Hey, look: The Dark Avengers are back! And just eighteen months after you’d last grown sick of them!

You’ve got to assume that there’s some master plan to the deja vu you get from looking at the new Dark Avengers teaser image, right? I mean, so much about it is so repetitious: The Dark Avengers as a concept – one that I’d argue was played out before the end of Siege, thanks to too many guest appearances beside their own series – and seeing Norman Osborn out of prison and being a big bad again, not two years after the overdone Dark Reign era. The whole “Who Are…?” thing, which we’ve seen recently in teases for Wolverine and The X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and twice for Fear Itself (for The Mighty and The Worthy). The very idea of a “New Dark Avengers” for the New Avengers title. It’s a tease completely made up of over-familiar, recycled parts, and that can’t just be accidental, right…?

(Also, aren’t the already-solicited, already-being-hyped “Revengers” enough of a take on the “They’re Avengers! But evil!” idea?)

Once a week I sift through the millions of Etsy listings to find the best in geek chic for Blog@ readers. Last week it was geeky jewelry by starbrightsilver, this week, it’s the cat’s meow. I’m talking of course about Catwoman. She’s been buzzing the last week thanks to the reveal of Anne Hathaway’s costume in The Dark Knight Rises so I thought I’d take a look around Etsy and see what Selina was up to. Catwoman has inspired a lot of people through the years and Etsy sellers were no different. I decided to focus squarely on art inspired by the character this time around.

The current Catwoman costume gets some love from user TimmyK. Titled “The CatWoman,” you can get this print for $12. He’s got some other great Gotham characters in his store too.

Lots of people have played Catwoman through the years but this lady is a favorite of a lot of fans. The Julie Newmar as Catwoman print is by user LauraGuzzo and sells for just $5. This artist also contributed a fantastic piece for Wonder Woman Day last year which she’s also selling as a print.

You probably know that Adam Hughes took a lot of inspiration from actress Audrey Hepburn while illustrating Catwoman through the years, well he’s not the only one. User Nude Squid (who admits inspiration from Hughes) created this Audrey Hepburn styled Catwoman print selling for $40.

User SilviaHKitty15 titles this one simply, “Catwoman,” but it’s of course a rendition of the animated Selina Kyle. This one is the actual original painting and is going for $75.

And finally, my favorite of the bunch, “Toxic Love.” By user ToxicAppleStudios, the print comes on gator board, ready to hang. $41.

As always, bear in mind, since Etsy is a craft website and not a commercial, mass-market dealer, items are almost always one-of-a-kind or in very limited availability. When you see something you like, buy it. It may not be there the next time you surf round. (Yes, it’s a very dangerous site for your wallet.) Also, since most items are created individually, many sellers are willing to customize something specifically to suit your needs. Just ask!

Demo and Pixu (amongst many others) artist Becky Cloonan explains what it’s actually like to work in comics:

As a freelance artist you are always working. I try to separate my art and life as much as possible, but I’m still surrounded by it. I still work all day, and I almost always take my sketchbook to bed to knock out a few more ideas before sleep. Days of the week don’t hold any meaning; whenever I go out on a Friday I wonder why there are so many people around. “Oh yeah, it’s Friday night. This is what normal people do.” As much as it is liberating, it’s also a bit alienating.I also try to plan my jobs a year ahead. As a freelance artist you never know where your next job is going to come from, and you don’t want to be stuck for a period with no work, so I’m constantly lining up two or three jobs ahead, just so when I finish one I’m sure I’ll have something new to jump into. This too is [a bit] stressful.

There’s more at the link, including the all-important conclusion: “The second I stop loving it I will find something else to do. Comics are hard work. Comics are relentless. Comics will break your heart. Comics are monetarily unsatisfying. Comics don’t offer much in terms of fortune and glory, but comics will give you complete freedom to tell the stories you want to tell, in ways unlike any other medium.” Go read.

As a rumor emerges that Action Comics #2 is already going to feature fill-in art (from Brent Anderson, so not necessarily a bad thing), I have an admission to make: I have no problem with fill-in artists. I know, as a card-carrying comic book critic, I’m supposed to abhor the very thought of one artist not being able to tell a multi-issue arc, but… I’m not. In fact, as the digital era continues to dawn and comics move away from a collection-based mentality back to the idea of the single issue as an artifact in and of itself again – Well, until digital starts working in terms of collected editions itself, of course – the idea of the fill-in artist seems more and more like a good idea, in order to hit deadlines and make reliable release schedules a priority.

It’s no surprise that DC are making such creator substitutions so readily – They’ve always been ready to replace creators (or stories) when it comes to making shipping. But with Marvel slowly going day-and-date-digital with their books, it’ll be interesting to see if they make the same choice, and if they don’t, whether choosing creators over schedule will affect sell-through.

