With the release today of Savage Dragon #153, the monstrous, Dragonlike character called Virus has made its way to Malcolm and Angel’s house, and conflicts raged between him and the Dragon Kids; between Overlord and rogue elements of the Vicious Circle; and between Malcolm and just about everybody he met. Erik Larsen sat down with us to provide some color commentary on the issue.

Blog@Newsarama: You know, it’s funny–that exoskeletal costume basically has NOTHING unnecessary on it–except the eyelash/antennae. Are they just for show or do they have a function?

Erik Larsen: It’s a balance thing–like with a cat and its whiskers. Helps her keep her balance scaling walls and jumping from rooftop to rooftop (and yes–I did just make that up. Pretty impressive, eh?).

Blog@: I know we’ve talked a little bit about Malcolm being confused about how he feels for Angel–is it possible that hormones are playing a role in some of what we’re seeing here? Even if you can put his denial of Dragon’s death up to “faith in his old man,” it seems like the beating and trash-talking of a basically defenseless villain is something worth noting…!

EL: She’s hardly defenseless– but I was trying to show Malcolm’s desperation and growing anxiousness and panic. He’s running out of options and he’s in a bad way. (more…)

A joke made by Ryan Reynolds in last week’s Saturday Night Live monologue–that they were going to start shooting Green Lantern soon, “…so look for that in spring 2053.” There was immediately some speculation as to exactly what he meant by that (and it really sounded more snarky than necessary when he opened with “…because there’s nothing kids love more than lanterns.”), which to me was made even odder by the fact that Sunday morning he was doing blog interviews where he was talking about his excitement over the shoot, which he claims is still on track for February.

While technically he isn’t contradicting himself here (since in the SNL monologue he said that the GL flick would start shooting soon), I can’t help but wonder if someone at Warner Brothers/DC Entertainment put him out there to do spin control when he pooched some of his earliest public comments about what promises to be a major film both for Warner Brothers and for Reynolds’ career. Win, lose or draw, Green Lantern will be a huge, big-budget affair and it’ll probably go down as one of the great successes or failures of the superhero genre.

Reynolds also gave an interview this weekend that described the film as a “space epic,” revealing some minor details about the movie (such as the fact that Kilowog and Sinestro will be involved and that about a third of the movie is set on Oa) and by his presence seeming to confirm the report’s claim that the film is on track for a June 17, 2011, release date.

Over at the Vertigo blog, fans who post their favorite Fables character and why have a shot (right now a little over 50/50, since only 18 people have entered) to win a free copy of the forthcoming Fables original prose novel, Peter & Max. Written by Fables creator Bill Willingham and featuring spot illustrations by Steve Leialoha, the book will be released on October 15, but readers have until October 9 to post and win.

Ten winners will be chosen randomly (so you don’t have to be a writer of Grimm Brothers caliber to have a shot) and notified on October 13 on the Vertigo blog, or else entrants can contact Vertigo by e-mail after that date to get a full list of winners.

There’s something vaguely insulting about CBS’s The Big Bang Theory.

I think it comes primarily from the fact that, these days, it’s accepted lore that The Big Bang Theory is actually “on our side,” as it were. The conventional wisdom, as espoused by show writer and former computer programmer Bill Prady, is that the comic book- and science-fiction-loving main characters aren’t actually being lampooned but lionized. The notion that—even though the characters are stereotypical, one-dimensional and not at all human—we’re supposed to be happy with their portrayal because, after all, it’s a modicum better than The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, seems a little absurd.
(more…)

