Every Day Is Like Wednesday

Some of you may be wondering what's going on with my face...

2012-01-27T20:25:00.000-08:00

(Or; "The state of my facial hair is getting stronger...as long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of my facial hair will always be strong")

Meanwhile...

2012-01-26T18:32:00.000-08:00

In the first issue of Brandon Graham and Simon Roy's new Prophet series from Image Comics (which is numbered #21, just to be Marvel-ous), the title character kills and cures a large, predatory mammal. Then, using one of its bones and a flap of its skin, he makes a hobo bindle out of those two part, in which he then carries around the flesh of the very same animal to use as food.

That is probably the goriest hobo bindle ever made.

For more on Prophet—like, for example, is it any good or not—you might want to check out this week's Las Vegas Weekly, or at least this link, which will take you to my review of the book there.

If you'd like to read still more of me writing about comics on websites that are not Every Day Is Like Wednesday tonight, you might also want to visit Robot 6, where you can find a piece of some length regarding Carl Barks' depictions of various native peoples in the stories collected in the (wonderful, essential) Walt Disney's Donald Duck: "Lost in the Andes".

Comics shop comics: January 25

2012-01-25T19:35:00.000-08:00

I only bought two comics this week at the shop, for the regular reasons that I am poor, too many comic book-comics are over-priced and trade-reading seems much more rewarding. But! Of those two comics, written by different writers and published by different publishers, both featured fantasy technology which characters compare to the black box on an airplane. Weird.

Aquaman #5 (DC Comics) After reading Abhay Khosla's post about an essential difference between the Geoff Johns-written Flash and the Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato-written Flash, the one in which he looks around at all of the superhero comics in which the superheros battle their own misconceptions about their parents and wonders if perhaps we've entered the "Parent Bro Era of Comics", it was pretty impossible to read the above sequence straight, and not think about Khosla's post.

It is, after all, written by Geoff Johns, and features Aquaman talking to a hallucination of his late father, about his mom and why Aquaman has made the life choices he's made up to this point, none of which we've been privy to, as the character was recently rebooted, and so there's only about four-and-a-half issues of Aquaman in which we can have observed his life choices (Mostly they seem to involve being an a-hole to surface-dwellers for not kissing his ass hard enough, and whether its okay to commit genocide if one feels pretty broody about it after the fact).

This issue, by the regular, still-hasn't-needed-a-fill-in creative team of Johns, Ivan Reis and Joe Prado, Aquaman ends up in a desert after fighting some mysterious, possibly Atlantean foes in a flying craft. There are a few bits of it that reminded me a little overmuch of Superman—Johns seems to be writing Aquaman as the Superman of the Sea, doesn't he?—or perhaps, more closely, a scene in the original Star Wars.

Aquaman's new level of superpowers continues to amaze me. We have so far seen that he's bullet-proof (although he does take shrapnel in this comic, so I guess he's not impervious to chunks of flying metal that haven't been shot out of guns) and is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and survive the fall to earth that results.

This issue, we learn that not only does he have hearing more advanced than that of human beings, but he has super-hearing almost as powerful as Superman's!It seems that not only is New 52-Aquaman more powerful than ever before, but New 52-Superman is weaker than ever.

Captain America and Bucky #626 (Marvel Entertainment) In this issue, the elderly Bucky II has a flashback, Captain America fights a Bucky robot, the most obvious thing concerning the mysterious new character that can happen in the story happens and Ed Brubaker, James Asmus and Francesco Francavilla continue to bide their time until the book gets relaunched in a few months.

Marvel's April previews reviewed

2012-01-24T21:51:00.000-08:00

Here's what Marvel plans to publish this April.

Here's what I have to say about it:

I would think fighting the Sandman would be the one time Black Widow would have to zip up.

Amazing Spider-Man: Hooky #1
Susan Putney (W) Bernie Wrightson (A/C)
•Spider-Man Vs. The Horrific Tordenkakerlakk In The Dimension Of Cloudsea!
•Can Spidey And The Spirited Spindrifter Overcome A Foe That Becomes More Powerful – And More Terrifying – Each Time It’s Defeated?
•A Macabre Masterpiece Illustrated In Disturbing Detail By Horror Master Bernie Wrightson!
•Reprinting Marvel Graphic Novel #22: Spider-Man – Hooky
.64 Pgs./Rated T+ …$4.99

Bernie Wrightson!

I have never heard of Susan Putney before.

I really like some of the words in the solicit, though. I think I’ll buy this if my shop carries it.

Avengers Academy #28
Christos Gage (W) Karl Monline (A)
Cover By David Lafuente_• Guest-Starring The Runaways!
• Romantic Sparks Fly Between An Academy Student And A Runaway! But Between Who?
• Jurassic Fans Rejoice: An Appearance By Devil Dinosaur…And The Return Of Old Lace!
• Plus: Will Nico, Chase, Victor, Klara, Karolina And Molly Finally Stop Running And Join The School?
32 Pgs./Rated T …$2.99

Oh hey, The Runaways! I remember those guys! I used to read their comic! I had planned on checking out their guest-appearance in Daken recently, but I heard it was pretty terrible, so I changed my mind. I wonder if this will be better…?

If nothing else, it will have at least two dinosaurs in it, so there’s that.

Avx: Vs #1 (Of 6)
Cover By Adam Kubert
...
The Premier Tie-In To Avengers Vs. X-Men!
• All-Out Action Featuring Cover To Cover Battles, Each Issue Expanding On Fights From The Main Avx Book In Ways You Can’t Imagine!
• This Issue: Iron Man Vs. Magneto And Thing Vs. Namor!
32 Pgs./Rated T+ …$3.99

I like that mindless, unnecessary (to the story) violence is right there in the pitch Marvel's offering their readers, and this seems like a better way to go with the “premier tie-in” series to one of Marvel’s big events. Previously, the premier tie-in would be an anthology book about the reporters covering the event, how some minor characters are reacting to the event and maybe something hideously offensive, like comparing the emergency forces who died trying to save the victims to 9/11 to Wonder Man’s inability to choose who he likes better, Captain America or Iron Man.

I like the cover, too, mainly as a design as opposed to the illustrations. The actual title of the book, however, is masked by that design. This book is called Avengers Vs. X-Men: Vs #1? That makes it sounds as if the “#1” is one of the combatants in a three-way battle.

The matches in this first issue don’t really seem that exciting—Guy Who Controls Metal should beat Guy Covered In Metal pretty handily, right?.

Finally, I wonder if Marvel charging $4 for a $3 book will seem more grating to their loyal fans than usual when those 20-22 pages of story are literally nothing but fighting.

Wait, one more thing: Isn’t it kind of weird that there’s no creative team listed for this thing…?

Okay, let's move on...

Moon Knight #12
Brian Michael Bendis (W) • Alex Maleev (A/C)
• The Conclusion Of Marvel’s Maddest Mercenary Moon Knight Is Here!
• After All He’s Been Through, Will There Be Anything Left Of The One-Man Avenger?
32 Pgs./Rated T+ …$3.99

Er, aren’t all the Avengers One-Man Avengers? Or one-woman Angers?

Look, artist Ryan Stegman gave Scarlet Spidey 90s feet!

What’s up with Vision’s face on this cover (which is of Secreat Avengers #26, by the way). Is he colored differently now? Also, anyone know who the guy in the background in the astronaut suit is? He looks like a Darkstar to me, but that’s the other superhero universe…

I think I say this, or something very similar, every month, but I hate Kaare Andrews’ Ultimate Comics covers so much. I think I hate them more than I would if they were done by someone I didn’t know was a great artist.

By the way, is the stretchy guy up there on the ultimate Comics Ultimates supposed to be Mr. Fantastic...? Because I thought they killed him off for some reason. But I don’t know; I haven’t read anything Ultimate since the Ultimate Spider-Man Ultimatum tie-ins.

Ultimate Spider-Man Adventures #1
Man Of Action, Dan Slott & Ty Templeton (W) Nuno Plati (A)
• 2012’S Most Anticipated Tv Show Is Now The Comic Book You Can’t Miss Out On!
• By Day, He’s Peter Parker, Mild-Mannered High School Student. But By Night, He’s The Ultimate In Super Heroics – Spider-Man! And He’s Just The Beginning Of A Super-Hero Universe…
• From The Minds Of The Men Behind The Hit Tv Show!
32 Pgs./All Ages …$2.99

Wait a minute...the new all-ages Spider-Man comic, the one based on the upcoming cartoon, which is going to be called Ultimate Spider-Man, is entitled Ultimate Spider-Man Adventures? Not to be confused with Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, the new title of the old Ultimate Spider-Man, or the old Marvel Adventures Spider-Man. Sheesh.

That's a pretty nice creative team; I wish Templeton was on art, though. Nuno Plati might be good—I have no idea—but I really like Templeton’s art, and it’s been far too long since I’ve seen it in a mainstream super-comic.

UPDATE: So it turns out Plati is good, awesome even. I'm really curious to see what his art looks like in this comic, however, as I can't imagine it will be drawn in the same style as the images in the linked-to post.

This Wolverine & The X-Men #9 cover by Chris Bachalo is the only Avengers Vs. X-Men-related cover this month that doesn’t really suck at al. It’s not that great—I don’t like that high-contrast image of what looks like a photo of 9/11 wreckage dropped in in lieu of an actual background, for example—and it’s still just a bunch of folks posing, but compared to the rest of them, it’s a freaking masterpiece.

So it looks like Marvel is going to be doing a (highly-alliterative) April Avengers Art Appreciation

2012-01-23T20:20:00.000-08:00

month of special variant covers on many of their books, similar to the Wolverine Art Appreciation varaints they did in 2009, featuring various artists homaging a particular classic work of art and sticking Wolverine in the middle of it. The Beat has a bunch of 'em up here.

I liked a whole lot of the Wolverine ones, and ended up buying the Wolverine Art Appreciation #1 gallery special, which was just a comic book collecting all of the covers together.

As with most gags, it seemed a lot funnier the first time then it does upon repetition. And that might have something to do with the fact that Wolverine is an inherently more alien—and thus more amusing—character to stick in classic works of art, unlike, say, Black Widow or Thor, whose visual design are simply that of very attractive people, one of whom is already a mythological figure that often appears in art anyway.

Here's Greg Land's, which includes several different Avengers in several different art homages:The fact that Thor is not nude and you can't see his tiny little pee-pee ruins the would-be Michelangelo's David homage for me, I'm afraid.

Christian Nauck's is nice......although suffers somewhat from having been done at least once before:
On a positive note, this one's probably my favorite:It's by Steffi Schutzee and, oddly enough, it's for Daredevil, which is also my favorite Marvel comic at the moment.

Were I Very Good Artist and Marvel asked me to do one of these, I think I would get a urinal, toss a couple of Avengers action figures in it, maybe scrawl "S. Lee 1963" on it, take a photo of it and use that as my submission.

That, or a nice painting of Thor's hammer with the words " Ceci n'est pas une Mjolnir" in cursive below it. Or would it be funnier in Nordic rather than in French, and in runic-looking type instead of cursive...?

Links...and a distracted tirade or two

2012-01-22T17:42:00.000-08:00

Here's the cover of the first issue of Marvel's upcoming Avengers Vs. X-Men event/series. I like that half the guys just seem to be screaming in the other guys' faces.

Hopefully someone on the Avengers' side knocks that goofy hat off of Colossus in the ensuing fight.

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

Check out Tim O'Neil's piece on recent Marvel Comics, in which he summarizes the state of the Marvel Universe from House of M to Battle Scars, the series which sparked O'Neil's post.

"Somewhere along the line the single most important question at issue in Marvel comics became Who Was In Charge of the superheroes," O'Neil wrote. He continues:

This is really weird: 2005's House of M was Marvel's first line-wide crossover since 2000's Maximum Security (an event so bad it was terrible), and the plot was basically Who Gets To Be In Charge, the Avengers or the X-Men. The winner was, of course, the Avengers, because House of M ended by kneecapping the X-franchise for years to come. But if the jockeying for dominance was metaphorical in House of M it became literal in Civil War: Who Gets To Be In Charge of the superheroes. If superheroes were real obviously they'd be run like any other branch of the federal government, so who gets to be the guy in charge of that agency (The Initiative). And then when that happens what happens when the guy in charge of the agency falls down on the job and lets a bunch of aliens invade (Secret Invasion) meaning that the new guy in charge is the looney ex-con who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to shoot Space Osama in the head (Dark Reign). And then the looney guy in charge goes nuts and leads his branch of the government right over a cliff (Seige) and then it's time for Daddy (AKA Captain America) to step in and take care of things. And from then on out it's all basically a story about all the characters getting in on Daddy's good side, because of course Daddy is the government and we all want Daddy's approval, right?

Because, you know, if there's one thing I always really wanted when I was a kid growing up reading superhero comic books, it was for stories about superheroes working for the government.

I've read pieces in which those very dots were connected before, and certainly I've noticed them myself (it's hard not too). But I think I haven't heard it explained quite as well as O'Neil does it there.

If the main concern of the Marvel Universe has become who is in charge of the superheroes, I wonder if that's because Marvel's editors and writers have been worrying about their job security, and those anxieties have been seeping into their work...?

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

So I guess something kinda weird happened on Newsarama this week. Specifically, EDILW favorite Brandon Graham might have talked some shit on Judd Winick for being a shitty writer, and that part of the roundtable interview was excised; according to Robot 6, the whole shebang has since been taken down.

I never saw it.

I wrote for Newsarama for years. (I almost wrote "I worked for Newsarama for years, starting in 2005," but then I remembered that I didn't get paid for most of the writing I did there until the old Blog@ crew moved on to start Robot 6 and the Newsarama's "Best Shots" review crew, of which I was then a part, took over Blog@. At that point, I started working for them.)

Everyone I dealt with there seemed cool, and they were always very nice to me. I did the vast majority of my writing at the mostly autonomous Blog@Newsarama section of the site, so the only writing I did for the main site was a few interviews and features that I really wanted to do. But the folks on that side were cool and nice to me too.

The unfortunate side of a site like Newsarama is that the Big Two sort of have it in a stranglehold (not unlike the grip the Big Two have on the direct market!) and can more or less indirectly dictate content. They can't demand positive reviews or get changes to articles or anything like that, but they can get mad at unflattering coverage, and give more exclusive previews to a rival site, or move a feature they were producing with Newsarama to its main rival site, limit access to creators for interviews and exert other forms of negative reinforcement.

That's not to say that Dan DiDio or Joe Quesada hand out Newsarama story assignments, it's just that there's a concern of the possibility of retaliation from Marvel or DC, and thus a reluctance to do anything that might piss them off. Well, not even a reluctance, per se—I can think of a handful of examples where Newsarama went ahead with things they were fairly certain would irritate the folks at DC and Marvel—but it's at least a constant concern. It's something that's always on their writers' and editors' minds, I would guess, even if only in the very back of their minds.

So maybe they did edit Graham's criticisms of Winick so as not to annoy either DC or Winick. It could also have been for space, or language, or a combination of them—like, for example, they had to lose 500-1,000 words from the transcript, so when looking for stuff to cut for space concerns, they went straight to the stuff that might also piss sources off.

I have no idea, though.

The thing that sucks about it though is that Graham has a really important point, one that the editing and/or eventual taking down of this story, one that the very existence of pressure—implied or expressed–exerted by Marvel and DC over an industry news site like Newsarama only reinforces.

"I want us to be able to actually have real conversations in comics," Graham wrote in his blog entry on the Newsarama kerfluffle. "I think we need to be critical of each other’s work, and this industry is especially weak on issues of race and gender. I want to see how good we can all get, and I want bullshit to be called when it needs to be called."

I can't really add anything other than "Amen."

The biggest problem with comics as a medium today is comics as an industry, and one of the problems with that industry is the amount of glad-handing, false high-fiving and outright lying about how great everything is all the time that goes on between creators and publishers. A lot of comics are terrible, a lot of the people who make them are terrible—not terrible people per se, but maybe terrible writers or artists or editors or colorists—and the fear of saying that because of fear of retaliation in some form of another, of not landing the big interviews you want to get on your site, or of not getting hired by the publisher you want to work with on the characters you've always dreamed of working on, paralyzes far too many people.

No one likes to mean—well, some people might—and I can understand why, say, Grant Morrison wasn't twittering about how DC was fucking him over by assigning Tony fucking Daniel to draw his Batman comics or whatever, because maybe Grant Morrison doesn't want to be an asshole. That's cool.

But critics? We should all be prepared to criticize. We should demand the best possible comics. The best work from the best creators, and, when one of even the best of the best creators turns in less than a perfect piece of work, we should feel free to accentuate the negative instead of simply ignoring it. Not to be assholes, but because in a perfect world, the comics should all be perfect, and me, I want to live in a perfect world with perfect comics...or at least a more perfect world with more perfect comics than the ones we have now in this world.

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

Sorry. Didn't mean to go off on a tangent or anything. I think Brandon Graham has more than earned the right to talk shit on Judd Winick, though, and I always find it refreshing when I hear a comics creator talking shit on another one, because it happens so infrequently that it can sometimes be difficult to believe anything any of these guys say about each other. Everyone can't love everyone's work all the time, you know? But that's the impression one gets if one reads enough interviews with creators.

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

Holy shit, can you imagine a Brandon Graham Catwoman...? That would be something to read, whether Graham was writing for Guillem March or writing and drawing it...

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

In that same post, Graham posted some sketches. Here's his Groucho Marx:Nice, huh? It's weird how its recognizably Groucho Marx, but also recognizably Graham's drawing, almost like Marx is a Graham creation.

You know what might be even cooler than a Graham Catwoman...? A Graham adaptation of Animal Crackers or The Cocoanuts...

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

Those are my two favorite Marx Brothers movies. Those two and Duck Soup are the best of them all, in my opinion.

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

Oh, I also kinda wanted to highlight the part where they talk about Ross Campbell drawing sexy ladies:

Brandon: Speaking of Ross Campbell(artist on Glory) and his stuff, he’s going through this period where he’s reassessing his work, really looking at how he’s approaching women. He’s actively trying not to be sexist in his own work, and talking about that a lot. His being given this character is almost a chance to make right how DC fucked themselves up on their relaunch and how they were really shitty to their female readers. Ross is coming in and being able to actually be thinking about them, because he comes off as one of the creators most aware of the female reader and how female characters are being depicted in comics.

Joe Keatinge (writer on Glory): That’s definitely a big part of it too. I mean, character comes first before any big political statement, but I want a female lead who can break Supreme in half, because why not? That’s definitely what we’re going for here.
My goal is to make her and one of the characters in the book who I won’t name, but who appears in the first issue, into two of the biggest bad asses in comics. Their gender doesn’t really come into it for me. I don’t see why it should. It’s just about who they are.

Brandon: It doesn’t hurt to point out they’re characters a teenaged girl could read about and not feel embarrassed.

Joe: Exactly! I wanted this to be a book that I could show to a girlfriend or my parents, and not be ashamed. I want a 13, 18, 20 year-old-girl to read this and not be embarrassed because Catwoman’s fucking Batman or whatever. I want this to be something where it can be enjoyed by them just as much by a 13, 18, 20-year-old boy, whatever.

Guys, I'm not gonna lie—as much as I love Ross Campbell's art (and I love it a lot) I also love his sexy art, including his insanely intense, hyper-sexualized artwork on The Abandoned and Water Baby. It might have been over-the-top on Water Baby, which was marketed toward teenage girls instead of lonely middle-aged men like me, but, divorced from context—it was very good, very sexy artwork.

I don't think Campbell's work was, in itself, sexist and, I think, the amped-up sexuality of his characters, their scanty clothing, the scenes of undress, their raging hormones all went a ways toward combating sexism in the mainstream comics industry in that Campbell was, in some of his work, drawing women of different ages, colors, styles and, most notably, sizes, and he was drawing them all in the same sexualized manner. You don't have to look far to find an image of a 90-110 lb. sexy woman in a comic book; but a sexy 150 lb. girl? Hell, a 150 lb. girl of any kind, sexy or not? Good luck with that outside of The Abandoned or Wet Moon or maybe a 45-year-old R. Crumb joint.

Super-sexy drawings aren't a problem by themselves...it's when they appear in inappropriate places, when they are so foreign to a narrative that they're breaking it that they cause a problem (At least for me).

So if Ross Campbell is writing and drawing his own original graphic novel about a zombie apocalypse in the southern united states, and wants to fill it with scantily clad, sweaty girls occasionally locking lips, having their clothes torn off or exposing their undergarments when they change? If Campbell puts PG-13 flirting with R levels of sexuality in a book like The Abandoned? That's fine.

It's when Ed Benes lays out every page of a Dwayne McDuffie script about the Justice League battling The Injustice Gang in an issue of DC Comics' all-ages Justice League of America so that the focus of each page is Wonder Woman or Black Canary's scantily clad ass, when he designs his pages to change the meaning of the script to imply Lex Luthor exuding sexual menace to Wonder Woman instead of take-over-the-world comic book super-villainy? That is a problem.

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

If you didn't read The Abandoned, and thus have no idea what I'm talking about, here are a few of the girls from the book: In your average superhero comic, every single woman would look like the woman in the cowboy hat above, with maybe different color hair to differentiate them from one another.

All of those images above are from Campbell's Abandoned gallery at his greenoblivion.com website.

I'd highly recommend the "Monsters" and "TMNT" galleries on the art page, too.

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

In addition to Brandon Graham's Catwoman and Animal Crackers, I'd also like to read Ross Campbell's Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vs. Gamera:Get on it, IDW!

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

The headline of this review could be referring to superhero comics in general, rather than a specific miniseries.

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

Really, Superman? Her strangest story? Wonder Woman's strangest story...? I find that hard to believe. Especially since throughout the Golden Age, each and every succeeding Wonder Woman story happened to be her strangest story ever.

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

Three words I never thought I'd see: "Jules Feiffer Variant"

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

Finally, I did this again. Give me your page views!

Comic shop comics: Jan 18

2012-01-21T17:57:00.000-08:00

Daredevil #8 (Marvel Entertainment) I was awfully worried about this issue. It's part two of a two-part story that began in Amazing Spider-Man, which I don't read and the existence of this crossover didn't convince me to start now, and it's not drawn by Marcos Martin or Paolo Rivera, the two artists who were taking turns drawing the book for the previous seven issues. (Martin's since left the book completely; Rivera's responsible for the beautiful cover above, in which we see the two heroes posed dramatically yet naturally in a quintessential urban crimefighter setting, in such a way that makes the image symmetrical and highlights Spider-Man's unique powers. It's a hell of an image, really).

Kano is the interior artist, and I remained worried by the time I got to the second page, and saw this image of Black Cat, whose proportions look...off to say the least.She's drawn with huge breasts throughout, and sometime they are just silly looking, this image being one such instance (I do like the look on Being Electrocuted Spider-Man's face, though).

