Calling all comics scholars:

Fantagraphics Books, publisher of The Comics Journal, has announced a partnership with Alexander Street Press to make the complete archive of the The Comics Journal available as part of its Underground and Independent Comics online collection. This is the first-ever scholarly online collection for researchers and students of literary and underground comic books and graphic novels, and the inclusion of more than 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory and criticism from the 35 year history of The Comics Journal marks a significant contribution to the academic study of the comics form.

“Most back issues of The Comics Journal are sold out and unavailable,” says Comics Journal founder and Fantagraphics President Gary Groth. “This will allow academics, critics, and historians access to the magazine that’s covered the widest range of cartooning for the longest period of time. We believe Alexander Street Press’ project serves an important cultural function and we’re very pleased to be part of it.”

Considering the breadth of interviews and criticism that’s appeared in the Journal in its 300+ issue history, this is kind of stunning – and the kind of thing that makes me immediately want to rush out and find how I can get access to all of this.

Not a comic book, but worth noting nonetheless: Ownership of the long-running newspaper strip Doonesbury changed this weekend. That doesn’t mean that creator Garry Trudeau is no longer working on it; it means that Mike Doonesbury has “retired” as the central character in the strip, with daughter Alex taking over.

The changeover was announced in Sunday’s strip, and the daily strips since then have centered around the changes Alex plans to bring to the strip. It’s a weirdly fascinating sequence, and well worth paying attention to if you’re a fan of the newspaper strip format.

I haven’t followed Doonesbury daily for years – but I do check out the collections on a fairly regular basis – so I found about the changeover via Think Progress’ great culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg, who has a short essay up about the switch:

It’s true that this has been an ongoing transition, and that Doonesbury has, unlike other strips that keep its characters preserved in amber, always allowed its characters to age and die, and achieved some of its finest artistic, emotional, and political moments in those departures. But there’s still something moving about seeing Mike formally announce that it’s Alex’s time, that she’s ready—and then to take it back as she, breaking the fourth wall, demands a cuter nose and that the aging hippies give pride of place to the kids they raised, who grew up to be programmers, and novelists, and world-class slackers.

Will Trudeau be able to make that change and stay relevant as he writes about a generation younger than his? My curiosity about that is just the kind of thing that’ll have me paying a lot of attention to the next few weeks (and months!) of strips, to see just how much of a generational strip he can successfully make it.

And this is what happen when you publish a hardcore porn and try to ship it to other countries with all your other comics, it appears:

I have been told by a number of UK stores that the new Black Kiss comic by Howard Chaykin, Black Kiss 2, due to be published tomorrow by Image Comics, has not arrived – although other Image comic books have.

Asking around, I am told by Diamond Comic Distributor representatives that the comic book in question has been held by UK Customs, who are concerned by its rather intense sexual content.

Judging by comments from those who’ve actually seen Black Kiss 2 – I haven’t – the book doesn’t shy away from scenes that could be described as “graphic,” and not in the traditional “graphic novel” sense. I am curious and worried about what the feedback will be from retailers in more conservative parts of the US when this hits shelves tomorrow.

We’re only four issues in, and it looks like Batman Incorporated is back to its permanently-delayed tricks: A new shipping update from Diamond puts #4 of the series delayed by two months, going from an August 22 release date to an October 24 one. One month is already accounted for – #3 was pushed from its original date last week to a late August release because of a scene that would, it was said, have appeared tasteless in the light of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, but what’s with the second month of delay?

The first series of Incorporated was repeatedly hit with delays, with the final two solicited issues being canceled because they were so late they overlapped with the New 52 launch, so it’s possible that this is just another case of the team of Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham taking longer than expected to complete an issue. Equally likely – if not moreso…? – is that DC really didn’t want a regularly-numbered issue of a New 52 title to be issued in September, the line’s “Zero Month,” necessitating the two month bump, but meaning that the books are now being released out of order. That said, #0 was always supposed to be a standalone, out of sequence, release, so it’s not as bad as Wolverine #309 being released after #310…

Nonetheless, this is the first majorly “late” book as part of the New 52 to date, isn’t it? Before this, we’d only really had Justice League slipping a couple of weeks…

Maybe it’s because IndieGoGo doesn’t have the far-reaching buzz of Kickstarter just yet, but I’m still stunned that Steve Rude hasn’t managed to raise the $5000 he needs to create a limited edition run of 1,000 full-color sketchbooks yet (As of writing, he’s a little over $1,000). I mean, come on, people. This is Steve Rude we’re talking about here.

