Happy Fourth of July, from your Uncle Sam

Uncle Sam isn't just the foundation of modern American political cartooning, he's also the U.S. Armed forces' number one recruiter, a Fourth of July parade fixture and America's greatest character and star of the greatest comic of all time.

And if "greatest character" and "greatest comic" sound like rather bold claims, well, you're just gonna have to trust me that they're absolutely true. I mean, it says so right there on the cover of National Comics, and they don't print lies on the covers of National Comics.

What is it exactly that makes Uncle Sam the greatest supehero of all time?

I think it's the fact that he's always willing to step up and punch out the enemies of America, those who would seek to subvert our way of life because they hate our freedom. Enemies like




Hitler,





masked cultists,




policemen,




Indians,



bears,




shield-slingin' traitors,




wizards,





and that filthy communist Green Arrow.

Why, if it were't for Uncle Sam, you might be reading this blog today in German. Or Indian. Or possibly Bear.


Of course, old Sam's affinity for fisticuffs in the name of freedom isn't the only reason he's the greatest comic book character in America. He's also also got plenty of sex appeal, and was always willing to pose barechested on his covers if it helped move a few more comic books.

Check it out:





Is that a shirtless Uncle Sam banging on his own red hot sword ? Yes, yes it is. Stirring adventure indeed.

THE FLASH

always eats ice cream way too fast, and gets the worst brain freezes.

A Visit to DC Nation

I was pretty caught off guard by DC editor Matt Idelson's June 13th DC Nation column. So caught off guard, in fact, that I wasn't sure how to react or respond immediately. I mean, when you spend as much time online giving free, unsoliticted, unread and untaken advice to DC editors as I do, you get into a groove of coming online once a day to engage in a few rounds of armchair editing and then promptly moving on to the next worthwhile subject. So when a DC editor publicly says, "Hey readers, little help here—What do you think we oughta do about this problem of ours?" it's so out of the ordinary that it pretty much completely stymied me.

Idelson's column dealt with the strategies for dealing with late books, an increasing problem among the Big Two publishers, and one that is most often framed by editors as a lose-lose one, where they must choose between their comics being good or their comics shipping on time. My initial impulse was, naturally enough, to simply point and laugh, as the Internet in general did when Eddie Berganza's incredibly out-of-touch column on Supergirl ran in the same space that Idelson's recently did.

But he does seem to be asking a serious question (even though I can't believe he's seriously serious about this issue because the solution seems so obvious), so I'm going to try and give him a serious answer. After all, how often is it that DC editors actually are interested in a subject about the operation of their business that I actually have a serious opinion on?

"What're editors to do when they can't win?" Idelson begins, which seems like an awfully negative place to start with, but perhaps he just wanted a catchy way to start his column. (We in the article-writing business call this a "lead.")

Idelson continues:


As every fan knows, there comes a time during the production of a book when things run behind schedule. Sometimes it's the writer, sometimes it's the artist… even the inkers and colorists run into jams. And it seems like there's no good solution. Editors have three options open to them.


Just three? Uh-oh.


Back in the ancient days of comics, before the Internet, cable and voicemail on our phones instead of answering machines, we'd keep an inventory story in the drawer. The issue was written and drawn months prior in case of emergency. But nowadays it seems like readers react poorly – they know they're reading an inventory story. I guess part of the reason for this is that stories today are so concretely focused on the present, and how it will impact the future of the character. There's little patience for stories that fill in gaps from the past.

The next option is to bring in a guest writer or artist to keep the current story arc going. But that's met with frustration by the readers, who wanted to see a certain team remain intact for this most important of stories. I often hear fans and editors alike bemoaning the inability of creative teams to produce twelve issues a year like they did in the good old days. And yet if you go back over the last forty-plus years of comics publishing, you'll find very, very few creative teams did all the work in a given year. I suppose the general similarity between most artists' styles has fooled us into thinking a given artist did more work "back then" than they really did.

And so the last option is not to put the book out until it's ready to go, regardless of the schedule — it's not an inventory, and it's been produced by the main creative team, so everyone's happy, right? Wrong. Because really, who wants to go to the comics store and not find their book waiting for them? I know that would drive me crazy when I was centering my week around my next comics run.


Idelson notes that all three of these seem to annoy about a third of readers, and that it's a bit of a "pain in the butt" for editors. He finishes up with this: "I'm curious to know—how do you, the reader feel we should proceed? What would you want us to do? Regardless of the answer, I guess the bottom line is that you can't please everyone. The real question is: how can we, the editors, please the most people?"

If this column is reflective of the way that Idelson and the rest of DC editorial actually frames the problem of late books (and I have no reason to believe that it's not), then it seems to me they're missing a rather important point about late books. All late books are not the same, and the three solutions, with their three attendant downsides, cannot be applied to all late books in the same way, nor will they necessarily elicit the same reactions.

