Are you ready for the most exciting return from a long absence since Mar-Vell was pulled through time from a point before his own death from cancer and given a job as like a prison warden or something in the Negative Zone concentration camp for good guys built by good guys Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic?

Because we’re back!

Kind of.

Sort of.

Thanks for your patience these last few days—and the kind words and well-wishes from those of you who left them—I was pretty bummed about not being able to post for a few days, as I was keeping a daily posting schedule (or at least seven posts a week schedule) for awhile there, and with a billion blogs in the blogosphere, the last thing I wanted was for anybody to get bored and go read something else and realize there are many better comics blogs out there than stupid old never updates Every Day Is Like Wednesday.

Anyway, I’m at the tail end of some wicked sickness (hopefully…fingers crossed…barring sudden ironic relapse caused by publicly declaring I’m almost over it) that has made typing, writing, thinking and leaving my house impossible-to-very, very, very hard for much of the last week, so, I didn’t snag too many comics on Wednesday and haven’t been able to spend any quality time with my local public library’s scanner.

As I may still be housebound for a few days, I won’t be able to scan, like, any crappy colored pencil drawings or pages of old Justice League comics for a while, but, hell or high water, I’m going to try to resume regular posting anyway.

What that basically means is you’ll just have to settle for my sterling prose instead of things about this week’s comics or image-heavy posts. I’ve got some books I’ve been meaning to review for a while that I’ll probably be getting too, and the one good thing about being sick was I managed to finally finish Showcase Presents: The Brave and The Bold Vol. 1, so, if worst comes to worst, we can spend the rest of the week talking about why Batman never uses the Whirly-Bat anymore.

But first, let’s play a little bit of catch-up, huh?

Here then are the three new books I did manage to secure and read this week, followed by your weekly link to the pages of Las Vegas Weekly…



1.) Abbreviated Weekly Haul




Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis #57 (DC Comics) It would be a bit of a stretch to call this a really good comic book or anything, but it was certainly an impressive one. Incoming writer Tad Williams had the depressing task of writing an Aquaman book without Aquaman in it (hey, if it didn’t work for Green Lantern or Green Arrow…) and dealing with a status quo established but unresolved by the previous writer. In fact, he’s the fifth regular writer for the series since it launched out of “The Obsidian Age” (I think; I might have forgotten one), and each previous writer had also set-up a bold new status quo for Aquaman…and then left it unresolved.

Well, Williams resolves them. All. In this issue, he even brings in the Lady of the Lake from Rick Veitch’s issues, the first time he’s addressed elements of Veitch’s run in a big way, plus he deals with the flubs between 52 and World War III and the OYL Aquaman.

It could have made for some pretty dull reading and, to be honest, some of it was a bit dull, but some of it is still rollicking fun, and that he manages to get any entertainment into an issue which dumps so much information and explanation on the reader impresses the hell out of me. He does so, for the most part, by packing things in like crazy. This is an issue that read like three issues.

The reveal of Aquaman II’s relationship to Aquaman I is so goddam long and complicated that a “Oh, he’s from Earth-2” would probably have been preferable, but at least its finally explained, which oughta cut down on scenes like the one in JLoA #12 where neither J’onn J’onnz or Aquaman II seemed to realize that there were two different Aquamen now.

I applaud Williams’ efforts with the book, and Shawn McManus’ always fun and expressive art, and look forward to more work from them both in the future. Maybe on the inevitable next Aquaman book, once DC figures out having the title character in the book is a bigger draw than a brand-new version of the title character in it instead, of course.




The Brave and the Bold #7 (DC) Well, there are two women alone in most of the scenes, but they do spend most of the time talking about men—Superman, whom Power Girl has been hypnotized to kill, and the villain who did the hypnotizing.

This is Mark Waid, George Perez and Bob Wiacek’s first issue after the six-part arc dealing with the Book of Destiny, and it seems to be a mostly done-in-one, with a little bit of an epilogue to the previous arc (or perhaps a tease to another arc) involving the new old Challengers of the Unknown.

On the script side of things, it’s nothing extraordinary—two heroes with little in common team-up and learn they’re not so different after all—but it’s still refreshing to see these two heroines handled so well. Power Girl and Wonder Woman both seem a bit one-dimensional—the former if headstrong and brash, the latter cautious and methodical—but at least it’s their one dimension. For a long time, whenever I’ve seen either of them pop up in a super-story, they didn’t exactly seem like themselves. (Or as much like themselves as fictional characters ever can). But this? This really felt like the “real” Wonder Woman and the “real” Power Girl.

They also looked that way too, thanks to Perez’s pencils and Wiacek’s inks, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Perez has really defined Wonder Woman’s look for the last generation or so. And as for Power Girl, at least she looks human, which is the extremely low bar for getting her right in a DC comic these days. The next comic looked especially bad after reading Brave and the Bold, and seeing all those little scrolls Perez and Wiacek packed into the backgrounds, or that bravura sequence where Superman gets hit my millions of shards of red kryptonite at once.




