This is not (quite) a graphic novel: Bossy Bear

Writer/artist David Horvath's Bossy Bear (Hyperion; 2007) is unquestionably a children's picture book, but it's one of those that is somewhat near the border to comics. Most of the words are in prose, but they are very short bursts of words, floating above the images. The dialogue, what little of it there is, appears in comic book-style dialogue balloons. And while the pages aren't broken into panels, if we accept each page as a panel unto itself, well, this could very easily be considered a comic.

Either way, it's pretty awesome, even for those of us who long ago learned that no one likes someone who's too bossy, and that we should share stuff with others.

This is how the book opens,

with a LOLcats like, Internet meme-friendly declaration. I've cropped the image, but only the field of mustard yellow that serves as a background. Most of the images in the book are exactly this bold: A bright-colored character given weight and dimension only by a shadow, standing in a big rectangle of color. Sometimes there are other characters or objects, and sometimes space is hinted at by backgrounds or the size of figures, but more often than not its just a simple character on a color, Horvath's "camera" zooming in or out to add drama occasionally.

If something about Bossy Bear looks a bit familiar, that's because Horvath is the co-creator of Uglydolls (along with his wife Sun-Min Kim), and these characters share the same designs sensibility, although they all tend to be recognizable animals instead of cute "ugly" monsters.

But back to the story: Bossy Bear is bossy, as his crown and ermine-lined cape probably clued you in on. "He likes things his way all the time," page two tells us, and page three adds "Bossy Bear spends his day telling others what to do."

The following pages show Bossy Bear interacting with the world, telling a variety of blank-faced, stupid looking animals to clean his room and give him things, yelling at a snail to crawl faster, demanding everything from Santa, etc.

About halfway through, a blank-faced, stupid-looking pig and dog ask B.B. if he wants to play with them, but leave when he gets bossy.

This leads to an existential, double-page spread, where we see Bossy Bear on the far left of a two-page field of empty gray, thinking to himself "Oh..."

Has he learned his lesson? Perhaps. (Spoiler alert!)

Soon a turtle with a red baloon comes along, and Bossy Bear demands it. To his surprise, the turtle complies, giving Bossy Bear something to think about.

"You don't think I'm bossy?" Bossy Bear asks, and the turtle responds "You are bossy...but you don't have to be."

So Bossy Bear walks off page, then returns with a present for the turtle.


It's...a crown, just like his!

The turtle puts it on and declares "Let's Go!" while he and Bossy Bear walk off the page, B.B. making eye contact with the reader.

The first time I read this, I just thought that was Bossy Bear's blank-ish, "I just learned a lesson face," but on the second and third reading (Um, it's pretty short, so three readings is, like, ten minutes time all together), it seems clear that Bossy Bear has realized that he might have just created a monster, and is, for the first time, learning what it means to be bossed around.

The moral of the story? Crowns and ermine-lined red capes look awesome, and you should totally wear them all the time.

Weekly Haul: December 17th

The Age of The Sentry #4 (Marvel Comics) If The Sentry is Silver Age Superman, in Jeff Parker, Nick Dragotta and Gary martin’s opening story, he meets his version of Earth-2 Superman, a sort-of catch-all parody of how Golden Age characters vary from later versions. The back-up, written by Paul Tobin and illustrated by Ramon Rosanas, The Sentry teams up with the Blonde Phantom to rescue the popular band The Crick-Hits from the clutches of Tyrannus and his Moleoids (Or are they Mole Man’s Moleoids?). If you’ve read the first three issues, then you don’t need me to tell you that this one is a really fun read. If you missed the last three and don’t want to start halfway through, wait for the trade…but don’t miss it!



Avengers: The Initiative #19 (Marvel Comics) I really liked Marvel’s previous line-wide event comic, World War Hulk, although I thought the name and the promotion of the series was pretty misleading, since the Hulk didn’t actually wage war on Earth, or even America, or even all superheroes: He was basically just pissed at four or five guys, and fought anyone who got in his way. In New York City.

If you just read Secret Invasion #1-8, it similarly seemed like a pretty small-scale affair: The Skrulls talked about taking over earth, but really the scope of the series was simply some Skrulls versus Nick Fury, Maria Hill and The Avengers in two different locales.

It was the tie-ins wherein all the real battles were fought—Skrulls in Wakanda in Black Panther, Skrulls in England in Captain Britain, Skrulls on the West Coast in SI: X-Men and SI: Who Do You Trust? and, in Avengers: The Initiative, Skrulls in every state in the U.S., trying to take down the various Initiative teams from within.

I’m not sure how this story arc would have read completely divorced from Secret Invasion #1-8, as I read it alongside the main series, but it certainly compliments it well—the scale, the scope and the stakes that seemed missing from the Brian Michael Bendis-written main series are all in here, and co-writers Dan Slott and Christos N. Gage do right some of the same things Bendis did wrong.

For example, remember in SI #8, how the Skrulls had some kinda biological weapon that didn’t make any sense? Well here they have another weapon of last resort, and Gage and Slott at least take the time to explain what it is, how it will work and what the consequences of its activation will be if our heroes can’t stop it. It doesn’t bog the story down one bit—it only takes a line or two to explain it; this is comic book science, not rocket science. Remember how that big, important character “died” in SI, and it was all like, Who cares? She was hardly even in the series until just then, and that’s not a terribly convincing death anyway?

Well here several characters died, and yeah, they’re not exactly founding members of the Avengers or anything, but, on the other hand, their deaths are more likely to be permanent, and there’s at least a perfunctory amount of emotion involved, as Slott and Gage spent the rest of the story arc letting us know who the hell they are and giving us enough information about them to conceivably like them.

Particularly in the case of the death at the climax, who was an extremely minor character prior to his introduction into this series, and yet was one of the stars of this particular arc. He has a pretty good “out” to return some day—they even add an ellipsis and question mark after “The End” at the end—but his death comes as a tragedy.

Harvey Tolibao and Bong Dazo’s art is slick, detailed and chaotically kinetic, so everything looks fairly cool, if occasionally overblown, but individual panel layouts are sometimes so over-stuffed with characters that they don’t look as good as they should. For example, I didn’t need to see the acrobatic Tigra’s taint front and center in the panel featuring her Initiative team, and I think the Florida team (recently seen getting decimated in Marvel Zombies 3 #1) was fighting a super-Skrull with Devil Dinosaur’s powers, but the rest of his make-up was obscured by the angle and crowded scene.

Even still, this has certainly been the most action-paced of the SI tie-ins, and the one that picked up more of Bendis’ slack than any of the others. Kinda makes me wonder what Secret Invasion woulda been like if Marvel had these guys write it. Slam-bang superhero action on an epic scale just isn’t Bendis’ strong point, whereas Slott and Gage seem quite at home juggling 50 superheroes fighting on a half-dozen fronts and managing to tell several storylines within the must-hit-points-A-B-and-C mandates of a crossover.


