Marvel’s Queen in Black #4, written by Al Ewing, has Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, trading flirtatious lines with Nova, and coverage is already treating the exchange as another step in turning one of comics’ best-known ladies’ men bisexual. Marvel has not formally announced a change to Johnny’s orientation, and that is how it works: a wink in one issue, a headline the next, and a readership expected to accept the result as settled. It comes after Iceman, and Fandom Pulse’s view is that writers who find a flirty man with a taste for women uncomfortable are rewriting the characters who fit the description.

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What the Issue Shows

Queen in Black #4 is by Ewing, with art by Iban Coello, Paco Medina and Guru-eFX. In it the Fantastic Four defeat the symbiote Firelord, with Captain R’Gar and the Thing holding him down while Johnny and Nova combine their energy to blast him apart. Before they do, Johnny compliments Nova’s cologne, and Nova promises to buy him a bottle. Nova then says: “I need you as hot as it gets.” Johnny answers: “That’s every day of my life.”

Coverage has run ahead of the comic. One outlet declared it a confirmation that Johnny is interested in men, while the largest write-up of the scene says his orientation is still officially unannounced. The same write-up lists earlier moments read as hints: tension with Daken in Marjorie Liu’s Daken: Dark Wolverine, Johnny’s flirtatious relationship with Peter Parker, his casual admissions of attraction to non-binary alien species, and his text reply to Iceman coming out, “Flame on! Literally!” Fandom Pulse covered the 25th issue of Ryan North’s Fantastic Four run, which showed Johnny with a spiky alien in a scene the piece read as signaling pansexuality.

Johnny Storm Has Always Been the Ladies’ Man

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Johnny in The Fantastic Four #1 in November 1961 as the youngest member of the team, brash and impetuous next to his sister Sue. His romances run through Crystal, an Inhuman princess he dated in college, Frankie Raye, who left him to become Galactus’s herald, Namorita, Medusa and Rogue. He married Lyja, a Skrull spy who had disguised herself as Alicia Masters, and the marriage ended on bad terms when her deception came out. The same coverage describes him as the superhero community’s ultimate flamboyant playboy and womanizer, chasing fast cars and fleeting romances.

The screen versions followed that template. Chris Evans played him in 2005 and 2007 and returned in Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024, and his version is remembered as a charming, slightly sleazy hothead. Joseph Quinn took over in The Fantastic Four: First Steps in 2025. Ahead of its release he said in an interview that he wanted Johnny to move away from the old-school ladies’ man and skip the cheesy pickup lines.

The Iceman Playbook

They’ve done this before with Iceman. Bobby Drake spent decades as a founding X-Man written around girlfriends and jokes, and in 2015’s All-New X-Men #40, written by Brian Michael Bendis, the time-displaced teenage Bobby was told by Jean Grey that he is gay. The adult Iceman was confirmed gay soon after, and Marvel gave him a solo series. A change like that is permanent in a way a death or a marriage is not, because it cannot be undone without an editorial about retconning a gay character.

Star-Lord followed. Another charming rogue, he was written bisexual and polyamorous in Guardians of the Galaxy #9, and the coverage notes he was returned to his default state in later appearances. Johnny is the third in the line, and his rollout uses a method that deniability makes easy: hints and flirtation in small moments, with the confirmation left for a headline writer or a later issue. The writers get the headlines without announcing the change, and the readers who liked the character as written are told they are imagining it.

A Move That Does Not Play With Readers

The argument against the move is not about one scene. Flirtatious men who like women are a staple of superhero comics, and Johnny, Bobby and Peter Quill each carried one of the genre’s classic dynamics: the cocky younger brother, the class clown, the space rogue. Changing the orientation of each one in turn removes that dynamic from the page, and the pattern reads as writers who regard a ladies’ man as a problem to be corrected, not a character to be written well. Quinn’s remark that he wanted to retire the old-school ladies’ man points the same way, from the film side. The question for Marvel is the one it keeps declining to answer: who is asking for this, and who is paying for it?

If Iceman, Star-Lord and now Johnny Storm each lost the flirtatious ladies’ man at the center of the character, which classic Marvel rogue is next, and will any reader who wanted the original Johnny Storm be left a comic to buy?

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Marvel Unlimited, the digital comics subscription Marvel has run since 2007, is being replaced by a Marvel Comics app that Webtoon will operate, launching Nov. 16 at marvel.webtoon.com on mobile and web.

Marvel Unlimited stopped taking new sign-ups on Oct. 5, new content stops Dec. 7, and Marvel’s sunset FAQ says the app will be removed Dec. 28. Existing subscribers will have to start a new Webtoon subscription, because payment information is not shared with Webtoon.

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Jonathan Hickman built Marvel’s Ultimate Universe around a married Peter Parker with a family, and the first issue sold out three times in two months. DC answered within months with an Absolute Universe of its own. Marvel then shut its line down on a fixed date, while DC’s version is still running with no end in sight. The man who started it has a long record of building worlds and then leaving them, and the writer who wanted to keep going on the Marvel side was a different one.

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A Married Peter Parker Moves Comics

The Ultimate Universe returned in February 2023 with Ultimate Invasion, written by Hickman and drawn by Bryan Hitch. That September Marvel announced Ultimate Spider-Man, drawn by Marco Checchetto, and the 2024 launch introduced a Peter Parker who is a husband and father. The first collected volume carries the title Married With Children.

Retailers could not keep it on shelves. Issue one sold out three times in two months and went to a fourth printing. In the weekly tracking of back-issue prices it took eight of the top ten spots, and the main cover’s aftermarket price jumped 340%. In point-of-sale data from more than 125 comic shops, it finished 2024 as the second-ranked issue by units. Issues one through twelve all placed in the year’s top fifty.

Marvel built a line around the book: The Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Wolverine and Ultimate Black Panther. The Spider-Man series earned an Eisner nomination for Best Continuing Series in 2025.

DC Builds a Copy

DC announced its answer in the fall of 2024: an Absolute Universe, led by Absolute Batman from Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta, with Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman beside it. The pitch matched Marvel’s, fresh versions of the icons with no continuity to study first. Absolute Batman #1 finished 2024 first by units in the same point-of-sale data, with Ultimate Spider-Man #1 second and Absolute Superman #1 third.

The sales have held. Orders for Absolute Batman #14 approached 200,000 in December 2025. Issue #24 reached 487,000 across all covers in September 2026, and Snyder has put the book’s sales near 500,000 an issue. The line keeps growing: Absolute Green Arrow and Absolute Catwoman arrived this year, and Absolute Catwoman #1 topped one retailer’s June sales chart. Absolute Martian Manhunter ended at twelve issues on a planned schedule.

The one visible gap is a creator break. Absolute Batman has no December issue. The main series pauses after #25 on October 28. A November special and a January issue on Barbara Gordon fill the space, and Snyder and Dragotta return in February with #27.

Marvel Pulls the Plug

At New York Comic Con in October 2025, Marvel announced that the Ultimate Universe would close with Ultimate Endgame #5 in April 2026. Hickman’s run on Ultimate Spider-Man was set at 24 issues, and the story that began in Ultimate Invasion carried a 24-month timeline. The line was still selling.

Hickman told an interviewer in December 2025 that the decision caught him off guard:

I’ve been at Marvel a long time, and I’ve never seen us do what we’re doing, which is end a book that is selling well and a line that is selling well. But I understand the decision because we, generally speaking, don’t do discrete units of books.

He went on:

I thought it was a really, really gutsy decision. I kind of love it.

