My Free Comic Book Day

Today was, of course, Free Comic Book Day, the closest thing to a national holiday celebrating comic books that we have...so far. I spent it by, um, working at my day job from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., not going anywhere near a comic book shop, and thus I am unable to report on what might have been going on at either of the two shops I shop at in my immediate area.

My day job is at a library, and we did participate in FCBD, although only in that the children's department laid out some stacks of the kid-oriented comics that the nearest shop donated for that purpose.

I did get a handful of comics today, however, as a friend of mine who was volunteering that that same shop snagged me some of those she thought I would be most interested in. And now I am going to review them.

Divergence FCBD Special Edition #1 (DC Comics) This was DC's main offering this year, and it was an all-around much less depressing, much less derivative, much less likely to actively repel readers offering than last year's zero issue of Futures End–You know, the one set in the nightmare future where cyborg monsters murdered old man versions of your favorite superheroes, while Frankenstein had Black Canary's face sewn into his chest.

So, you know, say what you will about this comic, but it could have been worst. It could have been last year's comic.

The title is apparent reference to the branding initiative that is set to follow the two-month Convergence event, which is currently serving as a punctuation mark of sorts to the 3+-year "New 52" branding initiative. I thought "Divergence" was just a cute way that DC was referring to what comes after Convergence–I didn't realize they were actually calling it that. Huh.

The cover was created just last night, Friday May 1st, by an intern on a dare. I have to assume.

The insides contain a eye-rollingly bullshit editorial from co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee about how greatly they value their characters' most iconic qualities, how they want to respect their history without letting it chain them down or to treat it as too precious and how important it is for their publishing line to reflect the world their readers currently live in. That's all well and good, but, um, these guys–DiDio at least–have been in charge of DC Comics for what seems to be forever now, and if we look back only as far as say, Countdown to Infinite Crisis, it would appear that–let's see–absolutely none of that is true.

But who comes to a comic for the prose? Bring on the comics! There are three in here, which DiDio and Lee assure us aren't reprints or previews of upcoming storylines, but discreet stories in their own rights, presaging "three major changes in our most iconic characters." (If you guessed they were referring to Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, you were right. Please note, however, the changes to Wonder Woman will not be occurring in the pages of Wonder Woman, which Meredith and David Finch appear to be continuing to do completely ignorable work on, but in the pages of Justice League).

The first story is "The Rookie" by regular Batman team of Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo and Danny Miki. It's only eight pages, so I suppose I can forgive Snyder for pulling out the tired, old Dark Knight Returns convention of having talking head newscasters explain things at readers to convey the fact that Batman is apparently "dead," which was the conclusion of the "Endgame" story arc, the last chapter of which shipped on Wednesday (I read Batman in trade, so I only flipped through that issue and read a few important-looking panels, but Batman and The Joker appear to die together...Snyder and Capullo don't even really pretend to imply that the pair are really for-real dead though, only that Alfred, Julia and others think they're dead).

That is why there has to be a new Batman, and this story reveals who it is, if you haven't heard or figured it out already. I'm not as excited about the Batman-is-out-of-commission-and-someone-has-to-replace-him storyline as I was the first time around (the "Knightfall," "KnightQuest" and "KnightsEnd" trilogy from the '90s) or the second time around (when Dick Grayson replaced the temporarily dead Bruce Wayne in 2009). I am kind of curious, of course, in large part because rather than having someone actually become a new Batman, Snyder and Capullo are putting someone in a Bubblegum Crisis-esque anime aromr, qne because this new Batman is not one any reader would likely have put in their list of Top Fifteen Replacement Batmen (Here's a hint: It's one of only like three Batman characters who weren't battling for the cowl in Battle for the Cowl. I suppose someone somewhere will have to write about why none of the expected Replacement Batmen are trying to replace Batman, unless they all know he's not really dead...?).

My only real complain is an aesthetic one. I don't mind the weird armor, or its color. I can probably live without a cape or wings. But I can't accept the fact that the new Batman's armor has "ears" that look absolutely nothing like bat-ears. Resembling instead moth antennae or rabbit ears, depending on the angle, they just look wrong, but wrong in the wrong way, if that makes sense (That is, we're supposed to notice and react to how different and off this Batman is visually. The ears just go a few steps too far).

That's followed by Gene Luen Yang's debut as the new writer on Superman, in the eight-page "Exposed." Drawn by John Romita Jr., who will be staying on as pencil artist when Yang's run on the Superman monthly begins in June, and inked by Klaus Janson and Scott Hanna, it's merely a collection of vignettes that reveals Superman's radical new status quo–bridged by the same media-as-storytelling device segment I was just complaining about a few paragraphs ago (I guess adding Twitter to the mix makes it seem slightly less Dark Knight derivative, but somehow more grating).

As for that status quo change? Superman has been outted as Clark Kent, and by Lois Lane of all people. That's...that's a pretty big goddam story right there. Unfortunately, it's also the sort of story that would be infinitely more compelling had DC not just rebooted their continuity a little over three years ago. The storyline seems to want to illicit shock and drama from the fact that its doing something outrageous that hasn't been done in the character's lifetime, but, well, this character has only been around for, like, 40 issues of a couple Superman and Action.

Not that I'm not interested, of course. I've already added Superman to my pull-list, for the first time in over five years. I like Gene Luen Yang's comics. I like John Romita Jr's comics. And I like Superman. So I'm having a hard time imagining Superman by Yang and JRJR not being good.

The final story is "Darkseid War Prologue Two: The Other Amazon," by Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok ("Part One" was this week's wordy, guest artist-filled Justice LEague #40). It's eight pages are devoted to revealing that the very same night that Diana was being born to Hippolyta, another Amazon (this one with an omega sign from her sorority tattooed under her eye) was giving birth to her own demi-goddess daughter, also sired by a god. Remember Darkseid's daughter from Wednesday's issue of Justice League? Well, it's not Scot, as the story seemed to imply (like, if that was your first exposure to Jack Kirby's New Gods characters, that comic totally sold Scot as Darkseid's daughter).

During the birth, an Amazon oracle has a vision that serves as a preview of the events of the upcoming "Darkseid War" storyline–Batman becoming the new Metron? Captain Marvel Shazam passing on his magic word to Cyborg? Badly drawn Mister Miracle, wearing a messed-up mask?–that should prove tantalizing. Most tantalizing of all, of course, is that this storyline seems to include another continuity-rebooting Crisis, seeing as it includes The Anti-Monitor and his shadow thingsGiven the genie of Superman's secret identity being let out of the bottle, a reboot seems more likely still, even though one has to imagine Geoff Johns is getting tired of re-writing DC history every couple of years, being the man who scripted Infinite Crisis and Flashpoint already.

Free Comic Book Day 2015 (Avengers) #1 (Marvel) And here I thought Divergence was a funny name...!

This comic features two stories, previewing two new team titles that appear to be set post-Secret Wars, one of which looks quite promising, the other of which looks much less so.

The first of these is a story featuring "The All-New, All-Different Avengers," written by Mark Waid and drawn by Mahmud Asrar. The line-up is on the cover, and you can see just how all-new and all-different they really are; there's only one founder on the team (provided that's really Tony Stark under the helmet; he never takes it off or gets called "Tony"), a team that features four newbies, three of whom are teenagers.

Waid's plotting and scripting are, as always, quite clever, and he manages to tell a complete and really quite solid story in just ten pages. A seemingly new and improved Radioactive Man attacks a bank, and these new Avengers arrive to stop him. Despite opening with a pair of splash pages that call into question if Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man Miles Morales (I'm interested to hear if they give him a name to distinguish him from Spider-Man Peter Parker or if they just call them both Spider-Man) and Nova will remain on the team after their very first mission.