The Complete Ro-Busters (Rebelllion) Oops, I didn’t expect to see this out this week. As far as I knew, it was already released in November (so says Amazon, anyway), so I was taking my time with the review copy Rebellion sent my way, and thus I’m only half-way through this massive, 340-ish-page collection of Pat Mills’ weird robot comedy/action strip from the pages of Starlord and 2000 A.D.. I’ll have a proper review up on Blog@ this weekend, provided I can get through 170-pages or so in the next few days. It’s extremely readable, so I don’t imagine that will be much problem. Breifly, it’s a sort of comic strip sitcom starring two repurposed robots—war droid Hammer-Stein and sewer droid Ro-Jaws—who work for a Thunderbirds-esque rescue team run by Mr. Ten Per Cent, a cyborg who looks like a robot, but is still ten percent human, and thus technically, legally human. They get into all kinds of wacky scrapes. Dave Gibbons, Kevin O’Neill, Bryan Talbot, Steve Dillon and others draw, Mills and others write. Oh, and one of those others is Alan Moore, so that oughta sell a few copies.



Hellblazer #250 (Veritgo/DC) Huh. What is there to say after “wow,” really? Hellblazer, which began as a sort of Swamp Thing spin-off starring a supporting cast member Alan Moore created to satisfy a collaborator’s desire to draw a guy who looks like Sting, has been passed from one British comics writer to the next—even occasionally falling into the hands of Americans—and is now the last of the original Vertigo series still standing. Sandman? Kaput (Although spin-offs of some kind of another keep cropping up). Animal Man? Doom Patrol? Reclaimed by the DCU. Shade, The Changing Man? The DCU doesn’t even want it back. Swamp Thing? Please. Hellblazer might not have been the fittest, but it is the most successful at surviving, which I think more likely than not comes down to the same thing that helps certain species survive where others die off—flexibility.

Hellblazer wasn’t tied to the work of particular creator the way so many of the other Vertigo series were, and the concept was the sort that was a little easier to replicate than some of the others. For example, whereas Shade was about a Peter Milligan-y creation Peter Milliganning about with his Minnigan-y cohorts having Milligan-esque adventures I to this day can’t even begin to summarize because Jesus Christ that comic was weird (where were all the annotators discussing Morrison’s DC comics now back then, when I really needed them?), the adventures of chain-smoking, alcohol-drinking British rake/asshole investigating demonic shit is the kind of thing that’s easy enough to be replicated by others. Constantine is like the James Bond of Vertigo Comics; the original may be the best, but each adds something unique and worthwhile to the mix, and none of them suck so bad as to ever break the concept.

So congratulations, Vertigo. This is indeed an achievement.

So what do they do to celebrate? Invite a whole mess of creators to tell holiday-themed tales and they ivited some good ones.

I’m not a regular Hellblazer reader, though I check in now and then (the only run I really followed start to finish was the Garth Ennis-scripted one), and what really attracted me to pick this up was the inclusion of art by Rafael Grampa of the recently-released Mesmo Delivery (Which I see Tom Spurgeon just had some kinds words about, if you don’t want to just take my word on whether or not it's a comic to read).

Grampa’s work is quite nice here, even in the smaller panels and duller colors of this book compared to his AdHouse debut, and his style is a nice, screaming contrast to the rest of the art in the book—Simply put, Grampa’s art doesn’t look much like what one thinks of when one thinks of Vertigo art. He illustrates a story by Brian Azzarello involving a curse, a goat, a scapegoat and a scary goat man monster which is pretty funny, but told rather poorly in all-verse narration. Poetry and comics can work, and work quite nicely, but usually only when there’s a one line-to-one image ration, and the panels are laid out into a more rigid pattern. Here the words just kinda get in the way, and I imagine prose would have served Azz’s gag better.

As for the rest of the book, Dave Gibbons writes and Sean Phillips draws a story about Constantine foiling a ritual involving the sacrifice of a live baby on New Year’s Eve, Jaime Delano and David Lloyd weave a quite beautiful looking story in which Constantine just kind of watches a poker game with his friends, Peter Milligan and Eddie Campbell tell probably the most British story of the lot (Based on the black, white and blue version of two of Campbell’s panels on the credits page, I kinda wish his whole story was colored so minimally) and finally writer China Mieville and artists Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini collaborate on a neat little mini-mystery with a sharply wicked sense of humor.

Jamie Delano comes closest to delivering a true meaning of Chrstimas type message: “seasonal lesson for all cynics, I guess. Don’t drop your guard for a moment, or the spirit of fucking Christmas will rip the best from the very worst of you.”

All in all, well worth the $3.99 price of admission.


Marvel Adventures Avengers #31 (Marvel) Iron Man takes Spider-Man and The Hulk (who’s just kinda hanging out as the Hulk, rather than particularly angry about anything) and newer recruits Luke Cage and Tigra to LA just to get out of the tower. They visit the beach, and before long, Namor and a giant, green tentacle-having whale monster thing show up and start kicking Avenger ass.

Namor vs. Spider-Man and Tigra! Namor vs. Iron Man! Namor vs. Power-Man! Namor vs. The Hulk! Since seeing Namor fight people and hearing him talk shit are among my two favorite things that can possibly be found in Marvel Comics, this is pretty much my ideal book.

Paul Tobin continues to prove that he can write this book Jeff Parker style just as well as Jeff Parker can, and manages about a gag a page, much of the humor inherent to the characters in their familiar 616 iterations (Spider-Man as sad sack who can’t get any respect, Namor as arrogant prick) as well as some sillier stuff, like Tigra’s fear of water (She’s “like fifty-six percent cat,” she explains) and dumb, gluttonous Hulk.

Ig Guara is the pencil artist, and while I’m not entirely sure why—New inker? Different colorist?—this seems like his best work I’ve seen so far, at least in part because it seems somewhat looser. I like the fact that his Cage looks a little thick and his Namor a little skinny (it’s not like their super-strength come from super-abs and super-lats, after all) and his Hulk is just so…hulking.

I generally like this title, but this one struck me as one of the better issues in recent memory, so if you’ve been on the fence about whether or not to try MA Avengers, this seems like a good one for sampling purposes.



Showcase Presents: The Brave and The Bold: The Batman Team-Ups Vol. 3 (DC) Man, they’ve gotta do something about the title of these things. Okay, obviously I haven’t read 500-pages of this between going to the shop at 1 p.m. and typing this post up around dinner time, but I did haul it home. I don’t think you need me to tell you that a super-cheap collection of the old The Brave and The Bold series is well worth a super-comics reader’s time, although, for what it’s worth, this volume seems to be all Bob Haney and all Jim Aparo, and it features some fresh new guest-stars, like The Joker, Man-Bat, The Demon, Mister Miracle, Kamandi, Richard Dragon and the apple of Mike Sterling’s eye. Now, I may not have read a single page of this issue beyond the table of contents yet, but I feel confident in reviewing it thusly: “Hey, DC! More, please! And let’s get some Showcase Presents: DC Comics Presents: The Superman Team-Ups going too, while we’re at it!”



