Entertainment

We made it people. Finally, a comic book person has made The View. Robert Kirkman will appear on today's Halloween-themed edition of the popular coffee-klatsch chat fest.

Continuing the review, I turn my attention to Marvel. They don't usually have a strong Holiday list, instead relying on licensed products to sell in bookstores. They even have a tendency to take what would be big ticket gift items like omnibus hardcovers and schedule them for January! No big gift books on the radar, so I wonder if anything will pop when people surf on Cyber Monday.

Okay... continuing on with Fall previews, we move to one of the Big Six pubishers. No, not comics, the mainstream Big Six, the ones which dominate American and English bookselling. Macmillan is part of of the Holtzbrinck Group, and includes such marques as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, St. Martin's, Tor, Scientific American, and, of particular interest to comics fans, First Second Books.

Everyone has been linking to the various Halloween goodies at Wonderful Wonderblog and the pictures of old Ben Cooper kids Halloween costumes from the 70s and 80s. It's a pretty remarkable sign of the progress in human evolution that we have gone from a holiday based around molded plastic masks of various characters accessorized with garish nylon jumpsuits to a holiday based around Sexy Nurse.

As if we needed more proof that superheroes in any medium other than their original one sell more units, BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY, the new video game featuring you-know-who has sold 4.6 million units in its first week, WB Interactive has announced.

Summit Entertainment has just announced that RED 2, the sequel to RED, will be released on August 2nd of 2013. The first film, very loosely based on the Warren Ellis/Cully Hamner mini-series, came out last year, and scored a surprise hit with its tale of over-the-hill spies (Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, et al) getting back together for one more gig.

Another day, another option, but this one is a bit different -- this time the comics creator himself has been tapped to write the script. Ed Brubaker is writing a script for a COWARD movie based on the first arc of his CRIMINAL series, says Variety. David Slade (TWILIGHT, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT) is attached to direct for Jamie Patricof's Hunting Lane Films.

It's Mary Blair's birthday and if Google can celebrate her, so can we. And so should we all. As an animator and designer, Blair is among the most influential artistic figures of the mid-century era, an icon and the creator of some of the loveliest art you'll ever see.

Next Media Animation has gone gonzo with a new version of the AVENGERS movie that features several guest stars. What does this mean? Unsure.

After many starts and stop -- an Albert Hughes directed version had the plug pulled after pre-production had already started earlier this year -- Warner Bros has greenlit a live action AKIRA remake again. This time Jaume Collet-Serra (ORPHAN) is set to direct. The movie apparently got new life after the budget was cut to a practically spartan $90 million.

Another day another comics in Hollywood deal! But this one's all in the family, as it's been announced that Warner Bros. TV is developing MEMOIR by Ben McCool and Nikki Cook, as announced in Publishers Marketplace. The deal was negotiated by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company. McCool writes:

While Heidi and Torsten were off having fun at NYCC, the rest of us had to sadly experience all the comics-related mayhem vicariously. Nevertheless, on the digital comics front matters continue to develop in interesting ways, particularly in relation to online retailing behemoth, Amazon. The explosive Amazon-DC graphic novel exclusive agreement for the upcoming Kindle Fire tablet device remains a hot topic and shows no signs of fading from view, with even the New York Times jumping on the controversy.