The news that Walt Simonson is not only returning to Marvel, but drawing Brian Michael Bendis’ last arc on Avengers, makes me think about Marvel’s talent management vs. DC’s. For whatever reason – I’m tempted to say “The fact that there’s little else to work on, there” – Marvel has a tendency to use big name creators on big name books, as opposed to DC, where the same creators often work on smaller, more personal, projects. It’s not just Simonson – who, in his time at DC, bounced around titles like Wonder Woman, World of Warcraft, DC Universe: Legacies, JSA Classified and his Orion series that still really, really deserves to be collected thank you very much – but consider Warren Ellis, who went from barely touching the DCU when he was under DC Exclusive (His footprint was, what, one JLA Classified arc?) to writing Ultimate Fantastic Four, Astonishing X-Men and Iron Man for Marvel as well as Nextwave, newuniversal and Secret Avengers; Andy Diggle, whose DCU work consisted of, I think, Green Arrow Year One before jumping ship to Marvel and Daredevil and Thunderbolts; or Brian Wood, who didn’t work on any DCU characters before going to Marvel and starting Wolverine and The X-Men: Alpha and Omega.

There’s almost certainly more to it than Marvel offering (a) a lot of money and (b) not a lot of choice of available projects to creators; in Wood’s case, at least, we know that he had pitched for DCU work and not landed the gig, and for all we know, Diggle and Simonson were in similar boats (Somehow, I doubt that Ellis falls into the same camp), but I find the disconnect interesting. It feels like it’s only recently, with Jeff Lemire and Scott Snyder’s lead, that DC has really become comfortable with using “Vertigo creators” in their DCU books, and so perhaps that also contributes to the weird discrepancy. But it ends with interesting results, such as this Simonson news, which Marvel can easily play as “Comics Great Walter Simonson Returns To Superhero Comics!” without that much fear of contradiction.

Mark Millar is explaining where his head is at this year:

I prefer the Millarworld books to just be radical from an idea point of view. Nobody’s ever seen a superhero comic like ‘Kick-Ass’ before, and I want the Quitely project and the Dave Gibbons project to each be very unique and very new. People just want something different. You can see it in the charts. I feel creator-owned is where people’s interests are shifting. The vast majority of what I’m picking up comes from Icon and Image and, as we saw with ‘Nemesis’ or ‘Kick-Ass 2′ or whatever, these things can hit the top ten or top twenty, even in the middle of massive events or company-wide relaunches. we did 125,000 copies of ‘Kick-Ass 2′ #1 over five or six printings. The appetite for something new is enormous.

This seems to be the same feeling for 2012 that Image Comics seems to be tying into with their new ad campaign, the idea that this will be the year where readers look for new ideas and new characters. I really hope that’s the case, but in a year when Marvel are going to be pushing Avengers Vs. X-Men and DC likely has a second wave of New 52 in the wings, I have suspicions that old ideas will end up doing just fine…

I missed this post by Brian Wood at the end of last year, but he’s possibly noticed a quiet trend for 2012 comics: Food comics. Wood talks about Ryan Kelly’s upcoming food-centric webcomic Cocotte and mentions that he had pitched his own food comic to Vertigo earlier:

My own culinary series, called STARVE, is something of a casualty.  Created for Vertigo almost two years ago, it hit too many of the same notes as that Anthony Bourdain book they got going on, and so it was ultimately not approved.  Another publisher, an indie one, also passed for similar reasons.  I guess there is a real glut of food comics coming.  STARVE now sits in limbo.

The Bourdain comic is, for those who don’t know, Get Jiro, the graphic novel co-written by the celebrity chef/writer (with novelist Joel Rose) and drawn by Langdon Foss that’s due this year. But I feel like this food comic trend, if it’s real, has been en route for some time; in addition to the various food manga that’s been around for awhile now, haven’t recipes been showing up in Scott Pilgrim and King City in the last couple of years…? Clearly, this has been a slowly building zeitgeist. What’s next? Mixology comics?

