What Are Some Comic Books or Graphic Novels You Have Been

We know that Star Wars will continue forward after Episode IX is complete, but at this point, we have no idea exactly how. That being said, it's looking more and more clear what the next Star Wars Story will be. While we know that Rian Johnson is working on an entirely new trilogy and the guys behind Game of Thrones are also working on Star Wars projects. The prevailing sentiment is that the first movie following the current trilogy will focus on Obi-Wan Kenobi, and a new rumor seems to reinforce the idea, reporting that pre-production on the project is now in full swing.

The report comes from Star Wars fan site Fantha Tracks, and the source is unnamed, so at the moment let's call this a rumor, but according to the rumor, pre-production, including concept artists, storyboard artists, and prop modelers are currently working at Pinewood Studios in London with additional work being done at the London location of Industrial Light & Magic. According to the report, the new Obi-Wan movie is set to go into full production in early 2019 with a December 2020 release date.

While this may be just a rumor, the fact that an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie being planned for 2020 is the only real rumor that we've heard at all, would lend some credence to the idea. We know Lucasfilm plans to release one Star Wars movie a year, which means something is likely coming for 2020, and this idea is the only one that seems to have any momentum behind it.

It certainly wouldn't be shocking. An Obi-Wan Kenobi movie, possibly even a trilogy, has been rumored since almost the beginning of the Disney Star Wars era. Ewan McGregor has repeatedly said he's open to returning to the role, and he's now the perfect age to play the part in a movie set between the original and prequel trilogies.


If there's anything that would make me question the idea, it's the December 2020 release date. The mid-December date that the rest of the current Star Wars movies have been using is already booked for 2020 by a little movie called Avatar 2, and while that movie feels like it could be even more of a figment than the Obi-Wan movie, considering how far it's already been pushed back, if it does come out, it will be a major competitor for screen space. Studios usually don't release tentpole films head-to-head like that. Not to say it couldn't happen, but it seems unlikely.

It's also a bit surprising that so much work is apparently being done on a movie that has never been officially announced. Lucasfilm may be trying to get other things set so it can announce an entire future slate of Star Wars movies down the road, but whatever the reason, if this movie is real, just how far along will it get before the studio admits it's real?

From Star Trek to Captain Marvel, a super squad of female film-makers are proving action and sci-fi movies aren’t just for the boys



Move over, Avengers: female directors and screenwriters have been assembling their own super-squad, spreading their powers across major movie franchises as they reshape Hollywood’s image of a blockbuster – and who can make one.



Captain Marvel, out next year, will be the Marvel franchise’s first female-led blockbuster by every rubric: Oscar-winner Brie Larson stars, six of the seven screenwriters are women, and co-director Anna Boden is the series’ first female director to see an entire film through. (Patty Jenkins was hired, then fired, from Thor 2: The Dark World in 2011, before breaking box-office records with last summer’s Wonder Woman.) In the DC universe, Ava DuVernay is directing the fantastical heaven-versus-hell epic The New Gods, and Cathy Yan is doing the same for Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn girl-gang spin-off Birds of Prey, written by Christina Hodson, who is also scripting Batgirl.



Elsewhere in the galaxy, SJ Clarkson is helming the next Star Trek, while here on Earth screenwriters Kira Snyder, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Amanda Silver have been rejuvenating established properties such as Pacific Rim, Planet of the Apes, Tomb Raider, Jurassic World and Transformers.



“Girls and women have always loved comics and fantasy,” says writer-director Angela Robinson, whose biopic Professor Marston and the Wonder Women saluted the two female muses who helped create DC’s Diana Prince. “There’s a land where Wonder Woman would have been a man if not for Elizabeth Marston,” explains Robinson. “William Moulton Marston wanted to create a superhero and [his wife] Elizabeth Holloway Marston quipped: ‘Fine, but make her a woman.’” That dare inspired an army of female heroines, who mostly stayed on paper in 2D, or scampered around the margins of major male characters’ movies.



