More words on Bluewater than I ever thought I'd type

I doubt it surprised anyone in the world when they heard that comics publisher Bluewater Productions announced a Charlie Sheen comic book the other day.

Over the course of the last few years, cheaply and quickly produced bio comics latching on to a celebrity figure central to water cooler conversations and late night TV monologue gags has been the company’s bread and butter.

The first of these was a wretched-looking 2008 Hilary Clinton bio comic, which lifted its cover design from IDW's Presidential Material Barack Obama and John McCain bio comics. It was followed by a “Female Force” line including other female political personalities and famous people, a bunch of Twilight-related material, bios of various male political figures and a “Fame” line presenting bios of the likes of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

I don’t recall seeing any of these, save perhaps the Clinton one, in “the wild” at any of the comic shops I’ve been to in that time—it’s possible none of those shops ordered rack copies, but it’s also possible I just didn’t notice them.

The covers tend to be more eye-repelling than catching, usually featuring either a bizarrely off-model image of the subject or subjectsor a slightly futzed with photo image, as if someone from the Greg Land school of comics art did the cover.From what little I’ve seen form the insides of the books, the insides are usually a bit worse.

Oddly, no one in comics seems to pay a whole lot of attention to Bluewater’s product, and when they are mentioned by comics bloggers or news sites or online critics at all, it tends to be in the context of some allegedly shady business practices, or groans, ughs and jokes about their choice of subject matter.

I can only recall reading two formal reviews of Bluewater comics. One was Chris Sims’ review of Female Force: Stephenie Meyer, and the other was Chris Sims’ review of Fame: Lady Gaga. He didn’t have anything very nice to say about either, and it’s worth noting that Sims used to often write about terrible comic books as ongoing features on his original blog, and was paid to write about terrible films in a column for Heavy.com entitled “The Worst of NetFlix.”

Perhaps others have written about these comics, but I can’t say that I’ve read any reviews of any of them, save those two pieces.

I have read a lot of press coverage of Bluewater books though, generally from the mainstream media and generally from the perspective of a bemused editor writing a headline like “Betty White to become a comic book superhero.”

The stories tend to be a paragraph or two of maybe three long, and basically just say that Famous Person A is going to have a comic book made about them, it will be a biography and maybe also that it will be from the publisher who did comics featuring Famous Person B and Famous Person C.

Bluewater’s publishing strategy therefore seems to be 1) think of a famous person whose popularity is cresting and/or has a built-in audience, 2) tell everyone you’re going to make a comic book about it, 3) see it mentioned in a lot of press, 4) publish some shitty comic meeting the basic requirements of the promise (i.e. it has to be a comic book, it has to be mostly about the person on the cover) and then 5), move on.

I have to hand it to Bluewater (or shake my head sadly at the media, or both): It still works.

In the course of preparing my thrice-weekly link-blogging for Blog@Newsarama, I have a bunch of Google News feeds set up under topics like “comics,” “superhero,” “graphic novel,” “cartoonist” and so on, which is the only reason I know how many people in the media really pick up on Bluewater’s product announcements.

For example, Albert Ching posted that Blog@ story on Bluewater’s Sheen comic (Boy, that’s a terrible likeness of Sheen on the cover, isn’t it?) yesterday. Today in my Google News alerts I found links to Fishbowl LA’s “Charlie Sheen Gets a Comic Book”, the Winnipeg Free Press’s “Charlie Sheen to be profiled in new comic book ‘Infamous: Charlie Sheen’” and MTV Geek “Charlie Sheen Comic Book On Its Way”.

I’m sure I’ll be seeing many, many more over the course of the next few weeks. In fact, let me click on over to Google News…punch in “Charlie Sheen” + “Bluewater”…and…Okay, there’s a link to “Charlie Sheen’s Winning Spree Gets Exteneded With New Comic Book” posted 24 minutes ago, atop links to CNN, the Washington Post and the option to see all 39 news article. Below that, and next to an image of what looks like Sheen drinking an old-fashioned Coke bottle full of blood from USA Today, is another WaPo article, “Charlie Sheen rants lead to ‘tiger blood’ drinks and a comic book biography,” sitting atop a link to a YouTube video of Charline Sheen waving a machete, a Hollywood Reporter article entitled “Charlie Sheen’s Growing List of Merchandising, Marketing Deals" and the option to see all 198 news articles.

That’s an awful lot of news articles mentioning Bluewater’s comic within two days of its announcement. And Bluewater’s actually a little late to the Sheen + comics meme. Michael Kupperman drew Sheen into the first Peanuts strip on February 25, Fernando Ruiz plopped Sheen down in Riverdale on March 3, Ty Templeton pit Sheen against Galactus on March 5, Ben Christian and Cory Smith pit him against Deadpool on March 7 and then Kate Beaton went ahead and drew Sheen into Fargo yesterday for International Women’s Day. Give it another week or so, and there should be enough material for a Sheen anthology comic from a who’s who of cartoonists.

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I kind of admire Bluewater’s ability to corner this particular market, the celebrity-sploitation market, especially considering how incredibly easy it should be to do the exact same thing they do, only much better, and without too much effort. (For example, every single artist listed above can draw circles around the poor folks who do those Bluewater things, even if they worked super-fast and half-assed it. A black-and-white, all sketch, all splash-page 22-page biography of Lady Gaga would no doubt be a thousand times more interesting and funny-looking than Bluewater's; even if Beaton didn’t know anything about the subject).

A few months ago I thought about throwing together a couple of mini-comic “parodies” of Bluewater’s bio-comics: That is, choosing celebrities they haven’t already gotten to, and then throwing together bios of them in my art "style" which, while probably not objectively "good" and, in fact, maybe not even Bluewater level quality, at least looks like it’s supposed to look that way on purpose. My style is naïve, amateur and unpolished, mostly because I actually am naïve, amateur and unpolished, but I try to embrace that as a “style” rather than a general lack of chops, because over the years I’ve come to realize that just making the comics is better than not making them at all.

Also, as far as writing goes, it doesn’t seem that hard to throw in some jokes to try to make a bio of someone with a short, uneventful life whose main accomplishment deserving a biography comic is that they are famous at least mildly diverting to read. My understanding of these things is that they tend to be more Famous Person A Sure Is Famous, rather than offering a life-changing insight, personal point-of-view or unique take on the person.

Despite thinking about it for a long time (including thinking it might be even funnier to choose extremely unpopular subjects, although that would sort of ruin the Bluewater-esque celebrity-sploitation aspect I was most interested in), I eventually opted not to try doing a Meghan McCain or Christine O’Donnell or Bristol Palin or LeBron James or Conan O’Brien or John Boehner or Christopher Nolan or Miranda Cosgrove biography comic.

The main reason was that even if I found the idea of a homemade, Bluewater-esque mini comic amusing, there was no guarantee anyone else would, and besides, it would probably stop being quite so amusing during the time it would take me to make it, and it takes me a loooong time to make comics. The one (1) I have published so far (copies still available!) took about eight years, although I was doing that the old-fashioned, computer-free way (and working a full-time, grown-up person’s job at the time), and the second one I managed to get done in under a month, but despite finishing it over the summer, I’m still fucking around with getting it to the printer and thus published.

So even doing it as fast as possible, it would take me a month or two to actually write and draw one, and God knows how many weeks of procrastination to scan it, save it to a disc and mail it to a printer.

And timeliness would have been of the essence; like, a Bristol Palin comic that came out after Dancing With The Stars would have been too late, you know?

(At least timeliness is of the essence for Bluewater celebrity-sploitation; Antarctic Press keeps cranking out Sarah Palin comics, despite the fact that she hasn’t been relevant to national politics in four years, relevant to Alaska politics in a few years, and is now merely a Fox News paid pundit, speaker and political book author. In Antarctic’s favor, however, they at lest come up with completely insane premises for their books, instead of straight bios).

The second reason was that I was completely uninterested in all of those names I threw out up there, in terms of actually wanting to read everything written about them in a short span of time, let alone spending a long time thinking about, writing about and drawing them.

There were also my limits as an artist. If I drew, say, Miranda Cosgrove (Um, do you guys have daughters or nieces? If not, she’s from a popular Nickelodeon show), she would basically look like my Caleb character in a wig. I’m not so good with people who aren’t skinny or huge, so I don’t even know if I could draw curvy people like Meghan McCain or Bristol Palin. And so on.

