Some links...mostly to posts discussing things I've posted about previously and to things I've been meaning to link to for so long I've forgotten why

Alan Kistler's recurring Agent of S.T.Y.L.E. feature at Blog@Newsarama has been a great deal of fun ever since it first debuted, and I become more and more impressed with it the longer it runs. Kistler's research is often so ridiculously thorough that he regularly unearths things I have never even heard of...and I'm not exactly unversed in things like, say, the history of Batman costumes.

Earlier in the week Troy Brownfield, another fellow Blog@ contributor, noted something hinky in a bit of Justice League: Generation Lost hyping, which indirectly lead to my posting a little bit about the history of Tora "Ice" Olfasdotter and a couple of different looks she and her fellow ice-powered Norwegian Sigrid "Icemaiden" Nansen have sported over the years (while in the process of trying to point out that when it comes to trivial matters like this in a genre of trivial matters, even the littlest things are kind of big deals). Well, Kistler was also on the Ice beat this past week, and he turned out another incredibly thorough article about the costume history of Ice and Icemaiden, complete with her appearances in other media, some pretty nice images and the unearthing of Wonder Woman and The Star Riders, some crazy early '90s reimagining of Wondy as the leader of a semi-She-Ra/semi-Strawberry Shortcake band of magical girl super-heroines. Or something.

I guess there was a member named Ice in there too.

It was neat to see that version of Wonder Woman after all the discussion of Wonder Woman's costume that has gone on this year (Quick Internet search turned up this, which seems to indicate that Jose Garcia-Lopez was responsible for the designs).

Star Riders Wondy seems to have the classic red Wonder-corset, the star-spangled blue field (on a skirt, instead of panties) and white leggings to make her look less naked without having to resort to pants. Boots, wristbands, tiara...all the "classic" Wonder Woman costume signifiers are there, with the addition of a cape, which I don't mind at all.

The flower belt and Queen Elizabeth collar on the other hand...

The rest of Wonder Woman's girl gang sorta hurts my eyes though.

I was curious enough about them to spend a few minutes Googling 'em though, and apparently there's one other Star Rider based on an existing DC heroine: Dolphin, who has the DC Dol's white hair, but nothing else in common. In fact, her power is apparently bubble-related. The others are the sun-powered Solara (a fiery Latina, like Fire) and Star-Lily.

I doubt this would have made for much of a cartoon or toy line, either in the early nineties or now, and it probably wouldn't have been much of a Western style, typical DC comic book in either era, but, in the right hands, that sure sounds like a decent enough basis for a Wonder Woman by way of Sailor Moon magical girl manga. The sub-title on the promotional comic is "Sparkling super heroines!"

Okay, question time. Anyone know who is responsible for the lovely Ice drawing I've re-posted above? I found it in Newsarama's archives, but there's no indiciation of who originally created it. It doesn't look like something from an issue of an actual DC comic, but rather a sketch or the work of an extremely talented fan. Anyway, I'd love to find out who did it so I can properly credit them here...and see more of their work.

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I always read Greg Burgas' reviews at Comics Should Be Good, but I rarely link to 'em. I wanted to do so with this particular column though, as he covers that Radical Publishing Mata Hari sample comic that I covered here previously, and he had a lot of different things to say.

Me, I couldn't really get past the art, which Burgas thought wasn't actually all that bad. He did note a whole bunch of pretty basic problems with the narration though, regarding anachronistic references. Anyway, for a completely different take on the comic, see Burgas' review.

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I've had the link to this Cat Rackham strip by Steve Wolfhard—"Cat Rackham Gets Depresssion."—on a sticky note on my desktop for about two years now, so I can't remember if I ever actually linked to it anywhere or not. Well, if I haven't before, I'm going to do it now, and if I have, I'm going to do it again. It is a very awesome, very true strip.

Actually, after reading everything I could find on WOlfhard's Catrackham.com site, I see that they're all pretty awesome strips, and all read as being pretty true. I have experienced many of these very things myself...metaphorically if not always literally...and Wolfhard seems to capture the emotion of the experiences perfectly. Wait, I have never experienced anything, metaphorically or not, like this one strip that features the craziest crazy cat lady ever.

Finally, from Wolfhard's Livejournal page blog thing, here's a strip that explains why you should never do drugs kids...and/or sleep outside overnight in the pouring rain.

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A million blog-years ago I wrote a post taking a close look at 1971's The Brave nd the Bold #91 by Bob Haney and Nick Cardy, in which Batman and Black Canary flirt a little bit but nothing ever comes of their mutual attraction. If you'd like to see some of those gorgeous Cardy drawings in color (and in context), a Joe Bloke at Grant Bridge Street & Other Misadventures scans what looks like the whole issue here. Don't read the whole thing there though! Buy the Showcase Presents collection it appears in; the Grant Bridge Street post is well worth a scan through to check out the Cardy art though.

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You guys know how I love Joe Kubert and his Enemy Ace, right? Well check out Thomas Haller Buchanan's gallery of Kubert Enemy Ace art here. Buchanan also has a Kubert Batman storyand a Kubert Superman/Etrigan, The Demon story, plus a boatload of other great Kubert art. (These links were seen at and swiped form The Comics Reporter, by the way).

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I was kind of going back and forth about whether I should recommend Kenjiro Hata's Hayate the Combat Butler to Tawky Tawny fans, since it features a talking tiger, and the only comic book on the market currently featuring Tawky is going to ship its final issue next month. I'm still not sure. While Hayate does have a tiger who talks as a member of its cast, Tama usually pretends that he can't talk, and never, ever wears fancy human duds, which seems to be almost as much a part of Tawky's appeal as the fact that he can talk. By the way, there area apparently a lot of volumes of Hayate Combat Butler. I've only just finished the second volume, but I liked it almost much as the first.

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I was pretty pumped to check out the eventual trade paperback collection of DC's First Wave series, partially out of curiosity regarding the construction of a pulp-infused, relatively superpower-less superhero sub-universe featuring characters like Batman, The Spirit, Doc Savage and Rima The Jungle Girl, but mostly because I couldn't wait to read a big huge chunk of Rags Morales art. The images posted in this review of an issue by Todd Klein, however, is seriously dampening my enthusiasm. The way the art's colored just looks kinda...gross. Maybe this will be more of a borrow-from-the-library-trade then a buy-for-the-bookshelf kinda trade....

