LSU vs. Ohio State. The Redskins vs. the Cowboys. Liddell vs. Silva. Triple H vs. Ric Flair. It’s the time of year for monumental battles with life-changing consequences.

We thought we’d join in the fun by pitting our “Big Two” columnists against each other inside the virtual octagon in a no-holds-barred war of words on who had the better year, Marvel or DC. The format is simple … I threw out six questions on different aspects of the comic book business, giving each of our competitors the chance to initially respond to three of them. Then they had the opportunity to respond to their opponent’s responses on the other three. And finally, we had one final question that hopefully helped them summarize the year for their company of choice.

In one corner, we’ve got Tom “T-Bone” Bondurant, our resident Grumpy Old Fan. By day, Tom wields his words like a scalpel in courtrooms all over the Southeast; as a lawyer, he was born to debate. And his knowledge and love for DC knows no bounds.

In the other corner, we have the “Dynamo Kid,” Carla Hoffman, who, as a comic shop employee, probably spends a good deal of her day debating with the best of them. This California girl’s passion for all things Marvel is limitless, so no doubt T-Bone will have his hands full.

So grab some popcorn, your drink of choice and one of those big foam fingers, fanboys and fangirls … and let’s get ready to rumble!

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On this, the last day of the year, journalists and bloggers are still talking about 2007:

– Writing for LA City Beat, Natalie Nichols rounds up the year, noting the mingling of comics and television, the works of Brian K. Vaughan (including the ending of Y: The Last Man), Vertigo’s war comics, and the launch of DC’s Minx imprint.

– Steve Duin of the Portland Oregonian names his Top 10 comics, including Jeff Lemire’s Ghost Stories, Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s Fell, and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.

– Deb Aoki of About.com reveals her list of best new manga. Her top pick is one of my favorites of the year: Mushishi, by Yuki Urushibara.

– Blog@’s own Chris Mautner rattles off his favorites for the Harrisburg, Pa., Patriot-News.

– At PopCultureShock, Katherine Dacey-Tseui, Erin F. and Ken Haley offer up their picks for the best and worst manga. They also name their favorite books.

– At Polite Dissent, Scott announces the best and worst in comic-book medicine.

– Blogger David Welsh looks at some of the top manga news stories of the year, and rounds up reviews of his favorite graphic novel of 2007, Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms.

– Blogger Marc-Oliver Frisch lists nine comics he enjoyed this year.

– Blogger David Allen Jones, aka Johnny Bacardi, serves up his best of 2007.

– Blogger Robert J. Parizek breaks his best-of selections into categories, including Best Writer, Best New Series and Best Comic Book Event.

– Matthew Price of The Oklahoman names his 10 best monthly comics.

– Brainfreeze looks at 10 comics she enjoyed reading in 2007.

– Bloggers Dave Ferraro and Heidi Meeley look at the worst 2007 had to offer — in the form of comics and “events.”

As we approach the end of 2007 (just a few more hours, and counting), I asked the Blog@ team to share some of their favorite comics from the previous year. As Kevin says below, it was tough to narrow down the list to just a few stand-outs, but here are our favorites:

Tom Bondurant

I’m sure no one is surprised to see Architecture & Mortality as one of my Best of 2007 picks. I loved the heck out of Brian Azzarello & Cliff Chiang’s metatextual take down of DC’s periodic character overhauls. Whether it was setting up a groan-worthy pun or a sentimental moment, A&M was designed to make its readers question not only the manner of revamping and reusing obscure DC characters, but the roles of all involved, including the fans. It reminded this reader that every character has its own dignity.

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Never a fan of the art comics crowd, editorial cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a lengthy opinion piece over at Yahoo News about how utterly, utterly awful the New York Times Magazine’s relatively new comics section is, saving most of his vitrol for Chris Ware:

Ware’s word balloons were so small that many mistook them as evidence of his contempt for his audience. Those who scrounged up magnifying glasses learned the sad truth: just like Michael Stipe’s mumbled lyrics on early R.E.M. albums, hyper-reduction was Ware’s attempt to cover up his inability to write dialogue.

Nothing wrong with working around your weaknesses, right? But cartoons need great writing more than they need great art. Which is why Gary Larsen is better than Winsor McCay. “Little Nemo” was high art. “The Far Side” is hilarious.

Seven months passed. (To those who didn’t give up on “Building Stories,” it felt like seven years.) Disappointment yielded to apathy. Fixtures of the tiny world of “art comics” Jaime Hernandez, Seth and Megan Kelso followed with their serialized graphic novellas. Daniel Clowes’ “Mister Wonderful” treads standard art-comics territory: unattractive boy meets dowdy girl, insecure girl meets shoe-gazing boy, reader prays for Al Qaeda to blow up their café.

It’s a shame he held back and didn’t let us know how he really felt, eh?

Anyway, Heidi’s post on the matter led to one of those comment feeding frenzys with folks like Eric Reynolds, Tom Spurgeon and Rall himself weighing in. I liked Kim Thompson’s post best:

Ted does have a point –Ted actually almost always does have a point until he gets carried away– that in terms of general tone the five stories so far map similar terrain in terms of emotion, pacing, etc. (An unkind person might use the word “mopey.”) I’m not sure if this is deliberate, or just luck of the draw as the editors picked their favorite cartoonists and had their work skew that way (Jaime’s story was unusually subdued, for instance)… although Jason’s “Low Moon,” which will follow Clowes in the Spring, is entirely different, and I’m sure Marjane Satrapi (who turned them down) would have been quite different as well.

Ken Parille, meanwhile, offers a pretty compelling denunciation of the article, while Dick Hyacinth notes the irony of Rall quoting critic Noah Berlatsky since Berlatsky also wrote this about Rall’s work.

Dave Sim has a new comic book coming out in April. It’s called Glamourpuss. The official Web site has images like this:

The text describes it as a parody of the fashion industry plus an homage to the classic “soap opera” comics strips of the 50s, like Mary Perkins On Stage.

Douglas Wolk is really excited about it. Derik Badman is intrigued. Sean Collins wonders why bother?:

Comicdom’s continuing enabling of Dave Sim astounds me, not necessarily because his beliefs are crazy and evil but because those crazy and evil beliefs so directly inform all his work. Actually, it’s more than that: His work is about his crazy and evil beliefs. I’m not sure why otherwise bright people would “look forward” to a comic about women by a man who espouses any number of noxious, vile, misogynist, almost paranoid-schizophrenic beliefs about women. I wouldn’t look forward to listening to an opera about the Jews by Wagner, either.

JK Rowling hinted at the possibility of another Harry Potter book in a recent Time Magazine interview. The author said she has ‘weak moments’ when she feels she will write another novel about Harry Potter, and her daughter has been pressuring her to “never say never”:

“If - and it’s a big if - I ever write an eighth book, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. I feel I’ve already told his story.

“But these are big ifs. Let’s give it ten years.”

In the meantime, Rowling is working on two writing projects – an adult novel and a “political fairy tale” – and is involved in charity work.

Rowling is No. 3 on Time’s Person of the Year list.

So the promised end to the Spider-Man/Mary Jane marriage has finally happened and it seemed only fitting to return to the topic in this column.

Jim did not like the issue:

Usually I feel no matter how bad of a story line has been produced as a reader you can close you eyes and pretend it never happened, this is such a core change that you can’t do it. It is also so disingenuous to the “Civil War” story that I actually lauded for making a true change to the status quo of the Marvel Universe, that it now no longer matters. I’m very concerned about what the resolution of the Captain America saga will be with this type of tripe being produced.

Tom Foss is skeptical about the benefits:

So, I hear that the new Spider-Man issue kills the marriage. I also hear that it brings back the mechanical web-shooters. You know, I hated “The Other,” I hated the organic web-shooters from “Disassembled,” but I think the marriage is a pretty high price to pay for undoing all that. It seems like undoing one bad idea with a worse idea doesn’t equal out to a good idea.

