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I really like the emerging trend of comic strips-as-movie reviews. Here, for example, is Faith Erin Hicks on Alien.

Regarding the words in her last panel, I'm having trouble remembering the last horror movie I saw that I genuinely cared at all about whether particular character lived or died in it, let alone one where I was actively rooting for the survival of some of the characters. Of course, I usually only watch terrible horror movies to keep me company while I draw or write, so perhaps that's on me as much as modern filmmakers...

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Dick joke involving Darkseid alert! (Via Tom Spurgeon)

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Speaking of Spurgeon, I'm really glad he's doing these, especially when I learn something. If you asked me who created The Human Torch last week, I would have said "Bill Everett" and been super-totally wrong.

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Say, I really like the art in this IDW Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic preview. It suggests Mike Mignola's TMNT to me.

As I alluded to the other night, I spent some time with IDW'S TMNT Friday evening, and I had pretty mixed feelings about it. It wasn't as good as I hoped, but it was definitely not-awful either, and I'll continue reading it in trade.

I was mostly perplexed by several elements of it, including the hyper-compressed timeline (the "teenage" mutant ninja turtles are less than two years old...?), where the "ninja" comes from, and why the turtles are now mutated sea turtles instead of whatever they were before...box turtles? Of course, I did watch parts of Turtle: The Incredible Journey with my nieces the same weekend I read the first trade collection of IDW's TMNT, so maybe the pre-mutant turtles having flippers instead of legs made a bigger impression on me than it might have otherwise...

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I wanna point this out just because Batman: Year One is such a big, important work that a lot of folks (and stores and libraries) are gonna want to buy a copy of it, any new copy of it, and, apparently, there are problems with it.

It's very (very, very, very weird that David fucking Mazzucchelli can't get a hold of anyone at DC Comics, too.

As the Wicked Witch of West always says, "What a world, what a world..."

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Here's Sean Kleefeld on Dark Shazam 4.0

I don't know that the evil, scantily-clad version of Mary Marvel from Countdown "sold," necessarily. It's always hard to talk about numbers and suchlike where comics are concerned, but Countdown sold much worse than 52 (at the time, the only thing to compare it to).

Looking back from the distance of a few years, I don't think I'd call Countdown much of a success. Few of the creators involved with it even work at DC now, and I don't recall seeing a single positive review of a single issue of it.

Last year, I might also have pointed out that DC went on to immediately ignore and disavow every single thing that occurred in that series, undoing most of it as quickly as possible, even within the pages of Final Crisis, the series it was supposedly counting down to. But then, DC has since distanced themselves from everything they've ever published pre-September of 2011, save perhaps Flashpoint, so that doesn't really seem to indicate the negative reception of something any more...

As for how well Jeff Smith's Monster Society of Evil miniseries sold, it's true it didn't turn out to be a new Bone, but, on the other hand, it's often the only Captain Marvel/Shazam material I see on the shelves of libraries and bookstores...

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Here's a great piece by Tom Bondurant about Captain Marvel and Earth-2, which provides plenty of historical context for the ways in which DC has used those concepts in the past, and how their upcoming usages may deviate from their original conceptions.

Do read all the way to the end—it's fascinating to see how many different people contributed to the character creation of a cast like that of, say, your average Justice League/Justice Society team-up...

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Speaking of Mary Marvel and the new direction of Captain Marvel, I'm eager to see how DC handles the Marvel Family. You can collectively call them "The Shazam Family," I suppose, and you can call Captain Marvel Jr. "Shazam Jr.", but "Mary Shazam" doesn't sound right at all...

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Well, this is kind of interesting.

Invincible Iron Man is a Marvel book I tried to read when it was first launch, the first movie having primed me to read a good Iron Man comic, but despite liking the scripting of the first two story-arcs okay, I couldn't stand the art. I dropped it after a few issues, and read the first two arcs in library trade, and then didn't even want to read it for free anymore, as I disliked the art so much.

I am impressed Larocca's stuck around on art as long as he has, though.

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You can't tell from my work, given its awfulness, but I too use Google Image for image reference when drawing stuff—it's so convenient! I usually don't use anything from the first few pages of results though, as that's too obvious.

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Here's Ken Parille, continuing the conversation on super-sexism in costuming and presentation at The Comics Journal.

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I liked reading this (awkwardly phrased) headline about Jim Woodring carrying a studio in his pocket, given the size of that dude's pen.

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Did you know you have to be at least 12-years-old to be a stalker, and that there are no stalkers at all in the city of Austin, Texas?

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In a perfect world, there would be a regular, serially published comic book pairing fairy tales with erotic and horror content not unlike those awfully Zenescope comics, only it would be by Richard Sala, and thus look more like this......and less like this...
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I'm on Team Chris, not Team David

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By the way, not only did Sims make the same observation I did that Johns borrowed something from a short, Christopher Priest-written JLA story from the late-90s to use in his terrible new Justice League series, Sims' post also includes scans of the Jim Lee-drawn panels in question.So yeah. Why is Green Lantern touching Wonder Woman's hip, exactly...?

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Grant Morrison was right! Now his Batman Inc concept is invading our own reality!

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I'm quite excited about the prospect of a feature film based on a real-life episode in Nicolas Cage's life. I am even more excited by the image ComicsAlliance put together to illustrate my short, "Hey, look at this!" post on the subject.

Behold:If Cage ends up not being able/wanting to play himself in the final film version, I hope he at least gets the opportunity to play Guy Freaking Out In The Corner of the Cover of Action Comics #1...

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I don't know if I wish Mike Sterling was the writer of Suuperman—I'd miss his Progressive Ruin blog too much—but, at the very least, I wish he was the editor of Superman, assigning story ideas to his writers like those found in this post.