Like most kids reading comics in the late 1980s, "The Uncanny X-Men" was at the top of the stack for  Gerard Way. The writer of The Umbrella Academy and lead singer of My Chemical Romance says he particularly liked the late 1980s run by artist Marc Silvestri and writer Chris Claremont, and the 1989 crossover “Inferno” remains a favorite to this day.
“I loved the action, and because they were complete underdogs,” Way says. “They were invisible, they didn’t get any credit for what they did, they had personal issues with each other.”
Having discussed the experience of making comics in part one of our interview, Way says it was while he worked in a comics shop that he began to see the range of experimentation going in on comics at the time. One comicbook from that era — writer Grant Morrison's run on "Doom Patrol" — became a major influence on Way, who says it was for him the bridge between "X-Men" and "Sandman."
Beyond comics, Way was a fan of films with strong visuals. Directors David Lynch and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s "City of Lost Children" were particular favorites.
After joining a band in middle school that Way was later thrown out of for not being a good guitarist, he was more attracted to creating his own comics.
“I wanted to do something where I could be self-reliant,” Way says. “I said I’m going to write comics and I’m going to teach myself how to draw properly so I could draw and write them, so I didn’t really need other people.”

Gerard Way is not your normal comic-book writer.

Better known as the lead singer of the alternative rock band My Chemical Romance, which formed in 2001 and has released three albums culminating in the 2006 smash hit The Black Parade.

To comics fans, he’s best known as the creator of The Umbrella Academy, a quirky and inventive tale of postmodern superheroes that debuted with a short tale in 2007’s Free Comic Book Day offering from Dark Horse Comics. That was followed by a six-issue series called "Apocalypse Suite" that has just been collected in trade paperback. Drawn by Brazilian artist Gabriel Ba, the series was a strong seller and a critical success.

The story begins with seven extraordinary children, brought together at birth by Sir Reginald Hargreeves, an inventor and entrepreneur who raised them to use their unusual abilities to save the world. It sounds like standard superhero stuff, but the joy is in the execution of the comic, which is skillfully written and drawn as a shady and bizarre world that draws as much from Grant Morrison and Mike Mignola as X-Men.

Way says he has always loved art and comics as much as music. A former comic shop employee, he grew up on 1980s superhero comics and went to New York’s School of Visual Arts intending to become a comic book artist. But music came to the fore after the 9/11 attack, leading to the creation and success of My Chemical Romance.

So for Way, carving out time from touring and recording to write a comic book was a labor of love. “The real simple reason is I love comics so much,” Way says. “It’s not even that I read an awful lot of comics anymore. I’m real specific about what I like, but I’ve always truly loved the artform and I’ve loved it since I was a kid.”

DC Comics has long been defined by its three most-recognizable superheroes: Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. All three bear the unique honor of having been continuously published since the Golden Age, but the connections between these characters in the larger DC Universe has always been somewhat disjointed.
Tackling this head on is Trinity, a new weekly series that debuts this week (minisite, preview) that writer Kurt Busiek says will define, challenge and ultimately redefine the relationship between these powerhouse heroes.
“It's about DC's big three heroes as a trinity — why they're a trinity, what that means, and what happens when the trinity breaks. Who replaces it? Can they fight back? What does it mean to the world? To the universe?,” says Busiek. “And it's not just their adventure, it's an adventure that matters to the entire universe. If Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman lose, the universe will be irrevocably changed. If they win, their understanding of how the universe works will be irrevocably changed.”
DCU exec editor Dan Didio says the company tries to reinvent the weekly concept each time out in order to keep it fresh, and Trinity will be closer in approach to 52, with Busiek and artist Mark Bagley leading off each issue with a 12-page lead chapter.

Announced last year at the New York Comic-Con, the alliance between Sci Fi Channel and Virgin Comics is about to bear its first fruit in the form of “The Stranded,” a five-issue series that debuted in comics shops this week and online at Scifi.com and Virgincomics.com.

The object of this exercise is, of course, to create comics that can be translated later into TV, movies or other media, and that’s reflected in how comics writer Mike Carey and Virgin Comics editor Stuart Moore have worked with Sci Fi in developing the series.

“We’re very much approaching this arc, this story as being like the equivalent of a pilot episode, defining the characters, setting out the big scenes, the big ideas and sort of laying trails for later stories,” says Carey, who is perhaps best known as the writer of the Sandman sequel series “Lucifer” for DC/Vertigo and current scribe of Marvel’s “X-Men.”

The Stranded is about five individuals who learn they not only have superpowers but are from an alien planet they have absolutely no memory of. A mysterious assassin named Janus, however, begins hunting them down, with the mysterious and beautiful Tamree doing her best to save them.