In case you’re asking “Who’s Steve Rude…?” then, well… He’s the guy who did this:

And this:

And co-created this guy:

Go here for a free taste of his sequential chops, and then you’ll see why it might be a good idea to contribute…

Who owns the Silver Surfer? Daniel Best of the 20th Century Danny Boy blog points out a complication to your first answer:

In 1978 Marvel published The Silver Surfer, a graphic novel which contained a copyright legend naming not Marvel, but the book’s authors – Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

That factoid comes out related to the opening brief for Gary Friedrich, filed in response to Marvel’s earlier win in the lawsuit over Ghost Rider ownership, which has now been made public and shared by Best. In that brief, there’s also a telling piece about Marvel’s 1978 creator contracts, as Best points out:

As expected the appeal is relying on the ambiguity of the Marvel contracts, in particular the retro-active contracts that Marvel had their freelancers sign in 1978.  If you believe Friedrich, those contracts were signed under some duress, with Friedrich stating in his deposition that, “I was given an agreement at that time by Sol Brodsky and told that if I wanted to continue to work for Marvel that I would have to sign it.”  That claim of duress isn’t isolated to Gary Friedrich, other creators have said the same thing, some, such as Don McGregor, walked from Marvel instead of signing it back in the day, however for Friedrich it was a double blow – he signed the contract and stopped getting work at Marvel.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the Lee/Kirby “ownership” of the Silver Surfer graphic novel or the bullying into contracts will become significant as Friedrich’s appeal play out legally. Certainly, they have the potential to become black eyes for Marvel in terms of public sentiment…

Start your speculation engines again. ICv2 talks to Valiant Entertainment publisher Fred Pierce, and he talks about the company’s growth over the next year:

We have so much to do and we’re trying to have a slow growth.  We launched one comic a month for four months.  We’re going to take a break from it.  Sometime between now and April, which will be a year that we’ve been publishing, we hope to launch two more properties.

So six in the first year and then four in each year after that.  Again, if we’re hugely successful maybe we’ll do more but the plan is really four.  Let’s give everybody a chance to absorb the universe because Valiant is a universe.  You can read any comic individually but you’ll get more out of the universe like you would with the DC or Marvel universe if you read more of the properties, and as things happen in one book you might see some passing reference to it in another book down the road.  That’s really what we’re doing.

We already know that Shadowman is the fifth book, but what will be the sixth…? Earlier in the interview, Pierce lists “Shadowman, Rai, Eternal Warrior, Dr. Mirage, [and] Quantum and Woody” as titles that Valiant hasn’t yet dealt with when answering the question about whether or not they’ll try to get the Gold Key characters back from Dark Horse (Short answer: Not anytime soon), so should we take that as a list of the next titles in the offing, or…?

This is a nice response from The Dark Knight Rises composer Hans Zimmer to the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado: “Aurora,” an eight-and-a-half minute new piece of music – or “tone poem,” as he calls it – written and recorded as “a heartfelt tribute to the victims and their families.” You can buy it on iTunes for $1.29 or on Moontoast for a donation for anywhere from 10 cents to $25, with all proceeds going towards Aurora Victim Relief organizations. For those who were excited about the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack, this should be considered a must-buy.

(Via.)

If you’ve been hoping for Civil War the movie, then your wait is over… kind of; this has just appeared in my inbox:

Marvel Comics’ new prose novel, CIVIL WAR, will be adapted to GraphicAudio®…A Movie in Your Mind® audio productions.  The Cutting Corporation and Marvel Entertainment have entered into a licensing agreement where four of Marvel’s prose novels will be released in the GraphicAudio®…A Movie in Your Mind® unique audiobook format.  GraphicAudio® audio productions are six hours on average of action packed audio entertainment with sound effects, cinematic music, narration and a full cast.

