Marvel Comics is leaving New York City. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news Thursday that Marvel’s entire comics and franchise division, roughly 100 employees, is being asked to relocate to Burbank, California by July 2027, ending a run in New York that stretches back almost 90 years to Timely Comics and Atlas Comics on 42nd Street. The move leaves New York without a single major comic book publisher, since DC made the same move to Burbank back in 2015.

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DC Comics used its San Diego Comic-Con presence to kick off a decade-long countdown to its own 100th anniversary in 2035, with a booth campaign that will spend the next several years revisiting each decade of the publisher’s history in ten-year chunks. Buried inside that nostalgia campaign is a harder deadline DC can’t spin away: Superman and Lois Lane enter the public domain in 2034, Batman follows in 2035, the Joker in 2036, and Wonder Woman in 2037.

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Here’s what that actually means, because the term gets misunderstood constantly. Under the Copyright Term Extension Act, a published work loses copyright protection 95 years after publication. Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman in 1938, crosses that line in 2034. Detective Comics #27, Batman’s 1939 debut, follows in 2035. Once a comic enters the public domain, anyone can legally reprint it, adapt it, or build new stories from it without paying DC or asking permission, the same process that recently put Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse into two separate horror movies within 24 hours of his copyright lapsing.

But copyright and trademark are different protections, and DC still holds the second one. The “S” shield, the name “Superman,” the title “Action Comics,” and Batman’s bat-symbol remain DC’s trademarks indefinitely, protected as long as the company keeps using them commercially. That means a 2034 public domain Superman story can legally use the character as he existed in his 1938 debut, no flight, no heat vision, no Kryptonite, no Lex Luthor, since those elements arrived in later, still-copyrighted issues, but it can’t slap DC’s trademarked logo or title on the cover without inviting a lawsuit. DC’s own deputy general counsel, Jay Kogan, laid out the company’s defense strategy years ago in blunt terms: keep updating the characters so the modern version stays the “de facto standard” in the public’s mind, no matter what the 1938 original loses.

Comic writer Mark Millar isn’t waiting to find out how that plays out in court. The Kick-Ass and Kingsman creator has spent the past two years building an actual production pipeline around the 2034 deadline. In a recent interview with Thinking Critical, Millar laid out a launch plan for a self-published Superman series starting January 2034, followed by his own Batman book the year after. He’s already put artists under contract years in advance, telling the outlet one collaborator is locked in for a twelve-issue run with a quarter-million-dollar advance, paid before a single issue publishes. “2034 to 2039, I’m going to completely exploit all the DC characters with the best artists,” Millar said. “I’m going to steal the best artists from Marvel and DC and do the DC characters with them. I just like causing trouble.” He’s also eyeing film adaptations built on the same public domain footing, telling the outlet, “I’ve got an entirely new way of doing Superman... I’ve got the whole thing planned. And I want to do movies of it as well, coz it’ll be public domain. So there’s no reason we can’t do it at another studio.”

Millar won’t be alone. Comics historian Chris Sims has predicted a flood of unauthorized Batman titles ready to print the moment the clock runs out, and once the characters open up, DC will be competing against Marvel, Valiant, Todd McFarlane, Robert Kirkman, and anyone else with a printing budget and an idea, not just the small-press operators the public domain usually attracts.

DC’s SDCC nostalgia campaign reads differently against that backdrop. A publisher spending the next nine years walking its own history decade by decade, right up to the exact year its founding character stops belonging exclusively to it, isn’t just celebrating an anniversary. It’s building a case, in the court of public opinion and possibly in an actual courtroom, for why the Superman everyone still recognizes is the version DC kept building after 1938, not the one anyone will legally be allowed to publish for free.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: DC Comics’ New “Anti-Price-Gouging” Rules Punish Retailers While Scarcity Stays DC’s Choice

DC Comics issued new terms and conditions for retailer exclusive variant covers this week, giving itself the power to ban any comic shop that charges too much for an Absolute Batman exclusive. Bleeding Cool broke the terms first: DC “strongly encourages” retailers to cap unsigned variants at five times cover price and signed variants at ten times, and reserves the right to cut off future variant access to any shop that goes higher.

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One of the mid-tier comic book industry’s most recognizable publishers is showing serious signs of financial distress, and the full picture of how bad things have gotten is worse than the company has publicly acknowledged. Subscribers who have been following Dynamite’s monthly solicitations may have noticed something missing from recent months’ releases…

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Bleeding Cool reported this week that Savage Dragon #280 hit number one on their Hottest Comics chart, beating out Absolute Batman and everything else in the direct market. The industry press is covering it as an achievement. What actually drove those sales is the story.

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The comic industry is in bigger trouble than it’s letting on, and there are changes on the horizon at Marvel Comics and DC Comics.

Dan Buckley joined Marvel Comics in 2001 and spent the next 25 years running its publishing operation, serving as Publisher and President through the MCU’s entire rise from Iron Man to Endgame. Andy Park joined Marvel’s visual development team in 2009 and spent 17 years designing the look of MCU characters, his work shaped how Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, and dozens of others appeared on screen for a generation of moviegoers. Both men are gone from Marvel in 2026. Buckley was pushed out in April as part of a broader Disney restructuring. Park was eliminated alongside the entire visual development team in the same wave.

Those two departures are the most visible part of a pattern that has been building for months. The signs have been visible for anyone watching closely. The entire visual development team eliminated in a single wave. A TV executive and a Disney Music Group operator installed to run a publishing operation that neither has ever worked in. New Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro describing the layoffs as building “a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce.” Cosmic Book News reporting that Disney insiders describe the company as “less interested in publishing” and eyeing a licensing arrangement rather than continuing to produce Marvel Comics in-house.

The trade press has been dancing around the destination. Fandom Pulse has now gotten word from an industry insider about exactly where Marvel Comics is going and when, and it’s not looking pretty for the current industry setup.

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Byrne, who turns 76 this month and has described Elsewhen as “my leaving in a blaze of glory,” took the opportunity to address one of the most persistent retroactive reframings in comics history, the claim that the X-Men were always a metaphor for gay and queer identity. He pushed back with characteristic directness.

