Comic shop comics: Oct. 27-Nov. 3

Batgirl #15 (DC Comics) The little preview of this issue DC ran on their Source blog earlier this week was all it took to get me to give this title a second try—I just couldn’t resist seeing the new art team of Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs’ summary of Bat-history using cute, super-deformed-esque cartoon versions of the characters in context.

Nguyen and Fridolfs’ presence sure helps this book; this was about five times the comic that the previous issue I read was. With that issue, I found myself reading the words and turning the pages despite the art, while here I was reading the words and turning the pages in large part because of the art.

I’m still not terribly fond of Stephanie Brown as a character—I haven’t seen anything in either of the two issues I’ve read that necessarily separates her from most of DC’s other teen superheroines—and was pretty shay on some of the characters and elements of the status quo, but writer Bryan Q. Miller writes with a sense of humor, seems as interested in character dynamics as fighting and there’s nothing gross about the book.

Given more regular access to a comic shop, deeper pockets and fewer choices (there is so much great stuff out there now that “pretty good” isn’t anywhere near the same as “good enough” anymore), I could see myself picking up the next issue, and maybe some more after that.


Batman and Robin #16 (DC) Say what you will about Grant Morrison and DC Comics, there’s no denying that the former has chutzpah, and the latter seems bound and determined to capitalize on that chutzpah (even if they also seem to constantly undermining it, as with Bruce Wayne: The Road Home; that really seems more like it’s due to incompetence than ill intent).

The ending of this particular issue, which DC themselves spoiled on the Internet if you want to check just that part out, is probably the biggest change to the Batman franchise since…well, at least since I’ve been reading. Killing Jason Todd, adding Tim Drake, breaking Batman’s back and making a “new” Batman, the “No Man’s Land” era, even “killing’ Batman and promoting Dick Grayson and Damian to Batman and Robin…all of those seemed incredibly, transparently temporary changes, with built-in loopholes to easily walk them back.

Generally when DC throws one of it’s big franchises off in a wild new direction like this, there’s a metaphorical bungee cord attached, and you know it’s only a matter of time before it snaps back.

But this? This seems a lot harder to walk back. And that, in and of itself, is impressive almost beyond belief. Batman’s been around over seven decades, been adapted repeatedly into every imaginable media and bizarre alternate takes on him were at one point so common that DC developed a special imprint just to publish them, and yet Grant Morrison found a way to do something entirely new with the character that simultaneously moves him forward while furthering the character as he is—as he’s more or less always been.

This climax to Morrison’s run on the Batman titles so far isn’t perfect. There’s three artists all drawing this single issue (Three good artists, but still). I still don’t know who the bad guy really is—a semi-immortal pilgrim and Wayne ancestor who pretended to be an actor pretending to be Dr. Thomas Wayne and claiming to be The Devil himself, I guess? And it’s a shame the publishing plan feel apart to the point where this came out before Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6 and that anyone at all had to read any of that Road Home stuff,

But standing ovation, Morrison; this is really great, really exciting stuff. Of course, you do realize you have to right Batman comics forever now, right? Because we’ve seen what happens when others try to follow you after you radically reinvent a franchise—it ain’t pretty.

By the way, page 12 and 13 are pretty much the best thing ever.


Batman/Catwoman: Follow The Money #1 (DC) For a more standard, straightforward sort of Batman comic, albeit a longer, zippier sort than your average non-Morrison Batman comic, this Howard Chaykin over-sized special is hard to beat.

Set during some time when Catwoman was wearing her Darwyn Cooke-designed outfit and Bruce Wayne was alive, Follow The Money follows minor, underused Bat-villain The Cavalier as rips-off Wayne Enterprises and frames Catwoman for the crime.

Chaykin’s an artist who needs no introduction, and his work has been popping up in some awfully surprising places over the last few years, from an ongoing Blade miniseries for Marvel to a Hawkgirl series for DC to a G.I. Joe miniseries for IDW. This fits quite nicely into the recent “What’s Chaykin drawing now?” bibliography.

His style is quite well-suited to Batman as a character; he gives us a big, blocky, athletic Batman and a suave, well-groomed Bruce Wayne. His Catwoman is similarly athletic, and awfully pneumatic, but always zipped up and well-dressed out of costume. The art, colored by Jesus Aburto, is awfully effects heavy, with an awful lot of shining surfaces, but Chaykin draws interesting surfaces to hosts those glares, like the villain’s maniacally gleaming eye and smile.

Surprisingly, the story is as much a treat as the art. Chaykin uses parallel structures in assembling the story in a way that almost approaches workman-like, but that regularity is also refreshingly straightforward.

It’s a fun story, in which Batman investigates the sort of heist-film crime that seems almost unique among the many issues of him fighting serial killers, and in which he gets to banter, flirt and almost play with Catwoman.

It’s a light story of heavy figures, and I breezed through it, having a blast. Compared to Morrison’s Bat-work, its positively old-fashioned and inessential, but that’s also exactly what makes it a pretty refreshing read.


Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam #21 (DC) After the previous issue, in which writers Art Baltazar and Franco and artist Mike Norton had all of the heroes fight all of the villains, I wasn’t so sure there was much need for another issue. That last issue sure felt like a victory lap, why take another victory lap?Apparently so Norton could draw the Justice League coming to Fawcett to offer Captain Marvel membership. That a few other little things—turning Mary Marvel back into the Jeff Smith little girl version, putting Captain Marvel in a white version of the costume for a panel, a coda about the importance of the family part of the expression “The Marvel Family—give Norton and company enough justification for a second victory lap.

This really is the end of the series now though. Here’s hoping Norton moves on to bigger and better things—the Young Justice series looks like a nice place to start—and DC figures out how to untangle the mess they’ve made of the Marvel Family in the DCU line of comics.

Captain Marvel saying “yes” instead of “no” to the Justice League there might work…


Brightest Day #13 (DC) Here’s Hawkman, the hero—well, the protagonist, anyway—of the issue, torturing one of his enemies:
Here’s Hath-Set, the antagonist, torturing one of his enemies:I hope writers Geoff Johns and Peter J. Tomasi are doing that on purpose, showing that the two enemies aren’t all that different, but whether the parallel is intentional or not, it’s pretty uncomfortable.

