News & Notes

• Topless Robot looks at the Joker toy pictured above. I'm not a toy guy, but that thing's pretty impressive.


• The Examiner talks to Chuck Dixon, who wrote for a lot of the Bat-titles in the 1990s. He has some interesting thoughts on comic book crossovers:
  

  Crossovers are the Frankenstein monster created when the direct market became the entire focus of the comics business. The first crossovers had phenomenal sales and the temptation was strong to do more. But they quickly became just anemic stunts designed to give sagging titles a sales boost. They gave up on trying to sell regular comics on a title-by-title, month-by-month basis and went for the easy-peasy marketing ploy of the crossover. Now superhero comics are pretty much all-stunts-all-the-time and the law of diminishing returns has set in.



• And I was expecting a bunch of lame April Fool's Day casting announcements, but this was the only thing I ran across. Not really that funny to me, but I hate April 1st on the internet.

The third round of Catwoman polling is still running, vote over to the right, and see more about the candidates here.