God bless superhero comics.

So this is apparently the second page of Magog #6, by Keith Giffen, Howard Porter and John Dell. You can see the page, along with three others, as part of a preview on Newsarama.com by clicking here.

On the first page, we see a splash of Power Girl punching Magog in his stupid Magog-y face, while he narrates, "Now I understand the cleavage cutout she sports. Distracting doesn't begin to describe it." And then there's the above page, which features a third panel in which Magog seems to be groping our heroine.

Okay, yes, I know that's not what's actually happening, and that the two-dimensional drawing of a three-dimensional world in which Magog's hand just happens to flail between the reader's eye and Power Girl's breast, but it looks like he's groping her.

So, Howard Porter penciled that image, then John Dell inked it, then someone else lettered it and someone else colored it and, presumably, an editor and/or assistant editor each looked at that page before it went to press (if not between each of those steps), and no one thought that panel might look a little weird?

Oh no!!! Change!!!!!!!

Don't worry, EDILW isn't going anywhere, but the person who writes it is...has, actually. I just moved from Columbus, Ohio to a new HQ in a small Ohio town, and I'm not entirely sure how it will effect the blog at the moment.

This town doesn't have a comic shop of its own, and the nearest one is 45 minutes away, so the regular "Weekly Haul" feature, in which I reviewed the new Wednesday releases right after I read them, may be going away, or going biweekly or...I don't know just yet. (Maybe I'll be switching to trades permanent like, now? Or are there services that deliver single issues to you through the mail on the day of release? If so, lemme know if you know of any!)

Additionally, I no longer have the Columbus Metropolitan Library system, which buys pretty much every graphic novel, to borrow from, so access to comics I'm curious about but not enough to pay for may be fewer and farther between. And I've still gotta figure out the scanner situation, as I never had my own, but used the one at the library I used to work at.

Also, I don't an Internet connection at my new house yet, so it may be a few days before I'm blogging at 100% strength. In the mean time, I'll definitely try to keep updating once a day, so long as I can find the Internet, but Blog@ will take priority over EDILW, so you can see me there.

Hopefully by this time next week, everything will be back to normal, with the possible exception of "Weekly Haul" no longer being weekly. Thanks for your patience during this transition and thanks, as always, for reading.

So anyway, this is just a post letting you know that EDILW may suck a little bit for a little while.

This ad raises more questions than it answers

Is the newspaper industry doing so poorly now that photographer had to take a job driving truck, as Spider-Man? Would you pull over if a policeman in a mask with knives on his hands flashed his lights at you? If Iron Man has that miraculous armor, is driving a firetruck the most efficient way for him to get to a fire? And what on Earth is the Hulk doing in a car, with some kinda crazy bazooka gun? Does he just drive around shooting stuff and giving the other guys people to rescue and fires to put out?

Something that's been bugging me while I make my way through Showcase Presents: Doom Patrol Vol. 1:

How do they know Larry will die if the Negative Man is out of his body for longer than sixty seconds?

Obviously I'm no scientist, let alone one of Dr. Niles Caulder's intellect, but it seems to me the only way one could test how long Larry could survive once Negative Man left his body would be to have him release Negative Man, click the stopwatch and wait to see how long it takes for Larry to expire. But then, you could only try that experiment once, and they obviously haven't, or Larry would be dead.



(Panel from 1963's My Greatest Adventures #80, drawn by Bruno Premiani and written by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney)

Three pretty random links

Hey, do you love the artwork of J. Bone, whose Super Friends #24 I was just raving about last night? Well then, you should check out my interview with Bone on Blog@. He was kind enough to share some art with us, including a couple of preliminary roughs for covers (those are the roughs for the Starro issue below the final cover above), as well as a great sketch of Metamorpho.