It honestly depends on the book—some are creator driven, some are schedule/event driven and some are character driven.

Let's take the last solution Idleson offers first, the don't-start-publishing-it-until-it's-turned-in-and-ready-to-go one. Ideally, a company DC's size would absolutely never have to solicit a book before the entire story arc is ready to go. To put blind faith in the fact that Jim Lee can draw three 22-page issues in the span of 60 days, for example, seems a little unrealistic, and you would think the company would be cautious about making promises they're not 100-percent sure they can keep. When the books are creator-driven, stand alone, out-of-continuity vanity projects—books that are completely defined by the creators creating them, and the interest in the books rests solely on who's doing them—then yes, for God's sake, don't publish it until it's ready.

We read All-Star Superman because it's Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely doing Superman; we read All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder because it's Jim Lee and Frank Miller doing Batman. Justice? It's Alex Ross, painting Challenge of the Super-Friends. I can think of a few other books that DC is currently publishing that fits this critera, like Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil, or the other two announced All-Star books, and that's probably all.

Having Daniel Bereton come in to paint every other issue of Justice would have been a disaster, obviously, because no one cared if they had to wait, just so long as we eventually got it.

Yeah, we don’t like waiting—in a perfect world, Morrison and Quitely's All-Star Superman would ship 365 days a year—but we'll wait if we have to because we know what we want might take a little longer than usual.

Also, these books are all self-contained, occurring in their own little continuitiverses, so if Quitely is kidnapped and DC can't negotiate his release for six months, it's not like the whole DCU line will crash and burn. In other words, for books like these, there's no real negative to either waiting until you have a bunch down to start soliciting, or simply not having them out monthly (other than that it would be better if they were). I think if you look at the sales figures, they bear this out. As much as Newsarama.com posters will make fun of All-Star Batman, for example, it still sells over 100,000 copies whenever it does come out.

So for your All-Stars and your Justice and Shazam!:MSoE, forget the schedule. Be as lazy as you want. No one really cares, and there are no serious adverse effects to the lateness.

Of course, these books are the easy ones. What do you do with the mainline, DCU books? The ones that do all interlock with one another to a certain degree, the ones you can't not publish?

The first thing you do is that you only hire professionals with strong reputations of meeting their deadlines for the creative rosters on these books.

What was most baffling to me about the Wonder Woman fuck-up, that is, canceling the title to relaunch it under Allen Heinberg, was that a) Nobody knows who the hell "Allen Heinberg" is, in comics or outside of it, so he was hardly a "get" worth missing months upon months of deadlines and sales for, b) The work he turned in was mediocre at best (I liked Young Avengers okay too, but I bet anyone able to string a few sentences together could have turned out a "Who Is Wonder Woman?" arc that was just as literate as the one Heinberg sold you guys, and c) The guy had exactly one and a half previous comics credits (YA, and a JLA story arc co-written by Geoff Johns), and one of them was on a book that was plagued with delays. Presumably whichever genius hired Heinberg for the gig also knew that he had a demanding, full-time job in another media.

It wasn't exactly Stephen King asking to write Green Arrow; it was an inexperienced writer with a low Q Rating likely to blow deadlines who wanted stewardship of one of the company's major character properties.

More pertinent to the Supeman books is Action Comics. Yeah, Richard Donner. Great "get." How many comics has that guy done? What's he known for? A 30-year-old movie that wasn't very good? And who's drawing it? That guy who regularly blows deadlines? Theoretically, I can see how the new Action team could be a blockbuster—but only in theory. The truth of the matter is, if you would have just announced Kurt Busiek, Fabian Nicieza and an up-and-coming artist like Renato Guedes, you would have effectively been in the exact same boat in terms of sales and stories, only without the embarrassment of looking like a schmuck.

The Donner/Johns/Kubert story, meanwhile, would have been a fine original graphic novel, the sort of thing civilians might pick up in book stores and direct market shoppers would have happily shelled out $25-$30 for…with plenty more waiting on the paperback edition (As you guys did with JLA: Earth 2, JLA/JSA: Virtue and Vice and the Bizarro anthologies).

That way, the high profile team's work would be in addition to the Superman books, rather than replacing them all with...nothing, since the Donner/Johns/Kubert story never comes out anyway.

I suppose hindsight's always 20/20, but Donner and Kubert on DC's flagship monthly? That's just crazy.

The other solution requires planning ahead, and that is to build into your publishing strategy the fact that comic book art today is more sophisticated and takes longer to produce (In theory. Given the number of splash pages in some DC books, I have a hard time believing it actually takes more than 160 hours a month for some of these guys to produce 22 pages). Rather than announcing a single creative team and then waiting for the delays to creep up on them, hire a single writer for a single book (and if someone can't produce 12, 22-page scripts of mainstream, DCU superhero comics—as Heinberg seemed to have trouble with, and Jeph Loeb was having some difficulty with—than they probably shouldn't be working on mainstream, DCU superhero comics.

