On 2010's The Twelve: Spearhead #1

In putting together the cast for his 12-issue limited series The Twelve, writer J. Michael Straczynski seems to have scoured the pages of Timely's old Golden Age comics for any characters that Roy Thomas might have missed a few decades previous. I imagine that this is how he came up with a dozen characters so obscure—some having only a single appearance, or two or three before being forgotten—that they made The Blue Diamond look like Wolverine by comparison.

The premise for the series was that in the last days of World War II, twelve minor superheroes—The Blue Blade, Captain Wonder, Dynamic Man, The Fiery Mask,The  Laughing Mask, Mastermind Excello, Mister E, The Phantom Reporter, Rockman, The Witness, the robot Electro and a previous Black Widow—were ambushed and gassed by the Nazis, and then put in suspended animation. The Nazis hoped to be able to study them later, after the war.

Given that the Nazis lost, of course, they never got the chance to do so, and so the heroes remained cryogenically frozen until 2008, the year the series launched. In that respect, they were a little like Captain America only, you know, times twelve. And are, like most Golden Age superheroes that never caught on, a bunch of real weirdos.

The twelve are all housed together as they adjust to the new, greatly changed world, which sounds an awful lot like the set-up for a reality show, but one of them is murdered, presumably by another of them, and the series was essentially a murder mystery of sorts.

Straczynski was partnered on the book with the great Chris Weston, and so it of course looked great. It certainly seemed to have some potential and was catnip to a fan of weird Golden Age heroes like me (Of course, the #0 issue and the #1/2 issue, which featured reprints of some of the characters original adventures, were actually my favorite part of the endeavor).

I wonder if, today, the series is best known for its incredible delay though.

As I said, the book launched in 2008 and kept to a monthly-ish schedule for the first eight issues. And then Straczynski apparently got busy with his day job (a Hollywood screenwriter), and there was an long delay of about three and a half years between issues #8 and #9. That's...not ideal, of course, especially for what was essentially a graphic novel published serially, but I suppose they at least finished it, unlike some other high-profile comics from Hollywood types-turned-comics writers, like, say, Kevin Smith's abandoned 2003 Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target or Jon Favreau's half-finished  2008 Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas. 

During that extremely long gap between #8 and #9, Marvel published a 36-page one-shot both written and drawn by Weston in 2010. It was entitled The Twelve: Spearhead and was set during the war in Germany, presumably shortly before the heroes were put in suspended animation. 

Pretty much completely divorced from the plot of Straczynski's The Twelve, Spearhead's main connective tissue is Weston's strong and realistic art, which gives all the characters very distinct, unique looks, so that even characters like The Phantom Reporter and Mister E, who dress almost identically, look like entirely different people. I mean, it's a pretty basic thing, but it's not something the majority of modern American comic artists might even bother with. (One of the great strengths of The Twelve was that its cast seemed to consist mostly of guys with faces like character actors, rather than all looking like matinee idols.)

That, and Weston of course honors the various personalities of the misfit heroes Straczynski had earlier established, some of which are quite...well, colorful, I guess.

Our point-of-view character is The Phantom Reporter, whose day job is, of course, that of a reporter, although he's taken to donning a mask and cape over his suit and fighting crime. (When Dynamic Man asks him what his powers are in the one-shot, he replies, "I'm more your 'masked avenger' type.")

He's on the frontline covering the story of the superheroes in the war, or, as U.S. army officers put it, helping with propaganda (Interestingly, when various soldier characters talk to him, they often refer to him by the initials of "P.R.", which, of course, also stands of "public relations", which is what he's doing for the military, really...although I don't know if that term was in popular usage back in the 1940s).

We follow him around and he essentially runs into other members of the cast of The Twelve or, in the case of The Black Widow, just hears a brief, scary story about her (And this Black Widow is scary; she's a super-powered servant of Satan; during her brief appearance here, she's shown standing in a room full of dead Nazi soldiers, some of whom are disemboweled, others of whom are missing their heads or limbs, and wiping blood off he hands on a Nazi flag. "This whole country offered its soul up to my master..." she says, "I'm here to collect.").

So in the opening, he watches with some soldiers from the tree line as the super-powered Dynamic Man strides up to a Nazi fortification, bullets bouncing off of him, and kills them all. He's on page just long enough to let us know that a) he's super-powered and b) he's a total asshole.

Phantom Reporter will later be saved by killer robot Electro, a large, remote-controlled robot with the face of his inventor appearing on a screen where his head should be (He's the big guy in the back of the cover up there), he will meet the psychic Mastermind Excello, who is using his mind-powers to gather intel for the U.S. forces, he will take in a USO show hosted by The Blue Blade, and compare notes with Mister E and The Witness, the latter of whom talks about the horrors he saw in a liberated concentration camp.

Some characters do barely more than cameo. For example, The Flaming Mask is shown standing behind some captured troops in one panel, while Captain Wonder is shown helping a damaged plane land, and P.R. comments on his bare legs. ("Who is that anyway?" Mister E asks. "Captain America?" P.R. responds, "Captain America can't fly. And has the decency to put some pants on.")

So too do plenty of other Marvel Golden Agers, which helps contextualize the characters of The Twelve within a sort of retconned Golden Age of the Marvel Universe (Or should that be Timely Universe?). And so we see The Destroyer and Blazing Skull milling around at the side of one panel, or another featuring Red Raven, Union Jack and...actually, I don't even know who these two lifting that gun up are, although I've seen the one on the left before. (Is the guy on the right The Black Marvel, maybe...?) 

Eventually, The Phantom Reporter learns of a big superhero-led operation, and he wants in on it. This is led by Captain America himself and will feature Rockman, Mastermind Excello and some of the more prominent Golden Agers, like The Human Torch, Miss America and The Whizzer (at this point, still rocking that weird-ass bird head on the front of his cowl). 

The mission will involve a fight with The Red Skull, mostly fought by Captain America and conducted off-panel, and an attempt to recover The Spear of Destiny, which is also  here referred to as "The Lance of St. Maruice", and which is ultimately put in "safe hands" (The panel accompanying those words shows a U.S. military officer gripping the spear, which is glowing and it looks rather ominous, but I don't know if anything bad ever comes of it...as far as I've been able to follow Marvel's Spear, it will "next" show up in 1994's Wolverine: Evilution and then the 2010-2011 Invaders Now!).

The issue ends with a practically poster-ready dramatic double-page splash showing all twelve of the heroes from The Twelve  rushing towards their fate.

So it is essentially a bit of a tour of Marvel's Golden Age heroes at war, serving as an introduction, or, given the delays in The Twelve series, a reintroduction, or, perhaps even a reminder, of the cast of the series. 

Weston also seems to take some pains to point out to what degree war is hell, with Nazis quite violently killed (in addition to that panel of The Black Widow, when Electro makes the scene, it tears an enemy soldier in half), even ones that Weston bothers to briefly humanize, like those that Dynamic Man lays into in the opening pages (Later, The Laughing Mask will execute some Nazi officers, shooting them in the backs of their heads as they kneel before him). 

It's not just the Nazis who die violently and graphically either, though; at one point, P.R. is in a jeep driven by a soldier with whom he has some exchanges, and, when the Nazi's ambush them, he takes a bullet to the head, half of his head seeming to explode. 

And, of course, there's the passage where The Witness describes what he saw, Weston confronting us with the disturbing images of the Holocaust. 

Weston also repeatedly contrasts the super-people's actions with those of the regular, mortal, flesh and blood soldiers who do most of the actual fighting and dying. It's their war Weston through The Phantom Reporter repeatedly stresses. As for the people in the costumes? They just "make it look good."

I know this issue is collected in The Twelve: The Complete Series, which Marvel published in hardcover in 2013 and trade paperback in 2014 (I'm kind of tempted now to revisit the main series via one of the collections, but my local library system doesn't have seem to have a copy available, and I'm not sure if I want to buy one...if I knew whether or not the #0 and #1/2 issues were collected alongside the rest of the series, I might be moved to do so.)

Regardless, Spearhead reads quite well on its own, and delivers on the most immediate pleasures of the series—the weird, obscure Golden Age characters and Weston's art—that are the strongest selling points of The Twelve series. So, should you see it in a back issue bin, you may like to pick it up; it's also available via Amazon/Comixology. 

JMS v. WSJ

Writer Tim Marchman took in and then took on the state of modern super-comics in a widely linked-to article in The Wall Street Journal, an article in which he lambasted the industry and many of its movers and shakers. One could quibble with the specifics, but overall, Marchman seems to have it about right, and most of the things he says are the very same things comics fans, readers, retailers, critics and creators have themselves said over and over and over.

