Could data mining change the way comics are made in the future? Rob Salkowitz seems to think so:

Digital comics represent something like 10-15% of the market, but their rapid growth gives reason to believe they are a good proxy for the comics audience at large – both direct-market and the broader mainstream.  Readership numbers on many books are high enough to provide statistically significant samples, and the nature of the digital experience allows much deeper insights into reader behavior.

Every time readers obtain comics through comiXology, there is not only a record of the transaction, but potentially a lot of information about exactly how, when and where they are reading that comic, what else they are reading, what they’ve browsed or previewed and decided against, and whether or not they purchase additional issues.  When aggregated with anonymous demographic data – for example, credit card information associated with the account – you get a much clearer picture than we’ve ever had of the comics audience.

As he points out, there’s no sign that any publisher is looking at this (presumably, proprietary) information or using it to change the way their comics are made just yet. But if they did, would that kind of demographic breakdown be of any use in making a better comic? Isn’t part of the problem with, at least the Big Two’s output, that they’re overly-analyzed and constructed with a marketing end product in mind instead of a good read?

People who wanted to buy Black Kiss II or Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix (amongst other titles) from ComiXology on their Apple device, there’s some bad news for you:

In order to comply with the Apple App Store guidelines regarding adult or inappropriate content, some new releases were rejected for our iOS app this week. In addition, certain previously released titles that fall outside of these guidelines were also rejected and will be removed from sale. As always, these books are available on comixology.com, where you can download and sync to your device for reading anytime, anywhere.

A full list of the removed/unavailable titles can be found here.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the way everything went down with Saga #12 and ComiXology is that, when I read the blog post announcing that titles had been rejected by Apple, part of me was immediately suspicious. We’ve heard that before and it wasn’t the case, in so many words. It’s extremely unlikely that this is a similar situation, if only because of the reaction to what happened last time, but I’m saddened that such suspicion doesn’t feel entirely paranoid on this subject now.

With the cancellation of Red She-Hulk, it’s worth looking at Paul O’Brien’s latest Marvel sales analysis to take a look at how Marvel’s other female-led titles are doing. The publisher has historically been weak in that area – There was a point, not too long ago, where Marvel had no books with a solo female lead – and, oddly enough, it looks like we might be headed that way again: Both Captain Marvel and Journey Into Mystery are selling less than the just-cancelled Gambit and Winter Soldier, which doesn’t bode well, and even Fearless Defenders is already selling less than Matt Fraction’s shortlived Defenders redo was twelve months earlier.

It raises the question: Why don’t Marvel readers seem to support female-led titles? After all, both Captain Marvel and Journey Into Mystery are good books – as is/was Red She-Hulk – and at least Red She-Hulk and Captain Marvel featured characters who were fairly central to the Marvel Universe. Why the low sales, especially in comparison to books like Thunderbolts or Scarlet Spider? I genuinely don’t understand; DC can seem to find a readership for its female-led books, so why are Marvel’s audience so seemingly resistant? It’ll be fascinating to see how Brian Wood and Olivier Coipel’s X-Men performs in its first year; that’s an amazing creative team, and a collection of fan-favorite characters. Surely that book will do well over a sustained period?

(Also interesting/surprising in O’Brien’s analysis: Seeing the rapid descent of Fantastic Four and FF. Was Hickman’s success on the franchise a fluke?)

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…

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…

So, yesterday afternoon, I posted this on Twitter:

400+ retweets – and responses that ranged from “Does Kirby’s estate see any of that money?” to “Jack Kirby must be a rich man!” – later, I thought it might be a good idea to put a little more meat on those bones.

As I said in the tweet, the figure comes from the first issue of TwoMorrows’ new magazine, Comic Book Creator. Specifically, it comes from an article called “If Kirby is King, Why Haven’t Jack’s Heirs Made One Measely Thin Dime Out of The Billions of Dollars Generated by His Creations in Hollywood Motion Pictures?”

The $7,310,655,909 figure mentioned is the combined worldwide box office and subsequent U.S. DVD sales for X-Men, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and Marvel’s The Avengers up to Feb 27 this year.

