Abhay: THE SIXTH GUN

THE SIXTH GUN-- BOOK I: COLD, DEAD FINGERS By Cullen Bunn, Brian Hurtt, Bill Crabtree, James Lucas Jones, Charlie Chiu, and Keith Wood.

"Why must pronouncements and judgements ... be so sweeping and extreme, not to mention callous and cruel? Why can't our voiced opinions be more measured, tempered, considered?"

-- Doug Moench, May 1984, COMICS INTERVIEW #11

THE SIXTH GUN is a supernatural Western, concerning six magical revolvers, and some cowboys & cowgirls who fight over them. If you're in the market for a very clever Saturday Morning cartoon, oh, it's a pleasant enough comic. Maybe not quite as good as some of Dark Horse's BPRD books, but I think they share some the same "comfort food" qualities and weaknesses, if that helps you.

(1) Straight-forward characters fighting over-the-top cartoon monsters. The heroic characters in THE SIXTH GUN are just stock characters for the duration of the first trade-- (1) anti-hero motivated by treasure, (2) pretty farm girl, (3) old coot. Boilerplate. If the next volume has a fucking retired gunfighter in it somewhere, I just might spit. There's not a lot of meat on the bone to the hero characters in the first trade-- maybe that gets better in the issues that have come out since; you can let me know. The "stars" of the comic are the bad guys, the monsters, the ghouls. They're a reasonably gnarly bunch-- the villains definitely received the lion's share of the book's creativity (which is maybe as it should be, though).

(2) Deliberate, "cinematic" pacing. The story moves along quickly enough, but the creators know how to slow things down at the right moments-- there's a nice build to a dragon/gryphon/whatever attack in the middle, in particular. On the other hand, THE SIXTH GUN has a lousy narrator-- it's not one of the elements to the book's credit, I don't think. One of the major character turns near the end-- the anti-hero's decision that gosh darn it all, it's time to behave heroically..? That gets handled by the narrator telling you it's happening-- the story itself hadn't really pulled that part off on its own. "Nevermind about the only and defining character trait of the hero." It's not a lot better than that. I like 3rd-person narrators, generally, but I just think they leaned a little too hard on it near the end...

(3) Traditional comic art, without a noticable influence from manga, art-comics or photo-tracing. Hurtt seems more influenced by Jeff Smith than anything "modern." Keep an eye out for Hurtt's sound effects, especially. (A lot of horses in this comic, though-- I'm nothing resembling an expert, but I'd have to figure drawing a comic with a lot of horses in it would be a headache some mornings. I mean, have you ever actually taken a good, long look at a horse? They're like giant muscular dogs from Mars-- they're just some weird-looking son bitches. Aliens in comic books usually don't even look so weird. Hurtt draws 'em swell enough, though.)

And (4) a larger fantasy universe setting with mysterious nooks & crannies that the reader is invited to explore.  THE SIXTH GUN is throwing imagery around from the start, within its first two pages-- references to Old West magical relics, throw-away ideas, Weird Legends, the sort of thing delivered in front of a candle and a skull in a Mignola comic. Smart move; probably bought no small amount of credit with readers. THE SIXTH GUN manages enough eyeball kicks in its first half, that I didn't put the book away when the last half of the book avoided any cool ideas and instead descended into some dreary, generic zombie battle. Boy, if you could have seen my face when the fucking zombies show up-- it was like watching air go out of a balloon.

I figure a considerable number of comics have aimed at those four particular virtues over the years. There's nothing intrinsic to the book that's especially noteworthy, no hard corners or inexplciable quirks that I could pick up on anyways. But there's nothing intrinsically noteworthy about a peanut butter & jelly sandwich or a glass of lemonade, either.   THE SIXTH GUN is just... pleasant. Nice. Unchallenging. Comfy. With room for growth, improvement, definitely, but that's not such a bad thing-- that can be fun to watch, too. I don't know that I'm enthusiastic about it, exactly-- look, I'm probably just not fan enough of Weird Westerns to get especially enthusiastic about one, however well done. But I'm at least curious to see if they can improve in later volumes, how they build out their world, if they can get a little weirder, darker, scarier without losing any of its underlying appeal.

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"At Oni, we really feel like we’re pushing the real mainstream on the comics populace. Oni’s output would include the romantic comedy that would gross $30 million on an opening weekend. It would be the cult teen flick like Napoleon Dynamite that just plays forever and has repeat viewing after repeat viewing."

-- From "Oni and the Real Mainstream," October 4, 2004.

But let's take a step back, and let's try to put this comic into context.

THE SIXTH GUN is a comic book published by Oni Press. Oni Press is a comic publisher founded in 1997, and since 2003, it's been the sister company to Closed on Mondays, a production company that Oni describes as "created specifically to help Oni Press creators and titles find life in mediums outside of comics" which "works closely with Oni creators and staff members to find [appropriate] creative partners." Like other similarly situated comic companies, Oni refers to their comics as "creator-owned" -- though when comic publishers have sister companies that work closely with creators, some people might find it a little fuzzier what creator-owned means exactly-- or at least, it's my limited understanding that reasonable minds might differ on that point. All the crowing and chest-puffing of this past year aside, the label "creator owned" on a comic seems sort of like the label "organic" on a box of cookiess-- it's not exactly clear to me what that means, and I don't know if it's a good idea for me to always assume what's being sold is healthy just based on that label.

