DC Comics, via the Source, has announced that Milestone Comics will get their day in the sun next year with MILESTONE FOREVER, which will be written by company founder Dwayne McDuffie.

This series, which will bring together Static, Hardware, Icon, Shadow Cabinet, and Blood Syndicate together with original Milestone artists John Paul Leon, Mark Bright, Chris Cross and Denys Cowan, will be a bittersweet tale that “chronicles the literal end of a universe, and the birth of something new, with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.”

“16 years ago this month, industry giant DC Comics and upstart Milestone Media entered into an unprecedented creative partnership, producing 14 interlocking, creator-owned titles including Hardware, Icon, and the multimedia hit that would best be known as Static Shock,” wrote McDuffie. ” The story Milestone chose to tell was an audacious one, larger than life on its surface, character and story-driven at its base, Humanist and multicultural at its heart. For over 250 issues, fans explored a superhero universe like no other.”

DC announced that they would be bringing Milestone into the DCU proper in 2008, where Icon, Hardware, and the Shadow Cabinet guest-starred with the Justice League. Since then, Static has — perhaps not surprisingly — gotten the most time in the mainstream DCU, having joined the Teen Titans.

Have you heard the reviews about Archaia’s Days Missing yet? Have you not read the first full FREE issue yet? Still not convinced? Then check out Frazer Irving’s beautiful covers for the series.

According to Bleeding Cool, which has a larger version of these images, apparently all five covers lock together to create this cool image. What say you, Rama readers?

Interested in process pieces? If you have the one of the most celebrated graphic novels of all time, what happens when you have to remaster it?

Corey Breen, senior pre-press artist at DC Comics and all-round nice guy, has written a blog post over at Master Digital Coloring detailing the whole experience of working on Absolute Watchmen. With 1980s artwork having to be reworked for an oversized format, it proved to be a tough process — here’s a highlight:

Since we no longer have the original art to older comics such as this, what we have are the pages in the film library.  Back in the day, all our books were shot using film on acetate.  Our film library has extensive books all on film, and when we need to reprint them, it is shot from that film, and made digital for us to use.  But this poses a lot of problems.  Since the film is well, film, and it is old, when you make a digital file from film, it can be dirty, have scratches, and have sections missing, depending on how well the film was originally made.  This was the case with the Watchmen ‘film’ we wound up having to use.

Breen goes on to discuss the main theme of remastering Watchmen — not noir, but moire, an unsightly and jagged form of lines that unfortunately crops up with high-res images of old half-toned art. It’s a cool process piece, especially for anyone interested in the production side of comics. Give it a read!

Image Comics has announced that for Spawn #196, it’s going to be an old-school Image team taking on that warrior from Hell.

In addition to series creator Todd McFarlane handling inks and second series artist Greg Capullo handling layouts, Image partner Rob Liefeld will be handling the pencil work for this issue! With the conclusion of ENDGAME, this year’s worth of storylines will tie together Detectives Sam and Twitch, Bill Winston’s suicide, with the mystery of new Hellspawn Jim Downing’s awakening.

“I was looking for good artistic help, and remembered inking over Rob on his New Mutant covers back in the Marvel days, and most recently a little bit of IMAGE UNITED,” McFarlane said in a press statement. “I thought it would be a fun experiment to see what Capullo layouts, Liefeld pencils and my inks looked like together on a handful of pages.”

The book is due out November 25th, and will cost $2.95.

Karl Kerschl has posted up an awesome sketch this weekend of that fiercest of X-Men, Wolverine, and with this image — forgive the pun — you better believe he tore up from the floor up:

Kerschl quipped that this image is probably of Logan frustrated that he lost his keys, but I say if that would mean we could see this guy take on Wolverine more often, I’d probably toss those keys down the sewer drain myself. What do you think, Rama readers?

Comics Alliance has a particularly fascinating post up, going back to the days of yore — 1990, that is.

In those glory days of million-selling comics, House of Ideas architect Stan Lee also did some video interviews with “Comic Book Greats” — and in this case, the interview is with Rob Liefeld.

What’s so fascinating for me is to see Liefeld really at the beginning of his career. For frame of reference, in this video, Rob Liefeld is 23 — which is both cool and a bit intimidating, as that’s exactly how old I am right now. Listening to him discuss how he broke into the industry — at age 19, no less — is a good story, even as breaking into the industry is tougher than ever.

If you click the Youtube link up above, there are additional parts to this interview — watching Rob draw “Cross” — one of the early names for Cable, if I recall correctly — is additionally cool. Do you think Rob knew how popular that character would become? And listening to him talk about style, about working with editors, well, it’s definitely something you should see. Check it out, let us know what you think!

Despite being a proud Massachusettsian, I was busy working for the weekend and wasn’t able to hit the Boston Comic-Con this weekend, which featured comics creators ranging from Scott Wegener, Cliff Chiang, Walt Simonson, and many, many more.

