On Sideways #1

*...


...Yeah, sorry guys, I can't do it. My plan was to read and review at least the first issue of each of DC's "The New Age of DC Heroes" books, but I just can't bring myself to read this one. I like artist Kenneth Rocafort's work okay, although the relatively few books of his I've read haven't given me any reason to suspect that he's got a great new superhero concept in him and the storytelling chops to make a great comic book about that hero. The press release-articulated premise even shows some promise: "During the events of Dark Nights: Metal, high shcool junior Derek James accidentally fell through a rift into the dark matter dimension...In Sideways, he can create rifts in midair to leap through dimensions at will." Given the vast canvas of the DC Multiverse, that concept could be fun, at least for a certain kind of reader; is Derek James going to be DC's answer to Marvel's Blink...?

Still, try as I might, I just couldn't get by that single, poisonous credit on the cover: DiDio. This book is co-written by DC Comics Editor-in-Chief Dan DiDio.

There is something incredibly gross about DiDio, inarguably one of the most powerful and influential individuals in the North American, direct market-focused comic book industry, co-writing a high-profile comic book that is meant to be part of a new line, spinning out of a very successful miniseries. Actually, there are probably a lot of incredibly gross things about it, but it says one of two things to me, either of which is so icky I can't really sit down to try to read a 20-page comic book with such thoughts in my skull (And besides, I just got Green Lantern: Kyle Ranyer Vol. 1 and Superboy Vol. 1; I'm more than set with DC super-comics to escape into during my free time).

Here's one reading of DiDio co-writing Sideways, with Rocafort and Justin Jordan. From his place of power within his version of the comics industry, DiDio looked out all across the landscape for potential writers for a particular DC comic he knew was coming up on the schedule--current DC writers, former ones who could probably use a little work, new up-and-comers like those from the workshops DC has had the last few years, artist who would like to dabble in writing, Marvel writers who aren't on exclusive contracts, accomplished writers in other fields with an interest in comics, promising talent from the world of indie, self-published, online and mini-comics--and he decided that, out of all the possibilities, the very best candidate for the job would be he, himself.

That's no way to run a comics publisher, is it? Not only is it a complete waste of a valuable-ish gig, it demonstrates a lack of good taste, a lack of humility and a lack of understanding of your readership (He's hardly the first editor to write while in the position of relative power within one of the big two, but, unlike, say, Stan Lee or Jim Shooter or Archie Goodwin or Denny O'Neil, DiDio doesn't actually have a decent body of work that he didn't assign to himself, nor does he have anything in the way of a fanbase, or people who buy comics because his name is on them).

The other possible reading is that, from his place of power within his version of the comics industry, DiDio looked out all across the landscape for potential writers for a particular DC comics he knew was coming up on the schedule, and though he saw dozens, scores, even hundreds of potential writers who weren't looking back at him from his bathroom mirror every morning, he couldn't find any of them who actually wanted to work for him, work for DC Comics, or work on this Canceled-On-Arrival book starring what appears to be Blink-By-Way-Of-Spider-Man created by an untested artist. While that seems unlikely, it is a real possibility that the publisher could have trouble finding writing talent to work for them instead of any of the other, direct market publishers, or a prose publishing house with its own graphic novel imprints, or for themselves. There are lots of reasons that this unlikely-sounding possibility could be, from reservations about the culture of DC Comics to writers simply preferring to work on stuff they themselves own, but I have to wonder how DC's current publishing strategy of trolling-one-of-their-most-valuable-writers-ever-for-no-apparent-reason* is perceived by writers who consider working for the publisher in the future.

Those things--the culture at DC, the publisher's perception among writing talent, etc--are also things that are at least partially under DiDio's control.

So, beyond the fact that I never really enjoyed a DiDio-written comic for its writing--the Metal Men feature in Wednesday Comics is the only one I can recall enjoying reading, but then, that strip was quite elegantly drawn by José Luis García-López and inked Kevin Nowlan, so it almost couldn't have been anything other than enjoyable to read--it's hard to see his last name on the cover of this book and not think that it's very presence represents a failure to make good comics.

Anyway, that's why I'm not reviewing Sideways #1.



Previously...

On The Silencer #1

On Damage #1



*While I think doing Doomsday Clock is as dumb as it is crass and creatively bankrupt, the one argument that anyone (probably an asshole) could make for doing it--retroactively, of course--is that it so far seems like it is a sales success. By the standards of a comic book miniseries in 2018. Not by the standards of, say, Watchmen. I cannot, on the other hand, imagine what the fuck DC was thinking by tossing Promethea into Justice League of America this week, or Tom Strong into the upcoming "New Age of Bloodlines" series The Terrifics. Look at the most recent sales charts analysis; JLoA sells less than 30,000 issues a month and is dropping...likely headed towards cancellation anyway, as there's a franchise refresh on the horizon. Even if there were thousands of Promethea fans out there who like the character, dislike her creators and are willing to buy appearances featuring her by other creators just because they love her so much (and there aren't), even if that doubles the sales of JLoA for a month or two, what does that really give DC? A...book that sells about 60,000 units for a month or so before plummeting back down to the mid-twenties again...? Is that really worth all the drama of pissing off/alienating Moore, J.H. Williams III, fans of either of them...? I can't imagine how one justifies these ABC characters showing up in these DCU books that makes a lick of sense.

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.

Review: Batman: Black and White #2

This second issue of DC's 2013 revival of the 1996 miniseries of the same name features a cover by Jim Steranko, and while I don't really get the visual elements being incorporated (Batman's vague, somewhat saintly gesture and cowl of thorns look particularly strange to my eye, particularly given the ants, house and puzzle pieces, but perhaps it's just an allusion I didn't catch), hey, DC got Jim fucking Steranko to draw a Batman cover for them.

If that's not a "get," I don't know what is. I hope editor Mark Chiarello got plenty of high-fives for that.