Well, I had nothing to worry about. The story was easy enough to follow, even if the specific details didn't resonate with me fully (it was no worse than reading, say, any X-Men comic ever made, for example). Someone framed Black Cat for stealing something, Spidey and Daredevil thought she was guilty, they had some sort of conflict and, when this issue opens, they are about to get into the "...and then team-up" portion of the traditional Marvel team-up formula).

Kano's art is really good, and, in fact, this is the best I've seen form him (or her, or them). It certainly helps that its colored by Javier Rodriguez in the same style as previous issues, and interesting to see that even though Martin is gone, his presence continues to be felt in the lay-outs, either because Waid is scripting tightly in such a way as to suggest the artists lay out the pages the way Martin might have, or because the artist is following Martin's example.There are several scenes that are just plain fun to read. I particularly enjoyed the scene right after the heroes all resolve their differences and take to the rooftops, each moving in a different, individual way and then crawling around an apartment in different ways. Or the panel where Spider-Man rips down a door. Or the inspired scene where DD uses his billy club thingee and a rotating helicopter blade to take out a crowd of thugs. Or Spidey's face on page 18. Or Daredevil's smile when a foe says "He can't hit what he can't see!" Or when Black Cat kicks that pilot in the face. Or...

Yeah, this is a really great-looking comic.

The cliffhanger Waid sets up recycles an element from his "Tower of Babel" storyline of his JLA run; the specifics are a little different, and the intent behind the, um, theft will certainly turn out to be quite different, but it's impossible to look at the panel of the reveal and not think of the panel of the reveal from JLA...if you've read both stories, anyway.

Tiny Titans #48 (DC Comics) Barbara unmasks, the Tiny Titans go retroactive, Wonder Girl reveals her secret orange and Commissioner Gordon...remembers:

Wonder Woman #5 (DC) Something seems off this month. Unlike previous issues, which managed to seem like 22 pages even though they were actually only 20, this one feels too short. What's different? Well artist Tony Akins is in for Cliff Chiang, but Akins does a fine job. His work does justice to to all of Chiang's designs, and it tells the story well, even if its obvious it no longer Chiang drawing it, and there are occasionally wonky poses here and there.

Brian Azzarello's long plot takes another step forward, introducing another demigod and reintroducing readers to two more Olympians, both of whom have radically different designs than the forms they're traditionally depicted appearing in. One of them is only barely glimpsed and will presumably be seen at greater length next issue; the other gets a scene, and I'll admit to sort of marveling at how thorough a reimagination his form presented.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

2012-01-19T19:12:00.000-08:00

I have a better-late-than-never review of the first issue of Boom/Kaboom's new Peanuts comic (actually, it's the second one, since they released a #0 issue, but I waited until the one numbered #1 came out to give it a look). You can read the piece here. The one bit of the book I forgot to mention was that it concludes with a strip in which Lucy Van Pelt teaches the reader how to draw Charlie Brown. I didn't follow the instructions exactly (I used pen, and didn't erase my guide line) and sort of rushed through it at the end, but above is my attempt at following her instructions. While the above kinda sucks, the instructions seemed spot on. With lots of practice, I think someone following them could end up doing a hell of a waving Charlie Brown.

Elsewhere on the Internet, I have "Six Thoughts on the Possibility of a Live-Action 'Green Arrow' TV series," generated by the news that the CW is apparently going to order a pilot of such a thing. I hope they go with the bearded version of GA, in which case I already know exactly who they could have play him.

DC's April previews reviewed

2012-01-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

Oh ish. Now that I'm contributing to both Robot 6 and Comic Book Resources and ComicsAlliance, I'm not sure where I should recommend you check out DC's full solicitations for the books they plan to ship in April. Maybe read half of the solicitations at one site, and the other half at the other...?

It looks to me like April's a bit of a blah month—I didn't see much of anything to get excited about, but then, neither did I see much to extremely irritated over. All in all, it looks like some pretty bland offerings, with some fairly exceptional looking Vertigo covers, a few nice piece of art on top of New 52 books and only like three books I'll actually pick up and buy off the shelf.

Anyway:

Come on, Animal Man! Lian Neeson would have made short work of those wolves by now, and he barely has any superpowers.

DC UNIVERSE: LEGACIES TP
Written by LEN WEIN • Art by SCOTT KOLINS, ANDY KUBERT, JOE KUBERT, GEORGE PEREZ, J.H. WILLIAMS III and others
Cover by ANDY KUBERT and JOE KUBERT
On sale MAY 9 • 336 pg, FC, $24.99 US
Acclaimed writer Len Wein chronicles the DC Universe’s epic history in this title spanning five generations of heroes starring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Justice League of America, The Teen Titans and more. Collecting the ten-issue miniseries!

Well good luck selling this one now, DC.

I wonder how final that cover is. Len Wein's writing credit looks pretty wonky like that; its placement seems to suggest that "DC Universe" wrote the book and Wein drew it...

DC UNIVERSE PRESENTS #8
Written by DAN DIDIO and JERRY ORDWAY
Art by JERRY ORDWAY
Cover by RYAN SOOK
On sale APRIL 18 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
As more and more of the Challengers of the Unknown are killed in action, the remaining few must press ahead on their quest! They have to uncover the secret behind the talismans they’ve been collecting before Ace and the spirits from the Well of Souls can finish the job that started with the plane crash!

Given the performance of DC writer Dan DiDio on The Outsiders and the just-canceled OMAC, the final issue of which is solicited among these, is it surprising that DC co-publisher Dan DiDio keeps giving the guy books to write...?

Black Widow….?

I really like Rafael Grampa's cover to Dominique Laveau, Voodoo Child #2. That is all I have to say about that.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #8
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art by CARLOS D’ANDA
Backup story art by GARY FRANK
Cover by JIM LEE and SCOTT WILLIAMS
1:25 Variant cover by MIKE CHOI
1:200 B&W Variant cover by JIM LEE
On sale APRIL 18 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
...
In the five years that the Justice League has been a team, Green Arrow has never once been a member. And he intends to rectify that right here, right now! One member against his candidacy: Aquaman! Plus, in "The Curse of Shazam" part 2, Billy arrives in his new foster home just as an ancient evil is uncovered halfway across the world.

So that the folks at DC were just pulling everyone’s legs when they said this “wasn’t a reboot,” right? Because if the above is to be believed, then not only has the Justice League’s origin changed, so has the bulk of its history. Or, at least, every story featuring Green Arrow (which is most of ‘em, up until about the Detroit Era).

I was really surprised to see Carlos D’Anda on art. His issue of Arkham City I read was illustrated okay, but he’s not exactly who I would think of as someone to fill-in for Lee (Neither is Ha, really, although I used to really like Ha’s work; not so much his recent Flashpoint: Superman series). I assumed Andy Kubert would be the Not Jim Lee DC rolled out every six issues or so.

I wonder if Aquaman is now taking the Fight With Green Arrow role that Hawkman used to fill? I wouldn’t think Aquaman slides as easy into the Stereotypical Conservative role to oppose Green Arrow’s Stereotypical Liberal role as easily as Hawkman or Hal Jordan do, but then, Johns is writing him now, and Johns’ heroes all tend to scan as pretty Republican.

I’m hoping Aquaman says “This team isn’t big enough for two blond pretty boys!” at some point in the script.

JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL #8
Written by DAN JURGENS
Art by AARON LOPRESTI and MATT RYAN
Cover by DAVID FINCH and RICHARD FRIEND
On sale APRIL 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
The plan was for the JLI was to be installed as Earth’s official protective team. But once Breakdown attacked, that all came to a swift and sudden end. Now, as the pall of death and injury hang over the team, all that matters is survival. Featuring the introduction of a surprise new team member!

It’s not Batwing is it? Because it’s not much of a surprise when he’s right there on the cover.

That's a damn fine cover Rafael Albuquerque created for Resurrection Man #8...

SUPERBOY #8
Written by SCOTT LOBDELL
Art by R.B. SILVA and ROB LEAN
Cover by SHANE DAVIS
On sale APRIL 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Well, that rescue mission didn’t go exactly as planned…and things have only gotten worse for Superboy, as N.O.W.H.E.R.E.’s plans for him and the Teen Titans take a deadly turn! If he wants to keep his head, he’s gonna have to take down another dangerous young metahuman for them: the bruiser once known as Grunge!

Wow, Grunge is keeping his name codename post-reboot?

And he's still got the same tattoo?

SUPERGIRL #8
Written by MICHAEL GREEN and MIKE JOHNSON
Art by GEORGE PEREZ and BOB WIACEK
Cover by GEORGE PEREZ
On sale APRIL 18 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
As the NYPD hunt her down, Supergirl takes refuge with a new friend named Siobhan. While Supergirl may have temporarily escaped her troubles, Siobhan’s are just about to catch up with her: the curse of the Silver Banshee has risen, and this time it’s brought its family with it…Don’t miss this special issue featuring artwork by comics legend George Pérez!

I like the basic design of this cover. I'm pretty surprised to see Perez on art here though; this is at least the third book he's worked on art for since September's reboot...

SUPERMAN: GROUNDED VOL. 1 TP
Written by J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI and G. WILLOW WILSON
Art by EDDY BARROWS, J.P. MAYER and LEANDRO OLIVEIRA
Cover by JOHN CASSADAY
On sale MAY 9 • 168 pg, FC, $17.99 US
Top comics writer J. Michael Straczynski takes Superman on a journey across the U.S., originally presented in SUPERMAN #700-706. After the devastating events of WAR OF THE SUPERMEN, Superman looks to reconnect with the roots of his mission by crossing the U.S. on foot.

Huh. DC seems fairly optimistic that someone out there really wants to read this thing.

And they're publishing it in two volumes! So they think that no only is there at least one person out there who still wants to read "Grounded," the story so bad even the writer couldn't finish it, despite the universal bad word of mouth its gotten, but that the same person will want to read more of it after reading it for themselves!

That's either optimism or insanity.

Sigh…

The first issue in an all-new ongoing series*

2012-01-17T23:30:00.000-08:00

*With one obvious exception

This week's (later than usual) links post

2012-01-15T18:43:00.000-08:00

If you weren't reading my blog all weekend because, I don't know, you have some sort of life of some kind, you may have missed a few big-ish posts. But don't worry, I'll link to them here: On Friday I discussed DC's announcement that they would be canceling six of their New 52 and replacing them with six new series at some length, on Saturday I discussed the proliferation of Batman series over the last few years by looking back at a one-time Batman assistant editor's discussion of how big a decision adding a third Batman title was and on Sunday, well, that post wasn't exactly very substantial. Over on ComicsAlliance, however, I had a link-filled post summarizing the previous week of CA coverage, which is a good way to get caught up if you missed a day or two of CA reading.

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

Entertainment Weekly reporter James Garler began his story about Archaia's plans to create a Labyrinth prequel graphic novel thusly:

Some 25 years ago, David Bowie famously turned to a group of goblins and quizzically stated, “You remind me of the babe … The babe with the power!” If comic publisher Archaia has anything to say about it, we may finally learn what on earth he was talking about.

Gartler apparently never saw The Bachelor and The Bobby-Soxer. He should. Everyone should! It's a pretty great Cary Grant romantic comedy, co-starring beautiful Myrna Loy and a 19-year-old Shirley Temple.

The Atomic Fireballs do that sequence in their song "Man With The Hex" on the soundtrack to the live-action Scooby-Doo movie, too..it plays during a chase scene at the club...

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

It is inappropriate to breastfeed seven-year-old children. I don't know that it's inappropriate for them to maybe see breastfeeding occurring somewhere though. I guess Dave Dorman doesn't agree...or he didn't last Monday. That's cool. He's free to think what he likes, and say what he likes, but everyone should beware of saying stuff in public in general—you might have a whole bunch of people ask you to clarify your opinion, so they can decide if you're as dumb as you sound, and if you can't, well...

Dorman did eventually clarify it—or at least said he would clarify it—after the comics sites picked up on it (artist Fiona Staples seemed pretty gracious in her response).

The most interesting part of this to me was the fact that one of the things Dorman seemed to be objecting to was that Dorman wrote:

I find this image offensive, not only for promotion of a comic book, but specifically for a comic that Brian clearly states that he would like to see today’s younger generation pick up and read as he did when he was kid. Rather than a family-friendly heroic saga, this promo art is telegraphing to the world that it’s a series I cannot share with my 7-year-old son. Is the comics industry really so dead that they have to stretch to these desperate, shock value measures to incur readers?

It wouldn't take too many seconds worth of googling to find hundreds, if not thousand of more widely offensive images that comic book publishers put on the covers of comics for kids, often involving breasts.

This is probably my most recent go-to favorite example...... from Rated T+ for readers 16 and up title Red Lanterns, a spin-off of Rated T-for-Teen Green Lantern, inspiration for the PG-13 feature film Green Lantern, a whole particularly garish aisle of toys in Wal-Mart and Target, and a new Cartoon Network series.

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

Oh shit, I hope there's no traffic on that street, because that would totally make me slam on the breaks, veer wildly to the right and/or maybe totally freak out.

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

Via Tom Spurgeon, a Walt Simonson drawing of Gandalf.

Someone with some pull in the proper circles should announce some sort of "Draw Gandalf" day...

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

I blame the existence of Green Lantern Glo Balls.

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

I love it when Abhay writes at length about comic books. He seems to be only slightly joking when discussing what the current volume of DC's Flash comic is about; it seems super-obvious, but that's probably what most superhero comics should be about and, if the creators don't agree with some of those statements, then maybe they shouldn't be working on that character...? Just a thought.

Also, I wonder if Geoff Johns pitched the premise of Flashpoint as Abhay diagnoses it...?

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

This illustrated review of War Horse by Lisa Hanawalt is awesome. Bonus? She mentions Casper Van Dien. I have a confession to make, something you don't know about me, but some of my closest friends and certain family members do: About six years or so ago I developed some sort of minor but weird form of Tourette syndrome (extremely minor, I should say, I don't mean to belittle an actual disease) where I uncontrollably recite the name "Casper Van Dien." I don't know what it is, exactly, but that names' been stuck in my head like a resilient pop song for years, and I can't help but say it out loud when talking to myself or around the house. True story!

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

Wait, if he fired his mouth, removing it from his face entirely, then how is he still talking?!

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

Here's TMNT fan and EDILW favorite Ross Campbell talking at some length about the 2007 computer-animated turtles movie, TMNT. Here's what I had to say about the movie the weekend I saw it. Almost five years later, the thing I remember most about the movie was how cool the ninja parkour teaser trailer for the movie was, and how I ultimately liked that better than just about anything that was actually in the movie itself. In fact, I like that trailer so damn much I think I'm going to go watch it right now.

Yeah, that's still pretty awesome.

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

I was all set to drop Captain America and Bucky, one of only two Marvel books I still read in monthly comic book format, when I heard that they were going to change the title again and change the focus again and the creators again...until I read that the next story arc would involve dinosaurs.

Still seems pretty disingenuous to have referred to—and to continue to refer to—Captain America and Bucky as an ongoing monthly comic book, or to have lead readers to believe the previous directions and creative teams were ongoing ones. In retrospect, it was never anything else than a series of miniseries strung together, with the numbers from the relaunched Captain America title retained for...some mysterious reason that eludes me.

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

Don MacPherson lucked out and found Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews' Astonishing X-Men spin-off miniseries in a back-issue bin, for a $1-per-issue. He didn't like it as much as I did.

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

Wait, if Mark Millar's latest round of screenplays illustrated by modern comics masters includes a series that's going to be published by Image Comics, then how is the publication of these comics supposed to make The Big Two the Big Three or whatever...? How can the new "Millarworld" initiative rival the creation of Image Comics for importance if it's component books are being published by Image Comics...and Marvel Comics...?

Or was some of Millar's hype sort of illogical...? Nah, that doesn't sound right...

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

This is pretty weird.

Especially since Marvel seems to be so actively pushing readers towards reading their books in trade rather than in serial comic books with their $4/22 or $4/20 price points.

Of course, it could simply be a matter of the people who shop at shops Diamond supplies and want to read Marvel comics do so in traditional comic book format, while people interested in Marvel graphic novels get 'em through Amazon or big box retailers, which may or may not use Diamond (I think not though...anyone know for sure?)

Regardless of where people buy Marvel trades at though, is it weird how few of the ones that show up on that list are Marvel-Marvel titles...? Or does that just mean Marvel readers will read Marvel comics in comic form, but trade-wait stuff like the literary adaptations and the delay-plagued Icon books like Millar's...?

I don't know.

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

What he said.

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

I already spoke about the DC cancellations and new series. Of them, the only two that really sounded very interesting to me were Batman Inc, which I suppose I'll read in trade (that was my plan with the previous volume of the series, although they canceled it before it was all ever collected into trades), and maybe Earth 2, although the strange continuity calisthenics it may involve kind of frightens me away, and writer James Robinson has kind of lost the benefit of the doubt I used to always afford him.

I do wonder where Batman Inc fits into the new post-New 52 continuity, as the reboot seemed to invalidate some of the elements that could be seen in the earliest chapters of Grant Morrison's Batman Inc story (Barbara Gordon is no longer Oracle, and seems to have been de-aged and to have maybe never been Oracle, Stephanie Brown is no longer Batgirl III and maybe never was, Batman and Catwoman no longer seem to know one another's secret identities, etc).

Editor Mike Marts was so coy in this interview, I still don't know if this is a continuation of Batman Inc or a reboot of it, and Josie Campbell didn't press him on the question.

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

Okay, if Earth-One is the home of Superman: Earth-One and Batman: Earth-One, and if Earth-2 will be the home of the JSA again, then what Earth is the New 52U? Earth-3? -4? -0? New Earth?

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

Oh man, I was annoyed to hear that Daredevil, the other Marvel series I'm still reading, was going to crossover with Amazing Spider-Man. Now DD's going to cross over with two other titles I'm not reading? Jeez, Marvel tries sooo hard to get readers to drop their monthlies...

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

And people wonder why no one reads newspapers anymore...

MY GOD--!!!

2012-01-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

On the cover of Boom Studios/Kaboom!'s first issue of Peanuts, Snoopy's head is revealed to be the exact same shape as an actual peanut! What does this mean?! It means something, right?

I feel like I just discovered the first clue in cracking some kind of Da Vinci code...

On the proliferation of new Batman titles...in 1989

2012-01-14T18:38:00.000-08:00

Idly scrolling through the search results for "Batman" on my library's website one day, which links to a consortium of libraries all over the state of Ohio between which books are shared, I found an entry for Batman: Shaman, and ordered it.

"Shaman" was the inaugural arc of Legends of The Dark Knight, the 1989-launched third Batman book that began as a showcase for top-tier creative talents, writing standalone, novel-like story arcs at a time before the trade paperback market had really caught on. It was dedicated to telling stories set in the era of Batman history carved out by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli in their "Year One" arc, when a younger, lonelier Batman was still struggling as a hero, and his victories therefore never seemed quite as inevitable, and his huge supporting cast and rogues gallery hadn't yet emerged, let alone solidified and calcified.

It was written by then Batman group editor Denny O'Neil, and drawn by Ed Hannignan, with John Beatty inking. The striking covers, which I still recall from seeing in comics shops at the time and in house ads, were very simple, and featured George Pratt painting over Hannigan's pencils. They told a story in and of themselves; each of the five covers functioning as a panel in a comic strip of metaphors telling the same story as the interiors, only wordlessly.

I had never read it.

The book that arrived was an old one. The edges of its pages were yellowed, the pages creaked and threatened to crumble when they were turned, and someone had tore pages 19 and 20 out of the first of the five issues that provide the chapters for this graphic novel.

It was published in 1993, which was apparently still early enough that there are two versions of it—one with a DC bullet logo that would have been sold to comics shops, and one, like this one, that was published by Warner Books, and features their logo (I've run across copies of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns collections from Warner Books before, too).

Like a lot of DC's early graphic novels, this one features an introduction, in which the person writing it describes what makes the story within so special, essentially providing an argument for the contents' collection. This was, remember, when everything that comics publishers published in serial, comic book format would then be published in a trade paperback a few months later as a matter of course. So often there was a need to explain why these books were given a spine and sold in book stores, and Batman #433-447 was not.

In this instance, it was Legends of the Dark Knight assistant editor Kevin Dooley who was writing it. I would like to quote the introduction at length, because of how revealing it is about how much comics—Batman comics, DC comics and comics in general—have changed since 1989. And since 1993.

Wrote Dooley:

In a way it's kind of too bad that 1989 had to be the summer that a phenomenon called "Batman" had to hit the silver screen. Lovers of sequential art mush have heaved a collective and woeful sigh that the second wave of Batmania sweeping the country in a quarter of a century had to come once again from a medium other than comics. It is just a little unfair that all the hoopla, fervor and anticipation that so swept the huddled masses was centered around June 23 and not that now-forgotten day in august when Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight hit the stands.

...

This is not to say that the publicity for said movie didn't help sales of this title at its nativity...the sales of the first issue of Legends went through the roof. It's just that it shouldn't have been another media event that sparked this book being done, especially as fast as it was done, if for no other reason than that this book was that good and the creators involved were nothing short of great.

It takes a bit of reading between the lines here, but beyond the admirable suggestion that, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if the whole country went bananas for Batman comics the way they did for that TV show and that movie...?", Dooley seems to imply that the idea to put out another, third Batman book by DC was something that came from outside of DC...or at least from very high up within DC, and was something that caught the people making the Batman comics off guard. Later on in the three-page intro, he mentions that they were all waiting to see how Batman did at the box office and how the public was reacting before it was finally decided to do another Batman book and, at that point, lead time was infinitesimal. Once they knew it was going to be a well-received hit, they decided "to jump on the already full bandwagon," as Dooley put it. "Then and only then did somebody say, 'Yes, putting out a new Batman monthly might be a fine idea.' And, as was always true in such cases as this—they wanted it now."

This is the part I found most fascinating:

Remembering DC's old offices at 666 Fifth Avenue, the close-quartered compartments and internal tumult about this project, it's very nearly a modern-day miracle that this puppy came out on time as it did. To let you in on a little of the inside poop, we at the office did wonder why Legends or any new regular Batman title wasn't prepared to ship on that 23rd day of June so touted on billboards and in magazine across America. What were we waiting for? Was there any doubt in anyone's mind that this picture would make box-office history? And even if there was some skittishness, what could be so bad about publishing a third monthly comic about one of DC's best-selling characters? To pie-in-the-sky speculate even further, if Legends had come out on its won without the lines around the block outside of every multiplex behind it, what harm would it have done? Better still, what good would it have done? After all, wasn't this acclaimed as the first "solo" Batman book in 49 years? But Legends was also the first Batman book to be sold exclusively in the ever-increasing number of comic book stores across the country. That in itself meant an almost guaranteed lock on market profitability.

