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BY JEN VAUGHN - This Friday, 'Marvel' will face the ghost of Jack Kirby when professor and attorney Oliver Goodenough squares off against creator rights advocate and cartoonist Steve Bissette.

Does the Society pay any of its staff? Does it rent office space? Does it buy office supplies? If the answer to any of these questions is "yes," please consider paying cartoonists and other creators. Cartooning is hard work, and it deserves recompense.

Over the last few years, all the Wizard news stories have been about who's leaving, but here's a story about a new hire for a change. Kevin Kelly, formerly of G4, io9, Cinematical and so on, has joined as managing editor for web endeavors. WIzard is currently published as a computer- and tablet-friendly PDF about once a week.

Scream Awards were presented to comics people; and the comics people rejoiced.

Over on the Vertigo blog, we find an announcement that Vertigo's titles are starting to be released simultaneously in both print and digital ("day and date" is an insipid phrase; let's all stop using it).

Yen Press has announced two manga style adaptations of bestselling YA novels: Sherrilyn Kenyon's Chronicles of Nick and Cassandra Clare's The Infernal Devices trilogy.  HyeKyung Baek...

This is a little premature, but we might be looking at Sesame Street comics in the not-too-distant future.  APE Entertainment, which does have some...

This is interesting.  Viz is migrating Shonen Jump to a digital edition that's only 2 weeks removed from the Japanese original.  (And you can...

DC announced yesterday that Ann Nocenti will be taking over the writing chores on Green Arrow, as of issue #7.  JT Krul was previously...

DC sold a lot of comics — so many that they actually sent out a press release about it; even Diane Nelson, previously silent on the relaunch, now thinks it was a great idea. Selling five million comics in 6 weeks is indeed a sizable number; however what augurs the best for the comics industry is that sales across the board were up. Marvel had its best September in a while, as did Image. We're not talking a return to 1993 -- as some retailers thinks -- but more like a return to 2003. Which is still great. It's fairly obvious that customers were waiting for something exciting to happen in order to go back into stores; these disenchanted readers -- Dan DiDio's much loved "lapsed readers" -- have now discovered that comics are still fun. But will they stay that way?

PW reports that Books-a-Million, the OTHER book chain remaining, has also ordered DC's top 100 GNs removed from their shelves in retaliation for DC's signing a digital four-month exclusive with Amazon.

The 20-year legal saga of Michael George reached another conclusion when he was found guilty again in the murder of his wife.