Artwork by James Sturm

Creators | Market Day creator James Sturm explains he’ll be boycotting The Avengers movie because he believes Jack Kirby, co-creator of many of Marvel’s longest-lasting characters,  “got a raw deal”: “What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel’s media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right. It takes a lot of corporate moxie to put Thor and Captain America on the big screen and have them battle for honor and justice when behind the scenes the parent company acts like a cold-blooded supervillain. As Stan Lee famously wrote, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’” Tom Spurgeon notes the position seems to mark a shift for Sturm, who wrote the Eisner-winning 2003 miniseries Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules for Marvel. [Slate, The Comics Reporter]

Michael Chabon

Creators | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay author Michael Chabon discusses a recent short story he wrote for The New Yorker about a comic book writer and artist who had a falling out, noting who they may or may not be based on: “Well, the obvious answer is Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Stan and Jack met in the forties, began collaborating during lean times in the fifties, jointly revived the fortunes of Marvel Comics in the sixties, and then underwent a creative divorce that seems to have resulted in a certain amount of acrimony on Kirby’s side. So the outlines of the story are similar. But Feather and Conn are not Stan and Jack; their fates, their experiences, their biographies, and their personalities are quite different. Jack Kirby died in 1994, still idolized by fans, surrounded by his loving family, as far from the embittered loneliness of Mort Feather as you can be. And Stan Lee is still going strong, a potent creative force who seems to bear up under the tribulations and triumphs of a long and interesting life with the élan for which he has always been famous.” [The New Yorker]

Comic strips | The Chicago Tribune has spoken: Editors pulled last Friday’s Doonesbury strip because it “broke from its satirical mission in order to deliver a direct fundraising appeal for a specific charity that the author favors. The Tribune’s editorial practices do not allow individuals to promote their self-interests.” [The Daily Cartoonist]

Amelia Rules!

Creators | Robot 6 contributor Brigid Alverson talks to Jimmy Gownley, creator of the all-ages Amelia Rules series, about his experiences from self-publishing to signing a multi-book deal with Simon & Schuster. During the interview, Gownley dropped a bombshell: His next Amelia book, the eighth in the series, will be his last—at least for a while: “Amelia was a huge learning experience for me. I came out the other side a very different person and artist. I want to take all those lessons and put them into one book that combines all of that.” [Publishers Weekly]

Editorial cartoons | Times are tough for editorial cartoonists, but The New York Times cattle call for artists to provide work on spec for their Sunday Review section — and the measly fee of $250 per cartoon for the winners — is raising a hackles in the cartooning community. [Comic Riffs]

Creators | Ao Meng chats with French artist Boulet a.k.a. Gilles Roussel, about his recent webcomic Darkness, among other topics. [NOVI Magazine]

The Hookah Girl

Creators | Erica Friedman interviews artist Marguerite Dabaie, creator of The Hookah Girl, a memoir of growing up in the Palestinian Christian community in the U.S. [The Hooded Utilitarian]

Commentary | Librarian Robin Brenner and the contributors to the Good Comics for Kids blog discuss whether the inclusion of dialogue in graphic novel biographies makes them fiction. [Good Comics for Kids]

Commentary | Joe “Jog” McCulloch pays a visit to Dredd Reckoning to discuss Vol. 17 of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files with host Douglas Wolk. [Dredd Reckoning]

Copyright | Mike Lynch calls out MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes show for displaying a cartoon by Lian Amaris without asking her permission, let alone compensating her. To his credit, Hayes responded on Twitter, saying “we absolutely should have credited it and will rectify.” [Mike Lynch Cartoons]

Academia | Columbia University librarian Karen Green lays out a possible typology of comics, discussing the different ways they can be broken up for teachers who want to use them in a variety of different academic settings. [comiXology]

As the licensing machine revs up for the May 4 premiere of The Avengers, fragrance company JADS International — the company behind such brands as Sulu Pour Homme, Slave Leia Perfume and Shirtless Kirk Cologne — has rolled out scents inspired by Captain America, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury and even Loki. Sorry, Hawkeye, you’re out of luck.

The Avengers Cologne Set boasts “four unique fragrances”: PATRIOT, Mark VII, SMASH! and Worthy; you can probably piece together which name goes with which hero. Loki, meanwhile, gets Mischief Cologne (“Made to Rule”), and Fury has Initiative Cologne (“Activate the Initiative”).

Check out the details below, or on the JADS website.

PATRIOT Cologne
A cologne that pays homage to the confident, stand-up-to-bullies, hard working average Joe in every man. PATRIOT Cologne is both reserved and sexy; like a symbol on a shield or a moniker on a motorcycle helmet. Fresh notes of green lime and white pepper are the first to hit with dry oak wood, sandalwood and tequila accords finishing the adventure. Perfect for any time or place, PATRIOT Cologne puts the Novus Mundus in your strong, sensuous hands for you to embrace and discover.

PATRIOT Cologne
Your Attack Plan.

Mark VII Cologne
A resolutely sophisticated cologne forged from the sea, the sun, the earth, and a touch of devil-may-care whimsy. Transparent, aromatic, and modern in nature, Mark VII combines mandarin, neroli, nasturtium and jasmine layered with light patchouli to create a contemporary expression of “I don’t play well with others” confidence; leaving you always ready for whatever a genius, billionaire, playboy-philanthropist might encounter along the way.

Mark VII Cologne
Armor Up.

SMASH! Cologne
Very unusual and rare materials have been brought together to create a woody aquatic cologne evoking both a serene sense of timeless freedom and a single-minded, unbridled passion for life. Yuzu, bergamot and tarragon create clean, clear top notes along with unexpected accords of water lily and nutmeg. SMASH! then carries an intense woody drydown enriched with Indian sandalwood, vetiver, musk and sharp cedar. Complimentary to a full range of emotions, it wears well no matter where—at work, the lab or an evening out on the town.

SMASH!
Be Angry.

Worthy Cologne
This woody citrus cologne is a unique, meaningful combination of bergamot, frozen ginger and wheatgrass blended with a hint of fresh natural grapefruit and layered deeply with aromatic cypress. Basenotes are possessed with sensual, seductive tones of dark amber and cedarwood, protecting and enhancing a deep, dry masculine (dare we say almost God-like?) musk.

Worthy Cologne
Possess the Power.

Infinity Formula Cologne
Colonel Nicholas “Nick” Fury. Paratrooper, Ranger, Weapons and Demolitions Expert, Aircraft Specialist and Pilot, Green Beret. Veteran of every US War and Military Conflict since WWII. Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. “The single most powerful, most important organization on the planet Earth.” And the only human strong enough to bring together a group of remarkable people who would fight the battles no one else could.

Infinity Formula Cologne.
Face danger with something dangerous. Activate the Initiative.

Mischief Cologne
Possessed of Superhuman strength, Genius-level intelligence, Mystical powers, Telepathy, Flight, Clairvoyance, Therianthropy, and Teleportation … who could blame you for becoming the greatest trickster of them all? So wear your crown of baleful maleficence with pride; let mirth and mayhem stand ready at your side, anticipating your every command. Test their mettle knowing you have nothing to fear; you are Mischief and you were made to rule.

(via ComicBookMovie)

After doing a number of peripheral X-Men titles and other work in recent years, the writer stepped away from mutants–and comics at large. The final issues of X-Men Forever 2, New Mutants Forever and Chaos War: X-Men came out in early 2011 but were written by the New York-based writer in late 2010. For over a year now, Chris Claremont hasn’t written a single page of comics script.