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These are all many millions of times better than the actual covers of the actual comic books featuring these characters. For example, this Rogan Josh fellow has provided what may just be the very first cool-looking image of the X-person Gambit. Be sure to check out his tumblr thingee too, for plenty of more images, like this wonderful one featuring Aquaman:

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Tom "Comics Reporter" Spurgeon wants to know, "Where's My TV Comic, Publishers?" and he then goes on to note that he's available to write any of them (I'm only semi-ashamed to note that I've never seen or even heard of any of the shows Spurgeon lists...with the exception of Q.E.D., which I had previously heard about on...Tom Spurgeon's blog).

On the off-chance that Spurgeon's gambit works, and Dynamite Entertainment or someone decides to hire Spurgeon to write a Q.E.D. comic, I should note that I would totally write a 90210 comic (based on either generation of the show) for free. Wait, they say you're never supposed to offer to do something for free that other people get paid to do, don't they? Okay, in that case, I'd write a 90210 comic book series for...two comp issues and, um...what's minimum wage now? $7.50? Let's say $7.50 an hour.

The second episode of the third season airs tomorrow, by the way, and if you missed the first episode, it's online at cwtv.com, so it's not too late to catch up on the new season!

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Speaking of 90210, I gave some serious thought to starting up a Twitter account again over the course of the last few weeks, until I realized it would probably amount to little more than me talking about 90210 and Dancing With Stars in addition to comic books.

Those of you interested in my thoughts on my comics but not so much about whether I think Bristol Palin qualifies as a star or if Lacey Schwimmer looks better as a brunette or a blond should count yourselves lucky.

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Huh. I have this saved on a sticky too, although now I have no idea why. Did I have something to say about it at some point? Hmmm... Looks like a bunch of crazy shit from the movies is in there, mixed with scenes and images more familiar with the original series, and maybe some crazy shit from movies I haven't seen or did see but don't remember seeing, but ummm...now I have no idea why I had this saved here. I really liked the anime series...the first movie or two offering a fuller or alternate ending sort of lost me though...and I think they kept making more...Anyway, watch it if you're so inclined. Then explain it to me. And explain to me why I saved it for something to blog at at some point. Thanks!

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I have this saved for some reason too. Was there a comics connection to this band that I was going to mention at some point...? Or did I just like the video...? (I do) Or the song...?(I do) Or the image of that lady playing the theremin? (I do?) Maybe I ought make better notes when I'm saving links in my To Blog About Some Day stickies...

Well, having listened to/watched a bunch of The Octopus Project on YouTube while typing up this post and readying its images, I can at least say they are an EDILW-approved band. Check 'em out if they come to your town (October 14 at the Grog Shop in Cleveland, my fellow Northeast Ohioans!)

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Speaking of the Grog Shop, Blood Red Shoes are also playing there in October...on the 28. Their comic book connection is more straightforward. Their song "It's Getting Boring By The Sea" was on the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World soundtrack, playing in the background when Knives confronts Ramona at the club before the Clash at Demonhead show (I think; I know it was at a club-set scene) and playing over the "You may have to defeat my seven evil exes" line in the trailers.

James Robinson makes his debut as an artist!

At least, that's what I gather from the cover of this 2008 hardcover collection of some Superman comics.

How is Robinson's artwork? Surprisingly good! He has a versatile, almost chameleonic style, that shifts from story to story. Sometimes his work looks remarkably like Pete Woods' or Renato Guedes'; other times it looks exactly like that of Jesus Merino or Gary Frank.

Okay I'm just being an ass, as is my wont. Robinson and Johns wrote the majority of the contents of this collection (Sterling Gates wrote a little too), and either because Robinson and Johns were the big "stars" associated with the book or/and because there were so many different artists (seven different pencilers), they only credited the writers on the cover.

The trade paperback version adds Gary Frank's name to the cover as well:
I grabbed this copy from a library shelf, thinking I'd catch up on the Superman: The World of New Krypton limited series, the 12-issue about Superman living on New Krypton while his Mon-El starred in Superman and the latest versions of Flamebird and Nightwing starred in Action Comics for about a year.

The first book collected here is Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen Special #1 by Robinson, Merino and four other artists, which I had actually already read, but I figured I'd reread it on my way through the rest of the story. I got to the third panel on page four when I completely lost interest: That's part of a conversation in which Jimmy Olsen's nameless girlfriend dumps him, informing him that she's moving to Midway City. His response is simply, "Oh."

Like I said, I read this story before, having bought the single issue version, so I guess I read this scene, but for whatever reason, the soul-crushing sadness of it didn't strike me so hard the first time around (Perhaps I was just less depressed in general about the state of Superman comics, DC comics, James Robinson's writing, super-comics in general, whatever back then).

I have a hard time thinking of a thought more dismal than that of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen joylessly fucking some nameless girl he doesn't even like while she similarly uses him until she can't stand it any longer.

I put the book down for a couple days, and then tried again, making it through the rest of that particular comic's worth of story before hitting the second comic's worth of story and realizing I had read that too (Adventure Comics Special Featuring the Guardian #1). As it turns out, I've actually read everything collected here—in addition to the two comics previously mentioned, it also includes Superman: New Krypton Special #1, Superman #681 and Action Comics #871—and had no desire to reread it.

There's no single panel that suggests the dreariness of the one I posted above, but the book is a series of down notes with brief flashes of paranoia, obscure characters reappearing in unexpected ways and some fantasy xenophobia that more often than not comes across as silly.

I guess maybe World of New Krypton material I was interested in checking out is included in Superman: New Krypton Vols. 2-3...?

Well, that will teach me to take a collected edition home from the library without first thoroughly flipping through it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go reread a few random pages from Showcase Presents: The Superman Family to stave off my melancholy...

Oh wow! Thanks, DC!

Here's a post I made at Blog@Newsarama in December 2008, asking Batman group editor Mike Marts to please think about integrating some of the awesome villains that appeared in the Batman manga of Jiro Kuwata that got collected in Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan:

Please introduce the following Bat-villains from Jiro Kuwata’s late-sixties Baman manga, partially collected in Pantheon’s Bat-Manga, into current DCU Continuity…

Lord Death Man

A master villain with a skull mask that cannot be removed who goes around in a skeleton costume he accessorizes with a cape and kicky boots, L.D.M.’s shtick is that he can die and return to life at will. Not a bad superpower really, as it allows him to be executed for his crimes repeatedly, or commit suicide to escape capture, and then crawl free from his grave later.

