Marvel's May previews reviewed

Marvel has released solicitations for their books shipping in May. You can see 'em all here, or you can simply read on. It'll be just like reading them with me reading over your shoulder!






Something tells me this issue of Amazing Spider-Girl will be on Chris Sims’ pull-list…





AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #559
Written by DAN SLOTT
Penciled by MARCOS MARTIN
Cover by ED MCGUINNESS
Peter Parker: Paparazzi! Part 1 of 3
"The Money Shot"
The DB, New York's trashiest tabloid, has just hired the sleaziest, most muckraking, lowlife paparazzi of them all...PETER PARKER?! Say it ain't so, true believer! Also in this ish, J. Jonah Jameson finds inner peace and harmony...(Hey, it could happen! Maybe.) All this and the first ever livestreaming super-villain: Screwball!
Dan Slott returns to Spidey, and he's bringing Marcos Martin (DOCTOR STRANGE: THE OATH) with him!


AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #560
Written by DAN SLOTT
Pencils and cover by MARCOS MARTIN
Peter Parker: Paparazzi! Part 2 of 3
"Flat Out Crazy"
Are Pete's paparazzi pics inspiring a super celebrity stalker? Is he responsible for all of her grisly acts? Even if he is, what can Spider-Man do about it? How can anyone stop the flatout freaky powers of Paper Doll? Also: Miss this issue, and you'll miss out on SOMETHING YOU'VE ALL BEEN ASKING FOR!!! Write it down, Spider-fans, ASM #560!!!


Okay, I haven’t exactly made it a secret that I think the new Spider- status quo is silly beyond belief, and Dan “The Man Who Was Born to Write Spider-Man” Slott has been kind of scaring me lately with some of his Internet posts on Newsarama.com, but for his second ASM stint he’s working with Marcos freaking Martin. Oh man…McNiven I could pass up easily, since the horribly phoned-in Civil War #7 still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but Martin?

Damn. I may have to read some pre-de-reboot ASM after all…

I also like the fact that Slott seems to be creating new villains here. Between that and Avengers: The Initiative, the dude’s a Marvel character creating machine.

Not sure if it’s just the cover image or if something similar happens within, but the real comic book characters fighting in front of Lichtenstein-like images gag was done in Morrison’s first Batman arc already though.




ANGEL: REVELATIONS #1 (of 5) Written by ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA. Art and Cover by ADAM POLLINA.“The Annunciation”Warren Worthington III has it made. A senior at St. Joseph's Prep, he's smart, tall, handsome, and rich; a star both on the field and in the classroom. All the girls want to date him, all the guys want to be him. There's just one problem…Warren's changing. Something's happening to his body–humps have started to grow under his shoulder blades, and they're getting bigger and more painful every day. See the never-before-told origin of one of the X-Men’s five founding members, and his first encounter with an unsolvable, unrelenting evil…the Hunter. Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN), with groundbreaking art by Adam Pollina (X-FORCE), who returns with a vengeance to the X-Men!


I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by either of these creators—at least not that I remember—and I don’t have any real affection for the character, but this project does look pretty cool to me. I think more X-Men (i.e. some of them who aren’t Wolverine) should occasionally get a spotlight as if they were heroes in their own right and not just a huge Wolverine support staff. I mean, if they can’t stand on their own as compelling superheroes, who needs ‘em?

Angel is one of the X-Men with a straightforward concept and a name and look that isn’t completely repellent to my sense of aesthetics, so I think he could work as a hero when taken out of the context of the X-Men.

It sounds like Aguirre-Sacasa is playing him as a Zach Siler type who develops mutant wings, and since She’s All That is the greatest movie ever made*, I heartily approve, even if my ideal Angel comic would be more Hawkman meets Richie Rich (with Colleen Coover illustrating).

I admire Marvel’s titling this simply Angel: Revelations too, and not, like, The Uncanny X-Men Present: Angel: Revelations, or any combination of the word “X-Men” with “Icon,” “Spotlight,” "Origins" or “Legends.”





AVENGERS/INVADERS #1 (of 12)
Written by Jim Krueger and Alex Ross
Penciled by Steve Sadowski
Cover by ALEX ROSS
Variant Cover by David Finch
Legends Live Again.
The original Invaders (Captain America , Bucky , Human Torch , Toro , and the Sub-Mariner) return in a twelve issue maxi-series by the award winning team behind EARTH X, Justice and Project Superpowers .The greatest super-team of World War II finds themselves transported from the battlefields of the Second World War to a future they never imagined! Now, the Invaders find themselves confronted by two teams of Avengers who want desperately to believe these heroes are who they say they are, while Tony Stark faces his greatest challenge since the Civil War as he must deal with the “return” of Steve Rogers. Confronted by a world they barely recognize, the Invaders will have to show two teams of the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes just what kind of power, courage and sheer determination it took to defeat the forces of unrelenting evil in the Twentieth century. In fact…they may just have to do it again in the Twenty-First.


While a fifteenth Avengers series is probably the last thing the world needs, you can never have too many comic books about Namor and tommy gun-toting Bucky Barnes beating up the Avengers. I’m not entirely sure how this will work out—can the Marvel Universe have room for two Namors—and seems to be stepping on The Twelve’s toes a bit (Will the two crossover?), but I’m eager to read it.




BLACK PANTHER #37 Written by REGINALD HUDLIN. Penciled by FRANCIS PORTELA. Cover by ALAN DAVIS_He’s back – and he’s badder than ever! Killmonger returns to Wakanda, with vengeance on his mind.


Killmonger is a funny name. Even funnier than Hatemonger.







I think the cover of this issue of Captain America is means to say “Vote 3RD Wing,” but with the “r” backwards like that, it makes the “3” look like a backwards “E” and therefore that maybe it’s really just an anagram from “Red.” In which case it says “Vote Redwing.” Which is the name of Falcon’s pet falcon, isn’t it?

I’ve only been reading sporadically, having opted to follow the book in trade, so I don’t know—Has Redwing made any appearances during Brubaker’s run on the series? Is he running for president? Because I think I’d find that story tons more exciting than knee-capping Cap vs. the sub-prime mortgage crisis. And I don’t say that to belittle Brubaker’s pretty cool plotting on the book, but to embiggen the idea of Redbird running for president.





INCREDIBLE HERCULES #117Written by GREG PAK & FRED VAN LENTE. Penciled by RAFA SANDOVAL. Cover JOHN ROMITA JR., KLAUS JANSON & DEAN WHITE. SECRET INVASION TIE-IN! The Greek Goliath gathers the most powerful super-team ever assembled to counter-attack the Skrull gods! Face front, True Believers, and prepare for the pantheon-pounding premiere of... THE GOD SQUAD!


Okay, I don’t know who a single person other than Herc is on that cover, but Hercules vs. the Skrull gods? That sounds fucking awesome.




THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1 Written by MATT FRACTION. Pencils & 50/50 Variant Cover by SALVADOR LARROCA. 50/50 Variant Cover by JOE QUESADA. Variant Cover by MARKO DJURDJEVIC. Variant Cover by BOB LAYTON. Variant Cover by BILLY TAN. Variant IRON MAN MOVIE Cover. A bold new ONGOING TITLE for the biggest hero of 2008! IRON MAN! You know you love him! And as the summer’s most anticipated movie boot-jets its way into theaters, here’s the perfect jumping-on point for new readers and Iron Man fans alike! Tony Stark – Iron Man, billionaire industrialist and director of S.H.I.E.L.D. – faces the most overwhelming challenge of his life. Ezekiel Stane, the son of Tony’s late business rival and archenemy Obadiah, has set his sights, his genius and his considerable fortune on the task of destroying Tony Stark and Iron Man. What’s worse, he’s got Iron Man tech, and he’s every bit Iron Man’s equal and opposite…except younger, faster, smarter…and immeasurably evil. Rising star writer Matt Fraction (IMMORTAL IRON FIST) and superstar artist Salvador Larroca (UNCANNY X-MEN) join forces to repulsor-ray your comic books to a cinder!


