Meanwhile...

Here's a particularly awesome page from Pippi Fixes Everything, in which the title character gives what for to a gang of bullies who were picking on a little boy until she interrupted them, at which point they started making fun on her hair and shoes. And then the above happens. I reviewed the book for Good Comics For Kids earlier this week. I liked it a whole lot, and, as I noted on Twitter the other day, I think it would be of great interest to the More Female Heroines And Creators In Comics, Please crowd on the Internet, given that Pippi is kinda sorta a female superheroine (she has super-strength, dresses outlandishly, fights crime and rescues those in need), and this comic is written by a woman (who created the character), drawn by a woman and even translated by a woman.

Also at GC4K this week, I reviewed The Aerosmurf, the latest volume of Papercutz's reprint program of Peyo's classic comics. It's kinda like the previous 15 volumes of the series, so if you liked those (I did), you'll like this, and if you didn't, you won't.

The most exciting piece I did for GC4K this week, however, is the one that appeared today: An interview with Charise Mericle Harper, the cartoonist responsible for Fashion Kitty and a few of the picture books I've reviewed here before (like The Power of Cute, for example). It's occasioned by the release of Fairy Tale Comics (you may recall I discussed that effort with its editor Chris Duffy already), to which Harper contributed the adaptation of "The Small-Tooth Dog."

And, finally, this week at Robot 6 I once again reviewed (almost) every issue of DC's Villains Month offerings released (now that I do the math, I read and reviewed 48 of the 52 books that DC released).

Here, let's look at a scene from one of them, so as to complain about it (Not the artwork though; that's a damn fine looking comic thanks to Francis Portela and Tomeu Morey). Check this out:

The above images are from the surprisingly good Killer Croc issue. I have no idea who that is under the Robin mask, beyond knowing that it's definitely not Damian.

That's one of the thing that bugs me about the New 52 reboot and the fact that it's costume redesigns affected not only the present, but also the past. That Robin, confronting Croc "three years ago" (Year two of Batman's somehow now only five-year career), is probably most likely Dick Grayson, but he's dressed more like Tim Drake (and, if you condense all of Batman history down into just a few years, it should still be Jason Todd as Robin around the time that Croc shows up, right?).

Well, two things, I guess. First, it doesn't make any goddam sense if you think about it for longer than ten seconds (Was Dick in his twenties when he was Robin? Or is he only like 17 now? Did he ever go to college? If not, why did Batman ever take Jason on as a replacement Dick; was Dick really sick of being Robin after only, what, like 16 months or something?).

Second, as demonstrated here, it is so unimportant who is in the Robin costume that it doesn't even matter if you understand who the character is; he's just a costume, not a character (Note how coy the artwork is in giving clues as to the character's secret identity.

Another very nicely-drawn issue this week was the Bane one, by Graham Nolan. This will also cause a continuity headache if you allow it—"Knightfall" still happened, just totally different than it did in the comic books entitled Knightfall that you can read if you want to—but what struck me most about this visual recap of Bane's origin?

No Osoito.