He asked people for their nominations for the greatest single panel in comics and started things off with this one:

Some of the entries are serious - lots of Sandman, Preacher, Watchmen, panels from Batman: The Killing Joke.

But the best ones were just hilarious. Some of my favorites below (with some subtitles for people who aren’t comics geeks):

(This one, from a story about the Joker making various “boners” (era slang for “silly mistakes”), was floating around the net for a while a few years ago. A definite classic.)

(It’s almost like someone made this one up just to make us laugh. The Green Arrow was one of many archery-heroes who had trick arrows — always just the one he needed, seemingly. Here, in the middle of a crowd of people — including other Justice League members — he’s going to detonate a nuclear warhead on the hide of a giant starfish-shaped space monster.)

(Yeah — this one’s a lot funnier if you realize that every one of the heroes worries about having doomed their lover — and Batman references Robin.)

(This is a male and female version of The Thing — of the Fantastic Four — getting it on on top of what must be the strongest couch every concieved by man.)

(This is from Grant Morrison’s mind-bending and often hilarious “The Filth.” A porn magnate named “Tex Porneau” has transformed male sperm into giant, hideous monsters that murder human women.)

(This one is a satire of a very serious incident during DC’s big “Infinite Crisis” event — wherein Batman tells Superman he’s falling down on the job because he’s ceased to be an inspiration to all of humanity.)

(This one is supposed to be from an old issue of “Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane.” As weird as that one was, I believe it.)

(This one, from “Marshall Law,” speaks for itself.)

(This one is from Ellis’ “Transmetropolitan.” Outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem is explaining to a TV news audience what he did with Santa Claus)

(This one just makes me laugh because I am secretly twelve years old. Fluffer. Heh heh heh.)

(This is The Mighty Thor, one of the Marvel Universe’s most powerful beings, being KO’d by Elvis — or at least an Elvis impersonator.)

(Android member of The Avengers The Vision gets all emo. He also married a human woman. Sort of. And fathered her children. Sort of.)

(This is supposed to come from “Ninja Tales” — and it is just perfect.)

(This one is, apparently, from a story in which Doctor Doom hires Marvel’s 70s blaxploitation character Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, for something or another. Doom doesn’t pay Cage, leading him to borrow the Fantastic Four’s futuristic flying car in order to invade the sovereign nation Doom rules, beat up his entire army, crash his fortress and face him down in a potential battle to the death…over like $200. DYNO-MITE! Doom capitulates in the panel below…)

(The only thing more humiliating than being taken down a peg by Luke Cage, jive-talking silly headband-man-for hire? Being bested by a dozen or so squirrels…)

Jesus, do I love comics.

This last one…hey, it’s Mary Jane.

‘Nuff said.

A couple of things about this ad:

1) It’s hard for me to remember a time when I was this excited for the release of a book. This is how Harry Potter people feel, why they gather at Barnes & Noble at midnight.

2) “The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep” — I wanted that nickname. Damn it.

3) When William Gibson says you’re scaring him you should be careful. You’re likely to try jumping off buildings and taking flight next.

4) Getting Joss Whedon to do a blurb on the back of your book — especially as breathless a blurb as this — is brilliant. Those Whedon fans are many and rabid. If a quarter of them get interested enough to pick up the book you’ve done well.

5) I’m really interested in the crossover of comics fans and fans of novels. When best selling thriller writer Brad Meltzer began writing the Justice League comic there was definite interest because of his novelist pedigree. But they also ran pieces of his next novel, The Book of Fate, in the back of one of the issues. When the book was released it became his first #1 New York Times best seller and he credited that, at least partially, to support from the comics community.

Neil Gaiman has certainly parlayed his comics career into a successful career as a novelist, though you could argue he was writing prose well before he was writing comics. Greg Rucka went from being a thriller novelist to the Eisner Award winning comics scribe who created Queen & Country and the gritty Gotham Central.

With the success of recent comics movies the studios are giving non-superhero works a go from Sin City and 300 to Brian K. Vaughan now writing the screenplay for a big screen adaptation of his Y: The Last Man.

It’s an interesting time to be a comics fan — and an even more interesting time to be a comics writer.

