A high school senior at a Richmond, Va., public school was suspended after school authorities discovered a homemade “Death Note” containing the names of some of his classmates in his possession:

The student is a senior at Franklin Military Academy in the city’s East End. The principal there sent a letter to the parents after a teacher spotted the student reading a list of his classmates’ names in the book called “Death Note.”

The student who got in trouble was not in class today He’s suspended pending an investigation.

Senior April Hopkins says she’s friends with the student. “He doesn’t really say much, he just stays to himself,” she said.

Hopkins’ name wasn’t on the list, but some of her friends’ were. She says they don’t fear him, and neither does she.

Now waiting for more cases to surface, along with the inevitable moral hand-wringing, in three, two, one …

I hope everyone out there in comic land had a nice Thanksgiving weekend … or if you’re outside the United States, a nice non-holiday weekend. I have a couple of quick updates to share:

–Kevin Melrose is out this week on vacation, and while he’s out, Aron Head, who recently covered Wizard World Texas for us, will be filling in. He’s already started posting today.

–A couple of people emailed me over the weekend about our RSS feed being down. If you’re subscribed to the feed that lives at newsaramablog.com, then it probably looks like the site hasn’t been updated since last Thursday. However, if you change it to this one, http://blog.newsarama.com/feed/, you should be good to go.

We had some issues with the newsaramablog.com domain last week that the folks at Imaginova are addressing, but until they are resolved, blog.newsarama.com is working fine.

TV Guide reports that Dermot Mulroney will voice Green Lantern Hal Jordan in an upcoming episode of the CW’s Batman cartoon:

Mulroney has deep ties to these superheroes. His brother and sister-in-law, Kieran and Michelle Mulroney, penned the upcoming live-action film Justice League of America, which includes Batman and Green Lantern. “Kieran and I grew up reading DC Comics,” Mulroney says. “We had a whole system where, once a week, we’d take a trip to the little store that sold the comics. I have a couple of brothers, and we’d fight over who got which issue. There’s a long history of comics in the family.”

You might remember Mulroney from My Best Friend’s Wedding, Must Love Dogs and several other sappy movies that my wife dragged me to, as well as Young Guns and The Thing Called Love. Green Lantern will appear on the Dec. 8 episode of the show, which will feature the villain Sinestro.

Courtesy of Tom Manning. (hat tip: Tom Spurgeon)

Fantagraphics designer Jacob Covey isn’t pleased with the French edition of Fantagraphics Fletcher Hanks book:

More often than not the foreign reprints produce covers not by starting from scratch but by somehow “improving” our cover designs. And it’s not like I wouldn’t understand if, say, you the reader of this post thought that the French edition is just fine. But I’m still cranky that the underlying purpose to my design choices becomes cosmetic furniture to be rearranged and thrown out– or, as is most often the case with these redesigns, added to. It’s ALWAYS accumulated upon– never stripped down.

And this angst isn’t rooted so much in pride of my own work (and certainly not rooted in some sense of vicarious possessiveness) but, frankly, it would be fun to see another, better-than-my-own take on the cover. Something besides a redecoration. In this case the French surprised me by throwing a heavy blue shag carpet over the top of fine (white) hardwood floors. They FORCE us to contextualize our god-like hero, to literally solidify Stardust in space and thereby reduce his power. His omnipotent presence is gone and he simply becomes a component in a generic field of empty blue space. The iconic quality of his turned-away pose goes from being a stark portrait of his unknowable-ness to a poorly-timed snapshot of some sci-fi space traveler. (I’m not truly an expert but besides the fact that this panel is fabricated it doesn’t FEEL like Hanks to me. His character is never so incidental to a composition and landscape never dwarfs his heroes. Though his worlds are bleak, they aren’t so expansively EMPTY.)

The Los Angeles Times talks to Chris Ware about his poster for the upcoming Laura Linney/Philip Seymour Hoffman movie, “The Savages:”

Did you come up with multiple designs, or was this the only one? Was the drawing you did the size of the poster, or was it blown up?