This is a pretty pregnant moment in modern comic book market history, in which forces that would drive so much of the industry in the decades to follow were just emerging. There's the massively successful film tie-in. There's the acknowledgment of the shift from the spinner rack to the comic book store. The next sentences mention the collector's item nature of the covers—the first issue shipped with an extra cover over the Hannigan/Pratt covers, which came in four different colors, which drove some collectors and speculation (See below).And, of course, Dooley was writing this in one of DC's earlier graphic novels, which was published in 1993; Neil Gaiman's Sandman, which launched the same year as Legends was about half over, and the trade paperback market that has so driven comics readership and popularity in the 21st century was just beginning to blossom.

But what really fascinated me about that is the mention of the sheer significance attached to a new Batman comic at the time. Not only had DC not published a companion book to Detective Comics and Batman before then, but there seems to have been reluctance, even resistance to doing so.

Times have certainly changed, and DC wouldn't wait another 49 years before adding more Batman books.

With Legends, they had three books; two set in the modern DCU and chronicling the ongoing adventures of Batman, and a third set in and around "Batman: Year One."

They would only wait four years after Legends to add a fourth Batman solo book, Batman: Shadow of The Bat. That was also set in modern times, and the main thing that seemed to separate it from TEC and Batman was that it would be written by Alan Grant, the long-time Batman writer who seemed to be given the book in order to be able to continue writing Batman while DC found new writers for TEC and Batman. It was published until 2000, the last two years of which it sort of lost its individual identity and simply became another issue of Batman a month, as the books were then engrossed in one of a series of line-wide crossovers.

Batman Chronicles launched in 1995; it was an over-sized quarterly anthology series featuring short stories starring Batman and members of his cast. It lasted until 2001.

In 2000, DC launched Batman: Gotham Knights to replace Shadow of the Bat. That book had a slightly different remit than the other Bat-books in that it was focused somewhat more nebulously on Batman's relationships. It began as a book for writer Devin Grayson, who excelled in the characterization aspects of the Batman stories, and changed hands only twice more—from Grayson to Scott Beatty, and from Beatty to A.J. Lieberman—before its 2006 cancellation (which occurred after Lieberman shifted focus from Batman's allies to his villains, and included a long story starring the new-ish villain created by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee, Hush).

In 2007, DC launched Batman: Confidential as a sort of replacement to Legends, and it likewise featured story arcs by rotating creative teams; these were also divorced from the present DC Universe adventures of Batman, but in a more haphazard way; they weren't set in any particularly well-defined era. Some were set during easily identifiable eras in the past, but some functioned as Elseworlds/"Imaginary Story" types of arcs, so divorced from Batman comics were they. It lasted 54 issues, before being mercy-canceled in 2010.

In 2009, Grant Morrison launched new title Batman and Robin to continue the story he began in Batman. DC obviously didn't cancel Batman though, and when Morrison launched another new title, Batman Inc, to continue his Batman story into in 2011, they didn't cancel the Batman and Robin title created for him either.

And that same year DC launched Batman: The Dark Knight, a book created as a showcase for writer/artist David Finch.

Legends, Shadow of The Bat and Gotham Knights were all canceled at various points, as were Chronicles and Confidential, but DC no longer prunes their forest of Batman titles with much care, if at all.

Come spring, there will be five ongoing, monthly Batman "solo" books all set in the modern DCU—TEC, Batman, Batman and Robin, Batman: The Dark Knight and Batman Inc. And, it's worth noting, in the years since DC was fretting over whether or not to add a third monthly Batman book, the Batman brand was extended into ongoing monthlies for his many allies and enemies, so that the last two decades have seen multiple volumes of ongoing monthly titles like Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman, Batgirl, Azrael and the Birds of Prey. And now there's a Batwoman and Batwing, too. And this is to say nothing of miniseries and one-shots and original graphic novels and comics based on Batman cartoons or video games, these can double or triple the size of the Batman line in any given month.

Looking back from 2010, it's easy to wonder if the folks at the DC Comics of the late '80s were suckers for waiting so long to start rolling out new Batman books, and, if they knew how many Batman books the comics market would eventually support, if they themselves would have considered themselves suckers, and would have started cranking them out at the rate they are now back then. Or is there something to be said for waiting to get something just right before publishing it, even if the waiting takes four years? Or forty?

I don't know, really. I do know the first year of Legends comics, produced when the only other Batman comics were Batman and TEC, consisted of the aforementioned "Shaman," Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson's "Gothic" and the beginning of Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy's "Prey."

The final year of Legends was 2006, produced when there were too many Batman comics for even the most dedicated fan to keep up with, included stories written by Bruce Jones, Justin Gray, screenwriter-turned-comics writer Christos Gage, animation writer-turned-comics writer Adam Beechen and animation writer-turned-comics writer Matt Wayne, with art by Ariel Olivetti, Steve Cummings, Ron Wagner, Phil Winslade and Steve Scott. I can't tell you the names of any of their stories, let alone what they were about.

I didn't read them. Neither did most of you.

52 - 6 + 6 = 52

2012-01-13T18:17:00.000-08:00

As DC Comics enthusiasts and comics news monitors are no doubt already aware, DC announced the imminent cancellation of six of the 52 titles they launched as part of last September's "New 52" publishing initiative. They also announced six replacement titles, answering the oft wondered-over question of how long they would spare failing titles from the scythe, and how would they address such needs given the fact that the specific number of titles was so integral in the creation, naming and overall promotion of the line.

The six canceled titles are Blackhawks, Hawk and Dove (not a good sign for The Savage Hawkman), Men of War, Mister Terrific, OMAC and Static Shock. None of these are terribly surprising, as some of them seemed created to fail.

There was no reason to believe either of the two war books would do well, as an extended Jack Kirby homage, the popular online, well-reviewed OMAC only had so far to go, and Mister Terrific's main selling point among DC's fanbase, the character's long history with the Geoff Johns-shepherded JSA/Justice Society books, was removed by the continuity reboot. (Similarly, one wonders—even if only idly—if a Hawk an Dove series might have sold better in an un-rebooted DCU, given that it would have been launching out of the rather successful Brightest Day and the very successful Blackest Night, instead of standing solely on the shrinking popularity of 90s phenomenon Liefeld and the residual hype of DC's unprecedented PR push).

Somewhat saddeningly, although also no real surprise, is the fact that two of the above titles were solo ones featuring black men, leaving only one book starring a black man in the "New 52" (That's Batwing, which has the valuable crutch of being a Batman family book to support it). It's my understanding from reading people who read it that OMAC starred a Korean-American protagonist, although there's no evidence of any particular race, ethnicity or nationality in the blue, finned hulk appearance of the title character.

Also, it's worth noting that the cancellations seem incredibly sudden, as changes were already announced on the creative teams of a few of those books, most notably—as in, I can remember them—pencil artist Rob Liefeld taking over writing duties on Hawk and Dove and Static Shock getting a new writer (It's third writing team, I believe, if you count the writer who was announced on the book before it launched, but didn't actually script the first issue).

These are the six new books replacing the six old books: World's Finest by Paul Levitz and George Perez and Kevin Maguire (starring The Huntress and Power Girl, rather than Superman, Batman and Robin); Dial H by China Miéville and Mateus Santoluoco, another new take on the Dial H For Hero concept; G.I. Combat by J.T. Krul and Ariel Olivetti; The Ravagers, a Superboy and Teen Titans spinoff by Howard Mackie and Ian Churchill (which I'd prefer have been named Superboy and The Ravagers, just because its echoing of Superboy and The Ravers would amuse me, although I am amused that no one at DC seems particularly aware of what the verb to ravage can mean, particularly archaically); Earth 2 by James Robinson and Nicola Scott; and, finally, the return of Batman Incorporated by Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham, a title that was apparently canceled due to the continuity reboot that accompanied the "New 52" launch, as it walked-back many of the changes and history that made Morrison's run on the Batman franchise possible.

From these new books, we can at least partially deduce what DC thinks is working right now. For one thing, more Batman never hurts. Incorporated will join Batman, Detective, Batman and Robin and Batman: The Dark Knight as a fifth ongoing monthly Batman book starring Batman Bruce Wayne himself. Add in Batwoman, Batgirl, Nightwing, Catwoman, Batwing and, if one wants to be generous, Red Hood and The Outlaws (starring former Robin Jason Todd, and bearing a bat-symbol in the logo) and Birds of Prey (co-starring Batgirl and other Batman allies and antagonists), that's a full dozen Batman family books, accounting for almost one-fourth of the "New 52."

The other spin-off is Ravagers, which would presumably tie-in to Superboy and Teen Titans (The Ravager was a member of the pre-reboot Teen Titans cast, and the character has apparently played a role in the post-reboot Superboy). Both books seem to be performing about as well as they were doing a few years ago at DC, but the company is apparently pleased enough with that to grow the franchise a bit.

Of the remaining books, Earth-2 seems like one that's been in development for a while now, although Robinson and Scott were previously announced to be working on "a JSA book." This new title is pretty suggestive, as is the hint about the book's premise offered at DC's blog The Source: "The greatest heroes on a parallel Earth, the Justice Society combats threats that will set them on a collision course with other worlds."

So too does Dial H, based on the creators involved. The previous take on the concept didn't last too terribly long, it's one of the DC concepts with the most pure potential—since it is a concept, and not a character or set of characters—and from editor to cover artist, it seems like a prestige book.

Both World's Finest and G.I. Combat, which will feature the G.I.'s vs. Dinosaurs "War That Time Forgot" up front and "Unknown Soldier" and "Haunted Tank" back-ups look rather thrown together, considering the creative teams and how often those premises have been explored in the recent past. The logic of doing another military book on the heels of the cancellation of two other ones is questionable, but then, all three of those war comic concepts are more on the "Weird War" side of things, and I find all enormously appealing (In Showcase Presents reprints, anyway; none of those creative teams particularly wow me).

As with the "first wave" of New 52 books, the talents called upon to create them seem to be almost exclusively old hands. In many cases, the same old hands that were making DC comics from 2003-2010 or so: James Robinson, Grant Morrison, Nicola Scott, Chis Burnham, Paul Levitz (again?!), George Perez, Kevin Maguire, J. T. Krul, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Ian Churchill. I like the work of at least five of those folks immensely, but, again, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of effort put into recruiting and developing talent, and some of these guys have had plenty of opportunities to not sell comics (Levitz and Krul spring immediately to mind) in the very recent past, and/or have been pinballed around the new line (Perez, who was on Superman and Green Arrow in different capacities recently).

The exception is Miéville, a somewhat prominent and popular prose fiction writer whose appearing here can be viewed by the comics industry as a legitimate "get." Olivetti was drawing for DC around the turn of the millennium, but has more recently been working at Marvel, where his style has devolved into something I quite dislike (that may be as much a matter of taste as quality, though). Mateus Santolouco's name is familiar, but I can't recall reading work he's done. Howard Mackie, a quick search informs me, wrote a bunch of '80s and '90s Marvel comics I never read, and thus he would seem to fit in the "New...To DC" category along with Scott Lobdell (Superboy, Teen Titans, Red Hood).

Since three of the six books canceled featured non-white male heroes as stars, it's worth noting that none of the books replacing them do (At least, not that we know of; maybe The Huntress and Power Girl in the new "New 52" World's Finest will be a black and Korean-American transvestite, respectively; if I'm leary of reading a Levitz comic in 2012, despite the presence of two such great artists as Perez and Maguire, than that kinda high-concept would definitely push me over the fence).

I'm not sure what they could do to replace one Korean-American hero with another, as I can't think of any characters in DC's catalog with that specific ethnic background. DC's non-martial artist Asian characters of any ethnicity or nationality reservoir isn't very deep. It would have been easier to replace Static Shock and Mister Terrific with another book—or two!—featuring black, male heroes though.

Black Lightning is probably the most obvious choice, having been one of the relatively few black men to headline his own DC ongoing monthly for a while, and is a character that could benefit from the Ultimate-like reboot of the DCU, given how rooted in a particular time the character's name (and costume!) is (Although DC did just make an effort in that direction pre-reboot with Black Lightning: Year One). Steel would have been another, although DC is employing him elsewhere, in the back-up features in Action Comics.

Post-reboot, Cyborg would certainly make sense (he's the only member of the current Justice League line-up without his own title at the moment). Does DC still have the rights to the rest of the Milestone catalog...? Because Hardwire and Icon or Icon and Rocket would make sense (and certainly wouldn't be any less likely to succeed than a G.I. Combat).

There's also...Okay, actually, I guess that's probably the end of that particular list, particularly since legacy characters like The Manhattan Guardian and Mister Miracle II might prove problematic. (Any other black DC superheroes that could conceivably carry their own book for at least as long as G.I. Combat or Hawk and Dove...? I would read a Black Manta or Amazing Man book, but I can't imagine too many others would be into that. I certainly can't imagine a Black Racer or Herald or Vykin or Orpheus or, um, Freedom Beast book. I would love to read a book entitled John Stewart, The Black Green Lantern or, even more simply, The Black Green Lantern, but of that I'm positive I'm the only one who would).

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

Even more surprising to me than the fact that DC would be tinkering so heavily with their new line so few months into it is the news that Rob Liefeld, the artist whose Hawk and Dove was among the six canceled titles, would be given three existing "New 52" books, to write—was his writing ever something anyone liked about any of his books?—or to write and draw.

That makes little sense to me—"Hey, the market didn't seem to like that one thing you did; how about we try having you do three things now?"—but I am not a DC Comics editor. I don't know why they are doing this thing, but I suspect that Liefeld and DC may have colluded just to make the piece I wrote for Robot 6 the other day completely irrelevant almost as soon as I hit the publish button.

The book Liefeld will be writing and drawing will be Deathstroke, which is interesting because Liefeld created Deadpool as a homage/analogue/clone of Deathstroke. I can't imagine how the change in creative reigns will affect the inside of the comic—I haven't read a single page of Kyle Higgins and Joe Bennett's run, and never read an entire, full-length comic book story of Liefeld's—but holy smokes, compare the Liefeld-generated image DC released to the Simon Bisley-drawn Deathstroke covers:One of those things is not like the other, huh?

Liefeld will also be plotting Savage Hawkman, which is currently written by another artist, Tony Daniel, and Grifter which, eh, who cares? I suppose it's interesting to see that one Image founder will be working on a character created by another, even if it's Liefeld just writing Lee's Grifter, rather than drawing him.

I learned something about Youngblood this week.

2012-01-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

I learned a bit more about Rob Liefeld's Youngblood this week, as I prepared to read and write about Joe Keatinge and Ross Campbell's Glory #23 (a piece you can read at Robot 6 by clicking here).

For example, do you see that guy on the Youngblood cover above, to the left of the guy with the arrows? Do you know what his name is? I would have guessed Othello, or Black And White Cookie Man, or The Line or, more likely, Hardline.

But I would have guessed wrong.

His name is actually Die Hard. Yes! Die Hard. In 1992, four years after the release of the film Die Hard, Rob Liefeld named a character after it!

Who are the other five members of Youngblood pictured on the cover of #1? Road House, Predator, Point Break, Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout? Ha ha ha ha! (My apologies to anyone who made that joke 20 years ago; I'm new to Liefeld's oeuvre).

Anyway, there's a post about the new Glory over at Robot 6. How many words can I spend to simply say "This is pretty interesting" and "I like this okay"...? Click on over to find out!

Comic shop comics: Jan 11

2012-01-11T19:38:00.000-08:00

Just three books this week. Still, that's three more than last week...

Batman: The Brave and The Bold #15 (DC Comics) Only one more issue left! Writer Sholly Fisch, inker Dan Davis and guest pencil artist Stewart McKenny team Batman and Mirster Miracle for a multi-day marathon of death-traps. Spoiler alert: They escape them all and save the day—as much as anyone can save the day on Apokolips.

I really liked McKenny's art on this issue—so much so that I didn't realize regular artist Rick Burchett didn't draw it until a second reading–and was particularly fond of his smooth-faced, nose-free Scott Free, whose face occasionally takes on emoticon-like simplicity:Also, whose Darkseid do you think is better, McKenny and Davis'...?Or Jim Lee and Scott Williams'...?
I agree!

Green Lantern #5 (DC) It's the last issue of the new volume's first story arc, and right on time too, since the art team pretty much completely poops out on this ish. Doug Mahnke's still on pencils, and this issue's amazing number of inkers is four, including regular Mahnke collaborators Christian Alamy and Tom Nguyen. I can't recall if Keith Champagne and Mark Irwin have inked Mahnke on this book before or not, and, if so, how often, but there's a notably dip in quality between this issue and the last. The image's are all scratchier and more indistinct, occasionally looking like the work of another pencil artist entirely.

The story puts Hal Jordan back pretty much where he was when the arc first started, although now he's got a power ring (but no Lantern with which to charge it), and he's a few iotas more mature than he was when it comes to his relationship with Carol Ferris.

I continue to enjoy Geoff Johns' take on Sinestro as the real greatest Green Lantern. He gets a little help from Hal throughout this story—although Jordan is doing little more than what Sinestro tells him to do, executing Sinestro's own plans—and he's able to take down the entire Sinestro Corps. When Hal went to war with the Sinestro Corps, he needed the rest of the GL Corps and Justice League in his corner, and that was still pretty much a draw.

The Return of The Smurfette (Papercutz) I've only read two of the six short stories collected in the latest little Smurfs collection so far, but I'm nevertheless quite confident that this will turn out to be another particularly smurfy comic.

Writer Max Shulman on the continuity discrepancies in his Dobie Gillis short stories, collected in 1951's The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis:

2012-01-10T20:54:00.001-08:00

Some picture books of note:

2012-01-09T14:55:00.001-08:00

Bear in Long Underwear (Blue Apple Books; 2011)

I was initially attracted to Todd H. Doodler’s book by its cover, which features (a) a bear, (b) a rhyming title, (c) long underwear of the sort I wear, (d) cute, bold, highly-abstracted cartoon-style art and (e) a special, multi-surface design, in which the area devoted to bear’s underwear is fuzzy to the touch, while the butt area of his underwear is of a third material, smooth and cushioned.

It’s a fun cover to look at, to touch and to poke at, and the image and the title promise an intriguing story involving, um, a bear. And his long underwear.

Bear and his friends— a variety of animals, mostly mammals, native to North America—are hanging out in the house, drinking hot cocoa. Bear is depicted wearing regular old short underwear, while the other animals, being animals, are naked.

Doodler draws them all in a similar square-bodied, boggle-eyed style, with little to know separation between their heads and bodies, depending on species.

The animals decide to play outside, and over the course of several pages, Doodler lists their various fun activities. Bear builds a snowman, and as he puts his hat on the snowman, various friends say “He looks cold,” so Bear strips down, giving the snowman his own clothes, until Bear is in his long underwear.

The animals all marvel at long underwear, having never seen it, and then Bear takes them back into the cabin and outfits them each with their own pair.

The story is as stark and declarative as Doodler’s brilliantly-bright art, but I liked it okay. Bears and underwear are, individually, inherently funny, right? So when you put the two together…?

What I was most intrigued about, however, was one of those friends of Bear’s, who goes unnamed. See if you can spot him in this image. Which of those animals is not like the other?That’s right, Doodler included a Bigfoot.

I read this one with Niece #1, and asked her what kind of animal that guy was. She didn’t know. Later, she asked me if I knew what it was, and I said that I thought it was supposed to be a Bigfoot. We didn’t talk too much about Bigfoot after that, but she did ask if he was real or not.

I liked seeing him in there, it was another thing that attracted me to the book (I’m more likely to consume any media that has a Bigfoot in it than I would be if said media lacked a Bigfoot. This has lead to me watching many, many terrible films).

Is it weird Doodler decided to include a cryptid among the definitely real animals in his book? I tried to imagine how I would have reacted as a little kid. I was only slightly less terrified of Bigfoot than I was interested in him as a child. Would seeing him in this context have desensitized me to him as something to fear? I mean, here he is sipping cocoa with a bunch of cute woodland creatures, is he really anything to be afraid of?

Would I have taken this as confirmation that he is real? Would I have asked my parents about it, found out the truth, and then been angry with Doodler for irresponsibly using Bigfoot in this story as if he were real?

I don’t know. I didn’t have any exposure to Bigfoot as a very young child—not before I could read, anyway—and the few places I might have encountered him didn’t really register on me. For example, there’s a Yeti in those Rankin-Bass stop-motion holiday specials, but I just assumed it was something akin to the Wampa on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back, and there was an episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies where the Laurel and Hardy and the gang were chased around by The Ghost of Bigfoot, but that just turned out to be a man in a mask.

Do Lions Live on Lily Pads? (Houghton Mifflin; 2006)

No, don’t be silly Melanie Walsh. Lions don’t live on lily pads. They live in dens. Or at the zoo.

Just kidding. In addition to knowing how to draw an incredibly simple, incredibly cute animal, one that seems fairly natural doing something it wouldn’t normally do— a crocodile wearing a size-appropriate snail shell, a parakeet standing in a fishbowl, etc—Walsh has an excellent handle on who lives where in the animal kingdom.

The format of the book is fairly simple, with series of two, two-page spreads following this formula: We’ll see, say, a baby goat hanging out in a nest, and the words will ask, “Is this the nest of a goat?” and, on the following spread, we’ll see the image repeated, now with a bird where the goat was, and the text answering, “No, it belongs to a bird.”

The formula only breaks at the very end, for a mildly amusing gag ending.

The title question is never really answered, however.

Here’s another example of Walsh’s design skills. She even makes spiders look cute:

The Eensy Weensy Spider Freaks Out (Big Time) (Random House; 2010)

And speaking of cute spiders…

Artist Troy Cummings retells the sing-song story of the title character, sung and acted out with hands by anyone who has ever attended a storytime, on the first two pages. Then he adds a third page, in which Eensy freaks out (big time), and then the story really begins.

After surviving the trauma of being washed out the water spout, Eensy develops a sort of PTSD and decides to give up climbing forever.

Her friend, a ladybug she shows no interest in eating, encourages her to try again, and although she’s afraid to do so, Eensy takes eensy weensy steps to start climbing again, essentially practicing desensitization cognitive behavior therapy, climbing something very small, and then something slightly bigger, until she climbs higher than anything with more than two legs has ever climbed before.

This is pretty damn healthy. Kids should read this when they’re young, so they’ll already have internalized it by the time they reach young adulthood and start to develop their own anxieties and phobias.

(I never really thought of the Eensy Weensy Spider as an inspirational story before, but I guess that’s just what it is—once the rain is dried up, the EWS starts all over again, despite the set-back. Cummings expands on this story, without changing the essentials).

Cummings’ art is a real delight, blending masterful design with an affected, child-like application of slightly sketchy lines and rough coloring to achieve something that looks professional while suggesting something homemade.

Some of the design work just plain cracked me up.