This slam on J. Michael Straczynski, a freelance comics writer who is now most often heard from in panel reports and mainstream media articles talking trash on Alan Moore, is pretty harsh, but also pretty accurate:

The first issues of Before Watchmen will be published next month. Among the writers working on it is former He-Man scripter J. Michael Straczynski, who once penned a comic in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil. (This is the rough equivalent of having Z-movie director Uwe Boll film a studio-funded prequel to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

JMS did not care for that characterization at all, and, according to Robot 6, Twitter-fougth Marchman (I don't read the Twitter).

Here's one of his tweets, as quoted at Robot 6:

Your behavior was dickish. I became a better writer after He-Man. You will always be a dick.

A poorly constructed allusion to a legendary Winston Churchill retort, or is the "I/you will" construction a coincidence?

I think the JMS is to Alan Moore as Uwe Boll is to Martin Scorcese analogy works, whether you're looking at what JMS was doing in the 1980s vs. what Alan Moore was doing in that same decade, and if you look at the work of both gentleman in the 21st century. Hell, I think it's accurate if you put 2012 JMS up against 1989 Alan Moore.

I am sure JMS has become a better writer since he was writing scripts for the old He-Man and The Masters of the Universe cartoon show—it would be unusual for a professional writer not to improve somewhat over the course of almost 30 years—but I do wonder if he feels he has become better since "One More Day," though, as that was only a few years ago?

For whatever it's worth, six-year-old Caleb enjoyed the writing on He-Man a great deal more than 35-year-old Caleb enjoyed the last dozen or so JMS-written comics he's read.


(Above: Straczynski's official DC Comics portrait; which you can see here, along with those of many other DC creators)

A library comics update: Batman #703 and Superman #700-702

This past spring I told you about a little library in the little city I live in that doesn’t carry any graphic novels, but does carry floppies in their kids magazine section, seemingly having subscriptions to Batman, Superman and Scooby-Doo.

That lead to a series of…let’s see here…seven posts, each based around a particular run on a particular one of those titles, large handfuls of which I checked out at once.

Well, it’s been long enough since then that a few copies of each title came in, so I thought I’d try and catch up on the single-issues that were checked in during the time I happened to be there.

Batman #703

This one-issue story, which immediately followed Grant Morrison’s three-issue return to the series and immediately preceded the resumption of Tony Daniel’s run as both writer and artist, is perhaps the perfect example of a pointless fill-in issue.

So interchangeable were the contents and creators that DC solicited it in June as a completely different book than the one they published in September.

Here’s what the initial solicitation said:

BATMAN #703
Written by PETER MILLIGAN
Art and cover by TONY DANIEL
1:10 “DC 75th Anniversary” Variant cover by KEVIN NOWLAN
Celebrating the “Return of Bruce Wayne”! Those closest to The Dark Knight look back on the legacy he has created. Featuring appearances by Alfred, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Selina Kyle and more!

The book is actually written by Fabian Nicieza, a decent writer who, no matter what you may think of his abilities or style, is quite clearly not, in fact, Peter Milligan. And while Tony Daniel’s cover, apparently featuring Dick Grayson, Tim Drake and Damian Wayne facing the returned Bruce Wayne (That’s his shadow cast on the wall behind him; the logo covers up the other bat-ear that appeared in the solicited image), shipped on the book, Daniel did not in fact provide the interior art. Instead it was drawn by Cliff Richards.

The description of the contents is at least close. Selina Kyle doesn’t appear, but the other characters mentioned by name do, and I guess there are technically “more” characters as well, including a second-generation version of a minor villain, Vicki Vale and, um, people in the background of some panels.

The story that actually shipped featured Batman Dick Grayson and Robin Damian Wayne trying to capture The Getaway Genius, a character who last appeared…well, sometime long before I started reading comic books (Wikipedia says he last appeared in 1983’s Detective Comics #526). Despite the obscurity of the character, Dick flashes back to a scene from that story when noticing how Damian’s behavior apparently paralleled his own behavior when he was Robin to Bruce Wayne’s Batman.

The Dynamic Duo attempt to takedown the Genuis and, in the process, Damian learns that his biological father wasn’t the grim, heartless avenger of the night he thought he was, but also had a compassionate side.

Meanwhile, the Vicki Vale-tries-to-out-Batman-and-his-many-sidekicks’-secret-identities plotline makes another appearance from…wherever that story was playing out. I think it started in those post-Battle For the Cowl one-shot anthologies that were collected in the Battle trade (Gotham Gazette: Batman Dead? #1 and Gotham Gazette: Batman Alive?#1), and likely continued wherever Nicieza’s been writing Bat-stories over the last few months (Red Robin, I think).

The book ends with this:And, as you can see on the cover, it was billed as “A Prelude To Bruce Wayne The Road Home,” so this pointless, time-waster fill-in was itself a lead in to an eight-issue pointless, time-wasting, fill-in month-long event.

Nicieza’s story here obviously has some problems, mostly having to do with accessibility—the Vicki Vale sub-plot is context-free, with no indication of where it began, or what it has to do with anything else in the issue—but it’s decent enough work and fits the requirements of this particular issue’s mandate. That is, it has to be a Batman story and it has to fill 22-pages.

The art is just appalling. It looks an awful lot like Greg Land’s work, particularly in the creepy, vacant, waxen, photo-reference-y expressions on the characters’ faces, none of whom seem particularly on-model (to be fair to Richards on that last point, DC doesn’t seem to have anything approaching a model to stay on when it comes to character designs these days; Vale, for example, looks completely different when each and every artist draws her, and the only way to really know that she’s supposed to be Vicky Vale is that that’s what the characters who are identifiable by their costumes call her). You can read a five-page preview of the book here at Newsarama, and take a look at Richards’ art for yourself. That segment is the first five pages of the comic, and an action scene involving Batman and Robin, and is thus actually among the strongest bits of the book.

Richards colors his own work here, and it seems as if it were applied directly to the paper using an airbrush and stencils a computer created from photographs. It makes me a bit nauseous to look at.


Superman #700-#702

This issue is the official start of writer J. Michael Straczynki’s Superman walking storyline.

When it was first announced, I had mixed feelings about it. As someone who follows comics, I thought there was a lot about the storyline and the DC’s promotion of it that was extremely interesting, but as a reader, I was more curious than excited, and due to my aversion to the work JMS’s artist collaborator Eddy Barrows, I figured I’d wait for a trade of the story arc.

Of course, while waiting for that trade, JMS and DC have since announced that the former was leaving Superman mid-story to pursue other commitments, and another writer was being called in to finish the story from JMS’s notes.

What interest I had in the story as a reader dissolved at that point; if the guy writing the story isn’t all that engaged in writing the story, it’s pretty clear it’s not going to be much of a read, and so I quite waiting for the trade. I was holding off on reading these library-owned singles so as not to spoil the experience of reading the trade once I bought it, but I took JMS’ implied “Aw, fuck it, it’s boring” declaration to forget getting the trade.

So here I am, reading it.

But before we talk about “Grounded,” JMS, Barrows and J.P. Mayer’s Superman walking story, let’s take a look at the rest of #700, an over-sized anniversary issue which ends with the first ten pages of the since-aborted JMS run.

The book opens with a 16-page story entitled “The Comeback,” which functions as something of an epilogue to the long-ass New Krypton storyline. It’s written by James Robinson, who was one of the main Super-writers during that period, and drawn by Bernard Chang, one of the artists from that period. The superhero action involves an opening during which the Parasite chases Lois Lane and Superman saves her, but the more interesting business involves the married couple talking about what a crazy, shitty year it’s been for them.

I checked out of the Superman books long before the climax of that particular status quo they had going for a while—Lois Lane’s dad used some kind of doomsday weapon to kill 100,000 Kryptonians? Is that right?—but for the purposes of this story, that’s not even really that important.

I think this story’s existence is a little important, given that Superman spent a long time away from his wife during the last Superman status quo, and his new status quo necessitates him doing the same, so, you know, nice to be reminded that though they don’t appear in the same city and/or planet all that often any more, the pair are married and do love one another.

That’s followed by a 16-page Superman/Robin team-up by writer/artist Dan Jurgens and artist Norm Rapumund. The Robin is, of course, Dick Grayson—the story is billed as “a tale from Superman’s early years”—and while it reads like an inventory story that could have appeared almost anywhere, the fact that Dick was Batman when this issue came out perhaps gave it some timely relevance.

