Serial storytelling is popular on television, but as far as print goes, it’s a dying art. There used to be a time when people regularly followed installments of actual books, printed a chapter at a time in magazines, but now magazines themselves are struggling to keep the public’s interest in the face of the internet. You can find serial stories on the internet—web comics and fanfiction for example—but the business of it isn’t the same. The comic book industry is one of the few businesses that still maintains that original serial model and because of that it usually takes six or twelve issues of a comic to tell a single story arc. The last few months I’ve spent a lot of time deciding what titles to trim from my pull list in favor of waiting for the graphic novel releases. As I’ve evaluated titles, I’ve thought a lot about the downsides of serial storytelling. The obvious downside for the consumer is the price. I bought the first six issues of Avengers by Jonathan Hickman for a cover price of $3.99 which meant I spent approximately $24.00. The graphic novel collection of those issues is currently being sold for $15.00 on Amazon.com. For someone with a tight budget, that kind of difference is noteworthy.

As you’ve no doubt already heard, the new Fantastic Four movie has cast its Human Torch. Meet Michael B. Jordan, the new Johnny Storm: Even though this is a topic that Eric has already covered, I’d like to offer my thoughts on why casting an actor of color for Johnny Storm isn’t just a good idea, but a really important move. It’s no secret that representation in media is a big deal. There has been a push in the past ten years for the superhero genre to expand past the cookie cutter of “white heterosexual man,” and while the comics have been slowly expanding their repertoire, the movies… have not. The Avengers movie universe has War Machine, Black Widow, and Falcon, who have all been relegated to sidekick status; the X-Men movie franchise has revolved around the trio of Wolverine, Professor X, and Magneto, even when the stories they’re trying to tell really revolve around other characters. DC’s movie division has made movie after movie featuring Batman and Superman while outright refusing to focus a movie on Wonder Woman; their Green Lantern movie focused on Hal Jordan, the most stereotypical white guy in all the Lantern Corps.

The internet is abuzz about the recent news by 20th Century Fox to have Johnny Storm played by an African American actor in the next Fantastic Four movie. The featured image of this article should be a reminder that this isn’t the first time we’ve had this happen. Of course, that flip’s nowhere near as famous as the Nick Fury race flip.

The first full-length trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy was released this week and it marks the tenth movie that will be released in the interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe, joining the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Avengers movie franchises as well as The Incredible Hulk movie and the television show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Also coming from Marvel Studios this year is Captain America: The Winter Soldier which continues the Captain America franchise and seems to be tied very closely to the S.H.I.E.L.D. stories and characters that featured in Avengers. These will be the last two movies before all the interconnecting threads meet again in Avengers: Age of Ultron and I thought I’d do an early overview of them both.

I’ve talked a lot about art and writing in the past few months, and a few weeks ago we had colorist appreciation day. I figured now was a good time to round out the collection of creators and talk about lettering. Lettering doesn’t sound important at first, especially considering the fact that a lot of lettering these days is done digitally. Hand-lettering was an art form of its own, but why does it matter anymore? What effect does lettering even have on a comic? As it turns out, it has a huge impact.

In 1962 Marvel Comics changed the face of the comic industry by creating Spider-Man. Peter Parker was a teenager who wasn’t stuck in the role of sidekick. He was able to be the hero of his own story and he managed to do it while balancing the struggles and drama of teenage life. Over the years from the X-Men to the Young Avengers, Marvel has continued making dynamic teen heroes that struggle to come of age against the backdrop of superhero life. The most recent addition is Kamala Khan, a young Muslim girl trying to find her place among her peers in New Jersey while taking up the mantle of Ms. Marvel. This title has already drawn a massive amount of attention because it’s the first time a Muslim character is headlining their own book at Marvel. Now, just to be clear, Kamala is not the first Muslim hero at Marvel. She’s not even the first Muslim heroine, but creating a title around her and giving her a beloved legacy title is an extremely important step toward diversifying comics and broadening representation.

Regular readers of Comic POW know I’m a huge fan of Brandon Graham. When I discover a new creator that I like, I tend to binge on their works. Fortunately for my bank account, Brandon Graham has a pretty small canon of work in which he is both writer and artist. Prior to working on Multiple Warheads his major non-porn was was King City. King City started off on Tokyo Pop and then the American division went belly up. The story was left untold until Image Comics picked it up for the second half. The story is, in my eyes, a cross between Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim. From Pulp Fiction it takes a couple low level gangsters - a professional burglar and a human smuggler who are best friends and then spends a large portion of the story dealing with their lives outside their jobs. From Scott Pilgrim it borrows a world that’s ALMOST, but not quite our world. One of the characters is a veteran of the Korean Zombie war. The cat burglar literally uses a cat that can become nearly any device with the right injection.

Continuing from a few weeks ago, here are a slew of comics Image Comics will be releasing in 2014. Nameless Nameless All Image released was the above image and that it will be written by Grant Morrison with art by Chris Burnham. However, I loved their work on Batman Incorporated, so I look forward to this. Nailbiter Nailbiter This series is neither my cup of tea nor do I recognize the creators, so I’m going to go with Image’s press release: ...

While every single person in the creative process is incredibly important, it’s often the writer and the penciller who get mentioned, with the inker sometimes getting credit as well. Yet without the colorist, comics would be a completely different medium. Hence colorist appreciation day!

By now, dear reader, you are familiar with the argument that Disney needs to get its Marvel characters back from Sony Pictures and Fox. They’ve done a pretty great job weaving together the Marvel cinematic universe around the Avengers. In the comics we have members of the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Thing from the Fantastic Four as members of the Avengers or New Avengers. Imagine how great things could be in the cinematic (and now, thanks to SHIELD, TV world). But there’s another place Disney could and should be leveraging its characters - it should have a Marvel park at Walt Disney World. As someone who grew up in Florida I went to theme parks a lot. In the last few months I revisited both Universal Studios/Islands of Adventure Orlando and Walt Disney World. There is no doubt in my mind that WDW is the king of immersive theme park experiences. Universal Studios is a mismatch of rides just randomly dropped on the property. The Islands of Adventure Side does a better job of grouping rides into themes, but the park is too small to do justice to the expansive universe that is Marvel comics.