The Best Graphic Novels of 2007

Today’s the last day of 2007, the perfect time to take one last look back at the year that was and arbitrarily declare which were the best graphic novels of the year.

Why? Because it’s the law.

For the purpose of my best of ’07 list, I’m using the same definition of “graphic novel” and the same criteria for the purposes of this list that I did last year—any work of long form sequential art published in 2007 (be they collections of comics strips, collections of comic books, collections of short stories from various sources and original graphic novels, regardless of what year the work collected was originally created). Additionally, I’m focusing on works that could be read and enjoyed by themselves, which in some cases eliminates 2007 volumes in series.

And, as a final caveat, while I read a lot of comics and graphic novels every week, obviously I didn’t read everything that was published in the year 2007, so this is more a top list of books I personally read rather than of every book published this year. But “The Best Graphic Novels That Were Published in 2007 That Caleb Happened To Read by December 31st” just isn’t as snappy a title.

Here’s what I’ve decided are my top ten:

1.) Robot Dreams (First Second), by Sara Varon A sweet story about making and losing friends populated by darling anthropomorphic characters that is actually an achingly bittersweet meditation on the most human of experiences—losing someone you love due not to tragedy or death, but circumstance and time. It’s a rare work—of any medium—that can break and warm your heart at the same time. (Note: I originally identified the publisher as AdHouse Books; I regret the error. For great '07 AdHouse releases this year, check out Joey Weiser's fun all-ages adventure The Ride Home and Jamie Tanner's ultra-weird The Aviary, and superior floppies Johnny Hiro and Skyscrapers of the Midwest).

2.) The Salon (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Nick Bertozzi In my original review, I called this “a masterpiece of a graphic novel,” and my opinion of it hasn’t diminished since.

3.) Laika (First Second), by Nick Abadzis The Cold War space race as seen from an unusual point of view. It’s not just that Abadzis looks at the Russian rather than American program, but that he gets inside his characters’ heads, all of them, and considering one of them is the titular dog, the first Earthling in space. It’s not easy trying to tell a story from the point of view of an animal, but Abadzis succeeds wildly, relying on the essential nature of comics to present the brave little dog’s thoughts as mostly-wordless dreams and memories. It’s a very convincing conveyance of how a dog might think. And Laika is but one of the interesting characters in this fictionalized version of a real-life epic story.

4.) Stagger Lee (Image Comics), by Derek McCulloch and Shepherd Hendrix An amazing mixture of fiction and non-fiction, this graphic novel dramatizes a version of the Stagger Lee legend, the inspiration for what seem like a million different songs, while also engaging in musical and cultural archaeology, drawing interesting and unexpected connections.

5.) Crécy (Avatar/Apparrat), by Warren Ellis and Raulo Caceres Certainly the best thing Ellis has written this year, and maybe, just maybe the best thing he’s ever written. Considering the fact that he writes several thousand new comics every week (I’m estimating), that’s really saying something. It’s educational, entertaining and important.

6.) Doctor 13: Architecture & Morality Architecture & Morality (DC Comics), by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang The unbelievably good story of a professional cynic and a band of the least-believable comic book concepts in DC’s publishing history team up for a hilarious adventure, meditation on the modern comics industry and creator’s manifesto, all rolled up into one beautifully drawn package boasting a joke or ten in every panel.

7.) Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly), by Rutu Modan A subtle exploration of personal and national identity, played out as a young Israeli man’s search for his estranged father and his father’s young lover, whom he may be starting to fall in love with a little bit himself. Great story, great art, great colors, great book design—Drawn and Quarterly had a hell of a year this year, and this may just be the crown jewel in their ’07 output. This, or perhaps Shortcomings. Speaking of which…

8.) Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly), Adrian Tomine Tomine fills me with hatred, he’s so damn good. The bastard.

9.) Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White (Viz Media), by Taiyo Matsumoto An oversized, one-volume collection of the manga series about two feral street kids who battle yakuza and gaijin investors for the fate of Treasure Town, a city apparently devoid of straight lines, in which an odd assortment of wild animals can be drawn into the background of any panel. It’s kind of like Batman, if Batman were two little kids, one of whom had a severe developmental problem and an affinity for funny hats. Matsumoto’s queasy urban environments and strong characters make for an incredibly engrossing read, of the sort it’s hard to stop once you start, and every character’s arc is of great interest, no matter how despicable they seem when you first meet them.

10.) 52 Vols. 1-4 (DC Comics), by A Small Army of Creators If anything on this list is likely to get me laughed loudly at, I suppose it’s this. And I have gone back and forth with whether what is, on its face, just a superhero soap opera deserves to be up here in the top ten, or down there on the lists of candidates for top ten spot-age. But ultimately, the 52-part weekly series, which was collected into four different trades that were released throughout 2007, belongs up here. I’ve always believed pretty firmly that the thing that distinguishes the very best comics are the ones that do things that can only be done in comics (Regarding comics criticism specifically, but this principle holds true for works in every medium; the best films are the films that do what only films can, the best plays, the best prose novels, etc.). Great characters, great dialogue, great stories, even great art—these are things you can find in other media as well. But 52 exploited the shared setting and decades-long fictional history of the DCU—something built up over some 70 years by hundreds of different writers, artists and editors—to tell a massive story that could have only been told in a comic book series. For its scale and ambition alone, this is a remarkable comic book. But when all is said and done, it was more than just that scale and ambition, or the unusual format, that earns 52 a spot up here—it also had all t hose things you look for in comics. It certainly wasn’t without its problems—obviously the art wasn’t the best, and there were problems with the narrative structure and point of view—but it’s still by far one of the most amazing comics that was published in ’07, even in this trade form, which I originally thought the story wouldn’t take to.


Throughout the year, every time I read a really good comic I thought might conceivably be a candidate for a future Best of the Year notation, I added it to a list. Below are all of the books that were on that list when I sat down to pick the top ten.

I don’t think these necessarily constitute the next best 22 books of the year, and looking at them now on December 31st, it’s clear some of them weren’t ever seriously in the running for the top ten, but may have seemed like it while I was subjected to the high of having just put down a comic book I really enjoyed. Anyway, I thought it might offer a different way of rounding up some of the more notable books of the year, even if, in some cases,uch of tthat noteworthiness seems to have dissipated between the time I first read them and now.



All-Star Superman Vol. 1 (DC Comics), by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely Put as simply as I can put it, this is probably the best superhero comic there is at the moment, and probably one of the best of any moment ever.

Aya, (Drawn & Quarterly), by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie I called this “easily the first absolute must-read of 2007,” so I hope everyone’s read it by now. A romantic dramedy set in the capital city of the west African country of The Ivory Coast in the late ‘70s, it’s a rare chance to see a story about Africa that isn’t about genocide, AIDS or safaris.

Black Metal Vol. 1 (Oni Press) Perhaps the most fun I’ve had reading a comic book this year. The only serious competition I can think of off the top of my head, in fact, was from Scott Pilgrim Vol. 4 and Yotsuba&!.

Dogs and Water (Drawn & Quarterly), by Anders Nilsen See what I mean about the year D+Q had? Here’s another of their releases. Nilsen’s post-apocalyptic existential melodrama is a beauty to behold. Occasionally unsettling—even somewhat irritating—it’s ultimately massively rewarding.

Elk’s Run (Villard), by Joshua Hale Dialkov, Noel Tuazon and Scott A. Keating A “coming of age thriller” about a small-town utopia that becomes a dystopia in the space of less than a generation. This is another genre piece that I don’t think manages to transcend that genre, but as a thriller with a neat hook and strong characters, it works quite well.

Empowered Vol. 1 (Dark Horse Comics) by Adam Warren Warren deserves a medal for turning out a superhero comic that manages to objectify its heroine and fetishize all of the genre elements, and yet still manage to do it without sacrificing the quality of the art, writing and humor, without insulting the reader and, most admirably, doing it in the context of an admirably healthy and honest relationship. Oh, and it’s in a book geared specifically at an audience who would like to see a barely dressed superheroine having sex and not, you know, for a general audience featuring a corporate owned pop culture icon.

Essex County Vol. 1: Tales From the Farm (Top Shelf Comix), by Jeff Lemire Despite the enthusiasm I expressed for the fact that this was labeled “Vol. 1,” promising at least one more volume, I still haven’t gotten around to reading the since-released Volume 2. This first volume is an elegiac short story with pretty incredible, versatile artwork that manages to do most of the heavy-lifting when it comes to telling the story. This is one of several books on this list that is a veritable how-to lesson in comics creation.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Dark Horse), by Howard Chaykin and Mike Mignola That this is a sword and sorcery novel adaptation by Chaykin and Mignola is really all you need to know about what makes this a book worth a comics reader’s time. Dark Horse’s new collection of this 1991 series captures Mignola still transitioning to the style his fans will recognize from his more recent Hellboy work, has some wonderfully fun characters to hang around, and boasts a scene in which a dude totally has a sword fight with an octopus that has eight swords! That may have been the single coolest scene I’ve read in a comic book this year. Here it is, in all it’s tentacle-slicing glory.

The Grave Robber’s Daughter (Fantagraphics), by Richard Sala Looking back from December, this is one of several books that doesn’t rally belong here, but, it’s release early in the year landed it in my “To Think About For Best of ’07 List” file. In my original review, I described the plot like this: “Girl detective Judy Drood is like a buxom Veronica Mars with Nancy Drew's fashion sense, the foul mouth of a sailor and the brawling skills of a prize-fighter. Sala's spooky adventure opens with Judy's car breaking down outside the secluded town of Obidiah's Glen, now populated entirely by asshole teenagers, scary clowns and a single little girl. Judy starts out simply looking for a phone, but soon has to fight her way through undead clowns and hard-partying teens to crack the case.” I had previously counted the ways in which I loved Judy Drood in this post.

Houdini: The Handcuff King (Hyperion), by Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi Come on Bertozzi; give someone else a chance, huh?

Incredible Change-Bots (Top Shelf), by Jeffrey Brown What kept this out of the top ten was the fact that if you don’t share the necessary set of experiences that inspired it—specifically, watching a certain cartoon and playing with a certain line of toys in the ‘80s—it’s going to seem more silly than brilliant. If you do share those experiences with Brown, however, then you’re in for an amazing reading experience. I wish more of the nostalgia-fueled comics in the market these days had this sort of creative version of nostalgia driving them.

James Sturm’s America: God, Gold and Golems (Drawn and Quarterly), By James Sturm Three formative tales of the making of America, from three different periods of time. All three are somewhat dark, but it’s not an oppressive darkness. These are tales of the past, after all, and while the ignorance, greed, violence and hatred they illustrate went into the construction of this country and its spirit, they also show the impact that normal, everyday people truly have. There’s more to history than wars and presidents and, in fact, those things may not even be all that important, really. I loathe the title of this book, incidentally.

King-Cat Classix (Drawn & Quarterly), by John Porcellino One of the pioneers of auto-bio comics gets a massive 380-page collection of his zines and mini-comics, covering most of his almost twenty-year-long career. The beauty of this collection is that it’s big enough that you can see Porcellino’s work change before your eyes, as he becomes a wittier and wiser writer, and a sharper, more elegant artist, with each thirty pages or so.

King City Vol. 1 (Tokyopop), by Brandon Graham I first became aware of Graham’s work after reading Escalator, a collection of shorter pieces from the writer/artist in which you can see him feeling his way towards what I think of as a sort of world fusion style, mixing elements of manga, European comics, American comics and other types of art in a storytelling style that’s the best of all worlds. It’s a style Paul Pope, Corey S. Lewis, Bryan Lee O’Malley, James Stokoe and a few others are working in to various degrees, although, obviously, there’s a great deal of difference in their finished products. Anyway, this is Graham’s first long-form work, a manga-like digest about the titular city and its interesting inhabitants. And it’s a tour de force of design. I tried to explain the awesomeness of King City in this post.

The Living and the Dead (Fantagraphics), by Jason Before reading this, I was so goddam sick of zombie comics that if I never read another one for my whole life, I probably would have been set. And yet despite this being a comic about zombies, as it turns out a Jason comic about zombies is an entirely different type of zombie comic. Confession: I still haven’t read I Killed Adolf Hitler. It may be even better than this one; I honestly don’t know.

The Professor’s Daughter (First Second), By Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert I’m getting awfully sick of reviewing books by Sfar and Guibert, as it gets a little tedious trying to think of new ways to compliment the same damn creators for a great new book every month or two. I’m not getting sick of reading their books one bit, though. The two reverse their normal collaboration duties here, for a sort of romantic comedy turning on the civil rights of mummies in Victorian England.

Red Eye, Black Eye (Alternative Comics), by K. Thor Jensen A comic book Kerouac travels the country by Greyhound bus, visiting friends and internet acquaintances as he searches for an adventure that will land him a black eye. Part travelogue, part anthology of biographical anecdotes collected from others and part auto-bio drama, it makes for a fascinating read. There’s a preview here, and I tried to figure out the specifics of his Columbus visit, and got some expert help in the comments section, in this post.

Spent (Drawn & Quarterly), by Joe Matt A creepy, possibly psycho chronic masturbator, porn addict cartoonist alienates his cartoonists friends while going to insane lengths to avoid spending money and interacting with his housemates. In his free time, he focuses on creating the ultimate pornographic mix tape. Sad, hilarious and more than a little distressing, for the glimpses of yourself you may see in Matt.

Terr’ble Thompson (Fantagraphics), by Gene Deitch This collection of the short-lived 1950’s comic strip about a young boy who was the real hero of history, serving as a sort of factotum solving the various problems of history’s notables. Deitch’s cartooning is top-notch, and doesn’t look the least bit dated.

Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love (G.T. Labs), by Jim Ottaviani and Dylan Meconis A fictionalized telling of the true story of the scientist who proved love was real in a series of experiments. Real enough to be accepted by the scientific community, anyway.

The World Below (Dark Horse), by Paul Chadwick In introductory material presented with this new collection of a short-lived action adventure series from the man who brought us Concrete, Chadwick talks about how any TV producers in the reading audience might like a story that’s just like Lost but different. He sells his brilliant if hardly transcendental genre story way too short. Mixing elements of British sci-fi comics and old-school pulp prose sci-fi, Chadwick sends an expert group of explorer/soldiers into a bizarre underground land, one that he populates with animals, monsters and machinery among the most alien I’ve ever encountered in comics. The imagination that must have went into that world-building is impressive as all hell; Chadwick invented creatures that operated so far outside of our normal understanding of science that a reader could feel just as lost as his protagonists. You’ve literally never seen anything like the world in The World Below.

Yotsuba&! Vols. 4-5 (ADV Manga), Kiyohiko Azuma Each chapter of this manga about a precocious toddler is a complete story unto itself, although the jokes get funnier and funnier the more chapters you read. At this point, the sight of Yotsuba alone is enough to make me crack a smile.

The Worst Lines of 2007

The beauty of the comics medium is that it is one that marries the written word and the drawn image, and the ratio between the two can always be adjusted, so that one can always do a little more work than the other when it comes to telling a story.

In other words, lines like those below could easily be avoided—and should have been. Here are the most laugh-out-loud terrible sentences, some originally delivered in dialogue others in narration, by some of the industry's most popular and successful writers this year...


“Now close your eyes, gentlemen. This might hurt.”

—Mark Millar, Civil War #6



“He’s going to die because that’s what people do. It’s humanity’s shared super-power. We die.”

—Greg Rucka and friends, 52 #36



“You’re the first person ever…to get a second chance… to make a first impression.”

—Paul Jenkins, Civil War: The Return #1



"Just because you can fly-- --doesn't mean you're not in a cage"

—Brad Meltzer, Justice League of America #7



“Nobody would want to see what I saw. Don’t you get it? It was-- The Death of Captain America.”

—Jeph Loeb, Fallen Son—The Death of Captain America #1



“I don’t know who you are, lady-- --but you’ve just awoken the hawk!”

—Gail Simone, Birds of Prey #105



“Tune your ear to the frequency of despair, and cross reference by the longitude and latitude of a heart in agony.

Listen.

Listen.”

—J. Michael Straczynski, Amazing Spider-Man #544



“Those days gave way to more days for these heroes…hard traveled.”

—Judd Winick, Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special #1

Because No One Demanded It: The Batman's Christmas List Post-Mortem

As I did after the last bad joke and drawing theme month here on EDILW, I thought I’d do a sort of post-mortem to share some of what I learned. Also, it allows for an easy, totally phoned-in post requiring no real original thought, perfect for this between holiday week, during which most of the comics blogosphere seems to have gone dark.

Spending a couple weeks drawing superhero costumes over and over is actually a pretty interesting way to relate to them, giving one a better appreciation for how the artists one might complain about online all the time approach their work.

I found myself liking some costumes I’d previously hated, and hating other less than I used to, and appreciating details I’d never noticed before. Like just how much detail is in Catwoman’s current costume, for example, or how much Metamorpho has changed since the ‘60s.

I also found myself respecting the pros a lot more. I mean, I think Ed Benes is a horrible comic book artist, and a terrible storyteller, but I do appreciate the fact that he can draw the same faces and bodies over and over (the same exact faces and body types over and over) kind of admirable. That’s a skill in the cartoonist’s toolbox that I’ve never been able to master (which is part of the reason I draw myself all the time…it’s not just because I’m vain, but because I’m easy visual reference, and want to eventually be able to draw at least one character consistent from image to image). Like, just getting Batman’s ears the same length in different images (or both his ears the same length in the same image), or keeping the heights of two characters consistent form panel to panel is really freaking hard.

So Benes may be terrible compared to most other professional comics artists…he’s still a good draftsman, and has basic cartooning skills that are really hard to master.

Anyway, before I get into random observation mode, I thought I’d share some behind the scenes stuff with you because, well, remember what I said about phoning a post in?

I draw these all on index cards, as they are about 75 cents for 120 cards or something like that, and the cards form natural panels, so I can try to keep everything the same size for when the elves in the computer do whatever they do when they take something form the public library’s scanner and put it on my blog. (Close-ups are generally half an index card).

When I’m writing them, though, they’re a mixture of very vague drawings and indecipherable handwriting, which I developed during my time as a newspaper reporter. It’s so hard to read that even I can’t make it out. In a few months, I will likely have no idea what it says. But while it’s relatively fresh in my mind, I can remember writing it, and therefore am able to read it.

So, here’s what they look like when I first write them down. This is the page on which I wrote the Superman and Flash ones:


My house is full of pages and pages of things like this, illegible first drafts of comics and graphic novels. If I die tomorrow, whoever has the unfortunate job of dealing with my belongings is going to find folders and boxes crammed with these types of scribbled up pages that I myself can just barely make out.

Here’s another, featuring two I didn’t use. The top one was Oracle, the bottom one was the beginning of the Vixen one, which I scrapped:



Here’s something else I ended up not pursuing, Martian Santahunter:



And finally, when I realized I wouldn’t be able to draw Pete Woods’ Bat-Santa, I decided to go with a Christmas-colored version of the Bat-suit I’d been drawing all month, but wasn’t sure about how to color it, red and white, or red white and green.




I’m still not sure the red and white was best. Like, Batman’s normal costume is black and gray with a little bit of yellow (the utility belt). Maybe Bat-Sanata shoulda been red and white, with a green utility belt.

Now, on to the eight random thoughts on the JLA and Outsiders I had while drawing them on index cards…



1.) Vixen: When I planned these out, I was originally planning to do the whole month of December, which meant 31 of ‘em. Then I realized there was no point of doing them after Christmas, because why would Batman still be giving Christmas presents afterwards? And surely we would all be sick of Christmas by then anyway, right? So that knocked it down to 23-25 or so.

I was thinking I’d do everyone that was on one of Batman’s two teams, plus his sidekicks/allies, like Robin, Nightwing, Oracle, Commissioner Gordon and Alfred. But I axed all of those not on one of his two teams because none of them were the least bit funny (and considering how unfunny the ones I did post were, that’s really saying something).

Anyway, it wasn’t until I had drawn almost all of them and was halfway through posting them that I suddenly remembered that Vixen was on the Justice League again.

Does this mean I have a pretty bad memory, or that Vixen has had pretty much nothing to do in JLoA so far?

Or a little bit of both?

In the first arc, she really just came out of left field at the end, not really teaming up with either of the factions of heroes that would ultimately come together to form Metlzer’s League. The only thing I remember her doing in “Lightning Saga” was saying she was borrowing a cheetah’s speed to keep pace with The Flash (explained in the next story, I understand), and then I dropped it until McDuffie took over.

I had a reeaalllly hard time thinking of a Vixen joke; with the exception of Red Tornado, for whom I did two and settled on the second one, Vixen’s the only character I did, like, drafts of. The final one was the fourth idea I came up with, the first three being much, much, much worse (One involved her trying to suck bee powers out of Red Bee’s partner Michael though; I just really love drawing bees).

Anyway, I do like Vixen being on the JLA again. She’s a really good character for the book, because she works best in team settings, I think, and it’s nice to have characters from each discernible era involved with the book.

And I kinda like her current look. I never cared for the Wolverine/Beast-esque hair shaped like animal ears that she sported during the Detroit Era. I did like the dreadlocks she was rocking off-and-on during the period between Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, but the current short hairstyle (or the more slick version she had on JLU) probably make more sense for a model, as it would more easily allow her to wear hats and wigs than her long locks did.

I do kinda wish she’d get a mask similar to the one she wore in her original Cancelled Comics Cavalcade costume at some point though.



2.) Diversity: The League is the most diverse it’s ever been, and The Outsiders are also very diverse for a DCU super-team.

As of “Unlimited” and the first two issues of Batman and the Outsiders, here’s how things were looking, regarding gender and race on the two teams:

Justice League

4 white men (Batman, Red Arrow, Hal Jordan and Geo-Force)

3 black men (Black Lighting, John Stewart, Firestorm)

1 alien that just so happens to look like a white man (Superman)

2 white women (Hawkgirl, Black Canary)

1 black woman (Vixen)

1 magical golem who looks like a white woman (Wonder Woman)

1 red android whose secret identity used to be a white man, and who inhabited a white man’s body for a few issues there


The Outsiders

1 white man (Batman)

2 white women (Catwoman, Grace)

1 black woman (Thunder)

1 Asian woman (Katana)

1 half-Asian woman (Batgirl)

1 white/purple/orange/brown/silver man who used to be a caucasian guy (Metamorpho)

1 green Martian


Regarding sexuality, everyone on the League is straight. Batman and Wonder Woman can be argued about to differing degrees of seriousness, but Batman’s always done it with and dated ladies, and Wonder Woman’s only dated men. I understand there are some arguments over whether she’s a virgin or not. Let’s not get into it. Anyway, they’re all straight as far as we know.

In the Outsiders, there are two lesbians (Thunder and Grace), and everyone else seems to be straight (Batgirl isn’t sexually active; she’s kissed three boys and no girls, though).

Could the teams be more diverse? Sure, I suppose. I mean, the thing about diversity is it could almost always be more diverse, you know?

But the League is probably as diverse as it’s ever been. With Stewart and Firestorm II joining during “Unlimited,” there are now five black folks on the League at the same time. And with Black Canary, Hawkgirl and Vixen on the team, there are now four women. Considering Wonder Woman has been pretty much the only woman since the Morrison/Porter relaunch (Oracle, Big Barda, Faith and a few others joining for more brief stints during that time, of course), I think that’s pretty significant.

Should there be a hero of Hispanic on the team now? Or an Asian hero? Or a Native American? Or a gay person? Or a person with a physical disability? Looking around DC’s hero pool, I don’t know how much more diverse the League could get until some new heroes are created.

I can’t think of a single Hispanic hero who would work on the League at the moment; I know there are some out there, but none that have served on the League and/or seem iconic enough to be there at the moment.

As for Asian heroes, Dr. Light II is the only one that springs to mind, and I think she’s unfortunately sullied by her namesake’s retcon. She really, really, reeeaaaalllly needs a new codename. It’s only logical, you know? In the real world, if you’re name was, say, O.J. Simpson, chances are you would have started going by Othniel J. Simpson or whatever after the other version of your name became synonymous with that guy who may or may not have totally killed his wife, you know? If you found out your totally voluntary codename was the same as a guy who totally raped a colleague, why on earth would you keep using it?

Katana would be a possibility, even though she’s not quite iconic. Problem is, the League is pretty lousy with Outsiders right now, just as its lousy with people who have her exact same skill set that Tatsu boasts (beating people up with their bare hands).

That’s all I can think of at the moment. Again, most of the promising Asian heroes are too new. The current Atom could work on the strength of his predecessor’s place in the League, and the fact that he doesn’t belong on any of the other teams anymore (he’s not really a Golden Age legacy except on a technicality so he doesn’t belong on the JSA, he’s not a teenager so he doesn’t belong on the Titans, he’s not an outsider so he doesn’t belong on the Outsiders).

For Native American heroes, I thought Manitou Raven was awesome, filling both the magic guy role and the Apache Chief legacy. Like Black Vulcan’s history with the League via Superfriends kind of grandfathers Black Lightning in, I think Apache Chief’s role on the cartoons grandfathers in any Native Americans who can grow gigantic by saying “Inukchuk!” Sadly, he kinda sorta died, to be replaced by Manitou Dawn, who’s a bit less interesting.

The only openly gay hero to have been on the League, or to approach the popularity/power/icon status necessary to be on the league is Obsidian, and he’s in the Justice Society, which is a better fit for him anyway, given the book he was created for and his parentage. The Question II and Batwoman both seem too street-level, particularly at a time when the League already has Batman, Black Canary, an Arrow and Hawkgirl.

And physical disability? Oracle, naturally. Oracle should always be on the League. I think it’s ridiculous that she’s ever not on the League, since her close relationship with pretty much every hero on the team anyway always makes her a sort of de facto member. Why not give the lady a gold key, certificate and occasional nod in the damn roll calls, you know?



3.) Katana: I really, really, really liked Katana’s all red costume and short hair in the first two issues of the new Batman and The Outsiders. Poor Katana has had some really terrible costumes over the years, from her primary-colored samurai get-up to that horrible right-breast-as-Japan’s-rising-sun look (Which Judomaster II has taken over in the pages of JSoA).