Oh my God am I dense: Have you ever been reading EDILW and thought to yourself, "Goodness, this Caleb character has no idea what he's talking about. What's wrong with him? Is he really that stupid?" Well good news! You might have been on to something. I've been reading comics for about, oh, almost 20 years no, and I've been aware of Mike Allred's Madman for probably about that long. Allred's one of my favorite artists, so I've snapped up any and all Madman back issues and trades I could find over the years, and was buying single issues from Dark Horse and then Oni and, where was he last, Image...? But it has honestly, no joke, no lie, never, ever, ever occurred to me that Madman's secret identity of "Frank Einstein" was meant to be a pun on "Frankenstein" until this morning, when I read this feature.


Hey, that little stuffed animal brings up a good point!: I've been trying to resist the temptation to comment on the Tea Party/Fox News/Some Tea Party Guy On the Internet Who Noticed It/Marvel Comics controversy, despite the fact that it has to do with comics, which I spend all my writing energy on now, and politics, which I used to spend most of my writing energy on before I started blogging. It's one of those insidious little non-story things that tends to make everyone who covers it, reacts to it, mentions it or even just looks at it sideways look bad. (I'm especially bummed out by Joe Quesada and Ed Brubaker's reactions, which I have a hard time even respecting as company PR or hucksterism—wouldn't having that fight or blowing off anyone actually taking offense at some tiny element of some background in a panel of comic book generate more publicity? Marvel Comics has always, at least with the comics press, operated under the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" philosophy or selling things...with the non-comics press, I think the game's new enough for them that they're not sure how to deal with stories they themselves aren't pitching. Brubaker and Quesada just seem dishonest and easily cowed. As Dirk Deppey noted today—in the process of kinda sorta defending Quesada for behaving like one would expect an adult to behave—of course it's about the Tea Party movement/mob. Wrote Deppey, "the idea that writer Ed Brubaker was discussing modern anti-tax protest movements but not the Tea Partiers per se might make a lick of sense if there were, you know, a second such movement anywhere in the country.")

Anyway, among those that did manage to talk about the Fox-forces-Marvel-to-apologize-and-dissemble-for-accurately-portraying-something-in-the-background-of-one-of-their-comics and come out okay were prominent bloggers Bully The Little Stuffed Bull and Chris Sims, who had some fun with Captain America's outragous behavior on their Twitter twatters last night.

For example, this one or this one from Sims, or this one or this one from Bully.

Joking aside though, I thought Bully brought up a very good point with this tweet, contrasting Marvel's apology for this instance with something a little more obviously offensive and hard to defend. It's certainly something to think about, what Marvel decides to defend versus apologize for, and why they might do so (Quesada and others at Marvel were pretty vigorous in their defense of the "Heroes for Hentai" tentacle rape-inspired cover, for example, and Brian Michael Bendis talked at length about the gang-of-male-villains-pistol-whipping-the-half-naked-tiger-lady-in-bed-while-video-taping-it-for-rebroadcast scene in New Avengers).

The hubbub over the crowd scene in a recent issue of Captain America reminded me of a scene in Secret Invasion, in which writer Brian Michael Bendis again turned away from the story of Skrulls invading New York City to focus on something seemingly trivial—making fun of liberal protesters, who were pretty emphatically identified with anti-war protesters.

Remember this scene?
If not, let Abhay Khosla break it down for you in his review of the issue in which it appeared:

Page after page, not of the first or second or even third issue, page after page of the SIXTH ISSUE-- it wasn’t spent escalating the stakes of the comic, it wasn't spent dealing with characters we care about, it wasn't spent paying off earlier scenes. The fucking SIXTH ISSUE was spent introducing an entirely new cast of straw-men liberal characters, and then attacking them for being naive about the nature of evil.

First, let me just say, on a political level, this comic can go fuck itself. You know-- one pretty easy way a person could read this comic if they were so inclined is that it equates protesting wars with supporting terrorism. I don't think the people who made the comic think that. I don't think they were thinking at all. I don't think they made a big priority of thinking.

