There comes a time when the characters are so stupid, you have to stop thinking, “Yikes, they are stupid” and start thinking, “I’m reading this; am I stupid?”

“It’s comics,” they will say to me when they see this. We expect our comics to be serious-as-a-dead-child stories about open-mouthed dum-dums who could still believe in the Tooth Fairy. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature. That “Joker fell in water; guess he’s dead” thing alone has been done so many times this most recent one was probably a “reference.” But maybe we have put so many spins on that classic story (from the forties, for eight year olds) that we have upped the ante past the maximum safe ante height. Any more, it’s just rubbing our noses in the mess we’ve made. Imagine the next poor sap who has to write a Joker story. For Batgirl.

Jim Mroczkowski is finding himself wondering whether or not taking certain genre conventions for granted is a good thing or not. My general rule of thumb is pretty much, when you start thinking about this kind of thing too much, it’s time to give yourself and the story a break for a bit; otherwise, you will start to realize that, no matter how good Superman is at hunching over, someone would realize that he’s really Clark Kent.

Of course, there are times when the stories involved make ignoring the ridiculousness of some of these things particularly difficult; any time a story focuses on the importance of the secret identity, for example – as Scott Snyder’s been doing over in Batman, the book that Mroczowski is talking about – there is that moment of “You’re just reminding us how ludicrous this actually is, you know that, right…?”

The always-wonderful Evan Narcisse at Kotaku talked to Greg Rucka about comics, video games and the value of treating creators well:

You treat talented creators poorly, you get shitty comics. It’s as simple as that. If you’re happy reading shitty comics, then I suppose you shouldn’t worry about it. If you want to read good comics about the characters you love, then you should damn-well care. You don’t get the best work from people who feel they’re under fire, that there’s no security in their job or trust in their work. Respect the talent, respect what they bring to the characters, and collaborate. Comics is, by nature, a collaborative medium. When writers and artists are treated as disposable and interchangeable, the work will suffer.It all comes down to what you want to spend your money on. You continue to pay for crap, then the message you’re sending is that crap sells, and more crap will come to market.

Well worth reading, as most interviews with Rucka are. And talking of Rucka, there’s still time to donate to the Lady Sabre Kickstarter, if you’ve been meaning to but haven’t gotten around to it just yet…

Marvel’s superheroes may rule the movie theater, but DC can at least claim the… supermarket?:

In a first-of-its-kind partnership, Target Corp.  and Warner Bros. Consumer Products, in partnership with DC Entertainment, have teamed up to introduce an extensive summer collection of exclusive Justice League merchandise. The summer collection was inspired by “DC Comics – The New 52” comic book character designs and holds surprises for fans young and old. Featuring the full lineup of DC Comics’ iconic Justice League Super Heroes – Aquaman, Batman, Cyborg, The Flash, Green Lantern, Superman and Wonder Woman – the summer collection will launch at all U.S. Target stores and on Target.com beginning May 19.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “I hope this means that I can finally see my favorite superheroes re-imagined as furniture!” Well, you’re in luck:

And that’s not all!

In addition to the exclusive summer collection, Target will be part of a broader partnership with Warner Bros. Consumer Products that will offer more traditional Justice League licensed products. The broader partnership will span more than 20 categories including home, stationery, toys, apparel and accessories. All Justice League licensed products will range from $1 for Justice League temporary tattoos to $59.99 for a Justice League Rocker Chair.

The next time someone claims that superheroes haven’t penetrated the mainstream, just point them to the fact that there’s going to be a Justice League Rocker Chair.

Colin Smith considers the opening pages of recent issues of Astonishing X-Men and Wolverine, and why one works for new readers while the other doesn’t:

The beginning of a monthly book needn’t involve a hysterical measure of world-threatening hype, and unfamiliar readers can certainly be intrigued by situations and characters they know nothing about. But this page’s lack of visual distinctiveness, key information and, most deleteriously, liveliness does undermine the scene’s appeal. For all that the art is careful and competent, and for all the undoubted craft that’s evident in the script, this really isn’t a particularly enticing introduction.