Tales of the TMNT #53 (Mirage) Remember that Turtles comic from a million years ago where Michaelangelo went for a walk and ran afoul of some criminals trying to make off with a truckload of Christmas 1985’s hottest toy, Li’l Orphan Aliens? Well Jim Lawson does too.

Lawson provides the cover story for this ish, a 26-pager in which a plumber and his assistant visit the Turtles and company’s farmhouse, and the assistant happens to notice a very rare Li’l Orphan Alien in Shadow’s room…still in it’s original packaging! He returns to steal it and finds more than he bargains for. Rounding out the book is an 18-page story by quartet of students from James Sturm’s Center For Cartoon Studies (writers Colleen Frakes and Jon-Mikel Gates, penciller Adam Staffaroni and inker Andrew Arnold), an 8-page story by Dan Berger and Chad Hurd that references another classic TMNT Christmas story (The Leonard vs. The Foot Clan one), a pin-up of the Turtles building a snowman by Michael Dooney and another pin-up of Leonardo and Usagi Yojimbo fighting a dinosaur by Stan Sakai.

The Berger/Hurd story, “Ghosts of Christmas Past,” is pretty sleight, even given its short page-count, and basically amounts to Hurd redrawing parts of the Leonardo story, with a panel or two or original story to add to it in a satisfying (if unnecessary) way.

I used to really dislike Lawson’s work when I was a teen, but I’ve really grown to like it over the years (like Jim Aparo, he’s someone who’s art I had to grow into, I guess), and this funny little story was some of the strongest work I’ve seen from him.

I was most impressed with the students’ story though; not because it was he best, but because it was awfully great, particularly since it was the one I had the least expectations for. There’s some continuity involved that I didn’t follow—Splinter is dead, Donatello was somehow shrunk, Raphael is a big, huge, mutated snapping turtle?—but there are some really neat visuals involving Donatello’s size that are quite casually communicated, and the meditation about the ninja turtles’ lifespans in regard to those of tortoises is interesting and well written.


Tiny Titans #11 (DC) Art Baltazar and Franco’s latest issue has more, shorter stories than some of the previous ones, including the introduction of Russian foreign exchange student Starfire I (or is it Red Star?), Beast Boy’s multiple attempts to impress Terra (dude, she’s into older men…with less eyes) and a fantastic one-page strip starring Lil’ Barda. Goddamnit I love Lil’ Barda!


Trinity #29 (DC) Poor Lois; she forgot to put her shirt on before she put her blazer on, and now she’s marching with a bunch of blue people in a different dimension. I bet she feels foolish. At least on the cover. The insides are pretty fast-paced this week, with the JSI, JLA and a panel of crack sciences trying to stave off madness on the altered-earth, Alfred and the gang questing on another earth and Tarot and Charity talking shop. Oh, and Space Ranger gets lines. Space Ranger gets lines! I’m sure I’ve mentioned this 28 times before, but I really like how pretty much anyone can show up at any time during this series. For example, this issue Busiek and Bagley cross Prometheus, Brainiac, Crimson Avenger II and someone called Sky-Knight off their “To Include” list. I’ve never even heard of “Sky-Knight” before…is he new?

Marvel's March previews reviewed

(I like this one 'cuz Greg Land didn't make it)

AGENTS OF ATLAS #2
Written by JEFF PARKER
Pencils by CARLO PAGULAYAN & GABRIEL HARDMAN
Cover by GREG LAND
Variant Cover by ED MCGUINNESS
Norman Osborn's shadow government looks to pull ahead in the arms race with the help of the Atlas Foundation and the Uranian weaponry of the world's most bizarre defense contractor, Marvel Boy! The dark contacts grow even more solid when Jimmy Woo meets his understudy - Temujin, the son of the Mandarin! How does this all connect to one of the Agents' 1958 missions? Access M-11's datahold and find out!

Uh oh, I hope this is a 50/50 variant cover thing instead of one of those deals where I have to pay a bunch extra to get the variant. Because my desire to read Agents of Atlas and my goal of never bringing another piece of Greg Land's work into my home are in direct opposition here.



AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #589
Written by FRED VAN LENTE
Pencils by PAULO SIQUEIRA
Cover by KLAUS JANSON, CHRIS ELIOPOULOS & DEAN WHITE
CHARACTER ASSASSINATION may be over, but the troubles keep coming as Spidey's old nemesis THE SPOT returns deadlier than ever! Wait. Did we just use "The Spot" and "deadlier" in the same sentence? You better believe it -- with his teleportation powers, he's poised to make a name for himself as an unstoppable killer for hire, and the only thing standing between him and his latest target is your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!

Spidey’s one of those characters that I like in general, but don’t feel any pressing need to actively follow just to see what he’s up to, particularly now that Marvel reneged on their side of the “let’s pretend this stuff is real” bargain and did away with the ongoing soap opera aspects of the character and his life. Well, they didn’t do away with it, they just started it over, but if I’m following Marvel Adventures Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man, I see no reason to follow a third version.

So after the reboot, I’ve decided to just read ASM when I really like the writer and really like the artist.

I haven’t thought about what to do if I like the writer and the villain, but am neutral on the artist. Hmmm...Good thing I've got three months to think about it…



AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE FEATURING REPTIL #1
Written by CHRISTOS N. GAGE
Pencils by STEVE UY
Cover by HUMBERTO RAMOS
Stegron the Dinosaur Man and his dinosaur army launch a campaign of destruction across America! With the Fifty State Initiative in tatters from the fallout of Secret Invasion, Tigra must pull together a squad from the few superhumans still fit for duty, including Cloud 9, Komodo, Prodigy...and a brand new recruit. Be here for the debut of Marvel's newest superstar--REPTIL! Will he save the Initiative...or ruin it?
48 PGS./Rated T+ ...$3.99

"Stegron the Dinosaur Man" was really all I needed to get excited about this, but I like the sound of "dinosaur army," "Steve Uy" and even the dumb-ass flagrantly and x-tremely misspelled codename “Reptil.” X-tremeasaurus is really the only way to improve on that name.

Oh, and check it out. This is $3.99, but it’s 48 pages. Usually these read “32 PGS” and 10 of those are ads, so you get 22 pages of story. So is this actually oversized, and we get 38 pages of story, or does that just mean Marvel sold a bunch more ads than usual? I dunno.




INCREDIBLE HERCULES #127
Written by FRED VAN LENTE & GREG PAK
Penciled by DIETRICH SMITH
Cover by DAVE WILLIAMS
King Variant by TBA
As Hera consolidates her takeover of Olympus, marking Hercules and Athena for death, she reaches out to forge an alliance with the greatest mortal power on the planet -- NORMAN OSBORN! With the forces of Heaven and Earth both arrayed against our heroes, how can they possibly survive? And what role does the ex-New Warrior AEGIS play in Hera's mad scheme?