It would be fun to do bio mini-comics of celebrities I was interested in, but most of the musicians and actors I’m genuinely interested in and excited about wouldn’t fit the bill of a trending celebrity. For example, there are few things I’d rather do in my free time than write a comics biography of the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210, but that won’t be as of-the-moment as Bluewater’s cast of Glee book; likewise, bios of Morrissey and Sleater Kinney or even The Yeah Yeah Yeahs just wouldn’t be the same as ones of Bieber and Lady Gaga.

Anyway, those were my excuses. There are faster, better, more-interested-in-celebrity-culture than I artists who should get on some of this shit, in part to beat Bluewater to the punch (just to be a dick, basically) and in part to help raise the level of quality of comics’ celebrity-sploitation efforts.

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Finding subjects seems easy. Every time I go to check my Yahoo email account, for example, there’s this little box in the upper right-hand corner that says “Trending Now” and then lists ten subjects that are trending now. Just pick one at random—do you have a ten-sided dice from your time playing Dungeons & Dragons? If so, roll that. If not, I can lend you mine—and do whichever number comes up.

Right now, it looks like this is what’s trending:

1.) Lindsay Lohan’s necklace (That sounds too boring; maybe do Lindsay Lohan instead? The necklace could maybe narrate. How on earth did they not do a Lohan book yet, anyway?).

2.) Mary Stuart Masterson (Why? I woulda expected Jennifer Beals…have you guys been watching Chicago Code?)

3.) Notorious B.I.G.

4.) Ashlee Simpson

5.)Dave Matthews Band

6.) Selena Gomez (Ha ha, I have no idea who this is!)

7.) Suze Orman

8.) Illinois death penalty

9.) Billionaire Carl Ichan (Don’t know who he is either…although I take it he’s a billionaire. Maybe I’ll hear about him on NPR later…)

10.) Jared Loughner

See, it’s easy! And this changes, like, daily, so you can either pick ‘em at random, or put some thought into who or what is going to remain popular for the time it takes to get a comic book created, published and marketed.


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DC and Marvel have known for years that a good way to sell a lot of comics is to come up with big, sprawling, epic storylines that involve as many of their characters as possible. You know, crossover event stories. More recently, smaller publishers whose lines are less conducive to Crisis or Civil War type stories have started attempting such stories, like IDW's Zombies Vs. Robots/Star Trek/G.I. Joe/Transformers/Ghostbusters event Infestation and Zenescope's even more bizarre-looking Dream Eater Saga.

Bluewater could keep on doing what it's been doing—like I said, it seems to still be working for them—but they could also step it up a notch, and come up with a story featuring all of their bio comics stars.

What comics reader could resist a story in which Hilary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Condoleeza Rice, Caroline Kennedy, Ellen DeGeneres, Michelle Obama, J.K. Rowling, Princess Diana, Sarah Palin, Stephenie Meyer, Rush Limbaugh, Taylor Swift, David Beckham, the Cast of Glee, the three stars of the Twilight movies, Lady Gaga, Bo Obama, Mark Zuckerburg and Ryan Reynolds must all join forces to defeat a threat too big for any one of them to handle on t heir own?

As long as it was, you know, competently written and illustrated, which might be too tall an order for Bluewater.

Fun to imagine, anyway...

"Hey party people, it's Charlie B"

If you're not addicted to ABC's Dancing With The Stars like, um, some comics bloggers I could name, then you may not have seen this year's commercial for the annual airing of 1966's It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, featuring a rapping Charlie Brown.

You are lucky.

You can see and hear it by clicking here (for now anyway; note you'll probably have to see a short ad before the ad for special).

Here are the lyrics:

Hey party people, it's Charlie B
Bringing Halloween Thursday to ABC
Raking leaves
and rolling on a pumpkin
trick or treat
then the party gets thumpin'
Lucy's getting bossy
Snoopy's feeling saucy
and things are getting crazy with my Peanuts posse
But where is Linus? This party's posh
He's waiting in the field for a mythical squash

Word.

If 2007's Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters isn't the worst comic I've ever read, it's only because it was so bad I couldn't read it.

As discussed at (far too great) length in yesterday’s interminable post on the subject, DC’s 2006 eight-issue miniseries Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters was followed in 2007 by another eight-issues miniseries with the exact same title and logo. (I feel sorry for anyone trying to collect those series from back issue bins in the future!).

The collection of the 2007 series at least got a sub-title to help differentiate it from the previous series: Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters: Brave New World (DC Comics).

Despite not really liking the trade collection of the first series, I had somewhat higher hopes for this second one, because a) it had a different artist, with Renato Arlem taking over for Daniel Acuna and b) the characters were all introduced and/or reintroduced and their status quo and mission statement re-established, which would theoretically eliminate the existential crisis I felt emanating from the pages of the first series.

Oh, and c) the cover is awesome. It’s by Dave Johnson, who drew Uncle Sam cradling a tattered U.S. flag in the same pose and making the same expression as Superman holding the dead body of his cousin Supergirl.I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be hilarious or not, but I was incredibly amused by the implication that Uncle Sam loves every single random American flag as if it was a close relative of his, and makes an anguished Crying Superman face whenever he sees one damaged.

As it turned out, I should have lowered my expectations rather than raised them. Because you see not only is this second series actually worse than the first, it is the worst comic book series ever published.

Okay, maybe that’s not fair. Admittedly, I can be a bit hyperbolic about superhero comics here (although, in my defense, the superhero genre was founded, sustained and sold on the basis of hyperbole) and, yes, I know I’ve said other comics were the worst comics ever before, perhaps most notably Ultimates 3, which I devoted a week of blogging to covering.

But here’s the thing—as terrible a comic book series as Ultimates 3 was, I was able to at least read it. I could make it through every single panel of the thing, look at all the images and make sense of them, read every single word.

I just could not do that with this book. It wasn’t simply a lack of desire. I tried about a half-dozen times, and made it maybe 40 pages in. I would pick it up and read a panel or three at a time later. As I said before, I liked the characters, I had no specific objections to writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and the plot did seem sort of awesome—a mind-controlled and newly empowered Red Bee II is the main antagonist, there’s an empire of giant super space-bugs invading earth, Neon The Unknown’s in it…but, man, I could not make myself do it.

I know I had the ability to read the book, but it required a lot of willpower, a lot of effort and it was just incredibly unpleasant. See, artist Renato Arlem—who apparently did all of the art, as no one else gets an artist credit, not even a colorist—didn’t draw the comic so much as assemble it.

The background and props—every single one of them—looks like a photo ran through a filter to make it look slightly less photo-y. True, the characters look drawn, and are cut-and-pasted over the backgrounds, but Arlem doesn’t draw them very often, and uses the exact same drawings of the exact same characters over and over again.

I’ll get to some examples, but this series looks more like a work of photo collage than drawing. True, Arlem likely created the raw material for a great deal of that collage work, but I found it just this side of unreadable.

Let me show you what I mean.

Here’s the first panel of page 10 of the first issue:Happy Terrill, the Golden Age Ray, and Uncle Sam are talking in Arlington Cemetery. Since this panel contains the characters in the background, it seemed like a good example of how Arlem handles the settings in the book.

They all look like that.

Aside from the fact that this is the diametrically opposed to what I like to see in a comic book, it’s worth noting that it’s also not very good storytelling.

Note The Ray II in the right hand corner—he’s kind of hard to see as he’s wearing black and he’s posed over a black background—long-jumping in from off-panel. See also all the little white, abstracted bird shapes frozen in mid-flight. The image represents one single moment in time—the time between the flaps of a bird’s wings—and yet three different people speak a sentence of dialogue in it.

In short, the script and the image just don’t match up. This is a little like one of those long-winded speeches that Captain America would give while jumping up in the air and kicking two Hydra agents in the face simultaneously—only we’re 45 years on, comics aren’t just for kids any more (Biff! Bam! Pow!) and everybody presumably knows better.

It’s on page 12 where Arlem’s habit of recycling art on the same page and even in consecutive panels became apparent, and, once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it. Check out The Human Bomb in panels two and four. Dr. Mid-Nite in three and four. Blond guy in three, four and six.

Arlem does this throughout, and it’s crazy annoying.

In issue two, a guy who looks like Tony Stark meets with Stormy “Phantom Lady III” Knight, who is in this series portrayed as a Lindsay Lohan-like celebrity in downard spiral.Tony Stark appears on the page four times, but is only drawn twice. Stormy appears four times as well, and is likewise drawn twice—and one of those drawings slightly altered to give her a third pose. The first four panels aren’t drawn so much as cropped.