The marketplace is saturated with super-books. Some of them are excellent. Why would either the casual browser or the uncommitted consumer opt for Astonishing X-Men #62 on the evidence of this opening page?

We very often get so dedicated to our viewpoints as established readers that understanding how something would/could appeal to someone not as well-versed in the mythology of a fictional universe can seem difficult; for my money, this was the same problem with Marvel’s Infinity preview for Free Comic Book Day this year. For the faithful, it was a well-done book teasing something they were likely to read anyway. But for new readers, what was really there for them…?

I was surprised to see the upset online yesterday at the news – via DC’s latest round of solicitations – that Legion of Super-Heroes has been cancelled. What was surprising wasn’t that people were upset that the book was ending, but that there seemed to be this feeling that this was the first time that DC had cancelled the book, which… didn’t really make any sense, to be honest.

For one thing, the current volume of Legion was the seventh, and at 23 issues (24, once you include the zero issue), it lasted eight months longer than volume 6, which was cancelled to make way for the New 52 relaunch. That previous volume launched with a cover date of July 2010, meaning that it had been almost a year and a half between volumes 5 (which ended with #50, cover date March 2009) and volume 6. In the meantime, there had been the three issues of the seemingly-permanently delayed Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds mini and four issues of an abortive back-up run in the revised Adventure Comics (The Legion were theoretically headliners in the Adventure tie-ins to the “Last Stand of New Krypton” storyline, but that was more of a Superman event that featured the Legion than any attempt at a Legion book).

Even if seven headlining appearances in sixteen months falls within your definition of “continuous publication,” it’s still odd to see people assuming that DC cancelling the current series means the end of the Legion as a whole. Even the final solicit suggests an imminent reboot, with talk of the future of the DCU future looking different… In an era where, just in the last few years, we’ve seen the cancellation of long-running titles like Action Comics, Detective Comics, Fantastic Four, Uncanny X-Men and so many more, just to be relaunched months (in some cases, just weeks) later, surely the idea of a classic book ending “forever” seems ludicrous or at least amazingly naive, doesn’t it? Is there really anyone out there who doesn’t think we’ll see the announcement of a new Legion title – even if it’s not called Legion of Super-Heroes (We have, after all, had replacements with titles like Legion Lost, Legion Worlds, The Legion etc. in the past) – within a few months at most?

Axel Alonso on spoilers:

That said, there will always be people out there who delight in leaking information and spoiling it for readers. There are so many people who have access to information after the book goes to the printer, after it’s printed, after it’s distributed — it’s impossible to prevent leaks, even if it is possible to track down culprits after the fact. That said, I actually think pirates and gossips hurt fans a lot more than their intended victims: creators and publishers. Does it hurt sales? I dunno. The sales of “Amazing Spider-Man #700″ sure don’t seem to indicate that. Does it hurt fans that want to enjoy the surprise as a part of their actual reading experience? My guess is yes. I mean, if can get through “Madmen” Season 5 without someone spoiling the ending for me, it’ll be a miracle.

Two things:

1. I think it funny that his list of ways in which people can be spoiled for comics they’re reading doesn’t include “Publishers revealing big news in mainstream press outlets anywhere from days to months before the release of said comic,” personally. Although leaks happen (a lot), I think that USA Today or somewhere similar running a story about the ending of a comic tends to spoil the story for more readers ahead of time than some printer/retailer/fan getting hold of a copy early and releasing a smartphone pic online to a fan site. YMMV, of course.
2. How important are spoilers, anyway? I wonder that, sometimes. There are plenty of stories that rely on a shock last minute reveal for a certain amount of drama and tension, of course, but that is rarely the only value of a story; there has to be something more to it, surely, otherwise the story can only be read once, because any re-reads would be pointless in light of you knowing the big secret. While knowing a spoiler ahead of time can rob the story of one kind of appeal, shouldn’t good stories have more to offer, and therefore have a different-yet-equal appeal even if you know the ending ahead of time…?

