Comic Book Resources

Psylocke, Carnage to be downloadable options for Ultimate Alliance 2

As is expected nowadays with just about any console game that comes out, Activision will release downloadable content, or DLC, for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. No release date has been announced, but they have released info on two characters you'll be able to add to the game. Earlier this month they announced Carnage, and this week they've added Psylocke to the roster.

Check out some more shots and a video of Psylocke after the jump.

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The Fifth Color - Leader in Red

I don't think I'm fooling anyone when I note that Marvel's merry Mutants are bite-sized metaphors on the human condition.  Each one had their own little quirk or personality touch that makes us think about ourselves and our place in the universe.  Lonely girl who can't be touched.  Check.  Ice queen who's more empathic and natural when she puts down her facade of material power.  Check, though it's a new turn on Ms. Frost when her reup'd power set.  There's the teenage girl who feels like she fades out of the room, the sensitive man behind a layer of steel, the intellect of a genius in the body of a beast, the list goes on.  Try it yourself on long car rides or waiting for the bus!

Boiling each X-Man down to their essential humanity seems super easy in the case of Cyclops.  He's the blind guy at the steering wheel.  The one guy who can never truly control his powers yet tries to control the entire world around him, and can't see the world outside a single shade of red is in control of the X-Men team.  Yes, yes, there's a lot more to that and it could be easily disagreed that this isn't his essential point (I eagerly await your comments below), but for today, let's humor the lady and say he is a man who can never see anything but red trying to lead possibly the most colorful organization in town.

How's he doing?

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Send Us Your Shelf Porn!

Welcome to another edition of Send Us Your Shelf Porn. Our guest this week is Dan Royer, a graphic designer from Wilmington, Il., and one of the co-creators of From the Tomb, an online horror comics magazine.

Often with Shelf Porn, folks send in collections built around a certain theme or character. Dan's is unique in that it's the first I've seen to focus on Iceman from the X-Men. To read about his fascination with the character and see more photos from his collection, just click on the link below.

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Straight for the art | A pair of covers by Terry Dodson

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.

What are you reading?

Labor Days Vol. 2

Welcome once again to What are you reading?, the weekly column where the Robot 6 team runs through what comics and other stuff they've been checking out lately. As Chris is in Bethesda this weekend, I'm filling in for him as your host.

Our special guests this time are Philip Gelatt and Rick Lacy, creators of the Labor Days graphic novels published by Oni Press. Volume two, Just Another Damn Day, is now available in finer retail establishments everywhere. (You can check out a preview here).

See what they've been reading, as well as the rest of the Robot 6 crew, after the jump ...

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Sandman

Let's try to run through some of the more notable links of the past several days. My apologies if this is old news to you or I missed something.

• Kicking things off, I should note that the gang at the Hooded Utilitarian are offering an in-depth analysis of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. In order: Noah Berlatsky, Ng Suat Tong,  Tom Crippen and Von Marlowe.

• Ken Parille looks at the work of his fellow blogmate Tim Hensley, specifically his Wally Gropius series: "I can’t think of another cartoonist who approaches space -- and what we might call 'spatial color' -- in such a rigorously strange way."

• Abhay Khosla talks about comics by way of crime novels:

So: a year from now, if we’re unlucky and Vertigo Crime no longer exists, and some so-and-so is screeching that “None of youse fools on the internet people could have done better because we are geniuses who thought of EVERYTHING” … I would suggest that maybe one thing they could have done differently is launched their crime line with crime fiction…? Just a silly thought.

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The Iceman Cometh to Marvel Ultimate Alliances 2

Iceman

Last week Activision announced another playable character, Iceman, for its Marvel Ultimate Alliances 2 game. Iceman is no stranger to the video game world, as he appeared in the first game as well as the two X-Men Legends games before it. Click the link to read more from the designer and the art director of the game on Iceman's powers and visuals.

It looks like Iceman will be the last character revealed before the game hits stores, if the now-full "classified" roster scorecard on the game's website is any indication. But in San Diego it was revealed that at least one other playable character wouldn't be announced in advance, and it sounds like the Wii version of the game may be getting some additional exclusive characters ... Blade, Cyclops and Psylocke. I wouldn't be surprised if those characters (and others) were released as downloadable content for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions down the line, though.

The game comes out next Tuesday.

Peter Parker on 'The Mutant Problem'

The Mutant Problem

I really dig this mock-up of a New York Times piece by Peter Parker, talking about the Marvel Universe's "mutant problem" in general and his fan-fiction friendship with former New Mutant Doug Ramsey in particular. Click on the photos to the right to see Peter's thoughts on each of the mutants he took pictures of for his "assignment."

Via

Chicago Comic-Con '09 | I should also point out ...

...that the cover to the Dark X-Men mini-series features two characters whited out:

Dark X-Men #1

which means it's time for another edition of "guess who's on the team." I'm guessing that those two characters weren't actually part of the Dark X-Men crew that is appearing in the Utopia crossover, otherwise why hide their identity? So who else do you think is on the team besides Dark Beast and Mimic?

What Are You Reading?

Pluto, Vol. 4

Another Sunday is upon us again. Time to kick back, crack open a Snapple and tell you all about the comics we're reading. Our guest this week is Ivan Brandon, whose prose you may have come across in books like NYC Mech, 24Seven or the new Image series Viking.

To discover what Ivan's reading, click on the link below, Snapple or no Snapple ...

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Chicago Comic-Con ‘09 | The return of Nate Grey

X-Man, a.k.a. Nate Grey

The X-Men panel at the Chicago Comic-Con just ended; I wasn't there, but CBR's Shaun Manning covered it live. One of the announcements at the show is another Dark X-Men mini-series that kicks off in November, by Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk. The pair worked together on Captain Britain and MI13, as well as stories in the Dark X-Men: The Beginning mini-series that ties into the big Utopia crossover between Dark Avengers and Uncanny X-Men.