The story is an uncomplicated but fun one. Batman has to go be Bruce Wayne at a social event, so Dick has to stay in and not be Robin for the night—plus, he has a big Geometry assignment to do. But when our young hero discovers a gun shipment headed for Gotham, he sneaks out and gets in hot water, and it’s up to Superman to save him.

I’ve always like Jurgens’ artwork, and it was a treat to see him drawing the classic version of Robin here, in addition to the Batman and Superman we’re more used to seeing him draw.

I really liked the bit at the end, where Superman uses his powers to try and cover for Dick:Then we get to “Grounded.”

It’s a very strange story. You’ve no doubt heard a lot of criticism of it already. I know I have, and, having read the first 54 pages of it, much of the criticism I’ve read seems well justified.

It’s not very good.

It is a pretty interesting idea. The premise is simple: Worried that he’s growing out-of-touch, Superman decides to walk around the United States and get his head on straight, walking among the people he’s dedicated his life to saving. And instead of spending all his time in Metropolis, Gotham, Nightwingville, Hawkman City and Starmanopolis, JMS was having him visit real cities like Detroit and Pennsylvania and Cleveland.

That’s actually a kind of ingenious idea for a Superman comic, as it practically guaranteed a steady, monthly stream of local mainstream media coverage. If done right, anyway. JMS’s inability to meet deadlines and DC Comics’ unfortunate tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory eighty-sixed a lot of that potential.

But forget all that—let’s look at the content of the comics themselves.

I think John Cassaday’s covers are worth noting. He didn’t provide the cover for #700, that’s a fairly strong one by Gary Frank (I didn’t think much of it the first time I saw it, but it’s been growing on me, and I like it more and more the longer I spend time with it, even though it contains a damn lie—Superman #700 was completely Krypto-less!).

Cassaday had a bit of a challenge in providing covers for “Grounded” because it is a story about Superman just cold walking around, so there’s only so many “Superman walking” covers you can do. Cassaday seems to have been shooting for iconic covers involving Superman and America, and the results have been interesting.

I don’t really care for that of #701It's a walking cover, but it’s a simple piece that stood out from the other books on the shelf and worked conceptually.

I do really like his cover for #702:The Superman on a black field is a very classic-looking image. I’m not a big fan of Cassaday’s style, but this was a really powerfully composed image and, again, one that stood out on the shelves. Superman is one of the only superhero characters—hell, maybe the only one—whose colors are so indicative of the character himself that just seeing them in relief against black like that can given a picture a sort of visual eloquence.

I know I’ve mentioned that I don’t care for Barrows’ art a few dozen times before, but his pencil work in these two-and-a-third issues was his best work yet.

His specialty, form what I’ve seen, seems to be twisted, swollen, muscular figures in agonizing poses, and so a story about Superman strolling about dealing with ordinary folks wasn’t exactly a story that seemed like one for Barrows, but he acquits himself quite well.

I haven’t completely come around on his work, nor do I think he was the best possible artist for this storyline, but I think it’s evident he’s doing the work of his career here (And if I were him, I’d be pretty pissed off that JMS checked out on the story).

Coloring isn’t something I pay a whole lot of attention to—good coloring isn’t something you should notice, and is, in fact, one of those elements of comics you only tend to notice when it’s either really good or really bad—but I thought it was a little bright and garish for this story.

It’s a very superhero palette that Rod Reis uses here, except the subject matter is mostly regular people in regular clothes, resulting in something akin to watching an old television set with the tint not quite right.

Now, the story itself. The idea of Superman feeling out-of-touch with humanity and feeling the need to reconnect is an exceedingly strange idea for a Superman story set in 2010, and is actually pretty hard to swallow at all—Superman’s been at this for seven decades our time, and about 12 years his time. He’s also got a job and is married to a human being, so you think he’d be pretty in-touch with humans at this point. It really feels like a storyline that should be occurring in a continuity-free original graphic novel, if not an officially “Elseworlds”-branded storyline.

Having the “real,” modern, DCU, in-continuity Superman having to do this at all just seems…off. JMS is helped somewhat past this hurdle by the fact that Superman has been living off-Earth on New Krypton for the last year or so, and, before that, his dad died. Oh, and I guess his father-in-law committed genocide against his people? I guess that could lead to a mild mid-life crisis.

If the timing works, the catalyst doesn’t—JMS has Superman allude to the stressful year he’s had, but the reason for his walking around is simply this. That is really one of those things that you should pretty much never have happen in a story involving Superman—a fellow Justice League member’s wife being raped by a supervillain in JLA HQ is another one—because it’s the sort of thing you can’t think seriously about while taking a story seriously because it just makes Superman look like an enormous asshole.

Instead of responding with a readymade answer along the lines of not interfering with acts of God or not being a doctor or not wanting to play God or not wanting to rob humanity of his achievements by doing everything for humans or whatever, Superman seems to take the lady’s criticism to heart.

Did Superman really go all this time without anyone saying to him, “Hey asshole, way to let my loved one die of something you could have easily saved them from!”…? I find that hard to believe. Like, harder to believe in than a flying invincible guy from a different planet with laser eyes. (Am I misremembering, or was Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee’s “For Tomorrow” story all about Superman wrestling with whether or not he had the right to cure that priest’s cancer…?)

If Superman agrees with that lady, then forget her husband, what the hell is he doing working as a reporter? Or eating or sleeping, human activities he doesn’t need to do, but does anyway? Because while he’s taking a nap he doesn’t really need or pretending to be a mild-mannered reporter, thousands of people all over the world are dying. What a selfish prick!

And if he didn’t think that until the lady brought it up, why does he decide to walk around? Why isn’t he immediately setting about curing diseases and operating on people constantly? Why isn’t he peacefully stopping wars and suchlike?

His motivations aside, JMS’ Superman is an alien one—not necessarily alien to humanity, but alien from the Superman we’re used to reading about. He’s kind of pretentious. And sanctimonious. And hypocritical. And a…well, a jerk, I guess you’d say.

Recently having his eyes opened by some grief-stricken lady, he immediately responds by giving his colleagues shit about continuing to see the world the way he did until about five minutes ago.

He’s essentially like the alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking, sobers up, and then shakes his head sadly at his non-alcoholic friends who drink socially. (Is that a bad example? How about the sinner who becomes a born-again Christian? The meat-eater who goes vegan?)

So when he and Batman Dick Grayson are on the JLA satellite, and Dick talks to him about how he’s tinkered with the monitoring systems so that they can no see if “anything bad” happens from up there in space, Superman corrects him by saying, “Anything important you mean,” and disappearing.

On the next page, he stops Flash Barry Allen just to ask him what he sees when he’s running across the country at super-speed. Batman and The Flash haven’t had their eyes opened like Superman has.

Issue #701, the first all-“Grounded” issue, was pretty thoroughly picked apart online. There are some neat bits to it—as labored as the set-up to the second-page reveal was, it was an effective splash page, and I still sort of like the idea of the story and the potential it shows, but there are so many little, irritating moments in it, most of them involve Superman vacillating wildly between totally douche bag and speechifying preacher. On one page, he makes short, sarcastic remarks to reporters, on the next he pats a youngster on the head and gives what sounds like a graduation speech.

Let’s see, there’s the one-page scene where Superman diagnoses a dude with heart problems and tells him to get to a doctor quickly, and then strolls off (Er, wasn’t your motivation for the walk that you didn’t save that one guy?).

There’s the seven-page scene where Superman talks a woman off a ledge, which Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely did better in a matter of panels in All-Star Superman.There’s the bit of dialogue where Superman tells the would-be jumper that it’s not fair that some folks are dead and some still alive:Huh. Superman wishing bad guys dead? Okay, I guess we can excuse Superman’s failure to save John Lennon and JFK since, given the DCU’s sliding time line, the Superman making this statement wasn't around during the time those men were murdered. But what’s stopping him from icing Manson or Castro or Kadaffi, if he wants ‘em dead so bad? Or hell, The Joker? It probably wouldn’t even be all that difficult for Superman to bring John Lennon back to life if he really wanted to, so maybe he should just shut up about it, huh?

Superman #702 doesn’t seem to have been picked apart online quite as thoroughly as Superman #701 was, perhaps because so many of those who read the first chapter of “Grounded” swore off the rest.

