You know, if Bruce Wayne really wanted to strike fear into the hearts of superstitious and cowardly criminals, he shouldn't have become a bat, but an aye-aye:

I mean, just look at that fucking thing.

Some thoughts on All-New X-Men Vol. 1: Yesterday's X-Men

•I still find it amusing that of all the possible X-Men titles out there, basically Any Adjective + "X-Men", they chose to call this particular title All-New X-Men, as it is the X-Men title starring the five original X-Men, displaced in time and brought to the modern Marvel Universe. It is therefore the book about the least new X-Men of all (Shortly after this title launched, Marvel re-launched Uncanny X-Men with a new #1. It is also being written by Brian Michael Bendis and is serving as a companion to this book; they probably should have switched the titles of the two).

•Less-than-accurate title aside, I really like the new logo.

•The book is visually a great one all around, from logo to coloring. That's due mostly to the contribution of pencil artist Stuart Immonen, inked here by Wade Von Grawbadger, who is one of the most perfect superhero artists, capable of drawing action and emotion, spectacular powers and run-of-the-mill, day-in-the-life stuff equally well, and doing so with enough flair and individual style that the artwork is nevertheless exciting and his (This may be comparing apples to oranges, but just before sitting down to write this, I re-read an issue of Forever Evil that David Finch pencilled, and Immonen's work looks even better when seen as a visual chaser, rather than something independent; I've never been a Marvel vs. DC kind of guy, but, speaking objectively as someone who reads as much from both publishers as I can, there is an incredible gulf in quality between the average DC comic and the average Marvel comic at the moment; probably the widest in my own personal memory).

•The premise of the book follows closely on the heels of Avengers Vs. X-Men, in which you'll recall Cyclops, Emma Frost, Namor, Colossus and Magik were possessed by The Phoenix Force, went completely bonkers and took over the world—temporarily—before the Phoenix Force was ultimately dispersed, un-doing the "No More Mutants" thing so that now new mutants are, um, mutating again. It ended with Cyclops essentially the worst villain in the Marvel Universe, having completed a years-long slide from having grown up to be his generation's Charles Xavier to growing into his generation's Magneto. Driving that point home, he killed—or, more likely, "killed"—Xavier and is now hanging out with Magneto.

In the pages of some comic I didn't read, Cyclops must have escaped, and now with the help of Magneto, Magik and a rather reluctant Emma Frost, he's building his own X-Men school and trying to save/recruit the new mutants popping up all over the world.

This puts the real X-Men in something of a bind, as most of them would rather not go to war with Cyclops again. Even if they win—and given that there's about 195 of 'em, they're gonna win—it would mean "mutant civil war" and maybe ending up killing Cyclops.

Bendis has Iceman, one of the original X-Men and one of the two modern X-Men in the book who has known Cyclops longest and best, says "I'm telling you, if the young us saw what was going on today it would feel worse than the mutant apocalyptic nightmare we used to worry about!" He says some variation of this enough times that Beast eventually hears him and decides to travel back in time, convince the five original teenaged X-Men—Cyclops, Jean Grey, Angel, Beast and Iceman—to come back to the present with him in order to confront modern day Cyclops.

Things go less than perfectly, as Beast is in the process of dying from another of his periodic mutations while hatching this plan of his, and the original X-Men scare Cyclops off before getting a chance to give him a good talking to, and they see enough of the modern Marvel Universe to know that it's all screwed-up, and not the future they wanted, so they intend to stay and fix it.

•I imagine this read much, much better in trade then it would have in single issues, and not just because everything Bendis writes reads better in trade then in single issues, or because it was a ridiculously expensive $4-per-20-pages. If you just read my synopsis above but haven't read the comics themselves, then you probably see some holes and have some questions  about Beast's cockamamie plan. It's all explained within this volume, but reading it in one sitting, questions about why he would do something that nutty or how it wouldn't destroy the integrity of the space-time continuum or whether characters' continuity are wonky only nag for 20-40 pages or so, whereas if you were reading this in monthly installments, you might spend two months wondering why teen Jean can read minds, or how Beast thinks he won't re-write the past by brining his past self to the future and so on.

•This may have been the best Bendis Marvel comic I've read in a while...certainly since the last time I read any of his Ultimate Spider-Man comics (many of which Immonen also drew—coincidence?). The one time he writes particularly Bendisian is during the fourth issue, in which the first two and a half pages are straight Cyclops narration, which eventually bleeds from narration boxes into old-fashioned thought bubbles, and then teen Jean starts yelling at him to "Stop!! Stop Talking!!" (Because she could hear his thoughts/Bendis' narration, of course).

•The Phoenix Force apparently altered the abilities of those that were in possession of it and/or blasted with it, so Cyclops, Magneto and Emma are all experiencing difficulties with their powers. I really like how Immonen draws Cyclops' eye-beams in this story, coming out of his visor in a straight line, but surrounded by a corkscrewing aura of energy. This is apparently because he can't control it quite as well as he used to, and/or it's more powerful, but it also makes for a strong visual contrast with teen Cyclops' eye-beams, when they try to eye-beam one another later in the story.

Well, one advantage of serially published comics over trades is that the former are easier to scan images from to post on your blog

•I also like how colorist Marte Gracia renders Magneto's magnetic powers, generally as subtle tracers of energy in the Mutant Master of Magnetism's favorite color:

•Beast doesn't die, of course, but he does mutate...again. I think he's meant to be a new version of "ape Beast," but he doesn't really look like any of the previous Beasts, and seems more 'Squatchy than any past incarnation I can remember:

•I'm not entirely sure if Bendis realized it or not, but one aspect of his story echoes that of Grant Morrison's millennial run on the franchise, a run that has mostly been undone as much as possible (And Bendis has has a weird relationship with Morrison concepts in the Marvel Universe, pretty much un-writing Morrison's Marvel Boy during his time on the Avengers franchise).

Bendis has Grown-Up Cyclops repeatedly blaming the Phoenix Force itself for the evil acts he committed while all Phoenix-ed up in Avengers Vs. X-Men, assigning it responsibility for things like killing Xavier and taking down Emma and so on. Magneto essentially tells him that's bullshit, and that he's just deflecting responsibility to make it easier to deal with.

Morrison's New X-Men opened with Cyclops questioning his own morality, assigning blame for some of his own dark thoughts to a time in the recent past (before I read any X-Men comics) when he was possessed or under the control of Apocalypse. So when he thinks something bad or wrong, he questions whether it's him thinking it, or if it's the linger effect of Apocalypse' influence. Ultimately he comes to the realization that he's him and his own thoughts, and that he was assigning blame for his own rebellion from emotional repression to an outside other.

•Okay, now I have a question for any regular readers of X-Men comics: Where's Angel at these days? As teenage Angel notices, he seems to be missing from the modern X-Men, and no one seems to want to tell him where he is at the moment. Is he currently dead too?

Admit it: You would have read the hell out of Brandon Graham's Gen 13

On an early page of Walrus, PictureBox's publication of a sketchbook of Brandon Graham's (which you can get for half-off if you order before January 2), the artist describes the sorts of things that show up in his sketchbook, and one broad category he described was "Fantasy Football," which he described thusly: "I like coming up with what I would do with mainstream comics to make them into something I'd be into...have they ever put Aquaman inside an alien ocean that's inside a giant fish?"

Er, I don't know, but that would certainly be a pretty awesome Aquaman story, particularly if written and drawn by Brandon Graham.