If an anti-war protester who happened to have really big glasses wrote a blog post about how Marvel seemed to be calling her and her fellow protesters terrorist-sympathizers deserving of vaporization, and, I don't know, Keith Olberman (is that who people say is the liberal Glenn Beck? I try not to watch/pay attention to cable news ever) freaked out about it, would Marvel have apologized and have said they wouldn't include the scene in the trade?

Damn, I went on about this a lot more than I meant to. I just wanted to say that Sims and Bully made some funny jokes, and Bully brought up a good point. Here, let's take a few deep breaths and meditate on Bone's character designs for some Captain Marvel villains:
Ah, that's better...

Weekly Haul: February 10

Amazing Spider-Man #620 (Marvel Comics) And so ends another Dan Slott/Marcos Martin Spider-Man story arc (this time with Javier Pulido splitting up art duties with Martin), and, for the third time in a row, I don’t have much of anything to say about it. It’s gorgeous looking again, Slott’s scripting is solid and everything you’d want out of a Spider-Man comic, even if it’s not reinventing the media or likely to change the life of the reader in anyway.

If this were the regular creative team and ASM were a monthly, I’m sure this would be on my pull-list. As an almost-but-not-quite-weekly with rotating creative teams though, this creative team is more a matter of stars aligning occasionally, and I’m always glad to see them do so.


Batman and Robin #8 (DC Comics) Part two of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s three-part “Blackest Knight” story arc, a pretty nice demonstration that Morrison + A Great Artist + Superheroes = Good Reading. Given the title of this storyline and what most of the characters have been up to lately, the book moves in a very unexpected direction, and man is it great to be surprised by a superhero comic in 2010. Pity about another little screw-up with dialogue bubble attribution on page 11, after the same type of mistake in the previous issue.

By the way, this issue contains a four-issue preview of some First Wave comic or another, featuring artwork by Rags Morales, and, I may be biased on account of loving Rags Morales so deeply, but it looks really, really nice. It’s in black and white, and given how good it looks, it seems like coloring it would be a damn shame.


Super Friends #24 (DC) This is a perfect example of a comic you can judge completely by its cover. Regular cover artist J. Bone even does the interiors this issue, and it’s the story of pretty much every DC mad scientist you can think of (and probably a bunch you didn’t even know existed, or forgot existed) vs. the Super Friends.

Specifically, a hotel on Oolong Island is hosting a conference for the group W.O.R.M.S. (The World Organization for Research in Mad Science). Host Lex Luthor has gathered them all here for a mad science contest, in which the will unveil their most deadly inventions.

I only read this title sporadically (usually depending on who’s drawing it, what the premise for the issue is and what the cover looks like), but of those I’ve read, this is by far my favorite, and not just because writer Sholly Fisch gives so much play to favorite characters like Mr. Mind and Dr. Sivana. Almost every single panel includes a gag or reference of some kind, be it a little elbow in the ribs to some obscure bit of DC continuity or character name-drop, or a fairly opaque pop culture reference (like Professor Bravo introducing his plastic robots to Green Lantern).

I know this is a kid’s comic, but I swear I actually laughed out loud once while reading it—the last panel on page 13-to-first panel of page 14 transition—and I think if you have any love of the sillier side of the DC Universe (or the more neglected corners of their extensive character catalog) you’ll dig this issue.

And if you happen to be a fan of Bone’s artwork, be sure to check out Blog@ tomorrow morning.


Uncanny X-Men: First Class #8 (Marvel) This is my first issue of this comic, and I think the reason I picked it up despite not having read the last seven issues or even really liking the X-Men all that much is probably pretty clear from Cameron Stewart’s cover: This is a comic book about irritating Irish stereotype superhero Banshee fighting a pack of leprechauns.