On the NYCC panel, Marvel’s Dan Buckley recounted a conversation at a creative retreat:

We were at one of those creative retreats and I was sitting next to him, we’re just talking, and he’s like, ‘Well, we’re finishing our stories, then you could do that.’ I said, ‘No, you’re done.’

Buckley continued:

We’re not going to do this with the Marvel Universe. This is more about a group of creators getting together and saying, ‘This is what I see as a story, we want to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.’

Deniz Camp Brings the Politics

Deniz Camp was brought in and wrote The Ultimates from issue one in June 2024, alongside Hickman’s Spider-Man, and his book carried the line’s politics. The team was a global resistance network, volume two is titled All Power to the People, and his Ultimate Hawkeye is Charli Ramsey, an Oglala Lakota, Two-Spirit and non-binary character. Camp also wrote Ultimate Endgame and the Ultimates finale. Hickman’s book was the one about a family. Camp’s second volume carries a protest slogan for a title.

After the closing was announced, Camp answered speculation about why in a thread on social media:

It implies people are getting pushed out, which I don’t think is the case (from everything I’ve heard/everyone I’ve talked to). John just didn’t think Marvel would be bold enough to do this.

John is very supportive of, and excited for, this, I know that for sure.

John was ending his run at 24, that was always the case. He was done.

The only person who planned on continuing was me.

He also addressed the politics directly:

Not because the books are “too woke” (if it were that, they’d interfere with the writing of it, which they haven’t) or because the main line is jealous...

And he named the editor who told him: “Wil Moss came to me and said, hey, I think we’re going to end it.” In January he added: “I was planning on continuing on for a while, and then there was going to be like a new wave of books that launched.”

Nothing on the record describes a fight between the two writers. The record shows two writers with different plans for the same line: one finishing at issue 24, the other ready to keep going. Camp was also writing DC’s Absolute Martian Manhunter during this stretch, a book that ended at twelve issues. “We would have both liked to continue, and DC was very open to it, but they offered us something we couldn’t turn down and we couldn’t do both,” he said of that book.

Hickman Builds, Then Leaves

Hickman has built and walked away from worlds throughout his career. At Marvel he wrote Secret Warriors from 2009 to 2011 and Fantastic Four from 2009 to 2012. He took over Avengers and New Avengers in late 2012, wrote the Infinity event, and closed it all out with Secret Wars, which ended in 2016.

His Image books followed the same arc. The Manhattan Projects ran from 2012 to 2016. East of West, drawn by Dragotta, ran from 2013 to 2019. The Black Monday Murders stopped in 2018, with issues nine and ten solicited for 2019 and never released. The Dying and the Dead stopped at six of ten issues, and Frontier was cancelled in 2016.

He returned to Marvel in 2019 with House of X and Powers of X, which relaunched the X-Men line as the mutant nation of Krakoa. He announced his departure in August 2021 and signed a Substack deal the same month. Marvel brought him back for Ultimate Invasion in 2023, and G.O.D.S. followed. Ultimate Spider-Man ended in 2026 after 24 issues. His new book Midnight X-Men launched October 7 as part of Marvel’s Midnight Universe.

Marvel closed its best-selling new line on a fixed schedule, while DC is running its imitation with no end date and orders near 500,000. Which of those choices will look smarter in 2027?

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IDW Publishing has announced two Star Trek books for 2027 that fans can get behind for once. One is written by the actress who played Beverly Crusher. The other is written by the novelist who created Grand Admiral Thrawn. They arrived within a day of each other, about a month after IDW’s longtime Star Trek editor Heather Antos announced she was stepping back from the line.

Gates McFadden Writes Crusher

IDW announced on October 6 that Gates McFadden will write Star Trek: Crusher, a limited series due in summer 2027. It is her comics writing debut, and the release is timed to the 40th anniversary of The Next Generation. Megan Levens draws it, with Charlie Kirchoff on colors. Levens has drawn IDW Trek before, including Boldly Go and Red Shirts.

The series fills 20 years of Beverly Crusher’s life that no screen story has shown, the gap between the film Star Trek: Nemesis and the third season of Star Trek: Picard. McFadden played Crusher in the Next Generation series, four feature films and that Picard season, where Beverly and the mystery of her son Jack drove the plot. The comic has a defined stretch of time and an unresolved thread to pull.

McFadden said she has spent years “bringing the words of other great writers to life in Beverly’s shoes” and is now the one scripting the next chapter. IDW CEO Davidi Jonas put the case in one line: “Who better to tell it than Beverly Crusher herself?”

Zahn Takes On Deep Space Nine

IDW announced on October 7 that Timothy Zahn will write Star Trek: Roc’s Egg, an original graphic novel set on Deep Space Nine and due in October 2027. It is his first Star Trek project. Ángel Hernández, whose credits include Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming and Godzilla: Here There Be Aliens, draws it. IDW’s tagline is “Something is rotten on Deep Space 9.”

The story is a mystery. A Roc’s Egg, an artifact, arrives on the station and is seemingly destroyed in transit, so a Federation JAG investigation is called in. The team finds a secret auction, a station full of wealthy collectors and dangerous criminals, a priceless artifact that may not be what it seems and a murder waiting to happen. IDW calls it a “twisty new mystery” set on a station “where everyone has something to hide.”

Zahn said his association with Star Trek “goes all the way back to 1966” and that he wants to add “my own small grace note to that rich and vibrant symphony.” He called the job “a huge honor and privilege.” Antos, quoted in the announcement as the former IDW Group Editor, called herself a lifelong fan of his work and pointed to his “incredible gift for intricate plotting.”

The Man Who Wrote Thrawn

Before Heir to the Empire arrived in 1991, Star Wars had gone four years without new material since the original film’s tenth anniversary. Zahn’s novel ended that stretch and reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Dark Force Rising followed in 1992 and The Last Command in 1993, and the three books sold 15 million copies combined. The trilogy is widely credited with building the Expanded Universe, and its success led Lucasfilm to commission more novels right away.

The books gave Star Wars characters it kept using for three decades. Grand Admiral Thrawn is an Imperial officer who beats his enemies by studying them, down to their art, to learn how they think. Mara Jade, a former agent of the Emperor, and the smuggler Talon Karrde came from the same books. Zahn followed with the Hand of Thrawn duology in 1997 and 1998 and the prequel Outbound Flight in 2006. When Lucasfilm rebuilt its continuity, Thrawn came back anyway, and Zahn wrote the new novels from 2017 to 2019, then the Ascendancy trilogy in 2020 and 2021. In 2023, Dave Filoni confirmed that Zahn consulted on Ahsoka to help the team portray Thrawn correctly.

That is the work of a writer who did more than fill a licensing slot. Zahn built a villain, a heroine and a political situation that readers carried for more than 30 years, with no film behind them for most of that time. NPR listeners ranked the trilogy 88th among the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books in a 2011 poll of more than 60,000 voters. Outside Star Wars, he won the 1984 Hugo Award for the novella “Cascade Point,” has published more than sixty novels, and wrote the Cobra and Dragonback series. A mystery set on Deep Space Nine sits close to his trade. Thrawn’s campaigns are puzzles that the heroes solve one step late.

Fans React on Zahn’s Facebook Page

Readers on Zahn’s Facebook page welcomed the news. One fan wrote:

I’ve always thought DS9 was the best sci-fi version of Trek. It’s fantastic one of the best sci-fi writers in the business is having a crack at DS9. I’m so pumped for this. !!

Another wrote:

Congrats! Maybe ill be able to get into Star Trek now that you are writing for it

A third wrote:

Congratulations! So happy to see you work in yet another of my favourite IP’s. Especially with the focus star trek has is appreciated with the current state of the world.

