“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?

Congorilla: Who He Is, And How He Came to Be

During Wizard World LA, DC announced that critically acclaimed writer James Robinson would be writing a second Justice League title called simply Justice League and featuring a rather unusual line-up: Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Green Arrow Oliver Queen, Batwoman, Superman, Whatever They End Up Calling Captain Marvel Jr., a Starman and a character I think it’s fairly safe to say no one would have expected.

In the Newsarama panel coverage, Robinson said that last character was an "old, 90-year-old man named Bill… People are going to love this character by the time I'm done with him.”

The Comicbookresources.com coverage was a little more clear on Bill’s identity, saying Congo Bill, and quoting Robinson as saying, "He's 90 years old. He's seen it all. He's done it all. And within six issues you will love this character. I guarantee it.”

And then in a follow-up interview with Newsarama, it was made crystal clear just who we’re talking about here. Said Robinson:

“This was a character that Dan [DiDio], Eddie [Berganza, editor] and everyone else stopped cold when I suggested him (and Geoff [Johns] was appalled). I didn’t let up, and they and finally said, ‘Okay, we trust you James, if you’re that passionate about the character, then use him.’ And then, after reading the pages devoted to him in the first issue, they’ve all told me that I was able to make them care about him. He’ll be the oldest character in the book – he’s 90 years old, his human body has been destroyed, and he’s trapped in the body of a gigantic, magic, golden gorilla. Congorilla will be on the team.”

This news shook the Internet to its very foundations, with opinion sharply divided. Some fans (the cool ones) responded with a hearty “Woo hoo!” Others (the lame ones) responded with a “Wah, I don’t don’t want silly old characters in my very serious and important stories of children’s characters in tight costumes committing acts of violence against each other and crying about their emotions!” But the overwhelming majority simply thought, “Wait, just who is Congorilla, and how did he come to be?”

Well, I’ll tell you.

Now, I was only negative 19-years-old when 1958’s Action Comics #247 hit newsstands and dime stores, containing within its pulpy pages the first appearance of Congorilla, in a story entitled “The Amazing Congorilla!”

But DC did re-publish that story, along with the origins of five other of their characters, in 2004’s Weird Secret Origins.


If you see this in a back-issue bin, be sure you snap it up. It cost $5.95 off the new-books rack when I bought it, but it contained six re-colored stories—including the origin of Enchantress back when she was super-cute and the gorgeous Carmine Infantino-drawn origin of Animal Man—plus the origin of Bizarro World and a brief piece on Metamorpho, an original Jerry Ordaway cover and no ads, save for house ads on the back-covers and little ads for Archives where ads originally appeared at the end of most of the stories. (And by the way, the heroes pictured on the cover above? That’d be, like, the greatest Justice League line-up ever, wouldn’t it?)

But back to the subject at hand, “The Amazing Congorilla!” by writer Jack Miller and artist Howard Sherman.

It opens with a splash panel of a golden gorilla trying to start a plane, with a trio of white guys running up behind him, one saying, “Now look at that gorilla! He’s starting our plane! I—It’s incredible! What can a gorilla know about flying?”

There’ s only one way to find out! By reading on!

This story is set in the Congo, “land of superstition and mystery,”where “Congo Bill, famous jungle-hunter” (and star of 1954 series Congo Bill, which featured a golden gorilla in the first issue) is approached by an excitable native, telling him that one of his best friends, medicine man Chief Kawolo has fallen off a cliff and is currently lying on a ledge.

Our dauntless hero rappels down the cliff face against Kawolo’s protests, and carries him back to the village, where he passes on. But not before he bestows upon Bill a great gift:



Gorilla strength, huh? What a bunch of hooey! Bill doesn’t buy it, but wears the ring out of sentiment for his friend. Besides, what’s the likelihood that he’d ever need gorilla strength?

Then, two panels and one avalanche later…



Still doubting the magic, but with nothing to lose, Bill rubs the ring and suddenly, Bill finds his mind in the body of the golden gorilla, while the mind of the gorilla enters Bill’s body…!



Yes, they switch bodies! So not only can readers thrill to the adventures of a super-heroic gorilla with the thoughts of a man, but there is the endless comedy of seeing a grown man act like a gorilla!

So now Bill-in-the-gorilla must find and rescue the-gorilla-in-Bill from the caved-in cave. Along the way, however, he stumbles across a Hollywood movie company making a weird sci-fi movie about a woman dressed like a witch…and a meteor…and rocketship?

He saves the actress from a leopard, but is rewarded by being captured and caged by the men working on the film. Using his human wiles, he maneuvers his wheeled cage into the line of fire of two real laser tanks with real, working laser guns that are part of the film, blasting away his bars.

From there, it’s a simple matter to start the plane


fly it away, parachute to safety—using three chutes—when the plane is shot down, and then lifting the boulders away from the cave entrance, where he’s greeted by the sight of himself, growling like a gorilla.



The end!

What happened next? Well, I sure as hell hope there’s a Showcase Presents: Congorilla in the works to let us know. (Or if there aren’t 500 pages worth of Congorilla stories to fill up such a book, maybe Showcase Presents: Gorillas Vol. 1. I know DC has more than 500 pages worth of gorilla stories.)

More recently, there was a 1992 Congorilla miniseries by Steve Englehart and Neil Vokes, and a 1999 Vertigo miniseries called Congo Bill by Scott Cunningham and Daniel Zezelj, the most memorable feature of which was the cover work by Richard Corben.




Related: Mike Sterling answers the all-important question of, “Congorilla?”

Gluttons for punishement (with punishment being defined as hearing me drone on about comics), can read my initial reaction to the Robinson book (along with Troy Brownfield’s) here, as part of Shotgunreviews.com’s new Con Job feature. My reservations haven’t changed much since; it sounds like it has the potential to either be a great comic or something of a horrible disaster. Much will ultimately depend on the artist. I really like to see Rags Morales, the guy who shoulda been teamed with Meltzer on the JLoA relaunch, or Robinson’s old Starman collaborator Peter Snejbjerg, but who knows. DC’s given out some plum art assignments to some pretty mystifying choices lately—Benes and Joe Benitez on JLoA, Tony Daniel on Grant Morrison’s Batman, Ian Churchill on the upcoming Titans—so who knows.

Based on the con coverage, it’s apparently going to be a “name” artist that will excite fans, since Robinson was about to mention the artist but was cut off by DiDio, who said they were saving the announcement. I haven’t even got a decent guess.

Review: Blue Pills: A Postivie Love Story

The subtitle of European cartoonist Frederik Peeters’ Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story (Houghton Mifflin) refers not so much to the tone of the love story as the HIV status of one of its participants—Peeters’ girlfriend Cati is HIV positive.

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too. Is this going to be another one of those graphic novels, a memoir casting its writer/artist as the protagonist, heroically facing horribly depressing circumstances, here a terminal disease with no cure?

Well, kinda. But under Peeters’ skilled brush strokes, it’s quite a beautiful book, with loose character designs and jaunty, energetic lines that make each panel flow into the next like a pleasant narrative stream. And while the “positive” in the subtitle may be a play on words, it does refer in some degree to the optimism of Peeters’ story, a story of two young people making a relationship work in a situation that would seem to many of us to be quite literally doomed from the start.

