So, Mario Gully – removed from Erik Larsen’s revival of Gully’s creation Ant – announced a new book, Bugg, which… well, looked very familiar, shall we say.

Over at CBR, Erik Larsen was asked about the similarity, and offers a particularly pithy reply:

What was your reaction to “Bugg,” Mario’s supposed upcoming book that looks an awful lot like “Ant”?

My reaction was to send Mario a cease-and-desist letter.

So, no hope of a Bugg/Ant crossover book anytime soon.

This week sees the release of the final issue of Firestorm, and in commemoration of the book’s passing, the Firestorm Fan blog came up with a quiet way to show support for the flame-headed superhero:

For the remainder of this week, please use the image below as your social media avatar (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Plus, Pinterest, Blogs, etc).  If several days is too much for you, please at least consider it for tomorrow, Wednesday, May 22.

The drawing above was done by the dastardly creative Luke Daab. It sums up how many of us Match-heads feel about the cancellation of this title. It’s been a fun ride with some amazing creators! The last few months with Dan Jurgens have been especially fantastic, so this cancellation is heartbreaking.

USE THE HASHTAG: #FirestormFarewell

If you post to social media about Firestorm this week, please include the following hashtag: #FirestormFarewell

I’m way behind the times – Transatlantic travel, I blame you – but as a longtime Firestorm fan (My favorite era? The Ostrander/Mandrake elemental one. Does anyone else like that, or is everyone into the classic version?), I find this whole thing very charming. The character’s sticking around in the New 52 via the Justice League book, of course, in what is a nice echo of his original publishing history; here’s hoping that he’ll get a revival of his own book before too long again, as well.

Could data mining change the way comics are made in the future? Rob Salkowitz seems to think so:

Digital comics represent something like 10-15% of the market, but their rapid growth gives reason to believe they are a good proxy for the comics audience at large – both direct-market and the broader mainstream.  Readership numbers on many books are high enough to provide statistically significant samples, and the nature of the digital experience allows much deeper insights into reader behavior.

Every time readers obtain comics through comiXology, there is not only a record of the transaction, but potentially a lot of information about exactly how, when and where they are reading that comic, what else they are reading, what they’ve browsed or previewed and decided against, and whether or not they purchase additional issues.  When aggregated with anonymous demographic data – for example, credit card information associated with the account – you get a much clearer picture than we’ve ever had of the comics audience.

As he points out, there’s no sign that any publisher is looking at this (presumably, proprietary) information or using it to change the way their comics are made just yet. But if they did, would that kind of demographic breakdown be of any use in making a better comic? Isn’t part of the problem with, at least the Big Two’s output, that they’re overly-analyzed and constructed with a marketing end product in mind instead of a good read?

Process junkies, Dan Slott has made your day. Over at his Jinxworld message board, he’s offered up the plot, script and lettering notes for the Free Comic Book Day Spider-Man issue from 2011, giving you a glimpse into how the comic was made. It’s an interesting insight into the writing (and fine-tuning) process; I only wish we could’ve seen editorial notes and in-process sketches, as well. Hey, Dan, maybe next time…?

Also, this – Slott’s notes to accompany the lettering notes – bears repeating:

Putting out comics is a process. And this is all part of it.
Along with my lettering notes, there are also notes from proofreading, and– MOST IMPORTANTLY– the editor.
There’s a LOT of time and thought that goes into doing this job– for EVERYBODY– at every stage of the game.
It’s a lot more work– on EVERYBODY’S plate– than you’d think.
Lettering is a VERY demanding job! And it usually has to be done under INCREDIBLE time constraints!
If you see a letterer on a message board or social media– you should reach out and tell them that you REALLY appreciate all of the hard work they do! That’d be very nice of you.
(Trust me, they deserve EVERY amount of praise you can heap upon ‘em!)

Letterers never get enough credit for the way a finished issue looks and reads, do they? Take a bow, ladies and gentlemen.

