Weekly Haul: February 11th

Action Comics #874 (DC Comics) Hmm, apparently the “New Krypton” goings-on have already started to jumble up the Super-books in unexpected ways. For example, this is the Geoff Johns-written monthly, but it’s scripted instead by Superman writer James Robinson. Where will the madness end?!

This particular issue is a not terribly eventful or innovative move-the-plots-a-few-steps-forward sort of issue, as Superman argues with his fellow Kryptonians and they invite him to move to New Krypton, Steve Lombard helps Jimmy Olsen with his cryptography (Psst, Jimmy! Steve didn’t mention it, but try 58,008! It’s the best one!), and Superman pulls Mon-El out of the Phantom Zone, where Superman has forced him to live while he works on a cure for his fatal lead-poisoning with the same speed and urgency that Reed Richards has been working on a cure for Ben Grimm’s mutation into The Thing, which is mysteriously evaporating. The Phantom Zone that is, not the cure.

The art this issue comes from penciller/inker Pablo Raimondi and co-inker Walden Wong, and they do a very nice job on it. Hooray for art that doesn’t make me sad just to look at!

If the proceedings seem a little breezy this issue, I suppose that’s because the story is only 18-pages long, to help make room for a six-page “Origins & Omens” back-up (Which adds up to 24 pages! That’s two extra pages…free! Marvel would have charged $6.99 for this very book).

This back up is by Robinson and artists Renato Guedes and Jose Wilson Magalhaes, and it couches the entirely unnecessary origin recap of the new Guardian (whose origin story was just told a couple of months ago) in a story about his day at work today.

And that sequence is framed by the Guardian of the Galaxy who has taken the name Scar crying black tears onto the blank pages of something called The Black Book, which I believe is actually just a copy of Kramer’s Ergot 7.


Avengers/Invaders #8 (Marvel Comics) About midway through, this book gets so wrapped up in Marvel continuity that it completely loses me: Something about the original Vision (whom I know nothing about other than that his costume design is 1,000 less terrible looking than the crying android version I’m more familiar with) getting somehow swallowed whole by the despair-driven demon thing with the stupid name of D’Spayre (Who once fought Man-Thing, I recently learned—thanks Essential Man-Thing Vol. 2!) on his way to watch over the Cosmic Cube, which is apparently something Vision’s people do, whoever they are. It was basically a pile-up of like six things I didn’t understand in the space of a few pages.

It doesn’t really matter.

Sure, Spider-Man’s Gollum impression is terrible, the events don’t really line-up with the rest of the Marvel Universe’s goings on (Luke Cage and Hawkeye/Ronin make a Secret Invasion joke, although this is well before Secret Invasion), Dr. Strange’s voice seems off and some of the dialogue is downright laughable. I don’t care.

This is still a comic book where the original Human Torch’s android blood is being siphoned off by Ultrons like vampires, until he realizes that Ultron is basically just a robot Hitler and rallies—robot vampires are one thing, but robot Nazis? Not on the Human Torch’s watch!

Also, Namor’s in it.

Only four more issues to go, at which point I will cry manfully at the loss of this limited series from my pull list.



Batman #686 (DC) This is the fourth two-part epilogue of Grant Morrison’s “Batman R.I.P.” story in a row, following Morrison’s own “R.I.P” to Final Crisis bridge story, Denny O'Neil's Nightwing filling-in on a case story and Paul Dini’s Hush vs. Catwoman story. This is certainly the most special of the three, being written by Neil Gaiman, whose comic work is increasingly welcome as it gets increasingly rare.

Entitled “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?”, it’s a very conscious evocation of Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” story, which served as a fake last Superman story to finish up the pre-Crisis Superman story. The title is the main similarity; this isn’t a possible last Batman story along the lines of The Dark Knight Returns (and heck, even that last Batman story got a sequel) so much as a very Neil Gaiman-y story about the possible death of Batman as a fictional character, and various other fictional characters coming to his wake (including, interestingly, Batman himself).

In fact, it seems to have a lot more to do with Morrison’s own “everything really happened” take on Batman comics that Morrison explored throughout his run and Morrison’s never-ending metafictional meditations in Final Crisis than it does Moore’s old Superman story. (Whether this is a coincidence or if Morrison and Gaiman talked about their stories is unclear; certainly Gaiman’s comics work has similarly dealt with characters as embodiments of fiction just as strongly as Morrison’s has, albeit in mystical rather than science-fiction terms).

So: Batman is dead. His body is in a coffin in the back room of the Dew Drop Inn in Gotham’s Crime Alley, and guests arrive to view his body, talk to one another, and tell the story of how he died. Conflicting stories, naturally.

It may remind you of Gaiman’s “The Wake” story in The Sandman, which is understandable, as both feature wakes for the title characters of their comics, attended by the supporting casts. It may also remind you of Sandman's “World’s End” arc, but only in so much as it deals with characters coming together to tell stories, which isn’t a Gaiman thing so much as a Canterbury Tales and the fifteen thousand works it inspired thing.

The attendees don’t seem to come from any set continuity. The Catwoman who arrives looks to be the Silver Age Catwoman, but the one who tells her story looks like Earth-2 Catwoman (and is wearing a completely different dress than the first one we see), and in the story entitled “The Cat-Woman’s Tale”, she begins as the Golden Age, first appearance Catwoman and moves through several different incarnations. The original Joker pulls up in his Joker mobile, yet inside it’s the Batman: The Animated Series Joker.

It doesn’t seem right, as Batman himself remarks. He’s present throughout, as a voice talking to someone, and, finally, as a shadow in the story, talking to a female shadow, who may or may not be a familiar Gaiman character.

The conceit is cute, and it’s interesting that while Catwoman’s story is built from “real” stories, Alfred’s is a completely different one than we’ve ever been told (at least, than one I’ve ever heard), and has the makings of an interesting Elseworlds sort of story. But those are the only stories, which seems a little odd—that leaves space for only two, possibly three more, and, well, there are a lot of Batman characters, aren’t there?

The art is by pencil artist Andy Kubert and inker Scott Williams and it’s extremely frustrating. Not because of any inadequacy—a weird figure of Damian al Ghul is the only real deficiency in the whole book I noticed—but precisely because it is so good.

Kubert, you’ll recall, was at one time the regular, “monthly” artist on Batman, partnered with Morrison, but he only managed about two story arcs before falling hopelessly behind, even with fill-ins by other artists—and at least two months worth of issues by an entirely different creative team—built in to the schedule.

He’s a really quite skilled artist and, unlike the pencil artist hired to follow him, he can actually keep up with Morrison. Not only was his art nice looking, but it was full of the sorts of things that his replacement’s Tony Daniel’s was missing, he managed to pull off some nice scenes I can’t imagine Daniel even attempting (the fight in the art gallery during the pop art exhibit, for example).

It’s somewhat frustrating then to see his work here, as Gaiman’s story, like the one Morrison was telling throughout his Batman run, is full of call backs to the work of past Batman artists, only Kubert is actually able to pull off art work that looks like Bob Kane’s or Dick Sprang’s or Neal Adams’ or Jim Aparo’s or Bruce Timm’s or Jack Burnley’s or David Mazzucchelli’s. Imagine what he would have been able to do on “Batman R.I.P.”…if only he could draw on a monthly schedule (Which he can’t; even given all the lead time he had on this two 32-page issue project, he’s apparently already behind schedule on the second installment) .

Ah well. This is a very nice project, and he does a great job. Easy to read lay out with more than four panels per page, logical mis en scene, backgrounds, feet, facial expressions, variation in character design…it’s like there’s a real comic book artist drawing Batman again, just like in the good old days!

I suppose in the grand scheme of things, this is more of a pretty damn good Batman story than The Greatest Batman Story Ever Told, and I wonder if it will ever even become a classic comparable to “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” But I was just as impressed with Gaiman’s work as I was with Kubert’s. He has a very naturalistic, very novelistic way of telling a story in comic book form; not by writing comics like novels shoved into panels, but by simply telling a story through dialogue. You don’t need things explained to you in a Gaiman comic; exposition, info dumping, an intrusive narrator…no need for any of that. The characters simply talking to one another is what tells the story. That is, Gaiman shows rather than tells, which make his comics such a pleasure to read.

Great script, great art, great comic book. It’s so simple really, that it’s amazing reading experiences like this are as rare as they are.



Batman Confidential #26 (DC) In a rather odd synchronicity, I just reread a twenty-year-old Batman story that Neil Gaiman wrote to prepare a post about Gaiman’s previous Batman comics, and in one of those stories he has The Riddler lamenting the bygone days of the ‘60s, as epitomized by the Adam West-starring TV show.

“And there were these guys you never see anymore…” Riddler says, before rattling off a list: “Book Worm. King Tut. Marsha, Queen of Diamonds. Egg Head.”

And yet the cover of this issue, the first in a story arc introducing the TV show villain King Tut into the comics, bears the tag “First Time Ever In Gotham!”

Which is it DC?!

Okay, so it doesn’t really matter. I think it’s kind of (well, mildly) exciting that they’re introducing a TV show villain into the comics, and am surprised it took so long. In general, such pre-existing characters tend to fit in pretty well with the comics their home medium adapted them from. Some do so perfectly (Batman: The Animated Series’ Harley Quinn), others find a way to make something exciting and interesting out of them (Isis in 52), but even those that are just sort of there (Superfriends’s Wonder Twins and Wendy and Marvin in Extreme Justice and Teen Titans, Superman: The Animated Series’s Livewire in the Superman comics) don’t exactly not work either, you know?

