Comic shop comics: Feb. 2-9

The All New Batman: The Brave and the Bold#4 (DC Comics) After watching Wonder Woman and Batman beat up some Wondy villains, the Olympian god of love Eros expresses his disappointment in his mother’s champion for spreading more punches and beat-downs in man’s world than love, and decides to do something—make Batman and Wonder Woman fall in love.

That leads to a hastily assembled wedding, and to Talia al Ghul summoning the “hundreds of enemies” the two heroes have, “The most wanted and the long forgotten! The major threats and the minor nuisances!” to destroy the happy couple. Naturally, there are plenty of superheroes in attendance, which leads to a big everybody vs. everybody fight.

It’s a cameo cornucopia. Fisch digs deep into Wonder Woman’s rogue’s gallery, and pulls out several characters I’ve specifically wanted to see in Wonder Woman comics for about four years now, including Mouse Man, The Crimson Centipede, Fireworks Man and an unnamed Blue Snowman (who Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Amanda Conner used recently-ish in Power Girl #7). They also employ Cheetah and Giganta, Angle Man, Paper Man, Amoeba Man and Egg Fu and Dr. Psycho, the latter of whom Rick Burchett draws H.G. Peter-style.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg in this issue, which features plenty of little treats, like an unexpected Sugar and Spike appearance, Ultraa the Mutli-Alien vs. Animal-Vegetable-Mineral-Man, a voice-only cameo by original H-Deal hero Robby Reed and fairly inspired applications of all these pretty random characters, at least in terms of who fights who and how this or that person responds to the news of Batman and Wonder Woman’s upcoming nuptials.

This was by far the most straight-ahead enjoyable, nothing-but-fun comic I’ve read in a while, so much so that I didn’t even mind that Fisch seemingly cribbed part of the twist ending from a 1961 issue of Batman (don’t click that unless you wanna spoil one of ANB:TbaTB #4’s better gags!!!). Of course, Fisch then added an additional twist, with one more page of unlikely old-school Batman and old-school Wonder Woman world-overlap, so it’s quite easy to forgive hearing an old gag repeated.


Brightest Day #19 (DC) So this is the issue in which one of the 12 returnees gets rather brutally maimed, one of the events from this book that you’ve probably already hurt about, if you’ve been following the events of the book—or how people react to them—at all. (Uh, spoiler review, so just go ahead and skip on down to DC Universe Online Legends if you haven’t read this yet/care about that).

This is the issue where Aquaman loses a hand again. This time Black Manta chops it off with a sword, and this time it’s his right hand.

I’d decry how ridiculous that is if I thought it even semi-permanent. DC has had a string of creators try various ways to get Aquaman’s hand back since he lost it at the start of the best post-Crisis volume of his title, the Peter David-launched one that began in 1994. David gave him a golden harpoon with a few applications (drill, grappling hook), Erik Larsen gave him a golden liquid metal transforming hand, I believe that was eventually traded in for a golden robot hand, and in one reboot he got a magic water hand, and on occasion he’d end up wearing gloves, removing the need to think about how many hands Aquaman has and what one of them is made out of entirely. Then he mutated into an half-cephalopod crazy person and died, coming back to life with both hands in this series.

That’s about 16 years worth of fairly regular, radical status quo changes for the character, most of them attempts to get him closer and closer to something resembling his original, more valuable status (from an exploitable intellectual property standpoint, anyway).

There’s no way DC would re-maim the guy and start the process all over again; this is the company that brought Jason Todd, Hal Jordan and Barry Allen back—they want their orange and green clad, short-haired, clean-shaven, two-handed Aquaman back.

Besides, this series also just seemingly killed off Hawkman and Hawkgirl, and the White Entity Thingee told Deadman it would probably be re-killing a handful of the Resurrectees in order to purify them, so I image Aquaman will be alive and well and able to play the piano again when this is all over.

And hopefully, hopefully he won’t be wearing a mock-turtleneck.

Also worth noting about this issue? Three things pertaining to recent announcements the publisher has made about the direction of their single-issue serials.

1.) DC is really pushing the rhyming “Drawing the Line at $2.99” campaign, as this issue includes little blue and gold logo of that saying where the price would normally be.

2.) It’s only 20 pages long, and reads like it’s too short. That probably has something to do with the one two-page splash and three one-page splashes. DC’s gotta cut down on splashes now, and this issue has a particularly apparent over-use of them. There’s a full-page splash of Aquaman’s hand getting cut off, followed by a single four-panel page of him falling to his knees, and then another full-page splash, featuring Black Manta standing over a now collapsed Aquaman—the image is almost identical to that of the preceding splash. Additionally, no page has any more than five panels on it, so a reader can just whip through this issue like it was nothing.

3.) This issue includes a letters column. I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t a Brightest Day specific letters column, but seemed to be a general column that applied to the DCU in general, which I guess would mean that every comic they publish in a particular week might bear the same column, just like with the DC Nation columns…? (There’s also a DC Nation column, by the way, so I guess the books will be 20-pages, with a letter col making 21 and DC Nation making 22…?)


DC Comics Online Legends #1 (DC) This is the new bi-weekly comic book series based on DC’s new MMORPG video game (Did I get the acronym right, or am I missing some M’s…?), which is, of course, based on DC Comics, so this is one of those weird series the publisher puts out, comics that it’s kind of weird even exist, yet it would be far weirder if they didn’t exist.

I am never, ever going to play the game, but I like DC super-characters, so this seemed like a good way for me to check in on it, and the bi-weekly format and big cast make this something of an ideal comic book for me, in a lot of ways.

It’s basically super-comic book methadone—it’s cheap, it’s legal, you can get it regularly and frequently and while it lacks the highs of the really good stuff, it doesn’t have any of the incredible drawbacks, and it can’t possibly do the sort of damage that trying to constantly fill that hole in you with as many super-comics as you can get a hold of can do.

It’s also better than it looks, but that might have something to do with the fact that it looks like a complete piece of shit.

On the cover we see Ed Benes at his absolute worst—the image looks rushed, unfinished and even a little off. The characters here are familiar ones, but they should be wearing different, altered costumes from their appearance in the game (the scene here is set in the near-future), but they look a bit indistinct, somewhere between their “real” duds and their near-future outfits.

Check out the lady between Luthor and cross-armed Deathstroke there. Who the hell is that? And why did Benes draw her like that?

Front and center, is Wonder Woman, wearing a should-pad around her bicep, and trying to eat it.

Behind her, Green Lantern shoots at Black Adam; both of them have lost their legs from the knees down in the battle. If you open the back cover, you’ll see the image stretches across that as well. Back there you see Giganta, standing in a very deep hole, getting shot in the chin by a floating Cyborg, The Flash running by The Joker and Harley Quinn so fast that they fall down, and Batman swinging in, pointing at nothing, and about to collide with Cyborg.

It’s terrible hackwork, and DC should count themselves lucky if any fan looks at it, picks it up and manages to resist the temptation to throw it down in disgust, let alone carry it up to the register and take it home with them to read (Ha ha, but that doesn’t matter anyway, since so many fans pre-order these things from their shops, who also pre-order and can’t return them if they’re unsold anyway; the covers could have stick-figures calling the reader mean names on the covers, and it probably wouldn’t hurt sales much).

The insides are better. Howard Porter pencils those, and Livesay, Adriana Melo and Norman Lee apparently finish and/or ink them. The quality of the imagery changes from page to page, but it all looks enough like Porter’s work that he certainly did the layouts and some degree of drawing on each page.

I’ve always liked Porter’s art, although it’s changed quite a bit over the years, depending on the project, the collaborator and the style he was consciously trying to work in. I like the intense, awkwardness of it, and the way his lurching figures remind me of Jack Kirby at his most intense, but I understand it’s hardly to everyone’s taste.

Like the cover, it lacks a bit of clarity—the characters never seemed like “my” DCU characters, nor did they seem to belong to a bold, new, different DCU either.

The story, written by Marv Wolfman and Tony Bedard, stars Lex Luthor, who narrates. In the future, a Cable-ed up Luthor is wearing a big, green tank suit, and is in the process of finishing off Superman and some of his allies, when his partner-in-crime Brainiac double-crosses him and starts destroying the world.

Luthor must then gather whatever remaining heroes and villains he can rescue in order to fight off Brainiac and save humanity from extinction.

