Following the prints of Seven and Shades earlier this week I mentioned that I’d be posting up the other two planned prints that will be available at the Super Comic Con at the weekend. There will be 20 of each made (including a collection of all four). With so many spoilers in the pages of Moon 2 it’s impossible for me to show you more pages of Moon than we already have but never fear because it’s very, very close – and we think it’s looking very, very good… action, intrigue, high drama, moon heads!! It’s got it all!!

I know it’s a bit early to be showcasing another Max Tannone track, but this video literally went live yesterday and Moon wanted to get it out there while it was still fresh.

Johnny Too Beef comes from Max’s Mos Dub project, an album which fuses the lyrical genius of Mos Def with some classic dub reggae. It’s probably my favourite of the Tannone projects and this fan made video for the album’s stand-out track is long overdue.

It’s made by youtuber Goodfear and you can check out the rest of his stuff here.

You can also download all of Max Tannone’s albums for free from his website.

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I got a tweet last night from Dave Probert over at Geek Planet Online telling me that I might want to check their recent awards listings. Just to be different, GPO holds its Editor’s Choice awards around Oscars season (or more specifically, around Kermode Awards season). I clicked on the link and was somewhat knocked sideways by what I saw within:

“Comic of the Year – Moon”

That’s right. The Geek Planet Online Editor’s Choice award has gone to the adventures of a man with a Moon for a head and we couldn’t be more pleased. Here’s a little excerpt from the post:

“Dan Thompson and Steve Penfold balance comedy and action perfectly with a book that feels uniquely British. It takes huge courage to have the title character be not only mute but have a moon for a head. It’s ridiculous and shouldn’t work but Moon was the most fun I have had reading a comic last year. Like Stake Land it deserves to be seen by a wider audience.”

Huge thanks to GPO for their support, to Ivanna Matilla (without whom the book would be a shell of itself) and to everyone who has supported the comic up to this point…and to the academy.

You can read an interview that I did with GPO a while back by clicking here and if you’ve yet to join the fun then you can pick up a copy of the award winning action-comedy, Moon, at this weekend’s London Super Comic Convention or direct from this site.

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We’re just over two weeks away from the release of Mass Effect 3 and the close of what could come to be regarded as the best gaming trilogy in history. To say that the final chapter of Commander Shepard’s adventure is highly anticipated is about as grand an understatement as you can get and to help whet your appetite even further, Bioware have released a new, extended trailer. The final fight for earth promises to be dark, gritty and (if the last two games are anything to go by) awesome.

Roll on March 9th!

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This week concludes the run for the Lost Jedi. However they are still available to see in the main gallery here. Essentially a fan piece, created very much outside the Jedi Universe it never-the-less represents a great memory of my time at the Star Wars Exhibition in London (which ran from May 4th, 2007 until January 2008). For those who missed that please find over the next couple of weeks some videos from that exhibition. And if you were present, please let us know what you thought.

As Norse Gods, American super soldiers and billionaire playboy philanthropist technocrats in multi-billion dollar battle suits launch into battle across cinema screens throughout the world to a hail of cheers and applause from fans of adventure of all ages does anyone wonder who decided to put these characters together? As the Silver Surfer CGI expands the limits of modern special effects technology on the silver screen while being pursued by a man on fire across the skyline of Manhattan does anyone notice the slightly built, silver haired gentleman in glasses being turned away from Sue and Reed Richard’s wedding? It’s the man who created the flaming figure and put him in Manhattan, who created the platform upon which the Silver Surfer sails, the Hulk smashes, Ghost Rider seeks vengeance and Spider-man spins his web. Let’s not beat around the bush. No Stan Lee, no Avengers, Spider-man, X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk. No Marvel comics. So no bringing Nick Fury, Namor and Captain America back from the dead. No Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil, Jack Flag. No Wolverine, Elektra, War Machine, Mary Jane. Definitely no Aunt May or J.Jonah Jameson.

