Two not-really-reviews: The Punisher Vol. 1 and New Avengers Vol. 1: Everything Dies

I borrowed these two collections from my library a few months ago, and read them both, with the intention of sitting down to review them at some point. In both cases, I kept putting doing so off—not out of a reluctance to write about them or out of procrastination, but simply because it seemed like I always had something else more timely or more pressing to write about, and thus they kept getting pumped further down the old review pile.

In the case of the Punisher book, I did pick it up and sit before my laptop with plans to review here on my blog one weekend afternoon, but then realized that despite having read it only a month or so before that, I had completely forgotten just about everything in it it (The Punisher grew a beard, I think? And there was a lady in it?).

So instead of writing about it that afternoon, I re-read it instead. And then, a few weeks later, I had once again forgotten just about everything that occurred within the story.

At that point, I just gave up and returned the book to the library. I figured if I could read the same graphic novel twice in the course of a summer and remember so little about it's plot, characters or overall quality, well, that fact was a sort of review in and of itself, wasn't it?

Here's all I remember thinking about the book:

1.) I was conflicted about the beard. On the one hand, Frank Castle has that whole military thing going on, so he seems like he might be the kind of guy who shaves every single day, and he even still makes his bed really well.  On the other hand, as a guy who only cares about killing criminals, maybe a beard would be a nice visual signifier that he puts criminal-killing above all else in his life, even personal grooming. Maybe he should have a gigantic beard like one of those guys in that duck show, long, crazy hair with twigs in it, and maybe some flies buzzing around his head that he never takes time to bathe, because he's just too busy killing bad guys.

2.) I think he wore a goofy Punisher shirt that looks like he bought it from a comic shop's clothing rack; like, it had a white skull/Punisher logo with a sorta wash effect on it, rather than wearing, like his superhero costume (In that respect, it reminded me of the Punisher shirt worn in the second of the three terrible Punisher movies). This seemed like a misguided attempt to make the character slightly more realistic, which is just silly; a Vietnam Vet who has killed 45,000 gangsters or so in a city full of superheroes makes The Punisher maybe the least realistic Marvel character of all. Dude's far below Man-Thing and Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer on my list of Marvel characters that could maybe possibly exist in the real world somehow someday. (Looking at the cover above though, maybe it was the Rucka Woman who apprentices with The Punisher who wore the lame Punisher merch shirt? Hey, I said I could barely remember the book!)

3.) Writer Greg Rucka put that same character he writes into every comic he writes in the book: The extremely competent, extremely tough woman haunted by personal demons and blessed with model good looks. I guess it's cool that Rucka is single-handedly trying to introduce as many "strong female characters" into comics as possible, but it's weird he keeps introducing the same one over and over, only varying her hair color and name.

4.) The Punisher fights The Vulture at some point, and The Vulture is not the old bald guy in green, but a young man with a full head of hair who wears red. All I really remember about this encounter is that I really hate hate hated Brian Hitch's cover for the issue that had the Vulture/Punisher fight in it.

Look at Hitch's Vulture:

He's just, like, a guy. In a red track suit. With some streamers on his jacket. And these streamers allow him to fly, I guess...? Or maybe he has superpowers, and the streamers are just for show? What a dumb cover image.

But it was just Hitch's version of the Vulture. The one inside, the one drawn by artist Marco Checcetto (whom I remember nothing of, so he was neither spectacular nor terrible), had, like, scary eyes and claws and fuller wings and looked like a super-villain monster man.

Did any of you guys make it farther into Rucka's Punisher run than I did, and manage to maintain memory of it? Is it worth starting over again some day, and reading all of it? I kinda want to get to the War Zone conclusion, where I think he fights the Marvel Universe, but not sure it's worth reading too many boring comics to get to it.

As for the New Avengers book, I really rather liked that one, but I let so much time elapse between reading it and considering reviewing it that I felt I'd have to re-read it to do even a half-way decent job of reviewing it, and it wasn't the sort of book I felt like re-reading (Not when I have sooo many other books, comic and otherwise, to read at the moment).

It collected the first story arc or so from the re-relaunched New Avengers book by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting and company, part of Marvel's "Marvel NOW!" initiative. It's not really an Avengers book, and it doesn't support its title very well (The more recent Mighty Avengers seems better-suited to the New Avengers title, given that for the bulk of Brian Michael Bendis' eight-years or so on the previous two volumes of New Avengers, they were meant to be the "street-level" super-team...and to have Luke Cage in it).

It's really an Illuminati title, the unofficial name given to the cadre of Marvel smart-guys who Bendis retconned into having been secretly running the Marvel Universe (Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Namor, Dr. Strange, Professor X). But I guess The Illuminati or The New Illuminati or Marvel's Illuminati just don't sound like proper titles for Marvel comic book (I like the sound of the word Superlluminati, though)

Hickman introduces some interesting changes to the line-up, with The Black Panther joining (after flirting with previous incarnations), Captain America joining for a little while until the others realized Cap just isn't an amoral enough asshole to hang with them and, finally,  X-Man/Avenger Hank "Beast" McCoy replacing the temporarily dead Charles Xavier.

The storyline of Bendis' involving these guys that I remember most clearly was an instance that lead into Secret Invasion, which I remember pretty clearly only because it made The Skrulls look like the good guys: The Illuminati detonate one of the Skrull's giant Star Wars ships and kill, like, thousands of Skrulls.

And that's sort of the quite dark gray area Hickman positions the team in. He's come up with a terrible moral dillema for them to face. In order to save the Earth, they must continuously destroy other Earths (wiping out the population of each), given some kind of cosmic thing where parallel Earths keep being drawn toward collision with the Marvel Earth. If they do nothing, both their Earth and the other Earth will be destoryed; if they destroy the other Earth, at least their Earth will survive, but at the cost of another whole planet.

Throughout this volume, they have to wrestle with that decision over and over, but circumstances tend to keep sparing them from having to actually make it. It's an interesting, unique conflict, and one well-suited to these particular super-heroes, some of whom aren't the sort who always find a third way when faced with two bad options (Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic in particular, given their roles as the villains of Civil War).

Infinity Gems, Thanos and, I'm sure, the already in-progress Infinity crossover/event figure heavily in the title's future, but I liked that first volume just fine, and was sorta surprised that I did, having no real strong feelings about the creators involved or the characters as a group (They've generally only appeared in the most talky, least exciting issues of Bendis' books).

I was sorta surprised by Mr. Fantastic's presence though, as he and the rest of the FF are lost in time and space in Fantastic Four and FF, two books being published concurrently with New Avengers, although perhaps they're actually set before or after the events of this title. 