The writing is actually quite decent, and Luthor makes for a fun lead when put in positions like this—a ruthless bad guy, but the less ruthless bad guy. It’s harder to follow than it needs to be, in part because of the way the characters are introduced and rendered, and in even larger part because Luthor’s narration boxes look the exact same as Brainiac’s-talking-to-Luthor boxes, so the narrator seems to switch from Luthor to Brainiac and back, with no indication of who’s talking other than the context.

Overall, I liked it enough to keep reading, but it looks and reads like an extremely rushed, quite sloppy effort. Thankfully, the sloppy, rushed work seems to be done by extremely experienced and competent creators, so its still readable, but, so far, it seems like a fine bit of super-comic methodone for life-time addicts like me, rather than a comic book for the thousands who will play the game, and thus like a hugely wasted opportunity.


DC Comics Presents: Green Lantern—Fear Itself #1 (DC) This is another one of DC’s new-ish almost-trades, basically a slightly flimsier version of the old pretige format books, or a thin trade paperback with ads.

Rather than a collection, this one was actually an original trade paperback from 1999, written by then-Green Lantern writer Ron Marz and featuring extremely weird by painted art from Brad Parker.

The story begins during World War II, when a Nazi occultist unleashes summons a giant eyeball monster. Green Lantern Alan Scott leads the JSA against it, defeating it. At least until the Silver Age, when it reawakens, and Green Lantern Hal Jordan and the “Year One” Justice League must face it. They manage to stave it off, until the ‘90s, when Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and the awesome JLA have to finally finish it off.

Marz’s scripting is strong; repeating a basic sequence of events while differentiating the three leads pretty strongly. It reminded how much I enjoyed the Kyle Rayner-lead status quo of the franchise, and of little elements I had sort of forgotten about, like Kyle playing cards with the former GLs.

The art is…hoo boy. I imagine it looked really different when read in 1999, but now that there are whole publishers whose output features heavily-modeled, painted-looking artwork.

I kind of liked it and kind of hated it at the same time, so, um, I guess that made it interesting.

I like how the JSA all looked like weird, creepy movie serial stars, for example:The choice of models left a lot to be desired, however. For example, I never in a million years would have imagined Tom Kalamaku and Carol Ferris looking like this:Or Guy Gardner like this:I enjoyed the hell out of it, though—100 pages for $8, three GLs and three super-teams from three fictional eras, and it was a pretty nostalgic for me, as a reader of Green Lantern at the time and fan of JLA from that period.

Now here’s a picture of Hal Jordan getting hit:


Deadpool Team-Up #885 (Marvel Comics) Did I really pre-order this, and, if so, why? That’s what I thought when I found this in my little stack from the comic shop the other day. I mean, yeah, featuring Hellcow, the vampire cow from an issue of Howard The Duck from forever ago in a modern Marvel team-up book is kind of funny, but surely that wasn’t enough to make me drop three more bucks on a Deadpool comic, as I’ve had more than enough of Deadpool in full-on Ambush Bug mode to last me for a good decade or so after a few issues of dabbling here and there.

And then I turned the cover and saw the credits:Oh, so that’s why I ordered this.

It’s pretty good for a Deadpool team-up comic. A lot of the jokes and gags are funny enough, there’s at least one good gory Looney Tunes type gag (oddly, it’s not Deadpool who sets it, but a brilliant scientist), there’s interesting rapport between Deadpool and the cow and a rather clever twist near the climax where Deadpool realizes that he’s in a comic book and tries to go back through the pages of the comic book to stop himself from making a mistake.

Pretty good work from two pretty great creators.


Knight and Squire #6 (DC) Things take a turn for the very serious in this issue, as the leads deduce that Jarvis Poker, The British Joker has a terminal disease, and try to help him go out in a style that he would want. His namesake, however, finds “this nation of pretend superheros and villains…a shambolic mixed metaphor echo of something real,” and, thus, “It’s an insult.” Hell of a cliffhanger, too; there’s only one more issue to go, which is kid of too bad, but then I can’t imagine the market supporting a book like this for too long.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of the increasingly busy Paul Cornell after the sixth issue of this series ships; I hope we get to see a lot more of artist Jimmy Broxton, too—he’s a large part of what makes this series so excellent.


Superman 80-Page Giant 2011 #1 (DC) Anthology books like this are particularly hard to review, especially in this babble-about-the-books-I-just-read-as-soon-as-I-finish-them format, so I’ll try to be less verbose in order to cover everything.

First, in general:

—The title and numbering is pretty silly. Is there going to be a second Superman 80-Page Giant 2011? No? Then why not cut off the year and just make the numbers go up by one each year? A “#1” on the cover can’t possibly fool that many readers, especially since Superman serial readers have grown so incredibly few and incredibly sophisticated.

—Dustin Nguyen’s cover is beautiful. A bunch of these characters don’t appear at all, but it’s nice to see how neat Nguyen’s Parasite or Steel are, anyway.

—At $6, this is an incredible value. That’s the price of two issues for your now-average 20-page DC comic, but for the page count of four. Or, looked at another way, that’s the price of one-and-a-half-issues of your average Marvel comic book, but for 80 pages instead of 33.

—This is a pretty incredible effort. There wasn’t a single story I didn’t like anything about, and some incredibly strong work here.

Okay, let’s look at the stories now:

Jor-El in “First Time For Everything” by Beau Tidwell, Cafu and Bit

This is the first time I’ve heard of writer Tidwell, but his story is quite accomplished. At least in its telling. The plot is kind of odd and pointless—Superman’s Dad doing some derring-do on the current version of pre-explosion Krypton—but it’s quite well-written nonetheless. I know I’ve read plenty of comics with the name Cafu attached, but this is the first time I really stopped and thought, Wow, this dude can draw.

Perry White in “Old Men Talking in Bars” by Neil Kleid and Dean Haspiel

The old men doing the talking in this bar are Perry White and Wildcat, who, between this and his appearance in Knight and Squire #1, is becoming a character who just randomly shows up in bars in other people’s comics. I approve.

The pair do shots and talk about the old days, which leads to a flashback of young White covering a charity boxing match between Wildcat and The Guardian. Intergang, toting neat-looking Golden Age versions of big, silly science-fiction guns, show up to rob the gate, and the heroes beat ‘em silly.Haspiel’s art is, naturally, masterful, and Kleid’s story is great too—finding common ground between these two long-lived but relatively minor DCU supporting characters, and giving them some things in common to talk about. Kleid deserves extra points for working in one of Perry White’s catchphrases, and not having it be “Great Caesar’s ghost!”(Above: I like the framing of two panels within the angles of the bar above; and Haspiel draws a very cool version of Wildcat's son, Wildcat)

“Quarter-life Crisis of Infinite Jimmy Olsens” by Abhay Khosla and Andy MaDonald

This story is the one I was looking forward to, and really the whole reason I bought the issue—I love Khosla’s writing about comics (he’s one of the few semi-regular comics bloggers I can think of whose work I’d actually like to see collected in a big-person’s, grown-up book-book), and wanted to see how he’d do writing a superhero comic book for DC.

He does great. A rogue scientist has clones Jimmy 100 times before Superman rescues him, and together the two pals must try and track down all of the clones.

I didn’t like the one mention of “militant were-gerbils.” I don’t think gerbils are funny. I think they’re an animal that everyone else thinks are funny, and thus get used in jokes sometimes, but they aren’t genuinely or inherently funny in and of themselves.

I think that was a serious mistake on Khosla’s part.

That was the only mistake I saw. The story was very funny, and it wasn’t funny in the way that funny writers can write funny comics, but funny in the way only a comic book can really be funny (For example, perhaps my favorite gag, is the one that comes at the end a sequence of four panels—the last two on page 7, and the first two on page 8).

It’s very funny, very heartfelt and very true to the characters of Jimmy Olsen and Superman, which is actually pretty hard, given how many different directions those characters get pulled in these days.

MacDonald’s artwork is likewise downright brilliant; between it and Sal Cipriano’s letters (although I suspect some of the lettering was actually done by MacDonald, drawn right into the background of some pages), the story has a very “indie” look and feel about it.

Like I said, this is the story I was most looking forward to, and the reason I bought the book. That means it was the one most likely to disappoint me. It didn’t, at all (unless you count the gerbil bit). It’s great.

More Khosla, more MacDonald and more Jimmy Olsen, please, DC—in any combination, really.

Bizarro in “No Go Away Glad, Just Go Away!” by Steve Horton and Dan McDaid

This is a Bizarro World story, starring Bizarro and set on Bizarro world and, well, while I love the character Bizarro, he can be tiresome to read about—not because of the way he talks, but because of the way I read the way he talks. That is, I’m constantly checking his dialogue while I’m reading it, reversing it in my head to make sure it is properly backwards, that the writer is using “am” correctly in this context and, well, it can be exhausting—especially when all of the characters are Bizarros.

This is full of great art by McDaid; I love every single line of it. The story isn’t so much a story as a series of backwards gags, but it has it’s moments. I snickered when Bizarro Lois ends her argument with Bizarro #1, and I found the dumpster marked “Best China” a rewarding joke (it took me a while to puzzle out why the graffiti said that), and Bizarro Dr. Fate has a pretty awesome costume:

Supergirl in “The Bloodsucker’s Moxie

This is a weird short story. Supergirl, who is now apparently a college student (she was 16 when reintroduced into continuity by Jeph Loeb in Superman/Batman, I thought, so she shouldn’t be much older than 17 at this point), is on a date with a friend, who decides he can’t date this smoking-hot, constantly almost-naked girl because he doesn’t like the way she disappears during monster attacks or something. Whatever.

It’s written by Joe Caramanga; he sends her to a state fair to meet a boy on a date, she gets picked up on by some douchey-looking (high school?) boys, and in the Hall of Freaks she discovers a tentacle monster that attacks the fair, realizing, at the end, that she too is a freak.

It’s fine, if a bit much. Trevor McCarthy’s artwork is incredible though, as is Andre Szymanowicz’s coloring of it. It’s strange that Supergirl’s civilian clothes are even more skimpy and revealing than her superhero costume (I think she’s wearing a costume patterned after the Supergirl of Smallville in her civilian identity), and it’s rather disappointing that she ends up sprawled out, covered in slime and wrapped in a tentacle before the end of the story.I love cephalopods as much as the next guy—actually, I’m fairly confident I love them a lot more than the next guy—but there’s something questionable about their battles with teenage girls sometimes, whether intentionally icky or not.

Still, another decent story and another bunch of pages of great art. Like MacDonald, I hope McCarthy’s is a name that is high on a lot of comic book editors’ lists of People To Hire after they see this story.

Lois Lane in “Credit Check” by Paul Tobin, Colleen Coover and Amilcar Pinna

Now that’s just cruel, having Colleen Coover do a Lois Lane story, but only as a writer rather than as an artist as well. How can one read that credit and not get excited about the prospect of a Coover-drawn Lois?

Well, as it turns out, this Amilcar Pinna person is pretty great too, just not-Coover.

This is a short, lark of a story in which Lois and Lana, apparently just hanging out instead of fighting over Superman, stumble upon a mystery and then solve it. It’s well written and even better-drawn.

Oddly, this is one of only two stories in this whole book—which you’ll remember is entitled Superman 80-Page Giant—featuring Superman in any capacity at all. And here he’s just on the phone talking to Lois in two panels (Khosla and MacDonald’s story is the only one which prominently features Superman, or has him being an active, hero-like character).

As fine a co-writer as Coover turned out to be here, I think DC still owes us a Colleen Coover drawn comic for Superman 80-Page Giant 2012 #1.

Superboy in “Bad Moon Rising” by Aubrey Sitterson, Eddy Barrows and J.P. Mayer

Congratulations, Aubrey Sitterson! You are the one millionth person to entitle a comic story about featuring a werewolf “Bad Moon Rising”!

This one’s a little odd for a couple reasons. First, it’s the only one to feature different artists penciling and inking. All of the others have single artists (well, the Jor-El story is inked by the penciler and another inker). Second, it features work from a more established (with these characters, anyway) artist.

Also, it’s pretty bad.

Superboy and Krypto are chilling out at Ma Kent’s, wearing their costumes, when Superboy decides he needs to go blow off steam. So he goes and fights a werewolf, and then comes back home. The end. And that’s all, really.

Review: Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers Unleashed

The original, 2009 Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers series was an extremely Marvel Universe-dependent affair. The cast, of course, was comprised of various animal heroes associated with various Marvel characters—The Inhumans’ teleporting bulldog Lockjaw, X-Man Kitty Pryde’s dragon Lockheed, The Falcon’s falcon Redwing, Ka-Zar’s sabre tooth cat Zabu, Speedball’s cat Hairball, a frog with Thor’s powers and costumes called Throg and Ms. Lion from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends—and the plot involved them going on a quest to assemble the Infinity Gems before cosmic villain Thanos could put them in his gauntlet and rule the universe or whatever.

The 2010 sequel series, Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers Unleashed (Get it? Because two of them are dogs, and dogs wear leashes?), is much less dependent on Marvel continuity, and perhaps ironically, seems a lot more reader friendly—at least up to a point.

The conflict in this outing is that half-frog, half-god-like superhero Throg feels out of place, neither true frog nor true god, but finally finds acceptance among his fellow mythological creatures, like the Yeti. In doing so, he stumbles into a world where such fantasy creatures have all been sent, a world where they’re under threat by a mysterious, unseen foe.

When Throg leaves Earth, his old teammates must reunite and try to find him, and, along the way, earth gets invaded by fantasy animals and, later, the things from their world that were harming them in the first place.

Writer Chris Eliopoulos’s plotting is fairly strong, though the twist at the end seemed a little tired and overused to me, as well as coming a bit out of left field (Of course, if this is a kids comic, I don’t suppose it matters so much if many other stories have similar elements, since this may be the first time in their younger lives they’ve encountered it). The characterization of some of the principals helps sell it all quite well, and I think the story is actually at its best when we’re just sort of hanging around Ms. Lion and Hairball as they attempt to be animal superheroes in New York City.

That pair has, by far, the most defined personalities among the cast members, even if their personalities are sorta simple—Hairball, the cat, hates the dog; Ms. Lion, the dog, is dimwitted and enthusiastic—and they get the most panel-time.

In fact, one of the weaknesses of the scripting is how unnecessary much of the cast seems. If Redwing, Lockjaw and Zabu weren’t in this comic at all, it wouldn’t change a thing—their few lines would just be spoken by someone else. That’s a challenge of writing team comics—especially super-team comics, as teams as stacked with powers as, say The Justice League and The Avengers really shouldn’t need to have folks like Superman or Sentry standing around constantly—and I guess it holds true for team comics featuring superhero animals.

Ig Guara’s art is, again, superior. He draws perfectly realistic animals, but without sacrificing their ability to emote in ways that seem both animal-like but easily readable. And Big Two super-comic artists who can do very realistic while still maintaining the vibrancy of a living, breathing, done-by-human-hand drawing are increasingly rare.

Much like the first volume then, this is pretty fun all-ages adventure; a not-great comic with an awesome premise and extremely polished execution that make a few flaws seem particularly forgivable.

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I read this story not as it was originally published, in serial comic book form, but in a trade. I read the original series in comic book form, and regretted it when I saw all of the nice variant covers that were being produced for it, variants that I assumed were included in the trade.

So this time I waited for the trade, so as not to miss out on Robert Langridge’s totem poll variant or this neat dogs-playing poker riff. I know the incentive for doing variant covers at all is that it helps the publishers sell more books to their retailers, but it has the opposite effect on me, and I wonder if it incentivizes trade-waiting among more readers than it manages to sell issues to readers? (It’s such a weird business model really, with publishers selling to retailers, not readers, and retailers selling to readers, so the publisher/reader relationship isn’t as important as it might be otherwise).

The advantage of my waiting for the trade is that I did indeed get all the covers without having to buy two copies of some of the issues, and I also got two other, shorter stories.

The downside? Marvel published the trade at a smaller, not-quite-digest size, which didn’t serve the art and thus the comics all that well, since they were created for the larger dimensions (which I’ve already discussed a bit here).

So I’m afraid I still can’t quite figure out the best way to read these things.

The serials come out more frequently and are at a size more complimentary to the content, but they’re also full of ads, missing some content (variant covers, at the least) and, in most Marvel cases, are more expensive.

The trade is generally cheaper, has more content (here, variants and back-ups) and can be purchased without a trip to a comic shop (45 minutes, for me), but (again, in this particular case) the artwork is ill-served by the size.

So, those back-ups?

The first is by Eliopoulos, writing and drawing, and was originally published as part of the $4 Tails of the Pet Avengers: The Dog Days of Summer one-shot, from last July. It’s actually a Franklin Richards, Son of a Genius story, drawn in Eliopoulus’ Bill Watterson-inspired style, and starring Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman’s young son, and his robot nanny HERBIE.

The inadvertently create a giant garbage monster, and the Pet Avengers show up to help.

