It might seem cheesy now to say that I like this comic book because it is moral and has a positive message, but that is who I see Wonder Woman as; a profoundly moral character. Someone almost on the level of Superman, but with more proverbial teeth, and a little less of the Boy Scout about her (and I mean that in the old school be-prepared or very-helpful sense of the words, not in the current ways that are so unfortunately in the news). It’s a big, bleak world out there and to my mind, what we need is a LOT more of the Perez-type of Wonder Woman.

Considering the various omnibuses we’ve seen for the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans, aren’t we due at least one for the Perez Wonder Woman?

Among the many, many topics discuss are: podcasting, the state of comics, X-Men comics, Daredevil: End of Days, Age of Ultron, Guardians of Galaxy, Fury: My War Gone By, reading comics when not writing about comics, Jupiter’s Legacy, random new comics, Marvel RPG, Forever Evil, some DC stuff, Matt Fraction Marvel comics, Hickman’s two Avengers titles, Thanos Rising, the new generation of comics readers, some recent movies, Rick Remender’s corner of the Marvel Universe, and, then, there’s like an hour or two about them talking about writing about comics, writing online, writing books, and more false endings than Return of the King (and more dated, unfunny jokes like that than you can imagine).

Chad and Tim are two smart, funny commenters about comics who love stuff that I just can’t get my head around and vice versa. I love Splash Page, and highly recommend this even without listening yet (After all, it’s five hours long).

Eight jurors will decide this fall if Marvel actually owns the copyright to Ghost Rider or not. That was the order issued today by a federal judge who set trial for November 4. The decision by District Judge Katherine Forrest in NYC comes just over two weeks after the Second Court of Appeals overturned a 2011 ruling of hers in Marvel’s favor in the legal battle with former freelancer Gary Friedrich over the fiery motorcycle-riding superhero. Marvel’s lawyers indicated today in a courtroom conference meeting on the case that while they will not challenge the Appeals Court decision, they would seek to have the case handled without a jury in a motion to be filed at a later date.

Even if the Marvel motion is unsuccessful, Judge Forrest has also ordered a pre-trial sitdown with all parties, upping the chance of a settlement out of court.

To me when you talk about who these characters are in the New 52, a lot of the idea is that across 52 books there are going to be slightly different takes on all the characters. You really can’t avoid that when you’ve got different creative teams on every book. Editorially, we want the characters to speak with the same voice, but artistically, they’re still drawn differently by different creative teams. To me, it’s all about saying, “Which way is resonating most with the audience? Which way is opening up the doors of perception?” If you look at continuity in general and at the version of Batman that’s “in canon” or “on brand,” it wasn’t necessarily because some person said, “This is the way it’s got to be.” It’s because Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams did some great stories that were so different from the stories before that hit a spark with the readership. Then with what Frank Miller did on “Dark Knight Returns” and Alan Moore’s work around that time, it ushered in the “grim ‘n gritty” era.

I think that’s ultimately how you lead the line itself. Through the creative work and how it resonates with the readership, that’s how these characters are ultimately defined. It’s a system that’s almost like natural selection. You’ll see slightly different versions of Lex or Lois, and as the creators keep telling their stories, different versions grow in popularity. It creates a circle of reenforcement where the best ideas rise to the top and keep pushing things forward. Part of the fun of the New 52 is that we all started with the same version of Superman, but you’re seeing slightly different versions grow through all the books. And as those takes evolve, you’ll see different creators respond and play off the different ideas presented. To me as a creator, it’s fun to play in that pool, and this is the way comics have always worked. Obviously, editors are a part of that creative process, but so are the readers. That’s the fun of a story like this. Yeah, we’re doing all the classic beats of Superman, but at the end of the day, we’re also introducing new elements to the mythology. And we’re as curious as anyone to see how the readers respond to the storylines we put out.

On the one hand, that sounds like a somewhat confusing thing for the (co-)publisher of the line to say: “We’ll have lots of different versions of a character, and whichever one is most popular wins”? Really? And, more importantly, on the other hand, that’s clearly not what’s been happening at DC over the last few years.

Saying “through the creative work and how it resonates with the readership, that’s how these characters are ultimately defined” is, at heart, a very optimistic (and creator-centric) view, but there have been multiple creators vocally declaring that the characters are being defined by editorial fiat over there with creators having storylines dictated or changed at the last minute for reasons that seem unclear at the time. “Obviously, editors are a part of that creative process,” Lee says, but too many creators would argue that they’ve hijacked the creative process altogether for it not to be slightly concerning.