I know the guy’s got a movie coming out and all, but two ongoing monthlies? (Three, if you count Marvel Adventures Iron Man). Isn’t that a little much? I mean, it’s not like the regular Iron Man monthly is selling that well…

And Jesus, check out the “Variant Cover by” credits. Is that a record for a comic from Marvel or DC in this century? It’s a hell of a lot of variants for a book from a publisher that isn’t Dynamite or Avatar…




IRON MAN: VIVA LAS VEGAS #1 (of 4)Written by JON FAVREAU. Pencils & Cover by ADI GRANOV. A Marvel Knights series by the talents who brought you the IRON MAN movie! What’s a billionaire to do when he’s worn out from running a multi-national corporation? Well, if his name happens to be Tony Stark, it’s a situation that calls for some R & R in the casinos of sin city! Mix in a beautiful archaeologist and the fifty-foot dragon statue she discovered, and a plague of lizards descending on Las Vegas, and it’s a recipe for the sort of armored adventure that’s a perfect chaser after an evening at the movies!


This Iron Man project, however, is absolutely necessary, given that it reportedly features Shellhead versus Fin Fang Foom, and any book with FFF in it is worth a purchase. That giant dragon in shorts is so money he…

Aw, sorry. Swingers jokes stopped being funny like eight years ago, didn’t they? But they put Favreau on a book set in Vegas, how am I gonna not immediately want to go there, you know?




KING SIZE HULK #1 Written by JEPH LOEB. Pencils by ART ADAMS & FRANK CHO & MORE. 50/50 Covers by FRANK CHO & ART ADAMS. HULK vs. SHE-HULK! HULK vs. WENDIGO! HULK vs. ??????????? JEPH LOEB! ART ADAMS! FRANK CHO! TOO many SUPERSTARS to fit into a puny REGULAR-SIZED issue!!! We’re comin’ upside your head with a KING-SIZE spectacular with MORE smashing, bashing, trashing, and clashing than should be allowed by law!!! Three new tales that fill in the gaps of the best-selling HULK book, and set up NEW storylines! PLUS, classic tales including THE INCREDIBLE HULK 180 (the REAL 1st appearance of Wolverine!) and AVENGERS 83 (Lady Liberators, anyone?)! More? You want MORE!?!? How about a super-secret MYSTERY ARTIST…??? 96 PGS./Rated A…$4.99

Hmm… It takes a great, great artist to get me to ignore my own Never Read Anything With Loeb’s Name On It rule, and Art Adams is just such an artist. But I don’t know, I usually feel kinda burned by these half-new, half-reprint Marvel books…I guess I’ll have to wait to see it in the store.




THE LAST DEFENDERS #3 (of 6) Written by JOE CASEY. Penciled by JIM MUNIZ. Cover by LEINIL YU. DEFENDERS…No More?! It sure looks like it, as Iron Man shuts down New Jersey’s Initiative team…and Nighthawk’s dreams of redemption. But when the diabolical U-MAN threatens humanity, Nighthawk finds the best Defenders money can buy: Paladin, Junta and Atlas! Meanwhile, what role does DAIMON HELLSTROM play? And who has he sought out to advise him in his journey? A strange connection to the Defenders’ past appears as the must-have super hero team book of ’08 continues!


Shit. This change in the cast from the one of the first two issues makes me think this will be more of a Nighthawk book than a Defenders book. But then again, Daimon Hellstrom, huh? I’m all over this. I hope his appearance is more Essential Marvel Horror and less Max Hellstorm…




MARVEL ADVENTURES THE AVENGERS #24 Written by JEFF PARKER. Penciled by IG GUARA. Cover by LEONARD KIRK. FAN FAVE JEFF PARKER RETURNS! Giant-Girl hates Spider-Man. Spider-Man hates Ant-Man. Ant-Man hates Iron Man. Iron Man hates...everyone. Where is all this hate coming from? Some kind of... MONGER, perhaps?


Oh wow, speaking of Hatemonger…! And good to see Jeff Parker back. I do hope it’s for a long stay.





Hmmm, not quite 300-y enough…




RUNAWAYS: DEAD END KIDS PREMIERE HC Written by JOSS WHEDON. Pencils and Cover by MICHAEL RYAN. The kids start running in a different direction. Superstar JOSS WHEDON (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ASTONISHING X-MEN) and rising star MICHAEL RYAN (NEW EXCALIBUR) take the Runaways somewhere they’ve never been before: the Big Apple…circa 1907! While there, they make surprising allies and even more surprising enemies. Can they escape a super-powered war on the streets of New York? This is the cannot-miss book of 2008! Collecting RUNAWAYS #25-30


Marvel seems pretty confident that issue #30 will have shipped by May. Considering that #29 only drops this week, and how damn late the series has been since Whedon came on, I’m not sure there’s any reason to be that confident.


Ready the pulpers! I think I see areola!





ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #122
Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
Pencils & Cover by STUART IMMONEN
The worst day in Peter Parker’s life! Spider-Man has been defeated and kidnapped! Wait till you see who did what the Green Goblin, the Kingpin and Doctor Octopus couldn't do! And can Kitty Pryde and Mary Jane team up to save him in time?


Wow, that’s an awesome cover. And I the solicit sounds pretty exciting too. (My guess? Aunt May’s boyfriend). I thought the book really lost some steam during the “Death of a Goblin” arc—come to think of it, all the Goblin stories have been pretty weak for some reason—but really got its mojo back last issue. With the mess of the “616” Spider-titles, USM is more important than ever.




ULTIMATE X-MEN #94
Written by ARON COLEITE
Penciled by MARK BROOKS
Cover by GABRIELE DELL’OTTO
New scribe Aron Coleite jumps aboard, fresh from his stint as one of the top writers on the hit NBC show Heroes! Regrouping after the devastating battle against Apocalypse, the X-Men encounter a new adversary which seems unstoppable. To fight it, the young mutants must ask themselves: how far are they willing to go and what are they willing to take to raise their game? The answer will test the bonds and shake the team to its very core.


A story ripped from the headlines! Will Colossus start taking super-steroids like his favorite baseball players in order to up his game? Man, who’s responsible for this after school special-sounding story? Oh, a TV writer, naturally. Damn you, WGA strike!



*I'm just kidding, of course. It's actually tied with Empire Records for that honor.

Don’t ever watch this cartoon. It’s dismal.

Having caught Little Lulu fever after finally giving Dark Horse’s winning collections of the series a try (something I’d put off doing for pretty much ever), I hit up all my local libraries to find as many Little Lulus as I could.

While searching their catalogs, I came across something odd, the DVD at the right.

It collects an HBO/Cinar-produced Little Lulu cartoon from 1995. I was highly suspicious of such an endeavor, based on the image on the cover alone—Tubby and Lulu were wearing their 1950s gear, but were striking odd, unnatural, more current poses that seemed somehow…off.

But what the hell, I thought, there’s no risk in borrowing it from a library, and I was curious how they would have modernized the world of Little Lulu and what the various characters would sound like and so forth.

Well, as it turns out, it’s awful. Just awful. And a pretty unusual project all around. But mostly just awful. Unusually awful, even.

Here’s the opening theme:



As you can see, they’ve got the John Stanley/Irving Tripp version of the character designs down pat. The expressions, the costumes, the movements, the shapes of the characters faces and hands—it was a little disconcerting how perfectly they managed to replicate the characters (Lulu actually has a pretty long history of animated adaptations, and this version hews closest to the designs seen in the Dark Horse reprints).

