Hey kids! DC Comics, Frankenstein and parts of Black Canary have a reminder for you:

From DC Comics' Futures End #0 

So apparently at DC Comics, "restraint" means putting an attempted gang rape in an Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld comic instead of an actual gang rape....?

Go read Chris Sims on the first issue of Sword and Sorcery, a just-launched DC comic featuring a rebooted Amethyst written by the creator of 1980s cartoon/doll line tie-in Jem, a comic that is shipping at the same time there's an Amethyst short on Cartoon Network as part of of the channel's "DC Nation" programming block.

It's weird: I just read Rob Saklowitz's book Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture a few months back, and he argued rather persuasively that the future of comics companies like DC and Marvel lie in an effective "trans-media" strategy, a future that involves the challenge of reorganizing their characters and franchises across multiple platforms so that they all cohere into something recognizable, consistent and (ultimately) salable. And yet I've seen little—as in, no—evidence that anyone at DC Comics is even really paying attention to what's going on in their cartoons and trying to calibrate their relaunched comics line to those more popular and accessible takes on the characters.

Short of making Batman's costume fussier and redesigning Harley Quinn so that the two characters look a bit more like the versions of them that appear in the Batman: Arkham Ayslum video games, it doesn't look like DC has even attempted to meet the challenge of transmedia synergy yet. This despite an overhaul of their entire line that's barely even a year old.

Anyway: Attempted gang rape in Amethyst, the sort of thing a wag might make up as a hyperbolic example in order to parody the sort of screwed-up mindset evident in DC's publishing strategy, only ha ha, you can't make fun of DC for this kind of thing because there's nothing to exaggerate up to. Or down to, as the case may be.

Man. Attempted gang rape in Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld.

What's on the next ring of the downward spiral at DC, pedophilia in a New 52 Sugar and Spike, or bestiality in Shazam...? Keep reading to find out!

Wait, why would anyone keep reading this shit...?

So there was a comic book convention this weekend.

That’s the cover of an Image one-shot written and illustrated by Ryan Ottley, shown as part of a slideshow at this weekend’s Emerald City Comic Con. Let’s hear it for high concepts! (Also, please note that there appears to be a baby’s head in the mouth of the Grizzly Shark. Perhaps Tucker Stone was on to something after all.)

What other news came out of the convention? And, more importantly, what do I think about that news?


Or, “Power Girl to be cancelled in a few months”: Well, perhaps that’s overly pessimistic, but it’s the first thing that sprung to mind when I saw the headline “Palmiotti, Gray and Conner off of Power Girl.” I’ve only read a handful of issues of the series, but Amanda Conner’s art was far and away the most appealing aspect of the book—it’s what got me to read those few issues, it’s what would get me to read a few more, and it’s usually the thing I see praised most when the book is being praised by anyone (Her art, and the general tone of the book).

If Conner couldn’t do more than twelve issues, and wanted to move on rather than take a break before returning a month or three later, I could sort of see why co-writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray would also want to move on too, but, on the other hand, I always got the sense from reading Palmiotti’s columns and posts around the Internet that he was super-enthusiastic about the character and the book and was going to be on it until it was pried from him.

Certainly someone somewhere should be able to replace Conner and bring much of what she brought to the book. Kevin Maguire is probably the most obvious choice in a lot of ways, and I know J. Bone could do deliver big, fun, funny, cartoony and sexy on a monthly basis, or maybe there’s a newcomer out there somewhere.

I will be curious to see what DC does with the title next. The Comic Book Resources article I linked to above ends with Palmiotti giving advice to his successors, which gave me the impression he wasn’t sure who they would be yet. Power Girl sells poorly enough that changing the entire creative team and possibly direction of the title only 12 issues in seems sort of radical.

The last Beat analysis had PG just below 22K for the eighth issue, below Supergirl and Wonder Woman, as well as both Titans books and Booster Gold. Unless DC ends up bringing in some pretty big names, it’s hard to imagine a Power Girl monthly being around this time next year.


Best news of the weekend (that I heard): Boom Studios, the comics publisher which has been cranking out some great kids comics of late, will be doing a Darkwing Duck miniseries starting in June.

I was a longtime watcher of the “Disney Afternoon” block of after-school cartoons, with Darkwing Duck following a close second to Duck Tales as one of my all-time favorites. Let’s see, I would have been…14 when the show debuted, which was right around the time I started getting into comics and superheroes, so it clicked with my waning interest in Duck Tales and waxing interest in superheroes.

I haven’t tried re-watching it since—despite having taped some of my favorite episodes on blank VCR tapes—so I’m unsure of how well it holds up, but I remember liking the premise (What if Batman were a Disney duck?), the lead actor’s voice a lot (as well as that of his evil opposite, Nega-Duck) and that gun he had that you could stick anything in and it would shoot it out the front. (Hmm, I guess I should check Youtube for old episodes…)

I, uh, I thought I might have more to say about this then simply, “Neat, I’m looking forward to this comic book!” But I guess not. Oh well, this sounds neat; I’m looking forward to this comic book.


I’m not at all surprised that Ian Sattler isn’t familiar with the term “women-in-refrigerators”: Considering I wrote a bit about the fact that DC killed off a little girl in Justice League: Cry For Justice (and read a ton about it over the course of the last week or so), I figure it’s worth following up on what Senior Story Editor Ian Sattler and writer James Robinson had to say on the matter.

Here’s a bit from a Comic Book Resources report on a “DC Nation” panel:

Sattler said he disagreed with the assessment that the character was “fridged” (i.e. that her death was pointless). Robinson (the writer of the story) quickly added, “The decision has been controversial and one that I know has been greeted with displeasure by some. I'm sorry if it upset people. In all honesty, they wanted to kill Speedy too, and I said no, so give me some credit for that."

It appeared that Robinson was joking about wanting to kill Speedy, although some in the crowd were unsure. Sattler jumped in and said, “I’m proud of the story and stand by it. I'm happy it upset people because it means that the story had some weight and emotion.”

Robinson and Sattler also added that this story needed to be told to get Green Arrow to a specific place story-wise, as the character is going to have a “big” year. During the panel, Robinson also noted, “If you see what DC has planned for Green Arrow; Star City (Green Arrow’s hometown) will be one of the greatest cities in the DCU.”

Two quick things.

First, there’s the repeat of the “I’m happy it upset people because it means that the story had some weight” bit. That’s…a peculiar take away. Were some readers upset specifically because Lian Harper, the child of Roy Harper (a.k.a. Red Arrow, a.k.a. Arsenal, a.k.a. Speedy) died? Sure, I’ve read reactions from fans specifically upset that that particular character had died, at least one of whom described herself as a Lian fan.

I read far more people reacting not to the fact that a character died, but to the fact that DC killed her, or the way in which DC killed her. You know, how crass and exploitive it is, how meaningless and pointless it is, how out of place it is in a Justice League comic that barely mentions her dad, let alone Lian herself. What it says about the publisher, the writer, the reader, and what the publisher must think of its readers. Where it fits in the pattern of superhero decadence and so on.

I’m sure we’ll see when sales analysis of the issue is released that, dead kid or not, it’s nowhere near as successful as Blackest Night or Sieige or Batman and Robin, and, more likely didn’t even sell as many copies as it’s parent book, Justice League of America, which didn’t feature any dead kids that month (Future issues of Green Arrow following up on that plot point may see an uptick, but then, Green Arrow sales are so low almost anything would have caused an uptick in interest and sales…)

Apparently Sattler subscribes to the “no such thing as bad publicity” school of thought. But even if that is true, it doesn’t mean people approve of whatever is generating the bad publicity.

Secondly, I thought it was kind of funny how the report says Sattler and Robinson went on to explain that “this story needed to be told to get Green Arrow to a specific place story-wise, as the character is going to have a “big” year.”

Something terrible happening to a female supporting character in able to motivate a male hero is pretty much the text book definition of women-in-refrigerator-ism, isn’t it?


(Oh, by the way, the above image of Green Arrow cradling the lifeless body of a little girl he and the rest of the superheroes of the DC Universe were unable to save is part of a splash page. Standing immediately to the left of Green Arrow is his wife, Black Canary. She looks like this in the same panel: Is she covering her face because she can't bear to look upon the body of her kinda sorta step-fake-granddaughter? Or is she slapping her forehead because she can't believe DC even put her in a stupid scene like this?)



File under Things That Probably Should Not Be: Star Wars burlesque…? Um, hmmm. A sexy storm trooper and a Jaba the Hutt balloon dance thing seem so, so, so wrong, and yet I couldn’t look away. They definitely gets points for creativity, including some of the last characters you’d expect to see (Chewbacca, the aforementioned Jabba, both droids), and only using slave Leia and none of those ladies with two tentacles for hair like that one dancer of Jabba’s. The photo gallery linked to above is at CBR, and they use black bars to cover up the pasties for some reason (does that make looking at a photo set of a Star Wars burlesque show at work more acceptable?); LA Weekly has a slideshow sans bars…and another of the same troupe’s video game themed show (Sadly, no Pac-Man, as the poster for the show suggested).

I can't really find anything to complain about in the preview for Cry For Justice #4

DC's The Source blog has just posted a brief preview of the latest issue of James Robinson's and Mauro Cascioli's Justice League: Cry For Justice, and after eagerly reading through it to see what hilarious and/or depressing nonsense this one might include, I was disappointed.

There was absolutely nothing along the lines of Justice League founder Hal Jordan complaining about the way the Justice League has always been run (sometimes by him), or a bunch of middle-aged dudes staring at teenage Supergirl's breasts, or Jordan and a bunch of super heroes torturing a guy for information, or talk of Jordan's threesome with two superheroines.

No. There is nothing hilariously/depressingly awful about these preview pages at all.

Oh sure, I guess you could complain about the gratuitous panty shot on the teenage alien Miss Martian, but that's really just par for the course with super-comics these days, so it doesn't really seem comparable to what's come before in the series. One might as well complain about the poor page lay-out of the page that panel's part of (try reading the speech balloons in the right order in panels three and four), or the fact that Clayface did such a good job of impersonating Prometheus that he/she/it somehow fooled the almost-microscopically small Atom (Clayface had to be disguised on, like, a cellular level, right?).

Based on the previews alone then, it looks like Cry For Justice #4 will be the best issue of the whole series. It's due out next week; buy two copies!

I don't know if it's art, but I know I don't really like it.

I just read Brian Azzarello, Lee Bermejo, Mick Gray and Patricia Mulvihill’s Joker this weekend. You’ll likely recall it’s the November 2008 original graphic novel (of the sort that Marvel’s EIC Joe Quesada recently said doesn’t make sense for his company, but which seems to work well for DC for some reason), the one that shares a general character design and Batman-comics-as-“realistic”-crime-drama mission statement with the previous summer’s film The Dark Knight.

It’s the one with the gross cover, and the cool Crazy Person font logo and credits.

This book was sort of a big deal last fall, or at least DC really treated it as a big deal—despite a deep catalog of solid Joker comics to draw from, they apparently commissioned this as a signature companion to the movie (in aesthetic and worldview only) and gave it a massive PR push, maybe the biggest PR push of any DC book since I’ve been paying attention, based on the number of reviews both in the comics blogosphere and in the mainstream media (It’s quite possible, of course, that the push on DC’s side wasn’t necessarily bigger than some previous books, but instead that more venues were more eager to bite, given the book-like nature of the release and the unique heat signature of The Joker at that period in time, when the movie was huge, the promising young actor who played him had passed away, and Oscar talk was earnest).

I didn’t read it last fall precisely because of the attention it was garnering; there were no shortage of reviews of it, and given the review-whatever-I-feel-like nature of my comics criticism, I didn’t feel pressed to add another. I also made the mistake of reading Jog’s review before the book’s release, and his review was so well written I couldn’t imagine trying to “compete” with it, even if I had the exact opposite reaction he did to every element of the book (Re-reading Jog’s piece now, after having read Joker, I see it that in addition to being well written, his review was also pretty damn incisive—his description of a lot of aspects are pretty much perfect).

So if you’re wondering why I’m bothering to write about Joker almost a year after it’s release, well, now you know.

Jog did seem to enjoy the work a lot more than I did, though.

Azzarello certainly put the short-ish story together with a great deal of precise craft. In length, scope and focus, this is certainly a work that earns the “novel” part of the term “graphic novel” (although maybe “novella” is more fitting? It’s only 128 pages). But because I was reading the book for pleasure instead of specifically to review it, my mind kept wandering away from concerns of the quality and back towards more behind-the-scenes ones. For example, why did this book exist, exactly? Why did DC publish it? Why did they publish it like this, instead of some other way?

Unless for some reason this is the very first post on my blog you’re reading, then you know I’m a regular comics reader, of the sort one might call a fan, or, derisively, part of “the Wednesday crowd.” I go to the shop every week, I buy somewhere between a handful and a small stack of super-comics in their stapled, 22-page format, I pay attention and keep at least casual track of the “universe” aspects of super-comics.

As such a reader, I wasn’t sure what to make of this book at first. Was it supposed to be “in continuity;” was it supposed to “count?” Was this Joker and this Gotham City supposed to be the same one most of the other thousands of Batman comics deal with, or is it an all-new one, Azzarello and Bermejo’s own, highly personalized remix of the familiar elements? Is it supposed to be all-ages, or adult?

It’s published by DC on their DC Comics imprint, instead of their Vertigo imprint; it doesn’t say “For Mature Readers” on it, as DC comics used to once upon a time, back when they published a variety of comics for a variety of different age groups, instead of choosing to focus almost exclusively on teenage boys who might conceivably get in trouble with their parents if there were F-words or nipples in their comics, but who nevertheless want to read about guys who swear and go to strip clubs and also really, really like reading about acts of violence, the more lurid the better.

Having read through it twice now, I understand this is a standalone work. It’s supposed to remind you of the movie (or at least what Azzarello, Bermejo and DC assumed the movie would be like, based on Batman Begins), but it’s a different milieu than the movie. It’s okay if it reminds you of the comics, particularly if it makes you want to read more Batman comics, but it’s not connected; it’s not in-continuity.

For us Wednesday Crowd-ers who’ve been reading DC for at least a decade, it’s an “Elseworlds” comic without the “Elseworlds” stamp. In more inclusive terminology, it’s Azzarello’s and Bermejo’s Joker story if they were allowed to reimagine the Joker how they saw fit; this is their The Dark Knight, only it’s a graphic novel instead of a film.

Looked at like that, it’s not a bad work. It’s engaging, and has new ideas to offer in terms of personalized riffs on characters and concepts that hundreds of different writers and artists have offered their riffs on already. The route it takes to its conclusion seems new, but it goes nowhere—or at least nowhere we haven’t been before.

Joker has nothing to say that The Killing Joke didn’t say about 25 years ago—The Joker and Batman are characters (in a comic book or TV show or cartoon or movie or video game), and they fight, because one’s the villain and one’s the hero, and that’s what characters do. The Joker wins for a while, and then he loses by the climax.

Azzarello chooses different words to say this than Alan Moore (and everyone else since) did, but that’s all he really has to say about the matter. What makes this at all different is the point-of-view, and the amount of time Azzarello puts off bringing Batman into the comic at all. The ending is the ending it has to be, or at least the one Azzarello acknowledges that it has to be, but some equivocal foreshadowing aside, he keeps the proceeding as Batman-free as possible.

