So how many of of these do you think Mike Sterling will be given in the next week...?

I'm going to guess...thirty-six. That is one of the 18 tear-out valentines available in this week's Young Romance: The New 52 Valentine's Day Special, which, as you can see, are modeled off the sort of valentines you probably got and gave in grade school.

They're not as funny as the New 52 valentines you can probably find online from the likes of Mr. Chris Sims (That first Aquaman one just made me laugh again), but it's a cute idea.

I was a little surprised to see this one, given the notoriety of the pose:

It's the zipped-up, straightened-out version of that pose; the one that ultimately shipped on the cover of Catwoman #0, rather than the one that was originally solicited.

Of all the possible New 52 images of Catwoman though, the choice of that one seems almost calculated to annoy some online critics, as much as that first one seems calculated to give people something to give Mike Sterling.

Personally, I thought this one was the most clever...

..but now that I've revisited that Sims-written piece on ComicsAlliance, I see that valentine rather echoes the headline.

Anyway, for more on Young Romance (i.e. actual reviews of the contents), click your way to Robot 6 using this here link.

For the second Wednesday in a row, I'm not going to have enough time/enough comics waiting for me to inspire me to make it to my local-est comic shop, so I'm afraid that's all of the new content I have for you. I hope to have some more substantial reviews this weekend, when no one is reading.

Is this the face of comics journalism?

I believe so. Okay, so the other day I was in a local Half Price Books, a chain of stores that sells used books (and other stuff) at half their cover price. Hence, the name. In the clearance section, I found a copy of Sam Henderson's 2004 Magic Whistle #9 for only a $1.

Imagine! A $12 Sam Henderson book reduced to just $6 must have sat on a shelf for so long that the good people at Half Price Books must have been like, "Aw fuck it, we're never gonna sell this—let's just put it in clearance for a buck."

Since I have a Magic Whistle #9-shaped hole on my bookshelf, I picked it up and read it with great interest until I got about half-way through the story "Hippy Beach" and realized that writer, critic and comics blogger Tom Spurgeon played a small role in the story.

I think.

My evidence? Well, as you can see, the character above is wearing a hat and glasses, and has stubble. And if you visit comicsreporter.com, you'll see a caricature of Spurgeon, drawn by Sam Henderson, in which Spurgeon is also wearing a hat and glasses and has stubble!

Additionally, and perhaps more convincingly, the above character is referred to as "Spurge" within the story, and "Spurge" is a nickname of Spurgeon's; in fact, the biography section of his site is labeled "Spurge's Bio."

Perhaps we should look at Spurgeon's role as a supporting character in a Sam Henderson comic more closely.

One night a hippy named Freakybeak is walking along Hippy Beach. You can tell he is a hippy because he has longhair, a beard, a head band, round John Lennon glasses and an acoustic guitar slung over his back. He sees a bunch of frat guys getting wasted around a fire. You can tell they are frat guys because they all have ball caps with Greek letters on them. Additionally, their leader has a soul patch.

Freakybeak is heartened by the scene. "My generation's time has come and gone. It's your time to shine," he tells the lead frat guy, handing him his guitar, which he's had since 1968.

The frat guy is excited. "Cool! We were just about to get more firewood..." he says, snatching it and tossing it into the fire. "Thanks, old dude!"

Bummed out by such un-coolness, Freakybeak returns to The Electric Love Bush, where his friends Starmother and Peacefrog are equally bummed out by his story.

Peacefrog makes a sleeve-rolling-up motion, and heads off to Hippy Beach to fuck with the rich kids who fucked with Freakybeak.

He does so in a rather novel fashion:


Peacefrog and his fellow hippies are dismayed by what's become of Hippy Beach, which "used to be paradise on earth...except for those lousy beatniks." He flashes back to the way they used to sock it to them:


Soon Freakybeak, a Beatnik and a cop are all commiserating about their past hatred of one another, when the policeman says, "Yet here we all are together, united by our contempt for those college kids and the sanctity of hippy beach!"

They form an alliance:


Meanwhile, this is what those damn college kids are up to:
Why it's our own Tom Spurgeon, eating ten fuckin' thousand Little Debbie snack cakes and swallowing a Pbst and Fresca chaser...without throwing up! Or dying!

As you can see in that last panel, the hippy, beatnik and cop have all snuck up to the frat boys, cleverly disguised, and are immediately asked if they are narcs.
The frat boys are prepared though, since every year "the old dudes" try to infiltrate their parties.

Prepared how? Why, with this:


But the policeman came prepared for the frat boys' preparation, with a "Counter-Disguise Kit." That's when things get a little confusing:
It looks like it may lead to violence, until the same little girl who broke up the beatnik/hippy/cop fight earlier appears to offer more wisdom: "Why can't you ass-cracks see the bigger picture? Stop and think for a moment...you'll figure out the real problem with Hippy Beach."

And they do! But I've spoiled enough of Henderson's story; I don't want to spoil the ending, too.

So if you haven't read it before, do keep an eye out for Magic Whistle #9, where you can see Tom Spurgeon as you've never seen him before, plus a whole bunch of other great stuff, like the adventures of Simperton J. Narcisissy, Aspiring Artist and "Gunther Bumpus Awaits a Package Which is Right Now Being Sent to him Via Express Mail by Dandy Zipper" and Pickles The Exploding Dog and the epic story of Hamburger Joe, a minor character in a lawyer comic strip who gets fired and then tries to launch his own strip.

While casting about for Sam Henderson characters to co-star in his Hamburger Joe strip, he thinks of Jack Wrongswear, who is the best:

Miscellany

This week former Massachusetts governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was on Meet The Press to discuss the state of the Republican Party with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and host David Gregory. Looking at Romney, I couldn't decide whom he reminded me of more:

HAL JORDAN...



...or REED RICHARDS?

These are the types of things I think about while watching Sunday morning political talk shows.


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

If you don't already make a point of reading Tucker Stone's This Ship Is Totally Sinking columns over at Comixology already, don't miss this week's column, in which he interviews Comics Journal blogger Dirk Deppey. That's right, it's one of my favorite comics bloggers, interviewing another of my favorite comics bloggers!

I think I found it particularly interesting because while I spend some time with Deppey five days a week, I don't actually know anything about him beyond his opinions on a lot of comics-related stuff, and the way he sounds in writing. Like, I know his voice really well, but I don't actually know a damn thing about him.

Now I do!

I really liked this passage, in which Deppey answers a question about whether he would like to do more frequent longer-form reporting and/or op-ed pieces:

On the one hand, I love writing and can't seem to keep from knocking out long essays when a short note would often do just as well. (Maybe you've noticed.) On the other hand, there's always the danger of turning into a Keith Olbermann-style blowhard – or worse, a Dave Sim-style crank – if you feel obliged to keep churning out 14,000-word essays three or four times a week. This became clear to me through the course of that Mary Jane Statue fiasco a while back; the more I wrote, the more I found myself circling around to points that I'd already made. Now, in a certain sense this is inevitable in blogging. Since almost everything I write is a mildly edited first draft, I find myself narrowing in on cogent points over the course of several days, refining my arguments as I read responses and get the chance to think more about a given subject. Still, it's a gateway to intellectual stratification as well, since the further you go in defending a point, the more you feel in your bones that You Are Inarguably Correct in whatever it is you're talking about. The longer I do this, the less I trust in such positions.

There's also the fact that I only have so many things to say in a given period. The comic-book industry tends to be very conservative, insofar as it cruises along on the same set of business practices until circumstances force it from its collective lethargy. While it stands still, there's only so many ways you can describe it, and I strongly suspect that repeating yourself too often can bore a readership to tears.

Deppey expresses my own worry about blogging almost exactly. Right now I write about 14 posts about comics a week, at least a couple of which are long essays, and plenty of which are reviews, and while I love writing and like the way blogging offers a way to do it almost constantly, I do worry that I spend way too much time saying the same things over and over. Part of that is because blogging requires daily or at least daily-ish posting, and I have a tendency to resist or reject doing short, punch posts in favor of blabbing on and on for paragraphs.

Anyway, go read that interview. If you want. Sorry, that sounded bossy. If I were you, and I haven't read it yet, I would go read it.

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

David Brothers at 4thletter.net has an extremely depressing post linking to an extremely depressing post of Dwayne McDuffie's in which the outgoing Justice League of America writer rounds up some of the "Insightful Racial Commentary" he found in the comments section below a preview of JLoA #34 that Newsarama.com ran.

It's pretty sad stuff, particularly coming from what I assume are superhero fans. I mean, I'm not under any illusions that a lot of superhero fans don't fall into the categories of "babymen" (to use Mike Manley's phrase) or "kidults" (to use Deppey's), but for some reason I always expect better from people who spend so much time, energy and money following the exploits of paragons of justice and virtue, you know?

Like, secretly wish Hal Jordan was your boyfriend if you want, rend your garments at plot developments you hate, and by all means, feel free to mention a comics creator, editor or company raping your childhood—fine. But complaining about the fact that there are too many black people on the fucking Justice League? And using the sorts of words and language that some of these posters do?

It makes me ashamed I even share a hobby with some of these assholes.