Speaking of fantasy football, that's the sort of thing I really wish the New 52 reboot would have dabbled in, outside-the-box, let's-try-appealing-to-new-readers stuff like Brandon Graham writing and drawing a new volume of Aquaman where he's inside an alien ocean that's inside a giant fish, although obviously "Just Getting Geoff Johns To Write Aquaman For a While" worked well enough for them financially (Personally, I think Johns went too far into trying to make the character "cool," making him too bad-ass, too powerful and too defensive, but I never thought there was anything particularly broken with Aquaman in the first place; I'm definitely of the There's Now Such Thing As a Bad Character, Except For Geo-Force. And Red Tornado. And, like, 35% of the X-Men school of thought). (As it turned out, of course, DC wasn't terribly adventurous in picking creative teams or new directions for their rebooted line, and it turned out to be more of a numbering scheme and fashion move than anything else; even Marvel's fairly modest ideas like, say, Doing a funny crime book about Spider-Man's lamer super-villains or Having Mike Allred draw us a comic or Letting the Phonogram team have an Avengers title for a year seem radical in comparison to most of the initial The New 52 books. Oh well; maybe DC will throw Scrooge McDuck bags of money at Graham for Aquaman: Earth One.)

Anyway, at the top of this post is one of Graham's final fantasy warm-up sketches, a Gen 13 line-up consisting of original members Roxy and Fairchild, plus Static and Brainiac 5.

Gen 13, if you're not aware, was a superhero comic created in the early '90s by writers Jim Lee and Brandon Choi and drawn by J. Scott Campbell, set in Lee's original WildStorm Universe, which was first published at Image Comics before the imprint was sold to DC Comics. Like a rather astounding amount of the Image founders' creations, it borrowed quite liberally from Big Two super-comics, using barely-veiled analogues of Storm of the X-Men and The Human Torch of the Fantastic Four in its cast. It was about a team of five very '90s teenagers—one was even code-named Grunge—with superpowers, learning to use their powers, X-Men style.  It was mostly pretty terrible, but featured exciting art that lots of comics readers liked at that time, and the three females on the team had a habit of having their clothes fall apart, particularly Fairchild.

Adam Warren wrote and drew it for a while—first as a series of miniseries, then as an ongoing—and it was awesome then. Later DC rebooted it repatedly, as with their entire WildStorm Universe line,  and it seemed to get worse and less popular each time they did so. Finally the WildStorm imprint was shuttered, and the WildStorm Universe and many of its characters were folded into the new DC Universe created in the 2011 New 52 reboot, along with the old DCU and the publisher's "Vertigo Universe" characters.

DC hasn't tried a New 52 Gen 13 series yet (and seem to be shying away from using any WildStorm characters at all in the New 52-iverse), but they did put Fairchild in this book...

...which lasted about as long as one might expect in 2013.

Static got his own short-lived title—Static Shock—which was one of the first books to generate the sort of he said/he said post-mortem bickering of the creative teams that has characterized much of the New 52, and I imagine Brainiac was in one of the two Legion titles DC launched out of the reboot, both of which I think are cancelled now, but I don't care, because it's the Legion (You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe for the New 52 Legion, they hired a writer who has been writing Legion comics off-and-on for about as long as I have been alive).

Anyway, look at that sketch, then close your eyes and  imagine: DC Proudly Presents Gen 13 by Brandon Graham!

Walrus is a really fun book. I plan to discuss it at greater length, and not get sidetracked into fantasy publishing, in a near-future post.

Either Charles Soule is mistaken about the nature of J'onn J'onnz's Martian vision or I am.

Martian Manhunter THROOMs General Zod, and then gets THWAMmed in return, in this page from Superman/Wonder Woman #3 drawn by Tony S. Daniel and Matt Banning

It has always been my understanding that J'onn J'onnz's "Martian vision" eye-beams were rather different than Superman's heat vision.

The latter is just what it sounds like—blasts of intense heat that blast out of Superman's super-eyeballs in a concentrated ray, usually drawn as a visible red eye-beam (Comics being a visual medium and all). But it was my understanding that the former was some form of laser beam or concussive blast, rather than simply heat-vision under a more local name (Examples of the pair of them shooting their eye-beams in the same panel are relatively rare, but I do recall it happening at least once during the Morrison/Porter/Dell JLA run, and in that case J'onn's martian vision beams were colored darker than Superman's heat-vision, more purple than red.

In Superman/Wonder Woman #3, however, it seems like J'onn's martian vision is basically heat-vision, of a sort.

Seeking to capture a mysterious and powerful visitor from a different dimension (General Zod, actually), the Justice League of America's Steve Trevor has Vibe use his, um, vibrational powers to kick up a cloud of sand around Zod, and then says the following to J'onn:

J'onn complies, his martian vision here transforming the sand into glass, as extremely intense heat would (No, I don't know why they thought glass would be the best way to contain him; prisons are rarely built of the same material as green houses for a reason).

Note that not only is the martian vision here clearly a heat beam, setting the cloud of sand on fire as it fuses it to glass, but Trevor indicates (and J'onn seems to agree with him) that the Martian aversion to fire is so powerful that it includes even a fear of their own vision powers, which is a little, well, nuts, isn't it?

Just how vulnerable J'onn is to fire, and the whys and wherefores of it, have changed over the years, of course. Pre-reboot, it was more of a psychological fear than a physical weakness, more debilitating phobia (like Storm's claustrophobia) than Achilles' heel (like Superman's kryptonite), although during his JLA run Joe Kelly played with it in a way to suggest that it's a psychological block meant to keep a monster of the Martian collective unconsciousness at bay.

After the New 52-boot, I don't know J'onn's status in regards to fire (His history is a bit confused, to say the least, at this point, most of it having occurred off-panel, in the undocumented five missing years), but if he's afraid of or somehow vulnerable to his own eye-beams now, well, that's a pretty big change.

To answer the question suggested in the title of this post, however, I would assume that Soule is right and that I'm wrong, given the fact that he's a professional writer hired by DC Comics and is writing comics edited by editors at DC Comics, while I'm a guy who reads DC comics and then complains about their shortcomings (if any) on the Internet.

And perhaps the New 52 continuity reboot changed the very nature of J'onn's Martian Vision...?

Except that would be really weird if they actually sat down to redesign and reimagine J'onn J'onnz and were like, "Okay, let's streamline this character to make him more accessible to more readers. We changed the shape of his head, added a loin cloth over his pants, put him on StormWatch instead of the Justice League...what else? Oh! Let's alter the nature of his eye-beams, so now they are even more like Superman's, and also he doesn't like using them, because he doesn't like heat, because heat comes from fire."

EDILW is closed for Christmas.

We'll return Thursday. -Ish. I hope each and every one of you has a safe and happy next few days, however you choose to spend them. Rest assured you'll be in my thoughts, but mostly as a, "Oh no it's almost midnight and I didn't write anything for the blog yet! I better-- Oh, that's right, I gave myself the day off."

Review: Avengers Arena Vols. 1-2

You can count me as among the many who found the premise of this series more repulsive than attracting. Arcade, the world's least cost-efficient superhero hitman, builds a new island version of Murder World in which he deposits young, teenage superheroes (taken primarily, I assumed, from the cast of Avengers Academy, as this book was launched as Avengers Academy was cancelled) and then forces them to fight one another to the death until only one of them remains a live, ala Battle Royale.

Watching teen heroes kill each other didn't really strike me as all that entertaining (I certainly didn't enjoy DC's Terror Titans any), especially given the already rather hight mortality rate among teenaged super-characters, the idea seemed rather creatively bankrupt (which the covers at least acknowledged, visually homaging Battle Royale on the first issue, and the going on to do so towards Lord of the Flies and Hunger Games), and given the make-up of the cast, it seemed rather likely a lot of these characters were going to end up dead by the end of the series, as the only ones to actually star in their own titles at any point—just as an indication of how relatively popular or unpopular the cast of this book is—were X-23, Darkhawk and Juston Seyfert, who starred in a 12-issue Sentinel ongoing written by Sean McKeever and drawn by the Udon studio. So if popularity is the main determining factor of whether a superhero will live or die (Batman? Never longer than temporarily. Robin II, IV or V...?), well, let's just say it's not too hard to imagine a Marvel Universe in which X-23 is the only character who survives this title (Which was actually another rather galling thing about it; should writer Dennis Hopeless be allowed to kill off characters like the McKeever-created Seyfert, or the Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona-created Nico and Chase?)

Well, I finally got around to reading the first two trades of this and, despite all of my reservations, I have to admit that it really isn't that bad of a book at all.

It opens with Arcade, now wearing his hair long and dressing a bit more dapper than clownish, somehow abducting 16 teenaged superheroes. It takes a while to introduce them all within the narrative, but there's Juston, X-23, Reptil, Mettle and Hazmat of Avengers Academy and then Apex, Anachronism, Cullen Bloodstone (a relative of Elsa's), Kid Britton and Nara (a blue Atlantean) from the Braddock Academy (I had never heard of any of these British characters before reading this, so, for all I know, they may be original creations of Hopelesses and artist Kev Walker). The rest of the cast includes Cammi from some of  the Annihilation books, Runaways Chase and Nico, the aforementioned Darkhawk, a little girl Deathlok eventually named Death Locket and a Red Raven legacy character who, given how long she lasts, I assume was an original to the series.

Arcade appears before them long enough to explain the rules—kill each other until only one of you is left—and demonstrate his own omnipotence upon the island, before retreating into the background, allowing the circumstances of the island to gradually cause the young heroes to turn on one another and kill each other, if the traps he's seeded the place with and the several inducements towards conflict he's created (limited food supplies, for example) doesn't do it first.

He says he got the idea from some "children's books," and in a later issue devoted to how and why Arcade did this, we learn that it was a book he read in his youth, so I'm assuming its Lord of the Flies, but Hopeless' script never identifies it.

The group splinters into camps almost immediately, with the two school groups sticking mostly together in two large groups, Nico and Chase going off on their own, and several loner characters going solo until forced into uneasy alliances. As with Lost, another bit of island survivalist pop fiction, Hopeless spends a great deal of time flashing-back to the characters' lives before they arrived on the island, which is pretty helpful considering how little we know of a lot of these new-ish characters (Death Locket, the kids from Braddock Academy) or characters that might have existed previously, but are awfully different now then when we last saw them (Cammi).

If you'd call what Hopeless is doing here stealing or simply "being inspired by"—and me, were I in his position, would feel way too uncomfortable about the thinless of the line between them to even pitch a Battle Royale-with-Marvel-characters comic—at least he's stealing or borrowing or homaging a good, pressure-cooker premise. Stripped of adult supervision, their superhero mentors and all hope of rescue, the characters begin to change almost immediately, with some becoming better people as they are forced to trust others, and others becoming, well, villains as they do whatever they have to do to survive, and then there is a lot of gray area—particularly among the Brits—the characters are forced to move through from issue to issue.

Horrible things do indeed happen to teenagers, and too horrible things happen to characters that it seems somewhat gauche for Hopeless to be messing with in the first place—

—but then dead very rarely means dead in superhero comics, and at least one of the six characters we see seemingly die in these collections comes back to life almost immediately, while two others that a character thinks they're killing in battle are revealed to be safe and sound a turn of the page later. Hopeless seems to have therefore struck a pretty good balance between creating and destroying, making a reader worry that any character could die at any time, while not always explicitly carrying through on that threat, even when limbs are severed or characters go missing for a while or their video game-like life meters drain completely.

Most of the art is by Kev Walker, whose work I like quite a bit, and who, after a rather rocky opening in which he and Hopeless seem to assume all readers will know who at least all of the members of Avengers Academy are, does a fine job of distinguishing the many characters and making them look quite distinct from one another. He also sells the weird geography of this Murder World, in which deserts and frozen tundras and jungles and tropical are all within a walking distance of one another, quite well.

He can't draw the whole series though, and there are occasional fill-in issues. In the first volume, Kill or Die, Alessandro Vitti draws one issue, while in the second volume, Game On, Walker is only one of four artists, a quartet including Vitti, Jason Gorder and Riccardo Burchelli (it's unclear who does what; I can't tell if Gorder and Burchielli are inking Walker, or penciling and inking their own work or...what).

At any rate, it obviously gets less an less consistent as it goes on, but no one drawing the book is bad at drawing, and there aren't really any visual flow destroying changes in style.

I rolled my eyes at this book's announcement and initial promotion, and picked up the trades expecting to not like it at all, but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit and eager to find out what happens in the third and final volume. So I'd say Hopeless and company did a pretty fine job here (As for Marvel, I'm not sure what the point of making this an "ongoing" series if it was only to run 18 issues was, other than some sort of marketing ploy).

Comic shop comics: December 18

Batman '66 #6 (DC Comics) High five to writer Tom Peyer for the story title "Conqueror Bookworm." This issue contains two stories by two entirely different creative teams, both featuring characters from the TV show I am completely unfamiliar with, having either never seen episodes featuring them, or having never formed memories of them in my young, still-developing brain: Bookworm, obviously and, um, Olga, Queen of the Cossacks.

Peyer's story is drawn by Ty Templeton, a favorite artist of mine whose work I see way too infrequently on the printed page these days. His Bruce Wayne, who actually appears in this story about as much as Batman, is so closely modeled after a 1966 Adam West that it's a little unnerving.

Regular writer Jeff Parker is joined by Ted Naifeh (!!!) for the second story, in which Olga lures Batman to her in an attempt to make him hers and, when that fails, she attempts to have him devoured by bears (I've said it before and I'll say it again: Bears are the new gorillas). I love Naifeh's art, just as I love Templeton's, and the former is an incredible Batman artist who would make a great monthly one. It's obviously great fun to see him doing his version of such idiosyncratic, specific versions of these characters, and also to see him drawing so many images of bears.

The second story also features a one-page cutaway to the venerable Gotham Library to check in with Barbara Gordon, apparently setting the stage for a future storyline, that features the bespectacled Ms. Gordon in a mini-dress, standing on one of those awesome ladders on wheels to reach library books that are super-high on the shelf, while a co-worker lugs around a huge grimoire. Basically, it's everything I fantasized the library business would be like before I got into it (It's not).

Classic Popeye #17 (IDW) As noted the other day, this issue is only 32 pages, down from the usual 48. That's still a pretty great value by today's standards—most IDW books are only around 22-pages for the same price—but it's not of the awesome, I'd-be-crazy-not-to-buy-this value of the previous issues.

I'll give it another month or two, but I'm not sure Classic Popeye is long for my pull-list...

This issue features two stories. The first is a long, meandering one in which Popeye is summoned to Spinachovia via an extremely circuitous method, and the second is a Ham Gravy story with a pretty unfortunate portrayal of a Native American character, "Percy Pink Skin" ("Ugh" indeed!). And Wimpy only appears on the back-page gag strip!

I was almost tempted to read the prose story this month, given the strange illustration accompanying it, featuring an anthropomorphic but hunting a tiger. Why is the tiger so small?!, I thought (If it is a tiny tiger, that would mean two of the seven books I bought this week featured tiny tigers in them). But now that I look closely enough at it to scan it, I see the tree seems to be in proportion to the tiger, so maybe the bug person is giant?

I don't know. Or care. I'm still not reading it to find out.

Daredevil #34 (Marvel Entertainment) Hey, nothing remotely like that cover happens in this book...!

So the Daredevil vs. The Serpent Society for the fate of the New York City justice system seems to be reaching an early climax, much more quickly than I would have expected (especially given how much longer the storyline with the super-disc of information on the Marvel Universe criminal empires seemed to last), and I wonder if I just misjudged how epic a storyline Mark Waid was setting up a few issues back, of if the decision to reboot the title somehow necessitated the change in direction coming a bit earlier than originally planned.

At any rate, Daredevil consults with Doctor Strange and enlists the help of a couple of civilian allies to draw out to capture The Jester and draw out the Society, a supporting character almost dies, and, in the cliffhanger last panel, it seems like another supporting character might be in a position to die soon (That would certainly explain a sudden move from New York to San Francisco!).

This issue is drawn by colorist Javier Rodriguez (with inks by Alvaro Lopez) and, once again, the storytelling style employed by Samnee and the artists he followed are so closely followed that there's nothing the least bit jarring about the transition of artists. This is really how these books should all work...at least within the same story arcs.

I really like Rodriguez's Strange.

FF #15 (Marvel) So what's become my favorite Marvel book is reaching its climax (I think this is the penultimate issue), as The Fauxtastic Four, the Future Foundation and their allies launch an all-out assault on Dr. Doom, hoping to stop him before he can be cajoled into mingling his power and essence into Doom The Annihilating Conqueror.

A battle plan using HeroClix and a rhyming mnemonic device is laid out, robots fights robots, Sun Tzu and Caesar argue tactics, The Inhumans wreck embassies, The Fantastic Four and Lockjaw (Lockjaw!!!) appear and then its Victor Von Doom versus Scott Lang.

I can't even really put into words how much fun this comic is, in large part thanks to Mike Allred's artwork,which captures little moments like a tiny little tiger lounging atop a video game control pad with the same detail and vitality as the remote-controlled Avengers robots fighting Doom's robot guards.

This is all around great comics-making, and I might actually cry when the series is finally over.

Harley Quinn #1 (DC) Villains are easy to write, but notoriously difficult to fashion series around, as even in today's more flexible moral superhero universes, you can't have the bad guys win and escape justice every month. I think Harley Quinn's a particularly difficult villain to get right, given her connection to The Joker, Exhibit A in Evil in the DC Comics Universe, and that in every media or "continuitiverse" I've seen her in, she works best when playing off of another character; she's a sidekick, a partner and a foil, not a star.

I think New 52 Harley Quinn is in a particularly hard place to fashion a series around, given how they've moved her from clueless and crazy to savage and evil in the pages of Suicide Squad.

So I do sympathize with writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner, but man, this book just didn't work for me at all—nothing landed. I liked Chad Hardin's art an awful lot though, and as I was nearing the end of the book, I found myself wondering why DC hadn't paired Hardin with Injustice writer Tom Taylor, given how well he writes the scantily-clad, evil Harley in that comic (She's actually funny there, although, again, she generally has a character to play against; in that case, it's Green Arrow).

They seem to be attempting to turn her into the DC Universe's Deadpool, which may be a valid take, and, given the character's fans and the fact that it can always use future Batman line crossovers (like "Night of the Owls," "Death of the Family," "Zero Year," etc) as an additional sales crutch, chances are the book will work just fine in the current market, perhaps even outliving the previous, pre-New 52 volume of Harley Quinn.

That doesn't make it a good comic, though.

Saga #17 (Image Comics) The Will utters what may very well be his last words. Marko's mom Klara gets shot with a pretty gigantic gun. Prince Robot IV gets shot, repeatedly. D. Oswald Heist is struck in the face by The Will's lance weapon thingee. I'm pretty sure we've witnessed at least one of them die in this issue.

As a reader, that's one of the scary aspects of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' narrative, and one of the signs of just how strongly conceived, written and designed the characters are and how effective the drama is. Not only could any of them die at any time, but as a reader, you worry about just that, and feel bad about it when someone does.

Also in this issue, we meet a new Freelancer, one with an awesome pet/parnter named Sweet Boy who isn't quite as cool as Lying Cat (at least, not from what we see of him so far), but seems to be in the same ballpark. There's an orgy scene (albeit one that happens in a character's head). And Heist teaches Prince Robot IV what the opposite of war is (Hint: It's not peace).

Young Avengers #14 (Marvel) This is the first half of an "after party" for the series, set on New Year's Eve, it features our heroes from the series celebrating their victory over the interdimensional invasion force/New Year's Eve with all the young heroes that cameo-ed in the last few issues. Regular writer Kieron Gillen and regular artist Jamie McKelvie are joined by art teams Emma Vicelli and Lee Loughridge, Christian Ward and Annie Wu and Jordie Bellaire, each drawing various character-centric segments.

Some of the segments of art are better than the other segments of art, and the story is mainly comprised of resolving relationships: Kate and Noh-Varr breaking up, Miss America revealing to the readers what the hell she's even doing here, Billy and Teddy reaffirming their love, etc.

I'm quite eager to see what Marvel does next with this title and these characters. This started incredibly strong, but as a 15-issue series, it seems in retrospect to be a light, meaningless trifle. It's the length of a graphic novel, not an ongoing series, and thus it seems like it should have been about something or made a statement of some kind to justify its existence, since "existing once a month indefinitely" so obviously wasn't it's raison d'etre after all.

Meanwhile...

I have reviews of two new DC #1's at two different places this week, if you'd like to go read them. First, I wrote a short review of the first issue of the new volume of Teen Titans Go! for Good Comics For Kids, and then I wrote a long review of the first issue of the new volume of Harley Quinn #1 for Robot 6.

Sorry gang; I don't have time to write an intallment of "Comic shop comics" tonight.

Wait, why would you put a cup of coffee inside a paper bag?! That is insane. That is the most insane thing in Harley Quinn #1, a comic book starring a criminally-insane madwoman. (The above two panels, by the way, are drawn by Chad Hardin, and aren't really the best example of his work, which is actually quite strong, I thought).

Anyway, just checking in with a post to inform you that there will be no post tonight. I went to the shop and brought back a pretty good haul of new books (for me, these days, anyway), but between doing some writing that I will actually get paid for and some holiday-related activities—gift-wrapping, card-making—I'm afraid I won't have time to give them full reviews in a post here tonight, even the half-assed, off-the-top-of-my-head, gut-reaction reviews that generally make up this feature. Thursdays are usually bad for me, too. Maybe I can get to those by Friday night...?

In the mean time, here, let me offer you a preview!

Batman '66 #6: Nothing the least bit Satanic, despite the 666 on the cover; I'm disappointed, Jeff Parker. On the plus side, there's art from two EDILW favorites, Ty Templeton and Ted Naifeh, plus the usual awesome Allred cover.

Daredevil #34: Excellent as always, even with a different excellent artist drawing it then the regular excellent artist who draws it.

FF #15: Probably the best, most fun book I read this week, a silver cloud bearing a gray lining—it's the second-to-last issue.

Harley Quinn #1: Nice cover art, nice interior art and as for the script, well...I'll tell you about it at some length tomorrow, at a place that is not here. (But did I mention the part where a guy puts a cup of coffee inside a paper bag? With other stuff in the bag too?)

Classic Popeye #17: Sixteen fewer pages than the previous issue, still $3.99! Don't make me drop you, Classic Popeye! (I should note that its still 32 pages of comics for $3.99, and thus 12-pages more than that same amount gets you from most Marvel comics and a few DC comics).

Saga #17: This was good, although while I love that particular character, I don't love him that way, and really didn't want to see him as he's portrayed on the cover. (Hey, why isn't the term "The Opposite of War" used in more pornographic website names? Not that I've ever been to a pornographic website. Or even know what pornography is. What is this strange word I'm typing over and over? Am I possessed? Is this some form of automatic writing?)

Young Avengers #14: A really good comic I think I'm actually going to be really glad to see go, given how little it does or has done in over a year.

That's all I got. Barring my waking up at 7 a.m. full of vim and vigor, I probably won't have actual reviews of greater length of any of the above tomorrow, although I will post my regular Thursday night links to things I wrote elsewhere that you can read. And, in the mean time, don't forget you can follow me on Twitter, although I don't tweet all that often or all that well, and I have a new-ish Tumblr thingee, focused on not-comics but also a lot of comics. 

Has Neil Gaiman softened his position on barbecuing babies...?

After my initial confusion regarding the two big comics/film news items of the last two days, I think I've got it straight now: Warner Bros. is moving forward with plans to adapt Neil Gaiman and company's Sandman series into a film, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David S. Goyer (and Gaiman, according to Heidi MacDonald's post) are involved.

As soon as I read that, I was reminded of a quote of Gaiman's regarding being involved in a Sandman movie, in which he said something along the lines of "No one should be asked to barbecue their own baby." (It was a strong metaphor, and stayed with me for I guess almost 20 years now; that Gaiman guy's a pretty good writer, huh?).

Anyway, I Googled "Neil Gaiman" "barbecue" and "baby," looking for the quote, and found a David Roel's website, and a link to this Q-and-A, which apparently dates it to a 1994 (1994!!) interview.

I'm not sure why Roel seems to change his initials to "HH" during the course of the Q-and-A, and I have no idea where this appeared first, although I assume it was in print somewhere, as I wouldn't have been online until closer to the turn-of-the-millennium, although I suppose I could have seen it reprinted somewhere. Anyway, barbecuing babies:

HH: Who do you see playing some of the characters in the Sandman movie?

NG: Tori would make a great Delirium. I like Sean Connery as Destiny. (Laughter and bad Sean Connery impressions.) Bear in mind you're dealing with Hollywood, you're dealing with this huge, strange entity that really doesn't quite know what it's doing... There are two screenwriters who seem to have the right idea, there's an executive producer who doesn't particularly... I, for my part, have elected to stay out of it. If you get involved, you can get hurt. Quite seriously, this is my baby; it's something I've been living with for seven years. Nobody should be asked to barbecue their own baby, nobody should be asked to cut off its little fingers and marinate them. And nobody should be asked to be at the other end of the phone when some guy from Hollywood rings up and says, (really bad Californian accent) "Hey Neil, y'sitting down, 'cuz hey, I got news for you guy, okay, y'ready, we got Arnie. We got Arnie. Arnie is Dream! It's casting against type, but Michael Keaton did Batman!" And I don't want to be there for that call.

I would actually kind of love to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in a big, black wig and cloak, trying to pronounce Gaiman's dialogue.

My second favorite out-of-context panel from Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Christmas on Bear Mountain:

My favorite out-of-context panel from Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Christmas on Bear Mountain collection:

Don't get me wrong; I like it in context as well, where it appears in color, but during my flip-through my eyes landed on that panel in the back of the book, where comics scholars write brief synopses of the stories, and that panel is just as funny when you have no idea what's going on. Other than the fact that Donald Duck has created a vengeance weapon, of course.

(Confidential to Santa Claus: I've been very good this year. Please bring me a vengeance weapon for Christmas.)

Marvel's March previews reviewed

Fun (?) fact: In March, Marvel will have only eight titles in their main, Marvel Universe-set line left that they're selling at the $2.99 price point. They are Deadpool (which double-ships in March), Avengers Undercover (Dennis Hopeless' I'm-not-really-sure-how follow-up to his Young Avengers/Battle Royale mash-up), Ms. Marvel, Loki: Agent of Asgard, She-Hulk, Avengers A.I., Thunderbolts and Hawkeye (The two Marvel kids books set outside the Marvel Universe, but entitled Marvel Universe Avengers Assemble and Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man regardless, will also go for $2.99).

The rest will all be selling at the $3.99 price point, regardless of how obscure and unlikely to support such an expensive book the characters, how relatively unpopular the creators or that Marvel failed to sell books featuring the same characters at the cheaper price point recently. They've even raised the price of some ongoing books, including my favorite non-Hawkeye book, which, before these solicitations were released, was in danger of cancellation. Now? It  seems destined for it.

If you'd liket o see Marvel's full socicits, click here. If you've no interest in hearing me complaing about how expensive comics are over and over, click away now while you still can.

Oh, and do read Carla Hoffman's monthly look at Marvel's solicits over at Robot 6—in addition to being smarter and more knowledgeable on retailing and Marvel Comics in general, I think like the "zombie #1" term she coins, I think she distills the problem of trying to read Marvel in trade I myself experience pretty much constantly (confusion and frustration have kept me from following up on sooo many of the books I waited for the trade on) and she beat me to the punch on the furry joke regarding the new Captain Marvel #1's "animal variant" cover, which, unlike most of the cutesy, cartoony ones looks created for a specific fetishist's kink.


A+X #18
BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS & GERRY DUGGAN (W)
KEVIN NOWLAN & DAVID YARDIN (A)
Cover by KEVIN NOWLAN
A+X GOES OUT IN STYLE!
• Superstar BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS and comics legend KEVIN NOWLAN tell a scintillating tale of KITTY PRYDE + VISION!
• Gerry Duggan (DEADPOOL) and David Yardin (X-FACTOR) finish their rip-roaring CAPTAIN AMERICA+CYCLOPS story!
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99

Kitty Pryde? Vision? Scintillating? Gross.

I assume "goes out in style" is another way of saying "FINAL ISSUE"... it's actually surprising it's lasted this long, given the conceit of random, continuity-lite mini team-ups featuring one Avenger and one X-Person. There have been some neat characters combinations and neat creators involved, but, for some reason, I haven't been able to work up any interest in this book at all. And I mean in the trades. Which I can get at the library. And read for free.

I really like how stupid looking Mike Deodato's cover for Avengers #27 is.

DAREDEVIL #1
MARK WAID (W) • CHRIS SAMNEE (A/C)
...
ANIMAL VARIANT BY CHRIS SAMNEE
...
BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT!
Join Marvel’s fearless hero as he begins his most awe-inspiring adventure yet in the sunny city of San Francisco! Gifted with an imperceptible radar sense and a passion for justice, blind lawyer Matt Murdock—a.k.a. DAREDEVIL—protects the Golden City’s streets from all manner of evil. But big changes are in store for Matt Murdock as old haunts and familiar faces rise to give the devil his due. Hold on tight, because here comes Daredevil…the Man Without Fear!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Please note that the new direction apparently prompting the reboot is not as drastic as Daredevil being turned into a mouse; that's just Samnee's "Animal Variant" cover for the book. The actual new direction is that Daredevil is moving back to San Francisco. And Marvel is using the occasion to present a new #1 issue, despite the fact that this is the same creative team as the last issue, and likely to continue in the same general vein. Oh, and that they raised the price $1.

Not sure which of those changes are "Because [We] Demanded It!" I haven't heard a whole lot of people saying, "I wish Daredevil would move," or "I wish  Marvel would arbitrarily relaunch this book with a new #1" or "I wish Marvel would charge me more money for this comic I enjoy reading."

Given how remarkably consistent sales on the book have been over such a long period of time, it will be interesting to see if and how that consistency is challenged or changed by the new #1, which might induce new readers to try it, or the price increase, which will likely induce old readers to treat this jumping-on point as a jumping-off point (Like me, for example. I'll likely check out this part of the Waid run in trade someday, provided I can figure out the trade numbering...will that start over with a new volume 1, so there are two Daredevil By Mark Waid Vol. 1s, or will it continue the volume numbering of the extant trades, or what...?

ALL-NEW GHOST RIDER #1
FELIPE SMITH (W) • TRADD MOORE (A/C)
...
“ENGINES OF VENGEANCE” PART 1
A street race leads a young man on the FAST and FURIOUS road of destiny. Amid an East Los Angeles neighborhood running wild with gang violence and drug trafficking, a war brews in the criminal underworld! With four on the floor, Marvel’s newest GHOST RIDER puts vengeance in overdrive!!!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

I can see a Marvel executive sitting in a theater, watching The Fast and the Furious 6 and thinking, This  is what we should do with Ghost Rider. Wait, no I can't. I can see a Marvel executive sitting on the toilet in Marvel's only bathroom, reading a brief article in the newspaper about FF6's opening week box office and thinking, This is what we should do with Ghost Rider.

Now, putting Ghost Rider in a car seems to violate the central core of the character's identity—a guy with a flaming skull on a motorcycle—but the Ghost Rider's ability to Ghost Ride other vehicles has been well established in some of the crazier comics and the crazier Nicolas Cage movies (plus, Drive Angry, in which Cage drove a car on a mission of vengeance, was better than either of the Ghost Rider movies, where he rode motorcycles on missions of vengeance).

I just hope it's a convertible, as Ghosty's head-fire could be hell on the interior.

At any rate, it's a pretty clear way of noting that this All-New Ghost Rider is indeed All-New (although he's more of a Ghost Driver than a Ghost Rider now, right?), and Tradd Moore's a great artist, so I'm actually surprised to find myself really rather looking forward to reading a—What?! $3.99? For a Ghost Rider comic?

Fuck that.

It's weird though. Marvel keeps trying to sell new comics starring the same characters that had trouble selling comics very recently, and while often effort is put into trying new things—creators, new directions—inevitably one of their changes seems to be, "Hey, we couldn't sell these Ghost Rider comics all that well last time. What should you try next? Oh, I know, let's charge a lot more money for them! Maybe that will help us sell more of them!'

MOON KNIGHT #1
WARREN ELLIS (W)
DECLAN SHALVEY (A/C)
...
ANIMAL VARIANT BY KATIE COOK
...
Marc Spector is Moon Knight!...Or is he? It’s hard to tell these days, especially when New York’s wildest vigilante protects the street with two-fisted justice and three—that’s right, count ‘em—different personalities! But even with the mystical force of Khonshu fueling his crusade, how does the night’s greatest detective save a city that’s as twisted as he is? The road to victory is going to hurt. A lot. Marvel’s most mind-bending adventure begins NOW as Moon Knight sleuths his way to the rotten core of New York’s most bizarre mysteries!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

More than any other animal variant cover I've seen, this one makes me wonder about how the particular species of animal is chosen. Why is Moon Knight a hippo, exactly? It seems completely random, instead of making him, I don't know, a calf or a lunar moth or a wolf or an owl or a bat (although that last one might have been a bit too much on the nose, huh?)

Anyway, charging $4 for a Moon Knight series seems like daring the audience to cancel this bool within a year—the one written by Brian Michael Bendis, in which Moon Knight's multiple personalities included Wolverine, Spider-Man and Captain America didn't last long—but then, it's written by Ellis, so I imagine they need more scratch to pay Ellis then they would, like, someone else, and even if only lasts long enough to generate a trade or three, that's a trade or three more Ellis-written Moon Knight trades then they had before.

I'm glad to see Shalvey on this too. I like his art, and hopefully his sharing credits with Ellis will bring it to the attention of a whole lot of folks who might not be aware of it yet.

Me, I'll wait for the trade. Four dollars my grumble grumble grumble mumble grumble...

NEW AVENGERS #16.NOW
JONATHAN HICKMAN (W)
Rags Morales (A)
Cover by Mike Deodato
VARIANT COVER by Rags Morales
“THE NIGHT BEFORE THE WORLD ENDED”
No more bloodshed. To save their nations, the proud Black Panther and the arrogant Namor have sued for peace. As members of the Illuminati, the secret organization made up of the Marvel Universe’s most powerful heroes, they must work together to stop the extinction of the entire universe! But are their amends too little too late? There’s no turning back for the Illuminati after this issue – and they’ll pay the price for their sins.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Rags Morales? What are you doing over here? I really liked the first volume of Hickman's New Avengers, but gave up on the book heading into Infinity, as it seemed I'd also need to catch up on Hickman's adjectiveless Avengers before proceeding. I do hope to read the whole series someday, and Morales' involvement is only a further motivator.

Man, did that crazy Evil Duplicate version of Dr. Strange...

SILVER SURFER #1
DAN SLOTT (W)
MICHAEL ALLRED (A/C)
VARIANT COVER BY FRANCESCO FRANCAVILLA
ANIMAL VARIANT BY CHRIS SAMNEE
...
“NEW DAWN”
The universe is big. Bigger than you could ever imagine. And the SILVER SURFER, the lone sentinel of the skyways, is about to discover that the best way to see it... is with someone else.
Meet the Earth Girl who’s challenged the Surfer to go beyond the boundaries of the known Marvel U-- into the strange, the new, and the utterly fantastic!
Anywhere and Everywhere... Hang On! THE SILVER SURFER
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

I don't generally post the variant covers, especially when the regular one is by the great Mike Allred, but these are both cool. The Francavilla one is gorgeous, and I'm intrigued as to why Samnee made the Silver Surfer a sloth, of all animals. No offense, sloths, but you guys are, like, the least likely animals to be action heroes. Is Marvel gonna do something with this Marvel Animal Variant Universe? I wouldn't mind a comic book featuring all these characters...

Anyway, the variant's, like the book itself, look great! I can't wait to read—WHAT?! This is four dollars, too? A $4 Silver Surfer series? By Allred, the artist whose FF just sold so incredibly poorly, and Dan Slott? You guys can barely keep a Defenders book around for a 12 straight issues, and you expect a Silver Surfer solo series to last at $4 a pop!? Madness! Madness, I say!

THE SUPERIOR FOES OF SPIDER-MAN #11
NICK SPENCER (W)
STEVE LIEBER (A)
Cover by JOE QUINONES
• They don’t get NOW-er than the Superior Foes of Spider-Man!
• Is there a rat in the Sinister Six?* *=there’s still only five members.
• Spencer & Lieber continue the sleeper hit of the NOW-lenium!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Oh come on...! Relaunch books at a 33% high price point if you must, but don't suddenly raise the price of books that haven't been relaunched! Especially one of my two favorite Marvel books! And especially not one that's sales are dropping low enough to put it on cancellation watch!

Sigh...

Well, I think cancellation just got that much more inevitable. I'll see you in trade paperback form some day, Superior Foes #11...

Okay, I give up. Why is Robocop on the cover of Uncanny Avengers#18.NOW! [sic]...? And why is he a she...?

WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN #1 & 2
Jason Latour (W) • Mahmud Asrar (A/C)
...
WELCOME TO THE JEAN GREY SCHOOL OF HIGHER LEARNING! The ALL NEW MARVEL NOW smash hit series schools with Jason Latour (WINTER SOLDIER) and Mahmud Asrar (X-MEN) leading the charge with drama, action and homework(?)! World-famous X-Men Wolverine, Storm, and a star-studded faculty must educate the next generation all-powerful, but inexperienced mutants! But with their own lives steeped in deadly enemies and personal crises, how can the X-Men guide and educate—let alone defend—the school? At the Jean Grey School, you never know who will enroll…or who will lead the class! And what mysterious organization waits in the shadows to destroy Wolverine’s mutant sanctuary? These questions and more are answered in the All-New Marvel Now sure-to-be-smash, WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN #1!
32 PGS. (EACH)/Rated T+ …$3.99 (EACH)

Weird. When they announced this book's cancellation, I was certain it wasn't being rebooted, as its writer Jason Aaron had just launched a new X-Men title prominently featuringWolverine, Amazing X-Men. I guess they are relaunching, but with a different (and less likely to sell at even the dwindling levels Aaron's version did) creative team and...the exact same direction?

Huh.

Marvel, sometimes I just don't get you. Like, every time I read your solicitations. So every month. Marvel, I just don't get you every month.

DC's March previews reviewed

March will be a time of endings in DC's New 52 line, with their seven-issue, seven-month Forever Evil series finally reaching conclusion (unless it gets delayed; Finch is drawing it, so that's an ever-present possibility), and several titles that have been chugging along since the relaunch are finally be cancelled (Animal Man, Batman: The Dark Knight), as is a newer one (Talon) and a kids comic (Batman: Li'l Gotham).

March will have only 44 "New 52" ongoing series, which means the 2011 launched line is now neither new nor 52, although if you count the in-continuity miniseries, like all those Forever Evil books, and the random one-shot like Suicide Squad: Amanda Waller, the line will feature 49 books in March. Either way, I would expect some new launches announced for April (with a dark, gritty Plastic Man book, mostly likely by Ethan Van Sciver, seeming most likely to me at this point), or else the line will shrink more dramatically still, when all the Forever Evil books and the canceled titles disappear from the line.

For the complete list of what DC intends to publish in March, click here. For more of my yapping about it, don't go anywhere.

ANIMAL MAN #29
Written by JEFF LEMIRE
Art and cover by JEFF LEMIRE and TRAVEL FOREMAN
On sale MARCH 19 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+ • FINAL ISSUE
A special finale to Jeff Lemire’s run on the series by the creative team that launched Animal Man in The New 52! What is left of Buddy in the wake of “Evolve or Die”?

See, now look how nice that looks! That's why I've been saying should been drawing all the DCU books he's writing all along (Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, Justice League Dark, Justice League of America, Green Arrow...Man, I hate the photo-reference heavy). art on Green Arrow so much I can barely stand to look at it, and therefore have had a hell of a time trying to read isolated issues of it here and there).

Anyway, this is the final issue of the Lemire-written, different artists-drawn New 52 Animal Man book. Twenty-nine issues is actually a pretty respectable number; Grant Morriosn's run on the original volume of the title was just 26-issues, but then, it was popular enough to sustain the book for another five-years and 63 issues...and, if you look at it one way, to sustain Lemire's 20 issues as well, given how much Lemire's take seems derivative of Morrison's, although often in the wrong ways.

I didn't read much of it, but I didn't like what I did read, and am hardly unhappy to see it go, but one especially unfortunate aspect of these New 52 books being canceled is that when they don't work and go on to be canceled, it seems a damn shame that they were so radically rebooted in the first place. Hawkman, Hawk and Dove, Firestorm, Static...these books all changed their characters pretty dramatically, and then just fizzled away anyway, leaving us with changed characters that are just as unable to sustain monthlies as they would have been without the changes, onlyy now they don't even have the benefit of continuity as a selling point (I believe StormWatch is on its way out too, having done a great deal to un-make and re-make the once popular characters of The Authority).

Same goes for Animal Man. The reboot didn't "work" in terms of making him a popular enough character to sustain a monthly indefinitely (or longer than 29 months), and now we've got an Animal Man with a lamer costume, goofier powers (his body morphing into animal-like shapes when using some of their abilities), a more explicitly Swamp Thing-like place in the DCU and now completely divorced from better, more popular and more evergreen trades featuring the character (The Morrison stuff, 52). Lemire's New 52 Animal Man didn't wipe out the Morrison trades or Animal Man's sections of 52, of course, but, if sales figures over the last decade or so have shown us anything, it's that today's direct market readers like to be told which comics are important, which one's matter, and they then proceed to buy those.

The old Animal Man stuff is still there and is still good, but it doesn't matter, it's not important, it doesn't "count" like the New 52 stuff does, and, not only was it seemingly not as good, it's also not around anymore.

AQUAMAN #29
Written by JEFF PARKER
Art and cover by PAUL PELLETIER and SEAN PARSONS
...
On sale MARCH 26 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
...
It’s all-out action as Aquaman feels the wrath of Atlas as he makes his first appearance in The New 52! And the environmental havoc seen in the pages of SWAMP THING may put Arthur on a collision course with a certain Avatar of the Green!

Nooo! Jeff Parker! Keep Aquaman far clear of Swamp Thing! Don't you know that's what doomed Animal Man?! (Atlas looks cool, though).

Wait, I forget...who wrote The Books of Magic miniseries?

BATMAN AND AQUAMAN #29
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art and cover by PATRICK GLEASON and MICK GRAY
...
On sale MARCH 19 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
Batman is ready to settle the score with Ra’s al Ghul, who stole Robin’s body out of the grave! As the Dark Knight travels to the island where Damian was born, he’s set on a collision course with Aquaman!

Well, I can honestly say I didn't see that one coming, as a follow-up to Batman and Two-Face, the title that used to be Batman and Robin (Volume 2) but, since Robin's death, has been changing its title regularly, depending on the Bat-Family guest-star (less frequently of late, as the Two-Face team-up was a multi-part arc).

At this point, they really should just change this to Batman: The Brave and The Bold, right? Or maybe Batman Team-Up...?

If they were going to cancel any Bat-book, by the way, I would have assumed it would be this, as it has officially outlived its original mandate (The Grant Morrison-written book about the then-new Dynamic Duo of Batman II Dick Grayson and Robin V Damian Wayne), and its secondary mandate (Batman Bruce Wayne trying to raise his son Damian while fighting crime alongside him), and now just seems to be casting aimlessly about.

Additionally, the title "Batman and Robin" seems to be a much less flexible title than "Batman: The Dark Knight, as the former really needs to be about Batman and Robin, and there isn't currently a Robin aside from Tim "Red Robin" Drake, whereas a book called "Batman: The Dark Knight" really just needs to have Batman in it.

Wow.

BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT #29

Written by GREGG HURWITZ

Art and cover by ETHAN VAN SCIVER

On sale MARCH 26 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T • FINAL ISSUE

The savagery of Man-Bat reaches a horrifying peak this final issue of the series!

The title originally launched (pre-New 52) as a title devoted to showcasing artist David Finch's writing in addition to his art, it continually suffered from blown deadlines and missed shipping dates until Finch took on first a co-writer, then he moved to just drawing, and then sometimes not even drawing, and, about two story arcs into The New 52, second volume of the title, he left it altogether. This, then, is another Batman book that long, long, long ago outlived its premise.

From what I've seen since Finch's departure (he left to become the new, regular artist on Justice League of America, then left that title after three issues to draw Forever Evil), it seems like Dark Knight has become something of a villain showcase, with Batman fighting a different classic Bat-foe in eamanch story-arc. With so many other Batman titles using the same limited pool of Batman villains, though, that's probably not the best idea for a Batman title, not when there are like three other Batman books and spin-off featuring so many sidekicks and associates.


DC UNIVERSE VS. THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE TP
Written by KEITH GIFFEN, TONY BEDARD and PAUL KUPPERBERG
Art by DEXTER SOY, CURT SWAN and MIKE DeCARLO
Cover by ED BENES
On sale APRIL 23 • 160 pg, FC, $14.99 US
When He-Man and friends go in search of Skeletor on Earth, they find themselves at odds with the heroes of the DC Universe! Can these heroes stop Skeletor and his mysterious new master? Collects the six-issue miniseries plus DC COMICS PRESENTS #47.

I see they're including the original Superman/He-Man team-up from an early '80s issue of the old Superman team-up title along with the current, not-very-good miniseries about the Masters of the Universe characters visiting the DC Universe. So at least one halfway decent comic in there—hey-oh!

The art credits are way off, as they listed only Soy for art on the title series (Swan and DeCarlo did the DC Comics Presents issue) I see. They credit only Dexter Soy, although issue #3, the last issue to ship, also featured work from what looked like emergency fill-in, we-need-to-make-deadline art from Derlis Santacruz and Andres Ponce. Sofar! Who knows how many artist will be called in before the end of the series...?

DETECTIVE COMICS #29
Written by JOHN LAYMAN
Art by AARON LOPRESTI and ART THIBERT
Cover by GUILLEM MARCH
...
On sale MARCH 5 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Combo pack edition: $4.99 US
...
The stunning conclusion of “Gothtopia”! Batman discovers the terrifying secret behind this brave new world.

That's a nice cover and all, but is the villainous mastermind behind the whole "Gothtopia" storyline really just The Scarecrow, as this cover seems to imply?