That theme song may sound a little old fashioned, and there’s a good reason for it—it is. It’s almost the exact same song that used to play before the old Famous Studios Little Lulu shorts from the 1940s. The one change? “Though you’re wild as any Zulu and you’re just as hard to tame” becomes “Though you’re wild you know it’s true, Lu, and you’re very hard to tame.”

The episodes collected on the DVD were divided into about three short stories, each of which was a scene-for-scene adaptation of one of the stories from the old Dell comics that Dark Horse is collecting. Even short gag skits between the stories—called “Lulu Bites”—were in some cases lifted directly from the comics. There were some minor changes here and there to fudge the fact that it wasn’t the mid-50’s any more, but the fidelity to the source material was remarkable.

Now, I don’t know if that’s exactly a good thing. It’s certainly something I’m not used to seeing in American animation. I have this problem with anime based on manga and manga based on anime, or any property that exists in both formats really—whichever version I experience first tends to taint the version I experience second, so that I hate the one I experience second, no matter how much I might love the one I experienced firest. At least with television anime; film versions tend to differ more dramatically.

So many anime series are so closely based on the manga, that, if I’ve seen the anime first, then I find the manga stories insufferably boring (and can sometimes have difficulty not hearing the voice actors’ voice in my head while reading their dialogue). Or if I’ve read the manga first, then the anime seems horribly boring, as a story I’ve already read at my own pace is slowly played out to fill a particular time slot (Dragon Ball Z is probably the worst offender of this ever created; it takes, what, two hours to read Goku and Gohan’s adventures on Namek, but some 98 days to watch the goddam cartoon version of the sequence?)

Anyway, that’s what watching Little Lulu was like. In most cases, I had already read the stories the cartoons were so rigorously replicating, so there were no surprises, beyond the changes in minor things to disguise the setting.

What I found most odd about the whole thing was the Seinfeld influence, which is about as random an influence for a Little Lulu show as I can imagine.

Each episode opens with Lulu on a stage, performing incredibly unfunny stand-up before a “live” audience providing canned laughter, laughter that always swells to cheering applause as her routine reaches its climax. The jokes are all incredibly weak—I felt sad seeing how many writers were involved with creating these sequences while watching the credits of Stanley and Tripp—the kind of jokes little kids might tell, only too polished for the insane non sequitirs that real little kids seem to delight in passing off as jokes. The audience seems to consist of adults though.

Sometimes the jokes will refer thematically to the story elements in the episode, a la Seinfeld, but just as often they won’t. It’s been about a week since I watched it, and I still haven’t come up with a rationale for why the producers decided a few Seinfeld homages/rip-offs per episode would be the best way to re-package these 40-year-old stories.

I mean, I know Seinfeld was pretty popular back in the '90s, but did kids love it too? What the hell?

Here's one of those awful sequences:



Ugh.

It did sate my curiosity regarding how Little Lulu would play as a cartoon though, I guess. Tracey Ullman provided her voice at one point, later replaced by Jane Woods (I believe all the episodes I saw were voiced by Woods, but I’m not sure). Lulu’s voice is pretty grown-up and irritatingly sassy throughout, kind of like Babs Bunny from Tiny Toons (Ooohhh how I hate that Babs Bunny!)

I’m not terribly fond of Tubby’s voice either, but it does sound nice and…well, fat, I guess. (If that makes sense; you can, like, hear the fat in his voice).

I think I preferred the 1940’s cartoon Lulu voice better though:




And, speaking of old-school Lulu cartoons, here’s one with some sweet Tubby action in it:



Lulu’s voice sounds younger and cuter, and Tubby sounds less fat, yet more obnoxious. Both of them sure are full of jokes at the expense of Native Americans though…sheesh. (And, as an Italian-American, I suppose I should maybe be offended by the portrayal of Christopher-a Columbus, “America, we-a discover-a you!”).

Satellite Era Spotlight: Justice League of America Annual #1

Justice League of America Annual #1 (1983), by Paul Levitz, Len Wein, Rick Hoberg and Dick Giordano

Twenty-two thousand and three hundred miles above the Earth, a handful of Justice Leaguers are in pitched battle against massive, armored aliens that seem to each be as powerful as Superman. While Ralph "Elongated Man" Dibny struggles to hold one, it's fist punches a hole in the JLA Satellite's plasteel walls, and



But it turns out it was all just a dream!



Whew.

Hmm, and it turns out I was wrong about Ralph’s favorite ice cream. But who could have guessed guacamole ice cream? I didn't even know such a thing existed...

Sue offers to talk about his nightmare with him, but Ralph laughs it off and she rolls over to go back to sleep. He stares out his bedroom window, thinking dark thoughts, and worrying that maybe some day someone will get hurt because of his choice to become The Elongated Man. Ha! Like that would ever happen!

Then we cut to...





Hey, when the credit box on the first page referred to Wein as "wordsmith," it wasn't kidding! Man, this is some nice narration. It almost sounds like a poem...

Elsewhere, in a room
Without number
In a place
Without name
A shadowy figure sits before a
Massive Materioptikon
His gloved fingers flying across
The control board as if playing
Some perverted calliope
But his is not a happy song

But who is this shadowy figure? Hobbers' panels slowly tease out his idenity. Why, it's...



...Skeletor!



Alright, alright, Doctor Destiny.

Special guest star Commissioner Gordon notices that Destiny escaped from his cell at Arkham Asylum, leaving an illusion of himself in his cot. Gordon can't reach Batman, who is busy invading Markovia in the pages of the then-just launched Batman and The Outsiders (The Showcase Presents volume of which is totally worth $16.99). So Gordon turns to the League, apparently inviting them all down to his kitchen for a meeting.



No, I guess that's actually the Justice League's meeting room. Hoberg just draws it like a kitchen. Anyway, after Gordon tells them about Destiny, the League decides that they'll split up into teams to search for the villain.

Firestorm, The Atom, Hawkman and Hawkgirl head to a psych-lab at Ivy University, using a Thanagarian cerebrumeter to follow a trail of unusually high concentrated delta-waves.

Using his molecular restructuring powes, Firestorm creates a revolving door in the wall of the building, and a mustachioed scientist immediately shows off his deductive skills:



“Sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first. The hawk-shaped helmet, the giant hawk-wings and the symbol of a hawk on your chest confused me. I thought you might be Batman and Batwoman.”

Destiny's not there, but when he sees that the League is, he uses the Materioptikon to summon green monsters from the dreams of slumbering test subjects to attack his foes.


What, you didn’t believe me this was from 1983?

Fresh out of quips with short shelf-lives, Firestorm manages to awaken the students whose dreams are generating their foes, thus ending the battle.

The Leaguers then show off what good teammates they all are, by all speaking one fourth of the same sentence



Now that's teamwork!

Meanwhile, the all-blonde squad of Aquaman, Black Canary and Green Arrow journey to a Greenwich Village art fair, because several of the artists participating have disappeared.



Note that when alone, the nearest civilians a good twenty feet away, these three Leaguers, all of whom know each other’s secret identities, even the two of them who are living together, don’ use their eal names. Even their nicknames are based on their codenames: "Arrow," "Archer," "Pretty Bird."

Now, one of ex-Justice League of America writer Brad Metlzer’s most obvious and annoying affectations was to always have the heroes calling each other by their first name, whether or not the character's knew each other's real names, or if there were villians around, or if they were out in public, or if no one reading the damn comic knew the characters' first names (See "The Lightning Saga;" surely fewer readers are on a first-name basis with the fantasy Legion of Super-Heroes that Meltzer and Geoff Johns created for the story than people reading the book, right?)

But what's the source of Meltzer's weird habit? Obviously the so-called Satellite Era has had a huge influence on Meltzer; these are the characters he likes most, the stories he references the most and all of the mistakes and continuity gaffes he made tended to come about from him trying to honor this Pre-Crisis (on Infinite Earths) continuity rather than the Post-Crisis continuity (It could even be argued that the sole reason DC rejiggered their continuity in Infinite Crisis was to realign it with Meltzer's vision of how it should be).

