DC’s 2013 WonderCon slate starts Friday afternoon in Anaheim with an “All Access” panel, featuring Ann Nocenti, Scott Snyder, James Robinson, Matt Kindt and DC digital’s Jim Chadwick.

Things start with Scott Snyder, talking about his upcoming “Zero Year” arc on Batman. “When the New 52 started, we tried to keep a lot of Batman’s history intact,” the writer says. “A lot of it is intact, but we realized a lot of the things from Year One couldn’t stand,” due to issues like Selina Kyle’s origin being different.

Synder says “Zero Year” is “nothing like Year One, since trying to do a better version of that story would be impossible. Snyder says he thinks it’s the best thing the current team has done on Batman, and that readers haven’t seen the character’s origin done like this before.

As for Superman Unchained, Snyder says that he’s, “Excited to see what you guys think. It’s meant to be a classic Superman story, but done in a new way.

The four-page poster fold-out in the first issue by series artist (and DC co-publisher Jim Lee) is “one of my favorite compositions I’ve ever seen,” Snyder says, showing Superman from different angles where he’s heroic in appearing both powerful and vulnerable. “It speaks to what our book is about, in a lot of ways.”

For his Vertigo slate, Snyder says the upcoming The Wake with Sean Murphy is very different from anything he’s done before, and thanks the fans for continuing to stay enthused about American Vampire during its hiatus.

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The Disney corporate synergy is working out pretty well for ABC and Marvel, isn’t it? The former gets two new non-superhero franchises to play with – The Once Upon A Time announcement yesterday feeling like the bigger deal if handled correctly, because it gives Marvel an immediate Fables competitor to play with – and the latter gets a prime-time TV show, if SHIELD goes ahead (Which, come on, it’s clearly going to).

When Marvel was bought by Disney, the synergy fear was one of the biggest one for fans; that Marvel would somehow be dragged into some Disnified mess or forced to add Mickey, Minnie and the other House of Mousers to stories, or something similar. Three and a half years later, it’s clear that things haven’t gone that way at all – and, in fact, have worked out pretty much perfectly for the publisher, all told (Could there be a Marvel Universe animation block without the Disney connection?). I wonder if there are any out there who find themselves wishing that Marvel and Disney had stayed separate at this point?

Thinking about the Uncanny Avengers/”Don’t Call Me A Mutant” thing a little more, two things become clear:

1. Marvel needs to release some kind of official press statement on the issue, and not leave everything to Rick Remender who may not be helping things despite his best intentions (Then again, Tom Brevoort kind of called it a stupid response over on his Tumblr, so maybe Marvel shouldn’t release some kind of statement just in case).

2. Whether intentionally or otherwise, there’s now a really interesting dynamic between the two Summers brothers in the X-Books, with Cyclops being a militant believer in – for want of a better phrase – a mutant agenda, and Havok being… what, a mutant apologist, of sorts? “Having an X-gene doesn’t bond me to anyone, it doesn’t define me,” Havok says during his speech, undercutting 50 years of X-Men books but also offering an alternate view to the dominant “We must stick together because we are Other” of the franchise. Ignoring, for a second, the tone-deaf nature of “I am not defined by what I am” – Steve Morris sums up my feelings on that nicely, and it’s telling that it’s a white, straight male mutant whose power is not visually obvious from the way he looks that gets that speech – there really could be some interesting plot potential here to be mined.

iFanboy’s Ryan Haupt wants comic fans to get extreme to show that reading comics is cool! Or something:

Practically, what I think we ought to do is develop hobbies that seem out of step with normal comics reading, then use those hobbies to show that people who read comics are also out in the world doing cool stuff. I realize this is a bit silly, because we all know the stereotype is wrong, but at the same time what’s wrong with developing a fun new pastime AND getting to show off your comics cred while doing it. One stone, many birds.

I genuinely have to wonder what “comics cred” is. Is it the thing that’s behind accusations of “fake geeks”? Is it important to have “comics cred” as opposed to just reading comics? Is it something that makes you feel self-conscious enough about reading comics that you also want to have a hobby that shows other people that you “are also out in the world doing cool stuff”?