Some disjointed thoughts on Wolverine By Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection

I saw this big, fat, somewhat absurdly-titled trade paperback sitting among the new ones in the young adult section of my library a few times, but I didn't actually pick it up and take it home with me until I was heading out of town for a few days and knew I'd have plenty of down time to kill. In other words, this wasn't a book that screamed "Read me!" so much as a book I looked at and thought, "I'd read that."

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It collects the first 19 issues of the Wolverine title that was launched in 2003, spanning three story arcs within a larger story arc all written by Greg Rucka and drawn primarily by Darick Robertson. It was likely a relaunched version of whatever the Wolverine title had going on before 2003, and it resumed its existence as a more straightforward superhero story with that twentieth issue, in which Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. took over and turned out a story arc with no more plot than this: Wolverine, now wearing his yellow costume and calling himself Wolverine again, fights the entire Marvel Universe.

That was probably regarded as something of an antidote to the Rucka run, during which Wolverine never wore a costume, his affiliation with superheroes or the Marvel Universe in general was only occasionally and seemingly reluctantly referenced, and he never went by anything other than "Logan."

In the rear-view mirror, the run was quite an aberration, a rather realistic take that eschewed pandering to the regular Marvel Universe audience in order to seek out potential readers who liked what they saw in the X-Men movies, or were intrigued with the idea of a stoic bad-ass type who could summon knives from his knuckles to kill bad guys in need of killing.

I guess Rucka and Marvel never found that audience, or didn't find them in sufficient numbers to keep this take on the character and the book going; in the third and final story arc of Rucka's run, Wolverine's archenemy Sabretooth re-surfaces, and there are riffs on the old "Weapon X" aspect of Wolverine's fictional history, making it the most Marvel-ous of the three. When Millar came aboard, his first issue had Wolverine bouncing around panels filled with Nick Fury, Elektra, Kitty Pryde, The Hand and SHIELD.

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Rucka's Wolverine launched during what was a pretty exciting time for Marvel, when the publisher seemed to be trying new things on the regular, with those new things often designed to appeal to people who didn't already read Marvel comics religiously. It's hard to even imagine today, but it wasn't that long ago that Grant Morrison was writing one X-Men comic, while Peter Milligan and Mike Allred were creating another X-Men comic.

I read this series as it was published serially for a story arc and a half; it was one of the many examples of the time of Marvel hiring creators who worked primarily at DC, DC's Vertigo imprint, and/or indie comics to come on board and breathe fresh life into their characters. Whiteout, Queen and Country and Batman writer Greg Rucka teaming with Transmetropolitan artist Darick Robertson for a new series starring the coolest X-Men? Hell yeah, sign me up!

Serially, the series was a real drag. This was during the period in which Marvel went out of their way to make their covers as bland and indistinct as possible—the idea was to shoot for "iconic" poses on every cover, the result being that the cover for any issue of a particular comic could be swithched out for any other.

On Wolverine, it meant painted images of the character by Esad Ribic (although Leanardo Fernandez would later take over), posing with his claws before a generic or minimal background, generally looking taller, slimmer, more handsome and with longer hair than Robertson's squatter, hairer more trollish character within. The guy on the cover looked like Hugh Jackman with better hair, the guy inside looked like comic book Wolverine (which I suppose is apropos...whenever they make films based on a real person, the actors in the films are generally better-looking, right...?)

A side-effect of this, however, was that I would often see issues of the book on the shop rack and neglect to pick them up because I thought I had already read that issue, or I wouldn't even notice it there. This happened a lot with Marvel's back then, with Timothy Bradstreet creating a new cover of Frank Castle standing there holding a gun each month for the Garth Ennis-written Punisher books or Utlimate Spider-Man, the first few years of which had practically identical covers month in and month out.

The interiors of Wolverine were similarly similar each month, and sometimes a flip-through wouldn't reveal whether or not you had already read the issue. The writing was of course de-compressed, and whether Rucka was necessarily writing for the trade or not, his pacing was slow and deliberate.

I dropped the book an issue or two into the second arc, "Coyote Crossing," out of boredom with it.

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At the time, I assumed the book was going for a filmic feel, given how the character was redesigned to match Jackman's portrayal in the X-Men movies (The second X-Men film opened the same year the book was released), but rereading it now, it seems more like it was written so as to resemble a television drama, of the hour-long sort you might see on a cable or premium channel. Unfortunately, it's paced so that every story arc would be an episode of the Wolverine television show that existed in Rucka's mind, rather than every issue, so it would take six months to "watch" each episode, with the only really complete stories being the little epilogues between them, during which Logan meets Nightcrawler, who is also out of costume and never referred to as "Nightcrawler" in a mutant bar with the unlikely name of The Box to talk about the action of the previous arc and weigh in on the issues that troubled Logan's soul—was he more animal than man, basically.

The budget seems television-low; there's some action in the first two arcs, but it's just gun-play and stabbing, nothing very dramatic. I don't even recall anything in the way of an explosion (Contrast that to Millar's first issue which, if I recall correctly, involved ninja fights, a flying aircraft carrier and an underwater fight to the death with a Great White shark).

It's not until the third arc that Wolverine fights anyone with super-powers, or fights army helicopters.

In live-action, you wouldn't need much in the way of special effects.

His opponents are realistic, power-less guys who don't need spandex or capes. There's a cult-leader with a soul patch and teardrop tatoo named Cry, a Mexican drug runner and people smuggler, and a couple of corporate suits, who hire actual super-villain Sabretooth, but who is only referred to as "Victor" or "Creed" and who wears street clothes (I never understood Sabretooth's costume—was it a fur-collared spandex bodysuit, with a Gambit-style built-in head-band....?)

There's also a new, original supporting cast, which include a guy who owns a gun shop that Wolvie goes to to get information from, and The Generic Greg Rucka Woman, a hard-man law enforcement/military type who just so happens to be a woman.

In this iteration, she's an ATF agent named Cassie who has a chance encounter with Logan and spends the first two story arcs trying to figure out who he is, what he's all about and, eventually, bedding him.

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These read much better in trade, where one need not wait a month between story beats, and run the risk of forgetting half of what's going on in each issue. It may feel like a paper version of Wolverine: The Series, but at least you get to watch the entire episode—or three!—in a row. Removing Wolverine from his usual trappings is also surprisingly refreshing, and Rucka's aversion to showing Wolverine-being-Wolverine comes off as purposeful, tasteful restraint when read all at once like this.

For example, his healing factor is teased in the first issue, as are his senses, and while he pops his claws a few times, Robertson doesn't drawn them on panel for a few issues; we only "hear" the SNIKT sound effects, and see the effects of his claws. For example, in once scene, he takes a crooked gun-dealer's pistol from him, turns his back to him and, a SNIKT later, hands him back the pistol in neatly cut pieces, like some sort of magic trick.