Justice League of America #14 (DC) The one good thing about last issue’s Joe Benitez art was that it was so bad, it actually made me miss the pencil art of Ed Benes, who was himself incredibly badly suited for the series (Particularly when Meltzer was in the writer’s chair, and it was a bunch of talking and subtle emoting among a bunch of different characters, drawing attention to Benes’ character design and “acting” abilities). This is Benes’ first pairing with new writer Dwayne McDuffie (and the New DC being the New DC, it’s also McDuffie’s second issue, but the third part of the four-part story arc).

At first blush, they seem to work a lot better together, although that’s not necessarily great news for the book. Benes’ strong-point is drawing supermen and –women with action figure physiques and no pants, and McDuffie’s script has so far been nothing more than playing with the characters as if they were action figures.

Each previous part of the story has had a little something I liked, like the Meltzer parody in the Wedding Special or the talk about Black Lightning’s hair in JLoA #13 (of course, I would find that conversation amusing), but this issue I’m having a hard time finding anything to point to and say, “Well, at least that part was nicely done.”

For the most part, all we’ve got is a game of supervillains vs. superheroes, and at this point, if you’re going to tell a story about that and nothing else, would it hurt to come up with an interesting twist? (Grant Morrison, for example, pulled the Lex Luthor-forms-a-team-of-villains-to-fight-the-heroes twice during his run; the first structured as a corporate take over and the second featured a team made up exclusively of League-level threats, rather than just the opposite number of one of the heroes. And he also set those conflicts in the middle of much bigger apocalyptic conflicts).

The one thing that does distinguish this from your average game of HeroClix is the level of superhero decadence in it, to borrow Dirk Deppey’s term for the dirtying up of superhero comics. Not much happens in this issue, other than Luthor telling Superman and Black Lightning he’s captured the rest of the League and is currently torturing them, and then Superman flying to the rescue and getting captured in the cliffhanger climax.

You know, the thought of torture makes me a little sick, personally, and if it’s gotta be used in entertainment, I sure as hell hope there’s a point to it. Because when I crack open a comic book about the Justice League, I don’t really want to see a helpless Geo-Force being beaten (And I hate that guy!) or seeing Lex fucking Luthor instigating it. What happened to renegade scientist Luthor? Or former President Lex Luthor? What’s his goal here? What’s his motivation now?

I don’t mind big, dumb superhero comics one bit, but it always rubs me the wrong way when creators and companies give us big, dumb superhero comics with simplistic plots suitable for children, and then try to make them seem more adult with sex and violence and swear words, as if mature or sophisticated storytelling could be measured simply by the check list the MPAA uses when deciding if PG a movie should be rated PG-13 or R instead.

The art by Benes, while stronger and less-lazy than Benitez’s, remains rather generic and lazy, and he seems to think he’s drawing an entirely different story than the one McDuffie’s writing.

First up, note this is a $2.99, 22-page comic book, right? And it opens with a one-page splash panel, closes with another one-page splash panel, and contains two two-page spread splash panels, neither of which are images that require anywhere near that space to show you what’s going on.

One is simply of the Hall of Doom from the Superfriends, which might be more exciting to see if the JLA didn’t just visit it in “The Lightning Saga.”

And the other?


Say what you will about Benes, he’s shameless, and DC doesn’t seem to mind much. Nine justice Leaguers are captured, and the bulk of the page devoted to just three of them—the women of the group. You’ve got Wonder Woman spread eagle, Vixen is some kinda crazy back-arching device, and Black Canary with a fucking ball gag in her mouth, probably to keep her from using her sonic scream, but coincidentally fetish gear. The rest of the League is just kinda crammed in the corner, and Geo-Force is off-panel (we see him getting beat later).

I don’t know what the script called for in that two-page panel, but it’s apparently pretty different than what cover artist Ian Churchill was given to draw for the cover. The highly-sexualized, bondage-esque image Benes drew, appearing in the middle of a scene where Luthor brags about torturing the League and lets it be known he’s just trying to rile Superman, gives the whole issue a sick feeling, leaving readers to wonder what that torture entails (It doesn’t help that Dr. Light is there, and it’s been pointed out twice already that he’s a rapist).

And check this out. The very next panel following the spread is a close-up of Luthor’s head in front of the captured Leagure hologram. And what’s behind him?


Not what was behind him in the previous panel, but another image of Wonder Woman’s boobs.

How exactly did Justice League of America get to be the DCU’s skeeviest book?







2.) Meanwhile, in Las Vegas…

This week’s, er, I mean, last week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics column features a review of James Sturm’s James Sturm’s America: God, Gold and Golems. Go check it out, you poor Caleb-talking-about-comics-starved readers.





3.) People still like comics about superheroes dying, right?

Oh, and before I go collapse again, I wanted to point out one thing regarding this week’s death of a hero in the DCU.

Now, I decided to pass on Death of the New Gods because of the stink of Countdown that clung to it (and the fact that I don’t really want to pay to see a bunch of characters I like get killed just to be resurrected en masse in a few months time), but the big (Big?) death at the end of the first issue that the blogosphere’s a-buzzin’ about struck me as odd:


Okay, they’re both in costume, and there are groceries on the floor. So either Big Barda just got back from grocery shopping in her costume to get killed by the Infinity Man (that’s my guess of the culprit, anyway), or Mister Miracle just got back from grocery shopping in his costume to find his wife murdered on the kitchen floor.

Why were they grocery shopping in their costumes?!