Updating Josie and The Pussycats' girl-band template for our brave new atomic future, comics' new expression of both Girl Power and Rock'n'Roll Power comes originally came from the frustrations of artist Stewart:

I was just finishing up my work on Catwoman with Ed Brubaker and I was feeling a little burned out and I wanted to draw something fun of my own creation to reinvigorate myself. I made a quick list of things I wanted to draw - cute girls was the top of the list, as anyone who knows me or my work should find completely unsurprising. I'm a big music fan so I wanted to do something that involved rock and roll in some way. And I absolutely did not want to draw lots of architecture, as I was getting sick of drawing the buildings in Gotham City. As a joke, I thought that the easiest environment to draw would be a desert, and then started thinking about how I could put girls and guitars in that setting. Soon I'd thought of an all-girl rock band in a ‘Mad Max’-like future wasteland.

Joining up with fellow Toronto-ite Fawkes, the pair created Mandy, Dot and Megumi (potentially the last Japanese girl alive), the last good band in a world full of evil musicians. As to why a future radioactive Earth finds itself full of bands, writer Fawkes thinks that it just makes sense:

It's sort of a chicken-or-egg situation. I mean, do a lot of musicians survive the apocalypse, or do a lot of people who survive decide that they really need to start making music?” Fawkes said. “If I wake up one day at three in the afternoon and discovered that my home town has been reduced to a cinder, I might just pick up the nearest harmonica and start honkin' it at anyone who wanders by. I might just.

The first volume in the series will debut at this year's San Diego Comic-Con at the end of next month; if you can't wait that long, there's a 50-page preview online here.

Ragna-Rock: Fawkes and Stewart on 'The Apocalypstix [Comic Book Resources]

This year's FCBD - set, as usual, the day after the summer's big comic-related movie opens - has 41 different freebies for you to read, as well as two additional miniature figures to collect (If you really, really want that Iron Man Heroclix figure, get yourself to your local comic store early Saturday morning, people) and all manner of creator signings galore (Go here for a complete list of who is signing where). If nothing else, it's a good chance to pick and choose some new things to read and get hooked on; here's our pick of what you should be spending your free time and nothing else on.

While DC Comics and Marvel Comics are both putting two books out each for the event, Marvel distinguishes themselves by both of their books being brand new material: X-Men: FCBD 2008 Edition offers Mike Carey and Greg Land giving you the start of "the future of mutantkind", while the more kid-friendly Marvel Adventures features movie franchises Spider-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man teaming up to fight crime and reduced box office potential. DC's also splitting their books between "regular" and kid books, offering reprints of the very, very good first issue of All-Star Superman and the not-as-good-but-still-worthwhile kid book Tiny Titans, which sees Puffy Ami-Yumi's favorite underage superteam as even younger kids in school. Don't ask, just pick it up.

Other all-new material includes Dark Horse's Hellboy/BPRD issue, with new stories by creator Mike Mignola and friends, Project Superpowers resurrecting public domain superheroes courtesy of Kingdom Come's Alex Ross, Del Rey's Dabel Bros preview book of novel adaptations (including previews of work by Dean Koontz, Jim Butcher and George RR Martin's Wild Cards series) and Red5 Comics' fun retro throwback SF series Atomic Robo.

Most worthy of the reprinted material are the EC Comics Sampler - reprinting several stories from the publisher that made Frederic Wertham go apeshit and bring congressional hearings into the comic book industry in the 50s - and Oni Press' Maintenance #1, which follows the unlucky janitorial crew of an evil scientist think tank. There's also classic Disney duck action in Gyro Gearloose and a couple of international anthologies worth looking into with Drawn and Quarterly's Gegika: A Drawn+Quarterly Manga Sampler and Fantagraphics' IGNATZ: International Graphic Novels At Their Zenith.

There are many more books available tomorrow - go here for a full list, including some previews - but why not just find the store closest to you and pick up whatever looks most interesting to you, even if it is Sci-Fi/Virgin's The Stranded? It's not like it's going to cost you anything, after all...

