Hey, even the monarch of Latveria has to cultivate his public image. With a nod to Shepard Fairey, Joe D! gives us a Doctor Doom we can believe in. It’s available as a T-shirt.

(via Super Punch)

• J. Scott Campbell, cover artist for IDW’s Presidential Material comics, talks about his approach to drawing the candidates. What’s the deal with John McCain’s toothy grin and Barack Obama’s closed mouth? “It’s funny, because people have tried to read into that. I’ve had some say that McCain, because he has teeth, that makes him look sinister. That’s not it all. It just happened that when I collected photos of them online, from that angle almost all of (McCain) had him smiling, and Obama most often was not.” [The Orange County Register]

• David Barnett wonders whether the timing of Presidential Material is IDW’s effort to get out the vote. [Guardian Books Blog]

• Okay, just one more politics link: Using Kill Bill as a guide, Antony Altbeker asserts that Sarah Palin is Clark Kent to John McCain’s Superman. [The Times of South Africa]

• Rapper and graphic-novel writer Percy Carey interviews comics and TV writer Dwayne McDuffie. [Complex Blog]

• Heeb magazine has named Dan Nadel one of its “Heeb 100″ — its annual list of “young, smart and innovative” Jewish Americans. [Heeb Magazine]

• Art Spiegelman talks about Breakdowns, Meta Maus and … Tina Fey. [Vulture]

• If you have an extra $3.7 million burning a hole in your pocket, Joss Whedon’s Brentwood home is for sale. [The Los Angeles Times]

• The student magazine at Cal State Long Beach profiles alumnus Chris Bachalo. [Dig Magazine]

If you’re tired of all the leftist propaganda we’re apparently shoving down your throats (never mind that it’s comic-related), then here’s the site for you: General Zod 2008. He also has a Facebook page so you can show your support as well.

When I went to see Iron Man, I remember my boyfriend turning to me asking what was up with the ‘cheseburger’ scene. It was shortly after Tony escaped his captors and was demanding cheeseburgers. My boyfriend figured there must have been something up with that, but we never discussed it again. Ends up it was loosely based on Robert Downey Jr.’s own personal experience with his drug addiction and credits Burger King for helping him beat the habit.

The fast food epiphany happened in 2003 when the “Iron Man” star was driving a car piled with “tons of f—ing dope,” Downey Jr. told Britain’s Empire magazine. The actor decided to pull over for a burger and everything changed.

“I have to thank Burger King,” he said. “It was such a disgusting burger I ordered. I had that, and this big soda, and I thought something really bad was going to happen.” Downey Jr. says he then tossed all of his drugs into the ocean, deciding right then and there to clean up his act.

Source: New York Daily News.

Fashion legend Diane von Furstenberg is dipping a stylish toe into the world of superheroes with a limited-edition DC Comics book that will be released alongside her Wonder Woman-inspired holiday collection.

Titled Be the Wonder Woman You Can Be, Featuring the Adventures of Diva, Viva & Fifa, the comic features illustrations by Konstantin Kakanias, essays by Gloria Steinem and Les Daniels, a letter from actress Lynda Carter, a reprint of Wonder Woman’s first adventure, and several early covers.

The von Furstenberg-penned story centers on three friends — Diva, Viva and Fifa — who make “empowering choices.” While wearing DVF clothes, naturally.

The $25 comic will be sold in DVF boutiques and at dvf.com, along with a special $50 T-shirt and a $230 tote. Proceeds will benefit Vital Voices, an organization that “identifies, trains, and empowers emerging women leaders and social entrepreneurs around the globe.”

Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and artists Lukas Ketner, Lloyd Dangle and Ted Rall have teamed up to create Steal Back Your Vote!, a graphic novel about voting rights and vote suppression.

