On Harley Quinn 25th Anniversary Special #1

If you're struggling with the math--or, like me, marveling at how fast time seems to pass once you reach 40--it should perhaps be noted that DC Comics is celebrating the 25 years that have passed since Harley Quinn's first appearance on Batman: The Animated Series in 1992. She wouldn't actually debut in comics until 1993, in an issue of cartoon tie-in comic Batman Adventures, and she wouldn't join the DC Comics Universe proper until 1999's Batman: Harley Quinn special. Perhaps because of the character's non-standard path--originating in a cartoon adaptation of the comics, then gradually working her way into the comics--it's appropriate that the Harley Quinn 25th Anniversary Special tackles various versions of the character.

I'm actually a little surprised at how slim a package it is though, given the character's seemingly exponentially growing popularity. It's just a $4.99 floppy, with four short stories totaling 32 story pages and six pin-ups. In terms of size and number of high-profile contributors, it's not much bigger than any of the many Harley Quinn one-shots and special issues DC put out when it was clear that they had a hit on their hands with the post-Flashpoint, second volume of Harley Quinn (Because DC relaunched all their titles during their "Rebirth" initiative, however, we are now on our third volume of a Harley Quinn ongoing series, although the creators and direction have remained the seam between the second and the third).

Of those pin-ups, my favorite is definitely the one contributed by Babs Tarr, who draws her own hybrid Harley with her old Gotham City Sirens co-stars Catwoman and Poison Ivy.

Tarr's an amazing talent, and particularly good at drawing sexy ladies. The issue is almost worth five bucks for her pin-up alone. The others are by Annie Wu (whose image prominently features Harley's pet hyenas, engaged in helping her wreck a psychiatrist's office), Bengal, Dustin Nguyen and Greg Tocchini, Kamome Shirahama (Looking at these reminded me of the old Gallery one-shots that DC used to publish, but have long since abandoned; I imagine with the price of comics now being what it is, it would be harder to make those seem like they were worth whatever the publisher sold them for, but I used to really enjoy seeing so many different artists' takes on particular characters in 1992's The Batman Gallery, 1994's The Sandman: A Gallery of Dreams and A Death Gallery, 1997's JLA Gallery and so forth).

The first of the four stories is set firmly in current continuity, and is by the regular Harley Quinn writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, with Conner also drawing it, something that happens far too infrequently (although, truth be told, the Harley Quinn monthly and its spin-offs have all generally had pretty good art, certainly better than that of your average DC Comic).

I had a hard time getting through this story, having skipped it the first time through the book and having to try two more times before I read it. As much as I like Conner's art, when it comes to Conmiotti's Harley comics, I am not a fan. This one has their character Red Tool--pronounce it "Deadpool," but with an "R" instead of a "D"--right there in the first panel, and when I see him my eyes roll so hard it makes reading comics somewhat difficult for a while afterwards. He is in a two-page framing sequence with Harley, between which is a "lost scene" from their 2015 Harley Quinn Road Trip Special co-starring Poison Ivy and Catwoman, probably most notable for all the great artists who contributed to it (like Moritat and the too-rarely-seen-at-DC-these-days Bret Blevins and Mike Manley).

Killing time before killing some dudes, Harley tells Deadpool Red Tool about how Vegas casino owner Yosemite Sam offered the three of them an ell-expenses paid stay in one of his hotels, and they got thrown out of it.

Harley's co-creator Paul Dini scripts the next story, "Birthday Blues," which seems to be set in The Animated Series continuity, or at least adjacent to it. Rather than being paired with Bruce Timm, the noticeably absent other creator of the character, Dini is working with regular Harley Quinn artist Chad Hardin. It's a pretty fun little story with the meta angle of Harley celebrating her 25th birthday, and how The Joker and Poison Ivy are involved in said celebration. There's a twist within a twist at the end, and as short as it is, those twists serve to pretty perfectly define all three characters and their relationships.

As great as it would have been to see Timm or someone who worked on Batman Adventures draw this, it was actually really interesting to see Hardin drawing the costumes from the TV cartoon, adapting the designs into his own style, which is very different than that of Timm (And, if you've spent as many hours of your life as I have on that show, it's fun picking out which designs from which season Hardin chooses, and to what extent; his Catwoman, for example, is wearing a costume that looks like a compromise between that of the first season and her more recent Darwyn Cooke-designed comic book cat suit. The Joker has the hairstyle and pointy-nose of TAS's redesigned Joker, but not the weird eyes; Killer Croc looks as he did on the cartoon, but with spikes. And so on.)

The most surprising stories are the two that follow. The first of these is by writer Daniel Kibblesmith and artist David Lafuente (a great artist who I really wish I could see more of, preferably on a regular, ongoing basis). Entitled "Harley Quinn & Friends In...Somewhere That's Green!", it is perhaps a little too timely in its reference to a deadly hurricane bearing down on the city (New York here, not Gotham).

Gal pals Harley and Ivy are in a grocery store to get supplies, when Swamp Thing grows out of the produce stand. He needs Ivy's help because of her connection to The Green, and Harley basically invites herself along. The Swamp Thing/Harley Quinn rapport was interesting enough that I kind of wish DC hadn't cancelled Harley's Little Black Book, as I wonder if it was fun watching those two interact because the short space here meant Kibblesmith could squeeze in all the potential good bits, or if the characters really could have the chemistry to carry a whole over-sized comic story.

If nothing else, Kibblesmith gets Swamp Thing in a raincoat and rain hat for a few panels; that's awesome.

As I mentioned, I really liked Lafuente's art, but it was especially good in this story, which had enough of a comedic tone that he could fill the backgrounds with loose, cartoony, caricature-like drawings, and go pretty wild with Swamp Thing. (Colorist John Rauch deserves some props here too, particuarly given his way with Harley's hair.

The final story was probably my favorite, and it came from the unlikely team of writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Joe Quinones, who are more Marvel guys than DC guys at this point (much to DC's detriment, if you ask me!). Entitled "Bird Psychology," this is the first story in the book to involve Batman, and, of course, Robin.

It's set somewhere...unclear-ish. Harley's look here is unique to this story, not lining up with that of TAS, The New 52, or the Margot Robie-in-Suicide Squad inspired "Rebirth" redesign. There's a Robin heavily involved, but the costume doesn't really give us any clues; it looks closer to Tim Drake's original than any other design, but then, the TAS Dick Grayson's suit looked a lot like Tim's comics costume, and the post-Flashpoint Dick also wore a more Tim-like costume...this one has some of the weird elements of Dick's New 52 Robin get-up but, like Harley's costume, is unique to this story (Based on the dialogue, in which Harley intuits that he's an orphan, it is probably meant to be Dick). The Joker and Batman both look like their TAS selves or their post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint selves, but neither of them is too terribly easy placed in any particular milieu by their duds alone. All that said, the red skies, the black buildings and the particular designs and costuming of Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya all definitely suggest that this is supposed to be a Quinones-ized TAS story.

This is, in broad strokes, a Batman and Robin vs. The Joker and Harley Quinn story, in which the superhero and his archvillain do battle, assigning their sidekick and moll to fight. The Joker underestimates Harley as per usual, and she ends up choosing to do good and play hero on the sly, because as crazy a bad girl as she might be, she's not, like, evil. Harley, and, to a lesser extent, Robin, are the focus of the story.

As well constructed as Zdarsky's plot is, it was the little elements that I really dug; he does a fine job of making The Joker seem like a completely insane criminal without having to, like, dwell on his homicidal tendencies. The story just cuts from The Joker at his work bench, plotting, to his plot already in progress, where Batman and Robin are fighting goons in adult pajamas, The Joker is wearing an old timey night shirt and night cap with sheep oven mitts on his hands, and there's a giant, angry Batman Tsum Tsum with a mouth full of striped missiles...? The creators do a pretty good job of nailing '90s Joker, particularly TAS-style Joker, where he could be menacing, scary and completely insane, without also having to be, like, Freddy Krueger or whatever.

