Things I had scanned and had planned to post in the past, but never did for various reasons

Those of you who hang on my every word (that is, just me) may recall that on Monday night I mentioned that I was going to review a really cool small press book, but, because DC and Marvel's April solicits were being released and they're much easier to write about, I'd push that review off until Thursday night. Well, I'm not going to write that review tonight either.

See, I thought the book—Hellen Jo's Jin & Jam #1—was a 2008 release, since I'd seen it on at least one best of list, but the publisher informed me that it won't actually be released until later this month, so I think I had better wait until closer to the release date to review it.

So what will I post tonight? Well, I was cleaning out my scanned images the other day, and ran across a couple of things that I'd gone to the trouble of taking to the library and scanning for posts, but then ended up never doing anything with them.

Well, I'll do something with them now!

This was going to be a Friday Night Fights post, a four-panel Big Barda vs. Plas battle, but I ended up quitting trying to keep up with FNF, as it was too difficult to make sure I had something each Friday night when I was using a public library scanner and access was never guaranteed:


It's from 1997's JLA #33, Mark Waid's third two-part fill-in for Grant Morrison on JLA, when the latter was winding down his run and the former was apparently gearing up for his. One of the White Martians from "New World Order" that was trapped in a human body and identity thought it was Bruce Wayne and started impersonating him. Batman obviously knew it wasn't the real Bruce Wayne, but couldn't tell the rest of the team how he knew that (this was before the Brad Meltzer everyone-knows-everyone retcon, and the fact that Batman wouldn't reveal his identity to his teammates was a major plot point during Waid's run).

Batman had to separate the Leaguers who did know his secret identity from those who did not, and this is the "not" group. Plas, Barda, Orion, Steel and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner get dressed up and go undercover at a casino to keep tabs on the fake Bruce Wayne.

One has to suspend one's disbelief quite a bit when reading certain superhero comics. With this volume of JLA, for example, once had to just accept the fact that Plastic Man was never sued for sexual harassment or Boom Tube-d to an Apokalytpian fire pit by Barda or her husband.

The art here is by penciller Mark Pajarillo, who was the most frequent fill-in artist for Howard Porter, although I haven't seen his work anywhere in quite a while.



This was going to be part of a post collecting a bunch of Hulk's battle cries, but when I abandonded the idea when it started to look like too much work:

It's from Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen's way too short-lived volume of The Defenders, one of my favorite comics ever. I believe this was from 2001's #7, part of an ongoing story in which Namor had his teammates help him liberate Atlantis from Attuma and a bunch of underwater villains, and Hulk was fighting Orka-with-a-K. Orka draws strength from whales, so he kept calling more whales to the scene to become stronger, which would make Hulk angry, and he'd get stronger, and the process just continued until the end of the story. The rest of the team was sitting around a table enjoying a victory banquet at the end of the story, and Hulk and Orka were still out there on the ocean floor whaling on each other (Ha ha!).

I liked just about every word of dialogue everyone spoke in this series, but I really like Hulk shouting, "Hulk's mother wore sensible shoes!"



A year or two ago, I was reading an old encyclopedia of superheroes, and at some point I realized that for some reason owl costumes almost always look really, really stupid. Even the coolest owl-themed costumes—the JLA: Earth 2 version of DC's Owlman, Ultimate Adventures' Hawk-Owl—were pretty goofy-looking, to say nothing of the Global Guardians' Owlwoman, whose most owl-like feature was that she had a single feather on her costume, or the original Silver Age Earth-3 Owlman, who just looked like less fit Batman wearing a taxidermied bird's head as a toupee.

Unfortunately, I gave up on this post before I even took notes, so I don't remember anything about this owlman—

—although I think he was either from a novel or radio show, not a comic. His name was actually The Owl, same as the next fellow.

This "The Owl" is purple for some damn reason, but I kinda like the look on his face:

I believe Alex Ross was planning to use/is using him in one of those Project: Superpowers comics, unless there's another purple-rocking Owlman.

Finally, here's Owlwoman 1,000,000, from 1999's DC One Million 80-Page Giant, a member of Justice Legion-A. She appeared in the anthologies final story, "Crisis One Million" by Grant Morrison, Dusty Abell and Jim Royal:

I assume Abell designed her appearance, but perhaps it was Morrison. It definitely looks Nite-Owl influenced, doesn't it? Like, maybe she just stole his costume and asked a tailor to alter it for her?


