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...

Don't get me wrong; I've got nothing against cheesecake, especially Terry Dodson's cheesecake (Marvel even has a defense against being accused of sexism: a companion X-Men cover by recently deceased artist Michael Turner for the same issue), and equally especially when it marks the start of a run promised to be sex-filled. But... Am I really the only one who kind of feels like this particular image kind of flattens out the characters of these characters? Okay, I can buy that Emma Frost would sit back and do her best to look aloof, and I'd even go along with the poses of both Dazzler and Kitty Pryde (I assume, even though Joss Whedon kind of wrote her out of the franchise for awhile). But what the fuck is going on with Rogue's "look at my ass" pose, Psylocke's "do you mind if I lean forward and use my arms to squeeze my breasts together" positioning and most of all, Storm's "let me arch my back and, by the way, how does my hair look?" demeanor? Last time I checked, Storm was not only some kind of African Goddess but also the Queen of fictional country Wakanda after getting hitched to the Black Panther last year; since when was she the kind of woman who'd really play with her hair while helpfully emphasizing her lovely lady lumps, as Fergie would so kindly put it? Would it have been too much to have just had her looking kick-ass instead of bimbo-esque, really?

EXCLUSIVE: Terry Dodson Art for "Uncanny X-Men" #500 [Comic Book Resources]

Two things jump out at me about Magneto, as described by reviewers. First, it tweaks Magneto's origin by suggesting that Nazi scientists either created or activated Magneto's powers by experimenting on him in the concentration camp. This could annoy some purists, especially since the first X-Men movie showed Magneto's powers starting to work when he first showed up at the camp and was separated from his parents. Also, early descriptions of the Magneto movie suggested it would show the beginnings of the rift between Magneto and Charles Xavier. I don't think that's in this script.

So the movie starts at the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz, where Ian McKellen's Magneto surveys the metal gate he twisted in the first X-Men movie. Then we flash back to the young Magneto surviving horrific Nazi experiments at the hands of mad scientist Dr. Kleinmein. Then we zip forward to the 1950s.

Meanwhile, Erik Lehnsherr, who will one day be Magneto, has a wife and daughter — until the suspcicions ofa small town lead to their deaths. It's implied that Erik kills everyone in the town as revenge, but we don't really see it. Eventually, Erik decides to hunt down the Nazis who escaped after the war, including Dr. Kleinmein, who is still doing his evil experiments on the bodies of mutants. Magneto meets and befriends Dr. Charles Xavier, and they rescue two mutants who are being imprisoned for experiments — the mutant prisoners sound a bit like Sabretooth and Mystique.

At first Magneto tries to work with the authorities to round up Kleinmein and the other loose Nazis, including CIA agent Owen Graves. But they only get in his way. So in the end, he decides to take the law into his own hands. And in the end, Professor X offers Erik some hope for the future — and then we zap back to the 60th anniversary Auschwitz event, where Senator Kelly is warning that Mutants are the new threat after the Nazis, setting the stage for Magneto's battle with the humans.

[Coventry Telegraph and Sal's Scripts]

Marvel Comics knows a good tease when it sees one, which might explain the latest, wordless image that they've released in support of a mystery project. All we know about this shadowy femme fatale is that she's somehow connected to the letter X and the number 2009, but if you come under the jump, you can see the whole picture, its earlier counterpart, and some baseless speculation as to what it could all mean.

The image - revealed at Marvel's "Mondo Marvel" panel at his weekend's Wizard World Chicago convention - is actually the second such teaser to be released by Marvel; the first, below, was released at the Wizard World Philadelphia convention earlier this year.

What do the images mean? Well, the letter X seems to suggest that it's got something to do with the X-Men... And, in fact, those bright red glasses make the character in the first image look not unlike X-Men leader Cyclops. But who is the second character with the green eyes?

Our bet is that it's Rogue (Look; her eyes are green); the seeming white strands at the front of her hair suggest that we're on the right track. But what's with the gun and the trenchcoat? And why is Cyclops also decked out in the coat and gun combo? And is that a cowboy hat he's wearing? Will we see Professor Xavier's children of the atom doing a little time-traveling at some point next year...?

Again With The 09 Marvel Teaser [Newsarama]

Talking about the relocation of Marvel's favorite mutants on the WordBalloon podcast, Uncanny X-Men writer Brubaker took responsibility for the decision:

When we were sitting down and talking about what to do with the X-Men post-Messiah Complex... and it was, yet again the Mansion had been destroyed and all this stuff, I just sort of threw out the idea because I remembered that Daredevil had lived in San Francisco. I just thought 'If I were the X-Men, I would move to San Francisco. Like, get as far away from Tony Stark and all those people, stop rebuilding your mansion where there's, like, a huge target for any anti-mutant person in the world and go somewhere where you're going to be able to let your freak flag fly and be loved... It just seemed like, why not go somewhere where people will think that you're cool?

Ellis' new series No Hero doesn't exist within forty years of distraught continuity full of explosions and death, but he explained to us that his choice of setting has much more to do with San Francisco's real-life colorful history:

NO HERO comes partly out of the notion that there was a cultural move in Sixties San Francisco to bring forth a new kind of human (not least through neurochemical roadtesting and devoted ingestion of whatever old shit had been scraped off the bottom of someone's bathtub). Timothy Leary even said that The Beatles were "prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species." Notably, in the same statement, he also called them "mutants." Where else should we be telling stories about the evolutionary future of strange Americans?

It seems that, at least as far as the cape and cowl set goes, San Francisco is finally ascending to take the cultural crown of the US that it so richly deserves.

Both Uncanny X-Men #499 and No Hero #0 hit stores today.

Warren Ellis' No Hero [Avatar Press]

"My character's name is John Wraith," Will.I.Am told MTV. "He's a black Texan. He's not a cowboy, but his gear suggests that he is. He's just a badass who'll whoop your ass." Sigh. So you have a southern Night Crawler but without the intricate tattoos, tail or sad back story but dons a cowboy hat and chaps? Sounds terrible.

I really thought that the studio went through great pains to cast this movie. Every time they announced a new actor and their mutant alter ego I was excited, if not intrigued. I have no explanation for this move other than it's probably payment for a performance at a producer's kid's birthday party.