Also, his name is Lord Death Man.

And here's the just-released solicitation info for the December-shipping Batman, Inc. #2:

BATMAN, INC. #2
Written by GRANT MORRISON
Art and cover by YANICK PAQUETTE& MICHAEL LACOMBE
1:25 Variant cover by ANDY KUBERT

The dynamic new era of Batman continues! The Dark Knight and Mr. Unknown – the Batman of Japan – go up against Lord Death Man. It’s going to be a fight to the end that could see the failure of Batman, Inc. before it’s even begun!

On sale DECEMBER 8 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US

Art party!

Yesterday I had a bunch of art supplies out to work with a friend of mine on an arts and crafts project when my niece came over to visit. We all spent a good hour or two drawing. Here are the results. Media? Ball point pen, ink pen, fancy-schmancy markers, cheap-o water colors, a World Wildlife Fund sticker and scrap paper. The artists are aged 34, 33 and 7.

Who did which? Eh, you could probably figure most of 'em out just by looking. That top one, though? That's totally my niece's. In watercolor. At seven! Isn't she talented?!

Comic shop comics: Sept. 1st-Sept. 9th

Batman and Robin #14 (DC Comics) I liked the way Frazer Irving drew Robin’s muscles going super-rigid under the effects of Joker venom in this comic. And a panel or two of his Batman leaping and hitting people simultaneously. And, um, well there’s not really much to this comic. The Joker is fighting Dr. Hurt/Dr. Thomas Wayne/Mangrove Pierce/The Devil; the former is using Batman and Robin as his weapons, and the latter is using Professor Pyg, who barely even vogues in a single panel, let alone dances during this appearance. It’s decent enough Bat-comics, but writer Grant Morrison has raised the bar on Bat-comics so much during his run that “decent enough” from him feels like bad.


Brightest Day #9 (DC) I just wrote like four paragraphs about this book and then for some reason Word closed itself and, when I reopened it, the recovered version of the file only had the title of the book on it.

Why is Word criticizing my criticism?

Well to be fair, I didn’t have much to say about this book. I kinda liked it, despite the ridiculous level of gore—c’mon gang, pages 8 and 9 were just silly with gore—and the fact that I couldn’t make out what exactly was happening in the Black Manta vs. The Evil Mera People fight at the end. The artwork by…whoever draws the Aquaman bits of the book wasn’t terrible or anything, but it lacked the clarity of great action comics, so you would see the results of a particular blow or gambit on a character’s part, but you couldn’t see it coming, or understand quite where it came from.

I don’t know. I enjoyed it, but then, Martian Manhunter and Aquaman are like my two best imaginary friends. I have a hard time imagining someone who doesn’t do a fist pump and hiss “Yesss!” to himself whenever he sees Black Manta getting quite so much out of this.

But then, earlier issues of this series were the best-selling comics of August, so maybe the entire direct market loves Brightest Day. Or hates it less than they hate everything else.


Gorilla-Man #3 (Marvel Comics) I suppose writer Jeff Parker’s intent was to take the narrative of this three-issue miniseries from the sort of high-zaniness you’d expect to occur in a book about a talking gorilla in the very first scene and then move into more traditional soldier of fortune action-adventure stuff throughout the rest of the series, as the Gorilla Man tells the story of how he went from being a man man to being a Gorilla Man.

That would make sense, but an unfortunate side effect is that the series’ very best scene was also it’s first one, and as fun as the two-pronged adventure story that followed was, it never again got as action-packed or imaginatively ridiculous as it did at the beginning.

I’m sure glad it’s over, too. I don’t normally buy $3.99 comics, but I made an exception in this case because a) I really like Jeff Parker and b) they were throwing in old Atlas-era gorilla stories as back-ups to help justify the price tag.

So this issue had an extra seven pages reprinting an old Jack Kirby-drawn gorilla story, but I don’t know, it probably wasn’t really worth a buck. If this went on for another issue or two or three, I’m not certain I would have kept up with it.


Green Lantern #57 (DC) Today I particularly missed When Fangirls Attack, as this particular issue of Green Lantern seemed like one that a great many female fans might have a great deal to say about.

Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Orange Lantern Larfleeze go to Las Vegas, where Pink Lantern/Star Sapphire Carol Ferris is hunting The Predator, the avatar monster-spirit that symbolizes Love, and thus fuels the love-powered Star Sapphires.

The Predator bonds with a creepy stalker guy, who tells the object of his obsession that “I finally have the power-- --make you love me,” but before anything too Meltzery happens, Carol is able to kiss the entity out of the dude, and then she takes it back to her Corps’ home planet where she is made Queen of the Zamorans again.

I actually tried hard not to think too hard about anything that got said or any symbolism in this particular issue, because of the various emotion/colors writer Geoff Johns has been using during his run, the pink/love one just lends itself to unflattering interpretations (Those who were pissed about the cover may or may not be relieved to find out that nothing remotely like it occurs inside the book—only four of the eight characters on it even appear inside—and the first male Star Sapphire is actually more of a Parallax or Ion than a Corpsman/-woman/-thing.

Dough Mahnke’s pencil art continues to amaze, but I notice there’s still four inkers credited. Why does Mahnke still need so many people inking the book? Is he penciling slowly enough that help is needed each and every month?

If so, that’s unfortunate. No page looks bad or anything, but the art is distractingly different from page to page, as the inkers change.


King City #11 (Image Comics) So in this issue, this happens:

In a genre built out of trivia, there’s no such thing as a trivial matter

I came across two news (“news”?) items on the Internet today that really sort of shocked and surprised me, to the extent that news/“news” items regarding shared universe super-comics can shock and surprise someone.

The first was an innocuous enough-seeming post hyping the bi-weekly limited series Justice League: Generation Lost on DC’s Source blog.