Discussing the upcoming Supercrooks, Mark Millar gives away the secret to his success:

We’ve got two underground cage fighters, because I love the idea of fight clubs for supervillains. You’ve got this idea of wrestlers with super powers fighting illegally and using their powers against each other. These two brothers are in there. Then, you’ve got the main character’s girlfriend, who is pissed off because she doesn’t want him to be a villain anymore. She’s an ex-supervillain who’s trying to go straight, and he hauls her back in for one last job. Then there’s his best friend who became a real estate guy because he was fed up with the superheroes taking him to prison so often. It’s a bunch of guys who were trying to go straight getting back together for the biggest job of their careers. I love that idea, which we’ve seen in crime heist movies before, but never seen it done with superheroes.

It’s that last line that’s the most important, and the idea of selling people something by going “It’s this thing you’re really familar with… but with superheroes!” Where Millar succeeds in his high concepts, I think, is by presenting things that readers are comfortable with, with one major change – normally one that is also very comfortable for readers (Civil War is “It’s post 9/11 America – with superheroes!”, Nemesis is “It’s Batman – as a bad guy!”, Kick-Ass is “It’s superheroes – but they’re fanboys!” and so on), something I hadn’t really realized until he explained Supercrooks as this movie we’ve seen countless times before, and then added “with superheroes!” at the end. It’s kind of genius, in a way, and I look forward to seeing if I have similar success with my own pitches to Hollywood, which will include “It’s a romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl – but she’s a superheroic ghost!”, “Have you ever seen Drive? Well, this is just like that, but the car can talk like in Knight Rider,” and “Think Star Wars, but it all takes place on Earth and in feudal Japan.”

The news that Batman and Detective Comics will be gaining back-up strips to accompany Action Comics, All-Star Western, Men of War and Justice League in DC’s “$3.99 for 40 Pages Club” makes me think of how shortlived the “Drawing The Line at $2.99″ experiment really was for DC – It only launched last January, and lasted just eight months before The New 52 reinstituted the $3.99 price point. Now, we’re seeing more books being “upgraded” to the format, along with back-ups, which makes me wonder whether DC is admitting that the $2.99 pricing isn’t inherently more attractive to the mass audience despite a vocal minority saying otherwise? After all, both Action and Justice League have been top-sellers since launch even though they cost $3.99… If Batman and Detective continue their sales dominance with the new pricing, how long before even more DC books go to this format? How many New 52 books will be $2.99 and 20 pages by this time next year…?

In case you’d rather watch the Avengers save the world than fight the X-Men, Marvel has come with something for you to like… literally: an Avengers Facebook game. Avengers Assemble, created by Marvel and fellow Disney subsidiary Playdom, will allow players to create their own characters to join Earth’s Mightiest Heroes alongside all manner of familiar faces; according to Marvel’s VP of Games Production TQ Jefferson, there will be more than 100 characters throughout the game to offer easter eggs for longtime fans:

You don’t need to know 75 years of Marvel continuity to understand what is going on, but if you do, those elements are in there.

According to USA Today, the game should be launched within the next three months, just in time for the ramp-up for May’s big movie.

Well, this is just plain lovely. Chris Ryall previews Darwyn Cooke’s next Parker book for IDW:

To anyone who loves comics and hasn’t picked up Cooke’s two Parker adaptations to date, The Hunter and The Outfit, you are missing out far more than you could imagine. Just amazing stuff.

The last-ever episode of Wizards of Waverly Place airs tonight, and I can safely say that I’m more emotional about it than most adult males.

I never had the Disney Channel growing up. It was a premium channel until the late ’90s, so the only glimpses I would ever get of it would be during those free preview weekends that used to happen. As a kid with plenty of entertainment options, it didn’t really seem worth it to me, even if my parents had been up for paying for it (which they weren’t).

