If [you're] unfamiliar with the comics industry, and just enjoy super-hero movies, you will notice my fathers’ name on some screen credits, usually buried at the end of the movie; sometimes, as in the recent “Thor” release, coming third after someone who had no hand in the characters’ creation other than being the editor-in-chief’s brother.  Unfortunately, for the past several years, some in the comics industry who have had the benefit of longevity have used the opportunity to claim to be the sole creator of all of Marvels’ characters. Must be great to be the last man standing.

I’m unsure how I feel about Neal Kirby’s “Father’s Day tribute” to his dad, Jack. I mean, it’s clearly not a tribute in the traditional sense as much as it is a chance for Kirby to complain about his father not getting the credit he deserves, but there’s something about the call-to-arms at the end of the piece that really seems odd: “Maybe it’s now time for those still in the industry and comic book/super-hero fans, the ‘little guys,’ to speak out.  Demand fairness not just for my father, but also for all those who have unjustly had their creative credit stolen from them,” Kirby writes, and my first thought is genuinely “You say that as if people aren’t already doing that.”

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not as if credit – or, more appropriately, perhaps, financial compensation – has been fairly shared on comics, never mind multimedia spin-offs, for most characters, but Jack Kirby’s role in basically creating what we know as the Marvel Universe isn’t something that’s even up for debate these years for anyone other than Marvel lawyers, right? There’s something about Neal Kirby’s piece that feels as if it’s more about the lawsuit over ownership of the characters than it is about making sure that Jack is recognized for credit that’s being “stolen” from him.

I don’t know. I’m a huge Kirby fan, but something about this tribute rubs me the wrong way. Am I being too oversensitive?

Hey, you know those “spot the differences” comic strips that run in the puzzle section of newspapers? (Or did, many years ago?) Here’s one for you, but instead of looking for five or six differences, just concentrate on finding one. You can do it!

Here’s the Justice League International #1 cover as originally revealed by DC on June 2:

And here’s the one that appeared in the September solicitations on Monday:

Did you spot it? Perhaps the missing character is taking a ride in Wonder Woman’s plane in the newer cover. Or maybe she’s a gender-switched version of Lyle Norg. (As pointed out by DC Women Kicking Ass, who beat me to the Sue Storm joke.)

Wondering why there’s no JSA (other than Mr. Terrific’s solo title) in DC’s immediate post-Flashpoint plans? Co-publisher Dan DiDio addressed the situation on Facebook this past Friday:

AS for JSA, we have decided to rest this concept while we devote our attention on the launch of the three new Justice League series. As for other characters and series not part of the initial 52, there are plenty of stories to be told, and we’re just getting started. best, DD

So, there you go. The move isn’t without historical precedent — there was no Justice Society book for years post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago. Keeping the speculation alive, in response to a fan upset about not seeing the usual JSA cast, DiDio wrote: “who said we weren’t going to see the characters?”

It’s great to see well-deserving comics getting adapted to films. The latest? Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s Beasts of Burden from Dark Horse.

The news comes today via The Hollywood Reporter who say Shrek and The Chronicles Of Narnia director, Andrew Adamson, will be the one to bring the comic to the big screen. “Adamson is producing what is intended to be a CG-animated feature adaptation with his Strange Weather Films partner Aron Warner along with Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Entertainment,” writes THR.

Dorkin and Thompson have both won Eisner Awards for their work on the story they created which revolves around a group of dogs and one cat who team up to save their owners and others after a supernatural event happens in the town of Burden Hill.

Besides what seems like a great choice for director, looks like they’ve got a good effects team on board for the film as well. According to THR, “Burden is being made by Reel FX, the company run by former Industrial Light and Magic senior executive Ed Jones and former Walden Media CEO Cary Granat, and that specializes in CG as well as live-action hybrid projects.”

“Dark Horse Entertainment’s Keith Goldberg is executive producing with Strange Weather’s Jeff Fierson co-producing” writes THR, “Reel FX’s head of feature development Jared Mass will oversee the project for the studio.”

Congrats to both Dorkin and Thompson! It’s very exciting news for them to be sure and I look forward to seeing this in theaters. What about you?

As more and more details about the DC relaunch leak out, one of the things that’s emerging is how unevenly the creative teams for the book seem to have been selected. Both Fabian Nicieza and Scott Lobdell have talked about being taken out for lunch and offered books by Jim Lee and Bob Harras, but other creators were seemingly asked to write titles, not necessarily knowing that other creators were being asked the very same thing for the very same books (Apparently, having previously worked for Harras is a good thing in the new DC). But if that already seems a little unfair, Kelly Sue DeConnick sheds a little more light on the pitch process, blogging about DC’s requests for her to pitch:

The first was to pitch on an ongoing. I declined because I was hip deep in work at the time and the turnaround they needed was just impossible for me. (I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was a day or two for the pitch and then a week and half for the first script–which would have been doable if I could have dropped everything and started immediately, but I had Castle pages due, another project you don’t know about yet, and Supergirl still on my plate!)

