Publishers

We're a little less than three weeks away from Comicon and there's a ton of speculation about Marvel's next move. Which is assuming there is a *formal* next move, granted. If you look at the May sales estimates, AVX is distracting from a sad state of affairs. Throw out the AVX minis, and no estimate breaks 70K. Throw out the Avengers and X-titles getting pumped up by the event (which are just under 70K and would likely be clustered about 60K without the bump). Selling in the 50Ks are three Spider-Man issues and Uncanny X-Force sneaks in. So the 40K band is pretty decent sales at Marvel these days. Throw out their most successful sales stunt in years and the rest of the line is as low as Marvel has been.

True to their word, DC is launching a followup reader survey, after last fall's New 52 launch survey. John Rood mentioned that any demographic info would only be truly useful as more comparisons were able to be made, and future surveys were promised. And here it is. We tried to take it but got booted out for truthful answers, sadly. (In this case not actually buying any DC comics.) As before there is a fake survey title, ORANGE IVY, to weed out wannabes.

Marvel's variant cover for Avengers Vs X-Men #8 shows Cyclops and chums having a lovely time

Although it is branded as a Pixar movie, "Brave" is more like a Disney feature. Is the Golden Age of Pixar over?

Even comics news is coming out in advance of Comic-Con—in this case, new HEROIC SCALED booth art for Image (#2729). As past con-goers may be aware, Image's booth is anchored by a huge 16' x 32' "Wall of Art" which now features more of the new mega-creator themed stuff like SAGA, MIND THE GAP, AMERICA'S GOT POWERS, and something called THE WALKING DEAD.

Valiant has released the following line with this image: "Are you different? Meet Faith Herbert this September, only in Harbinger #4."

Fails.

As you may have noticed, Marvel's been releasing two issues of several titles each month. It's not always the same titles each month. Marvel also might not be as into $3.99 titles as you might expect. I took a look at the solicitations for July-through September, looked at the core Marvel titles (Marvel's equivalent of the "New 52," if you will). No mini's. No Max. No Ultimates. No ".1" specials. This is what I found:

For the full effect you'll want to go right to the site, but this trailer has a lot of dark Bane vs Batman footage and less Catwoman. Any chance this movie will top AVENGERS? Probably not. But it should easily vanquish Spider-Man for #2 comic book movie of the year.

By Todd Allen To say that the original Black Kiss comic was controversial when it came out was something of an understatement.  Howard Chaykin spent the '80s...

Artist on multiple Marvel books including Amazing Spider-Man and the relaunch of Daredevil, Paolo Rivera has announced that he will be stepping away from his Marvel exclusive after 10 years of service.

Okay, so as the world has just noticed, in LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: Century 2009 we finally see Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil's multiverse spanning pop culture adventure reach the current day (or close to it) and since the current day isn't in the public domain, there's good old-fashioned satire in the tradition of about 8000 previous books. The Independent's Laura Sneddon has the lowdown: