I have reviews of two graphic novels in this week's Las Vegas Weekly, the Halloween issue. The books are Eric Hobbs and Noel Tuazon's The Broadcast, set during Orson Welles' Halloween War of the Worlds performance, and Scott Snyder, Stephen King and Rafael Albuquerque's American Vampire Vol. 1, which is, obviously, about vampires. You can read them here.
I liked 'em both, something which sorta surprised me regarding American Vampire, given how far I figured I was from the target audience (True fact: I have never, ever, ever read a book by Stephen King before, barring a failed attempt in junior high to try and read The Stand ; American Vampire was actually the longest piece of King's fiction-writing I've ever read). Of the three creators, Albuquerque was the only one whose work I was familiar with prior to reading. He does a pretty incredible job too; I don't know if he simply massively improved in the last few years or was super-inspired by the material and rose to meet it or what, but as much as I liked his previous work, his American Vampire art seemed a good ten degrees stronger.
As for The Broadcast, if you're intrigued by the premise, but not convinced by the cover art, do yourself a favor and check out this online preview, which gives a much better idea of what Tuazon's work looks like (So too does his entry on the Top Shelf website supporting his Top Shelf 2.0 contributions and, of course, his own blog. The cover of the The Broadcast is actually by the extremely talented—but quite different from Tuazon!—Francesco Francavilla.
I have short reviews of Dylan Horrocks' must-read Hicksville and Simon probably-should-read 100 Days of Simon in the last two issues of Las Vegas Weekly. You can go read them if you like.
By the way, did you know the Dylan Horrocks who wrote and drew Hicksville is the same Dylan Horrocks who had a short run on DC's previous volume of Batgirl, which kicked off with the cover above? It's true! I suddenly want to break out that longbox and re-read that run now, knowing the guy who wrote Hicksville wrote it.
I really rather liked pencil artist Adrian Sibar's weird art work, but I would have loved to see what a Batgirl run written and drawn by Horrocks would have looked like...
Can't get enough of me? I have a short review of Image Comic's original graphic novel One Model Nation in Las Vegas Weekly this week. You can read it here. The review that is, not the graphic novel. You'll have to buy that at a comics shop, or borrow it from your local library. (And I think you should, as it's pretty great).
I have a short review of Fantagraphics' jaw-dropping collection The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley's Cartoons from 1913-1940 in today's Las Vegas Weekly, which you can read here. It was a rather challenging review to write, as the most perfect and appropriate review of the book is the one mentioned on Fanta's site as "a verbatim office reaction to seeing the book for the first time"—"Holy motherfucker!" Seriously, that about covers it in just two words. You can download a preview of the book here, and think of your own appropriately profane exclamations.
I have a review of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe in this week's issue of Las Vegas Weekly, which you can read online here.
I've had at least one regular reader ask if I could maybe do a weekly round-up of links to my posts at Blog@Newsarama.com and thought about doing so because, hey, easy EDILW content, but never have because it seems like more work than it's worth.
Now that the current Blog@ team is starting to get settled in, and I've been contributing for about two months now, I've got a more or less regular schedule, which I guess I should mention here at my online home base.
Monday, Wednesday and Fridays my thrice-weekly link-blogging post Linkarama@Newsarama will run. Every Tuesday around 5-ish I post 'Twas The Night Before Wednesday..., which is a run-down of what new releases look good/terrible/interesting that week, accompanied by a terrible cartoon of the sort EDILW readers are familiar with. Saturday and Sunday I'll have reviews; this past weekend I covered 08: A Graphic History of the Campaign Trail and this past Sunday I covered Frankenstein: Prodigal Son Vol. 1. Thursdays and Fridays are days taht I don't have any regular features planned to run on, so those will usually be when I'll do any essays, general punditry, bad jokes, worse comic strips or whatever.
This week's Las Vegas Weekly comics review is of the IDW release of Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam's Therefore Repent!. If you happen to have read Therefore Repent!, let me know what you thought in the comments. It's a pretty different sort of book, so I'm really interested in other people's take on it.
If that whole being an editor thing doesn't work out for DC's Jann Jones, maybe she can get a job hand-crafting products for DC Direct. Did you see that image of her crocheted Ambush Bug in this week's DC Nation column. I'd totally buy one of those.
The Ambush Bug doll that is, not the new Ambush Bug: Year None miniseries. Well, actually, I will buy that, too, but that's not what I was referring to two sentence ago. I'm both a little surprised and a little impressed that DC's even attempting an Ambush Bug mini.
Considering how terrible a lot of these returns to "old favorites" sell, be they miniseries or maxiseries, new retooled versions by newcomers or straight-up original flavor and creators, they've got to know this thing isn't going to do very well. And yet they keep rolling 'em out—Checkmate, Omega Men, Suicide Squad, Infinity Inc., Captain Carrot, et cetera. I guess you've gotta kind of admire that. Or at least be happy you're getting a new Ambush bug series. (Me, I woulda first tested the Bug waters by commissioning Keith Giffen and Phil Jimenez to do a JLA: Classified story set during 52 #24 over a year ago, but what do I know).
How weird was it to see not one comic-centric cast on The Colbert Report of late, but two—both Marjane Satrapi and Joe Quesada sat down with Colbert this week (although I suppose the former was there more as a movie maker than a comics creator, but the line is awfully blurry, given that she made a movie based on the comics that she made).
That was the first time I've seen Satrapi in live-action...I'm much more used to her comics avatar and, when I think of "the real" Satrapi, I think of that black and white photo on the inside back covers of her books. I was kinda surprised how different Satarapi the comics creator looks from Satarapi the comics character, although I suppose there's no reason I should have. Most of the time when I see the "real" cartoonist after spending hundreds of pages with their self-drawn avatars, I'm surprised by the gulf between the two. When I bought some comics from Jeffrey Brown at SPACE one year, for example, I couldn't believe he was actually him. Joe Sacco's glasses aren't really opaque, James Kochalka's not really an elf, Art Spigelman's not really a mouse nor does he wear a mouse mask, etc.
In fact, the only autobio comics creator who looks exactly the same in both their comics and in real life that I can think of off the top of my head is probably Harvey Pekar, and Pekar doesn't draw himself, but is drawn by others. Someone smarter and better connected than I could probably write a pretty intersting article about why autobio comics creators draw themselves the way they do, and why they tend to look less like their avatars than autobio comics creators who are drawn into their comics by other people (ala Pekar).
Or maybe not.
Regarding Quesada's appearance, I thought he handled himself much, much, much better than he did upon his first appearance on the Report during which I cringed and winced quite a bit. Of course, he and Colbert seemed to have rehearsed much of the interview, which might have helped account for that, but I didn't cringe or wince once.
Thinking about Quesada as media personality—how come Dan DiDido's never on the Report or Howard Stern?—it occurred to me that as much as he tries to channel Stan Lee's old huckster persona, it never quite feels right. That is, seeing him in public as the face of Marvel Comics still seems off, as opposed to seeing Stan as the public face of Marvel.
Stan seemed like an eccentric uncle, whereas Quesada often seems like a smarmy older brother, and I'm not certain of why that is (Maybe just that Lee's old enough to be my grandfather, whereas Quesada and I are much closer in age?).
I think part of it might just be that Lee is a more strking visual persona. He has a "look" and a sound all his own. The two-tone hair, the shaded-glasses, the moustache—Lee is designed into a character. Quesada's just a guy with a haircut that makes me think he's a jerk. Maybe he should cultivate some unique physical attributes, in the hopes of acheiving a sort of iconic visual look some day.
This week's Las Vegas Weekly comics review is of Tokyopop's Manga Sutra Vol. 1 by Katsu Aki. Click on over to check it out. I liked it quite a bit, but aside from the book being a good read, I find it an extremely interesting type of book, unlike any other graphic novel I've read so far. And that's always a good thing.
