This is just horrible:

The final judgement has been handed down in the long running Gary Friedrich vs Marvel (Ghost Rider) case, and now we know the full amount that Friedrich owes Marvel.  That’s right, Marvel, a company that stands to make millions of dollars from the upcoming Ghost Rider II movie, and is paying Nicholas Cage millions to portray a character that Friedrich created, now wants money from Friedrich – in specific $17,000.

Essentially, Disney/Marvel counter-sued Friedrich over ownership of Ghost Rider, demanding all moneys he had made from selling prints of the character at conventions and the like, and won, so now Friedrich – who, by his own accounts, is unemployed and has no assets – finds himself owing the corporation that he believes stole his creation $17,000 with no way of paying. It’s one thing for Marvel to reassert itself legally as the owner of the character, but demanding $17,000 from someone who’s essentially penniless? That just seems cruel, and maybe worse for Marvel, something that can only lead to bad publicity for the company (and at a time when its treatment of Jack Kirby and the Kirby estate is getting some mainstream media attention, too). The sooner the decision is made to waive the “debt,” the better.

Considering the accusations that Avengers Vs. X-Men has been facing since its announcement that it’s little more than a second attempt to do Marvel’s 2006 mega-hit event series Civil War, you’d have thought that the publisher would do as much as possible to play up the differences between the two series – Make a bigger deal about the fact that this story is about the survival of the human and mutant races instead of a political argument, say, or the round-robin creative teaming of some of their most popular writers – instead of release a preview cover that makes it look as if AvX will bring Captain Marvel back from the dead… just like Civil War did.

On the plus side, it’s unlikely that plans will change again so that this return of Mar-Vell – if it actually happens – will be retconned into being part of a secret invasion by alien shapechangers, but still, it’s such a weird coincidence that I can’t help but suspect it’s some kind of fake-out. After all, it’s not even been a couple of years since Mar-Vell last came back from the dead. Give the guy a break already.

Entertainment Weekly has a preview of Avengers Vs. X-Men #1 – or, as the preview seems to call it, “Round 1″ – give you a chance to either get a sneak peek at what’s likely to be the year’s biggest event, or try and get used to some of the crazy explanations behind the McGuffins necessary to make the fighting start (Seriously, they analyzed the energy and worked out that the Phoenix Force was coming to Earth? Or they’re just convinced that Nova is correct…? “Well, he seems to mean it…”). Either way, the John Romita Jr. art is really nice. Go and see for yourself.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a release date. Fox has announced a July 23, 2013 release date for The Wolverine, the second solo movie for cinema’s favorite X-Man, directed by Girl, Interrupted and Walk The Line‘s James Mangold and starring – of course – Hugh Jackman. As the Hollywood Reporter notes, this means that it’s opening the same day as the Dirty Dancing remake, so feel free to start working on your jokes about “nobody puts Wolverine in a corner” right now. This date also make The Wolverine the third superhero movie of the year; Iron Man 3 is scheduled to open on May 3, with DC’s Superman reboot Man of Steel opening June 14.

This is interesting; over at mainstream news and commentary site Slate, James Sturm has written a lengthy essay about why he’s going to boycott Marvel’s summer blockbuster Marvel’s The Avengers (Yes, that’s actually the full official title, presumably to distance it from the Uma Thurman/Sean Connery revival of the old TV show), based on the publisher’s treatment of Jack Kirby and his heirs:

What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel’s media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right. It takes a lot of corporate moxie to put Thor and Captain America on the big screen and have them battle for honor and justice when behind the scenes the parent company acts like a cold-blooded supervillain. As Stan Lee famously wrote, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

What’s interesting to me about this isn’t necessarily Sturm’s reasoning itself, which is certainly nothing new to comic book fans who have been aware of the legal battle between the Kirby estate and Marvel over ownership of the characters for quite some time now and have chosen sides on this particular Comics Civil War (Although I wonder whether last week’s Before Watchmen argument has led to anyone reconsidering their position…?), but the fact that the article is – according to Slate’s sidebar – the third most shared story on the site. What happens if this story becomes suitably mainstream before the release of the movie, I wonder…? I’m reminded of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster being given creator credit and an annual stipend by DC ahead of the Superman movie in the ’70s (if I’m getting my dates right), and wonder whether there’s a similar move that Marvel can do for the Kirby estate to escape the potential publicity black eye that could result from this story getting wider transmission.

