Publishers

Long story short, Heritage Auctions is selling six Donald Duck paintings by the great Carl Backs, and the paintings will be displayed at the Heritage Auctions location at 445 Park Avenue (at 57th Street) through Monday, February 14th.

A news teaser campaign rolls out. Of course, the temptation to answer "a cult 1999 film starring Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller, Paul Reubens, Eddie Izzard, and William H. Macy and created by Bob Burden" is irresistible. If only...

February has only 28 days, but is jam-packed with lots of great graphic novels and related titles! Warning... looking at what appears so far on BarnesAndNoble.com, the rest of 2011 is going to be just as amazing! Click this link to discover more! (Sweet Kirby Crackle! Corto Maltese, in English, from Rizzoli?!) Better start shopping for bookshelves now.

Superman casting rumors were heating up this week and now it's final: English actor Henry Cavill will play the Man of Steel in the Zack Snyder reboot. Cavill, 28, is not a big name here -- he's currently starring inThe Tudors -- but he was previously considered for both Batman and James Bond, so obviously studios have had their eye on him for a while. According to Deadline:

There is a new DC event speeding towards us -- this one spearheaded by Geoff Johns and based around the supersonic Flash. Several teasers have been released on the DCU Source blog, all hinting that this will be some kind of alternate reality thing -- but today a few more details were released -- and the cost is discussed, as much as $170 for the whole event.

Hm, is the multi-talented Thompson working on something Archie Style? After tweeting this art, she tweeted the following:

With the Comics Code all but buried, what ever happened to the CMAA's priceless archives of historical documents?

Richard Starkings' ELEPHANTMEN is a real warhorse for Image Comics, featuring kick-ass art and an intricate story. In March there's a special jumping on point and here are a few mages of art by Axel Medellin.

An astonishing icepunk adventure by the great French cartoonist Jacques Tardi is coming in March from Fantagraphics. It looks incredible.

Before there was JOE THE BARBARIAN, there was Sean Murphy's OFF ROAD, the story of some guys on a weekend trip that becomes, by turns, confessional and dangerous. Kind of like the Breakfast Club in a jeep. IDW has released a new edition today -- the original was published by Oni. More proof that when you OWN YOUR WORK you can keep making money off it.

2011 is going to be a tumultuous year for comics. Heck, it's already tumultuous. There's going to be consolidation and retrenchment. So over the next few weeks we'll be checking in at a few companies to see what's going on -- some of it's great and some of it is not so great. We will start with Top Cow which announced last week that they were consolidating many of their functions at Image Central, including production, marketing and sales efforts.

Okay, so a member of the Fantastic Four died in FF #587 -- a comic which would normally be on sale tomorrow, Wednesday, like usual, but went on sale early at selected retailers. At the same time, a story hit the wires, NPR and just about every other media outlet with a "DEATH IN THE FAMILY" type story, effectively spoiling what had been a pretty well kept secret until then. Twitter was fluttering from the moment the stories hit. Whether you were outraged or shrugged your shoulders at the spoilage it was yet another example of a Big Two publisher planting a major media story and having no good option for timing. This also happened, famously, with the death of Captain America, the death of Batman, and surely many others stories we are too jaded to remember.