Last Update: July 13, 2025
DC plans big event in 2035 for the copyright change in status for Batman and Superman – Bleedingcool
The ShortBox Comics Fair – Shortbox Comics Fair
...innovative digital comics fair debuting all-new comics from independent artists around the world. Annually, October 1-31st."
ShortBox Comics Fair is an all-digital, online only comics fair ..."
Superman start piles up $21 million in Thursday shows – MSN Deadline Hollywood
Oh, and audiences love it at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.... Gunn and Safran and all of Warner Bros can rest easy after the cynics that have been out there going back to the first trailer in the December, for that’s the best RT audience score ever for a Superman movie, even better than Richard Donner’s 1978 original movie (86%). Take that, trolls...."
Yes, but will it last? A lot of reviews have been "I'm disappointed" but the heavy waves of positive word of mouth from ticket-buyers can overcome that. We'll find out over the next couple of weeks, until FF smashes into the theaters and grabs all the entertainment news.
Classic Filipino comics being brought back by the Vibal Foundation’s Grafika imprint – BWorldonline
The article goes over some of the history of older Filipino comics and also says this:
... they are also working to republish Kabalbalan ni Kenkoy by Tony Velasquez, the country’s first comic strip, originally published in 1929."
The Lois Lane-Margot Kidder tragedy – UK Daily Mail
TwoMorrows Publishing files objection to liquidation of stock at Diamond Comic Distributors Chapter 11 bankruptcy – Bleedingcool
Kazakhstan Comic Con Astana 2025 draws 75,000 – Astana Times
Profile of comic book artist Dave Wachter – PGH City Paper
Presales for Superman hits $20 million – Comicbookmovie
Remembering Dave Stevens – Downthetubes
Superman Reviews starting to roll out
"James Gunn’s lively reboot of the OG Superman" searching for a kinder world, and he brought his dog – Deadline Hollywood
"An energized reboot" – MSN Variety
"Fun and goofy" reimagining of Superman from James Gunn – Houston Chronicle
FYI: First appearance of Krypto was in Adventure Comics #210, March 1955. Character of Krypto the Superdog was created by Otto Binder and Curt Swan.
It's July and Marvel and DC are facing off in theaters
Story at WLWT
Jurassic Park Rebirth piles up $322 million world wide start to run – The Numbers
Layoffs come to Image Comics – Bleedingcool
Jurassic Park Rebirth clobbers competition at box office
Story at Bloomberg
...Jurassic World Rebirth, the latest installment of the Universal Pictures dinosaur franchise, scored the top spot in theaters over the five-day Fourth of July holiday, grossing $147.3 million in the US and Canada despite middling reviews from critics.....international theaters brought in an additional $171 million..."
Is there a new, other, Captain America from Marvel Comics? – comicbook
Mac Martin Anderson sentenced to prison for $1.2 million in unreported (to IRS) sales of Stan Lee memorabilia – Los Angeles Times
A selection of 4th of July comics strips from 2025 and 1925
Story at Daily Cartoonist
Early leak of James Gunn Superman film review gets pulled offline fast, but what it said wasn't pretty – Beebom
Something along the lines of "the final nail in the coffin of superhero movies."
Apparently film critics given early viewing privileges to see the Gunn film also had to agree to hold off publishing their review until a certain time just before the film premieres July 11.... the Daily Beast article broke that "embargo" and was removed from public view quickly.
Obviously, its just one person's opinion about the film and, as anyone who pays the slightest attention to this field knows, opinions can vary wildly. Something at the theatre that gets shellacked by a major-league movie critic can turn out to be a happy, entertaining and pleasing film that the mass audience finds worthwhile. Of course the other possibility is that the film isn't good and the critic knows it and the audiences are about to find this opinion confirmed.
If Superman tanks and Fantastic Four (coming on July 22) succeeds, well, then July isn't Armageddon for superhero movies. But if both films fail, the whole genre, as far as a place where movie studios will pump in hundreds of million of dollars for producing one, is going to be (presumably) on the thinnest of lifelines since Marvel/Disney is already committed to their two-picture deal with the Russo Brothers to bring back The Avengers (Avengers: Doomsday Dec 18, 2026 and Avengers: Secret Wars Dec 17, 2027) and the casting (so far) for these films seems to indicate they want to push in a lot of cameo appearances from the more lucrative years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a way to trigger audiences to remember a different era when the films didn't disappoint.
DC is in the same terrible position, since the first The Joker film (2019) made a billion dollars, only one other DC film (out of ten!) has turned a profit, and that's the Pattinson The Batman movie with $770,345,583 worldwide earnings.
Both DC and Marvel have been racking up a long list of financial failures and that can't possibly last much longer, can it? Are there Hollywood investors willing to keep throwing this kind of big money into a genre that is consistently flopping with large audiences?
