Rich Johnston over at Bleeding Cool mentioned mentioned that Dan Didio is allegedly going forward with putting together various Watchmen related comics in the form of prequels and spinoffs.  Paul Levitz,  despite his issues with Alan Moore, had always protected Watchmen from these sorts of things.  Now that Levitz has stepped down there is likely no one to stop it especially given the huge success of the trade from the movie hype.  Even though the movie is becoming a fleeting memory in people’s minds the original trade still continues to be a top seller with no signs of slowing any time soon.  So it is probably no surprise that Didio would want to take advantage of this and squeeze out everything he can from it.

At first look this sounds like a horrible idea.  Anything they did could never live up to the original, but I actually think it might be a good idea depending on the creative talent involved.  Obviously Alan Moore would never be part of it but Dave Gibbons is on good terms with DC.  Ideally Gibbons would at least over see projects like this much like he did with the Watchmen related merchandise around the time of the movie.  Len Wein, the original editor of the Watchmen, has been working for DC of late and would be another name worth having involved in this.  Wein did write the script for the Watchmen video game, which was basically a prequel based around Rorschach and NightOwl.  Beyond them there would be the various talent that worked on Moore’s ABC line comics like Zander Cannon, Gene Ha, Rich Veitch, and others.  I personally would love to see Grant Morrison do something with Doctor Manhattan.  I liked what Morrison did in Superman Beyond 3D with his own of version of the Doctor Manhattan/Captain Atom character.

Didio is usually pretty good about getting the right people on the right projects, so if this does happen it would be a honest effort and not just a quick money grab.  I for one would like to see happen.

My good friend Marc Streeter just launched his webcomic this week over at actionmanadam.com.  It centers around Adam a Canadian living in Christchurch New Zealand who is trying to find love.  Adam is based off a real life person both Marc and I knew.  The real life Adam was quite the character himself and unintentionally provided Marc with all the material he needed to make a entertaining comic.  Marc has coincided the launch with his birthday as a good way to remember it, so happy birthday to Marc and best of luck with the comic.

Webcomics

I must admit the world of webcomics is a bit foreign to me much like manga was before I made headway with that.  I’m not really sure what to think of them at this stage.  Some are done in a format like a comic strip and some are a comic book format.  I like that ActionMan is in the comic book format as that is my personal preference, much like Warren Ellis’ Freak Angels.  I’m familiar with the better known webcomics like pVp and Penny Arcade, but they never really caught my interest.  I have been regularly fallowing Karl Kerchl’s webcomic The Abominable Charles Christopher.  I enjoy it but it does leave me wishing that it was treated more like a comic book.  I have not had much luck finding other webcomics that catch my interest.  If anyone has any webcomic recommendations I certainly would appreciate them.  I would like to know what out there is worth reading.

Well, it looks like I was wrong, and Marvel’s new Avengers book is going to start at issue #1.

So since my first prediction was wrong, here is my next one — Marvel will only maintain this new numbering until the number of issues among all combined Avengers volumes equals some nice round number, such as 600.

The good news is that Bucky is still Captain America in this lineup. The bad news is that John Romita Jr. is drawing it. I hope Hawkeye is on the team.

Marvel has been playing a very strange game with the pricing of their comics.  They want to push the $3.99 price tag as much as they can to milk what they can out of the direct market.  The strange thing is some of the books like the recent Captain America books have been priced right at $3.99 because they each have 30 pages of new material.  Most of the $3.99 books, like the books in the Ultimate line, have only 22 pages of material which is over priced.  It seems somewhat fitting as Marvel creatively has been a mixed bag of late.  Some of the books are really great and some are just horrendously stupid.  So it’s probably no real surprise their pricing is just as haphazard.

DC on the other hand has their pricing set.  A DC book that is $3.99 will have 30 pages either as a full story or a co feature to make up the extra pages, while the 22 page books are set at $2.99.  It’s simple, it’s smart, and it doesn’t cheat the fans.  Marvel needs to fall in line with this because it is not just something that is good for the fans but it is something they will benefit more from as well.   The main reason Marvel would benefit from this also ties into one of the reasons why Disney purchased them, that being character development.  Disney wants properties they can develop in other media such as movies, TV, etc.  The better Marvel’s comics are the more Disney will have to work with. (more…)

Apple officially announced their tablet device today, the Ipad.  Newsarama has a good write up on the technical specs of the device.  This has of course lead to all sorts of chatter about what this means for comics.  The common reaction has been that this will be the game changer and that comic shop owners should be quaking in their boots.  It is wishful thinking but the truth is the Ipad is a dud for comics.  The device is a bit of a mashup of the Ipod and Iphone,  just with a large screen.  It has the same limitations as Apple’s other devices.  Those limitations are why this will not have any real impact on the comic industry for the foreseeable future.
(more…)

Another year has passed us by, and, while 2008 was a pretty stellar year for the superhero genre of movies, 2009 proved to be a different beast entirely. If there’s one thing that we can all agree on, right up front here, it’s that movies featuring superheroes this past year were pretty terrible across the board.

Not only did Watchmen get skewered by a barrage of quite negative reviews (it received a 64% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes), but it ended up performing terribly at the box office, too (its domestic total topped out just north of $100 million, more than half of which was made in the opening weekend, a total that was a few dozen million short of the production budget).

