In which I check back in with a couple of series I reviewed the first issues of

The Anchor #2 (Boom Studios) I was pretty impressed with the first issue of this new series by writer Phil Hester and artist Brian Churilla, and remained so with the second issue.

Hester teases out Clem/The Anchor’s origin a bit, sends the big, bearded bruiser and his friend Hofi to Scotland to fight an even cooler-looking monster than he fought last time, while two groups of enemies plot against him on two different planes of reality.

There’s still a great deal of mystery about who exactly this guy is and what exactly he’s whole deal is, but Hester and Churilla are telling us, they’re just doing it at their own pace—there’s no sense that they’re just drawing it out because they’re still trying to figure it out themselves or want to wait for a trade or anything.

The monster that needs a-punching this time is a huge centaur-like creature with the body of a stag, and the torso of a man, with the skull and antlers of a stag where his head should be. Wristbands, a big red beard, and a Scottish-looking, red and green plaid sash complete his look.

Oh, and Clem wears a sailor shirt and trims his own beard by ripping a fist-full of it off himself. Those things are awesome.

My only reservation regarding The Anchor is its price—it’s $3.99 for 22-pages, so it’s not one I’d personally buy in comic book form (I’ve been reading preview pdfs). If you’re richer and/or less stingy than me though, you may want to check it out. If not, make a mental note to check out the eventual trade.


Days Missing #2-#3 (Archaia) I wasn’t terribly fond of the first issue of this series, and I'm still kind of confused about its existence and production, but with these successive issues the premise at least has become perfectly clear.

Days Missing has the words “Rodenberry Presents” above it’s logo, and bears a Rodenberry logo right next to the Archaia one. It also has a credit reading “Created by Trevor Roth,” a creator who neither writes nor draws the book.

I’m guessing Roth came up with the premise for the book—a mysterious superhuman steward of humanity named The Steward with the power to alter and/or erase entire days from existence, in order to save the world—and turned it over to Archaia to develop.

Each of the first three issues have had entirely different creative teams, however. The first issue was by Phil Hester and Frazer Irving, the second by David Hine and Chris Burnham, the third by Ian Edginton and Lee Moder. Those are pretty talented individuals, and creative teams well worth paying attention to, but the books obviously lacks visual consistency, and the hopping through different times to face completely different threats makes every issue seem like a one-issue series of its own.

The good news is that it means every issue of Days Missing—which is currently a five-issue miniseries, but flexible enough to lead to more minis or an ongoing if there’s demand—is equally new-reader accessible, but the bad news is that they’re also pretty hit-or-miss.

Hine and Burnham’s issue has The Steward writing in his diary about a 19th century adventure, in which he erased the day in history when Mary Shelley met a real-life doctor who had discovered a way to reanimate the dead using lightning and later encountered the monster that resulted. The inspiration for her Frankenstein was therefore real, although The Steward did away with it, so only a vague memory was left to be turned into her novel.

The story is pretty well told, and Hine thankfully doesn’t make the parallels between Shelley’s eventual story and her encounters here too heavy-handed (The real-life doctor is named John Galton, not Frankenstein, for example).

The art was pretty wretched though, and Imaginary Friends Studios colors seem to obliterate all of Burnham’s lines, so that far too often pages look like they were produced entirely by color artists. Additionally, the character aren’t very good actors, excepting perhaps the monster himself, who seems to fit better into this style of art and color than real-life, famous 19th-century poets and writers do.

The art improves quite a bit in the third issue, in which Lee Moder provides flatter, more open work with cartoonier, more comic book-y art. I think the coloring is still far too aggressive—there are colored lines rather than black ones in many instances, for example—but the pages are cleaner, crisper and easier to read than in the previous examples.

This story involves a scientist who has noticed evidence of The Steward’s hand in history and is about to find the evidence she needs to prove that there are days missing thanks to a giant Hadron super collider. Luckily for The Steward, things work out so that he doesn’t have to choose between keeping his secret and saving the day.

These two newer issues share one problem with the first, and that’s that they seem to be 25-page stories squeezed into 22-pages. Each one has examples of pages stuffed with too much dialogue in too few panels, which can be tedious to read.


Hercules: The Knives of Kush #4 (Radical Comics) My major reservations about Radical’s use of one of fiction’s most enduring heroes from the first issue of this miniseries (which I reviewed here) concerned the art, and those haven’t changed.

The covers, like the one to the right by Clint Langley, often strike a balance somewhere between a science fiction paperback cover and a heavy metal album cover, and this one is no exception. The level of detail evaporates in the interior art though, which is provided by a trio of artists and a trio of colorists (Cris Bolson, Manuel, Leonardo Silva, Dough Sirois, Cliff Cramp and Steve Kirchow).

The characters themselves have a hyper-reality about them, but they don’t always seem to fit in the environments they interact with, or at least not as smoothly. The individual panels tend to look more like rough drafts to a video game, and thus have a different feel than the covers (And its worth noting that my objection to the art reflects my own bias against such highly produced, computer-aided art—I like to be able to see the lines the artists made, and to be able to pick out what a penciler did versus what a colorist did). I just don’t like looking at this comic book, which certainly makes reading it a lot less pleasurable for me than it should be.

Steve Moore’s script for this issue is a lot more busy, packed and fun than the set-up of the first issue, though, so I’m readers with different aesthetic prejudices than me may dig it a lot more.

Hercules and his gang of mercenaries have been employed by one side in a war between Egyptian rival factions, and the book opens with Autolycus and Ioalus undercover at an orgy (where they learn valuable information about their enemies’ sorcerer/secret weapon), leads into a chariot chase that goes down like a movie car chase, segues into some court intrigue and Oh shit our bosses are kinda evil too, huh? realizations and climaxes with a face off between two giant armies, in which this more realistic version of Herc does some seriously superheroic stuff.