Quinones is a fine artist, and this particular script allows him to pack in all sorts of great details; every available space of The Joker's hideout has an Easter Egg to some previous Joker story from some previous medium in it.

So while I didn't love all of this, the good in it definitely outweighed the bad, and it's certainly a reliable purchase for the casual Harley Quinn fan.

On DC/Hanna-Barbera's team-ups

Adam Strange/Future Quest#1 by writers Marc Andreyko and Jeff Parker, artist Steve Lieber and colorist Veronica Gandini

Here we have a relatively minor DC Comics character without his own title teaming up with one of the Hanna-Barbereboot titles (albeit one that's being canceled). It should go without saying that jet-pack-wearing, ray gun-shooting spaceman adventurer character Adam Strange is right at home with the 1960s-borne adventure cartoon characters that fill the pages of Jeff Parker and company's title starring various Hanna-Barbera adventure/superhero heroes. Created in 1958, he was spawned from the same cultural forces and pop cultural interests that inspired so many of those cartoon characters, and, if anything, one wonders if he isn't maybe too perfect for an appearance in the Future Quest milieu. There's no friction here in the way that there is, with, say, Suicide Squad/The Banana Splits or the Batman/Top Cat back-up feature that follows (which we'll get to later).

Additionally, because of the premise of Future Quest, in which mysterious portals to other times and places open on Earth, depositing a wide variety of super-characters ranging from Mightor to Space Ghost onto Team Quest and Birdman's Earth, Future Quest has a built-in excuse for any DC Comics character, no matter who or from where, to appear: Jonah Hex, Enemy Ace, The Haunted Tank, The Justice Society of America, Infinity Inc, Metamorpho, Aztek, The Legion of Superheroes, whoever.

So Andreyko and Parker have Adam Strange--the in-continuity, New 52 iteration, based on flashbacks that appear to reference his current origins and events from the recent Death of Hawkman miniseries--pop out of a portal in The Lost Valley, where Dino Boy and some agents of F.E.A.R. have been trapped by the events of Future Quest. Dr. Quest, Race Bannon, Jonny, Hadji and Bandit race there to see what came through, as do the F.E.A.R. folks, who are trying to escape the dangerous, screwed-up valley. The amnesiac Strange got bumped there in mid-zeta beam, and it takes him a while to get his bearings.

Meanwhile, there are lots of cool prehistoric creatures to run from, fight with and, in one case, befriend via snake-charming and rather generous feeding. While it's mainly a Strange/Quest crossover, Birdman appears for a few panels and Mightor and The Herculoids make cameos.

If you like Future Quest, you should like this kinda sorta epilogue to the series, and if you come for the Adam Strange, well, it's a nice introduction to some of the more likable aspects of Future Quest, the first chunk of which is currently available in trade paperback.

The back-up is an eight-page Top Cat comic which is problematically written by DC Comics Publisher Dan DiDio. Did he assign it to himself? Did someone assign it to their own boss, or their boss' boss? It's always bizarre to see DiDio get a writing credit, in a way that seeing his co-publisher Jim Lee's art appearing in a DC comic isn't, because while Lee is a proven popular commodity whose work tends to dramatically affect sales, DiDio is pretty much the opposite. The majority of his work has appeared in some sort of anthology context, and the one book he did write by himself died almost immediately upon his taking it over (his work with co-writers isn't much better).

DiDio does give himself a hell of an asset in writing Batman into the story. This is the only of the back-ups that includes a DCU co-star, but, again, are you going to say no to your boss's boss? So DiDio writes a five-page framing sequence featuring Batman and Catwoman--Batman chases Catwoman into an alley, where he finds Top Cat instead, covering for Catwoman. Batman questions the four-foot tall, anthropomorphic cat, during which time T.C. reveals his secret origin.

DiDio has basically reimagined him as a career criminal who ratted out the rest of his gang, hailing from a world very different from that of the setting of the original cartoons. It is a world of anthropomorphic cats, where Top Cat would be the equivalent of a human, rather than a regular (if talking and clothes-wearing) cat (Rather than human police officer Dibble busting T.C.'s chops, there's a panel where cat police officers bust his gang). He and Benny have journeyed to the DCU via a mad science device, which also makes this unique among the various Hanna-Barbereboot properties in that it is actually set in the DC Universe (Remember, in the lead story, Strange journeys outside the DCU to land in the world of Future Quest). These little changes basically cast T.C. as Howard The Duck.

Phil Winslade draws the feature, and he hasn't really redesigned the character in any appreciable way, other than making him much larger, and somewhat creepier, given that he is rendered so much more realistically than the flat, bright version of your parents (or grandparents) youth. Basically, Top Cat looks like a furry.

It ends, as all of the back-ups do, with the words "To Be Continued in...", which suggests a new round of Hanna-Barbereboot books on the horizon, none of which seem as promising as the ones we've already seen (And all of which, save Scooby Apocalypse, have either been canceled or are in the process of being canceled).

Booster Gold/The Flintstones #1 by writer Mark Russell, artists Rick Leonardi and Scott Hanna and colorist Steve Buccellato

This is the other special in which a DC character without a book of his own crashes into the milieu of one of the extant Hanna-Barbereboot books. Though written by regular Flintstones writer Mark Russell, it is really more of a Booster Gold story. Despite all of the panel time that The Flintstones characters enjoy, it is Booster who is our protagonists, and Fred, Barney and Wilma could easily have been played by generic characters from the distant past. Where the book really shares common ground with the modern, post-modern take on the 20th century's modern Stone Age family is in the tone. Like Russel's Flintsones book, this is social satire in a cartoon package, often quite dark, even shockingly so (Booster plays Weekend At Bernie's with a bisected corpse near the climax) and occasionally preachy.

Booster Gold, in the far-flung future of 2472, is on his way to a date in Gotham City when aliens attack. In order to save the day, Booster Gold researches the alien race on Chronopedia and uses his time machine to jump back to Bedrock 20,000 BC, the time and place of their kind's first appearance on Earth. His sudden arrival out of thin air kills the interplanetary prophet who arrived to share his advanced wisdom with the residents of Bedrock, cutting the poor sap in half...and starting the chain of events that would eventually lead to the invasion 22,500 years or so later (time travel!).

With the help of time travel and some local cave-people, he attempts to save the day, and kinda sorta does, in the process radically altering his present/our future in a way that he's pretty much the only one who can appreciate.

Russell's take on Booster Gold is pretty fun. The character seems like himself, despite appearing inn a narrative that is obviously more comedic in focus than even the Bwa-ha-ha-est of his superhero adventures, and he Russell does with time travel what he's been doing with history and American society in the pages of The Flinstones (I particularly enjoyed Booster's reaching out to other time travelers for help, all of whom seem to have chosen to inadvertently traveled to deadly, disastrous points in history).

Perhaps the scariest thing about this entire story, however? In the year 2472, people will still be dating via Tinder! I guess I should be gladdened by the knowledge that there is no way in hell I'll survive over 450 more years...

This back-up is the The Jetsons, courtesy the Harley Quinn writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner, with artist Pier Brito. I kind of hated it. It is essentially just an origin story for The Jetsons' robot maid Rosie, which is actually kind of disturbing (Spoiler alert: She is now a robot with the mind of George's mother, and thus Judy and Elroy's grandmother, implanted into it/her). She is the most drastically redesigned member of the cast--she's the creepy alien-looking thing on the cover--having lost her boxy appearance and stereotypical maid drag for a shapelier figure and lighter-colored metal placed in such a way to suggest an apron and such.

