Publishers

ICv2 has started its annual round of CEo chats and kicks off with IDW's Ted Adams in three parts.. Adam sis a good choice because IDW has made significant recent gains as the first new front-of-thebook publishers since exclusives were invented, and he doesn't give you a lot of double speak. A few excerpts: On pricing (IDW has always been $3.99):

http://d.yimg.com/nl/movies/site/player.swf Howcum Thor doesn't have a Norwegian accent? Just sayin'.

http://d.yimg.com/nl/movies/site/player.swf In addition to showcasing the TRON 3 trailer as performed by the Black Eyed Peas, Super Bowl XLV also featured the debut of the...

It's the Flash and he's....coming apart????? Oh dear. Art by Andy Kubert and Sandra Hope.

Marvel has released the cover to the first issue of its upcoming FEAR ITSELF event, written by Matt Fraction with art by Stuart Immonen...

July's Captain America film starring Chris Evans just got its first poster. Looks gritty.

DC has posted logos for five of their FLASHPOINT miniseries. FLASHPOINT seems to be a kind of DC-only alternative reality Amalgam comic where Cyborg is Superman and so on.

More info here.

Archie Comics has been making tons of news of late, in case you haven't noticed. In addition to all the digital initiatives they've recently announced, they're also repurposing the famed Archie Marries storyline by making all the original issues available as digital comics.

Marketing Coordinator Aaron Colter tweeted and social networked yesterday that he and Dark Horse had parted ways. Colter was a whiz at Twitter and Facebook and all the other ways we talk today, and managed these fuctions for DH, but he also was, shall we say, irreverent -- not perhaps the best image for a respected publisher. At any rate, maybe posting stuff like the attached image was a tweet too far.

Tarpé Mills is a name well known to comics historians, not only as one of the best of the female cartoonists of the war years, but as the creator and artist of Miss Fury, one of the first successful superheroine characters, which ran for nearly a decade as a sunday newspaper strip. It was a lively blend of outre characters, adventure and naughtiness. This April Dean Mullaney's Library of American Comics is reprinting the best of the strips in a deluxe volume complete with an introduction by comics historian Trina Robbins. Mullaney provided a desception of the volume and this preview for our Anniversary week:

While we're spotlighting creators issues and outlooks here at Anniversary Week at The Beat, here's an oldie but a goodie: The (Sad) Saga of Black Lightning’s Creation by Daniel Best which presents documents and drawings from writer Tony Isabella and artist Trevor von Eeden, the team known to have created Black Lightning's first appearance. There's some dispute over how the two should be credited -- Isabella claims sole creative credit due to having come up with the character all on his own and described the costume and so on -- but von Eeden has drawings but...we'll we won't get into that here. von Eeden doesn't want the creator's credit--or the royalties that come with it -- but has his own opinions. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. As is well known, Isabella had the foresight to keep a piece of the character he had created independently of DC editorial -- a move he thinks backfired…