To argue that classic eras for characters came out of great comics, and not being told “this is the way things should be” is laudable, and also entirely correct; we as readers do respond to the work more than anything else (To jump publishers for a second, look at the current Hawkeye series at Marvel; that’s a success where all others have failed because people are genuinely digging what Fraction and Aja are doing), and that’s always been the case. But to see Lee say that feels particularly frustrating, because it feels like he’s made it halfway towards getting it “right,” and then completely misses the other part of the whole thing, which is that a lot of people who’ve worked for DC lately don’t believe that that kind of work is welcome or even allowed at the publisher anymore.

We live in the world we live in, and we need to run out business dealing with that world. If The Leaks went away, then there wouldn’t be any need to do stuff like this. But that won’t stop a one of you from visiting the comics rumor sites today. So we get the world that we chose to create, as a group.

Now, beyond the fact that I don’t remember anyone besides Rich Johnston even hinting at Angela ahead of the announcement – and even then, he did it via acrostic that most people didn’t notice, never mind get – I have to admit that I’m unconvinced by this line of thinking, which essentially boils down to “Who would you rather be spoiled by, us or someone else?” If anything, doesn’t a publisher announcing big surprises at the end of comics via news media not only confirm whatever plot twist is definitely happening – as opposed to being an unverified rumor, as would otherwise be the case via leak – but also transmit that spoiler to more people than any unverified rumor could manage to reach?

I understand the idea of controlling the message, but ultimately, I’m unsure if this is a message that needs to be controlled in this way. The end result, whether the news is officially announced or unofficially leaked, is exactly the same: Fans are spoiled for the stories they’re reading ahead of time. The only difference is that the publishers doing it themselves removes any shadow of a doubt as to the veracity of the spoiler, ensures that the spoiler is more widely seen, and allows the publisher headlines in mainstream media and interviews that they would have otherwise not have had.

The leaks aren’t going to go away – but they’re also hardly a new thing (Consider the infamous case of Armageddon 2001 way back in the early ’90s, where the ending leaked ahead of time, for example). What’s changed isn’t the leaks, nor even the speed of transmission around the fan community because of the Internet; it’s the reaction of the publishers. I doubt that we’re going to see the official spoilers from publishers going away anytime soon, but that’s not because of “The Leaks”; it’s because headlines, media coverage and the need to control the story are too much to give up these days.

Admit it: You didn’t realize so much was going on behind the scenes when you read an issue of All-New X-Men every couple of weeks, did you?

The X-Men to me are about two things: characters and the minority metaphor. The films have really done a great job with the latter part, though exploring the conflicts and overlap between Professor Xavier and Magneto’s political stances, the threat posed by characters like Senator Kelly and William Stryker, and scenes like Iceman coming out to his family. All of those aspects work and make the good X-Men films stand apart from every other superhero film. The lesser films are lesser because they sacrifice the metaphor for boring punching.

Somehow, that doesn’t feel like it’s going to be fixed with the almost impossibly-crowded Days of Future Past next year… As the first in the modern era of superhero movies, it’s unsurprising that the X-Men franchise is flawed in ways that, say, Avengers isn’t – But the question is, whether it’s flawed enough that Fox will take the time to “fix” it, or just keep making the movies because they always make money.

The Wake included, only four ongoing Vertigo titles are left in May 2013, the lowest number of monthly titles on record for the imprint since at least March 2003. And unlike previous measures taken to streamline and re-energize the brand, this time it appears to working quite well.

Relying on creators who have already enjoyed mainstream success is not how Vertigo started out, certainly. Right now, we’re in the middle of Vertigo’s transformation from a relatively sheltered idea and talent farm to a much more competitive place. In terms of content, it’s not entirely clear what Vertigo will look like once — and if — it emerges from this transformation. Recent and forthcoming additions like Django Unchained, Astro City or Collider don’t reveal a distinctive direction yet.

What The Wake does, at this stage, is to prove that “creator-driven” books (as opposed to “creator-owned,” which only fully applies to Astro City) with high-profile creative teams can sell despite the Vertigo label. Whether or not this is going to help DC in re-establishing the Vertigo brand as a selling point, we’re going to find out in the next several months.