“We’ve seen a pretty major cultural shift in terms of understanding and accepting people with differences. The X-Men were created in a more conservative time, when difference was still a bugaboo. Stan said that the X-Men were his metaphor for racism, that Xavier was Martin Luther King, and Magneto was Malcolm X. And I go, no, actually, go look at the earliest issues. Xavier is F.D.R. and Magneto is Hitler. You know, he’s even using Nazi trappings. But people persuaded Stan that he was doing something else, and Stan said, ‘Sure, why not?’”

That last sentence is the one the comics press has been reluctant to engage with. Stan Lee was famously agreeable about interpretations of his work. If a reader found a meaning he hadn’t consciously intended, Lee’s typical response was some version of “absolutely, that’s what I meant.” It was generous, charming, and historically inconvenient. The Xavier-as-MLK, Magneto-as-Malcolm-X framing became gospel in subsequent decades of academic and fan analysis, cited so often it calcified into fact. Byrne, who drew the book during its defining era alongside Chris Claremont and knows those original issues with an intimacy few people alive can match, is saying that interpretation came after the fact — and that the textual evidence doesn’t support it.

He is correct. The 1963 X-Men, created by Lee and Jack Kirby, placed Xavier in a mansion, sent his students to a private school called the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning, and positioned Magneto as a costumed villain in the mold of every other 1960s Marvel supervillain. Magneto wore a helmet. He commanded an army. The Holocaust backstory that gave the character his moral complexity arrived substantially later, as subsequent writers built on what Kirby and Lee had sketched. Xavier as FDR — the wheelchair-bound leader of a coalition fighting existential evil through institutional means — is visible in those earliest issues in a way that Xavier as MLK is not.

The LGBTQ reading of the X-Men grew from the later comics themselves, particularly through Claremont’s writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Claremont has said in multiple interviews that the mutant metaphor was intentionally expansive, intended to encompass any group that experienced systematic exclusion. The “coming out” language surrounding mutant revelation, particularly in stories about Iceman and Northstar gave the queer reading textual grounding in that era. But that is Claremont’s authorial intent during the run Byrne co-created, not Lee and Kirby’s original 1963 design. Byrne is drawing a distinction that matters: what the creators intended at origin versus what subsequent writers developed the metaphor to encompass. Those are different things.

Claremont himself addressed the question directly at Flame Con in 2012 — an LGBTQ-themed convention where, while clearly trying to be generous to that audience, he acknowledged he did not always intend the X-Men as a stand-in for the LGBTQ community. His answer: "You know there's a space between every panel. You can go wherever you want. And who am I to get in the way?" That is a diplomat's answer from a writer speaking to a room that wanted validation, and it is still, even in its diplomatic framing, a confirmation that the LGBTQ reading was something readers brought to the material — not something the creators built into the foundation. Claremont gave them the space. He did not claim the intent.

The interview contains one passage that serves a different purpose. Byrne, 75 and in what he calls the epilogue of his career, told the Times: “It feels like evil has won. I look at Washington and go, oh my God, this is the guy who I modeled my Lex Luthor in part on, back when he was just a big noise in business in New York.”

The reference to modeling Lex Luthor on Trump is something Byrne has mentioned before in interviews, he has described drawing on New York business figures of the 1980s for the character’s aesthetic, and Trump was among the most visible of them. Identifying him as the model for one of DC Comics’ defining villains is a choice Byrne is making consciously, in a major newspaper, as part of the promotional tour for his farewell book. That is Byrne’s prerogative. It does not invalidate his reading of the X-Men’s origins, which stands on its own scholarly merits regardless of his current politics.

What the interview as a whole confirms is that X-Men: Elsewhen succeeded because Byrne made something readers wanted, and it sold out before the people trying to stop it could do anything about it. Heather Antos, IDW’s head of licensing, posted “During PRIDE MONTH. REALLY, MARVEL?! Do not buy this comic” and called Byrne “a transphobe” who has been “spewing transphobic ideology for decades.” The first printing of 25,000 copies was already sold out when she posted it. A second printing is underway. The audience did not consult Antos before deciding whether to spend their money.

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NEXT: Jim Shooter, One Year Gone: The Editor Who Rebuilt Marvel and Then Built Valiant From Nothing

Jim Shooter died one year ago today, on June 30, 2025, at his home in Nyack, New York, after a battle with esophageal cancer. He was 73. Across six decades in the industry he ran Marvel’s editorial office through one of its busiest creative stretches, then walked out and built a second publisher, Valiant, that briefly stood as the only company outside Marvel and DC to crack a major sales-share award.

Shooter started his career at 13, writing Legion of Super-Heroes scripts for DC editor Mort Weisinger after a phone call in 1966 changed the course of his life. He kept writing for DC through his teens to help support a steelworker father in Pittsburgh. After a stretch away from comics doing advertising work, Marvel editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman hired him as an assistant editor and writer in January 1976. Two years later, at 27, Shooter became Marvel’s ninth editor-in-chief.

His nine years running Marvel, from 1978 to 1987, covered Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s run on Uncanny X-Men, Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Frank Miller’s Daredevil, Walt Simonson’s Thor, and Roger Stern’s work on Avengers and Amazing Spider-Man. Shooter wrote and oversaw 1984’s Secret Wars, built around a Mattel toy line and credited as Marvel’s first company-wide crossover event. He put Marvel’s first ongoing direct-market-exclusive title on the stands with Dazzler #1, built the Epic imprint to give creators a venue for creator-owned work, and set up a royalty structure so writers and artists could earn money when their characters sold as merchandise. He was fired in 1987.

The following year, Shooter and businessman Steven Massarsky put together a bid to buy Marvel outright. They lost to Ronald Perelman, who outbid them. Rather than walk away from comics, the two formed Voyager Communications in 1989 and licensed a stable of dormant Gold Key characters: Magnus, Robot Fighter and Solar, Man of the Atom. Valiant Comics launched its original titles in 1991 and 1992, starting with Harbinger and X-O Manowar.