And while I'm linking to things, my fellow Best Shots @ Newsarama.com contributor Lucas Siegel announced earlier in the week that the Shots In The Dark forum is new and improved, and has a few creator forums up and running, including ones for Bump creator Mark Kidwell, Return to Wonderland writer Raven Gregory, and Marvel colorist Christina Strain. Lucas guarantees that "it's a nice, chill place to chat with people who aren't douchebags," so check that out. Additionally, Best Shots mastermind Troy Brownfield's Shotgun Reviews also has a forum, which is a good place to engage the Best Shots critics and tell them what a bunch of jerks they are for not liking the comics you like and disliking the comics you dislike.
1.) Meanwhile in Las Vegas…: This week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics review is of the better late than never Teen Titans Lost Annual, which I totally loved.
It wasn’t just the sight of a Dick Sprang-y looking Robin hanging out with a Jay Stephens-y looking JFK, in brilliant all-Allred ink and color (above), although, let’s face it, that is awesome.
It was the happy ending Haney and company gave our most tragic president:
(And, after a week of thinking on it, I wonder if that had anything to do with DC’s decision to release this…the thought that saying Kennedy survived his assassination and it was an alien doppelganger that died in his stead—complete with a drawing of the iconic image of his mourning son at the funeral—crossed some kind of line of good taste?)
The Stepens/Allred/Allred team is seriously great. Their Wonder Girl is probably the best damn Wonder Girl I’ve ever seen. Here she is in flight:
And here she is receiving foot-worship from an alien hippie:
I know future Haney “Year One” Titans stories are out of the question, but I do hope to see some more from the Allreds at some point. If only because I think a lot of folks won’t read this story simply because it’s not in a trade. And where could you collect it in a trade?
Maybe a trade full of Allred Teen Titans stories? So far we’ve got the Lost Annual, and this gem
“Doom Patrol Vs. Teen Titans” from Solo #7.
But that’s still not enough to fill a whole trade. So People In Charge of Assigning Awesome Projects at DC, please see that Mike Allred gets at least one more project featuring the Year One Titans at some point soon, okay?
2.) Careful! Comics blogging can make you so used to bitter nitpicking you’ll find yourself dissecting and criticizing the most innocent and innocuous stuff: While at my local library the other day, I saw a rowdy group of little boys leaving the children’s area with their moms. I would guess they were around four years old or so.
They were all excitedly shouting, “I spin the web! I spin a web!” and I soon realized they were playing Spider-Man.
The boy closest to me made a fist and held his arm out straight in front of him, making a spittle-fueld “Foosh!” sound and saying, “I spin a web!” again.
And I thought to myself how he was holding his hand wrong. Spider-Man only shoots webs from his fist while wearing his black costume. Otherwise using his web-shooter requires him to tap the palm of his hand with his middle two fingers and make that Ditko sign.
And the sounnd of his web-shooters is clearly “Thwip!” and not “Foosh!”
And then I realized I was nitpicking a four-year-old’s imaginary play in the back of my head, and hated myself.
I heard the mother telling the boys to calm down as I passed them, and the one who went foosh protested, “But we were just spinning the web to save the day.”
3.) On second thought, let’s stick with complaining about “One More Day” for a while longer: Sorry gang, but I just can’t muster even an iota of outrage over the fact that there’s a quasi-famous naked lady painted as Wonder Woman on the cover of some issue of Playboy. I honestly don’t see anything wrong with it at all.
As a standalone image, there isn’t really much difference between that cover image and your average Adam Hughes Wonder Woman cover, beyond the difference in media.
In fact, I think DC hyper-sexualizing their flagship superheroine in their comics is a lot more offensive than Playboy doing it in a shrink-rapped softcore porn and men’s interest magazine.
The little kids who see Wonder Woman on the Justice League Unlimited cartoons and in their toy aisles can go into a comic shop and pick up an issue of Justice League of America and see Ed Benes drawings of Wonder Woman’s body straining to escape her tiny costume—including that one issue where Lex Luthor seems to be alluding to sexually torturing her, or that one where her pants completely disappear. These hypothetical little kids hypothetically reading JLoA would see the “real” Wonder Woman in a constant state of undress being treated as a sex object by the villain (if they’re not sophisticated enough to realize it’s actually the artist responsible).
The same little kids won’t be able to buy an issue of Playboy and see what’s inside it because, well, they don’t sell issues of Playboy to little kids. And if kids were to somehow get their hands on a copy—maybe finding it under their dad’s bed or in his closet—it should be clear to them that it’s not the “real” Wonder Woman they’re looking at. First clue? She’s clearly wearing paint, not a costume. And she’s in a magazine, not a comic book or cartoon.
So, what we have here is what I gather is a professional celebrity (she’s from reality TV, right?) getting paid a good deal of money to take her clothes off in a magazine for adults who want to look at pictures of ladies not wearing any clothes, one who happens to be painted up like Wonder Woman—a sort of naughty superheroine look instead of, oh, a naughty nurse or naughty school girl or naughty librarian or whatever.
(Do nurses associations get upset every time they see a scantily clad lady in a tiny white dress with the zipper halfway down clenching a stethoscope in her teeth?)
For other examples of characters dressed as naughty superheroes and superheroines, please see Justice League of America Wedding Special #1, in which Green Lantern hires a bunch of strippers dressed like Marvel heroines for Green Arrow’s bachelor party, and the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special #1, in which Black Canary’s bachelorette party is at a male strip club called “The Meat Locker” wherein the strippers are all wearing scanty versions of DC’s male superhero costumes.
4.) Which of my favorite Justice Leaguers will die next?: I do hope this item from this week’s Lying in the Gutters column is misinformation Rich Johnston was purposely fed by DC (it’s marked with a “caution” light in Johnston’s system of accuracy): “If Warner won’t let DC Comics kill off Batman in “Final Crisis," who can DC get away with introducing to the Grim Reaper? I mean it has to be decent names, but it also has to be someone that a major franchise license isn’t totally resting on… the two names marked for karking I’ve been given by a DC source are Martian Manhunter and Aquaman.”
I thought both of them were supposed to be involved in some capacity in the upcoming Justice League movie (which I kinda hope never actually gets made…oh hey, good news on that front!), so I would assume Warner Brothers wouldn’t be enthusiastic about either of them dying either.
But regardless, Aquaman is already dead. He’s been dead for months now. When his last series ended, it was revealed that part of his spirit went into Arthur “Aquaman II” Curry and the rest of it mutated into The Dweller of the Deep, who then died and turned to water. So he’s, like, dead, but it’s a death so stupid that he should be pretty easy to bring back. But if they’re going to re-kill him in Final Crisis, they better hurry up and bring him back to life soon.
It’s worth noting that a lot of DC creators and editors don’t seem to even know this. There was Brad Meltzer writing Aquaman II as if he was Aquaman I in his last issue of JLoA, and I saw this panel from Green Arrow/Black Canary in Rachelle Goguen’s reviews of last week’s comics: So I don’t know, unless they, um, kark Aquaman II in Final Crisis, that just leaves Martian Manhunter. He’s not currently appearing regularly in JLoA or any other title, and DC seems to have a hard time figuring out what to do with him when he’s not in a Justice League comic.
On the other hand, his whole “last of his race” angle makes killing him seem kind of drastic, and the peculiar nature of his shape-changing physiology pretty much makes him impossible to kill-kill anyway.
On the other other hand, unlike Superman, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman's mom, Hawkman, Aquaman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Green Lantern Guy Gardener, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Green Arrow Oliver Queen, Donna Troy and Ice, he hasn’t died for longer than a few minutes and come back to life yet*, so I guess that killing him off temporarily might seem like a fresh idea.
5.) Elsewhere on CBR this week, there’s an interview with both writer Tom Peyer and pencil artist Rags Morales about one of my favorite DC comics of all time, Hourman. If you missed the not-in-trade book, you might want to give the interview a read and see if you can find it for cheap somewhere.
It’s interesting to consider the creative success (if not the financial success) of this particular brilliant but cancelled series today, in part because it was the result of a creative team taking a character recreated by Grant Morrison and running with it, and it resulted in some pretty great comics.
