Kill Or Be Killed #8 Out Now -- and Looking Ahead to Later Issues.

The next issue of Kill Or Be Killed by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser is out today:  yesterday afternoon, Image Comics posted a five-page preview of issue #8 on the official site, and Ed Brubaker sent out an email newsletter providing the same preview and MUCH more.

Everyone who visits this blog really should subscribe to Brubaker's newsletter, and you can do so by visiting http://tinyurl.com/edbrubaker-list -- and if you browse the online archives of the three emails sent over the last two months, you'll see a lot of in-progress work for this upcoming issue.

Between the newsletter, social media, and recent solicitations, we have even more info about this new issue as well as upcoming releases.

For issue #8, out today, the bonus essay is evidently on the 1958 film Murder by Contract, with the essay written by Kim Morgan and the accompanying illustration by Sean Phillips.

For issue #9, out in May, Brubaker just announced that Sean Phillips' son Jacob Phillips illustrated the bonus essay, also penned by Kim Morgan, this time on the 1976 film Mikey and Nicky.

(Issue #10 has already been solicited for a June release, and it's probably too soon to expect any interior-art previews or other details.)

We anticipated July to be a "skip month" without any releases, but Image proved us wrong with their July solicitations, released last week.  Kill Or Be Killed Volume 2 is scheduled for a July 26 release; the 160-page trade paperback edition collects issues #5-10, and it reuses the cover art from issue #5.  Retailing for $14.99, the book will be significantly less than the total cost for the individual issues, discounted nearly 40%.

Finally, issue #11 hasn't even been solicited yet, but yesterday Brubaker gave his newsletter subscribers an advance look at the completed cover art, which we had seen earlier as in-progress details on Sean Phillips' Twitter and Instagram feeds -- see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Kill Or Be Killed #11 cover,
  From the Desk of Ed Brubaker

From Phillips' tags, we learn that the work was painted with acrylics, and from Brubaker's newsletter, we learn that this is the first of several connecting covers (similar to these), as all the covers for the upcoming third arc will combine to form "one long cover image of escalating violence."

Ed Brubaker also confirms our earlier guess that issue #11 will come in August.

Bullets: Undertow Podcast Episode 11, Details about Brubaker's TV Show, and Sean Phillips on the Comic Art Podcast!

A very busy work schedule has kept me from blogging sooner, but we have a few noteworthy items before tomorrow's release of Kill Or Be Killed #8.

• Undertow Podcast Episode 11, Now Online!  The latest episode of The Undertow Podcast was released just last week.  Robert and I focus on Kill Or Be Killed #7, and it was quite a good issue to discuss at length:  showing us "What Kira Sees," the issue seemed to come from an indie title about relationships, quite the change of pace from the series' usual vigilante killing.

As with all previous recordings, Episode 11 is available at iTunes and Podbean.

In the episode, we mentioned a couple news items that we hadn't already covered here, and they comprise the rest of this blog post.

• Miles Teller to Star in Brubaker's Too Old To Die Young.  We have news about the Amazon TV show that Ed Brubaker has co-created and is co-writing with Nicolas Winding Refn.  The Hollywood Reporter and Variety reported, nearly simultaneously, that Miles Teller, the star of 2014's award-winning film Whiplash, has been cast for the series.  THR reports that Teller will play "the lead role of Martin, a police officer entangled in the criminal underbelly of Los Angeles."

The article also provides more details about the show's premise.

"Die Young tells of a grieving police officer who, along with the man who shot his partner, finds himself in an underworld filled with working-class hit men, Yakuza soldiers, cartel assassins sent from Mexico, Russian mafia captains and gangs of teen killers. Amazon, which made the casting announcement on Monday [March 27], says the series will follow 'killers' existential journeys in becoming samurai.' "

The more we hear, the more we like.

• Sean Phillips Interviewed in the Comic Art Festival Podcast.  As Robert and I discussed quite a bit, there's an excellent interview with Sean Phillips in the official podcast of the Lakes International Comic Art Festival.

In the 2nd hour of their 2nd episode, Ian and Nikki interview the artist from his home studio, and the wide-ranging discussion serves as a kind of professional autobiography and companion to Dynamite's 2013 hardcover, The Art of Sean Phillips.

We learn that Scene of the Crime -- his first collaboration with Ed Brubaker -- was also Phillips' first project inking another artist's pencils, and Phillips worked on what became the breakout hit Marvel Zombies simply because he was "desperate for work." 

We get some details about how Phillips and Brubaker end up producing about ten issues every year: they work on a 5-week schedule, so releases seem monthly for quite a while before requiring a "skip month."

And, Phillips fields a question that my cohost Robert sent to the podcast, on his favorite musical artists.  As a technical writer in my day job, I can attest to the benefit of listening to music while I'm working, especially a great soundtrack album.

Most importantly, we learned that Brubaker and Phillips are working on a single-page contribution to a self-published, tabloid-sized newspaper comic commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Will Eisner -- an announcement that deserves its own blog entry, which we plan to post later this week.