It’s not like you guys are publishing anything that requires more research and reference work than a flip through the The DC Comics Encyclopedia, are you? And writers don't even seem required to re-read the previous stories featuring the characters they're using, like Jodi Picoult, Adam Beechen and all those poor bastards toiling to make Countdown something other than horrible.

If pencil artists capable of drawing 12, 22-page comic books per year are harder and harder to find (Hey, give Norm Breyfogle a monthly, huh? Or how about that John Ostrander character? What's John McCrea doing? Or Rags Morales?), then why not simply hire two art teams with similar styles, and rotate them from story arc to story arc?

Andy Kubert can only get out eight issues of Batman per year? Fine, have Breyfogle pencil every other or every third story arc. The book looks consistent, it comes out bang on time, and, because the art changes are divided up by story arc as opposed to issue, trade readers will get a story that looks and reads the same issue to issue. The generational shift toward more individualized, and more stylized artwork makes finding art teams whose work look consistent with one another somewhat harder than it might have been 20 years ago, but it's hardly impossible. Rags Morales and Kevin Maguire's art would never be mistaken for on another's, for example, but they both work in highly detailed art, both are masters of subtle facial expressions, and both draw distinct characters (Unlike, say, Ed Benes, who only draws male and female characters, leaving it to the costuming and the colorists to differentiate them...which, by the way, is exactly how I draw. So, for God's sake, don't hire me...although I bet I could do 22 awful, awful pages per month for you).

I was more than a little surprised to see the derisive mention of inventory stories in your column, particularly since DC is currently publishing a comic book whose whole strategy is inventory stories. After Morrison's initial, three-part arc on JLA: Classified, hasn't every single story published within it been an inventory story, slated either for release as a standalone mini or one-shot or as a story arc in the flagship JLA title, back when it was to play host to rotating creative teams?

Inventory stories and fill-in stories don’t have to be bad. Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza, working together and alone, have picked up Dnner/Johns/Kubert's slack on Action, and given us a ton of fill-ins (as well as stalling for the too-slow-for-a-monthly Carlos Pacheco on Superman). And they've all been pretty great. How hard would it be to have regular writers and a special guest artist work up a timeless story to keep in the can to bust out in emergencies? (Between story arcs, rather than in the middle of them, of course.)

Some books that handled fill-ins really, really well were Starman, which would occasionally do a "Times Past" story set in the past (thus allowing for a fill-in artist to come in without a jarring or even noticeable change in the art), or Johns' run on The Flash, which would occasionally offer "Rogue Profiles" giving us the characters' origins and how those tie in to the story in general.

With the exception of maybe titles starring brand-new characters like Blue Beetle, I don't see why the Rogues Profile strategy couldn't be applied to almost any DCU title. Remember Busiek's all-Prankster done-in-one fill in? That was a great comic book. How hard would it be to have such stories done ahead of time and sitting in the can on other prominent members of Superman's supporting cast?

So forget the three options you mentioned, and the lose/lose/lose proposition, and simply do this:

1.) Remember not all books are created equal. All-Star Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman and Countdown are three different books with different sets of expectations from fans, and the solution to avoiding lateness is different in all three cases.

and

2.) Plan ahead. Hire professionals with proven track records for the monthly, main line books (those set in the DCU), and give untested newcomers from other media and/or hot artists and writers with records of deadline-missing the opportunity to work out of continuity or on minis and original graphic novels. Have high-quality inventory stories ready to go. And build a secondary art team or occasional special guest-artists (for done-in-one villain profiles or flashback stories) built into your publishing strategy from the get go.

WONDER WOMAN

likes Tofutti brand frozen desserts, particularly the Vanilla Almond Bark and Better Pecan flavors. A vegetarian with the ability to communicate with animals, Wonder Woman tries not to eat too many dairy products, the consumption of which indirectly supports factory farming and the attendant suffering of animals.

Ace the Bat-Hound

vigorously defends his master's trademark, copyright and visual likeness.

Monday Morning Man vs. Cephalopod Moment

From JLA: Incarnations #4 by John Ostrander, Val Semeiks, Prentis Rollins and Kevin Conrad (DC; 2001 )

BATMAN

doesn't eat ice cream.

SUPERMAN

always eats Superman flavor ice cream when he's in public, because he wouldn't want anyone to think he was ungrateful about having an ice cream flavor named after him.

But when he's alone,


or in his Clark Kent identity,

Superman prefers chocolate.

EDILW Presents: The Justice League Summer Ice Cream Social

In my ongoing efforts to make Every Day Is Like Wednesday the most erratic, random and inconsistent blog in the blogosphere, we're going to be launching a new feature today, a break from the normal reviews, armchair editing, griping, venom and occassional attempt at humor that you've come to expect from the EDILW brand. One which will allow me to show off not only my middling writing skills, but also my quite poor drawing skills.

