Tag: Marvel

A new poster for the Avengers film has been circulating -- this seems to be the "Ultimate Avengers Movie" version.

Bryan Hitch, the king of widescreen comics, is announcing the end of his Marvel run of nearly ten years -- or at least that's what he's tweet hinting:

In two days time, an amazing decade at Marvel closes for me. What a wonderful time to have joined the party. Very proud and honoured.

For the last month, Hitch has been counting down to a purported huge announcement -- he has only five days to go, so January 3 will be the big day -- coincidentally, the day that Hitch's frequent -- Ultimates, Authority-- collaborator Mark Millar also has an announcement planned. Hm.

Marvel has won a four-year legal battle over who owns the rights to Ghost Rider. On Wednesday a judge rejected the claim by writer Gary Friedrich, who co-created the character in 1972's MARVEL SPOTLIGHT #5 along with Roy Thomas and Mike Ploog.

Stopping digital piracy has become a full-time obsession for most major entertainment companies; but the Stop Online Piracy Act now wending its way through Congress is probably not the way to do it -- a far too broad law that would give lawmakers powers to stop just about any activity they don't like via cutting off funding to the site and other zero tolerance measures. Although aimed at hard-to-stop foreign websites that recognize no copyright laws, opponents say the bill goes way too far in allowing copyright holders to choke off stuff they don't want with an arsenal of tools.

Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort has opened up some kind of secret vault where artifacts from Marvel's history have been stored; and just like anyone else would do, he's putting them on Tumblr. For instance, here's the origial last page of AVENGERS #1 with Tom's annotation:

With FEAR ITSELF wrapping up, Marvel had several major releases in November - the POINT ONE one-shot, the relaunches of UNCANNY X-MEN and FANTASTIC FOUR, and the first issue of new ongoing title AVENGING SPIDER-MAN.

We've also got the epilogue of FEAR ITSELF, the start of BATTLE SCARS, and a bunch of other "Regenesis" tie-ins from the X-books.

Marvel found itself behind DC for the third straight month in November, though the gap is growing closer. DC led by 40% to 38% in unit share, and 35% to 33% in dollars. And of course, it should be remembered that DC's extra sales don't appear to have come at Marvel's expense; if DC's relaunch has brought any new or lapsed readers into the market, then in theory, that's good for other publishers too - it brings them into everyone's potential market.

Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures.

5. POINT ONE
11/11  One-shot - 113,352

Marvel's top selling comic of the month! Or is it? This book was massively overshipped, with retailers receiving twice the number of copies they'd actually ordered, at no extra cost. Those copies are presumably included in this number - that certainly appears to be Diamond's standard practice, given the odd sales spikes that we've seen when this strategy has been used before.

If that's the case, then the actual orders of this book would be 56,676 - which would have placed the book at number 29 between AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and AVENGERS. Considering the solicitation ("You CANNOT miss this. Catch a tease of the biggest change to the Marvel Universe in over 35 years!") that number would surely have been disappointing, even allowing for the six dollar price tag. The wisdom of pricing a teaser book that high must also be open to question.

Via their Facebook page, the upcoming Spider-Man reboot movie posted some stills. Surely Jim Carrey is very excited now over this still of Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, as well as Captain Stacy and Peter Parker in action. Is it just us or has this Spidey reboot hype kind of gotten lost in the Batman/Avengers shuffle?

Merry Christmas. I'll be watching some basketball today. The NBA has long tried to be to Christmas what the NFL is to Thanksgiving, and this year the league is even launching the season on Christmas. (If you don't know, don't ask. There was a work stoppage and it was ugly.) You may not realize it, but there's a smidgeon of crossover between comics and the NBA. Bill Jemas was fairly high up in the league offices YEARS before he joined Marvel. Remember the NBA Hoops trading cards that the league owned? That was Bill. Which led to Fleer. Which led to Marvel. Current Marvel EIC Axel Alonso has been speaking of basketball in his interviews of late. Marvel also did a neat cross-promotion with the NBA, ESPN and Wired last year, making up mock comic book covers merging Marvel characters with the various teams. Comics Alliance has an archive of it.

We've had a Hobbit trailer. We've had Dark Knight Rises trailers. We've had John Carter trailers. But Craig Ferguson's favorite geek-to-film adaption is getting the short shrift. Behold: the new trailer for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (Ghost Rider 2, if you prefer).

Thor, Iron Man and Cap are shown doing what they do best in these new stills released today.

Don MacPherson gathers the evidence "for".

Marvel is expanding its new reader-friendly line of graphic novels with some strong creative teams and some characters who seem to be ripe for Hollywood development.