'Twas the Night Before Wednesday...

So I thought I'd try doing this again here, because it makes for an easier Tuesday night post than writing an actual review or something. But maybe I'll stop after a few weeks. I don't know. Anyway, here are some comic books that will likely be on the shelves of your local comic shop tomorrow...

ADVENTURE TIME TP VOL 03
My plan was to read this comic in trade. So far I have read one trade.  Not only am I now officially two volumes behind, but I believe there are even trade collections of some of the spin-off series available now too.

BARNABY HC VOL 01
Part of me hopes a review copy of this shows up on my doorstop tomorrow afternoon, and part of me hopes it doesn't—I have a full day planned, and I'd hate to have to drop everything and spend the rest of the day and night reading this collection, which I'm not sure I'd be able to avoid doing if I found it thrust into my hands.

BATGIRL ROBIN YEAR ONE TP
This is a new collection featuring two different origin miniseries from the writing team of Scott Beatty and Chuck Dixon and pencil artists Marcos Martin (Batgirl) and Javier Pulido (Robin). Both are incredibly incredible, although the Batgirl one a bit moreso. I'd highly recommend this, and if you need more than my recommendation, here's a review that ran on ComicsAlliance by John Parker today

BOYS OF STEEL THE CREATORS OF SUPERMAN YR SC
I'm assuming this is a new printing or edition of the Marc Tyler Nobleman and Ross MacDonald picture book that I reviewed here a while back, timed to capitalize on the interest generated by some big Hollywood movie or another. If they keep screwing up making Superman movies, maybe they'd be better off doing a biopic of his creators...? Theirs is a pretty incredible story.

DONT PIGEONHOLE ME 2 DECADES MO WILLEMS SKETCHBOOK HC
The $40 price tag is a little too rich for my freelance writing blood, but you can bet damn sure I've already reserved this at my local library. Willems is one of my favorite artists and one of the few complete strangers I know who can make me laugh on a fairly regular basis.

FAILURE GN
I'm only about 30 pages into this Alternative Comics collection of Karl Stevens' strips for The Boston Phoenix, but the artwork in it is astounding. And that's not a word I use very often. Wait, I'm not sure if I've ever used "astounding" before, to describe comics art or otherwise...

IT GIRL & THE ATOMICS #11
I read the first six issues of this series, but Jamie S. Rich's scripting just never really connected with me, despite the great pleasure I took in the artwork and in getting to see some of Mike Allred's characters again (Allred's one of my favorite character designers). That said, I'm still kind of sorry to hear that the book is getting canceled. If nothing else, I'll miss seeing those gorgeous, Allred-drawn pin-up style covers show up on the racks each month.

PRIMATES FEARLESS SCIENCE OF GOODALL FOSSEY & GALDIKAS HC
Jim Ottaviani! Maris Wicks! Monkeys! If I were only allowed to read one comic book this week, this would probably be the one I'd choose based on all of the available information. Luckily, there's no such stupid rule, so I can feel free to read as many of these as I want.

SAGA TP VOL 02
I really enjoy reading this comic book series as a comic book, but I bet it reads really well in trade too, and I imagine there are a whole lot of people who will be reading it in that format thanks to cool librarians ordering copies for their graphic novel collections.

SPONGEBOB COMICS ANNUAL GIANT SWIMTACULAR #1
Attention Comics Internet! (Especially the corners that talk about wanting to see more women drawin more superheroes and/or talking about wanting to see more Jerry Ordway art). This $5, 48-page, superhero-themed SpongeBob special contains artwork by Jerry Ordway (who is credited with "flashback fun," which I believe refers to the comic within the comic and a few images that appear in thought bubbles) and Ramona Fradon, doing a nice, long Aquaman riff. That is in addition to providing the usual pleasure of SpongeBob comics, of course. But don't take my word for it, take my word for it.

Marvel's September previews reviewed

Sorry that this post about Marvel's September solicitations, which were actually released last week, is so late. Or, given that those solicitations are for books that aren't coming out for three more months, perhaps it's still early. At any rate, for the full solicits, I suggest you check them out on Comic Book Resources (although, at this point, I'm sure you already have if you were at all interested).

Otherwise, you need only proceed to see what jumped out at me as noteworthy this month...

Nice cover, Phil Noto.

Nice "artist variant" cover for Avengers A.I. #3, Mike Allred!

Er, what's an "artist variant," anyway...? Aren't the regular covers drawn by artists too...?

I was going to say something about Captain America apparently getting a short-sleeved costume to wear in the summer, but I see it's snowing on the actual image.

INDESTRUCTIBLE HULK #13
MARK WAID (W) • MATTEO SCALERA (A)
Cover by MUKESH SINGH
Time Travel Variant by MIKE DEL MUNDO
“HULK AGENT OF T.I.M.E.” PART 3!
• Guest-Starring the BLACK KNIGHT!
• CHRONARCHISTS in the time of Camelot--with MERLIN at their command!
• BRUCE BANNER is running out of time--literally!
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99

Oh man, I don't know which artist is responsible for that cover, but damn, that's an awesome cover.

INFINITY #2 (of 6)
JONATHAN HICKMAN (W) • JEROME OPENA & DUSTIN WEAVER (A)
COVER BY ADAM KUBERT
Variant Cover by SKOTTIE YOUNG
Design Variant by JEROME OPENA
Generals Variant by IN-HYUK LEE
Hero Variant by STEVE MCNIVEN
• The Inhumans pay the tribute.
• Victory in deep space.
• The secrets of Thanos.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Weird that I can read the solicit for this comic, which I guess is going to be Marvel's next Age of Ultron-scope crossover/event series, and still not have any idea what the hell the comic is actually about. I guess The Inhumans and Thanos are in it? And I know the creators?

Here's part of the solicit for #3, which is also do out in September, and also doesn't clear up anything about, oh, say, the plot of the event book:

• Prison break.
• Stealing a worldkiller.
• The fall of Attilan.

I don't normally post all of the variant covers for a comic, as I find variants so objectionable, but I thought the variants for #2 were of interest simply because of how greatly the images vary, with two looking extremely child-friendly, one looking kind of like a generic superhero cover, and the other looking like something for twenty-something gamers or fantasy enthusiasts.