The human Jetsons all look more-or-less like realistic versions of themselves, as if Brito just cast actors to play them in a live-action adaptation. Jane wears stretch pants under her dress, and Elroy looks older and dresses less like a little kid, but that's about it.

One thing I found strange about DC's various Hanna-Barbereboot books in general--these as well as the four original ongoings--was that in making "adult" versions of these cartoons (Future Quest being the only one that's really all-ages), none of the artists involved redesigned anyone as particularly sexy. In fact, though generally drawn in more realistic faction, the 21st century reboot versions are generally less sexy, with the ladies all more demurely, conservatively dressed than their 1960s cartoon counterparts. That is especially evident here, as not only were Jane and Judy drawn as particularly attractive (um, for their milieu), they were also relatively scantily-clad for the era of television from which they were born (Same goes for Betty and Wilma, I guess, although I never found Wilma the least bit attractive, even when I was a wee child and cartoon women were the only women I really saw that I wasn't related to; her pupil-less dead eyes and the shape of her head always turned me off, whereas Betty was a stone age fox).

But anyway, rather than a futurisic version of The Flintstones, this is an end-of-life story set in the far-flung future in which we learn George uses his dead mom's brain as a maid. It is to be continued in The Jetsons, we are told.

Green Lantern/Space Ghost #1 by writers James Tynion IV and Christopher Sebela, and artist/colorist Ariel Olivetti

As with Adam Strange/Future Quest, both sides of this particular team-up fit together so naturally it's almost not even remarkable to see them sharing a book, and there's certainly none of the inherent tension of the previous book, or the one we'll discuss next. Green Lantern is a space cop who fights various forms of evil in space. Space Ghost is a space cop who fights various forms of evil in space. Neither of them has anything approaching a personality, so even having them play off one another doesn't really generate much in the way of sparks. Tynion and Sebela's story isn't bad, it's just not terrible interesting.

Both heroes receive a distress signal of sorts from the most distant edges of their universes, and they each rush to investigate. Foes of each are encountered and fought--"Agent Orange" Larfleeze and Zorak/s--and the pair end up on a rather Earth-like planet, where they proceed to duke it out, because why wouldn't they?

This planet is ruled by bad folks who have convinced the populace that there is no life at all beyond their planet, and thus when the spacemen arrive, they need to be eradicated with laser guns and mechs. So more fighting. At one point the heroes trade weapons, and I can't tell you how disappointed I was that when Space Ghost put on the Green Lantern ring he didn't receive a Green Lantern-ized costume like heroes usually do when they try GL's ring on for size. Maybe next time...?*

Ariel Olivetti's art isn't to my taste. His designs are fine, but he uses a lot of computer gimickry, dropping in photo-realistic backgrounds and robots and such that contributes to an all-around look of sterile fakery. A lot of people obviously dig this kind of art, but I like comic book art that looks drawn with pencil and ink on paper. That said, as the artist on the 2005 Space Ghost miniseries with writer Joe Kelley, Olivetti was probably a pretty ideal choice for the comic, if none of the Future Quest guys were available.

The back-up is a Ruff 'n' Reddy feature by Howard Chaykin. The cat and dog characters are obscure enough that I have actually never, ever seen a cartoon featuring them (or, if I did, it was long enough ago that I have no memory of it). I can't really speak then to what degree Chaykin reinvents them, but it's worth pointing out that it reads like a weird Howard Chaykin funny animal comic, in which the pair are professional, old time-y comedians who are down on their luck. The strongest gag, I thought, was the series of other comedians they work with, all of whom have names that lend themselves to teaming with them.

Suicide Squad/Banana Splits #1 by writer Tony Bedard, artists Ben Caldwell and Mark Morales and colorist Jeremy Lawson

This was probably the most out-there of the four books, what with there being the largest gulf in tone between the  source material, and the fact that The Banana Splits was just a really, really weird show (and not even a cartoon, but an off-putting live-action one featuring people in frightening animal costumes...Liz Phair and Material issue's cover song of their theme song from the 1995 MCA anthology album Saturday Morning was pretty awesome, though!).

Writer Tony Bedard imagines the Banana Splits as a down-on-their-luck band of hybrid animal people (for whose existence no explanation is ever given) who are apparently native to the DC Universe. On their way to a gig, a misunderstanding leads to them getting busted by the cops, and they are shipped off to Belle Reve (perhaps because they are animal people? That doesn't get explained either). They don't exactly fit in there, and when Amanda Waller needs some extremely expendable Squaddies to reinforce Harley Quinn, Katana, Killer Croc and Deadshot on their rescue mission, the Splits suit-up and join the fray.

As their opponents are robots, the Splits aren't forced to kill any actual living things during the mayhem. It all leads up to a kind of forced gag, but that particular gag was perhaps the only reason a Banana Splits/Suicide Squad crossover would ever even have been a thing. Other than sheer weirdness, of course.

Caldwell's pencil art, inked by Mark Morales, is fantastic, and among the best art applied to the Suicide Squad in their 5,000 or so appearance since The New 52boot. Dude should really be drawing the regular series, or at least an arc or two of it, as the model for the current Suicide Squad series seems to be to put a different high-profile artist on each consecutive story arc.

His Harley Quinn is just right, capturing the basic look of the movie-inspired redesign with equal parts Animated Series puckishness and Suicide Squad craziness. He basically lands right in the middle of the two most pervasive versions of the character.

He gives Katana a redesign, with a more elaborate, samurai-inspired costume that is an improvement over most of her many costumes over the years, and his Deadshot is a more stripped-down and stylized version of the current costume. In fact, Caldwell's version may be the best of that particular (terrible) Deadshot costume.

The Banana Splits all look incredibly off, even wrong, though. Bingo (the monkey) is the only one who retains the strange person-in-a-furry suit look, given his over-sized head. The rest are simply animal men, and their sizes reflect which animal they are to some degree, rather than all being the same size. I don't know what the best choice for drawing The Banana Splits in a Suicide Squad comic is though, so I can't say Caldwell necessarily did it wrong, but making them realistic animal-men certainly looks and feels wrong to me. Like, even just being able to see their eyes, or Snork being an actual elephant-man instead of the weird, gray, shaggy, Cousin It-looking thing with a trunk and ears seemed un-Banana Split-like to me.

The back-up is a Snagglgepuss story, wait, I'm sorry, it's "The Snagglepuss Chronicles." It's by Mark Russell and Howard Porter and...it's a weird one. Snagglepuss is drawn as a more-or-less realistic felid of some kind, albeit a human-sized one with pink fur, creepy-looking "backwards" hind legs and a longer version of the yellow coat he sported during Laff-A-Lympics. Russell imagines him a quick-witted, controversial playwright of some sort, making his way through what appears to be the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings with a series of bon mots. Outside, he randomly meets Augie Doggie, who similarly looks weirdly realistic, and who says he wants to be a writer. Snagglepuss offers advice that does sound inspiring and, well, true, and he also flashes-back to a tragic event in his past (cameo by Peter Potamus).

I couldn't make heads or tails of this one, to be honest, and whatever joke Russell was trying to tell went over my head.



*After that weird--but surprisingly good!--2005 Space Ghost miniseries, I had spent some time thinking about Space Ghost joining the DC Universe, even if only on a temporary basis, and what that might be like. I assumed he would run into Green Lanterns. I thought it would be cool to see him as a POV character wandering around DC's Earth for a while too, maybe joining the Justice League for a while. I think the current Justice League, which has a pretty boring and incredibly static line-up these days, would really benefit from adding Space Ghost to it.

Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti understand the defining element of Hal Jordan's character.

