I thought this was funny:

The rest of Alex Sheikman and David Moran's Robotika: For a Few Rubles More #1 ain't so bad either.

The most important comics publishing news in the history of ever

This afternoon I finished drawing the inside front cover of the comic book I've been writing and drawing off and on for the last...oh, eight years now (Although it looks like it was hurriedly done over a weekend; about seven and a half of those years were probably spent on procrastination). That was the very last page I had to finish, so now the book is completely complete. Now all I've got to do is scan it, send it to the publishers and then start begging you guys to give me some money for a copy of it! Hooray!

Unfortunately, I just realized that counting the front and back covers and inside front cover, it's actually twenty-nine pages long, instead of the necessary twenty-eight, so I'm either going to have to cut the one-page epilogue, the back cover (and print the epilogue where the back cover would have been) or the inside front cover. None of which is a necessarily terrible loss or anything, but it sure sucks to have to decide to axe something after all that work, due to a simple counting/math error.

The lesson? Stay in school, kids! Study hard!

Anyway, details and an interminable amount of self-hype to follow in...a couple months, maybe...? In the mean time, start saving your dimes!

(Above: Panel three, and parts of panel five and six. See that house? I totally drew that house like five years ago)

Is 2008's Batgirl #1 the worst comic ever?

It's definitely a contender. Here are three consecutive pages from the comic, which was written by Adam Beechen, pencilled by J. Calafiore and inked by Mark McKenna (and I hope they're all ashamed of themselves):

I suppose it's technically possible for those pages to be worse. Beechen could have spelled half of those 1,500 words wrong, for example, or Califiore could have drawn the characters without necks, or perhaps even less symmetrically than he already did or something, but man, the "creative" team would really have to put some effort into making worse comics pages than these. Because that? That's about as wrong as you can possibly get a comic book.

If you read through all that dialogue—and I wouldn't recommend it—you'll see the characters aren't even really communicating throughout the second and third pages, they're merely summarizing the events of other comic books in which Batgirl appeared over the course of the last two years, occasionally adding details that happened off-panel by way of explaining the many inconsistencies between those comics and the Batgirl appearances that preceded them. It's the type of information you'd find in an Official Guide to the Marvel Universe entry, or perhaps a very thorough Wikipedia page, only put in dialogue bubbles.

That isn't comics, it's Adam Beechen trying to explain and apologize for a bunch of other shitty comic books, many of which he himself also wrote. It cost $17.94 as part of a six-month payment plan, or $19.99 to get it all at once.

New Batgirl costume to include utility garter

When DC released their solicitations for their November releases a few week's back, the cover of Batgirl #4, had the title character blotted out, so all one could see was her silhouette. At that point, the identity of the new Batgirl hadn't yet been revealed, and if they showed her hair color, it would have spoiled the surprise.

At the time, I feared I saw a bulge around her left thigh, which worried me, as utility belts-worn-around-the-thigh are hardly a sign of quality costume design:

It looks like they’re going with one of those blacked-out covers, showing Batgirl in what must be a new, secret identity-spoiling costume fighting some Dark Knight Returns extras. Take special note of her thighs, particularly the left one. Is she wearing utility belts around her legs…? (?!) Oh man, I hope that new costume isn’t as bad as the presence of thigh-bandoliers would indicate…

Well, today DC revealed that I had good reason to worry. DC's Source Blog revealed the un-blotted out cover by Phil Noto (looks an awful lot like Christopher Kent's Nightwing Costume, as Noto draws it), and Lee Garbett revealed his redesign on his blog:
Yes, her costume does have a utility garter on it. I hate those things. Not simply because they seem kinda dumb and impractical (Can she sit down wearing it? Can she run? And does she have so many Bat-gadgets they don't fit in her over-sized belt that looks like it's going to slide off her hip if she moves at all that she needs a utility garter?). No, I dislike them mostly because they seem like such a Jim Lee/Rob Liefeld circa 1992 design element. (In fact, it was right about that time that the last Bat-person who decided the best place to wear a utility belt would be his thigh tried that look out).

It's the superhero fashion equivalent of unlaced white high top sneakers.

As for the rest of the costume, I suppose it looks more realistic and more functional than a lot of superhero costumes, which I don't necessarily consider a virtue—do people read about teenage superheroines for the realism?—but I can understand why some would value that. Personally, I'm in the less-is-more camp of costume design, and the ribbing on the sides of this thing just reminds me of the old Ultimates designs, which even the Ultimates themselves have since abandoned.

Of course, I really liked Cassandra "Batgirl II" Cain's costume, which I understand was pretty unpopular, mostly on account of the creepy mask. Granted, different artists drew it quite differently, but I dug the way Batgirl pencil artist Damion Scott made it look after he hit his groove on the title. I liked the way it blended attributes of Batman's and Spider-Man's costumes: The pointy ears, scalloped cape and the spiky design on the gauntlets from the former, the bulbous, bug-like head, one-piece spandex suit and detail-free mask of the former. You could remove the more fetish-y aspects of the mask—the stitching around the mouth, switch in pupil-less white eye lenses for the black ones—and it'd still be a pretty nice look.

Additionally, it was probably the least sexualized superhero costume you could get. It was still skintight, wrapped in a cape, you wouldn't even know that Batgirl was a girl. Most of the time, she just looked like a petite Batman.

The new Batgirl costume keeps the new Batgirl covered-up, so she's not all Huntress-ed out or anything, but it does make the long, flowing hair and lips an integral part of the costume design again.

I'm not arguing that they should have kept the Cain costume, mind you. I think a new Batgirl deserves a new costume, and what worked about the Cain costume worked because of the character who wore it, but wouldn't have been transferable.

I'm just saying I don't much care for this costume...especially the utility garter.

But that's just me. If I've learned anything from the Internet, it's that there are a lot of different ways to draw a Batgirl.

Review: Wolverine: Logan

Bryan K. Vaughan and Eduardo Risso’s 2008 miniseries Logan was I think the very first Marvel Comic I decided not to buy based solely on its price. It was one of the earlier $3.99-for-22-pages books, and the only difference between it and all the other 22-page Wolverine comics on the shelves was that it had a heavier cover stock.

I figured that I would just wait a couple months and get the trade—the miniseries was only three issues long, so it’s not like there would even be much of a wait.

Of course, I read reviews of the individuals issues as they came out, and I ended up hearing a detail about the plot withheld from the original solicitation, a detail that made me realize this book probably wasn’t something I wanted to read anyway, no matter how much I may have enjoyed past Vaughan works, or how eager I was to see what Risso might do with Wolverine (that image on the cover sure looks pretty cool).

Apparently, Logan wasn’t just a story set in World War II era Japan, but it was set specifically on the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Yes, this is the story about how Wolverine’s healing factor is so awesome that it allowed him to survive one of the most horrific things that human beings ever did to one another. The only less appropriate setting I can think of for a Wolverine story might be a World War II concentration camp, but Mark Millar beat Vaughan to it.

