Tag: DC

We meant to post this yesterday but somehow it got lost in the shuffle. This fall Robot Chicken — the toy-motion animation satire that uses lookalikes of your favorite childhood toys to enact grisly jokes — is doing an entire 15-minute episode devoted to DC comics. Recently, Geoff Johns, a past contributor to the show, linked to the trailer — which is NSFW, we might add. Robot Chicken is animated in the super bad style, and it's ugly all the way, but with its laser-cutting, bloody wrist stumps and cock ring humor, this is one of the most disturbing things we've ever seen. And to think that DC used to burn books just because it was suggested that Superman might drink a beer.

Not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story, DC is collecting FLEX MENTALLO: Man of Muscle Mystery in one of those Deluxe Editions that will look nice on your shelf next to other Grant Morrison/Quitely classics like We3 or All Star Superman. You'll recall that FLEX MENTALLO is one of the seminal works in the Morrison oeuvre—many of Morrison's most important themes found their most cogent articulation here— but a collection was long held in the vault due to past legal problems. But now it's coming your way in all its glory, and it has an awesome new cover by Quitely. It's all good.

Although battered and bruised by a wave of opprobrium over his work on the New 52, writer Scott Lobdell hasn't given up, and he's facing the music -- or questions from the internet, as the case may be. After a lengthy layoff from high-profile comics assignments, Lobdell's work on RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS and TEEN TITANS has met with a....mixed reaction. Or as he reportedly asked Gail Simone, "Why didn't you TELL me?" In an interview with Comicvine he does cover some of the more controversial aspects of his recent work like...Starfire, the amnesiac sex addict.

As if we needed more proof that superheroes in any medium other than their original one sell more units, BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY, the new video game featuring you-know-who has sold 4.6 million units in its first week, WB Interactive has announced.

We don't know exactly what is going on in these set photos from the Vancouver shoot of the new Superman movie, but we approve.

The NY Times digs in to the DC/Amazon/B&N/Books-a-MIllions spat and doesn't get too much further than the vague statements that everyone has made so far, but you can read between the lines a bit.

This one has been out there for a while but hasn't gotten too much attention: A.D.D., an original graphic novel by Douglas Rushkoff and Goran Sudzuka from Vertigo.

What the heck, everyone else does it. A XOMBI collection with all five issues of the John Rozum/Frazer Irving romp and GONE TO AMERIKAY, the Derek McCulloch/Colleen Doran GN about the Irish immigration would top our wish list. Lots o' fill-ins in the New 52 creatives as deadlines take their toll. But it was all in the plan.

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).

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.

As you may have heard, DC had this relaunch thing going on in September, ending several months of deck-clearing and water-treading in the company's superhero line. The kick-off came in the last week of August, with the release of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League #1, which -- to nobody's surprise -- leads the August charts by quite a margin. To gauge what this means in the broader context of the comic-book direct market, though, we'll have to go back a few years.