Are superheroes, as a cultural phenomenon, simply shrinking back to the smaller (and less lucrative) place of importance they had for so many decades before Hollywood turned them into IP goldmine cash cows?
Dynamite, caught in the teeth of Diamond Distributors implosion and bankruptcy, running a 49-title Disney sale to raise funds – Humble Bundle – This story at BleedingCool says that Dynamite has been trying to get the courts to push the new owners of Diamond to speed up payments on the $1 million+ owed them, but its not happening soon enough to help. Dynamite announcing at can't meet payroll costs for their company thus is getting into a very tight place.
R.I.P. Jim Shooter – The Comics Journal
This short TCJ page pledges a thorough obit coming, but in the meantime there's a lot of old TCJ article links on Shooter plus the [scroll down] comments section has links to Shooter stuff, too.
Microsoft announce a "massive wave of layoffs, including their Xbox and gaming division" – Bounding into Comics
Ironheart TV Show Reviews
"Ironheart is a Surprisingly Dark, Mostly-Enjoyable Show..." – MSN WDW
Ironheart is an "unwitting victim of Marvel fatigue" – MSN USA Today
Fans say it's "one of the best Marvel TV shows" and demand a season 2 – Geek Tyrant
"Clumsy pilot and a frustrating finale" – MSN Hollywood Reporter
"Disappointing disaster" – Movieweb
Even a casual look at reviews across the internet shows the now usual MCU chasm between reviews that look like they're bought and paid for ("Ironheart is great!") to knee-jerk reactions against MCU ("Ironheart is the worst ever!")
The new PSA grading schedules, costs and changes to schedule announced – Yahoo Sports
Related: Comic Book Money
One Piece Manga and Major League Baseball getting together – comicbook
The One Piece/Los Angeles Dodgers collaboration has yet to take place, set to hit the field later tonight, but this isn’t stopping the Straw Hat Pirates from making big gains for Major League Baseball. In a new press release, the collaboration between the two unexpected partners has already brought in some big ticket sales and you might be surprised to learn just how big said sales are..."
The comic book movies that don't have superheroes – KPBS
Talking about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Josie and the Pussycats, Ghost World, Edge of Tomorrow, and Adventures of Tintin.
Dynamite Entertainment in tight spot due to huge debt owed them from Diamond – Bleedingcool
Remembering Jim Shooter – Comicsbeat
The controversial Jim Shooter – Plain Dealer Cleveland
"He really polarized people, but it was because he had a passion for what he was doing," Bill Sienkiewicz, who drew Moon Knight and New Mutants during the 1980s, told Forbes. "He went to bat for freelancers in a way you don’t see many people in editorial roles do today."
Jim Shooter has died – Forbes
Shooter took over Marvel Comics in the late 1970s when the comics industry was transitioning from mass market newsstand distribution to direct market sales to comic shops. He quickly grasped the opportunity of selling to long-time fans rather than casual consumers, leaning into Marvel’s dense story universe and encouraging creators to move the medium in more challenging directions.
Thanks to the breakout success of the X-Men by writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne, the signature title of Shooter’s reign, Marvel began a rise that saw the company bring in exciting young creators like Frank Miller, Walter Simonson and Bill Sienkiewicz, experiment with new formats like original graphic novels and trade book collections, spike sales with annual “events” and mini-series, and attract a new generation to a medium that many thought would not survive beyond the 1970s. At one point during Shooter’s tenure, Marvel sales were estimated at over 80% of the entire US comic book market.
Angry reaction in Turkey against magazine that published a Mohammed cartoon
Story at Skai [in Greek - use Google translate to read in English]
The Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies are coming back to theaters and Spiderman 2 will be an "extended" version – MSN Variety
New rewrite of the DC Comics Universe – CBR MSN
...you would have these interesting things where, if you go back and read a run of a comic book, you'd see the same story done, just with different flourishes by the different writers. That's what is so fascinating about The New History of the DC Universe, in that it is really just The History of the DC Universe by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, just, you know, done again, with FORTY MORE YEARS of DC history..."
Famous Jock Joker cover for Detective Comics #880 sells for $288K – Comicsbeat
The artist himself gets nothing from the sale.
October books from Marvel – Comicbookmovie
What in the world is going on with Marvel?
August 1962 Amazing Fantasy #15 sells at auction for $12,250 – Jacksonville Courier
"Beloved comic book store shutting down" Keiths Komix – Daily Herald
Distribution wars of the comic book companies
Universal Distribution bought Diamond at the Chapter 11 bankruptcy auction, got the Alliance Gaming infrastructure, and will now compete with Lunar Distributing to provides an equal discount on DC Comics – Bleedingcool
Publishers teamup for Indie comics creators distribution – Publishers Weekly
Power Pulp, a new comics distribution collective with members based across the U.S., is billing itself as an innovative, author-led organization aiming to lower the barrier to entry to the comics market for indie creators..."