Now that it’s almost a week after the release of Age of Ultron #10, I have a simple question to ask about the plot that I feel isn’t that spoilerish anymore. Namely: Doesn’t the resolution of this series somewhat destroy recent Marvel continuity?

For those who have somewhat avoided the end of this series and all the writing about it afterwards, I’ll expand under the jump.Okay, so as Age of Ultron #10 reveals, in the “new” Marvel continuity, Ultron never made it away after Avengers #12.1 – Something that means that the ruined world as seen in great detail in the first five issues of the series never came to pass. Except, as we learned earlier in the series, it was Ultron-in-the-future who re-activated the Vision by remote control in Avengers #19 as a sleeper agent to establish a beachhead for his invasion… So does that mean that the Vision didn’t get re-activated in the new timeline?

That surely can’t be the case, because if he wasn’t re-activated, then we’re back in the whole butterfly effect thing that the second half of Age of Ultron was about; without the Vision, the Avengers’ battle with Hammer wouldn’t have gone the same way, and more importantly, there would’ve been no-one to make the Scarlet Witch think twice about rejoining the Avengers in Avengers Vs. X-Men #0, which also would’ve changed the way that that event went down, too, thereby changing the nature of most of the Marvel Now books, if not leading to another alternate universe/timeline somewhere.

But then again, there shouldn’t have been a way for anyone else to be able to reactivate the Vision at that time, either; when he was re-activated in Avengers #19, it was pretty much established that Tony Stark, Hank Pym et al had been trying to bring him back online for some time with no success, and he appeared to re-activate on his own (Really, of course, it was Ultron as we learned a couple of years later. Forward planning counts, readers). So… in the new timeline, they… were able to switch him on, I guess…? Somehow? Maybe?

I know, I know, it’s comics and more to the point, it’s Age of Ultron, which magically made “It’s Wolverine Jumping Through Time” the new “It’s Superboy Prime Punching the Walls of Reality” as an excuse to explain away any such errors. But still: For a series that was ostensibly about the problems with messing with the past, you’d think that someone would have noted that the seeming solution to the whole thing would only create exactly the same problems as the earlier, failed attempt at solving the problem.

DEFENESTRATION GAMES presents MASS MURDER OF STEEL

Enjoy high-flying mass destruction as you ignore the hideous death screams of the millians you are pledged to save! Use your super powers to wage a never-ending battle for self-important allegorical bombast! Bludgeon your senses into numbed awe!

TOTALLY safe for work!

It’s a cheap joke, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a funny one.

On the plus side, there’s always Ronin for those who really, really want there to be potential for alternate Spider-Men on the team…

[Former 2000AD editor] Steve MacManus tells me that the practise in the Youth Group section of IPC Magazines was indeed to acquire all rights in work commissioned from contributors. The payment process at IPC began when the contributor invoiced and IPC Accounts would then send the contributor a blue docket which had to be signed and returned. The docket had boxes detailing the rights purchased, and the “all rights” box was always ticked in advance. There were other boxes for “one use” and so forth but these were for use by the Magazines department, not the comics. Once the docket was sent in, the contributor then received a cheque and a white copy of the docket for their own files. In order for the cheque to be cashed it had to be signed on the back by the contributor accepting the terms and conditions on the docket.

Of course, things aren’t likely to be as straightforward as that seems, otherwise the Work For Hire status would appear to be cut and dry…

Every great once in a while, people (like Levitz) inside a corporation will bring a personal sense of ethics to the table and contend that non-profit gestures have lasting financial benefit. What we need to understand is that when this happens, it’s a fluke. Some companies allow more flexibility in this arena, some less. But without being an apologist for Big Business–just being fair–I have to say that when courtesies are extended that reach beyond the corporate system parameters, being angry that it doesn’t happen more often seems a waste of energy given that, by design, it’s not supposed to happen at all.

Or to put it another way, if you have a legal, binding agreement, you’re entitled to whatever it promises. Anything else that may come your way outside the boundaries of that agreement is terrific–good for you–but to expect extras and then be pissed when they don’t come does nothing but shorten your life.

It’s a great, great piece. If you haven’t already read it, you should.