So shipping in some villains from the Batman live action show? Why not? They’ll be fresh and new to the comics and will likely at least feel like appropriate Bat-villains, whereas creating new rogues from scratch can be a much dicier proposal (Whatever the relative virtues of, say, Bane or Hush, they’re not exactly The Joker and Catwoman, you know?).

The writing team of Nunzio DeFilippis and Chrstina Weir are the ones writing this new story arc, “A New Dawn,” and their King Tut is a lot different than the one on the TV show. For one thing, he’s definitely not tubby—he’s actually super-buff—and his skin is dark. He’s a mysterious presence throughout the issue, we only seem him appearing before folks connected to a museum, reciting a riddle, and then murdering them in a fashion that evokes the answer to the riddle.

He has only one conversation with Batman, in which he talks about the arrival of the sun god in Gotham and that sort of crazy talk.

So there’s nothing exactly revolutionary going on here. Thematic psycho villain shows up, starts killing folks. Batman immediately expects The Riddler is involved since, you know, riddles, and while The Riddler doesn’t appear to be, he seems miffed that someone else is stealing his schtick, so he joins the hunt. I’m almost positive I’ve seen this exact same thing happen between The Riddler and Cluemaster at least once before, but now I can’t think of where exactly.

If the scripting isn’t great, it’s not at all bad either—it’s pretty much your mean average Batman comic. The art, however, is head and shoulders above a majority of your mean average Batman comics (particularly of late), as it’s penciled by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and inked by Kevin Nowlan. Even David Baron’s coloring is pretty nice, depicting the dawn and dusk times of the killings very well.


Black Lightning: Year One #3 (DC) When I started contributing to Blog@, I started doing a weekly run-down of new releases that look good/bad/somehow funny to me (basically, a more superhero-focused version of Jog and Brady’s superior versions, with bad jokes and drawings). That means a couple times a week now, I pore over the Diamond shipping lists, Amazon.com listings and publisher websites, thinking intently about what comics and graphic novels are coming out that week. You would think that would mean I’m less likely to completely forget about what comics are coming out that week when I got to the store the next morning—or at least I would think that—but no dice: I still inevitably forget a book or so each week.

Last week it was this issue of BL:Y1, which was perfectly fine. Jen Van Meter has gone past the necessary part of the story—it only took two issues to tell us who Jefferson Pierce is and how and why he came to be Black Lightning—and she’s now moved into the less necessary two-thirds of the series, which will revolve around his fight with Tobias Whale and The 100. That makes it slightly less interesting to me, as I was most interested in how this 1970s character would be updated to the 21st century, but its all done pretty well.

This week I forgot to get Super Friends #12, which is the one with Pirate Starro on the cover. Man, I suck…


Booster Gold #17 (DC) Speaking of unnecessary origin retellings in the backs of DC Comics—as I was, er, a couple hundred words ago—the “O&O” back-up in this issue is a longer, less efficient version of the two-page version Mark Waid did with Dan Jurgens for 52, updated to include what’s gone on in the title, clumsily revealed in forced dialogue between Booster and Rip Tyler (“I’m proud of you, Booster. You’ve done well. Your turnaround began when you faked your death, masqueraded as Supernova—and ended up saving the Multiverse”) and a couple pictures of Scar and KE7. As Jurgens draws it, Scar seems to be shooting the ink/black tears out of her left eye in projectile fashion, rather than crying them. I’m not sure about the mechanics of the whole eye liquid/image-creation process, to tell the truth.

There is a panel of Booster unmasking Black Beetle in either prehistoric times or the Batcave, and an image of the Wolfman/Perez Titans, which I assume are the “Omens” part of the “Origins & Omens” feature. Those might be kind of exciting.



Captain Britain and MI13 #10 (Marvel) There’s a scene in this issue wherein Dracula enters his secret vampire laboratory staffed with vampire scientists on the moon, and then launches a secret weapon, which shoots super-vampires like torpedoes out of moon craters in geysers of blood at his enemies on earth that made me think of Mike Mignola’s zanier elements in his Hellboy-iverse books. And it was really just a scene, one part of several well done ones that take advantage of the rich texture of the Marvel Universe—locales, characters, past story lines—to tell something that feels fresh and exciting by the way it synthesizes all these elements.

So Dr. Doom and Dracula hammer out a non-aggression treaty, The Black Knight and Faiza visit Storm in Wakanda to pick up the Ebony Blade that got left there in the first arc of Hudlin’s Black Pantehr run and flirt with one another on the trip back, Pete Wisdom and Captain Britain meet some girls in a bar, Blade and Spitfire go on a date, and bloody Nosferatu-looking vampire rockets rain down on Britain, which Dracula seeks to conquer to found a vampire nation, from which he promises to fight Islam for Dr. Doom. (Like Dracula’s recent appearance in the Buffy comics, this Dracula is a racist Dracula).

That’s…that’s just a whole lot of good stuff for 22 pages, and it’s just the broad strokes. It’s all the little details that really make the book fun.



Comic Book Comics #3 (Evil Twin Comics) So does the fact that this issue features an “Approved By The Comics Code Authority” stamp with arms and legs threatening Roy Lichtenstein and Fredrick Wertham with a red hot CCA brand mean that it is approved by the Comics Code Authority or not…?

In the third issue of Fred “Writes Incredible Hercules” Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s comic book about the history of comics, they cover Frederic Wertham (kinda like Ten-Cent Plague, but with pictures!) and the rise of pop artists and their affection for comics (Warhol, Lichtenstein and the Batman TV show) and what these things meant for comic books as an industry. Starring Wertham, Julius Schwartz, Harvey Kurtzman, William Gaines, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the Crumb Brothers.

I learned a lot, some of which I wish I didn’t (Particularly that Adam West and Frank Gorshin once attended a Hollywood orgy), I laughed out loud a couple of times and I found myself filled with a desire for Van Lente and Dunlavey to someday do a comic book about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby being forced to share an apartment or being assigned as partners on the police force.



The Darkness #75 (Top Cow/Image Comics) This is the $4.99, 11th/“75th overall” anniversary jam issue of The Darkness, written by Phil Hester and drawn by a platoon of different artists of various sill levels (Joe Benitez, Michael Broussard, Lee Carter, Jorge Lucas, Marc Silvestri, Frazer Irving, Ryan Sook etc).

I would not and did not buy it, but my local comic shop gave it to me for free. Not because I’m so special or because they like me so much; they gave it to everyone for free, at Top Cow’s request. Apparently different shops are giving away different Top Cow comics for free, as part of a promotion plan of the company’s. I don’t know much about it really, I just know that they offered me a copy of this extra-length, $5 comic that shipped with five different covers, one of which is called “The All Beef Edition” for some reason. (Oh wait, hold up; I guess there are actually six covers if you count the “New York Comic-Con 2009 Variant Cover” by Broussard). Mine was Cover D, one of the three versions drawn by Broussard. It’s just a picture of The Darkness posing so that you can’t see his feet atop a fountain of scary monster faces that drool lava.

I probably would have turned them down, as I have no interest at all in The Darkness, one of those characters who, like Witchblade, I can’t even look at the design of. I don’t mean that in a This Character Is Awful and You Should Be Punched If You Like Him kinda way, just that I’ve always found the character design so repellent to my own personal aesthetics that I’ve never been the least bit attracted to the thought of reading a story about the character. (Not even one in which he fights Batman, and generally anyone vs. Batman is at least worth a glance, right?) But this was meant as a good jumping on point, and I knew I liked at least some of the artists involved (Irving, Sook) and you can’t beat the price.

So, I accepted it, read it and now I am going to tell you about it.

It was a good jumping on point, which is why I’m sure Top Cow thought this one would be a good one to try promoting with some complimentary copies. Between the text paragraph on the title page, the coda scene set in the present, and the bulk of the issue, which seems to be set in a post-apocalyptic future, I felt like I got a pretty good grasp of who Jackie Estacado was, what his powers are, how good or bad a guy he is, and the types of conflicts he’d have to deal with. Despite some call backs to other characters, it also functioned well enough as a standalone unit, with a beginning, middle and end.

If you’re at all curious about The Darkness, this does seem like an okay place to start.

As for that story, it’s sometime in the future, and the world is enshrouded in lower-case-d darkness, and haunted by purple narration boxes (“And the clever animals that built them—the humans—scurry through the ruins like the vermin they once reviled. Dying beasts on a dying world. Whatever made them human spilled out of them and into the cracked earth long ago.” And like that).

The ruined streets are patrolled by warrior nuns, most of whom are built like superheroes (Joe Benitez draws these pages), and are trying to usher a boy prophet to one of their headquarters, while The Darkness (with a capital D) and his darkling demons try to stop them. In the future, The Darkness’ hair will be white, and it will vary in length from very long to mane-like to cape-like, depending on the artists. Sometimes he will have strange facial musculature, too.

There are allusions to past struggles between these nuns and The Darkness, and dissension in D.’s ranks of demons, who are all aspects of him, and there will be a lot of fighting and then the world will end, and we learn this was just a possible future, and future issues presumably take place back in the past, our present.

The specifics of the nun vs. Darkness war seemed overly familiar to me, as the warrior nuns are of the order of Magdalena, who apparently had a prophecy at one point, and it reminded me of Chrono Crusade, which also had warrior nuns of the order of Magdalena who fought demons and lived according to Maggie’s prophecies. That, in turn, reminded me how superior Chrono Crusade was. Thirty-seven pages of that, all with consistent art that is better than the best art here, offers a reader a flurry of interesting designs, a more unique setting, more developed characters and extremely well executed action.

So if you would like to read a good comic about warrior nuns fighting demons, well, you could certainly do better.