But here we have a Satellite Era comic, and the characters aren't calling each other Ollie and Arthur and Dinah.

Back to the story, the Blonde Batallion's investigation goes a lot like that of Firestorm's team. Destiny's not there but he's watching, and uses the Materioptikon to summon something for them to fight, which they do.

Meanwhile, Wonder Woman and The Flash race to Gotham City to search for Destiny, where they meet a surprise guest star...



Aw, come on, Wonder Woman! I was just complimenting you guys on your restraint and discretion regarding your real names, and there you are blurting John’s full name out in public!

(Actually, does John have a secret identity? I remember he made a big deal about not wanting to wear a mask, so maybe he's always been out? Short of one issue in the GL/GA trades, the one in which he first gets his power ring, this is the earliest story featuring him I’ve read, I think.)

Now, why is Flash so unhappy to see him? Why does Barry Allen hate black people?

John makes with some exposition (and refers to his costume as "cockamamie") before conjuring up a gigantic, glowing, green blood hound to sniff out delta-wave radiation.



Is the dog just for show, and the ring's detecting the delta waves? Or did GL use the ring to create a delta-wave detector and put it in the dog's nose or...?

Anyway, I like the fact that Wonder Woman's all, "This should get us upstairs unnoticed," and then they float up the shaft in a glowing green bubble attached to a giant, glowing green blood hound.

Anyway, you know what happens by this point, right? Destiny's not there, but he's watching, summons some dream foes for the Leaguer to fight, and they fight them off.

Meanwhile, Zatanna uses her magic to find Doctor Destiny, thus proving the last 20 pages or so a huge waste of everyone's time. First she and the League leftovers of Elongated Man and Red Tornado magic to the dream realm for their own version of the same scene we've already seen three times.

Then she summons the League, and they splash page their way forward.



I really like the top half of this panel, and the way all the fliers have their own flying style. Particularly John. He really looks like he’s being propelled through the sky by a force, instead of adopthing the gegneric Superman flying pose, and in fact, he isn’t really posing at all, just flying. Heck, that’s how I’d fly if I could fly. Good job, Hoberg!

And where are they splash-paging off, too? Why, to this familiar setting:



Oh wow, no way! It's the Kirby-created Sandman! The one that came long after Wesley Dodds, but long before Morpheus of The Endless! I honestly did not see that coming. With The Sandman and hsi servants Brute and Glob captured, Destiny controls the realm and all the nightmares and dream monsters within it, which he sics on the League.

They beat back the bad guys, however, and are closing in on their nemesis, when he decides to fight dirty, and thorw sand in their eyes



And not just any sand, but "The Sandman's somnolent sand," which puts them asleep. Ralph's the last one to go down, but he's able to stretch a finger to the eject button on The Sandman's tube, shooting him into the Dream-Stream. Doctor Destiny's all like, "Ha, who cares if I lose The Sandman; I've got the whole Justice League!" So he puts them all in glass collector's cases and gloats.

The Sandman uses his newfound freedom to journey to Earth and wake up a napping Clark Kent, who ripss off his suit to become Superman, and, in short order, they're in the Dream Dimension, kicking ass and opening glass cases:



With Destiny successfully defied, the League and their new ally retire to the Satellite for a post-mortem of the adventure. And then Firestorm pops the question:



Now, I'm sure it didn't occur to Levitz and Wein when they were writing this scene, and it may not even look like it now at first glance, but this is actually a momentous moment in comics history right here. The JLA is asking The Sandman to join their team here and, no exaggeration, which way Levitz and Wein decide to have him answer this question would have had a gigantic impact on the medium's creative and commercial growth.

To back up for a second, I should note there’s no real reason for The Sandman to say no here. He fits in perfectly well, even more so than Elongated Man or Firestorm or Red Tornado, in terms of Justice League worthiness. He's an iconic character and household name kind of hero of hero (Like Uncle Sam, he's a DC-owned superhero whose name alone makes him as familiar as Batman or Superman, even if he's not as popular as a comic book character).

While he's not Kirby's most inspired creation, not even his most inspired DC creation, he's not a bad character. Hes costume's decent and seems to fit in among the rest of the Leaguers, his powers are interesting and unique and, like the vast majority of the heroes on the League at the time, he works far better on a tea than he would alone. His book didn't last very long, but, like Elongated Man or Green Arrow or Zatanna or Red Tornado, eve if he couldn't support a book of his own, he could certainly help support a team book.

Long sory short, Levitz and Wein could have easily made him say yes and join the Justice League.

Now, imagine if he did. Imagine if he becomes a character like Elongated Man, Red Tornado, Firestorm or Zatanna, a member of the League's B-team who is forever associated with the team. That means he’s not in limbo and half-forgotten for the remainder of the '80s, and then, come 1989, maybe he’s joining on the JLI instead of lending his name and an element or two to Neil Gaiman’s dramatic reimagining of him in The Sandman.

Then what? Hard to say for sure, but, at the very least, there's no Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, one of, if not the, best American comic books produced (I once read an article that that said it wasn't just one of the best comics of the latter half of the 20th century, but it was one of the best works of fiction of that period, and I’m inclined to agree).

But the quality of Gaiman's Sandman series aside, it undoubtedly had a huge impact on our pop culture, and a hard to over-estimate one on comics.

Without The Sandman, what would become of Neil Gaiman’s career? Would he have simply taken over Swamp Thing after Alan Moore left? Would he have turned Books of Magic or Black Orchid into a sufficeintly Big Thing to replace The Sandman? Does he find success elsewhere?

What about all the superstar artists that came out of iThe Sandman, finding much bigger and more appreciative audiences than they had before working on it?

What about Vertigo, foundation of which was certainly laid by Moore, Grant Morrison and others, but the spine of which has long been Gaiman's little Sandman universe. It was his Death The High Cost of Living that was the first official Vertigo book. WithoutThe Sandman, is there a Vertigo? (At the very least, there wouldn't be that or the Death book and other Endless and Dreaming related spin-offs, and probably not Sandman Mystery Theater or The Books of Magic or Lucifer and all those The Sandman Presents books.

Without Vertigo, think of all the creators who might not have found their way into U.S. pop comics, or at least not in the same way or at the same level of popularity that they ultimately did—Morrison, Peter Milligan, Garth Ennis, Mark Millar...

Without The Sandman and Vertigo, does the graphic novel revolution ever get here? Does it just come a little bit later, or does it take a different form entirely? Is it pushed along by manga, and Western companies are rushing to reach this new bookstore audience at the beginning of the aughts?

Talk about a nightmare world! A world where The Sandman joined the Justice League is a world where The Sandman was never published, a world where Vertigo may never have existed, where graphic novels never became the prominent format ath athey are now and AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!



Whew! It was all just a dream. The Kirby Sandman turned the offer of Justice League membership down, and thus entered limbo to be transformed into Gaiman's Sandman at the end of the decade.

It’s a good thing that when The Sandman said that his condition of only being able to leave the Dream-Dimension for an hour at a time would make joining the team impractical, nobody was like, "Oh, that's cool. Aquaman had the same problem with being out of water, and he founded the team, and has been with us for years now."

Thank you, Mike Sterling

Comics retailer, Swamp Thing fan and elite comics blogger Mike Sterling's site Progressiveruin.com is one of my favorite places to visit on the Internet, in part because it's always open. Not only does Sterling update every single day, but since I've been reading, I don't think he's ever taken a day off or gotten sick or lost his Internet connection or any of the other little things that tend to keep folks from providing me something other than lolcats to look at on a daily basis.

