Given that this panel is from a Kevin Smith-scripted comic...

...I suppose it passes for a subtle dick joke.

It's from Batman: The Widening Gyre, by Smith, Walt Flanagan and Art Thibert (although the artists' names read like fine print on the cover of the collection, compared to Smith's above-and-twice-the-size-of-the-title credit).

I haven't read the book yet, despite my interest in a Satanic superhero named Baphomet whose costume includes a goat head (Any advice from readers regarding whether this is a trade to buy vs. one to borrow from a library?), so I saw the panel in a little excerpt on DC's Source blog. The subject of the post, by Dan DiDio, was how Smith's original scripting of the scene called for a couple of dolphins attempting to have sex with Batman. If I'm reading DiDio's post right. Maybe the dolphins attempted to have sex with Batman in the previous scene, and they just had to edit out Batman and Aquaman's conversation about being humped by dolphins...?

Two reviews of recent #2s

Aladdin: Legacy of the Lost #2 (Radical Publishing) This second of the three over-sized issues comprising Radical’s first Aladdin miniseries departs more, um, radically from the familiar story of the familiar character. This section features Aladdin trying to woo the princess and losing both her and the lamp to the wicked vizier, but there are some unusual tangents taken.

One is the now more prominent role given to Sinbad the Sailor, who guides our hero down into a secret city of humanoid monsters below Shamballah, and then provides Al with a ride to the evil sorcerer’s flying hideout.

The other is the person Al and Sinny (Just trying out an old-school Marvel-style nickname for Sinbad, don’t mind me) consult in the secret city, a devil-like figure called the mantis queen, who resembles a sort of insect centaur lady thing.

The art in this issue is particularly…curious, as Patrick Reilly draws the first half and Stjepan Sejic draws the second half. The two each boast individual enough styles that their work doesn’t really go well together (it’s pretty obvious when the artists switch), and given the fact that this is a limited series, it’s curious that Radical split the art duties up at all, rather than simply waiting for a single artist to finish the story (or devising a studio system of some sort to make the whole thing look more consistent).

At any rate, both artists obviously have decent chops, but aside from some neat monster designs here and there, I was rather unimpressed with both. Too many scenes lacked any real sense of wonder, while the subject matter of Ian Edginton’s script seems to demand jaw-dropping visual after jaw-dropping visual. Some of it looks quite nice, but none of it was particularly magical, stop-and-stare work of the sort you’d expect for an Aladdin and his magic lamp story.

For example, see that Arthur Suydam cover above? The interiors don’t look anything like that. I’m not always sold on Suydam’s work, but that image certainly has a nice storybook quality about it, looking like a modern, computer-heavy comic book version of the sort of book plate illustration that one might have seen in an copy of a Thousand and One Nights collection from early last century or so.


Kevin Smith’s Green Hornet #2 (Dynamite Entertainment) After having established the fact that the original Green Hornet and Kato have retired after completely defeating all crime in their city, and that the original Hornet has a young, rich, handsome, in-shape son with no direction in his life in the previous issue, this next chunk of Smith’s screenplay-turned-comic book miniseries takes the next expected steps.

For example, if you weren’t quite sure if Britt Reid Jr. start wearing Green by the end of this series, this issue lets us know that he was also a valedictorian with a 4.0 average and six kick-boxing trophies. And he doesn’t respect his father because he doesn’t think the old guy’s ever done anything worthwhile in his life (the Britt the Younger doesn’t know that Britt the Elder was the Hornet).

Despite the transparency of certain elements of Smith’s plotting, the scripting is fairly decent, and this issue gives the two Britts a lot more panel-time together, as well as introducing the children of Kato and the Yakuza boss we saw the original GH and Kato take down in the previous issue.

Johnathan Lau’s artwork remains serviceable, but there are a few instances in which the storytelling is quite confused, during the set-up to the issue’s big action set piece.

Beyond what charms Smith, Lau and Phil Hester’s book might have, however, a great deal of the fun of this project remains contemplating the hypothetical movie the story could have lead to, if the studios ended up using Smith’s pitch. What I found interesting on that front this time around was the fact that both Britt Reid’s have pretty meaty roles so far, the pair of them taking part in a big ninja brawl while in their civilian identities at the end of this issue. With two generations of crimefighters in the story, if this were a movie it may have provided a fairly unique opportunity to spotlight an older, middle-aged actor as an action hero/superhero star while simultaneously having a younger, hotter lead. (And the fact that the new Kato is a woman means they could have cast a middle-aged Asian action hero like Jet Li, whose name I believe was being tossed around early on, and a beautiful young actress in the role).

