Superhero Changing Station

Posterchild at Blade Diary has photos of a conveniently labeled superhero changing station in New York ... (Thanks David!)

Spider-Man's walk of shame

While The L.A. Times' Mel Melcon snaps some shots of Spider-Man's big arrest in Hollywood ... J. Jonah must be really proud right now.

Reeve Carney

The creative team behind Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark emerged from today's meeting with an announcement about new producers and official word on the musical's lead actor.

What they didn't reveal, however, was a specific date for the troubled Broadway musical, only saying that it will open in 2010 at the Hilton Theatre in Manhattan. The show, whose proposed budget has ballooned to $52 million, initially was set to bow in late March, but the most recent rumors had it opening past April 29 -- the cutoff for Tony Award nominations.

The creative team confirmed relative newcomer Reeve Carney, long rumored for the role, has been cast as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. The casting initially had been reported this morning in the Los Angeles Times. The 26-year-old Carney, lead singer of the rock band of the same name, also will appear in Spider-Man director Julie Taymor's big-screen adaptation of The Tempest.

In Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Carney joins Evan Rachel Wood as Mary Jane and Alan Cumming as Green Goblin in a production scored by Bono and the Edge.

This afternoon's press release also included the announcement that Michael Cohl has replaced Chicago lawyer David Garfinkle as lead producer, with Jeremiah J. Harris becoming second producer. The full producing team is Cohl, Harris, Hello Entertainment/Garfinkle, Marvel Entertainment/David Maisel, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

The fate of the financially troubled Spider-Man Broadway musical could be decided today.

According to published reports, producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, whose budget has soared to $52 million, are meeting in Manhattan with director Julie Taymor and other members of the creative team to discuss the cash-flow problems that stalled production for nearly a month and cast doubt on the future of the production.

The musical had been set to preview in late February at a renovated Hilton Theatre, and then open sometime in March. But Patrick Healy of The New York Times writes that Taymor is expected to say rehearsals for the technically complex show won't be able to begin before January, which could push the opening past April 29 -- the cutoff date for Tony Award nominations.

Perhaps of more pressing concern is the $24 million needed to cover a proposed budget that ballooned to $52 million from an estimated $35 million, in part due to theater renovations and restorations. According to the Los Angeles Times, Spider-Man will cost about $1 million a week to produce -- "hundreds of thousands dollars more than what some elaborate shows such as Mary Poppins or West Side Story cost -- and require the 1,700-seat theater to sell out for every show for four years just to break even.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which boasts a musical score by Bono and the Edge, has cast Evan Rachel Wood as Mary Jane, Alan Cumming as Green Goblin and, apparently, relative newcomer Reeve Carney as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. (Carney, who will appear in Taymor's big-screen adaptation of The Tempest, long had been rumored for the role of Spider-Man but never confirmed.)

However, as the LA Times notes, with production delays the musical risks losing the cast to other projects. Cumming, for instance, was just added to the cast of Burlesque, which begins filming next week.

NOTE: A post detailing the announcements made after the meeting can be found here.

Fever promo

Mark Kardwell shares with us an "idea sketch for a 'Coming Soon" type of advert" for Fever, the upcoming Dr. Strange/Spider-Man miniseries written and drawn by Brendan McCarthy. This Marvel Knights series is due in April, McCarthy told Kaldwell.

American Booksellers Association

Retailing | The American Booksellers Association has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the online price war being waged by Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target. The trade group says that by selling advance-order hardcovers at deep discounts the three retail giants are engaging in "illegal predatory pricing" and making it impossible for smaller stores to compete.

