It's not just big budget summer blockbusters anymore; now cable television is looking to the world of comics for material. Cartoon Network announced today that it's adapting three indie comics into made-for-TV movies, making sure that the adults of the future will have fond memories of warrior mice, teenage dragons and time-traveling families to look back on in years to come.

Ramsey Naito, the network's VP of Long-Form, talked up the projects:

We’re thrilled to expand our movie slate with both cinematic quality CG and live action... As we bring these and other titles into development, we’ll be seeking out projects that combine distinct voices with striking, contemporary visual worlds.

Live action, you say? Well, only two of the three movies - Mice Templar and Firebreather, both from Image Comics - will be animated, with the third, The Vanishers (based on an IDW comic from 2004), being planned as a live-action project similar to the network's successful Ben 10 movies.

The channel is clearly trying to grapple with the idea of "family friendly TV", with each of these family-centric tales: Templar has rodent hero Karic trying to save his family by reassembling a long-broken order of warrior mice, while Firebreather's teenage half-dragon, half-human hero, Duncan Rosenblatt has to wait until he's finished his chores before fulfilling his inherited destiny to save the world. Vanishers' heroes, Andy and Arvis, on the other hand, have a much less noble goal: they're just traveling through time so that their family can escape a group of robot bad guys out to enslave humanity, and who hasn't had to deal with that at least once in their life?

All projects have just moved into development; expect them to air late 2009 at the earliest.

Beloved Comic Book Titles Coming To Cartoon Network [The Futon Critic]

Marvel Comics are keeping their side of the bargain, admittedly; if you're not interested in the hardcover reprint of poorly-drawn 1980s miniseries Kitty Pryde and Wolverine or the Skrulls! oneshot (pretty much a collection of fact files to bring you up to speed about Secret Invasion's Secret Invaders), then you're pretty much limited to two books: the reprint of the first couple of issues of the Halo: Uprising comic to remind you what happened now that the end is finally nigh, and the far-more-enjoyable-than-it-has-any-right-to-be 500th issue of Uncanny X-Men, where the team moves to San Francisco and parties at the SFMoMA. In other weeks, it'd easily be the must-have book of the week.

Sadly, though, DC are doing their best to claim that title for themselves with the long-long-long awaited return of Ambush Bug in Ambush Bug: Year None, wherein Keith Giffen's fourth-wall breaking snarkfest takes the last five years of DC's output to task for being confusing, depressing and just plain not fun. You know you want to read that. Collections-wise, you can catch up on space religion in the unfortunately-named-but-actually-fun Countdown To Adventure (starring Animal Man, Starfire and Adam Strange from 52), catch up on the joys of matrimony with Green Arrow/Black Canary: The Road To The Altar, and catch up on how the mighty have fallen with Authority: Prime, where superhero comics' one-time most daring title is reduced to generic continuity schlock. If that last sentence made no sense to you, then perhaps you should avoid superheroes altogether and pick up the X-Files Special, instead.

Image Comics are also making a strong showing this week: The next big Witchblade storyline begins in the first issue of Broken Trinity, Mark Millar and Tony Harris get their political satire on with the debut of War Heroes, Mike Allred's Madman questions reality in the first collection of Madman Atomic Comics, and Tori Amos finally becomes the comic character she's always wanted to be in the indie-creator-tastic anthology Comic Book Tattoo.

And just in case none of that is enough for you, consider the two takes on post-Buffy female heroes available in the indie comicsphere this week: Oni Press' The Apocalypstix finally bring their post-nuclear brand of rock, roll and kick-ass to stores at the same time as Cassie Hack of po-mo horror book Hack/Slash teams up with real-life emo pornlets in the Hack/Slash Annual Featuring The Suicide Girls. And, yes, I wish I was joking about that last one as well.

As ever! All of these books and many, many, more are listed here for your perusal and, if you've somehow made it this far without knowing where your local comic book store happens to be, you can find that out by clicking here. It's probably a great week to go to the store, really, because chances are they may be really quiet...