INFINITY: THE HUNT #1 (of 4)
MATT KINDT (W) • STEVEN SANDERS (A)
Cover by SLAVA PASARIN
INFINITY TIE-IN!
• Hank Pym, Wolverine, and She-Hulk bring the students of the Marvel Universe together to announce a new CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS!
• This CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS pits the super students of schools all over the Marvel U (including some you’ve never seen before) against each other.
• However, the Contest is interrupted when Thanos’ forces descend on Earth. What do they have to do with the young heroes?
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Woah, woah, woah—so Matt Kindt is still writing and drawing his own idiosyncratic graphic novels like Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes, while also writing for DC Comics and writing for Marvel comics...? Is he living the dream? Well, if your dream is to make your own comics while getting paid big bucks to write superheroes for the Big Two then yes, Matt Kindt is living the dream.

Oh man, I hate to be in the position to have to say something nice about Greg Land's work, but I do kinda like this cover of his...

MIGHTY AVENGERS #1
AL EWING (W) • GREG LAND (A/C)
...
INFINITY TIE-IN! new ongoing series!
FROM THE BATTLEFIELDS OF INFINITY COMES THE MIGHTY AVENGERS!
• The Avengers are light-years away in space, contending with the Builders! Thanos’ marauders ransack the Earth, doing as they please! Who will stand in defense of mankind?
• Luke Cage! The Superior Spider-Man! Spectrum! The White Tiger! Power Man! And a mysterious figure in an ill-fitting Spider-Man Halloween costume! These unlikely heroes must assemble when no one else can—against the unrelenting attack of Proxima Midnight!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Well, the last thing we need is another Avengers title, and this one seems to be somewhat taking the place of a previous incarnation of the New Avengers title, back when that included street-level heroes like Luke Cage and Spidey while The Mighty Avengers was used for the real, official Avengers team, which is now appearing in The Avengers, while the name New Avengers is currently being used for a title featuring The Illuminati (Sigh. Keeping up with comics is so hard...!)

I like the idea of a line-up with so few white guys and so many characters of color (brown, black, green), I think I preferred the line-up to the "Black Avengers" Reginald Hudlin teased during his Black Panther run (Luke Cage, Blade, Brother Voodoo, Storm, The Panther, Goliath and...were War Machine and The Falcon in there? I think they might have been), or even that of the short-lived title The Crew (Junta, Justice, White Tiger and War Machine).

I'd kinda like more information about this—there are two Spider-Men in it?—but I guess just knowing that Greg Land is drawing it is all the information I really need to know. This book is definitely not for me.

Michael Del Mundo is apparently the new Kaare Andrews of Marvel comics covers.

That's Paolo Rivera's cover for Superior Spider-Man Team-Up #3 or #4, which gives a pretty decent look of what I guess is The Superior Spider-Man's new costume; I think it's inferior. I liked how he was pretty much just wearing Spider-Man's costume, only with pointier finger tips and slightly different eyes. The palms on this one look kinda cool, but overall it looks too much like the costume the clone Spidey used to wear (or was that the clone Spidey...?) for my comfort.

David Marquez's cover for Ultimate Spider-Man is pretty cool. Particularly because it looks like he's going to totally crash into that building.

I give up, John Cassaday, what is Kang lounging on...?

Nothing makes a dumb, unrealistic costume looker dumber, less realistic than when a good artist tries to draw it, as Milo Manara does to what is apparently Emma Frost's new look on this cover of Uncanny X-Men, which are involved in some big "Battle of The Atom" event spearheaded by Brian Michael Bendis this month, which means I'm no longer sure which is the big crossover event/series of September: Infinity or Battle of The Atom. Or are they just overlapping now...?

VENOM #40 & 41
CULLEN BUNN (W) • JORGE COELHO (A)
Cover by DECLAN SHALVEY
Issue #40 -
• Marvel’s newest symbiote-powered character – MANIA – is on the loose!
• But is she a hero or villain?
• And who killed Daimon Hellstrom?
Issue #41 -
• Venom and Mania tackle Lord Ogre... and Crossbones and the DOA!
• Flash and the symbiote have a heart-to-heart.
• And how can Hellstrom be in so many places at once?
32 PGS. (EACH)/Rated T+ …$2.99 (EACH)

What? Who killed Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan? Hopefully no one!

I like Declan Shalvey.

Hey, should DC have waited until June of 2013 to launch The New 52...?

I think it's pretty clear that they should have waited at least a few more months than they did, so they could at least get all their ducks in a row regarding consistent creative teams, some form of cohesive, behind-the-scenes Bible for the New 52 DC Universe (which character exist, which don't, what continuity was pitched, what was kept, etc) and at least a rudimentary continuity, so as not to have stories tripping over one another and writers retconning one another's work within the first year of this new supposedly streamlined and easier-to-follow new universe.

I've had three occasions in the last few months, however, to wonder if it might have served the publisher better to wait until now to do it, or at least within the last few months.

First, we have Grant Morrison's years-long Batman epic, currently un-folding in a second volume of Batman, Inc wrapping up, and while it's been pretty excellent (during all those years on the writing side; the art's been more up and down). Morrison's take was peculiar in that it assumed everything that ever happened in any Batman comic really "happened" in DC canon/continuity/history, even if in some somewhat altered form. It doesn't really mesh with the New 52's five-year timeline at all, nor do some of the core aspects of his mega-story (Batman conceiving a 10-year-old several years into his career as Batman, that son becoming Robin, a multi-national independent security force of vigilantes inspired by Batman working closely with Bruce Wayne, even little things like Robin Tim Drake becoming Red Robin).

It probably would have been better to reboot Batman continuity after Morrison's run ended, rather than a few years before, forcing bizarre alterations to the cast and some exceptionally goofy trade numbering. I'm pretty sure at least some of the other Bat-books could have been just fine if given another year or two before the reboot (For example, we still woulda had Scott Snyder-written Batman comics, they would have just kept appearing in Detective Comics instead of a rebooted new Batman series).

Second, we had Geoff Johns' run on Green Lantern ending recently, which occasioned the complete reshuffling of all of the Green Lantern creative teams. The same applies here; wouldn't it have been better to reboot Green Lantern continuity after Johns and company's run on the Green Lantern titles, allowing for a more pure reading experience of that epic and allowing DC editorial and the newer creative teams to have an actual clean break with Green Lantern continuity, being better able to pick and choose what aspects of Johns' run they wanted to include? (As is, Green Lantern continuity, like Batman continuity, apparently still "counts" everything, except for the many instances in which the events of the continuity must be different, leading to a worst-of-both-worlds kind of thing where new readers are still bombarded to references to older stories, but they can't consult older comics, because those events aren't accurate anymore either).