I'm pretty divorced from the month-in, month-out goings-on of the Marvel Universe at the moment, so I don't know who's who and what's what exactly, but I was curious about Iron Man, particularly since someone mentions The Avengers not having "Stark money" anymore, and thought Waid's Ms. Marvel sounded and acted a little off in a few panels, even if he recovered nicely at the end, when she quickly answers a bit of superhero trivia that Iron Man, who was actually there at the time, doesn't quite remember.

That's followed by a story featuring "The Uncanny Inhumans," by Charles Soule and Brandon Peterson. Set in Mumbai, it features a Bollywood actor getting misted and turning into a tree monster (which seems a little too Groot-like, if you ask me), another new Inhuman attempting to stop his rampage, and then Medusa and her team swooping in to save the day. In the last panel, she grabs Johnny Storm's butt and kisses him. I kind of want to Google Crystal to see what relation she was to Medusa, if any, but I also kinda don't want to know.

Peterson's artwork is very slick and photo reference-y, reminding me of Greg Land a little too much for me to stand looking at it long–frankly, I had trouble reading 10-straight pages of it, so I can't imagine reading whole collections worth of it. The artwork on the back cover by Nick Bradshaw looks infinitely better, and also features a few characters who aren't in Medusa's company during the interior story.

Free Comic Book Day (Secret Wars #1 (Marvel) Well, that's what the fine print says, one parentheses and all. But I guess I shouldn't nitpick typos...this is a free comic after all, and there are probably several dozen typos in this very blog post.

This is another two-story anthology from Marvel, the first of which is a prelude to their big Secret Wars event, the culmination of Jonathan Hickman's years worth of plotting on Avengers and (even more so) New Avengers, an event that will redefine Marvel's publishing line for the foreseeable (i.e. the solicit-able) future and likely involve some sort of DC-like continuity rejiggering (If nothing else, it will bring Miles Morales from the Ultimate Universe to the Marvel Universe proper, as the other Marvel FCBD book makes clear).

Written by Hickman himself and drawn by Paul Renaud, the "Secret Wars #0" briefly recaps the events of New Avengers and the threat of the Multiversal incursions of alternate earths. It does so in the course of a 10-page story featuring The Future Foundation kids; Valeria Richards is leading them in the building of a 60-seater "live boat" of sorts, in which they and chosen scientists and engineers and suchlike can attempt to flee the ending world and restart life somewhere else.

But, as she notes, it looks like they'll have to fight their way off of Earth, as this latest incursion is from a familiar alternate Earth, that upon which Marvel's Ultimate line has been set.

I've enjoyed Hickman's New Avengers so much, I honestly can't wait to read Secret Wars. Although I will wait, because goodness, are Marvel comics expensive!

The back half of the book is filled with a story that should probably be the cover one, and is likely to be of greater interest to more people worldwide than Secret Wars, but it's really hidden back there (Unlike the other Marvel FCBD book, this one doesn't have a back cover for the back story, but features a wrap-around ALex ORss painting of various Marvel characters from various alternate realities secretly warring).

This is "Attack on Avengers" by Hajimie Isayama, C.B. Cebulski and Gerardo Sandoval, and it's a kinda sort Attack on Titan crossover. There's a big paragraph that fills a whole page explaining its origins–Japan's Brutus magazine commissioned a story that "postulates what would happen in an encounter between Marvel's AVENGERS and the Titans from Hajime Isayama's popular manga ATTACK ON TITAN."

It would be terrible comics, apparently. At just eight pages, and not including a beginning or ending, I'm assuming this is a sliver of something that will be published state-side eventually. It's basically just the freaky-looking Titans from the manga attacking New York City as any giant monster would, while first Spider-Man and then Avengers from the movie arrive to fight them. In the last two panels, The Guardians of The Galaxy arrive to lend a hand, their arrival weirdly hearalded by Blue Swede's "Hooked On A Feeling." Apparently The Guardians' popularity is so inextricably linked to a handful of pop music songs that they travel with their own soundtrack now...?

Even though there's not enough to count this as an actual story, it's barely legible. Cebulski is credited with breakdowns while Sandoval handles the line art. It's possible that Brutus asked for the art to be as American superhero as possible, which apparently means shitty. Really, really shitty. It looks and reads like super-comics from the the time in which Image's founders were working at Marvel and preparing to make their own bad comics under their own new publishing outfit. Characters jump and pose nonsensically, and would collide with one another if each panel didn't jump like a smash-cut. It's a mess.

On the other hand, it's Attack on Titan. With Marvel's movie characters. That's gotta pique some interest.

Teen Titans Go/Scooby Doo Team-Up (DC) I couldn't find fine print revealing the actual title of this anywhere, so I'm just going to go ahead and call it that. It's a flip-book, featuring ten pages of each comic named in the title. The Scooby-Doo story is actually the first half of the Super Friends team-up from last year's SDTU #6. The Titans story is likely also a reprint then, but if so, I hadn't read it before, as I've only read the first issue of the Teen Titans Go comic (it doesn't quite capture the manic pacing of the TV show, but then, I don't think a comic book can precisely replicate all of the best aspects of that cartoon). In it, Raven and Starfire invite Bumblebee and Jinx to the tower for an all-girl slumber party and kick the boys out. I liked the fact that a Justice League and Guy Gardner and some of the GLC were in the neighboring lanes at the bowling alley whenC Cyborg and Beast Boy went there to spend the night.

Hey kids! DC Comics, Frankenstein and parts of Black Canary have a reminder for you:

From DC Comics' Futures End #0 

Comic shop comics: Free Comic Book Day

There were only two (2) new comic books in my pull-file this past week, so I didn't bother driving out to the shop to get them, but figured I'd wait another Wednesday or two until I had at least a handful of books built-up to justify the time spent getting to and from the shop.

But then Saturday rolled around, and I actually had the day off from both my day job and any tight deadline writing and I figured that since it was Free Comic Book Day, I should go check out the scene and pick up my two new comic books and see what freebies my shop still had available by the time I got there.

It was even more easy than usual to find my local comic shop, Comic Heaven in Willoughby, Ohio, as there was a Stormtrooper standing on the side of the road in front of the parking lot, waving at cars as they drove by.

Specifically, it was the type of Stormtrooper that pilots those low-flying speeder bike things through the forest of Endor in Return of the Jedi, which the Internet tells me is a type of Stormtrooper referred to as a "scout trooper," and that these are "light-armored stormtrooper variants, trained as reconnaissance troopers, spies and survivalists." (I was going to scroll through all the different types of stormtroopers in this crazy-long article about stormtroopers in order to find out if there was one that deals especially with traffic control and/or waving at cars, but the article is a billion words long, and I think I could finish a Star Wars novel before I finished reading that actual entry).

I kinda wanted to take a picture of him waving at cars, because the visual clash of stormtrooper armor and mundane stuff like northeast Ohio suburban traffic amuses me, but when I asked if I could photograph him, he said something I couldn't understand through his mask and posed for me:

I asked if he was hot in there, as it was in the low seventies and sunny, and he said something else I couldn't understand.

I guess it's a good thing he was wearing scout trooper light-armor, rather than the standard stormtrooper armor or, worse yet, snowtrooper armor.

Then I saw this young fellow, wearing a poncho and carrying a crossbow.

I took his photo form a discreet distance, as I generally try not to talk to strangers wearing weapons. At first I assumed he was just some random crazy person, as I couldn't think of any comic book superheroes or Star Wars characters who wear ponchos and crossbows, but maybe I'm just not all that hip to nerd media as I assumed I was. Later on I saw two or more other people with crossbows, so I have I imagine it was a thing of some sort.

That, or there's a small group of Ohioans who hunt cosplayers for sport.

There were only three more costumed folks at the shop during the 15 or 20 minutes I was there.

There was a couple wearing rather impressively realistic Black Widow and Loki (movie versions) costumes, who I took this creeper cam photo of as they browsed, because Black Widow and Loki browsing Marvel comics in a comic book shop is funnier to me than Black Widow and Loki posing for a photo.

