Happy Birthday, Jennifer Walters!

30 years ago, Stan Lee and John Buscema teamed up for the first issue of SAVAGE SHE-HULK — and so Marvel has announced that this week will be She-Hulk Week! If you hit up their Digital Comics Unlimited site, you can check out Dan Slott and Juan Bobillo’s first issue of their She-Hulk run.

While that’s all cool and all, part of me feels that this birthday makes the timing of this page, from the recently-released Incredible Hulk #606, seem a little bit… ill-timed:

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Larsen’s “Dragon War” starts to take its full toll on the world of the Savage Dragon; caught by his son in the act of eating another Dragon’s brain, “our” Dragon, who has regained his original, dictatorial memory set and lost the ones he made on earth, slaps the kid basically into orbit and starts taking on all comers, while all the supporting characters navigate themselves into position for what looks to be a pretty massive smackdown between the morally-ambiguous Savage Dragon and the morally-ambiguous Vicious Circle (now with a handful of Dragon clones). The coolest part of this story, and the most confusing part, is trying to figure out who the hell you’re supposed to be rooting for.

Blog@Newsarama: So is Kurr going to carry the scars of his battle with Darkworld Dragon throughout the story, to help differentiate him from other Dragons?

Erik Larsen: No. There won’t be any other evil twins or lookalikes that dress in an identical manner. Dragon’s healing ability will take care of the wound in short order–in fact it has already. By the end Of #157 he was back to normal. (more…)

Lost on what happened with LOST? Don’t worry — with the latest show on AOL TV, WE HAVE TO GO BAAAAAAACK!

Newsarama’s very own Jenna Busch was one of the first two guest hosts on AOL’s new webshow “Instant Dharma“, where she talked LOST theories and possibilities after last night’s Twitter-frenzying premiere. Don’t want to get spoiled? Don’t worry, my lips are sealed — but if you want to see more, click the link above.

Need a little bit of superhero swagger to your portable computing device? Etsy artist skinat has something kind of cool, even if I’m not 100% as to the legality of the whole she-bang:

An Iron Man decal for your laptop. I don’t know about you, but I think this is clever as hell. Skintat also has others, such as a Snow White one.

[Hat tip to Andy Diggle]

Find out more about Global Freezing here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com.

Well, the poster design is a winner: Here’s an image from the marketing for the new Losers movie, based on the Vertigo series by Andy Diggle and Jock:

Look familiar? It should. Here’s Jock’s cover to The Losers #12:

I prefer the crotch-in-your-face covers from #1 and #32, but that’s still pretty cool. The trailer looks awfully promising, too.

“In recent weeks, it seemed as though every other Marvel periodical I picked up featured an appearance by the original Captain America”: Don MacPherson managed to save up all his various Captain America comics set after the release of Captain America: Reborn #6, and thus was able to read and review ‘em all in order. Even in the proper order though, he was less than impressed.

Should Fergie play the lead in a Wonder Woman movie (if they ever get around to making one?): I don’t know, but USA Today was quite impressed with how Wonder Womanly she looked in her Grammys outfit with her hands on her hips. Meanwhile, Heidi “The Beat” MacDonald examined the evening’s fashion choices, and found a lot of parallels to superheroes and sci-fi. Is Black Lantern the new black?

The worst idea for a comic book movie I’ve heard in hours: The headline to this Hero Complex story says it all—”‘Sgt. Rock’ reloads as a movie project—but not as a WWII story.” Geoff Boucher interviews producer Joel Silver, who said the project is going to be set in the near future, as the idea was to be a war movie about where it’s going, rather than where it’s been. Well, I’m not a move producer, so I’ll just have to assume Silver knows what he’s talking about. A Rock movie set outside WWII sounds a little like a  an Enemy Ace movie about an American fighter pilot during the first Gulf War to me though.

Good luck with the cover credits this time!: “Second ‘Bat-Manga’ Volume In the Works”

I want to write an ongoing licensed 90210 comic book series, but that doesn’t mean I should: “Matthew Vaughn Wants To Make Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.”

Actually, the lamp that Radical Publishing’s Aladdin doesn’t have a singing, dancing, Robin Williams-sounding-like blue genie in it. Instead, it’s got a kinda scary-looking red djinn, which goes the entire first issue of Radical’s Aladdin: Legacy of the Lost without impersonating Ed Sullivan or Joan Rivers even once. The story is somewhat parallel to the more-familiar Disney version, given that they’re both built on the same skeleton of a story, but Radical’s is obviously a bit more serious and grim, replacing funny animals with cool-looking monsters.

