Over at USA Today, Christy Marx talks about her aims for the Amethyst strip from DC’s new Sword of Sorcery series – and explains why Amy has aged since her original incarnation in the 1980s:

I wanted to go for more mature themes and a character old enough to handle those mature themes… The original series couldn’t seriously tackle romance or sex because Amy still had the mental and emotional development of a 13-year-old. I didn’t want to have that restriction.

The influences for the new series? Game of Thrones, Twilight and Hunger Games, apparently. If the series can get that kind of critical response, never mind sales figures, then I suspect DC is going to be very happy indeed.

Via Bleeding Cool, these leaked rough cut (Note the lack of footage from the actual movie) advertisement of Mattel toy tie-ins to next year’s Man of Steel seem to offer some potential plot details for the movie itself… Robot armies? Black Zero spaceships?

I can only hope that the finished versions do something to the voiceover as well as fix the footage, because right now, these feel like parodies of real toy ads, not the real thing… Doesn’t anyone know that this is what a superhero toy ad looks like?

Maybe it’s because I’m a comic book numbers nerd, but this – from Marc-Oliver Frisch’s look at DC’s August sales estimates – was far more interesting than it potentially should have been:

We don’t know how much of the current sales volume is content-driven and based on genuine reader interest, because publishing stunts and gimmicks are reaching a level we haven’t seen since the early 1990s. In August 2007, DC Comics published 55 new DC Universe comic books and a total of 6 (in words: six) variant editions: four 1:10 variants, plus two 50/50 variants. In August 2012, DC Comics published 70 new DC Universe comic books and a total of 38 (in words: thirty-eight) variant editions: three variants that evidently could be ordered separately, plus one 1:10 variant, plus seventeen 1:25 variants, plus four 1:100 variants, plus two 1:200 variants, plus eleven “Combo Pack Editions,” which, DC admits, are just being treated as variants. That’s a 27% increase of new books over the last five years and a 533% increase in available variant editions. And this is not even considering that the 1:10 variants of 2007 required a lot less gambling on the retailers’ part than the 1:25, 1:100 and 1:200 variants of 2012 do. That’s a hell of a lot of hot air potentially in the market.

A 533% increase in available variant editions over the last few years? It really is the 1990s all over again. And not in a good way.

CM Punk is no superhero, but he’s always loved comic books. Since he can’t fly, he’s using his powers instead to express his love directly at Marvel Comics. The wrestler is writing the intro to Avengers Vs X-Men‘s hardcover collection coming November 7, 2012.

At USA Today, the wrestler also known as Phil Brooks talked about his love for comics and which character he most associates with – and it’s no hero!

He does, however look to one Marvel Hero for inspiration whenever he enters the ring. Like the ever-lovin’ blue eyed Thing, he yells out “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” before taking an opponent to the map. His comic book history includes some G.I. Joe, some Preacher, and more, but that Garth Ennis book changed things for Brooks.

“It’s one of those unfortunate instances where I think people look down on comic books almost the same way they look down on pro wrestling — maybe it’s this lesser art form or it’s just for kids and it’s goofy. But I defy anybody to read Preacher and tell me they feel the same way after that. That opened my eyes to a whole different world.”

Check out the link for more from Punk and check out the collected edition of Avengers vs. X-Men in November!

From an interview with Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel co-screenwriter David Goyer at CBR:

I have plans to do something with Geoff Johns that’s been on the drawing books for a while. Basically, [we're] just looking for the time to plot it out. DC is holding the space for it, it’s an event that we’re going to do, it’s a 13-issue thing. Hopefully, we’ll start plotting it out this fall.

So, is this Trinity War or something else altogether…? The timing might line up; if “this fall” means now, then it would allow for a series to be launched next summer, which could mean the already-teased Trinity War… unless there’s a second big event series taking shape for the New 52 sooner rather than later?

This is on the front page of YouTube today, via official Disney sponsorship:

[via Press Release and hat tip to Newarama Contributor, Amanda McDonald]

REBEL-NYC, New York City October 12th, 2012Excitement continues to build as ROCK COMIC CON rolls out what promises to be the major party event of convention week during the New York Comic Con. This year, ROCK COMIC CON is partnering with the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENSE FUND to create the ultimate Nerd Rock music party experience.ROCK COMIC CON is a perfect place for Heroes, Zombies, Jedi Knights and Fans of all kinds to get their “Nerd” Rock on and help support freedom of speech through the Comic Book Legal DefenseFund. ROCK COMIC CON is the ultimate place to mingle and will rock your face off with a flurry of nerd rockbands. It will also feature LIVE Art by Marvel, DC and Indie artists, prizes, costumes, giveaways and Special Guests.’

Nerd Rock’: [nurd 'rok] a  genre of music that tends not to take itself too seriously, often referencing “geek” pop culture, comic books and video gameswith signifcant doses of irony and humor.