I’d advise trade-waiting unless you’re very well off (I don’t think it’s worth $4 as opposed to $3), but in terms of overall quality, I think it remains fun on both its intended level and the whole, more-abstract, let’s-think-about-the-differences-between-comics-and-film-while –reading level.

Alex Ross’ cover sure is boring this time around though (also, why is the background flying by as if the car was in motion, if GH and Kato are just cold standing there next to it?)

Good thing Dynamite published 40 other covers.

(Just kidding. The only other one I can find is this one by John Cassady: ).

Review: Kevin Smith's Green Hornet #1

The first issue of Dynamite Entertainment’s new Green Hornet miniseries is by far the best comic book writing I’ve seen from Kevin Smith in about eight years.

I’m afraid that speaks more to the weakness of Smith’s recent comics output since he returned from his break (the second half of Spider-Man/Black Cat, Batman: Cacophony) then it does to the strengths of Kevin Smith’s Green Hornet #1.

In fact, the script for this issue isn’t exactly new, as it’s reportedly based on Smith’s script for a Green Hornet movie that he’s been attached to in various capacities over the years. The credit page gives Smith a “script by” credit, and Smith’s old Green Arrow pencil artist Phil Hester a “breakdowns by” credit, with artist Jonathan Lau handling pencils (Colors, provided by Jonathan Lau, are apparently put right on top of the pencils, with no inking).

The book’s unusual creation process is, I think, alone worth piquing a comics fan’s interest—if nothing else, it’s interesting to consider a comic book adapted from an unused film script for a never-made film adapting a superhero from the radio, TV and comics. And to wonder how Smith’s writing differs between the two media.

In the past, I would have guessed that his film work tends to be quite a bit better, as there’s so much money involved, and every word we eventually hear in it had a lot more filters to pass through, a lot more collaboration. His “View Askew-iverse” movies vs. his comics in the same fictional universe and starring the same characters tend to attest to this…in general (Oni’s four-part Jay and Silent Bob miniseries with Duncan Fegredo, which Smith partially cannibalized for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, being the exception, but then that film was by far Smith’s worst).

Is that why this is better than, say, the first issue of Batman: Cacophony, then? That Smith worked a lot harder on it, went through more drafts, and was much more careful, whereas that Batman miniseries was a paycheck waiting to happen, Smith a star writer immune to aggressive editing? Or was the Smith a few years ago a better writer than the Smith of today? (Intense laboring over his early Marvel work is certainly one way to explain the delays). Or maybe there’s something about the color green and the presence of Phil Hester that brings out the best in Smith?

I don’t know, but, like I said, these things are fun to consider. Well, they’re fun for me to consider, and that’s all that really matters here.

The book opens with a “Then” caption, and a sequence of The Green Hornet and Kato suiting up, getting in their sweet ride with green headlights, and then sneaking up on a meet between two rival crime families…which they proceed to break up, effectively ending organized crime in their fictional city.

It’s around page 17 that Britt Reid tells his wife Janet that he’s completed his mission, and would be hanging up the green fedora for good, in order to spend more time with his family, which includes a young son.

You probably know where this story’s going…and if not, the “Today” caption on page 21 oughta do the trick.

Britt Junior, a young, rich, in-shape scion of his father’s fortune is a layabout with no direction in life, a source of tabloid fodder. This is apparently going to be something of a Green Hornet: The Next Generation sort of story, as you could probably guess if you looked closely at the Kato in Alex Ross’s cover (or at all at the one in J. Scott Campbell’s cover) and noticed that this Kato’s a she.

Rated on the spectrum of Kevin Smith comics, this one’s somewhere in the middle—nowhere near as bad as the more terrible, even embarrassing comics to carry his byline, but not up there with his better work (His Oni stuff, Daredevil and Green Arrow) either.

It’s pretty generic stuff, but not necessarily bad generic. It’s a fairly straightforward, superhero movie-serious take on a rather derivative hero, free of any big mistakes or glitches, and thankfully able to avoid any of the unfortunate retrograde racial aspects that the Kato relationship can threaten (It’s been a long while since I’ve checked in with it, but I thought Dynamite’s Lone Ranger revival similarly did a good job of making the Ranger/Tonto relationship work well in the 21st century).