This issue finds Superman walking around Detroit, and it’s an even stranger issue, with a timeline I can’t quite make sense out of (Note that the industry that replaces automobile production in Detroit is already up and running by the time Superman walks out of town).

In this one, Superman encounters a house full of alien refugees hiding on earth, and is pretty miffed about their immigrating to the Earth and/or the U.S. illegally.

These are “good” aliens, who don’t want to conquer the world, but basically just post as humans using holograms and stay inside, keeping to themselves and watching TV. Superman wants to narc on them though.This would be fine if this weren’t a DCU story, but given the hundreds of aliens that live on DC’s Earth, I’m pretty sure there are laws regarding aliens moving to Earth. In fact, it was in the aftermath of a big Superman storyline, “Our Worlds At War,” that there were so many aliens seeking refuge on Earth that there was, like, an alien refugee camp outside of Metropolis and an X-Men like conflict with xenophobic Americans being all “Earth for Earthlings!” and so on.

Superman doesn’t want these aliens freeloading though. They have to give back to the community. According to Superman. What an asshole.

In a genre built out of trivia, there’s no such thing as a trivial matter

I came across two news (“news”?) items on the Internet today that really sort of shocked and surprised me, to the extent that news/“news” items regarding shared universe super-comics can shock and surprise someone.

The first was an innocuous enough-seeming post hyping the bi-weekly limited series Justice League: Generation Lost on DC’s Source blog.

Those of you who read and remember my “Comic Shop Comics” posts will know that I’ve been reading and rather enjoying that series regularly, and having just read the eighth and ninth issues of it, it is now the Judd Winick series I have read the most consecutive issues of since…2005, when I read the issue of his Outsiders in which a victim of childhood sexual assault dispassionately began to beat a rapist to death after the rapist attempted to sell five-year-old Lian Harper into sex slavery (Don’t worry, Lean was saved, and lived…until she died in an earthquake five years later). That was the moment when whatever good will Barry Ween and Pedro and Me had generated began to get outweighed by the weight of Winick’s awful, awful superhero writing, and the dark, broken light bulb appeared over my head (cutting my scalp on its jagged edge), signifying the arrival of a bright idea—Hey, this guy writes awful, ugly comics, and I don’t have to read ‘em!

But I liked weekly(-ish) comics, and I liked the JLI characters so I tried Winick’s Justice League: Generation Lost #1. And it wasn’t bad. So I picked up #2, and have been proceeding with caution since. I’ve expected to start hating it at any moment all along, and thus haven’t added it to my pull-list at my local shop, but have been reading it off-the-rack, just waiting for it to plunge from not-that-bad to Why God, why?!

Is that point around the corner?

I don’t know. I didn’t really read Alex Segura’s post hyping the upcoming issue #11 on The Source very closely, I noticed it had a quote from editor Brian Cunningham and there was a pencils-only splash page of “Ice Unleashed” which looked fie, if not “amazing.”

My Blog@Newsarama colleague Troy Brownfield did read Segura’s post and Cunningham’s quote closely though, and noticed a problem, which he posted about here.

You can go read Troy’s post (don’t worry, it’s much shorter and less rambly than mine!), as it will make more sense in context, but the gist of it is that Cunningham refers to Ice’s initial introduction as the Super Friends series from the 1970s, where Ice was originally introduced as Icemaiden…and he notes that she had an absurd origin. (Above: The Icemaiden from the Super Friends comic book. Those comics, by the way, were non-canonical in terms of official DCU continuity)

Troy points out that the Icemaiden from Super Friends is a completely different character than Tora “Ice” Olafsdotter, from the Justice League comics. Icemaiden joined the Justice League after Tora/Ice’s death, appearing on the line-up immediately preceding the Grant Morrison/Howard Porter/John Dell team (Icemaiden appeared briefly in the “New World Order” arc of JLA, fleeing the Justice League satellite with her teammates as the disguised Hyper Clan destroyed it).

(Tora "Ice" Olafsdotter)

(Sigrid "Icemaiden" Nansen, being menaced by tentacles. Wait, surely I can find a less exploitive image of her than that somewhere on the Internet...)

(Hmm, on her knees and in chains probably isn't much better, huh?)

(So, um, this image of her falling out of her costume is the most heroic and dignified image of her I can find on the Internet. Well, at any rate, please note that she has blue skin. That's one good way to tell her apart from Tora/Ice, who does not have blue skin)

There’s some commentary from commenters at both The Source and Blog@ but, so far anyway, no one from DC has popped up to explain what’s going on.

Did Cunningham simply confuse when Ice made her first appearance? If that’s the case, then it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, just something kind of embarrassing for a dude who edits a book starring the character to bring up on his own. But since he mentions that character’s origin and the fact that Winick would be creating “a credible and tragic origin that doesn’t negate what we already know,” well, then it sounds like the stories are being confused, and that is a big deal.

See, Generation Lost’s entire premise is one of nostalgia and trivia, building on the narrative arc of these decades old characters’ fictional histories. It’s a next chapter of a group novel that’s already been written, and the old stuff is much less flexible. This is, after all, a series about a half-dozen characters popular from a 20+ year old comics run reuniting to deal with a threat that surfaced in a five-year-old (or so) series of event comics, which has been given new urgency by the last year or so’s worth of Green Lantern and Blackest Night comics. Take away exacting fealty to the plot points of past comics, and what are you left with in Generation Lost? Just some clichéd if readable superhero action-adventure scripting, some uneven, generally sub-par art, and some really nice Cliff Chiang covers.

In other words, not a whole lot.

Troy ends his post by asking if fans can keep this stuff straight, why can’t editors? It’s a fair question. I’ve always assumed there was a lot more to editing a DC comic book than simply knowing the characters and their histories extremely well, but man, this seems to suggest there’s less. (Even if you don’t trust Wikipedia or the Internet in such matters, there’s always the DC/DK-published The DC Comics Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Characters of the DC Universe. Flipping to the I’s, I see Ice and Icemaiden are both included, their entries complete with their first appearances, secret identities and origins).

Ignoring The Source suggestion that this might lead to a new costume (it looks like Ice’s tank top is exploding off in that image, part of which you can see above, and her neat-o page boy is turning into a pointy icicle afro), there are at least two other less-than-thrilling suggestions about the character’s possible future.

The first is the promise that the character will be going “from pensive, shy flower to elemental badass.” Perhaps this time will be different, but Ice was already darkened and bad-assened in the ‘90s, just before she was killed off in 1994, remaining dead and off the board until she was resurrected through a combination of magic and herbs or something in Birds of Prey in 2007, which coincidentally returned her to her JLI-era costume and personality.

In other words, “Dark Ice” didn’t really work out all that well for anyone. (Above: Dark Ice. You can tell she's getting edgier and more bad-ass by the amount of cleavage pictured)

The second is Cunningham’s reference to a possible new origin for Tora/Ice to replace or update her original, “absurd” origin.

What origin is that? Tora is a princess of a long lost race of magical Ice-people who live in a secret mountain homeland in Norway. That is, magical ice princess has magical ice powers. That’s hardly an “absurd” origin story, particularly by the standards of super-comics (Ice’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Guy Gardner’s origin, for example, is that he was chosen as the back-up Green Lantern for Hal Jordan in case Hal Jordan ever couldn’t be Green Lantern. Oh, and then he was a retroactively geneteically-engineered human/alien hybrid with the ability to transform his body parts into weird weapons via magic tattoos. And then he wasn’t anymore, because that was stupid.)

By the way, the last time Judd Winick attempted to fix an origin story that wasn’t the least bit broke? That would be the troubled 2006-2008 limited series Trials of Shazam!, which effectively left the Captain Marvel and the Marvel family so toxic that they’ve been barely touched in the year since it wrapped up, as if DC was letting the radioactivity of Winick’s changes wear off.

So no, I’m not very excited about the future of Justice League: Generation Lost.


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

But enough DC Universe trivia, let’s look at some real world trivia: Quick, which Ohio city beginning with the letter C did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster collaborate on Superman in?

You did say Cleveland, right?

Because J. Michael Straczynski said Columbus in this particular post in the long, fairly healthy comments thread about one retailers disastrous attempts to try and use JMS’ Superman-walking-around storyline to promote Superman and comic in general while, naturally, selling some comics of his own.

If you haven’t read the story JMS was commenting on at all, please do—It’s one of those stories that is no doubt incredibly frustrating, even maddening, if you’re involved with it, but is actually kind of hilarious in a “Ha, ha, comics is soooooo fucked up” kind of way if you’re not.