He has a pretty great post today revolving around the Silver Age Justice League and their collective teen sidekick Snapper Carr, whom Sterling seems to single out for some abuse.

Why would anyone have anything negative to say about Snap? I don't know, but I suspect it's sour grapes; Sterling is just jealous that Snapper spent his teenage years hanging out with the World's Greatest Heroes, while young Sterling was splashing around swamps looking in vain for muck-encrusted mockeries of men to hang out with.

Anyway, go read Sterling's post.

Are you back?

Was that last panel awesome or what?

Let's look at it again:


God, what a great panel! The range of emotions on the various Justice Leaguers' faces, from the very uncomfortable Wonder Woman to the totally perplexed Hal Jordan to the surprisngly animated and puckish looking Martian Manhunter.

And the best part? The Flash and Manhunter doing that sitcom thing where they both have the same idea at the same time and announce it to each other (Since J'onn is a mind-reader, I'm surprised he doesn't do that, like, constantly).

I think this may be the single greatest Martian Manhunter image in the history of Martian Manhunter images:


Anyway, I don't have anything else to say about it. It's just been, like, twenty-some hours since I've last mentioned J'onn J'onnz here, and I'd hate to let a whole day go by without talking about him, you know?

misc.

—I’ve gone back and forth a few times this week over whether or not I should post something acknowledging the passing of Steve Gerber.

I didn’t feel the need to post about it to inform anyone, as I assume just about everyone who stops by here had already heard about it and read many of the tributes, remembrances, off-the-cuff eulogies and official obituaries that have poured out of the professional and fan communities throughout the week, in what amounts to something of an electronic wake.

And then there was the fact that I knew more about Gerber’s work than I actually knew his work; my personal experience with his writing is quite limited.

See, I’m 30 years old, and I didn’t start reading comics until around 1990 or so. Like a lot of readers, I started reading in both directions, scooping up new books as they came out, but also hitting libraries and back issue bins and reading backwards through the medium simultaneously (at a rate that’s increased exponentially in the last few years, given the incredible amount of work available in trades now).

So, obviously, I missed the work Gerber was best known for; I wasn’t even talking yet when he had left Marvel for the first time. The very first Gerber-written comics I’d read were Nevada and Hard Time, his last Howard the Duck series for the Marvel’s Max imprint was my first non-terrible movie experience with the character, and it wasn’t until about a year or so ago that I read his Defenders and Omega the Unknown, the latter of which was so far ahead of its time that it was weird reading it in the 21st century and wrapping my head around the fact that it was actually from the seventies.

Oddly, while I had always thought of Gerber as That Guy Who Used To Write Howard The Duck, I didn’t realize that he also wrote for television animation until I started reading about his career in posts like this, and that I had grown up experiencing his writing after all.

In addition to working on Young Caleb favorite series Thundarr The Barbarian, Gerber also wrote for G. I. Joe, a cartoon series that is near the top of my Greatest Things I’ve Ever Experienced list. I see that Gerber wrote two of the series’ very best storylines, the one where Destro and Lady Jaye discover they’re related, and there’s that crazy Lovecraft monster in the well at the bottom of their ancestral castle, and then that trippy two-parter where Shipwreck thinks he’s losing his mind).

This might sound silly, but in a way I feel kind of lucky to have not read so much of Gerber’s greatest work yet. The tragedy of a writer, artist or creative person you’ve never even met dying is, after all, in large part the realization that you won’t be getting to enjoy any new work from that person again. I know that there are still a lot of Gerber-written comics I haven’t read yet, and I look forward to doing so.

Tom Spurgeon has been compiling a master list of remembrances of and tributes to Gerber here.



—In announcing DC Universe #0, Dan DiDio says they changed the name from Countdown to Final Crisis #0 when they realized they didn’t want to end a Countdown to Final Crisis trade with a cliffhanger. I wonder if it didn’t have more to do with the fact that they were afraid to brand the book with the word Countdown, an association which has had little benefit for many of the several dozen other books to be branded as part of the Countdown mega story?



—I was relieved to read the rumored Busiek/Bagley Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman series being officially announced this week, mostly because it seems like such a good idea, and I was worried that the rumors rumor monger Rich Johnston was, um, mongering were too good to be true.

Interesting that DC’s had two weekly series now, one of which was successful in terms of sales, fan response and critical responses, and another that was fairly successful in terms of sales, widely reviled by fans and universally despised by all critics. Each was produced was a different approach. So I assumed that a third series would be done using the approach of the first, but it seems that DC’s going with a third approach, having one creative team handle the bulk of each issue.

It’s a great creative team, so I think the series has a lot of potential. It’s also a lot of work for so few creators though, and I think this series therefore has an even greater chance of hitting a publishing delay than the first two.

Like 52 and Countdown, this will be a fun series to watch and I hope that, like 52 at least, it will be a fun one to read.


—I’ll give Reign in Hell a chance, because I liked the idea of the DC devils fighting over hell in all the other comic books I’ve read it happen in over the last 15 years or so and I generally like Keith Giffen’s writing when he’s on, but I’m pretty leery of Dan DiDio’s contention that it will establish a new set of “rules” for magic in the DC Universe:

In the past at DC, we’ve always played the balance as being between order and chaos. Then, starting with Day of Vengeance, we’ve shown that magic has been in disarray since the death of Shazam and the other events that occurred in that miniseries. What you’re going to find now, is that magic has realigned itself with a whole new set of rules, and those rules are being crafted by those individuals who control Hell. So naturally, there’s a direct effect between what’s going on in Hell and the magic being used in the DC Universe.

Considering the last time that those rules were originally laid out in a series written by Neil freaking Gaiman and illustrated by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess and Paul Johnson in the days before the Vertigo imprint was created and some of the DCU’s most interesting supernatural characters were separated from the fictional universe that birthed them, did the rules of magic really need rewritten? Because if Giffen and company’s series doesn’t best Gaiman and company’s, than I don’t see how it can be seen to have been worthwhile.


—Is Grant Morrison the DC Universe’s savior? No matter how bad it seems to get fucked up, he’s right there waiting to re-awesomeify it. At least, that’s what I gathered from hearing him talk to Zack Smith about Final Crisis. It sounds great: A one-off Justice League villain from the ‘70s, a one-off Martian Manhunter villain, Streaky the Super-cat in #2, Kamandi, Anthro, Frankenstein, “a big definitive battle between Supergirl and Mary Marvel. Some seriously badass super-animals…”

What I found particularly interesting was this bit from Morrison: “It’s the apocalypse. (laughs) Basically, this is it. This is doomsday for the DC Universe… This is about the DC Universe under the greatest threat that it’s ever faced. It’s the ultimate annihilation of everything they hold dear."

See, what I loved about Morrison’s JLA run was that it started with the White Martians taking over the world and about to execute the League, and, with each successive arc, the end of the world threatened them again. Morrison’s League was a council of heroes, united by the fact that they were each the best of the best, constantly staving off the apocalypse (not a bad theme for a millennial book like the one he was writing), and each time they beat it back, it simply returned in greater force until “World War III.”

By that point, the apocalypse was such a huge threat it took the intervention of the armies of heaven and every single man, woman and child on Earth getting superpowers and uniting to defeat it.

And now Morrison’s saying he’s come up with a greater threat than Mageddon? Now that’s a comic book I want to read.


—Man, Mark Millar sure makes it hard to like him. Speaking to The List about Civil War, he says: ‘”It was actually the most difficult assignment I’ve ever had. It’s the bestselling comic of the last 15 years, yet when I see it sitting on my shelf I actually feel a bit sick. I just think of how much time it took up and how much re-writing I had to do just to co-ordinate everything with the other writers.”

If you follow the link, you’ll see folks fact-checking Millar, and an update regarding Millar’s response to said fact-checking.