Two pages later, Tony Stark meets with the president on a five-panel page which opens with a Gary Trudeau-like shot of the White House with a dialogue bubble pointing to it (although here it’s a photo of the White House, not a drawing of it), and three of the four panels consist of differently cropped versions of the same image.

And one page after that, we get this, in which Stormy appears in five consecutive panels, but is only drawn twice.Notice the PR lady—who may actually be Miss America; Arlem doesn’t do so hot at distinguishing characters either—in the first few panels.

Her image was simply flip-flopped but, in addition to that, she apparently ran across the roof and re-folded her arms between the panels. That’s…kind of unnatural behavior for a conversation, right?

I could go on and on, as Arlem does this throughout the book, but I’ll stop with examples from the second issue of the series, as that’s as far as I could stand to read.

Near the climax of the issue, a quartet of super-people calling themselves The Futurist Militia is found posing in front of a photo of “CIA headquarters, Washington, D.C.” (Weird; Hollywood told me they were headquartered in Langley, Virginia).Again, the story telling is wonky. Between the first and second panel, the three characters not named Thunderer apparently run away real fast, Thunderer takes several steps back to be closer to the C.I.A. seal, all thos soldiers run in, and then he does the action we see in that second panel, before returning to the same pose he was in in the first panel (although now the building is a different building).

Also, TV news cameras are shooting bullets out of their lenses at him. Pwee! Pwee!

The reason I chose this page of the many other awful pages in the book is that it contains that lady in the weird bikini and veil combo, striking a rather odd, rather particular pose.

As we’ll soon learn, her name is Seducer and her superpower is a “seductive glare” which “none can escape.”

She only appears in this one seven page scene in which The Futurist Militia appears demanding to fight the Freedom Fighters, a fight that lasts until a drunk Phantom Lady shows up and cuts one of them in half.

Aside from her one-panel appearance on the page above, here is every single image of Seducer:

That's it. She was apparently drawn exactly once, and then ever so slightly modified from panel to panel—flip-flopped, one of her limbs moved a tiny bit.

It was at this point that I realized Arlem was basically ding something akin to what the old Space Ghost Coast to Coast show on Cartoon Network did, recycling the same three or four poses of a few different characters and occasionally slightly altering them.

That was done for comedic effect though, and the producers drew attention to it and played it up, packing in lots of awkward silences.

The comics equivalent is probably Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics or David Rees’ Get Your War On and other clip art-derived comic strips.

Although, again, both of those use the obviously repeating, completely static images for comic effect; Arlem and DC seem to by trying to tell a serious (well, superhero serious) action adventure story using a similar application of the technique.

I found myself half-expecting Utahraptor to appear in a panel, or the Freedom Fighters to start swearing about the Iraq War and Bush Administration in red font.

If Palmiotti and Gray were filling Phantom Lady and Guy Who Looks Like Tony Stark’s mouths with North or Rees level jokers, then I suppose this way of building a comic book might actually work. Because those strips, and others that take similar approaches to their art work, have lasted because the writing is so good that it makes up for the fact that there’s very little to the art and the fact that it is quite clearly being lazily re-used on purpose.

But I don’t think Palmiotti and Gray told any jokes in this series…certainly not in the two issues I read all the way through. The plot seemed to involve the aforementioned alien bug army invasion, with spaced devoted to the FF wrestling with issues of superhero registration similar to those in Marvel’s Civil War and some exploration of the superhero-as-celebrity ideas explored in Marvel’s X-Force/X-Statix.

It looks like some potentially awesome stuff happens later in the book, but none of it actually looks awesome. It looks like Arlem moving his clip-art around photos, while the writing does all the story-telling.

And any comic book—but especially a superhero comic book full of primary colored, Golden Aged superheroes with fantastic powers—that leaves it to the dialogue to tell the story is pretty much a failure as a comic book.

Looking for a positive angle on the fact that DC apparently solicited, paid for, published and was proud enough to re-publish this as a trade paperback collection, the best I can do is think it was meant as an experiment, and DC, Arlem and all involved are proud of the fact that they tried a new and different way to tell a comic book story.

If that’s the case, well, the experiment was a complete and total failure. So there’s no need to ever try it again.


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Oh wait, I do have something positive to say about the book: Johnson’s covers are all fairly top-notch. Here’s his cover for the first issue—
—and you can see the rest here.

What is Marvel?

If you spend much time on the Internet reading about comics—and I'm assuming you do, unless you happen to be a personal friend of mine checking out this site to see if I wrote anything about you—then you've probably heard about Marvel's...weird move to accept returns of certain DC Comics in exchange for a particular variant cover.

The first place I saw anything on it was at Blog@, although The Beat and Robot 6 are also on top of it (the latter has one of the biggest, if not the biggest comments threads I've ever noticed on one of their posts before—111 at the time of this writing). I assume a lot of other smart people will have something to say about it tomorrow—I'm looking forward to someone at Marvel explaining what, exactly, is up, and some of the retailers who are also bloggers to explain whether or not this makes any damn sense to them.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

Variant covers in general don't make any sense to me. I see them at my local shop from time to time, the prices jacked up from cover price to some astronomical sum to presumably reflect its rarity and the amount of other books my shop must have ordered to "earn" the variant from the publisher. Occasionally I'll see an extremely expensive one, in a stand next to the cash register. Like, I think I recently saw a black and white, pencil variant of an issue of Blackest Night with $70+ price tag on it.

I don't understand why these things exist, nor can I imagine who buys them. Someone must buy them, because they do exist, and those someones must buy them because they think they will be worth money some day.

Those someones are all dumb and really ought to stop their foolish behavior immediately. Are they going to make that $70+ investment back some day? How? By selling the comic to some other dumb or dumber chump? It's just so horribly sad and depressing and—seriously now—ruinous to the direct market and the comic book industry that serves it.

This weird Marvel scheme seems especially so, as far as I can make sense of it. Marvel wants retailers to mail them 50 covers from 50 DC back issues. Specifically, Adventure Comics #4, Booster Gold #26, Doom Patrol #4, Justice League of America #39, Outsiders #24 and REBELS #10, each of which had their sales ridiculously inflated by DC's buy-a-comic-get-a-plastic-ring promotion. In exchange, the retailer will receive an "extremely rare" Siege #3 Deadpool variant.

I don't know how much it costs a store to buy on copy of any of those DC titles, but I know the cover price for them all was $3.99. Even if a store has unsold quantities lying around, say they put them in a dollar bin, or a fifty-cent bin or, hell, maybe the store is so awesome it has a quarter-bin. They could make $50 (or $25, or $12.50) off 'em by selling them at ridiculously cheap prices.

But if they just trash the covers in exchange for a single issue of Siege, then they have to sell it at between $12.50 and $50 to make what they would have by sticking those 50 issues in those hypothetical bins or, more likely, they'll have to charge far more if they want to make up what they spent on the books and/or equal what they could conceivably make by selling those books at cover price.

So, would stores be looking to sell that Siege variant for as much as $200? Is that feasible? Is there some asshole out there with $200 to burn on the third issue of some dumb fucking comic book series because this hypothetical dumb asshole thinks it will be worth some money some day—with "some money" defined as far more than $200?

Is this really what comics is like in the year 2010? Still? Really?

If so, that is horrible.

As far as I can understand it, Marvel is actively encouraging insane speculation on their products, even more so than they usually do by publishing variants (a depressing business tactic that DC and, to a lesser extent, Dynamite, Boom and most of the smaller companies who are players in the direct market also engage in to varying degrees), and consumer spending habits that don't benefit any players (except, perhaps, for some dumb asshole who unloads his variant on some other dumb asshole).

If one has $200 to spend on comics, aren't they better off, say, buying ten Marvel trades and, if all goes well, finding some new series or character or creator they liked so much they want to follow that series or character or creator in to other, future books?

So, serious question—what is Marvel? It's a comic book publisher, but what exactly is it publishing? Is it publishing stories? Or is it publishing collectibles?

Those are two very different things, and you can't effectively sell the same product to both markets simultaneously without eroding one of those markets.

Well, you can...but not for very long.

Is 2008's Batgirl #1 the worst comic ever?

It's definitely a contender. Here are three consecutive pages from the comic, which was written by Adam Beechen, pencilled by J. Calafiore and inked by Mark McKenna (and I hope they're all ashamed of themselves):

I suppose it's technically possible for those pages to be worse. Beechen could have spelled half of those 1,500 words wrong, for example, or Califiore could have drawn the characters without necks, or perhaps even less symmetrically than he already did or something, but man, the "creative" team would really have to put some effort into making worse comics pages than these. Because that? That's about as wrong as you can possibly get a comic book.

