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So in the trailer for the new Wolverine movie the X-Men's most badass (and most overly exposed) mutant meets Gambit, gets punched by a morbidly obese boxer (The Blob?) and fights Liev Shreiber as Sabretooth?

The Cartoon Network's new Batman: The Brave and The Bold cartoon premiered on Friday -- and it's well worth checking out.

(Theme music owes a bit to The Tick, I think, but it's not that tongue-in-cheek.)

As discussed in this Wired interview, it's the first time in decades that we've seen a lighter Batman -- not the driven, disturbed and haunted vigilante of the breakthrough Batman: The Animated Series or the "Dark Knight" of the new batch of Batman films.

The show will team a solo Batman with a different DC comics character each episode -- and it looks like they're going to the back-benches with some of the people who will be showing up. The first episode "Rise of the Blue Beetle!" is light enough for kids, but it's not junk-food. Adult comic fans, sci-fi geeks and kids-at-heart of all ages will also enjoy the show's wit and imagination.

Reminds me a bit of what they did with Superman Adventures some years ago - taking essential elements of the property and telling really great pop stories with them.

Over at BoingBoing Cory Doctorow is taking a look at a new book about Bat-Manga - the explosion of Batman comic books created for the Japanese market during the 1960s, when the classic Adam West TV series was being marketed there.

The best part of the story? Apparently the Japanese man tasked with selling Batman to his countrymen thought the stories weren't strange and outlandish enough to go over there and made Batman even weirder -- adding robots, dinosaurs and villains that rise from the dead.

My thing is...the American Batman was never weirder than he was in the 1960s. He was already traveling in time, going to different worlds, fighting aliens and magical villains, disguising himself as other super-heroes and...you know, regularly battling one of the weirdest rouges galleries of villains in comic book history with some of the most outlandish gadgetry imaginable. And the Japanese thought that wasn't enough? You'd have to seriously look at their manga and anime to truly wrap your head around that one.

The book, Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, is available now.

Check out more photos from the book (including weird Japanese Batman toys) here.

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Berkley Breathed is ending his popular Sunday comic Opus, which often swings from weird and whimsical to bitingly satirical.

He says he's "destroying the village in order to save it."

Breathed tells the L.A. Times: "30 years of cartooning to end. I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.”

Breathed seems at once eaten alive by cynicism and playfully hopeful.

“With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation," he told the L.A. Times. "The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.”

Apparently HBO has given up the idea of turning PREACHER into a television show.

The popular comic, concerning a disillusioned preacher, his gun-toting girlfriend and vampire buddy in search of an absentee God, is apparently too dark, violent and controversial for HBO.

Yes - TOO CONTROVERSIAL FOR HBO.

Somehow I just don't buy this explanation.

This is the network that brought us live car sex in Taxicab Confessions, graphic rape and murder scenes in Rome, prisoners shivving, poisoning and forceably sodomizing each other on OZ.

They're the network that originally gave us all George Carlin's specials, brought us Borat on Da Ali G Show, who gave Bill Maher Real Time when he got bounced from his network gig in a political/religious controversy.

They're going to shrink from PREACHER?

I'd be willing to believe they thought it was too complicated to translate to TV, that a lot of it would have to be changed or wouldn't come across the way it was intended, that the comedy would be hard to balance with the drama and that all of that, on top of the controversy it would create, made it untenable.

Luckily, PREACHER scribe Garth Ennis seems happy in comics. No one seems to be waving him off controversy there. I recently read THE CHRONICLES OF WORMWOOD, in which the hero, a rebellious anti-Christ who has shunned his dad and become friends with Jesus, has anal sex with a perverted Joan of Arc while she talks dirty and begs for more.

And then, two pages later, serious philosophical discussion.

Writer Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Ocean) continues to produce FREAKANGELS, a free weekly online comic. They're on episode fifteen this week.

I'm really digging the art by Paul Duffield.

Go take a look.

It's a wonderful day for free comics.

First Mr. Wonderful free from the New York Times, now Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, the Authority, NEXTWAVE) and Paul Duffield launch FreakAngels, a free ongoing weekly online comic.

Check out the first episode here.

Score!

The New York Times has the full run of the Mr. Wonderful cartoon by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Eightball) for free download as PDFs.

If you haven't read any Clowes, go check this out for free. If you have, thank the Times for giving us this great stuff for free.