It’s a pretty fun, funny little story, and it was a pleasure to see Eliopoulos drawing the Pet Avengers. Check it out:He also does an excellent job with Puppy, a puppy with similar powers to Lockheed (and a similar tuning fork on his head), really capturing the not-giving-a-fuck of certain dogs.Finally, there’s a four-page short entitled “Hulk-Pet Avengers,” which gives us an opportunity to see another artist’s take on the characters—that of Dario Brizuela.This one’s written by an Audrey Loeb, whom I believe may be related to that other comic book writer named Loeb (it would certainly explain why this not at all funny or even very good story got published), and, like so many comics written by people named Loeb, it’s sort of a nonsensical mess.

A little kid Hulk who is blue—Blue Hulk apparently only exists in these shorts, where he tends to hang out with Red Hulk and (Green) Hulk, neither of whom are present here—is hanging out and watching TV with the Pet Avengers. Here, they can talk to non-animals, like Blue Hulk.

Actually, all of them can talk, even Lockjaw, who can’t talk, even to other animals. It’s…it’s just weird, really. Like someone in old time Hollywood writing a script for a short film featuring the Marx Brothers, and including plenty of lines for Harpo.

Anyway, the TV watchers see an ad for some place called Ice Cream Mountain, which is apparently a literal mountain of ice cream, and then they try to go there, but talking Lockheed’s teleportation powers get scrambled by lightning, so they teleport to a few other places first, on the way encountering the Red Ghost’s Super-Apes, which is kind of cool, I guess.

(Disclaimer: If Audrey Loeb is Jeph Loeb’s young daughter and only, like, a grade schooler or something, I apologize for being mean. If she’s over 18, then never mind—it’s just the story I’m judging, not the person, obviously. And the story is no good.)

Meanwhile, at Blog@Newsarama...

I have a review of Joe Ollmann's new graphic novel Mid-Life up at Blog@ today, if you'd like to go read it. If you'd rather not go over there and read a few hundred words about it, I can give you a short review here: It's really good. The above two-panel sequence is from the second chapter, and it was the first time I found myself laughing while reading. I love the look of horror on the protagonist's face when he thinks his infant is shouting about Jews for a some reason.

Andres Guinaldo's Scarecrow

Andres Guinaldo only drew him in a single panel of his 2010 one-shot, Joker's Asylum II: The Riddler #1 (collected in Bamtan: Joker's Asylum Vol. 2), but that's his design for the character as it appeared in that single panel.

Thanks, DC!

Last September, I wrote this post. Today, I saw this announcement.

Review: Batman: Joker's Asylum Vol. 2

Having learned my lesson by sitting out the first Joker’s Asylum series of ridiculously-titled one-shots in 2008, only to discover via a library-borrowed trade that the comics it produced were actually pretty damn good Batman comics, I decided that I’d be purchasing the collection of the second Joker’s Asylum series of one-shots as soon as it was published.

It proved rather difficult to do so, leaving some of these issues on the shelves and counting down the weeks until the trade was available, in large part because one of the comics in the series was drawn by Kelley Jones and, I probably don’t need to remind you, it is the opinion of this blog that Kelley Jones rules.

The original Joker’s Asylum event used up most of the A-List Batman villains (or at least the A-List Batman villains who are also incarcerated in Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane), devoting one-shots to The Joker, Two-Face, The Scarecrow, Poison Ivy and The Penguin.

This series had to move down a bit to the B-List then—The Riddler, Mad Hatter, Killer Croc, Clayface, Harley Quinn—but despite having lower-profile protagonists, in many ways it proved to be a superior outing. Certainly its visually superior to the original.

The premise is the same: A series of stand-alone stories in which The Joker serves as a horror-host, narrating a story in which one of Batman’s insane villains serves as the protagonist, while Batman himself generally gets little more than a cameo near the conclusion.

The first story is that of the Mad Hatter, written by Landry Quinn Walker (whose name is most familiar for his generally excellent work on DC’s kid-friendly books) and penciled by Keith Giffen, with Bill Sienkiewicz inking.

Sienkiewicz is a powerful artist, and when he inks or finishes another artist’s work, it can have a pretty dramatic effect on the style, making the lines scratchier, jitterier, shakier—Sienkiewicz’s lines are full of energy, and that energy tends to be a nervous, even nauseous energy.

Obviously, that’s a pretty good match for a story narrated by two different lunatics and mostly told through The Mad Hatter’s point-of-view, and his work fuses somewhat surprisingly well with Giffen’s.

Walker’s Hatter is less-obsessed with hats and hung-up on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books in a very specific way: When we find him, he’s writing a book, “The Mad Tea Party by Jervis Tetch,” a sort of idealized children’s romance, but he still needs to find his Alice to complete it.

He’s also doing his best to resist drinking tea or wearing hats, things he must remind himself not to do constantly, by repeating instructions not to do so like a mantra, and putting little sticky notes reading “Do Not Drink” on boxes of tea around his cluttered, hoarder’s hide-out.

Eventually he succumbs of course, and transforms from a nervous, deeply troubled crazy person to an over-the-top, Batman-battling villain.

The visuals are further enhanced by the artists drawing the panels of the comic as if they were illustrated by Tetch himself, for his book, so that pieces of some panels look like pictures torn from magazines and taped over the art Giffen and Sienkiewicz would have provided if they weren’t using this technique.

Here's one panel, featuring Batman's appearance:It make for extremely immersive art, in which the world between The Mad Hatter’s book and the real world (which is, of course, actually the book we’re reading) overlaps—apropos for a madman who fancies himself The Mad Hatter from Carroll’s occasionally metatextual text.

Harley Quinn’s story, written by James Patrick, manages to recall some of the fun of the lead character’s own short-lived series, cramming it into a single issue. It’s entitled “The Most Important Day of The Year,” and features the Joker-obsessed villainess breaking out of Arkham on Valentine’s Day to spend it with the love of her life, and refusing to let anyone or anything—incarceration, the mobs of Gotham City, the Gotham City Police Department, Batman—stand in her way.

It’s a bit of a lark of a story, well constructed from beginning to twist ending, and artist Jason Quinones provides perfect art for it—representational-esque, but with a cartoony accent, full of life, movement and expression.

That’s followed by “The House The Cards Built,” featuring The Riddler. Not unlike the Two-Face story that closed out the first volume, this one tries to incorporate the villain’s schtick into the story itself, although with less successful results.

The story, written by Peter Calloway and drawn by Andres Guinaldo and Raul Fernandez, is of The Riddler falling in love with a young woman, and then trying to solve the riddle of getting her to love him, despite the fact that he’s not only older and, I assume, unappealing, but also and more obviously he’s a psychotic criminal.

Another Bat-villain plays a role in the story, trying to initiate The Riddler into a team-up, only to find he’s too lovesick to participate, and thus the mystery villain decides to solve The Riddler’s problem somewhat violently.

To keep the identity of the villain a secret—it’s apparently a riddle—Guinaldo and Fernandez draw a different villain in the place of The Mystery Villain in every panel he or she appears in. It’s a neat trick that at least lets us see a single art-team draw the majority of Batman’s rouge’s gallery.

It’s pretty great art throughout—it lacks the style of the opening and closing chapters, and doesn’t seem quite as perfectly matched to the particular character in the way that the Hatter, Harley and Clayface stories are, but it may be the all-around best art.

The strange thing is, Guinaldo and Fernandez draw the Dick Grayson Batman costume throughout the story (it has different gauntlets and a different belt buckle, if all Batman costumes look the same to you), despite the fact that the story takes place quite a long time ago, back when The Riddler was still a villain instead of a reformed private detective, as he has been in the comics since around 2006 or so; Dick Grayson didn’t become Batman until 2009.

Mike Raicht’s Killer Croc story, “Beauty and The Beast,” is probably the messiest of the stories visually, illustrated by David Yardin and Cliff Richards, with Jose Villarrubia handling the colors. It’s also somewhat strange in how little Croc actually has to do with the story. After he breaks out of Arkham in a most unusual way—and apparently demonstrates a new reptilian power—he’s taken in by a low-level criminal and the hood’s wife.

With a silent, brooding, obedient Croc as muscle, the low-level hood climbs to the top of the crime heap, until it all plays out how any tragedy would.

It’s a pretty okay crime story, but it offers little insight into the main character beyond his being a big, animalistic reptile-man who kills and sometimes eats people.

Although, come to think of it, that’s pretty much how the character’s been used since about “Hush” or so.

