Department of “Shoulda Seen That Coming”: in the UK, a government minister issues a stern warning that a particular book, Tintin in the Congo, contains “hideous racial prejudice,” and that no right-thinking Briton should ever, ever read it henceforward. Result? Sales increase immediately by 3,800 percent. (Forbidden Planet International has a longer story on the complaint, including the fact that the Commission on Racial Equality – and isn’t that a nice Orwellian name? – demanded that Tintin in the Congo be banned.)

The Beat is not happy with the final cover for Showcase: Batgirl. (And there’s no reason she should be.)

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog remembers the halcyon days when the Punisher was, briefly, a black man.

Media Life Magazine thinks that Zudacomics is a really swell idea and the most wonderful thing since sliced bread – but they also think that comic books are “almost an industry,” so I’m not sure if we should believe them.

The Chicago Sun-Times looks at DC Comics’s new teen-girl-focused Minx line.

Bookgasm reviews the newest reprint trade paperback of the Fables series, Volume 9: Sons of Empire, written by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Mark Buckingham and others.

Publishers Weekly reviews a number of comics this week, including House by Josh Simmons and the first volumes in two maanga series, Gin Tama and War Angels.

Dana’s Marvel Comics Reviews, at Comic Fodder, hits the week’s high points, starting with New Avengers # 32.

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In honor of Daniel Radcliffe’s roving eyes, today here’s a picture of what Emma Watson looks like on a regular movie screen, and what she looks like in IMAX 3-D. Quite a difference, eh? (And if you want to see the photo I almost used here — which is probably not safe for work, and presumably is from Daniel Radcliffe’s stage work in Equus earlier this year in London — it’s here. The caption would have been something like "Hey! That’s not Hermione!")

NPR interviews Arthur Levine, J.K. Rowling’s American editor.

The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles J.K. Rowling.

The Guardian profiles Christopher Little, Rowling’s famously tough agent.

My god, even Eddie Campbell has gotten into the act. Must everyone in the whole wide world write about Harry Potter?

The San Jose Mercury News, running a bit behind, files the standard Harry Potter story (interviews with kids, librarians, and booksellers; lots of impressive numbers; thumbnail history) that everyone else was doing last week.

KansasCity.com thinks the Harry Potter readers will be writing their own fantasy novels in six years. (So, agents, if you start getting a flood of boy wizards in 2014, remember that Kansas City called it first.)

Newsday, from bucolic Long Island, New York, gets a bunch of people to recommend other fantasy books for Potter readers. (more…)

Geoffrey James made a feature-length animated film by reprogramming computer games.  The result, the Star Trek film Borg War, with Patrick Stewart, Tim Russ and Brock Peters, will debut at the Official Star Trek Convention 2007 at the Las Vegas Hilton August 10.

According to the press release, Borg War clips have received more than a million downloads online.  If you want to see the trailer for the feature, check out http://www.creationent.com/cal/stlv.htm.

Vegas expects more than 12,000 Trekkies, and a guest list that includes William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Brett Spiner and damn near everybody else who’s been associated with the franchise and remains alive.  Also on the schedule — a Star Trek concert with members of the Las Vegas Philharmonic.

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About a month ago, our Glenn Hauman turned me on to this story and I’ve got to tell you, I’m still pissed.

According to published reports, which all carry the following verbatim: “NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”

Okay, let me first state the obvious: this man’s head is so far up his ass his eyeballs think they’re hemorrhoids. And I am in the intellectual property business: what ComicMix publishes is intellectual property, and we’d rather not see our various creators’ work, current and forthcoming, ripped off.

The whole thing about copyrights and the Internet is a little wacky and confusing. This country has lousy copyright laws and, to the extent they “protect” anybody, they tend to offer that protection more to the corporate oligarchs than they do to actual creators, let alone to any legitimate sense of history, art and culture. We’re muddling through as best we can, basically using the Grateful Dead’s policies as our starting point.

But Mr. Cotton acts as though he is an idiot. He is either woefully misinformed or he is an out-and-out liar. Intellectual property crime runs into hundreds of billions of dollars each year? Prove it. Smith Barney, hardly a communist organization, quotes the Motion Picture Association as saying such piracy cost them $6 billion in 2005. I realize there’s a lot of other stuff going on – music piracy, books, even comics – but movies and DVDs are the E ticket of the operation. If Mr. Cotton is even remotely correct, these other media have to come up with a minimum of $194,000,000,000.01 to justify his number. (more…)