Although he’s turned his focus to prose novels for the time being, Claremont remains in tune with developments in the comic industry that he worked in for so many years. In a far-ranging discussion with the London-born writer, we talked about the modern comics movie blockbuster, digital comics, the seduction of work-for-hire and news about his own creator-owned comics.

Chris Arrant: 2011 was a different kind of year for you and for fans of your work, Chris. What are you planning for 2012?

Chris Claremont: Well, I’ve got a prose novel making the rounds to potential publishers, and a short story in Simon & Schuster’s Under The Moons of Mars: New Adventures of Barsoom anthology. I’m working on another novel that’ll hopefully be in a position to start sharing with publishers soon as well. This year’s the first time I’ve been able to do things that are all totally mine and all totally different.

Chris Arrant: Are these sequels to your Willow novels or perhaps the First Flight novels you did a few years back?

Chris Claremont: No, the Willow books are George Lucas’; the fate of that is up to him. And these aren’t connected to First Flight either. They’re all in different genres with different emphasis. The novel making the rounds now is a young-adult adventure, and the novel on my desk right now that I’m stitching together for my agent is much more of a mystery/suspense.

Chris Arrant: Even if you’re working outside of comics currently, you’ll always be associated with the medium. Given that you have a little distance from the day-to-day of working in comics, what are your thoughts about the comics industry and medium as a whole?

Chris Claremont: This is the first time in 40 years that I haven’t written a line of comics work in a year. That is part of what’s enabled me to do a lot more prose. It’s a totally different experience, and I’m getting used to being on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out.

As far as the industry is concerned, it’s clearly in a period of evolution. I think that DC’s revamping of their entire line conceptually has brought them a measure of strong success this year. I think Marvel is taking whatever steps it feels appropriate to respond.

Over in the X-Men line of titles, I see that there seems to be a structural redefinition of the canon that will substantially change readers’ relationships with the characters, in the sense that some characters who you felt were on one side of the line in behavior now seem to be turning into anti-heroes, as I understand. Wolverine’s become head of the school, and Cyclops has been positioned as a Magneto equivalent, a good soul taking a violently pro-active stance toward mutants’ perceived antagonists in the world. It’ll be interesting to see how that all relates to the readership.

Last I looked at the Fantastic Four, Johnny Storm was dead, so that puts that title in a period of evolution as well. I don’t know if that death will be one that’s permitted to last, especially if Fox generates a new film arc. But meanwhile, it opens up a whole plethora of possibilities for writers to try new wrinkles on the classic theme of the book.

The Avengers, I assume, will be more increasingly geared toward presentation in line with the upcoming film. I know that we all have incredibly high hopes for that to work, so we’ll just have to wait and see. I mentioned Fox earlier, and I don’t know if they’ve firmed up plans to continue with the First Class concept and if they’ll attempt to reintroduce the Fantastic Four.

Chris Arrant: Since we’re talking about movies, what do you think of the showdown that’s shaping up this year for movies? You have The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises and a few others all coming out close to one another.

Chris Claremont: Summer is going to get real crazy–much like it’s been recently with the holiday releases. There have been so many huge films opening that I’d argue who’s had time to watch them all. None of the December films are anything approaching mega-hits, which I think is partly because public schools like the ones here in New York City didn’t have a long Christmas break. So it’ll be interesting to see if the winter films make any money.

Getting back to your question, the summer film season is going to be a very “no holds barred,” “whack-a-mole” kind of situation. Again it’s interesting to look at it from the outside to see how the pieces get shuffled around and who comes out on top. You’ve got to assume The Dark Knight Rises is going to have the most momentum because Christopher Nolan’s last Batman movie made $1 billion and change, and Inception was a financial and critical triumph. This new one is a wrap-up of his trilogy and from the trailer alone–that football scene alone–it’s bound to intrigue the living daylights out of people. Thinking about that more in depth, looking at the structure of the trailer, I’m wondering if Bane could perhaps be what was left of Ra’s al Ghul in disguise.

Chris Arrant: That’s an interesting theory.

Chris Claremont: At the same token, Sony’s got a huge stake in making Amazing Spider-Man successful. Raimi’s trilogy was successful in their own right, and if this one doesn’t hit that level right off the top then they’re in trouble. And Marvel and Disney have a huge stake riding on The Avengers. All of these films have a lot riding on them. The irony is that there’s so much emphasis and raw money on the films that the source material, the comics, are a little bitty piece off to the side now. From the studios’ point-of-view, the comics aren’t as relevant as we like to think, which is intriguing and sad. You then have to wonder how the publishers are going to respond, or anticipate whatever happens in a way that’ll make the comics reach out to a wider, more enthusiastic and long-lasting audience.

The next level in the equation is the evolution of the marketplace itself. The three-dimensional comic store is not the only way of presenting comics to an audience, with every comic having the potential digital download product to your iPad or whatever. That opens a whole new level of possibilities for a wider, global audience instantaneously. Not to mention the money publishers could save on print runs as they lean more digitally in distribution. Imagine if one of the primary publishing houses started doing in-house translations of new work for foreign-language audiences. Imagine if, as Avengers vs. X-Men was being lettered, there was also an in-house translation team doing the same for Europe, South America and other places for simultaneous day-and-date global release. That would in turn open up a whole new vast spectrum of audience, much like movies did.

If you go back 15 years, the domestic movie box office was the primary and near-exclusive revenue source for studios. Now the domestic American box office, strong or weak, is a minor fraction of the global take. Remember me mentioning how the last Batman movie did $1 billion and some change? $400 million of that came from U.S. movie-goers, but the other $700 came from outside our borders. Look at Avatar: the foreign ticket sales were over twice the domestic returns. The mind boggles at those kinds of numbers, but that’s what you get when you effectively reach out to a global audience. If that kind of thing came to comics, it would undoubtedly change how people perceive the mainstream industry.

If you look at that kind of thing coming in the horizon, you then think, “Do you write books exclusively for English-language audiences, or do you try to find ways to appeal elsewhere?” That was, in my own mind, the base subtext of GeNext when I was doing it a few years ago. One of the reasons all the stories in the second arc were set in India was because I wanted to see if it was possible to reach out and perhaps appeal to the sub-continental audience. If we’d gone to a third series, that would have been set in China; an intentionally global concept if it went forward as an ongoing.

Think about it: you have a whole host of X-Men locked up in North America; enough already, let’s see if we can entice a more international clientele. In a way, this kind of thinking goes back to where we started: Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Dave Cockrum, Len Wein in 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men–with the intentionally international team. It worked then, and it could work now.

Again, following the paradigm of cinema, in the old days releasing movies overseas was an afterthought but now it’s integral to the movie business. In some films it wouldn’t be surprising to see the United States envisioned as a significant but not primary dominant marketplace, and treated accordingly. But in comics, that’s for the governing minds at each of the companies and corporations to find out for themselves. Whether or not any of it comes to pass or whether or not the management teams at Marvel and DC are all that interested, or capable, of doing it is open for debate. I’m not interested or qualified enough to make that call.

Chris Arrant: You’ve put a lot of thought on the shape of the comics medium even though you haven’t written comics in a year. Do you feel any excitement for anything currently on the comics shelf?