Lee is a world class media operator before media operators were known to exist. Given opportunities many others had in the boom of comic books, Lee created something substantial, meaningful and powerful. He created a framework that would prove to be the single most well known and profitable set of franchises in history, revolutionise the way people read comics and bring a wry smile to many a fanboys face. He’s Stan Lee. There is no one like him. And this is his story…

Stan Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber in a tiny apartment at the corner of West 98th Street and West End Avenue, New York City on December 28, 1922. His father worked a dress cutter, working only sporadically after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Lee had one other sibling, his brother , Harry Lieber, 9 years Lee’s junior and described the one-bedroom apartment he and the rest of his family had lived in at 1720 University Avenue as “a third-floor apartment facing out back”, with him and his brother sharing a bedroom and his parents using a foldout couch.

Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, part of the swashbuckling capers that a young boy who would grow up to be Stan Lee was inspired by

As a child, Lee has recently revealed that he was fascinated and influenced by books and movies, in particular those of legendary swashbuckler, Errol Flynn. Attending DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Lee found entertainment and inspiration in his voracious reading habit. His penchant for writing was present early on, as a youth he worked such part time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Turberculosis Centre (where presumably he gained his chatty patter, while trying to alleviate the heavy language associated with such writing you can only imagine that writing anything lighter was a distinct joy), delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Center, working as a trouser boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Graduating high school early at 16 and a half in 1939, Lee joined the arguably awkwardly titled WPA Federal Theatre Project.

At a young age, as other Practitioners such as Jack Kirby were roughing in the streets and studying to become artists, Lee had immersed himself in New York. He had mucked in and fronted life out on the island of Manhattan. He hadn’t leapt straight for his dream job with both hands but done something immeasurably more valuable perhaps as a writer. He’d experienced the corners and seen the offices and lives of the average joe of Manhattan. This is something that would undoubtedly inform his work later in his career. This, perhaps, is where Lee’s fascination with the struggle of the average guy formed. In the shadows of the heaven fingering ramparts of giant cathedrals to man’s development and upper limits, there was still the guy making his way from one building to the next bringing sandwiches. New York is perhaps greatest of all cities for this, elevating it’s environment to represent grandeur and greatness while presenting daily struggle and difficulty to the great majority of it’s inhabitants that fuel it. It’s not that no other major city such as London, Paris or Tokyo represented this with both squalor and riches, but nowhere else have they both been so obvious and pronounced and yet so mixed and reliant on the other or for so long than in New York. Without the lingering class systems of London and Tokyo or the leveled society of federal and social in Paris, a dress cutter’s son, educated in the Bronx can wander into the marble lined halls of the Rockefeller center. It blended the exceptional with the every day. New York allowed the average person to witness Marvels.

Sometimes it’s not what you know but who you know and Stan Lee’s first step into comic books was with Timely Comics, thanks to his uncle, Robbie Solomon. Now an assistant on Timely Comics’ division of Pulp magazine and comic book publisher Martin Goodman’s company. Lee’s cousin Jean was Goodman’s wife, which would put Lee in good stead by the time he was hired by the great, Capatain- America-creating Joe Simon. But it wasn’t an unstoppable climb to stardom for Stan Lee.

Captain America # 3 (Stan Lee's first writing assignment)

His duties were prosaic at first and much like that which he had had to do in previous work. “In those days [the artists] dipped the pen in ink, [so] I had to make sure the inkwells were filled”, Lee recalled in 2009. “I went down and got them their lunch, I did proofreading, I erased the pencils from the finished pages for them”. Marshaling his childhood ambition to be a writer, young Stanley Lieber made his comic-book debut with the text filler “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” in Captain America Comics #3 (May 1941), using the pseudonym “Stan Lee”, which years later he would adopt as his legal name. Lee later explained in his autobiography and numerous other sources that he had intended to save his given name for more literary work, something that never really surfaced. Lee began immediately to have a lasting effect on the characters that still continue today, with this initial story also introducing Captain America’s trademark ricocheting shield-toss, which immediately became one of the character’s signatures.

He graduated from writing filler to actual comics with a backup feature, “‘Headline’ Hunter, Foreign Correspondent”, two issues later. Lee’s first superhero co-creation was the Destroyer, in Mystic Comics #6 (Aug 1941). The Destroyer was a field journalist, Keen Marlow, captured behind enemy lines and experimented upon with a super hero serum similar to that used on Captain America. The Destroyer was Lee’s most popular character prior to the Fantastic Four and enjoyed a MAX imprint (Volume 4) through Lee’s company Marvel very recently. Other characters he created during this period fans and historians call the Golden Age of comics include Jack Frost, (an amnesiac character made entirely of ice who woke in the icy wastes of the antarctic and is reminiscent of latter day Ice man Bobby Drake) debuting in USA Comics #1 (Aug. 1941), and Father Time (an interesting character used as back up material for Captain America 6-12, involving a hooded figure with a scythe who turns time against crooks), debuting in Captain America Comics #6 (Aug. 1941).

When Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left late in 1941, following a dispute with Goodman, the 30-year-old publisher made a decision that frankly, would alter the face of comics. He installed Stan Lee, just under 19 years old, as interim editor. Unsurprisingly, given Lee’s capacity for operating seamlessly between mover and shaker in later years, Lee showed an ability for business that led him to remain as the comic-book division’s editor-in-chief, as well as art director for much of that time.

But many of Lee’s friends and colleagues of similar age had been called to war and in early 1942, Lee had his call to join the United States Army. He would serve stateside in the Signal Corps, the section of the army that provides communications, writing manuals, training films, slogans and occasionally cartooning. In true Stan Lee style, while Jack Kirby walked into enemy territory to draw maps, Lee’s military classification, he says, was ‘playwright’ adding that only 9 men in the U.S. Army were given that title. Vincent Fago, editor of Timely’s animation comics section, which put out humour and funny animal comics, filled in until Lee got back from his World War II military service in 1945. Danger of bad back from sitting in a chair too long seemingly averted, Lee returned and now lived in the the rented top floor of a Brownstone in the East 90s in Manhattan, much like a certain young man and his doting auntie managed to almost 50 years later….

With Moon 2 on it’s way the lines are beginning to be drawn. Each character has his part to play in the oncoming craziness so to mark this each will have a distinct character print. 2 more will appear later in the week. These may not be the final designs but we thought you’d wanna take an early look.

Thank you for all the support that has been shown to this site since we opened our doors just over a year ago, we’ve grown massively and we continue to grow every day. Please keep telling your friends about us, checking back for new content and (if you can afford to) buying our comics. In return, we will continue to put out as much content as we can over the next 100,000 hits. More Practitioners, more comic and movie articles and of course much much more Moon.

Here’s to the future, Bunkerites!

Dan & Steve
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5. Tron

Ok, it doesn’t light up, but it does have reflective plates so if you can get somebody to shine a torch at you as you ride you can look like a total badass. Besides, what else are you going to where while riding your road legal Tron bike?

4. Stormtrooper

What better way to stay safe on the road than by wearing a helmet with no peripheral vision? Yes, for just $1,147 you too can look like those famously skilled bikers, The Stormtroopers! Word of advice, best not to go riding in any forests…or around teddy bears.

3. Iron Man

Perfect for any racetrack, it’s a replica of the Iron Man suit worn by Robert Downey Jnr while kicking seven bells out of Whiplash for messing up his F1 car. It doesn’t fly, or shoot repulsor beams, but it will make Pepper Potts fancy you and who doesn’t want that?

2. Batman

This one comes with an added element of danger as the temptation to attach a cape and subsequently be dragged under the wheels of your own ride will be almost overwhelming. Fear the night, fear justice, but most of all, fear falling off and scuffing your awesome batgloves.

1. Captain America

Forget anything else. If you want to look like a true biking legend then the only option has to be this replica of Chris Evans’ uniform from Captain America. The shield and helmet aren’t included but you can pick them up from other places and best of all, you get to shout “Assemble” at bike meetings before riding off on one of the sexiest looking bikes in/from history.

These suits are all made by some very talented craftsmen at a company called UD Replicas and if you have a lot of spare cash and the desire to ride a bike like a boss then you can pick these (and several others, including the awesome Daredevil and X-Men suits) from their website.

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Happy Saturday everyone. If you like popular science then you should probably already be subscribing to the fascinating youtube channel that is vsauce. In case you aren’t however, here is another fantastic video from them in which they take a look at the nature of time, how tall people live in the past and where we get the term “Chick Flick”.

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I’m out shooting a short film with James Eaton, Joshua Broadstone and Jack Gavin today. I’ll sling some more news up next week but until then why not check out our last film, The Devil’s Fork!