Over at CBR, Tom Brevoort responds to many people’s concern over Miles Morales – including my own – that he’ll not just be a generic Marvel superhero:

Obviously you need to do a certain amount of research to make sure you’re getting things right. That having been said, just as not every blond haired, blue eyed, white character comes from the same place and the same life experiences, so too is that true for every character of every shade or ethnicity or religious background. You want to speak to the universality of the demographic as a whole, but not to the point where you’re doing a caricature… I think Brian has shown over his years in the business that he can write with sensitivity and insight into the human condition regardless of the background of the characters he writes about. He’s covered a broad spectrum of people, types, ethnicities, sexual orientations and what have you in all the work he’s done. Given that, would you not expect that he’d be up to the challenge of developing a character of this particular ethnic set? And again, if Brian didn’t think there was something legitimately worthwhile in telling the story of this character, we wouldn’t be doing this. It’s his story, his character and an exciting thing to do — to try and bring a little more multiculturalism to the Marvel line in a big, big way.

Spider-Man is the quintessential Marvel character, the image most closely associated with Marvel. So taking a character like that and changing him in the Ultimate Universe to reflect the broader world around us I think will be effective, and sends a very clear message. But it is a challenge that anybody writing about a character with a different background than their own has to cope with. They have to find those common touchpoints of humanity that are common to all people, as well as some common touchpoints specific to the background or life experience of the particular character they’re writing. My expectation is that Brian will do this because he’s always done this.

The problem with Miles’ first appearance in Ultimate Fallout #4, for me, was that it was so short and (by its very nature) didn’t really give you enough idea of who Miles actually was. A wisecracking, insecure superhero? Sure, that seems very Spider-Man-esque, but that was also a drawback: What made Miles anything more than Peter Parker 2, outside of his skin color? So it’s good to see Brevoort addressing the issue, and I hope his faith in Bendis’ skill is well-placed.

I’m usually one to avoid spoilers if I can help it but for some reason I click on anything and everything The Dark Knight Rises related lately. This video is a behind-the-scenes look at a fight between Christian Bale’s Batman and Tom Hardy’s Bane, rehearsal and shooting, so if want to go into the film fresh, don’t watch.  (more…)

GK Films has picked up the rights to Image Comics’ The Vault by Sam Sarkar and Garrie Gastony, the first issue of which, just hit stores last week.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “The underwater sci-fi story centers on a group of divers who, off the coast of Nov Scotia, uncover a sarcophagus with unusual remains and inadvertently unleash an ancient evil.” They also mention that Sarkar and Gastonny previously created the supernatural Western graphic novel Calberfor Radical Publishing.

Johnny Depp and his production company, Infinite Nihil’s, president Christi Dembrowski will produce the adaptation along with GK’s Graham King and Tim Headington.

Anyone pick this up last week? It’s apparently only a three issue series so it will be interested to see how it’s adapted.

Brian Wood updates readers on his upcoming work schedule – How did I miss the news that he’s writing a Lord of The Rings book? That seems an unxpected and weirdly appropriate pairing – and, in the process, dropped this little piece of information:

We also had a near miss with setting DMZ up as a television show, at a verrrry respectable network, and its a bit crushing.  I had hoped the whole new “DC Entertainment” mean they’d be better about this sort of thing… and this deal seemed like a gift from heaven… but apparently not.

Dear Whoever Needs To Make This Happen At DCE: Please get over whatever hurdles happened with the DMZ TV show and restart that project. With the right people behind the camera, that could be amazingly good.

Rich Johnston has what he claims to be the script for DC’s radio ads promoting The New 52 launch, and… well, it’s interesting, in that it’s clearly aimed at a non-comic-reading fanbase: “This is the perfect entry point into the DC Universe if you’ve never read a comic book before,” it says, before going on to list “movies, TV and video games” as the places those people might have discovered those characters previously, before going on to leave space for a comic store’s name and information to be inserted in for any potentially tempted newcomers. Unlike Rich, I don’t hate the language, but I do wonder how successful radio ads will be at drawing people into what is, essentially, a visual medium. But what do you think?

Something tells me that this op-ed from British newspaper the Guardian’s website isn’t exactly the kind of mainstream publicity that Marvel was hoping for from the announcement of Miles Morales as the new Ultimate Spider-Man:

Most cynical of all has been the Ultimate series of storylines, set in an alternate universe. It’s here that the half-black, half-Hispanic Spider-Man has been floated, while his white counterpart continues to reign supreme in the regular comics – how’s that for tokenism? Despite the “change-we-can-believe-in” oratory of the Marvel spinmeisters, it’s understood that nothing in the Ultimate universe matters a damn. In these storylines, Marvel’s heroes and heroines are brusquely decapitated, drowned, strangled, raped, eaten and so on. Spider-Man was blown up in Ultimatum #4 last year, then killed again in Ultimate Spider-Man #160 this June.