Those of you who read and remember my “Comic Shop Comics” posts will know that I’ve been reading and rather enjoying that series regularly, and having just read the eighth and ninth issues of it, it is now the Judd Winick series I have read the most consecutive issues of since…2005, when I read the issue of his Outsiders in which a victim of childhood sexual assault dispassionately began to beat a rapist to death after the rapist attempted to sell five-year-old Lian Harper into sex slavery (Don’t worry, Lean was saved, and lived…until she died in an earthquake five years later). That was the moment when whatever good will Barry Ween and Pedro and Me had generated began to get outweighed by the weight of Winick’s awful, awful superhero writing, and the dark, broken light bulb appeared over my head (cutting my scalp on its jagged edge), signifying the arrival of a bright idea—Hey, this guy writes awful, ugly comics, and I don’t have to read ‘em!

But I liked weekly(-ish) comics, and I liked the JLI characters so I tried Winick’s Justice League: Generation Lost #1. And it wasn’t bad. So I picked up #2, and have been proceeding with caution since. I’ve expected to start hating it at any moment all along, and thus haven’t added it to my pull-list at my local shop, but have been reading it off-the-rack, just waiting for it to plunge from not-that-bad to Why God, why?!

Is that point around the corner?

I don’t know. I didn’t really read Alex Segura’s post hyping the upcoming issue #11 on The Source very closely, I noticed it had a quote from editor Brian Cunningham and there was a pencils-only splash page of “Ice Unleashed” which looked fie, if not “amazing.”

My Blog@Newsarama colleague Troy Brownfield did read Segura’s post and Cunningham’s quote closely though, and noticed a problem, which he posted about here.

You can go read Troy’s post (don’t worry, it’s much shorter and less rambly than mine!), as it will make more sense in context, but the gist of it is that Cunningham refers to Ice’s initial introduction as the Super Friends series from the 1970s, where Ice was originally introduced as Icemaiden…and he notes that she had an absurd origin. (Above: The Icemaiden from the Super Friends comic book. Those comics, by the way, were non-canonical in terms of official DCU continuity)

Troy points out that the Icemaiden from Super Friends is a completely different character than Tora “Ice” Olafsdotter, from the Justice League comics. Icemaiden joined the Justice League after Tora/Ice’s death, appearing on the line-up immediately preceding the Grant Morrison/Howard Porter/John Dell team (Icemaiden appeared briefly in the “New World Order” arc of JLA, fleeing the Justice League satellite with her teammates as the disguised Hyper Clan destroyed it).

(Tora "Ice" Olafsdotter)

(Sigrid "Icemaiden" Nansen, being menaced by tentacles. Wait, surely I can find a less exploitive image of her than that somewhere on the Internet...)

(Hmm, on her knees and in chains probably isn't much better, huh?)

(So, um, this image of her falling out of her costume is the most heroic and dignified image of her I can find on the Internet. Well, at any rate, please note that she has blue skin. That's one good way to tell her apart from Tora/Ice, who does not have blue skin)

There’s some commentary from commenters at both The Source and Blog@ but, so far anyway, no one from DC has popped up to explain what’s going on.

Did Cunningham simply confuse when Ice made her first appearance? If that’s the case, then it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, just something kind of embarrassing for a dude who edits a book starring the character to bring up on his own. But since he mentions that character’s origin and the fact that Winick would be creating “a credible and tragic origin that doesn’t negate what we already know,” well, then it sounds like the stories are being confused, and that is a big deal.

See, Generation Lost’s entire premise is one of nostalgia and trivia, building on the narrative arc of these decades old characters’ fictional histories. It’s a next chapter of a group novel that’s already been written, and the old stuff is much less flexible. This is, after all, a series about a half-dozen characters popular from a 20+ year old comics run reuniting to deal with a threat that surfaced in a five-year-old (or so) series of event comics, which has been given new urgency by the last year or so’s worth of Green Lantern and Blackest Night comics. Take away exacting fealty to the plot points of past comics, and what are you left with in Generation Lost? Just some clichéd if readable superhero action-adventure scripting, some uneven, generally sub-par art, and some really nice Cliff Chiang covers.

In other words, not a whole lot.

Troy ends his post by asking if fans can keep this stuff straight, why can’t editors? It’s a fair question. I’ve always assumed there was a lot more to editing a DC comic book than simply knowing the characters and their histories extremely well, but man, this seems to suggest there’s less. (Even if you don’t trust Wikipedia or the Internet in such matters, there’s always the DC/DK-published The DC Comics Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Characters of the DC Universe. Flipping to the I’s, I see Ice and Icemaiden are both included, their entries complete with their first appearances, secret identities and origins).

Ignoring The Source suggestion that this might lead to a new costume (it looks like Ice’s tank top is exploding off in that image, part of which you can see above, and her neat-o page boy is turning into a pointy icicle afro), there are at least two other less-than-thrilling suggestions about the character’s possible future.

The first is the promise that the character will be going “from pensive, shy flower to elemental badass.” Perhaps this time will be different, but Ice was already darkened and bad-assened in the ‘90s, just before she was killed off in 1994, remaining dead and off the board until she was resurrected through a combination of magic and herbs or something in Birds of Prey in 2007, which coincidentally returned her to her JLI-era costume and personality.

In other words, “Dark Ice” didn’t really work out all that well for anyone. (Above: Dark Ice. You can tell she's getting edgier and more bad-ass by the amount of cleavage pictured)

The second is Cunningham’s reference to a possible new origin for Tora/Ice to replace or update her original, “absurd” origin.

What origin is that? Tora is a princess of a long lost race of magical Ice-people who live in a secret mountain homeland in Norway. That is, magical ice princess has magical ice powers. That’s hardly an “absurd” origin story, particularly by the standards of super-comics (Ice’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Guy Gardner’s origin, for example, is that he was chosen as the back-up Green Lantern for Hal Jordan in case Hal Jordan ever couldn’t be Green Lantern. Oh, and then he was a retroactively geneteically-engineered human/alien hybrid with the ability to transform his body parts into weird weapons via magic tattoos. And then he wasn’t anymore, because that was stupid.)

By the way, the last time Judd Winick attempted to fix an origin story that wasn’t the least bit broke? That would be the troubled 2006-2008 limited series Trials of Shazam!, which effectively left the Captain Marvel and the Marvel family so toxic that they’ve been barely touched in the year since it wrapped up, as if DC was letting the radioactivity of Winick’s changes wear off.

So no, I’m not very excited about the future of Justice League: Generation Lost.


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But enough DC Universe trivia, let’s look at some real world trivia: Quick, which Ohio city beginning with the letter C did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster collaborate on Superman in?

You did say Cleveland, right?