I don’t like looking at it, but I kinda liked reading it.

All-American Shojo: The Dreamer

There's a pretty good chance that the existence of, and quality of, Lora Innes' The Dreamer is something you're already aware of, and have been for quite some time. If that's the case, feel free to skip this post, as it likely won't contain anything you don't already know.

As many comics as I try to read—that is, all comics—there are some pretty significant gaps in my comics reading. Like webcomics, for example. I can read short, humorous ones about Ketel One-swilling cats or talking dinosaurs no problem, but I have little patience with serial drama or adventure in that format. It's not webcomics, it's me; I am a Very Old Man and a Luddite. So Innes' Dreamer, like most webcomics, wasn't something I could get into in its native format, even if I did glance at it and think "nice art" when I started hearing that there was this lady from Columbus—a 2002 graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design—who was doing pretty great comics work.

Another sort of comic I pretty much never read? IDW's serial comic book-format comics. At $3.99 for 22 pages, they're just too expensive, and almost any series of theirs I am interested in I end up trade-waiting, despite how much I love reading comics in the 22-page, stapled format. So when IDW published The Dreamer as a six-issue comic book series, I missed that too, despite again hearing good things about it online and around the local comic shop

The eventual trade paperback collection, The Dreamer Vol. 1: The Consequence of Nathan Hale was released in July though, so I finally sat down and read it. And you know what? The Dreamer is very good comics.

It's not a completely transcendental, all-things to all-people, everyone-must-read-this-now sort of book or anything. And it's therefore not one I'd reccommend to anyone. But if you like shojo? If you like Young Adult fiction? If you like historical romance and teen drama and nicely drawn, very expressive, clean, open, fun, slightly cartoony artwork with a hint of Japanese influence? Then perhaps this is one that you must read now, at least.

There's a blurb on the back from the website of Wizard magazine (which I believe is either a Harry Potter fanzine published by pop culture convention organizer Gareb Shamus) that says "The Dreamer reads like an excellent issue of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane mixed together with the best parts of American history in one glorious conglomeration."

That's not quite it, and I suspect that appeared in Wizard simply because the editors had never read a Japanese girls comic (or, and I'm not sure if this is better or worse, assumed no one that reads their magazine ever has). It's more on the mark to say that The Dreamer and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane share some of the same influences, in their visual look and their coupling of teen, school-based melodrama to some sort of fantastic element. (And hell, maybe it's not influence so much as coincidence; I doubt Innes sat down and decided she wanted to do a shojo comic, but to make it as thoroughly American as possible, and to ditch the visual tics of the stereotypical shojo comic. She may just have done a comic of the sort that has long been more prevalent in Japan than the states).

The title character is Beatrice Whaley, a 17-year-old high school senior who seems on the verge of finally achieving her years-long dream of going out with school quarter back Benjamin Cato...who just asked her out...while they were auditioning for roles in the school's production of Romeo and Juliet...! Complicating matters is that Beatrice has just started seeing someone else, albeit only in her dreams.

When she falls asleep, she finds herself in 18th-century America during the Revolutionary War. She apparently mysteriously also exists there—the people there know her, although she can't remember anything about her life there—and had some sort of relationship with the dashing, handsome Major Alan Warren.

Throughout this first collection, she travels between the two worlds whenever she falls asleep in one, and the intense dangers and higher stakes of the dream world or real past being to make her 21st century problems seem more trivial as she increasingly realizes the dreams are too real to be just dreams.

And that's the premise—a modern teenager in love with two young men in two different centuries, trying to make sense of her two lives as they exist independently and if and how they relate to one another. There's obviously some high, even teen angst-y, drama moments, but the work is charming—the mood is often light, and despite the real dangers and stresses of the past, the mood is one of only occasionally dicey adventure, not one of horror or War is Hell-ism.

I really loved it, and if Young Adult fiction, shojo comics, teen melodrama and/or American history are among your things, you should probably give it a look. You can check it out online here, but I think you should probably buy the trade (or ask your local library to buy the trade so you can borrow it). That way IDW will sell more copies, and then hopefully print another trade so the webcomics-adverse like myself can continue to follow Beatrice.


********************

BONUS: This also happens in The Dreamer...

Yeah, that Batman Confidential art is not very good at all.

Imentioned briefly on Wednesday that this week's Batman Confidential #37 had some of the worst art I saw in a comic book this week, and that it was bad enough that I decided not to buy the book, despite my interest in the subject matter (That subject matter being Batman and The Blackhawks, specifically Lady Blackhawk). (I should note that I didn't look at every single new book, so maybe the art in Batman Confidential #37 wasn't really the worst of everything that came out on Wednesday; just of the ones I picked up and flipped through).

Yesterday I noticed that DC previewed the book on their Source blog, where you can see the cover and five pretty bad pages of art, like the awful, awful one above (Is she supposed to be crying in that last panel? Is that what the clear liquid in the middle of her cheeks is supposed to signify? That's not much of a "crying" expression though, is it?). That was the first page my eyes landed on when flipping through the book in the shop on Wednesday, the one that prompted me to think, "Jesus, this looks as bad as Greg Land art. Ew."

So I was amused to see that the second of the three responses under the Source preview was from an "straightace," who said, "I like the art. A nice blend of Paolo Siquiera and Greg Land." He/she/it obviously meant that art resembling that of Greg Land was a good thing, which reminded me that there's a reason DC and Marvel publish such shitty, shitty art. It's not just to annoy me personally and to keep me from reading their comics--it's because apparently someone out there really, genuinely likes art that looks shoddy color effects applied atop re-purposed photographs.