As someone who spends a significant amount of time at Newsarama.com and Blog@Newsarama.com, I advise reading the content and steering clear of the comments sections all together, as no good ever comes from reading the comments sections. At least on the main site; do read the comment threads over Blog@. And feel free to comment. About how much you love me.

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

To end on an up note...

This week's DC Nation column features Wednesday Comics, DC's fascinating comics-as-your-grandfather's-newspaper-Sunday-funnies experiment. I like the newspaper-like logo, and I was really intrigued by the individual logos of some of the characters/features (Follow the link above for a bigger, better look at 'em all).

Many of them match the logos of the characters' current or more recent books (Superman, Supergirl,Hawkman, The Demon and Catwoman), while others feature classic logos (Metamorpho, Metal Men. Several of the characters have new logos (Deadman), but a couple of those with new logos are characters who are currently starring in ongoings with very different looking logos.

For example, for the Teen Titans strip/feature uses the Teen Titans logo from the television cartoon, not the logo from the current Teen Titans ongoing. Does that reflect the content or the spirit of the feature? (The character line-up is one from recent comics, not the cartoon).

And check out the Wonder Woman and Green Lantern logos; both are extremely different from what you see on the Wonder Woman and Green Lantern comics. I wonder if and/or how these might reflect how different the stories are? The Green Lantern logo definitely has a '50s-ish, Vegas feel to it, which calls to mind Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier, probably my favorite Hal Jordan story. The Wonder Woman logo looks completely unfamiliar to me, but then her logo has changed so much over the years it's quite possible that's simply an old version I've never seen before. But then, that looks more like a young Wonder Woman than the current busty, muscley one, so maybe it's the adventures of Wonder Woman when she's a girl...?

Anyway, I guess we'll find out in six more days...

Oh, that Tom Spurgeon: A long, rambling post about a five-year-old Stan Lee biography

Last month I read, reviewed and then wrote some more about Craig Yoe's recent Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster. At the time, I noted that Stan Lee wrote the introduction, in which he mentioned working with Jerry Siegel, the fact that a lot of the fetish art didn't exactly ring his bell, and that Craig Yoe was his "colorful friend."

It got me thinking about Stan Lee in the early days of comics again, when he, Siegel and Shuster were all working in them, as well as what he's up to now in his post-Marvel days. So I wandered over to my bookshelf where I have two biographies of Stan Lee, at least one of which I never even finished reading.

Before I began my illustrious comics blogging career—oh wait, a career is something you make a living off, right? Let me start over. Before I began my illustrious, time-sucking, quixotic comics blogging hobby, I was a writer and editor at a Columbus altweekly with a very small editorial staff and a very small budget with which to hire freeelancers to provide content (a budget that, near the end of the road, when he ultimately had to sell to the city's big daily newspaper, was about $0 a month). That meant that I and the other three writer/editors got to/had to write about pretty much everything in the paper: Hard news, soft news, opinion and arts coverage and reviews of all kinds.

That included book reviews*.

Publishers would send us advance and review copies of books, which would end up in a pile that the arts editor would pick through for potential review. I ended up with the two Stan Lee books, and while I'm fairly positive I reviewed one of them, I can't actually verify it or dig up my review, as when the paper was sold to the daily, they took down all of the old archives from the Internet because hey, why keep a decade or so's worth of story's online and linkable, driving Internet searchers toward your site, right?

So, long story not-really-any-shorter-at-this-point, I have some Stan Lee biographies sitting around on my shelf, biographies I'm not that intimately familiar with, really.

One is Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee, a rather weird semi-autobiography by Stan Lee and professional celebrity biographer George Mair, which was published by Fireside in 2002 (To coincide with the release of Spider-Man, I imagine).

That was the one I started but didn't get very far with, as it was such a weird format and, I'm afraid to say, crushingly disappointing. Stan Lee has, I think we can all agree, an incredibly unique voice, and has seen a great deal of comics history unfold before his eyes. Honestly, I think it's hard to overestimate his impact on comics (and on American pop culture in general, to a lesser extent). So a Stan Lee autobiography sounds like it would probably be pretty much the greatest thing ever, right?

Unfortunately, he writes short summaries of periods of his life for a few pages, and then Mair comes in and essentially corrects the record, writing a dryer, third-person account in greater detail of the same period. The two switch off like this for the whole book, and it make for an odd, frustrating reading experience. I appreciate the honesty of the format—instead of having Mair ghostwrite it or have his contributions somehow masked, as is so often the case when a celebrity writes an autobiography, and the who does what is unclear.

I don't remember exactly now—it was seven years ago‚but I don't think I even made it into the 1960s.

The other Stan Lee biography was Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, and it was published by Chicago Review Press in 2004 and hey wait, Tom Spurgeon?! Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon? A guy whose website I visit repeatedly daily? How is it possible that I read a book by a guy and then, a few years later, start reading his website religiously, and never realize it's the same writer? (How is it possible besides the obvious explanation that I'm not very bright, I mean).

There couldn't be two Tom Spurgeons who wrote passionately and wrote well about comic books, could there? (No, there couldn't. Well, there could be, but there aren't. That Tom Spurgeon is indeed the same. I checked.)

Being in a Stan Lee-wondering-about mood, and now thinking of the biography as a book co-written by a prominent comics blogger whose work I admire and enjoy (as opposed to thinking of it as just a biography by two guys I don't know anything about), I tucked into it again.

If the two biographies on my bookshelf were to fight, I declare ...and the Rise and Fall... the winner, as not only was I able to finish it, I was able to finish it twice now.

So if you want to read a biography of Stan Lee, I'd highly recommend the Raphael and Spurgeon one.

Lee's story is a great one, and he's a colorful, even complex figure. I remember when Will Eisner passed away, how striking the thought that a man who was there at the beginning of comics, played such a big role throughout their development, and was still making comics had just died. That, in short, a man who was comics was no longer alive, and comics were just now entering a period in which Will Eisner was no longer an active participant.

There are still a few more creators around who have been in comics as long or almost as long as still doing vital work—Joe Kubert springs immediately to mind—and while Lee isn't exactly producing Eisner or Kubert level work any more, he still performs the same ringmaster/carnival barker/huckster role and serves as a sort of ambassador to comics. In their book, Spurgeon and Raphael describe him in the sixties as sort of a with-it, cool uncle figure to his readers, and now I think he still is, although now he's become a great-uncle figure, or perhaps a grandfather figure (Spurgeon and Raphael described his role in comics in the early part of this decade as that of a grand old man of comics, and that sounds right).

Finishing the book, I was struck by the fact that—unfortunately—Lee's probably not going to be around for another decade; certainly not another two decades (He'll be 87 in December), and that while Spurgeon and Raphael have managed such a complete portrait of his professional career,it's like nine-tenths of that career, and another chapter or two may need to be written once Lee does pass on (and the industry spends some time coming to grips with his legacy).

But those first nine-tenths are really solid. The Golden Age of comic books, Lee's skills as an editor, the invention of Marvel Comics (and the reinvention of the American superhero), the collaborations and combat with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the attempt to transform Marvel into a Disney-like entertainment company (with mixed results) and Lee's extremely busy golden years, where he finally finds himself and his work embraced by Hollywood and mainstream America, but more as a celebrity and personality than as a vital creative force.

It's a great story of a great man, and it's neither a hagiography nor a take down: Given how polarizing Lee can be, a lot of people have a very negative opinion of the man and his contributions to comics. Raphael and Spurgeon don't really cast judgement, but present arguments for and against many of his actions that have stirred the most controversy, and, when it comes to the issue of the who-did-what-and-how-important-was-it credit battles over things like Fantastic Four, they reach the conclusion that many of Lee's co-creations really were acts of collaboration. (Jack Kirby's FF, sans any input or scripting from Lee, might have still been fairly awesome, but it wouldn't have been The Fantastic Four, and Marvel certainly wouldn't have been Marvel).

So, anyway, that's my official five-years-after-the-fact endorsement of the book.

While re-reading it, I folded over the corners of some pages as potential blog fodder, and now, revisiting those pages, I'm not sure I want to devote whole posts to them, so I'll just do so briefly here, in bullet-point fashion.

—Here's their ultimate assessment of Lee's work, which reflects the complexity of his legacy and what I consider a rather tragic aspect of it, despite how silly it seems to apply the word "tragic" to the career of someone as rich and famous as Lee is:

Lee has managed to carve an unlikely career as creator emeritus for a body of work so broad it both exaggerates his public reputation and obscures his actual artistic contribution. Lee was briefly the most interesting creator in the comic-book art form. But the value of that legacy has faded, just as the American comic-book industry has faded. A story created from thirty-five years of press releases enjoys greater currency than one assembled from a considered understanding of an art form...

Stan Lee's belief in Stan Lee gave him a life where a mansion's view of greater Los Angeles takes the place of a city apartment's back alley wall. But it also cost him any real chance at developing something of his very own, and it created an almost impenetrable block of protective half-truths and obfuscation that protect and inflate the reputation of a the man doing the work at the cost of an honest consideration of the work itself. Stan Lee stands larger than life, lighter than air, and thinner than the pulp on which he made his name—a disposable product that better exists in our collective memories than under the yellowing light of serious examination. But, thanks to Marvel Comics, we expect our heroes to have feet of clay.