By the time shows like Lizzie McGuire or Even Stevens started, I was in high school and far removed from the channel’s targeted demographic, even though I now live with the sad knowledge that I robbed myself of precious early moments in Shia LaBeouf history. Disney Channel was just never really something on my radar, especially compared to the indelible mark that Nickelodeon programming like Ren & Stimpy and Clarissa Explains It All made on my childhood.

That changed, drastically, at the perfectly normal age of 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Ignoring that fact that the new six-issue mini spinning out of the twelve-issue mini Avengers vs. X-Men is called AvX:Versus, making the full title of the comic Avengers Versus X-Men Versus (It’s just like “DC Comics” actually being “Detective Comics Comics” if you think about it too much), I have to admit kind of loving the idea behind the series, which seems to be “Avengers vs. X-Men might not have enough fights in it, so here’re six more issues of fights so that no-one feels like they’ve missed out.”It simultaneously makes me wonder what is going to be in the twelve issues of Avengers vs. X-Men if there isn’t going to be enough space for fighting, and reminds me of the awesome structure of Steve Englehart’s Avengers/Defenders War, which took great pains to show each member of each team squaring off against their counterpart so that everyone got to see their favorite in action (I can but hope that each chapter starts with the logo for the starring characters).

For years, comics have seemed to be moving away from what used to be called “slugfests,” in favor of more complex stories and a somewhat nervous attempt at literate legitimacy, so Versus seems both a surprise and a welcome blast from the past. Is it too much to hope that Englehart himself will be rescued from relative comics obscurity for a chapter within this anthology series…? Probably. I’m still somewhat on the fence on the main series – I mean, it’s really Civil War 2: This Time It’s Schism, isn’t it? – but this seemingly gratuitous, punch-happy spin-off? Potential guilty pleasure of the year.

Over at CBR, Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson ‘fesses up and admits that, yes, Dark Horse’s digital comics are slightly cheaper than their print versions:

You are, in fact, pricing some digital comics lower than print: The digital versions of your $3.50 comics are priced at $2.99 on the day of release.

Yes. It didn’t dawn on us — the Apple store will only take [prices that end in] 99 cents, so some of the books got priced at $2.99, because the $3.99 price makes me flinch a little bit. If you take $3.50 and move it to $3.99, it’s not a very good experience. Some of the retailers are asking us please put them at the 3.99.

Will you?

It’s not our policy. I don’t like to charge more online than I do [for print copies].

Are people switching to digital to save that 51 cents?

It doesn’t seem to be happening. Print sales are steady and digital sales are growing.

Here’s my by-now-traditional question on these “Here’s what’s happening with our digital publishing plan!” interviews: Almost every single time, without fail, we see interviewees say “print sales are steady and digital sales are growing” or something similar; at what point is someone going to come out and say “We don’t think there’s as big a connection between the print and digital audiences are everyone expected, so we’re going to experiment and lower the digital price on certain books to see what happens?” Surely it’s only a matter of time, right…?

MorrisonCon is coming in fall 2012, apparently. What exactly that means, where it’s happening, and when, well, that remains to be revealed.

In a production from “the people behind Isotope Comics and iFanboy,” a new convention — clearly headlined by Grant Morrison — is scheduled for some point in fall 2012, billed as an “innovative new approach to comic conventions.” Confirmed guest so far? Well, Morrison, natch, along with “9 hand picked comic creator superstars.” As far as venue goes, San Francisco (or somewhere in the Bay Area) would be a reasonable guess, given the involvement of Isotope, but that would indeed just be a guess. There’s a Twitter account, too, but it has yet to tweet, in keeping with the somewhat mysterious vibe. Folks looking for more information can add themselves to the mailing list right here, and we’ll keep an eye on things and pass along more information as it comes.

So, we know that Marvel has Avengers vs. X-Men planned for 2012, as well as Avengers Assemble and Brian Michael Bendis’ “Ultron War” storyline amongst other big events. Which of these, if any, are the subject of tomorrow’s Marvel Mystery Liveblog, which promises both special guests and a major announcement from the publisher? Or should we be expecting something that’s not even been hinted at just yet…?