Um, what the hell's a “King variant?” A picture of the title character wearing a crown? Repurposed Jack Kirby art found lying around the Marvel backroom? What? Anyway, these seem to be this month's zombie/monkey/skrull/villain variant theme.



Oh man, is there anything more embarrassing than showing up to battle and realizing too late that you've completely forgotten to put on pants?



SPIDER-MAN Y LA ANTORCHA HUMANA EN...¡BAHIA DE LOS MUERTOS! EDICIÓN BORICUA EN ESPAÑOL
Written by TOM BELAND
Art & Cover by JUAN DOE
¡Los 4 Fantásticos regresan a Puerto Rico! Y esta vez, la Antorcha Humana trae a su buen amigo...¡el Hombre Araña! En Vieques, la Isla Nena – un paraíso terrenal a la costa este de Puerto Rico – ¡ha surgido un gran peligro! ¿Qué ha causado que las aguas brillantes más preciosas del mundo se conviertan en una bestia carnívora?! Nuestros héroes se enfrentan al terror de la bahía bioluminiscente...¿y quién será el amigo inesperado quien único los puede ayudar? Tom Beland y Juan Doe, los creadores de LOS 4 FANTÁSTICOS: ¡ISLA DE LA MUERTE!, lanzan una nueva aventura puertorriqueña...¡disponible en esta súper-especial edición boricua en español!
48 PGS./One-Shot/Rated A ...$3.99

Look, I can't make heads or tails of this, except for all the ands and thes, but I'm pretty sure this is going to be awesome, because the creative team's Fantastic Four one-shot was awesome. Also, I can’t imagine something co-starring "La Antoracha Humana" won’t turn out pretty well.


SPIDER-MAN & THE HUMAN TORCH IN...¡BAHÍA DE LOS MUERTOS!
Written by TOM BELAND
Art & Cover by JUAN DOE
The Fantastic Four are going back to Puerto Rico! And this time, the Human Torch is bringing his good buddy Spider-Man along for the ride! Off the coast of Puerto Rico, the small, paradise-like island of Vieques is home to plants, animals, people, and the world's most beautiful glowing waters. But what deadly secret has turned the tranquil bay into...a giant radioactive monster?! And what unlikely ally turns out to be the only one who can help our heroes now? By Tom Beland and Juan Doe, the guys behind the madcap, heartwarming, fan-mega-favorite FANTASTIC FOUR: ¡ISLA DE LA MUERTE!
48 PGS./One-Shot/Rated A ...$3.99

Oh, nevermind. Yes, that looks pretty awesome.



Aaaaaaa! Okay, so here's the Todd Nauck cover for aaaaa! some kind of book about Wolverine that aaaaaaaaaaa! is some kinda fake autobiography illustrated with Marvel art through the ages and aaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Aaaaaaaaaaaa! AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaa-- (choke!)


WOLVERINE: FIRST CLASS #13
Written by PETER DAVID
Penciled by RONAN CLIQUET
Cover by DAVID WILLIAMS
Fan-favorite PETER DAVID comes to the First Classiverse! Kitty Pryde usually likes museums, but wouldn't you know it...the art gallery that Wolverine's taken her to is run by the evil HAND (they're Ninja types), which means that DAREDEVIL & ELEKTRA can't be too far away from the action...

Well it ain’t Van Lente, but something tells me this Peter David fellow will be able to tell a solid light-hearted superhero story just fine.

Quick question: I see the term "First Classiverse" in there; it was my understanding the First Class books were canon/continuity...but apparently not? I suppose that would actually make a lot of X-fans happy; me, I'm so completely unfamiliar with X-Men history that I couldn't even tell if these things adhered to continuity or not, but I've heard complaining that would indicate they're not exactly religious about it.




Adrien Brody? Is that you?

DC's March previews reviewed

ACTION COMICS #875
Written by Greg Rucka
Art by Eddy Barrows & Ruy José
Cover by Eddy Barrows & Julio Ferreira
To give the full details of this story would spoil the dramatic finale of the "New Krypton" crossover, and we don't want to do that! Suffice to say, a "World Without Superman" is a very dangerous place, indeed, and the only thing standing between the good (and not so good) folks of Earth and an impending shadow of doom are the all-new Nightwing and Flamebird!

Eisner Award-winning writer Greg Rucka (FINAL CRISIS: REVELATIONS) teams with rising star Eddy Barrows (TEEN TITANS) to kick off a bold new era for ACTION COMICS!

SUPERMAN #686
Written by James Robinson
Art by Renato Guedes & Wilson Magalháes
Cover by Eddy Barrows & Julio Ferreira
Following the startling events of "New Krypton" and the shocking occurrence in the Phantom Zone, Earth finds itself without its greatest protector! Luckily, Metropolis still has a few heroes, like Mon-El and the Guardian. But after years of knowing nothing but the solitude of the Phantom Zone, how will Mon-El acclimate himself to society? And the recently returned Guardian has his hands full with his new position in the Science Police. How can they fill Superman's shoes? They'd better figure it out fast, because dangerous mysteries abound which will carry all the way into 2010!

The highly acclaimed writer-artist team of James Robinson and Renato Guedes continue their run on SUPERMAN with or without The Man of Steel!

Look, I don't care if that is Superboy in the Nightwing costume, sending Superman out of the picture so a bunch of Q-listers can bathe in his limelight just isn't going to end well, DC. And "World Without a Superman?" Haven't I seen this storyline already? Repeatedly?

I'm enjoying the current "New Krypton" storyline, but not sure I like where it's going to end up. Greg Rucka's back on a Super-book which might be kinda exciting if he hasn't already proven that he's not much of a Superman writer. And Eddy Barrows? Doesn't he do all that awful Teen Titans art? Yuck.

Confidential to The Guardian: Um...what do you think you're doing? Are you fucking air-surfing on your shield? Really? What are you, 13? And what year is this, 1994? Let me ask you something, does Captain America surf on his shield. No, no he doesn't. And neither should you.



AZRAEL: DEATH'S DARK KNIGHT #1
Written by Fabian Nicieza
Art by Frazer Irving
Cover by Guillem March
He was a husband and a father. A brother and a friend. A cop and a dark knight. But he had all that taken away. And in return, he was given a suit of sorrows, a quest for redemption and a new name. He is Azrael, avenging angel for the Order of Purity and a new protector for Gotham City's troubled times. But who will protect the citizens from him?

Guest-starring Robin, Nightwing, Talia and the League of Assassins, this miniseries runs alongside BATTLE FOR THE COWL and features the dramatic presence of a strangely familiar, troubled hero with two things on his mind: crazed vengeance for the wrongs he has suffered and salvation for the sins he continues to commit!

So it's come to this, has it?

The art should kick ass, inside and out, though.


BATMAN: BATTLE FOR THE COWL #1
Written by Tony Daniel
Art by Tony Daniel & Sandu Florea
Covers by Tony Daniel
"Batman: R.I.P." and FINAL CRISIS saw the end of Batman. Now, months following the disappearance of her protector, Gotham City sits at a precipice and it may be too far gone for Nightwing, Robin, Commissioner Gordon and the rest of the city's heroes to save the day. Amid the fires, rioting, looting and gang warfare, one question rings out from the souls of Gotham's desperate citizens: Where is Batman?