Sure, the writers of Harley Quinn's Little Black Book may have played rather fast and loose with the "rules" of the variously-colored power rings in the second issue of their bi-monthly team-up series (drawn this time by John Timms and Mauricet), just as they ignored the timeline of the New 52 in their first issue (I guess we can chalk the title's continuity-lite status up to it having an unreliable–meaning "insane"–narrator), but in the above panel they demonstrate that they know exactly what it is that makes Hal Jordan who he is.

Hal Jordan is a guy who gets hit in the head a lot.

There are also a few gags about Harley touching Jordan's butt (which at least one of you will likely appreciate), and the more standard line of making fun of the character: His complete lack of imagination when it comes to power ring constructs, the defaults being a handful of the types of sports equipment that might have been found in your father or grandfather's childhood toy box.

A few quick notes on Harley's Little Black Book #1

DC's recently launched Harley's Little Black Book is a bi-monthly team-up pairing the writing team of the Harley Quinn monthly with rotating artists, and it's seemingly patterned after old-school team-up books like The Brave and the Bold, which teamed Batman with a different DC character each issue, and DC Comics Presents, which did the same with Superman.

As I mentioned when it was first announced, it doesn't seem like a bad idea for a book at all, really, nor does it seem to threaten "Peak Harley," as the publisher continues to find new ways to cash in on the character's rather sudden and random popularity (her prominent place in the upcoming film Suicide Squad should help sustain that popularity for a few more publishing quarters, too). Considering the many one-shot specials and miniseries that the Harley Quinn writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner have been pumping out ever since it became apparent their particular take on the character (Sexy Deadpool) was a popular one, if Little Black Book simply replaces all those other Harley books on the shelves, the actual number of Palmiotti and Conner-written Harley comics pages will remain more-or-less consistent.

This first issue teams Harley with Wonder Woman, complete with a particularly elaborate variant cover scheme involving opaque-polybags to disguise which version of the cover you get (this scheme was stretched out across a chunk of the DC line, actually, to help "celebrate" the release of this book). But let's forget that the comics industry has returned to polybabbing comics (which, incidentally, makes them impossible to flip-through and, at least tacitly, encourages certain readers to either never open them at all, or buy two copies, one to open and one to keep sealed so it will retain it's original "value" of what will almost certainly be "less than the paper it's printed on," if the past is a good indication of what might occur in the future).

Reading the first issue, I was most struck by how it read just like another, extra issue of the parent title. There's no attempt to contextualize the goings-on of the book–which includes Harley at the head of a large, Harley Quinn-themed gang with goofy names, assisted by a re-re-booted version of the old Wonder Woman villain Egg Fu–and, for better or worse, simply squeezes the guest-star into the proceedings.

The plot is that the Gang of Harleys, or "Gang a' Harleys" as Harley refers to them, have stumbled on a London-based supervillain's plot to kill London-based superhero Wonder Woman. The villain is named "Barmy Bugger," and he's "The London Legion of Superheroes' number one villain," according to Harley's Oracle, Egg Fu. As a closet Wonder Woman fan, Harley can't let this happen, but she also wants to be in on the save herself, so as to team up with Wondy. She therefore launches a dumb plan to travel to London and replace Wonder Woman.

Conner draws most of the book, while John Timms draws about 12 pages. Conner's relatively heavy involvement in the art chores should be reason enough for many Harley Quinn fans to pick up the book; the main criticism of Harley Quinn's art has been that, as good as the interiors might be, they're not drawn by Conner, a fan-favorite artist who mostly just provides covers.

Bottom line, if you like the monthly Harley Quinn, you should like this just fine; if you're reading it just for Wonder Woman, though, well, keep in mind it's very much a Harley Quinn comic in which Wonder Woman happens to appear.

There are a few things I wanted to point out:

1.) The narration boxes are designed to resemble the ruled or lined paper one might find in a notebook or journal, albeit colored red bleeding into black, with white font. The suggestion is that it's written by Harley herself, then, as she's narrating in first-person (Do note those opaque polybags feature Harley scribbling in a notebook). However, Harley writes in her accent, which is fucking weird.

2.) The continuity of this comic doesn't work, like, at all.

Remember that the current DC Universe is about six years old or so, with Justice League #1 being set "five years ago." That was the first comic of The New 52 continuity, and that first story arc featured the first meetings between Superman and Batman, Batman and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Everyone and Wonder Woman, Everyone and Aquaman, et cetera. The characters were all presumably around for a few months previously (Batman and Superman had time to change costumes from those they wore during the first volume of Action Comics and "Zero Year" respectively, for example, and Hal Jordan met The Flash previously, and so on). If we consider the fact that the "present" of September 2011 is now about a year or two ago (according to the pages of Batman), well, we're looking at a Wonder Woman who has been active in Man's World for, what, seven years, tops?

Now, how old is Harley Quinn, exactly? At least 25, right?

And yet, when she was in grade school "Years and years ago," she was watching TV footage of Wonder Woman (in the pre-New 52 costume that shouldn't exist anymore) and idolizing the Amazon princess/superhero, to the extent that she even dressed up in an old-school, 1970s-era plastic mask and Wonder Woman costume (again, a pre-New 52 version) to beat up some bullies at school, nearly hanging one to death.

This...doesn't work. Even if we allow that Flashback Harley was, I don't know, as old as 11, and even if we allow that Wonder Woman has been a public superhero for as many as seven years, that would make current Harley Quinn only 18, which is pretty impossible, considering she's been active for 5-7 years as Harley Quinn too (and, at some point, had to go to college and grad school and get a doctorate prior to even becoming Harley Quinn).

Yes, I know I am being that guy, but that's just because I am that guy! Please mark this down as Reason #345,627 on your list of Why The New 52 Reboot Was a Bad Idea. The timeline in this story would have worked fine in the pre-Flashpoint DCU, but doesn't work in The New 52 at all. If you think about such things at all. And maybe you need not. While Harley Quinn and this book are both set squarely in-continuity, they do tend to play a bit faster and looser with the "rules" of the shared setting, to the point that sometimes the Harley who appears here seems to be a completely different one than the one who is part of Suicide Squad's ensemble, or appears elsewhere in the DCU.

3.) This is at least the second time that Palmiotti and Conner do the Harley Quinn's-boobs-aren't-as-big-as-another-heroine's gag. They previously used it on a cover of the parent title in which Harley tries on guest-star Power Girl's costume, but can't fill it out.

Here she strips Wonder Woman of her costume and puts it on herself, needing to tape it up to keep it on. When Wonder Woman awakens naked in her own bathtub amid a firefight, she's apparently forced to dress in the only clothes available to her: Harley's discarded and way-too-small costume, giving Conner the opportunity to draw Wonder Woman exploding out of that.

It's a gag they are fond of enough that it's also used as the cover for this issue.

Well, the regular cover (above), not the image on the polybag, or one of the three variant covers that might be inside the polybagged version.

4.) I did really like the Wonder Woman car chase secene, which does not involve Wonder Woman in a car. She's first shown chasing a speeding car down on foot...

...and then later leaps/flies over the car to land in front of it, where she somehow manages to slice it completely in half with her sword...

It's a big, stupid scene that doesn't make sense (the car-chopping, not the other parts), but it's also pretty awesome, and, as well all know, in the world of superhero comics, if something is sufficiently awesome, it doesn't have to make sense.

So whatever other weaknesses the book might have–and, again, if you like Harley Quinn, then you'll like Harley's Little Black Book–it at least has that scene going for it.

I like this John McCrea cover.

That's John McCrea's cover to Section Eight #1, a six-issue miniseries that constitutes he and Garth Ennis' return to the DC Universe and stars a couple of relatively minor characters from their 1996-2001 Hitman series. Below that is the cover of Hitman #1, which the former is clearly meant to echo.

