Comics Is Educational

The other day I stopped at a chain coffee shop that always offers ten cents off your purchase if you correctly answer the multiple-choice trivia question they have written on a chalkboard below the coffees of the day.

The question on this particularly day was, "What metal is liquid at room temperature?"

Choice d.) was mercury, which I correctly answered. Was this fact something I had learned in school? Hell no; I was an English major. I didn't learn anything having to do with the real world since my junior year in high school or so.

I learned it from Mark Waid, Grant Morrison, and company's weekly series 52, which featured The Metal Men, whose boisterous member Mercury announced the fact that he was the only metal liquid at room temperature so often that it was basically his catchphrase, a nerdier version of "Hulk smash!" or "It's clobberin' time!"

So thanks DC! You saved me a dime! (And not for the first time!) That's like getting 1/30th off of one of your comics!

Sixteen thoughts about the 52 trades and their "extras"

There was a lot to admire about DC’s first year-long weekly series, 52. One of the more admirable things, I thought, was that it was a sequential comic book completely intended to be read as it was being published, in it’s 20-page, stapled, comic book format.

In other words, it wasn’t a graphic novel that was simply being chopped up into chapters and marketed as a series to make a little extra money in the direct market before tackling the book market, like so many comics these days.

In fact, it was so perfectly created to be enjoyed as a comic book series, rather than a trade paperback, that as I was reading it, I couldn’t even imagine how it would be collected in trade. With different artists handling the art chores each issue, it seemed like it would make for the ugliest trade ever some day.

Well, I recently checked all four volumes of it out from the library. Part of that was simple curiosity, to see how it reads in one sitting, whether or not it works in a trade format or not (It does; Keith Giffen’s layouts really do the trick).

But in greater part, it was because the trades include little afterwords between each issue’s worth of story, with some of the creators involved telling inside stories about the particular issue. These come from Michael Siglain, Keith Giffen, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns, J.G. Jones, Phil Jiminez, Dan DiDio and, on one occasion, Paul Levitz. MIA are Grant Morrison and Steve Wacker, the latter of whom has since left the company to work for Marvel.

I find the production of this book incredibly fascinating, and always appreciated whatever interviews any of the creators involved did about it. The four writers—Johns, Waid, Morrison and Rucka—are just so different, and everyone insisted everyone wrote everything together, with a “band” like approach to the creation. I want every look behind the curtain I can get, and this one offers lots of little peeks.

Anyway, here are some thoughts on the trade collections of 52…


1.) While the trades read better than I would have thought, the series still reads best as it was intended—as a weekly experience. The myriad little mysteries running throughout and the guessing games involved were a great part of the fun of the series, and seeing them all solved within a few hours, rather than the course of a year, may be satisfying, but does rob the reader of one of the series’ great pleasures.

Additionally, a weekly comic book that readers feel has to be read immediately in comic book form, rather than six months form now in trade, is, I think, extremely important for DC and Marvel, and any comic book companies that hope to truly compete with them in a meaningful way. If the industry is ever going to be able to resist some sort of all-graphic novel (or perhaps electronic) model, then the future lies in books like these.

It’s not hard to imagine a weekly, universe-wide series like this at each of the Big Two, and weeklies starring Batman, Batman’s sidekicks, Superman, The Justice League, The Avengers, The X-Men and Spider-Man. If weekly series became standardized enough, it would be easy enough to see them even returning to magazine racks.

But back on track for a second, while the story itself reads just fine, the trades are an overall less appealing package. The two-page back-up origins are missing, for one, and while J.G. Jones’ covers are all included, they play a less prominent role, all republished at smaller scale at the back of each volume, rather than kicking off each chapter.


2.) DC and Marvel have both been shying away from using blurbs on their trade covers of late, but 52 is lousy with ‘em. Most are pretty positive, some kind suspiciously vague (“[A] grand experiment…fun.” Or “An unprecedented undertaking…”). But still, they’ve got blurbs from The New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon.com, The Onion, Variety, the New York Daily News, Entertainment Weekly, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Miami Herald, the Newark Star Ledger and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Can’t wait to see what the Countdown trades look like…


3.) Jones’ covers for these things are pretty weak:




(Note: That fourth one is in color and has trade dress matching the first three. DC hasn't updated the listing on their site though, despite the fact that the trade is, you know, completed and ready for purchase now).

The rendering is fine, and I can see how he was going for a unified theme, with the stars standing front and center in front of other members of the ensemble, but compared to some of the brilliant covers on the 52 individual issues of 52?

These really suck.

I don’t think I like the idea of Doctor Magnus looking so much like Doctor John Dorian, either…


4.) According to Waid, Steve Wacker wrote the notes on Rip’s infamous blackboard scene, and a few of them are things that were meant to be addressed but never were or will be, including “2000 years from now” and “What is Spanner’s Galaxy?” Not sure why Waid sounds so definitive abut it being something that won’t be gotten to eventually.

Looking at the board and Rip’s scattered notes, there’s a lot there that is so vague I’m still not sure if was actually covered somewhere. A lot of it seems to have been things covered outside of 52 anyway.


5.) Despite being constantly concerned with the book going off the rails due to the unforgiving deadline schedule, Giffen was apparently constantly fucking with everyone. He accidentally revealed Batwoman a little too early, which wasn’t caught, and he drew a Spider-Man balloon into the Thanksgiving parade (which was caught) and Zatara in fishnets (ditto).


6.) I’m not in love with Batwoman’s costume, which is just Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl costume with a different color scheme, a Silver Age Batwoman/Bat-Girl-esque mask, and a tweaked bat logo. Ross designed several different masks for her though, and they were all worse, I think. All were borrowed from other iterations—Batgirl’s mask, Batman Beyond’s mask, Huntress’ mask—save one, which looks like a Bat-symbol perched over her eyes, its wings flaring up off the sides of her head.

A few weeks later, there’s a full-color sketch from Ross labeled “Batgirl” (it’s the costume which is just a red and black version of Barbara Gordon’s, with a Batman Beyond-shaped Bat-symbol). The one sentence blurb accompanying it is interesting: “Alex Ross’s proposed sketch was originally intended for a new ‘Batgirl’—but was repurposed later for Batwoman.”

Huh?

This can’t possibly have been sitting in a drawer since the last new Batgirl was introduced (Huntress as Batgirl and then Cassandra Cain as Batgirl in “No Man’s Land”), could it? (Alex Ross did do some “No Man’s Land” covers).

Were there plans for another new Batgirl that were scrapped, then?


7.) There was one thing in the story that I was positive would get fixed in the trade and it didn’t. In week 11, Ralph confronts a member of “The Cult of Conner,” using the name “Cult of Conner” and showing a news clipping with the same name. In the weekly post-mortems on Newsarama.com, the editors and writers maintained that the general public wasn’t using that phrase, only those who already knew Superboy’s identity were. This scene contradicts that, and is still here.

Obviously, if Superboy’s name, even just his first name got out, the fact that there was a Conner Kent in Smallville, Kansas living with Clark Kent’s parents, well…you wouldn’t need to be Lex Luthor to figure out Superman’s identity with a clue that big.


8.) DiDio writes a passage about the introduction of Batwoman, and the fact that she was a lesbian caused a bit of a medium hubbub. He mentioned that he got over 1,000 emails on the subject of Batwoman’s sexuality, split 50/50 between positive and negative.

What I found most interesting was his conclusion:



I said it then and I feel it is worth repeating now: Batwoman is a hero first, and being lesbian only helps to define who she is and how she arrives at the choices she makes. I am proud of her addition to our pantheon of characters and although you are only meeting her briefly in this issue, we expect great things from her character in the future.



That first issue was September of 2006. This trade, in which DiDio wrote that paragraph, was released in May. Is she really in DC’s “pantheon of characters” at this point? Damian al Ghul has been a bigger part of Batman’s adventures and Gotham City since the end of 52 than Batwoman is.

DC has released solicitation through March of 2008, and there’s been no mention of the Batwoman ongoing that’s been rumored since fall of ’06, and had at least two writers attached to it so far.

And even if her title never comes, she’s yet to really play a part in the Bat-books. At least the one’s I read (Batman and ’TEC). Other than last year’s Christmas special and a panel or four of Countdown has she appeared anywhere yet? Has Batman met her yet? Has Barbara Gordon?

Every time a completely irrelevant fill-in appears in Batman or Detective Comics, every time a Bat- event like “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” or Gotham Underground is announced, I can’t help but wonder why DC is literally sitting on a more relevant, more interesting and more eagerly anticipated Bat-related story.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that the fact that Batwoman is a lesbian is apparently a bigger deal than DiDio’s words seem to indicate, and that people within the company hierarchy are of very different opinions on what’s appropriate for a member of the Bat-family.

(I don’t think the company as a whole, or DiDio, are necessarily homophobic, or worried about being perceived negatively by homophobes. Lesbian character Montoya has a current miniseries, gay character Midnighter has an ongoing in the WildStorm imprint, and gay man Piper plays a role in Countdown. On the other hand, Manhunter, which had gay characters in its supporting cast, isn’t being published any longer, but readers were publicly assured it wasn’t cancelled, gay Superman analogue Apollo was pointedly made into a Ray analogue in Countdown: Arena, and Countdown is full of some pretty clumsy gay jokes).