It’s actually low-balling the actual amount made by those movies; the DVD figures – $753,342,333 – are (a) missing any movie released on DVD before 2005 (i.e, the first two X-Men, the first Hulk), (b) not including Blu-Ray sales, and (c) are only domestic sales, meaning there’s a lot more out there… especially when you consider just how well Iron Man 3 is doing in theaters right now.

The Comic Book Creator piece by Jon B. Cooke notes that “The Marvel/Disney empire is raking in billions of dollars from the fruit of his imagination and they aren’t leaving scraps for his children and grandchildren; what they are sharing with progeny Susan, Neal, Barbara and Lisa, and their children is nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch.” That may not be exactly true; Ed Brubaker certainly said otherwise in an interview with Tom Spurgeon last year:

At the same time, I’ve always felt good about the fact that the credits for Captain America say, “created by Simon and Kirby” and that Marvel had settled with Simon and Kirby — not Kirby himself, but Kirby’s heirs — over Cap. So they are getting something from the Avengers movie, because of that.

Certainly, the lawsuit between Joe Simon and Marvel over ownership of Cap was “amicably settled” in 2003, although details of that settlement remained confidential. It’s possible that Kirby’s estate was involved in that settlement, but by no means definite; Brubaker would be more in the know about the subject than the majority of us, and Captain America wasn’t one of the characters mentioned in the 2010 lawsuit the estate brought against Marvel (A lawsuit that Marvel won, of course). So perhaps Kirby’s heirs aren’t getting zilch, but “a little bit more than zilch.” It’s still not really enough, though, is it?

In the last two decades – Really, little more than a decade – Marvel and its partners have generated more than seven billion dollars from Kirby’s co-creations from movies alone, never mind merchandise or publishing sales. Elsewhere in the Comic Book Creator issue (I know, I know, I keep mentioning it; You should buy it. It’s well-worth reading), Alex Ross puts it best, I think:

Well, I kind of feel like we know the great sin of how the Superman deal went is one of the biggest, most well-known stories in comics, given that that built the entire industry. But given that Jack Kirby himself almost built that entire other half of the industry by his own blood and sweat through countless books over a 50-year career, it’s got to go down as really the greatest sin of comics that in a way he didn’t both receive the amount of remuneration in his lifetime that he deserved, and that there isn’t a permanent structure set up for his family today.

The winner of the bookstore market in April is unsurprisingly clear from this chart of the Top 20 graphic novels: It’s obviously The Walking Dead, which takes nine of the twenty slots (with three different volume ones, interestingly enough; the hardcover, the omnibus and the compendium), as has pretty much been the case for some time now. But there’s something worth paying attention to happening at the bottom of the Top 20.

Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life As A Weapon is at #15. That, in itself, is a big deal, because Marvel collected editions tend to fare pretty terribly in the bookstore market (No Marvel superhero book charted at all in December 2012, nor January or February 2013, for example; Avengers Vs. X-Men charted in November 2012, and then you have to go all the way back to May 2012 to find another Marvel U title, when Infinity Gauntlet reached #19 as a result of the Avengers movie), but it’s an even bigger deal when you realize that it’s the book’s second month in the Top 20; it actually debuted in March, at #9.

Two months in the bookstore market Top 20 is very unusual for a superhero book, which tend to peak in their month of release and drift off never to be heard of again… Has the buzz around Hawkeye gone outside of the comic industry, perhaps (If so, deservedly; it’s a really good book)? And if it has – and if Marvel keep it in print – could Hawkeye turn into Marvel’s first perennial seller in the bookstore market?

Is Age of Ultron the ultimate Marvel comics event? Jim Mroczowski makes the case for a yes:

And what about those tie-ins? So far, there have been what, three a month? Almost all of them are one-shots; maybe one title is doing two crossover issues in a row. So far, all of them have essentially been DVD extras for the main series. If you want to see the deleted scenes featuring Spider-Man, or find out the backstory about how Sue Storm got to that room, you can do that; if you don’t, you don’t. It couldn’t make less of a difference. They have been the most perfectly skippable, functionally optional comics in the history of Eventing. Most of them have a completely different writer and artist than the ongoing series and don’t intersect with the regular stories at all. Wolverine and the X-Men was two issues into an arc; Matt Kindt wrote an issue about robot war that relates in no way; next issue will be part three of the arc, like Kindt’s issue was a dream we all had. Considering half these books come out every two weeks now, it’s like they’re treating you to a little time off. Or treating you to a done-in-one Matt Kindt Wolverine story! Take your pick!