But so: various announcements over the years. Wheeling. Dealing. For example, in June 2008, Oni Press announced a webcomic in collaboration with OZ creator Tom Fontana called "Men With Guns: Assassin," a "cat-and-mouse struggle between a hired killer and the cop who is out to get him—a conflict that is complicated by a Romeo and Juliet affair between their children." According to articles, that started out as a TV script (surprise!) before being "reimagined," though unfortunately it appears that no one could re-imagine a halfway decent fucking premise. Yaddah yaddah. Deals with CBS. Deals with Dreamworks. So on; so forth.

Skip ahead to May 2010, and Oni launches THE SIXTH GUN on Free Comic Book Day. On the precipice of the release of the film version of the beloved SCOTT PILGRIM series (and let me quickly add, beloved by, among others, me). Months after the release of THE SIXTH GUN, a billboard image of SCOTT PILGRIM VERSUS THE WORD would be splashed against the sides of a hotel at San Diego Comic Con-- "nerd culture" arguably at its zenith. Access Hollywood reports "SCOTT PILGRIM CREATES COMIC-CON PANDEMONIUM." Billy Bush might have even said those exact words to himself or one of his loved ones-- and he's probably going to be President someday.

Months after that, SCOTT PILGRIM VERSUS THE WORLD would be one of the most spectacular box office bombs of 2010.

It is the second bomb based upon an Oni Press comic, after 2009's WHITEOUT,

Would a film version of THE SIXTH GUN turn the tide on this deplorable trend? Well. One imagines there might be those in Tinsel Town reluctant to invest in what might be perceived, by lay persons, to be a "re-imagination" of 2010's multiple-Razzie nominee JONAH HEX, the most recent and most notable Weird Western movie, which also made its way onto various Biggest Bombs of 2010 lists...

And as we sit here today in 2011, Hollywood is enjoying the fruits of its latest attempt to cater to San Diego Comic Con crowds, Zach Snyder's SUCKERPUNCH. Here's a sample Comic Con panel report on advance footage of SUCKER PUNCH from 2010: "Unbelievably fast-aced [sic] and sleek and gritty. ... If you like women kicking ass, this film has plenty of it. Amazingly imaginative and creative. Reminds me of a video game on steroids."

Here's the New York Times: "There is nothing here to enjoy." Based on Cinemascore grades and box office numbers, audiences seem to agree.

When asked, there's a certain type of comic creator who likes to answer that comics are the "cheapest form of R&D there is," or some other small-minded variation thereof.  And above, we have the results of the cheapest form of R&D in action. The fanboy audience can now help to isolate the DNA of failure with almost unerring accuracy. The boys in the lab can make movies no one wants to see lickety-split thanks to nerd R&D. Next up for Science: making cats ugly, decreasing the power of orgasms, and frowning at ice cream. Thanks to San Diego Comic Con, Hollywood can now research what a limited number of people who don't matter in any great scheme of things, what they happen to like better than ever. Congratulations, Einsteins!

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"It's so hard because-- here's the thing, I hope I'm completely wrong. I keep hearing-- I check Box Office Mojo, and I read IMDB and I read the trades and stuff like that. Just to get an idea of, like-- can you at least tell me what the market is looking for? And most of the time, it's 'We don't know-- We don't know-- We don't know.' But they keep throwing around this word niche ... and I'm hearing it more and more. And ever since Scott Pilgrim vs the World, i hear this more and more: 'That's niche.' Which [they suggest] is a bad thing, that Niche movies don't work. Aimed at a specific group of people that love this stuff to death. They want something that's going to be across the board-- get that small group, get your mom and dad, and it just made me go, you and I, our taste, the stuff that we love, we are completely in the minority."

-- Rob Schrab, from Episode 41 of Steve Agee's UHHH WHAT podcast.

But let's take another step back and try to put the context of this comic into context.

Let's make a map.

Let's make a map of the "mainstream"-- not the mainstream of the present day yet; let's start instead pre-internet. How about 1986? Picked out of a hat-- 1986.

1) Let's start with the burning white-hot center-- culture which everyone in the culture you would expect to know.

That white dot was well-populated in 1986. Michael Jackson lived there; Bruce Springsteen lived there; Harrison Ford, Madonna, Bill Cosby.  For about two weeks, the band Timbuk 3.  Fact.

2) Let's add movies in blue-- a nice large circle for Hollywood and its blockbusters. Let's add some a smaller circle for foreign films, and an exceedingly tiny dot for independent films-- SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE was still three years away at that point. Let's also add television in yellow-- with a tiny dot for cable. This is 1986, and for people not alive in that year, in 1986, not everyone had cable. If you think that's mind-blowing, it's only because you don't know/remember what remote controls for cable television looked like back then.

3) And add in music and books, in green and purple respectively and that should do it. Music will need a small cluster-- a big circle for popular music, but then country, jazz, R&B, and classical. Books-- we just need one for books and one for magazines, I figure. Oh, let's add a tiny dot in grey for videogames-- I think Atari was around by then-- something needs to reflect the nascent gaming culture. And let's add in comics-- let's put that out past books and magazines.

Okay. So there's a rough map of "mainstream culture" in 1986.

Fast-forward to 2011, present day. How do we redraw the map?

1) For movies, we should increase the circle for independent film; probably decrease the circle for foreign films. Let's add a dot for documentary films-- those seem to have hit more often lately. And we have to add a dot for the home market-- 1986, the home video VHS market was around by then, but it was not like it is now. You'd have to go to some musty Mom & Pop shop, and if they didn't carry the movie you wanted to see-- you weren't seeing it. Now, we have DVDs, Netflix on demand, Hulu on demand, On Demand on demand. Also: we should probably shrink the size of current blockbusters-- you know, TRANSFORMERS 2 was a blockbuster, financially, but it's actual place in people's lives is ... what, exactly?

2) For television, we should drastically increase the size of the cable circle, maybe add a smaller circle out for pay cable which has original programming now in a way that it didn't in 1986. Again, we have to shrink the size of the television dot to reflect decreased ratings in network programming.

3) Music-- we would have to completely disintegrate music into a mist. Pop music isn't as popular anymore. According to Wikipedia numbers, Lady Gaga's album only sold about 4-5 million copies; THRILLER, by comparison, sold 65-110 million copies; even MC Hammer's 1990 album PLEASE HAMMER DON'T HURT EM sold 18 million copies. On the other hand, when ARCADE FIRE won the Grammy for Best Album this year, the internet got filled with shrieks of "Who are ARCADE FIRE?" Add in the rise of a million different sub-genres-- do you like country music? Or do you like Alternative Country, Honkie Tonk Country, Americana, Country-Rock, Pop-Country, Western swing, Texas Country, Red Dirt music, Southern-Rock, Nashville Sound, or Rockabilly?

4) Books and magazines are easy-- those, we just have to shrink.

5) Games we increase in size, but even there, you have to reflect the different platforms, indie games, casual games, MMORPGS.

6) We'd need to add a dot for internet video. If someone told me they'd never seen an episode of TWO AND A HALF MEN, I'd think nothing of it-- I'd congratulate them-- but if someone my age told me they'd never seen the Star Wars Kid-- that would be a little odd to me. One instantiation of the Youtube version of the Star Wars Kid has been seen about 21 million times, alone.

7) And comics-- let's decrease in size to reflect decreases in sales, but let's add in a dot for literary comics. And let's add a tiny, tiny dot for webcomics. The Penny Arcade dot, basically (which is being generous).

8) Is that everything? Nope-- almost forgot the very activity you and I are engaged in right this second. We've forgotten that each of those dots has in its orbit a cluster of podcasts, blogospheres, web-videos, tumblr accounts, facebook fan-groups, and twits. We'd need to add a fog around each and every dot to represent that.

So taking all that into consideration, here's what our culture looks like in 2011:

And here's what my ridiculous and pointless new map looks like:

2011 looks like someone vomited pepto bismol on top of a bag of skittles. Feels that way too some days, am I right or am I right? Or am I right? What lives in that white dot anymore...? For about a week, Charlie Sheen.  For thirty glorious minutes in 2004, Keenan Ivory Wayan's WHITE CHICKS.

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"You never know what's in the cards. I'm really doing my best not to think about it too much. I became obsessed with the possibilities for a while, and it doesn't do anyone any good as a creator. My best bet, I decided, was to concentrate on making the best comic book I can and be pleasantly surprised if any of the Hollywood stuff comes together."

-- THE SIXTH GUN writer Cullen Bunn.

We don't know what impact Oni's efforts to "find creative partners" may (or may not) have had on THE SIXTH GUN's contents, publication or reception by its comic audience, and can only speculate as to what its reception would be outside of the comic audience. Oni pursued a strategy of focusing on genre-but-not-superhero-genre books in the hopes of growing the comics audience beyond superhero fans. In the case of the SCOTT PILGRIM book series, that strategy may have proven extremely successful, notwithstanding any disappointment to the box office returns of the movie version. That strategy seems laudable, what's more.

So, what in pluperfect hell does any of this b.s. have to do with THE SIXTH GUN???

Well but okay-- my little map of 2011. Where am I on that map? What is my relationship to all those blurs? I still watch television and movies, sure. Though-- for television, mostly cable television. But besides that, maybe in equal amount, maybe in an increasingly greater amount, comedy podcasts-- the WTF podcast is two hours of out every week for me, say, and that's not the only one I listen to. More movies from Netflix Instant Watch than from a theater, certainly. Web video-- huge chunk of my time. Even comics-- my comic time is split up now between traditional paper comics, webcomics, reading essays about comics, that Oh Wait podcast. Music, I learn about from blogs, and listen to almost exclusively from youtube-- and as is the case elsewhere, I chase fleeting whim. About four months ago, I spent a week listening exclusively to calypso music-- I was just in one of those places in my life where I really needed to hear songs about rum and imperialism, you guys. And a huge chunk of time following the lives of arbitrarily-selected strangers on tumblr, which has really become my entertainment of choice more than anything else.

If you were to be given my media consumption, you would likely rebel because it is becoming, with every day, increasingly tailored to my ever more narrow interests.

You may like movies but you probably prefer snuff movies to whatever the hell it is I watch on Netflix. You may not have my interest in comedy podcasts, or may have that interest but for entirely different podcasts than the ones I listen to. You probably listen exclusively to snuff podcasts. The Sound of Young America Being Snuffed. You may not want to know what happens in the lives of random 20-something girls with tumblr accounts as eagerly as I do... or you may follow the lives of random 20-something girls but an entirely different group of them! Let that blow your mind. Either way, I think those ladies should be afraid because you will probably someday snuff them.