I imagine it analogous to a kid trying to stay up as late as possible. His parents keep telling him it’s time for bed, and he knows he’s eventually gotta, but he keeps pleading “Just five more minutes,” and they give him five more minutes.

And that’s about where I start questioning aspects of the work’s very existence. If you can turn these children’s characters into hard-boiled, pulp crime characters, if you can have these action figures drinking, popping pills, and snorting lines of representationally drawn cocaine, if these cartoon characters can butcher and skin human beings, can watch strippers and rape women, why can’t the story deviate into new territory? The acknowledgement that neither the Joker nor the Batman can ever win, that their conflicts are inevitably a never-ending series of repeating sequences is a tired cliché at this point.

And hell, if you can’t tell a new story, for the love of God, can you at least show a naked lady? An upraised middle finger? The word “fuck” spelled f-u-c-k with no cute little black bars or caps lock-ed number keys? Because this comic, like so many today, walks right up to the line of what they can and can’t get away with, farther than they need to if they’re not going to cross it, as if to point out that this is the work of a big, corporation which can’t risk offending anyone.

Wouldn’t it be bad-ass if we did this?, Joker asks. You bet it would, but we might get in trouble, so let’s not, it then answers.

And then skins a dude and lets us know that the woman over there was totally just gang-raped between pages, because that’s A-OK, as long as the penetration—serrated knife through naked man’s flesh or the Joker’s penis through the victimized woman—happens off-panel.

Shit, I sure am going on a long time here. And all I really wanted to do was highlight some weird panels that threw me out of the book and had me scratching my head and experiencing sympathetic existential angst for Joker, because it’s just a bunch of words and pictures on paper and can’t experiences it’s own existential angst.

For example, there’s this picture, of the Joker stalking out of Arkham Asylum, like the scene in a movie where the character gets out of jail after years (a scene we see later in flashback, starring our point-of-view character Johnny Frost):
That is a nice drawing of the buildings in the background, and the whole image has impact (It’s a full-page splash, and Azzarello and Bermejo actually know how to use splash pages, unlike most of their peers making DC comic books rather than DC original graphic novels).

But all I could think of was the fact that the Joker was wearing a lady’s coat. I wouldn’t have even noticed, if Eddie Campbell didn’t notice last year, and write a very funny post about it:

It can happen because the artist is looking in a mirror, but the overwhelming reason in the last twenty years is that comic book artists generally speaking, though there are a few fashion plates to give exception to the rule, are the worst dressed people in the world who mostly get around in t-shirts and draw people in leotards.

On the very next page, I realized that this was going to actually be one of those juvenile comics. Not one for juveniles necessarily, but one of those that has the juvenile tendency to think things like middle fingers are provocative, but will only lift them when their parents and teachers aren’t looking, because they don’t want to get in trouble:
(I included part of the panel above the Joker saluting the city, so you can see the gutter and note how Bermejo drew an image of Joker flicking off Gotham City. And yes, the lightning bolt-as-middle-finger suggestion is pretty awesome, if it's intentional, although it's not something you would see reading the first time, as your eyes would be headed in the opposite direction, and probably stop at, "What the fuck? Why can't they draw a middle finger? Fucking pussies!").

I’m not entirely sure why, but this line of dialogue seemed incredibly wrong to me. It was at this point during the reading experience where it started to become clear to me that this book was, as Jog put it, “continuity neutral,” and that this Joker most definitely wasn’t The Joker:
For the life of me, I just can’t hear the Joker using a double negative like that. If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the Joker in all interpretations across all media, it’s that he is an eloquent, well-spoken sort of villain, the sort who never would have said “no one” instead of “anyone” in that sentence.

Here’s one of Harley Quinn’s big scenes. (I think she’s only ever referred to as “Harley,” though). The Joker and Frost’s first stop after Arkham is this club, where they start drinking and partying. There’s a woman wearing only an open jacket over her breasts standing at the edge of the bar, and, at one point, she gets up on stage:
I suppose she’s supposed to be dancing, but during the four-panel sequence, she takes her jacket off, revealing her breasts to the audience (but not the reader! Because this is an all-ages comic, after all), then puts on her Harley Quinn hat and mask and, off panel, her top. She’s more changing clothes on stage than stripping.

And then she and Joker peel all the skin off that moustache man’s body, from the neck down, so you can see his red muscle (off-panel). They apparently do a very, very good job, as his skin is removed but there’s no blood or incisions in the muscle, and he’s perfectly capable of running back into the room before dying.

That guy in the vest and hat is Killer Croc, by the way. Bermejo draws him more in line with his original conception as a big guy with a tough, scaly skin condition that makes him look vaguely crocodilian, rather than the sort of hulking mutant crocodile monster man he’s become in the comics. Bermejo gives him hoop earrings, and big, baggy pants, sagged to reveal the tops of his boxers.

His role is as muscle in Joker’s criminal operation, and he’s given a sort of hip-hop look. Croc’s men are all black, and dressed in fashions which my mid-nineties MTV viewing tell me are supposed to indicate that they are gangsters. (In a previous Azzarello-written Batman comic, Croc was given a pimp look, complete with huge gold chain and leopard print silk shirt).

Harley is something between a generic movie gangster girlfriend character (stripping, doing it with the main bad guy, doing lots of drugs with the main bad guy, holding him while he cries during a private, vulnerable moment), and a Frank Miller-style Amazon whorerior, although she gets one splendid moment at the end of a meeting between Joker and Two-Face.

Two-Face looks as if he could have come straight from the comics, particularly now that his scarred half doesn’t follow any regular style guide in the DCU comics.

The Penguin looks like the Penguin, fo the most part. He’s short, round, has a pointy nose, wears a monocle, smokes his cigarette from a cigarette holder, but he’s never referred to as “The Penguin,” or “Oswald” or “Cobblepot.” Instead, Joker calls him “Abner,” which I took to be a Joke I didn’t get, although it’s somewhat odd that he continues to call him only that and nothing else.

The most radically reimagined character, however, is The Riddler. Just look at this:
Those are question mark tattoos emanating from his belly button, and although you can’t see it in this image, the back of his coat has a weird, tribal tattoo script-looking image constructed of stylized question marks. It’s all just awful but hey, that’s part of the fun of the book, I suppose….seeing how Bermejo and company reinvent the looks of the characters.

And then there’s their Batman. He too is given a very If This Were Our Movie… design, very reminiscent of the hard, black, rubber and leather looking shells that Michael Keaton and Christain Bale found themselves encased in. Like Bale’s especially, there’s no yellow oval or visible Bat-symbol on the chest, other than perhaps a black bat over a black cape over a black chest plate (or it’s just a crease in Bermejo’s figure).

Batman doesn’t show up until page 110, and only get two lines, for a grand total of four words of dialogue. His existence is acknowledged throughout, with Joker occasionally shouting up at the buildings or mentioning a “he” who’s out there, but this Batman sure seems to take a long time getting around to giving a shit about the many, many violent crimes his archenemies are committing.

This is probably an intentional choice on Azzarello’s part, as he has Joker walk away from murdering a crime boss and then asking the rooftops, “Not enough for you, huh? Need me for more of your dirty work?” It’s as if this Batman only gets involved when crime turns its attention to the civilians, and as long as its criminal on criminal, he’s not terribly rushed to fight it.

That, or this Batman just really, really sucks at his job, as he seems unable to catch up with the Joker until Two-Face finally calls Batman on a homemade Bat-signal and asks for his help.

I think maybe Batman just didn’t think to look for The Joker in an original graphic novel. He was already fighting super-crime in Batman, Detective Comics, Batman Confidential, Superman/Batman, Trinity, Justice League of America, Batman: Gotham After Midnight and Batman: The Brave and The Bold, how was he supposed to know that The Joker and so many of his other rogues were hiding out in an original graphic novel, half-disguised as more straightforward crime fiction characters than their usual, more super-villainous selves?

