Speaking of Chris Butcher, the blogger and Beguiling staffer is quoted in the National Post’s gossip column for a curious item about actors Chris “Robin” O’Donnell and Alfred “Doc Ock” Molina being spotted having dinner together at Morton’s Steakhouse in Toronto:

Top superhero savant, Chris Butcher, who holds down the fort at The Beguiling, the city’s Alist comic-book store on Markham Street, offered these comments when told about the colourful dindin for two: “I think sitting down for dinner and drinks — you know, talking things out — is a much saner way to battle crime.”

Butcher then added, “It’s bad enough in the city when they’ve got to do regular construction, imagine how much worse it’d be cleaning up after a superhero battle.”

I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that’s the first time Butcher’s been called a “top superhero savant.”

On his blog, Stuart Immonen shares a sneak preview of the cover to Nextwave #10:

Immonen also shares the news that the book has been declared unsafe for the kiddies. “Apparently, the book now ships with a ‘Parental Advisory,’” he writes. “See what happens when you push the red button?”

Retailers and readers have begun reacting to ICv2.com’s interview with Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley about the company’s decision to sell some titles exclusively through its website. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their comments aren’t exactly positive.

At ICv2, retailer Ed Sherman of Rising Sun Creations in San Diego isn’t bothered by the move itself — “These are all titles that were poor sellers at best” — but thinks Tokyopop’s money and efforts should be focused elsewhere.

“It doesn’t make sense to pursue promoting poorer-selling titles online when there are so many hot Tokyopop titles that have been out of print for so long,” Sherman writes. “I cannot get copies of Kingdom Hearts #1-3, Loveless #1, or Battle Club #1, just to name a few. These are all strong selling books that have been out of stock for months. … My read on all of this is that Tokyopop is in trouble. When they cannot keep hot titles in stock, there is obviously a problem.”

Chris Butcher, of The Beguiling in Toronto, accuses Kiley of equivocating in the interview, and points out that one of the web exclusives, Dragon Head, is one of Tokyopop’s best-sellers at his store.

At Love Manga, David Taylor provides a good analysis of the interview, and dwells on Kiley’s comments about market saturation.

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Karen Healey (Girl-Wonder.org) turns her attention to New X-Men this week, critiquing the unusual wardrobe of Sooraya Qadir, a sand-powered Sunni Muslin Afghani mutant.

You can say what you like about the burqa - and I do - but it is an over-garment designed to conceal the female body. This depiction of a character who says she wears a burqa to be modest and then apparently wraps it skin-tight is patently ridiculous.

Incidentally, though Sooraya refers to her robe and headscarf/facescarf several times as “burqa”, the artwork doesn’t show her wearing burqa at all. A burqa is, specifically, the long pleated over-garment with the grille over the eyes. Sooraya is wearing niqab. If five minutes of checking Wikipedia confirms that for me, what does it say about the research standards of the creators?

At any rate: self-professed modest Muslim girl! SKIN TIGHT ROBES! Marvel, we have a problem.

I’m not sure that it had to happen, but now that it has, I’m sure that I’ll have a whole new source of fun post subjects.

In response to the clamor from the legions of fans everywhere, Marvel Entertainment is proud to announce that it is once again making message boards available on Marvel.com. Putting the fans in direct contact with each other and Marvel insiders, this new online forum will give Marvel.com users the chance to openly discuss everything from the Avengers to Marvel Zombies and all the super-heroics in between.

So, All The Rage shows this image:

…and the internet doesn’t really notice, apart from Millarworld:

“I’m done commenting until I actually get to read the book where something happens. I feel like I’m being jerked around and I’m not going to waste time discussing things that aren’t true. That said, it looks like it could be from Spider-Man: Reign.”

“I’m pretty sure that is from the Reign. it has almost the same exact linework and color. Besides that, I find it hard to believe Marvel would be dumb enough to kill Mary Jane…again.”

“Yeah, pretty sure that’s from Reign, Spidey’s answer to Dark Knight Returns.”