Peeters tells his story in chapters that function as something of a relationship journal, with beginnings, middle and ends to each, even as they contribute to the larger story. He tells of the first time he met Cati, a night he remembers in great detail, though they hardly spoke. He tells of their original courtship and the date during which she drops her bombshell on him over dinner, of their halting sex life, begun on a bed of metaphorical eggshells. And he tells of his own growing relationship with Cati’s toddler son, who is also HIV positive, and how the three of them slowly begin to coalesce into a family.

At first blush, Cati’s story seems like the more dramatic part of the equation, since she’s the one that actually has the disease and the son with the disease, and perhaps the spotlight should fall on her instead of her boyfriend. But looked at one way, Peeters’ dilemma is just as palpable, as he essentially opts into the difficulties of their lifestyle, and struggles with a great degree of guilt over his particular situation.

Peeters takes full advantage of the medium to render complex emotions in simple visual cartoon metaphors, rendering the relatively short book an epic feel.

When the panicked couple visits the doctor after their condom breaks, for example, he tells them that Peeters has as much a chance of catching AIDS as he has of meeting a white rhinoceros on the street outside. Immediately, a perplexed looking rhino appears in the panel behind them, and it will stalk Peeters off and on throughout the rest of the book.

Near the end, Peeters engages in a long Socratic dialogue with a talking wooly mammoth, whose dialogue bubbles emanate from the tip of his trunk, about the role mortality plays in his relationship, and how he’ll ultimately come to grips with it.

That he does, and makes such a compelling comic about it in the process, is just one more positive aspect of this particular love story.

PSA: You may want to just plan to spend your vacation in Columbus this year

See, this is why I dig living in Columbus.

I had previously mentioned the upcoming Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond exhibit at Ohio State University's Wexner Center For the Arts and Cartoon Research Library, which will be running from May 10 through the beginning of August.

Well, it turns out there's going to be a few other can't-miss events going on in May in conjunction with the exhibit.

On May 10, Jeff Smith and Scott McCloud will have a conversation about Smith's career and comics in general at OSU's Mershon auditorium. On May 15, Terry Moore will give an artist's talk at the Wex's film/video theatre, followed by a book signing. And on May 20, Paul Pope returns to his one-time hometown for a talk and book signing in the same place.

Just click on the above for the specifics, and for more on the institutions, click to wexarts.org and cartoons.osu.edu. My fellow Columbusites, you may want to mark your calendars and start clearing your scheudles. Readers from outside central Ohio who think it may be worth a trip, feel free to hit me up for restaurant recomendations or whatever.

(Image: A futuristic Batman showing off his fake Dracula teeth to scare evildoers in Pope's Batman: Year 100)

The games Winick and Meltzer played (plus advice on where to get advice on women)

According to the paragraph-long bio on the back flap of The Games We Played: A Celebration of Childhood and Imagination (Simon & Schuster; 2001), editor Steven A. Cohen worked for President Bill Clinton as a press aide starting in 1993 and later for then-First Lady Hilary Clinton as her deputy director of communications. That no doubt explains how he got both Clintons to submit short essays about the games they used to play growing up to run as part of his short compilation of such memories.

While the Clintons are probably the biggest “gets” he got—interestingly, Mrs. says she spent a lot time playing with the boys and claims to have been very good at all of the games she played in a way that seems boastful, while Mr. engaged in the roguish behavior of throwing acorns at passing cars’ hubcaps—there are a lot of famous folks in the table of contents. You’ve got Esther Williams, Al Roker, Gwen Ifill, George Stephanopoulos, Rob Reiner, David Baldacci, and many others whose childhood play I’ve never been the least bit interested in.

So why I am I talking about this book at all, let alone here, on a site devoted to the discussion of comics? Well, the book happened to pass through my hands while at my local library, and two of the names on the back jumped out at me—Judd Winick and Brad Meltzer, two of my least favorite comics writers!

Suddenly I was curious.

I flipped right to the table of contents to look for Winick’s entry, and saw it was entitled “The Cape.” Aw, he’s always been into superheroes! That’s darling.

I was pleasantly surprised to turn to page 71 and be faced with a few panels of Judd Winick’s art. Of late it’s been particularly easy to just think of Winick as a human bad comics script factory, but it was a nice reminder that no matter what stupid shit he’s writing in Green Arrow/Black Canary (Like, "You are going to have to push back that ocean of rage—that monsoon of emotion that kicks around in your body like a rabid bear on steroids," for example, or perhaps, “butt monkeys,” both from the last issue), he actually is (or at least was at one time) a pretty good cartoonist who can actually draw quite well.

I’m not horribly fond of the particulars of his style, as his big-headed human figures with their warts-and-all bodies give off a sort of college newspaper cartoonist/caricaturist vibe that’s not exactly to my own personal aesthetic tastes, but his drawings are full of life and energy and, while it’s been forever since I’ve read anything he’s drawn, I recall him being a pretty solid storyteller when it came to the mechanics of comics.

Like all of the contributions to this book, Winick’s is only a couple pages long, and seems shorter, since four pages of comics can’t fit in quite as much as four pages of prose. His piece is about the Superman cape he used to play with every day, including when he and his family would go on winter vacations to their grandparents’ condo in Miami. There were plenty of things for him to do, including swimming, playing on the beach and drawing, but his favorite activity was to play with the cape.

Here are two of the cape-specific pages, which I realize accounts for almost half the story. Feel free to not read the words or just skip ahead if you intend to check out the book and don’t want to spoil it:



I like the kid’s-eye-view of Winick’s story here, with his dad just being a torso and set of arms, and the chaotic energy of his cape-play on the second page, with little bathing-suit-wearing Winick literally running off in six different directions.

But what really got me was the fact that not only did his father have to regulate the amount of time his son spent wearing a cape, but that he chose 2:45 p.m. as the start time. Not two o’ clock or three o’clock or 2:30, but 2:45. It seems so specific a time and so unnatural a time, that, I don’t know, I find it hilarious. Particularly the thought of the little Winick asking his dad if it was time yet.

(I don’t know when exactly I began to be able to tell time on my own, but I remember the period where I knew about the hours but didn’t understand what “quarter till” or “quarter after” meant, and the adults in my extended family always used the term; I knew a quarter was twenty-five cents and the cost of a videogame or half a candy bar, but I didn’t understand that it was also 15 minutes. In my mind, I knew it meant “almost,” but I didn’t know how to mark it out on a clock. Until I did, anyway).

This is just a short little story, telling a tiny slice of Winick’s childhood, but it’s a good one, and an interesting one, and I was reading the one-sentence bio about him at the end—“ Judd Winick is the author of the graphic novel Pedro and Me, creator of the comic The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius and the writer of DC Comics’ Green Lantern”—it struck me how odd it is that Winick is still churning out awful DC scripts.

Perhaps there’s just a lot more money in selling thirty-some thousand issues of Green Arrow every month, and certainly hammering out scripts like those I’ve read of his Green Arrow or Outsiders is a few thousand times easier than drawing a story (seriously, if he spends more than an hour on any issue of Green Arrow, he’s working way too hard to come up with so little), but I can’t understand why he’s still plugging away at DC, ruining franchises like the Marvel Family and now the Wolfman/Perez era Titans instead of working on his next Pedro and Me.

The comics medium and publishing industry in general has been in a full-on autobio/memoir graphic novel boom of lat e(no surprise in retrospect, given that both memoirs and graphic novels are, on their own, popular categories in the publishing industry), and Winick was out in front of the wave. Why isn’t he now surfing on it, instead of fiddling around with capes and masks? Maybe he’s still just playing with that superhero cape, and his DC scripting is what he wants to do most because it’s the most fun but, man, I kinda wish someone was there to enforce a schedule on him; to say he could only write so much Titans and Green Arrow, and then he had to sit down and work on drawing his memoirs or Barry Ween for a while.

Back to the table of contents, I saw that Meltzer’s chapter was entitled “The Craziest Kid in the World.” Now, I’ve never read any of Meltzer’s fiction, but I understand he’s pretty damn popular (they sell his paperbacks in grocery stores, so he’s reached that level of popularity), and I’ve heard he’s pretty good, but only in a second-hand way; I don’t think I’ve ever read a critic discussing his work. For all I know, he could be a great novelist.

He’s a goddam terrible graphic novelist though. He can hide how bad he is pretty well when he has a strong editor and he’s working with a great artist (You have to read The Archer’s Quest a lot to find its problems, beyond the obvious ones of the continuity glitch or four in each scene, and Morales helped Identity Crisis from completely falling apart until the nonsensical end which, since it was a murder mystery, retroactively ruined the rest of it).

But when he’s working with a terrible comics artist like Ed Benes, his weaknesses are glaring (Although, to be fair to Benes, what strengths he does have as an artist are quite ill-suited to the story Meltzer wanted to tell in JLoA—and I’m being generous by using the word “story”—and the pairing of them at all was just bad judgment on the part of the editors. So, terrible writing, terrible art, terrible editing—JLoA just wasn’t much of a comic).

I’ve probably spent as much verbiage as anyone else with an Internet connection pointing to problems in Meltzer’s writing, so I don’t think there’s a great need to go into too much detail here. But in addition to not knowing/understanding/caring about DCU continuity (which becomes important when telling stories specifically grounded in that continuity), Meltzer over-writes every scene, with his narration—often from most of the characters in the books—repeating verbally information that is already easily discernible in the visuals and/or dialogue (Kinda like super-comics from the ‘40s through ‘60s or so, actually), applying real-world logic selectively (gritty violence and other adult subject matter, but no logic applied to, say, the criminal justice system or the behavior of his characters) and, most pertinent to today’s post, never really finishing a story.

He regards the serial nature of the medium as a sort of a combination between a relay race and a dare, cooking up some crazyass scenarios to hand off to others to resolve and make some sort of sense out of after he’s gone (DC spent about a year untangling the nonsense of Identity Crisis, for example, and Dwanye McDuffie, Geoff Johns and others are still working on explaining the changes Meltzer made to the cast of JLoA during his short, 13-issue stint).

I’ve only read his prose once, in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmahsers!: Writers on Comics (Pantheon; 2004), a pretty interesting collection of essays that I know I’ve mentioned at least once before on this blog (I believe in reference to Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown project, as the book contains an essay in which Lethem mentions Gerber and company’s original).

The piece by Meltzer in that was actually similar to the piece by Meltzer’s in this, in that it was him writing about an element of his youth. In Atomsmashers!, it was about his reading of Wolfman and Perez’s Titans run, particularly the Terra storyline. In The Games We Played, it was about the game he and his friends played in grade school, called “Craziest Kid in the World.”

His piece is just six pages long, and it opens with an exciting scene. Ten-year-old John Chiarmonte is about to attempt to execute an impossible sounding jump. He’s going to jump down the entire flight of basement stairs to land on the mattress laid out at the bottom for him, despite not being able to get a running start and in spite of the low ceiling preventing him from jumping too high.

Apparently, Meltzer and his friends had each dared higher and higher jumps from the stairs, leading to this moment.

From there, he lays out the vague rules of the game—basically, one of them would do something, and they’d keep upping the ante until someone took it to an extreme no one else would surpass, thus earning the title, and segues into an incident at school involving a huge puddle and, ultimately, an open sewer.

Meltzer’s prose writing style isn’t anywhere nearly as purple as his superhero writing style can be. His sentences are short but well constructed, making his few pages propulsive and easy to read, flowing well into one another. As much as I may loathe his comics writing, he can write. I still haven’t worked up enough interest to try a whole novel of his, but, once again, I’m impressed by his abilities from this brief exposure.

However, I was quite chagrined by the ending. See, remember how I said he opens with the scene of his one friend about to jump down the stairs? There’s actually quite a bit of build-up to that scene; it’s honestly dramatic, a bit suspenseful even. Pains are taken to tell us how dangerous it is. How unlikely it is that he’ll land on that mattress. How likely it is that he’ll get hurt.

Well, the scene shifts to the puddle/sewer incident, the tale just ends abruptly. Did John make the jump? Did he chicken out? Did he land halfway down the stairs on his ankle funny, necessitating a trip to the emergency room?

I don’t know. Meltzer doesn’t say. He never returns to the scene. He brings us up to the point where young John is about to jump, and then moves on.

I even read the bio, which, like the end of some movies, tells us where the kids end up. John is a DJ at a strip club, so at least we can gather he didn’t die in the fall. But that’s all we can do, gather from the bio, since, like at least two-thirds of his comics work, Meltzer doesn’t give us an ending or resolution, but merely stops writing.

Perhaps Geoff Johns or Dwayne McDuffie is meant to tell us about Meltzer’s childhood friends dramatic basement stairs jump in a future volume of this book?



Related: On the subject of comics creators appearing in mostly-prose anthologies, I’d highly recommend Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me (Grand Central Publishing; 2008). It’s a slim, 200-page volume edited by Ben Karlin, who’s worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and The Onion.

The book is divided into 46 “lessons” the writers have learned from being dumped by women. Karlin writes one himself, and his mother writes the foreword (her son, she says, is a catch).

The are more comics (meaning people who work in comedy) in here than comics (meaning the stuff we normally talk about on EDILW) included. The contributors list includes several Onion writers, one politician (Bob Kerrey), two rockstars (OK Go’s Damian Kulash Jr. and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger) and one sex columnist/author/altweekly editor (Dan Savage), plus Stephen Colbert, Andy Richter, Bob Odenkirk, Will Forte, Larry Wilmore, Stella/The State alum David Wain, Brian Michael Bendis hype man Patton Oswalt and some other rather humorous writers you’re less likely to have heard of.

Representing the other kind of comics is David Rees of Get Your War On fame, illustrator Marcellus Hall (who provides a nicely drawn but not particularly amusing two-page comics sequence) and New Yorker cartoonist Alex Gregory (who provides two not all-that-funny-at-all one-panel gag cartoons).

