Forget the Robert Pattinson rumors for a second — this is something that I actually wouldn’t mind seeing.

Access Hollywood has revealed that Sony is in discussions with Percy Jackson and the Olympians star Logan Lerman for potentially helming another franchise — this one with the proportional strength of a spider.

“[Spider-Man is] of my favorite characters ever and I’m a huge fan of the series,” Lerman said during the interview. According to him, the interest between him and the studio was “vice versa.” “I’d love to have more conversations about it. I’m definitely very interested in it.”

And you know something? I’d actually be kind of cool with this — Lerman totally pulls off the look, and if he can get the humor down, this could be a slam-dunk. Lerman was quick to say that this is all a long process with the studio, but this is a Spidey I could certainly get behind. What say you, Rama readers?

If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

By Filip Sablik
Publisher, Top Cow Productions, Inc.

“So this is the New Year, And I have no resolutions,” – Death Cab for Cutie

Well, that’s not quite true. I do have one resolution; it’s “do better.” Every year I take a look at how we did as a company and try to figure out ways we can improve. Improve the stories, the art, our timeliness, the value we bring our fans, really every aspect of our publishing business.

I try to avoid doing a ton of self-promotion with this blog for a number of reasons. And besides, I figure there are a number of places where you can find me hyping up our new projects and besides most Blog@Newsarama readers would tune me out if all I did was chat up Top Cow projects.

However, since it’s the beginning of 2010 I hope you’ll indulge me if share some of my excitement with you. Here’s what Top Cow has in store for you in 2010:

Angelus and Witchblade - Ron Marz and Stjepan Sejic continue their dynamic partnership monthly in Witchblade, and in the beginning of the year they’ll also give you a second dose of their awesomeness with Angelus, starring Dani Baptiste.

The Darkness – Phil Hester and artists like Michael Broussard, Whilce Portacio, and others will bring Jackie’s war with The Sovereign to a brutal and pulse-pounding conclusion in 2010. You won’t want to miss the twists and turns Hester has in store for you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello has announced that Tom Welling has sold a new pilot to the CW — a show that may make you cheer!

Or cheerlead. The show is called Hellcats — not to be confused with the Thundercats — and it’s a “dramedy” based on competitive cheerleading.

Not that that show would remind you of a certain show about another snubbed extracurricular. A certain Glee-ful show. There’s no word as to whether or not this’ll impact Welling’s place on Smallville — but Ausiello speculates there may be some strings attached.

I hope so, because that’s what I’m doing at the moment. Just the rumor of the possibility of more Watchmen comics of any kind that David just mentioned below has got plenty of comics folks talking—I’m still sifting through my Google News hits of responses—and, of course, tweeting.

Writer Mark Waid was among those doing the latter:

—Wow, this seems like a bad day to announce that I’ve been tapped by DC to write DK3.

—Big news day for me and I’ve been cleared to announce it! Next summer, Paul Azaceta and I will be doing NEW FRONTIER 2: NEWER FRONTIER!

—I’m sorry. My bad. I meant to say NEW FRONTIER 2: FRONTIER HARDER.

Oh, that Mark Waid is a delight, and that’s before he even brings up Maus 2.

In all seriousness, if someone at DC is seriously considering moving forward with Watchmen projects, they sure picked a weird time to do so (Wouldn’t maybe sometime around the movie have been better? That whole “striking while the iron is hot” idea? Or maybe on an anniversary of the book’s publication?).

Remember, it’s still just rumors and chatter at this point, although a quote from Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes regarding “plans to mine more aggressively the deep catalogue of DC Comics characters” a quarterly earnings report sounds like possible support.

Personally, I sort of hope cool heads at DC and Warner listen to all the hand-wringing and joke-cracking like Waid’s and think better of Watchmen prequels, sequels, crossovers or stories from the squid’s point of view (Are there honestly any stories about those Charlton analogues that can’t be told using the actual Charlton characters DC also owns?). But, in all honesty, I am almost positive more Watchmen would make financial sense, and the publishing business is a business.

Even if they found creators who would take such a daunting challenge/rather tasteless assignment, even if it turned out terrible and every single person who read it hated it and/or only bought it to make fun of it on the Internet (like, say Ultimates 3 or Ultimatum, both of which sold gangbusters), it would certainly make a decent profit.

It shouldn’t be hard to crunch the numbers on Dark Knight Strikes Again, which most readers seemed to hate (I loved it, by the way) and see how much money that made, or to look at Blackest Night and see how much money the publisher can make by taking some old Alan Moore ideas and letting the right creator run wild with ‘em.

It might be better to wait until Alan Moore passes away to start aggressively exploiting his take on some DC-owned characters, but maybe the decision makers will feel better doing so while Moore’s still alive. After all, now all he’ll be able to do is make fun of them; once he’s dead, maybe he’ll be able to haunt them.

