I'm torn between laughing and sighing, honestly.

In this week's Cyborg #10, writer John Semper Jr. and artists Will Conrad and Szymon Kudranski introduce a pretty neat new villain with a neat power/gimmick, The Rat Lord. They also introduce a new Detroit-based superhero who calls herself The Black Narcissus. She has a variety of high-tech weaponry, including a hoverboard, which is, of course, just another word for "flying skateboard."

This new character is black.

I should note that this was the first issue of Cyborg I've bothered to read since the Rebirth special, and is one of the better of the handful of issues of his solo comics I've read since DC launched and then re-launched a Cyborg ongoing monthly in the last few years.

That said, seeing a back superhero with a high-tech skateboard can't help but bring to mind the late, great Dawyne McDuffie's infamous Marvel proposal for Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers.

Maybe Semper and company should have considered giving this new hero a jet-pack or rocket-boots instead...?

Briefly on The Atom's glasses and Ohio's Avenger (plus a few links)

I reluctantly started wearing glasses around the time I turned 30, when I finally realized that my eyesight was getting bad. It was a pretty big adjustment, and it took me a long while to get used to the way I looked in them (on the positive side, I feel they made me a lot easier to draw). It also took some getting used to the fact that I had to keep track of them at all times and that, once you take them off and absently set them somewhere, they could be really, really hard to find, given that you need to be wearing them to successfully accomplish many eye-related activities, like, say, looking for your glasses.

That said, I never considered getting Lasik or any kind of eye surgery, because Jesus, shooting lasers into your eyes? Contacts were also out, because the idea of touching my eyeballs a few times a day seemed incredibly unappealing to me.

You know what else sounds unappealing to me? Using cutting-edge, experimental technology in order to shrink down to a few inches high, or even down to a microscopic level, and having extremely dangerous adventures. In fact, I would get contacts or even have a doctor should me directly in the eye with a laser beam in order to burn it in such a way to improve my vision than shrink.

What I'm trying to here is I just can't figure out why The Atom Ryan Choi is wearing glasses on that cover. What if he loses his glasses when he's fighting a bug or an amoeba? Can you imagine how hard it will be to find your glasses if you need a microscope (in addition to your glasses), in order to see them? If you're going to be a shrinking super-hero and you don't have 20/20 vision, for God's sake, you gotta get contacts or have surgery!

Now, you may be looking at that picture above and thinking, "But Caleb, he's wearing his glasses under his dumb-looking astronaut helmet, which they are apparently making him wear because Bryan Routh wears a similar dumb-looking get-up on the CW shows, so even though the Silver Age Atom costume is one of, like, three perfect superhero costumes, he has to wear that for corporate synergy, wait what was I talking about? Oh yeah! He's wearing his glasses under his mask, so if they fall off, they will at least be contained within his helmet."

To which I would respond, "Wow, you talk just like I write! Oh, and also, how annoying would that be if you were fighting a bug or an amoeba and your glasses fell off and then they were rattling around your helmet? You'd have to open your face plate up and stick your hand in to put them back on your face and by that time you could be bug or amoeba food!"

Anyway, I hate that costume. And as much as I like The Atom Ray Palmer and The Atom Ryan Choi, The New 52 all but destroyed those guys. I mean, can you make sense of The Atom history now? (Remember, his Earth-3 doppelganger existed before him and was on the Justice League and OH MY GOD I JUST REMEMBERED FUTURES END!)

Hey, remember in 2013 when DC launched a new Justice League of America "ongoing" monthly series (that they canceled after 14 issues, consisting entirely of a "Trinity War" lead-in story, a few chapters of a "Trinity War" crossover story and a Forever Evil tie-in story)...? Remember they had some 50-ish variant covers, in which a handful of these new Justice Leaguers were depicted raising a flag, -style on the cover, and there was a different cover for each of the 50 state flags?

Man, that was dumb.*

Marvel made fun of DC at the time, publishing a Deadpool variant cover featuring all 50 state birds...and a lot of bird poop.

Well now a few years later, Marvel is launching a new Avengers book entitled U.S.Avengers, for which they are publishing over 50 variant covers, 50 of them being state-specific images featuring an Avenger character over a background including an image of the state.

Ohio got Black Knight. Why? I don't know. I asked my local comics shop, and was informed they are, for the most part, completely random. Which, of course, they would almost half to be, as, what, 95% of the Marvel superheroes you can think of are based either in New York City or some fictional setting, like Atlantis or Wakanda or wherever?