With guest-stars galore, the destruction of a sacred Gotham City institution and an ending that will have everyone talking, this 3-issue miniseries event written and drawn by Tony Daniel (The Tenth) features the battle to take on the Mantle of the Bat. Who has earned the right? Who thinks they deserve it? Robin? Nightwing? Jason Todd? Two-Face? Catwoman? Batgirl? Who will ultimately win the BATTLE FOR THE COWL?

Well I know Tony Daniel can't draw a comic book. Maybe he can write one? You'll have to let me know how it turns out guys.



BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #3
Written by Matt Wayne
Art by Andy Suriano & Dan Davis
Cover by Scott Jeralds
When the Ultra-Humanite wants to score big, he goes straight to the top – he's after the President! But Batman and Green Arrow have a rescue plan so daring that we could only call this story "President Batman"!

Yessssssssssss! Um, that's all I have to say about this comic.





One punch. He took that hurdle down with just one punch!



GREEN LANTERN CHRONICLES VOL. 1 TP
Written by John Broome
Art by Gil Kane, Joe Giella & Murphy Anderson
Cover by Gil Kane & Joe Giella
DC adds a new title to the CHRONICLES series: GREEN LANTERN CHRONICLES, collecting the adventures of Hal Jordan in the exact order of their original publication. In this first volume featuring SHOWCASE #22-24 and GREEN LANTERN #1-3, Hal meets the dying Abin Sur and gains his power ring before facing the menace of the Weaponers of Qward.

Wait, wait, wait...Green Lantern?

Okay, first: Fuck that guy.

Second, if the idea of the Chronicles program is to reprint in exact order of their original publication every single story featuring a character, you've already gone and fucked this one up by missing all the Green Lantern stories featuring Alan Scott. So either re-title this shit Hal Jordan Chronicles or go back to the drawing board.

And third, Silver Age Green Lantern? I thought the idea behind these was to chronicle DC's oldest and most enduring characters. Shouldn't we get a Wonder Woman Chronicles next?

I'd also like a Plastic Man Chronicles and a Captain Marvel Chronicles, since their Golden Age adventures are only available in expensive Archives, but, c'mon, Hal Jordan before Wonder Woman? How is that not fucking insane?!



JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #25
Written by Geoff Johns & Jerry Ordway
Art by Jerry Ordway & Bob Wiacek
Cover by Alex Ross
Variant cover by Dale Eaglesham & Nathan Massengill
The "Black Adam and Isis" epic concludes here! With Billy Batson banished from the Rock of Eternity, the Justice Society calls upon an old friend to help in the battle against the Black Marvel family and stop Black Adam and Isis once and for all!

Jesus, will this "Black Mary" phase never end?

And hey, look, it's a teenage girl flashing her panties at the readers. Damn, she must be evil!



ORACLE #1
Written by Kevin VanHook
Art by Don Kramer and Jay Leisten
Cover by Guillem March
Part 1 of 3-part story that will change the life of Oracle forever! Barbara Gordon, after disbanding the Birds of Prey, returns to Gotham City as a recluse only to lose herself to her Oracle identity entirely. But when the evil Calculator seeks the remnants of the Anti-Life Equation to save the life of his daughter, Oracle will be caught in the crossfire, and Barbara Gordon will pay the ultimate price!

Ha ha, remember a few weeks back when Dan DiDio was talking about the cancellation of Birds of Prey and said there was going to be a very important Oracle series coming up, although they hadn't nailed down who was writing it. I just knew it was going to be good when he said that because the best stories are always the ones where an editor has a "story" that needs told, he just needs the right writer to put it in script form.

Well, it looks like they tapped Kevin VanHook, the writer of Batman and Superman vs. Werewolves and Vampires, who is a "famous" Hollywood person you've never heard of who works in visual effects.

So this is going to be great. Particularly since it will be Oracle vs. The Calculator for, what, the eight or ninth time since Identity Crisis?

I do like the cover though. Have I mentioned how much I like this Guillem March character before?



SIMON DARK #18
Written by Steve Niles
Art and cover by Scott Hampton

Can there truly be life after death? Simon and his family of friends must cope with the gruesome aftermath of a profound loss. But the load may be too heavy for Simon's shoulders to bear. Has his time as Gotham's darkest protector come to a close? Must he give up his dreams of a normal life?
FINAL ISSUE • On sale March 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99

There's the one I've been waiting for, the "FINAL ISSUE" one. Not because I have anything against the title or anything—I only read the first issue, and it was fine if nothing super-special—but simply because I couldn't believe it was lasting as long as it was.



TEEN TITANS #69
Written by Sean McKeever
Art by Allan Goldman & Julio Ferreira
Cover by Eddy Barrows & Ruy José
Get ready for the debut of the new Teen Titans line-up! What surprising heroes show up as part of the team? Who made the cut and who got sent home? And where do they go from here? This special issue sets the stage for the "Deathtrap" crossover with TITANS, which kicks off in the upcoming TEEN TITANS ANNUAL!


Hmmm...let's take Robin off the team. That oughta help sales!



TRINITY #40-43
Written by Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza
Art by Mark Bagley & Art Thibert, Scott McDaniel & Andy Owens, Tom Derenick & Wayne Faucher and Mike Norton & Ande Parks
Covers for issues #40-42 by Jesus Merino; cover for issue #43 by Shane Davis & John Dell
As the Dark Trinity's all-out war reaches fever pitch, Krona rears his head with destructive consequences, and Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman face a world that's changing all around them. Can they find a way back from exile? And even if they can, does the world have any hope of survival? Guest-starring everybody!

I always like when I see "Guest-starring everybody!" in a solicit or next issue box. It's particularly exciting to see ti attached to a Trinity solicit because, if you've been following the series, you know Busiek and Bagley have been trying to give every character DC owns the rights to at least a cameo in this thing, so when they say "everybody" I fully expect to see everybody.

Tomahawk just fell to #2 on my list of comics I want to see collected into Showcase Presents volumes

Have you ever looked at Comics.org's gallery of Weird War Tales covers before? I mean, really looked at it?

Seeing the original Creature Commandos show up in action alongside Superman in last week's Action Comics got me curious about them, so I spent some time poking around Comics.org, and it seems there adventures are just as crazy-looking as you'd expect those of a Frankenstein-like monster, a vampire, a werewolf, a robot, a medusa and some asshole in an orange shirt fighting against the Axis in World War II to look:

Monsters fighting Nazi's while Frankenstein lifts a giant stone swastika over his head,


disguising themselves as a circus that tours concentration camps with (the one with the cover blurb that promises Hitler will freak out that Chris Sims detailed last Halloween),

fighting lions in a coliseum before a crowd of giants,

and, uh, well look, there's Frankenstein, and he's riding a bomb Dr. Strangelove style.

