Transmedia: Storytelling for the Digital Age

Eric Kohn: '"Dredd 3D" may present a dreary vision of the future, but it offers a promising encapsulation of the modern action movie.'

Travis Langley: "Why are we fascinated by supervillains? Posing the question is much like asking why evil itself intrigues us, but there’s much more to our continued interest in supervillains than meets the eye."

Mark Wilson: "[Jer Thorp's infographics] meticulously and elegantly plot the appearance of every one of the 132 Avengers through almost 50 years of issues, with each hero designated by a three-color shield borrowed from Captain America."

Sophie Woodrooffe: "Five years, $100 million in global marketing and Samuel L. Jackson. That’s what it took for Marvel’s The Avengers to earn over $700 million its opening weekend – a box office record."

Adam Rogers: "No one has professionalized nerdiness like Kevin Feige. As a movie producer, Feige - now an executive at Marvel Studios - has been involved with almost every movie involving a Marvel character for the last decade and a half."

"By announcing these initiatives at SXSW, an arts and technology event, rather than waiting for Comic-Con or the debut of one of Marvel’s big crossover movie properties like the Avengers, the company is clearly attempting to stake its claim to a larger chunk of cultural real estate than the niche market accorded to superhero comics in recent times"...

This article provides thoughtful analysis of "Marvel's innovations [as] solutions in search of a problem".  You can check out the SXSW demo here to see if you agree.

With several Watchmen prequels looming (check out a sneak peak of the first prequel internal panel here) its iconic writer Alan Moore lashes out at DC Comics and the franchising of art, and speculates where the next big ideas will come from.

[I'd say that this is a "must read" article for those of us in the business of transmedia storytelling.  #1 lesson learnt - know you're building a transmedia property before you start!]

An astonishing artifact from the beginnings of American comics history was unearthed this week, the check written by DC Comics to Jerry Siegel and...

Alex Garland: "Dredd moves, his character changes, but he’s like a glacier, you don’t see it change, maybe retrospectively you think ‘hang on, that’s a foot further down the valley than it used to be,’ but it’s kind of it. So that traditional story arc doesn’t apply in Dredd."

Jeff Gomez: "Our love of team-ups, in fact, dates back to the Stone Age. Early man imbued all things around him with animus, and the coolest things — the sun, the moon, the ocean — were either the incarnations of, or controlled by superior beings, gods. It was just a matter of time before pantheons formed, relationships got complicated, and villains arose to challenge the benevolent"...

Kendall Whitehouse: 'Disney’s Marvel Studios has been preparing the audience for this film for several years. After the closing credits of 2008′s Iron Man, an extra scene appears in which Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) encounters S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who states: “I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative.”'

DC Entertainment has announced a new corporate, "We Can Be Heroes" giving campaign fronted by silhouettes of its Justice League characters designed to benefit Save the Children, International Rescue Committee and Mercy Corps' humanitarian efforts in Africa...

The risky strategy of restarting their entire comic book line paid off for DC Comics, which had the top-selling comics of 2011. We talked with copublishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio about what inspired the relaunch--and what challenges the creators had to heroically overcome to get it off the ground.