The artwork isn’t too terrible, and the artists change frequently enough to make the patchwork line-up seem more like the intentional celebration it is, rather than a we-need-37-pages-of-art-at-the-end-of-the-month!!!! kind of thing. Some of its really good, some of it really plain and ordinary, but none of it offensive to the eyes or anything—even Benitez, who drew probably the worst issue of a Justice League comic ever printed, is on sure footing here. The only part that bugged me is the sequence where Estacado tells a follower to hold out his hands (plural) repeatedly, and yet the art shows the follower holding out a single hand.

Maybe I will look for that Batman crossover now, or that totally nutty crossover with Witchblade, Predator and Aliens.


Trinity #37 (DC) So, have you been wondering where The Joker has been, and what his life would be like in a DCU where there was never a Batman? Me neither, but the back-up in this week’s issue of Trinity, penciled by Scott McDaniel, deals with that, as the Bad Trinity recruits The Joker, whom they first glimpse sitting upon a pile of dead puppies (“Happiness is a warmp puppy! If only they’d stop cooling off!”). That would probably be pretty gross, if it weren’t drawn in McDaniel’s elastic, abstract style.

The front half of the book continues (and hopefully concludes?) the Trinity’s flashback to their war on Egg World. The three of them have a big, huge fight that lays waste to much of this world, a fight so fierce that it costs Wonder Woman and Superman their loincloths. The half-man, half-bat version of Batman, a big scary furry, sees his friends turned foes’ unclothed genitals, and the fighting stops, the trio of gods deciding that they should all be married in a three-way, two-grooms-and-one-bride ceremony (Or, as writer Kurt Busiek puts it, “They were bound together in a great ceremony. As the three who had been three became the three who were one”) and all live happily together in the same apartment. At least, that was my reading.

I may have mentioned this about 30 other times, but I haven’t been crazy about the covers on this series, which has been a series of twelve different triptychs so far, which has gotten a little old over time. This one, by Jesus Merino, is yet another, but at least it’s on a black cover instead of a mostly white one, differentiating it rather strongly from the ones that came before.

Not at all liveblogging Batman: The Brave and the Bold

If I had cable, I would totally liveblog Batman: The Brave and The Bold, which is probably the best show on television. Even better than 90210 and Dancing With The Stars, and I didn’t even think such a thingn was possible. But I don’t have cable. So I watch it o Cartoonnetwork.com a couple days later. So I guess this is, like, a delayed liveblogging of the latest episode…? I don’t know what you call it exactly. Anyway, I watched it, and typed some things while I did. And these are those things, if you’re interested…


—What’s this crazy flying house in Dr. Strange Land? Oh, the Library of Infinity, the flying guy in a cape announces helpfully. I hope he identifies himself in a similar fashion.

—He does. It’s Wotan.

—A glowing ankh means…sweet, Dr. Fate! He’s talking with an echo-y British voice. Kinda like the Justice League Unlimited version.

—I still sometimes have a hard time believing we live in a world where you can watch animated Dr. Fate on the TV.

—Where does Batman keep grenades the size of his fists?

—Holy shit, his utility belt also functions as a scabbard for some kinda crazy blue light saber? That is awesome. Have I said awesome too much already? I’m trying to mix it up, with some “sweet”s…..

—I’d say that the whole Escher stairs thing is totally played out now, but I’ve gotta admit, it still looks cool when people run around and get in magic swordfights in such a setting…

—Batman just destroys the fuck out of some magic fire guys, but it’s not actually killing if they’re made out of fire.

—Dr. Fate loses a magic-off against and then just lays out Wotan with a quartet of punches in the face. The message is supposedly that it’s not the tools, toys or equipment that makes the difference, but the person using them (Bats says something along the lines of “It’s not the helmet, it’s the man under it”). But I think the real takeaway here is that sometimes brute force and the application of violence will solve problems that special skills and knowledge can’t.

—And the show hasn’t even started yet! Now the title sequence begins. God I love this show.

—This episode is entitled “The Eyes of Despero.” I wonder who the villain will be?

—Comics writer J. M. DeMatteis wrote it this episode.

—Hey look Green Lantern fans, it’s the GL Corps! There’s your boyriend Hal Jordan, plus Kilowog, Tomar-Re the lizard chicken man, the cycloptic space cucumber with tentacles, the crystal guy who looks like a 20-sided die and has a Mohawk, the guy who’s just a big head with limbs growing out of it…

—“So this is the legendary Green Lantern Corps,” Despero says in a very goo villain-y voice. Shameful confession: I always pronounce “Corps” as corpse in my head while reading it, rather than core.

—What the fuck? Despero has eyes on his palms too? Now that’s just gross.

—More GLC cameos! Ch’pp! (sp?) Salaak! (sp?) Hal’s underage girlfriend! (Maybe. She’s wearing a GL costume instead of the white mini-dress from the comics)

—Meanwhile, on Earth, The Cavalier! That dude doesn’t get the panel-time he deserves in the comics. If I wrote comics for DC, I would have totally pitched a Club of Heroes book spinning out of “Batman R.I.P.” The second or third arc would have been a two-part Cavalier vs. Musketeer story.

—Ah ha, no more of that Hal Jordan bullshit, it looks like this episodes GL will be…Guy Gardner! And G’Nort?!

—The vocal work on Guy Gardner is just perfect. Just the right amount of annoying obnoxiousness.

—Huh. I always pronounced G’Nort guh-nort, but apparently the G and the apostrophe are both silent. I’m learning a bunch about pronunciation in this episode.

—I really like when Batman wears different costumes for different occasions, like this will-fueled Green Latern power suit the GLs whip up for them.

—I don’t care for Sinestro’s moustache in t his. It’s a little too sparse; I like it best when it’s either a John Waters, pencil-thin sort of affair, or a long, whip-like Snidely Whiplash sort of affair.

—G’Nort looks like he has the most comfortable of all the GL uniforms.

—Mogo? Really? Man, have DC and Time Warner ever gotten a lot of mileage out of that one throwaway Alan Moore story from 250 years ago…

—Oh no, it’s Tomar Re’s world! That egg-stroller that one of the space chicken lizard ladies is pushing looks familiar…wasn’t that on an episode of Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes….?

—“One punch!” Oh, DeMatteis, you scamp!

—Woah, Mogo’s fighting Guy “hand-to-hand”…using a mountain!

—Nice to see these GL’s making giant, green glowing objects to fight with. It seems like on Justice League/JLU John Stewart was always just doing boring things like laser beams and bubbles, rather than giant hammers and baseball bats and the like.

—Ha ha, Guy bites! Of course he bites!

—I like the fact that Batman’s version of telepathic combat involves head butts.

A couple of not-really-book-reviews, of one book I read and one book I did not.

When you hear the words “a cartoonist’s life,” what do you think of? Sore backs, anonymity, ink stains and poverty? Or fast cars, a harem of glamorous women, fame, wealth and a lot of fancy parties?

Perhaps it depends on the year, or the cartoonist, but I tend to think of the former, rather than the latter. Perhaps that will change now that I’ve read Linda H. Davis’ Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life (Random House; 2006).

I borrowed it from the library on a whim, being between prose books at the time and realizing I knew pretty much nothing about Addams other than that he was a cartoonist and he created The Addams Family, who were on Scooby-Doo (and in a couple of movies from the ‘90s; I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched an episode of the original live action TV show).

Well, now I do know some things about Charles Addams.

While rather leisurely making my way through Davis’ book over the last few weeks—20 pages here, 30 pages there—I read as many collections of his work that I could find in my libraries (The World of Charles Addams, Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of Your Loved One, Chas Addams’ Half-Baked Cookbook ) and even re-watched the two movies.

I’m perhaps ill equipped to assess how good or how bad a biographer Davis is, since I have no special expertise on her subject or on biographies in general. I did find it to be an enormously entertaining read, in large part because of what an extremely colorful life Addams lead (much of which was a complete surprise to me, which no doubt helped contribute to how entertaining I found Davis’ book), which is something a biographer has little control over. I suspect that, as with documentary filmmaking, the choosing of the subject and/or a certain amount of luck ends up playing a role in the finished project.

I do know that Davis did an excellent job of defining and summing up what exactly was so compelling about Addams’ cartoon work (comics being a subject I may also not have any great expertise with, but I at least have lots of experience thinking and talking about). Her focus is on Addams’ life rather than any sort of aesthetic study, but obviously his body of work plays a big role, and whenever she devotes attention to it, Davis writes intelligently and incisively about it.

When I would read her writing on Addams’ comics, comics that I would have just read since I was going back and forth between her bio and his collecions, I would nod in agreement, and, when I came across something in one of his comics that I had just read her talking about, I would recognize it and think, “Oh yeah, Davis was right about that too.”

If there’s any weakness with the book, I suppose it’s one that befalls most biographers—I can’t help but wonder if she goes too easy on Addams. He certainly seemed to have quite a few caddish proclivities, but he’s never portrayed as some kind of selfish monster. Of course, everyone Davis talks to or hears from in some manner or another sure seem to have been terribly fond of Charles Addams, so maybe his many infidelities and way with women in general was forgiven on something approaching a universal scale.

That, and I found myself wanting more pictures. The book includes plenty of reprinted cartoons and some sketches, as well as some photos of some of the players, but I could definitely have used more, particularly of the latter. Davis does a good job of conjuring up Addams’ houses and collections, his friends and family and lovers, but, man, I really would like to have seen some of this stuff for myself, you know?

Anyway, if you’re looking for an interesting biography of an interesting cartoonist, I’d definitely recommend this book, particularly if you, like me, aren’t terribly familiar with Addams.

David Denby’s Snark (Simon & Schuser; 2009) seemed like a book I should read. It’s true it doesn’t have anything to do with comics, but as anyone who spends much time online has noticed, it’s both a word you hear an awful lot in the comics blogsophere and a form of communication you see employed quite a bit.