Straczynski, by the way, really does know what city Siegel and Shuster did their Superman-making-up in, as he came back a little later down the thread to say it was just a stupid typo and to note that Ohio has far too many big cities that begin with the letter C (But, sadly, no Calebopolis…yet).

His mistake was enough to make me temporarily question everything I knew about Siegel, Shuster and Cleveland though, as I briefly entertained the possibility that JMS was right and my memory was wrong. Like, maybe they were born/grew up around Columbus and then moved north to Cleveland later…?

This sort of real-life trivia is perhaps a bit more important to me than it is to others, as I am a lifelong Ohio resident (Well, I went to college in Pennsylvania, but still…), and grew up east of Cleveland before relocating to Columbus for about a decade and then returning east of Cleveland again…I thought I knew my comics geography pretty well, and take a certain amount of pride in it.

I can forgive JMS the mistake though, as I’d be hard-pressed to name three big cities in many other states myself. I am pretty curious about Superman #703, the Superman-walks-around-Cincinnati issue, as from what JMS says Superman actually spends most of the time around Cleveland…?

Because Cincinnati is about two hours south of Columbus, and Columbus is about two to two-and-a-half hours south of Cleveland, so that’s a good four or five hours difference between cities…by car. Walking, it’s…I don’t know, really, really far? Is Superman super-walking?

Once the Columbus/Cleveland confusion was cleared up, I was still a little shocked to hear just how badly DC screwed over this retailer. Not that it’s was there job to help him with his own personal marketing efforts or decision to celebrate their book or anything, but in that they didn’t publish the book on time, thus ruining whatever he had happened to have planned in the first place.

Like, the absolute bare minimum DC had to do was just keep a shipping date, and they couldn’t even do that much. That is sad. And hilarious. Tragicomic? Let’s say tragicomic. DC and poor Kendall Swafford’s entire experience with Superman #703 is nothing short of cosmically tragicomic.

JMS explains the reason for his delay, explaining that he was very ill, which is, of course, pretty terrible for JMS, and is certainly an explanation, but not really an excuse.

I was under the understanding that DC Comics were written a good six months before they arrived in comics shops—a tidbit I learned from a letters page in a comic from the early ‘90s or so—but I guess that’s no longer the case? That six months has shrunk to a matter of weeks now? Jeez. I assumed JMS had his entire Superman-walking-around story finished in script form before the first issue saw publication. Why wouldn’t he? Why would DC want to start publishing a story arc that wasn’t even finished being written yet?

If that sort of schedule is more common than the six month lead time I remember form my youth, then it’s really no wonder so many DC books look rushed these days—they are rushed.

It’s really a shame in the case of JMS’s Superman-walking-around storyline, too. I don’t know if it’s any good or not—I haven’t read a single positive review of it, every panel of it I have seen posted here and there with reviews has made me cringe, and Eddy Barrows is one of my least favorite artists, so I haven’t been in a hurry to jump on it—but it’s certainly marketable.

The publisher should easily be able to get a bunch of local press with each and every issue of the storyline, as local TV news goofballs crack a few jokes about Superman visiting their cities on the 11 o’clock news and daily and altweekly newspapers review the issue or interview JMS or Barrows or the editors or whoever. This storyline is tailor-made for local mainstream media coverage.

Of course, to plan that sort of press, you have to have the issues actually come out when you say they’re coming out.

Two Oracles

(SPOILER ALERT, I guess. Don't read this post if you haven't read last week's Brave and the Bold #33 yet but intend to in the new future, and want to be surprised by its ending)

The other day I talked a bit about The Brave and the Bold #33 by J. Michael Straczynski and Cliff Chiang, featuring a story entitled "Ladies' Night" about Wonder Woman, Zatanna and then-Batgirl Barbara Gordon going out for a night on the town.

In one of those weird juxtapositions one sometimes finds in super-comics, the very last page of the story (which is set in the present, after Barbara Gordon had given up her Batgirl identity to become Oracle), is on a page facing a house ad for the new volume of the series Birds of Prey.

The result is that readers get to see the character drawn in two very different styles by two very different artists at the same time.

Here's a better look at the house ad, featuring Benes' muscular, buxom Oracle, with a face completely identical to that of Black Canary (They even have the exact same little identation between their upper lips and noses, which catch the light in the exact same way!):

And here's Chiang's Barbara Gordon from within the story:
I don't really care for Benes' work much, but it's kind of neat to see his version of the character side by side with Chiang's like this. They look like the same person, so its not like either artist did anything radical in terms of character design, and yet the two artists render the character completely differently.

That is, both Barbara Gordons look like Barbara Gordon, but through very different aesthetic lenses.

(By the way, if you haven't read the issue and have no interest in ever doing so, at least read the dialogue JMS wrote for Oracle in that last panel, and try not to laugh).

A few quick thoughts on a few recent announcements

I just don’t think white is a good color on Sinestro, given his coloration.

That said, I am glad he got the white ring instead of Hal Jordan (whose coloration wouldn’t look too much better in all-white anyway; that’s a hard color to pull off!), and I hope Geoff Johns leaves it on Sinestro’s finger through the end of the eighth and final issue of Blackest Night.

I think the Bad Guy Who Always Thought He was Doing the Right Thing Finally Gets a Chance to Actually Do the Right Thing story seems a lot more interesting than The Writer’s Favorite Character Saves the Whole Universe and Everyone Continues to Love Him for Being the Best Ever story, you know?


So Eddy Barrows is going to be J. Michael Straczynski’s collaborator on Superman, huh?

I was kind of curious about what JMS’ Superman would be like, but I don’t care for Barrows’ artwork...so much so that I’ll definitely be skipping this (Superman seems to be really exerting himself on that wall up there, doesn’t he? Why’s he trying so hard? It’s just a wall. And what’s with the anguished grimace? That wall must not only be really strong, it must be a real jerk to get Superman so angry).

With Marc Guggenheim taking over Action Comics, it looks like I’m going to continue to steer clear of the Super-books for the foreseeable future. The scripts of Guggenheim’s I’ve read have all lead me to believe he’s a fair writer—not brilliant, not bad enough to go out of one’s way to avoid—but I really don’t feel like paying cash money for comics written by the guy who said some really stupid things about gay marriage, civil unions and the Spider-Marriage while trying to promote his books that one time.

Oh well. There’s always that Superman: Earth One graphic novel series of JMS’…that’s still on, right? They haven’t decided to drop that and just run JMS’ planned stories in the main Superman title, have they? (Because now that I think of it, I guess it is somewhat weird to have the same writer on both versions of Superman simultaneously).


Speaking of Straczynski, this sounds like the same idea as the meta-human hospital introduced in 52, except his super-hospital has a different name and is located in a different city.

Actually, the second issue of the last volume of TMNT featured Michelangelo being taken via flying ambulance to a secret superhero hospital, and the Action Age’s Awesome Hospital seems to cover some similar ground. I’m not accusing JMS of ripping the idea off of anyone. “Superhero hospital” isn’t that unique an idea; it’s basically just a riff on all the similar superhero plus some mundane real world business ideas that have popped up in superhero comics over the years. You know, your superhero tailors, superhero bars, supervillain bars, supervillain real estate agents, etc. But the fact that the DCU already has one and JMS went ahead and made up a second one seems kinda strange to me.


I don’t generally like to just republish press release-type stuff here unless I have something to say about the comic or book being hyped, but Boom Studio’s forthcoming CBGB miniseries, bearing the name of the legendary rock club and devoted to “portraying the tales of music, discovery, heartbreak, confusion, rebellion and greatness.” The image above is the cover of the first issue, by Jaime Hernandez (obviously), and the creative roster includes comics people Kieron Gillen, Rob G., Chuck BB, Kelly Sue DeConnick and newcomers to the field like Ana Matronic (of the band Scissor Sisters), Sam Humphries of MySpace and Kim Krizan (screenwriter of Before Sunset and Before Sunrise).

Boom sent out an electronic copy of a special one-page story being used to promote the series. It’s drawn by EDILW favorite Chuck BB. Check it out:

Earth Wha--?!

Well, this is weird.

Today DC announced a new line of ongoing original graphic novels featuring continuity re-booted versions of Superman and Batman by two so-so creative teams of mixed popularity. J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis will be working on the Superman series, while Geoff Johns and Gary Frank will be working on the Batman series.

As a reader, the part of the announcement I found most exclamation point-inducing were the titles—Superman: Earth One and Batman: Earth One (and the indication that while the books are divorced from the regular DC Universe continuity, they will be set "on a new earth with an all-new continuity").

