It was almost six years ago that former Marvel Comics editor (and occasional mediabistro.com instructor) Danny Fingeroth launched Write Now!, a magazine about writing comic books. He's collected some of the best material from the first sixteen issues in an oversized trade paperback from TwoMorrows Publishing. I spent some of yesterday afternoon poring over the interviews with writers like Brian Michael Bendis and Stan Lee, and I'm really looking forward to digging into veteran writer/editor Denny O'Neill's "Comics 101" lecture notes. There's also a huge middle section where scripts from various comics are juxtposed with the pencilled pages that looks cool.

Over at UnBeige, mediabistro.com's design blog, Stephanie Murg discusses A People's History of American Empire, a comic-book adaptation of Howard Zinn's take on U.S. history, and what Macmillan, the book's publisher, describes as "the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq." The book will also feature some of Zinn's personal history, "from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America's leading historians."

How do you like them apples?

Yesterday, as comic book shops were laying out their copies of DC Universe 0, a fifty-cent one-shot prelude to this summer's Final Crisis miniseries, the New York Daily News was giving away the book's big secret: DC Comics is resurrecting the Flash. Specifically, the character of Barry Allen, who died in the 1985 miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths—while other super-speedy characters would don the Flash costume over the next 23 years, Barry Allen was always held up as the icon of noble sacrifice, the one death at DC that would hold firm against the tendency to revive every seemingly dead hero or villain... until a Justice League/Justice Society crossover storyline last year began to lay the groundwork for his return (but, funnily enough, ultimately served to bring back another Flash who had dropped off the face of the earth).

As the Daily News notes, there's some symbolic resonance to the move: the introduction of Barry Allen as the Flash in 1956 sparked the revival of the superhero comic, so maybe DC is hoping lightning will strike twice. Not everyone is convinced, though: "Every time you bring these characters back, you undermine the emotional resonance of those original stories surrounding the hero's tragic demise," blogs Valerie D'Orazio. "But, I suppose if it's a choice between maintaining the integrity of some past issues that will probably do ok in backlist trade paperbacks anyhow, and the thought of getting another sales spike, the latter will probably win out."

Random Happenstance offers a harsher assessment of the comic: "It's been like three-plus years of ongoing Crisis, and I'm a bit numb to it...I'll check back later, but for right now, no thanks." The review hints at one of the book's biggest problems: Although it's officially aimed at introducing new readers to the comics, it can still be somewhat obscure—frankly, without the Daily News article to explain things, I don't think the dramatic reveal, in which the narrator basically transitions from being the consciousness of the universe to realizing that he's Barry Allen, is all that apparent to readers who weren't around when he died. Especially since it all takes place in caption boxes.

(J.G. Jones artwork from DC Comics)

artwork by Frank Quitely for DC Comics; photo by Brian Heater

io9 actually beat me to setting down some of the best quotes from Grant Morrison's Saturday afternoon panel at the New York Comic Con, although they missed the part where an audience member asked the comic book writer what's going to happen in 2012: "Who knows? Beats me. Maybe nothing... The world's never ended yet. It might not end this time." Or the Earth's magnetic field might reverse, and we could all wake up feeling like we're on a non-stop acid trip. You just don't know!

I got to ask him how he's coming along at expanding his pop magic essay into a book. Slowly, he said; "my guardian angel is sitting on my shoulder telling me, 'You getter get it done or we're going to kill you!'" And then there was the fan who wondered if the plot twist at the end of the latest issue of All-Star Superman meant that Superman was the God of our universe, which in context was a perfectly sensible question.

(There was so much going on that nobody got a chance to ask him about his new project for Virgin Comics, scripting an animated adaptation of the Mahabarata as science-fiction epic for director Shekhar Kapur. ""Like the Beatles took Indian music and tried to make psychedelic sound," Morrison said at another panel, "I'm trying to convert Indian storytelling to a western style for people raised on movies, comics, and video games.")

