On ESPN The Magazine's The Body Issue: Super Heroes Edition

If you're better-versed in sports and athletics than I am–and you would almost have to be–then you likely already know that ESPN The Magazine has been publishing an annual "The Body Issue" special since 2009. Meant as a kinda sorta rival to Sports Illustrated's annual "Swimsuit Issue," each issue of "The Body Issue" features dozens of carefully-posed, often quite arty photographs of athletes–men and women–in the nude, showing off the rather wide variety of bodies and body types produced by specialization in various sports.

There is certainly a prurient element to the imagery, despite the fact that genitals (and the women's nipples) are always covered, although the intent is clearly in generating celebratory admiration of athletes and their bodies, rather than masturbatory admiration. It's sort of the modern, glossy magazine equivalent of ancient Greek art.

I imagine these issues and images should be of interest to super-comics artists and aspiring super-comics artists, as each issue certainly shows what men and women in peak physical condition look like without their clothes on, while highlighting the fact that there are more than two types of bodies (male and female).

This year's issue should be of extra-interest to comics readers, however, as it apparently included a 13-page pull-out collaboration between ESPN and Marvel entitled The Body Issue: Super Heroes Edition. I didn't read the magazine (although I did see the images in this year's issue online), but my father saved the insert for me.

Under a cover featuring an apparently nude Hulk–Bruce Banner wasn't wearing his over-sized purple pants with the elastic waist-band at the time of this transformation–jumping out of an explosion, there's a completely unnecessary table of contents (it's only 13 pages!) and a one paragraph introduction. The rest of the pull-out is devoted to nine superhereos, all sans costume, drawn by different Marvel artists.

Each of these pages feature, in addition to the drawing and the name of the hero, a little circle showing the character in costume (complete with artist credit for that image) and a smaller circle listing the year of their debut (no one earlier than 1962, no one later than 1980), their power or powers in as few words as possible and the name of the artist responsible for the drawing filling most of the page. There is also a paragraph or so long quote from each of the artists, talking a little bit about drawing super-characters for Marvel.

It's an all-around fun little package.

The heroes included are Ant-Man, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Hulk, Iron Fist, Iron Man, Luke Cage, Medusa and She-Hulk. All are drawn in the nude, but, in the case of most of the men, they fade into white just above where the bas of the penis might begin. Two of the three women are shown from behind, from the small of the back-up; I think this may be the first I've ever seen She-Hulk and Captain Marvel Carol Danvers drawn without their breasts appearing in any way shape or form; not even a glance of side-boob, as the Internet calls it (And Shulkie is drawn by Frank Cho!).

The exceptions are The Hulk, whose whole body is visible save the part obscured by his huge hand and arm reaching toward the viewer (it's the same Jim Cheung drawn image that's on the cover of the insert, only minus the explosion background), Medusa, whose entire body head to toes is visible (but is wrapped from clavicles to crotch in her "Superstrong, prehensile hair"), Iron Man (who is drawn from the knees up, but in the act of assembling his armor around himself) and Ant-Man, who is seen from the thighs down, for some reason.

None of the heroes have any body hair at all, and Tony Stark and The Hulk both lack nipples.

I was at first a little disappointed by the fact that all of the heroes essentially have identical body types: Big and musclely, like body builders. With the exception of The Hulk, whose body is naturally exaggerated to cartoonish proportions. Daredevil and Iron Fist look slightly smaller in certain muscle groups than Luke Cage, but that's about it in terms of variety. I don't know what Carol Danvers' work out routine, but I was a little surprised at how cut Pichelli draws her, as she and She-Hulk have the same build in this.

I was also a bit disappointed at the relative lack of diversity in the characters, as here the term "people of color" apparently refers to the color green. There are more green people than brown people (and I was a bit curious about the inclusion of Iron Fist over Shang-Chi, especially when artist Russell Dauterman talked specifically about Bruce Lee as inspiration for his drawing of Danny Rand's physique).

There are plenty of men and women of different builds throughout the Marvel Universe, and it might have been nice to see a curvy Squirrel Girl or Volstagg in there, or a short and stocky (and hairy!) Wolverine or Puck, or characters who are slimmer of build like Spider-Man or Cyclops, or some characters of color other than green, some teenage characters (Kamala Khan's parents would never allow her to pose, but surely Robbie Reyes or some of the Young Avengers or Jean Grey students could), or a silver fox character like Doctor Strange or Mr. Fantastic. Let's see Namor, whose one costume is so skimpy he might as well be nude, some characters with fantastical bodies, like Nightcrawler or Beast or The Thing or Howard The Duck, let's see The Vision or Machine Man with their "skin" off.

Of course, it occurred to me rather quickly that the nine characters chosen had nothing to do with showing off a variety of body types, and more to do with corporate synergy and cross-media promotion.

Daredevil, Luke Cage and, I believe, Iron Fist have appeared in/will appear in the Netflix corner of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" (K'un L'un gets mentioned in an episode of Daredevil, anyway). Ant-Man has a movie currently in theaters (Hell, it even says "See Ant-Man in theaters starting July 17" at the bottom of his page).

Hulk and Iron Man are both in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and while they probably could have filled this book or one two or three times as long just with Avengers that appeared in that movie, they decided against using Black Widow or The Falcon or Thor (curious, really, unless the idea was to promote heroes with upcoming film or TV projects, in addition to more current ones, achieving a sort of balance). Captain Marvel and Medusa have films announced, even if they are a long way off (Medusa will be appearing in Inhumans, not Medusa; her presence here is another indication of how hard Marvel is trying to promote the Inhumans as a brand these days). And as for She-Hulk...? Well, I don't know. Black Widow or The Wasp or The Scarlet Witch would have made more sense. Marvel doesn't exactly have many great female characters of the household name variety, particularly when you discount the X-Men franchise, so they may have just picked a woman with a more typical super hero physique.

Note that there are no X-Men, despite the wide variety of body-types that team has to offer, no Spider-Man and no Fantastic Four. The characters chosen had a lot to do with which ones Marvel Studios can exploit in other media, apparently.

Now, that disappointment on the same-ness waned after I actually started reading the quotes from the artists, as it quickly became evident that the point of this insert wasn't the same as that of "The Body Issue" proper; rather, this was simply a focused look at how artists draw superhero physiques, which is an equally valid (and, really, more interesting) way to go with it. After all, the characters aren't real, but the artists are.

The original pieces are drawn by Cheung, Cho, Dauterman, Mike Deodato, Greg Land, Emanuela Lupacchino, Alex Maleev, Sara Pichelli and Leinil Francis Yu. All are colored by either Jason Keith or Laura Martin, with the exception of Maleev's Daredevil, which he apparently colored himself. The other art that appears, the previously used images of the heroes in costume that appear in the little circles, are from Kaare Andrews (Iron Fist), Mark Brooks (Ant-Man), Cheung (She-Hulk), Cho (Hulk, Medusa), Greg Land (Luke Cage), Salvador Larocca (Iron Man), Ed McGunness (Captain Marvel) and Paolo Rivera (Daredevil).

It was, of course, dispiriting, if not depressing, to see Land included here. He draws Ant-Man, but he only draws a random pair of hairless human legs, posed between a few ant legs, framed by a magnifying glass. Ant-Man (apparently Scott Lang) is given huge quadraceps and calf muscles, as if he were a weight-lifter, which doesn't really track with Lang...or original Ant-Man Hank Pym, or Irredeemable Ant-Man Eric O'Grady. It does track with what Land says about his source material, which will sound like a wildly, laughable inaccurate statement to anyone who has read many–or any–Land comics and picked out the many celebrity likenesses of Hollywood actors and professional wrestlers, of catalog models and, as he's most often accused of using, porn stars, seemingly light-boxed onto the page (or whatever the computer age equivalent of a light box is).

"I always try to have the musculature of something that could possibly exist," Land is quoted as saying. "Even though everything looks extremely exaggerated, I still want him to look like he can move and be functional...If I need reference, I have old body-building magazines–guys like Frank Zane who have strong physiques but don't look exaggerated. I take their figures and translate them into something that can work in a comic book."

Huh. I admit I haven't read many Land comics of late, as I actively try to avoid his work, but I saw no evidence in his work from a few years ago. Maybe he just recently started drawing without reference–note the "if" in that sentence about reference–and, when he did, turning to old muscle magazines, instead of Google Image. I guess I could check Mighty Avengers to find out, but that would mean having to look at Land's art, and I've done more than enough of that in my life time, thank you.

Regardless, it was still a fun little package, one that perhaps gave some clues about how Marvel sees its characters at the moment, and how it would like the world to see them. I wouldn't mind Marvel Comics producing a similar package in the future, one that takes advantage of the whole Marvel Comics Universe, regardless of which studio owns the rights to which characters. It would be a fun way to highlight the diversity of body types within their increasingly diverse universe, and the importance of anatomy in comic work and could take the place of the old swimsuit specials.

Review: Fear Itself: Uncanny X-Men

I wasn't sure if I would be able to read this one or not, seeing as how it features art by Greg Land, the anti-artist whose static, phony-looking panels do exactly everything wrong that one could possibly do wrong while trying to tell a story in the comics medium. An artist couldn't provide worse comic book art if they were actively trying too. Probably because if they were trying to create bad art, they would just render everything poorly, but Land's problems are much, much deeper--it's his staging, his character designs, his inability to "act" through his characters, its the way panels don't flow from one to the next, the way there's no visual continuity. That's on top of the poor rendering, and the lifeless, antiseptic world he creates by manipulating photoreference into finished product.

I want to say his work is unreadable, but I did make it all the way through an entire page collection of it (even if it did take me three tries to do it), so that's obviously not true. I suppose that's what come from reading as many bad superhero comic books over the years as I have: There's nothing that Marvel can throw at me that I can't make it through now.

This book collects five issues of the previous, since canceled-and-relaunched volume of Uncanny X-Men (#540-#544, if you care), four of which tie into Fear Itself. These comics are written by Kieron Gillen, who hear seems to know his stuff and at least be trying to tell a fun, action-packed story in the midst of what must be one of the angstiest (if not the angstiest period in X-Men history). I'm not sure I bought many of the supporting elements of the story, which seem to have been put in place because they had to be in order to get various pieces in place for the X-line's next few months of stories, and this story behaves a bit differently than the other Fear Itself stories I read (including, most importantly, Fear Itself itself), but Gillen does a pretty fair job on the script.

He is, of course, undercut constantly and at every turn by Land. I could scan just about any panel from any page to post and point at, but let's look at a few of the earlier and more egregious examples.

Here are four consecutive panels from the first issue, in which Piotr "Colossus" Rasputin and Kitty "Kitty Pryde" Pryde argue about the way the X-Men are treating his little sister Magic, who did something really bad in a previous story, and so is now being kept in an underwater prison:

That's not important, for these purposes. What is. No, check out the Kittys in the first and fourth of those panels; not only has her hairstyle changed pretty dramatically—in length, volume and whether or not there's any curl to it—but her fucking face has changed too.

Two scenes later is one of the weirder scenes in the book. Namor has flown away from where we last saw him (Fear Itself: The Deep), changed from his current costume into his old Speedo costume, and then flown to see Emma Frost and tell her he'd like to fuck her one more time before he goes off to likely die in battle (I guess they did it in the recent past...? That guy has a thing for gorgeous blonds attached to tall, skinny, humorless super-team leaders, I guess).

Check out how his body morphs between these two consecutive panels:

So, Greg Land: Still the worst.

As one of The Serpent's Worthy, the guys who got evil magic Thor hammers that made them more powerful and also evil thralls, is X-Men villain Juggernaut, that's the part of Fear Itself that Gillen ties his story into.

The Juggernaut flies through the air to crash like a meteor near a gas station which has only one ad on its window, and it's for Orbit (Orbit sponsored this story arc, I guess; there are multliple Orbit logos in the art. Weird Marvel can't sell normal ads anymore, but they can find customers for their bizarre product placement ads: "No, we won't buy a half-page ad, but how much would you charge us to have someone cut-and-paste an image of our logo onto a billboard that the Juggernaut can throw an X-Person against...?")

There he touches his hammer to the face of a bystander, which tattoos the Fear Itself logo onto that guys face, and then transforms him into a sort of hype-man for the Juggernaut. Then Juggernaut proceeds to walk very slowly towards San Francisco, every one of his footsteps leaving a glowing pink Nordic-looking rune on the ground like a footprint, something that the other Worthy don't do in the other comics, but will prove important (or, at least "important" at the climax).

Meanwhile, the X-Men are pretty much just chilling around San Francisco, wondering how weird it is that the rest of the world is going to hell while everything seems pretty chill in San Fran. Being shitty, selfish superheroes, they decide to just hang around and wait to see if their neighborhood gets attacked by an apocalyptic threat, rather than, I don't know, lending a hand anywhere else (Not all the X-Men suck, of course; Wolverine and all his teams were already engaged in combating The Serpent, Namor and Psylocke popped up in other tie-ins I read this week).

After Scott "Cyclops" Summers trades some quips with Sadie Sinclair, the apparently 22-year-old mayor of San Francisco (in the Marvel Universe, anyway), it becomes apparent that the Juggernaut is headed their way, and they will need a joint response to deal with them.

The bulk of this collection consists of Cyclops throwing various mutants and combinations of mutant teams at the unstoppable foe—made more unstoppable by his magical upgrade. It reads an awful lot like Gillen looking at the list of 200 or so X-people he must have somewhere, thinking about their powers, how they might be creatively employed, and how a magic Juggernaut would remain un-stopped by those powers.

Eventually, the consult the one mutant who knows a lot about magic, identifiable by the fact that she is, of course, named Magic, and she, Kitty and Colossus go to hell to convince the demon that originally empowered Juggernaut that Juggernaut has betrayed him by serving the Serpent instead, so that demon takes away Juggernaut's power and is going to gift/curse it to Magic, when Colossus nobly steps in and decides to bear the burden of the curse instead.

For some reason, he then gets his own Juggernaut hat (I thought Juggernaut just wore that hat so Charles Xavier couldn't screw with his mind...?), and returns to earth to have a Juggernaut-off with the old Juggernaut. Spoiler: Colossus wins.

A couple of franchise-specific ramifications emerge from this story, which obviously has very little to do with Fear Itself (though the good guys win here, just as Dracula's forces defeated the Hammer-ed up Hulk at the end of Hulk Vs. Dracula, apparently it's only a very temporary win, as The Worthy are all in the climax of Fear Itself).

Firstly, Colossus is now Juggernaut II or whatever, which causes Kitty Pryde to dump him in a hilariously melodramatic scene where she angrily tells him, "You'd have sacrificed yourself rather than risking anyone else...It's great that you're willing to die for me, Pete. But I need someone who's willing to at least consider living."

See, she's pissed at her boyfriend for nobly risking his soul and his life to save his little sister from a fate worse than death and, in the process, saving the X-Men (and mutantkind, given their limited numbers) as well as the entire greater San Francisco metropolitan area. His girlfriend would have preferred he acted selfishly, and thought of himself and his own personal safety first.

So I guess Kitty probably shouldn't be dating in the superhero community, if she's so against heroic behavior. And I guess that means she's still being written as the readers' ideal imaginary girlfriend....?

And then Cyclops has a telepathic student of his hijack the mayor's body and temporarily paralyze her while he threatens to murder her and make it look like an accident for about two pages. Which must Example of Cyclops Being An Evil #19 that I've read, and I'm an awfully casual reader of X-Men comics.

The final issue has nothing to do with Fear Itself, and was fairly weird.

There's a strange opening page where Jack Kirby art is appropriated and new dialogue added for a refreshingly bizarre page (although I'm not sure how I feel about Kirby's art being used posthumously like that and, the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable it will likely make me).

And then there are scenes of a new look Mr. Sinister writing X-Men comics with a flying, voice-command ink pen and doing something that involves dying and being reborn in the same body or...something. He has a very poor beard; if he's not going to connect his muttonchops to his goatee, he might as well just shave. To beard or not to beard is the question, Mister; you can't leave such a tiny space un-bearded!

The Sinister scenes are intercut with scenes on Utopia, in which original X-Men Iceman and The Beast tell Scott to fuck-off in their own ways. Iceman is drawn wearing boots in his iced-up form, which makes him look even more naked than when he's not wearing any clothes.

Land draws Beast like Mr. Tawky Tawny, resembling a dude in a suite form the neck down, but with a big cat head. This is probably because to draw a huge cat-man in a suit would require Land to abandon his reliance on photoreference; he solves the problem by just giving Beast a normal human body, and avoiding drawing him as much as possible.

Check it out:

Extreme long shot, extreme close-up on his eyes, and one medium shot in which you see his face and shoulders. Whew!

And that's Fear Itself: Uncanny X-Men—a better-than-average script coupled with the worst art imaginable, resulting in an extremely unpleasant reading experience.

I'll leave you with an image of Colossus, Kitty and Magic having furious hate-sex with a giant devil hand:

Yeah, that Batman Confidential art is not very good at all.

Imentioned briefly on Wednesday that this week's Batman Confidential #37 had some of the worst art I saw in a comic book this week, and that it was bad enough that I decided not to buy the book, despite my interest in the subject matter (That subject matter being Batman and The Blackhawks, specifically Lady Blackhawk). (I should note that I didn't look at every single new book, so maybe the art in Batman Confidential #37 wasn't really the worst of everything that came out on Wednesday; just of the ones I picked up and flipped through).

Yesterday I noticed that DC previewed the book on their Source blog, where you can see the cover and five pretty bad pages of art, like the awful, awful one above (Is she supposed to be crying in that last panel? Is that what the clear liquid in the middle of her cheeks is supposed to signify? That's not much of a "crying" expression though, is it?). That was the first page my eyes landed on when flipping through the book in the shop on Wednesday, the one that prompted me to think, "Jesus, this looks as bad as Greg Land art. Ew."

So I was amused to see that the second of the three responses under the Source preview was from an "straightace," who said, "I like the art. A nice blend of Paolo Siquiera and Greg Land." He/she/it obviously meant that art resembling that of Greg Land was a good thing, which reminded me that there's a reason DC and Marvel publish such shitty, shitty art. It's not just to annoy me personally and to keep me from reading their comics--it's because apparently someone out there really, genuinely likes art that looks shoddy color effects applied atop re-purposed photographs.

I suppose that's something worth keeping in mind (you know, that the major American comic book publishers aren't devoting their resources to producing comics just to bug me, but man, just thinking about the fact that there are enough people out there that think Land-ian art is aces to justify the continued publication of work of this nature just depresses me right the hell out.

When Fangirls Attack linked to a post by a "bluefall" on Scans-Daily about the issue, where you can see a few more pages of the book. It doesn't look like it gets much better--they even seem to have turned old Blackhawk villain Killer Shark from a goofy villain who dresses in a shark motif into yet another generic shark-man monster character, probably necissating DCU law enforcement to round him up along with King Shark and The Shark to do a line-up whenever someone files a report about a shark-man attack.

Here are some links:

(Get it? There’s more than one Link in that picture? Ha ha!)


—I thought this was funny. Hell, I’d buy a comic about that guy.


—Why are people complaining about Dr. Doom calling Ms. Marvel a whore in the pages of Mighty Avengers?


He didn’t say she was a whore; he just said that she had a whore’s heart. That’s totally different.


—I don’t like Mary Marvel’s new costume design. The black lightning symbol on the white field reminds me of Little Debbie’s Zebra Cakes. And that makes me hungry.

Adam Kubert’s demonstrates his nuanced understanding of drapery on the human figure:



A still-life oil painting of a Little Debbie Zebra Cake:


Incidentally, you can see more still-life oil paintings of Little Debbie snack cakes here. And why the hell is Kubert drawing covers that anyone with a naked Barbie doll for reference could draw? Shouldn’t he be putting the finishing touches on that Superman story from a few years ago he still hasn’t finished yet?


—Speaking of the Marvel family, 17 months after it launched, monthly 12-part series The Trials of Shazam finally wrapped up yesterday. The result? In an effort to clear up the confusion of why books starring Captain Marvel can’t be called Captain Marvel but instead must have the word “Shazam” in the title, writer Judd Winick and his editorial enablers decided the best course of action would be to rename Captain Marvel “Marvel” and have him look more like Shazam and rename Captain Marvel Jr. “Shazam” and have him look more like Captain Marvel. Clear?


—And speaking of DC super-comics I picked up and flipped through in the store without buying yesterday, I came this close to buying my first issue of Supergirl in like forever yesterday, when I saw who that special guest-star who looks like it’s The Phantom Stranger on the cover but whom the blurb said that “you’ll never guess who this is!” is. It was certainly an out-of-left-field guest star…at least until I realized that his old, cancelled comic did crossover with the old, cancelled Supergirl comic. It caused me a lot of angst back in the day, because I wasn’t sure if I should file the issue with my copies of his comic, or with my Superman spin-off comics.


—Rich Johnston’s latest Lying in the Gutters col at Comicbookresources.com included a scan of an afterword to a collection of the “One More Day” storyline by Stan Lee.

Guess what? You may not believe this, but the man who co-created most of the Marvel Universe (or at least the lucrative parts of it), the man who still collects hefty checks from Marvel, said he…get this… liked it!

Of course, reading Lee’s couple paragraphs on the subject, I get the distinct impression that he never actually read “One More Day.”

“Sometimes readers forget that a series can’t continue going down the same road forever,” Lee writes. “Think about it. In real life, people may make friends, lose friends, stay single, get married, get divorced, get sick, die, whatever. All the Bullpen is brilliantly doing is giving you characters whose lives are as full of surprises as your own.”

Yes, but the Bullpen didn’t brilliantly have the characters get divorced or one of them die, as happens in real life; they had them do a deal with the devil to magically, randomly alter their lives.

And speaking of CBR, make sure you check out their new and improved design, as well as their new and improved comics critic.


—Check out Matthew J. Brady’s review of Adam Warren’s Empowered. I always find it incredibly challenging to put my finger on what precisely Warren is doing that makes his super-comics so much better than just about everyone else’s (aside from the obvious of drawing them so well or making them so funny), but Brady really rather nicely sums up a large part of that particular book’s appeal. It’s something that’s run through Warren’s previous work on the Gen 13 property and some of his Dirty Pair work too.


—I really like the term “punch-a-bunch,” as Abhay Khosla uses it in his quite excellent review of Secret Invasion #1, which is about twenty times better written than Secret Invasion #1 and about a thousand times more fun to read. I also like that he refers to the Mighty Avengers as the “Badly Written Avengers,” and that he boils the Marvel Universe vs. the Skrulls plot down to a ham-fisted analogy about Marvel vs. Islam.

That didn’t occur to me while reading—I was too busy sighing at that title page quoting a Skrull holy book to make the connection—but I guess it’s all there if you want to see it, right down to the Skrull acts of terrorism being “blowback” from the Marvels attack on them in New Avengers: Illuminati.

I was already looking forward to Hercules vs. the Skrull deities in the pages of The Incredible Hercules but, viewed through the lens as dumb-ass fantasy world metaphor for the dumb-ass real world “My God is bigger than your God” bullshit, it could take on a whole new level of meaning.


—Do DC superheroes benefit from some kind of affirmative action type plan?

I only ask because if you look at Marc-Oliver Frisch’s breakdown of DC’s February sales, you’ll note that Shadowpact has dipped down to the low 15K mark and has already been cancelled, while Blue Beetle and The All-New Atom are selling even worse (14,378 and 13,560 on this chart), and neither of them have been cancelled yet.

Shadowpact stars a bunch of white characters (although Zauriel’s kinda grayish, I guess) and a chimpanzee, while Blue Beetle stars DC’s only Hispanic character with his own book and Atom stars DC’s only character of Asian descent with his own book.

Okay, I’m just being silly, at least about Shadowpact being kept down due to their whiteness, but I am genuinely surprised that those other two aren’t cancelled yet, and I do wonder if a concern with diversity plays a role. As poorly as they’re selling, after all, I expect them to start selling even more poorly soon.

Blue Beetle is getting a new writer to replace John Rogers. Rogers isn’t exactly a marquee name at the moment, but he is the guy responsible for making it such a great comic, and I imagine a lot of those few thousand people are going to miss him. His replacement is Will Pfeifer, who also isn’t a marquee name, and will be dragging the chains of Amazon Attacks behind him like the ghost of Jacob Marley for a while yet.

Likewise, Atom’s new writer Rick Remender is pretty talented, but as far as I can tell, he’s less beloved among super-comics fans than Gail Simone, and as vocal as her fans are, her books don’t tend to sell all that great either. And with the Atom II returning, will fans of shrinky DC superheroes need this title for their fix, or will they just find it over in James Robinson’s new Justice League book?

It seems like Blue Beetle III and The Atom III are about ready to join Aquaman II, Firestorm II and Flash IV in Failed Attempt At Legacy Character Land…

On the subject of DC sales charts, how insane is it that a Booster freaking Gold series is currently outselling The Flash, Supergirl, Robin, Nightwing, Legion of Super-Heroes, a Green Arrow book and two Batman books (Confidential and Gotham Undergound, but still)? Do people just love the Geoff Johns or what?


—Over on his blog, Marvel editor Tom Brevoort deftly and gracefully sidesteps a question that amounts to “Hey, how shitty do you think it is that this shitty piece of Greg Land art is so shitty?”

Before he goes back and answers it anyway:

The history of comics is cluttered with artists who'd swipe their way to fame and glory. Now, today, the technology makes it all the easier to pull from all sorts of other sources as well--photographs or 3-D models or digital images or whatever. But it's really all in how you use it. I wouldn't hire a guy I didn't think could draw the story effectively, but if the guy can do it, then he can do it. A buddy of mine from my art school days had a saying about art that I still use today: "If it looks good, then it IS good." There's more to what a guy like Greg Land brings to his page than his scrap, and that's evidenced by the sales of the projects he draws--if the readership unilaterally decided to turn on him because of the way he uses sources in his artwork, then he'd probably have to approach things another way. But that hasn't happened--there's a tempest-in-a-teapot among a small group of people online, but that's about it.

There’s some discussion about it there, and at Blog@Newsarama.com.

I find it hard to believe that a guy as smart as Brevoort who’s been in comics as long as he has actually believes that Greg Land must be a good artist simply because of “the sales of the projects he draws.” Avoiding the temptation of getting into film, television, popular music and politics for a few thousand counterexamples of the implied “popularity proves quality” statement here, surely Brevoort knows that the best-selling comics aren’t always, usually or ever the best comics period.

In his random comics news story round-up today, Tom Spurgeon links to Brevoort’s blog entry and notes an important element Brevoort’s (hopefully just off-the-cuff) comment overlooks:

[C]onsumers of comic books don't suddenly buy or decide not to buy based on single elements. Both comic book buying generally and series comic book buying specifically are habitual practices that tend to stop when enough dissatisfying elements accrue that it no longer seems worth the investment of time and money. We always talk about the straw that broke the camel's back, but that doesn't mean how all the rest of that straw got on that back isn't just as important.

So Marvel Comics readers aren’t going to “turn on him because of the way he uses sources in his artwork,” because Land’s artwork is a single element in the comics he’s assigned.

His last series for Marvel was Ultimate Power, which was written by very popular writer Jeph Loeb and featured the very popular Ultimates characters in a heavily-promoted cross-over with the cast of Supreme Power.

Before that, he worked on Ultimate Fantastic Four with Mark Millar, probably Marvel’s most popular writer, and an Ultimate book back when the line still had a degree of heat (It was this run that introduced the concept of the Marvel Zombies as a throwaway idea in one arc, to give you an idea of how popular/influential it was at the time).

His next project is going to be one of the flagship X-Men titles.

In all three cases, these are books pretty much guaranteed to sell really well. Put Land on She-Hulk or Amazing Spider-Girl or Black Panther or even Iron Man, or on a creator owned project and see how it does if you really want to gauge his sales-power.

As Spurgeon pointed out, there are a lot of considerations that go into the purchase of a comic book than who the artist is, particularly with these sorts of corporate super-comics with a fanbase that’s followed them for years. Who’s the writer? Who’s the character? What’s the direction of the book? Is the story in-continuity, and will it impact another two-to-twenty comics I’m reading?

The other odd thing about Brevoort’s statement is his statement, “I wouldn't hire a guy I didn't think could draw the story effectively, but if the guy can do it, then he can do it.”

Sooo, did someone else hire Land or what? Because whether you think its ethical to use celebrity likenesses and/or other people’s photos and drawings as “scrap” or not, I think it’s pretty indisputable that Land can’t draw sequential stories effectively (Or, if not can’t, then certainly won’t).

I muddled through his UFF run, but it got increasingly difficult to do so, because the characters were so inconsistent from panel to panel that it was often difficult to tell them apart—they would change facial structure, build and height from panel to panel, depending on the “scrap” being used—and Land is probably the worst “actor” of any comics artist I could think of. Since the reference dictates the emotion he draws in his characters’ expressions and postures, they seem to overact like mimes or silent movie stars, with every panel offering an explosive emotion, because the photo reference being used is from single images meant to convey a single, exaggerated emotion. This is why so many of his characters have what the Internet calls “porn face” or come hither expressions or melodramatic rage.

So, just to reiterate, Greg Land's art isn't very good. But it does lend itself to hilarious, if not quite safe for work, re-dialogue-ing, as Christopher Bird has so ably demonstrated.

No Sale: Amazing Spider-Man #546

The devil on my left shoulder made the following arguments for not buying Amazing Spider-Man #546, the first issue of the new post-devil deal rebooted continuity “Brand New Day” initiative:

—Are you really going to be able to read a Spider-Man comic for a few months without hearing EIC Joe Quesada’s weird rationales in the back of your head? Hell, thanks to Howard Stern, you’ve even now got a voice to put to them.

—Are you really going to be able to read a Spider-Man comic for a few months without trying to figure out what the hell is going on continuity-wise now? You know you’re way too anal when it comes to there being actual sequence in your sequential art, consistency in your serial story-telling—wouldn’t reading “Brand New Day” Spider-Man just be like asking for a seizure?

—This thing cost $3.99, a $1 more than your average comic book. Sure, it's oversized, but that’s almost one-fourth a volume of Essential Spider-Man. Or a little less than half of this.

—Steve McNiven is drawing the lead story. Are you going to be able to read a McNiven-drawn story without being reminded of all the irritation you felt at Civil War? Look, your face is turning red with anger just seeing his name on the cover.

—Don’t you get all the Spider-Man you need from Ultimate Spider-Man and the occasional Marvel Adventures Spider-Man issue or digest? Just how many Spider-Man comics do you really need to read a month, man?

—And check that out: One of the back-ups has Mike Deodato doing his photo-referene a la Photoshop thing with an Osborn again...this time plopping the Ditko-designed hair on top of James freaking Franco. Not only is that stupid looking and horrifyingly lazy for a professional comics artist, isn't it also illegal? Franco owns his own likeness, after all...did he give Deodato and Marvel permission to "cast" him in this story, or are they profitting off his likeness without compensating him?


The angel on my right shoulder made the following arguments in favor of buying ASM #546:

—Two words: Dan Slott. Twenty-one more words: The lead story is written by Dan Slott, whom I believe you have a buy on sight rule regarding, don’t you? Remember how well Slott wrote Spidey in that one issue of The Avengers: The Initiative? Or that issue of She-Hulk where he tried to sue J. Jonah Jameson for slander? (Or was it libel? Or both?) Or Spider-Man/Human Torch? Dan Slott was born to write Spider-Man comics; are you really going to miss out on that just because his Editor-in-Chief can’t write his way out of a paper bag?

—You also tend to buy and enjoy everything with John Romita Jr.’s name on it, right? Well, he drew two pages of this.

—You’ve only been regularly reading Amazing Spider-Man since 2001, man; don’t act like you have a personal stake in whether the last 20 years of Spider-Man comics actually happened or not.

—This is the start of the triweekly shipping schedule for Amazing Spider-Man. You loved the structure of the weekly-shipping 52; this is going to be almost like that, only with better art.

—This is also the beginning of Steve Wacker’s tenure as the editor in charge of the Spider-Man franchise. He edited 52, one of the most enjoyable comics-reading experiences of, like, your whole life. Surely this is going to end up being worth checking out, right?



They both made some valid points, and I admit I was more than a little torn.

Then the devil on my left shoulder countered with, “Look, I wasn’t going to say anything at first but come on; this thing has Greg fucking Land art in it. Checkmate.”

To which the angel on my right could only meekly reply, “Dude, he’s right. Greg Land is just awful. Forget it.”

Thursday is links day

Meanwhile in Las Vegas… This week’s LVW comics review is of Wonton Soup, which I boldly called the best space-trucker cooking opera of the year. Boy will my face be red if another, even better comes out on one of the last two Wednesdays of the year! You can read/skim the first 39 pages of it here, and I should point out that the book gets better and better the deeper you get into it.




Hey man, nice shot: December is a busy time of year for a lot of folks, as they do all their Christmas shopping, make travel plans, prep their houses for visitors and so forth. It’s quite busy for me too, but for an entirely different reason—this is the point of the year when “best of” lists get assembled, and critics find themselves playing catch-up.

By the time December rolls around, I find myself buried in film screenings as studios begin to campaign hard for awards consideration and slots on best-of lists.

And, inevitably, as many comics and graphic novels as I read every week, I realize I’ve missed quite a few big releases, and spend much of the month tracking down everything I’ve heard something good about or just haven’t gotten around to, so that when I sit down to tell you what I thought the best books of the year are, I can feel pretty well-informed on the subject.

One book I just finished was Anthony Lape and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War, a dramedy about a blogger who covers the Iraq War during the McCain administration. Brian Doherty of The New York Post just wrote a very good review of it, with a pretty damn good headline (has no one ever turned the phrase “blog of war” before? Really? Because it’s a good one).

Doherty gave the book a bit of a kicking:



It might be formally appropriate that a graphic novel set in a chaotic, horrific near future should sport this book's off-putting computerized art style. It's a bricolage of digitally altered photos, cut-and-paste cartooning, and beards that look like the random up-and-down ballpoint pen scratches one would use to deface a magazine photo.

But formally appropriate or not, a reader versed in classic comic book cartooning will be apt to find it distractingly ugly. The style often gets in the way of the simple storytelling virtues that cartooning is best for. It's sometimes difficult to tell from panel to panel exactly what's going on. The graphic novel's look, created as the book flap says with “a combination of photography, vector illustration, and digital painting" is very now - the sort of “now" that will almost certainly look dated and oh-so-2007 soon enough.

In the book's afterword, the authors identify this as a “work of political satire" that strives to “get you thinking about some big questions concerning the media, the war in Iraq and American foreign policy." That was all-too-obvious in this heavy-handed, though successfully gripping, work. They add that, “We also hope it makes you chuckle." Unless, say, the suitcase-nuking of Bangalore is a knee-slapper, they misunderstand their own work's tone.



I can’t say I disagree with him entirely either. As I finished it, I was actually pretty relieved I wasn’t planning on giving it a formal review for LVW, but just satisfying my own curiosity about it at this point. The look of the book is just as Doherty described it. At times it did seem ugly and distracting to me, at other times it seemed pretty appropriate given the subject matter, and I thought it even had a sort of strange beauty, perhaps more beautiful than it might have looked were it all drawn out. But these times changed back and forth from page to page.

Ultimately I think it’s a fine style for a single graphic novel like this, when a reader is only spending an hour or two with it, but if this were serialized into single issues, or if I tried reading it as it was originally serialized on the web, I would have given up a long time ago, I think, as it’s not the sort of art I would seek out once I’d walked away form it.

I’m not quite sure what to think of the writing end of things, either. It’s structurally sound, and the dramatic arc works well enough. The lead character is one I kind of like, but really rather despise. The speculative political science work that went into the where will the world be in 2011 question was pretty interesting, but somewhat undermined by the more straightforward action adventure comic villain, the charismatic leader of a made-up terrorist group that actually compares himself to a Bond villain at one point.