—There's a section in the fifteenth chapter, "Building the Brand," that got me thinking a bit about the difference between Lee's public persona and Joe Quesada's. (Not to single Quesada out too much; he is the guy doing what Lee used to do at the moment, but this applies to Dan DiDio at DC, and their fellow editors at their companies, and editors and publishers of other companies, and creators).

Raphael and Spurgeon write about the care and consistency with which Lee dealt with fans, admirers, critics and complainers alike. They list the great variety of correspondence Lee received, from requests for jobs, offers of original superhero creations (like a black hero with melting powers called Hot Fudge, and a character named Norhawk, whose secret identity was the much more virile-sounding Steve Action), inquiries as to why there weren't any gay Marvel heroes (yet), an expression of unhappiness seeing the Lord's name taken in vain in a comic, and a survey about Lee's religious beliefs regarding the end of the world.

Lee took keeping in touch with anyone who wrote him very seriously, even if it was just in the form of form letters from his secretary, and he took great care not to piss any one off. I suppose this could seem quite weasely at times, but, on the other hand, it did successfully build the perception that Stan Lee gave a damn about you and was pretty much on your side.

Of course, he had the advantage of living in an Internet-free, email-less world in which a fan message board couldn't even be dreaded yet, but it seems like such a contrast to the occasionally combative way that Quesada, DiDio, Tom Brevoort and plenty of creators deal with their fans and readers in their blogs, tweets and online interviews. I'm sure it's much easier to snap at anonymous assholes calling for your job or your head on a regular basis, and today's industry figures receive negative attention 24 hours a day, but it would be nice to see Lee's concern for his reputation and his company's reputation shared by some of the people doing similar jobs today. Or, at the very least, it would be nice to see more industry figures develop the self-effacing sense of humor Lee had.

As much as ninety-percent of what Lee said at any given time might have been bullshit, but it was delivered happily, and with an admission that it was mostly bullshit, which made him a rather hard person to hate. And hey, he cared enough to bullshit you. That's somethng, right?

I'd certainly prefer more "Well, you have a point there, and believe me, it's something we discussed quite a bit here in the bullpen, but at the end of the day, we thought this was the best way to go. Maybe it wasn't, but we're happy with the decision and so are most of the fans I've heard from. I hope you'll stick with us, because what we have planned next is going to be pretty fantastic if I do say so myself" sort of answers, and fewer, "Fuck you fanboy. Just because 50 assholes with Internet connections have nothing better to do than cry about our that doesn't mean they speak for all 30,000 of our readers."

But maybe that's just me.


—Things I did not know anything about before reading this book: Stan Lee's painful-to-even-read-about-decades-later one-man show at Carnegie Hall, his attempts to co-opt the then-fading out underground comix scene with a Marvel-published version entitled Comix Book, and that he and John Romita Sr. pitched Playboy a soft-porn superhero parody entitled Thomas Swift. That latter one is—oh man, Stan Lee pornography!. I'm not even going to quote anything from it, but jeez, you really need to read it. It's just as terrible as you think it is.


—While the comic book medium is in better shape than ever today (and mainstream acceptance of comic books has never been better) the comic book industry, particularly the one that Stan Lee helped build and was most active in, is no more.

Remember, this was written in 2004, and here's what Raphael and Spurgeon wrote of the comic book industry at the time:

Today's comic-book industry is virtually unrecognizable. Marvel bills itself as a "licensing-based entertainment company." DC is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. The comics themselves are disconnected from any sense of a larger readership. They're more stylishly illustrated, to be sure, but they indulge in recycled thrills made stale by years of repetition in service to their value as licensing properties...Comic books are past the point of decline. The top titles struggle to sell 100,000 copies. Kids prefer to buy anything and everything else, and at $2.25 per issue, it's not certain they could afford to return.

Five years later, the only books breaking 100k are stunt books like Brad Meltzer's brief JLoA run, Marvel's Civil War and Secret Invasion and the once-in-a-lifetime Spider-Man/Obama crossover. And now DC and Marvel comics cost between $2.50 and $3.99, with most falling at $2.99 but leaning toward $4.

Excelsior? No, what's the opposite of that? Failsior? Ruinsior? Sputteroutsior? My thesaurus is letting me down even more than the American comic book industry is...











*Sadly, while the altweekly I used to work for still exists, even if it's less "alt" and more "weekly" now that it's owned by a mainstream—but still locally owned—mini-media empire, they don't have much in the way of book coverage any more. Nor does the company's daily. In fact, book coverage seems on the wane in newspapers in general these days, which is really too bad.

Ladies and gentleman, the president of Friends of Lulu

Friends of Lulu is, in their own words, "a national nonprofit organization whose purpose is to promote and encourage female readership and participation in the comic book industry." Valerie D'Orazio is the group's current president.

In the comments thread to D'Orazio's second post in three days about how terrible something she heard happened in a DC comic book she didn't read was, a commenter asked her why D'Orazio is only complainig about DC all of a sudden (a fact underscored by her contrasting that DC comic book she hadn't read unfavorably with a Marvel comic book she hadn't read yet either (the Obama/Spidey team-up), and trumpeting the fact that Marvel's Wonderful Wizard of Oz apparently "sold out" out the distributor level, which is something that should happen pretty much with every single Marvel book (since they print to meet pre-orders, and don't reveal the the numbers of books they print anyway.



Occasionalsuperheroine poster code-named "Najika":

Hello Val. First time poster, long time reader. I just want to say a couple things and then I'll stop bothering you.

When I first discovered your blog I absolutely loved it. I was just discovering the online comic book feminism community. Your blog was definitely the best. I really liked your insider views too. But the real appeal was how you never failed to call out the big name companies on their crap.

Flash forward a few months and it seemed like something had changed. Instead of calling everyone out on their errors, it seemed like you only called DC out on stuff. This confused me a little. I looked through your blog archives and saw that you used to work for DC and it wasn't pleasant for you.

I can see why an unpleasant experiance with a company would make you be hard on them. After all, you have an insight into them we don't. But I'm still disappointed with the new direction you've taken. It seems to me like you've started to ignore the rest of the industry and focus on DC's mess-ups exclusively. I'm bummed that the take no prisoner feminist views seem to be gone. When Ultimate Wasp met her gory end the rest of the blogosphere called Marvel out on it. Even though people have directly asked you about it in Comments sections you haven't addressed it once. I also have to agree with other commentors when they say you aren't really being fair to DC. They have a great all-ages line and publish lots of great titles that I, as a feminist, love to read.

Of course, this is your blog. If you want to talk about DC instead of feminism that is your complete right. But I'm not sure if I want to read about it. That's all I wanted to say. Thanks for your time.



Valerie D'Orazio, President of Friends of Lulu:

Najika, if you support DC Comics, then personally, I really can't consider you a feminist. Sorry. It's like "yeah, I read about your bad experiences with them. that stuff about sexism. that's too bad. but can you cool it on them? I want to read about feminism, but I don't want to ruin my comic book reading experience."

It's like if you had a horrible sexist thing happen to you at a certain coffee shop. And I stop by, and read the stuff you say about the coffee shop. Now, I consider myself a serious feminist. Ad I DO want to hear your opinions on sexism. But I tire of hearing about that coffee shop. Because I want to buy a fucking cappuccino there. They make good cappuccino, and I don't want to feel guilty about buying it. Now, you might feel offended that I have heard your story, yet not only have patronized the sexist coffee shop -- but had the temerity to tell YOU that YOU should stop talking about how you were hurt there. Because I want to enjoy my cappuccino.

For you to tell me to stop posting about this stuff and post about "feminism" instead -- it's like you didn't read a damn thing I wrote.

Go enjoy your comic books, and enjoy your "feminist" blogs. Hope you find one that hates Dave Sim -- he's such a good, soft target.


Once again:

[I]f you support DC Comics, then personally, I really can't consider you a feminist.


Okay obviously, that’s nonsense, D’Orazio knows it’s nonsense, and anyone who’s ever read her blog knows she knows it's nonsense, and if she stopped to think about what she wrote before she sat in front of her keyboard and started banging on the keys, she wouldn’t have written it.

I don't honestly think she honesty thinks that Gail Simone, Nicola Scott, G. Willow Wilson or Amy Reader-Hadley (just to name the women working on ongoings for DC), Jann Jones, Karen Berger and Shelly Bond (to name some editors whose names I happen to know how to spell) are all anti-woman, to say nothing of the scores of others—men and women—who work for DC Comics in some capacity. I don't honestly think she thinks that anyone who buys and reads DC comics is somehow anti-woman.

But that’s what she said.

The most depressing thing ever

This week director/gay joke factory Kevin Smith returned to comics stores with the first issue of his first new comic book series in years: Batman: Cacophony, drawn by his friend Walt Flanagan (who apparently had a very fast dog at one point) and pitting DC’s flagship hero up against a supervillain Smith created in his brief run on Green Arrow.