The radio play version of the book version of the comic will be released in March next year. Has anyone actually read Stuart Moore’s adapted novel, and is it something that seems like it would make more sense to adapt into an audio play than the original comic…?

More on what happened with Marvel’s Thanos: Son of Titan series, courtesy of Tom Brevoort’s Formspring. According to him, at least, the “Marvel pulled the series because of potential legal action from creator Jim Starlin” conspiracy theory – which I heard at my local store being related as fact, leading me to think I’d missed something somewhere – isn’t the case:

Jim had absolutely nothing to do with why we’ve put that Thanos project on the back burner for the moment.

Back to the idea that there was something that really didn’t work for someone at Marvel about the direction the book was taking, then, although it’s interesting that Son of Titan is described as “on the back burner for the moment” as opposed to canceled or dead; perhaps Steve Wacker’s “jumped the gun” comment was more about the timing of the book as it relates to other Thanos comics planned – maybe something contemporary spinning out from the character’s Avengers Assemble appearances? After all, Brevoort later confirmed that there are other plans for material to prepare fans of 2014′s Guardians of The Galaxy movie, much to no-one’s surprise…

I missed this Ivan Brandon piece from The Awl about superhero movies and comics when it first went live, but caught it now thanks to a Tweet from Tom Spurgeon:

Today, the comics industry’s seen as a sister to the movie industry, but she’s the sister who carries the mop. Or to use another metaphor, comics are seen as a farm. Scraps of raw idea to be grown and processed elsewhere for “bigger and better” things. Look at last year’s top ten bestselling American movies, and you’ll see that nine of them were sequels. Seven were adaptations from another medium. Out of the top 10 biggest films in Hollywood in 2011, not a single one of the stories was created there.

Hollywood has become a lumbering mountain made of red tape that absorbs enormous other-media worlds like Kirby’s and then distills them down for viewing with Parental Guidance. It took 20 years to figure out how to make Spider-Man into a movie. A distillation of a single piece of literally thousands of stories told every single week in Kirby’s world. The act of emulation drags behind the speed of Kirby’s creativity.

Now more than ever entertainment is a snake scarfing down its own tail. As the box-office records collapse, the comics are imitating the movies that are imitating the comics. We size our giants down to fit in the world they were built to tower over. We’ve removed the escape from our escapism.

Good stuff. And the more Kirby adulation, the better, says I.

Well, this is interesting.

After all, we’re less than a month out from the high-profile USA Today announcement of the Thanos: Son of Titan mini-series, and suddenly the first issue is announced as cancelled with no mention of a resolicitation. What makes this especially odd is that orders weren’t even in for the first issue; it was only in the most recent round of solicits, with Previews only hitting stores this past Wednesday, so it’s clearly not disappearing because of low orders. Whatever has happened to the book has clearly happened relatively recently; writer Joe Keatinge was promoting the series at San Diego Comic-Con two weeks ago, appearing on Marvel’s Next Big Thing panel to talk about how excited he was about the chance to write Thanos as well as giving interviews about the project.

Conspiracy theorists online have already suggested that Thanos creator Jim Starlin’s displeasure with the use of the character without receiving any notice or royalties may be too blame (Not to mention his hint that maybe he has legal claim to the character, having created him before he worked for Marvel), but historical precedent leaves me unconvinced that that would really have too much of an effect on Marvel’s plans (See #9 on this list, for details), to be honest – especially because none of the other announced (reprint) Thanos titles have been cancelled as yet. Instead, I suspect something more mundane involved internal editorial displeasure with the direction of Son of Titan itself, with the cancellation either coming as an opportunity to kill or retool a project that was being seen as having come off the rails.

If nothing else: Does anyone else have a sense of deja vu about this whole thing? Apparently, five issue minis about villains are cursed at Marvel…

Update: Leave it to Stephen Wacker to offer some hints about what happened:

For those interested, plans have indeed changed on Thanos. Nothing too dramatic, we just jumped the gun a bit. @joekeatinge and Rich Elson both have projects coming up in the Spidey office that we’ll be announcing soon. They’re bloody great!

So now we, uh, kinda know?