It does seem like an instance of leeriness of a gay character trumping a good business decision though. Surely a Batwoman comic or event is going to outsell, oh, at least half of the books DC is publishing now, and be met with more interest than Batman fighting the Scarecrow for the 456th time.


9.) Apparently, one of the most labor-intensive parts of the series was Booster Gold’s death in week fifteen, as multiple drafts were done as the writers tried to work out a way to make the death look final, from the presence of a corpse to Booster’s last words. Waid originally wrote him dying while making fun of Supernova, saying things like, “Look at me, I’ve saving the day, I’m Supernova!” The others talked him away from that as being a little too big of a clue. They were right. What sold the death the most to me was that it was a heroic death. If a hero dies in an unheroic way, you know they’re coming back—and even when they do die a heroic one, they’re still probably coming back sooner or later anyway (See Hal Jordan, Ice, Oliver Queen and Jason Todd).

Also, in Giffen’s lay-outs, Booster Gold’s body was ripped in half by the explosion. That’s gotta be Geoff Johns’ idea.


10.) Abraham Lincoln really was one of Booster Gold’s pallbearers. According to Waid, Wacker chose the pallbearers, and one was “yes, Abraham Lincoln (from—my hand to God—an unpublished Justice League story I once wrote for Steve on a dare).” Now that’s a story I’d really like to read. Forget Four Horsemen and Crime Bible, can we get 52 Aftermath: The Abraham Lincoln Justice League Story Mark Waid Wrote on a Dare? I’d buy one.

I wonder if Waid was referring to the Lincoln story he wrote from the never released Elseworlds 80-Page Giant? A book that was pulped because of the concerns that Kyle Baker’s Super-Baby story would have kids microwaving babies or something like that. It was later published in one of the Bizarro Comics anthologies, anyway.

Font of information Wikipedia has a breakdown of the contents, including a story by Waid and EDILW favorite Ty Templeton entitled “Superman in President Abraham (Brainiac) Lincoln Vs. Clark Kent, Mentallo” in which baby Kal-El’s rocket is discovered by the Booth family.

Or did Waid write two crazy-ass Lincoln stories?


11.) The Ross-designed Batgirl isn’t the only Bat-story that never came to pass referred to in this series of trades. Rucka talks about an unrealized plan during his time on Detective Comics, near the very end of Denny O’Neil’s era as the character’s chief shepherd, which was focused on “moving Batman away from the dour-faced humorless vigilante.” Says Rucka, “There had even been a plan to do so, and a way to bring it to pass, but a change in group editors scuttled that, and, shortly after, scuttled my own participation in all things Batman, at least for the time being.”

I wonder what the plan for that was? The one DC went with was apparently to rejigger the universe so that Batman did catch his parents’ killer, apparently retconning away some of his dour-faced humorless-ness (I guess; I don’t think this has been addressed in any stories at all yet, but it’s specifically referred to in Infinite Crisis as an element of the rejiggering), plus have him take a year-long vacation and have the darkness cut out of him by the ten-eyed surgeons.


12.) Waid refers to Plastic Man’s son Offspring as being a character he created “with Frank Quitely ten years ago for a story from which, I swear to you, he was the only good thing to emerge.”

That issue with Quitely was great, but it’s interesting that Waid won’t even say the words “The Kingdom” and that he’s so down on it, too. Because some pretty significant things came out of that event, including the concept of Hypertime (apparently since forgotten, and only really touched upon in the pages of Superboy and JLA/Avengers anyway), the idea that The Trinity were the lone holders of its secret existence (and a deputized Superboy), and the grown up version of the Trinity’s son.

I remember at the time, reading interviews with Morrison and Waid trying to explain exactly what Hypertime was, and Morrison saying that to truly explain it, he’d have to do a big, Cisis-like miniseries entitled Professor Morrison Explains It All. So I’m assuming Final Crisis is a story that Morrison’s been wanting to tell in some form for ten years now.

Oh, and Funnybook Babylon has uncovered a Morrison interview from 2002 in which talks about Hypertime and what sounds like Morrison’s plans for Final Crisis.


13.) Giffen hated Osiris, quite passionately. In fact, he hated him so much that one of the gag sketches he would occasionally do prefigured the fate the writers had planned for Osiris—it was three panels of Sobek looking upon Osiris and imagining him as a giant dancing roast chicken, then calling some kind of counselor on the phone.

A few issues later, Giffen’s afterword described the Osiris chomping and his own feelings for O. thusly—“I was coming off one of the more satisfying sequences in the series, the death of that annoying little twit Osiris (I HATED that kid!) and was up for more mayhem.”


14.) Originally Veronica Cale was supposed to be killed by Black Adam. That scene where he walks right past her on Oolong Island without even glancing at her? In the original script, Adam smooshed her there. Rucka had to argue for keeping her alive. I’m glad he won that argument. It’s a neat little scene and while she hasn’t been used to much effect since (I didn’t care for the issues of Giffen and Ollife’s Four Horseman mini I’ve read), Wonder Woman needs all the rogues she can get.


15.) Rucka pulls no punches in discussing the botched Wonder Woman relaunch.

Earlier Michael Siglain discusses the fact that though the 52 creators knew exactly where Batman and Superman spent the missing year (Having the incoming Batman writer and incoming Action Comics co-writer on the team), they weren’t sure where Wonder Woman was, and no one at DC could give them a straight answer, which is why she ended up getting only a few Nanda Parbat appearances at the end of the year’s worth of issues.

Rucka attacks the Allan Heinberg spearheaded and DC editorial OK-ed new direction more fiercely:

The Wonder Woman resolve bothered me—I think it was Grant who wrote it specifically—and to this day still doesn’t sit right with me. While Bruce got most of the year to define and then to “solve” his dilemma, Diana was releaged to three appearances in the course of two weeks, and I think that Rama Kushna telling her that her whole problem is that she’s “not human enough” is garbage. It’s reductive and it’s simplistic, and it was, in my opinion, unworthy of the character.

I was, clearly, in a minority, as her entire relaunch was based on this premise.

Heh. “Garbage.” “Reductive.” “Simplistic.” “Unworthy of the character.” And this is Rucka talking about the new direction in a DC comic book! Could you imagine what he’d have to say of it if you were alone with him in a bar after he’s had a couple of beers?

And, though he may have been in the minority at DC, I think that state of the Wonder Woman franchise post-Infinite Crisis as opposed to pre-Infinite Crisis will show that he was right.


16.) According to Waid, they spent a full week deciding whether Mr. Mind should still be wearing his little glasses post-metamorphisis. I think they made the right decision. Clearly his glasses would have fallen off his head when he transformed, given how big his head got and the new shape it assumed. Besides, his new form should have perfect eyesight, shouldn’t it?

May 17th's Meanwhile, in Las Vegas...

This week’s Las Vegas Weekly column is comprised of reviews of Nick Bertozzi’s excellent original graphic novel The Salon (thus far, 2007’s best book), one-named cartoonist Jason’s take on the increasingly tired zombie genre The Living and the Dead, and German manga-ka Anike Hage’s wonderfully named Gothic Sports.

In other, less self-promotional news…

—This post on Scans_Daily reminded me just how much I loved the relationship between Superman and Batman in Trinity, and how adding Wonder Woman to the mix really changes the dynamic between the two. They really oughta just cancel Superman/Batman (a mercy killing at this point) and let Matt Wagner do a Trinity ongoing.

The link has scans of two of my favorite scenes, Batman yelling at Dick Grayson in front of Superman, and Superman talking about how he sees all of Batman’s silly tricks before he pulls ‘em out, but lets it slide because it makes Batman happy to think he’s surprising and impressing him.



—So that Mary Jane “comiquette” thing? Forget my existential agonizing prompted by Dirk Deppey’s piece at Journalista. Turns out he was wrong and all the online complaining is accomplishing something. Not changing the direction of mainstream super-comics or anything like that, but the mainstream media is now apparently covering the kerfuffle. Outside of Spidey movie stuff (which is probably driving mainstream interest in the comiquette controversy to a large degree), this is the most mainstream media coverage Marvel’s garnered since Cap got capped, right?



—Any Eric Powell fans who slogged through this week's long-ass installment of “Weekly Haul” might have noticed that there was no review of Satan’s Sodomy Baby, or Satan’s $@#%* Baby, as the shipping lists and outer cover refer to it.

Why no review? Well, it’s a long, uninteresting story. Which I will now proceed to tell you.

I actually forgot to pick it up Wednesday. I blame my local comic shop. They used to shelve all the new books of the week on the back wall, the entire cover of each and every book clearly visible, in alphabetical order. Even with this very consumer-friendly layout, I would occasionally still forget books, particularly Ultimate Spider-Man, Runaways and New Avengers, since the covers remained pretty much unchanged form issue to issue (And I’m dumb).

The store was fairly recently redesigined with a new new book layout, and now I tend to forget books on a weekly basis. The whole left wall of the store is lined with tiered shelves, in which new books are shelved along with books from the last several weeks so, for example, the latest issue of Amazing Spider-Man is just above last month’s issue and the issue before that too. The way the shelves are set-up, you can generally only see the top parts of each book. There are little orange placards behind each book notifying you that it’s a new book, but it’s a lot of visual information to scan, and little to go on, making it less than browser-friendly.

