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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For additional Caleb-talking-about-comics content, please see Blog@Newsarama.com.

I have short reviews of Batman: Gotham Underground, Beasts of Burden, The Color of Water, The Color of Heaven and Johnny Boo Book Three: Happy Apples available for your perusal here.

Ralph Cosentino's The Marvelous Misadventures of Fun-Boy

I realize this is my third post this month about a work by Ralph Cosentino, but I swear I'm not trying to turn this into a Ralph Cosentino fan blog or anything*. It's just that I'm really excited about his art, and every new book of his I check out seems well worth spending some time talking about. Take, for example, The Marvelous Misadventures of Fun-boy (Viking; 2006), a book you'll likely find shelved with the children's picture books at your local library or book store, but which is actually a short collection of a dozen comic strips.

It's a rather unusual book in that respect, as it's essentially a comic strip collection of a comic strip that seemed to have been reverse-engineered from the collection in order to fill the collection, if that makes sense (Which it probably doesn't).

The book is a six-and-a-half-inch high, eleven-inch long hardcover rectangle. When you open it up, the picture space doubles to 22-inches long. Across this huge horizontal space are stretched a series of four-panel comic strips. Each opens with the title of the strip, Fun-Boy in the upper right-hand corner, followed by the name of an episode.

Each stars the main character "Fun-Boy," an imaginative little dark haired boy who gets into little adventures and misadventures that end with gentle punchlines. The strips aren't terribly funny, but still funnier than about nine-tenths of what you'll find in the funnies pages on any given day. They're also silent, so the jokes are all completely visual in nature.

This suits Cosentino's work just fine, given the strength of his visuals. The level of abstraction here is somewhere between that of The Story of Honk-Honk-Ashoo and Swella-Bow-Wow and Batman: The Story of The Dark Knight.

The designs are stripped-down and super-cute, but still contain plenty of detail—it's just that the details are themselves stripped-own and super-cute. It's a flat, flat world, where every shape looks a bit like a piece of colorful paper cut out and reassembled into the big, square panels seamlessly to create a new comic strip reality.

I'm well beyond the target audience for the book, and I honestly didn't laugh, chuckle or even smile once at any of the jokes (unless you count the identification of one of the little kid characters on the inside front cover as "Pirate Steve," who, for some reason, has five o'clock shadow). But I still found it well worth my time just to see what Cosentino was doing here.

Here's an example of one of the strips. Because of the shape of the book, I had to chop it in half to fit it on the scanner. Just bear in mind that these four panels would stretch across the 22-inch length of the book in a single row if you were holding the real deal in your hands:

By the way, does that joke seem a little familiar? If so, you may remember that Cosentino used a version of it in the comics strip Scaredy Cat that Honk-Honk-Ashoo was reading in the paper.

Cosentino engages in quite a few allusions to Honk-Honk-Ashoo in this work, actually. For example, Fun-Boy's slippers above look an awful lot like Honk-Honk-Ashoo's bunny slippers, don't they?

In the first strip in the book, Fun-Boy is shown in a library in the first and fourth panels. In the first, there's a spine that reads "Honk-Honk-Ashoo & Swella Bow-Wow" on the bookshelf in the background. And here in the fourth, you can see the book's cover:


The book appears again in the fourth and final panel of one of the Little Nemo-esque strips, in which Fun-Boy awakens from an exciting scene only to find it was all a dream. It's on the floor near Giant Iron-Man and Spider-Guy:
I didn't notice that until my second or third time through the book. The first time I was way too distracted by a disturbing detail of this panel. Look at what Fun-Boy is using as a pillow! It's the severed head of Honk-Honk-Ashoo!

Severed heads aside, I would understand if you think this book looks a little too childish to engage your more mature, sophisticated interests. After all, Amazon recommends it for ages four to eight. So I would just like to point out that there's a little something in here for grown men too (beyond all the great art, of course). Fun-Boy's mom?
Totally hot.


Okay, I swear this is my last post about Cosentino, as Fun-Boy brings us to the end of his bibliography. Well, at least until April, when his Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel is due, and I have a feeling I'll probably have something to say about that too.



*Although if I were, I'd be sure and point out this awesome Batman vs. Godzilla painting of his, and let you know that you can see details of it here.

I still owe you guys a Friday night post, huh?

Sorry about that. Here's um...

Let's see...

What have I got laying around here...

Ah,here.

Here are some dumb pages from my sketchbook.