The sub-title—It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation—made it sound like snark may be a pretty bad thing, so I was kind of interested in what author Denby had to say about it.

That, coupled with a very short page-count (less than 150 pages) and a bright, yellow cover was enough to convince me to reserve a copy of it from my local library.

I didn’t make it very far. I’m really stubborn when it comes to reading and rarely ever stop reading something once I start, no matter how bad it is, so when I say I couldn’t finish Snark, I mean that as a pretty damning assessment. The only other books I’ve started and quit that I can think of at the moment were 1) an Ann Coulter book (I can’t remember which one now, as they’re all about the same—it’s the one about how Joe McCarthy wasn’t really so bad), which I figured I’d try out because hey, a lot of people seem to like her, and if she can continue the same level of insanity of her written columns for 200 pages, that might be interesting to read, and 2) Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? which was given to me as a gift by a relative and Oh my God that guys sucks at writing books too!

Denby’s a little easier to read than Coulter, but even more irritating than Moore, based on how far I got in each of those before calling it quits.

It’s not entirely Denby’s fault that I gave up on him. The day I brought his book home from the library was the same day I saw this post on Wonkette entitled “The ‘Wonkette Part’ Of David Denby’s Book Really Just A Bunch Of Major, If Not Libelous, Errors.”

The gist of the post is that Denby used two examples of Wonkette posts to damn their brand of snark, and neither example he used was true, despite how easy it was to check their veracity. For example, reading the byline to determine whether or not a writer named “Jim” is male or female.

That sure deflated my enthusiasm for the book, as Wonkette’s Jim Newell points out, “Lord knows what else he makes up to fit his narrative in the rest of the book, but of the two (2) Wonkette pieces he analyzed, he got two (2) entirely wrong.”

I made it through the first part though, the introduction to the seven-parts the rest of the work is divided into. Strike Two was his weird understanding of the word “troll” as applied to online communication. Despite keeping a daily web log on comics and contributing daily to Blog@Newsarama.com for just about two months now, I am extremely tech-ignorant. The extent of my online knowledge prior to, oh, 2006 or so was looking up contact info on websites for articles I was writing, Googling shit for said articles, and checking Newsarama.com’s message boards for news about upcoming comics.

So perhaps “troll” used to be used to refer to something else, but it was my understanding that it was an abusive poster on a message board or comment thread, just kind of being a jerk in some form or another.

Denby defines it as some sort of malicious hacker, and references some form of online vandalism by trolls. Like I said, it’s very possible that I’m the one who doesn’t know what a “troll” is in an online context, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the first time I’ve heard it applied to a dangerous hacker.

Strike Three came near the end of the introduction, where Denby tries to differentiate between good, healthy snark and bad, unhealthy snark. The Daily Show’s John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park? That stuff is all great snark. The comedians and writers involved use snark “right.” Some people don’t. Who are those people? I don’t know; I didn’t get that far. But the premise seems to be that good, healthy snark is that which Denby personally finds amusing, and bad, unhealthy snark is that which Denby personally does not find amusing.

Realizing that, even just 125 pages of someone pointing at things and saying funny, funny, not funny, funny, not funny, not funny, not funny sorta lost its remaining appeal. So I put it down, got distracted by reading some other book-books, graphic novels and the daily grind of scanning pictures of superheroes to make fun of, and then the time was up, the book was due, and I returned it mostly unread.

Maybe I’ll try again later at some point, but, if any of you are similarly interested in the subject of snark and/or bright yellow covers, I just thought I’d offer a word or 800 of warning.

Just how evil is Darkseid?

Well, he'll neither wear pants nor will he cross his legs; you'll just have to deal with it.

Some random thoughts on some NYCC announcements

(Above: J.H. Williams sure can draw, can’t he? From his upcoming run on Detective Comics, starring the lady with the custom-made bat-boots)

—This is probably the news of the Con. Er, for me at least.


—I don’t understand this concept at all. Robert Kirkman and Todd McFarlane are doing a book about a scary Spider-Man who wears a mask that looks like Spawn’s face, and he shoots…webs? Slime? Ectoplasm? Seriously, what’s that stuff he’s flinging around in that image? It’s pretty gross-looking.


—I read this write-up of the Superman panel, and I’m afraid I still can’t figure out what exactly is up with the Super-books going forward. I have both Action and Superman on my pull-list at the local comics shop at the moment, but I guess I’ll drop ‘em and proceed on an issue by issue basis going forward. I definitely want to avoid any issues of Action with Eddy Barrows’ art, as he’s in the Ed Benes/Tony Daniel neighborhood in my own personal aesthetic estimation.

And what’s with Superman leaving Earth for about a year…again? The first Superman story I read was the one that followed his death, the yearlong “Funeral for a Friend” and “Reign of the Supermen” sequence, which was all about defining Superman by his absence. That was about 15 years ago now, I suppose. About two years ago, Superman left Metropolis for a year of story time (but just a few months of our time) as part of 52, and stories were told defining him by his absence. The ongoing Trinity is all about what the world would be like without Superman (and Wonder Woman and Batman in it) and thus defining him by his absence. I get it, I get it—Superman is very important to Metropolis and to the whole world in general.

This particular storyline, which I guess takes place in a third Superman series, will have a different reason for him leaving, and some different creators involved, but it’s hard to get very excited about a world without Superman story again.


—I’m still not at all interested in the X-Men. Although this image is pretty awesome, in a stupid-awesome kind of way:



—Ditto Star Wars comics. I don’t know what it is exactly; I loved Star Wars growing up, and I love comics now, but I just can’t seem to get into any of the Star Wars comics. I did dig the Star Wars Tales trades and the Tag and Bink trade, but that’s as far as I’ve been able to wade into ‘em.



—What I find most interesting about the existence of a book called Dark Wolverine starring Wolverine’s son Dokken (did I spell that right?), who has two claws on each hand instead of three, is that it’s being co-written by prose writer Marjorie Liu, who is currently writing a low-selling NYX miniseries. Not that her co-writing a Wolverine book with Daniel Way is a negative thing or anything, it’s just not the next place I expected to see her name pop up at Marvel.


—Vaneta Rogers covered the Batman panel, which was full of mysterious and exciting news.

For example, I’m kind of excited about the Greg Rucka/J.H. Williams III Batwoman arc on Detective, which will definitely get me picking up that title again. I am curious why it took DC so long to publish an actual Batwoman story after her high-profile debut in, when was that, 2006?

Also in June, DC will be relaunching Batman(hopefully with the original numbering still in place!) and launchng new books entitled Batman and Robin, Red Robin (A Jason Todd book? I’ll pass, but jeez, they sure did take their time getting around to telling a real Jason Todd story too, didn’t they?), Outsiders (New direction #16), Batgirl (which is pretty damn silly considering they cancelled a semi-successful Batgirl ongoing, then spent a few years doing their level best to wreck the character, and her just-ended miniseries sold pretty awfully), Batman: The Streets of Gotham and Gotham City Sirens.

They didn’t announce creative teams for any of those though, so who knows if any of those will be any good.

If Batwoman is taking over TEC due to Batman’s continued absence, than I suppose Jason Todd is in Red Robin, Dick Grayson reluctantly becomes Batman and stars in Batman and Robin and beyond that…I can’t make any guesses. Streets sounds like it could be a Gotham Central type book, and Sirens sounds like it could be the rumored girl book, which would be a natural place for Paul Dini.

I do hope Batman will be Grant Morrison’s story of Batman fighting his way through time from caveman days to the present.


—Okay, the plans for the Ultimate Universe post-Ultimatum just sound insane. Here’s a few paragraphs from Albert Ching’s coverage of the Cup O’ Joe panel:

Turning to Ultimatum, Quesada showed slides of "Ultimate Requiems." "We're kind of saying goodbye to those books," said McCann. "We're canceling Ultimate Spider-Man," said Quesada to a startled crowd. "We are done professionally!" yelled Bendis to Quesada, emulating the now-infamous Christian Bale rant.

"We are introducing Ultimate Comics," said Quesada. Bendis talked about Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, starting with a new #1, with David LaFuente as the new artist. "You can tell it's going to be good because it has the New Avengers lightning bolt on the cover," said Bendis.

Of LaFuente, Bendis said "This is his first ongoing series. He's awesome." Bendis said it's a fresh start, but not a reboot, though some time will have passed between the series. "Some new characters, maybe someone new in the costume," he continued.

I really like LaFuente’s art—he did the Peter/MJ sex life annual, and the Hellcat miniseries—and I’m sure I’ll continue reading Bendis’ new version of Ultimate Spider-Man, but I’m pretty surprised that they’re relaunching it, as doing so is kind of anathema to the whole line’s original concept. And Stuart Immonen didn’t end up sticking around all that long after all, did he? (Of course, New Avengers, which he’s taking over, sells better, so I can’t exactly blame the guy).

I love the way LaFuente draws Spidey's head, by the way.

They also announced Ultimate Comics Avengers—these kinda sound like Japanese titles using English words, don’t they?—by Mark Millar and too-slow-for-a-monthly Carlos Pacheco, continuing the proud tradition of ridiculously late Millar Ultimate Avengers books, I guess.


—This kinda sorta excited me. From Albert Ching’s DC panel coverage:

DiDio asked Giffen what his post-Reign in Hell comic will be. "Two words: Doom Patrol," said the veteran creator. Giffen then asked how many of the crowd were fans of the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol. Many cheered. "You're going to be really disappointed," said Giffen. "How about the original Doom Patrol?" Slightly less cheers, but still positive. "You guys are going to be really disappointed," said Giffen, playing the audience. He said that they were going to make the Doom Patrol accessible to people.