ROCK COMIC CON features an array of national acts; hard rocking and musically adept nerd bands including Schaffer, the Dark Lord, a New York City-based rapper and comedian with material best suited for brainy and/or drug-addled audiences. With manic energy and a verbose vocabulary, STD skewers such topics as religious zombies, sci-fi sex fantasies, grammar snobbery and obsessive cat enthusiasts. STD has released three full-length albums and toured the country with mc chris, MCFrontalot and MC Lars.  He is also a co-producer and co-host for the nerdy, themed production, EpicWin Burlesque. He has three releases (2004′s “Meet My Maker,” 2007′s “Mark of the Beast” and 2009′s “Manslaughterer”) and the music video for his single “The Rappist” has garnered a half million views on YouTube.

H2Awesome! is a hilarious NYC band that is a cross between Weezer, the Bloodhound Gang and Iggy Pop…but MUCH nerdier. Comic Geek Speak called them “pure punk rock goodness”. H2Awesome! is fronted by NYC brothers, Charlie and Jeff LaGreca who cut their comedy teeth working and training with such notables as Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Adam McKay, Rob Riggle and many others and have written or been seen on Comedy Central, Conan O’Brien, American MovieClassics, Nickelodeon & the Food Network.  Their repertoire includes catchy and well-crafted tunes referencing geek culture, including an anthem for Walking Dead fans entitled “Carl, Stay In the House!”, and Frodo? Fredo?, a song about two confused potheads watching The Godfather and the Lord Of The Rings at the same time. The Doubleclicks are a self-proclaimed “nerd-folk” duo, based in Portland, Oregon. The band is made of the Webber sisters: Berkeley College of Music graduate and cellist Aubrey, and songwriter and ukulele player Angela. In 2011, the band started a “song a week” project, in which they posted new songs on their YouTube channel every week for a year – ranging in topics from superpowers to grammar. Their music video for their “Dungeons and Dragons” song created by Brooklyn-based artist Brad Jonas, boosted the Doubleclicks into position as a songwriting voice of the geek andgamer community. The band has toured to gaming and comic conventions and has shared the stage with Wil Wheaton, Amanda Palmer, and Paul and Storm. Though the tracks on The Doubleclicks’ first studio album “Chainmail and Cello” come from “a geeky place,” reviewers note that the Doubleclicks’ music has a broad appeal that can reach beyond the walls of the local game store.

Special guests include singer/songwriter Molly Lewis and Illusionist Nelson Lugo of Epic Win Burlesque.  Lewis, whose original songs and covers, accompanied by her masterful ukulele playing, have earned her over 4.4 million views on YouTube and won her the “Ukulele Video of the Year” award from UkuleleHunt.com.  Her first album, “I Made You A CD, But I Eated It,” was released by DFTBA Records. Illusionist Nelson Lugo first started performing magic when he was nine and a half years old.  Fed on a steady diet of comic books, video games and Benny Hill – Nelson’s performance style combines classic magic with a refreshingly geeky contemporary twist. He dreams of one day creating a magic act that somehow combines his love of Batman, Dr. Who, Star Trek, and pie. He is the founder and executive producer of EPIC WIN Burlesque and the co-host of the EPIC PIE cast.

ROCK COMIC CON will also feature MARVEL, DC and independent artists who will be creating live art throughout the night. This art will then be used to raise money to help support the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENSE FUND, a program that protects artists.

Ticket sales for ROCK COMIC CON, the NYC Nerd Rock Music Festival are now underway. Don’t miss this fantastic, rocking, fun, colorful and outrageous event taking place at the Rebel-NYC,251 30th street, New York City, NY 10001 (Betw 7th & 8th Aves)  on Friday, Oct 12th.

Doors open at7pm.TICKETS:$12 Advance, $15 Door.Advance tickets are available at www.RockComicCon.com

It’s official – The comic book industry is growing again. At least, that’s what ICv2′s Comic Market Size Analysis for 2012 believes:

For 2012, the market in both channels was up 5% at mid-year, behind robust comic store growth and an 18% first-half decline in bookstore sales of graphic novels… Declines in the book channel have two unusual causes: the Borders shutdown, which means that current numbers without Borders are being compared to numbers which included aggressive inventory liquidation sales in Borders last year; and the DC fight with Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million, which led to DC’s top 100 backlist titles being off the shelves of the two chains during the first half of 2012.  The second half is expected to be better.  Manga sales in bookstores were down 35% in the first half of 2012, as the category most affected by the Borders liquidations in 2011.

The analysis also estimates that the digital market tripled compared with the same period last year.