And what is this feature, you ask?

Prepare yourself for the



Every day in the month of July we'll post a drawing of one of your favorite Justice Leaguers pertaining to their ice cream preference.

Which heroes will make the cut? What are their favorite frozen desserts? Will I actually be able to keep a daily deadline for an entire month when there's no money involved to motivate me? These and other burning questions will be answered daily at EDILW, starting...as soon as I finish this post. So stick with us all this month for superheroes, justice, ice cream, bad drawings and even worse jokes.

This post has pretty much nothing at all to do with comics (although drawing is involved in the things discussed within it)

I was walking through my local library the other day when the cover of this children's book caught my eye, and I checked it out on the strength of that image alone.

I'm glad I did; it was a fun read, and a really beautifully designed and illustrated book. 365 Penguins (Abrams Books; 2006) is written by Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet, both of whom are apparently rather productive in the world of children's books (I don't recognize their names, and I don't think I've seen any of their previous work...at least not that I can remember. But then, I don't read a lot of children's books).

This is a nice, big, sturdy hardcover, with a nice spine; it would look nice on a coffee table, and nice on a bookshelf, two things I look for in books because, well, I'm shallow.

As for the story, it's first-person-narrated by a little boy who lives with his mother, father and older sister Amy. It starts on New Year's Day, when they receive a delivery of a a penguin in the mail. They get one penguin a day for the rest of the year (hence the title). The book deals with the frustrations of having multiple penguins living in one's house, and how having 365 of them is pretty much impossible.

Jolivet limits her palette to just black, white, orange and blue and brown, and it works out quite lovely. The pages are all big and airy, which makes the encroachment of the hundreds of penguins seem all the more dramatic, and her penguin designs are killer. Each has a blank expression, only really betraying emotion when in the act of running towards or away from something, with its flippers back and beak open.




As problematic as the penguins prove, it could be a lot worse. The story refers to the cost of feeding them, and obliquely to the problem of penguin waste ("We can't stand the smell! Find a solution!" the family complains, after the boy tells us, "Let's not talk about the other problems...") But they are fairly docile, reamining motionless and going along with the father's attempts to organize them by stacking them in pyramids or cubes and, later, in boxes of a dozen, like eggs.

This works fine when there are only 144 of them, but then they all rush out to greet the 145th. I could actually relate pretty well to the whole "how do we organize these hundreds of things which increase in nuber with every passing day and are completely crowding us out of our home?!" conflict, since it parallels my own ongoing struggle to share my one-bedroom apartment with hundreds of comics and graphic novels.

Thank God I don't have to feed my comics.

Anyway, a really fun book. At $17.95, I probably won't buy a copy of my own, because it's repeated entertainment value is kinda low, but it is an all around well-designed, well-illustrated children's book.









And while I'm not really talking about comics at all, here are three animated music videos I really like, to songs that have spent a significant portion of time stuck in my head...




Peter, Bjorn & John; "Young Folks"




Well, they do use dialogue bubbles in this, so I guess it's kinda comic book-y.

I don't know why exactly, but this video really makes me think of the Legion of Super-Heroes. I think it's maybe because when I close my eyes and imagine Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy, they totally look like the couple doing the singing here. Or that there's a real Mike Allred-ness about the character designs, and Allred's the artist I'd like to see draw the LOSH more than any other.




Los Campesinos; "You! Me! Dancing!"






I happened upon this video purely by accident, and it was my first exposure to Los Campesinos, and, as it turns out, they're a pretty great band. The video itself contains may of my favorite things—laser guns, giant monsters, rocket ships, flying surfboards—and it's cool that it has absolutely nothing to do with the lyrics at all. I really love the song though too, from the Sonic Youth-y slow build at the beginning to the chorus that will embed itself in your brain. See also "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives." (That seems to be it for videos, but you can hear more music at their myspace page).




New York Dolls; "Dance Like a Monkey"





Dozens of dancing primates, Darwin thrusting his pelvis, Hanuman, Dick Cheney's sneer, King Kong, dinosaurs, a mammoth, an orangutan pope, a hot creationist, a monkey with a jetpack, a gorilla with a top hat, skeletons, Bigfoot... it's like a buffet of awesomeness.

Note the bear who's haning out amidst all the monkeys all the time. He is a terrible, terrible dancer.

Friday Night Fights: Shadow of the 'Cat

It's Friday night in Blogsville, and you know what that means, right?

Exactly.









You did click on the above images to make them Bahlactus-sized, right?

And because it seems unjust to scan from a Cameron Stewart drawn comic book featuring Ted Grant and not also scan an image of him in his cat suit, here are a few panels of Wildcat and Catwoman beating up some swarthy, scimitar-wielding bad guys:





(Both above squences are from 2003's Catwoman #20 by Ed Brubaker and Cameron Stewart, published by DC Comics. Check it out for plenty more pages of a cute girl in sportswear boxing and people dressed like cats kicking the crap out of theives, or, better yet, buy the trade, Catwoman: Wild Ride. The Stargirl image is from the same place as the the last Stargirl image.)