Because J. Michael Straczynski said Columbus in this particular post in the long, fairly healthy comments thread about one retailers disastrous attempts to try and use JMS’ Superman-walking-around storyline to promote Superman and comic in general while, naturally, selling some comics of his own.

If you haven’t read the story JMS was commenting on at all, please do—It’s one of those stories that is no doubt incredibly frustrating, even maddening, if you’re involved with it, but is actually kind of hilarious in a “Ha, ha, comics is soooooo fucked up” kind of way if you’re not.

Straczynski, by the way, really does know what city Siegel and Shuster did their Superman-making-up in, as he came back a little later down the thread to say it was just a stupid typo and to note that Ohio has far too many big cities that begin with the letter C (But, sadly, no Calebopolis…yet).

His mistake was enough to make me temporarily question everything I knew about Siegel, Shuster and Cleveland though, as I briefly entertained the possibility that JMS was right and my memory was wrong. Like, maybe they were born/grew up around Columbus and then moved north to Cleveland later…?

This sort of real-life trivia is perhaps a bit more important to me than it is to others, as I am a lifelong Ohio resident (Well, I went to college in Pennsylvania, but still…), and grew up east of Cleveland before relocating to Columbus for about a decade and then returning east of Cleveland again…I thought I knew my comics geography pretty well, and take a certain amount of pride in it.

I can forgive JMS the mistake though, as I’d be hard-pressed to name three big cities in many other states myself. I am pretty curious about Superman #703, the Superman-walks-around-Cincinnati issue, as from what JMS says Superman actually spends most of the time around Cleveland…?

Because Cincinnati is about two hours south of Columbus, and Columbus is about two to two-and-a-half hours south of Cleveland, so that’s a good four or five hours difference between cities…by car. Walking, it’s…I don’t know, really, really far? Is Superman super-walking?

Once the Columbus/Cleveland confusion was cleared up, I was still a little shocked to hear just how badly DC screwed over this retailer. Not that it’s was there job to help him with his own personal marketing efforts or decision to celebrate their book or anything, but in that they didn’t publish the book on time, thus ruining whatever he had happened to have planned in the first place.

Like, the absolute bare minimum DC had to do was just keep a shipping date, and they couldn’t even do that much. That is sad. And hilarious. Tragicomic? Let’s say tragicomic. DC and poor Kendall Swafford’s entire experience with Superman #703 is nothing short of cosmically tragicomic.

JMS explains the reason for his delay, explaining that he was very ill, which is, of course, pretty terrible for JMS, and is certainly an explanation, but not really an excuse.

I was under the understanding that DC Comics were written a good six months before they arrived in comics shops—a tidbit I learned from a letters page in a comic from the early ‘90s or so—but I guess that’s no longer the case? That six months has shrunk to a matter of weeks now? Jeez. I assumed JMS had his entire Superman-walking-around story finished in script form before the first issue saw publication. Why wouldn’t he? Why would DC want to start publishing a story arc that wasn’t even finished being written yet?

If that sort of schedule is more common than the six month lead time I remember form my youth, then it’s really no wonder so many DC books look rushed these days—they are rushed.

It’s really a shame in the case of JMS’s Superman-walking-around storyline, too. I don’t know if it’s any good or not—I haven’t read a single positive review of it, every panel of it I have seen posted here and there with reviews has made me cringe, and Eddy Barrows is one of my least favorite artists, so I haven’t been in a hurry to jump on it—but it’s certainly marketable.

The publisher should easily be able to get a bunch of local press with each and every issue of the storyline, as local TV news goofballs crack a few jokes about Superman visiting their cities on the 11 o’clock news and daily and altweekly newspapers review the issue or interview JMS or Barrows or the editors or whoever. This storyline is tailor-made for local mainstream media coverage.

Of course, to plan that sort of press, you have to have the issues actually come out when you say they’re coming out.

Can't...update...

blog...tonight...too sleepy...

Two...to...tomorrow. Two posts tomorrow. I swear.

Now...mmmust...sssleep...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Earlier today DC revealed the cover to the second issue of David Finch's

Batman: The Dark Knight #2 on their The Source blog. This is what it looks like: The first thing I noticed, after pondering the question of whether just giving any old character design a monocle and a cigarette holder was enough to make it look like The Penguin, was yet another detail of Batman's new costume, which I still don't like.

Specifically, his gloves: There's something vaguely familiar about them, although I'm not quite sure what they remind me of...

Wait.

Oh yeah, they remind me of this: Is Batman rocking two Nintendo Power Gloves as part of his new costume...?

A week or two ago I would have said that was ridiculous, as there's no way Batman has the time to waste playing video games.

But now that I've seen the animated trailer/ad for Batman: The Brave and The Bold: The Video Game, I know that Batman is, in Bat-Mite's assessment, as good at video games as he is at crime fighting. ("I make it a point to prepare for all possible contingencies," Batman says to Bat-Mite, explaining his video game prowess).

Review: The Order #1-#10

I was pretty thrilled to find all ten issues of the short-lived, 2007 Marvel series The Order in a fifty-cent bin the other day, as the trade collection of this Internet-beloved, market-rejected Matt Fraction/Barry Kitson series has long been on my To Buy, Someday list (Also in that bin? The first two issues of DC Universe: Legacies and issues #1 and #3 of Siege, two title I passed on due to their ridiculously high cover prices, but I perhaps foolishly passed ‘em up since the weren’t complete runs. That was one fine fifty cent-bin though.)

The above panel is from the second issue of the series, in which the two leaders of the new Marvel super-team seek to engage a publicist, and she rather prophetically explains why this title wouldn’t be long for the world.

Prior to reading, I knew two things about the book.

First, that it was originally announced as The Champions, reviving the team-name of Marvel’s previous left coast super-team, but that name had to be changed when Heroic Publishing claimed that violated their trademark on the name. Marvel settled on The Order, a revival of the name of a Defenders off-shoot team but it was an exceptionally poor choice, having ominous, negative connotations that were the opposite of those evoked by “The Champions.” (In retrospect, they probably should have went with West Coast Avengers, or even Defenders).

And second, it was prematurely canceled, leading to a lot of teeth-gnashing and/or clucking about how unreceptive the current market is when it comes to new characters and concepts.