But to make things a little bit better for those who weren’t able to go, Chiang has posted up some images of sketches he drew during this weekend’s Boston Con, ranging from Daredevil to Black Cat to Doctor Strange. But this one is my favorite:

Lois Lane, everybody. Talk about a beautiful image. Surprisingly, a look at the Comic Book Database shows that Chiang has never tackled the Man of Steel in an official capacity before — it’s too bad, because if this image is any indication, he’d hit that series more powerful than a locomotive.

[Hat tip to Kevin Church]

Readers of Warren Ellis’s Bad Signal Mailing List have given us a heads-up about a somewhat misleading ad from Wizard Entertainment about Wizard World Toronto Comic Con.

Ellis himself has put an image of the ad up on his web site, apparently from the latest issue of ToyFare:

Unfortunately, this ad is more than a little off the mark, as Ellis said that this is the first he’s heard of the convention, and that he isn’t sure he will be hitting ANY conventions in 2010, let alone Toronto.

“I’m presuming this is some kind of impossibly convoluted but innocent mistake, as opposed to ‘well, if we just SAY Warren Ellis is showing up, then he’ll HAVE to,’” Ellis said on his blog. “But I’ve had no contact from Wizard World about this or any other show, so, god knows what actually happened for this to have somehow gotten printed…”

Things obviously happen in the world of publishing, but no lie, it’s kind of a weird occurrence in any event. (Unless a tiny Warren Ellis has somehow joined the Astonishing X-Men team. That’s actually something I wouldn’t mind reading.)

If there was a book that isn’t Sandman more deserving of oversized, supersaturated Absolute edition, Promethea is it. It’s a sometimes-skipping, sometimes-running, sometimes-strolling journey through a dream world as wild and beautiful as Neil Gaiman’s but ruled by a warrior-queen who’s everything Wonder Woman ought to be.

Promethea is a living story, and she’s just taken over a new human host. The previous incarnations, like something out of Joseph Campbell, have all left their mark on her, and they each have something to teach young Sophie Bangs, a college student whose research has led her to Promethea’s tale.

I love Alan Moore (which should almost go without saying) and yet I’d never read these stories, which are probably the most like me of any of his works. Promethea is in one sense the wealth of woman-knowledge and magic passed down from generation to generation, and that’s an idea I can certainly get behind. But the story is less about ideas than about feelings; less a story than an experience.

Imagination-scapes unfurl across double-page spreads full of symbols that evoke a visceral reaction and yet are things you’ve never seen or heard of. It makes me want to write, or dream, or write about dreams. Hell, it makes me want to draw, and I’m no good at that.

Layered into the story are thoughtful critiques of power, hierarchy, patriarchy, as well as pokes and gibes at mainstream comic storytelling. The tale gets stranger as it goes on, spinning off into splashy explanations of Moore’s thoughts on magic and myth within the myth he’s created.

It’s less a narrative than a trip, fables layered on top of stories and characters’ identities shifting into dreams. If Watchmen is Moore’s Ulysses, then Promethea is Finnegans Wake and it demands the same experience—stop trying to make it make sense and just let it wash over you and enjoy the ride.

I really enjoyed this video from GRITtv, with cartoonists Jennifer Camper, Carlo Quispe, and Erika Lopez, discussing drawing comics and depicting marginalized lives.

Host Laura Flanders notes that most comics have in common, “the idea of capturing different dimensions,” and her guests are people from different ethnic and economic backgrounds, telling their stories particularly through the lens of their sexuality. Camper notes that she likes to tell “regular stories about working-class people,” and Quispe discusses “being infatuated with someone for twenty minutes” while drawing them. Lopez jokes that she is popular because she is “ranting from the bottom,” and all three note that it is not just people of color, not just LGBT people who read their work.

“Those are the kinds of stories I wanted to read,” Camper said, and the others agreed.

For New Yorkers, there’s a show of these cartoonists’ work opening Thursday at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.

Comic artist to TV director might not seem like the most obvious jump, but it makes sense if you think about it a bit, I suppose. Anyway, according to Splash Page, John Cassaday is set to direct an episode of Dollhouse this season.

“He’s going to f— up so much,” joked Whedon of the fan-favorite artist’s “Dollhouse” debut behind the camera.

“He’s a storyteller,” said Whedon of Cassaday. “I gave him shorter scripts than any other artist I’ve worked with because he has an extraordinary visual sense and it very much matches my own. … I know him as a person, his sensibility, the way he is with other people and I just feel that this step is logical for him, it’s something he’s been pursuing for a while.”

While the celebrated “Planetary” artist will be flexing slightly different muscles to direct the “Dollhouse” episode, he’s still looking to contribute in the area of production he knows best, too.

