The great Phil Noto is a master at catching those little moments of empathy. He excels at finding pathos in characters' faces, at capturing that tiny flicker of the eyes, that small turn of the mouth or tilt of the head, the moment that expresses the soul of character. He's awesome, is what we're saying. And that makes him a great choice for the variant cover for Astonishing X-Men #51, the ...

Northstar is getting married to his boyfriend Kyle. Rumors have been circulating for a while, but yesterday Whoopi Goldberg and the ladies of The View confirmed it. Said Goldberg; "In Astonishing X-Men #50, openly gay X-Man Northstar will propose to his boyfriend Kyle, with a gay wedding to follow in an upcoming issue." That would presumably be Astonishing X-Men #51, the cover for which was ...

With the massive box office success of The Avengers (the film has earned more than one billion dollars at box offices worldwide), Marvel Studios has accomplished an extraordinary feat in franchise building; it has created a shared cinematic superhero universe based on the characters originally created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. Introducing its heroes across five movies was ambitious enough ...

Buckle in; it's the fourth installment of ComicsAlliance Vs. AvX, our unofficial scorecard for Marvel's big summer publishing event, Avengers Vs. X-Men. Round one went to the Avengers when they seized the moral high ground, round two saw the X-Men rally back, and round three... well, that was Wolverine being the best there is at hogging the book. Jonathan Hickman is on script duties for round ...

Superhero comics have a diversity problem. The leading characters are largely male, mostly white, and overwhelmingly straight. By definition, well-established characters come from an era when the culture was even straighter, whiter and more male than it is today, and as a result the characters fail to represent the diversity of their audience. It's tough for minority characters to break ...

Renowned children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has died at the age of 83. The The Associated Press reports the creator of Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen and Outside Over There passed away this morning due to complications from a stroke. Sendak was the grand master in his field and one of the greats of modern American literature. When we talk about comics we ...

Welcome to the third installment of ComicsAlliance Vs. AvX, our unofficial scorecard for Marvel's big summer publishing event, Avengers Vs. X-Men. It's the Biff-Baff-Biff on Earth-616. (I need to work on that.) After a poor showing from the mutants in the first issue they rallied in the face of a helicarrier assault in the second. The scores now stand at Avengers 17, X-Men 13. Brian Michael ...

This coming weekend the Toronto Reference Library will play host to the seventh Toronto Comic Arts Festival, the fourth since the show went annual. Toronto boasts one of the industry's most diverse creative communities, and TCAF is the jewel in its crown - a free festival that celebrates amazing cartoonists from across the industry and around the world. Organised by the Toronto Public Library ...

In honor of The Avengers movie, which opens in U.S. theaters this Friday, May 4, Marvel Comics released 14 special variant covers across its comic book line in April, each depicting Earth's Mightiest Heroes in the styles of some of history's greatest artists like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Monet and Pollock, just because. The comics artists creating those visions include Gabriele Dell'Otto, ...

"Gayness is built into Batman. ... Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay." As we reported last week, this was the claim made by Batman, Incorporated writer Grant Morrison in an interview with Playboy where he offers his insights into the psychology of ...