Diving into Deadpool

According to popular twentieth century comic book artist/industry bad word Rob Liefeld in a recent Newsarama comment thread, his co-creations Cable and Deadpool are now “the center of the X-Universe and Deadpool is the most popular character in comics, soon to be fronting 4 monthly titles.”

That’s not remotely true, of course.

Even if you define “comics” as “American superhero comics,” Deadpool was outsold in August by titles featuring Captain America, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine’s son, Batman, Dick Grayson-as-Batman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, The Flash Barry Allen, Batwoman and Batgirl III (That’s not counting team and ensemble titles, of which plenty of others out-sell Deadpool, but comparing Deadpool to The Fantastic Four or Justice League doesn’t seem fair).

And as for how many titles Deadpool fronts, Marvel’s only announced three (and how long will that last?). But even if it is four, Deadpool’s still not fronting as many as Batman, Superman (when he gets back in town), Wolverine and probably Spider-Man, depending on the month.

I thought it was kind of astonishing for Liefeld to be bragging about Deadpool’s current popularity, precisely because it seems so very surprising.

His relatively long-running (for modern comics) solo title was cancelled in 2000 at #69, to make way for short-lived Agent X, which featured a Deadpool-like character who ended up not being Deadpool. Whether it was cancelled originally due to low sales, or as part of an ill-advised rebranding that killed it, Deadpool was title-less for a few years, at which point he returned in Cable & Deadpool, which lasted fifty issues before getting axed.

When he got his own title again in 2008, it apparently proved successful enough to justify more and more Deadpool comics. From outside Marvel’s offices, it’s not clear why they feel comfortable putting out multiple Deadpool comic all of a sudden. The main title is selling respectably—50,000-ish units in August—but is hardly a hit book.

Maybe it’s a relatively rare instance of the character itself being popular enough to moves 50,000 books, so Marvel can hire writers and artists who don’t cost as much as those at the Mark Millar/Brian Michael Bendis level, and thus its cheaper for them to produce Deadpool, making it a more profitable book?

I have no idea.

But it seems quite remarkable that in so little time Deadpool went from sharing a title to having two ongoings—Deadpool and Deadpool: Merc With a Mouth—with a third one, Deadpool Team-Up, set to start publication next month.

What accounts for the sudden surge in relative popularity? I can’t guess.

Maybe it has something to do with his appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which I haven’t seen yet, but which I understand features a Deadpool that’s pretty different than the comics version), or the announcement of an upcoming Deadpool movie starring Ryan Reynolds.

Maybe Marvel is just being extremely shrewd and short-term profit-oriented (surprise!). That is, perhaps someone at Marvel HQ noticed that the Deadpool solo was doing surprisingly well and/or making a lot of profits due to how cheap it was to produce compared to hit comics, and they decided to strike while the iron was hot and sell as many Deadpool comics as possible while Deadpool comics seem to be selling.

At any rate, hearing about all these new Deadpool title announcements has had me wondering about the character and his popularity. I thankfully missed his introduction in the nineties (I never liked Liefeld’s art, even as a teenager reading a couple of Image books), and have never been very interested in Marvel’s mutant comics.

As I’ve mentioned before, I could sort of see what people could see in the character. Aspects of his look and personality seemed borrowed from Spider-Man, but he also had guns and killed people like The Punisher, and, of course, he had ties to the X-Men, and a whole lot of people really liked the X-Men for a really long time. I just couldn’t see it for myself, because I never really looked.

A few months back, I finally got the opportunity to do so, when I was gifted a moving friend’s comics collection, which included a sizable run of Deadpool comics, with only a few holes here and there. It was among the first of that wheelbarrow full of old comics I read (runs of Cable, Gambit and some various X-Men comics are still in a pile, daring me to read them), in order to satiate my curiosity about the character.

So over the course of a couple of weeks, I worked my way through a bunch of Deadpool comics, and typed up my thoughts on them while doing so.


Deadpool #44

This is the earliest Deadpool issue I have, and although it’s from the summer of 2000, it’s worth noting just how much Marvel comics have changed during these past nine years.

The cover has the old, pre-little red box with white “Marvel” Marvel Comics logo, it has the little box in the upper left corner for a picture of the lead character (which I believe originated in response to the way comics used to be racked, in spinner racks. So even if most of the cover were obscured by the rack or the comic right below it on the rack, a browser would be able to spot the character in the corner), it only cost $2.25 and it was approved by the Comics Code Authority.

This story is entitled “Cat Trap (Or: Wakanda Merc Are You?),” and is the first part of a two-part crossover with Black Panther. It’s written by Christopher Priest, who was also writing Marvel’s Black Panther ongoing at the time, and drawn by J. Calafiore.

I like Priest quite a bit, and his superhero books are ones I’m always glad to find in back-issue bins (I managed to track down his whole Justice League Task Force run and have just about completed his run on DC’s The Ray, but have a long way to go with his Black Panther yet).

He’s one of those writers whose name I’m surprised I don’t see more often any more. He’s great with character, he’s very funny (often without being silly) and he seems to be constantly trying new and different ways to tell the same old stories.

As this story starts, Deadpool is apparently sharing an underground base with a couple of roommates—villains Titania and Constrictor—and as the story opens, it’s been infiltrated by The Reverent Michael Ibn al-hajj Achebe, whom as far as I can tell is basically just an off-brand Joker.

He hires Deadpool to kidnap the new Black Panther’s leopard, Preyy (with two y’s…not sure how that’s pronounced). The new Black Panther is, apparently, Erick Killmonger (Best. Name. Ever.), who is filling in for T’Challa while he…sits in a chair in some weird, undeground Wakandan Star Wars-looking labyrinth of wires and sci-fi stuff, I guess.

Anyway, it’s a whole lot of back-story, but I got through it without giving up and throwing the comic against the wall, as when I try reading X-Men comics form this period, so Priest is clearly doing something right.

The story itself is pretty simple. Because the new Black Panther, whom narrator Everet K. Ross calls “KillPanther” is hanging out with the Avengers during this period, Deadpool must fight the Avengers.

(In another sign of how old this comic is, The Avengers consist of Triathalon, Iron Man, Hank Pym, The Wasp, and She-Hulk.

So after a few pages of back-story filling-in, there’s a lot of rat-a-tat-tat banter between various players, and then a fight scene. Priest stays outside Deadpool’s head for the most part, so his craziness makes him seem more remote and amusing than when he’s played more sympathetically, as a point-of-view character.


Black Panther #23

“Cat Trap” continues in BP, which is drawn by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond (So now the characters all look bigger, rounder and more realistic than they did under Calafiore’s flatter, more jagged and compact figure work).

Deadpool and his roommates have been captured by The Avengers, who go to Wakanda looking for their captured teammate Triathalon (Deadpool teleported him along with Preyy).

Velluto’s Deadpool is really weird looking; the featureless face makes the head look extra tiny atop the titanic body Velluto gives his superheroes.

There’s a lot of fighting in this.


Deadpool #45

This is apparently the climax of Priest’s run on the title, in which the specific circumstances he set up are all taken away. Titania’s revealed to be, um, another character (I probably don’t need to worry about spoilers on nine-year-old comics, huh?), Deadpool and his roomies lose their pad, and a curse ‘pool’s been suffering from—in which he is given the face of Hollywood actor “Thom Cruz” is taken away.

Priest gets some gags out of that, but man, I hate when superhero comics half-use real celebrities and public figures like that. Either give him the face of Tom Cruise or don’t. You can say “Tom Cruise” in a comic book without getting sued, particularly in circumstances like these where it’s clear you’re not trying to pretend your Tom Cruise is the real Tom Cruise (Tom the Dancing Bug gets away with it pretty regularly). And if you’re afraid Cruise might be too litigious, try a different celebrity (Maybe Freddie Prinze Jr. woulda signed off? He was cool being in The Ultimates).