SallyP has a lot of questions:

Also, I don’t for the life of me, understand how this massive reboot is going to play out in the OTHER books that Spider-Man appears in. What about New Avengers? Do they suddenly all forget that he and MJ were married? Does Tony Stark? Is Peter even IN the Avengers anymore? How old is he now? Does he still work for the Bugle? Is he no longer a teacher, and what happens to all of his students? There are a LOT of ramifications to this that haven’t been thought out very well.

So what did you think?

Did anyone feel like punching something after reading the last Countdown special?

No? Just me?

I mean, I love the concept of a gender-reversed world. I picked up the Countdown Presents: Search for Ray Palmer: Superwoman/Batwoman special overjoyed at the thought of Earth-11. It’s just such a wonderful tool when analyzing gender in stories, to run through a familiar story with a woman instead of a man and consider how and why things could be different. Would they think differently about their actions? Each other? Why? And how does the reader react differently?

Granted, there was an option to screw up, but I figured we were beyond writing alternate universe female characters as less capable than their male counterparts. I wasn’t worried when I read it.

I was partially right. We are beyond writing alternate universe female characters as less capable than their male counterparts. All of the female characters were very well done. The dialogue and the way the story was set up suggested that the gender stereotypes were still the same, and that the people meant to be heroes just happened to more often be female than male this time around (probably due in no small part to the most inspiring hero on that planet being the Last Daughter of Krypton as opposed to the standard Last Son). I’d love to see a Kylie Rayner story (or find out what’s going on with Jordan’s counterpart) or a few World’s Finest adventures with Superwoman and Batwoman. The art was lovely, the designs were feminized but not sexualized (I especially liked the effect with the Flash’s long hair). The characterization in general was that the characters were themselves as men or as women.

There was one exception.

One big hairy exception.
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Robert Kirkman posts on his blog that Ultimate X-Men #93 is his last issue on the title:

A few weeks ago series editor Ralph Macchio and I were discussing what I would do after the upcoming APOCALYPSE story arc. This arc is something my run on the book has been building toward since I was given the regular writing assignment with issue 75 (issue 66-74 was supposed to be a fill-in arc). Everything I’ve done in the book thus far has been building to this and the thought of continuing after I’d completed my grand plan seemed like overstaying my welcome, frankly. I will have said everything I wanted and done everything I set out to do… so it seemed the time was right.

He adds that we should be hearing about what’s next for him “very soon.”

To the man who made me think, my spirit soar and made me broke, wih all those wonderful things in between.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever gotten to a chance to meet Stan Lee or hear him talk, but whatever you may think of Marvel’s current policies or stories or fanboy-ills simply disappear under the man’s enthusiasm and charm. It’s like Grandpa’s here to tell you stories! Hoorah! Young and old, you’d have to be real jaded not the find the Man himself anything more but the heart of your favorite books.

I could sit here and list out all the accomplishments the Man has, how revolutionary he was to the business, how at his tender age he’s as young as he feels, all that good stuff. But instead, I’m going to say what a good friend a man I’ve only seen across a crowded convention hall is.

I’m right behind you, Stan. Here’s to a happy birthday.

On her blog, artist Joëlle Jones shares the above Donnie Darko artwork she drew for her friend Terry Blas for Christmas, who returned the favor with this X-Men sketch. Sure beats a sweater or tie …

There are very few comics books where that I can honestly say I remember exactly where I was the first time I read it. That final issue of Watchmen would be one (in a Blimpie’s, on my lunch break). Gilbert Hernandez’s Poison River would be another (in my old apartment, on a lazy Saturday).

I also remember where I was when I read Storeyville for the first time. Not only that, I remember the exact moment I received it in the mail way back in 1995.

Such was the power of this one-time mysterious tome, about a drifter attempting to locate his long-lost friend and mentor. It was a moving, powerful work whose reputation was aided by the fact that no one seemed to know anything about it’s author, the enigmatic “Sirk.”

Turns out that Sirk was one Frank Santoro, a former Pittsburgh resident who dropped off the map following Storeyville’s initial release, only to come back to the indie scene recently with the release of books like Incanto and Cold Heat.

I talked with Santoro recently about the new re-release of Storeyville, now in resplendent hardcover format and glowing Chris Ware introduction, thanks to PictureBox, from his home in Pittsburgh.