For reasons that remain a complete mystery to me, the artists seem to have split up the book, with Yardin handling the early portion and Richards the later person; they have very different style, with Yardin doing very detailed work with heavier, darker lines, while Richards uses a weird soft-focus, faux-photographic style that makes his portion look like a bit like an old commercial for a feminine hygiene product—albeit one featuring a crocodile monster.
The final story was probably my favorite, but I’m biased—it’s the one drawn by Kelley Jones, drawing Clayface again (Jones last drew Clayface during his 12-issue 2008 collaboration with Steve Niles on Batman: Gotham After Midnight, and way back in 1998 Jones shared art duties with J.H. Williams III on a Clayface story during his run on Batman with Doug Moench and John Beatty).

It’s written by Kevin Shinick, and features the first Clayface, Basil Karlo, who I believe is now the only Clayface, having absorbed the others (That’s right, right? It would explain why he has the appearance and shape-shifting powers of Clayface II, and the melty-powers of whichever roman numeral-ed Clayface had the melty hands and was in love with a mannequin).

It’s often hard to separate the story from the art in a Jones story, given how showy and exaggerated that art is, but this one’s pretty solid—Clayface finds a theater showing one of his old horror movies, where kids dress-up as his character in some sort of V For Vendetta/Rocky Horror Picture Show-like celebration. His first impulse is to kill the kids, but then embraces their affection for him, and ultimately Batman’s investigates the murders around the theater only to find the villain.

Shinick offers some neat applications of Clayface’s powers, and all of the familiar Jones touches are there—weird angles, shocking close-up on ghastly expressions or incredibly detailed horror images, illustrated chapter breaks, characters’ faces appearing in the clouds of the sky, panel-background’s reacting to the emotions displayed in the actions of the foreground, etc.

There are some especially nice depictions of Clayface in action, which are refreshingly fluid. When he first storms the theater, for example, he flows in like a slow moving wave, and when he attacks a person, he splashes his arm against them like a viscous geyser.As with the first volume, this one proves to be a nice primer to various Bat-villains, and boasts enough fresh takes and quality work to offer something for long-time fans that have no use for a primer. I also particularly enjoyed seeing multiple different takes on different characters, something I never really tire of—this volume, for example, features five Jokers and five Batman, and each art team has a different, personal interpretation of each.

Columbus gets a new superhero; no one in Columbus cares

I've been fairly fascinated with the National Hockey League/Stan Lee team-up, in which the latter helped create 30 new superheroes, each one named after and given powers to represent the name of an NHL team. The Guardian Project, as it's called, seemed like a pretty fun idea when it was first announced, and in the course of my (week)daily link-blogging for Blog@Newsarama, I've picked up quite a few interesting items relating to the Guardian Project: Complaints that The Penguin is derivative of Cyclops, jeering at The Maple Leaf, Chris Sims' noble attempt to narrow the 30 bat-shit crazy super-characters down to just “the Ten Most Insane” characters, Toronto Life’s snarky paragraph “reviews” of each Guardian, Heidi MacDonald's declaration that the surreal project may be “Stan Lee’s greatest achievement yet” and so on.

It wasn't until very recently that I remembered that Columbus, Ohio—my adopted hometown from 2000-2010—had an NHL team of its own, and thus Columbus has its own Stan Lee-created superhero: The Blue Jacket.

Why did it take me so long to put 2 and 2 together, "so long" being relatively lengthened by the fact that I was reading articles about the NHL Guardians on a daily basis for the last few weeks?

Well, probably just because I'm a little dense. Maybe too because I left the city limits of Columbus last year, returning to my ancestral home off the shores of Lake Erie, and have been therefore thinking of Columbus more as my former hometown than my current hometown, and thus I now feel less ownership over fictional characters that live there. Surely my not giving a shit about sports at all was also factor.

But despite all of those other certainly relevant factors, another remains: Columbus, Ohio still doesn’t seem to have really integrated having its own NHL hockey team into its essential, core being just yet.

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Columbus was, and is, a great sports town.

Saturdays during college football season there are semi-religious affairs, and, if that Saturday’s game happens to be a home game, many parts of the city become embroiled in a sort of strange, fevered pagan holiday feeling—those days are like Easter, Super Bowl Sunday and St. Patrick’s Day combined, only it happens every other weekend.

The city spends a ridiculous amount of money on police officers to direct traffic and to arrest fans for pissing in the public and/or rioting and setting things on fire (During one period in the early part of last decade, when the campus area was rocked by house parties-turned-riots on a weekend-ly basis, the streets in the neighborhoods on game day would have a positively surreal amount of different police vehicles present: Police cars, police trucks, police helicopters, bike hops, mortocycle cops, horse cops (those are the best cops), and even a few of these weird high-tech mobile home-sized mobile command center things.)

Also, and this is true, you can shout “O! H!” at nearly any group of two or three people in Columbus, Ohio, and you could count on this group to shout back “I! O!” This is apparently a cheer that is popular at Buckeye games (I don’t know; I’ve never been to one).

Yes, Columbus is a great sports town—as long as that sport is Ohio State University football.

I know Columbus is a great sports town because during that first half of a decade I spent in Columbus, I was a reporter for a (since-de-alt-ified) alt-weekly newspaper, on the Things That Aren’t Music or Arts beat (although I ended up covering music and arts in my “spare” time too), and would end up covering things like the debut of the Columbus Destroyers arena foot ball team, or the Columbus Landsharks indoor lacrosse team.

Both of them shared facilities with the Blue Jackets, both of them were announced with great fanfare, their owners citing Columbus’ embrace of OSU as a sure sign that they would enthusiastically embrace these exciting new sporting endeavors, and both have been gone for years now—The Landsharks started playing in Columbus in 2001, but relocated to Phoenix after the 2003 season, while The Destroyers moved to town from Buffalo in 2004, and folded in 2008, while

The Blue Jackets obviously fared much better than the Destroyers or Landsharks, yet they’re still nowhere near as beloved nor as inextricably entwined with the city as the Buckeyes are.

If you were to rank various sports teams in Columbus’ collective heart, I would guess the Blue Jackets are somewhere near The Clippers, the city’s minor league baseball team.

Of course, the Buckeyes had a massive head start—their first season was 1890, and they’ve been playing in their current stadium since the early 1920’s.

The Blue Jackets became an official NHL expansion team in 2000, but began influencing the city a bit before that, when the city’s biggest employer and biggest business (last I knew), Nationwide, along with Columbus’ last-remaining daily newspaper The Dispatch and other entities, built Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus. It was sold as an effort to revitalize the dead, ghost town of a downtown (Downtown is filled with people form 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, but abandoned the rest of the time—in fact, finding a place that will sell you a cup of coffee on a Saturday in downtown Columbus is extraordinarily difficult).

I don’t know how well it’s worked exactly; I guess the level of development and night life and weekend life downtown is now much better than it was in, say, 1999, but I think it’s more than fair to suggest that downtown is more more vital than it is revitalized.

Anyway: Columbus has an NHL team, and while Columbus doesn’t mind the team, and in fact some folks in Columbus like it quite a bit, Columbus still isn’t a hockey town, and the Blue Jackets are a distant, distant, distant second or third in the hearts of Columbus sports fans.

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The team name comes from the uniforms of the Union Army during the Civil War. While it was fairly firmly part of the North and the Union, Ohio isn’t generally thought of as a big Civil War state, and its role in the conflict is thus sometimes surprisingly striking.

When Lincoln requested that Ohio raise ten regiments to fight for the Union at the beginning of the war, the state more than doubled his request, offering up 23 volunteer infantry regiments. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were both Ohioans, as was George Custer and Philip Sheridan. Ohio also produced a number of great Civil War figures, including William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Philip Sheridan, and George Custer. As for Columbus, there were two Civil War-era military bases there, Camp Chase and Camp Thomas.

The team name was derived via a contest in local, terrible newspaper, the Dispatch. This occurred before I moved there and had to pay attention to such things, but I’m told there was a contest in the paper to name the team, and “The Columbus Cows” or “The Columbus Mad Cows” received the most votes.

See, Columbus is referred to, both derisively and self-deprecatingly as “Cowtown” due to, uh, it’s general lameness and the fact that it’s perceived as more rural than urban by more urban parts of the country, so apparently the cow was regarded as a good animal mascot for a sports team based in the city.

I kinda like Mad Cows—why not name a sports team after a terrifying, deadly disease derived from the horrors of modern factory farming practices?—and think white uniforms with mottled black patches on them could have been rather neat looking. (An earlier Columbus hockey team, The Columbus Chill, apparently went by Mad Cows and had special jerseys made for at least one game)

But the powers that be went with The Blue Jackets instead; I guess Union Soldiers are cooler than cows. There was also an 18th century Shawnee war chief who went by the name Blue Jacket in Ohio, but the Blue Jackets’ logos and art usually feature elements of Civil War uniforms.