Could the clock be approaching midnight… for a Watchmen sequel?

While I feel a bit skeptical, that’s the rumor making the rounds of the comicsphere today, courtesy of Bleeding Cool. Rich Johnston has stated that apparently DC SVP Dan DiDio is taking another look at the property, which former Publisher Paul Levitz had apparently put the kibosh on any sequels for, due to not wanting to tick off Alan Moore (or any creatives that sided with him on the Watchmen debate) even further.

Here’s a snippet from Rich on this:

I understand that both Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have to be offered first refusal before any of these titles could be published. But if they don’t want to work on them themselves (and Alan Moore is never going to agree), DiDio has been sounding out people who might be willing to take on the task.

While some creators are reticent, the argument goes if there are a number of Watchmen spinoff projects, any blame or shame can be spread on many shoulders. The sales are expected to be massive, whatever the hardcore fanboy reaction and such expected sales benefits will be shared amongst the creative teams.

Part of me is taking this with a grain of salt — based on the sales figures and the behemoth ad campaign the Watchmen movie had, I wouldn’t exactly call the movie a box-office success. But that said, I’m sure a lot of people were saying this when they announced a sequel to the Dark Knight Returns — which was met with mixed reaction in 2001 and 2002. And as you’ll recall in the image above, Wizard had a particularly provocative promo image for Countdown: Arena, with a DKR Batman putting the slap-down on Rorschach. What say you, Rama readers? If such a sequel were to come to pass, what would you think about it?

(Click the image above for a larger version of the strip.)

WORLD OF HURT - The Thrill-Seekers - Episode 28: “An Abrupt Departure”

This episode was cathartic from a storytelling standpoint.  The upshot of the building with Duke represented as a tiny figure against the sky as he hurtled to his death was understated, yet powerful, and I am extremely proud of it.  Having Pastor standing there passively to survey his handiwork, instead of making some smart-ass quip, cemented the notion of him as a no-nonsense tough guy and underscored my desire to make WORLD OF HURT a serious, dramatic work exploration of Blaxploitation.

Yeah, I was pretty happy with this one.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT - The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

With the departure of David Tennant as the star of the BBC’s Doctor Who, BBC America and Warner Home Video have released Doctor Who: The Complete Specials. Featuring five specials (The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars and the first and second parts of The End of Time) over five DVDs, the box set features a wide array of features, commentary and documentaries and is available to own on DVD and Blu-Ray now after their February 2 release.

For hardcore fans of the series, this collection is a great sendoff to the current Doctor and showrunner Russell T. Davies, whose classic interpretation of the characters and the show have been well-received by fans and critics. The series, in addition to being a ratings success in the BBC and a staple of BBC America’s lineup, has inspired comic book spinoffs in the US and the UK and has led to interest in a US remake of the program. It’s a continuation of the BBC’s late ‘60s-late ‘80s run and has inspired a popular, Davies-helmed spinoff, Torchwood.

For more casual fans or those looking to acquaint themselves with the ideas of the show, this particular box set is a decent enough jumping-on point; Tennant has been widely praised as possibly the best Doctor ever to be featured on the show, and obviously the series finale (“The End of Time”) would be a decent enough lead-in to what’s currently a great jumping-on point for them, though: the introduction of a new Doctor (Matt Smith, introduced in part two of that story) with the new season. The show itself isn’t for everyone; the continuation of the old show is not only story-wise, but technically as well; it looks just like it did in the ‘60s, and has the very analog special effects and costuming of that era. Featuring a number of big-name guest-stars, the specials are an enjoyable, if campy, peek at the show.

Happy Birthday, Jennifer Walters!

30 years ago, Stan Lee and John Buscema teamed up for the first issue of SAVAGE SHE-HULK — and so Marvel has announced that this week will be She-Hulk Week! If you hit up their Digital Comics Unlimited site, you can check out Dan Slott and Juan Bobillo’s first issue of their She-Hulk run.

While that’s all cool and all, part of me feels that this birthday makes the timing of this page, from the recently-released Incredible Hulk #606, seem a little bit… ill-timed:

Read the rest of this entry »

Larsen’s “Dragon War” starts to take its full toll on the world of the Savage Dragon; caught by his son in the act of eating another Dragon’s brain, “our” Dragon, who has regained his original, dictatorial memory set and lost the ones he made on earth, slaps the kid basically into orbit and starts taking on all comers, while all the supporting characters navigate themselves into position for what looks to be a pretty massive smackdown between the morally-ambiguous Savage Dragon and the morally-ambiguous Vicious Circle (now with a handful of Dragon clones). The coolest part of this story, and the most confusing part, is trying to figure out who the hell you’re supposed to be rooting for.

Blog@Newsarama: So is Kurr going to carry the scars of his battle with Darkworld Dragon throughout the story, to help differentiate him from other Dragons?