So, now more than ever it's easier to go not only into niches, but, like, hyper-niches. Except: well, there's Pixar right? But I know with Pixar even, one of the most common compliments I hear for their work is "anyone can like it." Which-- isn't that a weird thing to compliment? It seems like it should be, at least if you grew up with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, ROMANCING THE STONE, BACK TO THE FUTURE,  movies that I don't think were age-specific...?

How does all of the above affect how any of us consume something like THE SIXTH GUN? Does it?

When it's a specific comic, but not specific to my peculiar set of tastes-- (e.g. when it's operating within the four-corners of the Weird Western genre, and I'm not a Weird Western fan), does that make me less excited about it than I would have been before this fragmentation? Or when it's trying to be a big crowdpleaser, with massive zombie battles and dull, pretty-boy heroes-- is that somehow more offensive to me now than before, now that I'm ever more effectively a crowd of one? And to what extent am I limited in my ability to communicate anything meaningful about THE SIXTH GUN's virtues and/or demerits in light of that? Or does what I was saying about Pixar above apply equally to THE SIXTH GUN? Am I actually more enthusiastic about THE SIXTH GUN than I would otherwise be because I do sort of admire how THE SIXTH GUN seems like it could appeal to kids of "All Ages?" Or am I unaffected by any of this at all, and when I sit down with THE SIXTH GUN, it's just me and the comic, fuck the world...?

I'm not sure what the answer to any of these are because I'm not sure how much I'm lying to myself fundamentally about what it is that I want. There are things I might say that I want from future volumes of THE SIXTH GUN-- for it to be weirder, MUCH scarier, a little sexier, maybe a little bit more ... about something? I might say those things, I might think that I want this comic to be more specific to my tastes, to make me feel less interchangeable by virtue of the fact I'm consuming something less interchangeable. But if it did those things, if it did every single one of those things, I have to acknowledge that it would probably be at the expense of being a "crowdpleaser," at being universal, and maybe what I actually want is that instead, to feel connected to some great mass audience, more connected to my fellow man and/or lady. Which one of my neurotic and sad needs will win? Oh, the suspense of it all.

Probably, however, there's a third answer. And probably it's that I want things to be tailored to my narrow tastes-- but that I want the rest of you to share my narrow tastes identically.

...But-- but SHIT, why wouldn't you want that anyways? I ask you!

Comedy podcasts and videos!

Strangers on Tumblr!

Calypso Music!

Building forts!

Snuff movies!

Erotic games of cat & mouse!

How great does sharing my narrow tastes identically sound? Sounds great to me! Try to disagree if you want, with your Oni comics and your misery, but logic, reason and deduction tells me one of us is walking away with a trophy, and that's probably going to be me.

Stealing trophies!

It's your move.

Events in mah brain!

It is April, and we're starting this year's cycle of event storytelling. I'm fairly unconvinced this is what the audience actually and truly wants -- at best I tend to think that the market supports them because its been sooooo long since we sold comics purely on the strength of the comics that we've forgotten anything BUT events, but I guess we'll see what shakes out.  

Clearly the market is reeling right now -- January and February were abysmal, and March not really that much better -- and there's a sense to me, at least, that this year's are "make or break" for the Marvel and DC universes in some fashion or another.

Not like comics will go away, of course, my big happy thought from WonderCon was that Larry Marder is still doing Beanworld, and getting paid to do so, and as long as THAT still happens, comics are just fine, thanks very much!

But that's something more to develop in a TILTING (which, huh, I should get to writing, shouldn't I?) -- this is to talk about the comics themselves.

FEAR ITSELF #1: In many many many ways, I think that the success of failure of an event can often be determined by looking at its "log line" or "elevator pitch" -- the one sentence summation of what the book is about. I'm not all that terrific at perfectly encapsulating them, for example I'm sure someone can come up with something more precise or sexy for CIVIL WAR than "Superheroes fight among themselves over liberty versus security", but that was pretty much what I used in '06, and it worked a charm, selling a bucketload of comics for me.

In the same way, DC's biggest recent hit, BLACKEST NIGHT, can be reduced to "Dead superheroes come back from the grave as murderous zombies" -- that the kind of thing people often say "Wow, cool!" to. The CLEARER the pitch, the more direct and large the sales.

FEAR ITSELF is a weird "event" comic -- I'll say straight up that I liked it pretty well. I have problems with bits of it (when don't I?): I thought the Avengers pro-Stark shilling was a bit.... strange, given the libertarian nature of some of the characters; I thought that the interactions between Thor and Odin were kind of heavy-handed; and I thought the lettering was oddly large, but all in all I liked the issue as I was reading it, and I'll even skip to the chase and say I thought it was pretty GOOD.

But I still can't log line it! Even after reading it! That's not a great situation.

I mean, I could say "An older pantheon of gods returns to kick the Asgardian's asses", I guess? But I don't think that's all there is to it, and, anyway, that sounds way too insider baseball for fan-off-the-street. Very very few people ACTUALLY care about "the Asgardians" as an abstract group, we have decades of sales information to clearly show that. And, clearly, Marvel is struggling with it as well, because THEY'VE yet to log line it themselves -- their marketing is all over the map, and not defining things in terms of story really. Even the title doesn't suggest what the story might be about.