"So what's your problem with Justice League International?" asked Giffen in DiDio's direction. "Does anyone really think I have a problem with JLI?" DiDio snapped back. (Apparently, much of the crowd did.) This led to an announcement that the classic JLI team — Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire — will be doing Metal Men back-ups in Doom Patrol.


—I don’t know what to make of any of the Final Crisis Aftermath books without hearing the names of any creators attached, but only the Super Young Team seem to naturally extend from FC and show any glimmer of the possibility of maybe being a minor hit. It also scares me to hear Ian Sattler say of Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape, "Dan described this book as a combination between The Prisoner and Saw.” I thought all DC books were now a combination of something and Saw.


—Fellow Blog@ contributor David Pepose covered the Radical Publishing panel, of which the most interesting news to me was this:

In addition, Levine said, after this Comic Con, Radical would no longer publish 22-page single issues, instead collecting six-issue arcs into three 48-page books. “It's just so much easier for readers to invest themselves in 48 pages rather than 22,” he said. “We'll keep it at $4.99 so it’s cheaper than two issues.”

Hey, yeah, that is great news. A five-dollar bill gets you 48 pages, whereas Marvel and DC charge you six bucks for 44 pages.

Assuming that there are prices associated with the production of individual books that would be involved with the production of a bigger book with two books’ worth of pages inside (i.e., making two covers, laying out the ads twice, etc.), that would be a way to save money, right?

If industry leaders DC and Marvel are really thinking they need to move to a higher price point, as Marvel’s already in the process of doing, the Radical model sure sounds promising. Currently, Marvel’s charging $3.99 for 22 pages of New Avengers; a pretty rotten value when put up against $4.99 for 48 pages, isn’t it?

The downside for the Big Two transitioning to double-length books would be publishing each one less frequently, which means potentially getting those customers into the shop less frequently, but smart publishing schedule planning could alleviate that.

For example, if Marvel’s publishing 20 X-Men books a month, they could simply schedule five a week. People! This could work! Try this before you go charging $3.99 per chapter of New Avengers!


—Hey, look at this!

Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers, apparently.

DC, your pets are like more numerous and much cooler; I can’t believe you let Marvel beat you to the punch on an all super-pet team book.


—Kevin Maguire will also be drawing Spider-Man: The Short Halloween, which is being written by some guys from that Saturday Night Live show I used to watch in high school. That’s still on, huh? Anyway, a lot of upcoming Maguire comics is good news

Twelve thoughts about Superman/Batman: Torment

I’m either a glutton for punishment, or have some crippling addiction to Superman and Batman that I cannot resist reading about them, but despite how little I enjoyed Michael Green and Shane Davis’ Superman/Batman: The Search for Kryptonite, I didn’t let that stop me from reading the next available Superman/Batman trade from a local library, Superman/Batman: Torment by Alan Burnett, Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs.

This one collects a six-issue arc that ran right before Search For Kryptonite (Well, right before the fill-in issue right before Search for Kryptonite), and right after Mark Verheiden’s short, nine-issue run that kept up title founder Jeph Loeb’s crazy shit happening at random formula, but was somehow even worse, operating with an attitude that wasn’t merely continuity-lite, but continuity-adverse. Although it was Pat Lee’s artwork on the Metal Man retcon/reboot that finally caused me to drop the title).

So, given what came before and what came after, I just sort of assumed that this was going to be a rough read and expecting the collection’s title to be more or less literal.

But, to my great surprise, this was actually pretty decent. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked it nearly so much as it was originally being serialized, as it does have to do with Jack Kirby’s New Gods, which, at the time, were in a weird state that varied from title to title (DC hadn’t used any of them for a while, to get ready for Final Crisis, but then apparently decided to use them everywhere during Countdown, killing them all off in preparation for Final Crisis). And also, if I read it in that format, I would have been paying for the privilege.

But as a trade, after Final Crisis, read for free from the library? It’s really not bad at all. It’s probably Burnett’s best DCU work (not that he’s done much) and maybe, just maybe, the best arc of the series’ existence, but it’s hard to say—I mean, Loeb’s the good writer on this book, so quality is pretty relative.

Although this was much, much better than The Search For Kryptonite, I am going to address it in the same format as I addressed the last collection of the series, and continue this weekend’s lazy, list-making review technique (I did write at least one real, paragraphs-and-everything review this weekend though! There’s a Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #1 review at Blog@).

1.) Dustin Nguyen is a really good artist. Superman/Batman has been blessed with some of the industry’s more popular artists, many of whom are actually quite good at what they do. That’s why Shane Davis or Pat Lee’s work kind of stuck out as being particularly bad, I think. I don’t know that Nguyen is quite as popular as, say, Ed McGuinness or Carlos Pacheco, but he’s certainly good at what he does. I haven’t got a single complaint about the art end of things here; it’s easy to read, many of the designs are rather inspired, the action is lively.

Nguyen seems to have taken some cues from Mike Mignola, as his Darkseid has the bulk and square-ish shape Mignola gave him in Cosmic Odyssey. Nguyen’s Batman also occasionally reminds me of Mignola’s, in certain medium to long shots of Batman in costume.

2.) Hey, how come this collection doesn’t get an introduction? Green’s Search For Kryptonite had an introduction to it, as did Green’s Lovers and Madmen, but here? Nothing. Lame.

3.) That’s Killer Croc? Okay, well, there’s one design I’m not overly fond of, and that's Nguyen’s Croc. He doesn’t look much like himself, although perhaps that’s not as much Nguyen’s fault as DC’s somewhat lax stance on character design. Croc was pretty radically transformed in Batman: Hush, either given plastic surgery or somehow mutated by Hush to make him look more like a crocodile, and that look has mostly stuck. Nguyen’s version seems like something of a compromise between the pre- and post-Hush looks, but his Croc also has craggy, stalactite-like spines all over his back that make him look like an entirely different character.

Burnett refers to him as reptilian too, which didn’t use to be the case—he was just a big, strong guy with a skin disease, not a crocodile/human hybrid—and uses him in a somewhat strange way. He’s hired by a mysterious villain to steal something from Lex Corp, which is more of a Catwoman-y job than a Croc one, you know?

4.) I like the messy hair Nguyen draws on Clark Kent.

5.) There’s a really nicely-executed page of Superman freaking out while sitting at his desk, seemingly beat-down by his own narration boxes. I thought that was a very effective scene. And kind of amusing, given this title’s traditional over-use of narration boxes, although I doubt that was the intent here.

6.) The Scarecrow working with the Desaad and traveling to outer space just doesn’t seem right. I love The Scarecrow, and the prospect of him taking on Superman is kind of interesting, but he doesn’t quite seem to fit in well with the sci-fi aspects of the story. Once he’s on a planet-sized warship in outer space, the clash between Superman and the New Gods and this rag-wearing Bat-villain seemed particularly discordant.

7.) Oh hey, this is the book with that cover. I’m not sure if you remember or care or not, but issue of this series was originally solicited with an image of Batman standing behind Bekka, his right hand resting between her throat and her breasts. When it finally came out, however, the hand was removed, and was now hidden by Batman’s cape. Apparently, his hand was too close to brushing her breasts on the cover for DC’s comfort.





The pair do make out and maybe more in the story. Batman does strip her naked and lay atop her on the floor kissing her for a while. But apparently the cover was a little risqué. In the back of this trade, there are a series of pages showing Nguyen’s roughs for the covers, and there are four different versions of the cover, with Batman’s hand on her neck, her stomach or simply on his batarangs.

8.) Wait, Bekka? I had no idea Orion was even married. I guess he doesn’t talk about his wife very much in his appearances in other books, does he?

9.) Batman is “aroused beyond all reason.” When I got to this part, I remembered that Batman’s secret Canadian girlfriend Rachelle Goguen had a pretty amusing review of this issue (With lots of scans! Check it out!). In a nutshell, Bekka is a goddess and, like all of the New Gods and New Goddesses she has a power of some sort, and hers doesn’t seem all that useful—the men around her really, really want to have sex with her, and she really, really wants to have sex with them. The more hardened the heart, the stronger it is, which is why she married Orion. And you know, Batman sure is heard-hearted, so the pull is strong. The only way they can get past it is to have sex, which they don’t want to do.

This whole conflict is kind of interesting, in a Well I’ve never seen THAT before kinda way, and Burnett does try to use this as an opportunity to describe how sad and lonely Batman is in life, but man, is it ever silly. Plus I guess Batman must have an erection for, like, the whole second half of this book? I guess it’s a good thing he wears that long, flowing cape.

10.) Oh yeah, Superman dies. So what’s Desaad up to here? Well, Darkseid lost his Omega powers, and is kind of sad and depressed and sort of losing it now. When we first see him, he trips. Desaad has found the late Highfather’s magic cane embedded in the Source Wall, and the plan is to have a brain-wiped Superman retrieve it for them and use it restore Darkseid’s eye beams. Once that’s occurred, they zap Superman with it, and he finds himself in The Source. But first he has this crazy hospital scene where various characters appear and pay their respects. Starro brings him a basket of cupcakes.

It’s pretty amusing, but seems pretty out of place with the rest of the story, which is about the evil of the evil New Gods and Batman’s unreasonable arousal.

11.) The second to last page is pretty awesome. After Desaad and Darkseid are defeated and the heroes make it back to Earth, Orion picks Bekka up on the flying elliptical machine he travels around on, and gives Batman a pretty dirty look.

Once they’re back home on New Genesis, they apparently sex it up for a while, and there’s a neat couple panels of Orion putting his belt and helmet on, and Bekka lying naked in bed, asking when he’ll be back from making war on the gods of Apokolips.

