Comics

Valiant's being a big tease again. I was sent the following graphic with the tagline, "Shadows fall this November."

We don't know who came up with it, but it appears the heartbreak of crotchleg has been with us for a while and seems to be here to stay.

These have been all over the place, but Calamity Jon Morris's renderings of early Marvel stories as pulp novel covers are the definition of nice art. And also, wouldn't a line of Black Widow novels be cool?

By Jeff Trexler

-- Whatever the merits of the latest summary judgment motion in the dispute over the Superman copyright, its supporting exhibits bring together a number of important documents in two accessible filings.

If you didn't see the trailer for Man of Steel, the upcoming Zack Synder Superman film, in the previews before The Dark Knight Rises, the trailer has finally started turning up online. The trailer is bleak and somber in tone. It might be the whole film has this feel or it might be a deliberate attempt to differentiate a new project from the Richard Donner version the viewing public is familiar with (and that Bryan Singer was attempting to emulate in the last Superman film).

I haven't written a post for The Beat in quite some time; I have been working, writing and trying to start up some new businesses - but more on that another time. I am writing because of what happened in Colorado and because today is my son's birthday. And for those of you I don't know - I am a former DC Comics employee. My son has been looking forward to both his birthday and The Dark Knight Rises. In fact he has invited a few of his friends to go with him tonight to see the film. As I write this he is playing Batman: Arkham City, and when I got home last night he was watching The Dark Knight. I also noticed a stack of Batman graphic novels stacked on the dining room table.

Or at least that's what was posted on Twitter.

By Paul Mellerick--

Walking Dead shoots up in sales with two issues this month, while X_O Manowar marks the return of Valiant with the second best-selling indie book this month. Saga, Buffy and Fatale follow shortly behind, with a nice handful of strong new launches from all of the major players as the indie books continue to make their mark in the upper part of the chart.

On Sunday at Comic Con panel dedicated to Darwyn Cooke's Parker series of graphic novels, Darwyn Cooke and editor Scott Dunbier announced that a fourthParker adaptation would be published in late 2013 and that it would be based on Donald Westlake's Parker novel, The Handle.

By Henry Barajas-- IDW was kind enough to invite me to a see a magic show at their booth at the San Diego Comic Convention as if there wasn’t enough magic in comic con. I have to admit I was a bit leary about attending a magic show. I’m very ignorant of the whole thing. I was afraid they were going to saw me in half and separate me from my nicely shaved legs. I got to the booth and I was greeted by the creators of Smoke and Mirrors, Mike Costa and Jon Armstrong. Jon is an award winning magician that has been performing internationally for over twenty years. Before we started the interview Jon was kind enough to do some card tricks.

It looks like Top Cow turned their Cyber Force Kickstarter campaign on the evening of the 17th. I discussed the campaign during Comicon, but the short version is that Top Cow is trying to raise $75K and distribute free copies of the first five issues/first story arc of a new ongoing Cyber Force comic in a manner similar to Free Comic Book Day. It's an interesting idea.

by Alexander Añé -- One of the hot topics in the comics industry is the movement into the digital medium, and of course the biggest question in that migration is, "what's it going to cost?" Sunday afternoon at San Diego Comic-Con, the leading voices in this debate came together to discuss this topic: Mark Waid representing Thrillbent, Scott Kurtz the creator of PvP, IDW Publishing's ePublishing director Jeff Webber, Chris Ross attending as Top Shelf's director of digital publications, and moderating the panel is comiXology's Chip Mosher.