Shout! Factory continues its line of Marvel Animation DVDs with the upcoming Spider-Woman: Agent of S.W.O.R.D. This story, by Brian Michael Bendis (writer) and Alex Maleev (artist), started as a motion comic before being published, which is a reversal of the usual order. That suggests (one hopes) that this product should work well animated. Spider-Woman is reintroduced through a plot that involves her joining a mysterious espionage organization to gain vengeance on the Skrulls, who had previously kidnapped and replaced […]

Marvel Knights Animation, the company behind the motion comics Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, Iron Man: Extremis, and Black Panther, has announced their next release, Thor & Loki: Blood Brothers. This four-episode series starts running on Monday, March 28, on iTunes, Xbox Live, and the PlayStation Network, with future episodes following on Wednesday starting April 6. They cost $2.99 each for high-def or $1.99 an episode for standard definition. (Update: There’s also a season pass for $10.99 in HD or $6.99 in […]

Following up the first Marvel Knights Animation/Shout! Factory release, Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, comes another movie tie-in: Iron Man: Extremis. This disc contains six motion comic episodes, each from 10-14 minutes. (The first is 20 minutes long.) The storyline is based on the comic of the same name by Warren Ellis and Adi Granov, a revamp of the Armored Avenger for the modern technological age, where computer chips replace the original transistors and hardware. (It also reportedly influenced the movie, as […]

Debuting on Tuesday, September 28, is a DVD collecting the Astonishing X-Men motion comic Gifted, based on the comic by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday and directed by Cassaday and Neal Adams. I’ve been harsh on motion comics before, but what I saw of it was better than I expected. The disc, list-priced at $15, contains six episodes and a handful of bonus features. The first episode, which is all I watched at one sitting, is 13 1/2 minutes long, […]

Marvel and Shout! Factory have announced the second in their line of motion comic collections on DVD, after Astonishing X-Men (out September 28). Iron Man: Extremis is due out November 30. As described by the press release, Adapting the critically acclaimed storyline by superstars Warren Ellis and Adi Granov, Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man) faces his greatest threat ever — a terrorist transformed into an unstoppable force with the powerful bio-engineered Extremis super-soldier serum! Now Tony Stark redefines Iron Man’s […]

I had thought, after not hearing of any new motion comics since last year, that the unholy hybrid of comic panels and limited animation had died out like the fad it was. Unfortunately, this week’s Comic-Con-focused issue of Entertainment Weekly brings the news that Dark Horse is turning their Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight into a motion comic that will cover the first 19 issues. It launches on iTunes this week with a DVD to follow later this year. […]

Last year (July 2008), Warner Bros. launched what they called “motion comics”, comic panels that had been “animated” through the addition of pans and zooms and a soundtrack with narration, voices, music, and effects. The best-known of such is probably the 12-episode Watchmen, which was released on DVD as well as online to tie in with the motion picture of the same name. Motion comics are a jazzy, buzzword-filled way to turn reading material into something you can watch, often […]