In Batman and The Outsiders #3, however, she’s back in her most recent red and yellow costume, so now I’m not sure if the look I liked the most was just a coloring mistake, and/or the penciller removed that weird half-skirt thing she wears now either because it would be impractical to parachute in, or because it interfered with his ability to draw close-ups of her ass.



4.) Thunder: I like Thunder’s newer costume, too. I believe it’s about one million times better than her original costume. I hated the wig and the overall design, but it was the realistic lightning design on the sleeves that drove me nuts. I wouldn’t have been able to even attempt to draw that.

I still don’t care for the character much, in part because I’ve read so few stories with her I’m sure, but it also just seems weird for Black Lightning to suddenly have an adult daughter that was never mentioned before, not to mention that him having a grown-up daughter messes with age perception in the fragile fictional environment of the DCU (I smell another long-ass tangent coming on!).

See, if she’s 20 (let’s say she graduated form college a few years early) and Jefferson Pierce impregnated her mother when he was only 18, that means he’s at least 38. But probably older, as his daughter is more likely 23 (four years of college plus the One Year Later year) and he was hopefully a little older than 18 when he sired her.

Personally, I think 38-45 is a fine age for Black Lighting to be, but it doesn’t really work so well on DC’s unofficial-official timeline, in which the main heroes are all in their late-twenties, early-thirties. I mean, Batman and Black Lightning are probably the same age, right? Jeff isn’t, like, ten or fifteen years older than Batman, is he?

And if so, does that mean he became Black Lighining that late in his life? Like, in his mid-thirties, he just decided to put on that dated-ass costume and start fighting crime?

Connor Hawke creates a similar problem for Oliver Queen (although Connor’s younger than Anissa, at least potentially so, and Ollie’s always been played as older than some of his peers). It doesn’t bug me at all, as I tend to think of Ollie’s generation of heroes as being of an older, more dad-like age of, say, late thirties or forties, but the official DC line is that these are all twenty- and thirtysomethings.

What was I talking about? Costumes, or something?



5.) Black Lightning:The more I draw Black Lightining’s costume, the more I like it. Maybe if they’d just fix his mask—losing the yellow lenses, at least, but perhaps switching it out for an older mask, I could live with the current costume.

I still think it’s weird there’s no black lightning anywhere on his costume though.



6.) Batgirl: The current Batgirl’s costume was not made for colored pencils, which is why it’s miscolored it. If I drew her eyes black and her bat-symbol black, she would have looked even more blob-like. I do like her costume a lot—the Spider-Man eyes and bulbous head, the Batman cape and cowl, on that little body with the giant utility belt—but she could stand to lose the stitched-up mouth and instead have a mouthless cowl (ala Spider-Man) or one akin to the Batwoman from that direct-to-DVD animated movie.



7.) Metamorpho: What are those…things on Metamorpho’s face? The greenish/blueish lines that are on his head and face, and that are on the orange half of his upper body. I know the Metamorpho fragment that went by the name Shift had them, and it seems Metamorpho himself has adopted Shift’s old look, dress pants, black eyes and those weird lines and all. Are they to be read as solid, like tattoos, or some kind of lava lamp-like whorls, resultant form his body being a sort of living periodic table?

Just wondering. I like his old head design better. I don’t mind costumes being tweaked now and then, but I guess I just think head re-design is taking things too far.

Speaking of which…



8.) Martian Manhunter: I was totally shocked by how much love the new Martian Manhunter costume got in the comments section for that post. It’s another look that I despised at first sight, but have been slowly growing more used to. Maybe in another eight years or so I’ll even dig it. But that head shape…if I hadn’t read so many comics about the shape of J’onn’s head, and why it looks one way in public and another in private, or if his new public head-shape resembled a Martian headshape, that would be one thing, but it’s just so random. I don’t get why they made him look so Skrull-y, either.

Anyway, I think I’m going to examine the fashion taste of Martian Manhunter in a near future post. He has worn a few outfits other than his original costume and his new one, and that guy looks good in just about anything. Except red. It clashes with his skin tone. Violently.

Weekly Haul: December 28th

Hey gang. Sorry for the delay in posting this week’s new super-comics reviews; the Friday release day put this week’s haul smack dab in the middle of the non-comics blogging portion of my week. Thanks for your patience.

On the subject of what-gets-posted-when, look for two days’ worth of updates on Sunday, and the best of 2007 feature on Monday. Next week’s “Weekly Haul” will also be later than usual, due to the holiday and new comics not being released until freaking Friday, but should go up Friday evening rather than Saturday night.




Action Comics #860 (DC Comics) Superman, powerless under Earth’s red sun, runs around the year 3008, while we continue to meet Legionnaires. I think we’re up to 450 at this point. Plus, torture. I suppose this half-over “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” arc by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank will make for a decent trade collection some day, but for now, the only thing keeping me awake while reading is scrutinizing the costume designs. Night Girl’s is almost awesome, but the cleavage diamond window ruins the cute cat head effect. Shadow Lass has neat boots. Polar Boy looks too cool, considering the fact that he is Polar Boy.




(Note: There were two covers for this issue. I went for the one featuring the devil wearing a cape, boots and no pants. That's evil!)

Amazing Spider-Man #545 (Marvel Comics) As much as I hated the first two issues of this four-issue storyline, I had to come back for the final installment, just to see if Joe Quesada really would do what he’s been threatening all along, or if it’s all been a misinformation campaign. And, well, he does do it.

Here’s a plot summary: Mary Jane makes a rational, reasonable argument about the fact that old people tend to die, Peter Parker makes a selfish argument about how he doesn’t much mind his aged aunt dying so long as it’s not his fault, the devil shows up, Mary Jane negotiates a better deal (Throw in a secret identity reboot and you got yourself a deal!), there’s a Lost In Translation gag where she whispers something in the devil’s ear the readers can’t make out, and BAM! the franchise is right back where it was when John Romita Sr. was drawing it.

I know I’ve expressed admiration for Quesada’s insistence at undoing the Spider-marriage despite the fact that he’s the only person in the whole world who seems to think it’s the right course of action before, but the amount of wiggle room he and co-writer J. Michael Straczynski leave for a future de-re-boot kind of takes away from that (Yeah, co-writer. They share a “story” credit, and no one gets a script credit. Interesting).

The end result is that it somehow manages to make this terribly written, poorly illustrated, over-priced and delayed story even more insulting, since the highly controversial, permanent can rather easily be unchanged at the drop of a hat (And that’s the problem with this sort of cosmic storytelling; it’s like a loose thread on a sweater, as the state of the DC Universe after a few reboots too many now so readily attests).

Even more galling? Nothing really happens, except that thing that you thought was going to happen all along. How does this work? Mephisto won’t tell Peter because it’s not important. Okay, but can someone let us in on the secret? How does this change the course of recent Marvel history? I mean, the past few years were kind of important, and Spider-Man played major roles in things like Civil War—if he didn’t unmask during it anymore, then did he switch sides? And does Tony Stark even know his secret identity? Did he fight on the Pro- side at all? Did he wear his black costume? Did he beat up Kingpin and cry a lot? What?

There’s an epilogue showing us the post “One More Day”status quo, and apparently Peter lives with his aunt again, she has her old hairstyle back, he rides a bike, and he hangs out with all his old high school friends (all this to undo a marriage, but nobody could reboot Harry Osborn’s hair?) and everyone looks much more stiff and heavily photo-referenced than they did in the front of the book.

That’s the first 31 pages. What else do you get for that extra dollar, besides nine extra story pages? Three pages of Aunt May’s Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe entry (Surprisingly, she ranks a 1 in strength, speed, durability, energy projection and fighting skills, and only a 2 in intelligence; you sold your marriage for that, Spidey?), six pages reprinting the marriage of Peter and MJ, and a page of Marvel freelancers and employees (and Harlan Ellison) kissing JMS’ ass.

Brian Michael Bendis said, “I do believe this will be remembered as one of the great runs, not only of Spider-Man, but of all comics.” Yes, Will Eisner’s Spirit. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Dave Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus. JMS’ ASM. It’s particularly funny in that Bendis’ straight-faced crazy-ass compliment comes after a list of JMS’ accomplishments on the titles, many of which the preceding 33-pages just undid.

Kevin Feige, who is apparently the producer/president of Marvel Studios draws attention to the storyline in which Aunt May discovered Peter’s secret identity, just as Bendis did, which this story un-writes.

My favorite though is Mark Millar’s. He points out that JMS doubled sales on ASM (John Romita Jr. says he tripled them; which Marvel employee to believe?!), but even more amusingly, this: “Joe picking up the writing duties on Amazing Spider-Man was a seismic moment in modern comics. He, together with Daredevil writer Kevin Smith, showed Hollywood that far from slumming it in comic books.”

You know, I liked a lot of Kevin Smith’s movies; I think he’s a great writer of dialogue and I usually find something to like in everything he’s done, but c’mon, in Hollywood, he’s an extreme lightweight. His movies don’t make any serious money, he’s not a terribly talented or even skilled director, and he’s tried to make exactly one movie that doesn’t revolve around his Clerks cast, and it was his biggest failure, one which drove him to make more Clerks spin-offs.

And before he started work on ASM, JMS was a TV writer who’s greatest achievement* was Babylon fucking 5. All apologies to any Babylonians in the reading audiences, but that’s hardly a show representative of “Hollywood.” I have a hard time believing anyone in Hollywood picked up their copy of Comic Shop News one morning and spit cappuccino all over it, eyes bugging out of their head as they exclaimed to their maid, “Straczynski’s writing a funny book? But—but—he could be writing science-fiction television shows! Why would he give all that up just to write Spider-Man? Has he gone mad?”

I actually feel kind of bad for JMS at this point. I really enjoyed a lot of his run on the title, particularly at the beginning when he was working with JRJR. The addition of Aunt May into Peter’s confederacy, his job as a public school science teacher, that 9/11 issue, new villains…there was a lot to like (I didn’t read “Sins Past,” so I can’t hate on it properly, I’m afraid). From “The Other” on, however, the Spider-Man franchise has been in a nosedive in quality, and JMS goes out on the most sour note imaginable.




Avengers: The Initiative #8 (Marvel) Taskmaster replaces Gauntlet as Camp Hammond’s drill sergeant; Irredeemable Ant-Man Eric O’ Grady, fresh from his own cancelled title, joins the initiative and gets in a giant brawl with Yellowjacket and Stature; the 616 Geldoff is introduced** and Dan Slott and his new co-writer Christos N. Gage rewind things for a behind the scenes look at how Tony Stark, Mr. Fantastic and Hank Pym brought about the Initiative from the pages of Civil War. And it's good. I mean, geez, where else are you going to see Triathalon, Dragon Man, War Machine and Stature in the same comic book? Confidential to Reed and Tony: Me, I like the name “G.I. Ant-Man.” I mean, it’s a lot better than “Yellowjacket.” Yellowjackets are small, but Pym grows giant—what’s up with that?




Batman #672 (DC) So, you like this cover, in which Batman hangs a left on his Bat-Cycle? Well, I sure hope you didn’t buy this issue for all the motorcycle action, because there are no motorcycles in this comic at all. Instead, Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend Jezebel Jet parachute out of hot air balloon, that Bane-looking Batman who put a footprint on Batman’s back shows up, another Batman with a napalm gun sets police men on fire, and Bat-Mite has a dramatic entrance. A lot of potentially cool stuff to compose a cover image around, really. But Tony S. Daniel decided to go with generic image of Batman on a motorcycle, probably form his portfolio.

With that Ra’s al Ghul nonsense behind him, writer Grant Morrison gets back to the Batman versus different versions of Batman plot he’s been working on for most of his run, and he brings a lot of the Morrison-brand craziness. Hints of some kind of psychological experiment that is never more than alluded to, magic words, strange exclamations (“UDD!” “KKAA!!”) and Bat-Mite. Did I mention Bat-Mite?

It would all be terribly exciting if Daniel knew the first thing about drawing a comic book, but Morrison goes to print with the artist he has, not the artist he might have liked. So scenes which should be incredibly exciting just seem awkward, and I sit with the comic open in my lap, in stunned disbelief that the very best artist DC could find to work with Grant freaking Morrison is the guy who drew page seven, in which the placement of the dialogue bubbles and layout-suggest Wayne Manor’s kitchen is so big that the entire city of Gotham is actually inside it, and in which we also see Bruce Wayne lose about four inches of height between panels two and five.

I did like Daniel’s Bat-Mite on page 22, one the four one page splashes (There’s also a two-page splash with two smaller inset panels). It has so few panels per page it’s paced almost like manga. Or at least manga drawn by someone who’s never read any of it. Or any comic books. Or a fucking comic strip.

Still, Bat-Mite. You can’t go wrong when Bat-Mite’s involved, can you? Oh, right.

Blue Beetle (DC) This issue seems a bit worrying. The title of the story is "End Game." The story involves Blue Beetle finally getting to the bottom of The Reach's insidious plans for earth, in a one-page drawing room scene where he explains it to Danni Garrett (and the reader), and both BB and The Reach deciding it's time to finish their conflict. Is this writer John Rogers bringing the series-long conflict to a climax because it's time to move on to another big storyline, the next phase of his plans for the title? Or because it's time to finally cancel it, and DC's letting him finish up the story? (It's solicited at least through March, with the next few issues continuing what sounds like a climactic battle between Jamie and The Reach).

I found this particular issue to be a little weaker than the best Blue Beetles I've read, as it's less self-contained, but it is still solidly crafted, with a balance of drama, humor and action that is exactly what should be the gold standard for superhero comics. And damn, Jaime's parents are awesome.




The Brave and The Bold #9 (DC) Remember the first issue of this series, in which Mark Waid and George Perez told an absolutely perfect Batman/Green Lantern team-up? Or the last issue, wherein they did the same with The Flash family and The Doom Patrol? Well, this is a lot like that, save that it features not one, not two, but three team-ups, each pairing consisting of characters and teams that, if they were the only team-up in the issue, probably wouldn't have moved very many copies (There's a reason the original Brave and The Bold quickly became a Batman team-up title). So while The Challengers of The Unknown contend with the Book of Destiny as a framing device, we get the pre-52 Metal Men and Robby "Dial H For Hero” Reed, The Boy Commandos and Blackhawk during World War II (Attention Birds of Prey fans!), and the momentous*** meeting of Hawkman and the All-New Atom, Ryan Choi.

I can't think of anything new to say about how good Perez is, so I'm not going to bother. He draws about 100 characters in these 22 pages, and they all look great. I marvel at the fact that DC even lets Perez draw one of their books; it makes much of their line seem merely mediocre, and the sub-par stuff (this week, Daniel's Batman, for example) look like garbage.

It's Waid who really impressed the hell out of me this issue, though. Not only does he cram four different narratives into a single 22-page issue, but each of the done-in-1/3rd stories are complete unto themselves, with a beginning, middle and end, often with at least a bit of a twist or punchline (Tin and Robby share a secret, Brooklyn appreciates the Blackhawks after all, Hawkman creeps out The Atom). Waid also tells each of the tales in the manner befitting the times in which they originate. So the two stories featuring past properties are told without narration, but with the reader observing them from the outside. The Hawkman/Atom story, set in the modern DCU, is written with Choi narrating, as if it were from an issue of his regular series. Waid nails Choi's personality as his creator Gail Simone established it, although he actually does a much better job writing Choi than Simone's ever managed—Waid even works in Simone's insistence on using quotes at random, but without mis-using asterisks.




Fantastic Four: Isla De La Muerte (Marvel) It doesn't take much to get me to look at a Fantastic Four comic. Usually something as simple as an allusion to The Thing vs. Chupacabras, for example, or an image of Benjamin J. Grimm in kicky vacation gear, or even a creator not generally known for superheroes like, oh, say, Tom Beland, tackling the franchise. This over-sized one-shot has all that and more, so I was expecting it to at the very least be pretty interesting but, good God was I surprised at how good it actually was. This was probably the best book I read this new comic day, edging out even the technically amazing Brave and The Bold.

The story? Three days a year, The Thing disappears on a top-secret vacation, which his fellow Fantastic Four members know nothing about. The curiosity, of course, kills them, and Johnny persuades Sue to persuadet Reed to track him. They find him on a Puerto Rican island, where he gets an annual party in his honor due to his resemblance to a rocky orange fort that's long protected the island. When the other 3/4ths of the team track him and discover a weird energy signal, Ben gets to make like the fortress and protect the island, this time from an invading army of Chupacabras.

Beland gets the voices of the Four and their relationships to each other absolutely perfectly (well, Sue using slang threw me on two occasions...but otherwise!), digging genuinely deeply at a few points, like when Sue and Ben have a heart to heart, or at the emotionally mature and affecting ending. He also makes inventive, fun uses of their powers, in action, everyday and gag situations (I liked Sue's super-powered mute button on her little brother). It's really everything you could possibly want from an FF story, while managing to even slip a little education into the mix (Hell, I learned some history, science and Spanish—and I hate learning on New Comic Day!).

While I'd love to see what a Beland-illustrated FF comic would look like, this one is drawn by Juan Doe, which sounds an awful lot like an alias, but I’ll take his word for it. Doe's style is hard to describe, but it reminded me of Kyle Baker's in its ability to straddle cartooniness and serious within the same image...sometimes even the same character. Actually, I thought of Baker, Kaare Andrews and Tom Williams at different points while reading it.

It's just a really all-around gorgeous book. Paired with Beland's really well written story, it makes for great super-comics done right. I'd like to see more Marvel work from both of these guys. Pronto.

You can see several pages from the book here. And you can see some more of Doe's art here. That guy is great. Here's the cover for the Spanish version, which has one sweet logo:





Green Lantern #26 (DC) Guest-artist Mike McKone joins Geoff Johns for a cool-down arc after the "Sinestro Corps" event story. Based on his work on JSA, it seems Johns often does some of his best work in terms of character development in these between-big-story stories, and he does seem to be treating GL as a JSA-style team book, checking in with plenty of players here. Sinestro, apparently given back his pants for good behavior, has a heart to heart with Hal; John Stewart contemplates Cosmic Odyssey and helps rebuild Coast City, The City Without Fear; The Guardians carve up some Lanterns and shove power batteries into 'em and do their cryptic dialogue thing; there's some business with "The Lost Lanterns" which hardcore GL fans probably get a lot more out of then I do; and Hal abuses his power ring to make out with Cowgirl and make one wonder how dude even has a secret identity at this point. It's pretty much Johns' normal mixture of inspired DCU space opera oddity, ham-fisted stupidity and deep, intimate knowledge of his principal characters and their fictional histories.

McKone is a welcome fill-in for poor Ivan Reis, who spent the last few months drawing several million aliens into the backgrounds of his panels. I liked his work here quite a bit (although his Tomar-Tu, son of that Silver Age orange chicken lizard man Tomar-Re, looked a bit weird from the front), and would like to see him take on a DC monthly soon. Maybe something that's currently drawn terribly, like JLoA or Batman?




Hulk Vs. Fin Fang Foom #1 (Marvel) Oh Marvel, why do you have to play me like this? This sounds like it has the makings of a perfect comic book. As the title alludes, it's a fight comic featuring The Hulk and the old Kirby-created, Godzilla-sized Eastern Dragon in short pants Fin Fang Foom—guy's name is fun to read. And who's writing it? Why, Peter David, a guy who knows how to pound out a fun comic script, and knows a thing or two about writing good Hulk stories. The solicitation promises a "double-sized" one-shot, and the cover price of $3.99, a buck more than your average 22-page Marvel comic, practically guarantees it.

But in fact, all we get is 22 pages of Hulk vs. Fin Fang Foom. The rest of the book has some stats and character history on one page, and a reprint of the first Fin Fang Foom story, which Marvel just sold me last year as part of their Marvel monster month. I felt like I got ripped off after reading this (or rather, reading the parts I haven't already read), and the fact that it came out on the same day as Amazing Spider-Man, which pulled the same trick (to a lesser extent; at least that was 31 pages of new content for $4), only made it worse. Hmm, reading the solicitation again, I see not only does it say the book is "double-sized," it also neglects to mention any artists beyond cover artist Jim Cheung (like, seeing the name "Jack Kirby" there might have tipped me off I was paying for a reprint), and promises "classic slugfests from the past." That's slugfests, plural, but I got one classic, singular. The line between hyperbole and lying? Crossed.

As for the pages worth paying for, David opens with a neat boxing opening, recapping the characters' histories, which was pretty funny (“In the left corner—with the lime green skin…In the right corner, in a more avocado-green hue…Both Fighters will be wearing purple trunks. We apologize for the confusion.”). From there, we find The Hulk, back when his head was kinda square and his speech pattern was kinda brutish but not all caveman-like (I like it a little more caveman-like, to be honest), is wandering around the Arctic or the Antarctic (depending on the page in question). Reverting to Banner, he's found by some scientists, and brought into their lab. Meanwhile, one of their fellow scientists discover what they think is a new dinosaur, but we know (because we saw the cover) that it's actually Fin Fang Foom. A little The Thing homage-ing later (The story is entitled "The Fin From Outer Space”), the green goliaths fight. A little. Like, for five pages. And that's it. Not much of a conflict for a one-shot. Or $4.

Oh, and since Marvel won't tell you who the artist is, I guess I should. It's Jorge Lucas on pencils, and Robert Campanella on inks. Lucas captures the Kirby designs of the title characters perfectly well, while embedding them in a world that is populated with characters of his own design (He's not trying to draw like Kirby, beyond retaining the monsters' essential Kirby-osity). And there's one really great panel in which we see Fin Fang Foom's gigantic arms emerging from the ice, so big they seem to bend at the tips due to the tiny scientist's perspective. It's a neat trick.

But not worth $4 to see. I don't know; download it if you understand how to do that. Or read it in the store. Or pray to your heathen gods that Marvel releases a Best of Fin Fang Foom trade some day soon, and include this story in it.




Ultimate Spider-Man (Marvel) A major character dies in a story that gives the death and reaction to it shockingly short shrift. Especially when you consider this is a Brian Michael Bendis comic. That dude invented decompression! The big, two-Goblin fight, with Spidey and SHIELD getting between them, is handled well by both Bendis and Stuart "Will Be Consdered New For The Next Three Years" Immonen, and they do a fine job on the mourning pages of the issue too, but it seemed rather rushed through for what should be one of the series' biggest moments so far.



*Actually, I think The Real Ghost Busters andShe-Ra: Princess of Power were far superior to Babylon 5.

**As far as I know. Has anyone else made fun of Bendis’ Geldoff in the Marvel Universe proper like this before?

***Momentous for Atom and Hawkman fans, anyway. All 47 or ‘em.

Misc.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas…: This week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics review column features two new miniseries offering up new spins on ancient myths, The Infinite Horizon and Hybrid Bastards.




Marvel vs. DC, Round 946: Quick question—What’s a common one-word term used to refer to the artist who provides pencil-only art for a comic book, to later be inked by an inker?

Okay, yes, that’s right.

Now, how do you spell it?

DC spells penciller with two l’s in their credit boxes, whereas Marvel spells penciler with one l. My spellcheck always underlines them both in red to let me know they’re spelled wrong (it also underlined “spellcheck” just now). I always assumed that it was because it was comic book jargon and not widely enough used to pop up in a spellcheck program.

But why do Marvel and DC differ on the spelling?

I’ve been finding myself writing it out as “pencil artist” so as to avoid finding a definitive answer. I haven’t pulled out my long boxes and done and exhaustive search or anything, but, just casually looking at my usual Wednesday stacks of super-comics, and now, just double-checking the past week’s, it seems Marvel and DC are purposely spelling the word differently.

Has anyone else noticed this? Does anyone know how long this has been going on? Or why this is going on?

If anyone has any further information on this matter, do let me know. It’s stuff like this that keeps me up at night.

And on the subject of spelling, is the term “the direct market” a proper noun or not? Should I capitalize the d and the m or no?

And how come so few comics bloggers capitalize the I in “internet” when referring to “the Internet?” That is a proper noun, unless it’s being used as an adjective, right?




As a comic book writer, she makes a fine prose novelist: I finally got around to reading Jodi Picoult’s entire five-issue Wonder Woman run, recently collected in a pretty thin $19.99 hardcover. (I had previously only read Picoult’s first, very disappointing issue before I decided to just wait until I could read it for free from the library, as “nothing at all” seems to be the amount of money the story would be worth).

It doesn’t get any better after that first issue, however, and it’s actually pretty surprising how bad it all is. I really can’t fathom how this all came about; did DC really think a name writer with the kind of book store/library cred as Jodi Picoult would be best applied to tap-dancing between the continuity points established by Allan Heinberg and the Amazons Attack! crossover?

It’s a really nicely designed trade, and has an introduction from Picoult herself, which Tom Spurgeon noted “feels like a defense attorney's opening statement.”

The art throughout is mostly pretty solid, although there are some badly choreographed scenes that look like they had dialogue rearranged or something the night before deadline (Note the panel on the right). But it’s a really uncomfortable amalgam of plot points culled from continuity (Max Lord’s murder, Hippolyta’s death, Circe’s history, what’s up with the Amazons post-Infinite Crisis, Amazons Attack!, who the hell is Everyman, etc.) and characterization made up wholesale by Picoult.

Her Wonder Woman as fish-out-of-water comedy, flirting with Nemesis-as-TV’s-Steve-Trevor might have made for a great original graphic novel or Elseworlds or All-Star type story, but for a relevant DCU event bridging crossovers? Come on.

Rereading her intro after the story arc itself, this part grabbed my attention:



I decided to undertake the challenge for a few reasons—because it was something I’d never done before; because I’d always been a fan of Wonder Woman (who hasn’t?); because I’d admired other writers who’d seamlessly moved between fiction and comic books (Brad Meltzer foremost); and because I would be only the second woman to write the comic book in its long history.



The fact that she chose Meltzer as an example of someone who had “moved seamlessly moved between fiction and comic books” instead of, say, Greg Rucka, is pretty telling. (Perhaps just as telling? She uses the word “fiction” instead of “prose;” “comic book” is a medium, “fiction” designates whether a work is true or not. Meltzer’s prose novels and comic book work are all works of fiction, just as Picoult’s prose novels and Wonder Woman work are fiction).

Like Meltzer, Picoult over-narrates her comic books a bit too much, although it’s worth noting she sticks with one narrator per issue, making her five comics a bit more clear and easy to read than some of Meltzer’s twenty-some comics.