More recently, we’ve seen Gail Simone and a small army of artists try to run with Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Atom and Ivy Town in The All-New Atom, “Graymiotti” and a couple of artists try to turn Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Freedom Fighters into a couple of miniseries, and Duncan Rouleau try to turn Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Metal Men into a miniseries.
Of the three, none of them seem to come anywhere near the quality of Hourman (It may have helped that Peyer seemed to genuinely be on Morrison’s wavelength—having edited his work and having been part of the foursome who were notoriously forbidden from taking over the Superman titles—while having a writing style that was quite different).
I like Rouleau’s Metal Men okay, although it can be so narratively jam-packed it can get awfully confusing at times (particularly in the earlier issues), and I tried both ANA and Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, and both failed to click for me.
Apparently turning Morrison’s ideas into comics gold is a very difficult challenge. Maybe they should give Peyer a call next time they decide to release a new series “based on concepts and ideas by Grant Morrison.”
6.) Trade-waiting this series was probably a terrible idea: I am worried that I won’t be able to avoid hearing about the end of Y: The Last Man online before I get around to actually reading it.
*Unless you count “Obsidian Age,” during which he and the rest of the League all died only to be reanimated as unkillable zombies and then brought all the way back to life via magic.
This week's LVW comics review is of Students For a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, by Harvey Pekar, Gary Dumm and others.
I was hoping to follow the link with an examination of some of the art, as the book is a rather singular reading experience, and becomes something of an anthology in the second half.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get me, the book, a scanner and no one else who also wants to use a scanner in the same room at the same time yet, so let's reconvene here in a few days to take another look at SDS:AGH, okay?
Meanwhile, in Las Vegas…: This week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics review column features two new miniseries offering up new spins on ancient myths, The Infinite Horizon and Hybrid Bastards.
Marvel vs. DC, Round 946: Quick question—What’s a common one-word term used to refer to the artist who provides pencil-only art for a comic book, to later be inked by an inker?
Okay, yes, that’s right.
Now, how do you spell it?
DC spells penciller with two l’s in their credit boxes, whereas Marvel spells penciler with one l. My spellcheck always underlines them both in red to let me know they’re spelled wrong (it also underlined “spellcheck” just now). I always assumed that it was because it was comic book jargon and not widely enough used to pop up in a spellcheck program.
But why do Marvel and DC differ on the spelling?
I’ve been finding myself writing it out as “pencil artist” so as to avoid finding a definitive answer. I haven’t pulled out my long boxes and done and exhaustive search or anything, but, just casually looking at my usual Wednesday stacks of super-comics, and now, just double-checking the past week’s, it seems Marvel and DC are purposely spelling the word differently.
Has anyone else noticed this? Does anyone know how long this has been going on? Or why this is going on?
If anyone has any further information on this matter, do let me know. It’s stuff like this that keeps me up at night.
And on the subject of spelling, is the term “the direct market” a proper noun or not? Should I capitalize the d and the m or no?
And how come so few comics bloggers capitalize the I in “internet” when referring to “the Internet?” That is a proper noun, unless it’s being used as an adjective, right?
As a comic book writer, she makes a fine prose novelist: I finally got around to reading Jodi Picoult’s entire five-issue Wonder Woman run, recently collected in a pretty thin $19.99 hardcover. (I had previously only read Picoult’s first, very disappointing issue before I decided to just wait until I could read it for free from the library, as “nothing at all” seems to be the amount of money the story would be worth).
It doesn’t get any better after that first issue, however, and it’s actually pretty surprising how bad it all is. I really can’t fathom how this all came about; did DC really think a name writer with the kind of book store/library cred as Jodi Picoult would be best applied to tap-dancing between the continuity points established by Allan Heinberg and the Amazons Attack! crossover?
It’s a really nicely designed trade, and has an introduction from Picoult herself, which Tom Spurgeon noted “feels like a defense attorney's opening statement.”
The art throughout is mostly pretty solid, although there are some badly choreographed scenes that look like they had dialogue rearranged or something the night before deadline (Note the panel on the right). But it’s a really uncomfortable amalgam of plot points culled from continuity (Max Lord’s murder, Hippolyta’s death, Circe’s history, what’s up with the Amazons post-Infinite Crisis, Amazons Attack!, who the hell is Everyman, etc.) and characterization made up wholesale by Picoult.
Her Wonder Woman as fish-out-of-water comedy, flirting with Nemesis-as-TV’s-Steve-Trevor might have made for a great original graphic novel or Elseworlds or All-Star type story, but for a relevant DCU event bridging crossovers? Come on.
Rereading her intro after the story arc itself, this part grabbed my attention:
I decided to undertake the challenge for a few reasons—because it was something I’d never done before; because I’d always been a fan of Wonder Woman (who hasn’t?); because I’d admired other writers who’d seamlessly moved between fiction and comic books (Brad Meltzer foremost); and because I would be only the second woman to write the comic book in its long history.
The fact that she chose Meltzer as an example of someone who had “moved seamlessly moved between fiction and comic books” instead of, say, Greg Rucka, is pretty telling. (Perhaps just as telling? She uses the word “fiction” instead of “prose;” “comic book” is a medium, “fiction” designates whether a work is true or not. Meltzer’s prose novels and comic book work are all works of fiction, just as Picoult’s prose novels and Wonder Woman work are fiction).
Like Meltzer, Picoult over-narrates her comic books a bit too much, although it’s worth noting she sticks with one narrator per issue, making her five comics a bit more clear and easy to read than some of Meltzer’s twenty-some comics.
She also seems to view writing serial comics as a sort of relay race, in which a writer need not resolve their own story, but simply stop at some point and hand the characters and the subplots they’ve introduced on to the next writer.
Meltzer’s done this with everything he’s written. “Archer’s Quest” had a pretty dramatic turn in the relationship between Oliver Queen and Connor Hawke that was introduced but left unexplored. Identity Crisis was really nothing but turns in characters and plots, few if any of which were ever resolved, and which DC writers have been working at making sense of ever since. Similarly, his four-story JLoA run was full of changes and sub-plots he had no intention of resolving; he was simply seeding the book for future writers.
Picoult’s run takes that concept to a more dramatic level, as she doesn’t even resolve the main conflict in an equivocal, open-ended way. The graphic novel ends with one character holding a knife to our heroine’s throat. Her love interest is poisoned and dying. There’s a nuclear missile pointed at the island home of the Amazons. The U.S. military and JLA are still warring with the Amazons in Washington D.C.
And that’s the end of the book.
When I’d read Spurgeon’s review a while back, he noted that it ends with “a ridiculous cliffhanger ending that asks readers to buy yet another book after dropping 20 bucks on this one,” I assumed he was simply referring to the book leaving some subplots unresolved. But no, it doesn’t resolve anything at all, and it doesn’t merely end with a “to be continued” in the last panel, but the last page is actually a full-page ad reading, “Find out what happens next in Wonder Woman: Amazons Attack.”
What a thoroughly despressing book. This had the promise of one which could help evangelize the medium, bringing new readers to comic books, and now I fear all it will accomplish is making sure any who do pick this up as their first graphic novel to simply swear them off for life.
It’s a pretty interesting and wide-ranging interview, one which reminded me how much I liked the 1999, Jill Thompson-illustrated Vertigo mini Finals, which was apparently Pfeifer’s comics debut.
He seems pretty honest about the nature of Amazons Attack! and t he frustrations of writing books like it:
I've worked on a few crossovers before, but this is the most closely I've been involved. It was almost a year ago exactly that I went to the DC offices for a weekend. We sort of plotted out the whole six-issue series, and we talked about all the tie-ins and this and that. When you're working on a big crossover like this, a lot of the plotting is just connecting the dots in a way. This is going to happen here, we'll deal with this here, and then over in Teen Titans this will happen, and then we'll deal with this, and then we'll deal with that. Readers may not like it, and in some ways it can be a pain to write, but that's what a lot of modern comic books are. The big ones that sell and the big ones that people seem to like are the ones that have crossovers crossovers crossovers. When you're writing it, the object is to hit those plot points. As a writer you try to work in those human emotions and twists and surprises and fun and action along the way. But you have to hit point A, B, C, and D because in another book, somebody's going to be hitting it.
It’s pretty funny watching him and Spurgeon sort of make sense of it all:
I think at its most basic, people have an idea about whatever superhero or character they love and have their ideal version of that character somewhere in their head. When you go against that version, some people are going to react very strongly. Amazons Attack! is right there in the title. They kill that guy and his kid on the very first page. People were really upset about that. But it was supposed to be shocking. It was supposed to be upsetting. It wasn't supposed to be a triumphant moment for the Amazons. People who have been reading Wonder Woman for however long they've been reading Wonder Woman —and some of them have been reading for a long time —they didn't like the fact that the Amazons were attacking and were evil. They also didn't like the fact that in Amazons Attack! that there wasn't enough Wonder Woman, and that Wonder Woman wasn't driving the plot along. The reason for that is that there's another book called Wonder Woman [Spurgeon laughs] where all that was happening.
While I don’t think anyone really wants to read superhero comics about people slaughtering innocent children on the first page, I doubt that (or the lack of Wonder Woman in the story) are the reason people reacted so negatively. I think it was more the fact that the story wasn’t any good, and didn’t make any goddam sense, not only within the context of the DCU and its history, but within the pages of the series itself.
Was that Pfeiffer’s fault, or the person who asked him to hit A, B, C and D? Because, B didn’t go with A and C, and D kinda cancels out A, and you can’t have B and C in the same story at the same time and expect it to make sense.
Regardless, this is one of those instances where it’s hard to feel too sorry for a comic book writer who wrote some shitty comics and then said it wasn’t entirely his fault (like JMS recently did with One More Day). Nobody makes you write these comics, and accepting the embarrassment that comes from writing bad ones—whoever’s bad ideas are ultimately fueling them—is part of the process. The writer’s name appears on the cover of the book, just like it does on the paycheck.
The cardinal is the state bird, the Pekar is the state curmudgeon: My fellow Ohioans, have you seen this political cartoon collaboration by Harvey Pekar and Nick Bertozzi yet? No? Then go read it. I love the use of the shape of the state as a lay-out, and I’ll be damned if Bertozzi doesn’t draw the scariest Pekar I’ve ever seen (I really like that Pekar is a lot like Batman; every artist finds a slightly different facet of the character). I would totally buy a set of postcards based on the “Greetings From Ohio” part, with the weird close-ups of a glaring Pekar in each letter…
This has very, very little to do with comics: Chris Ware designed the logo and poster for writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ latest movie, The Savages.
It doesn’t have anything to do with comics beyond the fact that Ware designed these, however. (The aesthetic of the film, and its melancholic sense of humor, sort of aligns with that seen in Ware’s work, though). It opened in Columbus on Christmas; if you’re so inclined, you can read my review of it here.
The other movie that opened in Columbus this week that’s well worth a trip to the theater? Juno, in which J. Jonah Jameson’s teenage daughter Kitty Pryde gets pregnant, and decides to have the baby and give it up to Elektra for adoption. That’s reviewed here.
Fanboys For Pele: I love comic books. And I love the music of Tori Amos. So the announcement of a an Image Comics-published anthology of short comics stories based on or inspired by her work should be something I’m really pumped about.
And while I can’t wait to read it, I’m not going to get my hopes too high at this point. Image’s Put the Book Back on the Shelf, which did the same with the songs of Belle and Sebastian, another favorite, was a pretty mixed bag—some stories were great, some were interesting, some were godawful. Since Amos’ work seems to be much less narrative than Belle and Sebastian’s, I’m really curious to see how it will translate to adaptation—it should definitely give creators a bit more leeway.
Thinking back, I can recall relatively little about the Belle and Sebastian anthology, with only the very best stories and the very worst sticking in my head. I do recall it being a really fun reading experience though, as I broke out all the Belle and Sebastian CDs and read the stories while listening to the songs. I look forward to doing the same with the Tori Amos anthology.
One of the first places I saw the project announced was at The Beat, and man, there are times when I have no idea what Heidi MacDonald is talking about:
Amos is one of early adapters in the comics/media crossover trend, due to her friendship with Neil Gaiman (the two were introduced by Hoseley) resulting in many lyrical and comical mentions of one another over the years.
What exactly is “the comics/media crossover trend?” Comics is a medium. Is she referring to Amos’ music as “media” and comics as “comics?” And regardless, I don’t understand the implication that Amos is “one of the early adapters.” Amos has never written or drawn any comics, and these are the first comics stories based on her music. She read comics and was friends with Neil Gaiman, who is rumored to have based Delerium’s final look and personality on Amos, but does that make one an “earl adapter?”
Sometimes I get a real “Biff! Bam! Pow! Holy Watchmen Batman, Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” vibe from The Beat, which is odd, given that it’s a comics-specific blog, you know?
And speaking of Tori Amos and comics… I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Nathan Rabin’s “My Year of Flops” series at The Onion AV Club. It’s exactly what I think criticism should be—so well-written and entertaining to read, it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen or plan to see the film being discussed, because the review itself has great value in and of itself. Anyway, Rabin gets around to one of the worst comic book adaptations of all time, Howard the Duck.
And he points out that Tori Amos was up for the part of Beverly.
Which means this could have been Tori Amos:
Or, worse yet, this:
Rabin also spends some verbiage belittling Y Kant Tori Read, Amos' pre-solo career rock band that really wasn’t so bad. I kind of liked that album! In fact, I liked more songs on it than on Scarlet’s Walk. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Well, I’m a little ashamed, but not so ashamed that I won’t admit it anyway.
Dear Dan DiDio....Last week’s “DC Nation” column saw Dan DiDio in teasing mode, presenting an annotated Christmas list from various DC characters.
Let’s parse it at exhausting length, shall we?
Superman— A new place to call home.
Lately it seems like Superman goes through Fortresses of Solitude like water, but since Geoff Johns and Kurt Busiek so recently gave him his latest (basically the one from Johns’ sometimes co-writer Richard Donner’s Superman movies), I’m going to guess he’s keeping those digs for a while.
And I doubt he’ll be moving out of Metropolis any time soon, as Busiek’s done a lot of work building the city up, with new geography and city services and such like.
So, I’m going to guess this refers to some sort of New Krypton, as the two Superman writers seem very interested in new Kryptonian history.
Superman Prime— A time to call my own.
I don’t care. Sorry.
Batman— More time.
I’m assuming this is just a joke about how busy Batman is, and if it’s a tease of some kind, it’s pretty vague. I mean, at any point in his fictional career Batman could have asked Santa and/or Paul Levitz for the exact same thing.
Robin— A memorial for Stephanie Brown
This is the one that has clearly set the most tongues a-wagging, or at least fingers a-typing. The request is of course scratched out, with the words “Can’t Do!” atop of it. For someone who claims not to pay too much attention to the messageboards and blogosphere, DiDio sure knows how to tweak the online fans, doesn’t he? Assuming he’s not just being a dick, this seems to be another strong indicator that Spoiler’s on her way back to life.
Does that mean the godawful costume the girl going by the name “Violet” in upcoming Robin solicits is a resurrect Spoiler? Ugh. If that’s what she’s going to be wearing, maybe she should stay dead.
Anyway, I’m more interested in the fate of Spoiler as an observer than a fan at this point. I never much cared for her outside the pages of Batgirl. The fact that she died at all, or that Batman never gave her a monument never really upset me, certainly not as much as I was upset by the fact that she died in a terrible story that didn’t make a lick of sense, and that she died from being tortured within an inch of her life and then from having Bruce Wayne’s lifelong friend and pacifist Doctor Leslie Thompkins deny her care to teach Bruce a lesson.
God…
I like the idea of Robin asking for a memorial for his dead ex-girlfriend for Christmas from Dan DiDio, though. If Tim Drake wants a memorial to Stephanie, then it’s easy to imagine some pretty uncomfortable conversations around the table at Wayne Manor, with Tim being all like, “Sooooo, have you given any more thought to erecting that memorial to Stephanie yet?” and Bruce being, “Oh look, it’s the Bat-signal! Gotta go! We’ll talk later!”
Batgirl— My very own mini-series
This one made me laugh. Assuming they’re talking about the current Batgirl, Cassandra Cain, she had her own monthly ongoing series which was selling adequately (not great, but not any worse than much of DC’s DCU line) but it was cancelled to…I forget the exact phrasing, but it was along the lines of streamlining the Bat-books (Apparently by just two titles; Batgirl and Gotham Knights).
So a new miniseries featuring a character who, just a few short years ago, was strong enough to carry her own title, seems like an odd move. After all, DC spent the last few years chasing away her relatively few fans and sabotaging the character as much as possible*, and now they’re looking to capitalize on the severely diminished returns for 4-6 months?
Red Tornado— A new body and a family to call my own
As Patrick pointed out in the comments section the week I reviewed JLoA #15 (the issue in which Red Tornado’s body was destroyed), his body is supposedly indestructible.
And that’s not, like, some obscure trivia from mentioned in a single issue of the pre-Crisis volume of Justice League of America or anything, but it was, like, the whole point of Brad Meltzer’s first arc on this very series, “The Tornado’s Path.” The new, smart Solomon Grundy wanted to put his brain into Red Tornado’s immortal android body precisely because it couldn’t be destroyed, and thus Grundy would never have to die and return to life again.
I find it almost as amusing as it is irritating that not only did Dwayne McDuffie, the JLoA writer who followed Meltzer, not really read Meltzer’s stuff too closely, but neither, apparently, did DiDio.
Not sure what to make of the “a family to call my own” comment. Does that mean in addition to Red Tornado’s wife and daughter, who also appeared throughout “The Tornado’s Path?” That story was just last year. It was the best-selling thing DC published. Surely DiDio read it, right?
Green Arrow— My son back
Black Canary— My husband’s son back
Man, this list of teases is terrible for my blood pressure!
Here’s hoping that having the stars of Green Arrow/Black Canary ask for Green Arrow’s son Green Arrow back means that Connor Hawke isn’t really dead, and/or that these items tease a story about bringing him back and are not, in fact, intimating that the next few months of Green Arrow/Black Canary will be devoted to mourning his death.
Whether he’s dead-dead or just temporarily dead, in either case it shows writer Judd Winick’s lack of imagination. When Connor Hawke was shockingly killed at the end of the last issue, he either seemed to die but will be back soon (like Oliver Queen in the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special of a few months ago), or he actually died, like all those characters in Judd Winick’s Titans East Special #1 from a few weeks back.
Darkseid— The Fifth World
Don’t care to the point in which this is part of Countdown, but may start caring if this is an element of Final Crisis, as the writer of the latter, Grant Morrison, mentioned the coming of the Fifth World back during the climax of his JLA run.
The Rogues— Revenge!! (A sentiment shared by all the villains in SALVATION RUN)
Revenge? For what? Instead of giving them the death penalty or putting them in jail for life for the murder of Bart Allen (in addition to any and/all other crimes they might have committed), The Rogues were handed their favorite clothes, their very powerful weapons, and then sent to a planet free of superheroes to do whatever the hell they want until one of the many super-brilliant mad scientists there figures a way to spring them all. I really fail to see the drama—or logic—in Salvation Run.
Mongul— A ring collection
The last issue of Green Lantern Corps ended with Mongul getting a Sinestro Corps ring, and I imagine he’ll therefore be fighting some ring-slinging Green Lanterns soon.
The rings in the image all have the Green Lantern symbol, rather than the various pictograms the new rings are supposed to bear. Because of that, it reminded me of the Mark Waid masterminded epic The Silver Age from a few years back, in which Lex Luthor and his villainous allies created their own special power-rings, which looked and worked like Green Lantern rings, but were different colors.
I’m really surprised that event hasn’t been collected into trade yet, given how many great/popular writers and artists were involved, and that so much of recent DC history has been driven by the characters it featured (The Silver Age League including Green Arrow and Black Canary, Elongated Man, The Secret Society of Supervillains and so on, plus a one-off iteration of the Seven Soldiers of Victory).
(An aside: I’m apparently not the only one who noticed the similarity between Geoff Johns’ rainbow corps and Waid’s Silver Age story, or the fact that the later is overdue for trade collection. I am, however, the slower to post about it one).
Geo-Force— Rock samples from another planet
Don’t really care at all, but I wonder if this will have anything to do with GF’s mysterious power problems Meltzer introduced but never resolved in JLoA.
The Question— A visit from an old friend
The real Question coming back to life? Nah, probably just Batwoman appearing in one of the issues of the Crime Bible series…
Speaking of which, I don’t see Batwoman requesting her series starting any time soon. Or Manhunter requesting her series resuming any time soon, either.
I get the feeling Ted Kord won’t actually be coming back for real at the end of this upcoming Booster Gold story, but, as I’ve said before, I hope he does because it’s only a matter of time before someone brings him back to life, so better to have it happen through the agency of a time-travelling Booster Gold than via something silly like, I don’t know, magic herbs, as in colleague Ice’s recent silly resurrection.
Lord Satanus— Control of Hell
Neron— Control of Hell
DiDio’s notation has arrows pointing to their requests, with the words “Uh-oh, this could be a problem.”
Sounds like this refers to Keith Giffen’s upcoming limited series about a war for control of hell, which he discussed with fellow Columbusite and Newsaramite Vaneta Rogers during an interview posted the other day.
Giffen’s an experienced storyteller, but man, I’d kinda hate to have an assignment like this. After all, stories of power struggles in DC’s Hell have been previously told by the likes of Garth Ennis, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.
*Batgirl appearances since the end of her own series, but before this month’s Outsiders #2?Robin: Boy Wanted written by Adam Beechen, who left the title shortly afterwards; “Titans East” by Geoff Johns and Beechen, the conclusion of which (by Beechen alone) is in the running for the worst DC story ever published (I think it’s a tie with JLoA #10, the conclusion of “The Lighting Saga”), a few pages of World War III by Keith Champagne and/or John Ostrander and/or whoever gave those poor bastards a set of plot points and said, “Here, make a script of some kind out of this, would ya?”, and the issue of Supergirl in which this happens:
Meanwhile in Las Vegas… This week’s LVW comics review is of Wonton Soup, which I boldly called the best space-trucker cooking opera of the year. Boy will my face be red if another, even better comes out on one of the last two Wednesdays of the year! You can read/skim the first 39 pages of it here, and I should point out that the book gets better and better the deeper you get into it.
Hey man, nice shot: December is a busy time of year for a lot of folks, as they do all their Christmas shopping, make travel plans, prep their houses for visitors and so forth. It’s quite busy for me too, but for an entirely different reason—this is the point of the year when “best of” lists get assembled, and critics find themselves playing catch-up.
By the time December rolls around, I find myself buried in film screenings as studios begin to campaign hard for awards consideration and slots on best-of lists.
And, inevitably, as many comics and graphic novels as I read every week, I realize I’ve missed quite a few big releases, and spend much of the month tracking down everything I’ve heard something good about or just haven’t gotten around to, so that when I sit down to tell you what I thought the best books of the year are, I can feel pretty well-informed on the subject.
One book I just finished was Anthony Lape and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War, a dramedy about a blogger who covers the Iraq War during the McCain administration. Brian Doherty of The New York Post just wrote a very good review of it, with a pretty damn good headline (has no one ever turned the phrase “blog of war” before? Really? Because it’s a good one).
Doherty gave the book a bit of a kicking:
It might be formally appropriate that a graphic novel set in a chaotic, horrific near future should sport this book's off-putting computerized art style. It's a bricolage of digitally altered photos, cut-and-paste cartooning, and beards that look like the random up-and-down ballpoint pen scratches one would use to deface a magazine photo.
But formally appropriate or not, a reader versed in classic comic book cartooning will be apt to find it distractingly ugly. The style often gets in the way of the simple storytelling virtues that cartooning is best for. It's sometimes difficult to tell from panel to panel exactly what's going on. The graphic novel's look, created as the book flap says with “a combination of photography, vector illustration, and digital painting" is very now - the sort of “now" that will almost certainly look dated and oh-so-2007 soon enough.