Why did he want to be in this? There won't be any funny outfits or silly glasses for him to wear. Just thinking of the list of talented actors they passed over to include some guy from The Black Eyed Peas enrages me, I hope Sabretooth has his way with him. If you're going to include a rapper as a superhero shouldn't it be at least one that's a little bad ass and not just a back-up singer for Fergie? I throw out any member of the Wu-Tang Clan over this. [MTV]

Perhaps it’s something to do with the amount of big name recent launches everyone has been doing recently, or otherwise a sign of impending San Diego Comic-Con (Publishers are already working on the timing of their big announcements, even though it’s more than a month away), but this is an astonishingly quiet week for new releases – DC Comics pretty much skip the week altogether, although you should probably be looking at picking up the second (and concluding) volume of Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War as well as the tenth and final collection of Y: The Last Man, called Whys and Wherefores (“Y”s and wherefores? Get it? Oh, it’ll make sense when you get to the last chapter). Otherwise, their big release of the week is probably a “deluxe” hardcover reissue of World’s Finest, a beautifully-illustrated (by Steve Rude) Superman/Batman story from the 1990s, as written by Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons.

Marvel, too, is taking this week relatively easy. Sure, there’s the fourth and final volume of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, a paperback release for Neil Gaiman’s revival of Jack Kirby’s Eternals, and even a “director’s cut” rerelease of the first issue of Mark Millar’s increasingly-racist Kick Ass, but nothing really jumps out as particularly worthy of your time or attention. You may be interested by the sound of something calling itself Jack Kirby’s Galactic Bounty Hunters, but trust me when I tell you that you would never forgive yourself if you spent any money whatsoever on that particular book.

No, this Wednesday, the message from your local comic store should be loud and clear: Kill All Parents. That’s the title of a new series by Aqua Leung’s Mark Andrew Smith and Marcelo Dichiara that shows you the darker side of superheroics… which happens to include the murder of any and all parents said superheroes may happen to have. What is behind such a plan, and who is doing the murdering? You’ll have to pick up the book to find out, but there may be a machine that can predict the world that’s coming, and a terrible possible future to avoid, involved. You have been warned.

If that’s not your cup of supertea, then why not try The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, the first collection of Gerard Way’s superhero story that no less than Grant Morrison called “[a]n ultraviolet psychedelic sherbert bomb of wit and ideas.” I think that’s supposed to be a good thing; just don’t hold Way’s My Chemical Romance past against him (And if you’re just in it for the prettiness, this book is worth picking up just for its visuals from Gabriel Ba with covers by Prada-favorite James Jean).

As usual, the week’s new releases can be viewed in full here, and you can find where to shop for the origin stories of new generations of superheroes over here. And, although I’m sure there’s nothing to be worried about, I’d check on how your parents are, just in case you have latent superpowers that you aren’t aware of. You never can tell, after all.

We already know that this Wolverine movie is going to explain what happened to some of Logan's missing memory. We'll also get to see his tumultuous relationship with Victor Creed or Sabertooth (Liev Schreiber) who have both been seen in army fatigues, follows them all the way to the Weapon X program (which didn't happen until the cold war so that gives us a lot of Wolverine's past to cover). And of course, readers of the comics already know that Wolverine was in a Concentration Camp. But what I'm most interested in is Logan's love Silver Fox (Lynn Collins), because that's where it really goes down between these two guys, especially if Sabertooth kills her on Logan's birthday in the movie. [Flickr via Latino Review]

It isn't just Serenity lunchboxes from Dark Horse Comics this week; they're also putting out a slab of goodness (in the form of Hellboy spinoff, Lobster Johnston Vol. 1: Iron Prometheus, bringing Mike Mignola's pulp crimefighter face to face with mystic Nazis on the eve of World War II.) And a slab of franchise-appeasing nostalgia (Star Wars Omnibus: Droids Volume 1, showing you yet more comedic misadventures of C3P0 and R2-D2 flying solo without parental guidance. It's just like Weird Science, trust me. Okay, maybe not).

Elsewhere in the world of four color periodicals, the fun is mostly coming from Berkeley's Image Comics: Rick Remender and Kieron Dwyer's "zombies, meet porn" comedy XXXombies gets a paperback collection, Earthworm Jim creator Doug Tennapel's new book Monster Zoo (soon to be a major motion picture!) comes out. And most importantly, the first collected volume of Proof (Imagine X-Files crossed with Hellboy, with Bigfoot replacing Mulder) hits stores as well.

Marvel Comics are, as is so often the case, chasing after the movie dollar with Hulk Vs. The Marvel Universe, a 224-page collection of Bruce Banner's mean green alter ego punching your favorite superheroes over and over. If you're looking for more than just violence, Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Origins begins, giving you a massive dose of conspiracy theory to accompany the secret origins of both Captain America and Wolverine; it's pretty, but potentially too dense for its own good. Also pretty is Astonishing X-Men Sketchbook, an art-heavy teaser to Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi's relaunch of the Joss Whedon mutant book.

DC Comics, meanwhile, are pretty much taking the week off with the exception of one book. I mean, sure, the Legion of Super-Heroes: 1050 Years In The Future is going to be an enjoyable anthology of stories from the 50 year history of the superteens from the next millennium, and Robin/Spoiler is more than just Batman's sidekick ruining the next episode of Battlestar Galactica for you (Spoiler is, in actuality, his thought-dead-but-not-really girlfriend). But still, the only DC book that counts this week is the first issue of Trinity, their new weekly book spotlighting the threesome that is Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman's unique relationship. It may not be as sexy as that sounds, but nonetheless, with Kurt Busiek and Ultimate Spider-Man's Mark Bagley at the creative wheel, it's very possibly going to be the most entertaining book to hit the stands in the next seven days.

You know the drill of this part by now: You can find the complete list of everything shipping here and find where to buy the lunchbox of your choice here. Because, seriously people. Lunchboxes.

But even though we all have twenty nine brains and a stomach that speaks Swahili, we shouldn't condemn Hollywood without considering the evidence. Here's the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Hollywood's unseemly hatred towards mutants.

Just consider the wealth of movies and TV shows about people who start spontaneously converting into something beyond their original human design, thanks to a genetic change or exposure to strange substances. Like the vicious ex-humans in Night Shadows aka Mutant, who terrorize a small Southern town. "Mankind's deadliest threat will not come from the skies," it proclaims.

There are also terrifying mutants in Hell Comes To Frogtown and a number of other movies. And on shows like Star Trek, whenever a character (usually a dweeb like Lt. Barclay on Next Gen) starts developing a super-mind — or evolving into a super-lizard — it's always portrayed as a bad thing.) Not to mention the murderous disease-altered mutants of movies such as 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, Omega Man and many others. (These aren't as well known as Night Shadows, of course, but they still have an impact on our mutant-hating culture.)
Counter-examples: Comic books come to our rescue. Mutants come off quite well in shows like Heroes and movies like the X-Men trilogy, which are either based on comic books or obviously derivative of them. Obviously, we should be using our superior posthuman intellects to boost the comic-book industry.

