November
17 Ups and downs

Marvel has sued NCSoft, makers of the superhero videogame "City of Heroes," because the company says the massive multiplayer online game allows players to create heroes who resemble Marvel characters. Game developer Cryptic Studios responded by saying the claim is meritless.

Revivals keep coming more quickly than ever in comics these days. Marvel announced plans for a new "Black Panther" series, starting in February to coincide with Black History Month. The book will be written by Reginald  Hudlin and drawn by John Romita Jr. Hudlin is a writer and director whose work includes the film "House Party" and "The Bernie Mac Show." He co-wrote last summer's graphic novel "Birth of a Nation" with "Boondocks" cartoonist Aaron McGruder and "Plastic Man" writer and artist Kyle Baker. The previous "Black Panther" series ran from 1998-2003 under writer Christopher Priest before morphing into a short run as "The Crew."

ICV2's monthly estimate of actual sales for the top 300 titles in the comicbook specialty market has numbers out for October. DC's Identity Crisis #5 topped the charts with an 125,000 copies, with Marvel dominating the rest of the top spots. The site also analyses the numbers, with some interesting results: A number of top-selling books saw a boost over September, but dollar sales for comics were 20% from October 2003 and down 12% for graphic novels. Much of that decline is due to the shipping of popular, high-priced issues in October 2003 such as Amazing Spider-Man #500 and JLA/Avengers #2.

A licensing deal between Dark Horse and Barnes & Noble is responsible for inexpensive hardcover editions of popular editions of Akira and Trigun to appear exclusively at the bookseller. Barnes & Noble had struck a similar deal with Marvel to produce softcover editions of Marvel Masterworks and a mammoth collection of Ultimate Spider-Man.

Flash co-creator Harry Lampert has died at the age of 88. Lampert drew the first Flash story, written by Gardner Fox, in 1940's Flash Comics #1. Mark Evanier has, as always, the full story on his comics career.

And if you've ever wanted to know what goes through the mind of a top artist like Jim Lee, you can now read his blog, which features posting from a number of his comics-making pals.