I get the comics culture is still, despite the widespread mainstream acceptance of comic characters, storytelling and ideas, essentially the culture of underdogs; that mindset dies hard, especially when actual comics still sell relatively poorly – Although the market is growing, and things aren’t that bad when you consider the print publishing industry in general, but who needs context? – but, still.

Reading comics is just reading comics; worrying about credibility or having cool hobbies or everything else is just weird additional baggage that we’re bringing to it ourselves. Instead of trying to prove that we’re extreme and awesome, why not just stop second guessing how we compare with other people in some meaningless ranking system that doesn’t exist?

There is a Wonder Woman car (Via the always wonderful DC Women Kicking Ass):

The red and blue exterior color scheme, accented with stars, was derived directly from Wonder Woman’s outfit, while the gold trim wrapped around the vehicle represents the heroine’s weapon of choice, “The Lasso of Truth.”  Up front, Wonder Woman’s eagle chest-plate emblem was creatively integrated into the production grille and is flanked by blue headlight beams, which reflect her piercing blue eyes.  The Sportage’s windshield features a banner portraying Wonder Woman’s tiara, and the chrome side panels on the vehicle are graphical interpretations of her invisible jet.  Beneath, the 5-spoke wheel design was chosen to match the stars on the exterior of the vehicle.

Once again, there is a Wonder Woman car. But this character can’t get her own movie off the ground (Well, aside from the porno version). Some days, I despair.

Over at Tom Brevoort’s new Formspring-esque Tumblr, someone takes exception to his mention of Avengers Vs. X-Men having “few tie-ins”:

How can you say AvX had few tie-ins?  It had 48 tie-in issues, plus Consequences, AvX Babies and now a What If.

Brevoort’s response is to clarify that it had “relatively few” tie-ins. Here’s the thing: Both Brevoort and the questioner are correct with this one. Sure, 48 tie-ins is a lot of comics, and that’s only counting the books that actually tied-into the series during the series itself. However, it could’ve been so, so much worse.

Fear Itself, for example, had 118 tie-in issues before you got to the epilogue books (There were 22 of those), up from the previous high of Civil War‘s 87 before epilogues. Considering just h0w amazingly successful AvX was for Marvel, the temptation to add the banner to more comics must have been vast, so maybe we should applaud the self-restraint that it took to keep things at “only” 48 tie-ins.

(If you think of things like this, Age of Ultron barely feels like an event at all. Its tie-ins are barely in the double digits…!)

Turns out, when I said that the Lynda Carter live-action TV show from the 1970s was the original live-action version of Wonder Woman, I was wrong…

This is the original pilot for a 1967 live-action Wonder Woman television series, starring Ellie Wood Walker as the title character and Maudie Prickett as her mother. But not the Hippolyta that comic fans are familiar with; this mom would rather her daughter stayed out of the rain and ate her soup instead of saving the day. “The nation needs Wonder Woman! And what about Wonder Woman, does the nation care what she needs?” she asks, surreally.

It’s the work of writer Stanley Ralph Ross and producer William Dozier, both of whom were responsible for the 1960s Batman series, as if you couldn’t tell, and it’s… well, it’s something else altogether. For all that fans may complain about the campness of the ’60s Batman “harming” the character, I can’t even imagine what this show would’ve done to Wonder Woman had it ended up being made into a series…

After a bit of a layoff, Marvel’s “Next Big Thing” conference calls with the comic book press are back, this time focusing on the latest with recently launched Marvel NOW! series Nova — and based on the images released to press, it looks like artist Paco Medina is joining the book. This page will be continually updated, so keep refreshing for updates!

The call hasn’t officially started yet, but Zeb Wells is on the line, so it looks like he’s joining Nova — possibly as a co-writer with Jeph Loeb?

Loeb is on the line, so we are officially starting, and with news: July’s Nova #6 brings a new creative team of Zeb Wells and Paco Medina.

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You know, the more I think about it, the less happy I am that Batroc the Leaper is going to appear in the next Captain America movie. It’s not that I’m not a Batroc fan; just the opposite, in fact. I think he’s a great character, and I’m always glad to see him, but I worry that a great deal of what I like about him – Mostly, that he’s a ridiculous, comedy character with an over-the-top accent – is likely to be lost in translation to the movie, which will in turn lead to an overly-serious “re-interpretation” of the character in the comics.