The announcement is timed for 3pm EST tomorrow. You have until then to speculate away.

For followers of comic history, the Comics Journal website is reprinting a Gary Groth interview with Kevin Eastman where he talks about Tundra, his well-intentioned-but-ultimately-doomed publisher from the early 1990s, and it is a must-read, if only to see just how the best intentions can end up going so horribly, horribly wrong:

I believed I was armor-plated and unstoppable. I thought I would have all the resources I needed with some of the finest work from some of what I thought were some of the best creators in the field, and that this would be the “comics company” that would break down some of those barriers. By the time I arrived at the cold “reality” of my “fantasy,” I’m killing myself for something that’s never going to work: it’s too late! This whole time, as long as I’m physically awake, I’m working. Either related to Mirage or related to Tundra: In a bed that I made myself, for sure… I really thought that Tundra would be something. But it was ludicrous. I thought I would spend a year forming this brilliant company that would break all the rules. I’d bring all these talented people in and then expect them to climb inside my head, read my mind, and try to make these impossible things happen. At the same time I’m a poor leader crippling them.

It’s fascinating, occasionally breathtakingly ludicrous, stuff. A must read.

Warren Ellis considers what will happen to comics in 2012:

This year should be the year where a wide swathe of established comics creators go “digital-first” with a broad variety of projects.  However, that should also have been last year.  Which leads me to wonder whether or not there’s really a taste for it among the creative community.  (Aside from me: but I’m not certain I’d have the time or access to the artists that’d really make it work for me.)  So I’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t going to happen this year, and won’t until it’s really too late – and just hope I’m completely wrong about this one.

This year, at least three groups will offer indie comics creators a “roll-your-own” digital service allowing them to ready and upload their own comics into storefront apps.  It will be absolute chaos, and will create the sort of curational crisis you see when you browse for Kindle books by genre.

A corollary to the above, though: I expect to see more new comics creators bypassing the standard model of comics publishing entirely this year, and going straight to book publishing houses and crowdfunded self-publication and direct-to-digital using one of the services mentioned above.

On that last point, I think we’ve already seen the start of that with creators like Bryan Lee O’Malley, Hope Larson and Craig Thompson go to “mainstream” publishers with their latest projects, and creators like Tony Harris and Camilla d’Errico using Kickstarter (not to mention Womanthology)… But I worry that Ellis is right about his first two suggestions, depressingly.

Colorist extraordinaire Matt Wilson explains how he approached a scene from Wonder Woman #4 in order to clarify what was happening:

The first [challenge] is that we have our group of characters split up, and in different parts of the club, and I knew that I could use color help the reader understand which part of the bar each character occupied. There are also quite a few panels with a lot of people drawn in them, and if I were to do my job poorly the art could flatten out and become hard to read. I had to make sure that I did a good job of separating planes (foreground, middleground, background) to properly show the depth of space in the club. In this case coloring different areas of the club with different color schemes solved both problems. These different colored “pools” of light include the blue-green seating area, the yellow bar area, the red stage area, and the crowd being a transition between red (stage) and blue-green (seating area) ending up a pink-ish/purple.

To further explain, he creates a simplified take on certain pages, as well as offering the finished colors:

It’s a really nice look into the thought that goes into coloring, as well as how important it is to the final page – Look at how differently the two versions of the same page above read on first glance.

Mark Millar is lowering expectations for his plans in 2012, as he normally does:

It’s me, DAVE GIBBONS, FRANK QUITELY, STEVE McNIVEN, JOHN ROMITA JR and LEINIL YU… six little tykes with a plan for a comic book revolution not seen since… well, six little tykes set up Image exactly 20 years before. I can’t even BEGIN to describe you the stuff you’re about to hear over the next two weeks.

