PW’s Calvin Reid grabs Comic-Con marketing director David Glanzer to ask him the lingering questions:

PWCW: I guess you’ve had to answer this question a lot, but what is your response to the general discussion out there that, perhaps, the show should move to another city?

DG: We would love to stay here; we love San Diego and it would make things so much simpler if we stay here. When we signed our last agreement with the city to stay through 2012, we knew we would have to forego growth for a few years. Now there is the possibility of the expansion of the Convention Center by the city. That’s something that wouldn’t just be just good for Comic-Con, but would be good for the city as a whole. They could book shows simultaneously and other things. But we haven’t seen much movement from the city on plans to expand the convention center.

Could Super Max be Warner Bros.’ Iron Man?

Screenwriter David S. Goyer says Warner Bros. seems prepared to move ahead with Super Max, the Green Arrow-goes-to-prison movie first mentioned in April 2007.

“Green Arrow is, you know, probably on the same level as Iron Man,” Goyer tells Sci Fi Wire. “And, yeah, I mean when a movie like Iron Man does $300 million, and DC, Warner Bros., realizes, ‘Wow, we’ve got 20 of these kinds of characters.’”

He says studio executives like the script, and like Green Arrow, who is “one of the characters that they’re really interested in [and] seem to be interested in moving forward with next.”

In Super Max, Green Arrow is framed, stripped of his identity, and sent to a maximum-security prison for supervillains, with whom he must team to escape and clear his name.

Last week Goyer told MTV.com that Super Max will include a variety of DC villains and plenty of Easter eggs for comics fans.

The Ticker

• Xingu Films has acquired the movie rights to American Reaper, the upcoming graphic novel by Pat Mills and Clint Langley. [The Hollywood Reporter]

• Family Guy executive producer David A. Goodman has been hired to adapt the zombie-vampire comic Last Blood for Benderspink. [The Hollywood Reporter]

• Warner Bros. is developing a Marvin the Martian feature, based on the Looney Tunes character. It’ll be a blend of live action and CGI. [Variety]

• Can The Dark Knight unseat Titanic as the top-grossing film of all time in North America? Okay, $600.8 million may be a little out of reach, but The Dark Knight will likely reach $400 million early next week, setting it up to surpass Star Wars and Shrek 2 to grab the No. 2 spot. [Variety]

• Lauren Davis dissects video of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer from Comic-Con. [io9]

• Well, that didn’t take long: a mash-up of Heroes and the Watchmen trailer. [YouTube, via Slashfilm]

It must be comics week over at the Onion’s AV Club. First there’s an extensive Jeff Smith interview. Now we’re blessed with one with Explainers author Jules Feiffer:

The A.V. Club: It’s surprising, reading the book, how early the strip’s sensibility was formed. Almost right from the beginning, you deal with the themes that preoccupied you for the next 40 years.

Jules Feiffer: Originally, there were going to be a few weeks of introductory strips before I started serializing Munro. When I went to the Voice, I showed them Munro—and maybe Passionella, although I’m not sure I’d written Passionella by then—and something on the bomb called Boom!—what today would be called graphic novellas. They were just long narrative cartoons. They had political content to the extent that they were strongly anti-government, anti- the prevailing political tides of the time. I though what I’d do was break the longer stuff down into weekly installments, but I thought it might be difficult in the beginning for readers to figure out what I was doing and what the hell was going on, so perhaps I should do five or six or seven weeks of introductory strips to tell them who I was and what I was going to do. The introductory strips were still taking over 40 years later. Once I got into the habit and routine of it, I realized what a good format this was for me, and how much better it was than serializing work I’d already done which wasn’t designed for that format and would never be ideal for it.

The Daily Cross Hatch has the first of a multi-part interview with Lucky creator Gabrielle Bell up:

Was there a point for you when it was clear that your work was publishable, or did you ultimately just want to get it out there?

