Welcome back to The Rundown, our daily breakdown on comic news stories we missed from the previous day. Have a link to share? Email our team at rundown@multiversitycomics.com.
In case you missed it yesterday, Sy Barry was identified as the artist on the seminal “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” comic from 1957, “Thief of Thieves” is returning with a new writer for its last arc in July, and Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan’s “Welcome to the New World” won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.
– Kicking off, DC announced a new crossover between the “Injustice” universe and “He-Man” called “Injustice vs. He-Man and Masters of the Universe.” The six-issue miniseries will be written by Tim Seeley (“Grayson,” “Green Lantern,”) with art by Freddie Williams II (“He-Man/Thundercats,” “Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”) The series is set to debut in July.
– Over at Marvel, Jason Latour confirmed on Twitter that July’s issue #34 of “Spider-Gwen” would be the series’ last issue. Latour and Robbi Rodriguez, have collaborated on 41 issues of the series about Earth-65’s Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy.
– At Image, “Wildstorm: Michael Cray” writer Bryan Hill and artist Jeff Spokes will launch “Aphrodite V” from Image and Top Cow in July. The series follows the android Aphrodite V in a future Los Angeles as she defends the series against a new enemy. The original Aphrodite was a part of Marc Silvestri’s “Cyberforce” which was also recently relaunched by Bryan Hill and Silvestri.
– John Ridley is set to direct a film adaptation of his Vertigo comic “The American Way: Those Above and Those Below,” produced by Jason Blum. Ridley and artist George Jeanty collaborated on the six-issue miniseries last year as a follow-up to their eight-issue WildStorm series from 2006 “The American Way.” The project is being fast tracked by Blum’s Blumhouse Productions.
– We reported it last week based on an article from Bleeding Cool and a tweet from Jeff Lemire, but today Valiant Entertainment Editor-in-Chief Warren Simons confirmed on Twitter that he was stepping down from the company. This follows a number of resignations from the company, including CCO/CEO Dinesh Shamdasani, following the buyout from Chinese entertainment company DMG. Simons’s replacement has not been named, but over the weekend it was reported that Joseph P. Illidge left Lion Forge to be the Executive Editor at Valiant.
– The Avengers: Infinity War cast continues to grow, even with just two weeks away from the debut of the movie in the U.S. The actors behind most of Thanos’s Black Order were revealed with Fargo star Carrie Coon playing Proxima Midnight, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor playing Ebony Maw, and Avatar‘s Terry Notary playing Cull Obsidian (known in the comics as Black Dwarf). No reveal was given for other Black Order member Corvus Glave, continuing rumors that Peter Dinklage is playing the character. The movie hits theaters April 27th.
– Continuing in casting news, Ian Somerhalder (The Vampire Diaries) has signed on to star in the Netflix adaptation of Jonathan Malbury’s IDW series “V-Wars.” Somerhalder will play Dr. Luther Swann who tries to understand the world as more people are turned into vampires through a mysterious diseases, including his best friend. The series got a 10-episode order on Netflix. IDW’s other in work series, based on the series “Locke & Key,” was recently passed over by Hulu.
– Academy Award-nominated film producer Marc Platt and Universal Studios have acquired the film rights to Jen Wang’s graphic novel “The Prince and the Dressmaker.” The YA comic, which was published by First Second just two months ago, tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a dressmaker and a prince with an unconventional taste in fashion.
– A new prose novel about Marvel’s Thanos is coming from writer Barry Lyga and publisher Little, Brown and Company called Thanos: Titan Consumed. An earlier version of the story stated this book was canonical with the MCU, which has been denied (although early cover art brands it as being an Infinity War tie-in and uses the film’s design). A full interview with Lyga can be found here.
– The New York Times ran a story on Peter Tomasi, Sara DuVall, Gabriel Eltaeb, John Kalisz, and Rob Leigh’s new graphic novel “The Bridge: How the Roeblings Connected Brooklyn to New York,” which debuts today. The book comes from Abrams ComicArts and tells the story of the Brooklyn Bridge and the family that brought the bridge to life.
– Finally, Vulture compiled a list of “The 100 Pages That Shaped Comics,” from comic creators and other professionals including Fred Van Lente, Klaus Janson, and Heidi MacDonald. You can find the whole list chronologically here.