So I look at these covers and I think, Man, wouldn't it be swell to read all these great stories of monsters fighting Nazis, preferably on cheap newsprint-like paper, in black and white, in a trade that doesn't cost very much? Like a Showcase Presents. But it doesn't look like there are actually 500-pages worth of Creature Commandos stories, so DC would need plenty of filler to round out the trade.

Well then, why not just go ahead and publish a Showcase Presents Weird War Tales or three? My favorite of the Showcases have been the war ones (Haunted Tank, War That Time Forgot and Enemy Ace), so there's one sale right there. And perhaps if the Creature Commandos will be sticking around the DCU for a while now, there will be an upsurge in interest in them?

At the very least, it seems like a Weird War Tales would offer the same sort of Holy shit, these are some crazy-ass old comics! thrills that War That Time Forgot offered. In addition to the Creature Commandos and what, based on the cover gallery, seems to be the U.S. ongoing war against skeletons and ghosts, there's apparently some pretty insane stuff in this series. Perhaps even more insane stuff than in Tomahawk, which I've also been hoping gets the Showcase treatment, so I can learn why that giant purple gorilla has a Native American headdress and is shooting a giant bow and arrow.

For example:











And my personal favorite:
It's not just that it's a cover with a centaur with a machine gun fighting a tank. It's that this centaur has those haunted Joe Kubert eyes. That is one war-weary centaur.

So, to summarize: DC should totally publish a Showcase Weird War Tales volume so I can totally buy it.

Today is Jack Cole's birthday

In a perfect world, he'd be 94 today.

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)

Meanwhile, on Blog@Newsarama...

Well it's been almost two weeks now, and I've so far managed not to cross-post anything both here and at my new home away from home, Blog@Newsarama.com, but today I wanted to post a heads-up here about review there, as it may be of special interest to my fellow Columbusites.

Local artist, comics creator and musician/performer Phonzie Davis had a new comic book hit the new comic rack this past Wednesday. It's a real, live, full-size, staples-and-everything comic book, it's called Left-Handed Sophie and it's pretty damn good. You can read me discussing it in greater detail over at Blog@ by clicking here.

The other reason I'm kinda sorta cross-posting this is because I can't figure out how to post large images at Blog@ on account of my not knowing how to do anything on a computer besides type (and, on occasion, beat the hell out of Kanjar Ro's space pirates).

So, here's the title character battling a bully in the school cafeteria:


And here's a page from later in the book, demonstrating how information-dense some of the book is:


If it looks or sounds like something that might be up your alley, word on the street (i.e. the Internet) is that Davis will be signing books at The Laughing Ogre at 4 p.m. this coming Wednesday (December 17).

Hey Kids! Comics!

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

Review: Jamilti and Other Stories

Like many of the people who find themselves using the term “graphic novel” on a daily basis, I’m not entirely comfortable with it, in large part because it’s a term that doesn’t really mean anything, or, rather, means too much. A sort of blanket term for anything with panels, it’s what publishers and libraries use to refer to what I called “comics” as a kid: Original graphic novels, collections of comic books published serially by one creative team, anthologies of comic books published serially by many creators over the span of decades, collections of comic strips, prose/comics hybrids, whatever.

It’s a damn shame really, and yet arguing about it is fruitless: It’s the word we’ve got, so it’s the word we’ve gotta use.

Israeli-born cartoonists Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly; 2007) was a graphic novel in the real, true definition of the term. It was the comics equivalent of a prose novel; it was a rather long work of fiction that featured a somewhat complex plot driven by the actions of its protagonists, and it was conceived, created, published and meant to be read as a single experience.

Mondan’s latest work, published this fall, is not a graphic novel, at least, not in that sense of the word. Jamilti and Other Stories (Drawn & Quarterly) is a graphic short story collection.

And that’s exactly how it reads. Like Exit Wounds, Jamilti has the tone and resonance of a work of literature, only here it is several, shorter works of literature.

It seems strange, even dangerous to use the word literature like this, as if to distinguish it from entertainment when talking comics, which then seems to imply Exit Wounds and Jamilti aren’t entertaining because they’re literature, or a comic created chiefly to entertain its readers doesn’t count as literature but, well, here we are: Talking about comics, just like talking about books, gets awfully tricky sometimes, particularly when you start the damn review by talking about he words you’ll be using while doing the talking.

But that was my experience of reading Jamilti—it was like reading a collection of short stories from a respected novelist.

While this is Modan’s next book published chronologically, the work within mostly predates Exit Wounds. The seven short stories were created between 1998 and 2007, and were all previously published by either Actus Independent Comics or, in the case of the title story, Drawn + Quarterly Volume 5. So while this is technically a follow-up, it doesn’t show where Modan’s going so much as where she’s been (In fact, the final story, “Your Number One Fan,” is the only one that looks and reads all that much like Exit Wounds).

Modan’s art style varies from story to story in ways minor—one is white, most are in color; one is printed horizontally on the pages, the others vertically; one story makes each page its own panel, while the others are broken into more traditional grids; et cetera—and major, with some quite loosely drawn with more abstracted character designs. It’s all recognizably the work of the same author however, with Modan’s collapsed field of vision and flattened space ever present, and the highly illustrative artwork the exact forms of the bodies can be somewhat amorphous.

There’s a great deal of variety in the tone of voice that tells the stories as well, although the subject matter is rather consistent, dealing as it does with families or family-like units contending with missing pieces and contemplating how to move forward, or if to move forward.

Perhaps the most whimsical of them is “The King of Lillies,” in which a plastic surgeon tries to transform all of his patients into the likeness of the young woman he loved and lost, although there’s a streak of silliness in “The Panty Killer,” about a serial killer with an unusual M.O. Several deal with the violence and nearness of two enemy peoples that was part of Exit Wounds; in the short, punchy affecting title story, a nurse helps the “victim” of a bombing and is rewarded with extremely conflicted feelings, and “Homecoming” manages to be somewhat comical in the way it treats the expectations of a family hoping against hope that a MIA soldier son will someday, somehow return to them.

Each of the seven stories is strong on its own, so naturally enough they all add up to a pretty great book, made greater than the sum of the parts by the way they comment on and reflect one another.

It was clear last year that Modan was a pretty great graphic novelist. It’s now clear she’s also a pretty great graphic short story teller.



RELATED: Check out a preview of the title story here.

And here’s an interview of Modan my fellow Blog@Newsarama contributor Michael C. Lorah conducted back in August.

Weekly Haul: December 10th

Action Comics #872 (DC Comics) The Creature Commandos. Ultra the Multi-Alien. Gold Kryptonite. That’s…that’s a lot of cool stuff for a 2008 issue of Action Comics, let alone one written by Geoff Johns and one that’s part seven in a big multi-book crossover storyline.