The story inside isn’t quite as exciting or silly as the one the cover suggest, unfortunately. This is probably something that all dedicated, reading-since-Claremont X-Men fans already know, but apparently leprechauns aren’t really all that big a deal or even at all unusual in the Marvel Universe. They just sort of live and work side by side with the human staff at Cassidy Keep, Banshee’s ancestral home in Ireland. Here, a leprechaun is as plain and prosaic a thing as, I don’t know, a Wakandian or an Atlantean or Latverian…a humdrum population that exists in the Marvel Universe.

That fact doesn’t take all that much away from the story, mind you, it was just somewhat disappointing to me to see leprechauns running around and no one reacting like, “Holy shit! There are leprechauns everywhere!” (The closest anyone comes to even remarking upon out-of-ordinariness of leprechauns is Wolverine commenting “This is the dumbest fight I’ve ever been in,” while being swarmed with tiny little mind-controlled fairy folk.

Writer Scott Gray (Yeah, I know marvel.com says Jeff Parker, but it’s really Scott Gray) has Banshee and his plainclothes pals Wolverine, Colossus and Nightcrawler accompany him to Cassidy Keep, where his leprechaun tutor was just found dead of an apparent suicide. They investigate it mystery novel/police procedural style, and, during the climactic drawing room scene, the murderer summons a mess of fairies for a big fight scene, since this is a superhero comic.

It’s pretty good genre comics writing, and Blanco’s art is pretty great (and a fair bit greater than many of the artwork you’ll see in many of Marvel’s more popular and “important” books, to be honest).

It’s just not as awesome as the cover. Also, Banshee and the other foreign-born X-Men don’t talk in their crazy phonetic accents that Claremont used to give them, and while they may be an improvement, it sure makes reading their dialogue out loud a lot less fun.

Is there a subliminal message in Marvel's Avengers campaign?

You've probably already seen several examples of Marvel's "I Am An Avenger" teaser campaign, like the Spider-Woman image above, throughout the last week or so, right? Well, this weekend I spent much longer looking at these images that anyone should (in the service of making some bad jokes), and, for the first time ever, I noticed that the "Avengers" logo is actually awfully sexually suggestive, what with that big phallic arrow snugly interlocking with the v-shaped space on the right side of the A.

It's even more so in the background of these teaser images, where the arrow is about to fill the void in the A:
So if you find yourself getting excited by these teasers, but aren't really sure why the excite you, perhaps it's simply a matter of super-subtle sex symbols implanted in the imagery.

Click to better scrutinize my poor penmanship and limited understanding of Photoshop's eye drop and paint tools

(Cross-posted here and at Blog@Newsarama)

Speaking of plastic ring incentives...

Instead of that goofy We'll take returns on certain DC comics in exchange for some ultra-rare Deadpool variant to reward bad retailing practices and encourage speculation scheme/PR stunt Marvel embarked on in reaction to the success of DC's Blackest Night ring scheme, why didn't Marvel simply produce a plastic four-finger "Cage" ring/set brass knuckles?

I can't speak for the whole direct market or anything, but I know I'd buy four issues of Siege if I had to do so in order to get a plastic version of the above.

Found while cleaning out my car:

DC's next plastic ring incentive program prototype? Maybe tied into their next big Batman event...?

I was going to re-read the relevant portions of The Thousand and One Nights before writing this, but that seemed too much like work

The very things that make stories riffing on fairy tales attractive also make telling such stories somewhat dangerous for the creators.

On the one hand, they’re starting with familiar source material in which some of the creative heavy lifting is already done, and the characters and concepts have a proven, centuries-old track record of success. On the other hand, so many other people have already riffed and re-riffed on the very same source material that it’s very difficult to do something that doesn’t seem overly tired and derivative.

On Wednesday Radical Publishing released two new comics, both of which took their inspiration from classic fairy tales that have long since become a familiar part of our current pop culture landscape and, thanks to Fables, Zenescope’s line and everything in between, fairly constant presence in comics shops.

In both cases, however, the creators managed to do something new and engaging with the overly familiar source material.