Which is to say, spoilers might not hurt sales; as Alonso says, Amazing Spider-Man #700′s success would suggest that, along with countless other comics from Marvel and other publishers (Surely that’s why mainstream news outlets get the exclusives on things like Peter Parker’s death, Johnny Storm’s death, et al ahead of time, to help sell the books). But is it possible that, in the long term, they don’t really hurt the stories, either…?

I’d fallen behind on everything that’s being offered at Thrillbent recently, which was a mistake considering the new material that’s joined Mark Waid and Peter Krause’s Insufferable in recent weeks. Being a Leverage and Dungeons & Dragons fan (The IDW series of the same name for the latter, sadly; start talking to me about 20-sided die and I’ll just have to nod politely and shamefully admit that I’m lost), it’s no surprise that Arcanum is a particular favorite standing out for me amongst the new strips, thanks to the presence of writer John Rogers. As is his wont – as listeners of the Leverage 10 podcast or readers of Rogers’ Kung-Fu Monkey know – he’s not only writing the new magic invasion series, but writing about the series, spilling beans and lifting the curtain on some of the thinking behind it to give the rest of us a peek. Here’s Rogers selling the series in one simple paragraph:

If anything even vaguely resembling alien tech were discovered, you’d see the US government immediately put two programs in play: 1.) a Manhattan project to unravel the broken physics of said tech and 2.) a secret military/intelligence agency to keep tabs on it. Just substitute “magic” into those sentences and you have Arcanum.

You can find those process blog posts here and the actual Arcanum comic here. Both are recommended.

This Tumblr post, showcasing early appearances by the leading characters in Brian Wood’s upcoming X-Men series, brings back all kinds of happy memories for me. I started reading Uncanny X-Men around #185, when Rogue was still relatively new to the team and Rachel wasn’t even a full member yet; Psylocke and Jubilee were years away from joining the book, although I’m tempted to say that I’d already met Betsy Braddock via the UK Captain Britain strips.

Something that I’m reminded of with these scenes is how tonally varied Claremont’s X-Men was in its prime; that the melodramatic angst would inevitably be balanced by comedy (even if it was, like most Claremontian humor, more unusual and awkward than actually funny to me), and that the characters would get to “win” every now and again. I drifted away from the series around the very start of the Jim Lee era, worn down by the endless plots and seeming lack of direction the book had at the time, and – Morrison’s brief New X-Men aside – didn’t really return to the franchise in any permanent sense until Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron had taken over.

Part of what had kept me away was the constant feeling of oppression the X-Books had devolved into, it felt like; a sense that the characters were fighting a permanently losing battle against… well, everything, really. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the fun of the X-Books I read growing up had disappeared, replaced by constant danger and depression and not fun, for want of a better way of putting it. Everything was melodramatic angst, and what little happiness there was always felt temporary (and, usually, would be proven to be so in the service of plot twists and cheaply manufactured drama).

That might’ve been why Aaron’s Wolverine and The X-Men and Gillen’s Uncanny X-Men clicked for me. There was a sense of humor in both books, and a lightness in tone beyond that. Both series had a sense of possibility and hope that appealed both in a nostalgic sense, but also to the reader I am today. I would rather read a series that wanted to make me smile as much as thrill, chill and sadden, you know?

The Bendis reboot of the franchise, post-Avengers Vs. X-Men, has left me a little adrift from the main X-Books again, I admit (It’s not a tonal issue anymore but one of pacing and disinterest in keeping up with Bendis’ work in single issues; collections of his superhero stuff have been my preferred format for awhile; I feel like I get more out of the experience that way), but I’m familiar enough to feel that we still have an X-Men franchise that offers as many “up” moments as down ones, and that’s a really nice thing to consider. It might have taken decades, but I like the idea that X-Men can have fun even when things look particularly grim again.

