Game developer Electronic Arts confirmed that they and Marvel comics have decided to terminate their plans to develop a new Marvel fighting game.

“EA and Marvel have jointly agreed to discontinue development of the Marvel titles under the EA Games Label. This was a business decision based on EA’s portfolio strategy,” an Electronic Arts rep told GameTap today.

The deal with EA was similar to one Marvel had with Capcom. That deal pit classic Marvel superheroes against original characters from the game publisher and resulted in the 1999’s Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes.

Only one game has been developed under the EA/Marvel licensing agreement since 2004: Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects.

Marvel briefly stated that they are other fish in the sea.

“(this) will not affect Marvel’s ongoing plans to release fighting games based on the Marvel properties in the future.”

Fans of the popular Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games rejoicing and hoping Marvel reunites with their former star-crossed lover, Capcom.

Mike Lynch shares samples from 1966 book Taboo, a collection of censored gag cartoons, in these two posts.

There have been a couple of interesting posts over the last couple of days about Marvel’s interim deal with the Writer’s Guild of America. First up, in a long editorial about the deal, Don MacPherson wonders if the creators of Marvel’s comic books are getting anything from their Digital Comics Unlimited initiative:

These recent developments give one pause and give way to questions. Has Marvel factored this new revenue stream into its contracts with the men and women who create their content? If not, could Marvel justify any kind of resistance to such additional compensation in light of its sister company’s acquiescence to the demands of the WGA? Might comics writers and artists look at the WGA’s actions and see the advantage of organization and solidarity, leading to a similar labor entity in the North American comics business?

It’s possible these questions may be moot. For all I know, Marvel is ahead of the game and has already acknowledged an obligation to beef up its payment package for talent. Then again, it’s possible that Marvel sees the online venture as a life preserver in an ocean of business challenges such as shifts from print to broadcast and online advertising, the added costs of the afore-mentioned creator royalties and dwindling circulation numbers (at least as compared to the industry’s heyday decades ago).

Second, Johanna Draper Carlson wonders if Joe Quesada feels bad about crossing the picket line to appear on the Colbert Report. Or does Marvel’s recent deal with the WGA outweigh Quesada’s appearance on the writer-less show, as Jason M. Bryant said in our comments section yesterday? What say you, fandom?

BookForum has an excerpt of David Hajdu’s upcoming book, The Ten-Cent Plague, about Fredrick Wertham and the great comic-book scare of the 1950s:

IN THE LATE ’40S AND EARLY ’50S, there was no more vibrant part of the publishing industry than the lowly dime-store comic, churned out by an army of boilerplate writers, illustrators, and editors in New York for a rapturously devoted young audience. That is, until a cadre of youth groups and civic authorities targeted these publications as gateway reading to moral depravity. After Mad-magazine founder Bill Gaines foundered in a sweaty, Dexedrine-fueled haze in front of televised congressional hearings on the link between juvenile delinquency and horror and crime magazines, virtually the entirety of comic-book publishing disappeared overnight. In The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hajdu looks back on the passions inflamed by the comics scare.

As Y: The Last Man ends its 60-issue run this week, the spotlight turns to writer Brian K. Vaughan and the impact of the Vertigo series:

• USA Today’s Whitney Matheson talks to Vaughan, retailer Mary Gibbons, director D.J. Caruso and blogger Tom Spurgeon about the comic’s end, and its impact.

“We’re so spoiled by comics with Spider-Man and Superman and the X-Men, that sort of illusion of the third act, it goes on forever,” Vaughan says. “I think finales are what give stories their meaning.”

• New York magazine’s Vulture blog talks with Vaughan about the final arc, killing a major character, and writing for TV’s Lost.

• Talking with About.com’s Aaron Albert, Vaughan relates his feelings about the end of Y: “Writing that final panel was very strange, a mixture of relief and depression, but it didn’t feel like really saying good-bye since I still had to see the last of Pia’s pencils and the last of Clemens letters and so on. It probably won’t sink in until after I’ve held the last issue in my hands.”

• And at Newsarama, Zack Smith has the first part of a lengthy Q&A with Vaughan titled “Good-bye to Y.”

Courtesy of Brian Hughes.

Over on the Whitechapel message board, Mark Seifert from Avatar shares artwork from the upcoming Warren Ellis/Facundo Percio book Anna Mercury. Additional artwork can be found on the Avatar website.

The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Fishtown creator Kevin Colden … currently Fishtown can be found on Act-i-vate, but soon it’ll be published by IDW:

We initially discussed setting up this interview at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund party, back in December, with the caveat that we wouldn’t set it up until you got a certain piece of important news.