Earlier this week, The Beat’s Heidi Macdonald wrote a smart piece entitled “Why DC and Marvel will never truly target female readers.” If you haven’t read it yet, you should; she writes that “By addressing female readers (and also younger readers), DC risks alienating its core audience of teenaged boys and men 25-35,” going on to suggest that Marvel doesn’t have the same concerns (I’m unsure about that part, personally, considering that Marvel has fewer female-led solo titles than DC, but I get the “The X-Men readership has traditionally had a large female percentage” point she makes in defense of the idea). “The truth is,” she concludes, “as much as some individuals within each system would wish to deviate, the mandate to both Marvel and DC from their corporate owners is to be for boys. Period.”

Sue at DC Women Kicking Ass disagrees:

If that were true we wouldn’t have seen DC blink after the efforts of Kyrax last year. We wouldn’t have seen DC and Marvel continue to put out books that feature female characters drawn so don’t have their tits and asses as the main focus (God bless you J.H. Williams III and Cliff Chiang). That those books sell well, kinda hits at some of the assertion of the Beat as well.It also means you wouldn’t have DC bringing a new writer on Catwoman who said publicly its because the company wants a “female perspective.” And as far as DC Entertainment goes you wouldn’t have DC Nation featuring content with real, gosh doggone GIRLS like Super Best Friends Forever, Amethyst and the Black Lighting sisters. I’m sure you could try and make a case that this is simply an attempt at a Brony play where female friendly content creates a male fanbase rather than emanating cooties, but really I think that’s unlikely. Now none of those are particularly change agents. I’d say more they are cracks in the ice. Signs of a thaw. Signs that yes we do recognize that people who don’t identify as male are an audience and here’s content for them.

It strikes me that the upcoming Amethyst revival – written by a woman and, seemingly from the promo material at least, divorced from the sturm-und-drang of the regular DCU – may tie into this thinking a little, as well.

Me, I’m unconvinced that either DC or Marvel really have a mandate to be “for boys”; I know that Disney’s purchase of Marvel was in part related to the company’s desire to build up its male audience, so there’s at least some truth there, but I don’t think that either Warners or Disney would be anything other than overjoyed at the prospect of building a female audience. I suspect the truth is that both publishers have a mandate to be successful, and that the various Powers That Be in both cases don’t necessarily know how to do that in any way other than the familiar, male-centric methods.

That said, I can kind of agree with Heidi on this:

Thus, I would much rather spend my energy enjoying the work of the hundreds of successful female creators outside the Big Two than hope that corporate culture will change very much on this point.

I certainly hope that corporate cultures can (and will) change, but really? Many of my favorite creators these days are female, and working outside of either DC and Marvel (and superheroes altogether). Yes, it may be a seeming constant struggle for women to break into the Big Two’s ranks, but the culture is already changing for the better outside of those publishers and will hopefully continue to do so, because, hello, progress. If Red Hood and the Outlaws (as a random example) is getting you down, why not read Octopus Pie or Family Man instead?

(To those snarkily saying “But those aren’t superhero comics, it’s not the same thing!” Well, fine; try The Adventures of Superhero Girl instead, then.)

San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs considers what (little) we know about Marvel NOW! and, well, gets nervous:

The problem as a retailer is that I don’t actually have a hook for “Marvel NOW!” because I don’t actually know the full contents of it. I can’t “talk it up” except in the most generic way. Instead, I have to make each of those sales connections individually by book as they announce them, and without the benefit of the global branding to tie them together. One thing we were able to do with “The New 52″ was to create a specific one-time sell-sheet for our customers outlining the whole program. That intensely focused interest because we’re urgently needed them to sign up for these new series within the next month (so we could accurately order!) — but I can’t create 20+ different sell-sheets, and, even if I could, that won’t work because by #3, people are going to be saying, “Ugh, not this again”… Unfortunately, the feeling I get from “Marvel NOW!” is “You know all that stuff we’ve been doing that you don’t seem to be responding to? Here’s more of it.” Which is a hard message to sell.

I have to admit, I’m surprised at the way that Marvel is rolling out Marvel NOW!; we’re, what, three weeks out from the initial announcement, and the most we’re hearing from the publisher beyond “It’ll be massive!” and the initial titles are things like Tom Brevoort talking about Captain America’s costume redesign, which feels… not like filler, per se, but certainly of less importance than revealing some of the other titles to be relaunched or new creative teams on books. On the one hand, I guess it allows Marvel NOW! to have a longer shelf life in terms of ability to get headlines, but on the other, how long can that actually keep going before people get sick of Marvel NOW! as a brand…?