2. Why does Hollywood persecute cyborgs?

Again with the Star Trek hate: Trek gives us the Borg, who are the most hurtful representations of cyborgs imaginable. My friend Zzarglboz had to hide his swizzle-shaped head implants on the street for a year after First Contact came out.
They're like Frankenstein, only cyber! (And actually, some of our posthuman friends are partially dead, and the Frankenstein story is very unfair to them.) In the original Robocop, being turned into a cyborg makes Officer Murphy into a heartless killing machine. And for some reason, regaining his "humanity" is seen as a good thing. Says Cyberpunk Review:

As Murphy begins to realize who he was, and worse, what he's become, the question asked is what degree of Murphy's humanity remains? Murphy's partner, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen) serves to surface these concerns, as she still thinks that Murphy is inside somewhere. Yet, every aspect of humanity has been taken away from Robocop - he doesn't have a home, but instead returns to a borg-like podchair at night to regenerate. Even if Robocop eventually considers himself human in some sense, it's no longer clear what that even means. At best, Robocop is part of that strange category we call "post-human."

3. Hollywood hates it when we merge with aliens.

In movies and TV, alien creatures that want to merge with poor ordinary humans and uplift them to a higher level of consciousness and ability are never "benefactors." They're always "parasites," or at best "symbiotes." For once, comic-book movie aren't even our friend, either — Spider-Man gets an awesome boost from the inky black creature in Spider-Man 3, but it's still portrayed as a terrible thing. Even though it makes his hair so much better! Plus in The Invasion, the alien "parasites" are horrible and awful, even though they clearly make Daniel Craig the most James Bond-esque he's ever been. The same goes for The Puppet Masters. And it's hard to find happy representations of people inter-breeding with aliens, either — it's always nasty and fatal, like in the Alien films or the Species films. When everybody knows that in real life, merging or interbreeding with aliens often works out great. (It's just like marriage, though — don't get hitched until you try living together for a while first.)
Counter-examples: Star Trek has one of the few I can think of, with its happy Trills, the symbiotes that make Dax and the other spotted-neck people all cheerful and ageless with the wisdom and the cute "old man" nicknames.

4. Movies and TV spread the hate against genetic engineering.

Just look at this hall of shame of genetic engineering movies and TV shows. You have your GATTACA, where genetic engineering upgrades the human race, but poor Ethan Hawke gets discriminated against because he's genetically inferior. (Which anybody who saw Reality Bites already knew.) And then there's the dark future world of Dark Angel, where people practice genetic engineering on humans, including the super-killer main character. And of course the aliens in the X-Files are practicing genetic engineering on humans. Not to mention, TV shows are always full of genetically advanced superhumans — including Khan's superior people in Star Trek and the subtly named Nietzscheans in Andromeda — who are all evil and intent on conquering everybody else. And in the forthcoming movie Splicers (or Splice), Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley create a scary-sexy human-animal chimera that turns out to be too much to handle. Why, oh why, can't movies and television ever celebrate the specialness of our genetically hacked brothers and sisters?
Counter-examples: Star Trek is the frenemy of the genetically upwardly mobile. On the one hand, there's Khan's gang and their whole Ceti-Alpha-Two keeping it real craziness. On the other, Trek does offer us Deep Space Nine's doctor Julian Bashir, who's a bit smug and obnoxious but otherwise a pretty decent upgraded human. So we'll call it even.

What can you do to stop the posthuman hate?

1. If you have mental powers as a result of mutation or some kind of alien implant, then use them on the producers and "suits" in Hollywood. Maybe if the blood vessels on their foreheads start swelling to the size of cantaloupes and everything tastes like bad salmon to them, they'll rethink their anti-posthuman prejudice. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the posthuman revolution happens, and then all of the regular humans will be tasped encouraged to treat us more fairly.

2. Support books. Books have been way more favorable to those of us who have moved beyond our human limitations. We'll have a post tomorrow detailing the pro-posthuman books that you as an aspiring posthuman, should read and support.

Top image adapted from photo by Lampeduza.

G.I. Joe:

Here are a couple of set pics of Sienna Miller as the Baroness from the filming of G.I. Joe. Note the blood, the huge-ass gun, and the weird personal explosive device. [WENN, via IESB]

Transformers 2:

Apparently for the filming of Transformers 2, they've transformed a Pennsylvania steel mill into a Chinese industrial city, with Blackhawk helicopters and a new concept car and stuff. Here's an early photo. (The top of the building says "Entrance/Exit," which doesn't really make sense as the name of a factory, but okay.) [Transformers Live, via IESB]

The Happening:

Here's a new plot synopsis for M. Night Shyamalan's next movie, The Happening:

It begins with no clear warning. It seems to come out of nowhere. In a matter of minutes, episodes of strange, chilling deaths that defy reason and boggle the mind in their shocking destructiveness, erupt in major American cities. What is causing this sudden, total breakdown of human behavior? Is it some kind of new terrorist attack, an experiment gone wrong, a diabolical toxic weapon, an out-of-control virus? Is it being transmitted by air, by water...how?

[For] Philadelphia high school science teacher Elliot Moore what matters most is finding a way to escape the mysterious and deadly phenomenon. Though he and his wife Alma are in the midst of a marital crisis, they hit the road, first by train, then by car, with Elliot's math teacher friend Julian and his 8 year-old daughter Jess, heading for the Pennsylvania farmlands where they hope they'll be out of reach of the grisly, ever-growing attacks. Yet it soon becomes clear that no one - and nowhere - is safe. This terrifying, invisible killer cannot be outrun. It is only when Elliot begins to discover the true nature of what is lurking out there - and just what has unleashed this force that threatens the future of humanity — that he discovers a sliver of hope that his fragile family might be able to escape what is happening.

Fringe:

Here's a second trailer for J.J. Abrams' FBI/mad science show Fringe, which shows more of that horrible airplane disaster (not to be confused with the pilot for Abrams' Lost.) [01-18-08]

And here's another sneak peek, showing a pretty non-descript rooftop chase:

Lost:

In this week's Lost finale, there will be more casualties. And the island castaways will face one obstacle after another in their quest to get off the island, so it seems like a miracle when the Oceanic Six finally do escape. [Spoilers Lost]

And here's a British trailer for the two-hour finale, which shows some new footage. [Spoiler Geeks]

Doctor Who:

There's a rumor that archeologist River Song (Alex Kingston) in Doctor Who's upcoming library two-parter is actually a Time Lord with ties to the Doctor. So one fan speculates that she could be Romana, the Doctor's long-lost Time Lord companion? [Romanafen]

Another weird rumor about RIver Song: She's someone who's gotten to know a future version of the Doctor very well — so she's from his future, and he's from her past. And she tells him that in the future, they'll get married. [AutumnRae63]

Giant Size Astonishing X-Men:

The final issue of Joss Whedon's X-Men comic comes out next week, and it includes the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. We wrap up Whedon's "Breakworld" plot, and the metal-skinned Colossus has to make a major decision about the barbarian world's fate. [IGN]

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed:

Here's a summary of the novelization of the forthcoming Star Wars: The Force Unleashed video game, which gives a few more hints as to the game's storyline:

Set in the dark times between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, this stand-alone novel delves deeper into Darth Vader's history, revealing the origins of his secret Apprentice and Vader's ultimate plans for him.