If you read through all that dialogue—and I wouldn't recommend it—you'll see the characters aren't even really communicating throughout the second and third pages, they're merely summarizing the events of other comic books in which Batgirl appeared over the course of the last two years, occasionally adding details that happened off-panel by way of explaining the many inconsistencies between those comics and the Batgirl appearances that preceded them. It's the type of information you'd find in an Official Guide to the Marvel Universe entry, or perhaps a very thorough Wikipedia page, only put in dialogue bubbles.

That isn't comics, it's Adam Beechen trying to explain and apologize for a bunch of other shitty comic books, many of which he himself also wrote. It cost $17.94 as part of a six-month payment plan, or $19.99 to get it all at once.

Ultimates 3 #1

This is the very first page of Ultimates 3 #1, and things go very wrong immediately:
The very first part of the book, the dateline box in the upper left corner of the very first panel is pointless and confusing, setting the tone for the next 100 pages or so.

The place is Tony Stark’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, and the time is “last night.” What does that mean, “Last night?” The night before when? Right now? When you’re reading it? This isn’t a flashback, it’s the very first panel. You can’t start with a flashback; you have to be at a point in time ahead of the flashback in order to flash back to something.

I suppose a story could start “last night” if it were to jump around in time, but this one doesn’t. Rather than moving from last night to today and back and forth, it simply starts last night, then progresses to today, and remains in today, without ever going back to last night.

So, despite the caption, this scene is actually taking place now, and the scenes later in the book will also be taking place now, although at a time in the future of when this scene is taking place, because that’s the way time works. The default mode for a comic book (or novel or movie or TV show or play) is to progress through time in a linear fashion, and if that is to be deviated from, then there should be some indication of the deviation.

The presence of this dateline is, frankly, completely insane, and we haven’t even finished the first panel yet.

According to the title page in the hardcover trade, this miniseries had three assistant editors plus an editor. That’s at least four people who could have at least tried to stop this book from existing. They are all complicit.

The Ultimates—Hawkeye, Black Panther, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, The Wasp and Tony “Iron Man” Stark—are having a meeting, which so far consists of watching a sex tape of Stark and his former lover, The Black Widow (a former member of the team that betrayed them in Ultimates 2).

It’s not just all over the Internet, but it’s also on CNN and ABC The Wasp says, “NBC at least had the decency to blur out the more graphic parts.”

That’s right, both CNN and ABC are showing an unedited sex tape. They are actually airing hardcore pornography. This information is included in the second panel of the first page. Already Loeb’s Ultimates has become completely disconnected from reality. (Fun fact: Loeb has worked as a producer for several television shows, so should be in a better position to know that ABC airing an unedited sex tape—with close-ups!—is even less realistic than a room full of super-powered mutants having drinks served to them by robots.

Also of note in this panel is that much of the background from panel two is repeated in panel four, with only image on the screen and the characters in different positions. There’s nothing wrong with an artist taking the occasional shortcut, of course, but this particular shortcut draws attention to itself as a shortcut, since despite the fact that some of the characters have moved, the robot servants remained rooted to the spot. Get to work you lazy robots!

Turn the page and hey, it’s time for a two-page splash panel already.

Thor comes flying through the room, saying "NNNGGNN," apparently thrown or punched through the wall by Venom, who is in the process of climbing through a hole in the wall, seven-foot-long serrated tongue first.

“Where is she?” he shouts in his own special Venom font (white letters on black bubbles, Morpheus-style). “Tell me where she is or I’ll KILL every last one of you!”

“Nice. And now a word from our sponsor…” Hawkeye says, his pistols drawn. This is actually the most clever bit of dialogue any character utters in the course of a fight scene throughout the entire series. You may not believe me, but just you wait.

This page also introduces the characters, with a little red-ish/orange-ish/coral-ish box appearing next to each of the Ultimates bearing their names. Along the bottom of the spread is the name of this story, “Sex, Lies and DVD,” followed by “The Ultimates 3.1: Improbably Cause.”

Hey, wait a minute… No, none of the other issues have a title.

Is “Sex, Lies and DVD” the name of the story arc, not the individual chapter? If that’s the case, I wonder why they changed the name of the trade to the more spoiler-iffic “Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?” Other than the fact that it’s a less dumb name than “Sex, Lies and DVD,” of course, which has very little to do with the story, and is a reference to the title of a 1989 independent movie. (This was the first time while reading the story that I would wonder who the intended audience is. It would not be the last).

Next up is page four, which may just be the worst-designed page in comic book history:

Man, just look at that thing. (Seriously. Look at it. Click on it to make it bigger; same as the rest of the images). Madureira has the characters breaking the frames of the panels because it’s exciting looking, a trick he learned from reading manga. He apparently didn’t digest the manga very well though, as this isn’t exactly how you do it.

Hawkeye running straight out of the first panel? That’s pretty awesome, really. He’s such an action hero that he just ran right out of the comic! But then the next panel, butted right up against it, ruins the effect, and it looks like Hawkeye might be running past a little Venom, or something?

This is just a terrible, terrible page. It took me seconds to figure out what order to read the dialogue and images in which, okay, is just seconds, but that’s an awful lot of time to spend trying to figure out how to read something that should be completely intuitive.

While I was reading this, I was reminded of those little “how to read” features you often see in the beginning of manga collections, which are there to inform kids reading their first non-flipped manga reading a comic right to left instead of left to right might work.

Here’s one from The Big Adventures of Majokao Vol. 1, an Udon Entertainment kids manga suggested for ages seven and up:

You really need some kind of chart like that to read this page, but the arrows on it would be pretty erratic, and would have to circle around whole figures here and there.

Man, this page…Madureira got paid money to draw it. And Marvel published it. And then they asked people to give them money to read a comic containing it. My God.

And hey, we’re only four pages in!

As for what exactly’s happening on the page, even after spending all this time on it, the final panel is a little unclear to me. I’m guessing Venom shoots some kind of goo darts out of his body at Hawkeye?

It may be worth noting that this Venom appears to be the Marvel Universe or “616” version of the character, not the Ultimate Venom that had previously appeared in a few story arcs in Ultimate Spider-Man. That discrepancy will eventually be explained though.

Next The Wasp and the silent Black Panther join the fray, but they are no match for Venom. Hawkeye attacks again, and we get some just sterling dialogue.

Hawkeye: “Wasp. Go! I’ll deal with butt-ugly.”

Venom: “Eat. This.”

Time for another two-page splash panel! Ultimate Valkyrie dives off the back of a black Pegasus, a broadsword bearing vaguely Nordic ruins drawn back behind her head, shouting “Nobody hits my thunder god!” (Remember, Venom threw Thor through a wall five pages ago).

I remember this image getting a lot of attention and commentary when this comic was first released, so I’ll post the relevant portion here:

Guess what it was that was so widely commented on? Yeah, you can see the outline of Valkyrie’s nipples through her top.

That’s actually a pretty good thing; in fact, it’s one of the two or three times during this entire story where I sort of admired something the creators had done.

See, when people where super-tight clothes, so tight you can see every single muscle straining against them? You really ought to be able to see their nipples. But you never, ever, ever seen women’s nipples in comics. Why is that? Because DC and Marvel basically suck, is why.

Horrible violence, even horrible sexual violence is A-OK in their books, even (in DC’s case) Comics Code Authority-approved books or those that don’t need a “mature readers” stamp of some sort, but the outline of a nipple through clothing? Saints preserve us!

Like so many writers’ difficult relationship with swearing in super-comics, the hang-up with sexual content, which I’m defining extremely broadly to include the admission that breasts may in fact have nipples—just contributes to the immaturity and juvenility of the comics.

There’s an admission that certain parts of the human body are naughty and are, in fact, so naughty that they must not be included in any story, whereas no act of violence is considered beyond the pale (in the very next panel, Valkyrie’s sword plunges through Venom’s shoulder and halfway down his torso, a bright read gusher of blood emanating from the top of the wound).

Are comics really for grown-ups? Is this really an adult comic? Then go ahead and show some naked people you big babies; otherwise just admit this is stuff for teenage boys and quit trying to convince us all how mature you are.

This panel is, unfortunately, the last time the existence of nipples will be hinted at in the rest of Ultimates 3 (Perhaps Marvel got gun shy after the first issue?) There will be several other sex scenes, many of them gross, but no actually nudity.

