So you may have noticed that comments are still hosed after the launch of the new design. I don’t have any sort of ETA as to when they’ll be fixed and, quite honestly, don’t really know any more about what’s happening to fix them than anyone else. I wish I did.

So, how are you guys doing? We’ll do this the old-fashioned way. Feel free to drop me an email and let me know what’s going on, what’s on your mind, what you think of Tom’s Trinity annotations or the Smallville news from earlier today or Chris’s MoCCA preview or anything else. I’ll compile them into a letter column.

Edit: Self-promotion is fine, too … send it in!

Oh, and before you ask, if you’re having issues with logging into the main site, I’m really out of the loop on that … from what I can tell, this thread is probably your best source of info on how to get your account working again over there.

– Our own Carla Hoffman, spreading the joy of comics to the unwashed masses.

– Hill & Wang plan to publish more graphic novels.

– PWCW covers the BEA.

– Jennifer de Guzman notes some recent passings.

– “Ownership of your work is the single greatest asset you have as a creator.”

–Gary Leib’s History of the Meatpacking District.

– khepri.com is taking pre-orders for Pixu.

– Dark Horse will be publishing the Trump collection now? I thought Playboy was doing it.

– The Dick Tracy Museum is now closed.

– If you want to apply for the John Lent scholarship, time is running out.

– John Jakala picks his favorite manga characters.

Compiled by JK and Chris.

As you’ve probably noticed, things changed around these parts this morning, as we have a new layout and a snazzy Wordpress upgrade. Unfortunately, something happened to our comments, so please bear with us as the Powers That Be get them up and running again.

Another casualty appears to be our contact page … so if you need to share a tip for the blog, etc. feel free to drop me an email.

Thanks for your patience!

I’m very excited to announce the debut of a new column from Neil Kleid, former guest blogger and writer of The Intimidators, Ninety Candles, Ursa Minors, Comic Book Tattoo, Starstruck and Tales from the Crypt, among others.

His new column, Take That!, can be found here on Blog@ every other Tuesday starting this week. Welcome aboard, Neil!

The New York Comic Con doesn’t open until 3 p.m. tomorrow, but the news has already started flowing. In a video interview with Newsarama (wait … what?) Dan DiDio announced that Mauro Cascioli, the artist on Trials of Shazam!, is the artist on the James Robinson-written Justice League series. And look, some art:

You can find more Countdown to NYCC videos with DiDio over on the Newsarama NYCC mini-site … which, incidentally, also has a blog feed of everything we’re posting about the con, which is pretty cool. We’re syndicated! Where’s my residual check?

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Hi this is Mark Smith and I’m joining Newsarama as a guest blogger from my home in South Korea. I should have plenty in store for you to keep you entertained so you don’t doze off at work.

Aqua Leung is out now, and it’s an epic story so be sure to grab a copy. You’ll thank me. I promise.

No doubt if you read anything in the blogosphere this past weekend about the Siegel case, it probably quoted, referenced and/or linked back to Jeff Trexler’s blog Uncivil Society. I’m pleased to announce that for the next week or so, Jeff’s agreed to blog with us and hopefully help translate the sometimes murky language of the law into plain English, particularly how it applies to this case.

When he isn’t blogging about comics, legal issues or religion, Jeff teaches social entrepreneurship at Pace University in New York City. He’s also taught law at SMU and St. Louis University, and received his law degree from Yale. We’re really pleased to have him on board … look for his first post very soon!

I’m very excited to announce that Jennifer de Guzman is bringing her monthly column “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” to Blog@Newsarama. Jennifer used to write for Comic World News before they closed up shop, and also writes the column Life in Comics for Publisher’s Weekly. And of course, when she’s not writing columns, she’s editing comics for SLG.

Helping her out each month will be her husband, artist Brian Belew, so expect something fun and different when her column debuts … and watch for it soon!

Congrats to the winners of our first New Frontier contest — Johnny Zito, Rob Nipe and Laura Gjovaag. As a reminder, winners were chosen at random from all entries. Thanks to everyone who entered and shared their favorite Justice League story; go take a look at the comments section of that thread to see what stories people mentioned.