Chris Claremont: Embarrassing as it sounds, I don’t. I’m not that interested. My basic response is that I’m not the intended audience anymore. But I have a certain vision for certain characters, and Marvel, for example, is taking their books in a direction that is not simpatico with that vision, so for me it’s easier to focus on other things that are definitely more enjoyable. I enjoy the memories, and enjoy the work that’s been done when I come across it, and then I move on to other things.

Chris Arrant: Earlier this year you donated your writing archive to Columbia University to act as the basis for a comics research center. How’d that come about?

Chris Claremont: They called. [laughs]

It was incredibly flattering and a significant honor that they would be so taken with the work I’ve done that they would wish to archive it in this way. It’s over 40 years of material, and there isn’t a writer around who’s been working for a lifetime that doesn’t have a room/basement/house full of crap, [laughs], that their spouse has been passionately suggesting to get rid of. Not because they don’t like the stuff, but because it’s clutter. For me, the longer it stays in the basement the more risk there will be that it’ll be lost. I’ve had enough basement floods in my life that it would be a shame to lose all my articles. I’ve lost most of my comics before, and manuscripts as well, so I’m glad as much survived as it has.

The collection really bridges the distance between when we worked on typewriters to the digital age. So while I may have 25 years worth of computer files or print-outs, I also have a dozen years of typewritten original manuscripts and drafts. It’s the original pages where Jean became Phoenix, and even John Byrne and my early work on Iron Fist leading into Uncanny X-Men. All of that stuff was done on a Selectrix typewriter. There may be bad Xeroxes of some of this stuff out there, but this archive are the originals. There are handwritten notes for ideas that worked, and ideas that didn’t work. Sketches of novels, musings, you name it, it’s in there. It’ll be interesting to see what it involves into once they fully access and collate the material. Hopefully it’ll prove of value to students and scholars in the future.

Chris Arrant: Since you mentioned rarities, it gives me an opening to talk about some unfinished projects you’ve done, namely the plans for the creator-owned Huntsman series. The characters debuted in an arc of Jim Lee’s Wildcats, but nothing ever came of that. Will that material be in the archive?

Chris Claremont: I still have all the raw material for the Huntsman, but it’s staying with me because it’s still an active concept. There’s a lot of stuff not going to the archive because it’s still being worked on. Although Image/Wildstorm couldn’t find a way to make it fit with their plans, it’s just a matter of finding a new venue to present it. Whether that’s in comics, prose or a screenplay, I don’t know.

Since you’ve showed interest in Huntsman, I’ll tell you something: the irony of that project was that it was planned to go into its own series shortly after its debut in Wildcats, but the artist involved had other ideas and wanted to do a series of his own. We couldn’t find anybody to take his place, and things moved out of sync and the opportunity evaporated. It happens all the time; everybody pitches scads of ideas that don’t make it. The first challenge that every writer or creator of material faces is getting through the crowd so that the person you’re trying to sell it to hears the pitch and is able to respond to it. If you get a positive response, then you have to produce.

I have two comics projects that I started in Europe, one science fiction and one fantasy. The fantasy series, titled Wanderers, got one issue published, a second issue fully complete and a third one plotted out before the artist left to work for Marvel. That’s no fault of the artist, but the book was published as a dual-publishing arrangement between a French and Italian publisher that came to blows. I think the French publisher was hoping for better sales of the first volume, and lost interest afterwards. But now because of that, I’ve got a hundred pages of story sitting on my desk. The other series, the science fiction one, went to the publisher and an artist drew 20 odd pages before the company collapsed. The other publishers I’ve shown it to were interested, but said that either the artist or the story wasn’t quite right for them. Again, there are many cases of concepts that look golden to creators but hit speed bumps along the way and never make it to fruition. That’s the business.

Chris Arrant: But from the way you’re talking, we might eventually see them released in one form or another.

Chris Claremont: Right, but it also provides reasoning from a writer’s perspective why many prefer prose over comics. At least with prose, the only person you have to worry about is oneself. You don’t have to worry about the artist. I’ve got concepts galore, but in the modern formula for getting comics made you have to find an artist, produce samples, then pitch and sell it. The pressures of the marketplace make it extremely challenging for those pieces to come together in an effective way. Finding an artist to take the time and risk, and paradoxically for a writer to take the time and risk. Teaming together, producing the work, flogging the work, finding the right marketplace in terms of a publisher and the right marketplace in terms of readers.

But if it was easy, everybody would do it. That’s why work-for-hire is so seductive; you don’t have to worry about any of that. You just do your job, stay friends with the editors, cash your check and move on.

Chris Arrant: Since we’re on the subject of creator-owned work, I have to ask; is any of your previous work like Sovereign Seven or Black Dragon up for re-release?

Chris Claremont: Funny you mention it, but Black Dragon is coming back via Titan Publishing this year, along with Marada, The She-Wolf.

Speaking more broadly and coming back around to our discussion of digital publishing, that is an avenue I’m increasingly looking towards for more. I’ve got a lot of material that is now out of print; the First Flight prose novel trilogy is going to be released digitally. With the collapse of Borders, people need a place to sell books and digital looks to be just that.

The one problem there, the potential disadvantage of digital versus 3-D is the ability to browse. When wandering through a bookstore, you look for a good cover or an interesting genre to see what catches your eye. It’s tangible. There’s much, much less of that to me onscreen with digital books. For digital, you go to a specific place and search for a specific book and can’t see what’s proverbially standing right beside it. My wife had a professor at NYU whose way of doing research when beginning a project carried on with this thinking. He’d find a basic reference book and then go to the library and look it up in the Dewey Decimal System down to the decimal point and see what surrounded it on the shelves. He’d wander up and down the stacks all afternoon to see what caught his eye. If anything caught his eye, he’d read the first page and if it looked promising he’d keep going. Every so often he’d get a serendipitous moment that would spark him off in a whole new, different direction.

The problem with digital bookstores is that it’s an A-to-B link. You want a book by a certain author, you get the book. Readers have no idea what’s right next door; no way of exploring and being taken by surprise and discovery. So how that affects the industry–and the audience–will be an interesting thing to watch over the next few years and decades as we get used to it.

On one hand the convenience of digital distribution is unparalleled, but on the other hand there’s no opportunity to discover… and bluntly, that’s a problem comics have right now. With everything increasingly geared toward central flagship concepts and mass crossovers, you have stores being asked to buy all the Avengers-oriented titles, for example, then books that don’t have those connections, whether it’s at Marvel, DC or outside, that have a rougher time. Before you even think about getting readers invested in a title, you have to figure out how to get the retailers invested. If retailers are put in a position where they have to throw 80 to 90% of their available budget to get all of the mainstream titles from DC and Marvel and then dependable peripheral books from Dark Horse and others, the one little itty bitty book with no link to anything might get just get an order of one or two copies, optimistically. With another round of event comics coming down the pike this year, it’s a far more challenging and brutal environment for new material, unexpected material, non-canonical material. And on the flipside unfortunately, publishers have less incentive to push what’s considered non-canonical work because those non-canonical work diminishes canonical work which they need to sell.

Chris Arrant: It makes you think that if Watchmen debuted today if it would’ve been able to capture audiences like it did when it was originally released.