I may be worrying about nothing; Rick Remender is the writer in charge of Cap’s comic book fate these days, after all, and if there’s one thing he has shown in his career so far, it’s that a lack of subtlety is hardly something he has a problem with. But Marvel always strikes me as somewhat conservative with the characters that turn up in movies, in the sense of “those versions gradually – or less than gradually, in the case of Nick Fury – end up becoming similar to the movie incarnations for synergistic purposes” (Hey, remember the new Whiplash created to mirror the one in Iron Man 2?) In that we’re unlikely to see a comedy Batroc in The Winter Soldier, how long before we end up with a depressingly serious take on Batroc in the comic books?

Brian Cronin looks at the deal ComiXology offers creators with its ComiXology Submit program:

The intellectual property ownership sections of the agreement in particular are strongly in favor of the comic creator. There does not seem to be anything to worry about there. It is also good to know that the agreement is not exclusive, so you can continue to sell your work elsewhere online. However, it is worth noting that the term of the agreement is for five years, which is a rather long time to be tied to comiXology, especially if you find yourself feeling that you could get a better deal elsewhere. Which is why it is all the more important that you consider the two questions above. It is important to point out that the agreement only applies once you have actually submitted your final content to comiXology, so you have until that point to back out if you do not wish to lock yourself in to the deal for five years.

There’s some interesting stuff in there about pricing, especially what ComiXology can do in regards to promotional pricing, but overall this appears to be a pretty legit contract for creators interested in going into the digital space…

Ray Fawkes, co-writer of Justice League Dark and Constantine at DC (and upcoming writer for Trinity of Sin: Pandora), did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit yesterday. Someone asked him about the “sheer chaos that seems to have enveloped the entire DC editorial process” (See: Andy Diggle and Josh Fialkov leaving last week, Gail Simone’s firing and rehiring, last minute creative changes on Supergirl, etc.), and this was his response:

I’m not sure I would characterize it as “sheer chaos”.The business of mainstream entertainment is, as far as I can tell, a struggle to balance the forces of creative, editorial, marketing, legal, and scheduling. Some people are less willing to bend and flex in that environment. Some people get hit harder than others. Some find themselves clashing frequently with management, and some don’t. Some people seem to dodge one bullet and then take another. Some just discover that the place they wanted to be isn’t exactly what they thought it was.

I’ve only been in the game for a short time, so it’s impossible for me to claim that any measure of self-possession or luck or charm or whatever has enabled my survival. This seems more like a question that someone should ask me during a career retrospective, thirty years down the line.

Firstly, the DC creative process sounds dangerous: Hitting, clashing and bullets?

Secondly, that was a smart, political response to a loaded question; I wonder what one of the creators who’d left the publisher would’ve said in similar circumstances. Go check out the rest of the AMA; Fawkes has a lot of good things to say, and those concerned about Constantine may be interested in his comments in particular.

We live in a world where the porn version of Wonder Woman exists before any “official” live-action version of the character (Well, outside of the 1970s Lynda Carter version, of course), as well as a world where, let’s be honest: This actually looks more “Wonder Woman”-y than David E. Kelley’s NBC pilot from a couple years ago.

In the email accompanying this pic of Kimberly Kane that went to Ain’t It Cool News, Wonder Woman XXX: An Axel Braun Parody director Braun reportedly wrote “David E Kelley can Kiss My Ass ” Maybe the CW should ask Braun to help out on their in-development Wonder Woman pilot…

File this under “Something Interesting to Think About, if Particularly Anal and Most People Don’t Notice This Stuff Really,” I think: Al Ewing riffs on Marvel’s shifting time scale and what it means for Captain America in particular:

Thanks to Marvel Time, he was constantly unfrozen ‘roughly ten years ago’. So he can come to terms with the Kennedy Assassination, the hippie movement, Nixon, Reagan, the evolution of the high and low arts, but then he has to do it all over again because time has shifted. Going by the ten year rule, he came out in a post 9/11 world, where even the incredible cultural shifts that he previously had to assimilate under people like Englehart and Stern were being forgotten, beneath notice compared to the massive changes that are still happening now.