And then, finally, on my way out, I saw a bigger (and plushier) than life-sized version of Beppo, the Super-Monkey:

Oddly, the big stuffed animal seemed to scare a few of the toddlers, who snuck peaks at it and clung tightly to their parents as they passed. Meanwhile the family of folks wearing crossbows or the guy dressed like a god of mischief with enormous horns on his heads didn't seem to frighten any children in the least.

The shop was more crowded than I'd ever seen it, with maybe 100 people of all shapes, sizes, ages and demographics within, and the employees rather hectically answering questions and rushing to and fro finding things for customers.

They were giving away seven free books per customer, and these were all stacked up on several tables and counter-top space apparently cleared off for the occasion. The DC book/s were already gone, and while I flipped through the Marvel book with Thanos on the cover, it looked so boring that I didn't think I wanted to read it, even for free. I picked up a couple of books for my nieces (Strawberry Shortcake, Archie's Pep Comics, Top Shelf Kids Club and the Disney Fairies book) and two for myself.

I generally try to buy a graphic novel or a couple of manga digests from my LCS on FCBD, because I always feel a little guilty taking free comic books when I'm already good and thoroughly hooked on the medium and thus am the opposite of the sort of person who should go to a comic shop on FCBD to avail myself of the free comics, but, like a heel, I didn't get anything (I'm pretty caught up on the trades I've been waiting to read, and they didn't have any of the few I'm looking for in stock. I considered buying a Showcase Presents volume, but I currently have four of 'em on an end table waiting to be read, so I figured I should read the over 2,000 pages of black-and-white DC Comics reprints I already have before buying another 500 pages).

Here are the four books I brought home from the shop on Saturday, and what I thought of 'em...

Hawkeye #10 (Marvel Entertainment) I suppose the idea of too much of a good thing is so ingrained in the American psyche that I shouldn't be too surprised that Marvel's been pumping out even their highest-quality, most standalone comics at a greater-than-monthly frequency, even if that means the artists who are largely responsible for that quality can't possibly keep up with the accelerated schedule.

So here's another David Aja-less issue of Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye, and, as in the past Aja-less issues, readers can at least take comfort in the fact that Marvel hired another of the best super-comics artists currently working for the Big Two to fill-in.

This time it's Francesco Francavilla, coloring himself, and the results are, as expected, lovely. The story pulls back from the cliffhanger of the previous issue, and then introduces us to the villain from that cliffhanger, telling his secret origin and what exactly he was getting up to just before putting on his mime make-up and drilling poor Grills. (Spoiler: Grills was shot to death in the previous issue).

Clint Barton, AKA Hawkeye, AKA Hawkguy, is largely absent from this issue, as the story belongs more to Kate Bishop, AKA Hawkeye, and this new killer who is apparently going to be a big threat to the Hawkeyes, given the build-up he's been given (more than one issue, in a series that has had a lot of done-in-one stories).

I feel a little weird about teenager Kate Bishop grabbing the charming but almost twice her age man she meets at a party and planting a deep kiss on him. I don't know if Bishop just likes older men (in all the Young Avengers comics I've read, she's only been romantically entangled with other teenagers) or if Fraction is just engaging in some thirtysomething male fantasies in the writing of this title or...what, but the romantic tension between the two Hawkeyes has always felt a little on the creepy side to me. And now here's another December for Bishop's May (Or is she more of an April or March...?)


Legends of The Dark Knight #8 (DC Comics) Two rather strong stories in the latest issue of DC's over-sized Batman anthology: One short, one long.

The first is a 10-page story written by the great Paul Tobin and drawn by Tradd Moore, an artist who is new to me, but whom I can't wait to see more of.

The plot is basic, Batman 101 stuff: Extremely bizarre, labor-intensive murders are being committed by a new killer with a hard-to-crack pattern (a one-off villain, I'm sure, as he lacks a name, costume or open-ended gimmick that would make return bouts of interest), Batman is on the case (wearing a disguise, intimidating thugs for info), Batman figures out the crimes and beats up the bad guy (Who it turns out is an artist and, from the look of it, one particularly badass artist: He takes three punches from Batman before going down).

Tobin does a fine job cramming that all into ten pages but making it read as if it all fits perfectly comfortably there; it's a pretty fine job of crafting a story so efficiently that it fits the half-as-big-as usual space afforded a done-in-one Batman story.

But I knew Tobin was a good writer before reading this; I didn't know what an amazing artist Moore was (That's his cover, and no, I don't know what all that glowy stuff is, but it sure looks dynamic, doesn't it?).

His artwork is smooth, clear, more than a little cartoony and extremely kinetic. When his Batman jumps, kicks, punches, falls or swings, he does so big and fast. Hell, even when his Batman gestures or changes expression, there's a sense of animation to it.

I really dig this Batman.

The second story is a full-length, 20-page one written by Ricardo Sanchez and drawn by Sergio Sandoval. This too is Batman 101, but the specific crime/s are even more outre, including finding a body that seems to have been mauled by a single animal that somehow left DNA evidence belonging to more than a dozen different animals, and the world's largest collector of "crypto-taxidermy" recently had his prize piece, a "barghest", stolen.

So Batman investigates, and has to eventually fight a real live barghest, which Sandoval draws to resemble very lizard-like dinosaur, like a Komodo dragon with a man and weird, eye-less face.

The exact nature of the creature's creation is fairly occult, which doesn't always sit well atop Batman comics, but Sanchez routes it in the alchemy/black magic that is deeply established in Batman comics, so it actually works quite well here. There are a few unexpected twists here, but it's probably the ending I liked the most, as it implies there will be a new, extremely weird addition to Bat-Family (Make way for Ace, The Bat-Barghest!)

Sandoval's art is very realistic and representational, a style I don't generally go in for much, but his storytelling is top-notch, so that while Batman's cowl may look an awful lot like, say, the one Michael Keaton had to wear in his Batman movies, the panels and pages all look, work and read like comic book panels and pages, rather than scans of photos. David Lopez and Santi Casas' coloring is extremely dark, which gives the art a dark, murky, occasionally washed-out look, pierced by the light of computer screens or the moon shining through a cloud, and, in another story, using another character, that might not work all that well, but this is a Batman comic, so those are, if not necessarily virtues, than at least perfectly appropriate to the content.

The Smurfs (Papercutz) This is the Papercutz FCBD offering, which includes:

1.) An eight-page Smurfs comic strip and two short, one-page Smurfs gag strips.

Even the Smurfs have trouble telling themselves apart, apparently

2.) An eight-page Annoying Orange strip that I could only make it half-way through (The art is really nice, but, uh, I dunno—anthropomorphic fruit bowling just didn't speak to me, I guess; maybe it's because a durian was involved, and it brought back traumatic flashbacks to the one time I had a sip of durian bubble tea and spent the next 12 hours trying to get the taste out of my mouth?)

3.) A 10-page story starring "ARiOL", a finely-cartooned, fine-line strip featuring anthropomorphic animal characters, that looks so European that I was not at all surprised to notice that the creative team was named Emmanuel Guibert and Marc Boutavant.

I liked them all save the Annoying Orange story; I'm already on board with any and all of the Smurfs reprints Papercutz has been putting out, and now I really want to see more of this ARiOL character and the comics he's in, even though I hate his name and am not sure if I'll be able to honor that capitalization scheme much longer.

The lead Smurfs story—in which an ogre tries to eat Gargamel, and Gargamel tries to convince him to eat the Smurfs instead, and then the Smurfs convince him to seriously, go ahead an eat Gargamel instead—is pretty aggressive in selling the line of Smurfs collections to new readers, with every page ending in a footnote referring to a particular volume.


