Lucifer

As CBS’ Supergirl and others caught the brunt of earlier this year, TV’s pilot season has been increasingly difficult to keep under wraps, assuming you trust the veracity of “leaks” to begin with. In any case, FOX’s Lucifer and Minority Report, along with NBC’s Blindspot and others have officially become the latest victims.

With most of its major hits and standout series having run their course months or years ago, Vertigo has been due for a renaissance for a while now. Judging from the announcements made at San Diego Comic Con late on Thursday, the publisher may be rallying, with 12 new series set to launch in the closing months of 2015 at a rate of one new issue #1 every week. Those 12 titles include a couple of previously announced books that have been rescheduled, but enough new announcements to suggest that Vertigo means to impress with its ambition. Sci fi and the supernatural are inevitably well represented, and the roster includes veteran talents, emerging names, and a few cross-disiplinary transfers in the form of novelists Lauren Beukes and Holly Black — the latter on a relaunch of Lucifer — and Supernatural creator Eric Kripke.

Marvel may be sitting out Comic-Con 2015 (at least on the movies side) but good grief if DC isn’t pumping everything they have into San Diego this year, big screen and small. Warner Bros. TV has set a whopping 18 shows to have a presence at Comic-Con, including another “Superhero Saturday Night” for the likes of Arrow, The Flash, Gotham, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl and more.

The first trailer for Fox's Lucifer TV adaptation is here, and it looks bad. Much like iZombie, this series looks to have sacrificed most of what made it vivid in the name of providing yet another procedural. Cop and wacky sidekick? What’s the new angle? Oh, he’s literally the devil. I coulda just watched The Collector.

DC’s foothold in the TV game got exponentially bigger with the potential for yet another Arrow spinoff for The CW, but FOX too is making strides toward its comic future. Following the pilot greenlight of Neil Gaiman Sandman spinoff Lucifer, FOX has appointed Rush star Tom Ellis as our new Prince of Darkness.

The DC foothold on TV isn’t losing traction anytime soon, as now that CBS Supergirl has her pilot marching orders, so too does FOX’s Lucifer series, derived from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series, now have a greenlight. Not only that, but Jerry Bruckheimer and Len Wiseman have been added to the talent pool bringing Lucifer to the screen.

Censorship is a serious issue. It's one of the reasons that we here at ComicsAlliance always show our support to organizations like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and rally behind creators who have been subjected to governmental restrictions on their work. Occasionally, though, there are incidents of people pushing to get books banned that slide right past concerning and directly into the world of hilarious ineptitude. Such is the case with Reverend Phillip Missick of Texas's amazingly named King of Saints Tabernacle Church, who pushed for the Cleveland, TX public library to remove manga like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight from its library, owing, of course, to it being a demonic product of Satan that would drag otherwise saintly children directly into the gaping maw of Hell itself. That, of course, is nothing new. What makes it amazing is that he didn't stop there, going so far as to declare pretty much everything around the manga to be the product of Satan, including a few Harry Potter toys, a bouquet of dried roses, and the actual room itself to be "occultic and demonic."