I suppose that's something worth keeping in mind (you know, that the major American comic book publishers aren't devoting their resources to producing comics just to bug me, but man, just thinking about the fact that there are enough people out there that think Land-ian art is aces to justify the continued publication of work of this nature just depresses me right the hell out.

When Fangirls Attack linked to a post by a "bluefall" on Scans-Daily about the issue, where you can see a few more pages of the book. It doesn't look like it gets much better--they even seem to have turned old Blackhawk villain Killer Shark from a goofy villain who dresses in a shark motif into yet another generic shark-man monster character, probably necissating DCU law enforcement to round him up along with King Shark and The Shark to do a line-up whenever someone files a report about a shark-man attack.

How is it possible that no one has ever used this title for anything before?

And is the title stupid, awesome or awesomely stupid? I can't quite make up my mind.

Two very odd scenes from Batman/Doc Savage Special #1

(Alternate post title: "Who is Batman groping now?")

I talked a bit about my disappointment with last week's Batman/Doc Savage Special #1 at Blog@Newsarama earlier this week, noting that I wasn't very happy with Phil Noto's art.

Noto is a pretty talented comics artist, and the major problem with his work on the comic was that it was simply not great work, merely pretty good work. He didn't engage in the sort of world-building the project called for, or tried to come up with a new style or match his own to the tone writer Brian Azzarello seemed to be going for in the world of "First Wave" (As Azzarello himself articulates it in the back-matter). Panels three and four are just terrible.

There were two scenes in the book that really confused me, and I wanted to draw attention to them here. The first is just an incredibly badly done sequence by Noto.

Check it out:
Let's ignore the fact that Noto seemed to have used the exact same image of a head in two consecutive panels (Damn you, computers! When I was growing up, comics artist had to draw every head with their own hands!)

Did that dude with the dark hair just stare with his blank, dead eyes at Doc Savage as he walked all the way across the room and to the door, without ever turning around to look at it?

Shouldn't there really have been another panel between those two, in which he's silent and walking toward the door?

I get the impression that he just glided across the floor without moving his legs or even blinking. That is either one creepy-ass dude, or a pretty shoddy sequence of panels.

The other odd scene is actually much, much odder, and doesn't have anything to do with Noto's execution. It has more to do with the scripting, which I'm not even sure I'm reading right.

Batman has broken into Savage's hotel room and started rifling around for some Maguffin-y documents or something, and Savage returns with a reporter who wants to interview him. The orange-colored narration boxes are Savage's, and the blue one's are Bamtan's:
Did...did they really just have Batman grope a woman to distract Savage? That...that's a really weird plan there, Batman. I...I can't even make sense of this sequence, but Azzarello and Noto expended more panels on Batman touching that woman and her reacting then they did on the drama of the dark haired dude in the previous scene's two lines of dialogue.

Weekly Haul: November 18th

So, do I have any readers left? If so, sorry for the dearth of posting over the last few days.

As you've no doubt guessed as soon as you saw that there is a new post, my computer is back from the computer hospital, and is now healed, rested and in better shape than ever.

Just in time to help me complain about this week’s new super-comics! So let's get to it right away...I've got days worth of Internet reading to catch up on.


Batman: Unseen #4 (DC Comics) Here’s a panel of Batman entering a room after blowing the locked door open with a little Bat-bomb:

Every panel in this issue looks like this.


The Brave and the Bold #29 (DC) You can say a lot about writer J. Michael Straczynski, but you can’t accuse the guy of a lack of ambition. This is his third issue on DC’s troubled team-up title, and it’s by far his most complex one.

It unearths perhaps DC’s single weirdest and most obscure character, Brother Power, The Geek, star of two 1968 issues of his own title and a 1993 Vertigo one-shot by Rachel Pollack and Michael Allred. In addition to having an awesome-sounding name and origin (he’s a living tailor’s dummy, basically), he was originally presented as some sort of hero to the hippies (or DC Comics versions of hippies, anyway) and later as a “puppet elemental.”

JMS earns tremendous good will from me for simply thinking of the character and deciding to use him in the book, and pairing him with DC’s most recognizable and bankable star Batman is certainly a pretty good idea.

As cool as that is, and as ambitious a story as JMS attempts here, there’s no escaping the fact that it is not a very good comic book. Like last issue’s Barry Allen-fights-and-kills-in-World War II story, there’s a whole lot going on in this story, good and bad, and it would certainly be best served by a critic taking a few days to think about it and spending a few hours writing about it.

I’m not going to do that though. Instead, here are some bullet point observations:

—With this issue, the logo gets a little tinkering. Just above “The Brave and the Bold” is a little strip of text reading “Lost Stories of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (I couldn’t find a scan of it yet online, but if you wanna see the cover for some reason, you can download the preview of it here). Both the title and that sub-title appear inside the book as well, where the name of the story usually does. Apparently DC wanted to be super-extra clear that these stories weren’t happening “today” in the DC Universe, but at some other time, just in case anyone read this issue and had a nervous break down when they noticed Dick Grayson is Batman in most of the Batman books, but here Bruce Wayne is still Batman.

—JMS lost me with the Universal movies version of Frankenstein’s monster/Brother Power, The Geek comparisons here. Obviously they are both man-like things that are not quite men and have an aura of tragedy about them, but they’re so far removed from one another that it seems a curious basis for a comic book story.

—At one point, Batman narrates that the movie Frankenstein always returned from the dead in sequels “Because he was a creature of his time. And that’s what such creatures DO. They come back. They ALWAYS come back.” What the fuck does that have to do with Brother Power, who returns to life as well? Do creatures of their times always come back? Is the Victorian Age—or Golden Age Hollywood—somehow parallel to the 1960s…or is it merely that they are time periods, and characters meant to embody those time periods always come back? Aren’t superheroes a better point of reference for Batman when it comes to characters coming back to life?