I really like McCrea's art, and it's fun seeing the deliberate reference to a previous cover. Note the differences in the Batmans, in terms of their costuming, as well as the similarities, in terms of Batman's expression and the way McCrea draws his cape, as a sort of explosion of ink.

Ennis and McCrea first introduced the characcter Tommy Monaghan, the hitman of the title, in a 1993  annual attached to their run on The Demon (Psst! Ennis and McCrea's Demon run would make a fine collection, People At DC Who Decide What Gets Collected). They used Batman to help ease the character into the audience's eyes, which made sense not only in terms of Batman helps sell things, but because Tommy was a Gothamite (The Demon was set in Gotham City, after all).

Between the end of The Demon and the launch of Hitman, Tommy appeared in a short story in The Batman Chronicles #4, sort of tied to the then-ongoing Batman crossover storyline, "Contagion." Batman then played a fairly prominent role in the first Hitman story arc, punching Tommy so hard in the stomach at one point that he throws Thai food up on Batman's boots. Despite both Batman and The Joker swearing vengeance upon Tommy Monaghan by the end of that story arc, neither reappeared for a rematch throughout the rest of the Hitman run, which made for maybe the only loose story thread Ennis didn't tie-up.

As for Batman's presence on the cover of Section Eight this week, Section Eight's leader Sixpack is trying to revive his team, no easy feat since most of them are dead. He gets up to seven, but still needs an eighth, and Batman is his first potential new recruit.

If you're looking for this book tomorrow–and you should be!–do note that the McCrea cover above is a "variant;" for reasons that perplex me, the "regular" cover is by Amanda Conner, a fine artist whose only fault in this instance is that she's not John McCrea.

Review: Harley Quinn Holiday Special #1

DC sure hasn't been shy about striking while this particular iron is hot. The new Harley Quinn solo series, the character's second, launched in November of last year with a #0 issue featuring one drawn-out fourth-wall breaking gag and drawn by a who's who of artists. It probably shouldn't have been a surprise that that issue was a hit, but, rather remarkably, the issues that followed also sold very well.

Perhaps it was the higher profile the already sorta popular character received thanks to various video games, perhaps it was the presence of cover artist and co-writer Amanda Conner, perhaps it was that the book was in the DC Universe line of books, while striking a very different tone and style than that of the other 51 or so books in "The New 52." Whatever the reason, Harley Quinn was working better than pretty much anything other than Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo on Batman.

And so in the last year DC has published Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International and Harley Quinn Annual #1, both with the sam basic different-artist-for-every-scene format as the #0 issue (the annual additional boasting the incentive of being a scratch 'n sniff rub 'n smell comic), and, just this last week, Harley Quinn Holiday Special #1.

It's a 36-page, three-story anthology, featuring two Christmas story and one New Year's story, which is why it's called a Holiday special and not a Christmas special, Kirk Cameron.

All three stories are written by the regular Harley Quinn writing team of Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, and each drawn by a different artist, each of whom works in a much looser, more distinctive style than regular Harley Quinn artist Chad Hardin (At the rate they're going, I wonder if Harley will be the next DC super-character to get a digital-first anthology series following Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman).

The first of these, entitled "Bad Toy," is the longest, and at 19 pages is essentially an extra issue of Harley Quinn, albeit with guest art by Mauricet. Harley, who is apparently now a pet hoarder, failed to properly spay or neuter her many pets (Public service announcement: Spay or neuter your pets!), and they've been multiplying like rabbits. She and her friend Tony come up with a brilliant plan to get rid of them: They dress up as "Santa's Helpers" who volunteer to carry packages to the cars of shoppers and, if they think the shoppers will be good pet-owners, they hide a puppy or kitten in one of their bags.

But on Christmas Eve, Harley decides to check on one of them, and ends up getting busted Christmas morning. The cartoonishly bratty little girl of the house thinks Harley herself is the present, and so the girl's father bribes Harley into playing along for a while...but to make herself so undesirable a playmate that the girl gets rid of her of her own volition.

It reads much less complicated in-story.

Anyway, Harley eventually solves the family's problems by virtue of being immature, juvenile and a deranged lunatic with a heart of gold. It works surprisingly well as a Christmas story and a Harley Quinn story.

The art is pretty great. Mauricet has a highly kinetic, highly expressive style used to great effect throughout, The characters—human and animal alike—are highly expressive, and Harley is drawn as super-sexualized as usual, but with a good girl, cartoonish edge that bleeds toward parody.

That's followed by a shorter, sillier story entitled "Get Yer Cheer Outta My Ear," in which Conner and Palmiotti introduce us to the humbug, a tiny parasitic insect that embeds itself in the ear of a human host hums Christmas music directly into the brain of its victim. Then they introduce it into Harley.

She is saved by Santa Claus in a way that isn't as dirty as this panel might imply...

...who then takes Harley out to dinner at a kosher deli and expresses his thanks to "these great people" for not celebrating Christmas, and thus "making my job easier each year!"

This one is drawn by Brandt Peters, in a painterly, picture book style that reinterprets Harley as a big, bobble-headed doll.

Finally, there's "Killin' Time," drawn by Darwyn Cooke, who is probably the ideal Harley Quinn artist, at least this side of her creator Bruce Timm. Cooke's Harley is Harley as originally conceived and designed for her birthplace, Batman: The Animated Series, although Cooke renders her in her "New 52" look, with the bone-white skin and half-red, half-black hair. He additionally outfits her with a winter version of her costume (In Mauricet's story, she merely wears her regular duds, albeit more skimpy versions, with a jingle-bell collar and short leather jacket; in Peters', she puts a coat and furry boots oon over her roller derby uniform).

The story here is one of cartoonish insanity, made more cartoonish still by Cooke's suepr-flat, unapologetically 2D artwork (I imagine the jokes in the regular series would sing much better if they were always drawn in such a style). On New Year's Eve, Harley notices that she has a gray hair—not sure how that works, given her New 52 origin—and when her friends tell her about Father Time and the New Year's Baby, she becomes convinced that all she has to do to stop from growing older is track down a Mr. Harold Tyme, an elderly patient of hers in a nearby hospital, and either break his magical time piece and/or murder him.

No one gets murdered, and while Harley doesn't exactly learn a lesson in this one, she does get that gray hair taken care of.

I'm inclined to say that I wish Cooke was drawing Harley Quinn monthly, but then, I'd rather see him work on other, better comics, particularly ones he might be more passionate about. But then, if he's just going to waste his time on things like Before Watchmen projects and vigorously, ignorantly defending them in interviews with industry media outlets, well, he might as well be drawing Harley Quinn comics monthly, you know?

In-between the stories are a pair of Billy Tucci-drawn holiday pin-ups, both needlessly labeled "Pin-Up." The first features New 52 Harley in front of a wreath and dangling mistletoe above her head, the second features the Bombshell version of Harley (save this one has all-white skin) in front of the New Year's Ball.

I'm not really a fan of Palmiotti and Gray's take on the character, which amounts to little more than a sexy Halloween costume version of Marvel's Deadpool, but I enjoyed the looks of all three of these stories, and while some of the previously mentioned Harley comics feature more artists, this one is probably the best preview or gateway comic into what all the Harley Quinn hype is about, as it allows the regular writers to tell short, complete stories, each with talented artists who stick around long enough to make an impression, rather than just drawing a page or three.


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

Hey, any of you out there regularly Harley Quinn readers? If so, can you identify the...character in the below panel who appears to be a large egg in some kind of robot suit...?

That's not the New 52 version of obscure-ish Wonder Woman villain Egg Fu, who Grant Morrison and company resurrected for the weekly 52 series, as a giant-er egg in a big robot suit, is it...?

Just wondering. I checked out of the Harley Quinn monthly after about two issues, and have only read the specials since then.