This was pretty much it, though the original design was much more literal and unforgiving, and it was actually through the suggestions of the studio that it got better. Not to speak pejoratively, but it’s been my experience that editorial and artistic guidance generally doesn’t always help something, but here such advice was quite helpful, and it made the final poster better. And, since you ask, while I usually draw with an eye toward reduction, here I drew the picture to be enlarged, so I had to be extra careful with my brush.

After several new Gotham-themed websites launched over the holiday weekend, it appears that the Joker is getting in on the fun as well. He’s made some modifications to the Gotham Times at a new site, The Ha Ha Ha Times, and also has a new personality profile quiz up on his Why So Serious? site.

Also, Geekanerd points out that there are quite a few references to Gotham Central in the Gotham Times.

Listening to the post Thanksgiving episode of the iFanboy podcast last night, I was amused by a topic the guys discussed: Naming your child after a comic character. They made the point that you have to be subtle. Naming your kid “Peter” is okay, but you might want to avoid “Peter Parker Johnson.”

This got me wandering down memory lane…

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Sharing a few potential Christmas gift ideas, Sam Leith with the U.K.’s Telegraph talks about “SSS Comix” — or Shy Schlumpfs in Specs Comix:

The rough gist is this: comic book artist, who is (like most comic book artists) a shy schlumpf in specs, mooches around feeling sorry for himself, worries that he might be too self-obsessed, has a short and self-loathing infatuation with a girl, returns to drawing board, creates comic describing the aforegoing events.

Still, there are SSS Comix and SSS Comix. Where would we be without R Crumb and the best of his disciples? And if you placed a prohibition on autobiography in comics, you’d be pretty quickly back to the men in tights.

He goes on to recommend a few comics that fall into the “SSS” category, including Seth’s It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken and Life, In Pictures: Autobiographical Stories by Will Eisner. Also getting a mention are Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds, Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine and Rich Johnston’s Flying Friar.

The Movie Blog posts an image of the first Solomon Kane teaser poster. The first film in a planned trilogy is due next year.

I would have thought that the Thanksgiving weekend would affect attendance at a comic convention, but it doesn’t sound like it slowed down the Mid-Ohio-Con. A good time was had by all this weekend, comic writer Mark Evanier reports on his blog. Evanier joined Sergio Aragones, Michael Golden, Roger Stern, Doug Jones, Tom Batiuk, Sean McKeever, Ale Garza, Barry Kitson, David Mack, Steve Rude and many more at the almost 30-year-old con.

In addition to all the celebrities and comic pros, Evanier notes that a lot of small press publishers attended the event, as does the site Comic Related:

I’m going to start my look back on Saturday at Mid-Ohio-Con with a tip of the metaphorical hat to the small press creators at this weekend’s show. I think the product being presented this weekend by the independent creators is stronger than any show I’ve been to this year. I will temper that remark with the fact that I wasn’t able to attend SPACE, APE, MOCCA or SPX (a fact I plan to remedy in 2008). That said, for the mainstream shows I’ve attended I came away from Saturday at Mid-Ohio-Con blown away by the quality. Title after title I found books I didn’t just want to read, I wanted to own (and in many cases I now do own). I can sum up my feelings here in two simple words… “more please”.

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Yesterday I blogged about Marvel and DC telling the torrent site Z-Cult FM to take down their material, as well as a message allegedly from SLG Publishing, giving Z-Cult permission to list SLG’s material on the site. It was that second item that really snowballed over the weekend.

Johanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading contacted SLG Publishing Dan Vado, and he said nobody at SLG wrote the letter. He also left a comment about it on the Z-Cult site.

Z-Cult pulled the thread down and contacted Dan. Someone from Z-Cult then posted a comment here on Blog@ saying they had heard from Dan; it turns out the person who sent the message to Z-Cult was a freelancer who has worked for SLG and had been in contact with Z-Cult before on SLG’s behalf.

That brings us to an email Dan sent me, after I forwarded Z-Cult’s comment to him to verify it was accurate. As it turns out, Dan did give the freelancer permission to contact the site on his behalf some time back to arrange a banner ad exchange:

Looks like I owe a couple of people some apologies on this. Let me break this down for everyone.