Yep, that’s right … that was only our first contest. The folks at Warner Video have provided us with a signed and framed cel from Justice League: The New Frontier to give away in a second contest:

To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post telling us who your favorite Justice League member is. Feel free to provide as much or as little detail on why he or she is your favorite.

Also, use your real name and email address so I can contact you if you win. I’ll pick three winners at random after 5 p.m. Pacific Thursday, March 6, so make sure you leave your comment by then.

Special thanks to Jorge for hooking us up!

The fine folks at Warner Home Video have provided us with three copies of Justice League: The New Frontier, the animated direct-to-DVD flick coming out next Tuesday. Based on the Eisner, Harvey and Shuster Award-winning graphic novel by Darwyn Cooke, the movie features the voice talent of Kyle MacLachlan, Lucy Lawless, Brooke Shields, Neil Patrick Harris and many more.

I managed to wrestle our free copies away from the rest of the Blog@ crew, which is good news for you … ’cause we’re gonna have a contest.

To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post telling us what your favorite Justice League story is. Feel free to provide as much or as little detail on why it’s your favorite as you want.

Also, use your real name and email address so I can contact you if you win. I’ll pick three winners at random on Thursday, Feb. 28 at 5 p.m. Pacific, so make sure you leave your comment by then.

Want to hedge your bet? Johanna’s also giving away copies of the DVD.

EW.com has listed their “100 Greatest Websites” for movies, TV, music and other various pop culture elements.

Newsarama made their list of comic/book sites, along with The Beat, Comics 101 and McSweeney’s, among others. There’s lots of good stuff on the list in all the categories, so go check it out and surf around.

As we approach the end of 2007 (just a few more hours, and counting), I asked the Blog@ team to share some of their favorite comics from the previous year. As Kevin says below, it was tough to narrow down the list to just a few stand-outs, but here are our favorites:

Tom Bondurant

I’m sure no one is surprised to see Architecture & Mortality as one of my Best of 2007 picks. I loved the heck out of Brian Azzarello & Cliff Chiang’s metatextual take down of DC’s periodic character overhauls. Whether it was setting up a groan-worthy pun or a sentimental moment, A&M was designed to make its readers question not only the manner of revamping and reusing obscure DC characters, but the roles of all involved, including the fans. It reminded this reader that every character has its own dignity.

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I hope everyone out there in comic land had a nice Thanksgiving weekend … or if you’re outside the United States, a nice non-holiday weekend. I have a couple of quick updates to share:

–Kevin Melrose is out this week on vacation, and while he’s out, Aron Head, who recently covered Wizard World Texas for us, will be filling in. He’s already started posting today.

–A couple of people emailed me over the weekend about our RSS feed being down. If you’re subscribed to the feed that lives at newsaramablog.com, then it probably looks like the site hasn’t been updated since last Thursday. However, if you change it to this one, http://blog.newsarama.com/feed/, you should be good to go.

We had some issues with the newsaramablog.com domain last week that the folks at Imaginova are addressing, but until they are resolved, blog.newsarama.com is working fine.

With the long Thanksgiving weekend upon us here in the United States, blogging will likely be pretty light until next week. But before settling in for a few days of rest and relaxation (not to mention food, football and shopping), I polled the Blog@ team to see what they were thankful for this year. Here’s our list:

1. The Black Dossier
2. Bully!
3. The Complete Peanuts
4. The Perry Bible Fellowship
5. Josh Fruhlinger’s Comics Curmudgeon
6. Brubaker’s Captain America
7. Quiet! Panelologists At Work’s inspirational podcasting
8. The friendly old-timey captions of a Stan and Jack comic
9. Creator blogs, particularly production and sketch blogs
10. The Last Call by Vasilis Lolos
11. The increasingly earlier Best Comics of the Year lists
12. Jeff Parker
13. Atomic Robo
14. Gail Simone writing Wonder Woman
15. Matt Fraction
16. Scott Pilgrim
17. Watchmen jokes on primetime TV
18. Jeff Smith
19. Alan Davis doing new Clandestine comics
20. The arrival of Tintin and Alph-Art, a book I never thought I’d see
on U.S. shores
21. Sundays With Walt and Skeezix
22. My wife, who’s very understanding about the amount of money I spend
every month on comics.
23. The crazy comics internet and all who sail in her

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

At the San Diego Comicon this past summer, DMZ/Northlanders writer Brian Wood graciously agreed to join us as a guest blogger this fall. Barring any technical difficulties, the plan is for Brian to start blogging with us this week from Italy, where he’s attending the Lucca Comics Festival.

Recently Brian spoke with Zack Smith over at the main Newsarama site about several of his upcoming projects, most notably Northlanders, so I’ll simply link to his interview instead of rehashing what Zack asked. I did have a few questions of my own, though …

JK: First off, thanks for agreeing to join the blog for a few weeks. Typically when someone joins the team, I make them write up a brief biography that we put up on our contributor’s page … usually they write them in the third person, which I guess is standard for these types of bios. What would your bio say?

Brian: Brian Wood released his first series, Channel Zero, in 1997 to considerable critical acclaim and has continued to produce comics and graphic novels at a brisk pace ever since. Focusing almost entirely on creator-owned works, he’s become one of the most important indie creators of the last decade. Standout works include his The Couriers and Channel Zero series, Demo, Local and Supermarket. He has earned multiple Eisner Award nominations and editions of his work have been published in close to a dozen foreign markets. Currently under an exclusive contract for DC/Vertigo, Wood continues to write his unique brand of iconoclastic creator-owned work with DMZ, Northlanders and The New York Four.

(Editor’s note: Brian’s bio was written by his wife, “lest you think my ego is THAT big,” he joked.)

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In our second Halloween post of the day, my fellow Blog@ ghouls and I share some of the comics we found particularly scary …

Michael May: Hellboy

As much as I love horror comics, they don’t really scare me. I guess I enjoy them more for the fantasy elements than the feeling of actually being frightened. That said, there are two moments in comics that genuinely creeped me out. Both of which were — not at all coincidentally — written and drawn by Mike Mignola. And with pictures being worth lots of words and all… here they are.

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The deadline for our Death of Superman contest is approaching … you can find all the details here.

The fine folks at Warner Bros. and their marketing partner, M80, have supplied us with some copies of the new Superman:Doomsday DVD to give away to our readers. So I turned to our resident DC Comics expert, Tom Bondurant, who came up with our theme for the contest:

Tell us why your favorite “Death of Superman” story — Silver Age, Elseworlds, imaginary, ’90s, whatever — is the best. The three most persuasive essays will win DVDs. Also, just to make it harder, note that “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow” is not actually a “Death Of Superman” story.

Please limit your entry to 300 words. Don’t post your entry as a comment; instead, email it to me directly at jkparkin at yahoo.com, with the subject line “Death of Superman contest.” Deadline is this Friday, Oct. 19. We’ll announce the winners sometime next week.

PC Magazine has named Blog@Newsarama among its 100 Favorite Blogs of 2007:

Whether the Justice League or Jimmy Corrigan is your comic book bag, the Blog @ Newsarama is an indispensable guide to the latest happenings in the world of sequential art, covering new releases and industry news, and conducting its own insightful creator interviews. If something is happening in the world of comics, from Peanuts to Persepolis, Newsarama has it covered.

Other comics-related blogs on the list are The Beat, Comics Curmudgeon, and Drawn!

(Via Heidi MacDonald)

It’s the news that shook the world! No, not retailer Todd McDevitt ending up with a previously-unknown, good condition copy of Detective Comics #27 that was discovered in someone’s attic; I’m talking about the return of Captain America, as designed by Alex Ross.

For those afraid of male chickens, worry not; it’s all part of Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting’s grand plan, as the Broob explained to the mothership:

[T]his is no tease. This is a new Captain America, in the Cap comic itself, so you know I wouldn’t just do it for a gimmick. This has been part of the plan all along, and if I ever implied there wouldn’t be a new Cap ever, then I was avoiding the question or dodging it. I tried to dance between the lines but I have said all along there wouldn’t be anyone in a Cap outfit for a while. Nine issues in comics is a while, right?

Of course, the kids still think it’s a temporary fake-out, if the ‘Rama poll is anything to go by.

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