I think this is a book I’d have to return to again in the future to truly form an opinion on, but, on my first reading, my reaction was extremely mixed, often simultaneously liking and disliking different aspects of the story.

One thing that I really enjoyed was Dan Rather, who cameos in one scene, only to become main character Jimmy Burns’ sidekick by the climax. Lappe nails Rather’s dialogue, or rather a convincing parody of his TV personality’s dialogue, and Goldman does a nice drawing of the old man. I cracked up in almost every scene featuring Rather as heroic newsman, particularly the bit about the frequency.

I give Lappe and Goldman a lot of credit for trying to spin a bigger story with Shooting War, addressing the media’s role in the world and in the war. Me, I would have just focused on the adventures of Dan Rather in the near-future Middle East, and, as entertaining as that may be, it’s probably not of much value to anyone all on its own.

Have any of you read Shooting War yet? Any prognosis to share? I’d definitely recommend it, even though I’ve not quite made up my mind as to how good a graphic novel it actually is.




Confidential to Joe Madureira and Greg Land:







Can a decision to collect a comic book series a particular way be considered evil? : I’ve been bewildered by many of the decisions DC has made in terms of what they choose to collect and release in trade, what they choose not to, and how they package some of their trades, but this is probably the most mystifying item I’ve seen show up on a Diamond shipping list from the company in a long, long time:

WONDER WOMAN AMAZONS ATTACK HC $24.99

Yes, the universally reviled series that didn’t make any goddam sense, the series that helped make Jodi Picoult’s run even worse, the series which caused sales of tie-in issues like Teen Titans and Wonder Woman to drop, is released in a collected edition for any unfortunate souls who want to subject themselves to it. I can see them in Barnes and Noble now, flipping through it, drinking in Pete Woods’ fantastic art, seeing all the heroes in it, and thinking, “Well, this looks good,” and then heading towards the cash register.

Yes, it looks good, but that’s only because the art is so good. But it is not a good book. It’s a terrible one! Terrible, I tell you! (Well, the first three issues…I didn’t read the last half). And at the end, you don’t get any kind of resolution (I did flip-through #4-#6), you just get a big, fat cliffhanger, and to find out what the hell happens next, you have to read Countdown!

I suppose DC thought they could make a few bucks off these poor folks and that it was therefore worth collecting this story in trade (a sad, sad fact when you consider all of the better Wonder Woman stories not available in trade, however).

But a hardcover?

Nobody wants a hardcover of this. No one who reads it will ever want to reread it. And charging $25 bucks for the sturdier cover just strikes me as…perverse. It’s a six-issue series, each sold for $2.99, so anyone fool enough to buy this thing is paying $7 more than they would have if they got it while it was originally coming out.

Surely you can still find all six of these issues in your local comic shop or on the ebay for cover price or lower…hell, you’re welcome to my Amazons Attack #1-#3 for the cost of shipping…




Here it comes: Have you seen the trailer for Speed Racer yet? I have. About, oh, 25 times now or so. I was skeptical of this project since it was first announced, having been a fan of the admittedly quite terrible cartoon and having lost pretty much all faith in the Wachowski Brothers about four minutes into Matrix Revolutions (Yeah, Reloaded wasn’t all that either, but the action scenes in it were a thing of beauty).

But I’ve gotta admit, this looks pretty great from the few minute snippet of the trailer—the costume design, the automobile design, the use of speedlines in live action, the jumping Mach 5 sound effect, the corny-ass dialogue like “It’s way more important than that, it’s like a religion” and “Maybe not, but it’s the only thing I know how to do and I gotta do something.” Awesome. A quick check at IMDB reveals that Snake Oiler and Inspector Detector are characters in the movie, too. Awesome I say, awesome!

Anyway, check out the scene where Speed discovers Spritle and Chim Chim in the trunk reading comic books by flashlight—they’re totally reading an issue of Geoff Darrows fantastic and hardly ever printed ongoing series Shaolin Cowboy, from the Wachowski’s own vanity publisher Burlyman.




And speaking of trailers…: I see no giant bipedal talking sword-wielding mice in this trailer, which worries me excessively. Still, I hope Prince Caspian makes a billion dollars, if only to ensure more Narnia movies, as the next two are my favorite of the seven books.




Poor Will Smith: The real tragedy of the dystopian future presented in I Am Legend?:Will Smith’s character, the last man alive in New York City after a plague has decimated humanity, must see a poster in Times Square advertising some sort of upcoming Batman/Superman movie (it features the S-shield from Superman Returns atop a bat-symbol shape) every day, knowing full well that even though the movie was made, it will never be played in theaters for him. The poor, poor bastard. Oh, and I guess he’s all alone fighting for his life too. Anyway, here’s a review of I Am Legend if you’re interested.



"He's a superintelligent small pox virus. And he wants justice": I should have posted this scan from Green Lantern #25 in yesterday's off-the-cuff review, when discussing the scale of the war. As you can see, not only were human-sized combatants duking it out, or planet-sized ones like Mogo and Warworld, but also microscopic rivals.

Here, check this out if you haven't already, and then I've got a serious question:


Is that the absolute coolest thing Geoff Johns has ever written? I know I make fun of Johns alot here, particularly for his affinity for gore (yes, there is a panel of a character being ripped in half in this same issue), the number of times he has heroes resort to torture, his uninihibted man-love for Hal Jordan, and his bad habit of going too grim and gritty too often, but I do think he's a pretty solid comics writer, and is probably DC's best writer by default (Busiek, Morrison and Waid are no slouches either, of course, but they just can't keep up with Johns, who writes about 15 books a month now, I believe).

And make no mistake, a heroic small pox virus that wants justice? That is pretty much the definition of awesome. (Well, not in my computer's dictionary, which I just checked to verify, but I bet if I went and got a dicitonary off the shelf, it would be in there). Thinking of all of the most awesome beats in other of the roughly two million stories by Geoff Johns I've read in the past, all of the closest competitors—Booster Gold and Skeets' journey to cowboy times, much of 52—came in books in which Johns worked with one to three co-writers on. But this book is all him, meaning this beat is all him.

So here's my question: Is this the most awesome thing Johns has ever written, or not? And if not, what is?




Yeah, what she said: Carla makes a very fine point here, in this post about Marvel’s “One More Day” story, which I’m sure everyone’s more than sick of hearing about at this point (And there’s still one issue to go, meaning over a month’s worth of commentary yet to come!)

She stopped reading at the same point I did, the second part, but returned faster than I would have because, as she says “This is important.”

Indeed, it is. Not change-your-life important, or impact-the-world-outside-the-Marvel-Universe-at-all important, but important within that fictional shared setting, and important to the way readers will be interacting with it for the next few weeks, months, years and, potentially, from now on.

This “One More Day” storyline, if they really do go through with it and they don’t change it back immediately, is going to end up being the most important Spider-Man story ever told, if only because it’s going to be the only one in which Spider-Man comics get rebooted. It’s going to be a big, bright, red line through Spider-Man’s (fictional history), not unlike the original Crisis on Infinite Earths was a big, bright red line through DC Comics’ (fictional history) becoming, like the birth of Christ, the point that divides that history into two different era. The death of Captain Stacy, or of Gwen Stacy, Kraven’s Last hunt, the Osborne/Golin saga, the black suit/Venom business, none of those will end up being as important as OMD, simply because none of them managed to shift the entire playing field the way OMD will.

