Marguerite Bennett

With mere minutes on the official countdown clock to the DC: Rebirth livestream, writer Marguerite Bennett tweeted an announcement, but it wasn't exactly the announcement we were anticipating from her today: She's launching a Patreon. Good for Bennett, that she's launching a Patreon. It's a great way to stay funded as a creator of any kind these days. I use one myself, to help fund my podcast. But when I saw her tweet, I immediately said to my co-workers "Bennett's not going to be announced as the writer of Wonder Woman."

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed while scanning the Marvel solicitations for April, May and June that certain All-New, All-Different Marvel titles are missing without any word from Marvel about it. Well, it seems that Marvel’s new plan for cancelled comics is to end them without an announcement, or even a FINAL ISSUE tagged onto a solicit, as today there were two confirmations of cancellations within the comics themselves.

This week sees the publication of Angela: Queen of Hel #6, written by Marguerite Bennett, with art by Aaron Kim Jacinto and Stephanie Hans, and it's an issue that could take the action in almost any direction after the events of the first five issues, but one thing seems guaranted; a clash with Thor.

It’s been roughly a month since DC Comics announced its latest publishing venture, DC Rebirth, and outside of the titles of the comics, and the news that over half the line will be published twice-monthly, we don’t know a whole heck of a lot. Big announcements are expected at Wondercon on March 26th, but we can’t wait that long, so we’ve put together a list of our biggest hopes --- and our most realistic fears --- for DC’s line-wide relaunch this summer.

Angela has a, shall we say, somewhat interesting path into the Marvel Universe, beginning life as an angelic hunter in the long-running Todd McFarlane superhero horror comic Spawn. However, you don’t need to know a thing about what happened in Spawn to read this series, since the only common thread is the name and the costume (and even then, the costume doesn’t last long). In this series, Angela is revealed to be Thor and Loki’s sister, raised by angels and beholden to their way of thinking, which is purely transactional --- nothing is done without a price, and selflessness is considered weak. This makes her a difficult character to like, but fortunately, the book surrounds her with more sympathetic characters, one of which is the subject of this column.

Beauties is a one-shot, available now from Rosy Press, written by Marguerite Bennett, with art by Trungles and letters by Rachel Deering. As you can probably tell from the cover, it’s a variation on the “Beauty and the Beast” story, but it’s a variation unlike any we’ve seen before. Beauties is unapologetically a fantasy romance. In fact, it’s more than that; it’s a fairy tale. It even begins with “Once upon a time.” Bennett takes the “Beauty and the Beast” framework in directions new and different and more complex, but she makes no effort to pull it down to Earth. The mythic power of the fairy tale remains, even as new dimensions are opened within it.

The last few years have seen some really great costume redesigns for supeheroines, and it looks like Dynamite is planning to add to that with a trio of heroines set to launch new titles next year. In advance of New York Comic-Con, Dynamite released new designs from artist Nicola Scott for Vampirella, Dejah Thoris and Red Sonja, to be featured in a new line spinning out of this year's Swords of Sorrow crossover.

Ever since it was first announced last April as the brainchild of Mike Marts and Joe Pruett, AfterShock Comics has been talking a pretty big game. They've signed an impressive roster of talent, but there hasn't been much news about the actual projects --- until today, when AfterShock announced the titles, teams, and release dates for its first four titles. All four are set to hit shelves in December, with new titles from Paul Jenkins and Andy Clarke, and Marguerite Bennett and Ariela Kristantina, leading the way.

At first glance, DC Bombshells seems like it's operating on a pretty weird premise. It is, after all, a digital comic based on a line of statues that reimagine the company's heroines with retro, pinup-inspired designs, and while a lot of them have been pretty great, trying to create a narrative based around an aesthetic seems like a tough task. In practice, though, Marguerite Bennett and Marguerite Sauvage don't just rise to the occasion, they demolish it. In a summer that's been marked by some of DC's strongest new titles in years, from Black Canary to Prez, the first digital chapter of Bombshells came out swinging and knocked it out of the park with what might just be the best first issue of the bunch.

AfterShock Comics, the new publisher formed earlier this year by Joe Pruett, has announced a huge slate of writers who'll be penning creator-owned stories for their eventual launch line - including Justin Jordan, Garth Ennis, Marguerite Bennett and Amanda Conner.