The second comment shows what an outside author brings to a franchise book. A reader who says he has not gotten into Star Trek names Zahn as the reason to try it.

IDW’s Trek Line After Antos

On September 8, Antos announced she was stepping back from editing Star Trek comics after a five-year run and shifting her focus to IDW Dark, the horror line she helped build. She remains Senior Group Editor for Licensing at IDW, and Thea Cheuk and Cassandra Jones take over the Star Trek books. The Zahn announcement still carries her name, though this is the beginning of a transition for Star Trek at IDW.

IDW’s most recent Star Trek launches centered on Kurtzman-era leads: a flagship series with Captain Seven of Nine commanding the USS Enterprise-G, and Star Trek: Zero Point, starring Commander Raffi Musiker, which goes on sale October 14. McFadden and Zahn point somewhere else. One book fills a 20-year gap in a Next Generation character’s life, and the other is a mystery on a Deep Space Nine station. Both rest on legacy settings and a writer with a following of their own.

If a Next Generation actress and the author of Thrawn can earn this response before a page is drawn, will IDW build its Star Trek line around writers like them, or go back to the Picard-era leads it launched last month?

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A comic retailer burned its own copies of the Frank Cho retailer-exclusive variant of Absolute Batman #23 on a Whatnot live stream to cut supply and raise the price of what was left. DC Comics answered by banning the shop from any further exclusive retailer variants, a penalty that cost it the planned Alex Maleev cover for Absolute Batman #25, according to Bleeding Cool on October 5. The shop’s Whatnot channel now appears to be gone.

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The cover shows Absolute Batman fighting Absolute Clayface. The shop promoted the burn with AI-generated Absolute Batman fire imagery and a live-sale countdown. After the backlash, its operator wrote online: “yeah because zero retailers in the history of comic books ever destroyed comic books they purchased. I’m just an outlier….” The shop is still listed for New York Comic Con at booth #3822.

This Is Not About Frank Cho

Cho’s name carries history, but it’s not about that in this interest. In April 2015 he posted a sketch cover of Spider-Gwen in a suggestive pose that mirrored the Milo Manara Spider-Woman cover from November 2014. Writer Robbi Rodriguez criticized it, and Sam Maggs of The Mary Sue objected because the character is a teenager. J. Scott Campbell and Rob Liefeld defended him. Cho answered by drawing Harley Quinn in the same pose, and he repeated the idea with Cammy for Street Fighter Legends #1 in April 2016. According to Wikipedia, Cho said the publicity tripled his website traffic and brought in more job offers.

In 2016 DC hired him for variant covers on the first 24 issues of Wonder Woman under Rebirth. He quit that July after the sixth, citing conflicts with writer Greg Rucka, who objected to sexualized depictions of the character.

Nothing in the reporting ties the burn to Cho’s past, and the shop’s stated purpose was to reduce supply. This was not a protest and not a statement about an artist. It was inventory management with a lighter: destroy copies, and the ones left in the shop’s hands become rarer and more expensive.

The cynicism runs deeper than any grudge. Cho’s own account of 2015 is that controversy paid. The shop applied the same math to paper.

The Rarity Racket

Scarcity is the business model, and DC wrote the rules. Retailer exclusives, ratio variants as steep as 1:1000 and embargoed reveals exist to manufacture rarity without shrinking the standard print run, according to one speculation analysis. DC’s new terms for retailer exclusives, reported by Bleeding Cool on July 12, bar shops from altering variant artwork, putting it on merchandise, building composite images, revealing covers before DC’s embargo date, or placing variants in blind bags, mystery packs and sealed bundles. DC “strongly encourages” caps of five times cover price on unsigned variants and ten times on signed ones, and says: “DC does not wish to support price-gouging of DC’s customers.” Fandom Pulse’s July coverage pointed at the contradiction. DC punishes shops for charging what the market will pay on books whose scarcity DC designed.

The lengths people go to for rarity have turned strange. Bleeding Cool reported that Scott Snyder receives complimentary copies of every issue of Absolute Batman, including every retailer-exclusive cover, in three-figure quantities, and sells them on his Whatnot show. The same report says his sales rep appears to be wholesaling some of those copies to a retailer, who then offers the books for sale before the original retailer has publicly revealed the exclusive. Bleeding Cool calls the flap CompGate. Separately, DC has told artists it is done with homage covers unless the homage is to something Warner Bros. owns.

Then there are blind bags. A blind bag is a sealed pack of comics where the buyer does not know what is inside until it is opened. Planet Comics says the contents can include standard covers, variants or ratio variants such as 1:25 or 1:50, and admits: “You’re not guaranteed a rare book.” Marvel has built promotions around them. Under its 2026 changes, the True Believers blind bags for books such as Queen In Black #1 and Avengers Armageddon #1 hold only exclusive variants that cannot be ordered through normal channels, including ultra-rare hand-drawn sketch covers by artists and celebrities. The Marvel 616 Day mystery bags for DoomQuest #1 hold black-and-white pencil versions with extremely limited print runs, plus foil Doctor Doom masks. After forged Robert Downey Jr. sketch covers from earlier Ultimate Endgame blind bags sold for $3,500, Marvel added authentication measures to its new sketch covers.

The structure is a loot box. The buyer pays a fixed price and takes a chance at a rare item, then does it again. DC forbids its retailers from putting DC variants into blind bags. Marvel builds a promotion around them. Either way, the reader who came for a story is being sold odds.

Comics have been here before. In the early 1990s, holofoil and die-cut covers and first issues like X-Force #1 and Spawn #1 ran to millions of copies on the promise of future value, and the market crashed when that value never arrived.

A Market Leaning on One Book

The business underneath all this has taken real damage. Diamond Comic Distributors filed Chapter 11 on January 14, 2025. It had been burning $1.3 million a week and had lost a $40 million annual revenue stream when its Wizards of the Coast exclusive ended. It shut down on December 31, 2025, according to BleedingFool. Publishers still cannot reach millions of dollars in consigned inventory locked in a Mississippi warehouse. Dark Horse and IDW laid off staff, and IDW reported a 12.5% sales decline that it blamed on Diamond. Marvel and DC had already moved to Penguin Random House during the pandemic, and comic shops lost the Previews catalog and its ordering tools. Elsewhere, the Tapas webtoon platform will shut down on March 31, 2027, and Popverse has closed, The Comics Beat reports.

The headline numbers tell a different story, and they point at the same book. Publishers Weekly reports direct market sales reached $2.2 billion in 2025, up nearly 30%, and analyst Milton Griepp credited an influx of new readers drawn to DC’s Absolute Batman and other relaunched titles. Bleeding Cool puts Absolute Batman at roughly half a million copies a month and says it would rank as the fourth-best-selling publisher in the direct market on its own. Skybound’s Robert Kirkman told Publishers Weekly: “I think we could do better at nurturing the new books that today will become the reliable mainstays.” SKTCHD’s David Harper wrote that 2025 was a good year for the direct market but that the gains were not spread equally among stakeholders.

That concentration explains the fire. The title carrying the growth is also the title whose variants shops are fighting over, so the temptation to game scarcity sits on the one book carrying the market. Add a collapsed distributor, shuttered platforms and a field this dependent on a handful of hits, and a shop burning stock on camera reads as the end point of the rarity economy, not an outlier.