Even if most of the mainstream coverage hasn’t been this blunt, there’s definitely been an interesting way in which so much of the reporting has essentially gone along the lines of “Of course, this is Ultimate Spider-Man, so the real Spider-Man is still Peter Parker, and still white.” It’s understandable, of course – and, probably, preferable for Marvel than having people who’ve seen the coverage but haven’t picked up a comic in years run to the store, grab Amazing Spider-Man and then feel lied to – but does the fact that Miles is “only” the Ultimate universe version of the character, when all other versions follow the Marvel universe/Peter Parker incarnation of the character, prove the Guardian’s charge of “tokenism” to some extent? Should Marvel try harder to argue that the Ultimate U characters are as “real” and important as the Marvel U versions – or is the freedom that comes from not being the “real” continuity what makes something like the replacement of Peter Parker possible?

As if I needed any more reason to be madly in love with Brandon Graham and his work, this massive Comics Journal interview provides it, filled with some great stuff, including the story of how King City went from Tokyopop to Image:

Tokyopop wasn’t really willing to talk to me at first, because they’d dropped all these books and they had a ton of different artists all pissed at them. 20 different people all calling them every day and threatening their lives or whatever. My editor was really nice during all of it, but I could tell that he couldn’t do anything, and he didn’t want to put me in contact with his bosses who could do anything because they were just getting harassed. Everyone was really upset about their books being put on hold. So I just started putting my stuff on my LiveJournal. I decided I was going to do some crappy lettering on the computer, because Tokyopop had been lettering it in-house, and then just start putting it up on the Internet. I think I posted the first 20 pages, and then I got a phone call from them the next day saying, “We need to set up a meeting,” and we had a conference call. They basically called me up to scold me about putting King City online, I think, but it worked because it got their attention. It’s such a bad lesson in comics: every time that somebody’s told me to just be quiet and not say anything, “We’ll deal with this,” and nothing comes, they say, “Just be quiet and wait another week.” So just being like, “That’s it, I’m putting it online,” and they immediately start dealing with me again. It showed me it isn’t always good to listen to people. What the companies want isn’t always in the artist’s best interest, obviously. While they called up kind of mad, his guy Mike who was the vice president there was really on my side, and he said, “You know, Brandon has some points.” I was really upset with them and they kept saying they were still going to publish it. It was a big contractual thing. I could have taken it to Oni or Image, but in the contract it said that as long as Tokyopop agreed to publish it they get to keep the rights, and that included putting it online.

An amazing amount more at the link, including Graham’s take on why it might be better to come up through porn comics than superhero comics (He may be making sense, too). Highly recommended reading to start your weekend with.

For those enjoying the preview of Animal Man #1 on the main site, you might want to check out DC’s The Source blog, which has been running a series of process posts all week taking those pages from script to completion (Actually, it stared with the series proposal, before moving on through script, pencils, inks and colors before reaching the finished preview). What’s surprising to me are how flat the colors feel at times, especially on that final page… But maybe it’ll look better in the finished product?

BOOM! Studios has been slowly ceding its Disney licenses over to Marvel, with Cars, Toy Story and The Muppet Show all migrating over to the House of Ideas in recent months. Then the “classic” Disney properties like Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories disappeared from BOOM’s schedule, and the writing was pretty much on the wall at that point.

Slipped into BOOM’s October solicitations, released over the weekend, was confirmation the publisher would be shipping its last Disney titles that month, with DuckTales and Darkwing Duck both coming to a close. From the write-up of Darkwing Duck #18:

Final Issue! “Dangerous Currency,” Part 4. The epic Darkwing Duck/DuckTales crossover event concludes right here! This is it fans, the last Disney single issue from KABOOM! has arrived. It’s the end of an era as we say goodbye to Disney at KABOOM!

BOOM! first acquired the license to Disney’s Pixar properties in 2008, with the classic roster of Mickey, Donald, Goofy, et al. following in June 2009. Comics like The Muppet Show and Darkwing Duck brought both attention and acclaim to the publisher, but when Disney bought Marvel at the tail end of summer 2009, it seemed inevitable that the Disney properties weren’t going to stick around at BOOM! forever.

Though whether or not Marvel has plans for the classic Disney characters or the “Disney Afternoon” titles like Darkwing and DuckTales remain to be seen, or if they’ll be producing any new material in the near future — Marvel’s Muppet Show and Cars releases are both reprints of BOOM’s previously published material.

An interesting tidbit of information from Chris Arrant’s latest “Late List” for CBR: Batman, Incorporated #9 and 10 will not be released, due to late shipping. Instead, #8 will be the last issue of the series, with the material intended for the final two issues being combined into a oneshot called Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes to act as a bridge between the original series and 2012′s twelve issue second volume.

