This week Marvel and DC both offer up new takes on old characters, as the first issues The Creeper and Agents of Atlas come out on Wednesday. They’ll be joined by the second issue of the new Atom series, which had an intriguing beginning last month, and the latest Civil War crossover, Fantastic Four #539, where we’ll learn where The Thing’s allegiances really are.

Also dropping this week are the first issue of Wormwood, Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner collection, the latest issue of the big indy hit Mouse Guard and the Absolute Kingdom Come collection.

Now on to the picks of the week …

Tom Bondurant’s Pick of the Week:

Not much on my plate this week, so I’m going with Spider-Man Visionaries: Kurt Busiek Vol. 1. It reprints the start of Busiek’s short-lived, well-received Untold Tales Of Spider-Man series, a retro experiment from the ’90s set against Spidey’s early adventures. Between it and the all-ages Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man #18, also shipping this week, fans who want a simpler status quo have a couple of options.

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Jeopordy! champ Ken Jennings launched his blog in June (“I know there’s nothing groundbreaking about yet another nerd getting on-line and starting up yet another blog”) and in his latest entry, the trivia guru compares the mascots of Kellogg’s and General Mills cereals to DC and Marvel’s characters:

Kellogg’s mascots are the square DC ones. They’re total Boy Scouts. Helpful Toucan Sam always wants lost jungle explorers to find and sample his Froot Loops. Cheery Tony the Tiger thinks everything is “Grrrreat!” Snap, Crackle, and Pop are so dull they’re mostly interested in the sound that air bubbles make in their cereal. Whoo!

General Mills, on the other hand, is where Gen-Xers get the familiar Joseph Campbell cereal-commercial archetypes of their childhoods. These guys are the edgy Marvel anti-heroes, full of conflict and angst. The Trix Rabbit represents Trix, but can he even get a bowl of the stuff from a pair of spoiled, privileged children? He cannot, so he resorts to stealing, and still he fails. Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Fruit Brute, et. al., are scary and misunderstood. Anti-spokesperson Lucky the Leprechaun doesn’t even want you to eat his damn cereal. He’s hiding.

Sonny the Cocoa Puffs cuckoo is the worst. This guy is seriously jonesing. In fact, a lot of these mascots seem to crave their cereal unhealthily, and are willing to steal, if that’s what it takes, to get it. What weird marketing concept. The modern-day equivalent would be Audi choosing a carjacking junkie as their new spokesperson.

I hear that the Trix Rabbit and Count Chocula disagree on General Mills’ “whole grain” healthy cereal initiative … whose side are you on?

(Thanks, David!)

Concluding our series of interviews with folks about the San Diego Comic-Con, today we check in with Jason and Elizabeth James, AKA Citizen Press, AKA the publisher of Johnny Repeat. We spoke with them back in June about the launch of their first graphic novel at SDCC, so let’s see how everything went …

Blog@Newsarama: When we last spoke to you, Citizen Press was preparing for the launch of Johnny Repeat at the San Diego Comic-Con. I assume since you’re talking to me that you survived the heat and the crowds?

Elizabeth: Oh, I’ll take those crowds any day. Those are my peeps! Represent, Citizens!

Jason: Yeah, it wasn’t so much about the heat or the crowds this year, as it was that god-awful humidity. Where the hell did that sticky mess come from?

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Heidi MacDonald is running Marc Oliver-Frisch’s analysis of DC and indie sales for June, allowing you to see that, sometimes, relaunches do work as Wonder Woman’s sales go up 341% compared with this time last year:

The relaunch by writer Allan Heinberg and artist Terry Dodson turns out to be a spectacular success. There was a variant edition with a cover drawn by Adam Kubert, which no doubt helped sales; but that’s the case with most high-profile launches these days, of course. This bodes extremely well for the similar relaunches the publisher has currently in the pipeline, such as Justice League of America and Justice Society of America.

Related: Newsarama/Comic Buyer’s Guide analysis of June sales, ICv2′s analysis of June sales.