Now, if only we can convince someone that an updated “Kitty’s Fairy Tale” should form the basis for the 2014 event, instead of another “Days of Future Past” retread…

Never mind the official Agents of SHIELD teaser, the Rising Tide blog is where it’s at for more hints about what to expect from the show when it debuts in the fall. With a header that reads

Who is S.H.I.E.L.D.? What are they hiding? Super-powers are real. Aliens exist. What else is out there? We will uncover the truth. We will not remain silent any longer.

it looks as if at least part of the show will deal with the fact that, post-Avengers, the existence of superheroes, supervillains, gods and aliens aren’t the stuff of conspiracy theorists anymore… which, of course, means that the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day trying to argue that everything is true after all. Given the senses of humor displayed by Whedons Joss and Jed and Maurissa Tancharoen elsewhere, something tells me this could end up being a very fun thread playing throughout the entire season…

When asked, over at CBR, whether fans can expect Marvelman to appear anytime soon, CCO of Marvel Entertainment Joe Quesada had this to say:

No. We’re still not prepared to talk about it. We’ve been very patient and very deliberate on how we talk about Marvelman. The internet leaks aside and the stuff that may be out there which you’ve read and isn’t true, we’re very careful with this. We don’t want to talk about this before its time — especially with something as great as Marvelman.

“We don’t want to talk about this before its time.” That’s a great idea, and one that the Joe Quesada of 2009 should have considered before telling the world that Marvel had bought the character, with Marvel telling fans to “stay tuned” for more news. It’s not as if fans started wondering, out of nowhere, whether Marvel would do something about the character; they were told four years ago that it was happening. Hell, as recently as last month, current EiC Axel Alonso was promising “an announcement soon.”

I get that it’s got to be frustrating to be continually asked about a project that is, quite clearly, taking longer to sort out than expected – but saying that the company doesn’t want to talk about it before its time, or that the company has been quite deliberate on how to talk about it rings somewhat false. After all, if that were really the case, why was it announced four years ago, and followed by a short-lived reprint series of the material that nobody really wanted, leading to everyone wanting to know when the good stuff would finally be available?

If, like me, you enjoyed Avengers Assemble #15AU this week, you might have thought that writer Al Ewing was making up Computer Graham, Magic Boots Mel and all of the new mythology out of whole cloth. Turns out, that’s not the case at all, and it’s up to his brother Tom to explain where it really comes from:

Computer Graham! There are two things to know about Computer Graham. One is the “bedroom coders” stuff he tells us in the issue, which is a two-panel summary of an important British pop-cultural moment, the early videogames boom. This happened everywhere in the West, of course, but it happened differently in Britain because the bulk of our videogame market wasn’t console-based, it was based around small, programmable home computers. So instead of our touchstones being large US and Japanese corporations, they were tiny software houses and teenage one-man bands rising to pop-culture success on games coded in, yes, teenage bedrooms. There’s a fine book detailing this history, and also at least one song about it. There was a very strong patriotic streak to the UK computer revolution – British gamers building a homebrew market in the face of flashy, but essentially crap, American imports. So no wonder Computer Graham’s come out of hiding now.The other thing to know about Computer Graham is that he’s a re-spray of a real old UK comics character, Computer Warrior, who starred in Eagle for 9 years, battling enemies inside mostly real games. I only read a couple of Computer Warrior strips, but I am fairly sure his treatment here does them justice. In the original strips he’s only a player, not a coder, though.

Panel 5: Doomdarke is – minus the ‘e’ – the villain from Mike Singleton’s Lords Of Midnight, one of the great cult UK games and an astonishing display of what is possible with 48k RAM. Singleton died recently, so this is a nice tribute. Macaroni Ted is from Jet Set Willy. probably the most anticipated UK bedroom-coder game of the whole era. The Chief Examiner has Marvel pedigree – he appeared in the Scott Adams range of Questprobe text adventure games, notorious for their unfairness.

In fact, all three games referenced are very hard – JSW famously uncompletable due to a bug (which the makers claimed hastily was a feature). So Computer Graham is kind of a badass.

Go read the whole thing; it’ll make you love the issue even more.