"Manbat Out of Hell"
Written by Dan DiDio, drawn by J. G. Jones

More interesting than DiDio's writing of this story to me would be an accurate telling of how his work keeps cropping up in each of the various prestige projects it does, given that, more often than not, he's the odd man out in terms of either talent or reputation.

Naturally he's co-publisher of DC Comics, but is his inclusion conditional, like "Sure, I'll greenlight the project, if you promise to let me script one of the stories"...? Is it a particular artist asking DiDio to collaborate, because they're friends, because of some genuine admiration of DiDio's writing, or because they think it would be a good career move? Does it come from DiDio innocently mentioning in passing how he wishes he had more opportunities to write, particularly short stories,a nd an editor or artists mistaking it for some sort of passive-aggressive coercion on the boss' part...?

I don't know, but as with a few similar projects—Wednesday Comics, Batman Incorporated Special—DiDio stands out as one of the few who is neither a legendary creator nor one unlikely to ever get to play with the character in other contexts.

This short story is sort of troubling, to be honest.

The World's Greatest Detective sees Man-Bat (I didn't forget the hyphen in the story title; they did) in the process of attacking a man that works at a foster home. Batman acts to stop his old frenemy, and it isn't until they fight for a few pages that Batman notices that the foster kids in the room are actually Man-Bat's own children, that there's photographic equipment all around and that there are photos of child pornography scattered about the room (see above).

That's the heart of the story, the reversal in which Batman realizes the real villain and monster isn't the frightening-looking comics character. That, and perhaps also that the narrator isn't Batman himself, but Becky Langstrom.

In other words: Batman and Man-Bat vs. Kiddie Porn.

When Batman realizes his mistake, he cuts the bat-rope he had just tied Man-Bat down with, allowing  his long-time frenemy to go after the pornographer, telling the foster home employee gone bad, "I won't hurt you. I don't waste my time on scum like you."

Which is, uh, kind of true, given how infrequently child abuse and especially child pornography or sex crimes of any kind involving children crop up in Batman narratives (Andrew Vachss' prose novel Batman: The Ultimate Evil being a rather rare exception), but also kind of a weird thing for Batman to admit in a story that forces him into confronting it. His dismissive dialogue makes it sound as if he thinks such a heinous real-world crime is beneath him; he only deals with costumed criminals.

Siccing Man-Bat on the scum to seemingly murder him off-panel is pretty un-Batmanly behavior, but given the continuity-free nature of the stories in this project (In which the only real rules seem to be that each story must be 1.) Short, 2.) Have Batman and 3.) Be black-and-white), it's not really that weird or unusual.

J.G. Jones' photorealistic works looks great in black-and-white and, frankly, far better than it does in color, if you ask me. There's a luminous quality to all the whites within it (which probably doesn't come through all that great in these images, which you're looking at on a black and white website).

His design for Man-Bat is pretty excellent, giving the character actual head of an actual bat, and big, huge, proportionate wings (Contrast it with the werewolf-with-a-leather shawl version in the recent "Man-Bat" Villains Month issue).

I don't like the way he handles the fingers and hands of Man-Bat though; after spending a lot of time thinking about bat-wings over the last year or so, I don't think the character should have hands and wings...maybe just an opposable thumb at most (This Man-Bat has seven or eight fingers, counting the three extra ones in his wing membrane).

"Into The Circle"
By Rafael Grampa

By far the best, most interesting and most exciting story in this particular issue, Grampa's artwork is incredible, and each and every one of his character designs is bursting and crackling with an idiosyncratic life of its own. Not just the main players, but also the regular street criminals, who most any other artist would render as more-or-less generic. Grampa gives each of them a sharp and distinct design, looking a bit like they were assembled from parts borrowed and synthesized from E.C. Segar tough guys, Jamie Hewlett Gorillaz characters and old-school Dick Tracy heavies.

Each of them would normally be at least as interesting as The Joker, were Grampa's Joker not so unique. This Robot 6 headline is right—Grampa's Joker is the most disturbing one yet. (Suck it, New 52, flayed-off face Joker!)

Ironically, I sort of wish this Joker was in color, as I'm curious about his mouth. I'm assuming it's all red in varying degrees of intensity around his real mouth, and that the tooth like impressions around it are just lighter bits of red, either painted on or some element of the chemically-induced deformity, but that's left to the imagination. Actually, the exact nature of this Joker's look might be dependent on a twist in the story, but still: Awesome design.

Grampa's story isn't just a bunch of great drawings though (And hoo-boy, is that fight-scene with Batman awesome!); there's a very clever little twist to it, with great crazy-person Joker narration, and some pretty smart, proactive crime-fighting strategy on the part of Batman and Alfred.

"A Place In Between"
By Rafael Albuquerque

Batman finds himself on a skiff in the River Styx, with Deadman playing Charon. As a regular Batman reader for years, I had a pretty hard time buying some elements of Albuquerque's story—Batman not recognizing a scene from Greek myth, Batman not recognizing Deadman, Batman and/or readers being asked to believe that its not clear if superhero Batman would end up heaven or hell after death—which is probably two little road bumps too many for me in a story that's only eight-pages long.

Albuquerque sure draws the hell out of everything though, and this is another example of artwork that actually looks better in black and white than in color. He does a great job of selling a Batman-with-pupils, too, which a lot of artists have a hard time pulling off convincingly, and I enjoyed the surprise appearance of a favorite Bat-villain.

"Winter's End"
By Jeff Lemire and Alex Nino

Lemire the writer isn't really a big deal, and seems a bit out of place here, given how regularly one can find Lemire's writing in the rest of DC's line these days (Lemire the cartoonist, or Lemire the artist, however, would have seemed more deserving of inclusion here). But if someone had to write something for Alex Nino to draw, I suppose it might as well have been Lemire.

This is a pretty straight-forward, even generic story about Batman fighting ninjas in the snow while wearing the sort of arctic adventure battle-suit that a Batman toy-line might include. There's mention of Mister Freeze and The Riddler, both somewhat randomly and out-of-place, but Nino doesn't draw them and Lemire doesn't write them in story.