I really like the banal domesticity of their life, as if Orion’s a neglectful husband about to go on a business trip again. Except his business if flying over to the next planet to beat up Kalibak and Granny Goodness.

12.) The last page is super-dumb. Once Orion flies off to work, Bekka thinks to herself, “As long as he returns, all will be right. Thoughts of Batman will pass. They must.”

And then she notices a pair of white, triangular eyes I the shadows of her room. A black hand stretches out of the shadows, and there’s a “CCHHHOOOO” sound that makes Bekka glow and say “AAAARRHHH!” while a “FSSSSS” appears. In the very last panel, a burning scrap of the sheer cloth she had wrapped herself in floats out the window, and someone off panel says “So begins the end.”

Because I read a lot of DC comics and a lot of reviews of them and pay attention to creator and editor interviews on Newsarama, I knew that around this time some mysterious stranger was going around killing all the New Gods characters in the DCU. I didn’t read Death of the New Gods or Countdown, so I don’t remember who it actually was—it was revealed to be Infinity Man in one comic I read, but maybe it was Darkseid posing as Infinity Man…or something…?

But there’s nothing in this book to give the scene any context; there’s no “To be continued in Death of the New Gods” or anything, no foreword or afterword to make sense of the scene.

If this was the only DC comic you read in trade, I can’t imagine how this scene plays out. Did Batman, who was in her thoughts in the previous panel, who wears black gloves, who sticks to the shadows, and who has white, triangle-shaped eyes, travel to New Genesis to take care of their problem by incinerating Bekka? Did Darkseid, the villain of the book, return from what could have been his death to get revenge on Bekka?

I thought it was the latter for a while, and then remembered the whole New Gods Killer plotline from a year or so ago. At any rate, a pretty strange note to end a book on.

Nine not particularly insightful thoughts about Beasts! Book 2

Beasts! Book 2, like 2007’s Beasts!, is a very well designed thematic art anthology, as well as a book-shaped objet d’art perfect for decorating your coffee table with. As such, it isn’t actually comics, but it is published by a publisher that publishes a lot of comics, and many of the artists who contribute to it come from the world of comics, so I think that’s close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades and blog posts.

Here then, in lazy, don’t-have-to-write-a-real-introduction-or-any-transitions format are some random thoughts I have about it.

1.) It’s expensive. Not overpriced or anything, just kind of expensive. That’s why I’m talking about it now in February of 2009 instead of back in October of 2008 when it was originally released; costing about $35, it was a little pricier than I could comfortably afford, so I had to wait for it to show up at the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and then wait my turn for it. Fantagraphics probably couldn’t have (and/or shouldn’t have) tried a lower price point, because as nice as this thing looks, you certainly get your $35 out of it (Click on the link above to check out a slideshow of the book’s various angles and parts…it is a seriously nice looking book). So I’m not complaining, I’m just observing. If I were rich—say, if I made tens of thousands of dollars a year—I would totally have bought this the first Wednesday it showed up in my local comic shop.

2.) It reminded me of the kind of books I used to like to read when I was a youngster. As a kid, I used to love going to the library and checking out encyclopedia-style books of monsters, mythological creatures and such-like. Because they didn’t offer stories per se, but just characters and scenarios for stories, I found them somehow really stimulating. They offered fuel for the imagination, fodder for play and daydreams and drawings, and that has always been just as engaging to me as actually reading a story. The brief text piece that accompanies each of the beasts in this book function pretty much just like that. Each entry therefore gives me something to read and think about, and an image to pore over for a bit. In that respect, I guess this is somewhat similar to a work of comics, except rather than the verbal and visual working in tandem, they take turns engaging me as a reader throughout.

3.) As with the first book, I’m not sure what to make of the longer text pieces. Editor/curator Jacob Covey again includes some longer prose pieces here, and they are interesting and well-selected. Cryptozoology giant Loren Coleman provides the introduction (“Mainstreaming Cryptozoology”), there’s an interview with real-life monster hunter Ken Gerhard, and scientist Richard Ellis talks about krakens, but I wasn’t sure what to make of these the first time I read through the book. The type of reading they ask of the reader seems so different from the type of reading the beast entries ask, that I had trouble going back and forth. In the end, I skipped over them, and came back later to read them, once I had finished looking at the pictures and reading the descriptions.

4.) There sure seemed to be a lot of Finnish monsters. I’m one-quarter Finnish, and one of my better friends spent a year as a foreign exchange student in Finland and learned to speak the language, so I’m somewhat fascinated by Finland, and was happy to see how many beasts my grandmother’s grandparents’ homeland once hosted. Ajattar, Hiisi, Iku-Turso and Nakki are all of Finnish origin. There also seemed to be a lot of Japanese monsters; in fact, there are far more Japanese ones than Finnish ones, but I guess that didn’t surprise me, because Japanese mythology and folklore is so much more embedded in our pop culture (or at least the strains of geek pop culture that I’ve been most interested in).

5.) There are all sorts of monsters in here I’ve never heard of. Barbegazi, Cadejo, Al-Mi’raj, Elephant-Tiger, the Iku-Turso, Ivunche, Tikbalang, Vouivre, Wivre—these are all totally brand new to me. I was particularly interested in the Elephant-Tiger, because it sounds so cool and so charming that it seems odd I’ve lived to be 31 without ever having heard of it. Basically, it’s the unimaginatively named result of elephant and tiger crossbreeding. In Olivier Schrauwen’s picture, they’re pretty freaky looking. Imagine a headless elephant, and, where the neck hole would be if you chopped the elephant’s head off, there’s a gray tiger’s face there. Looking at the one in the foreground, it’s hard to imagine how it gets anything up to it’s rather tiny mouth, but there’s another in the background with a victim dangling form its jaws, so apparently it’s possible.

6.) Nahan Fox draws the best damn Chupacabras I’ve ever seen. Here’s a cryptid of which there are scores of different descriptions of, and I’ve seen just as many different visual depictions of, but Fox’s is just fantastic—it looks at once like something that could exist in nature, and which was also absolutely terrifying. Sorry, I’m not going to post it—this books is too nice to scan things from.

7.) If I could have one of these images in the form of a gigantic, museum-sized painting, I think I’d want it to be Travis Lampe’s Hydra.

8.) There are some very cute monsters in here. Matt Leines’ Tarasque, Kathleen Lolley’s Domovoi and Aya Kakeda’s Mapinguari are all just darling.

9.) If I could read a whole comic book about any one of these beasts, I’d have a hard time deciding between Kim Deitch’s Jersey Devil or Roger Langridge’s Spring-Heeled Jack.



(The image at the top of this post, by the way, is Ray Fenwick's Shaitan, the scariest fucking thing in the whole book, and an image I found through Google, so I didn't have to risk damaging the copy of the book I currently have in my possession in a scanner)

Great news all you Geo-Force fans who also happen to collect DC Direct action figures!

Last week's DC comics included the above house ad announcing a few more figures in the line that DC Direct has been putting out based on Brad Meltzer's terrible, terrible (but thankfully brief) run on Justice League of America.

This part caught my eye:



Ha ha, of course there's never been a Geo-Force collectible action figure before now because hey, no one likes that guy, right?

Actually, someone must like him, and maybe that someone even collects DC Direct action figures. If so, that person is going to be pretty pumped about this particular ad—it was made especially for them!

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas...

I have a review of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe in this week's issue of Las Vegas Weekly, which you can read online here.

I've had at least one regular reader ask if I could maybe do a weekly round-up of links to my posts at Blog@Newsarama.com and thought about doing so because, hey, easy EDILW content, but never have because it seems like more work than it's worth.

Now that the current Blog@ team is starting to get settled in, and I've been contributing for about two months now, I've got a more or less regular schedule, which I guess I should mention here at my online home base.

Monday, Wednesday and Fridays my thrice-weekly link-blogging post Linkarama@Newsarama will run. Every Tuesday around 5-ish I post 'Twas The Night Before Wednesday..., which is a run-down of what new releases look good/terrible/interesting that week, accompanied by a terrible cartoon of the sort EDILW readers are familiar with. Saturday and Sunday I'll have reviews; this past weekend I covered 08: A Graphic History of the Campaign Trail and this past Sunday I covered Frankenstein: Prodigal Son Vol. 1. Thursdays and Fridays are days taht I don't have any regular features planned to run on, so those will usually be when I'll do any essays, general punditry, bad jokes, worse comic strips or whatever.

This concludes this vain, self-promotional post.

Weekly Haul: February 4th

Agents of Atlas #1 (Marvel Comics) After a couple of years of writing many of Marvel’s very best comics, mostly for the Marvel Adventures imprint, Jeff Parker gets a nice shot at the center of the main Marvel Universe. He’s writing the quirky characters he re-introduced in the Agents of Atlas miniseries a few years back, and the status quo he left them with—posing as villains running the sinister Atlas Foundation that they were battling—works out quite well with Marvel’s new “Dark Reign” status quo.

When the AoA mini came to an end, the characters that starred in it were heroes posing as villains doing hero work from within a villainous organization, and after Secret Invasion wrapped up and Norman Osborn began running the Marvel Universe, suddenly there was a villain posing as a hero while doing villain work from within the U.S. government. A pretty organic starting point for an AoA ongoing, no?

After a skirmish or two, the Agents and Osborn achieve a sort of détente, allowing for a rather graceful catch-up on who the Agents are and what their story is (I’m fairly certain you can pick this up with no previous exposure to the team, and follow it easily enough), while setting up a new conflict, one which also ties Parker’s latest endeavor in to the heart of the Marvel Universe, as Agent/Atlas leader Jimmy Woo finds himself saddled with a new, antagonistic understudy—someone who should be familiar to Iron Man readers and fans.