Having now read the book, I was a bit surprised at just how new it really was. It spun out of Mark Millar, Steve McNiven and company’s massively popular Civil War series, having gotten a brief conceptual cameo there. Part of Tony “Iron Man” Stark and his allies’ list of ways to improve the world, The Champions/Order team was to be one of the fifty Fifty-Stat Initiative Avengers teams, this one filled out by artificially-created super-teams given names, powers and roles based on the idea of the mythical Olympian pantheon (An aside: In other words, Millar’s big idea here was to have another writer base a series around something Grant Morrison once referred to an a Newsarama interview about how he decided on the line-up for his JLA run…?).

The fact that this book spins out of that scene in Civil War, some occasionally guest-spots by Tony Stark, and old Iron Man supporting character Pepper Potts on the team is the extent of the Marvel Universe buttressing the book had (And, oddly, the whole Greek god thing is referenced in the first issue, and then completely ignored: None of the heroes have code names, costumes and, in most cases, powers derived from Olympian inspiration).

Perhaps that ended up being a factor in The Order’s quick cancellation, but the fact that Fraction and Kitson came up with so many brand-new characters and tried to give a new book a go with them is in itself rather admirable. New-ness is, or course, relative, and as superheroes, these characters aren’t the most original lot, as a glance at the cover there will attest: Giant robot guy, Superman analogue, Flash-powered guy who looks like he’s wearing Gravity’s costume, a blonde in a belly shirt with a frighteningly elongated torso a la DC’s 2005 version of Supergirl, etc.

The codenames all sounded mostly like they could have been members of an early nineties Image Comics team that appeared in a series that only had one issue—Heavy, Anthem, Pierce, Maul, Calamity, Mulholland Black (sounds like Manchester Black). The costumes are, individually, quite uninspired and seemingly cut from the same cloth as way too many of the post-Ultimates superhero costumes have been (although Kitson or whoever was responsible did a pretty neat job of trying to make them look like team uniforms through colors and logos without actually making them uniform) and, for the most part, the powers are overly familiar and easily assigned as inspired by those of previous superheroes.

As individual superheroes then, this is a pretty lame collection, and it’s hard to imagine most of them carrying a book of their own.

That is, of course, completely beside the point though, since they don’t have to carry a book of their own; they were created to be a team in a team book, and it’s therefore more important how they function as pieces of a whole rather than as individuals.

And while the superhero personas of the various characters are mostly derivative and uninteresting, the characters themselves are all pretty interesting, Fraction have invested a lot of work into making well-rounded characters with big, exciting, diverse backgrounds chockfull of potential future sub-plots to be explored (Of course, given that most of them barely get introduced before the story and the title ends, it almost seems like an unfortunate waste that Fraction did give so many characters so much personality).

The way Fraction reveals theses characters is clever; “clever” meaning perhaps “cutesy” or perhaps “smart,” depending on how generous you’re feeling or, perhaps, what kind of mood you’re in when you’re reading the comics. I read them all in two big chunks, so it didn’t strike me as tiresome—perhaps it would have if I was reading it one issue a month over the course of the better part of a year though.

Each issue is structured to open and close with a different character talking directly to the reader or a camera, reality show “confessional” style, while an unseen, off-panel interviewer asks them questions. Long, horizontal “widescreen” panels offering silent images to back up or contradict the characters’ dialogue appear at regular intervals during pauses in the conversations. It’s an awful lot of telling rather than showing, but there’s enough showing thrown in that it reads like a subversive form of info-dumping.

This is only one part of the strict format structuring in the series; after these introductions, each issue also features a trio of related quotes to set the mood or reflect the action (A note on my personal preferences: I’m not a fan of quotes in comics), similar lay-outs for each issue, and rather intriguing last pages, with several small panels of conversation rather than the typical, Geoff Johns-style “Oh shit!” splash-image cliffhanger.

Overall, I rather liked it.

The benefit of an all-original, no-name cast like this is a lot of the rules readers come to expect in their super-comics don’t apply, and thus everything is much more suspenseful. If Batman’s caught in a death trap, no reader worries that he might get killed off and, in the rare instances in which he actually might die, the reader can rest assured the death is temporary. Is there sexual tension between Aquaman and Wonder Woman in an issue of JLA? Maybe, but they’re probably not going to ever hook up, get married or have any kids or anything. Dick Grayson’s not going to betray Batman. The Punisher’s not going to quit shooting dudes to retire and open a bakery.

But with a bunch of characters who have only existed a month or so, and who were created specifically created to put through this particular melodrama/action wringer? Anything goes yo.

As I said, Fraction has created some extremely interesting characters (for super-comics), and he manages to instill each issue with the perfect balance of a zaniness, real-world relevance and character-danger that seems realistic for the Marvel Universe as we’ve come to know it. In one issue the team might fight for their lives against zombie hobos (“Zobos,”) but they also have to deal with zoning issues, city and national politics and inter-personal conflicts.

Ten issues isn’t very many issues, but it seems awfully respectable in retrospect, as more recent Marvel series haven’t lasted that long, despite the benefit of longer-lived characters more ingrained in the Marvel Universe (Aside form the Iron Man cameos, Namor is the biggest-name guest-star, and he appears in a single issue).

Captain Britain and MI-13 lasted 15 issues, but it had some name recognition and some characters people had actually heard of before. The last stab at Exiles lasted six issues; they just canceled the latest attempt at an Agents of Atlas series at, what, five issues? Doctor Voodoo: Avenger of the Supernatural and S.W.O.R.D. lasted five a piece.

So ten issues of The Order? Not bad, guys. It’s somewhat unfortunate that the book didn’t last longer though, in large part because some of the initial premise seemed to be tied up in the fact that the various heroes would only have superpowers for on year’s time due to a flaw in the artificial superpower creation process. The characters had no choice but to burn out then, and there would have eventually been an element of urgency and desperation in their careers as superheroes, but we didn’t get to see any of that in action yet, nor much in the way of what would happen to the characters after they lost their powers (we do see some bitter, ex-Order members who have their powers prematurely stripped, however).

Would The Order occasionally get an entirely new cast? Would Fraction have written it in “Seasons” as if it were a TV show? Would the old characters stick around once they lost their powers?

It might have been interesting to find out.

In the seventh issue, Namor spends much of the issue being a prick to team leader Anthem, and talks about his own longevity in the world of superheroes and Marvels:Four years? Anthem and The Order didn’t even last four more months. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to know for sure, but I imagine if I reread the series, I’d be able to pick out the exact moment at which Marvel realized they’d be canceling the title, as Kitson’s presence seems to decrease the longer the title goes on, and more and more artists get involved.

