This Variety article about how director Guillermo Del Toro’s dance card is filled through 2017 contains a buried gem for fans of Hellboy: Universal Pictures could consider a TV series to help build interest in a third installment of the movie franchise.

Sure, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army did so-so in the United States, but it’s performed well overseas. That’s not enough for the studio to jump at a sequel, though.

“I think they’ll decide when the last euro hits the piggybank,” del Toro tells the trade paper. “We laid the groundwork to have a magnificent third act. I’d like to return to an action franchise with 60-year-old actor Ron Perlman, because he’ll be scratching at that age when I get to it.”

Perlman is 58, which means del Toro is apparently is hoping to charge into Hellboy 3 sooner rather than later.

But what about that television series? That tidbit came from Donna Langley, Universal’s president of production:

Langley said the studio is interested and may work with del Toro to add a TV series and online segments to broaden the following before making the series finale.

It’s nothing concrete, obviously, but given IDT’s abandonment of the animated movies and the performances of the theatrical releases, it’s interesting that Universal sees potential in Hellboy beyond comics.

For the month of September, Mattel is showcasing the DC Comics Dolls on their Barbie Collector website, and offering three sizes of the DC Barbie desktop calendar featuring the 2008 DC Barbie line-up: Supergirl Barbie Doll, Batgirl Barbie Doll, Wonder Woman Barbie Doll, and that hussy Black Canary Barbie Doll, who is hiding her skanky legs in the back.

Related:
Group calls Black Canary Barbie ‘filth’
Variations on a ThemeL Black Canary Barbie

In their continued bid for global — or at least internet — domination, Google is releasing their own web browser called Google Chrome. And they hired Scott McCloud to create a comic book about it. You can read the whole thing over at Google Books.

He’s a respected veteran, tortured by the enemy but not always a friend of the establishment.  She was a political newcomer thrust unexpectedly into the biggest challenge of her career.

(Ironically, this time she’s the one with the health problems….)

Much more at Tigh/Roslin ‘08!

Newsarama’s Steve Fritz spoke with Brooke Burgess recently, and the animator let slip some details about an upcoming project:

“What’s really cool is that my old partners from Saints, Ian and Andrew, nabbed the rights to do the animated version of Batman: Black & White from Warner Brothers,” says Burgess. “I’ll probably get in trouble, but they are taking the original Black and White stories, and are giving them the Saints treatment. I think this will be going on DC Online or some other Warner site, probably also Apple.

“I’m just consulted a bit on this project. I’m happy to let Ian fly on this one. We’re also going to have voice actors like Michael Dobson on it, as well as a couple of other very talented friends. It’s going to look really neat and super, super stylized.”

I’m going to guess he’s talking about another Motion Comic, like Watchmen.

Woodring Simulacra is a blog devoted to real-life objects that look as though Woodring drew them. Jimland Novelties, meanwhile, is a loose collection of mini-comics, commercial art and other oddities.

– Big Shiny Robot has a preview up of SLG’s Pirate Club.

– C.B. Cebulski and the Immonens shares pictures from this past weekend’s Fan Expo Toronto.

– G. Willow Wilson begins her own guerrilla marketing campaign for the recently released Air.

– Congrats to our friend Rick Marshall, who is the new co-editor of MTV’s Splash Page blog.

– A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran shares a tale about how not to make friends in the comics industry … it ranges from annoying to creepy. And apparently one of the folks involved really doesn’t have a clue.

–BusinessWeek takes a look at Marvel and DC’s recent online comics ventures, and in the process asks retailer James Sime what he thinks. I’m going to guess that this isn’t the answer they were expecting:

But James Sime, owner of the Isotope comic book store in San Francisco, isn’t too worried about the impact of digital comics on his business. He says he believes there’s a great opportunity for comics retailers and publishers to learn from the mistakes of the ailing music industry.

According to ICV2, a trade publisher that monitors the business of comics and pop culture, trade paperbacks (collections of single issues in one book) generated $375 million in 2007 and single issues did $330 million that same year. Although Sime doesn’t think single-issue sales will go away, he envisions a scenario in which they are moved from print to online as promotion for the trade paperback. “I’m all about it,” said Sime. “People are excited about comics. The more people get them into their hands, the more they read them—the Internet is a great facilitator for that.”