Finally, here’s a horrible page to close the post out with:
Well, the content's horrible, not the construction of the page itself. That’s The Joker buttoning up his pants after apparently raping Johnny’s ex-wife, whom Two-Face had kidnapped and tried to use as leverage.

If the new management at DC leads to only a single change in DC Comics, I hope it’s some sort of outright ban on rape in their super-comics line, or at least some sort of reduction to, like, one rape/implied rape/line of dialogue expressing a desire to rape every year.

Cry For Justice continues to make me laugh...and cry, alternately, depending on the page

Hey, remember back in April when DC's DC Nation column featured that comical image of some of their male heroes just cold ogling Supergirl's breasts?

I had made fun of it at the time, but also noted that "I’m sure this isn’t a full image, and was maybe cropped like it is to avoid a spoiler."

Well, it turns out the only cropping was done at the bottom of the image. The actual page of the actual comic features her head off-panel, in order to make room for her breast in the foreground. DC's Source Blog posted some pages from Justice League: Cry For Justice #3, and that page is one of them:


Reading through them for anything as comical as the last batch of preview pages contained, I was depressed to find out that this issue deals with the ethics of torture, and the heroes are all a-okay with it. Famously liberal Oliver Queen at least asks his highly Republican pal Hal, "Is this right? I mean, isn't this torture?"

Hal responds, "Prometheus is a villain, Ollie. He's a murderer." And when Ollie points out that they're supposed to be the good guys, Hal answers with, "Ask me that when the sting of Bruce and J'onns death and all the others has gone away, if it ever does."

Which is, of course, hilarious because Hal has returned from the dead, as has the person he's talking to.

Now the fact that writer James Robinson at least has the characters talking about whether torture is good or not—even though Ray "The Atom" Palmer eventually agrees with Hal and tells Ollie to shut up, while Ollie, Captain Marvel Jr. and Supergirl all stand around watching the torture—leads me to believe (hope?) that he's eventually going to get around to siding with Ollie and agreeing that yes, Hal and Ray are fucking monsters and torture is never justified and if anyone eschews tortue it should be these peple who refer to themselves as the Justice League.

But in these half-dozen pages, all I see is a half-dozen superheroes taking Vice President Dick Cheney's side of the real world, really fucking serious discussion, and I get depressed.

Ultimates 3 #4

Previously in Ultimates 3: Wolverine flashbacked up the joint, explaining how this one time he had sex with Wanda and Pietro’s mom and then a jealous Magneto magnet-ed him down a mountain, then he explained how Wanda made all the dinosaurs in the Savage Land through magic to stop him from killing Pietro, and how he watched as Pietro and Wanda discover a kind of love that “no one in this room can really understand” (because it is incest), Wolverine and most of the team traveled to the Savage Land to recover Wanda’s body from Magneto and there they met Ultimate Ka-Zar, Ultimate Shanna and Ultimate Zabu, and, back in New York, Iron Man revealed himself to be a robot who captured The Wasp (More here).

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

And now, the penultimate issue of Ultimates 3, and this one is all fight. Except for a dumb flashback. And some dumb robot shit. But there is a lot of fighting!

This one actually opens at a point in the past, a point so far back in the past that it’s colored black and white (It’s after the Wolverine-sexes-up-Magneto’s-girl flashback though, and that was in color, so who knows).

“Eight hundred miles off the coast of Australia. Years ago,” the gray caption box says, above a panel of a plane. Young, bald Charles Xavier is in the pilot’s chair, talking about this young mutant Aborigine he’s found to his pissed-off looking friend Eric, whose all “Who gives a shit about your dumb shit Xavier, all I care about is that my children find a home.”

His children are, of course, Pietro and Wanda, who are very little here. Wanda’s scared of flying, and just as Pietro’s promising that nothing will ever happen to her as long as he’s with her, the wing BOOMs off, and the plane crashes.

Assuming the plane was made out of metal, why didn’t Magneto just float it down safely? I don’t know. He does use his mastery of magnetism to dramatically clear some wreckage out of the way as they walk away from the crash.

Oh, and as the plane is going down, look who spots it:
Lil’ Ka-zar, Lil’ Shanna the Lil’ She-Devil, and darling little Lil’ Zabu.

Why he’s just a cub!

Hey, is Ka-Zar quoting Star Wars, or is that just a coincidence? Normally, I’d guess a coincidence, but given the dumb movie quote Jeph Loeb’s got coming up this issue, I can’t be sure.

When a big, tough guy dressed in animal skins and carrying a huge spear asks if Magneto and pals are okay and who are they anyway, Magneto makes the most evil expression he can and says “We come in peace…”

This is a story that Ka-Zar and Shanna, who are now grown-ups and in color, were telling the Ultimates. They plan to join them in their plans of kicking Magneto’s ass since, over the years, Magneto and his fellow evil mutants have slaughtered over half of K.Z.’s tribe, including his parents.

“Kazar. There’s more than just you and Shanna, right?” Valkyrie asks. “I mean, we need help, bit time.”

“Big time, Valkyrie says, and we see another dude with a torch, and a bunch of silhouettes in the background, indicating a crowd of guys with spears.

Back at the mansion, Iron Man, or the robot posing as him, holds Wasp by the throat and is talking about how the new world order will be better than the old world order, and, well, this:

Ugh. Did Jeph Loeb actually have a character un-ironically quote Terminator? In a story that’s about an evil robot?
Yes, yes he did.

Jesus.

And what’s worse, just as “Captain America” is leading Wasp away from the scene, lightning starts shooting out of his eyes and mouth, he shouts “SKEEEETTT” and Hank Pym, dressed in his Ant-Man costume and riding on a big, fat flying ant, flies out of “Cap”’s open mouth.

The character we thought was Captain America for three panels was actually a robot disguised as a human. Jeph Loeb had a robot-disguised-as-a-human un-ironically quote Terminator.

He melts into a puddle of green, viscous liquid because whatever.

“I need you to shrink down to wasp size and come with me,” Hank says to Wasp. “There’s a conspiracy -- it’s everywhere…”

Back in the Savage Land, Hawkeye is picking off Multiple Man’s multiple men, when Sabretooth jumps at him and shouts “I’m gonna rip your head clean off!”

It’s no “It’s clobberin’ time!” but then, Sabretooth is no Ben Grimm.

That’s when another genuinely cool, I’m-not-being-sarcastic-I-actually-thought-this-was-neat moment occurs—Ka-Zar’s sabretoothed tigers leap on Sabretooth and bury their claws and fangs into him. Sabretooth! Killed by sabretooths! That’s ironic!

(Well, I guess he actually survives, as Hawkeye "finishes him off" next issue, and I saw him ripping off Angel’s wings or something gross in last week’s Ultimatum #4, but as far as Ultimates 3 goes, this is pretty much the last we see of Sabretooth).

The only way this scene would have been cooler? If it was only one tiger—come on Zabu, you could have taken that punk solo—and if instead of Hawkeye getting saved, it was Captain America. And he replied, “You suck on that.”

Okay, maybe not cooler. But funnier!

(By the way, I should point out that as poor a comic book artist as Joe Madureira is, he’s much better suited to Loeb’s cartoonish ultraviolence than David Finch, the guy who’s drawing Ultimatum. This is probably because Madureira is a more cartoonish artists, and doesn’t do that ugly, little line-filled “realistic” style that Finch does. I mean, here we have two-thirds of a page devoted to two big tigers plunging claws and fants into a dude, and there’s not a speck of blood, no limbs flying off or exposed bones are intestines or anything. It’s extreme violence, but it’s relatively tasteful; Madureira apparently draws the split-second where the teeth and claws go in, rather than the split-second where the gushers of blood and shower of torn flesh would come out and off).

