Comics and books

Publisher Wildstorm has a free preview of Yoshinori Natsume's Batman: Death Mask on their Myspace page. The fist issue ships April 9, and follows Batman as he investigates a serial killer who seems to have the same martial arts training in Japan that he had.

Following Buffy's example, the original Star Trek will continue in comic book form. Starting with The Enterprise Experiment (a kinda sequel to TV episode The Enterprise Incident) IDW Publishing will be presenting Star Trek: Year Four as a continuation, since the show went off after three years and the Enterprise was on a five year mission. "In the new story the Federation tries to adapt the stolen tech and of course, things don’t go as planned. Kirk and Spock end up on an Enterprise phased out somewhere between time and space. Oh, and the Romulans don’t take the theft lying down and stage an attack at this most inopportune time."

Jonathan Hickman's Pax Romana is about how, "[The Catholic Church] sends an army back in time to pretty much conquer the world and set up a theocracy. They send everyone back in time to around 312 or 313 A.D., when Constantine was the first Christian emperor in the Roman Empire. And everything goes wrong." There's a sample up on the official site.

Wall Street Journal:
"Borders Group Inc. has decided you can sell a book by its cover. In a radical move aimed at jump-starting sales, the nation's second-largest book retailer is sharply increasing the number of titles it displays on shelves with the covers face-out. Because that takes up more room than the traditional spine-out style, the new approach will require a typical Borders superstore to shrink its number of titles by 5% to 10%." For anyone who doesn't understand how shelving in bookstores work, this'll have an effect on small publishers, "mid-list" authors, and niche genres: "Even so, its new strategy -- which at a typical superstore will mean a reduction of anywhere from 4,675 to 9,350 titles from the former total of around 93,500…"