Our first week sales were "fine" -- just a smidge above AVENGERS... but I have a hard time considering an event book a hit unless it does, say, twice, three times that. That's kind of the problem with Direct Market 2011 in a nutshell, in fact -- the bottom- and middle- sellers are no worse than flat, and even substantially up in a lot of cases, but the top-selling books have cratered to less than half of what they were 2-3 years ago. That's an ugly prospect.

I'm cool with the stock I have on hand -- worst case we'll sell out sometime right around the last issue shipping, but I *want* to have to go back for more, say, before issue #3 arrives in store.

Anyway, log-lines, yeah. That's the problem here. The comic is pretty GOOD, but I can't find the words to SELL it.

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #622: Kieron Gillen's first issue, and also the first crossover tie-in to FEAR ITSELF, and I really REALLY liked it.  If you had said "Neil Gaiman wrote this" I might have believed you. Gillen's always been strong on plotting, but this brings his prose up to a new level, and I'm anxious to see how long he can sustain this questing story with Loki as a lead. I hope it's a real long time.  VERY GOOD.

FLASH #10: This is the second "prelude" issue to the upcoming Big DC event FLASHPOINT, and every problem I have with FEAR ITSELF is magnified widely for FLASHPOINT -- what the hell is it about? Well, I've figured out that the best thing to say is maybe "It's 'Age of Apocalypse' for the DC Universe", but if you don't already read comics (and lots of them), then I have to explain what AoA is, right? I guess you could also say "It's an 'Elseworlds' as an event", but same problem, right?

Comics ABOUT comics are kind of a hard sell.

The problem is compounded by the fact that FLASH has really been a dull book, to date. I *still* don't know what compelling narrative reason there was to bringing Saint Barry back in the first place, and I *like* DC's Silver Age.

What I *did* like about this issue was the *idea* of "Hot Pursuit" as being from Earth-47 (or whatever), and I'm intrigued about the rest of the heroes on what could potentially be a "no non-tech superpowers" world, but since I'm sort of expecting HP to *be* the bad-guy here, I suspect that is going to go nowhere? I also hope very very much I'm wrong, because isn't that more or less the plot of the first FLASH arc anyway?

Bottom line: There's nothing here that interests me, or, more importantly, creates more interest for FLASHPOINT, and a lot of what DC is doing this year would seem to depend on one or the other of those conditions being met? FLASH #10 was essentially EH.

BRIGHTEST DAY #23: I know that there's one more to go, and I should probably hold off until then just to see if they tie the loose ends well.... but I can't see how they can?

I guess I'm just flabbergasted that the POINT of an entire year of a series, not to mention the end of BLACKEST NIGHT seems to have been to return Swamp Thing to the DCU universe? Really? Realllllllly?

Then there's the "And what the FUCK did that have to do with a WHITE LANTERN?!?!" I mean the whole "lantern" concept seems sort of inherently more than about parochial Terran concerns, no? Or how about how this ties in with some of the other returnees most specifically Max Lord? Or how about, how do you return the Terran Earth elemental with a cat from Mars, and another one from frickin' thanagar?

Plus, Alec Holland's body? Meatless.

Plus plus, how are you returning SWAMP Thing to what's clearly meant to be a Northwestern city (like Portland or Seattle)? Meh.

I also think the cosmology, as already established in the DCU is kind of off -- Firestorm ALREADY was the Fire Elemental, and there was mm, whatsname, Niaid is it? as the Water one. I mean, those are DC comics, not Vertigo ones!

I don't know.

But, at the end of the day, I can't believe all that was leading to the return of Swamp Thing, because I'm a retailer and I know that no Swamp Thing comic NOT written by Alan Moore is going to be commercially successful within a year. So why waste all of the effort to reintroducing what, at very very very best will be a supporting character?

I thought this was pretty AWFUL.

ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #157 and ULTIMATE AVENGERS VS NEW ULTIMATES #3: OK, now I *think* I see what they're going to do here, and it seems like they are going to kill "Spider-Man", presumably by completely crippling Peter Parker. Maybe they'll then turn Peter into the new Reed Richards of the Ultimate U, or, like "Professor P." running a team from his wheelchair or something. I guess there's some slight story potential there.

The thing is.... the thing is, as a marketing concept, they sold this entirely the wrong way. We had the postcards proclaiming "THE DEATH OF SPIDER-MAN!" on our counter for several weeks, and MANY people asked about it. "Yeah," says I, "It's in ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN". "Oh," says them, "so not the 'real' one". I'd then try to convince them that USM is actually spiffy, indeed, but you can see the eyes glaze over.

So, yeah, by marketing it like this, especially with the 3 "prequel" issues, boldly bannered and all that, they're setting up some false expectations, at best. I guess that I feel that if they had just DID it, without trying to make it a marketing "event", that it would have caught everyone by surprise, and sales could have built up from the sheer buzz and audacity of it. But, by doing it "top down" like this, I think you're not going to get the kind of audience response that the Ultimate line desperately desperately needs right now.

I quite liked the Spidey portion of these two issues (GOOD), but thought the Avengers portion was overblown, and undercooked (EH)

Yeah, that's enough out of me. What did YOU think?