Rees provides a prose piece entitled “Get Dumped Before It Matters,” and I think anyone who’s read very many of his GYWO strips is quite aware that Rees’ gifts as a cartoonist has more to do with his verbal humor than his drawing ability. For further proof of how funny Rees can be even when clip art of office workers or karate guys isn’t involved, I’d encourage you to check out his new-ish political blog at mnftiu.com. It began as a kind of sarcastic blog making fun of blogging, but is now focused on attacking politics, politicians and the people who talk about them with the same vitriol as GYWO, only on a much more frequent basis.

Wannabeasts!: The Ohio monsters that won’t be in Beasts! Vol. 2

(Note: This post might be slightly NSFW, depending on where you work and how uptight your boss is. There are two rather poor drawings of breasts further down the post).

As regular readers of Every Day Is Like Wednesday are well aware, I'm not exactly what you might call an "artist." Or even a "cartoonist." Or a "guy who can draw better than the average 14-year-old after half a bottle of shop-lifted NyQuil."

But I like to draw, and I do a heck of a lot of it, in part because if I want to tell a joke about Darkseid fighting a J'onn-J'onnz-disguised-as-a-cat or Black Lightning meeting the Ghost of General J.E.B. Stuart from The Haunted Tank, it's more expedient to draw it on my kitchen table that night than, like, hire an artist to draw a cartoon to amuse me and the eight-to-20 EDILW readers who will see it.

Nevertheless, when Beasts! editor Jacob Covey sounded the clarion call for entries to fill a one-beast hole in the second volume of the beautiful bestiary series, I didn't give it too much thought before I sat down at my kitchen table (My drafting table is in a room that's so cold, I don't enter it during winter). I even eschewed my regular materials—index cards and colored pencils—for actual paper-paper (thanks for the Christmas present, W.!), a really nice ink pen, and a Crayola brand twistable mechanical colored pencil.

See, Covey said, "Bonus points for creatures from recent times (such as the chupacabras, Beast of Bray Road, sasquatch, Loch Ness monster—but not those because they've been depicted by other contributing artists)."

So I figured I could, at the very least, score the bonus points because the beasts I was thinking of were of more modern vintage, falling closer into the "cryptid" category than the "completely made-the-fuck-up" category, but still pretty far from “likely to exist.”

Remote as my chances were then, I figured I’d do some drawing and send an entry in, as it would give me a chance to evangelize on one or more of the great state of Ohio's great monsters, whether to whoever reads Beasts! 2 (if it made it in), or just Covey and cohorts if it didn't and, of course, all of you who would end up reading this EDILW entry.

Now, we Ohioans are kinda used to being the butt of the East and West Coast establishment's jokes, but, in the monster department, I think we hold our own pretty well against the likes of New England, California and New York. We've got the various Lake Erie monsters, we share the Mothman with West Virginia, we’ve got phantom cats, kangaroos and even a phantom python, we've got the Loveland Frogmen, the Branch Hill Trolls, and good God, do we have Bigfoots. The Grassman, The Minerva Monster, The Mifflin Monster, The Mill Lake Monster, The Cedar Bog Bigfoot, Ol’ Red Eyes, The Stick Man, Mow Mow, The Wood Devil—local names for variations of the Sasquatch creatures that allegedly make their homes in Ohio.

I'm not entirely sure why Ohio has so many sightings, nor am I sure why it is one of the leading states of Bigfoot research. Given the amount of development in the state, and how surrounded we are by other equally or more developed states (there are no ocean coasts or rainforests for large unknown species to hide in), I would expect that if anyone ever does find a Sasquatch type creature in North America, they'd be far more likely to find it in the Pacific Northwest than here in the the Buckeye State*.

(If I had to hazard a hypothesis as to why there have historically been so many sightings, I would say it has to do with the amount of time many Ohioan's spend outdoors at night, as people are wont to do in places where there's nothing to do, and a certain paranoid energy in the air in a few locales, like the shore of Lake Erie and weird areas of Southern Ohio where the Moundbuilders plied their mysterious trades centuries ago).

Now the first monster that crossed my mind for a possible Beasts! submission was of the Bigfoot family (I think cryptozoologists and monster hunters refer to them as "Hairy Humanoids" as a class, although this one also falls under the category of "Monsters of Lover's Lane.") Basically, he's described like most Bigfoot-type creatures are, with two differences. One is his gigantic size—eleven feet tall. And the other is the feature for which he's namde—his bright, orange eyes, capable of lighting up the night around him.

Orange Eyes, as the monster is known, was said to have made a habit of lurking around parked cars in secluded places, spying on the young lovers engaged in necking, making out and um, the things young lovers do in parked cars. In other words, Orange Eyes was a gigantic Sasquatch-like voyeur.

There aren't a whole lot of stories about Orange Eyes, and they tend to overlap in the major details.

The creature was first sighted near Mansfield in central Ohio in March of 1959. Despite it’s Mansfield sightings, it was popularly believed to have lived for at least a generation in a tunnel near Cleveland’s Riverside Cemetery, but was driven out by post-war highway construction, and it made its home in a forest behind the Cleveland Zoo.

In 1968, a huge group of teenagers went out to catch or kill it, armed with baseball bats, flashlights and ropes, and were believed to have driven it off once and for all.

In the rather tongue-in-cheek book The Field Guide to North American Monsters (Three Rivers Press; 1998), author W. Haden Blackman writes, “The montser has been known to drool on windows and howl with delight at the sight of naked flesh. Frightened lovers have stabbed, shot and driven over the creature, but none of these attacks seem to have injured the beast.”

I really like a lot about this story, and I think it would have the makings of a great horror movie. Or graphic novel I guess, since movie-making’s for suckers. Aside from the monster itself, you've got a ready-made excuse for nudity and sexy imagery (I've heard sex sells), some great settings (graveyard, zoo, tunnel), a readymade climax (in which the monster, horrifying one-on-one, becomes pitiable when hunted by a crowd; not unlike Frankenstein going from scary to sympathetic in the latter half of the 1931 classic), and even a bit of a message, what with the development moving him out of his home, forcing this symbol of the natural world into conflict with humanity, which ultimately defeats him. Man, I’m tearing up just thinking about it…

So, that was the first monster I thought of when thinking of a beast for Beasts!.

I messed around drawing faces for a while, finally settling on a no-neck, mop-like version. This was my first sketch:

I gave him little hair horns, a tail and quadraped-like hindquarters just because they were more fun to draw than the normal hairy Bigfoot-type body.

Then I thought a stronger image might be one that incorporates the beast’s point of view and the lovers’ point of view better. So I thought about a scene from inside the car. That would be scarier. And easier to draw.


The first sketch had a much too small monster, using the car window for scale, so I tried again:


Ultimately, though, I liked the first idea best, so this is what I submitted to Covey:

Obviously, it didn’t make the cut. Covey received over 200 submissions, after all and mine is, well, it’s not exactly the work of a pro, you know? Covey was kind enough to respond with a nice email though, which was very cool of him, particularly considering the amateur quality of my submission.

Here’s the image that will ultimately fill the open hole:

It’s of some nymphs by Jennifer Tong, and it’s damn pretty. Covey has posted some of the beautiful runners-up here. You can see a bunch of the other submissions posted here. I’m glad I didn’t see any of these while I was drawing mine, or I wouldn’t have even bothered—there is some nice art there, and I can't imagine how hard it must have been for Covey and company to narrow it down to just one.

