(links)

I was somewhat frustrated by the lack of screen-shots and stills from Scooby-Doo! Curse of The Lake Monster, which I wrote a bit about the other day. It was hard to find examples to illustrate a few of the points I wanted to make. I finally found a good image of the film's version of Velma Dinkley, the traditionally dowdier, chubbier of the two girls who hung out with Scooby-Doo. In Curse, she was played by the slim, pixie-esque young actress Hayley Kiyoko and, as you can see above, her figure is quite un-Velma-like.

Although, as I mentioned in that post, Velma has been getting gradually hotter in the 21st century, thanks to Linda Cardellini's casting of her in the two feature films, Kiyoko's portrayal of her in two TV films and the the Cardellini-like character design in current Scooby series, Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated.

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Speaking of sexy Velmas, Newsarama writer Lan Pitts, who was part of the old "Best Shots @" crew of comics reviewers at Newsarama that I used to run with, collects sketches and original art, and one of the subjects he often solicited is Ms. Dinkley herself. The above is by by Joe Eisma, and is one of the more consciously pin-up-esque in his Velma collection; all 18 pieces of which can be seen here.

The many Velma's come in various shapes and sizes, with skirts of various levels of shortness. I think I like Robbi Rodriguez's the best; it doesn't really say "Velma" to me at all, but it's an awesome drawing.

You can see more of the work Lan's commissioned and collected in the various galleries here.

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Via Tom Spurgeon's superior link-blogging, I came across this post by Martin Wisse slamming a Milo Manara drawing of The Scarlet Witch, which Marvel is using as the cover of the upcoming Uncanny Avengers #2.

I don't want to quote Wisse's post at length, because it's only a few sentences long, but his main contention, if you're too lazy to go read his few sentences (don't be so lazy; go read them) is that the image in question? "That’s not the Scarlet Witch, that’s the bog standard Manara woman cosplaying her."

Wisse is right, of course, but then, do any characters look like themselves anymore? Close your eyes and imagine just about any superhero character, the Scarlet Witch is a fine example to do with.

Okay, what does that character look like in your mind? Does she look like a particular artist drew here? Does every artist drawing her make her look the same?

Hell, if Batman and Spider-Man, whose costumes cover somewhere between 90% and 100% of their bodies, look completely different depending on which artist is drawing them. Neither DC nor Marvel use style guides or character bibles or character designs of any kind to dictate how characters look anymore. The Hulk can be anywhere from six feet tall to 20 feet tall, a foot across or eight feet across. Sometimes Spidey's built like a praying mantis, sometimes like a runner, sometimes a swimmer, sometimes like a competitive body builder.

Namor can look like Robert DeNiro or Phil Collins, and, in fact, is more likely to look like either of them than he is the character designed by Bill Everett, or slightly redesigned by Jack Kirby or John Byrne years later. These days, Namor is really just a guy wearing one of Namor's costumes, who will more likely than not have black hair (although he might have brown hair, if the colorist prefers) and who will be referred to in the dialogue as "Namor," which is how readers will know who he is.

So is that the Scarlet Witch? I don't know. She's wearing the Scarlet Witch costume, so I guess so...? She doesn't look like George Perez's Scarlet Witch, the only one I've spent much time with, but then, I don't suspect anyone else on the insides of that book or the covers of that book are going to look a whole hell of a lot like Perez's versions of the character.

At least Manara drew his way off-model Scarlet Witch, rather than just photo-traced some poorly selected photo-reference (which Wisse alluded to in his post, as you know, as you read that before getting to the end of this bit of mine).

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Speaking of which this is a pretty nice picture, but it does just kinda look like J. Bone plopped Michelle Obama's head on top of Wonder Woman's body, doesn't it...?

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I was really happy when I heard that Get Your War On had returned (in the animated format). And then I was kinda pissed that I didn't hear about it sooner. Here are the latest ones.

GYWO was the only good thing about life in America during the first decade of the 21st century.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. A little.

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I read Don MacPherson's review of writer (?) Dan DiDio and artists Bren Anderson and Scott Hanna's Phantom Stranger #0 with great some interest. Apparently they are really playing up the connections between the character and Jesus Christ—the Stranger is apparently Judas, I guess—without actually using the words "Jesus" or "Judas" in the comic which sounds pretty damn fascinating, and like the kind of uncomfortable dance I'd like to see occurring (in a trade collection I borrow from the library next year, well after the series is cancelled at...let's be generous and say issue #10. Maybe #14, since DC's co-publisher is also the writer, and he might get a little more slack than the writers of the other 51 "New 52" books).

There's even a mention of Judas' coins in it!

Is that weird that DC released Phantom Stranger at about the same time that they released Walt Simonson's The Judas Coin, which follows one of the cursed coins of Judas through DC Universe history...?

To bad DiDio didn't tie his work closer to Simonson's, and have DC sell it that way—they maybe could have moved some more Judas Coins by saying it was a keystone of the secret of the New 52iverse, revealing a portion of The Phantom Stranger's origin.

Ah well.

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I was pretty surprised to hear DC announce a new comic set in the JSA: Liberty Filess Elseworlds setting. Mostly because I don't remember anything at all about the comic. I read one of those series, and all I remember is that they called the superheroes by different names (Exmaple, "The Clock" instead of "Hourman") and that...Martian Manhunter was in a tent, I think...? (Oh, spoiler! I think it was a surprise that it was Martian Manhunter in the tent and not, like, someone form the JSA...?) Seriously, I don't remember jackshit about those comics, which is kinda weird. Like, I know I read them, and I know I didn't dislike them, but they weren't so good that I remembered much of anything about them, for whatever reason.

Weirder still is that DC is doing a sequel series, like, a million years later, so long after they've done away with Elseworlds.

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I have only a passing familiarity with the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe—I know the characters names and some of the primary actors who played roles on the series, basically—but it was my understanding that all of the slayers had to be female, for some reason.

If this is true, then that means either a) males can be slayers too, or b) only gay males can be slayers too, and then things get, really, really weird.

Like, if the slayers have to be female, what is it about females that qualify them to be vampire slayers? It's not something biological or physical—like, you don't need two x chromosomes or a vagina to be a slayer—but you have to have that certain something that most females and some men, specifically, gay men have in common? Do you have to be sexually attracted to men in order to be a vampire slayer, not necessarily be female? (And does this mean there aren't any lesbian vampire slayers?)

Basically, I just don't get what a gay man would have in common with women that would qualify him but not qualify a straight man.

Damn, I've already thought way more about Buffy than I need to.

Also, it's kind of depressing that we're still at a point in comics history where "Hey look, a gay character!" is a send-out-a-press-release and successfully score coverage kind of event. Like, I would have hoped by 2012 the presence of gay superheroes, Riverdale teens, barbarians, X-Wing fighter pilots, Predators, whatever would be commonplace enough that it's not even worth pointing out.

That was, as it turns out, a naive hope. Oh well. Maybe next decade...?

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A whole lot of X-Men comics came out this week, apparently.

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Finally, here is retailer Brian Hibbs on the pox that is variant covers, a piece entitled "Don't Shit Where You Eat." I agree with almost every word of it, despite the fact that I see it from a different perspective than Hibbs does (I'm not a retailer, but a comics consumer/worrier about). I've long suspected they do much more long-term damage than they do short-term good, and what little short-term good they do seems to be somewhere between shady and scummy.

The saddest thing about variants is that the smaller publishers who seem like the greatest offenders are apparently forced into that corner by the big publishers (that is, Marvel and DC) also vigorously pursuing the variant cover strategy, and that either publisher feels they have to go crazy with variants is about a strong a statement about how fucked up the direct market is that I can think of.