I didn’t buy it. Not because I don’t like Smith’s comics writing (His Green Arrow and Oni Press spin-offs of his films were rather good, his Daredevil was readable, and, well, his Marvel stuff was just awful, but there are worse track records than that), or that I hated the art (on an in-store flip-through, it seemed decent enough to me; my first thought being, Well, it’s better than Tony Daniel…), but rather because I’ve learned my lesson with Smith comics.

At this point, I can’t imagine buying a series he was doing before it was collected in trade, having been made to wait four years between two issues of Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do, and I’m still waiting on the second issue of 2003’s Daredevil: The Target (Was President George W. Bush the target Bullseye was hired to kill or not goddamit?!)

I know DC has very publicly promised that the scripts were in and that this would totally ship on time, but then, that’s what comics creators and editors always say; it’s practically a promise that the book actually will be late. (To add fuel to the how-late-will-this-one-be speculation fire, DC was only able to assure folks that the first two scripts were done as of September…this is a three-part series. Let’s see, if the average length of time it takes a comic book to go from script to publication is six months, and assuming Smith got to work on September 10th on the third script, then that means…the third issue will be at least two months behind schedule…?)

So anyway, I just figured I’d save myself $12 and just borrow the trade from the Columbus Metropolitan Library in 2012 or so.

Now, what’d I miss? Let’s see what the critics who did read this issue had to say…


“I mentioned yesterday that I couldn't recall enjoying any of Smith's superhero comics; having read this one, I still can't.”

—Joe McCulloch, Jog—The Blog


“Boy, Kevin Smith's not a very good superhero comic book writer, is he?… [A] sloppy mess that smacks of an inside joke (note artist Walt Flanagan's presence) that somehow went a bit too far up the editorial chain.”

—Kevin Church, Beaucoupkevin.com


“Pretty Goddam terrible…Batman: Cacophony is what you'd get if you asked a twelve-year-old to write his idea of an "adult" comic: Everyone wears trenchcoats so that you know they're super-badass, and there's a string of sex jokes…that's just embarrassing for everyone concerned. Not because they're sex jokes, but–again–because they're the sex jokes a kid trying to sound edgy and grown up writes in his fan-fiction. Which is pretty much what this is, but without the level of quality control you get from the online community that actually wants to read about the Mad Hatter trying to fuck the Joker.”

—Chris Sims, The Invincible Super-Blog


“It's the sort of thing that makes you stop and wonder: how the hell did this reach publication? Did no one, at any point in the long and complex process of creating a comic stop to think…this piece of dreck is not going to help DC or the comics industry?”

— Diana Kingston-Gabai, The Savage Critics


“In the end, Batman: Cacophony feels like a massive sine wave of peaks and valleys, never quite succeeding or failing for more than a couple of pages. Hopefully things will level out in the remaining two issues; right now, this is truly an example of the proverbial mixed bag."

—Greg McEllhaton, Comic Book Resources


That last one is also the most positive review I’ve read, save maybe for Hanibal Tabu’s in his weekly Buy Pile column for CBR. If those are reviews, and not just explanations of why he buys some things and why he doesn’t buy others; I’ve never been 100-percent clear on that (If you do click through to read any one of those though, I’d recommend McCulloch’s; his isn’t just well-written and well thought out, but it’s also the longest and spends some time on Smith’s career in comics in general, and how it’s affected segments of the industry).

The consensus seems to be this is an awful, awful comic book, due mainly to the writing, which I gather is crass, remarkably focused on male-male couplings and male genitals, creatively bankrupt and far too wordy for the medium. Critics seem a little more mixed on the art, with some liking it and some not, but the overall assessment seems to be that this Flanagan guy is pretty damn good for someone who seems to have mainly gotten the gig by being Smith’s friend.

One thing that sticks out in the reviews is the expression that it seems wrong that DC would even publish this—Church, Kingston-Gabai and Sims all say something along the lines that this is something that should have been stopped by editorial before reaching stands (even if they say so jokingly).

And that brings us to the depressing part.

I mentioned up top that I kinda liked Smith’s Green Arrow. It’s actually pretty difficult to judge the quality of the writing given the nature of the story. He was returning the then-dead Green Arrow Oliver Queen back to life in a mysterious, supernatural way, and the bulk of the series involved Smith hitting the beats that every reader wanted him to hit, and any writer would have had him hit (Ollie meets his lover for the first time since returning to life, he meets his best friend for the first time since returning to life, his son, his former sidekick, his former teammates, etc).

There were more gay jokes than your average DCU comic, a ton of dialogue, and some minor continuity glitches (none of which seem that big a deal in the post-Identity Crisis era, in which continuity no longer really exists), but it was all competent enough, and Smith at least went to the trouble of a more or less original and extremely complex hero resurrection story (This was my first exposure to Stanley and His Monster, so upon reading it the first time through, Smith’s ridiculously dark take on the characters didn’t offend me as much as it would have if I’d read some Stanley... comics first; it’s worth noting that Smith’s approach to that revamp set the tone for pretty much the rest of the DCU afterwards, though).

I wonder what’s changed? Is it Smith? Going out on a limb here, I would hazard a guess that it’s the absence of then-Green Arrow editor Bob Schreck. Schreck’s then new Oni Press was the first comics publisher that Kevin Smith ever worked with, meaning all of my favorite Smith-scipted comics also involved Schreck (To further evidence Schreck’s abilities as an editor who works to bring out the best in his writers, he also edited the only Brad Meltzer comics I would define as Not Beyond Terrible, Meltzer’s “Archer’s Quest” arc of Green Arrow).

I don’t know who edited Cacophony, since I don’t have a copy handy*. Mike Marts seems to be running the Bat-office these days; Ian Sattler wrote the DC Nation announcement of the series, and given Smith’s star-status, certainly Dan DiDio was involved at some point. So maybe one of those three…?

Now, is this so bad because no one was there to point out to Smith that the Batman cast’s homosexual undertones work best when they’re UNDERtones, or that it probably doesn’t work to have Deadshot die here since he’s starring in this other book at the moment, or that Frank Miller can get away with that gonzo over-the-top shit because he’s Frank fucking Miller and his Batman book is in its own line anyway, whereas this is a DCU book, and so on?

I don’t know. But I do know that it is entirely possible that whoever edited the book, whoever read and okayed the scripts and proofed it and signed off on it, it’s entirely possible that those people could be one-hundred percent completely aware that the book they were about to publish was complete, irredeemable shit (I’m not saying it is; I haven’t read it), and they would still go ahead and publish it.

Because no matter how bad it is, it’s celebrity Kevin Smith writing Batman (the first issue coming out just as Smith is finishing up a round of press presence to promote his latest film, even!) and it’s guaranteed to sell really well for DC, and they need a hit these days because nothing is working for them.

And the thought that, despite all this talk of the medium having grown-up and come into its own, one of the major American comics companies still has to publish whatever will sell, no matter how poorly done it is, well, God that’s depressing.



*UPDATE: Well, now I know who edited it, thanks to one of the comments. Apparently, it was Jann Jones and Dan DiDio.

Links, and commentary about them

I spent a really long time looking at this site (and so should you): You probably recognize that silhouette above as that of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but do you know who drew it? Believe it or not, that’s an Eric Talbot drawing.

I used to love the Mirage-published black and white TMNT comics; in fact, they were among the comics that really got me into the reading comics regularly in the first place (along with DC/TSR’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle’s Batman comics).

And Talbot was one of my favorite artists working on them.

He was a frequent collaborator with Kevin Eastman, and handled inks and tones on a lot of TMNT stuff, bringing a dark, scratchy line that covered the art in a palpable layer of grit. Without consulting a long box, I remember Talbot worked on #17 and #20 of the original series, and I believe he worked on the Casey Jones story in Plastron Café, but my memory is hazy), and pin-ups and ads for things he drew were sprinkled throughout a lot of Mirage publications.

For some reason, I was pretty surprised by Talbot’s style as seen on his sketch blog. I don’t know if, in the back of my brain, I had always assumed something that was actually Eastman/Talbot was what Talbot/Talbot looked like, or if his artwork has evolved a bit in the last, oh, almost 20 years or so, or both, but it’s really great stuff, and I particularly love his big, white-eyed turtles and, especially, his pointy-nosed Splinter.

Here’s a taste:


In addition to a lot of ninja turtles and characters from their comics, you’ll also find sketches of Batman, Two-Face, Hellboy, Usagi Yojimbo, Mr. Miracle, Wolverine and a whole lot of tentacles, stitches, skeletal faces and pages and pages of silhouette sketches like this:

So go look around for a while. I’ll still be here when you get back.


The worst thing about DC’s fantasy presidential election comic DC Universe: Decisions?: Too few people read it.

I was looking forward to an Internet-wide, Ultimates 3-style drubbing of it by critics. But I suppose that was silly of me. People actually liked and looked forward to Ultimates and Ultimates 2, and were thus really looking forward to seeing what would happen when a new creative team—including known crazy person Jeph Loeb and that guy who perfected the art of missing deadlines—took over the franchise for a third volume.