“Honestly, I think the only reason Quesada wants to get rid of Mary Jane is so Spider-Man can go sleep with the Black Cat.”

I’m sure that’s not the reaction that Marvel was hoping for.

Brian Bendis interviews Brad Meltzer, and exposes Meltzer’s lack of respect for the fanboy:

If someone came to you and said, “You can pick the team of The Avengers, you can pick the team of The Justice League–or if I went back in time and I told the two of us that that’s what we’d be doing–I would basically die right there, even though we’ve been doing it in our heads since we were 10 years old. But again, the hardest part for me was not wanting to just do what I think is cool, but what actually is bigger than me. I think that there is just a history–even in the JLA, even in The Avengers–where you saw what can only be called “The Ego Character.” It’s the character that’s like, “I’m being put on the team so everyone remembers me.” I hate that character. It’s in just about every run of every Justice League and it’s in just about every run of every Avengers. There’s always one character that’s the ego character. I really wanted to not be that guy–and listen, I’m sure I’ll get called on that whether it’s for Black Lightning or someone else–but to me Black Lightning has total business being in that book.

Brad - You have a team that includes Vixen, Black Lightning, Arsenal and Red Tornado. You think that fans will complain that you have one ego character? Give us some credit, sir. Also in the interview, you’ll get a look at how Bendis’s first issue of Mighty Avengers is structured. Go read.

Planetwide Games are continuing their quest to democratize the comics process, according to ICv2:

Planetwide Games introduced its Comic Book Creator: Make Your Own Comics self-publishing software last November and is launching licensed versions.

 

CBC allows fans to create their own comic books by dragging and dropping their own digital images or supplied licensed images onto any of 500 comic book page templates, embellishing with captions and word-balloons, and printing out or saving into a PDF.  The software is user-friendly, and fans can share finished works on the company’s Website.

The Nacho Libre CD-ROM was released in June, and the first of several Marvel products (Marvel Heroes, featuring style guide art for Spider-Man, Wolverine, Elektra and assorted villains) is due out in mid-September.

If only the Marvel version had come out a couple of months earlier, then Civil War might have met its deadlines after all.

I don’t know why, but I’m fascinated by attempts to explain comic-book super powers in a real-world setting (I have a copy of The Science of Superheroes around here somewhere). Every time a superhero movie opens, someone trots out scientists who theorize about flight, or wall-crawling or invisibility.

The latest effort comes from James Sherwood, via Associated Content. Sherwood’s bio says he has a masters in criminal justice, so I’m not sure who science savvy he is; he simply may be well-versed in comic-book physics. However, I’m not overly concerned with credentials. I like that Sherwood has focused on comics villains instead of the same-old, same-old.

Sure, Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg already tackled several of the bad guys in The Science of Supervillains, but Sherwood tosses in a couple of surprises, like Green Goblin (”Technology hasn’t exactly caught up with this villain yet”), Bullseye (”yes”), and … The Joker:

“Any factory manufacturing the level of bio-chemo-toxin that it would take to do the damage to the Joker would probably be under about forty-six layer of scrutiny; decommissioning the plant would require destruction of the entire stock, not the warehousing of the sludge in open vats,” Sherwood writes. “Anything short of that level of chemical monstrosity would be most likely to just kill the poor Joker outright. A note on Smilex, the lethal laughing gas of the Joker’s invention: no such chemical nightmare has ever been identified as existing.”

A new blog, Four the First Time, sets out to read, and write about, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s legendary run on Fantastic Four. That’s 102 issues, plus annuals.

Here bloggers Drew and Joseph discuss the landmark first issue:

“I’m still impressed with storytelling this compressed, however. Millar & Bendis spent, what, six issues telling the Fantastic Four’s origin in Ultimate Fantastic Four? We get all that information in one issue, or as much info as we really need. No, we don’t learn much about Reed Richards’ motivation or his relationships with Sue, Johnny and Ben, but that seems all so extraneous and unnecessary when Mole Man’s on the loose.”