It’s also, remarkably, thankfully free of many of the weaknesses common to Smith’s work—I don’t recall seeing any gay jokes, or randomly applied sex jokes or juvenile potty talk and many of the pages are even free of Smith’s verbose scripting. Only a couple of pages between Britt and Janet look like the panels are threatening to burst under the weight of the dialogue balloons.

The art is clearly laid-out and easy to read. I might have preferred Hester himself pencil it, but that may simply be because his art is a known quantity to me, and I like it (And I’m curious what his Green Hornet and Kato would have looked like).

Lau’s art is at its best when the men have masks on, but I liked his elongated figures and the action scenes were presented well. Like the script, there’s nothing really bad or wrong to complain about regarding the art.

All in all, it’s not bad, but given how many Green Hornet comics Dynamite has planned for the near future, I think they needed more of a creative homerun than this issue provided if they plan to sustain interest in the franchise.

Of course, maybe the plan is simply to have enough series in the works to sell a ton of comics and trades around the time of the eventual movie’s release, in which case the simple fact that this isn’t toxic or radioactive is a triumph.



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

By the way, I think DC should totally do this with Smith’s script for a Superman movie from the late nineties. Maybe with Keith Giffen doing breakdowns and Kevin Maguire penciling…? It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember liking it (better than Superman Returns, that’s for sure!) and there being some neat, JLI-like scenes between L-Ron and Lex Luthor or Brainiac.

Review: Batman: Cacophony

I see Kevin Smith has gotten pretty rusty in the three years since he wrote a comic book.

About ten years ago, Smith was responsible for some rather high-profile, extremely well-received comics work, including some stuff for Oni Press based on his film characters, a Daredevil story arc for Marvel that helped return the character to some prominence, and a short, 15-issue run on Green Arrow for DC. He seemingly disappeared from comics around 2002 or so, leaving one project half-finished (Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do) and another just begun (Daredevil: The Target).

He reappeared and finished the second half of his Spider-Man miniseries in 2006, but it was hardly worth the wait—four years of not writing comics hadn’t made Smith any better of a comics writer. He returned to DC a few years after that, with Batman: Cacophony, which may just be his weakest comics work to date.

It’s pretty poor, reading like a published version of a first draft for a miniseries—it’s formless, badly paced and meandering. Many of the characters sound off, including the title character, which is something of an accomplishment. Along with The Fantastic Four’s Ben “The Thing” Grimm, Batman is perhaps the most recognizable, easy-to-get “voice” in superhero comics. One seemingly doesn’t need to write Batman’s dialogue so much as ask Batman what he’d like to say in this panel.

It doesn’t help at all that Smith is here paired with his weakest artistic collaborator to date, pencil artist Walt Flanagan (whose name, if its familiar, you may recognize from the expression “faster than Walt Flanagan’s dog” in one of Smith’s films). Flanagan’s drawn comics before, but he’s not punching in the same weight class as, say, Phil Hester, the last pencil artist Smith wrote a DC super-book for. The reason he drew the book, as Smith himself explains in the collection’s very Kevin Smith-y introduction, is that he’s Smith’s friend.

Cacophony is all around poor-bordering-on-amateurish work, and yet you can’t really blame DC for publishing it. Kevin Smith’s name may not command the sales it once did (he refers to himself as “persona non grata in the comics community,” due to “incessant lateness”), and Flanagan may not be the best possible artist for a Batman comic, but if Smith wanted to do a three-issue, throwaway story arc, the sort of thing that DC generally publishes in Batman Confidential in the hopes of moving 20-to-30K units to retailers and, if they’re lucky, produce an evergreen Batman trade, well, why the hell not? Even a fallen Kevin Smith is likely to sell twice as many issues as a Tony Bedard or Peter Milligan or Doug Moench or Fabian Nicieza or whoever they’ve got doing that month’s least-important Batman story. And hell, Flanagan knows how to draw a comics page, and is conversant in the medium—he’s better than some of the guys DC’s had drawing the main, flagship Batman title over the course of the last few eyars.

As I said, there’s an introduction to this collection (Hooray! I love introductions), and in it Smith addresses his getting Flanagan the gig in a Smith-y way—it’s a sweet, charming story of friendship that naturally leads to a gay joke:

So here we were: two comics-lovin’ dudes from the Jersey ‘burbs who both fulfilled dreams of making funny books. But we’d never done it together (y’know, a comic book; not “whoopee”).

