Today's News, and some gift shopping help

First - holiday help is here, courtesy of your friendly, neighborhood comic book store owner.

STILL haven’t gotten your Christmas cards out yet? Well, it’s getting late. You may as well send ecards instead. These are very nice!

People in Ft. Wayne, Indiana must be BIG comic book fans, because it seems like there is an article dealing with comics in one way or another in the paper at least once a week. Anyway, today they list a number of great gift ideas for comic book fans, including DVD’s, collectables, and other nifty novelty items.

Video game fan on your holiday shopping list? Not sure what games are hot? Well, JournalNow has a really nice list of games that are popular and new for the season, listing them by genre as well as giving a brief description of the game and which systems it is available for.

Now, today's pop culture news...

While I am all for people reading comic books, I really don’t want the retailer left out of the equasion. Direct subscriptions were bad enough, now people can read Marvel comics digitally. I really have mixed emotions on this!

A while back Marvel sued NCSoft, makers of City of Heroes, because they claimed it was too easy for players to make characters that looked like Marvel’s own characters. Today it was announced that, basically, NCSoft won. Earlier this year a number of Marvel’s claims were thrown out. A portion of the settlement agreement that was released on Wednesday includes the following: "The parties' settlement allows them all to continue to develop and sell exciting and innovative products, but does not reduce the players' ability to express their creativity in making and playing original and exciting characters. Therefore, no changes to City of Heroes or City of Villains character creation engine are part of the settlement." YIPPIE!! I still say Marvel should be glad that people are giving their characters free advertising, rather than trying to restrict folks just so they can try to profit off of it themselves.

When Playmates toys announced that it was no longer going to keep the Simpsons license and product the character toys, McFarlane Toys didn’t wait long to try to step in and ride that cash cow. Here is a sneak peak at their first box set: Ironic Punishment, set to launch sometime in 2006, whenever that may be—expect them to be late.

Marvel has announced alternate covers for the remaining issues of their “Spider-Man: The Other, Evolve or Die” crossover. Parts 7-9 will have what they call “limited edition variant” covers, which means us retailers can order however many of them we want without limit (get that, no limit on the limited edition). Those chapters include (part 7) “Cosmic Spider-Man” for Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #3, the above-mentioned “Spider-Armor” for (part 8) Marvel Knights Spider-Man #21, and in the works is a “Spider-Man 2099” cover for (part 9) Amazing Spider-Man #527. Parts 10-12 will be “incentive variant” covers, which means we have to order a certain number (in this case, 8) of the regular cover in order to earn the ability to order one of the variant cover. These chapters are: Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #4 (part 10), Marvel Knights Spider-Man #22 (part 11), and Amazing Spider-Man #528 (part 12). The Amazing Spider-Man #528 alternate cover will be chosen by retailer votes! To see the covers, check out the Newsarama.com link.

*Sadness...* Ghost Rider movie is rescheduled, from July 14, 2006 to early 2007, probably mid-February. Apparently Sony feels that the date change will help them make more money on the movie.

Body language translated. DaVinci’s Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Thanks to everyone who bought toys for our toy drive for the Waukesha County Christmas Clearing Council. We have a full box, and a few extras. Hopefully these will help make Christmas better for some of Waukesha’s less fortunate children.