What the Fire Shows

A shop destroyed new product from the title credited with driving the direct market’s growth because the math said fewer copies bring a higher price. DC answered by banning the shop. The same DC sets the ratios, controls the exclusives and writes the embargo rules that make a scarce cover worth burning for in the first place. Marvel sells sealed bags of odds and adds authentication after forgeries reach $3,500. Retailers and publishers both feed an aftermarket that rewards whoever controls supply.

None of it needs a grudge against Frank Cho or anyone else. It needs a number on the cover and a buyer willing to pay it. The 1990s showed where an industry ends up when the collectible becomes the product. The shop on the Whatnot stream did not invent that logic. It took it at its word.

When publishers sell rarity as the product and shops answer by destroying the product, who is left selling comics to readers?

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Gail Simone came into X-Men in a lot of ways with a no-win scenario. Her editor, Tom Brevoort, had already alienated fans by attacking them and blocking them before it launched this new era with her #1 issue of Uncanny X-Men, and it was filled with a line of deep identity politics downstream, many of which had books canceled.

The title and all of Marvel’s lines have been floundering for years, and frustrated X-Men fans have taken to different platforms to voice their grievances, something Simone is clearly upset about.

Gail Simone’s Uncanny X-Men #1 was a major sales event for Marvel in 2024. The numbers since then show a launch spike that never became a rising tide for the X-Men books around it.

The opening was strong. Bleeding Cool’s weekly bestseller list showed Uncanny X-Men #1 selling more than twice what Batman #151 did that week. CBR reported that the debut ranked among the year’s highest-grossing releases, behind only DC’s Absolute Universe titles and a few Spider-Man and X-Men books. Marvel got the opening it wanted.

The flagship has been harder to hold. In ICv2’s March 2026 point-of-sale rankings, Uncanny X-Men #25 fell from #33 to #54. Comic Book Revolution’s Rokk wrote that the book had fallen out of the Top 50 conversation. In August, issues #33 and #34, the start of the “Wild Ride” arc, ranked #16 and #27, so the book can still reach the upper chart when a story kicks off. The open question is whether it stays there between arcs.

Gail Simone unloaded on Facebook after receiving criticism for her Uncanny X-Men run:

There are a couple platforms that seem to hate me personally and so of course, they make all their hatred of my work very personal. I think it’s kind of a sad way to live, but there you go. We still have the best-selling X-book and critical raves pretty much every issue. Feel free to tell people I ruined your childhood, I guess.

I don’t take it seriously, but there is one complaint I find funny, which is that I am ‘pushing my own characters’ or a certain favorite character, or whatever, over THEIR favorite character.

I mean, guilty, I guess. I would never think some character I came up with is going to be as popular as Wolverine. But Wolverine is in eighty books a month. I like using him as Fonzie, he comes in, tears up the theatre and is awesome.

Rogue and Gambit, I made Rogue the POV character for the first stories because I felt she was compelling in the role of leader (yes I know she has been point man on teams in the past, briefly). And with that came some really cool Gambit stories. But she’s barely been in a bunch of issues lately and other people have had the spotlight. She’s given leadership to Monet and Quicksilver, I am not even sure if some of the people on these platforms read the books, to be honest.

And as for ‘pushing new characters,’ well, I don’t know what to say. The Outliers, Lady Henrietta, Mutina and Howler, even the Vig, have gotten huge response, people ask to see more. When I came aboard, I said I didn’t want to just tell the same stories over and over, I wanted to add to mutant lore. It’s not about ‘my’ characters, all of which were co-created and designed by the greats David Marquez and Luciano Vecchio. In my opinion, it would be a shame not to let THOSE two guys bring characters we created together to the book.

I get that we’re not for everyone, but there are a lot of books that have been telling more traditional stories with your favorite X-People, that’s part of why I love the X-line so much. There’s a book for everyone.

I wanted a book with a LOT of new stuff, I am proud of how many things have been brought into the lore.

I totally get it if you want to see more Jubilee. She has a multi-issue story to herself after the next big arc.

Want more Pietro and Monet? On it’s way, you’re seeing more already.

Nightcrawler is becoming more of a panel hog and I love it.

And Wolverine is Wolverine, he steals most of the scenes he’s in.

I wanted to bring a lot of new stuff because I love the X-Men. It’s not about me, it’s about these books I have loved. We’re having a blast and a lot of readers are, too.

Thank you for the support!

But there’s not a lot of support for the franchise. In March 2026, the X-Men franchise placed six comics in ICv2’s Top 50, against fifteen in March 2025 and twelve in March 2024. Its Top 25 presence went from eight comics in March 2024 to six in March 2025 to one in March 2026. February 2026 had been better, with ten in the Top 50, and Comic Book Revolution blamed the drop on a wave of February launches that fell fast. August 2026 came in at six in the Top 50 and two in the Top 25, so the line has not regained its 2024 footing.

The down-line books show the pattern in detail:

• Generation X-23 #2 fell from #38 to #103.

• Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #2 fell from #35 to #84.

• Psylocke: Ninja #3 landed at #92 after a #15 debut.

• Rogue #3 slid from #61 to #80.

• Magik & Colossus #2 dropped from #24 to #60.

• Inglorious X-Force #3 sat at #125.

Comic Book Revolution, using Comichron projections from 2022, estimates that titles outside the Top 100 sell under 18,000 copies. That is a rough benchmark, since Marvel does not release unit figures.

Cancellations came with the same pattern. Weapon X-Men was cancelled after five issues. NYX, X-Force and X-Factor each ended at issue #10 in spring 2025. Exceptional X-Men ended in November 2025 after 13 issues. Bleeding Cool now reports that listings suggest Inglorious X-Force, X-Men United and Gen X-23 may each end with a tenth issue this fall, and that Marvel may be preparing a December relaunch timed to Avengers: Doomsday. Marvel has not confirmed any of that.

The relaunch that began with Simone’s first issue in 2024 was supposed to reset the line. Two years in, the flagship needs a new story arc to climb back toward the Top 25, and the books launched around it are being cancelled or sliding toward the bottom of the chart. If the 2024 relaunch could not hold the line, what does a December relaunch change?

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Paul Cornell announced in his newsletter that Cosmic Lighthouse, the comics company he co-founded, is adapting Martha Wells’ “Murderbot” into a graphic novel. The book is titled “Murderbot: All Systems Red,” adapted by Erica Schultz, with art by Gary Erskine, color by Yel Zamor, and letters by Simon Bowland. Jaime Jones, who already illustrates the prose novella covers, handles the main cover, with variants from John Picacio, Tommy Arnold, and Francesca Myman. Arnold also worked on design for the “Murderbot” television series.

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“This is one of those big announcements!” Cornell wrote. “My comics company, Cosmic Lighthouse, today announced its second graphic novel: Murderbot: All Systems Red, an adaptation of the Martha Wells novella.”

The book includes a new “Murderbot” short story written by Wells and an introduction from David Dastmalchian, who plays Gurathin on the show. Cornell specified the comic adapts the source novella rather than the television adaptation: “We’re adapting the book, not the show, so expect a more androgynous Sec Unit and a different take on its favourite shows.”

Cosmic Lighthouse plans several physical editions alongside a digital release, with add-ons Cornell described as “luxurious extras,” including an option to have yourself drawn into the comic. A Kickstarter is coming, and the signup page already shows 1,733 followers ahead of launch.

A Track Record Before This Announcement

Cornell built his career across comics, television, and prose before starting Cosmic Lighthouse with Lee Harris and Anthony Cronin. He wrote Marvel’s “The Avengers” and created “Saucer Country” with artist Ryan Kelly. He has writing credits on “Doctor Who.” His novel work includes the “Lychford” series, now six books deep, and he co-hosts a podcast examining science fiction television going back to 1953.