Meanwhile, stealthy, tracking-types with heightened senses Wolverine and “The Black Panther” are running through the Savage Land, when Ultimate Juggernaut, now the size of a small house, with hands a few feet wide, sneaks up on them and punches the shit out of them.

“@#$%!” Wolverine says, “The @#$%ing Juggernaut!?”

Ha ha ha ha ha! Like in that one Internet comedy video from many years ago!

The Juggernaut raises his fists to smash Black Panther and, is this the end of the mysterious Black Panther whose identity we don’t know but whose costume has been torn to reveal white skin beneath. White? Oh my God, what is his secret?!

We’ll have to wait until next issue to find out!

Elsewhere, Valkyrie is flying around on her pegasus, when a spurt of flame makes him say “REEEEEE” and throws her off. She wakes up in a messy bedroom, wearing her old “costume,” which was just a half-dozen pie tins, while an unseen landlord knocks on the door and asks for the rent.

She’s experiencing her “own private hell,” the mind-controlling Mastermind says. Late rent? A messy bedroom? Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And since this comics series just hasn’t been gross enough so far, we get this delightful scene:
Meanwhile Thor, Shanna and a bunch of random guys with spears are fighting an army of Multiple Man. Why did the rest of the Ultimates split-up Scooby-Doo style? I don’t know.

This brings us to the scene that Unus the Untouchable fans have been waiting for! Ultimate Unus the Untouchable vs. Ultimate Thor!

Sadly, he never refers to himself as “Unus the Untouchable.” He just stands in front of a rock wall and says, “This place is untouchable” while Thor’s hammer hits a force field in front of him.

“You stand against a god, Unus,” Thor says, and then he raises his hammer and, in the next panel, we get a close-up look at his face, which is contorted into the very angry Madureira expression, blood splatters all over him from off-panel and he says in a special yellow-colored dialogue bubble that Unus is but a mortal, “a thing of mere flesh and blood!”

The implication is that Thor totally smashed Unus the Untouchable with his hammer, but in the very next panel, Thor and his hammer are completely blood-free, and there’s no dead body anywhere. (Or maybe that’s Unus in the far right of the panel? There are some dark, grey shapes being flung around, and I assume they’re Multiple Man duplicates, but its unclear).

Anyway, Magneto strolls up and he and Thor exchange generic dialogue, while Magneto uses his power to drag Mjolnir down through the ground, with Thor still hanging on to it, being towed along with it.

Back in New York, in a subbasement ten stories below the mansion, Ant-Man and Wasp watch through a ventilation grate, as an unseen person puts the Iron Man robot back together, and talks about how the robots are so closely patterned after the Ultimates that their personalities assert themselves strongly (that’s why the Captain America robot tried to save Wasp from the Iron Man robot).

Then we get the dramatic last page splash!

“Hank!” Wasp says “He sounds just like you.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Ant-Man replies, “He’s our son…!”

And on the last page, we see that the figure is Yellowjacket! Wearing a costume almost identical to the one that Marvel Universe Hank Pym wore when he was going by the name Yellowjacket, only with smaller shoulder pad wings and without the yellow bug symbol on the chest.

This Yellowjacket is surrounded by four others, the Iron Man, an Ultimate Thor that actually looks like Brian Hitch’s Ultimate Thor (Shorter hair and beard, slimmer build, the big half-axe Mjolnir), an Ultimate Hulk, and an Ultimate Captain America who’s wearing the uniform from World War II.

Here’s the dramatic monologue: “They think of us as toasters -- --alarm clocks -- --and vibrators. But when the war between man and mutant is settled-- --and most of the human population is dead, only then will they realize-- --the MACHINES have already won.”

Holy shit, a machine whose all “Rah rah robots rule!” that Hank Pym says is his son! Who is this mysterious new villain?! If you’ve ever read an Avengers comic, you probably already know. If not, you’ll have to wait until the next issue to find out.

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

Tomorrow night: This is it! The ultimate issue of Ultimates 3! Who will live? Who will die? Who will utter the worst dialogue? Can a human being write over 10,000 words about Ultimates 3 in just five days and still retain their sanity?! Find out tomorrow night!

Should DC maybe have some kind of rule about the maximum

number of books that can be released in a single week in which the villains discuss raping Supergirl?

(From Action Comics #872, written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Pete Woods and Brad Anderson)


(From Final Crisis #5, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by J.G. Jones and Alex Sinclair)

My legal obligation as a comics blogger: A post about Stephanie "Spoiler" Brown

So I had kind of an unusual experience Friday afternoon. I was sitting in my wingback armchair, enjoying a pipe and a good book, which is how I usually spend my leisure time, when I heard a thunderous knock on my front door.

Standing on my porch were two clean-cut looking people in their mid-thirties, one male and one female, each wearing dark suits with ties and carrying expensive-looking briefcases. When I cracked the door and asked if I could help them, they said they were from the Comics Blogosphere Bureau of Regulation and asked if they could speak with me for a few minutes.

I was naturally skeptical, and told them I’d never even heard of any such an organization, but they quickly produced badges, as well as I.D.’s and some very convincing paper work.

So I welcomed them in, offered them seats and asked what they took in their tea, when they abruptly cut me off and asked me to have a seat.

From their briefcases they produced a manila folder with my name of it, full of print-outs of my past posts, a few unflattering headshots of me, and other information pertaining to Every Day Is Like Wednesday. They curtly informed me that I had yet to broach the subject of Stephanie Brown in any great detail.

For those of you who don’t know, Brown was a minor heroine in DC Comics n the 1990s and early aughts who went by the name Spoiler, was Robin IV for about fifteen minutes, and then died a violent death in one the stupidest Batman stories ever written, a distinction which would immediately be surpassed by the story that immediately followed it.

She’s also, somewhat surprisingly, become incredibly popular online (Particularly for a character who never carried her own title…or miniseries…or one shot. Or, um, solo story. Anywhere. Ever). She’s also become emblematic of online comics feminist criticism, a popular Exhibit A in the case arguing rampant sexism in Big Two comics. Mostly because Batman hasn’t erected a glass case with her uniform in it, as he did for Robin II when Robin II died.

Anyway, the two agents in my parlor this afternoon informed me that I was legally obligated to post at least 1,000 words about Stephanie Brown on my blog a year, or else risk losing my comics blogger’s license. I could appeal of course, but there was no guarantee the judge would side with me, and in the mean time they would be able to seize my blog.

All in all, it seemed far easier to comply, so here we are: A rather lomg post about Stephanie Brown.

As it turns out, the timing couldn’t be better, as it’s Stephanie Brown week at Project Rooftop, the website where talented artists redesign superhero costumes, often coming up with designs that are one hundred to one thousand times better than what DC and Marvel had previously designed for the characters.

As usual, Dean Trippe came up with the best. That’s it at the top of the post. He mixes Brown’s Spoiler costume with her Robin costume, and comes up with a look that’s better than both. If I ran DC Comics, I would have long ago put Trippe on the payroll and given him some fancy title like Senior Vice President of Teen Aesthetics and Fashion Consultant, and a one-sentence job description: “Redesign all of our teen heroes so they don’t look quite as stupid as they do at the moment.”

Trippe’s previously drawn the best Supergirl ever, the best t-shirt version of Superb*y, and a not-so-bad version of Batgirl (although I couldn’t see the Cassandra Cain version wearing either of his designs; the cape and skirt one being cooler than the Catwoman-like one).

I like Trippe’s Spoiler costume so much that it actually makes me wish DC would bring Spoiler back to life and start putting her in their comics again. Of course, that’s a popular position among people who write about DC comics on the Internet, what gives this declaration weight here? Well because, in all honestly, I never cared about Stephanie Brown one way or the other.