Among my favorites of the other wannabeasts are the turtle town, kick-ass Chimera, the pissed-off Skunk Ape, the Maryland Goat Man (another Monster of Lover’s Lane), the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (I coulda sworn it was in the first volume, but maybe that was just a similar lamb/plant hybrid) and the Batsquatch (Hey DC Editorial, I just go a great idea for a Batman Confidential pitch). If you've already checked out the flickr images, you might want to check back. Every time I click on the link, the images multiply.

I never completed my drawing of the other Ohio monster I was thinking about, which is, rather than a single monster, a race of monsters: The Melonheads.

Despite the funny name, they are some scary-ass customers—feral, possibly cannibal diminutive humanoids with gigantic hairless heads that roam the woods and lonely roads around Kirtland, Ohio, one-time home to real-life monster Jeffrey Dahmer.

The Ohio Melonheads have very well defined stomping grounds—Chardon-Windsor Road in Chardon, and Wisner Road and around the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland. The area’s about 45 minutes from the town I was born in and grew up in, and about two hours or so from Columbus; I drive through it whenever I go home to visit. I’ve never gone looking for Melonheads though, and haven’t actually been in the woods in the area since I heard of them. In high school I used to spend a lot of time running around the area though, so I’m kinda glad I didn’t hear of them until I transplanted to Columbus.

The most popular version of the Melonhead story goes like this. Around the time of World War II, a Dr. Crow or Dr. Crowe or Dr. Kroh or Dr. Crower, who was an evil or benevolent scientist, was given a brood of normal children or children suffering from a rare form of hydroencephalism to take care of or experiment upon or to give a rare form of hydroencephalism. He inejected their heads with water or chemicals or radiation, and it mutated them or caused them to mutate them further. He may have abused them physically and mentally until one day they revolted, attacking and killing him and burning down the lab or orphanage in which they were kept. Or he was kind to them, and it was burnt down in a fire that also claimed the doctor and/or his wife, leaving the despised Melonheads to fend for themselves.

The Melonheads that now roam Lake County are either the originals, or the descendants of the originals or possibly the ghosts of the originals. They are either filled with vicious hatred of normal-headed people, and will attack, kill and eat them on sight. Or they are deeply ashamed of their misshapen looks and will try to scare people away before they can get a good look at them. Or they are shy and docile and will try to avoid any and all contact with others at any costs.

There are a couple of other more radical variations, including one in which The Crows are nineteenth century farmers or settlers who gave birth to a brood of disfigured children, and retreated to the woods to raise them in secret, far from prying, judgmental eyes, and, when the couple passed on, their children became feral.

The other version, which I’ve only encountered in Weird Ohio (Sterling Publishing; 2005), has the doctor performing illegal abortions out in the woods, and he’d bury the (sometimes deformed) bodies around his cabin. Implying that the Melonheads are the ghosts of aborted, deformed fetuses…?

Abandoned structures and ruins found in the area—barns, shacks, houses—are often said to be the place where the Crows lived or raised their kids or performed their experiments.

The Internet is absolutely lousy with Melonhead stories, and Weird Ohio has a few pages devoted to the subject, including a handful of personal accounts. I understand that both Michigan and Connecticut have their own version of the Melonheads, which sure makes them seem a lot less likely to be real. I mean, how many races of diminutive feral creatures with giant heads can there be hidden on this half of the continent?

The scariest stories I’ve heard or read involving Melonheads have to do with people encountering them by accident. Pulling over on the side of the road near the woods so someone could get out to take a piss, or parking by a dead end somewhere to make out for a while. And, while they’re out of the car or the car’s engine is turned off, a Melonhead or a group of them will appear in the headlights or come slowly wobbling through the underbrush at the teller of the tale.

So I imagined an image of someone running away from a group of Melonheads, coming out of the woods and about to clamber over a guiderail to get at the victim.

At first I thought about drawing a trio of them, each with an actual melon for a head. Like, one would have a watermelon head, one would have a honeydew head and one would have a cantaloupe head. I was thinking of the logo for Lemonheads candy, and thought about a “cute” version of the Melonheads.

For a few seconds, anyway. Then I realized I can’t draw melons to save my life. At least, not without photoreference.


So then I settled on something more akin to giant babies with huge heads

and got this far with a final piece

Before February was about to turn into March, and the deadline expire, so I stuck with the Orange Eyes drawing.

And there you have it: A guided tour of my Beasts! submission thought and drawing process, and just about everything I know about two of the coolest creatures in Ohio’s monster menagerie.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go redesign the hell out of Iron Man…



*Since writing the first draft of this post, I’ve read Bigfoot In Ohio: Encounters with the Grassman by Christopher L. Murphy (Pyramid Publications; 1997), and apparently as of 1992, 81% of Ohio's total 41,000-square mile area was “rural or forest in character.” Researcher Rene Dahinden, who wrote the introduction, said “Ohio, like numerous other states, certainly has sufficient wilderness regions to support a Bigfoot creature…Would these creatures venture into Ohio’s rural areas as numerous witnesses claim? Such is not beyond reason.” So there you go. That’s what the experts say.

Weekly Haul: March 19th

Birds of Prey #116 (DC Comics) Now this is the Barbara Gordon I know and love. One issue, she’s screwing up missions and failing to save cities from transforming suicide bomber robots, the next she’s breaking the ankle of a teenage sparring partner out of frustration, and then she’s shooting sonic weapons at two teenage girls she’s supposed to be training.

Wait, did I say “know and love?” I meant, “am confused and repelled by.” Writer Sean McKeever, credited as Gail Simone on the cover, continues the weird Oracle B-plot in nonsensical fashion—first she asks Alice to help out, then she shoots her and kicks her out?—while the A-plot involving Lady Blackhawk, Huntress and Killer Shark concludes. The icky mind-controlled-love-slave thing is continued here too, and it’s revealed that this Killer Shark is just one more legacy character.

McKeever wraps up his five-issue run next issue, and then its back to Tony “The Bridge” Bedard. The Nicola Scott/Doug Hazlewood art team continues to impress, at least.



The Brave and the Bold #11 (DC) And so begins DC’s best monthly titles descent in quality. This is the first George Perez-less issue (what, they couldn’t have kept him on two more issues to finish the story arc?), and the first of three pencilled by Jerry Ordaway, before Scot Kolins comes on for at least one issue in June.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Ordaway well enough; I think he’s a strong artist, and he excels at the little things that the artists on some of DC’s flagship titles like Batman and JLoA fail at (like distinguishing characters’ faces from one another, easy-to-read mis en scene, drawing backgrounds, drawing feet when he has too). But he’s not Perez, and this book’s whole hook has been that it’s Mark Waid and George Perez going nuts with the DCU.

Waid continues having fun drawing connections between obscure bits of DC trivia along the theme of transformation, focusing mostly on Red Kryptonite this issue. The main characters are Superman and Ultraman, with the latter causing trouble for the former by walking around The Daily Planet as The Evil Clark Kent.

I could quibble with Waid’s usage of a good Mr. Mxyzptlk from Ultraman’s universe (both Earths would be embedded in the same fifth dimension, wouldn’t they? And yet this Mxy repeatedly refers to his own universe), but otherwise it’s another fun issue of Brave and the Bold, complete with a cliffhanger that feels unique and genuinely suspenseful, despite the fact that I know Superman’s not going to die.