The acts themselves are brutal: Hawkman bludgeons his foe with spiked maces and then rips out one of its wings, while Hath-Set headbutts, slaps and pulls back to punch Hawkgirl, after first sexually menacing her. It’s really only the motivation that sets the actors apart: Hawkman is double-fisting maces and killing his way through “Man-Hawks” to save his beloved partner, while Hath-Set is beating on a bound Hawkgirl because she spit in his eye when he tried to lick her.

In other words, the ends justify the means.

Hawkman has long been portrayed as an ignorant, brutal, violent a-hole—particularly since Geoff Johns resurrected him the time before this time, and portrayed him as a sort of Conan-with-wings type—so this is certainly in keeping with his characterization, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to read.

And the Hawkworld storyline dominates this issue, with a full 20-pages being devoted to it, saving only one page for Deadman and Dove to chat with Resurrection Man and another page for a splash featuring Batman Bruce Wayne (in appearance #9 before the release of Return of Bruce Wayne #6, if I counted right*).

I must confess to being greatly amused by Hawkman’s entrance into Hath-Set and Shiera’s evil mother’s headquarters though. It’s just so ridiculously over-the-top that Johns, Tomasi and company are either mocking their own violent impulses, or, if they’re earnest, then I guess it’s even funnier:


Bruce Wayne: The Road Home: Oracle #1 (DC) I read this the same day that I read Batman and Robin #16, the climax of Grant Morrison’s run on that title, which was created specifically to tell a series of stories about Dick Grayson and Damian as the new Batman and Robin while Bruce Wayne was “dead,” and it’s quit remarkable how superfluous Morrison’s writing there has made this whole Road Home series (and, contrary to the marketing and numbering, it actually is an eight-part miniseries, rather than eight standalone stories).

In fact, not only are does this Road Home stuff seem superfluous, it seems downright contradictory in certain places, and read together with Morrison’s Batman and Robin, this seems to drain a lot of the urgency and excitement out of Bruce Wayne’s return.

I’ve only read two of them, and I don’t think I can reconcile the timelines between the one I did read, Bruce Waye: The Road Home: Batman and Robin #1 with the events of Batman and Robin #15 and #16.

Since Oracle isonly the second issue of an eight-part series I’ve read—as near as I can figure it, I read the first part and now the seventh—I’m probably missing a lot, but as near as I can figure, Ra’s al Ghul has put out a hit on Vicki Vale and Bruce Wayne is trying to save her life, but in the dumb, adopted persona of “The Insider” instead of Batman because…I’m not sure why, exactly.

He’s wearing some sort of weird black battle armor with a full-face mask, three glowing red eyes, Batman-like gauntlets and a utility belt full of Batarangs. Not much of a disguise really; at least Matches Malone had a mustache to distract you.Though the title of this is Oracle, it’s basically a Birds of Prey-type story, in which Oracle has various Bat-people and friends get in random fights here and there while she sits in front of a computer and apparently retcons her origin. (To be fair to writer Marc Andreyko, I wouldn’t have noticed the changes if the linked-to blog post didn’t point them out).

Actually, maybe Birds of Prey is a bad comparison. This is more like one of those random Battle For The Cowl tie-ins, the one where a bunch of superheroes cameo for 22 pages—Batman: Battle For The Cowl: The Network, maybe?—the sole difference being that artist Agustin Padilla does sharper work here than J. Calafiore and a few others managed in Network.


Hellboy/Beasts of Burden: Sacrifice (Dark Horse Comics) So what if Hellboy walked right out of one of his own adventures—as he does on the first page of this special one-shot—and then right into an issue of Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s Beasts of Burden comic?

That’s the premise of this. Hellboy is just finishing off a vampire when he follows a mysterious dog into the woods, and is lead to the supernatural investigators who are also cats and dogs from Beasts. With Hellboy providing some extra muscle (and some much needed thumbs), the group descends into a tunnel to find some black magic going on.

Like pretty much everything Thompson draws, this is well worth paying attention to simply because of the fact that she’s drawing it—and how cool is it seeing Thompson’s take on Hellboy?!—but Dorkin’s story is as much fun on his previous ones featuring the Beasts.

There are some super-cool monster designs (I loved the Skull Golems’ offensive maneuver), some twists and turns, some amusing dialogue and a nice demonstration of just how flexible a character Hellboy really is. He fits in so perfectly well here (Mike Mignola polished his dialogue, which no doubt helped), that this reads as much like a Hellboy story as it does a Beasts of Burden story. You can’t ask for a team-up comic to better fulfill it’s team-up comic obligations than that, can you?


Image Firsts: Hack/Slash #1 (Image Comics) I’ve long been intrigued by the premise of this series—Suicide Girl and monster team-up to kill the colorful “slashers” that started populating low-budget horror movies in the late-seventies before booming in the eighties and never really going away—but missed the first few series and then felt it was “too late” to try it out. Like, I didn’t even know where to start after a certain point.

Well, I guess that’s exactly where these $1 reprints Image has been publishing is meant to come in.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this issue, though. It’s extremely heavy on exposition and summary, a sort of this-is-who’s-who-and-what’s-what story without much character or drama to it beyond the exposition. It read like the comic book version of a pilot episode of a TV show; not the sort of pilot they air on TV, but the sort that used to get made just to show network executives to convince them to green light production for a series.

Basically, I’m right where I was before actually reading this issue, only now I know a lot more details—names, origins and like that.

The book ends with a full-page ad with a bunch of Hack/Slash trades, including an omnibus or three. I suppose the first omnibus would be the best place to try out Hack/Slash in a larger portion. Any fans—or readers of—the comic out there who would care to make a recommendation, or warn against reading it…?


Justice League: Generation Lost #12-#13 (DC) In the twelfth issue, Ice gets a new costume!No seriously what she gets is a new origin story which seems an awful lot like an X-Men character’s origin—kid born with destructive powers linked to their emotions, leads to terrible personal tragedy, puts on spandex and becomes superhero. In this version, Tora’s no longer from a magical kingdom of snow people, but from a family of thieving Scandanavian gypsies who want to either worship her as a goddess and/or use her ice powers to help them steal—she freezes them all to death, her father as well, before the bad elements can take her away from the good elements.