Family Guy’s eighth season premiered last night with one of its Brian/Stewie “Road To…” special musical episodes. In this case, the geek-favorite show might be even more inviting to comics fans, as the title was “Road to the Multiverse” and featured the pair visiting a variety of different worlds. On each, they experienced that universe’s version of the Griffin family.
My first thought was that the Family Guy multiverse is not entirely dissimilar to the one that we saw in Final Crisis. Random, identifiable sight gags that separate the universes in Family Guy aren’t unlike the ones used by Grant Morrison, who had “The Watchmen Superman,” “The Black Superman” and “The Vampire Superman” rounding out the Supermen of 52 worlds who appeared at the end of Final Crisis. In Family Guy, we’re treated to a world where dogs are in charge, a world where everyone has two heads and “The Robot Chicken Universe,” where Stewie taunts the inhabitants, “How does it feel to be on a real network for about thirty seconds?” before leaving.
While the dog-controlled universe (where Stewie the dog and Brian the human have already been on this trip before, and so they know what to do and how to resolve the episode) was good for a couple of chuckles, the world I wish they had visited—which unfortunately the show’s writers have apparently been denied access—is one where Family Guy is still funny.

Like every month, Dan Jurgens joined us here on Blog@ to discuss the most recent issue of Booster Gold. This month’s issue, #24, featured the “rise of the Black Beetle,” and saw resolution to the apparent premature deaths of the Teen Titans at the hands of Deathstroke and the original Ravager way back in Deathstroke’s first appearance.

Building toward the battle in the Batcave next month that will start to put things into motion implicating the man behind the Black Beetle mask (and scarabs), Booster Gold #24 was an action-packed issue filled with dramatic images and a few nice twists, including a great moment for Kyle Rayner fans.

Join us back here in three short weeks, as The Gold Exchange gets back on schedule!

Blog@Newsarama: Is Booster just like everyone else, where in all of these variant timelines there are variant Boosters? Or is our guy more insulated from chronal change? I ask because often, everyone thinks he’s dead in these situations and part of me wonders if maybe he is.

Dan Jurgens: I think it depends on the timeline. The closer the timeline to our own reality, the more likely it is to have its own version of Booster. We have seen other Boosters in various timelines. My general take on this particular timeline is that it developed without its own Booster Gold because he would have been gone from “the departure point.” (more…)

The release of Young Liars #18 a couple of weeks ago was bittersweet–a terrific issue that put an unfortunate and premature punctuation at the end of a brilliant, creative and daring young series by one of the premiere creators of comics-for-grown-ups in America. When this column goes live at Comic Related, there’ll be more room for consideration of what the series’ end means–but for now, Blog@Newsarama presents the final conversation with David Lapham about the monthly ins and outs of the series. Apologies to Lapham and the readers that this has taken so long to post, but I’ve spent the last ten days completely incommunicado due to a family trip to Alaska, where the Internet is decidedly rarer than it is in Upstate New York.

Blog@Newsarama: So we’ve talked a little bit before about the need (or not) to establish a timeline for the title by using “real” dates or at least dates that can be tied together. Was there a reason for placing the climax in the future?

David Lapham: The climax is not in the future. Looking at it again I can see how that may have been confusing. The opening was set at an incident in the past, when Danny wakes up in the hospital we’re on the same timeline as everything that’s been happening along for the arc. When he comes out of the dream there’s a caption you could miss in the lower right corner that reestablishes that we’re days from the Anniversary Spectacular. (more…)

This week’s DC Nation column has Dan DiDio putting a question to Wonder Woman readers (and comics fans in general, as I’m sure the people who feel vested in such a discussion goes beyond the title’s audience): Should Wonder Woman, which is one of DC’s most consistently-published books sincs superheroes were invented even as it get canceled once a decade or so, return to its “original” numbering and turn the upcoming #45 to #600, reflective of the number of ongoing, monthly Wonder Woman issues that have been printed?

This is, of course, a thorny question. When I was growing up, Superman and Spider-Man were relaunched with new “first issues” to take advantage of popular creative teams or to build interest in the properties. As a teenager, Superman #75 seemed like it was going to be the most important comic book published in my lifetime (hey, I was a kid, okay?), and X-Men #1’s cover sprung to mind whenever someone mentioned either the X-Men or its artist, Jim Lee, as my first mental reference. As these books have been folded into other titles, canceled or returned to their old numbering (along with many other examples of the same kind of fuzzy math), I’ve felt a little pang of something giving way–even though really I wasn’t reading them anymore anyway, and whatever I might have felt I was “losing” had been gone for years as the publishers routinely changed creative rosters. But there’s always some heat generated by this discussion; should Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern or Jeph Loeb’s Hulk assume the numbering of one (or collect the numbers and add together all) of their predecessors?