Power Pulp Comics Distribution – "We may look like a publisher, but we’re something else entirely—a collective force built to uplift original voices and bring boundary-pushing work to a wider audience."
John Malkovitch is in out of the Fantastic Four Movie – comicbookmovie
Fantastic Four and Superman shirts and outfits at Hot Topic, a Virginia Mall
The Copyright Wars
It's all free! – Courthouse News
The infringement case against Skynet AI turned out to be a "clear loser" (the judge's words) because of lack of adequate evidence to qualify the case to move it to a jury trial.
A federal judge granted partial summary judgment to Meta on Wednesday, despite claims from 13 award-winning and acclaimed authors who argued that the tech giant violated U.S. copyright law by using their works to train its flagship AI model Llama without their permission."
...As evidence of copyright infringement, the authors argued that the AI’s responses are sometimes verbatim excerpts from their books, which they claim amounts to Meta unlawfully benefiting from their works by failing to license them through their authors."
...However, the judge said his ruling wasn’t necessarily a huge win for Meta, nor a colossal setback for artists in their struggle against AI-generated content, because it only affects the rights of these thirteen authors — not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models."
"Hostage comic books" at Diamond Distributors to get liquidated? – Bleedingcool
The New York Comicon has announced the guest line-up – New York Post MSN
The Fantastic Four: First Steps could change the MCU "forever" – MSN Total Film
"FF First Steps] arrival will ... signal the first step toward the presumed end and rebirth of the Multiverse in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, which draw on classic comic stories that remade aspects of Marvel Comics continuity. And with the close of the Multiverse Saga, I'm sincerely hoping that the Fantastic Four will be the vanguard of what comes next, with a renewed focus on characters, and creators with a unique vision being allowed to build an entire, captivating world around their story."
The article gives a nice long history of the FF and the importance of Marvel's first big superhero success in comics way off in the past transferring successfully to the big screen now (of course, right now, any kind of success is probably welcome over at Disney/Marvel).
The first teaser trailers for FF stirred up a lot of positive response, but subsequent marketing activity hasn't expanded on that, if anything, there's been some backtracking in reactions. It'll all be moot once the film hits theaters and the reviews, social media punditry and word-of-mouth takes over. But if James Gunn's Superman does well (it comes out first on July 11, FF on the 25th), the nice feeling from a successful superhero movie might leave a strong, happy wake for FF First Steps to surf on.
"Rebirth of the Multiverse" scares me, though, because the concept was gobbling up the superhero genre entirely while simultaneously profit-earning superhero films were becoming rare items at theaters over the past years. In fact, the core of 'power phantasy' superhero storytelling had shifted away from essentials into this sci-fi concept, and then getting larded over with 21st century soap opera melodrama. The combination was not only making for rather unintelligible stories but burying the genre under the emotional baggage of two other genres (the sentimentality of "romance" and the tangled up emotional bloviating of "family drama"). There's no reason a superhero saga can't include these other story modes, but its got to keep the dominate reason the story is being told front and center, otherwise we're getting a tale that looks like a superhero film but its actually something else entirely. The contamination of the superhero concept is pretty easy to spot once the heroes start turning out to be nincompoops and asses and the various characters gathered around them are preoccupied with non-superhero cause-and-effect issues, and the moral imperative of squashing the bad guys has faded.
Of course, lousy film-making doesn't help, and DC-Sony-Marvel films for awhile now have been trying hard to be completely in line with Martin Scorsese's accusations, and at the same time being examples of poor craftsmanship, especially in the storytelling department, all of these things creating a Perfect Storm of failure.
Diamond holding inventory "hostage" of Fantagraphics, Oni, Titan – Bleedingcool
Ryo Tatsuki's manga book "The Future I Saw" is being blamed for decline in tourism for Japan – Washington Post
How did this come about? Because:
In the original 1999 version, the book claimed that a "great disaster will occur in March 2011." That month happened to be when a deadly triple disaster struck Japan’s Tohoku region: a devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that triggered one of the biggest nuclear disasters in history...."
In an updated version of the Tatsuki story, "the real catastrophe" is predicted for July, 2025, and as a consequence, some manga-influenced tourists are writing off visiting Japan this summer.
Uh, what? Daredevil TV Show writers told not to look at the preceding Netflix series – MSN CBR
Apparently, the ban was temporary and had to do with constructing an original framework, and then the doors were opened to look back at the old show.
"The numbers are bullshit"
Snyderverse fans vs the Gunn Superman movie – Boundingintocomics
It's waaaar!
Interview with Peter Kuper – The Comics Journal
Turkish cartoonist Zehra Omeroglu facing three year prison sentence for cartoon – Daily Cartoonist
The chaos in the comic shops – Bleedingcool
Chris Nolan's Odyssey adventure film getting an R-Rating?