The Jackets’ mascot wasn’t a Union Soldier, however, but a red-eyed, yellow or green-neon-colored, bee-like stinging insect named Stinger, who wore a Union soldier’s uniform. I guess he was a play on the similarities between the words Blue Jacket and Yellowjacket. Wikipedia, which is never wrong about anything ever, says “The Blue Jackets have since distanced themselves from Stinger, removing him entirely from the jerseys beginning in the 2005 season.” What is the reason for this friction between Stinger and The Blue Jackets? I don’t know, but it’s probably for the best that the giant bee-man has had less to do with the team of late, as he didn’t influence the creation of Stan Lee’s Blue Jacket superhero.

Perhaps if Stinger were still part of the team’s logo, Lee would have given us a superhero akin to Marvel’s Yellowjacket, the name Ant-Man/Giant-Man Hank Pym would later adopt. Yes, Blue Jacket might have just been Yellowjacket, only blue.

Instead, this is Blue Jacket:

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Here’s what his “bio” at The Guardian Project website says about him:

The Blue Jacket is entirely encased in a metal suit of armor…For weaponry he has an armada of 1857 Napoleonic Cannons strapped all over his body. The cannons on his wrists, shoulders and thighs fire cannon balls loaded with explosives. At his side hangs the state flag of Ohio, only this is no ordinary flag. He can throw the flag and envelope his opponent, something he calls ‘cocooning’; temporarily freezing them in their tracks.

In design, he looks like more of a robot than a man in armor, a la Iron Man or Steel. If you look at his thighs, they look like pieces of girders, with no real room for a human leg in them. His costume is blue, steel gray and red. His metallic gray face and glowing red eyes call to mind DC superhero Captain Atom, although he wears a Union Soldier cap with the Blue Jacket’s logo atop it. His chest is open, and shows some clockwork-like gears in it, a neat little detail, giving him a sort of steampunk look, appropriate for a 19th century-themed superhero.

His cannons, which are ridiculous in number (I count eight) are all old-school cannon-shaped, and while his bio says he shoots exploding cannonballs, all of the art so far makes them look more like lasers or something.

Over all, it’s a pretty cool design, especially compared with many of his peers in The Guardians, which are…well, “pretty cool” isn’t the first, second, third or forty-first descriptive phrase that comes to mind when looking at some of them.

Although I’m not sure why he has a obelisk-shaped cod-piece, sticking straight up, over his crotch, the NHL logo on its tip. A surprise, ninth cannon, for those situations where eight cannons just aren’t enough, I assume.

One of the genuinely endearing aspects of Lee’s Gauridans is how complex they are; like, they never just have one power, or set of powers, but have something else thrown in. For example not only does The Shark have titanium teeth that can bite through anything, the ability to summon and command sharks, razor water-skis and enhanced senses, but he can also "telepathically interface with computer software."

Overkill? Probably, but overkill can be kind of charming in the world of superheroes, particularly ones from the hyperbolic mind of Stan Lee. It’s as if he thought to himself, “In the ‘60s, I was just giving every superhero one power each, how can I top that! I know, I’ll give these heroes three of four powers each!”

Kind of like if, in addition to his extra-sensory powers, Daredevil could also shoot eye beams and telepathically command his enemies to perform actions against their will, so long as his commands are phrased in the form of a dare.

So no only does The Blue Jacket have all these cannons, but he also has that stupid flag gimmick.

And the official press release from The Blue Jackets themselves goes into much greater detail than the bio at The Guardian Project website, unveiling a mystical power in addition to the old-fashioned, high-tech armor:

A great military mind, the Blue Jacket lives to fight and he has the power of mediumship to communicate with the Union Civil War Generals that he idolizes. In battle, he relies on his heart and intelligence and not on modern technology. The Blue Jacket is entirely cased in a metal suit of armor that houses a devastating array of weaponry. For weaponry, he has an armada of 1857 Napoleon Cannons strapped all over his body. The cannons on his wrists, shoulders and thighs fire cannon balls loaded with explosives. At his side hangs the state flag of Ohio made of astral plasma. He has the ability to cocoon his victim with the flag, giving the illusion the victim has disappeared when in reality, the victim is temporarily suspended in time.

So not only does he have this boss, cannon-filled armor, not only does he have a flag of “astral plasma,” but he also has the power of mediumship to communicate with the Union Civil War Generals he idolizes.

So The Blue Jacket is kind of like Iron Man, if Iron Man was The Haunted Tank.

I’m not going to lie—I completely love The Blue Jacket.

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This is very important: THE BLUE JACKET is essentially IRON MAN, IF IRON MAN'S ARMOR WAS MADE OUT OF THE HAUNTED TANK. And the tank were haunted by more than one Civil War general. And the ghost-generals fought for the right side of the conflict.

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Quick aside: If the type of cannon that comprises Blue Jacket’s armada of cannons sounds awfully specific, there’s actually a reason for it—The Blue Jackets have an 1857 Napoleon cannon housed at Nationwide Arena, which they fire off to celebrate certain good things happening during the course of their games. I think they pretend to fire it off, rather than actually shoot cannon balls, but I don’t know; the only Blue Jackets games I had to attend were pre-cannon acquisition.

They also have lots of t-shirt cannons, but those are of 21st century origin.

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Each Guardian stars in a short little comic book adventure, which you can download and read from the “Battles” page of the Guardian Project website. The Blue Jacket stars in a five-page comic, complete with a cover that recalls the cover designs of the earliest of Marvel’s Ultimate line of books, with a character posing, and a bar of solid color running vertically off to the side of the image, to set it off.

The story is written by Chuck Dixon, which both excited me—Cool, I like Chuck Dixon!—and made me kind of saddened me—Aw, why’s Chuck Dixon writing this instead of comics about Batman being awesome, or the Punisher punishing people?. Tony Chagrin gets a story credit, which is sorta funny, given that “the story” is simply this: Bad guys show up, Blue Jacket shows up, they fight, Blue Jacket wins. An Al Bigley and Bob Almond are credited with pencils and inks respectively, and Stan Lee gets a “Chief Guardian” credit, which is kinda vague, along the lines of his “Grand Poobah” credits in his Boom Studios super-comics.

The first panel is a blurry aerial photo of The Battelle Institute, near OSU’s campus, on King Avenue and near the bank of the Olentangy River. (If you want to go to the trouble, if you download the comic, and then open up the “About Us” section of Battelle’s website, you’ll see that it looks like the comic used the exact same image of Battelle that is on Battelle’s site—four different views of parts of Battelle alternate on that page, and one of them is a non-blurry version of the first panel of The Blue Jacket comic).

A narration box doesn’t quite name Battelle, although the photo and a later drawing make it pretty clear what it is, if you’ve ever heard of and/or seen it: “A local Columbus research facility…The world’s largest, independent research and development organization and a treasure house of classified projects.

There are probably legal reasons explaining why they didn’t name it, but they missed out on the opportunity to entitle the story “The Battle for Battelle.”

Anyway, “world’s largest, independent research and development organization and a treasure house of classified projects” sounds about right.

I’m not so sure about the narration box in the second panel, however: “And also a magnet for spies and international thieves.”

Here the spies and thieves are a uniformed group being called Hammersmith,” and they’re about to battle the police when Blue Jacket shows up.

Fun fact: The Columbus Division of Police uniform consists of a white shirt and white hats tucked into dark pants, not the all-blue outfits drawn in this comic. Also, their patrol cars are all white with read and blue stripes on them, and are not the traditional, generic black-and-white police car design.

Even more fun fact: It took me less than a minute of googling to find a photo gallery on the Columbus Division of Police’s home page with plenty of photo reference of what their uniforms and cars look like.

After the first page, there’s not much city-specific about the story. Blue Jacket talks in a computer-like font, his dialogue bubbles square and outlined by blue borders.

Hammershmith shoots at Blue Jacket, he re-boots by plugging a downed power line into the cogs in his chest (“Yeah…that’s what I’m talkin’ about!”), he shoots Hammersmith into submission, and when they start to run away (“You win this time, Jacket! But we’ll be back and you’ll be sorry”), he throws a giant flag on them.

At no point does he consult with any of the ghosts of any Union Generals, but the Dixon/Lee/Chagrin team only had five pages and 20 panels to work with here—I think a story exploring all of the potential awesomeness inherent in a Columbus, Ohio-based superhero who is kind of like Iron Man and kind of like The Haunted Tank is going to need a lot more room to breathe.

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Fortunately, it sounds like there will be more room to breathe for all of these guys, if the NHL and Stan Lee get their way. From a Washington Square News story:

The animated debut at the All-Star Game is merely the first step in a Guardians media blitz. The Guardians' online presence will include back-stories and animations, social media websites that parse out Guardians information and a game in which fans will battle with their chosen Guardian. Graphic novels, as well as a full-length novel, will be created. A major piece of the puzzle, however, is to "eventually expand into animated TV series, feature films, and console video games," [Guardian Media Entertainment’s chief creative officer Adam] Baratta said.

That all sounds very optimistic, probably naively so in the case of a feature film, but you can’t fault a chief creative officer for being super-ambitious.

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Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any one in Columbus paying any attention to the debut of The Blue Jacket. I visited the websites of Columbus’ two faux-altweeklies, The Other Paper and Columbus Alive, and could find nothing. I was particularly surprised that neither Googling nor poking around The Dispatch’s archives yielded any results, since The Dispatch is basically just a big daily sports page with a hard-right Republican editorial page and a bunch of wire features attached.

Cursory searches of both donewaiting.com and columbusundergroun.com didn’t yield any results either.

In fact, all I found was able to find was the following:

—Three sentences on a Dispatch site, linking a joke another paper made about The Blue Jackets.

—A January 30 post on Fire That Cannon, a Blue Jackets-specific blog

—Dara Naraghi posted a bit about the project on the Ferret Press/Panel blog, and several of Naraghi’s fellow Panel-ists weighed in.

And that’s all I could find and, you know, I’m not sure if the Panel posts even “counts,” given that it is from comic book-people on a comic book dedicated blog—if the goal of the Guardian Project was to get folks talking about/excited about NHL and/or they’re new heroes, than I assume the target audience is people who can’t recognize Neal Adams artwork or tell you which Marvel characters Stan Lee co-created, and with which collaborator.

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One of the regular features on The Ferret Press blog that I dig is their “Character Wednesday,” where they pick a comics character of some sort—Goody Rickles, Black Panther, Ralph Wiggum, Stilt-Man—and they all contribute their drawings of said character.

I think it is Panel’s duty as Ohioans and Columbusites to devote a future installment of Character Wednesday to The Blue Jacket.

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A frequent topic of conversation here on the comics blogosphere is the way black people, women and, really, any “minority,” with “minority” here being defined as “any group other than white, heterosexual males of the sort that defined the superhero genre when it arose in the 1930s-1950s,” are represented and portrayed in comics. One frequent sub-topic being the fact there are so few black superheroes, or so few superheroines, or no good gay superheroes, or non-stereotypical characters of Asian or Latin descent.

It occurred to me while scrolling through the 30 Guardians on The Guardian Project that they are a) all male and b) all white, excepting the ones that have unnatural skin colors (Avalanche is ice-colored, Blue Jacket is steel-colored, etc), are half-animal/half man (Bruin’s a bear man, Wild’s a werewolf type, The Shark has a shark head, etc) or have their faces and bodies completely encased in a skin-color-hiding costume.

And isn’t it kind of weird that there are clearly more bear-men and shark-men on The Guardians then there are black dudes?

Now, this isn’t meant to be a rant about race, and I’m not accusing The Guardian Project of anything malicious here; I’m just offering an observation.

The lack of ladies on the team could easily be explained away by the fact that these are heroes based on various National Hockey League teams, and there are no women on any of the NHL teams.

I’m not sure what the racial make-up of the NHL is, but it’s been my understanding that professional hockey—and hockey in general—is a “whiter” sport than many other sports.

So maybe that was a consideration…?

But, honestly, I doubt it. I think it was more a matter of just not thinking about race at all when creating the characters, and perhaps the subconscious default state of the superhero in the minds of the creators were white dudes. And bear- and eagle- and shark-dudes.

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I have a question about The Guardians: What is their relationship to the hockey teams they take their names and logos from within the context of the fictive setting they inhabit?

That is, in the Columbus that appears in that little Blue Jacket comic, is there even an NHL hockey team called The Blue Jackets? Because if so, and that Columbus is home to both an NHL hockey team called The Blue Jackets and a superhero who calls himself The Blue Jacket and wears the Blue Jackets’ logo on his head (not to mention an NHL logo on his crotch), then he would either have to be working with the NHL and Blue Jackets in some capacity, or else he would be violating their copyrights and trademarks and would likely be at odds with the team whose name and icon he bears, right?

And what are the chances that 30 cities in this fictional North America would all have superheroes in that exact same situation, in relation to professional sports teams in the same cities?

Unless there is no coincidence involved, and the back-story involves the NHL creating, licensing and employing all of these superheroes to fight crime and evil in their 30 host cities, but if that’s the case then the whole thing gets kind of disturbingly meta, doesn’t it?

(you celebrate Super Bowl Sunday your way, I'll celebrate it my way)

Why doesn't Superman like football?

It's pretty much the only sport he hasn't played with his pals Batman and Robin. I thought Superman liked all sports.He obviously loves baseball. He likes basketball......and tennis......track and field......surfing......swimming......skating......skiing......rock-climbing......fishing......gladiatoiral combat......even synchronized punching.

But he never tosses the old pigskin around with his pals on the covers of World's Finest.

Could it be that Superman doesn't like to play football because he sucks at it?After all, despite all of his superpowers, he can't even sack The Phantom Quarterback......And he's been trying to do so for decades now.

Marvel Vs. DC, Round 2,346,789

This is the cover of Lockjaw & The Pet Avengers Unleashed, a trade paperback collecting a four-issue miniseries of the same name from earlier this year, as well as a one-shot featuring the characters: This is the cover of Batman: Joker's Asylum Vol. 2, which collects five "Joker's Asylum II" branded one-shots from earlier this year: The first book is 120 papges, while the second one is 128 pages.

Both books cost $14.99.

This is a crappy cell-phone picture of the two books stacked atop one another:The DC Comics-published Joker's Asylum is about 6 and 3/4's of an inch wide, and 10 inches high. Pet Avengers is about 5 and 3/4's of an inch wide, and just under 9 inches high.

So same cost, almost the same length, but much smaller pages on the Marvel book.

I probably wouldn't have even noticed that the two were priced identically despite their differing sizes if I hadn't received both of them together in a shipment of graphic novels form a popular online shipper of graphic novels (I'm sorry brick-and-mortar comics shops! I'd prefer to buy graphic novels from you, but the closest one of you is 45 minutes away, and gas is so expensive!)

The smaller size of the Pet Avengers book didn't really bug me, even though Ig Guara's beautiful art work would have been better served by a comic book-sized collection (The artwork was, of course, produced for a standard sized comic book, so when it came time to publish this collection, it had to be shrunk somewhat. It looks and reads just fine, but the size just isn't the size it was made to be in—kinda like watching a DVD of a film on your television set instead of watching it in the theater. No matter how nice a TV you have, you're still aware that it's not the ideal way of watching the film.

And, perhaps more importantly, I enjoyed it and was entertained by the book; if it wasn't any good, I suppose the fact that it's not much of a value would have proved more irritating to me as a reader and consumer of a Marvel product. Like, it would have added a perceived insult to my perceived injury.

Anyway, just thought that made for a strange contrast. For a while now DC and smaller publishers have been able to sell 22-page comics with ten pages of ads (or less!) to readers for $2.99, while Marvel comics of the same length have cost a whole extra dollar more, for reasons that don't really make any sense from the consumer's perspective.

This is another example of a Marvel comic costing more than a DC comic for reasons that are unclear. Well, in this example the cost is the same, but the size of the product you get for that price is fairly dramatically different.

Not comics: So I just saw the movie The Flock that isn't based on the novel about killer prehistoric birds...

In the summer of 2009, I wrote at some length about the 2006 prose novel The Flock, in which writer James Robert Smith imagined a highly-evolved, relic population of giant, carnivorous ground-birds coming into contact with human beings for the first time in modern Florida.

At the time, the book had just been optioned to be made into a film, and I mentioned that there was already a film entitled The Flock, a 2007 drama by director Wai-keung Lau. During my last trip to the library, I saw a DVD for this The Flock on the just-returned shelf, so I picked it up to watch while drawing one night.

Sadly, it is 100% completely devoid of killer birds. In fact, I don't think there's a single bird in the entire movie. There are a couple of killers in it, though.

It's about a completely obsessed (to the point of being pretty much insane)registrant administrator of the Department of Public Safety, whose job it is to keep tabs on registered sex offenders (the title refers to the flock of registrants he tends). Forced into early retirement, he is partnered with his replacement for a while, in order to train her. Eventually, they stumble onto a case of a missing girl, and he's pretty much the only one who can solve it, but no one wants his help since he's cried wolf so many times. And is kind of insane.

It's basically a bit like an episode of Law and Order: SVU with higher production values, more disturbing imagery and scarier villains.

It stars Richard Gere and Claire Danes. I can watch pretty much anything with the latter in it, as I love looking at Claire Danes and the sound of her voice, and since my Summer of The Mothman, I've been particularly interested in Richard Gere movies. Like, I sometimes half-pretend in my head that he's John Keel when I see him now, so as I was watching this I imagined Claire Danes and John Keel teaming up to save a missing girl from scary corpse-porn pornographers/serial rapists/serial killers (Imagining that Gere is Keel can have interestingly transformative effects on a film; it certainly made Hachiko: A Dog's Tale a different viewing experience than it otherwise would have been, and I'm kinda curious to rewatch Pretty Woman now...).

KaDee Strickland plays one of the registrants, and she's scary as hell—particularly in the climactic scene. Laura Palmer's dad Ray Wise plays Richard Gere's boss, and Avril Lavigne plays an abused prostitute with a very chipped tooth.

But, again, no killer birds.

Meanwhile, at Blog@Newsarama...

I have a kinda sorta but not really review of Mermin #4 and #5, which concludes a designated "Part 1" of Joey Weiser's series of mini-comics, up at Blog@Newsarama. I labeled it a recommendation, since it's more of that than an actual review. Anyway, since I reviewed the rest of the series here on EDILW (the first two issues in the second part of this post, the third issues in the middle of this post), I figured I should link to it here, for completeness' sake.

Groundhog Day comes but once a year...

Monday night I turned to Google Image to help me find some photo reference of a groundhog emerging from his hole to see (or not see) his shadow, and I came across this cartoon from last year, by Rob Rogers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.It’s a really nice drawing of a groundhog completely freaking out, but it was strange to see a political cartoon from that long ago, divorced from the news of the day by almost a year, and realize it didn’t really make all that much sense any more…at least, not as much sense as it would probably have made when it was originally drawn and published. I guess President Obama proposed a pretty large budget last February…?

Another 2010 Groundhog Day cartoon I found mentioned a Toyota being unable to stop, which was still a big news story last year around this time.

As holidays go, Groundhog Day is a pretty fascinating one to watch America’s political cartoonists play with, as it features a set of fairly universal iconography that can easily be applied to pretty much any topic, but unlike say, Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving, the iconography is extremely limited: Groundhog, emerging from hole, shadow, seeing or not seeing it, six more weeks of winter, or not. Those are the puzzle pieces cartoonists have to rearrange, remix, or swap out for something.

Let’s head on over to Daryl Cagle’s Political Cartoonists Index which, of course, has a dedicated Groundhog Day gallery, and see what cartoonists came up with this year. Cagle’s own cartoon is…weird. It features President Obama either dressed up in an adorable little groundhog suit, or as some sort of mutant human/groundhog hybrid, emerging from a hole. Given the shortness of his arms, I’m assuming it’s the latter. Why is Obama a groundhog? I don’t know. Watching the ritual is a man with an elephant’s head. That’s probably the symbol of the Republican party, expressing his disbelief in the groundhog day superstition, but he looks so strange there, interacting groundhog with a man’s face, instead of a man with a donkey’s face. Henry Payne of The Detroit News similarly features Obama as the groundhog, but rather than groundhogizing the president, Payne simply has President Obama emerging from a hole in the ground, which struck me as much funnier, simply because of the absurd incongruity of the president emerging from a hole n the ground. (The mailbox seems kind of like unnecessary overkill, cluttering the message though; are any of Payne’s readers likely to not recognize who that man is supposed to be, or that he’s behaving in a groundhog like fashion? By naming him “Obama Hog,” it kind of raises questions about whether that is the president or, just some guy who looks like him and has his last name for his first name).

Bob Englehart of The Hartford Courant provides another cartoon inserting President Obama into the Groundhog Day ritual, but here he’s one of the top-hatted Inner Circle guys who pulls the groundhog out of the ground, rather than as the groundhog himself.This groundhog isn’t Punxsutawney Phil, but is instead named Health Care Reform, an unusual name for a groundhog, which he has apparently had branded across his torso. Given the torture he must have endured, perhaps the arrow that claimed his life in this image came as a relief…?

No, “Health Care Reform” probably isn’t his name; it’s what he’s supposed to symbolize in this cartoon, via the proud, lazy tradition of straight-up labeling something as something else in a political cartoon. Why is Health Care Reform being shot with an arrow, every time the president holds it aloft? I don’t know; the president’s health care reform hasn’t yet been shot down in a meaningful way. So far, House Republican’s passed a purely symbolic We Sure Don’t Like This measure, and a few federal judges in lower courts ruled it unconstitutional, but it will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to make that call.

Of course, the arrow itself isn’t labeled, so we have no way of telling who it is that keeps shooting Health Care Reform to death.

Whoever it was, it wasn’t Sarah Palin.As we can see in Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoonist Mike Luckovich’s cartoon, she doesn’t use a bow or crossbow, but a high-powered rifle.

Englehart isn’t the only cartoonist to prominently feature a dead groundhog this year.

John Cole draws one face down in the snow, its little legs sticking straight up in rigormortis, with a guy in a top hat asking another guy in a top hat, “What does it mean if he succumbs to hypothermia?”

Bill Schorr also drew a frozen-to-death Groundhog in this repeat from last year:I like this one a bit more, as the groundhog may have frozen to death, but he froze to death in a funny way, and his death seems easily reversible: Just thaw him out, and he’s good to go.

Jeff Darcy of The Plain-Dealer has a groundhog stuffed and mounted above some guy’s mantle:For some reason, this dude decided to not only mount the head as a trophy, as is usually the case with the taxidermied corpses hunters display in this manner, but he includes the forelegs as well, making it look like the groundhog died while trying to wiggle its way through a too-small hole in the man’s wall.

The weapon the fellow in the Darcy cartoon used was a shovel which, incidentally, is what the gentleman in Brian Duffy’s cartoon plans to brain the groundhog with: Are these before and after images of the same drama?

And if you find yourself wondering what happened to the rest of the groundhog’s body after the shovel guy cut off its head and forepaws to mount on his wall, it was, of course, roasted and eaten by hobos:Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle has the groundhog whispering to the Inner Circle that global warming is a crock:The Inner Circle top hats are obviously pretty freaked out about this; is it the message, or simply the fact that the groundhog is speaking to them? (This groundhog has something in common with Spider-Man).

My personal favorite of this year’s crop of groundhog cartoons is Larry Wright’s, which seems to feature a pissed off groundhog, with his few groundhog possessions tightly packed into two tiny groundhog-sized suitcases, moving out of his hole in the ground, presumably because it’s been foreclosed upon, or he can no longer afford payments to his, um, hole in the ground: Now that’s a true sign of a terrible housing market and worse economy—when even a hole in the ground is too expensive. Where is the groundhog moving too? Presumably somewhere not as nice, but what’s sort of living space is less nice than a hole in the ground?

Finally, there’s this one from Randy Bish of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which I believe may also be a repeat, as it looks very familiar:It raises a lot of questions, like, why are those top hats and the groundhog looking at a blank, black monitor screen? What is the dear’s computer plugged into? And who wouldn’t want to see see deer replaced with robot deer during hunting season? Wouldn’t hunting robot deer be sort of awesome? Hell, I’m a vegetarian and former member of PETA, and I’d take up hunting if I could shoot robots.

Actually, I was most curious about this hole robot groundhog thing. Is it for real? It is! Awesome.

Six more weeks of evil lurking in the hearts of men...?

(From this afternoon's 'Twas the Night Before Wednesday... over on Blog@, which you can go read if you like)

The Amazing...Global Warming Denier?

Come on Pete, I thought you were a scientist, man. Were you really in the middle of confessing your disbelief in the gradual increase in the temperature of the earth's air and oceans over a sustained period of time, resulting in unpredictable weather phenomena, based simply on the fact that snow is cold rather than warm? I'm so disappointed in you right now.



(Detail from a panel in Marvel's Free Comic Book Day 2009 The Avengers, scripted by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Jim Cheung and Mark Morales)