Top Shelf Kids Club (Top Shelf) And finally, here's the other FCBD book I brought home for myself. It's a black-and-white anthology featuring a half-dozen kid-friendly Top Shelf characters, including a preview of an upcoming book, Rob Harrell's Monster on the Hill.

The others are:

1.) A typically charming four-page Owly story by Andy Runton (which reads a bit longer, as two of those pages feature 16 panels apiece)

2.) An elegantly drawn Korgi story by Ann and Christian Slade (eh)

3.) A Johnny Boo story by James Kochalka (God I love Johnny Boo; this one's about annoying boinging, and while the eighth panel is the funniest, the third is my favorite, as it features a completely upside down Squiggle, and I'm a big fan of Squiggle's expressions)

4.) A not particularly interesting Upside Down story by Jess Smart Smiley (whose debut Upside Down graphic novel I really rather liked)

5.) A Pirate Penguin Vs. Ninja Chicken strip by Ray Friesen that I didn't particularly like (I think it was the designs that put me off; that, and the the weird-but-not-that-weird-weirdness-for-weirdeness'-sake of it. I did like how the skull on the Penguin's pirate hat wold occasionally change expressions in order to match that of the Penguin.

As for the Harrell story, I didn't read it, as I plan to check out and review the graphic novel, and didn't want to read part of it before I read the whole of it. I did look at the pictures though, and they actually reminded me quite a bit of Jeff Smith's Bone, particularly in the look of the monsters, the landscape and the lines used.

Well, that was my Free Comic Book Day. What'd you get during yours...?

My Free Comic Book Day, and reviews of what I got

This past Saturday was the very first Free Comic Book Day I spent in a city other than Columbus, Ohio, so it was the first Free Comic Book Day I didn't observe at my former local comic shop, The Laughing Ogre (which I'd highly recommend to any Columbusites looking for a good comic shop!).

My new "local" comics shop is a bit of a drive from my current base of operations, and since there are only a single comic currently waiting for me in my pull file, I didn't think it was worth a visit just to celebrate my hobby's national holiday this year.

I was thinking I'd probably just sit this one out, but late Saturday morning decided that FCBD might provide a good excuse to visit a new shop, for exploration's sake.

According to the FCBD locator at freecomicbookday.com, the nearest participating shop to me was Comics and Friends in the Great Lakes Mall in Mentor, Ohio. So I decided to take a little field trip.

Mentor is a town of about 50,000 somewhere around 15 to 30 minutes east of Cleveland, and is the one-time home of 20th president of James Garfield, as well as home to the urban-legendary monsters known as the Melonheads (which I've discussed in some detail in this 2008 posts about some Ohio monsters).

I haven't been to The Great Lakes Mall since, I don't know, high school, and I don't recall there having been a comics shop there the last time I was. Comic shops in malls are probably fairly common, but seemed a little...weird to me, and put me in mind of Mallrats. As in the movie, there was a lot of activity around the shop.

Some sort of police show thing was going on, so the center of the mall was filled with police vehicles, and right in front of the comics shop there was a display of various police uniforms and riot gear. Maybe they were recruiting...? Also in front of the shop was a person in some sort of cow furry suit with a young woman passing out fliers. I think they were from that chicken place that has cows encourage people to eat the flesh of chickens instead of the flesh of cows.

Comics and Friends had a comics pro doing a signing this FCBD. Simpsons comics writer Chris Yambar of Youngstown, Ohio (about an hour and twenty minutes south of Mentor) was seated behind a table with plenty of his wares near the entrance (I'm unfamiliar with Yambar's Simpsons writing, but he's a frequent visitor to Columbus' Mid-Ohio Con, and I have a couple of trades he's written, one a licensed comic based on the TV show I Dream of Jeanie, the other a funnybook about El Mucho Grande, a gigantic, rather round lucha libre).

Also near the entrance were two tables, each full of stacks of specially produced Free Comic Book Day free comics. One table was for all-ages stuff, the other for the less kid-friendly stuff. I didn't see every single FCBD offering available—I heard one mother searching in vain for "the Toy Story" comic, and I didn't see the Oni offering, but they sure seemed to have everything else. The signs standing atop the two tables which mentioned the age appropriateness said that visitors could choose any two comics.

A young woman behind the counter was dressed as Harley Quinn, and there was a 50% off sale on trade paperbacks and collections for club members, which I assume are customers with pull-lists there.

That seemed to be the extent of the FCBD celebration there. Like I said, it was my first time at the shop, but it seemed like a pretty nice one. They had a ton of trades, and it seemed like it was more graphic novel oriented than comic book-comic book oriented. A crowded back wall had all of the new single issue comics stuffed on it, and there were some back-issue long boxes, but most of the store was devoted to shelves of trades, as well as some toys and comics-related books and magazines and the like.

I'm no expert on comics retail or anything, but they seemed to have a pretty good set-up in terms of displaying things. I noticed a lot of kid-friendly, all-ages stuff as soon as I walked in and in the most accessible and visible areas, the superhero stuff all shelved along the wall, and some grown-up, pin-up art books behind the counter. There were also some spinner racks in the back with Dell and Gold Key comics in plastic with backing boards, selling above cover price (I saw an Uncle Scrooge comic for about a $11 or so).

If I lived closer to Mentor, and/or had occasion to visit there a couple times a month or so, I'm sure I'd be happy to visit the shop and make it my regular stop, despite not really liking the idea of having to go through a shopping mall to get to it.

Anyway, here are reviews of everything I got there on Free Comic Book Day, including the books that weren't free...


Free Comic Book Day 2010 (Iron Man/Thor #1)

I was kind of torn between the two Iron Man team-up comics Marvel was publishing this year. The Iron Man/Nova book featured a script by EDILW favorite Paul Tobin, and a plot involving The Red Ghost and his Super-Apes, but I ultimately went with this one because a) it featured John Romita Jr. art, and I was curious to see him draw these two characters given that he’ll soon be drawing them monthly as the regular artist of one of Marvel’s 17 new Avengers books and b) I wanted to see how Marvel would be presenting these two characters to a potential new audience excited by the Iron Man movie, as comic book Iron Man has had very, very little in cartoon with movie Iron Man for the bulk of the last four years or so (The main thing Iron Man the movie and The Invincible Iron Man have in common is that they’re both pretty good).

This book is presented in a smaller format than the standard modern comic book; it’s nine-inches high and six-inches wide, rather than the standard ten-inches-by-six-and-a-half-inches.

It sure looks dinky sitting there before you, but once cracked open, it reads just fine; I didn’t notice the lack of an inch here and a half-inch there at all, and realized I could easily get used to reading comics of this size. I suppose it’s too late now, but if Marvel had to start trying to increase their profits by a ridiculous amount in the past few years, saving money by reducing the trim instead of rocketing the price up 33% would have been a less pain-less way to go.

The script is by Invincible Iron Man writer Matt Fraction, which is of course a pretty great choice, considering Invincible Iron Man is certainly the place to point readers who dug the first movie (and, I imagine, the second one). It’s a pretty straightforward, all-ages-friendly, no-continuity-knowledge-needed done-in-one, emphasizing Tony Stark as a cocky, charming genius always seeking to make amends for his time spent developing weapons and Thor’s otherworldliness.

The Earth’s weather system is going a little nutty, and not listening to storm god Thor’s commands. Meanwhile, a bunch of rich folks are terraforming Earth’s moon for condos, using a weather weapon Stark once developed, and the two Avengers team-up to set things right. This includes a whole bunch of robot fighting.

Romita’s art is just as good as I expected, maybe even better. I’ve never really gotten used to the “New Look” Thor, but Romita really sells it, and I love the way his Thor exudes power through his posture, expression and casually flexed muscles.
Romita’s one of the only Marvel artists currently working regularly for the publisher whose work provides a clear, straight-line link back to the work of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and, yes, John Romita Sr.; JRJR’s art is Marvel Comics art at its purest, looking both current and classic at the same time.