That’s also why last week’s “Weekly Haul” didn’t mention that Jeff Parker and Mike Wieringo’s Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four #2 was pretty awesome (I loved the “Daredevil’s all bumpin’ into things” line), and Wednesday's didn’t contain a review of Satan’s Sodomy Baby.

And speaking of which...

The book came pre-bagged, with a generic black cover featuring a big, long South Park-style “Warning” that functions as both an actual warning and a joke, and the title changed to Satan’s $@#%* Baby.

Flip that bad boy over, and there’s the actual title—Satan’s Sodomy Baby—on the actual cover, which features a really nice Powell cover with absolutely nothing objectionable on it (Well, the stuff that the titular character is covered in might be objectionable, but, without reading it, one won’t know for sure what the material actually is; it could just as easily be blood or mud as…anything grosser). The title page and the small print also use the Sodomy title. So that’s apparently the title.

Soooo, why the “$@#%*” did Dark Horse retitle the thing? “Sodomy” is not a swear word; it’s an extremely old term that is incredibly loosely defined to the point that it refers to pretty much any sexual act that isn’t penal/vaginal. “Sodomy” doesn’t mean “ass-rape” or “butt-fucking;” a blowjob administered to a man from a woman, is also defined as sodomy by some parts. I could see being cute about the name of the book if it were Satan’s Ass-Rape Baby or Satan’s Butt-Fuck Baby or just plain old Satan’s Fuck Baby (which is what I actually assumed the title was when I first saw those swear-word symbols), but “sodomy?”

It just seems like an overly squeamish response, trying to preempt a modern day Wertham from freaking out should the book somehow find it’s way into a child’s hands (Like kids go to direct market comic book shops and buy comics! The industry wishes.)

Oh, and pet peeve—There are six letters in “sodomy” and only five symbols in “$@#%*”; I suppose there’s no rule regarding this, but I like when the letters and symbols correspond, so that you can figure out what the swear word is. But maybe that’s just me. See, to compare it to a bleeped-out swear word in an audio or audiovisual media, not having them match up is like bleeping out the “-uck” ane leaving the “fuh-“ (or, starting the bleep too early), you know?

I probably wouldn’t have bought this book at all due to my irritation with Dark Hors'es embarrassment about publishing it at all (I certainly wouldn’t have made a special trip back to the shop today to pick it up) if I didn’t review comic books for a living (Well, 1/3 of my living, anyway…if you could call this living. [Sorry, that was a bad joke even by EDILW bad joke standards]).

Full review next week, but it is full of Powell’s usual nice art and lots of funny sentences. And if you buy one book just for the boobs this week, make yours Dark Horse, True Believers! At least Powell draws nipples on his topless women.



—Damn it. I just realized I didn’t get X-Men First Class Special this week either. I forgot to get it on Wednesday, just like Satan’s Sodomy Baby. I went back to the shop today to pick up SSB and I forgot to get the First Class special again. Arrgh.



—DC announced two 52 related trades Thursday at Newsarama.com (and I don’t know, maybe elsewhere too.) The new J.G. Jones cover for the trade is decent, but not as good as some of the 52 covers he’d done. And what the hell is up with that Entertainment Weekly blurb. “As addictive as any good TV series” is the best they could come up with? I know I’ve said much kinder things about it both in LVW and here (What do you mean EDILW isn’t as well-known and well-respected as EW?).

Two companion volumes were also announced, a $20 hardcover collection of Jones’ covers, which is a little more than I was expecting, but I feel obligated to buy it, having asked for just that for about 52 weeks straight. The other is a very, very weird one:


52: THE COMPANION TP
Writers: Steve Ditko, Greg Rucka, Gardner Fox, Grant Morrison, Steve Gerber, Mark Schultz, Jack Miller, Dan Jurgens, David Goyer and Geoff Johns

Artists: Steve Ditko, Kano & Stefano Gaudiano, Chaz Truog & Doug Hazlewood, Carmine Infantino, Walter Simonson, Doug Mahnke & Tom Nguyen, Murphy Anderson, Alex Toth, Dan Jurgens & Tom Dzon and Leonard Kirk & Keith Champagne

Collects: MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1, GOTHAM CENTRAL #40, ANIMAL MAN #16, METAL MEN #45, SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF STEEL #97, RIP HUNTER: TIME MASTER #6, JSA #43-44, and stories from DETECTIVE COMICS #350, STRANGE ADVENTURES #226, SECRET ORIGINS #35.

$19.99 U.S., 224 pages

I’m just about curious enough about these issues to look them all up on comics.org, but as far as I can tell they appear to be a collection of key issues from the various players in 52’s fictional careers. It sure looks like the most random collection of comics stories ever assembled, and the title is a little goofy. I think I already have most of these stories, but it may be worth checking out .

I’m a little surprised there hasn’t been a Secret Origins trade announced yet, collecting the back-ups.


—Finally, speaking of Newsarama.com, Countdown editor Mike Marts tells Matt Brady that the fact that Jimmy Olsen knows the secret identities of the Robins is a plot point, not a mistake. Uh-huh. Then why doesn't Jason Todd act surprised when Olsen calls him "Mr. Todd?" The 'rama interview sound a litle like someone who trips and then says "I meant to do that," but not in a deadly serious way, and then follows it up with, "And if you get to know me better, perhaps you'll come to understand why I tripped on purpose."

From the Pages of 52

Ready for the second round of the Official EDILW 52 Post-Game Armchair Editing? You know I am!

In this installment, we're going to take a look at how DC could best capitalize on the success of 52, both creatively and commercially. So we'll be breaking spin-offs into three categories: The comics that DC has already announced, the ones they should announce, and the ones they shouldn't announce.

Each series, be it imminent or hypothetical, will be followed by two scores, with the first number designating the project's creative potential on a scale of one to ten (with one being World War III and ten being All-Star Superman), and the second number designating the project's commercial potential (with a one being Manhunter and a 10 being Justice).



Comics That DC Has Already Announced:







BLACK ADAM

There's no question that 52 (and Geoff Johns' JSA run before it) made a star out of Captain Marvel's evil double, so finally giving him a book of his own to star in was a no-brainer. It's somewhat odd to see it coming so soon after the end of 52 though, since he was given a rather elegant send-off into limbo (not the bit with the boots, but the end of #50, where he's left wandering the world guessing his new magic word).

Re-powering him in the near future should probve problematic (dude is up there with Hitler in terms of bodycount now, right?), although his series could very well focus on his past, or, even more interestingly, as his presnet stuck in Teth-Adam form. Can DC resist temptation and keep him a powerless human being throughout an entire series? It will be interesting to see. Writer Peter Tomasi's Light Brigade was a very good series, penciller Dough Mahnke is an incredible talent, able to handle quiet emotion even better than big supehero brawls (which he does quite well, as his run on JLA proved), and inker Christian Alamy rules the school, on both pencils and inks. 7/10









BOOSTER GOLD

Now this is something of a surprise, even though I didn't really believe that Booster had died way back in Week 15, and he was long my prime suspect for Supernova. But on the list entitled DC Characters That Are Capable of Carrying Their Own Monthly In Today's Market, I'd suspect Booster Gold to be somewhere between Martian Manhunter and Space Cabby (Fercrisakes, I can barely take his name as the name of a superhero seriously, let alone as a title of a good comic book, and I love the lug). Nevertheless, the very last issue of 52 seems to have given his book a neat premise, even neater than the time-travel focus that was mentioned when it was first announced (which would have made it like the ill-fated but excellent series Chronos), since it now seems he'll be exploring the new, economy sized multiverse (which would make it more like Exiles, I guess).

Plus, he's got a cast including Supernova, Rip Hunter and Skeets, so that's something (now just add a Ted Kord to the mix—shouldn't be too hard to save him from death using time travel a la Marvel's Captain Marvel and a few dozen other super-characters I can think of—and we're really cooking). Based on the cover, the first storyline will involve Booster journeying to an earth where pre-invasion Iraq was run by a Baathist regime consisting of characters throughout the old DC multiverse, and he's hunting them down for the U.S. marines.

The announced creators are, at the outset, Johns and Jeff Katz. As an architect of the new multiverse, Johns is obviously a perfect choice. I'm less sure about this Katz character, mainly because DC hasn't had much luck (creatively or commercially) with recruiting professional writers from other media to handle their characters of late (Think those knuckleheads who wrote Flash: The Fastest Man Alive, Jodi Picoult, Tad Williams, John Rogers and Richard Donner*).

Art comes courtesy of penciller Dan Jurgens. I really like seeing an artist of his caliber drawing characters primarily known by other talents (on that cover above, for example, we get to see a Jurgens version of Frank MIller character and a C.C. Beck character). The cheif (okay, only) pleasure of that ill-considered ten-part "History of The DCU" that ran in the back of the first ten issues of 52 was seeing Jurgens "covering" other artists throughout this series. 8/10







52 AFTERMATH: THE FOUR HORSEMEN

Now this is weird, on just about every level. The Four Horsemen? They only appeared in a few issues of 52, and were all killed in thier last appearances (one is even currently a pair of boots, which should be showing up in Black Adam at some point). Weirder still is that DC is calling this book 52 Aftermath—it weakens what is currently a pretty strong brand (in the same way that putting "from the pages of 52" atop the World War III books did), and how is it that those five words are somehow deemed more likely to move books off the shelves than the names of DC's top three icons?

