* My Strange Tales Spotlight series at Marvel.com keeps on truckin’, with interviews with Johnny Ryan and Peter Bagge.

* My friend Matthew Perpetua of music-blog juggernaut Fluxblog is looking for cartoonists to develop a graphic novel project with him. I’ve heard about this thing and it should be a hoot.

* The Charles Burns-edited Best American Comics 2009 anthology is a doozy. How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen C.F.?

* And as Tom Spurgeon points out, the overall comics publishing landscape for late 2009 is a doozy too. There is an actual Al Columbia book coming out. As a wise man once said, ’nuff said.

* It’s weird: There wasn’t a ton of news out of Wizard World Chicago Comic-ConFare this year, but what there was was almost all stuff from the corner of the Marvel Universe I’m interested in. To wit:

* Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk of the late, lamented Captain Britain & MI-13 are doing a Dark X-Men miniseries.

* Jeff Parker’s Agents of Atlas is doing a crossover miniseries with the X-Men, then becoming a back-up feature in the even better Incredible Hercules, then getting relaunched. Meanwhile, Herc writers Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente talk to CBR about “Assault on New Olympus,” the storyline into which the Agents of Atlas back-up will feature. Wow, Incredible Hercules just became the book no semi-mainstream comics blogger can do without.

* And finally, Atlas‘s Parker will be taking over Thunderbolts from incoming Daredevil writer Andy Diggle.

* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken reviews G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra as only he and the voice in his head can.

* Dan Nadel waxes skeptical about Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter. That one Stark/Cooke scene comparison Dan pulls out is pretty rough.

* I enjoyed my fellow Savage Critic Graeme McMillan’s strip-by-strip review of Wednesday Comics. A lot of it seems really nice, but is there a there there?

* Speaking of the Savs, Jog’s review of several recent superhero comics brings our attention to Joe Casey and Nathan Fox’s stunning-looking Dark Reign: Zodiac. Where the hell did THIS come from?

* Curt Purcell bemoans how “bad-assedness often gets expressed as a certain jaded matter-of-factness about the supernatural” in genre stories with tough-girl heroines. Man, you think it’s bad in Anita Blake or whatnot, count yourself lucky you haven’t been immersed in superhero comics for the better part of a decade. There’s a prominent strain that seems geared to suck the wonder out of the whole shebang, with constant commentary from the characters about how blase they feel toward the amazing shit they’re doing.

* Elsewhere, Curt wonders, per some dismissive comments by Geoff Johns, if Blackest Night is really a horror-meets-superheroes affair after all. That’s certainly been the selling point DC has been using in promotional venues like Dan DiDio’s DC Nation column, Curt. My guess is that maybe Johns was trying to downplay it in his interview with Laura Hudson lest people think all the emotional-spectrum and death stuff isn’t Serious Business. A false dichotomy, I know, but you go to war with the Lantern Corps you have.

* My friend Ben Morse cracks open his Nova sketchbook. This Jim Lee “sketch” really is pretty impressive.

* Tons of preview pages from Lane Milburn’s Xeric application book, Death Trap, are over at the Closed Caption Comics blog.

* Please welcome Big Sunny David Allison back to the blogosphere!

* Gaze upon this gallery of Master of the Universe movie concept art and ponder what might have been. (I do remember the villain designs they ended up using being pretty good, though.) (Via Topless Robot.)

* Your Word of the Day, and my Word of My Life, is anagnorisis: “A revelation into the true nature of things, usually through tragedy.”

* OH JESUS CHRIST JIM WOODRING WHAT ARE YOU DOING

* It gives me a hope for our species I haven’t had in a long, long time to see that even on the Internet, people are naturally repulsed by the idea of being mean to a total stranger. Even when that total stranger is Rob Liefeld. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

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