And damn, he draws some nice Thor-smashing-shit-with-a-hammer panels: House ads: A teaser as for the X-Men vs. vampires thing that Marvel stole from Mark Millar’s dreams while he was sleeping, featuring a blood-splattered X over a yellow background and the cryptic “We are the X-Men, July 2010, Marvel”; an ad for The Art of Iron Man 2 book; an ad for Brian Michael Bendis, JRJR and Klaus Janson’s Avengers series, which launches this month; an ad for a ten-foot-long, $35 poster featuring The New Ultimates by Frank Cho, which seems a silly ad for this audience (if you were going to advertise a ten-foot-long, $35 poster to a “lay” audience, shouldn’t it be one featuring characters the readers are more likely to be familiar with?); an ad for “Brand New Day” collections of Amazing Spider-Man; an ad for Astonishing X-Men: The Motion Comic on iTunes; an ad for Invinicible Iron Man #25, which, like JRJR’s upcoming Avengers, is a natural place for people who dig this to look for more like it; an ad for the first collection of JMS and Olivier Coipel’s run on Thor, and a full-page ad saying “Iron Man and Thor Appear In…Invincible Iron Man #25 On Sale Now!…Thor #610 On Sale 5/26!”


Yow! Drawn & Quarterly Presents A John Stanley Library Grab-Bag for Free Comic Book Day 2010

Yes, that’s the title of D&Q’s offering, according to the fine print. There were a lot of fairly exciting comics out this FCBD, and, honestly, I would have been at least curious to at least scan just about all of them, but this is the one I just plain had to have.

Which is perhaps silly of me, since I imagine many of these stories will be available in the eventual John Stanley Library collections and I’ll read them all eventually anyway, but I really wanted to take the opportunity to read all of these strips in an actual comic book-comic book format for once, rather than in a handsome collection. Just to experience them in their native habitat, I suppose.

Seth’s cover promises a sort of crossover of characters from various Stanley comics—Melvin Monster, Tubby, Judy Jr. and Nancy—all drawn in Seth’s stripped-down, super-simplified, off-model style. I also like the mystery of the cover. Not only am I unsure why Nancy’s so thin and has eyeballs around her pupils, I have no idea what’s going on in this cover. Are they all running and crying? Screaming? Singing?

The contents, printed in full-color on pulpy paper, are as follows: A Nancy strip in which our heroine visits Oona Goosepimple’s crazy house and encounters some of her relatives, a Tubby story in which Tubby wakes up one morning to discover he has grown a real moustache in his sleep, a Judy Junior story in which she terrorizes poor Jimmy Fuzzi (I don’t like Judy Junior strip at all; like Witch Hazel stories in Little Lulu, for some reason I just can’t stand them despite loving everything around them), a second Nancy story in which she flees from tough guy Spike, a Melvin Monster story in which Melvin is followed home by a Thing, and a Choo-Choo Charlie story involving Choo-Choo Charlie and his, um, Choo Choo…?

With the possible exception of the Judy Junior story (and, it’s worth noting, that’s more of a personal taste thing than a These Are Bad Comics kind of thing), they are all a lot of fun, and it’s a nice sampler platter of Stanley’s range. It’s really something to see that last page of the Melvin Monster story next to the first page of the Choo-Choo Charlie one, for example, and realize the same talent is behind two comics with such extremely different visual styles, character designs and types of gags.

This was my first exposure to Choo-Choo Charlie, whom a quick Internet search tells me was actually a mascot for Good and Plenty candies (which I’ve never been able to cotton too; I like the way they look, but I hate the taste of ‘em), and the designs in the comic look very little like those from other Stanley books (although I suppose he didn’t design either the Nancy characters or the Little Lulu one’s himself, huh?). The narrative is also quite random and silly compared to the slow-building, usually grounded in the real world gags found in Stanley’s most popular comics.

But at the end of the day—well, the end of the 45 seconds or so I spent glancing between the tables trying to decide which free comic books to grab—what ultimately sold me on Yow! was the Tubby story.

It might take me some deep thinking and some serious writing to determine and then properly communicate why I love Tubby so much, but, since I met him in a volume of Dark Horse’s Little Lulu reprints, he’s become one of my favorite comic book characters, and this story is just fantastic, featuring scenes of the entire world freaking out because a little boy has grown a mustache, upsetting the balance of nature,and a scene where Tubby’s mom tells him she just doesn’t love him.(By the way, you can download the entire seven-page Tubby story from Yow! here)

I’m sure it doesn’t really make economic sense for D&Q to do so, or they would already be doing it, but, for whatever it’s worth, I would love to be able to read a John Stanley kids comics anthology comic book like this on a regular basis. Preferably monthly, but quarterly would work as well.

Also, more regularly appearing comics along these lines might mean more letters pages like this:

House ads: A full-page ad for the upcoming fifth volume of Tove Jansson’s Moomin (and the publisher’s Moomin line in general), featuring a blurb from Neil Gaiman; a half-page ad for Who Will Comfort Toffle?, the next Tove Jansson storybook set in the world of the Moomins, this oen featuring a quote from Jeff Smith; a half-page ad for Doug Wright’s Nipper 1963-1964, with a blurb from Lynn Johnston; and, finally, a full-page, back cover ad for the John Stanley Library collections, including an upcoming collection I think I may have heard about, rejoiced over, and then forgot about, because when I saw this ad I turned a cartwheel:You know how I said I loved Tubby earlier? He’s my favorite part of the Little Lulu comics. So this? This is kind of like…you know how when you’re a little kid, you love sugar at the exclusion of all else? So a bowl of Lucky Charms with nothing but marshmallows sound delicious rather than disgusting to you? Well, that’s what an all-Tubby collection sounds like to me.

I’m curious about this books existence, as I would assume Dark Horse had the rights to Tubby comics as well as Little Lulu ones, but I guess not.

Anyway, there’s another reason to look forward to summer…


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Now, I always end up spending a lot more money than I mean to when I go to the comic shop on Free Comic Book Day, even though it’s usually the second time I’ve been there that week.

I guess I feel guilty for going to a shop and getting something for nothing, especially since I’m already a regular, die-hard comics consumer, rather than the sort of “civilian” or casual reader the day is designed to hook on comics. That is, surely there are people the FCBD organizers, comics publishers and retailers would rather have picking up these The First One’s Free, Kid bait books, and I feel like everyone I get is sort of a waste.

So I usually end up impulse buying a graphic novel or two while I’m in the shop.

This year was no exception. I picked up a couple of things from Yambar’s table, and a cheap graphic novel on my To Buy, Someday list. In an effort to make this already interminably long blog post ridiculously long, I'll review those too...


Lucha Pop! (Airwave Comics)

I would have passed on this 64-page, “prestige format” comic were Yambar selling it at its $8.95 original price, but he’d knocked it down to $5, so it seemed a safe gamble: How bad could a book of stories about Mexican wrestlers be?

Inside are four stories, each written by Yambar, penciled by George Broderick Jr. and inked by Ken Wheaton.

The first features “Major Smackdown, Lord of the Ring” (Who doesn’t have a terribly Mexican sounding name) and his understudy Understudy in “Quest For The Blue Tiger Diamond.” The pair board a plane taking the titular magical diamond to evil figurehead type Fire Dragon’s hideout in the Himalayas, and attempt to stop the bad guy from doing something bad with it. Broderick and Wheaton work in a Bruce Timm-inspired, “animated” style, and the tone of the script is remarkably…straight, given the zaniness of the material.

This art style re-appears in a later story, featuring “Sainto, God’s Own Wrestler” in a two-page origin story and a sci-fi/lucha libre/private eye mash-up entitled “…Then She Walked In,” which has a much lighter tone to the script.