1) In regards to the statement on Zcult attributed to SLG. I did not write it. However…

2) Someone whom I have done a lot of business with over the years DID write it. This person had asked me some time back if I would be willing to allow some torrenting of our material in exchange for ad banners on those same sites. This was a few months back and something I thought had already been done. In my mind this was supposed to be a low key promotional opportunity to see if people using those torrent sites could be persuaded to buy legal downloads and not a grand statement on the overall rightness or wrongness of torrent sites.

3) The fact that this took a long time to get done wound up being bad timing as I was now being painted as being pro-torrent, anti DC and Marvel. Those companies have the right to do whatever they like with their property, including threatening legal action. That I might find some promotional use for these download sites doesn’t change that. The timing of the statement was very poor and caught me off guard while I was on vacation and made it look like our decision was a reaction to the Marvel/DC thing and not an initiative we took on our own.

4) I made some pretty harsh comments about the quality of comics journalism. While nobody covering comics is ever going to win a pulitzer, in this case I have to take responsibility for being out of line.

So, with a load of egg on my face I would like to sincerely apologize to Serj at Zcult, to Landry Walker who has been nothing but a tireless and hard-working friend and colleague, and to everyone whom I may have offended in general.

I’m too sluggish from all the turkey to offer anything remotely resembling an intelligent opinion today. Thankfully, there have been enough thoughtful reviews and essays out on the comics blogosphere over the past few weeks to make up for my lack of loquaciousness. (more…)

A collection of interesting quotes from this week:

“Just because Marvel’s comics have a shitty interface or an unwanted run of Gambit comics doesn’t validate my pirating their stuff, it doesn’t excuse or justify it or give me any moral or ethical high-ground. If I’m stealing their IP then I’m a thief, and I either make my peace with that or I don’t, and stop stealing.”

– blogger and retailer Christopher Butcher, on torrenting and entitlement

“I simply can’t stress enough how shortsighted, how ignorant, how goddamned lunkheaded DC and Marvel are being right now. They aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot like other media companies; they’re shooting themselves in the head. Internet downloading and the word-of-mouth generated by it has been quietly driving their business for the last couple of years now and they want to kill it. It’s just staggering.”

– blogger Christopher Bird, on word that DC and Marvel have sent cease-and-desist letters to a popular torrent site

“Frankly, the problem with American comics is that they were too conservative. They lacked the courage to go fully with the creator-owned model to the extent that Japanese publishers have. The American publishing companies are corporate-owned, and they go with this mindset that they’ll ‘reinvent Spider-Man for every generation.’ You can’t read every issue of Spider-Man that’s come out since 1963 and read it all the way from then to the present — that’s just ridiculous and impossible to do.

“And maybe that’s what some people want. They want a story that they can just drop into at any point. But I think that it’s much, much more rewarding to read and follow a complete story and to identify the story with the artist, not just the character.”

– Jason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide, comparing American and Japanese comics

“What’s great, and rather unique, about comics is that we’re a small concern, financially. No one is sinking tens of millions of dollars into a new monthly series like they would a film, so the freedom is so much greater. A creator can see his vision realized just like it is in his head, not after being rewritten by a bunch of hacks, edited mercilessly, and filtered through a bunch of producers and a director. I have a feeling if I tried to write for Hollywood I’d be stressed out and driven mad within weeks.”

– writer-artist Brian Wood, on comics storytelling

“I was just always amazed that people used to rag on my movies. Nobody really acknowledged the fact that [Batman] was slightly different at the time from other comic book movies. So lay off, will you? They would get on my case all the time and it’s still kind of that way today.”

– director Tim Burton, on criticism of his Batman movies

The Gotham Times website I linked to yesterday now has an issue of the paper up, and if you read through the stories you can find all kinds of websites dedicated to the movie, like a Gotham Police site. Try calling the Gotham Times subscription department, too … the number’s at the top of the page.