The Flash #238 (DC) Writer Tom Peyer and artist Freddie E. William II comprise the latest creative team to take a turn trying to fix The Flash, a title that’s been pretty much screwed since Geoff Johns and Howard Porter left it in the midst of Infinite Crisis, and a top-down bad idea meant to fix a book that wasn’t broken ended up breaking it instead.

I’m a big fan of Peyer’s past work—his Hourman was one of the best super-comics from DC during one of the company’s best times for super-comics—and was therefore looking forward to seeing if he could be the writer to pull The Flash out its “One Year Later” quality black hole.

I can’t tell from just this first chapter of the first story arc, but it sure seems to me like he’s off to a good start. He turns a “My name is Wally West” riff into a one-page recap that gets lapsed readers like me “up to speed” (ha ha!) with the new, kinda stupid status quo (not only did Wally and Linda have magic twin babies reappear in her womb, now they’re magicially grade-school aged kids…with powers!). I’m still not quite clear on everything—like why Linda can’t get a job reporting—but catching up in all the changes of the last year or two was easier than I thought.

Wally’s having money troubles (it’s all Hal Jordan and Geoff Johns’ fault, for giving him his secret identity back!), the West family and City of Keystone is having trouble with a cable news network that’s much more Fox than C-Span and we meet a new villain named Spin with a connection to the network.

It’s a pretty straightforward superhero story, with a mixture of personal problems and supervillain troubles, but it’s solidly constructed and has a few fun moments.

I had a bit more difficulty adjusting to the art (the only other time I’ve seen Wally, Linda and the super-kids post-“Lightning Saga” has been in Brave and the Bold). Williams’ character design is pretty good, although his big-headed figures and extra musclebound Wally seem like a pretty large departure from some of the previous Flash artists. Something strange was up with the coloring though, with character outlines sometimes being rendered in black, but often not, and changing back and forth without a pattern I could discern. It was pretty distracting, and gave off an overly-computerized, less-drawn look to some of the panels and pages.



Gumby: The Collected Edition #1 (Wildcard Ink) This trade collecting the first three issues of Bob Burden and Rick Geary’s new Gumby series, is easily one of the most insane comics I’ve ever read, and it’s somehow made all the more insane by the fact that its anchored by the vaguely familiar pop culture figure of Gumby.

There’s the clay boy, his pony best friend and the meddlesome Blockheads just as you would expect, but there’s also bad clowns, cannibal salesmen, Geronimo, a house where everyone is named Jeffrey, and narration boxes containing lines like “The astral image of Johnny Cash!”, “Unknown to the rest of the world, Oppenheimer, along with many other top financial advisors, has laser teeth!” and, of course, “Suddenly, a giant pork chop appears over the wooded hills.”

It’s really got to be read to be believed.



The Incredible Hercules #115 (Marvel Comics) If you liked the big fights and awesome sound effects of of Greg Pak’s World War Hulk, then, chances are, you’ll love Pak and Fred Van Lente’s big fight between Ares and Hercules atop a helicarrier being bombarded by missiles, complete with missiles being used like clubs, combatants thrown into propellers, panels with eleven “WHAM”s with them and penciler Khoi Pham’s name being used as one sound effect (“KHOIPHOOM”).

This is the climax of the first story arc, and it’s great stuff. I don’t think I can say anything about how cool it is that I haven’t already said about the last three parts of “The Incredible Herc.” Another nice mixture of Greek myth and Marvel myth, a nice, new take on why Hercules goes by “Hercules,” and a conclusion to the conflict between Herc and Amadeus Cho to decide whether the kid will be a great supervillain or a great hero. Plus, Cho pulls a Bugs Bunny on Herc.

There’s a house ad for the next issue featuring a John Romita Jr image of Herc fighting an Eternal, and a quote from Comixreme.com about the book reading, “On its way to becoming one of the best comics Marvel is pubishing.”

I disagree. With this issue, I think it’s there.



Princess at Midnight (Image Comics) The prolific Andi Watson expands his entry in Tokyopop’s Mammoth Book of Best New Manga into a delightful all-ages fairytale published in the same format as his recent Glister books for Image.

The story involves Holly Crescent, who is homeschooled by her father by day, and is the princess of Castle Waxing by night. There she and her two advisors—a mustachioed man named Tranquility whose chief concern is fashion, and an Eastern-style dragon named Peepo who handles the finances—become embroiled in a war for territory against the Horrible Horde.

There’s a humorous and occasionally touching moral about war in here, but Watson’s minimalist, perfectly designed art work makes the surface engaging all on its own.

While the format looks much like the Glister books, the art work is more starkly black and white, with fewer gray tones and more white space, and the story is all around more comic book-y, with everything in panels and every word in a bubble or box, whereas Glister can occasionally lean hard toward storybook territory.



Robin #172 (DC) Didn’t Maxie Zeus die? I could have sworn he died in one of the recent DC character purges—Infinite Crisis? “War Games”? “Face the Face?”—but now that I stop and think about it, I don’t actually remember a death scene. Anyway, another issue of Chuck Dixon’s Robin. There have been scores of these things, so you ought to know exactly what to expect here. The only really noteworthy bits are that new or guest penciller David Baldeon draws a pretty thick, bulky Robin, and that the person in the Spoiler costume totally has long blonde hair.



Superman/Batman Annual #2 (DC) Joe Kelly’s second Superman/Batman annual isn’t quite as much fun as his first one, in large part because it doesn’t feature a bickering Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, unaware of one another’s secret identities, reluctantly sharing a double-booked cabin on a cruise ship, nor does it feature an uncredited Deadpool guest appearance, or art by the likes of Ed McGuinness and some guys whose styles were not dissimilar to McGuinness’.

Like the last annual, this one is set early in the relationship of the World’s Finest team (complete with Dick “Robin” Grayson), and is a kinda sorta retelling of the old story in which Superman becomes Supernova. The central story revolves around the stars facing off against Socrates, a bearded corpse in a cape that talks only in questions (neat touch) and who grants victims’ wishes to help test them to find out who they really are.

It’s an okay, if somewhat cheesy, story, but the real pleasure is in Kelly’s take on the characters. His Dark Knight and Man of Steel are polar opposites, and argue like an old married couple—I never tire of this World’s Finest as Odd Couple take. With some strong scenes for both Robin and Alfred, it’s a ton of fun (Once you get past the confusing, Loeb-style opening pages, anyway).

The art is provided by Scott Kolins, and it’s…well, I’m not entirely sure how it is, actually. I think it’s pretty good—I like his costuming of Bruce Wayne, for example—but I had a hard time reading it, thanks to Jorge Molina’s murky coloring, which relied on some filmic computer tricks and too much shading and shadows, particularly in the Gotham scenes.

No Sale: War Is Hell

Dear Marvel Comics,

Hey guys, how’s it going? I just wanted to drop you a line to say WHAT THE HELL?! When I went to my local comic shop this week to pick up the new releases that looked good, I couldn’t help but notice that you were charging $3.99 for War Is Hell: The First Flight of The Phantom Eagle #1.