The art, penciled by Carlo Pagulayan and inked by Jason Paz, is very nice, but Jana Schirmer’s coloring makes it kind of hard to tell that it is. I was actually surprised to see there was an inker, as the blacks are so soft and fuzzy, and the whole book has that over-colored, photohyperrealistic look that is so widespread at Marvel these days and which I personally find repellant. It’s not so bad that I’m no sure how long I can keep looking at it (a la Invincible Iron Man), but I’d prefer a more drawn-looking book.

As Marvel has been experimenting how much to give readers for $3.99—Nada? Nada plus a cardstock cover? Extra story pages? “Director’s Cut” “bonus” material bullshit?—it’s worth pointing out that though this is $3.99, it has 35 story pages, a 23-page lead story and a 12-page back-up. That back-up is set in the 1950s, and features young Jimmy Woo, Gorilla Man and M-11 going to Cuba, where secret agent Logan is on the same case as them. It features art by Benton Jew, which is great—I kinda wish he handled the whole book. He certainly captures the extreme weirdness of the characters, like the first appearance of Gorilla Man in the story, naked and holding a pistol in his right hand.


Age of The Sentry (Marvel) Hey look, more Jeff Parker! This issue opens with a Paul Tobin, Bill Galvan and Terry Pallot story which functions as a Legion of Super-Heroes parody. The conflict? Idda, cousin of Ego, The Living Planet, is about to give birth, and Sentry and his pals need to find a book of Planetary Midwifery to lend a hand. In the back-up, by Parker, Nick Dragotta and Gary Martin, some overly entitled fans try to bend The Sentry to their will, with the use of a robot double. There are a couple of pretty funny Dr. Strange panels included, and a great Fantastic Four panel. Only one more issue to go, I’m afraid.



Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #3 (DC Comics) Final Crisis, huh? That sounds familiar…Hey, wait a minute! That’s the name of that big, controversial, much-talked-about event series DC was publishing! Didn’t that wrap up last week? Why are there still three issues of a tie-in miniseries that takes place before the end of Final Crisis (chronologically, if not sequentially on a linear timeline) still to go?

I suspect because DC simply decided to brand this miniseries a Final Crisis tie-in, even though it’s not much of one. And I suspect here’s a good example of bad marketing building up confusion and ill-will against Final Crisis. Branding this part of Final Crisis only adds some question marks—where Superman is at any given time, for example—and doesn’t much contribute to Final Crisis proper (other than the fact that Superman and a Brainiac needed to be in the same room at the same time for a single scene in FC).

In retrospect, I’m not exactly sure why this is an FC tie-in (ditto Rage of the Red Lanterns), other than the fact that someone probably thought adding those two words and a colon to the title would maybe help sales. But it’s hard to believe that a Geoff Johns-written book needs much in the way of sales help, particularly when it’s illustrated by George Perez and promises to be the ultimate Legion story.

On the other hand, the skies are red, there are some shadow demons, and it boasts Perez art, so it sure looks, feels and reads like something in the traditional Crisis model (In fact, while reading this, I kept thinking about whether or not FC would have been a better read if Perez had drawn it; I think it would certainly have had a more epic feel, and might have proven even more subversive, since it would have looked exactly like the other Crises, without reading anything like them).

Anyway, enough time has passed since the first two issues that I hardly remembered what was going on, and the fact that I’ve never really read any comics featuring any of the three versions of The Legion and their villains here sure didn’t help me keep anything straight.

It doesn’t really matter. This issue is nine-tenths fight scene, and one-tenth Johns-style continuity patch leading up to a return that seemed pretty obvious, but was still kind of exciting when it finally happened (I still don’t like that codename and costume as much as his first ones, but they’re better than his third ones).

Perez is a master of superhero comics, and that mastery is on full display throughout this issue. Most pages have what looks like a few dozen extremely detailed panels, and he sure knows how to use a splash page—the bigger the panel, the bigger the impact it’s supposed to have, be it a scene-setting splash revealing the combatants in a fight scene, the entry of a couple extra Legions into the battle or that last page appearance by the surprise character who’s not much of a surprise.

Johns and Perez aren’t doing anything terribly ambitious here—this is basically an everyone fights everyone story—but I can’t think of a single artist who does that sort of story better, nor can I think of a writer better at that kind of thing working in comics at the moment.


Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe (Oni Press) Shiny…so shiny.

Um, I should have a formal review of this in tomorrow’s issue of Las Vegas Weekly, so I don’t want to pre-repeat myself with a review here. I’ll just point out that there’s a really cool foil-y cover on this thing, which I read about online and just kind of expected it was a NYCC exclusive for some reason, but it’s not. I walked into my local comic shop, and there was this little digest sitting on the shelves, glowing in a rainbowy aura of light as I walked past.



Secret Six #6 (DC) Superhero decadence alert! James Robinson had reimagined Golden Age contortionist villain The Ragdoll as a sort of Manson-like cult leader/serial killer in the pages of Starman, but dammit, that just wasn’t dark and gritty enough! So now Ragdoll Senior is also a child abuser, who raped his own daughter. Another thing I didn’t need to read is The Mad Hatter referring to his “littlest hood.”

As I said before, if you’re going to have superhero decadence in your superhero universe, I suppose a book about evil villains and the even more evil villains they fight is probably a better place for it than anywhere else, but it still seems kinda lazy. Can’t the scariest villain in the DCU just be a woman? Does she also have to have been raped by her villain father to give her sufficient motivation? Writer Gail Simone has already shown us the Mad Hatter having sex with a top hat in an early Secret Six miniseries so we know he’s kind of loony, did anyone need to draw an Alice sex doll in his room?

Pet peeves, really, but ones I figured I might as well mention. This issue we learn part of the origin of the lady in the powdered wig and see one of the five official members of the Six betray the other four, and maybe even kill one of ‘em, and see the return of a former member. Its as well written (despite my reservations about the decadence-for-decadence’s sake content) and well drawn as usual. Aside form JSoA, which I’ll probably drop once Johns leaves, this is the only ongoing DC team book I’m reading, so, in my opinion at least, it’s the best written and best illustrated of their current crop of team books.

This is also the first of the “Origins and Omens”-branded books I’ve read, and apparently these will all be framed by an appearance of Scar, the scarred Guardian of the Galaxy seen crying tears of black blood onto a blank book in the Ed Benes-drawn O&O house ad.

This one’s a six-page story written by Simone herself, drawn by Pete Woods and narrated by The Mad Hatter. It’s basically just a catch-up of Secret Six history—from Villains United to Secret Six the miniseries to Birds of Prey to Secret Six the monthly—and something of a character portrait of the Hatter.

If this one proves to be representative of all the O&O back-ups, I can see them being a fairly useful jumping-on point sort of thing, even if the rest of the comic is a chapter of an in-progress arc. It did make me wonder how DC will deal with these stories in collected editions—having a Guardian from Green Lantern randomly float through a Secret Six story would seem pretty damn weird to someone just reading a SS trade. Maybe DC will choose not to collect them in trades at all? I think that would be a good idea. DC—and Marvel—really need to do more to incentivize the reading of single issues if they want to stay in the business of publishing single issues, and the weekly comics are really the only moves they’ve made to do so.

And speaking of Marvel and the future of serial, single issue comics, it sure seems like they’re thinking about getting out of that business all together with the $3.99 price point. So it’s probably worth pointing out that this issue is slightly longer than usual at 24 story pages (18-page main story, six-page back-up), and it’s still $2.99. Take that, Marvel!



Trinity #36 (DC) Finally facing their supporting cast members, the three gods of Egg World engage in a long flashback that takes up the front half of the book. There’s a panel of Superman and his wife, one of the native Egg Worlders, which reminds me how grow it is that he hooked up with one of these humanoids. Maybe it’s speciesest and shallow of me, but it somehow seems wrong to me that he’s shacked up with a native Egg Worlder, who are these short, lumpy little things that look a bit like what I imagined orcs looked like when I used to read fantasy novels that had words like “orcs” in them. But then I got to thinking, Hey, Superman and Lois Lane are different species, so why doesn’t it gross me out when I think about them consummating their marriage? Is it just because Superman looks human, whereas his Egg Worldian wife Luai is short, blue and funny looking? Maybe.

In the back half, Ray “The Atom” Palmer makes some unlikely allies on the altered DCU earth. It’s drawn by Scott McDaniel, who does that thing he used to do all the time on Nightwing, where you see six or seven images of the hero jumping all over the panel showing how fast and acrobatic he is. I like those panels.

Review: Sulk #1-#2

You know, at this point, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I used to think Jeffrey Brown was just a one-trick pony.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked that one-trick he seemed to have perfected, the painfully revelatory, episodic books about his sometimes sweet, sometimes pathetic love life. It’s a trick any pony could be proud of, and admired for having.

Then I read Brown’s Be A Man parody of his own “girlfriend” book Clumsy, his humor collections (Feeble Attempts, Minisulk, I Am Going To Be Small), his superhero parody Bighead, his bizarre Transformers parody/celebration The Incredible Change-Bots (a true landmark in nostalgia-driven comics, being one of the few that tries to capture the pleasures that lead to the nostalgia rather than revisiting the actual source of the nostalgia) and Cat Getting Out of a Bag (a comic I love despite not even being all that fond of cats, which I’ve never actually shared a place with). Heck, Brown even draws a pretty great Dr. Doom.

Now that pony that I once regarded as a one-trick pony has proven itself to be one of the more versatile ponies working in comics today—okay, I’ve taken the “one-trick pony” thing way too far by this point, haven’t I? Sorry. The point is simply this: Jeffrey Brown? That guy is one versatile comics creator.