This is mainly just a showcase for Nino's weird, angular artwork, his thin, kinetic, occasionally tortured-looking character designs and his admirably bizarre technological and architectural elements.

"Silent Knight...Unholy Knight!"
Written by Michael Uslan
Illustrated by Dave Bullock

This is a great showcase for Bullock, an incredible artist whose work bears a striking resemblance to that of his peer Darwyn Cooke, only generally with a more detailed, illustrative quality.

This is premised as a silent movie, and the Batman who appears is the "first-appearance" Batman, with a Golden Age Bat-mobile and logo. After a page devoted to replicating the credit sequence of a movie, this is presented in a format similar to that of a silent movie, with dialogue and narration appearing on title cards between action panels.

The level of detail in the art, the irregular panel shapes, the degree of action and variety of angles all seem more modern than silent movie era though; viewed as a film, this would have to bee seen as a film aping silent movies. It's still gorgeous though.

The plot introduces a new villain, albeit one with the name of an old, somewhat obscure DC period hero) who, in a rather prevalent tradition of Batman villains, shares a great deal of origin and modus operandi with Batman, but went in the opposite direction.

Words are hard.

"Honestly I can understand why he might feel the way he does because this is a personal project to him. He has such a long and illustrious career and he's been able to stand behind the body of work he's created. But quite honestly the idea of something shameless is a little silly, primarily because I let the material speak for itself and the quality of the material speak for itself," DC Entertainment Co-Publisher Dan DiDio said, while speaking for the material and the quality of the material to Guardian reporter Allison Flood about Before Watchmen, a suite of comics so good he doesn't even need to speak for them or their quality.

Supergods: Not quite an industry tell-all, but closer than usual

One thing American politics has over American comics is that the former publishes many more and much more interesting books and memoirs. The political book market is a curious one, as it seems to exist primarily for participants to cash in on their experiences by telling their side of the story (which, in some cases, turns out to be a story of historical significance), revealing just enough new, gossipy, insider details to justify the political media paying attention for a week, which in turn justifies the book's existence, and then everyone forgets about the particular books forever, because they are all terrible and full of lies anyway.

Comics doesn't generate these sorts of books. Not simply because so many fewer people care about comics than they do about politics, not simply because there's so much less money involved, not simply because the comics media is a tiny fraction of the political media, and thus relatively few books about comics exist at all, but instead because no one ever really leaves comics, and it is thus, even if there was enough interest in comics memoirs from creators and industry leaders to regularly generate them, it would be all but impossible to get anyone to offer up any bridge-burning gossip or name-calling.
A prominent writer, artist or editor leaving one company (say, Marvel), would just end up across the street at the other (say, DC Comics) and probably, a few years later, they would end up back at the former company. If, hypothetically, former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter used to subsist on a diet of live puppies and kittens and bather every night in a tub filled with the tears of Marvel freelancers, most of the editorial staff whose job it was to procure live animals and gather those tears wouldn't share that information widely, for fear that they would have a reputation for talking out of turn and become unhireable.

When someone leaves a job in comics, they generally take another job in comics, unlike politics, where leaving, say, a presidential administration generally leads to sitting on a few boards somewhere and maybe lobbying. It's not like you're ever going to have to work with Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice again, so go ahead and write about what a bunch of babies they were.

I don't really read many of those sorts of political memoirs, but I always enjoyed the way they receive coverage, particularly from places like online magazine Slate, which would pore through them looking for the newsworthy/salacious bits to air in articles with headlines like "We Read Slimy John Edwards' Stupid, Self-Serving Book (So You Don't Have To)" (Note: I said with headlines like; that is not an actual headline).

As you may have heard, superstar comics writer Grant Morrison recently wrote a book, and I recently read it.

There are several strands to the book, and they sometimes intersect a bit awkwardly, but one of those strands is Morrison's career in comics, and thus many familiar names appear in the book, either as subjects or as characters, and Morrison reveals his thoughts and opinions on many of them. Mark Waid is nice...and smart! Glenn Fabry once drunkenly bit Karen Berger on the ass! Peter Milligan used to drink a whole lot with Morrison! Jill Thompson is striking looking! Warren Ellis was thin, eager and brainy as a teenager! Alan Moore is hairy!

Relatively little of it is along the lines of "Colin and Condi are sissies and I would have bombed Iraq two years earlier if it weren't for them," but it is rare, even refreshing to hear even this much talk of comics behind the scenes, and to hear even mildly unflattering opinions shared.

I thought I'd try to put together one of those Slate style "We Read Supergods (So You Don't Have To)" articles for fun, but you should read Supergods—it's much more engaging, educational and fun to read than, say, Donald Rumsfeld or Presidents Bush or Clinton's books.

I should note at the outset that the two creators who receive the most discussion in the book are Alan Moore and Mark Millar. Morrison rarely goes into any great detail, but he clearly has very complicated relationships with both men, and both are so important to comics today that Morrison couldn't have written this book without discussing them.

Morrison writes at considerable length about Marvelman/Miracleman and Watchmen, offering a fairly brilliant review of the latter before launching into its weaknesses. Both seemed to have dramatic impact on Morrison, as they showed the end of one particular road of superheroes, and necessitated him trying different directions for superheroes. Moore shows up as a writer glimpsed from afar though, not a character.

Millar's work is similarly dissected, particularly Wanted, The Ultimates and Civil War, with some discussion also given to The Authority and Kick-Ass. Millar appears as a character though, and is in many anecdotes, as Morrison and he were apparently besties and collaborators for years before...something happened, which isn't really explained at any length.

I whole book could probably be written about Morrison, Millar and Moore, and the way their work and relationships have effected mainstream comics and the mainstream's acceptance of comics in the last few decades (and influenced one another's work). Morrison talks about both men so often (Millar appears on 26 pages, Moore on 30, according to the index). I didn't really bother looking for good, juicy quotes to share; read Supergods to read his thoughts on them...and their impact on his work.