Per their website, it’s “a project of the Palast Investigative Fund (a 501c3 non-partisan non-profit educational foundation), Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. With the generous support of voting rights and other organizations and concerned individuals, we are aggressively investigating the hanky-panky Republicans have already road-tested in the primaries, and are prepared to use this November to steal YOUR vote. The good news is, you CAN steal back your vote. Kennedy and Palast are publishing a major expose in a mass-circulation national magazine. The Palast Investigative Team is heading to the Democratic convention to finish a documentary film. And three major cartoonists have teamed up to illustrate the “Steal Back Your Vote” graphic guide that you can download, print and distribute now.”

You can see excerpts at Palast’s Flickr stream and for a small donation, the guide is available for download.

(Via Brian Wood).

If you weren’t already anxious about the state of the U.S. economy, this news should do wonders for you: Some troubled stock-market investors reportedly are sinking their money into vintage comic books.

No, I’m serious.

If the early ’90s taught us anything, it’s that they’d probably be better off stuffing their cash in a mattress. However, The Wall Street Journal quotes a Kentucky retailer as saying “There’s kind of a buying frenzy” in Silver Age comics.

As evidence, The Journal points to the “Silver Age Comic Book Pricing Index” — I’m a reader, not a collector, but I didn’t realize there was such a thing — which seems to indicate that while Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is down, the buying and selling of ’60s comics is up.

Likewise, according to Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com, the market for original comic-book art is booming — in Europe, at any rate. That’s thanks, in large part, to the weak American dollar.

Writer Joseph V. Tirella points out that a European collector can snag Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott’s cover art for Fantastic Four #171 from the website of New York dealer Albert Moy for €23,809 ($32,095). An American buyer would have to pay $35,000.

Related: Portfolio.com’s slideshow of original comic art

You’ll recall that last week Bluewater Productions tore a page — or a cover, in any case — from IDW’s book by announcing the release of a biography of former presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The news landed with a resounding thud as several people, myself included, took jabs at the obvious mimickry of IDW’s Presidential Material comics, an error-riddled press release, and a cover that, among its other shortfalls, included an American flag with 14 stripes and a Sen. Clinton who didn’t much resemble Sen. Clinton.

After apologizing last week for sending out the wrong press release and for giving the United States an extra original colony, Bluewater President Darren G. Davis now has issued a second release apologizing again for “the incorrect portrayal of our most cherished American symbol” — the flag, not Clinton — and changing some of the cover art.

Oh, Female Force still looks like Presidential Material, but now Old Glory has the appropriate number of stripes, and Clinton’s depiction has been altered drastically.

I stared at the figure for quite a while, trying to figure out just who it resembles; it’s not the senator from New York, that’s for sure. It’s, unsettlingly enough, a certain former senator from Kansas in a wig and ill-fitting pantsuit.

Good luck getting that image out of your head.

The first issue of what’s planned as a quarterly series on female politicians will hit stands in January.

The fourth issue of Comic Foundry, the Eisner-nominated comics lifestyle magazine, hits stands Oct. 8, and CF chief Tim Leong sent over four preview pages for us to share with you.

Leong said this issue “puts the spotlight on how comics and politics intersect.” It includes a big politics package, a cover feature interview with Mark Millar and Tony Harris on War Heroes, a preview of the third Whiteout series and an original Chip Zdarsky comic detailing the San Diego Comic Con secrets of Matt Fraction, Daniel Way, and Kurt Busiek.

You can check out the preview pages, along with commentary from Tim, after the jump. And if you’re in New York, The Comic Foundry gang is hosting a release party the day after the issue comes out. More details on the party, as well as the variant Mark Millar/Tony Harris birthday clown cover, can be found here.

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In a mercurial election year, we’ve already seen the worlds of politics and comic books collide on a handful of occasions: biographies of the presidential candidates, an oh-so-similar profile of a presidential hopeful, Savage Dragon’s endorsement of Barack Obama, and a social-networking site for creators and fans who support the Illinois senator.

At the risk of having the comments thread descend into Lord of the Flies-style mayhem, I’ll point out one more intersection.