Wonton Soup centers around Johnny Boyo, former star student at the XXX culinary school who gave it all up for life as a space trucker. When a space ninja attack leaves his ship damaged, he ends up temporarily stranded on his former home planet while waiting for repairs, with only his ex-girlfriend, former professor and spatula to help him when he ends up in a cooking challenge from the local bully chef. Giving lots of familiar ideas a sci-fi spin - the alien recipes alone make this book worth reading - writer/artist Stokoe manages to create an SF book that's almost accidental about its science fiction, but in a wonderfully enjoyable way; who doesn't want to read about oven hacking, or ninjas with no muscle power because they've spent too long floating in deep space? With art that's reminiscent of Jamie Hewlett or Brandon Graham, and a drifting slacker plot that takes the long way 'round at all times, Wonton Soup is a book that deserves to make it onto many tables, whether they be bedside-reading or kitchen.

Wonton Soup + 38 Page Preview [Oni Press]

For the first major convention of the year, Wondercon was surprisingly light on any real news, with the biggest player, DC Comics first suggesting that they were going to tell us something big the next day, and then telling us that they'd rather wait until April after all. The lack of any major surprises to take away from the con (Both of the stories that actually did break, J. Michael Straczynski working for DC Comics and Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan working on new issues of Demo for Vertigo, seemed to be common knowledge on the con floor before their official announcements) seemed to affect the regular con-goers with an unusual feeling of malaise hitting even the 501st Legion as they performed con security. This wasn't helped by the no-shows from creators - not only was the Image Comics panel cancelled, but both Boom! Studios' Mark Waid and Aspen Studio's Michael Turner failed to make it to the show.

That isn't to say that the entire show was a disaster, mind you; the pros who did make it there were entertaining and available - Particular shout-outs should be given to Oni Press's James Lucas Jones (Expect me to tell you all about Wonton Soup very soon) as well as DC's Jann Jones and Dan DiDio, whose late-Sunday panel "For The Love of Comics" turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable conversation not about upcoming DC Comics but what is awesome about comics in general (Goofiness and obsessive collecting being two of the answers), entirely free of the kind of hucksterism that you might expect from a DC panel.Bill Willingham proved to be a fine gentleman able to keep people's attention throughout the various panels he dominated (and I'm not just saying that because of his apology to me about this), and even if some DC panels may have been half-empty, the two showings of the animated version of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier were packed with enthusiastic fans (With good reason; it's a better movie than I expected).

That's not even talking about Saturday's CBLDF party that we co-sponsored, populated by the creme de la creme of comics folk, from retailers to creators (Hi, Cecil!) to fans, with we journalist types mingling and posing for photos that I feel like I should be apologizing for; I didn't mean for my head to be that shiny. Overall, it may not have been the most exciting weekend in terms of comic conventions - that'll be San Diego Comic-Con in July - but it was definitely a fine, exhausting, one nonetheless.

When he's not writing for such TV shows as CSI: Miami, Law & Order or Brothers & Sisters, Guggenheim dabbles in comic book script-writing. Following runs on Blade, Wolverine and a new regular gig on the thrice-monthly Amazing Spider-Man, he's ditching the world of big-budget superheroes for his own creation, Resurrection, for indie publisher Oni Press. The monthly series - which launched last month - starts with a take on a familiar idea: What happens the day after an alien invasion?

Beginning as humanity discovers that the aliens they've been at war with for years have mysteriously disappeared, the book follows the survivors of a decade-long war as they try to return to something resembling normality while also wondering just what happened to the aliens in the first place. With this kind of high concept - which the writer likens to dearly-departed Y: The Last Man in terms of post-apocalyptic atmosphere - and Guggenheim's TV connections, how long before we see this series on an upcoming network fall schedule?

Judge for yourself whether this could be the next cult thing: the entire first issue is online for free here.

Resurrection [Oni Press.com]

Jumper: Jumpscars [Oni Press.com]