Considering the shipping delays that both Incorporated and The Dark Knight ended up suffering in their short runs, it’s safe to say that the most recent Batman relaunch is an example of how not to relaunch your biggest franchise – and, hopefully, a lesson learned by DC as we head into next month’s New 52.

We may have little, shy of a teaser trailer and some production shots, from The Amazing Spider-Man, due in theaters in 2012, but the sequel is already underway, with a release date announced by Sony Pictures today.

May 2, 2014, less than two years after the July 3, 2012 release date of the first film, is the tentative release for the sequel.

Now that we’ve looked 3 years in the future, let’s all take a step back and let the first Marc Webb directed, Andrew Garfield starring film come out first, shall we?

Now that the first image of British actor Henry Cavill as Superman has been released (and dissected by the internet), the star can share his own thoughts on the famous costume and the work it involves.

“They just put it on, I turned around and look in the mirror and you can’t really play it cool – you sort of guffaw and laugh. I thought ‘OK, holy hell, this is real, it’s not a joke anymore. This is it…you’re doing it, you’re right in the middle of it,’” Cavill told TotalFilm.com. He also said wearing the costume is “extremely cool” and, “There’s no other feeling like it.”

Being in the iconic suit requires a certain degree of physical fitness to say the least and the actor, who also stars in the upcoming Immortals, has had to stay quite toned for a while thanks to the back-to-back roles. Speaking to Newsarama a few months ago, Cavill said, “Biggest challenge on [Immortals] was maintaining the physical shape because it was extraordinary difficult with the hours we had and like I said, fourteen hours minimum with a half hour lunch and you can’t eat that much and you’re in every day. There’s no time to sit back and relax and settle and then have your recovery day and have to go back in. It was nonstop brutal.”

Since this was before filming started on Man of Steel, he also looked to the future, “I think on Superman it will be slightly different because I’ve approached it with the experience of Immortals and I’ve said, ‘Look, guys, I’m going to need recovery time and I’m going to need this, I’m going to need that, if possible, please, please.’”

For his role as Superman, Cavill told TotalFilm, “I’m on 5000 calories a day… You’ve got to eat protein first, then a little bit of carbs…you’ve gotta keep your hunger levels going. I’m training two and a half hours a day, pushing my body beyond its normal limits, putting on a lot of muscle mass and just making myself look like Superman.”

When speaking to Newsarama about taking on such a famous character Cavill said, “I think the most difficult thing with Superman is going to be making everyone…doing a true justice to the role while reimagining it.” The actor couldn’t give any plot details at that time or now to TotalFilm but did say that he’s focusing on “being as true as I can be to the original character and who the character is.”

The fact that a British man was going to play an American superhero ruffled a few feathers but Cavill told TotalFilm, “I’m very proud to be British and playing an iconic American superhero…it means I’m doing something right somewhere.” When speaking to Newsarama he said, “Superman is, I think these days he’s such a universal idea. And yes, he was raised in America as a character but I don’t think the Brits see it any different, they see him as the coolest, biggest and best superhero out there.”

Man Of Steel is set to hit theaters in June 14, 2013.

If you’ve paid attention to the Internet or the wackier side of pop culture in the past year, you would know that a story isn’t truly news until Taiwanese company Next Media Animation makes a bizarre recreation of it. And the new Ultimate Spider-Man, Miles Morales (find out much more about him here), is the latest to receive such treatment.

While they’re at it, they also ask the question “why couldn’t Spider-Man be Asian?” Please notice that not only do the Marvel executive have Marvel logos affixed to their suits, they’re apparently interrupting Miles while he’s balancing his checkbook. Video below:

So, here’s a page from next week’s Fear Itself #5 (Spoilers, so it’s under the jump): (more…)

Now, I watch The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson fairly regularly, and have done for some time… So how did it take me until this week to discover “Dear Aquaman?”

Ferguson has apparently been doing these skits for years on his late night CBS show – including this week’s French variation – and while they’re silly, throwaway sketches with occasional easter eggs for fans, they’re also another sign of just how weirdly and deeply ingrained a part of American pop culture Aquaman really is. We can only hope that Geoff Johns’ new series contains at least one scene of Aquaman acting as agony uncle every storyarc.

Courtesy of Jim Shooter’s blog, here are the official model sheets for Howard The Duck, post-Disney legal action, in which he had been redesigned in order to be less likely to resemble Donald Duck. Curiously enough, Shooter reports that, although these sketches come from John Romita Snr., Disney actually provided Marvel with the design they deemed acceptable (“John actually seemed pleased to have gotten Disney to do the work for us,” he adds). If only they could’ve known what was to come between the two companies decades later…

Another sheet after the jump. (more…)