Patty Jenkins directs Gal Gadot on the set of WonderWoman, 2017.

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Patty Jenkins directs Gal Gadot on the set of Wonder Woman, 2017. Photograph: Clay Enos/Warner Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

“When I was starting out as a screenwriter, the people I met with often made me feel like a unicorn: ‘A woman who loves to write sci-fi and action? How unusual!’” says Snyder, who co-wrote Pacific Rim: Uprising and is a writer and supervising producer on The Handmaid’s Tale. “But the fact was – and is – that this isn’t unusual.”





The women were there; the jobs weren’t. So what’s behind the industry’s rapid change?



The historical hurdle has been Hollywood’s refusal to let these geek-loving women prove their worth – in the office and in cinemas. Studios credited male audiences for the success of male-directed hits, assuming that the women in the cinema had simply been dragged in by their dates. With their opinions calcified, producers wouldn’t even give female film-makers – and female films – a shot.



Rachel Talalay became the first woman to direct a comic-book flick with 1995’s Tank Girl, a cult hit that fell short of mainstream success. Hollywood didn’t green-light another girl-powered property for a decade, and the stinging back-to-back flops of Catwoman and Elektra in 2004 and 2005, both directed by men, closed the door for another 12 years, until Wonder Woman. “I felt like I was gonna make this female action picture and we were going to kick through the glass ceiling and that was going to be that,” says Talalay. “We all know how naive I was.”



In its earlier days, Comic-Con – the Las Vegas extravaganza of all things mainstream geek – entrenched the image that genre was guys-only. When Talalay brought Tank Girl to the convention, “the only other women there were booth babes”. Lori Petty’s snarling, fabulously nasty heroine encouraged more women to take up space – “the beginning of some female fandom actually coming out”.



Look around Comic-Con today and it’s clear fandom equalised long before Hollywood caught on. “The nerds have taken over in such a positive way,” says Talalay. “Social media has had an effect – social media shaming does make some difference.” Online, they have championed the hiring of female directors, which has also pressured TV shows to hire more women. Talalay was the first woman to direct an episode of Supernatural, and one of the first few to direct the modern version of Doctor Who.



Talalay survived what she calls “the dark ages” of the 2000s, post-Catwoman. “There was a whole vocabulary of ‘We don’t like working with women directors’,” she recalls. “‘Our show isn’t for you,’ ‘We had a woman director and she didn’t work out’ – it was just completely accepted like smoking on aeroplanes.”



Talalay did what her advisors recommended – “Put your head down and keep working” – while fuelled by Tank Girl’s motto: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Eventually, the discrimination became so obvious that a handful of female directors contacted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which alerted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which then launched a years-long investigation into Hollywood hiring practices that culminated in a legal letter sent to every studio informing them that they had to correct their employment violations or face a lawsuit. “Then things started to change,” Talalay says.



Suddenly, lots of things have changed. The ACLU and EEOC camps aren’t directly tied to #MeToo or #Time’sUp, but together, these movements have united the women of Hollywood. “Crucially, women are talking to each other more than ever,” says Snyder. “Social media and in-person meet-ups have been a great way to come together to share resources and recommendations and connect mentors and mentees.”



From actors to directors, many of the women had spent their careers feeling isolated by the pressure of competing for a single female spot: the one tag-along girl in the all-guy action flick, the one female film-maker entrusted with the rare high-profile gig – who can’t screw it up for everyone else. In the tradition of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in Feud, women were encouraged to tear down each other, not the system.



Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad, 2016.

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Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad, 2016. Photograph: Allstar/WARNER BROS.

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“We’ve heard Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock say on the red carpet that for so long they tried to keep us separate: that you can’t have two major actresses on a movie – you know those divas, they’ll fight,” says Vanity Fair writer Joanna Robinson. This week, Kidman has vowed to work with at least one female director every 18 months and the Twitter feeds of everyone from Ava DuVernay to Zoe Saldana are a continuous celebration of other women in the industry, whether they have won an award, signed on to a new project, or simply had a birthday.