Retailer website ICv2.com talks with Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley about the company’s recent decision to sell some titles exclusively through its website.

Kiley admits that the initiative is “kind of an experiment,” designed to utilize Tokyopop’s website community to draw attention to titles that haven’t performed as well through traditional distribution.

I would actually be kidding you if I told you there was a firm magic formula about what to put into the program. We just want to take advantage of this new audience we have online, in acknowledgement of the competition for shelf space at retail. This is a way that made sense to us to try in terms of, ‘Can we help find a bigger audience for particular books using a slightly different platform?’

(snip)

In the spirit of full disclosure, the titles that are not volume 1s, the existing, continuing series that we’re putting into that program, probably fall into one of two categories. Either A, they have been commercially very challenged and we want to try and give them a shot in a different way; or B, they’re just really special in some way that we think the regular distribution mechanism hasn’t been able to deal with. It hasn’t been able to get the right amount of exposure and highlighting that we think those titles deserve. That’s my take on the two reasons why existing properties could go into the program.

With the volume 1s, it’s very consciously not an attempt to say, ‘Here’s the dregs or the bottom of the barrel’ or whatever. It’s very consciously more an attempt to say, ‘Here’s a book that we think is kind of quirky, interesting, can profit from a slightly different treatment prompted from the increased exposure it will get from this new audience that we’re cultivating online.’

Tokyopop launched its online-exclusive program in July with Atomic King Daidogan, One, starting with Vol. 10, and Neck and Neck, starting with Vol. 6, and has since added several more, including Heaven Above Heaven, Heaven!!, Rure, Soul to Seoul, King City, and Short Sunzen.

Kiley interview: Part 1, Part 2

Via MoviesOnline.com comes a report that Jessica Biel, like Ryan Reynolds, isn’t interested in career suicide:

A long long time ago our little site of horrors, Horror-Movies.ca, reported that Ryan Reynolds has no interest in doing a spin off from Blade Trinity, Nightstalkers. And now rumors on the inter-web indicate Jessica Biel has pretty much come out and said the same thing. So I guess that the spin off that Blade 3 was made for, was a big waste of time. So all we get is a really crappy blade movie.

Like Jessica, I don’t really care about a Nightstalkers movie … I posted this just so I could mention that Biel’s latest movie, The Illusionist, which also stars Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, is probably the best movie I’ve seen all summer. Go check it out.

From the ashes of yesterday’s announcement that The Fourth Rail was closing down, a new Austin-based review site rises — Comic Pants:

Longtime online critics Randy Lander (The Fourth Rail) and Dave Farabee (Ain’t It Cool News) have joined with two other Austin-based reviewers to launch Comic Pants (www.comicpants.com), a brand new comic book review and commentary blog.

Joining Lander and Farabee in this endeavor are Nick Budd and David Martindale. Martindale also serves as lead designer and technician for the new site. All four writers work at Dragon’s Lair Comics in Round Rock, Texas.

Comic Pants is anchored by “Wednesday Number Ones”, a weekly feature updating every Wednesday morning that will provide commentary on every first issue coming to comic shops that day. In addition, the site will feature regularly updated reviews from all four contributors, Lander’s popular Previews forecast column “Down the Line” and more.

Comic Pants is a serious review site with a sense of humor, as indicated by the unusual name, which was suggested by Dave Farabee during a brainstorming session.

“We wanted something that would stick in peoples’ minds,” said Lander. “And hey, you’ll remember Comic Pants, right?”

In addition to reviews and other text-based content, the Comic Pants team expects to begin providing podcasts as of mid-to-late September.

The comic blogosphere seems to grow larger every day and just like comics, sometimes it’s pretty easy to get a little lost. “Meanwhile …” will act as your map, pointing out what interesting discussions are happening out there while you’re reading Blog@Newsarama.

Critique is the name of the game. From Legends of the Dark Knight, to Wonder Woman, to the Clone Saga, from retcons to aging to rat poison bombs. Here’s a sampling of what the blogosphere’s buzzing about this week.