In fact, I find the strong emotions swirling around the Internet about her rather fascinating, as I can’t quite figure out what makes her so special. Certainly there are plenty of other Tim Drake love interests, dead or in limbo, whom no one seems to insist on seeing more of.

Just as there are plenty of other Gotham vigilantes, female or otherwise, dead or in limbo, whom no one seems to care about.

And God knows there are plenty of female supporting characters in comics who were killed in stupid stories that were, at worst, offensive and, at best, tone deaf. What makes Brown so special? Is it that she’s a little bit of each?

Trippe offers a nice, evenly toned overview of the character’s history in his intro the Project Rooftop entry.

I personally found her intriguing in her first appearances, in some of Chuck Dixon’s earliest Bat-writings, when he was still transitioning from the series of Robin miniseries to Detective Comics.


If I remember my Bat-history correctly, Brown made her first appearance in a three-part story that ran from TEC #647-#649. Dixon reintroduced second-rate Riddler The Cluemaster to Gotham (previously he had fallen far enough into joke status that he was part of the Injustice League/Justice League Antartica in the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice titles).

In addition to Batman and Robin, someone else kept spoiling Cluemaster’s schemes, and the big reveal was that it was his daughter in disguise.

It’s a neat origin for a heroine, playing off the teenagers rebelling against their parents idea, although Dixon played it straight and soap opera-y, instead of going for the inherent fun and laughs in the situation.

I’m sure in a black and white drawing, the original costume didn’t look too bad: A body suit with a hood and a full-face mask (to completely conceal her identity). But for the first few years of her existence, the costume was often hideously colored a sort of fuchsia. Sometimes it would be straight purple, sometimes more of a lavender, but more often than not, it looked fuchsia, and the sleek bodysuit was full of 90’s style ornamentation—shoulder pads, pockets, belts and straps that didn’t seem to do anything but make the costume less appealing. Additionally, the gloves, boots and mask were often more of a navy than black.

Brown began appearing in Dixon’s ongoing Robin almost immediately, and I dropped the title around that time (Not because of Spoiler; it was honestly just a coincidence).

See, Dixon is a great pop comic book writer, but he’s far better at coming up with cool action movie-like plots than character work (For a good example of this quirk of Dixon’s writing, think of just about any Dixon-written DC story of the 1990s. Okay, now change the protagonist, from Robin or whoever stars in the one you’ve chosen to Batman or Nightwing or Green Arrow or Catwoman or Black Canary. Okay, now how does the change in protagonist change the plot? Exactly).

Having seemingly abandoned the far more interesting King Snake and Lynx as Robin archenemy and love interest, Dixon started using Cluemaster and Spoiler in pretty the same roles and, well, if heroes are defined by their villains, and Cluemaster’s your main villain…

Dixon cultivated a romance between Robin and Spoiler, which seemed rather unconvincing to me (Did Tim Drake really have time for girls? As a reader his age at the time, I had a hard time suspending my disbelief enough to buy a 14-year-old high schooler who was popular, serving as Robin, keeping his secret life from his family, and had an active love life. Still, Brown was better than Tim’s previous girlfriend, Arianna, since she was actually a vigilante, giving her a leg up on people who weren’t vigilantes).


Let the record show: This costume is pretty sucky

Over the years, all kinds of questionable things would happen with the character, including her getting knocked up (not by Tim, who’s totally still a virgin I bet*.), having the baby and giving it up to adoption. It was all very after school special-y.

For a brief time, when Batman was being an especially antisocial dick, Spoiler was the only Gotham vigilante he was talking to, but her presence in Bat- stories really betrays the fact that DC wasn’t quite sure what to do with her.

One month she was blacklisted by Batman, the next he was personally training her, the next she’s retired. Then she’s Black Canary’s apprentice, then she’s blacklisted again, then she’s Robin, then she’s blacklisted again.

I never cared for her as an ongoing component in Robin, or in the Bat-books in general, where she seemed to occupy a weird space between accepted agent of the Bat Family (like Azrael, Robin, Nightwing, Oracle and Batgirl), black sheep (like Huntress) and just some random vigilante who only appeared in stories written by writers who loved her (like Anarky).

I personally only warmed to her in the pages of Batgirl, a title I came to too late. The introduction of a new Batgirl struck me as a bit random in No Man’s Land, but when I actually tried an issue of Scott Peterson, Kelley Puckett and Damion Scott’s Batgirl, I realized what I was missing.


Same costume, suddenly pretty awesome-looking

I still can’t speak highly enough of that series, particularly the first 25 issues, which comprised one big complete story. Cassandra Cain was a heroine unlike no other in the DCU, and was the closest thing to either a martial arts hero and a manga protagonist that DC Comics was publishing at the time.

That first 25 issues of Batgirl essentially comprised an ongoing conflict between father figure Batman and mother figure Oracle over how best to raise a teen vigilante, one which, interestingly enough, was pretty much the Dark Knight version of Batman if he happened to be a mute, illiterate teenaged girl. Batman treated Cain like his ultimate weapon, and Oracle wanted to convince Cain to be a real, normal human being in addition to dressing up like a bat to beat people up. Cain herself leaned toward the Batman side of the debate.

Spoiler began popping up occasionally, and the girls formed a sort of friendship based on mutual need-fulfillment. Batgirl didn’t really have any friends (Robin was the only person her own age she knew, and he was kind of terrified of her), and Spoiler gave her someone to play rooftop tag with and have the occasional brief, clipped, reluctant talk with. Spoiler, meanwhile, still wanted to be a hero, but Batman had shut her out almost completely at that point, and she looked to Batgirl for training and a bit of Bat-approval.

If Spoiler didn’t work quite as Gotham Vigilante #8, or as Robin’s girlfriend, or as an ongoing Very Special Message in the pages of Robin, she worked quite well as a supporting cast member in Batgirl.




Spoiler walks in on Batgirl during a typical destroy all mannequins training session

And damn, did Damion Scott make that costume work. Check out those huge Spider-Man-sized eyes on her mask! I love Scott’s version of Spoiler’s costume, and I suppose the fact that she stopped looking stupid went a long way towards helping me to enjoy comic book stories about her.

And then things went to hell.

During that dark period between Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, during which the quality of DC’s line of super-books began to slide, and so many of the “rules” of the fictional universe just seemed to fall apart, Bill Willingham was writing Robin. He was writing a pretty intense arc about Tim’s dad Jack Drake finally discovering his son’s secret identity, and understandably being a little pissed off that the weird millionaire he knew was secretly dressing his teenaged son up in tights and sending him against mass murderers every night.

So Drake did the responsible thing, respected his father’s wishes and quit the Dynamic Duo. So Batman turned to Brown and made her Robin. This wasn’t out of necessity. Batman’s gone thorough most of his career saying how he doesn’t need anyone else to anyone who will listen, and in cases where he needs to bounce ideas off some one or help kicking ass, it’s not like he didn’t have Nightwing and Batgirl on speed dial. No, he made Spoiler the new Robin basically as a classic Batman dick move, to shame Drake into returning.

This new status quo lasted three issues of Robin. Stephanie-Brown-as-Robin appeared in an issue of Batgirl and Teen Titans and maybe elsewhere during those months, but she was Robin far less time than Jean-Paul Valley or Dick Grayson were Batman. Or Huntress was Batgirl.

And this is why the frustration at Batman’s failure to memoralize these three months (Or, more specifically, DC’s failure to memoralize these three months through Batman) confuses me.

I don’t think anyone suspected for a moment that Stephanie Brown was ever going to be Robin for longer than a story arc, did they? Certainly it didn’t seem any more permanent than Jean-Paul Valley or Dick Grayson permanently being Batman. In fact, JPV got to be Batman for three rather sizeable story arcs.

Batman quickly fired Brown as Robin for some dumb-ass reason. Maybe because she just wasn’t as properly trained as Tim was, despite the fact that every two months or so Batman would forbid her to be a vigilante and would force her to quit training.