As for Morrison on some other topics of note to you, dear reader, please, read on...


On Bill Jemas:

—"By this time, I was coming into regular conflict with Marvel’s new fire-brand publisher Bill Jemas over the direction and execution of my stories. He’d been brought in to modernize along with Joe Quesada as EIC, and we’d all started out on the same page. But slowly I began to feel that misunderstood the fasion aspect of mainstream hero books and their need to constantly change with the times.

"The old war between groovy Marvel and stuffy Brand Echh intensified into playground name calling. Jemas expertly manipulated the Internet crowd, stirring up controversy to draw attention to his books. He referred publicly and disparagingly to “AOLComics” and called his DC rival Paul Levitz “Lol Pevitz” over and over in interviews and inflammatory press statements, as if repetition could eventually make it funny…Levitz, who had elected, in old-DC style, to play the role of gray-templed gentleman, resolutely ignored the ruffians hurling their excreta at his drawing room window, but quietly placed his tormenters on a DC blacklist. "


On Dan DiDio:

—"Dan was the same age as I, but bearlike and gregarious, with a Brooklyn tenor I loved to imitate when he wasn’t around. I liked Dan immediately and appreciated the respect he was showing my work, after Bill Jemas’ growing disinterest. "


On Joe Quesada:

—"I liked Joe a lot…"


On Brian Michael Bendis:

—“[Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s origin of Spider-Man] was perfectly composed in just eleven pages. (When writer Brian Michael Bendis was called on to update and retell the Spider-Man origin for a new generation of readers in 2000, it took six twenty-two-page issues to tell the same story in the “decompressed” screenplay style of twenty-first-century comics)”

—“A recent Marvel Comics event series entitled Secret Invasion was a direct sequel to The Kree-Skrull War but without any of the dazzling narrative tricks that made the original so remarkable.”

—“Bendis came from the independent comics scene and, influenced by playwright David Mamet rather than Stan Lee, he made alarmingly convincing dialogue the focus of his style and broke the rules of comic-book storytelling by having characters exchange multiple balloons in a single panel. His dialogue had a call-and-response rhythm that captured each voice perfectly, like the strains in a chorus, and soon he was Marvel Comics’s premier writer, dominating the sales charts for the next ten years with no sign yet of slowing down. When Bendis committed to a title, it was like swans mating, with ten-year-runs on his pet books”

—“Marvel parried with its own events. Civil War, as I’ve already discussed, was the best of them. But Brian Bendis also contributed the lukewarm House of M, and Secret Invasion—his sequel to the Kree-Skrull war in which the aliens won, Earth was conquered, and some slightly hamfisted attempt to compare Skrulls to radical Islamists were made, borrowed wholesale from TV’s Battlestar Galactica"


On Allen Heinberg:

—"Screenwriters, tried-and-tested storytellers from a more glamorous medium, were the only strangers admitted into the comics field during this time of withdrawal and consolidation…Unsurprisingly they didn’t write comics quite as well or with the same freewheeling abandon as the pople who did it for a living, and few lingered beyond their first unimpressive checks…Allan Heinberg’s short but effervescent burst on 2006’s nineteen-millionths Wonder Woman revamp was another rare exception, but the writer, who’d worked on the youth drama The O.C., couldn’t stand the poisonous atmosphere of comics fandom and made a swift, quite exit after a promising start, leaving the field once more to the diehards.”

[Ah, so it wasn’t Allen Heinberg that quit comics, it was us readers that drove him out of the field. What could have made comics fandom seem poisonous to a writer who was widely and greatly celebrated for his rather uninspired “I’ll take The Avengers, and make teenagers out of those IPs!” and supported to ludicrous, money-leaving-on-the-table-lengths by Marvel? Surely his inability to meet a deadline might have had something to do with it...?]


On Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s influence on the post-Watchmen/Dark Knight Returns supercomic:

—“Take out Moore’s passion, his excellece as a wordsmith, and his formal obsessions, and save only his cynicism, his gleeful cruelty, and his need to expose the potentially wounded sexuality of carton characters, and you had the germ of a strain of superhero-porn comics. Unlike Watchmen, which was written for a wide mainstream audience, the new superhero comics were pitched at fans in the direct market, who were tired of all the old tricks and craved shock-thereapy versions of their old favorites."

—“Elmintae Millers’ talent as a cartoonist and satirist, his skill as an action storyteller, and leave only his reactionary 'bastard' heroes—all those psychologically damaged sociopaths in trench coats, jackboots, and stubble—and you had the new model superhero in the late-eighties American style."


On his old enemy, the Internet:

—"Soon film studios were afraid to move without the approval of the raging Internet masses. They represented only the most minuscule fraction of a percentage of the popular audience that gave a shit, but they were very remarkably, superhumanly angry, like the great head of Oz, and so very persistent that they could easily appear in the imagination as an all-conquering army of mean-spirited, judgmental fogies.

"…Too many businesspeople who should have known better began to take seriously the ravings of misinformed, often barely literate malcontents who took revenge on the curel world by dismissing everything that came their way with the same jaded, geriatric 'Meh.'"

—"It is, of course, telling that I’ve never met any reader at a comic convention who behaved the way many do online, suggesting that the Internet monster is a defensive configuration, like the fan of spikes a tiny fish erects when it feels threatened."


On Mark Millar’s radical, pioneering exploration of why nobody’s ever done a “real” superhero before his Kick-Ass:

—"Back in 1940, Ma Hunkel, the Red Tornado, was the first attempt to dpecit a 'real-life' superhero in comics. Not a spaceman from Krypton, not a billionaire playboy with a grudge, Ma had no powers except for her formidable washerwoman build. She wore a homemade costume to dish out local justice in the stairwells and alleyways of the Lower East Side in some aborginal memory of the early DC universe…

"...Seventy years after Ma Hunkel, sixteen-year-old Dave Lizewski, the hero of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass, asked the question 'WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE PARIS HILTON BUT NOBODY WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO?' Leaving aside the cynical response that nobody in their right minds wanted to be Paris Hilton, Dave’s question had already been answered by a handful of brave souls, real people in the real world who dress up in capes and masks to patrol the streets and keep people safe. You can read all about them online if you type 'real world superheroes' into a search engine."


