News

Two crimes peripherally involved with comics characters team up for one blog post!

The 2011 Harvey Awards nominations have been announced and after a few years of...puzzling choices that seemed to reflect small voting blocs, these are pretty solid.

By Jeff Trexler-- In March 2008, Grant Morrison's homage to Siegel and Shuster appeared in comic shops on the very same day that the Siegel heirs recaptured half the original Superman copyright.  Now Morrison is set to work his shaman's magic once again in the September relaunch of Action #1--and this time, the Siegels could lose everything. Morrison's upcoming Supergods holds the key to understanding why. For an explanation and a sneak preview of Morrison’s new book, click below. A mysterious appeal, Joe Shuster’s super-swastika and the final crisis of the legal multiverse--this one has it all.

Seeing as how it was somehow unearthed by Bleeding Cool, there is no way of knowing where this video featuring all of DC's major editorial players save Geoff John talking about the relaunch was created for. It's definitely aimed at consumers, but the actual venue we may never know. Or it may never have been released. The video shows Dan DiDio, Jim Lee, Eddie Berganza, Bob Harras, and special guest star Grant Morrison each uttering the word "new" about 30 times each. Our impressions is that they want us to know that this is a NEW initiative and a NEW way of doing things. It's NEW.

Via BOOM!'s mailing list, Chip Mosher has a pretty clear suggestion that shows just how publishers are living on a copy here and a copy there. With DC's massive relaunch coming up a lot of retailer dollars are going to be tied up elsewhere so a book like Roger Langridge's SNARKED needs every little boost:

Speaking of things that K---B----- hath wrought, in the same post on Fleen that talks about Strong Females, Tyrrell also talks about the print/web divide:

CCS, the much-admired cartooning school that has turned White River Junction, VT into a comics mecca, has been awarded $255,000 in community grant money to develop the Inky Solomon Center. Named for CCS's "legendary" founder, The Inky Solomon Center will be a modern facility aimed at helping CCS alums create and develop projects.

A comics writer who sued Adam Sandler, his production company, Judd Apatow and Sony Pictures has had his case dismissed after a judge found that using a hair dryer as a weapon was not infrangible

This is practically all kibbles and legal bits, but that seems to be where things are going.

It's been a furious few weeks of action here at Stately Beat Manor and around the comics intertubes as everyone scrambles to cover the DC Relaunch and What It Means. I've been as obsessed as anyone, although some of the fruits of my labor have yet to be posted. And of course, San Diego Comic-Con is just around the corner (less than four weeks) so things are about to get even busier and even crazier is such a thing is possible. And it is.

DC has cited its changes and additions to the Super-verse as grounds for reducing the Siegel heirs’s share of Superman material produced since 1999. A recent Variety article takes this even further, reporting thatNeil Gaiman’s success in winning co-ownership of Medieval Spawn provides legal precedent for giving DC complete ownership of the contemporary Superman, limiting the Siegels’ interest to the far less lucrative 1938 version of the character. Does DC have strong legal grounds for splitting Superman between The Man of Tomorrow and The Man of Yesterday? Click below to see if Gaiman v. McFarlane is legal kryptonite for creators' rights--or whether that's just another misconceived retcon.

Imagine traveling to another country and having your comic books and electronic devices seized. Then, you're arrested because of the books you read. This may seem like a horror story, but for one comics reader, it's come true.

-- Thus begins the story of one traveler. We make a lot of jokes about the US/Canadian border but as tales of the comics that were seized on the way to TCAF make clear, Canadaisn take their ideological border security seriously.