He gets an “art by” credit in the first three issues, while Mark Morales gets an inking credit. For the fourth issue, Jon Sibal joins Morales on inks. For the fifth issue, Kitson is just providing layouts, while Khari Evans pencils (I love Evans’ work, but he draws nothing like Kitson).

For the last three issues of the series, Kitson handles breakdowns, and the credits as well as the bylines start changing from issue to issue. Order #8 finishes by Kitson, Stefano Guadiano, Paul Neary and Jon Sibal. Order #9 has penils by Javier Saltares and inks by Guardiano and Serek Fridolfs. For #10, there are pencils and finishes; Saltares for the former, Scott Hanna, Olazaba and Nelson for the latter.

So when the book reaches its halfway point, Kitson seems to arbitrarily recede, and then briefly return, before the book visually disintegrates. The rather rigid formatting of each issue that I discussed earlier helps redeem the book—the line work and character designs start to vary widely, but the book looks and reads the same due to the layouts—but The Order’s lame duck status can be read quite clearly on the pages of it’s last few installments.

It was well worth the $5 I paid for it, although I’m pretty sure I would have been sorely disappointed had I paid $26 for the two $13 trade paperbacks collecting the series. It’s certainly an interesting book to look at and consider though, for the way it illustrates a valiant attempt to try to sell new-ness to the Marvel audience and to capitalize on one of Millar’s ideas for a new series seeded into Civil War (This and Avengers: The Initiative were really the only brand-new series launched out of concepts in Civil War, right? The rest of “The Initiative” branded books were just tweaks of status quo, right?) and, I think, ultimately as a signpost in Fraction’s career. At the very least, the start of his Invincible Iron Man can be seen in the book, and a couple of elements—the setting, the prominence of Namor—prefigure some of what he’d do with the X-Men franchise.

Comics shop comics: Some recent books that aren't on my pull-list but that I bought off the shelf of a strange comic shop I visited

Batgirl #14 (DC Comics) Allow me to state for the record that I do not like the character Stephanie Brown; I hated her in 1992’s Detective Comics #647-#649, and the passing years and successive appearances of the character have done nothing to make me like her anymore. Certainly sticking her in a godawful purple Ultimate Batgirl costume with a utility garter and giving her the Batgirl title—making her DC’s Blond Teenage Superheroine No. 17, and re-kicking shy, Asian, bad-ass super-ninja Cassandra Cain to the curb in the process—sure didn’t make me like her any more.

I don’t even like the logo of her book.


Needless to say, this is the first time I actually picked up an issue of the book. I may not be very interested in Batgirl III* or her stupid costume or her lame logo, and I may know next to nothing about the creative team, but if you add in Supergirl and a bunch of black-and-white Bela Lugosi Draculas (about a half-dozen on the cover, and the solicitation promised 24) then sure, I’ll try that out for $3.

Well, as it turns out, Batgirl is pretty terrible.

From what I could gather about the premise, writer Bryan Q. Miller seems to be writing Batgirl like Chuck Dixon’s Robin, which is fine, I suppose, and this particular done-in-one, good jumping-on-point story has a nice, zany, Silver Age plot to it. Supergirl and Batgirl are hanging out on campus (Stephanie’s in college now? And she was a year older than Tim Drake? That means he must be 17 or 18 at least now, right?), and they go to see an old black and white Dracula movie. Meanwhile, a campus experiment goes awry, and 24 Draculas come to life from the movie, and the teenage blond version of the World’s Finest team unite to montage through a bunch of vampire slaying.

The comic book science is smart and original, and while some of the jokes are kinda lame, the script seems like it should make for a rally fun comic.

I mean, it puts Dracula on a Segway for God’s sake, that’s gotta count for something.
The problem? Lee Garbett and Trevor Scott’s art is just awful.

Here’s how Garbett dresses our two leads:Stephanie’s mom, by the way, is wearing the same top, only her tight long-sleeve blouse is light green.

I’m a big fan of the silent “beat” panel in which no one moves, but not when it’s as transparently repeated completely unaltered like this:Jeez, how does Stephanie even talk with her lips pursed like that?

This panel is typical of the backgrounds in the book, with the added advantage of featuring confusing action:A double, finger-splayed back handed lunge-slap? Your fighting style is…weird, Dracula.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m nitpicking, I know. But when there’s something to nitpick on every page, there’s a real problem with your comic book. I guess the great Dustin Nguyen takes over the art chores with the next issue (which doesn’t come out until November, because Comics!), so if this sort of plotting is typical of Miller’s run, then I suppose the title will seriously turn around next issue.

But it’s too late for me. This is the issue with all the Draculas in it, and thus the one I decided to test out.

Oh, hey! When I checked out dccomics.com to see when Nguyen was starting, I noticed this in the solicitation: “But what Gotham City's Batgirl isn't prepared for is the arrival of the mysterious 'Order of the Scythe.'" Gotham City’s Batgirl, eh? That’s odd phrasing. I wonder if part of Batman Inc.’s Bat-franchising will lead to more than one Batgirl in the near future…?


Batman: The Brave and The Bold #20 (DC) What is this insanity?! This issue features a 20-page new story (which is pretty great), and an eight-page reprint of the first half of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold #18 (That issue was divided into two different complete stories which were bound together by their villain). Maybe the idea was to add value to the title now that the price has gone up to $2.99 from $2.50, but it’s…weird, since the story it reprints is just two months old.

As I said,the new story is pretty good. It’s by writer Robert Greenberger and the Robert Pope/Scott McRae art team, and is about The Female Furies kidnapping Mister Miracle in order to pose him in an elaborate Jack Kirby cover homage. It’s up to Big Barda and the World’s Greatest Detective to rescue the World’s Greatest Escape Artist.

I’m not really the target audience for this fairly straightforward issue of a fairly straightforward comic, but I really enjoyed the bits where Batman was lecturing the Furies while beating the shit out of them:



Image Firsts: Liberty Meadows #1 (Image Comics) This $1 comic book reprinting a whole bunch of four-panel gag strips is my first extended exposure to Frank Cho’s signature, name-making work. It’s pretty good, actually; most of the don’t really transcend the level of humor typical of daily newspaper comic strips, but Cho’s great artwork goes a long way toward redeeming even the weakest jokes.

If, like me, you’re a Liberty Meadows virgin, this is a great way to spend a dollar.


Justice League: Generation Lost #8-9 (DC) Let’s take a moent to really look at Cliff Chiang’s latest two covers for this series, shall we? Those are some great covers.

In the first of them, our heroes not only all look sexy, cool, powerful and determined, but, most importantly, they look colorful, and are thus in super-sharp contrast to their enemies, who have seemingly emerged from a black and white movie. I love what Chiang has done with the staging of our heroes here too, pulling the “camera” back far enough that we get a good look at them all from head to toe, and allowing enough space to fill up the image with what look like overwhelming odds. Not only is the Justice League the brighter, more colorful side of the conflict on the cover, but they are also individuals, facing off against the forces of conformity, and they are the underdogs.

The second cover doesn’t have quite as much going on, but is still pretty great, showing Fire tied to a chair, but, as her determined smirk reveals, she isn’t the slightest bit cowed. After all, she’s still as superhero, which Chiang reminds us by depicting her in both her regular Josephine form and her superhero form. And is it just me, or does Max Lord seem a lot scarier when she’s just dressed in a suit and tie, as opposed to the t shirt, gun holster, gloves and cargo pants he wears inside these books.

Speaking of the insides of these books, they’re just awful looking compared to those Chiang covers, generally saying less in 22 pages of panels and dialogue than Chiang does with a single image.

They’re perfect junk food comics, though. They’re not very good for me, they’re rather everyday and unremarkable and I probably wouldn’t serve them to guests, but they fill me up when I’m in the mood for something in particular. Say, some favorite C- and D-level characters appearing in readable comic books that don’t hurt my eyes or make me want to punch out the person who wrote them.


Magnus, Robot Fighter: One For One (Dark Horse) This was pretty fun. It’s one of Dark Horse’s $1 reprints, this one collecting the very first Magnus story from 1963. It’s all by Russ Manning so the art is, of course, gorgeous, and it was really great reading it in a spine-less, stapled comic book format like this instead of a big, fancy, expensive hardcover. The experience just seemed more genuine.

There is next to nothing to the story, which is simply man vs. machine at the most literal level possible. In the year 4000, robots rule humanity, and only the super-strong, trained by a robot Magnus has the guts and power to stand up to them…mostly by karate-chopping their heads off.

Manning’s robots are a charmingly dated version of futuristic robots, skinny arms and legs that look like they might be made of pipe cleaners, if viewed from far away.

I was particularly amused by the way the word “robot” is constantly abbreviated into “rob”-something, instead of the more common something-bot. For example, a repair robot is a “Repairob” rather than a “Repair-bot,” and a police robot that quells riots is a “Riotrob” rather than a “Riot-bot.”

It’s well worth a buck, although I found myself having a hard time rooting for Magnus.

Sure, the evil robot named “H8” who built a computer out of living human beings seems like he could probably use a good karate chop, but the police robots who arrested the fetching senator’s daughter for speeding? They were just doing their jobs. She was speeding—endangering her own life and those of otheres—and when the robots were like, “Hey lady, quit speeding yo,” she’s just like “Suck it, robots” and speeds away even faster. I’ve gotta side with the polrobs on this one.


Scooby-Doo, Where are You? #1 (DC) The relaunched Scooby-Doo is a lot like the old Scooby-Doo (I was hoping against hope that this might be based on the look and continuity of the new Mystery Incorporated series, the first two episodes of which were awesome). This contains a ten-page story written and drawn by Scott Gross in which the gang vacation in Canada and face a fake (and sorta cool-looking) Ogopogo, followed by an eight-page story by Chris Duffy and Tim Harkins in which Fred tries to make Shaggy shave off his shag, but mysteries and monsters keep him form ever finding the time (Comics.org tells me this back-up is actually a reprint of a strip that originally appeared in 1997’s Scooby-Doo #2; that would make sense, as I recall seeing Harkins’ byline a lot in the title back then). Three pages of profiles round out the issue.


Star Wars: Legacy: One For One (Dark Horse) Despite having a certain amount of affection for Star Wars hardwired right into my DNA on account of the year I was born and the years in which I grew up coinciding with the release of the first few films, I’ve never been able to work up much enthusiasm for any of the expanded Star Wars universe business. Not even the second trilogy really, except for some cool stuff around the edges here and there (Wait, I loved the 2-D Clone Wars “micro-series” on Cartoon Network).

My interest in Dark Horse’s Star Wars line has never been sufficient enough to read much of it (I bought a couple of the Tales anthologies, and that’s about it).

This here comic book seemed like a pretty ideal way of checking in though because a) it’s only $1, b) it’s written by John Ostrander and EDILW favorite Jan Duuresema, and c) I had heard from someone in the Star Wars know that the “Legacy” stuff was some of the best Star Wars stuff since the Empire Strikes Back…or wait, did he say “Legacy” or did he say “Knights of the Old Republic”….? Well, that’s one thing I hate about the expanded universe stuff…it’s just so expansive.

This comic is set 130 years after Return of the Jedi and, disappointingly, the state of the galaxy seems an awful lot like it was during the prequel trilogy—there’s even an insufferable, angry, hot-headed little Skywalker punk who seems tempted by the Dark Side. The big difference seems to be that the Sith are now playing the role that the Jedi once played.

The comic certainly read and felt like Star Wars, which is a good/bad thing, although the comic format robs me of the things I now find most pleasurable about Star Wars movies—the sound effects of lasers and light sabers and the kicky fight music.

Duuresema’s art was a real treat, although Brad Anderson colors it with an inch of it’s life—she does really great stuff with shadows on people’s faces, but the coloring softens and obscures the lines and blacks inker Dan Parsons has applied to her artwork, dulling everything that wasn’t a laser blast to create a rather dreary and un-Star Wars-like atmosphere (But maybe that’s the point, since this is so long after the bright, shiny period of the prequels…?)

I liked the artwork enough that I could easily see myself reading comics like this if they were all priced at a buck, but this is, of course, a special publication. Maybe I should look for some library trades at some point in the future…



*Yes, III. Betty Kane was “Bat-Girl,” with a hyphen. And also she didn’t exist as Bat-Girl in current DC continuity, as far as I know.