Ron Catapano of Ron's Comic World in Mount Holly, New Jersey, asserts that direct-market retailers face a similar scenario: "I hope the comic publishers are paying attention. When the Watchmen movie came out and Amazon was selling the Watchmen trade paperback for less than I could get the book from Diamond Comic Distributors (including shipping cost), I complained and nobody cared. For most discounters, these books are not a significant part of their business, they are just something to make a few extra dollars on." [ICv2.com]

ChuChu

Publishing | Japanese publishing giant Shogakukan plans to close three of its magazines, including the shojo manga monthly ChuChu. The magazine debuted in December 2005 with a print run of 180,000, but more recently sales have hovered around 50,000 copies. [Anime News Network]

Libraries | The New Jersey State Library has awarded $3,000 grants to 14 libraries to help them establish and expand graphic-novel collections. The State Library also conducted workshops about developing collections, and furnished librarians with "a core graphic novel bibliography" to help them with their purchases. [NJ.com]

Publishing | A new teen survey by Teenreads.com revealed that of the respondents who read graphic novels or manga, 51 percent enjoy the romance drama, followed by humor (45 percent), mystery (33 percent), sci-fi/fantasy (31 percent) and action/superhero (26 percent). [Publishers Weekly]

Ministry of Defense comic

Publishing | Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense has created a comic-book version of its latest white paper as part of an effort to attract young people to military service. The ministry has published 10,000 copies of the comic, which targets junior-high students. [Taiwan News]

Conventions | This weekend's Boston Comic Con reportedly drew about 3,000 people. [The Daily Free Press]

Business | Your Spider-Man musical vague update of the day: A spokesman for the financially troubled Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark says, “A lot of progress has been made on the show. It is going to happen.” So, there. [ArtsBeat]

Stan Lee at the Scream Awards

Creators | Stan Lee talks about receiving the Comic-Con Icon Award at Spike TV's 2009 Scream Awards, digital comics and the proper pronunciation of "Magneto." [GeekDad]

Creators | Brian Fees discuss his graphic novels Mom's Cancer and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? [Sequential Tart]

Creators | Tom Spurgeon interviews Will Dinski, winner of this year's Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics. [The Comics Reporter]

Creators | Bestselling author, and former Saturday Night Live writer, Max Brooks chats about his graphic novel Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks: "Don't be proactive: If you see someone stumbling and moaning across the quad (especially on a Saturday night), do not chop their head off!" [Times Union]

Creators | Liz Conley talks about comics, bookbinding and the Couscous Collective. [Sequential Tart]

Creators | Malaysian artist Zint (aka Lu Wun Khang) talks briefly about his work. [The Star]

Blackest Night: Titans #1

Comics | Graeme McMillan gives four reasons why zombies and superheroes don't really mix: "The dead being brought back as pawns to use against our brave heroes? Old hat for superhero comics - In fact, Marvel even has multiple characters based around this concept (the Grim Reaper, the Black Talon ... You could even argue that Brother -- now Doctor -- Voodoo would have some familiarity on the subject). The only thing that's new about this latest wave is the overwhelming scale of the risings ... which is one of the few things legitimately taken from zombie culture." [io9.com]

Comics | The Sequential Tart crew discuss comics that "go bump in the night." [Sequential Tart]

Fandom | U.K. comedian Phill Jupitus writes about his longtime love of comics: "It was Billy Bragg who got me into some of the more serious comics. He told me about Forbidden Planet, a tiny basement comics shop among all the guitar stores on London's 'Tin Pan Alley', Denmark Street, near Soho. He showed me something called V For Vendetta when I was 22 that blew me away." [Mail Online]

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Libraries | Two library employees in Nicholasville, Kentucky, were fired last month after they refused to allow an 11-year-old girl to check out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which they dubbed pornographic. However, the policy of the Jessamine County Library states it's the responsibility of parents to decide what's appropriate for their child to read.

The fired employees, Beth Bovaire and Sharon Cook, stand behind their decision, asserting that the award-winning comic by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill contains lewd pictures that are inappropriate for children.