In the book's afterword, the authors identify this as a “work of political satire" that strives to “get you thinking about some big questions concerning the media, the war in Iraq and American foreign policy." That was all-too-obvious in this heavy-handed, though successfully gripping, work. They add that, “We also hope it makes you chuckle." Unless, say, the suitcase-nuking of Bangalore is a knee-slapper, they misunderstand their own work's tone.
I can’t say I disagree with him entirely either. As I finished it, I was actually pretty relieved I wasn’t planning on giving it a formal review for LVW, but just satisfying my own curiosity about it at this point. The look of the book is just as Doherty described it. At times it did seem ugly and distracting to me, at other times it seemed pretty appropriate given the subject matter, and I thought it even had a sort of strange beauty, perhaps more beautiful than it might have looked were it all drawn out. But these times changed back and forth from page to page.
Ultimately I think it’s a fine style for a single graphic novel like this, when a reader is only spending an hour or two with it, but if this were serialized into single issues, or if I tried reading it as it was originally serialized on the web, I would have given up a long time ago, I think, as it’s not the sort of art I would seek out once I’d walked away form it.
I’m not quite sure what to think of the writing end of things, either. It’s structurally sound, and the dramatic arc works well enough. The lead character is one I kind of like, but really rather despise. The speculative political science work that went into the where will the world be in 2011 question was pretty interesting, but somewhat undermined by the more straightforward action adventure comic villain, the charismatic leader of a made-up terrorist group that actually compares himself to a Bond villain at one point.
I think this is a book I’d have to return to again in the future to truly form an opinion on, but, on my first reading, my reaction was extremely mixed, often simultaneously liking and disliking different aspects of the story.
One thing that I really enjoyed was Dan Rather, who cameos in one scene, only to become main character Jimmy Burns’ sidekick by the climax. Lappe nails Rather’s dialogue, or rather a convincing parody of his TV personality’s dialogue, and Goldman does a nice drawing of the old man. I cracked up in almost every scene featuring Rather as heroic newsman, particularly the bit about the frequency.
I give Lappe and Goldman a lot of credit for trying to spin a bigger story with Shooting War, addressing the media’s role in the world and in the war. Me, I would have just focused on the adventures of Dan Rather in the near-future Middle East, and, as entertaining as that may be, it’s probably not of much value to anyone all on its own.
Have any of you read Shooting War yet? Any prognosis to share? I’d definitely recommend it, even though I’ve not quite made up my mind as to how good a graphic novel it actually is.
Confidential to Joe Madureira and Greg Land:
Can a decision to collect a comic book series a particular way be considered evil? : I’ve been bewildered by many of the decisions DC has made in terms of what they choose to collect and release in trade, what they choose not to, and how they package some of their trades, but this is probably the most mystifying item I’ve seen show up on a Diamond shipping list from the company in a long, long time:
WONDER WOMAN AMAZONS ATTACK HC $24.99
Yes, the universally reviled series that didn’t make any goddam sense, the series that helped make Jodi Picoult’s run even worse, the series which caused sales of tie-in issues like Teen Titans and Wonder Woman to drop, is released in a collected edition for any unfortunate souls who want to subject themselves to it. I can see them in Barnes and Noble now, flipping through it, drinking in Pete Woods’ fantastic art, seeing all the heroes in it, and thinking, “Well, this looks good,” and then heading towards the cash register.
Yes, it looks good, but that’s only because the art is so good. But it is not a good book. It’s a terrible one! Terrible, I tell you! (Well, the first three issues…I didn’t read the last half). And at the end, you don’t get any kind of resolution (I did flip-through #4-#6), you just get a big, fat cliffhanger, and to find out what the hell happens next, you have to read Countdown!
I suppose DC thought they could make a few bucks off these poor folks and that it was therefore worth collecting this story in trade (a sad, sad fact when you consider all of the better Wonder Woman stories not available in trade, however).
But a hardcover?
Nobody wants a hardcover of this. No one who reads it will ever want to reread it. And charging $25 bucks for the sturdier cover just strikes me as…perverse. It’s a six-issue series, each sold for $2.99, so anyone fool enough to buy this thing is paying $7 more than they would have if they got it while it was originally coming out.
Surely you can still find all six of these issues in your local comic shop or on the ebay for cover price or lower…hell, you’re welcome to my Amazons Attack #1-#3 for the cost of shipping…
Here it comes: Have you seen the trailer for Speed Racer yet? I have. About, oh, 25 times now or so. I was skeptical of this project since it was first announced, having been a fan of the admittedly quite terrible cartoon and having lost pretty much all faith in the Wachowski Brothers about four minutes into Matrix Revolutions (Yeah, Reloaded wasn’t all that either, but the action scenes in it were a thing of beauty).
But I’ve gotta admit, this looks pretty great from the few minute snippet of the trailer—the costume design, the automobile design, the use of speedlines in live action, the jumping Mach 5 sound effect, the corny-ass dialogue like “It’s way more important than that, it’s like a religion” and “Maybe not, but it’s the only thing I know how to do and I gotta do something.” Awesome. A quick check at IMDB reveals that Snake Oiler and Inspector Detector are characters in the movie, too. Awesome I say, awesome!
Anyway, check out the scene where Speed discovers Spritle and Chim Chim in the trunk reading comic books by flashlight—they’re totally reading an issue of Geoff Darrows fantastic and hardly ever printed ongoing series Shaolin Cowboy, from the Wachowski’s own vanity publisher Burlyman.
And speaking of trailers…: I see no giant bipedal talking sword-wielding mice in this trailer, which worries me excessively. Still, I hope Prince Caspian makes a billion dollars, if only to ensure more Narnia movies, as the next two are my favorite of the seven books.
Poor Will Smith: The real tragedy of the dystopian future presented in I Am Legend?:Will Smith’s character, the last man alive in New York City after a plague has decimated humanity, must see a poster in Times Square advertising some sort of upcoming Batman/Superman movie (it features the S-shield from Superman Returns atop a bat-symbol shape) every day, knowing full well that even though the movie was made, it will never be played in theaters for him. The poor, poor bastard. Oh, and I guess he’s all alone fighting for his life too. Anyway, here’s a review of I Am Legend if you’re interested.
"He's a superintelligent small pox virus. And he wants justice": I should have posted this scan from Green Lantern #25 in yesterday's off-the-cuff review, when discussing the scale of the war. As you can see, not only were human-sized combatants duking it out, or planet-sized ones like Mogo and Warworld, but also microscopic rivals.
Here, check this out if you haven't already, and then I've got a serious question:
Is that the absolute coolest thing Geoff Johns has ever written? I know I make fun of Johns alot here, particularly for his affinity for gore (yes, there is a panel of a character being ripped in half in this same issue), the number of times he has heroes resort to torture, his uninihibted man-love for Hal Jordan, and his bad habit of going too grim and gritty too often, but I do think he's a pretty solid comics writer, and is probably DC's best writer by default (Busiek, Morrison and Waid are no slouches either, of course, but they just can't keep up with Johns, who writes about 15 books a month now, I believe).
And make no mistake, a heroic small pox virus that wants justice? That is pretty much the definition of awesome. (Well, not in my computer's dictionary, which I just checked to verify, but I bet if I went and got a dicitonary off the shelf, it would be in there). Thinking of all of the most awesome beats in other of the roughly two million stories by Geoff Johns I've read in the past, all of the closest competitors—Booster Gold and Skeets' journey to cowboy times, much of 52—came in books in which Johns worked with one to three co-writers on. But this book is all him, meaning this beat is all him.
So here's my question: Is this the most awesome thing Johns has ever written, or not? And if not, what is?
Yeah, what she said:Carla makes a very fine point here, in this post about Marvel’s “One More Day” story, which I’m sure everyone’s more than sick of hearing about at this point (And there’s still one issue to go, meaning over a month’s worth of commentary yet to come!)
