Comics

Continuing their teasers for the CCI Amazing Spider-Man panel, here's the new one. Captain America, eh?

Archer & Armstrong will be the latest Valiant book getting the revival treatment. The original A&A was a Barry Windsor-Smith book. It was also a book with a sense of humor about itself. An immortal of slovenly bent and an uptight martial artist. Yes, this was the comics version of a buddy movie.

In the run-up to San Diego 2012, Marvel have released two teasers for an upcoming story called 'War'

J.T. Yost writes to alert us to a successful Kickstarter for a great sounding project called DIGESTATE, a food-theme anthology:

We told you about the now Legendary webcomic The Oatmeal having an amazingly sarcastic response to a threatening legal letter and starting a charitable fundraiser. Then we told you that the lawyer who sent the initial letter decided to sue Matthew Inman (of The Oatmeal), the charities he was planning on donating to, and Indiegogo (which he was using as a fundraising tool.) If you thought the strangest was over, this affair has done nothing but snowball since then. Yes, while following the links spinning out of this story, I came across Batman's point ears in a place I really wasn't expecting to see them. We'll get to that in due course.

Disney comics is a complicated topic. Disney bought Marvel, but the BOOM! had some of their licenses. BOOM! lost the licenses, but Marvel didn't exactly come charging out of the gate with a lot of Disney titles. If you were paying attention to job listings, you'd also see Disney was hiring comics editors and digital comics people for their publishing office in White Plains (which is about to move to Burbank). It looks like we're seeing their first product: the "Brave Interactive Comic."

We're a little less than three weeks away from Comicon and there's a ton of speculation about Marvel's next move. Which is assuming there is a *formal* next move, granted. If you look at the May sales estimates, AVX is distracting from a sad state of affairs. Throw out the AVX minis, and no estimate breaks 70K. Throw out the Avengers and X-titles getting pumped up by the event (which are just under 70K and would likely be clustered about 60K without the bump). Selling in the 50Ks are three Spider-Man issues and Uncanny X-Force sneaks in. So the 40K band is pretty decent sales at Marvel these days. Throw out their most successful sales stunt in years and the rest of the line is as low as Marvel has been.

Add another player to the growing list of digital comic app providers. Madefire has been in skunkworks mode for probably a year, hiding out in Berkley . Last fall I bumped into one of their executives at a tech event and after hearing his description, it was pretty obvious this was what Liam Sharp had been setting up. Boy, did his eyes pop out when I said "oh, so this is the new Mamtor." And, if we're honest, this is Liam Sharp taking his Mamtor concept (which was a perfectly reasonable idea) and moving it into a more independent format.

True to their word, DC is launching a followup reader survey, after last fall's New 52 launch survey. John Rood mentioned that any demographic info would only be truly useful as more comparisons were able to be made, and future surveys were promised. And here it is. We tried to take it but got booted out for truthful answers, sadly. (In this case not actually buying any DC comics.) As before there is a fake survey title, ORANGE IVY, to weed out wannabes.

Marvel's variant cover for Avengers Vs X-Men #8 shows Cyclops and chums having a lovely time

Although it is branded as a Pixar movie, "Brave" is more like a Disney feature. Is the Golden Age of Pixar over?

I'll make it short and sweet: creators have to create. Marvel and DC no longer allow them to do that, except within rigidly proscribed guidelines. And the Paolo Riveras of the world are going to have to move on. It might not be too long before the Big Two are just steppingstones to get your name out there for even bigger things.