At one point in the distant past, around the time Marvel announced Mighty Avengers I think, I thought it would be ever so amusing to think up additional Avengers teams and post a different one each day for a week or so.

I was going to do a Diabolic Avengers, which would have had Daredevil, Devil Dinosaur, Son of Satan and so on, and a Sean McKeever-written Characters Avengers that would have had the kid and robot from Sentinel, Gravity, Mary Jane and so on.

At some point I must have realized that it would be way too much work to be worthwhile, and/or I got distracted by a shiny object in the next room, and that's about as far as I got with that idea.

Well, I did start messing around with some sketches of a Feline Avengers team. Here, let me show you!

Here's the second and third pages full of Black Panther...
(and there's Captain Americat in the corner).

Here's Tigra, who was going to be off to the side in the group shot, talking to Tony Stark on her cell phone a la Civil War...
(That's part of a picture of El Gato, the villainous sorcerer form a single issue of Omega The Unknown, in the corner).

And this is about as far as I got with Sabretooth. I was going to go with the look he had in Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, which is much less dumb than his original Marvel Universe look...

Black Cat and Patsy Walker, Hellcat were going to make up the rest of the team.

And here I thought all the weird tension between them was because of their political differences.

So what I get from this panel is that Hawkman wants Green Arrow's ass, but he'll settle for Hal Jordan's...?

Oh and also Hawkgirl likes to watch.



(Panel from DC's Blackest Night #3 by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis and Oclair Albert)

So who wants to hear me talk about the latest Justice League line-up at (probably way too) great length?

If you do, I have a piece up on Blog@Newsarama responding to the above ad, which appeared in at least one DC book this week. You can read it here.

Weekly Haul: September 16

Agents of Atlas #11 (Marvel Comics) Girl in a bikini on page one, gorilla with a machine gun on page four, gorilla piloting an airplane on page 5, flying convertible versus a killer robot on page 10, dragon warfare on page 16, Atlanteans riding giant crabs on page 17, flying saucer on page 19, and a killer robot programmed with Muhammad Ali’s smack-talking abilities punching the head off a second killer robot on page 20 and shouting “DESTROY” with four exclamation points.

Why isn’t anyone reading this title, exactly?

It looks like this is the last issue of the series for the time being, and it’s kind of hard to believe it lasted only 11 issues. It seems that it’s only semi-canceled though, the way Runaways tends to get canceled. Word on the street—well, on the Internet—is that it’s going to become a back-up in Incredible Hercules for a while (which is a-okay in my book, since I’m reading it anyway, and I imagine if you like Inc Herc you’re going to dig AoA), and will be replaced on the shelves by an X-Men vs. Agents of Atlas miniseries, the first issue of which prominently features Wolverine on the cover.

I’m not sure if that’s really going to bring many new readers to the Agents, as they already had the more popular New Avengers guest-star and still only made it 11 issues, but here’s hoping.


Batman and Robin #4 (DC Comics) Just three issues in, and the quality of this title does falling down the stairs. The art team of Philip Tan and Jonathan Glapion replace Frank Quitely, and they just aren’t very good, as is made double apparent by the fact that Quitely drew the cover for this issue—just flip the cover and the visuals devolve into amateur hour.

Look at that page. (Actually, you can look at the first third of the book without even buying it, by downloading the preview from DC's site). Are they on a rooftop? In a club? A club on a rooftop? A club high in a sky scraper with a huge window? Who the fuck knows? Tan's still wrestling with perspective apparently, based on how that second panel turned out.

I was expecting the drop in quality though, and I’m glad to report that it’s not that bad. It’s not good work, it’s certainly the worst work on any of the comics I’ve read this week (and you’d think one of DC’s best-selling comics penned by one of the company’s best-selling writers would have better art than Brave and The Bold, wouldn’t you?), but it usually didn’t take too long to figure out what was supposed to be happening in the panels, and the mis en scene wasn’t as messy as it was during Tony Daniel’s partnership with Morrison (although as with those issues, I found myself in a constant state of reimagining each panel the way it might look if it were drawn better).

In this issue, the new Batman and Robin face-off against darker, more dangerous versions of themselves in the form of vigilantes The Red Hood and Scarlet. It’s refreshing to see Morrison use the old villain-kills-super-characters-to-show-how-bad-ass he is technique, but goes to the trouble of inventing his own super-characters first, so he’s not subtracting anything from the universe that he didn’t at least add first.

(Confidential to Commissioner Gordon: Dick Grayson isn’t the ward of Bruce Wayne anymore; Wayne adopted Grayson a couple of years ago).