Chris Claremont: DC would still publish Watchmen; they’d sell it to the comic stories and maybe sell 30,000, and that would be it. Back in the ’80s, it took a mainstream publisher coming to DC and saying, “You guys are idiots! Let us have the book, we’ll market it and show you how it’s done.” The next thing you know, Alan and Dave are all over the bestseller lists. Even if the movie was self-destructive, the book still endures.

Comics publishers are used to looking in a very, very narrow focused prism. It’s like when I started writing X-Men. Our “meat and potatoes” money was made of newsstand sales, while anything that came through the Direct Market was considered gravy. In everything we did in those early years up through the ’80s, everything we sold to the Direct Market was pure profit because we’d already paid for the printing with our newsstand sales; we were just cranking out money.

But on the flipside, when DC made the decision to go exclusively to the Direct Market, it made life much easier because they’d have the orders in before they set the print runs and would just print a marginal amount of extra copies. That way you didn’t have to worry about 200,000 excess copies unsold by the newsstand, for example. But the negative to being exclusively aimed at the Direct Market is that you’re selling to a committed audience and not bringing any new kids in the door. When Marvel followed DC’s route for the Direct Market, they were going for guaranteed profit and minimal risk, but newsstands had a much bigger potential for sales and induction of new readers.

Once local comic shops began going away in the ’90s, it put a lot of those readers out because not many people are willing to drive 40 or 50 miles for comics; they’ll simply move on to other things. The fiscal decision in the ’90s to maximize profit at the expense of investment was like cutting our own throats. But on the other hand, the guys making those decisions are now billionaires.

Daredevil #7

As the end of 2011 approaches, websites and publications are unveiling various year-end lists and gift guides — so many that keeping up is a challenge. Here’s just some of what’s been released in the past few days

• Matt Madden and Jessica Abel, editors for the Best American Comics series, have released their annual Notable Comics list. Every year they try to get their hands on every North American comic that’s published every year so they can narrow them down to about 100 or so comics for their guest editor to choose from for each edition. This year’s list includes comics by Matt Kindt, Brandon Graham, Megan Kelso, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, Michael Deforge, Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, Mike Dawson, Joshua Cotter and many, many more.

• In a list of their favorite music, movies, books and more of 2011, The Tulane Hullabaloo spotlights Mark Waid, Marcos Martin and Paolo Rivera’s run on Daredevil: “The series contains a sense of pure, manic glee missing from many of today’s dark, gritty and realistic superheroes, with Daredevil grinning as he makes snow angels on the rooftops of his beloved city rather than brooding over his internal demons. It’s a joy to read every month and cannot be recommended more, even to non-comic book enthusiasts.”

• UK comics retailer Forbidden Planet has been posting best of the year lists from various comic folks on their blog, including Sean Azzopardi, Mary Talbot, Edward Ross and Robin Etherington.

• MTV Splash Page counts down the top five comic book movie deaths of 2011.

• Brian Truitt at USA Today offers a list of gift ideas for comic fans.

• Lauren Davis at ComicsAlliance offers a guide to various webcomics collections and merchandise she thinks would make fine gifts — “a fantastic way to convert friends and family to your favorite webcomic.”

Avengers Assemble

Saturday at the New York Comic Con brought news for the Avengers, Superman, Legendary Comics and … Disney’s Prep & Landing? Here’s a round-up of announcements from the show today.

• With a big, blockbuster Avengers movie scheduled for next May, Marvel announced a new ongoing series, Avengers Assemble, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mark Bagley. The book will launch next March and will feature most of the Avengers featured in the movie — Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye and the Hulk. The first arc will feature the villainous group the Zodiac.

• Speaking of that big, blockbuster Avengers movie, fans were treated to new footage from it featuring Bruce Banner and the Black Widow. Tom Hiddleston spoke to CBR about his work on the film.

• Marvel also announced that writer Rick Remender and artist Gabriel Hardman will take over Secret Avengers with issue #21.1, adding new members and pitting them against a new Masters of Evil.

• At the Cup O’ Joe panel today, Marvel also announced a Disney/Marvel crossover — Prep & Landing: Mansion: Impossible. It features the elves from the Disney television special who prepare homes for the arrival of Santa Claus every Christmas eve — only this time they’re trying to break into Avengers Mansion to get it ready for Santa. Written by director Kevin Deters and drawn by story artist Joe Mateo, the story will run in the back of the Marvel Adventures books as well as Avengers #19 in November.

• Marvel CCO Joe Quesada also announced that Marvel will publish a comic based on the Showtime television show Dexter. Novelist Jeff Lindsay will bring the popular character to comics with an all-new ongoing series with new stories set in the world of the Dexter novels

• During their All Access: Superman panel, DC Comics plans to release a second Superman: Earth One graphic novel next fall, by writer J. Michael Straczynski and artist Shane Davis. They showed off the book’s cover, and Davis revealed the Parasite will appear in it.

• It was confirmed that Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens will take over Superman from George Perez beginning with issue #7.

• DC’s CCO Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank have been tapped for “The Curse of Shazam,” a back-up story that will appear in Justice League starting with issue #5.

• Fans were treated to the first episode of Warner Bros. upcoming Green Lantern animated series. The first scene is available to view online.

• Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi will bring back Sabretooth, the character they decapitated some years back.

• Harold Parrineau will voice Blade in the upcoming Blade Anime from Marvel.

• Top Cow announced that David Hine will take over as writer of The Darkness, and a second volume of his comic with Shaky Kane, Bulletproof Coffin, is in the works.

Dragon Age

• Dark Horse Comics, who already have the license for Bioware’s Mass Effect video game, will publish digital comics based on the video game series Dragon Age. The comics will feature characters from the first and second game — Isabela, Alistair and Varric. (As a huge Dragon Age fan, I can’t help but wonder, which Alistair will appear in the comics? I have three different saved games on my Playstation 3 — one where Alistair became king, one where he became a drunk and one where the new queen of Ferelden had him killed. It’s likely not the third Alistair).

• Famed creator Mike Kaluta is working on a “big, meaty graphic novel” based on the John Milton poem Paradise Lost. Legendary Comics will publish it.

• Legendary will also publish a collection of Paul Pope’s The One Trick Rip-Off, an early work first published by Dark Horse.

• Viz Media will replace its Shonen Jump magazine with a weekly digital magazine called Weekly Shonen Jump Alpha.

• Steve Jackson Game will introduce a card game based on Image’s Skullkickers.

• Lucasfilm debuted a poster for the upcoming film Red Tails, drawn by Joe Kubert.

• And finally, ABC showed a sneak preview of their hey-isn’t-that-kinda-like-Fables TV show Once Upon a Time. A fan asked about the similarities between Once Upon a Time, Fables and NBC’s Grimm. “I haven’t seen what the movies are doing and I haven’t read those scripts,” said creator Edward Kitsis. “For us, this is our interpretation of this world. Fairy tales have become a genre the way science fiction is a genre, and I am always up for watching someone in a spaceship heading somewhere on a mission, and this is our version of that.”

France gets some cool comics movies. Last year there was The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec; now in a couple of weeks they’ll have Poulet Aux Prunes, an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Chicken with Plums.