Rarely has an event book under his steady hand had a clear, definitive ending.  The Avengers disassembled because the Scarlet Witch went crazy. Why? That was left for nurse Allan Heinberg to flesh out more in Avengers: Children’s Crusade. Now that there’s no more mutants, what happens to the X-Men? Welcome to the entire direction of the X-titles handled by everyone but Bendis at the time. Secret Invasion just ended with Norman Osborn slaying the Skrull Queen. What’s after that? Dark Reign, where more characters were just pushed into place until Siege, where they were pushed back out of place and Heroic Age could begin. It’s like there’s no period at the end of Bendis’ event sentences; they just keep going and going, running one into the other until someone else gets their hands in there and puts in that full stop.

Her metaphor of Bendis as surgeon who gets in, does a specific job and doesn’t really care about what comes afterwards, is a good one. Go check out the whole piece. I maintain, after all ten issues are now out, that Age of Ultron is one of the weirdest, most unclear and messiest event books in modern comics. And, yes, that includes Final Crisis.

Want to know more? Here’s the man himself, answering some questions about the whole thing:

What made you want to use Kickstarter for the transition into hardcover? Were there particular campaigns that caught your eye and made you aware of the service?

With Kickstarter I can submit an idea and see if there is interest. If the numbers are there, then I have the support to go ahead with some of my personal projects. I became aware of Kickstarter through other artists who have had success using Kickstarter. 

I get the idea of doing an art book (especially with work like your own), but what made you go all the way back to including work from when you were 15 years old? Is this an attempt to live up to the book’s title by showing the way your work has evolved and developed, or simply a desire to embarrass your teenage self?

For the original softcover book, I called it Evolution after the book was put together. As a hardcover book I wanted to call it Evolver – I felt that the word looked better on an aesthetic level. The idea started off as a simple sketchbook from my first digital painting up to now, but I thought that it would be interesting to put in some work that led up to digital painting and it sort of snowballed from there.

Your Kickstarter mentions both “Robot & Girl” and “Into A Rift” – I have to admit ignorance about both of these, so for those readers like myself who know you primarily as an artist for Valiant and Marvel… What are these two things?

“Into a Rift” was a previous creator owned project I ran through Kickstarter, which I’m continuing to develop. “Robot & Girl” were pin-ups I made for my own amusement. 

You’re adding new art for the new edition – Do you see Evolver as an ongoing project that will constantly be reissued with new material?

I’ve had some requests for a hardcover book and I wanted to add some new material for this particular project, but I have no plans for it to be reissued in the future. I do have an ibook version of my sketchbook on iTunes that was created as a continually updating sketchbook, though. 

The Evolver campaign runs through August 10.

It would be fine if 3-5 books each week were part of this event, but by making it the entire line this is dangerously “all or nothing” in a way that I fundamentally don’t think is healthy for the operation of the marketplace. Further, I think that the specter of a fixed print run means that a very few actors could utterly unbalance the ability to order for other stores. If DC is really “losing money on each copy sold,” then print runs are unlikely to be significantly expanded past the current sales level of the equivalencies that DC made. And if that’s the case, it would just take a small handful of large accounts ordering, let’s say, 500% of their usual order to trigger allocations for everyone. Then, stores that ordered “the right amount” will suddenly come up short, sending their customers to the bad actors instead.

It’s an in-depth look at the problems that retailers are facing with this month of DC books in particular. Everyone, help them out by pre-ordering for this month at the very least, because the alternatives don’t seem very pleasant at all. Seriously, go read the full piece and then let your retailer know which Villains Month books you want. They’ll thank you, and that way you stand a better chance of actually getting them.

We all need to keep on our game, but I also think there’s enough diversity in the marketplace that even if one of us stumbles and one of us starts putting out lousy comics, there’s a good mix.  If you look at the bestseller list, particularly for graphic novels, that’s not being driven exclusively by superheroes and hasn’t been for a long time. There’s a really nice diversity out there so if you look at the big five publishers, the premier publishers with Diamond, I think if one of us stumbles the other four will be strong.  I think it will be unlikely that we’ll head back to the days where mediocre comics were being way over-purchased by speculators.

It’s a long one, broken into three parts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 - but worth checking out even for those with short attention spans. Adams is a smart guy and IDW an impressive publisher who’s really made the licensed book market work for them. They should be paid attention to.

Today, Amazon Publishing announced that it has secured licenses for its new publishing platform, Kindle Worlds, with leading comic book publisher Valiant Entertainment and best-selling authors Hugh Howey, Barry Eisler, Blake Crouch and Neal Stephenson. Through these licenses, any writer will be able to create and sell fan fiction inspired by the popular Worlds of Valiant superhero comic book series Bloodshot, X-O Manowar, Archer & Armstrong, Harbinger, and Shadowman, with more to be added at a later date, as well as Howey’s Silo Saga, Eisler’s John Rain novels, Crouch’s Wayward PinesSeries, and the Foreworld Saga. Kindle Worlds is the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so.

