Weekly Haul: December 10th

Action Comics #872 (DC Comics) The Creature Commandos. Ultra the Multi-Alien. Gold Kryptonite. That’s…that’s a lot of cool stuff for a 2008 issue of Action Comics, let alone one written by Geoff Johns and one that’s part seven in a big multi-book crossover storyline.

In this chapter of the “New Krypton” story (illustrated by Pete Woods), Superman, Supergirl and Uncle Zor argue with Aunt Alura about whether or not its cool to kill policemen, while Lex Luthor launches a spectacular attack on New Krypton through Brainiac’s inert ship and the motherfucking Creature Commandos team-up with Ultra the Multi-Alien and Superman to fight robots. Meanwhile, The Guardian rallies a bunch of superheroes to go kick Kandor’s ass, and Johns teases the new Nightwing’s identity so damn hard that if it’s not Superboy/Connor Kent/Kon-El/“The Kid” somehow back from the dead, then Johns just isn’t playing fair.

As far as the plotting goes, this is a pretty exciting 22 pages, and it’s nice to see Johns using some obscure(-ish) DC characters for something other than heat-vision fodder.


Booster Gold #15 (DC) I took the Rick Remender-written issues off and decided to just wait around until Dan Jurgens took over as both writer and artists to decide whether or not to stick with the title now that original writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz have moved on.

Initially I wasn’t crazy about the choice of Jurgens, even if he did create the character, but this was actually a pretty decent read, with only one or two attempts at humor that made me wince (and only one page wasted on reminding us of Identity Crisis for no reason other than to add a little melodrama).

Booster and his little sister go back in time to renaissance Italy for fun, cause some problems, and find themselves in an altered timeline. Trying to figure out exactly went wrong, Booster finds himself teaming-up with The Elongated Man, from way back in the day (Like, Showcase Presents era).

If Jurgens can manage at least this level of quality month in and month out, I’ll probably stick around. I’ll definitely be here next month, as Booster Gold meets Hans Von Hammer, the Hammer of Hell next issue.


Captain Britain and MI13 #8 (Marvel Comics) Paul Cornell gets 500 points for Blade’s Wordsword (“Papier mache. Made of pages from magical books. Good against demons. Not so good in the rain.”), and 100 points for the comic book science of the titular agency’s “pentagram tesseract” generator.



(Above: That's my favorite of the eight covers for this comic, by John Romita Sr. It was a 1-in-15 variant though, so I ended up getting the Cassaday one)

The Death-Defying ‘Devil #1 (Dynamite) I find myself incredibly frustrated by the fact that I can’t put my finger exactly on why it is that these cool Golden Age character resurrections Dynamite has committed to with the help of Alex Ross have been so incredibly dull. If I were better at this comics-criticizing game, I think I’d be able to properly diagnose the problem with Project: Superpowers and its spin-off minis, of which this is one, but I just can’t manage it with any degree of certainty.

I know I was always fascinated by these characters, when I had yet to read a single comic featuring any of them, and only knew them from their names, the artists who made them, and the occasional covers I’d see (Here, doesn’t this look pretty awesome?). And yet I couldn’t even make it through the whole Project: Superpowers series, and was dismayed to see that not only did DDD #1 pick up on the status quo of that series, it also picked up on the tone and spirit of it: That is, boring as hell, terribly diluted and somehow palpably generic.

Is the problem perhaps the way in which Ross and his collaborators chose to Marvel-ize these various Golden Agers into a cohesive universe, and then treat their decades of obscurity as a plot point in a meta-story that made no further attempts to comment on that obscurity, except to explain why they weren’t in comics for so long, thus making the resulting comics seem like just your average DC or Marvel book, only without the years-to-decades of readers’ personal investment in the characters? Maybe that’s it.

I honestly don’t know, nor do I know how Ross and/or Dynamite should have perhaps proceeded. All I know is that it’s notoriously difficult to create a comic book universe shared-setting all at once like this, and even the companies that managed to do a decent job of it for a while (Valiant, Milestone) didn’t last all that long.

So: This comic is written by Joe Casey and drawn by Edgar Salazar. It features the superhero formerly known as Daredevil, the mute one with the cool costume and boomerang, as he listens to Green Lama prattle on about New Shangri La, sees some claw-shaped graffiti, and then goes to fight some Claw terrorists with the French lady he met in Project: Superpowers, and then he fights a guy dressed like him, only in purple and green.

The art is pretty great, and I liked the look of the book much more than its parent series, but there is absolutely nothing special or even mildly interesting about the script. It’s just a guy, probably a good guy, fighting some other guys, who are terrorists. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this somewhere before.

I won’t be interested in a second issue of this, but Dynamite, seriously: I would buy the hell out of a collection of the original Golden Age Daredevil comics.



Detective Comics #851 (DC) DC has chosen to capitalize on the increased eyeballs and buzz the Batman franchise earned through Grant Morrison’s “Batman R.I.P.” story arc in about the weirdest way imaginable: Entering a confused, months-long period in which the next part of the Batman story is so vague it’s impossible to even spot, let alone follow.

The true ending of the story, according to interviews, which is where far too much super-comic storytelling goes on these days, occurs in Final Crisis #6, which won’t be out until the end of January, if it doesn’t fall further behind schedule than it already has. Meanwhile, we know all of the Batman satellite titles are being canceled in the near future, presumably to reflect big changes, and the two Batman ongoings—Batman and Detective Comics—will play host to about four different epilogues/codas, by four different writers.

The good news is that those writers are all pretty respectable names. This is the first part of one of those codas, by Denny O’Neil. I don’t know how much of a draw his name actually is in the market, but I know it’s hardly hyperbolic to refer to O’Neil as a legendary writer, and I imagine his presence will prove enormously attractive to longtime Batman readers like myself.

While O’Neil’s choices for the Batman, his portrayal and the way the character interacted with the rest of the DCU might not have been popular with every single DC reader, you have to admit that, when O’Neil was editing the Batman line for DC, the character was remarkably consistent from book to book, the franchise was remarkably streamlined and it was remarkably free of Jason Todd being Superboy-punched back to life as a psycho-killer, Were-Scarerows and murders committed by Leslie Thompkins.

So while five years ago the name “Denny O’Neil” on the cover of a Batman comic wouldn’t have done anything to fire my passions, now it’s oddly comforting.

So what’s O’Neil’s particular coda about, exactly? Well, while Morrison’s, which began in Batman last week, was an extended dream sequence of maybe-memories, O’Neil’s “Last Days of Gotham” is set in Gotham after the events of “Batman R.I.P.” and that fateful (fatal?) helicopter punch.

Actually, it starts “several years ago” during the Gotham earthquake (See Batman: Cataclysm, but only if you must), at which time Gotham stage actress Millicent Mayne is being threatened by some thugs when she’s saved by the natural disaster. She narrates in O’Neillian prose about the experience, and the weird sensation of filling up with the presence of Gotham’s dead.

Flash forward to “One week ago,” when we see those same three thugs who, remarkably, haven’t changed clothes for several years. Or they coincidentally are all wearing the same outfits they did back then. Or they all three have closets full of the same clothes, so they actually have changed them many times since, but they always look the same.

Anyway, they attack M.M. in the name of Two-Face, Batman is apparently missing, and so Nightwing has to come in and fill-in (though, despite the cover, not as Batman, sparing us Prodigal: Redux…at least for now).

As a story, it’s pretty much just something to fill up the pages and kill the time, but O’Neil’s old-school narration and down-to-earth, plain, old, every day criminals intent on paydays give it some charm.

The real reason to pick up the issue at all, however, is the artwork by Guillem March. I haven’t really been feeling the art on any of the Bat-books of late (‘TEC has been strong since Nguyen became the regular artist, but that was also about the time Dini started devoting the book to Gotham’s deadliest plastic surgeon and I gave up on it), particularly the work of Tony Daniel whom, I may have mentioned before, sucks.

But this March character? Holy shit, is this guy good. There was something very European about his work (and, poking around his site, I think that might be because he’s from Europe). I see a little Tim Sale here, a little Joe Kubert there, a touch of Marcos Martin, but it doesn’t really seem derivative of any of those particular artists, so much as the way he draws certain faces, shadows, outlines or expressions reminds me of those artists.

The story-telling is crystal clear (which you would think would be an absolute minimum requirement in any professional comics artist, but, sadly, it isn’t), almost all of the panels have actual backgrounds to them, the character designs are all distinct and the faces highly expressive, attention is paid to page lay out and panel shape, and when March breaks a panel border, it’s almost always for a good reason—to highlight the action or emotion of that scene. Just look at page 17. How many times have we seen Nightwing jump through a skylight? Three hundred times? Five hundred? And yet here it’s like seeing him do it for the first time.

I’m really excited to read the next chapter of this story, not because I’m at all concerned whether Nightwing will die in the burning building he was left unconscious in during the cliffhanger ending, or what’s up with Ms. Mayne—I really just want to see how March draws what happens next.

Here’s a preview of the first few pages of the issue, if you’d like to get a better sense of his work than I’m probably conveying.



Final Crisis #5 (DC) Oh wow, this series is still going on? That was my first thought as I flipped open the cover, on which J.G. Jones demonstrates that Wonder Woman’s costume must be incredibly uncomfortable to wear. Yes, while the outcome seems remarkably clear—Darkseid just about wins, then loses, and the birth of the Fifth World gives us a the DC Multiverse 5.0—we’ve still got a few more tedious months of waiting for Jones, and the co-artists brought in to help him get this thing done in as few extra months as possible, to draw the damn pictures.

On the most basic level of super-comics criticism—Can I figure out what the hell is going on in the pictures? Does Frankenstein pop a wheelie on a motorcycle? Is Dr. Sivana involved?—this issue passes muster. But frankly, it doesn’t seem as special as it should. It’s essentially just an arc of Grant Morrison’s JLA monthly, but with less kinetic art, fewer surprises, higher expectations and an insupportable amount of hype.

Still, Frankenstein does pop a wheelie on a motorcycle. So there’s that.



Secret Six #4 (DC) Like most comics readers who can also string a few sentences together, I have long dreamed of writing comics, and there’s no company I’d rather write comics for than DC Comics, on account of the fact that they own all the very best comics characters that aren’t Namor or ninja turtles. That fact won’t come as a surprise. But this might: You know what I’d want to write for DC more than anything?

Those stupid punning blurbs that appear on some of their comics.

Not all DC Comics have them, but an awful lot do. Often times they’re just descriptive—like this week, Action Comics has a blurb reading “The Startling Return of The Creature Commandos!” and Booster Gold’s reads “In The Grip of The Elongated Man!”—and sometimes there’s just no room when there’s something like “A Final Crisis Tie-In!”, but sometimes there are just these…random sounding phrases on the cover.

They’re kind of like headlines, I guess, usually playing off the cover image and/or the character and/or the nature of the story, but not always. I don’t really understand these things, or why they are there. I can’t imagine they’ve ever sold even one comic book to one customer; the descriptive ones, sure, but the joke ones? I can’t imagine someone seeing an issue of Birds of Prey that says “Birdstrike!” on it and thinking, “Ooh, I should get this comic, because it says ‘Birdstrike!’ on the cover.”

Anyway, I think that would be the very best job at DC Comics. I imagine there’s someone who has their own office—not a big or particularly nice one, but still, an office—at DC HQ and their only job is to write these stupid little pun/blurb/headlines that appear on covers. Each month, they’d get, like, 50 mock-ups of all the DC covers for the month, and then they pin them up on the wall, and pace around all day, stroking their chins and thinking of what blurbs to match to the images.

That would be a fine job.*

Take this issue of Secret Six. On the cover, we see the five members of the Secret Six in an ice cream truck, striking various action poses appropriate to their nature. This exact scene never occurs in the book, but they do all ride in an ice cream truck in the comic. Someone must have looked at this image long and hard and found that something was missing. Some sort of combination of words was needed on the cover to really complete it. A phrase taking into account the elements of the cover. Let’s see…there’s an ice cream truck. And some super-villains. Hmm….

And they arrived at “Ice Creeps.” Because super-villains are creeps, right? And “creeps” sounds a little like “cream.” Get it?

Yes, that job would rule.

Oh, this issue was pretty good…maybe the best of the series so far. I’m pretty sure Gail Simone owes Geoff Johns some small percentage of any royalties she makes off this book, since she wrote a panel in which a villain tears someone’s arm off. Johns trade-marked arms-being-ripped-off, didn’t he…?



Trinity #28 (DC) What the hell guys? Why aren’t you reading Trinity? According to Marc Oliver-Frisch’s sales analysis, not only does Trinity sell fewer copies than 52 or (Shudder!) Countdown, it’s shedding more readers faster than either of those series.

Now, I expect Trinity to get its ass kicked by 52, for all sorts of reasons. But Countdown? More people were more into Countdown than Trinity? How is that even possible?

I’m afraid that somewhere down the line, maybe when planning the fifth or sixth weekly, DC’s going to look at Trinity vs. Countdown and decide readers must prefer a weekly that’s sold as a big, important “spine” of the rest of the universe no matter how shoddily it’s created or whether or not it actually matches up to anything else in the “body” of the DCU to a competent (on a weak week) to rather good (on a rather good week) series that is somewhat self-contained.

And Trinity’s version of self-contained is still pretty expansive. I mean, Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley do seem bound and determined to at least namedrop or cameo every single DCU character ever during the course of this thing (This issue they cross Brimestone and The Folded Man off their list).

The last two issues were pretty dull and slow-moving, devoted to Busiek’s pounding home the architecture of the universe point, but with this issue, we’re back in super-action, with the altered Alfred Pennyworth and company journeying into another universe looking for Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and, in the back-up, the JSI taking on super-villains.

In conclusion: Buy this book. Only you can prevent a Countdown II.



*I realize this job probably doesn’t exist, and that it’s probably just the assistant editor on the respective books and/or someone in production who comes up with these things. But in the DC HQ that exists in my imagination, there’s one person whose job it is. The DC offices in my imagination probably don’t match up to the real ones at all. For example, I think trade collections are determined by a rabid wolf trapped in the office of the person who was actually hired to determine what to collect in trade when, and that Dan DiDio looks, talks and acts exactly like Perry White and that when Grant Morrison visits the office to talk about story ideas he appears in Metron’s chair.

The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #8

Long, long ago—maybe eight or nine months ago, although it seems like it's been years—I noticed that the basic plot of Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu's Secret Invasion story sounded a lot like the basic plot of DC's 1988 hostile-aliens-invade-Earth-by-infiltrating-the-heroes storyline, Millennium (Not that the observation was unique to me or anything; anyone who's read Millennium probably had the exact same reacation). And I thought, Hey, maybe it would be fun to re-read an issue of Millennium each week I read an issue of Secret Invasion, and publish an examination of it.

Well, as it turned out, it wasn't much fun of at all, and, after a certain point, it became kind of a waste of time, given that DC actually took my advice and published a trade of Millennium for the express purpose of saying, Hey, comics readers! Marvel's biting off our worst story ideas from 20 years ago!

But, at that same point, I didn't want to give up. Who wants to be known as The Guy Who Wrote Five Really Long Posts About Millennium Then Gave Up, instead of The Guy Who Wrote A Really Long Post About Each Issue Of Millennium. Having come so far, how could I abandon my quest to make EDILW the Internet's number one source for disucssion of DC's 1988 weekly series Millennium? (Shit; I just googled "Millennium, 'DC Comics'" and EDILW is only the seventh site to come up. Perhaps this was all for naught...)

So here it is! The very last post about the very last issue of Millennium! And then I'll put these crumbling yellow comics back into their cardboard coffin and never see them again.

So here we are at Millennium #8, “The Rising and Advancing of Ten Spirits.”


In the last issue, we saw that the Manhunters were defeated on earth after Earth’s “heroes” had destroyed their planet and murdered every last one of them, the lost space heroes successfully returned to earth, it was revealed that Booster Gold had secretly invaded the Manhunters… what’s left to resolve? Oh yeah, all that boring New Age-y business about the ethnic stereotypes who are to guide humanity into “The Millennium.”

We open outside Hal Jordan’s condo, where the heroes have all gathered to form an aisle for some sort of wedding or graduation type ceremony:

“They’e ready for ya now!” Kilowog says, and rushes to push play on an off-panel boombox that will play “Pomp and Circumstance.”

Writer Steve Englehart starts out with the weirdest narration box: “See, it’s an extraordinary day in the DC Universe…!”

Is it? Oh, we’ll see about that.

The Immortals, now rapidly aging because, well just because, recap just what the hell’s going on here,

and then it’s time to start passing out superhero powers and makeovers.

First up is Xiang. Herupa shoots green light out of his forehead and Nadia shoots violet light out of her head, and the result is that Xiang is no longer Xiang, but

Here’s the saddest part of this issue and, indeed, this whole series. Look closely at Gloss’ name there. Not only does she get her own special logo, but there’s a teeny little “TM” after it. DC trademarked Gloss. They were so confident that they had the next Wonder Woman on their hands, or at least the next Infinity Inc. character, that they went and put a TM after her name. They do this with all of The Chosen, who will all become pretty terrible superheroes.

“It’s-- --Clarity! Power! Sleek Sensation!” Xiang shouts, and explains that the Chinese know feng-shui, and that she can draw power from the earth’s dragon-lines, power and “sinuous skill!”

Betty points out to the others that Gloss said “the Chinese,” as if she herself were no longer Chinese, and they immediately catch on.

I know I’ve said this before but man, Gregorio is just. So. Gay.

I know there are supposedly more and bigger name gay superheroes in the DCU now, but have we really come that far? Renee Montoya, Obsidian and Batwoman may be gay, but add all three of them together and they’re still not half as gay as Gregorio.

This Xiang-to-Gloss sequence establishes a pattern that most of the book will follow. The Chosen say some nice things to one another, one of them walks up for the green and violet ray blast and they become a lame-ass superhero. They then explain their powers, and some DC superheroes strain to make some connection between themselves and the new guys, while cosmic onlookers from around the universe throw in their two cents worth (Here, some Greek goddesses on Olympus say “Diana’s involvement in man’s world has borne its first fruit!” while the Parliament of Trees talk about The Green and Woodrue.

Next up, is Takeo:

who, as his new codename suggests, now has computer-y powers. “Fields link—Data spiral through the ether —through my fingers —for me —Random Access Memory!”

Then Gregorio,

who is somehow made even gayer.

This is the face of gay superheroes in 1988:


Extrano explains his powers—“I’m a witch!”—while The Phantom Stranger stands atop a rock, making puns to himself.

"Somewhither?"

Betty becomes

the earth, I guess? She’s not really a superhero per se, but a funny looking globe symbolizing the planet and providing a connection with Gregorio.

Celia gets taller, bustier, hip-ier and more scantily clad to become

Huh, the same thing happened to Xiang, actually.

Next up is Tom Kalamaku, but he decides to take a pass, and explains that it’s basically because his wife has been nagging him all miniseries and the dude is totally pussy-whipped:

Hal understands, and takes the opportunity to slur Tom’s ethnicity for the 5,000th time in his life:

As an aside, I prefer when Hal’s mask has the eyes pupil-less white triangle, a la Batman’s. Something about his mask really creeps me out otherwise:

See? Creepy.

Since Tom is such a baby about the whole thing the Immortals pick Harbinger as his replacement, but she bolts, so they give Tom his power in latent form, to protect him from fat white racist South African guy who washed out of the enlightenment program. He is determined to get his revenge:

Their task done, the Immortals drop dead.

Sick of this shit, Superman and the real superheroes decide that since their hosts have died, they don’t have to feel compelled to stay any more and get ready to bolt, but not before Batman and Brainwave each make a pass at Jet:

And then the old superheroes all take off in a pretty cool splash panel that Staton unfortunately laid out diagonally so I can’t scan it in its entirely:

And we get a final, posed panel of the new super team:

And that's the last anyone would ever see of these new superheroes.

The end.



Previously:
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #1
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #2
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #3
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #4
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #5
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #6
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #7

Good old Brian Michael Bendis

I was pretty hard on last Wednesday's Secret Invasion #8 (on account of it being such a poorly written comic book), and have been making fun of various panels from it ever since.

So I thought I'd bring what somehow turned into Talking About Secret Invasion Weekend to a close by posting another of Bendis' late-nineties Plain Dealer strips that I happen to still have around my apartment:




After I found the previous Bendis strip I posted and realized that it was torn from an issue of the PD's Lake Effects magazine section, I remembered that I still had an issue of it in The Very Large Stack of Magazines I Should Probably Throw Away, and thought that it might have a Bendis strip in it as well.

It did.

This was from the very first issue of Lake Effects, marked Fall 1997 (which is probably why I saved it—I would have been in college at the time, and hoping to move to Cleveland to write for a living. What foolish dreams of grandeur I entertained in my youth!).

The cover story was written by the PD's humor columnist Michael Heaton, about a Lakewood neighborhood and some of the hip businesses that dotted it at the time. There's also an ambitious feature following four young people who work day jobs to support their creative after-hours efforts, a profile of a Cleveland talk show, a feature on Ultimate Frisbee and another on rock band Skunk Anansie and then Bendis' strip, and that's the whole magazine.

It's a pretty damn nice spotlight for the then-young and up-and-coming Bendis, whose strip appeared across two pages, giving him a full 11-by-16 inches to work with.

Once again, this is an extremely Bendisian strip. It takes a reader all of three sentences or so to immediately identify it as the work and voice of Bendis. As Tony said of the previous strip in the comments section, this seems like something that is more of a prose piece than a comic. The story is told not through images—perhaps other than the fact that it all looks kinda nice laid out in one, big, static image—but through the dialogue, and there's absolutely nothing done here that could only be done in comics. Hell, the images are for all intents and purposes simply repeated over and over, with only their size and a slight turn of the head or a hand gesture from the characters differentiating the panels.

It makes me wonder if back then Bendis saw himself as a cartoonist, or simply a writer who ended up working in comics, as he seems to do all of his story-telling through words, and the images exist only as a place to put the word balloons. (And I think if you look at some of Bendis' worse comics over the years, there's this same tendency to simply ask the artist to draw repeating panels for his dialogue to be lettered into—the most offensively bad example of this is the concluding chapter of Secret War, which still pisses me off every time I think about it).

But on the other hand, a comic strip maybe is the perfect place for a little anecdote type story like this or the other Lake Effects strip. In both cases, we don't know the characters, and it hardly matters. The setting doesn't matter. It's the anecdote itself that's the thing, and if that's all Bendis has and all he wants to share, well, it might make for a scene in a short story or screenplay, or a few paragraphs of an essay, but otherwise, maybe a comic strip is the only place for such context-free scenes.

Behold—The kiddy table of evil!

Geez Norman Osborn, you're a big, powerful businessman type who's been running a federal superhero-busting organization for a couple of months, you just got a big, huge promotion to be in charge of The Avengers and the entire Fifty-State Initiative, and you decide to hold a super-secret meeting in the basement of Avengers Tower, a meeting with two highly irritable monarchs, the Norse god of mischief, the kingpin of super-crime and an X-Lady, and that's the table you decide to use?

Really? That's the best table you can supply for that particular meeting? My kitchen table is bigger and more stately than that. That looks like a piece of patio furniture.

Just look at poor Dr. Doom there. Dude is pissed to be seated at such a small table. He's like one second away from "Doom demands elbow room! Bah, Namor and Red Hood won't quit kicking Doom's feet under the table!"

This isn't a very auspicious beginning to your dark reign, Osborn.

Aren't you taking this "Team of Rivals" thing a little too far, Mr. President-Elect?

Putting your vanquished political opponents like Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson in your cabinet, and keeping a token Republican like Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one thing.

But making Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn the Boss of All Superheroes? That really doesn't seem like a very good idea.

Weekly Haul: December 4th (Now featuring 100% more Secret Invasion spoilers)

Batman #682 (DC Comics) I’m beginning to think that maybe Grant Morrison really believes the world is going to end in 2012, as he seems to have kinda just quit giving a fuck about the comics he makes.

This is the first issue after last week’s much-discussed, semi-controversial “Batman R.I.P.” conclusion, in which Batman went M.I.A. after punching a helicopter. It’s also one of the last two solicited Batman stories by Morrison, so it is maybe sorta some kind of coda to “R.I.P.,” if not his whole run.

According to its labeling, it’s a “R.I.P.” follow-up—along the top, it says “Last Rites” next to the Knightfall-esque bleeding bat-symbol—and a Final Crisis tie-in, which is probably a good time to stop and think about things for a second.

So how exactly do “R.I.P.” and Final Crisis possibly co-exist? Incompatible continuity is more-or-less a given in the DCU these days, but it seems extremely glaring here because a) this is probably DC’s best writer, b) he’s writing the two stories that don’t match up himself, and c) he’s writing a single story that explicitly ties-in to both stories that do not seem to otherwise match up with one another. Unless Batman just swam out of that helicopter explosion, put on a new cape and cowl, and then went straight to the JLA meetings in the first few issues of Final Crisis without letting his sidekicks know he was okay…?

Okay, well all that aside, this isn’t a bad script for a Batman comic, although the fact that it occurs in Bruce Wayne’s mind, references dozens of stories in and out of continuity (whatever Batman continuity is exactly these days) makes it hard to care too much about. Essentially, it’s a twenty-page dream sequence, with a two-page Final Crisis tie-in at the end.

Morrison takes us on a tour of Batman history, weaving in and out of continuity in a selective fashion, and doing a passable job of making it seem as if all 69 years of Batman comics happened to the same guy.

As always, the art is the big drawback here. This time it’s not by Tony Daniel (huzzah!), but by Lee Garbett. It’s a bit of an improvement—basic visual storytelling ability is always present, obvious extraordinary lengths are not taken to avoid the drawing of feet—but it’s that same, lazy, generic WildStorm house style that just seems depressing on a Morrison Batman story.

The characters are all drawn fairly detailed with a lot of little lines, but backgrounds usually don’t exist, with fields of fancy coloring brought in to try and hide the fact. With different character design—or even a sort of well-designed, thoughtful use of empty spaces, a la Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman—it might look like minimalism is a style choice, but as is, it just looks lazy.

It’s passable work, but it really should sing, given what the script has given Garbett to work with. The story references ones drawn by Bob Kane, Dick Sprang, Frank Miller and Sheldon Moldoff—every decade of Batman is verbally referenced, but Garbett doesn’t do anything to visually reference them, besides posting Batman a certain way here or there. It’s such a wasted opportunity (as is the fact that he doesn’t even tie his visuals of Julie Madison or the Monster Men into Matt Wagner’s recent designs of them). It seems like it would be a once-in-a-lifetime dream script for an artist to draw, but Garbett seems to merely rush through with completely generic, get-the-job-done-and-collect-the-paycheck art.

Where’s the joy, man? How often do artists get paid to re-draw panels from this story?


Jingle Belle: Santa Claus Vs. Frankenstein #1 (Top Cow/Image) Have you ever looked at Top Cow’s logo? I mean really looked at it? It’s a black and white globe, with udders, and a lightning bolt behind it. I stared at it for a while today, and I think it might just be the most repulsive comic book logo I’ve ever seen.

It’s atop the latest of Paul Dini’s Christmas comics, starring Santa’s rebellious teenage daughter Jingle Belle, as Dini has taken the character (and her girlfriends) to Top Cow, as part of his own sub-imprint, Dini Cartoons. (He has a few paragraphs about the move and his plans in the back of the book.)

The logo’s no the only rather disturbing thing about the cover. I got “Cover B,” by Greg Horn, and it’s pretty icky. It’s kind of neat seeing Jing portrayed “realistically,” given that she usually appears under the pencils and pens of artists with highly animated cartoon styles, and yet this is Horn’s weird, mannequin form of realism. She looks kinda real, but for some reason she’s wearing paint instead of clothing, andboth she and the stool she’s sitting on emit a soft, white aura of light. In the background, a department store Santa is coming down the chimney, his long hair somehow unaffected by gravity (The magic of Chrsitmas!)

The insides are much better drawn, by Stephanie Gladden, whose big-eyed, exaggerated style is a lot of fun. The character design seems pure old-school, 1940’s animation—with perhaps a touch of Mad here and there—and the lines and expressions all explode with movement, to the point that the action within the panels seems to be almost moving at times.

As for the story, Dini has two of the North Pole’s most famous residents meet one another, for what seems to be the first time (as far as I know, anyway). While snowboarding, Jing accidentally uncovers Frankenstein’s monster, frozen in a block of ice. She chips him out and brings her home to her dad, asking if he can stay with them. Frank quickly settles in and finds his own niche in the workshop, stitching together creepy monster toys.

The conflict driving the plot is a bit weaker than the otherwise strong jokes that dominate the scenes, as an ambitious city councilwoman campaigns to ban Santa, ultimately leading to Frankenstein’s monster dressing up as Santa to stop her, and then Santa having to come to the rescue and pretend to fight F.M. (leading to the “vs.” in the title), but all in all it’s another fun Jingle Belle outing.


Justice Society of America #21 (DC) The precise nature of the threat Gog represents is finally revealed—basically, he’s like a faith-based Galactus—and then both factions of the JSA unite to try and beat him up.

Top-billed penciller Dale Eaglesham provides eight pages of the art, while workhorse Jerry Ordway handles the bulk of the pencil art. I love Eaglesham’s work, but I wonder if at this point it wouldn’t be better to have Ordway take over art chores?


Secret Invasion #8 (Marvel Comics) God, where do I even start?

This is the 26-page, $3.99 conclusion of Marvel’s eight-part, over-priced miniseries about Muslim Skrull terrorists waging holy war on the Marvel Universe (And they just come out and say it, this time around), and the spine of a line-wide event that has tied in to just about every single Marvel publication at one point or another (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a Skrull has been masquerading as Cardinal Richelieu in the pages of Marvel Illustrated: The Three Musketeers).

This won’t do anything to endanger Brian Michael Bendis’ reputation as the most frustrating mainstream writer. Unlike a lot of his peers, Bendis is actually a demonstrably good writer, yet one with a ton of terrible comics to his name. When you see Jeph Loeb’s Ultimatum or Judd Winick’s The Titans sitting there on the rack, you need not wonder if they will be good or not, you only have to note the words “Loeb” or “Winick” on the title. But with a Bendis comic, one never really knows until one reads it: “Will this be Powers or New Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man or House of M?

There’s been a particular amount of tension about this series, given that Bendis has been building up to it for a good two years if not longer (when did he take over the Avengers franchise, exactly? Cause that’s when this story actually started). So on the one hand, it seemed as if it would be practically impossible for Bendis to deliver a climax big enough to justify all the time and work that went into foreshadowing this damn thing, but, on the other hand, he’s been working on this story for years, so it’s conclusion really oughta be one of his best stories ever, right?

Well, it hasn’t been all that. And now that it’s ended and can be more easily judged, well, Bendis hasn’t gotten much better at line-wide Marvel Universe crossovers than when he did House of M.

Part of the problem is systemic to these things, I suppose, as instead of presenting more-or-less complete stories, Marvel has treated their crossovers as prologues to the next few months of stories throughout the Marvel Universe. House of M gave way to a half-dozen X-titles, Civil War established a new status quo for the whole Marvel Universe, World War Hulk fizzled in the end to lead into Jeph Loeb’s relaunched Hulk and now this has to lead into something called Dark Reign, with one of the main characters of this particular issues quite literally walking away from this storyline and entering a room to sit down with the co-stars of the next storyline and bam! two pages o’ hype from Joe Quesada about “Dark Reign” tie-ins, and a full-page house ad for Secret Invasion: Dark Reign.

The bigger problem is all Bendis’ though; this thing was structured horribly. The climax occurred in Secret Invasion #1, wherein all of the major Skrull reveals and major attacks occurred, and the next seven issues have been more or less about filling up pages with a low-stakes stand-off between The Skrulls and superheroes, meeting in a field in the Savage Land, and then meeting in a field outside New York to determine who will rule the world the way the Sharks and Jets might have fought over a block of turf.

You may recall last issue ended with Janet “The Wasp” van Dyne growing gigantic and screaming, emitting Kirby dots that made everyone else scream. She was some sort of bio-weapon that Skrull Hank Pym made as a last resort should the Skrulls start to get their asses kicked too badly.

This final issue begins with her still giant and screaming and emitting Kirby dots, and the various heroes, villains and Skrulls all also covered in dots and screaming. Bendis inserts sixteen narration boxes into the first panel, a two-page spread of this, but never explains the nature of her…bio-weaponicity. What’s happening, exactly? How is she affecting all the other characters? Who knows.

This is probably something worth devoting a sentence or two to though, since on the very next page the heroes get out of their sticky situation with a literal bit of deus ex machina. Thor (the deus in question) kills The Wasp with a disintegrating tornado.

Yes, Thor. Kills. The Wasp.

I understand you have to, like, kill a hero or two in these sorts of things, just to prove that the events are actually important—it’s tradition!—but this is a pretty abrupt killing of a hero, particularly since The Wasp doesn’t, like, sacrifice her life or anything, she just has an ally put her down. It’s not terribly heroic. Every hero in the entire Marvel Universe is standing right there, and the only idea anyone can come up with to counter a Kirby dot-generator is to kill their friend? Reed Richards pulled a Skrull-detector out of his ass in an earlier issue of this very series, but he’s plumb out of ideas here.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. The Marvel heroes have been quick to kill throughout this entire series. In fact, the event that initially angered the Skrulls (as detailed in one of Bendis’ flashback stories) was Reed, Iron Man and the Illuminati preemptively killing a whole ship full of Skrulls, but still, here, everyone’s just killing Skrulls left and right.

“Thunderbolts, m-make sure none of them weasel away,” Norman Osborn tells his team of reformed villains, “No loose ends.” When The Avengers start mopping up the remaining Skrulls, Tony Stark clucks, “Come on, guys…keep the casualties light. I want prisoners.”

The fight is over by page nine, and the rest of the book is reserved for answering questions, and setting up “Dark Reign.”

Where were the people who got replaced with Skrulls? Oh, they’re right here on this ship here, and look, Mockingbird is still alive.

What happened to Baby Cage, I thought she was a Skrull? Eh, who knows, Skrull-Jarvis has her wherever; I’m sure Bendis will write about it somewhere.

Will the rest of the FF ever get out of the Negative Zone? Yes, look, here they are now.

Will Thor and Captain Buck-erica e cool with Iron Man now that they’ve all bonded over the killing of Skrulls/The Wasp? No, they still totally hate his ass.

And that seems to be the big, game-changing event here. Everyone in the Marvel Universe realizes what we’ve all been thinking since just before Civil War: Iron Man is a useless asshole. President Elect Barack Obama, who apparently co-narrates the issue, comes to the same conclusion which is why, (okay, here’s the big spoiler!) he does away with SHIELD and puts “all that fell under the SHIELD banner, including The Avengers and the Fifty-State Initiative” under Osborn and his Thunderbolts initiative.

In the three page-epilogue, we see Osborn standing around under his stupid haircut in Avengers Tower, and then taking an elevator down to a dark room where a cabal of bad (and bad-ish) guys are sitting around the smallest table in the world like some sort of slightly-more-evil version of Bendis’ Illuminati.

And that’s the new status quo: Rather than being ruled by asshole industrialist/super-person Tony “Iron Man “ Stark and his cabal of heartless pricks \of whom fucking Namor was the voice of reason, the Marvel Universe is now being ruled by asshole industrialist/super-person Norman “The Green Goblin” Osborn and his cabal of heartless pricks of whom fucking Namor (and/or maybe Emma Frost…?) is/are the voice of reason.

Now that’s change you can believe in!

Given the fact that Osborn is supposed to have emerged as the new Iron Man from this series, it’s a little puzzling that Bendis didn’t spend more time on him throughout the series.

Skimming Quesada’s piece at the end, I see he says, “at the end of the day, it was Norman Osborn who saved the day,” but that’s not really true. If anyone saved the day, it was Thor, by killing The Wasp. Or Reed, for belatedly whipping up a Skrull detector that allowed the Avengers to know who to kill and who not to kill. Or Nick Fury, for saving Manhattan a few issues ago? Or the Skrull queen, for being a dumb fucking idiot and deciding the best way to defeat the superheroes was to line-up British-in-the-Revolutionary War-style and duke it out with them. All Osborn has done throughout the course of the series is talk to Captain Marvel for like three issues, show up in the same crowd scene as everyone else and, in this issue, shoot the Skrull queen in the head.

And Bendis and artist Leinil Francis Yu make it pretty clear that Osborn didn’t do anything remarkable in the killing of the queen; he just managed to kill her before everyone else who was about to kill her managed to kill her, and he did so because he shot a gun at her. A split-second later, and Wolverine’s claws woulda got her; would that have made Wolverine the Boss of All Superheroes?

Well, at least its over, and I’ll never have to buy another $3.99, 22-page Marvel comic again (Right, Marvel? Right?!). Now I’m going to pound out two more quick reviews and head on over to Savagecritic.com and keep hitting refresh until Abhay’s latest and last SI review appears…



Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade #1 (DC) Of the non-tie line, non-cartoon tie-in superhero comics in DC’s Johnny DC imprint, this is the one I had the lowest expectations for. I was familiar with the work of Art Baltazar of Tiny Titans and Mike Kunkel of The Magic of Shazam already, and it seemed likely they would be pretty likely to deliver some pretty cool all-ages comics with those characters.

But I’m not terribly familiar with writer Landry Q. Walker and artist Eric Jones, and don’t have much in the way of affection for Supergirl, beyond the loathing I have for the current jailbait iteration of the character and DC’s comical habit of giving her DCU book a new creative team and new direction every two-to-six issues.

Well, Walker and Jones knock this one out of the park.

It’s an elegantly simple story, boiling Supergirl down to her essence—Superman’s younger cousin from Krypton, joining him on earth as a teen instead of arriving as a baby—and making it work perfectly well in a modern context. In the space of just 22 pages. (Jeph Loeb and company, meanwhile, spent six issues of Superman/Batman on introducing Supergirl, and I still didn’t know what her origin was by the end of it).

So: Superman is fighting Lex Luthor, when a rocket conveniently crash lands, and Kara stumbles out. In the middle of an argument with her parents, she hid in a message rocket being sent from their dimension to Superman, and ends up stranded on earth. Superman takes her under his cape, but suggests she adopt an Earth identity to learn more about people. Cue the fish-out-of-water comedy.

And…the end. What I found most striking about the book, beyond the fact that Walker and Jones have managed to give us a Supergirl who looks and acts unlike the half-dozen or so other Supergirls we’re already familiar with, was just how close they stuck to the Supergirl origin you can read in your Showcase Presents and how well it works.


Trinity #27 (DC) Um, fine…? I guess…? Nothing remarkable about this issue; it’s not godawful, it’s not that great, just a few more scenes moving the plot a step or two further along from where it was last week. It’s comics like these that make trades attractive, but I’m 27 issues into a 52-issue series at this point, so…

A handful of Aya's Clement Oubrerie's children's books

I’ve really loved both Aya and its recent sequel, Aya of Yop City, the slice-of-Ivorian-life dramedies written by Marguerite Abouet and drawn by Clement Oubrerie, and when I finished the second volume, I was so eager to read the third that I went looking by more work from Oubrerie to tide me over.

Oubrerie is a pretty prolific illustrator and designer, so I didn’t think it would be too too difficult, but I only managed to find a trio of books with his name attached in the libraries nearby.

The best of the lot is The Good Little Girl (Doubleday; 1998), a picture book written by Lawrence David.

It’s about a good little girl named Miranda who has two not-so-great parents. They come home from work tired, both of them put off her requests to read to her until tomorrow, and then when they sit down to watch TV together, they both fall asleep:

“That’s okay,” she told her dozing parents, “I can tuck myself in. Well spend time together tomorrow at Saturday Family Waffle Breakfast.”

This is only page three, and I am already pretty depressed. The next day, there is no Saturday Famil Waffle Breakfast, because her mom forgot to buy the mix. That’s when Miranda snaps.

There’s a really great two-page squence in which Miranda more or less Hulks-out. On the far left side of the left page, we see a large image of Miranda with a mad, frowny face, and she gets smaller and smaller and angrier and angrier in three consecutive images.

Meanwhile, on the lefthand page we see a little green girl with red eyes and dreadlocks, and she gets larger and larger in the next three images, so that on the far right side of the right page, we see a giant version of the little green girl, and a tiny little Miranda stuck behind her eyes.

The green girl is named Lucretia, and she tells the tiny little Miranda that she’s here to help. She yells that she wants waffles and she wants them now, and that Miranda won’t come back until she gets waffles.

So they take her out to a restaurant for waffles. But Lucretia wants more, and so she demands to be taken to amusment park Kiddyland before she’ll let Miranda come out.

This goes on for quite some time, with Lucretia making increasingly elaborate and cruel demands of the parents, and the parents forced to obey if they ever want to see Miranda again. Miranda can see it all through Lucretia’s eyes—and talk to her—but can’t really do anything to stop it (Oubrerie draws several nice spreads set inside Lucretia’s head, with the outside world visible only through her giant, porthole-like eyes.

Eventually, Miranda’s able to seize control again, and there’s a reverse transformation sequence, in which Miranda grows larger and larger and Lucretia smaller and smaller until the latter is trapped in the former’s eye. Miranda and her parents talk, and they decide to be more attentive, less jack ass-y parents, and the story ends happily, with her parents reading to her:



The moral of the story is…well, I think it’s that most people just plain shouldn’t have kids. And that life is hard and sad. Wait, I’m going to go cry for a while.

Okay, I’m back. God, what an emotionally upsetting book. I really liked Kiddyland though; it seems like the least fun amusement park in the world.



Look at this one ride, The Air Pirate:



You get hijacked at gun-point in a ride shaped like a passenger plane? That’s…fun?

And right below that is the “Man-a-pult,” which seems to be a catapult that just plain throws a person off to their death somewhere. Slithering toward the line for that terrible ride is a gigantic snake.

The other books I found were both poetry books by Marilyn Singer, with Oubrerie illustrations.

Neither It’s Hard to Read a Map with a beagle on Your Lap (Henry Holt; 1993) nor Please don’t squeeze your boa, Noah! (Henry Holt; 1995) are what I’d call good books (although, as always, remember I’m waaaaay outside the target audience for these books).

I really liked the title of the first one, a collection of dog rhymes and gag pages, but the insides are a collection of rather tedious poems about dogs—Limericks, couplets, shape poems—uniformly lame and rather uninspired. Oubrerie’s art at least makes a flip-thorugh worthwhile, and I suppose little kids who are super into dogs or just learning about various breeds may like this, but I didn’t care for it.

It’s kind of neat to see Oubrerie’s style applied to so many breeds of dogs, but none of the images were exactly knock-outs either.

Please don’t squeeze you boa, Noah! is an improvement in that area, at least. I’m not any crazier about Singer’s poetry here, but the subject is much broader—pets, and animals in general—so its far less tiresome.

It’s also pretty dirty. I mean, the title poem is really just an admonition of s pre-pubescent boy that he never masturbate, right?



Here’s one of the nicest images I saw in either of the Singer books. This is only half of it, and it’s out of context—this brilliantly bright cityscape is all enclosed in a dialogue bubble coming out of the mouth of a black and white parakeet named Tricky treat:



Here’s an illustration for a poem about “Pretty Mrs. Quivers” who “likes pets that give you shivers”:



Her dark house is full of scary or creepy crawly animals (outside the borders of my scan, there’ sa framed portrait of a shark on her wall, and an aquarium with an eel in it atop a bookshelf).

While she’s cool with all these animals, ironically, “bunnies frighten her to death.” That explains the horrifying white rabbit in a tutu in the next room. To be fair to Mrs. Quivers, that is a particularly frightening bunny rabbit.

Speaking of rabbits, I love this page, which apparently shows the world through the eyes of a greyhound, who “has a famous habit/ He dearly loves to chase a rabbit”:



To the left, I suppose those are supposed to be two little human children kicking a ball back and forth that the dog just thinks are rabbits but, doesn't it look like there are two rabbit-people kicking the severed head of a third rabbit person around?

And hey, dig those sweet rabbit cars.

I say we give the auto-industry its bail out, but only on the condition that they promise make fuel-efficient rabbit head cars available to whoever wants them.

And all I ever see in it is a story about Bendis

This weekend I steeled myself, took a deep breath and then forced myself to open an old suitcase in which I store notes, stories, drawings and (shudder!) poetry from when I was in college and high school. It...it's not a pretty sight in that suitcase.

Anyway, near the top I found a two-page comic strip I had apparently liked enough to rip out of the magazine it was printed in, fold in half, and stuff into the back of an old notebook.

It's a strip by one-time Cleveland cartoonist Brian Michael Bendis, who has since gone on to bigger and better-paying things. (Perhaps you've heard of him?).

This example is from 1998, and ran in a short-lived magazine-format Cleveland Plain Dealerinsert called Lake Effects. I think I may have an issue or two of it in the basement, somewhere. It was basically the PD's attempt to get at ad revenue that at the time was going to Cleveland's two altweekly papers; a weekly pull-out that had the size, shape and cover of a magazine, printed on something between newsprint and glossy magazine paper, and full of feature stories, local music coverage and content more likely to appeal to younger readers.