It's not until the climax of the first story that we see Logan with all his claws out, and leaping into action; it's a striking use of a splash, with a spread featuring 13-panels giving way to a double-page splash, featuring a huge image of an animalistic, screaming Wolveine leaping claws-first at the viewer, teh background a solid field of red.

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The stories are these: "Brotherhood," "Coyote Crossing" and "Return of the Native."

In the first, Logan's next door neighbor, a troubled seventeen-year-old girl, is gunned down by automatic weapon fire, and, when he steps in to intervene, so is he. He tracks her killers, eventually finding a weird cult that has taken over an entire town, and crossing paths with Cassie for the first time.

In the second, he stumbles across a human smuggling operation, which sends him south of the border to find the monster behind it, and the identity of the head of the criminal organization was a nice, effective twist that made for a dramatic moment for the character.

In the third, Victor Creed is hunting "The Native," a Weapon X alum who has gone feral in Canada, and some people seem to think she's some kind of Bigfoot now. Handily defeated by her, Creed sends Wolverine looking for her, and follows Wolverine, as he's easier fro Creed to track. Wolvie and the Native fall-in lust—amusingly, going feral means she has waist-length dreadlocks and dresses in animal skins, but she still shaves her legs and armpits, as the sexy feral wolf lady still has to meet the traditional Madison Avenue standards of beauty—we can't have Wolverine copulating (and impregnating!) a woman as hairy as he is!

As I said, this is the most superhero-y of the three, with three super-powered characters, and the most supervillain-y of the bad people Wolverine encounters, a mad scientist lady named Vapor who wears spandex in one scene and may or may not be a recurring X-Men villain (If an X-Men character wasn't prominently featured in more than one episode of the 90s cartoon on Fox, chances are I won't recognize them in a comic book).

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They're pretty good action genre comics, made with a high degree of craft, and they were enjoyable read in this particular package. Rucka finds a character hook to Wolverine, one that's or more less essential to the character—am I man or an animal, does doing bad things make me a bad person, will I ever learn to control my animalistic berserker rage, etc—and has him wrestle with them more or less subtly (few of the issues are narrated by anyone, and none of them are narrated Chris Claremont style).

This, and the relationship with Cassie, is the one constant in the book, although the Cassie plot disappears in the third story, perhaps to make room for the other characters.

De-coupling Wolverine from the X-Men (for the most part) and the Marvel Universe in general (again, for the most part) made for an easier, less new-reader hostile experience, but it was also somewhat surreal.

It would be understandable in a Wolverine TV show or movie, but it was strange reading a Wolverine comic book in which a federal agent spends so much time trying ot figure out who the short, hairy, wolfman guy with Civil War sideburns driving around on a motorcycle righting wrongs by stabbing dozens of bad guys to death might be. Was he man or animal? Did he even exist?

Maybe Wolverine usually wore a mask when the X-Men or Avengers were on the news or whatever, but still, there can't be that many guys with knuckle-knives, can there? And certainly mutants and super-people have to be a pretty common thing in the Marvel Universe of the 21st century, right?

It's also pretty jarring because Rucka sets the stories in this story-universe apparently devoid of knowledge of Logan, Wolverine and mutants and superheroes in general, but then we'll get an issue like #6, wherein Wolverine has a drink with Nightcrawler in a mutant bar and they talk about Colossus and Kitty Pryde and so on. The book thus had a very convenient relationship with continuity and the Marvel Universe as a shared setting, which I found fairly amusing.

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Also amusing? The cover for Wolverine #6?

Why is Nightcrawler naked? Why does it look like the cover of a romance novel? It looks like this would be the cover to some X-Men yaoi/slash fiction paperback novel that exists in an alternate universe.

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Also convenient? In the first issue, Wolverine is unable to protect the teenager girl he spends the first story arc attempting to avenge. Even though he lives right across the hall from her, and even though that very night she warned him that she needs protection, two guys with automatic weapons shoot her to death through her door and, when Wolverine comes out of his room, they shoot him to death too.

Well, he lives because of his healing factor, but he totally let the girl get killed. Later he would kill those same two dudes...plus 25 other dudes, all at once.

I realize the girl had to die and he had to fail to protect her in order to move the story in the direction Rucka wanted it to go, but it was hard to reconcile the unstoppable killing-machine with super-human senses version of the character to the one who lets a girl get chopped up with bullets right under his super-nose, and gets filled full of lead himself.

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What's the closest close-up you've ever seen of Wolverine's nipples? Is it this scene?



Robertson drew the hell out of Wolverine's nipples, didn't he?

Oh, and if you're wondering what the hell is going on in that completely out-of-context series of three panels in which we see Wolverine's nipples up close, this is the morning after he has been shot to death (or what would be shot to death if he didn't have a healing factor), and apparently his skin has healed up over some of the bullets, so he's cutting open his skin in order to pop the bullets out of his body.

That guys is so gross.

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Please note that while the only artist I've mentioned doing interiors was Robertson, Fernandez actually draws the "Coyote Crossing" storyline. His art is fine, and while it doesn't mesh as well with Robertson's as would be ideal, he's a good artist who doesn't clash with Robertson's art style either.

If you need more than one artist on a superhero monthly, that's the smart way to do it, have the artists each draw distinct story arcs.

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Here's a badly-scanned page form the final story arc, in which Wolverine fights a bunch of black helicopters to try and save his new feral girlfriend.

Do you remember that part in X-Men Origins: Wolverine where Wolverine fought a helicopter? That was my favorite part of the movie. In fact, it was the only part of the movie I liked, except for the part where the kindly old couple that adopted Wolverine over night gut killed, which was pretty funny, not because I am psycho who thinks it's funny when kindly old people get murdered, but because the film took such pains to force them to be Wolverine's surrogate parents for, like, one scene before killing them off just to make Wolverine slightly madder.

Anyway, that movie came out in 2009, and this story took place in 2004 or so. Did the people who made the movie steal Wolverine vs. Helicopter from this old Greg Rucka comic, or is Wolverine fighting helicopters, like, a thing? A thing that's been going on for years and years, like Daredevil beating up bar-goers?

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So, Wolverine By Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection? You could read it.

Reviews of some recent and upcoming comics

Last Days of American Crime #1 (Radical Comics) The title of this comic book is meant to be taken somewhat literally as its premise. In the near-ish future, the U.S. government will be readying some sort of signal that will “neurologically make it impossible for anyone within its range to engage knowingly in unlawful activity.”

That seems like a pretty great idea for a crime story, right? The problem is that the government in this series is doing it on the down low, which takes a great deal of the urgency out of that premise, and dulls the hook of the story quite a bit.

