You may remember that memorable panel in Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye #3 where an old-school Hawkeye head covered a naked Clint Barton’s private area:

Well, now you can recreate that scene yourself — sort of — with a t-shirt from We Love Fine:

It’s part of a three-shirt collection from the site, celebrating the critically acclaimed and Eisner-nominated cult favorite series. The line is curated by Fraction himself, and the shirts go above and beyond your average wearable tie-in and celebrate Hawkguy’s bro-filled nuances. Plus, Fraction is donating his curation commission to Futures Without Violence, which works to prevent violence against women and children.

This is pleasantly unexpected, from Tom Brevoort’s Tumblr:

Coldmoon and Dragonfire, there’s still a chance we’ll see you again, too…!

(Seriously, if you look back at Marvel Point One from 2011, it’s a very strange book now: Previews for an event comic that didn’t come out for more than a year, a Defenders reboot that only lasted a year, an X-Men spin-off that was just cancelled, Avengers vs. X-Men, Scarlet Spider and two strips that apparently didn’t lead anywhere at all. As a historical artifact, it’s weirdly compelling in its oddness.)

With the cancellation of Red She-Hulk, it’s worth looking at Paul O’Brien’s latest Marvel sales analysis to take a look at how Marvel’s other female-led titles are doing. The publisher has historically been weak in that area – There was a point, not too long ago, where Marvel had no books with a solo female lead – and, oddly enough, it looks like we might be headed that way again: Both Captain Marvel and Journey Into Mystery are selling less than the just-cancelled Gambit and Winter Soldier, which doesn’t bode well, and even Fearless Defenders is already selling less than Matt Fraction’s shortlived Defenders redo was twelve months earlier.

It raises the question: Why don’t Marvel readers seem to support female-led titles? After all, both Captain Marvel and Journey Into Mystery are good books – as is/was Red She-Hulk – and at least Red She-Hulk and Captain Marvel featured characters who were fairly central to the Marvel Universe. Why the low sales, especially in comparison to books like Thunderbolts or Scarlet Spider? I genuinely don’t understand; DC can seem to find a readership for its female-led books, so why are Marvel’s audience so seemingly resistant? It’ll be fascinating to see how Brian Wood and Olivier Coipel’s X-Men performs in its first year; that’s an amazing creative team, and a collection of fan-favorite characters. Surely that book will do well over a sustained period?

(Also interesting/surprising in O’Brien’s analysis: Seeing the rapid descent of Fantastic Four and FF. Was Hickman’s success on the franchise a fluke?)

So, now we know: the mysterious Age of Ultron #10UC solicit from last month that had no final title, no synopsis and no creative team information – It was all “classified” – is actually a comic called Hunger by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Leonard Kirk, and also a four issue mini-series. While the solicit suggests “a dangerous rift in the universe,” suggesting that maybe theories about the UC standing for Ultimate Comics isn’t too far off, I’m sticking with the “Universal Constant” theory. After all the new title for the series is Hunger and, thanks to Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers, we know that “Universal Constant” is just another name for Galactus, AKA the hungriest character in Marvel’s back catalog.

Nonetheless, now that we’ve been given the creative team and new title for the series… Why was this “classified” information in the first place? Given that the announcement of the title and team came via solicits and without any fanfare – not to mention, still before Age of Ultron #10 – what was so secret that we couldn’t know last month, but can know now…? It almost seems as if plans for what is now Hunger just weren’t fully together when last month’s solicits were compiled, and “Classified” with used instead of “To Be Announced” for the credits, doesn’t it? “Classified” is the new “We can’t tell you because we don’t know, but we don’t want to tell you that we don’t know,” it seems.

Well, if true, this is unexpected:

Now, per The Daily SuperHero’s Hollywood source Renner is done as Hawkeye mainly due to his negative comments after The Avengers… Even though nothing official has been said about Hawkeye’s involvement in The Avengers 2, Whedon has said he will introduce a new brother/sister duo to the superhero ensemble team. More reasoning that Renner’s days are over because the hero depth chart is filling up fast and there might not be any room for the archer.