There are also two comedy stories featuring El Mucho Grande, drawn in a much looser, more cartoony style. The first of these features EMG attempting to rescue his pal, a mute Chupacabra, from the clutches of its evil monster-making creator. The second of these teams El Mucho Grande with a couple of other Yambar creations, in which a recurring villain traps El Mucho Grande and company in some old Harvey comics. To avoid copyright infringement, Casper, Lil’ Hot Stuff and the others appear with black bars over their eyes, although Broderick otherwise draws them all spot-on.

Rounding out the volume is a long-ish prose piece entitled “The Secret, Sordid History of Santo USA,” detailing Yambar’s frustrated, ultimately fruitless efforts to get a Santo licensed comic book going, starting with his first introduction to Mexican wrestling and continuing through his efforts to find other real-life luchadores to work with after the Santo thing fell apart. It’s pretty interesting reading, actually, and it also explains the weird tone of the Major Smackdown and El Sainto stories—they are apparently repurposed from the first issue of a completed but never published El Santo comic.

It was a pretty fun read, although if you wanted to start with a Yambar-written Mexican wrestler comic, I’d suggest an all-El Mucho Grande one.


The Muppet Show Comic Book: The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson (Boom Kids)

This trade collects the second of cartoonist Roger Langridge’s Muppet miniseries for Boom, the last before they launched an ongoing by the creator.

Give the sub-title and the cover, I expected this to be a very different sort of book than the original miniseries, which essentially recreated The Muppet Show TV show as a comic book (which is, of course, no mean feat, given the difference between puppetry and television and comics). But, remarkably, Langridge was able to maintain the TV-show-as-a-comic-book format, while simultaneously telling a series of plots that carry from issue to issue.

The result is book much like the original miniseries, only instead of one-per-issue storylines broken up by the on-stage sketches, this volume contains bigger, more ambitious storylines between the bits.

Dr. Honeydew and Beaker have been performing a “civilizing” experiment on Animal, which has successfully transformed him into a polite, soft-spoken, well-dressed and intelligent member of society, but with one sad side effect—he’s lost his ability to drum like a wild Animal (This plot is particularly affecting, given the parallels it suggests between Animal’s situation and the challenge that faces a lot of creative folks with mental or behavioral problems when they first consider pharmaceutical treatment). Kermit the Frog has hired the only celebrity impersonator devoted to him, Kismet the Toad, who, despite looking exactly like Kermit, is different from him in almost every other way. And, in the storyline that gave the series its subtitle, Scooter finds a pirate treasure map suggesting there’s treasure buried somewhere in the Muppet Theatre, and Rizzo and his rats begin tearing the place apart to find it.

The treasure storyline is something to behold. Langridge starts it out as a running background gag, with rats in miner’s caps with shovels and pick axes busy behind or off-to-the side of much of the action in the foreground of the panels, and yet he builds it up into something genuinely dramatic and emotionally satisfying.

Boom’s Muppet mini-series casting the characters in adaptations (Muppet Robin Hood, Muppet King Arthur, etc) can be pretty hit or miss, but these Langridge comics are simply great comics. I really can’t recommend this highly enough.


Popeye Picnic #1 (Premium Pop Comics)

I should really devote more attention to this then a short entry in a multi-comic post like this, given the usual nature of the book. Yambar and his regular co-creators George J. Broderick Jr. and Ken Wheaton created this 30-page, black-and-white comic book in 2009 to mark Popeye’s 80th birthday, and the 30th anniversary of Chester, Illinois’ annual Popeye Picnic celebration.

Chester is the birthplace of E.C. Segar, and thus the birthplace of Popeye.

There are two connected stories within. In the first, Popeye and his supporting cast—Bluto, Olive Oyl, Swee’pea, Wimpy and the Sea Hag—are enjoying a picnic when a can of spinach lands on Popeye’s head and knocks him out. When he loses consciousness, he travels back in time to meet his maker, Segar, who shows him around Chester and introduces him to the real-life residents who inspired Wimpy, Olive and Popeye himself.
In the second half of the book, these half-dozen characters head to modern day Chester for the Popeye Picnic celebration, and there they’re met by Castor Oyl. Alice the Goon, Eugene the Jeep and The Whiffle Hen all cameo.

It’s an interesting book. The history lesson and tour of town have an unfortunate, perhaps unavoidable “edutainment” vibe about them, although there are some funny gags sprinkled throughout (I particularly liked Popeye’s real-life inspiration punching Popeye so hard that he send him into the future or reverse knocks him out, depending on how you want to read his unconscious journey to meet Segar).

Probably the biggest treat is seeing Broderick’s take on the characters. They all look bigger, rounder, smoother, cleaner and more three-dimensional than Segar’s, and its fun to see them interacting with “real” people (who are also cartoony drawings, but done in a different style) and the modern world.

The production values, sadly, leave a lot to be desired. The lettering is pretty poor, and ill-serves the dialogue, which perfectly captures the peculiar voices of each of the characters. Maybe making it look more Segar-like would have been too difficult, but it certainly didn’t have to look so computerized. The balloon tails also make it difficult to tell who’s talking in certain panels. The writing and art are highly professional, but the lettering looks pretty amateurish. So too does the pixelated pin-up art by Hy Eisman, and the ads from local businesses, which are laid out so as to resemble those you’d find in a high school year book, church bulletin or restaurant place mat.

Even still, it’s a one-of-kind comic book experience, and one I imagine anyone terribly interested in comic strip history would enjoy at least taking a look at.


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There was a second comic shop listed on the FCBD locator near Comics and Friends which I attempted to also visit that afternoon, but I was unable to locate it, and I ended up just driving around wasting gas in Lake County for a while. My plans for exploring the area's comic shops was only half-successful then.

I did find a fantastic library though, featuring the biggest and most up-to-date manga selection I've ever seen in a single public library location. They had an awful lot of American comics too, mostly of the book publishers YA offerings and classic superhero comics reprints, but there manga section was to die for.

This is what I hauled home from there, as modeled by my new roommate Yogi, The World's Most Active Labrador Retriever:
Expect a lot of manga reviews in the near future, and maybe some posts about Bigfoot drawings.

Weekly Haul: Special Free Comic Book Day Bonus Edition

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day, prompting a second trip to the comic book store for a second batch of new comics this week. It was like a week with two Wednesdays!

I had visitors coming in from out of town, so I didn’t have too much time to spend at my local comic shop, The Laughing Ogre. I was quite happy to see how busy it was though. It was so busy that all of their dedicated parking spaces were filled, and I actually had to hunt around the lot they shared with other businesses to find parking, ultimately parking behind their little strip mall and having to walk around to the entrance.

It was rather crowded inside, about as crowded as I’ve ever seen it, with more women and kids there than usual—a lot more kids, actually.

Right by the front door were two large tables, each full of stacks upon stacks of comics, with store employees behind each. They explained that everyone could take two books from the first table, and maybe a third from the second table.

The first seemed to have most or all of the FCBD books; certainly all the kid-friendly stuff. I heard the employees making suggestions to a mom and a little kid in front of me, asking if the kid liked Owly, and I overheard a “Well, this one’s kind of mature…” in reference to some other comic.

The second table had a few more FCBD books, as well as a bunch of DC’s “After Watchmen…” branded books, and some other cheap comics, like the recent 25-cent Buck Rogers #0 book from Boom, or the 25-cent DC Universe 0 book that kicked off Final Crisis and announced the company’s intentions to resurrect Barry Allen.

Toward the back of the shop, two artists sat around tables full of paints, offering face-painting for the kids.

I always feel kind of guilty going to FCBD just to get free books, since I don’t exactly need sold on the idea of starting to read comics, so I shopped around a bit for a cheap trade to assuage my guilt.

Leaving the shop, I felt a little brighter and happier than I did when I went into it: Free Comic Book Day sure has a way of lifting one’s spirits regarding the medium, its potential and its future.