"If you give children pornography, a child, a 12 year old, can not understand and process the same way a 30 year old can," Cook told a local television news station. [WTVQ, WTVQ]

Tokyo International Manga Library

Libraries | A private university in Tokyo hopes to promote the serious study of manga by opening a library stocked with 2 million comics, anime drawings, video games and other artifacts. If everything goes as planned, the Tokyo International Manga Library would open on the campus of Meiji University in 2015. [AFP]

Publishing | Even after the closing last year of Virgin Comics, upbeat profiles of the Indian comics industry continue to appear regularly. But here Gaurav Jain, head of the Mumbai-based Illusion Interactive Animation, offers a more dismal assessment of the scene in India: "While competition has arrived, the local industry continues to live in its shell, churning out visually unappealing and terribly written local content with little or no film and television possibilities. One of the most widely read labels offers sanitized, vanilla retellings of Indian mythology and historical figures with visuals inspired from the works of Raja Ravi Verma. Derivative art work and bland writing, leads to visual fatigue." [The Wall Street Journal]

Stitches

Publishing | Robert Weil, executive editor and vice president of W.W. Norton, discusses graphic novels and working on David Small's Stitches and R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated: "I edit graphic artists the same way I edit language. My biggest encouragement to David was — he kept sending two or three pages to friends and his agent and to me, and finally I said, 'David, I want you to be a cormorant. I want you to be a bird and go underwater and disappear for several months and just do it one last time. Just commune with yourself. Find the deepest possible images and stirrings in you and when you come up, you’ll be filled with fish in your beak. Which is what a cormorant does. I order you not to call anyone. Go in your studio and just resonate with your work.' And he did." [Graphic Novel Reporter]

Business | It's looking more and more as if the financially troubled Spider-Man musical won't open for previews on Feb. 25, as producers initially planned. [ArtsBeat]

Legal | Not comics, but Harlan Ellison has settled his lawsuit against Paramount over the studio's alleged failure to pay him for merchandising, publishing and other exploitations of "City on the Edge of Forever," an episode the author wrote for the original Star Trek TV series. [Variety]

The Book of Genesis Illustrated

Sales charts | Given the buzz surrounding R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated, it's no surprise the graphic novel debuts as the No. 1 hardcover on The New York Times' Graphic Books Best Seller List, bumping the first volume of Bloom County: The Complete Library to No. 2. [The New York Times]

Creators | Your R. Crumb profile of the day, focusing on "The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis," which opens Saturday at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. [Orange County Register]

Creators | The Eastern Edge translates a discussion by Naoki Urasawa about drawing. [The Eastern Edge]

Air, Vol. 1

Creators | Writer G. Willow Wilson discusses her Vertigo series Air: "I have ideological boundary issues. Air is one of the very rare opportunities I get as a writer to ignore them. Air is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter. In Air, all that is externalized; the symbols we use to represent what we believe, and the lenses we use to look at our past, are all made physically real." [Underwire]

Creators | Brett Williams talks with co-writers Tony Trov and Johnny Zito about their Zuda Comics series Black Cherry Bombshells and LaMorte Sisters. [Surfing the Bleed]

Manga | Robert Ring offers a brief history of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy. [The Sci-Fi Block]

Comic strips | Jill Schulz, daughter of the late Charles Schulz, briefly discusses the enduring popularity of Peanuts and plans for the 60th anniversary of the comic strip. [Nerdage]

Comic strips | Adam Kepler spotlights Nevin Martell's Looking For Calvin and Hobbes. [The Moment]

Comics | A TV station in Greensboro, North Carolina, is excited that a local landmark appears on the variant cover for G-Man #2. [Digtriad.com]

Blackest Night #3

Publishing | Sales of comics to the direct market increased 12 percent in September over the same month last year, lifting the third quarter by 7 percent. Graphic novels, meanwhile, slipped 2 percent in September and 10 percent for the quarter, largely because of the strong performance of Watchmen in 2008.

DC's Blackest Night #3 topped Diamond's comics chart, with sales estimated at 140,786, followed by Marvel's Captain America: Reborn #3 with 108,331. The "Blackest Night" event performed well for DC, with five related titles placing in the Top 10. ICv2.com notes in its analysis that the $3.99 price tag on some of Marvel's comics appears to be having an impact on sales, with the second issues of Ultimate Comics Avengers and Ultimate Comics Spider-Man falling about 15,000 copies each, and Hulk #15 dropping about 18,700 from the previous issue.