The “bestselling comic of the last 15 years” bit sounded suspect to me, at least without a bunch of caveats regarding format and market and so forth (all of the sort there’s no reason The List would bother to include anyway), but what struck me was this thought: What kind of jerk pays attention to that stuff, anyway? Does Millar have a big chart in his office with bar graphs of comics sales to see if he’s the best-selling or the fifth best-selling comics writer or what?

It’s an especially amusing remark right before lamenting how much time it took him to produce the series. (And imagine how much more time it might have taken if it was any good!). Perhaps he’d have more time for comics writing if he wasn’t collating sales data for comics from the last fifteen years…


—Speaking of Millar, I’m waiting for the trade on his Fantastic Four, like I wish I would have done for his last two collaborations with Hitch. It was not easy not buying this week’s issue though, once I got a look at the Thing in his 19th century gear.


—Easy joke at the expense of someone toward whom I bear no ill will: Valerie D’Orazio thinks all black superheroes look alike.

You know, one of the great advantages of blogging vs. writing for traditional print media is that in the case of the former, when you make a mistake, you can go back and correct it immediately, whereas with the latter, once the mistake is in print, all you can do is apologize for it later in print.

So it was weird to see D’Orazio refer to Jefferson “Black Lightning” Pierce as “John Irons,” apparently an abbreviated version of John Henry Irons, the secret identity of Steel, in her recent review of the last JSoA issue. And then, when a commenter pointed out her mistake, rather than issuing the typical “Oops, my bad,” she went to bizarre lengths to note that her misreading pointed to a key weakness in the book, and how her misread version would have made more sense, and that the commenter was pulling “a dick move” for pointing out her mistake and reaction to being told she made a mistake.

Now, neither Steel nor Black Lightning are regulars in the book, and yeah, they’re both black dudes with bald heads, the former often in the company of a teenager with long braids, as the latter was in this issue.

But then, Irons has glasses. And usually a goatee. And, depending on who’s drawing him, an earring or two. And he’s not married. And he doesn’t have any daughters, let alone two of them, one of whom is on The Outsiders (He does have a niece named Nat, who does, admittedly, look like the girl in this scene named Jennifer). Oh, and he’s not a teacher. An he doesn’t live in Chicago. And, obviously, his names not Jeff, and the dialogue in the scene refers to the character in question as “Jeff.” Three times.

To be fair to D’Orazio—fairer than her churlish response to her own readers warrants, actually—her confusion perhaps underscores the weakness in making Black Lightning bald, so that he more closely resembles Steel, Mister Miracle II, Jakeem Thunder and the animated version of John Stewart (Why can’t DC let it’s black superheroes have hair? I feel like Mr. Terrific needs to grow a big blowout just to compensate for everyone else’s head-shavings). And, of course, how weird it was that Geoff Johns just sort of retroactively invented a wife and second daughter for a character who was single and childless (up until Judd Winick and/or Johns assigned him his first daughter, anyway).

Perhaps D’Orazio’s confusion between Black Lighting and Steel speaks to how complicated and new reader repellent the modern DCU is though. I mean, note that she’s a former DC editor and she can’t tell who’s who in one of the company’s best-written and best-drawn series; what hope do new readers have of making sense of The Legion of Super-Heroes, Countdown to Infinite Crisis or Salvation Run?


—I haven’t been reading Salvation Run, in part because of its association with Countdown and in part because it seems supremely illogical even for a series involving not one but two talking super-gorillas (If their captors want to give the villains an extra-judicial punishment, why bother putting them on another planet? Why not just put a bullet in each one’s brain? And why on Earth give them their weapons and their favorite clothes before sending them there?).

I did flip through it this week, however, on account of the cover, which featured the aforementioned two talking super-gorillas coming to blows. The first really stupid thing I saw was on page one, wherein Martian Manhunter, presumably there incognito, resumes his hero form to covertly call home on the down low. What, his radio doesn’t work while he’s in disguise or invisible?

Please note: The above scene is extremely stupid.

And then there was the gorilla-on-gorilla Grodd vs. Monsieur Mallah battle, which seemed to come to a rather permanent conclusion. The solicitation for this particular issue promises that “villains will die” and Hannibal Tabu’s Comicbookresources.com review also indicates that it was a battle to the death. Mallah and The Brain weren’t caught in an explosion or thrown into the ocean or some sort of easy-to-come-back-from death, either, but they were beaten to death.

Man, who wants to live in a fictional universe that doesn’t have room for a talking gorilla with a French title, a beret, and a bandolier and his boss/best friend (and possibly more), who is a talking disembodied brain that lives in a skull-shaped robot canister?


—Damn, that Jog character sure can review of a comic book. In his review of the first issue of Image’s Next Issue Project, I noted several occasions where he said the exact same thing I thought about the book, although he said it much more concisely and elegantly than I did, either in my hastily assembled Wednesday night review, or the slightly more polished version you can see on Newsarama on Monday.

He seems to have found the anything-goes approach a virtue, while I thought it was a drawback. Likewise, my favorite story was the one he liked the least (Allred and company’s Stardust one), and the ones I liked the least were among his favorite (the contributions from Ashley Wood and Joe Casey and Bill Sienkiewicz).

We both seem to have enjoyed Rugg and Maruca’s Captain Kidd story though.

Valentine's Day Special: I love Cub

“My Chinchilla,” from 1993 album Betti-Cola. This is by far my favorite love song of all time.



“New York City,” from 1995’s Come Out Come Out. Another great love song. (And yes, They Might Be Giants did cover it.)



“My Flaming Red Bobsled,” also from Come Out Come Out



“Freaky,” from 1996’s Box of Hair.



What does now-broken-up Vancouver-based band Cub have to do with comics exactly, aside from some of the imagery in the above “Flaming Red Bobsled” video?

Well, here’s the cover of their debut album Betti-Cola, from Canada’s Mint Records:



Hey, is that…



Yes. Yes it is.

PSA: Attention, Columbus music and/or comics fans!

If you've been to even a single show in Columbus, you've probably seen Donewaiting.com mastermind Rob Duffy; if you're involved in music in just about any aspect in Columbus, than chances are you know Duffy. In addition to his work building and maintaing the DW blog and its (occassionally rowdy) message board, Duffy's a show promoter, mini-label runner and, of course, a huge music fan.

To celebrate his site's fifth anniversarry, he's put together a hell of a two-day, two-venue bill. Friday night, it's Sinkane, Grave Blankets, Deathly Fighter and This Moment in Black History at Carabar. Saturday night, as the above Clint Reno poster says, is El Jesus de Magico, Blueprint and Brainbow (in a special one-time only collaboration) and EDILW favorites Miranda Sound and Mike Shiflet at Skully's. The last few days, DW's been previewing the various acts, so if you're interested in any of the above, check out the site.

If you don't have anything better to do this weekend (and come on, you know you don't), make sure you check out the show.

And while I'm engaging in some hypery for Columbus events, here's a few other heads-ups, although they're more of the mark-your-calendars variety at this point.

Anyway, this year's Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo is right around the corner now. Like, just a few weeks away.

Here's Tom Williams' poster of the event:



A secret Dave Sim project entitled, um, Secret Project #1, will be unveiled there. For more info, check out the SPACE site. For comics-focused socializing that weekend, the Panel gang will be hosting a couple of public parties.

Here's the skinny on those:

Friday, Feb. 29
Monkey's Retreat
1202 N. High St (Near the corner of High and Fifth Ave.)
8 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Saturday, March 1
Momo2
2885 Olentangy River Rd

Weekly Haul: February 13th

Booster Gold #0 (DC Comics) The seventh issue of Jeff Katz, Geoff Johns, Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund’s surprisingly good series should by rights be labeled #7, but bears #0 instead. Why? Well, it’s a kinda sorta but not really crossover into the 1994 miniseries written and drawn by Jurgens, Zero Hour (A story which, by the way, Johns has spent much of career at DC fiddling with fall-out from).

