Publishers

If you're going to have a Star Trek: The Next Generation comic, there's a very short list of people who would be more authoritative to write it than Brannan Braga. The only other name that pops into my mind is Ronald D. Moore. IDW has tapped Braga to write Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hive, which is being promoted as "the final chapter in The Borg saga."

A couple months back, Dynamite starting publishing new adventures of two classic pulp magazine heroes: The Shadow and The Spider. Both characters have seen comic adaptions over the years, particularly The Shadow. With a couple month elapsed, its time to step back and see how these characters that predate comic book superheroes (and influenced the creation of Batman) are holding up.

Today's Kindle app update for both iOS and Android has received little notice inside the comics world, but it now includes comics and children's books.

Bryan Q. Miller's comic-book continuation of the Smallville series brings a few familiar people face-to-face with Tom Welling

Wow, two crotchgates in one day. It seems that Andrew Garfield, who will appear as Spider-Man in the new film which opens on July 3rd, had to learn the hard way that superhero costumes aren't that practical in real life. It turns out that obliging certain natural functions was not that easy in his Spidey suit.

Lettering king Todd Klein has a couple of great blog posts showing a series of photos by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez in 1979 on a visit to DC's offices. Klein's memory is prodigious and it's a great look at everything from obsolete technology to the prevalence of sweater vests in the late 70s to a different way of working:

We were all pretty excited when the first set photos of Henry Cavill as Superman leaked out. It seemed that after years of binding and CGI smoothing, Superman was finally getting super where it counted.

Speak of the devil! Only hours ago we were making jokes about Chris Ware joining the Cirque du Soleil and now there is nows of an actual Cirque du Soleil comic! Sadly it is not from Ware—we can just imagine his version of Limber 12-year-old Chinese Acrobats Stories—instead, it's from Marvel, in a custom comic that ties in with the Vegas spectacle Kà which you will be able to get at this year's Comic-Con.

By Todd Allen

--I learned something new today. Remember how Watchmen started out as a treatment for the Charlton characters DC had purchased? Come to find out out, DC didn't purchase the rights to all the Charlton characters and Dynamite now has the rights to Peter Cannon/Thunderbolt. As in, the prototype for Watchmen's Ozymandias.

Valiant Comics' relaunch has now expanded even further, with the announcement of an apparent new Ninjak series coming out in September.

One of the most watched cartoonists to graduate from CCS, Chuck Forsman's work has been mostly available only in small mini-comics editions. But that's changing, as Fantagraphics will reissue THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD in book form and then publish a NEW graphic novel, CELEBRATED SUMMER, in 2013. Exciting!

If you click the link, you will get to see Cyclops wearing a thong.