Oddly, Satrapi’s story of a relative of hers who decides to kill himself after his wife destroys his cherished tār looks like it’s played for laughs in the film. The trailer below shows some surreal fantasy sequences in which Nasser Ali Khan imagines various ways of committing suicide. It’s been a couple of years since I read the book (I reviewed it for Robot 6 at the time), but though I remember its using humor, it’s certainly not the comedy that the trailer makes it out to be. While the suicide plan sounds extreme and ridiculous at first, there’s a hidden reason for it that makes sense once it’s revealed. Discovering the answer to that heartbreaking mystery is one of the book’s most captivating and powerful elements and I dearly hope the film doesn’t sacrifice it for laughs. Satrapi both co-wrote and co-directed the film, so there’s reason to be optimistic.

(via Straitened Circumstances)

The Scream Awards will be taped Oct. 15 in Los Angeles and broadcast Oct. 18 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Spike.

Here are the nominees in the three comics-specific categories:

Best comic book or graphic novel
• American Vampire, by Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque (Vertigo)
• Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory (Image Comics)
• Daytripper, by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba (Vertigo)
• Locke & Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriquez (IDW Publishing)
• The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard (Image Comics)

Best comic book writer
• Ed Brubaker (Captain America, Captain America: Reborn, The Marvels Project, Steve Rogers: Super Soldier)
• Joe Hill (Locke & Key, The Cape)
• Robert Kirkman (The Astounding Wolf-Man, Haunt, Invincible, The Walking Dead)
• Grant Morrison (Batman Incorporated, Joe the Barbarian)
• Mike Mignola (Baltimore, The Amazing Screw-On Head)

Best comic book artist
• Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead)
• Mark Buckingham (Fables)
• Duncan Fegredo (Hellboy)
• John Romita Jr. (The Avengers, Kick-Ass)
• Bernie Wrightson (Doc Macabre)

Also worth noting are nods in other categories for comic-book adaptations Captain America: The First Avenger, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, RED, Thor, The Walking Dead and X-Men: First Class. A full list of nominees is available on the Scream Awards website, where fans are encouraged to vote often.

Anonymous protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks (photo by Vincent Diamante)

Infamous for its protests against the Church of Scientology and website attacks on Sony, Visa and, most recently, Bay Area Rapid Transit, the loose-knit hacker group Anonymous is perhaps best known for a single image that’s become a symbol of its anarchic movement: The V for Vendetta-inspired Guy Fawkes mask worn by its members in public protests.

However, as The New York Times notes this morning, each of those masks purchased by the largely anti-government, anti-corporation activists puts money in the coffers of Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. The parent company of DC Comics, which published the Alan Moore-David Lloyd miniseries in the United States, and Warner Bros., which released the film adaptation in 2006, owns the rights to the image, and receives a licensing fee for each mask sold.

And there are a lot sold, thanks largely to the Anonymous movement. Rubie’s Costumes, the New York company that produces the masks, sells more than 100,000 a year; by comparison, it sells only about 5,000 of each of its other masks.

But it wasn’t until recently that Rubie’s knew why Guy Fawkes was a bestseller. “We just thought people liked the V for Vendetta movie,” Rubie’s executive Howard Beige tells the newspaper. “Then one morning I saw a picture of these protesters wearing the mask in an online news article. I quickly showed my sales manager.”

Green Lantern

Movies | National Public Radio commentator John Ridley critiques Hollywood for being even less diverse than the Big Two when it comes to diversity in lead characters, and demolishes their blame-the-audience theory that white people won’t go to see a movie with a black lead by pointing to a study by Indiana University professor Andrew Weaver: “Weaver found that white audiences tended to be racially selective with regard to romantic movies, but not necessarily when it came to other genres. So, sorry, Hollywood. You can’t blame it on the ticket buyers.” [NPR]

Piracy | Comic-book torrent tracker Z-Cult FM, which was threatened with legal action by Marvel in 2007 and eventually shut down in 2009, has re-opened its virtual doors. [Facebook]

Creators | Becky Cloonan talks about the joys and the hardships of being a full-time comics creator: “Comics are hard work. Comics are relentless. Comics will break your heart. Comics are monetarily unsatisfying. Comics don’t offer much in terms of fortune and glory, but comics will give you complete freedom to tell the stories you want to tell, in ways unlike any other medium. Comics will pick you up after it knocks you down. Comics will dust you off and tell you it loves you. And you will look into its eyes and know it’s true, that you love comics back.” [Becky Cloonan: Comics or STFU]

Creators | The Sixth Gun writer Cullen Bunn has returned to writing a column for Broken Frontier. [Broken Frontier]

Creators | Vera Brosgol, whose first graphic novel, Anya’s Ghost, was just published by First Second, talks about being that funny immigrant kid… who knew how to draw comics. [Speakeasy]

Creators | Robot 6 contributor Brigid Alverson interviews artist Ramon Perez about his work on A Tale of Sand, a graphic novel based on a recently discovered script written by Muppets creator Jim Henson. [Publishers Weekly]

Creators | James Romberger talks to Anders Nilsen about his ambitious new work, aptly titled Big Questions. [Publishers Weekly]

Creators | Vaneta Rogers talks to Scott Lobdell and Ron Marz about their Twitterfight of last week, which started when Lobdell criticized Marz for Tweeting “‘Worst. Week. Ever.’ — Racists.” If you’re expecting more snark, go elsewhere; everyone has calmed down and is being all nice now. [Newsarama]

Creators | Sean Kleefeld links us up with a beautiful piece of animation by Little Nemo creator Winsor McCay. It’s all hand drawn and amazingly fluid — like watching one of McCay’s cartoons come to life. [Kleefeld on Comics]

Infographics | Freestyle Interactive compares popular social media sites to superheroes, noting Facebook is “big, ugly, powerful, but not very friendly” like the Hulk and flickr is “Very impressive to look at but you wouldn’t miss it if it was extinguished” like the Human Torch. Burn. [Freestyle Interactive]

Retailing | Todd Allen looks at a little-understood phenomenon, the placement of comics in big-box retail stores — sometimes priced at less than the wholesale cost. [Publishers Weekly]

Retailing | Damage to the Birmingham, England, Nostalgia & Comics store during the recent riots was limited to some broken windows; there was no looting, and no one was hurt. [Forbidden Planet]

Jobs | Want to get into digital comics from the inside? Dark Horse is looking for an Application/Web Developer. [Dark Horse Comics]

from The Last Lonely Saturday

The Last Lonely Saturday, by Uptight and The Clouds Above cartoonist Jordan Crane, is one of my favorite comics of all time. Why? You can find out if you read the entire beautifully bittersweet story online at Crane’s webcomics portal, What Things Do.

It’ll only take a minute or two. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

There now. Need a hankie? I figured. The story of an elderly man bringing flowers to his beloved, The Last Lonely Saturday is where I first discovered Crane’s impeccably cartoony character designs and near-wordless storytelling chops, as well as his knack for teasing both the darkness and the light out of issues of love and loss. And now the comic has been adapted into a live-action short film by director Seth Craven. The movie premieres as part of the HollyShorts Film Festival at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 in Los Angeles on August 12 at 5pm. Get ready to be heartbroken.

WPXI reports that on Saturday evening, Pittsburgh police Det. Robert DiGiacomo was in an unmarked vehicle looking for the suspect in an assault. Suddenly a man matching the suspect’s description opened the car door, sat down and told the detective to get out. When the officer drew his gun and ordered 21-year-old Micah Calamosca to exit the car, the suspect reportedly responded that he was part of the cast of the Christopher Nolan film … and that stealing the vehicle was just part of the script.

