Continuing Doomkopf.com’s transformation into an exclusively-Iron Man comics blog, here are some entertaining little bits on an alleged Easter Egg.

FIRSTSHOWING.NET: Is that Captain America’s shield in the background of the Iron Man movie?

I have confirmed myself, along with our comic book expert Roman Chavez, in person that Captain America’s shield is actually in Iron Man. Yes, you heard me right, and if you need to go out and see it again this weekend I suggest you do. We’ll provide the information on when and where it shows up below if you care to go find it, but we’re pretty damn sure this is it. As for what this means for the Marvel universe and future movies - who knows? I thought Captain America wasn’t around at this time and I thought he got his shield from S.H.I.E.L.D.?

TOYRSEVIL.BLOGSPOT.COM points out that the shield was clearly added for the theatrical release, as it is absent from the trailer version of the same shot.

What is the fascination with endings in comic books? It seems we just can’t get enough of them, and big comics companies just can’t stop giving them to us. Whether it’s the Ultimate X-Men or Y: The Last Man or the Final Crisis, it seems that endings are popping up around every corner, only, once we get there, it just shows a new path to a new ending, in a never-ending loop.

I don’t know how far back this trend goes, but let’s look at the most recent example of it. When 52 ended, the big tagline on the cover was, “It All Ends Here!” The very next week, the first issue of Countdown had the tagline reading, “So Begins the End!” One Year Later, the last issue of Countdown featured the tag, “The End!” Now, one week after that, DC Universe #0’s cover exclaims, “The Ending Begins Here!”

Aren’t you getting sick of it all? I know I am. I mean, it’s obvious that none of these were the real ending of anything, so why should we believe that Final Crisis will actually be the last Crisis that DC makes? Who’s to say that five years from now, there won’t be some new miniseries titled, “The Crisis of the Future” or something?

I guess I just don’t get the fascination. It’s like Margaret Atwood once wrote: “So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.”

Remember early last year, when DC released this image?

Countdown is now over, so let’s take a look at what all these teaser images were referring to, moving clockwise from the left side, and compare them with Dan DiDio’s comments from last January.

1. Big Barda and Scott Free are dead. They got killed in DONG.

2. The Statue of Liberty is knocked down. Cloverfield.

3. Kyle Rayner and Donna Troy are looking … beyond? They became the Challengers from Beyond in Countdown. Donna changed costumes in the middle of a battlefield. DiDio said “The color is important key to her future and her allegiance.”

4. Jason Todd as Red Robin. Dan DiDio said in the initial Q&A that physical distance could represent emotional distance. Jason become Red Robin to aid Earth-51’s Batman, but ended up not learning a single lesson from that one potentially meaningful episode in the year-long series. He’s still the same jerk he was, hence his separation from his traveling buddies Donna and Kyle.

5. Oliver Queen. Is he separated from Black Canary after getting married? I haven’t been reading that series.

6. I assume it’s a Batman from another earth, as all those Elseworlds books are now in-continuity, but DiDio said “The image is symbolic in natural and it is indeed the Batman you are reading now. As for the sword, it’s not the first time he used one.” I still don’t get this one.
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Every time I try to make sense of a rise in Countdown’s sales, it ends up being something artificial — a reporting glitch, a change in return policy, or something like that. So this month, I’m not even going to try to justify it. Countdown’s numbers rose slightly. Make of it what you will. The book is still selling way below what 52 did, and overall, it’s still declining.

If there is one success with Countdown, it is this: both titles had a huge jump in week 13, previously attributed to the return policy. Regardless, 52 returned to week 12 levels by week 36; Countdown was able to hold off returning to that previous low until week 40.

Take a good look at this. You’re staring into the face of the new comic trend. Because of an incestuous circle of mild talent that propogated itself around the time of the forming of Image Comics, we’ve been subjected to the artist as celebrity trumping the much better “book coming out on time every month” trend which was previously the standard. But now it’s not enough to put up with fugly, constantly late and past its prime art. Now we have to have it painted to hide the fact that the artists still draw like a bunch of mid-nineties turds. I discussed it a little bit here in my Ultimates 3 review and tackling the Johnny-always-fucking-come-lately Joe Madureira. For the record, if that’s misspelled, I don’t particularly care. But the king of all turd kings, Rob Liefield, is now having his shit stains painted over. It’s like you can use this to hide the lazy penciling.

PS - It’s about the Bible.

PPS - At least he’s restrained himself on the amount of guns.

Mr. Simon earned the “legend” title with his partner Jack Kirby by creating Captain America, the superhero who arrived in December 1940, just in time to play a patriotic foil to the Axis powers. The cover of the first issue even has the good captain socking Hitler in the jaw.

For Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, though, the biggest blow came when they were dismissed from the series, which had been selling a million copies a month, in a dispute over royalties. The team moved to Detective Comics (today DC Comics), but Captain America stayed with Timely, the forerunner of Marvel Comics.

Read the full article at nytimes.com.

File this under “WTF?” Our beloved Iron Man, the drunk ol’ asshole who no one seems to like right now has a new facet to upset Bloggers, developers, crackers, Linux users and hackaday.com.

In this bit of news, it seems ol’ shellhead is going to be taking on a new force of evil. In the absense of Soviet Union and Crimson Dynamo representing the anti-American forces of Communism, collectivism and anti-capitalism, we have a new behemoth - nerds who like to create free software. Here’s a little sample of writer Matt Fraction’s take on villian Ezekial Stane:

Zeke is a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist… He has absolutely no loyalty to any sort of law, creed, or credo. He doesn’t want to beat Tony Stark, he wants to make him obsolete.

Quick, delete your copies of GIMP, Firefox, Adium and NeoOffice and burn that Ubuntu-based laptop. Do it in the name of our hero, Tony Stark, a drunk who dresses like a robot.

We interrupt this irregularly scheduled review for this breaking news bulletin. (Okay, so I’m sure this “news” is far from “breaking.” Usually the internet is weeks ahead of the Previews, so I’m probably way behind the curve.)

I nearly blew a gasket today when I left the comic store and caught a glance of the back cover of Previews. I knew Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley, the creative team behind the original Thunderbolts, where going to team on a new book at DC, but there had been no hint of what it would be. This Mark Bagley art has been on the internet for weeks now, but up until now I was unaware it was attached to a specific project and not just a “look what I can do” sort of promo piece.

But holy crap! Bagley and Busiek on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman?! That’s fracking awesome!

It wasn’t until a few minutes ago when I got home that I got to take a really good look at the cover, and I blew right through that first gasket and nearly through a second one:

“Three Incredible Super-Heroes…One Explosive Weekly Comic.”

Frack me.

After the atrocity that has been Countdown, it was going to take a lot to get me excited about a new DC weekly series.

Reuniting one of my all-time favorite writers with one of my all-time artists may have been enough to accomplish that on its own. Throwing the three biggest characters in the DCU into the mix is just icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.

Not much has changed in the past month. Countdown’s slight rise at issue 16 proved to be just a temporary jump, as numbers were back to pre-blip levels by issue 12. Overall, it’s as if January’s rise never happened, with week 40 sliding right back into the week 1-35 decline.

As was the case with 52, the general curves seem to be leveling out — probably a combination of two factors: 1. There is bound to be a smaller and smaller number of readers who get fed up with each issue, as there is a smaller and smaller numbers reading each issue, and 2. As we get closer to the end of the series, there may be a bit of renewed interest in seeing where this was all going.