Harbinger sold over 5 million copies and spent a then-record eight straight months atop Wizard Magazine’s top ten list. X-O Manowar #0 sold as many as 800,000 copies during the speculator boom of 1993. The Unity crossover Shooter built to tie the line together ran 18 chapters across nine titles in the summer of 1992. That year, Diamond Comic Distributors named Valiant Best Publisher under 5% market share; the next year Valiant won Best Publisher over 5% market share, the only company besides Marvel and DC to take that honor. Shooter received a Lifetime Achievement Award for co-creating the Valiant Universe at a 1992 ceremony that also honored Stan Lee for Marvel’s.

Shooter left Valiant by the end of that year. Massarsky later said the two had different ideas about where to take the company. Shooter went on to found Defiant Comics, then Broadway Comics, working with veterans from both prior companies. He returned to Valiant material twice more: in 2007, writing new short stories for Valiant Entertainment’s hardcover reprint line, and again briefly when the relaunched company brought him back to help untangle continuity ahead of 2012’s Summer of Valiant.

Tributes followed his death from across the industry he had spent a lifetime building and rebuilding. Marvel’s own account posted that Shooter had redefined the company. Writer Larry Hama recalled Shooter pushing insurance paperwork through for a freelancer’s widow against company policy, telling Hama, “They owe it to him, we just won’t mention that he already passed.” Rob Liefeld posted that Shooter took a toy partnership and turned it into one of Marvel’s signature successes.

A year out from his death, Marvel hasn’t run a crossover built around a toy line that outsold the comics behind it since 1984. Valiant Entertainment, relaunched in 2012, still publishes stories built on characters Shooter assembled from a stack of dormant licenses in 1990. Which of those two builds holds up better: the editor who reordered an established universe, or the founder who built one from spare parts and made it outsell everyone but the Big Two?

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NEXT: Marvel Turned Away the Man Who Created the Winter Soldier From His Own Movie’s Afterparty

The year is 2014. Captain America: The Winter Soldier has just screened to rapturous early reactions. Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting, the writer and artist who created the Winter Soldier a decade earlier in the pages of Captain America, walk up to the afterparty for the film built entirely on their work. They’re turned away at the door.

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Heather Antos, IDW’s head of licensing and one of the more reliably combative progressive voices in the comics industry, went after John Byrne this week for “transphobic” remarks on his personal blog. The attack landed the same week Byrne’s Amazing Spider-Man #1000 cover controversy was resolved, his Elsewhen volume is on shelves, and his legacy was being discussed in broadly positive terms across the fan community.

Whatever Byrne’s specific blog comments were on trans issues, his overall record on gay representation in comics is the opposite of what Antos claims. Byrne created Northstar, Marvel’s first openly gay superhero, in 1979. He was explicit about his reasoning: “There needs to be Gays in comics because there are Gays in real life. No other reason. Same reason, in fact, that there are Blacks in comics. Asians in comics. Women and children in comics! The population of the fictional world should represent the real world. That’s why I created Northstar — I felt the Marvel Universe needed a Gay superhero (even if I would never be allowed to say it in so many words in the comics themselves), and I felt that I should create one, rather than retrofitting an existing character.”

That last phrase of “rather than retrofitting an existing character” is the distinction that the current comics industry has spent a decade refusing to honor.

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DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation announced today at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival that Absolute Batman is being adapted as an adult animated series. Scott Snyder will serve as executive producer and showrunner. Nick Dragotta, the comic’s artist, will produce. No network or streaming home has been named and no release date exists. The announcement was met with applause at Annecy.

Here is what the comic being adapted actually is.

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Absolute Batman launched in October 2024 as the flagship of DC’s Absolute Universe initiative, a line of Elseworlds-style reimaginings of classic characters developed under Snyder’s editorial direction. The premise: Bruce Wayne without the Wayne family fortune. No mansion, no Alfred as family retainer, no trust fund to bankroll a private vigilante operation. Instead, a 24-year-old working-class civil engineer whose father Thomas is still alive, whose childhood friends are Gotham’s future supervillains — Catwoman, Riddler, Killer Croc — and whose chief antagonist is a billionaire Joker. Alfred Pennyworth becomes an MI6 agent. The Joker becomes the rich man. Batman becomes the working-class hero.

The sales numbers aren’t public but they do keep saying they’re extremely high. The first issue reached eleven printings. DC claims six million copies sold across the Absolute line. DC overtook Marvel in direct market share for the first time this century during the Absolute launch period. The Absolute titles are among the top-selling comics of 2025.

The sales figure of six million copies spans the entire Absolute line of Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and others, not just Batman. Absolute Batman’s genuine sales are inflated by a variant cover strategy that has generated dozens of covers per issue, some of them priced at $17,500 as collector’s items. Absolute Batman #21 was solicited with over eighty variant covers. The number of readers who actually follow the storyline is considerably smaller than the print run suggests. Speculators buy first appearances — first Absolute Joker appearance, first Absolute Catwoman — at high prices, inflating the unit numbers without adding readers who care about the story. The direct market data reflects variant cover fever as much as genuine audience interest.

The storyline itself is less discussed than the covers, for reasons that become apparent when you examine what the comic actually depicts.

The 2025 Annual, drawn by Daniel Warren Johnson, contains the scenes that generated the most controversy. The story depicts Absolute Batman encountering an encampment of immigrants. A gang wearing pig masks — the comic’s visual shorthand for white supremacists — attacks the camp with the police joining in. One officer performs a Nazi salute and shouts “White power” before Batman breaks his arm. Batman then strangulates an ICE officer. He burns down the gang’s hideout with a flamethrower. The issue ends with Batman weeping at what he has become.