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Usually in Can’t Wait for Wednesday I focus on all the first issues that are coming out in a given week, but today I want to talk a bit about second issues, as several #2’s to some promising series drop this week.

If it seems like it’s a little too soon to already have another helping of the twisted Garth Ennis/Darick Robertson series The Boys, that’s probably because the second issue is coming out a mere two weeks after the first. It’s definitely not a series for everybody, and I think that releasing two issues of it in a given month could lead to rampant chaos on a global scale — dogs & cats living together, that kind of stuff — but I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss seeing what happens next. It’s kind of like Nip/Tuck … I don’t know what it says about me that I really, really like it.

Also out this week is the second Uncle Sam & the Freedom Fighters, which I never intended to like, but somehow the first issue won me over. Other deuces dropping this week include the Ultimate X-Men annual, Jack Kirby’s Galactic Bounty Hunters, Young Avengers & Runaways, and Ursa Minors.

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Don MacPherson and Randy Lander of the well-respected and long-running comic review site The Fourth Rail announced today that they are closing down the site. The pair posted a final “Two-in-One” farewell message on their site and issued the following press release:

Online comics critics Don MacPherson and Randy Lander will no longer update TheFourthRail.com, their comics-reviews website.

The Fourth Rail was launched in August 2001, and both reviews felt it was time for a change, opting to end regular reviews on the site.

“So why break up the band now? In a word: evolution,” Lander wrote in the pair’s farewell column.

While closing this chapter in their online endeavors, both critics will begin new ones. Lander is joining three friends in a new review site — ComicPants.com — and MacPherson is working on developing a new one with a new format as well.

“I’m guessing that for longtime readers, this won’t come as much of a surprise,” MacPherson wrote.

“The regularity of updates has gradually slowed over the past year or two, and of course, Randy ’semi-retired’ from the site a few months ago. The fact of the matter is that my life and Randy’s life have changed radically in recent years — for the better.”

That means they’ve had less time to devote to the reviews format they’ve been following for years and less time to collaborate on joint reviews as well.

Since both decided to change their reviewing schedules and formats, they decided it was time to start fresh with new websites.

The Fourth Rail won’t disappear right away. MacPherson and Lander have decided to keep the site and complete archives up and running until the end of the year so readers can still access the material for a few months.

But don’t think of it as losing a review site … think of it as gaining two review sites. Don will be launching his own review site, while Randy is joining the wonderfully named Comic Pants review site. Comic Pants will also feature reviews from Dave Farabee from Ain’t It Cool News and retailers David Martindale and Nick Budd.

(Comic Pants. Seriously, that makes my whole day).

Brian Wood unveils some background material for the upcoming DMZ issue that he illustrates as well as writes, on the Engine:

I have too much fun doing this… spent the majority of last night making these fake posters to litter the streets of the DMZ with… it’s a great mental and creative exercise, for the imagination and also to step outside myself and design in ways I wouldn’t normally. I could do dozens and dozens of these, if I had the time.

There are other versions of the same images available on his livejournal. I love the graphic design loveliness.

For those who have read Wizard, think they know the line-up of the new Mighty Avengers team, or just want to read other people bitching about it, click that “More” link.

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Mark Evanier points out on his blog that today would’ve been Jack Kirby’s 89th birthday:

“People referred to him as a great artist, and he was…but I always thought that compliment kind of missed the point. It wasn’t just that he drew so well but that he thought of wonderful things to draw that no one else would ever have imagined. Another pretty good artist, Al Williamson, once said, ‘If you told me or most of my buddies to draw fifty spaceships, they’d all look like they were built in the same plant. If Jack drew fifty spaceships, they’d look like they were built by fifty different alien races’.”

Tom Spurgeon has a good interview with Ed Brubaker that focuses on Criminal, the writer’s new crime series with artist Sean Phillips. There’s a lot of talk about theme, genre, process, and Brubaker’s approach to marketing — which I always find interesting.

Criminal debuts in October under Marvel’s Icon imprint.

Related: PDF preview of Criminal