She stopped reading at the same point I did, the second part, but returned faster than I would have because, as she says “This is important.”
Indeed, it is. Not change-your-life important, or impact-the-world-outside-the-Marvel-Universe-at-all important, but important within that fictional shared setting, and important to the way readers will be interacting with it for the next few weeks, months, years and, potentially, from now on.
This “One More Day” storyline, if they really do go through with it and they don’t change it back immediately, is going to end up being the most important Spider-Man story ever told, if only because it’s going to be the only one in which Spider-Man comics get rebooted. It’s going to be a big, bright, red line through Spider-Man’s (fictional history), not unlike the original Crisis on Infinite Earths was a big, bright red line through DC Comics’ (fictional history) becoming, like the birth of Christ, the point that divides that history into two different era. The death of Captain Stacy, or of Gwen Stacy, Kraven’s Last hunt, the Osborne/Golin saga, the black suit/Venom business, none of those will end up being as important as OMD, simply because none of them managed to shift the entire playing field the way OMD will.
In a few years time, people could be discussing Spider-Man using the terms Pre-OMD and Post-OMD, as they used to with Crisis (Again, if they really have Spidey and/or MJ trade their marriage for a reboot, and if they stick to it).
It’s a seriously ballsy move by editor-in-chief, penciller and, if JMS is to be believed, plotter Joe Quesada, whatever you think of it.
And I can’t help but wonder how many people are reading this story not because they like the writing or art, or are invested in the story, but simply because they know how potentially important it is. Are they, like Carla, reading it simply because it’s going to be the starting point for the pretty exciting sounding future of Spider-Man comics? (Three times a month! Dan Slott writing Spidey regularly!). I fear Marvel will interpret the gonzo sales of the event as tacit approval for the story itself, giving them grounds to dismiss all criticism as the opinions of a few hundred cranks with Internet access and too much free time on their hands (Now, I’m not saying I’m not a crank with too much free time on my hands, just that that doesn’t make me wrong about whether a comic book story is stupid or not).
Do check out Carla’s review of the third chapter, as she has a beautiful image of a fan’s despair at the book, and check out this week’s Lying in the Gutters if you haven’t already, as Rich Johnston recounts previous pitches for how to undo the marriages of Superman and Spider-Man without resorting to divorce or killing off a supporting character. As awesome as I think the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Super-books would have been (and hey, where is Peyer these days?), I’m glad DC let the Superman/Lois marriage stand. I could do without this Chris Kent character, though…
1.) Meanwhile in Las Vegas...: Everyone’s talking about Garth Ennis’ new series for Virgin Comics, Dan Dare. And so am I. That’s the book featured in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics column. Go read it, if you like. I’ll wait here.
Back already? That was fast. Did you get the headline? It was supposed to be a play on “derring do,” but I have a feeling it could just as easily be read as “having sex with Dare” or “making another Dan Dare comic.”
2.) Rare first appearance of Bow-wow: In the corrections department, in discussing children’s book Bow-Wow Bugs a Bugon Monday, I mistakenly claimed that one of its creators, Mark Newgarden, is the author of a graphic novel entitled We All Die Alone.
That’s not exactly true. While Newgarden does have a book entitled We All Die Alone, it’s a collection of biographical information and old gag strips and cartoons by Newgarden, some sequential, but mostly one-panel. It's not a graphic novel. A lot of these strips are hilarious, some of them are tedious, and most of them are pretty avant-garde, making for an interesting book to think about, but not a terribly entertaining one to read.
Newgarden is a huge Nancy fan, he worked with Art Spiegelman and he is the inventor of Garbage Pail Kids. Yes, Garbage Pail Kids. For real.
One reoccurring strip idea Newgarden used was something called “Meet the Cast,” in which he’d fill a panel or series of panels with weird-ass cartoon characters, like Dampy the Effeminate Pancake, Sid The Sea Bishop, Noah the Unhappy Apple, Way Groovy Tom Peacenik of the Moon, and so on. In one installment, I couldn’t help but notice a dog named Bow-Wow…
Let’s take a closer look there…
Bow-Wow sure has mellowed out a bit since 1990, and I think he may even have had some work done to his snout.
Now I wonder if we’ll bee seeing a charming children’s book series starring Shithead O’Leprechaun or Joey Donutfoot the Misanthropic Dead Bakery Assistant in the near future…
3.) Ed Benes Isn't Very Good: Some people apparently like the work of Ed Benes on Justice League of America. I know this to be true, because I’ve read through plenty of message board posts at Newsarama, where you’ll always have a lot of guys saying how awesome it all looks or what a great talent Benes is. Seriously, check it out if you don’t believe me.
Now, everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion, however I feel compelled to point out that if you’re of the opinion that Ed Benes is a good comic book artist, you are wrong.
I’m not familiar enough with Benes’ entire body of work to say how bad he actually is. I kinda liked a lot of his work on Birds of Prey for example, particularly at the beginning (after his run lasted for a while, his weakness in drawing more than two different body types—male and female—became clearer and clearer). I don’t think Sandra Hope’s inks necessarily do his pencils the best justice, however the pair of them can acquit themselves fairly well when doing big, posed shots, like that cheesy team photo in JLoA #7 (A badly scanned version of which is above). Benes may be a fine pin-up artist or cover artist.
But as a sequential comics artist, illustrating a script? The guy sucks. Now, JLoA is certainly harder than other titles in the number of characters that need dealing with. The team has, what 14 characters on it, now? (I’m not sure if Flash or Geo-Force are actually on the team or not). And in this storyline, they’re fighting about as many super-villains. That’s a lot of costumes to keep straight. So maybe Benes is just on a book too big for him (Well no maybe about it; the number of fill-ins we’ve seen in the first 15 issues shows that he’s definitely on a book too big for him).
But aside from the lack of backgrounds, the lack of variety in characters’ body types and faces, the poor “acting” he does, and the Liefeldian layouts full of characters breaking the borders for no reason, Benes has that one unfortunate tendency of putting a female characters’ butt or breasts or both in the focus of every panel he can get away with it in.
This week’s issue is chockfull of that, but here’s what may be the most egregious example. Ready? Here’s what I think may be the worst panel in a book full of bad panels:
Note Batman’s head sticking out of the top of the panel. Why? No reason. It just is. At least it’s not as hard to read as other border-breaks, like the Vixen/Rocky Guy Thing fight.
Also note the fact that Batman gets off a whole sentence in the time it takes The Joker to fall a few inches. Reading old comics today, we all like to laugh at how Captain America could say paragraphs of dialogue while executing a flip or two, but a) that was a generation or two ago, b) those comics were made for kids and c) Jack Kirby can get away with that shit because it would have been one of the ten thousand panels he drew that month.
This is 2007, and Benes is drawing a comic book read almost exclusively by adults (at least, I hope kids aren’t reading this thing) who read a lot of comics. Why not draw The Joker already on the ground? Or still in Batman’s hand? Why choose to draw the fall in mid-air, if the script tells you there are two sentence of dialogue that will pass the time in which the image is supposed to capture?
But I already know the answer to that. If he drew The Joker on the floor, or being dragged along it by Batman, he might have had to lower the "camera" angle a bit, and then wouldn’t have been able to draw Black Canary’s ass in the panel, or perhaps not as much of it.
And, let the record show, Benes’ guiding principle when composing an image is whether or not he can draw a woman’s ass in it. I mean, look at this image; it’s almost 50% Black Canary’s ass. No one’s talking about her ass, her ass has nothing to do with the story. The subject is Batman disobeying Black Canary’s orders and having gone off into the swamp to retrieve the escaping Joker.
Anyway, it wasn't my intention to turn this into Benes bashin week at the EDILW or anything; I actually drew the previous post a while back, and was saving it for the second Batman's Christmas List post because Wonder Woman's his second best teammate or whatever. It's honestly just a coincidence that I've talked shit on Benes for, like, four posts in a row.