So the Dark X-Men are hanging around after Utopia, in some form or another. And it sounds like another old character we haven't seen in awhile is making his return, based on this quote: "This also has something to do with an X-Man named... X-Man."

Per an additional article on CBR, Nate Grey/X-Man is indeed back:

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The Fifth Color | Our Own Heroes

Like boy bands, sentai teams and sitcom pals, the X-Men thrive on fan identification. Mutants aren't just the outsiders, they are in many ways just like us. They've been multi-gender and multi-racial, with backgrounds as rich and diverse as they are simplistic and stereotypical. Just enough to give the reader something to identify with and hook them into the rest of the story. While it might seem odd since I certainly can't 'relate' to being possessed by an innate cosmic power only to be resurrected while my genetic clone has had a baby with the boy I crushed on in high school, you have to admit that the X-Men, above all other Marvel comics, find a way to relate to all of us and we likewise see ourselves in Xavier's students.

They have grown with us pop-culturally, from Kitty Pryde's interest in home computers to Jubilee's rollerblading mall-rat 'tude to Pixie's 'Chemical Romance' so to speak. They have loved and lost and grown older (but not too much older) and wiser (but not too much wiser) as we grew up along with them, each generation it seems getting their own freshmen class of mutants. They've been heroes, they've been villains and then they switch around in that gray area for a story or two, I could go on. But today is not for the X-Men as a whole, but one particular member not cited on Marvel.com or listed by the inexhaustible uncannyxmen.net. Someone I got to know through the talents of Joe Casey and John Paul Leon... and the funding of Steven Spielberg and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

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The best there is at being emasculated

Ex Men

Dan Piraro, creator of the comic strip Bizarro, talks about the strip that ran this past Sunday -- "Ex Men" -- and how he regrets the strip about men estranged from their families ran on Father's Day.

"So I'd like to apologize to any estranged fathers out there who found this cartoon to be painful," he wrote on his blog. "I got divorced in the mid-nineties when my daughters were 9 and 14, so I know it can be tough. On the bright side, it probably isn't a tough as being a huge, blue furry guy with a face like a baboon's ass. So count your blessings."

Heroes Con + Wizard World Philly | Catching up on the weekend's news

Longbox

This past weekend Philadelphia welcomed Wizard World, while Charlotte hosted HeroesCon. Two East Coast conventions, separated by more than 500 miles and a couple of states. If you were away from your computer, then you may have missed some of the announcements that sprang from both venues:

• For years people have been asking for an "iTunes for comics." Well, it looks like we might actually get one. Rantz Hoseley's Longbox will be a free download available later this year for PC, Macs and Linux. Comics can be download for a suggested price point of $.99 per issue, with the potential for block and subscription pricing. BOOM! and Top Cow have already signed on.

• Marvel had a lot of announcements at the show. Spinning out of the Uncanny X-Men/Dark Avengers crossover that kicks off any day now will be a series of one-shots that fall under the heading of Dark Reign: The List. Basically Norman Osbourn starts making a list of everyone standing in his way who he needs to do dirty, nasty things to.

The eight one shots and the creators working on them are:

Dark Reign: The List – Daredevil by Andy Diggle and Billy Tan
Dark Reign: The List – Wolverine by Jason Aaron and Esad Ribic
Dark Reign: The List – Hulk by Greg Pak and Ben Oliver
Dark Reign: The List – Amazing Spider-Man by Dan Slott and Adam Kubert
Dark Reign: The List – Avengers by Brian Bendis and Marko Djurdjevic
Dark Reign: The List – Uncanny X-Men by Matt Fraction and Alan Davis
Dark Reign: The List – Secret Warriors by Jonathan Hickman and Ed McGuiness
Dark Reign: The List – Punisher by Rick Remender and John Romita Jr.

The project was announced at around the same time both in Philadelphia and in Charlotte. For more info, check out CBR's interviews with Bendis, Fraction and Remender, as well as Pak, Hickman and Aaron. Also, Aaron talks a little bit about his Wolverine one-shot on his blog; it will feature both Marvel Boy and Fantomex, as well as a new Weapon XVI.

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X-Babies vs. Star Comics coming in October ... wait, what?

X-Babies

One of the announcements made at HeroesCon this weekend is that Marvel Comics is bringing the X-Babies back in a four-issue limited series by Gregg Schigiel and Skullboy creator Jacob Chabot.

The X-Babies, a set of X-Men clones created by the villain Mojo when the X-Men were believed to be dead, have appeared in various X-Men-related comic books since the late 1980s.

What's even more interesting is that the mini-series will also bring back some of the characters that Marvel published under the Star Comics banner back in the 1980s.

Star Comics was a kid's line Marvel did circa 1984-88 that featured both original creations, like Top Dog and Peter Porker, Spectacular Spider-Ham and licensed comics like Fraggle Rock, ThunderCats and Heathcliff. Chabot talked to Marvel.com about the return of some of those original creations, like Top Dog, Wally the Wizard, Royal Roy and Planet Terry:

"It was Gregg's brilliant idea to include the old Star Comics characters in the story, both to act as adversaries and hopefully update them for a modern audience," says Chabot. "I was thrilled at this concept! I pretty much got into comics through Marvel's old Star line, so this really goes back to my roots. I am doing some redesigns, but I'm trying to keep them recognizable by incorporating as many details from the original designs as I can. So, for example, if you're one of the few who remembers Top Dog from back in the day, you'll be able to know it's him when he shows up. Hint: he's the dog."

Check out some of the redesigns at Marvel.com.