I honestly have no idea how that works really, since we’ve seen Ice’s magical snow kingdom family in the pages of Justice League comics before, but then, it’s not like the characters of this book haven’t all been radically, contradictorily retconned before (They’re currently fighting Evil Killer Max Lord, after all).

In the thirteenth issue, Magog fights Captain Atom to the death, as part of Max Lord’s plan to prevent the future the White Power Lantern resurrected him to stop. I was actually quite surprised by the finality of that fight, enough so that I’m not sure what to make of its permanence. (Well, semi-permanence, anyway).

I liked Fernando Dagino’s pencils on #12 more than Joe Bennett’s on #13, but Cliff Chiang’s cover images are far better than both.Hell, Chiang even makes Magog look kind of cool, and I didn’t even think such a thing was possible!



*The first seven Batman: The Road Home “one-shots” and Batman and Robin #15 and #16

Another place I didn't expect to find a comic on Halloween weekend?

The back of my cereal box. Check it out: That comic strip was on the back of all three of the "monster cereals"—Count Chocula, Frankenberry and Boo Berry—this year. No artist is attributed, of course, but I really rather like the artwork. Yeah, the lay-out is too crowded, and the lettering overdoes it with the fonts a bit, but the character designs are all pretty neat (more stylized and expressive versions of the very of-their-day 1970s conception) and all the lines that go into building the characters' poses and postures are used to great effect.

I particularly like the panels featuring the count and Frank's scary faces, and that Count Chocula is hanging from the ceiling in the first panel.

At first I was a little disappointed by the premise of the strip. Is this what monsters, even cereal spokesmonsters, do in their spare time? Sit around playing video games, occasionally stopping to argue about whose cereal is better and/or who can make a scarier face?

But then I spent about 15 minutes on YouTube looking for old TV commercials featuring the characters—originally, I wanted to check to see if the Boo Berry ghost sounded as much like Peter Lorre as I remembered, or if that was just some weird memory construction of my own—and found that that is exactly what the spokesmonsters do. Just hang out engaging in various leisure activities, occasionally breaking to fight about their cereals. In most of the ones I watched, Frankenberry and Count Chocula seem to be living together, and sharing a meal or dusting their castle or hanging out on the beach when Boo Berry floats in to annoy or scare them. (One exception being the time they are exploring an Aztec pyramid and stumble upon Yummy Mummy, whose fruit-flavored cereal didn't prove as enduring as their own cereals).

The gag of the monsters being scared of perfectly ordinary children seems particularly long-lived as well, as many of the commercials end with them either being frightened by a kid, or some thing else fairly innocuous, like a cat or the wind disturbing something.

All in all, I thought this short comic was pretty sweet. Get it? Sweet? Like the cereal? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Religious tracts in the form of comics make pretty lousy treats

This past Halloween was the first time I had been in the same city as my nieces during this particular holiday since they were born. Halloween is a really big deal in their household, and is really more of a season like Christmas rather than a single holiday.

And as with Christmas, on the climactic day, much of their extended family gathers at their house for a big dinner, the main course of which is their mother’s “Halloweenies” (just hotdogs, with a seasonal name) and mummy dogs (hotdogs wrapped in Pilsbury croissant roll dough and baked), plus some sort of green sherbet punch, and cupcakes with gummy worms and so on.

Some of their other relations come over, they all get dressed up in their costumes (a gargoyle and a butterfly this year) and then, accompanied by a troupe of adults and their Shih Tzu, they go trick-or-tricking en masse, while one of their grandmothers stays at their house to pass out candy.

When they return, candy gorging commences, with a whole lot of running around and being loud, buzzed on sugar.

When my youngest niece, who is currently about five and a half, set her purple plastic jack o’lantern-shaped bucket of candy down near me, and I peeked in to see what she got. I noticed a plastic sandwich bag with a small piece of paper with a four-panel black, white and red grid on it—a comic! In the same little baggy were a few pieces of generic candy and something made out of plastic.

As I pulled out the bag to take a closer look—the lettering and coloring made it look like something from the Chick Tract family, or at least a near relative—my niece bounded up and snatched the candy bucket away. All she saw was her uncle’s hand in her candy.

Their mother saw the comics before they did, and removed them from their buckets before they could read them. I asked her to save one for me and she did—although she read one of them first.

“It was horrible,” she reported, and that it was a good thing the girls hadn’t seen them, because they would have been traumatized. “I wish I knew who gave these out so I could go talk to them,” she said.

As it turns out, it wasn’t a Chick Tract, but the same general idea—Christian evangelism through cheaply made little cartoons put in the hands of strangers some way or another. In this case, in plastic bags with some candy, handed out to neighborhood kids going door-to-door trick or treating.

This particular tract is produced by The Fellowship Tract League of Lebanon, Ohio, and is entitled “I’ll Do It Later”. You can read it online at their site, if you’re interested in seeing the whole thing in its original context.

Here’s the first page: Johnny, dead-eyed, unblinking child sitting among a pile of toys ignoring the first shouted command to put away his toys, but mildly freaking out when he hears a second shouted command to put away his toys.

Johnny, now going to school, rubbing his check with glee while a teacher shouts about a homework assignment, then recoiling in terror and choking an apology when his teacher yells at him for not doing his homework.

On the second page, we see another two-panel sequence, in which now the grown-up John does the same at work. One moment his leaning back in the big leather chair at his desk, hands behind his head while thinking about all the time he has to do his report for the boss, and then later, he’s apologizing to someone yelling at him from off-panel: “Because of your neglect, we have lost much income!”

I’m not sure where John works, but it seems like a pretty good job, based on his desk, chair and the suit he wears to work. I guess his boss is an ESL speaker too…maybe Japanese or Chinese? That would explain the odd phraseology.

Anyway, one day John’s friend, an older, fatter man shouts at him:This sequence was the climax of the four-page strip for me, its comedic highlight. John is really excited—comically so—to be getting good news of any kind, and his reactions to this whole Jesus Christ thing and heaven and hell are similarly outsized.

It seems as if John has never heard of Christianity prior to his middle-aged friend telling him the good news. Somehow John managed to make it to adulthood, including at least four years of college to earn that suit-wearing, leather chair-having, report-making office job, without ever hearing about Jesus or Christianity.

I’m actually sort of surprised that John knows what heaven and hell are enough to be excited about the former and scared of the latter (“NO!!”) considering that he’s never heard of this Jesus Christ guy dying for our sins thing before.

After John shouts “NO!!”, his friend comes back with “YES!!!” instructing him on how to avoid hell and get into heaven. “Joh, all you have to do is this: Call on the Lord Jess Christ!”

Easy peasy, right?

As is his way though, John, perhaps still shaken from the whiplashing emotional rollercoaster of the previous few panels, responds with his default response: “I—I’ll do it later…”

Here are the last two panels, with a prose moral quoting the gospel of John and two of the letters from the New Testament: What do I think? I think the cartoonist’s panel filled with flames and narration box saying “It’s too late to say ‘I’m sorry’ now” doesn’t leave too much room for interpretation.

I also don’t think this is an appropriate form of evangelical ministry, particularly if it’s aimed at little kids. My nieces are five-years-old and seven-years-old, and the girls they went trick or treating with were one, three, eight and nine.

Kids mature intellectually and emotionally at different paces, of course, and, at seven, my eldest neice is just starting to have some understanding of death, hell, heaven, God, Jesus and religion. Seven is the traditional “age of reason” in the Catholic faith, defined as the period of human life in which people are supposedly able to begin to be morally responsible. She just started going to mass regularly and going to Sunday school; it was only within the last few weeks that she began to learn about the concept of sin at school, and asked her mother and I if she sins, what sin is, if we ever sinned when we were her age and so on.

Her teachers and parents and priest are just now introducing her to this stuff—she’ll earn the sacrament of reconciliation next year, and first communion the year after, while she won’t be confirmed in her faith for a good nine to ten years late—she certainly isn’t ready to hear about how easy it is to burn in hell through inaction (If you believe that; I don’t know what denomination produces the tracts, but it was stamped with a local church of a different denomination than the one my nieces are part of).

My youngest niece—and two of the other girls she was trick or treating with—is still learning to tie her shoes and read. She could look at the very, very boring pictures of the comic, but would have to ask her sister or a grown-up to read the actual words to her. While understands a little about death—that it’s sad and permanent—I don’t know how strong her grasp on God or the afterlife are.

I do know that she has some pretty irrational little kid fears still, including being afraid of raccoons, skunks, deer, cats, tornados, hurricanes, being alone, the dark and one particular poor old lady suffering from dementia that she saw yelling at her in a nursing home one recently—she’s certainly not emotionally ready to think about dying herself, going to hell or burning.

(Although now that I stop and think about it, I realize I’m not intellectually and emotionally mature enough to deal with the theology posed by this tract; reconciling the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God with the existence of a hell of eternal damnation is an issue that’s troubled some of history’s greatest theologians and philosophers).

It just doesn’t seem like an appropriate thing to hand out to little kids on Halloween. Unless…well, Halloween is all about scary things, right? And what could be scarier than the thought of dying and suffering as if you were burning alive for all eternity, with no chance of any relief ever?

Huh.

I guess I just assumed that whoever was passing these out was trying to do what they thought of as a good deed, scaring some little kids straight in order to save their souls. But maybe they were trying to terrify the neighborhood children simply out of the spirit of the season.

Some things I noticed about Action Comics Weekly #605

Hey gang, it's time once again for a new installment of Caleb Posts Just Posts Some Images From Copies of Action Comics Weekly He Got In a Fifty-Cent Bin Because He's Too Tired To Write A Review Tonight! Hooray! Tonight we're looking at Action Comics Weekly #605, which features a cover by Andy Kubert and Adam Kubert, two young, up-and-coming artists who showed a lot of promise back in 1988, but never amounted to anything, and quickly disappeared from the face of comics.

Ha ha, just kidding! They both went on to become extremely popular, always-in-demand artists, both of whom have some sort of issues with deadlines. At this point, their combined work looks an awful lot like that of their father Joe's work. If you took their signatures off the cover and asked me who drew this image—and, um, hadn't already seen their signatures and thus knew the correct answer—I would have guessed Joe Kubert.

Nice to see that dumb-ass headline/blurb/gag/whatever on the cover too...DC's been doing that on the covers of their comics for 30 years now, huh?

First, let's check in with the Green Lantern feature, sill written by "James Oswley" and stilled penciled by the great Gil Kane. When we last left Carol "Starfire" Ferris, she used the evil magic gem possessing her to make it appear as if John "Green Lantern" Stewart had murdered her. In this issue, she climbs out of her grave, wearing a sassy, off-the-shoulder burial gown......that fits like a glove...In fact, I think her burial gown is even more clingy and formfitting than her purple bathing suit is.

Once out of her grave, she uses her gem to make her costume and silly hat appear and, something I hadn't noticed until seeing her in and out of costume on the same page before, apparently when she's Star Sapphire her hair grows about three feet longer and gets so thick that it must weight about fifty pounds.

She continues talking to herself for a few more minutes in teh graveyard, until my favorite panel happens:I love how surprised she seems to see an alien, given that she is herself an alien (sorta, the gem is, and its possessing her) and she flies around in space dealing with other aliens all the time. I also like how her response is to just state, "An alien!" when she sees the bizarre being appear before her. What makes her so sure it's an alien, so fast? Why not, "A mutant shrimp-man!" Or a more realistic "What the hell is this thing?" or "Aaa!" or "Holy @#$%!"

That is one awesome-looking alien, by the way. It's humanoid wihtout looking the least bit human really. I like how its hips are so close to its arms, and the split tail. And it's weird little suit. I can't quite imagine how it puts on that suit—getting it over the tails, and lining up the little tail-spikes just so seems especially difficult—all of which contributes to its overall alien-ness.

Unfortunately, we don't learn much more about him in this issue. That above panel is the end of this scene, and when we return to Star Sapphire and and the little space shrimp man later in the issue, he speaks only in alien gibberish, so we don't learn his deal. He usurps control of the gem and kick's Carol's ass though.

Meanwhile, Hal Jordan thought-ballooning about his current predicament. He's trapped at Golgotha, but not the Golgotha of the Bible; rather, he's at Space Golgotha, which is place with a weird, twisty landscape, fuchsia skies, and constant yellow lightning storms. Carol trapped him here, in this place where time doesn't really pass, and he's ringless and in chains.