But by going with “Thom Cruz” it just calls attention to the fact that you’re—the writer, the editor, the company, the company’s lawyers, whoever—wants to make a particular joke, but is afraid to. And nothing is less funny than caution.


Deadpool#46-#48

This is the launch of a new creative team…or at least a new writer, Jimmy Palmiotti. It’s a three-part storyline entitled “Cruel Summer,” and it’s basically a noir-ish sort of crime story in which a femme fatale seduces Deadpool before turning on him.

It’s executed well enough, although the femme’s betrayal lacks much impact because it’s so hard fto imagine a beautiful woman seriously falling for Wade Wilson who, under his mask, has a Freddy Krueger-like face of red, peeling skin over various pits and boils.

What makes this story arc really special, however, is the art. It’s provided by Paul Chadwick, with Ron Randall on inks.

Man, look at this stuff:

Just gorgeous.


Deadpool #49

Palmiotti gets a writing partner in Buddy Scalera, and Chadwick is gone, replaced by Michael Lopez (Jon Holdredge replaces Randall on inks). This one’s entitled “Cat Magnet,” by which they mean “Pussy Magnet,” but apparently didn’t think they could get away with it (Still Comics Code approved, by the way).

Basically, the story consists of Deadpool, his scarred face disguised, meeting one remarkably scantily clad and sexually aggressive woman after another, often in unlikely places—including an ER nurse and a package delivery person. Deadpool would have to be stupid not to suspect that something is up, but if he does, Palmiotti and Scalera don’t share his suspicions with the reader.

As it turns out, each of these women are the same person, his shape-shifting ex-girlfriend Copycat. (Ah! So the title has a double meaning!)

The cover is by Kevin Nowlan. This run sure has a lot of great talent on covers. It also credits Chadwick and Randall on art, and fails to mention Scalera. Makes me wonder what was going on behind the scenes as these were coming out. The original creative team sure didn’t last in its original form very long at all.


Deadpool #50-#51

Check out these two covers, one by Arthur Adams, the other by Darick Robertson (The latter of whom even Bob Kane-inizes his signature. Neat).


Palmiotti and poor, never credited on the cover Scalera are joined by Darick Robertson on pencils (Holdredge is still inking).

That Robertson sure knows his stuff, and it’s nice to see his art on this old, grittier paper with more comic book-y coloring. There are none of the weird computer coloring effects that are endemic to Marvel comics these days. The skies are drawings of skies, not photos dropped in. Ditto the cityscapes and the moons. It’s all just nice, bold drawings, with nice, bold bright coloring. Beautiful.

This is probably the strongest of Palmiotti’s run (that I’ve read), in which he applies a standard element of superhero comics to Deadpool just to see what happens. In this case, it’s giving Deadpool a sidekick, Kid Deadpool.


Deadpool #52-#53

A two-parter featuring Deadpool versus two scantily clad, serial-killing twin teenage sisters with Barbie doll bodies. It’s pretty silly-bordering-on-stupid stuff, and it was in this issue that I noticed something that would grow to be a pet peeve of mine throughout this experience, the pop culture references.

They’re easy to make and can be funny, but they sure don’t have much shelf life. I think I noticed it here simply because the narration boxes mention Jennifer Lopez’ Oscar gown on the first page, and the second page has a character refer to the killer sisters as “those two Brittany-looking twins.” In 2001, “Brittany-looking” had a different meaning (and certainly different connocations!) than it does in 2009, and I wonder what it will mean, if anything, if this is read in 2019, or 2069 (I don’t think it will be, but still)

Oh, another new art team for this “Talk of the Town” storyline. It’s Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning, and their work is pretty nice.


Deadpool #54-#55

And now it’s time for a guest star! It’s a two-part Punisher story, drawn by Georges Jeanty and Holdredge. Two great covers, by the two artists probably best associated with The Punisher at this period in his career:

Deadpool doesn’t really translate to Tim Bradstreet’s realistic world as easily as Frank Castle does, does he?

This story is a continuation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s initial Punisher story, Welcome Back, Frank (which Palmiotti inked). It turns out, Ma Gnucci had a single, surviving relative, who would inherit all her money after her untimely death, so long as the condition of her will is met—her death must be avenged.

So Ma’s nephew Peter Gnucci hires Deadpool to kill The Punisher for him.

The two killers fight and fight and fight and—surprise!—neither of them dies.


Deadpool #56

It’s the end of another creative team’s run, although, to be fair, the word “team” might not really apply, given all the comings and goings. For this issue, Palmiotti himself is gone, and Scalera gets the sole writing credit. Karl Kerschl’s on art now, inking himself.

With this single issue, Scalera does a deck-clearing story along the lines of the one Priest provided at the end of his run, with all of the supporting characters being sent away from Deadpool, and his home again getting destroyed.

The issue is divided into two plots.

One follows Deadpool trying a variety of Wile E. Coyote-style traps to catch and kill a super-speedster named “The Street Speeder,” whose costume is yellow and blue and who says little other than “Meep meep” (GET IT?!).

The other follows Copycat disguised as Deadpool to go on a date with and then beat the hell out of an X-person. Siryn, I think. I suppose I should be thankful I got this far without a single reminder that Deadpool is technically an X-Men character.

This, by the way, is the first one without the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval on the cover. There’s no Marvel replacement rating either though.


Deadpool #57-#59

The title received a pretty radical makeover with #57, and I wonder if it caused much—or even any—confusion among comic shop patrons the week it was released. It certainly confused me, when I sat down to try and put all the Deadpool comics in order to read.

Marvel ditched the logo with the character image in the corner (the image shape had, over the months, shifted from a rectangular one to a circular one). The new logo is in a completely different smaller, thinner font, and is actually much smaller than the name of the storyline. In fact, based on the logo, it seems like it is an entirely different book, one called Deadpool: Agent of Weapon X.

Adding to the confusion is the big #1 on the cover, with a smaller “57” under it. So this looks like the first issue of a new series, but it is actually the fifty-seventh issue of an old series in disguise (This doesn’t seem to be a matter of Marvel relaunching and retaining their old numbering, as they sometimes did, because “Agent of Weapon X” and this weird numbering only lasted three issues).

The covers for these three issues, by the way, are by original Weapon X series artist Barry Windsor Smith, and they are thus fairly awesome.

Here’s the cover of #58, in which Smith must draw a trio of terrible costume designs:
Deadpool’s temporary new look makes him look like a little KGBeast, doesn’t it?

The new writer is Frank Tieri, and the new, more steady art team is Georges Jeanty and Holdredge.

Tieri seems on pretty sure footing with all the Marvel super-people and shadow organization intrigue, and while his version of Deadpool is a zany, agent-of-chaos type of character, the rest of the narrative doesn’t conform around Deadpool’s personality. That is, the story would be pretty straightforward and serious if you plucked out Deadpool and plopped in, say, Wolverine, which is probably how it should be.

While I like the way Tieri constrains the comedy to Deadpool’s character instead of the structure of the book in general, I don’t think his Deadpool is particularly funny, and he seems to go for an abundance of pop culture gags. In Deadpool’s very first panel, for example, he mentions that “Barbie Girl” song (the existence of which I had completely forgotten), Liberace, VH1’s Behind The Music, Magilla Gorilla, The Weakest Link and Gilbert Gottfried.

The plot involves the old Weapon X re-starting as a free agency, offering alumni like Sabretooth and Deadpool amped-up powers and resources if they come to work for them. In Deadpool’s case, he gets his face back, but he can’t reconcile working with Sabretooth, who’s been killing and eating people left and right, and some of the other bad guys—especially the agency sets its sites on his ex.

Sabretooth totally murders her, by the way.


