Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked

* the writer Matt Fraction will join A-level comic book artist John Romita Jr. for a Free Comic Book Day effort kicking off a run by the writer on the Thor character. It sounds like Fraction and whomever ends up on the regular series will be delving into the Tales of Asgard/riding a ship around in outer space side of Marvel's Thunder God as opposed to the Don Blake/Jane Foster/adventures in Midgard side. I think the Lee/Kirby run on Thor is either the second best or third best run of 1960s comic books, and certainly the most under-appreciated, so this sounds like it could be fun. Fraction talks about all things Thor here.

* speaking (in sideways fashion) of the King, Mark Evanier's Kirby is apparently available in an Italian translation.

* Marc Guggenheim will be among the writers to have a crack at a Superman comic book in 2010. He likes the Superman of the Richard Donner film, the John Byrne comics (Byrne loves the Donner movie) and the second Spider-Man/Superman team-up. The big DC crossover event for 2010 will star Superman. It is a war of supermen, which sounds very exciting to eight-year-old me and a lot like a number of recent wars to jaded teenager me.

* Rex Morgan returns to his own strip.

* the company that rose from the ashes of Virgin Comics has scored a deal to make graphic novels, with an eye on making them into films. My computer actually typed "with an eye on making them into films" for me. They sound like workable concepts, if not ferociously original ones.

* CR's own David Welsh notes that Viz is going to end its mining of the Oishinbo series with a seventh English-language volume of the more than 50 done in the manga's initial market. I think it's healthy for Welsh to note that Viz can always go back to the well. The seventh volume comes out in January and features "pub food."

* Marc-Oliver Frisch catches that Marvel will be re-releasing a bunch of books at the price point of free or $1, ostensibly to encourage/entice new readers into sampling some of the longer-term series successes. I guess DC did much the same thing in a promotion I was probably enthused about at the time.

* Marvel announced through PW's "The Beat" blog a three-issue mini-series entirely from female creators called Girl Comics, set for March 2010. That's Women's History Month. I suppose there's some debate to be had whether or not such efforts are as important as simply mainstreaming such creators into the everyday Marvel Comics output, but it's not like the two goals are mutually exclusive. Besides, there are a lot of talented creators involved and many of the stories have a chance to be really good. Johanna Draper Carlson comments.

* this only goes down this far on the page instead of up to is because I got this last second and I'm doing this not-at-home: it looks like Frank Miller may be doing a prequel to 300 about the Battle at Marathon.

* DC announced this artist for the Grant Morrison Batman and Robin title last week. I would have to add my voices to the chorus that says DC seems to have good artists on weird titles, so it's good to see them run one of those people on a big-time title like B&R.

* there's a nice summary of what's going on in future issues of MOME here.

* finally, according to this article on his terrific Footnotes In Gaza, Joe Sacco has a few follow-ups in mind including something on the city of Camden, New Jersey. He's working on that with the journalist Chris Hedges.
 
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