Definite read of the day: ICv2′s interview with Marvel’s SVP of Sales, David Gabriel, which addresses every single topic you’d want him to tackle in a way that is both professional and wonderfully frustrating. It’s nonetheless full of interesting information, whether it’s that Marvel apparently plans for collections to stay in print for eighteen months unless they’re considered evergreen, which the Essentials collections are not, or that the publisher has cut its line by 25% for 2012. He’s also great at downplaying DC’s success (“Certainly DC achieved some success with their New 52 and we’re happy to see them prosper” being my favorite line of the interview) and initiatives (Dropping pricepoint to $2.99 is characterized as “retailers seeing a huge drain on their bottom line when prices from other publishers dropped overnight without any story to increase sales of these price reduced titles”), but the money quote of the whole piece may be his answer to how many story pages we can expect in a 32 page comic from Marvel this year:

First, that’s like asking how many minutes does an audience expect a movie to be, or a concert, or a Broadway show… those forms of entertainment are not pro-rated by the minute and comic books have never been prorated by the page count (which has fluctuated for all publishers for 75 years!).  But because it does get asked… in a standard comic they should expect to find around 20 pages of content.  Some may have more, some may have less.  The important thing is to deliver a compelling comic book month in and month out–as long as we’re doing that, everyone’s getting their money’s worth.

It’s the “some may have less” part that sticks in my head. We’ve already seen some Marvel books have 19 pages of story for $3.99, but now I can’t help but wonder if this is a sign that we’re going to see more of this kind of thing. The question of the year may end up being, how short can a mainstream comic get and still feel worth the money?

After premiering Monday afternoon at a promotional event simulcasted in several cities across the globe, the second Amazing Spider-Man trailer is now on YouTube. And here it is:

Our bicoastal write-up of Monday’s event — with plenty of more details about the footage shown and comments from the cast and director Marc Webb — is here.

Reloading on dip while the Avengers Super Bowl commercial debuted during the second quarter of the Patriots/Giants match-up? Just want to relive it frame by frame? Well, here it is!

And here’s the 1:05 extended version, posted on Marvel Studios’ Avengers Facebook page:

Here’s a totally random thought brought on by all the Before Watchmen hoopla: What does this mean for Marvel’s Marvelman plans?

On the one hand, it’s great for Marvel: It shows there’s a high level of interest in (and respect for) Moore’s work, which suggests that a release of Moore’s original Marvelman material would have a much, much bigger impact than the earlier Mick Anglo reprints if it ever happens. But I can’t help but feel that it also points to a potential backlash for any new material planned for the character, at least new Marvelman that doesn’t include Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, and that feels like it could be a real problem for the House of Ideas.

Marvel, it seems to me, doesn’t “do” legacy material well; in addition to the often-discussed inability to keep material in print continuously without switching format, Marvel hasn’t historically been good at letting classic material stay as classic material without trying to resurrect or revamp it and make it into an ongoing property (See the attempts to revive things like Kirby’s Eternals, or even the New Universe, in recent years). I think most fans expected that Marvel would want to do more with Marvelman than just reprint the classic material, and I wonder whether seeing the uproar in response to the Before Watchmen announcements will change that. After all, if fans can’t accept Cooke, Azzarello and JMS as writers, are they really likely to hook into more Marvelman from the likes of Bendis, Fraction or whoever Marvel would have to offer…?

Alternatively, if the outrage about Before Watchmen is all about that particular series’ status as (a) a conflicted ownership property and (b) a completed story, then Marvelman may be spared all of this kind of protest. I guess we’ll see if and when Marvel ever do anything with the character…

The news that DC took the entire Diamond Comics Distributors top 10 in January seems somewhat stunning. I know that Marvel had a relatively quiet month, with no new launches outside of the second-tier Scarlet Spider and Wolverine and The X-Men: Alpha and Omega mini, but nonetheless, it’s amazing that fifth issues from ten different DC books managed to outsell second issues of Avengers: X-Sanction or Defenders or the oversized Wolverine #300, especially when you remember that DC didn’t manage to take the entire top 10 in September, when their entire New 52 line launched.

(It’s interesting to look at the top 100, and see where the Marvel books do fall in the chart – Most of the big ones form a pile up in the back half of the top 20, with the relaunched core X-Men titles outselling the Avengers books handily; looks like that franchise is back on top at Marvel, for the first time in years. I’m genuinely surprised to see Defenders #2 all the way in the 40s, mind you; with that creative team and amount of pre-release hype, I expected it to be way higher. Also worth pointing out: Look at the dollar ranking of the books: In that, Marvel and DC split the top 10 evenly, but the 5 top selling books by quantity are also the 5 top selling books by dollar share…)

Considering that we’re still in the window of DC’s orders being discounted on the chart by 10% because of availability, it’d be interesting to see what the real numbers for these books would be, and try and work out what this means – Are retailers ordering substantially heavier even at this stage because of the returnability, or do they believe that they can sell more DC books than Marvel, when it comes down to it without any outside influences or events goosing sales (All bets are off to that when it comes to Avengers vs. X-Men and this summer’s Avengers movie, of course)? And, as ever in this scenario, do the sell-through numbers echo the orders?