The story itself actually has very little to do with that of Zero Hour—Booster Gold and his quartet of Blue Beetles simply pass Zero Hour-era Extant and Parallax in the timestream and have to duke it out with them for a couple of pages—but Katz and Johns seize the opportunity for a fun little nod, even using the silver ink on the cover that all the ’94 zero issues bore (They could have gone further though, and included the Zero Hour symbol in the upper righthand corner, and the “The Beginning of Tomorrow!” slug).

I look forward to Booster visiting the 853rd Century at some point, and DC giving us a Booster Gold #1,000,000 told in the format of JLA #1,000,000 and some of the other DC One Million tie-ins.

Aside from that fight, the rest of the issue deals with Blue(s) and Gold crash-landing in the 25th century, the other Beetles going home, and Booster and Ted returning to the present, only to find it swarming with OMACs (Of the Infinite Crisis variety, not the Kirby variety). The implication seems to be that you can’t change history after all, which doesn’t bode well for the resurrection of our Blue Beetle (sniff!), but it’s still been a blast.

Columbus readers may be surprised to note that the team Booster was playing on the day he threw the game that cost him his football career was Ohio State. Apparently in 500 years, OSU’s football program will still be going strong, although apparently not as strong as Gotham University’s.




The New Avengers #38 (Marvel Comics) I wasn’t entirely positive this wasn’t a long-delayed issue of Alias #29 for a while, as Jessica Jones gets more panel-time then any of the Avengers, New or Mighty (both sets appear). Plus it’s drawn by Brian Michael Bendis’ old Alias partner Michael Gaydos, and the first panels are set in front of a door reading “Alias Investigation Services.”

Jessica and Baby Cage are safely ensconced in Avengers Tower, and Luke Cage isn’t happy about it, resulting in almost a whole issue’s worth of him arguing with his wife. The Mighty Avengers swoop in and don’t arrest Cage for the seventeenth time since Civil War, and the New, now Dr. Strange-less Avengers get a new base of operations.

It’s all well-written and well-drawn (although Echo better turn out to be a goddam Skrull, if she’s lip-reading a dude who has no lips), but it’s very much a chapter of a story rather than a story in and of itself, even more so than a lot of Bendis’ Avengers work, meaning it will probably read better in a trade someday.




Next Issue Project #1: Fantastic Comics #24 (Image Comics) I’ve always been fascinated by Golden Age comics characters, particularly the ones that didn’t quite make it to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman levels of enduring popularity, like Plastic Man and Captain Marvel, and those that slipped so thoroughly through the cracks that they only existed for me in tiny black and white cover reproductions in price guides, and as intriguing names and images in books about comic books, their real stories existing only in my mind.

For someone who’s always been intrigued by the idea of the Jack Cole Daredevil, The Green Lama and the like, it’s been a hell of a couple of months. Marvel’s The Twelve brought back twelve freakish never-made-its from Marvel’s catalogue, Project: Superpowers brought back another handful of some of the characters I’ve always wanted to read adventures about, and now Image’s Next Issue Project unearths another group of Golden Age also-rans.

It may simply be a matter of the stories that others write and draw never quite living up to the ones you’ve built up in your head over the years, but I found both The Twelve and Project: Superpowers to be somewhat disappointing (The former due mostly to Straczynski’s hackneyed story-telling strategies and the jumpy structure, the latter due to the awkward juxtaposition of an extremely goofy plot with an off-putting self-seriousness).

Perhaps I should have known then to ratchet down my expectations for Image’s Next Issue Project then, in which a group of creators present the next issue of a Golden Age series, but this ends up being another example of a book from our Golden Age of Golden Age revivals not quite living up to its potential.

My heart sank the second I laid eyes on the book, as it’s dimensions are Golden Age—that is, its dimensions are far bigger than a normal comic book, more magazine-sized. Meaning I wouldn’t know where to store it, and this would actively irritate me for the rest of my life.

So what’s wrong with the book, other than how it taunts my OCD over comic book storage and organization? Well, it’s a pretty great idea that wasn’t completely thought out, or at least not to the point where all of the contributors were on the same page regarding what they were doing.

Is this supposed to be a modern comic book, bringing the old characters into the 21st century, in terms of setting and storytelling style? Or is this supposed to be a long lost next issue of Fantastic Comics, issue #23 of which shipped in 1941?

Different chapters take different approaches. Some ape the Golden Age era to varying levels of success, some are merely modern comics; some are told as if they were modern comics, but colored as if they were printed in the ‘40s. It’s really all over the place.

The list of contributors, similarly, are all great talents whose work I really dig, but few of them are very Golden Age in their art style; Michael Allred, Tom Scioli and Erik Larsen, for example, are so heavily influenced by Silver Age work that it would take an enormous amount of effort on their part to ape the work of that era. Others, like Andy Kuhn, Bill Sienkiewicz and Ashley Wood, have such a modern sensibility it seems impossible to imagine their work existing in the 1940s.

Still, not every story is a wasted opportunity. At least three of them pull of the “Next Issue” concept perfectly, and the Allred-drawn one provides an elegant coda to the endeavor.

But let’s take them one by one, shall we?

Erik Larsen, he of the hurried, Kirby-like line, contributes a story about Samson, Fantastic Comics cover feature. In it, the post-deconstructionist school of thought regarding sidekicks come into play, while Samson and David fight their way through hordes of monsters. Larsen’s story is colored so as to resemble a Golden Age book, but otherwise is a mélange of styles.

Joe Casey and Sienkiewicz contribute a story about Flip Falcon in the Fourth Dimension, whch is also colored old school, but in it’s lettering, box narration, design and concerns, it seems more like a post-Bronze Age story.

The strongest Golden Age approximation comes from writer/artist Thomas Yeates and co-writer Bryan Rutherford featuring The Golden Knight, which is clear in it’s coloring, but has the panel lay-outs and letters of comics from back in the day, with the somewhat unsure mixture of words and images of the sort you saw in the first decades of the medium, when comics were still inventing themselves.

Andy Kuhn presents a Yank Wilson story which amounts to little more than a gag and, in lay-out, style and story, it’s very much a 2008 comic rather than a 1941 one.

B. Clay Moore contributes a two-page Carlton Riggs illustrated prose story, of the sort I despise in my comics, but which you did see in the comics of the day, so I can’t hold it against Moore.

Scioli writes and draws a brilliantly bright Space Smith story, which mixes Buck Rogers-style sci-fi designs and small, detailed panels, with arrows showing your eyes where to go.

One of the strongest comes courtesy of the Street Angel team of Jim Rugg and Brian Marucca, who tackle Captain Kidd. He’s one of the few characters who really stands out as a character with a unique hook in the book. Their art style doesn’t exactly scream “Golden Age,” but you can see them striving to approximating the more detailed style of someone like, say, Lou Fine, and the story looks and reads right.

That’s followed by a two-page Professor Field story by Fred Hembeck which…well, it’s no good, really, but deserves a certain amount of affection simply in that it’s a Hembeck story.

Then there’s what will undoubtedly be the story that garners the most interest, Fletcher Hanks’ Stardust The Super Wizard, newly famous thanks to the crazy-ass I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets. Michael Allred draws the pictures, Laura Allred colors them, Joe Keatinge writes the story and Val Nunez chameleonically letters the story.

Allred’s refined art style isn’t exactly the sort you’d think would make for a strong continuation of Hanks (actually, I would think Allred would have been better on Samson, and Larsen better on Hanks), but it is fun to see Allred redraw some of the images I Shall Destroy… has made somewhat iconic over the past few months, including Stardust streaking like a comet (as seen on the cover of Paul Karasik’s book) or the scene with the head-turning-into ray.