“The only problem we have is he wants to storyboard his episode, and I’m like, ‘You do know that it’s a script that will be late, right?’” said Whedon.

We’ve already seen the awesome that was Whedon/Cassaday in comic form; what will they dream up for live action?

The internet loves you, and it brings you fun things. Today:

Twilight-haters will no doubt have even more to complain about, but I don’t care: Stephenie Meyer’s The Host to be made into a movie.

From Wired: Get to know the Surrogates comic before the movie hits.

Fun little comic page by Matthew Sheret and Julia Scheele.

Jason Aaron has some thoughts on Scalped. You know, the best comic that comes out each month. (He didn’t say that. I did.)

Another story from Wired. I don’t know why I’m linking it, really. Those illustrations are sort of cool, I guess. Who’s the artist? Oh, some guy named Ryan Kelly…

One of the only reviews of Jennifer’s Body that I’ve seen that doesn’t spend half its time complaining about Diablo Cody (see comments on Stephenie Meyer).

I’ll repost this under events, but I found it interesting: from Johanna Draper Carlson, a lecture by Noah Berlatsky, whose blog examines classic Wonder Woman comics.

Y’know, I usually don’t talk too much religion on this blog — perhaps it’s the Jewish holidays that are bringing it to the fore for me (so happy belated 5770 to my fellow Red Sea pedestrians) — but G. Willow Wilson has a really interesting look about Islam and comics over at Broken Frontier.

Here’s a highlight from the article:

We talked about AIR, and he asked whether I’d gotten any push-back from conservatives. This is our polite way of saying threats from fundamentalists. I told him I’d heard a little grumbling, primarily about Blythe’s skirt. Her premarital relationship too, but mostly the skirt. It came as a surprise to me—here I thought I was starting a conversation about whether or not it’s acceptable to use pagan symbols to make a point about monotheism. Was anybody concerned by the giant winged serpent that shows up in almost every issue? Nope, just the skirt.

It’s really fascinating stuff, especially once she starts talking about Teshkeel Media’s The 99, a superhero team series I got to read a few years ago via a close friend at Los Angeles’ Levantine Cultural Center. Click here to read the rest of the column — it’s definitely worth reading.

Just when you thought the comicsphere could rest easy after the past few weeks — the heirs of Jack “King” Kirby have something to say.

The heirs of one of the architects of the House of Ideas have sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel, Disney, Paramount, Sony, Fox, and Universal, the New York Times has reported.

There’s no word about what characters are involved with this — or if the rights being discussed are for comics, film, television, licensing, or all of the above — but considering Kirby has helped create characters ranging from the (original) X-Men to the Fantastic Four, it could be big. Any change-up would occur around 2014, which would be years after Paramount’s Avengers films, Sony’s Spider-Man 4, or Fox’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine sequel would hit theatres.

On the legal side of things, this is more or less bleeding edge copyright and intellectual property war being waged here. DC has seen similar issues with the Siegel estate’s legal dealings regarding the Superman franchise — and in this case, both the Siegels and the Kirbys have the same lawyer, Marc Toberoff. The phrase “work for hire” will almost certainly come into play here, as the creation of these characters in the early 1960s didn’t typically come with the most ironclad of creator contracts.

But what about that Disney deal? Will this spoil that? Not according to Disney reps, who told the NY Times, “the notices involved are an attempt to terminate rights seven to 10 years from now, and involve claims that were fully considered in the acquisition.” Stay tuned to Blog@ and the mothership for more info…

I am off to Bergen Street Comics’ release party for Beasts of Burden tonight, so I’ll save my thoughts on the comic for tomorrow. For now, have some linkage:

Johanna Draper Carlson did not much like the Whiteout movie.

Warren Ellis asked artists to Remake/Remodel Black Orchid. He must’ve asked VERY nicely…

Some thoughts on comics and race in an interesting discussion thread on Racialicious.

The Rumpus brings you a review of Shane Acker’s 9.

I like this interview a lot; it’s full of interesting thoughts about the nature of vampire stories and why they appeal to us.

But I think then the thing that changed everything and gave vampire fiction, if not a new lease on life a new lease on death, would have been AIDS. You hit the early ’80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood, an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as metaphor — not particularly as a metaphor for gay sex, but again as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jong quote, that vampirism is the ultimate ”zipless f—.” And I think you got the resurgence of vampirism in the ’80s as ”zipless f—.” And then in a sort of continuous transmutation, you had Lost Boys, which is essentially vampirism as wish fulfillment — it was really the first time you can absolutely take a pin and point to these great vampire moments on celluloid or on video, or in print, whatever, where people really seemed to have looked around and gone, ”What is the downside of this thing again? Hang on, you get to live forever, you get to be absolutely sexually attractive and you don’t have zits… You have magic powers; what you’re giving up is daylight.”