“I’m in conversation all the time with other female film-makers about the future and what it all means,” says Angela Robinson. “Everybody’s head is exploding – careening from euphoria over the possibility of systemic change, to deep despair and cynicism about the nature of the machine.”



Consider this burgeoning bond an unofficial union, forging ties across the screen actors, directors and writers’ guilds. Like when Suicide Squad star Margot Robbie insisted she wouldn’t participate in a stand-alone Harley Quinn film until the studio hired a female director. “We all need to be making conscious efforts to even out those statistics,” she declared. Five years ago, she might have been cautioned to simply be grateful for the lead in her own comic-book blockbuster. But in the current climate, Robbie felt confident raising her voice.



“It’s tremendously encouraging to me that she felt like she had the power to do that,” says Joanna Robinson. “A Margot Robbie relatively early in her career can say no with the spiritual strength of this core body of women who’ve survived Hollywood behind her.” And, she adds, men are also consciously supporting the cause. “When I see a woman get hired for the Star Trek franchise with only TV credits to her name [Brit SJ Clarkson’s resume include episodes of Collateral, Jessica Jones – and Doctors], I feel like that’s a man saying: ‘Let’s give this person the same shot we would give a young man in a baseball cap who had one small film at Sundance.’”



Lori Petty in Tank Girl, 1995.

Lori Petty in Tank Girl, 1995. Photograph: Allstar/UNITED ARTISTS

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As for the online trolls who rail against girl cooties in their popcorn flicks, most recently at the heroines at the centre of Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, there is a growing awareness that their opinions don’t matter. At least one studio has calculated that geek reactionaries comprise such an insignificant sliver of the potential box office that it can ignore their demands to go back to the early Comic-Con days of submissive babes in bikinis. “They’re small but loud, and they’re disproportionately blown out of proportion,” says Robinson. The real fight is changing the studio’s ingrained idea that girls will go to “boy” movies, but boys won’t go to “girl” movies – a trope Walt Disney himself dismissed back in 1959 when he wrote that female audiences “are the ones who drag the men in. If the women like it, to heck with the men.”



Robinson is particularly cheered by Clarkson’s appointment. “Star Trek is really exciting because it’s not like: ‘Oh, this is the one with a female captain of the Starship Enterprise, so we want a woman to direct it.’ No. It’s nice to have a female perspective on a female superhero film, but in my utopian future, a woman can direct whatever, a man can direct whatever. LBGT, any race, your perspective on a different person’s experiences is also valuable.”



That’s a point every woman echoes: true equality will come when the gender reveal of the latest Marvel director is as casual as a coin flip, not the high-pressure attention of Jenkins’ Wonder Woman – the first female-directed superhero film in 22 years starring the most legendary comic-book heroine – having to hit a home run for Team Female.



“Many times it upset me in the past when people were saying: ‘Oh, so they brought a woman director because it’s a Wonder Woman movie,” star Gal Gadot told me last autumn. “And I always say: ‘No, Patty was the right person for this job because she knew exactly what she wanted to get and how to get it.”



“Wonder Woman had to be amazing, it had to be the best DC movie – and I think it was,” says Variety’s Jenelle Riley. Its critical and financial success shattered the fossilised idea that female-driven blockbusters were jinxed. “I think going forward, it’s going to be hard to at least not consider women and people of colour,” says Riley. “We have 18 movies in the Marvel universe. If they didn’t start to expand their director pool, it would look a little funny.” Even if one female-headed flick stumbles, there are enough in the pipeline that Hollywood will continue marching forward.



“I do think there is a slight lifting of the veil,” says Angela Robinson. “I feel like a lot of executives and gate-keepers are looking around, like out of a haze, and saying: ‘Wow, there’s a lot of people out there who want different kinds of stories.’ There is an unprecedented opportunity right now to create a whole new generation of characters and stories that speak to under-represented voices.”