I've got next to nothing to go on here, but I suppose it's nice to see DC's "Trinity" actually doing something together. I've said before that I think the concept is more than a little forced (Sure, Wonder Woman is the third most well-known DC character, but there's as big a gap between her overall Q-rating and that of Superman and Batman's, and a much, much smaller gap between hers and, say, Robin, Aquaman, Supergirl or even the Flash). Superman and Batman seem to team up a couple times a week—they even share an ongoing title devoted to their team-ups—but how often does Wonder Woman get included in their adventures unless there's a whole Justice League involved? Rarely, to the point of hardly ever.

On the positive side, it's written by Keith Giffen, who should reeaallly be doing some more writing at DC these days, and drawn by 52 pencil army veteran Patrick Olliffe, whose art I look forward to seeing in a less deadline pressurized book. 5/5




INFINITY INC.

No cover image of this book yet, nor has an artist been announced (or, if there has, I totally forgot who it was), but this was actually one of the earliest 52 spin-offs announced. It's also one that perplexes me. I really dig Steel; I have since "Reign of the Superman." Morrison and Waid used him quite brilliantly in JLA (though I was more than a little irritated that Waid dumped him from the line-up when he inherited the title), his own monthly had some ups and downs (with the Preist/Cowan run that ended it consisting of the most consistent up**), and I've often found myself unreasonably concerned about his well-being (Our Worlds At War) and character design (I don't know who designed that bug helmet, but it sucks).

Now, what Steel has to do with Infinity Inc., other than the fact that Natasha/Steel II (Or Steel III, if we count Commander Steel's grandson as Steel I?) joined the a team which co-opted that name, and that he himself kicked a few of their asses, I don't know. The pitch for this book is that John Henry and Natasha would be leading a new team of Infinitors, forging the loser leftovers from the Everyman Project into real heroes.

All of which strikes me as a pretty shrug-inducing idea for a monthly, particularly from writer Peter Milligan, who already wrote the hell out of the concept of shallow, fame-hungry heroes-as-celebrities once with X-Force/X-Statix. I'd much prefer a more flexible Steel solo title (even if it begins by dealing with Everyman Project/52 fall-out) and/or Steel back in the League (even if mainly/only in a building-stuff for the knuckleheads on the team capacity—outside the Trinity, it's not exactly a group that has any rocket scientists, and steel is both a literal and metaphorical rocket scientist).

Finally, this book uses the tried-and-false tactic of taking a DC brand name of next-to-no-value (Blue Beetle, Atom, Firestorm, Aquaman, Manhunter) and giving it to different characters, thus successfully alienating the only people who actually are attracted to that brand name. 4/2




Comics DC Should Announce:



DOC MAGNUS AND THE METAL MEN

I've mentioned this one before, but I'll mention it again because, goddamit, this would be awesome. Seriously, close your eyes and think about what the best part of 52 was—why yes, that's right, the Oolong Island bits. And who was the star of those? Doc Magnus. Paired with Waid's mission statement for the team, setting Magnus and his inventions up against the very mad-scientists he co-starred with in 52 seems like an easy continuation of the series (as well as a natural and organic one).

When one considers that Metal Men film is apparently currently in development, this really, really has to happen.

Unfortunatley, DC has screwed this pooch almost immediately, with the Metal Men's post-52 appearances consisting of cameos in "The Tornado's Path" and a horribly drawn, completely nonsensical story in Superman/Batman. While Waid and Morrison would be perfect (as would Darwyn Cooke or Michael Allred or Evan Dorkin or Kyle Baker, none of whom seem terribly likely), so too would Tom Peyer, Scott Beatty, Ty Templeton, Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis and...that's all I got off the top of my head, actually. After reading the first issue of Mark Verheiden and "Pat Lee"'s story in Superman/Batman, I'm tempted to say anyone but them, but I'm sure there are actually all sorts of people who could fuck a series like this up. 10/10




GHOST DETECTIVES

And speaking of things that just have to happen, there's the incredibly happy ending that the Four Horseman of 52 managed to give the Dibneys in #52. On one hand, this seems like a nice set-up for future Dibny stories, but on the other, it seems like a perfect place to end their story, doesn't it? It is, after all, Ralph's version of heaven, and why muck it up by having us watch them? I say put this book off until Mark Waid has the time and inclination to write it. (In the meantime, we can always see the Dibnys and Sat. Era or JLI Era stories in JLA: Classified, or a Croaton Society mini set in the past). 7/7



CAPTAIN MARVEL

This is another one I'm repeating myself on, but if there's one thing we pride ourselves on here at EDILW, it's consistency (Which is a nicer way to say redundancy). Now that the villain behind Skeets (or, in this case, inside him) has been revealed, it's clear that on one level, 52 boils down to a story of Captain Marvel villains Black Adam, Dr. Sivana and Mr. Mind fighting one another and much of the DC Universe.

It was unqeustionably DC's biggest hit of the year, and the largest swathes of it's stars came from Captain Marvel's cast...and not even any of the heroes, just some of his villains. Surely if Black Adam and company can carry a friggin' weekly, they could (help) carry a monthly, no?

Of course, one could argue that the success of the Marvel character in 52 owed more to the people writing them than the characters themselves, and one could point to the cancelled Power of Shazam! series as evidence of this. It's true that Cap isn't an easy character to "get," as Judd Winick's body of work so readily shows. Those that seem to get him the best—Morrison, Waid, Johns, Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, Kurt Busiek, Jeff Smith—are all pretty busy dudes, with a lot on their plates (and the stature to work on pretty much whatever they want). And I'd personally prefer no Captain Marvel DCU comic to a wretched Captain Marvel DCU comic (a la Trials of Shazam). So maybe the time isn't right for a new Shazam! monthly, but don't sleep on it too long DC—if that Shazam movie ever gets made, you're gonna want to have a comic book on the stands by then. 10/8



MISCELLANEOUS MISSING YEAR MADNESS

Again, these are all series I've mentioned before, but here goes anyway: Batman, Robin and Nightwing sailing around the world traning, something that I'm actually surprised we haven't seen more flashbacks to yet; it's certainly a thousand times more interesting than Royal McGraw's weird continuations of '70s storylines, John Ostrander's inventorty-tastic tale of Grotesk and Johnny Karaoeke and whatever the hell's been going on in Robin and Nightwing OYL); what went down in Gotham City (they could even reuse the name Gotham Nights, from those early '90s miniseries about Gotham citizens who weren't sueprheroes or supervillains); the Teen Titans' nutty year (we saw some of it alluded to in "Titans Around the World," 52 and we got to see Terra II's heart get punched out for no reason in World War III, but I'd kinda like to see those 50 teens coming and going through the tower, as well as see how Wendy and Marvin hooked up with the gang and...hey, where the hell did they disappear to in the last story arc, anyway?); and the further adventures of Firestorm II's shortlived JLA (C'mon DC, the world needs more Ambush Bug and Super Cheif team-ups, and you're not really using JLA: Classified for anything right now anyway!) 10/10




Comics DC Shouldn't Announce:



ANIMAL MAN

I like Animal Man, and always have. He was pretty cool before Grant Morrison got his hands on him, and, obviously, he was much cooler afterwards (I have a soft-spot for vegan activists superheroes). I even dug a lot of the post-Morrison Vertigo stories, particularly those written by Jamie Delano, many of which would have fit into the DCU just as easily as the VU (with a few minor alterations).

In his just-ended weekly debriefs with Matt Brady at Newsarama.com, Michael Siglain asked Newsaramites whether or not they'd want an Animal Man mini or ongoing. Some apparently did.

Well, they're wrong.

We don't need or want an Animal Man mini or ongoing, at least not at this point. Now, I always enjoy seeing Buddy Baker whenever he shows up, even if the stories aren't all that great, and am certainly in favor of him showing up in DC books a lot (even on a regular basis, in, say, JLoA or, possibly, a Forgotten Heroes book; though the former already has an animal-powered hero and the latter doesn't seem like a good publishing move at this point), but I don't think we need him in his own book.

It basically boils down to the fact that Morrison handled his last solo, ongoing DCU adventures so consumately in Animal Man that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot in the way of new story to tell...at least not new story capable of living up to what Morrison and several of his followers managed. A new Animal Man series seems predestined to suffer in comparison (A similarly effected character is Swamp Thing; I know there have been good Swampy stories since Alan Moore's run ended but, at the same time, most of seemed perfectly superfluous).

Sure, he worked fairly well here in 52, but then, he was part of an ensemble through most of it, and was partially written by Morrison throughout. as well A new Animal Man series would have to be able to be at least as good as (or at least not too much worse than) Morrison's Animal Man, and there are precious few writers capable of following Morrison in any successful fashion. Waid and Millar (sometimes), Tom Peyer and Jamie Delano have all done it successfully, but I have trouble thinking of any others.