Cosmic Lighthouse’s stated mission is publishing original graphic novels by established science fiction and fantasy prose writers, built around their existing series. The company’s first release under that model was “Salvation’s Child,” a prologue to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “The Final Architecture” series, with Tchaikovsky adapting his own material rather than handing the job to a separate writer. That book went out through Comixology as a digital release on Amazon’s platform. Cornell confirmed the follow-up will differ in format: “There will be (several) physical editions at the same time as a digital one.”

Why Murderbot Is The Bigger Get

“Murderbot” carries an audience the Tchaikovsky book didn’t have built in at launch. Apple TV+’s adaptation, starring Alexander Skarsgård, holds a 97% critics score and an 80% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus reads: “Alexander Skarsgård’s superbly dry wit brings a lot of heart to Murderbot, making for a refreshingly jaunty sci-fi saga about finally coming out of one’s shell.”

Wells’ novella series has also sold well on its own before the show existed, and the television deal put the property in front of a much wider audience than a prose-only fanbase. A comics adaptation lands into that expanded audience rather than needing to build one from scratch, which is a different position than Cosmic Lighthouse’s debut title occupied.

The Move From Amazon To Kickstarter

The shift in format matters beyond the extras. Comixology releases put a book inside Amazon’s Kindle comics ecosystem, where digital comics sales have historically lagged behind other digital categories on the platform. Crowdfunding a physical release instead opens up tiered pricing, multiple format options, and add-ons like the in-comic self-insert Cornell mentioned, all of which give a publisher more revenue per backer than a flat digital purchase.

Going from an Amazon-exclusive digital debut to a Kickstarter-backed physical release with variant covers and creator involvement from Wells herself looks like a company adjusting its model title to title rather than repeating the same playbook. The 1,733 followers already signed up before launch suggest the swap is paying off before a single pledge comes in.

Cornell closed his newsletter post with: “Do take a look! This is enormous for us!”

Does the jump from a digital-only debut to a fully crowdfunded physical release with this kind of talent attached tell you Cosmic Lighthouse is scaling up faster than expected?

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Tom King will stop writing Wonder Woman after issue #40, releasing December 16, 2026, ending a run that turned the character into a vehicle for one political jab after another. King had originally planned to write 100 issues. “I wanted to, when I first started, do 100 issues, so I’m disappointed in myself for not getting that,” he said. His schedule, including work on Lanterns, made continuing past issue #40 impossible.

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The run leaves behind a track record fans won’t miss. Wonder Woman #4 put a dying boy in a scene where the child asked Diana, “Is it because I’m sick? Inside, like. And…and is that why I am…Why…Is that why God made me sick?” The subtext is here because the boy is very effeminate and really into girls’ toys and Wonder Woman paraphernalia, implying he’s “born” homosexual or transgender.

Wonder Woman #5 followed with an image of the villain Cheetah appearing to masturbate with her animal companion. Wonder Woman #8 had King’s stand-in for Donald Trump, a villain called the Sovereign, quote Ephesians 5 through a “lasso of untruth” meant to frame Scripture as a lie, then have the character ask Wonder Woman, “Why do you think God sent his only son to save us? And not his only daughter?” Diana’s response: “I… do not… I do not believe in your… your… God.”

The Sovereign never let up after that. The character has been described as an “old, white, straight, misogynist who sits as the ‘King’ of America,” built around “xenophobia” toward Amazons framed as unwanted immigrants. King had the Sovereign take a shot at Ronald Reagan too, referencing the Iran-Contra scandal with the line, “What was it we had that old actor fellow say when he got himself into all that Nicaraguan trouble? Mistakes were made.” Wonder Woman #17 put the Sovereign in the White House the same week Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president, a timing Bleeding Cool called out in a piece on the matter.

Wonder Woman #14 killed off Steve Trevor at the Sovereign’s hands, then gave readers a panel of Diana sobbing while wrapped in his service flag, a scene critics tied to accusations that King had turned Wonder Woman into what ComicBook.com called “an American propaganda tool.” Fans called the issue the most hated of the entire run.

King’s final arc, “Wonder War,” introduces the Matriarch, the Sovereign’s daughter, as the last villain of his tenure. King and artist Daniel Sampere describe her as an evolved threat who no longer hides what the Sovereign concealed, choosing to display dominance openly rather than operate through subtlety. Even on the way out the door, King built his ending around a metaphor for power that refuses to hide itself.

It’s a good thing King is finally off the book. What’s worrying is that DC hasn’t named a permanent successor for issue #41 onward. The last time King and Sampere stepped away, even briefly, DC handed Wonder Woman #29 and #30 to writer Stephanie Williams and artist Jeff Spokes, the same Jeff Spokes who had just come off the single-issue-and-cancelled Red Hood run with writer Gretchen Felker-Martin. That’s the bench DC reached for on short notice. Whoever gets the assignment permanently in December will be picking up a character DC has spent years turning into a soapbox, and there’s no reason yet to think the next writer will do anything but keep pushing.

Who do you think DC hands Wonder Woman to next, and does anyone expect the book to actually get better?

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NEXT: Heather Antos Is Officially Off Star Trek Comics, Her Successors Raise Their Own Questions

Heather Antos, the editor who built IDW’s modern Star Trek comics line into a woke monstrosity, announced she’s handing the franchise off after five years. She’s not leaving IDW, she remains Senior Group Editor and is shifting her focus to expanding the publisher’s IDW Dark horror line. As much as her post claims to make this a good thing for her, it’s clear this signals problems with how the line has gone as of recent. Her full farewell post reads:

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Two people paid by DC Studios to promote Lanterns are, this week, publicly building the case that the property itself is broken along the lines of sex and race. Not fan theorists. Not critics. The Episode 3 writer and a co-host of DC’s official podcast.

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Vanessa Baden Kelly, who wrote “OutKast” and serves as a co-executive producer on Lanterns, told Collider exactly what she’d been arguing throughout the writers’ room. “If the ring wasn’t sexist, Bernadette would have been chosen,” she said, calling John Stewart’s mother the most fearless character in the entire story. This wasn’t a one-off comment made after the episode aired. Baden Kelly described it as something she said repeatedly during development, meaning the writers’ room debated whether a 60-year-old fictional alien artifact discriminates against women, and the writer lost that argument only in the sense that the show still aired.

Frankey Smith, co-host of DC Studios Showcase: The Official Podcast, a program produced in partnership with DC and Max, has been running her own parallel campaign accusing Hal Jordan specifically of racism. In an Instagram Reel, she said: “Hal casually enacts misogyny and racism when it suits him, and not because he believes in the system so much, but because he wants to get the job done and he’s lazy.” She added that Hal “is not absolved from inherent racism that plagues our country, and he has no issues enacting that.” When a fan named Raymond Weijland pushed back on her original claim in her DMs, Smith told him directly: “The DC may not be for you love, the heros are complex and flawed. I suggest paw patrol.” When he said he’d keep watching anyway, she told him to check his privilege and to “buckle up” because more of this was coming.

Both of these positions collapse under about ten seconds of scrutiny. Baden Kelly’s ring argument requires ignoring that the Green Lantern Corps has been packed with female Lanterns since the 1980s: Katma Tui, Arisia, Boodikka, Soranik Natu, Jade, Jessica Cruz, an entire roster spanning every species and sex in fiction. Katma Tui isn’t just a random example either, she’s John Stewart’s own wife in the comics. The ring has never once operated on a rule that excludes women. It measures the ability to overcome great fear, which Baden Kelly herself described accurately in the same interview, then somehow concluded that measurement is sexist anyway.

Smith’s case is even shakier on inspection. Her go-to piece of evidence is Emerald Twilight, the 1994 story where Hal destroys the Green Lantern Corps and becomes the villain Parallax. What she leaves out is Green Lantern: Rebirth, DC’s own canonical follow-up establishing that Parallax was an ancient fear-entity that Sinestro deliberately unleashed on Hal while he was psychologically shattered from watching his home city get destroyed. Citing a hero’s actions under supernatural possession as proof of his everyday character isn’t analysis, it’s cherry-picking a result and working backward to justify it. Her other core piece of evidence, Hal calling John “Junior,” is condescending and rude. It’s also not automatically racial just because the person receiving it is Black, a distinction Smith’s framework doesn’t appear to allow for at all: in her telling, every insult directed at John becomes proof of racism, every conflict with the sheriff becomes proof of misogyny, and Hal’s simple refusal to hand over his own ring to a replacement the Guardians unilaterally chose becomes “participation in an unjust power structure.” There’s no version of Hal Jordan resisting his own forced removal that wouldn’t get flagged as bigotry under that logic.

This isn’t confined to two people going rogue on social media. It’s baked into the show itself. Episode 3’s “OutKast” has Bernadette explicitly telling Laura Linney’s Guardian character that Hal gets to live without fear because he’s a white man, directly framing his courage as a function of racial privilege rather than character. Frankey Smith’s own defense of the backlash cites Peacemaker Season 2 exploring how “white complicity in these structures” can be “just as harmful” as active racism, meaning the show’s writers’ room and its own official promotional podcast are both explicitly running white privilege and complicity as a throughline across multiple entries in the DCU, not as subtext audiences are reading into it, but as text the people making it are describing out loud. When your own writer says the villain’s mother was right to blame a white man’s ease on his race, and your own podcast host says any white character’s passive existence inside the story counts as harm, you’ve stopped writing a superhero show and started writing a lecture with a Green Lantern logo stapled to it.

The ratings are already reacting. Samba TV’s household chart shows Lanterns falling from No. 2 to No. 4 in the same week both of these stories broke. James Gunn is publicly calling the episode “one of the best” of the season while the show’s own creative and promotional team hands ammunition to every critic calling this exact pattern out.

None of this requires audiences to invent a race-war narrative. The people writing and promoting the show are typing it out themselves, on the record, in their own words, and then acting surprised when fans notice.

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NEXT: Grant Morrison Watches “Lanterns,” Delivers Mixed Verdict After Slamming Damon Lindelof

Chip Zdarsky told YouTube’s David Harper he was turned away from the official Spider-Man: Brand New Day afterparty, held at his own hotel, and stopped by security while trying to walk through his own lobby. Rob Liefeld went through something close to identical eighteen months earlier at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere, and it ended with him quitting Marvel entirely. Zdarsky’s version of the story ends with him shrugging it off and heading upstairs.

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Zdarsky laid out the contrast in treatmen. “It was interesting to see the difference between going to the Fantastic 4 premiere, which is obviously a Marvel movie, and we were treated quite well, and it was like really extravagant, and this was a little bit different because it was like a Sony Marvel movie. We weren’t quite the A-list celebrities that we were at the Fantastic 4 premiere.” The comic creators weren’t invited to Sony’s official afterparty, and Zdarsky says that was fine, Marvel Comics had its own smaller gathering. The trouble started once he tried to get back to his own room. “It was happening in my hotel. So I try to get in, and there’s a bunch of people lining up to get into the actual afterparty, and I see a buddy, and I start talking to them, and they stop me, and they’re like, ‘Do you have a ticket? Do you have the bracelet? The bracelet?’ I’m just like, ‘No, I’m a guest here in the hotel’. He’s like, ‘If you don’t have a bracelet, you can’t be here, you can’t be here’. I’m like, ‘I’m sleeping in this hotel’.”

Security tried to remove him from the lobby entirely. “I showed him my card. I’m like, I’m in the hotel. I’m just talking to this guy. He’s like, ‘You got to get out all the way. You’ve got to get out all the way. I’m like, ‘there’s no one here’. I was like, ‘Am I going to get into a fight?’ It’d be pretty funny if you know there’s like a news story about a Marvel comics creator taking a swing at a security guy at the afterparty.” He eventually just pushed past them. “I just pushed by them. I didn’t really want to go to the afterparty anyway, so I was fine. I didn’t get turned away from the party because I wasn’t invited, and I didn’t try to get in. I’d rather hang out with like Marvel creators and Marvel family than, you know, than weird executives.”

Rob Liefeld’s version of this story, as he told it on his Robservations podcast in February 2025, carried none of that shrug. Liefeld said he and his family weren’t invited to the Deadpool & Wolverine afterparty, and that Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige blanked him on the red carpet, an encounter Liefeld described as something meant “to embarrass, diminish, defeat me.” He also said photos of him with the film’s cast and crew, taken at Disney’s own request, were later deleted at his publicist’s request from Marvel’s side. Liefeld traced the friction back further, to Marvel giving co-creator status on Wolverine to editor Roy Thomas in 2023 rather than the writers and artists who actually created the character, and to a 2024 request that he and Fabian Nicieza get lead creator credit on the film itself, similar to what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have received. That request, by his account, went over badly inside Marvel. “My reps were screamed at today ‘We are NOT Fox!’ Tell me about it. Also hung up on,” Liefeld posted at the time. He put the blame directly on Feige: “Kevin Feige does not treat comic book creators well. That is my personal experience.” Days later, he confirmed he was done with the company entirely: “This last issue of Deadpool Team-Up is my final work with all the gang and my last work with Marvel.” Fabian Nicieza, by contrast, was invited to that same afterparty and confirmed it publicly when asked, adding only that he’d been disappointed the celebrities were roped off in their own section and that his one shot at meeting director Shawn Levy came at adjacent urinals.

The difference between these two stories isn’t the snub. It’s the leverage each creator was working with when it happened. Zdarsky is still an active Marvel and DC writer with ongoing contracts on both sides, credits that keep him inside the industry’s two biggest publishers and inside its convention afterparty circuit by extension. Liefeld had already spent a year publicly souring on how Marvel treats its creators over the Wolverine co-creator credit dispute before the party snub even happened, and he had creator-owned properties and Image Comics to fall back on the moment he decided he was finished. A writer with contracts still on the table has every incentive to laugh off a bracelet dispute with hotel security. A creator who’s already decided the relationship isn’t worth it anymore has nothing left to lose by naming Kevin Feige directly and walking.

Zdarsky’s night didn’t end at that door either. Weeks later at San Diego Comic-Con, he got the full VIP treatment at Marvel Studios’ own post-Hall H party, working a room with Paul Rudd, talking Tim Robinson comedy bits, and standing five feet from Questlove on the decks. “I waltzed in like I owned the place,” he said. By the fourth drink he’d wandered into the DC Comics party uninvited too, dancing with DC’s creators after “sweaty from dancing at Nou.” That’s the treatment a creator with active contracts on both sides of the Marvel/DC divide gets to enjoy. Liefeld doesn’t get invited to either party anymore, because he made sure of it himself.

If Marvel treats its afterparty guest list as a real signal of who the company values, what does it say that the creator still cashing Marvel and DC checks gets waved into every room in the building, while the one who asked for actual creator credit doesn’t get past the lobby?

