The weekly news-commentary piece returns after a 2-week, Bristol-motivated absence to discuss the industry’s latest developments, with a look at James Robinson and Geoff Johns’ Superman, Jim Mahfood’s latest announcement, some stuff about the book we all love to hate, Ultimates, and links to a couple of columns about the tenuous relationship between comics and Hollywood.

Jim Mahfood’s recent Stupid Comics: Phoenix Edition might not have been my favourite release of his, but his recent announcement of the two issue “Kick Drum Comix” is more than enough to get excited about. Between this and Wood/Cloonan’s new Demo series from Vertigo, it’s going to be a good autumn for comics. (JH)

CBR have a two-part interview with new Superman and Justice League writer James Robinson, although to be honest for all the talk of those titles, perhaps the best bit of news to come out of it is that we may well be getting another Shade spinoff special or miniseries before long - which is, of course, fantastic news - and that there really are no plans ever to bring Jack Knight back out of retirement. But it’s also worth noting the plans that Robinson and Geoff Johns have to interlink the Super-titles more strongly, which I just hope doesn’t go down the route of forcing people to buy both books to get a whole story (I do like some of Johns’ work, but have been singularly underwhelmed by him on Action so far). It’s also interesting how keen they are to bring Supergirl into the fold - she’s a character who has been, in my view, an utter catastrophe since day one (another one to thank Jeph Loeb for), but one thing that encourages me is that she’ll be an important part of Robinson’s Superman run, as the artist on that book will be Renato Guedes, pretty much the only person since her creation to have a decent take on drawing her. In Guedes’ all-too-brief stint, she genuinely looked like an ordinary teenage girl in a vaguely practical costume, rather than a stick insect in Playboy. It’s not an approach that went down well with the slobbering fanboys, but I rather liked it, as I have pretty much all of Guedes’ Superman work so far. Let’s hope Robinson can do a similar job on salvaging some actual character out of Kara. (SP)

As if Ultimates 3 hadn’t already become comics’ biggest train wreck in years, we now find that Marvel are being tellingly quiet about any news on the next issue (all their proud statements about the series shipping on time have, of course, quietly disappeared), while amazingly attempting to shaft readers further by putting out those first three hideous issues in a reprint format. This despite the fact that the series is only intended to consist of five issues, so any trade collection will be less than twice the length of this reprint. And for any of you who think that $4.99 is worth spending just to see how bad the book is, let me tell you now… it isn’t. We at Comics Daily of course do not advocate piracy, but even at that price we cannot recommend you buy this book. Seriously. Leave well alone. There are better things to spend three quid on. Books like Captain Britain and Blue Beetle need your money far more than these atrocities. So leave well alone, and maybe Marvel will stop thinking they can foist this crap on us not once, but twice. And maybe they’ll think twice about essentially dumping the Ultimate universe in Loeb’s hands. (SP)

As usual, the weekly round-up of Comics Stuff I Wrote For Other Sites see two week’s worth of DoG columns - the most recent, “A Shared Universe“, discusses the increasingly likely probabiliy of Marvel integrating its films into one universe, and asks just how good an idea that is, where the second, “Screenwriters in Comics” takes a fairly scornful look at the success - or lack thereof - that hollywood writers have had crossing over to comics. (JH)

Tags: James Robinson, Jeph Loeb, Jim Mahfood, Shade, Superman, Ultimates
Publisher: The Sunday Pages