The Rundown: “Guardians” Gets Its Drax, Van Lente and Pak Teaming Up Again, and more

Welcome back to The Rundown, our daily breakdown on news stories we missed from the previous day. Have a link to share? Email me at david@multiversitycomics.com.

– Guardians of the Galaxy gets its Drax the Destroyer, and it is a wrestler. It’s Dave Bautista, and before you worry, realize that wrestlers are effectively highly physical actors anyways and do regular bits where they perform segments of pure posturing. So wrestlers could be good. Of course, amongst the wrestling fans at Multiversity, it was said that Bautista was horrible at his intros and even “had problems talking.” Not the most reassuring acting review, if I do say so myself. Perhaps he’ll strictly be mo cap and someone else will talk? Who knows, but I have to say…I’m a bit down on this casting. I guess you could say he sort of looks like Drax, at least.

– All you “Incredible Hercules” fans should get excited. Not because Herc is coming back, but because Greg Pak shared on his Tumblr that he and “Incredible Hercules” co-writer Fred Van Lente are working on a creator-owned project, and that is reason enough to celebrate. They’re both brilliant writers and awfully nice guys, so who wouldn’t support them working on something together? I give this a big…well, this.

– For all of you who’ve always wanted to read the old Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman comic strips, do we have good news for you. Robot 6 shared that IDW – who are noted for putting out damn amazing collections that shine a light on the comics of yesteryear – will be putting these collections together, which means one thing: they’ll be awesome as all hell.

– CBR threw down with all four of the incoming (or current) Superman writers, as they interviewed Andy Diggle, Scott Lobdell, Greg Pak and Scott Snyder about the character, his legacy and much more. It’s not so often you get an interview this big together, but it’s definitely worth the read. Mad props to Snyder, as per usual. If there is a more selfless, supportive guy in comics, I don’t know him.

– In an event that certainly will freak out the hordes of ComiXology readers, JManga, an online manga vendor, closed down its shop and in the process every reader lost the comics they paid for. Basically, this is the worst, worst, worst case scenario, and it underlines the very real issue and fear that is growing increasingly pervasive amongst readers: if ComiXology went out of business, you’d lose everything. With no actual, real digital copies of comics coming your way in your purchase, all of it existing in the cloud, you’d lose everything if ComiXology went bye bye. Sorry to all you JManga customers. Tough break, for sure.