Story at Comicbookmovie
What movies in the 21st century have sold 300 million+ tickets? Well, there's Avengers: Endgame with $1.2 billion+ in boxoffice with 351.5 million tickets – Far Out Magazine
"Hollywood come-back story" - theaters are in rebound since April – CNN MSN
CNN argues that the good earnings on Minecraft, Sinners, Lilo & Stitch indicate a positive trend, and they throw in other titles (including Thunderbolts) that are helping build momentum.
Apparently a bad script for the Sgt Rock movie got the project cancelled – Boundingintocomics
Shakeup in the business – Bleedingcool
Marvel, Dark Horse, IDW, Boom and other comic book publishers are exclusive at Penguin Random House for the USA direct market. But Lunar Distribution only has DC Comics and Image Comics as big-name publisher exclusives. If DC is no longer exclusive, will Image join DC at Universal in the US as well?...
"
With Diamond Distributors collapse all the big pieces of the comic book industry continue to reposition.
Here comes a new comic book digital platform - and its carrying titles from the heavy weight companies – Forbes
Neon Ichiban, a new digital comics marketplace with an elite pedigree from publisher DSTLRY, will launch with new and backlist material from Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Kodansha, Oni Press, Vault Comics and DSTLRY’s own titles, according to the company’s announcement today...."
Neon Ichiban Waitlist – its ntnoto off the ground yet but you can join the waitlist.
Is Damson idris the next Black Panther for Marvel's movies? – Instagram
Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries is the star for DC’s Clayface movie – Comicsbeat – the film is due in theaters September 2026
Fantastic Four "merch reveal" – Facebook
Lots of stuff blandished with the Fantastic Four movie color palette and logo - for example the Blue Milk of TruMoo
No tomorrow for Supergirl movie, that is, now its just Supergirl and not "Woman of Tomorrow" – MSN Tech Radar
James Gunn interview at Rolling Stone – paywalled.
IDW Comics sticking around but there's quite a financial tangle in the background – Bleedingcool
The collector popcorn buckets for forthcoming Superman movie – Superherohype
The Sikh Captain America – MSN Associated Press
He suited up as Captain Sikh America in Manhattan for the first time in summer 2013 — one year after a self-proclaimed white supremacist opened fire inside a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring four others...."
Thunderbolts* still in theaters but limping to $378,846,193 worldwide – The-Numbers
Racer X (from Speed Racer) comic coming – Comicsbeat
Mad Cave Studios and Tatsunoko Production are doing an eight-issue limited series about Speed Racer's mysterious brother.
Frank Miller does a variant cover for Detective Comics #1100 – Bleedingcool
It looks like it is in his DK2 style.
Marvel's 616 Day event on June 16 – Screenrant
Gianfranco Manfredi has died – The Comics Journal
Creator and writer of Magico Vento is Manfredi’s most famous work, blending western, horror, and supernatural elements. He wrote the main 130‑issue series (1997–2010) and later revived it in new miniseries (Il ritorno in 2019, Guerre Apache in 2023)
He is also known for Gordon Link (1991–1993), Bonelli: Volto Nascosto (2007–08), Shanghai Devil (2011–13), Adam Wild (2014–16), Coney Island (2015), and Cani Sciolti (2018–19).
His work resume is much longer and is considered a highly important figure in the "golden age of Italian comics."
Rare: An original fine print of the original 1977 Star Wars screened at BFI festival with Kathleeen Kennedy in attendance – Superherohype
The print’s discovery came as a surprise, and quickly led to a stir amongst fans online. George Lucas infamously did not like the very first print of Star Wars (which would later be renamed to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), and would tinker with it in the years after its release. Specifically, Lucas added the now infamous opening crawl, and changed the scene in the Mos Eisley cantina, making it so that bounty hunter Greedo shoots at Han Solo first, rather than vice versa...."
Comic Book Brain wishes there was a 4K blu ray release of the original untouched 1977 Star Wars.
The muddy slog through Diamond DIstributors current situation – Comicsbeat
Interview with Kate Beaton – The Comics Journal
In this excerpt, the two talk about Beaton's webcomic, which often poked fun at historical figures, learning how to adapt to an internet audience and where Beaton is going to go from here...."
Okay, this probably isn't the new Bat Logo
Here comes a new Batman logo – Bleedingcool
"DC Has Changed Batman’s Logo Again Because the First 1 Million Times Weren’t Enough" – Fandomwire
Black Panther game build is cancelled – Boundingintocomics
Get into the Public Domain archives that are online at Graphic Chatter
Time to go to Disney World? Goofy 4 Mickey
Classic Film, reviews and more Cinemagraphe
Belief-Code, Body Code and T3 Therapy? See Belief Code Therapy.com