Stuart Moore

Deadpool is Marvel's most popular comedy character of the last decade. Howard the Duck was the publisher's comedy star of the Bronze Age, and he's enjoyed a recent revival. But what if these two characters were squished together into one character? That's the very important question that's answered in Deadpool the Duck, a five issue mini-series written by Stuart Moore with art by Jacopo Camagni.

Announced at New York Comic Con on Friday, Deadpool the Duck, by Stuart Moore and Jacopo Camagni, is a five-issue miniseries in which Deadpool becomes Howard the Duck, or maybe Howard the Duck becomes Deadpool. To be honest it seems a little complicated. In any case the comic comes out in January 2017, and you have to admit that a duck in Deadpool's costume is pretty cute.

Stela is a new smartphone app that offers original, exclusive comics optimized for the phone-reading experience. Chapters release every week, and you can read them all for a flat subscription fee of $5 a month. Reading the comics in Stela is smooth and intuitive. Each chapter is read via a downward scroll, and it totally works. Stela moves beyond Comixology's Guided View technology to offer comics that were born to be read on phones, and the result is extremely effective and, at its best, beautiful. However, there are some things about the app that I don't love. All I want is to look at a simple list or menu of the titles available, but Stela doesn't want to give me that, just a sliding visual menu along the bottom of the screen. Also when I was reading a comic, I wanted to be reminded of the title, and there seems to be no way to bring that up without exiting the reading experience. But let's take a look at opening wave of comics available so far to help give you a sense of what Stela has to offer.

The Tangent universe is a recurring feature in the third week of titles for DC's spring 2015 Convergence event, cropping up by name in the solcitations for the Flash, Justice League of America, and New Teen Titans two-part minis -- and "tangent" seems like an apt term to describe DC's impenetrable two-month event that offers all the confusion and frustration of a reboot with none of the narrative consequence. Besides the Tangent universe, the other unifying theme of the third wave of books is that dig into DC's pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths past, with writer Marv Wolfman returning to the New Teen Titans, Len Wein taking another swing at his own creation, Swamp Thing, Diana Prince back in her modish 1968 white jumpsuit, and the return of the mid-80s Detroit Justice League.

While Disney's relationship with Marvel regarding Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik's Howard the Duck hasn't historically been, shall we say, awesome, the publishing pair's merger seems to have already had a positive effect on Howard's productivity...