On The Red Bee:

—“The race to create superheroes with fresh gimmicks crashed headlong into one spectacular dead end with the Red Bee…[Richard] Raleigh was clever enough to have invented his own 'sting gun,' which shot effective knockout darts. He could have simply loaded up his sting gun, stopped right there, and still made a perfectly serviceable Golden Age mystery man called the Red Bee. But for Rick Raleigh, only one thing guaranteed his crucial edge over the violent underbelly of society: the hive of trained crime-fighting bees he kept confined in the buckle of his belt…until crime reared its snout. Ever eager to be set free in the cause of justice, the lead bee and chief offensive weapon in Raleigh’s apian arsenal was somewhat endearingly named Michael.”

—“If it seems ridiculous, it’s because it is. But there was something else goin on here: a radical eenchantment of the mundane. As the creators of the superheroes pitched their nets ever wider in search of fresh and original gimmicks, they touched more and more of the everyday world with childlike wonder dust. Bees could be special…Boring gym equipment could become the lethal arsenal of the criminal knon as Sportsmaster….In the world of the superheroes, everything had value, potential, mystery. Any person, thing or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil—remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero. Even a little bee named Michael—after God’s own avenging angel—could pitch in to win the battle against wickeness.”

Quick question for the game-players in the audience

Well, it's been a full two days since I mentioned any PR announcements from either of the Big Two super-comics publishers, so I guess I'm due for another post on the subject, huh? This one's another one from DC, who have been announcing things like crazy all week.

Yesterday their Source blog pointed to another of the pre-arranged exclusive interviews on one of their announcements, this one on the subject of a fifth weekly series, following 52 (hooray!), Countdown (Gah!), Trinity (not bad, not bad) and Wednesday Comics (hooray!).

Strangely, this weekly is in addition to the two 26-part bi-weekly series already announced, Brightest Day and Justice League: Lost Generation.

It's going to be called DC Universe: Legends, and it's going to be based on DC Universe Online, a "massively multiplayer online action-RPG," which I know, um, next to nothing about. So basically it's a weekly series based on DC super-characters, but ones distinct somehow from the DCU versions.

Distinct how? I don't know. The IGN.com interview with Executive Editor Dan DiDio was definitely geared towards people who already knew what DC Universe Online is, exactly.

I don't know whether it will be any good or not—I'm excited in general about DC weekly series, but it will depend as always on who exactly is making it, I suppose. The only creators involved that have been announced so far are writers Dan Jurgens and Tony Bedard, the former of whom did back-ups for 52 and the latter of whom was one of the writers involved with Countdown.

In the IGN interview, DiDio mentioned that Marv Wolfman would be involved at some point, and I guess Jim Lee did initial designs for the characters in the game/community/whatever-it-is.

Anyway, here's my question. What's the difference between the DCU of the comics and the universe/continuity of DC Universe Online. Like, how different are the two, and in what ways? (From what I've seen so far, it seem mostly a matter of costuming and freedom from the month-to-month goings-on of the comics line, like Cassandra Cain being Batgirl instead of Stephanie Brown, Superman being on Earth, Batman not being dead, etc).

Are the two close enough that one will probably be able to read the comic without playing/knowing anything at all about the game? Will one want to be able to read the comic in that case?

If anyone's knowledgeable of DC Universe Online and wants to weigh in, please do!

Terribly important follow-up post

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

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

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

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

(Hopefully) coming in 2010: Batman's Skull #1

If, like me, you spent a portion of your Saturday evening checking the Internet for comics news, you may have already heard that controversial DC Executive Editor Dan DiDio and artist Philip Tan were announced as the new creative team for DC's struggling and creatively troubled The Outsiders ongoing series (a comic that must hold some sort of record for creator turnover, as the creative team changed three times before the first issue landed in shops).

I liked this quote from DiDio that the Robot 6 post excerpted from DC's official announcement:

This is an exciting time for me both personally and professionally. I have been a fan of The Outsiders since their inception and with Pete Tomasi moving on to some very exciting projects in 2010, I have been afforded the opportunity to work with some of my favorite characters. Most importantly, this also gives me the chance to work with the immensely talented Philip Tan, and together I hope we can meet and exceed all expectations for this series.

People have expectations for Dan DiDio, or Philip Tan, or The Outsiders comic? Huh.

The more exciting news is that the writer DiDio will be replacing is Peter J. Tomasi, who DiDio told Newsarama's Vaneta Rogers will be leaving the book to work on something that he "can't talk about that now, but it definitely has to do with the post-Blackest Night universe."

That I find very interesting, being something of an Aquaman fan. Now, DC could launch pretty much anything as an ongoing post-Blackest Night I suppose—never in a million years would I have expected them to launch a Magog ongoing, or either of the Red Circle ongoings, for example—but it's hard to imagine any of the various Lantern characters getting a new title post-Blackest Night. DC's already tempting fate having two GL ongoings and spending about a year on a GL-centric crossover story.

Since smart money is one the book ending with Hal Jordan or someone harnessing the "creative energy" of white light to resurrect at least the popular Black Lanterns, I've long assumed the story would end with Martian Manhunter, Aquaman and others coming back to life (Once they killed off Tempest, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, I think a mass-resurrection at the end became guaranteed).

Aquaman seems like the most likely of the dead Justice Leaguers to get his own book, having carried on off-and-on for so long, and having had a few years off now. So if I were going to bet money on what Tomasi's post-Blackest Night title might be—and man, what a dumb thing to bet money on; do Vegas odds-makers do stuff like that?—I would bet that it's a new Aquaman ongoing.