Trained from childhood by Vader himself, the Apprentice is ready for the final test: he must hunt down and destroy the last of Vader's old enemies-the Jedi. Aided by Imperial pilot Juno Eclipse and the droid PROXY, the Apprentice has no qualms obeying his master's commands-until he has a fateful epiphany that will change everything he knows about who he is...and what he is meant to accomplish.

Shedding new light on events in the Star Wars universe, this exciting novel will rev you up for the action-packed video game!

The alien visitor from a doomed world:

The most famous refugee in science fiction is probably Superman, who gets sent to safety when his home planet Krypton is destroyed. It's no coincidence that Superman is also the posterboy for assimilation — his "real" family is the Kents of Kansas, and he thinks of himself as an American. He gets to live the refugee's dream, being totally accepted into a prosperous new world — plus he's physically and mentally superior to everyone else around him, which is a plus. He's the embodiment of the melting pot, even as he has the power to melt you. (And of course, his creators Siegel & Schuster were the sons of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, mainly Lithuania and Ukraine.)

Doctor Who, meanwhile, has the same alien-world story as Superman, but without the assimilation. The Doctor, in the early episodes from 1963, drops hints about being on the run and in hiding, but doesn't explain further. The show's creators had a vague sense, originally, that he was fleeing a space war. But by the time it's explained in 1969, the explanation is much more benign: the Doctor's species are dicks. (No, not Terrance Dicks. Just dicks.) It's not until the show's 42nd birthday that we get back to the idea that he's fleeing a space war (upgraded to a time war.) And his planet has been destroyed, just like Superman's. But like I mentioned, he doesn't assimilate with Earth/British culture — even though he constantly takes on weird British affectations like jelly babies or cricket, they only make him seem like more of an outsider. He's like those Indian immigrants in the TV show Goodness Gracious Me, who anglicize their names and try to be more British than everyone else, only to look more out of place than ever. In many ways, the Doctor is the anti-Superman.

The protagonist who's fleeing war or genocide:

There are also tons of characters who flee a doomed or destroyed Earth, including Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series. And John Varley's novels frequently take place in a universe where humans have been forced to flee an Earth invaded by aliens, and have colonized the rest of the solar system as a result.

And then there's Hope Hubris, the hero of Piers Anthony's Bio Of A Space Tyrant series. As the first book's title, Refugee, suggests, Hubris starts out as a humble refugee from the moon Callisto, fleeing to Jupiter, where his family gets killed horribly. This starts him on his path towards becoming the "Tyrant of Jupiter."

The rag-tag fleet of humans:

And then there are plenty of stories in which a straggling mob of people flees from a disaster or massacre in space. Maybe the most critically acclaimed SF show right now — if not the most popular — is Battlestar Galactica, where the Cylons drive the humans out of their homeworld not once, but twice: on Caprica, and then on New Caprica. At the end of season three, Lee Adama makes a huge speech in which he says this has changed humanity from a civilization to a "gang," on the run and doing whatever it takes to survive.

Less organized rabbles also turn up, fleeing wars or political unrest, in books like C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station, where swarms of refugees pack into Pell Station in the wake of conflict between the Earth Company and outer stations. And a mob of refugees from a disaster that befalls the H9 colony swarms aboard a cruise ship, only to be exploited by the media, in Eric Idle's The Road To Mars. The TV show Babylon 5 is also full of refugee crises, like the people fleeing the Vorlon attack on Ventari III in "Falling Towards Apotheosis." (We also see a ship full of refugees under attack in the first regular episode, "Midnght On The Firing Line.")

Eco-refugees or disaster survivors on Earth:

Every eco-disaster narrative or post-apocalyptic story includes some kind of refugee motif, with people fleeing the destroyed cities or trying to find a safe haven. Like The Day After Tomorrow, The Postman, Waterworld, or Mad Max. Or Steven Gould's novel Blind Waves. The Martian attacks in War Of The Worlds spawn a huge fleet of refugee ships running away from the carnage. Islanders flee rising sea levels, only to drown or wind up in horrible refugee boat camps, in the 2002 young adult novel Exodus. And of course, there are tons of refugees from the collapsing nations of the world, seeking sanctuary in the U.K., in Children Of Men. Not to mention the Raft of refugees organized by telecommunications magnate L. Bob Rife in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

One of the most arresting moments in the TV show Jericho is when our heroes find the remains of a refugee train a mile wide, made by people fleeing the frozen north. The refugees have left their icy dead where they lay. (Not to mention the whole gaggle of refugees who settle in Jericho, only to face expulsion again.)

Survivalists:

And the survivalist narrative is a huge part of science fiction. Robert Heinlein not only wrote the novel Farnham's Freehold, about people surviving a nuclear war, but according to the source of all lies, he also wrote "How To Be A Survivor" and other essays on surviving nuclear war. Frederik Pohl deals with similar themes in his story "Fermi And Frost." Also, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle write about a group of survivors barricading themselves into a mountain retreat after a deadly comet strike, in Lucifer's Hammer. Plus there's The Survivors, the TV show Terry Nation made between his work on Doctor Who and Blake's 7 (which is also a refugee show, sort of.)

And then there are the narratives about people going on the run from repressive regimes. Like Logan's Run, where Logan flees the non-stop beautiful-people orgy where they kill you when you reach 30, in search of the mythical Sanctuary. (And in the Logan's Run TV series, he's just on the run, every week, with a rogue android. In Roger McBride Allen's The Ring Of Charon, Marcia MacDougal can only escape from the repressive Naked Purple movement, which has taken over a lunar penal colony, by being declared a refugee when her house burns down.

Fleeing from the future:

And finally there are refugees in time — sort of like the Doctor, except they're fleeing a particular oppressive future through time travel. Just type "refugee from the future" into Google (with the quotation marks) and you get a bunch of weird stories — including various X-Men who have journeyed back to our time to escape one of those Mutants-in-concentration-camps dystopian futures.

