WW-CHICAGO: DC at the crossroads
At Wizard World Chicago this weekend DC staffers sat down for another DC Nation panel and gave fans some insight into what we can expect in the Immediate" future."
Editorial honcho Dan Didio was joined by coordinating editor Jann Jones, marketeer Bob Wayne, Jim Starlin and Sean McKeever. Starting off we heard what we have down the pipeline after Countdown to Final Crisis, the aptly named Final Crisis will be a seven issue series by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones starting in May 2008.
And since the weekly format has been so successful for DC over the recent years, starting weekly in December Countdown: Arena starts bringing us more tastes of the Multiverse pitting three different versions of a character fighting out to be a leader in Monarch’s army. The results will be determined by the fans who will get to vote on the DC website for the winner. That’s right folks its reality comics!
Salvation Run will place DC villains in a penal colony, their own planet resulting from the DC heroes looking for a better solution than prisons and Arkham.
Starlin will be killing off whomever he feels like in Death of the New Gods, an eight-part mini-series starting in October. At the panel he jovially made it clear that no one is safe.
The long awaited Marv Wolfman/Damian Scott Raven has been slated for early 2008. In other Titans news we’ll see a Terra mini-series in March.
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Kyle Rayner will be joining the Challengers. DiDio suggested for everything to make sense read GL 26 then Atom #18 (Actually, DiDio was unsure of the actual issue number but assured us it’s the one after GL 26) then Countdown, all of which should be going down in December/January if I’ve done my math correctly.
Jann Jones described The Black Canary Wedding Planner (out in September) as the “girliest book” ever put out and marveled at how a man (J. Torres) could be doing such a great job writing it.
Cassandra Kane will pop up again in Gotham Underground. McKeever said to look for Manhunter to join the Birds of Prey and DiDio says the Manhunter series isn’t gone, they just want to have a few issues put to bed before they start publishing up again.
DiDio also assures us he’s got a big map of the multiverse and is plotting out what all 52 planets are to ensure the richest DC Universe possible. On a side note, Earth 26 is the Captain Carrot Earth and Vertigo is still not going to be a part of any DC Universe.
You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul, as Doug Sahm would have it. No, and you can’t live in Arizona if you don’t have a sense of Yuma.
For years on end, my most vivid images of Billy the Kid came from Toby Press’ Billy the Kid Adventure Magazine (29 issues, spanning 1950 – 1955 and boasting efforts by the likes of Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, and Harvey Kurtzman) and from the after-school telecasts of an extensive run of low-budget movies starring, by turns, Bob Steele and Buster Crabbe. At a turning-point for such awareness, while visiting Northwest Texas’ Panhandle–Plains Historical Museum with the folks, I noticed a display containing this document:
Day Two at Wizard World has presented us with a lot of cool stuff to bring you on the Big ComicMix Broadcast— starting with an adorable lady who is putting her heart and soul into her love of comics and producing her own work completely on her own. Then Battlestar: Galactica‘s Richard Hatch unveils his newest passion project, The Great War of Magellan , and we give you a chance to work with him on the development of the concept! Then there’s a tip on how you can be your own comic book star – and a trip back to when there was a group on the charts whose front man was doing the pirate things a long time before Johnny Depp!
(with Duncan Fegredo) for Vertigo in 1995 and [[[Children of the Voyager]]] (with Paul Johnson) for Marvel in 1993.
Today the Big ComicMix Broadcast is at Wizard World Chicago, where the US Post Office kicked off the way by unveiling the Marvel Stamp Collection, plus the debut of the Ultimate Spider-Man Project from the Hero Initiative which was unleashed here as well. DC dropped a few news bombs which we cover and then there’s a new Venom series to talk about from Marvel and so much more.
My mama told me never to play pool against someone who brings his own cue. I shudder to think what she’d say about someone who brought his own pool table.
Ha! Make you look!
