I feel a little out of the loop: Apparently, the website Wonder-Who.com popped up last week announcing Transformers star Megan Fox as Wonder Woman in the long-planned Warner Bos. movie.

However, despite what some fans and online writers believe, or hope, the website is a fake.

Never mind that Wonder Woman has been in development hell for the past seven years and that, despite countless fits and starts, no significant progress has been made on the project. Never mind the pedestrian Photoshop work.

The definitive sign the website is fake, Graeme McMillan points out, is the inclusion of the logo for Legendary Pictures: Producer Joel Silver (Silver Pictures and Dark Castle Entertainment) has had an iron grip on the Wonder Woman rights since 2001.

Less than 48 hours after a historic election, comics creators and commentators ponder what a Barack Obama presidency will mean to America … and to comics:

• At MTV’s Splash Page, Laura Hudson rounds up comments from a slew of comics notables, including Incredible Hercules writer Fred Van Lente, K Chronicles cartoonist Keith Knight, Love & Rockets creator Jaime Hernandez and DMZ and Northlanders writer Brian Wood.

“Real-life politics has played a huge role in my work, from the Rudy Giuliani ‘Quality Of Life’ regime in the ’90s to the W. Bush legacy of war, torture, illegal politics, occupation and terrorism,” Wood tells Hudson. “But this morning it was impossible to get up after a long night watching election news and put myself into the necessary pessimist headspace to work on the latest DMZ script.”

• Blogger Sean Kleefeld thinks a sense of optimism may seep into the works of creators. However, “that’s about all an Obama presidency is going to lend to comics, I figure. He can’t wave his hand and suddenly have 200,000 more people head off to their LCS every week. He can’t suddenly make paper and/or printing costs diminish to pass savings on to readers. Even the suggested economic stimulus package won’t have that dramatic an impact on comic sales since people are still spending more on food and gas.”

• Blogger Valerie D’Orazio briefly looks at how the national mood during President Bush’s two terms were reflected in comic-book storylines.

• The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna calls on fellow cartoonist to hone their caricatures of President-Elect Obama.

• Dan Goldman, who’s also interviewed in that Splash Page piece, unveils the final cover art (above) for 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail. The “sociopolitical-document-in-comics,” by Mike Crowley and Goldman, is available for pre-order. It’s due in stores in January.

This may belong under the heading “rumor mill,” but horror site Bloody Disgusting reports it has confirmed that Mandate Pictures is working on a sequel to last year’s adaptation of 30 Days of Night.

The website previously had published rumors of “very early talks” about a follow-up back in May.

According to the new report, Steve Niles and Ben Ketai are listed as co-writers; however, that could change. Niles, of course, is the co-creator of the 30 Days of Night comic-book franchise. Ketai wrote the two webseries movie tie-ins, Blood Trails and Dust to Dust.

Judging from the brief article at Bloody Disgusting, the movie will follow the plot of Dark Days, the 2003 miniseries by Niles and Ben Templesmith in which Stella Olemaun rededicates her life to wiping out vampires.

Lionsgate has released 20 new images from Frank Miller’s adaptation of The Spirit, which opens on Dec. 25.

You can see all of them at MovieWeb.

• Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons talks about catching Alan Moore’s typos, the miniseries’ colors, the movie adaptation, and audience reaction to seeing a naked Dr. Manhattan on the big screen: “He’s somebody who, by the force of his will, has reconstructed his body, so you’re not looking really at a naked man; you’re looking at a model of a naked man. I know that’s a rather fine distinction.” [Vulture]

• Cairo and Air writer G. Willow Wilson discusses those titles, superheroes, the Standard Attrition message board and group blog, and guerilla marketing. [Heavy Ink]

• The Dresden Files author Jim Butcher chats about bringing wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden to comics. [Sci Fi Wire]

• Best-selling author Stephenie Meyer rattles off some of the inspirations for her insanely popular Twilight vampire epic. Who would’ve guessed X-Men cartoons and and the Iron Man movie would be on the list alongside Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables? [EW.com]

• Ned Beauman celebrates Garth Ennis’ reinvention of Marvel’s Punisher. [Guardian]

• FEARnet profiles Devil’s Due Publishing, focusing on the company’s horror titles. [FEARnet]

A 19-year-old British man now may have the longest name in the world, and certainly the nerdiest.

George Garratt of Glastonbury last week changed his name to “Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined.”