Review: Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International San Diego #1

I generally loathe the very concept of having issue numbers with decimal points in them, something Marvel has indulged in quite a bit over the past few years and DC flirted with during their weird "Villains Month" last September, but this book actually seems like one in which an issue number with a decimal point in it would actually work. That's because in its format, style, tone and even some of its marketing, Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International San Diego #1 reads a lot like Harley Quinn #0; think of this as Harley Quinn #0.1.

As such, it promises many of the same pleasures, but also many of the same pitfalls and, unfortunately, there are fewer pleasures here than in the #0 issue, but much more time spent in the pitfalls, as the book becomes quite quickly overtaken by weird in-jokes, many of which feature various DC comics executives and creators, appearing in scenes in which the jokes are sometimes at the expense of the people who buy and read DC comics. That's sort of weird, right?

As with every issue of the New 52 version of the Harley Quinn solo comic, it is written by the husband and wife team of Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, with the former providing the cover: Here a wraparound cover in which we see Harley running past a line of DC cosplayers and stereotypes (Because this is a DC comic, all of the comics characters represented by cosplayers, merchandise and background noise—note the Kaley Cuoco Power Girl movie poster between Harley's pigtails on the cover—are either DC characters, or generic character-types. Similar to the way that Warner Bros' direct-to-DVD Scooby-Doo: Mask of The Blue Falcon was set at a comics convention where the only superheroes in existence seemed to be ones from Hanna-Barbera cartoons, a gag that worked a bit better for the Scooby movie, given its higher level of ridiculousness).

The artwork, as that in the #0 issue, comes courtesy of a sort of all-star jam line-up, although it's worth noting that, despite a higher page count, there are fewer stars involved in this issue, and many of them boast a much lower wattage. Paul Pope kicks everything off with a four-panel first page in which Harley leaps into a two-page splash title page, laughing "HA HA!!" in Pope's hand-writing in a little, Pope-shaped dialogue bubble. It's only a page, but yeah, he certainly qualifies as one of "the GREATEST ARTISTS of ALL TIME!" mentioned on the cover (What? No "comics" qualifier between "greatest" and "artists"...?).

From there, though, the caliber of creator slips. EDILW favorite Damion Scott and Robert Campanella contribute five pages, Amanda Conner herself draws three and Stephane Roux two and from there the line-up consists of creators I'm much less familiar with: Javier Garron, John Timms, Marco Failla and Dave Johnson (plus four different colorists!).

The premise is that Harley has traveled to SDCC with some of the characters that live in the building he runs in Coney Island; I'm not sure what exactly their business is, but I think it has something to do with old-school carnie folk, and they're here to sell merchandise of some kind (I didn't make it very far past the #0 issue of the Harley Quinn monthly, before the mixture of poor humor and aggressive, desperate joke-making turned me off; it's fine to tell lame jokes and to fail to be funny constantly—I'd be a hypocrite to suggest otherwise!—but in Harley Quinn those lame jokes are always delivered with an off-putting confidence bordering on arrogance, a sort of wackiness or zaniness produced by writers who crack their knuckles, sit down at the keyboard and announce, "Okay, let's write some wacky and zany stuff!").

Harley's con invasion is broken up into days, so under the banner of "Day One: Tuesday" she and friends arrive, and we get the first instance of a running gag that will be repeated every few pages. Harley will see someone in the crowd and say, "Oh my God! It's that--" and in a string of off-center, no-spaces verbiage she will rattle off some long, complicated back-story to the person's career or stuff they are famous for, before ending with, "I love that guy!"

If you're reading the comic, and not just this review of it, then I hope you liked that gag. Because you'll be seeing a lot more of it. A lot more.

It's in the hotel that night that she shows her friend Queenie her portfolio, which features her own superhero creation, "Hurl Girl," who is "a superhero that up-chucks her way out of any situation." This accounts for Conner's interior work, three pages of black-and-white comics featuring the character; turns out Harley draws a lot like Conner, only slightly rougher.

Later, she hijacks a truck of DC Comics clothes and gives them away to the homeless, and beats up and nearly murders a waitress at "Rude Rick's Hateful Hideaway," one of those mean-on-purpose places.

On Day Two, John Timms takes over the art (I really like his sharp lines and angles, and he's got a great style, but oh boy does his Harley costume suddenly shrink dramatic, compared to what Scott had her wearing in the previous sequences).

Here we get our first DC Comics cameos, as Harley approaches "Katie Kubert, DC Editor," who Timms draws in a more illustrative style (ditto the other real people). She suggests Harley talk to Bob Harras, DC's Editor-In-Chief regarding a portfolio review, and when Harley asks how she can ever thank Kubert, the editor responds "When you are rich and famous, hire me out of this soul-sucking job."

Ha ha it's funny because...working for DC is horrible...?

To illustrate how terrible the job is, she's show to be surrounded by three fans asking innocent if inane questions about DC Comics plot points, scheduling and creators.

Gross! DC fans! Is there anything a DC Editor hates more?

Unfortunately for Harley, Bob Harras is talking to Batman, which is...weird. I don't know if this is meant to be the "real" Batman or just someone dressed like Batman, but Harley, who is, remember, the "real" Harley, says it's Batman, and while she is an unreliable narrator, this Batman is drawn like Batman might be drawn—big, muscular, square jaw, cool suit—so...I don't know.

Harley pantses Batman in order to make Batman look bad and show her portfolio to Harras (who, luckily, doesn't get any dialogue, so he doesn't come across like an asshole, like a lot of the other folks Palmiotti and Conner include). It doesn't work, but we do see that Batman–or a guy who dresses like Batman—wears boxers with Harley Quinn on them under the suit (apparently the utility belt doesn't actually hold his pants up?).

How one wears boxers with skin-tight spandex pants, I don't know, but there's got a be a lot of bunching and chafing going on in Batman's nether regions. Explains the scowl, I guess.

Thrown out for that, Harley tries a variety of hijinx to get back in, and eventually stumbles into a room of guys dressed up like The Joker, at which point she breaks the fourth wall...

...and comes out of the room on the next page, her hair a mess, saying "Yeah, yeah, I know none of them was the real Mistah J... ...But I hadda make sure."

The fake Jokers, meanwhile, are all drawn with their lipstick smeared al over their faces and their hair tousled—so she apparently just smooched them all. Don't use that much imagination!

Day Three, drawn by Marco Failla, finds Harley partying with a limo full of Harley cosplayers, all of whom are dressed as different versions of her. They say they want to go out for a night of mayhem, but, not realizing that Harley's the real Harley, they turn out not to be ready for her brand of mayhem.

Day Four brings us more DC cameos and in-jokes, including the bizarre one I ranted and raved about the other day. Dan DiDio is being interviewed in front of a television camera, and the interview consists of him rambling a bunch of jokes that seem to be at his own expense...

...but then there's that weird bit about editorial oversight, and I'm not even sure I get it. In the previous panel, they were taking something absolutely real and true—DC's dumb September events with gimmick covers that proved hard and expensive to create, according to DC—and exaggerating it for comedic effect.

But then, in the next panel, he's talking about how they're launching a new line with no editorial input, just creators going crazy and doing what they want (that is, how most of the comics that aren't produced by DC, Marvel and some part of a few other publishers' lines are produced), but that's not an exaggeration of something true, but the exact opposite of the current situation.

So while the sequence starts out by making fun of DiDio, it then seems to pivot to having DiDio making fun of...DC Comics readers? Again?

And then there's the weird swipe at Marvel, in which Harley Quinn, currently starring in a book that is basically just DC's answer to Deadpool's recent success, laments that they "aren't looking for anything new or original."

And then the day closes with a brief, un-embarrassing cameo by Geoff Johns...