The more straightforward of the two was Aladdin: Legacy of the Lost, the basic story of which is the same you’ll find in the Arabian Nights stories, the Disney flick, or any of the other popular versions. Evil sorcerer, Aladdin in a treasure cave, a humble lamp with a wish-granting genie in it, beautiful princess—you know the drill.

Here the evil sorcerer is Qassim, who draws glowy magic floaty sigils in the air that summon giant shark/worm monsters from the sands to do his bidding (i.e. eat people). Aladdin is the son of a whore raised in a brothel and trying to make an slightly more honest living with trick dice on the streets of Shamballah.

The first issue, which comprises the first third of the three-part series, ends with the Aladdin-as-a-prince arriving in town, magic genie (well, “djinn” here) in tow, and thus sticks pretty close to what is expected.

What writer Ian Edginton and artist Patrick Reilly bring to the tale, beyond a certain fidelity, are unique details in the form of some neat monsters—the aforementioned shark-like sand worm thingees, some giant scorpions—and some hints at a larger, more complicated narrative to come. Sinbad the sailor appears briefly, and much is made of an ancient city of magicians. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the origins of Aladdin, a connection to Sinbad and the story of the djinn and how it got in the lamp to be explored either later in the series or in future miniseries (the colon and sub-title pretty much promise future minis, right?).

Reilly’s artwork can be a bit stiff here and there, and I’m not personally crazy about the painted-looking style employed here, but it works fine—it reads and it moves and it always serves the story, which is pretty straightforward action adventure.

The world building is rather interesting to watch, as Reilly (and/or whoever worked on designs with him) go for a sort of modern exotica not necessarily tied down to any too specific a culture or time period… beyond somewhere fantastic and some time in the past.

Far more, um, radical in its reimagining of fairy tale characters, and in its visuals, is Legends: The Enchanted #0, a special $1 issue apparently designed to whet readers' appetites for a graphic novel to come in the spring.

It’s written and illustrated (Painted? Computer-painted?) by Judge Dredd and Slaine alum Nick Percival, and it sounds like the sort of comic book I would normally hate, but I’ll be damned if Percival doesn’t make it work.

He opens with a scene of Jack the Giant Killer killing giants. There’s a full-page splash of Jack: Long, shaggy black hair, face pale and full of scars, eyes glowing red, decked out in what looks like some sort of steampunk old-timey diving suit and a cape of moss and leaves. Pages two and three are a double-page splash of Jack posing atop a pile of dusty junkyard filler, lady giant in lingerie yelling at him in a red dialogue bubble while her mate lies dead at her feet, a huge axe in his head. Three panels are inset in the splash, and the giant and Jack seem to change sizes in at least one of them…not on purpose either.

By the end of the scene, Jack takes a magic bean that “fixes” his face (apparently it was all battle-ravaged at first?) and then he gets on his motorcycle and drives off.

Cut to a caption box reading “The Edges of the Bionic Woodlands,” and then an image of “Poor, poor Pinocchio,” who looks like Swamp Thing with Alice Cooper’s face, hung in chains and being tortured.
What the hell’s going on?

Well, as near as I can figure, in this weird 1980s heavy metal album cover art world, characters like Jack, Pinocchio and Little Red Riding Hood have all gotten McFarlane toys-style redesigns, and belong to a class of hard-to-kill beings called “The Enchanted.” There are some evil Enchanted too, or at least a couple of witches doing bad stuff and capable of killing the Enchanted permanently.

Oh, and Little Red Riding Hood kills a pack of albino vampire werewolf monkeys with a pair of sickles (that’s her on the cover).

Percival’s strange post-apocalyptic setting and decadent ultra-busy science-fiction/fetish/Hollywood superhero fashion is so fully realized that the familiar elements are all completely transformed, and the very limited use of them—basically just a single appropriated attribute and name for each Enchanted character—keeps it from ever feeling cheap.