A day or two for the pitch? A week and a half for the first script? Assuming that DeConnick wasn’t an especially late invite to the whole process – which is, admittedly, a potential jump – that’s an amazingly short amount of time to get things done. Cue sinking feeling about just how well-planned the reborn DCU will end up being…

I’m sick of death.

I’ve never been a big fan of the “shock death” in superhero comics, I have to admit; if nothing else, it’s become an increasingly lazy way of grabbing attention and attempting to give the story “importance” and “weight” without really earning it over the years, as well as one that’s become more and more pointless considering the number of characters who’ll later return from the dead at some point (Final Crisis‘ knowing funeral for J’Onn J’Onzz comes to mind: “We’ll all miss him. And pray for a resurrection”). But over the last year, it’s become particularly overused with the “deaths” of the Human Torch, Ultimate Spider-Man – although I’m not sure that counts, considering he’s clearly not dead yet, three months after having been fatally wounded – and now Captain America (again). So, imagine my lack of thrill when I saw Tom Brevoort discuss Cap’s death in the most recent Talk To The Hat column at CBR:

I’ve talked about this in a couple of other places, but to reiterate what I said there, we don’t go into these things thinking that you have to have a death. What we do go in thinking is that you have to have a change. Something has got to change from the beginning of an event series to the end. The landscape in some way, shape of form needs to be different. That can involve any number of things. It can certainly involve characters perishing. It can involve characters being resurrected. It can involve characters ending up in different places around the universe or any number of other things. But you need a certain amount of legitimate change to give the event and its aftermath the necessary gravitas. Without that, it’s a big, fun adventure, but it doesn’t amount to very much.

Really? Really? (more…)

Every year, Comic-Con International: San Diego has become increasingly important to movie studios looking to promote their splashy new genre features. Except maybe this year.

According to The New York Times, Warner Bros., Disney, DreamWorks and The Weinstein Company are all skipping Comic-Con this year, at least as far as major presentations go. The article states that even Marvel Studios is “on the fence” about their level of involvement, despite The Avengers coming in 2012. (And yes, that would presumably mean no Dark Knight Rises panel, but there wasn’t one for The Dark Knight, and that movie seemed to do OK.)

To borrow a phrase from Norm Macdonald — what the H? The article (while making the customary Ewok cosplay jokes) describes Comic-Con as a “treacherous place” for movie studios. Two main reasons: while good buzz always help, bad buzz from Comic-Con can irrevocably tarnish a product in the early going. Plus, promoting at Comic-Con is expensive, with the article citing the example of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World — a critically acclaimed and beloved by fans film that had a huge presence at San Diego last year, and nonetheless ended up earning $31.5 million domestically off of a $60m production budget.

Of course, there will be solid studio representation this year — Sony and The Amazing Spider-Man, 20th Century Fox and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Universal and Cowboys & Aliens, and in what folks are surely already either lamenting or rejoicing, Summit and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1. So it’s not like Hall H is going to be a ghost town, and given where the event falls in the calendar, it’s still a definite priority for TV networks. But is Comic-Con’s exponential growth and influence starting to taper off a bit? Probably not a question that can accurately be answered for years — certainly it’s a hotter-than-ever prospect in terms of attendance — but will be interesting to see how things play out in the future.

The Tony Awards were last night, and host Neil Patrick Harris — himself a former Spider-Man voice in both the 2003 MTV cartoon and last year’s video game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions — couldn’t resist making Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark jokes, albeit (mostly) confined to a 30-second span. Here’s the clip:

TALES OF MR. RHEE
is brought to you by…
Dirk Manning (Writer)
Josh Ross (Artist)
Austin McKinley (Colors)
Jim Reddington (Letters)
Image Comics/Shadowline (Publisher/Overlord)

Check out the first four pages here!

Well, here’s one reason why we shouldn’t be calling the new DC a reboot… Because it appears to leave all manner of former continuity in continuity. Not only do the Batman and Green Lantern franchises seem to be coming through the September relaunch pretty intact, but now Scott Lobdell seems to have spilled some particularly unexpected beans in an interview over at Bleeding Cool:

Similarly, Superboy comes to Teen Titans and his own series with a lot of his D.C.history in place.  He still showed up shortly after the Death of Superman, he is still the clone of Superman and Lex Luthor.  How we reconcile his past with the opening issues of Teen Titans and Superboy?   That, I’m afraid, has to remain vague for now.