Deadpool #62

I’m missing two issues, including the final “Agent of Weapon X” one (presumably, he avenges Copycat without actually killing Sabretooth), and the first issue of the next arc, which is also designed to look like a stand alone miniseries.

This one’s called “Funeral For a Freak,” and once again has the little confusing numbering going on. (This is also, by the way, the first cover featuring the little image of a red, white and blue ribbon above the silhouette of the World Trade Center towers. I guess I never noticed when these first arrived on Marvel covers and when they went away, but they seemed to be there for a while).

Tieri, Jeanty and Holdredge engage in an odd mid-nineties, “Death of Superman” era parody, in which Deadpool is seemingly killed (he actually just has amnesia and is living on the streets) and is replaced by four different new Deadpools. No idea how it started or ended, as I only have the second and third parts of the arc.


Deadpool #67

In some ways, this is the best of the Deadpool issues I read, as it’s the first in which the writing is very sharp and the art’s really great.

It’s written by Gail Simone, who is perfectly at home writing superheroics and comedy simultaneously, and the art comes courtesy of Udon studios—I’m not sure who does what on art chores, as the credits don’t parcel out credit by the task, but from pencil to colors its all well done, boasting the look of anime cels-as-panels that Udon was doing so well at the time.

Having missed a few issues, it seems Deadpool’s status quo has changed quite a bit again, but it wasn’t too difficult to feel my way through the issue. Deadpool is hanging on to a shrunken Rhino, whom he’s using as a key chain, and is tasked with body-guarding Dazzler, in all her disco roller-skating glory.

While this is the all-around best creative team I’ve read on the book, even they didn’t last long. According to comics.org, they took over with #65, and the series was canceled with #69.

Unworthy of the legacy.

What was that, Dick? "Is Barbara and Gordon okay?" Shouldn't that be "Are Barbara and Gordon okay?" After all, "is" is the singular form of the verb, and you're referring to plural subjects. Bruce Wayne didn't send you to all those expensive schools over the years just so you could talk like that, mister.



(Panel from Blackest Night: Batman #3 by Peter J. Tomasi, Ardian Syaf and Vincente Cifuentes)

Did you know that before he was the father of our country, George Washington was a vampire?

It's true! Or, at least, I assume it's true, based on the cover of this children's book about him which I've never read.

I got nothing. Except for all these links.

—I attended the Columbus stop of John Porcellino's fall tour promoting his new book, Map of My Heart on Monday night, and I have every intention of writing about it in the very near future. In the mean time, I can assure you that it was not very much like this event at all. (Update: Okay, now I've written and posted it at Blog@. You can read it here Also, check out Aaron Miller's cartoon coverage of the event here).


—Earlier this week, my fellow Blog@ contributor Troy Brownfield wondered aloud about who the mysterious figure behind the door at the first "Cabal" meeting was, the one who was apparently meant to explain-without-explaining why the likes of Dr. Doom and Loki would give Norman Osborn the time of day, let alone ally themselves with him.

I honestly hadn't thought about that scene since Tim O'Neil solved the character's secret identity almost immediately, as I haven't really been following the Marvel Universe mega-story since the Secret Invasion price escalation made reading Marvel Comics prohibitively expensive for me.

Troy makes an excellent case for Mephisto, and given the character's recently revealed ability to re-write Marvel continuity, his presence would even go a long way toward explaining how Norman Osborn went from being just some dick Spider-Man knew to becoming Marvel's Lex Luthor (Maybe it even explains why he looks different in almost every appearance!).

The thing is, I can't imagine Namor seeing Mephisto behind that door and being cowed. Picking Osborn up by the ankles and using him to bludgeon Mephisto seems like the natural Namor response to that situation. Even if Mephisto could hand Namor his Atlantean ass, and if Mephisto is simply Marvel's devil, I assume he can take Namor, I still can't imagine Namor not picking a fight with him.

But then, as I cycle through all the Marvel characters I can think of, I can't come up with any villain, hero or cosmic entity that Namor would be afraid of. His arrogance and willingness to pick a fight with anyone are pretty much his defining characterisics, you know?

Of course, that's the same comic in which Namor looked like this—
—so it's not like there's much point in holding that particular comic to any sort of consistency standards.

Whoever that ends up being behind the door, I still find that whole scene hilarious. Like, say it is Mephisto. He just stands around in a room waiting for Osborn to open the door, lets everyone look at him, and then just continues standing there while Osborn shuts the door? He doesn't even say hello, cackle menacingly, hurl any threats or anything? Isn't he bored standing there? Doesn't he have better things to do?


—I was sorry to hear that the planned FCHS collection has been canceled. I was really looking forward to reading that, and I hope the creators can find a way to make it happen. In general, "90210 meets..." is all I need to get me super-excited about something, but in this case, the artwork looked really nice as well.


—I enjoyed reading this well-linked-to post from Scott McCloud regarding the value of comics criticism from a creator's perspective. As a comics critic, I obviously agree with McCloud that there is value in criticism, even the most extremely negative ones based on prejudices or biases. McCloud fails to mention the handsomeness of comics critics though.


—Check out Matthew J. Brady's review of Nomad: Girl Without a World #2 here. I felt kind of bad about not picking up #1 the week it came out, because writer Sean McKeever was doing a signing at my local comics shop that week, and I find myself more inclined to pick up comics when their creators are in the store. It was a $3.99, 22-pager though, so I had a good excuse, and I figured I'd eventually pick up the trade. Now I'm actually eager to pick up the trade, as this second issue apparently features the villain Flag-Smasher, and there is absolutely nothing about Flag-Smasher that I don't love.


—If you read any DC Comics this week, then I'm sure you saw the DC Nation column, which re-ran this news about DC returning some long-canceled books from "the dead," as it were, as part of their "Blackest Night" event. That's honestly a pretty clever gag, clever enough that I'm a lot more inclined to check some of these out on the strength of that gag alone than I would be just another Blackest Night branded miniseries (along the lines of the Batman, Superman and Teen Titans one that are currently in publication).

Oddly, the announcement of the titles focuses only on the characters and the writers, with no mention of the artists involved. That's kind of worrisome, and I hope it's not simply because they're all "TBA." It makes me think it's just going to be whoever's hanging around the office the day the scripts get done (So Scott McDaniel will probably draw half of them, and the other half will have eight artists apiece on each).

I hope they try to get artists from the original, canceled series, to go as far as they can with the concept. Like, Jerry Ordway on Shazam, Peter Snejberg on Starman, Denys Cowan or Question and so on. That doesn't seem to be the case with the writers, with only John Ostrander and James Robinson returning to books they've written at length before.


—I really enjoyed reading Nina Stone's review of the second issue of Image Comics' repackaging of the great Brandon Graham's King City. It basically consists of ten things she really liked about the issue. I remember trying a formal review of the original Tokyopop digest version of the story (it's somewhere in this post), but I think just pointing at random elements and saying "These were awesome" was probably a more effective way to communicate ho good the book is (It's really one of those works that a critic need only point at and suggest "read this, I bet you'll dig it," I think).


—Ah, if only it were. Between Miley Montana's departure and Meghan McCain's weird announcements regarding giving up Twitter over reaction to a photo of her breasts she posted, I was getting hopeful that the Twitpocalypse are nigh. Nothing personal against Twitter-ers—it was on Kevin Church's Twitter feed that I found a link to that Telegraph article—but I miss the good old days (i.e. last year) before U.S. Senators were regularly communicating with their constituents in lolcat language and the mainstream media was reporting on Twitter tweets about events instead of the actual events.


—Oh, and I have long, tedious reviews of House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1 and Perhapanauts Halloween Spooktacular #1 up at Blog@, if you'd like to read 'em. I should have reviews of three other books between tomorrow and Sunday there as well.