Thank God for public libraries then, the curious but cautious comics reader’s very best friends. Logan was retitled Wolverine: Logan for the trade collection, which makes a certain amount of sense when it comes to shelving and selling it, but also makes the bland, meaningless title seem even blander and more meaningless. But perhaps Vaughan and/or Marvel were just trying to be careful about tipping readers off regarding the content, and thus shied away from calling it Wolverine: Hiroshima or Wolverine: Logan in the Grave of the Fireflies.

I suppose I should point out that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with using superhero characters in stories dealing with extremely grave, serious and real settings, but publishers, editors, writers and artists need to be extremely careful about doing so.

But if you’re going to use one of these guys in your story about one of the most horrific events of World War II, it better be a really, really, really good story. By using a cartoon character like Wolverine at all, you’re already fighting an uphill battle when it comes to gravitas, and putting him at ground zero runs the risk of making light of the event (and making you look like a bunch of assholes).

Suffice it to say that Vaughan didn’t exactly bring his A game to this one.

The tale opens with these two lines of narration:

When you rip a guy’s heart out, the blood inside stinks of hot iron and dead blossoms. After all these years, that’s still what Japan smells like to me.

That’s what Wolverine is thinking about as he trudges through a snowy woods towards a Japanese temple, his goofy blue and yellow superhero costume half-obscured by a trench coat. He walks into the courtyard, takes off his trench coat, puts on his cowl shaped to mimic his peculiar haircut and fights some kind of flaming skeleton ghost.

The title appears at the bottom of a panel revealing his antagonist:

Logan
Act One of Three

Oh shit, this is one of those stories. One so important that it can’t consist of something as prosaic as “parts” or “chapters,” but of “acts.” Logan, it would appear, is going to be, like, the Shakespeare of Wolverine stories.

The scene shifts to a tiny prison cell in Japan, where an American prisoner in dogtags is demanding a password from Logan, who was there as a Candadian paratrooper, and was apparently also captured by the Japanese.

Using his mutant powers, Logan busts them both out of the prison, and they escape into the countryside. Meeting a Japanese woman on the road, the American soldier wants to kill her to keep her from reporting them. Our hero refuses and tells the American he’ll kill him if he tries to hurt her, and so they part ways.

The woman, Atsuko, takes Logan back to her place with her, feeds him, strips off her kimono, and then deflowers him (“Guys back in the barracks called me badger, ferret, skunk. Said a real woman would never make time with someone who’s all hair and stink like me.”)

As they collapse into one another on the floor, Logan asks, “What is this place? Where am I?”

Atsuko replies, “Hiroshima,” as we see a V-formation of bombers flying above her shack.

“It was just about the most beautiful word I’d ever heard,” Logan narrates.

Okay Vaughan, points for a great “Oh no you didn’t!” surprise ending for your first issue (or “act,” whatever), but it’s all downhill from there.

“Act Two” opens in the present, with Wolverine fighting the flaming skeleton ghost monster, and still narrating embarrassingly, with lines like “A Little Boy scattered a hundred thousand men, women and children into a hundred billion fireflies…but the next morning, they were back again. Least, their shadows were, still clinging to this rotten world, not quite ready to let go.”

Then it’s back to the past, where Logan and Atsuko are intruded upon by the American soldier, who shoots and seemingly kills Wolvie, fights with and ultimately kills Atsuko, and then, what’s this?, must fight with Wolverine again, because it turns out Wolverine is a mutant with a healing factor!

But wait, there’s more! The American soldier is also a mutant with a healing factor! And so they’re still fighting when the bomb is dropped. You can put the rest of it together for yourself, and from this point on there’s no real surprise or suspense to the story. Logan survived the bomb, obviously, and so did his adversary, who became the flaming atomic skeleton ghost monster Wolverine is fighting in the present.

With his lost memories restored, Wolverine has returned to Japan to put down this ghost. They fight, Wolverine wins.

While a sense of tastelessness hovers around the story, Vaughan is a talented writer, and he chose his words carefully throughout, choosing symbols and parallels that at first don’t seem quite apparent, which makes it all the more frustrating that he’s delivered such a generic, run-of-the-mill Wolverine story.

There are only three characters, Wolverine, his enemy, and the woman, and the bombing is treated only as an interruption in Wolverine’s conflict with his enemy, something that breaks them up in the 1945 and necessitates a 2008 rematch.

Why go to the trouble of putting Wolverine there at that time, and then simply tell one more story about a woman Wolverine loved, a villain he fought, and how incredible his mutant powers are?

Risso draws a nice double-spread splash of a mushroom cloud, with panels detailing effects of the blast on our scene around it, then there are two pages of Wolverine wandering through deserted Hiroshima large parts of his flesh melted off of his skeleton.

Where did he go? What did he do next? How did the bomb affect his body, his brain, his mind? Did he stick around to help the victims? Did he seek vengeance for them? Did he scramble away in fear of another bomb?

Who knows?

That’s the end of the issue, and the third one deals with the fight in the present, the only flashback being to a conversation between Logan and Atsuko.

Vaughan took the risk of interjecting Wolverine into the very real, very terrible events of Hiroshima, but he retreats from the subject matter as soon as he broaches it.

Because the series was a mere three issues long—adding up to less than 70 pages—the trade includes another 50 pages worth of behind-the-scenes type content. There’s Vaughan’s proposal for the series, the entire script for the first issue, and then some sketches and sample pencil pages of Risso’s.

In the proposal, Vaughan writes, “There are three things I’d like to accomplish with our three-issue miniseries,” and the first is to “Create a story what will showcase the considerable talents of Eduardo Risso…There are countless Marvel readers who have yet to be exposed to Risso’s artwork, and I hope Logan will give fans a chance to see what he does best (sophisticated storytelling, visceral action and beautiful women), while also giving Eduardo an opportunity to stretch his muscles…(costumed heroes, misshapen mutants and period drama)."

The other two goals were to tell an a “classic, ‘evergreen’ adventure” that would go on the shelf next to Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s original Wolverine miniseries, and to show the importance of Japan and World War II in a less cartoonish and “more realistic, relevant” version of events than usual.

The book unquestionably fails on that third goal, and I suppose it will be up to readers over the course of the coming years to determine whether this becomes a classic Wolverine story or not, but Vaughan certainly achieved his first goal: Spotlighting Risso’s talents.

And Marvel was certainly on board with meeting that goal. At least the first individual issue of the series was sold in a regular, colored format (and colorist Dean White does a hell of a job, it should be noted) and in a black-and-white variant format, in which there’s no colorist to get between Risso’s line work and the readers’ eyes. Likewise, Marvel published a hardcover version of this story in which the entire contents of the book were in black and white.

Risso’s definitely out of the comfort zone readers likely associate as his—big city urban crime—but he proves to be not only comfortable but quite capable in the snows of rural Japan. His occasionally quite sparse panels reflect the minimalist aesthetic often associated with that country uncannily, and Risso’s a master of getting a lot out of few lines.

It’s just unfortunate that while Vaughan’s heart may have been in the right place, the story he gave to Risso to draw isn’t a very good one, and is, in fact, fairly impossible to recommend.

Flipping back through it one more time, I see that Risso’s storytelling and acting are so strong that the images tell the basic story all by themselves. So if Marvel really wanted to highlight Risso’s work to their fans, perhaps they would have been better off publishing a wordless version of this instead of a color-less version.