Gaiman traces the history of the vampire story from Dracula to the modern day–it’s worth reading in its entirety.

Jamie McKelvie

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(click through for larger version) Ryan Kelly:

Fiona Staples:

Becky Cloonan:

(again, click through for larger)

Molly Crabapple:

This post on girl power in comics, from Retconning My Brain, is a seriously awesome piece that made me want to read a lot of these books (Power Girl, Batgirl, etc.) more than I already did.

The original “Girl power,” a sugared-up, popified version of what Riot Grrl was, hit when I was in my last years of high school. The late 90s, which brought us post-communications deregulation prefab pop, but also at least sort of acknowledged that women wanted pop culture that was their own, and that there was more to it than fighting over a man on a soap opera. It brought us Xena and Buffy, too.

I’ve never been the type of feminist who is terribly bothered by the word “girl”–if prodded, I can even conjure up a defense of using it as a word that doesn’t contain the word “man,” although that’s really not any less useless to me than spelling woman with a y. At the ripe old age of almost-thirty, I still refer to myself as a girl and usually anyone else who is my age or younger. I’ve even been scolded for it by friends male and female. But I can’t really help it, and I wonder if the twin specters of Riot Grrl and Girl Power are to blame.

I was thinking about Girl Power, while I was writing my generally-happy reactions to the stories, and I remember learning about third wave feminism and discussing Girl Power in my class, and the positives and negatives. You had shows with strong (Xena) or complex (Ally McBeal) female leads, but they were wearing short short skirts (and some of them could have used a sandwich, ahem). You had the Spice Girls saying friends come first (in a way more empowering way than bros before hos, yo) but most of their popular songs were still about finding love or something. I think. I can’t actually admit in public to listening to the Spice Girls. You know.

So. Is the rash of “Girl” comics a revival of this kind of feminism-lite? There certainly has been a trend lately, especially with DC books, toward female leads. Batwoman, Batgirl, Gotham City Sirens (and yes, Marvel Divas) and many more that I’m probably missing because this just isn’t really my area of expertise. The pop universe doesn’t seem to be swinging that way in the dramatic fashion it did in the Spice Girls era, but we do have Twilight and other pop-culture phenomena that are aimed at girls bringing a new demographic to geek culture–check out Vaneta Rogers’ awesome piece on The Fangirl Invasion.

Either way, I have to agree with this statement, again from Retconning My Brain:

What it came down to for me this week was that it was nice to buy a bunch of comics that are led my female superheroes, who are super with or without their male counterparts, but don’t exist in a vacuum of femaleness or solely for the gaze of the male reader. They’re there to kick some ass and be super.

Amen to that.

Hi everyone.

After yesterday’s post, where I promoted an event at my local comic shop, I got to thinking. I do love promoting local events and creators of whom I’m fans, but I feel bad because there’s an entire country out there that my little northeastern behind never gets to. So! A brilliant idea.

Eventually, we want to create a Newsarama Events calendar where you can promote your shop, your appearances, everything. For now, though, I’m going to take charge and do a weekly events post here at Blog@. I’m thinking Thursday is a good day to do them for the week coming up, since it’s the day after comics day and the day before the weekend officially starts (though I know a lot of you start partying on Thursdays…)

We have an email address set up just for this, so if you’ve got an event at your comic shop OR if you’re a comics creator making an appearance somewhere, you can email us at newsaramaevents [at] gmail [dot] com. Then I’ll aggregate and post them on Thursdays for everyone to peruse.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Please don’t abuse this address, everyone–I’ve got entirely too much junk mail on my other email addresses.

Thanks!

It’s an extra-special movie-themed linkblogging day today.  To start things off:

District 9

Reviewed by Spencer Ackerman, we get some thoughts about white anxiety in the film, and also the future of video-game movies. No, District 9 isn’t a video-game film, but Ackerman points out some similarities to video-game structure in the pacing of the movie, and wonders what it means for the future. He also takes on another blogger whose comparison of the movie to US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, he thinks, is over the line.

At Racialicious, of course, the focus is even more on the racial undertones, with one commentator finding the film uneven and problematic and another writer examines the racist portrayal of black Africans in the movie.

Inglourious Basterds

R.M. Guera of Scalped (the best comic you may not be reading) worked on a comic book from the film, and the results can be seen here.

Splash Page’s Twitter report shows several comics professionals have Tarantino on the brain, too. Glad it’s not just me.

Whiteout

1979SemiFinalist looks at Whiteout’s promo materials and gender issues. Verdict? Looks pretty, who knows if it’ll be any good.

Twilight

Eclipse, the third Twilight movie, started filming today, apparently. And apparently the werewolf pack likes to hang out and eat muffins? (I swear that’s not sexual innuendo.)

Finally, Scott Pilgrim

Splash Page has some video from the Scott Pilgrim set. You know you wanna see it…