"Earth One" is, of course, the old Gardner Fox designation for the DCU, originally conceived as a way to differentiate it from "Earth Two," a parallel dimension where the Golden Age DCU existed. If you're reading this blog, then you know that other "Earths" sprouted up every time there was a Justice League story where they traveled to or interacted with a parallel dimension—and/or the company acquired the characters from a different publisher—and the company finally found their cosmology so complicated they pared it down to just one Earth at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths. And, a couple decades later, the publisher started adding new Earths between Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, making it more complicated than ever (For example, now there are pre-(first) Crisis Earth Two and post-(first) Crisis Earth Two and post-Final Crisis Earth Two, which AAAAUUUUUGGGGHHH!!!).

Anyway, that's the name DC's using for these books, which seem to be All-Star Batman and All-Star Superman, but with generally worse and objectively less popular creative teams, and a different publishing strategy (straight to trades, rather than comic-books-and-then-trades).

If you're of a certain age, the name means the established-in-the-Silver Age, original DC Universe. If you're of another certain age—my age—it probably just gives you a headache to think about ("Earth One" was the Earth that the DCU was built out of, right? That bits of the other Earths were folded into to form the DCU as it existed from COIE to IC/52? But this isn't that Earth, so I guess it's a new Earth One? Or, to use DC's own terminology, New Earth One?). If you're not a long-time DC reader—i.e. the type of a reader a series of original graphic novels is going to appeal to—than "Earth One" is completely meaningless, just some goofy name that hopefully you'll never seek out the origins of, and thus be spared trying to make sense of DC's cosmology.

So yeah, I don't get it. I mean, All-Star and Ultimate were kinda goofy, meaningless names too, but they were goofy, meaningless names without any baggage.

It is, of course, probably too early to start judging the quality of these books, but hell, I've never let that stop me from criticizing something before.

Neither one sounds very interesting to me at this point as a reader (I think they're very interesting as a publishing strategy, though).

The Geoff Johns/Gary Frank team strikes me as the stronger of the two, and while Johns is DC's most bankable star at the moment, the Secret Origin project that creative team is currently working isn't setting the Direct Market sales charts on fire. That probably won't matter in the GN market, however, as anything with Batman in it will do okay, and the less bound to a particular time and space it is, the more okay it will do. The designs look pretty terrible though. Specifically, they look like Bryan Hitch redesigning Batman to join The Ultimates line-up in the year 2000. (Stacked up against All-Star Batman, this book seems like a loser—while the results have been controversial*, there's no denying that Frank Miller is the most popular Batman writer ever, and that Jim Lee's one of the more popular Batman artists still working today...and one of the industry's more popular artists period).

The JMS/Shane Davis book looks to be the worse of the two. Given the way JMS has written the few DC superheroes I've seen him write so far, a new-continuity venture may be best for him, but he doesn't really have any sort of reputation as a guy who's going to do a great Superman comic. Davis' work I've seen mainly in fill-ins and on Superman/Batman, and while there are certainly worse artists collecting paychecks from DC, I don't think he's a very good one, and certainly more of a work-on-a-monthly artist than work-on-a-prestigious-original graphic novel, marketed-outside-the-DM kinda project. I suppose it is worth noting that the Superman image they're showing looks very, very different than the Davis art DC's previously published, so maybe he's working a new style or with new collaborators that will transform it similarly, however.

(Stacked up against All-Star Superman, this one doesn't seem as bad. Grant Morrison was more popular than JMS, but not necessarily known as a Superman writer the way Miller was known as a Batman one. And Frank Quitely is talented as all hell, but his popularity isn't that of Jim Lee's. But damn, that was a great comic book, I'd say one of the best superhero titles ever written, and one that did the best job of taking the best element of every version of Superman from every form of media he's conquered and synthesized it into a lower-case u ultimate iteration. If I were JMS, I'd be afraid to get out of bed knowing that All-Star Superman is the project everyone was going to be judging my work against for a while).

I guess we'll see. At this point, I'm most interested in seeing the price point, so we can see who exactly DC is targeting the books towards, and what (if any discernable) impact they'll have on sales of periodicals, since it stands to reason that if you just saw the latest Batman movie or cartoon or video game and wanna check out the comics, Earth One will be a more obvious entry point than any Batman comic books.

In the mean time, here are some links to bloggers talking about it, and, in a few cases, commenters a-commenting:
The Beat
Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter
Newsarama commenters
Robot 6 readers

UPDATE:

Retailers-who-are-also-bloggers have also begun weighing in:
Mike Sterling
Christopher Butcher
Brian Hibbs

It's probably gauche to link to link which links to me, but Dirk Deppey's couple paragraphs are worth a read for his reaction.

And hey look, the fine folks at Living Between Wednesdays, another comics blog with the word "Wednesday" in the title, came up with the exact same headline joke that I did. Great minds and all that...



*Because too few people will admit to themselves that All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder is the best comic book in the whole world ever.

The Worst Lines of 2007

The beauty of the comics medium is that it is one that marries the written word and the drawn image, and the ratio between the two can always be adjusted, so that one can always do a little more work than the other when it comes to telling a story.

In other words, lines like those below could easily be avoided—and should have been. Here are the most laugh-out-loud terrible sentences, some originally delivered in dialogue others in narration, by some of the industry's most popular and successful writers this year...


“Now close your eyes, gentlemen. This might hurt.”

—Mark Millar, Civil War #6



“He’s going to die because that’s what people do. It’s humanity’s shared super-power. We die.”

—Greg Rucka and friends, 52 #36



“You’re the first person ever…to get a second chance… to make a first impression.”

—Paul Jenkins, Civil War: The Return #1



"Just because you can fly-- --doesn't mean you're not in a cage"

—Brad Meltzer, Justice League of America #7



“Nobody would want to see what I saw. Don’t you get it? It was-- The Death of Captain America.”

—Jeph Loeb, Fallen Son—The Death of Captain America #1



“I don’t know who you are, lady-- --but you’ve just awoken the hawk!”

—Gail Simone, Birds of Prey #105



“Tune your ear to the frequency of despair, and cross reference by the longitude and latitude of a heart in agony.

Listen.

Listen.”

—J. Michael Straczynski, Amazing Spider-Man #544



“Those days gave way to more days for these heroes…hard traveled.”

—Judd Winick, Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special #1

Weekly Haul: December 28th

Hey gang. Sorry for the delay in posting this week’s new super-comics reviews; the Friday release day put this week’s haul smack dab in the middle of the non-comics blogging portion of my week. Thanks for your patience.

On the subject of what-gets-posted-when, look for two days’ worth of updates on Sunday, and the best of 2007 feature on Monday. Next week’s “Weekly Haul” will also be later than usual, due to the holiday and new comics not being released until freaking Friday, but should go up Friday evening rather than Saturday night.




Action Comics #860 (DC Comics) Superman, powerless under Earth’s red sun, runs around the year 3008, while we continue to meet Legionnaires. I think we’re up to 450 at this point. Plus, torture. I suppose this half-over “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” arc by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank will make for a decent trade collection some day, but for now, the only thing keeping me awake while reading is scrutinizing the costume designs. Night Girl’s is almost awesome, but the cleavage diamond window ruins the cute cat head effect. Shadow Lass has neat boots. Polar Boy looks too cool, considering the fact that he is Polar Boy.




(Note: There were two covers for this issue. I went for the one featuring the devil wearing a cape, boots and no pants. That's evil!)

Amazing Spider-Man #545 (Marvel Comics) As much as I hated the first two issues of this four-issue storyline, I had to come back for the final installment, just to see if Joe Quesada really would do what he’s been threatening all along, or if it’s all been a misinformation campaign. And, well, he does do it.

Here’s a plot summary: Mary Jane makes a rational, reasonable argument about the fact that old people tend to die, Peter Parker makes a selfish argument about how he doesn’t much mind his aged aunt dying so long as it’s not his fault, the devil shows up, Mary Jane negotiates a better deal (Throw in a secret identity reboot and you got yourself a deal!), there’s a Lost In Translation gag where she whispers something in the devil’s ear the readers can’t make out, and BAM! the franchise is right back where it was when John Romita Sr. was drawing it.

I know I’ve expressed admiration for Quesada’s insistence at undoing the Spider-marriage despite the fact that he’s the only person in the whole world who seems to think it’s the right course of action before, but the amount of wiggle room he and co-writer J. Michael Straczynski leave for a future de-re-boot kind of takes away from that (Yeah, co-writer. They share a “story” credit, and no one gets a script credit. Interesting).