Confirming the dangers of the Internet, The Telegraph reports he did so using an online service that charges $20. Whatever happened to teens just downloading porn?

“I wanted to be unique,” Captain Fantastic told the newspaper. “I decided upon a theme of superheroes.”

He was about to say more, but he was beaten up by a passing busload of schoolchildren.

Heidi MacDonald reports that news and commentary website ComicMix is scaling back, ending its editorial columns and leaving just online comics and pop-culture news.

Launched in February 2007, ComicMix was founded by former DC Comics editor Mike Gold, writer Glenn Hauman and Weblogs co-founder Brian Alvey. Eight months later, the site added webcomics.

In September, ComicMix announced it would offer print-on-demand collections of some those comics at Baltimore Comic-Con. However, Johanna Draper Carlson notes those volumes “didn’t come near to selling out at the one convention they were offered.”

In the comments section of his final column on Monday, Gold noted that, “the columns didn’t reach as big an audience as some of us had hoped for. Really, it’s that simple. We need to put our attention elsewhere.”

Other columnists included Denny O’Neil, Elayne Riggs, John Ostrander, Michael Davis, Martha Thomases, Michael H. Price, Ric Meyers.

Todd Allen, author of The Economics of Webcomics and a columnist for Comic Book Resources, questions the source of ComicMix’s revenue: “No ads, no merchandise, no collected edition. Those are standard revenue streams and without any of them (100 print copies in Baltimore doesn’t count), I cannot call ComicMix serious about monetizing their comics.”

If it’s November, it must be time for the best-of-the-year lists to begin, right? I’m convinced that Best-of Season eventually will start sometime around May.

Amazon.com and Publishers Weekly lead the charge, each with fairly diverse lists.

Amazon ranks its selections, and divides them into Editors’ Picks and Customer Favorites, with Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1 (Dark Horse) topping the former, and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (Amulet Books) leading the latter.

The unranked Publishers Weekly list includes Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie’s Aya of Yop City (Drawn & Quarterly), the Sammy Harkham-edited Kramers Ergot 7 (Buenaventura Press) and Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk (Viz Media).

The full lists can be seen at the links.

As if victories in the Electoral College and popular vote weren’t enough, Sen. President-Elect Barack Obama also has won the battle of the biographical comic books.

ICv2.com reports that sales of IDW Publishing’s Presidential Material: Barack Obama handily defeated those of John McCain by 59 percent to 41 percent. That’s a wider margin than the popular vote, which now stands at 52 percent to 46 percent. (Final results from Missouri and North Carolina haven’t been included in that tally.)

According to the website, the sales figures are based on copies sold to direct-market retailers, not actual sales to customers.

The biographical comics still can be ordered through IDW’s Presidential Material website.

Ah, Election Day, when a citizenry whose collective brain has been scrambled by 24-hour news channels and poll-tracking websites finally stumbles, zombie-like, into the voting booth.

What’s that have to do with this week’s comics shipping list? Nothing, really. But as “Can’t Wait for Wednesday” is a couple of hours late, I’m pointing to the election as an excuse.

If you’re not as election-obsessed as I am, your attention may be turned to what titles are hitting comics shops tomorrow.

From DC Comics, we’ll see the final volumes of New Teen Titans Archives and The Absolute Sandman, as well as Final Crisis: Resist and the first issue of The Sandman: The Dream Hunters adaptation. Marvel rolls out the Daredevil & Captain America: Dead on Arrival and Wolverine: Chop Shop one-shots, and the first issue of the big Ultimatum event. Dark Horse, meanwhile, collects Dean Motter’s Mister X sci-fi saga.

Elsewhere, IDW Publishing releases Kevin Colden’s Xeric-winning Fishtown, Macmillan publishes the autobiographical Alan’s War, and … Chris Mautner recommends porn. Really.

To see what other titles Chris and I think are worth mentioning, just keep reading. As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.

(more…)

Marvel gets behind the get-out-the-vote efforts with “Be a Hero, Vote!” button-like reminders featuring an odd array of characters. How odd? Try a Canadian mutant, a Norse god and a feathered alien.

Somehow, I just know ACORN will be blamed.

Marvel Animation has canceled the planned Hulk: Gamma Corps television series, and will fold the work into the recently announced The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

Marvel Animation Age reports the decision was made during Gamma Corps‘ pre-production because executives “saw the chance to tell bigger stories that reached far beyond Hulk’s universe.”