Yeah. I thought it wasn’t going to happen. And then I was contacted shortly afterwards, and now it can actually be told. Fishtown is going to be published by IDW. It’s slated for a hardcover November release. It will be the complete story.

He also talks about how he gave up a Xeric Grant he received for the book because he wanted to keep publishing it online:

… I would have had to have stopped immediately. My reason for not accepting the grant was, if I keep it online until these 23 pages are done, I can sell out the entire print run, but if I take it offline and just print it up anyway, I’ll probably be out however many thousands of dollars it takes to print it.

It was ultimately a fact of, I was reaching thousands of people on weekly basis that I would have had to have cut off. And I wouldn’t have had any basis for promotion. The Web serialization is an amazing promotional tool. We’ve seen evidence recently, actually. The best selling graphic novel of last year was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which is more of an illustrated book, but is still the best selling graphic novel of last year, and it was still available entirely online before that. So was Shooting War, Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappe’s book. A large portion of that was online, and that’s doing gangbusters. So, it was just really a marketing decision. Eventually I was going to find a publisher for this, one way or another. And Lo and behold, I did.

Astronaut Dad, Volume 1
Written by David Hopkins; Illustrated by Brent Schoonover
Silent Devil
$5.95

I wanna talk about Horrorwood for a second before I get into Astronaut Dad, if that’s okay. Brandon Terrell’s script for Horrorwood was an engaging homage to the horror movies of the thirties and forties, but another artist might have been tempted to focus on its darker elements and create a straightforward horror story out of it. What made Horrorwood really special was Brent Schoonover’s simple, expressive illustrations. Letting the script communicate the mystery of those old films, Schoonover’s cartoon-like drawings ran against expectations and captured their fun.

So, I was pretty excited to see what Schoonover was up to next. When I heard it was a book called Astronaut Dad, I immediately thought of shows like Lost in Space and My Favorite Martian. Something about family, but with a space-adventure hook. But, in what’s becoming a recurring theme in this column lately, I was surprised to read a book that was pleasantly different from my expectations for it.

(more…)

Millarworld wonders just whatever happened to their favorite creators, anyway…?:

“lobdell was one of favourite x-scribes back in the day (probably due to the fact that he was writing them when i started collecting) but how come when he left he never went on to write another franchise book for anyone? what was the cause of that? with kelly i guess he never really fell from grace after great stints on deadpool and x-men, and even jla, but what has he done lately?”

“The ultimate creator-falling-from-grace story has to be Chuck Austen (not that I’m complaining). He went from being everywhere at Marvel, Uncanny X-Men, Exiles, New X-Men, X-Men, Avengers then jumped to DC and did one of the Superman titles (and JLA?) and then he disappeared after he ‘fired’ himself from his creator owned title. Oh well.”
“Whatever happened to Christopher Priest? Did he leave of his own accord or was he pushed or just ignored?”

“Ron Zimmerman, IIRC, left comics because the Internet was mean to him. Seriously.”

Kenneth Johnson, writer and director of The Incredible Hulk, posts Kevin Koster’s list of every reason David Bruce Banner transformed into the Hulk in the classic TV series.

My favorites, I think, are Nos. 8 (”Being mauled by a bear”), 19 (”Being pushed down a mountainside by a bigfoot impersonator”) and 20 (”Dealing with a pesky operator in a phone booth”).

(Via The A.V. Club)

It had to happen. Time Magazine calls John McCain a political phoenix, and then we get… Well, we get this:

To a certain cohort, the associations are devastating. It so happened that at Kay’s birthday party last week, Kriston and I had the opportunity to introduce Amanda to the Dark Phoenix Saga. Already we can see the costume worn by McCain, perhaps stirred by the pernicious influence of Mastermind, turning a deep red…

Matthew Yglesias goes one nerd further:

Is John McCain responsible for the deaths of billions of D’Bari?

Oh God. Is this what happens when comic culture goes mainstream?

Filling in for this year’s missing Golden Globes, Marvel’s Tom Brevoort gives you all a chance to vote on this year’s newest awards, the Golden Loebs:

You can practically feel the electricity in the air. After a weekend spent tallying the nominations of you, the Marvel Comics readers, we’re ready to announce the nominees for the 2007 Golden Loeb Awards… TO VOTE: Simply name your picks and e-mail them to mheroes@marvel.com. One ballot to a customer, please, and one vote per category. You don’t have to vote in every category–vote only for the ones you want. You can also write-in a vote for a non-nominee in any category.