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NEXT: Grant Morrison Watches “Lanterns,” Delivers Mixed Verdict After Slamming Damon Lindelof

Matt Kindt designed an open-source emblem for one purpose: let creators tell readers, at a glance, that a comic came from a human hand and nothing else. Ahoy Comics just became the first publisher to commit its entire line to wearing that emblem, starting with Mark Russell and Russ Braun’s The Forgotten Divine. And now that the logo is actually circulating in the wild, plenty of people are looking at it and asking the same question: why does the symbol meant to reassure you about authenticity look like it belongs on a dollar bill next to a floating eye?

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Ahoy Comics Editor-in-Chief Tom Peyer then put the company’s position in writing without softening it: “AI is rightly loathed throughout the world of legitimate comics, and we want to make it clear to our readers that Ahoy is 100% powered by the very human blood, sweat and tears of our uber-talented creators.” Every future Ahoy title carries Kindt’s certification now, a public, permanent, on-cover promise that nothing inside was touched by a generative tool. It, of course, does not certify anything regarding people using digital 3D assets, Photoshop rendering, or using robots to print and staple books, however.

The certification itself is open-source, released under a Creative Commons license so any publisher or independent creator can use it for free, provided the work was made entirely by human hands from concept through finished page. Kindt debuted it on his own Mind MGMT: New & Improved #1 under his Flux House imprint at Oni Press before Ahoy picked it up wholesale. There’s no third-party auditor checking anyone’s process. The whole system runs on a publisher’s word.

That trust-based system is landing in an industry that has gotten ugly over this exact question. San Diego Comic-Con spent years quietly allowing labeled, non-for-sale AI art in its art show, until artists like Karla Ortiz, who’s worked on Marvel films and is a plaintiff in an ongoing AI lawsuit, and Sarah Myer publicly called the policy “tone deaf.” The convention reversed the rule within 24 hours and banned AI art from the show outright, with no public announcement, just a quiet edit to the fine print.

That reversal didn’t happen in a vacuum. A month earlier at Dragon Con, a vendor’s booth, registered to Oriana Gertz Art, got surrounded by fans and organizers over accusations of selling AI-generated prints. When the vendor couldn’t produce convincing proof the work was human-made, Atlanta police physically removed them from the show floor. Someone left a sign on the empty table reading “Vendor removed for selling AI,” and it became a rallying point for the rest of the weekend. Within weeks, GalaxyCon, which runs a portfolio of mid-sized comic and pop-culture conventions across North America, announced a sweeping AI ban of its own, citing the Dragon Con incident directly. DC Comics president Jim Lee put his own line in the sand publicly around the same period, vowing the company would never lean on AI for its published work: “Not now, not ever.”

The suspicion cuts the other way too, and that’s where it gets uglier. A Japanese fan artist doing Demon Slayer work got hit with false AI accusations from a single caller-out and deleted their entire account rather than fight it, the cultural pressure around “causing offense to the community” too intense to weather. An artist named Ben Moran posted commissioned work, over 100 hours of labor, to a major art subreddit and got banned anyway; moderators told him even after seeing his process files that the piece “looks so much like AI we don’t care.” In China, an illustrator who goes by Snow Fish discovered his own work had been fed into a platform’s AI generator without his consent, and even after the company privately admitted it, boycott hashtags accusing him of secretly using AI himself racked up more than 20 million views before the record got corrected. One artist helping moderate an AI ban in a children’s-book illustrators group watched legitimate artists get harassed off the platform, then got falsely accused herself. Reports have documented posts telling AI users to kill themselves, and pro-AI commenters receiving actual death threats over hobbyist image generation, threats platforms have in some cases determined don’t even violate their own terms of service.

That’s the environment Ahoy is stepping into with a permanent, unverifiable, cover-mounted pledge. It’s either a genuinely smart trust play in a market where readers are primed to demand exactly this kind of proof, or it’s painting a target on every future release for anyone looking to make an accusation stick, given that the certification has no auditing process behind it at all.

Set the politics aside for a second and just look at the triangle with a single centered eye. They inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally?) created the exact visual grammar that’s been shorthand for the Illuminati and secret-society iconography for decades, on everything from album covers to conspiracy forums. Maybe nobody at Ahoy or in Kindt’s design process intended that reading. It doesn’t matter. A symbol whose entire job is inspiring trust probably shouldn’t require a footnote explaining it’s not what it looks like.

I’ll be running a side-by-side below: Kindt’s original certification next to a cleaned-up version I put together using AI as the thumbnail here. Tell me which one you’d actually want to see on a comic book cover.

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NEXT: Grant Morrison Watches “Lanterns,” Delivers Mixed Verdict After Slamming Damon Lindelof

Dynamite Entertainment cancelled every retailer order for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel on Wednesday, then followed it hours later by cancelling the newly launched Firefly series too. The publisher’s official explanation: writer Kelly Thompson’s story “evolved and became more ambitious,” so the books need bigger page counts and a resolicitation. Dynamite owner and CEO Nick Barrucci told Bleeding Cool the change comes “at no additional cost to readers or retailers.”

That explanation lands differently once you look at what Dynamite has been through in the past eighteen months.

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Larry Hama, the writer who built the mythology behind Marvel’s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, spent part of this week airing a very public dispute with toy dealer Mark Bellomo over a haul of vehicles and figures that vanished from his hands before the pandemic and never came back.

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Hama laid out the accusation in a Facebook post:

"Has anybody been in touch with Mark Bellomo? He has ALL of my GI Joe vehicles and figures. He hauled them away before the pandemic to sell them for me on line, and so far, I have not received a single cent. I have asked him repeatedly for an accounting, and to return my property. At first he made excuses, saying he was having personal issues, but I see that he is on FB selling toys again. He has not returned my calls in over a year. If anybody has purchased signed GI Joe toys or figures from him, please contact me. "

Bellomo apparently resurfaced to claim he’d already responded on Hama’s page. Hama wasn’t having it:

He claims he replied to my page. So far, I haven't seen it."

Then came the money. Bellomo sent Hama a PayPal payment of $850, unannounced and unexplained. Hama posted a screenshot of it and refunded the transaction on the spot, laying out exactly why:

“Just got this. No accounting, no explanation, nothing. At this point I don't want his money. Especially not an arbitrary amount he made up. If he has never sold any of them, I want the toys back. If I accept this, he is off the hook."

Days later, the temperature dropped. Hama posted that the collection was coming home through a third party:

"Mark Bellomo has promised to pack up all my stuff and return it via Carson Mataxis. He has made his mea culpa, and apologized for stalling so long. I accept his explanation, and agree with him that the personal issues involved in this are just that- personal, and need not be gone into any further. I don't hold grudges, and I hope nobody else holds anything against Mark for this."

That would be a tidy ending for a dispute over a private collection, except Hama tacked on a coda that had nothing to do with Bellomo:

"One positive thing is that this brought all the trolls, and lurking 'gaters out of the woodwork. They popped their heads up, and I blocked about ten of them. The comments on his rant made up most of that list."

Nothing in the sequence ties comicsgate to a toy reseller failing to pay a Marvel writer for online sales. The connection exists only in that closing jab, and Hama never explained it.

The collection itself matters beyond its dollar value. Hama didn’t just write G.I. Joe. He invented the file card format that turned a line of plastic action figures into a cast of characters with service records, specialties, and personalities, the backstory engine that made Hasbro’s toy line a cultural fixture in the 1980s. A Vietnam veteran who entered comics after his military service, Hama spent years lettering and scripting for Marvel and built G.I. Joe into one of the publisher’s longest-running licensed titles. Toys built on his own writing disappearing into a reseller’s garage for years, with no payment and no answers, lands as a strange footnote to that career rather than a routine collector dispute.

