* While I’m busy touting my Marvel clout, I’m reasonably sure it was a suggestion I made among a group of my friends that led to my pal Kiel Phegley asking whether Paul Cornell & Leonard Kirk’s late, lamented Captain Britain & MI-13 might be brought back as a digital comic, and Joe Quesada responding favorably, in the latest Cup o’ Joe column at CBR. If you like this idea, why not say so in public, and to any of your friends or acquaintances in Marvel’s employ? It sounds like if we ask for it, they’ll listen.
* That Cup o’ Joe interview also makes it sound like Marvel is out of the line-wide event business, or will be after maybe one more trip to the well. I think that’s good for the long-term health of the superhero comics industry, but May’s ginormous sales dip likely indicates it’ll be a challenge in the short term. I suppose it depends in part on whether, like Marvel over the past couple years, you try really hard to keep all your plates spinning, or whether you can only spotlight one or two franchises at a time to the detriment of the others.
* James Robinson and Mark Bagley on Justice League of America? Sure, I’ll eat it. I don’t have the experience with Robinson that many superhero readers do, having never read Starman, but while I didn’t end up liking his One Year Later Batman arc I’ve enjoyed his work in the Superman books recently quite a bit. Bagley, meanwhile, is not my favorite artist when it comes to drawing DC characters, but he knows how to tell a story and his work on Ultimate Spider-Man remains a woefully underappreciated component of that title’s success. I remain concerned about DC putting the cart before the horse by preventing its flagship team title from including its biggest characters because they’re busy elsewhere–there’s a reason Grant Morrison’s JLA and Brian Bendis’s Avengers were/are the biggest books of their eras, and it’s not because they focused on Vixen or Jack of Hearts–but still, color me intrigued. (Via JK Parkin.)
* Now this is how you write a post-artcomix-festival thank-you letter: TCAF’s Chris Butcher shows us how it’s done.
* The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror 2009—aka Kramers Ergot 7.5–will be guest-edited by Sammy Harkham. That line-up is effing nuts.
* It wasn’t until Heidi MacDonald used the word “remote” to describe the old location of the Eisner Awards that I realized, hey, wait, yeah, that is kinda weird, isn’t it? All the way at the end of the convention center by itself after the show shuts down for the evening, and you’ve got to walk under the sails through that deserted stretch of swag tables and autograph aisles. Anyway it’s moving to the Hilton.
* Because the original Red Dawn is a) a gonzo artifact of its time; b) a John Milius fever dream; c) TOTALLY AWESOME, I’m not sure I’ve said word one about Their plans to remake the movie, because why bother? But Latino Review is reporting that Tony Gilroy, Oscar-nominated writer/director of Michael Clayton and screenwriter of, I think, the last two Bourne movies is writing the Red Dawn remake. Suddenly this project got a lot more interesting. Incidentally, Red Dawn has recently joined Atlas Shrugged as a key text for the Obama era in the minds of some prominent and semi-prominent conservatives, so it should be interesting to see how they react to the prospect of the film being remade by the pen of a writer whose thrillers are generally perceived to tilt left.
* That Red Dawn link was via SciFi Wire, but I’m not linking to them again until they knock off their obnoxious habit of putting spoilers in their article headlines, above the by-now-pointless “spoiler warning” tag.
* B-Sol reviews The Blob. That scene where it eats the old man’s hand really was horrifying to watch as a kid, wasn’t it?
* These are two years old at least, but no less awesome for that: Marvel go-to cover artist Marko Djurdjevic redesigns He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Dig this Marilyn Manson-esque Skeletor! But the Mer-Man is more representative of what the redesigns look like overall. (Via Monster Brains.)
* I have no idea what the deal is with this photo from Rob Zombie’s upcoming Halloween 2, and I’m unlikely ever to find out first-hand, but damn what a great character design. It’s almost criminal to consign it to some other monster’s movie. (Via Arrow in the Head.)
* Finally, my pal Chris Ward talks to Jazma Online about Political Power: Barack Obama, his upcoming comic from Bluewater (yes, the “Female Force” people–Chris wrote the Condoleezza Rice issue). I’m trying to think how to put this…Chris is an interesting choice to write this project, or to write anything that you don’t want to read like the work of a crazy person, which is what Chris is. I think the interview speaks for itself. And it also has some juicy tidbits about life at Wizard.
One thing I’ve always enjoyed about Robinson’s titles is his ability to bring the second stringers to the forefront. Starman wasn’t just about Jack Knight… it may have started about him, but over time the supporting cast was just as important. You can see it working in Superman, too. So while I may not care for this current line-up of the JLA (and I’m really hoping it changes soon), I at least have faith that Robinson will make me care more about them just as much as I would any of the big guns that could be in the title.