—Artist Jesus Saiz really disappointed me here. His art is solid but unremarkable, and I thought it was quite a let down last issue, when he completly wasted a splash page. The wasted opportunity here is that JMS continuously cites the first two Universal Frankenstein films, and Saiz provides art to depict scenes from them, and they just look like black and white versions of Saiz’s own designs and works, as if he was simply working from JMS’ descriptions instead of actually referencing the images, some of which are among the more iconic in American film history. There may be a legal reason for this or something, but it struck me as lazy and weird. If there is a reason not to draw Boris Karloff’s monster or to visually quote scenes from the film, then maybe the script should be written to avoid doing so, rather than forcing the issue?

—Batman’s mom is blond here. I hate when that happens.

—This is another one of those stories driven by Batman’s memories of his short childhood with his parents. Dude sure had a hell of a lot of very meaningful memories of his parents that would happen to parallel the strangest cases considering he only co-existed with them for about six to eight years.

—In addition to being about how Brother Power, The Geek is a lot like Frankenstein, this comic is also about how the 1960’s were so much better than right now, driven home with some embarrassingly blunt panels. In the sixties, everyone hung out in coffee shops, now they hang out in bars; you used to be able to pick up hitchhikers, now everyone drives right past people in need; college kids used to read books and enjoy one another’s company, now they all listen to those goldanged iPods and look at their laptops in solitude.

—I’ve read a lot of Batman comics in my lifetime, but I can’t say I’ve ever read a Batman who talks quite like JMS’s Batman. He doesn’t sound a thing like the post-Crisis Batman of the last twenty-some years, and he doesn’t quite sound like the Bob Haney Batman, or the wise-cracking Golden Age Batman either. For example…

The kids of that age called him—get this—Brother Power. The Geek.

or

What can I say?…It was the sixties.

or

Sometimes I get so caught up in the world of mega-crime and super-powered nutbars…

“Nutbars”…?! Batman called his villains nutbars? Man.


The Flash: Rebirth #5 (DC) Two thing about the cover of this issue jumped out at me. First, it wasn’t the one solicited; on that one, the figure running from the other side of the wall to deck Barry Allen was The Black Flash, here it’s the real villain of the piece, who was revealed last issue (You can download the real cover as part of the preview here if you’re dying to know but didn’t read #4).

Secondly, in the upper-right corner is this little round blurb:
Congratulations to Johns for the win, and I’m sure it’s almost always better to win a prize than not win a prize, but is it really something to trumpet on the cover of the fifth issue of your six-part series? Is it cool to be so proud of a prize…particularly one of dubious stature? I mean, winning a Spike TV Scream Award isn’t like winning one of these, you know?
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this issue of the series that doesn’t apply to the four that preceded it. The story is fairly well done and probably as good a Barry-Allen-comes-back-to-life-for-no-reason story as anyone could have written at this point, the event seems strangely small and disconnected from the rest of the DC Universe, it’s irritating to see this level of darkness and faux-seriousness retconned onto the origin of a comic book character that embodies the Silver Age of comics, artist Ethan Van Sciver does extremely solid work and occasionally pulls off an extremely admirable “special effect” depiction of speed powers, et cetera.

A couple of noteworthy-ish things happen this issue, including a new character taking on a retired code name from the Flash family and a couple of Flashes getting different costumes (I sure hope Jesse’s is temporary though…), but maybe that’s the sort of stuff better discussed elsewhere (Like say, Blog@…tomorrow).

In the mean time, I’d just like to point out this line of dialogue that Geoff Johns wrote, and remind you that the year this line of dialogue was published is 2009:
Van Sciver sure drew a nice splash page of Liberty Belle kicking the Reverse-Flash in the grill though…


Superman/Batman #66 (DC) This is part one of a story called “Night of the Cure,” a two-part arc in the Superman/Batman team-up title by Scot Kolins. In actuality, it’s part nine of Scott Kolins’ Solomon Grundy comic, which launched with a special before turning into a seven-part miniseries.

This issue doesn’t exactly demand you know what the hell went on in that series, and does a decent enough job of letting you know things like Bizarro was friends with Grundy, and that Frankenstein killed Grundy with a magic sword or whatever, and even the origins of Man-Bat and Grundy, but it still feels like a story in progress.

I like the idea of Bizarro and Man-Bat as a villain version of the Superman and Batman team, but exploring that idea isn’t the focus of this story. Instead, it’s a Blackest Night tie-in, which means a dead character gets a Black Lantern ring, a Black Lantern costume, and then acts like an asshole to a superhero before attempting to eat his or her heart.

Here, the dead-again Solomon Grundy gets a ring, and attacks Bizarro, who just failed in an attempt to befriend Man-Bat, who was just hunted down by Frankenstein, The Bride, and his scientist wife Francine Langstrom.

It’s a quick, light read without a whole lot to recommend, but Kolins’ art is pretty nice here and there, and I really liked some of his images of an upside-down, silhouetted Man-Bat and Frankenstein making eyes at The Bride.


Thunderbolts #138 (Marvel Comics) This is one of two comics I picked up in the shops and thought about setting right back down after seeing the art. The other was Batman Confidential, which I did put right back down. I brought this one back home with me, however, as it was written by Jeff Parker, whom you may have noticed I’m rather fond of.

The art is just awful.

It’s Marvel “house” style, which means the panels look photo-refrenced and lazy, it’s hard to see the work of human hands in its creation, and the coloring makes everything look soft, murky and unreal.