Smith also talks a bit about Batman, whom he wrote rather extensively into his first Green Arrow story arc, “Quiver,” and was, it was announced once upon a time, supposedly going to write in a Brave and the Bold series that never materialized. Smith said he had lost the desire to write comic books, but found his love of Batman reignited by The Dark Knight, and hence this project came along (Cynical reading: He saw how successful The Dark Knight was, realized he had an in and wanted some of that sweet, sweet Bat-money).

The result was Cacophony, which was originally sold as the secret origin of Onomatopoeia, a mysterious (and kinda clever) villain that Smith dreamed up for the end of his run on Green Arrow. Instead, it turned out to be a weird, zigzagging storyline in which the characters pass through, as The Joker fights Maxie Zeus, Batman fights The Joker, and then Batman and The Joker have a long, heartfelt relationship talk.

It opens with a mysterious figure with a smooth, round black head and wearing a trenchcoat, thus looking an awful lot like O., breaking into Arkham Asylum, while Smith’s verbose narration explains how the economy has impacted the asylum and helped this stranger break in.

It turns out that he’s not O., but Deadshot, who’s the fifteenth or so assassin hired to kill The Joker. Before he can do the deed, Onomatopoeia shows up and apparently shoots Deadshot dead…the old my villain is so formidable that he can take out the villain you thought was at the top of the heap in like nothing flat trick.

Onomatopoeia frees The Joker, who immediately goes after Maxie Zeus, a crazy costumed criminal who has seemingly gone legit, but who is actually selling a party drug derived from Joker Venom (I can’t recall if I’ve ever seen a story where Joker Venom is used as a party drug, but it certainly feels like I’ve read dozens of stories where various villain poisons and super-stuff are used as the sources for designer drugs—Brad Meltzer having the Signal Man hooked on Scarecrow gas in JLoA is the last one that springs to mind).

After taking on Mr. Zsasz, the one-off villain from that has proved to be Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle’s most enduring gift to Batman writers, Batman gets involved, and after a climatic battle between Batman, The Joker and Onomatopoeia on the roof of police headquarters, Batman is given his 297th chance to either let The Joker die by inaction or save his life.

The crux of the story comes after, as Batman and The Joker have an eight-page chat in the hospital, followed by a short, four-page sequence revealing Onomatopoeia’s home life.

Smith is still an overly wordy comics writer. In fact, he seems to be an overly wordy writer in general, as his movies are incredibly talky, but the excess verbiage is no vice in film, where one hears the words, rather than sees them all gathered in once place, eclipsing the art.

There are some panels, particularly in the first issue, which look a little like those on this page (Not that Batman: Cacophony #1 is as bad as Batgirl #1…it’s not good, but it’s not that bad), and Smith still hasn’t quite mastered a golden ratio between words and pictures.

It’s also awfully crude and/or unpleasant for an all-ages Batman story.

In the first issue, The Joker jokes with Deadshot about his green pubic wig, and mentions that the Asylum cuts out “The Family Circus” from the funny pages because it riles up the inmates that “like to touch children.” When presented with a suitcase of money by Onomatopoeia, he pulls down his pants, bends over against a tree and asks that O. not tell The Mad Hatter, as “That midget’s been tyring to get me to do this for years now, and I told him I don’t swing” that way. A badly off-model, out-of-character Zsasz is about to mutilate his own penis when Batman jumps through a skylight, thinking, “I crash Zsasz’s unholy briss. Baruch haba, SCUMBAG.” When rattling off a list of what he wants to Zeus, The Joker includes “and to one day murder Batman and defile his carcass sexually.”

That’s just the first issue, or first third of this collection, and I sort of quit paying attention after that (although the finale includes a rather random bit, in which The Joker mentions to Batman that he “saw a little bit of your junk” when the Dark Knight was changing out of a disguise and into his Bat-costume behind a curtain.)

I’ve complained about DC’s inclusion of discussion of heinous sex crimes and (attempts at) sex humor in their DCU books so often that I’m sick of hearing me talk about it too, but this is yet another rather striking example of the publisher refusing to label anything outside the Vertigo line for “Mature Readers” and then proceeding to try and stuff square mature story pegs into their round holes, the ultimate result being that the books read exceptionally juvenile. It’s kind of like watching an R-rated movie cleaned up and dubbed for broadcast on network TV,

The most interesting bit of the book is that conversation between Batman and The Joker, in which Smith takes his stab at trying to explain their relationship and why neither’s killed the other yet—do they even want to kill each other?

The idea is that The Joker is pumped so full of morphine and “an ass-load of mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics” that he’s “momentarily psychologically balanced,” so Batman wants to ask him, “Do you really want me dead? Do you really want to kill me?”