Last week Marvel’s Dan Buckley told Comic Book Resources that Marvel would be “reviewing and evaluating ‘illegal’ downloading activities on a case by case basis.” The next day, the site TorrentFreak reported that Marvel and DC sent letters to the BitTorrent site Z-Cult FM, giving the site a deadline for taking down their comics:

Popular comic book tracker Z-Cult FM was threatened by Marvel and DC Comics, as site admin ‘Serj’ explained: “We got legal letters from both Marvel and DC Comics who have been working together to send us these legal threats. We are currently dealing with the legal issues and they have given us 3 days before they are forced to take anymore action.”

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On The Hero Initiative blog, Jim McLauchlin shares a really great reason to donate to their cause:

I just wrote checks totaling $3000 for a creator who Hero just benefited. He wishes to remain anonymous, but our Disbursement Committee knows who he is. He lives in an area of the country, where the cost of living is moderately cheap, but still…he and his wife just rolled pennies to buy milk, and they luckily had a coupon for a free box of Cheerios. After the milk, they had $3 to their names.

The creator in question had cancer about a decade ago, and his wife was diagnosed with cancer a few years later. When she found she was going to lose her hair in treatment, she had it cut off and donated to the Locks of Love program. That’s just the kind of folks they are. Her cancer is still an issue to this day. It took six years for her to get government help, as with no under-18 children living in their home, they had to get below 200% under the federal poverty guidelines before they could qualify.

Probably needless to say, due to health and mobility issues, finding work is difficult for these folks. The funny part is they’re STILL plugging away, still writing and even self-publishing comics. Their spirit is indomitable. Some of the checks I wrote were to a landlord for rent and a propane company for heat. I spoke to said recipient today to tell him the checks went out and he remarked that “The prospect of a warm winter with no bills facing disconnect is more than we hoped for.”

And it hit me: He had already resigned himself to the fate that the heat was probably going to get turned off for part of this winter. It was just going to happen. Until us. And until you, reading this.

So if you’re looking for gift suggestions or just want to help someone out, visit The Hero Initiative site to make a donation.

Salgood Sam, the artist of the upcoming IDW book Therefore Repent!, dropped us a note about a pricing mistake in the latest Previews, which features the book:

It’s in this November Previews, published by IDW in the U.S.
Diamond # NOV073660
Very important info; There was an error in the initial listing, the cover price will be $14.99 U.S., Cheep! not $24.99!

That’s a big difference so I really wanted to make sure to let as many shops know as possible.

I pre-ordered the book a few days ago based on the 60-page preview that’s up on ComicSpace. It’s written by novelist Jim Munroe and is about a post-Rapture world.

The Warner Bros. marketing folks are at it again … on Halloween, the Joker-themed site WhySoSerious.com posted a contest that sent fans on scavenger hunts in various cities based on clues on the site. Now the Dark Knight Unofficial Movie Blog reports that the folks who were “recruited” by the Joker are receiving their prize — a copy of The Gotham Times. There’s also a Gotham Times website now, which doesn’t have much on it, but I’m sure that will change.

Also, try emailing humanresources@whysoserious.com for more Joker fun, and visit http://www.wearetheanswer.org/ if you’d like to join the other side of the fight.

With Thanksgiving here, we can finally look forward to… FEBRUARY! Merry Valentine’s Day. Because not only does the end of November bring with it the start of December and the crazy days of Christmas, but a look forward three months ahead to Marvel’s books for the second month of 2008. Let’s take a look at what the end of this year has wrought upon the next.

LORDS OF AVALON: SWORD OF DARKNESS #1 (of 6)
It’s interesting how Marvel was trying on the Romance Comics genre a while back, checking to see if it was still in style, mostly using Romance Redux to treat it as a gag. Now, welcome to February 2008! Where a best-selling supernatural romance author’s work is being adapted for the comic page. It makes a lot of sense, considering how well Anita Blake is doing (I can only speak for my store where the title has actually netted us a healthy amount of new customers) and it’s no secret that this book is most likely the direct result of the popularity of Marvel’s ‘literary’ line, like Dark Tower and Anita Blake.

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