DC Comics

Guillermo del Toro served as a guest of honor at the fourth annual Hero Complex Film Festival last weekend in Hollywood, appearing on stage for a Q&A between screenings of  two Spanish-language movies — “The Devil’s Backbone,” the 2001 gothic horror movie set during the Spanish Civil War; and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” his Academy Award-winning dark fantasy set during Francoist Spain. While taking questions from the audience, Del Toro elaborated on his planned adaptation of DC Comics’ “Justice League Dark,” saying that he wanted to focus on characters including Constantine, Deadman, Etrigan, Swamp Thing and Floronic Man. “I was never a superhero guy,” Del Toro said. “I thought I could do some of the edgier, darker stuff. “One of my most cherished memories when I was a kid was running to the drug store, the newsstand, on my bike to get […]

Video gamers will soon have the opportunity to create their own superheroes for the DC Comics universe. Or turn Batman into a zombie. Or suggest Superman wear a pink cape and ride a unicorn. But don’t try to give Batman a gun. Some things will never change. This fall 5th Cell and Warner Bros. Interactive will release “Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure” for the Wii U, 3DS and PC. The latest in the Scribblenauts franchise looks to be an expansive, puzzle-based adventure that makes use of the heroes, villains and locations made famous by the worlds featured in the 75-plus years of DC Comics. And some of the not so famous, too. “For the first time in any game we have all the DC Comics characters,” said Caleb Arseneaux, a 5th Cell producer. “The entire roster — characters who appeared in […]

“American Vampire” continues to show signs of life – or, well, undead-ness – during its hiatus. Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque’s Eisner Award-winning Vertigo series about a new breed of bloodsucker has been on a planned break since January, but Hero Complex has the exclusive announcement that “American Vampire Anthology” No. 1, an 80-page special, will be released Aug. 7, and offers readers a first look at the cover by Albuquerque, right, showing a more-dapper-than-usual Skinner Sweet. “Anthology” comprises eight “lost tales” of familiar favorites and new characters by a star-studded roster of writers and artists including multiple Eisner winner Greg Rucka (“Whiteout,” “Stumptown”), Jeff Lemire (“Animal Man,” “Sweet Tooth”), Gail Simone (“Batgirl,” “Secret Six”), Ray Fawkes (“Constantine”), Becky Cloonan (“American Virgin”), Francesco Francavilla (“The Black Beetle”) and the Brazilian brothers behind the Eisner-winning limited series “Daytripper,” Fabio Moon and Gabriel […]

For a man about to start a war, Geoff Johns seems calm. Upbeat, even. Upstairs from Golden Apple Comics in Hollywood in an office lunchroom ahead of a signing for Free Comic Book Day on Saturday, DC Comics’ chief creative officer, sporting just-tearing-at-the-knee jeans, a red plaid shirt and a weathered Aquaman baseball cap, occasionally pets his bulldog while discussing the summer event he and collaborator Jeff Lemire are scripting in their respective “Justice League” and “Justice League Dark” titles, and together in “Justice League of America.” (You can see a larger version of Ivan Reis and Joe Prado’s triptych cover for the first issues here.) “Trinity War,” which unfolds in six parts across those three series’ July and August releases, with tie-ins including “Trinity of Sin: Pandora” No. 1 (written by Ray Fawkes), is DC Comics’ biggest event since launching […]

Success couldn’t come at a worse time for Buddy Baker. As “Animal Man” No. 20 lands Wednesday, its titular superhero/actor is still grieving the death of his young son Cliff, who was felled trying to protect him. He’s also newly estranged both from his wife, Ellen, who has their child daughter, Maxine, and from the Red, the fauna life force that continues to give him his power to draw on animals’ abilities. At the end of the wrenching, funeral-centered Issue 19, the hero remarks, “I’ve never felt so alone in my life.” But soon, the trappings of newfound fame may make him wish the world would leave him alone. “It’s really using Buddy and using the superhero genre as a way to explore celebrity and our modern society’s obsession with celebrity,” series writer Jeff Lemire says of the new story […]

“Smallville” concluded its television run on the CW with a series finale in May 2011 that saw Tom Welling’s Superman finally take to the skies, but the emotional moment didn’t exactly signal the end of the show. Almost a full year later, the show’s 11th season kicked off via a digital comic penned by former “Smallville” writer Bryan Q. Miller, and last week the first four issues were released as a single print graphic novel with cover art by Cat Staggs and interiors by Pere Perez. Set six months after the events of the finale, “Smallville Vol. 1: Guardian” sees Lex Luthor launch his “Guardian Defense Platforms” to ward off alien invaders after the scare of Apokolips — but he obviously has other, more nefarious plans in mind. Hero Complex caught up with Miller to ask about the creative impetus […]

Batman and Talia al Ghul deal with the death of their son Damian in “Batman, Incorporated” No. 10, due out Wednesday. The series, written by Grant Morrison with art  by Chris Burnham, has focused on Damian’s evolution from bratty child to a leader in Batman’s crime-fighting corporation. Damian became the latest in a long line of Robins before dying at the hands of a cloned version of himself. “In many ways this has been Damian’s story as much as it has been the story of Bruce Wayne, and it’s a story that had its end planned a long time ago,” Morrison wrote in a post on DC Comics’ blog, “for what son could ever hope to replace a father like Batman, who never dies?” In issue No. 10, Talia al Ghul and the supervillain group Leviathan retain their ruthless grip on Gotham, Batman […]

Writer Steven T. Seagle and artist Teddy Kristiansen are best known in the comics world for their collaboration on Seagle’s autobiographical graphic novel memoir, “It’s a Bird,” which won Kristiansen an Eisner Award for the art in 2005. That wasn’t Seagle and Kristiansen’s first collaboration, however. That work, the supernatural series “House of Secrets,” has been hard to find ever since its publication in the mid-1990s. But that’s about to change with a hardcover omnibus collecting the entire series under one cover for the first time. “House of Secrets” was originally a “Tales From the Crypt”-like anthology series that ran from 1956 to 1978 and was mostly known as the title that introduced the character Swamp Thing. But in the 1990s, DC Comics took several defunct or second-tier properties and allowed certain respected writers to reinvent them in wildly new […]

Carmine Infantino, the comic book artist whose sleek, futuristic drawing style heralded the Silver Age of Comics, died last week at his home in Manhattan at the age of 87. Infantino began as a comic artist and went on to become DC Comics’ artistic director, then editorial director, then publisher. In a guest essay for Hero Complex, comics historian and Eisner-winning comic writer Mark Waid – who, like Infantino, enjoyed a long run on “The Flash” and created comics for both Marvel and DC – looks back on Infantino’s game-changing work. For most of us, his career stretched from comics we were way too young to care about to comics we were way too old to care about. We cared an awful lot about the ones in the middle. Carmine Infantino was, depending on your age, the Flash artist or […]

DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint is continuing its translation of the original screenplay for Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning western onto the paneled page this week with the release of the third issue of its six-part “Django Unchained” series. Hero Complex readers can exclusively check out the early pages from the issue, in addition to getting a look at the cover by Massimo Carnevale and a variant cover by Guillem March. Cover | Variant Cover | Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 6 Reginald Hudlin, the Oscar-nominated “Django Unchained” producer who penned the miniseries, told Hero Complex earlier this year that fealty to the original iteration of Tarantino’s acclaimed screenplay — about freed slave Django teaming with the grandiloquent bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz to search for a trio of ruthless overseers known as the Brittle […]