Weekly Haul: October 14th

Blackest Night: Batman #3 (DC Comics)




Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. I was just lost in my own head, imagining how much cooler the final issue of Blackest Night: Batman—which features Batman, Deadman, zombies and Etrigan, The Demon—might have been if, say, Kelley Jones or Tom Mandrake had penciled it. Or perhaps John McCrea. Or even Norm Breyfogle. Or shit, Matt Wagner.

Instead, we’ve got Ardian Syaf inked by Vincente Cifuentes, and while Syaf’s art is certainly readable, it’s more serviceable than beautiful. There just isn’t a whole lot of life to it, which becomes particularly apparent when a character like Etrigan bounds on to the scene.
If Generic Ogre-Type is the best you can bring to a character like Jack Kirby’s Etrigan, then maybe you’re not ready for a book that crosses-over DC’s two biggest brand names at the moment.

It doesn’t help any that the majority of the panels featuring Etrigan also feature copious amounts of computer-generated flame coloring effects, so that photos of fire seem super-imposed over Syaf and Cifuentes’ drawings. What’s the point of that? Who doesn’t like drawing fire? Fire is, like, one of the most fun things to draw…! It’s right up there with smoke and pretty ladies, except much easier than the latter!

As for the story, it’s rather unsatisfying, although I suppose that was to be expected—it’s not like Dick Grayson, Tim Drake. Damian al Ghul, Deadman and Etrigan could crack the case of the Black Lanterns or anything, given that Blackest Night isn’t even half over yet.

So Dick and Tim find themselves in a graveyard that their back-from-the-dead parents have apparently built a huge circus tent/Drake family home set upon, and then proceed to use this elaborate set just to fuck with their sons’ heads.

With no way to destroy or defeat the Black Lanterns, even when an actual demon from hell shows up and starts bathing them in hellfire, Dick decides to put himself and Tim in a death-like cryogenic state for a few panels, and, thinking the pair are dead, the Black Lanterns all fly off. Dick Grayson heroically looks off into the distance and declares, “Well, that’s the end of this miniseries. Perhaps we’ll meet them again in future issues of Blackest Night.”

As for the Black Lanterns, they presumably go off to continue terrorizing, killing and eating the citizens of Gotham City.

Dick Grayson, you are a terrible superhero.

Points go to writer Peter Tomasi and Syaf for Black Lantern Tony Zucco though, the very first Black Lantern I’ve seen whose uniform is actually for sale at my local comic shop right this minute.


Deadpool #900 (Marvel Comics) Marvel may have adopted the most fan-reaming pricing strategy conceivable, but you’ve got to give them credit for books like this—Over 100 pages of comics, the majority of them brand-new ones, from a host of creators who, for the most part, happen to be really, really good at making comics, all for just $4.99, the price of one and one-fourth issues of Doctor Voodoo.

I have relatively little experience with Deadpool the character or Deadpool the comic, and I’ve been rather intrigued by the character’s quite sudden popularity.

The bulk of my exposure came from a rather spotty run of Deadpool comics from between #44 and #59 that were among the collection recently gifted to be by a friend moving out of town and trying to divest himself from as many comics as possible. I’ve been meaning to blog about the experience of reading those issue with an eye toward unlocking the secret of the character’s popularity for a while now, but I just never find myself with the time and/or desire to write a couple thousand words about Deadpool. (My main question about the character is why his dialogue bubbles are colored yellow).

This is all a long way of saying that prior experience with or affection for the character doesn’t seem to be mandatory to enjoy this book, which is an obscenely good value.

Let’s take the stories one at a time.

“Close Encounters of the @*#$ed-Up Kind” by Jason Aaron, Chris Staggs and Juan Vlasco

Deadpool gets abducted by aliens, kills them. Um, not really much to this one.

“Silent But Deadly” by Fred Van Lente and Dalibor Talajic

Deadpool fights a gang of mines who have some sort of super-maguffin that makes their silent, imaginary actions real. So if one mimes the throwing of a grenade, a grenade-explosion will result.

I can’t think of any examples, but as I was reading this, I was convinced that someone must have thought of this gag before. If not, than kudos to Van Lente for putting a somewhat obvious gag into a comic and beating everyone else to it.

This story is mostly a silent one, and relies on Talajic to do a lot of the story telling—and he’s more than up to the challenge.

Words only appear in the last three panels of the story, and this is the first one in the book in which two different narration boxes are used to communicate the voices in Deadpool’s head.

This is apparently new to the character, as I don’t remember any such boxes during the run I read.

I’m not entirely comfortable with mental illness being used for comedy like this—the next story diagnoses ‘pool as a schizophrenic on account of those voices—and think I prefer the character’s craziness being treated as more of a Daffy Duck-style daffiness than anything out of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Not that anyone asked.

“Shrunken Master” by Mike Benson and Damion Scott

Hey, it’s our old friend Damion Scott, the pencil artist who made the last volume of Batgirl so awesome. This short story is a little…dark, with Deadpool’s motivation for taking and executing a particular hit being the target’s sexual abuse of a minor. That coupled with the rather obvious direction Benson was going with the story, drains it of fun and surprise, but Scott’s imagery is energetic and inventive throughout.

Now, how does Deadpool sit in an easy chair while wearing two katana on his back.

“Pinky Swear” by Joe Kelly and Rob Liefeld

Hey, I’m not sure if anyone’s ever pointed this out before or not, but this Rob Liefeld fellow? He’s not a very good comic book artist.

He’s especially poorly suited to a comical comic book story like this, which calls for more in the way of panel-to-panel continuity and timing than pouches, guns and grimacing (Deadpool wears a full face-mask! You can only fit a few dozen little lines on it!)

That said, it’s actually not as bad as I was thought it might be, and there were only a couple of panels I had to puzzle over to figure out.

Kelly’s script is fast-paced and funny, and he seems to be writing towards Liefeld’s strengths as much as possible.

“What Happens in Vegas…” by Duane Swierczynski and Shawn Crystal

This is apparently a parody of a show featuring police investigators that Deadpool refers to as “crime scene guys.” I don’t think I watch the particular show Swierczynski, so I’m not sure how effective it is. I liked the gag about the presence of the chicken at the end, though. Crystal’s art is pretty great though, striking a nice balance between funny and gritty.

“Great Balls of Thunder on the Deep Blue Sea” by Victor Gischler and Sanford Greene

Deadpool and the voice in his head go on a vacation cruise, and fights Doctor Octopus, who is also on the same cruise. I like Greeen’s art a whole lot, and Gischler’s story is amusing enough.

“One Down” by Charlie Huston and Kyle Baker

This is probably the most clever of the stories, and while Baker’s such a fine cartoonist that it took me a while to get used to the very computer-y style he’s working in here, it eventually won me over as a bit of collage. I don’t want to say much of anything about the story so as not to risk ruining it, although I will note there’s one panel featuring Deadpool fighting Fin Fang Foom on top of a pile of Tyrannosaurus Rexes, and FFF is wearing a pirate hat in it.

And then there’s a reprint of 1998 one-shot Deadool Team-Up by James Felder, Pete Woods and Walden Wong. It involves a little Deadpool called “Widdle Wade” on the cover, The Beyonder and sumo wrestlers.


House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1 (DC/Vertigo) I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I have a real weakness for comics featuring characters who have pumpkins for heads, so the inclusion of a Merv Pumpkinhead story by Mark Buckingham, Kevin Nowlan and Bill Willingham was enough to edge this big, fat anthology special from my “maybe” pile and on into my “what the hell” pile. I am not going to review it here now though, as I’m planning on covering it and another Halloween-themed anthology I bought today at Blog@ in the near future. I’m just including it here for the sake of complete accuracy in reporting the comics that I hauled home during my weekly comics-buying trip.