Q: Have you always lived in Pittsburgh?

A: No, I’m from Pittsburgh. I graduated high school in 1990 and immediately moved to San Francisco. And then I moved to New York in fall of 1999. I was in New York until the spring. (more…)

Villard Books has provided us with an excerpt from “Wedding Picture,” by David Gordon, one of 11 stories featured in Out of Picture, Vol. 1: Art From the Outside Looking In, an anthology from animators at Blue Sky Studios. (They’re some of the creators behind Ice Age and Robots.)

The eclectic compilation features work that never made it to film, but instead was transformed into comics form.

Out of Picture, Vol. 1, is out this week. A second volume is due in June.

Read part of “Wedding Picture” after the break:

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Anime News Network points out that German company Schwarzkopf & Henkel is using characters from Hiroshi Takahashi’s Crows and Worst fight manga to promote its new line of hair-coloring products in Japan.

The company already licenses the characters for bleaching and darkening products. The new line, called 2008 Men’s Fresh Light, will launch on Feb. 4.

ANN notes that most beauty products that license manga characters have been for women.

Bill Radford of the Colorado Springs Gazette talks with writer Brian Wood about his preparation for his new Vertigo Viking series, Northlanders:

“I go a little overboard with research — I always have — and my wife no doubt grows weary at the steadily growing stacks of books filling our house,” Wood said.

A trip to Iceland, which also served as his honeymoon, provided an opportunity for even more research.

“It was fun,” he said.

“Our hotel sat, literally, on the remains of an old settlement house, meaning one of the first houses built when Vikings settled the island. And I could go down into the small basement museum and check it out.”

Readers shouldn’t worry, though, that they’ll be force-fed lessons in Viking history.

“It’s all in the background, this research,” Wood said. “It’s going into the locations, the ships, the battle scenes — not into the dialogue, meaning no one in this book is spouting facts and history as exposition.”

The second issue is due in stores next week. A preview can be found here.

Stanley Martin Lieber, the man who co-created much of the Marvel Universe, was born on this day in 1922. Happy birthday, Stan Lee!

I don’t know the details on this beautiful X-Men poster by illustrator Eric Tan, but it better be for sale somewhere. Soon. You can see Tan’s napkin sketch here.

(Via Neatorama)

MTV.com has the first official still images from Universal Pictures’ The Incredible Hulk, which is set to open on June 13, 2008.

Let’s pretend the holidays haven’t sapped us of all our extra money and we can actually afford to buy comics this week, okay?

Luckily, there aren’t a lot of major releases this week, as most publishers rushed to get the big-ticket items out in time for Christmas. Still, there are some noteworthy books, including the return of writer Jim Shooter after three decades or so to The Legion of Super-Heroes, the not-so-shocking conclusion to “One More Day” in Amazing Spider-Man, the penultimate volume of the apocalyptic Dragon Head, and more.

To see what other titles Chris Mautner and I think are worth mentioning, just keep reading. As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.

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Did you think we’d seen the last of those year-end lists? Well, think again:

– The New York Times names Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings as one of its “100 Notable Books of 2007.” It’s the sole comic to make the list, which also features David Michaelis’ Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography.

– A couple of iFMagazine contributors rattle off their favorite comics of the year, with a heavy dose of DC and Marvel titles. “Take 1″ features, among others, Astonishing X-Men, Fables and Speak of the Devil. “Take 2″ includes Civil War, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Marvel Zombies 2.

– Randy Myers of the Oakland, Calif., Tribune picks his top graphic novels, including Planet Hulk, Shooting War and Criminal, Vol. 1.

– Gary Brown of Cox News Service damns with feint praise as he lists his 12 favorite titles released during an “up-and-down year for quality” (the headline is a little more pointed, dubbing 2007 a “year of comics mediocrity”). Brown’s selection includes Captain America, The Spirit and The Lone Ranger.

– Wired looks at its favorite magazine illustrations of 2007, and spotlights Yoichiro Ono and Masa Sakamaki’s cover for the “Manga Conquers America” issue.