Later this month Papercutz will release Tales from the Crypt #8, which features on the cover a hockey stick-wielding Gov. Sarah Palin chasing off the three narrators of EC’s horror comics, The Crypt-Keeper, The Old Witch and The Vault-Keeper.

The caricature of the Republican vice-presidental candidate asks, “Didn’t we get rid of you guys in the 50’s?” — a reference to suggestions that, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin sought to ban books from the town library. (It’s contended that her inquiries were “rhetorical”; no books were actually banned during Palin’s tenure as mayor.) Of course, it’s also an obvious nod to the 1954 Senate investigation into juvenile delinquency, and the atmosphere that spawned the Comics Code Authority and effectively brought about the end of horror and crime comics.

The issue includes a “special editorial” by Cathy Gaines Mifsud, daughter of original Tales of the Crypt publisher William Gaines, who insists the comic “is not endorsing any political candidates, nor are we attacking any candidates.”

However, it’s difficult to view the cover illustration as anything less than that.

“What usually seems to be behind banning books is an attempt to repress ideas that may offer alternative political views,” Gaines Mifsud writes. “This is not only un-American — blatantly violating the very concept of free speech — but it is assuming that people are unable to come to their own informed conclusions.”

Sharp-eyed viewers of HBO’s True Blood may have noticed a famous — or is that infamous? — Alex Ross illustration lurking in the background of one scene in this week’s episode.

On a wall at Fangtasia, the vampire bar in Shreveport, La., hangs Ross’ depiction of President Bush draining blood from the neck of the Statue of Liberty. The image caused a bit of a stir when it first appeared as the cover of The Village Voice on Oct. 26, 2004.

I’d meant to post something about this yesterday, but I have a mind like a sieve. Luckily, The New York Observer jogged my memory.

True Blood, Alan Ball’s follow-up to Six Feet Under, is based on Charlaine Harris’ popular series of “Southern Vampire” novels. You can read the show’s online comic, The Great Revelation, at the HBO website.

Liz Farmer at the Maryland Daily Record is reporting that the Geppi Entertainment Museum has been embroiled in a rent dispute with the state agency that leases its space for more than a year:

Puddester would not say exactly how long the dispute had been going on, or if founder Stephen A. Geppi had simply missed rent payments or was not paying rent at all out of protest. But he did say the rent became an issue when the Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards, the tenant in Camden Station below Geppi’s, had its rent payments reduced in June 2007 because the nonprofit was struggling to make ends meet due to unexpectedly low admissions revenue.

At that time, the stadium authority voted to forgive the museum its $444,274 in back rent and also lowered its monthly rent from about $32,200 to $10,300, which Puddester said approximately covers the building’s operating expenses. The museum, which received partial funding from the state, opened in 2005.

Apparently part of the reason the musuem has not been doing well is because of declining attendance at Camden Yards.

Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort wrestles with the complexities of the passage of time in comics, and then proceeds to blow our fragile little minds with Captain America’s sliding timeline:

… Worse still is what the passing of time does to characters who are rooted into a specific event in history. Captain America, at least, has a built-in get-out-of-jail-free card, in that he was in suspended animation since World War II. But because of the sliding timescale (Cap himself is only in his thirties, and has only been Captain America for twelve years or so) this means that Cap was unfrozen when Bill Clinton was President — which can really mess with your mind if you think about it too much.

Steve Rogers was thawed during the Clinton administration? Maybe that’s why The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer, tongue planted in cheek, contends Cap is “in fact an America-hating liberal.”

Okay, that’s not why. But it’s a good segue into his response to writer Ed Brubaker’s recent interview with Wired.com.

• USA Today’s Whitney Matheson has the first look inside IDW’s comic-book biographies of John McCain and Barack Obama.

• A new comic from a U.K. sexual-health group teaches kids about the birds and the bees, but not everyone is happy about it.

• Den of Geek talks with artist Frank Quitely about All-Star Superman, We3, and his involvement with Alan Grant and Jamie Grant in the adult-humor comic Wasted.