Incredible Hercules #136 (Marvel) In previous issues, we’ve seen Hercules impersonating Thor, and on the last page of the last issue, we see that the Warriors Three have convinced Thor that he needs to disguise himself as Hercules and defeat Hercules-as-Thor (the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you see).

In this issue, which Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente had to call “Thorcules Versus Hercuthor!”, the two do battle while dressed as one another, and Herc faces a dilemma—he knows Thor has to defeat him in order to save the world, which would, of course, also prove to everyone watching that Hercules is thus superior to Thor, but if he lets Thor-disguised-as-Hercules win too easily, he won’t get a chance to beat the bejeezus out of Thor for a while.

What’s he to do?

Simply initiate the single greatest fight scene in comic book history (that I can recall without stopping the typing of this sentence long enough to think hard on the matter for a potentially better example)! Seriously guys, the fight in this issue is awesome.

And the best part is that while it is genuinely funny, it also serves to define the character of Hercules, and what makes him such an appealing character and even such an great hero, super or otherwise.

And as much credit as Pak and Van Lente deserve for this issue, it was penciler Reilly Brown who completely pulled it off. The facial expressions throughout the entire issue are so…well, perfect really. Reilly Brown should be the only person allowed to pencil Inc Herc from this way forward.


The Perhapanauts Halloween Spooktacular #1 (Image Comics) See the second sentence of the House of Mystery entry above.



Secret Six #14 (DC) Here are the second and third pages of this month’s issue of Secret Six, featuring Grendel touching and licking a spread eagle, chained-down Wonder Woman while talking about how he’s totally going to eat her:


Huh. This scene is written by Gail Simone and penciled by Nicola Scott, so what do you know? Women can create gross, questionably sexual “superhero decadence” scenes just as well as male creators can.

And believe me, this is one decadent issue, which is pretty much cover-to-cover killing.

An Amazon, from the Wonder Woman comic, explains how she used to be in charge of the purple healing ray and, because of it, she got into cutting and self-mutilation (Remember, the term “purple death ray” was deemed so goofy and Silver Age-y that DC actually eliminated reference of it in Infinite Crisis when they collected that series in trade).

Catman announces his intention to chop up, dress and clean a self-healing foe (If it occurs, it happens off-panel).

A bunch of Amazons totally kill a bunch of dudes, then kneel down in order for Artemis to machine gun them all to death because they’d rather die than be jailed.

Wonder Woman breaks another villain’s neck.

And, of course, the Secret Six just kill the living shit out of tons of people.

In general, I’m not a fan of completely gratuitous gore and violence in super-comics, and tend to find it all somewhere between hilarious and depressing. As I’ve said before though, what might be inappropriate for Justice League or Teen Titans generally works just fine in this book, because it’s usually well written and excellently drawn (there are, unfortunately, two pencillers in this issue, leading to at least one confusing scene), and because Secret Six has a different focus than most superhero books.

Wonder Woman’s presence this time out, however, kinda cancels out the “Well, it is a book about nasty villains fighting nastier villains” excuse and, at the risk of getting all fan entitlement-y on you guys here, it just sort of goes a long way toward making Wonder Woman look like a useless schmuck.

What sort of superhero has to a) kill a villain and b) let a bunch of other villains and her own pals kill themselves out of a tough situation, without even attempting to bring any of ‘em to justice?

Well, I know what sort of superhero does…the Punisher/Wolverine/Ghost Rider type that the other guys publish, not Wonder freaking Woman. I know it might not be “realistic” for Wonder Woman to be able to solve all the problems confronting all the characters in this book without resulting to killing or tolerating killing, but then, that’s the point of characters like Wonder Woman. They find impossible, third-way solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems, and they do so without compromising themselves or their ideals.

Superman could have shut this whole place down without killing anyone or allowing anyone else to kill anyone. Batman might not have been able to, but he would have tried. But Wonder Woman? She’s apparently no Superman or Batman.

(Wonder Woman’s excuse for forcibly turning this villain’s head backwards is simply that “Demons are an exception,” but in the previous scene the same villain indicates that he is not a supernatural creature, but the son of Vandal Savage and a “cavebeast of a mother.”)


X-Men Vs. Agents of Atlas #1 (Marvel) Well, look who finally showed up in central Ohio! Mr. Johnny Got Shipped-Late-ly! Regular AoA writer Jeff Parker and original AoA art team of Carlo Pagulayan and Jason Paz get together for a hopefully sales-goosing two-issue miniseries pitting their guys, Marvel’s least popular team franchise, against Marvel’s second most popular team franchise, The X-Men.

I haven’t read an X-Men comic since…well, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember when. I think I read a trade that Ed Brubaker wrote where Professor X was kind of a dick to his students and got ‘em all killed on an island…? Or maybe it was Joss Whedon’s first Astonishing arc, back when it was shipping on some semblance of a schedule…?

Anyway, the point is, I haven’t read an X-Men comic in a super-long time, but found this quite easy to follow, thanks in large part to the cute little character-introducing boxes and Parker’s otherwise organic approach to clear, straightforward storytelling.

The mutants are apparently building their all-new, mutant-only country, perhaps thinking that the eight time’s the charm (They’re even building it on the ruins of one of the old, failed mutant-only countries!), when they learn the Agents are trying to borrow Cerebra (without asking!) to help them find a their missing teammate Venus.

Then they fight.

The cliffhanger ending involves a second, bigger group of X-folks teleporting into AoA HQ, so presumably Parker and company will eschew the “then team-up” part of the traditional Marvel “fight, then team-up” formula for a new and improved “fight, and then fight some more” formula.

Marvel’s solicitation for this $3.99 issue referred to it as “a monster-sized throwdown,” but apparently Marvel’s solicitation-writer and I have very different ideas about how big something needs to be to earn the description “monster-sized.” It’s 30 pages, with a back-up eight-pager featuring the Agents in their original costumes facing off against the First Class version of the X-Men (This one’s written by Parker, but drawn by Chris Samnee). So, not a rip-off or anything, but when they say monster-sized, I think they mean more Hulk-sized than Fin Fang Foom-sized.

Oh, and in the next issue, Gorilla Man apparently gets to use all that high-tech weapondry he’s been tricked out with. So that should be cool.

Question time!

—Who’s that X-gal with the glowy hands between, um, Rockslide and Beast on the last page?

—Have any of you been reading any of this Dark X-Men business? I see Namor pops up here in a new X-Men costume, and his involvement in that makes me kinda curious about tracking down an eventual trade. Are those Dark X-Men comics any good? If you’re a fan of the shouty, fight-y Namor, would you like ‘em? They’re not full of gross Greg Land art are they?

The same unit of story twice—once in words and once in pictures

First Second's recent release Refresh, Refresh is a graphic novel adaptation of a rather short prose short story. Or, to be more accurate, it's an adaptation of the screenplay adaptation of the original prose short story.

I read the graphic novel version, which is written and drawn by Danica Novgorodoff, first, and then eagerly sought out the Benjamin Percy story it's based on. I did so not simply because I was reviewing the graphic novel, and being familiar with its source material seemed like something that would be do more good than harm in reviewing the adaptation, but because the way in which Novgorodoff ends her version was such a strange, such a visual, such a comic book-y way to end the story, that it was hard to imagine how it would have been accomplished in prose, and, if it was an invention of hers, how Percy originally ended the original.

I was more than a little surprised by how different the two versions of Refresh, Refresh are (You can find Percy's version in a 2007 short story collection of the same name, by the way). His story, as it was printed in The Best American Short Stories 2006 is only about 12 pages long, while the graphic novel is 138-pages long.