This isn’t just grown-up, gory, grim and gritty fairytale remixing; rather it looks like something completely new and rather original being built from familiar pieces.

That said, this is only the first bit of the story, and these 22 pages are devoted to staking out territory and giving glimpses of some characters. It’s quite possible that Percival will end up in less than interesting territory once the story gets rolling, but at this early stage at least, Legends looks intriguing, and I’m curious to see where it goes.

Also, it’s only a $1*, which puts it squarely in the You’d Be a Fool Not To Buy It category.



*That means 22 pages of Legends: The Enchanted #0 costs the same as five and a half pages of Ultimate X #1!

Damn Christopher Bird.

I was totally going to do almost that exact same post. Mine would have used those three little words in the post title though, since I can't do the fancy lettering image magic stuff. But still.

Well, instead of posting that post then, I'll just post a link to Bird's post, and add, "Ha ha, superhero comics are dumb and gross aren't they?"

Props to Bendis and company for having a character torn in half vertically instead of horizontally though. I guess if you have to have a superhero character torn in two in your comic, bisecting a character in a less traditional manner is something, right?

Weekly "Haul": February 3rd

Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #3 (DC Comics) Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott wrap-up their three-part miniseries chronicling Wonder Woman’s involvement in the first two-thirds of Blackest Night in this issue (All these three-issue Blackest Night minis are going to make for teensy, 66-page trades, aren’t they?), which, like the previous issue, seems set entirely between the panels of Blackest Night #6.

Wonder Woman is now wearing a Star Sapphire love-powered ring (and awful fuchsia latex costume), and she flies around Coast City for awhile, chatting with Star Sapphire Carol Ferris, re-defeating Black Lantern Max Lord and re-fighting Red Lantern Mera.

At the climax of the Wondy/Mera re-match, she lassos Aquaman’s ex, and the pair each learn something dramatic about one another, but after reading the sequence three or four times now, I can’t for the life of me figure out what it was they learned, exactly. Am I missing a page?

It has something to do with something Mera didn’t tell Aquaman, I guess…whatever she’s thinking in the image of her staring down at a sleeping A-man. (Unless it’s just that she never even wanted to have kids, which I thought was just the sort of thing a mother who has replaced her heart with a rage-powered alien artifact might scream while vomiting napalm-like hate-blood on the resurrected zombie corpse of her dead infant. The fact that it’s a plot point at the climax of a tie-in a Wonder Woman tie-in series, and that its not made explicit here anyway, is somehow infinitely weirder).

Scott’s pencil art is, as always, top notch, although I could have done without the photographic sky and sea dropped into the background of the panels behind some of her figure drawing (I assume that was the colorist?) You know, drawing a horizon line, some clouds and waves isn’t really all that hard…if you can draw Wonder Woman, you can handle that stuff easy).

The scene where the ladies learn secrets* about one another, but Rucka and Scott keep too coy about, is my favorite part, as it shows all the things Wonder Woman and Mera have in common: They both wear tiaras, they’ve both smooched Justice Leaguers, they’ve both seen younger loved ones brutalized, and they both occasionally handle phallic ancient weapons. Why, they’re practically sisters!


The Question #37 (DC) This week’s back-from-cancellation, Blackest Night tie-in/revival reunites original Question creators Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan with current Question II writer Greg Rucka (and current Question II artist Cully Hamner even handles the cover).

The two writers work together remarkably well. The credits don’t make the division of labor explicit, and they simply share credit rather than each writing a different section…as far as I can tell. The narration, particularly during the re-cap the back-from-cancellation one-issue revival formula demands, sounds like O’Neil, as does much of the non-Montoya dialogue, while Montoya sounds like a Rucka character.

It’s really quite seamless, as is the art team of Denys Cowan inked by Bill Sienkiewicz and John Stanisci—I honestly can’t tell where one artist’s work ends and the other’s begins.

