The (Animated) Daily Wire

Trailer for Batman:Under the Red Hood

Looney Tunes makes a comeback

Teen Titans return to CN as Young Justice, 

Mad Magazine gets animated

Stop the presses: South Park pisses someone off!

Star Wars "sitcom" to follow RotJ?

The Multiverse Titans

From George-Perez.com. Art by the Fraim Brothers.

The Teen Titans return (again)

Wow.
Not long before the first issue hit the stands, DC let creators Marv Wolfman and George Perez take their new Teen Titans idea for a test drive. A short, 16-page story was inserted into the pages of the Superman team-up book DC Comics Presents to let a wider audience get a look at the series. It was not only a savvy business idea, but a solid story, as well.
Wolfman forgoes the usual introductions by throwing a very confused Robin into a future where a thriving new group of Teen Titans — which had been disbanded for months in his reality —
battle an extra-dimensional organism. The story tricks both Robin and the reader into off-the-cuff introductions and character exposition without ever bogging down the story (which is something a 16-page sampler couldn't afford to do.)
The tale has an interesting structure. Robin begins to lose his equilibrium while dealing with a mundane terrorist threat (so mundane that, like the jewel heist in Reservoir Dogs, it is never shown in panel). He loses consciousness several times, awakening in a false future where he and a new group of Teen Titans fight to send an alien blob back to its dimension. The story collapses inward as Robin's "dream" threatens to pull him into a third reality of an alien dimension before he's hastily pulled back to his own reality. By this point, though, neither the character nor the reader know what to think about the events of the story.
It’s revealed that Raven, the mysterious new “witch” on the team, has manipulated Robin into confronting his own doubts about the Titans in anticipation of a more aggressive effort to draw her players to the battlefield in the first issue of the on-going series. The fact that Robin’s vision of the future comes to pass — though this particular conflict never does — is only icing on the cake.
Wolfman and Perez leap the usual hurdles of introduction stories with ease and set the stage for a much more elaborate “cute meet” in the first issue of the on-going series. It's not every team that gets two origin stories.

Eduardo Barreto 'gravely ill'

Here's a depressing headline from The Washington Post:

BREAKING: 'Judge Parker' artist Eduardo Barreto is 'gravely ill'; new artist sought

Excerpt:
Beginning next week, readers will notice a significantly different look to the comic strip "Judge Parker." That is because Eduardo Barreto, the feature's artist since 2006, is gravely ill.

"Eduardo is not coming back," Woody Wilson, the longtime writer of "Judge Parker" and "Rex Morgan M.D." tells Comic Riffs. "He's gravely ill. He has told us he will not be able to [draw the comic for] the foreseeable future."

The first time I remember seeing Barreto's work was on The New Titans, not long after George Perez left the re-launched direct sales title. And I hated him. They couldn't have found an artist more different from Perez — who'd worked on The New Teen Titans for 7 or 8 years straight — had they done so on purpose.

But here's the strange thing: by the time Barreto left the book, I was sorry to see him go. With enough time he won me over and I've been a fan ever since. (I had the same response/resolution when Tom Grummett took over the pencils for Titans.)

While I'm still not sure Barreto was the appropriate artist for a book like the Teen Titans/New Titans, he found a comfortable home in The Shadow Strikes, DC's "conventional" take on the pulp hero. He and Gerard Jones re-wrote many of the classic pulp novels and streamlined them into a comicbook narrative. Barreto's style is pure pulp fiction. It's no surprise to me that he's found so much work in the subsequent years drawing crime-related comics.

Here's hoping he makes a full recovery.