I like this spider, a reporter for The Spider Insider: And this satellite is awesome: And I like this bit, where we see Eensy is biologically accurate in the number of eyes she possesses, but Cummings obscures six of ‘em under her hair, so she looks more human throughout the story. There are a few problems, scientifically speaking, with the conclusion, but I don’t think it will matter much, as it would be too difficult for any child to try and imitate Eensy’s final act of climbing and suffer the fate Cummings spared her.

The Good Little Bad Little Pig (Hyperion; 2002)

With this book, it was the title that initially grabbed me, but a quick glance on the cover provided more reasons: It is written by the legendary writer of classic children’s books, Margaret Wise Brown, although the style of illustration makes it evident that this was a cross-generation collaboration of some sort.

As it turns out, the story is from a 1939 collection, while the illustrations by Dan Yaccarino are new to this publication, in which the story is broken out into its own picture book. Yaccarino’s artwork is rather thoroughly modern, but he keeps elements of the artwork as timeless as possible.

One day, a little boy named Peter asks his mom if he can have a pet pig. His incredulous mother asks, “You want a dirty little bad little pig?” But the boy replies that no, he wants a clean little pig, “And I don’t want a bad little pig. I want a good little bad little pig.”

His mother attempts to fulfill this wish, and she sits down to write a poem to a farmer:

Farmer, farmer,
I want a pig—
Not too little
And not too big
Not too good
And not too bad—
The very best pig
Any boy ever had

The pig they get fits the bill. It’s not always good, and it’s not always bad. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s bad.

Just like children who will have this story read to them. Just like the grown-ups who will read the story to them. Just like everyone in the whole world.

Happy Pig Day! (Hyperion; 2011)

I strongly suspect Mo Willems wrote this book in his Elephant & Piggie series for the express purpose of giving youth librarians a good excuse to program around a particular book of his.

Happy Pig Day, you see, is, “the best day to have a pig party! It is the best day to sing pig songs! It is the best day to dance pig dances! It is the best day to eat pig foods! It is the best day to play pig games!”

See? The children’s programming practically programs itself!

I’m not entirely sure Willems played fair with the twist ending, but it’s a nice gag, and Happy Pig Day sure seems like a holiday worth celebrating. Mark your calendars.

Oh wait. Piggie neglected to say which day is Happy Pig Day…

The Legend of Ninja Cowboy Bear (Kids Can Press; 2009)

I feel somewhat sheepish admitting that I didn’t like this book more than I did. I feel like I should love it, given the high concept title and the fact that it stars a bear, a ninja and a cowboy.Certainly artist Hilary Leung’s art is great, and there are some neat ninja jokes within, and nice applications of comics language and visuals as verbal communication, but the Everyone Is Special In Their Own Way message is communicated somewhat haphazardly, given the specificity of the stars.

The story goes like this…

Once upon a time there were three friends: a ninja, a cowboy and a bear. They did everything together and enjoyed each other’s company. However, they were each different in their own way. One day those differences came between them, and here is what happened. The ninja and the bear started to quarrel. The ninja thought he was better than the bear. The bear disagreed.

They ask the cowboy to decide, and he responds by devising a contest. Once that’s decided, another disagreement breaks out, and another contest between friends is devised. And then there’s another disagreement, with another contest.

Essentially, each contest proves that each character is better than another at something.

The book concludes with a “Ninja Cowboy Bear” game, which is kinda like rock, paper scissors, only instead of just using your hands, kids face one another back-to-back, as in a duel, then walk three paces away from one another, and turn, assuming one of the three positions, winning or losing depending on which they pick in relationship to one another.

Operation Ghost (Harcourt Brace & Company; 1999)

Normally I would scan a page or two of art to use as an example when discussing Jacques Duquennoy’s funny little book about ghosts, but the fine print reads stricter than usual, not even having the “except for small portions for purposes of review” allowance one normally finds in it.

So I’ll try to describe it in words.

This is the story of a ghost named Henry, who has been suffering various medical problems, despite being dead.

Henry, like the other ghosts in the book, is depicted as a generic, sheet-like ghost, with a big black eyes and a black line for a mouth, and arms and hands extending from his sheet-like white body.

Henry suffers measles and jaundice. He falls out of a tree and gets covered in Band-Aids. He hurts his head, and then breaks his arm. When he starts behaving funny as well, his friends take him to the ghost hospital, where ghost surgeon Doctor Ouch performs a risky surgery that restores Henry to normal, save for a stitched up scar in the middle of his body/sheet.

The book is mostly noteworthy for all of the fun ways in which Duquennoy draws the ghosts. When Henry catches measles, for example, he’s covered in red dots; when he gets jaundice, he’s colored yellow. When he takes pills for the former, we see the pills floating around inside Henry’s ghost form. And when he takes medicine for the latter, he changes the color of the medicine.

As far as visual jokes involving ghosts go, there’s at least one on every page of this book.

The Retired Kid (Hyperion; 2008)

As any kid, including the one that stars in Jon Agee’s The Retired Kid, will tell you, it’s hard work being a kid.

So eight-year-old Brian decides to retire, flying to Florida to move into the Happy Sunset Retirement Community. There he befriends the other retirees and enjoys naps, golf, fishing and playing cards…but he soon discovers the downsides of hanging out with a bunch of old people in an old people’s home, and he begins to miss his old life. So he returns to it.

Agee’s art has a pencil-like drawn quality to it (I would guess it’s done in some sort of charcoal crayon…?), and the colors are light, bright and similarly sketchy, as if applied with watercolor.

His art is super simple, and has a nice, urgent, unfinished quality about it, allowing the originally chosen lines to have a great deal of impact, and convey the majority of the visual information. The story is pretty good, but it’s the way Agee draws something like kid Brian dancing with an old lady that I really found interesting and amusing about the book.

The Robot and the Bluebird (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2008)

David Lucas’ precious story of a robot with a broken heart seems to be aiming for something that appeals to adults as much as kids, and he largely succeeds. The tone is quite elegiac, though, and it’s a bit of a bummer to read.

The broken-hearted robot couldn’t be fixed, so the other robots send him to the scrap heap, where he sits amidst all the other, more broken robots, with whom he can’t communicate. He sits there for at least a year, exposed to the elements.

Eventually a bluebird arrives, and the robot gives the poor bird shelter in the space where his heart used to be. The bird needs to get south for the winter, so the robot decides to walk it there, carrying it in his heart cavity. They make it, but at the end the robot is rusted so solid it can no longer move.

The heart metaphors are a bit obvious, and as I read I couldn’t help but constantly compare it to Sara Varon’s Robot Dreams, with which it shares at least a few similarities. Varon's book about a robot has a happier ending, though, and was far more emotionally devastating than Lucas’, due, perhaps, to the fact that Varon’s robot was a character with real-feeling feelings and emotions, whereas Lucas’ is mostly a symbol.

He’s a nice looking one, though! The art throughout is quite gorgeous, form the storybook, timeless look of the various mechanical men to the unspecific, drawn from the imagination varieties of birds.

Should I Share My Ice Cream? (Hyperion; 2011)

Here’s yet another exceptionally strong entry in Mo Willems’ Elephant & Piggie series. Check out Gerald’s face on that cover. Each of these books allows a reader to see an Olympic level cartoonist do a sort of floor routine, as Willems spends around 50 pages or so drawing wildly expressive emotions on a pair of characters, at least one of which has a trunk and is thus a little harder to wring emotion out of than something more anthropomorphic (to stick with the Olympics analogy, the fact that Willems gets Gerald’s face to do all he does is like a gymnast doing his think with a hand tied behind his back).

This is a great one for Gerald faces. Gerald gets some ice cream, and then must decide whether to eat it himself for share it with Piggie, and he ping pongs from devious satisfaction at the prospect of eating it all to heroic determination to share, temporarily landing on every conceivable emotion in between.

Sugar Would Not Eat It (Random House; 2009)

This is the story of Leo, an exceptionally stupid young boy who has apparently never heard of cat food.

The day after his birthday, he discovers a kitten sitting on a stoop and decides to adopt it. (You would too if you saw it; look at it’s face on artist Giselle Potter’s cover!)

When the kitten, who Leo names Sugar, gets hungry, he tries to feed her the last piece of his chocolate birthday cake. But, as the titles says, she would not eat it.

Leo tries a couple of rhetorical strategies to get her to eat the cake, but she refuses. He begins soliciting friends and neighbors for advice, and each says something about how their parents used to try to convince them to eat. Leo would then adopt these to apply toward Sugar and the cake.

So, for example, when a man at a food cart tells Leo that his mom used to tell him she slaved all afternoon over a hot stove to guild him into eating, Leo tries to guilt Sugar into eating the cake by telling her “It took me two hours to bake this cake.”

After six attempts and two days, Leo gives up and goes to make himself a tuna fish sandwich and milk. And Sugar helped himself!

Stupid, Leo. Cats don’t eat cake. They eat cat food. That’s why cat food is called “cat food;” it is literally food for cats.

Okay, I kid. Writer Emily Jenkins’ story is kind of funny if you can get past the hurdle of believing in a kid who knew so little about cats—Jenkins does point out quite early one that Leo “didn’t know anything about kittens, and he didn’t know anything about cats”—and it’s interesting to see a kid put in the position of an adult, and a mute kitten cast in the kid role. There’s a certain absurdity to the neighbors’ interest in the problem as well, as the first night several of them sleep in the kitchen with Leo and Sugar, waiting to see if she will ever eat her cake.

Potter’s art is highly painterly–each page looks like a distinct painting, and wouldn’t look out of place in a frame on a wall—and the words and lettering are cleverly integrated into the pages, with different fonts and layouts for dialogue versus narration, and unique placements of certain words.

It’s an interesting exploration of rhetorical strategies for getting kids to eat when and what they don’t want to, although I’m not sure the message is ideal—your parents should just feed you what you like or want to eat, could be one way to read it.

But if it saves just one stupid kid in the real world from trying to feed a kitten cake for two days…

Unicorns! Unicorns! (Holiday House; 1997)

So where are all the unicorns these days? Writer Geraldine McCaughrean crafts a myth-like story of what became of the unicorns and grafts it onto the Genesis story of Noah.

As the rains started and the animals were gathered, Noah started calling for the unicorns, “Unicorns! Unicorns!”

They were late getting on the boat, because they kept stopping to help other animals who were having a hard time getting there—carrying tortoises over a puddle, extracting a deer stuck in the mud, scolding some playful monkeys who were fucking around in the trees instead of getting to the ark.

Noah’s wife, called, um, “Mrs. Noah” here, and the other animals repeat the call between each of the Unicorns’ stops, but eventually they miss their ride.

Everyone’s all broken up about it, until after they flood waters subside, they notice “how two waves rolled in towards them over the ocean: two green translucent waves with arching manes and prancing hooves of foam.”

The unicorns lived on as the sea foam atop the waves, and even now you can see them. As McCaughrean somewhat poetically ends her story,

Though they race for dry land, they somehow never reach it. Only their candy-twist horns and sugar-stranded tails melt on the wet sand amid the seaweed and shining shells.

The image of unicorns living as sea foam is probably familiar; that’s where all of the surviving unicorns but one were kept in 1982 film The Last Unicorn (and, presumably, the book it was based on and the comic book series that followed them both). I’m not sure where the origin of this metaphor comes from, as I’ve read a few non-fiction books about unicorns (Of them, I’d most highly recommend Chris Lavers’ The Natural History of Unicorns), and Last Unicorn and Unicorns! Unicorns! are the only places I’ve heard the sea foam story.

I found the connection to the Noah story in the Bible pretty interesting, in part because it’s a source of gags cartoonists occasionally turn to, and in part because of unicorns’ relationship with the Bible. They are actually mentioned in the Bible quite a bit. Not in stories—Moses doesn’t call down a plague of unicorns against Egypt, and Jesus doesn’t heal a man gored by a unicorn or anything—but they appear in metaphors and so forth. I guess it was a mistranslation of the name for the animal the “auroch,” large, now extinct relatives of the bull. Later, in medieval Europe, the unicorn was used as a symbol of Christ.

Sophie Windham’s artwork also called to mind medieval Europe, as there’s something quite bestiary-like about some of her depictions of the various animals. The style of the ark–like a large, dragon-headed, striped-sail Viking ship—and the style of Noah and family’s clothes are also more European than Middle Eastern or Biblical.

Like a lot of medieval and Renaissance art, she seemed to be updating the story to that time period, while filling it with symbolic filigree that, if read literally, would seem a strange, pagan intrusion (For example, drawing huge faces on the gray clouds, blowing down wind and rain, or a weeping sun being obscured by them, or giving the rainbow a woman’s head and long, feathery wings).

She packs the pages with imagery, so that the words appear in tight blocks of text on white squares, usually in the center of the pages, while pictures of animals run along the top of the page, the bottom of the page and, in some cases, up and down the sides.

It’s a really beautiful-looking book.

When Santa Turned Green (Thomas Nelson; 2007)

I was slightly surprised and disappointed to learn that by “green,” author Victoria Perla was talking about Santa’s energy policy rather than the color of his suit (although he does change that as well).

First clue? There’s a tiny little sticker on the front cover, right below Santa’s left foot, with a blurb from Al Gore (“When Santa Turned Green helps even the youngest child grasp the importance of caring for our planet and solving the climate crisis”), the border of which reads “Printed on 100% recycled paper with soy-based inks.”

Hey, I’m all for teaching kids to practice environmentalism—and to do so while explaining why—and recycled paper and soy-based ink (so long as it’s not taking soybeans out of my mouth; I practically live on soybeans), but there’s always something uncomfortable about a work that is meant primarily as a teaching tool or propaganda (depending on your political views regarding global warming; I know there’s still a shocking amount of people who don’t believe in it and would thus prefer the latter term to the former). Especially when it’s aimed at children.

That said, maybe it’s better that Perla is so upfront about it…? The book opens with a letter from her to Moms and Dads, so it’s not like she’s trying to sneak anything by anyone to secretly indoctrinate kids or anything.

The basic idea is a pretty smart one. One day Santa notices his roof is leaking and, going outside, sees the North Pole is getting warmer and warmer, and a whole lot less snowier and icier. He hops in his sleigh to find out what’s what, and learns about global warming.

To figure out what to do, he visits every single child on earth to ask them for ideas on what they can do to cut down on carbon emissions and, getting into the act himself, he decides to use solar and wind power at his toy factory (Weird; I assumed it all ran on “magic” and elf labor, not fossil fuels). Also, Mrs. Claus makes him some green suits; he wears these every night of the year except Christmas Eve, when he wears his traditional red.

Santa Claus is pretty uniquely geographically situated to notice the effects of global warming, and is probably even more beloved by children than charismatic mega-fauna polar bears, so it makes sense to cast him in the middle of a global warming story like this. I’m actually surprised no one thought to do so before.

Illustrator Mirna Kantarevic's art is superlative. Kantarevic does a wonderful version of the little lively and quick, jolly old elf version of Santa, and I really like the details of the elf designs……and the abstracted nature of her reindeer, which doesn’t commit them to a particular species of deer as so many modern Santa stories do. You know what would really cut down on the use of fossil fuel, though? If Santa shared the secret of flying reindeer and his moving so fast and/or slowing down time that allows him to travel the whole world in a single night. Then we could do away with ocean liners, airplanes and cars and simply all get around by magical flying sleds pulled by magical flying reindeer.

What gives, Claus?

(links)

2012-01-08T17:32:00.000-08:00

It was either a remarkably slow week in comics—You know how many comics were released this Wednesday that I read? None!—or I just wasn't paying as much attention as usual, as the file I have marked "links" that I gradually fill between Monday and Saturday of each week, and then consult Sunday afternoon to put together a post has hardly anything in it. So this will probably be brief. And being brief isn't something I'm too terribly comfortable with.

**********************
First, I hope you will indulge me in some self-linking. Here' s a new thingee I'm going to be contributing to ComicsAlliance, a one-stop shopping post that recounts much of what CA covered throughout the previous week. So if you don't read CA religiously already—and you should!—then give this a look (and give me your page views!). Personally I found it pretty interesting to condense a whole week's coverage like that, and see just what we're covering and in what amounts. I was really pleasantly surprised, for example, how much attention gets paid to artists.

**********************
Speaking of ComicsAlliance, editor Laura Hudson was one of the subject featured in the third (and final?) week of Tom Spurgeon's holiday interview series. Also featured were Jeff Smith and Chester Brown, whose Paying For It was by far one of the most talked about books of 2011. I haven't read that last one yet, but I can't wait to do so as soon as I push "Publish Post" on this post...

UPDATE: Spurgeon has posted a post linking to all the interviews from all three weeks. It's here. Do check it out.

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

I thought this Todd Allen piece for The Beat was kind of weird in that the headline referred to both "DC" and "the Spectre," but he wasn't talking about that guy above. The full headline was "DC Talks Changes—$3.99 Bat-books and the Spectre of Cancellation Looms." It's essentially a recapping and response to a Newsarama interview with DC's John Rood and Bob Wayne regarding some tweaks to the new New 52 line, including upping the price of two more books (and bolstering them with content) and talking a little more frankly about how many issues the poorer-selling New 52 might have to live.

There seemed to be a lot of speculation, in the article and in the comments, regarding what is meant by "editorial content," and that it might be something other than "comics." It's still an open question, I guess—will DC's $4 books have back-up features, like the flirted-with-but-abandoned $3.95/32-page books like Booster Gold (With Blue Beetle back-ups), Doom Patrol (With Metal Men back-ups) and so on, or will they just charge an extra buck for the same 20 pages, and stick in some lame-o sketches and quasi-advertising material, like they've been doing with Justice League, and call that "editorial material' the equivalent of as many pages of Geoff Johns-written, Jim-Lee drawn comics pages?

Obviously, I hope they will justify higher prices with higher page counts (and pages of comics, not not-comics), as they seem poised to (belatedly) do with Action Comics, which is getting a Steel back-up, and Justice League, which is getting a Curse of Shazam back-up. I assumed DC didn't care for the results of those co-features, though, given how quickly abandoned them (For my part, I was unable to find any books where I liked both the title feature and the back-up, and found not liking either reason to drop the book and trade-wait the portions I did like) . I do think DC has to take the higher road than the one Marvel's been traveling down for so long now. Not only because Being Less Scummy Than Marvel seems like a reasonable goal for DC Comics, but because their "Drawing The Line at $2.99" ad campaign is only about a year old now. I went into a new comic shop a few weeks ago, and they had the poster from the campaign hanging on the counter below the cash register. To trumpet a promise like that so loudly is only going to make DC reneging on it so soon after make them look like huge assholes. I know I got, like, actively angry about some of the $3.99/20-page issues of Flashpoint and Justice League precisely because DC had promised not to do that sort of thing.

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

I really like the drawing of Kermit in the last panel of this comic strip. It's pretty off-model, but in a delightful sort of way.

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

I didn't notice in September, because I don't really know or care much about the Wolfman/Perez era Titans (aside from liking Perez's art), but isn't it pretty weird that DC finally published Games the exact same month they (temporarily...?) excised the Wolfman/Perez era of Titans comics from their universe's fictional history, with many of the characters disappearing completely, two being rebooted so as to be entirely new characters divorced from their creators' original stories involving them, and only Dick Grayson's codename "Nightwing" remaining in tact? In The New 52, are the names "Nightwing," "Starfire" and "Cyborg" all that survived from the once popular and influential Wolfman/Perez collaboration...?

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

I only reviewed one of the six books on this "The six most criminally ignored books of 2011" (Lynda Barry's Everything Vol. 1), and only read one other (Marc Bell's Pure Pajamas, which I woulda reviewed, but couldn't really make heads-or-tails of, and I don't generally like to review books I either hate or don't have a good handle on—not counting corporate super-comics, obviously; I'll write about those when I hate 'em no problem—and I couldn't get a good enough grasp on Bell's book to write it up). So I'm as guilty as criminally overlooking as everyone else, I guess. (As for Barry's book not getting more attention, I think it was because it wasn't anywhere near as great as her last two, and thus was more of a publishing initiative sort of story than something critics could conceivably gush over. )

Anyway, a neat list of books to see how many you've read...and how many you might want to hunt down now...

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

I might buy and try an Axe Cop body spray, but don't think I'd wanna read an Axe Body Spray comic.

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

Wait, Axe's whole image is beautiful women throwing themselves at guys who wear a particular spray, right? Plus junior high sex jokes? I guess I might buy a comic, depending on who drew the beautiful women. Like, if they got Richard Sala or Paul Pope or Colleen Coover, that might be cool.

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

Beautiful women throwing themselves at a man for no discernable, logical reason, saving perhaps the way he smells...that's, like, Wolverine's love life, isn't it? Minus the claws and body hair and ninjas and and X-Men missions and stabbing and occasionally running around with wolves in the nude when he needs some him time?

It has to happen...?

2012-01-08T06:31:00.001-08:00

VS.

Happy Birthday, Charles Addams!

2012-01-07T16:48:00.001-08:00

Charles Addams, one of the all-time greatest American cartoonists—and one of my all-time favorite American cartoonists, and an incredible influence on me (though it hardly shows in my own poor work)—was born 100 years ago today.

Just in case you didn't Google anything at all today before stopping here, above is a screen-capture of Google's doodle honoring the occasion. Here's the LA Times story on Addams, which offers a nice overview of his life and career (and a few examples of his work). Here is Torsten Adair's post about Addams at The Beat, which includes a nice selection of New Yorker covers and cartoons. Here's Michael Cavna's piece for The Washington Post, which is full of videos to watch. Here's the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation website. Here is Charles Addams' baby picture. Here is a 2009 post I wrote kinda sorta reviewing Linda H. Davis' biography of Addams, Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Lie, which I'd highly recommend (Davis' book, not my post about it). And here's a review of The Charles Addams Mother Goose.

And here is one of his earlier, more famous cartoons:

Meanwhile, in 1988...

2012-01-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

The best part about IDW's Classic G.I. Joe Vol. 7—aside from its scenes of evil, terrorist accountant/falconer/bird furry Raptor doing stuff, of course—is that it includes G.I. Joe #67, the issue with this wonderful cover:Why is Lady Jaye punching her fellow Joe (and beau) Flint in the face so hard that his beret shoots straight up in the air?

Well, you'll have to read the issue to find out.

That, or you can just use your own imagination. I did!

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

2012-01-05T19:07:00.000-08:00

I have a discussion of Zahra's Paradise which is, in one way at least, probably the comic book of 2011, up at Robot 6 today. You can read it here.

One more thing about that skeevy sex scene in September's Catwoman #1

2012-01-04T20:25:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago I wrote at some length about the extremely skeevy but attention-getting splash-page ending of DC's Catwoman #1, in which writer Judd Winick and artist Guillem March had Batman and Catwoman totally doing it in a gross, awkward sex scene (Above).

By way of disparaging the lack of subtlety in Winick and March's scene, I compared it to a Batman sex scene in another comic.