What's with the hat, I wonder? Has Johns got a little bald spot going? If so, just shave your head, man! Embrace baldness! It's very freeing!

Day Five, and it's time for a Jim Lee joke! Jim Lee—also wearing a baseball cap!—reviews Harley's portfolio in a six-panel sequence, in which thoughts race through her head in very wordy thought bubbles, as Lee silently looks at her work and she tries to guess what he's thinking, growing angrier and angrier until he says something nice at the end, and she skips away, overjoyed.

This lead to my favorite gag in the comic, a reference to Stan Lee: "I could give a crap his dad created all those other comic characters for that other company!"

Doesn't hurt to kiss the boss' ass now and then, I guess.

And then we finally, finally get to the final pair of gags, on Day Six. Handsome actor Steve Amell is talking to a group of fans—I don't watch Arrow, so I didn't recognize him with his shirt on until the dialogue offered a clue as to who he was—while a security detail that looks like Secret Service keep them at bay. Harley charges through the crowd, screaming about how she simply has to get this guy to sign her autograph book and when Amell offers, she pushes him aside to approach, "Bruce Timm! My hero!" She fawns over Timm and Paul Dini, her creators, before trying to get her hands on a copy of Batman Adventures #12, her own first comic book appearance.

The dealer will sell it to her for "about three hundred bucks," which, wait, is that how much those are going for? Because I'm pretty sure I've got one in a long box in the tomb-like structure of longboxes in my ancestral home. Do I really have a comic book that might actually be worth some amount of money?

I hope so. This Harley Quinn special, on the other hand? I wouldn't all it "worthless," as there are a few gags that land, there's some great art, and it offers the always welcome opportunity to see Paul Pope and Damion Scott in action, but it's not what I'd call a fine comic book.

Or even a Very Good or Good one. Maybe Fair/Good...? Or Fair? Let's go with Fair/Good.

Good God, that's some chutzpah.

The above is a two-panel sequence from this week's Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International San Diego #1, a new one-shot by regular writing team of the surprise-hit Harley Quinn monthly series, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (the issue is drawn jam-issue style by nine different artists, although the above panels come from artist Dave Johnson's pages).

The premise of the comic, in brief, is that that Harley and her supporting cast are visiting CCI to sell merch, and she is using the opportunity to shop her portfolio of sample pages around (she's created a comic book character called Hurl Girl, which Conner draws). In punchline of the above joke is apparently that DC's direct market and superhero IP rival Marvel Entertainment doesn't pay as well as DC does (I guess...? It's one of the many inside baseball jokes that are so inside I think you actually have to work for DC to get, appreciate or care about them), and, of course, that "They," which would be Marvel, "aren't looking for anything new or original."

That hopefully good-natured slam comes in a comic book about a once-serious violent psychopathic comic book character now played for laughs invading a comic book convention (as in Keith Giffen, Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill's 1993 Lobo Convention Special #1), a character created by in 1992 by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, and currently being used in her second ongoing series by Conner and Palmiotti as DC's answer to Deadpool, a crazy, anarchic character who hears voices, frequently breaks the fourth wall, and is portrayed as silly and comedic in her own book, but seriously outside her own title.

Excusing the fact that DC's current editorial strategy is re-do and re-mix pre-existing characters, costumes and even stories as part of their New 52 initiative, I think it's worth noting the recent bibliograpies of the writers making fun of Marvel's unwillingness to try something "new" and "original."

Conner's most recent work for DC prior to co-writing and providing covers for Harley Quinn was working on a prequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1986 Watchmen, over the very loud and very vociferous objections of the original author, featuring Moore and Gibbons creations inspired by superhero characters from the 1960s, created by a bunch of other creators.

The much more prolific Palimiotti's recent output for DC has consisted mainly of a very long run with co-writer Justin Grey on Tony DeZuniga and John Albano's 1972 Jonah Hex character, which, as it neared its cancellation, included a Booster Gold/Hex team-up that followed the pairing of the characters by Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz in 2007 and a Hex-thrown-into-his-future storyline that followed the same premise that Michael Fleisher-written Hex series from 1985.

He and Gray also wrote a bunch of miniseries based on Grant Morrison's reimaginings of the Golden Age Freedom Fighters characters and took over the Batwing title starring a legacy version of Morrison's re-creation of a black Batman originally conceived by Frank Robbins and Dick Giordano from a 1973 issue of Batman. They are currently writing a character dubbed "G.I. Zombie," whose name echoes that of the 1962-created Robert Kanigher co-created character G.I. Robot, and who is a monster serving in the military, like the characters of J.M. DeMatteis/Pat Broderick 1980-created Creature Commandos.

It's also a fucking zombie comic. Launched in 2014.

I'd like to think that Conner and Palmiotti were being ironic in their Marvel diss, that they were lampooning DC and themselves rather than taking a crack at their main competitors, as a quick survey of the output of the two publishers features a very, very, very wide gulf in terms of quality, originality, relevance, vitality and, of course, variety. DC mostly publishes New 52 comics which, with few exceptions, all look alike and share a very similar tone, whereas Marvel's output includes incredibly quirky books like a Mike Allred-drawn Silver Surfer, that All-New Ghost Rider, a superhero-humor-comic-that-is-actually-funny She-Hulk, sad-sack super-crime comedy The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, and books like Hawkeye, Daredevil, Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel.

I don't want to get into a Marvel vs. DC thing here, but Conner and Palmiotti apparently do, and for anyone at DC to be trying to troll Marvel in 2014 for being adverse to anything new and original is, well, crazy-sounding.

Like I said, I would like to think they weren't serious, but those panels immediately follow this weird-ass one, in which Palmiotti and Conner have Dan DiDio making fun of the frequent (constant?) complaints from fans and ex-DC creators that DC is just way too involved in dictating stories and interfering in the creative process in a way that is weird, random, unwelcome and unproductive and, obviously, usually results in pretty shitty comics:

I think the DiDio in the comic is meant to be making fun of the idea of letting creators go crazy and do what they want on their books, but that actually sounds kind of awesome, doesn't it?

The reason DC doesn't do that, DiDio's avatar seems to say, is that they won't sell more than a thousand units, which seems pretty contrary to much of the available evidence of auteur-style/creator-driven comics in the direct market that outsell a great deal of DC's output (Walking Dead, Saga, anything written by Mark Millar no matter how terrible it is), the general success of Marvel's current editorial model in relation to that of DC's (which almost always has a greater share of the market than DC's comics, and produces many more positive reviews) and even in-[DC's]house evidence, with DC's consistently best-selling comic being the one where Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo do whatever they want with Batman, and other outliers like Geoff Johns' Green Lantern franchise or Grant Morrison's Batman Inc being exempted from "New 52" continuity, save for a costume-tweaking here or there.

They're pretty damn weird jokes to be sharing a page, with creators Conner and Palmiotti arguing in favor of strict editorial control of books and that sales are the best metric of success in one panel, and then arguing in the next to panels that Marvel isn't willing to try new and original ideas like DC is.

I hope to discuss the book further and at greater length in the near future, when I get some time to review-review it, but, in the meantime, I wanted to at least stop and point at the unbelievable chutzpah of the Conner/Palmiotti writing team. This doesn't seem to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black so much as the pot calling the good china black.

Meanwhile...

I have reviews of two new DC #1's at two different places this week, if you'd like to go read them. First, I wrote a short review of the first issue of the new volume of Teen Titans Go! for Good Comics For Kids, and then I wrote a long review of the first issue of the new volume of Harley Quinn #1 for Robot 6.

Wednesday Comics vs. New 52: Supergirl

Superpets Krypto the Superdog and Streaky the Supercat are acting out, which, given their Kryptonian super-powers, is causing all sorts of trouble for Supergirl (not to mention all sorts of property damage). She's on their tails, and trying to figure out what's making them act so squirrelly, with expert advice from the likes of Aquaman and Dr. Mid-Nite, by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner.

