Publishers

All week DC Women Kicking Ass has been running polls to pick the favorite artists on various DCU heroines, such as Wonder Woman and Batgirl. It's fun to see the great artists who have drawn these characters over the years. It is also fun to observe how community standards have changed with regards to superheroines. Take Black Canary. It's a pretty safe assumption that even when the character was created by Carmine Infantino and Robert Kanigher in 1947, a woman in fishnet tights was assumed to be hot stuff. However, first general prudishness, and later the Comics Code, kept her sort of modest. In recent years, she's been unchained.

Ending some speculation, DC released an updated schedule for New 52 collections, and even the red shirt six titles that already joined the hall of heroes WILL be collected in their entirety -- all eight issues of Omac, Static Shock, etc, will be collected. Nice move there, actually.

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.

The newly resurgent Valiant Entertainment is taking action to get the retail community on it side, hiring former retailer Atom! Freeman to the position of Sales Manager and starting a campaign to contact all the 2500 retailers in the US. This kind of goodwill tour should pay off quite a bit—in our experience, all it really takes to befriend a retailer is to listen and then maybe learn.

Okay this might just be the coolest comics-related promo of the year. Aardman Films, the claymation studio behind Wallace and Gromit, has made a promo piece for the DC Nation cartoon block debuting on the Cartoon Network later this year. It takes a conceit first used on their breakthrough film, CREATURE COMFORTS, which animated zoo goers comments on what the zoo animals might be thinking. In this case, they take kid's voicing various DC superheroes. The result is charming and fresh. If DC Nation has anything this good we're in for a treat.

Two is a trend! Oni Press has just announced a new logo replacing the Dave Gibbons-designed original. The new logo was designed by Oni Press art director Keith A. Wood and will first appear on THE SECRET HISTORY OF D.B. COOPER, which comes out in March.

The ugly legal battle between Archie Comics co-CEO's Jon Goldwater and Nancy Silberkleit has escalated in recent weeks with new legal filings. And now a judge has banned Silberkleit from going anywhere near Archie's offices or contacting any of the employees.

One of the questions you ask when you hear about a new Shadow comic is "what kind of take are they doing?" Another is "how serious will it be?" And then there's "how faithful is it to the source material?" As it happens, I've had a chance to read the script for The Shadow #1. I can't speak to Aaron Campbell's art -- I haven't seen that yet. I can, however, tell you what the tone and the take are going to be.

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.

Who the heck is Afu Chan? He drew a story in SPERA, the fantasy anthology by Josh Tierney that also sports art by Kyla Vanderklugt, Hwei, and Emily Carroll, and was published by Archaia. But a glance at his Deviant Art page reveals an illustrator very much in the modern, pan-comics Moebius-inspired vein, but with violent, pastel brawls breaking out all over the place.

Starting with yesterday's highly corporate We Can Be Heroes press conference, DC Comics/Entertainment has been rolling out its new logo. It's seen briefly at the end of the WCBH video—but not in the eagerly awaited animated form, alas.

New manga! Fast cars! Sexy women (and men)! Nazis! Cats! Rock 'n' Roll! Murder!