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

So I’m a little slow on the draw for this particular post — I’ve been meaning to write something about it, and other news got in the way — but I was interested to see Tom Brevoort talk about something that’s been on the minds of a lot of Avengers fans: will the classic lineup return?

We’ll use any and all of the classic Avengers characters as the situation demands it, of course, but those folks who are hoping for a full-blown reversal of the last ten years and a complete return to the Avengers of a decade ago are sadly in for a disappointment. And the reason for this should be obvious: in the last decade, AVENGERS has become the leading franchise in comics, and that’s in large part due to the alterations we made in the basic formula. I love the classic Avengers as much as the next person-and I edited them for a good, long time-but there are clearly so many more readers who are interested in the team and the book since we turned over the apple cart that there really isn’t any good reason to go back, other than nostalgia.

I’ll be honest, I was really sad to read this — even though I completely understand his point. It took me awhile to figure it out, but once I did, it was crystal clear: as someone who has been reading comics for the past decade and a half, I’ve always liked the Avengers more as an idea than in execution. (The one time that hasn’t been the case was the brief Geoff Johns run on the book — and even then, I didn’t really dig the book until he teamed up with Oliver Coipel for the Red Zone arc.) Because despite the archetypes being used in this book — which really do rival the Big Seven JLA in a lot of ways — a lot of times the book felt jumbled. Cramped. Suffocated by continuity and story arcs that just felt inconsequential.

In response to that, Marvel decided to do their own take on the Justice League model — ie, assemble their most popular characters for a team. Now, as someone who has been reading the current Avengers books, they aren’t series that leap off the shelves and mug me for my hard-earned dollars — for me, the tone doesn’t quite float my boat, even despite Brian Michael Bendis’ talents with Luke Cage and Ultimate Comics Spider-Man. (Which I adore.) But for a lot of people, it makes sense — it’s Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Wolverine teaming up, it sets the tone for crossovers for the rest of the Marvel Universe, and they dig Brian Michael Bendis’ dialogue, and that’s enough for them. It’s SOMETHING in the Avengers’ favor, when for so long it was hampered by continuity and Z-list characters. (Gilgamesh, I’m looking at you!)

But the question I have it this: when Hollywood — and thus, the general non-comics-reading public — see the Avengers, they will see something closer to the classic mold, with Cap, Iron Man, Thor, The Black Widow, The Hulk, and maybe Hawkeye or Ant-Man or the Wasp in the mix as well. Will Marvel rework the Avengers to fit that mold, as they gave Spidey his black costume back when Spider-Man 3 hit theatres? Or is the classic lineup now more Mark Millar’s domain, with the Ultimate Avengers? In Marvel’s defense, one could easily say that if you want your classic Avengers, look no further than that.

I don’t know for certain. I know that Brian Michael Bendis has done a lot to bring in the bajillion new readers to the Avengers books, which puts them higher up on the Top 300 comics lists month after month than they probably ever were. But, to play Devil’s Advocate, I also feel like comics writing has really ramped up its standards of quality in the past 10 years — taking more of a page from blockbuster cinema as opposed to soap opera — and I wonder if a classic Avengers lineup written under those conditions, with an Ed Brubaker or Matt Fraction playing up the archetypes’ potential, wouldn’t do well enough to make it worth Marvel’s while. What do you think? Are the New Avengers more archetypal than the Avengers Classic? If you wanted a return to the classic line, who do you think would be able to pull it off? Sound off!

Slashfilm has an interesting interview up with Lauren Shuler Donner, the producer who has backed the X-Men movies since the first film with Bryan Singer.

According to the post, Donner took a moment to dismiss rumors about X-Men: First Class being filmed anytime soon — despite a tweet from Tim Pocock, who played the Young Cyclops in the Wolverine film, who said the film would start shooting by March of next year — but said that the two properties that were being kicked around at this point were X-Men 4 as well as the New Mutants.

And I say, awesome.