Between the mention of the creation of Image Comics and the “The Big Two Just Became The Big Three” advertising slogan he’s adopted for Millarworld this year, I keep finding myself wondering whether or not Millar’s planning to switch up existing plans and launch MW as an actual publisher this time around. I tend to doubt it – At least three of his upcoming projects already have publishers announced, right? – but it’s not impossible; with Millar no longer writing for Marvel, I’ll be interested to see how long Nemesis and Kick-Ass remain Marvel Icon titles, after all. Perhaps Titan will extend the Clint publishing agreement to a wider Millarworld line…?

Elsewhere in the same thread, Millar teases his project with Quitely a little bit more:

This stuff is on a whole new level. Seriously. The Quitely project in particular has potential to be as big as Civil War, but still creator-owned superhero. Nobody’s ever done anything like this before.

Typical Millar hyperbole or hint at something people should get excited for? We can decide for ourselves soon; the reveals are due to start coming at the end of this week.

While Bryan Hitch’s high-profile departure from Marvel has been grabbing headlines lately, he’s not the only artist whose exclusive contract with a publisher has just ended, as Jamal Igle has announced that he’s no longer a DC Comics exclusive creator:

Frankly, this has been a long time coming,While I was very happy for many years to be exclusive, There comes a time when you’re ready to move on. There’s no animosity, in fact just the opposite. I’ve never been calmer or more centered than I have since I made this decision. I was forced to turn down a lot of outside opportunities while I was exclusive because I was so busy that I couldn’t take them on or contractually unable to do them.

So what does this mean?

Well, for one I already have a some comics work coming up, which will be announced soon, as well as securing other work in and out of the industry. I’m also available for work as well. I’ll be taking private commissions and developing some projects and pitching some of the creator owned concepts I’ve been working on over the last few years.

He adds that this doesn’t mean he’ll never work for DC again, although he adds that he’s not been offered anything beyond the end of the current Ray series. Weirdly enough, I was just wondering why we’ve not seen any Igle work at Marvel recently… Perhaps it was some strange premonition; I can see him paring well with Mark Bagley on an Avengers book or something.

Are we far enough away from last week’s comics now that I can write about the end of one without spoiling it for everyone? Possibly not, so join me under the jump if you’re not that worried that I’ll spoil Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #8 for you, please. Read the rest of this entry »

So the Mystery DC Hooded Stranger is called Pandora, is she? Sure, as Michael suggests, that name draws all manner of connections to the Pandora of Greek myth, who had a box (Really an urn, but “Pandora’s Urn” really doesn’t sound quite as good) filled with the evils of the world, but what if it’s something else? What if it’s actually a revival of a DC character that never even managed to see print the first time around?

I know, it sounds like some kind of Sentry-esque fake-out, but way back in 1981 DC announced a new series called Pandora Pan by Len Wein and Ross Andru that was described as the adventures of “the assistant of an archaeologist who unwittingly opens Pandora’s Box and spends the rest of her time trying to retrieve the evil she has unleashed by doing so.” The series was slated to get a preview in Saga of The Swamp Thing #5, before being launched as a full-series later that year. Neither the 15 page completed preview or the series appeared, with Wein later saying that he couldn’t remember what had happened to the series (Arak launched as a series in its place).

Admittedly, it’s unlikely that the mysterious hooded woman is really “the assistant of an archaeologist,” but I have to admit, there’s something interesting about the idea that she’s a character who’s accidentally unleashed something terrible on the world and is trying to clean up her own mess. I guess we’ll find out what’s going on with this new phantom stranger when she next appears in Justice League…

That mysterious project that Bryan Hitch has been counting down to on his Twitter account has now been revealed, with the first teaser originally unveiled over at CBR:

As that image makes pretty clear, he’s teaming with famed UK talk show host Jonathan Ross — the writer of five-issue 2010 series Turf —for America’s Got Powers at Image Comics in April, and here’s how Ross described it on Twitter: “America’s Got Powers Full on superhero angst and action as Americas most gifted superpowered teen wannabes slug it out on tv for a place in the worlds only official super- team.” Keep reading Newsarama for more details as they come.