It’s time to hold back your hatred and distrust for all things Diamond Distributors, as they give back to the community:

“Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. is proud to partner with The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) to award an aspiring cartoonist a full one-year tuition scholarship at The Center for Cartoon Studies beginning in fall 2007.”

That tuition is equivalent to $15,000, and is applicable only for the year beginning fall 2007. Applications are due February 2007.

Harry Potter and the Invisible Man can take a seat … apparently it’s Marvel’s Invisible Woman who represents the “most plausible example” of how invisibility will work in the future:

… Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at St. Andrews University in Scotland, believes the most plausible example is the Invisible Woman, one of the Marvel Comics superheroes in the “Fantastic Four.”

“She guides light around her using a force field in this cartoon. This is what could be done in practice,” Leonhardt told Reuters in an interview. “That comes closest to what engineers will probably be able to do in the future.”

Invisibility is an optical illusion that the object or person is not there. Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone. The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there.

Leonhardt’s article on theoretical invisibility devices was published in the New Journal of Physics, where the author said scientists are making advances in “metamaterials,” i.e. artificial materials with properties that could be used to create invisibility devices.

The article links to an earlier one from last May, where MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle talked about metamaterials and the potential military applications:

Theoretically at least, the metamaterial could work like the helmet of invisibility celebrated in Greek myth, or the cloaking device that hid Romulan and Klingon vessels in the “Star Trek” series, or the invisibility cloak that came in so handy for Harry Potter in J.K. Rowlings’ novels.

“Fiction has predicted the course of science for some time. … Maybe these Harry Potter novels were ahead of their time,” Pendry said, half-jokingly.

The Munster, Ind., Times previews this weekend’s Wizard World Chicago, and manages to work Joyce DeWitt into the lead — a good thing, in my book.

Well, DeWitt and Priscilla Barnes of Three’s Company will be at the convention, so it wasn’t that difficult a task. But the article doesn’t dwell too much on the “celebrity guests,” which include Dirk Benedict, and the guy who played Jaws in a couple of Bond films.

Instead it turns its attention to Chicago native Marc Silvestri, who’ll be among this year’s guests.

“You’ve got real writers, real artists and real publishers there willing to take a look at your work and looking forward to talking with everybody about what we do,” Silvestri told the newspaper. “Sometimes (aspiring artists) are going to hear things that they don’t want to hear (about their work), but we’re interested in hearing about your work and hearing about your ideas.”

The complete programming and guest list can be found here.

Add another player to the online news and entertainment game: Todd McFarlane.

Although this press release is light on details, it’s clear McFarlane plans to step up his companies’ online presence with tomorrow’s planned launch of CultureBoom.com, a “one-stop shop of choice for everything entertainment.”

The press release promises, among other things, reviews, Top 10 lists, editorials and, curiously, book and DVD clubs. Also, “official tattoo designs.”

I haven’t been following Marvel’s Civil War – I’m not an “event comic” kind of guy — but this Miami Herald article seems like a pretty good overview of the miniseries.

“What makes Civil War intriguing,” Leonard Pitts writes, “is its pointed, albeit allegorical, exploration of a question that very much faces the country in the present era of surveillance, detention and the Patriot Act.”

Pitts touches upon some key scenes from the miniseries — the destruction of Stamford, Conn., weighty political exchanges, the unmasking of Spider-Man — and reader response, but the focus is on the allegory.

And on that point, one local retailer wonders whether some younger readers are grasping the concept:

Jo Minieri, manager of Tate’s Comics, Toys, Videos and More in Lauderhill, says the series is also popular with her customers, though she wonders if some of the younger readers really understand the analogy. “Many of the older fans, people 25, 26 and up, they all seem to get it. The people more my age [23] and down, they don’t get it as much.”

I’d like to read more about that because, really, the allegory isn’t that complicated; some may argue heavy-handed, but the parallels are pretty obvious. So what’s not to get?