At any rate, DC seems ready to make the change with Wonder Woman, but wants to generate some interest in doing so. With Marvel’s 70th anniversary happening and so many extra-sized or event-related one-shots or issues coming out (and with a number of issues returning to their old numbering just in time for milestone issues), they had a built-in notification system to let the readers know that the #600 that came after #50 didn’t represent a sea change for Captain America’s creative or editorial direction. DC doesn’t have anything like that and so instead they’re turning to interactivity.

That’s right–if you want to see Wonder Woman #45 magically transform into Wonder Woman #600, you have to write to Dan DiDio. Six-hundred postcards from fans asking for the change will make the change happen. DiDio’s column explains the arguments for the change (Wonder Woman is an important part of DC’s history and the numberings on Batman and Superman dwarf hers, so it makes her seem less-than) and against it (big numbers are daunting to potential new readers who don’t want to feel weighed down by continuity), and lays out this challenge to the readers, which makes fans an integral part of the decision-making process.

Given that six hundred is a relatively small number (far less than the letter-writing campaigns to save Manhunter reportedly generated a few years ago), it seems likely that we’ll see this happen…but I doubt it’s a slam-dunk. I wonder if aside from a very vocal group of fans who are passionate on either side of the issue, whether enough fans will be motivated to actually engage in the ritual of mailing something from the post office in order to make this happen.

Note: This interview discusses—almost immediately—the ending to IDW’s recent series The Life and Times of Savior 28. More than any other issue of the book, it should be noted here and now that the “creator commentary” provided by J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Cavallaro in this issue are SPOILER-FILLED. Think of these interviews as a director’s commentary on a DVD; if you don’t want to know who Keyser Soze is at the beginning of The Usual Suspects, then you don’t listen to Bryan Singer’s commentary before your first viewing of the actual movie.

The story of Savior 28 and his Daring Disciple draws to a close with the release of this week’s fifth issue, and while there are some obvious and predictable moments in the issue (let’s face it—there’s one page that we’ve been building to since page one), there are also a few nice surprises along the way. Savior 28 is what we need in our superheroes—in spite of the kind of bad press that would make Peter Parker blush, he inspires everyday people, and in spite of his death (way back in the first issue, so don’t worry folks, I’m not spoiling anything here) he continues, in a way that I can’t imagine most mainstream superheroes being able to compete with, to effect positive change in the world he left behind.

As usual, writer J.M. DeMatteis and artist Mike Cavallaro sat down to discuss the issue with us. (more…)

While the site for Disney’s D23 Fan Expo doesn’t mention Marvel Comics at all, one has to assume that the studio’s recently-announced acquisition of the comic book giant plays nicely into a convention that they, as well as the mainstream press, have been comparing to Comic-Con International.

While “D23″ (Short for Disney, 1923, the latter being the year that Walt Disney arrived in Hollywood) was formerly just the name of a fan community of Disney enthusiasts, their decision to launch their own, Disney-centric convention in Anaheim and use it as a springboard for Disney properties raises a number of questions: If Disney expands beyond just their own broad media empire and seeks out partners to make the appeal of the conventions a little greater, will comics publishers or their representatives be invited? What if they decide that D23 and its Disney-only, Marvel-only focus is better press for them than other shows, and begin to trim back Marvel’s convention appearances, or limit the number of high-profile Disney events that can happen at San Diego? Does this render moot the conclusions that some of us were starting to draw regarding Marvel choosing a couple of recent Reed conventions over their Wizard-owned counterparts?

While Marvel’s experiments with “exclusive” conventions was less than impressive, it seems logical that Disney (who already have two year-round attractions dedicated to celebrating their properties) could take the D23 show on the road and “bring Disney to the masses,” as it were. Adding Marvel Comics to that empire stands to help them attract convention-goers who are more than just tourists; they’re walking photo-opportunities, enthusiastic Internet posters and just generally people who are used to the idea of expressing their fandom by getting together in large groups and celebrating all the best things about the entertainment they love.