Wait wait wait. Even in the new DCU, there’s been a Death of Superman storyline already? I mean, we knew already from Saturday’s LA Times event that at least two titles in the new line will begin in the past – Action and Justice League – but does that mean that we can fill in a lot of history for long-running characters by mapping what we already know about them onto the missing periods? And if so, does this mean that backstories have already been written for every character to make sure everything is consistent, or are we heading for the same level of confusion that followed 1985′s Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot?

The unsatisfying end of Birds of Prey: At Irrelevant Comics, Yan Basque gripes about Birds of Prey #13, which ended up being the unintended last issue of the current volume of the series, save for a two-issue fill-in before September’s relaunch.  Basque counts up the number of different pencil artists involved with the series, and how often the artists who actually drew the issues matched the artists who were advertised as the ones who would be drawing them. It’s not a very good record. Meanwhile, at House To Astonish, in the course of his weekly “X-Axis” review column, Paul O’Brien also notes that the book seemed to be written without any knowledge that it would actually be the end of writer Gail Simone’s tenure on the book, and, perhaps, the end of this pre-reboot verison of the book and team. It does raise the question of how long ago DC decided to relaunch the line, and how many creators they actually shared that info with. Did they know a year ago? If so, one wonders why they bothered working so hard to give so many characters new status quos in Brightest Day-branded books, if they were going to start over again in one short year.

Don MacPherson on DC’s fall line-up: In addition to looking at the books themselves, MacPherson looks at DC’s public relations of the matter, applauding the way they’ve dominated comics news and managed to keep a tight lid on such a big thing, and noting that they unfortunately let others (like Newsarama) name their new initiative, instead of branding it themselves.

Hundreds of words about Superman: Tim O’Neil talks about the Man of Steel’s greatest strengths in a pair of posts, here and here (And, in the process, points to some excellent Superman comics, some of which are often overlooked). Meanwhile, at The Comics Journal, John Hilgart talks at length about Superman’s face.

Surprises were promised for the final stretch of the Hero Complex Film Festival in Los Angeles on Sunday, and were delivered in the form of Robert Downey Jr. joining the regularly scheduled Jon Favreau Q&A, plus an extended nine-minute Cowboys & Aliens trailer. (more…)

I literally just saw the world premiere of the new Captain America: The First Avenger trailer at the Hero Complex Film Festival in Los Angeles — played right before a screening of the first Iron Man — and here are some quick thoughts. (more…)

We’ve been posting interviews with post-Flashpoint DC Comics creative teams at a furious path on the Newsarama homepage, but it looks like Superman writer and all-around comics legend George Pérez may not be among that number. He’s not doing pre-release interviews on the book, but he is clarifying that along with writing duties, he’ll also be providing thumbnail layouts on the book, with finishes from series artist Jesus Merino — preliminary rumors said he’d be both writing and drawing, but the official DC announcement listed him solely as writer. Pérez clarifies it all on his official Facebook fan page:

Since I’m not going to be doing any interviews regarding the SUPERMAN reboot (not wishing to inadvertently spill any plot beans) I just want to give you all the skinny on what exactly I’m doing on the book. As was recently revealed is that I will be writing the new series SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF TOMORROW. What wasn’t explained is that I’m also doing the thumbnail layouts for the book, something I did for artist Kerry Gammill years ago when I worked on ACTION COMICS. This way, I’d be providing my storytelling style, body language and suggestions for facial expression, but the final look of the book and characters will be handled by Jesus Merino, and from what I’ve seen of his work so far, we’re going to work quite well together. I was asked to draw the covers, so I will get some experience drawing this new Son of Krypton. I hope you like what you see and read when it debuts in September. And that’s all I have to say about that. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.

Sunday update: Though X-Men: First Class might have had the lowest opening weekend for an X-Men film, good word of mouth ensured that it had the second most favorable first to second weekend divide, behind 2003′s similarly acclaimed X2: X-Men United.

X-Men: First Class earned an estimated $25 million this weekend according to Box Office Mojo, representing a 54.6 percent decline — similar to X2‘s 53 percent, and way below X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘s 67 and 69 percent drops, respectively. The $25m take was good enough for the weekend’s second place behind Super 8, and a domestic total nearing $99m.

Original story: Despite suffering the bad PR of “lowest opening weekend for an X-Men film yet” (Conan O’Brien even made a monologue joke about that) X-Men: First Class is holding strong thus far in its second weekend, finishing at No. 2, below only the debuting Super 8.

According to Box Office Mojo, First Class grossed $7.6 million on Friday, behind Super 8‘s $12.2m. That puts First Class at a domestic total of $81.5m, and should be within striking distance of $100m by the end of the weekend. Its current worldwide take is $156 million, close to the reported production budget of $160m. Marvel’s Thor is still hanging in the top 10 at No. 9.

