For the first time ever, there is no new original Star Trek series on television, but your favorite characters are alive and well in book form. Discover what’s been going on with the Next Gen crew, DS9 and more, plus:

— Marvel unveils two new, hard-to-get treasures

— Famous Monsters is back!

— “Dial H For”??

You just want to kill time before the three-day weekend – so  press the button!

   And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via or RSS!

Here at ComicMix, we’re traditionalists that believe summer actually starts on Memorial Day weekend, no matter what movies premiere in early May. So, with the official start of grilling season, may we humbly recommend that you do so with a Munden’s Bar grilling apron?

Straight from the pages of Munden’s Bar, with our multiverse-famous slogan "If you leave here sober, it’s your own damn fault", this apron will protect you from grease, slime, beer, and other hazards of the barbecue. And at the low, low price of $17.99, how can you go wrong? Okay, you could go wrong by taking a chainsaw to school and saying the leprechauns are telling you to carve up the auditorium stage, but that’s a unique way to get out of final exams, at least.

Remember: the more Munden‘s merchandise you buy, the more Munden‘s stories we put out! So buy those beer steins and coasters too!

[/End of soft sell.]

Georges Prosper Remi was born in Etterbeek, Brussels, Belgium in 1907. He was still in school during World War I, when Brussels was occupied by the Germans, and doodled images of the invaders in his notebooks.

In 1920 he attended the collège Saint-Boniface and joined the Boy Scouts troop there. His first published drawings were in the school’s Scout paper and in the monthly Boy Scouts magazine Le Boy-Scout Belge. In 1924 he began signing his illustrations “Hergé,” the French pronunciation of his first and last initials reversed. He would keep the pseudonym for the rest of his life.

After finishing school, Hergé worked at the Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle. In 1926 he published his first cartoon series, Totor, in Le Boy-Scout Belge. In 1928 Hergé was given responsibility for Le XXe Siècle’s weekly children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième.

In 1929 he debuted a new strip of his own creation there, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Tintin became an immediate success, and Hergé produced new Tintin adventures right up to his death in 1983—the 24th and last one, Tintin and Alph-Art, was published unfinished.

Hergé received many awards during his lifetime, including the Harvey, the Eisner, the Adamson, and the Grand Prix Saint Michel. He was posthumously inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003.

 According to Gawker, the New Yorker recently ran a cartoon that plagiarizes the very famous cover of Tales to Astonish by King of Comics, Jack Kirby.  The too-cool-for-school blog asks, "Comic book geeks, your services are at last required.  How obscure is this?" 

On behalf of geeks everywhere, allow me to say, it’s not at all obscure.  It’s one of the more famous images around.

[Above image pulled from Gawker for use in comparison.]

When it comes to portraying the duality of a character, there are probably no better examples in the DCU than Victor Stone and Harvey Dent — otherwise known as Cyborg and Two-Face. With two new miniseries, Grounded writer Mark Sable intends to bring readers the back-stories of these two tragic characters.

With DC Special: Cyborg, the writer takes a look at the fan-favorite Teen Titan in a six-issue arc that began this week. Victor Stone was an Olympic athlete who, after being crippled, was resurrected with experimental prosthetics by his scientist father. Blessed with powers but cursed by his accident, he called himself Cyborg and became an important member of the Teen Titans. Created in 1980 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez and introduced in the pages of The New Teen Titans, Cyborg quickly became one of the most popular DC characters of the ‘80s. He even became a member of the Super Friends on the ‘80s Saturday morning cartoon, The Super Powers Team: The Galactic Guardians.

In Two-Face: Year One, the writer takes a look at one of Batman’s most dangerous villains in a miniseries whose first issue hits shelves just days before Aaron Eckhart takes on the big-screen role of Harvey Dent in July’s Dark Knight. The two-issue miniseries follows Dent as he runs for District Attorney and has the accident that changes his fate (and his relationship with Batman) forever.

I spoke with Sable about Cyborg, Two-Face, the characters’ respective miniseries and writing webcomics for the hit NBC television series Heroes.

CMix: To start with, tell us what fans of Cyborg can expect from your new series.

Mark Sable: It’s a six-issue series and the first issue is almost like a “Year One” in the sense that it gives you a lot of his origin. I’m not tinkering with his origin. I’m trying to be as respectful as possible to what Marv Wolfman and George Perez did, because I think Cyborg’s origin is one of the best in comics. There were a couple of things that needed to be slightly tweaked to make everything make sense. It’s done deliberately because I want people who aren’t familiar with Cyborg to be able to pick it up. It lays the groundwork for what this series is about. Without giving too much away, we really weave his supporting cast of human characters into the story as well as the Teen Titans, so it was important for people to know who they are. (more…)

Nick Fury’s appearance in the special scene after the end credits of Iron Man may not be the last we see of the man with the eye patch.

Fans have assumed that Samuel L. Jackson will naturally resume the role in the forthcoming Avengers movie, but now we have a little more evidence to support that prediction. Well, not much, but at least it’s something.

According to Devin Faraci at CHUD, Jackson recently met with Kevin Feige, the President of Production at Marvel Studios. The two haven’t met since Jackson filmed the cameo scene in Iron Man. It’s only idle speculation as to what the two met about, but Marvel could be getting a fast start on assembling its Avengers and getting them locked down with contracts.

The Avengers film is currently slated for release in July 2011.

(via CHUD)