Empire

Today is Inauguration Day, and Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States. And really, it's obvious why he won. After eight years with one of the most qualified and accomplished presidents in generations, what America really needed was a vain, egotistical, thin-skinned braggart with a long history of bullying and abusive statements, absolutely no experience in public service, and a track record of astonishing failure. If you voted to Make America Great Again, here are some comics to dig into while you wait for all those manufacturing jobs to come back, and for those pesky SJWs to finally be put in their place.

Born on this day in 1962, Mark Waid is one of the most prolific and consistently relevant comic book writers of the last three decades. His storied career has taken him through pretty much every major publisher at one time or another, and as well as being a phenomenal writer and editor, Waid also has a reputation as one of the best collaborators in comics.

Mark Waid and Barry Kitson's Empire has had a pretty strange publication history. First there were two issues through the short-lived Gorilla Comics imprint at Image, then those later became the #0 issue of a seven-issue series from DC, and just last year, the story of a world where the ultimate supervillain actually succeeded in taking over the world was reborn as a webcomic at Thrillbent, Waid's webcomics concern, with new pages going up weekly. This week, however, IDW Publishing announced that the series was returning to the printed page. As the first part of a partnership between IDW and Thrillbent, Empire: Uprising will collect the digital chapters as a monthly series starting in April.

As part of the short-lived Gorilla imprint of Image Comics in 2000, frequent collaborators Mark Waid and Barry Kitson launched Empire, a creator-owned title about the reign of a supervillain who succeeded where so many others failed, and actually conquered the Earth, uniting it under his brutal, iron-fisted rule. The initial run only lasted two issues, but a few years later, Waid and Kitson finished the first story arc under the DC Comics banner, and in so doing created something of a cult classic that some fans still regard as their best work together -- work that includes The Legion of Super-Heroes, JLA: Year One and Flash & Green Lantern: The Brave and the Bold. Now, fourteen years after Golgoth first took control of the world, Waid and Kitson have returned to Empire, releasing it as a webcomic through Thrillbent's monthly subscription model, whereby you get access to the entire Thrillbent catalogue for $3.99, and a free download of Empire volume 1. To find out more about the return of Empire, we spoke to Kitson about the initial idea, how he approached designing a world that had been conquered by evil, and where he and Waid intend to take the very long awaited Empire volume 2.

Thrillbent, the digital comics publishing website founded by writers Mark Waid and John Rogers, has spent the past two years offering up free comics for pretty much free. In a Wednesday blog post, Waid unveiled what he's calling "Thrillbent 3.0," which adds another layer of content that Waid is calling a sort of "Hulu Plus of comics." Fans can pay a $3.99 monthly fee -- about a

Movies: Henry Cavill is standing tall in his Man of Steel suit on the latest cover(s) of Empire magazine. Movies: Director Bryan Singer has announced that X-movie veterans Anna Paquin (Rogue), Ellen Page (Shadowcat) and Shawn R. Ashmore (Iceman) will reprise their mutie roles in X-Men: Days of Future Past...

Digital: DC Entertainment has launched an Amazon storefront in conjunction with its deal to sell 100 graphic novels exclusively on the Kindle Fire tablet (for the time being). Gaming: DC Universe Online reports that its number of users has increased 6 percent a day since going free-to-play on November 1...

UK film magazine Empire has some tantalizing early promo shots from the set of The Dark Knight Rises, the next and final film in writer/director Christopher Nolan's hugely popular Batman cycle. The photographs offer our cleanest looks yet at Batman and Bane as they will appear in the film, whose plot remains largely unknown despite a seemingly ceaseless stream of leaked set photos and mobile phone

With the 2010 summer movie season coming to a close, what better time than the present to start getting all worked up about next summer's blockbusters? "Empire" magazine knows what we're talking about, and thanks to SuperHeroHype.com, we're getting a sneak peek at some all new pics from next summer's "Thor" one day before the mag hits stands (kneel before the internet, print...