Here's what I wrote then:

Even All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, one of the least subtle comics of the 21st century, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee, two creators no one would ever accuse of being too subtle, had a scene of Batman having costumed super-sex with a fellow super-type, and that was infinitely more subtle.

At the time, I hadn't yet read Frank Miller's original graphic novel Holy Terror (it was released in October), but, it turns out, that that book also features a Batman/Catwoman sex scene that is much, much, much more subtly staged than the one in Catwoman #1. (Above: A post-coital conversation from the "We keep our masks on...It's better that way" scene from Miller and Lee's All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder).

Holy Terror opens, after the obnoxious, inflammatory, out-of-context two-page quote, with Miller's Batman analogue The Fixer pursuing his Catwoman analogue Natlie Stack. He's trying to arrest her after she stole a diamond bracelet. When he finally catches up with her, they fight.

She kicks him square in the area, then kicks him in the face, and that slashes his face with her claws. He punchers her in face. This goes on for another page. After recovering from that last punch, she jumps lips first onto The Fixer: Then things get weird.

On the next page, the two tumble, still kissing, backwards off a roof, until The Fixer lands head first on another roof with a "KRUNK" and, on the next page the continue to fall, and The Fixer is slammed into a wall ("WHUDD."). He stands up and punches Natlie in the gut, but at this point, she's already talking about the sex scene to come. "It's not like we planned this," she narrates as they roll around, still fighting. "We didn't even know we wanted it. It was just a slow night. That's all."

On the following page, Fixer punches her in the ace again for good measure, and they do what is apparently their version of flirting (She: "I hate your guts. You make me sick." Him: "Sure I do.")

Then: And can you guess what happens in the next panel?

This?No. Don't be silly.

Frank Miller, the guy who just wrote a scary weird, almost ten-page long scene where two people brutalize one another between kisses, in a comic book about how Islam is a religion of terror, pulls away from the two fetish freaks just as they are about to copulate, so the next page is a long shot of some "Empire City" architecture, and we just see the silhouette of Fixer's cape and Stack's hand (he's on top now), and her narration repeats, "Just a slow night. That's all."

The next page is an even longer long shot of buildings in the distance, with clouds made my fingers smudging ink on the white page, and the rhythmic repetition of "That's all. That's all."

And then, finally, this page: Miller conveys the sex through the repeating narration, that phrase spaced out and given a certain amount of time to occupy by being placed in individual narration boxes and in different consecutive panels (Even though he's suggesting the sex with the words instead of the pictures—at least in those two pages, between the last two splash pages I scanned aboe—it's an effect that couldn't be achieved in straight prose, as the writer can't control the passage of time the way a cartoonist can through panels of artwork).

The next page features a bomb packed with nails exploding, the first of many terrorist attacks that rock Empire City and lead to the Not-Batman vs. Terrorists plot that is Holy Terror's real subject matter.

So hang your heads in shame, People Who Made Catwoman #1, because Frank Miller did a more subtle, more artful, more elegant, even—dare I say it?—more classy comic book scene in which Batman and Catwoman fuck. Frank Miller. In Holy Terror.

You have to try reeeeaaaalllllly hard to lose that kind of contest, guys.

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

AND SPEAKING OF HOLY TERROR AND ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER:

It's rather remarkable how many times the former seems to echo the latter, at least in Miller's staging:
************************

Okay! Now I'm off to take two showers! One to wash away that skeevy Batman/Catwoman sex scene in Catwoman, and then another to wash away the disgusted feeling I get when reading Holy Terror. If you need to cleanse your eyes and mind, I'd recommend revisiting David Brothers' series of essays on Miller's Batman, one entry of which I borrowed/swiped a few of the scanned ASBaRtBW panels from.

Fixerman and Catalie Stack

2012-01-03T19:15:00.000-08:00

A panel from Frank Miller's Holy Terror, featuring the masked vigilante The Fixer and his cat burglar love interest Natalie Stack:A photocopy of the same panel, plus a pen, five colored pencils and five minutes of time: I know it was no secret that the graphic novel began as a Batman project for DC, but Miller sure didn't put a whole lot of time in redesigning the characters after taking it to a different publisher, did he?

The Best Comics Published in Calendar Year 2011 that I Happened to Read in Calendar Year 2011

2012-01-02T14:19:00.000-08:00

The year-end best-of list is, no lie, probably the only thing that comics-bloggers and critics do that I hate doing, but feel compelled to do anyway (Well, I guess it's kind of cool to put on my Anubis mask, pull out my feather of truth and weight comics against it on my scales of judgment...)

Reluctantly then, here is my list of The Best Comics of 2011. Please keep in mind that the usual caveats apply, particularly that this is a list of what I think (today) were the best comics published during the calendar year 2011 that I actually read during calendar year 2011, and that much of my diet of comics reading is dependent on what publishers and creators send me and/or what I find at the library or at the comic shop. As hard as I try, I don't read everything, and there are still some very big, very well-received 2011 books I haven't gotten to yet, like Craig Thompson's Habibi and the new Love and Rockets and so on.

And, with no further ado...

1.) Big Questions (Anders Nilsen; Drawn and Quarterly) Original review at Robot 6. In the months that have passed since this originally came out, my esteem for it has only grown. If there's any reason why it shouldn't be on a best of the year list, it may be that Nilsen has been working on it for so long, and publishing parts of it previously, that it is both a work from this year and of years past. I think that's a technicality, though. I think this is the best comic I read this year.

2.) Garden (Yuichi Yokoyama; PictureBox) Original review at Blog@Newsarama. After first reading it, I wrote that I had never read anything like Garden before. Half a year later, I still haven't.

3.) Too Dark To See (Julia Gfrörer; Thuban Press) original review at Blog@Newsarama.

4.) The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists (Seth; Drawn and Quarterly) Original review at Robot 6. The premise and presentation Seth's love letter to cartoons and the people who make them and the people who read them, presented as an alternate history given during a tour of the titular group's headquarters, is deceptively straightforward, but there's a lot more going on here with each successive reading (So far, anyway; surely it will plateau with a fourth or fifth reading). It's a very rare comic that makes a reader want to climb inside it and live it while reading it.

5.) Night Animals (Brecht Evens; Top Shelf) Original review at Blog@Newsarama.

6.) Mister Wonderful (Daniel Clowes; Pantheon) Original review at Blog@Newsarama. I struggled a bit with whether to include this or Clowes' Death-Ray, which Drawn and Quarterly republished as a standalone graphic novel after its original publication in Fantagraphics' Eightball, or if they maybe both belonged on the list. I think Death-Ray is probably a better comic, but maybe I'm just saying that because I like the colors of the cover better, and it has a superhero in it (kinda). But as a new original graphic novel, Mister Wonderful seems much more of 2011, and thus deserving of a spot on the list. So I gave it the slot, and figured I'd just mention Death-Ray here, which I now have.

7.) Any Empire (Nate Powell; Top Shelf) Original review at Robot 6

8.) Zahra's Paradise (Amir and Khalil; First Second) Review forthcoming. I have a feeling this will be the book on this list that I'm most likely to look back on in the future and wonder if it really belongs here instead of, say, in a top twenty list. Part of that is because the book is so new—I literally just read it, and am still working on a review of it—that it has the advantage of being fresher in my mind than some of the excellent books I read at the beginning of the year (That's the main reason I've decided to keep Jim Henson's Tale of Sand off this list; I'm not entirely sure I trust my assessment of it in relation to the rest of the calendar year's worth of comics so soon after being surprised by its excellence). That, and the subject matter is so very powerful—I almost stopped reading after the very first scene, it was such a struggle for me to get through—that it may have an "advantage" of seeming better than other books in the runners-up list below (in the way that an Oscar might go to a holocaust movie over a slightly better genre film because the former seems more serious). But at the moment? I'm pretty confident this was one of the best books I read in the year 2011.

9.) Shadoweyes Volume 2: Shadoweyes in Love (Ross Campbell; SLG Publishing) Original review in Las Vegas Weekly. This was another rough year for superhero comics, with reprints of comics from previous calendar years providing me many of my favorite—and, I think, best—comics featuring capes, tights and superpowers. Even the standouts among the corporate heroes—Daredevil, Wonder Woman, All-New Batman: The Brave and The Bold—are only achieving what should be the baseline of all comics with that much money and talent behind them produced in the 21st century. (That's not a slam on those books; it's a slam on everything else. They're not reinventing the wheel, but they so many other comics have gotten so awful that Daredevil looks like it was written by the Ghost of Shakespeare and drawn in ichor by angels. That's not the case with Campbell's Shadoweyes series, of which this is the second installment—not only is it a step or two above what should be baseline quality standards for superhero comics, it's something new, something original and something vital. It too my benefit from the sad state of superhero comics in 2011, but it's still king of that particular mountain.

10.) Tiny Titans and SpongeBob SquarePants (Art Baltazar and Franco and Various; DC Comics and United Plankton Pictures) I give up. I can't decide. Genre comics are hard to rate in these sorts of list, as genre-less, "literary" ones almost always look "better" by comparison ("Wow, that story in Optic Nerve really made me think about identity and relationships and my life, but gee, that's a great drawing of an extremely stupid starfish in Bermuda shorts..."). I think SpongeBob has an unfair advantage over TT in that it's an anthology by a whole mess of great cartoonists, and in some ways it usually features stronger art in a variety of styles but, on the other hand, TT's Art Baltazar and Franco seem handicapped in that it's just the two of them against the big SpongeBob team. So I'm going to call it a tie: These are both excellent all-ages gag comics with superior cartooning.

Other comics that were under consideration for inclusion: All-New Batman: The Brave and The Bold by Sholly Fisch, Rick Burchett and Dan Davis (#2-#14 came out this calendar year; no one else has done that many consecutive issues of a superhero comic in that amount of time that was that good...if I remember correctly, only #13 was a fill-in, and it was also great), Jim Henson's Tale of Sand by Ramon Perez, Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl (I mentioned this one's newness being a problem for me, I also felt a little uncomfortable time-stamping it as a 2011 best-of, given the fact that it was written decades ago), Mid-Life by Joe Ollman (the opposite problem here; this one came out so long ago that it seemed more faded in my memory than some of the other books that made the list above), Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki (a rare case of me not reviewing a comic I read and enjoyed meant that this work wasn't as easily recalled for rating-versus-everything-else purposes), Optic Nerve #12, Orc Stain (Has my comic shop sucked at getting this in, or was #6 the last issue to see release...?) and Stargazing Dog by Takashi Murakami.

Previously:
2010: The Year Drawn and Quarterly Won Comics

The ten comics that I happened to read in 2009 that I thought were better than the rest of the comics I read in 2009

The Best Comics of 2008

The Best Graphic Novels of 2007

Thirty-Three Notable Graphic Novels of 2006

(links and sundry)

2012-01-01T18:37:00.001-08:00

You said it, Raptor!

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

A few days after writer Christopher Hitchens’ December 15 death, I visited Daryl Cagle’s Political Cartoonists Index to see how political cartoonists were dealing with Hitchens’ death.

A popular reaction to the death of a famous or important person is the cartoon where they meet St. Peter at the gates of Heaven. I was particularly interested in how cartoonists by riff on this with Hitchens, an eloquent and outspoken atheist.

I didn’t find a Hitchens gallery there, unfortunately. I did find a whole mess of Superman-related cartoons, however, as many cartoonists turned to Superman-related imagery in order to discuss the congressional super-committee.

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

I haven’t really read anyone writing about reading comics on their phone before—not because no one’s ever written about it before, but simply because I’m not really interested—but I thought this piece by World’s Greatest Letterer Todd Klein was an interesting read.

Because of his age (older than super-old-fashioned, Luddite Caleb) and because of the years he’s spent making comics (with the understanding that they were ultimately going to be read on paper), Klein probably doesn’t fit the demo for people who might be inclined to read comics electronically on their phones, so his is an unusual perspective, I would guess.

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

I watched the new Batman movie trailer when I woke up at 3 a.m. one Tuesday morning before going back to bed.

I had insane Batman related dreams afterwards (which may or may not be related). Batman’s Rogue’s Gallery was in my bedroom at the house I grew up in, chasing around Robin, Nightwing and Batman, and Batman used that flock-of-bat-summoning device from Batman: Year One to summon all these bats that streamed up the stairway of my house and started eating the villains, including one giant, monster bat. There was a house on my street whose roof was full of corpses. The Joker's dad was this giant, muscular warlock who commanded a big 300-style army of shirtless ancient warriors. The He-Man bad guys teamed up with the Batman villains.

I guess my subconscious liked the trailer...?

I don’t know. I haven’t been too terribly enamored with Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies in general, certainly not as much as many of my fellow comics fans. This one looks a little more intriguing than the previous ones due to how…strange it seems, with Bane as the villain and Batman coming out of retirement or some such.

The scene with the football player looked pretty dumb.

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

Knowing that there's going to be at least one al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises and that Bane is the villain, and that this is the concluding part of a trilogy that began with a movie in which Ra’ al Ghul tried recruiting Batman to his quest, I wonder if Nolan and company are taking some of their inspiration from the 1996 Batman comics crossover storyline “Legacy” and Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan and Tom Palmer’s 1998 miniseries Batman: Bane of The Demon, which dealt with Ra’s and Bane forming an alliance, as the former considers the latter a more appropriate protégé than Batman.

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

Bane’s design in the movie looks kind of dumb, but Bane’s design always looks kind of dumb, in the comics, in the other movie he appeared in, in the various cartoons he’s appeared in… I wonder after his weird face get-up though. It sure makes him hard to hear, but then, it was only one line, and Christian Bale’s Batman has been hard to understand for two whole movies now, and that hasn’t affected the box office performance…

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

“Ponzi scheme”…? That word? I don’t think it means what Tom Brevoort thinks it means.

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

Wow, this “Batman and the History of the Bat-Suit” infographic thingee that Bejamin Andrew Moore made is pretty great.

If anyone cares, the “Troika,” “Year One” and “New Batman Adventures” costumes are my favorites (And “Batman Inc” and “New 52” are my least favorites, of the comic book suits. Most of the movie suits are, of course, awful).

What are your favorites…?

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

Wait, the new The Hobbit film doesn’t come out until next December…?!

Oh man, that’s soooooo far away yet!

The trailer looks pretty awesome, and it was really exciting to see Ian McKellen’s Gandalf again. I’m super-curious about how this movie is going to work out, as they seem to be messing around with it a little in order to get some characters from The Lord of The Rings films into it, and overall the tone of the book is much more lighthearted and even, at times, silly compared to the tone of the trilogy. They certainly seemed to have a bit of humor in the trailer; will they have to butch up the battle scenes to please LOTR film fans, I wonder…?

My first reaction after watching the trailer was, “Oh man, I hope they show Smaug and the giant spiders in the next trailer,” and then I remembered they were splitting the book up into two movies, and neither Smaug nor the spiders would be in the first one. (Fuck.) Well at least with this version they should be able to fit in Beorn, who was excised from the 1977 animated version for space.

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

And hey, speaking of Hobbitses, my comic book My Pet Halfing has one, and is chockfull of hobbit and Tolkein jokes! If you haven’t read it yet, and the number of copies I have in a dusty box in the back of my closet tells me quite a few of you haven’t, here’s my original announcement of it, and here’s a post with a six-page preview. I’ve updated both posts to include my current address.

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

Eh, I'm a fan, and always want to root for the guy, but I never felt defensive about it.

I think Peter David and Grant Morrison both had good takes on Aquaman. Paul Dini and Alex Ross did too, in their treasury-sized Justice League story, and in Ross’s Justice miniseries.

Just do good stories featuring the character, being cool, rather than talking about how cool he is, or overreacting to perceived misunderestimation.

Aquaman quietly beating down Power Ring in Morrison and Frank Quitely’s JLA: Earth-2 graphic novel, or appearing on the back of a blue whale jumping out of the ocean in his first appearance in Morrison’s run on JLA, or that scene in Brian Azzarello and JIm Lee's Superman, where Aquaman assembles an army of fantastic sea creatures just to stare down Superman…those panels or sequences are all worth thousands and thousands of words of talking about how Aquaman is actually cooler than the kids you went to grade school with might have thought he was at the time.

I think it's even easier to prove Aquaman’s worth in Justice League comics than it is in his own title (Johns’ is currently writing both Justice League and Aquaman), where Aquaman doesn’t really have to do or say anything to prove his worth; he just needs to show up and stand around next to Superman and Batman. Like, if Superman and Batman are cool with Aquaman and consider him one of The World’s Greatest Heroes, who am I to argue?

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

I do miss Mike Sterling’s words, but I’d be lying if I said wasn’t enjoying the hell out of his holiday hiatus strategy for Progressive Ruin: Simply showing panels of Swamp Thing fighting stuff.

They say there are four major types of conflicts in literature: Man vs. Man, vs. Society, vs. nature and vs. Himself. So far, Sterling has identified at least seven major types of conflicts in Swamp Thing literature.

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

It’s that time of the month again: Marc-Oliver Frisch’s analysis of the available month-to-month sales data for DC Comics!

Give it a read, and make sure to stick around for the comments, which are a lot more contentious than usual, and feature several retailers leaping to the defense of DC’s New 52 sales strategy as a whopping success.

With this month’s installment, Frisch has some more substantial analyses than usual, regarding which of the New 52 seem to be hanging on to their audiences in relation to others.

I was especially interested in his assessment that it didn’t bring a lot more, new readers into comics (at least not into the shops to buy the paper comics, based on the charts; digital is still an unknown). It didn’t seem like DC was really all that serious about this anyway, given the fact that all of the titles were created by the same group of creators that did the pre-New 52 DC Comics, with the few exceptions being guys from old Marvel superhero comics and a guy from an Image superhero comic. There was also a noticeable retrenching of the tone and address of the books, which was the same as it was before the relaunch (if it changed in anyway, I think it got a little grimmer and a little more Marvel-like), as opposed to something more general or mass audience friendly like, say, the tone of DC’s suite of animated series from the last decade or so.

***********************
Someone in those comments brought up Xombi, the critically acclaimed but extremely short-lived series by John Rozum and Frazier Irving that launched in the spring of this year and was canceled by issue #6. What if DC held off a few months and launched it with the rest of the New 52, it woulda been a monster hit, right? And given it’s subject matter, if it were released with the rest of the “Dark” sub-line that includes Animal Man and Swamp Thing, it would probably have done even better than a good handful or three of the New 52.

Strange that DC launched it when they did. I guess it’s because so few people at DC seemed to know the relaunch was coming even a few months before it came, but, if that was the case, why didn’t they just relaunch Xombi a la Batman: The Dark Knight, another title that had just begun prior to the relaunch?

************************
Reading through the Quality Companion, which I mentioned yesterday, I got to thinking about DC’s most recent Freedom Fighters series, this last one an ongoing by writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, who wrote two long miniseries featuring the characters first.

It was (predictably) canceled after this summer, after just nine issues.

What if it were a success, what would DC have done about it? Would they have had to cancel it anyway come September, given that it is based on the old continuity, in which superheroes were around since World War II, rather than the new continuity, in which Superman was the first superhero, and he debuted just five years ago? Was it canceled due to low sales or, like the two JSA titles, did it simply not fit in with the newer, younger DC Universe…?

For a few seconds I wondered why DC didn’t try to launch it as a New 52 title—Grant Morrison and then Palmiotti and Gray had invented brand-new versions of a lot of the characters that didn’t necessarily have all that much to do with the predecessors—but perhaps there just wasn’t much interest in the characters divorced from their place in DCU history.

It’s writers did just launch a Ray series though, which is even newer than The New 52.

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

Finally, if you haven’t been keeping up, here’s a post in which Tom Spurgeon provides links to the dozen holiday interviews he conducted this year. A lot of great conversations with a lot of great folks; I particularly enjoyed the Tucker Stone one, although they were all quite welcome reads during this way-too-slow couple weeks in the comics blogosphere.

Comic shop comics: December 28

2011-12-31T19:03:00.001-08:00

Once again, I bought and read very, very few new comics this week. Just two, actually, one from each of the Big Two. I wanted to get a third, DC Comics Presents: Elseworlds 80-Page Giant, but my regular shop didn't order any copies of it. So then I ventured to a second shop, a little further away, only to find that they had ordered a few copies for the rack—but they were all sold out.

Fortunately/unfortunately, they were having a year-end 20% off graphic novel sale, so I ended up buying a whole bunch of stuff I wouldn't normally have purchased, but that was on my too-read list. Here, then, are all the comics I bought at the comic shop this week...

Aquaman #4 (DC Comics) Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis conclude their first arc of the relaunched Aquaman with title character exterminating the man-eating humanoids called The Trench that he's been fighting when not exhibiting an adolescent-like concern with whether or not people think he's cool. To Johns' credit, Aquaman realizes it's not like he's just squishing bugs here, and that he's faced with an extremely difficult decision of essentially choosing to let one group (The Trench) die in order to save another (the humans they were attempting to feed on). Rather than having to have Aquaman make a choice, Johns allows fate to intervene, and fate chooses us over the monsters.

Somewhat ironically, this story couldn't have been told in quite the same manner that it was if Johns hadn't changed Aquaman's powers to the extent he did. In the first issue, Aquaman is offended that people thinks he "talks" to fish, and he makes it clear that he's not communicating with them so much as psychically dominating them, hijacking their nervous systems and controlling them.

There's a scene where the Trench try to explain themselves to Aquaman while fighting him, and the hero laments not being able to understand them. "I wish we could talk," he says, "I wish I could make you understand, I can't allow you to use us as food." Pre-reboot Aquaman could have done that with his powers, but the new, Savage Aquaman has to resort to deadly violence, even if he does regret having to do so.

It's worth noting that this issue has 21-story pages instead of the now-customary 20, and includes a four-panel "Coming Up This Year in Aquaman teaser that is essentially a 22nd page, giving readers a heads-up that the cause of Atlantis' seeking will be explored starting with the next issue. (Which seems to be another very clear case of a "New 52" title evidencing a hard continuity reboot, in opposition to what was originally said about the initiative keeping the original continuity with a few tweaks.)

Captain America & Bucky #625 (Marvel Entertainment) Writer James Asmus and artist Francesco Francavilla join co-plotter Ed Brubaker for the second story arc of the new series, which has an issue in the low 600s already because, um, Marvel, I guess. The book jumps forward in time to the present, then back to the late '40s to introduce Captain America II and Bucky II, whom the president charged with secretly filing in for the dead originals, so as not to demoralize the country, then forward again.

The new Cap and Bucky are pretty new to me—I think I've read maybe one other story to feature 'em before—so I was interested in meeting them, although I wonder if some of this will seem like an unnecessary retread to more experienced Cap fans. In the present, the original Captain America, Steve Rogers, teams up with the grandson of the late Cap II and the original Human Torch to begin investigating an attack a Golden Age villain seemingly initiated on the still-living but rather elderly Bucky II. Also, there's a Bucky I clone or android or something on the last page.