A lot of that added length is due to dramatizing events the story either summarizes or implies, although Novgorodoff—or, more likely, James Ponsoldt, who wrote the screenplay adaptation the comic is itself adapted from—also adds significantly to the cast. If you're interested in either the comic or the short story, you may want to quit reading now, as I'm going to contrast the endings of each (and thus spoil them, I guess).

Here's the very last paragraph of Percy's story:



And here below is the climax and ending of Novgorodoff's graphic novel. I wouldn't normally excerpt so much from a graphic novel, but that's how many pages Novgorodoff spent attempting to say through pictures what Percy said through words. I should also note that I skipped a six-page sequence between the first page posted and below and the second, plus one abstract image (which I scanned upside down by accident), and another short sequence toward the end in which the boys have another conversation not in the story. I was basically interested in trying to capture Novgorodoff's picture version of Percy's word-evoked imagery:

You go with the Bone One Volume Edition you find on sale, not the one you might want or wish to have at a later time

I try to avoid going into Half Price Books, the chain of used book stores that re-sell books at half their original cover price, since the last thing I need to do is bring more printed matter into my small, one-bedroom apartment, which will one day likely expode from having too many comic books compressed into too small a space. If I must go into a Half Price Books, I try my hardest not to look at the comics or graphic novels, as I'll inevitably rationalize myself into buying them ("I probably shouldn't get this Essential Tomb of Dracula Vol. 4 yet, since I don't have volumes two or three, but on the other hand, it's only nine bucks—when will I find such a great deal on it again?").

Unfortunately I recently found myself brought to a Half Price Books during one of their occasional additional 20-percent off sales, which meant everything there was then seventy percent off, and, well, I couldn't resist the pull of the graphic novel shelf.

I got three great Tarzan collections from Dark Horse (including two by Russ Manning!), three Elephant & Piggie books by the great Mo Willems (whose art on this particular series of books I not only love, but also admire and envy), and, best of all, I found a Bone: One Volume Editon, one of those two-and-a-quarter-inch-thick monster bricks-of-a-book, which puts Jeff Smith's entire epic between two covers.

I originally read Bone in the single-volume series of Cartoon Book trades borrowed from the Columbus Metropolitan Library, so I never owned it any form. There were several times I picked up a copy of the one volume edition, looked longingly at it, considered it, and put it back, figuring I'd use that $40 on comics I haven't already read yet. I kept putting purchasing it off, and then it eventually went out of print, apparently because Smith didn't want to compete with the Scholastic Books color versions of the trades when they were first being released.

But here was a copy of it for half off ($19.98 instead of $39.95!), with an additional 20-percent off on top of that! So, like $17 something, I guess...? I'd be a fool not to buy it, right?

Once I got it home, I realized that I don't care for the cover of the book, at least not compared to some of the other one-volume edition covers (This post on Smith's Boneville blog, which I linked to above, talks a bit about the various covers for the one-volume edition).
It's not all that representative of what goes on within the book and, if I didn't know a thing about Bone, I might think it was some sort of horror-genre story based on this single image.

The newer one-volume edition features this image of Fone Bone sitting upon a rock in one of the goregous landscapes that Smith has often cited as extremely influential in the creation of the comic. It's also much prettier looking.

But as Donald Rumsfeld once famously said, "As you know, you go with the Bone: One Volume Edition you have on sale for 70-percent off. It's not the Bone: One Volume Edition you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Other places on the Internet you can go to

I have a review of Matt Kindt's 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man over at Blog@, if you'd like to read it. In preparation for writing the review, I re-read Kindt's Super Spy and spent some time poking around his website and blog. As it turns out, there is a whole lot of great art on both.

I wanted to call attention especially to some of the superhero artwork he's posted, as it's probably not at all what people think of when they think of Kindt (just as Micronauts fans probably don't think of Kindt as their go-to guy for sketches...but surprise!).

First, check out his Green Lantern, which was apparently a commission:
(Bigger and better version at his blog here).

I'm not a fan of the modern trend in superhero comics of depicting every character like a well-sculpted body-builder, so I always like it when an artist draws a superhero with a slimmer build...or even just doesn't define each and every swollen muscle through the hero's costume.

I love the boots on Kindt's Hal Jordan, too. The laces make them look like the sorts of boots professional wrestlers wear. Now I suppose Hal Jordan's boots, like the rest of his costume, are ring-generated matter that simply appears on him, and thus he never needs to actually put his boots on, and thus laces are unnecessary, but they still look cool, dammit (Actually, this is something I've always wondered about: Do Green Lanterns create their costumes out of the matter their rings allow them to generate, or do they use their rings to transmute whatever clothes they happen to be wearing at the time into their costumes? I would think the former, and I think Geoff Johns even implied that early in his run when he talked about the heat emanating from the energy in Hal's costume, but the latter makes more sense from what I've seen over the decades of Green Lantern comics. Because if it was the Lantern's will alone that maintained the costume, then wouldn't they suddenly become naked every time they lost their concentration or got knocked unconscious*?)

Okay, let's look at one more together, and then you can go peruse Kindt's sites on your own if you like. The front and back covers of his Super Spy featured two spy characters, each seemingly trapped within the confines of the cover as if it were a box, with little cutaway bubbles penetrating their clothing to show the various spy gadgets they have on their persons.

If you haven't seen it—and while I didn't love Super Spy, I really think it's well worth a look—the covers look like this:
(Just fold it in your mind on the spin where it says "Super Spy").

Here's a super neat-o image of Spider-Man from Kindt's portfolio, putting Spidey in a similar pose: Now go scour Kindt's site, and spend some time being awestruck, okay?



*Actually, I don't want to name names or anything, but I bet some Green Lantern fans would prefer that this happen more often.

Terribly important follow-up post

Last week, I spent a few paragraphs talking about the odd announcement that DC's Executive Editor Dan DiDio would be taking over DC's floundering Outsiders title with current Batman and Robin artist Philip Tan. At the time, DC released a rather hard to make-out pencil version of the first cover of their upcoming run, showing two unidentifiable figures shaking hands. At the time, my best guesses as to their identity were a caveman with a bad haircut wearing Geo-Force's costume and maybe a poorly drawn Steel.

DC has since released the final, color version of it, and it's still a difficult to read image—presumably on purpose, to obscure the identity of the new recruit—but it seems that the figure on the left if indeed Geo-Force, and the figure on the right is not Steel.

If not, then who is it? My best guess would be The Eradicator, who briefly lead the team during the short-lived, early '90s incarnation of the title, in some sort of new costume (How early '90s was that incarnation of Outsiders? It launched with two versions of the first title, with variant interiors as well as covers, labeled Outsiders #1 Alpha and Outsiders #1 Omega. I make fun, but I did enjoy that title at the time, more so than the the volumes of Outsiders to launch this decade. I liked that one guy who was basically just a bear wearing blue underpants...Wyled with a Y, I think his name was...).

In other DC Comics cover news, in January, Tony Daniel is apparently going to have Batman fight Spawn once again. I do like his use of power lines in the background though...

Is Owly moonlighting as a snack mascot...or does he have a brother in advertising?

At the grocery store today, I noticed this guy on the packaging for a box of Treasure Mills brand school lunch snacks:
He looked so much like Andy Runton's Owly that I had to stop and look extra closely to make sure it wasn't: As you can see, the wings and feet are shaped differently. And, of course, the first orb-shaped owl is wearing a hat. So they're clearly not the exact same owl. But at the very least, they must be part of the same sub-species of cartoon owl, if not actually related, right?

THERE'S A NEW ANGEL OF JUSTICE

...AND HE'S WEARING REALLY BAGGY PANTS.

If there was a Law & Order: SVU comic, I doubt I'd want to read it...

...unless Sean Murphy were drawing it, in which case I'd certainly think about it.