The Comics Beat review of the annual called it “the catharsis I needed” and described it as capturing “the anger from seeing the headlines of ICE agents kidnapping mothers from elementary schools and vegetable fields and the National Guard descending on major blue cities like a plague of locusts.” Bleeding Fool described the same issue as depicting scenes where “Batman brutalizes a violent white supremacist gang and strangulates an ICE officer, making it glaringly obvious that the story’s intent is to endorse violent political extremism masked as heroic justice.”

The main series also worked contemporary politics into the fabric of the premise. The billionaire Joker visually evokes tech-sector plutocrats. The economic framing of Bruce Wayne as working class against a system rigged by the wealthy maps onto the progressive critique of economic inequality that runs through the Absolute line’s marketing. When Snyder describes the concept as Batman being “a working-class hero up against impossible odds... in an era of wealth, power and corruption,” the political context he is operating in is not subtle.

Snyder has not been subtle about his politics outside the comic either. He was among the comics industry figures who participated in No Kings protests, the series of anti-Trump demonstrations that began June 14, 2025, drew an estimated five million participants at its peak, and extended through March 2026. The comics industry showed up to those events in force. The Absolute Batman Annual, published in October 2025 with its ICE agent strangling and white supremacist mass beating, arrived four months after the first No Kings protests and was widely read at the time as a direct artistic response to them.

The announcement that an animated series is coming rewards the hype cycle and benefits everyone who bought into it for speculative reasons. When an IP gets optioned for screen adaptation, back issues appreciate and first appearances that speculators bought at elevated prices become worth more. The variant cover machine gets validation. The sales figures get cited as proof of audience demand. Whether the actual story sustains an animated series for multiple seasons is a different question from whether the announcement moves back issues.

This is not what Batman is. Batman is not a working-class vigilante whose politics align with whoever writes him in any given era. The character has survived as an icon because he transcends politics. He is justice without affiliation. He is the one person in the room who operates on principle rather than ideology. The version of Bruce Wayne that strangles ICE officers and burns down white supremacist hideouts while weeping at his own rage is a character using Batman’s name to do something Batman was never designed to do: pick a side.

DC’s animated catalog has produced some of the finest superhero storytelling in the medium’s history. Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League, Batman Beyond — these shows worked because they served the character rather than using the character to make a point. An animated Absolute Batman will be a full CG production, according to Register’s Annecy comments. It will have Snyder as showrunner. The politics of the comic will almost certainly travel with it.

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NEXT: Cartoon Art Museum Curator Andrew Farago Arrested for Secretly Recording Party Guests, Including Children, in Bathroom

Andrew Farago, the curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum and one of the more prominent progressive voices in the organized comics community, was arrested June 3 on 20 counts of invasion of privacy after secretly recording birthday party guests using the bathroom at his Berkeley home, according to court documents obtained by The Berkeley Scanner.

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The allegations date to May 23, when Farago co-hosted a birthday party at his South Berkeley residence. During the party, a woman found Farago’s cellphone concealed and recording video in the bathroom. The phone contained footage of Farago himself setting up the recording, according to police, as he had hidden the device under a towel and positioned it to capture guests’ genitalia as they used the restroom. Party guests included both adults and children.

When the woman confronted him, Farago made admissions and stated he had deleted the videos from his phone and the cloud, according to Berkeley police. Officers subsequently obtained an arrest warrant, arrested Farago at his home on June 3, and served a search warrant seizing approximately a dozen electronic devices.

Following the incident but before his arrest, Farago emailed party guests to express remorse. He wrote, according to court papers: “I hid my phone in our bathroom for the purpose of spying on our guests, my closest friends in the world. I had never done anything like that before and don’t know what possessed me to do it. This was an inexcusable violation of your privacy and our friendship and I am prepared to face whatever consequences will come from this tremendous lapse in judgement.”

As of publication, no criminal charges have been filed. Berkeley police said they could not release additional details due to the ongoing investigation. Farago did not respond to the Berkeley Scanner’s request for comment. He is presumed innocent under the law.

The arrest is significant within the comics community because of Farago’s institutional position and his long record of public ideological commentary.

Farago has served as curator of the Cartoon Art Museum since the mid-2000s, building it into one of the country’s foremost repositories of cartoon and comic art history. He received the Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International in 2015, one of the industry’s most prestigious honors for contributions to comics and popular art. He chairs the Northern California chapter of the National Cartoonists Society. His published books include the Harvey Award-winning Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, Batman: The Definitive History of the Dark Knight in Comics, Film, and Beyond, The Complete Peanuts Family Album, and most recently A Minecraft Movie: From Block to Big Screen. He is published by Simon and Schuster. He is married to webcomics creator Shaenon K. Garrity.

Alongside that professional record, Farago maintained an active social media presence that was consistently and combatively left-wing in its orientation toward comics industry controversies. He was a vocal opponent of the Comicsgate movement, describing its participants as bigots and comparing them to racist fictional villains. In February 2024, Bleeding Fool documented a series of his posts, including one stating: “Never forget that everyone in ComicsGate took personal offense when Superman took a stand against the Klan,” and another drawing a comparison between Comicsgate creators and the X-Men villain Graydon Creed, writing: “Watching the X-Men cartoon again. Graydon Creed, the shrill, screaming bigot seemed so over the top and ridiculous back then, but today he’d be running the Mutants of TikTok social media account and would be cranking out a dozen YouTube videos a day about the Woke menace.”

Farago took to The Daily Beast where he was quoted by the media at length in his attacks on ComicsGate: “[Comicsgate] is made up of people who were into the Gamergate thing and when that ran out of steam they noticed that they hadn’t made comics miserable for enough people yet.”

He spent a lot of time on social media, especially Twitter pre-Elon Musk takeover, harassing artists and professionals such as Cyberfrog creator Ethan Van Sciver who put up with his relentless attacks for years. Van Sciver reacted to the news, “It doesn’t surprise me that someone who mercilessly worked to ruin my life and career, and the careers of so many others who loved to make comic books, but were political conservatives or followers of our Savior Jesus Christ, trespassed on the sacred privacy of the friends and guests he invited into his home. Andrew Farago represented so many pillars of the mainstream comic book industry, like The Comics Journal, San Diego Comic Con, DC Comics, Hachette Group Distribution, and the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He even wrote a book about Snoopy. His behavior, which involved hiding his cell phone under a towel in his guest bathroom in order to film the genitals of his party guests, is emblematic of the sickness that lurks in mainstream comics, where evil is welcomed and feted, and traditional American values are hunted and despised. I hope he finds Jesus Christ through diligent prayer and bible study should he be sent to prison, where he belongs.”

He used his institutional position and platform to position himself as a guardian of progressive values within the comics community. He curated museum programming and public appearances through that lens. He spoke with the authority of someone who ran a respected cultural institution and was regarded as a credible voice on what comics should and should not be.

That same man wrote to his closest friends that he hid his phone in their bathroom to record them using the restroom at a birthday party.

The Cartoon Art Museum has not yet issued a statement.

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NEXT: Embattled IDW Editor Heather Antos Calls For A Boycott Of New Work From The Greatest X-Men Artist of All Time

Amazing Spider-Man #1000 hits shelves September 16. The thousandth issue of Marvel’s flagship title, the character that built the publisher. The main cover was drawn by John Romita Jr. and painted by Paolo Rivera. It was pulled by Marvel editorial after social media mockery spread. Then the comics industry pushed back and Marvel restored it within 72 hours.

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The cover was designed to show Spider-Man from a pedestrian’s upward perspective, his body distorted by the G-forces of acceleration at high speed, webbing pulled taut, figure warped by inertia and momentum. The concept is kinetically ambitious, with Romita’s pencils rendered at maximum velocity, with Rivera’s painted finish giving the figure three-dimensional weight. Online, nobody engaged with the concept. The cover spread across social media with a single read: Spider-Man looked like he was shrugging. As if it were “one thousand issues? Really? Who cares?”

That description is how the mockery framed it. A TikTok video amplified the joke, and it spread far enough that Marvel editorial pulled the cover entirely and replaced it in the Penguin Random House catalog listings with a new Pepe Larraz piece. Marvel then issued a press release on June 18 describing the Larraz cover as “a main cover” rather than “the main cover” — language that suggested they were giving retailers two options rather than admitting they had yanked the Romita piece. The solicitation listings, however, confirmed the Romita/Rivera cover had been removed as the primary. The people who had mocked it celebrated online, with some specifically describing themselves as having “bullied” Marvel into pulling it.

What they had actually done was pressure a publisher into removing a 70-year-old legend’s farewell cover from the milestone issue he had spent his career building toward. That distinction matters because of who John Romita Jr. is, and what Amazing Spider-Man #1000 represents for him specifically.

JRJR’s father, John Romita Sr., took over Amazing Spider-Man from Steve Ditko in 1966 and spent years defining the character’s visual identity. The poses, the costume details, the weight and proportion of the figure — Romita Sr.’s design choices became the standard every Spider-Man artist since has referenced. John Romita Jr. grew up inside that legacy. He created his first Spider-Man character — the Prowler — at age 13. He began drawing the book professionally in his 20s. He is now 70. His collaboration with J.M. DeMatteis, his runs across multiple decades, his willingness to keep pushing the character into new visual territory — none of that is the work of someone with a casual relationship to Spider-Man. Amazing Spider-Man #1000 is his farewell. After this issue he steps away to work with Mark Millar at his new production company. The cover they briefly replaced his with was a perfectly competent piece by Pepe Larraz. Larraz is a talented artist. He is not the man whose family built this book.

The industry’s response to the pull was immediate and went in one direction.

Scott Snyder: “JRJR, Sale (RIP), Miller, they’re masters who’ve done every kind of classic design — they invented a lot — so in recent years we get to watch them experiment to find things they’ve never done. For a lot of us creators, the boldness is incredibly inspiring. Legends still pushing.” He added: “I REALLY like this cover because we so rarely see JR’s work rendered three dimensionally with a painterly approach.”

Jimmy Palmiotti: “I like this cover. The internet has now made it famous. If I was JRJR I would sell prints of this at every show.”

Declan Shalvey: “Art is subjective, tastes are varied but JrJr is one of the greatest living Spidey artists who is normally inked, then coloured. To have another iconic Spidey artist in Paolo Rivera collaborate by painting his pencils for a milestone issue is an objectively cool and suitable idea.”

Ivan Costa, responding directly to the TikTok video that spread the mockery: “John and Paolo deserve RESPECT from Marvel and from these so-called ‘fans’. SHAMEFUL.”

Fan @FkMySmPnsLife: “Nobody deserves the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #1000 more than John Romita Jr. He created his first Spider-Man character when he was 13. That character was the Prowler. He’s been drawing Spider-Man since he was in his 20s. The man is 70. His LIFE has been Spider-Man.”

@TheJamOfSteel: “I’m not even a big Romita Jr fan, but pulling his cover for ASM 1000 is absolute bullshit. The Romita family are so crucial in the legacy of Spider-Man — his cover belongs on this book.”

Marvel reversed course. Both the Romita/Rivera piece and the Larraz piece are now listed as main covers. The Penguin Random House listings updated Monday to reflect the restoration.

The mechanics of what happened here are worth sitting with. A cover was revealed. Social media decided it was funny. A TikTok video spread that joke widely enough that Marvel’s editorial team felt sufficient pressure to pull the work of a 70-year-old artist from his own farewell issue. The publisher of the thousandth issue of Amazing Spider-Man looked at a viral joke about the cover and concluded the right response was to remove it. That decision lasted 72 hours before the people who stand with the history of the industry told them what they had done.

The cover still doesn’t evoke excitement among fans like many in the past have done, but a lot of the pattern of modern covers has been like this. What do you think of ASM #1000?

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NEXT: Embattled IDW Editor Heather Antos Calls For A Boycott Of New Work From The Greatest X-Men Artist of All Time

John Byrne is 75 years old, has not published a comic in over a decade, and spent three years drawing 31 issues of X-Men fan fiction for his website with no pay, no editorial oversight, and no expectation of publication. He did it because a drawing of Wolverine fighting Sauron fell out of his pencil in 2018 and he could not stop. Marvel saw the pages, CB Cebulski got involved, and X-Men: Elsewhen Volume 1 arrives in stores June 23 through Abrams ComicArts. The first printing of 25,000 copies has already sold out on pre-orders alone. A second printing of 20,000 is already underway.

Heather Antos, IDW Publishing’s head of licensing, saw this news and went to Bluesky.

“During PRIDE MONTH. REALLY, MARVEL?! Do not buy this comic.”

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Jon Sable, Freelance hit newsstands in June 1983 with no superheroes, no cosmic powers, and no publisher backing from either of the Big Two. What it had was Mike Grell, a razor-sharp Bond-and-Hammer concept, and 56 issues of some of the most mature, character-driven storytelling the direct market had seen up to that point. Four decades later, the series still doesn’t get the conversation it deserves.

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Grell described the book at a late-1980s convention as “something like a cross between James Bond and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.” Jon Sable is a bounty hunter and mercenary who previously competed as an athlete in the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. After witnessing the terrorist massacre there, he married a fellow athlete and they relocated to Rhodesia, where Sable became an organizer of safaris and later a game warden. His family was murdered by poachers. After avenging them, Sable returned to America as a freelance operative.

That backstory hits every note a thriller needs: trauma, a world-spanning origin, a man defined by loss rather than a radioactive spider bite. But the genius move is what Grell layers on top. Sable also carries a double identity as a successful children’s book author under the name “B.B. Flemm.” Unlike many such characters, his literary agent is aware of his secret activities, but is persuasive in enforcing his writing contract obligations as well. The literary agent knowing and still hounding him to meet deadlines is the kind of detail that makes a fictional world feel lived-in. It’s also funny. Grell never lets you forget it. F

The Run Itself

First appearing with a cover date of June 1983, Jon Sable Freelance was a successful non-superhero comic book in an era when successful non-superhero comic books were almost unheard of, and a graphically violent comic sold in mainstream comic book stores in an era when such was equally rare. It was one of First Comics’ first titles and was completely creator-owned, marking a shifting trend in the industry toward giving creators more control over their work and better financial incentives.

The series ran 56 issues from June 1983 to February 1988. While Grell wrote the entire run and handled all the covers, he stopped drawing the interior stories after issue #44. That first stretch of 44 issues, with Grell doing everything, is where the book reaches its ceiling. The origin arc spanning issues #3 through #7 established the character’s history across Rhodesia, the Olympics, and Vietnam in a four-issue run that readers at the time called one of their favorites. Early issues had Sable protecting a sitting president, working the streets of New York, and rotating back to Africa depending on what the story required.

Grell often went pages without dialogue in his stories, using the art to carry the narrative load. That’s not a stylistic quirk. It’s a creative choice, and one that separates Grell from most writers working in mainstream comics then or now. Because this was his own book, he had room to experiment. Different stories called for different visual approaches: noir-inflected black shadows for the urban New York crime work, wide open geography for the African sequences, and a more intimate, almost watercolor quality in the flashback material. The battlemask Sable wears in the field, a theatrical touch that reads a bit superheroic on paper, functions in practice as a way to compartmentalize the character visually. In the mask, he’s the killer. Out of it, he’s B.B. Flemm, the guy who shows up at a cop’s kid’s birthday party and just thanks him quietly for doing the job.

Grell put that kind of character work throughout. He is skilled with facial expressions, and those small character moments, like Sable appearing as B.B. Flemm at a party and expressing simple appreciation for a police captain’s work, accumulate into a portrait of a broken man who is, in some sense, trying to kill himself through his mercenary assignments. That’s not subtext. Grell put it in the dialogue.

Notable Stories

The origin arc, issues #3-7, remains the emotional anchor of the entire run. The flashback sequences covering Sable’s days as an Olympic athlete and mercenary in Rhodesia still rank as standout material from the period. Issue #1 opens with the President of the United States coming to New York and Sable getting pulled into the security operation, which plants the character in the real world immediately. The 108-page origin saga that followed gave the series the mythological weight it needed to sustain a five-year run. Fante’s InfernoAmazon

One issue has Sable hired when a conspiracy to assassinate Ronald Reagan develops, with Reagan himself involved in the response, and the hired killer turning out to be an old war buddy of Sable’s who is every bit as capable. It’s a tight thriller with a genuinely difficult central conflict. Issue #14, “The Wall,” puts Sable into Cold War territory with a Berlin backdrop. The series also used real-world issues as story material: the psychological fallout of the Vietnam War, the uncertainty around soldiers unaccounted for after its end, and the poaching of elephant ivory all appeared as plot drivers.

Femme fatales cycle through the book consistently. Maggie the Cat, a recurring thief and foil, got her own spinoff material later. Shado would show up in Grell’s work again. The women in the book are written as competent and dangerous, which fits the Bond template, but Grell never makes them decorative. They push the story or they complicate Sable. Usually both.

The Omnibus Editions

For years, the best way to read Jon Sable, Freelance was the IDW trade paperbacks from the early 2000s or the ComicMix paperback omnibuses that followed. Both got the job done but neither gave the art room to breathe. Masterstroke Studios, via Kickstarter, launched a series of five deluxe hardcover omnibus volumes measuring approximately 8.5 by 12.25 inches, the same format as DC’s Absolute Edition releases, with glossy interior pages, rare and never-before-seen artwork, new covers, and dust jackets designed to line up into a complete image when shelved in order. Each volume runs around 400 pages. At that size, Grell’s linework, his shadow work, and his page construction read completely differently than they do at standard comic dimensions. The remastered coloring does what remastering is supposed to do: it doesn’t make the book look modern, it makes it look like the original artist intended it to look.

Sable had never previously been collected in hardcover. The Masterstroke editions represent the first time the series has received that treatment.

What Grell Did Next

Grell left art duties on Jon Sable, Freelance with issue #44, continued writing through issue #56, and then departed to do Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters for DC in 1987. The Longbow Hunters miniseries reset Green Arrow entirely: Grell did away with the trick arrows and rearmed Oliver Queen with penetrating broadheads with which he actually killed his opponents. The Longbow Hunters showed the first instance in which Green Arrow ever deliberately killed someone.

That three-issue prestige format miniseries led to an ongoing Green Arrow series, on which Grell served as writer for 80 issues, that ran for 11 years. His approach on Green Arrow carried the same DNA as Sable: he avoided references to the fantastical elements of the DC Universe, and in no Grell Green Arrow story is the character ever referred to by his superhero name (with one exception in the Longbow Hunters itself). It’s a grounded crime and espionage book wearing a superhero costume. Same instinct, different character.

The Sable-to-Green Arrow pipeline shows what Grell was doing with his decade of independent work. He built a template for gritty, character-driven men’s adventure storytelling at First Comics and then brought those instincts back to DC, where they were new. The direct market in 1983 wasn’t ready to reward that kind of work the way it deserved. The audience found it anyway.

Made for a Streaming Adaptation

The bones of Jon Sable, Freelance fit a streaming series better than most properties optioned in the last decade. A mercenary with a tragic African backstory. A children’s book author alter ego that generates built-in comedy and character contrast. A literary agent who functions as the version of M who calls you about your royalty statements instead of classified briefings. Femme fatales who are actually written as characters. Real-world locations and real-world politics. No mythology to explain, no universe to set up.

The ABC series that ran in 1987 barely made it past a single season. The show co-starred Rene Russo in one of her first screen roles and folded after a few months. It didn’t fail because the property was wrong. The network format wasn’t built for what Sable needed to be.

A streaming adaptation that kept the Africa origin intact, kept the dual-identity structure, and didn’t sand down the violence would work. The show practically writes itself from issues #1 through #20. Whether anyone in Hollywood has the discipline to resist updating the politics or switching the mercenary angle into something more palatable is the open question. Given recent track records, bet the under.

What Jon Sable, Freelance proves, and has proved since 1983, is that a Bond-Hammer hybrid with a real human backstory and a creator willing to experiment with the form doesn’t need a cape to carry a long run. The Masterstroke omnibuses make that case in the best possible format. If you’ve never read it, the first volume is the place to start.

Do you think the dual-identity concept, a mercenary whose cover is children’s books rather than a tech billionaire or a playboy, still holds up as a more interesting setup than most of what passes for character depth in modern comics?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: DC Signs Deniz Camp to an Exclusive Deal. Last Month He Posted “Missed Again” After Someone Shot at Trump.

Deniz Camp signed an exclusive writing deal with DC Comics this week. Bleeding Cool confirmed it today. Camp’s Absolute Martian Manhunter concludes July 1, and DC is bringing him back with full exclusivity ahead of San Diego Comic-Con and the Eisner Awards, where he has six nominations this year.

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This is the same Deniz Camp who, on the night of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in late April, posted two words on X within minutes of shots fired outside the Washington Hilton: “Missed again :(”

Trump and Vice President Vance were both in attendance at the hotel when the shooting scare spread across social media. Camp posted before the full facts were known, before anyone had confirmed who the target was, before the word “missed” had any other reasonable referent. When the backlash came, he claimed he was posting about darts. He posted a picture of a dartboard. Neither Marvel nor DC issued a statement. Neither dropped him. Neither called him.

Now DC has not just kept him. They locked him in.

The contrast with DC’s recent history is direct and unavoidable. In September 2025, writer Gretchen Felker-Martin posted “thoughts and prayers you Nazi b----” and “Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie Kirk” within hours of Kirk being shot and killed at a Utah university. DC Editor-in-Chief Marie Javins personally called Felker-Martin to inform her that “any kind of promotion of violence or harm is unacceptable to them.” DC canceled the entire Red Hood series — not just future issues, but existing orders. Retailers were credited for copies already sold. The book was gone the same day it had launched.

Felker-Martin told The Comics Journal she had “no regrets” and that Kirk was “such a loathsome person” that his murder did not strike her as “an especially hot flashpoint.”

DC’s stated standard, from Javins’s own mouth: “any kind of promotion of violence or harm is unacceptable.”

Camp’s post sat on X for weeks. His Marvel work continued. His DC exclusive was announced this month.

The distinction between the two cases is not ideological in any principled sense. Felker-Martin celebrated the killing of a conservative figure who was actually dead. Camp appeared to celebrate a failed assassination attempt on a sitting president and then denied it with an explanation nobody believed. The outcomes: Felker-Martin was fired within 24 hours. Camp got an exclusive deal eight weeks later.

The argument DC could make is that Camp’s post was ambiguous, as he never named Trump, and he had an alternative explanation. Felker-Martin’s posts named Kirk directly and left nothing to interpretation. That distinction is real. It is also not how DC framed its standard at the time. Javins did not say “we fire people who celebrate confirmed deaths.” She said “any kind of promotion of violence or harm.” Camp’s post, timed to a shooting, reads as promotion of harm whether or not you accept the darts explanation. DC chose not to apply its own standard.

What makes this an industry story rather than just a DC story is Camp’s specific position in the current comics ecosystem. He has six Eisner nominations this year. He has credits at Marvel, DC, Image, Valiant, Vault, and Scout. He is the most nominated individual writer in the 2026 Eisner cycle. The awards apparatus that the comics industry uses to signal who matters has placed him at its center, and DC’s exclusive deal confirms that institutional position regardless of what he posted in April.

The comics industry has spent years telling conservative creators, fans, and readers that there are standards of conduct that apply to everyone. The Felker-Martin firing was cited repeatedly as proof those standards exist and are enforced without ideological preference. The Camp exclusive deal, eight weeks after “Missed again :(”, tells you what those standards actually are.

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Three free books. No spam. Just new releases, deals, and the occasional update from the front lines of independent publishing. Sign up for the Jon Del Arroz newsletter and start reading today.