Anyway, back to the violence: Despite a gaping chest wound that spurts blood all over Valkyrie’s face, Venom grabs her sword and raises it to strike her—“You’re a very silly girl-- --who’ll look much sillier without a head!”—when all of a sudden “KARAKKAKATHOOM” Thor re-enters the fray.

Yes, KARAKKAKATHOOM, with the THOOM being about four times larger than the k’s, a’s and r’s. This is another one of the admirable points in the series.

Thor’s lighting is enough to melt Venom into a very large sticky black puddle, and he and Valkyrie embrace. Thor is talking in the faux Shakespearean sort of dialogue that Stan Lee used to write for him, which Millar’s Thor never did. Will this be significant? No, not really. It’s just an example of something about the series that’s changed to make it more like the Marvel Universe.

Also of note, the dialogue is always in all-caps now. In the first two volumes, all of the dialogue was written with upper and lower-case letters, just like non-comic book writing. That was something that was rather unusual and noteworthy about the original Ultimate comics.

Why the change? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like it could be accidental. In the Superman/Batman story arc Loeb wrote that I mentioned yesterday, the one where the heroes encountered analogues of the Ultimates, Loeb had the Ultimate analogues’ dialogue appear in both capitals and lower-case letters, while Superman, Batman and everyone from their dimension spoke in standard all-caps).

Hawkeye, who happens to be pretty insane, starts shooting at the puddle of Venom, to make sure it’s dead. Wasp tells him to holster his weapon, calling him Clint, and she puts his gun in her face and says, “You call me that name in public one more time and I’ll drop you right here in the street.”

Yes, Clint “Hawkeye” Barton would rather publicly murder his teammate than have his real name spoken aloud in public. Hawkeye wouldn’t last one second on Brad Meltzer’s Justice League.

On the next page we see an exterior shot of the team’s building, with robots repairing the hole that Venom and Thor made. There is a box there that says “Today.”

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who sat out the whole fight with Venom, are leaving to go Christmas shopping, when Captain America, who also missed out on the Venom fight (or did he?), stops them to ask the Witch to maybe not go out in public wearing just a loin cloth and spandex bustier.

When Cap touches her arm and says “Be reasonable, Wanda…” Quicksilver pulls Cap’s hand away and says, “You come near my sister again and I’ll kill you.”

This team is so extreme that they don’t just argue and threaten one another with physical violence, they literally threaten one another with death over disagreements.

Then comes another notorious page:

In the Marvel Universe, it’s always been my understanding that Pietro “Quicksilver” Maximoff was always a little over-protective and kinda weird around his sister, Wanda/The Scarlet Witch. In Ultiamtes, Mark Millar played up that weirdness to the point where one’s meant to think that they’re maybe too affectionate to one another, like maybe there’s some kinda creepy, unspoken sibling lust between them. Loeb tries to one-up Millar with disastrous results in this Look, they are actually, no bones about it, totally fucking each other scene.

While the admission that the Maximoffs were indeed doing it is fucked up enough, Loeb’s handling of it makes it seem even weirder, as The Wasp seems to indicating that there’s nothing that weird or wrong about it, and it’s only Captain America’s “1944 brain” that can’t process anything in the 21st century, like incestuous relationships.

I do like Hawkeye’s last line there, where he seems to be indicating that for the sake of PR, they must put down one of the Maximoffs. I can’t tell if Loeb’s Hawkeye is supposed to be a hilarious parody of a shitty bad-ass superhero or not, but most of the scenes involving Hawkeye strike me as funny. The fact that all of the characters are written as shitty superheroes makes me think that the humor I find in how ridiculous Hawkeye is can’t be anything other than accidental.

With that, Hawkeye takes his leave, announcing that he’s going to look for Black Panther, who hasn’t been seen since the Venom fight, as he’ll need his help tracking down Spider-Man, who might know something about the Venom attack, since that’s his villain.

There’s a tight close-up of Captain America looking intense and not saying anything, at which point I figured out the “secret” about the Black Panther and his relationship with Cap. Have you figured it out yet? No? You will.

Wasp, who used to be Captain America’s lover, is feeling kind of sad that he’s shutting her out, so she goes to a dark room where her abusive ex-husband Hank Pym is hunched over a microscope, and complains about things to him. He doesn’t seem to be listening because—what this?—he’s dead or unconscious or something, drool hardened over his mouth, his eyes open but vacant, and a bottle of pills spilled next to him.

Outside, it’s snowing, and those crazy incest-having heroes the Maximoffs are enjoying the it, despite poor Wanda being dressed in a loin cloth and bustier, with only a long, open fur coat to keep her warm.

Then, suddenly, there’s a full-panel BANG sound effect, and Pietro pushes Wanda down at super-speed and starts chasing the bullet, all the while trying to reach the Wasp via some kind of communication device, and getting angry that she’s not answering him, despite the fact that his few dialogue bubble’s worth of dialogue would have to be spoken so fast that Wasp couldn’t possibly get the message, let alone respond.

The bullet, Pietro discovers while trying to catch it, is apparently a Wanda-seeking bullet, as it dodges him and flies back towards Wanda.

And here, for at least the third time in these first 19 pages, I saw something completely unrealistic, even by superhero comic standards:

Now, I’m no physicist, and I never even made it through the copy of James Kakalios’ The Physics of Super Heroes someone gave me as a Christmas present one year, but if Pietro was moving faster, or even just as fast as the bullet, wouldn’t he have been able to catch it without it piercing his hand?

I’m not basing this on any scientific understanding of velocity or kinetic energy, but on the simple fact that other superhero speedsters in other comics I’ve read are always harmlessly snatching speeding bullets out of the air, by virtue of their speed relative of the bullet making it as if the bullet were simply lying on the ground.

Perhaps Pietro is really, really slow for a speedster, though, and was able to catch-up to the bullet, but then dropped his speed as soon as he wrapped his fist around it, and it therefore tore through his now normal velocity-having hand?

I don’t know exactly, but this seemed all wrong to me.

As Wanda lay dying on the street, a blonde, bespectacled doctor with an oddly carved wooden cane appears. He seems to be Donald Blake, 616 Thor’s one-time human alter-ego, but here he’s just some doctor who looks like Blake; it’s just an Easter egg I guess. He tries CPR, but it’s no use.

“She’s dead,” he says.

And that is Ultimates 3 #1, definitely the worst issue of what is probably the worst comic book ever created.


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


Tomorrow night: It gets worse! (Not really. How could it? But it don’t get a whole hell of a lot better, either).

“Comic books suck these days, and this book is a shining example why…”

Well, I haven’t talked about what a bad comic book writer Brad Meltzer is for four whole days now, so I suppose I’m due for another post on the subject, huh?

Actually, I had an image-heavy post planned for today, but I couldn’t get at a scanner for long enough to get the whole thing in. (Hopefully tomorrow.) I did, however, get my hands on Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga.

The cover for this volume is an oddly cropped version of the Alex Ross image that was used as the cover for the second printing of JLoA #12 (For the first printing, one half of the image was run on the cover; if you wanted the full image, you had to buy two issues). To make room for a bar of text on the back cover, 1/4th of it runs on the back cover, half of it is on the cover of the book, and the final 1/4th of the image on the front cover flap. This leaves Batman off the cover. In Ross’ original layout, the Trinity function as the pillars of the pose, with Black Lightning and Hal Jordan behind each of Wonder Woman’s shoulders. With this cropping, Jordan and Lightning seeming quite prominent. It’s not often you see someone trying to sell a Justice League comic book by putting Black Lighting or Black Canary on the cover instead of Batman.


(Behold my photographic skills! Do not adjust your monitor and/or eyes, the writing has been reversed! I could learn how to fix it, as a few have you have pointed out in the past but, well, I'm lazy.)

(And speaking of Ross’ painting, it’s a good thing he doesn’t read Batman and the Outsiders. I’m sure painting some of the characters on this cover, particularly Vixen and Geo-Force, who didn’t debut in any form until after the cut-off point in DCU costume history that he likes—the appearance of Firestorm signaling where things-he-likes-to-paint stops—must have killed him. And now Geo-Force isn’t even on the Justice League? DC made him paint Geo-Force on the cover of JLoA and he was only even on the team for, like, two stories?*)

Image aside, the cover of this volume varies remarkably from the one containing the first half of writer Brad Meltzer’s run. That one was mostly just cover credits and white space, with the Michael Turner image shrunk down about as small as possible. This one is pretty much all image.