As you may have guessed, DiGiacomo didn’t buy the explanation. Calamosca was subsequently arrested, and faces a charge of robbery of a motor vehicle. A police vehicle. I’d have at least gone for Batman’s Tumbler. Heck, he has three, so he may not have missed one.

Baron von Strucker vs. Captain America in "Captain America: Super Soldier"

Ahead of the July 19 release of Captain America: Super Soldier, SEGA has debuted new art and background information for some of the villains players will encounter in the third-person action game.

Tying into the upcoming Captain America: The First Avenger feature film, Super Soldier allows gamers, playing as the Sentinel of Liberty, to engage in free-flowing combat and acrobatic platforming to infiltrate a mysterious castle and battle the Iron Cross, the forces of HYDRA and a host of enemies serving the Red Skull in an attempt to stop evil scientist Arnim Zola.

You can see screenshots, art and descriptions for Baron von Strucker, Madame Hydra and a sniper after the break.

Baron Wolfgang von Strucker

Baron Wolfgang von Strucker

Baron von Strucker
Baron Wolfgang von Strucker was born into Prussian nobility with familial association to the secret society known as Hydra. Ambitious, arrogant and harboring a particular distaste for the lower-class, Strucker quickly rose through Hydra, becoming proficient in both combat and tactics. Intercepted documents suggest he is pursuing development of advanced weaponry known as the “Satan Claw” for personal use.

Madame Hydra

Madame Hydra vs. Captain America

Madame Hydra

Madame Hydra
Hydra has a longstanding tradition of the role of Madame Hydra, the highest-ranking female in its organization. Little is known about the current Madame Hydra, except that she is respected and feared as a ruthless fighter. Madame Hydra is rumored to be an expert in poisons and torture, and is proficient in coaxing information out of those she captures.

Sniper vs. Captain America

Sniper

Sniper
The Sniper is one of the ranged enemies Cap will encounter, and is the foot soldier of Arnim Zola’s security forces. These men are top conditioned Hydra soldiers, augmented by a weak version of Red Skull’s serum-enhanced DNA. Armed either with rifles or shotguns they strike from a distance with careful precision, making well-timed use of Cap’s shield essential.

Honestly, most comic book movies feel like most tie-in-videogames do. Those things get made to service the trademark. They aren’t very good games. There’s nothing amazing going on in innovation or gameplay. They’re cool because you get to roleplay Batman kicking skulls in or the like. I’m sure they’re entertaining enough, but they’re not memorable above and beyond that.

–Strangeways writer (and Robot 6 veteran) Matt Maxwell, with a comparison that really clarified a lot of things for me about the pleasures and disappointments of superhero movies. Fatherhood has done to my movie-going time what I do to about 20 diapers a day and thrown it right in the garbage, but I’ve looked forward to and seen a lot of these flicks over the years, and on an alternate Earth I’d have seen two more already this summer in the form of Thor and X-Men: First Class, with another two, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger soon to join them. I’ve disliked many of them. I’ve liked some of them. I’ve liked a handful — the Marvel Studios suite of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2 — well enough to own them on DVD. But with the exception of the first Tim Burton Batman movie, I’ve never seen one that offers the never-seen-that-before sensation that superhero comics still regularly afford you, if you know where to look.

I enjoy the Iron Man films’ use of crackling banter as connective tissue. I’ve seen memorable action sequences in Incredible Hulk and X-Men and Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight, the latter of which also boasts a for-the-ages performance and villain. But only that first Burton Batman (the second took things too far into Burton’s self-indulgent Hot Topic bubble world) had a sense of style — an extra element, an x-factor, a weirdness, something that didn’t need to be there just to sell the characters to a wide demographic and deliver the basic popcorn-movie beats. (Ang Lee and Bryan Singer gave it a shot with the Hulk and Superman, but any idiosyncratic flair they might have brought to the material was crushed under the weight of leaden self-seriousness.) The comparison with superhero movie tie-in video games, where the selling point is generally just “hey, you can play as Captain Character!”, is dead-on. “Hey, it’s Captain Character up on the screen, surrounded by tens of millions of dollars in special effects and publicity and famous actors’ salaries!” That’s terrific, but I’ll tell you what: As soon as one of these things pushes the boundaries of even just popular English-language action-adventure filmmaking the way comparable efforts from George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, George Miller, James Cameron, John McTiernan, the Wachowski Brothers, and Peter Jackson have done, gimme a call.

My son is 10 and a romantic, as all 10-year-olds surely have the right to be. How then do I speak to him of this world’s masterminds who render you a supporting actor in your own story? How do I speak of the Sentinels whose eyes melt history, until the world forgets that in 1962, the quintessential mutants of America were black?

—from a New York Times op-ed piece on Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class by Atlantic contributor Ta-Nehisi Coates. In the piece, Coates praises the film as “the most thrilling movie of the summer…narratively lean, beautifully acted and, at all the right moments, visually stunning” — and at the same time finds the makeup of the film’s mutant heroes and anti-heroes an unintentionally revealing glimpse into the American psyche. “Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes.”

Coates elaborates on both points, and more besides, on his blog. “It is easily one of my top five comic book movies ever, and significantly better than any of the other X-movies to date,” he writes, even after comparing it unfavorably to the racially homogeneous but racially aware Mad Men and calling it “a period piece blind to its own period.” He also offers a quick take on the pros and cons of the film’s treatment of women, a point examined in depth by The Mary Sue’s Susana Polo.

Elsewhere on the “sociopolitical examinations of the latest X-movie” beat, ThinkProgress’ Matthew Yglesias agrees with a point of Polo’s and argues (twice) that Magneto’s out-and-proud Brotherhood of Mutants has a far more appealing message than Xavier’s accommodationist group; Ezra Klein disagrees, pointing out that Magneto’s agenda is a supremacist one, and wondering if the real dividing line between rival mutant camps would be one between those who could profit monetarily from their abilities (eg. Storm selling her rainmaking services to agribusiness conglomerates and drought-stricken nations) and those who couldn’t; and Adam Serwer connects the film with Avatar‘s enlightened-colonizer-goes-native storyline as “another example of the way the quest for racial innocence so permeates American culture that it’s almost unrecognizable.”

“I think audiences are ready [for more challenging superhero films]. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anyone in Hollywood who could drum up the $300 million it would take to make [a Final Crisis movie]. But entertainment has changed, again. We’ve been concerned with realism for a while, but we’re getting back into psychedelia and fantasy again. Look at James Cameron’s Avatar or Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which are two of the most successful films of the last two years. Both happened to catch a wave that few were ready for.”

–Grant Morrison in Wired, November 2010

My recent entrance into the world of fatherhood has done to my theatergoing what Bane did to Batman’s back, but that hasn’t kept me from eagerly anticipating new superhero movies, for good or for ill, nor has it stopped me from picking them apart with my friends. During one such recent discussion about Kenneth Branagh’s hit Thor adaptation, two of my friends said it feels a lot like Marvel Studios’ other movies — one of them meant it as a compliment, the other as a criticism, but both agreed that this similarity was the plan all along. Thor’s roots in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s cosmic take on the Norse myths may be a million miles away from Iron Man’s weapons-manufacturer-turned-roguish-hero science fiction, but both properties are being filtered through Marvel Studios’ version of Marvel Comics’ “as close to the real world as the presence of superheroes will allow us to get” tone — specifically, the military-industrial version thereof that was pioneered, I’d say, by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates a decade ago. Most of the other big superhero movies have been similarly earthbound, aesthetically speaking, from Christopher Nolan’s dark, Chicago-set Batman movies to the paramilitary jumpsuits of Bryan Singer’s X-Men. In those cases you could make a reasonable argument that toning things down made sense. In other cases, like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, making Spidey as much of an everyman as possible is part and parcel of the concept’s appeal.