Some reviews, originally written for last week’s Best Shots, which unfortunately got lost under that big metaphorical couch that is someone’s Spam filter: (more…)

Since the whole Civil War/Dark Reign thing started happening at Marvel, I’ve been telling parents who talk to me about comics that DC is a safer bet if you insist on giving your kids mainstream, in-universe comics for their morality plays. I explain that while both publishers pretty routinely present rape, murder and all that good stuff, and that either of the two should be vetted first by a parent, at least DC had heroes you could look up to.

And then, yesterday, I visited the DC Comics website.

Both Justice League: Cry for Justice, which features hideously amoral representations of superheroes talking sex, ogling teenagers and torturing villains, and Magog—which is inherently amoral, given that his genesis came as an almost-villain in Kingdom Come and each new story featuring the character has seen him kill more or less indiscriminately and then blame it on a military background—were featured on the front page of the site at the same time, along with The Shield, one of J.M. Straczynski’s Red Circle comics. While I know nothing about the Red Circle book, I would have hoped for a Superman or Flash comic—something with a stand-up guy for the hero—would have rated a plug on a page so violence and amorality-heavy. As it stands, the three main images you see on the website of DC Comics are pretty sketchy characters. And I don’t mean to say they aren’t well-developed.

Yes, I know that both DC and Marvel have their respective young readers titles and that these books are geared toward a more and more mature audience–but the reality is, when I was a teenager, Kingdom Come was one of the books that helped me get past the “Oh, cool, he can fly!” mentality and really define what a superhero is. Part of it, to me, is that they’re actually at least somewhat heroic. And these guys just don’t fit the bill.

Hey, kids! Read your own comics.

Coming in November from Image Comics is the Chew: Taster’s Choice trade paperback. Ordinarily, a collected edition being rushed off the presses a little quicker than usual because of high sales numbers on the floppies wouldn’t be all that interesting–but in the case of Chew, arguably Image’s most successful new title launch since The Walking Dead, the solicitation also touts a “special introductory price.” The paperback, collecting five issues of the comic, is $9.99, which means that even after tax many direct-market customers will pay less than $10 for the book once their discounts are factored in.

Given that Boom! Studios’ most popular non-licensed title right now, Mark Waid’s Irredeemable, got a similar $9.99 treatment for a four-issue collection (along with the simultaneous release and 99-cent price point for the series’ fifth issue), one has to wonder if publishers besides Marvel and DC are seeing smaller price tags on the first trade as a good way to hook potential new readers. Given the serial nature of comics, it’s a well-known phenomenon that readers will stick with books for long periods of time, because of a relationship they develop the the characters or creators. For many books, the secret is just getting those fans to open up their first issue in the first place. Once they’ve done so, books that remain good for long periods of time–like Starman, Preacher or The Walking Dead–develop substantial cult followings and have potential for licensing and longevity that’s rarely matched in the creator-owned or non-Superman/Batman/X-Men market.

What do you think? Would a $10 price tag make books like The Life and Times of Savior 28, The Perhapanauts or Jennifer’s Body more attractive? Discounting your personal preferences (I think we’d all like to pay less for our books), do you think a lower price point will be an effective selling tool for some of the more obscure titles? And if it catches on, what “Big Two” titles would benefit from a discounted rate on the first trade just to convince people to try them? I’m thinking $9.99 volumes would be a great strategy for marketing the collected editions of DC’s new “second feature” titles.