She also seems to view writing serial comics as a sort of relay race, in which a writer need not resolve their own story, but simply stop at some point and hand the characters and the subplots they’ve introduced on to the next writer.

Meltzer’s done this with everything he’s written. “Archer’s Quest” had a pretty dramatic turn in the relationship between Oliver Queen and Connor Hawke that was introduced but left unexplored. Identity Crisis was really nothing but turns in characters and plots, few if any of which were ever resolved, and which DC writers have been working at making sense of ever since. Similarly, his four-story JLoA run was full of changes and sub-plots he had no intention of resolving; he was simply seeding the book for future writers.

Picoult’s run takes that concept to a more dramatic level, as she doesn’t even resolve the main conflict in an equivocal, open-ended way. The graphic novel ends with one character holding a knife to our heroine’s throat. Her love interest is poisoned and dying. There’s a nuclear missile pointed at the island home of the Amazons. The U.S. military and JLA are still warring with the Amazons in Washington D.C.

And that’s the end of the book.

When I’d read Spurgeon’s review a while back, he noted that it ends with “a ridiculous cliffhanger ending that asks readers to buy yet another book after dropping 20 bucks on this one,” I assumed he was simply referring to the book leaving some subplots unresolved. But no, it doesn’t resolve anything at all, and it doesn’t merely end with a “to be continued” in the last panel, but the last page is actually a full-page ad reading, “Find out what happens next in Wonder Woman: Amazons Attack.”

What a thoroughly despressing book. This had the promise of one which could help evangelize the medium, bringing new readers to comic books, and now I fear all it will accomplish is making sure any who do pick this up as their first graphic novel to simply swear them off for life.





And speaking of Spurgeon and crappy Wonder Woman stories… Spurgeon recently interviewed Catwoman writer Will Pfeifer, the man responsible for Amazons Attack!.

It’s a pretty interesting and wide-ranging interview, one which reminded me how much I liked the 1999, Jill Thompson-illustrated Vertigo mini Finals, which was apparently Pfeifer’s comics debut.

He seems pretty honest about the nature of Amazons Attack! and t he frustrations of writing books like it:



I've worked on a few crossovers before, but this is the most closely I've been involved. It was almost a year ago exactly that I went to the DC offices for a weekend. We sort of plotted out the whole six-issue series, and we talked about all the tie-ins and this and that. When you're working on a big crossover like this, a lot of the plotting is just connecting the dots in a way. This is going to happen here, we'll deal with this here, and then over in Teen Titans this will happen, and then we'll deal with this, and then we'll deal with that. Readers may not like it, and in some ways it can be a pain to write, but that's what a lot of modern comic books are. The big ones that sell and the big ones that people seem to like are the ones that have crossovers crossovers crossovers. When you're writing it, the object is to hit those plot points. As a writer you try to work in those human emotions and twists and surprises and fun and action along the way. But you have to hit point A, B, C, and D because in another book, somebody's going to be hitting it.



It’s pretty funny watching him and Spurgeon sort of make sense of it all:



I think at its most basic, people have an idea about whatever superhero or character they love and have their ideal version of that character somewhere in their head. When you go against that version, some people are going to react very strongly. Amazons Attack! is right there in the title. They kill that guy and his kid on the very first page. People were really upset about that. But it was supposed to be shocking. It was supposed to be upsetting. It wasn't supposed to be a triumphant moment for the Amazons. People who have been reading Wonder Woman for however long they've been reading Wonder Woman —and some of them have been reading for a long time —they didn't like the fact that the Amazons were attacking and were evil. They also didn't like the fact that in Amazons Attack! that there wasn't enough Wonder Woman, and that Wonder Woman wasn't driving the plot along. The reason for that is that there's another book called Wonder Woman [Spurgeon laughs] where all that was happening.



While I don’t think anyone really wants to read superhero comics about people slaughtering innocent children on the first page, I doubt that (or the lack of Wonder Woman in the story) are the reason people reacted so negatively. I think it was more the fact that the story wasn’t any good, and didn’t make any goddam sense, not only within the context of the DCU and its history, but within the pages of the series itself.

Was that Pfeiffer’s fault, or the person who asked him to hit A, B, C and D? Because, B didn’t go with A and C, and D kinda cancels out A, and you can’t have B and C in the same story at the same time and expect it to make sense.

Regardless, this is one of those instances where it’s hard to feel too sorry for a comic book writer who wrote some shitty comics and then said it wasn’t entirely his fault (like JMS recently did with One More Day). Nobody makes you write these comics, and accepting the embarrassment that comes from writing bad ones—whoever’s bad ideas are ultimately fueling them—is part of the process. The writer’s name appears on the cover of the book, just like it does on the paycheck.




The cardinal is the state bird, the Pekar is the state curmudgeon: My fellow Ohioans, have you seen this political cartoon collaboration by Harvey Pekar and Nick Bertozzi yet? No? Then go read it. I love the use of the shape of the state as a lay-out, and I’ll be damned if Bertozzi doesn’t draw the scariest Pekar I’ve ever seen (I really like that Pekar is a lot like Batman; every artist finds a slightly different facet of the character). I would totally buy a set of postcards based on the “Greetings From Ohio” part, with the weird close-ups of a glaring Pekar in each letter…





This has very, very little to do with comics: Chris Ware designed the logo and poster for writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ latest movie, The Savages .

It doesn’t have anything to do with comics beyond the fact that Ware designed these, however. (The aesthetic of the film, and its melancholic sense of humor, sort of aligns with that seen in Ware’s work, though). It opened in Columbus on Christmas; if you’re so inclined, you can read my review of it here.

The other movie that opened in Columbus this week that’s well worth a trip to the theater? Juno, in which J. Jonah Jameson’s teenage daughter Kitty Pryde gets pregnant, and decides to have the baby and give it up to Elektra for adoption. That’s reviewed here.




Fanboys For Pele: I love comic books. And I love the music of Tori Amos. So the announcement of a an Image Comics-published anthology of short comics stories based on or inspired by her work should be something I’m really pumped about.

And while I can’t wait to read it, I’m not going to get my hopes too high at this point. Image’s Put the Book Back on the Shelf, which did the same with the songs of Belle and Sebastian, another favorite, was a pretty mixed bag—some stories were great, some were interesting, some were godawful. Since Amos’ work seems to be much less narrative than Belle and Sebastian’s, I’m really curious to see how it will translate to adaptation—it should definitely give creators a bit more leeway.

Thinking back, I can recall relatively little about the Belle and Sebastian anthology, with only the very best stories and the very worst sticking in my head. I do recall it being a really fun reading experience though, as I broke out all the Belle and Sebastian CDs and read the stories while listening to the songs. I look forward to doing the same with the Tori Amos anthology.

As with any anthology, the contributors will make or break it more than the concept. News of who’s involved is still trickling out, but at the very least, it will include work from Hope Larson, Colleen Doran, Lea Hernandez, Chris Arrant and Star St. Germain, and Columbus’ own Tom Williams.

One of the first places I saw the project announced was at The Beat, and man, there are times when I have no idea what Heidi MacDonald is talking about:


Amos is one of early adapters in the comics/media crossover trend, due to her friendship with Neil Gaiman (the two were introduced by Hoseley) resulting in many lyrical and comical mentions of one another over the years.


What exactly is “the comics/media crossover trend?” Comics is a medium. Is she referring to Amos’ music as “media” and comics as “comics?” And regardless, I don’t understand the implication that Amos is “one of the early adapters.” Amos has never written or drawn any comics, and these are the first comics stories based on her music. She read comics and was friends with Neil Gaiman, who is rumored to have based Delerium’s final look and personality on Amos, but does that make one an “earl adapter?”

Sometimes I get a real “Biff! Bam! Pow! Holy Watchmen Batman, Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” vibe from The Beat, which is odd, given that it’s a comics-specific blog, you know?




And speaking of Tori Amos and comics… I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Nathan Rabin’s “My Year of Flops” series at The Onion AV Club. It’s exactly what I think criticism should be—so well-written and entertaining to read, it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen or plan to see the film being discussed, because the review itself has great value in and of itself. Anyway, Rabin gets around to one of the worst comic book adaptations of all time, Howard the Duck.

And he points out that Tori Amos was up for the part of Beverly.

Which means this could have been Tori Amos:



Or, worse yet, this:



Rabin also spends some verbiage belittling Y Kant Tori Read, Amos' pre-solo career rock band that really wasn’t so bad. I kind of liked that album! In fact, I liked more songs on it than on Scarlet’s Walk. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Well, I’m a little ashamed, but not so ashamed that I won’t admit it anyway.





Dear Dan DiDio.... Last week’s “DC Nation” column saw Dan DiDio in teasing mode, presenting an annotated Christmas list from various DC characters.

Let’s parse it at exhausting length, shall we?

Superman— A new place to call home.

Lately it seems like Superman goes through Fortresses of Solitude like water, but since Geoff Johns and Kurt Busiek so recently gave him his latest (basically the one from Johns’ sometimes co-writer Richard Donner’s Superman movies), I’m going to guess he’s keeping those digs for a while.

And I doubt he’ll be moving out of Metropolis any time soon, as Busiek’s done a lot of work building the city up, with new geography and city services and such like.

So, I’m going to guess this refers to some sort of New Krypton, as the two Superman writers seem very interested in new Kryptonian history.

Superman Prime— A time to call my own.

I don’t care. Sorry.

Batman— More time.

I’m assuming this is just a joke about how busy Batman is, and if it’s a tease of some kind, it’s pretty vague. I mean, at any point in his fictional career Batman could have asked Santa and/or Paul Levitz for the exact same thing.

Robin— A memorial for Stephanie Brown

This is the one that has clearly set the most tongues a-wagging, or at least fingers a-typing. The request is of course scratched out, with the words “Can’t Do!” atop of it. For someone who claims not to pay too much attention to the messageboards and blogosphere, DiDio sure knows how to tweak the online fans, doesn’t he? Assuming he’s not just being a dick, this seems to be another strong indicator that Spoiler’s on her way back to life.

Does that mean the godawful costume the girl going by the name “Violet” in upcoming Robin solicits is a resurrect Spoiler? Ugh. If that’s what she’s going to be wearing, maybe she should stay dead.

Come on Mr. DiDio, didn’t you see Project Rooftop’s redesign Stephanie Brown thing a few months back? Particularly Dean Trippe’s wonderful design?

Anyway, I’m more interested in the fate of Spoiler as an observer than a fan at this point. I never much cared for her outside the pages of Batgirl. The fact that she died at all, or that Batman never gave her a monument never really upset me, certainly not as much as I was upset by the fact that she died in a terrible story that didn’t make a lick of sense, and that she died from being tortured within an inch of her life and then from having Bruce Wayne’s lifelong friend and pacifist Doctor Leslie Thompkins deny her care to teach Bruce a lesson.

God…

I like the idea of Robin asking for a memorial for his dead ex-girlfriend for Christmas from Dan DiDio, though. If Tim Drake wants a memorial to Stephanie, then it’s easy to imagine some pretty uncomfortable conversations around the table at Wayne Manor, with Tim being all like, “Sooooo, have you given any more thought to erecting that memorial to Stephanie yet?” and Bruce being, “Oh look, it’s the Bat-signal! Gotta go! We’ll talk later!”

Batgirl— My very own mini-series

This one made me laugh. Assuming they’re talking about the current Batgirl, Cassandra Cain, she had her own monthly ongoing series which was selling adequately (not great, but not any worse than much of DC’s DCU line) but it was cancelled to…I forget the exact phrasing, but it was along the lines of streamlining the Bat-books (Apparently by just two titles; Batgirl and Gotham Knights).

So a new miniseries featuring a character who, just a few short years ago, was strong enough to carry her own title, seems like an odd move. After all, DC spent the last few years chasing away her relatively few fans and sabotaging the character as much as possible*, and now they’re looking to capitalize on the severely diminished returns for 4-6 months?

Red Tornado— A new body and a family to call my own

As Patrick pointed out in the comments section the week I reviewed JLoA #15 (the issue in which Red Tornado’s body was destroyed), his body is supposedly indestructible.

And that’s not, like, some obscure trivia from mentioned in a single issue of the pre-Crisis volume of Justice League of America or anything, but it was, like, the whole point of Brad Meltzer’s first arc on this very series, “The Tornado’s Path.” The new, smart Solomon Grundy wanted to put his brain into Red Tornado’s immortal android body precisely because it couldn’t be destroyed, and thus Grundy would never have to die and return to life again.

I find it almost as amusing as it is irritating that not only did Dwayne McDuffie, the JLoA writer who followed Meltzer, not really read Meltzer’s stuff too closely, but neither, apparently, did DiDio.

Not sure what to make of the “a family to call my own” comment. Does that mean in addition to Red Tornado’s wife and daughter, who also appeared throughout “The Tornado’s Path?” That story was just last year. It was the best-selling thing DC published. Surely DiDio read it, right?

Green Arrow— My son back

Black Canary— My husband’s son back

Man, this list of teases is terrible for my blood pressure!

Here’s hoping that having the stars of Green Arrow/Black Canary ask for Green Arrow’s son Green Arrow back means that Connor Hawke isn’t really dead, and/or that these items tease a story about bringing him back and are not, in fact, intimating that the next few months of Green Arrow/Black Canary will be devoted to mourning his death.

Whether he’s dead-dead or just temporarily dead, in either case it shows writer Judd Winick’s lack of imagination. When Connor Hawke was shockingly killed at the end of the last issue, he either seemed to die but will be back soon (like Oliver Queen in the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special of a few months ago), or he actually died, like all those characters in Judd Winick’s Titans East Special #1 from a few weeks back.

Darkseid— The Fifth World

Don’t care to the point in which this is part of Countdown, but may start caring if this is an element of Final Crisis, as the writer of the latter, Grant Morrison, mentioned the coming of the Fifth World back during the climax of his JLA run.

The Rogues— Revenge!! (A sentiment shared by all the villains in SALVATION RUN)

Revenge? For what? Instead of giving them the death penalty or putting them in jail for life for the murder of Bart Allen (in addition to any and/all other crimes they might have committed), The Rogues were handed their favorite clothes, their very powerful weapons, and then sent to a planet free of superheroes to do whatever the hell they want until one of the many super-brilliant mad scientists there figures a way to spring them all. I really fail to see the drama—or logic—in Salvation Run.

Mongul— A ring collection

The last issue of Green Lantern Corps ended with Mongul getting a Sinestro Corps ring, and I imagine he’ll therefore be fighting some ring-slinging Green Lanterns soon.

DiDio’s end of the year interview with Matt Brady at Newsarama was illustrated by a piece of art depicting Mongul with three different colored rings.

The rings in the image all have the Green Lantern symbol, rather than the various pictograms the new rings are supposed to bear. Because of that, it reminded me of the Mark Waid masterminded epic The Silver Age from a few years back, in which Lex Luthor and his villainous allies created their own special power-rings, which looked and worked like Green Lantern rings, but were different colors.

I’m really surprised that event hasn’t been collected into trade yet, given how many great/popular writers and artists were involved, and that so much of recent DC history has been driven by the characters it featured (The Silver Age League including Green Arrow and Black Canary, Elongated Man, The Secret Society of Supervillains and so on, plus a one-off iteration of the Seven Soldiers of Victory).

(An aside: I’m apparently not the only one who noticed the similarity between Geoff Johns’ rainbow corps and Waid’s Silver Age story, or the fact that the later is overdue for trade collection. I am, however, the slower to post about it one).

Geo-Force— Rock samples from another planet

Don’t really care at all, but I wonder if this will have anything to do with GF’s mysterious power problems Meltzer introduced but never resolved in JLoA.

The Question— A visit from an old friend

The real Question coming back to life? Nah, probably just Batwoman appearing in one of the issues of the Crime Bible series…

Speaking of which, I don’t see Batwoman requesting her series starting any time soon. Or Manhunter requesting her series resuming any time soon, either.

Booster Gold— The Blue and Gold back in action

Seconded!

Looks like that’s what we’ll be getting in the next few issues of Booster Gold, March’s issue of JLU and March’s issue of Blue Beetle.

I get the feeling Ted Kord won’t actually be coming back for real at the end of this upcoming Booster Gold story, but, as I’ve said before, I hope he does because it’s only a matter of time before someone brings him back to life, so better to have it happen through the agency of a time-travelling Booster Gold than via something silly like, I don’t know, magic herbs, as in colleague Ice’s recent silly resurrection.

Lord Satanus— Control of Hell

Neron— Control of Hell

DiDio’s notation has arrows pointing to their requests, with the words “Uh-oh, this could be a problem.”

Sounds like this refers to Keith Giffen’s upcoming limited series about a war for control of hell, which he discussed with fellow Columbusite and Newsaramite Vaneta Rogers during an interview posted the other day.

Giffen’s an experienced storyteller, but man, I’d kinda hate to have an assignment like this. After all, stories of power struggles in DC’s Hell have been previously told by the likes of Garth Ennis, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.






*Batgirl appearances since the end of her own series, but before this month’s Outsiders #2?Robin: Boy Wanted written by Adam Beechen, who left the title shortly afterwards; “Titans East” by Geoff Johns and Beechen, the conclusion of which (by Beechen alone) is in the running for the worst DC story ever published (I think it’s a tie with JLoA #10, the conclusion of “The Lighting Saga”), a few pages of World War III by Keith Champagne and/or John Ostrander and/or whoever gave those poor bastards a set of plot points and said, “Here, make a script of some kind out of this, would ya?”, and the issue of Supergirl in which this happens:

These are not graphic novels: Patrick McDonnell's children's books

Since today is a Wednesday without comic books, it seems like a good day to blog about something other than comics—in this case a couple of children books which are written and drawn by a cartoonist.

Patrick McDonnell is probably best known for his daily striip Mutts, a domestic comedy about a couple of pets, including dog Earl and cat Mooch.

It's been a while since I've spent any serious quality time with a Mutts collection, but I remember it well enough that I'm confident in saying that in just about any funnies page which it appears, it's probably one of (if not the) best strips there. McDonnell is, simply put, a hell of a cartoonist, one who gets an unbelievable amount of information and emotion out of the very few lines he puts down per panel.

He's created four children's books so far, and I wouldn't be surprised if he continues to make more, based on the quality of the work and the reception they've received. Tonight, we'll take a look at two of them.

First up is the lesser of the two, Art (Little, Brown; 2006).


This is a very, very slight book, one that could easily have been reduced to the size of, say, a one page comic strip, but then, it is a children's picture book. It's about art, with both a capital A and a lower-case one.

Here are the first two pages, for a clearer idea of what I mean:





That's followed by one mixing the two images, captioned "Art and his art." See, Art is an artist.

After that set-up, the book is dominated by images of Art running around the big, open, white spaces of the squarish-pages, usually featuring a single image and phrase per page, drawing, painting and coloring. These pages are visually interesting, but don't really contain much information or story, beyond showing Art drawing.

The drawings are quite nice though. Here's a detail of one page, in which Art draws a dog:




If you've ever tried it, you know there's nothing harder than drawing something that looks like a little kid drew it. I really like McDonnell's attempt here. It's clearly his art, and yet it's made primitive enough to seem like the work of, say, a young McDonnell.

Anyway, the bulk of the book is just McDonnell messing around, spending time on Art messing around, but here's the Awww-inducing punchline, which I'm about to spoil here. Art's mother puts his work up on the refrigerator door. Why?



Another of McDonnell's children's books is Just Like Heaven (Little, Brown; 2006).


This is a picture book featuring the Mutts stars, and appears to be based on a few strips from the Mutts strip (Examples here).

Mooch takes a nap under a tree, and while he's asleep, a fog rolls in. When he wakes up, he finds himself suddenly surrounded by clouds and comes to what must seem like an obvious conclusion to the mind of a child (or the child-like mind of a cat):



From there, Mooch explores the world around him, the supposition that he's in heaven coloring his perception of it, so that the little everyday details seem both more dramatic and more benevolent. Part of it is merely appreciating what usually goes unappreciated because it's thought to be mundane rather than divine, but it also allows Mooch to confront problems. For example, when a chained bulldog begins barking at him, his first thought was to run away, unitl he wondered how barking bulldog/cat relations go in heaven, and he ends up hugging the problems away.

Like the very best childrens' books, it's both simple and beautiful in its message and in its execution. Each page is pretty airy, and used like one giant panel of a comic strip. A usually rather small image fills the lower portion of the page, the edges bleeding into the whiteness of the page or the gray clouds of the fog, while short, declarative text runs across the top. McDonnell's art is, as usual, almost calligraphic in its simplicity, and appears even more so in this book than in the comic strips, where his lines are more crowded by the tiny boxes. Here, the boxes are gigantic, giving even greater power to his few well-chosen lines.

This is a children's book that belongs on every child's book shelf. And, I imagine, most adult's.

Shipping delays make superheroes cry

"There, there Superman. Tell your friend Wonder Woman what's bothering you."

"It's just-- it's just that today's Wednesday, the day new comic books usually come out and I get to spend time with all my fans. And this week, there are no new comics today. Sniff!"

"It's okay, Superman, it's okay. It's just for the holiday. The people who work in the warehouses that store the comics and the shipping companies that get comics to shops every week deserve a day off to spend Christmas with their families too, right? And besides, it's only one day. There will be new comics on Thursday, just like on all the other holiday weeks throughout the year..."

"No! Not this time. This week, new comics don't come out until Friday! Sob!"



"R-really? A two-day delay? W-well at least it's only this one week, right? Right?"

A Visit From Bat-Santa

And yet it's still more exciting then Mark Millar's original ending...

(From What If? Civil War #1's "What If Iron Man Lost the Civil War?" by Chrstos Gage and Harve Tolibao)

Soon...

Weekly Haul: December 19th

Action Philosophers Giant-Sized Thing Vol. 3 (Evil Twin Comics) Featuring a back-cover blurb from yours truly! I’m glad to see writer Fred Van Lente’s name popping up in Marvel Comics solicitations so often these days for two reasons. First, it means more Marvel comics are going to be well-written and fun to read, and second, I hope the wider audience he’ll be reaching through his work on stuff like Hulk comics will help lead fans back to he and artist Ryan Dunlavey’s Action Philsophers! comics, because these things are—and I don’t say this lightly—brilliant.





Batman and the Outsiders #3 (DC Comics) The cover reads “Batman and the Outsiders vs. Justice League of America” and shows characters from each team duking it out, while writer Chuck Dixon entitles this story “Throwdown,” so you just know this issue is going to be a slam-bang super-throwdown between the two super-teams, right? Right?

Not so much, actually.

First, forget that cover. Red Arrow, Black Canary and Martian Manhunter don’t actually appear in the issue, and Thunder doesn’t suit up or fight anyone, let alone her dad; she just kinda lounges around Outsiders HQ, which is apparently still just a lavish penthouse apartment.

The League and Outsiders do kinda sorta come into rather unconvincing conflict, though. Batman is having Dr. Kirk “Man-Bat” Langstrom’s wife Francine analyze the captured OMAC unit for him, when in bust three of the newest and greenest members of the League—Hawkgirl, Geo-Force and Black Lightning—to tell Batman they should be the ones analyzing the OMAC unit, and they get slapped around a bit.

Meanwhile, Thunder thrusts out her tits while talking about all the things she and Grace can share (Urgh…one of these girls has to leave this book STAT; there’s only so much lesbian banter I can take when I know it’s being written buy a guy who loudly proclaims how wrong gay banter in comic books is) and Cassandra “Batgirl” Cain walks around naked.

Writer Chuck Dixon still seems to be arranging things in order to launch this series, and it’s admittedly starting to get kind of fun. I liked Geo-Force getting “transferred” like being a superhero was some kind of corporate job, and while the Batgirl scene was…weird, at least Dixon seems to know something about the character (she’s quiet, creepy and was horribly abused growing up). Plus, that was a pretty dynamite cliffhanger, and I’m really curious as to who those two people are.

The art is again by artist Julian Lopez, returning after a one-issue break (maybe if this series wasn’t on a biweekly schedule for some reason, it wouldn’t need two pencillers?) and it’s pretty solid. Lopez is a very strong storyteller, and gets in some neat expressions. Not sure if giving Katana a red mask in the first two issues was a coloring mistake or if giving her a yellow one in this issue was the mistake, but I liked the all-red outfit much better.




Birds of Prey #113 (DC) After a four-issue, time-killing stint by Tony “The Bridge” Bedard, Gail Simone’s replacement Sean McKeever reports for duty. The results are a little disappointing; not Countdown or Teen Titans disappointing, but not what I was hoping for from a writer with as impressive a body a work as McKeever has amassed. I say this, of course, as a fan of the series and characters more than as an objective critic or anything here.

The story is actually constructed pretty well, and does a decent job of introducing all of the characters for any new readers in the audience, getting all of their voices fairly right (save two, whom we’ll get to in a bit) and including an action scene followed by a big, crazy action scene.

Barbara “Oracle” Gordon, and her bare bones, Canary-less team of Huntress, Lady Blackhawk and Misfit are dealing with the teenage mobster’s daughter from Gail Simone’s second OYL arc, who has gotten control of a superweapon and brought it to Metropolis, while Superman is conveniently out of town. It goes off, countless civilians are dead, and it’s all the Birds’ fault—specifically Misfit’s, for setting it off, and Barbara’s I guess, for having Misfit around in the first place.

If McKeever is trying to push the team out of Metropolis and give them a new status quo, this makes a certain amount of sense (and Barbara Gordon in any city other than Gotham, or maybe D.C., will always seem a little off), but not enough.

Oracle still comes across as an amateur fuck-up, particularly when protesting that they can’t be expected to “call in the cavalry for every little thing.” That’s Oracle’s whole deal—she’s got every superhero in the DCU on speed-dial and uses them to play chess against the world on her behalf. Also, countless deaths seems like the wrong thing to call a “little thing.” Her protest comes while Superman is castigating her, complete with finger-pointing, doing the whole Batman speech, save for using the phrase “my city.” (The scene actually played like all of those Superman guest spots back during the “King of the World” story arc).

It was off enough that this would seem like a good time to leave the series, if old Blackhawk villain/super-pirate Killer Shark wasn’t on the cover of the very next issue.

