…and, well, here it is:

Yep! Last week, Brian Michael Bendis was announced as the writer for the Marvel Universe massively multiplayer online role-playing game. No release date has been announced yet, but it’ll be free-to-play, and you’ll be able to play as the actual Marvel characters, rather that user-generated creations. Many more details are here.

What’s due in comics shops this week? A whole bunch of stuff, on two days, not just one (Remember this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, so plan on visiting your local comic shop a second time on Saturday). In the mean time, here are some of this Wednesday’s releases that looked good, bad or interesting to me this week…

Alexandro Jodorowsky’s Screaming Planet: The writer’s name is the one above the title of this $25, 125-page hardcover collection of Humanoids material, but plenty of American fans are likely going to be attracted to the all-star list of international artists involved, including J.H. Williams III, Jerome Opena, Adi Granov, Ladronn and plenty of others.

Avengers Academy Giant-Size #1: This Paul Tobin-written, Ed McGuinness and David Baldeon-drawn comic featuring the Avengers Academy characters and The Young Allies team-ing up against Arcade has already been solicited in a few different formats, but it finally sees rlease this week as a huge 80-page, $8 single issue. As with DC’s DC Comics Presents format, I think this is a pretty good way to sell certain comics in the era of $4/22-page book—it’s pricey, but given its page count and relative to a lot of what’ son the shelf, it’s a great value. (Also, I have a weakness for Arcade). It’s not the only Avengers Academy book out this week; Avengers Academy #13 features the heroes going to their prom in a story by Christos Gage, Bily Tan and Sean Chen. I haven’t read any of the series yet, but everyone who has seems to like it.

Bat Boy: The Complte Weekly World News Comic Strip by Peter Bagge: Just what the title says. This 100-page, $18 harcover collects Bagge’s newspaper-style gag strip featuring one of the late, great supermarket tabloid’s most famous cover boys.

Cyclops Vol. 1: This $20, 115-page hardcover collects the first two instalmments of the futuristic sci-fi action story from the The Killer team of Luc Jacamon and Matz. I’m not a fan of the genre and didn’t really transcend that genre, so it wasn’t really my cup of tea, although you may like different tea than me. The art and production were certainly sensational, and our own David Pepose gave it rather high marks on the main page’s Best Shots review feature.
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From iFanboy’s write-up of the Darwyn Cooke panel at Boston Comic Con:

There’s another secret project that Cooke has coming up that will be the “biggest thing I’ve ever done at DC.” This is from a man who did DC: The New Frontier.

From Cooke’s Boston Comic Con interview at Comic Book Resources:

People really are desperate to categorize any sort of entertainment medium. For example, at DC I can’t get any work other than retro Silver Age takeoff work, because “New Frontier” was successful, so that’s what I do.

and

I want people to be able to open my books at any time and see something, not necessarily dated, but classic. I don’t want it to look like an Image book from 1990, I want it to come from this place that’s timeless.

I strove for that in my DC work. I never worked on continuity things, never worked on one of the events. I want it to be readable in ten years. I’m as lost as the next guy [when it comes to continuity]. I don’t know who these characters are. I did a Justice Society cover last month, and they sent me a list of characters and I didn’t know who they were. I am sort of out of touch with month to month stuff. I want my books to have a shelf life. I don’t want to be part of the here today, gone tomorrow.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your speculation.

(And if you’re a Cooke fan who isn’t particularly bothered about DC – His creator-owned digital-only romance comic sounds particularly awesome, doesn’t it? “Imagine two young people that love each other, but it’s so new they haven’t even told each other yet, and they find out that the world’s going to end in less than an hour,” as he described it to CBR. I’m eagerly anticipating that one, and hope that it makes its Christmas-teased debut.)

Blink and you’ll miss it: This incredibly short (7 seconds) tease of the upcoming Cartoon Network Green Lantern: The Animated Series has leaked online, and it’s… well, it’s so fast, it’s hard to have any opinions about it, to be honest. But is that the Go! Team as the soundtrack? If they provided the theme music, finally Teen Titans would have some competition for Greatest Animated Series Theme Ever.

(Via ICv2)

Well, the cat is well and truly out the bag now – apparently, Fear Itself‘s Worthy is just a bunch of bankers:

(Yes, I actually meant bankers. To those thinking I was using rhyming slang, shame on you.)

Never ones to miss a promotional opportunity, Marvel attempted to hype this week’s US release of Thor with a particularly unconvincing God of Thunder stand-in ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, alongside Marvel executives and a clearly embarrassed Axel Alonso. Am I the only person thinking this is a weird backfire in terms of PR? I look at this Thor and wonder why they couldn’t get Chris Hemsworth:

That said, if Fear Itself really did turn out to be a story about a bunch of Disney execs and stock traders using godlike power irresponsibly, I would probably be more excited about the “real world” implications of the series.

In a very cool graphic showcase, one YouTube user has taken a slew of Batman’s symbol designs through the years and morphed them from one to the next. Beware: U2′s “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” from Batman Forever plays in the background.

User Antupainamku includes the details of each symbol which for some are film or television credits while others are specific comic book cover or interior designs. The first comes via Detective Comics 1942, “Batman with Robin, The Boy Wonder,” the last comes from “Superman & Batman vs Alien & Predator” from DC and Dark Horse in 2007. It’s far from complete of course but definitely cool to see a good chunk of them put together.

The Bwa-Ha-Ha band is back together once again: The classic Justice League International team of co-writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, along with artist Kevin Maguire, are reuniting for August one-shot DC Retroactive: Justice League of America — The ’90s #1. (Whew, long title.) Now, given that the team’s original run stretched from 1987 to 1992, and they released the Formerly Known as the Justice League and I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League miniseries in 2003 and 2005, I’d say that the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire team is arguably more known for the ’80s and ’00s than the ’90s, but this is still worth getting excited about. (When you think ’90s Justice League, you think of the Grant Morrison and Howard Porter JLA run, right?)