The character designs are uniformly boring as well, with the team leader Scourge resembling Jason Voorhees in a big coat and the one character with a genuinely neat look—The Ant-Man of the canceled Irredeemable Ant-Man—given a new, worse look. I can’t blame that on the artist here though, as I assume these characters existed prior to this issue, and maybe someone else is to blame for their overall generic-ness.

As for the story, it’s fairly accessible. This is the first time in memory that I’ve used Marvel’s re-cap page, and it worked fine for me (I coulda used one of these in Superman/Batman, actually). It’s a 22-page introduction to the team, which consists of a half-dozen superpowered assholes, some of whom may be insane, doing a great deal of killing. It reminded me a bit of Gail Simone’s Secret Six, albeit with less colorful characters and less humor (Thank God for Ant-Man!).

As I neard the end of the issue, I was thinking it would probably be my last (check out the third-to-last panel if you’ve got a copy handy…that’s such an ugly, lazy panel the book woulda been better served with an all-black one), until I got to the very last panel and saw that the Thunderbolts are going to be taking on Parker’s Agents of Atlas next issue.

Damn it. Okay, so I guess I’ll try one more issue of Thunderbolts, Parker. I can’t resist the charms of your talking gorilla and mute killer robot…


Tiny Titans #22 (DC) How can you not love a comic book that includes panels like this one?
Also, this issue introduces a few more new characters into the fold. There’s the “Elastic Four” above, including new Sidekick Elementary student Offspring, and then there’s the newest member of the Bird Scouts, Golden Eagle:
Tiny Titans is so adorable sometimes I can barely stand it.

Oh @#$%.

A piece of my computer died this morning, and it's going to be in the shop until at least Thursday. Apparently, the computer-fixer people don't supply you with a loaner while they're doing their fixing, the way auto mechanics do. So Every Day Is Like Wednesday is going to unfortunately have go un-updated for a while.

I'm going to try to keep my posting schedule up at Blog@Newsarama from other people's computers, and I might manage to get a Weekly Haul up on Wednesday afternoon, but otherwise I won't have anything new here.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Ryan Dunlavey's Golden Age Daredevil

Among the many cameos in this week's Comic Book Comics #4 is our old friend the Golden Age Daredevil.

The above panel is how writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey introduce and depict him (He appears in only one other panel, standing shoulder to shoulder with, I believe, Lenin and Stalin. God, I love this book).

What did the aborigines who raised him get him for his birthday? I'm betting it's a boomerang.

Just a couple of links.

EDILW favorite J. Chris Campbell recently posted a big, huge gallery of monster images he created, and you can take a gander at it here. It's really great stuff, and if you're wondering how great, well, I stole the above two images from there, as they happen to be of a few subjects I like—scarecrows and people with pumpkins for heads. Do check it out if you haven't already (Link via The Comics Reporter).


—Here's your occasional reminder to read Tucker Stone's weekly "Comics of the Weak" column of reviews at The Factual Opinion. Here's Stone on Vampirella: The Second Coming #3:

Vampirella comics aren't bad, in and of themselves. They just make everything else around them look bad, because really, this sleazy hot girl horror comic is pretty much indistinguishable from a healthy crop of Big Two super-hero comics and most of the non-crime stuff Vertigo publishes. It's the same mediocre shit. The only difference is that Vampirella freely admits it, right on the cover. You're supposed to yell at it for that?

As per usual, Stone also tackles a bunch of the previous Wednesday's releases that I have neither the money nor the courage to read.


—Also always worth a read? Jog.


—I didn't mention it in my little review of Marvel's Assault on New Olympus last week, but reading Don MacPherson's excellent review of the same reminded me—aren't the plots of this Hercules mini-event and Marvel's upcoming Siege event awfully similar? In "Assault," Hercules apparently assembles a whole bunch of heroes to attack the bad guy Greek gods' home base of New Olympus. In Siege, Norman Osborn apparently leads his bunch of villains to attack the good guy Norse gods' home base in Asgard. Is "Assault" purposely foreshadowing Siege's plot, or is this just a weird coincidence no one at Marvel noticed until that Hercules one-shot hit shop shelves?

I may just be completely misreading what Siege is supposed to be about, of course. I just watched this stupid trailer, for example, and learned absolutely nothing about it. Aside from the fact that Dave at Living Between Wednesdays is totally right about the logo, that is.


—Todd Klein, the world's greatest comic book letterer in my humble opinion, also runs a swell blog, and his posts on logo history are always great reads. This latest is something of a must-read, though. Klein talks to Batman artist Jerry Robinson and determines that Robinson designed the Batman logo in which Batman's head and cape/wings form the backdrop of the word "Batman."

Why is this so important? Well obviously the logo stuck around a while—Klein said it was around until 1965—and it was the basis for many different updated versions ever since. The current flagship Batman title Batman and Robin, for example, boasts a version of it.

When I heard this though, my mind immediately jumped back to Paul Pope giving his lecture at the Wexner Center last year and explaining how he determined just who and what Batman was at his core: Batman is, in a sense, a logo and advertisement for himself.

While that might seem like a very artist point-of-view with which to approach a comic book character, I've been struck with how writer Grant Morrison's whole run on Batman/Batman and Robin has been something of a meditation on Batman as a living logo...a trademarked image being fought over and pirated...a powerful sigil. Yesterday's issue of Batman and Robin was, looked at from one angle, simply a conflict between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd over the appropriate use of that Batman logo.

Weekly Haul: November 11th

Batman and Robin #6 (DC Comics) Grant Morrison continues to do that thing Grant Morrison tends to do on low-pressure superhero comic books like this. Mainly, turning out perfectly serviceable genre stories that cover all of the expected bases, while also being exceedingly clever, addressing the audience both as readers of comics and people who like to know and think about comics in a general sense.

