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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Rob Liefeld, the Deadpool and X-Force co-creator, has drawn a hard line against ever working for DC Comics, saying that no amount of money changes his answer, not even seven figures for a single cover.

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Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Publishing have officially announced Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles, a five-issue crossover launching in January 2027 that will, for the first time in either franchise’s history, place Star Wars characters directly inside Marvel’s mainline Earth-616 continuity. The plot mechanism is a “reality-shattering spell” that pulls the events and cast of A New Hope onto contemporary Marvel Earth, putting Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca alongside the Avengers and Spider-Man, while Darth Vader, the Galactic Empire, Doctor Doom, and Thanos form the villain side of the ledger. David Marquez, known recently for his work on Uncanny X-Men, draws the series. Kevin Smith writes it.

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The City of San Diego hit Elevue, the outdoor signage company Marvel hired to promote Avengers: Doomsday during Comic-Con, with $160,000 in fines after the contractor covered the city’s landmark Gaslamp Quarter Archway sign despite repeated warnings not to. The fines accumulated between July 21 and July 26, the exact window of this year’s convention, and the city says it warned Elevue weeks in advance that any installation on the archway was off-limits.

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According to the city, officials repeated that warning again once Elevue began construction and asked for the piece to be safely removed. The company kept building anyway. The City of San Diego said the contractor continued construction despite several additional reminders, calling it a knowing safety risk that Elevue refused to address before being cited.

Elevue describes itself as a boutique outdoor media company specializing in street-level signage, and the Marvel/Doomsday wrap was exactly the kind of high-visibility placement that job exists to land. Whether the $160,000 lands back on Marvel’s marketing budget or stays Elevue’s problem depends entirely on the contract between the two companies, something neither side has made public. The city’s fine went to the contractor that did the installation, not to Marvel or Disney directly, so any further cost-shifting would happen privately between the two companies rather than through the city.

Elevue wasn’t alone in getting hit. The city separately fined 11 Downtown businesses a combined $48,500 for illegal building wraps tied to Comic-Con weekend, including Lou & Mickey’s, The Collection, Huntress, Pendry, Hilton Gaslamp, Omni, Hard Rock, Hasta Manana, Harbor Club Towers, Ebenezer, and Spill the Beans and Bagels, with individual citations ranging from $500 to $7,000. San Diego’s Building and Land Use Enforcement Division typically issues a courtesy warning before fining first-time violators, but says flagrant or repeat offenders shouldn’t expect one.

The numbers this year dwarf what the city collected last Comic-Con, when total building-wrap fines came to just $19,000. Part of that jump is structural. The San Diego Municipal Code raised the maximum penalty from $1,000 per violation to as much as $10,000 per day, with the change taking effect July 15, one week before this year’s convention began. Elevue’s fine alone is more than eight times the entire citywide total from a year ago.

ABC 10News reported it had reached out to Elevue for comment and had not yet received a response as of publication.

$160,000 is a rounding error against a marketing budget for a film expected to cross a billion dollars worldwide, and Marvel got the exact viral moment it paid for either way. The real question is whether the studio ever sees a bill for it at all, or whether that risk was baked into Elevue’s price from the start.

Is a six-figure fine actually a deterrent for a studio this size, or is defying the city just factored into the cost of Comic-Con marketing at this point?

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irst 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: California AG Calls Ellison’s Threat to Relocate Paramount Out of State “Blackmail”

Damage Control is the main villain of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and the reveal has a lot of readers scratching their heads, as it’s a very niche group of characters many viewers aren’t aware of. For most of the movie runtime, Sadie Sink’s mystery telepath looks like the threat. She hijacks Bruce Banner’s mind and forces his first Hulk transformation in years. She possesses MJ and lets Peter believe she remembers their relationship, only for the truth to gut him later in the film. By the third act, audiences learn Sink is playing Jean Grey, and that her rampage through the city traces back to one target: the Department of Damage Control.

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Jean isn’t hunting Damage Control for its tech or its files. She’s looking for her sister. Bill Metzger, played by Tramell Tillman, runs the agency, and he has spent the film abducting powered individuals to harvest their abilities for Damage Control’s arsenal. He kidnapped and tortured Jean’s sister Sara in pursuit of that goal, a program that gets her killed. Metzger spends the movie posing as an ally to Spider-Man while his scientists quietly build weapons designed to take Peter down if the partnership ever sours. He escapes at the end of the film, positioned as a recurring threat tied to the franchise’s coming anti-mutant storylines. Damage Control shows up earlier in the film too: a stolen tank crashes into one of its buildings, which is how Spider-Man first crosses paths with Metzger and starts asking questions about a mysterious program called “V-Max.”

For anyone who grew up on the comic book version of Damage Control, watching it get cast as a covert human-experimentation program is a considerable tonal reversal. The organization did not start as a menace. It started as a joke, and the distance between that joke and the Brand New Day black site says something about how far Marvel Studios has been willing to stretch a forty-year-old punchline.

An Insurance Sitcom Born In The Marvel Universe

Dwayne McDuffie and artist Ernie Colón created Damage Control for a five-page story in Marvel Age Annual #4 in 1988, inked by Jon D’Agostino. The pitch asked a question nobody else in the industry had bothered with: who cleans up after the Avengers fight Ultron in the middle of Manhattan? McDuffie followed the debut with a seven-page serialized story in the anthology title Marvel Comics Presents #19 in early 1989, and the concept earned its own ongoing life with Damage Control Vol. 1 #1-4 that same year, still written by McDuffie with Colón on art. That first miniseries followed the company’s founding cast, adjusters and account executives billing supervillains for property damage, and folded in a tie-in to the demonic “Inferno” crossover then running through the rest of the Marvel line.

McDuffie was a comics historian as much as a comics writer, and he used the book to settle old scores with continuity he disliked. In the second issue, comptroller Albert Cleary visits Doctor Doom over an unpaid invoice, a direct answer to the infamous “Where’s my money, honey?” Luke Cage story from the 1970s where Doom had stiffed Cage on a bill. McDuffie revealed it was an embezzling underling, not Doom himself, who had skipped the payment.

The humor came from ordinary employees like Robin Chapel and John Porter treating cosmic destruction as a Tuesday afternoon accounting problem, and it stayed that way through Damage Control Vol. 2 #1-4, published December 1989 through February 1990 as a tie-in to the company-wide “Acts of Vengeance” crossover. This is where the company’s ownership structure became a plot in its own right.

The Stark And Fisk Ownership Fight

Founder Anne Marie Hoag sold Damage Control to Tony Stark and Wilson Fisk in the first volume, splitting the company fifty-fifty between two men who had no business being business partners. Stark’s discomfort with Fisk proved justified fast. During “Acts of Vengeance,” a group of supervillains conspired to swap targets so heroes would face unfamiliar enemies, and Fisk had helped organize the whole operation, knowing full well that the resulting citywide destruction would land as a repair contract for a company he still partly owned. Stark eventually sold his stake rather than keep doing business with the Kingpin, and Fisk later engineered a scheme to buy the company back at a discount once Hoag stepped away to take a government job and handed the reins to Robin Chapel.

McDuffie closed the loop with a third miniseries, Damage Control Vol. 3 #1-4 in 1991, credited on the trades as “Damage Control: The Movie,” this time drawn by Kyle Baker. Guest stars ranged from Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer to the Hulk, and the plot had the company fending off accusations that it was manufacturing disasters on purpose to keep the repair contracts flowing, a satire of media cynicism aimed squarely at the company’s own workers rather than its executives.

Major Appearances In The Comics

Marvel Age Annual #4 (1988). The character debut, written by McDuffie, art by Colón and D’Agostino.

Marvel Comics Presents #19 (1989). A seven-page serialized follow-up establishing the company ahead of its first ongoing miniseries.

Damage Control Vol. 1 #1-4 (1989). McDuffie and Colón’s founding miniseries. Introduces Hoag, Chapel, Porter, and Cleary, and ties into the “Inferno” event.

Damage Control Vol. 2 #1-4 (1989-1990). The “Acts of Vengeance” tie-in that introduces the Stark/Fisk ownership fight and reveals Fisk’s scheme to profit from a crossover he helped orchestrate.

Damage Control Vol. 3 #1-4 (1991). McDuffie and Kyle Baker close out the original trilogy with “Damage Control: The Movie,” featuring She-Hulk, Captain America, and Nick Fury alongside accusations that the company manufactures the disasters it profits from cleaning up.

Wolverine (2003) #42. Wolverine investigates Nitro’s attack on the New Warriors that triggers “Civil War” and uncovers a scheme running through Damage Control’s resources.

Civil War: Front Line #1-11 (2006). Reporters Ben Urich and Sally Floyd cover the Superhuman Registration Act fallout that eventually turns Damage Control intern Robert Baldwin into Penance.

Irredeemable Ant-Man #9 (2007). Reveals that Eric O’Grady, then operating as Ant-Man, moonlighted for Damage Control under the alias Slaying Mantis.

WWH Aftersmash: Damage Control #1-3 (2008). McDuffie’s fourth and final run on the property, with art by Salva Espin. Damage Control lands the contract to rebuild Manhattan after “World War Hulk,” complete with a rampaging, newly sentient Chrysler Building and a new Goliath joining the Search and Rescue team.

Civil War II: Choosing Sides #1 (2016). Damage Control tries to rehabilitate its public image in the aftermath of the second “Civil War” event.

Damage Control (2022) #1-5. A revival written by The Goldbergs creator Adam F. Goldberg with Hans Rodionoff, backup stories by Charlotte Fullerton, art by Will Robson and Jay Fosgitt. The main story follows new hire Gus navigating a staff that regularly crosses paths with Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Nightcrawler, Quicksilver, and Ghost Rider, while the Fullerton/Fosgitt backup covers the company’s cleanup after the original Infinity Gauntlet storyline.

From Punchline To Federal Apparatus

That register, a grounded, working-class outfit navigating a universe of demigods, mostly played for laughs, held for over three decades of sporadic comics appearances. The MCU broke from it almost immediately. Spider-Man: Homecoming introduced Damage Control in 2017 as a Stark-owned operation that displaces Adrian Toomes’s independent salvage business, the inciting insult that pushes him toward becoming the Vulture. Where the comics split ownership between Stark and Fisk for satirical tension, the film simplified it to Stark alone.

The agency’s role kept expanding after that. It reappears briefly in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. The Disney+ series Ms. Marvel in 2022 casts Damage Control agent Sadie Deever as a proactive antagonist who raids a New Jersey high school hunting Kamala Khan, using Stark-sourced sonic weapons and racially profiling the students she searches, before getting relieved of duty for exceeding her authority. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, also in 2022, gives the organization its own supermax prison holding Emil Blonsky’s Abomination. Secret Invasion in 2023 has Skrulls infiltrating a Damage Control facility to steal the severed arm of the Black Order’s Cull Obsidian. By the time Brand New Day puts Bill Metzger at the head of a black site running experiments on telepaths, the MCU has walked Damage Control from insurance clerks joking about Doctor Doom’s unpaid bills to a government body running covert human trials on mutants, with rumors already circulating that it becomes the franchise’s central anti-mutant agency once the X-Men era gets underway.

That is a wide gap to cross for an organization McDuffie built as a workplace comedy, and it raises the obvious question for anyone tracking where the franchise goes next: does turning the punchline into a surveillance state say more about where Marvel Studios wants the X-Men era to go, or about how far the MCU has drifted from the grounded, human-scale premise McDuffie and Colón put on the page in 1988?

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NEXT: Clover Press Is Reviving Marvel Masterworks, and Collectors Are Finally Getting Their Unfinished Runs Closed Out

Clover Press is bringing Marvel Masterworks back from the dead, and the first four announced volumes go straight at the exact runs Marvel left hanging when it pulled the plug. Publisher Hank Kanalz confirmed the deal at the ComicsPRO Retailer Day during San Diego Comic-Con, with Uncanny X-Men Vol. 18, Super-Villain Team-Up Vol. 1, the final Walter Simonson volume of Mighty Thor, and Tomb of Dracula Vol. 6 as the opening slate, each crowdfunded through Kickstarter and each preserving Marvel’s original legacy numbering.

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Marvel Masterworks has been running since 1987, and it built its reputation on being the best physical version of these stories that exists. The line launched as a way to reprint classic Marvel material in hardcover at the original size of publication, with restored artwork pulled from bleached original pages to recover linework Marvel’s own archives had lost. That restoration work is the reason the line commanded a premium price for decades: it wasn’t just reprinting the comics, it was rebuilding them. The resulting scans eventually fed the cheaper Omnibus and Epic Collection lines, which gave newer collectors better value for money, but Masterworks kept things the Omnibus format dropped, including creator essays, original cover galleries, and a hardback trim size that matches how the comics looked on a spinner rack.

Why the Cancellation Stung

Marvel canceled Masterworks in 2025 after Near Mint Condition first reported the line was on indefinite hiatus, later confirmed by Bleeding Cool as a full cancellation once Defenders Vol. 10 and Marvel Team-Up Vol. 9 disappeared from the January 2026 schedule. Marvel SVP Tom Brevoort put it plainly: sales had dropped to the point the volumes were no longer financially viable.

What made the cut worse than a normal cancellation is what it did to collectors already deep into specific runs. Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, and Marvel Two-in-One were each left exactly one volume short of a complete run. Man-Thing, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Captain America, and the Avengers were two volumes from a natural stopping point. Anyone who has built a matching set on a shelf knows what that means. A partial run in mismatched formats isn’t a substitute, it’s an open wound, and it’s one of the more frustrating experiences in the hobby to have a publisher walk away one book before the finish line.

The timing lined up with a gutting of the people who understood collectors and cared about them. Marvel laid off SVP David Gabriel earlier this year, the executive who built the Omnibus program from a single 2005 pitch into dozens of releases annually and who championed the entire collected-editions strategy that made back-catalog publishing Marvel’s most reliable business. Cutting Gabriel and then killing Masterworks in the same stretch read like Marvel dialing back on the one corner of its publishing operation that consistently worked, and it tracked with a pattern this outlet has been reporting on for months: Marvel increasingly licensing out work rather than keeping it in house.

Clover Press Was the Right Company to Ask

Clover Press has spent the past year building exactly the kind of reprint credibility this handoff needed. The publisher has been steadily bringing Stan Lee’s Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strips back into print, starting with 1977 through 1980 and continuing into 1981 through 1984, restoring material that had gone out of print since The Library of American Comics’ original hardcover editions. That’s the same instinct Masterworks was built on: take something collectors can no longer get in a format worth owning, and do it right.

Near Mint Condition pushed for exactly this outcome back in December, running a post specifically arguing the Masterworks line deserved a second life and that it could end up “in the right hands of the right people.” Clover Press listened. Kanalz framed the pickup as a natural extension of Clover’s archival line, telling ICv2 that Masterworks “fits in perfectly” with what the publisher already does, and he pitched the legacy numbering as a way to keep longtime collectors’ shelves intact while giving new readers, intimidated by a line pushing 390 volumes deep, an actual jump-on point.

What This Means for Your Shelf

Every one of the first four announced Masterworks volumes was chosen to close a wound Marvel left open. Uncanny X-Men Vol. 18 and Tomb of Dracula Vol. 6 finish exactly the kind of unfinished runs that had collectors staring at an incomplete shelf for the better part of a year. Super-Villain Team-Up Vol. 1 and the final Simonson Thor volume round out a slate built for people who never stopped hoping the line would come back.

This is what a functioning market looks like when a bigger company walks away from a niche it can’t be bothered to serve anymore. A smaller, more focused publisher with real archival chops steps in, keeps the format collectors wanted, and finishes the job. Marvel spent forty years building the specific kind of trust that makes someone pay hardcover Masterworks prices for a story they could get cheaper in an Omnibus. Clover Press just inherited that trust, and the opening slate suggests they understand exactly what they’re holding.

With Clover Press proving a licensed reprint line can pick up exactly where Marvel left off, how many other corners of Marvel’s back catalog are sitting there waiting for the right smaller publisher to make the same call?

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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: Dynamite Just Lost Edgar Rice Burroughs Too, And Titan Comics Is Stepping Into The Gap

John McNichol, author of the steampunk series Young Chesterton Chronicles, is moving into comic book writing and production. The announcement came on the heels of finishing the trilogy’s final volume.n

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The series first made its mark in the mid-2000s when Sophia Institute Press published the opening volume, The Tripods Attack. McNichol built the Chronicles around a real historical figure: G.K. Chesterton, the prolific British author, reimagined as a teenager in a steampunk adventure.

The idea for the series came out of frustration with what McNichol was seeing in his own classroom.

“I was teaching in the Portland, Oregon area,” McNichol said in a recent discussion. “I’d seen my students handing in book reports where ultra-liberals were the kind, compassionate, open-minded good guys, and conservatives and religious people were the evil, awful villains out to wreck everyone’s joy. The thing is, in my experience and with very few exceptions, the exact opposite was true. I wanted there to be books for the YA to adult readership, and there was nothing recently published, but there was nothing I could point to.”

So McNichol wrote the books himself. “I loved the concept of Steampunk, the elegance and sometimes the absurdity of it all. And it hit me one day while driving to work: Why not take a great author like GK Chesterton and make a steampunk series about him, set in his teenage years?”

Turning a real author into a teenage steampunk hero wasn’t without pushback. “I had some older fans of the original GKC who were confused about the choices I made,” McNichol said. “But younger fans of the teen-to-30s age group seemed to really ‘get’ the series and have enjoyed it a great deal. Young male readers in particular enjoy reading a series that reinforces their worldview without a lot of high poetry and puffed sleeves getting in the way.”

Asked about the reference, McNichol explained: “It’s a line from Anne of Green Gables. A lot of fiction with values today is written by women for home schooling-mom types; one publisher I knew called it ‘the granny market,’ old grandmas in Christian bookstores who are looking for a nice, tame thing to buy their grandkids. Me? I write adventure stories with giant robots, blood-sucking aliens, things blowing up and people throwing up. And it won’t turn your sons into liberals- wins all around!”

That same sensibility carries into his new comic, EXTRAordinary Heroes.

“A lot of the more ‘woke’ comics today either want to preach leftist politics at you, or make the heroes out to be messed-up psychopaths, or both,” McNichol said. “I wanted to make a story where a regular person ends up in the lives of the superheroes of his day. What happens? Well… “In the first issue of EXTRAordinary heroes, the main character is a single dad working two jobs to make ends meet who ends up in the mansion of the A-List supers of his day. He realizes that while these are still ‘the good guys,’ a number of them have the kinds of issues you’d imagine 40-somethings would have if they’d been saving the world over and over again since their teen years. They can stop an alien invasion and wreck a giant robot, but they’ve never had a serious relationship, raised kids, had to make and stick to a budget, or develop a number of other skills that most ‘norms’ take for granted. He learns from them, and they learn from him. The most important thing they learn is something everyone ought to know: That in an age where truth gets sneered at, practicing ordinary virtue is its own super power. In a time when irresponsible, perpetual adolescence is a life goal, the people who keep a job, provide for their families, are present for their kids and keep relationships together- these are today’s superheroes. Ordinary virtue makes you an EXTRAordinary hero. It was a lot of fun to write, and I’ve had great help from editors and my amazing artist, Grayson Bowling.”

McNichol is aiming for a Christmas release, and the campaign at FundMyComic.com is live now. He’s also bypassing the traditional comic shop model entirely.

“For a long time now, woke cancel-culture had so permeated the industry that creators who weren’t lock-step-lefties found themselves in the midst of a firey twitter campaign,” McNichol said. “Distributors, shops and fundraising platforms were lobbied and/or bullied out of carrying books by conservatives, libertarians, or even liberals who weren’t liberal enough for these people.

“The good news is that now there are outlets and platforms that don’t give a darn who you voted for. We’ve gotten a good chunk of funding from fundmycomic.com, and if necessary we’ll be bypassing the comic-shop model completely through outlets like Ka-blam.com, who will print and mail out your books for a reasonable slice of the price. Creators can see their vision made real, get their books out to their readers, and the bad guys can’t stop anything, no matter how many tantrums they throw.”

With more independent creators routing around the traditional distribution model, is the direct-to-fan approach becoming the default path for conservative comics, or just the workaround until the industry changes?

Readers can back the campaign and pre-order EXTRAordinary Heroes at FundMyComic.com.

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Titan Comics put out Solomon Kane: The Lion’s Errant #1 this week, the second solo outing from writer and artist Patrick Zircher after his prior series carried Robert E. Howard’s puritan wanderer from the Barbary Coast to the canals of Venice. This time Kane lands in India, a land split among rival powers, tracking a ring of slavers through a plot that has bigger things waiting in the wings.

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The issue opens with Kane restless, hunting for a fight he can’t seem to find, a strange note for a character who has never lacked a mission. He calls himself “a crusader without a cause,” a play on the old rebel-without-a-cause line. The phrase lands oddly for a Puritan witchfinder. Puritans historically held a dim view of the Crusades and the Catholic tradition behind them, so hearing Kane reach for the word as a badge of honor reads like a slip in the character’s own voice rather than something he would say.

From there the story moves fast into the region’s politics. Local mistreatment shows up on the page and a mystery builds underneath it. The issue ends with a killing, carried out by a figure the reader hasn’t been given any reason to care about yet. Titan’s own credits page names that figure as some kind of vampire or ghost before the story itself gets around to revealing it, spoiling a beat the script hadn’t even played.

None of that derails the issue so much as it exposes the format problem underneath it. This reads like a script written for the trade rather than for single issues, a four-part story where issue one exists mostly to introduce the setting and introduce the players. There isn’t enough plot here to stand on its own the way a single-issue comic needs to.

The art is where the book earns its keep. Zircher handles both the pencils and the script here, same as he did on The Serpent Ring, and the linework and page layouts carry the issue when the story itself is still finding its footing. There isn’t a page in the issue that falls short on the art side.

Add it up and The Lion’s Errant #1 lands as a 7 out of 10: a competent opening chapter dragged down by a decompressed script and a spoiler baked into the credits, held up by art that doesn’t put a foot wrong. Titan and Zircher have three issues left to pull the India arc together, and the pieces (a warrior queen, an empire, a slaving ring, whatever is stalking Kane in the shadows) are all on the table now.

Readers who like their comics one issue at a time may want to sit this one out until the collected trade arrives, where the pacing of a single issue should smooth out across a full read. Does the rest of the arc earn the mystery it’s setting up, or is this another case of a story built for the wrong format?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Dynamite Just Lost Edgar Rice Burroughs Too, And Titan Comics Is Stepping Into The Gap

Three weeks after Fandom Pulse reported that Dynamite Entertainment quietly let its Disney comics license lapse because the company couldn’t afford to renew it, a second major license is walking out the door. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. announced at SDCC that its publishing rights, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and the rest of the ERB library, are moving to Titan Books and Titan Comics starting summer 2027.

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Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Robert Kirkman, and Eric Stephenson are sharing a single stage at SDCC today for “Image Comics Legends Together on One Stage,” billed as a look back at how they “revolutionized the comic book industry.” The panel description doesn’t mention that this same group of men spent the 1990s pushing one of their own out of the company, watching a founding partner sell his entire imprint to their industry’s other biggest publisher, and burning through a market collapse that Image itself helped fuel.

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The founding and the bubble

Image was born in February 1992 out of what the industry nicknamed the “X-odus”: Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio all walked out of Marvel together, joined briefly by longtime Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont. Their complaint was simple and, for the era, radical: Marvel owned everything these artists created, no matter how much merchandise or spinoff success a character generated, and the creators saw a fraction of it in page rates and modest royalties. Image’s founding structure solved that by refusing to be a single company at all. Each founder ran his own independent studio under the Image banner, McFarlane’s Todd McFarlane Productions, Liefeld’s Extreme Studios, Lee’s WildStorm (originally named Aegis Entertainment), Silvestri’s Top Cow, and so on, keeping full ownership and creative control while sharing a distribution and marketing umbrella.

The launch was one of the biggest commercial explosions in comics history. Image’s initial titles were published through Malibu Comics, which handled distribution and production while Image built its own infrastructure. Liefeld’s Youngblood #1 hit stores in April 1992 with pre-orders around 930,000 copies, a record for both creator-owned and independent comics at the time. McFarlane’s Spawn #1 followed a month later with a print run exceeding 1.7 million copies. Within months, Malibu’s distribution deal with Image alone had captured close to 10% of the entire North American comics market, briefly outpacing DC Comics. By early 1993, Image had grown enough to cut ties with Malibu entirely and open its own central publishing office.

That explosive growth was built on sand. The early 1990s comics market was in the grip of a genuine speculator bubble: variant covers, foil embossing, and “collector’s item” marketing convinced buyers that first issues were investments rather than reading material, and retailers over-ordered accordingly. Total industry sales peaked above $1 billion in 1993. The bubble burst starting in mid-1993, as speculator demand evaporated overnight, unsold inventory piled up in warehouses, and industry-wide sales fell roughly 70% by 1996. Image, having helped drive that same speculative frenzy with its own foil-cover and variant strategy, took the collapse hard right alongside everyone else.

The Liefeld ouster

The company’s founders didn’t survive the decade intact either. By 1996, Marc Silvestri had grown frustrated enough with Liefeld’s conduct within the partnership that he pulled his own studio, Top Cow, out of Image entirely in protest. That move pushed the remaining founders to formally move toward ousting Liefeld from the company outright. Liefeld got ahead of it: he announced his own resignation minutes before the partners would have officially removed him. Silvestri brought Top Cow back into the Image fold once the dust settled. It’s a genuinely remarkable footnote sitting underneath today’s panel: Liefeld is one of five men on stage celebrating Image’s legacy despite having been pushed out of the company by the very people standing next to him.

The Jim Lee exit

Jim Lee’s departure was quieter but arguably more consequential. WildStorm had become Image’s most consistently successful studio through the mid-90s, built on WildC.A.T.s, Stormwatch, and Gen13. But as industry-wide sales kept declining through the late 1990s, Lee decided to get out of the publishing business side entirely. In 1998, he sold WildStorm outright to DC Comics, a deal that took effect in January 1999, reportedly motivated by a desire to step back from running a company and refocus purely on drawing. DC’s own later accounting of the deal suggested the company primarily wanted three things out of the purchase: WildStorm’s respected color separation studio, Lee himself as a working artist, and the ongoing relationship with Alan Moore, who was writing for the imprint at the time. Lee went on to become DC’s co-publisher in 2010 and its sole publisher in 2020, meaning one of Image’s seven founders has spent the last quarter-century running the very company Image was founded to compete with.

Portacio’s exit was the quietest of all. He never became a full partner in the first place, withdrawing before the partnership fully solidified due to his sister’s illness, and later dealt with his own serious health crisis, a near-fatal pancreatic illness in 2000. He’s never held a board seat at the company he helped found.

What’s left, and what never got finished

What survived is a much smaller core than the original seven: McFarlane, Silvestri, Larsen, and Valentino held the company together through the leanest years, joined by Robert Kirkman as a partner in 2008 on the strength of The Walking Dead’s runaway success, and Eric Stephenson, who’d joined back in 2001 as marketing director, rising to publisher that same year. Today’s board runs six seats deep, with McFarlane as president, Silvestri as CEO, Kirkman as COO, Larsen as CFO, Valentino as VP, and Stephenson as publisher and chief creative officer.

The clearest unfinished business from that entire era is Image United. Announced in 2009 as a full reunion crossover, Kirkman scripting, McFarlane, Liefeld, Silvestri, Larsen, and Portacio all drawing characters from their own imprints together in one story, Youngblood, Spawn, Savage Dragon, Cyberforce, and more sharing a page for the first time, it was meant to be the definitive proof that Image’s founders could still function as a unit two decades on. It shipped exactly two of its planned four issues before collapsing, undone by the same fractures baked into the company from day one: Portacio had already stepped back from the partnership before the project even started, Liefeld left partway through production, and Lee was long gone to DC before any of it wrapped. It’s sat unfinished for over fifteen years.

With McFarlane, Liefeld, Silvestri, Kirkman, and Stephenson sharing a stage today, and Kirkman, the writer who scripted Image United in the first place, sitting right there among them, it’s a fair question whether this is finally the moment someone brings it back up. Jim Lee is still one phone call away at DC, Larsen never left the board, and Portacio, health permitting, remains the one true loose thread. Thirty-four years after seven artists walked out of Marvel together, the company they built has outlasted every one of the fractures that nearly ended it. Whether it ever finishes the one project built specifically to prove that is still an open question.

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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: Mainstream Comics Are Turning To The Same Playbook As Kickstarter Erotica, And Even Rob Liefeld Just Joined It

Rob Liefeld is bringing back Avengelyne this October, and the version he’s using to launch it at San Diego Comic-Con this week says something about where comics marketing has landed in 2026.

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Avengelyne #1 arrives with seven different covers. Six are standard artist variants from names like Diógenes Neves, Shannon Maer, and Andy Park. The seventh, Cover B, is Liefeld’s own work: a polybagged, explicitly labeled “NSFW” variant. Liefeld has built hypersexualized characters before, Avengelyne herself was co-created in 1995 as a “bad girl” superheroine based on a former Vampirella model, and her original run already carried nude photo-variant covers. What’s different this time is the packaging. This is the first time Liefeld has slapped an explicit NSFW label and a polybag on a mainline release rather than letting the cheesecake speak for itself the way it always has.

That choice lands in the middle of a much bigger shift across the industry. Kickstarter tightened its adult-content rules as of May 2026, banning implied nudity, lingerie, fetish wear, and “very tight” clothing on campaign pages, a policy serious enough that creators immediately started listing which mainstream, non-comics properties would get flagged under the same rules. As one Kickstarter creator put it to Bluesky, “Just for context, here is some award-winning media that’d be banned on Kickstarter now: The Witcher, Game of Thrones, Cyberpunk 2077, Castlevania, Baldur’s Gate 3, God of War, Dragon Age, Mass Effect.” Pat Shand, publisher of Cheeky Comics and one of Kickstarter’s largest NSFW-adjacent labels, made a similar point to The Beat: “Many of the largest IPs in the world outside of comics, Game of Thrones, Euphoria, The Boys, and certainly any of the romance novels dominating traditional publishing sales, the list goes on and on, would be considered ‘NSFW’ if presented on the platform as a comic.” Some campaigns got pulled mid-run over the new rules. Creators who built entire businesses on cover nudity started migrating to less-regulated platforms like Indiecrowdfund.com just to keep selling.

The pattern underneath all of it is the same one showing up in Liefeld’s Avengelyne launch: when a comic needs to cut through a crowded market, cover nudity has become one of the most reliable levers left to pull, reliable enough that Kickstarter’s own payment processor forced a crackdown, and reliable enough that a 30-year industry veteran with an established, recognizable brand still reached for it this week to launch a character he could have sold on nostalgia and name recognition alone.

None of this is really about Liefeld specifically. It’s about what the broader market currently rewards. A polybagged NSFW variant generates buzz, drives pre-orders, and gets written up by every outlet covering SDCC exclusives, functions a strong story and a good creative pitch used to handle on their own. When even veterans with built-in audiences feel the pull toward the same mechanism struggling small publishers are fighting Kickstarter to keep using, it’s worth asking what that says about how comics currently sell books versus how they used to.

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NEXT: Another Legendary Comic Shop Closes: System Of A Down’s John Dolmayan Shutters Torpedo Comics After Nine Years

Torpedo Comics, the Las Vegas store owned by System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan, has closed its physical location for good. A sign on the door read simply: “Thank you to the Las Vegas community for supporting us for the last 9 years!” The Torpedo brand will continue selling online, but one of the most recognizable brick-and-mortar comic shops in the country is gone.

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Titan Comics released The Savage Sword of Conan #15 this month, and the lead story stitches together a serviceable Conan tale that struggles with pacing but lands its pulpiest beats.

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Writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner script “Conan: The Exchange” with art from Andy Belanger. Conan opens the issue as a prisoner aboard Captain Brock’s ship alongside Tadia Brazoria and a handful of other captives. He breaks free, kills his guards, and takes the vessel with the other prisoners’ help.

Tadia’s backstory carries the weight of the issue. A former cookery maid forced into a scheme by King Cyrus of the Isle of Maldyra, she lost her child fleeing the king’s demented son Edgart and rebuilt her life as a blacksmith’s apprentice before Brock hunted her down again. Conan and Tadia jump ship together, and the Cimmerian spends the rest of the story helping her settle the score: killing Edgart’s guards, freeing two more captives, and facing down a giant blind serpent in King Cyrus’s dungeon before the throne changes hands again.

The pulp elements here work. A dungeon serpent and a usurped crown are the kind of material Conan comics were built on, and Palmiotti and Conner know how to hit those beats. The pacing between them is where the story stumbles, with the plot’s political machinations slowing down what should be a straight line from captivity to vengeance.

The art carries a similar problem. Belanger’s figure work holds up, but several backgrounds read like the characters were dropped onto stock imagery rather than drawn into the same scene. It pulls the reader out of the action at exactly the moments the story needs to hold together, and it falls short of the standard set by other Savage Sword shorts in this Titan revival.

Sandwiched between the lead story and the backup is “The Ghost Kings,” a Robert E. Howard poem illustrated by Juan Alberto Hernández as an homage to H. Rider Haggard. It’s brief, and it’s the best few pages in the book.

The real standout of the issue is the backup, “Breckinridge Elkins: The Two-Ton Terror!,” written by Tom DeFalco with art by Ron Frenz and inks from Pat Olliffe. Elkins gets sent to Misery Swamp to catch snapping turtles for his father’s soup, runs into the legendary Two-Ton Turtle, and the resulting tall tale moves fast and lands its jokes.

DeFalco, Frenz, and Olliffe spent years together on Spider-Girl, and that chemistry shows on every page of this backup. It is the kind of character-driven adventure comic this creative team built a reputation on, and the issue leaves you wanting a full monthly series with all three of them back at it. A handful of pages is not enough.

The Savage Sword of Conan #15 earns a 7.5 out of 10. The lead story’s art and pacing hold back the bulk of the book, but the Elkins backup alone makes the issue worth the cover price.

Would a full ongoing series from DeFalco, Frenz, and Olliffe find an audience in today’s direct market, or has the appetite for that style of team-driven adventure comic faded along with the artists who made it?

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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