This week’s release of Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon #152 sees Malcolm and Angel trying to figure out how to resurrect their father, while the Golden Age Daredevil and the Li’l Wise Guys cope with the fallout from their battle with Mako the Shark Man last issue and the new Overlord battles with…well, with Savage Dragon, whom he, too, has been working to bring back to life. A little confusing? Sure. Erik Larsen sat down with us to suss it all out. (more…)

With the sixtieth anniversary of his creation looming, Harvey Comics favorite Casper (the Friendly Ghost) is seeing the release of his first comic book series in more than a decade. Ardden Entertainment, who published a 75^th Anniversary hardcover book for Flash Gordon last year, acquired the publishing rights to create the six-issue miniseries Casper & The Spectrals, featuring the return to comics of not only Casper, but Wendy the Good Witch and Hot Stuff as well. Edited by star Spider-Man writer J.M. DeMatteis (co-creator of this year’s smartest superhero comic, IDW’s The Life and Times of Savior 28) and written by Todd Dezago (of Tellos and The Perhapanauts fame), the series will reintroduce the characters to a new generation of readers, updating the art style with sleek pencils by Pedro Delgado and computer coloring the likes of which these characters have never seen. Blog@Newsarama tracked down Dezago to talk about the project. (more…)

While it may not be as sexy for the average fan as the “Who is the Blackest Night Big Bad?” question I posed a while back, there’s another mystery out there that’s nearer and dearer to my Booster Gold-loving heart; namely “Who is the Black Beetle?”

Back when it was solicited, Booster Gold #24 promised to answer the question—but according to a recent Gold Exchange interview with Dan Jurgens, that issue and the one that follows it will now just have some movement in the direction of answering the question, not an answer unto itself. He did, however, promise that #25 would have at least one major revelation: the identity of The Black Beetle’s mysterious ally, a lab-coated stranger who remains locked up in a high-tech facility in the side of a snow-covered mountain while Black Beetle does all the dirty work. Whether this man is Black Beetle’s boss, or the other way around, is unknown at this point (when I referred to him as Black Beetle’s “puppet master” once, Jurgens was quick to point out we didn’t know who was really in charge there), but he seems like a good place to start for speculation’s sake. So: Who is he? I’ve got some ideas—and then next week I’ll look into who might be The Black Beetle himself. As with the Blackest Night story, I’ll start with the guy who’s my odds-on favorite…but the rest of the list has no particular order. (more…)

While Booster Gold and Rip Hunter both walked away from last issue’s explosions pretty much unscathed, all the classic Teen Titans except Raven—a powerful empathy and the daughter of the villain Trigon—were killed, creating a time derailment that, among other things, caused Dick Grayson never to become Batman following Bruce Wayne’s apparent death. As the two join forces in the past with Raven (late to the party for her teammates’ battle with Jericho, Deathstroke and the Black Beetle), Hunter determines that the only way to keep it all from happening is to go into the future, and see what it is that the Black Beetle wants.

When they get there, of course, it’s the future of a world in which the Teen Titans’ deaths paved the way for Raven’s father Trigon to take over the world, killing the Justice League and leaving them without successors to protect the next generation. While Kyle Rayner and Zatanna appear to be leading a fledgling resistance movement against the cosmic dictator, it doesn’t appear to be much more effective than the revolt Green Arrow and Hakwman were leading against Max Lord in the “Blue and Gold” storyline. It’s an issue full of a lot of talking and stage-setting, which promises to deliver with a LOT of punching and explosions in next month’s conclusion to the “Day of Death” story. Still, Booster’s upcoming Blackest Night tie-ins don’t start until #26, so what’s in store for the landmark 25^th issue of the book? We talked to Dan Jurgens for some commentary on this month’s issue and some clues as to what’s next for the world’s most commercially-viable superhero. (more…)

Jim McLauchlin at the HERO Initiative has blogged a series of images from Chicago Comic-Con’s Sachs and Violens Speed Dating party hosted by comics legend George Pérez. The party was held to celebrate the release of the Sachs and Violens perfume and cologne oil from Black Phoenix Alchemy Laboratories.

Pérez traded in his “artist of Crisis on Infinite Earths” nametag for one that said “Doctor of Love” for the event, which was held to benefit the HERO Initiative. Check out the photos by Wizard Entertainment’s Dan Reilly, and a link to buy the perfume and cologne, at the link above.

In spite of having been corrected by many, many readers who say that Nekron is the presumptive winner here, I’m going to present the second five of my list of “suspects for the Black Lantern Guardian” and the reasons for why I think they could be in the running. To be honest, some of the candidates have changed in my brain as a result of talking with fans (I’d forgotten completely about the Mad God of Sector 3600) but I’m going to present the ones originally written and let y’all discuss them along with some of your admittedly cleverer ideas!