On the art end of things, the title remains exactly as strong as it was when Simone was still writing. Penciller Nicola Scott and inker Doug Hazlewood strike a pitch-perfect balance between realism and exaggerated superheroics. That is, the action scenes sing, the character look bigger than life, and yet they still look like real people in real clothes.

I do hope this book gets very good very fast, as I’d hate to see it get cancelled (it’s usually less than ten thousand units away from cancellation level), and I’d love to see McKeever get a real hit on his hands at DC (Well, one other than Countdown, which sells well, but which only three people in the world will admit publicly enjoying—and they go by fake names on messageboards).





Justice League of America #16 (DC) After devoting a four-issue story arc to setting-up the already begun Salvation Run miniseries, a tie-in to maxi-series Coutndown, writer Dwayne McDuffie’s very next story in JLoA is a prequel to a Tangent miniseries beginning in March. Seriously, it even ends with the words “To be continued in Tangent: Superman’s Reign.” It occupies the first 15 pages of this issue, illustrated by Joe Benitez and Victor Llamas.

It’s followed by a seven-page back-up by writer Alan Burnett and artist Allan Jefferson (who, if you’re wondering, is much better than both Benitez and “regular” penciller Ed Benes) which also alludes to Salvation Run.

I can kind of see the logic of DC turning their best-selling title into a sort of preview book pushing other books. After all, more readers read this title than any other, so if you’re going to try advertising other series within a series, you might as well go with the one that gets the widest exposure, right?

The problem is, it’s incredibly self-destructive, as the reason JLoA is so popular is because it was being written by Brad Metlzer for a year. McDuffie’s less popular but also much better, meaning he has a fighting chance of keeping JLoA a top-seller, but keeping that 100,000+ audience month in and month out is going to be hard when people start to realize they’re reading a Countdown-like book, one that exists not to tell its own story, but to suggest other stories to readers.

To zero in a bit on the story itself, however, it’s pretty short and simple: The green lantern from 1997’s skip-week Tangent event masterminded by Dan Jurgens swaps a thief targeting Guy Gardner’s storage unit out for the Tangent Universe’s Atom, a handful of Leaguers investigate, and then the lantern swaps them back. Of the nine heroes on the cover, only two appear within (Tanget Flash and Benitez’s gargoyle-faced John Stewart).

I’ve been pretty cruel in discussing Benitez’ art on JLoA #14 but, to be fair, it was really, really, really bad. Here there are still a ton of problems with the art, including terrible lay-outs, a derivative style that seems to blend the worst of Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane, a failure to match up with the script (Roy mentions his quiver being destroyed in one panel, while the image shows his bow destroyed but quiver fine; in a conversation with a police officer, a second police officer’s voice comes from an unseen, never introduced character off-panel) and images that it’s hard to believe even exist in a comic being published in the year 2007. (It’s times like these I wish I had my own scanner; check out the image of Roy in the lower right hand corner of page 11 if you have a copy of your own, and please note how much his boots and belt changed in the space of a page).

That said, this time Benitez’s art at least seems a lot less lazy, as he actually draws backgrounds. Not in every panel or every page, mind you, but compared to his work on #14, which looked like an avante garde stage play? These backgrounds are positively intricate.

Given that this story features two characters from a universe created in 1997 and 1998, perhaps using an artist with such an unapologetic ‘90s art style makes a certain amount of sense, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to use someone actually involved with the Tangent line provide the art this issue? Jurgens drew The Atom one-shot, J.H. Williams III drew the Green Lantern books, and Gary Frank and Paul Pelletier did the Flash books. The other pencil artists involved were Tom Grummett, Sean Chen, Angel Unzueta, Mike McKone, Butch Guice, Joe Phillips, Vince Giarrano, Darryl Banks, Jan Duursema, Dusty Abell and Matt Haley. All of the above are better artists than Benitez (in terms of storytelling; I realize everyone’s tastes in style varies dramatically), so not only would any of the above turned in better work, they also would have been more appropriate in capturing the particular feel of the comics being referenced here.




The Incredible Hulk #112 (Marvel Comics) Marvel’s official solicitations refer to this book as The Incredible Herc and the cover itself is a little vague on that matter (the “Hulk” part of the logo has “Herc” spray-painted over it), but I’m sticking the title as it appears in the fine print. Besides, you can’t change the title of a book drastically but leave the numbering; that’s just insane (No offense, Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis and Hawkgirl).

Anyway, this is the first real post-“World War Hulk” issue of the series, ceding the spotlight completely to Hercules and Amadeus Cho, who were more or less the stars of the monthly during WWH anyway, when the Hulk-centric parts of writer Greg Pak’s storyline filled the main World War Hulk miniseries.

Joining regular writer Pak here is co-writer Fred Van Lente, and together the pair do a wonderful job of somewhat subtly setting Herc and Cho up in the same big strong guy/punk kid dynamic of the Hulk/Rick Jones stories, as well as the brawn/brains dynamic of the Hulk/Bruce Banner relationship, and having them on the run from the authorities (here SHIELD and the Ares-led Mighty/Republican Avengers, who are sore at them for taking the Hulk’s side during the war). Additionally, they tie Hercules’ situation here to his mythological past, committing a crime and engaging in labors to atone for it. And Pak and Van Lente manage all of this without seemingly laboring at all (Get it? Hercules? Labor? Ah, nevermind). It’s also a pretty damn fun romp with scenes of Herc hitting the old goblet pretty hard and breaking a lot of stuff.

With witty dialogue and artists Khoi Pham and Stephane Peru’s nice art (with occasionally scratchy ink lines and a gorgeous scene depicting the climax of WWH all in silhouette, this is all around good comics. I wasn’t reading the title before the change in protagonists, so I don’t know how welcome or irritating this might be fore people who are picking up The Incredible Hulk specifically to read about the Hulk, but I really dug this issue, and am looking forward to the next one.




Marvel Adventures Hulk Vol. 1: Misunderstood Monster (Marvel) And besides, if you are missing the green goliath, this week sees the release of the first Marvel Adventures digest collecting his adventures. Having sampled the series last week with #6 on the strength of the Namor appearance, I thought I’d catch up via collections, and man, this one is pretty great.

First up, it’s only seven bucks, but it collects the first four issues of the series. If you bought ‘em in singles, that would run you $12, but this is only $6.99. Talk about value. Oh, and the stories inside? They’re pretty damn good.

I admit I didn’t care for the first one, which was basically just a dry retread of the Hulk’s origin, modernizing it a bit (General Ross is concerned about insurgents, not Communists), making Rick Jones an intern, Betty Ross a scientist and adding a monkey into the mix. But #2-#4 are really quite great, as Hulk/Banner, Rick Jones and their pet monkey Monkey are on the run from General Ross and seeking a cure for Banner’s Hulk affliction.

The second issue guest-stars Madrox the Multiple Man of X-Factor Investigations, and I was surprised to see him in an MA book which kept the look, feel, voice and powers of the Peter David iteration of the character, right down to the noir movie obsession. This was probably the best Madrox story I’ve read since David’s original miniseries (I dropped X-Factor as it got too X-Menny recently). Writer Paul Benjamin writes a sharp script, in which one of Madrox’s dupes hangs around on fire escapes narrating out loud, while the other does his detective thing for Banner. An accident gives the Hulk Madrox’s powers, leading to a bravura sequence in which New York is over run with hundreds of Hulks with varying personalities.

Next up is a team-up with The Radioactive Man, who rides the rails with our heroes engaging in nerdy science talk with Banner while alienating Jones. And finally there’s an issue in which Ross hires both Madrox and The Radioactive Man to help him apprehend The Hulk.

Benjamin doesn’t seem to have a regular artist to work with here, at least, not all the way through pencilers David Nakayama and inker Gary Martin handle three of the stories (and do an incredible job; they seem above average in skill for the MA line, and by their last two stories were actively reminding me of Dale Eaglesham), and Juan Santacruz does another issue.

That’s five issues of the series I’ve read now, three of them were pretty good, one of them was excellent, and another wasn’t so hot. I’d definitely be adding this to my pull list—if the digests weren’t such a great vaule. As is, I think I’ll be following this via digest from now on. I just hope Benjamin sticks around; Jeff Parker broke my heart when he left MA Avengers…




Special Forces #2 (Image Comics) While the first issue of Kyle Baker’s balls-out war satire involved a lot of set-up, including introducing a bunch of characters who wouldn’t survive the first issue, this one zeroes in on Felony as our protagonist, and is mostly occupied with a few action scenes, in which our scantily clad heroine, her clothes shrinking even more, must shoot her way through a building full of foes, keep her autistic fellow survivor alive, wrestle an equally naked bad guy, and then face a car bomb. It’s great stuff but then, it’s Kyle Baker; that guy doesn’t make bad comics, does he?




Superman #671 (DC) Okay yes, Grant Morrison is probably the best Superman writer at the moment, producing the very best Superman comics available over in All-Star Superman. But he has a somewhat unfair advantage there; that stuff is out-of-continuity, so Morrison’s free to do pretty much whatever he wants. Poor Busiek has to deal with crap like Superman and Lois having a foster son from the Phantom Zone, and Lana Lang being divorced from former President of the United States Pete Ross and so on—it’s like he’s writing this thing with one hand tied behind his back.

And yet he still manages to write an incredibly powerful Superman, one with a brilliant mind and crazy-powerful super-senses (he uses his nose like Wolverine here, but it’s attached to a brain that can identify, like, every base chemical he smells), and come up with fun challenges to give his godlike Superman physical challenges that instill the confrontations with at least a veneer of danger.

He also, like Morrison, loves the Silver Age, and manages to transplant plot elements from that era into the modern DCU without it seeming at all retro. This issue involves Lana Lang becoming the Insect Queen on the moon (sorta), and a very, very busy Superman fretting over the things in his life he can’t help, like having broken Lana’s heart or the fact that her marriage to Pete is something he can’t save, despite his powers.

He also wears a baseball uniform to pitch a super-fast fastball over the plate, which he then bats out of orbit. For charity.

Busiek fills the issue with genuine drama and actually thrilling action, lots of science talk and plenty of elbows to fans (I like that he remembers that Gateway City exists, for example, and that Luthor’s desk form Morrison/Quitely’s JLA: Earth-2 original graphic novel is the same one Lana sits in now that she’s the CEO of Luthor’s old company).

The pencil artist here is Peter Vale, and he does everything Busiek does with words with his art, which is exactly what a comic book artist should be doing. His bug-monsters are scary and threatening, his Superman is powerful and determined, his women are sexy, his characters have a full range of emotions, and he works in lots of fun little details, like worried looks on the face of the catcher and bat boy, and designing a logo for Metropolis’ baseball team.





What If? Civil War #1 (Marvel) Tony Stark is milling around a graveyard, mourning the death of his friend-turned-foe Captain America, when up walks a tiny little Watcher to tell him stories about alternate universes. That’s the set up, written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Marko Djurdjevic, who also provides the Civil War inspired cover (and whose work resembles that of Steve McNiven and company’s enough that it makes for a particularly potent CW riff).

This is just the framing sequence, however, and the two stories don’t look quite as good.

The first and lesser story is by Kevin Grevioux, penciled by one-name artist Gustavo and inked by Gustavo and three others. It asks the question “What if Captain America led all the heroes against registration?” and it posits a world in which Stark dies before Stamford, and Cap is therefore able to rally everyone against the U.S. government. So it’s basically the Marvel Universe against just Maria Hill, James Rhodes, Henry Gyrich, some Sentinels and a ton of Clors.

It’s pretty boring, actually. Grevioux suffers from the same thing that sinks a lot of these stories—it’s just too much story to squeeze into so few pages, so much of it reads like a summary. Gustavo’s style is much more exaggerated and cartoony than McNiven’s, and this doesn’t look much like Civil War; his drawings of the FF in morning are particularly hilarious, when, of course, the scenes are meant to be serious.

Much beter is the second story, “What If Iron Man Lost the Civil War?” which isn’t phrased in a way that actually reflects what it deals with. But then calling it “What If the Marvel Heroes Who Starred in Civil War Remained Heroic and Consistent With Their Previous Portrayals?” might have been perceived as too insulting to Mark Millar, even if it were a more accurate title.

This one’s written by Christos Gage, who wisely skips a lot of recap, assuming readers are familiar with the beats of Civil War (and if you’re not, why on earth are you bothering with this book anyway?) and basically has Cap decide not to zap Tony in that silly burning warehouse trap and Iron Man throwing himself in front of Clor’s lighting bolt, saving the life of Goliath. Seeing a killer clone of their friend sent to murder their other friends, both sides team up against Clor, and then figure out an extremely easy to figure out compromise in which war is averted. It’s not as melodramatic as Millar’s Civil War plot, on account of it being happier, but it is a hell of a lot more logical.

The art here is by Harvey Tolibao, and seems a lot more appropriate to the subject matter. It’s not quite as static or glossy as McNiven’s, but it’s not incongruent with it either.

And the last two pages of the Gage/Tolibao story, while not as completely hilarious as the last two pages of What If? Annihilation, are still pretty funny in a Captain America and Iron Man are totally gay for each other kind of way.


Wolverine: Firebreak (Marvel) Mike Carey and Scott Kolins seem to be courting a glowing review from Chris Sims. Not only do they include a Wolverine versus bear fight in their lead feature, but it’s a Wolverine on fire versus a bear on fire fight. The rest of that story’s pretty so-so, but this issue has a pretty cool back-up, featuring Vasilis Lolos art. For a more long-winded review from me, check out Newsarama, which provided me with a review pdf from Marvel. And hey, did you know Chris’ Invincible Super-Blog was the fourth google hit under the search “Superheroes fighting animals.” Hard to believe it was that far down…

Marvel's March previews reviewed

A few weeks back, the Comics Should Be Good blog asked if the Spider-marriage dissolution via pact with the devil to save Aunty May's last year or two of life was a dumb idea, or perhaps the dumbest idea. At the time, it sure seemed like the dumbest idea ever, but has Marvel managed to top it? There's certainly a strong contender in the crop of books they're releasing this March*. Join me as I sift through them, won't you? You can find the full list here, and my commentary on the highlights and lowlights below.




AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #552
Written by BOB GALE
Pencils & Cover by PHIL JIMENEZ
Variant Cover by ADI GRANOV
BRAND NEW DAY continues with two new web-slingin’ creators: Oscar-nominated screenwriter Bob (Back to the Future) Gale and artist extraordinaire Phil (NEW X-MEN, Infinite Crisis) Jimenez! What starts as a petty theft from a local Soup Kitchen turns into a chase that results in the birth of a brand-freaking-new Spidey villain – and we mean “Freak” literally! Plus: more JJJ! More Daily Bugle – oops, we mean DB! Repercussions from the actions of new villain, Menace! Curt Connors! And – what you’ve really been waiting for, true believer – Peter Parker does his own laundry! Will those stains come out? And what ARE those stains anyway? Find out in “Just Blame Spider-Man!”

Wait, I thought MJ did Spidey’s laundry? At least, that’s what I gathered from that one comiquette.






Captain America as Peter Pan—the worst idea ever?

Actually, if they cast the Grim Reaper as Captain Hook, cast Tigra as Tiger Lily (and call her "Tigra Lily"), Warpath, Wyatt Wingfoot and Thunderbird as her tribe, use Stingray, Namor, Namora and Namorita as mermaids, have a Red Skull Rock...okay, maybe this has a little potential. But a British fairy story character wearing a Captain America costume made out of leaves? Come on now, Cebulski; there are limits to this shit.




Hmm…not really feeling the Sue and Johnny’s short-sleeves there. The FF costumes are so damn hard to tweak and not look wrong, given how classic and iconic their originals are. Other than making them gradually tighter, there’s not a whole lot of changes that have been done to them over the years that seemed right.

Looks like Hitch is getting better with The Thing, who doesn’t look quite so itty bitty on this cover as in the previous month’s.





Confidential to Kaare Andrews: Including the “.com” on your signature kinda ruins the “super-old comic” vibe of the cover. Just saying.




THE LAST DEFENDERS #1 (of 6)
Written by JOE CASEY
Pencils by JIM MUNIZ
Cover by STEVE MCNIVEN
At long last, the team book you've been waiting for! The return of the Defenders! (no trademark infringement here!) And look who's on the team: The mutant Colossus! The sensational She-Hulk! The unpredicatable Blazing Skull! An all-new lineup led by the enigmatic Nighthawk! Injected into the heart of the modern Marvel Universe, the Defenders have been reformed to serve a specific policital purpose...but is there a greater destiny in store for this crew? It's hi-octane superheroics mainlined right into your fanboy brain!

Oh man…The Defenders are by far my favorite Marvel team, but it’s “The Big Four” that make them so. It looks like this is going to be Big Four-less, plus be part of the Initiative, despite the fact that the line-up includes someone who sued and fought Tony Stark over registration, someone who fought against him before changing sides because he was a big pussy, and someone who declared neutrality during the civil war. Huh.

I do like the fact that Casey assembled a team that has some kinda sorta versions of the real Defeders’ Big Four. You’ve got your shiny silver guy, your green goliath and…um…your guy who was alive during World War II? I don’t know, I’ll give it a shot; it can’t be any worse than 2002’s The Order was.




LOGAN #1 (of 3)Written by BRIAN K. VAUGHAN. Art & Cover by EDUARDO RISSO. Superstar artist Eduardo Risso (100 Bullets) joins critically acclaimed writer Brian K. Vaughan (TV's LOST, Y: The Last Man) for a unique take on the man who's the best there is at what he does. Finally armed with long-lost memories from his past, Wolverine returns to one of his first battlefields to settle an old score in an all-new adventure with a shocking revelation about the man known as Logan.

This sounds a lot more like the sort of story I’d expect to see in a book like Wolverine: Origins, which doesn’t ever sound like it ever actually has anything to do with Wolverine’s origins. Still, the last BKV miniseries I read was quite excellent (Dr. Strange: The Oath), and I do like Risso’s art, so I’ll definitely check this issue out.




MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #34
Written by PAUL TOBIN
Penciled by DAVID HAHN
Cover by TOM GRUMMETT
Ahh, Reed Richards. Ever absent-minded. When the Fantastic Four helps to raise money for a block renovation, Reed runs an "I'll fix anything!" booth, and in between putting booster rockets on mopeds and laser cannons in wristwatches, he sort of, you know, accidentally fixes the Mad Thinker's android. Oops. Now it's the Mad Thinker and his Awesome Android versus the Fantastic Four and some toasters. Yeah, I said toasters.

First off, The Mad Thinker’s Awesome Android is —well it’s right there in the name, isn’t it. And the FF vs. toasters? That’s also awesome. But what pushes this from “might want” to “must have” is the artist—David Hahn?! This David Hahn?

Fantastic.




MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #11
Written by Fred Van Lente
Penciled by Graham Nolan
Cover by FRANCIS TSAI
The Living Laser is back, and having merged with the aurora borealis, he's laying waste to the Great White North. Iron Man had better call in the cavalry! Wait, no--the Mounties! No, better yet--Canada's greatest super heroes, ALPHA FLIGHT!

Another MA book with a awesome sounding plot, written by Fred “Totally Wrote Action Philosophers! Which Was Like The Best Comic Ever” Van Lente, and featuring art by the excellent Graham Nolan, one of the most under-appreciated Batman artists of all time? This might be the first month where I buy all the MA books, depending on what’s in Spidey’s book.

Let’s see…




MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #37
Written by MARC SUMERAK
Penciled by ALE GARZA
Cover by SEAN GORDON MURPHY
They say the best defense is a good offense and Peter Parker doesn't find anyone more offensive than Midtown High's biggest bully, Flash Thompson! When Peter starts taking self-defense classes, he figures he can finally stand up to Flash without giving away his secret life as the Amazing Spider-Man. Too bad the Taskmaster has other plans for our webbed wonder...

And Taskmaster vs. Spider-Man in MA Spider-Man this month! Wow, Marvel Adventures is the new Ultimate Universe!




NOVA #11
Written by DAN ABNETT & ANDY LANNING
Penciled by PAUL PELLETIER
Cover by ALEX MALEEV
Rocketing from the pages of ANNIHILATION: CONQUEST, a new story begins, featuring the debut of new cover artist Alex Maleev (HALO: UPRISING) and new interior artist Paul Pelletier (FANTASTIC FOUR)! Nova finally reaches the end of his quest…but will his techno infection take him out before a surprise former fan–favorite guest–star can attempt to save the day? Before the Human Rocket jets back into the pages of CONQUEST, now is the time to jump onboard and find out why ComicPants.com says “this series just keeps getting better.”

Wait, what? New interior artist Paul Pelletier?" No! Pelletier, your Fantastic Four collaborator Dwayne McDuffie needs you on JLoA. I need you on JLoA. Don’t do this to me…!




PUNISHER #55
Written by GARTH ENNIS
Penciled by GORAN PARLOV
Cover by TIM BRADSTREET
“VALLEY FORGE, VALLEY FORGE: THE SLAUGHTER OF A U.S. MARINE GARRISON AND THE BIRTH OF THE PUNISHER,” PART 1
Garth Ennis concludes his seminal run on PUNISHER -- in style. Thirty-five years ago, the Fifth Cavalry disgorged their troops on an isolated Vietnamese hilltop and was met by a scene of utter devastation. The final body count ran to well over seven-hundred -- almost 200 hundred of them American soldiers. Standing alone amidst the carnage, a sole survivor: Captain Frank Castle, who years later would be known as the most fearsome vigilante to walk the Earth: The Punisher. Now the Punisher is about to face his stiffest test: He’s hunted big game in his day, but none as big as this. Five men with unlimited resources. Men who’d put anything between themselves and the Punisher’s bullet. Men who know exactly who he is…and how to fight him.

I haven’t read a single issue of The Punisher since that one arc about the modern sex slave trade—not because it was bad, but simply because every arc had gotten as predictable as clockwork, and were all going to be available in trade anyway—and yet it still sounds like sad news to hear this is Ennis’ last story. I feel sorry for whatever poor sucker has to follow Ennis, just as I felt a little sorry for poor Matt Fraction when he started War Journal.




WAR IS HELL: THE FIRST FLIGHT OF THE PHANTOM EAGLE #1 (of 5)
Written by GARTH ENNIS
Penciled by HOWARD CHAYKIN
Cover by JOHN CASSADAY
Set against the grim backdrop of Word War I, mysterious aviator Karl Kaufmann arrives on the western front dressed outlandishly and at the controls of his own plane. Overconfident and full of romantic ideals, he has come to fight and kill the Hun. But soon Kaufmann confronts staggering loss and witnesses violence on a scale he has never imagined. In the process, he learns the harsh truth of conflict: war is hell. Written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Howard Chaykin.

Unless I’ve miscounted, this makes the number of comics featuring a pilot protagonist set during one of the world wars that Garth Ennis has written an even 1,000.




ULTIMATES 3 #4 (of 5)
Written by JEPH LOEB
Art & Cover by JOE MADUREIRA & christian lichtner
Who rules the Savage Land? Who could possibly challenge Magneto's authority? How about the Ultimates with special guest Wolverine! Plus: back in NYC, the Wasp makes a discovery that will change everything! The most-talked-about series from superstars Jeph Loeb, Joe Madureira and Christian Lichtner charges toward Ultimatum!

The “most-talked-about series from superstars Jeph Loeb, Joe Madureira and Christian Lichtner?” Isn’t this the only series from superstars Jeph Loeb, Joe Madureira and Christian Lichtner?






Well, at least we know Greg Land didn’t use porn for reference material for this particular piece. Or did he? Oh God, what if he did? What kind of crazy porn is that guy into, where people who look like the mad Titan Thanos are involved?





Doesn’t it look like someone threw a wicked razor-sharp boomerang into Colossus’ head in that image?

Kind of looking forward to this one. I don’t think I’ve seen much of the Ultimate X-Men since…well, the last time they were in Ultimate Spider-Man, probably.





And that’s exactly why I haven’t read an Ultimate X-Men comic in ages. Ultimate Onslaught? Ultimate Stryfe With A Y? What has become of you, Ultimate Universe? Where has all your awesome gone?




WOLVERINE: FIRST CLASS #1 Written by FRED VAN LENTE. Penciled by ANDREA DI VITO. Cover by SALVADOR ESPIN. Return with us again to the early days of the all-new, all-different, X-Men for all-new solo adventures of Wolverine and Kitty Pryde! The next generation of students has arrived at Xavier's School—Colossus, Storm, Nightcrawler, and the mysterious Wolverine—and with them, new teaching methods. Professor X pairs up green recruit Kitty Pryde with the been-everywhere, done-everything vet Logan, and neither of them are all that happy about it. But unless they learn to work together, neither of them will come back from their first mission together alive!

Normally I’d make a joke about Wolverine needing another monthly title, but this one is by Van Lente, is supposedly in the vein of Jeff Parker’s X-Men: First Class, and sounds pretty good.

I don’t really get the title, though. I mean it says “next generation of students’ right there; shouldn’t this technically be “Second Class” then? And wouldn’t Wolverine and Kitty be a better title anyway? I mean, even if you don’t know who Kitty Pryde is, it sounds cute, right?




X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #10 Written by Jeff Parker. Penciled by CLAYTON HENRY. Cover by John Romita Jr.
“Hey Cyclops!”
“Huh?”
“Why’re ya so dang boring?”
“I dunno.”
“Well…if we give ya a whole issue of First Class, do you promise to be cool?”
“Ok.”
“Deal!”

It’s always a good sign when the solicitation for a comic itself is funny. Now I wish I wasn’t trade-waiting this series, because this issue has a sweet cover by John Romita Jr.



*Okay, not really. Said dumb idea is actually in a non-continuity, self-contained miniseries, and not part of the main line Marvel Universe.

DC's March previews reveiwed

Is Infinity Inc cancelled yet? Is a new issue of the supposedly not cancelled Manhunter going to come out in March? How overt is the phallic imagery on the cover of Batman Confidential #15? There’s only one place to find out! DC’s March solicitations, which you can see here.

And the only place you can see my pithy comments on them? That would be right here.




One thing I’ve really come to appreciate after spending much of the month scribbling drawings of Batman on index cards is just how awesome his cape is. It’s huge and black and, if you draw it big and billowy enough, it can be used to obscure pretty much any part of his body you’re not particularly good at drawing. I try to use it to cover up everything except maybe a hand or two.