It's pretty hectic and confusing in summary, but its an engaging and exciting sort of confusion when read. It helps that Francavilla is one of the greats, and is, in fact, so good that I don't even miss Chris Samnee, the artist he replaces. Given that I started picking this book up to see Samnee's art on a monthly basis, I consider that fairly high praise.

Classic G.I. Joe Vol. 7 (IDW) This trade collects issues #61-70 of Marvel's G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero series, comics originally published between 1987-88. This would be have been getting pretty damn near the time little Caleb stopped playing with G.I. Joes—in this volume, I see appearances by only about four or five action figures I used to have—but I'm still fascinated by these comics, which were produced using characters and concepts during a time when I was absolutely head over heels in love with those characters and concepts, but before I had any real interest in reading comics. Now I've lost that sort of obsessive interest with the characters, but feel about comics the way I used to feel about G.I. Joe.

Larry Hama's scripting is still superior, only semi-silly army guy and ninja soap opera, but man, the art in these things is rough, floating just below "awful' and just above "unreadable." It's also incredibly lazy for a a book based on a toy line, as characters will refer to things like, say, their jacket or their shoes, when they are drawn without a jacket and barefoot. Stuff like that. The covers were all pretty great, but the interiors are nothing any of these guys can be too terribly proud of (And there are some pretty great artists involved, like pencil artists Ron Wagner and Marshall Rogers, and inker...Russ Heath? For real?!)

IDW's presentation doesn't do it any favors, either. According to the back, the comics were all re-mastered for color, but the coloring is pretty bad, in some pages near the back of the book, blobs of color overtake the lines of the figures, resembling the results of an exceptionally bad kindergartener with crayons who can't quite stay in the lines (Maybe I had a bum copy though...) I do hesitate to say anything bad about IDW's doing these books though, as I super-happy they decided to reprint these comics after Marvel quit doing so, and I hope they actually do end up printing the whole run, right up until those crazy-looking early '90s issues.

I think my favorite bits in this particular volume were those featuring Raptor (I had his action figure!), who has trained hawks and falcons and whose costume is a Hawkman-like cowl that sits atop his head, a feathered cape he usually wears over bare shoulders, and talons on his feet.

He's an accountant.And he apparently dresses like that, like, all the time, not just when in the field fighting G.I. Joe with trained birds. For example, after driving to San Francisco, while wearing his cape and talon shoes, he uses the pay phone:
And the worst part? The worst part is probably issue #63, in which Hama has couples Snake Eyes and Scarlett and Flint and Lady Jaye vacationing in Grenada together. There are multiple panels of Lady Jaye in a skimpy bikini, and artist Ron Wagner draws her either far, far in the background......or, in the single panel where she's shown in a medium-shot, stupid Flint's stupid elbow is blocking our view of her...Damn you, Flint!

Full Metal Alchemist Vol. 26-27 (Viz Media) This is it! The penultimate and ultimate volumes of Hiromu Arakama's feverishly addictive adventure series in which brother alchemists Edward and Alphonse Elric search to unlock the mysteries of the Philosopher's Stone and find themselves key players in a gigantic plot that gets bigger and bigger, as more and more players are introduced, and grander and grander schemes are revealed.

I wasn't 100% satisfied with the conclusion, which I think suffered a bit from a Return of The King (the movie) like pile-up of too many endings, and re-sets the Elric brothers with a new status quo that doesn't necessarily end their story and seems a little too easy to continue. The journey to those conclusions was amazing—this has ended up being one of my favorite manga reading experiences—and Arakawa did a fairly astounding job of working his way up to the final battle, in which the Dwarf in the Flask essentially kills the whole world and absorbs God, and having the heroes fight back from such a total defeat.

Everything gets tied up rather neatly too, although, as I said, some of the plot threads could have used a tad more finality...that, or more ambiguity, I guess. It just seemed a little too open. But maybe it was just weird to see the narrative return to something more quiet after what was probably about 800 consecutive pages of almost every single character in a cast of dozens battling for the fate of the world.

I'd highly recommend this manga series. (It's a lot better than the anime, too, if that's your only exposure).

Quality Companion (TwoMorrows) Okay, I'm not actually done reading this yet, but I'm including it here anyway, as I purchased it. I was pretty excited when I first heard about it, and actually considered trying to get a review copy just so I could read it without having to pay for it (at $32, it ain't cheap). But it was 20% off, and seeing it right on a shelf in front of me, well, I couldn't resist. Quality was home of some of my favorite Golden Age superheroes, as regular readers no doubt know, including Plastic Man, Uncle Sam and The Red Bee (they, and most of the rest of Quality's characters were eventually purchased by DC Comics and gradually folded into the fabric of the DCU...although after the New 52-boot, I'm not sure how many of them are actually even still around. I know there are books using the names Blackhawks and The Ray, and I heard there was a one-panel Plas cameo in Justice League International. Is that it so far? Geoff Johns mentioned using Lady Luck in his Justice League book after its initial six-part story arc wraps up...)

The Companion is a compilation of several types of books I would like to read, all rolled into one. There are nine original comics reprinted (featuring The Ray and Black Condor by Lou Fine, Midnight by Jack Cole and stories starring Phantom Lady, Human Bomb, Uncle Sam, Firebrand, Wildfire and Madam Fatal), there's some Golden Age history (Quality was home to some of the era's very best artists, including Fine, Cole and Will Eisner), and encyclopedia-like entries on the various characters, which take into account everything from their original adventures up through their 2010-ish status at DC (There are entries on all the various Ray characters up until the one that appeared in the Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray-written Freedom Fighters series, but no mention of the one who just appeared in a new Ray miniseries), and encyclopedia-like entries on the artists at Quality.

There are also some Q-and-A interviews with the DC writers who made most use of the Quality characters—Len Wein, Roy Thomas, James Robinson—but I haven't read any of those yet. I've basically been flipping through and reading an entry here and a chapter there.

So, um, I can't really offer much of a review, per se, other than that this is a fantastic book, allowing for several of my favorite types of reading experiences between a single set of covers, and covering some of my favorite creators and characters in the history of comics.

Wonder Woman Chronicles Vol. 2 (DC) I've already read all of these stories thanks to DC's fancy-schmany archive editions, but I would never be able to afford them. That's why I love the hell out of these Chronicles reprints. My only complaint is the Wondy ones don't come out fast enough, and there aren't any Plastic Man or Captain Marvel ones...

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

2011-12-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

I have a review of Deepak Chopra's prose book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes up at Robot 6 this week. It's a fairly negative review, but I would recommend the book (as something you borrow from a library, at least). I think there’s a lot of fairly insightful stuff in it, and I don’t think it would hurt anyone to practice anything Chopra recommends. That is, I think the message is good, I just didn’t think it was delivered all that effectively, and it's essentially a confusion of two books between a single set of covers ( I do suspect "laypeople” might find it more engaging, of course, lacking the “that’s not how I’d do it” or “Storm’s powers don’t work that way” hang-ups some of us writers-about-superhero comics might).

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

Deepak's son Gotham Chopra, a name that may be familiar to comics readers from his involvement in the now defunct Virgin Comics, writes the foreword, and is on hand as the superhero expert throughout. In that foreword, he shares an interesting anecdote:

A couple of years ago when I helped facilitate a discussion at the San Diego Comic-Con between my dad and comic icon Grant Morrison, an audience member asked my father a question about "quantum consciousness." He turned and stared at me with wide eyes and a grin. I knew what he was thinking: He was among his own.

It seems like the younger Chopra brings that up in part to burnish his fathers superhero bonafides, but it's also true that there's a rather remarkable overlap between Eastern philosophy, science and superhero comics, as evidenced in the work—comics and prose—of the non-Chopra on that panel.

I like the image of someone with expertise in one field being sort of surprised by the interests and knowledge of some of the folks at Comic-Con, I guess. (Although, cynically, it does make one wonder if Chopra was expecting something else and, if so, what was he doing there, you know?)

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

I didn't really have room to get into it in the review, but the artwork in the book is pretty nice. The image above, which you can see in full in the body of the column at Robot 6, is of one of the several superheroes who appear at the start of each chapter, to illustrate the seven laws (That guy is from the chapter on transformation). I believe there are seven in all, with the super-lady who appears on the cover in color re-appearing in one of the interior full-page, black-and-white illustrations.

These were all provided by Jeevan Kang, one of the artists who illustrated some books for Virgin (7 Brothers, Devi, Snake Woman, Ramayan 3392 AD), although he's probably best-known for his work on Marvel's neat 2005 series, Spider-Man: India.

The heroes he designs for the book are fairly generic—the above, the gal on the front with a shimmery energy cape of some kind and the Iron Man-like guy at the front of the creativity chapter being the best and most distinct—but a lot less generic than one might expect in a book like this. It probably helps that Kang is a comic book artist illustrating a prose book, rather than an illustrator trying to ape comic book artist style for the book.

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

This is my favorite anecdote in the book:

"You know, Papa," Gotham started one mrening as we both sipped our coffee, "your story is a lot like Doctor Strange's."

I stared at him blankly. Was this a compliment or something else?

"Do you know the story of Doctor Strange?" he asked curiously.

I shook my head.

"I can tell you if you want," he smiled.

Surely this was his plan all along. I nodded, intrigued, and he began.

The Chopras have weird breakfast conversations.

The elder Chopra's story is like Doctor Strange's in at least one way. Strange began as a medical doctor, but turned toward sorcery and eastern mysticism after his surgical career was ended by a car accident.

I don't know enough about the particulars of Chopra's career to know if he was all that much like Strange in any way other than the fact that he was a medical doctor who at some point turned toward eastern philosophy and is now better known for that than for the work of his former life.

I like imaging Chopra wearing those neat-o yellow spotted gloves and big red cape with the pointy-collar though. Or imagining the Deepak Chopra of the Marvel Universe befriending Doctor Strange and talking about all that crazy Ditko magic and how it parallels certain aspects of Hindu philosophy and yoga or whatever. "What you call the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, Stephen, is really just another aspect of the universal consciousness," and like that.

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

The book ends with both Chopra's collaborating on a "Superhero Reading List" of "modern Western comics" that "have something to say about the spiritual laws that drive great superheroes."

It's an interesting list. I was all set to rag on it, as there are some pretty poor comics on it—I can barely stand to look at the pages of Invincible Iron Man long enough to read the dialogue balloons, for example, and the Dini/Ross Batman: War On Crime is nice-looking, but pretty run-of-the-mill for a Batman comic otherwise—but each is accompanied by a sentence or two that explains why each was chosen, making it harder to complain about.

For example, Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's old Wolverine comic gets "Even the greatest superheroes can't always contain their shadow selves," and All-Star Superman "No one knows quantum consciousness like Superman."

Also recommended for various reasons are Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Silver Surfer, Ex Machina, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, World War Hulk, Spider-Man: Kraven's Last Hunt, The Death of Captain Marvel and Strange (The J. Michael Straczynski and Samm Barnes one, not the Mark Waid and Emma Rios one).

It's not a list I likely would have assembled, but I think it avoids any out-and-out stinkers or anything that makes superhero comics look as depraved and degenerate as they can often be, and it actually provides a pretty good sense of what the Big Two superhero comics field is like these days, mixing still-relevant and inspirational (to other comics) eighties comics with some generally well-received modern ones. That Silver Surfer probably sticks out the most as the one that is not like the others, and I wonder if it was included simply to get Lee to provide a blurb (Ha! I bet Lee would blurb anything if you asked him) or simply because of how well character embodies a lot of the stuff Chopra talks about in the book.

New Watchmen comics I'd be totally okay with:

2011-12-29T07:35:00.000-08:00

1.) Tiny Watchmen by Art Baltazar and Franco

2.) Watchmenstruation by Johnny Ryan (If you're going to take a crap on a classic comic, why not turn to the expert?)

3.) Watchmice by Art Spiegelman

4.) The Watchmen Strike Again by Frank Miller (You might think I'm kidding, but I'm totally serious. They have to use this exact title, though)

5.) Watchmen Gallery (I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I think DC's best strategy for exploiting Watchmen further than they already have would be to publish one of those Gallery books they used to do in the '90s—I remember buying ones featuring Batman, Death and the Justice League, although I know there were others out there too—in which they would basically have a bunch of great artists contribute pin-ups. It would give them a new comic book, or even comic book series—Mike Allred had a Madman miniseries like this, and DC's JLA-to-Z was essentially a pin-up collection with short bios of various characters offered as a primer to Marvel readers during the JLA/Avengers crossover—that wouldn't actually be a new story. I think that would allow prominent creators to "cover" Gibbons and Moore's work without feeling like jerks, and even those appalled by the idea of a Watchmen 2 something they could comfortably purchase or, at the very least, not feel the need to organize against. Hell, I'd drop $3 on 20-pages of pin-ups of Paul Pope drawing Silk Spectre and Geoff Darrow that squid-thing and Joe Kubert Ozymandias and his genetically-engineered cat thing or whatever. Slap an Alex Ross or Jim Lee or Brian Bolland cover on that sucker and ship away. On a similar note, I guess they could do like some popular manga series like Death Note and Full Metal Alchemist have done and publish some sort of guidebook, with, like, character bios or profiles and suchlike, although I think that would still seem pretty crass compared to a straight-up gallery, which could at least be interpreted as a tribute in addition to a cash grab).

6.) Watchmen Vs. Justice League (I was only 3/4ths kidding when I said that if DC were gonna do it, they should just do it and make it as crass and silly as possible—Watchmen vs. V For Vendetta, etc. Following Watchmen on its own terms is just silly. But what if they get someone like Grant Morrison—probably the only creator of Moore's stature who both works for DC and conceivably wouldn't mind needling the hell out of Moore by doing this—or Geoff Johns—who is synonymous with DC Comics in 2011-going-on-'12 and is an ideal awesome comics/stupid comics writer—and pair them with an unimpeachably talented drawer of superhero comics like, say, George Perez, and do a semi-silly, Gardner Fox style heroes of two worlds crossover in today's super-serious melodramatic style. Where, I don't know, having failed to save their world from nuclear war, Ozymandius sends a handful of his fellow heroes to the DC Universe to try saving it, only to find that its got like 200 guys who are all as powerful as Doctor Manhattan. They could fight, and then team-up. I'd buy that before I'd buy Comedian: Year One or Rorshach Begins)

On those Watchmen-related drawings that showed up on the Internet on Christmas

2011-12-28T20:10:00.000-08:00

(Please note: This is not one of them).

As you've probably heard about by now, gossip-monger Rich Johnston, who has been talking about rumors of a comics project of some kind expanding on the characters and universe of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1986-1987 series Watchmen for years now, posted a drawing of the character Nite-Owl by Joe and Andy Kubert and a drawing of The Comedian by J.G. Jones online, offering them as evidence of the project's existence.

Several other sites linked back to Johnston's post (the first I saw were at Robot 6 and Comics Alliance) before all were hit with cease-and-desist requests from DC. As some have noted, including Blog@Newsarama's Graeme McMillan and ICv2.com, the wording of DC's communication with the various sites seems to confirm the existence of the project (and, as The Beat notes, means someone at DC must really, really not like the project...that, or Johnston either hacked or "hacked", as in guessed, into DC's server to get the images for himself).

You know what's weird about DC attempting some sort of further exploitation of the Watchmen characters? I mean, aside from everything else that's obviously super-weird about it?

Over the last few years, DC has invested considerable effort and resources into new comics featuring characters or groups of characters owned by other publishers or entities, characters whose temporary acquisition by DC was announced with great fanfare.

And none of these characters from beyond the traditional DC Universe managed to take off in any significant way with either DC's core customers or the direct market in general.

Think Will Eisner's Spirit (beneficiary of not one but two volumes of a solo book), the Milestone Media characters (of whom Static is the only one appearing in a book), the Red Circle characters, Doc Savage and The THUNDER Agents. The creative success of the comics to feature any of the above can be debated, but, from a financial stand-point, from a sales stand-point, from a simple "Is this a big deal? Is it anything approaching a big deal?" stand-point, they were all pretty dismal failures.

The people who read DC comics don't seem terribly interested in reading about non-DC Comics characters being published by DC Comics, whether those characters are integrated into the DC Universe shared setting proper, or are in their own little universe or publishing line.

And in the above examples—The Spirit, Doc Savage, the THUNDER Agents, the Milestone and Red Circle characters—comics readers seemed mostly neutral to the idea of DC publishing new books featuring them. There wasn't any sort of virulent opposition to the very idea of them the way that there is toward Watchmen sequels, prequels or expansions.

Chances are the very controversial nature of the project might be more than enough to counteract the opposition to it on ethical or moral grounds (or the fact that it just seems too crass for even a lot of superhero comics fans) and DC's customers' long-evident complete disinterest in any comic books featuring extra-DCU characters being published by DC. And God knows the publisher's poor track record of selling comics not featuring some variation of the characters created in their National Comics Golden Age is the least of the concerns facing a potential Watchmen 2—I would think the biggest obstacle would be finding enough comics professionals who are both talented and esteemed enough to be considered worthy of following Moore and Gibbons and willing to do so for the paycheck despite the deserved and widespread mocking and bile they will receive for it—but I still think it's really, really, really weird that DC would consider another stab at something somewhat similar to something they have had such difficulty pulling off in the last half-decade or so.

(Although I think the argument can be made that DC's readers are naturally resistant to characters from outside the original DCU, as it had formed by those Gardner Fox Justice League stories, no matter how long DC has owned them. It's not like Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, the Charlton characters or the WildStorm characters have ever received a level of prominence equal to that of even the B-Listers like Green Lantern, Flash and Wonder Woman, or C-Listers like Aquaman and Hawkman, you know?)

Good one, Superman.

2011-12-27T19:46:00.000-08:00

Of course, your sarcastic remark might carry more weight if you were doing something more productive than just standing around juggling bricks...

(Panel from 1958's Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane #5, collected in Showcapse Presents: Superman Family Vol. 2, which is where this was scanned from; drawn by Kurt Schaffenberg)

Comic shop comics: December 21

2011-12-26T18:52:00.000-08:00

So I guess this new, brutal, stab-and-decapitate-and-ask-questions-later version of the Justice League is here to stay then? Their official stance on lethal force in the "New 52" is, "Yeah, cool, whatever"...? Because the above image of a heavily-sideburned Aquaman just cold SHUNKING something to death with a trident to the face is from last Wednesday's Justice League #4, on the splash page immediately following a scene where he summons a bunch of great white sharks to eat more of Darkseid's minions. Apparently. I didn't actually buy and read the issue because, come on, $4 for 20 pages that read more like 10 pages? I am not made of money. (If I was, I would have long ago been captured by someone and probably caged in a vault, where I would be periodically visited to have a piece of my body removed). DC is so proud of this new bad-ass Aquaman, and his spot on the new bad-ass Justice League, that this was among the scenes excerpted for a preview of December 21's releases, which you can read here.

You know what else is weird? Apparently the Conan O'Brien of the new New 52 U. does Aquaman jokes, and was doing them before anyone had ever even known there was an Aquaman...? That's kinda weird, isn't it?

Anyway, let's not dwell on the comics I didn't buy and didn't read, because that is actually the exact opposite of the point of this recurring feature...

Daredevil #7 (Marvel Entertainment) There's a neat twist here, as Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera put our hero and a group of children in a surprisingly tense, life-threatening situation that's far, far removed fromt he world of superheroes and -villains that he usually finds his life-endangered in. Perhaps it's the removal from the usual that makes the threat seem so effective...? Another great issue of a pretty great series.

Tiny Titans #47 (DC Comics) Art Baltazar and Franco have been choosing organizing principles by which to write issues of this title for a while now, and this time there are two: A scout-like meeting of Team Nucleus (a gathering of all the tiny Tiny Titans: The Atom, "Ryan", "Adam", Molecule, The Ant and Bumblebee), which leads to Bumblebee (and Miss Martian) babysitting the various baby characters (Aquaman's kid Arthur Jr., Kid Devil and Batman's brats Damian and "Jason Toddler"). It's cute and funny, if that's not a completely redundant thing to say about a Tiny Titans comic.

I'm not so sure about the dancing tiger gag, though. Was that meant as silliness for silliness' sake, or is there a riff on DC trivia or a pun on an expression that I'm just not thinking of...?

Wonder Woman #4 (DC) Hey, Wonder Woman and Daredevil on the same day means the two best Big Two super-comics are out on the same day! That makes for a much more pleasant Wednesday afternoon reading experience than usual. In this issue Brian Azzarello does what amost every modern Wonder Woman writer does at some early point in their run on the series—decimates the population of Paradise Island as a way of alienating Diana from her sisters. But Azzarello does so in a more unique way, one befitting the interference of the Greek gods (and one that's a lot less bloody and hard to reverse than some of the previous purges).

Azzarello also gets around to using Ares, one of Wondy's most consistent foes since the Perez reboot, and he's redesigned to look like a regular human being instead of the armored giant Perez designed him as, just as was done during Greg Rucka's run on the title, yet this version is even different than the redesigned version—That is, he's a redesign of a redesign, that looks rather radically different from both of the previous ones. Also, he goes by the name "War" instead of "Ares," further distancing the character from the previous iteration.

But the best part of Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang's fourth issue of the promising new series? That may be Diana in "plain" clothes (still wearing WW-branded chocker and arm-ringlet, though) going to a rock club with Zola, Stryfe and Hermes, the last of whom is so badly disguised that he might as well be wearing a brown trench coat and wide-brimmed hat, Thing or Ninja Turtle-style. (You can see Chiang's Ares and Wondy and Hermes' club-wear in this preview at Comics Alliance).

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas...

2011-12-22T17:02:00.000-08:00

I have a review of Jim Henson's Tale of Sand in this week's Las Vegas Weekly. You can read it here. That's all you'll be reading from me the rest of the week, as I'll be traveling home to spend Christmas with my family and not thinking as much about Batman and the X-Men as I do the rest of the year. Daily blogging will resume on Tuesday. Thanks, and have happy Christmas/cool next four days.

The worst Noel

2011-12-20T18:59:00.000-08:00

It’s easy to see the logic behind Batman: Noel, a new original graphic novel by Lee Bermejo, who teamed with writer Brian Azzarello to deliver the well-received, rather successful Joker graphic novel (Which I didn’t like, but it’s not like something selling a lot of copies and me not liking it is all that rare an occurrence).

In addition to providing a sort of visual sequel that allows DC to put “From The Co-Creator of The New York Times Best-Selling ‘Joker’” on the cover, the new $23, 120-page hardcover probably makes a decent gift purchase for bookstore shoppers looking for something to get the comic book reader or Bat-fan on their list.

Creatively, the logic behind publishing Batman: Noel makes little to no sense to me. It’s a pretty awful comic book, of the sort that makes one feel a little embarrassed for its creator while reading.