Paul Cornell, who’ll be leaving Demon Knights with December’s #15, introduces the title’s new writer on his personal blog, noting that “I know that comics fans sometimes see ‘I’m giving up the title when you leave’ as a compliment, but I really want to see this world that myself, Matt Idelson, Chris Conroy and Dio built continue, especially since the wonderful Bernard Chang is staying on as artist.” The new writer will be Surrogates creator and X-O Manowar revivalist Robert Venditti, who teases what’s to come:

So what exactly will I be doing with this ragtag band of misfits we all know and love? Well, without getting too deep into spoilers, I can say that the end of issue fifteen will offer an opportunity to spin things in a new direction, while still remaining true to the mythology that Paul has laid down. Issue sixteen will begin decades removed from the previous arc, and the team will find themselves thrown together after having spent many years apart. Most of them will not be happy about this. And rest assured, all the core cast members will be present— though in ways I hope will surprise you—and for some the years will have been kinder than others.

Venditti’s run begins in January.

Dan Slott apparently spoiled his own Amazing Spider-Man story at today’s pre-NYCC retailer breakfast. Click through for the spoiler, because I’m not ruining it for everyone. (more…)

We are, apparently, in a new age of permanent events at DC. From the just-revealed solicit for Green Lantern Corps Annual #1:

•“RISE OF THE THIRD ARMY” ends here!

• Thanks to the Third Army, the Guardians have shut down the Green Lantern Corps!

• Everything from the GREEN LANTERN comics from the past few months has been building to this.

• Get ready for a go-for-broke ending, which sets up the next great GREEN LANTERN event!

That’s right: It’s the end of the latest event, which sets up the next event. Man, remember when the Green Lantern books went, like, six months without crossing over…? Those were the days.

Matt Fraction looks back on his Invincible Iron Man run:

I just wanted to write an Iron Man book that I would want to read. I wanted to mine as much pathos, carnage and drama out of the character’s circumstances and situations as I could. I don’t think it’s wise to write at an audience; to try and guess what they want. You just have to write the kind of story that you would want to put your own money down for. So really, I just wanted to write what I thought would be a compelling Iron Man comic. Something as much science fiction as a super hero comic, but the science fiction of twenty minutes from now.

I love that Fraction points out that “This entire series has been about how much better Tony’s life would be if he just asked for help.” It’s been an interesting, at times frustrating, run, but definitely the most coherent Fraction work at Marvel, and as much as I’m looking forward to see what Kieron Gillen can do with the character, I think I’ll miss Fraction’s take on Tony.

Chris Ware speaks:

Having a family answered pretty much every question and problem I ever thought I had in life; it’s made me a much better person, I think, or at least I hope it has. Though it can’t solve one’s problems if one isn’t already somewhat stable, it can be the final catalyst towards the necessary firming up, or maturation, of the spirit (though America keeps assuring one that this is completely avoidable, if one prefers). I cringe with embarrassment when I think of my pioneer great-great-grandmother Clara F. Abbott and the privation and grimness she endured on the 1850s Nebraska prairie so I could … what? Draw comic books?

Arturo R. García looks at the demographics of Marvel NOW!:

Right now T’Challa, now established once again as The Black Panther, appears to be the only PoC character in Hickman’s New Avengers series, which will focus on the latest iteration of the secret super-cabal known as the Illuminati.

Joining him as diversity stand-ins will be both The Beast and The Sub-Mariner, the latter of whom most recently seen drowning a third of the population of T’Challa’s home, Wakanda, in the critically-pannedAvX cross-over, which pitted the Avengers against the X-Men for the purposes of…well, who the hell knows at this point. So, that will probably be awkward.

That said, it’s still a better representation than Rick Remender and John Cassaday’s Uncanny Avengers, a title spawned directly from AvX:

Brunettes! Blond white guys! Canadians! Smell the diversity, amirite?

Both Hickman’s Avengers and the new Uncanny X-Force get singled out for some praise, however, although All-New X-Men gets… well, somewhat the opposite treatment.

Odd to see this making it as far as the official preview without being fixed:

By “this,” I mean the generic credits (Also, do Marvel normally give cover credits to cover artists?). That said, even though this is a “sketch variant,” it’d be nice to see some color brought in in terms of trade dress – In this early stage, it really looks like someone has photocopied the actual cover with so much greyscale (especially in terms of the actual logo, which doesn’t read well in grey at all).

I would say that the comic book market is the worst market that there is on the face of the earth for creative talent and the reasons are numberless and legion. I have had many talented people ask me how to get into the comic book business. If they were talented enough the first answer I would give them is, ‘Why would you want to get into the comic book business?’ Because even if you succeed, even if you reach what might be considered the pinnacle of success in comics, you will be less successful, less secure and less effective than if you are just an average practitioner of your art in television, radio, movies or what have you. It is a business in which the creator, as was mentioned before, owns nothing of his creation. The publisher owns it.