The end result is that it somehow manages to make this terribly written, poorly illustrated, over-priced and delayed story even more insulting, since the highly controversial, permanent can rather easily be unchanged at the drop of a hat (And that’s the problem with this sort of cosmic storytelling; it’s like a loose thread on a sweater, as the state of the DC Universe after a few reboots too many now so readily attests).

Even more galling? Nothing really happens, except that thing that you thought was going to happen all along. How does this work? Mephisto won’t tell Peter because it’s not important. Okay, but can someone let us in on the secret? How does this change the course of recent Marvel history? I mean, the past few years were kind of important, and Spider-Man played major roles in things like Civil War—if he didn’t unmask during it anymore, then did he switch sides? And does Tony Stark even know his secret identity? Did he fight on the Pro- side at all? Did he wear his black costume? Did he beat up Kingpin and cry a lot? What?

There’s an epilogue showing us the post “One More Day”status quo, and apparently Peter lives with his aunt again, she has her old hairstyle back, he rides a bike, and he hangs out with all his old high school friends (all this to undo a marriage, but nobody could reboot Harry Osborn’s hair?) and everyone looks much more stiff and heavily photo-referenced than they did in the front of the book.

That’s the first 31 pages. What else do you get for that extra dollar, besides nine extra story pages? Three pages of Aunt May’s Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe entry (Surprisingly, she ranks a 1 in strength, speed, durability, energy projection and fighting skills, and only a 2 in intelligence; you sold your marriage for that, Spidey?), six pages reprinting the marriage of Peter and MJ, and a page of Marvel freelancers and employees (and Harlan Ellison) kissing JMS’ ass.

Brian Michael Bendis said, “I do believe this will be remembered as one of the great runs, not only of Spider-Man, but of all comics.” Yes, Will Eisner’s Spirit. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Dave Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus. JMS’ ASM. It’s particularly funny in that Bendis’ straight-faced crazy-ass compliment comes after a list of JMS’ accomplishments on the titles, many of which the preceding 33-pages just undid.

Kevin Feige, who is apparently the producer/president of Marvel Studios draws attention to the storyline in which Aunt May discovered Peter’s secret identity, just as Bendis did, which this story un-writes.

My favorite though is Mark Millar’s. He points out that JMS doubled sales on ASM (John Romita Jr. says he tripled them; which Marvel employee to believe?!), but even more amusingly, this: “Joe picking up the writing duties on Amazing Spider-Man was a seismic moment in modern comics. He, together with Daredevil writer Kevin Smith, showed Hollywood that far from slumming it in comic books.”

You know, I liked a lot of Kevin Smith’s movies; I think he’s a great writer of dialogue and I usually find something to like in everything he’s done, but c’mon, in Hollywood, he’s an extreme lightweight. His movies don’t make any serious money, he’s not a terribly talented or even skilled director, and he’s tried to make exactly one movie that doesn’t revolve around his Clerks cast, and it was his biggest failure, one which drove him to make more Clerks spin-offs.

And before he started work on ASM, JMS was a TV writer who’s greatest achievement* was Babylon fucking 5. All apologies to any Babylonians in the reading audiences, but that’s hardly a show representative of “Hollywood.” I have a hard time believing anyone in Hollywood picked up their copy of Comic Shop News one morning and spit cappuccino all over it, eyes bugging out of their head as they exclaimed to their maid, “Straczynski’s writing a funny book? But—but—he could be writing science-fiction television shows! Why would he give all that up just to write Spider-Man? Has he gone mad?”

I actually feel kind of bad for JMS at this point. I really enjoyed a lot of his run on the title, particularly at the beginning when he was working with JRJR. The addition of Aunt May into Peter’s confederacy, his job as a public school science teacher, that 9/11 issue, new villains…there was a lot to like (I didn’t read “Sins Past,” so I can’t hate on it properly, I’m afraid). From “The Other” on, however, the Spider-Man franchise has been in a nosedive in quality, and JMS goes out on the most sour note imaginable.




Avengers: The Initiative #8 (Marvel) Taskmaster replaces Gauntlet as Camp Hammond’s drill sergeant; Irredeemable Ant-Man Eric O’ Grady, fresh from his own cancelled title, joins the initiative and gets in a giant brawl with Yellowjacket and Stature; the 616 Geldoff is introduced** and Dan Slott and his new co-writer Christos N. Gage rewind things for a behind the scenes look at how Tony Stark, Mr. Fantastic and Hank Pym brought about the Initiative from the pages of Civil War. And it's good. I mean, geez, where else are you going to see Triathalon, Dragon Man, War Machine and Stature in the same comic book? Confidential to Reed and Tony: Me, I like the name “G.I. Ant-Man.” I mean, it’s a lot better than “Yellowjacket.” Yellowjackets are small, but Pym grows giant—what’s up with that?




Batman #672 (DC) So, you like this cover, in which Batman hangs a left on his Bat-Cycle? Well, I sure hope you didn’t buy this issue for all the motorcycle action, because there are no motorcycles in this comic at all. Instead, Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend Jezebel Jet parachute out of hot air balloon, that Bane-looking Batman who put a footprint on Batman’s back shows up, another Batman with a napalm gun sets police men on fire, and Bat-Mite has a dramatic entrance. A lot of potentially cool stuff to compose a cover image around, really. But Tony S. Daniel decided to go with generic image of Batman on a motorcycle, probably form his portfolio.

With that Ra’s al Ghul nonsense behind him, writer Grant Morrison gets back to the Batman versus different versions of Batman plot he’s been working on for most of his run, and he brings a lot of the Morrison-brand craziness. Hints of some kind of psychological experiment that is never more than alluded to, magic words, strange exclamations (“UDD!” “KKAA!!”) and Bat-Mite. Did I mention Bat-Mite?

It would all be terribly exciting if Daniel knew the first thing about drawing a comic book, but Morrison goes to print with the artist he has, not the artist he might have liked. So scenes which should be incredibly exciting just seem awkward, and I sit with the comic open in my lap, in stunned disbelief that the very best artist DC could find to work with Grant freaking Morrison is the guy who drew page seven, in which the placement of the dialogue bubbles and layout-suggest Wayne Manor’s kitchen is so big that the entire city of Gotham is actually inside it, and in which we also see Bruce Wayne lose about four inches of height between panels two and five.

I did like Daniel’s Bat-Mite on page 22, one the four one page splashes (There’s also a two-page splash with two smaller inset panels). It has so few panels per page it’s paced almost like manga. Or at least manga drawn by someone who’s never read any of it. Or any comic books. Or a fucking comic strip.

Still, Bat-Mite. You can’t go wrong when Bat-Mite’s involved, can you? Oh, right.

Blue Beetle (DC) This issue seems a bit worrying. The title of the story is "End Game." The story involves Blue Beetle finally getting to the bottom of The Reach's insidious plans for earth, in a one-page drawing room scene where he explains it to Danni Garrett (and the reader), and both BB and The Reach deciding it's time to finish their conflict. Is this writer John Rogers bringing the series-long conflict to a climax because it's time to move on to another big storyline, the next phase of his plans for the title? Or because it's time to finally cancel it, and DC's letting him finish up the story? (It's solicited at least through March, with the next few issues continuing what sounds like a climactic battle between Jamie and The Reach).

I found this particular issue to be a little weaker than the best Blue Beetles I've read, as it's less self-contained, but it is still solidly crafted, with a balance of drama, humor and action that is exactly what should be the gold standard for superhero comics. And damn, Jaime's parents are awesome.




The Brave and The Bold #9 (DC) Remember the first issue of this series, in which Mark Waid and George Perez told an absolutely perfect Batman/Green Lantern team-up? Or the last issue, wherein they did the same with The Flash family and The Doom Patrol? Well, this is a lot like that, save that it features not one, not two, but three team-ups, each pairing consisting of characters and teams that, if they were the only team-up in the issue, probably wouldn't have moved very many copies (There's a reason the original Brave and The Bold quickly became a Batman team-up title). So while The Challengers of The Unknown contend with the Book of Destiny as a framing device, we get the pre-52 Metal Men and Robby "Dial H For Hero” Reed, The Boy Commandos and Blackhawk during World War II (Attention Birds of Prey fans!), and the momentous*** meeting of Hawkman and the All-New Atom, Ryan Choi.