That would have kept all of the book’s virtues, and only cost it its flaws.

Another good thing about G.I. Joe (the '80s cartoon, not this summer's live-action movie)

Earlier this week, Marvel editor Tom Brevoort touched on what Robot 6’s Sean T. Collins referred to as “the third rail of fanboy politics.”

Answering a reader question on his company blog about why books with non-American casts (like the recently canceled Captain Britain and MI13) don' sell, Brevoort gave a very candid and honest appraisal:

I don't know that it's any one thing, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that it's all part of the same phenomenon that makes it more difficult to sell series with female leads, or African-American leads, or leads of any other particular cultural bent. Because we're an American company whose primary distribution is centered around America, the great majority of our existing audience seems to be white American males… hat's something that continues to change as the audience for what we do gets larger and more diverse-but even within that diversity, it's probably going to be easier to make a success of a book with a female or African-American lead before it is a British or Canadian-centric character.

The 4thletter’s David Brothers responded with a pretty astute post, saying that,

But, if you’re going to go, “Our best-selling comics tend to be about our universe and continuity. We should do more of those so we can stay afloat,” you’re going to get comics starring people with several dozen years of Marvel history. All but two of those people are white, and the two are Black Panther and Falcon, who no one cares about anyway.

So if the audience wants stories that matter, you’re gonna get stories starring white dudes. It’s not even racism. It’s mathematics.

(He then goes on to note that there is the danger of creating a “self-defeating cycle,” wherein you keep doing stories starring white dudes because you know those will sell best, and never get around to grooming the audience to dig stories starring non-white, non-dude or non-American characters).

How representational Big Two super-comics are of the non-white male demographics is more or less a topic of constant conversation in the comics blogosphere (and, hopefully, within the Big Two as well).

That conversation was sloshing around in the back of my mind, as was a Vince Moore post on the lack of black villains in super-comics, over the course of this last week, while I was enjoying my recent discovery that you can find pretty much every G.I. Joe cartoon ever on YouTube*.

The G.I. Joe cartoon is over 25 years old now, and man, it is strikingly representational when it comes to diversity; certainly when compared to other cartoons of the time and even today (Like, for X-Men: Evolution they had to make-up a new black character because there weren't any more popular ones for them to choose from; when the Justice League cartoon started, they used the least popular version of Green Lantern at the time because he was the only way they could get a black character in a Big Seven line-up).

The original 1983 miniseries (the five-parter about the M.A.S.S. device) only had two black characters in it—Doc and Stalker, neither of whom I can remember ever getting a spotlight episode. But the 1984 miniseries (The Revenge of Cobra) and the series that followed between 1985 and 1987, featured many, many more characters, and among these were new black characters include Roadblock (who played a pretty prominent role throughout), Alpine (ditto) and Iceberg (who was featured as the lead in at least one episode...that awesome one where he gets turned into a killer whale? Remember that? God, that one was awesome).

There were at least three women on the team, Scarlett, Lady Jaye and Cover Girl, and those first two were among the most prominent characters in the series. Both were romantically linked to male heroes, but they were rarely were forced to play the role of “the girl” at the expense of being G.I. Joes.

I know there was at least one Asian-American (Quick Kick) and Native American (Spirit), and I could have sworn there were some Joes of Hispanic or Latin descent prior to the 1987 movie, but I’m afraid I can’t think of any off the top of my head now.

Anyway, there were a ton of white dudes, but still a decent number of non-white, non-dude characters. The portrayal of many of these characters was often cringe-inducing (well, is cringe-inducing to me now that I’m in my ‘30s, as a grade-schooler I didn’t notice), particularly in the case of Spirit, who was every noble savage stereotype rolled into one, but even now I feel inclined to cut the show a little slack. After all, almost every character on it talked with some kind of outrageous accent or verbal tick, either to help distinguish the large cast of characters for the benefit of young viewers, or to disguise the fact that like most cartoon, the voice cast was much, much smaller than the actual cast.

While the Joes were pretty diverse in terms of gender and racial/ethnic make-up, the villains weren’t. In fact, I can’t think of a single non-white Cobra agent, other than Storm Shadow, who looked white as hell on the cartoon, but I believe was supposed to be Japanese (he always talked like someones bad impression of a samurai). They did have a couple of women in their ranks—Baroness and Zarana—but diversity among the bad guys seemed to rest on which countries their crazy accents were imported from.**

I wonder if that had anything to do with the reluctance to create negative racial stereotypes leading to white creators avoiding using non-white villains at all (which is why, I think, Aquaman’s archenemy is the most prominent black super-villain), or if it’s just a complete coincidence. There seemed to have been a lot fewer Cobra characters in general, their armies generally filled out by anonymous foot soldier types in matching Cobra uniforms.

If there's anything that DC and Marvel can learn from this about making their team books more diverse, I think it's that the bigger the team, the easier it is. Like, if you're only going to have seven to ten characters are the Justice League, it might be hard to work in too many non-white dude characters if you reserve six or seven spots for the original, most popular characters, who happen to be white dudes. But if you have 14 or 20 guys on the team, it's sure a lot easier to work in Vixen, Steel, Skyrocket, Dr. Light II, Cyborg, Tomorrow Woman, Sala, Rising Sun or whoever. (If a 20-hero Justice League seems unwieldly, keep in mind not every character has to appear in every issue; the problem with JSoA and it's massive roster wasn't the number of characters, but that the writers insist on putting them all in every issue, whether they have anything to do or not).

The Avengers are a little more challenging due to the way they're being handled at the moment, consisting basically of Brian Michael Bendis' favorite characters, and how they relate to the overarching Marvel Universe storyline Bendis has a hand in. They've been a small team on the run from the law for a while now, which makes it difficult to double or triple their numbers, I guess. Even still, they could use more color or, at the very least, their "colorful" members—er, just Luke Cage at the moment?—could use some extra attention.

In the post I linked to above, for example, Brothers mentioned how long it's been since Luke Cage has had a miniseries, despite being a prominent member of the team starring in Marvel's best-selling book, whereas Hawkeye got a mini pretty much as soon as he joined the team. Even if Marvel's unsure how well a Luke Cage miniseries would sell, certainly a New Avengers: Cage or Dark Avengers: Cage one would sell like hotcakes, wouldn't it?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go see if I can find that episode where Iceberg gets mutated into a killer whale on YouTube...



*Holy crap, have you ever tried watching the post- G.I. Joe: The Movie series, the one that was produced by a different animation studio, and had new character designs, almost all-new voice actors and animation that looked about ten years behind the original cartoon series? Those are not very good cartoons.


**I thought Destro was supposed to be black, based on his booming deep voice, right up until that one episode where he and Lady Jaye see that Lovecraftian monster beneath his clan's castle in Scotland. If Destro's Scottish, why doesn't he have a Scottish accent instead of a vaguely Jamaican one? He sounds a bit like an evil, melodramatic James Earl Jones to me.

Is it too late to request Black Lanterns we’d like to see?

The second issue of the Geoff Johns-written, eight-part miniseries Blackest Night, in which the dead rise up as zombie-versions of Green Lanterns, is already out, so artists Ivan Reis and Oclair Albert should be finishing up the final issue right about now.