"Meet Supergirl. She’s got the unpredictable behavior of a teenager, the same powers as Superman – and none of his affection for the people of Earth. So don’t piss her off!"...by Michael Green, Mike Johnson and Mahmud Asrar.

I can't decide.

Is the pun on this cover really funny, really terrible or so terrible it's funny?

(Oh, and if you're not up to date with DC's various legacy characters, the dark-haired girl is named Terra.)

So there was a comic book convention this weekend.

That’s the cover of an Image one-shot written and illustrated by Ryan Ottley, shown as part of a slideshow at this weekend’s Emerald City Comic Con. Let’s hear it for high concepts! (Also, please note that there appears to be a baby’s head in the mouth of the Grizzly Shark. Perhaps Tucker Stone was on to something after all.)

What other news came out of the convention? And, more importantly, what do I think about that news?


Or, “Power Girl to be cancelled in a few months”: Well, perhaps that’s overly pessimistic, but it’s the first thing that sprung to mind when I saw the headline “Palmiotti, Gray and Conner off of Power Girl.” I’ve only read a handful of issues of the series, but Amanda Conner’s art was far and away the most appealing aspect of the book—it’s what got me to read those few issues, it’s what would get me to read a few more, and it’s usually the thing I see praised most when the book is being praised by anyone (Her art, and the general tone of the book).

If Conner couldn’t do more than twelve issues, and wanted to move on rather than take a break before returning a month or three later, I could sort of see why co-writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray would also want to move on too, but, on the other hand, I always got the sense from reading Palmiotti’s columns and posts around the Internet that he was super-enthusiastic about the character and the book and was going to be on it until it was pried from him.

Certainly someone somewhere should be able to replace Conner and bring much of what she brought to the book. Kevin Maguire is probably the most obvious choice in a lot of ways, and I know J. Bone could do deliver big, fun, funny, cartoony and sexy on a monthly basis, or maybe there’s a newcomer out there somewhere.

I will be curious to see what DC does with the title next. The Comic Book Resources article I linked to above ends with Palmiotti giving advice to his successors, which gave me the impression he wasn’t sure who they would be yet. Power Girl sells poorly enough that changing the entire creative team and possibly direction of the title only 12 issues in seems sort of radical.

The last Beat analysis had PG just below 22K for the eighth issue, below Supergirl and Wonder Woman, as well as both Titans books and Booster Gold. Unless DC ends up bringing in some pretty big names, it’s hard to imagine a Power Girl monthly being around this time next year.


Best news of the weekend (that I heard): Boom Studios, the comics publisher which has been cranking out some great kids comics of late, will be doing a Darkwing Duck miniseries starting in June.

I was a longtime watcher of the “Disney Afternoon” block of after-school cartoons, with Darkwing Duck following a close second to Duck Tales as one of my all-time favorites. Let’s see, I would have been…14 when the show debuted, which was right around the time I started getting into comics and superheroes, so it clicked with my waning interest in Duck Tales and waxing interest in superheroes.

I haven’t tried re-watching it since—despite having taped some of my favorite episodes on blank VCR tapes—so I’m unsure of how well it holds up, but I remember liking the premise (What if Batman were a Disney duck?), the lead actor’s voice a lot (as well as that of his evil opposite, Nega-Duck) and that gun he had that you could stick anything in and it would shoot it out the front. (Hmm, I guess I should check Youtube for old episodes…)

I, uh, I thought I might have more to say about this then simply, “Neat, I’m looking forward to this comic book!” But I guess not. Oh well, this sounds neat; I’m looking forward to this comic book.


I’m not at all surprised that Ian Sattler isn’t familiar with the term “women-in-refrigerators”: Considering I wrote a bit about the fact that DC killed off a little girl in Justice League: Cry For Justice (and read a ton about it over the course of the last week or so), I figure it’s worth following up on what Senior Story Editor Ian Sattler and writer James Robinson had to say on the matter.

Here’s a bit from a Comic Book Resources report on a “DC Nation” panel:

Sattler said he disagreed with the assessment that the character was “fridged” (i.e. that her death was pointless). Robinson (the writer of the story) quickly added, “The decision has been controversial and one that I know has been greeted with displeasure by some. I'm sorry if it upset people. In all honesty, they wanted to kill Speedy too, and I said no, so give me some credit for that."

It appeared that Robinson was joking about wanting to kill Speedy, although some in the crowd were unsure. Sattler jumped in and said, “I’m proud of the story and stand by it. I'm happy it upset people because it means that the story had some weight and emotion.”

Robinson and Sattler also added that this story needed to be told to get Green Arrow to a specific place story-wise, as the character is going to have a “big” year. During the panel, Robinson also noted, “If you see what DC has planned for Green Arrow; Star City (Green Arrow’s hometown) will be one of the greatest cities in the DCU.”

Two quick things.

First, there’s the repeat of the “I’m happy it upset people because it means that the story had some weight” bit. That’s…a peculiar take away. Were some readers upset specifically because Lian Harper, the child of Roy Harper (a.k.a. Red Arrow, a.k.a. Arsenal, a.k.a. Speedy) died? Sure, I’ve read reactions from fans specifically upset that that particular character had died, at least one of whom described herself as a Lian fan.

I read far more people reacting not to the fact that a character died, but to the fact that DC killed her, or the way in which DC killed her. You know, how crass and exploitive it is, how meaningless and pointless it is, how out of place it is in a Justice League comic that barely mentions her dad, let alone Lian herself. What it says about the publisher, the writer, the reader, and what the publisher must think of its readers. Where it fits in the pattern of superhero decadence and so on.

I’m sure we’ll see when sales analysis of the issue is released that, dead kid or not, it’s nowhere near as successful as Blackest Night or Sieige or Batman and Robin, and, more likely didn’t even sell as many copies as it’s parent book, Justice League of America, which didn’t feature any dead kids that month (Future issues of Green Arrow following up on that plot point may see an uptick, but then, Green Arrow sales are so low almost anything would have caused an uptick in interest and sales…)

Apparently Sattler subscribes to the “no such thing as bad publicity” school of thought. But even if that is true, it doesn’t mean people approve of whatever is generating the bad publicity.

Secondly, I thought it was kind of funny how the report says Sattler and Robinson went on to explain that “this story needed to be told to get Green Arrow to a specific place story-wise, as the character is going to have a “big” year.”

Something terrible happening to a female supporting character in able to motivate a male hero is pretty much the text book definition of women-in-refrigerator-ism, isn’t it?


(Oh, by the way, the above image of Green Arrow cradling the lifeless body of a little girl he and the rest of the superheroes of the DC Universe were unable to save is part of a splash page. Standing immediately to the left of Green Arrow is his wife, Black Canary. She looks like this in the same panel: Is she covering her face because she can't bear to look upon the body of her kinda sorta step-fake-granddaughter? Or is she slapping her forehead because she can't believe DC even put her in a stupid scene like this?)



File under Things That Probably Should Not Be: Star Wars burlesque…? Um, hmmm. A sexy storm trooper and a Jaba the Hutt balloon dance thing seem so, so, so wrong, and yet I couldn’t look away. They definitely gets points for creativity, including some of the last characters you’d expect to see (Chewbacca, the aforementioned Jabba, both droids), and only using slave Leia and none of those ladies with two tentacles for hair like that one dancer of Jabba’s. The photo gallery linked to above is at CBR, and they use black bars to cover up the pasties for some reason (does that make looking at a photo set of a Star Wars burlesque show at work more acceptable?); LA Weekly has a slideshow sans bars…and another of the same troupe’s video game themed show (Sadly, no Pac-Man, as the poster for the show suggested).