I feel as though I've just scratched the surface of science fiction's nearly endless store of refugees here — this post could be twice as long. But these seem to be the main types of refugees in science fiction, and I was somewhat surprised by how many of them I turned up when I started looking.

History is full of mass evacuations and displacements, and we've gotten pretty used to the sight of streams of humans struggling across an unforgiving landscape with whatever they can carry, trying to escape from something or other. But it seems pretty likely the 21st century will see more refugee crises than ever before, as the number of humans on the planet continues to skyrocket and there are more ecological disasters and wars over scarce resources. There will be more and more refugees — possibly including you.

And science fiction is uniquely suited to tell the stories of these fleeing people, because the stark reality of the refugee condition is so awful, we need metaphors to cover it. It's easier to think about people running away from an exploding planet than it is to think about grabbing what you can and running from your home before you get ethnically cleansed. A dollop of escapism — or, in the case of Superman, a truckload — helps us swallow the unthinkable.

Note: The illustration up top comes from Wagner James Au's New World Notes blog, from a report about a virtual "Camp Darfur" in Second Life, which was being vandalized by asswipes spouting racist slogans. So a team of Green Lanterns, most of them extraterrestrial, took it upon themselves to guard the site.

9. Decompression. This term refers to a more "cinematic" style in comics, in which the "lens" lingers over every moment of a scene, and the action is slowed down. There are more splash pages, or single-page panels. And a sequence which might have taken half a page in the 1960s will take half an issue. Comics' fad for "decompression" in comics coincided with the first blush of superhero movie popularity in the early noughties, and it's best understood as an attempt to copy the experience of watching a movie. Comics Should Be Good criticized this trend in 2005, and held up this page from Warren Ellis' Ocean #1 as an example: Yes it's an entire page of a guy walking out of a building and dropping a coffee cup, which dissolves. The "decompression" boom seems to be more or less over, although most comics are still slower paced than they would have been even 15 years ago.

8. Better, and fewer, costumes. Superhero movies are often loathe to cover up the faces of A-list actors, so masks tend to go out the window. You could get righteously sloshed if you drank to every occasion where Peter Parker loses his mask in Spider-Man 2. And many superhero movies avoid the gaudy spandex in general — most notably the X-Men movies, which influenced the comics to move over to the more dignified black leather uniforms... for a few years, at least. On television, Heroes chose to explore superheroic themes without any costumes at all, and it's becoming more common to see heroes in their civvies for long stretches in comics as well.

7. More Hollywood writers.
Comic book writers used to be their own breed, many of whom had started out as assistant editors at the big comic-book publishers before "graduating" to writing. But these days, you're just as likely to see a revolving door between Hollywood and comics, with writers like Jeph Loeb, James Robinson and Brian K. Vaughn working in both comics and TV/movies. And more slumming Hollywood writers, starting with comics buff Kevin Smith, have ventured into writing comics in their spare time — which has led to horrendous delays between issues.

6. Back to basics. If you liked Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie, and you wanted to read comics about that character, you might pick up a Spider-Man comic — only to read about a married high-school teacher who's some kind of mystical spider-totem and wears exo-armor. And goes around saying things like, "I AM THE SPIDER!!". (First J.M. DeMatteis, then J.M. Straczynski, explored the "spiritual"/mystical side of Spider-Man, adding a lot of baggage.) So Marvel started putting out Ultimate Spider-Man and other Ultimate titles, which retell the origins of their classic heroes. And as writer Mark Millar has pointed out, the Ultimate version of Tony Stark ended up being a huge influence on the new Iron Man movie. And of course, every now and then there's a huge effort to go back to basics in regular continuity, like in Spider-Man's "One More Day" storyline — which erased Spidey's marriage, his exo-skeleton, his unmasking and a ton of other baggage.

5. Reconstruction. In the 1980s, the watchword in comics was "deconstruction," meaning that writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Frank Miller were dismantling comics characters and critiquing them through works like Watchmen. In the 1990s, there was a wave of nostalgia and comics creators paid tribute to the innocence classic comics — which Moore creating the "1963" series of comics that were supposed to look like they'd been published in 1963, and later the "America's Best" comics. But it wasn't until superhero movies started to take off that the trend of "reconstruction" went mainstream, and superhero comics made a concerted effort to build up their heroic characters instead of taking them apart. Take Batman, whose spine got smushed in the early 1990s and then spent the rest of the decade mired in angst and self-doubt. Grant Morrison and other writers swung the pendulum the opposite way and started turning him into an almost infallible (well, except for that "Brother Eye" business) Nietzschean demigod.

4. The movie pitch in graphic novel form. This is one way that the rise of comic-book movies didn't necessarily make comics better — comics publishers put out a lot of graphic novels that were obviously only aimed at generating new characters and ideas that could result in a movie deal. In the worst cases, the graphic novels in question didn't have much to say besides, "Here's a cool concept and some kick-ass characters. Can't you just see Brad Pitt playing this guy?"

3. (Somewhat) more realistic art. In the 1990s, the trends in "mainstream" comics art were running away from realism as fast as possible. Hot artists included Rob Liefeld, who could not draw the human body if you put a gun to his head, and Todd McFarlane, whose art got more and more scratchy and gothic. There was also a huge trend towards cartoony Manga-influenced artists like Humberto Ramos, whose work lacked the expressiveness and detail of real Manga art, and was often just confusing to look at. In the noughties, as superhero movies have exploded, a more photorealistic art style has taken hold in superhero comics. This hasn't always been a good thing, as artists like Greg Horn apparently take photos from porn magazines and trace over them to create female characters. But it's an improvement over the bug-in-a-shitstorm art styles of the 1990s.

2. Every time, it's personal. One of the defining characteristics of superhero movies is that they take place in a small world. The villain of a superhero movie is usually someone the hero knows personally. Often, the villain plays a part in the hero's origin — think Batman Begins, where ubervillain Ra's Al Ghul trains Batman to be a super-ninja. This trend has carried over to superhero comics, where newer villains are more likely to have a personal issue with the hero. Like new-ish Bat-villain Hush, who turned out to be a childhood friend of Bruce Wayne's.

1. Villain stew. In superhero comics of the 1990s and earlier, each storyline would usually feature one villain at a time. Sometimes villains would team up, and they would have to come up with a cool name for their joint venture. Like the Sinister Six. Or the Superman Revenge Squad. Villains couldn't just have an ad-hoc team-up. And you would seldom have villains just randomly running around in the same storyline, each with their own agendas. But movies, starting with Batman Returns, regularly featured two or more villains per movie, just on a "more is better" theory. And comics started to follow suit, until every Daredevil villain, from the Owl to the Kingpin, would put in an appearance in the same story arc. Instead of getting defeated and then disappearing for a few months, the villains just hang around and keep getting in each other's hair.