Moore, a Vertigo alumnus and author of such sci-fi comics as Earthfall and Para, says the collaboration process has been so far smooth — more like a consultation process than an hierarchy of approvals — with both companies learning from each other’s approach to telling stories.

“(Sci Fi has) had to learn that there are things we can do in comics that they sort of automatically screen out, because they can’t film it or they wouldn’t want to put on screen because they just don’t consider it,” he says. “At the same time, we’ve been working in comics so long that there are certain conventions we just take for granted. And occasionally they’ll stop and say to us, ‘Well that’s a little confusing,’ or ‘What does that mean?’ And it forces us to step back and make a comic that actually I think is a little more accessible to more people.”

For those who still come to Comic-Con for the comics, Warren Ellis was as big a star as any Hollywood actor or actress at this year's show, at least in part because he last appeared at the show 10 years ago.

In that time, Ellis has become one of comics'™ most consistently entertaining and inventive voices. He rose through the ranks at Marvel working on various X-Men related books before his sci-fi maxi-series "€Transmetropolitan" caught on and became the only series in DC'€™s Helix line to survive its demise and move over to Vertigo. He followed up with canny ventures into the "€œwidescreen" superhero epic with "The Authority,"€ the pulpy origins of comics in "€œPlanetary,"€ and the joy and horror of space exploration in "Orbiter," thrilling readers with a mad mix of ideas, stories and characters that were irresistibly clever and vulgar at the same time.

Now, he divides his comics time between a number of comics publishers, such as Marvel, where he i€™s set to take over "€œAstonishing X-Men"€ from Joss Whedon, and DC/Wildstorm, home to "€œDesolation Jones." On the indie side, "€œFell"€ with artist Ben Templesmith has been a hit at Image Comics and Ellis has carved out a nice niche for his work at Avatar Press, where since 1999 he ha™s published horror and sci-fi titles such as "€œStrange Kiss" and the Apparat line of singles.

Credit Avatar with finally getting Ellis back to San Diego to promote the launch of three new projects: the historical graphic novel "€œCrecy,"€ the sci-fi series "€œDoktor Sleepless" and the political superhero miniseries "€œBlack Summer."€

Also, Ellis' first novel, "€œCrooked Little Vein,"€ was just published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, and has been getting solid reviews and attention from the likes of Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.

Ellis spent much of his time at the show signing at the Avatar and HarperCollins booths, as well as appearing on a couple of panels —€” one of which was a two-hour Saturday night spotlight on his work —€” and doing press from a hotel room well-stocked with cigarettes and Red Bull, where he answered some questions Saturday afternoon about his work, the comics industry and returning to San Diego.

"€œIt'€™s a completely different show,"€ Ellis says of the convention. "€œThere are three times the number of people than were here the last time I attended, the hall is three times bigger and I had a brief walk across the convention floor yesterday and I couldn'€™t see any comic stands at all,"€ he says. "€œThe only comics presence I'€™ve seen is the Avatar Press booth that I"™m signing at."€

Anyone who’s read Garth Ennis’ work, especially on "Preacher," knows he has a deep love of the West. Now, Ennis is going back to the old West in a new six-issue oater from Avatar Press called “Streets of Glory,” due to start in October with art by Mike Wolfer.

Here’s how Avatar describes the tale:

In the past fifteen years, Joseph Dunn hasn't seen much of the little civilization Montana had to offer in 1899, but his absence along with the death of a generation has rendered the atmosphere unrecognizable.  Dunn is the last of the drifters that independently roamed the western frontier of the United States in the 19th century.  These were men who fought with nobility, wits, and an easily un-holstered gun at their side.  The body count will rise when Dunn's trigger finger is forced to settle new problems with the only solution he knows.

Ennis answered a few questions via email about the new series.

Variety: You obviously have a great love for Westerns. Which films, books and especially comics in the genre do you admire?

Garth Ennis: “Unforgiven,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly,” “The Shootist,” “The Searchers,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Lonesome Dove,” “The Cowboys.”
“Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy, also his Border Trilogy. “True Grit,” by Charles Portis. “The Tonto Woman And Other Stories,” by Elmore Leonard. “St. Agnes' Stand,” by Thomas Eidson. “Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurtry, also “Zeke And Ned.”
The only comic that comes to mind is “Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo,” by Joe Lansdale and Tim Truman.

Variety: Tell me about Joe Dunn. What makes him a hero? How is he different from some of your other, cowboy-like protagonists, like Jesse Custer?