-B

The Reason We Read Periodical Comics

There are two kinds of special thrills that periodical comics can bring. The first is tied to world-building, in which you get a piece of a story here, and another piece there, and eventually it adds up, building into something much larger than it's parts -- this is much of the thrill of the Marvel or DC universes, and one of the reasons that every other attempt to make a "universe" usually comes crashing down: it is nearly impossible to coordinate in that particular way, and it takes a multi-year dedication to build, with titles come out in a specific way. When you try to "erect" that kind of thing, the scaffolding is usually pretty apparent, and like a magic trick, you don't want to see how it is done.

(Because, of course, DC and Marvel both stumbled into their "universes" nearly by accident -- and they grew organically from there)

Even Marvel and DC have become pretty bad a really mining this special thrill. Look at the way sales figures have flattened as they've tried to geometrically expand the search for that thrill!

But this is something that really only main-veins as a periodical experience -- because that kind of manic soap opera thrill depends AT LEAST as much on sequence and spatial-relationship-in-time as it does about content. That is to say, to create a really lousy example that doesn't actually exist, anyone can team up Spider-Man and Daredevil to fight, but only comics can have Spidey start a swing-punch in SPIDER-MAN #123, and have him finish that arc in DAREDEVIL #213. When the inter-relationships-of-titles get reprinted in book form, you're generally only getting one strand of it, so you miss out on this whole kind of meta-thingy.

I could totally explain this better, I think, but THAT thrill isn't the one I actually want to really talk about today, it's the OTHER one: the cliffhanger.

I remember vividly the first cliffhanger that REALLY stuck with me -- at the end of the first issue of the O'Neill/Cowan QUESTION #1, Vic Sage gets shot in the head at point blank range, and falls into the river, apparently dead.

Whoa!

That was a very long month, I tell you.

In #2 it turned out that because of the caliber of bullet, the angle of the shot and the shockingly cold temperature of the river, the bullet just bounced off Vic's skull, and he was able to survive. O'Neill even told a story in the letter's page of a similar real-life incident that he took as inspiration.

But when you read this in the paperback collection, where one page he plunges down, and the next he is rescued most of the cliffhanger's power is completely abrogated. It's actually a pretty flat sequence.

It's a bit like, say, watching LOST on DVD box set, and just CHEWING through the episodes -- that can be satisfying in it's own way, but losing out on the week-between-airings and the time-to-think that stems from that is missing most of the cultural weight that LOST had on the Broadcast audience.

In fact, in really terrific network-style TV, you can get some awesome impacts of this kind of thing just from commercial breaks, which, again, get often minimized on DVD. The thing TV-on-DVD has going for it (as it were) are the musical cues which can help build suspense or otherwise manipulate your emotional reaction.

Comics don't have THAT particular trick (though they have a few native ones), so it is my firm belief that the cadence of periodical versus book-format is very very different.

Once one has been doing comics enough, it's very possible to make the periodical seams vanish when something gets collceted -- what we usually refer to as "decompressed storytelling", but unless you're very careful or very very good, it's pretty easy to short change the periodical.

I'd say that, consistently, really the only cartoonist who master the comic/book split right has been Dave Sim. Especially from, say, CHURCH & STATE through to MELMOTH or so, there are little jolty cliffhangers every 20 pages in CEREBUS, so that reading the monthly was generally satisfying (and often thrilling), but when you join those together in a book, almost every one of those cliffhangers is nearly invisible within the book as a whole. Things rise and fall differently in a book.

The other guys who have started to really figure out the trick are Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard in WALKING DEAD.

Which brings us to this week's issue of WALKING DEAD #86.

There's a potenitally massive massive game changer here, just one of those moments where your jaw drops and you're all "please god say you didn't!" and "I wantwantwantwant the next issue NOW!!!!", and now you've got to live what what you saw for the next entire month.

I'm not going to spoil it, but I KNOW it is going to read differently in the paperback than it does here. Why? Because similar things in previous issues have as well -- it read one way in serialization, and in a more subdued way in the collection.

And if you're one of the (many!) "I read it in trade" people, well you're missing out on one of the best thrills of WALKING DEAD -- the wait between events, and the suspense that engenders.

(Plus, the Big Thing isn't the ONLY thing that happens this issue -- there's at least one more Pretty Big Thing [and maybe 2] that gets undersold because of the Big Thing)

Anyway, this is really WHY I read comics -- for the suspense BETWEEN issues, and this was a truly EXCELLENT example of that.

What did YOU think? (though, if you comment, any spoilery ones will be deleted by me)

-B

Tucker Goes Deep Inside Hal Jordan's War

Green Lantern 64 (Part One of War of The Green Lanterns)

Hal Jordan? Funny you asked. As a result of of the death of his father, he’s refused to acknowledge fear, forever living a life of risk and insubordination. He lacks professionalism and restraint and has never been able to keep his emotions in check. The Green Lantern Corps--a paramilitary police organization whose shield he operates under--was willing to look the other way, until he started hanging out with aliens who have and use colored rings from other spokes of what’s been called “The Emotional Spectrum”. Forming what's been called the Rainbow Squadron, this unofficial team of Jordan's is unacceptable to the Corps, so he must be, and he will be...arrested.

That’s the blurb I wished they’d use for this series. It would look good in a bold white font on an all black background, being read aloud by a Kevin Conroy-type. I didn’t really have to change any of the comic's actual text either, that’s all from the first few pages of this issue.

The rest of this issue's pages follow.