Now, as an English major in college and a “creative type,” math has never really been my strong point, but I know enough of it to know that $3.99 is a whole entire dollar more than $2.99, which is what you guys normally charge for 22-page comic books. If I understand fractions right, that’s a one-third increase over the normal price of your normal 22-page comic books.

I picked up War Is Hell, felt its weight in my hand, and flipped through it, and while I suppose it’s possible that it was printed on an ultra-light paper that deceived me, it sure seemed to be your average 22-page page count. It didn’t even have a cardstock cover like Logan #1, that other comic book you jacked the price up to $3.99 for no reason for. At least in that case, I could assume you were spending more on cover-stock, and felt justified in asking readers to shell out a little bit more.

But why did War Is Hell cost so much? Is red ink more expensive than all the other inks, and thus a scene of a dude falling into a biplane propeller is more expensive to create?

Or is it simply because it is a Max imprint book, meaning there’s probably some swear words that appear in English instead of, like, “@#$%” you Iron Man, you @#$%ing @#$%!” and you want to discourage kids from reading it by making it more expensive?

Because if that’s your rationale, don’t worry. Kids don’t read Marvel Comics. And even if they did, I’m fairly certain their first choice isn’t going to be the one about the obscure World War I flying ace that their dad’s never even heard of drawn by that Chaykin guy who makes all the characters look fat and flat. I would assume they might gravitate towards something with Wolverine on the cover. Or Venom. Or Wolverine possessed by Venom.

Me, on the other the other hand, I’m the goddam target audience for this stuff. Garth Ennis? I love that guy. And everyone knows that other than stories featuring Irish vampire drinking buddies, sarcastic hitmen with x-ray eyes and hearts of gold and insane vigilantes killing mobsters with zoo animals, his very best work is that which involves war.

And I love Howard Chaykin’s art. And cover artist John Cassaday’s. Hell, this book even has my favorite letterer on it.

And having recently made my way through Showcase Presents: Enemy Ace and Ennis’ Enemy Ace: War in Heaven, I’m totally pumped about a WWI pilot story.

But why should I pay an extra dollar for it? Anyway, I guess I’ll just wait for the trade. Again.

Make mine $2.99,
Caleb

Marvel's June previews reviewed

Wow, that's a nice cover! I'm planning on trying out this arc; as much as I hate the new status quo, Marvel could put Marcos Martin on a book called Extremely Cruel Jokes About J. Caleb Mozzocco's Manhood and I'd pay $2.99 for it.



AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE #14
Written by DAN SLOTT & CHRISTOS GAGE
Pencils by STEFANO CASELLI
Cover by MARK BROOKS
SECRET INVASION TIE-IN
"We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us!"
During the INFILTRATION, a Skrull at the heart of the Camp Hammond said these words: "It won't be long until we have a Skrull in every state! "Now that Skrull stands revealed and the fate of The Initiative, the United States, and Planet Earth hang in the balance. Plus: Former Avenger, Delroy Garret, assumes the mantle and arsenal of Earth's greatest Skrull-Hunter, THE 3-D MAN. He's here to chew bubblegum and kick some Skrull-@$$. And he's all out of bubblegum.

I damn well hope Hank Pym turns out to be a Skrull. That would certainly explain why he was all like, "Oops, I guess I killed my old friend Goliath with that killer robo-clone I made of my old ally Thor. Oh well, back to the concentration camp construction..." in Civil War.

I have no idea who Delroy Garret is, but I'm kind of excited to hear the words "3-D Man." I hope that doesn't deep-six Jeff Parker's plan to include 3-D Man in a future Avengers of Atlas project...



CAPTAIN AMERICA #39
Written by ED BRUBAKER
Pencils & Cover by STEVE EPTING
Okay, what the heck is going on here? Is that two guys in Captain America outfits? Yeah, it is.
More than that, we cannot say.
The epic Death of Captain America continues in Part Three of "The Man Who Bought America" by the acclaimed team of Brubaker and Epting.

This might be a little more mysterious and suspenseful if the Invaders/New Avengers, in which the original Invaders (a Captain America include) come forward from WWII into the present Marvel Universe, wasn't going on simultaneously. I'm not saying that is what Brubaker's got going on here, but with such an obvious explanation around, it really deflates what would otherwise be a real "What the--?!!" kind of cover.



CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND MI: 13 #2
Written by PAUL CORNELL
Penciled by LEONARD KIRK
Cover by BRYAN HITCH
The Skrulls are winning in England. Their mysterious goal there could turn the tide of the invasion. The emergence of the fabled sword Excalibur (once again locked in stone) may lead to salvation. But who can claim the mythic weapon? Pete Wisdom? Spitfire? John the Skrull? The Black Knight? And what is the fate of Captain Britain?

This is one of those titles that, due to the creators and characters, I kinda want to sort of try out, but the starting on a cross-over kind of repels me a bit. Like Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man launching with a chapter of "The Other."

Also, John the Skrull? Not funny. Not as not-funny as Bob the Monitor, but close.



FANTASTIC FOUR #558
Written by MARK MILLAR
Pencils & Cover by BRYAN HITCH
Who are the New Defenders, and why does their appearance on Earth foretell the eventual extinction of mankind? Who has liberated Doctor Doom from his incarceration awaiting trial, and why? And what's up with Valeria? (Oh, and the Fantastic Four are in it too...)

The "New Defenders?" But I thought those in the Joe Casey series were the "Last Defenders;" it's right there in the name! Hmm, I wonder if Millar is coordinating his story to match-up with what's going on in Casey's miniseries... No, I'm just kidding. I actually don't wonder about that at all.



I tried out Starlord on a whim, since I liked the writer, I liked the look of the art and it had a tree monster and raccoon with a gun. I ended up enjoying it immensely. I'm sorta unsure about this though; it has the tree monster and the raccoon with a gun, but different creators. Hmm...



HULK: RAGING THUNDER
Written by JEFF PARKER
Art by MITCH BREITWEISER
Cover by GREG LAND
She will be the mightiest champion of her time. He was the mightiest monster of his. What happens when these legends clash will change the course of history for the warrior known as THUNDRA! PLUS, a classic Thundra tale!

When I see the name "Jeff Parker," my brain translates that directly into "buy this comic." But when I see the words "by Greg Land," my brain translates that directly into "do not buy this comic."

I have no idea how to proceed here. Any chance of a variant cover here, Marvel? Maybe one that would be less likely to be cropped into something inappropriate?



IRON MAN: VIVA LAS VEGAS #2 (of 4)
Written by JON FAVREAU
Pencils & Cover by ADI GRANOV
With the aid of archaeologist Elsa Bloodstone, Tony Stark has discovered the cause of the plague of reptiles that's crippled the Las Vegas strip! Unfortunately for his armored alter ego, that something is "He Whose Limbs Shatter Mountains, And Whose Back Scrapes The Sun"—Fin Fang Foom.

The worst thing about this series? It means Iron Man probably won't be fighting F.F.F. in the inevitable Iron Man 2.



Hmmm...that may just be the worst idea for a variant cover anyone's ever had...