Solicitation info — and the artist announcements for the rest of the Retroactive ’90s books, straight from The Source — after the jump.

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Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
Written & Illustrated by Shigeru Mizuki
Translated by Jocelyne Allen
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

This book is excellent. It is, according to the interview with its author Shigeru Mizuki printed within, the first of his books to be published in English – I can only hope we’re soon flooded by Mizuki translations. I’d like to drown in them.

A veteran of World War II, Mizuki based Onward Towards Our Nobles Deaths on his experiences in the Pacific theatre. Now, there are two types of war stories: tales of noble men (and women) accomplishing amazing things in horrifying circumstances, and sagas showing the ugly futility of it all. I enjoy the former, but my peacenik sensibilities are far more in line with the latter. And Mizuki appeals to my side of the equation very strongly.

With upwards of thirty named characters, Onward doesn’t spend much time getting to know the cast outside of their military roles, but Mizuki spends plenty of time sympathizing with each man within the extreme expectations placed upon them by the military. The ongoing theme of the book deals with the men being ordered into a pointless suicide charge, contrasted against the high-level brass who fret they’ll be made fools when they report the squad killed only to find out that not everyone participated in the charge.

Mizuki threads a little comedy, absurdism, theatrical speeches about the honor of death, through Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, preventing it from becoming a moribund book. It’s still quite dark, and tragic, but mostly, it’s a reminder that for every hero found in war, there are thousands of senseless losses.

So, let me get this straight: Ultimates is followed by Ultimate Comics: New Ultimates and Ultimate Comics: Ultimate Avengers and then those series are, in turn, followed by Ultimate Comics: Ultimates? I’m pretty sure that self-parody has not only been approached but well and truly engaged by this point in things.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that getting Jonathan Hickman (and, I presume, Nick Spencer, considering he’s joining Hickman and Brian Michael Bendis on Ultimate Fallout in July) on an Ultimate book is at least slightly more forward thinking than having your decade-old line being masterminded by the guys who created it and outlasted the newer guys, but at the same time, I have to ask: Hasn’t the Ultimate Universe outlived its usefulness by this point? When your “anything can happen!” line is being written by the same guys writing the big guns as the main line (well, and Nick Spencer), doesn’t that suggest that something has gone wrong somewhere?

Also along that line of thinking: Didn’t we just get a “massive rebranding and rebuilding of the Ultimate Universe” (as Hickman refers to the post-Fallout line)? Ultimatum finished less than two years ago, and we’re already at the point where he need the same thing all over again? That really doesn’t sound like the healthiest of lines. Bendis just established Reed Richards as the new Doctor Doom! Can’t we deal with some of the current status quo, instead of establishing another brand new one? At this rate, we’ll be relaunching again in summer 2014, just in time for the new Spider-Man to be killed and replaced by the original all over again.

It was only last week that Tom Hiddleston’s Loki was confirmed for the big screen Avengers, and now a new interview for Thor seems to give away just how big his role will be in the movie. Spoilers, perhaps? (more…)

Recently, while reviewing comics, especially the freebies some companies are gracious enough to send to the Best Shots crew, I have found the question of value looming larger and larger in my considerations. Not value in the finicky collector sense, but value in a more abstract sense, , i.e. what does any issue give to the reader for their three or four dollars and, regardless of quality of the work, is it enough?

Comics, and by comics I mean the monthly floppies, not trades or graphic novels, undoubtedly offer the lowest price-to-entertainment value in pop culture. This is well trod ground. Readers lay out $3-$4 for something that may take them 20 minutes or less to read. Repeat reading value probably only exists in the cream of the crop, and, in these days of de-compressed plotting, a story with any sort of closure will cost you significantly more over the months or even years of its authorship. Taking all of this into consideration, how much narrative, great art, or long-term significance needs to be crammed into those 2 dozen or so pages to make it worth the cash?

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How will this affect Frank Miller’s Holy Terror graphic novel?: I don’t know. Or care that much. But I feel weird linking to any comics-related “news” this morning and not at least mentioning the thing most folks are going to be talking about/thinking about. It’s a slow news day today, other than, you know, that news.

So long, Sluggo Saturdays: At his Progressive Ruin blog, Mike Sterling talks at length about his two year-long Sluggo Saturdays feature, pointing out some of his favorites and the awesome panel that first drew his interest to Sluggo in the first place.

“One of the best by one of the best”: The Moment of Moore tumble-thingee spotlights a 1998 drawing of Alan Moore by Gilbert Hernandez. I love the fact that as great a comic writer as Moore is, he’s also a great comics character. (Via Flog)

Everybody interview Chester Brown: Here are two new mainstream media pieces on the Paying For It cartoonist, from The National Post and The Star.

People’s attentions are already turned towards this coming Friday’s debut of Thor, but another comic book movie came out this past weekend: Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, starring comic book movie veteran Brandon Routh (Superman Returns, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World). It’s based on the long-running Italian comic book Dylan Dog, about a paranormal investigator. According to Box Office Mojo, it only made it to 875 theaters (by contrast, the weekend’s No. 1, Fast Five, debuted at 3,644) and netted $885,500 over the weekend, for No. 17 and a per-screen average of $1,011 — a lower average than No. 18, The Lincoln Lawyer, in its seventh week of release.

Critics haven’t been too kind to Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, either, with the film sitting at a 30 — “generally unfavorable” — average on Metacritic. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a 7% fresh rating, with one favorable review (from Horror.com, who urged, “don’t take it too serious”) against 13 unfavorable takes.