I suppose the only workable thing – if you treat him as a soldier/fighter and nothing else – is that he ends up like Jamie McCrimmon, needing a thing explained once and then just accepting it as ‘the future’. I remember Jamie needing a train explained to him after he’d been on a spaceship. Or there was one time he and the Doctor came across a hovercraft and he just refused to believe it – “och, that’s daft” – again, after spending time in space. Later in the same story he demonstrated that he’d picked up enough modern culture to do a convincing James Bond.

So, yeah, Jamie McCrimmon. Or Buck Rogers, I suppose. We’ve reached the point where Cap’s ‘home era’ is so different from our own that he might as well be Buck Rogers.

So, yeah, I’ve rambled myself into a corner. Hopefully it was semi-interesting.

If I ever wrote Cap it’d be all about interrogating culture. He’d increasingly blow off his Avengers duties to spend more time in the library learning about Rod Serling and Busy Bee Starsky.

Every issue would end with him huddled in the foetal position in his room at Avengers Mansion, rewinding Nixon saying SOCK IT TO MEEEEE? over and over.

Fade to black.

Continuity – as opposed to consistency – is, as we all know, the devil, and trying to make it all “work” something that should genuinely be left to fans instead of creators (which is to say, I know that the New 52 timescale just doesn’t make sense if you try and work out how there could’ve been four Robins in five years, but let’s just move on instead of making Scotts Snyder or Lobdell try and explain it to us). The whole shifting timescale thing has always been the most ideal solution to me – essentially, leave things vague enough to have wiggle room, and allow for as many story possibilities as possible as a result.

Also, I would totally read that Captain America series.

From last week’s Axel in Charge column:

There are plans for a Marvel NOW! Wave 2 — a new wave of titles that will generate the same amount of excitement amongst retailers and fans that the first wave did. From “Uncanny Avengers” to “Thanos Rising,” Marvel NOW! has been a hit, and we’re far from done. Look for exciting new series, starting in July and carrying through next year.

I’m kind of fascinated by this quasi-announcement, in part because I don’t really see how it’s possible to do a Marvel NOW! Wave 2 that will “generate the same amount of excitement amongst retailers and fans” as the first one. Didn’t the first one use up almost all of the big names in terms of characters and creators? We had relaunches for all of the X-Men books with the exception of Wolverine and The X-Men and Astonishing X-Men, all of the Avengers books (including solo titles), the Fantastic Four titles, Spider-Man… Are there really enough crown jewels left for Marvel to be able to have a similar successful relaunch again? Is the post-July date – which means after Age of Ultron is finished, with whatever changes it’ll bring – important, and does it mean we’ll see re-relaunches of some titles?

J. Caleb Mozzocco has a fun fact in the wake of last week’s DC Implosion:

The six-page house ad for Andy Diggle and Tony S. Daniel’s upcoming “era” of Action Comics that ran in many of DC’s books this week is three-tenths the length of Diggle’s one-issue run on the book, and one-tenth the length of Daniel’s three-issue run on it.

Because of publishing schedules being what they are, that house ad appears again at the end of this week’s DC comics as well. There’s something very bizarre about seeing “A New Era” being promised that you know – not even with hindsight, as such, as it’s still upcoming – will last exactly one issue. If only they’d had a chance to change the verbiage to “A New Blip in That Whole Era Thing.”

Again, I wonder aloud: Who will replace Diggle as Action Comics writer? And, again, I ask the following question: Isn’t Peter Tomasi short a book now that he’s stepped down from Green Lantern Corps?

Becky Cloonan talks sense:

As silly as it is, sometimes I do get irritated because so many of my interviews are, “Oh, now we’ll do this for the women’s issue! We want to put you in the magazine in the girls’ issue!” Why can’t I just be in the regular issue? Why can’t you just highlight women doing awesome things because they’re doing awesome things, not because you have to lump them all together in a special issue? At the same time, if there are girls who do feel shy and love comics but they feel intimidated, if they read this and it helps encourage them and inspire them to go and try to make their own comics then I think it’s worth it. I don’t think you’re necessarily going to change the way people hire or the way the masses think about things. What we’re doing is we’re slowly changing things. If a young girl out there is reading this and decides to get into comics because of reading this, that means we helped one person and that one person could help one person down the road to make more comics. That’s what we’re doing right now. I know it can be redundant and I know a lot of my fellow creators are sick of the discussion! [Laughter] But as long as there are less women involved it is a conversation that needs to happen.