Batman reveals that he doesn’t want The Joker to die, if for no other reason than that he doesn’t ever want to see someone die in front of him again (which probably makes spending his whole life in the pursuit of serial killers a less-than-ideal career choice). He even goes so far as to reveal that that’s the reason he’s Batman; to prevent deaths.

The Joker says he does want to kill Batman, and that that’s the reason he kills so many people, and the reason he’s crazy at all. Once Batman’s dead, The Joker says, he’ll quit being The Joker (So shouldn’t Batman just kill himself, to save thousands of future lives, if he can’t bring himself to kill The Joker to save thousands of future lives…?)

I say it’s an interesting scene, and it is from the perspective of seeing a writer with a fairly individual voice wrestle with one of the more artificial aspects of one of our most prominent superheroes, an aspect plenty of other writers have wrestled with and come to different conclusions regarding.

But it doesn’t quite seem to belong in this story, as very little leading up to it mattered–the first two and a half issues were essentially just random events necessary to get a knife in The Joker’s chest to set up yet another choice of whether to save him or not for Batman. (I also question the choice to render The Joker temporarily sane through drugs—mental health is treated so bizarrely in Batman comics that it’s almost necessary to completely ignore it, or at least think of Arkham’s inmates as “mad” in a Victorian or gothic novel sort of way, rather than clinically insane in a real world way. Because, really, if all you need to do to The Joker to make him mostly insane is to pump him full of drugs, why isn’t he constantly being pumped full of drugs? Even if there are laws against forcibly drugging genocidal madmen against their will, why doesn’t Batman just break into Arkham and drug The Joker each night? It sure would solve a lot of problems and save a lot of lives).

As for Onomatopoeia, his presence in this story is completely unnecessary. His M.O. when he first appeared in Green Arrow was as a villain who stalked normal, non-super-powered superheroes. The Green Arrows certainly fit that bill. Apparently, he visited Gotham—a damn fertile hunting ground—to take on Batman, and The Joker was simply bait for Batman (Hmm, if you can’t take down either Green Arrow, why would you go after Batman? Why not start in Gotham with an Obsidian or Azrael or Huntress or Pagan or someone and work your way up to Batman?)

What do we learn about Onomatopoeia? Nothing, other than the fact that under his mask and coat he’s apparently a normal, boring-looking family man who dresses up to try and kill vigilantes as a hobby. Panels show him greeting his family at a small, two-story home with a picket fence as he seemingly returns from vacation, checks his mail, and puts away his costume in his secret room.

Flanagan, who is inked by Sandra Hope and colored by Guy Major, improves by leaps and bounds in the space of these 90-ish pages, so that his Joker and Batman resemble Graham Nolan-esque versions during their conversation at the end, but even the that improvement is a sign that he probably wasn’t ready for this project yet, if his style is still so fluid and developing.

Like I said, he’s hardly the worst Batman artist around, and is better than some of the guys drawing the character these days, but his character’s are often off-model, even the models he himself has established in the book. If he is still improving, as the work within seems to indicate, then his current collaboration with Smith (the limited series Batman: The Widening Gyre, which Smith’s introduction promises is much better than Cacophony) is probably a better, more polished comic…and the one after that will be better still.

"F---ing Dick [Grayson] has a girlfriend, why can't I have a girlfriend? I f--- a lot, but why can't I be involved with somebody?"

That's filmmaker turned comics writer/filmmaker Kevin Smith talking to Rick Marshall at MTV's Splash Page about his current DC series, Batman: The Widening Gyre. Or, more specifically, that's Smith paraphrasing Batman's thought process during the series, in which the Dark Knight wonders if maybe he could scale back his never-ending war on crime enough to accommodate having a relationship.

I kinda wish Smith actually wrote Batman's narration boxes and dialogue like that. I don't know if it would make for better comics, but I'm sure it would make for funnier comics (Disclosure: I haven't read Smith's Batman comics yet, so maybe they're brilliant already). I guess that doesn't really sound like Batman though. Maybe for an All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder spin-off...?

Anyway, the Splash Page piece contains an "exclusive" reveal of which character from Smith's series will get his or her own ongoing title from DC in the future. It's not really hard to guess, since from what I've seen by flipping through the first issue there's only one new character so far, but Smith does reveal that character's name, so follow that link to find out, if you're interested.