Well, I think it’s more of the latter. I just wanted to start getting stuff out there. But I definitely do comics with intention of publishing them and others with the intention of not publishing. Sometimes I do comics that are sort of in-between and I think that maybe I could publish it, and then when I finish, I realize that it’s not publishable. And then there’s a lot of stuff that just ends up on the cutting room floor.

Are there any consistent things that come up which make works unpublishable?

Generally it’s just because it’s not interesting enough, or it just embarrasses me, in one way or another. Usually when I do Lucky, there will be several more pages that I don’t release, because they’re just kind of boring. The comic could really be twice as many pages. I kind of have to weed through stuff I’ve written down and comics I’ve done. It’s not necessarily that the most interesting things that happen get published—there are a lot of personal and sentimental things that I write.

With all of the hustle, bustle and hype of Comic-Con, we could all use a little break. So it’s probably good that it’s a light week for big releases.

Well, mostly. Del Rey Manga has seven noteworthy releases this Wednesday, from the first volume of Me and the Devil Blues to the second volume of Toto! to the fourth volume of Parasyte. Image uncorks a second installment of the Popgun anthology, and Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking Little Nemo in Slumberland gets two hardcovers.

To see what other titles Chris Mautner and I think are worth mentioning, just keep reading. As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.

(more…)

Whitney Matheson at Pop Candy gave away a cool piece of swag at her meet-up during the San Diego Comic-Con … a collection of single-panel comics based on posts to the Pop Candy Twitter feed. Matt Silady, who contributed, showed me his copy during the con; his comic featured John Candy and Kermit the Frog getting very close. You can check out the entire comic over at Pop Candy.

And, via Topless Robot, Kotaku has a shot of The Joker from the game.

The A.V. Club talks to Jeff Smith about RASL, Bone, Shazam!, his creative process, and reacting to criticism:

What inspires me to change things is if it sounds true to me. If somebody’s just being negative… there are lots of negative people on the Internet in all fields, and comics, they’re somehow just really let loose. But I can tell if somebody just doesn’t like me. There are people that just cannot stand me, or anything I do. And why that is, just not important. I can’t even figure it out. It might be because I’m not friends with Dave Sim anymore, or because I went to Image Comics in 1995 for a year, and people hold grudges. Or maybe they just think I draw little funny-bunny things, and they just hate that. So I can tell right away. If it’s just somebody that—they just hate me, well I can dismiss that, I don’t lose any sleep over that. But if it’s somebody who clearly is interested by the books, but they’re like, “You did this one thing…” Sometimes they’ll hit something on the head, and it might have been something that was nagging me a little bit too. That’s when it’ll make me want to change it. And I will, often. I’ll go back to print and change things. And it can be negative or positive.

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment keeps teasing the upcoming LEGO Batman: The Video Game by spacing out the unveiling of characters. Now the company trots out another villain in the form of Man-Bat. You can see more shot of the character — and, I believe, Mad Hatter — here.

The game hits shelves in September.

Stuart Immonen retells the secret origins of Superman’s villains, Winsor McCay style (from a 1998 ‘Secret Files’ comic).

Yes, Comic-Con International ended two days ago, but there are still stories and announcements filtering out:

• ICv2.com has a convention overview, and an interview with David Glanzer, director of marketing of public relations. This year saw a sellout before the show even began, and “a large increase” in registrations by journalists. Comic-Con will remain in San Diego at least through 2012, when its contract with the convention center expires. However, if the facilities don’t expand by 2010, Glazner says, “we’re going to have to explore options.”

• National Public Radio’s All Things Considered reports on librarians at the convention attending tailored panels and searching for — you guessed it — manga.

• Deb Aoki covers Chip Kidd’s Bat-Manga! panel.

• The Christian Science Monitor, which couldn’t resist a “POW! ZOWIE!” headline, looks at scholars who are drawn to comics, and to the convention.

• The Los Angeles Times laments that comics are being squeezed out of Comic-Con. Here’s The Spirit actress Jaime King: “There does seem to be some random booths here which don’t have anything to do with comics. Slowly but surely the entertainment community is taking over to promote their projects here even though they have absolutely nothing to do with comics. What’s next? A panel for Deal or No Deal?”