There is no better way to do this sort of thing. If you love Ultron and Events, that’s what you get. If you don’t, this won’t hurt a bit and will be over before you know it. It might as well come with a tank of nitrous oxide. Compare that to Avengers vs. X-Men; if you liked Cyclops stories but hated the Phoenix Five, you had yourself a bad year.

Quite when “It’s easily ignored” became the benchmark for event comics, I’m unsure. If that’s your basis for judgment, though, it’s a good case – Age of Ultron ultimately is entirely avoidable for now when it comes to the larger Marvel Universe. We’ll see if that continues to be the case in its aftermath; after all, the same could’ve been said for Flashpoint during its run back in mid-2011…

Marc-Oliver Frisch looks at the DC sales for March in his inimitable fashion:

Since issue #1, Talon has been promoted with a 1:25 variant-cover edition. For issue #1, there was also a 1:200 variant, and for issues #2 through #5 there were 1:100 variants. Issue #6 was the first issue with just the 1:25 variant-cover edition. So that’s at least part of the explanation why Talon is still dropping at an alarming rate, but certainly not all of it.

After issue #7, now, co-writer Scott Snyder (of the Him That Sells Many Books Snyders) and popular artist Guillem March (of the Him Whose Page Rate Is Way Too High For A Title That Won’t Move 25K Marches) will vacate the premises. And come issue #10, Talon will no longer be supported with any variant-cover editions, either. To make a long story short: It’s going to be an uphill struggle from here on out.

For DC, the worrying thing here is that they had a top-flight co-writer and an upper-class artist on a book that launched strongly out of a tremendously successful crossover, and it still ended up in free-fall.

The interesting thing for me in this month’s sales analysis – Aside from seeing quite how savage Marc will be about drops that Paul O’Brien would call standard attrition over in his sales chart analysis – is the addition of the 10 year comparison, which seems to work out surprisingly well for the publisher: Overall sales are up compared with a decade ago, and most individual titles are also higher than they were. Hopefully, we’ll see the same being added to Marvel’s charts soon.

Corey Blake steps into the ongoing debate over a lack of superheroic material in this year’s Eisner nominations:

So what happened? Did Marvel and DC, and the superhero genre in general, just have an off year? Are Marvel and DC getting lazy after years upon years of ruling the roost? Are superhero comics not keeping up with the increasing growth and quality of other genres? Is the rest of the industry leaving Marvel and DC behind in being leaders in creative and innovative comics? Are movies and TV finally doing superheroes better than comics? Or did the Eisners just have stuffy superhero-hating judges this year?

That line about “is the rest of the industry leaving Marvel and DC behind in being leaders in creative and innovative comics?” sticks with me because, well, have superhero comics from either publisher really been leading the way in creative and innovative comics for anytime in the last… what, decade, at least? That’s not to say that either publisher haven’t been putting out good – or even great – superhero fare during that time, but… am I alone in thinking that the place to look for material that pushes the boundaries of the medium isn’t necessarily the New 52 or the Marvel Universe? That’s not what they’re there for, surely? Aren’t they primarily focused on fulfilling expectations of the genre and the fanbase, and generating interest in the characters and concepts each universe contains, instead of innovating or pushing comics forward?

Swamp Thing artist, 1963 co-creator and industry watcher Steve Bissette on today’s comic book industry:

But seriously, the so-called “comics industry” is otherwise in a new dark age. The major players are in Hollywood-la-la-land, and locking down anything that movies—uh, moves, for as little as possible: Silver Age terms for Post-Millennial Media Golden Age non-shares in the bountiful riches. Page rates are in the toilet; “independent publishers” (i.e., not Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, etc., which is stretching the definition of mainstream, but there you go) are offering rates for work-for-hire gigs that are less than freelancers were earning work-for-hire in the late 1960s-1980s.

