Andy Runton’s Owly gets a cuteness rating of two thousand out of ten. Check out the scans for yourself and tell me I am right! So does David Petersen’s Mouse Guard, which I managed to check out recently thanks to my friends in Kanpur.

The weekly series 52 is drawing to a close pretty soon, and I must say that, taking into consideration my general apathy towards Marvel/DC’s corporate superhero storytelling, I would be willing to shell out money for a collected hardcover of 52. An Absolute edition wouldn’t hurt, either. After all, the writers involved included Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid ( Geoff Johns is more of a fanboy than a writer, in my humble opinion.)

Volume 4 of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is titled Century. It’s going to be published by Top Shelf Publishing, because Moore has broken off all ties with DC/Wildstorm following the release of V For Vendetta. In case you are confused about Volume 3 of League, it was published last year by DC/Wildstorm and was called The Black Dossier, I am waiting for the Absolute Edition to release before I buy it. From the Top Shelf website, Century is a 216-page epic spanning almost a hundred years. Divided into three 72-page chapters — each a self-contained narrative to avoid frustrating cliff-hanger delays between episodes –this monumental tale takes place in three distinct eras, building to an apocalyptic conclusion occurring in our own current twenty-first century. Chapter one is set against a backdrop of London, 1910, twelve years after the failed Martian invasion and nine years since England put a man upon the moon. With Halley’s Comet passing overhead, the nation prepares for the coronation of King George V, and far away on his South Atlantic Island, the science-pirate Captain Nemo is dying. Inthe bowels of the British Museum, Carnacki the ghost-finder is plaguedby visions of a shadowy occult order who are attempting to create something called a Moonchild, while on London’s dockside the most notorious serial murderer of the previous century has returned to carry on his grisly trade. Working for Mycroft Holmes’ British Intelligence alongside a rejuvenated Allan Quartermain, the reformed thief Anthony Raffles and the eternal warrior Orlando, Miss Murray is drawn into a brutal opera acted out upon the waterfront by players that include the furiously angry Pirate Jenny and the charismatic butcher known as Mac the Knife.

Craig Thompson’s next release called Kissypoo Garden is also solicited for sometime in 2008. This is a 200-300 page collection of his shorter works over the years. And what is this my eyes spy? A 500-copy limited release of a hardcover of the collected American Elf by James Kochalka! 520 pages. My cup runneth over!!!

Apparently, Warren Ellis’s latest offering, Black Summer arose out of a bet between himself and William Christiansen, the head of Avatar Press. The challenge was to come up with a superhero concept that wasn’t a rehashing of old ideas and yet managed to reach Event-level high notes, kind of a multipart crossover that threatens to change all reality. In Ellis’s own words – “Huge technical challenge, and I like those, because they keep me sharp. It took me more than a year, mind you… Until I hit on the two ideas. What if a superhero killed the President? And the underpinning: where do you draw the line?” The artwork is by Juan Jose Ryp, and looks like a combination of Geoff Darrow and Jacen Burrows influences, as far as I can see from the preview images.