Ian Edington writes, Patrick Reilly draws (with Stjepan Sejic joining him next issue), and it’s $5 for 64 musical number-free pages. What else is due out this week, and will any of those books have musical numbers in them? Join me after the jump for the answer to the first question…as to the second, I won’t know until I read the rest of ‘em, but I’m guessing none of ‘em do.

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DC fans who have wondered for years if we’d ever see Young Justice again can take a little solace from this report on Rich Johnston’s Bleeding Cool site.

In a nutshell, actress Stephanie Lemelin blogged that she’s voicing Arrowette in an upcoming “Saturday morning cartoon” called Young Justice League. Along with an image of the character (seen here) that she claimed was concept art for the series, Lemelin said that “Due to the extreme popularity of this series, however, that’s about all I can say,” which apparently was more than she should have because the link provided in Johnston’s story leads nowhere, and there’s no mention of the entry or the series anywhere else on Lemelin’s blog. Bleeding Cool, of course, deals pretty regularly in gossip and off-the-record stuff, so they had the foresight to archive the material, probably knowing full well that it wouldn’t be allowed to stay online very long. A second, unattributed source told Johnston that the team will be made up of Arrowette, Martian Girl, Aqualad, Nightwing, Impulse, and Superboy/Kon-El.

Lemelin has some interesting projects coming up, according to IMDB, but what we’ve seen so far makes her a perfectly reasonable choice for an animated spin-off of a comic; she has experience in the direct-to-video Kung-Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five, based on the feature film starring Jack Black, and starred in several episodes of the Cavemen TV series based on the series of popular Geico commercials.

(Click the image above for a larger version of the strip.)

WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 27: “Time to Go”

Like I said before, Duke is reduced to a quivering bowl of Jell-o from the tough guy posturing he assumed when we first saw him.  In my original pencil drawing of the final panel, he looked a lot like Edward Blake before he was sent down to the pavement below and turned into “human bean” juice.  If you don’t get that reference, you probably are on the wrong website. If you do, you probably know what’s coming next…

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

In last week’s Amazing Spider-Man #619, Spider-editor Stephen Wacker devoted a full third of the “Amazing Spider-Mail” letter column to addressing Marvel’s new relationship with Disney, and what he hopes will bloom from that relationship.

If you haven’t read the issue yet (And you should have! Marcos Martin’s art is about as gorgeous as comic book art can get!), let me quote Wacker for you.

“Now I could go on an don about all the great Disney animated films I enjoyed in my youth and even now with my own kids,” he writes.  “But I think I speak for everyone at Marvel when I say I’m most proud of being associated with the company that brought us Condorman.”

Unfamiliar with Condorman? You and most everyone else. It’s a 1981 superhero/spy spoof in which cartoonist and comic book writer Woody Wilkins (played by Michael Crawford), creates his own Condorman costume, complete with a flapping hang glider like set of wings, in order to ensure the veracity of his comics creation.

“If Condorman can’t do something in real life, then I won’t have him do it one of my comic books!” he tells his friend early in the film, explaining his form of method comic book making. “Kids all over the world read my stuff, they trust me. They know if I fake it.”

He gets his chance to play hero for real when his buddy, a file clerk with the CIA, enlists his aid in what’s supposed to be a simple mission. I imagine hilarity ensues, but I had to stop watching it before any actual hilarity began ensuing, on account of the fact that watching Condorman seemed to be physcially hurting me.

It did poorly at the box office in 1981, accrued plenty of bad reviews the year of its initial release (and it’s got a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment) and it isn’t particularly fondly remembered by anyone—except for Steve Wacker.*

Wacker again:

Dear new corporate overlords…in all humility I beg you to please—as your first order of business—let us here at Spidey Sentral take the first comic crack at this wonderfully winged character, restoring this feathered, falcon-esque funseeker to the heights he so rightly earned in the barely seen, hardly remembered 1981 feature film.

(Actually, I think a Wacker-edited Condorman comic would be the second comic crack that this wonderfully winged character).

Wacker ends his plea with a call to action, asking that “letters of support” be sent to “LET WACKER BRING BACK CONDORMAN c/o Spider-Man Office” at Marvel’s address, 417 5th Avenue, New York, New York, 10016.

Personally, I was more looking forward to a Scarecrow of Romney Marsh comic, but I can get behind a Wacker-edited Condorman revival. Especially if he gets Martin to draw it. And makes whoever ends up scripting it adhere to Condorman’s own creative process of doing everything the character does in real life before putting it in a comic to make sure it’s realistic.

*Well, Steve Wacker and maybe Mike Sterling, whose posted about Condorman on more than one occasion.

By TGIO, of course, I mean “Thank God It’s Over.” And in that department, DC’s blog The Source has unveiled the covers to the final issues of Justice League: Cry For Justice and Superman: World of New Krypton. The World of New Krypton preview (seen here at the main page) also includes five story pages of the upcoming final issue.