That’s none other than Stan Lee talking, back in 1971. It comes from the transcript of a discussion between Lee, Dennis O’Neil, Gil Kane, Will Eisner and others about the state of the comic book industry, and the entire thing makes for a fascinating, somewhat depressing, read. Go, see.

Tom Brevoort uncovers character descriptions written by Stan Lee in the mid-60s for a cartoon version of the pre-Uncanny X-Men: Scott Summers is “grim, unsmiling,” while Jean Grey “falls madly in love at the drop of a hat” and has a crush on Professor Xavier himself. It’s like a glimpse into an alternate reality, in a way; I find myself hoping that Brian Michael Bendis uses this as a guide to characterization in his All-New X-Men…

Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is released today (Here’s a great interview with the author in support of the release), and The Comics Journal site has an excerpt about how Marvel dealt with the creation of Image Comics to convince you that you really need to buy it:

At the Marvel offices, the talent exodus left scars. Writers Fabian Nicieza and Scott Lobdell scrambled with Bob Harras to come up with the annual summer crossover for the X-titles, now that the Image guys had left them holding the bag. “In my opinion,” said Nicieza, “they were waiting as long as they possibly could in order to sabotage the production of those books. The longer they waited under the assumption that they’d still be drawing those issues, the harder it was going to be to get quality artists to draw it, the harder it was going to be to write it. They were hurting, for no reason, the people they’d worked with for the last several years, who’d helped them get to that level. To this day, I think that was a little bit of hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness.”

Still, any office debate about the long-term damage to Marvel was strongly discouraged. “No independent comic artist has ever sold numbers that could do anything to us,” Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco insisted to staffers in meetings. “It’s not gonna happen!” he’d shout back at them if they protested.

Over on Formspring, Tom Brevoort answers something I’ve been wondering:

What made me think of this was the rumor that Steve McNiven was going to be the launch artist for the Guardians of the Galaxy book that everyone’s talking about, something that made me immediately inner-snark “Well, I guess we know which title will have the first delay and/or fill-in artist.” After all, McNiven’s last high-profile Marvel launch, the last Captain America title, saw him replaced mid-arc on the fifth issue, and he also famously delayed his multiple collaborations with Mark Millar (Civil War, Wolverine and Nemesis) due to his painstakingly slow process. This isn’t to condemn McNiven – He works at the rate he works, and his art looks great – but it does make me wonder if the need for having “the best artists” on titles when they launch is defined more by “biggest name” than “likely to be a long-term presence on the book and bring a sense of artistic continuity” (See also Joe Mad on Avenging Spider-Man or Marc Silvestri on Incredible Hulk, in the last year alone).

Of course, that’s assuming that McNiven is doing the Guardians book…

Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett discuss Avengers vs. X-Men and how authorial bias conflicted with where the story went:

The final issue is nothing but proof that Cyclops was 100% correct in the first issue of “Avengers vs. X-Men” and, yet, somehow, he became the villain. At the beginning of the story, he told Captain America that the Phoenix was coming to Earth to bring back the mutants and use Hope as its host. Captain America called him crazy (and with good reason, I might add) and, so, they fought. But, when the Phoenix arrived and was ‘broken’ by Tony Stark, it possessed five different X-Men who claimed that they were simply holding onto the power until Hope was ready for it, which, again, is true. During this time, the Phoenix Five did a lot of good things, but four of the members proved corrupt and were stripped of their power. However, Cyclops never wavered until issue 11. Up until that point, he continually kept the others in check, told them to be patient with the Avengers, and, generally, only reacted to the violent attacks of the Avengers. In issue 11, he was again attacked and, surprise, surprise, was finally pushed to the point where he overreacted to their attack, killing someone who was actively trying to assault his mind (self-defense?) and, generally, getting really pissed off at the heroes who wouldn’t even try to work with him, who automatically assumed him crazy and corrupt… despite the fact that he was right. In the end, Captain America, after having known Hope for all of two weeks, decided that she was more trustworthy than Cyclops, a mutant superhero he’s known for years and fought besides dozens of times, and allowed Hope and the Phoenix to do exactly what Cyclops said they would.

Cyclops is the hero of “Avengers vs. X-Men” and Captain America is the villain.

But, I wouldn’t say that that’s the story that Marvel tried to tell, would you? Which is what I found frustrating. You can’t present a seemingly off-balance/crazy character in the beginning like they did with Cyclops and, then, have him actually be right the entire time. They were some hints about that at the end of the event (more in the latest issue of “Uncanny X-Men” than in “Avengers vs. X-Men” #12), but it’s a fairly messed up way to present a story and suffers a little from the semi-recent idea at Marvel that Captain America Cannot Be Wrong. No matter what, that’s the one character that is never wrong even when he’s clearly wrong.

Clearly, someone needs to start making “Captain America Was Wrong” t-shirts. Quick, before NYCC!