Bleeding Cool has been reporting on the rumors for two years now, but DC Comics just made it official: They'll be publishing seven Watchmen prequel series under the Before Watchmen banner:

Rorschach by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo
Comedian by Brian Azzarello and JG Jones
Minutemen by Darwyn Cooke
Silk Spectre by Darwyn Cooke and Amanda Conner
Doctor Manhattan by J Michael Straczynski and Adam Hughes
Nite Owl by Joe Michael Strazynski (and presumably Andy and Joe Kubert)
Ozymandias by Len Wein and Jae Lee.

Bleeding Cool reports that the demand for these prequels came from high up in the Time Warner corporation, which owns DC Comics and has recently been taking a firmer hand in the way the company works: "...the word from on high at Warners had come to exploit any and all properties within the DC remit that could make money, and this specifically included Watchmen." I cringe that Azzarello, who is a writer I like a lot, refers to Watchmen as a "franchise" in the DC press release.

This is a terrible idea. Sure, these are some talented names in comics (well, some of them are talented; Strazynski is terribly overrated, for example), and these comics will make a butt-ton of money for DC initially. But to use their own corporate-speak against them, they're devaluing the brand. Watchmen, the original collected comic, is always one of their bestselling titles; it's on every DC year-end bestseller list. Now that they're doing this, I promise you: In ten years, it won't be there anymore. They'll be turning one of their bestselling books into a midlist by trying to extend it into a franchise, when the closed-circuit properties of Watchmen is what attracted people to the book. Both DC Comics and Marvel Comics need to be pumping all their money into creating new ideas. For the last twenty or thirty years, all they've been doing is milking the original properties for all they're worth; their audience is slowly realizing that there's nothing new in any of their comics—that it's the same story, over and over again—and they're going away forever. But enough about what I think: What do you think?

• From Glory #23, art by Ross Campbell

Except, not: A couple of weeks ago, two Rob Liefeld properties, Glory and Prophet were dusted off and re-presented in an interesting new light. Glory, written by Joe Keatinge and drawn by Ross Campbell, doesn't stray very far from Liefeld's idea for the character—her origin, in short: what if Rob Liefeld got all the royalties for Wonder Woman?—but the execution is what matters here. This is a comic written and drawn by two people who know how to make comics. Keatinge's script is solid, but slightly derivative of these kinds of comics; a young reporter tries to find the truth behind the superheroic legend of Glory. As far as introductions go, it's a decent one, but it leaves you hoping he's got loftier goals than intellectual property maintenance in upcoming issues. The art by Campbell is the star here: Hyper-detailed, kinetic, and imaginative. He gets bonus points for making Glory more muscular than Liefeld's Barbie doll character. It's a solid first issue that promises some thrills and—hopefully—some surprises.

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You should read this great essay by China Miéville about the connections of—and differences between—two opposing categories of sci-fi/fantasy: The Weird, which Miéville has championed in the past, and Hauntology, which reimagines ghosts into something that, in the words of Lovecraft, are "lean, dwarfish, and hairy – a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man – and usually touched before it is seen." It's a sharp, funny, highly literate exploration:

Dickens thinks nothing of jostling together, in ‘A Christmas Carol’, the ghost of a person, Jacob Marley, with those of various Christmases. To post-hauntological eyes this is a category-error, but Dickens is merely subordinating the specifics of the ghost to his extreme and mawkish extrapolation of the preceding epoch’s tendency to morally ‘mean’ with spectrality. In neither ‘The Haunted House’ (1859) nor ‘The Haunted Man’ (1848) are the haunts revenants of the dead, but ‘of my own innocence’, or a doppelganger who performs a selective mnemectomy so the story can thumpingly moralise that it is important to remember wrong done to us ‘that we may forgive it’. Dickens’s ghosts are apotheoses of the instructional ghosts of the preceding century – out of time, rearguard in their sentimentality, themselves haunted by the future. They are not so much convincing, morally, as performatively flourished. These are not modern ghosts, but the last, already-dead walking dead of a dead epoch, bobbed about on sticks.

There's much more, including thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, and octopuses ("it has no claws, but deploys vacuum as a weapon; it eats and shits with the same orifice ((supposedly)); it swims and walks and crawls...[and Hugo insists that they] demand a rethinking of philosophy.") Go read the whole thing.

• Click to enlarge.

The minicomics include new and rare material from the excellent Fantagraphics stable of cartoonists, including the very first appearance of Peter Bagge's Bradleys, a never-before-published comic from David B, some early Hernandez Brothers material, a full-color piece about converting his comics for television by Tony Millionaire, new illustrations from Stranger Genius Jim Woodring, and—Santa, get me this one, please—Ivan Brunetti's Nancy comic strip tryouts.

The minis are also available individually with purchase of related comics—buy any Johnny Ryan book, for instance, and you automatically get Ryan's mini, Cool Shit from the Pit. I love minicomics—the idea of taking photocopied sheets of paper, stapling them together, and making a book out of them is so simple and direct and touching, like a handwritten letter. These books are a great idea; a special gift for your special comics fan.

This is an excellent first issue—it introduces Orson and his world to us, sets up a conflict, and teases at what's to come. (The fact that it only costs a dollar helps, too.) Risso's always been an excellent draftsman, but he's doing his best work ever on Spaceman. Things look familiar, but remixed somehow. The future is made up of rundown shacks, disposable technology, and rampant body modification. This could be the best thing DC is publishing right now.

What is it about Batman that makes cartoonists want to write Christmas stories about him? I'm willing to bet Superman hasn't starred in half the Christmas stories that Batman has.

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