In which you start to feel that Grant Morrison is trying to get a rise out of those upset by Before Watchmen, and DC Comics’ treatment of Alan Moore:

[M]y own relationship with DC Comics is a pretty good one. I have a lot of friends at the company. I’ve always been treated fairly and with respect. I get to do what I want without heavy-handed editorial interference. The accounting department pays regularly, it pays on time, royalties are good, my back catalogue is kept in print in multiple editions and honestly, I couldn’t say the same for some of the small press or alternative publishers I’ve worked for in the past. Most of them still owe me for work done in good faith. Under DC’s umbrella, with access to their printing facilities and distribution, I’ve been able to put out pretty idiosyncratic personal stuff like “Kill Your Boyfriend,” “The Invisibles,” “The Filth,” “We3,” “Joe the Barbarian” and others to a wide audience. Me and my collaborators own those books. No one can do “Before We3″ but me and Frank Quitely! No one can do “After Seaguy” except me and Cameron Stewart. I never signed a contract I regretted, and I never felt cheated by DC. My own experience proves they can be reasonable and honorable, if you deal with them in an adult fashion and I have to take that into account before I condemn anyone working there today over decisions made in the past. I’ve found that “issues” rarely seem to come in convenient black and white, and that’s pretty much my last word on this.

“My own experience proves they can be reasonable and honorable, if you deal with them in an adult fashion,” Grant? Really? I completely, 100% agree that issues are rarely black and white, but still…

And this is what happens when you let smart political writers have a go at the politics of a superhero movie:

The Dark Knight Rises does indeed endorse a kind of Burkean small-c conservatism — a preference for incremental reform over convulsively deconstructive revolt. But that’s hard to square with the modern American conservative/Republican movement, which just produced a budget seeking to dismantle many of the social institutions Americans have relied on since the New Deal and the Great Society. Shoehorning Occupy into a “the Dark Knight movies are conservative” narrative requires a reductive stereotyping of the Occupiers, simplifying the nebulous movement into a collective of radical anarchists and ignoring its respect for liberal democratic forms — as demonstrated by the general assemblies — as well as the fact that it hasn’t really damaged anything other than public grass.

That’s from Jeff Spross and Zack Beauchamp’s take on the politics of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, in particular the most recent Dark Knight Rises; you should go read the rest.

This may be my favorite product update in recent memory:

SPAWN #222 – which was solicited as having a parody cover based on The Walking Dead #1 – was incorrectly printed with the cover solicited for SPAWN #223. The contents of Spawn #222 are as solicited. The Walking Dead parody cover will now be the cover to SPAWN #223.

Is this the first time cover images have been accidentally switched for consecutive issues of a series, does anyone know? For the curious, that means that Spawn #222 now has this for a cover:

While I’ve really enjoyed the Spawn homage covers to date, I have to admit that I’m not so sure about homaging yourself…

The future of the DC Universe… looks very much like the past of the DC Universe, it seems. Here’s Dan Didio talking to ICv2 (That’s part 2 of the interview; here’re parts 1 and 3) about what to expect from the next year of New 52 books:

We’re leading to probably our first crossover event in the latter half of next year, but you’re going to see a better continuity developing through the line.  Hopefully through the zeroes, we’ll bring some clarity to our characters.  There might be some questions on how they came to be five years in “The New 52,” so to speak.  What I’m hoping is everyone buys in to what we’re trying to do and it re-introduces people to some of the books they might have sampled, may have gotten away from, and they come back to see what’s happening with the zeroes.  Because it’s not just about giving a snapshot or a snippet of what they are in the past, but also setting up stories for the future.