Murphy's the artist of an upcoming Vertigo series with Grant Morrison, so if you haven't heard of him before, I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot about him in the near future. In the meantime, check out his deviantart gallery, which is full of great stuff, like the above image I stole from there, and his "Wolverine Alphabet" series (It was a Robot 6 post about the latter which drew my attention to his gallery in the first place).

It looks like everyone who wanted to read Watchmen around here has now done so.

Since it is very difficult to live off of the money that there is to be made in the field of semi-professional comics criticism and comics blogging, I also have a part-time day job. It's working in a library that serves a small city of 34,000 immediately adjacent to the city of Columbus, where I live.

The other day while I was at work, I noticed something I hadn't seen all year—a Watchmen graphic novel on the shelf. Looking closer, I saw that there were actually two copies of Watchmen on the shelf.

All year—actually, maybe as far back as last November or December—all of our copies of Watchmen have been out, demand apparently driven by interest in the movie adaptation, and the relentless media attention focused on both the film and the comic that inspired it.

The library system I work in has three branches, but, like I said, it serves a rather small city, so we don't order every single graphic novel that comes out, and thus we rarely if ever have a situation where reserve lists are generated for particular graphic novels. But Watchmen grew such a long reserve list over the course of the last year that not only was it the only graphic novel I've ever noticed to have more than one or two people waiting on it (and those tended to be manga books like Deathnote, from the teen department), but more had to be ordered to accommodate the demand, and all of these went out and stayed out. Until a few days ago.

All together, we now own seven copies between the three branches, and, as of the other day when I checked, five of them were still checked out. So everyone that uses our library system who wants to read Watchmen has apparently done so (I'm sure they'll continue to circulate, but the fact that there are some on the shelf indicates the surge in interest if finally dwindling).

I checked the catalog at the Columbus Metropolitan Library to see what their Watchmen situation was. CML is a much, much bigger system than mine. It consists of 21 different branches that all share a collection, and they're spread throughout the 212-square mile, amoeboid-shaped city of about 750,000 people (1.7 million, if you count the greater metropolitan area, regardless of city borders).

They own 120 copies of Watchmen between all of their branches, and it looks like 34 of them are available at the moment. There are two or three other individual library systems in adjacent Columbus suburbs, but I didn't check their catalogs, because I don't care that much, but from my half-assed research, I think it's safe to say that the boom in interest related to the film has finally died down among Columbus' library patrons.

In case you were wondering.

Weekly Haul: Buying fewer comics leaves more time to complain about them in far greater detail

I generally go over the Diamond shipping lists pretty thoroughly every week, in addition to reading a bunch of columns about what’s coming out on New Comics Day (in addition to writing my own), so I was expecting it to be a fairly light week for me at the comic shop.

But when I got there, I learned that Diamond had failed to ship my shop their copies of X-Men Vs. Agents of Atlas #1, and either hadn’t shipped or my shop hadn’t ordered (I didn’t ask) any copies of the two manga series I might have considered adding to my haul on such a slim week.

The result? I walked out of the shop with only three comics this week. I was able to buy my entire haul with a single ten-dollar bill…and get change back!

I think this is a failure on the part of DC, Marvel and a few of the other, superhero-focused publishers, frankly, as that’s generally all I read in single-issue format—they’re just not publishing enough awesome comics, and/or charging too much for many the comics they do publish. (For example, I’d pay $2.99 to laugh at an issue of Cry For Justice or see what Brother Voodoo’s up to, but $3.99?).

There were, of course, a ton of great graphic novels and collections released this week, but buying something like IDW’s Bloom County: Complete Library #1 is a lot different than just plopping down $3 to $4 for 22-34 pages of super-people doing super-stuff; that’s the sort of thing one has to save up for, and maybe keep an eye on Amazon.com until the price gets slashed a bit (Sorry, brick and mortar store! I’m poor!)

Anyway, what used to be New Comic Book Day for me and had since become New Comic Book Afternoon was, today, more like New Comic Book Hour, and I wonder if I’ve somehow found myself in the transition phase between being a single-issue comics reader and a trade paperback-reader. I actually prefer the former in most instances, but the factors—writing for the trade, rising price, fewer quality books from the Big Two—seem to be pushing me toward trades despite myself. Hell, of the three comics I did buy today, I’m on the fence when it comes to dropping one of ‘em, I hate the art on another and feel kinda bad about rewarding the publisher for hiring the guy by buying the book anyway, and the other book I easily could have trade-waited.

Well, enough of the existential rambling of a Wednesday Crowd-er, worrying about his weekly rituals, let’s get on to the handful of books I did read this week—now with added scans!


Batman and Robin #5 (DC Comics) Grant Morrison’s Batman writing is far from the strongest he’s ever done, but there are some interesting ideas percolating in just about every installment. This is the middle section of the three-part “Revenge of the Red Hood” story arc, in which DC decided to humiliate poor Philip Tan by having him follow Frank Quitely on pencil art.

I liked the way that The Flamingo, introduced in one of Morrison’s trademark name-drops in the possible-future issue of Batman #666, is now part of the actual Batman story in the present. When Morrison mentioned him in the previous story, it seemed like it just a name chosen to sound like a new generation version of a bird-themed Batman villain like The Penguin, and yet now he’s on his way to Gotham, and he’s apparently a pretty big deal (Commissioner Gordeon calls him the “alpha-enforcer” of a crime cartel; Red Hood sidekick calls him “King of Killers, the Ace of Assassins.”)

I also liked the couple of panels in which The Red Hood talks about Batman in marketing terms: “That’s all Batman is now--A brand, a logo.” It reminded me of Paul Pope’s discussion of Batman at the Wexner Center, in which Pope explained how he came to the determination that, at his core, Batman is essentially just a logo for himself. The idea takes on a new emphasis in light of what Morrison’s been doing with the Batman franchise, as Batman isn’t even Bruce Wayne anymore, but whoever is wearing the Batman suit (currently Dick Grayson).

The Red Hood would know this better than most people because—okay, I’m going to spoil this, so if you’re heavily invested in which of the obvious suspects turns out to be the Red Hood, stop reading this blog post now—as a former Robin and former Batman, Jason Todd is familiar with the idea of superhero identities as symbols and sigils that can be passed down or exchanged (Morrison sort of explored this idea from another angle in DC One Million, in which he took the company’s love affair with legacy heroes to the extreme with superhero logos being used as something like power sources and natural resources).

Yeah, it turns out the Red Hood isn’t the obvious suspect—the mask-wearing mystery writer who appeared last issue—but the even more obvious suspect…the same person he was last time he appeared.

At least, I think it’s Jason Todd. The Red Hood seems to think he’s Jason Todd, and I guess I’ll take his word for it. Unfortunately, Philip Tan’s poor artwork doesn’t help:
(Before I proceed to discussing the art, did you read that dialogue? Apparently Batman made Jason dye his hair to look more like Dick? That’s…interesting, right? One wonders why Todd just now let his hair return to its apparently natural red just now, and continued to dye it ever since the “Hush” arc of Batman. And also why he wore that stupid just-a-jacket-and-pants with a lame, Spider-Man like helmet/mask when he first became the Red Hood, instead of this more elaborate superhero costume, complete with cool red guns).

I realize this isn’t entirely Tan’s fault, but it’s really too bad DC doesn’t have its artists work off of any kind of model sheets at all. I understand why they don’t, of course—these days artists, editors and fans all seem to want artists to draw in as personalized a style as possible, and to be as uninhibited by outside force as possible—but I imagine scenes like this would be much more powerful if there was anyway of telling what a character looked like based on his physical character.

A theoretical artist’s guide for popular, commonly used characters wouldn’t have to be overly onerous. I think if DC could just get all their artists to do things like agree on the height, weight and basic build of their character in relation to one another, that would be swell.