I have to say that while the Cry For Justice cover is really nice-looking, and a small part of me wonders whether it happens before or after Blackest Night, given the appearance of the Hawks on the cover, there’s simply nothing that could make me (in the words of one fan in the comments thread) subject myself to the series finale, particularly now that the only ace in the hole it had left–what happens at the end?–has been spilled by DC.

World of New Krypton, which hasn’t been nearly as bad as Cry for Justice but which came with the handicap of being an idea I didn’t like from the get-go (whereas the basic concept of Robinson’s Justice League story was good all the way up until about three pages into the first issue), is a title that continues to baffle me. I remember back when I was a kid, and the Superman titles came out basically on a weekly basis. Back then, if you needed a bridge between a couple of mega-crossover-type stories, you just took an issue or two of Superman: The Man of Steel and Superman, and you set the stage. Here, it feels like the Superman titles (both this one and the monthlies) have been basically a year-long exercise to segue between Geoff Johns’ Brainiac story and the upcoming War of the Supermen. That said, declining sales on all of the Superman titles combined with no discernible enthusiasm from most fans I’ve talked to have me wondering whether that event stands a chance of success. After all, the last time one of DC’s beloved heroes from a race of super-beings had to play referee between their own people and earth, it’s not like the story went over phenomenally well.

Kate Beaton extrapolates some books by their covers: Using some Edward Gorey drawn book covers as a starting point, Beaton creates five three-panel comic strips summarizing what the books look like they’re about. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats is particularly awesome.

“The list of films that pundits claim to be something other than what they appear is extensive”: I’m not sure if this article from the Sydney Morning Herald deserves much in the way of attention, even for the purposes of disagreeing with its position on whether or not critics should seek political meaning in popular films (The writer claims a scene from Reservoir Dogs is in Pulp Fiction, and doesn’t even seem to consider the possibility that it was a joke). Recent-ish  comic book blockbusters 300 and Iron Man are included in the list of movies he thinks are better off taken at face value though, so take a look if you’re interested.

Save the date: The film Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World has an official release date of August 13. If you still haven’t read the series, that gives you about six months and two more weeks to do so.

“Yeah, I feel like I really got lucky with Jellaby, because I’m not 100% sure I really knew what I was doing or what I set out to do”: Here’s a nice, healthy-sized interview with Kean Soo conducted by one of his hometown media outlets. There’s a lot of focus on Soo originally got into art,  drawing and comics before delving into his signature work, Jellaby, which interviewer Dave Howard sums up rather succinctly as ” basically about a young girl and her non-imaginary dinosaur friend who she conceals from others.”

“Robin grew up, moved away, and became super-attractive”: An anonymous lady lists her top-five comic book crushes, including Nightwing, Green Arrow, “Spiderman” with no hyphen and two X-Men. I found Green Arrow the most shocking inclusion. Not if she’s talking Smallville Green Arrow of course, as he’s super-dreamy, but comic book Green Arrow is almost always presented as a middle-aged jerk with a funny beard, isn’t he? (Which makes him, like Hal Jordan and Hawkman, a character I like reading about despite disliking him intensely).

One day soon, everything will be have a graphic novel version: Not necessarily a good one, mind you. For example, this graphic novel adaptation of the Lutheran small cathecism looks even dryer and less engaging than the prose version. Did you know reading a newspaper is considered using a Satanic art, in violation of the second commandment…? That’s what I gather from the sample, anyway.

Attention publishers!: Looking for a good idea for a neat anthology project? The Comics Reporter‘s most recent “Five For Fridays” asked readers to suggest five “Musical Acts Whose Songs You’d Like To See Made Into A Comics Anthology, as Tori Amos’ Work Was The Basis of 2008′s Comic Book Tattoo.” That netted about a billion suggestions, almost all of which would lead to some kick-ass comics collection.

More Swedish rap for your listening pleasure: Last Thursday I mentioned Simon Gärdenfors, one of the Swedish cartoonists whose work Top Shelf is helping introduce to the U.S. audiences as part of their “Swedish Invasion” initiative. His comic is called 120 Days of Simon, but in addition to comics-making, he’s also a rapper. If you’d like to hear what he sounds like while you’re waiting to see what his comics are like, Top Shelf has since sent along some links. Here are two songs from his Las Palmas project, in which he raps and Calle Thörn DJs (song one and song two), and here’s the song “Panik” from his Far & Son project, a collaboration between Simon G and Frej Larsson from the Swedish techno group Slagsmålsklubben. Impress your friends with your newfound knowledge of Swedish music!

Find out more about Global Freezing here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com.