Tony Daniel knows what I’m talking about. Here he uses it to cover up Batman’s crotch, feet and the entire left side of his body. Hey, I’m not ragging on the guy; sure he’s a shitty pencil artist, but he’s a thousand times better than me, and, like I said, I totally appreciate his taking the exact same shortcuts as me.

My only complaint about his cover? I really think Daniel should have used the cape to cover up more of Batman. Particularly his chest. What the hell kind of shape is that supposed to be? An umbrella? It sure doesn’t look like the regular bat-symbol. Was Batman in a hurry to get dressed, and accidentally grabbed the wrong gray shirt on the way out the cave door or what?




BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #5
Written by Chuck Dixon
Art by Julian Lopez & Bit
Cover by Doug Braithwaite
The Outsiders run into trouble while a recon mission for Batman at a European Space Administration site in North Africa! Meanwhile, tension within the group comes to a head as the Outsiders’ newest member challenges Batman for leadership!

Now with 100% more Geo-Force! I assume he’s the “newsest member” who will challenge Batman for leadership. I also assume he will fail to win leadership. I mean, who on Earth would buy a comic book called Geo-Force and The Outsiders?

I like Doug Braithwaite’s art, and think he makes for a fine cover artist, but I wonder if this is the best team book for him to be working on, given the nature of the team members’ costumes. I think Braithwaite would be better suited to JLoA.





Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!






Yay!




THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #11
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Jerry Ordway
Cover by George Pérez
Superman and Ultraman of the Crime Society…together? What situation could be so dire that it would cause this team-up? Will two men who are the exact opposite of each other be able to work together long enough to save the day? Featuring guest art by Jerry Ordway!

“Guest art?” Noooooooooooo!




COUNTDOWN SPECIAL: ECLIPSO 80-PAGE GIANT
Written by Robert Loren Fleming and John Ostrander
Art by Colleen Doran, Tom Mandrake and Ray Kryssing
Cover by Ryan Sook
Collecting stories from Eclipso #10 Spectre #17-18, shedding light on these pivotal characters from COUNTDOWN!

I already own these comics, so will definitely be passing on this, but I just wanted to point out that the Ostrander/Mandrake Spectre is a great, great, great series (and one that’s almost entirely uncollected in trade), and I really enjoyed the majority of the short-lived Eclispo ongoing.

I’m not sure why DC is bothering to reprint them as part of Countdown, since the current Eclipso kinda breaks the “rules” of Eclipso, but whatever.

I look forward to seeing the Sook cover, too. The one solicited looks like it’s simply a blown up piece of a Mandrake panel.




DC SPECIAL: RAVEN #1
Written by Marv Wolfman
Art and cover by Damion Scott & Robert Campanella
From Marv Wolfman, co-creator of Raven, and maverick penciller Damion Scott (BATGIRL) comes a 5-issue miniseries delving into Raven's past and giving her a new life — but first she must survive the horrors of high school! Can the Titan's empath endure the wave of teen angst at school, especially after someone begins killing students? Emotions are driven sky high thanks to the reappearance of the Psycho Pirate's Medusa mask, and there's no way anyone can contain it once it has fallen into the wrong hands. Titans fans new and old dare not miss this one!

I was super-excited when the Wonder Girl miniseries was announced, as it was being drawn by an artist I really liked and was eager to see more work from, and written by J. Torres, who has a lot of great comics under his belt. And well, I lasted two issues before losing all interest in all the Countdownian, NewGodkillingness of it.

So here's another miniseries featuring a female Titan lead being drawn by an artist I really like and am eager to see more work from, so I would be super-excited, but maybe I should temper that down to an excited.

I love Scott's work, particularly on the later issues of Batgirl (It took him a couple arcs to really find himself, I think). His more recent work on Robin saw his style getting a way from him quite a bit, but I imagine back under Campanella's inks he should be looking good again (The cover's nice). Wolfman's writing, and he knows Raven better than anyone, but I don't know that his old-school writing style is exactly a good match for Scott's new school art style.

There's some more weirdnesses about this book too. Why's it titled with a "DC Special," especially since it's a five issue series? And why's it coming out now? Wouldn't a mini focusing on Raven's new status quo as a teenager have been better in 2004, when Raven was first de-aged to a teenager, staring high school, starring in a popular team title and a well-received cartoon show?




THE FLASH #238
Written by Tom Peyer
Art and cover by Freddie Williams II
“Fast Money” begins! Don’t miss the kickoff of this provocative new storyline by Tom Peyer (HOURMAN), as the Flash is pulled into an intense moral dilemma about superpowers — and Keystone’s plagued by a menace who’s using familiar mind-bending tactics!

Hey, just last week I was wondering why I haven’t seen a credit by Tom Peyer anywhere in a while, and what do you know? He’s taking over—or just filling in on?—The Flash. I haven’t read an issue of this since Infinite Crisis, so bad was the taste left in my mouth by the Flash switch just for switch’s sake, but I’ll probably check this out. Surely the bad taste of the switch will be gone by March, right?




GREEN LANTERN CORPS #22
Written by Chuck Kim
Art and cover by Nelson
Part 2 of CURSE of THE LOST LANTERNS written by HEROES scribe Chuck Kim continues to reveal the missing time between Parallax’s destruction of the Corps and its survivors struggle against the Manhunters and the coming threat of the Sinestro Corps as Boodikka ponders her future as one of the newly anointed Alpha Lanterns. Can her old allies trust her anymore, what secrets does she hold and why does it mean to Hal Jordan?

Chuck Kim? Tomasi just took over the title last week, and they’ve already got another writer coming in? I blame the Hollywood writers’ strike. Pass.




JLA PRESENTS: AZTEK — THE ULTIMATE MAN TP
Written by Grant Morrison & Mark Millar
Art by Stephen Harris, Keith Champagne, Drew Geraci and others
Cover by Howard Porter and John Dell
From writers Grant Morrison (52, BATMAN) and Mark Millar (Ultimates, Civil War) comes Aztek, the visionary hero from the 1990s! In these stories from Aztek: the Ultimate Man #1-10, Aztek fights the forces of evil in Vanity City, where he meets costumed characters including Green Lantern and The Joker!

Well it’s about fucking time. Aztek seems to have come out about a year too early—can you even imagine a Morrison and Millar book being cancelled after a year today?—and I can’t believe it’s taken DC this long to get around to capitalizing on the two writers’ since risen stars. (Morrison was, by that point, already a big name creator, but I think he’s become even more popular since; Millar, meanwhile, went from a guy who wrote really awesome comic books that no one read to really shitty comic books that every one reads).

The series isn’t all that awesome, truth be told. There are a lot of fun concepts at play in it, and Aztek is a really cool hero and a nice addition to the DCU (though he didn’t last all that long), but the art is really rocky, and the storyline is visible flailing through much of the run. Still, I’m all over this. I’ve been looking for the issue guest-starring the JLA since it came out, and I could never find it for less than $10 anywhere.




JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #19
Written by Alan Burnett
Art by Ed Benes & Sandra Hope
Cover by Benes
Don't miss the final chapter of "Salvation," as the JLA turn themselves over to the U.S. government to be sent to prison off-world! What old foe will they have to rely on to save themselves from planet hell?

Hey, remember when DC said Dwayne McDuffie was going to be JLoA's regular writer until he no longer wanted to be? Is McDuffie sick of writing the title already?

Of course, who could blame him, considering JLoA is, by this point, a tie-in to Salvation Run, which is itself a tie-in to Countdown to Final Crisis?

On the plus side, this month's terrible Ed Benes cover is completely ass-less. I'm shocked. Why, by simply showing this exact same image from the opposite direction, like inside the Boom Tube, he could have worked a record-breaking nine asses on a single cover, four of them belonging to females.




JLA BUILD-A-SCENE STATUE: PART 1 Based on the art of Ed Benes. Sculpted by Alterton Bizarre. Ed Benes’ legendary image from the cover of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #7 stands tall as it becomes a multi-part statue! Sold in three parts, each features two of the world’s greatest superheroes and includes a piece of a bonus Red Tornado figure. (To fully assemble Red Tornado, all three Build-a-Scene statues are needed.) All of the pieces slide together to make a complete cover scene in striking 3-D!

And speaking of Benes…

I don’t normally comment on the DC Direct toys and statue stuff, because it usually is all worthy of the same amount of denigration, and I don’t want to be at this all night or anything, but I did want to point out that this solicitation refers to Ed Benes’ cover for JLoA #7, which, you’ll recall, was actually only half an image, with the other half available on a second issue of the exact same comic book, is referred to here as “legendary.” Legendary. As in “something commemorated in a legend” or “appropriate for a legend” or “a story told as history in future generations which may or may not be true.”

A legend. This cover—



Man, “legendary” would be hyperbolic for some of the most famous comic book covers ever, but I think you could get away with it if you’re talking, I don’t know, Spider-Man swinging on the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15 or Superman with that car over his head and the dude freaking out in the corner, but JLoA #7?

Does anyone even like that cover?





JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #43
Written by Keith Giffen
Art by Christopher Jones & Dan Davis
Cover by Jones
An untold tale of the Justice League by 52’s Keith Giffen! Meet the early Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, who want to join the League — because that’s where the big money is! They have much to learn…

Wow, it’s “Blue and Gold” month, I guess. And check it out—written by Keith Giffen!





Kiichi and the Magic BooksWritten and illustrated by Taka Amano. CMX/FLEX COMIX. With his horned head and pointed ears, young Kiichi resembles a demon. When his mother dies, he is ostracized from his village. Alone and with no clue to his true origin, he meets Mototaro, a traveling “Library Man” who goes from town to town, lending out books. When Kiichi spies some magical creatures literally jumping out of the pages of one of these books, he thinks he may be on the way to finding out where he came from. Mototaro and Hana – his young assistant – agree to let Kiichi accompany them. Together, they will encounter strange creatures and adventures while Kiichi tries to find his place in the world.

Gah! Fuck you, Taka Amano! I was working on something with a similar premise, and now it turns out that there’s a manga series already done on the subject! And, since it’s an English translation being reprinted here in the West, it’s probably years old too! Well, at least mine will be distinguished by vastly inferior art and shoddy hand lettering, likely full of spelling and grammatical errors…

I like the cover image.




NIGHTWING #142
Written by Peter Tomasi
Art and cover by Rags Morales & Michael Bair
Why is another super-powered body, this time the corpse of the KGBeast, being stolen from the Gotham Cemetery — and how is Nightwing going to stop it?
Nightwing starts to piece together the diabolical plans of Dr. Creighton Kendall, a scientist whose twisted mind harbors dark and devious plans that may fit into the far-reaching scheme of Talia al Ghul and her desire to protect herself once and for all from the evil clutches of her father and the world at large.

Aww, when did the KGBeast die? I have no memory of this. But maybe I did read that story and have just forgotten; the deaths really are starting to all blur together in my mind. Anyway, that’s too bad. Sure, he was a lame character, but I kind of liked the goofy Claremont-esque Russian accented dialogue writers like Chuck Dixon would come up with for him, and he had the absolute most awesome ‘80s codename…even better than New Wave.




Ladies and gentleman, we have a new contender for Worst Costume In the DC Universe…




SUPERMAN/BATMAN ANNUAL #2
Written by Joe Kelly
Art and cover by Scott Kolins
Acclaimed writer Joe Kelly joins fan-favorite artist Scott Kolins (THE FLASH) for a reimagining of a classic story from Superman and Batman's Silver Age! In WORLD'S FINEST #178, Superman lost his powers and took on the identity of Nova, the inspiration for 52's Super-Nova. Now, the mysterious Socrates has robbed the world of its Man of Steel forcing Batman and Robin to find a way to replace him!

Joe Kelly's Superman/Batman Annual #1, in which the World's Finest, pre-secret identity reveal, sparred in their alter egos and came into conflict with Ultraman, Owlman, Deatshroke and a stealth guest-starring Deadpool, was by far the single best story to appear under the Superman/Batman name. So seeing Kelly return for a second annual, set during the same time period, is really great news. Not so sure about the art at this point; I usually enjoy Kolins' work, but his Robin on the cover looks a little...off. Is the original Robin really so hard to draw? Ian Churchill similarly butchered the design in Titans East, although Kolins will have to do much, much worse than that to match Churchill's hairy-legged Robin. (Shudder!)

Oh, and the last annual was in 2006; this one's due in 2008, which strains the definition of annual, but whatever—I look forward to seeing a Superman/Batman team-up issue that isn't terrible again.





I like the composition of this cover. Just in case you didn’t notice that the focus of the image were Ravager’s boobs, they’ve included a man’s hand pointing his index finger at her boobs.




Have I mentioned how much I love Karl Kerschl’s Teen Titans: Year One art yet? What’s that? I have? For the last two months now? Well, I still love it.





Man, could I go for a cupcake arrow right now…





TRIALS OF SHAZAM #12
Written by Judd Winick
Art & Cover by Mauro Cascioli
The Trials of Shazam conclude…and win or lose, Freddy Freeman may still need the help of the Justice League to survive the “verdict”!

Woo-hoo! It’s finally over! Now quick, put everything back together the way it was before Trials of Shazam #1!




VARIANTE VOL. 3 Written and illustrated by Iqura Sugimoto. CMX. Agent Sudo tries to uncover the secret behind Aethos, the government linked corporation in charge of investigating the Chimeras. But in doing so, he stumbles upon a secret from his own past—a girl he believed he had killed years ago, but who instead has been a subject of experimentation. As for Aiko, she’s having doubts about what the_Chimeras really are and may be losing the will to fight them.

I wonder if it will have a variante cover? Ha ha ha ha! Get it? Variante cover? Ha ha!




YOUNG LIARS #1 Written by David Lapham. Art and cover by Lapham. Indie comics auteur and SILVERFISH creator David Lapham hasn’t embarked on a monthly series since STRAY BULLETS, his magnum opus that garnered industry awards and international acclaim. Now Lapham’s back with YOUNG LIARS, his first full-color monthly series, about a group of misfits and their desperate attempt to salvage their crushed dreams. “I haven’t had this much fun since my Uncle Chuck took me on a crime spree in the fourth grade.” — David Lapham. At the core of YOUNG LIARS is the disturbing relationship between Danny Noonan, a habitual liar and crap guitar player from Texas, and Sadie Dawkins, the object of his desire. Sadie was a poor little rich girl until a bullet lodged in her brain turned her into an adrenaline junkie who only listens to Danny. But who shot Sadie is only part of the mystery that drives YOUNG LIARS, from the twisted club scene of lower Manhattan to absurdist hijinx on the high seas. And from the hot shores of Ibiza to the haunted castles of Spain, Danny, Sadie and their entourage of losers will run from poorly disguised assassins, demented billionaires, and psychotic midgets — not to mention each other — in an absurd quest to get rich and famous. Or kill each other trying. YOUNG LIARS will provide relentless action, suspense, sex and murder in the way that only David Lapham can deliver.


I like that logo.

Usually what I do with intriguing looking new Vertigo series is read the first issue or two or three, and then switch to trades. I think I may just start with the trades on this one though, as it’s pretty much guaranteed to be good comics.

I really liked Houdini: The Handcuff King

What an incredible book this is. Writer Jason Lutes (Berlin, Jar of Fools ) and artist Nick Bertozzi (The Salon) tell the life story of Houdini, and they do it in just under 100 pages, spanning only a day or two in the life of history's most famous magician.

It's this economy of the story which I find most remarkable.

It goes without saying that the life and work of Houdini is a pretty big subject to tackle in any medium, and with any amount of space. I can't even imagine how many hundreds of pages of prose have been written on the subject at this point. Houdini as the first celebrity, Houdini as the first superhero. Houdini as escape artist. As magician. As showman. As spiritualist. As fraud buster. As symbol of freedom. There's his complicated relationship with his own fame, with his many rivals, with the press, with his wife. There was that one time he teamed up with Batman.

There's a lot of ground to cover—where to begin?

Lutes and Bertozzi begin the day before a particular stunt of Houdini's. He's about to plunge into the cold Boston River, his wrists handcuffed behind his back and chains placed around his ankles by the Boston police, who will thoroughly search him for lock picks before he dives in. We watch a little of his preparation, meet his wife, see him interviewed by the press, and then witness the stunt for ourselves, from both Houdini's point of view and that of the crowd. Along the way, Lutes and Bertozzi manage to unfold a great deal of Houdinin's life story subtly, naturally and elegantly. It's a suprisingly full and thorough portrait of the man, given how much space is allotted and how little time is actually covered.

And it's surprisingly suspenseful. I mean, I know exactly how and when Houdini died, as does, I imagine, pretty much everyone. And yet near the climax of the book, when his wife is trying desperately to get through the crowd to slip her husband a lockpick he needs to survive the plunge, and encountering constant obstacles, there's a palpable tension, and I found myself slowly edging to the seat of my chair, in spite of my knowledge that this will surely end happily.

This is the page where I began to notice how well put-together the book was:



It's a pretty simple thing, building the page lay-out around the elevator shaft, but it sure is a neat one, as the elevator is like a panel itself, traveling up the page, and the characters in it seem to have gotten on at the bottom of the preceding page, only to ride up to the beginning of the next page, the readers' eyes along for the ride.

It's followed by pages of Houdini and his wife in their room together, him venting about his rivals and the press, she ultimately soothing him as they prep for the stunt together. And then we get this brilliant sequence, in which Houdini leaves the room and hotel, his mood as reversed as the direction of the elevator ride:



Together, the two rides form natural borders to the entire room sequence, book-ending it from the rest of the story, like a set of parantheses made out of the same material as the story itself.

Lutes and Bertozzi use a similar tactic, the subject occupying black space in vertical panels on the borders of the pages, during Houdini's plunge, his slow sinking and eventual ascent from the river (there's a brief sample below). It's great stuff, and Bertozzi communicates so much information in every panel; there is literally no space wasted in this story.

Take, for example, this page here, in which we see Houdini's wife looking calm as can be, so confident that her husband will survive, while the rest of the crowd, including one of her husband's employees (the big sweaty guy next to her) are mostly starting to freak out:



This book is like a how-to book of comic storytelling, and that's on top of being a fun, funny, thrilling character study of one of history's most fascinating characters.

*The name given to two books "published" by DC Comics on their office photocopier in 1978, filled with stories that were completed (or very nearly completed), but were axed as part of a sudden reduction in the number of books the company was publishing at the time.

Thursday is links day

Meanwhile in Las Vegas… This week’s LVW comics review is of Wonton Soup, which I boldly called the best space-trucker cooking opera of the year. Boy will my face be red if another, even better comes out on one of the last two Wednesdays of the year! You can read/skim the first 39 pages of it here, and I should point out that the book gets better and better the deeper you get into it.




Hey man, nice shot: December is a busy time of year for a lot of folks, as they do all their Christmas shopping, make travel plans, prep their houses for visitors and so forth. It’s quite busy for me too, but for an entirely different reason—this is the point of the year when “best of” lists get assembled, and critics find themselves playing catch-up.

By the time December rolls around, I find myself buried in film screenings as studios begin to campaign hard for awards consideration and slots on best-of lists.

And, inevitably, as many comics and graphic novels as I read every week, I realize I’ve missed quite a few big releases, and spend much of the month tracking down everything I’ve heard something good about or just haven’t gotten around to, so that when I sit down to tell you what I thought the best books of the year are, I can feel pretty well-informed on the subject.

One book I just finished was Anthony Lape and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War, a dramedy about a blogger who covers the Iraq War during the McCain administration. Brian Doherty of The New York Post just wrote a very good review of it, with a pretty damn good headline (has no one ever turned the phrase “blog of war” before? Really? Because it’s a good one).

Doherty gave the book a bit of a kicking:



It might be formally appropriate that a graphic novel set in a chaotic, horrific near future should sport this book's off-putting computerized art style. It's a bricolage of digitally altered photos, cut-and-paste cartooning, and beards that look like the random up-and-down ballpoint pen scratches one would use to deface a magazine photo.

But formally appropriate or not, a reader versed in classic comic book cartooning will be apt to find it distractingly ugly. The style often gets in the way of the simple storytelling virtues that cartooning is best for. It's sometimes difficult to tell from panel to panel exactly what's going on. The graphic novel's look, created as the book flap says with “a combination of photography, vector illustration, and digital painting" is very now - the sort of “now" that will almost certainly look dated and oh-so-2007 soon enough.

In the book's afterword, the authors identify this as a “work of political satire" that strives to “get you thinking about some big questions concerning the media, the war in Iraq and American foreign policy." That was all-too-obvious in this heavy-handed, though successfully gripping, work. They add that, “We also hope it makes you chuckle." Unless, say, the suitcase-nuking of Bangalore is a knee-slapper, they misunderstand their own work's tone.



I can’t say I disagree with him entirely either. As I finished it, I was actually pretty relieved I wasn’t planning on giving it a formal review for LVW, but just satisfying my own curiosity about it at this point. The look of the book is just as Doherty described it. At times it did seem ugly and distracting to me, at other times it seemed pretty appropriate given the subject matter, and I thought it even had a sort of strange beauty, perhaps more beautiful than it might have looked were it all drawn out. But these times changed back and forth from page to page.

Ultimately I think it’s a fine style for a single graphic novel like this, when a reader is only spending an hour or two with it, but if this were serialized into single issues, or if I tried reading it as it was originally serialized on the web, I would have given up a long time ago, I think, as it’s not the sort of art I would seek out once I’d walked away form it.

I’m not quite sure what to think of the writing end of things, either. It’s structurally sound, and the dramatic arc works well enough. The lead character is one I kind of like, but really rather despise. The speculative political science work that went into the where will the world be in 2011 question was pretty interesting, but somewhat undermined by the more straightforward action adventure comic villain, the charismatic leader of a made-up terrorist group that actually compares himself to a Bond villain at one point.

I think this is a book I’d have to return to again in the future to truly form an opinion on, but, on my first reading, my reaction was extremely mixed, often simultaneously liking and disliking different aspects of the story.

One thing that I really enjoyed was Dan Rather, who cameos in one scene, only to become main character Jimmy Burns’ sidekick by the climax. Lappe nails Rather’s dialogue, or rather a convincing parody of his TV personality’s dialogue, and Goldman does a nice drawing of the old man. I cracked up in almost every scene featuring Rather as heroic newsman, particularly the bit about the frequency.

I give Lappe and Goldman a lot of credit for trying to spin a bigger story with Shooting War, addressing the media’s role in the world and in the war. Me, I would have just focused on the adventures of Dan Rather in the near-future Middle East, and, as entertaining as that may be, it’s probably not of much value to anyone all on its own.

Have any of you read Shooting War yet? Any prognosis to share? I’d definitely recommend it, even though I’ve not quite made up my mind as to how good a graphic novel it actually is.




Confidential to Joe Madureira and Greg Land:







Can a decision to collect a comic book series a particular way be considered evil? : I’ve been bewildered by many of the decisions DC has made in terms of what they choose to collect and release in trade, what they choose not to, and how they package some of their trades, but this is probably the most mystifying item I’ve seen show up on a Diamond shipping list from the company in a long, long time:

WONDER WOMAN AMAZONS ATTACK HC $24.99

Yes, the universally reviled series that didn’t make any goddam sense, the series that helped make Jodi Picoult’s run even worse, the series which caused sales of tie-in issues like Teen Titans and Wonder Woman to drop, is released in a collected edition for any unfortunate souls who want to subject themselves to it. I can see them in Barnes and Noble now, flipping through it, drinking in Pete Woods’ fantastic art, seeing all the heroes in it, and thinking, “Well, this looks good,” and then heading towards the cash register.

Yes, it looks good, but that’s only because the art is so good. But it is not a good book. It’s a terrible one! Terrible, I tell you! (Well, the first three issues…I didn’t read the last half). And at the end, you don’t get any kind of resolution (I did flip-through #4-#6), you just get a big, fat cliffhanger, and to find out what the hell happens next, you have to read Countdown!

I suppose DC thought they could make a few bucks off these poor folks and that it was therefore worth collecting this story in trade (a sad, sad fact when you consider all of the better Wonder Woman stories not available in trade, however).

But a hardcover?

Nobody wants a hardcover of this. No one who reads it will ever want to reread it. And charging $25 bucks for the sturdier cover just strikes me as…perverse. It’s a six-issue series, each sold for $2.99, so anyone fool enough to buy this thing is paying $7 more than they would have if they got it while it was originally coming out.

Surely you can still find all six of these issues in your local comic shop or on the ebay for cover price or lower…hell, you’re welcome to my Amazons Attack #1-#3 for the cost of shipping…




Here it comes: Have you seen the trailer for Speed Racer yet? I have. About, oh, 25 times now or so. I was skeptical of this project since it was first announced, having been a fan of the admittedly quite terrible cartoon and having lost pretty much all faith in the Wachowski Brothers about four minutes into Matrix Revolutions (Yeah, Reloaded wasn’t all that either, but the action scenes in it were a thing of beauty).

But I’ve gotta admit, this looks pretty great from the few minute snippet of the trailer—the costume design, the automobile design, the use of speedlines in live action, the jumping Mach 5 sound effect, the corny-ass dialogue like “It’s way more important than that, it’s like a religion” and “Maybe not, but it’s the only thing I know how to do and I gotta do something.” Awesome. A quick check at IMDB reveals that Snake Oiler and Inspector Detector are characters in the movie, too. Awesome I say, awesome!

Anyway, check out the scene where Speed discovers Spritle and Chim Chim in the trunk reading comic books by flashlight—they’re totally reading an issue of Geoff Darrows fantastic and hardly ever printed ongoing series Shaolin Cowboy, from the Wachowski’s own vanity publisher Burlyman.




And speaking of trailers…: I see no giant bipedal talking sword-wielding mice in this trailer, which worries me excessively. Still, I hope Prince Caspian makes a billion dollars, if only to ensure more Narnia movies, as the next two are my favorite of the seven books.