But who cares which fake-ass, made-up candidate Green Arrow is endorsing in the cloud cuckoo land of the DCU (Probably some liberal guy, because as Denny O’Neil has shown us in decades past, bowhunters are the Democrats’ most reliable base), or if Lois Lane is supposed to be Republican or Libertarian based on the political beliefs she states in the story (despite the statistical unlikelihood of a big city investigative reporter being either).

Yes, who really cares about any of that nonsense, particularly since the real-world election is getting so completely insane that no writer could even make this stuff up*.

Thank God for Nina Stone of The Factual Opinion then: She at least was brave enough to take on DC Universe: Decisions #1. Go give it a read, and then join me in a prayer that she and/or Tucker Stone and/or a civilian they rope into reading comics and reporting back to them will read the next three issues as well.


And speaking of…: After twelve seconds of research—i.e. asking my local comic shop-keep if they received copies of DC Universe: Decisions along with the now-infamous All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder and the OMG Superman drinking beer maybe! issue of Action Comics—I’ve developed a theory as to why it wasn’t shipped as originally scheduled.

My shopkeep said they received issues of the swearing comic and the drinking comic, but not the “political” comic. Decisions just didn’t show up at all that week.

Perhaps then it wasn’t recalled and pulped like ASB&RtBW and Action, but was instead simply delayed a week? It was scheduled to come out on Wednesday, September 10, which, if I’m doing my math right, is only one day before September 11. Since terror attacks on presidential candidates are central to the plot, maybe DC wanted to avoid risking someone being offended if they published a comic book about that during that particular week.

If this was the case, I think they overreacted. Simply avoiding real-world politics, they’ve ensured that no one would even notice the book outside the direct market-audience for Judd Winick and Bill Willingham books, and nothing offends those readers anyway.


Too bad it’s not Chuck BB illustrating the lyrics of Chuck D: I don’t normally publish press release type info here, since so many other places on the Internet do a much better job of it, but I’ll make an exception based on how cool this particular project looks.

Boom Studios will be publishing a new version of H.P. Lovecraft’s prose poem Nyarlahotep.

Now, the only thing more boring than prose or poetry is prose poeery, but this $15, 32-page book has something going for it that most prose poetry (and prose and poetry) lacks: Full-color illustrations by Black Metal’s Chuck BB.

They look like this:

I’m not sure when the in-store date for this is exactly, but if you follow the link above, you can get the Diamond order code and bug your comic shop about ordering you a copy (and see a few more illustrations).


What is wrong with Marc Guggenheim?: A lot, apparently. On Tuesday Dorian Wright noted a particularly insane-sounding couple of paragraphs in an interview with Guggenheim that coupled the issue of gay marriage to the Spider-Man continuity reboot for…some reason.

The original interview, written up by longtime writer-about-comics Jennifer M. Contino, is a pretty basic sort of Creator Talks About His Projects type of interview, common throughout much of the comics press.

He talks about his work on the Amazing Spider-Man almost-weekly, his TV show and a superhero movie script he’s apparently working on.

And, in discussing the fact that a lot of people don’t like the new Spider-Man direction on the basis that it is really stupid, he says this:

"Here's my attitude, if anyone is upset about the marriage going away, then they must all be pro gay marriage," he continued. Because if you're pro gay marriage, you understand the distinction between a marriage and a civil union -- that a civil union is not equal to a marriage. We downgraded Mary Jane and Peter to a civil union. If that bothers you, then you're pro gay marriage."

I’m kind of disappointed that Contino didn’t take the opportunity to say, “I don’t understand what you mean. Could you explain that?” Perhaps she didn’t notice how insane it was until she sat down to transcribe the interview…?

Wright mentions some of the obvious problems with that quote that I won’t repeat here (Go read Wright’s). But there are a lot of problems with it. (Feel free to skip down to the next item if you don’t want to read about Spider-Man continuity and comic book writer dumb-assery for a few hundred words).

It’s been interesting to watch just how defensive some of the writers involved with the new Spider-Man direction have been regarding how they got there. One of the main problems with the J. Michael Straczynski/Joe Quesada “One More Day” storyline, in addition to it being poorly written, poorly drawn, over-priced and behind schedule, was that it didn’t make a lick of sense.

Repeatedly in interviews creators like Quesada and now Guggenheim have stated that nothing changed in Spider-Man’s timeline (what we mean by “continuity”) beyond the fact that Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson weren’t married for the decades during which they were married. Something happened on their wedding day that prevented the consumption of their engagement, but, otherwise, everything else remained the exact same, Quesada had maintained.

This isn’t true. At all. In addition to their not ever having been married, Spidey and MA weren’t dating as of the beginning of the “Brand New Day” storyline. Aunt May was no longer on her deathbed in the hospital dying of an assassination attempt on her nephew, but was perfectly well again. Her house, which was destroyed, was now un-destroyed. The knowledge of Peter Parker’s secret identity, which was known to Aunt May and everyone else in the world, was suddenly forgotten by May and everyone else in the world. Harry Osborn was no longer dead; he was just in Europe.

Those are some pretty big changes right there, beyond the “they just weren’t married.” It gets even harder if you follow the Marvel Universe in general, not just the Spider-Man title, because Spider-Man and his family lived in Avengers Tower, all of the Avengers knew his secret identity and his family, his secret identity reveal was a pivotal part of Civil War, a storyline that defined the entire state of the Marvel Universe. Changing just the unmasking and the marriage changes all of that. And, for the hundreth time, continuity between consecutive events is the entire point of serial storytelling like that of Spider-Man comics.

So no, Guggenheim. False. That is not the only thing that changed.

By reducing the changes to a single change, Guggenheim can then go on to state that if you don’t like the post OMD/BND direction of Spider-Man, you must not like the marital statue reboot. But you could also dislike all the other reboots, or the idea of any kind of reboot at all, or the weekly format, or you could think the writing is awful, or you could hate the art. There are a lot of reasons to dislike particular comics (I’ve only read two story arcs, so I’m not endorsing any of those opinions; I loved Marcos Martin and John Romita Jr.’s art, and Dan Slott’s writing was pretty decent in those arcs).

Then Guggenheim jumps to the, if you object to the reboot of the marriage, you must be pro-gay marriage bi, “Because if you're pro gay marriage, you understand the distinction between a marriage and a civil union -- that a civil union is not equal to a marriage. We downgraded Mary Jane and Peter to a civil union. If that bothers you, then you're pro gay marriage."

Wright and a few others see this as Guggenheim gay baiting; if you don’t like my comics, that makes you a fag.

I’ll give Guggenheim the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s not what he meant (although he’s a huge ass for comparing his Spider-Man comics to the gay marriage debate at all, and thus getting himself into the position where he could be accused of gay-baiting).

I’m pro gay marriage personally and understand there is a distinction between the two. This personal belief has nothing to do with Spider-Man’s love life. I’m also pro civil union. (Here in Ohio, we don’t even have civil unions. In fact, most of the country doesn’t. That seems to be step one here. Until the latter is actually commonplace, advocating the former over the latter seems a little silly in places like Ohio. Is marriage better than a civil union? Yes. Is a civil union better than nothing? Yes.)

Spider-Man and Mary Jane not being married but living together and sharing a bed doesn’t mean they suddenly have a civil union. It means they’re dating; cohabitating; “living in sin.” A civil union is something between that state of affairs and an actual marriage; did they go to the trouble of trying to get a civil union? (I don’t know the state of civil unions in New York state; is it even possible at the moment?) If so, why the fuck did they do that? Why didn’t they just get married? They’re straight people; there’s no law against them getting married! A civil union is the consolation prize for people who can’t get married. It’s the next best thing.

Finally, let’s look at that last bit one more time: “We downgraded Mary Jane and Peter to a civil union. If that bothers you, then you're pro gay marriage."

Like I said, I haven’t been reading a whole lot of ASM, but I’m pretty sure Marvel didn’t actually downgrade them to a civil union. Quesada said they just didn’t get married on their wedding day for some reason, and I don’t remember seeing any covers marked “Collector’s Item: The Civil Union Special!”

I should point out that there are many thousands of people in the U.S. who are bothered by civil unions, but definitely aren’t pro-gay marriage. They’re bothered by civil unions because they hate gay people, or are grossed out by them, or think they should always be treated as second-class citizens, or are afraid gay couples are trying to gain special rights to game the system and use tax dollars to fund gayness initiatives, or because they’re crazy coo-coo banana birds, or because they’re super-ignorant. A lot of the people who are bothered by civil unions are even more bothered by gay marriage.

So brilliant bit of anti-marketing, Mark Guggenheim! Now when I see a new comic book with the name Guggenheim on the cover, I won’t be able to think, “Oh, it’s the guy who wrote that great Blade series that was unfortunately cancelled,” but “Oh, it’s that defensive dumb-ass who said some pretty ignorant shit about civil unions and gay marriage when trying to convince people to read fucking Spider-Man comics.”


Art contests are fun: If you’re reading this, that means you read comics blogs on the Internet, and that means you probably also read Chris Sim’s The Invinicble Super-Blog which, while perhaps technically not invincible (that is, vincible), is in fact super.