As for the storyline, it’s simply The Questions plugged into the now overly familiar formula of Dead Character History Recap, Dead Character Appears and Tries to Elicit Emotional Response from Intended Victim, Fight, Hero Wins. In this case, Vic Sage comes after Montoya, and finds his old supporting characters there as well.

Given that O’Neil and Rucka are working with interesting supporting characters, however, it’s a rather engaging read, at least in as much as Aristotle Rodor and Lady Shiva both see unique opportunities in the dead rising premise of Blackest Night and attempt to seize them. (Also, points for finding a different end to the conflict than simply destroying the Black Lantern through light as in most of the tie-ins). It’s almost too bad this one’s only one issue, but then, it does end with the new Question vowing to hunt down and stop the old one, so maybe this will continue in the TEC back-ups or somewhere.


Leave it to PET Vol. 3 (Viz Media/Viz Kids) This is my I’m only going to read two singles this week? Should I spend the change from the twenty dollar bill on something else? purchase of the week. Exactly how long can I continue to find amusement from Kenji Sonishi’s short gag strips about an ever-growing legion of super-robots created from recyclable materials bound to help the masters who recycled them in the first place, mostly with such tasks as retrieving a fallen mechanical pencil refill or skinned knee? Well, after finishing this volume, I’m at about 540 pages of it, and I’m still really enjoying it.



*I guess Wonder Woman’s is maybe that she loved Batman and never told him before he “died”…?

A few words about two new comics I'm probably not going to read anyway

There’s something kind of fascinating about Ultimate Comics X, or, as it appears on the cover of the book, “Ultimate X.” The image above was first revealed in a house ad, and its mainly notable only for the fact that the character being focused on looks to be an original one, albeit an original character with Wolverine’s claws on him.

The Ultimate/Ultimate Comics universe has been rather notorious in its inability to introduce brand-new characters instead of simply Ultimatizing versions of pre-existing Marvel characters.

Brian Michael Bendis’ sole new invention from Ultimate Spider-Man, a mutant high-schooler named Geldoff, immediately became a sort of punchline with which Bendis’ boss Joe Quesada could rib him with.

The Batman and Robin-like characters in Ron Zimmerman and Duncan Fegredo’s 2002 six-parter Ultimate Adventures, Hawk-Owl and Woody, showed some promise (the series wasn’t bad, at any rate). But they never appeared again.

The solicitation for Ultimate Comics X is extremely vague, but it seems to be spinning out of Loeb’s own Ultimatum (Which, sorry guys, I haven’t been able to bring myself to read, even for free from the library), and to deal with new characters in the Ultimate Universe.

Here’s the solicitation in full:

Who—or what—is Ultimate X? The answers and even more secrets arrive in the all new ULTIMATE X ongoing bi-monthly series from the superstar dream team of JEPH LOEB and ART ADAMS. Wolverine is dead. Captain America is a fugitive. The Fantastic Four disbanded. Lives have been destroyed and nothing can ever be the same—is there any hope left? It all begins with a search for a brand new character whose identity will leave jaws on the floor and change the Ultimate Universe forever.

The What the hell is going on here? element of the marketing, along with the promise of something original (well, somewhat original-esque) and the presence of Arthur Adams is sort of intriguing, but pretty much negated by the presence of writer Loeb, a $4 price tag, and the fact that even a bi-monthly schedule is probably way too much wishful thinking from this creative team.

This image really should have smothered any lingering embers of interest in the book though, Adams art or no Adams art:
That’s a scan of a house ad for the book, but it looks like that’s also a variant cover for the first issue (the solicitation mentions four variants, one of which is called a “Spoiler Line-Up Variant” by Adams).

You can’t really get more stereotypically ‘90s in your team make-up than two Bad Boy types (one of which is even badder than the regular strength Bad Boy type), a Sexy Girl and a Big Giant Strong Guy (Here a/the Ultimate Hulk, which may be of some interest maybe?).

