Marvel editor C.B. Cebulski went on a mini-twitter-tirade against Wizard today:

More shoddy, sensationalistic reporting in the new Wizard. Let them retweet that as it seems this is where they’re getting all their “news”. (source)

@jengrunwald With that kind of misinformation, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a Wizard podcast. (source)

@richjohnston I think the industry as a whole is allergic to Wizard these days. (source)

Now it’s really easy to call someone out for “shoddy” reporting, but it’s a lot more difficult to say what somebody did wrong and what the truth is. So I tweeted Mr. Cebulski, asking “have you said what they got wrong yet or just that they got something wrong?” He, unsurprisingly, has not replied.

To put it quite bluntly, it’s ridiculously irresponsible to accuse someone of bad reporting without providing any evidence to back it up. When you don’t back up a claim like that, it looks more like Wizard published something true that Cebulski didn’t like, and since he has nothing factual to refute it with, he turns instead to trying to drag their name through the mud. It’s a pretty standard — but sleazy — tactic.

But he didn’t stop at accusing them of flawed reporting. (more…)

From Rob Liefeld’s Twitter.

In junior high, we’d call this an “easy target.” It’s like I caught the slightest hint of underwear peaking out from sweat pants and now my hands can’t wait to put a wedgie death grip on them.

Instead, I’ll let you write them. Put your comments below, and speculate on the awful ineptitude that Ryan Reynolds and Rob Liefeld are in the process of santoruming on the world.

EDIT: I should note that, as a comic fan, I was the one getting my pants pulled up in junior high.

I needed something to read over lunch today, so I cheated on my regular Wednesday shop and swung by the comic shop that’s closer to my workplace to pick something up. I settled on Daredevil: Dark Reign: The List #1 as 1) I am a Daredevil fan and reader and 2) its standalone nature suited my needs quite well.

I’m excited about the direction Daredevil is going. While the Bendis and Brubaker runs have been among my favorite comics ever, I felt like the series was getting a bit stale in its shift to focusing primarily on the personal life of Matt Murdock, of which the red costume was just a tiny part. I commented to Doom DeLuise about a year ago that if I were in charge of writing Daredevil, I’d shake things up by dropping a bit of the mopey gloom (even though that’s a great part of what makes Matt Murdock such a fantastic and well-defined character) and focusing on the spandex life of Daredevil the superhero. So I’m all about what appears to be just such a shift.

Here’s where I get annoyed. (more…)

New X-Men movie? Say it ain’t so! Please, if there’s a god, you will say it’s not.

But Internet rumblings say it is. Check this news.

MTV’s Splash Page blog noticed that Tim Pocock, who played the young Cyclops in this summer’s retro X-Men movie had left the following update on Twitter:

currently shooting Australian TV series till February 2010…then X-men first class

This can only end poorly. Expect a multitude of cobbled together mutt continuity from a music video director. Any guesses on the class to be? Will we have a Lil’ Bishop storyline? Is there a mutant untouched (or, thanks to Brett Ratner, scathed) by the X-Men movie Juggernaut that can join this team? By my count … Banshee, Warpath, Dr. Reyes and Cable will be on the team.

As someone who has griped extensively about $3.99 comics (I had to get through two pages of more recent $3.99 moaning just to find that post in the archives) I was super pumped to see this story from Rich Johnston:

What if the comics, rather than creeping towards the $3.99 price, suddenly dropped. To $1.99. Across the board. Sales would rocket, market share would soar, other publishers would be squeezed off the shelves, plastic rings or no plastic rings, comics revenue would fall. But buzz would increase, increase, increase.

It might even just save the direct market. Or it might doom it, if certain retailers have become used to the $3.99 price point. Volume might help though…

Naturally such a publisher would need deep pockets to do this on a mass scale.

Oh, it’s Disney.

Lose a million, make a billion. This is not just speculation, I understand it is seriously being discussed at the publisher right now.

Rereading the quote, my super-pumpedness has come down a bit since starting this post upon realizing how ruthless this would be, as it likely would eliminate competitors who couldn’t compete at that loss-level. So I guess there’s a flipside to that coin.

h/t a guy named Dave that I can’t link to

I am no manga fan. I have nothing against the stuff — I just don’t know much. The only series I’ve ever read was Death Note, which I eventually dropped around volume 9 or so because I just got tired of all the twists and what seemed like a contractual obligation to continue stretching the story out. That said, I came away with a lesson that I could definitely like manga. Stories were stories, and good stories can come in many formats, including little backwards books.

So fast forward a few years to this summer and I see Scottie Young praising this “Pluto” book on twitter, with comments like “I may have to stop reading PLUTO or risk not being able to read another comic again ever due to it destroying them all” and “So good. Read this book, do it, do it, do it.” Being increasingly apathetic about the comics I pick up on a weekly basis these days, I decided to give it a shot.

It’s basically a robot murder mystery, but it’s beautifully told. The first four volumes have been released in the U.S. and volume 5 comes out next week. I can’t recommend it enough.
(more…)

In case you haven’t heard, the Powers That Be at Warner Bros have recently hired Guy Ritchie (of “Swept Away” fame) to direct the big-screen adaptation of Don Payne’s “Lobo” script. You might remember Don Payne as the guy who wrote the second Fantastic Four movie or the dude who penned “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” one of the absolute worst movies of the past decade.

According to the article in Variety: “In the film, he is a seven-foot tall, blue-skinned, indestructible and heavily muscled anti-hero who drives a pimped out motorcycle, and lands on Earth in search of four fugitives who are bent on wreaking havoc. Lobo teams with a small town teenaged girl to stop the creatures.”

Doesn’t that just sound AWESOME? An anti-hero with a pimped-out motorcycle? Teaming him up with a small town teenaged girl doesn’t even have the possibility of being lame as shit!

Hopefully, once they get into casting, they’ll decide it’d be more marketable to hire a small town teenaged boy, putting some, I don’t know, Fred Savage-esque tween in the sidekick role. From there, all they have to do is cast Howie Mandel as Lobo, and they’ve got a sure-fire blockbuster on their hands.

In case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic. This is gonna be so stupid it’ll make “Little Monsters” look like “Casablanca.”

By the way, for those of you keeping score at home, when it mentions who’s producing this inevitable shit-burger, yes, Akiva Goldsman is the same Akiva Goldsman whose writing skills killed the Batman franchise back in the late 90s. He also got hired this week to reboot the Fantastic Four franchise. So, for those scratching their heads, the answer is: Twelve Years. The question, of course, is, “How long does it take before Hollywood forgets about somebody committing career suicide?”