Erik Larsen: No. There won’t be any other evil twins or lookalikes that dress in an identical manner. Dragon’s healing ability will take care of the wound in short order–in fact it has already. By the end Of #157 he was back to normal. Read the rest of this entry »

Lost on what happened with LOST? Don’t worry — with the latest show on AOL TV, WE HAVE TO GO BAAAAAAACK!

Newsarama’s very own Jenna Busch was one of the first two guest hosts on AOL’s new webshow “Instant Dharma“, where she talked LOST theories and possibilities after last night’s Twitter-frenzying premiere. Don’t want to get spoiled? Don’t worry, my lips are sealed — but if you want to see more, click the link above.

Need a little bit of superhero swagger to your portable computing device? Etsy artist skinat has something kind of cool, even if I’m not 100% as to the legality of the whole she-bang:

An Iron Man decal for your laptop. I don’t know about you, but I think this is clever as hell. Skintat also has others, such as a Snow White one.

[Hat tip to Andy Diggle]

Find out more about Global Freezing here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com.

Well, the poster design is a winner: Here’s an image from the marketing for the new Losers movie, based on the Vertigo series by Andy Diggle and Jock:

Look familiar? It should. Here’s Jock’s cover to The Losers #12:

I prefer the crotch-in-your-face covers from #1 and #32, but that’s still pretty cool. The trailer looks awfully promising, too.

“In recent weeks, it seemed as though every other Marvel periodical I picked up featured an appearance by the original Captain America”: Don MacPherson managed to save up all his various Captain America comics set after the release of Captain America: Reborn #6, and thus was able to read and review ‘em all in order. Even in the proper order though, he was less than impressed.

Should Fergie play the lead in a Wonder Woman movie (if they ever get around to making one?): I don’t know, but USA Today was quite impressed with how Wonder Womanly she looked in her Grammys outfit with her hands on her hips. Meanwhile, Heidi “The Beat” MacDonald examined the evening’s fashion choices, and found a lot of parallels to superheroes and sci-fi. Is Black Lantern the new black?

The worst idea for a comic book movie I’ve heard in hours: The headline to this Hero Complex story says it all—”‘Sgt. Rock’ reloads as a movie project—but not as a WWII story.” Geoff Boucher interviews producer Joel Silver, who said the project is going to be set in the near future, as the idea was to be a war movie about where it’s going, rather than where it’s been. Well, I’m not a move producer, so I’ll just have to assume Silver knows what he’s talking about. A Rock movie set outside WWII sounds a little like a  an Enemy Ace movie about an American fighter pilot during the first Gulf War to me though.

Good luck with the cover credits this time!: “Second ‘Bat-Manga’ Volume In the Works”

I want to write an ongoing licensed 90210 comic book series, but that doesn’t mean I should: “Matthew Vaughn Wants To Make Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.”

Actually, the lamp that Radical Publishing’s Aladdin doesn’t have a singing, dancing, Robin Williams-sounding-like blue genie in it. Instead, it’s got a kinda scary-looking red djinn, which goes the entire first issue of Radical’s Aladdin: Legacy of the Lost without impersonating Ed Sullivan or Joan Rivers even once. The story is somewhat parallel to the more-familiar Disney version, given that they’re both built on the same skeleton of a story, but Radical’s is obviously a bit more serious and grim, replacing funny animals with cool-looking monsters.

Ian Edington writes, Patrick Reilly draws (with Stjepan Sejic joining him next issue), and it’s $5 for 64 musical number-free pages. What else is due out this week, and will any of those books have musical numbers in them? Join me after the jump for the answer to the first question…as to the second, I won’t know until I read the rest of ‘em, but I’m guessing none of ‘em do.

Read the rest of this entry »

DC fans who have wondered for years if we’d ever see Young Justice again can take a little solace from this report on Rich Johnston’s Bleeding Cool site.

In a nutshell, actress Stephanie Lemelin blogged that she’s voicing Arrowette in an upcoming “Saturday morning cartoon” called Young Justice League. Along with an image of the character (seen here) that she claimed was concept art for the series, Lemelin said that “Due to the extreme popularity of this series, however, that’s about all I can say,” which apparently was more than she should have because the link provided in Johnston’s story leads nowhere, and there’s no mention of the entry or the series anywhere else on Lemelin’s blog. Bleeding Cool, of course, deals pretty regularly in gossip and off-the-record stuff, so they had the foresight to archive the material, probably knowing full well that it wouldn’t be allowed to stay online very long. A second, unattributed source told Johnston that the team will be made up of Arrowette, Martian Girl, Aqualad, Nightwing, Impulse, and Superboy/Kon-El.

Lemelin has some interesting projects coming up, according to IMDB, but what we’ve seen so far makes her a perfectly reasonable choice for an animated spin-off of a comic; she has experience in the direct-to-video Kung-Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five, based on the feature film starring Jack Black, and starred in several episodes of the Cavemen TV series based on the series of popular Geico commercials.