Kindle Worlds is an IP minefield. Yes, fans can write stories and publish them through the program, but the owners of the original properties then have the right to adapt/exploit those stories and any ideas and new characters in them at will with the fan authors having no say in, nor profit sharing from, that adaptive or future use.

On the one hand, there’s an element of “Hey, it’s all fan fic, authors should realize they have no rights whatsoever” in there, but on the other, there’s also a sense of Kindle Worlds ending up being a cheap (free) IP farm for those property owners, at the same time. I’m entirely unsure how I feel about the program, I’ll be honest, but I’ll admit this: I really, really didn’t see Valiant being the first comic publisher to sign on.

Co-publisher, Dan Didio gave a boisterous speech about admitting that DC’s “new 52″ had only been planned up for a first act, and they had all been surprised that the “new 52″ would have garnered so much momentum two years ago.  He also confided that with any raising momentum, there inevitably a decline in momentum and DC is now prepared to unveil their second act.

Yes, now you can be disappointed by publishing executives from the comfort of your own home. Somehow “We didn’t think it would be this successful, and we had only planned so far” doesn’t really feel like an appealing proposition as a potential explanation for why DC’s favors have been waning in recent months. We can only hope that the mea culpas have improved by the time the next roadshow event happens.

Nrama: Well they look like the Justice League we know: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Diana of Themyscira, etcetera.

Giffen: They’re the Justice League! That’s all I can say. They’re the Justice League.

Nrama: Is this all new characters in the 31st Century?

DeMatteis: I don’t know. Are they?

Nrama: Keith?

Giffen: No comment.

Nrama: Are they mostly new?

Giffen: You know what? I’ll just say that this is the Justice League. But there’s no time travel involved. So everyone who thinks it’s time travel, that’s not involved.

And when we do explain it to you, one thing is going to jump out and go, “Oh no! Not that again!” But… trust us.

That mention of “one thing [that] is going to jump out and go, ‘Oh no! Not that again!’” has me very curious. Is this League clones of the originals? That might fit the bill – or are we looking at a League from a parallel Earth? I’m trying to think of cliches that would risk fans’ upset. A new Superboy Prime Punch? Guess we’ll find out in October…

Between his work with Fantagraphics, his editorial roles in both The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes and translation work for the likes of Jason, Jacques Tardi and Lorenzo Mattotti, Thompson has given so much to comics as a medium, a culture and an industry. He’ll be very much missed.

How do you read comics? I don’t know about you, but I really don’t read most superhero comics with the kind of care and diligence I would use to read Love & Rockets. If I see a two-page spread of smashed buildings and rubble – and boy howdy, are there lots of two-page spreads of smashed buildings and rubble in Age of Ultron – I’m going to scan it to see what the relevant information is before turning the page. I’m not lingering over the drawings. Because, sure, Bryan Hitch can draw. He can draw really well. But asking him to draw page after page after page of smashed buildings and rubble is just stupid. It’s moronic. It betrays a pathological inability to understand the most basic difference between detailed drawing and involving stories. Yeah, seeing a couple pages of carnage is fun. But so much of the first half of Age of Ultron is just the same thing repeated over and over again. Now lets do the same thing with different characters! What are Black Panther and Red Hulk doing in Chicago? Pretty much the same thing as Black Widow in San Francisco! Lots of people scurrying around in rubble waiting for a plot to happen. And then, the worst part, the absolute worst part, is that the real “story” as such doesn’t even begin until the end of the fifth issue. It’s not until they actually get into the time machine – one group of heroes heads into the future for a last-ditch assault on Ultron, while Wolverine and Sue Storm hijack the machine to go into the past – that the actual business of telling the story they intended to tell gets underway.

Go read the whole thing. It’s really, really worth reading, no matter what you thought of the series. I hope he comes back with commentary on the final issue which, for me, kind of compounds a lot of the problems he seems to have with it as a whole.

I am interested in the culture of war that permeates the world at the moment, be it large-scale wars or the ones we keep inside ourselves.I have seen first hand what kind of damage war inflicts on people, and how often the wounds become obscured as the decades progress, often through many generations. Nevertheless, the wounds are still alive within unless they are understood and healed.