I think it's pretty interesting, if only because it would be hard—if not impossible—to even imagine an ongoing DC comic book series starring a title character with that particular name in, say, the 1980s and maybe even early '90s, back when so many people were so worried about things like Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal turning children into Satanists.

I'm not sure if that means DC is less concerned with being perceived as a publisher of comics for kids any more (they've publicly stated that the majority of their books are for teenagers and up), or if it reflects the fact that the people who used to expend so much energy worrying about how the occult in pop culture might effect the nation's youth have moved on to other concerns, like stopping gay folks from ever being able to get married or making sure affordable, universal health care never ruins our great nation.

Between the new Smith character's book and Magog though, DC sure will have a lot of comics named after the enemies of God...

Laughs about butt-sex, and Batman: The Brave and The Bold (Not in relation to one another, though)

Two of the most dependable sources of comics-related humor on the Internet have been lightening up my Black Friday, and, oddly enough, they're both talking about sodomy.

First, Dan DiDio played 20 questions with Newsarama's Matt Brady, and when Brady asked why there wasn't a mature readers label on Batman: Cacophony, since it included scenes of The Joker discussing the color of his pubic hair and bending over so Onomatopoeia could have anal sex with him (while alluding to the fact that The Mad Hatter has always wanted to have anal sex with him as well), DiDio challenged his critics who thought that maybe that's a little more mature than is necessary for a comic featuring this guy:


And I will challenge everybody on that – one of the things I think Kevin [Smith] does so deftly is that he walks the finest of lines. The implications of certain scenes and certain dialogue, if you read into them further, could be deemed mature, but I think he stops the story right at the right spot, so we don't have to consider labeling in that fashion. I think that's what makes him a great writer.


See what I mean? DiDio is hilarious. This is, by the way, the first time anyone has ever praised Kevin Smith for the subtlety of his writing. So, if I understand what DiDio is saying, Cacophony doesn't need to be labeled mature because talking about prison sex, clown fetishes and ass-fucking for money is fine so long as no one actually says the "F-word" and Onomatopoeia doesn't actually take up the Joker on his offer to let him fuck his ass.

Basically, it's like Jaws or Alien, only instead of not-showing us a shark or an alien, Smith was not showing us anal-sex. Smith is the Spielberg of man-on-man supervillain sodomy.

Secondly, Abhay Khosla finishes up his occasional series of essays on Blue Beetle, taking into account its recent cancellation and one-time Blue Beetle writer John Rogers' reply, Sean Witzke's suggestion that those sad about the news shove it up their asses, and his own suggestion of what people should maybe shove up their own asses.

Khosla's commentary is as amusing as always and, in this case, devastatingly withering. While I actually did like a big chunk of the book, I can't really say he's wrong about the book either (But then, I'm not a 12-year-old nephew without a doctorate in DC Continuity; I'm a 31-year-old uncle with one).

You know what is perfect for 12-year-old nephews and 31-year-old uncles alike though? Cartoon Network's Batman: The Brave and the Bold. I lack cable and thus am eagerly awaiting an eventual DVD collection, but I did manage to catch the second episode and, holy shit guys, it was pretty much perfect. Batman teamed up with Plastic Man and Fire to fight the Gentleman Ghost for, like, three minutes, and then Batman and Plastic Man went to Dinosaur Island, where Gorilla Grodd and his gorilla minions were riding dinosaurs and working on a gun that turned Batman into a gorilla. Also, there's a flashback featuring Kite-Man.

Watching the title sequence on YouTube and pausing it over and over during the bit where they flash Flinstones vitamin looking images of various guest stars, I got even more excited about this awesome damn show.

I mean, we all knew Blue Beetle III, beard-free Green Arrow, beard-rocking Aquaman, Fire, and Plastic Man were going to be on the show. But did you see who else flashed on the screen? Etrigan, The Demon! Dr. Fate! Green Lantern Guy Gardner! Bronze Tiger! Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth! Jonah Hex! And B'wana Beast (or possibly Freedom Beast). Still, one of the Beasts!

Alright, that's all I got in terms of "content" for tonight. Reviews and some actual original content will resume tomorrow, and you can look forward to a (mildly) exciting (to me) announcement on Monday morning. Huzzah!

The most depressing thing ever

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

—Joe McCulloch, Jog—The Blog


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

—Kevin Church, Beaucoupkevin.com


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

—Chris Sims, The Invincible Super-Blog


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

— Diana Kingston-Gabai, The Savage Critics


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

—Greg McEllhaton, Comic Book Resources


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

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

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

And that brings us to the depressing part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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