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John McNally shows off the original Chris Burnham artwork illustrating his short story "Remains of the Night," from the forthcoming anthology Who Can Save Us Now?, which McNally co-edited with Owen King. The two authors, and their illustrator, took part in a panel at the New York Comic Con Saturday afternoon, where Burnham talked about the challenge of encapsulating a 25-page short story into a single "splash page" image...and then doing it another 21 times. "How do you keep [the illustrations] consistent without them all looking the same?"

Prompted by a question from Austin Grossman, the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, King talked about how the short story form gave writers teh opportunity to probe their characters' backgrounds and delve into the psychology of superheroics. (Afterwards, Free Press editor Wylie O'Sullivan echoed that sentiment, praising the way the stories "get behind the facade." She was not a comic book fan when she got McNally and King's proposal, she admitted, but "I admired the aesthetic from afar.") He also played up the diverse range of material, from authors like Tom Bissell, Jim Shepard, and Jennifer Weiner—although the stories don't all take place in the same universe. "That would've been cool, though," McNally chimed in.

To generate advance buzz for the book, which comes out in July, Free Press is inviting readers to submit their own superhero fiction (under 15,000 words) through the book's official website, with a Nintendo Wii for the winner—and possibly inclusion in the ebook edition of the anthology.

So there's another lifelong dream accomplished, although I probably should've combed my hair first.

The basement of the Times Square Virgin Megastore was packed last night with comic book fans (and more than a few pros) who came to pay tribute to the legendary Stan Lee, who received the New York Comics Legend Award on the eve of the third annual New York Comic Con. Lee had already been working in comics for about two decades when he (in collaboration with artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) revolutionized the field by injecting psychological (and geographical) realism into Marvel Comics titles like Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man in the early 1960s. At the same time, as current Marvel head Joe Quesada observed during his remarks, he created the persona of "Stan Lee," a.k.a "Stan the Man." That was a crucial step in making the creators of comics stand out in the imaginations of young fans as the characters, not to mention how pretty much my entire generation, through constant Saturday morning repetition, learned to recognize the phrase "This is STAN LEE."

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If you've been wondering for years what 'Spiderman 2' would've been like if Pulitzer-winning 'The Yiddish Policeman's Union'author Michael Chabon's contributions to the script hadn't been reduced to a mere story credit, well, exhale! McSweeney's is letting you download the original script in order to promote Chabon's new nonfiction collection, 'Maps and Legends.' "It's like reading Pulitzer-winning fan fiction," claims Gabe Delahaye at Videogum. We read a few pages and found it more like ... watching Spiderman 2. But if anyone wants to study it more closely and point out the subtle differences, go to town.

Longtime GalleyCat readers may remember the battle between Georgia prosecutors and comics shop owner Gordon Lee, who has stood accused for more than three years of handing obscene material (in the form of a free promotional comic) to a minor. It's a case that the district attorney's office has screwed up over and over again—and, as writer/illustrator Nick Bertozzi, who created the "offending" passages for his graphic novel The Salon, and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund executive director Charles Brownstein explained last Saturday afternoon, the law Lee is accused of breaking is likely unconstitutional. In this ten-minute video, they break the case down to its basics; the PowerPoint slides, I should warn you, contain cartoonish depictions of Pablo Picasso painting in the nude and of a semi-naked female model. (But they aren't onscreen very long.)

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This is how David Malki's "Wondermark" got onto my ultimate blogroll:

click to see full-scale version

And this is how it got that way:

Technically, the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman isn't until 2009, but DC Comics is jumping the gun with a set of matching bookends depicting Dream (above) and his sister Death set to go on sale in early September. The limited-edition figures were designed by Mark Buckingham, one of the many artists who worked on the series during its seven-year run, and then sculpted by Mike Locasio.

At $295, the bookends were among the most expensive items in DC's room at this week's International Toy Fair. Mostly there were a lot of action figures, including several variations on Batman and the Joker (although not the infamous Heath Ledger version, which is a Mattel product). But there were a few other high-end collectibles tucked away in one corner, including a life-sized replica of Superman's cape (complete with a hidden pocket in the lining to hold Clark Kent's folded clothes) and a miniature Bat-signal powered by a halogen bulb.

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