June 28th's Meanwhile in Las Vegas...

This week's Las Vegas Weekly column features reviews of





and



If that last one seems a little too innocent and childlike for your tastes, I suppose I should point out that there is actually some pretty extreme violence in it.

Check it out:




Did you see that?! That cute little dog on the cover? It totally set that dude on fire!

Or how about this. See that chick on the cover?



She punched that little monster so hard that she knocked its eyeball clean out the socket!

Damn,those are some hardcore little all-ages fantasy comics characters right there.


And while I'm link-blogging, here are some links to things that I didn't write...



—You’re likely familiar with this Dick fellow, the one who’s not terribly fond of your blog, right? Well, this recent post of his deserves a bit of metaphorical underlining (via linking), I think. He sits his wife down for a sort of Rorschach test of recent comics controversies, showing her such images as the MJ “comiquette,” the “Heroes for Hentai” cover and Michael Turner’s Power Girl cover, and asking her opinions on them (And I wonder how often, if ever, Marvel and DC’s marketing people do the same with their significant others, or focus groups?)

She’s not a regular superhero comics reader, but she is someone who has read comics before, and could conceivably be in a comic shop with her husband Mr. Hatesyourblog some day. In other words, from DC and Marvel’s perspective, she’s a potential customer.

Her answers are thus especially fascinating, because in almost every case, her initial reaction is to laugh at the images and/or call them stupid, despite the fact that she gets the aesthetic references they’re going for, like Adam Hughes’ allusion to classic cheescake or Marvel’s tenatacle rape homage. And then, once her husband further clarifies things, like what the zombified MJ cover refers to, for example, or who exactly is on the Heroes For Hire roster, then she sees the icky sexual politics at work in sharper relief.

So, based on a test audience of one, it seems like in the cases of almost all of the products in the experiment, the reaction of a "civilian" was that the product was stupid, and to those that get the “jokes” and/or know the context (i.e. direct market consumers like us), the products are likely to be actively offensive.

If you’re selling your products with images that elicit responses ranging from thinking they’re stupid and thinking they’re offensive, chances are you’re doing something wrong.



—Tom Spurgeon writes the single best comic book review (and one of the better reviews in general) that I’ve read in a long time. It’s of the much talked-about Flash #13, which I didn’t even read, but Spurgeon’s review is a smart, entertaining reading experience all by itself, regardless of whether or not you’re personally familiar with the work he's discussin.



—At The Beat, Marc-Oliver Frisch examines DC sales data from May, which is of greater interest than usual (at least to me) because that was the month Countdown launched. Looks like it began selling at levels lower than the very worst selling issues of 52, and dropped down to just under 80,000 by the fourth issue (Which, while not as good as DC's last weekly series, is still a lot better than a bulk of their DCU line). I’m somewhat morbidly curious to see what happens in June, given that I think quite a few people—myself included—generously gave the title a few issues to improve after that disappointing first issue.

Weekly Haul: June 27th

Amazons Attack! #3 (DC Comics) It takes an awful lot of suspension of disbelief to read some comic books, particularly DCU ones. This one, for example, has Superman in a supporting role, and centers around Wonder Woman and the Amazons, so even before you start reading, you’re accepting flying strongmen from space with laser eyes, the literal existence of everything in Greek myth, a woman made out of clay, and so on. The problem with Amazons Attack!, which has now officially passed the halfway point and might want to think about starting telling a story soon, is that it just asks for way, way too much in the suspension of disbelief area. There’s straining credulity, and then there’s breaking it, and the series has long since broken it, and is now jumping up and down on the shards of it.

For, in addition to all those amazing people with amazing superpowers that make up its cast, the plot is one that doesn’t quite make sense given its players. Never mind the fact that former Justice Leaguer, former JSA member, all-around nice lady Hippolyta is slaughtering innocents for no reason all of a sudden (presumably, Will Pfeiffer’s going to get around to explaining that eventually), or that her noble, heroic lieutenants are thinking that maybe they oughta do something to stop her instead of having stopped her before the first of the few thousand deaths were caused by their nonsensical invasion.

Let’s just think about the pitch for this series, okay? The Amazons, less than 2,000 strong, invaded Washington D.C. with only swords, spears, arrows and some monsters. It is now days later and, according to the cable news scrawl, the death toll is in the thousands.

Now, I’m no military expert, but I think it’s safe to say that even with our military strained to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, I don’t know, maybe Qurac in the DCU too), there are probably still enough soldiers and guns to take down a few thousand women whose military technology stopped developing before the Trojan War (These Amazons, oddly, don’t seem to have any super-science, which Batman even points out by saying they don’t even work with microchips. Hey World’s Greatest Detective, pick up a back issue sometime, huh? Purple Healing Ray? Invisible jet?).