• Wildstorm continues snatching up licenses, announcing comics based on the video games Resident Evil and Devil May Cry.

The New Yorker offers a retrospective of choice Blitt covers, no doubt inspired by the recent brouhaha over his latest effort.

Courtesy of Those Fabulous Fifties.

It looks as if 20th Century Fox is moving forward with the rumored young X-Men spinoff.

Superhero Hype stumbled across a listing in Production Weekly for X-Men: First Class, which shares a title with the Marvel Comics series by Jeff Parker and Roger Cruz about the original X-Men: Angel, Beast, Cyclops, Iceman and Marvel Girl.

And X-MenFirstClass.com redirects to Foxmovies.com.

But is this the supposed prequel that was, perhaps erroneously, tied to Gossip Girl producer Josh Schwartz back in May, a feature focusing on a new generation of mutants, or something else entirely?

Yesterday DC announced that after Grant Morrison’s “Batman R.I.P” story ends, Denny O’Neil will write a couple of issues focused on Gotham City and the aftermath of that storyline. After that, in January 2009, DC teased that Neil Gaiman will write a Batman story called “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” On his blog, Gaiman shares a few nuggets of info:

So I don’t have to write lots and lots of emails back to all the journalists:

1) Yes, I am writing a two part Batman story.

2) Yes, Andy Kubert will be drawing it.

3) Yes, it will be two oversized issues.

4) No, I don’t plan to say anything else about it until it’s all written and drawn.

Related: Matt Brady talks to Dan DiDio about the announcement

Activision and Marvel rolled out a new trailer for Spider-Man: Web of Shadows at Comic-Con. The game will hit shelves in October.

Coming next February, the next Scott Pilgrim volume is titled Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. This was announced at the Oni panel on Saturday; watch for my full report from the panel on the main site.

It was announced before the San Diego Comic-Con, and now Mattel’s collector’s website is live. Unfortunately, you can’t buy anything off of it yet; the four con-exclusive toys they had at the show are listed as “coming soon” and the “add to cart” button on the home page image generates an error.

Update: You can now order the Giganta and Lobo exclusives from San Diego.

• Shhhh! The comics industry is sleeping now.

• At Good Comics for Kids, Scott Robins reports that Scholastic has plans for more Bone after Vol. 9 is released next spring. Previously published “peripheral material” will be adapted for a young audience.

• Gia Manry covers the spotlight panels on creators Tite Kubo (Bleach) and Hiro Mashima (Fairy Tail). As an added bonus, she has video of Mashima drawing Natsu from Fairy Tail.

• ComiPress has an exhaustive roundup of manga-related convention coverage.

• Tor.com’s Pablo Defendini reports on the Watching the Watchmen panel, which featured Dave Gibbons, Chip Kidd and Mike Essel discussing the upcoming book that details the making of the groundbreaking comics series.

• Another Comic-Con, another round of folks questioning whether the convention could, or should, leave San Diego: Variety, Broadcast Newsroom, Major Spoilers.

• According to Geoff Boucher of The Los Angeles Times, sales of original art were brisk at the convention. He spoke with art dealer Joe Mannarino, who had just laid out $115,000 for the original pages from Green Lantern #84, by Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson.

• Wired‘s Underwire blog provides a convention overview, focusing on the relationship between comics and Hollywood.

• Creators Jason Aaron, Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang, G. Willow Wilson and Brian Wood blogged from San Diego. Azzarello will never have a career as a food photographer …

• USA Today blogger Whitney Matheson rattles off her “15 favorite things about Comic-Con.”

• Heroes star Milo Ventimiglia is, I don’t know, producing a comic through his DiVide Pictures, to be released by Top Cow.

You can follow our complete Comic-Con coverage here.

A psychoanalytic take on Little Nemo, courtesy of Marcus Parcus (link via The Ephemerist).