Beasts of Burden #1 (Dark Horse Comics) I’ll have a full review of this over at Blog@ over the weekend (although it’s a new comic by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, so it’s not like you need me to to tell you that’s well worth reading), but I’m including a sentence on it here anyway since I did haul it home during my weekly trip to the comics shop.


Blackest Night #3 (DC) The Black Lantern Justice League attacks Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Flash Barry Allen and Ray “The Atom” Palmer, the “Indigo Tribe” of Indigo Lanterns appear and exposit the hell out of a two-page, turn-it-sideways-like-a-centerfold spread, and Geoff Johns seems to tip his hand about where this is all going super-hard (Not that there’s a whole lot of suspense about what will happen at the end of this series). Oh, and a supporting character gets killed, and this character is so minor that chances are he or she won’t be coming back at the end of this the way I imagine most of those killed in the series will (he or she isn’t immediately resurrected as a Black Lantern, for example).

If you liked the first two issues, you’ll like this one. If you didn’t, then I wouldn’t bother with this issue if I were you—the title has been rock-solid in its consistency so far.

I wanted to note a couple of things though. The first page is devoted to the component characters who make up the new Firestorm II, as they have a talk about their relationship. It’s kind of cheesy and melodramatic, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Now, I didn’t read any of Firestorm II’s short-lived title while it was still around, because I never cared about Firestorm I, so it’s not like Firestorm II was likely to entice me (I did read that last arc that Dwayne McDuffie wrote, though, because I like Dwayne McDuffie and the guest-starring Mister Miracle). So maybe this sort of thing occurred fairly regularly in the series, I don’t know. On this one-page scene, Firestorm has Jason and Gehenna, the two young people who combine forms to create the superhero Firestorm, arguing about generic relationship stuff, and at one point, Gehenna says, “Maybe we shouldn’t be Firestorm anymore.” That is awesome—superhero as metaphor for relationship. There’s potential there, and it’s exciting to see potential, even if that’s all it is, on a super-comics page.

Okay, that’s something positive, now here’s something negative. On the second page, Black Lantern Ralph Dibny is being a real jerk to Barry Allen (that’s the B.L. M.O., to be real jerks while trying to eat people’s hearts). “You were right. Going public with my secret identity way back when? Not the best idea I ever had, was it, Sue?”

I don’t get it. Sue wasn’t raped by Dr. Light because he knew that The Elongated Man was Ralph Dibny; it was a crime of opportunity, as she was alone on the League satellite with him. And she was murdered by someone who would have known Sue was married to a superhero whether Ralph was “out” or not. So what the hell is Ralph talking about? (Interesting that, a few pages later, Black Lantern Sue brings up the fact that “Jean brought along a flame-thrower ‘just in case.’ Ha ha ha, Identity Crisis was just awful and everyone—Sue Dibny, Geoff Johns, literally everyone—knows it!)

Finally, my favorite it of nerd service? The Black Lantern who appears attacking Washington D.C. on the monitor bank on pages nine and ten. That is awesome. Oh, and that same panel makes clear that yes, there is indeed a Black Lantern Rainbow Raider. Fantastic.


The Brave and the Bold #27 (DC) Well it’s about time new regular writer J. Michael Straczynski showed up here. He’s teamed with artist Jesus Saiz, to tell a story about a team-up between Batman and the Dial H For Hero dial.

They do a pretty good job. The story can veer into pretty cheesy territory at times, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a Batman/H-Dial story being a little cheesy, is there?

So teenager Robby Reed and his grandfather are visiting Gotham City (this is apparently set in the past), when a no-account, petty thief robs them and makes off with the Dial. Meanwhile, The Joker has a plan to finally kill Batman, and he might actually have gotten away with it, if the thief didn’t turn the dial and turn into another superhero.

It’s a very tidy, tightly plotted done-in-one, and JMS gets the voices of both The Joker and Batman right (I particularly liked the little speech Batman gave the new H-Dial created hero about working in Gotham; it sounds like something Batman has memorized from delivering every couple of weeks). It also serves as a pretty good introduction to the character/concept teamed up with Batman, which is what the book should do.

Saiz is no George Perez or Jerry Ordway, so the book still looks like a step down from where it was when it initially launched, but his art is clear, crisp, easy-to-read and allowed to do a lot of the heavy-lifting, as far as the story-telling is concerned. Saiz certainly doesn’t crumble under that weight.

He’s not my ideal choice for a book like this, which is—or at least I assume should be—devoted to introducing elements of the DCU to readers unfamiliar with them in the way that Perez is. I think I’d prefer someone with a more classic approach, like Perez’s, be it Ordway or Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez or Graham Nolan, but Saiz does a pretty great job here.

Welcome back to my pull list, Brave and the Bold!


M.O.D.O.K.: Reign Delay #1 (Marvel) This is Action Philosophers! and Comic Book Comics’s Ryan Dunlavey’s online comic about M.O.D.O.K. moving back to his hometown of Erie, PA (where I went to college!) in an attempt to conquer it, now in a good old-fashioned paper-and-staples comic book format. Much more on this later and elsewhere.


Tiny Titans #20 (DC) Art Baltazar and Franco riff on the old portable hole gag from classic cartoons, here generated by Raven’s handy teleportation spell. That’s the first half of the book. The second half involves Alfred doing Batman’s laundry, trying to prevent Robin and his friends from playing in the Batcave and saving Beast Boy from rocket-powered mischief. I might have already mentioned this like twenty times now, but I would totally read a Baltazar and Franco Alfred series. Maybe a back-up in Batman and Robin…?


Wednesday Comics #11 (DC) What the hell Comics-Buying Public?! More of you bought a fill-in issue of JLoA, JSoA by the Salvation Run writing team, Batman by Judd Winick and Red fucking Robin than bought the first few issues of a comic featuring all of your favorite DC superheroes and featuring work by some of the greatest writers and artists working in comics, including that Neil Gaiman fellow, who turns everything he touches into gold?

What a world, what a world…

Sigh. Anyway, this is the penultimate issue of the weekly experimentally series, and many of the strips are clearly climaxing this week, and taking the opportunity to open things up a bit with huge panels or splashes (to the extent one can have a splash panel in this format). I expect a few climaxes, and a whole lot of denouement next week.

Of special note this week?

—The end of the Batman strip is excellent, as Risso makes it appear as if the murderer is attempting to escape Batman not only by jumping out the window (as she is in the context of the comic strip) but by jumping out of the strip itself (as she appears to be). Beautiful.

—Nate Piekos’ weird alien font for the praying mantis-like alien creature in Metamorpho? That is a fantastic font for alien speech. (While this strip has been hit-or-miss, this installment is definitely one of the hit one)

—Ben Caldwell only draws 13 panels in this week’s Wonder Woman strip, and one of them is a gigantic panel that fills more than half of the space on the page, so fuck you everybody! It makes ffor one hell of an effective splash, after the cramped, claustrophobic panels that have lead up to it.

—The lay-out on the Flash strip is fantastic this week. I like the way they included the title into the dialogue, to eat up even more space on the page then usual.

—The Demon/Catwoman is one of several strips to open way up with some huge panels and, in this installment, some extremely bright colors. There’s some real nice use of Kirby dots, always appropriate in a story featuring a Kirby character, including one in which the borders of an artful burst of flame emanating from The Demon’s mouth imply Kirby dots in the night sky around it. That whole panel, in fact, is a thing of beauty.

—This week, Kyle Baker’s Hawkman is a little like this particular Brandon Bird painting.

Now I’m off to start fasting and praying that next week’s issue includes an unannounced insert featuring the Plastic Man and Creeper one-off strips…

Did any of you guys see 9 yet?

Did The Machine, that big monster robot creature that assembled other, smaller robot creatures out of whatever was handy to hunt down the little bag homunculi heroes remind anyone else of the Master Mold and its "wild Sentinels" from Grant Morrison's first arc of New X-Men? Not the various, specific configurations of course—9's were obviously a lot cooler—but just the concept in general? Or was it just me?

Ralph Cosentino's Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight

Curlicue-shaped gusts of wind blow a few stray autumn leaves past an imposing wrought iron gate, framed by two scary, demonic-looking gargoyles. In the background, a huge, dark mansion rises up into the deep blue sky, every window illuminated with yellow light, but no exterior lights playing upon it. Bare, leaf-less black trees point their branches like jagged fingers in the direction of the house, and a large flock of bats flying in an undulating cloud pass over the bright, white full moon in the direction of the house.

The image is stretched across the first two pages of Ralph Cosentino's Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight (Viking; 2008). In a rectangular box in the lower right-hand side of the image floats what looks like a perfectly rectangular scrap of paper. It reads: "Wayne Manor is where most people think I live, but only bats know my true home."