Being a child of a certain era – as well as a fan of the 1970s Marvel book The Champions – I was kind of fascinated by Tom Brevoort’s Formspring thoughts on the team, and the series:

CHAMPIONS was the poster child for what Roger Stern used to call “fake books”–books without a viable core concept that worked, that only existed by editorial fiat bringing that particular set of characters together. While there were some fun issues, as a series it was kind of a mess from start to finish. It was originally pitched as an Iceman and Angel buddy-book, but the Editor in Chief at the time wanted it to be a team book–which meant, according to him, that it needed a woman, and a strong guy, and somebody who had their own title to anchor it. That became Black Widow, Hercules and Ghost Rider. And the ostensible concept of the series was that they were “The Team For The Common Man.” Not a common man among them, mind you, and they didn’t really get involved in much that a common man could relate to, but there it is. Five characters with virtually nothing in common who hung out together in a skyscraper because that’s what the book said they’d do.

I read that and thought, at first, “Well, he’s not wrong; Champions was a book without a real hook,” before thinking… well, so was Defenders in its prime, and so was Avengers in the early days, especially in the “Cap’s Kooky Quartet” era. Was the true failure of Champions, then, not that it had no organic reason to exist, but that it wasn’t entertaining enough to make readers overlook that…?

(It also made me wonder how many of today’s team books would pass the “fake book” test – and whether there’s a modern-day equivalent for team books that exist because the franchise has become overextended, as in the X-Men and Astonishing X-Men series.)

For everyone excited about The Avengers movie this summer, it’s worth remembering that things could’ve been very, very different indeed. Here’s an excerpt on Marvel’s movie plans as was, from 1985′s Marvel Age Annual #1:

Stan [Lee] is mostly involved with live-action movie projects, featuring the Marvel super heroes. Dr. Strange is currently being worked on by the same folks who brought you the movie hit “All of Me,” which starred Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin. Also in the works is a Captain America film, a Spider-Man film, an X-Men film, and even one starring Howard The Duck (Can you imagine Howard The Duck in live-action??). And last but certainly not least, a Fantastic Four live-action feature is being worked on by the same producers who did the highly-acclaimed film “The Neverending Story.” With all that in progress, no wonder Stan is always so busy!

Just think: Of all of those potential movies, only Howard The Duck made it to the big screen. Sadly, the Marvel Age piece doesn’t have any more information about what the other movies would’ve been like, but I can’t help but wonder if the Cap movie ended up as the much-derided 1990 release from the director of Cyborg and Brain Smasher… A Love Story. “What If…?” as the saying goes…

Tomorrow sees the release of Avengers: X-Sanction #3, a series that seems to have (very quickly) befallen the same fate as Avengers: The Children’s Crusade… Namely, the massive event book that people kind of forgot was still coming out. That isn’t to say that either book isn’t selling well – As Paul O’Brien demonstrates, Children’s Crusade has been remarkably steady in terms of sales, even if the book hasn’t stuck to its bi-monthly schedule, and X-Sanction was a top-seller for its first month at least – but there seems to be no real discussion of either book online outside of their hardcore fanbases. Is it just me, or does this seem somewhat surprising, at least in regards to the much-hyped X-Sanction? It’s possible that the announcement for Avengers vs. X-Men took the air of the book’s sails (After all, “X-Man vs. Avengers!” doesn’t seem nearly as interesting once you’ve announced “X-Men vs. Avengers!” as the next round), but… am I missing a lot of people talking about what happened in the second issue and speculating on what’s going to happen in the rest of the storyline, or has the ever-present but what happens next just left this book in the dust while people start thinking about April’s big slugfest?

Here’s a tantalizing “If Only” project… On his (fantastic) Tumblr, The Marvel Age of Comics, Tom Brevoort has shared two unused Jack Kirby Hulk pages from, he suspects, #3 or #4 of the original run, apparently rescued from destruction by Larry Lieber following an argument between Kirby and Stan Lee at some point. This weekend, Kurt Busiek tweeted a truly tempting offer: “@TomBrevoort Do you have enough of that unused Kirby Hulk story to have it finished up and printed? I’ll dialogue it!”