The rainbow squadron--or the Kaledeioscopic Klan O' Kosmic Kops, they don’t seem to have a real name--have just discovered a large black hardcover book, and this book contains the Guardian’s darkest secrets. (The Guardians are the small floating blue people who give out the Green Lantern rings.) This big black book is about the size of a mid-range automobile, and when Hal Jordan decides to close it, he uses his ring to create an old lady wearing the female version of the Col. Sanders tie to close it for him. There is a bit of a hubbub when it is revealed that Atrocitus (he’s the Red Lantern, they’re the ones who vomit blood) already knew the secret that the team came to find, which is about a rogue Guardian named Krona who is responsible for killing everyone in Atrocitus “sector”. (Sectors are like states, but intergalactic. I don’t believe it has ever been explained who came up the borders of the individual sectors, which sounds like an untapped well of historical map-constructing possibility if you ask me, which I am.) Responding to Atrocitus’ betrayal with some of the lack of restraint that’s got him in hot water, Hal Jordan lashes out and smashes our Red Lantern against a wall, which makes cracks in the wall and also squirts the Red Lantern signal out of Atrocitus’s back. Embarrassing? On purpose? It just reminds me of the old Spider-Man light signal that he’d spray out of his belt. I bet they don’t let him use that anymore now that he wears that white suit. It would just be a big flashlight! That’s what cops do, not Spider-Man.

Then, there’s a big surprise that interrupts the fight that was getting ready to go down between Hal (who is a regular human man) and Atrocitus (who is a big tough alien who vomits blood), which is disappointing. The book pops open, and Larfleeze (the Orange Lantern who represents people with large comic book collections) gets tricked into grabbing an actual orange lantern (which is attached to a easy-to-see chain). The chain sucks Larfleeze into the book like a flushed toilet, making way for the reveal of...Lyssa Drak, the Story Vampire! She’s the Keeper of the Book of the Black! See?

They call that the real deal.

CUTAWAY TO....OA.

Oa is where the floating smurf people live. They are in their hovering room, talking about themselves and how disappointed they are in Hal Jordan, which I’m pretty sure is the only thing I’ve ever seen them do with their time, except for in Blackest Night, when a bunch of them got their hearts ripped out. They seem really put out that their lantern wielders always go bad, but not so much that they’re actually upset about it, because having emotional reactions would be unacceptable.

Although these sorts of comic book cutaways usually resolve itself by throwing out some kind of cliffhanger line before returning to the previous Hal Jordan-centric action, this one doesn’t. Instead, a big light show goes off, turning the hover dome--that's a dome for hovering--into a massive reverse planeterium, which makes yellow shit squirt out of the noses and ears of the Guardians.

PERSONAL ANECDOTAL ASIDE TANGENTIALLY RELATED TO GREEN LANTERN COMIC:

There’s this actor guy I know, who has a pretty good career now playing terrorists in Stephen Speiberg movies as well as scientists in Keanu Reeves movies, but when I knew him, all he wanted to do was a scene from Narc where he played the Jason Patric part and me and my old roommate played the Busta Rhymes and other rapper part. In the scene, Busta and the other guy are beat-to-shit and tied to chairs, which seemed pretty boring. To have a bit of fun with it, we both bought massive amounts of the really expensive fake blood, the kind that has a mint flavor and nutritional information, and then we just went to fucking town, making our own capsules and packs and pouring the shit in any manner of things. When we did the scene--which just consisted of us crying and screaming expletives while our very own Jason Patric forgot his lines and fake punched us--we had so much blood pouring out of our mouths and scalp that you could hear people retching while they watched. Later on, I found out the secret: people will tolerate hardcore violence, and they’ll tolerate fake blood coming out of just about anything, including your groin (that was all me son), but the sight of it coming out of the ear? It was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that the average audience member is always going to turn their nose--and quite possibly, their lunch--up when that starts to happen.

BACK TO THE COMIC

The lightshow and yellow bodily fluid are all attributable to the return of Krona, the Guardian that the Crayola Unit are looking for...on the other side of the galaxy! (Actually, the comic just says that Hal's Color Guard is in the Lost Sector, i’m just assuming that means other side of the galaxy because that would be dramatic.) Krona has brought the “entities” with him, they are gigantic alien dragon-looking characters chained to the inside of his ripped up black cape-y outfit, which makes him look like a cross between a Smurf AND Gargamel, with a touch of Doctor Octopus for good measure. The entites each represent one of the different colored rings, and are named as follows:

The Butcher: Entity of Rage Parallax: Entity of Fear Ophidian: Entity of Avarice Proselyte: Entity of Compassion Adara: Entity of Hope Ion: Entity of Will and last, but not least Predator: Entity of Love

Predator is the entity of love? Is that some kind of meta joke designed to make fun of people that hate relationships? Why can’t “Love” have an entity with a goofy, meaningless name like....well, like all of them, except for Rage, who gets a pass because Rage has “The” in its name, which is pretty awesome. When I get a bulldog--and trust me, I'm getting a bulldog someday--it will be named Dumptruck and The Dance Contest, because I really like the idea of having "and" and "The" in the names of animals.