On the first volume, Meltzer’s name was huge, and Ed Benes’ was smaller. On this one, Benes’ isn’t even included. Writers Meltzer and Geoff Johns (who only writes of two of the eight issues within) have their names on the cover in nice big yellow font (much, much bigger than the words “Justice League of America”), and no artists are credited, probably because so many were involved (Benes pencils three of the eight issues; Shane Davis, Fernando Pasarin, Gene Ha and Dale Eaglesham pencil one a piece; the final is a jam issue). In fact, looking at the cover or the spine, you’d be forgiven for thinking an artist named Johns drew the whole thing.

Oddly, while no artists are named on the cover, there is a little credit under Johns’ saying, “Introduction by Patton Oswalt.” Is that a strong selling point? Stronger than any of the artists involved? I mean, “Patton Oswalt” isn’t exactly the first, fifteenth or four-hundredth name that comes to mind when I think of “people who know a lot about comics, and who I’d look to for a recommendation on one.”

The only other text on the cover is a blurb from IGN (The videogame site?), which says, simply, “Spectacular.”

Oswalt’s introduction was pretty funny, and I agreed with large parts of it. For example, he writes, “Comic books suck these days, and this book is a shining example why…”

And, “Brad Meltzer threw a flaming monkey wrench into the machinery when he wrote the IDENTITY CRISIS for DC Comics…this, ‘THE LIGHTNING SAGA,’ is a perfect example of why comics suck.”

Why, he even says at one point that Meltzer’s vision of his stories can “make for frustrating, confusing single issues.”

I couldn’t agree more with any of those out-of-context sentiments; in fact, if I had to choose two words to describe these stories, they would probably be “frustrating” and “confusing.”

Now, Oswalt means all of this in a good way. Basically he’s saying that the overall story that Meltzer—and Geoff Johns, and other of the more popular comics writers of the day that get name-dropped—don’t write single issues anymore, but all write for the trade instead. He means it in a good way.

He even compares the books to those of the old days, when you could buy a single issue of “THE FLASH or X-Men or even Richie Rich and be told a zippy story with a beginning, middle and end.” And that, that’s a bad thing.

I think the exact opposite; the best comics can both tell a single-issue story with a beginning, middle and end and still be a chapter in a bigger story. It’s not an either or proposition. And I don’t see any way in which a single issue being frustrating and confusing can be seen as a virtue, particularly if you read comics as single-issues. Basically, Oswalt is articulating an argument against buying comics like JLoA and JSoA, and instead wait for the trades.

(He also compares single issues of “The Lighting Saga” to single episodes of The Wire, Deadwood and Friday Night Lights, as if being like a TV show, and the trade of it like watching those shows on DVD; I don’t know, there’s something kind of depressing about complimenting a comic book story by saying it’s like a TV show. That’s pretty much my definition of “not a great comic book”).

As for the specifics of what Oswalt has to say, well, after having read his intro, I now suspect that Secret Invasion is gonna suck.

“Oh man,” he writes of JLoA #11, “There’s a moment of revelation that will, literally, make you flip…something.” If you’ve read it already, you know that revelation is that Vixen has lost her animal powers and been leeching her fellow Leaguers’ super-powers. I think. You probably won’t flip anything, but think, “Oh, so it wasn’t just one more dumb-ass mistake when she was using cheetah speed to keep pace with The Flash.”

Or wait, he said “literally.” I guess you will flip the book literally, because a few panels are printed upside down. God, I hope that’s not what he’s talking about…

He also singles out the playing capture the flag scene and the non sequitir involving a trio of supervillains that have absolutely nothing to do with anything at all in this story (rather, it was a tease for a plot currently unfolding in Geoff Johns’ Booster Gold) as examples of “wasn’t it cool” scenes.

I don’t really have anything else to say about “The Lightning Saga” that I haven’t said as it was unfolding. It’s just terrible, terrible, terrible stuff. Since it originally ran, we’ve seen that trio of villains reappear in Booster Gold, we’ve seen Johns play around with The Legion some more in Action Comics, and we’ve seen what’s become of Karate Kid and the shadowy figure from the future in Coundown, and even knowing that, these things still seem off as they occur in the trade, just unconnected, random happenings seemingly beyond the writers’ control.

I was also curious to see if DC changed anything that seemed like a mistake—the coloring of Jai’s hair, the fact that Karate Kid said he “ducked” a lightning bolt that clearly strikes him a few pages earlier—but no dice.

I dropped the monthly after “Lightning Saga,” figuring eventually a nearby library would carry the eventual trade (I’m not above reading bad super-comics, but man, I hate to have to pay for the privilege). So this was the first time I read #11 and #12, Meltzer’s second-to-last and last issue of his short 13-issue run.

The second-to-last issue is easily distinguishable from the rest of the series—it’s the nice-looking one. It’s illustrated by Gene Ha, and it’s impossible to read without thinking how much better Meltzer’s run would have been had Ha drawn it instead of Benes, as he does what Benes can’t by drawing figures that look remotely human, distinct from each other, and capable of expressing emotions.

The story itself is a somewhat pretentiously clever one. It reads a lot like a Brian Michael Bendis story, in which BMB experiments with something seemingly just not to get too bored while cranking out forty super-comics a month.

After they’re caught in a collapsing building and terribly wounded, Red Arrow and Vixen are badly injured, buried alive, facing death, and unable to be rescued by “doors” or Superman. (No mention of why Geo-Force, whose whole deal is lifting rocks and shit, can’t come through). They have to fight through their pain and shock and pep talk each other into getting out (think Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, but with Red Arrow and Vixen instead of fireman). And Vixen doesn’t have any superpowers! And she’s been lying about it this whole time! And now she and her teammate could totally die because she lied! I’d say this makes her seem less than heroic, but considering the actions of the “Power Pact” in Identity Crisis, I suppose this is nothing.

Anyway, it’s a dialogue-heavy issue with too-cute presentation of how they came to be in their predicament, and a kinda neat gimmick near the climax.

And that brings us to the twelfth and final issue of Meltzer’s run on the title, which forms a sort of bookend to JLoA #0, which kicked the series off, but is reprinted as if it were #13, following #12 in this trade (So, if this were a book shelf, both bookends are on the same side of the books, which doesn’t really make much sense).

It starts with nice Eric Wight pencil art, and Wight, like Ha, would have been a far better choice to collaborate with Meltzer for the entire series. He’s seemingly been chosen because his style here looks old and simple, but it’s much more complex than Benes’ (or most of the other pencillers here, excepting only Eaglesham). It only looks simple in that it has less lines, but the lines that are there all do something, whereas too many of Benes’ lines are just there to make the drawing look slightly more complex than a generic figure posing infront of a generic background or, more often than not, empty space.

This story is entitled “Monitor Duty,” and the idea is a day in the life type story exploring the characters and relationships of the various Leaguers. It’something of an empty gesture, given that this is the end of Meltzer’s run; he’s taken 13 issues to get this team together, but leaves before he can say anything about any of them beyond, “Here’s a new status quo; have fun making sense of it, successors!”

In the Wight drawn flashback, we see “Year One” era Aquaman and Martian Manhunter chatting about starting the Justice League, while Hal Jordan and Barry Allen do the same, and then we jump to the present. Two shadowy figures talk about the current League line-up from their hidden base in Rhode Island, spying on them using hologram spy-ware of some sort. Near the end we learn that these spies are actually Aquaman and Martian Manhunter.

This presents some problems. Firstly, Aquaman is dead. The Aquaman who was on the Justice League, the one shown in the flashbacks, the one who knows all the players and experienced all the memories he’s talking about, is dead. During the missing year chronicled in 52, he lost his memory and mutated into “The Dweller of the Deep.” He hung out with Aquaman II for a while, but then he died in the pages of his own book.

So the only Aquaman in the DCU at the moment is Aquaman II, also named Arthur Curry, who absorbed some of Aquaman I’s magic and essence during the missing year, but he’s a totally different person.

The dialogue and story construction indicates Aquaman I is the person talking to J’onn J’onnz throughout the story. The art indicates that it’s Aquaman II, who, in addition to not knowing J’onn, obviously doesn’t know the whole history of the Justice League as experienced by Aquaman I.

That’s a pretty big mistake right there, much bigger than having Felix Faust be the off-panel antagonist of this issue (He’s still stuck in Fate’s Tower with Neron at the time this story is occurring). Flipping through this issue in the shop, I thought it was kind of amusing that not only was Meltzer not reading Aquaman, but neither were his editors on JLoA, and I wondered if they’d be able to correct it in the trade. Maybe if they just had Benes redraw Aquaman, the story would work (so long as you don’t read Aquaman, and, at the time, about 70,000 JLoA readers weren’t reading Aquaman, so it’s probably safe to assume most of those who pick up this trade won’t be tracking down back issues of the now-cancelled Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis). Or if they changed some dialogue to make it look like J’onn was talking to Aquaman II for, um, some reason, it would maybe kind of work. A little.