Cyborg-Superman

As last depicted (in Johns’ own Sinestro Corps War), Henshaw is obsessed with death, craving it although it can never come for him. The Anti-Monitor (who is the power source for the black battery) had association with another guy kinda like that—Pariah—and he forced Pariah to live a life full of pain and misery for years. Were Henshaw to learn of Pariah—and of the character’s eventual (short-lived) death—it would stand to reason that he might use the Anti-Monitor himself to bring about his own ending.

Why not him? Henshaw isn’t in any position to have much interest in the seven million dead of Coast City rising from the ashes with power rings.

Darkseid

Anti-Life has always been his obsession, and bringing about death on a broad scale one of his methods. So is it a stretch to think that the despot of Apokolips might be serving Death with a Big D in some capacity? Also, he was last seen as being on his way to transitioning into the Fifth World, living as sort of ambient energy after his body was killed, so it’s a fair guess that he could be the disembodied voice that Black Hand is hearing…AND that would speak to the hints that we’d start to get some Bruce Wayne clues during Blackest Night.

Why not him? Aside from just having been shot by the Bat-God-Killing-Gun at the end of Final Crisis, there’s the fact that…well, he was the VILLAIN in Final Crisis. Using him again so soon would seem a little uninspired.

John Stewart

Most folks don’t remember it, but at the end of Green Lantern: Mosaic, John Stewart was at least briefly imbued with the powers of a Guardian of the Universe. I was never entirely clear on when that power was taken away (maybe a reader can tell me), but my position is that, first of all, when Appa Ali Apsa started taking on human characteristics, it drove him mad—so what might happen when a human gets Guardian-powers? I wonder if subconsciously some part of his mind and some fraction of the powers he was granted have been working on this for years. This would be a serious twist AND fit Johns’ bill of a very, very dangerous badguy.

Why not him? It’d seem pretty random and arbitrary. Plus, he’s one of DC’s few reasonably popular African-American heroes and was “The Black Guy” on Justice League Unlimited, so at a time where the company is looking for diversity, it’s hard to imagine DiDio signing off on making Stewart a mass-murderer.

Hector Hammond

As mentioned by a reader in the previous installment of the list, Hammond is a classic Green Lantern villain who has made brief, menacing appearances in Johns’ current run and who has mind-control capabilities. While he’s never undertaken anything on this scale, it’s safe to say that anyone who turns out to be this story’s villain, will never have attempted anything so big before.

Why not him? Apparently Johns has made convention comments fingering Hammond as the first post-Blackest Night bad guy. Also, the scope of his power has never been great enough that Hal couldn’t overcome it with time and/or a little help—so the notion of his controlling a Martian Manhunter with even a portion of his original memories and powers seems a little preposterous.

Blackguard

Seriously? Come on—“Blackguard, the Black Guardian?” How cool would that look on a business card? And he’s got beef with Booster Gold and the JLI, so raising Beetle would be a natural. He was last seen in one of the Giffen-DeMatteis JLI miniseries (which apparently are non-canonical to some extent anyway) as part-owner of a bar with Guy Gardner, giving him a connection to the GLs.

Why not him? He’s a putz with little or no power, who really had no business putting up a fight against Booster twenty years ago. Also, he was last seen in one of the Giffen-DeMatteis JLI miniseries (which apparently are non-canonical to some extent anyway) as part-owner of a bar with Guy Gardner.

Along with the release of its third issue this week, Image’s Chew saw a second print of #2 and a third print (well, three-and-a-half if you count the one in The Walking Dead) of #1. We sat down for a brief conversation with series writer John Layman about setting up the series, and his plans for the future.

Blog@Newsarama: What made you decide to just jump in headlong, rather than spending an issue or an arc getting readers acclimated to this new world?

John Layman: What issue are we talking about? I was sorta under the impression I WAS getting readers acclimated to the new world. There’s a whole of aspects to it people have not seen. Trust me, I’m rollin’ it out slow! (more…)