Well, that’s a problem. Perhaps the bigger problem with writer Rick Remender’s scripting of the first issue of this three-issue miniseries is that I only know the bit about the secret government crime-stopping signal because I read about it in the press materials for the book, and then again in an interview with Remender that ran in the back of this first issue. Reading the story itself, there’s only a passing reference to that big idea, most of the focus going to another big idea—the fact that the U.S. is about to go to a purely cash-less society will in and of itself make most forms of crime obsolete, but not before it presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a smart, tech-savvy criminal element to set itself up with an inexhaustible source of electronic wealth.

The two big ideas make almost one another redundant—in this issue at least, only one of them gets any play at all, and, remember, this is a three-issue series, so this is a 90-minute movie, Remender’s already burned through the first half hour.

The focus is on the criminal element hoping to make that one big last score. The plan is that of Graham, a rather unlikable, old-fashioned criminal type (When we first meet him, he’s about to burn a man alive). He’s so old-fashioned, he needs to recruit someone else to do the computer hacking for him, a shifty, hipster-y looking young man named Kevin Cash, and, complicating matters, is a mysterious woman who initiates some anonymous bathroom sex with Graham before later being introduced as Shelby, Kevin’s girlfriend.

You know how the news magazine’s will occasionally run big long story’s about whether America is in decline or not? Well, the milieu of Last Days is an America in which that’s no longer a question—things are bad, Robocop bad, Mexican police using lethal force to keep Americans from jumping the fence to immigrate south bad.

Artist Greg Tocchini does an excellent job of suggesting how bad the world is through his gritty, messy but still quite pretty artwork, mostly with the details in the background. It’s a nice-looking comic book, and the rocky aspects of the premise aside, Remender has written a propulsive, page-turner of a story. With two issues yet to go, there’s certainly time for Last Days to turn itself around, but even if it doesn’t, it’s not a bad bit of crime comic book-ing, and when it comes to straight genre work, “not bad” is often just as good as “good.”

Like the recent Incarnate series from Radical, Last Days is being released in 48-page, $4.99 “prestige” format, with a spine and the ads all stored up and running just in the back, segregated form the story. It’s a heck of a value, and a nice format compromise between the 22-page, stapled serial comic books and the inevitable industry standard of the trade paperback.


Lola: A Ghost Story (Oni Press) “Lola” is the Tagalog word for grandma, and preteen Jesse’s Lola has just died, prompting him to return to his parents’ home in the Philippine countryside to bury her. His Lola had a special power, a sort of mysterious second sight that allowed her to see ghosts, visions and the occasional supernatural monster. Jesse has inherited the ability, but he’s not terribly happy about it, given that the visions tend not to be a whole heck of a lot of fun and his parents, teachers and classmates don’t really believe him anyway.

Writer J. Torres’ story is a low-key one, set on simmer. Our quite, withdrawn special boy hero goes about the visit, with little to no control over what happens when (as children never do in such occasions), while he learns a bit more about his Lola and legendary aspects of her childhood and abilities and deals with another dead relative, one only he can see but who never the less has a great impact on the rest of the family.

It reads quite a bit like a young adult novel, and probably makes for a pretty solid all-ages read. Torres sometimes seems to try too hard, and I found the open-ended, “I’d love to do a sequel if you guys like this” conclusion rather unsatisfying, but its otherwise a very solid story with enough going on between the supernatural imagery and the family melodrama to offer a little something for almost everyone.

Torres does a pretty great job of getting out of the way and letting Elbert Or’s accomplished art work do the heavy lifting when necessary. Or’s style is soft, round and cartoonish (like, characters only have four fingers cartoonish), all of which contributes to a sense of warmth that keeps the scarier elements of the story from overwhelming the mood. Rather than straight black and white, the book is colored in sepia tones, which no doubt help add to that sense of warmth and highlight the nostalgic aspects inherent in the returning home and coming-of-age elements in the story. (Note: This should be in shops this coming Wednesday, January 13).


The Muppet Show Comic Book #1 (Boom Kids): Boom and Roger Langridge are transitioning their Muppet Show Comic Book from a series of miniseries to an ongoing series, and this is the start of that effort (not counting the recent #0 issue). With the theater undergoing renovations, Kermit decides to take the Muppet Show on the road, and familiar routines get refit for more lo-fi, outdoor performance. For example, Electric Mayhem is now Acoustic Mayhem, Rolf’s medical drama skit is devoted to an old-timey snake oil routine and while the two cranky old hecklers who haunt the balcony aren’t around, there are two equally cranky old locals sitting on a tree branch who look and act an awful lot like ‘em. Meanwhile, Fozzie decides to strike out on his own as a street performer, and in a back-up detailing the ABC’s of this new challenge facing the sad sack stand-up, Langridge again reaches one of those occasional bits of pathos he’s been able to bring to the property. If I did my math right, this is the ninth issue of a Muppet comic scripted and drawn by Langridge, and, like the previous eight, it its amazingly fun and an impressive adaptation of one medium into another that, by all rights, shouldn’t even be possible, let alone this successful. Damn that man is good… (Note: This should be in shops this coming Wednesday, January 13)


Stumptown #2 (Oni) Greg Rucka’s portrayal of his attractive young female protagonist’s flexible sexual identity and outgoing availability is a little on the icky side, isn’t it? Last issue Rucka had his early-thirtysomething Dexedrine flirting with a mob boss’ bikini-clad daughter, seemingly making her the third lipstick lesbian comic book crime-fighter he’s currently writing (Along with Batwoman and The Question II in Detective Comics). This issue opens with her flirting with her male doctor, getting into an argument with a policeman whose marriage she broke up in the past and, upon encountering the mob daughter again, we learn that the daughter isn’t really gay (“Sorry to break your heart, but I don’t play for your team”) and that Dex is probably bi or still experimenting (“I’ve yet to figure out what team I’m on.”)

That’s right boys, she’s even better than a lipstick lesbian! She’s one that might sleep with you!

That rather minor (if distracting, given Rucka’s recent body of work) business aside, Stumptown remains a rather engaging and enjoyable detective comic. Beyond her fantasy aspects, Dex is a charming enough person to spend time around, and Rucka is playing the mystery out like a real mystery novelist rather than a comics writer fooling around with the genre—introducing suspect after suspect and possible motive after possible motive, each equally likely.

I continue to enjoy Southworth’s work, even if the heavily-referenced style isn’t one I’m personally particularly fond of (I really dislike the way his cars look, but otherwise he does a pretty great job of making each panel, regardless of the amount of reference, his own). There’s some back matter in this particular issue in which the artist discusses his work which turns out to be a lot more interesting than such back matter usually is. I usually pick up a comic for the comic, not what’s in the back about the comic, but I do like reading about how artists go about meeting little challenges like, say, how to people and cars relate to one another in terms of size.