And thirdly, this week Scott Snyder and Jim Lee's Superman Unchained launched, which probably woulda made for a fine Superman #1 or Action Comics #1, particularly given the creative chaos that has engulfed both of those titles in the less-than-two years they've been around. As is, the book has become the de facto flagship of the five-book Superman line (six, if you wanna count Adventures of Superman along with Superman, Action Comics, Supergirl and Superboy).

It's a really tricky thing to try and armchair quarterbacck this far into the New 52—I'm not sure, for example, how the old DCU might have limped along for two more years with just the Batman and Green Lantern franchises kicking ass (Putting Geoff Johns on JLA immediately after Brightest Day in the old continuity and/or spinning he and Ivan Reis' Aquaman out of that tile woulda worked just fine though; I'm sure the JLI promised at the end of Justice League: Generation Lost woulda been just as well received as The New 52 Justice League International in the long run; and I would have loved to read two more years worth of Paul Cornell Superman stories after reading his "Black Ring" arc in Action Comics, as I'm sure plenty of others might have). And then there's the Jim Lee factor. He was a major selling point of the Justice League #1 that lead the New 52 reboot, and he's a major selling point of the new Superman Unchained book, and I doubt they coulda had him draw both arcs simultaneously.

Anyway, less than two years into The New 52, it seems like DC's got some really big, almost tectonic things shifting for them, and it seems a shame these shifts were taken into account when the decision to reboot the whole superhero line was made.

Review: Avenging Spider-Man: The Good, The Green and The Ugly

This trade collects five issues of what is essentially Marvel's current version of the old Marvel Team-Up, which paired Spider-Man with a different co-star each issue, now given a title that makes sense only in that it's meant to suggest an association with Marvel's most popular branding device at the moment, "Avengers."

After all, Spider-Man does nothing in the way of avenging in these issues, which are quite light-hearted adventures that play up the character's fun and funny side, and, of the three Marvel heroes he teams up with in the three stories within, one of them doesn't even have any association with The Avengers.

The first of the stories collected is an all-Immonen one-issue She-Hulk team-up, a Spidey/Shulkie comic from the creative team behind 2010 Top Shelf graphic novel Moving Pictures, which was about a pair of people making tough choices during World War II, while the Nazis were pillaging the art of the continent.

Oddly enough, this one is also set in and around a museum!

I find that one of the best ways to judge whether a Spider-Man comic is any good or not is whether it manages to make me laugh at all, and this made me laugh:

(The art really sells that joke; not sure if it's the speedlines or the figure work that do the heavy lifting, or simply the combination of the two, but that's a joke that would very easily not be very funny if drawn differently).

In this story, She-Hulk's team-up with Spidey lasts a lot longer than she would have liked, as the wall-crawler tags along to a museum function she has to attend for work. There some cultists attempt to steal some ancient Egytpian maguffin, and the cat goddess Bast arises.

It's full of the same sharp wit Kathryn Immonen's scripts usually are, and the super-short length (just 20 pages) keeps her sometimes overly wild plotting (see Hellcat, Herald, X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back for examples) in a nicely constructed, easily digestible package. It's great fun to see Stuart Immonen—a great, and greatly undervalued artist—drawing something light and fun like this, rather than the sorts of epic angst-fests we've seen him doing for Marvel lately (Fear Itself, Bendis-written Avengers comics).

That's followed by a slightly flabbier two-parter teaming Spidey with another super-strong superheroine, Marvel's current Captain Marvel Carol Danvers. This one's written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, penciled by Terry Dodson and inked by Rachel Dodson, making for another extraordinarily high-caliber art team for what is essentially something of a trifle of a comic.

In this one, Danvers offers Peter Parker a free flight to Boston to visit his aunt, in Danvers' own personal airplane, but the pair get pulled into superhero action against a spunky, jet-packing 99-percenter and an overzealous independent security contractor in a mechanized suit of super-armor. It's incredibly predictable—I've seen this almost exact same twist used in half the page-count by Grant Morrison in the late '90s—but DeConnick writes fun banter, and the art is super-slick.

I hadn't noticed previously, when I'd seen the cover image online before, but Danvers is actually wagging her index finger at whoever is shooting at her and Spidey on the cover. From a distance—the distance at which the image is visible as a little jpeg on a computer monitor, for example—it looked more like she was holding up her first two fingers.

The image makes a lot more sense now, although it's still kinda weird; it's such a frozen image, confined to a particular split-second—we can see where the bullets hit and are arcing away from her invulnerable skin—that allowing for motion in it like that seems pretty off.

The final story is another two-parter, featuring Deadpool, who must be "the Ugly" being referred to in the title). It's written by Kevin Schinick (whose name I'm not familiar with) and drawn by Aaron Kuder. It's a pretty Deadpool story, which means it's kind of in your face and annoying, but it has some pretty decent moments.

The first half features Deadpool in Spider-Man's subconsciousness, trying to guide him through his dreams in order to rescue him from a villain purportedly attacking him through his dreams. And then there's a reveal in the second issue, in which the incredibly unlikely (anywhere other than a story featuring Deadpool, anyway) villain: The Hypno-Hustler.

I really liked Kuder's style, which reminded me quite a bit of Frank Quitely's and Chris Burnham's in many panels (mostly in character design and in the way he draws his lines), and he has a pretty swell version of the Green Goblin (who appears in hallucinatory form only). Take away that guy's pupils, and he looks pretty damn horrifying, doesn't he?

So in The Good, The Green and The Ugly we get stories that are pretty great, pretty good and pretty decent, all of which adds up to not bad at all.

DC's September previews reviewed (After "Forever Evil" is discussed at some length)

There's already been quite a bit of discussion of DC Comics' plans for September of 2013, as it's a particularly big month with a particularly ambitious gimmick promotion.