(Click the image above for a larger version of the strip.)

WORLD OF HURT - The Thrill-Seekers - Episode 27: “Time to Go”

Like I said before, Duke is reduced to a quivering bowl of Jell-o from the tough guy posturing he assumed when we first saw him.  In my original pencil drawing of the final panel, he looked a lot like Edward Blake before he was sent down to the pavement below and turned into “human bean” juice.  If you don’t get that reference, you probably are on the wrong website. If you do, you probably know what’s coming next…

New strips of WORLD OF HURT - The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

In last week’s Amazing Spider-Man #619, Spider-editor Stephen Wacker devoted a full third of the “Amazing Spider-Mail” letter column to addressing Marvel’s new relationship with Disney, and what he hopes will bloom from that relationship.

If you haven’t read the issue yet (And you should have! Marcos Martin’s art is about as gorgeous as comic book art can get!), let me quote Wacker for you.

“Now I could go on an don about all the great Disney animated films I enjoyed in my youth and even now with my own kids,” he writes.  “But I think I speak for everyone at Marvel when I say I’m most proud of being associated with the company that brought us Condorman.”

Unfamiliar with Condorman? You and most everyone else. It’s a 1981 superhero/spy spoof in which cartoonist and comic book writer Woody Wilkins (played by Michael Crawford), creates his own Condorman costume, complete with a flapping hang glider like set of wings, in order to ensure the veracity of his comics creation.

“If Condorman can’t do something in real life, then I won’t have him do it one of my comic books!” he tells his friend early in the film, explaining his form of method comic book making. “Kids all over the world read my stuff, they trust me. They know if I fake it.”

He gets his chance to play hero for real when his buddy, a file clerk with the CIA, enlists his aid in what’s supposed to be a simple mission. I imagine hilarity ensues, but I had to stop watching it before any actual hilarity began ensuing, on account of the fact that watching Condorman seemed to be physcially hurting me.

It did poorly at the box office in 1981, accrued plenty of bad reviews the year of its initial release (and it’s got a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment) and it isn’t particularly fondly remembered by anyone—except for Steve Wacker.*

Wacker again:

Dear new corporate overlords…in all humility I beg you to please—as your first order of business—let us here at Spidey Sentral take the first comic crack at this wonderfully winged character, restoring this feathered, falcon-esque funseeker to the heights he so rightly earned in the barely seen, hardly remembered 1981 feature film.

(Actually, I think a Wacker-edited Condorman comic would be the second comic crack that this wonderfully winged character).

Wacker ends his plea with a call to action, asking that “letters of support” be sent to “LET WACKER BRING BACK CONDORMAN c/o Spider-Man Office” at Marvel’s address, 417 5th Avenue, New York, New York, 10016.

Personally, I was more looking forward to a Scarecrow of Romney Marsh comic, but I can get behind a Wacker-edited Condorman revival. Especially if he gets Martin to draw it. And makes whoever ends up scripting it adhere to Condorman’s own creative process of doing everything the character does in real life before putting it in a comic to make sure it’s realistic.

*Well, Steve Wacker and maybe Mike Sterling, whose posted about Condorman on more than one occasion.

By TGIO, of course, I mean “Thank God It’s Over.” And in that department, DC’s blog The Source has unveiled the covers to the final issues of Justice League: Cry For Justice and Superman: World of New Krypton. The World of New Krypton preview (seen here at the main page) also includes five story pages of the upcoming final issue.

I have to say that while the Cry For Justice cover is really nice-looking, and a small part of me wonders whether it happens before or after Blackest Night, given the appearance of the Hawks on the cover, there’s simply nothing that could make me (in the words of one fan in the comments thread) subject myself to the series finale, particularly now that the only ace in the hole it had left–what happens at the end?–has been spilled by DC.

World of New Krypton, which hasn’t been nearly as bad as Cry for Justice but which came with the handicap of being an idea I didn’t like from the get-go (whereas the basic concept of Robinson’s Justice League story was good all the way up until about three pages into the first issue), is a title that continues to baffle me. I remember back when I was a kid, and the Superman titles came out basically on a weekly basis. Back then, if you needed a bridge between a couple of mega-crossover-type stories, you just took an issue or two of Superman: The Man of Steel and Superman, and you set the stage. Here, it feels like the Superman titles (both this one and the monthlies) have been basically a year-long exercise to segue between Geoff Johns’ Brainiac story and the upcoming War of the Supermen. That said, declining sales on all of the Superman titles combined with no discernible enthusiasm from most fans I’ve talked to have me wondering whether that event stands a chance of success. After all, the last time one of DC’s beloved heroes from a race of super-beings had to play referee between their own people and earth, it’s not like the story went over phenomenally well.