For the first major convention of the year, Wondercon was surprisingly light on any real news, with the biggest player, DC Comics first suggesting that they were going to tell us something big the next day, and then telling us that they'd rather wait until April after all. The lack of any major surprises to take away from the con (Both of the stories that actually did break, J. Michael Straczynski working for DC Comics and Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan working on new issues of Demo for Vertigo, seemed to be common knowledge on the con floor before their official announcements) seemed to affect the regular con-goers with an unusual feeling of malaise hitting even the 501st Legion as they performed con security. This wasn't helped by the no-shows from creators - not only was the Image Comics panel cancelled, but both Boom! Studios' Mark Waid and Aspen Studio's Michael Turner failed to make it to the show.

That isn't to say that the entire show was a disaster, mind you; the pros who did make it there were entertaining and available - Particular shout-outs should be given to Oni Press's James Lucas Jones (Expect me to tell you all about Wonton Soup very soon) as well as DC's Jann Jones and Dan DiDio, whose late-Sunday panel "For The Love of Comics" turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable conversation not about upcoming DC Comics but what is awesome about comics in general (Goofiness and obsessive collecting being two of the answers), entirely free of the kind of hucksterism that you might expect from a DC panel.Bill Willingham proved to be a fine gentleman able to keep people's attention throughout the various panels he dominated (and I'm not just saying that because of his apology to me about this), and even if some DC panels may have been half-empty, the two showings of the animated version of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier were packed with enthusiastic fans (With good reason; it's a better movie than I expected).

That's not even talking about Saturday's CBLDF party that we co-sponsored, populated by the creme de la creme of comics folk, from retailers to creators (Hi, Cecil!) to fans, with we journalist types mingling and posing for photos that I feel like I should be apologizing for; I didn't mean for my head to be that shiny. Overall, it may not have been the most exciting weekend in terms of comic conventions - that'll be San Diego Comic-Con in July - but it was definitely a fine, exhausting, one nonetheless.

DC Comics make the largest grab for your science fiction dollar this week, with three collections aimed right at your sweet spot. Mark Waid's run on Legion of Super-Heroes concludes in the uneven, but worth reading, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominator War collection, which sees a time-travelling Supergirl join the 31st Century's favorite teenage rebels in a battle against alien invaders. For more interplanetary action, look no further than Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War Volume 1, a hardcover collecting the first half of the popular storyline that aims to make you scared of at least half of the rainbow.

And then there's Booster Gold #0, in which the super-hero Quantum Leap series flashes back to mid-90s time-travel crossover Zero Hour.

Less expected - but no less worth searching out - is the reprint of Time Masters, a semi-forgotten 1990 series by sci-fi writer (and Fiction Liberation Front creator) Lewis Shiner, along with Bob Wayne and artist Art Thibert. Starring Rip Hunter (now appearing in Booster Gold after a star turn in 52), the series saw time travellers at war with an Illuminati led by an immortal caveman, and if that hasn't made you even slightly curious, I don't know what will.

Marvel Comics, in comparison, are travelling in time in a different way. A previously-incomplete story by original creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby sees print (aided by artist Ron Frenz, filling in for the deceased Kirby as best he can; the now-85-year-old Lee completed the script last year) in Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure. Will it be more than an experimental curiosity? Pick it up to see for yourself. Also, the relaunch of the Fantastic Four hits the shelves. Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, who came up with the critically acclaimed and popular Ultimates series, are taking over with this week's #554.

Also from Marvel this week: X-Force #1, in which Wolverine - yes, io9ers, your favorite character - gets together with lots of similar characters (including his clone ex-hooker daughter; yes, really) to kill bad guys and grimace a lot. I'm being sarcastic, but watch this be the best selling book of the month, depressingly.

The comic that may deserve that position is Image Comics' The Next Issue Project, which sees an all-star line-up of creators take on public domain characters from the 1940s to create what would have been the next issue of their adventures had their series continued. The high concept may not grab you, but creators like Mike Allred, Bill Sienkiewicz and Ashley Wood should. You can read creator Erik Larsen talk up the project a little more here.

If none of those grab your fancy, the complete list of tomorrow's releases is available here, and for those who want to know where their closest comic book store is? You can do so here. Honestly, sometimes we make it so easy for you...