DC has announced its official pricing strategy for the August 31 rollout of its relaunched comics. The bottom line (that DC is holding)? Single issue digital comics are going to cost the same as print for their first month of availability. After that, the digital titles will drop to $1.99. In the case of Justice League (and future oversized issues), they'll start at a $3.99 price point and drop to $2.99 after the first four weeks of release.

Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League #1 will also be released in $4.99 print/digital combo pack, although readers will be able to pick up either the print or the digital version of separately for the equal price of $3.99.

The Downfall meme has pretty much achieved "Klassic" status at this point, but iFanboy polishes it up to see just what Hitler thinks about DC's upcoming relaunch plans. Turns out he's kind of a troll.

After nearly a year of experimentation in the digital comics sphere that could fairly be characterized as toe-dipping, DC Comics took a surprising leap out into the comic book industry's little pond this week, and performed a mighty cannonball. Not only will DC be rebooting almost all of their comics with new #1 issues in a younger DC Universe this September, but also digitally releasing all of their new titles at the same time as print.

As gambles go, it is a big and bold one, and one that has heightened worries about the stability of brick-and-mortar comic shops. ComicsAlliance reached out to a variety of comic book retailers across the nation to get their reactions to the big news, and as might be expected after such a dramatic and far-reaching shift in publishing strategy, their reaction was far from unanimous.

Debuting in August is Mystic, the new Marvel Comics series written by G. Willow Wilson, the critically acclaimed co-author of the graphic novel Cairo and the Vertigo series Air. Joined by penciller David López and colorist Nathan Fairbairn, Wilson tells the story of a fantastic city called Hyperion where magic and science are one in the same. Mystic focuses in on two citizens of Hyperion, the orphan girls Genevieve and Giselle, whose destinies will pull them to opposing positions and philosophies in a rivalry that may destroy Hyperion completely.

Flashpoint is DC Comics' summer even of 2011 that promises to change the DC Universe unrecognizably until the event's climactic finale, when the DC Universe will instead be left changed somewhat recognizably. In support of the event, DC is releasing 60+ issues of comic books across 22 titles in just three months. You'd have to be deranged to expend the time, effort and money to follow it all, but fortunately for you, ComicsAlliance has never been particularly whole in the sanity department. Over the next few months we'll be reading every single Flashpoint tie-in so we can tell you what you need to know. There are bound to be some good ones and we'll recommend them to you. The rest of them may contain some facts you'll need to make sense of what's going on in the overall Flashpoint, and we'll help you piece that together as well.

This week in Get to the Flashpoint, we look at

• Batman: Knight of Vengeance by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
• Secret Seven by Peter Milligan, George Perez, Fernando Blanco and Scott Koblish
• Abin Sur: The Green Lantern by Adam Schlagman and Felipe Massafera
• World of Flashpoint by Rex Ogle, Eduardo Francisco and Paulo Siquiera

The world can never have enough Kitty Pryde and Lockheed artwork, and the nicest one you'll see on the Internet today comes via artist and illustrator Dane Ault. Ault's definitely got range. Give his portfolio a few clicks, and you'll see a Green Lantern with some knockout colors that sits over at the Darwyn Cooke end of the spectrum; but he's also done some fine Swamp Thing and Wonder Woman portraits that look more like the work of J.G. Jones.

In today's original comic by Curt Franklin and artist Chris Haley of the superhero webcomic "Let's Be Friends Again," we're going break down the convoluted history of notable comic book characters in a recurring segment we call Comics, Everybody! Today's character is about to appear in movie theatres, albeit with a bit more hair than usual: Professor X, the erstwhile leader of the X-Men.

DC Comics announced Thursday several of the new series and creative teams that will debut in the company's September relaunch of its superhero line of comic books, which will see every title begin again with a #1 issue. Among the new series spinning out of Geoff Johns' and Jim Lee's Jusstice League #1 are Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang; The Fury of Firestorm by writers Ethan Van Sciver & Gail Simone and artist Yildiray Cinar; Justice League International by Dan Jurgens and Aaron Lopresti; and much more.

Thanks to an ever-improving marketing campaign and an almost preposterously high Rotten Tomatoes score, mutie fans are fairly pumped for this Friday's debut of X-Men: First Class. For Professor Xavier and Magneto, however, it's a painful reminder of a friendship in perpetual free fall since the '60s. Good thing Deadpool's around to, like, force the duo to remember the good times in the latest installment of Marvel Super Heroes: What The--?!, maaaaan.

Over the past few weeks, we here at ComicsAlliance have talked quite a bit about Thor. We've covered the recent blockbuster Marvel movie, the video game tie-ins, and we've even taken an in-depth look at the SyFy Channel's low-budget knockoff. But there's one dubious tie-in that we've yet to discuss:


The current story arc in Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, in which Tarot's boyfriend fights Loki with Thor's hammer. It's hard to believe that the timing of this particular arc is a complete coincidence, but regardless, the end result has become one of the strangest and most ridiculous stories in the comic's eleven-year run. And considering this is Tarot we're talking about, that's saying something.

Comic book fans are typically attuned to loving an often under-appreciated medium, which is why when I scoped the balloon sculptures of Balloon Guy Entertainment over at Joystiq yesterday, I knew CA had to share the company's relevant comic book and pop culture works. We've seen some cool balloon art before, but never the size of a small child -- or a full grown friggin' dinosaur. See BGE's amazing parody take on Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Super Mario Bros. crew, Master Chief, the Power Rangers and more after the jump.

The writer (and occasional illustrator/designer) of such superlative works as The Nightly News, Fantastic Four, S.H.I.E.L.D., Pax Romana and more, Jonathan Hickman is a favorite of ComicsAlliance readers and staff. Indeed, Hickman's work with Fantastic Four and FF is so beautifully dense, dramatically enthralling and meticulously structured that it's inspired an ongoing series of annotations by our own David Uzumeri. As such, all we really need to know about any new Hickman comics is that they exist and we will definitely buy them, and we know you will too.

To that end, ComicsAlliance and Jonathan Hickman have teamed up to bring you an elegant and exclusive teaser for the writer's latest creator-owned project, The Red Wing, a time travel epic illustrated by Nick Pitarra.