Poor Will Smith: The real tragedy of the dystopian future presented in I Am Legend?:Will Smith’s character, the last man alive in New York City after a plague has decimated humanity, must see a poster in Times Square advertising some sort of upcoming Batman/Superman movie (it features the S-shield from Superman Returns atop a bat-symbol shape) every day, knowing full well that even though the movie was made, it will never be played in theaters for him. The poor, poor bastard. Oh, and I guess he’s all alone fighting for his life too. Anyway, here’s a review of I Am Legend if you’re interested.



"He's a superintelligent small pox virus. And he wants justice": I should have posted this scan from Green Lantern #25 in yesterday's off-the-cuff review, when discussing the scale of the war. As you can see, not only were human-sized combatants duking it out, or planet-sized ones like Mogo and Warworld, but also microscopic rivals.

Here, check this out if you haven't already, and then I've got a serious question:


Is that the absolute coolest thing Geoff Johns has ever written? I know I make fun of Johns alot here, particularly for his affinity for gore (yes, there is a panel of a character being ripped in half in this same issue), the number of times he has heroes resort to torture, his uninihibted man-love for Hal Jordan, and his bad habit of going too grim and gritty too often, but I do think he's a pretty solid comics writer, and is probably DC's best writer by default (Busiek, Morrison and Waid are no slouches either, of course, but they just can't keep up with Johns, who writes about 15 books a month now, I believe).

And make no mistake, a heroic small pox virus that wants justice? That is pretty much the definition of awesome. (Well, not in my computer's dictionary, which I just checked to verify, but I bet if I went and got a dicitonary off the shelf, it would be in there). Thinking of all of the most awesome beats in other of the roughly two million stories by Geoff Johns I've read in the past, all of the closest competitors—Booster Gold and Skeets' journey to cowboy times, much of 52—came in books in which Johns worked with one to three co-writers on. But this book is all him, meaning this beat is all him.

So here's my question: Is this the most awesome thing Johns has ever written, or not? And if not, what is?




Yeah, what she said: Carla makes a very fine point here, in this post about Marvel’s “One More Day” story, which I’m sure everyone’s more than sick of hearing about at this point (And there’s still one issue to go, meaning over a month’s worth of commentary yet to come!)

She stopped reading at the same point I did, the second part, but returned faster than I would have because, as she says “This is important.”

Indeed, it is. Not change-your-life important, or impact-the-world-outside-the-Marvel-Universe-at-all important, but important within that fictional shared setting, and important to the way readers will be interacting with it for the next few weeks, months, years and, potentially, from now on.

This “One More Day” storyline, if they really do go through with it and they don’t change it back immediately, is going to end up being the most important Spider-Man story ever told, if only because it’s going to be the only one in which Spider-Man comics get rebooted. It’s going to be a big, bright, red line through Spider-Man’s (fictional history), not unlike the original Crisis on Infinite Earths was a big, bright red line through DC Comics’ (fictional history) becoming, like the birth of Christ, the point that divides that history into two different era. The death of Captain Stacy, or of Gwen Stacy, Kraven’s Last hunt, the Osborne/Golin saga, the black suit/Venom business, none of those will end up being as important as OMD, simply because none of them managed to shift the entire playing field the way OMD will.

In a few years time, people could be discussing Spider-Man using the terms Pre-OMD and Post-OMD, as they used to with Crisis (Again, if they really have Spidey and/or MJ trade their marriage for a reboot, and if they stick to it).

It’s a seriously ballsy move by editor-in-chief, penciller and, if JMS is to be believed, plotter Joe Quesada, whatever you think of it.

And I can’t help but wonder how many people are reading this story not because they like the writing or art, or are invested in the story, but simply because they know how potentially important it is. Are they, like Carla, reading it simply because it’s going to be the starting point for the pretty exciting sounding future of Spider-Man comics? (Three times a month! Dan Slott writing Spidey regularly!). I fear Marvel will interpret the gonzo sales of the event as tacit approval for the story itself, giving them grounds to dismiss all criticism as the opinions of a few hundred cranks with Internet access and too much free time on their hands (Now, I’m not saying I’m not a crank with too much free time on my hands, just that that doesn’t make me wrong about whether a comic book story is stupid or not).

Do check out Carla’s review of the third chapter, as she has a beautiful image of a fan’s despair at the book, and check out this week’s Lying in the Gutters if you haven’t already, as Rich Johnston recounts previous pitches for how to undo the marriages of Superman and Spider-Man without resorting to divorce or killing off a supporting character. As awesome as I think the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Super-books would have been (and hey, where is Peyer these days?), I’m glad DC let the Superman/Lois marriage stand. I could do without this Chris Kent character, though…

Weekly Haul: December 12th

Booster Gold #5 (DC Comics) Geoff Johns, John Katz and Dan Jurgens revisit one of the darkest stories in DCU history in this issue of the formerly pretty light-hearted series, when Rip Hunter sends Booster Gold and Skeets back in time (or, really, into Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke) to stop the crippling of then-retired Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon. It goes exactly how I thought it would go when I first saw the solicitation for the issue, and while it’s interesting the way this book accesses previous books for story and setting, it was definitely the least fun issue of the series so far.

For one, we had Rip Hunter torturing a bad guy for info, something I see wayyyy to often in my DC super-comics (often those with Johns’ name on the cover), particularly at a time when the country is debating the effectiveness and morality of torture. Now, I don’t think anyone’s picking up Booster Gold for opinions on whether waterboarding is torture or not, but doesn’t Geoff Johns live in the same country as me and read the same articles I do? Doesn’t he ever pause, his fingers hovering over the keyboard, and think, hey, maybe having our heroic time master torturing our villainous time master doesn’t really qualify as light escapism these days? The scene would have read just as effectively if Rip just used the threat—allowing him to show off his implements—or even just warned Rex that he could protect him from the fate that was inevitably going to happen, and does in short order.

Also of note, we get another look at a Rip Hunter blackboard, with a blogosphere-cognizant Spoiler warning on it (“No Trophy = Stephanie?”), the three villains who appeared for absolutely no reason one one page of “The Lightning Saga” reappear here and actually makes some sense this time, and Jurgens and inker Norm Rapmund draw the worst Jaime Reyes ever.




Fantastic Four #552 (Marvel Comics) This issue crystallizes exactly why I’m so disappointed in writer Dwayne McDuffie’s first JLoA story arc. The plot for this issue is essential just Dr. Doom fights the Fantastic Four, with all the same doohickeys, powers and catchphrases you’d expect in such a battle. But even though this is round 493 of a Doom/FF rivalry older than I am, McDuffie makes it feel fresh by giving the participants all a new motivation. That, and writing great, often very funny dialogue.

I’m going to be really sorry to see this creative team go (I believe this is their second-to-last issue). I know they’re being replaced by the all-star team of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, but, personally, I’d prefer a great FF comic that comes out once a month to a quarterly one with photorealistic art.

Here’s hoping someone at DC is already offering the Paul Pelletier and Rick Magyar art team an exclusive gig to come work with McDuffie on JLoA…



Green Lantern #25 (DC) Here it is folks, the conclusion of the “Sinestro Corps War” storyline, a capital-E Event book from DC that was not only huge in scope, but damn near flawless in execution. I’m not sure exactly what they did with “Sinestro Corps” that they didn’t do in, say, Infinite Crisis, Amazons Attack or Countdown, or perhaps what they didn’t do here that they did do in their other recent “Event” comics, but this one seemed to work perfectly.

It began with an over-sized special chockfull of “Holy @#$%!” moments, and then branched off onto two parallel roads, one running through Green Lantern, the other through Green Lantern Corps. Read either one or both; each is a complete story unto itself. Along the way, there were maybe a half-dozen tie-in one-shots offering more background on key players, but they were all completely skip-able if the life story of Hank Henshaw or secret origin of Superboy-Prime wasn’t exactly your cup of tea (I only read one issue of GLC and one of these one-shot specials, and I don’t feel like anything was missing from the final story).

And here we are at the conclusion, in which the “War” in the title actually seems appropriate, as much of the issue concerns two gigantic armies and some of the more powerful members of DC’s cosmology fighting, with a battlefield encompassing whole cities and stakes that include the Multiverse.

I’ll be honest, there are some sections of this over-sized issue that are almost howlingly cheesy, and if I were slightly more cynical a reader, or slightly less invested in the story, I might actually howl at some of the more melodramatic or goofy things, like, oh, Coast City’s show of support for Hal Jordan, or the prophesied rainbow of Corps (Seriously, Indigo Lanterns?), or the movie trailer-like preview section by Ethan Van Sciver regarding a story “Coming in 2009.”

But writer Geoff Johns, penciller Ivan Reis and the two inkers who covered his work here won me over by panel four. The first page opens Star Wars like, on an empty field of outer space, and then pans toward the flying green and yellow power rings, each representing one of the soldiers dying. It’s a great visual image, one unique to the story, summing up its urgency in a beautiful looking image.


Turn the page, and there’s an insanely detailed two-page spread of a Corps vs. Corps battle that puts the redded-out splash of “The Battle of Metropolis” in Infinite Crisis #7 to shame. Turn the page again, and there’s another insanely detailed two-page spread that puts the redded-out splash of “The Battle of Metropolis” in Infinite Crisis #7 to shame. Both are by Reis, although Van Sciver contributes one of his own a few pages later, focused on the war of the rainbow Corps.

In this ultimate issue of the storyline, Hal and Kyle Rayner take off for Coast City, to defend it from Sinestro and a squad of his soldiers, a battle that ends with a great deal of ring-less face-punches. Meanwhile, John Stewart and Guy Gardner head to NYC to face the Anti-Monitor and his gang, a battle which involves all of Earth’s heroes, Superboy-Prime taking on heroes and villains alike and even the Guardians of the Universe rolling up their robe sleeves.

It’s an incredibly well structured slam-bang action story, with Johns at least trying to tell a deeper story about the power of emotion and its ability to influence the world around us. And Jordan’s daddy issues. I’m not sure how well it succeeds on deeper, more dramatic levels, but, at the very least, it features Johns at the height of his powers, pushing Green Lantern and DCU mythology forward, something too few creators tend to do on the corporate owned character properties they work on these days.

Reis’ art, meanwhile, is incredible. Once again he and Van Sciver both reward patient scanning of their panels, looking for neat alien designs and, I should point out, I didn’t see a single art error to nitpick like, I don’t know, Bulleteer or Black Lightning flying, or the wrong Marvel involved or the sort of things that usually slip into stories involving the whole DCU like this (In fact, there are actually positive surprises in the cameos, like Yellow Lantern from the recent “Escape from Bizarro World” arc in Action Comic, or a Predator alien with a ring in the corner of the first big spread)

Green Lantern fans should be ecstatic, DCU fans should be excited, and super-comics fans in general should be content.




Green Lantern Corps #19 (DC) I’m back. New writer Peter J. Tomasi takes over for Dave Gibbons, as the title gets a slightly different status quo, one more in keeping with the Green Lantern Corps: Recharge miniseries that spun out of Green Lantern: Rebirth, with Kyle Rayner and Guy Gardner resuming their partnership as the Earth men among the various aliens that make up the Corps cast. I say this as someone who hasn’t read much of the last year and half worth of issues of this series, but it does seem like they were, in part, an interruption between the story of Recharge and the one being picked up here.

Tomasi plays up the post-war aspect of the book, which is being billed as an epilogue to the “Sinestro Corps War,” a strategy that proves remarkably effective in introducing not only stars Kyle and Guy, but also the various alien Corps members (most of whom I recognized from the few issues I have read, a few I didn’t), plus recently resurrected Ice, Kilowog’s funny-looking family, and a new old villain, whose power ring matches the color of his skin. Every character gets at least a page, and most of the Corps members are shown reacting to having survived a war that hundred of others didn’t in individual ways.

Pencil art comes courtesy of Patrick Gleason, a great talent whose work I love looking at (dig the details in Guy’s home away from home, for example), who is assisted here by no less than six inkers (that’s about twice as many that were needed for GL #25, which was over 50 pages long).




Marvel Adventures Hulk #6 (Marvel) Despite enjoying Jeff Parker’s Marvel Adventures Avengers book, and the MA Spider-Man issues I’ve read, I haven’t gotten around to sampling the relatively new Hulk book yet. This one seemed like a good one to try out though, as the cover features Namor and the Hulk fighting, and, perhaps my favorite thing about Marvel Comics is that sometimes Namor and the Hulk fight.

Writer Paul Benjamin’s script was similar to all the other MA books I’ve read in several respects—it was a done-in-one story with a low threshold of previous continuity awareness to enjoy, it was lighthearted and fun, and it gave the familiar characters a presentation that seemed both classic and fresh (That is, this was definitely Hulk and Namor—and Bruce Banner and Rick Jones—as we’ve come to recognize them, but at the same time they seemed more vital than they sometimes do in Marvel’s main, grown-up line).

Likewise, Mario Gully and Scott Koblish’s art was similar to much of the art in other MA books. Perfectly readable and competent in its storytelling (which is rarer than you might think in mainstream super-comics these days, I’m sorry to say; they’re certainly better than, say, Ed Benes, or Joe Benitez, or Greg Land or this Joe Maduriera man who’s been hurting the eyes of readers this past week), with a style that’s unremarkable, but not much of a departure from what you’d find in the Marvel Universe books.

They draw a terrible, terrible monkey though, if Rick’s pet monkey named Monkey is supposed to be a normal monkey and not, like, a mutant one or something. He looks a little like Devil Dinosaur’s Moonboy.

As for the plot, well, gamma radiation has caused sea-life (ranging from sharks to sea turtles and starfish) to “hulk out,” turning giant, mean and green and attacking Atlantis. So the Avenging Son (not actually referred to as “The Avenging Son” in this particular story, I’m sorry to say) fights the Hulk. The story, entitled “Law & Order: Atlantis,” unfolds as a courtroom drama, in which Rick defends Banner before judge Namor in Atlantean court.

I don’t think this issue has completely sold me on the title, not quite reaching the heights of Jeff Parker’s MA Avengers run, but it was pretty fun, and it only took me two sentences to realize this Benjamin character may be someone to pay attention to. In that second sentence, you see, he has Rick refer to Namor as “Imperious Pecs.”




New Avengers #37 (Marvel) Ah-ha! I thought it was weird that Howard the Duck and The Punisher had Luke Cage’s back in the cliffhanger at the end of the last issue! This issue is essentially one big fight scene, in which Luke Cage and the Democrat Avengers (or The Friendly Neighborhood Avengers, as Spidey refers to them) wade into battle against the host of anonymous villains The Hood has assembled (Seriously, can I get a character key or something? I recognize, like, four of these guys).

It’s kind of a mess really.

Action, particularly at the climax of a story, has never been Brian Michael Bendis’ strong point, and while I do dig artist Leinil Yu’s style and lay-outs, he loses me quite often in this particular story. It’s all pretty disjointed, mostly involving the Avengers jumping around in panels crammed with villains and illusions of other heroes, all quipping like Spider-Man (Wolverine even laughs at a not particularly funny Spidey quip). The fact that not only is every crammed with so many people, but they all talk alike (in addition to the quippy Avengers, all of the villains seem to say “Dude!” at one point or another), sure doesn’t help it read terribly clearly.

I did like Cage beating Iron Fist to making the exact same quip, though.




Wonder Woman #15 (DC) Gail Simone’s second issue continues the troubled title’s march back towards readability. But it’s still got its problems.

It’s a little darker and ickier than a Wonder Woman comic needs to be. For example, Captain Nazi threatens to ravish our heroine (He just says “kiss,” but he says it in the sentence, “Shall I kiss you before dying? Or after?…I wish I could promise that I would be gentle.”) And when she uses her magic lasso to get to the bottom of his badness, we learn that his mother was a prostitute, his father her pimp (is that a German word?), and that Captain Nazi was beaten everyday of his childhood. Ah, light escapism!

I’m also still pretty confused by how the whole secret identity thing works now. And I mean how it works physically within the context of the story, not how it works as an element of the story, because I don’t think it does at all (It’s not like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne often fight supervillains, then tag out to Superman and Batman, the way Agent Prince does here). Narration tells us that she has no powers while in her Diana Prince identity, and yet not only does Captain Nazi, who’s about as strong as Captain Marvel, who’s about as strong as Superman, who’s stronger than Wonder Woman, not totally kill her death, but Diana is able to break a wall with the back of her head and judo throw him into the next room. (Yeah, yeah, leverage, Amazonian martial arts training, whatever…).

More successful is the opening scene, continuing the more myth-like story set in Themyscira’s past, and the scenes on the modern day island, wherein Hippolyta goes all ninja on the Nazi invaders while Diana pleads with different pantheons for help…doing…I don’t know what actually. Is Themyscira still in a different dimension or something? Why’s this shit so hard to follow? Can DC just leave the status quo of the Amazons alone for, like, at least a year at a time every time they change it?

Two issues under her belt now, Simone has made Wonder Woman better than it’s been since Greg Rucka’s run, but still not as good as it could and should be (or even as good as Rucka’s was).

Oh, and bonus nitpick: On page 20, panel 2, Wonder Woman goes to the Wizard Shazam to ask for his help. The Wizard Shazam, you’ll recall, died somehow in the final issue of Day of Vengeance, which was two years ago our time, over a year ago Wonder Woman’s time.

Reminder

This is Bat Lash, the new comic book by Peter Brandvold, Sergio Aragones and John Severin, which debuts tomorrow:


This is Bat For Lashes, the British girl group led by singer/songwriter Natasha Khan:

*Red Tornado and Caleb are both members of The Bald Men of the Comics Mega-Multiverse, as seen in 11/6/07's post.

Delayed Reaction: Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born

Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (Marvel Comics), by Peter David, Robin Furth, Jae Lee and Richard Isanove

Why’d I wait?: It was with some trepidation that I read the first issue of the seven-part series. Marvel’s relentless hyping of the book was a huge turn-off, but it was the sort of case where the publisher saying it was an event so often and so loud genuinely made it an event, and as a critic I felt I needed to check it out for myself.

Despite having no previous experience with the series of novels it’s based on, or any great affection for the work of the artist or the writer (at least, not when he’s in paycheck mode), and despite being sick of hearing about Marvel’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series long before I even cracked the cover, the first issue was pretty enjoyable.

It just wasn’t anything I felt I need to drop a couple bucks on every month, and so I stopped at #1.



Why now?: I recently saw it on a Best of 2007 list from a fairly reputable source, and was surprised to see it there, given the solid-but-unremarkable nature of the issue I’d read (And the complete silence of the comics press and blogosphere on the book).

Of course, now I can’t remember whose list it was, or where I saw the link to the list. So maybe there was no list; maybe it was all a dream.

Anyway, I began to wonder if it was actually great after all, and my local library had a copy of the hardcover, so I was able to read the whole series with zero financial risk.



Well?: Well, it’s not that great, and, despite the obviously high production value and extra care taken in it’s presentation, as a graphic novel, it’s not even a very good one.

But before I get into the story part of the book, I did want to say a few things about the overall package, which is a pretty nice one, especially by Marvel standards. Things that will probably drive this post way off topic, so bear with me (and/or just skim until you hit something that interests you).

Marvel has always been pretty terrible at graphic novel design, and if you’ve ever encountered their books in a big box bookstore, you’ll know exactly what I mean. A shelf or six full of Marvel books, shelved spine out, look almost identical—it’s a wall of black, with the identical Marvel logo and the title of the book on the spine, completely uniform, no matter what the book is or what the format is.

There’s some variation—glossier hardcovers will have gold lettering as opposed to the trade paperbacks’ red and white Marvel logo and individual title logos—but they all bleed together, with nothing jumping out. (The only exceptions are the digests, which are more colorful and often shelved with the manga, and the Essentials, which have a spine fat enough to accommodate a clearer presentation of the books’ logo, although they’re also always black).

Compared to the DC/Vertigo/WildStorm books, in which many series have their own trade dress and design, or the Fantagraphics and Drawn + Quarterly and AdHouse books, in which great care has been put into ensuring that the books look good from all angles, or especially the manga, which is a veritable candy-colored rainbow of eye-grabbing design, Marvel graphic novels look like small press text books for an economic class you have to take if you want to graduate.

Nothing particularly flashy is done on the spine of this trade—other than leading off the title with a bigger “Stephen King’s,” which may actually be all it needs to fly out of bookstores—but the overall package is a nice one.

The cover has the words “The Dark Tower” super-imposed over a much bigger “Stephen King,” which makes his name clearly visible, but without comically eclipsing the title of the actual books (as in Brad Meltzer’s first Justice League trade or Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman trade, for example. (Also, if you didn’t really scrutinize the fine print, you might even think King actually wrote the book, instead of serving as its “Creative Director and Executive Director,” as the credits page says).

Inside is a one-page introduction from Ralph Macchio, and an afterword by King, plus a brief How-I-Made-This-Comic-Look-So-Shitty section by Richard Isanove, and 24 pages of covers and variant covers, seemingly by every artist in Marvel’s employ: Joe Quesada, David Finch, Stuart Immonen, Leinil Francis Yu, John Romita Jr., Steve McNiven, Billy Tan, Olivier Coipel, Greg Land and J. Scott Campbell all contribute what amount to cowboy pin-ups.

All the extra material, particularly the text pieces, reminded me of the good old days of Marvel and DC trade paperbacks, when the graphic novel market was barely in existence (back when Watchmen, Maus, The Dark Knight Returns were the only things you were guaranteed to find in a bookstore; anything else was just gravy).

I’m old enough to remember when Marvel and DC generally only published trades of books that were so popular that there was no way for new readers to find the comic books themselves anymore, and that the trades existed to meet exceptional demand, and/or keep stories in print that were important in some way, stories that new direct market customers would want to read throughout the next several years, and “civilians” might pick up if they saw it in a bookstore or library.

In a way, that’s how you could tell a book was good. Sandman must be a much better series than Shade, The Changing Man or Doom Patrol, because it was in trade. Batman: A Death in The Family and A Lonely Place of Dying must be more important Batman stories than, say, Batman: Blind Justice or Batman: Year Three, because DC put the former out in a trade but not the latter.

These trades were treated as special occasions, and usually had introductions by name writers in other fields, or even other prominent comics writers, telling you how awesome they were in the beginning.

Now, introductions seem rare to the point of non-existent, and trades have lost that sense of the special. In fact, DC and Marvel seem to publish everything in trade now, without much thought for what audience might exist for it. (Teen Titans: Titans East is a trade, for example, and I was genuine surprised DC printed that once as a monthly comic book, let alone again as a book-book. Paul Dini’s Detecive Comics run is being collected along with non-Dini fill-in stories that were only solicited and published the first time to fill gaps in the monthly book’s schedule, not because they had anything to do with Dini’s story). For some reason, often time The Big Two seem to print their trades, like their comic books, for direct market readers who prefer that format, rather than for a wider audience.

So even if I wasn’t aware of all the relentless hype The Dark Tower received prior to the first issue’s release, if I was a customer flipping through this in a book store, it would certainly seem like it was a special occasion, compared to all the other Marvel and DC graphic novels on the nearby shelves.

What’s that?

Oh yeah, I used the word “shitty” to describe the way the book looks a few paragraphs back, didn’t I? Okay, that was pretty crass, and maybe a little mean-spirited, but this is not a very well put together comic book story, something which is even more remarkable when you consider the amount of effort that went into it.

The weaknesses in Jae Lee and Isanove’s art, and their failure to compliment or even match up with Peter David’s script throughout the story, isn’t quite the same as Ed Benes not being able to draw a single background in 22 pages or refrain from drawing a woman’s mostly-bare ass every six panels or so in Justice League of America; it’s not even Steve McNiven not drawing an actual big fight in the climax of Civil War, a story Marvel geared a majority of its comics line around.

This is worse. This is Marvel hyping a book like it was the second coming, this is Marvel garnering almost Death of Captain America non-comics-press attention (at the outset, anyway), this is comic shops opening at midnight to sell the first issue of a comic book!

Now, who actually does what on this book is a little mysterious, as the credits are so weird. What was King’s contribution, beyond the source material? I don’t know. There’s no “based on” credit for King, just the cryptic “Creative Director and Executive Director.” Robin Furth is credited for “Plotting and Consultation.” Third down the line with “Script” is Peter David.

I’ve no complaints on the story side of things really. I’m not a real fan of narration in comics in general, as it’s almost always unnecessary, but the narrator’s voice here is an interesting one—folksy and friendly and conspiratorial, it feels like the story is being told to you by an older relative, or someone sitting on a log across the campfire from you. I’m assuming the voice comes from the novels, as it’s peppered with the same slang that fuels the rest of the dialogue.

The names of places, charachters and conflicts are flung around with little to no introduction, and I felt a bit like I did watching a not very well-made sci-fi movie like, say, Chronicles of Riddick or Phantom Menace, where the characters seem to know a lot more than I do about everything, and I feel like I should know what they’re talking about.

While this happens as much in the seventh issue as in the first, it’s actually kind of almost a sort of pleasure, as I felt my way toward familiarity. I had no understanding of the setting in the first few issues—and kind of wished there was a recap page like in most Marvel comics—but by the end, I began to feel my way toward understanding. Is this in some post-apocalyptic future, I take it?

Part of my wrestling with the setting came down to Lee and Isanove’s art, as there is precious little in terms of addressing the setting. The book is almost devoid of establishing shots, a pretty basic tool in the comic book (or film…or TV) toolbox. It’s especially important in a book like this, set in a time or world not our own.

Lee’s panels are all pretty sparse, and I never really got a sense of where anything was taking place, or what if anything differentiated Roland’s home town from the city to the east he spends most of the adventure in, or the wilderness around it, or the trails between them. Likewise, the interiors all looked the same, be they hut or witch’s house or mayor’s house, rough roadside bar or classy inn, Roland’s mom’s bedroom or hell itself.

The result was a little like watching a stage play, with much of the setting left to the imagination of the reader. That approach may not always be wrong for comics, but I think it usually is—one great and oft-cited advantage of comics over film, for example, is the ease with which the set is built. A Dark Tower movie would have had to build all these locales, scouted landscapes and sent helicopters with cameras into the air to capture them, while Lee could have delineated them with pencil and ink, if he so chose.

Compounding the problem is Lee’s relatively weak sequential storytelling abilities. I don’t know if it’s peculiar to this project, which likely had more cooks in the kitchen and higher production demands than some of his past work (fewer folks had to vet his Fantastic Four: 1, 2, 3, 4 or G. I. Joe/Transformers crossover, I’m sure), but Lee chooses extremely close shots of his characters in every scene, with long shots being few and far between. All are horizontal, perhaps going for a cinematic feel, and closely cropped, cutting out backgrounds and other characters.