There are a few that certainly make sense, of course, like Ms. Marvel repping New Jersey, or the current Ant-Man getting Florida. Some heroes are attached to states that make some historical sense, like, say, Thor (Odinson flavor) on an Okalahoma cover, and I don't know who is on the cover for California, but Daredevil, or Iron Man or Lady Hawkguy or any of the West Coast Avengers or Champions would work.

But man, imagine how deep they would have to dig to match an Avenger--or just a superhero of any kind--to a every single state.

I'm a little disappointed they didn't do that digging though; I remember being pretty bummed out after (the first) Civil War ended and Tony Stark unveiled his "Fifty State Initiative" in which every single state was said to have been assigned its own team of Avengers, and we never, ever got to see what the make-up of many of those teams actually was. Like, I really wanted to know who was on The Ohio Avengers, and never found out.

Anyway, giving us The (a?) Black Knight at random is pretty weak. Why not Howard The Duck, who was a long-time Clevelander? Or that new Inhuman character Ulysses from (the second) Civil War, who I understand was going to school at Ohio State Universeity when he became...Inhumanized...? Or...wait, that's all I can think of. Ohio has an entry in Marvel's own wikia, but it doesn't really mention any heroes who live here or were born here. Maybe a Great Lakes Avenger?

As long as I'm just typing a few random bits of nonsense, here are links to some comics I reviewed elsewhere recently: Steven Weissman's Looking For America's Dog, Box Brown's Tetris and Mariko Tamaki, Joelle Jones and Sandu Florea's Supergirl: Being Super.



*Not that I didn't buy the Ohio state flag variant though, because of course I did.

I still think this is funny.

That's the second-to-last page of Green Lanterns #4, by writer Sam Humphries and so many artists that you wouldn't believe me if I told you how many there were (Okay, I 'll try. It's nine. It took three pencil artists and six inkers to draw this 20-page book...that bi-weekly schedule's looking like it might be such a great idea, huh?).

It's been years since former Green Lantern writer Geoff Johns first introduced Red Lantern Dex-Starr, a perfectly ordinary house cat from Earth who earned a Red Lantern ring, which he wears on his tail. Like all Red Lanterns, Dex-Starr now vomits laser-blood that burns like napalm. It's been years, but man, Dex-Starr's existence still hasn't ceased to amuse me.

I particularly liked Green Lantern Simon Baz's set-up to his appearance, the "Is that a...cat?" line.

It sure is, Simon. It sure is.

Happy Martha's Day, everyone!

My sister has a suggestion for DC Comics:

My nephew recently discovered the 2004-2008 cartoon series The Batman on Netflix. And, because he is three-and-a-half (and a bit of a tyrant), that means his whole family watches The Batman regularly now. Which is why I've been getting a lot of texts like the one above this week.

Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti understand the defining element of Hal Jordan's character.

Sure, the writers of Harley Quinn's Little Black Book may have played rather fast and loose with the "rules" of the variously-colored power rings in the second issue of their bi-monthly team-up series (drawn this time by John Timms and Mauricet), just as they ignored the timeline of the New 52 in their first issue (I guess we can chalk the title's continuity-lite status up to it having an unreliable–meaning "insane"–narrator), but in the above panel they demonstrate that they know exactly what it is that makes Hal Jordan who he is.

Hal Jordan is a guy who gets hit in the head a lot.

There are also a few gags about Harley touching Jordan's butt (which at least one of you will likely appreciate), and the more standard line of making fun of the character: His complete lack of imagination when it comes to power ring constructs, the defaults being a handful of the types of sports equipment that might have been found in your father or grandfather's childhood toy box.

A "strange fear"...?

Actually, Smee, I think crocodiles are one of the least strange things to fear, seeing as how they're the world's largest extant terrestrial predators and have the most powerful bite force of any animal in the world and all. (Oh yeah, that's totally Smee, at least as drawn by Fernando Cano in Stone Arch Books' adaptation of Peter Pan.)

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The DC Universe...?

Maybe it's just because I've watched the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World trailer hundreds of times since it first appeared online, but when I see this

I can't help but think of this

Now, I don't follow superhero TV and movie news all that closely, but from what I can tell, it appears that Warner Brothers is launching a new movie called Legends of Tomorrow, in which Michael Cera's Scott Pilgrim has to defeat the eight-or-nine evil exes (depending on how you want to count Firestorm) of Earth-0's Ramona Flowers in order to date her? And on Earth-0 Todd Ingram is The Atom...? Have I got that right...?

Man, this movie sounds awesome!

If this is true (and I have no reason to doubt the good people at National Geographic on this matter)

...then how come the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles don't have a villain who is a mutant butterfly, who is always trying to hurt their feelings or make them sad in order to get them to cry, so he or she can drink their sweet, sweet turtle tears...?

I'm just going to pretend I didn't see this ad.

I didn't think anything could possibly dampen my enthusiasm for DC/IDW's Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the first issue of which ships this week...in just two short days.

But then I saw this ad, and the word "Cowabatga." That's right, Cowabatga.

I'm...I'm just going to go ahead and pretend I never saw that ad or that word.

Wait, does DC Comics pay writers by the page, or by the word?

Based on page 9 of Patrick Gleason's Robin: Son of Batman #4, I suspect it may be the latter.

Come on Grayson, you're better than that.

Making fun of Lex Luthor for being bald seems somewhat beneath you, Dick Grayson. You've been making fun of super-villains since you hit puberty, so I'd really expect better material at this point in your career of insulting your foes.

Yes, calling attention to Luthor's lack of hair  probably is a good way to get under Luthor's skin, as we all know he's quite sensitive about being bald–in fact, permanently losing his hair after Superboy blew it out while fighting a lab fire is the entire reason Luthor went into villainy in the first place and has had a 70+ year grudge against the Man of Steel.

But Mr. Clean?

The Hair Club For Men?

For shame, Grayson. I'm surprised you didn't throw out "curly," "cue ball" and "Kojak" while you were at it. Step up your game, Dick.

(From Grayson #11, written by Tim Seeley and Tom King, drawn by Mikel Janin and colored by Jeromy Cox)

This is the best part of Batman: Arkham Knight Vol. 1:

And this is the worst part of Batman: Arkham Knight Vol. 1:

Peter J. Tomasi wrote both parts, but I can't figure out who drew them; they were penciled by either Viktor Bogdanovic, Ig Guara or Robson Rocha, and inked by one of three different inkers.

One strange side effect of Superman's new power.

Not only does Superman's new solar flare power, in which he releases all of the solar energy stored in his cells at once in a big explosion, shred his costume, it also apparently burns off all his chest hair. And his nipples!

I did not know that until I read this week's Batman/Superman Annual #2.

I would tell you who drew the above panels, because it seems only fair to credit the artist when posting images of their work, but there are five pencil artists, five inkers and four colorists on this issue, and it doesn't say who did what. I'm going to go ahead and guess Tom Derenick penciled those images though, and that Viente Cifuentes inked them. I could be wrong though. They could have been pencilled by Tyler Kirkham, Ian Churchill, Ardian Syaf or Emanuela Lupacchino. But I would bet, let's see, I would bet one copy of Batman/Superman Annual #2 that it was Derenick.

Pippi Longstocking burn!

(From Pippi Won't Grow Up by Astrid Lindgren and Ingrid Vang Nyman, published by Drawn and Quarterly)

You can't fool me, Jean-Paul Valley.

The packaging you're hiding in may be labeled "ACTION WING BATMAN," but I know you're not really any kind of Batman, Azrael.

Huey, Dewey and Louie have never been so insulted in their whole lives.

Uncle Scrooge offers a theory as to why the people of Plain Awful might have decided to base their entire culture around Donald Duck instead of Huey, Dewey and Louie after that one time Donald and his three identical nephews visited them.

That gag is probably my favorite part of Don Rosa's "Return to Plain Awful," one of the stories collected in the second volume of Fantagraphics' Don Rosa Library, entitled Return to Plain Awful. You're gonna want to pick that up this week, or write yourself a note to do so in the near future, as it's a pretty great collection, and the title story's not even one of the better ones you'll find in it.

I didn't post anything last night because I couldn't put Star Wars: Dark Times Omnibus Vol. 2 down.

Yesterday was Wednesday, and after reading a decent-sized stack of new singles from the comic shop, I would normally sit down and start reviewing them immediately for my off-the-cuff, typo-ridden regular feature "Comic Shop Comics." But a copy of Star Wars: Dark Times Omnibus Vol. 2 had just come into the library for me that day, and I thought I'd read a little bit of that before doing any comics blogging. Once I started, I couldn't stop reading though, and the damn thing was 450-pages.

I really liked those two volumes of that particular series of Star Wars comics, all written by Randy Stradley and mostly drawn in a beautiful, painterly style by Douglas Wheatley. They are set after the end of the prequel trilogy (Revenge of the Sith) and before the start of the original trilogy (A New Hope, or, as we called it when I was a kid, "Star Wars"), when there are a handful of Jedi knights still left in the galaxy, having survived the great Jedi purge at the climax of Reveng, and Darth Vader is still a hot, young, new super-bad-ass space wizard (as in the comics with Darth Vader in the title, he is crazy powerful in these, like Superman with a costume designed by Batman and Doctor Doom). The Republic is still transitioning into The Empire, so while they are the bad-guys, a lot of them aren't as bad as the generic villains they will eventually become.

Stradley follows a couple of these surviving Jedi, the crew of space-pirate types (all of them interesting-looking aliens save one female human, and they seem to be "new" aliens rather than one of the 10 or 12 different races that keep popping up in Star Wars stuff), and Darth Vader. Their paths all criss-cross in various ways, often directly, sometimes less so, throughout the 1,000 pages or so that make Dark Times. Stradley devotes the most attention to a character with the name Dass Jennir, a white-haired human Jedi who seems to change his look for each adventure.

I think that one thing that appealed to me personally was the simple fact that this time period wasn't completely alien to me, as some of the "Expanded Universe" stuff is (like, the stuff set centuries before the movies, or in the decades after Return of the Jedi), but it was also fresh and new, in that it didn't have much of anything to do with the lame plot-lines of the prequel trilogy, nor did it spend time constantly foreshadowing the original trilogy. In other words, it was new without being alien; it was a Star Wars that felt like a Star Wars, without being derivative of what I normally think of as Star Wars.

Stradley also really plays with the genre inspiration of the original conception of Star Wars. Large passages of the second volume read like they could very easily have been samurai movies, or westerns or sword-or-sorcery fantasies, only with, you know, aliens and robots and spaceships. Blue Harvest, the story arc that kicks off the second omnibus, would really only need to recast the aliens as Japanese guys to be a samurai story; they even all use swords—not light sabers, but swords—and, for the most part, dress like people from feudal Japan.

I also liked the droid character H2, a floating droid that, for much of his story arc acts like an asshole petulant teenager (a more amusing personality to R2-D2's pluck and spunk, or C3-P0's cluleless know-it-all-ism and prissy, easily shocked, scared or insulted sense of decorum).

And then there's that gorgeous Wheatley art. He's pretty damn incredible at every aspect of comics storytelling. I like his aliens, the humanoids and the wild animals and beasts of burden, many of which seem "new" to me. I like his fashion and ship design. And he draws really quite excellent action scenes.

As far as I can tell, these two collections represent all of the Dark Times material, and while it does seem to get a decent enough conclusion to several of the storylines, there are still threads left hanging and, one curious aspect of the Star Wars universe being that everything gets completely told eventually, I was sort of expecting there was much more to come. Perhaps the license for Star Wars comics moving from Dark Horse to Marvel has precluded that possibility.

I don't know. After reading these—And you guys know how hard I am to please, right? How demanding I am of even genre comics?—I actually felt a little, well, sad that Marvel is taking over Star Wars. With the projects they've announced so far, it seems like they will be pulling creators from the regular stable that handles all their superhero comics, albeit some of the bigger and most popular names. I do hope someone at Marvel has the good sense to hire some of these Dark Horse creators and/or editors to work on their Star Wars line with them though. Dark Horse has produced some pretty good Star Wars comics over the years. And they've produced some damn fine ones, too.

Happy New Comics Day!

Did you guys get the latest issues of Throttle, Jab and Gouge...? What did you think of the new story arc they just started in Murder Comics? Did it seem a little derivative of the earlier issues of Murder Komix to you at all...?

...

Okay, I don't have a post for tonight, so please just admire this great single panel from an early Schulz Peanuts Sunday strip. It and about two years worth of great comic strips can be found in Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts 1950-1952, now available in paperback.

Well there goes my to-do list.

I arrived home from running some errands this afternoon planning to get so much writing done today, and then what do I find waiting outside my apartment door but a package containing all this: All of the original Mirage trade paperbacks collecting Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that I don't already own (save one), the last handful of issues from the original volume of their comic that I've never read, the final 3/4ths of the Flaming Carrot crossover I read the first issue of in the early'90s and never finished and a trade paperback collection of Paleo, one of Jim Lawson's dinosaur comics.

I have a feeling it's going to be very, very difficult to get too far down my to-do list of writing I had planned on today with those comics just sitting there, begging to be read. (By the way, if you have holes in your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collection, this is where I ordered this awesome but frustrating package from; I was quite surprised that I could get all of 'em as cheap and in such good condition).

I'll try and post a new review later tonight, and it's a safe bet you'll read a lot of me talking Turtles here on EDILW in the weeks to come.