots of little projects over the past few years, and, reportedly, getting ready to wrap up his name-making THB series and collect it all as Total THB. This is apparently some kind of magnum opus, the excerpts Pope’s posted on his blog are enticing, and First Second has had us anticipating it for years. But that’s all we know.

Grant Morrison’s Multiversity. It’s not like we haven’t been getting a lot of Morrison lately–between his Batman titles, the apparently-soon-to-be-completed Joe the Barbarian, and side projects like 18 Days, he’s hardly spent a week away from the shelves. But this tour of DC’s parallel universes, including issues to be drawn by Frank Quitely and Cameron Stewart, sounds like it’ll play to all his strengths. While we’re at it, it’d be nice to see Morrison and Stewart’s Seaguy 3.

Gilbert Hernandez’s Maria M. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here–there’s at least one Hernandez graphic novel scheduled to appear before this one (Love from the Shadows). The premise of Maria M, though, is that it’s an adapatation of a nonexistent biopic about his character Luba’s mother–covering basically the same events as his mid-’90s graphic novel Poison River, but “fictionalized” in the manner of a Hollywood B-movie. It sounds sublimely screwed up, in other words.

Charles Burns’ The Hive. Has it only been a couple of months since Burns’ crazy Tintin/William S. Burroughs tribute X’ed Out (and its subsequent “bootleg remix” Johnny 23) came out? It already feels like we’ve been waiting for its sequel The Hive for millennia. Burns has an it’ll-be-done-when-it’s-done attitude about his work (it took him something like ten years to draw the magnificent Black Hole), but this project is so creepily thrilling we can’t help but be greedy for the next part.

(More on Techland: Emanata: Bad Alchemy)

Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder: Torch. It’s been a few years without a new book in McNeil’s mindbending science fiction series Finder, but that situation is finally being put right. Dark Horse is publishing a collection of the first four volumes early next year (full disclosure: I wrote the introduction), as well as a new volume called Voice, initially serialized online. But McNeil’s also already serialized most of another volume, Torch; that’s apparently going to appear in print a bit later.

Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s City Lights. The first officially published sign of this graphic novel was an interview with Ennis and Dillon about it in a 2003 one-shot, Vertigo X Anniversary Preview. They’ve apparently been working on it, very slowly, ever since; as of mid-2009, Ennis figured it would probably be done in about two years. Ennis and Dillon have worked together on Hellblazer, Preacher and Punisher, but some of Ennis’s best work is outside the “violent action thriller” genre; here’s hoping the recent turbulence at Vertigo doesn’t derail this project.

Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown and Building Stories. Ware has been serializing his two works-in-progress in Acme Novelty Library since he completed Jimmy Corrigan, and some of the individual chapters so far have been extraordinary–“Lint,” a.k.a. this year’s Acme Novelty Library #20, is apparently a section of Rusty Brown, and it’s a phenomenally powerful piece of work on its own. But don’t count on seeing the completed works any time soon.

Alan Moore and Steve Moore’s The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. The Moore non-siblings have been working on this guidebook to their system of magical thought and practice with what’s promised to be an all-star cast of artists for a few years now; Top Shelf’s site currently lists it as “a 2013 release.” To paraphrase Sun Ra, that’s after the end of the world–don’t they know that yet?

More on Techland:

Comics Geek Gift Guide 2010

Do Your Comics-Reading Homework Now for “Batman: Arkham City”

Your Kid Wants An iPad for the Holidays