So I vote no on Animal Man in his own new comic, but yes on more Animal Man in any (and everybody) else's comic. 3/7



THE QUESTION

I like Renee Montoya. I like The Question. But I don't like Montoya as The Question II. (Just like I like Aquaman and like Batman, but wouldn't like Aquaman as Batman...at least not permanently***). Granted, Montoya-as-Question would probably be a lot less grating in a title of her own than as part of a huge story involving an ensemble cast (As I've complained about somewhere in then neighborhood of 50 times previously, Montoya's scenes were the only first-person narrated ones in 52), but her storyline was one of the least popular in 52 (along with Steel's) and thus she doesn't seem to be a great character to be given her own title. Also, the forced-legacy rule is in full effect here. Fans of the the Question are the only people who are going to be attracted to the name "The Question" on a comic book, but they're going to be more interested in one starring the Question, not a different character with the Question's name (This one strikes me as particularly tragic since Vic Sage is such an incredibly unique character, and that JLU recently raised his profile in mainstream consciousness more than it's ever been, and because Sage more closely resembles the Watchmen character he inspired than Montoya). I suppose one of the other 51 Sages could enter into the DCU at any moment now and resume Question-ing, so it's not as tragic as it was a few week's ago. 3/1


BATWOMAN

This is an ongoing title that has been rumored for a long time—even the swell-looking logo design has been leaked onto the Internet—although it hasn't been announced. I couldn't possibly be less interested. Kate Kane is a terribly uninteresting character, whose defining characteristics seems to be that she's a lesbian (albeit a man's fantasy of a lesbian, a "buxom lipstick lesbian" as the New York Times put it), is Jewish, and used to sleep with the new Question. Strike two is that her costume draws attention to her long flowing, easy-to-pull-in-a-fight hair and her lips.

The female version of Batman she'd be replacing in DC's publishing line if she does get her own ongoing is Cassandra "Batgirl" Cain, who was a much more complex and unique character (just grabbing randomly at elements of her character, she was illiterate, shy, quiet and thus far pretty much completely uninterested in the opposite sex), and had a much less male-fantasy gratifying costume (No matter what Johanna Draper Carlson says).

On the plus side, it would be cool to have a female super-person with the word "woman" instead of "girl" have her own comic book (Is Wonder Woman the only DC superhero with the word Woman in her name that hasn't been killed or erased from the timeline somehow at the moment?), but that could have been accomplished just as easily by changing Cassandra Cain's name, now that it's "One Year Later" and I think she's 18 now.

Personally, I'd likely pass on this book, unless they assemble a dynamite creative team. The one storyline that would interest me would be the one dealing with her origin, or the missing year in Gotham, during which a lot of pretty exciting things happened that we haven't seen (Harvey Dent, Kite-Man, Nightwing flirting, Commissioner Gordon returning, Apokalyptian firepit-making). Oh, and I suppose a meeting with Cassandra Cain and/or Oracle would get me to pick an issue up. 5/7


*I don't mean they're all creative failures; I really dug Williams' Helmet of Fate and first issue of Aquaman (his run already seems to be falling apart as of his second issue, however), I haven't read much of Rogers, and I haven't read enough from Donner to sum up his run. But none of them have been able to tell good stories and sell as well, say, Johns, David Goyer, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith and Brad Meltzer.


**Hey, 52 fans! Check out Steel #38 , which features a Steel/Question team-up!


***EDILW readers who have been taking their ginseng will remember I made a similar comment before; however, since I forgot when and where, I assume you all have too, so there, I've used it again.

Four Lessons the Big Two Could Learn From 52

With 52 now officially a wrap, it's time to look back on what proved to be a surprisingly successful series. There has been a lot made of the fact that it simply was never late, which didn't surprise me as much of the fact that it was consistently a great read. Sure there were some mistakes that slipped in and weeks that were less good than others, but as a whole it was an amazing read and, it's safe to say, an unparalleled success. In fact, the numbers it was selling at as it finished (as of March it was still selling over 90,000 copies, outselling almost everything else DC publishes) constitute the single biggest shock of the entire series.

Can it be repeated? Sure, and DC's going to start trying next week with Countdown. I'm not confident this new endeavor will work as well as the last one did, given that it has entirely different creators employing an entirely different creative process, but certain elements from the success of 52 can certainly be successfully employed elsewhere in both DC and Marvel's "universe" lines of comics.

So pull up your favorite arm chair and settle in for the first of two rounds of that favorite sport of the hard-working staff here at EDILW HQ—armchair editing!


1.) IT'S THE WRITERS, STUPID: This book’s stellar sales—remember, not only was it one of only a handful of DC books to pass the 90,000 mark over the last year, but it managed to do so four times a month—put to lie the notion that it’s the artists who drive sales of mainstream super-comics. (And/or any of the other factors that conventional wisdom usually points to as the cheif factor in sales).

Don’t get me wrong—artists like Alex Ross, Jim Lee or even Bryan Hitch sure as hell move books, but when you consider how many books most superstar artists can realistically get to in a year, it seems better to focus a company’s resources on the writing end, doesn’t it? Here was a book with no big name artists attached. The biggest was probably Phil Jimenez, who drew maybe 30 pages or so overall, or maybe Darick Robertson, who couldn’t have drawn many more.

Most of the time the art was provided by reliable talents who aren’t exactly in the same weight class as, say, any of the Kuberts when it comes to name recognition. And the art was never a factor in sales; most of the time, the artists weren’t even announced at the time issues were solicited.

The book wasn’t driven by A-List characters, either. Despite the occasional Batman appearance how many were there, three, over the course of 51 issues?), the book’s stars were all D-Listers (to be charitable) better known as supporting cast-members in other heroes’ books.

And it wasn’t necessarily events that drove things. Sure, it followed Infinite Crisis, and lead to “One Year Later,” but it was a self-contained book, and completely unnecessary to understand what was going on in the rest of the DCU. Because it covers a “missing year,” readers already knew exactly where their favorite heroes (i.e. every DC character not starring in the 52 ensemble) would end up when the story was over, not that they were terribly interested in how they got there anyway (as the sales of the “OYL” books all reflect, the only books that benefited were the Superman and Batman books).

Also, not a single variant cover for 52 issues, and it still landed somewhere between 92,000 and 140,000 issues every week, making the number a little more “pure” than the high numbers for, say, JLoA, which are driven to an unknown degree by collectors snapping up variants. What’s this mean? A single brilliant cover by a great artist is all you really need on a successful comic book. Go figure.



2.) Weekly Comics Are Awesome: This is more a subjective reaction, and purely anecdotal, but from my perspective as a reader, there’s nothing better that knowing that you only have to wait seven short days between reading issues of one of your favorite comics (and week after week, 52 was almost always the book I read first upon returning home from the shop, as it was the one I was most excited to find out what happened next in.

Keith Giffen had mentioned in one of his several interviews about the book with Newsarama.com how exciting the weekly schedule would be if applied to big events, and I agree wholeheartedly. Just imagine if Infinite Crisis or Civil War came out in the course of seven consecutive Wednesdays, filling almost a whole summer with nothing but, big, huge events. Business-wise, it might not be good for the publishers’ bottom lines (I know I personally ended up buying quite a few Civil War tie-ins near the beginning of the series simply because the premise excited me and I couldn’t wait a month or three to find out what happened next), but for readers, it would certainly make the events more exciting (and give the bloggers and message boarders less time to think about and pick apart the stories—certainly in a lot of these big, blockbuster type events, the less time you spend thinking about them, the better they seem).

Of course, the only way to get a big, event miniseries like IC or CW out on such a schedule, and by the same artist, would be to work, far, far in advance—far farther than either of the Big Two seem to be comfortable working thinking ahdead to at this point. It would necessitate a dramatic shift in the ways both companies work, so that they're more like newspaper offices and less like record studios.


3.) The Way to Defeat Wait-for-the-Trade-ism is to Not Write for the Trade: This should be common sense to everyone at the Big Two, but the fact of the matter is that there are three distinctive audiences for their universe comics—the Direct Market readers who buy their comics in weekly installments from comic shops, lapsed Direct Market readers who have given up on monthly installments and switched mostly to trades (which can be purchased from shops or big box book retailers), and bookstore/Amazon/library customers who exclusively read trades. Oddly, ninety-five percent of the stories the Big Two publish seem geared towards that second group, but they still publish monthly and put everything they release these days in trades to sell to the third group.

But they’re three different audiences with different needs and tastes, and don’t all three want the same stories.

DC, like Marvel, increasingly seems to write story arcs specifically for eventual trade collection, but rather than dense, stand-alone stories that read perfectly well as episodic chapters in a longer story or a story in and of themselves (as quality serial fiction should), far too many simply spread a single story out more spaciously, making for stories that are less TV or short story, and more film or novel. It’s the difference between All-Star Superman and Justice League of America, or the difference between Detective Comics and Batman Confidential.

Despite some noble efforts like A-SS and The Spirit and 'TEC, more and more DC is writing everything for the trade, which leads to a strange market where the Direct Market customer is well aware they’re subsidizing the book store market, but begrudgingly read anyway, out of addiction.