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I also have reviews of Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca's Afrodisiac and Josh Cotter's Driven By Lemons up at Blog@Newsarama. Click here if you'd like to read 'em.

Two recent comics starring tough broads.

I wonder, is it an insult or a compliment to say that Greg Rucka’s Stumptown #1 (Oni Press) reads precisely what one would expect a Greg Rucka-written comic to read like?

Because the first issue of Stumptown, Rucka’s new creator-owned crime series from the publishers of his Queen & Country and Whiteout comics, does just that.

It stars Dex, a tough, sarcastic, trouble-prone hard-living young woman whose hard living doesn’t show up in her runway-ready good looks who is so far indistinguishable from Rucka’s Renee Montoya/Question (save that her vice is gambling), and could be most any Rucka heroine. The plot is super-straightforward, all-event and no-character genre plotting.

That probably sounds somewhat insulting, or, if it’s a compliment, then perhaps a backhanded one, but all I really mean by it is that Rucka is well within his comfort zone with Stumptown.

No, it’s not ground-breaking, no it’s not going to change your life (or anyone’s else’s), but it’s well-produced genre entertainment, and if crime is one of the genres of comics you did, then you’re probably going to dig this.

Dex is a busty, young, presumably lesbian private investigator with a severe gambling problem and a little brother with developmental issues she’s trying to support. She gets a chance to clear her debts at the local casino when the little old Native American woman who runs it hires Dex to find her missing granddaughter.

The case immediately becomes very complicated for Dex, who takes a beating or two and almost gets killed immediately. As the title suggests, the book’s set in Portland, Oregon, and it sure seems to include a lot of local color, but I wouldn’t know for sure, I’ve never been there.

Rucka is working with artist and co-creator Matthew Southworth, who’s based in Seattle, which is in the same general corner of the country, if I remember my sixth grade geography class correctly.

Southworth is a real talent, and one I suspect we’ll be hearing more and more about in the years to come. His work reminds me a bit of the sort that Brian Michael Bendis used to do for his pre-Marvel crime comics, and maybe a bit of Michal Gaydos, and a bigger bit of Guy Davis. There’s a nice balance between realism and scratchiness—Southworth’s Stumptown always looks like a comic book, even if it’s drawn in an extremely realistic style.

It’s fully-colored, which still strikes me as kind of unusual for an Oni book, and the palette is slightly muted, so the art pops without ever doing so too loudly. Hell, even the letters and cover-design are top-notch here.

Crime comic fans will definitely want to check this out, and comics readers simply looking for quality entertainment may want to give it a look as well.

Stumptown seems even stronger when read around the same time as Nola #1 (Boom Studios), as the former is well-constructed as an introduction to the character, story, conflict and premise. After one issue of Stumptown, you’ll know if it’s something you want to read another issue of or not.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for Nola. After reading the first issue, I still don’t know enough about the comic to be able to say if it’s very good or not…wait, check that. Since I have read the first issue and still don’t have enough to go on regarding the story and its quality, that sort of answers that question right there.

The narrative is split in two, with scenes apparently set in the present giving way to ones set in the past, and then jumping back and forth. Why this particular strategy is employed isn’t quite clear; I suppose it’s to keep an air of mystery about the events, without spending too much uninterrupted time on the character drama of the flashback portions, but I’m just guessing. How exactly the pieces fit together remains to be seen, but I didn’t see much to entice me into coming back next issue to see if that’s when it will start fitting together.

According to the credits, Nola is created by Chris Gorak, who gets a story credit, while Pierluigi Cothran gets a script credit and Damian Couceiro handles art.

The title refers to the main character’s name, but it’s also set in New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA, get it?!?).

In the present, a black woman in a makeshift mask and extremely tight black top is trying to cross a bridge into post-Katrina, still-flooded New Orleans, but a pair of cops are trying to keep her out.

In the past, we spend a day in the life with a young black woman named Nola as she hangs out with her mom and goes on a “date” with some rich, married, scummy dude who has sex with her on the kegs in the backroom of a seedy bar. By the issue’s end, she’s caught in an explosion.

Presumably, both women are the same, and Nola is trying to get back into town to get revenge on her boyfriend for letting her get blown up. She kills the cops in order to do so.

So in both the present and the past, Nola’s a rather unsympathetic and unlikable heroine, and if she’s got good reason to be so unsympathetic and unlikable, we weren’t shown her motivation by the end of the first issue.

This is one of those comics that reads like an unproduced screenplay, chopped almost arbitrarily into enough chunks to fill out a comic book miniseries. It will therefore likely read infinitely better as a trade than it does at the moment as a serial. Couceiro’s art is pretty nice, at least.

Bat-Pope Week: Turning Points #5

In a lot of ways, Paul Pope’s weirdest Batman work was probably this
, the fifth issue of five-part, 2001 series Batman: Turning Points. It wasn’t set on an alternate timeline, it wasn’t part of a one-off project and it wasn’t set up as a showcase for Pope’s unique style and storytelling sensibility. It was an in-continuity, non-“imaginary” story that Pope merely provided the pencil art for, working from another writer’s script and having an inker finish his art.

Turning Points came out during that very structured period of Bat-comics I had mentioned the other day in discussing Gotham Knights, between the conclusion of “No Man’s Land” and before “Officer Down,” and the slow unraveling of the line that followed.*

Writers Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker took turns writing issues of Turning Points, with Chuck Dixon stepping in to handle #4, which focused on the Jean-Paul Valley Batman, a storyline that predated Rucka and Brubaker’s Bat-work but coincided with Dixon’s.

As the title implies, the series focused on the major beats of the Commissioner Gordon/Batman relationship, the moments when that relationship took a turn for the better, or worse: There’s a “Year One” era story where they make tentative steps toward a personal relationship in addition to a professional one, the introduction of the first Robin, Batman’s withdrawal after the Joker murdered Jason Todd and attacked Barbara Gordon, Batman electing to have Valley replace him without mentioning it to Gordon, and then the then-current “status quo.”

DC eventually collected it all into trade, and it’s a pretty solid endeavor, particularly the Rucka and Brubaker issues. (I’d highly recommend it to Batman fans; although I suppose it does make for a decent primer on Bat-history for those who might not have read all the stories it responds to, like Batman: Year One, The Killing Joke, Death in the Family and Knightquest).

The art is consistently incredible, coming from Steve Lieber, Joe Giella, Dick Giordano, Brent Anderson and Pope, with covers by Javier Pulido, Ty Templton, Joe Kubert, Howard Chaykin and Pope. (The trade features a new cover by Tim Sale).