The graphic novels list was led by the fifth volume of Dark Horse's Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, with an estimated 7,225 copies. However, the most interesting entry is probably R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated, which charted at No. 28 with some 2,178 copies. [ICv2.com]

Astro Boy

Publishing | Astro Boy, Phoenix, Black Jack and other creations by Osamu Tezuka soon will be available on iPhones and iPods in the United States as Tezuka Productions and D-Arc Inc. launch Weekly Astro Boy Magazine. The first English-language manga service for mobile devices, which could launch as early as this month, will volumes of about 100 pages for about 99 each. [AFP]

Publishing | Speaking of R. Crumb, I'm not sure that I buy this article from a U.K. newspaper that asserts his adaptation of Genesis is at the center of a "Biblical sex row," particularly when a representative from just one group is quoted as objecting to the graphic novel. In related news, Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker thinks The Book of Genesis Illustrated could be on track to become a bestseller. [Telegraph, Shelf Life]

Alan Moore

Publishing | Alan Moore discusses his new underground magazine Dodgem Logic, which launches next month: "We want to provide something that is going to illuminate the rather dismal times that we are currently going through -- and which I tend to suspect will be getting a lot worse – as well as giving people some practical information. Whether that’s under the rubric of our recipe pages, DIY clothing pages, articles on squatting or the more political articles. To keep people informed in a way the conventional media doesn’t do anymore."

Moore also explains what happened to, and what may become of, the songs recorded for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. [Mustard]

Conventions | The London MCM Expo (that's "Movie Comic Media") will be held this weekend. And while it's not exactly a comics convention, it does include a Comic Village that will feature such creators as Andy Diggle, Jock, Ben Templesmith, Alan Grant, David Lafuente, Frazer Irving, Antony Johnston, Marc Ellerby, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Emma Vieceli, Bryan Talbot, Gary Erskine, Simon Spurrier and others. [London MCM Expo]

Retailing | Heidi MacDonald reports on the "upbeat" Diamond Retailer Summit held Oct. 11-12 in Baltimore. [Publishers Weekly]

Retailing | Shadow Gear Comics opened about a month ago in Exeter, Maine New Hampshire. [SeacoastOnline]

Business | The financially troubled Spider-Man musical is "still a $45 million mess," apparently. [Showbiz 411]

Creators | Jason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide and the forthcoming King of RPGs, talks about his work. [Sequential Tart]

Creators | Writer B. Clay Moore runs down his favorite graphic novels and collections. [On Broken Radios]

Digital comics | Neal Adams bangs the drum for motion comics in what amounts to a carnival barker-esque press release for Marvelfest (at which he'll appear) and the Astonishing X-Men adaptation (which Adams directed and his Continuity Studios produced). [Hero Complex]

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

The financially strapped Spider-Man musical may have found new backers to make up for a $10-million shortfall.

Roger Friedman -- you'll remember him for his review of a pirated copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine -- reports that Jim Stern of Endgame Productions may step in to pick up the slack left after producer David Garfinkle ran into money problems a couple of months ago. New Jersey real-estate mogul-turned-movie producer Norton Herrick also could pitch in.

"Cash-flow obstacles" caused preparation work on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark shut down in early August before resuming about a month later. The Broadway production, directed by Julie Taymor (The Lion King) and featuring music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge, is expected to cost somewhere between $35 million and $45 million.

Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming have been cast as Mary Jane Watson and Green Goblin. The role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man hasn't been announced.

Despite the delays, the musical is set to begin previews in late February and open sometime in March.

Spider-Pope!

On last night's episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert spied a spider crawling on the face of Pope Benedict XVI and posed a hypothetical scenario that would make Stan Lee proud: "... Given all the toxic waste and loose nuclear radiation all over Eastern Europe, if that spider bit the pope we might soon have ... Spider-Pope!"

"He could shoot holy water from his wrists," Colbert continued. "Trap atheists in his web, and every time someone used birth control his popey-sense would tingle!"

Uncanny X-Men #518 Cover Art

Artist Terry Dodson shares two "work in progress" covers over on his blog. First, the above cover for Uncanny X-Men #518, and second, the pencils for an upcoming issue of What If? about Spider-Man.