Publishers

Another digital to print success story—Alex De Campi and Christine Larsen's VALENTINE, which made headlines as a digital only comic that was translated into multiple languages. As noted below it was a true digital pioneer, with more than 350,000 downloads. And now...you can hold it in your hand.

On the scale of "Oh thank God," this ranks pretty high.Joss Whedon will be back to write and direct AVENGERS 2, as Disney CEO Bob Iger told an investors call. Immediately after the announcement, people started throwing money directly at Iger, just pelting him with dollars and quarters. "Take our money!" they cried. "Just take it! THE AVENGERS has already made $1.5 billion worldwide and the sequel will make even more."

This is firmly under the HYPE banner since I was a publishing consultant for this project, but Ham Fisher's venerable boxing-themed comic strip character has been updated to an MMA-fighter for IDW's Joe Palooka, the brain storm of boxing announcer Joe Antonacci, along with Mike Bullock, Fernando Peniche and Matt Triano. In the story, Joe Palooka is a discredited MMA fighter who travels the world desperately trying to clear his name while fighting to earn a spot in the legendary “Legion of Combat,” worldwide fight series.

After a successful roll-out at C2E2—and in light of how artists everywhere are doing it themselves—DC Collectibles is making more than 20 new posters available at their online store, all in the highly designed style that has become so popular with things like the Alamo Drafthouse and so on. Can we say, it's about time? You can see all the prints here—no creators given, alas, in the licensed style of the Warners and Disney stores, but there are some nice items.

Breaking news! Hepzibah returns for another appearance in Avengers Vs X-Men!

We've alluded to this a few times, but Kyle Baker has posted some art from a new Image book by himself and Kevin McCarthy called CIRCUIT BREAKER, which is:

When Kevin sent me his story about a little girl robot in futuristic Tokyo, I thought it would be funny to draw it in the style of my favorite Japanese cartoonist, Osamu Tezuka!

Some set pics of Hugh Jackman from WOLVERINE II, currently known as THE WOLVERINE, which is set in Japan. From these photos, we can assume that in the story, Jackman's Wolverine character will have a period of extreme self doubt, which evolves into self neglect, from which he will be rescued by a period of intense study of Zen Buddhist philosophy and Japanese fighting techniques.

Christmas is coming! Here are the upcoming titles from Dark Horse! What's on your wish list?

As sometimes happens, I walk into a comics shop and discover something I didn't know I needed! Here's an example...

Marvel have made a change to their solicitations, revealing that issue #17 of Wolverine & The X-Men is going to be a showcase issue for Doop.

Something that may have gotten lost in the shuffle of Comicon was the release of Bloodshot #1, the third title from Valiant's relaunch. Valiant went raiding Marvel again for the creative team: Duane Swierczynski (Iron Fist, Cable, and more recently Birds of Prey) is the writer, Manuel Garcia (probably best known for runs on Raven and Checkmate) is penciling with Arturo Lozzi, Stefano Gaudiano (all sorts of Marvel titles... plus X-O Manowar) is inking.

There's been some concern over Marvel's sales in the last six months or so. "But AVX is frickin' huge," you say. And it is. But that might be masking Marvel's inability to sell comics that aren't part of a crossover/Event. Marvel's Next event is the pseudo-relaunch of Marvel NOW! and nobody's quite sure what to make of that just yet. Last week, Brian Hibbs penned a column expressing concerns about Marvel NOW!'s viability and the poor general state of Marvel's and non-Event top list and mid-list. I think it's time to compare some of the numbers on this.