Suddenly, his ring appears! But he's having trouble getting his shit together long enough to use it, since he keeps getting hit by lightning (This story, by the way, seems to be a good one for anyone working a Hal Jordan Is Massively Brain-Damaged thesis). But then he does get his shit together and escapes.

The sequence on Golgotha gives Kane the opportunity to draw a sexy Hal Jordan to compliment his sexy Carol Ferris in the opening pages. Hal's mask is off, his costume in tatters, his hair is tousled and he's unshaven. And in chains, if you like that kind of thing: In the Deadman story, or hero has been captured in some sort of glass capsule found by the CIA at an ancient astronauts HQ in South America. They stuck him in it, and transported him to their own headquarters. Can you believe the uniforms that CIA officers on guard duty used to have to wear in the eighties? This chapter of the Deadman story takes a pretty weird twist, when Deadman, inhabiting the body of that poor guard in that terrible uniform that would have embarrassed an X-Man, makes the mistake of communicating with the disembodied voice in an old piece of pottery kept under a similar bit of glass, and then getting a little too close to it. Oh hey look, it's Satan! As designed and drawn by pencil artist Dan Jurgens and inker Tony DeZuniga. What's up with his weirdly erect tail? And who knew the CIA had Satan captured during the late-eighties?

I thought this was a pretty cool cliffhanger, as the story went from fairly typical superhero and sci-fi stuff into supernatural and religious territory in the space of a scene.

In the Wild Dog strip, the be-hockey masked hero plays possum, admits that he likes the smell or burning flesh (remember, he set a dude on fire in the previous installment) and then uzis two dudes at point-blank range. I forgot how much I liked the sound effect BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA until I saw it here. Do writers just not use it very much anymore? Or do I just read fewer comics in which character fire sub-machine guns at each other than I used to?

Finally, in Mike Grell, Rick Burchett and Pablo Marcos' Blackhawk strip, the title character meets Sheah Chun Ryan, The Red Dragon. She's a red-haired Asian lady dressed like a supervillain with a cape, a pistol, a whip and a tiger, all of which adds up to sort of dangerous and exotic, but I can't help being disappointed in her tiger. Burchett gives her a little tiger. Not a cub, but not yet a big, scary tiger either. It's like a teenage tiger, I guess. I'm sure it's a lovely pet and all, but it looks like more of an around-the-house tiger, not the sort of tiger you'd break out to terrify your captive guests with.

Finally, if the pages of Hal Jordan naked to the waist straining against his bonds didn't offer enough scantily clad dude for you, the Blackhawk strip also features hairy-chested Andre, wearing only shadows:Although with a mustache and expressive eyebrows like that, Andre doesn't need to be naked to be sexy.

As it turns out, EVERYTHING I THOUGHT I KNEW ABOUT GHOSTS IS WRONG!

EDILW favorite James Kochalka has a new Johnny Boo book bout, Johnny Boo and the Mean Little Boy. As the title indicates, there is a mean little boy in the story. He enters the story with a butterfly net, attempting to capture a butterfly that has landed on Squiggle's head. Thinking Squiggle is himself some sort of crazy butterfly, the mean little boy chases him with the net and (spoiler alert!) catches him:
The scene is part of a much larger sequence that is as charming and funny as pretty much any other sequence in one of Kochalka's Johnny Boo books, until I realized that Squiggle is, in fact, a ghost. And this boy captured him with a net. And plopped him into a jar, which he could not escape from. He's not just playing along with the boy; he's really stuck in there: Aren't ghosts insubstantial? Can't they, like, float through walls and stuff? And if you hold out your hand to try and touch a ghost, won't your hand go right through it? I thought the only real physical impact ghosts had on the world around them was limited to coldness and, in some cases, ectoplasm. Sure, you hear about poltergeists who can open and shut doors and throw objects around, but they themselves don't seem to have any physical mass. How did the mean little boy capture Squiggle? Is he a wizard? A ghostbuster? A ghost himself?

Kochalka never answers this question at in the course of Johnny Boo and the Mean Little Boy (despite reasserting that Johnny and Squiggle are, indeed, ghosts in near the climax of the story). But it's a pretty good comic nonetheless.

If you'd like to read more of me talking about Johnny Boo and the Mean Little Boy, I have a review of it (and Kochalka's Dragon Puncher), up at Blog@Newsarama today. You can go read it, if you like.

This is how my local paper decided how to fill the hole in the funny pages left by Cathy

I think I may have seen some mention of papers doing something similar to determine how to replace Cathy Guisewite's Cathy on one of the comics blogs I read, but it was kind of strange to see this in my hometown paper.

I don't regularly read this paper, so I'm not sure if they ran these same five strips for five days in a row (which would make sense, since it's hard to get a good idea of what a strip is like by picking a single one out at random), or if they ran five different strips each day for five days, for a total of 25 choices (I checked today, and the contest was over, but I didn't see any of these five on their comics page though, so I don't know).

I can understand why a paper would choose this method, as it a) fills up a lot of space (which seems to be a big concern for this particular paper, which is apparently always seeking different strategies for killing space, given the number of high school athletics photos are run at one-fourth the size of a full page), b) passes the buck on the decision-making, and thus diffuses some of the negative letters to the editor complaining about the awful new strip ("Don't blame us, the majority of our readers wanted that dumb strip you hate!") and c) invites reader participation/engagement with the paper in a relatively low-stakes way.

Still, it seems a little strange to me, as it's hard to imagine any paper giving that sort of control to their readers over other aspects of the paper. Editors at small city, wire service-dependent papers like this one are always making many little decisions about content, but would they leave it to their readers to vote on which syndicated op-ed columnists they run? Which advice columns? Which paper's crossword puzzles? Which wire service they subscribe to?

Probably not, which seems to reveal the paper's lack of esteem for the importance of the funnies page. But hell, maybe I'm just sensitive about this sort of thing, it being comics-related and all.

I found it interesting that the two forms of voting mentioned in the little paragraph explanation were to either drop off your choice at the newspaper office in person, or to mail it to the office. No email? No, of course not—no one who reads the paper version of a daily newspaper is online. (Okay, I'm just being a jerk; it's probably to circumvent attempts to stuff a virtual ballot box).