It’s a bit like watching a movie composed completely of close-ups—when new characters enter a scene, it’s disorienting, because you’ve no idea who else is in the room or how many of them there are (There are a few times where this is particularly noticeable, as when our three young heroes attack a supposedly vastly superior force, and we see no more than two or three of their foes at a time, or when they supposedly face 200 men, and we see no more than ten or tenty).

While great comic book art will tell a story, even a large part of the story, through the imagery alone, Lee’s art makes no sense without the words, and in a lot of cases makes little sense with the words, or even seems to contradict them in little ways here and there.

Many of the panels seem like the covers of comic books or prog rock albums or cheap mass market paperback novels, but they don’t flow into one another very well, or at all. They’re highly posed, and don’t reflect the passage of time in the same way that the dialogue does.

In other words, it’s really beautiful looking terrible comic book art, if that makes sense.

Maybe it's easier to show some weak bits rather than simply describe them.


In the above section, the middle panel states that the two characters kiss. In that panel, however, they seem like they're about to kiss, or, perhaps, have just finished kissing. But in neither the preceding or following panel do they kiss. Lee apparently chose to draw around the significant event of the page, which the narration explicitly points out.



What happened to the dude on the right's horse's head? Or did he dismount, run over, jump up and punch the other dude? And given how much time it would take him to clear the distance between them, on his own horse or off, why was the other dude still caught off guard?



According to the character, he's holding a "long" knife, which appears to be about the size of his thumb in that panel. We don't see any other images of the knife in the scene to indicate it is, indeed, a long knife.




The script makes clear within the next few pages what just happened, but it's impossible to tell from the part of the comic in which the event acutally occurs. Does that dude say "No, Dave?" because Dave is crumpling from an unseen, unheard blow from the person in the hat and coat? Or does he say "No, Dave" to keep Dave from maybe attacking that person?



What Isanove does to the art exactly isn’t entirely clear. Instead of being listed as colorist, he’s credit under “art” with Lee, and this seems in large part due to the degree of his contribution. Is he digitally inking Lee’s pencils? Trying to interpret the four-page “The Painted Process” segment at the end, that seems to be the case.

In eight steps, that feature demonstrates how Isanove constructed the first two-page spread on pages three and four from Lee’s “line art.” He starts with a photograph, tweaks it, adds Lee’s art, tweaks that, and keeps tweaking aspects until he gets to the finished product. That finished product is simply the grown-up Gunslinger posing on a rock, with a vulture flying nearby. It’s apparently dawn or sunset, as the sky seems aflame. It’s not a bad piece of art, but it’s damaging to the book as a whole, since almost every image is so luxuriously covered.

In that opening shot, for example, the sky seems to be aflame. In the book’s second-to-last panel, also a two-page spread, a character is burned to death at the stake, I think. The background looks identical to the original one, though, and the only reason I think the character is on fire is because the words mention her hair and clothes being in flames, which is not the case in the art itself.

Clearly a ton of work went into putting this book together, and it’s really a shame that so much work must be done in the eye and the mind of the reader to make sense of it.



Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf?: No, this is actually a much better package to enjoy the story in than the monthly installments would have been. Each of the seven issues is structured so that there’s a cliffhanger at the ending, and an awful lot occurs in each issue, so I imagine it would have read just fine in monthly installments. But this version is free of all those super-irritating ads Marvel runs for Spider-Man fishing poles and Wolverine candy action figures or whatever, and includes what appears to be every single version of the one million variant covers.

I don’t know if this is the case or not, but it seems to me that variant covers encourage waiting-for-the-trade purchasing in direct market customers. I’m sure there must be a segment of the consumers who do actually speculate on variants or collect them (or at least, retailers speculate that such a segment exists, and thus buy enough copies to justify publishers continuing and increasing variant cover publishing), but to the rest of us whose only interest in variants might be seeing different artists draw the covers, it certainly makes more sense to wait for a trade which is more likely to have all the variants.

Take the Marvel Zombies series for example; the fresh variant covers on each new printing was a large factor in each issue selling out. But why re-buy each new printing for a new cover, if you can just wait a few months and get them all at once in the trade?

Anyway, this is hardly a must-own graphic novel for me, and I don’t think it’s a must-own for anyone who’s not a Dark Tower fan already, but, in retrospect, if I were going to have bought the series, I’d prefer to have the graphic novel, where I can at least get a neat John Romita Jr. pin-up of the Gunslinger in the back, without having to pay extra for it.

Soon...

Later...

*First seen in 1985's Detective Comics #554

The Further Adventures of Black Canary, Chairperson of the Justice League of America

Source: Justice League of America #15, written by Dwayne McDuffie, featuring art by Ed Benes, Sandra Hope and Pete Pantazis and featuring the expert lettering of Rob leigh; copyright DC Comics

One post, six topics

1.) Meanwhile in Las Vegas...: Everyone’s talking about Garth Ennis’ new series for Virgin Comics, Dan Dare. And so am I. That’s the book featured in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics column. Go read it, if you like. I’ll wait here.

Back already? That was fast. Did you get the headline? It was supposed to be a play on “derring do,” but I have a feeling it could just as easily be read as “having sex with Dare” or “making another Dan Dare comic.”




2.) Rare first appearance of Bow-wow: In the corrections department, in discussing children’s book Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug on Monday, I mistakenly claimed that one of its creators, Mark Newgarden, is the author of a graphic novel entitled We All Die Alone.

That’s not exactly true. While Newgarden does have a book entitled We All Die Alone, it’s a collection of biographical information and old gag strips and cartoons by Newgarden, some sequential, but mostly one-panel. It's not a graphic novel. A lot of these strips are hilarious, some of them are tedious, and most of them are pretty avant-garde, making for an interesting book to think about, but not a terribly entertaining one to read.

Newgarden is a huge Nancy fan, he worked with Art Spiegelman and he is the inventor of Garbage Pail Kids. Yes, Garbage Pail Kids. For real.

One reoccurring strip idea Newgarden used was something called “Meet the Cast,” in which he’d fill a panel or series of panels with weird-ass cartoon characters, like Dampy the Effeminate Pancake, Sid The Sea Bishop, Noah the Unhappy Apple, Way Groovy Tom Peacenik of the Moon, and so on. In one installment, I couldn’t help but notice a dog named Bow-Wow…



Let’s take a closer look there…



Bow-Wow sure has mellowed out a bit since 1990, and I think he may even have had some work done to his snout.



Now I wonder if we’ll bee seeing a charming children’s book series starring Shithead O’Leprechaun or Joey Donutfoot the Misanthropic Dead Bakery Assistant in the near future…




3.) Ed Benes Isn't Very Good: Some people apparently like the work of Ed Benes on Justice League of America. I know this to be true, because I’ve read through plenty of message board posts at Newsarama, where you’ll always have a lot of guys saying how awesome it all looks or what a great talent Benes is. Seriously, check it out if you don’t believe me.

Now, everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion, however I feel compelled to point out that if you’re of the opinion that Ed Benes is a good comic book artist, you are wrong.

I’m not familiar enough with Benes’ entire body of work to say how bad he actually is. I kinda liked a lot of his work on Birds of Prey for example, particularly at the beginning (after his run lasted for a while, his weakness in drawing more than two different body types—male and female—became clearer and clearer). I don’t think Sandra Hope’s inks necessarily do his pencils the best justice, however the pair of them can acquit themselves fairly well when doing big, posed shots, like that cheesy team photo in JLoA #7 (A badly scanned version of which is above). Benes may be a fine pin-up artist or cover artist.

But as a sequential comics artist, illustrating a script? The guy sucks. Now, JLoA is certainly harder than other titles in the number of characters that need dealing with. The team has, what 14 characters on it, now? (I’m not sure if Flash or Geo-Force are actually on the team or not). And in this storyline, they’re fighting about as many super-villains. That’s a lot of costumes to keep straight. So maybe Benes is just on a book too big for him (Well no maybe about it; the number of fill-ins we’ve seen in the first 15 issues shows that he’s definitely on a book too big for him).

But aside from the lack of backgrounds, the lack of variety in characters’ body types and faces, the poor “acting” he does, and the Liefeldian layouts full of characters breaking the borders for no reason, Benes has that one unfortunate tendency of putting a female characters’ butt or breasts or both in the focus of every panel he can get away with it in.

This week’s issue is chockfull of that, but here’s what may be the most egregious example. Ready? Here’s what I think may be the worst panel in a book full of bad panels:



Note Batman’s head sticking out of the top of the panel. Why? No reason. It just is. At least it’s not as hard to read as other border-breaks, like the Vixen/Rocky Guy Thing fight.

Also note the fact that Batman gets off a whole sentence in the time it takes The Joker to fall a few inches. Reading old comics today, we all like to laugh at how Captain America could say paragraphs of dialogue while executing a flip or two, but a) that was a generation or two ago, b) those comics were made for kids and c) Jack Kirby can get away with that shit because it would have been one of the ten thousand panels he drew that month.

This is 2007, and Benes is drawing a comic book read almost exclusively by adults (at least, I hope kids aren’t reading this thing) who read a lot of comics. Why not draw The Joker already on the ground? Or still in Batman’s hand? Why choose to draw the fall in mid-air, if the script tells you there are two sentence of dialogue that will pass the time in which the image is supposed to capture?

But I already know the answer to that. If he drew The Joker on the floor, or being dragged along it by Batman, he might have had to lower the "camera" angle a bit, and then wouldn’t have been able to draw Black Canary’s ass in the panel, or perhaps not as much of it.

And, let the record show, Benes’ guiding principle when composing an image is whether or not he can draw a woman’s ass in it. I mean, look at this image; it’s almost 50% Black Canary’s ass. No one’s talking about her ass, her ass has nothing to do with the story. The subject is Batman disobeying Black Canary’s orders and having gone off into the swamp to retrieve the escaping Joker.

Anyway, it wasn't my intention to turn this into Benes bashin week at the EDILW or anything; I actually drew the previous post a while back, and was saving it for the second Batman's Christmas List post because Wonder Woman's his second best teammate or whatever. It's honestly just a coincidence that I've talked shit on Benes for, like, four posts in a row.




4.) Although Benes is still better than Liefeld: Have you read this article headlined “The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings” yet? If not, make sure you check it out when you’ve got some free time and are in a place where it’s okay to laugh out loud. I’m not sure if the headline is meant to be taken literally, as there are some very, very bad drawings in here, but I kept expecting to see the Cap With Boobs image, and it never came, and I’m pretty sure that’s worse than some of these. Maybe not.

I’ve always felt a little sorry for Liefeld, on account of making fun of him is just so easy, it feels a little like making fun of the foreign exchange student for talking funny during lunch period or whatever. (And I have very little personal experience with his work; there are exactly two comic books containing Liefeld art work in my long boxes—Darker Image #1 featuring the most shameless rip-off of another character I’ve ever read by Liefeld [Plus, a Sam Kieth Maxx story, the reason teenaged Caleb bought it], and that one Superman Christmas issue by eight different artists, one of which was Liefeld.)

But man, writers “Hanstock and B” (what kind of names are those?) show no mercy, and it gets pretty hilarious. After a while, I began just giggling myself silly at the images themselves, before the commentary would even begin. I mean, look at that panel up there. I was alive and reading comics in the ‘90s—did people really think stuff like that looked cool back then?




5.) I will now comment on that one thing everyone else will also comment on: So J. Michael Straczynski’s not crazy about the latest J. Michael Straczynski Spider-Man story either, huh? Does that make it official? Does everyone hate the idea of rebooting Spider-Man continuity to magically undo his marriage to Mary Jane? Everyone except Marvel Editor-in-Chief and the story’s penciller Joe Quesada, anyway?

If they don’t undo the marriage magically now, I’ll be pretty surprised, because whatever the decision was—to do it or not do it—it must have been made months and months ago, since the new, tri-weekly schedule for Amazing Spider-Man is dependent on the outcome, and, if Marvel’s as on-schedule with ASM as they claim, then the first story arc of that book at least was finished before “One More Day.”

They can still de-re-boot Spider-continuity, as I’m fairly certain they will, given fan reaction, but it may not be for a while yet.

What I find perplexing is that Quesada even took it this far. He’s been talking about his problems with the Spider-marriage for years on Newsarama. No other issue gets talked about as much as the Spider-marriage in this formerly weekly interview columns, Joe Fridays, not even his ban on smoking in Marvel Comics. And his opinion has always been universally disagreed with.

Of course, he is right, a married Peter Parker ages the character and makes him easier for adults to relate to then children—having him marry Mary Jane in the first place may have been a mistake, and should have been undone. But it would have had to be done in, when was it, 1987?

Now, there’s just too much momentum to the marriage, and it’s played too big a role in too many Marvel Comics.

But to stop thinking like a fan and reader for a second, un-marrying Spider-Man no longer makes a lick of sense.

Ultimate Spider-Man (indeed, the whole Ultimate line) was launched specifically to appeal to new and young readers, to bring the spirit of the original Spider-Man comics into the 21st century, and it succeeded wildly. It remains one of the better Big Two comic books being published. It also features a young, unmarried Spider-Man.

Marvel Adventures Spider-Man overlaps with USM quite a bit, in terms of being focused on younger readers and telling stories with much easier jumpingonability, and it also features a young, unmarried Spider-Man.

As does Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. And large swathes of the stories appearing in anthology Spider-Man Family.

The only version of Spider-Man who is a little older and married is the Marvel Universe one, the one whose primary audience is the dwindling, graying Direct Market crowd, all of whom overwhelmingly prefer a married Spider-Man to a single one.

Making Marvel Universe Spider-Man more like the USM and MA ones just undercuts what makes those books special. So Marvel is risking alienating it’s shrinking Direct Market fan base to make their line of Spider-Man books less diverse, is that it?

But back to JMS, it is pretty weird to see a Big Two Marvel writer, even one as influential as him (he is safe and secure with an exclusive contract at the moment, right?) saying he doesn’t like the direction the story’s going in.

It also strikes me as incredibly insincere. As I mentioned last night, JMS could personally be in some trouble over the poor quality of this story—what’s going on in it aside, those first two issues constituted some of the worst comics writing I’d ever encountered—so it’s understandable that he’d want it on record that this wasn’t all his bright idea.

But at the same time, there’s no gun to his head here. If he thought it was a stupid idea, he didn’t have to write it in the first place. Likewise, if he pitched an idea for a story in which Gwen Stacy’s and Peter Parker’s grown children are the villains, but gets it shot down, he could have just scrapped the story and told another one, he didn’t have to change the father of Stacy’s children to Norman Osborne. If there was any form of compulsion to write the dumb-ass story his boss wanted him to write, it would have been financial and fairly minor (I’m assuming; he was leaving ASM anyway, which means the only “at risk” book would be Thor, right?). Isn’t turning down one story’s arc worth of paychecks worth not looking like a chump?




6.) Countdown to Checkmate getting cancelled :And speaking of popular comics writers speaking out against the grind of editorial fiat, long-time DC writer Greg Rucka isn’t renewing his exclusive contract with the company. In a second post responding to the original post which set off Internet response, Rucka essentially says that if there’s any dirty laundry regarding his relationship with DC, he’s not going to air it.

Fair enough.

Rucka got his comics start after a few prose crime novels, then had a very successful Oni mini Whiteout and, next thing you know, he’s writing Batman for DC, including part of “No Man’s Land” (the last really good Batman crossover?) and a long, successful stint on Detective Comics. After working on DC’s biggest star, he then got to work on their other two biggest stars, Superman (which he actually wasn’t very good at) and Wonder Woman (a title he was kind of mediocre on, but being mediocre on the Wonder Woman monthly is the same as being brilliant on other titles).

He was heavily involved in the Infinite Crisis build-up, including the really shitty OMAC Project, and was part of the 52 team, giving DC one of it’s biggest hits in, what, ever? (Seriously guys, that thing sold 90 to 100,000 or more every single week!)

But since then, it’s clear he’s been somewhat, um, underappreciated by the company. His only ongoing monthly is Checkmate, which seems to be a title he’s well-suited for, but also a title that’s on the verge of cancellation, and seems to be getting monkeyed with quite a bit (I can’t imagine Rucka thinking, “Oh sweet, I love Judd Winick and his goddam stupid book Outsiders! Let’s do a crossover!” Or “Sure, by all means, use these characters I’m supposed to be writing to set up your stupid fucking Salvation Run series; sounds faboo!”*)

He’s publicly mentioned that he wasn’t thrilled to see Renee Montoya, a character DC owns but he’s adopted as her primary writer since his TEC run years ago, appearing in the pages of Countdown (drawn badly off-model to boot), and I see she had at least a one panel appearance in the recent Gotham Underground miniseries, which also ties into Salvation Run.

And then there’s Batwoman, the monthly starring the lesbian vigilante who made such a huge splash in the mediascape a few years back. Originally, her monthly adventures were going to be written by Devin Grayson, and a title logo was even designed, but the book never materialized. Later, Rucka was supposed to be working on her series, and he mentioned frustrations with DC’s reluctance to release the book in interviews on different subjects. There’s still no Batwoman comic book on the schedule, and I wonder if that ended up being the last straw?

Anyway, with Rucka leaving DC, what’s that mean for the company? I’m going to assume John Ostrander is going to be named the new Checkmate writer sometime in the near future, if the book’s not cancelled before then, at which point he’ll get to write it for six months and then it will get cancelled.

I’m also going to assume Batwoman will continue to not come out, and, if anything, is now a lot less likely to ever come out.



*Actually, I can’t imagine anyone saying the word “faboo.”

Weekly Haul: December 5th

I’m running a little later than usual this week on account of having gotten a much later start reading than usual, which means this week’s edition of the Internet's most hastily written comics reviews will likely be even more hastily written than usual (I predict a 250% increase in typos—see if you can spot ‘em all!).

On the plus side, you get two posts today…and tomorrow…and at least a couple times a week for the next few weeks, as we present a daily holiday-themed index card and colored pencil extravaganza through the 23rd or so, counting down to Christmas.

But enough preliminary blabbing…these things are late enough already…




Avengers: The Initiative Annual #1 (Marvel Comics) This seems more designed for newcomers than regular readers, as it fills in some gaps regarding certain characters’ origins that didn’t really need filling in, but it succeeds in that respect, as it showcases the title’s greatest attribute—it’s really the Marvel Comic which ties all the other Marvel comics together, so if you’re interested in the whole universe’s story, and want to read as few Marvel comics as possible, this is the one to be reading (Well this or New Avengers; The Initiative is better-grounded in the Marvel Universe as a place and has a deeper cast of characters, but New Avengers seems to set the agenda for all the other titles much of the time, doesn’t it?).

Regular writer Dan Slott and incoming co-writer Christos Gage present five stories, each focusing on a member of the book’s regular cast—There’s the origin of Gauntlet by Salvador Larroca, the origin of Armory by Clayton Henry (weird; I didn’t think we’d see her again), the origin of Hardball by Steve Uy, the origin of MVP and the Scarlet Spiders by Tom Feister 7 Carmine Di Giandomenico, and a look at Pennsylvania’s super-team, The Liberteens. I like some of the characters introduced in the team—although one of ‘em isn’t who he appears to be (see the above the title banner on the actual cover)—which brings us to another attribute of this title. It’s one that is constantly, actively adding new characters to the Marvel Universe.

Also, Flagsmasher is totally in this issue. And I love Flagsmasher.

On the downside, this issue is printer’s mistake-tastic, with several pages smaller than they should be, the bottoms of the bottom tiers of the panels cut off. Nothing vital was missing, but still.




Black Summer #4 (Avatar) I cringed when I first saw the American Prospect cover with the post-assassination John Horus on the cover, and later had friends ask me about the book. See, it’s pretty cool that such an unlikely source for comics coverage would do a comics cover story like that, but at the same time, Black Summer sure seems like one of the least political superhero comics I’ve read—there seems to be more commentary, intentional or not, on the state of war-time America in The Avengers: The Initiative or World War Hulk then Black Summer. David Rees manages more outrage and relevance in a single panel of Get Your War On than writer Warren Ellis and artist Juan Jose Ryp have managed in the last three issues of Black Summer. In fact, the political angle seems to have dropped out of site completely, for bang-up action, explosions and super-fights, with the occasional detour into science jargon sprinkled speculative fiction territory. Are we ever going to see anyone react to the thrilling situation set-up in the first issue? Anyone who isn’t a super-person, anyway?

Really nice hyper-detailed art by Ryp, though. I don’t much chare for his character designs, but he does an incredible job drawing explosions and rubble. When he spends a two-page spread, the reader really seems to get their two-pages worth out of it.




Blue Beetle #21 (DC Comics) Missied it! I completely forgot how much I hated the fact that the new Spectre has a goatee until I read this fill-in issue which came out last week but went un-purchased by me. I’m not really sure what the point of even having a new guy’s soul bound to The Spectre Force is if it doesn’t give the Spectre any sort of personality beyond “I gruesomely kill murderers with grand guignol prop powers for God.” In this story, all Crispus is adding is a goatee. Which looks lame. Spectral lameness aside, this is a strong fill-in, done-in-one in a book known for strong done-in-one’s by the regular creative team.





Justice League of America #15 (DC) For the third issue in a row, writer Dwayne McDuffie tells a chapter of a pretty dumb fight story, a pretty dumb fight story that’s not about anything other than a big, dumb fight. There are hints that the characters know this sort of pointless story is beneath them, as Superman suspects and Luthor confirms near the end, but it would have been nice of McDuffie to let the readers in on it. As is, this is the chapter where all the good guys beat up all the bad guys, and then the Suicide Squad come in to announce everyone’s due to appear in Salvation Run now.

The thing McDuffie does well is write the characters though, and he seems to actually do in-story the sorts of things that his predecessor Brad Meltzer only talked about in interviews. He shows Canary being a leader and actually, like, leading, for example, and has Geo-Force actually use his awesome superpowers for the first time in 15 issues. He even uses both Green Lanterns at once, in a way that seems perfectly natural.

Unfortunately, he’s still working with pencil artist Ed Benes, for whom the best that can be said of is that he’s better than Joe Benitez (who returns next issue). In addition to being lazy (the whole story is backgroundless, as if the characters are actors working in front of a green screen, and the CGI artists never got around to filling it with special effects in post-production), he again manages to work a completely inappropriate shot of a woman’s ass into almost every page. Check out the double-page spread on pages four and five for example—does Black Canary really look like she’s about to fight an army of supervillains there?

Benes likes drawing cheesecake. I get it. But isn’t there a comic book better suited to super-cheesecake than the Justice League one? Is Wonder Woman really a character DC wants depicted as bare-assed in half the panels she appears in?




Justice League Unlimited #40 (DC) The nature of this book—done-in-one stories set outside the DCU line, rotating creators who can only bring so much personality to the property—make it a perfect book to pick up now and the. Miss an issue—hell, miss 20 issues—and you’re not really missing a thing; that 21st issue will still make perfect sense.

I tend to only pick these up when I really like the characters involved. This month, the spotlight falls on Zatanna, with the other half-dozen heroes who appear being more or less interchangeable with any other six heroes in the JLU, although it was the cover image that sold the book to me.

I just love the semi-Scooby-Doo set-up of the image, with the heroes tiptoeing in tight formation, the monster sneaking up behind them (I think it’s the totally scared Martian Manhunter half-hiding behind Wonder Woman that totally makes the cover).

Luckily, the next 22-pages are pretty fun too. Writer Ben McCool crams the old "Zatanna’s Search” plot line into a single issue, one which opens with little girl Zatanna Zatara, wearing fishnets, and telling spooky stories in her treehouse and getting busted by her father Zatara, and then, from there, gets into the Wizard of Ys and Shadow Thief versus the Justice League fight. It’s a lot of story, but it’s so tightly constructed, it doesn’t seem rushed at all, in fact, McCool seems to be killing time with a page and a half epilogue in which the JLU come across as jerks (Which is fair; in the era of comics this one homages, the League were hardcore jerks).

My only complaint? I love the fact that Zatara apparently wears an ascot and top hat around the house, but what’s up with that checkered vest and khaki ensemble? It’s a tuxedo or nothing on the original Z, artist Dario Brizuela! Um, not that I mean it would have been better if Zatara were wearing nothing in this issue, because a nude Zatara would have made a couple scenes in this issue kinda creepy.




Justice Society of America #11 (DC) Thank God JSoA came out the same week as JLoA this month—penciller Dale Eaglesham really is the anti-Benes. Every panel is filled with deep, rich backgrounds, so you can tell the difference between the settings, giving the stories a sense of place. Since the JLA guest-star in parts of this sisue, you see the exact same characters as in JLoA, yet here Wonder Woman has a bit more coverage, and Eaglesham manages to make characters like Black Canary sexy in her posing, body language, expression and neat, Veronica Lake hairstyle—not simply by drawing her costume as skimpy as possible and sticking her butt and boobs into the focus of every shot. Eaglesham also varies his character designs, so that each character has a different build and expression, even when they’re the same characters from different dimensions.

It’s really too bad that DC can’t find an artist of equal caliber for their best-selling book as they’ve already got on their second best-selling book.

As for the plot, this really feels like the end of the set-up for the actual Kingdom Come-Superman-comes-to-the-DCU storyline, as he more or less joins the JSA, Mr. America III (Is that right? III?) joins the who’s-killing-all-these-minor-supervillains-you-need-to-look-up-on-Wikipedia case, and the Society meets Judomaster II.

Geoff Johns really just writes good-old-fashioned superhero comics, with a mixture of action, fisticuffs and a dozen soap opera plots going at once, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t seem like the very best writer DC’s got on their payroll some weeks. Perhaps his past success has earned him a greater degree of freedom from editorial interference than the rest of his peers, but JSoA seems to be one of the few DC Comics where the creators are telling stories they want to tell, rather than serving bigger storylines.

Confidential to Cyclone: Quit hanging on Superman like you are on the cover, girl. He’s old enough to be your grandfather.




Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #34 (Marvel) Look at that cover. Look at it. How could you not buy it? I don’t have much to say about this issue and how cool it is that isn’t better said by that image.