If not, that means you’re probably a friend of mine who only reads this because you know me, or you’re someone who got here by accident after googling “Justice League Ice Cream” or something. Either way, you should probably be reading Chris Sim’s Invincible Super-Blog.

Especially posts like this, which featured the results of the ISB unconventional nunchuk contest (inspired by a drawing of Batman with nunchuks made out of sharks, which was in turn inspired by Sims’ own post involving Lego Batman’s sharkchuks, the only weapon capable of defeating evil wizard Shaquille O--look, I can’t explain this stuff. Just follow the link).

I pretty much laughed through the entire Batchuk results post; it’s one awesome design after another. It’s pretty remarkable how Sims-spefic so many of the designs are, using as raw materials things Sims loves, loathes or talks about all the time. The only thing missing was, as he pointed out himself, OMAChuks and, perhaps, nunchuks made out of Lucy and Lois Lane or out of John Workman-lettered KRAKK-A-DOOM! sound effects.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our enemy to the north, Rachelle Goguen (who, oddly enough, made a guest-appearance in one of the most random Batchuk contest entries), had a sketch contest of her own, involving entries combining two of her favorite things: superheroes and hockey.

The winner was frequent EDILW poster Sally, whose entry unsurprisingly involved both Green Lanterns and their butts.


Speaking of both Sims and Batman: Today the former has an examination of the one time the latter almost murdered The KGBeast.

I never read that story, but I remember it being referred to in the Batman: Year Three/ “A Lonely Place of Dying” era that immediately preceded the introduction of Tim Drake as a Robin-in-waiting, cited as evidence that Batman was totally losing it in the late ‘80s without a kid in a cape around to keep him from killing dudes.

KGBeast was never put to very good use again after that story though, was he? I know he showed up a lot in 90’s Batman stories, but he was always just kind of a big guy with a stump for an arm who talked funny, and I believe he’s dead now (at least the bad guys in Nightwing were recently robbing his grave of the big one-handed corpse in it…that’s usually a sure sign of a character being dead, even in super-comics). The end of the Cold War wasn’t very kind to the soviet assassin…too bad he didn’t live to see the dawn of our new Cold War, Cold War II: The En-coldening…

This man liked Identity Crisis: Devan MacPherson has a pretty good review of Identity Crisis up here. And by “pretty good” I mean both the way it was written as well as the overall assessment of one of my least favorite comics of the last 2,000 years.

MacPherson notes that he’s not a member of the read-new-superhero-comics-every-Wednesday crowd, so he wasn’t too tied up in knots about any of the continuity issues (unlike some people I know), and he seems to have read it in the final, collected trade rather than in the monthly installments.

I wonder if it’s easier to like/harder to hate if originally experienced all at once rather than read chapter by chapter over the better part of a year. I know those of us who read it in seven sittings had a lot longer to puzzle over the murder mystery aspects, and thus had more time to notice holes in the story (Why did the killer bring a flamethrower with her if she didn’t mean to kill the victim? Why was she in disguise if she was going to be invisible to her victim anyway? And so on).

And, of course, if you don’t plan on seeing Green Arrow, Hawkman and Black Canary next Wednesday, do you really care how far they went to protect a friend’s loved one, or how far they went to keep a secret? If you weren’t planning on seeing Dr. Light fighting scantily clad teenage girls in the near future, would you think his being retconned into a rapist was such an inappropriate thing?

I don’t know, but I like reading well-articulated opinions that are completely different than mine, as it helps remind me that not everyone who disagrees with me is a dodo bird.


Don’t read this one if you don’t live in Columbus: Death Note II: The Last Name, the second live-action Death Note movie, will be playing in town on October 15 and 16 only. The AMC theaters at Lennox and Easton will be hosting showings, as will three other area theaters I’ve never been to and wouldn’t be able to find without a compass and Google Maps. Event info here. Make sure you read the manga first though, as it is the greatest thing ever.


Minx no more?!: Wow, I was surprised to hear that DC’s pulling the plug on their Minx line so fast. here’s a Blog@ post that includes a round-up of reactions. As usual, Tom Spurgeon and Dirk Deppey have some of the best analysis. (UPDATE: Not to mention Kevin Church).

My reaction, if anyone honestly wants it, was intense surprise followed immediabley by disappointment. I liked just about every Minx book I read (I only skipped three) on some level, and some of them quite a lot. There was a lot of criticism right out of the gate about the way Minx’s editors were talking about it (“comics for YA readers” would have sounded a lot less patronizing than “comics for girls”) and the relative lack of female voices involved, and I realized a few of the books that appealed to 31-year-old male Caleb might not appeal equally to teen girls (Josh Howard and Ross Campbell’s sexy girl art in Clubbing and Water Baby, for example) , but by and large the books were positioned to appeal to all comers: Art comics fans, YA readers, manga readers.

Was DC expecting an overnight success here? From my view, the line received an incredible amount of press coverage, overwhelmingly positive criticism (Some did receive mixed reactions, but some were pretty much universally praised) and a lot of library penetration (at least in central Ohio), but I don’t know how they were selling, how much of the (fairly incredible) amount spent on marketing them was being recouped, and how much the creators were being paid.

Obviously the people who do know all this did the math and concluded that it wasn’t worth it, but, like I said, I’m surprised. I assumed this was more of a five-year investment than a two-year investment.

So does this mean copies of Minx books are going to skyrocket in the back-issue market now?


Well, it’s about time: Marvel Comics decided to finally take advantage of the fact that a Very Famous Celebrity Who Likes Plugging Things That Have To Do With Him, the one with a half-hour show on cable television four days a week, is running for president in the Marvel Universe.

The initial press release states that Kevin Maguire will provide a variant cover (I state that he should be doing interior art too; who better to capture Colbert’s raised eyebrows?). I hope it’s a costs-the-same-as-the-standard-cover type of variant and not a costs-several-dollars-more-than-the-standard-cover type of variant…

And don’t forget, if you don’t pre-order this comic, that means you support gay marriage.


It happens to all comic book characters eventually: Has Mickey Mouse ever died and come back to life? What about Donald Duck?



*Although, to be fair, Judd Winick is no writer. Zing!

Society doesn’t know, care about Namor The Sub-Mariner (and a few other subjects undeserving of their own posts)

Aquaman first appeared in 1941, but didn’t become a real fixture of comics and American pop culture until years later, during the so-called Silver Age. He was, at the time, essentially just a weaker, blonder, more pleasant version of Namor The Sub-Mariner, with a more direct and marketable name.

Namor first appeared in 1939, and he was essentially just Superman from underwater…if Superman was an enormous prick who would occasionally just walk around wrecking the joint for no good reason. Namor fought Nazis with Captain America in the Golden Age, kidnapped Sue “Invisible Woman” Richards of the Fantastic Four in the Silver Age, and has swam around the Marvel Universe being an enormous prick, telling superheroes to touch him not, spouting catchphrases and occasionally wrecking joints ever since.

And yet, when the mainstream, non-comics media reach for an underwater superhero to compare Olympic athlete Michael Phelps to, it is inevitably Aquaman, never Namor.

What’s up with that, mainstream media?

Here’s Sports Illustrated magazine online, comparing “two guys who live their lives in the water.” The guys are Phelps and Aquaman.

Here’s cartoonist J.D. Crowe’s horrifying caricature of monster-man Phelps, calling him Aquaman.

Here’s Jon Stewart showing “stunning footage” of “Phelps racing his French rival Black Manta.”

Here’s Wonkette.com’s Ken Layne on Political Machine, talking about America’s inability to respond militarily to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, or do much of anything militarily a the moment: “Or that famous swimmer Michael Phelps can save the country by, uh, swimming very fast to various problem zones, like Aquaman.” (And at Wonkette proper, they ask, “WTF was Aquaman’s secret power anyway, just basically swimming?” Yeah. And a little thing we like to call telepathy! And the ability to totally breathe underwater! And super-speed, -strength and –endurance!)

Google News-ing “Michael Phelps” and “Aquaman” Thursday evening got me 74 hits; doing the same for “Michael Phelps” and “Namor” got me only three, and one of those mentioned both Namor and Aquaman.

Not that there weren’t any comparisons of Phelps to Namor, of course, but there are significantly fewer, and certainly none in as high-profile a place as The Daily Show or any of the one million newspapers that have called Phelps Aquaman.

In conclusion, while Aquaman may still be something of a pop culture punchline thanks to Super Friends, at least pop culture is aware of his existence.


—I don’t think all this Olympic-related name-dropping of Aquaman would at all translate into an increase of in-store comics sales, but it hardly matters, as DC isn’t publishing an Aquaman comic, the last volume of which was cancelled at the end of last year after an ill-considered 18-issue run in which the title character was ditched in favor of a brand-new legacy character.

In a similar vein, I found it rather ironic that DC published a monthly comic book series with the phrase “Dark Knight” right there in the title (Legends of the Dark Knight) for 215 issues over the course of 19 years, and the ended up canceling it the year before a gigantic movie called The Dark Knight was released, replacing it with a similar book entitled Batman Confidential (which no one will ever use for a movie title ever).