• How could there be so much confusion over who owns the film rights to Watchmen? At the heart of the dust-up between Fox and Warner Bros. is turnaround, a contractual mechanism that comes with all kinds of strings. Michael Cieply tries to untangle them and, in the process, discovers evidence that Warner Bros. may have settled an earlier rights dispute with Paramount — yet another studio that had planned to adapt Watchmen – by handing over the foreign distribution rights. [The New York Times]

• Fox will stream the premiere of J.J. Abrams’ Fringe and the second-season opener of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles online at the same time they debut on television — but only on college campuses. Students, who are more likely to have computers than TVs in their dorm rooms, will be able to log in to the Fox website to watch. [Variety]

• The fourth volume of NBC’s Heroes – aka the second half of Season 3 — will be titled “Fugitives.” [io9]

• Kristen Bell has joined the voice cast of Warner Bros.’ Astro Boy. [Variety]

• Nicolas Cage will be the death of Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, apparently. [Collider]

On Wednesday, Newsarama reported on fans organizing online to demand a three-hour-plus run time for Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen.

However, there’s another Watchmen-related petition — this one following up on threats of a boycott of 20th Century Fox because of the studio’s lawsuit against Warner Bros. over who owns the film rights to the property.

Buoyed by a judge’s refusal last week to dismiss the complaint, Fox is playing hardball — for the moment, at least — with sources claiming the studio isn’t looking for compensation. Instead, it apparently wants to prevent the release of Watchmen because Warner Bros. never bought the rights from Fox, which claims to have acquired them sometime between 1986 and 1990.

Hollywood Insider’s Jeff Jensen dubs the rights kerfuffle as “perhaps the priciest whoopsie! in Hollywood history.”

But that’s all “nit-picky legalistic crap,” according to the “Boycott FOX for Watchmen Litigation” petition, which has racked up 979 names since it was started on Wednesday morning:

(more…)

Laura Hudson looks at all the different ways comics are being delivered digitally these days:

The diversity of initiatives is dizzying: Marvel Comics, Boom! Studios and Viz Media have made select back issues available in digital form; DC Comics and Top Shelf Productions now curate Web sites of comics developed specifically for the internet; Korean manhwa house Netcomics offers comics online for a small fee; and Tokyopop, Devil’s Due Productions, Papercutz and Virgin Comics have joined with mobile digital publishing services like uclick and GoComics, to distribute their content on mobile phones—not to mention e-books, animated comics on iTunes, or the smart phone-based reader from ClickWheel, which also offers a format for reading comics on the iPhone.

But as publishers scatter in a variety of different digital directions, it’s hard to know when—or whether—some kind of industry standard will emerge. Some pundits are more optimistic about the possibility than others

This “viral” trailer for author and comics writer Brad Meltzer’s new novel The Book of Lies is kind of interesting, really. In the video — it looks like something from a conspiracy-theory documentary on Discovery — Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan, Damon Lindelof and others draw a link between the murder of the biblical Abel and the murder of Jerry Siegel’s father. They also discuss The Book of Lies, which God supposedly gave to Adam.

It’s all in service of Meltzer’s book of the same name, due in stores on Sept. 2.

(Via Risky Biz Blog)

Michael Horn inserts an Imperial presence into camcorder footage of San Francisco. The Official Star Wars Blog talks to Horn about how, and why, he did it.

• The runaway success of The Dark Knight may be to blame for Warner Bros.’ decision to move Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from Nov. 21 to July 17. Industry insiders say the shift could stop next year’s profits from looking anemic in comparison. “They don’t need the money this year anymore,” says a rival studio executive. “When a movie overperforms the way Dark Knight has, you really don’t need Harry Potter in the fall.” [Hollywood Insider]

• Seeing a vacancy in the fall schedule, Summit Entertainment has moved the tween vampire sensation Twilight to Nov. 21 from Dec. 12: “With a giant franchise like Harry Potter in the market, we had to stay clear of it,” said Summit co-chairman Rob Friedman. “Their move created an opportunity to bring the movie to fans three weeks earlier, who have continued to show their enthusiasm, from Comic-Con to the giant Breaking Dawn book sales. We felt we had to take that opportunity.” [Variety]

• TheWB.com will officially launch on Aug. 27. It will feature not only old WB fare like Smallville, Gilmore Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and some new content, as was previously announced, but will also feature programs that aired on other networks, like Veronica Mars and Firefly. [Variety]

• Rumor has it that Lionsgate wants Punisher: War Zone to be released as a PG-13 film, rather than with the previously planned R rating. That follows the still-circulating rumor from last month that director Lexi Alexander, who didn’t appear at Comic-Con, had been removed from the project. [Latino Review]