In this issue, the climax of the three-part “Revenge of the The Red Hood,” the late Bruce Wayne’s two protégés battle, but find their rivalry interrupted by a villain who renders their disagreements on crime-figthing philosophy moot, while simultaneously proving an example on which to test their philosophies.

It’s also the best Jason Todd story I’ve read since DC made the silly decision to bring him back to life. I don’t know that it justifies that decision, or makes all of those terrible Jason Todd stories between his fake-out return in “Hush” and this very issue worth while, but I’ll be damned if Morrison didn’t find ways to turn the character’s significant baggage into something appealing. (For example, Dick Grayson sums up Todd’s post resurrection Countdown career thusly: “…Jason’s fought aliens and been to parallel worlds. He’s died and been brought back to life. Don’t ever underestimate him.” It’s just the set-up for Damian to act arrogant and dismiss Todd while escaping from his bonds: “Well, he’s useless at tying knots.”

Also cool? Someone finally wrote a story about the grown-ups in Gotham City treating Jason Todd like the murderous villain he’s been written as, rather than as an annoyance on the peripheray of Batman and company’s radar.

Like the previous two issues, Philip Tan handles the art, and it is a credit to Morrison’s abilities that the art doesn’t destroy the book, given the gulf in quality.

Tan’s art is a bit different here, although stronger than it was. There’s still no real sense of setting or place, and some action scenes are handled poorly—the death blow administered to the bad guy, for example, or a character being shot five times being revealed in dialogue a few pages later, not when it was supposed to be occurring right before the readers eyes.

Jonathan Glapion is creidte as inker and Alex Sinclair as colorist, but I’m not sure what is going on with the art, really.

The Batman and Robin scenes seem to be color effects applied directly to pencils with no inks, whereas the the Red Hood and Scarlet scenes look penciled, inked and colored in the same way previous issues were.
When all of the characters start interacting, everything takes on the gauzy, soft, ink-less look of the Batman scenes.

It’s better, but it’s still bad work, and of a confoundingly amateur quality, given this is one of the American comic industry’s biggest publisher’s biggest books.

It’s not all Tan’s fault, of course. Someone hired the guy, approved his work, and put this issue together so that it looks half like a late ‘90s Wildstorm Universe book and half like a couple photo-referenced characters jumping around fields of color effects.

Batman says it himself in this panel…
…but note the writing in the “background.” What’s that say? “*colors flames in left bg”…? I don’t know. I tlooks like Tan penciled Batman and left instructions for the colorist to finish it up…?

And then there’s the very last page of the book:
I think it’s supposed to be a big, climactic splash panel, revealing original Batman Bruce Wayne’s body, which Dick Grayson has hidden away. But in addition to the lack of visual context leading up to the reveal, the way the page is laid out, it simply looks like it may be a piece of the next issue ad, which is just as big as the splash panel.

(And to get all nerdy for a second, if Dick Grayson has Batman’s body, whose buried in Batman’s grave (and whose skull is The Black Hand toting around in Blackest Night? The mystery of the multiple Batman bodies deepens!)


Booster Gold #26 (DC) One of the things that buggd me about all the wanton character death in the DCU starting around the time of Identity Crisis and Countdown to Infinite Crisis was how realatively little was actually being done with the deaths.

Like, if DC was going to start killing off characters, why not explore the dramatic possibilities of those deaths? Why not have some character development result or, at the very least, some special funeral issues? Instead, the deaths tended to be events leading to particular actions, but never any real stories or consequences. It felt like the editors and writers were swatting flies, not killing characters.

Well, writer/artist Dan Jurgens finally gives us the funeral of Ted “Blue Beetle II” Kord, so this issue of Booster Gold has that going for it. The time-travelling Booster was apparently so upset and so angry with everyone at his best friend’s superhero funeral that he couldn’t give a eulogy, and he goes back in time to try again.

It ain’t exactly great literature or anything, but it’s at least character-focused. It makes an effort, dammit, and I appreciate someone making an effort every now and then.

This is the Blackest Night tie-in issue of Booster Gold, which should come with a plastic ring of some sort (I got an orange). It will therefore probably be the best-selling issue of Booster Gold…perhaps of its entire run.

I’m not sure how great a job it does of showing off the specific virtues of the title in a way that might keep ring-hunting, Blakest Night completist readers, but it struck me as fairly reader-friendly.

The Blue Beetle back-up is done away with for the issue, with the character and page-count being absorbed by the lead feature, as Jaime Reyes joins Skeets, Booster and Supernova against Black Lantern Blue Beetle (Regular Beetle back-up artist Mike Norton provides some of the art).

Like last week’s Doom Patrol, the issue opens with a info dump of exposition narrated by Ted Kord, excused as the character’s memories being downloaded into the Black Lantern form of his corpse.

From there, Rip Hunter and Skeets search for the missing Booster, who is attending/re-attending Beetle’s funeral. Perhaps fighting a zombie douchebag version of his friend in the present will help give him closure?

I dug it.

(Hey, did you guys read the five-page preview of JSA All-Stars #1, the new series featuring all of the unpopular JSA characters in their own book, that was included in the back? What’d you think? It sure made me not want to read that series at all. I was pretty surprised by the artwork too. I liked it well enough, but it didn’t really look like the previous Freddie Williams III art I’ve seen at all).


Comic Book Comics #4 (Evil Twin Comics) Another excellent issue of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s brilliant idea of presenting the history of comic books as a comic book.