In a few years time, people could be discussing Spider-Man using the terms Pre-OMD and Post-OMD, as they used to with Crisis (Again, if they really have Spidey and/or MJ trade their marriage for a reboot, and if they stick to it).

It’s a seriously ballsy move by editor-in-chief, penciller and, if JMS is to be believed, plotter Joe Quesada, whatever you think of it.

And I can’t help but wonder how many people are reading this story not because they like the writing or art, or are invested in the story, but simply because they know how potentially important it is. Are they, like Carla, reading it simply because it’s going to be the starting point for the pretty exciting sounding future of Spider-Man comics? (Three times a month! Dan Slott writing Spidey regularly!). I fear Marvel will interpret the gonzo sales of the event as tacit approval for the story itself, giving them grounds to dismiss all criticism as the opinions of a few hundred cranks with Internet access and too much free time on their hands (Now, I’m not saying I’m not a crank with too much free time on my hands, just that that doesn’t make me wrong about whether a comic book story is stupid or not).

Do check out Carla’s review of the third chapter, as she has a beautiful image of a fan’s despair at the book, and check out this week’s Lying in the Gutters if you haven’t already, as Rich Johnston recounts previous pitches for how to undo the marriages of Superman and Spider-Man without resorting to divorce or killing off a supporting character. As awesome as I think the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Super-books would have been (and hey, where is Peyer these days?), I’m glad DC let the Superman/Lois marriage stand. I could do without this Chris Kent character, though…

Marvel's October previews reviewed

And now, it's Marvel's turn. You can see their October solicits here, and you can find my reactions here.





The advent of HeroClix has pretty much ruined the villain-playing-chess-with-other-characters comic book cover forever, huh?




ESSENTIAL WEREWOLF BY NIGHT VOL. 2 TPB Written by DOUG MOENCH, DON PERLIN & BILL MANTLO. Penciled by DON PERLIN, VIRGIL REDONDO, YONG MONTANO & FRANK ROBBINS. Cover by GIL KANE. Jack Russell's struggles against his long-time curse pale before his determination to save his beloved sister from a similar doom! Vicious vigilantism, muscled madmen and intergalactic intrigue highlight the second volume of one of the seventies' strangest sagas! Fear, fate and family – Werewolf style! Guest-starring the Frankenstein Monster, Morbius and others from Marvel's Legion of Monsters! Collecting WEREWOLF BY NIGHT #21-43, GIANT-SIZE WEREWOLF #2-5, MARVEL PREMIERE #28.

Yes!

Um, that’s all I have to say about this. Just “Yes!” Which I’ve now said. So we can move on.




Seeing this shitty cover for Fantastic Four #551 reminded me that I didn't see a single Michael Turner cover in yesterday's DC solicits. Turner if finally off JLoA covers! That means I'm only reading one book which will continue to be marred by his bad and getting worse covers every month! And this one, well, it's another Michael Turner cover, isn't it? I guess it's nice to see that the FF have finally gotten out of that burning building they've been posing in for most of Turner's run on covers. Now they seem to be hanging out in...a time warp? A dance club? A screensaver?




HOWARD THE DUCK #1 (of 4) Written by TY TEMPLETON. Pencils & Cover by JUAN BOBILLO. Grab your guns and camcorders and start shooting, it's DUCK SEASON! Marvel's favorite furious fowl, Howard, and his faithful friend with benefits, Beverly, begin their journey to destroy the internet, radio and television, in this all new mini-series by Ty (She-Hulk) Templeton and Juan (She-Hulk) Bobillo. SEE Howard face mighty hunters with mighty guns on MeTube! SEE Beverly in nothing but fig leaves! SEE grown men dressed as bunnies! And who is that giant headed guy taking A.I.M. at our heroes? HINT: It starts with "MODO—" Just when you thought it was safe to read comics again…and Marvel has to do THIS?!?

I kinda wish Templeton was drawing this as well as writing it, as I really like his art but rarely get to see it, but this sure looks like a lot of fun.




IMMORTAL IRON FIST VOL. 1: THE LAST IRON FIST STORY TPB Written by ED BRUBAKER & MATT FRACTION. Penciled by DAVID AJA & TRAVEL FOREMAN. Cover by DAVID AJA_Many years ago, in the mystical city of Kun’ Lun, young Danny Rand stared at a suit behind glass -- the garb of the "Immortal Iron Fist” -- and knew that he was destined to wear it. But where did this costume come from? Why did it wait for Danny all those years like a shadow of his future? The answer to those questions will stun both him and his readers, as Danny Rand leaps from the pages of his breakout hit in DAREDEVIL to his own history-spanning kung-fu epic that will shatter every perception of what it means to be the Immortal Iron Fist! Brought to you by top-ten writer Ed Brubaker and breakout talent Matt Fraction (PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL), with action-packed art by David Aja (DAREDEVIL, GIANT-SIZE WOLVERINE). Collectng IMMORTAL IRON FIST #1-6.

Man, I cannot wait for this book. I dropped the monthly three issues in because, ironically, the art was just too good (It launched during the last quarter of last year, back when Marvel was putting ads opposite almost every single art page). I loved what I saw though, and have been literally counting the weeks until this thing came out.





MARVEL ADVENTURES THE AVENGERS #17 Written by TY TEMPLETON. Penciled by RONAN CLIQUET. Cover by TOM GRUMMETT. Ok, you’re a super hero. And you’ve got to fight a robot. But while the robot can punch and blast you with lasers, YOU can’t touch him. That’s a problem, right? That’s what the Avengers are up against when they encounter THE VISION!

If you’re older than ten, the main reason to read this title is writer Jeff Parker…who doesn’t seem to be writing this issue. Damn. Still, Templeton’s no slouch himself.



Man, Namor is pissed at those fish!



NEW AVENGERS #35 Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS. Pencils & Cover by LEINIL FRANCIS YU. The Hood makes his play for the big time by gathering the most ruthless rogues gallery of evil the Marvel Universe has ever seen. What does a guy who wants to be the “Kingpin of all super-villains” do to make his point? You have to see it to believe it. Guest-Starring Tigra. Poor Tigra. Poor, poor Tigra.

Hey, have an army of Venom-like symbiotes ever taken over all of the Marvel heroes, at least the more popular ones, like Wolverine? Because that seems like something they would have done in the early ‘90s. And if not, they should have.





This is the last issue of the less-than-impressive New Avengers/Transformers crossover series, and it's the first one with a nice cover. The other three are pretty uninspired and, in at least one case, featured a one of the worst drawings of Wolverine I'd ever seen.




OMEGA: THE UNKNOWN #1 (of 10) Written by JONATHAN LETHEM with KARL RUSNAK. Art by FAREL DALRYMPLE & PAUL HORNSCHEMEIER. The story of a mute, reluctant superhero from another planet, and the earthly teenager with whom he shares a strange destiny -- and the legion of robots and nanoviruses that have been sent from afar to hunt the two of them down. Created in 1975 by Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes, the original Omega The Unknown lasted only ten issues but was a legend to those who recall it -- an ahead-of-its-time tale of an anti-hero, inflected with brilliant ambiguity. One of Omega's teenage fans was award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem, who has used the original as a springboard for a superbly strange, funny, and moving graphic novel in ten chapters.

I fairly recently read the original series, and was pretty blown away by it. It was a book far, far, far ahead of it’s time, and I would heartily recommend anyone check it out—even though the current trade collection of it is kinda overpriced (Or maybe I’m just used to reading Marvel Comics from the ‘70s in cheap Essential editions).