Finally, here's an old Wonder Woman villain apparently named Master Destroyer:

I don't know exactly where this is from, or what his deal is. I assume I scanned him to include in this 2007 post about Wonder Woman villains, and ended up not using him, perhaps because he wasn't as awesome as The Blue Snowman or Red Centipede. Oh, and linking to that post reminds me— Gail Simone, are you out there? Where's Mouse Man at? What's the hold up? He would be perfect for Wonder Woman or Secret Six. Catman vs. Mouse Man! Think about it, won't you?

The Greatest Five Panels in Kurt Busiek's Career

I've been writing a lot of pretty nice things about Kurt Busiek lately. Not only is he currently writing Superman, but thanks to the M.I.A. Action Comics creative team, he's pretty much writing that title too. The result? The Super-books are currently better-written then they've been in...well, at least since I've been reading comic books.

Busiek's comics career is long and storied, and he's done a lot of great comics (and, yeah, a couple of not-so-great ones too). Recently he attempted to do the impossible and successfully relaunch Aquaman without the book's title character, with some pretty mixed results (which is a win, considering the doomed nature of such an endeavor). And, before that, he made Conan totally awesome again.

His signature work, Astro City deserves all the accolades it's racked up over the years, and belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who loves superheroes.

Teamed with George Perez, he penned the superlative JLA/Avengers and had a stellar run on The Avengers (probably my favorite Avengers run, for what that's worth).

His Marvels collaboration with Alex Ross is one of the most essential Marvel Universe comics ever published, and his Superman: Secret Identity is mandatory reading for any and all DC super-fans.

Untold Tales of Spider-Man? Shockrockets? Arrowsmith? Thunderbolts? Great stuff.

With that much good stuff on his resume, it might seem like it would be difficult to select a single work and confidently hold it above all the others and say, "This, this is the single greatest acheivement of Kurt Busiek! This is his masterwork! This is the very best work of a very good writer!"

It might seem like it would be difficult to do that, but it's really not. That's because one of Busiek's works is so far superior to all of his others that it's on a whole other plane. Marvels and Astro City wish they were a tenth of the comic book that this series was.

And what book is this that represents the zenith of a modern master of super-scripts?




Yes, 2001's The Defenders, which Busiek co-wrote with penciler Erik Larsen. The greatest comic book ever published by human beings, Busiek and Larsen's Defenders immediately surpassed the works of all of Marvel's classic creative teams, even the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby and Lee/Ditko teams, and would ascend to a level of quality that no Marvel book since has been able to touch. The very best issues of New X-Men or Garth Ennis' Punisher comics or Ultimate Spider-Man were almost as good as the lesser issues of The Defenders (the ones featuring guest-artists instead of Larsen and his inker Klaus Janson), but they couldn't possibly compare to even the mediocre issues of Defenders.

Larsen's brilliant badness featured a primitive, primal energy that only Kirby could have hoped to achieve, only with a rough terrible-ness that Kirby couldn't have achieved no matter how fast he drew or how many corners he cut. Larsen's pencil art was a mixture of awful superhero art and great cartooning, creating a style completely unknown to Marvel readers.

Larsen and Busiek were able to find an ingenious way to reunite the original anti-team into a cohesive unit that could team up every single month, while keeping their reluctance to do so completely intact, even slowly ratcheting that reluctance up issue by issue. They also managed to distill the characters into their most iconic, mythic essences.

The Hulk was a big, stupid baby who talked like a caveman and was always breaking things. Namor was a pompous ass who hated everyone. Dr. Strange was a remote, distant, pompous ass. Silver Surfer was a remote, distant, pompous ass...on a surfboard. The other Defenders were a bunch of self-conscious losers who were just glad to be in the same comic book as Hulk and Namor.

Together they faced Red Raven and the Bi-Beast, an alliance of all of Marvel's stupidest underwater villains, the fearsome Orrgo and MODOK and his team of Headmen, and remember, this was back before the Internet told you how cool MODOK was.

The series only lasted 12 issues, ending in a completely silent "'Nuff Said" special issue that ranks up their with "The Anatomy Lesson" as one of the best and most influential single issue comics stories in history. But that was simply because it was caviar for the masses. It would take fans a few years to realize that what they had failed to buy in droves was actually the greatest thing they could ever have the chance to read in their entire lives.

But I can narrow the zenith of Busiek's writing career down even further than a single series. We can narrow it down to a single issue of this series, Defenders #2, co-written by Larsen and illustrated by Larsen and Janson. And from there we can narrow it down even further, to a single scene.

Here then, are the greatest five panels in Kurt Busiek's career:








Genius!