“It became apparent to us that the creative work that was being done to bring Hulk’s world and his villains to life was too good to relegate to his universe alone, and would be much better suited as part of an full-on Avengers scenario,” Marvel Animation’s Joshua Fine tells the fan site.

Hulk: Gamma Corps, which always was contingent on the performance of The Incredible Hulk movie, would have teamed the Green Goliath with other gamma-fueled characters, such as She-Hulk and Doc Samson.

The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is scheduled to debut in 2011.

Max Allan Collins is set to write and direct two sequels to the Oscar-winning 2002 film Road to Perdition, which was based on his DC Comics graphic novel.

The follow-ups, titled Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise, center on the adult Michael Sullivan Jr., the son of Tom Hanks’ character. The younger Sullivan returns from World War II determined to avenge his murdered father.

Phillip W. Dingeldein will executive produce. Jeffrey B. Mallian’s JBM Production Company will produce with Joel Eisenberg and EMO Films.

The original graphic novel was published in 1998 by DC Comics’ Paradox Press imprint. A follow-up miniseries, called Road to Perdition, Vol. 2: On the Road, was released in 2003 and fleshed out the six-month period in which the father and son were on the run.

You can read the press release here.

Cliff Chiang may be more awesome than Prince Rogers Nelson.

If we’re to believe Entertainment Weekly, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the replacement of Terrence Howard as James Rhodes in Iron Man 2.

According to the magazine, which relies on anonymous sources such as “those with intimate knowledge of the situation,” the reasons for Howard’s departure predate his reported “difficult behavior” on the set: He was not only the first actor signed on to Iron Man, but the highest paid.

Yes, Howard made more than star Robert Downey Jr. and co-stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges. And once the cast came together, it was too late to renegotiate Howard’s contract.

EW also reports that, “according to one source,” director Jon Favreau and the producers were uhappy with Howard’s performance — so much so that Favreau and co-writer Justin Theroux planned to minimize Rhodey’s part in the sequel. Learning of the reduced role, Marvel Studios reportedly went to Howard’s agents with a commensurate salary — “amounting to “somewhere between a 50 and 80 percent pay cut” — closer to what the supporting cast was paid for the first movie.

EW notes that it’s unclear which side walked away first. However, the result was Marvel replacing Howard with Don Cheadle, who signed on for Iron Man 2 and “subsequent installments of the Iron Man franchise,” plus The Avengers.

NBC’s Heroes underwent a creative shakeup Sunday with the firing of co-executive producers Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander.

Variety reports the two writer-producers were axed because of the network’s frustration with the direction of the three-year-old series, which has taken a pounding this season from fans and critics.

The show is averaging 9 million-plus viewers, down from 11.6 million last season. According to the trade paper, Heroes also has been grappling with overruns that far exceed the $4 million-per-episode budget.

Alexander was a co-executive producer of Lost and Alias before joining Heroes. Loeb, of course, is best known for his comics work such as Batman: The Long Halloween and A Superman for All Seasons, and as a producer of Smallville.

Here’s a Halloween treat for fans of LEGO Batman: The Videogame, Ace of Cakes and Food Network Challenge: a behind-the-scenes video detailing the creation of that fantastic Gotham City cake we blogged about last week.

(Via The Feed)

Seventy years ago tonight, Orson Welles’ now-legendary adaptation of The War of the Worlds was aired over the CBS radio network, triggering a panic nationwide as countless listeners believe the report of a Martian invasion to be real.

That’s the story, in any case. The reality, one media historian claims, was far less dramatic.

“Nobody died of fright or was killed in the panic, nor could any suicides be traced to the broadcast,” Michael J. Socolow writes in the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Hospital emergency-room visits did not spike, nor, surprisingly, did calls to the police outside of a select few jurisdictions. The streets were never flooded with a terrified citizenry. Ben Gross, the radio columnist of the New York Daily News, later remembered a ‘lack of turmoil in front of CBS’ that contrasted notably with the crowded, chaotic scene inside the building. Telephone lines in New York City and a few other cities were jammed, as the primitive infrastructure of the era couldn’t handle the load, but it appears that almost all the panic that evening was as ephemeral as the nationwide broadcast itself, and not nearly as widespread. That iconic image of the farmer with a gun, ready to shoot the aliens? It was staged for Life magazine.”

It’s an interesting article that examines how the legend took root and grew, thanks largely to the showmanship of Welles and the news media’s craving for a good story.

This being the 70th anniversary of the broadcast, it seems like a perfect time to read Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel on the Dark Horse website.