On the other hand, we were given a couple movies that performed exceptionally at the box office yet were complete disasters when you look at the critical reception. X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen both found their way onto my list of the worst five movies of the year, for example. Then there’s the stuff that I don’t even feel like talking about (G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and Dragonball: Evolution, I’m looking at you).

Luckily, it’s a new year, and Hollywood is still churning out superhero movies, thanks to the successes of so many past movies with men in tights. And that’s what we’re here to discuss. Just like every single year, it’s once again time to set our attention to the year to come and toss back enough bottles of beer to wash the year that just passed fully from our collective memory.

First up, we have the big screen adaptation of Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass, a series that, as far as I know, still hasn’t completed its first story-arc. I talked about it briefly in my movie preview last year, as its release was still TBA, but I’ve changed my tune in the 365 since.

I’m looking forward to this movie immensely. Yeah, I dropped the comic after two issues, and the casting initially kind of pissed me off (a superhero movie with Nic Cage and McLovin?), but something about the trailers has made me rethink the whole thing. It looks like a lot of fun, and Nic Cage has completely redeemed himself in my eyes after his performance in “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans” (seriously, that movie is absolutely amazing). So I’m going to give this one a chance. If it sucks, I’ll only be down nine bucks anyway, so what’s the big deal?

And, come on, it can’t be any worse than “Mystery Men.” Wait. Can it? (more…)

Newsarama quoted Dean from Krypton Comics on Marvel’s offer to trade for unsold DC comics.

Dean Phillips, owner of Krypton Comics in Omaha, Neb., said he liked the fact that Marvel is trying a promotion, but not one this economically unfeasible. “Unless you are choking on unsold quantities of those books, it’s just not worth it,” he said. “Keep on coming up with inventive ways to promote, but do so in a way that helps the industry. Why attack others when you are in a position to help the entire market?”

Everyone is failing to point out that Marvel is offering a Deadpool variant cover to mock DC’s lame promotion.

Deadpool.
Variant.
Cover.

2010.

So Marvel is cancelling all the Avengers books, with the obvious assumption that they’ll bring back the adjectiveless Avengers and resume the original numbering.

New Avengers and Mighty Avengers used to be two of my favorite monthly books. Then New Avengers jumped to $3.99 a month and Dark Avengers showed up. I wasn’t going to give in to the inflated price tag, so assuming that the events of Mighty Avengers would be tied in with what was happening in the $4 Avenger books, I just decided to drop Avengers books completely.

When Siege #1 was about to come out a few weeks ago, I remember feeling almost bummed. I hadn’t read anything positive about the buildup to this latest huge event, but I was still kind of sad at the awareness that I was growing away from the comics I used to enjoy so much. A few years ago, I would’ve been such a loyal Avengers comics reader that I would’ve picked up Siege regardless of whether or not it looked good — it would’ve just been the next chapter in wherever these stories were going.

Things I’m still curious about:
- Would a new “The Avengers” book retain the $3.99 price of New Avengers or the $2.99 price of Mighty?
- Which — if any, if not all — of the current Avengers titles will be used to calculate the new numbering. Will they pick up at #505? Or will they add up every New, Mighty and Dark issue and combine that with the original run?

DC today announced Justice League: Generation Lost as a 26 issues bi-weekly series.  It is the same format as the Brightest Day series announced yesterday.  Essnetially the two books with trade off each week.  The surprising thing about Generation Lost is that it will feature the classic Justice League International team, comedy and all.  It will be co written by Judd Winnick and Keith Giffen.  The two were interviewed at newsarama making it pretty clear they are going for comedy.  On top of that the original writing team of JLI, Giffen and JM DeMatteis, fresh off their entertaining Metal Men co feature in Doom Patrol will be taking over Booster Gold sometime this year.  Saddly there is no word on what artist Kevin Maguire will be doing but hopefully he will be involved in one or both of these books in some way.

I personally think all of this is great news but I honestly don’t know how well it will do.  It is banking on a nostalgia of sorts with the revival of the sitcom style superheroes.  Hopefully most are like me and are looking for something more fun and light hearted like this to help scrub away the overly serious grim and gritty elements of many superheros titles in recent years, of which most of the JLI characters took the worst of the grim and gritty abuse.  Thankfully it is structured to be separate from the Brightest Day events so people will not be force to feel like they  have to read it for continuity’s sake.  It can just be read for the sake of entertainment.

DC’s official blog the Source had quite a bit of news today announcing the Brightest Day as a fallow up to the Blackest Night event.  It will essentially be to Blackest Night what 52 was to Infinite Crisis, just with a bi weekly release of 26 instead of the weekly, that is two issues a month for one year.  It will be co written by the Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi in addition to their continued work on the Green Lantern books.  It will also be treated like something of a event to help launch the new Flash series written by Johns as well as the new creative directions for Titans, Justice League, and likely a few other books.

At first glance it does seem kind of tiresome to have even more big event things piled onto everything else DC has planned for this year.  But after reading the IGN interview with Goeoff Johns covering this news I feel pretty confident that it will be pretty good.  I have enjoyed the Blackest Night for the most part and having this fallow it sounds far more interesting then the War of the Supermen event that is set for later this year.  That is not to say the Superman event will be bad, but Superman just doesn’t have the same depth of interest that the Green Lantern related books have now.  Of course this is also further evidence that creatively speaking 2010 will just be more of the same as last year.