You can’t tell from the generic title or generic cover, but this is actually the inevitable Batman version of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol…actually, it’s at least the second.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale did a far superior version in 1995’s Batman: Ghosts—A Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special (a $5, 48-page book that was later collected with the other Loeb/Sale LDK Halloween specials in the 1996 Batman: Haunted Knight, which is a better trade with more story for less money than this goofy Noel book, Christmas shoppers!).

That transposes the basic structure of Dickens’ holiday classic so that it's essentially A Halloween Carol. A young Bruce Wayne seems to be embracing his role as Batman at the expense of living and enjoying his real life as Bruce. After the Penguin attacks him and he eats some bad sea food, he sleeps fitfully the night before Halloween.

He’s visited by the ghost of his father, then Poison Ivy, The Joker, and a mysterious cloaked figure and, upon waking to discover it was all just a crazy fever dream, he decides to spend a little more time as Bruce Wayne (This was the introduction of Sale’s incredibly idiosyncratic versions of Poison Ivy and The Penguin and, I believe, his first Joker story; all three would show up in his “Year One” era series with Loeb, Long Halloween and Dark Victory).Bermejo, writing his own story, does the same "Dickens + Batman" premise, but in a very different way. First, it’s a Christmas story again.

Secondly, there’s no "it was all a dream" twist; that excused Loeb’s borrowing the plot from Dickens (Batman would be familiar with the story, and could have been dreaming along that template) and allowed for the artificiality of the plot reflecting that of the novel. The events in this story all "really" happen, although this is essentially an un-labled Elseworlds or Imaginary Tale, as Bermejo’s costume designs and continuity signifiers make clear.

Thirdly, the story arc is different. Whereas Ghosts saw Batman needing to rediscover the, um, Spirit of Bruce Wayne, Noel finds Batman needing to stop being a savage, scary asshole who never un-grits his teeth and doesn’t risk the life of an innocent boy by using him as bait to capture The Joker and, ultimately…not being that guy…? I don’t know; it’s not really clear. Bermejo basically presents Batman as a Frank Miller-inspired ‘90s-style Dark Knight, dialed up to eleventeen and, after his visitation by the “spirits,” he…well, he basically just buys Tiny Tim a Christmas tree and hires Bob Cratchit as a janitor at Wayne Enterprises. We're not privy to whether or not he's changed, as after capturing The Joker he promptly falls asleep and we don't see him conscious again in the book.

Most bizarrely, the story Bermejo tells through his images and dialogue is a Batman adventure which is parallel to certain elements of Dickens’ story...which is different from the loose adaptation of A Christmas Carol Batman: Noel offers.

For the former, Batman’s trying to catch The Joker, and is using The Joker’s bagman as bait. The bagman is the story’s Cratchit, and he has a sick little boy named Tim. Sick with fever himself and battling pneumonia, Batman thinks he sees the ghost of an unnamed dead Robin, in for Marley. Catwoman is in for the Ghost of Christmas Past (Her conversation allowing Batman to flashback in his mind to the past), Superman is in for Christmas Present (his superpowers allowing him to fly Batman around and show him stuff) and The Joker in for Christmas Future, burying Batman alive, so that our hero can hallucinate the future (Before ultimately fighting his way to the surface, as in the conclusion of "The Black Glove" storyline from Batman).

For the latter, Bermejo has the Cratchit character re-tell A Christmas Carol quite badly to Tim, updating it to modern times. This narrative, told all in prose that appears in big white text over the artwork, isn’t the Batman story, Bermejo just lines them up with one another. It’s really quite poorly told, as it’s essentially what you would get if you asked a random person on the street to summarize A Christmas Carol for you, but to set it in the 20th century instead of the 19th. And I’m confused as to why it’s even included. They already removed all reference to Dickens’ story from the title, why keep a retelling of it? With it removed, the book becomes a super-subtle adaptation—one that works remarkably well, given the care with which Bermejo chose his ghosts and the sources of the visions they give his protagonist—and it becomes somewhat more readable.

But it still has problems. My favorite part happens right after Batman jumps on the Cratchit character and screams at him for a few pages, spit literally flying out of Batman's mouth and onto the terrified bagman's. Batman tells him he's going to let him go rather than bust him, since he'll make better Joker bait than "jail bait."

I don’t think we’re meant to laugh at Batman here, but surely a smart guy like him knows what “jail bait” actually is, right? It’s not someone who goes to jail. I would imagine the most common response to this book will be along the lines of Chris Mautner’s: Terrible story, nice art.

I found it more than a little undercooked myself. Bermejo’s style isn’t to my taste, as it’s quite representational—sometimes filmic, sometimes photo-realistic—and there’s a defensiveness about the costume designs that betrays a bit of embarrassment or shame on the part of the artist in embracing them (Robin, for example, has long pants, because shorts are just silly; he also had chain-mail in his costume. Batman is wears armor that makes the Arkham Asylum game Batman and Christian Bale’s Batman look vulnerable; and his mask looks like Midnighter’s).But at the end of the day, too much of it (with “any” being “too much”) is just plain hard to read. Look at this image, with Alfred in the background and foreground simultaneously. Does Batman have twin butlers, or does Alfred have super-speed in the Noel-iverse?

That said, the costume designing was my favorite part of the book. I liked seeing how Bermejo thought through various aspects of various costumes, coming up with unique tastes that seemed like compromises between the original comic designs and what Hollywood costume designers would outfit the characters with in potential live-action films. It’s all little stuff, but I like seeing where Bermejo put the buckles, or how his Catwoman’s boots might differ from other Catwoman boots.I could find no such silver lining in the writing, however. It was just too hard to believe, from Batman being so amoral as to dangle people in front of The Joker in order to catch him, to Batman being so plain stupid about the way in which he does so (he uses the Cratchits as bait for The Joker, but then goes home to the Batcave and undresses, watching them on his Bat-computer, God knows how many miles away, while he has no idea where The Joker is), to Superman flying in to check on Batman, and not offering to help find The Joker with the amazing powers he has, or to stand guard over the kid Batman was using as bait (remember, Batman's plan is to wait for The Joker to show up to kill Bob and Tim in order to catch him).

Check out this page:Superman doesn't even look over his shoulder when the Batmobile explodes in Batman’s face (“I heard you coughing all the way from Metropolis,” Superman says when he first appears, reminding us that he has super-hearing).

And Bermejo and co-publisher Jim Lee, who writes an introduction (Oh, there’s a silver lining! There’s an introduction! I think all graphic novels of this sort should have one), are just daring people to take issue with it.

First, Lee writes that Bermejo is one of those few lucky talents whose work (Joker) is both popular and well-reviewed.

And here’s how Bermejo starts the story:No, no you’re not. But you don't have to be that honest about it.

Nice costume designs and buildings, though. This would be a pretty strong second draft, but it still needs a lot of work.

Marvel's March previews reviewed

2011-12-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

I had intended to put this post together and publish it last night as my Monday post, but for some reason I ended up falling asleep around 9:30 p.m. last night. Was this because I was so exhausted from my long, six-hour day checking books in and out at my library day job? Or because the solicits themselves were so boring they put me to sleep?

You'll have to read them for yourself to decide.

The thing that jumped out at me in this month's batch as the most interesting is that before Brian Michael Bendis will finally step down as the writer of two ongoing Avengers titles, he will first add a third (Actually, counting the ".1" issue of Avengers schedule for March, there will be four new Avengers comics written by Bendis on sale).

That will be Avengers Assemble, which appears to star the Marvel Universe equivalents of the Avengers in the upcoming movie, and it will feature art by Mark Bagley, who previously teamed with Bendis during his Mighty Avengers run.

To help promote the book, Marvel will be offering "Retailer Variants", which, judging by the blank spaces on a couple of the previews, look like bad riffs on IDW's idea of having store-owners allow Godzilla to step on their store on the cover of Godzilla #1, as long as they order enough copies.

So I guess if you order enough copies you can pretend you have the sort of terrible comic shop that is small, cramped and stocks exclusively Marvel comics and overpriced statuettes? Or you can have your name on a pedestal, surrounded by a poorly drawn Hulk and Captain American pumping his fist in the air for some reason? Also of note this month? To me, anyway? I hate these new-format solicits of Marvel, with non sequitur bullet points offering a few salient facts about each, and every single world beginning with a capital letter. Write paragraphs, you damned solicitation elves, you!

Okay, let's see what we got...

Astonishing X-Men #48
Marjorie Liu (W) • Mike Perkins (A)
Cover By Dustin Weaver
Amazing Spider-Man 50Th Anniversary Variant By Tba
• New Creative Team! Best-Selling Author Marjorie Liu And Mike Perkins (The Stand).
• The X-Men Return To New York City, But It’s Not A Social Call.
• Don’t Miss The First Chapter Of What Will Be The Most Controversial Story Of 2012!
32 Pgs./Rated T+ …$3.99

…in which it’s revealed that Wolverine slept with Northstar in the past…?

Why not? He's slept with just about everyone else in the Marvel Universe...

Avengers Vs. X-Men #0
Brian Michael Bendis & Jason Aaron (W)
• Frank Cho (A/C)
...
• The Return Of The Scarlet Witch! What Does This Mean For The Mutant Messiah Hope?
• Three Of The Hottest Names In Comics Kick Off The Biggest Event In Marvel History!
• And Did We Mention Frank Cho On Art?!
40 Pgs./One-Shot/Rated T+ …$3.99
*Issue Will Be Polybagged

Oh so that’s Hope (as Kate said in the comments the other day). That makes sense then, to have the deus ex machina that reduced the mutant population of the Marvel Universe down to less than 200 X-Men and their villains (and put one of Joe Quesada's genies back in one of his bottles) and the deus ex machina that can restore the mutant population of the Marvel Universe and let that genie of Quesada's out of the bottle, on the cover together.

I guess I just didn’t realize that the grown-up Hope had such a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible costume.

I like the background of Cho's cover, if not the overall structure and rendering of the characters in the foreground.

...

Wait, did they say "pollybagged"...?

Sigh...

Jeez Spidey, how could you miss at such close range…? Your web-shooter is only inches away from Cable!

And speaking of Cable—I assume that's him, since this is the cover of that Cable vs. The Avengers miniseries—I guess his character design isn't hopelessly ugly after all. To make it look cool, all you have to do is simply redesign him into Colossus, I guess.

Look at this cover. Look at this cover.

New Avengers #23
Brian Michael Bendis (W)
• Mike Deodato (A/C)
• The Shocking Conclusion To The Dark Avengers Saga!
• Will One Of The Dark Avengers Become A New Avenger?!
• …And Will There Be A Shocking Fatality In The Avengers Battle Of The Year?!!
32 Pgs./Rated T …$3.99

Well there had better be a shocking fatality, if you include a question like that in the solicitation. If someone reads New Avengers #23 in March and finds there isn't a shocking fatality—that is, if the answer is "No, of course not"—then they're probably going to be sort of disappointed.

This is a really rather nice cover by Deodato (I actually thought it was by Neal Adams until I saw the signature), which provides a good example of the basic appeal of Hulk's son. The Hulk + A Sword is a pretty good formula.

Wow, that cover looks stupid.

Nice Arthur Adams cover. It even manages to make Lady Deathstrike look kinda cool.

Ew. What is Kaare Andrews doing?

Links and sundry

2011-12-18T17:57:00.000-08:00

In addition to a scene where Batman gets his ass kicked harder than at pretty much any other point in his career—including being set on fire and having the pointy side of a shove embedded in his chest cavity—Batman: Birth of The Demon features something else I don't recall seeing in any other Batman comics I've ever read: Ra's al Ghul's bare ass. That's him above, fighting the dark, winged monster he encounters in his dreams, which gradually takes the shape of Batman through the centuries of dreaming. The image is, of course, by Norm Breyfogle.

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

I didn't end up using the above image in that piece I wrote about Ragman for Robot 6 this week, opting instead for an image from a house ad that Ragman creator Joe Kubert did for the original 1976 series, but I really like it, and went to the trouble of cropping it, so I'll just stick it here.

It's from the cover of the second issue of 1993 miniseries, Ragman: Cry of The Dead and, of course, by Joe Kubert. Kubert provided all six covers for the series, and they are all really beautiful. (Look here at comics.org, if you like). Kubert's now at the point in his career where he can draw anything he wants, or nothing at all, if he wants, so I imagine whatever's on his drawing board at the moment is exactly what he wants to be there. Still, I would love to read a full Ragman story drawn by Kubert now...

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

Speaking of images I prepared but didn't ultimately use, here are two weird scans from that X-Force collection I wrote about early in the week. I singled those images, both from the same scene in the Clayton Crain-illustrated "Angels and Demons" storyline, because I didn't understand them at all. That is, of course, Rahne "Wolfsbane" Sinclair, whose mutant power is that she is basically just a werewolf who can control her transformations.

In every other scene, Crain drew her with a pretty standard wereolf head, an organic-looking head with furry brown flesh over a face with a long canine snout (although in some panels it look more like that of a rodent). At any rate, in the above images, Wolfsbane looks like an entirely different animal. The first image made me think of an Egyptian hieroglyphic version of a jackal head, but, in the second, her face seems to be made out of black PVC, and her mouth has disappeared. That humanoid-shaped figure is also here and, again, rather than having a human face with human flesh, she's drawn with a weird black, plastic face, and missing features like a nose or mouth.

That scene confused the hell out of me when I first read it, and I went back and reread it immediately to see if I was missing something.

Don't get me wrong, it's kind of cool-looking—and it's additionally cool in that it differentiates her mutant ability to turn into a wolf-like monster from just being a garden variety werewolf—but it's so different from Crain's previous depictions of her that it seemed like I was missing something.

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

Jerry Robinson died last week. I didn't ay anything last week, as I didn't have anything to say that dozens of others couldn't say better. I'm thankful for the work that Robinson did and the way it enriched my imaginative life, and I'm even more thankful for all the work Robinson did that I wasn't even aware of until I had already grown up. Here is Tom Spurgeon's "Collective Memory" round-up of various eulogies and remembrances.

As it turned out, Robinson's passing was only the beginning of what became a pretty rough week for the comics community, as his fellow Golden Age giant Joe Simon also died this week, as did the much-too young Eduardo Barreto . Here is Spurgeon's collection of Simon posts and articles, and here is his obituary for Barreto. (I imagine a Collective Memory post will follow tomorrow).

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

Hey, who wants to read something else depressing?

Then check out this piece by Gerry Alanguilan, about how the changing technology and trends in comics-making can mean there's less and less work for comics artists who specialize in inking and lettering.

I know that, on a certain do-it-yourself level, it's simple desperation that leads folks to turn to computers for things like lettering. I wanted to hire a talented letterer to hand-letter my comics, but, having no money, I then decided to try and teach myself to computer-letter them. But it was way too hard for me to do so, so I ended up poorly hand-lettering them myself (I'm still pretty rotten at it, and I have particular trouble with the bubbles and tails, but I've decided I like even my own shitty hand-lettering better than computerized lettering. But, in a perfect world, where I had millions in lottery winnings to pay folks to help me produce my shitty little comics about hobbits and Mothman? I'd hire Steve Lavinge or someone to hand-letter things for me).

Alanguilan discusses computerized inking and lettering vs. the old-fashioned way in terms of jobs, but I'd also like to point out that eight times out of ten, computer-driven stuff looks fucking terrible compared to old-fashioned inks on top of pencils, and/or letters drawn right into the panel before it's inked. Especially the lack of inks in favor of coloring from pencils (Unless the artists are using computer programs that replicate the application of inks to pencils, anyway). In general, the colors-on-pencils style tends to look fuzzy, soft and—to me—nausea-inducing. A lot of publishers and editors seem to prefer that fumetti-like look, and it must sell, but It doesn't produce any excellent comics. (Via Comics Reporter)

*******************
Hey, look at these lovely Richard Sala Christmas images! Nice to see Peculia hanging out with a nicer sort of supernatural figure than she usually gets to...

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

Retailer, blogger and Swamp Thing-er Mike Sterling conducts an impromptu survey of DC's "New 52." I started with five (Justice League, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Justice League Dark) and I've dropped two (Justice League, due to price, and Justice League Dark due to the art style).

Wonder Woman is the only one of the three I'm still reading that I would go to the mat for and argue is good-good; Green Lantern and Aquaman both hit that sweet stupid/awesome spot that Geoff Johns so often hits with me, and features pretty good (Aquaman) to really great (Green Lantern) art.

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

Hooray! Given the creative team, I hope this Superman Family Adventures is more in keeping with their Tiny Titans than with their work on Magic of Shazam or Young Justice. From the very little we can see in that cover, I'm assuming it is.

Hey, three months after "The New 52" debuted, DC unveils a book aimed at new readers! (And that I am legitimately excited to start buying and reading as soon as possible!)

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

Here's the trailer for the next G.I. Joe movie.

Here was my original reaction: What the F...?

The 2009 G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra spent so much time—waaaayyy toooooo much time—setting up a franchise,including origin stories for Cobra Commander and Destro, and those guys aren't even in the sequel? Also missing, Scarlett, General Hawk, The Baroness... Jeez. Something obviously went really wrong between the first and second installments.

I'm still bummed most of my favorite characters still don't seem to be in in it in any capacity, with the exception of Lady Jaye, who joins the cast of this second installment. Unfortunately, it looks like she'sbeing played by TV actress, Ohioan and almost-Wonder Woman Adrianne Palicki, instead of my first choice, Hannah Spearritt.

No one ever asks my advice on these pressing matters...

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

Okay, I give up. Who is that lady with guns on the cover of Avengers Vs. X-Men...?

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

Here's a well-timed piece from NPR's Monkey See blog, "The 20 Unhappiest People You'll Meet In The Comments Sections of Year-End Lists."

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

Yeesh, check out the choices on USA Today's list of the best graphic novels of 2011, relatively few of which qualify as such, unless they're using the loosest definition possible for "graphic novel"; that is, bound comics with a spine.

Two of them are collections of comic strips (xkcd, Hark! A Vagrant), at least one is a collection of a miniseries telling a story that doesn't even really begin or end between its own covers (Flashpoint), another is an anthology collection of various shorts by a single author (Bob Powell's Terror) and the even included DC's The New 52 collection, which is every #1 issue of their 52 September-launched monthlies between a single set of covers. Its inclusion on the list should make eve DC Comics uncomfortable; that's about as far away from a "graphic novel" as you can get while still being comics; it's the first chapter of 52 different "graphic novels," if one wants to consider eventual trades collecting story arcs as graphic novels.

Given those choices, whether or not it matters that The Death-Ray and Walt Simonson's Thor comic are reprints from comics that range from a few years to a few decades old doesn't even seem worth considering when it comes to assessing the best work of the year 2011.

Three different guys put the list together, and each includes something that is totally not a graphic novel, no matter how you look at it the work chosen or the definition of "graphic novel." The list reads like a list a newspaper would put together if the feature editor looked at the pile of unread comp copies publishers sent them in the last few months and simply picked the ones with the covers they liked best and copied some copy from the back-covers.

Man, don't even click on that link, which will take you to Robot 6's link to the USA Today article and, if you do, don't click on their link to the USA Today list. Not unless you wanna read a newspaper feature that will make you wanna punch some motherfuckers in the face.

Jesus. The New 52. Better than 99.9% of all other bound comics published in 2011!

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

By the way, I'm totally dreading putting together a best-of list for the year. That shit is hard work. If only I wrote for USA Today, I could just name the last few comics I read, call those the best graphic novels of 2011 and collect my paycheck....

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

Holy shit. Holy shit.

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

Kiel Phegley threw questions at Marvel Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso in Comic Book Resources's regular column devoted to that, and one of them pertained to Gambit playing a role in the upcoming Avengers Vs. X-Men event/story. Alonso answered:

Though he's on the cover of "AVX" #1, Gambit doesn't yet have a strong presence in the story. But we have been discussing the possibility of a "Gambit" ongoing series. On second thought, maybe not. I mean, who likes Gambit…?

No one, that's who!

There are some interesting tidbits in there. Those features are always very, very hard to get real, valuable information out of, because someone in Alonso's position can only be so honest/volunteer so much information, but it's nice to hear his thoughts on a few of the subjects brought up. Even if some of the answers—like the one about why there will be more Avengers and X-Men comics than Truth or X-Statix-like projects—are kind of super-depressing.

Reveiw: Batman: Birth of The Demon

2011-12-17T21:11:00.000-08:00

I can’t tell you exactly why I didn’t read original graphic novel Batman: Birth of the Demon in 1992, or at any point during the next two decades.

I recall seeing a full-page house ad for it in Batman comics of the time, featuring a rather shocking image from the climax of the book that, at the time, I didn’t really process as representational, given its content. And it featured fully painted art by Norm Breyfogle, who was then one of my favorite comics artists (and he remains the definitive Batman artist for me).

I suppose it might have had something to do with the villain, Ra’s al Ghul, who I never really cared for, or the fact that it was presented as the concluding part of a trilogy of …Of The Demon books I hadn’t read or been at all interested in (1987’s Son of The Demon and 1990’s Bride of The Demon, if you’re curious; Mike Barr wrote both, while Jerry Bingham provided art for the first and Tom Grindberg for the other).

I suspect a lot of it had to do with the simple fact that graphic novels of any kind seemed rare, strange, even alien in 1992, certainly to Teenage Caleb, who could regularly find 22-pages of Batman in any number of places—book stores, drug stores, grocery stores, comic shop—for around two bucks then.

I saw Breyfogle’s name on the spine in the library a few weeks ago though, and picked it up. I’ve missed Breyfogle’s art a lot since he sort of drifted out of the Bat-books during the early bits of the “Knightfall” storyline, and I’ve missed his work even more in the last few years, when DC started handing plum art assignments like Grant Morrison’s Batman run or relaunching Detective Comics to fairly terrible artists. (And the recent-ish DC Retroactive: Batman—The ‘90s #1 made me feel all the more nostalgic for it).

Birth of The Demon seems to be only nominally part of the …Of The Demon books; it’s not by Barr, but by Denny O’Neil, who created the Ra’s al Ghul family of characters and was then editor of the Batman line. Additionally, it’s Ra’s origin story, so much of it is set well before Batman was even born, and thus well before the events of the other two graphic novels, although Batman does appear in the framing sequences that do seem like they are climactic of an ongoing conflict between Batman and Ra’s.

It’s a hardcover, and an over-sized one, eight inches wide and eleven inches high. Breyfogle’s art is fully painted, which, along with the hardcover, high quality of paper and dust jacket, contributes to the special-ness of the book’s presentation. While trade collections and even original graphic novels weren’t unheard of during 1992, the were still awfully rare compared to today, and DC seemed to approach this as something special.

I was such a fan of Breyfogle’s pencil work, that I was unsure if what I liked about it would necessarily translate to painted comics work (note that, other than the basic figure in the pool in the immediate foreground, the cover doesn’t really look like a Breyfogle image).