But then there are situations like Fantastic Four, which seemed to run screaming from the visual and narrative flair provided by the Lee/Kirby original. Would it really have been so horrible to portray Galactus as a gigantic guy in a purple suit and hat? I know that in the bizarro logic that pervades a lot of nerd culture, that’s somehow less “serious” than a movie about astronauts who get mutated by cosmic rays would otherwise be, but even so, providing filmgoers with something they’ve never seen before can be a recipe for blockbuster success just as much as visual comfort food often is. Why not give it a shot? Why not use all of the spectacular elements of superhero fiction to really blow some minds? Sure, Thor has Asgard, but it’s still a relatively toned-down version compared to Jack Kirby’s eye-melting godlike machinery.

Which leads me to Green Lantern. Its first trailer was very very Iron Man in tone, with its “handsome womanizing wiseacre gets powers, learns to use them heroically” arc. Its second trailer was a more traditional “very serious superhero versus very serious threat in very serious action film” affair. But its third and most recent trailer goes full-on, balls-out cosmic in its depiction of the Green Lantern creation myth and the menagerie that is the Green Lantern Corps. Cotton-candy colors, wavy hazy energy, landscapes straight out of a Roger Dean album cover for Yes, a Crayola 64-pack of aliens, epic narration (“Billions of years ago, a race of immortals harnessed the most powerful force in existence: the emerald energy of willpower”) that sounds like it could have come from the B-side of Donovan’s “Atlantis” — it’s defiantly unrealistic. It presents the Green Lantern Corps as the anti-S.H.I.E.L.D. — there’s nothing ground-level about them whatsoever.

Obviously the movie’s not out yet — it could be really bad, and/or it could bomb. (Those two things are by no means necessarily related.) I’ve already seen plenty of complaints about the CGI, which makes no effort to hide that it’s CGI; I don’t mind that, because to me that’s how all sci-fi CGI has looked, from the Star Wars prequels right on through Avatar (The Lord of the Rings still has the best blend of extensive and convincing CGI usage to date, going on 10 years after it premiered), but I’m sure that could hurt it with some segments of the audience. But in watching this third trailer, what came to mind weren’t the two touchstones of contemporary superhero cinema, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, but Morrison’s dynamic duo of Avatar and Alice. Is that what superhero audiences want to see? We’re about to find out.

Green Lantern roller-coaster

With less than a month until the opening of the Warner Bros. movie, Six Flags Great Adventure today premieres its 15-story Green Lantern roller-coaster — excuse me, stand-up thrill coaster — in Jackson, New Jersey. Season pass holders get an exclusive preview through Sunday, with the ride opening to the general public on May 25. That is, as long as the rapture doesn’t arrive on Saturday, throwing a wrench into the rollout.

Designed by the engineers behind the DC Comics-themed Bizarro, Superman-Ultimate Flight and the unimaginatively named Batman the Ride, Green Lantern reaches speeds of 63 miles per hour, and features a 121-foot-tall loop.

Check out video of the ride after the break. The Green Lantern movie, which stars Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively and Mark Strong, opens on June 17.

Updated: Though many of the comments about this article (below and elsewhere) indicate that people read the entire thing and understood my point, enough didn’t that I now realize that the tile of this post is unintentionally misleading. This is not a post about how the story presented in the movie is better than the best stories presented in the comics. It’s about how Marvel’s trade program is impenetrable enough and how the quality of stories over a series’ 50-year history varies enough that people who enjoy Marvel movies and would enjoy reading some similar comics often end up just throwing their hands in the air and deciding to watch the movie again instead. Sincere apologies to those for whom this was not clear.

In his response to the news that Marvel’s putting a lot of their cartoons on Netflix, Tom Spurgeon noted that “the Marvel cartoons are probably a bigger factor than we realize in building a core audience for many of their properties, but I haven’t seen anyone seriously engage that subject since the first X-Men movie came out.”

I don’t expect that this article constitutes “serious engagement,” but Spurgeon did remind me of my own reaction to last weekend’s Thor movie. My dominant thought as I watched it (and one that lingered into the parking lot and beyond) was that I enjoyed it more than I’ve enjoyed a Thor comic in a long, long time. Since I was a kid really. The same is true of the Iron Man films – even the second one – only replace “in a long, long time” with “ever.”

Take into consideration that I’ve yet to read Walt Simonson’s Thor or any of Matt Fraction’s stuff with either character, so I realize that my viewpoint is extremely limited. But that’s not the point. I’m not trying to claim that the story presented in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is objectively better than every comic ever written about the same character. I do suspect however that the experience of watching it is – for most people – a more satisfying thing than the experience of trying to read the books on which it’s based. As a life-long comics fan, my surprise is that I’m not only sympathetic to that perspective, but have adopted it myself.

The discussion about whether or not movies lead people to comics is an old one. I prefer to let Mike Sterling have the last word on it, because a) he’s a retailer and most people who argue about this aren’t, and b) it makes sense. According to Sterling, “movie-related comics tend to peak in sales just before the movie’s release, before dropping down to pre-movie hype sales (or even lower) upon or shortly after the film’s debut.” I’m pretty sure I recall another caveat to that rule too: that it primarily applies to collected volumes or graphic novels that are easily identifiable as the clear inspiration for the film. In other words, Sin City and Watchmen sales temporarily benefit from an upcoming movie, but people generally don’t go see X-Men and then decide to start following the serialized periodicals. I found this to be true among my friends when Spider-Man came out. They loved the movie and would reminisce with me about all the Spider-Man comics they loved as a kid, but I couldn’t drag them into a comic book store. They just weren’t interested. Nor do people who don’t read comics all of a sudden start buying Batman monthlies because they really like Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

I finally understand this because as much as I loved the Thor movie, I’ve got zero desire to start digging into Thor comics. A large part of the reason is because Marvel – in making sure that there’s puh-lenty of Thor comics available for movie fans – has completely overwhelmed and confused me about where I might want to dive in. There’s a buttload of Thor series out right now; all with generic-sounding names that fail to make me think they might replicate some of what I liked about the movie.

None of which contradicts what Spurgeon said about “building a core audience for many of [Marvel’s] properties.” Having seen the Thor movie, I’m a bigger fan of Marvel’s version of the character than I’ve ever been. I’m just a fan of Chris Hemsworth as that character and not so interested in trying to maneuver through the comics.

One of the things that the movie got exactly right that the comics usually fail to do is the balance between Asgard and Midgard. As a kid, my favorite Thor stories were the superhero ones where he was on earth, fighting Absorbing Man or whomever, preferably with the Avengers so that his godliness stood out in stark contrast to the comparatively frail humanity of guys like Captain America and Iron Man. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized some folks actually prefer the Asgardian fantasy stories. I’d always seen those as things to be patiently endured until Thor could get back to Earth where the real action was.

One of the reasons I’m anxious to read Walt Simonson’s Thor is that he’s said to be one of the few people to get that Asgard-Midgard balance just right so that fans of both settings are equally pleased. I want to see how he does that. The film does a fantastic job by creating a story in which events occur simultaneously in both realms so that what happens in one directly affects the other. The movie’s constant shifting between the two ensures that there’s no time to get bored with either.