The source hints that there’s the tiniest chance Renner will reprise his role in The Avengers Sequel but the source also said there is a greater chance Hawkeye will be recast (like War Machine and the Hulk have been recast before). Finally, the source said if Hawkeye is to be recast there is a solid chance he could be incorporated into the new television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a primary character.

This is, of course, just a rumor with only an anonymous source to back it up – In other words, hardly the most credible of reports. However, coming after the Deadline Hollywood story about Avengers actors reportedly falling out with Marvel over the sequel, it’s becoming oddly believable that, whenever Avengers 2 comes out, at least one actor won’t return…

Brett White thinks about a subconscious lesson of the X-Men’s success:

There’s a misconception amongst comic book fans that feminist creators and characters means that their comics will change for the worse. There’s a fear that women reading comics will fundamentally change some ill-defined something. The truth is, the X-Men prove that feminist creators and characters lead to success. Having a team composed of strong men and women doesn’t dilute the action. As a kid reading these comics, I didn’t realize how feminist they were. I just knew they were awesome.

I’m not sure that all X-Men creators are feminist, per se, but it’s true that Chris Claremont created a culture in that series where women were treated as equals at the very least, unlike so many other superteams. It’s odd to think that, although so many comics and creators attempted to copy Claremont’s soap operatics (and moral corruption storylines) in an attempt to ape Uncanny X-Men‘s success, none really thought to also adopt his approach towards female characters.

Prompted by the news that the CW’s Wonder Woman project is still in development, here’s a question: Is the problem in adapting Wonder Woman to other media her origin story?

Origins, after all, have particular significance in modern superhero adaptations; they’re where most (if not all) adaptations begin and, in the case of Smallville and Arrow, the space where some stay for the length of the entire story. And yet, Wonder Woman’s origins remove a lot of agency from the character; it ultimately boils down to “She is created and raised by her mother, and then decides to leave her home because of a boy.”

That’s not to say that there’s not a lot of good stuff there to play with – Her mother is, after all, the Queen of the Amazons, and you should be able to spin out enough drama from that alone to fill an entire TV series – but it lacks a moment where Diana does anything particularly dramatic or worthwhile, leaving those responsible for the adaptation to come up with what’s still referred to as “the hero moment.”

She isn’t unique in this, of course (Green Lantern’s origin is similarly happenstance when it comes to Hal’s participation, as is the Flash’s), but Wonder Woman also faces the strange problem of lacking a single, successful (in terms of fan reaction) narrative in any incarnation that provides a framework to build around; whereas Geoff Johns altered Green Lantern with the introduction of the multi-colored Corps, Wonder Woman still lacks that one story for adaptations to… well, adapt. Is the reason we’ve not seen a Wonder Woman TV show or movie so far that those responsible for the adaptation just don’t know what to adapt yet?

With the future-gazing Wolverine and the X-Men #29 freshly on sale, series writer Jason Aaron is set for Wednesday’s Marvel “Next Big Thing” conference call with the comic book press. We’ll be on the line and updating live, so keep hitting refresh for the latest details. Here’s an album with lots of new art from the series.

Call starting now — on the line, Aaron and Marvel senior editor Nick Lowe, talking “The Hellfire Saga.”

“It certainly is something that’s been building for quite a while,” Aaron says of the story. “The Hellfire Club kids first popped up in Schism. I think this is what their story has been building towards this whole time.” Aaron says “Hellfire Saga” involves more characters than he’s written in a single story in his career. “I’d say it’s the biggest, craziest arc we’ve done in Wolverine and the X-Men, and if you’ve read Wolverine and the X-Men, you know that’s saying something.”

Read the rest of this entry »

There comes a time when the characters are so stupid, you have to stop thinking, “Yikes, they are stupid” and start thinking, “I’m reading this; am I stupid?”

“It’s comics,” they will say to me when they see this. We expect our comics to be serious-as-a-dead-child stories about open-mouthed dum-dums who could still believe in the Tooth Fairy. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature. That “Joker fell in water; guess he’s dead” thing alone has been done so many times this most recent one was probably a “reference.” But maybe we have put so many spins on that classic story (from the forties, for eight year olds) that we have upped the ante past the maximum safe ante height. Any more, it’s just rubbing our noses in the mess we’ve made. Imagine the next poor sap who has to write a Joker story. For Batgirl.

