By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Deadpool

The original art by Rob Liefeld of a page 14 of New Mutants No. 98 sold for $960,000 this weekend, the second-highest price ever paid for a single page of a comic book. That page is the first-ever appearance of the character Deadpool, which went on to become a cult favorite until finally making it onto the big screen. The debut of Deadpool still came short of the $3.4 million earned in 2022 by the original art drawn by Mike Zeck of page 25 of Secret Wars No. 8, a page which shows the origin of Spider-Man’s black costume. The cover of that issue was also up for auction and also drawn by Liefeld, but was yanked from sale despite having an estimated worth of $7.5 million.

Joel Meadows, The Art Newspaper

Moana

The end-of-the-year box office has some real gusto, with Moana 2 making another $103.4 million overseas and another $52 million domestically for a global total of $600 million so far. It’s already the fifth-biggest movie of the year just two weekends in. Wicked made another $34.9 million domestically and $26.9 million abroad, good for a $455.5 million global cume, while Gladiator II also participated in the box office this weekend and should be very, very proud of itself. A re-release of Interstellar made $4.5 million from 166 Imax theaters which all sold out, which weirdly enough was good for sixth place.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Wisdom

The oldest known wild bird in the world is Wisdom, a 74-year-old Laysan albatross who was first banded in 1956 and was spotted last week at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that Wisdom indeed laid an egg, her first egg in four years and what is estimated to be her 60th egg. Laysan albatrosses mate for life and Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, had returned to the atoll to lay and hatch eggs since 2006. Akeakamai has not been spotted for several years; Wisdom was seen interacting with another male last week. I await the news that Focus Features has already optioned the story and Todd Haynes is slated to direct.

Hallie Golden, The Associated Press

Bastrop

Company towns have been a consistently emerging side effect of industrialization for centuries, and yet again the controversial idea of a town built by a company for its workers, with all the possible utopian and dystopian reverberations of that, has appeared in Texas. Elon Musk has been setting up a number of his companies in Bastrop, Texas, around a development called Snailbrook, and two years in it’s a humble community that has very big ideas about its future growth. Bastrop’s county has been growing at a remarkable clip, increasing 17 percent from June 2020 to June 2024, which outpaces even the notoriously fast-growing neighboring city of Austin, which grew 4 percent over the same period.

Rani Molla, Sherwood News

Surrender

Coca-Cola announced that it will fail its sustainability goals and is giving up on its intention to recycle the equivalent of 100 percent of its packaging by 2030. In 2023, 47.7 percent of Coke’s packaging was plastic, 26 percent was aluminum, and 10.4 percent was glass, and it has decided that rather than try to hit its barely reasonable recycling targets, it’s way easier to just continue to package its single-use beverages in essentially immortal structures that will outlive even the great-grandchildren of the youngest employees in the company, because why not. Last year, 1.2 percent of Coke’s packaging was reusable, and attempts to get it to 25 percent were essentially nil. Coca-Cola is one of the few companies that has actually managed to increase its use of virgin plastics by about 6 percent since 2019. The company announced a few more goals on some longer timelines, but they’re not worth writing about here because you’d have to be an idiot to trust them at their word at this point.

Maria Rachal, Food Dive

Farms

The USDA forecasts that farm income in the U.S. decreased 3.5 percent in 2024, mostly due to declining sales of crops. The $158.8 billion projected in 2024 is still up 9.8 percent over the 20-year average. Forecasted crop receipts are down 9 percent, but sales of animal products are up 8 percent, which overall washes out to a 1 percent decline in agricultural commodities sold. In other words, parts of the country that make plants are doing worse than the parts of the country that make meat. Median farm income in the U.S. is projected to be $100,634, which is up 3 percent from 2023.

Cami Koons, Iowa Capital Dispatch

AdCorp

Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group are reportedly eyeing a merger, which makes sense for the two most ambiguously and ominously named corporations in America. Both are juggernauts of advertising, and Omnicom’s looking to value Interpublic at $13 billion to $14 billion. This would combine the third- and fourth-largest advertising companies to leapfrog WPP and become the largest ad firm in the world. Based on my understanding of the business, which is derived entirely from Mad Men, the only holdup is that right about now a key executive at one of the firms is essentially missing on a transcontinental bender that will lead to a moment of self-discovery at a retreat on the Pacific coast where they eventually figure out how to sell Americans soda.

Suzanne Vranica and Lauren Thomas, The Wall Street Journal

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