BookExpo America, the annual trade show highlighting the publishing industry’s plans for fall and winter seasons, was held at Manhattan’s Javits Center last week, and among all the other things I did over those four days, I sat in on a panel discussion on “The New Graphic Novel” hosted by Publishers Weekly senior news editor—and PW Comics World co-editor—Calvin Reid.

[Moebius and Jack Kirby and manga and...]

DC Comics recently debuted a prequel comic for the new Superman movie Man of Steel, in theaters on June 14, which focuses on Krpytonian society and its efforts to explore the galaxy and better itself as a species. It also offers some overt and thematic hints about what we might ultimately see in Man of Steel.

[Man of Steel prequel comic]

I have a special emotional attachment to the comic book mini-series Shadows of the Empire. Issue #4 sports a beautifully painted Hugh Fleming cover featuring Leia and Chewie in their bounty hunter disguises but it ALSO contains, in the editorial section, a letter from a young fan complaining about stuff that happened in issue #1. This young fan felt like Rogue Squadron’s dialogue was “forced and unrealistic,” and his name was Ryan Britt. (The Dark Horse people were nice enough to publish my letter, and I’ve forever believed the improved dialogue in the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron series must have been a direct result of my complaining.)

But listen. The comic version of Shadows of the Empire was a town of space-crazy, populated by characters with insane names. What? You don’t remember Big Gizz? Let’s remember together.

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The character of Superman, first created in comics by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933, has a longer history of screen adaptations than most people realize.

Though many know the most recent movies were preceded by the 1978 movie Superman, which starred Christopher Reeve and was followed by three sequels in the 1980’s; and some are aware that pop culture has a friendly niche for the 1950’s Superman television show featuring George Reeves, two episodes of which were mashed into a theatrical release titled Superman and the Mole Men in 1951; fewer know of the serials Superman and Atom Man vs. Superman, that ran before feature films in theaters in the late 1940’s, and in which Kirk Alyn was the first actor to play the role in a screen adaptation.

[Superman goes back even earlier than that, though]

The pervasively magical stories of Neil Gaiman are everywhere these days, which often makes us wonder if hundreds of years from now he won’t be regarded in mythical, legendary tones, like Hans Christian Andersen, or the Grimm Brothers. Just like those guys, Neil Gaiman was inspired by existing stories, too, but interestingly enough, when Gaiman plays in other sandboxes, he frequently employs a kind of “bubble universe” where his unique sensibilities are free to roam, relatively unconstrained by the rules of the world he’s visiting.

Here are four instances of Gaiman setting up shop in a familiar world and making it his own.

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David S. Goyer, screenwriter for Man of Steel, took to Reddit’s r/IAmA subreddit last night to discuss the high stakes facing DC’s Superman reboot. Unlike other celebrities who treat Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread as an online press conference and push their projects without personality, Goyer demonstrated an actual understanding of Reddit’s community and the DC fandom with engaging—and even snarky—answers. When some Redditors teased him about whether he could dodge any questions about the rumored Justice League adaptation, he responded, “Dude, I can dodge Justice League until the end of this AMA.”

But Reddit eventually wore him down.

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In his Introduction to The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman writes about an encounter he had in a hotel lobby in Turin, where he was asked to tell the story of Sandman in less than 25 words. “I pondered for a moment,” he says, and then he delivers the essence of his highly-regarded series like this: “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.”

That’s a powerfully succinct statement, yet filled with thrilling ambiguity, for Gaiman never answers his own implicit question, since while the Morpheus we knew and grew to love does “die,” to be replaced by a new incarnation of the Lord of Dreams, Dream itself never dies. And what does the Sandman choose, anyway? Does he chose to change—and one aspect of his change is his transformation into the Daniel-white-haired-Dream persona with a more sensitive touch? Or does he find himself incapable of change, and that is why “he” dies, only to be reborn as a new version of not-quite-his-old-self?

