DC

It is with sincere regret that we bring you news that the viral Internet hero known as Batman bin Suparman has been jailed in his native Singapore for crimes including theft, breaking and entering and drug use. The man became famous within the last several years after a photograph of his Singaporean identification card found its way online, delighting millions with the knowledge that a sweet-faced and perhaps even supremely confidant young boy existed somewhere out in the world with a name that when translated means "Batman, son of Superman."

Read More

A couple weeks ago when I was writing about why the Penguin has never been one of my favorite Batman villains, I mentioned one of my earliest favorite comics: An issue of The Brave and the Bold that was nominally a Penguin story, but was more focused on the Joker. The main point then was that the Penguin was kind of a bit player even in one of his own stories, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that there might be some subtle nuances to this story that would be worth a closer examination.

There aren't. I mean, it's a mid-80s issue of Brave and the Bold, and those things are about as subtle as a brick upside the head. But it is a pretty great issue, and as an added bonus, it features a handy guide to everything you should not do if you're running a business in Gotham City.

Read More

Courtesy of DC Comics, ComicsAlliance brings you an advance look at new periodical comic books, collected editions and graphic novels going on sale in February 2014 (and in some cases beyond) from the publisher’s New 52 superhero line, the mature readers Vertigo imprint, and the DC Entertainment brand of special projects, digital-first, all-ages and licensed titles. All of the following books can be purchased at finer comic book shops, where you can also pre-order your selections to ensure you’ll get a copy before they sell out.

Highlights for January include Superman: Lois Lane #1 by Marguerite Bennett and Emanuella Lupacchino; the final issue of Batman Black & White; the first hardcover collection of Batman '66; an expanded edition of Bruce Wayne: Murderer?; a deluxe reprint of Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabrial Bá; and the conclusion of Forever Evil by Geoff Johns and David Finch, featuring "the final fate" of Nightwing.

Read More

It's hard to work out how Robot Chicken creative director and increasingly busy comic book writer Kevin Shinick found the time to complete 100 episodes of Mad for Warner Bros. Animation, but he did it, and it's an accomplishment he and the studio are celebrating with a double-sized anniversary show tonight on Cartoon Network. Perhaps most enticingly for ComicsAlliance readers, the episode's centerpiece is what's surely to be a biting Man of Steel parody starring "Weird Al" Yankovic as Superman and Henry Winkler as Jor-El.

Devised and written by (and usually starring) Shinick, the Mad cartoon is, in his words, the magazine brought to life in animation. It's a bold statement but honestly Shinick isn't wrong. Besides just being very funny, Mad translates the venerable humor magazine's signature irreverence, silliness and other naughtiness for television, segueing from one sketch to another with animated page tears and everything. The series actually employs some of the cartoonists who continue to define the voice of Mad, including Sergio Aragonés, who contributes all-new in-the-margins strips that find their way into every episode, as do topical film and television parodies, fake commercials and, of course, Spy vs. Spy. In every case, sketches are presented in visual styles reminiscent of Mad masters like Don Martin, Mort Drucker and Al Jaffee, and by way of different animation techniques such as Flash, stop-motion and puppets, to further honor the stylistic diversity of the magazine. But the series updates the magazine's scope for the extremely memetic world of today, going all-in on mashups (the ThunderLOLcats comes immediately to mind) and other highly bloggable jokes.

That any contemporary animated series makes it to 100 episodes is remarkable, but Mad has the additional distinction of being explicitly based on a comics magazine -- and with the help of that comics magazine's current contributors like Aragones and Tom Richmond -- makes the Emmy-nominated series that much more interesting. It's obvious from talking to Shinick (who's also writing Superior Carnage for Marvel) that the mantle of Mad is hugely important to him. In the following interview you'll find out why that is, as well as an inside look at Mad's impressive production workflow, Shinick's philosophy about comedic content for children, and what else to expect from tonight's 100th episode.

Read More

The CW’s superhero series Arrow re-imagines Green Arrow for a TV audience as a tough, often ruthless vigilante bent on setting things right in his home of Starling City by punishing the wicked. ComicsAlliance’s Matt Wilson will be following along to see how he fares.

This week, we see some flashbacks from a different perspective, assassins roll into town, and Officer Lance cries a bunch!

Read More

A superhero sitcom inspired by the characters created and/or popularized by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, Teen Titans Go! is one of the best ever DC Comics series to come out of Warner Bros. Animation, which is saying something considering the prestigious history of that asso

Read More

Fresh off the fan-funded Veronica Mars movie, series creator Rob Thomas is teaming up with writer Diane Ruggerio to write the pilot for a show based on the Vertigo comic iZombie by Chris Roberson and Mike Allred.

The series is in development at the CW, as many TV projects based on DC properties are. Like the comic, the show would follow the exploits of a zombie med student named Gwen who has to eat brains to keep her human appearance.

Read More

When we last visited the DC Universe in the wake of Forever Evil, it was a dark, grim and gritty place -- well, darker, grimmer and grittier than usual, anyway. Most of the members of the Justice League of America, Justice League Dark and Justice League Vanilla mysteriously disappeared after encountering the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3, the evil doppelgangers of Earth-New 52's greatest heroes.

Rallying an army of supervillains behind them, the Syndicate announced the death of the Justice Leagues, outted Nightwing as Dick Grayson, moved the moon to eclipse the sun, and exiled the Teen Titans into the time stream. With the world pretty much conquered, the Syndicate went about the business of ruling it -- you know, establishing a currency and economic system, redrawing maps, writing up a constitution, designing a flag, developing a body of laws, intervening in disputes between countries and the meetings! Oh, the many meetings they'll have to have!

Is that what we're in for with the remaining issues of the seven-part series? Perhaps we would be, were it not for a handful of villains unwilling to sign up with the Crime Syndicate. Villains with home-world pride. Bad guys who are bad, to be sure, but not that bad. They're just almost always evil, not forever evil, and this issue, they start to get organized.

Read More

The comic book, animation, illustration, pinup, mashup, fan art and design communities are generating amazing artwork of myriad styles and tastes, all of which ends up on the Internet and filtered into ComicsAlliance's Best Art Ever (This Week). These images convey senses of mood and character -- not to mention artistic skill -- but comic books are specifically a medium of sequential narratives, and great sequential art has to be both beautiful (totally subjective!) and clear in its storytelling (not so subjective!). The words and the pictures need to work together to tell the story and create whatever tone, emotion and indeed world the story requires. The contributions of every person on a creative team, from the writer to the artist(s) to the letterers, are necessary to achieving a great page of sequential storytelling.

It is the special nature of comic books that we're celebrating in this all-new recurring feature: Best Sequential Art Ever (This Week).

Read More

From 1996-2000, Superman: The Animated series followed in the footsteps of Batman: The Animated Series by introducing an entire generation to a version of Superman who fought to do what was right no matter what and always found a better way in the face of adversity. Sure, he had to wear a suit to survive the vacuum of space long term and got banged up by lasers once in awhile, but when it came to raw characterization, most would agree that the cartoon presented a definitive version of the last son of Krypton. A true hero. Then there's this past summer's Man of Steel, which... did not necessarily communicate the same characterization. Screen Junkies contrasts the two versions of Supes in a new "Man of Steel: The Animated Series" mashup parody, which you can see after the cut. Spoiler warning if you haven't quite seen MoS yet, although if you've read the comics internet at all since June you don't have too much to worry about.

Read More