His latest project for Top Shelf Productions, the publisher of most of his stuff, capitalizes on that versatility, being an ongoing series of nicely-designed, digest-sized, spine-having mini-graphic novels, with each issue/volume being devoted to a different subject. It’s called Sulk, but it’s basically Jeffrey Brown Does Whatever He Wants For However Many Pages He Wants. The contents are standalone, but I imagine once you try one you’ll want the other—and any future issues.

Sulk #1 is entitled “Bighead and Friends,” and features 64 pages of Brown’s pretty lame superhero Bighead, who always makes me think of a humanoid penis wearing a condom and a cape.

The contents should be familiar, if you’ve read Bighead or caught any of his prior appearances. Basically, it’s just superhero comics in Brown’s signature style, although this time around the parody seemed a little sharper and the gags a little funnier to me.

Bighead meets his greatest villain, The Author, a la Animal Man, we see the adventures of Little Bighead (the adventures of Bighead when he was a boy), we see the death and resurrection of Bighead, Jesus punches out the devil (Brown really needs to do a full-length Jesus project some time), and goofy heroes (I really like Sunflower, actually) and villains (Beefy Hipster?) appear and disappear.

It’s $7, which I remember giving me a bit of sticker shock the first time I saw it on the shelves of my shop, but I guess that’s actually quite a value for 64 pages, in an ad-free, “prestige format” comic (even if it is black and white). Seven dollars only gets you about 51 pages of DC Comics’ standard $2.99 books, or 38 pages of Marvel Comics’ $3.99 books.

Sulk #2 is a little pricier at $10, but it’s also 96-pages long, and probably the least Jeffrey Brown Jeffrey Brown book I’ve ever read (and I’ve read ‘em all, save Little Things). This one boasts the best story title of any comic in recent memory: “Deadly Awesome.”

It’s sub-titled “A competitive mixed martial arts match from the S.C.F.C.L. (Superior Cage Fighting Championship League),” which I assume is a fictional version of a real MMA league or ultimate fighting whatever that they show on cable and that an old roommate of mine used to be pretty into but I never watched because it seemed too much like sports to me.

The book is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek (tongue-slightly-in-cheek, or tongue-in-cheek-but-just-barely-in) drama about a match between veteran fighter Haruki Rabasaku and younger, bigger, more powerful Eldark Garprub. A few pages is spent on the fight commentators/announcers/whatever they’re called in this sport setting up the story, introducing us to the fighters and the rules, and then the bulk of the book is devoted to the match—an 80-page fight scene.

The fight has the size and scope of a manga battle, yet aside form the black and white imagery and some occasional speed lines, Brown’s storytelling remains Western in style, the two fighters more or less narrating their strategies in thought bubbles, with the announcers and Brown chiming in to describe what we’re looking at.

This is the most realistic I’ve seen Brown’s work look before, at least for a sustained work, and it’s pretty nice stuff. It looks much more polished and fussed-over than usual, with lots of lines on the page, giving the surfaces a grittier feel.

The story is more or less all sports story cliché, but Brown livens it up with a lot of extremely weird touches, and a wild use of various layouts that give the book a surprisingly fluid look. (My favorite part is probably a two-page spread that, on the left page features a 12-panel grid, chopping up a splash of Eldark straddling a fallen Rabasaku and trying to punch his face repeatedly, and, on right, two small panels of Eldark freaking out about how Rabasaku keeps blocking his punches, and a big panel showing a close up of Eldark’s face, with tiny little Rabasaku faces floating all around his head, the caption reading: “His face, not a bloody pulp, mocks me!”)

The back flap functions as a next issue box, and it shows a picture of a Godzilla-ish monster menacing a trio of tiny human figures. It bears the title “The Kind of Strength That Comes From Madness,” and promises, ahem, “Giant Robots! Pirates! Elves! Giant Monsters! Time Travelling Infants! Science fiction and fantasy filled fun!”

Admittedly some items on that list are pretty played out, but elves? Time traveling infants? That sounds pretty promising—particularly if Sulk #1 and #2 are indicative of the quality.



RELATED: For a second opinion on Brown’s first two Sulk issues, I’d highly recommend you check out Dick Hyacinth’s review here; in addition to being an incisive comics critic and damn good writer, Hyacinth knows more about this MMA fight stuff than any human being I’ve ever crossed virtual paths with, and thus offers a valuable view point on “Deadly Awesome” (Not that I’ve crossed virtual paths with many MMA fans, of course).

Monthly(-ish) Manga Reviews

Cowa!
Viz

I mentioned this briefly the week I bought it, but I figured I might as well review it while I’m taking the time to mention the last few manga digests I read. It’s the work of Akira Toriyama, best known for a little creation of his called Dragon Ball, and it’s an easily digestible one-volume adventure about a half-vampire/half-werekoala kid named Paifu.

After a few shorter stories introducing us to Paifu and the other colorful characters who live in his little village of monsters—including his shape-changing best friend Jose Rodriguez, rival Arpon and a disgraced human sumo wrestler—the book shifts focus into a road-trip adventure. Much of the town has come down with a deadly monster flu, and its up to this quartet to journey far away, through the big city and a haunted woods and up a tall mountain to get the cure.

Whether because this was earlier in his career or because this was intended for a younger audience, Toiryama’s art is a lot more simplified than his later Dragon Ball output or even his Dr. Slump, although it’s clearly the work of the same man. The story reminded me quite a bit of the original, pre-tournament Dragon Ball stories, when Goku was still just a little kid and the book was more of a comedy adventure then it was a fight comic. Toriyama touches like anthropomorphic animals living among humans, weird-shaped houses, cute vehicle designs and well-choreographed, over-the-top action scenes abound; there’s even some character design resonance between some of Cowa’s stars and Dragon Ball characters.

I’d recommend checking out Matthew J. Brady’s review of it; he’s the one who alerted me to this book’s existence, and he has some scans of the art over there.

No, I don’t have any idea why this is called what it’s called.



Dororo Vols. 1-2
Vertical

In synopsis, this one sounds weird, even compared to that last book, which starred a half-vampire/half-werekoala. In feudal Japan, a wicked lord promises 48 pieces of his unborn son to a host of demons if they’ll grant him power. They comply, and his son is born as what looks a little like a large, fat worm with a skull on one end (that’s him as a baby in yellow on the cover to the right). He’s sent floating down the river in a basket, where a kindly old doctor finds him and cares for him, building him a mostly artificial body (with hidden swords for arms). Thanks to psychic senses and telepathy, the boy, who grows up to be Hyakkimaru, can function normally, despite a lack of body parts.

He goes on a quest to wander Japan, slaying demons, and each one he kills restores one of this body parts to him.

This is just part of the story. The title character is a sneaky, ill-tempered little orphan kid that befriends Hyakkimaru and joins him on his journey, which, by volume two, becomes more about Dororo’s heritage and a lost treasure than it has to do with Hyakkimaru’s search for his body parts.

This is the work of Osamu Tezuka, and while it’s not his best work, it’s still the work of Osamu Tezuka, which means it’s better than about 90% of the other stuff you’ll find in your local comic shop. The peculiarities of the particular premise aside, I found myself reminded of Rumiko Takeshi’s early Inu-Yasha volumes, in which the colorful heroes wandered feudal Japan getting into episodic battles with a variety of demons.

Tezuka’s demon designs are top-notch, and regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the rest of the narrative, awesome monster abound.

This series is being packaged and published by Vertical, who have done a pretty stellar job with all of the Tezuaka work they’ve been putting out the past few years, and this is no exception. I love the collage-like covers and spines of these book s, which are nice enough to probably be well worth a purchase just to spruce up your book shelf, whether you read them or not. But you should read them. Because they’re about a guy with a prosthehic body and swords for arms wandering feudal Japan and fighting alien moth women and armies of ghost foxes to earn his body parts, and it’s by Tezuka.



Yotsuba&! Vol. 5
ADV Manga

I held off as long as I could. It was my understanding that this was going to be the last volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s darling and hilarious slice-of-life stories about a precocious little girl, her good-humored single father, and the neighbors they pester for the foreseeable future.

Having heard this repeatedly online, I held off on buying this volume, so that I would know that I still had at least one more volume of Youstuba to look forward to. My plan was to wait until a sixth volume was at least announced, but then I read Christopher Butcher’s recent-ish post about the manga market in 2009, and I finally caved. According to Buther, more Yotsuba is somewhat inevitable, but there’s no indication on when it might get here.

If you’ve read any of the first four volumes of this series, one of the most delightful comics I’ve ever read, then you know exactly what to expect from this particular volume. It’s just as good as the previous ones, and in the exact same ways. In fact, this might be a little bit better than the last few, in large part because the longer the amount of time you spend with Yotsuba, the better you get to know her, and thus the more endearing her antics become.

In this volume, she meets Cardbo the cardboard robot who isn’t really a robot but Shh! Don’t tell Yotsuba or you’ll break her heart, she meets a young friend of her father’s who becomes her mortal enemy, she goes star-gazing, runs errands and goes to the beach. Er, none of which might not sound like the plot of a particularly hilarious comic book, but Azuma’s characters are so sharply realized and their behavior so sharply communicated that day-to-day activities become thrilling comic adventures.

Harvey Pekar! Nooooo!

A few panels from Incredible Hercules # 125...


Wait, is that...?

It is!

Don't worry though, American Splendor fans; Hercules and Amadeus Cho were able to save the day, so that none of the horrible crimes perpetrated by the Amazons in this altered reality stuck.



(Above panels written by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente and illustrated by Clayton Henry and Salva Espin)