I assume then that it's probably too late to say that I think it would be really cool if Jumbo came back as a Black Lantern.

That’s right, Jumbo, the late 19th century celebrity elephant who was part of the Barnum & Bailey Circus until his untimely and tragic death.

I’ve been reading a lot about famous dead elephants lately (relative to how much I normally read about famous dead elephants, of course), thanks to Jan Bondeson’s The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Cornell University; 1999). As the title indicates, it’s a collection of essays on animal topics, mostly of the unusual sort—the history of belief in the basilisk, strange falls of the sort Charles Forte was so interested in, animals being put in trial, the biographies of a few very famous performing animals.

One of these was Jumbo, whom Bondeson devotes a 34-page chapter entitled “Jumbo, King of the Elephants” to. I knew very little about the elephant before reading this—only that he was said to be one of the biggest elephants of all time, and that he was one of P.T. Barnum’s attractions—and was surprised at what a dramatic story his is. (If I were a Hollywood producer, I’d be working vigorously on a Jumbo movie for holiday, Oscar-bait season release. It’s got everything! A period piece that would necessitate a great deal of special effects, out-sized characters like Barnum, Queen Victoria and less well-known but eccentric types, animal drama for the kids, and the set-piece surrounding his death! Wow!).

I certainly didn’t know that he was killed be getting hit by a train, nor any of the morbid, gory and semi-religious details that followed. Basically, elephants are really, really big, and disposing of their bodies was pretty difficult, probably particularly so in the late 1800s as opposed to now.

The other famous dead elephant Bondeson devotes an essay to is Chunee, an elephant kept in an indoor menagerie in the heart of London in the early years of the 19th century. Chunee suffered an equally spectacular death, and a much more prolonged and violent one.

Essentially, it went “mad,” and had to be put down before it could smash it’s way through its cage and destroy the menagerie—which housed other dangerous animals whose escape was feared—and God knows how man people in buildings.

A firing squad was hastily assembled, and seemed to have little effect—they fired over 150 musket balls into Chunee, and it was only killed when it was stabbed with a harpoon and a sword.

The disposal of Chunnee’s body was even more difficult, as the giant elephant was indoors at the time of it’s death, and in the middle of London (Jumbo died at a rail yard in Canada).

In both instances, Bondeson talks in some detail about groups of butchers cutting up the elephant and carting away the meat, the removal and preservation of the skins and various other body parts, and notes that both elephants had very long and productive afterlives, with their skeletons (and, in Jumbo’s case, his stuffed skin) being put on exhibit.

As far as the reanimated rotting corpses of superheroes with magic rings returning to get revenge on the living goes, I think a huge black elephant with glowing red eyes and a Black Lantern ring around his trunk flying around attempting to gore and trample Hal Jordan would make for a pretty scary customer.

Scarier than any of these guys, anyway:

I got nothing.

Due to the Labor Day holiday, I won't have access to the scanner I usually use until Tuesday, so the handful of image-dependent posts I have planned all have to wait until mid-next week. The non-image related ones are all kinda labor-intensive, and I don't feel much like spending a long period of time on any of them tonight. So I got nothing for tonight, and maybe not tomorrow night either.

If you absolutely need to read my writing about comics tonight though, perhaps you can make do with the review of Del Rey's X-Men: Misfits Vol. 1 I have over at Blog@ (By the way, Johanna Draper Carlson is giving a copy of it away, if you'd like to enter her contest for it here). And I'll have my usual Saturday morning link-blogging up at Blog@ tomorrow morning as well.

Some old first issues I've recently read

Captain America: Dead Men Running #1 (Marvel Comics) I was pretty excited to finally find a copy of this comic, as I somehow missed it the first time around, despite the fact that it featured cover art by Derek Hess, the Cleveland-based rock poster artist (and avowed Captain America fan). The interior art comes from Danijel Zezelj, and while there's obviously a bit of a gulf between the two men's respective styles, they're at least close enough on the spectrum that a reader shouldn't get whiplash when they open the cover and start reading.

I was pleasantly surprised by the comic, perhaps because I was expecting it to not be very good—I guess I've mentally sorted modern Captain America history into Brubaker and pre-Brubaker, with the former being the good stuff, and the latter the bad. But this issue read an awful lot like a Vertigo style comic that just so happened to feature a Marvel character in it (quite a few of the Marvels from the first years of this decade read like that actually, on account of Marvel hiring Vertigo editors, writers and artists to work on their comics; these creators among them).

Darko Macan scripts this one, and the focus is on a small group of American soldiers and some little kids lost in a jungle, surrounded by enemies, and beginning to despair tha they're not going to get out of this alive. That's when a U.S. military plane drops a single man in a parachute off, not far from where they're lost. But of what help can a single man really be in their dire straights, they wonder aloud. Ha ha, buck up guys, that one man is Captain America! Hooray!

After a middle section in which Captain America is viewed through these soldiers' eyes, there's a few twists near the end that flip the script in an intriguing way. I wanted to get the next two issues in the miniseries, not just because there were two more Hess covers on them,
but because I wanted to see what would happen next. And in serial comics storytelling, that's exactly what you want your readers to feel like when they get to that "to be continued" in the last panel.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Marvel ever collected this into a trade, either because it's only three-issues long, or because Macan and Zezelj don't have names that move trades the way other cover credits do. Collect this book Marvel. I promise to buy it!


El Diablo #1 (DC/Vertigo) Speaking of Zezelj and Vertigo comics, here's a Veritgo comic illustrated by Zezelj from 2001. Brian Azzerello handles the script, in which DC's old Western hero is kept off-panel for the bulk of the first issue, appearing as little more than a silhouette when he appears at all. They play up the otherworldy aspects of the original iteration of the character, to the point where he seems to almost certainly be a ghost or spirit of some kind—or at least a super-sneaky dude who is a really, really good shot.

The protagonist is a former bounty hunter who settled into a new role as the sheriff of a town, and he finds himself being forced to go back to hunting men when El Diablo rides into town and slaughters a bunch of outlaws.

There's obviously something in the sheriff's past that links him to El Diablo, but Azzarello teases it with a few sensational clues without revealing it in this first issue. Again I found myself eager to see what happened next, although this time I'm in luck—there is a trade collection of the miniseries, although no local library has it.

It can be pretty weird reading a Vertigo comic from the late-nineties or early-aughts and thinking of how incredibly tame they are, even compared to mainstream DCU books these days. For example, last week's Batman: Widening Gyre #1 featured several pages of Etrigan the Demon eating severed heads and other body parts and a Poison Ivy whose entire costume consists of a leaf over her vagina. I didn't see any mature readers stamp on that. El Diablo #1 did have a little "suggested for mature readers" tag on the cover, but the only "mature" bits I noticed were one instance apiece of the words "fuck" and "pussy," and a sex scene in which you can see part of a man's ass in one panel.


The Hood #1 (Marvel/Max) Now is probably a poor time to try reading the first issue of this 2002 miniseries by Bryan K. Vaughan, Kyle Hotz and Eric Powell. Over the past few years, Brian Michael Bendis has used Vaughan's character extensively in his Avengers comics, first building him up as a sort of Kingpin of super-crime, then involving him in some sort of magical storyline (I'd dropped New Avengers by this point), and making him a key player in the post-Secret Invasion, "Dark Reign"-branded Marvel Universe, where he sits at a table with such archvillains as The Green Goblin, Loki and Dr. Doom.