Keatinge also writes an elegant little story, a sort of meditation on both the insane primal power of Stardust, and the way in which the original superheroes were eventually whittled down into gray, mechanical automatons that…well, just read it. It’s pretty good though, and Allred gets to draw Fantomah, Fighting Yank, Daredevil, Spy Smasher and other familiar suits before it’s all over.

That story would have been a good one to end on, but instead Ashley Wood brings up the rear with a Sub Saunders story that looks just like everything else Ashley Wood does and, obviously, doesn’t look like it belongs in a book like this. It’s nice enough looking, but a rather frustrating read.

And—whew!—that’s the whole book. While I only liked a little less than half of the stories, all were interesting to look at and see what the creators did with the characters, making it for a fun reading experience the first time through, even if I doubt I’ll reread very many of these stories ever. I’ll definitely be reading the rest of Image’s Next Issue Project books though.

Now to figure out where to put this thing…




Superman #673 (DC) Superman vs. Ant-headed Supermen! America’s national past-time vs. The Insect Queen! Lois’ approach to parenting vs. Superman’s! Kurt Busiek wraps this three-part story arc up admirably precise plotting, in which no single part was wasted. It’s a dense, fun, smart read, with a nice balance between character work and super-stuff. I’m gonna miss Busiek like hell on this title when he departs, but I suppose a Busiek-written weekly comic is a more than fair trade off.





Tiny Titans #1 (DC) The highly-anticipated (by me, anyway) new Johnny DC title featuring a new, more kid-friendly take on the Titans characters by Art Baltazar, mastermind of the super-cute Patrick the Wolf-Boy comics (which, while not very compellingly written, feature fantastic art).

Having just read it, I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. Originally I assumed I wasn’t at all the target audience for it, but now I’m not so sure—much of the humor seems to be directed at people with familiarity with the characters, and the designs are all based on the DCU versions of the characters rather than the cartoon ones (Robin’s in the Dick Grayson costume, Beast Boy’s in his Changeling gear, Speedy’s in his original costume, etc).

Will kids now who Ravager is, or get a Trigon joke? Is Speedy not having super-speed humorous to little kids? What about Cassandra Sandsmark’s costume cut-ups…are they as amusing to readers who haven’t followed her succession of odd costumes?

I don’t really know. Without a focus group of little ones here with me, I have no way of judging whether this book is successful or not. I know I wouldn’t have liked it when I was little. It’s format is a gag-driven anthology comic, along the lines of Archie Comics, which I loathed as a child (I know cousin read ‘em, though). I think a lot of kids have an awareness of and a resistance to being pandered too, and, given the choice between a comic that is designated as a kids comic and one that’s not, I can only assume most kids would prefer the one that doesn’t have a crayon-writing logo.

This certainly is a poor replacement for Teen Titans Go!, as it’s clearly targeted at a much younger demographic; I don’t think the two books are at all interchangeable, although the plan seems to be for this to replace TTG!. And, finally, while I really like the casual, greatest-hits approach to the “line-up” here—Donna Troy and Cassie are both Wonder Girl! Short-pants Robin and Aqualad, Kid Devil and Ravager are all on the team at the same time!—it seems wildly inappropriate to me to use the same characters in this and Teen Titans.

The company is so careful about keeping Vertigo and the DCU separate, but there’s an even greater gulf between the DCU and the Johnny DC line. It seems odd to have cute little Ravager here, and have her stabbing her own eye out in Teen Titans, or all the plunging necklines and upskirt shots of the gals in the DCU book, and then the little kids here, you know?

Anyway, as for the book itself? I loved it! While I despised gag-driven books like this as a kid, preferring things with monsters, guns and punches, as an adult I’m much more appreciative of nice line work and pleasant, even meaningless story construction.

Baltazar’s art is incredible, and there isn’t a single character design in this book that isn’t fantastic. I particularly like his Bumblebee, who is almost a stick figure (with little afro-puffs that resemble Mickey Mouse ears). Even his adult characters are neat, like Principal Slade, who wears a coat and tie over his normal blue chainmail and orange accessories costume, or substitute teacher Mr. Trigon’s glasses over one of his sets of eyes.

Honestly, I enjoyed this much more than Teen Titans Go! and Teen Titans (under McKeever, Beechen or Johns), which, of course, makes me wonder if it’s going to hit with its intended audience after all or not. At any rate, I hope to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

The book ends with a “Super Friends Preview Surprise,” four pages of the Super Friends comic based on the new Super Friends toy line and, holy shit, does it suck. I don’t want to be too hard on the creators, who are obviously being asked to work within extremely strict confines, but it is a complete abomination that will turn all children who read it against comics and superheroes for life. I mean, The Flash is fat in that last panel. Come on!




Wonder Woman #17 (DC) Gail Simone finishes up her first story arc on the troubled title, and she finishes it fairly strong. I’m not real taken with her Wonder Woman-as-Ultimate-Ass-kicker take on the character, but Wonder Woman is coming out regularly and it’s no longer killing my brain cells while I read it, so that alone is reason to celebrate. She does seem to have some good idea of where to take the book, including given Wondy her sidekick back in the last few pages (Although DC doesn’t seem to be making it easy with Wondy’s mom and island stuck in the Countdown mega-plot for a while yet).

Simone’s dialogue and narration is almost hysterical in its purple hyperbole and melodrama; on another character or in a book with a more serious tone, I might go so far as to pronounce it bad, but it actually seems perfectly appropriate here.

The art is again split between the Dodsons and Ron Randall; both are good, but they don’t mesh all that well, and it’s unfortunate this book can’t have a regular artist. I look forward to the new artist and, hopefully, some covers that are better than these bland, Marvel-like, background and context-free posed shots.

Bonus points to Simone for remembering that a) Plastic Man exists and b) was on the Justice League.

Wonder Woman has a plan so crazy it just might work

Of course, if J'onn stayed in his cat form, we'd probably see more fights like this...

J'onn J'onnz's greatest look?

Yesterday we took a look at some of the many looks J'onn J'onnz has sported over the years, which, due to his ability to change his shape, tended to be a lot more dramatic than the changes that, say, Batman and Wonder Woman have made to their looks over the years.

But I saved what I regard as J'onn's very best look until today. Here's a hint, its one of those in Mister Bones' monitors on the cover of this comic:


That's the cover of 2000's Martian Manhunter #17, from the ultimate Martian Manhunter team of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake. This was a single-issue story, one that sort of crossed over with Chase, as it prominently featured the star of that series, plus Bones and the D.E.O. It also explored J'onn's then recent habit of assuming mutliple identities both to better fight crime and to better understand the human race that his destiny was now inextricably linked to.

The plot revolved around Bones trying to strongarm J'onn into working for the D.E.O., where the Manhunter's mental abilities and stealth capabilities would make him the ultimate spy. When J'onn refuses to narc on his fellow heroes, Bones plays hardball. In effect, roll over, or we'll out you in all your various identites.

The book opens with J'onn in perhaps his most unusual identity:



Yes, in addition to being a Denver-based private eye, a Brazilian street urchin and a Japanese businessman, J'onn is also a cat. I love this particular scene, not only because of what's in it explicitly, but because of the events that it references. Apparently Americans were asking around about that particular cat. I love the image of two Men In Black-types approaching old Italian ladies and saying "Excuse me ma'am, but have you seen a small black and white cat with green eyes? Answers to the name Tomasso?"

Bones assigns the task of outing J'onnz to Chase, and she complies, but she leaves a few of J'onn's identities uncompromised, since she doesn't completely agree with Bones (and because of J'onn's friendship with her father). The issue ends with J'onn touching base with his elderly friend Carmela, and here again a neat scene is implied, in which someone tries to convince her that the stray cat she feeds is actually a Martian superhero. That's gotta sound weird, even in the DCU: