Yesterday the U.S. postal service unveiled the artwork for their 2007 commemorative stamp series, in which Marvel’s characters join DC’s in being immortalized in stamp form. Look for them next July.

Don MacPherson takes a break from reviewing comics to show us at what might be happening at your hometown Civil War Recruitment Office:

Recruitment Officer #1: Yes! And he needs strapping young men such as yourself in the war against Captain America’s Secret Avengers.

Man: Cap? He’s cool, too.

Recruitment Officer #2: Oh, no. He’s a bad man who must be stopped.

Recruitment Officer #1: You see, Timmy…

Man: My name’s Julian.

Recruitment Officer #1: Timmy, Captain America and some other superhumans have opted to violate the law — the Superhuman Registration Act. You see, Davey…

Man: Julian.

Recruitment Officer #1: Davey, men and women with super-powers are like walking weapons of mass destruction, and the government needs to know who they are, what they do and who they vote for. That way, they can tell the good guys from the bad guys. The government gives the good guys jobs and the bad guys prison cells. Since Cap and company don’t want to register, they’re automatically the bad guys.

Recruitment Officer #2: And the government needs handsome, heterosexual boys like you to spank them! [produces riding crop and smacks her desk]

On the plus side, it is good to see Happy and Pepper working again.

Palladin the “Mad Monk” of “Christians Read Comics Too!” talks about his religion and how it helps him appreciate themes in superhero comics:

I gain comfort from heroic tales. They remind me of the calling I have accepted as a Christian. I live now hidden within my own Faith because of the forces more powerful than I feel I can stand up to an still be an effect minister. I read and wish I had the Oan Power Ring, the evils of the Sudan and other places would be on my list as places to try and protect the helpless. I see wish fulfillment on a global scale as I try and do simple heroic deeds locally. I can not battle the regimes in the Sudan, but I can help raise money to feed the refugees and displaced. I cannot stop evil in the world, but I can combat it at every turn I find it in my path.

Unfortunately, he’s found that much of his church isn’t open to these ideas:

What is my place? I wrote the title as a way of striking out because “church politics” had used my hobby as the way to attack me. It still stings. I was in no less terms being accused of being a person that would harm children because I read and reviewed comics of a supernatural nature. Lies were told, this I know because I looked on sites of a Christian nature that was cited as the source of the attackers information. Other lies were dismissed by people that read the addresses of pages printed from on-line that were not the sites I wrote for and with. Why and how did I survive the almost destruction of my professional ministry? God.

I’m a little late discovering this, but on his Myspace blog comedian/actor/comics writer Patton Oswalt has been recommending a horror story a day since the beginning of October.

It’s a terrific, and varied, list that includes the likes of W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw, The Brothers Grimm’s Rumplestiltskin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Horror of the Heights, and Alan Moore and Rick Veitch’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing #31.

Oswalt’s list of “31 Horror Stories” starts here and continues here.

(Via TV Squad)

At my old stomping grounds, the horror blog Dark, But Shining, Sam Costello talks with writer Steve Niles about, of all things, horror:

Costello: I think it’s fair to credit you as the guy, along with Ben Templesmith, who really kicked off the current boom in horror comics with 30 Days of Night. When that book was coming to the market in 2000/2001, did you see this boom coming? Did you feel that horror comics were about to come back in a big way?

Niles: I never stopped loving horror comics and really, most of the things I pitch were horror before and after 30 Days so I didn’t feel one way or the other. As a fan and reader of comics I knew there were no decent horror comics out there. The ones that were out had been sanitized to death in the name of “art” and I wasn’t interested. So I guess the short answer is no, I didn’t see a boom coming. Now the question is, will it last. It would be tragic if it was treated like a fad and comics became all-leotard all the time again.

Related: Costello launches a horror webcomic, Split Lip

Action Comics #844 arrived yesterday [unlike Seven Soldiers #1 -- I'm in the Memphis service area, apparently], but does it signal the start of the “Donner Superman?”

(more…)

Via Newsday comes the story about the rise of Principal Poopypants, arch enemy of the popular children’s book hero Captain Underpants:

If the captain’s creator, author Dav Pilkey, were to write the story of the conflict Wednesday at Long Beach High School, it might open like this: The evil school principal went insane with horror when he saw three girls strolling brazenly through hallways looking like caped crusaders. Naked caped crusaders.

But in reality, principal Nicholas Restivo is simply an administrator who, on Superhero Day, had a problem with the way the three seniors were dressed. He issued them an ultimatum: Change clothes, cover up or leave school.

At the root of the clash was Captain Underpants, chubby superhero star of popular children’s books in which he battles talking toilets and foes such as Professor Poopypants.

Peter David comments on his blog (and gives the principal his new nickname):

What the hell was he TALKING about? They were wearing capes, so seen from the back, they wouldn’t appear topless. Seen from the front, they would only appear naked if the biology teachers at Long Beach failed to teach the kids that girls have breasts. Nevertheless, the mere suggestion was enough to make Principal Poopypants issue an ultimatum that the clever teens cover up. Having no clothes to change into, the girls had to go home.

The Principal (real name Nicholas Restivo) stated he didn’t know the character, “not that it mattered.” Talk about having your underpants in a bunch. Someone should send Principal Poopypants a collection of the series.