And then things get really stupid, because from there we get into “War Games,” one of the very worst Batman stories ever told. What makes the story so bad is its Countdownian transparency—you could almost see through the panels of art and dialogue bubbles a poorly thought-out memo listing plot points to get the various Bat-characters from Point A to Point B, no matter what. The result was a story in which all of the characters seemed to be either hysterical or stupid (or both), the events driving the plot don’t make any sense if you stop and think about them, and everyone’s actions seem to contradict their own fictional histories.

Stripped of her “R” blouse, Brown goes back to being Spoiler, and initiates a war game of Batman’s in an attempt to win his love or whatever.

The game assumes every crime boss in Gotham is stupid enough to answer an anonymous invitation in person with one body guard, and then that they would all somehow simultaneously kill each other by accident.

This somehow leads to a gang war so big that not even the combined forces of Oracle, Batman, Orpheus, Obsidian (Is that her name? The bald chick?), Batgirl, Nightwing, Catwoman, Robin and Tranatula II (Or III?) can possibly stop it.

It also hinges on Black Mask being able to go hand-to-hand with Batman, Barbara Gordon forgetting that she knows martial arts too and thinking that Black Mask could actually take Batman in a fight, and a were-scarecrow.

The centerpiece of it all? Black Mask torturing Spoiler to death with drill bits. Well, she escapes, but dies from the injuries sustained in the battle. It’s a cruel, depressing, relentlessly negative story, one which makes all of its heroes seem not only highly incompetent, but to be pretty bad people.

But as stupid as it was for DC to willingly engage in such an exploitive story with the cloud of women-in-refrigerator-ism still hanging like a thick, black cloud above them, and hard to refute claims of outright misogyny stemming from Identity Crisis leveled at them, it was also just a really, really badly told story.

The end result? Robin and Batgirl are sent to Bludhaven, Nightwing is sent to New York to go undercover as a gangster or some such shit, Batman is labeled a wanted vigilante by the GCPD like back in the old Year One days, Oracle moves to Metropolis and refuses to speak to Batman anymore, Orpheus is dead, Spoiler is dead, and, oh yeah, Leslie Thompkins, pascifist lifelong friend of Bruce Wayne, is a killer. Point B looks a lot different form Point A, and the story was just the most direct line between them, quality be damned.

That radical shift in the status quo was revealed to be little more than poorly-planned random change for change’s sake a few months (our time, a year Batman’s time) later, however, when the various Bat-characters would get another radical shift, for the most part, in the direction of their pre-“War Games” status.

One Year Later, Batman had adopted Robin, and the pair of them were in Gotham and on better terms with the police than ever before. Nightwing was back in the fold, although sent to New York to star in some exceptionally shitty stories (even by Nightwing standards). Batgirl was suddenly the Totally Evil Leader of the League of Assassins (I’m still waiting for the reveal that that’s the Earth-3 Cassandra Cain we’ve been seeing…the various “fixes” to the original shitty Robin arc don’t match up at all). Oracle seems to be speaking with Batman, but she’s still steering clear of Gotham City. Leslie Thompkins is simply not spoken of. Spoiler and Orpheus are still dead.

And there’s no memorial case in the Batcave for Robin/Spoiler.

Is this a big deal? I don’t think so. And I don’t think there ever will be one there, either.

If fans didn’t start asking about it, I doubt anyone at DC would ever have even entertained the thought. The fact that Robin II still has a case likely has more to do with the fact that artists drawing the Batcave know from experience that the five things that signify a drawing of a cave as a drawing of the Batcave are a dinosaur, a giant penny, a computer, a parked Batmobile and a glass case with an old-school Robin costume in it.

I assume any Bat-artist drawing the cave could have drawn a Stephanie Brown-related memorial case in if they wanted to**, especially since clearly DC’s not real big on editing art to make sure characters are on model or that long dead people don’t accidentally cameo these days.

But of course, once fans started asking about a second, Stephanie Brown-specific case, then editors had to start thinking about one, and the obvious answer is that, “Good God, memoralize one of our greatest mistakes?! Why would we want to do that?”

I’m assuming DC wants to simply forget “War Games” and “War Crimes” ever happened (they’ve undone almost all of the changes effected by them already) and a memorial to the fallen Stephanie Brown would double as a memorial to those stories, just as the memorial to Robin II has always served as a memorial to “A Death in the Family.”

So I don’t think we’ll be seeing a case there ever, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

Will we ever see Stephanie Brown again? That’s a more interesting question, I think.


Like I said near the beginning of this post, she was never really that popular a character. She was popular enough to guest-star here and there, but never carried a title of her own (Hell, Anarky got a mini and a monthly). So I don’t think there’s any kind of financial impetus to bring her back to life. And creatively, I think resurrection stories are to be avoided at all costs, because they simply erode the drama of death in your fictional universe.

But then, there was no real financial impetus to bring Jason Todd*** back to life, or Ice, and DC resurrected them both since Brown died. And both of those were accomplished in the most pedestrian, random ways (A character in another comic punching the walls of continuity in the case of the former, magic herbs in the case of the latter).

Hell, Spoiler’s fellow minor Bat-characters have had even more goofy resurrections.

Lynx, who, like Spoiler, died in “War Games,” simply appeared alive again in Robin…at least long enough to be killed by Batgirl a few panels later. Killer Moth, who was torn apart in Infinite Crisis, similarly just appeared alive again in “Face The Face.”

Next month, totally dead forever Ra’s al Ghul is expected to return to life in a storyline called “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul.”

So maybe Stephanie Brown did come back to life along with Lynx and Killer Moth in the Infinite Crisis/52 rejiggering, and she just hasn’t made the scene yet.

Or maybe she’ll come out of a Lazarus Pit like Ra’s in the next issue of Robin.

Or a Spoiler from one of the other 51 Earths will immigrate to the main one.

Or maybe the upcoming Final Crisis will involve some sort of final continuity rejiggering, which will essentially undo all of the stupid things that were done between Identity Crisis and Final Crisis, including all of “War Games.”

If and when she does return, however, I hope she’s wearing that outfit Trippe designed for her.






* Although I bet if we wonder if Robin’s gay enough, Dixon will be sure to write a story in which Robin totally bangs a bunch of chicks.


**Does Batgirl I have a memorial in the cave? In some stories there’s a glass case containing Barbara Gordon’s costume right next to Jason Todd’s. In others, there’s a glass case containing it elsewhere in the cave. In plenty of stories, there’s no sign of one, but then, in plenty of stories there’s no sign of a penguin statue, an assortment of penguin umbrellas, or Batman costumes either, but in other stories there are.


***Oh sure, it probably boosted sales on Batman for exactly one arc, and helped get Judd Winick more royalties off a short run on the title than he otherwise would have, but it’s not like we’re going to be getting a Red Hood miniseries or monthly. Or a Red Hood/Jason Todd movie. Or even DC Direct toys. Jason Todd doesn’t even have a marketable name or look at the moment; he’s just a secret identity of a former superhero.

Well at least she's not doing laundry...

Whew! Just in time! The comics blogosphere had juuuusst about exhausted its last bit of rage over the "Heroes for Hentai" cover, when Marvel released an image from the upcoming fifth printing of the hardcover collection of Marvel Zombies, a rather clever (and phenomenally successful) series which posits a world in which the Marvel heroes have become zombies.

It was Mark Millar's idea originally, in the pages of his brief Ultimate Fantastic Four run, and it was a great one: Marvel Superheroes + Zombies = A License To Print Money.

Part of the fun for fans was that each issue that sold out necessitated another printing, which sent the cover artist Arthur Suydam back to his drawing board, to come up with a zombified version of a classic Marvel cover.

I can't believe they're using this one though.