I don’t know that that necessarily cost DC any sales either (or, more accurately, cost them potential new sales)—particularly since I heard the film referred to as Batman and Dark Knight interchangeably in conversation—but it’s an unfortunate failure to capitalize on the free publicity of having everyone on earth saying the words “Dark Knight” over the course of a few months.

It’s not like they didn’t know what the name of the next Batman movie was going to be back when they decided to cancel LDK and replace it with a book that sounded like it was about Batman’s love life, right?


—Back to Namor for a minute: I stumbled through a (more) half-assed (than usual) review of the Last Defenders #6 last week, and I freely admit that I just didn’t get it.

Tim O’Neil did, and I’d encourage you to read his review of the series (and thoughts on the franchise in general). He has an interesting take on what exactly Joe Casey was up to with this weird little miniseries, and, after reading O’Neil’s case, I think that not only is he right, but Casey’s mini might actually have been kind of brilliant. I kind of want to sit down and reread it again sometime soon, now that O’Neil’s offered another way to look at it.


—Okay, one last thing pertaining to Namor and then I swear to move on: Did you see James Kochalka’s cover of a page of Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four? Kochalka, who is responsible for Superfuckers, a comic book that is all about a bunch of super-powered jerks and dicks, draws a superb Namor.

In a perfect world, Joe Quesada would already be knocking on Kochalka’s front door, with a big sack of cash money (complete with a dollar sign drawn on the front) in one hand, and a contract to do a Namor Max miniseries in the other. (Link from many places, but I think I saw it at Comicsreporter.com first).


—I haven’t mentioned that Robert Kirkman video manifesto thing, in large part because I a) don’t have a dog in that fight, and b) don’t want to be a dick to Robert Kirkman, in case I ever have the opportunity to pitch something to Image Comics, but of the various reactions I’ve read—from Dirk Deppey’s it’s "just insane” to Steven Grant’s measured response—I thought Abhay Khosla’s was the most amusing.

He used it to frame a review the latest issue of Kirkman’s Astonishing Wolf-Man comic:

I watched this video of Robert Kirkman the other day; he put out this odd video saying that established comic creators should focus exclusively on their own comics, and quit their jobs, and something-something-kids. But I had a weird time turning 30, too, so who am I to judge?

Anyways, it at least worked as a marketing video, and successfully reminded me that guy existed and that I didn’t really have an articulate reason why I don’t read his comics

Good stuff, as always.


—Oh, and speaking of Abhay and good stuff, click here to watch him make Scott Kurtz look like the dumbest fucking guy to ever touch a keyboard.

In the comments section, Kurtz goes round and round with posters, several of them prominent and/or pretty great online comics critics, about, I don’t know, how he doesn’t believe in the existence of quality prose about creative works, or that criticism on the Internet doesn’t count because those are just bloggers and not critics (an odd statement for a guy who does webcomics to make; wouldn’t a webcomic creator be offended to be told their comic isn’t a real comic because it’s not on paper?), or that writing isn’t an art form unless it’s a screenplay, a novel or the words in the bubbles of his strip. (Hell, he says that not only is non-fiction writing not only not an art, it’s not even a craft. The construction of the previous sentence, by the way, isn’t very good, I know).

This is another excellent example of why creators should pretty much never post anything online ever, particularly if they happen to be idiots (like Kurtz) and/or have thoroughly unlikable online personas (like Mark Millar) and/or hold wacky-ass personal beliefs (like Dave Sim and a few dozen others).

See, I’ve never read Kurtz’s PVP. Not because I didn’t like it (I just searched for it online, and I see Kurtz has a pretty nice line and highly animated character designs), not because I wasn’t aware of its existence and not because of any aesthetic prejudice against online comics. I’m just a slow adapter. I’ve never had a cell phone, or one of those little white boxes that pump music into your ears…whattayacallit, an I-Pad? It took me years of hearing how genius Achewood was before I dedicated the time necessary to get into it, and, likewise, I had to try Dinosaur Comics over and over until I found the proper dosage of which I need to take it in to enjoy it (one strip a day; the opposite of Achewood, really).

But after reading Kurtz spend time publicly making an ass of himself, I’m never going to be able to come to PVP cold and try to experience it with fresh eyes. I’m going to think, “PVP? Oh, the strip by that dumb fucking guy who’s never read anything in his life? No thanks.”

The moral of this story? If you are a comics creator and can’t help making an ass of yourself in public, don’t go out in public.


—After completing this year’s Justice League Ice Cream Social, I went back and reviewed my master list and realized I completely forgot to do one of the superheroes on the League. Can you guess which one? Here’s a hint: She’s a she, and she was on the team sometime between Legends and JLA #1. I guess I’ll do a mini-one next summer, to include her and any Leaguers added by then, like Icon or Hardware (if McDuffie does end up adding some of the Milestone characters to the team).

The next sketch blog event is tentatively scheduled for October.


UPDATE #1: I altered the wording of the first sentence, since, as commenter Tegan pointed out, it wasn't technically accurate.

UPDATE #2: Kurtz struck a more concillatory note later in that Blog@ post which makes him seem like less of an ignorant douche. I still have no desire to ever read PVP though.

Sifting through the fifteen tons of star-fuckery and product announcements generated over the past weekend

That's what Dirk Deppey said he had no intention of doing today, and the very prospect of doing it would give him dry heaves. But I have a very high tolerance for star-fuckery and product announcements, so here are the big stories that came out of this past weekend's San Diego Comic Con. Or at least the big stories I saw covered somwhere else and cared enough to say something about...

MANY PEOPLE HAD THEIR PICTURES TAKEN:

I’d highly recommend Kevin Church’s photos, as he has some experience with a camera, and captures the faces of a lot of the folks you’re probably used to reading the writing of on the Internet, and Bully’s, because, well, comic con photos are usually better when there’s a little stuffed bull in the foreground.

Looks like Bully finally met the girl of his dreams, as well as the girl of Chris Sims’ nightmares (not Anita Blake; the other one).


EISNERS AREN’T REALLY MUCH OF AN HONOR AFTERALL, I GUESS:

I was going to congratulate Matt Brady, Troy Brownfield, Vaneta Rogers and the other good folks at Newsarama.com for winning an Eisner, but then I saw that Brad Meltzer won the Eisner for Best Single Issue (Or One-Shot) for JLoA #11 (The World Trade Center starring Roy Harper and Vixen issue), and realized that apparently Eisners aren’t the big deals I thought they were.

And that was the last entertainment industry award I still believed in, too.


NEW BATMAN CARTOON TO BE TOTALLY AWESOME:



Oh, wow. Plastic Man, Silver Age Green Arrow, Kite-Man, Jaime Reyes, Gentleman Ghost and a sweet jazzy instrumental Johnny Quest-sounding score…Jesus, I wish I had cable.

Here’s hoping Jann Jones is already rounding up talent for the Johnny DC companion comic…


THE BLACK PANTHER CARTOON PROBABLY WON’T BE ALL THAT AWESOME:

The Black Panther trailer is a weird beast. It’s extremely faithful to John Romita Jr.’s art on the first six issues, which is great, because he provided what was probably the best Black Panther art since Jack Kirby, but, based on this short snippet, it looks like it might be too faithful. I don’t know what the exact process was, but much of it looks like they just scanned JRJR’s art and used some computer magic to make it move around. Some of it turns out pretty neat looking (the bit of BP running, for example), and some of it just looks cheap (the close ups of the raiders talking to one another).

I wonder what they’ll do after they finish adapting that first story arc, too. That was the end of JRJR’s involvement in the title, and while I’m not 100% positive, I think every single issue after that tied into other Marvel comics (there was an X-Men crossover, then a House of M one, he “Black Avengers” arc, the wedding with Storm, the world tour arc, Civil War, the “Initiative” branded stories that tied into Fantastic Four, and I believe BP is currently fighting Skrulls).


VERTIGO TO STEAL HAUNTED TANK AND UNKNOWN SOLDIER FROM DC, DASH MY HOPES AND DREAMS:

Actually, I guess they were probably the last imprint to use The Unknown Soldier, unless you count the (excellent) Showcase Presents collection.

But where does Vertigo get off grabbing The Haunted Tank? This just confirms that there won’t be a Brian Azzarello/Cliff Chiang Dr. 13 sequel. Or, if there is, the Ghost of General J.E.B. Stuart wont’ be in it.

(Also, The Ghost of General Stuart won’t be able to join the Justice League either).


MARVEL TO PUBLISH ANOTHER COMIC WITH THE WORD “WAR” IN THE TITLE:

I would be really excited about this “War of Kings” story if it were about Atlantis and Wakanda going to war, but I guess it’s just some space stuff.

I suppose Atlantis and Wakanda have already gone to war in some old comic I never read though, haven’t they? I mean, they’d have to have had a war by now, right?

I guess I am kinda curious when Blackbolt was replaced by a Skrull, if only because the revelation that he was a Skrull kind of retroactively siphons some awesomeness out of World War Hulk, but I imagine that will be addressed in Secret War: The Inhumans rather than this space story.