“Better continuity developing through the line”? I’m curious as to whether people at DC really think that’s what’s keeping people from sampling their New 52 books, the lack of continuity (as opposed to the swiftly changing creative teams and directions or, simply not liking the creative teams/directions/quality of the books as is). On the other hand, you only have to look at Marvel’s success in recent years to see how much draw a strong central continuity that everyone ties into can be, so maybe they’re onto something after all…

Did DC’s Earth-2 immediately ruin the positive PR of Green Lantern being gay? Dennis Farr suggests so, over at political site Think Progress:

[Alan Scott's boyfriend] Sam serves to highlight two things. First, DC was pushing an interracial, same-sex relationship. This sounds great from a diversity standpoint (and somewhat mirrors Northstar’s current relationship), but when the non-white character is the one who is easily disposed of, it becomes a bit troubling. Second, they firmly established that Scott is now gay, and can move on, eliminating the need to worry about how to fit Sam, or the relationship, into the picture as much (I am sure Alan’s PTSD will come up again when it’s convenient). They may introduce new lovers, bring Sam back, or just milk the distraught Scott trick.

Unfortunately, at this point, I am left not wanting to return. I have more than enough media where I get to see painfully unsuccessful same-sex relationships, and read more than enough news of harm inflicted on the LGBT community. I am left wondering what would make this Green Lantern specifically interesting to me. Watching him go through pain? As yet, they have defined nothing else about him as queer man. While on the one hand, this is normalizing gay men into the broader culture, it also means that the queer history and culture I know and live is not present.

Cornered during an appearance on the current Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour, Anthony Russo – one of the two (with his brother Joe) directors of 2014′s Captain America: The Winter Soldier – has opened up slightly about the project, offering tantalizing hints of what’s to come… and all manner of things that he’s not allowed to say just yet (For example, “Marvel would shoot me if I answered” whether or not there are other Avengers appearing in the movie, he says).

When asked if the movie is based on the existing Ed Brubaker story, Russo answered with “In a way. I mean, they’re all sort of rooted in what’s come before, but they’re all also their own jumping-off point as well,” circling back to say that the script was what attracted him to the movie in the first place:

Well, we like the [story]. I can’t talk too much about specifics, that’s the way Marvel handles things. I can say in general that there’s sort of a darker, edgier sensibility at work there that we found appealing, and that is going find its way into Captain [America] in the modern day.

He also adds that he and his brother are “going to have lunch with Brubaker soon,” and that “certainly everybody is aware [of what's in the comics], has read everything, is aware of all their other material. But [Marvel Studios does] like each thing to be its own, organic process, which is nice.”

Amongst other avoided spoilers, Russo ducked the question of whether Hayley Atwell will make an appearance as Sharon Carter, whether we’ll see another side of SHIELD (Although he admitted, “I’m very interested in that, but yeah, I can’t really say more”), and whether or not we’ll see some more flashbacks to the 1940s (“Certainly, Cap has this complicated history,” he says).

He also addressed the nervousness some may feel about two directors more known for their relationship with NBC’s Community than anything else being hired for the movie:

There’s a little-known side to my brother and I, which is, we didn’t start out as comedy directors. We started out in the mid-’90s — we made this credit card movie that made the festival circuit in ’97, that Steven Soderbergh saw at the same time he [was showing] “Schizopolis” on the festival circuit. He loved our movie and offered to produce something for us, so we went into a cycle of writing — we wrote three scripts, only one of which was a comedy. That was “Welcome to Collinwood,” and when he formed his company with George Clooney, he wanted to make something with us, so we showed him these three scripts and he picked “Collinwood,” and from that point forward, we were comedy directors. And we’ve loved doing it, but we’ve always had another side to ourselves… Marvel is this incredible machine with all these amazing people who work there. That’s part of their confidence and why they can go outside the box [in choosing] directors, because they have people there who know everything. They said to us early on in the interview process, “We don’t expect you to know anything [about special effects and so forth] — you don’t have to know everything about this stuff, because we’re here for that.” They’re very respectful of directors. They’re an amazing company to work with.

And don’t worry; they’re also fans of the source material, just like us:

We were comic book geeks from a young age and big fantasy geeks. We got to talk to [Marvel] in detail about that history. They knew that we understood the brand really well and the characters really well. It was a long process, actually, of talking to them over and over again, through a series of meetings over a long period of time. And I think they just — we were really passionate about the movie, incredibly passionate about the movie. They felt that, and they felt like it was the right match.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is due for release in April 2014, with production due to start next year.