Turn the page and you see that true home. Under a spotlight in the background, a familiar figure with pointy ears and a flowing black, serrated cape sits hunched in front of a massive computer of indeterminate vintage. The big open space looks a little like a sewer, a little like a cave, and a little like an industrial space. Under spotlights are a giant penny, a dinosaur, a Batmobile and Batplane with furious expressions, and suits of armor in glass cases.

This is Cosentino's Batman, and it's an All-Star approach to the character similar to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's approach to the other most popular superhero in All-Star Superman—a contemporary take which cherry-picks the very best elements from decades worth of different interpretations of the character and synthesizes them into something that is at once modern and relevant, but also classic and iconic.

Obviously, Cosentino's book—shaped, formatted and priced like a kids picture book recommended for ages three and up, but in the medium of comics—is a shorter, less-ambitious and more straightforward story than Morrison and Quitely's 264-page series, but the method and approach are the same.

That story? Simply who Batman is and how he comes to be.

He's summoned from the cave by the Bat-signal, hops in the Batmobile and catches a crook while narrating about himself: "I fight all crime and evil. I am a creature of the night. I am...Batman! This is my story."

A strip of four panels tells of his parents and their death, a splash page introduces Alfred, a strip of three panels covers his training...

...and he tells us a bit about his villains, each of whom is introduced with a one-page splash followed by a series of four panels on the next page showing them in combat with Batman (The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face and Catwoman, if you're curious).

"There will always be a criminal to stop... A victim to save... A monster to fight...and a crook to catch," Batman says of his life. That really pretty much sums him up, doesn't it?

The villains are mostly patterned after Dick Sprang's versions...Two-Face so much so that in a different context, I might have thought that was a Sprang drawing. Cosentino's design throughout owes an acknowledged debt to Sprang and, to a lesser degree, Bob Kane. Each panel, each page is a bold punch in the face of design, and Cosentino quite deftly references classic Batman images throughout, proving the power of them even while making them his own.

The cover, for example, probably looks awfully familiar. Here's the cover of Detective Comies #27, for comparison's sake:


Inside, there's a similar version of it:

(Sorry about the poor scanning; the line to the left is the border between two pages, as that image is another of the many two-page spreads).

Here are a few more images from Batman's origin sequence, and the original Bob Kane (I think...?) images they're based on:





The book ends with an image parallel to the one it opened with. The flock of bats fly over the moon again, while in the foreground there are two different menacing figures. To the left is a bat-winged gargoyle, and to the right is Batman himself, assuming a gargoyle-like position, and announcing his name again:


Wow. That is, like, and ideal Batman. If this looks like something up your alley, here's some good news: Cosentino has a companion book entitled Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel currently scheduled for release in April.

Review: Lunch Lady Vols. 1 and 2

Jarrett J. Krosoczka's Lunch Lady books are the sort of thing we didn't have when I was a kid—graphic novels created specifically for kids. The two I recently read, Lunch Lady and The Cyborg Substitutes and Lunch Lady and The League of Librarians, were 7"-by-5"-ish hardcover digests with sturdy spines, about 100 pages a piece. Amazon suggests them for 9- to 12-year-olds, which sounds about right. Younger readers could probably still dig on them; grumpy old men can too.

I'm curious if the existence of something like Lunch Lady (as well as books like Fashion Kitty, Babymouse and the like) bodes well for the future of the medium. If kids are exposed to the form and format at a younger ag, does that mean more and more people will grow up without dealing with the hurdles and barriers previous generations did? (Well, they probably will anyway, due to a variety of other factors, but I'm just concentrating on the bound-comics-for-kids subject at the moment).

On the other hand, are the existence of books such as these merely a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of comics are no longer geared toward kids? In the absence of short, cheap, stapled, paper comics for kids—at least in the numbers and accessibility that my generation and previous generations experienced—have kids' comics simply become bookstore- and library-ready kids' graphic novels?

I don't know. But I recently read a couple of Krosoczka's Lunch Lady books.

Many elements of Lunch Lady are so familiar so as to be ubiquitous in superhero comics and movies and various parodies and riffs on them, but the application here is unique, so the familiarity didn't breed contempt so much as it bred simple familiarity. (And familiarity is more a problem for us grown-ups that kids don't share. After all, few of them have seen decades worth of James Bond movies or Adam West Batman references in pop culture).

Riffing on the word "Lunch Lady," one of those occupations that naturally sounds something like a superhero construction (like "Milk Man" or "Police Woman" or "Paper Boy"), Krosoczka imagines a character who is a school lunch lady by day, and a school lunch lady by night. During the day, she serves fish sticks and tater tots; by night, she serves justice.