In this chapter of the “New Krypton” story (illustrated by Pete Woods), Superman, Supergirl and Uncle Zor argue with Aunt Alura about whether or not its cool to kill policemen, while Lex Luthor launches a spectacular attack on New Krypton through Brainiac’s inert ship and the motherfucking Creature Commandos team-up with Ultra the Multi-Alien and Superman to fight robots. Meanwhile, The Guardian rallies a bunch of superheroes to go kick Kandor’s ass, and Johns teases the new Nightwing’s identity so damn hard that if it’s not Superboy/Connor Kent/Kon-El/“The Kid” somehow back from the dead, then Johns just isn’t playing fair.

As far as the plotting goes, this is a pretty exciting 22 pages, and it’s nice to see Johns using some obscure(-ish) DC characters for something other than heat-vision fodder.


Booster Gold #15 (DC) I took the Rick Remender-written issues off and decided to just wait around until Dan Jurgens took over as both writer and artists to decide whether or not to stick with the title now that original writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz have moved on.

Initially I wasn’t crazy about the choice of Jurgens, even if he did create the character, but this was actually a pretty decent read, with only one or two attempts at humor that made me wince (and only one page wasted on reminding us of Identity Crisis for no reason other than to add a little melodrama).

Booster and his little sister go back in time to renaissance Italy for fun, cause some problems, and find themselves in an altered timeline. Trying to figure out exactly went wrong, Booster finds himself teaming-up with The Elongated Man, from way back in the day (Like, Showcase Presents era).

If Jurgens can manage at least this level of quality month in and month out, I’ll probably stick around. I’ll definitely be here next month, as Booster Gold meets Hans Von Hammer, the Hammer of Hell next issue.


Captain Britain and MI13 #8 (Marvel Comics) Paul Cornell gets 500 points for Blade’s Wordsword (“Papier mache. Made of pages from magical books. Good against demons. Not so good in the rain.”), and 100 points for the comic book science of the titular agency’s “pentagram tesseract” generator.



(Above: That's my favorite of the eight covers for this comic, by John Romita Sr. It was a 1-in-15 variant though, so I ended up getting the Cassaday one)

The Death-Defying ‘Devil #1 (Dynamite) I find myself incredibly frustrated by the fact that I can’t put my finger exactly on why it is that these cool Golden Age character resurrections Dynamite has committed to with the help of Alex Ross have been so incredibly dull. If I were better at this comics-criticizing game, I think I’d be able to properly diagnose the problem with Project: Superpowers and its spin-off minis, of which this is one, but I just can’t manage it with any degree of certainty.

I know I was always fascinated by these characters, when I had yet to read a single comic featuring any of them, and only knew them from their names, the artists who made them, and the occasional covers I’d see (Here, doesn’t this look pretty awesome?). And yet I couldn’t even make it through the whole Project: Superpowers series, and was dismayed to see that not only did DDD #1 pick up on the status quo of that series, it also picked up on the tone and spirit of it: That is, boring as hell, terribly diluted and somehow palpably generic.

Is the problem perhaps the way in which Ross and his collaborators chose to Marvel-ize these various Golden Agers into a cohesive universe, and then treat their decades of obscurity as a plot point in a meta-story that made no further attempts to comment on that obscurity, except to explain why they weren’t in comics for so long, thus making the resulting comics seem like just your average DC or Marvel book, only without the years-to-decades of readers’ personal investment in the characters? Maybe that’s it.

I honestly don’t know, nor do I know how Ross and/or Dynamite should have perhaps proceeded. All I know is that it’s notoriously difficult to create a comic book universe shared-setting all at once like this, and even the companies that managed to do a decent job of it for a while (Valiant, Milestone) didn’t last all that long.

So: This comic is written by Joe Casey and drawn by Edgar Salazar. It features the superhero formerly known as Daredevil, the mute one with the cool costume and boomerang, as he listens to Green Lama prattle on about New Shangri La, sees some claw-shaped graffiti, and then goes to fight some Claw terrorists with the French lady he met in Project: Superpowers, and then he fights a guy dressed like him, only in purple and green.

The art is pretty great, and I liked the look of the book much more than its parent series, but there is absolutely nothing special or even mildly interesting about the script. It’s just a guy, probably a good guy, fighting some other guys, who are terrorists. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this somewhere before.

I won’t be interested in a second issue of this, but Dynamite, seriously: I would buy the hell out of a collection of the original Golden Age Daredevil comics.



Detective Comics #851 (DC) DC has chosen to capitalize on the increased eyeballs and buzz the Batman franchise earned through Grant Morrison’s “Batman R.I.P.” story arc in about the weirdest way imaginable: Entering a confused, months-long period in which the next part of the Batman story is so vague it’s impossible to even spot, let alone follow.

The true ending of the story, according to interviews, which is where far too much super-comic storytelling goes on these days, occurs in Final Crisis #6, which won’t be out until the end of January, if it doesn’t fall further behind schedule than it already has. Meanwhile, we know all of the Batman satellite titles are being canceled in the near future, presumably to reflect big changes, and the two Batman ongoings—Batman and Detective Comics—will play host to about four different epilogues/codas, by four different writers.

The good news is that those writers are all pretty respectable names. This is the first part of one of those codas, by Denny O’Neil. I don’t know how much of a draw his name actually is in the market, but I know it’s hardly hyperbolic to refer to O’Neil as a legendary writer, and I imagine his presence will prove enormously attractive to longtime Batman readers like myself.

While O’Neil’s choices for the Batman, his portrayal and the way the character interacted with the rest of the DCU might not have been popular with every single DC reader, you have to admit that, when O’Neil was editing the Batman line for DC, the character was remarkably consistent from book to book, the franchise was remarkably streamlined and it was remarkably free of Jason Todd being Superboy-punched back to life as a psycho-killer, Were-Scarerows and murders committed by Leslie Thompkins.

So while five years ago the name “Denny O’Neil” on the cover of a Batman comic wouldn’t have done anything to fire my passions, now it’s oddly comforting.

So what’s O’Neil’s particular coda about, exactly? Well, while Morrison’s, which began in Batman last week, was an extended dream sequence of maybe-memories, O’Neil’s “Last Days of Gotham” is set in Gotham after the events of “Batman R.I.P.” and that fateful (fatal?) helicopter punch.

Actually, it starts “several years ago” during the Gotham earthquake (See Batman: Cataclysm, but only if you must), at which time Gotham stage actress Millicent Mayne is being threatened by some thugs when she’s saved by the natural disaster. She narrates in O’Neillian prose about the experience, and the weird sensation of filling up with the presence of Gotham’s dead.

Flash forward to “One week ago,” when we see those same three thugs who, remarkably, haven’t changed clothes for several years. Or they coincidentally are all wearing the same outfits they did back then. Or they all three have closets full of the same clothes, so they actually have changed them many times since, but they always look the same.

Anyway, they attack M.M. in the name of Two-Face, Batman is apparently missing, and so Nightwing has to come in and fill-in (though, despite the cover, not as Batman, sparing us Prodigal: Redux…at least for now).

As a story, it’s pretty much just something to fill up the pages and kill the time, but O’Neil’s old-school narration and down-to-earth, plain, old, every day criminals intent on paydays give it some charm.

