Blair's back! Following last week's segment hosted by guest Jenna Busch, Blair Butler has returned for another installment of G4's Fresh Ink! Online with her picks of the week. It's a Batman-heavy bunch of books, as Blair shares her feelings about the latest issues of Batman Inc. and the videogame tie-in Batman: Arkham City, plus reviews for G.I. Joe: Cobra Civil War, Punisher Max, Northlanders: The Hunt, Moon Knight and of course DC's event-launching issue of Flashpoint #1.

Blair also gives an appreciated nod to Chris Sims' rundown of "Fur-Thor" reading, which gives fans of the recent Thor film a place to start in the mountain of Marvel stories at their fingertips.

Check it all out after the jump!

As unlikely as it may seem, a recently released pornographic parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation is an astonishingly good, big budget fan-film based on the classic television series. Featuring impressively faithful recreations of the sets, costumes an even technology seen in the original Gene Roddenberry show, writer and director Sam Hein puts forth a wholly acceptable plot in which Lt. Tasha Yar returns to the Enterprise alive and well, and in such a way that is completely in keeping with established Star Trek continuity.

While this has something to do with comics only by the thinnest possible stretch of the imagination, I was so taken aback by The Thumbcast's shockingly decent version of the film, which cuts out all the sex, that I felt compelled to pitch it as a feature to ComicsAlliance Captain Laura Hudson, who inspected the material and replied, "Make it so."

Fans of David Petersen's all ages Archaia series Mouse Guard have come to count on the artist's skilled balance of luscious detail, cartoonish cuteness and sword-swinging action. Mice have a tough life out in he wild, but in his world, they've got the anthropomorphic means to build a more proactive society. As pointed out by igeektrooper, that magical tone is embodied pretty perfectly by UK DeviantArtist pspynett, whose CG animated Mouse Guard fan short (by Robin Bryony French, Katya Scott and Victoria Forbes) pits a furry warrior against a giant winged predator. Check out the awesomeness after the jump.

Defining exactly what a "comic" is has always been a bit of a struggle, thanks in part to all the wonderful exceptions in the world of sequential art. For example, while you might assume "a thing that you draw" would be one of the criteria, there are a number of comics -- and notably webcomics -- that aren't drawn at all. A Softer World uses panels of photographic art (sometimes called fumetti) in the place of illustration, while Dinosaur Comics has been telling new tales with the exact the same clipart for about eight years now.

And now we have My Cardboard Life, a strip by London-based creator Philippa Rice that is perhaps best described as collage comics. Instead pen or ink or even pixels, it's crafted primarily from carefully clipped paper shapes, cardboard squares and other various office supplies arranged into an adorable cast of surprisingly expressive characters.

Architectural Digest released this week a series of images -- some of them never-before-seen -- of sets and locations from X-Men: First Class. Based on the classic superhero Marvel Comics team, the film is meant to be set in the early 1960s, and AD spoke to First Class Production Designer Chris Seagers about the period flourishes seen in the movie. You can see those images after the jump.

Tonight marks the end of an era, as ten long years of Superman-inspired television come to an end with the series finale of Smallvile! We here at ComicsAlliance have been diligently chronicling the final season, but for such a momentous occasion, we're doing something special.

Tonight, from 8 to 10 PM Eastern time, Chris Sims and David Uzumeri will be liveblogging the end of Smallville, and you can follow along right here!

Remember back when Kia Asamiya was drawing "Uncanny X-Men"? Artist Drake Tsui endows his subjects with a similar manga-infused flair. From The Venture Bros. and the Bat family to Nintendo's most famous ladies and Hit-Girl, he's caked on the color and big expressive eyes with all of them.

Here at ComicsAlliance, we value our readership and are always open to what the masses of Internet readers have to say. That's every week, Senior Writer Chris Sims puts his comics culture knowledge to the test as he responds to your reader questions!



Q: What's the best supporting cast in comics? -- @Protoculture27

A: In a medium that's so driven by serialized storytelling, it is impossible to overstate the importance of a supporting cast. Sure, the heart of any story is the conflict between the hero and the villain, but especially in super-hero comics, the supporting cast provides a viewpoint for readers and interactions that allow for deeper insights than just "boy howdy, this guy sure doesn't like crime."

But while there are a lot of great characters who might not be in the spotlight all the time, super-hero books provide an interesting problem in figuring out just what a supporting cast member is.

When Mimoco announced its series of Mimobot Batman USB flash drives at the beginning of the year, fans were likely hoping that wouldn't be the last of their DC Comics digital storage options. Provided you dig the Green Lantern, there's four more surf board-like faces to choose from for your grab-and-go data needs. Joining Hal Jordan are Sinestro (in his Sinestro Corps uniform), Kilowog and Tomar-Re.

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists and/or specific bodies of work, but there's just so much great work to see that we've initiated Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the virtually countless pieces of especially compelling artwork that we come across in our regular travels across the digital media landscape. Some of it's new, some of it's old, some of it's created by working professionals, some of it's created by talented fans, and some of it's endearingly stupid. All of it's awesome.

Agents of the Canadian Border Services confiscated last weekend a number of independently produced comic books en route to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Copies of the graphic novella Young Lions by Blaise Larmee and an anthology called Black Eye 1: Graphic Transmissions to Cause Ocular Hypertension were seized from artist Tom Neely and small press publisher Dylan Williams at the border in Buffalo, New York, and if Canada's Prohibited Importations Unit deems the material obscene, the comics will be destroyed.