That said, I’m really looking forward to this version, particularly because of the art team, which consists of two artists one wouldn’t imagine working for Marvel, particularly on a superhero book.

As for the writing credits, I’ve never read one of Lethem’s novels (I did read a prose essay of his in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! ), but then, writing good prose and writing good comics are two entirely different things. Having suffered through eight issues of Brad Meltzer’s JLoA and one issue of Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman, I’m pretty confident I’ve read the absolute worst work novelists can do in comics, and that even if Lethem proves totally awful, this book should still prove more readable than JLoA and WW.

I find the last bit of the solicit particularly interesting, the "graphic novel in ten chapters" part. Obviously, the Big Two have been creating their monthlies for the trade for years now, but it's generally something nobody ever admits (or, to use a less charged term, talks about). But here they're openly advertising the fact that this thing is being written for the trade, it will be a trade, so you might as well wait ten more months—you've waited this long, haven't you?—and you can read it all in one sitting, sans dumb-ass ads for Spider-Man fishing rods and Old Spice fellatio.






PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #12 Written by MATT FRACTION. Pencils & Cover by ARIEL OLIVETTI. With WORLD WAR HULK in full swing and New York shut off from the outside world, who's left to protect those left behind? Frank @#$%!@!* Castle, that's who -- and he's none too thrilled. As the insatiable MUNG THE INCONCEIVABLE rampages through lower Manhattan, Frank and Clarke help a small band of refugees hold back his relentless onslaught. The Punisher? World War Hulk? Alien Invasion, Manhattan in ruins? This is the book Ariel Olivetti was born to draw.

I became disenchanted with this title pretty quickly. Olivetti’s art is nice, but lacked much in the way of detail or imagination, and Marvel and/or Fraction did a pretty piss-poor job of making those first few issues match up with Civil War, which is kind of important when the stories they were telling were Civil War tie-ins. Even still, Punisher vs. the Hulk? That sounds so stupid I don’t think I’ll be able to not buy this issue.



SPIDER-MAN AND THE FANTASTIC FOUR: SILVER RAGE TPB Written by JEFF PARKER. Penciled by MIKE WIERINGO. Cover by MIKE WIERINGO. Two great tastes that taste great together! The world's greatest super hero and the world's greatest super team collide for an adventure set nowhere near a Civil War (and upon which we will not put a CIVIL WAR tie-in label)! After a visit by the Impossible Man, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is faced with a dangerous new alien threat for which he has only one recourse...call in the Fantastic Four. Separately, Spidey and the FF are the foundation of the Marvel Universe. Together...they just may save it! Collecting SPIDER-MAN/FANTASTIC FOUR #1-4.

This miniseries has been a ton of fun, and if you missed out, this trade looks great—it’s only $10.99! Man, I kinda wish I would have missed out now, just so I could get the affordably priced trade.






If this cover had Red Sonja reclining on the hood of a sports car and Wolverine playing electric guitar in the background, it would be absolutely perfect. Still, Venom with a sword is certainly a good start.





SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN #41 Written by J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI. Pencils & 50/50. Cover by JOE QUESADA. 50/50 Cover by MARKO DJURDJEVIC. “ONE MORE DAY” Part 3. The most-talked about – and controversial – comic event of the year continues, brought to you by J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada! Brace yourself, Spidey fans, after this, nothing will be the same for Peter Parker! The stakes have never been higher. At his darkest hours – and he's had plenty – Peter has always had one shoulder to lean on, one person who'd remind him who he is, who he was, and who he can be. Now he's about to lose that person. What would he do...what would you do, if you only had "One More Day?"

I think a comic book has to actually be released before it can be considered the “most-talked about” and/or “most…controversial.” It’s true I’ve heard some talk about the “One More Day,” storyline, but certainly not as much as, say Countdown or World War Hulk. And most controversial? It’s got a looooong way to go if it wants to take that crown from Heroes For Hire #13, the one with the tentacle rape cover, which I don’t think has come out yet either.

And speaking of covers, I don’t think Quesada’s really the best guy to be handling these covers. His artwork just doesn’t really match up to the old school, classic Marvel aesthetic that the layout and the text evoke. Wouldn’t John Romita Sr., who recently did a Daredevil cover, or John Romita Jr., or maybe Mike Allred been a better choice for covers?




You know what would be awesome? If the Thing fought a bear. You know what would be even more awesome? If it could maybe be some kind of monster, Frankenstein-looking bear. I've been resisting my curiosity about Mike Carey's UFF for a while now, thinking I'll maybe check it out in trade some day, but I don't know—Ben Grimm vs. a Monster Frankenstein Bear sure looks like it will be worth $2.99, doesn't it?




ULTIMATE POWER #9 (of 9)
Written by JEPH LOEB
Pencils & Cover by GREG LAND
The final chapter in this lauded limited series finds the two teams—the Ultimates and the Squadron Supreme poised for the cataclysmic climax that will decide the fate of two worlds! And the ending is more than mortal minds can imagine!

Three things. One, is this series seriously “lauded?” Because I can’t recall ever seeing anyone anywhere saying anything remotely nice about it, and I do kinda make a habit of searching the Internets for people talking about comics. Two, Ultimate Wasp is fucking Asian! This is, like, the third time I’ve seen her looking all Caucasian in a Land drawing of her. Three, am I the only one who doesn’t like to see the word “climax” right below a Land image?




WORLD WAR HULK #5 (of 5) Written by GREG PAK. Pencils by JOHN ROMITA JR. Cover by DAVID FINCH. ariant Cover by JOHN ROMITA JR. The millennium's most massive Marvel smashfest careens towards its cataclysmic conclusion! Four so-called Marvel "heroes" shot the Hulk into space. Their exploding shuttle destroyed his people and pregnant queen. And the Hulk has taught them what their arrogance has wrought. But now the Hulk faces the puny humans' greatest champion. And as the terrible battle rages, who will stand revealed as the hero – and who will be proved the monster? Who knows the difference between vengeance and justice? And who will pay the terrible price of anger?

Man, the only person I’d like to see get beaten to paste by the Hulk more than Tony Stark at this point is probably the Sentry because, well, I’ve always hated that guy, but he’s so powerful that there just aren’t that many opportunities to see someone beat him to paste. But if anyone can, it’s the Hulk. Go get him big guy! Give him one for me!





WHAT IF? PLANET HULKWritten by GREG PAK. Penciled by RAFA SANDOVARL & CAFU. Cover by CARLO PAGULAYAN. Last year, a group of Marvel heroes decided the Hulk was too dangerous for Earth, tricked him into a shuttle, and shot him into space. After the Hulk rose from slave to gladiator to conquering emperor on the savage planet of Sakaar, the shuttle exploded – destroying the Hulk's people and his pregnant queen. And the entire Marvel Universe knows what happened next as the Hulk returned to wreak his terrible vengeance in the pages of "World War Hulk." But what if the Hulk had landed on the peaceful planet the Marvel heroes originally intended? What if Banner had landed on Sakaar instead of the Hulk? And what if the Hulk's warrior bride Caiera the Oldstrong had come to Earth seeking vengeance instead of her husband? Get ready for three shocking tales of what could have been from the writer of the "Planet Hulk" and "World War Hulk" epics.

Wow, that was fast.