Rucka was back on scripting duty for the final, Pope-drawn issue, which wasn’t really about a “turning point” so much as where all the turns lead, the then-current relationship between Gordon and Batman. The plot is a sort of callback to the first issue, in which the bad guy from that story, Corbett, returns to Gotham with an insatiable desire to face Gordon and Batman—to thank them for stopping him back in #1, and setting him on the path to his current happiness.

Pope’s pencils are inked by Claude St. Aubin, and it’s so damn weird to see a somewhat toned down and subdued version of Pope’s Batman in the “real” Gotham. The spinning, ballet like fight moves, the balled-up posture, the full lips—this is clearly Pope’s Batman, but it’s the turn-of-the-21st-century Batman of Batman, Detective and Gotham Knights, complete with Gordon, Renee Montoya, Detective Crispus Allen, the laser-light Bat-signal and the peculiar GCPD uniforms familiar from Gotham Central.

Now let’s take a look at some of the art.

Here’s page two, in which Batman comes to the rescue of a couple being attacked in an alley:


It takes him just two panels to knock out all three of the muggers. It’s interesting to look at this Batman of Pope’s after reading about his thoughts on Batman’s costuming in the Batman: Year 100 trade. Now we know what Pope thinks of various elements of Batman’s costume, but he’s not 100% free to tweak it as he wants; this is the costume Batman was wearing at the time—the same one he’s been wearing since “No Man’s Land,” actually (Black and gray, no yellow oval, with bulky pockets on the utility belt).

Pope gives Batman’s shorts more of a swim trunk cut than the man-panties cut he was wearing when most artists drew him, and he gives the boots discernible treads (Gotham Knights penciller Roger Robinson was also drawing Batman with realistic sole and tread-having boots back then).

Also, Batman’s costume is clearly fabric, not body paint and plastic; his tights bunch, his jersey stretches across his torso, little wrinkles appear in his gloves and boots at the wrists and ankles.

Here’s another action scene a few pages later, during which Batman swoops to the rescue of Gordon, Allen and Montoya:

I love the various expressions on Batman, Allen and Montoya’s faces in those last two panels. This is apparently Allen’s first time seeing Batman.

“He’ll get over it,” Batman responds two panels later, after one panel of staring at Allen in silence.

Later, Gordon is pouring himself a cup of coffee in his darkened kitchen, and goes out to his garden, where he knows Batman is waiting; checking up on him as he has been ever since Gordon’s wife Sarah Essen was killed by The Joker at the end of “No Man’s Land.”

Rucka has the two joke a little bit before talking business, and there are some really interesting choices in the staging. When Gordon sits on a bench, Batman crouches down near him, and…bites his thumb?:

That seems very un-Batman-like to me, which actually makes it kind of neat. Batman’s now so comfortable with Gordon that he doesn’t have to pretend to be a mysterious monster man around him, but can feel free to nibble on his glove (which has honest to God seams on it!).

On the next page, there’s some more interesting body language choices:

Their conversation is interrupted by the Bat-signal, and they convene on the roof of police headquarters, where Corbett has turned on the signal to lure them there. He wanted them to meet his new family, which leads to this darling scene between Batman and Corbett’s daughter:

And that, as far as I know, is all of Pope’s Batman work.

I would say I would like to see him doing more of it, even if just on a penciling basis (especially considering the appalling state of the Batman monthly at the moment), but, honestly, I’m really looking forward to more Thb and the upcoming Battling Boy, and, as much as I enjoy seeing Pope take on Batman (or Spider-Man, or The Fantastic Four or—some day—The New Gods), my favorite work of his has been his original stuff, like Escapo and Heavy Liquid.

Perhaps what I’d really like, then, is to see more artists draw the regular Batman books who are good in the same ways that Pope is good—capable of realism that serves rather than subverts a highly individual personal style, possessing a basic understanding of drapery and anatomy, having a passion for design that shows through in every drawing, and excellent “acting” skills.




*Just in case I need to justify that statement: Back then, there were three Batman monthlies, each with their own look and focus, plus a fourth in Legends of the Dark Knight which sometimes focused on present continuity and sometimes told stories set in the past, plus satellite books for supporting characters Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman, Batgirl and Barbara Gordon/Oracle. Now there are just two Batman monthlies, each defined by a strong writer with his own vision of the character, but little in the way of month-to-month visual continuity, and Batman Confidential has replaced LDK as an anthology title focused on different, past eras of Batman’s fictional history. Catwoman and Batgirl have lost their books, Birds of Prey has been refocused away from the Bat-line, and Robin and Nightwing have been a wee bit…chaotic, creatively over the past few years. The latter seems to have settled down for now, however.

Sixteen thoughts about the 52 trades and their "extras"

There was a lot to admire about DC’s first year-long weekly series, 52. One of the more admirable things, I thought, was that it was a sequential comic book completely intended to be read as it was being published, in it’s 20-page, stapled, comic book format.

In other words, it wasn’t a graphic novel that was simply being chopped up into chapters and marketed as a series to make a little extra money in the direct market before tackling the book market, like so many comics these days.

In fact, it was so perfectly created to be enjoyed as a comic book series, rather than a trade paperback, that as I was reading it, I couldn’t even imagine how it would be collected in trade. With different artists handling the art chores each issue, it seemed like it would make for the ugliest trade ever some day.

Well, I recently checked all four volumes of it out from the library. Part of that was simple curiosity, to see how it reads in one sitting, whether or not it works in a trade format or not (It does; Keith Giffen’s layouts really do the trick).

But in greater part, it was because the trades include little afterwords between each issue’s worth of story, with some of the creators involved telling inside stories about the particular issue. These come from Michael Siglain, Keith Giffen, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns, J.G. Jones, Phil Jiminez, Dan DiDio and, on one occasion, Paul Levitz. MIA are Grant Morrison and Steve Wacker, the latter of whom has since left the company to work for Marvel.

I find the production of this book incredibly fascinating, and always appreciated whatever interviews any of the creators involved did about it. The four writers—Johns, Waid, Morrison and Rucka—are just so different, and everyone insisted everyone wrote everything together, with a “band” like approach to the creation. I want every look behind the curtain I can get, and this one offers lots of little peeks.

Anyway, here are some thoughts on the trade collections of 52…


1.) While the trades read better than I would have thought, the series still reads best as it was intended—as a weekly experience. The myriad little mysteries running throughout and the guessing games involved were a great part of the fun of the series, and seeing them all solved within a few hours, rather than the course of a year, may be satisfying, but does rob the reader of one of the series’ great pleasures.

Additionally, a weekly comic book that readers feel has to be read immediately in comic book form, rather than six months form now in trade, is, I think, extremely important for DC and Marvel, and any comic book companies that hope to truly compete with them in a meaningful way. If the industry is ever going to be able to resist some sort of all-graphic novel (or perhaps electronic) model, then the future lies in books like these.

