News Items

Here are a few items of news from the past week or so, as I’m catching up on some things.

Longbox Beta

The open beta for the digital comic store front Longbox launched this weekend.  It can be found here.  It is being setup to be the iTunes of digital comics.  It is the most promising of all the digital comic stores out there as it will be cross platform from home computers, to mobile devices, and even things like the Xbox.

After playing around with it for a bit I did find it a bit disappointing even though it is just a beta, mainly because it is too much like iTunes for my liking.  Like iTunes it just feels too slow and clunky to do what I like, but that is my personal bias.  The positive of being like iTunes means it will be more user friendly to more casual minded computer users.  I hope it does well as I think it will be good for comics in general.

DC

DC has made a few writing changes on key books that have had very poor sales of late.  Of note, J Michael Straczynski will be taking over both Superman and Wonder Woman.  Action Comics will be getting Marc Guggenheim.  Over all those are good moves as the Superman line had a promising start with the World of New Krypton but things derailed to the point where sales were plummeting on the books.  The Superman monthly numbers are the worst they have been in seven years.  This means James Robinson will be moving off of Superman.  He recently announced he is putting together a book based around the Shade.  That is the best possible news from him as his Starman related work is his best, so it will be good to see him regularly writing some of those characters again and with any luck it means no more books like Cry Justice.

World War Hulks: Hulked-Out Heroes

Marvel revealed a post Fall of the Hulks book called Hulked Out Heroes.  It is a two part mini series, which sounds like a complete train wreck.  So apparently a bunch of Marvel characters are going to get Hulk powers (there is a steroid joke in their somewhere).  Of course Deadpool is part of this as Hulkpool because the new Marvel edict is to put Deadpool in as many books as possible.  It sounds pretty awful doesn’t it?  The thing is this might actually be a fun book as it is being written by Jeff Parker.  That guarantees I will be reading it even if it does sound like a terrible mess waiting to happen.

Guardians of the Globe

Image has released two teasers from what appears to be a Image team book spinning out of Invincible or the aftermath of Image United.  They have been pretty humorous as they mock Marvel’s Avengers teaser images.  My favorite so far is the one with Spawn.