I do not care for this blurb.

It's white on light blue, so it may be a little hard to make out, but it says, "Fun like watching The Venture Brothers or listening to The Ramones," and is attributed to "Kelly Sue DeConnick, Captain Marvel" (the former being a professional comics writer, the latter being the title of one of her current comics, the probably-not-long-for-this-world series for Marvel comics.

The blurb appeared on the cover of It Girl! and The Atomics #2, and thus must be referring to It Girl! and The Atomics.

I don't like it.

I've watched The Venture Bros. I've listened to The Ramones. And I've now read both issues of It Girl!, and I'm afraid I can't find anything the three have in common.

In what way is the cartoon series The Venture Bros like It Girl...? They both have bearded, red-headed scientist characters. And...that's all I can really think of.

In what way are The Ramones like It Girl...? I got nothing. I think an argument could be made of similarities between Madman and some of character creator Mike Allred's comics with the work of the Ramones, but I don't see anything in these 40-50 comics pages that seem at all like the Ramones.

Now, it's possible DeConnick was simply grabbing two random things that she also enjoyed and using them as signifiers by which to gauge her enjoyment of the comic book—she did say it was fun like "watching" and "listening" to those two examples, rather than saying it was fun like those two examples themselves, but, if that's the case, it's a pretty poor blurb for Image to put on the cover (Why not go with "Fun" and leave it at that?), and it requires a little too much rhetorical reach.

Not to mention how subjective "I liked reading this comic book as I like listening to this band or watching this TV show" is as a measure of the quality of a book, or even the endorsers endorsement of that book.

It would be a little like me saying, I don't know, "Faith Erin Hicks' artwork is charming, like an old-fashioned doughnut shop with a horseshoe-shaped bar lined with stools built into the floor or a crayon-drawing of a pony that actually looks more like a cat taped on the office refrigerator," or "She was wearing a really pretty dress, like Vince Locke's ink line or a church bell ringing nine o'clock in the evening in December."

Comic shop comics: September 12

It Girl! And the Atomics #1-#2 (Image Comics) I think it says something about something that I was unable to purchase the first issue of this series off the rack of my local comic shop the Wednesday afternoon it came out (last month), but had to wait until this week, for a pre-ordered copy of the second printing.

I think it says that the series is extremely popular, and sold out really fast—not only at my shop, but in such numbers that Image had to rush a second printing to press.

Or that Image did a poor job of estimating the market for the book, and thus didn't publish enough copies.

Or that my local comic shop did a poor job of estimating how much demand among their customers there was for the book when placing their orders.

Or that I don't pay enough attention to new comics coming out, as I wasn't aware of the fact that Image was publishing a new comic based on Mike Allred's Atomics cast, drawn by an artist I really like (Mike Norton) until the week it was released, and thus it was way too late to pre-order.

At any rate, a month later, I can read the first issue of It Girl! And the Atomics featuring perhaps the best designed character (man, that logo/hero icon is the best!)with the coolest super-powers (the ability to take on the characteristics of whatever she touches, essentially becoming it) from Allred's spin-off, written by former Oni editor Jamie S. Rich (who has impeccable taste in comics and artists and has edited a lot of my favorite comics, although a lot of his writing has left me cold-to-luke warm) and drawn by Norton, with covers drawn by Allred and colored by Laura Allred.

The paper and cover stock is awesome. I love the way the book looks and feels. Before even opening it, It Girl! seems like the Platonic ideal of a comic book. It's what I want to see and feel when I'm near a comic book. If I were a movie producer/art director and a scene called for a character to be holding or reading a comic book, this is the comic book I'd give 'em, as it just says "comic book" so very perfectly eloquently.

And then I opened it and, well, it's less than perfect on the insides.

Allred characters by someone other than Allred, and in an art style so very far removed from Allred's, certainly underscores the virtues of Allred's particular writing and drawing style, the overall aesthetic of his comics. This feels...off, and while reading, I kept wondering if it was because it was missing Allred. Like, maybe Madmen and The Atomics weren't actually better written comics, but maybe Allred's art made them seem better...?

I don't know. I just know that this was extremely mediocre, basic superhero comics writing, distinguished mainly by it's old-fashioned, dismemberment and rape free plotting and the superior costume design to that you'd find in the vast majority of today's super-comics.

Norton's art remains great, and it is interesting seeing his particular take on so many Allred characters, but it's worth noting he's dialed back the super-stylized cartoonishness that characterized the last work of his I spent an extended amount of time with—Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam—and I wonder if he dialed back a little too much.

I'm gonna stick with this a bit longer, in part because Rich promises China Clugson fill-in art in the near future, but I was a more than a little disappointed in how run-of-the-mill the comic turned out to be.


The Judas Coin (DC Comics)I purchased this, and read most of it tonight. I won't say any more, as I'll probably give it a full and thorough review somewhere else in the near future. Wait, I will say it's writer/artist Walter Simonson and letterer John Workman telling a half-dozen loosely connected stories taking place in several different time periods, allowing him to draw modern Gotham City, the Old West, Viking times, the future, etc. And I will also lament the fact that one of those time periods was not World War I, so there is sadly no Simonson-draw Enemy Ace flying the Simonson-drawn deadly skies.

Saucer Country #7 (DC) Just like last month's issue, this one features a guest artist (David Lapham, depsite the appearance of regular artist Ryan Kelly's name on the cover), and consists of a character giving a presentation to another character, in which writer Paul Cornell couches an issue-length history lesson.

While Saucer Country #6 was more or less a "true" story, or at least one that cites real (or "real," I don't know; UFO shit is hard to talk about!) events from the history of human belief in UFOS and aliens, this one focuses on the fictional (or fictional as far as I know; maybe Cornell is referencing UFO lore that's simply new to me) group The Bluebirds that have appeared in the series before, and are being set up as kinda-sorta antagonists, or at least rivals, to the cast of protagonists.

After these last two issues, I'm kind of wishing I would have trade-waited this series, as, structurally, it's kind of like watching a television drama that only airs episodes once a month.

Awesome cover as usual, though.


Negima! Vol. 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17-20, 23 and 26 (Del Rey),
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days Vols. 3, 5 (ADV Manga) and Sgt Frog Vols. 6, 11-13, 16 and 19 (Tokyopop) My local comic shop was having a "manga blow-out!" sale, apparently to rid themselves of the last of their manga stock. This means that all manga that was priced at $9.99 or under was now $2 ($2!) and all manga $10 or more was now just $4. Now, I don't really need all of these manga immediately—I think I left off on like the fourth or fifth volume of Ken Akamatsu's Negima!, for example, and there are obviously large holes in these collections, but all three of those are series I started and planned to finish some day, and, well, it's not terribly likely that I'll someday find cheaper deals on them then $2 or $4 dollars, you know? So I blew about $80 I could have better spend on, say, medicine or food or gasoline on manga this week. Damn you, local comic shop and you're unbelievably good sale...! (I typed that last sentence using only my left hand, as I was using my right hand to make a fist to shake in the general direction of my local comic shop while I typed it).

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I have a review of Larry Tye's Superman up at Robot 6, if you'd like to go read it. I thought it was a very good telling of Superman's story, framed sort of as a biography, but more as a (pop) cultural study.

I also really liked the cover image and design. Superman is a somewhat unique character in that he is now old and influential enough to warrant such works about him, and/or his creators, and yet he remains owned and controlled by a corporation that has trademarked almost every inch of him—Publisher Random House couldn't have just stuck an image of Superman on there, nor could they use his S-shield or even the special font his name usually appears in.