She and her sidekick/gadget-maker Betty, who also works in the cafeteria, have a secret base in the school boiler room, accessible by a sliding wall obscured by a refrigerator in the kitchen. Employing an arsenal of food and kitchen utensil-themed weapons, they battle equally goofy and school-related villains.

Like West's Batman, Lunch Lady generally has the perfect gadget for every situation, and their very existence and announcement are generally pretty amusing. There are hair net nets for capturing villains, hover pizzas for transportation, fish stick nunchucks and so on.

In The Cyborg Substitutes, the lunch staff face a mad science teacher's plot to become the students' favorite teacher by capturing the rest of the faculty and replacing them with robot substitutes, who are all real hard-asses. In The League of Librarians, a league of librarians launch a plot to stop a shipment of a new video game system in an effort to combat children's ever-eroding interest in reading.

Point-of-view characters are provided by "The Breakfast Bunch," a trio of sympathetic little kids who are troubled by a bully and curious about the secret double-life of their lunch lady, which they become involved with about two-thirds of the way through the first book.

Krosoczka's cartooning chops are super-solid, and a large part of why I found the books not only readable, but engaging, despite being so far outside the target audience (and receiving the vast majority of the gags with either a groan or rolled eyes). The pages are filled with small panels, and a great variety of medium shots, long shots and close-ups. The pacing is therefore strong, and the characters designs are all fun and loose (It may be worth mentioning that he designs against type with his lead; Lunch Lady is a big eccentric looking with her thick glasses and triangle of curly hair, but she's not your typical caricature of a lunch lady).

The artwork is rendered in black and white and yellow, the color of LL's apron and rubber gloves, which gives the books the look of something drawn in pen, pencil and highlighter, certainly appropriate for a book set in and around a school.

I can't quite puzzle out where books like Lunch Lady came from exactly, or what they might mean about where we're going, but I'm glad we have books like this, and I'm sure they must mean something more positive than they could mean anything negative.

When exactly did Jack Kirby become awesome?

When one thinks of Jack Kirby and his awesomeness, one naturally thinks of the furious explosion of influential work he produced in the 1960s for Marvel. But when exactly did Kirby become awesome?

I haven't done any sort of serious inquiry into the matter, but as these panels of the Golden Age Vision blowing up dinosaurs with dynamite from Marvel Mystery Comics #16 (recently reprinted in Mystic Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1) clearly demonstrate...



...it was definitely at some point before 1941.

I fail to see what that Wertham fellow was so worked up about.

This image of Namor the Sub-Mariner pointing his huge gun at the sky to shoot down enemy airplanes, for example, looks perfectly innocent to me.



(That's the cover of 1940's Marvel Mystery Comics #14, which was recently reprinted in Mystic Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1, which you should totally read)

Huzzah!

Thanks to Blog@, I see that the next artist on Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin title is going to be none other than Cameron Stewart.

This is very good news because a) Cameron Stewart is aweome, b) Stewart is one of the relatively few artists who can really, really work perfectly with Morrison, in much the same way that the initial Batman and Robin artist Frank Quitely has and c) Philip Tan drawing the first post-Quitely story arc had me worried about the direction the book might take (Like, not to be a dick or anything, but Tan is not very good at drawing comic books—a fact made abundantly clear to me last night as I struggled through a library-borrowed hardcover of Final Crisis: Revelations—and having to follow Quitely seems kind of cruel on DC's part).

Also, DC's Source blog posted a cover, featuring The Squire, which is also good news. She's one of those characters I really like, but only when Morrison's writing her. Like, I'd be super-excited to hear about a Grant Morrison/Ed McGuinness The Knight and Squire miniseries, but I'd openly dread an Any Other Writer/Pretty Much Even My Favorite Artist Knight and Squire miniseries.

September 10's Weekly Haul, in a different format and at a different place

If you're looking for my weekly Weekly Haul feature reviewing my weekly purchases, I'm afraid you won't find one this week. Instead, I thought I'd try liveblogging my reading of the (few) superhero books I bought this week at Blog@Newsarama, thus fulfilling my daily post obligation and allowing me to read my new comics ASAP instead of trying to think of something intelligent to say about Paul Levitz or whatever. You can read the results here. If you totally hate it, don't worry. The feature will be here and in it's normal format next week.

I thought this was funny:

The rest of Alex Sheikman and David Moran's Robotika: For a Few Rubles More #1 ain't so bad either.