(just a few) (links)

Ooh, I have one of these too...in my head. (One has to do something with one's mind while sitting there in the theater watching those super-long Transformers movies so as not to fall asleep, you know?) Mine is very, very different, at least from what little I can tell from the imagery.

I have an idea about the Transformers that I haven't seen used in any of the comics, cartoons or movies yet and how it would apply to the DCU would, I think, be kinda cool. I didthink there would be a Transformer with a Green Lantern power ring, as Jimenez's pitch apparently includes, but it wouldn't have been Optimus Prime wearing it; instead it would have been Cosmos (the little flying saucer guy, who spoke in a slight Scottish accent for some odd reason), and he woulda been a regular member of the Green Lantern Corps from whatever sector of the universe Cybertron is in.

I really wish this Jimenez thing was happening, though. I love Jimenez's work, and the level of precise detail he brings to it would/does look incredible on giant robots. His (and Devin Grayson's) JLA/Titans remains one of my favorite crossovers/favorite comic book reading experiences of all time.

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Another Transformers crossover pitch that exists only in my head after formulating it while daydreaming during Michael Bay movies? The Transformers: The Lost World of the Dinobots, a mash-up of Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World and Transformers.

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DC Women Kicking Ass posted a link to a post from last year that I either never saw, or read and then forgot reading. In any case, here's former Batman editor Scott Peterson, who assistant-edited and editing during maybe the tail end of the time when I was most into Batman comics, discussing how exactly the once-new Batgirl Cassandra Cain came about.

I genuinely love this sort of thing. I would read a book of nothing but Marvel and DC editors and creators talking about how (relatively) minor heroes and where, exactly, they came from. Like, there's plenty of material out there about where Superman came from, or the the first wave of Marvel heroes and the DC Silver Age version of the Golden Age heroes, but where did, say Vibe, come from, you know?

I was pretty resistant to the idea of Batgirl at the time she was introduced in the Bat-books. She seemed somewhat random. I did really come to like the character when I sampled an issue of her solo series though, and started reading it backwards and forwards (snapping up whatever back issues I could find while reading the new ones as they came out), and eventually came to really love the Cassandra Cain character.

That she sort of drifted out of the Bat- universe around the time of Infinite Crisis is just very, very weird. It's like DC's editors just sort of lost track of her, forgetting she existed for a while, and then suddenly remembering, and doing something weird (She's a villain now, apparently! For some reason!), and then trying to explain why they did that weird thing. So, like, for years now almost all Cassandra Cain stories have been either weird, out-of-character, character-as-plot-point stories, or overly-complicated explanations for why the previous story was so awful. I swear DC has published an entire miniseries full of nothing but attempts at no-prizes.

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Wow, look at this nice drawing of The Scarlet Witch by Milo Manara. That's pretty perfect superhero cheesecake, and I'd happily purchase a comic book featuring the character drawn by Manara. It is, sadly, just a cover: The interiors are written by former artist Brian Michael Bendis, drawn by John Cassaday and will, naturally, cost you 33% more than your average DC comic, because Marvel can get away with charging you that much.

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At Savage Critics, retailer Brian Hibbs offered some off-the-cuff reviews of some of this past week's DC releases, as a way of surveying where the New 52 experiment stands a year later.

I liked the Green Lantern/onanism joke that shows up in the comments, because I like puns and think penises are funny because I am a child.

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I was pretty surprised to check the comments thread on that post about Geoff Johns comics on Robot 6 and find 70 comments. Seventy! That's an awful lot. Especially for me.

I was also surprised to read a few commenters saying they were A-OK with the fact that Aquaman ices his foes now. I suppose when the current story arc ends, it's going to end with Aquaman realizing he shouldn't kill his archenemy Black Manta, as that's his current goal, but you can't really kill off the villain in a superhero comic, but I really just can't wrap my head around that scene where Aquaman tridents a henchmen to death.

Like, even if you were okay with fucking Aquaman being the Wolverine of the Justice League all of a sudden, what a weird scene. Aquaman sneaks up on Black Manta and his mean. Black Manta orders one of them to kill Aquaman's scientist frenemy. The henchman raises his gun to shoot, and Aquaman jumps out from wherever he was hiding and hurls his trident into the dude's spine, impaling him.

Why not aim for the gun, or the hand? The shoulder or legs? Why not throw a rock? Or tackle the dude or say "Yo yo yo! Over here, yo!" Why fucking stab the dude to death like that? It's so...weird.

I guess it's part of Johns' overall rehabilitation strategy for Aquaman, but I really have a hard time believing that "make Aquaman more like Wolverine" is going to work all that well for all that long, or that the character of Aquaman can sustain that level of callous, lethal warrior-itude without the whole thing crumbling into inadvertent self-parody.