J. Torres prefers blondes

I probably don't need to post links to Newsarama.com here, since 'rama has slightly better traffic than EDILW, but what the hell, it makes for easy content.

I've got two interviews with J. Torres up at the moment, including a brief chat about his upcoming Wonder Girl: Champion miniseries and a talk with both he and editor Jann Jones about the Black Canary Wedding Planner special. Both look and sound pretty interesting, particularly the latter, which will feature Christine Norrie work. (I think the Amanda Conner image above is actually from the Wedding Special itself, but it is a really nice image.)

There's a ton of superhero news up from all the convention announcements today. So much so, in fact, it's hard to even keep up.

But the two big ones for DC readers seemed to be:

1) The Flash shenanigans, which seem to hint very, very, very strongly that Barry Allen is coming back to life to star in the book, which I think is The Second Worst Thing DC Could Possibly Do (They've already done the first, which was resurrect Jason Todd)

and

2) Brad Meltzer's replacement of JLoA is Dwayne McDuffie. I'm enormously excited about this, and look forward to really enjoying what used to be my favorite title again. It does cast Meltzer's run in an even worse light. There was an awful lot of leeway given to him to basically do whatever he wanted with the team—cancelling the last volume of the book and launching with a new number one, changing the title, changing the line-up, changing the headquarters, a fold-out showing the bold new line-up in all their glory— all of which seemed to signal the start of a new Era for the League, something to follow such easily identifiable ones as the Satellite Era, the JLI, and the Big Seven leagues. I honestly expected an announcement that Geoff Johns would be taking over, with Meltzer to return for another brief stint next year.

Instead, we got all that build up for what amounts to only three or four stories. Spending eight issues putting a team line-up together seems kind of excessive no matter what the length of a run is, but when the run amounts to 14 issues, after which the line-up is going to change anyway, it sounds downright ridiculous. That's from a reader's perspective though; from a business perspective, it doesn't matter how bad Meltzer's run has been, only that it's super-popular, and I hope DC isn't going to fire McDuffie if he's unable to keep the book over 100,000 each month.

The big Marvel news, at least the news that struck me with the most impact, was folding all the Spider-Man titles into one, single almost-weekly series. I think it's smart, and not as radical a move as it sounds (the Superman titles were all essentially one big weekly during the old "Triangle" numbering, and most of the franchises switch to that format during crossovers periodically). I'm not sure why it's three times a month and not four though. "Tri-monthly" seems kind of arbitrary. The downside? I was really, really, really, really hoping to see an announcement about Dan Slott being named the new Amazing Spider-Man writer. While it's possible he could be writing all three issues that come out each month (Hell, you know Brian Michael Bendis could do it), I have a feeling that it's going to end up being closer to the 52 or Countdown model, with a team of writers and artists switching off far too regularly.

Oh, and this sounds pretty peculiar. The origin of the Ultimate Universe? Is it, like, different from the origin of, say, our universe? Was there a younger, hipper, possibly minority version of the Big Bang in the Ultimate Universe?

I like Bendis' UU work quite a bit though, and have always liked Jackson Guice's art, so I'd probably check this out if it were Ultimate This One Guy Bendis Knew In College. I'm not sure what to make of Bendis' description of Guice's art as "a mix of Bryan Hitch and Greg Land." What does that mean exactly? It's very detailed, almost photoreaslitic pencil art, but it looks like traced-over photo reference poorly integrated into the page design?

Anyway, actual original content returns to EDILW tomorrow. And by "actual original content" I mean, of course, out-of-context panels paired with bad jokes and/or complaining about superhero comics.