Marvel

New collections from Marvel, including a storyline which takes place between paragraphs in another book! And the Justice League as zombies! New Titles from DC, including Silver Surfer and Captain America!

If you didn't hear about it, the Ghost Rider sequel film, "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance" debuted this weekend. It also didn't finish where the experts thought it would. Initial estimates have it in the #3 slot behind Safe House and The Vow.

Sam Humphries is going to the ultimate ultimate with ULTIMATE COMICS: ULTIMATES. We are really just posting this as a shout out to long time Beat pal Sam Humphries, who will be co-writing the book with Jonathan Hickman starting with issue #10; Luke Ross is the interior artist. Humphries has been at the writing game for a few years, but he's finally about to blow up, with a ton of new assignments.

Well, speak of the devil. As we posted only a few hours ago, Marvel is in a very vulnerable PR position on the Gary Friedrich matter...so much so that they have sent both CCO Joe Quesada and publisher Dan Buckley to clarify and soothe at Comic Book Resources. As they point out, the matter is still under litigation and a settlement is being negotiated. Buckley and Quesada do a good job of trying to handle the negatives—they're pros—especially with this:

Comic books crossing over? The crossover quote of the week goes to Dan Buckley in his Comic Book Resources interview:

Okay, just so we don't forget the OTHER member of the Big Two on this day long to be remembered...Marvel has a new project involving...more than one man tagged Spider. It comes out in June. As you were.

A sequel to the well-received X-MEN: FIRST CLASS has been greenlit with Matthew Vaughn once again to direct, Deadline reports. Simon Kinberg has written a script and Bryan Singer will produce. Everyone expects Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy to reprise their roles as Magneto and Professor X, but no one has officially been signed yet. And given Fassbender's recent roles, maybe we'll get to see little Magneto, too.

Once again, a creator loses a copyright battle against a major comics publisher with a major motion picture soon to screen. The artist is living in poverty, has health problems, and is forgotten by the general public. Sound familiar? Read on... it gets worse.

by Paul O'Brien

-- This month, the slow build to AVENGERS VS X-MEN begins with the AVENGERS: X-SANCTION miniseries; and DEFENDERS is relaunched. Both are wisely given a pretty clear run, without other Marvel launches competing for space. Elsewhere, the X-Men, Hulk and Fantastic Four relaunches continue to bed down. And down at the bottom end of the chart, the cancellations continue to mount up. Normal service is resumed, kind of, as Marvel had the largest share of the north American direct market, albeit by a fairly narrow margin - 39% to 38% in units, 34.4% to 33.7% in dollars. But bear in mind, this was a five-week month where DC more or less sat out week five.

With Marvel's April solicitations up, we can now declare crossover season upon us. AVX (Avengers vs. X-Men, if you prefer) has been announced. Axel and Tom have talked about keeping it in the core books. Let's see how many titles that entails in April.

Every once in a while Marvel likes to get cultural by commissioing a bunch of variant covers in the style of great paintings. they've just done this with April's Avengers Art Appreciation Variants, which will whet your appetite for both the Avengers movie AND a trip to the local museum. Alex Maleev, Michael Kaluta, Gabriele Dell’Otto, Greg Horn, Gerald Parel and more channel Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Monet, Pollock, and Egon Schiele (one 'l'). Which one do you like best?

The past year has seen an unusually large number of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, both in comics and on the screen, but not all Holmeses are created equal. Last night, British viewers got to see the last episode of Season 2 of the BBC's wildly popular starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows starring Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law is still doing well in theaters a month after it opened. So if you're in a Holmesian mood and wondering what to read next, here's run down on the Holmes adaptations which have come out or had new installments in the past year. Varying from inspiredly odd to unreadably awful, don't go to the comic store without reading this first!