4.) Although Benes is still better than Liefeld: Have you read this article headlined “The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings” yet? If not, make sure you check it out when you’ve got some free time and are in a place where it’s okay to laugh out loud. I’m not sure if the headline is meant to be taken literally, as there are some very, very bad drawings in here, but I kept expecting to see the Cap With Boobs image, and it never came, and I’m pretty sure that’s worse than some of these. Maybe not.
I’ve always felt a little sorry for Liefeld, on account of making fun of him is just so easy, it feels a little like making fun of the foreign exchange student for talking funny during lunch period or whatever. (And I have very little personal experience with his work; there are exactly two comic books containing Liefeld art work in my long boxes—Darker Image #1 featuring the most shameless rip-off of another character I’ve ever read by Liefeld [Plus, a Sam Kieth Maxx story, the reason teenaged Caleb bought it], and that one Superman Christmas issue by eight different artists, one of which was Liefeld.)
But man, writers “Hanstock and B” (what kind of names are those?) show no mercy, and it gets pretty hilarious. After a while, I began just giggling myself silly at the images themselves, before the commentary would even begin. I mean, look at that panel up there. I was alive and reading comics in the ‘90s—did people really think stuff like that looked cool back then?
5.) I will now comment on that one thing everyone else will also comment on: So J. Michael Straczynski’s not crazy about the latest J. Michael Straczynski Spider-Man story either, huh? Does that make it official? Does everyone hate the idea of rebooting Spider-Man continuity to magically undo his marriage to Mary Jane? Everyone except Marvel Editor-in-Chief and the story’s penciller Joe Quesada, anyway?
If they don’t undo the marriage magically now, I’ll be pretty surprised, because whatever the decision was—to do it or not do it—it must have been made months and months ago, since the new, tri-weekly schedule for Amazing Spider-Man is dependent on the outcome, and, if Marvel’s as on-schedule with ASM as they claim, then the first story arc of that book at least was finished before “One More Day.”
They can still de-re-boot Spider-continuity, as I’m fairly certain they will, given fan reaction, but it may not be for a while yet.
What I find perplexing is that Quesada even took it this far. He’s been talking about his problems with the Spider-marriage for years on Newsarama. No other issue gets talked about as much as the Spider-marriage in this formerly weekly interview columns, Joe Fridays, not even his ban on smoking in Marvel Comics. And his opinion has always been universally disagreed with.
Of course, he is right, a married Peter Parker ages the character and makes him easier for adults to relate to then children—having him marry Mary Jane in the first place may have been a mistake, and should have been undone. But it would have had to be done in, when was it, 1987?
Now, there’s just too much momentum to the marriage, and it’s played too big a role in too many Marvel Comics.
But to stop thinking like a fan and reader for a second, un-marrying Spider-Man no longer makes a lick of sense.
Ultimate Spider-Man (indeed, the whole Ultimate line) was launched specifically to appeal to new and young readers, to bring the spirit of the original Spider-Man comics into the 21st century, and it succeeded wildly. It remains one of the better Big Two comic books being published. It also features a young, unmarried Spider-Man.
Marvel Adventures Spider-Man overlaps with USM quite a bit, in terms of being focused on younger readers and telling stories with much easier jumpingonability, and it also features a young, unmarried Spider-Man.
As does Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. And large swathes of the stories appearing in anthology Spider-Man Family.
The only version of Spider-Man who is a little older and married is the Marvel Universe one, the one whose primary audience is the dwindling, graying Direct Market crowd, all of whom overwhelmingly prefer a married Spider-Man to a single one.
Making Marvel Universe Spider-Man more like the USM and MA ones just undercuts what makes those books special. So Marvel is risking alienating it’s shrinking Direct Market fan base to make their line of Spider-Man books less diverse, is that it?
But back to JMS, it is pretty weird to see a Big Two Marvel writer, even one as influential as him (he is safe and secure with an exclusive contract at the moment, right?) saying he doesn’t like the direction the story’s going in.
It also strikes me as incredibly insincere. As I mentioned last night, JMS could personally be in some trouble over the poor quality of this story—what’s going on in it aside, those first two issues constituted some of the worst comics writing I’d ever encountered—so it’s understandable that he’d want it on record that this wasn’t all his bright idea.
But at the same time, there’s no gun to his head here. If he thought it was a stupid idea, he didn’t have to write it in the first place. Likewise, if he pitched an idea for a story in which Gwen Stacy’s and Peter Parker’s grown children are the villains, but gets it shot down, he could have just scrapped the story and told another one, he didn’t have to change the father of Stacy’s children to Norman Osborne. If there was any form of compulsion to write the dumb-ass story his boss wanted him to write, it would have been financial and fairly minor (I’m assuming; he was leaving ASM anyway, which means the only “at risk” book would be Thor, right?). Isn’t turning down one story’s arc worth of paychecks worth not looking like a chump?
6.) Countdown to Checkmate getting cancelled :And speaking of popular comics writers speaking out against the grind of editorial fiat, long-time DC writer Greg Rucka isn’t renewing his exclusive contract with the company. In a second post responding to the original post which set off Internet response, Rucka essentially says that if there’s any dirty laundry regarding his relationship with DC, he’s not going to air it.
Fair enough.
Rucka got his comics start after a few prose crime novels, then had a very successful Oni mini Whiteout and, next thing you know, he’s writing Batman for DC, including part of “No Man’s Land” (the last really good Batman crossover?) and a long, successful stint on Detective Comics. After working on DC’s biggest star, he then got to work on their other two biggest stars, Superman (which he actually wasn’t very good at) and Wonder Woman (a title he was kind of mediocre on, but being mediocre on the Wonder Woman monthly is the same as being brilliant on other titles).
He was heavily involved in the Infinite Crisis build-up, including the really shitty OMAC Project, and was part of the 52 team, giving DC one of it’s biggest hits in, what, ever? (Seriously guys, that thing sold 90 to 100,000 or more every single week!)
But since then, it’s clear he’s been somewhat, um, underappreciated by the company. His only ongoing monthly is Checkmate, which seems to be a title he’s well-suited for, but also a title that’s on the verge of cancellation, and seems to be getting monkeyed with quite a bit (I can’t imagine Rucka thinking, “Oh sweet, I love Judd Winick and his goddam stupid book Outsiders! Let’s do a crossover!” Or “Sure, by all means, use these characters I’m supposed to be writing to set up your stupid fucking Salvation Run series; sounds faboo!”*)
He’s publicly mentioned that he wasn’t thrilled to see Renee Montoya, a character DC owns but he’s adopted as her primary writer since his TEC run years ago, appearing in the pages of Countdown (drawn badly off-model to boot), and I see she had at least a one panel appearance in the recent Gotham Underground miniseries, which also ties into Salvation Run.
And then there’s Batwoman, the monthly starring the lesbian vigilante who made such a huge splash in the mediascape a few years back. Originally, her monthly adventures were going to be written by Devin Grayson, and a title logo was even designed, but the book never materialized. Later, Rucka was supposed to be working on her series, and he mentioned frustrations with DC’s reluctance to release the book in interviews on different subjects. There’s still no Batwoman comic book on the schedule, and I wonder if that ended up being the last straw?
Anyway, with Rucka leaving DC, what’s that mean for the company? I’m going to assume John Ostrander is going to be named the new Checkmate writer sometime in the near future, if the book’s not cancelled before then, at which point he’ll get to write it for six months and then it will get cancelled.
I’m also going to assume Batwoman will continue to not come out, and, if anything, is now a lot less likely to ever come out.
*Actually, I can’t imagine anyone saying the word “faboo.”
J. Caleb Mozzocco is a freelance writer and long time comics blogger based in Ohio. His upcoming book of giant monster movie reviews, GIANT MONSTER MOVIES: 100 YEARS OF BIG-SCREEN BEHEMOTHS, will be available from McFarland in 2026.
I have reviews of two graphic novels in this week's Las Vegas Weekly, the Halloween issue. The books are Eric Hobbs and Noel Tuazon's The Broadcast, set during Orson Welles' Halloween War of the Worlds performance, and Scott Snyder, Stephen King and Rafael Albuquerque's American Vampire Vol. 1, which is, obviously, about vampires. You can read them here. 