But this, this just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t deserve a “Continuity is for nerds, it’s the story itself that matters!” pass either, since Meltzer is so goddam concerned with continuity that his readers are supposed to have read and internalized early ‘80s New Teen Titans to the point that when Roy says Vixen’s shaking “like Gar after we lost Terra,” they’ll know what the hell he’s talking about.

To say nothing of referring to the Legionnaires by their first names throughout “Lightning Saga.” When characters call Superman and Batman “Clark” and “Bruce,” it’s annoying and unnatural, but at least any reader who picks this book up is going to be reasonably aware of who Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are. But Jeckie? Luornu? Val? The hell?

This book is nothing but continuity (and continuity errors) so, like Identity Crisis it doesn’t get that pass; you can’t base a story in DC trivia, expecting your readers to know it at least as well as you, and then beg their indulgence when you screw it up.

The trade ends with JLoA #0, which is the first chapter of the first story arc, trade-collected at the end of the run for some reason. Reading it here seems…off, particularly after the exclamation point ending of Meltzer’s final issue, with Martian Manhunter saying things never change over a two-page spread of the whole line-up running straight at the reader.

All of a sudden, we’re back in the Batcave, watching the Trinity sit down and get ready to look at photos for a few months. I kind of liked the way Meltzer redefined the Trinity as a clique within the League in this story, but the story itself is extremely random.

There are a few pages in the present, but most of them flashback to a new version of DCU history (the post-Intinite Crisis/52 version of pre- and post-Crisis (on Infinite Earths version, in which Wonder Woman was being reinserted into League history after having been removed from it for over 20 years). Or flash-forward to events of the future labeled “tomorrow.” Looking at these now, well over a year since the #0 issue first came out, none of the six “tomorrows” have come to pass yet, and most probably never will (the death of Batman and the marriage of Wonder Woman, for example; the marriage of Hal Jordan and the death of Pa Kent are more possible, I suppose, and the Trinity vs. Luthor over Superboy the most likely to occur).

The main virtue of this issue is the art, with Wight again handling the “Year One” stuff, Benes the present day stuff, and a slew of guest-artists each getting a page or so. We get to see Kevin Maguire and Howard Porter drawing pages set in the eras they defined, plus Dick Giordano, Tony Harris, George Perez, J.H. Williams III, Gene Ha, Rags Morales, Ethan Van Sciver, Jim Lee and others.

And I imagine that’s the last post I’ll have complaining about Meltzer for a good long time, as I’ve now read every comic he’s written. All 26 of ‘em. Stop back tomorrow for “Judd Winick: Threat or Menace?” Kidding! Something light and image-heavy for sure tomorrow.



*I’m guessing, here. Was he officially on the team for “Lightning Saga,” or still just kinda hanging around? In #7, he says he’s not on the team. Well, if he is on the League, that means he’s around for “Lighting Saga,” “Monitor Duty” and McDuffie’s fist arc, “Unlimited.” So, two to three stories altogether, right?

Weekly Haul: June 20th

Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis #53 (DC Comics) Poor Black Manta. He went from being a scuba diver with an awesome helmet to a pretty cool looking man/manta monster during the Underworld Unleashed crossover, to a half-monsterized guy in his old scuba suit (in first Green Arrow, and then Wonder Woman and Aquaman), back to a normal dude (and good guy) in a scuba suit during the beginning of the latest volume of Aquaman, to a guy who could breathe underwater unaided and now it looks like he’s about to get yet another look, after the conclusion of this story.

I really like what Tad Williams and Shawn McManus did with Manta in this issue; it’s probably the coolest Manta has been in the DCU that I can remember (Alex Ross and company’s Justice version? The best he’s ever been anywhere). His fight chatter comparing Manta, Inc.’s survivor benefits to the life insurance plan of the Aquamen is great, as is his dis of young Arthur “Aquaman II” Curry: “I imagine being an apprentice Aquaman is your summer job while you struggle with junior college, right?” Ha ha, you tell him, Manta!

McManus tricks out Black Manta and his underlings to look pretty cool, with his henchpeople looking like black-colored underwater Iron Men, and he lends a welcome cartooniness to many of the characters, particularly his gigantic King Shark, crazy angry de-helmed Manta and the highly expressive Topo (it’s all in the eyes). The new team’s run has been something of a roller coaster in terms of quality, rising and falling unpredictably each issue, but this issue is definitely a hill rather than a valley. The sense that this is all just a tangent before a return to normalcy (i.e. the real Aquaman returning to reclaim his comic book from the pretender) haunts the proceedings, but Williams at least integrates the supporting casts from the last few directions of the book smoothly, and gives everybody something to do. It even seems like a new iteration of one of Peter David’s greatest Aqua-villains is joining the cast, and Orin gets one step closer to resurrection.





The Brave and the Bold #4 (DC) Another predictably pretty much perfect issue. Reading this on the very same day as the rushed and sparsely populated Countdown and the everybody-looks-the-same-but-with-different-costumes JLoA, penciller George Perez’s deft character design, full backgrounds and precise details seem even greater, and with all those pages that have more than four panels all them, reading this comic is kinda like Christmas. Writer Mark Waid does a nice job with the characters as well; I’m not terribly fond of Blue Beetle III, this Supergirl, Lobo or the Fatal Five, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t make them all seem like distinct and likable individuals (well, except the Fatal Five, but then, they’re the villains). This is an all-around fantastic comic book, maybe DC’s very best at the moment (at least among the DCU books). Now the bad news: The Waid/Perez run is only twelve-issues long, meaning we’re already a third of the way there.





Countdown #45 (DC) Okay, remember last week when I said that as much as I’ve come to loathe Countdown I’d probably continue to buy and read it because with a weekly series, it’s almost easier to keep doing so then going to the trouble of actually dropping it? (I said much the same thing in this week’s “Best Shots” col, to the disapproval of many of the posters, some of whom seem to genuinely enjoy the series).

Well, I take it back.

Apparently I just needed to suffer through one more bad issue to push me off the fence and, make no mistake, this is yet another bad issue, with hints that the thing I am kind of interested in seeing play out—the story itself—is about to get much, much worse (How can a story teaming Jason Todd up with Donna Troy get worse? How about we throw in a Monitor and Monarch…or Captain Atom in Monarch’s armor…or whatever the hell is up with Monarch post-Battle of Bludhaven).

So this week’s exciting Ed Benes cover, which features Karate Kid front and center among the assembled Justice League of America? Well, don’t get too excited about it. The only one of those characters who actually appears within this issue is K.K., as he just kinda mills around the League satellite, apparently waiting for the last chapter of “The Lightning Saga” to ship, so the Countdown creative consortium can get on with his story.

The rest of the book is devoted to two scenes. One is Jimmy Olsen talking into his tape recorder summarizing things, a speech that seems a little off, with Jimmy forgetting his own post-Crisis(on Infinite Earths) time as an “elastic lad,” and referring to Lois as “Miss Lane.” (Even if you’re suddenly on a last name basis with Lois again Jim, it’s the 21st century and you work for a newspaper; how about you call her Ms., huh?) The other is Donna Troy vs. Forerunner. As Jason (2scoops, not Todd) mentioned in last week’s comments section, the problem with Countdown is that it’s a matter of “a death by a thousand cuts,” and #45 features a few more, from tiny little things like the lack of Amazons attacking or Donna’s super-speed creating a streak effect of completely static stars to bigger problems, like the completely confusing and seemingly random Monitor storyline to the wasted space of the dull retelling of every Multiverse crossover ever in the back-up feature.

So, Countdown? I wash my hands of you. I’ll endure next week’s issue of you (which will be waiting for me to pick up next time I’m in the shop), and that’s it. If you do turn out to be worthwhile later in your run, well, I’ll see you in trades borrowed form the library in a year or so.





Justice League of America #10 (DC)
Oh, wow. I was not expecting this at all. I thought I’d successfully lowered my expectations for this title enough that I couldn’t possibly be surprised by how bad a particular issue might prove to be, but apparently Brad Meltzer and Ed Benes have managed to find a way to limbo below my lowered expectations—this was just plain god awful, among the very worst DC comics I can remember reading. Almost Teen Titans #46 bad, but not quite (This issue counts as improvement over TT in that the art doesn’t look quite as rushed, and it does compare Brainiac-5 to Hitler, in a roundabout, implied way, and that’s gotta be worth something, right?).

We start off on the wrong foot with that infamous Michael Turner/Power Girl cover, which is exactly as bad as the preview version to the right, despite the fact that some of it gets covered up by the UPC symbol and the “The Lightning Saga Concludes!” blurb. The interior is no better, although it’s worth noting that Benes is a better illustrator than Turner; yeah, sure he only draws two different figures, the anatomy is ridiculously exaggerated, and Canary and Wonder Woman might as well be bare-assed, it’s still not Turner-bad.

The main problem is that the story makes absolutely no sense. Seriously, I just could not follow what was happening in this issue at all, to the point where I spent an awful lot of time flipping back to reread pages, in case it was a matter of my just being so distracted by the little things, like why Powergirl calls Superman “Clark” on one page and “Kal” on another (Pick a first name and stick with it, huh “Karen?”) or how Black Canary knows the Legion were “Clark’”s best childhood friends, or how he’d react when his best childhood friends betrayed him since, presumably, she’s never seen him betrayed by his best childhood friends, since this is the first time he’d been betrayed by his best childhood friends, to follow the color-coding on the narration boxes and keep the universes and timelines straight in my head.

The thrust of the story is that the Bronze Age Legion Which Shouldn’t Even Exist As Far As We Know manage to complete their little resurrection ritual, despite the best efforts of the Justice teams, but it wasn’t a Legionnaire they were really there to resurrect at all, it was a Flash, and not the one you’d expect a pre-Crisis(on Infinite Earths) Legion to want to resurrect. No, the other one, and his family…although they weren’t really dead anyway. (Were they? I haven’t been reading Flash: The Fastest Man Alive, but I thought the West clan had just disappeared into the Speed Force or time stream or something like that?). Or wait, did they capture another Flash during the ritual somehow? Is that a face in Brainy’s lightning rod there in the last panel, the one in which he says “But for this universe, all I really care about-- --is that we got who we wanted.” I don’t know, I didn’t really get it. But then, I haven’t read the late-70’s stories being referenced here. Personally, I’m not really a fan of any story that requires me to spend a half hour on Wikipedia, read a post-game interview with the creators and editors, and post a bunch of questions on message boards to older fans more versed in Legion lore than I just to come up with a few alternate theories about what might have happened in the story I just read. (My own, perhaps peculiar, definition of a good comic book story is one that you can enjoy all on its own without extensive research).

The confusing badness wasn’t all that I found shocking about the “concluding” chapter of “The Lightning Saga.” I was also surprised how little was actually explained or resolved at the end; it ended with just as many questions as it began. There was no real explanation for what was up with the Legion here. Brainiac’s dialogue at the end seems to indicate they’re from a different universe than the one the Legion just visited, but, if that’s the case, then how are they still that universe’s Superman’s friends (and how is Wildfire made out of Red Tornado’s body, how is that universe’s history in their records, etc). And why are the West twins hitting puberty, rather than babies, like the last time we saw them? And what was up with those panels involving the Ultra-Humanite, Per Degaton and the 90-pound weakling version of Despero? Weren’t they supposed to be involved in this somehow?

Fun fact: Brad Meltzer has exactly two issues left in this run on the title, which means he has about 44 pages to address those questions, plus the mystery with Geo-Force’s powers, and that business about the immortals in “Tornado’s Path”, and the identity of Dr. Impossible. Why do I get the feeling that’s going to another Meltzer-made mess for some other writer to clean up somewhere else?

It wasn’t all bad though. I did like a few things. In addition to the implication that Brainiac was worse than Hitler (Oh Dreamgirl, you just lost the debate!), I liked Brainiac’s extreme dickishness (“That’s a truly inspiring and useless speech, Drake Burroughs.”), and Superman’s threatening Sensor Girl with, “You’ve got a femto-second to put that-") and the smooth, computer-aided juxtaposition of scenes from COIE and old Legion and Flash Silver Age stories into the artwork as memories or (in one case) things in Brainiac’s monitors.

Still, a few cool moments nestled among many more horrible ones, as part of a story that makes absolutely no sense at all isn’t the sort of thing that inspires confidence about the rest of Meltzer’s run. It’s way too short to actually finish any of the stories he’s started in the previous eleven issues, but at the same time, it’s still two issues too many. Dropped until #13, when Dwayne McDuffie swoops in to hopefully save what used to be my favorite DC title.





Shadowpact #14 (DC) I bought my first issue of this series last month with #13 (behold the power of the Zauriel cover appearance!), and the amount of Zauriel within this issue prompted me to pick this one up too. Z. is under heavenly orders to kill Blue Devil, whose continued existence as a superhero is apparently glamorizing selling one’s soul to the devil, but the two former Justice Leaguers decide on another course of action. B.D. hires a lawyer to take on hell for him (nice), and Zauriel is forced to replace him in the Shadowpact line-up, despite the fact that the ‘pact all seem to hate him. I don’t much care for writer Bill Willingham’s portrayal of Zauriel as a henchman for Heaven (which continues the portrayal Steve Gerber initiated in Helmet of Fate: Zauriel); I preferred the character as the rebel, fallen angel who became a superhero to do the right thing, no matter what Heaven’s opinion of creation and/or humanity was (They decided to scrap it and start over when Mageddon had Earth on the ropes). But I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. The rest of the team barely appears here, but the Blue Devil storyline is a pretty interesting one, as is this weird sun god waiting in the wings. New penciller Tom Derenick is something of a personal favorite, and it’s nice to see there’s a place to get a monthly does of him in the DCU now (Although his Detective Chimp can use some work, and his Oblivion patrons don’t seem as cameo-tastic as usual).





Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four #3 (Marvel Comics)
Oh Jeff Parker, Mike Wieringo and Wade von Grawbadger, how did you know exactly what I’d need to read the Wednesday after seeing Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer? Your Doctor Doom appearance, in his classic green house dress and cape combo over full body armor, spouting lines like “Fah!” and “The Four! Wretched curs!”, is exactly what I needed to cleanse my mind of Tim Story and Julian Sands’ portayal of Victor Von Doom as just another jackass who isn’t much fun to work with.

In the penultimate chapter, Spidey and three of the FF head to first the High Evolutionary’s Beast Men and then good old Doc Doom for help with a whattayacallit that might halt the silver aliens’ invasion of earth. It’s good old-fashioned, old-school Marvel Comics fun, and I don’t mean that in a bad way at all; Parker hits all the character notes that made these Marvels so well-loved back in the day, but he uses the characters in a story that is just as sophisticated as anything else being published today. As for Wieringo’s pencils, I admit it took a big to get used to his more loose-limbed, gorilla-like version of the Thing, but I’m used to it now, and I like it. The rest of the characters are all well designed and rendered, and I especially like his thin, regular guy like version of Spidey, which recalls John Romita Jr.’s in terms of build.





The Spirit #7 (DC) Now this is a fill-in! Few could actually successfully fill in for writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, a fact DC seems aware of, which might explain why in this first Cooke-less issue of the series, they brought in a half-dozen creators to make us miss Cooke less. Three shorts make up this “Summer Special,” each by a different creative team. Walter Simonson, Chris Sprouse and Karl Story present “Harder Than Diamonds,” in which an Eisner-esque femme fatale leads the CCPD and the Spirit on a series of fals trails after a diamond heist. Jimmy Palmiotti and Jordi Bernet offer up an even more Eisner-esque story featuring an entire tenement apartment building worth of characters with their own plotlines, all of which are elegantly solved when the Spirit chases a crook up the stairs and onto the roof. The least Eisner-esque is probably Kyle Baker’s, a rather complicated murder mystery packed with gags, the punchlines of which are most often expressed via Ellen’s oversized, rolling eyes. My favorite Baker joke comes early, when Spirit answers the phone, “Murder? In a filthy alley? I’ll be right there,” although the Sin City panel and Dolan and Spirit’s meat dinner come close. I’m really glad to see Baker doing a Spirit story, because that means now he’s done both Plastic Man and The Spirit, which makes him a good candidate for creating a story along these lines:








Ultimate Spider-Man #110 (Marvel) Is this still the most consistently best written, best illustrated and most entertaining Spider-Man monthly on the shelves? Yes, yes it is. Is this still one of the best superhero monthlies from any company on the shelves? Yes, yes it is. This issue features the conclusion of the guest star-packed “Ultimate Knights” story arc, and, if you watch the backgrounds, the first appearance of Ultimate Cloak and Dagger.