52 is the exact opposite. As a weekly focusing on story over art, told on a gigantic scale (over a thousand pages!) and occurring in rat-a-tat-tat real time, 52 is a book that demands to be read in weekly chapters, rather than in an eventual trade. I was actually a little surprised to hear them say they’re collecting it in trade at all (at the very least, they shoulda waited until now to announce the schedule), as I believe it will read very poorly as a trade (I’ve heard some pretty smart people say the exact opposite of course, so maybe it’s just me). The only other book I can think of off the top of my head that demanded to be read as it was published (rather than in a trade) was Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers experiment, which ended up being traded (rather too quickly, in my opinion), but told a story that needed to be experienced in a very particular fashion, with only tangentially-related chapters occurring near simultaneously in separate books between separate sets of covers. And maybe DC's Challenge, which is a book that really ought to be in trade, but isn't.


4.) Universe Comics Can be Much More Awesome Than They Usually Are: If you’re going to go to the trouble of having a fictional universe like the DC Universe or the Marvel Universe, you might as well use it all—all of its diverse settings, all of its hundreds of characters—and not just a handful of cities and a handful of star characters, who divvy up more obscure characters as occasional guest-stars.

The DC Universe was slowly built up over the course of almost 70 years, and this was the first series that really seemed to even try to use all of it (Crisis on Infinite Earths, Challenge and World’s Funnest being the exceptions that prove the rule). Not that it did use all of it, but it certainly used a lot of it, and it was fascinating to spend time in a world where Booster Gold could stop by and see Doc Magnus, who could then visit T.O. Morrow, who could then meet Silver Age Wonder Woman villain Egg-Fu, Golden Age mad scientist Dr. Sivana, and 2004 Wonder Woman villain Veronica Cale in the space of a few issues.

As I was reading this series, I immediately wanted more like it. I wanted an ongoing, set in the contemporaneous DC Universe, which would seem like a total nightmare editorially, but wouldn’t be impossible, particularly if the team of writers included someone like Geoff Johns, who was writing Superman, Green Lantern, the JSA and the Teen Titans already anyway. (This seems to be the idea with Countdown, to a certain extent). If such a book existed in the '90s, then when Superman died or Coast City was destroyed or Diana lost her Wonder Woman status, we'd see how Elongated Man and Aquaman and Amanda Waller reacted, what Perry White editorialized about it, and how Darkseid hoped to take advantage of it, for example.

I wanted a period piece, by this very same creative team. Imagine a DCU: Year One that began the year from the point when Superman first went public, and we could see the first adventures and meetings of a lot of these characters who haven’t had the extensive origin treatment that Batman and Superman have, and certainly not in any cohesive or interconnected way. Or imagine a Golden Age version of 52, featuring the JSA, all those characters from the All-Star Squadron on the homefront, and all of those crazy war heroes Robert Kanigher used to write in the ‘60s (though their adventures occurred in the ‘40s). Set in the past, either of these would have the benefit of being bookended as 52 was, without having to worry so much about making sure nothing in the monthlies contradicted what happened in it.

While Marvel has yet to announce a weekly series, I think it would be particularly easy for them to do so. Even more so than DC, they seem to have a stable of writers who act like architects of their universe. It’s not hard to imagine Brian Michael Bendis, Dan Slott, Mark Millar and J. Michael Stracyznski getting together with an editor like, oh, say, Steve Wacker and making a Marvel 52. When you look at a story like “Civil War,” it essentially was a weekly, it was just one that was spread across many different books, which meant many different writers and many different editors, and the results were things happening completely differently in the main mini than in its tie-ins in far too many cases.

Weekly Haul: May 2nd

52 #52 (DC Comics) And thus ends what I’ve long considered the most ambitious super-comic ever, the ultimate in “universe” comics (being a story of the whole fictional universe) and the best DCU comic of the past year. I’m really sorry to see this end, and I’ve no real confidence that Countdown will be able to replace it in quality (the main selling point of 52 was the four guys writing it, not the schedule or even the scope).

I’ll probably be doing an autopsy on the series as a whole sometime later this week, but regarding this single issue, it involves Rip Hunter and the Carter Boys taking on the Suspendium-mutated Mr. Mind to save the new Multiverse of Earths 1 through 52, which they plan to keep a secret between the three of them (You know, just like The Trinity decided to keep Hypertime a secret between the three of them). I’m not exactly sure I followed all of the multiverse shenanigans here, and I still have that uncertain feeling that DC hasn’t quite nailed it down either (At one point, Hunter says that figuring out the changes in the Earths can wait, to which I say no it fucking can’t. Say what you will about Zero Hour, but we got a nice, specific timeline at the end of the series, nailing DC history down for readers and writers alike, and the post-Zero Hour period was devoid of the rampant continuity errors that have plagued the DCU since around the time that Identity Crisis dropped).

The part of the book that doesn’t involve these blonde heroes and Mr. Mind checks in with the rest of our stars, giving them all wonderfully happy endings. I don’t know if I’m on board with all of the changes coming out of 52 (I think Question II is a mistake, and I’m not terribly excited in the Steels heading up an Infinity Inc. series, as announced), but I’m definitely on board for future Booster Gold stories and a Ralph and Sue Dibny miniseries (their new status is the best possible solution for the characters; Identity Crisis ended their story potential as it was, and while their original concept was more visually interesting in its possibilities than this status quo, this is seriously as close as you can get to their original concept at this point).

It’s probably not terribly likely that these four writers will get together to co-write another series in the future, but man, I would love to see them launch a Shazam! monthly or take over JLoA at some point—on a monthly schedule, that’s only as much work as three months worth of 52, guys!




The Avengers: The Initiative #2 (Marvel Comics) This issue is something of a weird read, and I vacillated between extreme revulsion with the characters and the illogic of the whole thing (the bit about the Negative Zone jumps? Um, what?! Having the prison there threatens all existence, and they treat it like global warming?) and satisfaction with how well Dan Slott pulls so much of it off. And as for Stefano Casselli’s art, it just gets better and better. The mixture of real-world politics and problems and Marvel high super-fantasy makes me a little queasy, and the heroic George W. Bush standing his ground in the face of terrorist threat seriously made me want to throw up. Come on Slott, I know the “616” is technically a parallel universe, but I have a hard time believing Bush would be like, “Leave the danger zone like I did on 9/11? Fuck that! I’ll stand my ground and kick Hydra’s ass myself if I have to! Let’s roll, Avengers!” Not that Slott should have taken the opportunity to bash Bush either, but what exactly do those two panels add to the story exactly? Maybe he’s going somewhere with all this though; I admit I did like Bush saying “You’re doin’ a heck of a job, Pymmy,” which is perhaps simply Slott building up to a Katrina-sized fuck-up on the part of Pym and the Camp Hammond assholes.




Green Lantern #19 (DC) I’m not feeling this storyline at all. Geoff Johns and Daniel Acuna enter the middle chapter of their storyline about the Star Sapphires, and it amounts to a long burst of exposition in the form of Carol picking the middle of a big superhero fight to tell Hal Jordan the history of the star sapphires for the first time, and there’s a brief fight at the end. It’s worth slogging through if only to get to the “Tales of the Sinestro Corps” back-up drawn by Dave Gibbons, in which we get a six-page pulp science fiction spin on The Jungle Book.




Midnighter #7 (WildStorm/DC) Brian K. Vaughan and Darick Robertson present a one-issue story that internalizes the way the Midnighter’s mind works in the story structure itself, resulting in a rather typical Midnighter adventure told in Midnighter-vision. Yeah, it’s a gimmick, but it’s a pretty inspired one, and absolutely brilliantly executed.




Runaways #26 (Marvel) One punch! One punch!




Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #3 (DC) Wow, what a week for Sivana fans! Jeff Smith pits Captain Marvel against his diminutive archnemesis and some monsters, and gives us at least two wonderful scenes (the panel where Cap says, “Cute!” and the sequence of Billy and Cap conversing about Helen Fidelity). Three-fourths over already, it’s pretty clear that there’s a lot Jeff Smith just isn’t going to have time to get to—Mister Atom, Ibac, Sabbac, Uncle Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Black Adam, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, etc.—which is a shame. As for the future of Smith’s vision of the Marvel Family, sure to have a long life on bookshelves once the trade is released, given the revelations of 52, maybe this is continuity after all. Maybe this is the “Year One” story for the Captain Marvel of Earth-5?




Superman #662 (DC) And we’re back on track, with Busiek’s overarching storyline about Superman’s role in the world and how by averting some disasters, he may actually be inadvertently building up to an even bigger one. It’s a solid idea that’s been great fun to watch Busiek explore thus far. With Carlos Pacheco and Jose Merino back on art chores, Busiek seems to be bringing his A game again (Well, his A+ game, since his fill-in issues have all been great too, just not as great as his Pacheco-pencilled issues). Great interpretations (verbally and visually) of post-Seven Soldiers Zatanna and newer character Sirocco, particularly the former’s magic words. Wow.







Teen Titans #46 (DC) I’ve never been terribly impressed with this volume of Teen Titans; thus far it’s been a bit of a roller coaster that dipped into not very good, occasionally climbed to fairly decent, but spent most of it’s time around mediocre, and it was the characters more than the stories that kept it on my pull list. With Geoff Johns’ run officially over now, it seems like a good time to drop it, particularly since this last story, co-written by Johns and his replacement Adam Beechen, is probably the worst Titans story I’ve ever read (and I read Dan Jurgens’ volume, the D.E.O. kids arcs of The Titans, and an awful lot of Teen Titans Go!). The last three issues have been ten kinds of horrible, and this is the conclusion to that story. The plot goes like this: Bad guys attack good guys, bad guys capture good guys, good guys escape and fight bad guys, more good guys show up and they outnumber the bad guys, and are thus able to beat them up more easily.