It’s from an interview with Cloonan and Marjorie Liu from CBR, part of Josie Campbell’s great series of Women In Comics. Go, read.

Print and digital comics will always coexist. When I first broke into comics, there was a trade paperback revolution, when multiple issues of most comics started being collected for sale in bookstores, etc. A lot of people thought that would be the death of serialized comics, as monthly readers would inevitably all start “waiting for the trade.” But instead, it created a whole new audience of readers who might never visit a comic-book store for their weekly fix, but who loved picking up collected editions at Barnes & Noble or on Amazon. Similarly, the digital market doesn’t seem to be cannibalizing the print market. For example, as the sales numbers for the digital edition of “Saga” go up every month, so do the numbers for our print versions. It’s a brave new world out there.

Brian K. Vaughan is talking about The Private Eye, Panel Syndicate and digital and print comics over at the New York Times, which – y’know, is something.

Axel Alonso works in a DC-directed zinger in his latest Axel In Charge column over at CBR:

Each Marvel NOW! title starts with a writer who has a long-term vision for their series, and an artist — or complementary rotation of artists — who brings that vision into focus and then some. In certain cases — like John Romita Jr. on “Captain America” or Mark Bagley on “Fantastic Four” — we’ve been able to concoct a system that allows for one artist to do virtually all the issues. In others — like “All-New X-Men” — we’ve managed to put together a solid core rotation, with Stuart Immonen and David Marquez. But there are times when the unforeseen happens: When ["Deadpool" artist] Tony Moore decided he wanted to take a break from the daily grind of sequential art, we had to adjust our plans.

That said, I want to remind readers of this column that all the Marvel NOW! launches are going strong — none have been cancelled or RE-relaunched in a whole new direction after 3 or 4 issues — which is a testament to the talent and coordinated effort of our writers, artists and editors.

That’s true; it took six issues for Savage Wolverine to be relaunched with a whole new direction and creative team. Much better.

Well, this is potentially interesting. On Twitter this afternoon, incoming Green Lantern Corps co-writer Robert Venditti responded to the rumors – officially unconfirmed by anyone at DC, but coming from multiple anonymous sources to both Bleeding Cool and CBR – that the publisher was planning to kill off John Stewart:

Now, it’s worth pointing out that Venditti and co-writer Van Jensen replaced Joshua Hale Fialkov, who reportedly quit the book over editorial plans to kill Stewart, meaning that it’s possible that DC editorial did want to kill Stewart, then let Fialkov walk off the book over the issue, then changed their collective minds all before Venditti and Jensen came on-board – And, to be perfectly cynical, given some of the about-faces and change-abouts we’ve seen from DC in recent months, that’s far from unusual behavior from the publisher, never mind impossible behavior – but, it’s also possible that the rumors of Stewart’s offing were just that – rumors – and that Fialkov’s resignation was over a different matter altogether (Potentially just general editorial direction for the title, as he said, instead of one particular plot development).

Eddie Campbell talks about the upcoming From Hell Companion volume, and makes it sound like a pretty tempting book indeed:

I mean to say that I’ve used excerpts from Alan’s scripts and thumbnail sketches, but I haven’t just dumped them in there in separate sections. I’ve woven it all together in narrative sequence, with technical commentaries, short essays and speculations, as well as anecdotes, photos and previously unseen artwork of mine. Plenty of digressions. The rarest thing I have is a 15,000 word synopsis that Alan wrote describing the second half of the book for the benefit of the movie production company. They bought the rights when we were only up to chapter 8, you see. The attraction of this synopsis is that it has a few sequences that play out differently from the finished book that everybody is familiar with. Again, I’ve worked these in where they belong narratively.

I’ve long thought that From Hell is Alan Moore’s best work – In large part because of Eddie Campbell’s wonderful art, which humanizes the writing in a way that other collaborators haven’t managed to – so I’m really curious and, yes, just a little excited about this book, and seeing behind the scenes.