Talking about the new series, Claremont explained the lure of writing a comic outside of usual continuity:

The advantage of a book like GeNext or Exiles is that I can pretty much define the realities we are playing in... my approach is not a solo-title it is a potential foundation for new line and perhaps if we are successful we can bring back GeNext for a second arc or try it out on a one-year basis or even as a potential ongoing—or even create a spin-off. It's almost like having the potential for a second line of "Ultimate-style" books.

Chris Claremont on GeNext [Newsarama]

The Ultimate line was created in the year 2000 as an attempt by Marvel to make their core characters more friendly to a mainstream audience who didn't feel like wading through 40 years of continuity in order to enjoy a Spider-Man comic (The alternative, making Spider-Man comics that didn't rely on 40 years of continuity in order to be enjoyable, didn't seem to occur to them for some reason). After the successful launch of first series Ultimate Spider-Man, the line has kept itself small, concentrating mostly on characters who happened to have movies coming out - titles in the line have included Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, Ultimate Iron Man, Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra and Ultimate Sucky Ghost Rider Oh God Why Did They Go With Nic Cage. Okay, maybe not that last one.

Sadly, as Marvel's main line started getting more big name creators, attention from fans and - most importantly - sales, the Ultimate line has fallen into disrepair; something that Ultimate Origins aims to rectify. And with reasons like this, who can fail to be excited?

Wow? How can anyone not want to see "the first appearance of the Ultimate ?"? Not to mention "The End of Wouldn't You Like To Know"? It's like they knew they had to try and get people's attentions, but forgot to do anything about it before slapping this together in their lunch break on deadline day. Here's hoping that the already-announced sequel Ultimatum, written by Heroes exec producer Jeph Loeb, will get more people excited.

Marvel Lists Top Ten Reasons To Read Ultimate Origins #1 [Newsarama]

X-Men: Magneto:

In addition to the Wolverine prequel to the X-Men movies now filming, there's also a Magneto prequel in the pipeline. And apparently it will feature a young version of the Beast aka Hank McCoy, the blue-furred, leaping mutant with the thesaurus-boosted vocabulary. No word on who will step into Kelsey Grammer's blue makeup for the film. The special effects house doing Hellboy II and Land Of The Lost had a test photo of the young Beast, and confirmed it was from Magneto. [Latino Review]

Smallville:

Remember those Smallville casting sides we mentioned the other day? About two new characters, Davis Bloome and Tess? Well, it turns out Davis Bloome, the charming bartender, is actually Doomsday, the alien destructo-monster who killed Superman in the comics. Why is Doomsday working in a bar? It's Smallville: Everybody's just a little bit less awesome than in the comics.

Meanwhile, Tess is someone who was trained by Lex and is totally devoted to him. She has super-strength and is willing to use coercion or "seduction" to further the missing Lex's agenda. Nobody can resist her beguiling ways, even Clark. Tess doesn't remember anything from before the day she met Lex, and when she realizes her past is buried, she's desperate to retrieve it. (I'm still wondering if she's Maxima. Or some other random woman from the Superman mythos.)

Also, there's an update on whether Alison Mack will be back as Chloe next season. The current thinking is she may copy Kristin Kreuk (Lana) and only return for a handful of episodes. [Ask Ausiello]

And here's a somewhat spoilery video from tomorrow night's season finale. [Turkey Whisperer]

Spectacular Spider-Man:

Here are four new images from this Saturday's Spectactular Spider-Man, including the Black Cat, voiced by Tricia Helfer. Spidey has to team up with the Black Cat to clear his name after the Chameleon goes around committing crimes disguised as him. Also, it looks like we get our first glimpse of the Venom symbiote, contained in Curt Connors' lab. [Black Cat image from TV Guide]

Lost:

The "spectacular kiss" in the Lost season finale actually stops time for a moment. (Or maybe that's a metaphor.) And it makes the entire world vanish. Also, there's a lot of bloodshed in the season finale, and a very significant death. And we won't be seeing Libby this season. [Ask Ausiello]

Also, "Horace," the guy who built the cabin, and "Jacob," are played by the same actor according to IMDB — so maybe they're the same person? [Looking Glass Station]

At the ABC upfront, they showed a scene from tomorrow night's Lost in which the Oceanic Six land in a small plane, to face the waiting hordes of press reps. And Michelle Forbes (Admiral Cain from Battlestar Galactica) is the Oceanic Airlines rep, in stiletto heels. Everyone has family greeting them, except Kate and Sayid. Admiral Cain tells the Six they can duck out on meeting the press if they want, but Jack says they'll answer any questions the press has. If the press asks anything tough, they'll say they're in shock. Sun replies that they actually are in shock. [E! Online]

And here are a couple more sneak peeks from tomorrow's Lost episode, plus stills from both tomorrow's episode (the press conference) and the two-hour finale, coming in two weeks (the beach scenes). [Spoilers Lost]

Resurrection

Q: Do you have any dreams for directors or cast in Resurrection yet? Have you spit balled a few ideas?

Not just yet. I hardly ever develop 'pie-in-the-sky' sort of ideas for directors. There are so many great directors out there. I wish I could say that I had a particular wish list, but that's not how my brain operates.

Q: Why did you decide to write Resurrection ?

I love science fiction, and like anyone who loves science fiction I've been watching TV shows and movies and reading comics about alien invasions for my whole life, practically. At the conclusion of every one of them I was always left with the question: "Well, what now?" You have a world that is fundamentally changed. Changed infrastructure-wise but also sociologically, politically, and economically. I'm really sort of fascinated by how we would rebuild things. What survives and what doesn't in terms of our ideals and our beliefs?

For example, if aliens were to invade, it would throw our whole religious system for a loop. Because we're supposed to believe that man was created by god and that we are the only life in the universe what happens when that belief is not just challenged, but completely proven false. There are a million questions just like that about a world post-alien invasion and post-contact with an alien race. What happens to America if there's no president? What happens to America if there's no line of succession any more? We take democracy for granted in this country, but democracy doesn't just exist because we want it to. It was fought for and constructed very deliberately hundreds of years ago. If you got rid of all of the things that were keeping that system in place, how would the vacuum be filled afterwards?

Q: How will this be different from other post-apocalyptic movies coming out like The Road?