But it takes a specific kind of story to be able to do that and I’m not sure how filmmakers are going to repeat it in sequels. I believe that they can, but only in a limited way before the formula becomes tiresome. Fortunately, there are other limits to the longevity of these films as well: actors’ contracts, audience interest, etc. Even if the quality of the sequels measures up to this first one, we’ll only get five or six Thor movies tops before the series either fizzles out or needs to be rebooted with a fresh cast. Giving the hypothetical writers of the sequels the benefit of the doubt, let’s say that they can keep the Asgard-Midgard balance interesting for six films. With a strong team of writers, that’s possible. Doing it over 50 years of serialized comics: not so much.

And that’s where I’m getting at with this whole thing. Though the weight of history indicates that Thor 3 will have more in common with Superman III, Batman Forever, and Spider-Man 3 than everyone’s expectations for The Dark Knight Rises, it’s at least conceivable that someone could tell six good Thor stories on film. And even if they can’t, film doesn’t work the same way as comics. At least, not the same way that we’re told comics work.

Even if this first Thor movie is the only good one, it’s enough. It stands on its own and if you never watch another one, watching this one has been a satisfying experience. It’s not even important whether or not you buy the DVD or whatever. You get to choose your level of involvement. Periodical superhero comics, on the other hand, ask you to make a commitment that may or may not pay off in good stories. In fact, the more committed you are – the longer you keep reading – the more likely you are to be disappointed. As good as Simonson or Fraction or [name your favorite Thor creator] may be, you have to prune away an awful lot of less-worthy stuff to get to what you like. Movies (and TV shows) take a lot less work to find the good stuff and so are a lot less frustrating. That makes them much more satisfying for most people.

The question is: how could Marvel (or DC, for that matter) change what they’re doing to create more interest in the comics versions for people who like their superhero films?

Really, it was always just a matter of time before these two great products of the 1980s, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and Hasbro’s My Little Pony, met. Even if it is The Hub’s strange new My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic cartoon — seriously, that’s the name — mashed up with Zack Snyder’s 2009 comic-book adaptation.  “From the visionary director of 300 Ponies,” it’s … Ponymen. Stay gold, Ponymen. Stay gold.

(via Colleen Doran)

Neil Gaiman

Politics | The controversy in Minnesota continues over Neil Gaiman’s speaking fee, with a state House Republican committee chairman now recommending a $45,000 cut to the Twin Cites’ regional library system budget to make up for the Legacy Fund money paid to the author and comics writer in May 2010. “I simply subtracted out $45,000 — just making a point,” Rep. Dean Urdahl said. Gaiman responded that the move “seems like a sad way to make a point.” He talks at length with CityPages about the controversy. [Star-Tribune]

Passings | Prolific Argentine comics writer Carlos Trillo, co-creator of CyberSix, passed away over the weekend while on vacation in London. He was 68. Trillo, whose career spanned five decades, collaborated with such artists as Eduardo Risso, Jordi Bernet, Juan Bobillo, Carlos Meglia and Domingo Roberto Mandrafina. [TN.com, via The Beat]

Retailing | Peter Panepinto turns a Free Comic Book Day preview into one of those perennial articles about the potential effects of superhero movies on comic-book sales. [Carroll County Times]

Conventions | Deb Aoki wraps up the first day of last weekend’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. [About.com]

Flashpoint #1

Publishing | Brian Truitt continues his preview of DC Comics’ Flashpoint event, which puts The Flash in the spotlight. “He’s not about a hundred guys who run fast,” Geoff Johns says. “He’s not Green Lantern where Green Lantern is about this intergalactic space corps. The Flash’s huge canvas is time. I’ve always said when I was redoing both these characters, it’s time and space. Batman’s the ultimate crime vigilante superhero. You will never ever top Batman, and for time travel and crossing all these different planes of reality, you’ll never top the Flash. The Flash owns time.” [USA Today]

Creators | Mike Huddleston chats, not entirely seriously, about Butcher Baker, Righteous Maker, his new Image Comics collaboration with Joe Casey: “Joe and I had both been on the professional arm wrestling circuit for several years and kind of knew each other from competitions. It just happened that we were both sidelined last year with injuries, so being out of competition for a season we had time to kill and started talking about other jobs we could have. I had heard you could get really rich making independent comics, so I convinced Joe to give writing a shot and the rest is history. Joe has had these characters in his head since he was like 6 years old, so I’m not sure how many issues he has planned. We’ll see if he can keep his schedule once he’s back in competition.” [Bloody Disgusting]

One Piece, Vol. 27

Crime | Police in Fukuoka City, Japan, arrested three 17-year-old males on charges of shoplifting the first 57 volumes of One Piece, the insanely popular manga series by Eiichiro Oda. [Anime News Network]

Comics | J. Caleb Mozzocco writes at length about the 2010 Marvel miniseries Doomwar. [Every Day Is Like Wednesday]

Comics | Jeffery Klaehn posts a gallery of Thor art, and posts his list of the Top 10 Thor covers by Jack Kirby and Walter Simonson. [Pop]

Amazon Kindle

E-books | Amazon announced it will allow Kindle users to read e-books from more than 11,000 libraries, marking a reversal of the company’s policy. Previously library users who borrowed e-books could read them on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader and other devices, but not the Kindle. “We’re excited that millions of Kindle customers will be able to borrow Kindle books from their local libraries,” Jay Marine, Amazon’s director of Kindle, said in a statement. The Kindle Library Lending will debut later this year. [The New York Times, press release]

Publishing | Several DC Comics staff members laid off as part of the sweeping corporate restructuring — among them, editors Mike Carlin and Pornsak Pichetshote — have been hired by DC Entertainment’s newly formed Burbank-based Creative Affairs division, which operates alongside Creative Services. [Bleeding Cool]

Legal | Japanese police have arrested a 25-year-old man suspected of using Share file-sharing software to upload about 28,000 manga and anime files without the copyright holders’ permission. [Anime News Network]

Tokyopop

Publishing | Sam Humphries and J. Caleb Mozzocco join in the reflection on the closing of Tokyopop’s U.S. publishing operations. [Comics Alliance, Every Day Is Like Wednesday]

Publishing | IDW Publishing is auctioning all 83 variants of Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #1, with the proceeds going to AmeriCares to benefit the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. [IDW Publishing]

Retailing | Borders Group, which is closing 226 superstores, is paying a dozen consultants more than $500 an hour to guide the company through the bankruptcy process. [AnnArbor.com]

Retailing | Kevin Czap tours Cleveland’s comic stores. [Comix Cube]

Far Arden

Creators | Far Arden creator Kevin Cannon has been dubbed the best cartoonist in Minneapolis. [City Pages, via Top Shelf]

Creators | Matt Fraction talks about the new Mighty Thor series: “Is he a superhero, is he a god? Is it a little g or a big G and what does that mean? Is my god better than your god, and does Jesus live somewhere? It’s also fun to refer to big Gs and then cut to Galactus.” [USA Today]

Creators | Jonathan Valelly spotlights Chester Brown and the official book launch for Paying For It. [Xtra]

Creators | Cowboys & Aliens co-writer Andrew Foley discusses the upcoming movie adaptation. [Edmonton Sun]