We’ll update tomorrow with the full weekend estimates.

There’s no doubt that DC has dominated the comic book headlines in the past week, with their slow striptease of September relaunch details. Not to be outdone, Marvel has had some pretty major news of their own — first, the end of Uncanny X-Men in October, and now, word that they’re set to reveal something “top secret” this coming Monday, June 13, at 3 p.m. eastern, and not of the circa 1984 Val Kilmer variety.

We don’t know anything more than that, but we’ll pass along details the very second we get them on Monday afternoon. Marvel did give us this image to promote the press conference with:

Of course “Next Big Thing” has been their name of their frequent press calls for about a year now, so you probably shouldn’t look too much into that picture. But hey, logos! Fonts!

Everyone’s talking about the DCnU. If you don’t know about it (and really, where have you been?), here’s the deal: In a few months, DC is relaunching (not “rebooting”) it’s universe with 52 new titles hitting the shelves. Some characters are getting a modernized origin. Others are getting new costumes. We all have questions and very few answers at this time. But we do have some new designs to look at and discuss.

Now, keep in mind, I have not gone to the future and read these new titles coming out. So I don’t know if some of these costumes that are drastically different will be perfect for the new version of the character coming out. I can only judge these based on gut reaction and my familiarity with how the character has been presented in the past. I’m also only selecting a few of the DCnU titles to look over, otherwise we’ll be here all day.

So let’s start the action.

HAWKMAN

Here we have some of the old school flavor. Carter Hall, archaeologist, who became Hawkman with help from anti-gravity Nth metal and a cool wing harness. He also enjoys maces, katar blades, spikey gloves. Anything that would have TSA tackle you to the ground.

Wow, DCnU Carter is angry. Now, initially this seems a bit much to me. But the title is Savage Hawkman now and this look definitely carries that. We’ve been told for years that Carter is a fearsome warrior you have to sometimes hold back from tearing his enemies apart (which makes it odd to me that he was able to be leader of the Justice Society for so long, but that’s another discussion). Now he actually looks as fearsome and bloodthirsty as everyone says he is. Even the handle of his weapon is designed to mess you up. Interesting. (more…)

Surprising fans who expected to see George Perez announced as writer and artist on the relaunched Superman, cover art has leaked out from Perez’ first issue as writer and artist on the Man of Steel, and he’s handling Action Comics:

Oh, never mind. That’s from the first time he handled Superman, twenty-two years ago. On the plus side, now Scott Lobdell has someone to point to when people accuse him of being too old-school for the new, younger, hipper DCU.

(Expect the Superman beans to be spilled tomorrow at the LA Times event with Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, I assume.)

UPDATE: Or, the whole thing could be revealed here… with a really, really, nice Action cover by Rags Morales.

For some reason I can’t picture Frank Miller any way other than how he is today. Perhaps that’s why I find it so entertaining to read a young Frank Miller showing his love for Spider-Man in this letter column from back in the day.

This piece of history was pulled by Jeff Lester from Savage Critic. The note comes from the letter column in Amazing Spider-Man #169 from 1977. That would make Mr. Miller just twenty-years-old at the time of writing it. Granted, the fan-love is directed at the art in the book, which makes sense coming from an artist. Part of me wishes he was exclaiming his devotion to Peter Parker himself though. Now that would have been something to read. Of course, it wouldn’t be too long before Miller would get a chance to draw Spider-Man himself, taking on Spectacular Spider-Man in 1979 for Marvel.

Pretty cool, no? Keep an eye on today’s letter pages, you never know who will turn out to be the next famous comic artist in the business.

I’ll admit it: I haven’t read Chester Brown’s Paying For It, in part because I don’t have enough disposable income at hand right not to, ironically, pay for it. But that hasn’t stopped me from reading the four part roundtable from the Savage Critics about the book, where retailer Brian Hibbs and critics Abhay Khosla, Jeff Lester, Tucker Stone and Chris Eckert discuss the book, Brown’s argument for the legalization of prostitution and how well appendixes work for comic books. Here’s Abhay:

I didn’t spend too much time with the appendices.  As a life-long Democrat, I’m rather predictably more favorable towards hearing about prostitution than Libertarianism. My family crest has “Prostitution, not Libertarianism” on it, with pictures of Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy underneath.  I got a big whiff of “the market” off the appendices and ran the other way.  Banging whores I want to hear about, but the elaborate rhetorical edifices that libertarians construct around their orgasms– no thanks.  That’s really not of significant interest of me.

The whole thing is very, very worth reading if you have any interest in Brown, Paying For It or just good discussion about comics. Go and check it out.