The Week at the Curve

April ends with a pretty heavy news week here at The Great Curve, as the Toronto Comicon wraps up today, the online vs. paper debate raises its head and, of course, Civil War and Infinite Crisis make headlines.

We had a couple of posts in the digital vs. paper vein. First, continuing the trend of giving away comics online for free, Jason Latour is offering The Expatriate, the series he created with writer B. Clay Moore, for free.

And speaking of online comics, Wired.com wants to know when comics will be available to buy in digital formats a la iTunes or on CD. A few of our readers pointed out that several Marvel titles are already available on CD, such as Fantastic Four and X-Men.

If you'd rather use your computer screen (or PSP or Playstation 2 or whatever) to actually play a comic-based game versus reading comics, then this week brought some great news, as Activision prepares to launch Ultimate Alliance, an RPG featuring 140 different Marvel characters. C.B. Cebulski talked about his role in designing the game.

This coming week should be a pretty big one for comics, as the first issue of Civil War lands on Wednesday. Marvel has introduced an online clock counting down the seconds to the big event, and the New York Daily News jumped on the Civil War PR bandwagon. But hey, what about that other big comics event, Infinite Crisis? Tom reviewed where DC has come from and looks where it might be going post-IC. And then there's Virgin, whose first solicitations we talked about in Forward Thinking this week ... they took a shot at both big events with a new ad for their comics.

And this coming week ends with Free Comic Book Day next Saturday, which will see not only the release of tons of free comics, but comic signings and events around the country, such as CAPE 2 in Dallas or Rob Osbourne appearing at the Khepri store in Tempe. This coming weekend ought to be a great one for comics fans.