Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett discusses the new Captain America strip, the new writer on Superman and Wonder Woman, Generator Rex, Phineas & Ferb, and "Marvel characters Disney might want to know about."

Maybe it's because the announcement came on a Friday but the story concerning the Captain America comic strip hasn't gotten nearly enough traction on the usual suspect comic news sites as far as I'm concerned.  If you haven't heard, writer/artist Karl Kesel is doing a daily Cap comic set in the 1940's that's supposed to run for three months on the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited site.  That's eighty-five strips total with the Sundays running in Sunday comic size which will eventually be collected into three monthly comic books.

This may not seem like big news to many of you but me, I'm almost excited (and I have to confess that "almost" is as close as I usually get to "excited" these days) for mostly self-indulgent reasons.  I love old comic strips*, think that the 40's is the best setting for the character and can't get enough of the work of Karl Kesel who has come up with a plot so obvious it's a wonder it never occurred to this continuity obsessed fanboy (i.e. the Government wouldn't have let the death of Dr. Erskine stop them from continuing work on the Super Soldier Program).

All of which is nice and all but what Marvel has done here is bury their lead.  They're doing something that's never been done been done before - an original online daily comic from a major publisher!  As someone who's always been a big proponent of publishers increasing the amount of original material they put online this is great news because (if it's successful) it's the kind of thing that could help build regular, repeat traffic to their Websites.  This in turn could help grow the market, something that theoretically we all want.

I'm also almost excited by the prospect of J. Michael Straczynski writing both Superman and Wonder Woman, especially Superman.  I want to believe JMS when he says he's going to write "a story that returns Superman to his roots in a way that will have the whole country talking about him in ways that we haven't seen in a long time." (see "JMS to Write 'Superman'").  I really want to but a lot of writers have tried to "return Superman to his roots" and while these attempts usually start out well enough so far they've always proven impossible to sustain.  But hope springs eternal.
 
In a bit of old cartoon-related business, after all my whining I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Generator Rex (the latest animated series from Men of Action, creators of Ben 10, based on the comic book M. Rex) will finally debut on Cartoon Network in April.  Anyone who wants to see the trailer its posted online--just put "Generator Rex trailer" in your search engine and you'll get there; it looks pretty cool.

And next summer will see the premiere of the first Phineas & Ferb movie Phineas & Ferb: Across the Second Dimension.  While I'll admit this is good news mostly for me the show has been the #1 animated series for Kids 6-11 and Tweens 9-14 on both Disney XD and The Disney Channel two years running so it can't be just me.  But buried deep in the Disney Channels Worldwide press release for 2010-11 programming, listed amongst the other P&F merchandise was the promise of "books and comics from Disney Publishing."  So I might actually live to read Phineas & Ferb comic books after all.

This is usually where the latest installment of my "Marvel character(s) Disney might want to know about" segment goes but I (a) don't want to overdo it (though I've more than likely already gone way beyond that point) and (b) lately Marvel has been doing a pretty good job of doing that for themselves.  Recently both US Archer (and his super eighteen wheeler from the 80's comic US1) and IT, The Living Colussus have popped up in the pages of Deadpool Team-Up.  And though I never thought I'd live to see it this summer they'll again publish a regular comic book titled Young Allies (though happily this version won't include Tubby Tinkle, the resident fat kid from the Golden Age team's line-up).

* Which is why I could have done without Marvel claiming these were "newly discovered strips from the 40's" since they very obviously aren't.  I know it's fun to pretend but I didn't much care for this kind of dissembling when Marvel did it concerning the origins of The Sentry and like it even less here.  Kesel makes no attempt to make his work look like it was drawn in the 1940's which should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the subject, though I'll admit that's probably a pretty small segment of the readership.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.