What’s worse than the low page rates are the contracts offered (“take it or leave it,” most often) at those rates—I’m now seeing retro-retroactive contracts (don’t get me going). I’ve turned down cover gigs that offered less than I was paid for covers in the 1980s (and those were for “lucrative, prestige” licensed character gigs—you bet your ass the licensor earns more than the freelancers ever will).

The industry is in flux right now, and it’s hard to read the signs to see in which direction anything is moving. Or perhaps the problem is, we’re moving in multiple directions at once, and the center isn’t holding.

Brian Hibbs – owner and manager of San Francisco-based store Comix Experience – reports from the annual meeting of comics retailer organization Comics PRO, and the news is apparently very good indeed:

The repeated refrain from every single attending retailer was how well business is doing — I heard so many positive numbers and percentages of growth that one might think people were lying… except that national statistics are backing our individual experiences up — the national market is up a staggering 19.78% Q1 2013 vs Q1 2012, and that’s the “dead quarter.” That’s also after a yearly growth of 14.72% of 2012 vs. 2011, so things are going in what appears to be the overall right direction, and we’re also seeing the second consecutive year’s rise of the total number of comic book stores.

So, yeah, comics are thriving, and even more specifically, print comics are thriving in a way that many pundits did not see coming — unlike virtually other media’s experience in the face of new digital release models, the physical market for comics is growing — in fact, if I’m doing the math correctly, it appears to me that just the increase of physical sales in 2012 was larger than the entirety of the digital market combined! That is phenomenal for a medium that too many people are quick to write off as “dying.”

We knew that the direct market was growing – Despite the example of other media when faced with digital reincarnations – but finding out that print growth was larger than the entire digital market is the kind of fact that really puts everything in perspective. Of course, with digital continuing to grow as well, I wonder how long that will be true…

Hey, kids! Remember Avengers #12.1, the Brian Bendis/Bryan Hitch prologue to the current Age of Ultron story that got reprinted the following year as Marvel’s Free Comic Book Day issue? Well, turns out that – if you missed that 30 page story the first two times around, you’ve got a third chance to read it… Well, part of it, at least:

AGE OF ULTRON #10 (OF 10) is now 34 pages in length. 8 of those pages are being repurposed from AVENGERS #12.1.

That’s from the latest shipping update from Marvel. Three things jump out:

1. Presumably “now 34 pages in length” means the story, not the actual issue – Unless Marvel is announcing that it’s gotten shorter than its original 40 page solicit, which admittedly isn’t impossible. But we didn’t know the length of the story before, did we? Is it longer now?
2. Well, now we know what Bryan Hitch is drawing in the issue, I guess. Or not drawing, seeing as he did this work two years ago at least.
3. Eight pages “repurposed” from Avengers #12.1? I wonder what eight? There’s no one scene in the issue that runs exactly eight pages, after all. If pressed to guess, I’d go for the end of the book when Ultron appears and disappears suddenly because he’s “not ready” for the confrontation with the Avengers, but I guess we’ll see in June.

Reprints aren’t a new thing to Age of Ultron, of course; the preview of the series that appeared in 2011′s Point One issue turned out to be – unlike every other strip in the issue – not a standalone, specially-produced prologue, but seven pages from the middle of Age of Ultron #1. When Age of Ultron #1 was finally released, there had been some minor alterations made in terms of coloring, lettering and switching the orientation of a panel, but essentially, a quarter of the book was a reprint of work that had originally appeared two years earlier. Still, it is a series (partially) about time travel, so such deja vu might even add to the experience of reading it.

This news about the final issue, though… The more we learn about the final issue of Age of Ultron – That Joe Quesada will be drawing an epilogue introducing Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane’s Angela to the Marvel Universe, that the artist count for the book keeps rising (The issue was originally solicited with Brandon Peterson, Carlos Pacheco and Joe Quesada as artists; Bryan Hitch’s name was added afterwards, and then Tom Brevoort promised “a couple of other surprise guys” would also be contributing), and now that just under a quarter of the story will actually be a reprint of some kind of a two-year-old prologue to the series that doesn’t fit with any of the time periods featured in the series to date – the more surreal it seems to become. Will it read like the patchwork it’s beginning to sound like, from the various bits-and-pieces of information we’re learning? Will there be method to the madness when all is said and done?