Don't get me wrong, he's my favorite Batman villain, but good God I think we've seen w-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-y too much of him lately, between the first two story arcs of Dark Knight and his role in Forever Evil and its lead-ins (JLoA) and spin-offs (Arkham War, some of the Villains Month one-shots, etc) and so on.

It really seems like there are just too many books featuring Batman, and not nearly enough Bat-villains to go around. I mean, it's cool that Scott Snyder came up with the Court of Owls, and Layman created an Emperor Penguin to rival the traditional Penguin, but someone really needs to start cranking out new villains like Grant Morrison or Alan Grant did. Is DC not offering sweet deals on characters created their freelancers like they did with Bane a few decades back? Gotham needs villains!

FOREVER EVIL: ARKHAM WAR #6
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art by SCOT EATON and JAIME MENDOZA
Cover by JASON FABOK
...
On sale MARCH 5 • 32 pg, FC, 6 of 6, $2.99 US • RATED T
...
The final battle for Gotham City starts now! The Scarecrow has unleashed a mutated army of Arkham’s worst killers, and only Bane can stop them! It all leads into FOREVER EVIL #7!

Oh God, Bane's still going to be dressing like short-sleeved Batman for three more issues?!

Please note that while you may look at Jason Fabok's cover and think, "What? He doesn't look so bad there," that is merely the cover. Scot Eaton draws the interiors, and in this past week's issue #3, in which Bane forges his Batman costume in a metal-working shop, Bane is drawn about 14 feet tall and eight-feet wide at the shoulder, with a tiny head, and the centerpiece of his Batman costume is a gigantic metal Bat-symbol about the size and weight of an anvil that he wears on his metal vest, and, at the climax of the issue, pulls off to beat Killer Croc into submission with.

Please also note that the cover shows Bane, the leader of one army in the Arkham War, with his hand around the throat of The Scarecrow, the leader of the opposing army. In the second issue, Bane had Scarecrow literally under his heel, and just sorta drifted away, with Scarecrow escaping off-panel. So that cover really doesn't look all that dramatic, seeing as how it recreates a similar scene from four issues previous that the creators were so uninterested in they didn't even bother to depict it.

JONAH HEX: SHADOWS WEST TP
Written by JOE R. LANSDALE
Art by TIMOTHY TRUMAN and SAM GLANZMAN
Cover by TIMOTHY TRUMAN
On sale APRIL 9 • 392 pg, FC, $24.99 US • MATURE READERS
In these twisted tales from JONAH HEX: TWO-GUN MOJO #1-5, JONAH HEX: SHADOWS WEST #1-3 and JONAH HEX: RIDERS OF THE WORM AND SUCH #1-5, Hex battles a doctor determined to transform him into a zombie, joins up with a Wild West show and learns the dark secret behind the existence of a demonic baby, and discovers an ancient race of man-eating worms from beneath the earth.

This looks promising. I'm almost positive you can find all of those individual comics in $1 bins at cons without too-too much difficulty, but for those uninterested in the thrill of the hunt/ and/or through back-issue bins, this is a nice way to get all the Vertigo Hex comics, which, if I recall correctly, featured various variations on the theme of Jonah Hex as a cowboy character that often ends up fighting...what's that word Abhay uses...? Boogens!

In his review of Pretty Deadly, Abhay Khosla wrote that "westerns where boogens show up to fight the cowboys— that is the very, very worst thing that a thing can be." Well, this is essentially Jonah Hex: Boogens Fighter, so it may not be for him, but I remember liking what I saw of these. And if there's a better artist to draw Hex comics than Timothy Truman, well, I bet there aren't that many better artists to draw Hex comics than Timothy Truman.

"I am vengeance, I am the night, I am the only metal that's liquid at room temperature!"

THE MOVEMENT #10
Written by GAIL SIMONE
Art by FREDDIE WILLIAMS II
Cover by STEPHANE ROUX
On sale MARCH 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
Guest-starring Batgirl! The Movement goes head to head with Batgirl over someone who’s using Coral City as a sanctuary! Then, the team heads to West Virginia to stop Michael the Blessed from killing his brother: The Movement’s own Burden!

Impressive. I assumed it would be canceled by issue #8, so it's doing better than I thought. As in, it's still around, having outlived The Green Team, which launched at the same time as it, and featured characters that appeared at least, like, once, so, chances are there was at least one or two really big Green Team fans out there, whereas The Movement seemed to be all original characters. And it's name makes me think of going to the bathroom, but that may be simply because one of my grandfathers never used the "potty" or "poop" when we were little kids, but the word "B.M." for "bowel movement," and, as we got older and occasions would arise where bowel movements need to be spoken of—which happens a lot when you get into your mid-eighties, it turns out—he would just say "movement" instead of "B.M.", because now we are adults and can hear the truth behind the M. in "B.M."

Anyway, whenever I see this title, I think about bowel movements, my grandfather, and my grandfather's bowel movements. But again, that's probably just me.

I like the background of Stephane Roux's cover.

Oh my God, Guy's only a harpoon hand away from going full Nineties Aquaman! Sally P, what do you think of Guy's new bohemian look...?

And Superman, why are you so upset? You're lucky she's just heat-visioning her old costume. As a Red Lantern, she has much grosser options for destroying things she could be employing instead.

SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP #3
Written by SHOLLY FISCH
Art and cover by DARIO BRIZUELA
On sale MARCH 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED E
A magical imp is causing havoc in Gotham City, and the Dynamic Duo is looking for help from Scooby and the gang! But when Scooby gets his own “greatest fan” from the Fifth Dimension, can even Batman, Robin, and Mystery Inc. outwit two unpredictable imps to deal with the spooky, magical hijinks of…Scooby-Mite?!

Scooby-Mite?! Fuck yeah, Scooby-Doo Team-Up! Er, it's Rated E, so I mean, um, @#$% yeah!

By the way, did you read my interview with Fisch about this title? Because you can, you know. I don't mind.

...

That's...

That's a lot of projectile blood vomit, even by Red Lantern standards.

Hey, kids! Boobs!

Is that young, skinny Amanda Waller who forgot to wear a blouse under her jacket? I sometimes have trouble identifying Amanda Waller now that she doesn't look anything at all like Amanda Waller.

Er, why do these devils all have Firestorm hair...?

I do like Zauriel, and by like I mean "love," but I'm not crazy about his New 52 redesign, nor of the appearances of his I've read in Trinity of Sin: Phantom Stranger (which, to be fair, were only two in number).

TALON #17
Written by TIM SEELEY
Art by JORGE LUCAS
Cover by EMANUEL SIMEONI
On sale MARCH 26 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T • FINAL ISSUE
Calvin Rose and Anya must defeat Lord Death Man, but there’s another master of death in the mix, the key to LDM’s plans: Dr. Darrk! Will Calvin Rose finally be resurrected, or will the Talon succumb to eternal Death?

Another (sort of) Batman book down? Must be clearing the line for some new books. I know they've got the weekly series coming out soon, and I suppose if that's four issues a month, it will replace Dark Knight and Talon on the schedule in terms of having a (likely higher-selling) Bat-book on the shelves the weeks these no longer ship.

But given the low numbers of New "52" books, maybe they're gearing up for new additions? A Red Robin and Batman Inc/Club of Heroes book (with a new title to divorce it a bit from the Inc premise) seem to be the most likely to me, but I can hardly predict what DC will do next with any accuracy.

I really rather liked the first collection of this short-lived series (reviewed at the bottom of this column, if you're interested), but unfortunately DC replaced its original artist Guillem March (one of my favorites) with Miguel Sepulveda and Szymon Kudranski (two of my least favorites), and any and all interest I had in the book evaporated.

Consistent creative teams, DC—that is what sells. The more consistent, the better. Please see Exhibit A, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's 26-issue (so far!) run on Batman.

Wonder Woman! Give Loki his hat back! That hat does not belong in your universe at all, let alone on your head!

...

Oh wait, never mind. I just noticed the nose-guard.