It’s not hard to imagine a weekly, universe-wide series like this at each of the Big Two, and weeklies starring Batman, Batman’s sidekicks, Superman, The Justice League, The Avengers, The X-Men and Spider-Man. If weekly series became standardized enough, it would be easy enough to see them even returning to magazine racks.

But back on track for a second, while the story itself reads just fine, the trades are an overall less appealing package. The two-page back-up origins are missing, for one, and while J.G. Jones’ covers are all included, they play a less prominent role, all republished at smaller scale at the back of each volume, rather than kicking off each chapter.


2.) DC and Marvel have both been shying away from using blurbs on their trade covers of late, but 52 is lousy with ‘em. Most are pretty positive, some kind suspiciously vague (“[A] grand experiment…fun.” Or “An unprecedented undertaking…”). But still, they’ve got blurbs from The New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon.com, The Onion, Variety, the New York Daily News, Entertainment Weekly, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Miami Herald, the Newark Star Ledger and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Can’t wait to see what the Countdown trades look like…


3.) Jones’ covers for these things are pretty weak:




(Note: That fourth one is in color and has trade dress matching the first three. DC hasn't updated the listing on their site though, despite the fact that the trade is, you know, completed and ready for purchase now).

The rendering is fine, and I can see how he was going for a unified theme, with the stars standing front and center in front of other members of the ensemble, but compared to some of the brilliant covers on the 52 individual issues of 52?

These really suck.

I don’t think I like the idea of Doctor Magnus looking so much like Doctor John Dorian, either…


4.) According to Waid, Steve Wacker wrote the notes on Rip’s infamous blackboard scene, and a few of them are things that were meant to be addressed but never were or will be, including “2000 years from now” and “What is Spanner’s Galaxy?” Not sure why Waid sounds so definitive abut it being something that won’t be gotten to eventually.

Looking at the board and Rip’s scattered notes, there’s a lot there that is so vague I’m still not sure if was actually covered somewhere. A lot of it seems to have been things covered outside of 52 anyway.


5.) Despite being constantly concerned with the book going off the rails due to the unforgiving deadline schedule, Giffen was apparently constantly fucking with everyone. He accidentally revealed Batwoman a little too early, which wasn’t caught, and he drew a Spider-Man balloon into the Thanksgiving parade (which was caught) and Zatara in fishnets (ditto).


6.) I’m not in love with Batwoman’s costume, which is just Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl costume with a different color scheme, a Silver Age Batwoman/Bat-Girl-esque mask, and a tweaked bat logo. Ross designed several different masks for her though, and they were all worse, I think. All were borrowed from other iterations—Batgirl’s mask, Batman Beyond’s mask, Huntress’ mask—save one, which looks like a Bat-symbol perched over her eyes, its wings flaring up off the sides of her head.

A few weeks later, there’s a full-color sketch from Ross labeled “Batgirl” (it’s the costume which is just a red and black version of Barbara Gordon’s, with a Batman Beyond-shaped Bat-symbol). The one sentence blurb accompanying it is interesting: “Alex Ross’s proposed sketch was originally intended for a new ‘Batgirl’—but was repurposed later for Batwoman.”

Huh?

This can’t possibly have been sitting in a drawer since the last new Batgirl was introduced (Huntress as Batgirl and then Cassandra Cain as Batgirl in “No Man’s Land”), could it? (Alex Ross did do some “No Man’s Land” covers).

Were there plans for another new Batgirl that were scrapped, then?


7.) There was one thing in the story that I was positive would get fixed in the trade and it didn’t. In week 11, Ralph confronts a member of “The Cult of Conner,” using the name “Cult of Conner” and showing a news clipping with the same name. In the weekly post-mortems on Newsarama.com, the editors and writers maintained that the general public wasn’t using that phrase, only those who already knew Superboy’s identity were. This scene contradicts that, and is still here.

Obviously, if Superboy’s name, even just his first name got out, the fact that there was a Conner Kent in Smallville, Kansas living with Clark Kent’s parents, well…you wouldn’t need to be Lex Luthor to figure out Superman’s identity with a clue that big.


8.) DiDio writes a passage about the introduction of Batwoman, and the fact that she was a lesbian caused a bit of a medium hubbub. He mentioned that he got over 1,000 emails on the subject of Batwoman’s sexuality, split 50/50 between positive and negative.

What I found most interesting was his conclusion:



I said it then and I feel it is worth repeating now: Batwoman is a hero first, and being lesbian only helps to define who she is and how she arrives at the choices she makes. I am proud of her addition to our pantheon of characters and although you are only meeting her briefly in this issue, we expect great things from her character in the future.



That first issue was September of 2006. This trade, in which DiDio wrote that paragraph, was released in May. Is she really in DC’s “pantheon of characters” at this point? Damian al Ghul has been a bigger part of Batman’s adventures and Gotham City since the end of 52 than Batwoman is.

DC has released solicitation through March of 2008, and there’s been no mention of the Batwoman ongoing that’s been rumored since fall of ’06, and had at least two writers attached to it so far.

And even if her title never comes, she’s yet to really play a part in the Bat-books. At least the one’s I read (Batman and ’TEC). Other than last year’s Christmas special and a panel or four of Countdown has she appeared anywhere yet? Has Batman met her yet? Has Barbara Gordon?

Every time a completely irrelevant fill-in appears in Batman or Detective Comics, every time a Bat- event like “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” or Gotham Underground is announced, I can’t help but wonder why DC is literally sitting on a more relevant, more interesting and more eagerly anticipated Bat-related story.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that the fact that Batwoman is a lesbian is apparently a bigger deal than DiDio’s words seem to indicate, and that people within the company hierarchy are of very different opinions on what’s appropriate for a member of the Bat-family.

(I don’t think the company as a whole, or DiDio, are necessarily homophobic, or worried about being perceived negatively by homophobes. Lesbian character Montoya has a current miniseries, gay character Midnighter has an ongoing in the WildStorm imprint, and gay man Piper plays a role in Countdown. On the other hand, Manhunter, which had gay characters in its supporting cast, isn’t being published any longer, but readers were publicly assured it wasn’t cancelled, gay Superman analogue Apollo was pointedly made into a Ray analogue in Countdown: Arena, and Countdown is full of some pretty clumsy gay jokes).

It does seem like an instance of leeriness of a gay character trumping a good business decision though. Surely a Batwoman comic or event is going to outsell, oh, at least half of the books DC is publishing now, and be met with more interest than Batman fighting the Scarecrow for the 456th time.