It looks amazing. The figures, the faces, the action, it all looks, moves and flows like Brefygole’s comics, the main difference being a softer, rounder look that moves the needle ever so slightly toward representational, and the coloring is just lovely. It’s neither the flat, bright “comic book-y” coloring that can be found on the bulk of Breyfogle’s pencil work from that decade, nor is it that sickly, computer effect-driving faux video game or airbrushing look of most modern super-comics.

The palette is often quite limited—the pages not set at night or in a desert really jump out because of the amount of different colors in them.

The panels are essentially border-less, with thick white gutters separating them from one another. The format of the pages then doesn’t really look like anything of Breyfogle’s I’ve seen before, or anything from the monthly super-comics of the time. I’m trying to think of other painted-projects that used this technique, but I’m coming up empty—it seems usually the gutters are black in painted projects.Of course, the way in which this is painted is itself kind of unique, I think. Unlike, say, the work of Alex Ross or Daniel Brereton, it looks more like Breyfogle penciled a Batman comic as he normally would, but colored it himself using paint, rather than having constructed the panels as individual paintings. Does that make sense? If not, the point is this: It’s a really beautiful-looking comic, and unlike anything else that I can think of off the top of my head, at least in terms of superhero comics.

The story is this: Ra’s al Ghul is elderly, ill and near death, and his followers are trying to prepare a Lazarus Pit in which, will restore him to youth and health. Batman is stopping them.

At one, he meets Talia al Ghul and they discuss Ra’s’s before-this secret origin, which occurred in ancient times in a Middle Eastern locale that Ra’s had obliterated from human history.

Broadly, the man who would become Ra’s al Ghul was a physician who had discovered a secret power within the earth, accessible via certain points (which would become known eventually as “Lazarus Pits”), that can heal the sick, and restore even the dying and dead, with the unfortunate side effect of the person emerging being temporarily insane with rage.

Ra’s is caused to suffer greatly because of his discovery and the wicked rulers he serves, so he rebels, destroys them and their city and then embarks on his centuries as an immortal.

Back in the present, Ra’s arrives, and he and Batman take off their capes and shirts for a shirtless fistfight to the death.

It’s pretty brutal. Both Batman and Ra’s al Ghul are kinda crazy and desperate by the climax of the story, and Batman takes probably the most brutal beating of his life, up to and including that one time Bane broke his back.

Ra’s pushes him into a fire, which they role around in, and then Ra’s hits him in the face with a torch, setting his hair on fire. Then a sandstorm kicks up, and while Bruce Wayne is clearing the sand out of his eyes, Ra’s hits him across the face with a shovel and then stands above the prone Wayne and then, pausing only long enough to look at Talia as she begs him not to, he does this:Holy shit, Ra’s al Ghul just totally killed the hell out of Batman!

And, as you can see in that last panel, Ra’s hears someone say his name in a small, rough voice and he turns around, shocked to see:Batman got back up. With a shovel still in his chest!

And then he stalks over to Ra’s, grabs him by the throat and they both plunge into the Lazarus Pit and are restored to life (Ra’s and Talia have disappeared by the time Batman wakes up, his skin and hair re-grown).

That’s a pretty big, intense moment in Batman history, and I felt weird reading it for the first time so many years after the fact. I didn’t realize Darkseid wasn’t the first person to “kill” Batman…

O’Neil’s Batman is a pretty idiosyncratic one, although it was a lot of fun to revisit his take on the character after being so far removed from the O’Neil-written and/or O’Neil-edited Batman.

For example, the book opens with some hired thugs trying to uncover a pit, only to be interrupted by a very dramatic appearance by Batman, first as a voice from nowhere saying “Go Home,” then as a weird shape silhouetted against the night sky. He warns them to leave, he lets a few bullets bounce off of his bulletproof cape to scare them, and warns them again.

O’Neil’s Batman is obviously capable of sustaining and dishing out a lot of violence, but he’s very slow to do so, only fighting when he’s attacked, at which point he quickly and efficiently dispatches his enemies, and he is, in fact, so eager not to hurt them that he leaves himself open to an attack, getting hit with a shovel and knocked down a hill.

In addition to being a kind of scary Zen-like reluctant warrior, O’Neil’s Batman is also fallible and vulnerable, which makes the climactic battle so believable, even if the injuries get so unbelievable the reader knows Batman will be in a Lazarus Pit before it’s over.

O’Neil also goes to the trouble of characterizing the bit parts of the Guys Who Fight Batman in the opening scene. Thugs for hire, they’re in no hurry to fight Batman either, and only decide to do so for desperate, financial reasons.Sure, they’re only given a character trait or two, but man, that’s a hell of a lot more than characters like that tend to get in scenes like that in stories like this.

The bits in the distant past are pretty far-removed from what we normally see from O’Neil, but because he goes so far as to make Ra’s a character from a fantasy culture, it doesn’t have to read like anything more than a broad, melodrama, which is easy enough for O’Neil to accomplish.

All in all, it’s pretty great stuff and, surprisingly so, given how far from the creators’ respective comfort zones so much of the book is, and how little one seems to hear about it these days. I’m still not terribly interested in tracking down Barr’s two …Of The Demons graphic novels—although DC will be making it awfully easy to do so, packaging the them along with Birth in a huge, 300-page collection due out in March—but I’m now kind of curious to see the goofily titled 2005 series Year One: Batman/Ra's al Ghul by Devin Grayson, Paul Gulacy and Jimmy Palmiotti, which presumably told some form of parts of this story.

Meanwhile...

2011-12-16T20:46:00.000-08:00

I am now contributing to Comics Alliance, a very good comics news site that I imagine many of you already read but if, for some reason, you don't, now you've got an extra reason to be doing so. I think I'll mostly be helping out with news and project announcement type things for the time being. I've written three posts so far, including this one on the passing of Joe Simon and this feature on Marvel's upcoming Doctor Strange: Season One, for which I interviewed Greg Pak and Emma Rios. I probably won't link back to every single thing I write over there, so consider this a heads-up regarding another place you can find additional writing about comics by me on the internet.

I'll continue to contribute weekly to the Robot 6 blog at Comic Book Resources as well. This week's column, which I linked to yesterday as well, was a bout Ragman, miracles, holidays and religion, but mostly about how cool Batman: The Brave and The Bold #14 was.

Comic shop comics: December 14

2011-12-15T21:28:00.000-08:00

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #14 (DC Comics) I love Ragman, who boasts one of my all-time favorite character designs, and is thus one of those superheroes whom I enjoy reading about on one level simply to see the way different artists draw him. And I love the "All-New" volume of Batman: The Brave and the Bold by Sholly Fisch, Rick Burchett and Dan Davis. So you can probably guess how excited I was about issue of the B:TBnB featuring a Ragman team-up and, I'm happy to report, I wasn't the least bit disappointed. (I've already enthused about it over at Robot 6, if you'd like to read a couple hundred words on it and some of the issues it raised).

I was a bit surprised by Burchett's Ragman, as it seems fairly far removed from Joe Kubert's original Ragman depiction, and the artist generally hews pretty closely to the designs of the character's creators in his designs. Instead, his Ragman looks to be more inspired by the look of the TV show itself.

He has a clean, smooth black face beneath his hood, which is a flowing green zig-zag, rather than the more conical hood Kubert used to draw, with pupil-less white triangle eyes (despite the cover, which shows him with glowing yellow eyes with visible black pupils. Burchett uses Kirby dots in depicting the mystic energies of the suit of rags, as when Rory Regan first transforms into Ragman and, later, when he uses the cape to absorb bullets. One aspect of his Ragman I really liked was how skinny who drew Rory. He's not at all a superheroic-looking figure, but once the rags are on he gets the broad-shoulders and barrel-chest of a Brave and The Bold superman.

There was quite a lot to like about the book, but this was probably my favorite part:Yeah, take that Batman!

Green Lantern #4 (DC) I've been reading Geoff Johns' Green Lantern comics as long as he' s been writing them, but given the "Everything Is New!" premise of The New 52, I've been trying to read the few DCU books I still read with two pairs of eyes: Mine, and those of a theoretical newcomer. Johns is now into his fourth issue of the new volume of Green Lantern, and he's still telling the Sinestro-and-Hal-Jordan-team-up-to-save-Korugar-from-the-Sinestro-Corps (The yellow Lanterns) story arc.

Now, I know Sinestro is a wicked villain, not only because his name has the word 8/9ths "Sinister" and I've seen Super Friends, but because I've been reading about him for years now and know that, morally, he's somewhere between Space Machiavelli and Space Hitler. However, based on these four issues alone, he seems like the better and more noble of the two characters (In this issue, he admits past mistakes and, while struggling to be humble, apologizes for once oppressing Korugar by abusing his power).

Sure, Jordan egged him on a bit in this, and encouraged him to sacrifice some of his own power and trust in others to try and save the world, but Sinestro seems like a pretty decent guy in this story so far, while Jordan still seems like a dumb, cocky/arrogant a-hole whom I'd hate to share an elevator ride with, let alone look up to as a hero.

I wonder to what extent this is intentional, and if and when Johns plans to knock Sinestro off of the road to redemption the character has been on?

Nice art, as always.

SpongeBob SquarePants Comics #6 (Plankton Pictures) In the cover story, billed as "Crisis of Infinite Jerks," SpongeBob inadvertently gets a multiverse full of different versions of himself and his cast onto the same splash page, and it's truly a joy to behold, and a greater joy to scan the George Perez-level crowd scene to spot the radically reimagined versions of the characters. As with the last five issues, this one is full of rock-solid gag comics from a bunch of talented cartoonists, many of whom it is surprising to find working on a comic based on a cartoon show.

Review: X-Force Vol. 1

2011-12-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

In discussing Uncanny X-Force, I referred to the previous volume of the series—plain, old adjective-less X-Force—as a team consisting of all the stabbiest X-Men.

I assumed I was making a joke, and exaggerating a bit, as at least one member of the team didn’t always have blades in her hands or growing out of her hands.

That character was Rahne “Wolfsbane” Sinclair, who was introduced in the ‘80s as a member of The New Mutants and has the neat mutant power of being a werewolf, which seems admirably like creators cheating (Like, someone thought, “I want to write about/draw a werewolf, but I’m stuck on this stupid X-Men spin-off, so I can only write/draw mutants…Oh wait!” I don’t know. Having a mutant whose mutation is being a werewolf seems somewhat akin to having a mutant hero whose mutant power is to turn into The Hulk or be basically Deathstroke, The Terminator from the New Teen Titans or something).

I assumed she was on the team, since she appeared on a majority of the covers I saw. But then I read the massive hardcover collection of X-Force Marvel published in June of last year and, it turns out, Rahne was simply one of the many X-Men characters who turned up in the book, who seemed to be in the extended cast, but wasn’t really an official part of the team, in that she worked with the other characters and went on X-Force missions.

Instead, she spends some time captured by some of the bad guys, gets brainwashed into taking something form another X-Men character and, while present for much of the first volume, isn’t really on the team. Other such characters who drift in and out of the various narrative threads without seemingly having X-Force membership cards include Cyclops, Angel, Domino, a golden-skinned kid with healing powers I’ve never seen before named Elixir, a bad guy with terrible tattoos and teleportation powers I’ve also never seen before named The Vanisher and, most randomly, Ghost Rider, who shows up for an issue or two to help fight a demon.

So who is on the team?Well there’s Wolverine, whom we all know and love.

There’s X-23, who is apparently a teenage girl clone of Wolverine, differentiated from her genetic source material by the fact that she only has two claws on each hand (but a third one on each foot!), has no identifiable personality beyond “killing machine,” has huge breasts and wears a mask-less, belly shirt version of Wolverine’s costume.

And, finally, there’s the Native American mutant whose name is actually—no shit—“Warpath,” the only member of the team who has to carry his own knives, since he doesn’t have any growing out of any of his extremities. He is also different from the other two in that he has apparently never killed before, or hasn’t in any great numbers, which is why Wolverine is opposed to him joining the team at first.

Actually, Wolverine is opposed to X-23 being on the team as well. And Wolfsbane, whom wants to join the team, but doesn’t get to. Either Wolverine knows the toll totally killing all your enemies takes on a person’s soul and wants to spare others from the pain he feels, or he loves killing so much he’ greedy for it, and doesn’t want to split up slaughtering bad guys duties with other characters—he wants to keep all the fatal stabbings for himself.

I would call these the X-Men stabbers, but the bad guys refer to this team as “all of the mutant’s best trackers and killers.”

And who are these bad guys?

Well, there are five individual stories contained in the giant, 300-page hardcover that collects X-Force #1- #11 and X-Force Special: Ain’t No Dog, three of them written by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. Of these stories, the biggest is the imaginatively titled “Angels & Demons” (the series was relaunched as Uncanny X-Force before they could get to “Digital Fortress” or “The DaVinci Code”) and it’s pretty complicated.

There’s one of those crypto-Christian religious sects/militias that the X-Men sometimes encounter, the kind with suspiciously vague and simplistic tenets of belief (usually, something along the lines of “mutants bad, God good”). They are called The Purifiers, and they apparently had something to do with the X-Men crossover event that X-Force used as a springboard to publication (The one that introduced Hope, I guess—“Messiah Complex,” I think…?).

This group attaches the head of a preexisting X-Men villain I’ve never heard of onto the body of another preexisting X-Men villain I’ve never heard of, and it’s apparently pretty powerful. It finds some other preexisting threat—like, semi-sentient alien technology, or something—on the ocean floor, and uses that to resurrect all of the X-Men’s old human asshole enemies, all of whom this villain can control as puppets. The human leader of the Purifiers and his immortal-monster-disguised-as-human friend grate against the leadership of this new composite villain. The grand plan, though, is to steal Angel’s wings, robotocize them, and graft them onto the militia guys, so they will basically just be a Christian, anti-mutant militia that can fly.

Also, they’ll look like angels!

Cyclops thinks this will be very bad for his people, so he wants Wolverine and the gang to stab everyone involved to death for him.

That six-issue story arc is followed by a four-issue arc entitled “Old Ghosts,” in which Wolverine, X-23 and Angel (now Archangel) bump into Domino while trying to capture The Vanisher, who stole The Legacy Virus, which is also something from old X-Men comics I never read (I think that’s what killed Colossus forever during the short-lived “dead means dead” period of Marvel Comics, before Joss Whedon brought Colossus back to life in Astonishing X-Men). Meanwhile, Warpath fights a giant bear with a mohawk, and Ghost Rider helps him. These are both pretty shitty stories, featuring poor artwork that is somewhere betweeen terrible and less-terrible, depending on who is drawing which.

The rest of the book consists of the one-issue “Who The Hell Is Eli Bard?”, which explains who the lead Purifiers not-really-human human pal is, and features the first appearance of good art in X-Force, when Alina Urusov shows up to draw flashback scenes.

The last two stories are both from the special, I think. These include “Ain’t No Dog,” by Charlie Huston and Jefte Palo, the best story with the best art in the book (which we’ll discuss later), and “Hunters & Killers,” by Jason Aaron, Werther Dell’Edera and Antonio Fuso, in which Wolverine finds Warpath feeling guilty about butchering so many enemies, and Wolverine reminds him that yeah, butchering your enemies can take a lot out of you, emotionally. The art on this isn’t as good as in “Ain’t No Dog” or those Urusov-drawn flashbacks, but it’s not as terrible as in “Angels & Demons,” and is head-and-shoulders above that of “Old Ghosts”, too.

As you can probably tell from my description of the plot of the first few stories in this collection, it is probably best enjoyed by people who already know all of the players. It’s not completely new-reader unfriendly, but I knew I didn’t know a lot of the characters and events being referenced, and I knew that the stories were being written as if I did.

Certain parts of the book made me wish I knew even less than I did, though. For example, that I had no idea that Rahne’s mutant ability was to turn into a werewolf, or who Warpath and Wolverine and X-23 were, exactly, or who they were to one another.

Because there were plenty of panels or entire scenes that just seemed loony—enjoyably so—and I found myself wondering what it would be like to be reading this book and just…happen upon something like some of these scenes.

For example?

Well, here are two panels featuring Rahne, as drawn by Clayton Crain, the primary artist in the book (He draws issues #1-#6, and the parts of #11 that Urosov didn’t). These are the fourth and fifth panels to feature Rahne. Before these panels, her only line has been “Logan…”Pretty great, right? Just all of a sudden this lady has a rat head and is saying “GRRRR…” Surreal. Absurdist. Unless you know she was werewolf power, in which it just looks like she has a badly-drawn wolf-head all of a sudden, than that Crain just dropped a new figure in on top of the same background panel so he could use it twice, and save on drawing/artistry.

Here is the first panel in which the official X-Force team all appears together. I laughed out loud when I first saw this panel, and can only imagine it would be even funnier if I had no idea who the hell these people were supposed to be:I would assume Warpath was cruising the park at night and tried to pick up Wolverine, unaware that Wolverine was waiting for a date, if it weren’t for the girl on the ground, whose butt Wolverine seems pretty pissed off about.

And check out Warpath’s arms! One of the things I hate about this level of representational coloring is how ridiculous it makes exaggerated anatomy look. If Crain drew Warpath like that in pencil and ink and it were colored the old-fashioned way, it would look like a cartoony superhero design. But with realistic-looking flesh over that bicep that’s almost as big as Warpath’s torso? He just looks like a grossly deformed man-thing. The photo-realistic night-sky and trees don’t help any.

Crain’s art is pretty poor in general, with every panel looking like a still from a not very good video game from 2002 or so—Mortal Kombat fumetti. I’ve read comics he’s illustrated before and not minded the art in them at all—his 2005 Ghost Rider series with Garth Ennis, for example—but I hated it here. It was hard to read, in addition to just being hard to look at, and there are panels where certain actions are meant to be taking place that don’t make any visual sense, but must be figured out using context clues, like when you’re a little kid reading a book and you see a word you don’t know, but can guess its meaning from the way its used. Only with comics, and the unknown vocabulary word is just a crappy panel with stranger blurs meant to evoke motion of some kind.

If I had to guess, I think a big difference between that Ghost Rider comic and this X-Force one is that motorcycles, chains, fire, skulls and demons look more natural in this video game-paint style, whereas flesh and blood humans—even spandex-clad ones—look gross and off-putting and, obviously, hard to “read” emotion or even motion from. And nighttime highways and Hell are easier settings to fudge than the real-world settings of this X-Men comic.

Here’s something I didn’t know about X-23: Apparently, she is a “cutter.” That is, the slangier way of referring to someone who suffers from the behavioral and/or mental disorder of self-harming, usually with non-suicidal tendencies.

Unlike most cutters, Laura has several blades conveniently stored inside her own forearm. And she has a healing factor which immediately repairs the self-harm she does, which makes the whole thing kind of…odd. And, I think, sort of crass and insensitive.

These panels are the only reference to this among the 300 pages of X-Force Vol. 1; perhaps the ramifications are discussed in greater detail and with greater sensitivity elsewhere.

This is probably my favorite, “God, this comic must seem weird” moment in X-Force. The epilogue for issue #10, the conclusion of the “Old Ghosts” storyline, features a wolf running through the snow, panting, when it gets knocked down. And, on the next page:Holy shit! This X-Men comic is suddenly about furries?!

That male furry only appears in that panel, and that’s his only line, so, um, not sure what’s up with that. Is he a recurring character, that X-Force/-Men/New Mutants fans will immediately recognize, or does that page seem just as out-of-left field to them as it does to me?

Okay, let’s take a look at “Ain’t No Dog,” or, as I like to think of it, “The Good Part.”

This is a clever, perfectly constructed 21-page story which opens with Wolverine in front of a bound and gagged man, holding his own spilled guts in while he waits for his healing factor to fix him, sitting around in a pool of blood spilled from himself and the various dead bodies scattered around.

He’s there to get something from someone, but first he has to fight a bunch of mindless berserker cannon fodder that chants "KILL KILL KILL." He does all the talking in the book, to the gagged man, save for one scene with Cyclops told in flashback.

Huston does a fine job of doling out information efficiently and dramatically, in such a way that the reader gets it when the reader needs it, and can put the story together for him or herself as the story is read. He has a lot of fun with Marvel’s Quesada-era no smoking policy (more on that later) in the process. And the story both fits in with what was going on in the main X-Force book the one-shot containing it spun out of and stands alone (at least one of the bad guys Wolvie kills is wearing a Purifier uniform).

With the possible exception of Urusov’s flashbacks, this the best X-Force looks. Jefte Palo’s Wolverine is rather Frank Miller like, as is his entire comic. Not necessarily in terms of design, which is detailed and round where it needs to be, but in the starkness of the juxtaposition between shape and space. And some little details, like Wolverine in profile, the way he pulls on his mask, or the way the bodies of ninjas pile up around him.Palo and colorist Lee Loughridge do neat work with the copious amounts of blood as well. The borders around the spilling or spilled blood aren’t inked, so it has an almost unreal, luminescent effect to it accomplished by a lack of black (rather than a computer-added lens flare effect), and it looks like red paint. It’s beautiful, which allows the reader to see it as the protagonist sees it, and the result is a story in which there is literally vats of blood spilled, but while its bloody, it’s not gory or gross. A little artifice goes a long way…especially in art.

For example, here’s how Crain draws a scene in which a couple of guys have parts of their heads cut off:And here’s how Palo draws a scene in which a guy gets his head cut into pieces by Wolverine: Discussion of art can get tricky when you stop to wonder if you’re factoring in personal taste or preference when evaluating quality, but I don’t know—the one image seems so much better than the other, even in terms as simple as legibility, that I don’t see much room for uncertainty regarding quality here.

And that’s X-Force Vol. 1, which isn’t at all as good as Uncanny X-Force Vol. 1, but is at least big (I borrowed it from the library; you should too if you’re interested, because it sure ain’t worth $35) and has some funny bits, even if they’re not meant to be funny, and at least one really good story in it.

Oh wait, before we go, here’s the last page of “Ain’t No Dog,” which you shouldn’t read if you don’t want Huston’s best joke spoiled:There are two references earlier in the story to the fact that Wolverine used to smoke but no longner does. See, smoking is really bad, but killing enough dudes to form a twelve-foot pile or corpses to perch upon? That’s not as bad as smoking.

I think that’s pretty cool that Marvel let Huston essentially get away with saying “Quesada’s policy regarding smoking in Marvel Comics is fucking insane.”

Wait, one more image. Since I wasn’t terribly kind to Crain, I should also point out this variant cover to the first issue by Bryan Hitch, whom we all generally consider a pretty good artist. That image sucks. (Is it something about the word “X-Force” that brings out bad work in artists? Is it a magical word that executes a “draw worse” spell? Is Rob Liefeld a warlock, and did he place a curse on the property when he left in the early ‘90s…?) Is Warpath’s mutant power that he’s fucking gigantic, or are X-23 and Wolfsbane only about three-feet tall? How unusual is it for a man's butt to be that much smaller than his head?