The fact that it depicts the corpse of a 15-year-old girl, or that it takes its cover image from a series targeted at young girls aside, I find it hard to believe that the cover of Mary Jane #2, from way back when the ongoing Mary Jane was downgraded into a miniseries (and, if I remember correctly, was later upgraded to a series of miniseries, and then relaunched as a new ongoing under the new title of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane), is a classic Marvel cover. I imagine most of the customers of Marvel's superhero line of comics don't read the Mary Jane books, which occur in thier own little pocket universe, one that's neither "616" nor Ultimate nor Marvel Adventures, nor would they even recognize the source material.

So, why use it at all?

Is Marvel seriously out of classic cover images already? Or is this an attempt to capitalize on what I imagine must be the very, very, very small audience of zombie fetishists out there? Hell, they did a cover just for the tentacle porn fans, so maybe they'd do one for the zombie fetishists as well.

So, anyone want to place bets on what the inevitable next zombified cover image will be? Something from Power Pack or something from Franklin Richards?

If they used a zombified version of the "comiquette" or of the Heroes for Hire #13 cover on the sixth printing, or a future printing of the trade paper back, that would would actually be pretty cool. That would show that Marvel has a sense of humor about its own decadence, and would acknowledge said decadence's existence. "Oh, this image of Mary Jane washing laundry offends you girls? Well, what do you think of this image of a zombified Mary Jane washing laundry? Ha ha, even death is no escape from laundry and pleasuring a man! Ha ha!"

I'd certainly welcome that sort of reaction over another, "Oh, this image of the rotting corpse of a 15-year-old girl we culled from the cover of a series we commissioned specifically to attract young women to our products offends you ladies? What, seriously? Gosh, we never thought of that. You're probably just reading too much into it."

Comics Controversy Calvaclade Update: Quesada on that statuette and that cover

Props to Newsarma.com's Matt Brady asking Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada about the two biggest Marvel stories of the past two weeks. You'll have to slog through some goofy Marvel hypsterism to get there, but after their weird-o online video show (I'm just glad they didn't call it In Da House), Brady asks Quesada about Comiquette-gate and Heroes For Hentai-gate.

Regarding Comiquette-gate, Quesada quite diplomatically responds,


When fans saw the statue was exactly the same time I was made aware of it, I have no involvement in that stuff and haven't kept up with the brouhaha. It kind of floors me in a way because Adam Hughes is brilliant and is known for his amazingly sexy portrayal of strong women, so I'm not quite sure what people are up in arms about? Seriously, fill me in because I've literally been out of town and out of the loop.


He's right on the fact that Hughes is generally one of the last artist one would expect to cause this sort of reaction. Sure, he draws sexy super-women exploding out of their costumes pretty much exclusively these days, but he draws them the way real women actually look. He's a great artist, who knows anatomy, lighting, design and drapery. He certainly doesn't belong in the same category as Michael Turner and Greg Land, who I'm frankly shocked that both Marvel and DC continue to give money.

Hughes didn't do himself any favors in his Newsarama interview about the statue, but anyway you look at it, this is a nice piece of art:





And it's not really Hughes’ fault that the sculptors drained all of the humanity, sexiness and spirit out of his design. But then, that's what happens when you're making a plastic statuette based on a drawing.





I was incredibly disappointed (and, frankly, extremely shocked) to hear Quesada's response to the Heroes For Hire cover, however:


First, I think people are reading way too much into that cover than was ever intended. I heard terms such as "tentacle rape" being thrown around when that in no way is what's happening, nor does it happen in the book. Those tentacles are the arms of the Brood who appears in the issue and is a major story point, the Brood have tentacles, sorry about that.

Secondly, the concept for that cover, soup to nuts came from a female artist. Thirdly, not being a deep follower of manga, I have no idea what recurring theme people are referring to or concerned with. While I appreciate the sentiment and the feelings that some may have about this, I honestly feel that there is way too much being read into this cover.

Also, HFH is a book that features two strong, lead female protagonist who kick major ass; somehow folks have forgotten to focus on that.


I've actually already heard all of these arguments torn apart in the same posts in which people originally began reacting to the cover image. No, it's not technically a picture of women being raped by tentacles, and yes, we're not all retarded, we can see that's not what's actually happening on the cover...it's what's about to happen.

Whether that scene as depicted occurs within the book or not is irrelevant to the discussion of whether the cover itself is reprehensible, particularly on a Marvel superhero comic book. Although, if nothing like it occurs in the book, why on Earth is it on the cover at all?

Exactly.

Quesada points out that the image came from a female artist. Um, so what? That doesn't make it any less repulsive an image, nor does it exempt Marvel from getting to share in the criticism of it. Are we to believe they were just like, "Hey, give us an image of the Heroes For Hire team fighting the Brood," got this
back, and were like, "Awesome! Let’s just slap this on the cover now, okay?”

They didn't see any sketches first, or talk to the artist in detail about what they wanted? And they have no power to reject an image, or ask for alterations to it? How hard would it be, with the powers of computers, to at least clean that up a bit? (They were certainly able to alter the image of Peter Parkers genitals that slipped into Reign or the nip slip in Iron Man once they were discovered/noticed, without having to have someone redraw an entire page).

Quesada acts like Marvel is completely powerless over what their cover artists do, and have no choice but to run what a freelancer turns in. Why do I get the feeling that if Misty Knight was smoking a cigarette in that image, it would have gotten rejected? (It may be worth noting that Marvel voluntarily rates it’s comic books, betraying a belief, as the smoking ban and the confused comments about gay title heroes did previously, that Marvel believes there are kids who might be reading their books. HFH is rated “T+,” which I assume meant is for older teens, but their site says actually means is for “9+ years old [readers]… Appropriate for most readers, parents are advised they may want to read before or with younger children.” So, that cover is cool for a ten-year-old to look at? Because I wouldn’t even look at it at work).

Quesada’s comment on the fact that HFH has " two strong, lead female protagonist [sic] who kick major ass" is also weird. That's part of the problem, as has been pointed out by Tamora Pierce, who has written for Marvel:


It's not right that we have these powerful women. Let's humiliate them publicly, on the cover. Let's strip them of their power, wit, and rage, and show them off to everyone who walks by, to show what powerful women can expect, even when we've showed them being powerful. This is what happens when women strut along, kicking butt. This is what they can expect. Savor and learn!


Beyond the fact that Quesada doesn't see a problem with the cover (A state of affairs I had imagined and found perhaps just as bad if not worse than an intentional use of the imagery to stoke it's most negative and perversely sexual connotations), I was surprised to hear him say publicly that he's not a "deep follower" of manga.

Um, should you really be the Editor-in-Chief of one of the biggest American comic book publishers and not be "deep into" the most rapid-growing and widely-read type of sequential art storytelling? Admittedly, it does explain why Marvel's dozen or so attempts to attract the manga audience have all fallen flat (with a few vestiges of such initiatives seemingly succeeding despite Marvel's efforts, like Runaways surviving the doomed "Tsunami" line or Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane lasting as long as it has and racking up rave reviews), but, Jesus, if I was Quesada I'd have copies of Fruits Basket and Naruto under microscopes in a big Marvel lab somewhere, with Marvel staff scientists studying the things around the clock and I'd be calling once a day to ask if they've managed to identify and reverse engineer whatever it is that makes kids love those things so much.

I hate to sound all doom-y and gloom-y here, but I'm 30; I'm going to be dead in 50-60 years (if I'm lucky), along with just about everyone else who reads Marvel Comics. The comic book consumers who are going to replace me are currently a bunch of little kids and teenagers who read manga.

I thought that was common knowledge, but I guess not.

As depressing as Quesada's response to the HFH controversy, it's nowhere near as depressing as reading the comments Newsarama.com posters left in response. Read them at your own peril.