I loved The Road. I read it and I thought it was incredibly gripping and moving. The world that Resurrection is in is very different from The Road. As bad a shape as the world is in at the beginning of Resurrection, it's in much, much worse shape in The Road... There are all sorts different projects that are out there that deal with life post-apocalypse. What makes Resurrection different is they are dealing with life post-alien initiated apocalypse. And as a result I'm getting into a couple of things that you can't do, post-nuclear, post-zombie or post-natural disaster. Pick your brand of apocalypse. We are going to be showing some pieces of alien technology, some alien cells. We've got the whole mythology of, "Why were the aliens invading us in the first place?"

Q: What are you most excited to see be brought to live on screen from Resurrection?

One of the things that's in the comic that we're excited about seeing on the film are the carriers. They are these massive, massive ships. I'm excited to see these on a huge scale.

Young X-Men

Q: Where did you get the idea to start the comic with a flash-forward?

I love the flash-back and flash-forwarding. In comics, I feel like have the most license to play along with that stuff. It's something I like to do a lot. In case of Young X-Men it was actually a very practical thing. I knew that I wanted that first issue to be an homage to the first half of Giant-Size X-Men Number 1, where Professor X went around the world and gathered up the team of new X-Men. And I knew I wanted to do the same thing with Cyclops. The problem is that as a whole first issue goes, if I were to just come in and just do Cyclops assembling the team, you would never get a chance to see the team in action. As a fully formed team in costume, doing their thing. The solution was the flash-forward. Then I get to do my homage to Giant-Size X-Men while at the same time not making readers wait until issue 2 to in order to see this team fully formed and kicking butt. And then of course since one of the characters is a precognitive it just seemed natural to make the flash forward something that she was predicting that would happen in the future.

Q: Are any other X-Men making an appearance?

In the second arc for sure we'll have a lot of the tried and true characters. Basically, this first arc is all about putting the team together and setting them up. Once I've accomplished that I'm going to start integrating them pretty tightly into the X-Universe.

Q: Any characters that will be coming back that you want to tell us about?

I would definitely expect to see Anole, who is a very popular character, a character I certainly like. I don't want to spoil too much, but you can definitely expect to see Anole and a few other characters from the past. Including one X-Man that I don't think anyone knows about just yet.

Q: Tell us more about Ink, the character that can take on powers from his tattoos. Are there any other tattoos he will be getting in the future?

If you go back to the first issue and you look on the cover in that flash forward. You can see that he's shaved his head and he has two lightening bolt tattoos on the side of his head so those are new powers that he'll be getting. My goal with Ink is to constantly be changing him by giving him new tattoos, thus giving him new powers. So he's going to be pretty dynamic.

Q: Why did you choose to bring Dust into the group? I know that it is a timely subject matter but were there any other reasons?

When you are trying to fit characters for a team you want a mix of a lot of different things. You want a mix of genders and powers. It wouldn't make sense to have three bruisers on the team. You want a mix of ethnicities and beliefs and what not. I also didn't want there to be just one token woman, I wanted a couple female characters. And having a character who is Muslim and from Afghanistan, in today's political climate, I think is interesting. It's not dissimilar to having Colossus having on team X-Men during the height of the Cold War. But mostly I thought her power worked really well in connection with everyone else's powers. She's has this really cool power in terms of being able able to turn herself into a sandstorm, I think she has a lot of different potential, in terms of spinning it. I thought it fit with the whole team.

Q: A lot of writers have started incorporating timely matters with the Middle East into their writing such as prejudices and terrorism, are you?

I have an idea for a Dust-centric story, that doesn't actually deal with terrorism but deals with prejudice against Muslims. That's a story I'm kind of dying to tell. I'm envisioning a self contained story with her. The idea is a little incompatible with another character I've got so I have to make some choices in terms of which story I want to tell and how I want to tell it. They also have a lot of plans for Dust that have nothing to do with her heritage. I don't mean to be coy but I like to keep my options open. Particularly if I make my way through another book I want to be able to allow inspiration to strike. It drives my editors crazy.

Q: What are your plans for Cyclops? A lot of people have problems with this character and I know you are planning to do new things with him.

Everyone sort of has issues with Cyclops. Ironically I think a lot of people are changing the way they feel about Cyclops because of Messiah Complex and these other big events that rocked him to his core. He's changed. He's become a different person. He's become ruthless. All of that is in service of a personal evolution. He's been becoming his own man for years and years. His whole adult life he's lived in the shadow of Professor X. I think what people are reacting to, both positively and negatively, is [the fact that] he isn't reacting the way he used to because it's sort of like a child that leaves a parent. That is very much the type of relationship that he had with Professor X, it was a father and son type of relationship. And in here you have him moving out and charting his own course. And like anyone else who has done that, sometimes the parent doesn't like it, or the people around you don't like it. You have to take risks and try different things. He is trying to discover who he is. He spent all of these years living in someone's shadow, only servicing their agenda.

Q: Well he does seem to have a lot more personality than before.

I think he's a fun character. I think Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon over the years have done some really amazing things with him. I think it has gone a long way towards making him a more interesting and dynamic character.

Q: What do you think about Jason Schwartz the writer for Gossip Girl going to write the new Young X-Men?

Yeah I heard that the news and I thought, 'Really, the Young X-Men movie, you don't say.' I'll be really curious to see how that movie turns out. I'm really glad that they are making all these comic book movies now. It's a great time to be a comic book fan.

Spider-Man

Q: Now that Peter Parker is single, what are Black Cat's chances with him?

Oh yeah that's funny. A lot of people ask about Black Cat. I can tell you right now we just don't have any plans to bring her into the book. It's not like we don't like her or anything, we've just got a lot of balls in the air right now and she just doesn't happen to be one of them. One of the big things that is different after One More Day, [is that] Black Cat no longer knows his identity. So the whole nature of a Spider-Man, Black Cat relationship will be very, very different, just because she doesn't know who Spider-Man is.

Q: How did you decide what to change in One More Day?
A lot of it was decided before the other writers and I were brought on. There was some discussion of do we resurrect Gwen Stacy while we were at it? And we collectively decided that obviously we wouldn't. A lot of it was decided before we got involved so I can't really speak as why they decided to change this or that. Most of it is just the natural outcome, of okay, Spider-Man is no longer married and the world no longer knows his identity.

Q: How have you dealt with the fan reaction with One More Day? Does it ever change your writing?

In Young X-Men there was a lot of negative reaction to the first issue. I think what you have to do is set your course and stick to it....I'm at the point where I'm almost immune to criticism. When you're working on something that is just starting out like Brand New Day is or Young X-Men, we're plotted out for the next year and a half at least. So we know what's coming down the road, the fans don't. There's no reason to change because people's reactions are based on a couple of months worth of reading. Those are not necessarily the same reactions they will have a year from now or two years from now. It's like trying to govern by the polls from a poll that was taken a year and a half ago. The problems that we are dealing with on Spider-Man in terms of story and things that we are trying to work out are about a year and a half removed now from where the books currently are. So you really can't react to people's reactions. You have to go forward to what you have planned in the first place.