ZERO is my observation and investigation of the war meme. It’s a meditation on genetics, on nature, on nurture. It uses the existing storytelling tropes of spy stories, action thrillers and speculative fiction to explore new possibilities within them.

War as a disease; war fiction as a healthy release.

I’ve gone from a Kot-cynic (I really didn’t like Wild Children) to a convert; Change lived up to its name for me and completely brought me around on what he’s capable of, and in Suicide Squad, I think he’s writing one of DC’s best books of the moment. Zero sounds like something both ambitious and personal, and between that and the wonderful artistic line-up of the issues so far – Mateus Santolouco, Tradd Moore and Change‘s Morgan Jeske are three of the names involved – I’m really looking forward to this book when it launches in September.

(Now, if only the mention of “war fiction as a healthy release” becomes enough of a meme that we see a Losers revival that brings back the odd but wonderful tone of Jack Kirby’s run on the comic in the 1970s…)

Yeah, we’re going to be tackling all the genres we can handle. There’s comedy, there’s horror, there’s romance, there’s what I understand people on Tumblr call ‘the feels’. There are big threats, little threats and threats that can’t be solved with a punch or an anti-matter blast. There are creatures torn from the depths of Hell, secret societies, corporate intrigues, vengeance quests, family squabbles, diapers that need changing, some laughs, some tears, some guest stars. A new HQ, new transport, a new way of doing things with a little of the old mixed in.

I’ve written before about my love of, and faith in, Ewing as a writer – For those who haven’t read his stuff yet, go read his Jennifer Blood for Dynamite or Zombo in 2000AD – and the idea of seeing him play around with the Avengers brand and the particular line-up of these character (Like him, I have a lot of fondness for Roger Stern-era Monica too) is particularly thrilling.

Quasi-related, with Greg Land leaving Iron Man to draw this series, Kieron Gillen quietly revealed who’d be replacing him on Iron Man on Twitter yesterday:

Pagulayan, of course, designed the armors for Gillen’s run to date, so it’s almost a homecoming for the artist. His run on the book starts with #15. 

Fans of stylized Frank Miller films will be disappointed to know that another of the author’s anticipated sequels, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” has now been pushed back, this time to Aug. 22, 2014. The “Sin City” follow-up was previously slated for release this October.

No reason has been given for the ten month delay, but this doesn’t seem promising at all.

Killing Zod was a big thing and Chris Nolan, originally, said there’s no way you can do this. That was a change–originally Zod got sucked into the Phantom Zone along with the others and I just felt it was unsatisfying and so did Zack. We started questioning–we talked to some of the people at DC Comics and said, ‘Do you think there is ever a way that Superman would kill someone?’ And at first they said ‘No way, no way,’ and we said, ‘but what if he didn’t have a choice?’

But for those who feel that this scene takes away the idea that Superman doesn’t kill – Well, not exactly. Director Zack Snyder explained:

And the why of it was, for me, that if it’s truly an origin story, his aversion to killing is unexplained. It’s just in his DNA. I felt like we needed him to do something, just like him putting on the glasses or going to the Daily Planet or any of the other things that you’re sort of seeing for the first time that you realize will then become his thing. I felt like, if we can find a way of making it impossible for him–like Kobayashi Maru, totally no way out–I felt like that could also make you go, ‘Okay, this is the why of him not killing ever again, right?’ He’s basically obliterated his entire people and his culture and he is responsible for it and he’s just like, ‘How could I kill ever again?’

In other words, this Superman will never kill again, because he’s already killed too much. It’s a significant change from traditional canon, but I have to admit, I kind of like it a lot.

(Via.)

(Looking at the collection of books in the sale, Hawkeye does that, I think.)

The second issue of a series – Like the second storyarc of a series, for that matter, it’s always the follow-ups – is where the reader gets to see whether or not a comic has more up its sleeve than just the initial moment of “Awww, yeah.” In so many respects, it’s the hardest of the initial issues to get right, and yet the one we think of the least, it seems.

We are looking at summer 2014. It will pick up on the status quo that was established at the end of the last “Queen and Country” novel called “The Last Run.” This will be Oni Press. Queen and Country will be back in comic form.

Goodness gracious, but I’m looking forward to some new Queen and Country. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this would be a good place to learn. (We haven’t seen a new issue since 2007!)