That's the cover "Director's Cut" version of Kick-Ass #1 by the way. I've never understood these things. Firstly because comic books don't have directors. And secondly because the film analogy doesn't hold up. They're not usually "cut" a different way—i.e. with scenes in different order or re-edited to include different footage—it's just a reprint with some extras, right? So it's more like the comic book equivalent of some lame-ass DVD extras than an actual re-cut of the finished product. Which, by the way, isn't finished anyway.



MARVEL ADVENTURES THE AVENGERS #25
Written by JEFF PARKER
Penciled by IG GUARA
Cover by LEONARD KIRK
You're smart. DARN smart. You're so ahead of the curve, you've had your head removed and let your face be broadcast by a TV screen in your chest. That's not just smart, that's Arnim Zola Smart. And if the Avengers try to go up against that, well you can just switch their minds around so they don't know what to do with themselves. Oh Zola, you make M.O.D.O.C. look like a common street thug!

Considering the fact that "Oh Zola, you make M.O.D.O.C. look like a common street thug!" is the last line in the solicitation for a comic by the guy who gave us this story,
I'm going to go ahead and assume that this will be a pretty good comic.



Are those Super-Skrulls, or is Ms. Marvel throwing down with Combo Man and pal?



NEW AVENGERS #42
Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
Penciled by JIM CHEUNG
Cover by ALEKSI BIRCLOT
SECRET INVASION Tie-In!
THE EMPIRE part 3. For 42 issues readers of New Avengers have wondered, who caused the breakout in New Avengers #1 and why? And how was this the real start of the SECRET INVASION? Find out right here!! Special guest artist Jim Cheung returns to these pages for this shocking story.

Actually, I kinda forgot about the breakout around the same time Brian Michael Bendis did.



SECRET INVASION: FANTASTIC FOUR #2 (of 3)
Written by ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA
Penciled by BARRY KITSON
Cover by ALAN DAVIS
Part Two [of Three]: "He's Just Not That Into You"
Trapped in the Negative Zone with Franklin and Val, beseiged by monsters, Ben and Johnny are scrambling to get back home before a cosmic anomoly with the power to consume, well, everything swallows Manhattan. But the team's biggest brain, Reed Richards, is nowhere to be found, and the Skrull who infiltrated the FF isn't just any Skrull, it's Johnny's ex, Lyja. Forget worldwide domination, hell hath no fury like a Skrull scorned...

Well, the obvious skrullspect among the FF has been Reed Richards, whose been written so out of character throughout all this Illuminati/Civil War business. Maybe it wasn't just that Bendis and JMS didn't know him very well, but that they were writing him poorly on purpose to tie-into Secret Invasion.

I guess it could be Sue too, though, as she seemed like a pretty horrible person throughout Civil War too, just less fascist and evil than her husband.

But either way, it's gonna be weird, especially if the Skrull is Johnny's ex. Because Reed and Sue are man and wife and they have sex. Remember that scene in Civil War, they totally did it! So, if Lyja was posing as Reed, she had lesbian sex with her ex's sister! And if she was posing as Sue, she had sex with her ex's brother-in-law! And Reed nailed an alien posing as his wife! Eww!!! (This was the main reason I never thought that they'd undo the Spider-marriage through the means of an MJ Skrull...it'd be just too icky to reveal that Peter's been having sex with a Skrull infiltrator, you know?).



SECRET INVASION: RUNAWAYS/YOUNG AVENGERS #1 (of 3)
Written by CHRISTOPHER YOST
Penciled by TAKESHI MIYAZAWA
Cover by MICHAEL RYAN
The Skrulls are invading and the Runaways and the Young Avengers both have a Skrull on their team. Coincidence? We think not. You two favorite teen teams come together again as the Marvel U is pushed to the brink.

I didn't dislike the Civil War team-up between the two teams too much (aside from the Marvel Boy treatment), and I am kinda looking forward to this one (You can't go wrong with Miyazawa, can you?).

I'm sure Young Avengers fans are excited to hear Marvel's actually publishing some books with them, and, as a regular Runaways reader, I am too. While Runaways hasn't been cancelled like YA, it's been practically cancelled, ever since they started publishing it as a quarterly instead of a monthly.



SHE-HULK #30
Written by PETER DAVID
Penciled by VAL SEMEIKS
Cover by MIKE DEODATO
From the pages of INCREDIBLE HERCULES comes…yeah, you guessed it, Hercules! The Lion of Olympus, still wanted for crimes against S.H.I.E.L.D., collides with our bounty-hunting She-Hulk. The question is, given these two combustible characters' current mindset and situation with the law, will they meet as longtime friends…or bitter foes?

Hey, I haven't seen new Semeiks art in forever! That guy's great!



SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #9
Written by PAUL TOBIN
Art by DEREC AUCOIN
Cover by SALVA ESPIN
Spider-Man, the friendly neighborhood…chaperone? When the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier races off to fight a hostile UFO, Nick Fury asks (okay, tells) Spider-Man that he needs to watch after Bruce Banner. Now all Spidey needs to do is convince a city full of assorted thieves and felons (and…DANG…Dr. Octopus!) to KEEP IT DOWN for the day, cuz, you know, this is the guy that turns into the Hulk. PLUS: the story no one thought they would see, the debut of all-new backup feature "Mr. & Mrs. Spider-Man"! In this first installment, using their individual talents, Peter and Mary Jane Parker join forces to prevent the Lizard from destroying his own family.

Way to keep stick to that no-one-likes-the-marriage-and-its-bad-for-the-character line, guys!

The lead feature sounds pretty cool. If they didn't just release a digest containing stories from this book last week, I would be sorely tempted to get this. As is, I guess I'll wait for the digest.



ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #123
Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
Pencils & Cover by STUART IMMONEN
Venom returns in part 1 of "War of the Symbiotes"! When Spidey's most fearsome foe strikes, it looks bad for the outmatched web-slinger, but Silver Sable and her Wild Pack may turn the tide! Have they come to save Spider-Man or is their motive something more sinister? Plus: this story adapts, expands and incorporates the hit Ultimate Spider-Man video game (which Brian Michael Bendis just happened to co-write) into Ultimate Spider-Man continuity! So be like Venom and return to ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN to find out why folks like Wizard are saying it's "the best Spider-book on the stands right now."

Far be it from me to question the word of Wizard magazine but, um, hasn't Ultimate Spider-Man always been the best Spider-book on the stands...since it started, I mean? I guess you could make the case that some issues of Tangled Web were better than some issues of USM but, come on, when was the last time the regular Marvel Univers spider-books were any good at all, let alone better than USM?



ULTIMATE X-MEN #95
Written by ARON COLEITE
Penciled by MARK BROOKS
Cover by GABRIELE DELL'OTTO
HEROES writer Aron Eli Coleite continues his run – and introduces a team of X-Men like you've never seen before! Who are Ultimate Alpha Flight? What do they want with Northstar? What is Colossus willing to do to get him back? And just wait until you see that last-page shocker!

It's been so long since I've read UXM...I think the Fenris twins were fighting Rogue and Gambit in the last issue I read?...that it's now just like the regular X-books to me: Something I fear even attempting to read given how big and complicated the cast and history are. But I've gotta admit, I do find the words "Ultimate Alpha Flight" somewhat exciting...