We’ve all had a chance to recover and step back a bit, and we can now look at what are the most important pure-comics stories out of San Diego Comic-Con. (No, not movies, or movies based on comics, or video games based on comics, those are all for other posts.) So what are the ComicMix Six Comic Stories from Comic-Con International?

1. Neil Gaiman returns to write “Before Sandman”.

Neil Gaiman is returning to his most famous comics creation, The Sandman, one more time, for a prequel miniseries to be released next year to be drawn by J.H. Williams (Promethea, Batwoman). “When I finished writing THE SANDMAN, there was one tale still untold. The story of what had happened to Morpheus to allow him to be so easily captured in THE SANDMAN #1, and why he was returned from far away, exhausted beyond imagining, and dressed for war. It was a story that we discussed telling for SANDMAN’s 20th anniversary… but the time got away from us. And now, with SANDMAN’s 25th anniversary year coming up, I’m delighted, and nervous, that that story is finally going to be told,” said Gaiman.

A few years ago a demonstrable moron of a moviegoer raised a brief public stink about Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE TWO TOWERS, claiming that this was a sneaky reference to 9/11 and that Jackson was clearly making light of the tragedy.

Informed that the book had existed for forty years and that it was an international cultural phenomenon before the hijackers were born, and that the title was therefore established, the fool doubled down. The existence on an unassailable timeline had no effect on him. He preferred his conspiracy theory, even if it was disproved by facts nobody could possibly counter. The conspiracy theory was more fun, more satisfying and (to him) more empowering.

Clearly an absolute moron, right?

So we now have Rush Limbaugh, claiming that the villain of the new Batman movie, Bane, is clearly lib’rul Hollywood’s sneaky slam at Mitt Romney, just because Romney used to work at a company called Bain.

(This is a connection made by Jon Stewart too, but Stewart, at least, knows it’s a joke.)

Okay. So forget that Bane the character has been around for years and years and years — since 1993, in fact — and that he in fact appeared in a previous Batman movie, during the Clinton Administration; you can argue that this is the kind of thing only stone geeks would know, and no doubt that argument will be made, in defense of Limbaugh’s sloppiness.

But you don’t even need that kind of specialized knowledge to tear this idiocy apart.

See, movies don’t take five minutes to make.

They require time for screenplays to be written, then rewritten; time for the cast and crew to be hired and to gather, time for the sets to be built, for the movie to be made, time for it to be scored and edited. Everybody knows this. Everybody also knows that Mitt Romney has only been the presumptive candidate for a few months. Nobody, but nobody, knew for sure that he was gonna be the guy, when the movie entered production.

Christopher Nolan, beginning to plan this final movie in his trilogy, did not suddenly have the brainstorm, “Gee! I don’t know who’s going to be the Republican nominee in 2012, but just on the OFF-CHANCE it’s Romney, two years from now, I’ll take this one Batman villain whose name is similar to a company on Romney’s resume and everybody will be so stunned by my clever political barb that they won’t vote for him!”

You discern even more stupidity when you realize that Romney’s doings at Bain have only been big-time controversial for a matter of weeks…since long after the movie was in the can. More alleged clairvoyance from Nolan.

And there’s even more than that when you take this into account: if the hero fighting Bane were Marvel’s The Black Panther — a charismatic black guy, and one LITERALLY born in Africa, who has a name of an organization that some idiots think Romney’s opponent supports — then he might have a case. But it’s Batman, a billionaire and a law unto himself. HE’S the Romney surrogate, if you have to believe that Romney has a surrogate in the movie. Thus, the metaphor Limbaugh thinks he sees doesn’t even survive simple knowledge of a character created in 1939, for crying out loud.

What gets me is that even the folks who ditto everything Limbaugh says, who might be able to spot the sheer appalling brain-dead stupidity of this particular claim, will not make the logical leap that he might have his head equally as far up his ass on some of the other things he says.

Seriously, folks: is there anybody out there who contends that this is the only time Limbaugh has just made stuff up? Or is this just the most recent, and obvious?

In case you weren’t following our Twitter feed on Friday (and why weren’t you?) you missed the winners of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writer’s annual Scribe Awards ceremony, held Friday night at Comic-Con in San Diego.