Two things … first, Superhero Day is an awesome idea; I wish they had it when I was in school. Second, “The outfits looked so much like nude skin that they caused a commotion among students, Restivo said.” I’m sure the subsequent media coverage hasn’t done anything to cause a commotion … nice work, principal!

Mike Miller: He’s not all about Christianity anymore:

Five secular comic book series that were left out in the cold when Alias Comics decided to concentrate on the Christian bookstore market (see “Alias Refocuses Efforts“) have found a new home at Abacus Comics, a new company headed by Alias Comics’ Executive Director Mike S. Miller.  Three of Miller’s own titles, Imaginaries, Lullaby, and Sixgun Samurai will move to Abacus along with two Mortal World Entertainment books, Kord and Harley, and Soulless.

Abacus already has a website, with some interesting ground rules for what they’ll publish:

Comics have to be ongoing series. Mini-series come and go, and no-one cares a year later. With our ‘ongoing only’ policy, we give fans time to care about the characters we create.

“Mini-series come and go, and no-one cares a year later”? Isn’t that almost as if they’re admitting that they can’t do good mini-series? I mean, if the mini is good, people will still care a year later…

If it’s Thursday, then Andy Diggle is revisiting past successes:

I’ve been so wrapped up in all these new projects, I almost lost sight of the fact that the final LOSERS graphic novel has just been published – so if you missed out on the series first time round, now’s the perfect time to jump on board and find out what you’ve been missing.

You can read THE LOSERS from start to finish in five graphic novels.

It’s a contemporary action-thriller about a U.S. Special Forces team who are betrayed by their CIA handler. Targeted for assasination after they learn too much about one of the Agency’s dirtier operations, they decide to fight back the only way they know how – by declaring war on the CIA itself – and in doing so, find themselves embroiled in a top-level conspiracy using falsified intelligence to seize control of the Middle East’s oil supply.

Thing is, I started writing THE LOSERS over a year before we even invaded Iraq. Funny how things turn out, ennit… ?

THE LOSERS won the 2004 National Comics Award for Best New Comic, and was nominated for the 2004 Eisner Award for Best New Series.

Warner Bros are turning it into a movie.

Now if you only want to read comics about grown men in tights agonizing about relationship issues and bemoaning their burden of responsibility, then THE LOSERS probably isn’t for you. But if you want some ballsy entertainment that doesn’t treat you like a fucking idiot, you could do worse than start here.

(There’s an identical posting at The Engine, so it looks like Diggle’s wanting everyone to remember the series that made his name in the US…)

Steven Grant is looking for a few good men. Who don’t want paid:

Anyone interested in giving me a hand for absolutely no money and probably not even much respect or fame?

I want to do a column on working plot to art to script style and am looking for five artists to each draw the same page of plot I come up with – it’ll be something not very complicated – so I can discuss the differences of approach toward the same material and highlight just what a weird crapshoot working “Marvel” style is. It’ll cost you a page of pencils, but you can keep the page; I just need a scan. Unless it also becomes an article for JUST WRITE!, but Danny can work out those details if it happens. Thanks.

Later, he goes into more detail about what he’s looking for:

I’m not planning to get into the “right” or “wrong” way to do things. It’s just a demonstration, because I don’t think a lot of people quite get how much room for variation there is in the Marvel method, and how much any apparently transparent description of desired/necessary visuals can be interpreted by different artists. If possible I’m going to do a thumbnail of what I saw in my head when generating the page, which will be a fairly simple scenario, nothing spectacular or especially noteworthy.

It’s something I can talk about all I want but that won’t have the same impact or information value as showing what I’m talking about. I wish in retrospect I’d been able to do that with my chat about timing a few weeks back.

I’m figuring running this in a couple of weeks.

He doesn’t say for sure, but I’m guessing this would run in his Permanent Damage column at CBR.

Hellboy: Sword of Storms, the first of the animated Hellboy movies, debuts Saturday at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT on Cartoon Network.

In Sword of Storms, “a professor of folklore opens a forbidden scroll and becomes possessed by the ancient Japanese demons of Thunder and Lightning, who seek to return and dominate our world. The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense sends Hellboy and a team of agents to investigate, but when Hellboy picks up a samurai sword, he literally disappears into a weird wonderland of Japanese legends, ghosts and monsters.”

The movie will be available on DVD beginning Feb. 6.

Related: The Hellboy Animated production diary

The relatively recent debut of a post-Crisis Kara Zor-El has been generating a lot of controversy and discussion for the past year.

From her build and costume to her attitude and demeanor, this current Supergirl is very different from any of her predecessors and everyone has an opinion about it.

Today’s topic centers around a young artist’s redesign of the character, with a more realistic build and a more conservative costume.

Point

Dawn at “My OTHER Comic Book Blog” is showcasing the re-design in her post, this is how to draw Supergirl:

Excerpt:

Aren’t those just exactly what Supergirl should be? She’s strong, confident and standing in a classic and powerful pose. She’s wearing a uniform instead of a stripper costume and those gloves…I love that. Gloves mean business.

Counterpoint

Not everyone agrees, however, Shelly of “Shelly’s Comic Book Shelf” posts why it doesn’t work for her.

Excerpt:

Kara is striving to carve her niche, find her identity, and a costume that mimics Superman’s so strongly negates that for me. Keep the S somewhere, keep the colors, but she needs a unique look. Like it or hate it, what she has now doesn’t make me think about Superman at all.

What do you think?