But again, DC's recent publishing decisions have indicated they could honestly publish just about anything. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Tomasi's new title were The Adventures of Batman's Skull (which, judging by how well comics featuring Batman and/or a guy walking around carrying and occasionally licking Batman's skull are doing versus everything else on the latest sales charts, maybe Batman's Skull would out-sell Aquaman anyway).

Back to Outsiders, Rogers also has an interview with Tan about the book here, which may be worth a read if you like either the Outsiders or Tan (I'm not really a fan of either, although the original Jim Aparo-drawn volume of the title was pretty awesome).

Sounds like Tan will be re-designing Geo-Force, Katana and Black Lightning's costumes, which is cool, since their ever-changing costumes are all almost always pretty awful. (Good luck, Tan! I'm rooting for you!)

If you do give the Tan interview a read, come back and explain to me a) what Tan's talking about with the script style...does he just mean old Marvel style, where Stan Lee or whoever writes a synopsis, Jack Kirby or whoever draws the page however he wants, and then Lee or whoever comes back and writes the dialogue? (If so, I might wanna check out an issue of Outsiders to see if the reason I've hated Tan's previous work so much was that he honestly can't draw full-script style, but kicks-ass with the "plot script style" style) and b) who the hell those characters are supposed to be in that little black and white drawing, also posted to the left here. One's apparently bald and has an S-shield, which makes me think Steel, but if so that's a pretty wretched image of Steel. The other looks like a bulked-up Anthro with a Nazi hair-cut and Geo-Force accessories. So I guess maybe it's Geo-Force...? But then, why would his head shine like the bald and/or metal-encased head of the other figure, if the other figure is Steel...?

Sometimes I really don't get DC Comics (Pt. 2)

Late last night my fellow Blog@ contributor David Pepose linked to this interview on Isn't It Cool News, the ugliest designed website on the Internet. There's a sort Q and A between DC Comics' Senior Vice President/Executive Editor Dan DiDio and an anonymous person using the name of a DC character as his or her (or its?) pseudonym.

"Bug" is the questioner, "DD" is DiDio:

BUG: I know you have to go and that you’ve already revealed a lot of stuff here at the Con, but do you have any scoops you can share with AICN?

DD: Yeah, I’ll give you a scoop. I’ll give you a spoiler. You know what, I had so much fun writing METAL MEN that I’m actually going to be taking over a monthly title coming up at the end of the year.

Okay, let's set aside questions of how talented a writer Dan DiDio might be for a moment. To be perfectly honest, I don't even have a strong opinion on the matter. I've read the Superboy issues he co-wrote, and while they weren't great comics, they didn't cause me to drop the book or anything. I've been reading his Metal Men strip in Wednesday Comics, and that's been fine; again, not brilliant, but not bad (there are certainly worse scripted strips in Wednesday Comics). I read a short Blue Devil story/It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown parody he wrote for one of DC's Halloween specials and that was godawful. And that's it. Aside from DC Nation columns, that is the sum total of all Dan DiDio writing I've read.

So from what I've read, I can only say DiDio seems capable of writing serviceable comics scripts.

But again, let's forget about that for a second, that's not what confuses me about DiDio writing an ongoing comic for DC.

No, what confuses me is that Dan DiDio is probably the most unpopular person in mainstream comics, the only person rivaling his unpopularity being Marvel Comics' Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada.

It's just the nature of the job really. When you're the person in charge (or even perceived as in charge) of managing a decades-old fictional superhero universe patronized almost exclusively by change-resistant, entitled, lifelong fans who feel a certain degree of ownership over the characters they don't actually have any control of (none of which I necessarily mean as an insult; that description certainly applies to me), then you're going to be unpopular. Hell you're going to be disliked, hated even.

Every little change that goes on in that universe is going to be laid at your feet, particularly the bad changes, or the things people don't like. Was it Dan DiDio's idea to kill off Ted Kord, have Sue Dibny raped and killed, bring Jason Todd back to life, not give Stephanie Brown a memorial case in the Batcave, de-reboot DC's post-Crisis continuity (and then re-de-reboot it), publish Countdown, make Dwayne McDuffie's life miserable, kick Superman out of his books for a year and keep Judd Winick employed? Sure, some of those might have been DiDio's ideas, or at least ideas he okayed,but not everything that goes wrong in the DC Universe or DC Comics is necessarily his fault, it's just that since the buck stops with him, that he's the guy who has to go out and sit in the dunk tank all the time, he's who gets the blame, deserved or not.

And all the good stuff that goes on at DC? Well, it's usually assumed that that's all because of the particular writer or artist, and DiDio doesn't even get credit for not stopping it from seeing publication (while he does get blame for not stopping the bad stuff).

So, the point is, deserved or not, DiDio is one of the most hated people in mainstream comics.

Now, what sells mainstream comics to fans today? A couple of things. The character or title, to a certain degree. The perception of importance, as in the case of certain event comics involving crossovers or character deaths, resurrections or mantle-passings. And the credits—who's writing and who's drawing.

Decades ago, like, before the mid-70s, I imagine, it was the characters that sold the comics, but now that the readership is mostly adult and thoroughly understands that not only are comics made by particular people, but how they're made, that's not always the case—in fact, I imagine it's rare.

For example, if people used to read Disney duck comics because they were Disney duck comics, and to be particularly excited when they got "the good duck artist," now they would look past the publisher and title and look to see if it was a Carl Barks comic or not.

Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Mark Millar, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis, Jeff Parker, fans read their comics because they see their names on them, not because they can't wait to see what Booster Gold or The Hood or Spider Woman are up to these days. And, likewise, people avoid comics by writer's whom they don't like.