Also of some interest were that none of the five strips above really seemed all that Cathy-esque, in terms of subject matter or content. Pickles is a family sitcom-like strip, I suppose, and this particular installment of Dustin does mention dating I suppose, but none of these five seem particularly woman-oriented the way that say, Tina's Groove or The Pajama Diaries are.

Of these five, I think Pickles is probably the closest one to actually being funny, but mostly just because of the overreaction of that dude on the right in panel three...seeing that toilet seat fall down all by itself like that raised his hair as if he just saw someone spontaneously combust. Dustin seems like the best-drawn though, and would probably get my vote (reading through the archives of Dustin, it's actually a pretty strong strip). If I cared enough to vote for Cathy's replacement in my hometown newspaper that I never read.

Some women just aren't that interested in Batman

and his penis, while some guys just can't stop talking about Batman and his penis. James Kochalka offers some examples in this charming installment of his American Elf strip.

Frank Miller's Krypto pun

I saw a link to this neat Frank Miller drawing at The Beat today and included it in my thrice-weekly linkblogging for Blog@Newsarama, but I wanted to stick it here too, where it will be easier for me to find in the future.

And if frankmillerink.com is place you visit as infrequently as me, you may want to check out some of the previous posts, including another drawing of a dinosaur eating someone (coupled with his cover for IDW's Jurassic Park #1, I think there's nothing I'd like to read so much at the moment than a Frank Miller dinosaur comic; if his Holy Terror, Batman! project with DC morphed in to something else, maybe he can do a Batman: The Dark Knight Totally Fights Some Dinosaurs book for them instead...?), and a nice Frank Miller vs. Neal Adams story.

Some links about some various things.

A few thoughts on rogue’s galleries: Recently one of my Blog@ co-contributors decided to spotlight the artwork of Mark Robinson in a post devoted to Robinson’s occasional “Foe Vs. Foe” sketches, in which the artist draws a Spider-Man villain engaged in combat with a Batman villain. It seemed like a fun endeavor, so I followed the links and spent some time the other day spelunking through archives to find the pieces. It turns out, they’re actually rather old drawings, and I didn’t get any indication that the project was ongoing or anything.

Still, some pretty neat drawings (the more I looked at Robinson’s sketches, the more I liked his work), and some rather unique match-ups (Like, instead of the Black Cat, Robinson has Catwoman fighting The Rhino, for example).

In the blog post, Robinson is quoted as saying, “IMO there is/are no hero/es out there with a better villain gallery than that of the Spider and the Bat.”

“IMO” means “in my opinion,” so I guess there’s no reason to argue with an opinion, but in my O, there’s Batman’s rogues gallery at the apex of rogues galleries and then, on the next level down, Spider-Man’s, tied with The Flash’s.

I’ve heard folks compare both Spidey’s and The Flash’s stable of villains to Batman’s before, but I don’t think Spider-Man’s villains really hold a candle to Batman’s.

For one thing, Spider-Man really lacks an archenemy of the Joker’s caliber (in that regard, even Superman’s rogues gallery is a bit stronger, in that it has Lex Luthor in it). You can see this in the movies especially, where they went with The Green Goblin almost as a default archenemy—they couldn’t really make his costume work at all, but they were casting about for Spider-Man’s Joker, and they settled on Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin.

You can also see it in the last ten years or so worth of Spider-Man stories, following Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man lead, in which Norman Osborn is turned into a more Lex Luthor-ish villain. Originally, he was just some asshole adult with a terrible haircut, an insane costume and some mental problems, but he was gradually reinvented into 1990’s Lex Luthor, with a voice in his head.

Don’t get me wrong, Spider-Man has a great little rogues gallery, but they are all more gimmick-focused than personality-focused. Capitalize the name of any vaguely threatening animal, add a “The” in front of it, and congratulations, you have a Spider-Man villain. Batman’s villains tend to be more well-rounded, their visual gimmick linked to an obsession of some sort that could be played either as an oddity (someone who only steals cat statuettes, commits crimes having to do with the number two, a hat-thief, etc) but easily grew to deep, scary psychological problems manifesting in weird ways.

Maybe it’s not fair to compare the two, though. Batman did have a good 20+ year head start, so many of his villains are among the first crop of comic book villains, and were inspired by things other than other comic book villains. They’ve also had a bit longer to gestate and evolve into what they are now.

It’s easy to imagine a Batman movie without Batman in it at all—Christian Bale’s Batman just gets in the way of Heath Ledger’s Joker movie in The Dark Knight, for example—but not so easy to imagine a Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movie. Well, I guess The Punisher started as a Spidey villain before graduating, and there’s been talk of a Venom movie before, but I have an easier time imagining movies featuring Deadshot, The Joker, Catwoman (wait, they did that one already), Man-Bat, The Riddler or even The Penguin than I do, say, The Scorpion, Electro, The Rhino, The Green Goblin, Any Other Goblin or Mysterio.

The real reason I wanted to post on this subject, however, is simply that I wanted to mention artist Mark Robinson as an excuse to post this image:That’s The Red Tornado with an unfortunate new hairstyle in the back, you probably recognize the two dudes in the capes and, on the far right is that…? No, it couldn’t be…Yes, it’s Aquaman with a handlebar mustache!

I…I’m not sure how I feel about Aquaman with a mustache. I liked bearded Aquaman a whole lot, but mustachioed Aquaman? That’s something I’m going to need to think about. In the meantime, go look at Robinson's art.


More rogues galleries: On the subject of rogues galleries, Tom Spurgeon’s last Five For Friday feature was fun: “Name Five Members Of A Rogues Gallery NOT Batman's, Dick Tracy's Or Spider-Man's And Don't Identify The Hero.” The results were pretty wide-ranging, and while some of ‘em were awfully obscure, it makes for a great list of proper names to read, even if you don’t recognize them all. (The image above, incidentally, identifies one of the heroes and two of his "rogues").


"The Champion Bad Guy": One of the many Golden Age characters I’ve always been fascinated with, despite only having read about rather than read actual comics stories actually featuring the character, is the villain Iron Jaw. R. C. Harvey writes about Iron Jaw at some length for The Comics Journal, noting what made him such a scary, compelling customer and that in many ways he seems to have been decades ahead of his time, a villain whose ilk became common in the 1980s, but was fairly alien back in the Golden Age.


FY Sims and Bellegarde!: Invincible Super-Blogger/ally of comics Chris Sims collaborates with Hector Plasm artist Nate Bellegarde for one of Comics Alliance’s occasional “Great Comics That Never Happened,” and their issue of The Tomb of Dracula is a great Marvel + Vampires mash-up of the sort the publisher has been doing on their variant covers recently, only pushed a wee bit further. The punning name of the…vampirized characters if cool, but it’s all the little details that make the image. It’s a great cover…I just wish there was a comic book under it.


DC’s August: I didn’t notice until I read Marc-Oliver Frisch’s analysis of DC Comics’ sales chart at The Beat, but apparently Green Lantern, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, Batman and Robin and The Flash all failed to ship.

Now, there are two other Green Lantern titles and about 18 other Batman titles, but Green Lantern is the only of the three GL books to feature the primary, movie-starring Green Lantern Hal Jordan, and the two Bat-books that didn’t ship are the two Grant Morrison-written ones, which are the flagship ones steering the good ship Batman; the other Bat-titles are more particular flavors catering to the specific tastes of Batman readers.

All in all, that’s three-fourths of the guys on that pin! And Superman’s only book at the moment may have shipped in August, but he just walked around and preached for 22 pages, right?

I’m not surprised that the two Morrison books failed to ship, but two Geoff Johns books failing to ship seems pretty unusual.

Also of note, DC’s best-selling books had Deadman and Hawkgirl on the cover; Deadman hasn’t carried his own monthly in…my lifetime? And Hawkgirl’s book, the renamed Hawkman, lasted only 16 issues before DC axed it in 2007.

I find it amusing that a book featuring those two, plus Martian Manhunter, Aquaman and Firestorm—all of whom have also had titles canceled in the last decade or so (repeatedly, in Aquaman’s case)—are carrying DC’s best-selling book (And even if Johns’ GL and Morrison’s Bat-books would have shipped, Brightest Day would still be one of the company’s better-selling titles).

As with 52, is this a demonstration that creator (in this case, Geoff Johns) and perceived importance to the fictional universe (Brightest Day following up on plot points of cosmic significance from Blackest Night) trump even character in terms of selling comics?

Finally, as determined by this particular chart, if the free market chose the Justice League, and the line-up were to consist of the seven characters whose solo books move the most copies, than the JLA would feature Batman, Superman, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, Red Robin, Batgirl, Zatanna and Supergirl (More than half women!)


Marvel has a second Scarecrow…?: As I reiterated last night, I really dig DC Comics’ Batman villain The Scarecrow, and while I knew Marvel had a villain who was also called The Scarecrow and whose costume was also that of your average Scarecrow, I did not realize Marvel had two of ‘em. Not until I read this entry in Andrew Weiss’ Nobody’s Favorites series, an often fun and always occasional series profiling various comic book characters that no one really likes. Like Marvel’s Scarecrow who isn’t the contortionist one who fights Marvel superheroes now and then. He sounds pretty insane, and in a pretty awesome way, but I suppose he must not be that awesome, given the fact that I’ve never heard of him, and that Weiss counts him among Nobody’s Favorites instead of Everybody’s or even Somebody's Favorites.

Nice scarf, anyway.


I’m not sure what do about this Walking Dead TV show thing: Not that I have to, like, do anything about it at all, of course. But, as you probably know, writer Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard’s ongoing zombie serial Walking Dead has been adapted into a television series, which apparently debuted on AMC last night to strong ratings and positive reviews (at least in the circles I run in/blog in).

I don’t get AMC, so I won’t have to decide whether to start watching it or not until its released on DVD, but as much as I like the comic, I’m sort of reluctant to see an adaptation of it before it’s complete. The comics have such a significant head start on the TV series that it would be a long, long, long time before the show ever caught up to the comic, if that’s even possible, but I don’t know, for some reason an adaptation of an ongoing series like this makes me a little uncomfortable.

I am glad for Kirkman and his collaborators though, and I’m glad to see a comic book series being adapted to TV in live-action again, particularly one that’s not a corporate-owned superhero.

Long, long ago, nearer to the launch of The Walking Dead comic, I reviewed an early volume of the series for an altweekly that no longer exists (and which purged its online archives, to my irritation). At the time, I stated that the series was well on its way to being the greatest piece of zombiepocalypse fiction, because unlike film, the medium zombies have long been most at home in, serial comics never have to end, making The Walking Dead potentially the biggest, longest, most expansive epic of the still-burgeoning genre.

Ironically the only other medium that could really match the serial nature of comics is that of television.

As is often the case, Tom Spurgeon says it better than I do. In his “Random Comics News Story Round-Up” for today, Spurgeon talks up two of the comic’s virtues, including both it’s wide-open serial narrative, and the fact that unlike most of the potentially endless comic book serials we know of, it’s creator-owned and likely to end at some point, whereas Spider-Man and The Flash will just move on under different creators.

Spurgeon included it as an item in a post of several items, so I’m going to have to quote him at length here, but I encourage you to go read it on his site (As I encourage you to go read his site every day. I do!):

One key element from my perspective -- for those of you who have dabbled and felt that they were missing something, or haven't read it at all -- is that Kirkman tweaks two pop culture concepts to great effect. The first is that as an ongoing comics series the dread and horror of a zombie-devastated world increases as the comic keeps going, and thus the format helps Walking Dead avoid the pitfall that zombie movies have where a reasonably quick resolution or at least a stopping point is required and played against. The second is that as an independent comic book, Kirkman is free to take the story in whatever direction he wants, which may not be a big thing to you and me as grizzled veterans of such works but if this is the first comic book series you've read outside of the cape and cowl corner of the field, or the first piece of zombie fiction you've experienced outside of watching a lot of largely formulaic genre movies, that freedom from acting as a corporate property caretaker must seem ruthless, inspired and slightly unhinged.

Old news that's new news to me department: Did you know that cartoonist Tom Neely made a sweet video for The Muffs back in 2005 for the song “Don’t Pick On Me”…? Well, he did.


Aw, I want a paper version to “read” to my nieces: I forget the first place I saw this to properly credit the linker, but I saw it linked-to in multiple places over Halloween weekend. I’m going to link to this long, wordless Punkin & Boo storyline by Matthew Sundstrom too, on account of how great it is.


Lucy Knisley, Renaissance Woman: We can all agree that Lucy Knisley is an awesome cartoonist and artist right? Right. But does she have any other talents? Like, say, costume design? Sea-creature eyeball creation? Squid costume model? I think this Flickr stream-y thing she linked to from her blog thing answers that.


A brief commercial message: Last week, commenter “Kid Kyoto” said I should make a point of plugging my work elsewhere on EDILW more often. I generally link to any formal reviews or pieces appearing in unusual places here, but I only rarely link to Blog@Newsarama, since I have something up there pretty much ever (week)day. To review though, Monday, Wednesday and Fridays mornings I post Linkarama@Newsarama, which is straight-up linkblogging along the lines of, um, this very post, only with generally shorter, less self-reflective links. Every Tuesday around 4:30ish I post an installment of Twas the Night Before Wednesday…, a here’s what’s coming out this week and what I think about it sort of column, with a colored pencil-on-index card cartoon (unless The Sandman gets me before I draw it the preceding night). And on Thursday mid-afternoons I either post reviews of recent graphic novels or something miscellaneous, depending on whether or not I have anything to say about anything…or a dumb joke about something to share.

And on the subject of reading things I created, I still have lots of copies of my self-published comic My Pet Halfling (Oh so very many copies…!) left to sell you. It’s just like a blog post…that you have to pay for…and that you can’t make go away by turning off your computer.

Ale Garza's Scarecrow

I tried to remain at least a little bit coy regarding the villain in my hastily-written review of October 20's Superman/Batman #77, but it's been about a week and a half, so presumably anyone planning on picking up the book has done so by now. And since tonight is Halloween, a post devoted to The Scarecrow seems apropos.

The villain menacing Supergirl and Robin Damian Wayne in the Halloween-themed Superman/Batman #77 is, of course, The Scarecrow, my favorite Batman villain and one of my favorite comic book characters in general—from a design stand-point as much as anything else. I've always loved the way that almost every artist who draws him does so differently, and yet their depictions almost always turn out looking "right."

The artist for this particular issue of Superman/Batman is Ale Garza, with Oliver Nome inking. When we first see Garza's Scarecrow, he's wearing a costume over his costume, since he's attending a Halloween costume party.

The jack o' lantern head is a pretty appropriate disguise for a scarecrow.

Supergirl notices that the fellow in the cape and pumpkin head is the only party attendee not talking about a recent spate of murders nor seemingly atwitter with fear, so she accosts him, giving us a better look at this Scarecrow's attire: Very nice footwear! They say both "rustic" and "villain" at the same time, and are pretty far removed from the scarecrow socks tied with rope that the character usually wears.

The villain retalliates by PSSSTTT-ing Supergirl with a special, Kryptonian-strength fear gas, in a scene which gives us a nice view of his ascot: Or weren't you looking at The Scarecrow's neckwear in this panel? Perhaps something else caught your eye? (This is a pretty good example of how Supergirl wearing shorts under her skirt can be sexy without ridiculously impractical. That is, flying around in a skirt might seem kinda stupid, so sure, put her in shorts—short, tight shorts are still kind of sexy, though, so it's not like a single sensible addition to her costume suddenly makes her look puritan (Not to go off on a tangent about a different character's costume or anything here but, for the record, I don't care for this Supergirl's costume at all. I like it with shorts better than without shorts, but the half-shirt, the belt, the mini-skirt, the triangle-shapes on her wrists and the bottom of her shirt...I don't care for it).

The Scarecrow is wearing that pumpkin head for most of the panels he's in, so there isn't a really good image of him in his "real" costume in the book. I think this is the panel in which Garza draws him sans pumpkin the biggest: Not sure what he hopes to accomplish with that wooden stake there.

Here's a close-up of his face: Garza draws the mask as if it is stitched togehter from several too-small pieces of cloth. I'm not crazy about how it looks close-up, but I do like the shape of the head. Generally he's wearing a hat of some sort, or, if he's not, his mask gives his head more of a bag or hood-like appearance. I like how this gives him a smooth, round head—he looks vaguely like a Dum-Dum sucker.

Finally, here's my favorite image from the book. Once the heroes KO Scarecrow, he collapses like a bug in an advertisement for some sort of household pesticide: And that's Ale Garza's Scarecrow. If you'd like to see more of his Superman/Batman #77, you can download a short preview here (The Scarecrow's not in the preview, but you can see Garza and Nome's rather distinctive version of another Bat-villain in it).

Some superhero costumes in this weekend's funnies

Sunday's Family Circus strip offered a wordless observation of the distance between kids' Halloween costumes in their imaginations and in their minds, and our pal Batman makes an appearance. Given the timelessness of most of the costumes—clown, witch, jungle cat—I would have guessed that this might have been a re-run of an older panel, save that the current artist gave young Billy's Batman costume those crazy fake abs so many superhero kids' costumes have developed over the last few years. Those things really freak me out.


Yesterday's Blondie featured Dagwood and his boss Mr. Dithers attending a costume party, the latter dressed as Superman...with one slight alteration. The gag's not really funny, but I like Mr. Dithers' shape, and seeing it wearing that particular costume. I also really like the fact that this is a joke—if that's not too strong a word for what is occurring in the panel—that could have been told at any point since Superman's creation in 1939. That seems fitting, given the strip's longevity.


Here's another one from yesterday's funny pages—Ted and Sally Forth dressed as Hawkman and Hawkgirl. I don't even really understand the "joke" in this one (Is it a weather thing? Because is the weather on October 31 and November 1 really that different?). But it doesn't really matter. The basic design of Hawkman's helmet is so funny all by itself, with those big, crazy hawk-eyes which here, as is often the case in the comics, move as if they were the real eyes of the person wearing the helmet, is such a strong visual gag that mild daily comic strip humor is simply eclipsed by the the default insanity of Hawkman's helmet. Interesting that Ted actually looks like the superhero when he puts that costume one, while Sally looks more like Sally in a costume. I guess it's because we get to see her hair sticking out of the bottom of the helmet, and that she doesn't have big googly eyes over her normal eyes.