It would be great if every Wednesday—or maybe Saturday, since kids have to go to school—could be like Free Comic Book Day. But even if shops are only crowded with kids one day a year, that’s better than no day’s a year, isn’t it?

So, here’s what I hauled home from the shop yesterday…


Blackest Night #0 (DC Comics) The folks at the Ogre put a copy of this in my pull-box, since I subscribe to Green Lantern through them, which meant I was able to get a copy of this without it counting against my two free book total. Huzzah!

This isn’t really what I’d consider a good book for evangelizing the medium of comics or the DC superheroes as comic book stars to newcomers, but then, I saw at least two other DC books on the free book table—Tiny Titans and a DC Kids Mega Sampler—so I suppose the company felt they had their evangelical bases covered and could focus on promoting what is already likely to be their biggest hit of the year (if not the last couple years; I’m eager to see if Blackest Night might actually out-perform Final Crisis).

It seems to be designed for those with at least a rudimentary understanding of what’s going on in the DCU at the moment, and clarifying what “counts” as far as continuity going forward (the state of Aquaman, for example, here seemed a little different than I remembered it at the end of Sword of Atlantis, and the story confirms that the panel of Aquaman inFinal Crisis was a mistake, as was the last issue of Brad Meltzer’s run on JLoA).

Green Lantern Hal Jordan is in a Gotham City cemetery, standing above the blank headstone marking Batman’s grave, right next to that of Thomas and Martha Wayne (So that’s where Batman’s body ended up! ). Up runs Hal’s recently resurrected pal Barry “Flash II” Allen, and the two exposit through conversation about their own deaths, as well as those of their fellow Justice Leaguers Batman, Martian Manhunter and Aquaman.

As they zoom off to do some superhero-ing, we see Black Hand lurking in the shadows. He digs out Batman’s skull with his desiccated, Black Lantern ring-wearing right hand, and recites the Black Lantern oath, something I have—no lie—been looking forward to hearing for a good long time now. As he does so, there are some cut-aways to a few more graves that promise at least a few more Black Lantern members—Ralph “Elongated Man” Dibny, Sue Dibny and Ronnie “Firestorm I” Raymond.

That’s followed by a brief letter from Geoff Johns, explaining how long he’s been planning this story (four years now), sort of promising that it won’t be inaccessible and delayed like most modern “event” comics and, most intriguingly to me as a DC reader and watcher, stating “Blackest Night will recharge the DC Universe as Green Lantern: Rebirth recharged the Green Lantern Corps.” (Dude, Geoff Johns is totally writing JLoA after this wraps up; hopefully relaunched with a new title, making it easier to ignore and forget the Meltzer/McDuffie volume).

That accounts for 13 pages; the rest of the book is devoted to splash pages drawn by Doug “The Hero of Final Crisis” Mahnke detailing the various Lantern corps, with some short paragraphs by Johns serving as primers on them.

DC’s blog The Source has these available to look at here, but this is the money one:
Terra I/II (brown glove), Aquaman (green glove), Firestorm I (red, puffy sleeve), Mirror Master I (green wristband over orange sleeve) and Martian Manhunter (the blue-black sleeve with red piping in the far right) are all definite Black Lanterns, and one of the two blue-sleeved hands must belong to Earth-2 Superman.

I don’t see any hands I can conclusively connect to them in that panel, but I’d be pretty surprised if Blue Beetle II, Pantha, The Question I and Vibe don’t also get rings. So far, none of my requests seem to have made the team, but it’s still early.

Finally, there’s a back-page checklist that includes 24 books. Assuming they’re all $2.99, that’s $71.76 worth of comics between July and October, which actually isn’t too too bad (Not if you’re already spending $10-$30 on DC comics a week anyway). I’m definitely down for the main series and the tie-ins that occur in the two Green Lantern books.

The three-issue Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps series is going to be written by the regular Green Lantern writers and feature art by artists including Rags Morales, Chris Sprouse and Dough Mahnke, all of whom I’m crazy about, but it will also feature pretty shitty Ed Benes covers, which may prove deal-breakers for me, depending on how good and/or insane the stories inside look.

It’s interesting to see a trio of series that seem to be following Marvel’s recent strategy for event tie-ins. Blackest Night: Superman, Blackest Night: Batman and Blackest Night: Teen Titans are three miniseries featuring characters with their own titles (or their own multiple titles), apparently providing them space to have tie-in adventures without interrupting whatever’s going on in their own titles, a la Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four and Secret Invasion: Thor. Superman will have his “New Krypton” thing going on, and there will be a new Batman (probably Dick Grayson), so they will have their own “events” to deal with in their own books.

Does this mean Teen Titans will have a new, independent direction by August, when this tie-in series starts? (Also possibly of interest, Johns wrote a story during his Teen Titans run which intimated that the trend of superheroes dying and resurrecting after Superman’s pseudo-death were somehow all related).

I’ll have to wait and see the creative teams on all of these before I decide if I’m interested, but I don’t have a lot of hope for these three.

Wow, I went on really long about this book, considering it’s just a twelve-page prologue and some splash pages, huh? Sorry. At the very least, this is a pretty good indication that Johns is doing something right with the series; he’s certainly got me babbling about it, and it’s still two months away.


Comics Festival! (Legion of Evil Press/ Toronto Comics Arts Festival) I didn’t read all of the FCBD offerings, or even get to inspect them too terribly thoroughly, but this seems to be the single best book in terms of medium evangelization. That is, if someone were completely new to comics, and wanted to get a pretty good idea of what comics are all about, why they’re so appealing, the rather wide breadth of different genres, types and styles, this one will definitely do the job. I wasn’t sure until I actually sat down and read it, but it also seems all-ages friendly. Some of these will fly over kids’ heads—I can’t imagine anyone under the age of 18 not completely fucking hating Dinosaur Comics, for example—but there’s nothing inappropriate for the little ones either.

So, what have we got here?

About 33 pages of comics by about 20 different creators, a who’s who of up-and-comers and already-here-ers, who, if you dig what you see in this book, can be followed off into plenty of other great comics.

The cover story is a short, ten-page Sardine in Outer Space adventure by Emmanuel Guibert, in which the gang must rescue a freshly made moon pie from the evil Doc Croc and Supermuscleman.

Kean Soo’s Jellaby has two stories spread over five pages, the first of which I didn’t really care for, as it was a basically just an average day in my kitchen, but the second one I liked quite a bit (Jellaby is a great, silent comedian).

The rest of the book is devoted to a bunch of one-page and half-page short strips, which I won’t mention on a strip-by-strip basis, considering how numerous they are. My favorites were Steven Charles Manale’s “Pegasus and the Monumonsters,” Kate Beaton’s short Blackbeard strip (Beaton! In Color!) and Dave Lapp’s extremely weird “Evil Bacon,” but most of them evoked either a chuckle or a nod of appreciation at the drawing chops involved.


Leave It To PET Vol. 1 (Viz) This was my annual well-I-might-as-well-buy-something-with-actual-money-while-I’m-here guilt purchase, and I’m really glad I made it: I thought this book was hilarious.

PET stands for polyethylene terephthalate, and it’s the acronym-made name of the super robot made out of a recycle d plastic bottle. That bottle was recycled by nine-year-old boy Noboru, and to repay his good deed, PET is now Noboru’s devoted servant, appearing to save him whenever he’s in need and no matter what the problem is.

Well, that’s the idea, anyway.

The first time he appears to aid Noboru, who is being menaced by some older bullies, PET manages to delay the beating for a while by telling his secret origin, but ends up beating up some little girls instead of the bullies. The second time, Noboru gets beat up by the bullies while PET waits behind a tree for the special code words he gave Noboru to be recited just so.