NEXT: Marvel Closes the Ultimate Universe After Identity Politics Killed What Hickman Built

Ultimate Endgame #5 and Ultimate Universe: Finale #1 both dropped June 10, closing the three-year Ultimate Universe imprint. The line is over. What it became by the end bears almost no resemblance to what made it the most talked-about comics launch in years when it started.

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Jonathan Hickman launched the relaunched Ultimate Universe in June 2023 with Ulti…

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IDW Publishing announced this week that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #300 has topped 200,000 pre-orders from comic book stores, alongside its blind bag cover program. It may be real, but that doesn’t mean there’s anywhere near 200K readers.

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The Bleeding Cool headline reveals the mechanism: IDW describes it as “the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #20, renumbered with its legacy issue number.” This is issue #20 of the current ongoing volume. It has been renumbered #300 by combining the issue counts of previous volumes that ran for years before the current series launched. The current TMNT ongoing began in 2024. It is not the 300th consecutive issue of an unbroken run. It is the twentieth issue of a new series wearing a legacy number calculated by adding up all the issues across decades of prior volumes, relaunches, and restarts.

This is standard direct market practice in 2026 and it has been standard for years. Marvel and DC do it routinely. A series launches at #1 to generate a first-issue sales spike. It runs for twenty or thirty issues until sales normalize. Then it is relaunched at #1 again for another spike. When a milestone anniversary number becomes commercially valuable, publishers combine volume counts to get there faster and generate a milestone issue.

The 200,000 pre-order figure for TMNT #300 reflects the blind bag program attached to it: rare covers by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in blind bags, plus variants by Frank Miller and J. Scott Campbell making their TMNT cover debuts, plus Ito and Juan Ferreyra exclusives. Blind bags are the direct market’s equivalent of trading card packs. Retailers and collectors order multiples chasing the rare variants. The pre-order number does not represent 200,000 individual readers who want to read the story. It represents the combined ordering of retailers, speculators, and collectors who want the covers. The Comic Book Club noted of the issue: “As for the actual interior of the book… Who cares!” — a joke, but one that accurately describes how the direct market processes milestone numbers.

The actual story inside TMNT #300 by Gene Luen Yang, Freddie E. Williams II, and Fero Pe will be read by far fewer people than ordered the issue. That gap is the direct market’s central unexamined problem. Publishers report the pre-order figures. Nobody reports how many copies are read.

IDW’s position in the market makes the TMNT numbers more significant because the franchise is essentially carrying the publisher. IDW’s other notable titles include the Star Trek line, and the GI Joe and Dungeons and Dragons licensed books. None of these are generating milestone pre-orders. Outside TMNT and a handful of Star Trek collectible editions, IDW is a company running on one franchise’s legacy appeal and the collector market’s appetite for variant covers.

It’s interesting that when one looks on eBay, one can already see that resellers are putting the book up graded for pre-sale. That means a person like this would have to be buying dozens of copies of this variant cover just to get the grade to guarantee it, which means again, there’s not that many readers up there fore these books.

DC does the same. Bleeding Cool noted that Absolute Batman #21 with Jae Lee topped the weekly bestseller list — but the surrounding context is that the Absolute line’s dominance comes partly from the variant cover and collector market the same way TMNT’s milestone numbers do. The difference is that Absolute Batman has genuine reader demand driving its numbers. Most books do not.

The 200,000 figure will be cited in press releases and industry reports as evidence that the direct market is healthy. It is evidence that the collector market, the variant cover program, and the blind bag speculation economy are healthy. Those are different things.

Are you buying TMNT #300 to read the story or to collect the covers? Let us know in the comments.

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450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Supergirl’s Marketing Has Now Alienated Both Sides As Grace Randolph Says “Stop Talking for the Love of God”

Justice League: Dream Girls: A DC Pride Event #1 shipped today. The cover shows Nia Nal/Dreamer on horseback on Themyscira, in Wonder Woman’s costume, waving a transgender pride flag. The story places her in the Wonder Woman origin template: a champion chosen to leave the all-female Amazon island and save the world.

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Dreamer is a biologically male transgender character created for the CW’s Supergirl series as the “first transgender superhero on television,” played by a man pretending to be a woman,Nicole Maines, who co-writes this series.

Themyscira’s entire mythological identity is built on the absence of men. The Amazons are warrior women who withdrew from the world of men and built a civilization without male influence. Diana’s origin depends on growing up in that society. DC chose the island whose identity depends on the biological reality of its inhabitants as the backdrop for a story about a biologically male character playing its champion. Maines is co-writing a story that places her own character in the Wonder Woman origin role. The creative casting decision is not subtle.

None of this is generating commercial results. The direct market picture running alongside DC’s activism spending tells the actual story. Absolute Batman has topped the direct market bestseller list for multiple consecutive weeks, outselling its nearest competitor three to one. That book is about a working-class Bruce Wayne with no billion-dollar fortune and no ideological mandate. Everything else in DC’s line exists in its commercial shadow.

The main line DCU is not a market driver. The Absolute Universe carries DC’s numbers on the strength of one book. The Pride Month events, the Galaxy solo series, and the Dreamer showcases are not commercial performers. They are ideological statements dressed as publishing strategy.

The statements are not even satisfying the activists DC is courting. The #DCSoWhite boycott launched this month demanding two to three new Black-led ongoing titles with guaranteed 18-24 month cancellation protection regardless of sales. The audience DC is spending its publishing budget pursuing is simultaneously telling DC it has not done enough.

That is the trap. The audience that buys Absolute Batman needs no Pride events. The audience DC is chasing with Pride events demands more regardless of what DC produces while not buying what DC already published for them. The books built on story sell. The books built on agenda do not, and still generate demands for more agenda.

Placing a biologically male character in Wonder Woman’s costume on the island of women is not a story decision. It is a statement that alienates the audience that built the Wonder Woman fanbase while producing no commercial return that would justify the cost.

What do you think DC’s publishing strategy communicates about who they believe their audience is? Let us know in the comments.

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450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Black YouTuber Calls For Boycott Of DC Comics #DCSoWhite