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During a podcast this week, legendary comics creator Neal Adams announced that he and Frank Miller are both working together on a new Batman mini-series titled Batman: Odyssey. This is awesome news but I’m still alittle wary with Frank Miller. After Dark Knight Returns, Miller has been a little, umm, less than award winning with his Batman stories.

cough*dark knight strikes back*cough*all-star batman*cough.

Regardless I’ll be buying it when the 6 to 8 part series comes out. No word on when it should start but I would imagine sometimes in the next few months.

Remember Comic Collector Live! from back in November? Yup the same one that was suppose to be released in December. Well, its still not released but in the past few weeks some interesting things have started to happen. First off Joe Butler, CEO of Comic Collector Live!, has posted a screenshot of the application. And that brings us to number 2, their forums are live.

Today I got an email that I will be included in the next batch of beta testers. This should be next week on February 15th. During the signup, I was asked if I would be willing to sign an NDA but according to the email, I will be able to post of the public forums about the software. There will also be another beta signup on the weekend of February 16th so keep an eye on the forums.

Back in the early 90’s I was big into comics like most kids my age. But as I got older and entered high school and all the gimmicks started with Marvel, I pretty much walked away.

And thats how it stayed until about 2002 when I found out Kevin Smith was writing comics such as Green Arrow and Daredevil. This made me start looking at comics again and started getting weekly issues. At this time, I still owned my own business and really didn’t have time to go back and catch up on story lines and actually read weekly comics. But I still kept a pull list for about 3 years. The comics started to add up week after week and I never got around to reading any really. I did a small run of Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spider-man and tried to pick up X-treme X-men but that was really it. In 2005, I finally canceled my box at my local comic store as I was planning on moving in the next few weeks and was tying up loose ends.

2006 came and I was starting to get back into podcasts thanks to diggnation and Revision3. I happen to catch the Kevin Smith interview on Geekdrome but didn’t really start watching Geekdrome until about episode 39 and feel in love with it. This started me back on a comics somewhat but not until Geekscape and iFanboy recently started did I actually start reading comics.

My “in” was Marvel Civil War. Comics are a little hard to just jump right in but Civil War was a crossover throughout the entire Marvel Universe. I could start at the beginning of a story arc that covered a lot of books so it was a good starting point no matter which title I wanted to read. I spend the last few weeks reading Civil War from the start and all the tie-in books. This was about 80 books altogether and I finally finished last night. Since I was caught up mostly, I started going back a few episodes of iFanboy and posting on there forum. From this I started making notes of what other books are good and I should check out.

Right after watching the first vidcast of iFanboy, I went and ordered Watchmen: Absolute Edition and 300 from Amazon. A few days later I was looking at the Comic Book Finder and found a comic shop in my area called Legends of Superheroes. I tossed the address in my GPS and off I went. I liked the store and they seemed to have a good selection of Trades which my old shop didn’t. I talked to the owner some and I was pretty much hooked again. I picked up The Dark Knight Returns and the first two volumes of The Preacher TPB. As a comic book fan, its embarrassing to admit I have never read any of these but hey, you got to start somewhere.

This Wednesday I went down to Legends, picked up this weeks comics I wanted and started a box. So I’m officially back and can’t wait for next Wednesday!

Watched V for Vendetta over the weekend. Wow, favorite movie this year so far. Its about time an Allan Moore work has been done some justice after the disgrace of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the uneventful From Hell. DC has been on fire lately with last year’s Batman Begins and now V for Vendetta. If you could get past the fact Ted �Theodore� Logan played John Constantine, Constantine wasn’t too bad either. Then again I’m a sucker for Heaven vs Hell stuff. If this is any taste of whats to come, Superman Returns is going to be great.

Now Marvel should have a blockbuster with both the upcoming X-men 3 and next year’s Spider-man 3. I just wish Marvel would put as much work into their lesser films as they would with X-men and Spider-man. Hulk, Fantastic Four, Punisher, Daredevil, Elektra. All ok but nothing great.

The difference between the DC films and Marvel films is that DC seems to make movies from good stories where Marvel tries to ride popularity of the titles. While I do like Spider-man and X-men, so far my favorite comic book movies are Sin City and V for Vendetta, both lesser know comics but great works. Now with the right writer and director, a popular title can and will make a great movie also. Spider-man, X-men and Batman Begins fall into this category. So I don’t see why Marvel can’t stop rushing out films just to get them out and rather take there time with each franchise. Comic book movies can generate a lot of money for the company if done right. Sequels are pretty much a given. I’ll tell you right now I’ll see X-men 3 opening night but I wouldn’t even give Elektra 2 a second thought.

‘Nuff Said