A book like this then, is in the tough spot of being all about Superman, without being able to actually use Superman's image on its cover (I was reminded of Marc Tyler Nobleman and Ross MacDonald's children's picture book Boys of Steel, which faced a similar dilemma). Using just his flexing arm, however, still says "Superman"—if you've seen Superman before, you know what his arm looks like—but doesn't say it in such a specific way that it seems to be exploiting DC/Warner Bros.' trademark.

I don't know the ins and outs of the legality of such things, but I thought the cover clever in the way it used a somewhat sly image of Superman...similar to the way Dave Sim and Todd MacFarlane used Superman and many other DC and Marvel superheroes in their collaboration on Spawn #10:

Also, the flexing arm focuses on one of Superman's most obvious attributes—his great strength—and the choice of colors on the cover similarly, almost subliminally conveys Superman. Sure, red, yellow and blue are the three primary colors, but who do you know who owns that particular color scheme the way Superman does?

Here are a few tidbits I bookmarked while reading, but didn't end up working into my piece on the book...

1.) Did you know Jimmy Olsen, who got his start on radio before emigrating into the comics, had a mother who worked at a candy store, but his dad had died? I always assumed he was an orphan.

2.) This sounds unbelievable now, but check it out:

The Superman family of comic books stayed the top sellers through the 1960s, but their sales were falling and their lead shrinking. Batman tumbled earlier deeper, to the point where Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane was outselling him and National contemplated killing off the Caped Crusader; he was saved by his campy TV show, which started in 1966.

There was a time when Lois Lane's comic book was outselling Batman's. Try wrapping your 2012 head around that. Today, the very idea of a Lois Lane having her own comic book at all sounds like madness, nevermind her selling better than Batman.

3.) In writing about the "Death of Superman" era of DC Comics, Tye talks a bit about race and Superman, as Steel opens the door for that particular conversation:

More remarkable and counterintuitive was the injection of race into Superman sotries and into the staff at DC, which for twenty years had struggled with its reputation as the home of heroes who were both white and white-bread. Now the "Reign of the Supermen" story arc had parachuted a black man, John Henry Irons, into the middle of the most popular comics narrative ever. He was the least egocentric of the four replacement heroes and the easiest to warm to.

Tye interviews Louise Simonson, the writer who created Steel with artist Jon Bogdanove, and she reveals something I had never heard before, having read Steel's comics from back-issue bins, rather than off the new racks:

"I was told I was fired because I had sent Steel into space and he should be an earthbound character," Simonson says. "I think I was fired because if there was any publicity related to the movie they didn't want a middle-aged white woman being the face of Steel."

And check this out:

Christopher Priest, who took over, is African American, but he says he "wrote John Henry a lot whiter than Louise wrote him. I made him droll." It didn't matter, Priest adds, because few at DC still seemed to be paying attention, and not many readers were, either. As for making Superman more appealing to black readers, Priest says that would have been difficult sixty years into the legend. Superman, he explains, "represents white culture in an intensely megalomaniacal way. To many blacks, he is not Superman so much as he is SuperWhiteMan. There's no sign on the comics shop window that reads WHITE POWER, but the sensibility is implied."

Damn. Tye follows up that bomb of a bon mot with "Not to everyone," and then citing a few famous black men who are also Superman fans: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Al Roker and, of course, Shaquille O'Neal, whose brings it all back to Steel, the subject of an ill-fated 1997 film.

For the record, Every Day Is Like Wednesday's position on Steel remains:

Fuck yeah, Steel!

I also remain baffled that neither Steel nor Icon got their own books out of the New 52boot, but I guess it's cool that gave Batwing and Static a shot, even if they really fucked up the latter about as badly as it could be fucked up.

Who wants to see a Dave Stevens painting of King Kong...?

Don't bother responding, I already know the answer—Who doesn't want to see a Dave Stevens painting of King Kong...?

The above image, depicting the beast-god of Skull Island as he begins to "pluck [Ann Darrow's] clothes away as a chimpanzee might clumsily undress a doll," is one of several paintings used to illustrate Underwood Books' 2005 publication of King Kong, a novelization of Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper's story by Delos W. Lovelace. The Stevens piece originally appeared as the cover of the first issue of the 1991 Fantagraphics-published King Kong miniseries by Don Simpson.

The 2005 Underwood book features three more illustrations, including a Frank Frazetta painting of Kong fighting a giant snake, a Jon Foster image of a rampaging Kong in New York City (which also serves as the book's cover) and a Ken Steacy image of Kong fighting the bi-planes atop the Empire State Building which, like the Stevens image, previously appeared on a cover of that Fanta Kong series.

I plan on returning to the novelization again in the near future, as I'd like to discuss it at greater length when I have the time, but until then I'll just as a few more difficult-to-answer questions than the one in the title of this post—has Simpson's Kong comic ever been collected into a trade and, if not, why not? Because a few days ago I didn't even know it existed, and now I really want to read it.

Review: Batman Vs. Bane

Well this is a pretty strange packaging of some 1990s comics, recently assembled and published to appeal to readers who might understandably want to learn more about Bane and his dealing with the Ra’s al Ghul in the wake of July’s Dark Knight Rises movie.

The five comic books in here all had “Batman” in the title—this collects the 1998 miniseries Batman: Bane of the Demon the with 1993 special Batman: Vengeance of Bane #1 that first introduced the villain—but Batman himself just barely appears, and never actually fights Bane.

Batman appears in the last 14 pages of the Vengeance story, following clues laid out by Bane and his henchmen Bird, Zombie and Trogg, allowing the freshly-arrived-in-town Bane to stalk Batman and make the plans to break him that he would engage in during the “Knightfall” storyline.

He doesn’t appear at all in Bane of the Demon, save for a one-panel flashback and a one-panel prelude to the next story (the “Legacy” crossover story/event, which I’m not even sure is available in trade any more).

So Batman: Bane of the Demon might have been a more sensible title for the trade.

Both are by the same creative team of Bane co-creators Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan, the latter inked by three different inkers throughout the collected comics, each of ‘em dynamite at their craft (Tom Palmer, Eduardo Barreto and Bill Sieknkiewicz).

The origin story in Vengeance is a solid one that aged pretty well. I remember being extremely impressed by it and by Bane when I first read it as a teenager—Dixon sure put in the work to thoroughly introduce Bane as a credible figure of menace, a feat that seems even more impressive when one compares it to more recently-arrived Batman villains like, say, Hush, or any of the many new characters created by Grant Morrison during his run.

By spending the first half of the book showing us the doomed Bane growing up in one of the world’s worst prisons, it also goes a way toward making the villain seem sympathetic. Even once he crosses the line and starts killing dudes by the dozen, one can still appreciate the up-by-the-bootstraps nature of his origin story, which included millions of push-ups and sit-ups, daily underwater fights with fish (his prison cell was under sea level), and a lot of reading.

They take Bane-as-sympathetic figure even further in Bane of the Demon, as he is essentially the hero of the piece—he’s still pretty monstrous, and continues to kill his opponents by the roomful, but Dixon plays him as extremely cunning and ruthless, a brainier villain than a brawny one, and the entire story offers an interesting exploration of the character by contrasting him to Ra’s al Ghul, who bests him in some ways and is bested by him in others, and Batman, who is barely present, but whose boots Bane finds himself in when Talia takes a (verytemporary) sexual interest in him and Ra’s considers him as a potential heir.

The book concludes with three of the two-page origins that ran at the end of 52 and Countdown (Say, did DC ever collect all of these from both weeklies into a trade? It’s kind of too bad they went to all that trouble and then rebooted, negating all of the relevant information in these; they oughta do ‘em again for the New 52 continuity, but then, DC obviously doesn’t actually know it’s own phantom five-year continuity at this point).

There’s two from Countdown, both written by Scott Beatty.

The one for Bane is drawn by Graham Nolan, which sees the artist basically redrawing the same scenes from his Vengeance, only inking himself and given better, more modern coloring.

The Ra’s al Ghul one is drawn and colored by Cliff Chiang, and it’s kind of a mess, using the first five panels to retell Birth of the Demon, one panel to retell the original Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Ra's storyline and then closing with three panels covering Batman: Death and the Maidens and “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” storyline. It’s a lot of story, and Beatty has to over-stuff the pages with narration boxes to get it all in. Revealing a weakness in the Grant Morrison spearheaded “Resurrection” storyline, I’d read it as it was published, and had no idea that much of what Beatty says happened in his summary actually happened in that mess of a storyline.

From 52, there’s the Mark Waid-written, Andy Kubert-drawn two-page, six-panel origin of Batman. It’s notable, perhaps, for its variance from “Year One,” at least in the staging and dressing of the bat-through-the-window scene, which isn’t the fevered, semi-religious event it is in Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s telling, but a more calm and casual one in which Bruce Wayne is writing a letter rather than bleeding to death after wounds sustained while trying to fight crime not dressed up as a creature of the night.

Despite the questionable decisions of titling and packaging the trade, these are fine stories from Batman’s fruitful 1990s, featuring superior art from one of the better of his artists of that era. Personally, I had a blast re-reading Vengeance and reading Bane of the Demon for the first time. I picked this up after Dark Knight Rises, so I read all of Bane’s dialogue in Tom Hardy’s voice, which…oh man, I want to go reread “Knightfall” and Secret Six in Hardy’s Bane voice now…

Review: X-Club

The X-Men franchise may be unique in super-comics in that there are just so goddam many X-Men characters—about 200, the last time Marvel took a head count, right?—that series and stories need not be structured around particular teams or settings, status quos or mission statements, but can rather just pick up a handful of characters almost at random and hang a story on them.

The 2012 miniseries X-Club, the trade collection of which rather remarkably doesn’t include the prefix X-Men: in the title, is just such a story. It’s written by underrated super-writer Simon Spurrier and drawn with sharp, expressive art by Paul Davidson, and features a few members of the X-Men’s so-called “Science Team,” an invention of Uncanny X-Men writer Matt Fraction’s.

These are various scientist characters originally gathered by Dr. Hank “The Beast” McCoy to try and undo former Marvel Editior-in-Chief Joe Quesada’s “M-Day” directive; in-story, they were put together to try and figure out a way to re-populate the world with mutants after the reality-warping powers of one mutant somehow de-mutated most mutants (Look, I don’t get the science of the thing; I don’t think anyone does, really).

Anyway, these are Dr. Nemesis, a Golden Age Marvel character recently repurposed as an arrogant, snarky super-genius who talks a bit like an all-ages Spider Jerusalem; Dr. Kavita Rao, the doctor who created a mutant “cure” in the pages of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men; Danger, the sentient Danger Room that menaced the X-Men during Whedon’s just-mentioned run; and Madison Jeffries, and Madison Jeffries, an old Alpha Flight character with the ability to reshape inorganic matter and to communicate “technopathically” with computers and robots and stuff.

The miniseries isn’t focused on that goal, but on the quartet of X-Men affiliated super-scientists gifting the world with a technological marvel as a sort of goodwill, see-we-do-more-than-just-collateral-damage-so-quite-fearing-and-hating-us-gesture: The Stringstar, “This proud planet’s first viable space elevator,” which reaches from a space station in orbit down to a rig in the sea (and, come to think of it, looks a bit like a large version of that tube that the Satellite of Love guys used to use to send things back and forth to Deep 13 with during that one season of Mystery Science Theater 3000).

Things naturally go a bit haywire, when an Atlantean protestor starts mutating and explodes, and local sea-life develop mutant abilities, as illustrated in this awesome panel:

And then Danger starts acting villainous again, Jeffries gets in a lot of trouble, some sort of psychic octopus attaches itself to Nemesis’ head, revealing his actual thoughts out loud constantly, often deflating his posturing dialogue

And Spurrier does this weird bit where he keeps checking in for a page or two per issue with various events in Marvel android history, eventually revealing a connection to the conflict of the series which is…well, it’s pretty complicated, and I don’t want to spoil it, nor spend the time it would take to reduce it into something easily communicable in a few sentences.

Suffice it to say the plot is big and crazy in a way that would (or at least should) satisfy fans of Fraction’s particular style of big and crazy, and it’s communicated with a great deal of character-driven humor emanating from the various personalities and their conflicts, and the set-ups like that psychic squid thingee.

While the four X-Clubbers (that’s not what they call them is it? I’m just guessing) are the stars, the rest of the X-Men play supporting roles and offer cameos, and are quite effectively used.

This is apparently taking place after the “schism” between Cyclops and Wolverine and their respective factions of X-people (if you weren’t paying attention/caring, Cyclops and his gang are on a mutant isolationist island called Utopia and are intent on the survival of their race at all costs, while Wolverine and his gang have reopened Xavier’s School for Gifted Blah Blah Blah under a different name). Spurrier has Cyclops worried about branding, to the point where he keeps referring to his team as “The real X-Men” and insisting of adding “of Utopia” at the end of each mention of the X-Men.

Somewhat unusually, at least from my experience with this franchise of characters, the book ended up being very fun, very funny, highly imaginative and easily accessible. It’s not often I set down an X-Men comic book and think to myself, “Wow, I’m really glad I read that X-Men comic book,” but this was one such occasion.

Did you know Scooby-Doo and the gang are from Ohio, apparently?

I've been watching various incarnations of Scooby-Doo cartoons with various levels of interest and frequency for as long as I've been alive, but, had you asked me where Scooby and his human companions hailed from at any point before, say, 1988, I would have confessed ignorance.

The cartoons I had seen the most, the 1969-1984 shows Scooby-Dooo, Where Are You?, The Scooby-Doo Show and New Scooby-Doo Movies that aired in the early afternoon when I was a little kid, almost never seemed to take place anywhere that recognizably felt like it was set in something resembling a hometown. The impression I had was that the gang was always traveling—vacationing, visiting a friend or relative and, on very rare occasions, actually looking for a mystery rather than stumbling into one. (The one where Scooby acts as a decoy to foil a dog-napping plot, which the Internet tells me is from the first season and is entitled "Decoy for a Dognapper", used to stand out in my young head as the only mystery the gang didn't have to drive some distance to get to).

What happened in 1988? Well, that was when A Pup Named Scooby-Doo debuted as a Saturday morning cartoon, and established Coolsville as the gang's hometown, although like Gotham City, Springfield and other cartoon cities, the exact state in which it was situated was never mentioned. The 2004 feature film Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed was similarly set in Coolsville (although that Coolsville seemed like a much bigger city than the other, prior Coolsville).

Well, not long ago I picked up a DVD copy of Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster, a 2010 Cartoon Network original, live-action movie...sort of a made-for-TV, budget version of the feature films, set prior to those...and a sequel to the 2009 Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins!, featuring the same cast.

So I'm half-watching it while drawing, taking note of the curious casting choices, like dark-haired Robbie Amell as Fred and slim, lithe, Asian Hayley Kiyoko as Velma, and thinking to myself how strange it is that this Daphne is so much bigger and curvier than this Velma, and that this may be the first instance where Velma is clearly the more attractive of the two (Personally, I think Linda Cardellini is hotter than Sarah Michelle Gellar, but that's certainly something that reasonable people can disagree about; actually, now that I'm re-watching this, Kate Melton's actually pretty hot too...I guess I was originally just struck by the fact that thsi Velma is so much hotter and...different than the original cartoon Velma). Kiyoko's casting seems to have been another step in the gradual enhottening of Velma, that began with Cardellini being cast in the feature films, and continued with the latest character design in the current Mystery Incorporated series).

Above: Velma, apparently

The movie begins on the last day of school at Coolsville High, and the gang piling into the Mystery Machine to head to Daphne's uncle's new country club, where they've gotten summer jobs. To illustrate the trip there, the filmmakers position a tiny little Mystery Machine van on a map, and show it's progress driving along the map to get from Coolsville to Erie Pointe.

Well, imagine my surprise when I recognized the names surrounding Coolsville on the map—Wadsworth, Medina, Oberlin—and realized that, Holy shit, Coolsville is in Ohio!

Specifically, in this movie it is off of Route 18, either in Lorain County or possibly Medina County. It's south of Elyria, Oberlin and Wellington, Medina and Strongsville.

On their way up to Erie Pointe, they drive through Cleveland, then Mentor, where I currently work. They stop at Erie Pointe, a fictional city situated on a fictional peninsula jutting into the lake which, it turns out, is obviously Lake Erie. If you're familiar with this part of Ohio, Erie Pointe is shown on the close-but-hardly-exact map as being about midway between Mentor and Geneva, which would situate it around Perry or Madison. My home town is just east of Geneva, which means this Scooby-Doo mystery is set about a half hour from where I grew up watching Scooby-Doo mysteries!

Now, Erie Pointe isn't a real place, but obviously Lake Erie is real enough. As someone who has lived two-thirds of his life in the area, and had a keen interest in monsters for three-thirds of it, I am sad to report that there is no "Lake Monster of Erie Pointe"...there is supposedly a Lake Erie monster, and it's of the sea serpent variety. There's not really much evidence, or even a very compelling body of sightings, to support the existence of the beast nicknamed Bessie though—our lake monster is no Champ.

The Lake Monster in Curse of The Lake Monster is a fanged, humanoid frog monster which, oddly enough, bears some resemblance to another Ohio monster—The Loveland Frog.

The story, related by Richard Moll's lonely lighthouse keeper, is that when settlers first came to the place that would eventually become Erie Pointe, they were confronted by a witch, who warned them away, saying she owned all of the land around the lake. When they didn't heed her warnings, she used her moon stone-tipped magical staff to turn an ordinary frog into her monstrous servant.

When the gang arrives in town and meet Daphne's ascot-wearing uncle, played by Ted McGinely, the Lake Monster shows up in short order, wreaking havoc and plunging them into an un-looked for mystery.

The mystery isn't that terribly complicated, and anyone who's ever seen, like, a single episode of Scooby-Doo, will figure out the identity of the witch within, like, the first minute or two of the movie.

It's a pretty good live-action recreation of a cartoon though, with Nick Palatas doing a heck of a Shaggy voice, and doing the best job of acting like a cartoon character. The other leads are pretty decent, and Kiyoko does a good Velma voice, although she seems to be doing an impression more than a character.

The filmmakers go to noticeably great lengths to keep Scooby out of a lot of the scenes too, perhaps because even the relatively cheap animation that's used to create him was still prohibitively expensive (in many of his appearances, little is done to disguise the fact that it's a human actor with a computer-animated head and hands). They make up for that by giving the four humans their own interpersonal conflicts.

Fred and Daphne apparently started dating after the events of the previous film, and Shaggy has developed a crush on Velma, spending a majority of the movie trying to woo her, which makes Scooby jealous (a sub-plot that is explored in Mystery Incorporated, at the beginning of which Shaggy and Velma are dating, and Shaggy's trying to keep it secret from the jealous Scooby).

There are even some genuinely funny bits, like this exchange:

Shaggy: Hey Scoob, can I talk to you man to man?

Scooby: Uh...sort of...?

And, my favorite part, after a particularly garbled string of words, all beginning with "r", Shaggy sighs, "Just my luck: I have a talking dog, and I can't understand a word he says!"

Ha ha ha! (Well, I thought it was funny).

Of additional interest to grown-ups, the climax involves the gang donning color-coded scuba suits, so that the buxom Melton is running around in a partially unzipped pink suit and the totally-ripped Amell shirtless.

If you do end up watching this, and find the scenes set on the beach of Lake Erie make you want to plan a visit to the area and enjoy the beautiful beaches, the crystal blue water and the big, curious rock formations, I suppose I should warn you that it was actually filmed in Southern California, so that's apparently the Pacific Ocean playing Lake Erie, and, while I love Laker Erie and Northeast Ohio and think it's a fine place to visit or even live, it's not quite as nice as the Pacific Ocean and Southern California.

Oh! And there's a scene where Shaggy retires to his bunk to read a comic book, and he's reading a Sam Kieth-drawn Batman comic, but I'm not sure which Kieth-drawn Batman comic it is, as I only saw three panels of it.

Comic shop comics: September 5

Classic Popeye #2 (IDW) I'm still a little bummed I missed the first issue of this series and, sadly, my comic shop wasn't able to reorder me a copy of it. See, I had no idea what this comic book was exactly, until I saw Mike Sterling mention it on his blog. Basically, IDW's straight-up reprinting old Popeye comics, from cover to cover, and while it's at the regular $3.99 IDW price point I always avoid, it's actually twice the size of a regular comic, so $4 ain't so discouraging when you get 50 pages of full-color comics, with no ads, even!

See, when I first saw this first issue on the shipping lists, I assumed it was part of the new Popeye comics written by Robert Langridge IDW was printing, and thus didn't pay any attention. I actually have this problem with IDW all the time. They publish a ton of comics I'm theoretically interested in, but often at such volumes I get easily confused and don't know where to start (like, I like both the Transformers and G.I. Joe franchise, but good God IDW publishes a whole of comics featuring each, and there are several, like, different universes of each within their line, I think).

I was recently confounded by something called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Color Classics Vol. 1 from IDW that I saw on the new book rack. I would really like to get all of the Mirage Turtle comics in trade format eventually—there are probably still about a half-dozen or so issues of the first volume of TMNT that I was never able to track down over the years—but I'm not sure who they're collecting them, or which books to get. That particular trade, for example, had a Mark Martin Turtles story in it, and it also had a short from Anything Goes, I think...? I don't know; I put it back on the shelf, my head awash with cartoon question marks.

I suppose I just need to sit down and do, like, 20 minutes of research some day.

But anyway, IDW's Classic Popeye comics seem pretty great—fun, funny, all-ages comical comics in a traditional comic book format. The only thing that would make it more enticing would be if it were, like, two bucks or so, but given the state of the rest of the market, it's hard to beat a $3.99/50-page price point.

Glory Vol. 1: The Once and Future Destroyer (Image Comics) I already reviewed this at Robot 6, but am listing it again here just for the sake of complying to the "rules" I set up for myself with this column (That is, briefly discussing the comics I bought at the comics shop).

It's quite good, even a little surprisingly so, given I wasn't too terribly enchanted by the first issue, which had Ross Campbell's art going for it, but too much of a too-faithful Glory story by Joe Keatinge for my taste, a story which suggested Promethea a bit too. As it turned out, there was never more than a suggestion of Promethea, and Keatinge went on to do something very, very different in the following issues—I think this works much better as a trade than it did/would have as a serially published comic.

Fans of Ross Campbell (that's everyone, right?), fans of design work as applied to characters and world-building and fans of superhero-style ultra-violence (there are panels in here that make Geoff Johns at his goriest look like he's doing kids comics) should find a lot to like here.

Plus, and I can't stress this enough, this 120+ page trade costs only $9.99. That's the cost of like two-and-a-half issues of whatever piece of shit Bendis Avengers comic Marvel's publishing this month.

Green Lantern #0 (DC Comics) This is it! The one with that hilarious cover featuring a dark-skinned Green Lantern wearing a ski mask and levling a handgun at the reader on the cover! The one we've all been waiting for!

As it turns out, that's not a black guy under the ski mask, but an Arab-American guy—the first clue being the glowing green Arabic tattoo on his forearm ("Courage" it says, and it is the only thing about him not in the government's file on him!)

I got even more excited as I flipped the cover and got to the first page and say that at long last we would get a Geoff Johns-written Green Lantern story dealing with 9/11!

As you may have heard, the DC Universe was recently rebooted so that it is now only five years old, so Superman made his debut in September 2006 or so...the new DC Universe is and (retroactively) always has been a post-9/11 world now, which I guess saves writers from having to think up excuses for why Superman or the Justice League allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place, but I think DC has done a pretty good job of ignoring such questions throughout the last decade.

But now Geoff Johns, perhaps their least subtle writer, and one, not incidentally, who is a fairly big advocate of extra-judicial bullying, torture and lethal violence in his comics—with both villains and heroes being the actors—is here writing a story about an Arab-American from Dearborn Michigan who is an illegal street racer and car thief who has been arrested for terrorism and brought to an unnamed Guantanamo Bay or similar site to be tortured...!

I'll be honest, I was more excited with each page turn, because this is all so...un-Geoff Johns, and the sort of thing I would be afraid/enthusiastic to see him screw-up in a spectacularly entertaining fashion.

He does fine though. It's a very mediocre, by which I mean not horrible as well as not brilliant, bit of Superhero Origin, Part 1.

It's pretty weird to see Johns introducing a new Green Lantern here though, as when he started writing for the franchise almost eight years ago now, he did so with the specific purpose of re-introducing the old, boring Green Lantern Hal Jordan and promoting him over the newer, cooler, better-liked later Lanterns John Stewart and Kyle Rayner, the latter of which was invented to be a more relevant replacement for Jordan (His '90s cool signifiers being that he was a freelance artist, he hung out in techno clubs wearing Nine Inch Nail t shirts and in coffee shops).

This new Lantern is Simon Baz, an Arab-American immigrant of Lebanese descent who who did time for illegal street racing (Like Fast and the Furious!) and, after the auto plant he worked at closed down (relevant!), he turned to car thievery (Like Grand Theft Auto!), but made the mistake of stealing a van with a pre-programmed bomb in it (?), and so was arrested for terrorism. He was about to be water-boarded by the federal agents questioning him at a place that might or might not be Guantanamo Bay, when Sinestro's Green Lantern ring from last week's annual rescues him.

And that's pretty much it, save a one-panel appearance by skinny Amanda Waller and a two-panel appearance by two members of the new Justice League, the first indication I've seen in this book that Green Lantern is set in the New 52iverse instead of the pre-boot DCU, and a three-panel check-in on Sinestro and Hal Jordan who, I was shocked to learn, weren't actually killed off last week!

The pencil art is by Doug Mahnke, and it remains superior work. He's inked, as per usual, by a bunch of guys, and colored by two. The art looks like it, but only because it's sharper in some sequences than in others.

While reading, I was pretty struck by the fact that this seemed more like a Green Lantern #1 than #0, and couldn't stop thinking about how effective a head-spinner this would have been if DC had waited for Johns to finish up his last 12-issue sequence, which ended with Hal and Sinestro seemingly being killed off and the ring seeking a replacement, before the reboot, and then started with this issue, in which Earth gets a new Green Lantern, one with what looks to be a new, emerging supporting cast, plenty of conflict to drive storylines and even a new cosmic threat lurking in the shadows.

Two other quick notes.

The cover's a bit weird here. When they first announced these #0 issues, each was teased with a full-color image of the hero bursting through a black and white version of the cover for the first issue of the series. This GL, whom one Facebook friend referred to as Gun Lantern, is actually ripping through three black and white panels from inside of the book for...some reason. I don't really get the motif anymore, or why it changed. It still jumped out at me off the rack pretty well though, even though so many of this week's DC books had essentially the same design. (The originally solicited version and the final version are shown above).

Finally, the book ends with a checklist of all the zero issues, and a full-page "Who's Who In The New 52!" feature with three paragraphs of information about the character Green Lantern (Hal Jordan flavor), like his first appearance (Which is, uh, Justice League #1 from 2011 now, apparently), his base of operations, powers and history.

It's a nice enough feature, and welcome given the stated goal of offering new jumping-on points to the DC line, although only a year into the New 52, it's not like any character's history should be too difficult to suss out, if they're doing the books right. Still, if this was your first issue of a Green Lantern comic, and there's no reason it couldn't be, then I guess that will be helpful.

Hawkeye #2 (Marvel Entertainment) Well Matt Fraction and David Aja did a good enough job on that first issue that I'm back for this second one, and have added Hawkeye to my pull-list...although maybe I should have trade-waited it...? I don't know. I really like reading comic books monthly, so I'm kind of torn about drifting to the trade format.

Like last issue, this one reads well as a comic book, being a nicely complete standalone story with it's own beginning, middle and end. This time, Fraction and Aja introduce Kate Bishop to the book—that was the girl with the bow and arrow in Young Avengers—and positions her as Hawkeye's partner...while simultaneously setting-up some kind of gross sexual tension (I don't have her driver's license in front of me or anything, but I'm pretty sure everyone in Young Avengers was a teenager, and I'm pretty sure Hawkeye is about twice her age...at least).

The plot involves Marvel mainstays The Circus of Crime, here looking more Cirque d' Soleil than usual, robbing a collection of Marvel Universe bad guys. The two Hawkeyes attend a performance in order to stop them, and, simultaneously, rob the robbers who are robbing the bad guys.

As I said, it's a nice done-in-one, very grounded adventure story—like the first issue, it doesn't even really need to be a superhero story, or even be about Clint "Hawkeye" Barton—given how little superhero trappings and or Marvel Universe trivia is inserted in any way that matters much at all.

It's Aja's superior art work, and whatever alchemy between it and Fraction's scripting that leads to one inventive sequence after another, that really sells this book though. This comic looks so damn good it's almost too good...like, I keep having this nagging thought in the back of my head that Aja's really wasting his time and talent here, but Marvel's lucky to have him, and I sure hope he's getting paid what he deserves here.

Once again, the heroes seem quick to kill their foes here, but, oddly enough, Fraction inserts narration and dialogue to assure us (rather unconvincingly, really) that (most of) the guys who get shot in the eyeballs or the back of the neck aren't really dead.

"They're not dead they're just blinded now," Kate tells CLint after she puts those arrows into those dudes' eyes.

And this part?

I didn't really get that part, as it looks like the back of the arrow hits him in the neck, and then in that bottom panel it looks like the colorist added a purple blot on the tip of the arrow to indicate the opposite...? I don't know...maybe there was some last minute disagreement on what exactly Hawkeye was supposed to be doing to that guy with the boss mustache, who I hope gets better and returns in future issues.

Anyway, this is a pretty great fucking comic book. Hell, look at the penultimate page, which does a "nothing but talking" sequence, and gets it done in one page rather than 22:

Though he's been writing for Marvel for a few years now, Fraction's still a new kid on the block compared to Brian Michael Bendis, but it looks like the latter could learn a lot from the former when it comes to conversation scenes in Marvel comics (Or maybe the lesson is simply "Work with David Aja"...?)

Bad news? Editor Steve Wacker is already threatening crossovers in the letters page. Like Daredevil, this is very much a book that's only good because of the creative team on it, so, like Daredevil, the thought of publishing too-many issues for that creative team to produce, or spreading the narrative into other books featuring other characters and creators, isn't likely to do anything remotely positive.

New Crusaders: Rise of the Heroes #1 (Archie Comics) Well, by at least one metric, Archie Comics' recent stab at resurrecting the old Red Circle family of sueprheroes has been more successful than DC Comics' J. Michael Straczynski-lead 2009 attempt: I bought an issue of this revival attempt (I suspect the fact that it's all happening in one book rather than several, and that the covers on the comics don't make me want to throw up has something to do with that).

Archie's attempt is digital-first, print-second, but, because I am old and afraid of computers, I naturally waited until I saw this on the shelf and gave it an impulse buy.

It's fine. Ian Flynn is the writer, and the art is by pencil artist Ben Bates and inker Gary Martin, working in a clean, smooth heavily manga-influenced style (the villain's eyes totally look like Akira Toriyama-drawn villain eyes...to the extent that it's kind of uncanny. I kept thinking, "Vegeta...?" whenever he was on-panel).

The story is super-simple, and pretty much told by the cover image itself. The original Red Circle heroes have defeated all the villains and made the world a safe place in which to raise their kids, which is what they all concentrated on after going into retirement in their idyllic suburban town of Red Circle.

Then one of their villains attacks and blows them all up, save for the bearded Shield, who is apparently going to lead the kids into action as the next generation of The Crusaders.

I would read a second issue.

I'd also read collections of the original Red Circle heroes' comics, if Archie ever wants to publish those in an affordable format. Just in case anyone at Archie is wondering.

Prophet Vol. 1: Remission (Image) As with Glory, this was already reviewed by me this week, but I'm including it here because I did buy it at the comic shop this week.

If you read and enjoyed Brandon Graham's King City (that's everyone, right?) but wondered what kind of sci-fi he could cook up with that fevered imagination of his if he tried working straight, rather than in a more comic vein, well, here's your answer. Graham and a succession of incredible artists (including Graham himself) provide a series of sketches of various length about a series of human characters in a distant future trying to complete various portentous tasks, each quest involving a lot of killing, consuming and even occasional copulation.

Like Glory, this is another triumph of design work and world-building, and good God you should see the giant spiders and other alien monsters that Emma Rios draws...!

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I wrote a column reviewing Image Comics' Prophet and Glory, now that the first trade collections of each are out. You can go read the piece by clicking here, if you like. And you should go read the trades themselves by going to your local comic shop, and handing them a $10 bill, because each six-issue trade is only $9.99! And for that you get pages and pages and pages of Brandon Graham and Ross Campbell! And other folks doing stuff, too! But Graham! Campbell!

The image atop this post, by the way, is a tiny section of a two-page splash in Glory, which is perhaps one of the better examples of a two-page splash I've seen a comic book lately. Like, that expression? The image accompanying it totally deserves it.

Reminder: Columbus is awesome

Aw man, it's news like this that makes me wish I never left Columbus.

Wednesday Comics vs. New 52: Teen Titans

Two generations of teenaged heroes face a surprisingly powerful new version of the villain Trident, a villain with surprising connections to several of their greatest adversaries, in a fight-heavy adventure with superior character design (and sub-par visual clarity), by Eddie Berganza and Sean Galloway.

Batman's former sidekick Red Robin teams with "the mysterious and belligerent powerhouse thief known as Wonder Girl and the hyperactive speedster calling himself Kid Flash...a few other tortured teen heroes" to combat a mysterious organization targeting young meta-humans, by Scott Lobdell, Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund.

Comic shop comics: August 29

Yeah, yeah, yeah—I've already discussed two of these books before, and re-discussed one aspect of one of them again yesterday. But it's my blog, so I'm gonna talk about 'em again.

Aquaman #12 (DC Comics) Want to see some really shitty lettering? Here's an example from the first page of the latest issue of Aquaman:

Oh wait, you probably can't actually tell how shitty that lettering looks by looking at a scan posted to a blog, can you? That's because the shitty lettering is typical of comics today, where the letters are applied by computers rather than hand, and seem to float above the drawings themselves. If you held the comic in your hand and looked at the art with your eyes, you'd see how foreign that "NUMBER UNKNOWN" and "VRNGG" are to the art, but if you're looking at a digitally transmitted image? You probably can't even tell.

Take my word for it: It looks shitty in real life, so maybe it's better that fewer and fewer people read comics in real life, and in a another decade or so maybe superhero comics won't even exist outside of computers.

So, The Associate, one of The Others, the retconned pre-Justice League version of The Justice League Aquaman hung out with in flashbacks during this story arc, has called Mera on the phone and asks how fast she can meet him on his airplane.

She swims super-fast, then flies out of the water, way up into the air and lands in the airplane, landing with the facial expression of an exceptionally angry baby. She argues with The Others, characters Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis created to be killed off throughout this story arc (So far, the female, Iranian one has died).

Meanwhile, Black Manta has found the long-lost "scepter," a golden weapon that sunk Atlantis, thanks to the forced help of Dr. Shin. He orders an underling to shoot Shin, at which point Aquaman stabs the underling to death by jumping out of his hiding space and throwing his trident through his back.

Aquaman is a superhero, and a founding member of a group that unironically refers to itself as the "Justice League."

Black Manta is about to kill Aquaman, when The Others appear, in an attempt to kill Black Manta first (in the meantime, more of Black Manta's henchmen are shot in the head; henching is a much more dangerous career path in the New 52 than it was pre-reboot, apparently). Then one of The Others tries to kill Shin, by having a jaguar eat him. Then another Other saves Shin. Then Aquaman goes to kill Black Manta. But then Black Manta tries to kill Aquaman (attacking silently from behind, just like Aquaman did a few pages earlier). Then one of those guys created to get killed jumps/kinda appears in front of Manta's weapon, and gets totally killed. Then everyone cries. But Aquaman's tears?

They are tears of rage!

This is a pretty well-drawn but overall pretty bad comic book. Reis' mis en scene is pretty fucked up in all the fight scenes though, as characters shift around strangely and unnaturally. It's pretty, funny trash, basically.

Green Lantern Annual #1 (DC) I thought the opening scene, in which Hal Jordan is buried alive in a coffin, was pretty clever on writer Geoff Johns' part: Actor Ryan Reynolds played Jordan in that Green Lantern movie after all, and he was also in a movie where he played a guy who was buried alive. I thought that was kind of funny.

I never actually saw the creatively entitled Buried, though, so I'm not sure if Reynolds' character is able to tear through the wooden coffin lid and then dig his way out of the earth with his bare hands, though.

In this annual, which is essentially an over-sized issue split into a main story and a back-up (to make the transition from Ethan Van Sciver to Pete Woods and Cam Smith seem more natural), Johns wraps up his current Green Lantern story arc while setting up the next event, bannered across the top: "The Rise of the Third Army."

It's Johns doing what he does best with the Green Lantern franchise, and I liked it okay, although I wish we could take at least a story arc to get away from the secrets of the Oan Guardians' past coming back to bite the universe in the ass...just for a change of pace. I'd really like to see The Shark again, or Johns revamp some of GL's old, goofy villains like, I don't know, Goldface or The Invisible Destroyer.

The Guardians, who are usually presented as out-of-touch and emotionless, causing problems by being too inflexible, are here presented as having finally gone around the bend completely, and just plain bat-shit—they reveal another group of Guardians (who smart money says will replace these crazy Guardians as the real Guardians of the Universe when the dust settles) and the mysterious First Lantern (a name I could have sworn was applied to a guardian creature in the bowels of Oa during "The War of the Green Lanterns," but I'm probably misremembering it).

The Third Army seems pretty threatening—the plan is to erase all free will in the universe, is that it?—and the way the Guardians make them is pretty gross. I'm looking forward to the future of this title, as it seems like it will feature a brand new Green Lantern for a while, and he seems ridiculously awesome-looking.

Quick question: Was Black Hand wielding white light in this issue, or does black light just look white sometimes or...what...?

Superman Family Adventures #3-#4 (DC) My shopkeeps left this off my pull-list for a month or so, so I actually missed #3 until I saw #4 on the new racks this week and it reminded me that I missed one.

In the third issue, Jimmy's signal watch is out of tune, so each time he tries to signal for Superman, a different super-pet (and all of the super-pets are in this series) shows up to "help" him. I don't know about you, but few things bring me more pleasure than seeing a mouse, dog, cat and horse dressed up likes Superman, all using super-breath to blow giant monsters and an armada of flying saucers off of the planet. The back half of the issue is devoted to a sorta weird story in which Clark's attempts to to keep his secret identity from Lois using robot duplicates backfires...and trivia from the 1978 Superman: The Movie is alluded too, demonstrating the unique way this title targets parents and children.

The fourth issue introduces Titano, the Superman family's own answer to King Kong (as well as a Negative Superman, reminiscent of Superman's dark side from Superman III and the Jeph Loeb/Ian Churchill "Dark Supergirl"). I like the way Franco and Art Baltazar present the Lois/Clark relationship regarding his secret identity. Essentially, she knows he's Superman more than she suspects he's Superman, and she gamely—if somewhat resignedly—plays along. Meanwhile, Clark seems fairy terrible at keeping the secret.

In this issue, for example, Clark brings Beppo the Super-Monkey to work with him, dressed in a dress shirt, red bow tie and glasses: "Oh, that's Bob! Bob Kent. My pet monkey!"

When Titano appears and Clark excuses himself to run off and become Superman, Lois reminds "Bob", "Don't you have to go, too?"

(just a few) (links)

Ooh, I have one of these too...in my head. (One has to do something with one's mind while sitting there in the theater watching those super-long Transformers movies so as not to fall asleep, you know?) Mine is very, very different, at least from what little I can tell from the imagery.

I have an idea about the Transformers that I haven't seen used in any of the comics, cartoons or movies yet and how it would apply to the DCU would, I think, be kinda cool. I didthink there would be a Transformer with a Green Lantern power ring, as Jimenez's pitch apparently includes, but it wouldn't have been Optimus Prime wearing it; instead it would have been Cosmos (the little flying saucer guy, who spoke in a slight Scottish accent for some odd reason), and he woulda been a regular member of the Green Lantern Corps from whatever sector of the universe Cybertron is in.

I really wish this Jimenez thing was happening, though. I love Jimenez's work, and the level of precise detail he brings to it would/does look incredible on giant robots. His (and Devin Grayson's) JLA/Titans remains one of my favorite crossovers/favorite comic book reading experiences of all time.

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Another Transformers crossover pitch that exists only in my head after formulating it while daydreaming during Michael Bay movies? The Transformers: The Lost World of the Dinobots, a mash-up of Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World and Transformers.

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DC Women Kicking Ass posted a link to a post from last year that I either never saw, or read and then forgot reading. In any case, here's former Batman editor Scott Peterson, who assistant-edited and editing during maybe the tail end of the time when I was most into Batman comics, discussing how exactly the once-new Batgirl Cassandra Cain came about.

I genuinely love this sort of thing. I would read a book of nothing but Marvel and DC editors and creators talking about how (relatively) minor heroes and where, exactly, they came from. Like, there's plenty of material out there about where Superman came from, or the the first wave of Marvel heroes and the DC Silver Age version of the Golden Age heroes, but where did, say Vibe, come from, you know?

I was pretty resistant to the idea of Batgirl at the time she was introduced in the Bat-books. She seemed somewhat random. I did really come to like the character when I sampled an issue of her solo series though, and started reading it backwards and forwards (snapping up whatever back issues I could find while reading the new ones as they came out), and eventually came to really love the Cassandra Cain character.

That she sort of drifted out of the Bat- universe around the time of Infinite Crisis is just very, very weird. It's like DC's editors just sort of lost track of her, forgetting she existed for a while, and then suddenly remembering, and doing something weird (She's a villain now, apparently! For some reason!), and then trying to explain why they did that weird thing. So, like, for years now almost all Cassandra Cain stories have been either weird, out-of-character, character-as-plot-point stories, or overly-complicated explanations for why the previous story was so awful. I swear DC has published an entire miniseries full of nothing but attempts at no-prizes.

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Wow, look at this nice drawing of The Scarlet Witch by Milo Manara. That's pretty perfect superhero cheesecake, and I'd happily purchase a comic book featuring the character drawn by Manara. It is, sadly, just a cover: The interiors are written by former artist Brian Michael Bendis, drawn by John Cassaday and will, naturally, cost you 33% more than your average DC comic, because Marvel can get away with charging you that much.

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At Savage Critics, retailer Brian Hibbs offered some off-the-cuff reviews of some of this past week's DC releases, as a way of surveying where the New 52 experiment stands a year later.

I liked the Green Lantern/onanism joke that shows up in the comments, because I like puns and think penises are funny because I am a child.

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I was pretty surprised to check the comments thread on that post about Geoff Johns comics on Robot 6 and find 70 comments. Seventy! That's an awful lot. Especially for me.

I was also surprised to read a few commenters saying they were A-OK with the fact that Aquaman ices his foes now. I suppose when the current story arc ends, it's going to end with Aquaman realizing he shouldn't kill his archenemy Black Manta, as that's his current goal, but you can't really kill off the villain in a superhero comic, but I really just can't wrap my head around that scene where Aquaman tridents a henchmen to death.

Like, even if you were okay with fucking Aquaman being the Wolverine of the Justice League all of a sudden, what a weird scene. Aquaman sneaks up on Black Manta and his mean. Black Manta orders one of them to kill Aquaman's scientist frenemy. The henchman raises his gun to shoot, and Aquaman jumps out from wherever he was hiding and hurls his trident into the dude's spine, impaling him.

Why not aim for the gun, or the hand? The shoulder or legs? Why not throw a rock? Or tackle the dude or say "Yo yo yo! Over here, yo!" Why fucking stab the dude to death like that? It's so...weird.

I guess it's part of Johns' overall rehabilitation strategy for Aquaman, but I really have a hard time believing that "make Aquaman more like Wolverine" is going to work all that well for all that long, or that the character of Aquaman can sustain that level of callous, lethal warrior-itude without the whole thing crumbling into inadvertent self-parody.