Publishers

Via Sam Henderson, a gallery of art by fabulist Basil Wolverton, from PLOP! In case you are wondering what PLOP! was, it was a humor/satire...

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Bruce Wayne, orphaned at eight, wants to overcome his fears and honor his father. This turns out to be rather more complicated than he suspects it will be. Batman Begins presents a radically new vision (for the movies, anyway — this stuff had been around the comics and the animated series for many years beforehand) of the Batman story, grounds it in a startling new sense of reality, presents not just a caped crusader and a wacky new villain but a whole wealth of good guys and bad guys, all following their stars in increasingly complex and interconnected ways, all of it bound together with the one fantastic conceit of a young billionaire who dresses up like a bat. It strongly reminds me of the Casino Royale re-boot, which brought the James Bond character to a new level of immediacy while retaining enough of the series’ fantastic hallmarks to still qualify as escapism. There is still enough silliness in Batman Begins to make it a recognizable "superhero movie" (grand, outsized villains with colorful personalities and an ambitious scheme to destroy an entire city, spectacular action sequences that teeter at the brink of believability, production design that borders upon science-fiction) but it’s presented with a sober, straightfaced earnestness that’s nothing less than shocking after the garish camp of Batman & Robin. The Dark Knight would successfully develop all of Begins‘s good ideas into an even more complex, startling vision of modern urban justice.

You could learn a lot from Mark Millar. Seriously. Not content to let his movie option deal announcement go live and get covered everywhere, he got a full three days of publicity out of it! And made such a big deal of it that Bleeding Cool literally wouldn't sleep until they scooped Deadline on the news -- which everyone we talked to seems to have known for days. So a big deal becomes a Bigger Deal. That is how you market it, Mark Millar, and we salute you.

We won't slap a "Tolja!!!" over this, but a memo this afternoon confirms what many had been predicting since DC's new regime took over...

While folks like Mark Millar, Mike Mignola, and Robert Kirkman have been deservedly marked by the success of their creations in Hollywood, one hard-working...

by Marc-Oliver Frisch After unleashing a deluge of new titles in May, DC Comics' lineup of major periodicals was fairly restrained in June. There were...

A version of Wonder Woman aimed at teen-aged girls and not 40-year-old men? That will never fly. BTW for everyone who is always wondering "How should a pitch look???" Here's an example. Of course, being able to draw as well as Ben Caldwell really helps.

Artist Stephen DeStefano directs us to a trailer for his new graphic novel LUCKY IN LOVE, written by George Chieffet. The trailer was directed by Miguel Martinez-Joffre and colored by Carly Monardo -- both are vets of The Venture Bros., as is DeStefano.

by Paul O'Brien It's a month of relaunches and new titles, as the "Heroic Age" branding continues. June saw the relaunch of NEW AVENGERS,...

The road to comic book Valhalla is lined with companies that have tried to do "celebrity comics" as a means of switching to the fast lane of movie money and licensing gold. Tekno, Virgin, CrossGen. There is hardly a company that does not have some kind of celebrity "vanity project" comic out there made mostly to show to producers as a bible for a film. And all of this is despite the fact that not a single movie has yet been made from a comic book that was published just to be turned into a movie. COWBOYS & ALIENS, which is certainly an A-list project with Jon Favreau, Daniel Craig, and Harrison Ford aboard is set to be the first comic of its genre to ever actually get turned into a big movie. But this is the first time it has ever happened and it took 10 years. And despite this, there are still no other Platinum, Tokyopop, Radical, or Liquid movies. No one can go to Netflix and order the MAYHEM movie or OCD movie or GAMEKEEPER movie.

Funnybook Babylon has an interesting charticle looking at the runs of various Vertigo ongoing series over the years, following some speculation that books were being canceled there because of increased scrutiny from DC's new management. Chris Eckert suggests this is not the case, or at least not the only factor, by showing that the lowest selling titles are always canceled, although nowadays the best selling title is something that would have been canceled a decade ago. Eckert also runs a chart showing relative Amazon rankings for various Vertigo trades, a weak metric but all we have to go on.

A vigilant reader sent us this scan of an ad in the current edition of Women's Wear Daily, the bible of the fashion trade. The ad, for Green Lantern licensing opportunities, ran in a previews section for the upcoming 2010 MAGIC Marketplace, "the preeminent trade event in the international fashion industry." Obviously, Warner Bros. has BIG, BIG plans for Green Lantern licensing -- and based on the number of folks we see walking the streets of NYC in GL T-shirts, we'd say they might just be on to something.