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Faith Erin Hicks (of Tor.com fame) and Prudence Shen’s new graphic novel, Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, has a bit of everything: nerds, jocks, robots, friendship, drama, and, of course, wanton destruction. It is essentially everything you could want out of a high school story, and perhaps a little bit that you didn’t realize you wanted.

The story begins with a scenario we have, at this point, all encountered in some way or another: a text message break-up. Charlie—the protagonist and gentle, well-meaning basketball star—is in shock. After all, by the natural order of things, he is supposed to be dating the head of the cheerleading squad, but instead, he is being whisked away by his next-door neighbor and childhood best friend, Nate, and harangued for something he has no control over. In fact, Charlie doesn’t have control over much in his life; his parents are divorced and emotionally distant, his closest friend is a lunatic, and now—well, now he’s single.

[Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong… right?]

The promotional build-up to the release of Iron Man 3 has left a lot of clues about Marvel’s “Phase 2” slate of movies, giving us a better idea about the state of our favorite Avengers leading up to the 2015 release of Avengers 2. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has already leaked plans about what happens in “Phase 3” after 2015, and this week a new casting development and an interview with Captain America: The Winter Soldier screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely inadvertently revealed what Captain America 2 will focus on.

[New story tidbits on Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy]

Years after Neil Gaiman had concluded the Sandman series, after all the epilogues and Death-sequels, after Dream joined forces with his gas-masked Golden Age namesake, and after the writer had moved on to such things as the work that would become American Gods and the English-language dub of Princess Mononoke, he was asked to return to his comic book creation to commemorate its tenth anniversary.

Inspired by Japanese folklore he had discovered while working on the Studio Ghibli Mononoke adaptation, he decided to recast an ancient fairy tale from our world and place it in the realm of Sandman. He wanted to retell the story “in his own way,” according to the afterword printed in Sandman: The Dream Hunters.

So he took versions of the old Japanese story from the likes of Reverend B. W. Ashton and Y. T. Ozaki and pulled in some of the familiar Sandman components like Dream’s raven and a brief cameo from a pair of famous Biblical brothers. Sandman: The Dream Hunters ended up as a prose story retelling of that foreign tale, with the great artist Yoshitaka Amano (who you may know from such character designs as Gatchaman anime and the Final Fantasy video game series) providing sumptuously painted illustrations.

That’s how the story goes. But it isn’t actually true.

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Tor.com favorite Faith Erin Hicks and writer Prudence Shen are releasing a new original graphic novel called Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong on May 7th. The novel is currently being serialized over on her website and things are really gearing up for the impending release! If you decide to pre-order Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, you could win some fun prizes, including signed copies of Friends With Boys, original art, and more! 

Head over to Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong for details and read our excerpt of the book here.

Listen, I’m a fan of the “Everyone on Krypton was a perfect super-person, it was a utopia and now it is gone, alas” viewpoint so I am with you that far, Mister Snyder. I am also a fan of the Donner Era “let’s just lean on the Christ-like imagery” angle, as well. Sure! I’m just...trepidatious at Yahoo Movies saying he’s a “special child” and that his birth was a “cause for alarm.” You don’t need to push too hard on the space-savior angle. It is already built right in. I’m guessing that this actually ties into a more cerebral, Byrne- era Krypton; Krypton as a sparse emotionless world where children are conceived in test tubes birthing matrices rather than through physical contact.

[The Man of Steel can leave out some things, but shouldn’t others]

For 70 issues in the mid-1990s a sort-of-Sandman spin-off detailed the pulpy adventures of one Wesley Dodds, aka the Golden Age Sandman, in a series by Matt Wagner and Steven Seagle and (mostly) Guy Davis called Sandman Mystery Theatre. That series recast the original Gardner-Fox-and-Bert-Christman-created DC Comics Sandman as a plump amateur detective who would hone his skills on the city streets while trying to maintain his relationship with the lovely and whip-smart Dian Belmont.