9.) Apparently, one of the most labor-intensive parts of the series was Booster Gold’s death in week fifteen, as multiple drafts were done as the writers tried to work out a way to make the death look final, from the presence of a corpse to Booster’s last words. Waid originally wrote him dying while making fun of Supernova, saying things like, “Look at me, I’ve saving the day, I’m Supernova!” The others talked him away from that as being a little too big of a clue. They were right. What sold the death the most to me was that it was a heroic death. If a hero dies in an unheroic way, you know they’re coming back—and even when they do die a heroic one, they’re still probably coming back sooner or later anyway (See Hal Jordan, Ice, Oliver Queen and Jason Todd).

Also, in Giffen’s lay-outs, Booster Gold’s body was ripped in half by the explosion. That’s gotta be Geoff Johns’ idea.


10.) Abraham Lincoln really was one of Booster Gold’s pallbearers. According to Waid, Wacker chose the pallbearers, and one was “yes, Abraham Lincoln (from—my hand to God—an unpublished Justice League story I once wrote for Steve on a dare).” Now that’s a story I’d really like to read. Forget Four Horsemen and Crime Bible, can we get 52 Aftermath: The Abraham Lincoln Justice League Story Mark Waid Wrote on a Dare? I’d buy one.

I wonder if Waid was referring to the Lincoln story he wrote from the never released Elseworlds 80-Page Giant? A book that was pulped because of the concerns that Kyle Baker’s Super-Baby story would have kids microwaving babies or something like that. It was later published in one of the Bizarro Comics anthologies, anyway.

Font of information Wikipedia has a breakdown of the contents, including a story by Waid and EDILW favorite Ty Templeton entitled “Superman in President Abraham (Brainiac) Lincoln Vs. Clark Kent, Mentallo” in which baby Kal-El’s rocket is discovered by the Booth family.

Or did Waid write two crazy-ass Lincoln stories?


11.) The Ross-designed Batgirl isn’t the only Bat-story that never came to pass referred to in this series of trades. Rucka talks about an unrealized plan during his time on Detective Comics, near the very end of Denny O’Neil’s era as the character’s chief shepherd, which was focused on “moving Batman away from the dour-faced humorless vigilante.” Says Rucka, “There had even been a plan to do so, and a way to bring it to pass, but a change in group editors scuttled that, and, shortly after, scuttled my own participation in all things Batman, at least for the time being.”

I wonder what the plan for that was? The one DC went with was apparently to rejigger the universe so that Batman did catch his parents’ killer, apparently retconning away some of his dour-faced humorless-ness (I guess; I don’t think this has been addressed in any stories at all yet, but it’s specifically referred to in Infinite Crisis as an element of the rejiggering), plus have him take a year-long vacation and have the darkness cut out of him by the ten-eyed surgeons.


12.) Waid refers to Plastic Man’s son Offspring as being a character he created “with Frank Quitely ten years ago for a story from which, I swear to you, he was the only good thing to emerge.”

That issue with Quitely was great, but it’s interesting that Waid won’t even say the words “The Kingdom” and that he’s so down on it, too. Because some pretty significant things came out of that event, including the concept of Hypertime (apparently since forgotten, and only really touched upon in the pages of Superboy and JLA/Avengers anyway), the idea that The Trinity were the lone holders of its secret existence (and a deputized Superboy), and the grown up version of the Trinity’s son.

I remember at the time, reading interviews with Morrison and Waid trying to explain exactly what Hypertime was, and Morrison saying that to truly explain it, he’d have to do a big, Cisis-like miniseries entitled Professor Morrison Explains It All. So I’m assuming Final Crisis is a story that Morrison’s been wanting to tell in some form for ten years now.

Oh, and Funnybook Babylon has uncovered a Morrison interview from 2002 in which talks about Hypertime and what sounds like Morrison’s plans for Final Crisis.


13.) Giffen hated Osiris, quite passionately. In fact, he hated him so much that one of the gag sketches he would occasionally do prefigured the fate the writers had planned for Osiris—it was three panels of Sobek looking upon Osiris and imagining him as a giant dancing roast chicken, then calling some kind of counselor on the phone.

A few issues later, Giffen’s afterword described the Osiris chomping and his own feelings for O. thusly—“I was coming off one of the more satisfying sequences in the series, the death of that annoying little twit Osiris (I HATED that kid!) and was up for more mayhem.”


14.) Originally Veronica Cale was supposed to be killed by Black Adam. That scene where he walks right past her on Oolong Island without even glancing at her? In the original script, Adam smooshed her there. Rucka had to argue for keeping her alive. I’m glad he won that argument. It’s a neat little scene and while she hasn’t been used to much effect since (I didn’t care for the issues of Giffen and Ollife’s Four Horseman mini I’ve read), Wonder Woman needs all the rogues she can get.


15.) Rucka pulls no punches in discussing the botched Wonder Woman relaunch.

Earlier Michael Siglain discusses the fact that though the 52 creators knew exactly where Batman and Superman spent the missing year (Having the incoming Batman writer and incoming Action Comics co-writer on the team), they weren’t sure where Wonder Woman was, and no one at DC could give them a straight answer, which is why she ended up getting only a few Nanda Parbat appearances at the end of the year’s worth of issues.

Rucka attacks the Allan Heinberg spearheaded and DC editorial OK-ed new direction more fiercely:

The Wonder Woman resolve bothered me—I think it was Grant who wrote it specifically—and to this day still doesn’t sit right with me. While Bruce got most of the year to define and then to “solve” his dilemma, Diana was releaged to three appearances in the course of two weeks, and I think that Rama Kushna telling her that her whole problem is that she’s “not human enough” is garbage. It’s reductive and it’s simplistic, and it was, in my opinion, unworthy of the character.

I was, clearly, in a minority, as her entire relaunch was based on this premise.

Heh. “Garbage.” “Reductive.” “Simplistic.” “Unworthy of the character.” And this is Rucka talking about the new direction in a DC comic book! Could you imagine what he’d have to say of it if you were alone with him in a bar after he’s had a couple of beers?

And, though he may have been in the minority at DC, I think that state of the Wonder Woman franchise post-Infinite Crisis as opposed to pre-Infinite Crisis will show that he was right.


16.) According to Waid, they spent a full week deciding whether Mr. Mind should still be wearing his little glasses post-metamorphisis. I think they made the right decision. Clearly his glasses would have fallen off his head when he transformed, given how big his head got and the new shape it assumed. Besides, his new form should have perfect eyesight, shouldn’t it?

The Worst Lines of 2007

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

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


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

—Mark Millar, Civil War #6



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

—Greg Rucka and friends, 52 #36



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

—Paul Jenkins, Civil War: The Return #1



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

—Brad Meltzer, Justice League of America #7



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

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



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

—Gail Simone, Birds of Prey #105



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

Listen.

Listen.”

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



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

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