People who wanted to buy Black Kiss II or Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix (amongst other titles) from ComiXology on their Apple device, there’s some bad news for you:

In order to comply with the Apple App Store guidelines regarding adult or inappropriate content, some new releases were rejected for our iOS app this week. In addition, certain previously released titles that fall outside of these guidelines were also rejected and will be removed from sale. As always, these books are available on comixology.com, where you can download and sync to your device for reading anytime, anywhere.

A full list of the removed/unavailable titles can be found here.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the way everything went down with Saga #12 and ComiXology is that, when I read the blog post announcing that titles had been rejected by Apple, part of me was immediately suspicious. We’ve heard that before and it wasn’t the case, in so many words. It’s extremely unlikely that this is a similar situation, if only because of the reaction to what happened last time, but I’m saddened that such suspicion doesn’t feel entirely paranoid on this subject now.

Over at iFanboy, Jeff Reid relives a classic moment in DC Comics’ history – DC Challenge:

This 12-issue miniseries started with a simple concept. Legend has it that during a hotel party taking place at the 1983 San Diego Comic Con, several writers escaped to the roof to get some fresh air. Len Wein, Gerry Conway, Mark Evanier, and Marv Wolfman took advantage of this late night reprieve and spun an idea for a miniseries. Mark claimed to have the initial seed of the idea and credited Gerry for coming up with the name. It was a round-robin story with each issue written and drawn by a different creative team. The entire thing would be one continuous story and each issue had to end with multiple cliffhangers that it was up to the next writer to resolve. The final issue would be a big jam piece that would tie up the loose ends that would inevitably result. The series would be called the DC Challenge and its catchphrase would be “Can you solve it before we do?”

There’s something wonderfully playful about the finished series – It’s the work of creators who like their jobs and the characters they work with, and have something resembling freedom to do what they want within the framework of the series. I’d love it if this got reprinted sometime. Go, look at Reid’s piece and the excerpts therein, and tell me that you wouldn’t want to read it, too.

For Kirby fanatics like me, this Kickstarter is unmissable:

Hello everyone, I am Jeremy Kirby, Jack Kirby’s grandson.  Years ago (1997 to be exact) I wrote a screenplay and shared it with my grandmother.  She did what every grandmother would do after reading her grandson’s story and told me how wonderful it was.  But then she stopped for a moment as if pausing to think.  She had me wait where I was and I saw her go into her closet.  She reached into a box that was on a shelf and pulled out a dusty old folder.  She handed it to me and said “your grandfather would have wanted you to have this.”  It was a play that he had written.  I have since showed the play to friends of the family and not one had ever heard of its existence.

My grandfather had kept the play to himself for all those years and it is time for it to be brought forth so everyone can enjoy it.  This, combined with hundreds of never-before-seen photographs and personal art from Jack’s early years through the 1980′s, is a dream that I would like to see come to fruition.

I would like this to be a coffee table sized book reprinting the play in its undisturbed state as well as full color photographs and art.

The play is called “Frog Prince.” That this isn’t fully-funded yet – It only needs $7,500 – is an oversight, world. It’s a previously unknown Kirby work! How exciting is that?

(Thanks, Sean)

Hannah Means-Shannon writes about the seeming banning of super-hero roleplay at an American pre-school:

The document states that children’s “imaginations” have become “dangerously overactive causing injuries”. Couldn’t that happen with any kind of make-believe play among children? Isn’t monitoring the level of danger part of a school’s responsibility, rather than unilaterally banning superhero themes in play? The types of games banned are “Wrestling, Super Hero play, and Monster games”, strange phrasing at best. No monsters either? This encompasses pretty much all types of conflict-based games that are fairly deeply rooted in the psyche of childhood. The flyer blames “re-enactment” as the problem, and could be related to the recent release of plenty of action movies like Iron Man 3, but you’d be hard pressed to find a cartoon on a children’s network that doesn’t display many of the same things.

If this is a real thing – As Means-Shannon writes, “it’s possible that this document is some kind of fabrication to generate discussion” – I’m surprised at this; I’m just back from spending a week with my family in the U.K., and my nephews – Aged between 5 and 12 – are all heavily into superheroes, and roleplaying is definitely a part of that. Their play isn’t actually violent, though, just “And then I do this“-style narration, and the play seems more about the imaginative qualities of the character and the world – and the social status therein, oddly enough – than violence itself. It makes me wonder what would be lost by restricting that kind of play on an institutional level, and whether or not that will ultimately be good for the the kids or not.

