After a fun but discordantly plotted Iron Man II, we’re hoping that Thor can get lightning to strike at least once.  We’re hoping it’ll hammer it’s competition at the box office.  We’d like it if it’s release couldn’t be considered low key.

Last month fans jumped at the news that Disney and Marvel would be bringing two Marvel properties to the small screen, and one of them would be an Incredible Hulk show. There was, however, no official announcement from ABC television regarding Marvel’s statements. Well, now we’ve got it from an even higher source, Robert Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company.

We’re developing three live-action series for ABC and ABC Family.

There’s no confirmation yet on which Marvel properties will be chosen for the TV treatment, but there are some indication of which ones are most likely.

This week’s Entertainment Weekly boasts a fair feast of images from the production of Captain America: The First Avenger, including a look at Hugo Weaving as Red Skull, some wonderfully art deco scientific instruments, and a shirtless Chris Evans.

We’re actually most interested by the middle one, we swear.

Lion-O Is Ceiling Cat For Some Reason (FashionablyGeek)

Square Enix Is Making A Christmas Album (GameInformer)

StarCraft II‘s New Minigames (Kotaku)

Marvel Shelves Runaways Movie (Bleeding Cool)

ABC, CBS, and NBC Are All Blocked on Google TV (The Wall Street Journal)

CALM DOWN: Rumors of Star Wars Sequel Trilogy are Unfounded (Wired)

BlizzCon Costumes, Day 1 (WoW Insider)

(pic via Guyism.)

ESPN The Magazine will feature basketball players alongside iconic characters from the Marvel Universe in what is being billed as an “epic quest for hoops supremacy.” We spot The Hulk, The Thing, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and more:

>>>Details at SportsGrid.

When the Marvel/Disney merger was made official, a lot of people immediately plundered the wide ranging crossover potential, from Spider-Man in Kingdom Hearts to a Beast buddy movie.

Today we see the first shamelessly tied in fruit of that union, in the form of a series of variant covers for Marvel’s November titles, where ten of Marvel’s biggest characters get reinterpreted Tron-style.

What superhero had a beloved but campy television show in the 70′s, and then kinda fell off the non-comics radar until now, when a new show was announced to be in development?

Well, Wonder Woman.

And now the Hulk!

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Hulk is a priority at Marvel‘s television division, which has been running along quietly since Jeph Loeb took charge.

In a change that was totally planned out and has nothing at all to do with DC‘s slightly previously announced decision, Marvel Comics are also dropping the price of a regular-sized monthly comic to three bucks starting in January.  According to Senior VP of Sales and Circulation David Gabriel, Marvel can afford to do this because of the success of their digital comics initiatives.

But don’t get too excited yet, though:

Gabriel confirmed that “selected” Marvel titles — including new titles — would be priced at $2.99.

That means that the stuff you’re reading now may or may not get cheaper, and only stuff that debuts in 2011 and later will start with the new pricepoint.  However, unlike DC, Marvel will not be cutting the page count on their cheaper titles.

(via The Beat.)

Yesterday DC Comics made a long expected announcement that they will be moving part of their offices to Burbank, California, to be closer to the movie studio that is looking forward to exploiting their characters for box office proceeds. As a part of that announcement, they also mentioned that they will be shutting down WildStorm, one of their relatively independent imprints. And so begins the speculation of what, exactly, will happen to the WildStorm Universe, a specific superhero setting with its own rules and concepts, much as the DC and Marvel Universes themselves.

I can pretty much guarantee that if you don’t read comics, you won’t recognize many of the titles that I’m going to mention below (although you might use it as a recommended reading list). If you do read comics, you’ll notice me mentioning quite a few examples of the most interesting out-of-the-box superhero stories of the last 20 years. They’re all Wildstorm titles, and they’re all being indefinitely boxed up at the end of this December so that they can maybe be incorporated into the DC Universe.

But before I get into what Wildstorm titles will be affected by the editorial apocalypse, a brief history lesson is in order, for irony’s sake if nothing else.

Agent M, Marvel comics blogger extraordinaire was tweeting with some friends yesterday about “Kitty Avengers and Kitty versions of Marvel characters on Twitter,” and things went naturally from then on.

Which is to say that six different professional artists made a score of interpretations of different Marvel characters as cats.

See below, of course.