That dude up there? He doesn’t look a damn thing like Jason Todd. But then, what does “Jason Todd” even look like now? Who knows?

Also, some sort of guide might avoid panels like this:
I know by the costumes who the characters are, but does the Dick Grayson on the left, the one with the Gambit-like eyes, look much of anything like the Dick Grayson other artists draw? Does the monstrous little hobbit goblin thing on the right look like a ten-year-old boy? Why’s he got more wrinkles in his face and longer side-burns than I do, when I’m over three times his age?

And on the subject of “What’s up with this shitty panel,” what is Damian—the creature on the right—doing with the object in his right hand there? Following the context clues from the previous few panels, that’s either some sort of tool used to remove spirit gum from one’s face, or some sort of butter knife with either grape jelly or maybe butter or cream cheese on it (Two panels previous, Damian uncovers his breakfast while peeling off his mask, so either seems possible).

I don’t like looking at that panel at all.

And that of course remains the problem with too many of the artists DC has assigned Morrison throughout his time on the Batman books. Not every artist has to be Frank Quitely or David Mazzucchelli, but, at the very least, they should be able to do a completely bland, personality-free, complement the script to tell the story without ever sucking so bad that someone has to stop reading it to figure out what the hell is supposed to be going on work.

In the 1990’s, I read a lot of Batman books. Just about all of ‘em, I think. And there were a ton of artists whose style I didn’t care for as much as some of them. But even those guys whose work I used to find kinda boring—Tom Lyle, Jim Balent, Staz Johnson, Graham Nolan*, Jim Aparo** etc.— those guys still managed to draw everything without making me have to start a scene over or read past it to get to a verbal clue of just what the hell I was looking at.

Like this:
What is that? If you guessed The Penguin bouncing off the top of a car in the rain and being thrown into a crowd of people while saying “GAAAHH!”, congratulations, you are correct. How long did it take you to figure it out? If it was any longer than “instantaneously,” then it’s not a very good panel.

By the way, here’s Tan’s Penguin:
It's not bad. Not from that angle, anyway (the nose looks strangely broad from the front, but in profile it looks more beak-like). His egg-shaped body recalls the weird pillow-suit thing Danny DeVito wore in Batman Returns, and something about his face and his legs makes me think of some sort of Jim Henson creation.

I do wish Quitely were still drawing this though. Not just because it would be easier to read and better looking, but because I’d like to see what his Penguin might look like.


Batman: Unseen #1 (DC) Have I got that right? The small print has it like that, whereas the cover says Batman Unseen, sans colon. I could have sworn I’d seen it as Batman: The Unseen before somewhere as well.

My position on the matter of Kelley Jones and whether or not he kicks ass is, I assume, well established at this point. While he was the part of the Doug Moench/Kelley Jones/John Beatty Batman creative team I probably appreciated the most, I do like Moench’s writing quite a bit too.

Now, Moench is no Morrison, and I like some of his scripts a lot less than I like others, but he and Jones both share in common a certain overblown flair. Just as Jones can exaggerate the hell out of everything, while still managing an often quite rigid, formal filigreeing of detail (check out all the little dots expended on the night sky of that cover, all the folds in the bat-wings and bat-wing shaped cape), Moench’s characters will often talk in very purposeful, meaningful dialogue, with a sort of formality that often seems highly artificial.

There’s a theatricality about Moench’s Gotham characters, as if they’re all either engaged in word-play of various types, or, at the least, behave like actors reading too-clever to be natural lines.

This line, for example, might seem ridiculous, were it being screamed by anything other than a Jones-drawn skull-face, the character's hat thrown back with a melodramatic gesture, while a pattern of abstract firecrackers serves as a partial background:
I like Doug Moench. And I love Kelley Jones. And they work together perfectly.

Of course, they’re on pretty familiar ground here. One of their earlier collaborations was Batman/Dracula, which spawned two sequels, and the bulk of their run on Batman was a little like a Brave and The Bold, in which Batman teamed-up and/or fought DC’s creepiest heroes and villains.

Here, Batman is poised to meet and battle a modern-day Invisible Man, Gotham scientist Dr. Nigel Glass, who is perfecting a way to make the human body completely invisible (“Take that, Mr. H.G. Wells…Eat your own invisible heart out!”)

The story, billed as “A Lost Tale of Bruce Wayne as Batman,” is devoted to Batman realizing that his power to scare Gotham’s criminals seems to be weakening, while the Black Mask begins surreptitiously funding Glass’ work.

By issue’s end, Glass has become invisible—after going through some stages which allowed Jones to draw him in a variety of gory states—but not before committing a murder, which sends Batman looking for a partially transparent “meat-man.”

This series is only five-issues long, as opposed to the 12 issues Jones got to play with writer Steve Niles during Batman: Gotham After Midnight, I guess I’ll just have to savor this while I can.


Doom Patrol #3 (DC) Of all of DC’s 30-some-page, $3.99, second feature-having books I’ve sampled, this one is by far the strangest.

The lead story, by Keith Giffen, Matthew Clark and Livesay, has, for three issues now, been rather lifeless and uninspired, flying quickly by. But the back-up, by Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, has been a blast, and seems to take as long if not longer to read than the feature, owing perhaps to the sort of verbal humor Giffen and DeMatteis engage in needing so many words, and the fact that Maguire’s detailed funny faces invite the eyes to linger.

Clark’s art, on the other hand, often looks like the artist himself doesn’t even want to look at it for very long.

The result is I could take or leave Doom Patrol, but I love Metal Men, and the back-up is so substantial that I don’t even feel like I’m paying $4 for just ten-pages.

I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with Clark’s art, either. He seems technically proficient, it looks like she spends some time on each panel, he doesn’t take too many obvious shortcuts, and the panels and page lay-outs show some variety.

There just doesn’t seem to be much joy in the drawings themselves, which is so much more apparent when you compare this Doom Patrol comic to, say, that issue of Batman: The Brave and the Bold featuring the DP that J. Bone drew, or even that issue of The Brave and The Bold that teamed The Flash’s family up with the DP that George Perez drew, which depicted the characters in Perez’s more stately, classic superhero style than Bone’s own fast, fun and light cartooning style.

Both of those books featured delightful art. The characters looked alive, and every panel was fun to look at. That’s not the case here, and I don’t know why exactly. I could just say that Clark is no Perez and no Bone, but Perez and Bone are polar opposites—no one draws like both of them.

I think there’s a problem, but I can’t really diagnose it, nor can I imagine what an editor could do. Tell Clark to love the Doom Patrol more? To have more fun drawing it? To make sure his pages somehow emanate joy?

But when I see something like this panel, in which a guy wearing lederhosen who has been possessed by a sentient black hole is arguing with a robot
and I somehow find it dull, I can’t help thinking that something’s just not clicking the way it should.

I suppose all the weird lighting “special effects” in the art work don’t help much, nor does Giffen’s use of Dr. Caulder’s notes as story-telling devices.

I mean, this is the very first page of this issue:
Who wants to read a comic that looks like that? I got discouraged at my first glance, before reading a single word.

I don’t suppose it matters in the long run, since there may not be a long run. According to Marc-Oliver Frisch’s latest sales analysis, the new series debuted right around where John Byrne’s re-booted version was selling by its third issue, which makes it seem like DP should be doomed by the 18-month point.

It’s too bad, as the concept for the series seems strong this time out. Maybe DC shouldn’t have waited so long to give the team a title after Geoff Johns re-introduced them in Teen Titans in the “One Year Later” arc...?



*Whose art I’ve since come to love, and wish I could see more often. Especially around Gotham City.


**What can I say? I was obviously a stupid kid. My opinion’s changed since then. Looking back, my biggest beef with Aparo in the ‘90s was that he drew terribly ugly ties, and that he wasn’t Norm Breyfogle or Kelley Jones.