Jim Mroczkowski is finding himself wondering whether or not taking certain genre conventions for granted is a good thing or not. My general rule of thumb is pretty much, when you start thinking about this kind of thing too much, it’s time to give yourself and the story a break for a bit; otherwise, you will start to realize that, no matter how good Superman is at hunching over, someone would realize that he’s really Clark Kent.

Of course, there are times when the stories involved make ignoring the ridiculousness of some of these things particularly difficult; any time a story focuses on the importance of the secret identity, for example – as Scott Snyder’s been doing over in Batman, the book that Mroczowski is talking about – there is that moment of “You’re just reminding us how ludicrous this actually is, you know that, right…?”

The always-wonderful Evan Narcisse at Kotaku talked to Greg Rucka about comics, video games and the value of treating creators well:

You treat talented creators poorly, you get shitty comics. It’s as simple as that. If you’re happy reading shitty comics, then I suppose you shouldn’t worry about it. If you want to read good comics about the characters you love, then you should damn-well care. You don’t get the best work from people who feel they’re under fire, that there’s no security in their job or trust in their work. Respect the talent, respect what they bring to the characters, and collaborate. Comics is, by nature, a collaborative medium. When writers and artists are treated as disposable and interchangeable, the work will suffer.It all comes down to what you want to spend your money on. You continue to pay for crap, then the message you’re sending is that crap sells, and more crap will come to market.

Well worth reading, as most interviews with Rucka are. And talking of Rucka, there’s still time to donate to the Lady Sabre Kickstarter, if you’ve been meaning to but haven’t gotten around to it just yet…

Despite online reports citing a Marvel subscription newsletter, a representative from the publisher tells Newsarama that ongoing series Avengers Assemble is not cancelled.

Various sources including The Beat and Bleeding Cool passed along word Tuesday of an email to Marvel subscribers stating that the Kelly Sue DeConnick-written title was ending, and that subscriptions would roll over to the main Avengers book.

Last week, DeConnick talked to iFanboy about an Avengers Assemble tie-in to Infinity, starting in August.

Update: Marvel’s subscription service has sent out an email clarifying the situation:

Whoops! Has Kang been messing with the timestream or have we just been getting confused?

The Avengers keep on assembling! Avengers Assemble is not ending, it’s carrying on its merry way, and its loyal subscribers will stay right where they are.

Marvel Universe Avengers Earth’s Mightiest Heroes will also be keeping on track.

We’re so sorry about the confusion! Avengers forever!

Sincerely,

Your friends at Marvel

Marvel’s superheroes may rule the movie theater, but DC can at least claim the… supermarket?:

In a first-of-its-kind partnership, Target Corp.  and Warner Bros. Consumer Products, in partnership with DC Entertainment, have teamed up to introduce an extensive summer collection of exclusive Justice League merchandise. The summer collection was inspired by “DC Comics – The New 52” comic book character designs and holds surprises for fans young and old. Featuring the full lineup of DC Comics’ iconic Justice League Super Heroes – Aquaman, Batman, Cyborg, The Flash, Green Lantern, Superman and Wonder Woman – the summer collection will launch at all U.S. Target stores and on Target.com beginning May 19.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “I hope this means that I can finally see my favorite superheroes re-imagined as furniture!” Well, you’re in luck:

And that’s not all!

In addition to the exclusive summer collection, Target will be part of a broader partnership with Warner Bros. Consumer Products that will offer more traditional Justice League licensed products. The broader partnership will span more than 20 categories including home, stationery, toys, apparel and accessories. All Justice League licensed products will range from $1 for Justice League temporary tattoos to $59.99 for a Justice League Rocker Chair.

The next time someone claims that superheroes haven’t penetrated the mainstream, just point them to the fact that there’s going to be a Justice League Rocker Chair.

Colin Smith considers the opening pages of recent issues of Astonishing X-Men and Wolverine, and why one works for new readers while the other doesn’t:

The beginning of a monthly book needn’t involve a hysterical measure of world-threatening hype, and unfamiliar readers can certainly be intrigued by situations and characters they know nothing about. But this page’s lack of visual distinctiveness, key information and, most deleteriously, liveliness does undermine the scene’s appeal. For all that the art is careful and competent, and for all the undoubted craft that’s evident in the script, this really isn’t a particularly enticing introduction.

The marketplace is saturated with super-books. Some of them are excellent. Why would either the casual browser or the uncommitted consumer opt for Astonishing X-Men #62 on the evidence of this opening page?

We very often get so dedicated to our viewpoints as established readers that understanding how something would/could appeal to someone not as well-versed in the mythology of a fictional universe can seem difficult; for my money, this was the same problem with Marvel’s Infinity preview for Free Comic Book Day this year. For the faithful, it was a well-done book teasing something they were likely to read anyway. But for new readers, what was really there for them…?

I was surprised to see the upset online yesterday at the news – via DC’s latest round of solicitations – that Legion of Super-Heroes has been cancelled. What was surprising wasn’t that people were upset that the book was ending, but that there seemed to be this feeling that this was the first time that DC had cancelled the book, which… didn’t really make any sense, to be honest.

For one thing, the current volume of Legion was the seventh, and at 23 issues (24, once you include the zero issue), it lasted eight months longer than volume 6, which was cancelled to make way for the New 52 relaunch. That previous volume launched with a cover date of July 2010, meaning that it had been almost a year and a half between volumes 5 (which ended with #50, cover date March 2009) and volume 6. In the meantime, there had been the three issues of the seemingly-permanently delayed Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds mini and four issues of an abortive back-up run in the revised Adventure Comics (The Legion were theoretically headliners in the Adventure tie-ins to the “Last Stand of New Krypton” storyline, but that was more of a Superman event that featured the Legion than any attempt at a Legion book).

Even if seven headlining appearances in sixteen months falls within your definition of “continuous publication,” it’s still odd to see people assuming that DC cancelling the current series means the end of the Legion as a whole. Even the final solicit suggests an imminent reboot, with talk of the future of the DCU future looking different… In an era where, just in the last few years, we’ve seen the cancellation of long-running titles like Action Comics, Detective Comics, Fantastic Four, Uncanny X-Men and so many more, just to be relaunched months (in some cases, just weeks) later, surely the idea of a classic book ending “forever” seems ludicrous or at least amazingly naive, doesn’t it? Is there really anyone out there who doesn’t think we’ll see the announcement of a new Legion title – even if it’s not called Legion of Super-Heroes (We have, after all, had replacements with titles like Legion Lost, Legion Worlds, The Legion etc. in the past) – within a few months at most?

Axel Alonso on spoilers:

That said, there will always be people out there who delight in leaking information and spoiling it for readers. There are so many people who have access to information after the book goes to the printer, after it’s printed, after it’s distributed — it’s impossible to prevent leaks, even if it is possible to track down culprits after the fact. That said, I actually think pirates and gossips hurt fans a lot more than their intended victims: creators and publishers. Does it hurt sales? I dunno. The sales of “Amazing Spider-Man #700″ sure don’t seem to indicate that. Does it hurt fans that want to enjoy the surprise as a part of their actual reading experience? My guess is yes. I mean, if can get through “Madmen” Season 5 without someone spoiling the ending for me, it’ll be a miracle.

Two things:

1. I think it funny that his list of ways in which people can be spoiled for comics they’re reading doesn’t include “Publishers revealing big news in mainstream press outlets anywhere from days to months before the release of said comic,” personally. Although leaks happen (a lot), I think that USA Today or somewhere similar running a story about the ending of a comic tends to spoil the story for more readers ahead of time than some printer/retailer/fan getting hold of a copy early and releasing a smartphone pic online to a fan site. YMMV, of course.
2. How important are spoilers, anyway? I wonder that, sometimes. There are plenty of stories that rely on a shock last minute reveal for a certain amount of drama and tension, of course, but that is rarely the only value of a story; there has to be something more to it, surely, otherwise the story can only be read once, because any re-reads would be pointless in light of you knowing the big secret. While knowing a spoiler ahead of time can rob the story of one kind of appeal, shouldn’t good stories have more to offer, and therefore have a different-yet-equal appeal even if you know the ending ahead of time…?

Which is to say, spoilers might not hurt sales; as Alonso says, Amazing Spider-Man #700′s success would suggest that, along with countless other comics from Marvel and other publishers (Surely that’s why mainstream news outlets get the exclusives on things like Peter Parker’s death, Johnny Storm’s death, et al ahead of time, to help sell the books). But is it possible that, in the long term, they don’t really hurt the stories, either…?

I’d fallen behind on everything that’s being offered at Thrillbent recently, which was a mistake considering the new material that’s joined Mark Waid and Peter Krause’s Insufferable in recent weeks. Being a Leverage and Dungeons & Dragons fan (The IDW series of the same name for the latter, sadly; start talking to me about 20-sided die and I’ll just have to nod politely and shamefully admit that I’m lost), it’s no surprise that Arcanum is a particular favorite standing out for me amongst the new strips, thanks to the presence of writer John Rogers. As is his wont – as listeners of the Leverage 10 podcast or readers of Rogers’ Kung-Fu Monkey know – he’s not only writing the new magic invasion series, but writing about the series, spilling beans and lifting the curtain on some of the thinking behind it to give the rest of us a peek. Here’s Rogers selling the series in one simple paragraph:

If anything even vaguely resembling alien tech were discovered, you’d see the US government immediately put two programs in play: 1.) a Manhattan project to unravel the broken physics of said tech and 2.) a secret military/intelligence agency to keep tabs on it. Just substitute “magic” into those sentences and you have Arcanum.

You can find those process blog posts here and the actual Arcanum comic here. Both are recommended.

This Tumblr post, showcasing early appearances by the leading characters in Brian Wood’s upcoming X-Men series, brings back all kinds of happy memories for me. I started reading Uncanny X-Men around #185, when Rogue was still relatively new to the team and Rachel wasn’t even a full member yet; Psylocke and Jubilee were years away from joining the book, although I’m tempted to say that I’d already met Betsy Braddock via the UK Captain Britain strips.

Something that I’m reminded of with these scenes is how tonally varied Claremont’s X-Men was in its prime; that the melodramatic angst would inevitably be balanced by comedy (even if it was, like most Claremontian humor, more unusual and awkward than actually funny to me), and that the characters would get to “win” every now and again. I drifted away from the series around the very start of the Jim Lee era, worn down by the endless plots and seeming lack of direction the book had at the time, and – Morrison’s brief New X-Men aside – didn’t really return to the franchise in any permanent sense until Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron had taken over.

Part of what had kept me away was the constant feeling of oppression the X-Books had devolved into, it felt like; a sense that the characters were fighting a permanently losing battle against… well, everything, really. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the fun of the X-Books I read growing up had disappeared, replaced by constant danger and depression and not fun, for want of a better way of putting it. Everything was melodramatic angst, and what little happiness there was always felt temporary (and, usually, would be proven to be so in the service of plot twists and cheaply manufactured drama).

That might’ve been why Aaron’s Wolverine and The X-Men and Gillen’s Uncanny X-Men clicked for me. There was a sense of humor in both books, and a lightness in tone beyond that. Both series had a sense of possibility and hope that appealed both in a nostalgic sense, but also to the reader I am today. I would rather read a series that wanted to make me smile as much as thrill, chill and sadden, you know?

The Bendis reboot of the franchise, post-Avengers Vs. X-Men, has left me a little adrift from the main X-Books again, I admit (It’s not a tonal issue anymore but one of pacing and disinterest in keeping up with Bendis’ work in single issues; collections of his superhero stuff have been my preferred format for awhile; I feel like I get more out of the experience that way), but I’m familiar enough to feel that we still have an X-Men franchise that offers as many “up” moments as down ones, and that’s a really nice thing to consider. It might have taken decades, but I like the idea that X-Men can have fun even when things look particularly grim again.

Now, if only we can convince someone that an updated “Kitty’s Fairy Tale” should form the basis for the 2014 event, instead of another “Days of Future Past” retread…

Never mind the official Agents of SHIELD teaser, the Rising Tide blog is where it’s at for more hints about what to expect from the show when it debuts in the fall. With a header that reads

Who is S.H.I.E.L.D.? What are they hiding? Super-powers are real. Aliens exist. What else is out there? We will uncover the truth. We will not remain silent any longer.

it looks as if at least part of the show will deal with the fact that, post-Avengers, the existence of superheroes, supervillains, gods and aliens aren’t the stuff of conspiracy theorists anymore… which, of course, means that the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day trying to argue that everything is true after all. Given the senses of humor displayed by Whedons Joss and Jed and Maurissa Tancharoen elsewhere, something tells me this could end up being a very fun thread playing throughout the entire season…

When asked, over at CBR, whether fans can expect Marvelman to appear anytime soon, CCO of Marvel Entertainment Joe Quesada had this to say:

No. We’re still not prepared to talk about it. We’ve been very patient and very deliberate on how we talk about Marvelman. The internet leaks aside and the stuff that may be out there which you’ve read and isn’t true, we’re very careful with this. We don’t want to talk about this before its time — especially with something as great as Marvelman.

“We don’t want to talk about this before its time.” That’s a great idea, and one that the Joe Quesada of 2009 should have considered before telling the world that Marvel had bought the character, with Marvel telling fans to “stay tuned” for more news. It’s not as if fans started wondering, out of nowhere, whether Marvel would do something about the character; they were told four years ago that it was happening. Hell, as recently as last month, current EiC Axel Alonso was promising “an announcement soon.”

I get that it’s got to be frustrating to be continually asked about a project that is, quite clearly, taking longer to sort out than expected – but saying that the company doesn’t want to talk about it before its time, or that the company has been quite deliberate on how to talk about it rings somewhat false. After all, if that were really the case, why was it announced four years ago, and followed by a short-lived reprint series of the material that nobody really wanted, leading to everyone wanting to know when the good stuff would finally be available?

If, like me, you enjoyed Avengers Assemble #15AU this week, you might have thought that writer Al Ewing was making up Computer Graham, Magic Boots Mel and all of the new mythology out of whole cloth. Turns out, that’s not the case at all, and it’s up to his brother Tom to explain where it really comes from:

Computer Graham! There are two things to know about Computer Graham. One is the “bedroom coders” stuff he tells us in the issue, which is a two-panel summary of an important British pop-cultural moment, the early videogames boom. This happened everywhere in the West, of course, but it happened differently in Britain because the bulk of our videogame market wasn’t console-based, it was based around small, programmable home computers. So instead of our touchstones being large US and Japanese corporations, they were tiny software houses and teenage one-man bands rising to pop-culture success on games coded in, yes, teenage bedrooms. There’s a fine book detailing this history, and also at least one song about it. There was a very strong patriotic streak to the UK computer revolution – British gamers building a homebrew market in the face of flashy, but essentially crap, American imports. So no wonder Computer Graham’s come out of hiding now.The other thing to know about Computer Graham is that he’s a re-spray of a real old UK comics character, Computer Warrior, who starred in Eagle for 9 years, battling enemies inside mostly real games. I only read a couple of Computer Warrior strips, but I am fairly sure his treatment here does them justice. In the original strips he’s only a player, not a coder, though.

Panel 5: Doomdarke is – minus the ‘e’ – the villain from Mike Singleton’s Lords Of Midnight, one of the great cult UK games and an astonishing display of what is possible with 48k RAM. Singleton died recently, so this is a nice tribute. Macaroni Ted is from Jet Set Willy. probably the most anticipated UK bedroom-coder game of the whole era. The Chief Examiner has Marvel pedigree – he appeared in the Scott Adams range of Questprobe text adventure games, notorious for their unfairness.

In fact, all three games referenced are very hard – JSW famously uncompletable due to a bug (which the makers claimed hastily was a feature). So Computer Graham is kind of a badass.

Go read the whole thing; it’ll make you love the issue even more.