But let’s imagine that the U.S. military, for the sake of argument, is completely incompetent, and have lost their guns or something. How is it that the Justice League is allowing this to go on for days, with thousands killed? Because Superman could seriously handle this all by himself. What’s that? Kansas is on fire? Well, let’s see, he moves at the speed of light, so putting Kansas out oughta take…what, five minutes, if he’s extra-thorough? Honestly, I have a hard time thinking of a less-intimidating threat that the Justice League has faced since they reorganized prior to the White Martian invasion. And so far, the combined efforts of the League, the JSA and a handful of other heroes hasn’t been able to defeat the Amazons…for days. My god. How can I take this series at all seriously?

Now I suppose it’s possible that I’m missing something, as I dropped the unreadable Wonder Woman and Teen Titans, both of which tie-in to this storyline, but somehow I doubt either explains why Superman, J’onn J’onnz, Power Girl, Supergirl, Mary Marvel, Jay Garrick, Wonder Woman or one of the five Green Lanterns operating from Earth hasn’t just swooped in at super-speed, scooped up Hippolyta and ended the war yet.

There’s something Countdown-ian in this book’s attempts to tie in characters and story threads from all over the DCU, but manage to get everything wrong. Like why all the heroes who know Hippolyta haven’t thought that “Hey, this really isn’t like Polly, is it?” Or that Oracle called Batman, the first time the two have spoken since the decided to stop working together in another story that made even less sense. Or the president’s response to round up women nationwide suspected of being in cahoots with the Amazons instead of, you know, just sending a few thousand guys with guns to fight back against the handful of women with bronze age weapondry. Or hell, this





What's wrong with this picture? Well, aside from the fact that almost a dozen of DC's superheroes, including some of their most powerful, seem to be having an awful lot of trouble defeating one three-headed dragon (and it's not even a fire-breathing dragon). I actually find the fact that these all-powerful characters are getting their asses kicked by a single monster kind of amusing. I mean, just look at Black Lightning there. What was exactly going through his head, huh? Forget my super-powerful lightning power! I'm taking this thing on...bare-handed!

No, what's wrong with this picture is the Captain Marvel in it. Who the fuck is that supposed to be? We know it's not the real Captain Marvel (Billy Batson), since he's turned into "Marvel", changed clothes and grew his hair out. And we know it's not Freddy Freeman, who's apparently being groomed to be Captain Marvel II, because Trials of Shazam! is still going. And we know that this story is set during Trials because both Amazons Attack! and Trials of Shazam are referenced in Countdown as occurring at the same time.

It's just a stupid art mistake, Woods could have just drawn Martian Manhunter or Robin or Odd Man or Plastic Man there instead, but it's exhibit L that the universal traffic copping at DC is at an all-time low, which is troubling considering that traffic between DCU titles is at an all-time high. I mean, is there nobody at DC whose job is simply to read all the scripts and look at all the pages and make sure everything is consistent? If not, maybe Countdown and having several other simultaneous crossover stories (Amazons Attack!, Sinestro Corps) all being published at the same time really isn't such a hot idea.

There is one thing I really liked about this issue though. It didn’t make sense either, but it was such an insane non sequitur of a moment that it was hilariously entertaining. Page 14, panel one. Batman is looking down at the prone and unconscious form of Nemesis, and says to him, “Of course, you’ve got bigger problems right now. An Amazon attack, a deadly bee weapon…Bees. My god.”





Yeah, um, what?! “A deadly bee weapon?” SERIOUSLY?!





Black Ghost Apple Factory (Top Shelf Productions) Thanks a lot, Jeremy Tinder. Now I’m never gonna want to eat another apple as long as I live.





Black Panther #28 (Marvel Comics) Wow, it’s a perfect storm of over-exposed Marvel characters you’re sure to be sick of seeing in a few more months! Reginald Hudlin manages to work both the Marvel Zombies and Skrulls into a single issue. If only he could have had Iron Man fly in and try to register the zombies and shoot the Hulk zombie into space. Ah well, maybe there’s the next chapter of this story. As for this story, the new FF have teleported onto the Skrull homeworld just as the Galactus-powered Marvel Zombies are dropping in to feed on it, as was seen at the end of Marvel Zombies (So, I guess they actually jumped over from the 616 into the Zombiverse, which is itself parallel to the Ultimate Universe, and I always thought that Joe Quesada said if they ever crossed the Ultimate Universe and the Marvel Universe, it would end the world…or defeat Gozer. Maybe it doesn’t apply if they use the Zombiverse for insulation though?). There’s really not much to this issue at all, other than the various groups exchanging blows and dialogue, but there’s nothing wrong with it either. I guess, in that respect, this is the very definition of mediocre superhero comics.