• Could David S. Goyer bump X-Men Origins: Magneto in favor of The Invisible Man? “I’m in the process of doing [Invisible Man] right now, and I’m working with some conceptual artists in tandem with writing the script. … So it could be Magneto, or it could be The Invisible Man next.” [MTV Movies Blog]

• Justin Marks, who’s writing Grayskull – the He-Man movie — says the adaptation will stay true to the ’80s cartoon series, while working within a somewhat logical framework: “The script is very true to the characters — we’re not talking about putting nipples on the Trapjaw suit. But we had to come up with a reason again why Trapjaw would actually not just be something that’s totally absurd, but why he would need those bionic parts added to him.” [MTV Movies Blog]

• “Besides the Clone Wars, the Star Wars Comics Introduced Us to Talking Bunnies and the Dark Lady of the Sith.” [SciFi Scanner]

• A fan creates a hypothetical Dark Knight sequel — one featuring The Riddler as the villain, of course. Are you reading this, Brian Austin Green? [Slashfilm]

Compiled by JK and Kevin.

Who’s ready to embrace change? Are you ready to embrace it? I am, if it means the skrulls won’t blow up my Twitter account:

“You will conform. You will assimilate to our ways. Because they work. And because you have no choice,” reads one of their tweets. I’m not worried, though. Pretty soon they’ll be so wrapped up in the daily life of Agent M and his kittens or trying to overcome the Twitter failwhale that they won’t have time to take over the world.

The Twitter account is part of a bigger “Embrace Change” viral marketing thing from Marvel, which also includes posters that look like they came from the Barack Obama campaign:

Related: Editor’s notes to Brian Michael Bendis on Secret Invasion #1

Over at the Fourth Letter, David Brothers uses a Grant Morrison quote from DC’s Final Crisis Management panel in San Diego as a springboard to talk about the New Gods and Afro
Futurism. First, the Morrison quote, which is interesting in itself:

The whole idea with Mister Miracle, Mister Miracle was supposed to be a book where everyone was black and that was the idea. I wanted to do like, Metron as Sun-Ra. He’d sit in this big Sun-Ra chair with mirrors and stuff.

But, it wasn’t drawn that way. And when they drew the second issue, they drew the homeless New Gods as white guys, don’t ask me why. ’cause everyone in that book was supposed to be black characters ’cause I wanted the whole thing to be based on Shilo Norman and his world. But, those guys shouldn’t be white, sometimes things just happen, artists tend to draw white guys.

(more…)

It’s Billy Mavreas’ sketch blog basically, though he seems to post others’ creepy portraits as well.

– H is for Hobbes.

– Some blogs to bookmark: Brian Fies’ Fies Files, Matt Cruickshank, Bill Kartalopoulos’ On Panel, and Comic Research and Such.

– Matt Silady teaches a comic book class; here’s his required reading list.

– Is Barack Obama Peter Parker or Batman?

– Chris has another interview up today on his own blog, this time with Candorville’s Darrin Bell.

Compiled by JK and Chris.

Who will be the villain in the next Batman movie? If you believe the Internet, it’s Angelina Jolie as Catwoman. Or Johnny Depp as The Riddler. And possibly Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Penguin.

Well, you shouldn’t necessarily believe everything you read.

Last month, before this latest round of casting rumors started, The Dark Knight co-writer David S. Goyer said the filmmakers probably wouldn’t dip from the same pool of foes for a third movie.

“Batman has been published for 70 years,” he told Slashfilm in early July. “In the first movie we use Ra’s Al Ghul and The Scarecrow, who had not been in the movies before, and had not been in the sixties TV show before. And there are dozens if not hundreds of other characters that fit that bill. Everyone says its gotta be The Penguin or Catwoman … well I completely disagree.”

Now, at Sci Fi Wire, Goyer underscores that point: “There’s no reason why we necessarily have to use the same three or four that are still around. I mean, Batman’s got a wide variety, [a] rogue’s gallery. Certainly we used two in the first movie that hadn’t been in the films before.”

So, who should Batman face in the next movie? For the answer, MTV’s Splash Page turns to Dan DiDio, Grant Morrison, Brad Meltzer, Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Jeph Loeb and others.

Catwoman is the popular choice, but The Long Halloween and Dark Victory artist Tim Sale has a caveat: “But god, I hope not as Frank Miller’s version of her as a prostitute. That’s the worst part of ‘Year One.’ That’s just Frank trying to be outrageous. It didn’t ring remotely true to me.”