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And speak for over-represented voices, too. “Looking ahead, I hope to see more women spearheading big franchises that don’t necessarily star women,” says Snyder. “There’s still much work to be done in achieving parity in stories and roles created for women, of course, and I love that women are being sought to write and direct these projects, but we’re writers and directors. We can write and direct male characters. Hell, men have been doing that on women’s stories since Sophocles.”



It has been more than 2,400 years since the Greek tragedian wrote his version of Electra. Time for today’s generation of female storytellers to take their bow.

We live in Bizarro Times, so in a way it’s not surprising that Top Cow Productions, the comics publisher that once upon a time had Sara Pezzini and Lara Croft enjoying lingerie-clad slumber parties, is now leading the way in terms of progressive comics that put a positive, healthy spin on sex and sexuality. Particularly those practices and perspectives considered “alternative.”


First there was Sunstone, the surprise smash hit from writer-artist Stjepan Šejić. Sunstone centres on Lisa and Ally, two women who develop a friendship over their shared interest in BDSM, and then see their initial “friends with benefits” arrangement evolve into something more. Part romantic comedy, part relaxed exploration of the dom-sub dynamic (with a dash of LGBT flavour), Sunstone is a normalising alternative to Fifty Shades of Grey.



Essentially done as a thank you to one of its artists, Top Cow, a partner of creator-centric Image Comics, helped Šejić transform Sunstone from a free webcomic on DeviantArt into a series of five trade paperback volumes (and two hardcover collections). Sunstone promptly went on to become Top Cow’s top-selling book out of its current offering.











Top Cow President and veteran comics writer Matt Hawkins is now continuing the trend, joining forces with co-scripter Jenni Cheung, and two other artist creators, to pen two more saucy romances for mature audiences – and to fill a definite market gap that Sunstone identified.



Swing

Out at the end of this month (30 May), is Swing: Volume 1, a 128-page graphic novel that follows a couple, Cathy and Dan, as they delve into the swingers’ scene in an attempt to reignite the passion in their seven-year marriage. Although tonally more serious, and less goofy, than Sunstone, Swing is set in the same universe as the Šejić series, with characters from the latter making cameo appearances.



In fact, Swing was developed in consultation with Šejić and his wife Linda, and Linda Šejić is responsible for art and lettering on the new series. She has also previously collaborated with Hawkins on Wildfire and Postal, and has released two volumes of her own comic, Blood Stain, a quirky, genre-blender that also overlaps with Sunstone and Swing. (The gamer characters are all part of the same MMORPG guild).


As with Sunstone, you can read Swing on DeviantArt, although the sexually-explicit comic is censored on that platform. The intention with Swing is to release five volumes, both in print and digital format.



Sugar

Channelling the spirit of Pretty Woman – the heroine is even called Julia – and featuring far more of a manga/manhua aesthetic than Sunstone and Swing, Sugar focuses on the relationship that develops between a lonely young waitress and a lonely older divorcee. Initially your fairly standard blessed-blesser (AKA sugar daddy-sugar baby) arrangement, the couple starts to develop deeper feelings for one another.



There’s less information available about Sugar, but Chinese-British illustrator Yishan (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) Li co-created the book with Hawkins and Cheung, and provides all art.



There are plans for Sugar to be a three-volume series, with Volume 1 releasing on 18 July, again in both print and digital formats.



With Swing and Sugar, Top Cow is further strengthening its reader offering. These slice-of-life, adults-only romances join the company’s healthy selection of sci-fi series (like newer books Port of Earth and God Complex, and a returning Cyber Force and Aphrodite saga). Then there’s rebooted supernatural hits Witchblade and upcoming The Darkness. Top Cow’s sex-and-relationship-focused books are proving to be a great alternative for grown-up comic readers who have developed general superhero and “far-fetched” fatigue – and are just seeking something a bit more grounded and relatable.