At the time, Bendis was working for the Plain Dealer, and his cartoons appeared in various places in their publications. I have a hard time recalling specific ones now, but I believe most of them were shorter, only taking up one page.

Anyway, here's "Camelot," written and illustrated by Bendis:



Don't mind the crappy scanning; the original has been folded up in a notebook for a decade.

One part of Bat-Manga that I found absolutely hilarious

In Chip Kidd’s introduction, he writes of presenting DC Comics President Paul Levitz with a 40-page proposal for the book.

“Upon inspection, he told me that he had never seen any of this material before, or knew anything about it,” Kidd writes. “Now, those of you familiar with Mr. Levitz will understand the significance of this. To you civilians who don’t know what I’m talking about, let’s just say that it was the comics equivalent of presenting the pope with the skull of John the Baptist.”

I have absolutely no idea what that means exactly, or how the analogy really holds up—I can kinda see how Levitz could be considered the pope of DC maybe, but not how the Batman manga could be considered the skull of John the Baptist.

At any rate, it’s a great image, and I like imagining Levitz dressed like a pope, and/or Kidd bringing him an ancient skull to examine.

This is not a graphic novel: James Kochalka's Squirrelly Gray

Remember a few weeks back when James Kochalka commemorated his 500-year anniversary of drawing little pictures of himself as a magical elf? At the time, I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve never reviewed any of Kochalka’s children’s books here, have I? I should do that soon; I’m sure EDILW readers are just dying to know what I thought of Kochalka’s children’s books…”

Well, I’m still waiting on the copy of Johnny Boo: The Best Little Ghost in the World I reserved from the Columbus public library (Hurry up and read faster, little kids; don’t you know grown men are waiting on you?!), but I’ve read, re-read and re-re-read Kochalka’s 2007 book Squirrelly Gray, so let’s start with that.


As you can clearly judge by the cover, Squirrelly Gray (Random House) is a rather adorable book. Of course, it’s a Kochalka book, and everything he draws is pretty cute, even when it’s just a bunch of super-powered teenagers trying to get high, or Kochalka himself arguing with his wife. This is a kids book, so it’s likely going to be even cuter.

The cover introduces us to some of the major players: S.G. himself, the Tooth Fairy, a Hungry Fox (with adorable overbite, saw-like teeth, and giant cat eyes) and a Magic Acorn. Awesome.

Now, there are some problems with the book, despite the predictable super-cute Kochalka art, and the familiar, comfortable Kochalka lettering.

This isn’t quite a graphic novel/sequential art/comics, but it’s not quite a picture book either; it’s one of those weird hybrids. On the left hand side of each two-page spread, there’s a page of pure text, and on the right there’s either a full-page illustration or, more often, a grid of panels, telling a scene of the story in comics form.

The problem is, the comics almost always repeat what has just been described in the words, so that there’s a strange and shifting overlap in narrative; sometimes the comics portion repeats it exactly, sometimes it repeats it differently, sometimes it contains new information alluded to in the text portions but not communicated in them outright. (It occurs to me that maybe this is merely a symptom of this being a book for little kids who are being read to; they can maybe make their way through the comics sections on their own, while their parent or reader tackles the blocks of texts on the left).

The other problem is that the text is all told in rhyme and it’s usually pretty lame. Again, little ones might not be as sensitive to shitty poetry as adults are, but I found myself wincing and groaning my way through passages like “Squirrelly gray, he bravely tried/ His very squirrelly best./ He Freed the little fairy while/ His heart thumped in his chest.”

These storytelling choices of Kochalka’s aside though, the story itself is pretty good. It’s a kind of animal fable about how color came into the world.

Once everything was gray, and out protagonist was a cute little squirrel who “spent his time in bed,/ Just watching static on TV,/ Quite bored out of his head.”

(I think Squirrelly Gray was suffering from depression, actually).

He takes to wiggling his teeth and, eventually, he wiggles them so much that they pop right out of his head. So he puts them under his pillow for the tooth fairy.

He’s awoken by a scream outside, gets his little squirrel-sized flashlight, and rushes out to see who needs help. It’s the tooth fairy, and she’s stuck in a spider’s web. He helps her out, and, for a reward, she gives him a magic acorn. There’s a surprise inside, she says.

This excites Squirrelly Gray, and there’s a neat panel of him frolicking with the acorn (“I always wanted a magic nut,” he says, happily punching it in one panel), until he realizes he can’t open it without his teeth. Irony!

Eventually the Hungry Fox comes along and asks what’s bugging S.G., and he has an idea for helping him crack the acorn open:

That part cracked me up: The fact that the fox has a club collection. Fox swings the club, intending to brain Squirrelly, but instead he hits the nut, which cracks it open, and out pours a rainbow.

Suddenly, the book is no longer black and white, but full-color. And, for some entirely random reason, the fairy nut’s magic power turned the fox’s club into a flower, which brings us to my second favorite page:

I love the panel of the fox being all confused. You even feel bad for the guy; I mean, why should his club turn into a flower. How does that make any sense?

His crushing depression healed, Squirrelly Gray runs off to play, skipping over a hill top while wearing the cap of the acorn like a little beret.

“And that is why the world we know/ Is colorful and bright./ We all have one young squirrel to thank/ For turning on the light!”

EDILW@Blog@Newsarama

Good morning Every Day Is Like Wednesday readers. Ever wish you could read twice as much of my writing about comics than you already do? And that you had to visit more than one website every day to do it? Well, good news! Starting today, I’m going to be contributing daily to the all-new, somewhat-different Blog@Newsarama.com.

As you may already be aware, J.K. Parkin and the Blog@Newsarama team have all decided to move on from Newsarama.com. For regular readers who have been following their work for years (readers like me), that sure sounds like bad news. Blog@ has long been one of the first websites I checked each morning, and one that I’d return to a few times throughout the rest of the day.

The good news is that from Parkin’s announcement, and those of other Blog@ contributors over the course of the week, it sounds like the old Blog@ team intend to set up shop somewhere new and continue to work together, so that although we won’t be seeing them at their old URL, chances are we’ll being seeing them somewhere else soon.

And as for Blog@, well, I’m pretty confident that it will be in good hands, and will remain a must-visit site for comics fans.

I’ll be contributing daily, as will longtime Newsarama contributor Troy Brownfield, some of my old Best Shots@ Newsarama colleagues (including frequent EDILW commenter Michael C. Lorah), and a pretty exciting line-up of pros from throughout the industry. Here’s Matt "Not Matthew J. Brady of Warren Peace Sings The Blues" Brady’s and Troy’s announcement regarding the near-future of Blog@, and here’s my first official contribution.

So see you there! And, of course, here.