Kieron Gillen on the morning after scene that launched his Young Avengers with Jamie McKelvie:

I think you’re right, basically. I think mainstream American Superhero comics lag a little behind other expressions of teenage life in culture, and if you don’t do that, you’re risking writing comics that appeal to the parents of teenagers rather than the teenagers themselves.

In terms of blocks, I suspect a good chunk of it comes out of comics being a visual medium. Text is a great obfuscator of content. You can read a book, and your parents will never know that it contains matter they’d have trouble with, because they’re never actually going to read it. But comics, being visual, are transparent. At a glance, they can judge it — and so often judge it at a glance, without actually reading it.

So you walk a line. I started “Young Avengers” with the scene for a number of reasons, but one of them was certainly seeing if Marvel would let me do it. If I weren’t able to write that, I’d have had to bow out of the gig, because there would be no way of doing anything I thought worth doing.

Marvel didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

I think the biggest blockade to the creation of the content is creators not choosing to create the content.

That last line sticks with me, especially in light of Rick Remender’s comment about not being afraid to “bend” iconic characters in his interview on the mothership. I wonder what comics we’ve missed out on because creators self-censored or were too afraid to push ideas that they initially wanted to do, but felt would never get published…?

Colin Smith takes on Age of Ultron #8, and suggests that there’s more going on than meets the eye:

Bendis and Peterson have reduced their narrative to a sequence of  exceptionally familiar cliches. No attempt has been made to use this material in a way that’s either innovative or informing. Quite the contrary is true. After all, Helicarriers crashing onto cities, and in particular onto New York, have been an exceptionally familiar sight since the Eighties. That Peterson has lent this alt-timeline’s version of a flying aircraft carrier dramatically larger engines hardly passes for ingenuity. This is storytelling reduced to nothing but the regurgitation of the genre’s most familiar, and most-mined out, traditions. As such, it seems to represent the belief that the superhero book works best as a literal-minded, dead-hearted trawl through the most obvious and hackneyed aspects of its own past. As if these were religious icons representing eternally vital truths, their very presence is presumed to be implicitly inspiring. Why then spoil the purity of the experience with anything more than trace elements of a story, let alone the contaminants of character and feeling?

As either a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the avant garde celebration of fashionable banality or a demolition of the current state of the superhero mainstream, Smith’s look at just one page of AoU #8 is really, really worth checking out.

Alas, the Marvelman we never saw, courtesy of Padraig O Mealoid:

Briefly, what the [Dave] Elliott group intended to do was to licence Marvelman from Emotiv – rather than buy the character from them outright – and with the consent of all the other copyright holders – Moore, Leach, and so on – to produce three films based on the three books of Moore’s run on the character; to publish the three volumes of Moore’s run with new artwork, all done by a single artistic team, possibly with Garry Leach involved; to also republish the books in Moore’s run as they had originally appeared, with the original artwork; and to then go ahead and produce two new mini-series, both set in the time before Moore’s story started.

I love the Moore Marvel/Miracleman series a lot, but the idea of seeing the three volume run re-illustrated by Garry Leach is something that I really, really wish had happened. Marvel, consider this the baseline for your eventual Marvelman plans…

The wonderful Tom Bondurant ponders the Legion of Super-Heroes in light of the cancellation of the most recent series:

For someone who’s been a part of Legion fandom — perhaps even casual fandom — Legion lore may be best acquired gradually, one issue at a time. It only feels like five, ten, twenty, or forty years if you step back and realize how long it’s been since you started reading. (That story about the Nightwing/Batgirl wedding produced a similar feeling in me, when I realized Dick’s been Nightwing for almost 30 years, and it’s been 25 years since The Killing Joke.) The great irony (for lack of a better term) of our current age of reprints is that if you wanted to, you could probably catch up on a good bit of Legion history, given enough time and effort. Like any other long-running series, LSH is now this big chunk of info-matter — a thing to be mainlined in marathon reading sessions, and not so much doled out issue by issue, month by month. The question then becomes whether there’s still a market for all that old material. Again, conventional wisdom seems to be that there will always be a Legion book, because there’s always been a Legion book. If that circular argument remains unbroken, it means simply having a Legion book isn’t as big a question as justifying a Legion book — which, again, goes back to all those relaunches.

Much more in the link. Speaking as a hardcore Legion fan for decades now – Yes, I am old – I have to shamefully admit that, as much as it pains me to say this, I’d be very interested in seeing a new writer take over the book following the last three + years of Paul Levitz handling the team for a third time. The Legion needs something to get people interested again, and it’s clearly not what’s been on offer for the last few years. I’m only hoping that, whatever replaces Legion of Super-Heroes as a title this time around, it’s more upbeat than the past storyline…

As Gabe Roth considers the problems we have separating art from artists, he suggests something that stuck with me for some time after initially reading the piece:

As for someone like John Byrne, the vitriol and negativity that seem to be associated with him seem to me to taint anything he puts out into the world these days. Knowing what people know about John Bryne and his reputation essentially sullies anything he puts out there. I’m not saying he’s doing his best work now, but I have my doubts that a great “return to glory” creation would ever gain any traction because of the negativity associated with the John Byrne name.

This really got me thinking; even if Byrne’s work was somehow back in style – which is something that I can’t see happening for some time, if ever, to be honest – would his reputation really put him beyond critical and commercial rehabilitation? I remain utterly unconvinced of that, to be honest; with enough of a push from a major publisher, I fully believe that any creator could be at least partially redeemed on a sales level, at least, and with that would come some level of cultural and critical re-examination. Is any creator really beyond redemption in that way?

Thinking about Age of Ultron this weekend, a realization occurred: Could this one-up DC’s Flashpoint and end up being a series that features no mainstream version of any characters? Flashpoint, you’ll remember, featured the Barry Allen Flash in an alternate world that ended up being his own creation, and in the process of trying to undo that mistake, he ended up creating the New 52 universe, and we had a scene of New 52 Flash and Batman at the end.

Age of Ultron, meanwhile, started In Media Res in an Ultron-ruled world that – at this point – everyone seems to agree will end up being retconned out of existence, and only existed within the Age of Ultron series and tie-ins, out-of-synch with everything else in the Marvel line. From there, history was changed and we jumped to an entirely different version of the world as a result, but one that again is out-of-synch with the Marvel line. Assuming that we’re going to see that timeline undone by the end of the series, two issues from now… Is Age of Ultron going to end up featuring only alternate timeline versions of the characters, instead of those from the same timeline as the rest of the Marvel books? Or should we expect a Flashpoint-esque epilogue (or epilogues, plural) featuring the heroes we know and love?

You may remember that memorable panel in Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye #3 where an old-school Hawkeye head covered a naked Clint Barton’s private area:

Well, now you can recreate that scene yourself — sort of — with a t-shirt from We Love Fine:

It’s part of a three-shirt collection from the site, celebrating the critically acclaimed and Eisner-nominated cult favorite series. The line is curated by Fraction himself, and the shirts go above and beyond your average wearable tie-in and celebrate Hawkguy’s bro-filled nuances. Plus, Fraction is donating his curation commission to Futures Without Violence, which works to prevent violence against women and children.

This is pleasantly unexpected, from Tom Brevoort’s Tumblr:

Coldmoon and Dragonfire, there’s still a chance we’ll see you again, too…!

(Seriously, if you look back at Marvel Point One from 2011, it’s a very strange book now: Previews for an event comic that didn’t come out for more than a year, a Defenders reboot that only lasted a year, an X-Men spin-off that was just cancelled, Avengers vs. X-Men, Scarlet Spider and two strips that apparently didn’t lead anywhere at all. As a historical artifact, it’s weirdly compelling in its oddness.)

