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It’s Friday! Here a few of the Entertainment-related headlines that just hit the wire:

– After weeks of negotiations, AMC has found its lead for its adaptation of DC Comics/Vertigo’s Preacher, and it’s a face familiar to comic book movie fans: Dominic Cooper. The British actor, who you surely recognize as the younger face of Howard Stark (Mad Men‘s John Slattery plays him in his middle aged years) in Captain America: The First Avenger and Agent Carter, will be playing the role of Jesse Custer, with production on the pilot beginning this summer. Preacher‘s Executive Producer Seth Rogen confirmed the news on twitter today.

For you Garth Ennis experts out there, what do you think about this casting choice? Did AMC make the right move?

- 12 Years A Slave is easily one of my favorite films of this decade, and one of the only movies that’s moved me to near-tears in the theater. It is truly that moving and engrossing. So, it was with great shock today that I saw EW reporting that its screenwriter (and winner of the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his work on the film) John Ridley is teaming up with Marvel for a mysterious television project aiming to reinvent an existing Marvel character for ABC. This project is reportedly a separate entity altogether from the already announced Agents of SHIELD spin-off that’s in the works.

Given that it’s for ABC, something like the Punisher seems like a no-go, and really, neither does Blade (both of which Marvel recently regained the rights to back to a few years back). I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Moon Knight perhaps, but really any guess is a good one at this point.

Ridley is no stranger to comics, having written The Authority and the graphic novel The American Way.

– Yes, we know all about the leaked Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer, and we won’t be posting it here for obvious reasons. Plus, the presentable version will make its way online by Monday, if not over the weekend. We’ll hold out for that. In the meantime, here’s a related unconfirmed rumor, according to Jeff Sneider (of TheWrap) on his latest episode of Meet the Movie Press, he stated that the Green Lantern that we’ll see in the 2020 reboot (and presumably the Zack Snyder directed Justice League films) will be John Stewart.

Sneider’s sources on this kind of information are generally pretty strong, so there’s likely something to this. Many fans had hoped/figured the new Green Lantern post-Ryan Reynolds would be Stewart given the younger audiences greater familiarity with the character over Hal Jordan thanks to the Justice League animated series.

Plus, he’s just an awesome character. Green Lantern: Mosaic anyone?

The Wrap has all the background on that beef between director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley, who both won Oscars for 12 Years a Slave the other night but somehow managed to forget to thank one another. It seems McQueen wanted a screenwriting credit, Ridley declined and bad blood flowed, with even Brad Pitt unable to secure a truce. All the shade throwing stayed quiet during the Oscar campaign however, and it worked! Even if in the group shot above Ridley in the back does look like the axe murderer who wasn’t invited to the party.

As you may have recalled, Ridley is actually one those big comics fans in Hollywood and spent a while writing comics for Wildstorm, including a run on the Authority, the mini-series Razor’s Edge: Warblade, and The American Way. The latter is a book that really deserves to be on more comics reading lists—an 8 issue mini-series drawn by Georges Jeanty and Karl Story that has similar themes to Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier about the cold war and superheroes, but treats them with a much harsher view. The book follows the government’s development of the Civil Defense Corps, a pr-driven team of superheroes introduced in the early 60s, and the turmoil that stem from the first African-American member in the Civil Rights era. A lot of comics mini-series have tried to be “the Next Watchmen” and The American Way is one of the few series that takes that tired “What if superheroes really existed???” idea and gives it a take based on the real world and not the imagined one.

Sadly, like many of Wildstorm’s adventurous comics of the Aughts, The American Way is not available in print (although you can find back issues pretty easily.) However, as DC’s Hank Kanalz reminded us on twitter yesterday, you can buy it all digitally.

AND finally, Zack Smith has an excellent

interview with Ridley about comics and diversity. Well worth reading. Ridley doesn’t rule out a return to comics, although he’s very busy launching a film he wrote and directed, All Is By My Side, and a TV pilot, and more so don’t expect him back in comics any time soon.

So I loved The American Way; I still own it, and if I could find a way to go back and do it…writing graphic novels is a serious business. The people who work on those books are serious, and the fans are serious. So I don’t want to be this guy who just air-drops in and it’s, “I got some award in some other space, let me come in and do graphic novels.” I’ve seen some people do that and it hasn’t worked out so well.

I would love to go back do it when I have the space, especially if I was able to work with an editor like Ben Abernathy, who helped me out and made me look good, who saved me from myself often – that’s a great editor, not just someone who goes, “Oh, John writes movies! Let’s get him to do this and this and this, and it has to be out by this date, so it needs to be done now.”