And by that point, the pattern is formed. PET’s heart is usually in the right place, but he’s not all that helpful of a super robot, and usually causes more problems than he solves.

Manga-ka Kenji Sonishi’s sense of humor on this project reminded me a great deal of that in Mine Yoshizaki’s Sgt. Frog, although the stories are much shorter and simpler. (Basically, PET is to heroics as Sgt. Keroro is to planet conquering).

A great deal of the humor comes from Sonishi’s super-simplified character design. PET is simply a large plastic bottle, with tiny little arms and legs attached to it, and a large, bulbous head that’s shaped a bit like a club (as in the suit in a deck of cards). He has huge, round, blank black eyes, and a big V for a smile, which becomes a diamond-shape when he yells. He bears a recycling symbol on his forehead.

It’s such a great design that just looking at PET makes me smile, so obviously laughs can come pretty quickly. The 22 short stories flew by, and I was actually pretty bummed when I came to the end.


Owly and Friends! (Top Shelf) Oops, I guess this is the 2008 version, not the 2009 version, which seems to have some of the same characters by the same creators, which perhaps accounts for my shop/my confusion. I'm going to talk about it anyway, as I've already written about it mistakenly thinking it was the 2009 edition until commenter Tomorrow Boy set me straight. Top Shelf’s (2008!) offering consisted of stories featuring four of their all-ages, kid-friendly comics characters, ones that tend to be so well drawn and so cute and/or so funny that the oldest, most jaded readers should still find plenty to dig about them.

The lead story was a ten-pager featuring Andy Runton’s Owly, in which the title character helps so many people (well, animals) in the course of the day that he’s unable to complete his own task. I love Owly, which I realize isn’t exactly a bold statement—everyone loves Owly—but the pictogram “dialogue” here seemed a little more sophisticated than in many of the stories I’ve read before, which made the conversations a bit more charming. Like, I found it extremely rewarding to have to think about what the characters are saying for a second before I figure it out exactly.

Next up was a six-page Korgi story by Ann and Christian Slade entitled “Bath Time!” It’s a simple, silent story pretty far removed from the particular setting and set-up of the Korgi graphic novels, but was nonetheless well done, and Slade’s more detailed, line-filled cartooning provided a nice contrast to all the abstracted, cute work in the rest of the book.

Then there’s “A Very Scary Johhny Boo Story” by James Kochalka, which is actually a portion of Johnny Boo Volume 2: Twinkle Power, presented here in black and white.

Finally, there’s seven pages of short Yam strips by Corey Barba, which are also excerpts from his book, also called Yam.

I liked all four of these works in their native formats—well, I liked Yam and Owly, loved Johnny Boo and thought Korgi was fairly decent, but haven’t read the second volume of it yet—and thought this was a fine intro to them.

It’s also a nice gateway comic, since, if a reader is intrigued by any of these, they can follow it up with five Owly graphic novels, two volumes of Korgi, two-going-on-three Johnny Boos, and a book full of Yam strips.

That's right Scrooge, free!

If you're reading a comics blog, I'm pre-et-ty sure you're already well aware of this, but, just in case, I want to make sure I do my duty and remind everyone that today is, in fact, Free Comic Book Day.

So make sure you take some time to visit your local comic book store today and you'll be given the choice of many different specially-published FCBD books, some particularly for kids (Owly and Friends and DC Kids Mega Sampler should be particularly high-quality books for the young ones; I also hear there's a pretty great all-ages Wolverine comic written by EDILW favorite writer Fred Van Lente too, perfectly timed to tie-in to the movie). Oh, and if you can afford it, buy something else while you're there too—it will help stimulate the economy!

If you're not a regular comics reader and just read this blog because, I don't know, you love me or something, and live in Columbus, I'd suggest my regular shop, The Laughing Ogre. If you live elsewhere, try the shop locator at the offical Free Comic Book Day site, which offers plenty of info about the celebration in general.

Happy Free Comic Book Day everyone!

Holiday Weekend

This is truly a great weekend in Comic Book Land, with back-to-back national holidays: Today is Spider-Man 3 Day, and tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day (which also makes tonight Free Comic Book Day Eve, I guess).

Regarding the former, it seems I may be just about the only film critic in the country who really loved Sam Raimi's third swing at Spidey. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but if so, it's not intentional, and only stems from my not having read every single Spider-Man review in the world. Of the critics I regularly read though, the reviews seems to run from mixed to negative. As IMDB.com's "Studio Briefing" for the day put it, "Spider-Man faces three villains in his new movie, but he's facing a lot more in the film section of your local newspaper."

For the most part, I've understood where a lot of (the better of) the critics who have disliked it are coming from, and yet, I've gotta say—Batman Forever, people! Superman III, dammit!

Also, I'd like to adjust a statement I made last May, when I called X-Men: The Last Stand the Citizen Kane of superhero franchises' third installments; I think Spider-Man 3 has earned that title, and X-Men will just have to settle for being, I don't know, the Gone With the Wind of superhero franchises' third installments.

Of course, as Las Vegas Weekly critic Mike D'Angelo makes clear in his review, it's not only superhero franchises which tend to suffer in the third installment, it's action franchises in general: "This is the point at which folks start tossing out goofy ideas like, 'What if his dad turns out to be James Bond?' (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) or 'Maybe Richard Pryor would attract a whole new demographic' (Superman III) or 'What the heck, let's just kill off almost everyone from the last movie in the first few seconds and start from scratch' (Alien 3)."

Regarding tomorrow's holiday, I'm afraid I might end up missing it completely, due to my work schedule. (If any publishers or shopowners want to send me some freebies, however, the address is up in the righthand corner there; I'd really like the one in the picture). There certainly seems to be a ton of great offerings this year, some of which I ran down previously here. Also, be sure to check out Living Between Wednesdays' insightful rundowns of two FCBD books, Little Archie and Mickey Mouse here.

I'd like to take this opportunity to state for the record one last time that DC giving away JLoA #0 on FCBD? Absolutely retarded.

Contrast it with Marvel's Dan Slott/Phil Jimenez Spidey book. The audience for the day is newbies, an audience likely consisting of three major demographics: kids, grown-ups who are interested in comics but not addicts and people who already read comics, but maybe not one company or one publisher's particular comic books. If any of these dig the Spidey book and want more Marvel Spider-Man comics, shopowners can easily send the kids to Marvel Adventures Spider-Man digests or singles or Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane digests or singles. If they're adults new to comics and mainly interested in Spidey from the movies, there are a ton of Ultimate Spider-Man trades to suggest. And if they're hardcore readers of supehero comics already, just not Spider-Man ones, well, there's the Marvel Universe Spider-Man. If they're like, "Wow, this writer rules, have any more by him?" then shopowners can push a Spider-Man/Human Torch digest their way.

Now if someone reads and enjoys JLoA #0 for some odd reason (it's basically a clip-show, consisting of clips that never happened, haven't happened yet and, in some cases, never will happen, drawn by an all-star cast of artists), and they want more, what can you offer them? If they just like the idea of the Trinity or the Justice Legue, there are trades galore. But if they like this Meltzer chap's writing, well, there's the continuity-heavy Archer's Quest, the conitnuity-heavy Identity Crisis (featuring a controversial rape scene, ethically repulsive behavior by our heroes and a cover-up by our heroes), or the first eight issues of JLoA, featuring a long, drawn-out, extremely violent storyline revolving around many characters whose heyday was in the late '70s/early '80s. Those are three of the last story arcs I'd reccomend to people who haven't been reading DCU comics for 10 to 40 years already.

Me, I woulda reprinted Kurt Busiek's first Superman issue as a flip-book with Paul Dini's first Detective Comics issue, or maybe a preview of or specially-produced prologue to Jeff Smith's Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil, or, hell, Mark Waid's best eleven 52 back-up stories.

But no one at DC ever asks my advice on these sorts of things.