And the people who buy DC Comics? They do not care for this Dan DiDio character. So putting his name on a book seems like stamping a "Do Not Buy" on it, and I can't imagine why he or anyone at DC would think this was a good way to sell comics (Joe Quesada, while being similarly hated, is in a different situation I think, because he had a long-ish career as a fairly popular artist before he assumed the EIC spot at Marvel, and started becoming the focus of fan hatred. Additionally, I think there's a general perception that editing is closer to writing than it is to drawing, that a person's editorial work might reflect one's writing more than one's ability to draw. Hence comments from Quesada fans like, "I might hate every single decision he's made since he became editor in chief, but he draws a really cool Spider-Man" or whatever).

To parse the scoop that DiDio gave "Ambush Bug," he says he'll "be taking over a monthly title," which means he'll be writing an existing one.

What might that be? I'm not sure. The most obvious one would have been Teen Titans which he was editing (and seemingly rather aggressively when it came to story suggestions, given the merry-go-round of writers since he took over), but then DC just named a new writer, Felicia D. Henderson, who is something of a "get" (Of course, if she was starting in the fall and leaving by the end of the year, that wouldn't be all that unusual for Teen Titans; Adam Beechen was the "regular" writer for somewhere between one and three issues). Adventure Comics, a new book starring Superboy and The Legion of Superheroes might also be a good bet; it's going to be written by Geoff Johns, but Johns' services are always needed elsewhere, so maybe he's planning on getting it started and then leaving it to someone else, a la Booster Gold.

I guess we'll see, but unless it's a book featuring a very popular character and DiDio's teamed with a very popular artist—Batman with Jim Lee?—I can't imagine it not doing more harm than good.


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

It just occurred to me that a Dan DiDo/Joe Quesada comic book done for charity would be a really cool project.

Magog?!

If you've read any (on schedule) DC comics this week, then you saw the above image on the DC Nation Page, complete with an image of a piece of paper super-imposed on it. That paper image is a memo to Dan DiDio from Ian Sattler reading, "He Dan, Here is the art from Magog #1. It's looking pretty amazing—when do you think we can announce this an ongoing and say who the creative team is?"

Today, apparently, as DC's Source blog, from which I appropriated the image above, announced the team and showed off another page in a second Magog post of the day. The creative team is going to be Keith Giffen, Howard Porter and John Dell.

I still have a question though: Why?

I'm not trying to be an a-hole or anything, but a Magog ongoing? Does anyone like Magog?

He was created by Alex Ross as a Cable analogue in Kingdom Come to be a living symbol of the shitty character design and free-floating moral code of the superheroes of the Image Comics age. Chuck Austen brought him into the DCU a few years ago as a Superman villain, and then Ross and Geoff Johns more recently brought another version of him into the DCU in their 3,000-part "Thy Kingdom Come" storyline in Justice Society of America. Their new version is a descendant of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's, and was a U.S. soldier who was brought to life and given his funny looking costume by a god of the Third World.

I know every character has fans, so I'm sure someone, somewhere really, really likes Magog, but I've never encountered this fan. In fact, I've never heard anyone say anything remotely positive ever about any version of Magog anywhere.

Now, DC often makes perplexing publishing decisions, like publishing a Huntress: Year One miniseries by an un-tested creative team just a few years after a popular writer wrote Huntress' definitive origin, or starting their Final Crisis Aftermath series half a year after Final Crisis wrapped, or sitting on an announced Batwoman ongoing for years before finally just shuffling her into Detective Comics temporarily, or launching a Power Girl series for no reason, but this seems so completely random I can't even comprehend it.

I mean, Power Girl launched with a countdown-to-cancellation clock ticking, but its creators have their fans and the characters has some fans. But Magog? Maybe if Alex Ross were involved, and it was premised on a series about the road to Kingdom Come, of the sort that Ross and Mark Waid have talked about as an idea that was once tossed around, but even if that what Giffen and company end up doing, without Ross' involvement, would anyone care? (And that JSoA arc made clear that Kingdom Come was a place outside of the DCU, not a time in it's future).

Although, maybe this is set in the Kingdome Come-iverse, rather than the DCU? That seems like it would potentially be a better hook but, again, it doesn't involve Ross, so will anyone care?

If brand-name heroes, originals or legacy characters, like Catwoman, Firestorm, Aquaman, Hawkman/Hawkgirl, The Atom, Blue Beetle and Manhunter can't carry books, why on Earth would anyone greenlight a Magog ongoing?

My mind boggles. Or is boggled.

At any rate, are any of you out there Magog fans? If so, let me know below; I'd like to hear from you, as that would indicate giving the guy a monthly comic isn't as mind-bogglingly strange a decision as it seems to be to me.

Hate the Alex Ross cover, not the Alex Ross

It seems somehow wrong to say that I kind of like Alex Ross out loud or in public like this, as if admitting I like and appreciate a lot of his work may compromise my reputation as a cranky, cynical, hard-to-please critic who hates everything. Additionally, liking Alex Ross seems kind of un-cool, or—what's the word the kids use these days?—square.

Mostly because Ross not only promotes backwards-looking nostalgia for things that weren't very good the first time around (and he does so quite persuasively), but also because he embodies such nostalgia.

Ross is like a living, breathing avatar of the veneration of one's childhood experiences with superheroes. A lot of us imprint on the first superheroes we encountered as kids, and follow them like baby ducks from that point on. So Barry Allen is the best Flash and Hal Jordan is the best Green Lantern only because they were Ross' firsts; the satellite League is champagne and what followed was shit because the former was his first Justice League and the latter wasn't. (Not that Ross has said any of this in interviews or anything; I'm just assigning these sentiments to him, as he symbolically represents them).

I certainly understand why dissing Ross is therefore pretty commonplace among critics, fans and people with access to the Internet, but that doesn't mean I feel compelled to dis him too.