I wonder if that apparent gulf between older and younger fans has more to do with nostalgia than complex concepts. Are those younger readers not understanding the political allegory, or are they not getting the appeal of sweeping crossovers? The second scenario makes more sense, I think.

USA Today reports that the X-Men: The Last Stand DVD will hit stores on Oct. 3, in both regular and collector’s editions. The collector’s edition will feature another chapter in the “Stan Lee meets …” comics line, written by Stan Lee:

The story, The Unlikely Saga of Magneto, Xavier and Stan, is “the most offbeat, wildest, wackiest plot I could think of, using myself as the fall guy,” Lee says. Both versions have commentaries by director Brett Ratner and producer Avi Arad. Other extras: three alternate endings, deleted and extended scenes.

The comic will weigh in at a whopping 100 pages.

After years of suffering from lack of respect, who would have thought Aquaman would be such a hot property? Or a warm property, anyway … sure, his TV pilot was a wash (though it did make it to iTunes this week) and his movie is only a rumor right now, but at least he still has his own series, written by Kurt Busiek, no less.

Aquaman wasn’t the only one making news this week, as Sub Diego … er, San Diego also made a headline or two. Kevin has a nice round-up of many of the bigger news stories, and I spent the week chatting with a few folks who were there, namely Chris Arrant, Larry Young and D.J. Coffman. You can find several other links to SDCC news below …

Other highlights

52: numbers fall, title may become “every 2″?
Comics-industry gossip a matter of life and death
Creator profile: Denise Mina
Battle of the sexists sexes — ’70s-style!
Engine: Still Running
First look at Spider-Man 3’s Venom
Five TV shows whose heroes never really took off
New Iron Man movie poster released
I’ve already made the “Ed Brubaker adapts Fiona Apple song” joke, sadly
Peter David vs. Dan DiDio
Philadelphia Daily News likes the Freedom Fighters
Protect thy iPod
Quesada/Colbert: The Reviews Are In!
Rev it up
She’s been around since 1998, but she seems new
Sienkiewicz’s Venture Bros. art for your desktop
Studio alleges GN images too similar to film
Ultimate Avengers preview
Video is the new blog

Features

Meanwhile
Grumpy Old Fan
Amateur Art Appreciation
Fenton & Fenton, Boy Detectives
Heroes & Villains

Hero of the Week:Bernie Wrightson for committing to an ongoing series. And with Steve Niles, no less. Dark Horse’s City of Others about a sociopathic murderer who has to be transformed into a monster in order to learn what it means to be human sounds like the perfect project for both of these guys.

Hero: DreamlandChronicles.com for finally posting new material. When Scott Christian Sava decided to take his excellent, CGI comic online, it was understandable that he wanted to start over from the beginning and attract new readers. But longtime fans of the series have had a long wait for the story to move forward. As of last week, the wait’s over.

Villain: Fangoria Comics for concentrating on future movie properties instead of just making good comics. Their display at San Diego used disappointing phrases like, “Reel horror comics by real horror moviemakers,” “You won’t find them in any theater… yet,” and “These are the horror films of tomorrow.”

Hero: DC for knowing that some things are made for each other. It was all good that they hired Brian Bolland to draw the two-page origin stories for Animal Man and the Joker in the back-up feature for 52, but hiring him to also illustrate the Zatanna story is a sign of excellent sense. Now, if only they could work out an ongoing…

Hero: Marvel for bringing back Thor.

Hero: Marvel Studios for not only planning the Hulk sequel for the big screen (as opposed to the rumored direct-to-DVD release), but for hiring action director Louis (The Transporter) Leterrier to direct. Now we’re gonna get to see Hulk SMASH!

Villain: Pendragon Pictures for drumming up free publicity by accusing Dark Horse of copying images from its movie version of War of the Worlds. There are a couple of interesing coincidences (like a man wearing a hat with a purple ribbon), but most of the similarities (like camera angles and direction of explosions) are laughable.