Not that I want to influence the voting in any way, but when you click on the link to check on the list of nominees, surely you can see that Captain America should walk away with Best Story Arc…

The Sunday Herald talks to Judge Dredd writer Alan Grant about the growing similarities between the post-apocalyptic Mega-City One and the world he lives in today:

“It’s pretty horrific when you realise that what you’ve written, admittedly an extrapolation of a trend, has got stronger and stronger,” said Grant. Going to Glasgow airport and seeing police officers armed Judge Dredd-style confirmed to Grant the state of society. “We are living in a dystopia, and pessimistically I can only see it getting worse. I think the world that we, and I include myself, are bequeathing to our grandchildren, is a horrible, horrible place.”

The smoking ban is another worrying example of science fiction becoming reality, according to Grant. A 1979 Judge Dredd storyline featured the Smokatorium, the only place in the city where people could smoke. “But instead of having a Smokatorium, they’ve made us go outside to do it,” said Grant. “This blanket ban is, well, it’s Judge Dredd. We deliberately set out to portray Judge Dredd as a fascist. And while our government is nominally a left-wing government, it has all the signs of a fascist government.”

On his new-ish blog Talking with Tim, Tim O’Shea interviews Jeff Lemire about his Essex County trilogy and, um, noses:

O’Shea: This may be a strange question, but I have to ask: Do you really enjoy drawing noses? I have never seen an artist render characters with such spectacular noses.

Lemire: I actually get that a lot. Put it this way, every single panel that I ever have drawn that has a face in it, the first thing I draw is the nose and go from there. I think a lot of people see the eyes as the center of the face, or the most characteristic feature, but I see the nose as giving the whole face its personality.

The third volume of the trilogy is due in October.

As I was amusing myself with thoughts of Charles Xavier as the Kenny McCormick of the X-Men — “You killed Charlie! You bastard!” — Valerie D’Orazio one-ups me as she sees shades of Blue Velvet in the increasingly creepy Tigra-Hood storyline in New Avengers Annual #2.

Meanwhile, Blog@’s own Carla Hoffman looks at the abuse recently heaped on Greer Grant, and wonders, “Did Tigra spit in Bendis’ coffee?”

At ComixTalk, Brigid Alverson talks with Kage no Matsuri creator rem, winner of Kodansha’s Morning International Manga Competition, and Eijiro Shimada, editor-in-chief of Morning Two magazine:

Now that you have a longer comic in print, Vampire Kisses, can you talk a bit about the differences between working on a fairly short comic for the web and a longer one for print—in terms of planning and the actual work?

Holy crap, it’s like the difference between night and day for so many different reasons. I mean, Vampire Kisses could not be any more different than KnM. Mainly because it’s not my story at all, and I don’t really communicate with the writer. Bikkuri (the writer for KnM) and I are very close so it’s kinda like his stories are my stories, too, and I get to put in a lot of input as a result. In KnM, I was totally free to do whatever I wanted and experiment artistically how I wanted. In the case of Vampire Kisses, everything is restrained and scrutinized by a ton of different people. The planning and actual work for VK was (is still) daunting since I am very new to the industry. I also hear that people who publish original titles are given much easier schedules that what I have. Everything is in steps: thumbnails, sketches, inks, and then toning, and each step needs to meet the demands of Harper Collins. So even though it was fun, and it still is, I feel like it’s a commission rather than my own work.

Related: The Star of Malaysia profiles rem

The Star also profiles second-place winner Lim Hwei Lin

The Oregonian’s Steve Duin talks with cartoonist Colleen Coover about her early career, Small Favors and Banana Sunday.

Sharknife creator Corey Lewis posts this gorgeous T-shirt design at Design By Humans, where it’s apparently still up for vote to be offered in the website’s store.

The National Post has a nice feature article on seminal alt-cartoonist Julie Doucet about her new D&Q book, 365 Days, and why she left the comics world:

But had she stayed in one place — comics — it’s likely she would be as well known as some of her Canadian contemporaries, such as Chester Brown and Seth. Oliveros remarks that “had she done a graphic novel now, she probably would have had maybe some more mainstream acceptance.” Birkemoe calls her “very much ahead of her time.”

Doucet, though, doesn’t feel like she missed a gold rush.

“Oh, I really don’t care about that. I felt so trapped,” she says. “You know, when you’re a cartoonist it’s like being a priest: If you quit, everybody around you goes crazy. I mean, when you’re a cartoonist you’re supposed to be doing the same thing over and over again until you die. And I didn’t want that. It was very frustrating and I needed to try a different thing.”