The Rundown: Bill Watterson Takes Angoulême Grand Prix, Johns In, Nolan Out on “Batman vs. Superman”, and more

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 either david@multiversitycomics.com or brian@multiversitycomics.com.

– In really spectacularly amazing news, Bill Watterson was the hugely surprising Grand Prix winner at this past weekend’s Angoulême International Comics Festival. This award goes to a person for their body of work, and is selected for the award by past winners, so it’s basically the cartoonist hall of fame as decided by other greats. In most situations, the winner becomes the president of the jury for the next year, but given Watterson’s reclusive nature, all bets are off on whether or not he accepts. Still, it’s a well-deserved award, and I’m glad they chose him even though they likely knew it wouldn’t end up paying off in regards to him accepting.

– Forbes did a piece on how Warner is rebranding “Batman vs. Superman” on the heels of the big Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor announcement, but it is in surprising ways we immediately missed. Such as, Ben Affleck’s pal Chris Terrio (screenwriter of “Argo”) is now writing the screenplay based on a David Goyer screenplay (screenplay…based on a screenplay?), and apparently Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas are out as exec producers, with Geoff Johns in. It’s very interesting workings on the back end, and while the writer of the piece is a lot more into Zack Snyder’s direction than myself, he does bring up some interesting points as to what this means and how it’s going to change things. I have to wonder how far we are from Ben Affleck officially directing “Justice League”, for one, off this piece.

Very interesting.

– Is there a “Superman” monthly coming from Geoff Johns and John Romita, Jr.? Bleeding Cool says so, and that is a pretty damn phenomenal team. Let’s hope it happens.

– In case you missed it, Ed Brubaker was in the trailer for “The Winter Soldier” that premiered in the Super Bowl yesterday (and by in the Super Bowl, I mean it was a full length commercial connected to the Super Bowl 30 second spot). People had hilarious things to say about this.

– Tom Hiddleston plays word association with Agent M because who cares its Tom Hiddleston he’s totally awesome.

– Speaking of, what happens when Loki, The Mandarin and Sinestro do a Jaguar commercial together? We now have the answer in the Super Bowl spot starring Tom Hiddleston, Ben Kingsley and Mark Strong.

– Lastly, congrats to Dean Trippe on crushing his Kickstarter goal for “Something Terrible”. Very well deserved.