Culture

By Victor Van Scoit In the Marvel Universe Ultron is an artificial intelligence robot fixated on world domination. Ultron may only be a work of...

Joe Leisner, the 80 year old former owner of Comic Book Heaven, a comics shop in Sunnyside Queens and the star of the above short film, is a character. An authentic New York character, as they say, and someone who's been running a comics shop for 50 years, long before it became fashionable. So long that having a Shrek poster hanging in his store, or pondering the price of an issue of Moby Duck is the same to him as the latest Convergence title. If you watched the film,, you'll definitely see a comics shop as it once was, and many still are: a little messy and timelost, a kingdom of ragged long boxes, but a friendly place for the regulars.

Audi produced this short comedy advertisement with Stan Lee teaching how to do what he does best: appear in cameos in Marvel films. The short, directed by Kevin Smith with appearances by Smith, Jason Mewes, Michael Rooker, Tara Reid and, poignantly, Lou Ferrigno, sort of sums up where we're at as a culture right now. “I’ve studied a lot of acting methods,” Rooker says in the short. “I’ve studied the Stanislavski method, the method method, but I’ve never studied anything like the Stan Lee method.

The Beat has been reporting over the last few weeks on Ty Templeton's severe heart attack and I'm pleased to report that he's...

Girl in Dior has been getting great press worldwide for its depiction of one of the most influential premiere collections in fashion history, but...

Some anniversaries are painful to remember, and so is today's: the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. A while ago we told you about a graphic novel about this event, OPERATION NEMESIS: A Story of Genocide & Revenge. The book is out now and in memoriam of those who lost their lives, here's two illustrations from the book, one by Dan Panosian above and one by Harry Bogosian, below, a student of Paul Pope.

Little girls like superheroes! At least that's what WB's hopes with a while new universe created just for girls aged 6-12. As announced in a news blast the new line will come with heavy hitting partners, including Mattel, which will launch its first ever action figures for girls, Random House and Lego. Dolls for girls! Inconceivable! While the news is a stunner for the long boy-focused DC Entertainment line, with the swift evolution of comics to a co-ed undertaking, it's only good business. Plus, if you hang around Disney long enough you'll notice two things: #1 girl-based licensing programs like Disney Princesses make billions of dollars. #2 people like superheroes. Put em both together and you MIGHT have a winner.

Nerd girl fashion is popular...and stylish. Her Universe, the fashion line started by Ashley Eckstein, has been setting the trend for much of this and now they've teamed with Hot Topic to offer a line of Avengers outfits. Rather than cybernetic body armor and purple pants it heads more towards fishnets and sleeveless dresses. You can pre order it here.

With Convergence, aka Atlas Moving Vans, now rolling out in the DCU and the New 24 about to launch, several websites have taken a look back at The New 52, which launched in September of 2011 and super-charged the comics industry. As I've written several times before, the pr for the New 52 immediately lifted the entire comics industry with more customers coming into stores and finding a lot of new comics to read. Call it the Millennial Rush. The debut of Saga #1 six months later hooked those who were just nibbling and he rest is history: record breaking sales.

Chicago may be the Second City (later retconned to Third), but two of fandoms biggest geek gods are trying to build monuments to themselves!  (Kinda...

The Pulitzers, awarded for excellence in journalism, were announced yesterday, and the winner for cartooning was Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News. Finalists were...

This is sad but not surprising—given the insane rise in real estate prices in San Francisco, it was only a matter of time before the Cartoon Art Museum, which occupied a spacious and accessible spot near Market Street has been evicted so its space can be converted to something expensive and greedy. The museum will stay open until June 28th, and in a release they note that the move was not unexpected and they had already begun preparations, just like Cutter and Skywise.