Comic book icon Captain America lies sprawled on courthouse steps after Marvel hero is gunned down by sniper. (Art by Steve Epting)
Cover of 1941 debut

Captain America is dead. The Marvel Entertainment superhero, created in 1941 as a patriotic adversary for the Nazis, is killed off in Captain America #25, which hits the stands today.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/503132p-424376c.html

The trailer got me hooked.

Yahoo! Movies provides much to explore.

Jeri says:

But with the Civil War series, which ended last week, there’s something that goes beyond the worn-out parade of comic book clichés.

It’s the series’ moral ambiguity, the sense of unease, that pervades the entire Marvel universe. It feels so relevant to the world we see around us today.

More on the war here.

Having successfully relaunched their “Batman” and “Superman” franchises, and with the likes of “The Flash” and “Wonder Woman” in development, surprising news came to light today about DC Comics next big project.

Warner Bros. Pictures is looking to make a feature based on super team the Justice League of America, and have hired writing duo Kiernan and Michele Mulroney (”Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, “Paper Man”) to pen the script reports Variety.

The film will include some combination of DC’s most iconic superheroes, but which ones and how they will affect the current separate franchises remains in question. How the story arcs unfold will also affect whether the studio will make offers to actors Christian Bale and Brandon Routh to play their respective roles in the project.

Despite having included almost every super hero in DC’s line-up, the core seven that have made-up the JLA since its inception in 1960 are Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter.

The expense of such a project is daunting, but the interest level is extremely high and the franchise potential extremely strong. The animated series in recent years proved a big hit, and The WB network series “Smallville” has drawn ratings and raves for a recent episode featuring an early version of the Justice League.

Still, remember what happened with the now aborted “Batman vs. Superman” project.

“The thing that’s going to be quaint about “cyberspace” (that already is, really) is the inherent assumption that it’s a realm unto itself; that it’s in any way elsewhere or other.

Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.”

I think this is why I was sort of lukewarm on some of Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, which is almost universally acclaimed as brilliant. He’s right. “Cyberspace” as imagined by Gibson, the 90s TV series “VR5″ and movie “Hackers,” even Max Headroom does now almost seem quaint.

We’re not far enough away from it to see it as skull-splittingly on point or just slightly off in a way that is weird and wonderful like Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. We’re just far enough away from it to see these ideas about Cyberspace, the Internet and how it would work, this sort of futurism as weird and sort of harmless but not particularly exciting. It probably did seem terribly exciting in the 1980s — but Gibson’s dead on about futurism having a shorter shelf life these days.

When you live in a world that uses up the future this fast, can you possible produce near-future sci-fi fast enough?

I think about Warren Ellis’ political sci-fi comic series Transmetropolitan sometimes, and the way in which it presaged a journalistic environment that is increasingly a reality - the print product becoming less and less important, reporters producing content primarily for the Internet using sound, pictures and video they gather themselves. People subscribing to “feeds” in order to get the news and entertainment they want. The more fantastic bits of the series’ world have yet to develop (people downloading themselves into microscopic computer viruses, smokers taking “trait” pills that keep them safe from cancer) but the world itself seems to be coming true all around us. I rarely do anything in my capacity as a journalist now without thinking about the Internet, multimedia, what I’d do with it if it was a blog post rather than a news story, what bloggers who don’t have my constraints might do with it, etc. We’re terrifyingly close to realizing the strangest dreams of science fiction writers every five or ten year.

Of course, good writers will continue to surprise and shock us in ways we can’t possibly see coming. Ellis himself is releasing his first novel, Crooked Little Vein, this year. Next year we’ll see his second. I keep wishing that HBO would pick up Transmet as a television series and do it right. Maybe if Preacher is a success there, they will. There does seem to be an awful lot of sci-fi on the pop culture landscape all of a sudden.

From Vaughan’s blog:

“I’ve learned more about the creative process in two weeks inside the Lost writers’ room than I did in four (very rewarding) years at NYU’s film school, so hopefully, this new challenge will push me to become a stronger writer and help my work to evolve.

Mostly, I just don’t want to screw up a show that I love.”

Vaughan, who began as a film student at NYU before being tapped for a Marvel Comics program that developed new comics talent, is currently at work on scripts for the forthcoming film versions of Y: THE LAST MAN and EX MACHINA but swears he isn’t leaving comics.