THE DC UNIVERSE TO ABSORB MORE SUPERHEROES, AS THEY JUST DON’T HAVE ENOUGH YET:

Among the bigger DC announcements, at least from a what’s up with the DCU perspective, is that they would be returning both the old Archie comics superheroes (the stars of the briefly extant DC-run Impact line of comics) and the Milestone characters (the ‘90s company which created a line of comics heavily featuring minority characters, including Icon and Rocket and Static Shock).

The characters will be incorporated into the DC Universe proper, meaning that Icon can fight Superman and Static can join the Teen Titans. The Milestone characters will start popping up in JLoA, which Milestone co-founder Dwayne McDuffie is currently writing, and the Archie heroes will be introduced by J. Michael Straczynski in his Brave and the Bold run.

DC has a long, long history of absorbing heroes from other companies to expand their universe, including Captain Marvel and the other Fawcett Comics heroes, the Charlton heroes (Blue Beetle, The Question, Captain Atom, etc.) and the Quality Comics heroes (Plastic Man, Uncle Sam, Doll Man, etc.)

They haven’t had a ton of success figuring out how to properly capitalize on any of their acquisitions, however; at least, not for very long, anyway. Just look at the state of the Marvel Family franchise in the DCU at the moment, thirty-some years after they acquired it.

Some of these characters fit in quite well for a while (Plastic Man in JLA for several years, the Denny O’Neil Question series, Blue Beetle and Captain Atom in the JLI books, etc), but DC’s never been able to turn any of them into the next Green Lantern or Flash (or even Aquaman or Wonder Woman).

So this seems like a pretty curious move. It should be interesting to see how it plays out (probably from afar, as I have no desire to see Ed Benes drawing Rocket and Icon in JLoA), particularly since a lot of what made those old Milestone comics so great was that they weren’t sharing story-space with Superman, and could address topics like abortion or racism in a more realistic fashion that is typical of issue-oriented super-comics.

Hopefully this means we’ll get trades of the old Milestone material, and I can quit longbox spelunking to complete my Icon run. I seem to recall the old Impact comics being better than average for the time as well, but I haven’t read as many of those.


ONI PRESS GIVES ME A BUNCH OF THINGS TO LOOK FORWARD TO:

Not only did they have the title, cover and estimated time of arrival for the next Scott Pilgrim volume, but we’ll finally be getting more Corey S. Lewis’ Sharknife and, at long, long, long, long last, more of Chynna Clugston’s Blue Monday series of miniseries. Also, more Black Metal, more Salt Water Taffy and more Courtney Crumrin, and a bunch of new projects, some of which sound pretty good and some of which sound kinda lame.


KEVIN SMITH SAYS HE’LL WRITE A COMIC BOOK, AND IT’S NOT THE REST OF THAT DAREDEVIL MINISERIES HE STARTED DURING THE 1920s:

I really liked the superpower-less vigilante serial killer Onomatopoeia that Kevin Smith introduced during his brief run on Green Arrow. He’s a character who spoke only in sound effects, as he was making them. So like, he’d shoot a gun and say, “Blam,” and at the same time the letterer would draw a BLAM sound effect in the panel. A very neat, very comic book-y villain.

Smith is apparently going to write a new Batman miniseries featuring the character, which is kind of exciting, although Smith’s GA collaborators Phil Hester and Ande Parks apparently aren’t drawing it, which is kinda too bad.

I have a feeling the story will address who exactly Onomatopoeia is and what his whole deal is, which is also kinda too bad—the mystery of not knowing who the hell he was or why the hell he was doing what he was doing and why he talked like that is a pretty large part of his appeal.


MARVEL TO PUBLISH AN AGENTS OF ATLAS ONGOING FOR SOME REASON:

Of Marvel’s announcements, the one I was most excited to see was that the company was going to go ahead and giving Agents of Atlas an ongoing.

It was my understanding that the miniseries didn't sell too terribly well—although one could argue any Marvel book featuring characters this obscure capable of selling in the thousands at all is pretty good—so I wonder if they've been encouraged by the extremely positive critical reception smaller books from Immortal Iron Fist and Incredible Hercules on down to Captain Britain and Guardians of the Galaxy have been getting to go for more books of similar stature.

Or has Parker's star been on the rise enough from his exemplary work on X-Men First Class and Marvel Adventures Avengers that Marvel wanted to give AoA another shot?

Or do they maybe just love awesomeness?


GET THIS—A REAL LIVE TV WRITER TO WRITE A COMIC BOOK!:

Good news: Judd Winick isn’t writing Green Arrow/Black Canary any more! Bad news: He’s got room on his schedule to start fucking up some other book/character/franchise.

Andrew Kreisberg wasn’t a name that was on my radar for the next person to write GA/BC, but mainly because I just assumed Winick would write it forever. It’s interesting (to me) that the fact that any TV writer taking on a comic is still treated as a kinda sorta big deal, since Kreisberg is just a writer on Eli Stone and not, like, a big huge hit or anything. (Like, “From a writer on Eli Stone probably doesn’t carry quite the same weight in nerd circles as “From the creator of Lost” or “From the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and That One Show They Cancelled But Still Made A Movie Out of.”)

Anyway, Kreisberg isn’t completely new to comics. He’s written Hellen Killer, which is actually a seriously very, very good comic book, whether you believe me or not.


NEIL GAIMAN, THE ONLY WRITER WHO COULD WRITE A COMPANION PIECE TO AN ALAN MOORE BOOK AND NOT SEEM PRESUMPTIOUS, TO WRITE “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER”:

Details are few and far between, but the artist he’ll be working with is Andy Kubert, which immediately begs the question of how exactly this will be anything like Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, since that was drawn by classic Superman artists, and Kubert is merely the would-have-been-current-Batman-artist-if-he-could-draw-fast-enough.

Does this mean the value of my copy of Secret Origins Special #1, in which Gaiman wrote the framing sequence starring Batman and I’m pretty sure The Riddler story too, will be rocketing up now?


TORI AMOS COSPLAYS AS ONE OF THOSE CHARACTERS FROM HER CONCEPT ALBUMS OR SOMETHING:

The panel I would have been most excited to go to if I were at San Diego this year would undoubtedly have been the Tori Amos one dealing with the new comic anthology inspired by her songs that I can’t wait to read.

But damn Tori, what exactly are you wearing?





MARK MILLAR TO RETURN TO THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE TO WRITE WHAT HE THINKS WILL BE THE GREATEST COMIC BOOK EVER:

Newsarama’s Eisner-award-winning Matt Brady talked with Mark Millar for a bit about the news he’d be writing some more material for the Marvel’s Ultimate line of books. After some allusions to erections and orgasms, here’s the very end of their interview…

NRAMA: Finally, and to give you one last chance for a vague-ish but exuberant tease, is the artist someone you've worked with before?
MM: No, but I've dreamed about it. He's probably the biggest artist in the industry. This guy is a superstar and Marvel is really stepping up to the plate with this revamp. It's exciting times.

Any guesses as to who the hell he might be talking about? Who’s “probably the biggest artist in the industry?” I assume it’s not Jim Lee or Frank Miller, who both seem to have their plates full of DC stuff, and I can’t imagine Alex Ross being interested in painting the Ultimate Universe characters.

And that would take care of the artists I would think of as “probably the biggest artists” in the (superhero comics) industry.

I suppose going by the latest sales charts, the top artist at the moment is Secret Invasions’s Leinil Yu, and Millar does seem to be a writer remarkably attuned to the goings on of the sales charts, so perhaps that’s who he’s referring too.


MARVEL HIRES SOMEONE WHO ISN’T EVEN A WRITER TO TRY WRITING A COMIC FOR THEM:

Comics companies have been hitting up writers from other media to try their hands at comics quite a lot over the last few years—actors, directors, musicians, book writers, TV and film screenwriters—but Marvel has apparently sunk to the level of hiring a blogger, the lowest form of writer there is (Please note irony of previous sentence, which is appearing on a blog; it’s intentional). And not even one that’s demonstrated any real skill at writing on her blog (Perhaps her scripts are better than her prose, but Occasional Superheroine is probably the most-read badly-written blog in the comics blogosphere).

So I would have been seriously shocked to hear that Valerie D’Orazio would be writing a new Cloak and Dagger series for Marvel, if Rich Johnston didn’t say she’d be writing a Marvel series in his column last week, and Kevin Huxford correctly predicted the title a few days later.

The art looks pretty nice, but an Internet-famous first-time comics writer paired with a manga-style artist on a fan-favorite (read: obscure) property from decades ago? It doesn’t sound like a formula for success, particularly considering D’Orazio has spent much of the last year picking fights with and alienating the online critics and commentators who help generate buzz and enthusiasm for books like these until they can find their (often non-direct market) niches.

I hope it does pretty well though, if only to encourage Marvel to start scouring the blogosphere for new talent. I for one would love to see a Sims-written Batroc: Face-kick Journal or a What If Christopher Bird Wrote Civil War Instead of Mark Millar?.


NEWSARAMA HAS AT LEAST ONE STORY NOT PERTAINING TO SDCC:

And that would be this week’s Best Shots column. I contributed a review of the Corey Barba’s extremely cute Yam, which I invite you to go read.