The reconciliation post ties things off cleanly on Hama’s end, but plenty stays unexplained: what Bellomo actually did with the collection for over a year, why a payment showed up only after Hama went public, and what comicsgate had to do with any of it.

What’s the more interesting story here: a Marvel legend’s decades-old collection getting tangled up with an online reseller, or the reflexive swipe at comicsgate tacked onto a resolution that had nothing to do with them?

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NEXT: Grant Morrison Watches “Lanterns,” Delivers Mixed Verdict After Slamming Damon Lindelof

Kevin Smith’s “Spider-Man/Hulk: Fire and Brimstone” #1 introduces a new all-male supervillain group called the Manosphere, led by Mole Man and stocked with C-listers including Stilt-Man and Sandman. Spider-Man narrates the issue as the team causes chaos across the Marvel Universe, with the loaded term doing exactly the work it’s designed to do: taking a real online subculture and turning it into a punchline villain roster for a Big Two superhero book.

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Smith didn’t need to reach for a manosphere-branded villain team to fill out a Spider-Man/Hulk crossover. Marvel has decades of forgettable henchmen sitting in a filing cabinet waiting to be used. The choice to name the group after a specific, politically loaded internet culture is a decision, not a coincidence, and it fits a pattern Smith has run for years: importing whatever cultural hot button is nearby into a mainstream superhero book, then leaning on the shock value to generate buzz.

This is not new territory for him. Smith’s 2009 “Batman: The Widening Gyre” had a fifteen-year-old girl leave an infant with Daredevil, claiming a virgin birth and insisting the child was either the Messiah or the Antichrist. His run on “Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do” opened with Black Cat’s sexual assault as the inciting incident for the entire miniseries, then took four years between issues to finish telling that story, a gap long enough that readers had largely moved on by the time it wrapped. His “Daredevil” work on “Guardian Devil” gave Karen Page an HIV diagnosis that escalated to full AIDS as a plot twist, then reversed it entirely by revealing she was never sick in the first place, treating a real disease as a cliffhanger gimmick rather than a story worth telling honestly.

Add to that his reputation for simply not finishing what he starts. “Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target” shipped one issue of a planned four-issue run in 2002 and never continued. “The Widening Gyre” was billed as the first half of a longer story with a sequel that never materialized. Smith has openly admitted his lateness made him close to unwelcome in the industry before his Batman work gave him a second chance. A writer with that track record reaching for a culture-war villain name in 2026 isn’t taking a creative risk. It’s a reliable play from a well-worn deck.

Smith is about to become one of the most visible writers in the entire Marvel line. “Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles,” his five-issue crossover with artist David Marquez, launches in January 2027 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of “A New Hope,” bringing Luke Skywalker, Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca into Earth-616 alongside the Avengers and Spider-Man, while Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire team up with Doctor Doom, Ultron, and Thanos. It is a genuine marquee event for Marvel and Lucasfilm both, positioned as a fiftieth-anniversary centerpiece, and it puts Smith in charge of one of the most anticipated superhero-meets-Star Wars stories ever published.

Fans hoping “Fire and Brimstone” was an isolated stumble should look at the twenty-plus years of pattern behind it. Smith has consistently used shock elements, whether it’s a fake virgin birth, a hero’s sexual assault backstory, a disease used as a plot twist, or now a named internet subculture turned into cannon fodder, as a substitute for stories that hold together without the gimmick. There’s no reason to expect “Hope Assembles” will play it straight when the writer has spent two decades reaching for the same trick.

Does Marvel actually vet what Smith puts in these scripts, or is his name alone enough to get a green light regardless of what he does with it?

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NEXT: Warren Ellis Returns to Image Comics, and the Comics Press Wants Him Erased Again

Warren Ellis has a new comic coming out, and half the comics industry is treating it like a crime scene. Image Comics announced on August 11 that the writer will release Ghost Drive Station, a graphic novella illustrated by Lordess Foudre, on November 18. It’s his first new mainstream comics work in five years, and the reaction proves that in this industry, forgiveness has an expiration date that never arrives.

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Rob Liefeld is accusing the internet of faking a column he wrote about Cable, after that column’s contents lined up with an account he had just finished calling a lie.

The fight started with Louise Simonson. At Terrificon’s Uncanny X panel, Simonson described pitching a placeholder leader character she called Commander X, before Liefeld submitted a batch of character designs that led Marvel to settle on the look that became Cable. Fabian Nicieza followed with his own account of what happened later, crediting Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio, and then-editor-in-chief Bob Harras with the decision to retroactively reveal Cable as the son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor.

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Art Spiegelman wants a revolution. That’s the word the 78-year-old cartoonist used in a new Guardian interview published August 15, telling reporter Sophie McBain that “the US needs a counter-revolution,” and that he does not “know where to look for it because the Democrats are so timid.”

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Spiegelman did not stop at policy disagreement. He told the Guardian the Republican Party is “at this point the equivalent of made men in the mafia,” adding, “they’ve committed a murder, they’re complicit in something and they have to keep moving as a complicit unit, so it’s very hard to get someone to blow the whistle and say ‘This is crazy.’” He called the state of American politics “worse than most things I know” and said, “I just don’t see how we get out of this.”

The specifics of the crime he says Republicans are covering up never make it into the piece. Neither does any concrete plan for what a “counter-revolution” would look like. What readers get instead is mafia imagery, a claim that democratic norms have been destroyed, and a shrug toward the opposition party for being too timid to act.

That vagueness is the story, and it lands harder once you know who is saying it.

Spiegelman was born in Stockholm in 1948 to Polish Jewish parents who survived Auschwitz. That history became the subject of Maus, the graphic novel he serialized from 1980 to 1991 depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, built directly from his father’s account of the camps. In 1992, Maus became the first, and still the only, graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Before Maus, Spiegelman spent years in the underground comix scene of the 1960s and 70s, and he co-founded the avant-garde anthology RAW with his wife, Françoise Mouly, in 1980. He also drew for Topps, contributing to Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids. After September 11, he produced In the Shadow of No Towers, a book responding to the attacks and their aftermath in Manhattan, where he lived.

In January 2022, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted 10 to 0 to pull Maus from its eighth grade curriculum, citing profanity and a small nude illustration. Spiegelman called the decision “Orwellian” and told CNBC he was “kind of baffled by this,” adding, “I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”

A man whose defining life’s work documents what happens when a government strips a category of citizens of their rights, using unaccountable state power and mob complicity as its subject matter, is now reaching for mob language and revolutionary rhetoric to describe an elected political party he opposes. The book that made him famous is a warning about what happens when people stop asking for evidence and start sorting the world into conspirators and bystanders. The interview reads like he skipped that part.

None of this makes Spiegelman unusual among figures in his corner of the entertainment and publishing world. Comparing domestic political opponents to organized crime, or calling for a vaguely defined uprising against a sitting government, has become standard content for outlets like the Guardian. What makes it notable here is the gap between the moral authority Spiegelman carries because of Maus and the substance of what he is actually saying about American politics in 2026. The Holocaust literacy that built his career depended on precision: named perpetrators, documented policies, specific atrocities. The counter-revolution he is calling for right now depends on none of that.

Readers can decide for themselves whether “made men in the mafia” and unnamed “murder” clear the bar Spiegelman spent forty years building. What is harder to argue is that this counts as measured commentary from someone warning about the dangers of unchecked rhetoric.

Does invoking Holocaust-adjacent moral authority to describe an elected opposition party as a criminal conspiracy strengthen Spiegelman’s case, or does it cheapen the very history that made his name?

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