First, it's the launch of Forever Evil, a seven-issue miniseries by the publisher's top writer Geoff Johns and artist David Finch, who only managed two or three issues as the artist on JLoA before abandoning the project—perhaps to get to work on this book (And, if that's the case, then apparently this wasn't planned out all that far in advance). It will be the first line-wide crossover/event series of The New 52, which is curious, as DC has been teasing and hyping this summer's "Trinity War" almost since the launch of The New 52, and that ended up being only a six-part crossover between three different titles, not a Blackest Night or Final Crisis style project. The premise seems to be something about the Justice League "dying" or being removed, and the villains getting the run of the joint (a premise that might be more effective were these heroes or this League one that was older than three years or so).

Second, each New 52 book will go on semi-hiatus, with many of them getting special between-issues issues with decimal points in the numbering, each highlighting a particular villain and each bearing a matching enhanced cover, a portrait of a villain with some sort of goofy limited-motion lenticular effect.

This apparently means DC will go back on two things they've said rather publicly before. First and foremost, there was that whole "holding the line at $2.99" campaign, which they've wiggled around variously in the past (chopping story pages per book from 22 to 20 pages, and publishing more over-sized books with back-up stories). Each of these books is priced at $3.99, but their page-counts remain 32 pages (20 pages of story, 10 pages of ads, 2 pages of advertorial "Channel 52" features, if this month's pattern holds into September). The extra dollar goes to pay for the cover technology, I guess.

The other thing is a quote Robot 6's Kevin Melrose caught DC's John Rood saying in a passive-aggressive swipe at Marvel,saying DC doesn't do decimal point issues.

Just as noteworthy, however, is the way in which DC is publishing those decimal-point issues, or at least the titles. They're not restricting themselves to one issue of each book, as popular book like Justice League and JLoA getting four issues this month, while less-popular books like Vibe and Katana are taking the month off. Heck, even books like Supergirl and Superboy are missing, while there are instead multiple issues of the higher-selling Action Comics and Superman (The new Scott Snyder/Jim Lee series Superman Unchained is absent; apparently some creative teams or book's get the month off so as to avoid participating).

It's a way for DC to publish four issues of a more popular title and avoid selling any issues of a less-popular one without actually going to the trouble of canceling it, and it has the effect of rack-crowding to an almost unprecedented degree (there's ten books with the words "Justice League" in them alone, and I'm afraid to even count up the Batman books, which, as with the Superman family, published more issues under the more popular titles like Batman, while not publishing issues of, say, Nightwing or Batgirl.

I'm sure it will give DC a huge market share, something they always protest they're not interested in, given that they are selling more books with more popular titles for more money that month, but I can't imagine it will work as well as they want, however.

For example, look at the four issues of Justice League. Of them, only one of them is co-written by Geoff Johns (#23.4: Secret Society), while another is quite explicitly the final issue of the canceled Dial H series under a different name ("In a special VILLAINS MONTH coda to the fan-favorite DIAL H series," says the solicit for #23.3: Dial E), another is written by Greg Pak and is just as likely tied to the Greg Pak-written Superman/Batman as to Justice League (#23.1: Darkseid) and the other is a Lobo one-shot.

If you look closely at creators—well, writers, anyway—you can see what villains month book replaces what regular book—Batgirl writer Gail Simone is writing Batman: The Dark Knight #23.1: The Ventriloquist, starring a villain she's been using in Batgirl, for example—and while that's not that hard for readers to puzzle out, I bet it's gonna suck to be ordering these things as a retailer (Like, obviously you can order the Johns issue of Justice League as if it were a regular issue of Justice League, plus whatever you think the promotion itself will add, and the "Dial E" issue as if it were an issue of Dial H plus whatever you think the promotion will add, but then you have to factor in for whether readers will be fooled into wanting it because of the "Justice League" in the title or...Urrgh. This looks like one of those month's where I look at the solicitations and all I can think is "Those poor bastards" when I think of our friends in the comics retailing business).

DCWKA already broke down the creative teams by gender, and noted that while there are four times as many women writing for The New 52 than in September of 2011 (when there was only one), now there's one fewer artist—there are no female artists involved. Of greater interest to me (increasingly I think the Big Two need women more than the women need the Big Two; I can't imagine Prudence Shen, Faith Erin Hicks and Lucy Knisley aren't getting much more money and recognition for their First Second-published OGNs Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong and Relish than they'd get and make were they working on Earth-2 or Hawkman or whatever) is how few new creators of any kind are involved: Once more, it looks like a bunch of the same old creators, with new blood consisting of the likes of old hands without monthly assignments, like Tom DeFalco, John Ostrander, Dan Jurgens, Frank Tieri and, most surprisingly, Graham Nolan.

(I am glad to see some talented name creators getting some no doubt lucrative gigs in The New 52 though, like Francis Portella, Tim Seely, Jeremy Haun and Aaron Kuder.)

At any rate, let's take a closer look at a few of the publisher's offerings of special note this month. As always, for the full solicits, you can head on over to Comic Book Resources...

ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #5
Written by NATHAN EDMONDSON and KYLE KILLEN
Art by YILDIRAY CINAR and PIA
Cover by YILDIRAY CINAR
On sale SEPTEMBER 25 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
When an alien baby crashes on Earth, Superman must protect the screaming infant from her pursuers both human and extraterrestrial! Plus: a Lex Luthor tale like you’ve never seen before, written by Kyle Killen, creator of Awake, and drawn by Y: THE LAST MAN’s Pia Guerra!

Weird. I was just wondering whatever happened to Guerra after reading this must-read (well, should-read) piece on The Beat (which quotes me, and misplaces my J). She's a great artist, and one whose work I'd like to see on a regular basis again somewhere.

Ha ha ha! Remember, Black Manta is a very serious character now! You can tell because of all the blood swirling around him. That's from one of the two issues of Aquaman being published in September (please note: Aquaman is one of DC's titles that is so successful that it's not only being published during a month when only the most successful books are being published under their own title, it's being published twice! Both issues are being co-written by the very, very busy Johns (he's writing one comic in September, but co-writing four more); the other issue features Ocean Master.


BATMAN #23.4: BANE
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art by GRAHAM NOLAN
3-D motion cover by GUILLEM MARCH
On sale SEPTEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Batman is gone, and the inmates of Arkham Asylum are running wild in the streets! Bane is in Gotham City with one goal…to take it over no matter who he has to break!


BATMAN AND ROBIN #23.1: TWO-FACE
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art by GUILLEM MARCH
3-D motion cover by CHRIS BURNHAM
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Two-Face is approached to join the Secret Society! Which side will his coin land on?

So if I were to buy any of these issues—and at $4 for 20-pages, I won't, but maybe there are actually 32 story pages in these things—these would be the two I'd buy. I think of the villains' month special issues, these are the ones where I like the work of the writer, love the work of the artists and have some interest in the characters.

BATMAN BLACK AND WHITE #1
Written by CHIP KIDD, NEAL ADAMS, JOE QUINONES, MARIS WICKS, JOHN ARCUDI and HOWARD MACKIE
Art by MICHAEL CHO, NEAL ADAMS, JOE QUINONES, SEAN MURPHY and CHRIS SAMNEE
...
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 48 pg, 1 of 6, B&W, $4.99 US • RATED T
...
The legendary, Eisner Award-winning series BATMAN BLACK AND WHITE returns in a brand-new six-issue miniseries featuring tales of The Dark Knight by some of comics’ greatest writers and artists! This first issue kicks off with stories by Chip Kidd and Michael Cho, Neal Adams, Joe Quinones and Maris Wicks, John Arcudi and Sean Murphy, and Howard Mackie and Chris Samnee!

Probably the biggest, most exciting release of the month, a new version of DC's 1996 miniseries that featured black-and-white Legends of the Dark Knight style stories from some of the best comics creators in the world (and which later lead to back-up strips in Batman: Gotham Knights). This one doesn't sound quite as awesome—that original series had a cover by Alex Toth and a contribution from Katsuhiro Otomo, for example) but Chip Kidd and Neal Adams are pretty big names, and I like the work of just about everyone mentioned there. I'm especially eager to see what Samnee and Quinones can do with Batman.

BATMAN: ODYSSEY TP
Written by NEAL ADAMS
Art by NEAL ADAMS and others
Cover by NEAL ADAMS
On sale OCTOBER 2 • 368 pg, FC, $19.99 US
Legendary Batman artist and comics pioneer Neal Adams returns to Gotham City with an electrifying new story that pits The Dark Knight against villains and allies old and new! Now, all thirteen issues of BATMAN: ODYSSEY are collected in trade paperback!

Wow, $20 for 368-pages seems like a pretty good value, doesn't it? And I really like that they decided to put an image of Batman riding a pterodactyl on the cover, just to make it clear how insane the contents of the book actually are.

DEADSHOT: BEGINNINGS TP
Written by JOHN OSTRANDER, KIM YALE, STEVE ENGLEHART, DOUG MOENCH, GERRY CONWAY and PAUL LEVITZ
Art by LUKE McDONNELL, MARSHALL ROGERS, TERRY AUSTIN, DON NEWTON and others
Cover by LUKE McDONNELL
On sale OCTOBER 30 • 160 pg, FC, $14.99 US
In these bullet-ridden 1980s tales, Deadshot goes on a solo mission to kill a crime boss known as El Jefe, only to learn that the men who sent him on this mission have ulterior motives. Collects DEADSHOT #1-4, BATMAN #369 and DETECTIVE COMICS #474.

Sure, I'll take one of these.

That bit about Suicide Squad on the cover only reminds me that we're way past due for the next volume of the Ostrander-written Suicide Squad to come out in collection.

Woah, woah, woah, what's this?! In The New 52, the green in Mirror Master's costume has been replaced by mirror-color...? That's...that's actually kinda cool. I don't think mirror and orange are the greatest color combination in the world, but it's not any worse than orange and green.

Say, is this the first New 52 design I prefer to the original...? I think it just might be. Usually they're much, much worse (see Captain Cold and Heatwave on the same image, for example), but that Mirror Master may be an honest to-to-God improvement. Huh.

That's regular Flash artist Francis Manapul's cover to The Flash #23.3: The Rogues, by the way. There are three issues of The Flash in September, each of 'em by either Brian Buccellato, Manapul or Buccellato and Manapul, so unlike, say, the various Justice League books, it looks like all of these "count" as being issues of the Flash series.

Kinda sucks to be a Flash reader then, as your Flash comics line item for the month will have jumped from $3 to $12...

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #23.1: THE CREEPER
Written by ANN NOCENTI
Art by CHRISCROSS
3-D motion cover by MIKEL JANIN
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Freed from his mystical prison, The Creeper walks a path littered with gore and misery—and there may be no way to stop him! Many will be caught in his web, including the Justice League of America’s Katana and Jack Ryder, The Creeper’s unwitting human host. Where will The Creeper strike next?

Despite the title and the Dark Justice Leaguers on the cover, I have to assume this is actually the stealth September issue of Katana, given that it's written by Katana writer Ann Nocenti and mentions Katana in the solicit copy.

That is one...not very interesting looking version of The Creepr, and "littered with gore and misery" sure doesn't make it sound like one that will be very interesting to read about, does it?

FOREVER EVIL #1
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art and cover by DAVID FINCH and RICHARD FRIEND
1:25 Villain A cover by TBD
1:25 Villain B cover by TBD
1:25 Villain C cover by TBD
3-D motion variant cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
1:200 B&W variant cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 48 pg, 1 of 7, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Combo pack edition: $4.99 US
Retailers: This issue will ship with seven covers. Please see the order form for more information.
The first universe-wide event of The New 52 begins as FOREVER EVIL launches! The Justice League is DEAD! And the villains shall INHERIT the Earth! An epic tale of the world’s greatest super-villains starts here!

Nothing reminds me that making comic books at this particular corporate level is little different than making sprockets or widgets than seeing that many TBDs for variant covers announced. Someone decided that this book will need seven different covers, but they hadn't yet decided what seven artists should draw them.

Sigh...

I suppose this is on the artist who drew that particular cover more than some kind of statement on the state of the DCU at the moment (the artist being Finch, I assume, although it doesn't look all that Finchy), but all but ten of those villains are Batman villains.

Well, I hope this is a good comic book series, and easy to follow for someone not reading much of the New 52 on a monthly basis, as it's most likely the only comic book-comic I'll buy this month, given the 33% price increase in the entire line (and even then I'm not sure; while I love Johns' writing of DC super-comics, I'm not a fan of Finch's artwork at all).


JUSTICE LEAGUE #23.2: LOBO
Written by MARGUERITE BENNETT
Art by BEN OLIVER
3-D motion cover by AARON KUDER
On sale SEPTEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Deep in the dark corridors of space lives a black-hearted being of unimaginable power. He’s witnessed horrors beyond description and committed unparalleled evils. In all of history, no being has ever been capable of as much chaos and terror as this lone individual. This is the story of the man called Lobo. He’s coming. And he’s bringing all of hell with him.

I thought Lobo already made his New 52 debut in Stormwatch...?

Anyway, I thought this noteworthy for the darkness of its tone—Lobo sounds far, far from his dark humor heyday—and the absence of Lobo creator and DC workhorse Keith Giffen, who is MIA from the villain specials (His only September credits are on a pair of Masters of the Universe books).

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #7.1: DEADSHOT
Written by MATT KINDT
Art by PASQUAL FERRY
3-D motion cover by TONY S. DANIEL and MATT BANNING
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Is it a death wish that makes Floyd Lawton put on the mask of Deadshot? Or is something more sinister pulling at Floyd when he becomes a relentless assassin who feels nothing for his victims? Discover the truth behind Deadshot’s secret history in this issue!

Reading Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes and Super Spy, I think a Matt Kindt Deadshot comic would be pretty much the best thing ever. Seeing that cover, and reading that solicit, I think otherwise.

If only Kindt drew his own scripts for DC...

SUPERMAN #23.1: BIZARRO
Written by SHOLLY FISCH
Art by JEFF JOHNSON and ANDY SMITH
3-D motion cover by AARON KUDER
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Lex Luthors’ sinister plan to manipulate Superman’s genetic material to create a mindless soldier under his control results in the monster known as Bizarro: opposite of Superman in every way, with no compassion, no remorse and no mercy!

Woof, I do not care for that Bizarro re-design, which mixes elements of both of Superman's bad New 52 costumes, and, somewhat perplexingly, have the exact same shades of blue and red that Superman's costumes, instead of being a few shades off, as per Bizarro tradition.

Normally I'd be really excited about a Bizarro one-shot, especially one written by Sholly Fisch, but man, that solicitation copy sounds no fun at all, and it looks like we're back to the post-Crisis origin for Bizarro as a botched clone, rather than an entity from Bizarro World, as the pre-New 52 version gradually evolved back into.

That's not a bad Parasite design—I'm not crazy about the physique, but the face is cool. That's from Superman #23.4, written and drawn by Aaron Kuder. Oddly enough, I literally just heard of Kuder the other day, when I read a few issues of Avenging Spider-Man he illustrated. He is a good artist.

Not entirely sure what's going on in this Batman/Superman cover—it's drawn by Tony Daniel, so no real surprise—but it sure looks like Doomsday is totally missing Superman there, isn't it?

I do kinda dig the horns, though.


WONDER WOMAN #23.2: FIRST BORN
Written by BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art by ACO
3-D motion cover by VICTOR IBANEZ
On sale SEPTEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
The First Born son of Zeus—Wonder Woman’s oldest brother—has returned to claim the throne of Olympus! But it’s been a long and bloody road to reach his destiny…and you won’t believe the horror when you meet the rest of Wonder Woman’s extended “family”!

There are two issues of Wonder Woman this month, but this seems to be the one that "counts," as its written by regular Wonder Woman writer Brian Azzarello and features the villain of his latest story arc. The other issue features The Cheetah, who appeared in Justice League, not Wonder Woman, in the The New 52. That one's written by John Ostrander.

Review: Wolverine: Wolverine Goes To Hell

Despite how exactly the title of this collection describes the premise of the story within, it seemed to be missing rather large chunks of likely valuable information: I felt like I walked in on a movie already in progress, and or that pages were removed from the book almost at random.

Naturally, there were no volume numbers on the spine to indicate when this book should be read in relation to any other Wolverine comics so that it might make more sense, despite the fact that it stars Wolverine and is written by Jason Aaron who, at the time this originally came out, had been writing Wolverine for years (The fine print says these comics came from Wolverine #1-#5 though, so I guess this is technically the start of a new series, or just the renumbering and retitling of Aaron's ongoing Wolverine: Weapon X title).

Part of that may have to do with the way Aaron chose to tell the story, beginning with a scene from a special (Wolverine: Road to Hell) in which a naked Wolverine is falling down to hell like Alice falling to Wonderland, then flashing back to a point before that and the action on Earth, never dramatizing why or how exactly Wolverine's soul was sent to hell or why his possessed-by-demons body is still on earth, except in explanations delivered later in the game.

And part of it may have to do with the way I'm reading this story—in collected form—rather than the way it was originally published in serial form. Apparently, the original issues it appeared in contained back-up stories, so they would lead with a chapter of "Wolverine Goes To Hell" by Aaron and pencil artist Renato Guedes, and then there would be a shorter chapter of a back-up story entitled "Scorched Earth" by Aaron and a variety of quirkier, more stylized artists (Jason Latour, Steven Sanders, Michael Gaydos, Jamie McKelvie, etc) following Wolvie's possessed body on Earth. The two occur simultaneously, and the former refers at points to the latter, although someone reading the collection won't understand the references until the whole book is read. (One unfortunate side-effect of this collection strategy is that, unfortunately, if you're not aware of the back-up material, "Goes To Hell" seems to end quite suddenly, with a good 30 story pages left in the collection (which also includes a variant cover gallery, some design sketches and an 11-page "All-New Wolverine Saga" feature, in which Wolverine recaps his adventures in prose, while illustrations pulled from the comics those adventures occurred in liberally stud the paragraphs.

At any rate, in this story entitled "Wolverine Goes to Hell," Wolverine goes to hell; we eventually learn that he gets there via a trap involving a cabal of civilians who seem to really, really hate hm, a black magic ritual of some kind, and Mystique masquerading as his girlfriend Melita serving as bait.

While Wolvie's in hell, someone that speaks in yellow speech bubbles and refers to itself in the plural is in control of his body; he/she/it dress him up funny, change clothes a lot, and go about attacking and killing his friends and loved ones (In addition to Wolverine claws, the soul-less, possessed Wolvie body has Dark Side of the Force powers like air-choking and the ability to, like, summon insects and stuff like that).

Most of the loved one hunting occurs in the back-ups, but he also fights some X-Men (mostly Colossus) and two Ghost Riders and The Son of Satan, who Mystique has gathered together, apparently regretting her role in all this.

Wolverine's time in hell is...well, it's kinda weird. The devil isn't really ever referred to as the devil or Satan or Lucifer, and he doesn't look like any Marvel devils like Mephisto or Satannish. Rather, he's a kind of generic looking horror movie demon, with horns the size of Legend's Tim Curry, a mouth full of fangs and tusks, and purple skin, plus the traditional cloven hooves, batwings and a tail.

He's intent on "breaking" wolverine, who is intent on not being broken, and the punishment the devil has for Wolverine consists mainly of having Wolverine fight a bunch of dudes. He does so without the benefit of his healing factor (but he can't die, so he still kinda sorta has a healing factor, right?) or his adamantium, but isn't that also basically Wolverine's every waking day and, I imagine, his purgatory and his heaven? Fighting a bunch of ninjas, thugs and evil mutants, including one's he's killed before?

The devil has the most luck torturing Wolvie by having his old love Mariko flail him until he screams, which takes 12 blows depicted in 15 grueling panels.

I don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that Wolverine eventually escapes hell, thanks to some unlikely assistance from two unexpected allies in hell and a plan that seems so familiar I know I've seen it before, but I'll be damned if I can remember which movie or comic I've seen it in know, and an exorcism performed by Mystique and her leather boys up on earth.

Of all of the Wolverine material of Aaron's I've read, this was by far the worst. Not only is it not funny—there aren't many, or any, really, opportunities for humor—even dark humor—in the scenarios being set up here, but the big, huge, epic mythological scale and setting of the story seems brief, small and unimaginative. The hell Aaron gives us here is a pretty generic one, and so far removed from the other visions of hell other Marvel comics have shown us over the decades that it seems a poor replacement for them.

Check this out:

A full page of Aaron conjuring highly imaginative imagery of a horrible hellscape and its denizens, but we don't get to see any of it drawn, nor did we see Wolverine see any of these things he's now narrating that he saw. The actual hell in the comic book is just one big room full of standard, generic demons and devils.

It's disappointing, and that's all on Aaron: So much of his Wolverine material to date has been so great, that a merely decent story like this seems terrible by comparison.

Guedes isn't my favorite of Aaron's Wolverine collaborators—I prefer Garney—but he does a pretty find job. The demons are generic, but they're well-drawn generic, and his human characters are all rather finely detailed. I dug how he rendered Damion Hellstrom, as someone who looks like he should be hanging out with skull-faced bikers from hell, even if he's not rocking his original design (and my favorite look of his).

Melita's clothes seem to have a hard time staying on, though.

The artwork in the back-ups is mostly much more interesting, but it also comes in shorter bursts, and as much as I enjoyed, say, Latour's artwork, I don't think it would have worked quite as well in the main story.

Review: Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine

This fairly nutty 2010 six-issue miniseries came out during the rather brief period during which Marvel seemed to be trying to establish something of an "Astonishing" line of books or, at the very least, to have the adjective's appearances in titles suggest a certain level of quality.

The word has a long history at Marvel, from the 1950s Astonishing comic to the Marvel Age Tales to Astonish, but it gained a new, more prestigious meaning in 2004, when Marvel launched a new X-Men book entitled Astonishing X-Men to house the stories of the Joss Whedon/John Cassaday creative team (The title was itself taken from the mid-90's, when one of the "Age of Apocalypse" X-teams used the moniker).

After Whedon, Astonishing X-Men became first a showcase title for continuity-lite stories by Warren Ellis and various A-List artists, but has since become just another X-Men ongoing, and had rather long ago relinquished its flagship status (I'm no X-expert, but Uncanny and All-New seem to be the X-Men A-titles at the moment, yes...?).

Nevertheless, in 2010, Marvel attached the adjective to this Jason Aaron-written, Adam Kubert-drawn miniseries teaming their two most popular characters (and, not long after, launched Rob Rodi and Mike Choi Astonishing Thor five-part miniseries, before seemingly retiring the adjective for use anywhere outside of one of the half-dozen X-team books).

Aaron's plot for his Spider-Man & Wolverine story is a tough one to describe without spoiling much of anything, as it features Aaron at his most excessive, with a Morrisonian technique of throwing big, huge, imaginative ideas at the reader and barely developing them before moving on. It also features Aaron working in what I've heard some refer to as a Silver Age-like method, where insane comic book things happen, often seemingly at random, and the characters, who are written as their modern-age "selves" rather than 1960s pastiches, essentially play straight-men to the plot.

The plot here is, in one way, a bunch of crazy, random things happening, so it' shard to discuss without simply pointing at scenes and sequences and saying, "And then this awesome thing happened! And then this awesome thing happened!"

Suffice it to say that Spider-Man and Wolverine, two characters who don't generally share a lot in common within the Marvel Universe save for their recent time on multiple Avengers line-ups together (a fact dictated by what they do share in the real world: Popularity), find themselves being literally knocked around time together, landing in the prehistoric past, one another's adolescent years and a post-apocalyptic future.

There's a scene set in the future where Doctor Doom has transformed himself into Doom, The Living Planet and is set to devour earth until Wolverine shoots him with a Phoenix Gun, which, like it sounds, is a gun that shoots the Phoenix Force in bullet-form (Wolvie approaching the planet packing that particular heat is revealed in a three-page fold-out splash).

And as big and crazy and cosmic as that sounds, it's only issue #2, not a climactic moment.

The villain of the piece is a drug-dealer named Czar who has gotten his hands on "time diamonds," with which he has studded his teeth and encrusted a baseball bat he calls his "timestick" (when he whacks Wolverine with it, for example, he literally knocks him into a different time period). He is aided and assisted by Big Murder, a dwarf. The pair are black dudes, and while Aaron depicts what, exactly, they use their fantastic powers for in his typically clever, witty, funny way, the portrayals veer so close to stereotype and parody (Big M, for example, functions as a sort of hip hop hypeman to Czar, and wears Flava Flav like accessories).

When a character refers to Czar as a "buck," it sure made me flinch—even if the context was "young buck" and the person saying it was an old man version of Czar himself from the future.

They are actually working at the behest of another villain, a familiar face that certainly makes sense within this context (and explains why Spider-Man and Wolvie are together in this), but he's also such a lazy, predictable stand-in for comic book writers that Aaron might as well have written himself into the story as the Big Bad; that, at least, would have been a more original twist.

It's not Logan's big brother Dog, who appears in this and, apparently, in issues of Wolverine and The X-Men that are the stands now, making this book a bit more relevant to readers of the ongoing X-Men saga, I suppose. Nor is it The Orb, one of my favorite of Marvel's oddball villains (I still have a very distinct memory of picking up a copy of Ghost Rider as a child from a drugstore rack and being fairly bewildered by the site of a guy on a motorcycle with a giant eyball for a head), although he's in this too.

It's a hell of a showcase for Kubert (inked here by first Mark Morales and Dexter Vines, and then by Mark Roslan), and the ideal sort of project for an artist of his talent and particular relationship with deadlines—a continuity-lite miniseries in which no other books depend on the narrative's timely completion, full of wildly different settings, characters, opportunities for designs and style-switching (In one section, for example, Wolverine finds himself in Spidey's teen years, during the brief period between the spider bite and the Uncle murder that he tried being a professional wrestler, while Spidey finds himself in Wolvie's teen years, which Kubert renders in the style of Origin).

It's not a perfect comic, and it's not all that astonishing a comic either, but a few uncomfortable bits aside, it easily was one of the most fun superhero comics I've read in a while (Probably since the last Jason Aaron-written Wolverine story I read, actually, and Aaron writes Spidey just as well as he does Wolvie).

But I can see while they called it Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine; Most Fun Spider-Man & Wolverine just doesn't sound quite as marketable.

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

Writer Matt Fraction had the Fantastic Four travel back in time "2.66 million years ago" in in the first issue of his rebooted Marvel NOW! Fantastic Four, where they were attacked by a dinosaur...despite the fact that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago (and it wasn't just a typo, as it was repeated again the very next issue).

In the opening issue of this series, our heroes are marooned in the prehistoric past, where multiple species of homindis (The homosapien-looking "Small Folk," and the more bestial, ape-like "Kill Folk") live side by side with dinosaurs, some of which they've managed to domesticate. We can probably date this pretty closely to 65 million years, as Peter Parker sees the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs as it comes speeding out of the night sky.

So that's two Marvel comics I've read lately that has humans and dinosaurs co-existing; is the modern Marvel bullpen full of creationists, or is it just a function of the Earth-616 having a very different natural history than us, what with the Savage Land and that meteor that killed the dinosaurs off being encrusted with time diamonds...?

Meanwhile, at Good Comics For Kids...

This week I reviewed Sabrina The Teenage Witch: The Magic Within Vol. 1, the first digest-sized black-and-white collection of Tania del Rio's reinvention of Archie's witch as a manga style heroine, for Good Comics For Kids.

I liked it an awful lot, but by far my favorite story was the final one in the collection, "Model Behavior," in which Sabrina's one-time love interest, Japanese pretty-boy warlock Shinji, is discovered and becomes a model...right about the time that Josie and The Pussycats are coming to town.

If you ever wondered what Josie and The Pussycats might look like manga style and/or as drawn by Del Rio, this comic answers that question (see above). Alan, Alexander and Alexandra are all absent, denying readers a Salem and Sebastian meeting.

The title page shows the cats and Shinji chibi style, while the giant heads of Sabrina (right) and her best friend (and Shinji's girlfriend) Llandra look on:

And here's a montage from Shinji and the Pussycats' photo session:

Please note that while Josie is hanging on Shinji in the first image, it's just a shoot, and she has no romantic interest in Shinji. Melody, on the other hand, does, and even asks him out on a date, but he declines, much to the relief of Sabrina and Llandra, who were jealously spying on Shinji the whole time.

If you want to see Del Rio's version of The Pussycats in color, though, you'll have to look at the cover of Sabrina #67, from which the story is taken (but which doesn't actually appear in the collection):

Speaking of color, the other thing that I wrote for a place on the Internet that is not Every Day Is Like Wednesday? A short-ish piece on the new The Smurfs Anthology Vol. 1, Papercutz's bigger hardcover collection of Peyo's Smurfs material seemingly geared toward adults, for Robot 6.

It's a nicely designed package of some great comics, presented in a very eyeball-friendly format, but is noteworthy for keeping the Purple Smurfs purple instead of turning them back to black.

The Black Smurfs had as much to do with black people as the Black Lanterns in Blackest Night had to with black people, so keeping 'em kid-friendly purple in this volume seems an odd choice to me, but whatever; some Peyo always trumps no Peyo.

This week's ads of note

What? A reality show?! No Mr. The Rock! Don't do a reality show! You're better than that!

Why are you doing this? Surely there are sequels to Journey 2 The Mysterious Island and G.I. Joe: Retalliation and a Fast and the Furious 7 to make, right? Or hey, I have a script for a comic book miniseries about a dinosaur-fighting barbarian that could be retooled into a script for a The Rock vehicle pretty easily...! Just don't do reality television! Surely it hasn't come to this already, has it...?

I'm pretty curious about this title for three reasons.

1.) Greg Pak is a writer who has done a lot of work for Marvel Comics, making his debut at DC Comics (as far as I know) at a time when DC Comics seems to be somewhere between dismissive and monstrously hostile towards its creative talent, perhaps especially its writers (based on what at least a half-dozen or so writers have said about their time there in the last year or so, and based on what one can see from the vantage point of not being within the company, but watching its moves from outside.

2.) The series is being pitched as a Greg Pak-written, Jae Lee-drawn one, but it's hard to imagine Lee staying on a monthly schedule for too long. The previous iteration of this series changed artists every story arc, and, after the first few arcs, even the writer changed every arc.

3.) It should be interesting to see how Pak handles New 52 continuity. Even the scant info given in this ad seems suspect, based on the first arc of Justice League, in which Batman and Superman meet an team-up for the first time.

The individual continuity of those two characters seem pretty messed-up and out-of-synch, so a series devoted to their relationship seems to be handicapping itself right at the conceptual level.

Here's a bad scan of the two-page ad they're running for the upcoming tertiary Superman title, the bafflingly entitled Superman Unchained by Scott Snyder and Jim Lee.

I found it interesting that they devoted only two pages to hyping this new series, versus the six pages devoted to hyping the new Action Comics creative team of writer Andy Diggle and artist Tony Daniel, which ended up only lasting a single issue.

I wonder if it's simply a matter of a Snyder and Lee collaboration selling itself in a way that a Diggle and Daiel one doesn't, or if their ad department got skittish with the results of that last effort to sell Superman comics, I figured if they only used two pages to advertise this one, it'd last at least three issue...