Hero: Dark Horse for it’s appreciation of Jason (Damn Nation) Alexander. I saw some of Alexander’s stuff for upcoming Dark Horse projects at San Diego and his brushwork is amazing. I saw stuff from Escapists and The Secret, not to mention the recent announcement that he’s illustrating Mike Mignola’s Abe Sapien solo mini-series. There are also rumors of a possible Steve Niles project.

Hero: Stephen Colbert for hosting Joe Quesada for a night. Is it just me or is Civil War the first book by one of Colbert’s guests that he’s actually read prior to the interview?

Hero: DC for Adam Hughes on All-Star Wonder Woman.

We’re continuing to catch up with folks who we posted about before San Diego to see what went down. Before the convention, we posted that Newsarama’s own Chris Arrant would bring an anthology to the show called Four Stories. We caught up with Chris to see how everything went last weekend.

Note: check the bottom of the post for a special offer …

Blog@Newsarama: Your new mini-comic Four Stories was released this past weekend in San Diego. Tell us a little bit about how you went about selling it at the con. Did you have a table, or did you partner with a retailer, or anything like that?

Chris Arrant: That’s the thing; I wasn’t selling it. The goal of Four Stories was to get it out there into people’s hands; to transition from the would-be or could-be comic creator to an actual creator of comics.

I took 150 copies to San Diego Comic-Con to give out to friends, publishers, creators, and just people I thought would appreciate it. No table, no retailer, just me with a messenger bag plump with free comics.

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It never ceases to amaze me how effective pink and blue are in a comic book. I’m serious here. I read this story in passing, researching for another project when I realized she was wearing pink, and how it fit into the story overall. After that I couldn’t leave this panel alone no matter how hard I tried. It’s a woman in pink against a blue background. Even if the colorist (Anthony Tollin) himself came in and told me he picked a random color, you will never convince me that’s its random. It just fits the story too well.

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For those who (a) live outside of America, (b) don’t have basic cable, or (c) forgot, Marvel Comics EiC Joe Quesada appeared on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report last night to talk about Civil War – It was part of the ongoing media blitz for the series, but an interesting change from the NPR/news media coverage that Marvel has been going for so far. The mothership has a recap of what happened, but that’s obviously not going to stop the rest of the internet talking about it.

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Courtesy of Scans Daily comes this excerpt from a letter that apparently appeared in an issue of DC Comics’ late-1970s series Batman Family. I find it funny in a sad, sad way. Except, y’know, the letter-writer probably wasn’t joking.

Denver’s Rocky Mountain News profiles crime novelist Denise Mina, who concludes her opening arc on Vertigo’s Hellblazer this month.

The article focuses on her latest book, The Dead Hour, but also touches upon her comics work — “part of a trend among comic publishers to pull in top writers for their stories” — and her impressions of the United States during her second trip there.

“I’m falling in love with America this time because I’ve spent more time in each city,” she tells the newspaper.

All right, it looks as if Joe Quesada and Mark Millar’s planned appearance on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has been postponed.

Joe Quesada and Mark Millar are scheduled to appear today on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered to discuss Marvel’s Civil War. Check the website for local broadcast times.

Related: Newsarama on Quesada’s Colbert Report interview

Bill Radford of the Colorado Springs Gazette spotlights IDW’s CSI: Dying in the Gutters, a five-issue miniseries that begins with the (fictional) murder of gossip columnist Rich Johnston at a Las Vegas comics convention.

The list of suspects is long: Ed Brubaker, Phil Jimenez, Robert Kirkman, Stan Lee, Joe Quesada, Greg Rucka and Gail Simone, to name a few.

“There are people who love him and people who hate him and a lot of people who kind of feel both ways about him,” Chris Ryall, IDW’s editor in chief and publisher, told the newspaper. “So we thought, `If we’re going to kill anybody, let’s do in a comic what a lot of people have said they’d like to see happen in real life.’”

In the article, Ryall recounts how IDW recruited Johnston — “I’m a total media whore,” Johnston says — and the suspects for the story.

CSI: Dying in the Gutters #1, written by Steven Grant and penciled by Stephen Mooney, debuts in August.