I have my collection of the series bound in two customized hardcover volumes, if you’d like an indication about how much I enjoy Sandman Mystery Theatre.

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On Tuesday of this week, Image Comics and comics writer Brian K. Vaughan reported that this week’s issue of Saga, the star-faring fantasy series written by Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples, has been banned from being sold “through any iOS apps” over two background depictions of gay sex in the issue.

Update: Comixology released a statement on Wednesday taking responsibility for the snafu, saying that their interpretation of Apple content policy was in error.

[Vaughan and Image on the ban]

How great is it that Superman is the first and best superhero? Some might invoke the name of pulp icons like Doc Savage, Nyctalope or The Phantom here, but it was really Superman who synthesized the elements of pulp action and science fiction into the bright four color world of capes and cowls. He defined it, but then, in one of the best quirks of fiction, he didn’t fall into the dustbin of history; Superman became the most famous of the lot. He started with a bang (that’d be Krypton) and kept going strong for 75 years...which Glen Weldon, who does comics for NPR, has brought together into a nice, readable biography: Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. The history of Superman, behind the curtain and the Man of Tomorrow himself, from comics and radio to television and film.

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In Neal Stephenson’s rightly-beloved masterpiece Snow Crash, there are a few memorable moments of scorn in the story—which I’ve always thought, sidebar, to be slyly narrated by one of the characters, in an unbreaking deadpan manipulation of the fourth wall—for what their near-future society terms “gargoyles.”

These are people who, unsatisfied with the seamlessness of human-use technology, strap video cameras and tape recorders to their bodies, in order to more fully embody surveillance culture (couture, if you like). Of all the mystifyingly accurate parts of the satire/prophecy the book contains, that one always stuck with me. I liked to imagine them, steampunky almost, uploading their experiences at baud rates, one photo and soundbite at a time.

Of course the real future—us—is a much different situation, and we’re engaged right now in a cluster storm of debates about privacy, technology, even the very basics of how to accomplish capitalism in a world where information is literally free, because the real future takes its form from continuity. It’s a rare technology that survives without fitting seamlessly into daily life, which is why the few evolutionary jumps that actually change the way we operate ourselves—the PC, the Smartphone—do such big things to our economy.

Generally, when we say “early adopter” we mean physical technology, hardware. But there’s a rumbling undercurrent over the past few years that I think applies a new meaning to the word, and it has to do with the acquisition of IP. And it has to do also with being a dick.

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I’ve been writing about television for the site Television Without Pity for about ten years now, and while I love having the opportunity to think more intensely and talk things out when it comes to the shows and stories I love most, that part of the job pales in comparison to interacting with the fans of the shows and seeing the communities they build around those shared interests.

It’s practically impossible—for me, at least—to think about shows (especially in the genre) without immediately attaching a kind of parallel narrative about the fandom of the show, its connections with other fandoms and geek interests, and what the things we love say about us as people. Not really in the same way as scholarly “media studies” work, or even the snarky metacommentary and inter-fandom sniping that goes on (no matter how often it’s hilariously true), but in the very personal and heartfelt ways fandom appreciation creatively expresses itself.

Being a TV recapper for so long, I’ve sometimes felt stuck in that blurry area between “consumer” and “producer” of content. I mean, I write stuff that people find enjoyable for some reason, but in my role as recapper it’s not really my toys I’m playing with.

[I don’t think I’m alone in that blurry place.]

Women in Refrigerators. You might have heard the term. It refers to the death of a female character in comics that was done just to provide plot movement for or offer emotional “depth” to a male protagonist. This trope was coined after Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend was murdered, hacked up into little bits and shoved into his refrigerator for him to find. It was hailed as one of the most gratuitous murders of all time and sparked a controversy that created this now well-known call out. It is typical to hear a storyline called out for “fridging” a woman.

[Warning: Further spoilers below for Injustice comics!]