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.
– DC announced a second annual “DC Power” special celebrating the company’s Black superheroes. The 104-page book will be headlined by a new epilogue for “Far Sector” (by series writer N.K. Jemisin and artist Jamal Campbell), depicting the first meeting between Green Lanterns Jo Mullein and John Stewart.
It will also feature original stories with the Signal, the Spectre/Crispus Allen, Thunder and Lightning, Bloodwynd, Val-Zod, Nubia, and more, by contributors like John Ridley, Brandon Thomas, Lamar Giles, Shawn Martinbrough, Cheryl Lynn Eaton, Alitha Martinez, Edwin Galmon, Khary Randolph, Denys Cowan, Tony Akins, and Asiah Fulmore. It will be released in time for Black History Month on January 30, 2024.
– Marvel announced Alien will be getting the “Black, White & Red” treatment with “Alien: Black, White & Blood,” a four-part black-and-white anthology series. The series will feature a story across each issue called ‘Utopia,’ a generations-spanning story by Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, and Michael Dowling about how fear of the Xenomorphs causes a society to descend into darkness. The first issue, due out February 7, will also contain stories by Ryan Cady & Devmalya Pramanik, and Stephanie Phillips & Marcelo Ferreira.
– Random House Books for Young Readers will publish Storm: Dawn Of A Goddess, a young adult novel starring the X-Men’s weather goddess. Written by NAACP Image Award nominee Tiffany D. Jackson, the book will retell the origin of Ororo Munroe, beginning with her childhood as a thief in Cairo, before culminating in her first battle with the Shadow King. It will be available on June 4, 2024, and also receive an audiobook release from Listening Library.
– GKIDS revealed the English dub cast for Hayao Miyazaki’s new film, The Boy and the Heron. It includes Christian Bale (who previously voiced the title character in Howl’s Moving Castle), Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson, and Florence Pugh, plus Luca Padovan (You, Are You Afraid of the Dark?) as protagonist Mahito Maki, and Mamoudou Athie, Tony Revolori, and Dan Stevens as the Parakeets. The film, which may or may not be Miyazaki’s last, will be released in US theaters on December 8.
– In date announcement news, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will be added to Netflix on October 31; Skybound’s visual novel Invincible Presents: Atom Eve will be released on PC on November 14; and Netflix revealed this year’s Geek Week will be held from Monday, November 6, to Sunday, November 12. To mark the latter news, they released photos of the Fire Nation cast in the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series, giving us our first look at Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai, Dallas Liu as Zuko, Elizabeth Yu as Azula, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Uncle Iroh, and Ken Leung as Commander Zhao.
– The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Masters of the Universe are crossing over in a new toy line, Masters of the Universe Origins: Turtles of Grayskull. The line include Leonardo and Donatello in Eternian-style armor, and a Mutagen Mutation He-Man. It will hit shelves in January 2024.
– BBC News reports longtime Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell has been laid off following a dispute over a rejected drawing of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The cartoon, based on David Levine’s “Johnson’s Scar,” depicted Netanyahu operating on himself, with an incision shaped like the Gaza Strip. Bell said it was dropped after the paper deemed it might be considered an antisemitic reference to the “pound of flesh” from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. A spokesperson for the paper commented, “The decision has been made not to renew Steve Bell’s contract. Steve Bell’s cartoons have been an important part of The Guardian over the past 40 years – we thank him and wish him all the best.”
– Finally, Rolling Stone ran a report on allegations of misconduct from Last Podcast on the Left podcast host Ben Kissel, ranging from sexually inappropriate behavior, to emotional and physical abuse. Kissel, who has been undergoing alcohol rehab, responded by admitting to being in toxic relationships, while denying being “physically or verbally abusive” towards any women in his life. Kissel’s comic book credits consist of Z2’s “The Last Comic Book On the Left” series, and DC Horror’s “Soul Plumber,” which were written with his co-hosts Marcus Parks and Henry Zebrowski. The latter two, who recently launched the Dark Horse series “Operation Sunshine” without him, also come under scrutiny in the article over the extent they knew about Kissel’s behavior.