With the cancellation of Red She-Hulk, it’s worth looking at Paul O’Brien’s latest Marvel sales analysis to take a look at how Marvel’s other female-led titles are doing. The publisher has historically been weak in that area – There was a point, not too long ago, where Marvel had no books with a solo female lead – and, oddly enough, it looks like we might be headed that way again: Both Captain Marvel and Journey Into Mystery are selling less than the just-cancelled Gambit and Winter Soldier, which doesn’t bode well, and even Fearless Defenders is already selling less than Matt Fraction’s shortlived Defenders redo was twelve months earlier.

It raises the question: Why don’t Marvel readers seem to support female-led titles? After all, both Captain Marvel and Journey Into Mystery are good books – as is/was Red She-Hulk – and at least Red She-Hulk and Captain Marvel featured characters who were fairly central to the Marvel Universe. Why the low sales, especially in comparison to books like Thunderbolts or Scarlet Spider? I genuinely don’t understand; DC can seem to find a readership for its female-led books, so why are Marvel’s audience so seemingly resistant? It’ll be fascinating to see how Brian Wood and Olivier Coipel’s X-Men performs in its first year; that’s an amazing creative team, and a collection of fan-favorite characters. Surely that book will do well over a sustained period?

(Also interesting/surprising in O’Brien’s analysis: Seeing the rapid descent of Fantastic Four and FF. Was Hickman’s success on the franchise a fluke?)

So, now we know: the mysterious Age of Ultron #10UC solicit from last month that had no final title, no synopsis and no creative team information – It was all “classified” – is actually a comic called Hunger by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Leonard Kirk, and also a four issue mini-series. While the solicit suggests “a dangerous rift in the universe,” suggesting that maybe theories about the UC standing for Ultimate Comics isn’t too far off, I’m sticking with the “Universal Constant” theory. After all the new title for the series is Hunger and, thanks to Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers, we know that “Universal Constant” is just another name for Galactus, AKA the hungriest character in Marvel’s back catalog.

Nonetheless, now that we’ve been given the creative team and new title for the series… Why was this “classified” information in the first place? Given that the announcement of the title and team came via solicits and without any fanfare – not to mention, still before Age of Ultron #10 – what was so secret that we couldn’t know last month, but can know now…? It almost seems as if plans for what is now Hunger just weren’t fully together when last month’s solicits were compiled, and “Classified” with used instead of “To Be Announced” for the credits, doesn’t it? “Classified” is the new “We can’t tell you because we don’t know, but we don’t want to tell you that we don’t know,” it seems.

Well, if true, this is unexpected:

Now, per The Daily SuperHero’s Hollywood source Renner is done as Hawkeye mainly due to his negative comments after The Avengers… Even though nothing official has been said about Hawkeye’s involvement in The Avengers 2, Whedon has said he will introduce a new brother/sister duo to the superhero ensemble team. More reasoning that Renner’s days are over because the hero depth chart is filling up fast and there might not be any room for the archer.

The source hints that there’s the tiniest chance Renner will reprise his role in The Avengers Sequel but the source also said there is a greater chance Hawkeye will be recast (like War Machine and the Hulk have been recast before). Finally, the source said if Hawkeye is to be recast there is a solid chance he could be incorporated into the new television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a primary character.

This is, of course, just a rumor with only an anonymous source to back it up – In other words, hardly the most credible of reports. However, coming after the Deadline Hollywood story about Avengers actors reportedly falling out with Marvel over the sequel, it’s becoming oddly believable that, whenever Avengers 2 comes out, at least one actor won’t return…

Brett White thinks about a subconscious lesson of the X-Men’s success:

There’s a misconception amongst comic book fans that feminist creators and characters means that their comics will change for the worse. There’s a fear that women reading comics will fundamentally change some ill-defined something. The truth is, the X-Men prove that feminist creators and characters lead to success. Having a team composed of strong men and women doesn’t dilute the action. As a kid reading these comics, I didn’t realize how feminist they were. I just knew they were awesome.

I’m not sure that all X-Men creators are feminist, per se, but it’s true that Chris Claremont created a culture in that series where women were treated as equals at the very least, unlike so many other superteams. It’s odd to think that, although so many comics and creators attempted to copy Claremont’s soap operatics (and moral corruption storylines) in an attempt to ape Uncanny X-Men‘s success, none really thought to also adopt his approach towards female characters.