Tom Brevoort answers a question I’ve had since last weekend’s Free Comic Book Day issue: In what world could Avengers: Endless Wartime be called “Marvel’s First Original Graphic Novel,” considering the 1980s line of OGNS?

Those are absolutely all great books, but none of them really fit the parameters of a Graphic Novel in the way the term is recognized today, for all that the line that they were a part of was called Marvel Graphic Novels. They’re really European-style albums, and not truly long enough in most cases to be considered a genuine graphic novel. So that’s the difference

Even if that’s the case, what about the Season One books…? Weren’t they issued as OGNs? Do they not count because they were created as single issues, according to those who’ve worked on them…?

It’s not often that I direct people to particular sales, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that ComiXology’s Amelia Cole sale finishes tonight, meaning you only have a few more hours to sample what was easily one of my favorite new series of last year for a ridiculously low price. For just $6 – the price of two regular DC books! – you can get the entire run of the first series, which just might be the best bargain you’re going to get in comics anytime soon. This ends the plug; you can thank me later.

Ryan Haupt considers the concept of free, and in the process, accidentally outs himself as the Grinch of Comics:

Then there’s Free Comic Book Day, which from what I can see on the internet seems to be a HUGE deal and I honestly can’t force myself to care. I get the impetus, it’s a good day for retailers to get new bodies in the door, and I hope my friends who are retailers are able to accomplish just that. People promote it as a great time to introduce your friends or kids to comics. Well I don’t have any friends kids so me trying to bring kids to the comic shop the first Saturday of May would likely get me banned from the park. Unless by kids we’ve all been talking about baby goats this whole time, in which case I wouldn’t bring them either because they’d probably eat all the free comics.

And as someone without human children, I wouldn’t want to bring another adult friend to the shop on the Free Comic Book Day because I can’t imagine them wanting to return to a place with that many children running all over, especially when such a state isn’t representative of a normal day in the local comics shop. I think I’d be much better off taking someone to Isotope on a lazy day and kicking back on the couch, or to one of their parties and just blow their mind. I’ve done both, and they’re both fun in different ways neither of which got that friend into reading comics even though I like to think they had a good time.

Who doesn’t like seeing happy kids with free comics? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like baby goats as much as the next man, but still…

The Deadline report on the current state of the Marvel Studios makes for fascinating, if somewhat confusing, reading:

But The Avengers cast are ready to rumble with Marvel for the Avengers sequel slated for a May 2015 release. “Some received only $200,000 for Avengers and Downey got paid $50M. On what planet is that OK?” an insider tells me. CAA represents an overwhelming majority of the Marvel stars and is trying hard to keep the negotiations out of the public limelight and media headlines. But that may not be possible with some reps blaming the studio for ’scorched earth’ tactics past and present. ”Marvel has created so much animosity by strong-arming and bullying on sequels already. It’s counterproductive,” one source tells me. Says another, “I’m sick of Kevin Feige telling me again and again how Marvel is ‘reinventing the movie business’. It doesn’t work like this. They’re reinventing business, period.” I’ve learned Marvel already has threatened to sue or recast when contracts and/or options are challenged. That prompted a few cast members to respond, “Go ahead.” I hear Hemsworth especially wasn’t anxious to go back into that arduous diet and training regimen and subsist primarily on egg whites for Thor: Dark World which hits theaters November 8th.

On the one hand, given the various rumors and behind-the-scenes stories that have emerged from Marvel Studios in the past, in regards to the studio’s ability to work cheap, this isn’t the biggest surprise. But on the other, I really can’t see Marvel getting away with recasting any of the main characters in Avengers without risking a significant backlash; cutting costs is one thing, but managing to dump lead actors to save money when you’re arguably the most successful movie studio in the business right now…? That’s not going to play so well, surely.