This issue is chockfull of short pieces, including one on crime comics, another on Marvel Comics’ golden era, another on the career of R. Crumb and finally a piece on European comics.

The history of comics, like all history, can be boiled down to a series of conflicts, and this issue has plenty behind its cover of Crumb, Ditko, Kirby and Tintin and Snowy versus a gigantic Stan Lee monster. Mr. Crime vs. Mr. Coffee Nerves! Stan Lee vs. the State of New York! Ayn Rand vs. The Marvel Method! Galactus vs. God! Spider-Man vs. The Comics Code Authority seal! Crumb vs. himself!

This issue has pretty much everything you’d want, including things you never knew you wanted, like seeing the dozen different ways Dunlavey can add Stan Lee’s moustache, smile and glasses on to different types of people to make them completely disturbing, and the Le Soir Vole headline “Hitler = Awesome” (next to picture of Der Fuherer surfing).

This is one of those books where I could probably have spent the entire night just scanning random panels and typing, “Ha ha, look at this it’s so great!”

I limited myself to two.

First, here’s a friendly reminder that while comics may be more accepted and cool then they’ve ever been before in America, no one really reads the damn things anymore:
Yes, the very best-selling comics in North America today would have been abysmal, embarrassing failures and canceled immediately, back when comics were a real business.

And here’s Van Lente and Dunlavey boiling the entirety of Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams and company’s classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics down into just a portion of a single panel:
That entire run was exactly like that, for two whole trade paperbacks.

Anyway, if you like comics, you’ll love Comic Book Comics.
today's creators



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...Wait, one more nerdy detail thing and I'll shut up about this week's comics. What color of the emotional spectrum is racism? Because the Racist Lanterns would destroy the Green Lantern Corps handily.

Another weird thing about that Hulk Vol. 2 trade?

It's rated "A," which Marvel indicates is material, "Appropriate for ages 9 and up."






I think their ratings system is sort of silly in general, but I was sort of surprised to see that "A" on the back of the back cover, instead of a "T+" ("Appropriate for most readers 13 and up, parents are advised that they may want to read before or with younger children") or "Parental Advisory" ("15+ years old similar to T+ but featuring more mature themes and/or more graphic imagery. Recommended for teen and adult readers").

I can't imagine Loeb and Cho were thinking about nine-year-old readers when doing that locker room scene at the top of this post, for example. (And man, what the fuck is up with Spider-Woman's gesture in that last panel? Is she stifling a laugh, or eating an invisible banana, or...?)

Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green is a very strange collection.

I didn’t exactly have high hopes for Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green. Jeph Loeb wrote it, and his entire bibliography tends to range from fair on the high end to The Worst Comics Ever Written on the low end. I had read the previous volume, and it wasn’t very good (Though not terrible either; I was actually sort of pleasantly surprised that it seemed to be Loeb writing in his Superman/Batman cameo-and-splash pages mode, instead of Mark Millar-but-even-dumber Ultimates mode).

So I didn’t expect Red and Green to be a good comic, but I was completely unprepared for how strange a comics work it is.

It make very little sense, and not merely in the usual this doesn’t obey the rules of good fiction or narrative structure or “Holy shit, they are paying this guy real actual American money for this?” sorts of ways, but even at the most basic, structural level, I was confused by the book.

The fine print on the title page says the trade collection I borrowed from the library “contains material originally published in magazine form as Hulk #7-9 and King-Size Hulk #1.” I only went back and checked that because the book seemed composed entirely of 8 to 11-page mini-stories, each set apart by a new cover image and brief introduction or title and ending with a cliffhanger or climactic event.

I thought that perhaps the chapters only seemed short given Loeb’s tendency to put as few panels as possible in his scripts, but when I went back and counted the pages of the segments, they did indeed turn out to be the length of back-ups, rather than 22-page feature stories.

I’m not sure how this book was put together exactly, or what its source material—those comics “originally published in magazine form”—actually looked like, and that ended up being just one more thing for me to puzzle over why wading through Red and Green’s 120 ponderous pages.

The volume opens with Loeb’s usual Chris Claremont-style first-person narration, from a character telling us, “My name is Bruce Banner. I am THE HULK.” He spends a few panels telling us all about the extraordinary security measures SHIELD has taken to keep him calm and unable to turn into the Hulk and/or escape his cell. He will narrate the first mini-story of the book, despite not being present during it (which he at least notes; his narration is his attempt to reconstruct the events).

I was shaking my head by the second page, during the course of which Loeb has Banner say: “THIS Hulk does things I never did. Like using a GUN. Which I’ve done.”

How can those three sentences be strung together like that by a grown-up? How can an editor or six read it, and a letter put it on the page? My mind was boggled and I was sputtering to myself on page two. I still had 118 to go.

In this story, the Red Hulk makes camp somewhere in the frozen north (despite a bunch of place name-dropping, Banner never tells us where “there” actually is), and is attacked by The Wendigo, a Marvel monster probably most famous for being in the issue of The Incredible Hulk in which Wolverine was first introduced.

Actually, Banner notes, this is a Wendigo, not The Wendigo. (This will be important later on). Where do they come from? Dr. Banner explains that they are: “Mystical creatures born out of humans who feast on…human flesh. CANNIBALISM.” (Yes, he actually, redundantly adds the all-caps “CANNIBALISM” there. The narration, by the way, is being written on a yellow legal pad by Banner, and appears in little narration boxes that look like squares of yellow legal pad paper with handwriting on them. That means Banner occasionally writes words in all-caps like that. And that he actually wrote out “…” before writing the words “human flesh” in the above sentence. This is only page three, and Red and Green has already become awesomely terrible. That is the secret of Loeb’s success, I guess).

