January
23 News Roundup

Bags and Boards is pleased to inaugurate its weekly Friday roundup of news and views from the comics biz.

Daily Variety reported Tuesday that David Maisel, most recently head of corporate strategy and business development at Endeavor, was named prexy and chief operating officer of Marvel Studios this week. He will work with Avi Arad to to bring more comics properties to the big and small screens.

In further news at Marvel, Newsarama says the comics publisher is canceling X-Treme X-Men, a showcase for longtime scribe Chris Claremont, and replacing it with a revival of another X-Men spinoff, Excalibur. Claremont, already slated to write Uncanny X-Men with artist Alan Davis, is rumored to be writing Excalibu. too. Marvel also is moving three of its titles over to its darker Marvel Knights line aimed at older readers. The affected titles are Wolverine, X-Statix and Hulk.

DC Comics hired L.A.-area reporter and writer Jonathan Vankin as an editor for its Vertigo line. Vankin has written several comics for the publisher, including Vertigo Pop!: Tokyo. The publisher also signed artist Arthur Adams to a three-year exclusive deal.

Dark Horse announced plans to publish the manga Samurai Executioner, the pre-Lone Wolf and Cub series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima starting in June. A trade paperback conversation between comics greats Will Eisner and Frank Miller, to be called Eisner/Miller, is set for April.

The huge Angouleme Comics Festival is on right now in France and has announced its Prix d'Angouleme. Among the winners were writer Neil Gaiman, who won best story for his Sandman: Endless Nights graphic novel.

George Woodbridge, a longtime artist for Mad magazine, died Tuesday at 73.

And lastly, convention season appears to be heating up in L.A. After the Media City Convention was held earlier this month as the same day as the long-running L.A. Comic-Book Sci-Fi Show at the Shrine, the latter has announced its next show will be a two-day affair at the Pasadena Convention Center Feb. 7 and 8. A month after that, Wizard World Los Angeles debuts in Long Beach, and rooms at the most popular hotels for ultra-hot annual Comic-Con Intl. in San Diego became hard to find only a few days after the online registration system went live.