I’m sure there’s an audience for ‘90s nostalgia comics, but I wouldn’t have expected Marvel’s Ultimate Comics line to be the place for it (Of course, inter-book crossovers, new numbering, variant covers and “foilogram” covers are similarly antithetical to the Ultimate line’s original reason for being, so perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising).

Anyway, that cover dashed whatever small hope the initial image gave me that this might be Marvel trying something rather radically new with the book.

Finally, I know it’s probably not all that fair to complain about superhero character designs being derivative in the year 2010—after almost 80 years of superheroes, just about every one of them is derivative of some other one—but I can’t really look at this guy, the one behind the blond Wolver-teen,

without seeing this guy
He’s Mongrel, a "darkforce-blasting African American-Vietnamese hero" who appeared during DC’s 1993 summer crossover event.

Loeb participated in the event, but he didn’t write Mongrel. Instead, he introduced Loose Cannon, a character who was basically The Hulk with a terrible haircut, but instead of green, he could change colors from blue to purple to red. Hey, wait a minute…!


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


As long as we’re discussing comics shipping tomorrow that owe a great debt the comics of the 1990s, it’s probably worth mentioning Milestone Forever #1.

It’s a very strange project, and one I have to assume was dramatically scaled back from what DC and its principal creator, writer Dwayne McDuffie, must have originally had in mind.

Check out what DC has to say about it on dccomics.com:

DC Comics and Milestone Media entered into an unprecedented creative partnership 16 years ago this month by producing 14 interlocking, creator-owned titles including HARDWARE, ICON, and the multimedia hit that would best be known as STATIC SHOCK. Now, nine Parents Choice Awards, four Eisner Award nominations, and one Emmy and Humanitas Award-winning hit TV series later, Milestone is back, its continuity mysteriously merged with the DCU.

While we saw the DC side of the story in JUSTICE LEAGUE: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, the 2-issue MILESTONE FOREVER gathers the original artists from Milestone's launch titles – including John Paul Leon, Mark Bright, Chris Cross and Milestone founder Denys Cowan – to complete the tales told in the original runs of STATIC SHOCK, ICON, HARDWARE, SHADOW CABINET and BLOOD SYNDICATE. Milestone editor-in-chief Dwayne McDuffie reveals the final fate of each of Milestone's launch characters in a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe and the birth of something new…with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.

That sounds awfully ambitious, doesn’t it? Completing the stories of at five different ongoing series, while moving ahead with “the birth of something new”?

And yet all of that is going to be accomplished in the space of just two 48-page comics. That’s—wait, let me double-check on a calculator–only 96 pages. McDuffie introduced the Milestone characters into the DCU over the course of about six or seven issues of his run on Justice League of America—the collection of that story folding the one universe into the other is 176-pages long.

What really brought my attention to how, well, skimpy the Milestone book is going to be, the vast disparity between what it is apparently meant to accomplish and how much space is being allotted to it, was that I noticed this week DC is also shipping The Great Ten #4.

The Great Ten is an ideal example of the “Why is DC publishing this?” class of books in their line. It stars a group of minor characters from a 2006 event series that no one seemed particularly interested in reading much more about, it’s written by Tony Bedard, DC’s ill-used, go-to fill-in writer, and it’s drawn by Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens, DC’s main “These guys work fast, drop this in their laps” art team.

It is ten issues long.

So McDuffie and a half-dozen Milestone creators are given just 96 pages to reveal “the final fate of each of Milestone's launch characters in a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe and the birth of something new…with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.”

And Bedard, McDaniel and Owens are given 220 pages to…I don’t know…keep an IP of dubious value in the public eye for the better part of a year? And by public eye I mean direct market retailers and maybe a few thousand of their customers According to The Beat, the first issue of The Great Ten moved only about 13,160 units, and sales are almost always all downhill after the first issue of a limited series.

"I am going to kill the bear!"