Publishers

Must survive until daybreak!

Writer Victor Quinaz and illustrator Brent Schoonover, the creative team behind the recent Archaia and Before the Door graphic novel, Mr. Murder Is Dead, have created a brand-new strip just for Halloween.

Download the first issue of Knights of the Living Dead by Ron Wolfe and Dustin Higgins (Pinnochio Vampire Slayer) FREE from SLG. King Arthur vs the Zombies? Why not!

Continuing his pageant of quirky heroes and bizarre adventures, Ted McKeever has a new three-issue miniseries coming out this January called MONDO. The story deals with Catfish, a chicken-farm worker who gains strange powers and takes on even stranger foes. We're sold.

To celebrate the season, Boom! Studios has launched one of its comics as a webcomic, DRACULA: THE COMPANY OF MONSTERS by Kurt Busiek, Daryl Gregory, Scott Godlewski, and Damian Couciero. To start off with, the webcomic is serializing the print version, but then will start running new material.

Continuing the review, I turn my attention to Marvel. They don't usually have a strong Holiday list, instead relying on licensed products to sell in bookstores. They even have a tendency to take what would be big ticket gift items like omnibus hardcovers and schedule them for January! No big gift books on the radar, so I wonder if anything will pop when people surf on Cyber Monday.

Okay... continuing on with Fall previews, we move to one of the Big Six pubishers. No, not comics, the mainstream Big Six, the ones which dominate American and English bookselling. Macmillan is part of of the Holtzbrinck Group, and includes such marques as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, St. Martin's, Tor, Scientific American, and, of particular interest to comics fans, First Second Books.

Although battered and bruised by a wave of opprobrium over his work on the New 52, writer Scott Lobdell hasn't given up, and he's facing the music -- or questions from the internet, as the case may be. After a lengthy layoff from high-profile comics assignments, Lobdell's work on RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS and TEEN TITANS has met with a....mixed reaction. Or as he reportedly asked Gail Simone, "Why didn't you TELL me?" In an interview with Comicvine he does cover some of the more controversial aspects of his recent work like...Starfire, the amnesiac sex addict.

Those gruesome/adorable Mars Attacks! cards from the '60s just got another resurrection: Topps and IDW will team for a comics series next year, just in time for the iconic card set's 50th anniversary. And the door looks wide open for more branded entertainment. A perfect distillation of the '50s obsession with little green men mixed with EC's gleeful gore, the cards were the work of artist Norman Saunders and inspired the 1996 Tim Burton film.

Fresh off the announcement of his reboot of The Prophet for the Extreme Studios, Brandon Graham has a teaser for "The Speaker" a new story in December's Dark Horse Presents #7.

As if we needed more proof that superheroes in any medium other than their original one sell more units, BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY, the new video game featuring you-know-who has sold 4.6 million units in its first week, WB Interactive has announced.

We don't know exactly what is going on in these set photos from the Vancouver shoot of the new Superman movie, but we approve.