The only thing that could possibly make this simplistic plot remotely interesting is the characters, and Johns and Beechen are playing with pretty much any characters they want, including the current Titans, some old-school Titans, and cherry-picked rogues from throughout the DCU (Superboy enemy Match, Impulse enemy Inertia, et cetera). But Johns and/or Beechen seem to not know anything about these characters, twisting them to suit their own story-telling agenda (Match is written like Bizarro, not, you know, Match), which defeats the one benefit of using them. You want to dust off ‘90s D-Listers like Risk? Fine, but at least read a few stories featuring Risk before you write him.

Let me wrap up the irritated fan-boy portion by pointing out that Risk is never given a reason for turning from hero to villain, and that Batgirl’s in no better shape now then when Beechen besmirched her in Robin. Yeah, there was the brainwashing juice (although World War III and Supergirl contradicted it), but this Cassandra Cain is still a killer and is still a weakling. Rather than holding her own against Slade, she does nothing but jump over his head once (it took Slade a few pages to kick Batman’s ass, Cassie should tear him apart if she’s got a dozen superheroes helping her out), and then get knocked out by a rightwing by Nightwing, who, let the record show, is no Batman. (And, if he was, Cassie would still kick his ass).

Okay, now that I’ve got all that out of my system, let me just point out that the dialogue is embarrassingly bad. Take, for example, “I am Deathstroke, The Terminator. And I never lose,” or anything that comes out of Flash IV’s mouth, or, my favorite exchange…

Deathstroke: “You’ve got guts, Grayson, thinking you can stand up to me after how I’ve played you for years… …Guts, but no brains.”

Nightwing: “Coming here, doing what you’re doing… …You tell me who’s missing brains, Slade.”

Dude! He just told you who’s missing brains! It’s you! (He goes ahead and says, “You , will be, when my sword carves them out of your skull!” anyway). Beechen is one-sixth of the Countdown writing team, which is one of the reasons I’m not expecting too terribly much out of it.

The art, by Al Barrionuevo and BIT, looks horribly rushed. There are lots of one-page splashes full of nothing but characters in random poses, three-panel pages, and zero backgrounds. There’s maybe three or four panels where you see the coast in the background, and two at the end where you see an urban landscape, and that’s it.

Hey Kids! Comics!

52 spin-offs I'd buy

I think it’s safe to declare this week’s issue of 52 the series’ climax, despite the fact that there are two more issues to follow. After all, this is the issue that features Black Adam fighting the rest of the world, and is accompanied by a four-part World War III miniseries. But either way, the best superhero comic of the last year that isnt’ All-Star Superman is not much longer for the world and I for one will be sorry to see it go.

Oh sure, DC’s launching a sequel of sorts, although Countdown will lack the all-star writing team, as well as its predecessor’s two main hooks, one good (a missing year in the life of the DCU) and one bad (a day-by-day real time epic). But there were a lot of really cool ideas introduced in the course of the last fifty weeks, ideas that would make easy story-seeds for future spin-offs.

In fact, DC’s already announced a couple, including a new Infinity Inc. series featuring the Steels and a Booster Gold series playing up the character's time-traveling aspects. Additionally Lady Styx has been appearing in some of the space books, and Egg-Fu is set to appear in an upcoming Outsiders/Checkmate crossover. It’s a good start, I guess, but I don’t see much potential beyond the Booster Gold series, which sounds a lot like the brilliant-but-cancelled Chronos, only with a (slightly) more high-profile protagonist.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Greg Rucka written Question series announced relatively soon, or the long-rumored Batwoman series (a logo design of which has already made the rounds on the Internet).

But you know what I’d really like to see?

No?

Well, I’ll tell you.



Doc Magnus and The Metal Men: The true breakout star of the series has been Doctor Will Magnus, who has spent the last few decades vacillating between being the Metal Men’s human sidekick and appearing for a few panels in other heroes’ stories when they need a robotics expert to say a few words. Hell, when 52 was announced and launched, Magnus didn’t even rate a star status; he’s missing from the first cover, and his storyline wasn’t pushed as one of the major ones.

But look what 50 issues has done. Lacking Metal Men of any kind for much of the story, Magnus was the least-mad mad scientist on Oolong Island, home of Egg-Fu’s Science Squad (and the setting for the zaniest, most fascinating storyline of the series). The clear alpha male among the likes of Sivana and Dr. Cyclops, he got the girl (even though he didn’t really want her) and totally saved the day, taking down Egg-Fu (over)easy. And he accomplished most of this without the help of the Metal Men, who were clearly more weapons in Magnus’ arsenal here than anything else.





While the explanation of how the Metal Men work in #49 was great, perhaps the most promising thing about 52 regarding the Metal Men was the mission statement Mark Waid gave ‘em in his back-up origin story: “The Metal Men specialize in defending earth from the unique menace of cutting-edge science gone wrong.”

Yeah, that sounds cool. Especially considering the fact that Magnus turned on his fellow mads and let the JSA in (and totally went all Frank Castle on Egg-Fu). Imagine a series devoted to dashing scientist Magnus and his robots defending the world from science gone mad, including such foes as Egg-Fu, Sivana and the other nut-jobs he shared a lab space with.

Of course, based on the dialogue, I would guess an awful lot of the mad scientist stuff came from the mind of Grant Morrison, who’s a notoriously hard writer for others to capitalize on the ideas of. And he’s busy, so I don’t see him helming a Metal Man monthly? So who could do such a thing? If I were in charge over at DC*, I’d hunt down Tom Peyer, who had great success with a Morrison concept in Hourman (and he also made it pretty funny, and humor is something that should be mandatory in a Metal Men story), and it even dealt with human-like robots and androids. Perfect! On art chores, it’d be hard to beat Rouleau’s designs on that origin (check out that beautiful responsometer!). So sign that man up too!

(Note: I think Evan Dorkin, Mike Allred, Nick Dragotta and Ty Templeton would also kick ass on art for a Metal Men comic).



The Croatoan Society: In 52 #18 , Ralph Dibny investigates a murder at the House of Mystery, where via dialogue and some tantalizing newspaper headlines hanging from the walls, we learn that the stretchable sleuth occasionally gets together with fellow DCU detectives like Detective Chimp and Teri Thirteen to solve impossible mysteries like who Kaspar Hauser was or what Stonehenge is all about. The Society only really appeared in this issue, which kicked off the whole Ralph and His Magic Helmet plot, but it is an absolutely awesome idea, and one which should be further explored in a miniseries immediately, either one detailing their first adventure or, better yet, something along the lines of New Avengers: The Illuminati, checking in with the team/club every now and then. And if that title is too goofy, how about just naming it after their “headquarters,” House of Mystery.

Noted Elongated Man fan Mark Waid would be a perfect writer for such a series, as would James Robinson, who did such nice work on Ralph in Starman (and whose work on that title kept both feet squarely in the DCU while leaning toward Vertigo quality and tone, as would be needed in a series about a detective chimp kicking it in the House of Mystery in these post-Sandman times) or maybe Bill Willingham, whose Day of Vengeance was pretty terrible, but whose recent Helmet of Fate: Detective Chimp was great. I bet John Ostrander could pull it off as well, based on his The Spectre and, to a slightly lesser extent, Martian Manhunter.

An artist would be trickier, as Bobo, Ralph and the House all seem to require slightly different tones. Guy Davis of BPRD and Sandman Mystery Theatre fame could easily nail it, however.



Batman/Robin/Nightwing: And speaking of goofy titles, I couldn’t think of one that was less stupid than this one. I can’t do all of DC’s work here! We’ve seen some glimpses of these characters in 52 (and one flashback to their boat trip in ‘TEC), and it seems like there’s some pretty interesting stuff going on there. At the end of Infinite Crisis, Batman says he’s taking Dick Grayson and Tim Drake with him to follow the steps he took to become Batman, rebuilding himself with his partners. Awesome, huh? So let’s see some more of it, huh?

Again, Morrison seemed to do the heavy lifting during these portions of 52, but Batman is a character that pretty much anyone can write pretty well, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Batman artist who just couldn’t seem to draw Batman (except this guy). I’d like to say, oh Devin Grayson, Scott Beatty and Norm Breyfogle do it, but honestly, I’d probably buy this series no matter who created it. Come on, Batman, Nightwing and Robin globe-trotting and fighting crime until Batman goes into some nutty mystical stuff, Nightwing says “Screw it, I’m heading back to Gotham,” and Robin’s stuck there trying to figure out what Batman’s gonna do next? How could that not be awesome.

And, worst-case scenario, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than this or this, could it?



Batwoman: Frankly, I don’t care much for the character, who’s sole hook seems to be that she’s a lesbian. Her costume design is an interesting mash-up of Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl costume and the Batman Beyond suit, but the visible lipstick, the long, flowing, easily pulled hair makes her seem like the anti-Cassandra Cain to me. And as a fan of Cassie Cain, I just never really saw the logic of Batman and Oracle completely ignoring their Batgirl while DC writers did…whatever they did to her, just so they could introduce another female version of Batman named “Kane.” I couldn’t imagine caring to read a monthly, ongoing featuring her.