Fantastic Four #547 (Marvel) As you can see from the cover, this is the pulse-pounding, action-packed, mind-blowing issue in which Johnny Storm and his sister Susan stand around in a cloud of smoke. No actually, despite what the cover says, things do actually happen in this issue. Quite a lot of things. Many of them rather interesting and exciting and/or funny. Reed takes a vacation from his vacation to visit Earth and Hank Pym to crack a mysterious object he found in space, the Frightful Four attack Susan, Johnny tries to hit on T’Challa’s bodyguards, and Ben has a very interesting conversation with Storm, which lends the issue it’s title, “Never Ask Her If She’s Wearing Colored Contact Lenses.” Dwayne McDuffie continues to write the Fantastic Six as a sci-fi action sitcom, which is pretty much exactly what it should be, and his artistic collaborators Paul Pelletier and Rick Magyar just get stronger and stronger each issue. It’s really too bad that their work is buried between what is by far the least imaginative, interesting and good-looking cover on the shelves. Seriously, this thing is tied with Greg Land’s Legion of Monsters cover for most aesthetically abominable thing I saw on the racks today.





Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1 (DC) In a way, this comic book is really just your standard good Geoff Johns comic book. I know some people have very strong feelings about Johns, be they positive or negative, but I’ve never been able to just stuff all of his work into one category or the other. I think he’s done some fantastic superhero comics (most of which seem to be in JSA/JSoA, although dude also was one-fourth of the 52 team), a few that I’d go so far as to call brilliant, and he’s also done some shitty, shitty comics (most of them seem to have been in his Teen Titans run, for some reason). I’ve yet to read something of his that wasn’t just a superhero comic written for DC or Marvel, and so, as solid as he might be, I don’t think he’s done anything wholly original yet to distinguish himself as a great writer (In that respect, he’s clearly not in the same league as Grant Morrison or Neil Gaiman, or even Garth Ennis or Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar). I hope he does take the time to do something not dependent on DCU characters and plotlines some day, but even if he never does, there are certainly worse things to be than one of the best superhero comics writers writing at least one monthly.

Anyway, on the Johns scale, this is definitely on the high end, and, paired with Ethan Van Sciver, this book really fulfills all the promise of the Green Lantern: Rebirth mini the two created (picking up on several plotlines from it), as well as the early issues of the current run of Green Lantern which, unfortunately, really got derailed by the “One Year Later” jump. All that the pair did in Rebirth to reinvent the Green Lantern mythos is back here, underlined and further explored in ways that no one, not even Johns himself in Green Lantern really did before.

With all the various spin-offs and chaos involving the four Earthling Corps members since Rebirth—GLC, Infinite Crisis, Ion, the JLA/JLoA line-up flux—I’d really forgotten what a great job Johns did of finding and defining unique character traits in the four, and playing them off one another. Under Johns, the idea of the Green Lantern franchise as a team book is enormously appealing. Not only does every fan win when their favorite Lantern is both a Lantern and in the spotlight, but all four of the characters work best in team situations, playing off one another, so why not play off each other? (This is the first decent Kyle Rayner story I’ve read since Rebirth and, before that? Joe Kelly’s first few JLA issues, maybe?).

Speaking of Kyle, something happens to him here that isn’t really that fresh an idea (it kinda sorta happened once or twice before), and is also something that the tea leaves of future solicits kind of hinted at, but it’s executed very well, and I’m cool with it as long as, like his Ion status, it’s temporary. As the first half of the book proves, Kyle belongs in the Corps, sitting around a table talking to his fellow Lanterns.

In addition to the strong character work, Johns really weaves DCU continuity confidently and with clarity; there are plot threads that stretch back to the ‘80s and ‘90s contained herein, but rather than out of left field, they’re integrated into the story naturally, almost as if they were first being mentioned here. Short of the last page reveal—perhaps the biggest exclamation point ending in Johns’ career of last-page reveals—this could pretty much be your first Green Lantern comic and it would all make plenty of sense. (As for that last page reveal? Bigger than anything in all of Infinite Crisis, that’s for sure…instead of just a crazy Superboy, you’ve got the heaviest heavies in DCU history all lined up there).

I think I was even more impressed with Johns this week in part because I’d just suffered through “The Lightning Saga” last week, which Johns is at least half responsible for. With the godawfulness of Brad Meltzer’s Johns-approved fan fiction still in my head, it was refreshing to see how much better Johns is. He uses several of the same techniques as Meltzer, including multiple narrators within the same issue, occasional panel-packed grids broken into more horizontal than vertical tiers, multiple threads of verbal information and pulling plot information from the past to buttress the present story, but Johns does it all right; here they’re tools used in telling a story, not simply tools a novice is using to play with some toys in front of an audience. The Meltzer/Johns comparison was practically begged by the inclusion of the JLoA early in the book, when we see them trying to help Hal round up the Reverse Flash for questioning. God, was it refreshing to hear “Lantern,” “Green Lantern” and “Lighting” instead of Hal and Jeff. I suppose it’s also worth nothing that between this and their appearance in “Wanted: Hal Jordan,” Johns has written more JLoA adventures with Meltzer’s line-up than Meltzer has in his first ten issues on the series.