The real reason to pick up the issue at all, however, is the artwork by Guillem March. I haven’t really been feeling the art on any of the Bat-books of late (‘TEC has been strong since Nguyen became the regular artist, but that was also about the time Dini started devoting the book to Gotham’s deadliest plastic surgeon and I gave up on it), particularly the work of Tony Daniel whom, I may have mentioned before, sucks.

But this March character? Holy shit, is this guy good. There was something very European about his work (and, poking around his site, I think that might be because he’s from Europe). I see a little Tim Sale here, a little Joe Kubert there, a touch of Marcos Martin, but it doesn’t really seem derivative of any of those particular artists, so much as the way he draws certain faces, shadows, outlines or expressions reminds me of those artists.

The story-telling is crystal clear (which you would think would be an absolute minimum requirement in any professional comics artist, but, sadly, it isn’t), almost all of the panels have actual backgrounds to them, the character designs are all distinct and the faces highly expressive, attention is paid to page lay out and panel shape, and when March breaks a panel border, it’s almost always for a good reason—to highlight the action or emotion of that scene. Just look at page 17. How many times have we seen Nightwing jump through a skylight? Three hundred times? Five hundred? And yet here it’s like seeing him do it for the first time.

I’m really excited to read the next chapter of this story, not because I’m at all concerned whether Nightwing will die in the burning building he was left unconscious in during the cliffhanger ending, or what’s up with Ms. Mayne—I really just want to see how March draws what happens next.

Here’s a preview of the first few pages of the issue, if you’d like to get a better sense of his work than I’m probably conveying.



Final Crisis #5 (DC) Oh wow, this series is still going on? That was my first thought as I flipped open the cover, on which J.G. Jones demonstrates that Wonder Woman’s costume must be incredibly uncomfortable to wear. Yes, while the outcome seems remarkably clear—Darkseid just about wins, then loses, and the birth of the Fifth World gives us a the DC Multiverse 5.0—we’ve still got a few more tedious months of waiting for Jones, and the co-artists brought in to help him get this thing done in as few extra months as possible, to draw the damn pictures.

On the most basic level of super-comics criticism—Can I figure out what the hell is going on in the pictures? Does Frankenstein pop a wheelie on a motorcycle? Is Dr. Sivana involved?—this issue passes muster. But frankly, it doesn’t seem as special as it should. It’s essentially just an arc of Grant Morrison’s JLA monthly, but with less kinetic art, fewer surprises, higher expectations and an insupportable amount of hype.

Still, Frankenstein does pop a wheelie on a motorcycle. So there’s that.



Secret Six #4 (DC) Like most comics readers who can also string a few sentences together, I have long dreamed of writing comics, and there’s no company I’d rather write comics for than DC Comics, on account of the fact that they own all the very best comics characters that aren’t Namor or ninja turtles. That fact won’t come as a surprise. But this might: You know what I’d want to write for DC more than anything?

Those stupid punning blurbs that appear on some of their comics.

Not all DC Comics have them, but an awful lot do. Often times they’re just descriptive—like this week, Action Comics has a blurb reading “The Startling Return of The Creature Commandos!” and Booster Gold’s reads “In The Grip of The Elongated Man!”—and sometimes there’s just no room when there’s something like “A Final Crisis Tie-In!”, but sometimes there are just these…random sounding phrases on the cover.

They’re kind of like headlines, I guess, usually playing off the cover image and/or the character and/or the nature of the story, but not always. I don’t really understand these things, or why they are there. I can’t imagine they’ve ever sold even one comic book to one customer; the descriptive ones, sure, but the joke ones? I can’t imagine someone seeing an issue of Birds of Prey that says “Birdstrike!” on it and thinking, “Ooh, I should get this comic, because it says ‘Birdstrike!’ on the cover.”

Anyway, I think that would be the very best job at DC Comics. I imagine there’s someone who has their own office—not a big or particularly nice one, but still, an office—at DC HQ and their only job is to write these stupid little pun/blurb/headlines that appear on covers. Each month, they’d get, like, 50 mock-ups of all the DC covers for the month, and then they pin them up on the wall, and pace around all day, stroking their chins and thinking of what blurbs to match to the images.

That would be a fine job.*

Take this issue of Secret Six. On the cover, we see the five members of the Secret Six in an ice cream truck, striking various action poses appropriate to their nature. This exact scene never occurs in the book, but they do all ride in an ice cream truck in the comic. Someone must have looked at this image long and hard and found that something was missing. Some sort of combination of words was needed on the cover to really complete it. A phrase taking into account the elements of the cover. Let’s see…there’s an ice cream truck. And some super-villains. Hmm….

And they arrived at “Ice Creeps.” Because super-villains are creeps, right? And “creeps” sounds a little like “cream.” Get it?

Yes, that job would rule.

Oh, this issue was pretty good…maybe the best of the series so far. I’m pretty sure Gail Simone owes Geoff Johns some small percentage of any royalties she makes off this book, since she wrote a panel in which a villain tears someone’s arm off. Johns trade-marked arms-being-ripped-off, didn’t he…?



Trinity #28 (DC) What the hell guys? Why aren’t you reading Trinity? According to Marc Oliver-Frisch’s sales analysis, not only does Trinity sell fewer copies than 52 or (Shudder!) Countdown, it’s shedding more readers faster than either of those series.

Now, I expect Trinity to get its ass kicked by 52, for all sorts of reasons. But Countdown? More people were more into Countdown than Trinity? How is that even possible?

I’m afraid that somewhere down the line, maybe when planning the fifth or sixth weekly, DC’s going to look at Trinity vs. Countdown and decide readers must prefer a weekly that’s sold as a big, important “spine” of the rest of the universe no matter how shoddily it’s created or whether or not it actually matches up to anything else in the “body” of the DCU to a competent (on a weak week) to rather good (on a rather good week) series that is somewhat self-contained.

And Trinity’s version of self-contained is still pretty expansive. I mean, Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley do seem bound and determined to at least namedrop or cameo every single DCU character ever during the course of this thing (This issue they cross Brimestone and The Folded Man off their list).

The last two issues were pretty dull and slow-moving, devoted to Busiek’s pounding home the architecture of the universe point, but with this issue, we’re back in super-action, with the altered Alfred Pennyworth and company journeying into another universe looking for Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and, in the back-up, the JSI taking on super-villains.

In conclusion: Buy this book. Only you can prevent a Countdown II.



*I realize this job probably doesn’t exist, and that it’s probably just the assistant editor on the respective books and/or someone in production who comes up with these things. But in the DC HQ that exists in my imagination, there’s one person whose job it is. The DC offices in my imagination probably don’t match up to the real ones at all. For example, I think trade collections are determined by a rabid wolf trapped in the office of the person who was actually hired to determine what to collect in trade when, and that Dan DiDio looks, talks and acts exactly like Perry White and that when Grant Morrison visits the office to talk about story ideas he appears in Metron’s chair.