But I am interested in the missing year in Gotham City, specifically how the city coped with it’s hero gone. Was it a factor in Kane deciding to become Batwoman then? How did Harvey Dent spend the year, exactly? When did Commissioner Gordon become commissioner again, and why did he come out of retirement? Did The Question and Montoya fight other super-crime in Gotham, or pretty much just stick to beating up animal men? With Mannheim setting Gotham City up as the Vatican City of his global crime faith, no Batman and a bunch of colorful crimefighters coming and going during the ocurse of the year, there has just got to be some awesome tales to be told of Gotham during the missing year, all centering around Batwoman (also, it’d be nice to see her encounter Oracle, who would presumably come into some contact with her at some point, even if it was just sending Black Canary and Huntress in to kick her around, and her encountering Batgirl, who seems to have spent her year-off studying English, forgetting how to fight, and getting hopped up on Slade Wilson’s science juice).

This would be another series that I think anybody who read all of 52, the “OYL” bat-books and bat-books in the past ten years could handle (so no Adam Beechen). Again, Devin Grayson, Scott Beatty and Norm Breyfogle? Perfect! Maybe John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake could handle it though, and atone for their recent Batman arc.




The Legion of Teen Titans: Geoff Johns had a lot of fun playing with some of the missing year’s Titans during his “Titans Around the World” story arc, and it was pretty cool seeing a new Titans line-up every time they team appeared in 52, given how chaotic their line-up has been historically, with new directions occurring every couple of years. Call me greedy, but I’d like to see more of those missing year Titans. I’m sure Adam Beechen will get to some of that during his upcoming Teen Titans run, at least regarding Miss Martian, but I’d really like to see more about Offspring (and, um, why he exists at all in this universe), Aquagirl, Hawk and Dove, Mas y Menos, Young Frankenstein and how these characters came and went during that year. And, of course, I’d love to see Osiris and Sobek’s time with the Titans. I think there’s a good miniseries in here somewhere.




Shazam: The Marvel Family had a couple of cameos in this series, but their villains owned this series. Much of the series has revolved around Black Adam’s acquiring his own Black Marvel Family (complete with talking animal sidekick) and then losing it, and Sivana has played a major role in the whole Oolong Island side of things. How is that Waid, Morrison, Rucka and Geoff Johns can write these two Marvel Big Bands in a way that is completely in keeping with their original iterations and in synch with the modern DCU and the result be one of DC’s best-selling titles, but Judd Winick had to go and re-invent the wheel with Trials of Shazam in order to make the concept work? Next to the Metal Men, the DC franchise that seems to be the most obvious spin-off of 52 would be a new, improved, de-Winickified Shazam! series (which I’d go ahead and call Captain Marvel if I were DC…what’s Marvel gonna do, sue you? Let ‘em…It’s not like Time Warner can’t take ‘em in a courtroom brawl).


And in the “random” category, after Infinity Inc. gets inevitably cancelled before it hits 15 issues, I’d like to see John Henry Irons’ Steel back in the Justice League where he belongs and Nat’s Steel in Teen Titans. I’d like to see Egg-Fu pop up in Gail Simone’s upcoming Wonder Woman. I’d like the 52 version of SABBAC be the official one now, instead of the dirty Winick version.

And I would love to see a one or two-issue JLA Classified arc detailing Firestorm’s incredibly short-lived version of the Justice League…you know, the one featuring Firehawk, Ambush Bug, Super Chief and Bulleteer. Yeah, I know they didn’t stay together long, but I can’t be the only one interested in how Firestorm found his predecessor’s signal device, and how he arrived at that group of heroes, and if they did anything other than get slaughtered by Skeets. (The Tomorrow Woman one-shot placed a League adventure during JLA #5, so it shouldn’t be hard to set one during 52 #24, which spanned a week).

Yeah, those would all be awesome. Even more awesome? If they did 52 spin-offs to 52. Of course, we’d need 46 more suggestions.

Like, say for example…


Terra-Man: Year One

DC Comics Presents Soder Cola Presents Booster Gold’s Ferris Air Adventure Sponsored By Sun Dollar Coffee

Supernova’s Pal Clark Kent

The Menace of Manthrax

Giant-Size Hawkgirl This doesn’t refer to the format of the book, but rather the protagonist.

Firestorm/Cyborg Ditto.

Coalition of the Killing Black Adam convenes super-powered representatives from the superpowers in a bit of anti-U.S. diplomacy, including members of the Great Ten, the Global Guardaians, Sonar, Ibis the Invincible and others I’d need some Who’s Who In the DC Universe pages to identity.

The Brave and the Bold All-Adam Edition Featuring Black Adam and Adam Strange Guest-starring Atom-Smasher

All-Straw Sue Dibny Steve Wacker wasn’t just kidding about that book, was he? Was he?

Super Chief: The Lost Days Covering the few days we didn’t see between the time he first donned his buffalo mask and his death.

The Crime Bible A one-shot told in the style of several Chick Tracts, only dealing with Dark Side worship instead of Christianity.

Batshit Insane Billy Batson and the Seven Deadly Enemies of Mankind

Mercury, The Only Superhero Who’s Liquid At Room Temperature

Booster Gold: Funeral For a Friend Come on, don’t you want to see 22 pages featuring paid mourners Beefeater, Odd Man, the Human Blimp at Booster’s funeral in Cincinnati, with Skeets giving a eulogy?

Gold Twilight In the tradition of “Emerald Twilight,” the vilifying of Skeets.

Wait, What’s Up With The Shadowpact Exactly? A one-shot explaining what they were doing outside their little “One Year Later”-cheating forcefield in 52 #18.

Dynamole Did you know this Everyman Project hero is a legacy hero? Well he is. (You can read about the original Dynamoll’s adventure here). Man, there are a ton of Everyman characters who were just name-dropped in 52 #24 whom I’d like to read more about. Take, for example, any of the next four suggestions.

The Tornado Ninja

E.S. Pete

The Crimson Ghost Mainly because I want to know why a ghost-themed hero would have those little ears on his futuristic looking battle helmet. And why he doesn’t look anything like a ghost. And why his costume’s more of a maroon than a crimson.

Poledancer Come on, who doesn’t want to learn what Poledancer’s powers are, what her secret origin is, and how she fights crime?

Ambush Bug vs. Baron Bug

SABBAC, King of Devils Halloween Special

Happy Halloween, Judeo-Christians!

Turkey Man Thanksgiving Special Call me crazy, but I’d kinda like to read more about the Everyman Project’s lamest superhero, Turkey Man and his tryptophan fingers. I’ve even got the cover slogan worked out; ready? “Evil Grows Drowsy at the Touch of the Turkey Man.” Eh? Eh?

The Beard Hunter Shaves the DC Universe The wacky Doom Patrol villain returns during DC’s missing year, with his sites set on Aquaman, Richard Dragon, Ralph Dibny, Adam Strange and Animal Man. Who’s beard will survive?

Pulsar, Master of Sound

The Sivana Family

Tawky Tawny/Sobek

Montoya Vs. Ralph Dibny In a drinking contest, not a fight.

The Brave and the Bold Featuring Renee Montoya and Animal Man In order to shut up the infernal narration running through Montoya’s head, she’ll need Buddy Baker’s help to travel outside the DC Universe, through the fourth wall, and all up in Greg Rucka’s grill.

The Brave and the Bold Featuring Dr. Mid-Nite and Renee Montoya “Wait, what? He was dying of cancer and you dragged him threw snowy mountaintops on a sled? Why didn’t you just call your pals Black Adam and Isis to fly you back there again? Or cure him they way they cured Osiris?”

Twenty-Two Pages of J.G. Jones Just Painting Stuff

The Ten-Eyed Surgeons of the Empty Quarter

Shut Up, Wonder Girl

Mini Metal Men

Red Tornado Down Under

The Triple Fish Code Just like the Da Vinci Code, with Lobo in the Tom Hanks role, and a talking space dolphin in Audrey Tatou’s.**

The Erotic Adventures of Dr. Veronica Cale We know from #46 what a turn-on she finds the apocalypse. In our world, that might be a particularly hard fetish to cater to, but in the DCU? It’s the end of the world like once a week. It’d have to be a Vertigo series though.

Batwoman Confidential This one too.

The Brave and the Bold Featuring Batwoman and The Question II Ditto.

Batwoman vs. The Question II And definitely this one, what with the costume’s being ripped off (tastefully so, of course) during the big fight scene.

Nanda Parbatman And if it proves successful, there’s always

Nanda Parbatman: The Shadow of Nanda Parbat Or maybe Nandaparbatman and Robin

Teen Titans Costume Special #1 Why did Robin change his costume, adopting Batman and Superman’s briefs-on-the-outside style? Why did Wonder Girl trade in her ugly red spandex costume for the more sensible and aesthetically pleasing jeans and blouse look? (Or did I answer my own questions?). All of your answers inside!

M.P.D.: The Odyssey You think 911 is a joke in your town? Learn the incredible adventure that befell the Metropolis Police Department when they tried arriving on the scene of a super-brawl and Lex Corp to arrest the perpetrators, and arrived six days later, with no memory of what happened during their lost time…until now!





* I’m not.

** Come on, there’s 52 jokes in this post. Of course some of ‘em are gonna be terrible ones.