Sadly, reality isn’t in our favor; Brevoort replied that “I’ve got something like six pages of it, but not the opening nor the finale.” Of course, now I’m holding out hope that we’ll instead see an all-new Busiek Hulk project that can include these six pages as some kind of flashback, even if that’s more than likely a victory for optimism over common sense at this point in time…

(Click through to see the Kirby pages under the jump. Oh, and * – This is probably not a factual statement.) (more…)

Director Matthew Vaughn is returning for an X-Men: First Class sequel, Deadline reported Monday.

The news was tucked into a post on Fox production president Emma Watts sticking with the studio through 2015, along with word that Bryan Singer is returning as producer, and that Simon Kinberg — a First Class producer and co-writer of X-Men: The Last Stand — will write the screenplay. Though no other details are yet available — like possible storylines, actors returning or an estimated start time for production — in the same article Deadline speculates that Chronicle director Josh Trank might be tapped for a Fantastic Four reboot, also at Fox.

X-Men: First Class, released last June, grossed $146.4 million domestically, for a worldwide total of $353.6 million.

Something surprising from Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso’s latest CBR appearance is his explanation for the latest round of Point One issues:

A Point One book is meant to provide an easy entry-point to a monthly series for new readers that is relevant to long-term readers. It counts. Simple as that. If you haven’t read a single issue of Iron Man, here’s a clean, told-on-one sampler. There was a time when the Annuals might have served this purpose, but in recent years retailers and fans lost confidence that they were essential reads. The first wave of Point One books did so well we had to do more. And we’ll continue to do more for any title we think will benefit from it.

The surprising part? That the first wave of Point One books did so well that Marvel “had” to do more… because the direct market estimates tell an entirely different story. Of the twenty Point One books that have already come out that weren’t #0.1 issues, only three were ordered in quantities higher than the previous issue, with sales on the following issues either seeing a small bump that didn’t offset the drop from the .1 issue, or continuing to drop in all but six cases (and in two of those cases, the following issues were Fear Itself tie-ins). Quite how that translates into such a success that the company felt compelled to do more seems a mystery to journey into, some might say; perhaps the collected editions did particularly well, or the digital sales…?

If you really can’t wait until this summer to see footage from The Amazing Spider-Man, then you’re in luck. Posters started appearing this weekend directing fans to go to TheUntoldStoryBegins, a site that allows you to reserve tickets for sneak footage screenings on February 6 in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Mexico City, Moscow, Rio, Rome, Seoul, Sydney and Tokyo (Perhaps unsurprisingly, more events are already fully-booked). According to Deadline, those attending the events should expect “other surprises,” but your guess is as good as mine as to what that means.

For everyone who can’t make it to one of those screenings, take some comfort in the fact that, with the event happening a week today, I figure we’re at most two weeks away from the footage making it to YouTube…

Thinking about Avengers vs. X-Men the other day, I found myself stuck on the fact that the Fantastic Four wouldn’t be taking part in the event. On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense, because (a) adding another super team to the event seems ridiculous given the number of characters already involved given the size of the Avengers and X-Men franchises these days, and (b) it’s called Avengers vs. X-Men, not Avengers And Their Friends vs. X-Men And Their Friends. But on the other hand, “limiting” the event to these two teams feels artificial given the way that the Marvel Universe has always historically worked, with books crossing over and guest stars appearing when you least expect it, and especially so when you consider that the Thing is an Avenger now, or that it’s very likely that Reed Richards would have something to say about the Phoenix Force coming to Earth (Wouldn’t Nova go to the FF before he’d go to the Avengers or the X-Men, considering past adventures, after all…?).

The real reason there’s no Fantastic Four in the title of Avengers Vs. X-Men, of course, is that the F4 isn’t one of Marvel’s core franchises, and so hasn’t earned its way onto that banner. A harsh truth, perhaps, but a truth nonetheless; whereas the Avengers books (top-sellers for Marvel since Disassembled) have led the linewide events since 2006, and the X-Books have been so numerous that they’ve had their own family to have linewide events of suitable size and success for even longer, the Fantastic Four has always seemed to be on the periphery of storylines that affected the direction of the Marvel Universe: They had tie-in issues to Civil War, but Reed’s involvement in the Negative Zone prison aside, they were pretty much removed from the main action; they pretty much skipped World War Hulk in all but cameo appearances, and had a minor Secret Invasion tie-in mini to show for their troubles, with even less involvement in Fear Itself (the Thing aside, but as I’ve already pointed out, he’s an Avenger now).

Maybe it’s me being old-fashioned and sentimental, but this seems sad, considering the importance of the Fantastic Four to the Marvel Universe both internally and externally; this was the book that started it all, after all, and even within the fictional universe, this is the team that saved the world from Galactus, the ones who discovered the Negative Zone (and Unstable Molecules, which have saved many a Marvel hero from unfortunate accidental nudity at times) and the Microverse, the greatest scientific adventurers around, and so on… These characters should be at the center of every big Marvel event, surely.

And all of this got me to thinking: What’s wrong with the Fantastic Four? Historically, it’s not been a massive seller since… what, John Byrne’s era (although it seems to be holding its own quite well right now, thanks to Jonathan Hickman’s efforts)… but why? Is there something inherently less interesting to readers about the Fantastic Four than there is the Avengers or the X-Men, and if so, what?

Certainly, as a long-running series, it’s arguably the longest-running Marvel title with the least amount of creative peaks (Lee/Kirby, obviously, but then it’s a fallow period until Byrne, and then relatively dull until Walter Simonson’s short-but-still-underrated run, and afterwards a number of well-meaning-but-again-dull efforts until Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo, and then… Hickman? Have I missed anyone truly exceptional out in there? Over 50+ years, that feels low, especially compared to the X-Books or Avengers… Am I misremembering?), so is that the problem: That getting the F4 “right” is just harder than it is for other books, and the failed attempts put people off…? Or is it just that the core appeal of the Fantastic Four – A family who love each other who have dedicated their lives to discovering the unknown – doesn’t have the same appeal as existing in a world in which you’re feared and hated, or being the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes?

I have no answers; I’m not even sure if I’m asking the right questions. But there’s something about the Fantastic Four that, in my mind, makes them the core of the entire Marvel Universe, and seeing them treated as something out on the outliers because the market doesn’t seem to want that much more from them, seems like a far, far sadder fate than they deserve.

Something caught my eye in this Marvel.com story about the unveiling of “Asgardia,” the new city designed by Tony Stark for the Earth-bound former inhabitants of the World Tree that’ll debut in next month’s Mighty Thor. Namely, this Matt Fraction quote:

Since we’ve fixed the World Tree on Earth, we’ve created a capitol city where denizens of all nine realms may reside… Everyone’s in it together now, and the cast and flavor of the book is all the more diverse and varied for it. The Nine Worlds aren’t a ladder anymore but a wheel, with no top and no bottom, no paradise and no hell—and Asgardia is its hub.

The Nine Worlds are a wheel? Like… a wheel where gods live? Wouldn’t that make it a Godwheel?

There’s every chance that Fraction’s comment has absolutely nothing to do with the Malibu Ultraverse concept of a “cosmic artifact of tremendous size [that] contains many realms at the same time,” but considering that Thor was the first Marvel character to appear in an Ultraverse title, and that that title was the Godwheel series, that’s a particularly weird, unlikely coincidence, don’t you think?

Marvel has shied away from using Ultraverse characters and concepts since the line died out in the late 1990s, with the reason usually given that there are contractual complications in Marvel’s ownership of the line that prevent anything from the one-time successful line being used these days, so this wheel of gods likely has nothing to do with Malibu’s Godwheel.

But… if Marvel has quietly wrinkled out all the problems with licenses and contracts and whatever, this would be a nice and unexpected thing to reintroduce to the Marvel Universe once the dust settles from Avengers vs. X-Men, wouldn’t it? Never mind “No More Mutants,” what if the combined Phoenix Force and Scarlet Witch hex power can conjure up a new life for the Ultraverse?

…Nah, it’s probably just a coincidence. Right?

Looks like the lack of Generation Hope in the recent Marvel solicits wasn’t a one-time thing, as writer James Asmus confirms the book’s cancellation in an interview over at CBR:

Yes, the book is ending with issue #17.  I will say (as I did a month ago) that these were the five issues I planned from the beginning.  You can read all the old interviews where I promised to get to the betrayal, and I knew I had to do it before “Avengers vs. X-Men.”  The book was already under 20K copies when I took over, so while I figured there was a chance to tie into “AvX,” the way the market and the event developed, a “Generation Hope” tie-in doesn’t make sense… When Marvel first asked me to hop on the book last summer, I was told that they wanted me to take the book up to “AvX”.  Sales were already below the 20K copy mark, so there was the expectation that unless a market-miracle happened, the book probably wouldn’t keep going after the first five issues.

I guess the question now becomes “Just how much of the remainder of the book’s run is going to be run-up to Avengers vs. X-Men?” Maybe Avengers: X-Sanction isn’t the only prelude book for that event after all…