[[[Kevin J. Anderson]]] was awarded this year’s Grandmaster award for remarkable achievements in the tie-in field, which include more than one hundred novels, adding up to over 20 million books in print in thirty languages. His work includes the Star Wars “[[[Jedi Academy]]]” books, three internationally bestselling [[[X-Files]]] novels, the Superman novels The Last Days of Krypton and Enemies & Allies, many novelizations ([[[Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow]]], [[[League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]]], etc.) and ten globally bestselling [[[Dune]]] novels he has co-authored with Brian Herbert.

But he wasn’t alone accepting honors on Friday. [[[Cowboys & Aliens]]] by Joan D. Vinge was the winner for Best Adaptation, [[[Dungeons & Dragons — Forgotten Realms: Brimstone Angels]]] by Erin M. Evans took the prize for Best Speculative Original Novel, [[[Mike Hammer: Kiss Her Goodbye]]] by Max Allan Collins & Mickey Spillane won for Best Original Novel, [[[Thunderbirds: Extreme Hazard]]] by Joan Marie Yerba was honored for Best Young Adult Novel, and [[[Mike Hammer: Encore for Murder]]] by Max Allan Collins & Mickey Spillane won the Best Audio award.

The IAMTW (I Am a Tie-In Writer) is dedicated to enhancing the professional and public image of tie-in writers, working with the media to review tie-in novels and publicize their authors, and providing a forum for tie-in writers to share information, support one another, and discuss issues relating to their field.

My original First Comics partner Rick Obadiah, who is not prone to outrage (I took care of that part), sent me an email a couple days ago expressing his pissed-offness at a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times.

For those who don’t have time to click-through, the Times essentially gives credit for the whole creators’ rights movement to Image Comics, now enjoying their 20^th anniversary. I have no axe to grind with Image and I don’t think Rick does either; this is another case of typically sloppy reporting from the fantastically over-important New York Times.

In his email, Rick correctly points out that the stuff attributed to Image Comics started with First and with the other so-called independent publishers of the time: Eclipse, Comico, Now, Malibu, and others too numerous to name. I won’t quibble with the definition of “independent” – back in those days the term really meant “not Marvel/DC.” The Comics Buyers Guide even listed Disney Comics as “independent,” and that was the day I stopped using the term.

As I pointed out nearly 30 years ago in the pages of sundry First Comics, the creators’ rights movement on a publishing level started with Denis Kitchen and his fellow “underground comix” providers. The actual creators’ rights movement pretty much started on Day Two of the comic book industry when folks like Will Eisner, Bob Kane, William Moulton Marston and Joe Simon and Jack Kirby negotiated their own deals with the existing publishers and retained certain rights and/or received cover billing and/or creator credit and/or royalties.

But we – First, Eclipse, Comico, Now, Malibu, and the rest – took all that several steps further. Creators received certain ownership rights, cover billing, creator credit and royalties. Perhaps that was tame by today’s standards, but in 1983 this was akin to torching the Great Teat. We paid a price for this: all of those companies are now extinct, although some lasted nearly two decades – a good run in publishing. But we had nothing to take to the bank in terms of actual ownership when times got rough, when distributors went out of business and when investment-mania boiled over.

Once we started offering fair deals, DC and Marvel pretty rapidly started offering some of these rights under certain circumstances. That didn’t make them competitive on the creators’ rights front, but they provided acceptable safe haven to creators when times got rough on the independents front. And that includes me, and I am not ungrateful.

Did Image take this one step further when they went into business a decade later? They goddamn well should have and, yes, of course they did: the company was started by a half-dozen of the top writers and artists in the field. But Image isn’t a publisher in the traditional sense – to its credit, it’s more of a vanity press without the negative connotations of that term.

Image – and Dark Horse and more recently IDW and Dynamite – were built on the shoulders of the founders of First, Eclipse, Comico, Now, Malibu and the rest, and on our investors and our creative talent who took big risks breaking from the clutches of DC and Marvel without any guarantee those doors would reopen for them should the desire arise.

Again, I do not blame Image in the least. I blame the lazy, self-important “journalists” at the New York Times for having a historical point of view that fails to go beyond recently emailed press releases.

Here’s a secret. It is well known that the New York Times has never run comic strips. But this was not because comics were too lowbrow and well beneath their dignity. That was just their typical arrogant posturing. The New York Times didn’t run comic strips back when Pulitzer and Hearst started the medium because they couldn’t afford the fancy color presses. The paper of record, indeed.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil and the God Particle