Q: Why doesn't the Green Goblin know Spider-Man's identity?

Simply put everyone who knew Spider-Man's identity after One More Day, doesn't. So there would be no way for him to keep that knowledge. It would be like everyone forgot his identity except for this person or that person. This was something we had to decide very early on was, who knows and who doesn't know it and the thing that we all agreed upon was best to keep it simple. Let's come up with one bright light rule: nobody knows. And anybody that we want to know, it turns into a story about how they found out. Because now everybody has to rediscover that information.

The Flash

Q: It's an old question, I know, but why did The Flash (Bart Allen) have to die?

That was another thing that was decided before me. I killed him but it wasn't my decision. Basically DC came to me and said look we're killing off Bart Allen, we're going to do it in five issues, do you want to write those five issues? And I said yes and even though I didn't necessarily think that Bart needed to be killed off. I was determined that if I was going to make it the most meaningful death possible.

Q: Was it hard for you to write that, the end to a character?

It was actually a lot of fun. I really, really enjoyed writing those. Those five issues were a really pleasant writing experience. Maybe because I've never really worked with anything quite like that before. Because I knew my character was going to ultimately die, I could do crazy things. Like reveal his secret identity in the second issue, and have him break up with his girlfriend. I could blow up a lot of things knowing I would never have to put them back together. I wouldn't have to put any genies back in the bottle. It was very educational for me to be able to write with abandon like that. I tried to do this a lot in Resurrection. That is, sort of write like each issue is the last issue. So it creates this sense of unpredictability so you never really know what's going to happen. Anyone can live or die. The book can go in any direction and it's going to be a wild ride. And I learned that by doing The Flash.

Nowhere Man

Q: When are we going to be able to see your Virgin Comics series Nowhere Man?

My editor was just asking me that very same question earlier today. I've got to finish the scripts, it will still be a couple of months. I'm not quite far enough to be able to solicit the book yet, but hopefully there will be a release date shortly.

Q: What can you tell us about it?

Basically what is exciting to me about it is that it's science fiction. Like all good science fiction it has a lot to say about out present society. Right now in the post 9/11 world we are asking more than ever, how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for security. And Nowhere Man is set in a society where they have answered that question in an ultimate way. It's a world where there is very little black and white, there are a lot of shades of grey. Even our protagonist will discover that he might be on the wrong side. So the characters are constantly asking themselves questions, that hopefully people will start asking about our world today.

Magneto's mutant haven, Genosha looks a bit like the emerald city, and Professor Xavier's wizard impersonation isn't doing much to hinder the comparison. There were so many mutants in this clip I lost count, was that The Hulk and burqa sporting Dust? Plus more Sentinels, which the X-Men never tire of fighting. The cartoon series will air on Nicktoon in the summer of 2009.

But if the bleak genocide storyline and running mythology of the X-Men cartoon isn't your cup of tea, there's antoher Marvel cartoon on the way, aimed at a demographic of 6 to 8-year-olds. It's titled the Marvel Superhero Squad and will feature all the greats including, Captain America, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four. They're living in some kind of stylized superhero city and fighting villains like Doctor Doom every week. [Illusiontv and Marvel]

According to the now-retracted report, Schwartz said that the project was "a prequel of sorts" and added:

I'm very well aware that I'll be bludgeoned by purists, but I love its mythology, and it comes with a pretty hefty paycheck... It's not like I'm adding new characters like Toaster Head, or anything like that. The Hulk looks like it's going to be terrible. And why does he look like he's fighting against the monster from Cloverfield? I mean, with Transformers, it's not like fans were going to come back saying, 'You used the wrong car.' This, however, is a different story. Brett Ratner didn't have a lot of credibility going in to the third X-Men movie, but I think Bryan Singer [who directed the first two installments] got a free pass on Superman Returns because of his work on X-Men.

In a blog post that appeared May 2 on bbook.com, some quotations by the subject Josh Schwartz were erroneously reported. Consequently, BlackBook immediately removed the item. We regret the error and extend our apologies to Mr. Schwartz.

Correction [Black Book] (via Blog@Newsarama)

This year's FCBD - set, as usual, the day after the summer's big comic-related movie opens - has 41 different freebies for you to read, as well as two additional miniature figures to collect (If you really, really want that Iron Man Heroclix figure, get yourself to your local comic store early Saturday morning, people) and all manner of creator signings galore (Go here for a complete list of who is signing where). If nothing else, it's a good chance to pick and choose some new things to read and get hooked on; here's our pick of what you should be spending your free time and nothing else on.

While DC Comics and Marvel Comics are both putting two books out each for the event, Marvel distinguishes themselves by both of their books being brand new material: X-Men: FCBD 2008 Edition offers Mike Carey and Greg Land giving you the start of "the future of mutantkind", while the more kid-friendly Marvel Adventures features movie franchises Spider-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man teaming up to fight crime and reduced box office potential. DC's also splitting their books between "regular" and kid books, offering reprints of the very, very good first issue of All-Star Superman and the not-as-good-but-still-worthwhile kid book Tiny Titans, which sees Puffy Ami-Yumi's favorite underage superteam as even younger kids in school. Don't ask, just pick it up.

Other all-new material includes Dark Horse's Hellboy/BPRD issue, with new stories by creator Mike Mignola and friends, Project Superpowers resurrecting public domain superheroes courtesy of Kingdom Come's Alex Ross, Del Rey's Dabel Bros preview book of novel adaptations (including previews of work by Dean Koontz, Jim Butcher and George RR Martin's Wild Cards series) and Red5 Comics' fun retro throwback SF series Atomic Robo.

Most worthy of the reprinted material are the EC Comics Sampler - reprinting several stories from the publisher that made Frederic Wertham go apeshit and bring congressional hearings into the comic book industry in the 50s - and Oni Press' Maintenance #1, which follows the unlucky janitorial crew of an evil scientist think tank. There's also classic Disney duck action in Gyro Gearloose and a couple of international anthologies worth looking into with Drawn and Quarterly's Gegika: A Drawn+Quarterly Manga Sampler and Fantagraphics' IGNATZ: International Graphic Novels At Their Zenith.

There are many more books available tomorrow - go here for a full list, including some previews - but why not just find the store closest to you and pick up whatever looks most interesting to you, even if it is Sci-Fi/Virgin's The Stranded? It's not like it's going to cost you anything, after all...