If his current ubiquity and the primacy of Bendis' flatter, more generic bad guy version of the character taints the original Hood story, this first chapter gets off relatively easy, as The Hood isn't The Hood yet, but still just Parker Robinson, a low-level crook and pretty scummy individual who nevertheless loves his ailing mother and girlfriend enough to lie to them and try to make enough fast money to help them out.

This issue is pretty much all Parker actually, and there's relatively little Marvelous going on. A plainclothes Electro shows up at a bar, and a Hydra recruiter gets a beatdown from Parker and a friend as payback for 9/11 (Not that Hydra was responsible, but they are a terrorist organization, and Vaughan uses the incident to draw a line between Parker and really evil pricks).

We basically follow him through a night in his life. He visits his mom in a hospital/sanitarium, he meets a friend at a bar and learns about a smash-and-grab job, he visits a prostitute, he visits his pregnant significant other, he goes to rob a warehouse but finds instead of a shipment some kind of monster wearing a red cloak and boots, he kills it and takes its clothes, and he then discovers they hold some kind of power while he tries to flee muggers.

Vaughan's pretty good at this sort of character-focused work, and he can be a very clever writer when it comes to dialogue and setting up certain scenes (I was struck by how he out-Bendises Bendis when it comes to a street-level Marvel Universe crime story; the subject matter and situations are familiar to the sorts of stories Bendis has often written for Marvel, but the dialogue is all much more natural sounding).

He's also lucky enough to be working with some talented artists with unique styles. Hotz has a cartooniness to his work, but not a silly or child-like sort of cartooniness. His work is a bit abstracted, but it retains a hard edge. It's loose and fun, but perfectly effective, and serves Vaughan's script well.

This is a Max series, with a big old "explicit content" warning on the front, but all that's explicit is the language. The only difference between this and, say, a Bendis-written Marvel book is that when a character says "fuck" or "pussy," it appears as "fuck" or "pussy," instead of "@#$%" or "@#$%&." It's also only $2.99, rather than the $3.99 price tag that Marvel's Max books were the first to carry.

I was eager to see how the magical boots and cloak would effect Parker's life, but I didn't have the next five issues. There is a trade of it, although not anywhere nearby.


Ruse #1 (CrossGen) I bet there's a fascinating and funny book to be written about the short-lived publisher CrossGen, although I don't know if anyone will ever write such a book, because a) I have a feeling all of the employees may have signed some kind of wacky non-disclosure form gagging them from talking about what went on in the CrossGen Compound and b) comics professionals seem to hate to say anything bad about one another and/or their employers, on account of how small the industry is.

My own exposure to the publisher's work is extremely limited (although I've got a whole stack of Sojurn with art by—ugh—Greg Land sitting there in the corner now, thanks to the same collection from which all of the books in this post came from). I think I read a few issues of something involving swords and a boat drawn by George Perez, and at least one other issue of Ruse.

I remember kinda liking that issue, although I think CrossGen imploded shortly afterward. I did kinda like this issue too.

The premise is on the simple side, but it's extremely well executed. What if Sherlock Holmes lived in the CrossGen Universe, and Dr. Watson was a hot chick with a time-stopping super-power she's trying to keep secret? That's it, really. Maybe writer Mark Waid's version of Sherlock Holmes, Simon Archard, is a bit more of a total cock than Holmes though. As someone who's only read a couple of Doyle's original stories assigned in school, I'm most familiar with Holmes from various movies, and his cock-ishness seems to vary from film to film. But Archard? Total cock.

Of course, you might be a total arrogant prick with no social skills if you were as smart as Archard is. (Batman's a real asshole, for example, and like Archard and Holmes, he's a master of detection and deduction).

In this over-sized first issue, we meet him and his blonde assistant Emma during the drawing room climax of a mystery we weren't privy too. The murderer attempts to make his escape, and Archard kicks his ass and saves a helpless hostage in a pretty dramatic action scene in which stopping the bad guy and saving the girl seem completely impossible to everyone but Archard.

From there, we learn a bit more about our protagonists, including the fact that Emma has some kind of crazy super-power that she's not supposed to use under any circumstances, since once she uses it she'll expose herself and/or lose a bet or something.

The pair then attend a fancy party, take on an extremely difficult case, solve it and determine there's much more to said case than was originally apparent, the comic ending with a cliffhanger climax in which another lady with another crazy super-power appears.

The crazy super-powers are a bit jarring at first, as is the setting, which looks like Victorian England under a different name, but it's actually some sort of sci-fi facsimile, I guess (also, there are a little race of gargoyles that flie around, which no one seems to pay too much attention too). The sci-fi elements seemed to come out of left-field to me, but I put that down to my own unfamiliarity with the CrossGen line. Perhaps if I was reading this as it was originally released and intended to be read, I'd know it's set on a particular planet or in a particular dimension or whatever.

Anyway, if you can roll with that, it's solid, solid work. Waid's Archard is a fun character, the sort that's 50 steps of everyone in certain arenas, but at the expense of being socially inept (Emma is as much as social buffer for Archard as she is his assistant), Emma is an appealing point-of-view character, and Waid's presentations of various mysteries and their solutions is clever.

Butch Guice's art, inked by Mike Perkins and colored by Laura DePuy, is gorgeous, maybe more gorgeous than usual. I'm having trouble recalling where I've seen it look brighter and sharper.

Weekly Haul: September 2

Achewood Vol. 2: Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar (Dark Horse Comics) I don’t want to talk too much about this because a) so many more talented writers have written much more intelligently about Achewood before that I feel like I have little to say worth hearing, and b) I may stumble through a more formal review of it elsewhere in the near future. For the time being, I’ll just point out that this is exactly what I wanted from an Achewood collection, much moreso than Vol. 1: The Great Outdoor Fight (although that is a better introduction than this). Additionally, I finally feel like I understand certain elements of the strip’s premise that have always confused me, and, finally Chris Onstad is a really great prose writer. His characters are so well-rounded that hearing them talk and/or simply described in prose feels just as natural as seeing them in their home medium.


Agents of Atlas #10 (Marvel Comics) Jimmy and the Agents catch their breath between battles with their new enemy, The Jade Claw and her rival Great Wall organization, leading to a very effective, very full issue in which writer Jeff Parker spends a few pages on every character, teasing out characterization and advancing and introducing sub-plots. Great stuff, as always—actually, a little greater than usual, if you ask me. I also infinitely prefer the current art team of Gabriel Hardman and Paul Rivoche to original pencil artist Carlo Pagulayan, so I hope they’re here to stay…whatever the future holds for this title.


Daring Mystery Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 (Marvel) I’m not going to lie, I love the Phantom Reporter. Not necessarily the character himself, whom I’ve had very little exposure to (basically, a few reprint comics from the Golden Age, and the first half of J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston’s abandoned miniseries The Twelve), but the name and the implied concept.