Reuniting the X-Men — preferably without the increasingly manic cameos that I think diluted the second two films — would be a no-brainer cash-cow, considering how popular the franchise has become, and the fallout from the third film with Phoenix and Charles Xavier. Maybe we’d get to see a return of Cyclops, and Matt Fraction’s move to San Francisco?

The New Mutants, in a lot of ways, were the X-Men’s version of the Teen Titans. Cannonball, Sunspot, Moonstar, Wolfsbane, Karma, Warlock, Magik, and Cypher were the newest recruits of Charles Xavier’s School, and for me one of their most interesting elements was the fact that these kids became brothers-at-arms, training under Xavier, Magneto, and eventually Cable himself. If told with the same sort of heart that Singer gave the first film, this could be one hot property. Which would you rather see?

Marvel just posted an image, which looks like it will herald the return of Wendell Vaughn:

As the image above notes, Quasar’s return will be touched upon in November, in Realm of Kings, written by space maestros Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning.

DnA killed off the wielder of the Quantum Bands a few years back in Annihilation, but he has since had some play in the pages of Nova.

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…

In honor of the longest-running soap opera’s final episode today, Marvel has rereleased a comic teaming up the Avengers with the cast of Guiding Light.

Jim McCann, who has some experience with soap opera having worked on One Life to Live, wrote this project in 2006, along with artist Udon. The book is free in its entirety on Marvel.com. What say you?

Unable to hit New York and ask for a tour of Marvel? Well, Slate’s got your back, as Marvel EiC Joe Quesada took them around for a look at the House of Ideas:

Pretty cool, eh? I kinda chuckled at the restroom signs in spite of myself.

So I was reading this interview on Marvel.com with Amazing Spider-Man writer Marc Guggenheim on his upcoming story featuring as least some mention of the controversial Spider-Clone known as Ben Reilly, and this really stood out:

“This will be my last arc on the book as a member of Spidey’s ‘Webheads,’” Guggenheim confirms. “I’d been thinking of an exit strategy for a while now because my workload has gotten so heavy, and the inter-coordination required to write Spider-Man was something I found myself having less and less time to devote to. I was going to write one more arc, but I was so happy with the way this one was turning out that I thought this should be my swan song. Hopefully, people will buy the book, read it and agree with me.

That said, Guggenheim said that he would work on Amazing Spider-Man Presents Jackpot, due out in January, and would return intermittently if possible.

It’s interesting, as the Eli Stone co-creator was one of the original members of the Spider-Man Brain Trust, when the series went thrice-a-month following the controversial One More Day storyline. During his tenure, Guggenheim worked on introducing a new Kraven in the Kraven’s First Hunt storyline, as well as revealed the mystery of Menace in Character Assassination. Thoughts?

From Philip Gelatt and Rick Lacy’s Labor Days vol. 2, coming soon:

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Jamie McKelvie

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(click through for larger version) Ryan Kelly:

Fiona Staples:

Becky Cloonan:

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Molly Crabapple:

I’m just going to go ahead and say it: I think X-Men: Misfits Vol. 1 (Del Rey Manga) is the single best X-Men story I’ve experienced since Grant Morrison brought his run on New X-Men to a close.

Writers Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman and artist Anzu have a lot of definite advantages over the creators toiling away in Marvel Comics’ X-Men mines, of course—they’re not beholden to decades worth of continuity or the designs and characterizations of other creators, and they don’t have to line-up what they’re doing with what, say, the people over in the Avengers office are up to that month.

In this manga-style “remix” of the X-Men (to use the back of the book’s own word for this particular sort of reimagining), the creators are free to take whatever core concepts they think work best, and rebuild the X-Men franchise from the ground up as they see fit. They do an incredible job, and it was downright uncanny how they managed to make the X-Men into something that seemed completely new while still retaining much of their essential je ne X quoi.

Telgemeir and Roman retain the deep adolescent appeal of the mutants as stand-ins for kids who feel awkward, persecuted or alone (but, it turns out, are actually much more special than anyone else), and, if anything,  broaden the appeal beyond the normal metaphors and make it feel a little more universal.

They also retain basic elements that worked well from throughout the various eras of the comics: Xavier and Magneto’s differing views on on how humans and mutants relate, school-as-superhero team, Kitty Pryde as point-of-view character, and so on.

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For the three cornerstones of the Avengers — Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor — it’s been a rough few years.

Steve Rogers found himself on the losing side of the superhero Civil War, ending with his untimely “demise.” Tony Stark split the Avengers by backing the Superhero Registration Act, only to find himself forced underground by Norman Osborn. And Thor, betrayed by his former colleagues in the Civil War, has recently been cast out of Asgard by the machinations of his half-sibling Loki.

But according to Previews, despite being battered and broken, there is some hope that the Avengers Trinity could be back in business. According to them, November’s issue of Wizard will have a Marcos Martin cover of the Avengers, with the following blurb:

o Avengers Assemble
We’ve waited and we’ve begged, but can we finally be close to seeing the classic trinity of Thor, Iron Man and Captain America back together again at the House of Ideas?

The fact that the question is even being asked is a good sign — if Marvel didn’t have something to say, would it make the magazine at all? The trio (and yes, I do consider Bucky Barnes to be Captain America, at least till Steve returns in full) last joined forces in the Secret Invasion, but before that, it’s surprising how long it’s been since the Trinity joined forces in the mainstream Marvel universe: they haven’t been together since 2003, several months before Avengers: Disassembled hit, cementing Brian Michael Bendis’ take on the top-selling Marvel characters. What say you on all this?

When it comes to online comics, apparently sex really does sell.

That’s what happened when Red Handed Studios creator Kyle Hurlbut got an unexpected e-mail from Apple. His online comics series — Fallen Justice — was ready to launch its second issue, after getting a decent following on his 9-and-older first issue.

So imagine his surprise when he got an e-mail from Apple saying that the second issue could not run with the 9+ rating, due to two panels with some sexually charged content — in this case, the character Dyna-girl laying in bed with protagonist Justice Theta, clearly topless.

“I felt this rush of guilt like our mom had caught you,” Hurlbut said. “And then they included a zip file with those two panels and I opened it up and said I guess, okay, I didn’t even think about it.”

But before you cry censorship — despite the comic being delayed by three days as Hurlbut made a few concessions, such as with a violent panel of a character’s head literally exploding, the 12-and-older comic surged in sales. Hurlbut said that the sales difference between Fallen Justice #1 and Fallen Justice #2 was about a 175 percent increase.

“I’m not faulting Apple really — it shows they really are looking at this stuff and they had to dig into the panels and find the things that were questionable, and that was really impressive,” Hurlbut said. “Had they made the comics stick to 9-and-older, I would have been off the outskirts, but since they’ve put in this ratings system, now it goes to the right level.”

Hurlbut says he isn’t quite sure what brought this on — it could have been the book’s weekend release, which kept it on the Featured Downloads list a bit longer, but he says some of it could be attributed to the older rating, which would alert 20- and 30-something readers that it isn’t a “baby” comic.

“It’s weird, because [the second issue] doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without Final Justice #1,” he said. “I’ve kinda tried to draw the line and not do an R-rated comic and every time I talk with my partners about it, they think I’m crazy. The target audience is 30-year-olds with iPhones, not kids, and a lot of them like sex and violence to some level, I guess.”

Fallen Justice #1 is currently free on the iTunes store — Fallen Justice #2 will remain free through the end of this Saturday.

Hasbro’s Mighty Muggs Spider-Man toy

David LaFuente’s Ultimate Spider-Man

Am I the only one who thinks they look pretty similar to each other?

Via When Fangirls Attack, which curates all the great women-and-gender related comics posts out there on the web so I don’t have to, I find this piece on “Marvel Bromance,” or now, apparently “Marvel Super Hero Team-Up.”

I wasn’t aware that there had even been a planned “Marvel Bromance,” which just shows you that I have entirely too much work to do in my life that doesn’t revolve around comics. Because you know I would’ve been all over that, right?

The evolution of the “bromance” out of the “buddy movie” has been interesting to me because it’s deliberately skated across that line of homoerotic tension that buddy movies always shied away from. In comics, the grand pairing of “buddies” was always Batman and his series of Robins, and since Robin was usually a good bit younger than Bruce Wayne, you really want to stay on the right side of that line with those books.

But the “bromance” is still ironic, not genuine. The movies are comedies; the stories loaded with snark and jokes about sharing feelings far more often than actually sharing feelings (when the kids in Superbad say “I love you” to one another they immediately have to pretend it didn’t happen). And so, as Chris Butcher noted, was Marvel’s solicit copy for the trade.

If This Be Bromance–! Marvel’s greatest buddies take the spotlight in this one-of-a-kind collection, and it’s male bonding like you’ve never seen — as Cable and Deadpool swap stories, Wonder Man and the Beast share a plane ride, Spidey and the Human Torch battle back-to-back, Wolverine makes a bet with Nightcrawler, Black Panther and Everett Ross lay their feelings on the line…and the Warriors Three set sail for fun! Plus: Captain America and the Falcon, Iron Man and Jim Rhodes, and more! Be here as Marvel says, “I love you, man!”

However, apparently “Bromance” was too–what, edgy? didn’t get enough attention? any ideas? It’s been changed to the too-long and unmemorable “Marvel Super Hero Team-Up,” which is so bland that it almost seems it must be a euphemism for something.

While “Bromance” might have been silly, it was at least an acknowledgment of the changing rules of same-gender friendships in the wider pop culture. More accurately, since the trade would be a reprint of classic stories, it would have been an acknowledgment that male friendships have always been more complex than a secret handshake or a gruff “Thanks.” Now it’s just another super hero team-up.

I was very skeptcial of the New York Times announcing special beseller lists for various categories of comics back in March, and have only grown more skeptical and cynical since, as being on any of the three ghetto-ized lists under the ghetto-ized “graphic books” category doesn’t seem to mean much of anything.

Unless you’re a publisher, in which case it means you can refer to  yourself as a New York Times bestseller in blurbs, and perhaps make readers think that means you’re a real New York Times bestseller (that is, on the books list), and not that you got a participation ribbon in the just about everybody wins eventually lists, micro-targetted to make entry fairly easy (that is, one of the graphic books lists).

If you’d like to hear someone who isn’t just a cranky crank talk about why the lists don’t really work right, I’d suggest reading Christopher Butcher’s posts on the subject here and then here. Obviously I personally don’t put much stock in the list and generally ignore it, but I certainly understand why publishers would like it (and thus why the NYT would bother producing it).

In the past few months, I’ve seen inclusion on that list touted in more and more press releases and other PR material for various comics and graphic novels, but by far the most elegant example of such touting I’ve seen came in this week’s issue of Incredible Hercules:

See that box in the lower right corner? That’s Incredible Herc’s editor Mark Paniccia semi-ironically name-dropping the NYT while in the process of providing one of those old-school footnotes.

Bravo Paniccia! That’s an amusing bit of own-horn tootery worthy of Stan Lee himself!

(The image above is by Reilly Brown and Nelson DeCastro, and it appears in Incredible Hercules #132, which, by the way, you should totally read if you’re not already a regular Herc reader. It’s a great jumping-on point!)

Because min seems to be missing some pages.

See, the first issue of DC’s big summer event series (which will, of course, last well into winter) cost $3.99 and was 40 pages long. But the second issue, which still costs $3.99, is only 24 pages long (27 if you want to count the three-page illustrated prose back-up, presented as an excerpt from Blackhand’s diary.)

DC didn’t deliberately publish fewer pages in the second issue of a miniseries while leaving the price at the elevated, for-40-pages level, did they? (The solicitation on their website says the book is 40 pages long; that’s counting ads though, as #1’s solicitation says it’s 48 pages long, and the average 22-page DC book is solicited as 32 pages—22 story pages and 10 pages of ads. But even subtracting 10 pages for ads, that 40 page figure is still off by three-to-six pages).

Because that’s not very cool. That’s what Marvel Comics did with Secret Invasion—start the series with an oversized $3.99 issue and then drop back to 22 pages for the rest of the $3.99 sereies—which was the point at which $3.99-for-22-pages pricing went from something reserved for Max and Marvel Knights imprint books to being commonplace among the Marvel Universe books too.

With their embrace of back-ups in their $3.99 books, I thought DC was going to eschew Marvel’s strategy of “Eh, the suckers will buy it no matter what we charge for it! Mwa ha ha ha!” It was looking like DC might be less evil in their pricing strategies, but perhaps they’re just slower to be evil…?

This does not bode well for future.

I waited to write this until this piece went up, and now I can’t even particularly remember why.

Regular readers here may know that I’m not much of a superhero comics reader, but that I’ve been branching out lately. When I was asked if I wanted to talk to Kieron Gillen and Steven Sanders about their new series, I jumped at the chance even though it required me to binge on Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men so I had some clue of what I was talking about.

If you’ve read the comics, or are mildly aware of my love for Whedon’s work, you can probably guess what my reaction was to Whedon’s vision of the X-Men. Yep, I loved it. Intensely. Mostly, I loved Whedon’s Kitty Pryde.

As I’ve mentioned, I didn’t exactly grow up on comics, but I have a distinct memory of the X-Men cartoon and seeing this little brunette girl who looked kinda like me, who wasn’t all badass like the rest of the characters but could walk through walls (and didn’t I feel at times like I wanted to just sink through a floor and escape my life?). So Whedon, who likes to take those normal girls and make them extra-special, really did a great job with Kitty, contrasting her with the super-sexy and conniving Emma Frost and using her powers to save the world when all the offensive skills in the universe couldn’t have done so.

Of course the end made me sniffle a lot, but it also made me think about superheroes differently. I’ve always seen them as creations designed to allow people like me to transcend their normal lives; to become larger than life. I’ve never read books or comics simply because I identified with the characters (though I certainly have my share–Megan in Local being a prime example).

Yet the appeal of the X-Men has always been that they’re freaks; the world doesn’t understand them. As blogger Renegade Evolution noted:

The X-Men have the misfortune of being born different into a very intolerant world. They are mutants. Outcasts. Feared. Hated. Seen as dangerous…when for the most part, they just want to live and be left to it like everyone else. Hummm…imagine that? And it is odd, in my geekdome and time spent hanging out with other comic nerds, I have noted that a lot of people who are big into the X-Men are also somehow…well…different. Non-traditional.

Is it so weird, then, that of all the various reasons, and after all the explosions and action in Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, that I love it because I see myself in Kitty?

PW’s Beat blog posted its monthly analysis of the sales charts this week, and while I read those posts with great interest all the time, I did so with greater interest this month simply because I was curious to see how The Big Two’s embrace of $3.99 comic books might be effecting their sales.

I was surprised at the answer: Apparently not at all.

At least, not in any obvious ways. Here’s Paul O’Brien’s look at Marvel’s direct market sales in June. Marvel has been testing the $3.99 waters for so long, I can’t remember when they first started, but this year they’ve been much more aggressive, making some of their most popular titles $3.99-for-22-pages, as well as a majority of their miniseries. (I noticed last week, for example, that of the 28 new comic books Marvel shipped, 24 were at the $3.99 price point.)

But Marvel’s top books remain New Avengers and Dark Avengers, plus a Dark Avengers spin-off (Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia). Ultimatum, another $4 book, is right behind that little Avengers-related pack.

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And yet here’s Steve “Captain America” Rogers smoking a pipe while ironically telling his pal Bucky that they should enjoy some fresh air. Sure, the panel is from a story in 1944’s All Winners Comics #12, but Marvel just republished it on Wednesday, as a back-up All Winners Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1. Aren’t they concerned about the tens of thousands—well, thousands anyway—of the impressionable 35- to 60-year-old readers who pick the book up are going to see their idol Cap smoking a pipe and take up pipe-smoking just to emulate him?