I like the fact that he likes Captain Marvel and Plastic Man, and considers them at least as important as all the other DC superheroes he considers icons and treats like saints in his work. I like the fact that he dresses up friends, relatives and whoever he can convince to wear a cape and lay on a coffee table in a flying pose to play dress-up for him (I would probably be able to bring myself to buy Greg Land comics if each issue of his work included photos of people dressed in X-Men costumes making silent movie actor-broad facial expressions). I like the fact that he knows enough about human anatomy to remember that men have genitals, and draws them under their pants. I think he's a pretty fantastic superhero costume designer (see Kingdom Come and Astro City for particularly good examples). And I even enjoyed some of his recent comics collaborations, like Avengers/Invaders and Justice (his JSoA arc, on the other hand, was pretty tedious, and I remain shocked at how boring the Ross spear-headed Project: Super Powers work has been).

But there's no denying he has his weaknesses as an artist, and the greatest of these seems to be a relative lack of imagination. He's been doing a great deal of cover work these last few years, much of it for DC super-comics, and a great deal of that work is, well, just plain boring.

If Ross' strengths are his nearly photo-realistic portrayal of characters, and the iconic aspects of them that he draws out from them by drawing them in certain poses, the power of those strengths erodes the more he paints the same subjects. This makes him a pretty rotten cover artist for an ongoing series, as he's been on Batman, Superman and Justice Society of America for a while now.

There's only so many different ways in which to paint Batman looking stately and slightly perturbed on a rooftop. Looking down at the reader, in profile, in the rain, from behind, holding a batarang, etc. I think this might have been one of his most dynamic and imaginative Batman covers,

and what's going on in it, exactly? A low-angle on Batman, here yelling instead of glowering, while some crazy lights fill the background? Considering what's actually going on inside the comic book—which, you may recall, involved Batman being shot up with drugs while his back-up personality, an alien Batman from a different world, took over his mind and made him dress in a homemade rainbow-colored costume while he took a baseball bat to his foes, while getting advice from Bat-Mite who was also half alien insect for some reason—well, it's pretty prosaic, isn't it?

I was thinking about how Ross is at once a great comic book cover artist (the painting makes books look important, and he's good at the single pin-up image that's in style these days) and what a miserable comic book cover artist he is (the images are almost always boring and infinitely less entertaining than whatever they're actually covering), when I saw the cover for the new printing of the History of the DC Universe trade, which collects a Marv Wolfman/George Perez effort from 1986. (I talked a bit about why re-publishing the book now seems a somewhat strange publishing decision in this week's 'Twas column at Blog@, if you're at all interested).

I haven't read it, as I wouldn't get interested in comics until I became a teenager almost a decade after it was published, but apparently it's a sort of definitive, here's-what's-in-and-what's-out story of the DC universe's entire fictional history during the post-Crisis years. Or, as the solicit says, it features "virtually every character in the DC Universe, this tale takes us from the dawn of creation to the end of recorded history."

Wow, that sounds like pretty exciting stuff, right? Every character ever? Every adventure ever, over the course of billions of years? What kind of cover image might Alex Ross come up with for that?

Seriously? That's the best he could think of? The history of the DC Universe can essentially be boiled down to the fact that Krypton exploded, Bruce Wayne saw his parents killed and was then dive-bombed by giant bats, Captain Marvel screamed in Egypt this one time and the trinity all have different good sides they like to be photographed from? Oh, and there was a blue space man with funny hair.

I mean murder, the destruction of a planet and creepy blue space men are pretty dramatic things, but they aren't terribly representative of billions of years worth of events involving gods, aliens, humans and superhumans; it's more like Superman's Tuesday lunch hour.

Here are the original covers for the series:


I'm not terribly excited by these covers, nor am I sure I understand why the images repeat with only some small alterations between issues as if it were an example of one of those can-you-spot-the-differences picture puzzles, but it at least gives some idea of the scope of the project. You know it involves superheroes and an evil god and cowboys and wars and Uncle Sam and gorillas.

Here's a cover to what I assume is one of the first collections, although I don't know who the artist is:

In some ways I think it is the weakest of the three, but, one advantage it has over the Ross version is that it's an active image—there's a character doing something on it—and it gives some sense of the scope. The red mess of characters might not be all that well chosen—does Vigilante really deserve such a prominent spot?—but again you see that the history involves a World War I flying ace and World War II sergeant, little blue space men and giant ghosts of god, Batman and Darkseid, Wonder Woman and hawkpeople.

I'll probably try to pick this up—despite the fact that I imagine most if not all of the information within is completely irrelevant—the next time I have an extra $13 to waste at the comic shop, but I wouldn't mind it having a less lame cover.


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I wonder why DC hasn't done a new version of this series yet? I know they had Dan Jurgens draw one about the post-Infinite Crisis "New Universe" in the opening issues of 52, but 52 ended with another reboot, and then was followed by Darkseid-falling continuity hiccups/disorientations and another re-ordering of the multiverse and recration of the DC Universe in Final Crisis. When the dust has finally settled—after they've figured out where they're going with the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Multiverse and maybe this "Blackest Night" business, Paul Levitz, Dan DiDio, Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison should all sit down and figure out the definite past, present and future of the DCU, at least in the broadest of strokes and do a new series in this splash page-and-prose format.

Fans would appreciate it, it would be helpful to creators and editors, and, after hammering out what "counts" and what doesn't, it should be pretty easy to produce—just have Geoff Johns polish his notes from the meeting for the prose, and have Perez provide a bunch of new splash pages and Bam! comic book hit. I know DiDio has spoken in past interviews about not wanting to nail history down so much that it limits DC's abilities to tell stories but a) that's stupid, since it's not like there weren't a ton of great DC Comics between the years 1986 and 2005 (actually, come to think of it, aren't most of DC's very best efforts from those years?) and b) it can be down in general enough terms it doesn't limit the ability for future writers to tell good stories (For example, knowing whether Wonder Woman started her career five months after Superman started his or five years afterward, and whether she co-founded the Justice League or joined eight years later doesn't exactly take any stories off the table).

But be sure to get a better cover for that version, guys.