The Red Hulk butchers the Wendigo with his Hulk-sized hunting knife and jumps away, leaving the pieces of his foe’s body to be devoured by a pack of Wendigos. In the last panel, the unidentified General Ross—who won’t appear again in this volume—sits at his desk looking grim, and the word “Soon…” appears before him. That is the end of the story.

And you know what’s weird? It’s drawn by Arthur fucking Adams, so it looks great. Adams is a nee plus ultra of monster drawing, and his Wendigos are incredibly detailed, scary and fluid. It’s kind of shocking that Marvel would hire Adams to draw one of their books, and then give him a script that everyone involved should be embarrassed to have their names attached to, and that he’d accept it. And then he’d proceed to draw the hell out of it.

The next story opens with Bruce Banner in Las Vegas suddenly, his escape or release from the prison in the last story not only unexplained but unmentioned, on the trail of the Red Hulk. He hears screams, and heads into a mythology-themed casino, and Adams draws this splash page:
Jesus, look at that. Look at the detail there…the differing expressions on the faces of the Cyclops statues, the care with which Adam lined up the slot machines, the little details like the arms of the dead hanging over the edges of the fountain, the number of panicked extras, the way the Wendigo on the far right casually tosses a slot machine with his right claw while reaching toward a terrified victim with his left.

This is a really nice splash page, made even nice still by the fact that too few artists even bother to draw enough to fill-up splash pages anymore. Later in the book, Frank Cho will squander double-page spreads on nothing more than a half-dozen characters posing in front of a blank background.

The entire Wendigos going ape-shit in Vegas storyline looks this great, by the way. The story isn’t just an insult to its readers, it’s a punch in their faces, but hell, Adams just about redeems it with his work.

How did this pack of Wendigos get to Vegas, which is, after all, quite a ways away from the frozen wastes of Canada? That goes unexplained too. Somehow they are in a Vegas casino, apparently passing Wendigo-ism on to their victims, and Bruce Banner, who is also somehow there, must stop them…which he attempts to do by randomly turning into the gray “Joe Fixit” version of the Hulk for some reason.

Then New York-based superhero Moon Knight randomly appears and starts fighting The Hulk. Then The Sentry and Ms. Marvel appear. Then the gray Hulk turns into the green hulk. Then he turns into this: It’s all completely random and aggressively, insultingly stupid, right up until the one and a half page appearance by Brother Voodoo, who simply magics everything back to normal, ending the storyline.

I did snicker at that Wendihulk splash, and, as I read it, I could kind of see what some people must find appealing about Loeb, beyond the fact that the brand of stupidity he writes is often so very funny. There’s certainly an appealing craziness to the Hulk just randomly becoming a Wendigo for a few pages, and calling himself the Wendihulk.

But were all these other pages really worth that one, single-image burst of zaniness? The rest of the story didn’t really have anything to offer aside from Adams’ always appealing line work.

More representative are pages like this—
—in which Loeb writes Moon Knight, Marvel’s off-brand Batman, and The Sentry, Marvel’s off-brand Superman, as if they were Batman and Superman, and even titled the story “World’s Finest,” just in case the gag weren’t obvious enough.

That’s the end of that storyline, and Arthur Adams’ involvement with the book. He’s replaced by another exceedingly talented artist, Frank Cho, and Loeb seems to have written a storyline specifically for Cho—it consists of nothing more than random Marvel superheroines fighting the Red Hulk, giving Cho the opportunity to draw just pages and pages of asses.

There’s an eight-page segment that recounts the Red Hulk vs. She-Hulk scene from the previous volume, this time from Shulkie’s point-of-view. It ends with the words “The Beginning…”

The next chapter finds She-Hulk calling superheroines from a list and trying to recruit them for an all-girl assault on the Red Hulk. Why is she only calling women? Well, because Cho likes drawing women. There’s no in-story reason given, because it’s not really a story…it’s just Cho drawing women, with Loeb writing terrible dialogue over the pictures.

The only two she can successfully recruit are Valkyrie and Thundra, shown here with SHIELD Deputy Director Maria Hill, who, it turns out, is actually a hobbit: After She-Hulk declares “Let’s go spank some red ass…” on a full-page splash, the trio track down the Red Hulk and engage in a violent battle full of gross dialogue. Then, just as the Hulk has them on the ropes, all the random heroines that all turned She-Hulk down earlier all appear.

Spider-Woman! Invisible Woman! She-Hulk! Tigra! Even Hellcat and Black Widow, who can’t possibly add anything! Why did Invisible Woman leave the rest of her rather powerful teammates to come alone? Because they’re boys, duh!

Here is some more actual dialogue that Jeph Loeb was paid to write:

"A waffle house of witches. Which one of you puts on the waitress uniform-- --and serves me? GOOD THING I BROUGHT MY APPETITE!"

They defeat the Hulk, and proceed to spend the night waiting for him to revert back to whoever he is when he’s not the Red Hulk. He never does, and eventually wakes up, grabs Thundra, jumps away with her, recruits her for something, and then the story ends.

It’s followed by one more, much shorter piece, “The Death and Life of The Abomination,” which is a recap of the Abomination’s fictional history, presented as a report from an unseen General Ross and illustrated by the great Herb Trimpe.

So the creative roster for this book? Jeph Loeb. Arthur Adams. Frank Cho. Herb Trimpe. One of those guys doesn’t seem to belong on that list, and the reason why isn’t simply that he’s not an artist.



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RELATED: Here’s a typical “look at all those asses” panel from Cho’s story:
I like the fact that Storm says she lost her phone. No wonder! Where would she put a cell phone? Did she try putting it in her pocket, forgetting that she wasn’t even wearing pants, and thus it just fell to the ground before she flew away?