Padraig O Mealoid illustrates just some of what makes the rights issue for Marvelman quite so complex:

When Marvelman finished its run in Warrior in August 1984, the copyright situation had already complicated itself quite considerably from where it had stood in March 1982, when the relaunched character first appeared. Above and beyond the issue of who owned how much of the copyright in the Marvelman strip itself – and completely leaving aside the far more complicated issue of where that copyright came from in the first place, which I promise I will address to the best of my ability before this series is over – there was also the issue of who owned any new characters or concepts introduced into the story. And it was all very well that they had started out with Dez Skinn owning 20%, and Garry Leach and Alan Moore owning 40% each, but those figures had since been changed to allow Alan Davis to own a share of the character as well. And, to add to the confusion, a considerable amount of new characters and new ideas had been added to the story along the way. Whilst Alan Moore obviously co-created these, and co-owned the rights to them, the visual design of them was the copyright of the artist who created them.

So, Garry Leach had co-created, and owned the visual rights to, the updated Marvelman costume, the adult Johnny Bates, the adult Mike Moran, his wife Liz Moran, the ‘Tinkerbell’ forcefield effect, and various other things, like the logo, and some minor characters, like the terrorist and journalists in the first part of the story. Equally as importantly, he had also co-created the Warpsmiths and the Qys with Moore, with whom he shared the copyright on those characters and their settings.

Alan Davis, for his part, had created the visual design of both aspects of Marveldog, as well as Sir Dennis Archer and the Spookshow, Evelyn Cream, and the Zarathustra Bunker and its contents, as well as other minor characters who appeared along the way.

In theory, anyone wishing to take over creating further Marvelman stories would need to have permission from not just Alan Moore, but from both these artists as well, before they could use any of these creations in their work. To add still further to the confusion, Dez Skinn and Quality Communications Ltd wholly owned the character of Big Ben, although the version in Marvelman was so completely different to the original character that the name was about the only thing they had in common.

Add in later contributors to the strip – including Chuck Austen, John Totleben, Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham – and the four years plus that it’s taken Marvel to do anything with the character beyond the Mick Anglo reprints suddenly seems a little more understandable.

Mealoid’s Poisoned Chalice series of pieces about Marvelman’s history is a thing of wonder. If you’re not already following it, you should fix that.

Last week’s news that Vertigo will be publishing both Tom Strong and Astro City is another reminder that things are very different for the DC imprint in its post-Karen Berger era. Both books are good, sure, but both are also all-ages superhero titles – far outside the previous Vertigo remits of horror/supernatural genre work and Suggested for Mature Readers titles. Of course, those two things are now being published under the DC Comics imprint – Swamp Thing, Constantine and Animal Man for the former, and Before Watchmen for the latter.

That both Tom Strong and Astro City are former Wildstorm titles is doubtlessly worth noting – Vertigo now falls under the control of Hank Kanalz, SVP of Integrated Publishing at DC Entertainment and former Wildstorm GM. But what I find myself wondering is whether or not we’re seeing Vertigo slowly shift to an imprint for DC’s creator-owned or creator-controlled works (What is the status of the ABC books, anyway?).

The relative failures of books like Lot 13 and Insurgent have to have clearly demonstrated to DCE and DC Comics that pushing out non-DCU books under the DC Comics brand is likely to result in a lack of audience awareness and media coverage – Really, who was talking about Insurgent before it got cancelled early? – and, meanwhile, there was Vertigo lying around, its line shrinking and doing nothing much apart from waiting for Sandman Zero and some new Fables titles. What could go wrong?

I could be wrong, of course; these may be the only two off-topic additions to Vertigo that we’ll see, and other creator-owned/controlled books from what would’ve been Wildstorm will appear in future without the Vertigo banner. But somehow, I suspect that we’re watching the Vertigo imprint and brand be rebuilt as something else right in front of our eyes…

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

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

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

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

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