• Comics are literature, which means that what I have always suspected is true: The Hulk is Shakespeare. I knew it!

• Invincible Iron Man writer Matt Fraction chats with MTV’s Splash Page about meeting with director Jon Favreau and screenwriter Justin Theroux about Iron Man 2.

• Who’s more powerful, Spider-Man or Spider-Woman? How about Hulk or She-Hulk? Nisha Gopalan of io9.com looks at the super-powered battle of the sexes.

Compiled by Aron Head and Kevin Melrose

Following up to yesterday’s article about Wizard World Texas, the Convention Report confirms the collaboration between WWTX and FearFest: “Two cons at the cost of one!”

While I’m sold on the idea, there’s a lot of concern that Wizard won’t be as aggressive in booking comic book talent for the show with FearFest rounding out the program. According to the Convention Blog, Wizard is “currently in talks with a bunch of great creators to get them to come out west.”

At the Mental Floss blog, Mark Juddery considers “5 Memorable Moments in Comic Book Censorship,” including the altered ending of a Steve Ditko story from Marvel’s trange Tales #83 (April 1961):

Artist Steve Ditko’s story told of a vengeful socialite who meets a guy dressed as the Devil at a costume party, and falls for him. But at midnight, when it’s time to unmask… you can probably guess the rest. “Mask?” says the Devil. “What mask, my love?”

However, the editors were afraid of what the Code might think, so they removed the final panel (which presumably suggested a terrible fate for the socialite) and hurriedly replaced it with two small panels, drawn by another artist, in which she faints, recovers and resolves to change her malicious ways, while the “Devil” (who is obviously somewhere else) pulls of his mask, and is revealed to be one of her would-be victims in disguise. Yes, they included all of that. When you’re censoring a story, you can squeeze a lot into two small panels.

Related: Blake Bell, author of Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, has more on the story.

It’s been a rough week in the financial sector. With banks faltering, the stock market has taken a tumble, the dollar’s dipping and the yen’s a bit shaky. Now the government is considering an estimated $700 billion bailout. One has to wonder, how have our heroes fared?

Last year, Forbes estimated Bruce Wayne’s net worth at around $7 billion. Tony Stark is close, at $6 billion. Both men earn a solid chunk of their change from defense contracts, which should find their respective nuts well covered in the current geopolitical climate with steady cash flow.

Their other investments? Let’s just say that Batman might want to watch how many of those Bat-a-rangs he tosses around, and perhaps Iron Man needs to stick to one suit for a while. Those things don’t grow on trees.

Let’s say you’re a small comics publisher and you see that another publisher is getting a lot of mileage out of its upcoming biographies of the presidential candidates. What do you do? What do you do?

If you’re Bluewater Productions, you “[break] new ground” with a comic-book biography of a former presidential hopeful — one Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“John McCain and Barack Obama have all of the spotlight,” Publisher Darren G. Davis says in the press release. “Our goal is to show the historical impact that maybe underrated from by those who are too facetted on the candidates to fully understand the historical impact of being a few votes show [sic] for the 1st female president. Many people are daunted by the endless stream of articles on the candidates. A visual medium provides perspective that is not only accessible but more relatable to the average person without loosing [sic] any of the information involved.”

“Too facetted”?

The comic, called Female Force: Hillary Clinton, features a woman on the cover who doesn’t much resemble the senator. At all.

But I’m hoping the Female Force of the title is a super-team whose ranks include Barbara Boxer, Carol Moseley Braun, Dianne Feinstein, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Mikulski and Nancy Pelosi. Fingers crossed!

The issue is due out in time for Inauguration Day, with a side of salt and lemon to help soothe Clinton’s wounds.

Update: Holy cow! I just took another look at the covers for IDW’s Presidential Material comics — you can see them after the break — and compared them to the cover for Bluewater’s Female Force: They sport the same scroll at the top, same font for the title, similarly tilted flags, similar photo backgrounds, and similar poses.

That’s … What’s the word I’m looking for?

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