Hell, Johns even explained the way the DCU multiverse works now better than it’s been explained absolutely anywhere else before, although the explanation does raise a few questions outside of this particular book (What’s this business about the Source Wall simply being a barrier between this universe and the next? Seems a little…prosaic, doesn’t it? Is this the first mention of this, or was that the Source Wall as envisioned by Jack Kirby? And how come there are so many Monitors and only one…ah, I can’t bring myself to say it.)

Van Sciver likewise picks up where he left off with Rebirth, bringing a downright insane level of detail to the characters and finding interesting ways to put otherworldly grandeur into their every movement. The scene with the Reverse Flash, for example, with the skeletal afterimages trailing him, the strange aliens of the GLC, the baroque creature design that went into the Sinestro Corps, the wrinkles on every character’s face…this is just plain beautiful work, with almost every design, every line clearly thought out.

Note the “almost” up there. There is one single panel, where, one single part of one single panel where EVS screws up, which I was actually glad to see. Lets me know the dude’s at least human.







You see that picture of Black Canary? It straight up sucks! Ha ha! Nice job Van Sciver! Don't quit your day job! Your comic book is only 99.7% beautifully illustrated!

And Johns does write at least one line of totally perplexing dialogue (not counting the Sinestro oath, the last few lines of which I'm putting down to Sinestro just being a bad poet, rather than bad writing on Johns' part). Okay, so Guy Gardner flies into the big crazy red sun room where they're keeping Superboy-Prime imprisoned, and Guy has this to say to prisoner:







I don't get it. Really. I have no idea what that sentence is supposed to mean.

And as long as I've got Sinestro Corps in a scanner, I should probably point this out. It's not a mistake or a mystifying tidbit, it's just something I personally found interesting. You know that awesome two-page spread on pages 26 and 27, where we see the Sinestro Corps assembled in a canyon beneath a giant yellow power battery, listening to Sinestro's speech? The one with all those super cool, super scary looking aliens? I spent a long time lingering on that page, and returned later to really study some of the scary customers EVS filled it with. But what really caught my eye was that one guy.

You see the one I mean? In the lower righthand corner? The pretty ordinary looking guy with a beard and male pattern baldness? You see that the guys around bald, bearded guy include some crazy scary toothy claw guys, what looks to be some sort of zombie bat creature, something with a melty face right behind him, a gelatinous creature with human bones floating within it, a velociraptor and, my personal favorite, a big, blue monster man with a hunchback, his hump full of living babies!.

And among all these scary-ass monsters, there's just this guy:






Can you imagine what must be running through his head?









Marvel Adventures Avengers #14 (Marvel) Okay, so the plot is a rip-off…er, homage. At least it’s an homage to something so oft-homaged, and it gets a really fun Marvel twist. When a poor farming village finds itself terrorized by a small army of bandits, they look to seven strangers to protect them, promising payment in crops. The seven they find? The Avengers, naturally. There’s some great fun as the team tries to train their new recruits in fighting and strategy—I especially enjoyed Hulk’s lesson in smashing—and Parker really makes these characters work effortlessly together. Remember the hue and cry that went up in fandom when it was first announced that Wolverine would be joining the Avengers? Well, Parker makes it work here in a way that Brian Michael Bendis never did (in part because his team never seemed to all be in the same room at the same time), and the relationship he’s built up between Wolverine and Captain America seems true to both characters’ 616 iterations, and the character comedy who so often works into the lighthearted, old school action.






She-Hulk # 19 (Marvel) Yeah, you're probably gonna want to buy this one. It's the issue where Mallory Book tries to defend The Leader in court. But it's also the issue that contains this







and this







And, perhaps most importantly, it continues to address the question of whether or not Chuck Austen's X-Men stories were so bad they should not be regarded in continuity, whether Marvel published them as such or not, a question that is raised when Book gets Jen Walters on the witness stand:








X-Factor #20 (Marvel) The army of one thing is cool, as is pencil artist Khoi Pham’s version of Rahne all werewolfed out, but this issue, like this storyline, left me pretty cold. Having not really understood House of M and having not read any of the follow-ups that this story deals with, I don’t really get what’s up with Quicksilver and the Inhumans crystals and what’s going on with the mutant powers he’s handing out and taking away again. Or whatever. Also, this issue reminded me that Marrow, Fatale and Abyss all exist, and that’s something I could definitely have done without.

You know who else should do Wonder Woman? Paul Pope

If that pin-up from 1997's JLA Gallery doesn't convince you, for further evidence, please see everything else Paul Pope has ever done.