The marriage of two vastly different words together like that appeals to me—The Phantom Reporter!—dude sounds a bit like someone who would chase Scooby and the gang around for 20 minutes before being unmasked. His costume is kinda neat—The Spirit, only with a cape!—and, as a former reporter, I like the idea of a guy who spends all day reporting, then goes out at night and decides to just insert himself into the story, Jimmy Olsen-style. Like, what if Clark Kent were Batman, you know?

Anyway, this is a Phantom Reporter comic. It is written by David Liss, who is a writer of prose mystery novels, which might mean he’s a “get” for Marvel. I’ve never heard of him, but then, I’ve heard of relatively few prose mystery novelists.

I’m happy to report that he does a swell job on the script. There’s an awful lot of narration, something an awful lot of prose writers breaking into comics usually write an awful lot of, but given how big and full a story Liss is telling here, it’s completely understandable.

He works The Phantom Reporter’s origin story into a case/story that the reporter by day, Phantom Reporter by night character is working on and puts it in a framing sequence (set in modern days), with a bit of a twist ending.

It actually reminded me a bit of Vertigo’s Sandman Mystery Theater, which is of course a good thing.

Liss’ collaborator is artists Jason Armstrong, who not so long ago did a bang-up job on the Hellboiverse miniseries Lobster Johnson. He does great work here, too—dynamic lines, simple shapes building into a well-rendered, lived-in world, lots of scratchy, inky texture, and a maniacal expression on our boy when he goes all vigilante.

The back-up feature is a reprint of an old Phantom Reporter story which I’m almost positive Marvel already sold me in The Twelve #0.


Mystic Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 (Marvel) Yes, Marvel published two of these 70th Anniversary specials this week, even though they haven’t published one since August 5, and aren’t planning on publishing next week. Why? Because they are always doing stupid shit like publishing seven Avengers or X-Men books to all be released on the same day. Hopefully the frozen head of Walt Disney can whip this company into shape, when it is attached to a robot body and takes over as Editor-in-Chief.

This issue features The Vision, and not the sensitive android Avenger whose costume makes me want to throw-up. No, this is the spooky, Golden Age version which I’ve only read one (1) story about before (That being Avengers/Invaders series Dynamite helped Marvel put together.

This was basically my introduction to the character then, and I’ve gotta say, he seems pretty rad. He appears out of smoke—kitchen fires, gun barrels, cigarettes—and Spectres up gangsters with weird illusions. It turns out that he is from a different dimension, and was brought here by an eccentric professor with a hot daughter, and has decided to stick around to destroy evil. That all sounds pretty awesome to me.

This story is by both written and drawn by David Lapham. I know his past superhero work has proven controversial among certain circles of super-fans—controversial as to if it’s good or not, that is—but I’ve always like it, and I like this one too. It introduces us to The Vision from the perspective of his enemies, and as they seek to learn more about him, so do we, and his origin story gets told as Lapham speeds along through a story that’s part period crime piece and part supernatural superhero punch ‘em up.

The two back-up stories, both credited to a Jack Kirby, are pretty much prefect Golden Age shorts. In the first, The Vision discovers a werewolf and kills it. In the second, The Vision faces a couple of rampaging dinosaurs, and destroys them. With dynamite. The art on both of these are rough, but still incredibly dynamic, with weird, twisty, off-kilter designs to the monsters.

Honestly, it’s hard not to love a comic book that ends with an exploding T-Rex.


Sweet Tooth #1 (DC Comics/Vertigo) I do hope you all bought a copy of this at the shop today. It was $1…that’s 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of any other single issue on the shelf. Like, you can’t even buy a cup of bad coffee for a dollar anymore, can you? I guess you could get something off a fast food dollar menu, if you want to eat terrible fast food somewhere…But! A dollar! If this thing was completely terrible, it would probably still be worth the price you paid for it.

And hey, guess what? It’s not terrible. It's really quite good.

That’s really not all that surprising. It’s both written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire, of Top Shelf’s excellent Essex County trilogy and, more recently, the Vertigo graphic novel The Nobody.

I really, really like Lemire’s artwork, and it was especially cool to see it in this format—in full color (thanks to Jose Villarrubia), on the cheaper, pulpier paper stock, and in a comic book instead of a graphic novel.

I liked the portions of Lemire’s work I got from Top Shelf, but I like the nostalgia (and, in relation to Lemire’s work so far, the novelty) that this provides.

So, somewhere in an abandoned Nebraska wilderness sanctuary, there’s a kid named Gus, who has deer-like antlers growing out of his head. He lives all alone with his hard-working, religious father, and has never seen another human being, although someone seems to be lurking around the woods, given that candy bars occasionally appear, and the crack of far off gun shots can be heard.

When his father dies, Gus is on his own…but not for as long as he might like, as the guys leaving the candy bars and shooting things in the distance come after him, talking about catching “hybrids.”

Is a pretty intriguing set-up, one that ends with a nice cliffhanger, and, of course, it has Lemire’s art going for it as well.


Wednesday Comics #9 (DC) I will miss reading this, but I don’t think I’ll miss reviewing it.

Batman: Wow, that dude punched the hell out of Batman’s face, didn’t he?

Kamandi: The last panel is pretty much the best “here comes the cavalry” type of panel I’ve ever seen in a comic.

Superman: Aha. So it was a pussification beam that alien hit Superman with. Explaining why they last seven strips were so boring doesn’t make them any less boring, unfortunately.

Deadman: I enjoyed seeing a physical Deadman trading blows and jumping around avoiding fire in this strip, as it’s so different from what one usually sees in Deadman stories (i.e. him just being a ghost).

Green Lantern: Hal Jordan uses his ring to strip his old friend and rival completely nude. Hot.

Metamorpho: I will forgive this week’s strip being the exact same format as last week’s simply because it taught me how to say “suck it” in Latin.

Teen Titans: This last panel doesn’t even make any sense. Is there some dialogue missing in the last few panels or something?

Strange Adventures: Still gorgeous.

Supergirl: Aw, I like the panel of Streaky grooming. This is a particularly darling installment of the project’s most darling strip.

Metal Men: “Frak, yeah?” You are dead to me, Lead.

Wonder Woman: Huh. I wonder if Caldwell has been listening to critics, and to what degree, as this is the clearest, easiest to read installment yet. It features less panels, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality.

Sgt. Rock: Rock only manages to kill one stinkin’ Nazi before getting bludgeoned in the head again. Come on, Rock! There are only three issues left to go!

The Flash: Ever wanted to see Barry Allen drawn like Charlie Brown or Dagwood Bumstead? Neither did I…until I saw this page, anway.

Demon/Catwoman: I really like the fourth panel. That’s one nice, big image of Etrigan.

Hawkman: It’s no “I’m the goddam Batman,” but I did like, “I’ve got this! I’m Hawkman, dammit!” Dude, don't argue with Hawkman about how best to fight a T-Rex!

What's wrong with this picture?

I'm a big fan of Jo Chen's art, and have particularly admired her covers for this series, as she constantly demonstrates her ability to do effective character likenesses in an organic way, so that the characters look like characters more than weird, wax models of the actors who played them. This cover really jumped off the shelf at me this week, and I couldn't help noticing that both Buffy and Willow seem awfully...big, don't they? I don't think I've ever even watched an entire episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer start to finish before, so I'm hardly an expert in these matters, but the I'm familiar enough with the actresses who played the characters on the show that these images look a little...exaggerated to me. Well, a little exaggerated in Buffy's case; really exaggerated in Willow's.

"It will take more than a handful of lumbering, muddle-minded Transformers to defeat us! We are binary bonded!"

The next stop in my ongoing search for the good Transformers comics is another from the Marvel series, specifically 1988’s Transformers #46, featuring the story “Ca$h and Car-Nage!” by writer Bob Budiansky and artists Jose Delbo and Danny Bulanadi.

The title of the story is pretty promising. Not only is there the forward-looking dollar-sign-used-as-the-letter-“S” in the title, but the punning, putting-the-“car”-in-“carnage” emphasis is pretty awesome, in a “this is so stupid it’s awesome” kind of way.

And I do love the cover, in which the motorcycle dude with a spiky-bike and a huge mourning star is driving straight at the crotch of a Transformer, who stands confidently before him. Why is this robot behaving so courageously? Because as we can see from this angle, Transformers have no genitals; their crotches need not fear mourning stars swung at them from motorcycles the way fleshy humans, with their vulnerable genitals do.

Note the little yellow explosion near the robots ankle, screaming “The Sparkabots battle the Roadjammers!”

Who are the Spakrabots? And who are the Roadjammers?

We meet the latter first. They’re a group of bounty hunters recruited by the mysterious Z Foundation to hunt down Transformers, for $50,0000 a head.

Let’s meet them, shall we?

There’s Burn-Out, who was recruited at a county fair in Pennsylvania after he uses a shotgun to blast the robot target in a shooting game called “Reck the Robot.”

There’s Randy “Roadhog” Horton, a bounty hunter whose hobby is riding his motorcycle in demolition derbies and destroying cars with a huge medieval weapon, who is recruited after one such derby in eastern Pennsylvania.

And then there’s these two, Felix and Skunge, the best bounty hunters in Nevada, who a policeman points in the direction of the Z Foundation after they drop off their latest captures.

They all convene in New York City a few days later at the headquarters of the Z Foundation. There they meet with Mr. K, Mr. B, and Mr. L, who explain that the Founaation is founded “on the principle that all sentient robots—Transformers—must be eliminated for the safety of humanity.”

Because the government has been ineffectual in repelling the Transformers, Mr. Z decided to star paying bounty hunters to take down Transformers, and apparently these four are the best in the country.

The group, code-named “Roadjammers,” are given a little gizmo called a jammer, which emits a frequency that blocs the Transformers’ ability to transform and act on their own. They are then given word that three Autobots are operating in a nearby mountainous area.

Meanwhile, on Cybertron, a half-dozen Autobots are rotting away in a Decepticon prison camp,

and all referring to one another by name in every sentence, so as to subtly introduce them to readers. (Guzzle? Backstreet? Fizzle? Sizzle? These poor ‘bots were near the end of the line when they were passing at codenames, I guess).

Suddenly, in walk the dumbest looking Transformers I’ve ever seen:
Man, just look at these guys! They’re basically cube bodies with a rectangular limb in each corner, and a robot face stuck in the middle of one side. They hardly look like they should be able to walk, let alone transform into something and/or fight Autobots.

I’m assuming they look so awkward and goofy because pencil artist Delbo is sticking as close to the model of the toy designs as possible.

Wait, let’s check the Internet to find out…
Okay, so the above image is of the toy version of Flamefeather, taken from a Mr. Jeff Bryant’s website about his Transformers collection. In the above panel, he’s the robot on the far left. Apparently Delbo actually tried to anthropomorphize these robots a bit, and they do look less clunky and impossible in the comic than the toys do.

What kid would even want to play with such a toy? Well, these robots are the Firecons—Flamefeather, Sparkstalker and Cindersaur (Wait, isn’t that a Pokemon name?). And while they may look pretty stupid, if you dragged the toys across a flat service, they would emit sparks, hence the name. The Sparkabots similar contained a spark-creating device.

So, back to our story, the Firecons are there to escort the Sparkabots away, but the Autobots are all like, “No way!” and decide to fight it out, prompting the Firecons to reveal their equally ridiculous monster forms


I would have bet on the Autobots winning this fight, as their arms are long enough to reach their opponents with a punch, but it turns out the Autobots are all under-energized and thus so weak “a microcon could beat them with one armature tied behind his back!”

Ooh, sick burn Sparkstalker!

The Sparkabots are then given an energy bath to restore them to full operating capacity, and then marched across a transdimensional space bridge, and then find themselves on earth.

What follows next is a few repetitive pages in which we get three similar scenes of a Roadjammer or two attacking a Sparkabot with their little jamming devices, the Sparkabots trying to feel and/or talk their way out of a fight, and each ultimately being frozen in car mode.

The Sparkabots' protests apparently got to the Roadjammers though, as they sit around on the hoods of the conquered cars, smoking and drinking beers, and thinking something’s fishy about this whole set-up. They decide the dudes they talked to at the Z Foundation must secretly be in league with the Decepticons.

They drive the captured Autobots to the Z Foundation’s parking lot, where they discover three headless Deceptcons in robot mode.

Then out walk Mr. K , Mr. B and Mr. L. When the Roadjammers challenge them, some crazy shit happens:
Ah. So apparently these guys are the heads of Headmasters, a sub-set of Transformers that, like The Pretenders, young Caleb just could not get behind.



Like, there was a headless robot, that could transform into a vehicle, and its head was a tiny little humanoid Transformer, right? I just couldn’t understand this concept as a kid—it seemed so far removed form my understanding of Transformers evolution.

Also, they were called “Headmasters.” Even at 11 I knew how dirty a name that was, and was somewhat repelled by the fact that Hasbro seemed clueless about it.

Anyway, this transformation sequence in these panels are pretty insane…look how huge the Headmasters’ bodies get when they rip off their suits! And then they just become these flying heads that “POP” into their huge, headless bodies?

In the last panel, they discover that they’re paralyzed. That’s because Felix, the smart one, has monkeyed around with the jamming devices, and focused them on the headless Decepticon bodies as well.

Then things get kind of weird. Mr. Z comes in and explains that the whole thing was just a big scam—
—he needed to test the jammer technology on Autobots, and for some reason he thought it best to employ a bunch of shifty, violent bounty hunters instead of just doing it his damn self.

And check it out—


Mr. Z is a Decepticon’s head too! What the hell Z? This is a very stupid plan you have.

Mr. Z calls out Scroponok, the giant robot scorpion that is also his body. Felix ain’t scared though, as the jammers allow him to remote control the Decipticons, who he makes transform and announce their names:
Horri-Bull! Fangry! Ha ha, those are great names! Squeezeplay doesn’t really belong though, as he lacks a stupid/awesome name. Felix also sics the Sparkbots on Scroponok, leading to this wonderful splash panel:
Those are some awesome sound effect. I particularly like “Peeyooo!” That’s a sound I used to make a lot when I played with Transformers and other toys with guns.

The result is that Scorponok gets his ass kicked so bad that he’s forced to use an anti-jammer to release all the jammed Transformers, so the Decepticons will quit attacking him. Freed, the Sparkabots pick up the Roadjammers and ride away to safety.

So it’s basically a draw. The Sparkabots forgive the Roadjammers and drive off into the sunset, while Felix lights a cigarette and tells his smiling comrades that as soon as he figures out how to build a new jammer, “The Roadjammers are back in business!.”

I think he may still be working on it.

My legal obligation as a comics blogger: A post about Disney buying Marvel

(Note: I have very little to say about this, as I'm no expert in any aspects of the entertainment business beyond being able to recognize what I like and dislike and, hopefully, explaining why I like or dislike certain products to third parties. But I feel to not do at least one post on the subject would be to risk having my comics blogger's license revoked. This is that post)

A friend called me last night. "I have some news from you," she said. "Did you know that Disney is buying Marvel?" Yes, of course I did I snapped, dick-ishly; it was about all I had heard about all day.

"How does that make you feel?" she asked. "Are you happy? Sad? Are you all like, 'Aaa, don't touch my comics!'"

I said that I didn't much care as I didn't think it would impact me directly at all; I didn't think it would even really impact the comics at all, as Disney was probably more interested in access to the characters for films, cartoons and other licensing opportunities.

I still don't think it's going to impact me directly very much, which is actually kind of weird. Like, it's obviously a big deal, maybe one of the biggest events in Marvel's storied history, and certainly the biggest comics news story of...I don't know, the millennium? (Marvel should have timed this to announce it at San Diego Comic Con, instead of going with that lame "We kinda sorta maybe some acquired some Miracle Man rights, and might maybe some day publish some comics or something" announcement. At the very least, it would poured tubs of cold water all over every other publisher trying to announce anything). I suppose it could have a drastic effect on the Direct Market, too.

But so far, from where I sit, it seems like it will be more a matter of who signs some folks' paychecks than anything else.

Here are the few thoughts I had about the deal—beyond my initial "Woah!" and "Holy crap!" ejaculations of disbelief*—in the order I had them.


1.) What about Boom's The Muppet Show comic? I know a lot of people have been asking about what the deal means for Boom's various licensed comics, and I'm sure answers won't be hard to find once the dust settles...at this point, I'm not 100% even Boom, Disney and Marvel know exactly how all that will shake out.

Selfishly, I really, really, really like Roger Langridge's Muppet comic, and think it's one of the rare licensed comics that is actually an extremely good comic, and would be alarmed if the one company buying the other company somehow affects that. I've tried some of Boom's Pixar comics, but didn't get very far with any of them—they seemed well-made, but more directed at kids than something I could really get into personally. And I was really looking forward to what Boom might have in store for the ducks and mice.

Can Marvel make Muppet/Pixar/ducks and mice comics as well as Boom is/will? I don't know. On the one hand, Marvel has a longer history with comics in general than Boom, but on the other, I have a little less faith in Marvel, mainly because of how long it's been since Marvel was serious about licensed comics/dealing with characters that aren't their own (and those that are their own are quite often ill-served by Marvel). Like, based on things like New Avengers/Transformers or that hideous-looking Pride and Prejudice, I can't imagine Marvel producing an Uncle Scrooge comic at this point in time, let alone a halfway decent one, but I guess we'll see.


2.) I remember shortly after Joe Quesada became Marvel's Stan Lee-in-Chief, he went through a period where he was being really quite aggressive in tweaking the distinguished competition, referring to them as "AOL Comics" because Time Warner owned DC. Will his critics start referring to his company as "Disney Comics"?


3.) If it's true that Marvel and Disney settled over the Howard the Duck issue by the former promising the latter that Howard the Duck would always wear pants, so as not to be confused with one of the Disney ducks, maybe now Howard can go pants-less. Who's Disney gonna sue, themselves?


4.) I was quite amused every time I saw in the various press coverage mention of Marvel's catalog of 5,000 characters as a virtue, as if they had 5,000 Iron Men and Ghost Riders just sitting there waiting for movie deals. You know that 5,000 is is like 80% full of guys like Razorfist, The Puma, The Armadillo, Swarm, Marvello, Ruby Thursday and so on. You know, characters that are kinda awesome, but aren't likely to ever serve as the center of a successful franchise, or attempt at a successful franchise.


5.) If it does affect the comics at all, it's probably going to be in a way I like. Like I said earlier, I didn't expect the move to have much if any impact on the current Marvel Comics line, in much the same way that DC seems (for the most part) to be run by and for a very particular, shrinking market, regardless of corporate ownership.

But then I read this post on comicsreporter.com, a letter from writer Ben Schwartz. Go read it in full if you're interested, but here are the parts that made me go, "Oh yeah," and "Ah, of course":

Look, Marvel didn't just get bought up by a subsidiary of General Dynamics. Disney is a creative company, and superhero books in general could use a shake up. No loss, in my opinion, if they did get involved. Marvel's line has been a angry version of Weisinger-era Jimmy Olsen concepts lately (suddenly, everyone's a zombie; suddenly, everyone that was bad is good and was good is bad ...). After all these-post Miller/Moore years of "dark" and "edgy," ie, angry and adolescent, maybe Marvel moving towards pop light isn't a bad idea. The pop-culture Kirby/Lee/Ditko-era was Marvel's creative peak, while 2009 is its financial peak from movies, TV, etc, (but not in comics). They need something.

and

The Spectacular Spider-Man animated show is better than the comics. The X-Men and Spider-Man movies are, too. As I mentioned above, the guys running the comics division live in the past and their sales are mediocre. The people making the comics into movies are the ones connecting to the public in a big way, that's actually made Marvel fun for me again.

Well, that all sure sounds reasonable, doesn't it? A Marvel Comics that published comics more like Spectacular Spider-Man and X-Men Evolution cartoons or the Iron Man movie is certainly a Marvel Comics I'd likely read a lot more comics from (I should note right now that the comics I enjoy most tend to be the Marvel Adventures ones, and things written by Jeff Parker, Fred Van Lente and Paul Tobin—whose scripts all tend to be fun and accessible, sometimes despite having to deal with heavy continuity and the "angry and adolescent" stuff).

If Disney assigned a new editor who sat everyone down and was like, "Look guys, kids don't like art that looks like photos run through a couple of PhotoShop filters, knock that shit off," or "Necrophilia and tentacle rape enthusiasts are a pretty small set of readers, and frankly, ones we could do without. Perhaps we can go in a different direction with these covers?"

And those big "genies" that Quesada wanted to put back in the bottles—making the X-Men less like the movie and more like the original Claremont era, un-marrying Spider-Man, and making the Marvel Universe more "dangerous" feeling through inter-hero conflict—only served to make the line harder to access, understand and enjoy (Without getting into the virtues of any of those moves, I can't imagine it wouldn't have helped if Quesada had to run the script for "One More Day" past someone at Disney, someone with the power to mark it up with red ink and attach a post-it note saying "Are you kidding? This is completely fucking retarded. Do-over.")


6.) Maybe Marvel will start sending me review copies? That would be pretty awesome. Especially since I can no longer afford most Marvel comics.



*Ha ha! I wrote "ejaculations."