Ennis: He's the protagonist, the lead character. He's capable of heroism, but whether he's a hero or not is up to the reader to judge. He's a harsh man born of harsh times, capable of extremely harsh acts. He's not a million miles away from Jesse, in that both are dangerous men given to patient consideration before acting. Dunn, however, is a good forty years older.

Year-end wrap-ups have become a mind-numbing fixture for media outlets desperate to fill slow December news days. But few have quite the same skewed POV as Mad Magazine, whose ninth annual list of the year’s 20 dumbest people, events and things hits stands Dec. 20 in issue #473.

Mad editor John Ficarra says the list is a yearlong project for the “usual gang of idiots” who put out the magazine. And luckily for them 2006 had more than its fair share of candidates.

Among the obvious events to make the list were the war in Iraq, Vice President Cheney accidentally shooting his hunting buddy, “Survivor” winner Richard Hatch failing to pay taxes on his million-dollar prize, Mel Gibson’s drunken screed, the rise of YouTube, Paris Hilton’s short-lived vow of celibacy, and the Bush administration’s assault on civil rights.

The events that make the list are a combination of the obvious and dumb luck, Ficarra says. “I think we knew the war in Iraq was probably going to be on the list just from the way it was going, so that was pretty much a no-brainer. And then you have the things that fall into the comedy writer’s lap like the Mel Gibson tirade.”

Marvel Comics’ past and present will come together this Saturday, as Stan Lee and Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada appear at UCLA with Kevin Smith in a benefit event for The Hero Initiative called Marvel Then & Now.

“With a guy like Kevin Smith acting as the interlocutor, I don’t think there will be any problem having a real fun evening,” says Lee, who as most people know co-created most of Marvel’s classic superhero characters. “I’ve done things with him before. Of course, he’s a lot smarter and cleverer, more articulate and more innovative than I am, but at some point he always has to stop for breath.”

The Hero Initiative is an org that provides financial assistance to comicbook creators, many of whom created or worked on classic characters at a time when there were no royalties or retirement benefits. Lee says that there was little time to think about such things in those days.

“Years ago, nobody was making enough money that they could say, ‘Gee, maybe we ought to help out the other guy.’ Everybody was just hoping they could pay his own rent,” he says. “But now comics are paying better, there are royalty arrangements and a lot of really top writers and artists in the business – and even those who aren’t quite at the top but are working steady – they’re making fairly good money. And when we think about the people who were in it years ago, who were really the ones who helped start the business, and who for some reason or other aren’t finding employment and are down on their luck, it seems that it’s kind of a nice thing to do to get a fund and help them out when we can.”

Fans of independent comics have known about writer Matt Fraction for a while. He turned the 1970s-style action pic genre on its side with “The Last of the Independents,” united Mark Twain and Nicola Tesla to fight crime in “Five Fists of Science” and now is jumping into the Marvel Universe with Punisher War Journal #1 and Immortal Iron Fist #1 due next month.

But the ultimate Fraction reading experience so far is Casanova, an ultracool take on the spy genre that’s near and dear to the Kansas City-based writer’s heart.

“I’ve always loved the super-spy genre — and not even necessarily the John le Carre or ‘Sandbaggers’ sort of working-class spy. I want ‘The Ipcress File,’ I want ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,’ ” he says.

The impetus for Casanova, published by Image Comics, sprang from the format Warren Ellis developed for Fell — a 24-page book with a 16-page comic story and eight pages of text material published monthly for a mere $1.99. Fraction says that format was almost like a challenge.

“I thought: ‘Sixteen pages. I can find the time somewhere to scribble down 16 pages,’ ” he says, adding that he had at the time a full-time job working on videos and commercials for local studio MK12.

He's strong, he wears a cape, he flies and everyone knows who he is. He takes on a colorful rogue’s gallery in his battle for truth and justice. He’s not Superman; he’s Shazam! (a.k.a. Captain Marvel), who decades ago rivaled the man of steel in the hearts and minds of comic book buying kids everywhere.

The intervening decades have not been kind to the good Captain and his extended family of Marvels, something that DC comics and writer Judd Winick and artist Howard Porter are looking to rectify in the “The Trials of Shazam!,”  a 12-issue maxiseries that debuted in comics shops this week.

Winick, known to millions from his tenure on MTV’s seminal reality show “The Real World,” has become a mainstay at DC Comics, which has long struggled to find the right approach to Captain Marvel.

“Dan (Didio) and I talked about it and the bottom line is what wasn’t working about him isn’t so much the antiquated qualities of the character as much that everyone thinks of him as a rip off or Superman,” Winick says. “He needed his own realm, needed his own toy box. And for us, we wanted to concentrate on his becoming a character of magic.”