I can't think of anything new to say about how good Perez is, so I'm not going to bother. He draws about 100 characters in these 22 pages, and they all look great. I marvel at the fact that DC even lets Perez draw one of their books; it makes much of their line seem merely mediocre, and the sub-par stuff (this week, Daniel's Batman, for example) look like garbage.

It's Waid who really impressed the hell out of me this issue, though. Not only does he cram four different narratives into a single 22-page issue, but each of the done-in-1/3rd stories are complete unto themselves, with a beginning, middle and end, often with at least a bit of a twist or punchline (Tin and Robby share a secret, Brooklyn appreciates the Blackhawks after all, Hawkman creeps out The Atom). Waid also tells each of the tales in the manner befitting the times in which they originate. So the two stories featuring past properties are told without narration, but with the reader observing them from the outside. The Hawkman/Atom story, set in the modern DCU, is written with Choi narrating, as if it were from an issue of his regular series. Waid nails Choi's personality as his creator Gail Simone established it, although he actually does a much better job writing Choi than Simone's ever managed—Waid even works in Simone's insistence on using quotes at random, but without mis-using asterisks.




Fantastic Four: Isla De La Muerte (Marvel) It doesn't take much to get me to look at a Fantastic Four comic. Usually something as simple as an allusion to The Thing vs. Chupacabras, for example, or an image of Benjamin J. Grimm in kicky vacation gear, or even a creator not generally known for superheroes like, oh, say, Tom Beland, tackling the franchise. This over-sized one-shot has all that and more, so I was expecting it to at the very least be pretty interesting but, good God was I surprised at how good it actually was. This was probably the best book I read this new comic day, edging out even the technically amazing Brave and The Bold.

The story? Three days a year, The Thing disappears on a top-secret vacation, which his fellow Fantastic Four members know nothing about. The curiosity, of course, kills them, and Johnny persuades Sue to persuadet Reed to track him. They find him on a Puerto Rican island, where he gets an annual party in his honor due to his resemblance to a rocky orange fort that's long protected the island. When the other 3/4ths of the team track him and discover a weird energy signal, Ben gets to make like the fortress and protect the island, this time from an invading army of Chupacabras.

Beland gets the voices of the Four and their relationships to each other absolutely perfectly (well, Sue using slang threw me on two occasions...but otherwise!), digging genuinely deeply at a few points, like when Sue and Ben have a heart to heart, or at the emotionally mature and affecting ending. He also makes inventive, fun uses of their powers, in action, everyday and gag situations (I liked Sue's super-powered mute button on her little brother). It's really everything you could possibly want from an FF story, while managing to even slip a little education into the mix (Hell, I learned some history, science and Spanish—and I hate learning on New Comic Day!).

While I'd love to see what a Beland-illustrated FF comic would look like, this one is drawn by Juan Doe, which sounds an awful lot like an alias, but I’ll take his word for it. Doe's style is hard to describe, but it reminded me of Kyle Baker's in its ability to straddle cartooniness and serious within the same image...sometimes even the same character. Actually, I thought of Baker, Kaare Andrews and Tom Williams at different points while reading it.

It's just a really all-around gorgeous book. Paired with Beland's really well written story, it makes for great super-comics done right. I'd like to see more Marvel work from both of these guys. Pronto.

You can see several pages from the book here. And you can see some more of Doe's art here. That guy is great. Here's the cover for the Spanish version, which has one sweet logo:





Green Lantern #26 (DC) Guest-artist Mike McKone joins Geoff Johns for a cool-down arc after the "Sinestro Corps" event story. Based on his work on JSA, it seems Johns often does some of his best work in terms of character development in these between-big-story stories, and he does seem to be treating GL as a JSA-style team book, checking in with plenty of players here. Sinestro, apparently given back his pants for good behavior, has a heart to heart with Hal; John Stewart contemplates Cosmic Odyssey and helps rebuild Coast City, The City Without Fear; The Guardians carve up some Lanterns and shove power batteries into 'em and do their cryptic dialogue thing; there's some business with "The Lost Lanterns" which hardcore GL fans probably get a lot more out of then I do; and Hal abuses his power ring to make out with Cowgirl and make one wonder how dude even has a secret identity at this point. It's pretty much Johns' normal mixture of inspired DCU space opera oddity, ham-fisted stupidity and deep, intimate knowledge of his principal characters and their fictional histories.

McKone is a welcome fill-in for poor Ivan Reis, who spent the last few months drawing several million aliens into the backgrounds of his panels. I liked his work here quite a bit (although his Tomar-Tu, son of that Silver Age orange chicken lizard man Tomar-Re, looked a bit weird from the front), and would like to see him take on a DC monthly soon. Maybe something that's currently drawn terribly, like JLoA or Batman?




Hulk Vs. Fin Fang Foom #1 (Marvel) Oh Marvel, why do you have to play me like this? This sounds like it has the makings of a perfect comic book. As the title alludes, it's a fight comic featuring The Hulk and the old Kirby-created, Godzilla-sized Eastern Dragon in short pants Fin Fang Foom—guy's name is fun to read. And who's writing it? Why, Peter David, a guy who knows how to pound out a fun comic script, and knows a thing or two about writing good Hulk stories. The solicitation promises a "double-sized" one-shot, and the cover price of $3.99, a buck more than your average 22-page Marvel comic, practically guarantees it.

But in fact, all we get is 22 pages of Hulk vs. Fin Fang Foom. The rest of the book has some stats and character history on one page, and a reprint of the first Fin Fang Foom story, which Marvel just sold me last year as part of their Marvel monster month. I felt like I got ripped off after reading this (or rather, reading the parts I haven't already read), and the fact that it came out on the same day as Amazing Spider-Man, which pulled the same trick (to a lesser extent; at least that was 31 pages of new content for $4), only made it worse. Hmm, reading the solicitation again, I see not only does it say the book is "double-sized," it also neglects to mention any artists beyond cover artist Jim Cheung (like, seeing the name "Jack Kirby" there might have tipped me off I was paying for a reprint), and promises "classic slugfests from the past." That's slugfests, plural, but I got one classic, singular. The line between hyperbole and lying? Crossed.

As for the pages worth paying for, David opens with a neat boxing opening, recapping the characters' histories, which was pretty funny (“In the left corner—with the lime green skin…In the right corner, in a more avocado-green hue…Both Fighters will be wearing purple trunks. We apologize for the confusion.”). From there, we find The Hulk, back when his head was kinda square and his speech pattern was kinda brutish but not all caveman-like (I like it a little more caveman-like, to be honest), is wandering around the Arctic or the Antarctic (depending on the page in question). Reverting to Banner, he's found by some scientists, and brought into their lab. Meanwhile, one of their fellow scientists discover what they think is a new dinosaur, but we know (because we saw the cover) that it's actually Fin Fang Foom. A little The Thing homage-ing later (The story is entitled "The Fin From Outer Space”), the green goliaths fight. A little. Like, for five pages. And that's it. Not much of a conflict for a one-shot. Or $4.

Oh, and since Marvel won't tell you who the artist is, I guess I should. It's Jorge Lucas on pencils, and Robert Campanella on inks. Lucas captures the Kirby designs of the title characters perfectly well, while embedding them in a world that is populated with characters of his own design (He's not trying to draw like Kirby, beyond retaining the monsters' essential Kirby-osity). And there's one really great panel in which we see Fin Fang Foom's gigantic arms emerging from the ice, so big they seem to bend at the tips due to the tiny scientist's perspective. It's a neat trick.

But not worth $4 to see. I don't know; download it if you understand how to do that. Or read it in the store. Or pray to your heathen gods that Marvel releases a Best of Fin Fang Foom trade some day soon, and include this story in it.




Ultimate Spider-Man (Marvel) A major character dies in a story that gives the death and reaction to it shockingly short shrift. Especially when you consider this is a Brian Michael Bendis comic. That dude invented decompression! The big, two-Goblin fight, with Spidey and SHIELD getting between them, is handled well by both Bendis and Stuart "Will Be Consdered New For The Next Three Years" Immonen, and they do a fine job on the mourning pages of the issue too, but it seemed rather rushed through for what should be one of the series' biggest moments so far.



*Actually, I think The Real Ghost Busters andShe-Ra: Princess of Power were far superior to Babylon 5.

**As far as I know. Has anyone else made fun of Bendis’ Geldoff in the Marvel Universe proper like this before?

***Momentous for Atom and Hawkman fans, anyway. All 47 or ‘em.