As a Gold Level sponsor, VIZ Media is inviting you to visit your local comic book store to pick up two free comic books. They have contributed the following:

• Uglydoll and Hello Kitty graphic novels. A fun video featuring a few of the artists on these two graphic novels may be viewed at http://youtu.be/Td2fDoxOzqY
• VIZ Media flip book features Dragon Ball and Rurouni Kenshin: Resoration Read the full story

Splinter Cell is returning in a big way next year with Blacklist, following up the events of Conviction with the closing of the Third Echelon and the founding of the Fourth Echelon, with series protagonist Sam Fisher at its head. But what happened in the gap between Conviction and Blacklist? That’s what Splinter Cell Echoes, a graphic novel set to release in 2013, will attempt to fill in. Echoes will have writing from Nathan Edmondson and art from Marc Laming, and will set the stage for Blacklist. Read the full story

This summer is going to be one hell of an interesting one for Spider-Man. Marvel’s greatest hero is already starting his possible greatest epic against the Sinister Six in Ends of the Earth, and with the film reboot coming out, how could it get more epic.

Two words: Spider-Men.

Read the full story

If someone told me that Kaine, the infamous evil Spider-Man clone from the much maligned 90′s epic known as the Clone Saga, would be starring in a hit spinoff comic (let alone one named after the other Spidey clone), I would have thought it was insane. But Kaine is proving his mettle in Marvel’s Scarlet Spider.

Read the full story

Marvel Comics has had a real hard-on lately for “events” in their universe. Eschewing the path of simply allowing characters to play out their own adventures and missions within their own titles, Earth 616 has seen back to back, and often simultaneous, major events bringing their world’s cast together in collaboration and in conflict. So far, since 2010, we have seen more events within the Marvel Universe than the entire decade of the 1990s. That aside, their newest upcoming event will pit the Avengers against the X-Men in a battle over the Phoenix. Read the full story

The Avengers vs. X-Men event draws ever closer, and in anticipation of hero vs. hero, Marvel will be releasing episodic breakdowns of some of the event’s big battles. Read the full story

I remember recess being one of the highlights of the day when I was but a mischievous little lad in elementary school. We would run out to the field in a direct line to what we referred to as the “big toy,” and disappear. In our places, the superheroes we loved and adored became reality, battling each other around our “big toy” in clashes of epic proportion that would be spoken of in hushed tones for years to come. There were four of us back then: Shawn, Chris W, Chris L, and me…or Snake Eyes, Batman, Wolverine, and Mr. Fantastic. Invariably, our battles ended in arguments about who would win between our respective heroes. Read the full story

March is going to be an interesting time to be Spider-Man. The Sinister Six are coming back in a major storyline called “Ends of the Earth” (starting in March’s Amazing Spider-Man #682), and it seems like they’re about to earn the fear and respect they’ve been due not just from Spidey but from his allies among the Avengers. In honor of this, I’m going to talk about some of the most major storylines to feature this rotating roster of Spider-Man villains.

Read the full story

I’ve always thought that the Hitman series of video games would lend themselves well to novelization. The aspects of patience, detail, and attention in Hitman would make for great suspense on the page. Apparently I wasn’t alone in this thought, since 2007 saw the release of a Hitman novel, Hitman: Enemy Within. Enemy Within took place between the events of  the Hitman video game series entries Hitman 2: Silent Assassin and Hitman: Blood Money, and revealed new details about Agent 47 and the Hitman universe. Now, five years later, Agent 47 returns in print form with Hitman: Damnation. Read the full story

One of the things I was happy about when hearing that Disney bought Marvel was the massive media empire that some of my favorite superheroes were now part of. And since DC has a monopoly on Cartoon Network (due to being owned by the same company, Warner Bros.), I was waiting for some new blood to appear on Disney’s major channel Disney XD. With this new press release, Marvel is planning to expand the adventures of their upcoming animated series with tie-in comics, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Read the full story