While mainstream buyers fall for Hawkeye, the Hooded Utilitarian’s Ng Suat Tong takes a look at the series and isn’t that impressed:

Barton in these issues is a bit like Chandler’s Phlilip Marlowe without the cool dialogue, machismo, and active mind—he’s basically a plains clothes knight of the city who gets beaten up a lot. He uses fists not words and is bereft of any trace of deep intellectual content or motivation. He’s just another nice guy in an unending stream of nice guys in popular culture. He never dies; no, he can’t die because no one actually wants to kill him. They just want to tell him that he’s going to die like every weirdo in the Marvel universe. If readers came here even remotely excited that this was a comic which takes the superhero into hitherto unknown territory, let me dampen that down right now.

The excitement here is that Hawkeye doesn’t wear his costume all that much and acts like a real life human being once in a while. He cracks some jokes and has some sense of his own mortality when he or his friends get shot at. He is hopeless at superheroics (i.e. fallible). He also has to make rent for his poor neighbors, just like a rich Peter Parker would do (except that, you know, Spider-man was poor). Also, he gets to hang out with a bunch of babes. The bar has been lowered to the level of a Munchkin.

The appeal of Hawkeye, I suspect isn’t that it raises the bar on the entire superhero genre, but rather that it’s a well done alternative to the superhero norm, especially as the norm at Marvel Comics currently; it has enough nostalgia value in the “Clint as a regular schlub” angle – Shades of classic Peter Parker! – and enough style in the seemingly effortlessly beautiful visuals to stand out in the crowd of everything else that’s on the shelves right now. While Tong makes some good points about how reliant the book is on David Aja’s art in particular, I can’t help but feel that he’s dinging the book for not being something that it wasn’t trying to be in the first place…

At the Beat, David Carter offers up a sales chart for what comics and graphic novels are selling on Amazon. Besides what are now the usual suspects for bookstore audiences – The Walking Dead, Diary of a Wimpy Kid etc. – there’s an impressive presence for DC’s Injustice: Gods Among Us digital series, with thirteen placings in the Top 50, and once again, no Marvel presence beyond Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life As A Weapon. That book really does seem to be appealing to a mass audience in a way that nothing else from the publisher can manage…

This mock ad (described as “but a daydream wish”), from Marvel Comics The Untold Story author Sean Howe, seemed appropriate given earlier thoughts today:

Always worth linking: You can find the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund here, and the Hero Initiative here.

Heidi Macdonald traces the origins of graphic novels as a force in U.S. library lending:

The audience of children and teens is growing, critical and academic recognition has confirmed comics’ literary and artistic value, and a new shelf of modern classics has arrived. The use of comics is on the rise in educational circles as well: a recent survey by test-prep publisher Kaplan showed a third of ESL teachers use comics to help teach English, and the call for unorthodox learning materials in the new Common Core standards could result in even more attention for the growing field of nonfiction comics… According to librarians surveyed for this article, graphic novels are among the most circulated categories, right up there with teen paranormal romance and DVDs.

Reed Tucker has a plan to save the comic book industry, it seems:

The big-two publishers at this point should take a hard, honest look at themselves in the mirror and realize what they are: caretakers of trademarked characters owned by big corporations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These characters have long histories and massive name recognition around the world, and there are plenty of creative types out there who’d cut off their penciling hand to work on them. That’s the one major advantage DC and Marvel have over the other publishing houses, besides upfront money to talent.

There’s no point in the publishing giants wasting time and energy trying to launch new characters and new-concept series at this point only to cancel them in six months. (Vibe, anyone?) That part of the market is now better served by Image and other boutique publishers. And what writer or artist, in the age of the creators’ rights movement, wants to hand over a new character or concept that he won’t own?

In total, his suggestions (which are all for Marvel and DC) are:

1. Publish less comics
2. Cut all comics to $1.99 in price
3. Focus on individual titles, not crossovers
4. Don’t create new characters, but stick to established properties

While none of these – with, perhaps, the exception of the last one – are bad ideas, per se (Really, is anyone really convinced that the DCU line has to have 52 titles in it?), I remain unconvinced that any of them are necessarily realistic in today’s market, never mind likely to save the industry…