I should take this opportunity to point out that, however, that for the second week in a row I’ve enjoyed a well-written, well illustrated story about a teenage, unmarried Peter Parker who still lives with his aunt and hasn’t outted himself to the world, and nobody had to make a deal with the devil or go through any goofy-ass continuity contortions to get it to me.




The Twelve #0 (Marvel) This is really just a glorified preview book for J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston’s upcoming maxiseries—I’m sorry, their “thrilling novel of tomorrow,” according to the cover copy—most of which you’ve already seen for free on Newsarama.com. There’s the character designs by Weston, a few pages of black and white art and two random color pages from The Twelve #1. Hardly worth $2.99, and I certainly would have left it on the shelf, if it didn’t also contain three tales of three of the Golden Age heroes.

I don’t know if it’s simply because Marvel hasn’t fetishistically incorporated quite as much of their Golden Age character properties into their fictional universe as DC has, or if DC’s buying up other company’s heroes (like Fawcett and Qaulity’s, for example) makes it seem like they have a richer Golden Age catalog, or if these heroes are so much less popular than the ones you see in old price guides and such (like Green Lama, Cat-Man, War Nurse and the like) or what, but these guys seem really, really, really out there, even for characters from such an out-there era.

Short stories include one starring Rockman, Underground Secret Agent (conveniently acronym-ed into USA), drawn by Basil Wolverton (?), who seems like Namor and The Mole Man combined into one bad-ass figure; The Phantom Reporter, who has a double secret identity and appears to be neither a phantom nor a man who does much actual reporting (although it does seem most comic book reporters spend more time fighting crime than conducting interviews and writing stories, doesn’t it?); and The Laughing Mask, who appears to just be a guy who shoots people.

I’m pretty interested in JMS’ upcoming Twelve series, and wonder if, after “One More Day,” if I’m the only one who is. His current Spider-Man arc really does seem like a career-killing one, as based on the reaction to the last issue, it has replace Countdown as the most reviled comics story, no easy feat.




Wonton Soup Volume 1 (Oni Press) Remember what I said about getting a late start? Well, all I’ve read of this so far is the back cover, but the plot synopsis sounds interesting, as does the character name “Citrus Watts” and the question, “And what good is a spatula against space ninjas?” Man, I can’t wait to find out. The art looks pretty cool from the flip-throughs I’ve given it. Expect a real review um…sometime in the future. Maybe next week?

This Is Not A Graphic Novel...Or Is It?: Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug

The same interests that lead me to become so enamored of comic books, writing and drawing, reading and looking at drawings, have also always attracted me to children's picture books, which also generally feature a fusion of word and image in a print format. I spend an awful lot of time in libraries these days, and whenever I see a neat-looking kids' book, I'll usually snatch it, bring it home and give it a read.

The other day, I saw this one:



There's no title on the cover, but it's called Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug (Harcourt Children's Books; 2007). I didn't much care for the extreme close up of the dog on that cover (he's actually much cuter on the insid when you can see his whole head; this cropping out of his snout makes him resemble some kind of old Disney cartoon cow or horse), but I really liked the three-legged, almost featureless bug, so I took it home to give it a looksee.

It opens with a full-page image of a little golden dog of the terrier variety cureld up on a little dog bed, sleeping. Then I turn the page, and am greeted by this:





Two pages, each divided into four different panels, with four different images in them.

The majority of the book is told like this. The lay outs on the pages differ greatly—there are full-page images, single images that spread across two pages, pages divied into three vertical panels, pages divided into three horizontal panels, pages with nine-panel grids.

So, is this book a "graphic novel?"

The two local libraries I go to both had it shelved with their childrens' picture books, and its size and shape is such that, without cracking it open, one would assume it's a childrens' picture book (It's nine inches wide and nine inches high, has a spine, is a hardcover, and is only about 50 pages long). There's no suggestions on where to shelve it on the title page or back.

Shelving it with childrens' picture books is certainly the best place to put it, as it will get it into the hands of the intended audience much better than if it were shelved with graphic novels, and I'm not really asking in a practical sense so much as out of curiosity regarding the medium.

The book is wordless, so if the fusion of words and images are integral to graphic novels, then it doesn't seem to fit. But by the most accepted and used definitions of "graphic novels"—which here I'm using to mean "comics" or "sequential art"—Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug seems to be one.

At any rate, it is a great read. It's by Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash. I'm not sure which of them does what, as the credits are a little unclear; Montague Cash designed the book at the least, and Newgarden is a comcis artist with at least one graphic novel to his name (We All Die Alone, which I haven't read yet; but plan to this week on the strength of Bow-Wow).

As you can see in the badly-scanned images above, the book is beatifully constructed, with each panel filled with a clear, sharp image with a nice, thick line, the sort of line that doesn't look drawn so much as simply extant (I really like lines like that, as they give me the impression that the characters they delinieate werent' drawn by artists, but are "real" in the same way you or I are). The images flow perfectly into one another, and the artist/s are in perfect control of the pages, and the way different sizes and shapes of panel effect the flow of the story. For example, big surprises and new encounters always come on the left-hand page, so that the right hand page will set something up, and then you'll turn the page to see womething unexpected.

And the book is pretty muc a series of unexpected encounters. That little black dot in the image aboe is the bug of the title, and Bow-Wow follows it out the doggy door and out into the world. What's going on in Bow-Wow's head isnt' exactly clear. His brow is furrowed as he follows it, but you can't tell if he's angry or just really intensely concentrating on the bug—he doesn't seem to be chasing it as much as following it and looking at it super-hard.

Along the way, he and the bug experience a series of increasingly bizarre situations, like another dog that looks identical to Bow-Wow (save a different color collar) following another book that looks identical to the bug. They met, sniff each other, and then go into the Marx Brother's routine in which the one brother tries to fool the other, thinking he might be a reflection (the bugs play out the exact same sequences in miniature below the Bow-Wows).

I don't really want to spoil any of the weird things Bow-Wow and his bug encounter, as the surreal twists and turns of the story are its cheif pleasure, but there's one of my favorites (note the first image appeared on the right half of the open book, so that you would see something slightly off in the last panel, turn the page and then see the punchline):





That kicks off a sequence of even weirder, more unsettling things.

Apparently, there are two other Bow-Wow books, both of which have really nicely designed covers, and neither of which my local libraries carry, and two more scheduled for next year. If you like what you see here, check out bow-wowbooks.com. It's a kinda tough site to navigate, on account of the lack of words, but it's full of neat images of Bow-Wow and some odd games and suchlike.

Wonder Woman at her not-very-good-est

The ever quotable Rachelle Goguen of Living Between Wednesdays had this to say in her review of writer Gail Simone’s debut issue of Wonder Woman:



Now, a lot of people have said lately that certain writers have "ruined" Wonder Woman. This is simply not true. Wonder Woman was NEVER GOOD IN THE FIRST PLACE. Please tell me when exactly the Wonder Woman title was good. The way some people talk, it's like she's the greatest character of all time, and certain recent Wonder Woman events have reduced her to a two-dimensional, boring character who can't stand on her own. People...this is what she has always been like. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying it's the truth.



Now, Wonder Woman actually was quite good before, even great. When was that? Well, around 1942 to 1947 or so. There have been high points since, certainly (Much of George Perez’s run, most of Phil Jiminez’s run), but Goguen has a point—Wonder Woman was quite often really terrible.

You know when Wonder Woman was really, really, really not good, though? May of 1958. That’s when Wonder Woman #98 was published, the first book to be collected in Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman Vol. 1, which is jam-packed with Wonder Woman comics that are no good at all.

(I had previously used the amount of time it took DC to get around to publishing a Wonder Woman Showcase volume as possible evidence that Wonder Woman just wasn’t as much of a priority for readers or DC as many of their other heroes are, but, having finally gotten around to reading Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman, I understand that maybe it was because they wanted to publish some volumes of good comics first to establish a market, even if it meant shining the spotlight on lesser luminaries like Jimmy Olsen, Metamorpho and Elongated Man first).

These comics are all written by Robert Kanigher (I know! Bad Kanigher comics, who would have thought such a thing possible?), penciled by Ross Andru and inked by Mike Esposito.

They kind of reboot Wonder Woman continuity, although I’m not sure the words “reboot” and “continuity” existed in 1958. And even if they did, it’s not like you could go online and complain about how Kanigher’s failure to include a giant kangaroo rodeo in his origin of Wonder Woman clearly contradicted Sensation Comics #1, because there was no such thing as the Internet. Back then, the comics blogosphere was actually a comics telegraphesphere, and it took forever to complain about shit.

Anyway, since World War II was long over, Wonder Woman no longer fought Nazis. Nor did she ride on kangas. Or hang out with sorority girls. Or do much of anything terribly cool.

After rescuing a horny, leering pilot from falling into shark-infested oceans, she travels to America to…actually, I’m not sure why she does. But she goes to America, and in the guise of “Diana Prince,” she gets a job for “Military Intelligence,” the branch of the U.S. government devoted to launching rockets, fighting flying saucers, judging costume contests and dealing with giant space birds, a bigger problem than you might think in the late 50’s.

Her supporting cast consisted mainly of Colonel Steve Trevor, whom she seemed to be dating. He was always trying to get her to marry him, and she’s apparently provisionally accepted his proposal, so long as he waits until her “services are no longer needed to battle crime and injustice.”

To most guys, “when all evil has been eradicated in the world” would sound like a brush-off akin to hen “not in this life time” or “when hell freezes over,” but it seems good enough for Trevor. Although he still checks in every other adventure to see if she’s decided to marry him yet.

(This makes me think Wonder Woman had a weird idea of what marriage entailed; even if she intended to tend house, cook Steve three meals a day, have sex with him one to four times a day, have a drink ready for him when he got back from the office every day and raise his kids, given her stupendous Amazonian powers, she should be able to do all of that and still have enough free time to fight evil with. It also makes me think that there would be a lot less hurt feelings in DC comics in the Silver Age if Wonder Woman and Superman would only have set Steve Trevor an Lois Lane up on a date. Those two are perfect for each other!)

Wonder Woman’s teenage boyfriend seemed like a slightly less needy guy, although he was sexually incompatible with. That would be Ronno or Renno (depending on which panel had the spelling error), whom Wondy always just called “Mer-Boy” (Which seems a litter harsh, considering he called her “Wonder Girl” and not, you know, “biped” or “air-breather” or whatever).

Then there’s her mother, the still-blonde Queen Hippolyta, who checks in often from Paradise Island (and plays a bigger role in her Wonder Girl adventures), and General Darnell, who’s not a character so much as the guy who occasionally shows up to tell Trevor to go do something or other with Wonder Woman.

Her Golden Age supporting cast, Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls, only appear in one story in this volume. They’ve been redesigned, so that Etta isn’t obese or wearing a cowboy hat and boots, and the others are each given a one-not personality. In addition to slimmer, smaller, less rambunctious and less funny Etta, there’s Lita Little, Tina Toy and Thelma Tall (When Wonder Woman asks what kind of story they’d like to hear, Etta asks to hear one about candy, Tina one about toys, Lita about a short girl who gets taller, and Thelma about a tall girl who grew shorter! Ha ha ha ha! Comedy gold!)

There’s a real repetitiveness to the stories, which seem to mostly revolve around Wonder Woman fighting different versions of herself



Or giants from different planets and dimensions



Or both at once





In fact, I’m pretty sure Kanigher just had a fishbowl on his desk full of 12 ping pong balls in it, each with a different word written on it, and when it came time to bang out a Wonder Woman script, he’d just reach his hand in and pull one out for a story idea.

Check it out. Now, Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman Vol. 1 is 527 pages long, featuring 20 issues of the Wonder Woman comic and 36 individual stories.

Wonder Woman fights different versions of herself nine times, or in one-fourth of the stories. There are more than nine different fake Wonder Women however, as in addition to robot duplicates and Dimension X doppelgangers, in one story the entire population of Paradise Island dresses up as Wonder Woman and competes against her in a variety of challenges, and in another hundreds of young women dress up as Wonder Woman and pretend to be her to win award money. She also fights a “Tracy’s Day” parade balloon-come-to-life version of herself and a wooden ship’s masthead-come-to-life version of herself.

She also fights giant birds and/or pterodactyls on nine occasions.

She fights aliens from different planets on six different occasions (not counting any of the giants, some of whom hail from different planets).

She fights octopuses five times.

She fights races of giants on four different occasions.

She fights giant electric eels three times.

She fights only two reoccurring super-villains, neither of which appears more than once in this particular volume. They’re the Duke of Deception, a servant of war god Mars who lives on the planet Mars and bedeviled her during the Golden Age, and The Angle Man, who’s menaced Wonder Woman and her fellow heroes since the 1940s, and continues to do so today.

While the volume proved pretty disappointing (Why did they start it after this comic, but end it before this one?), there are still some decent enough stories in here.

My three favorites include “The Invasion of the Sphinx Creatures!” in which Wonder Woman battles an army of four living sphinx-shaped monuments in the desert before they can invade civilization. The sphinxes make for some really weird visuals, particularly when marching all together over sand dunes or battling one another. See, in the peculiar rules of this stor, “Only by a sphinx can a sphinx be defeated!”

Wonder Woman solves the problem by rebuilding a sphinx around herself and somehow animating it to fight the other sphinxes. How she moves it around, I don’t know, but it looks cool as hell.

Then there’s “The Cave of Secret Creatures!” in which Mer-Boy tries to get Wonder Girl to like him, and takes the advice of a friendly mer-girl, and tries to make Wonder Girl jealous by taking her to a mer-person dance and then dancing with other girls right in front of her.

It’s only 12 pages long, but plays like a little crappy teen movie, only with added Wonder Woman weirdness, like the mer-teens having an underwater juke box in their underwater hang out, or the mer-people having underwater park benches to sit on (even though they don’t even have asses to sit on!), or Wonder Girl getting ready for a date by bathing in an “Amazon perfume geyser,” and expressing her frustration with Mer-Boy by throwing a giant clam at him. All is resolved for the best when Mer-Boy is trapped by a giant sea spider.

The most delightful story of all though is a nine-pager entitled “Wonder Girl’s Birthday Party!”, in which the Amazon teen is about to blow out the candles of her birthday cake when her mother tells her of all the trouble Wonder Girl’s had with birthday cakes over the years. When she was just two-years-old and still a Wonder Tot (actually, Wonder Tot would appear until Wonder Woman #122, but this is Wonder Girl as a toddler), she blows her cake so hard that it disappears into orbit, and is seen through a telescope orbiting the earth. In later years, earthquakes and freak tornados would keep Wonder Girl from getting to enjoy her cake, and, at the end of the story first a roc snatches this year’s cake, and she fights off the bird, but not before a giant whale can devour her cake.

These stories aside, however, Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman Vol. 1 really kind of sucks.

Now hurry up and ready Volume 2, DC!

Minx in review

(I said Minx, not minks, dammit!)



Well, it took me most of the year, but I finally read all of DC's Minx titles that I was interested in (passing on only Kimmie66 and Confessions of a Blabbermouth, the former of which has a premise that doesn't make me want to drop $9.99, and the latter of which got some pretty harsh reviews that also make it seem a poor way to spend a ten dollar bill).

There was a lot of talk inside the comics industry and the comics blabosphere when DC's girl-focused Minx line was first launched and announced, spurred on by the somewhat clumsy roll out (Karen Berger saying girls don't read comics when she meant girls don't read DC comics), the predominance of men making these comics geared towards girls (only two female creators involved in the first seven books announced), and the difficulty DC had in defining a line that ended up simply being young adult graphic novels.

Oddly, conversation seemed to die down once the books themselves started rolling out, with only the occasional review and creator interview appearing, and less of the ranting and raving associated with the announcement persisted. Did the books themselves shut up the critics, or did the critics just not bother to read any?

I haven't seen much discussion on them online, anyway—although Johanna Draper Carlson just put up something—but then that could be part and parcel to the fact that they are books aimed for an audience outside the regular comics audience...and manga audience...and even bookstore/art comics audiences, meaning, to a certain degree, we’re not supposed to talk about them. It could also be because they're damn hard for most of us to judge, let alone talk about.

Obviously, I don't have any data about how well they're selling, in the direct market or the library/bookstore market (where they're likely to do much, much, much, much, much better), nor much interest in looking what data is publicly available up. And, as a 30-year-old man and regular comics reader, I'm horribly ill suited to say if something is a book a girl would like or something a non-comics reader would like, and this is a line intended for girls who don’t already read comic books, according to DC.

So keep in mind all I can really do is offer educated guesses and not terribly valuable opinions. At any rate, here are my thoughts on the Minx line, presented in the order I've read the books. Good As Lily is the only one I bought off the rack at my shop the Wednesday it came out; I read the other three within the past few weeks, having found multiple copies of each at a local Half-Priced Books (Does that mean they're not selling well? Or just that a couple people in my neighborhood bought some and decided they never wanted to read them again?).




GOOD AS LILY

# of former girls involved: 0

# of former boys involved: 2

Who are they, and what have they done before?: Writer and cover artist Derek Kirk Kim wrote and drew the excellent graphic novel Same Difference and Other Stories. Artist Jesse Hamm makes his mainstream debut with this book, although he's produced minicomics, webcomics and appeared in a few anthologies.

What's it about?: On her 18th birthday, high school senior and drama enthusiast Grace gets a magic piñata that somehow summons different versions of herself from different ages—6, 29 and 70—and she tries to keep them secret from her family while making it through her day to day life, which includes putting on a play, a crush on her drama teacher, and a crush from her longtime platonic friend.

Palpability to manga readers: Hamm's art isn't very manga-esque. Many of the characters are Asian, though, and some of the plotlines, and the something-wacky-happens-to-otherwise-normal-person set-up, will be fairly familiar to anyone who's spent much time reading manga.

Girliness: Mild to strong.

Is it any good?: Yeah, it's pretty great. There was some mild disconnect from how different Grace and her different selves look on the cover (drawn by Kim) and throughout the story, drawn by Hamm, but I really enjoyed Hamm's art, and look forward to seeing more from him in the future. Kim juggles the various Graces pretty well, and while they make for the story's hook, they are really just other characters, with the actual conflicts focusing on Grace's relationship with her family and her friends and her self, the selves helping and hurting her attempts to solve her problems. It doesn't quite work like clockwork, but there's some real emotion in this, and I found myself alternately laughing and getting choked up.

Will it hit its target audience?: Yeah, I think it's more or less a direct hit.





RE-GIFTERS

# of former girls involved: 0

# of former boys involved: 3

Who are they, and what have they done before?: Writer Mike Carey has written many mainstream serial comics I have not read, including Lucifer, X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, Crossing Midnight, plus some that I have read (Spellbinders, Voodoo Child). Penciller Sonnie Liew drew Slave Labor Graphics' Return To Wonderland and wrote and drew Malinky Robot. Inker Marc Hempel pencilled The Sandman arc "The Kindly Ones" and has written and drawn many very awesome comics, including Gregory. The entire creative team previously produced My Faith in Frankie, a Vertigo miniseries collected into a Minx-like digest-sized trade.

What's it about?: Korean-American high-schooler Dixie is training for the national hapkido championship, but is thrown off-balance by fellow student and school cute boy Adam, whom she tries to impress with an expensive birthday present. Teen melodramedy ensues as the tries to win the championship and his heart and stay out of trouble with her parents and local bullies.

Palpability to manga readers: Strong. The teen romance, bully/bullier, and competition elements are all of the sort present in a lot of manga and manhwa. Liew's pencil style and sense of design is pretty unique, not falling into more representational or cartoony Western design or manga-like Eastern design, but having a sketchy, doodley quality that is more akin to what you'd see in children's picture books, illustration work and (in a few characters) political cartooning than sequential art.

Girliness: Mild

Is it any good?: Yes, it's very good. I'm a fan of Liew and Hempel individually and together, and Carey's written things I liked and things I didn't, so my expectations were kind of mixed going in, but I was really impressed. This is certainly the strongest of the Minx books in terms of book design (it resembles an actual wrapped gift, with the main character looking like a tag on it), and there are some really strong characters, both in their visual design and their story realization. Not only are the leads strong, but even the most minor of characters are unique— I loved Dixie's little twin brothers, for example, and cracked a smile every time they appeared. The story is constructed in that sort of perfectly pleasing way in which a great deal of seemingly diverse elements are introduced, and are all pulled together and resolved at once.

Will it hit its target audience?: Hard to say. I think the story will certainly prove appealing to new readers, but I wonder if Liew's style might be a bit of a turn-off to comics virgins. Despite the strength of his storytelling, it doesn't really look like anything that someone who's never really read comics before would be familiar with, and I wonder if it would repel them, or even just have a higher learning curve.




CLUBBING

# of former girls involved: 0

# of former boys involved: 2

Who are they, and what have they done before?: Writer Andi Watson wrote and drew Glister, Slow News Day, Breakfast After Noon, Geisha, Skeleton Key and many other comics I don't like as much. Artist Josh Howard wrote and drew Dead @17 and Black Harvest, plus a few other things too.

What's it about?: Charlotte "Lottie" Brook is a goth London teenager who gets caught with a fake ID trying to get into a club and, as punishment, gets sent out to the countryside to live with her grandparents and work at their country club for the summer. There it becomes something of a fish-out-of-water comedy, but also a murder mystery, and Lottie tries to solve the weird goings on of her household and the village. Oh, and then it gets all Lovecrafty for, like, 12 pages.

Palpability to manga readers: Pretty palpable. Howard's art is strong influenced by manga, particularly in the character design of the females, but it tends to be even flatter and more abstract. In other words, it looks particularly manga-influenced to people who don't read a lot of manga; definitely influenced by manga-influenced art, if that makes sense.

Girliness: Mild. The protagonist likes clothes and talks about shopping a lot—girls like shopping and clothes, right? That said, all of those clothes are really, really small, and Howard's art seems to appeal more to boys and men than girls, I would think.

Is it any good?: I really like Howard's art style, to the point where he's one of the artists whom I read just about anything by, no matter how bad, just to look at the pictures. And Watson does a good job on Lottie's slang-filled voice, which is definitely unique. But this definitely feels like the first draft rather than a finished product, as it veers and lurches between genres at random. I think every review I've read mentions how out of left field the supernatural element actually is, so I was expecting an unexpected element and wasn't caught off guard by it, but, yeah, you probably want to foreshadow something like that somewhere. I mean, Scooby-Doo foreshadowed its monsters in every episode, and none of those were even real. Of the Minx books I read, this was by far the weakest.

Will it hit its target audience?: Maybe.

Anything else to add?: Yeah, you know, Josh Howard would have been a great artist on DC's current volume of Supergirl comics, wouldn't he? He's really good at belly shirts and micro-skirts, and he's much better at anatomy at drawing cute girls than pretty much anybody who DC actually hired for that gig.

Back on topic, why does DC mention Howard's Dead@17 being "Wizard magazine's pick as the #1 independent book to watch in 2005" on the back of the book (and on the online solicitation). I assume Wizard readers/peole who care what Wizard says about comics/anyone who even knows what Wizard is are well outside the target audience for Minx books.

Finally, this book also has the absolute worst cover. That image of white junior high girls at a school dance or whatever above the title? Nothing remotely like that occurs in this book. The club Lottie goes to is a goth club where everyone goes all out in their goth costumes. Also, that picture looks terrible juxtaposed against the Howard girl in a photo environment right below it (That juxtaposition does work pretty well, though, visually accentuating the culture clash that's the subject of the story—she's a two-dimensional comic book heroine in a three-dimensional photograph world!)




THE PLAIN JANES

# of former girls involved: 1

# of former boys involved: 1

Who are they, and what have they done before?: Writer Cecil Castellucci is a prose novelist responsible for The Queen of Cool, Beige, and Boy Proof (none of which I've read). Artist Jim Rugg is responsible for (too) short-lived series Street Angel, one of the coolest comics in like ever, and has had short peices in a variet of pretty goon anthologies, like Project: Superior

What's it about?: A bomb attack in New York City stand-in Metro City transforms life for protatonist Jane and her family, who move to a suburb. Inspired by a sketchbook from a fellow victim of the attack, Jane decides to devote her life to art, forsaking the popular girls at her new school and forming an all-girl art gang with the three girls at the outcast, all of whom are coincidentally named Jane. The P.L.A.I.N. Janes' anonymous art attacks stoke (unattributed) post-9/11 fears of terrorism, causing a rift between the adults and teens in the small town.

Palpability to manga readers: Other than the digest format and black and white art, there's nothing particularly manga-esque about it. Some of the situations repeat what you'd find in shojo comics, but this book visually has more in common with Western art comics than Japanese pop imports.

Girliness: Mild to strong.

Is it any good?: The art is absolutely perfect. Rugg does his expected strong job, but I think this may be his best work I've seen. He finds a perfect balance between representational and subtle cartoonish exaggeration, turning in a series of character designs that are all distinct, realistic and highly pleasing to the eye.

The story is similarly well constructed, and Castellucci doesn't show any of the weakness typical of some prose writers doing their first comics (telling more of the story through the words than the pictures, using too many words, an omniscient narrator who checks in with various voices, etc.). Some of it struck me as pretty unrealistic in a way that originally grated on me—why use "Metro City" instead of New York? Why use a cafe bombing more typical of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict than 9/11 itself to address post-9/11 fear in our culture?—but that lack of realism coupled with other more highly manufactured elements lends the whole story a sort of fairy tale feel, as if that unreality is quite intentional.

Perhaps Castellucci is consciously telling a half-fable about the conflict of art vs. fear in modern America. I think the story could still be told if she were more direct in her address of issues, without sacrificing the more escapist, entertaining elements. The ending is pretty sudden, and leaves one of the main conflicts—the romantic one—completely unresolved, with a good character seeming to suffer punishment for his goodness, making for a pretty unsatsifying ending to an otherwise quite satisfying story.

Word at Comicsworthreading is that there's a sequel planned for the future, but there's no "to be continued" or official indication of this in the book istelf. If this were manga or an ongoing series from Oni, it would have had a "Volume 1" on the spine to indicate that it would presumably continue at some point, but not so. (Something for DC/Minx to think about in future printings, though).

Will it hit its target audience?: Yes, dead on.