Anyway, after this big reveal--it’s a two-page splash, this twenty-two page comic’s second--the story makes a quick return to Hal Jordan's Planeteers. Sinestro is yelling at the librarian vampire (they used to work together) but she is still mad at him for abandoning her to live inside a book. (Which is fair.) According to  her, the book she was living in has more “tales of the unknown” than a different book has about the Green Lanterns. This seems like an obvious thing to say, but it's ultimately irrelevant, isn't it? Hal and Company pretty much came here for Krona and Krona related information; the book itself and the blue lady who live inside it aren't really important to the story in any concise way, she's just important to these particular pages and the particular beats this issue has to hit. Considering how obvious this is, it's curious why additional attention is being placed on it. Alternatively, maybe this is where they start setting up the next Green Lantern "Event" that will follow this one, as that seems to be the pattern of these Green Lantern comics--constantly postponing actual conclusions.

Anyway: in keeping with the necessities of the plot which dictate that Hal Jordan start hanging out with people again, the Sexy Bondage Librarian freezes some of our least favorite team members inside the giant book, and the comic returns to Oa.

Back on Oa, Krona is being a bad guy, meaning he is ripping off somebodies lower jaw, which is an old school technique from the Old Testament. It works like a charm, if your ultimate goal is to really hurt somebodies face, and that seems to be Krona's ultimate goal. Awaken the Giant Within and all that. After this one page break for jaw-ripping, we're back to the Lost Sector, where Hal, Sinestro and Hal’s ex-girlfriend are all struggling to escape the giant book, which is eating them. Hal's ex-girlfriend is wearing that kind of bathing suit that has to be glued or taped onto the female body, which is why you’ll only think they are sexy until the first time you see one of them get taken off, and then you'll be a bodysuit man for life. For some reason, these three are being quicksanded into the book instead of frozen like the Hope and Compassion people were , which would have been quicker and not allowed Hal and Sinestro the time to kiss their rings together, which is the Green Lantern version of “crossing the streams”, which is a reference to the movie Ghostbusters. Like in Ghostbusters, this instance of doing something you shouldn’t as a last resort--I'm assuming ring kissing is also totally dangerous--totally works, and Hal is set free, although all of his team disappears and their rings clatter to the floor. To show us how big of a deal this is, Doug Mahnke draws the panel of Hal Jordan reaching towards his team’s rings from a viewpoint INSIDE Sinestro’s ring, which, for a comic supposedly about emotionless justice drones, is pretty clearly geared towards making one feel some kind of emotion. And bang, right then, the other Green Lanterns--the ones from the first part of this comic, who were all worked up about Hal’s Team of Useless Multi-Colored Fucking Assholes--have arrived, and they're ready to do some arresting!

They arrive in a one-page splash, which is great for people who don’t have a lot of time, because it makes this comic take a lot less time to read. After we get this inspired use of the serialized comic book medium out of the way, one of the Green Lanterns who has arrived to arrest Hal Jordan does something totally dickish that endears him to me forever. Here, take a look:

That part where the long skinny one says “What book?” and then says “It doesn’t matter” before Hal can finish answering--that’s such a prick move. In your smug plastic asshole face, Hal Jordan. You just got fucking served, buddy. Oh sure, Hal argues a little bit more, but it’s obviously just time-killing bullshit, because the comic keeps jumping back to Oa and the Krona guy, who is putting the yellow entity of fear (Parallax) inside the gigantic green Coleman lantern all of the smurfs on Vowel Planet pray to. For some reason, this gives all of the non-Hal Jordan Green Lanterns yellow eyes, and then the long-skinny dick one wakes up, freaks out, and starts shooting his own alien version of the Swastika out of his ring. (I thought it might be a specific swastika, but I used google to find this picture of the world’s swastikas, and it seems to be one of his own long n’ skinny alien construction.) Back on Oa, Krona looks to have turned the Guardians into his own version of Hal’s rainbow squadron, which ha ha, I already saw how useless that kind of 90's Benetton ad works out when you plop them into a face off against a gigantic book of secret stories. Like any good hero at the start of a tale, Hal Jordan runs away, thus starting the War of the Green Lantern Corps off on the classic foot of "For a Guy With No Fear, You Sure Are A Big Fucking Coward".

I guess I'd rate this Eh or Okay? The part where the guy got his jaw ripped off was pretty surprising.

In Which Hibbs Actually Recommends Something

As many of you know, I've really become quite a cynical bitch about comics lately. There's just a resounding sameness to so many of them, and too many writers are "writing for the trade" (rather than trying to make each single issue a compelling read in an of itself). In far too many weeks, I think the alright stuff is really just all right in comparison to other, lousier, comics.

Well, I read a comic that I genuinely liked in and of itself this week, and I want you to read it as well, That comic is XOMBI #1.

XOMBI gave me a thrill, because it's full of crazy ideas just tossed out there, like a good Grant Morrison comic -- seriously, it features a team of Catholic superheroes, one of whom is named "Nun The Less", whose superpower is shrinking -- and, in this incarnation, it has some REALLY GOOD art, by way of Frazer Irving.

XOMBI was a Milestone book -- part of the third wave, if I recall correctly, released after the market had decided, actually no it didn't want the Milestone books, though, looking at comics.org, I'm a little shocked that it lasted 22 issues back in the mid-90s.

It was an idea machine back then, too, but it kinda suffered from art in v1 by JJ Birch -- well, Joe Brozowski under a pen-name, and he's one of those artists who actually has a lot of wonderful fundamentals, but whose actual rendering style isn't too exciting, really. Everyone looked a bit stiff and angular.

This isn't a problem now with Frazer Irving doing the art -- man, this stuff just sings.

This series clearly follows from the first, but I understood every word that I read (and it's been like 14 years between issues, so I'm telling you this as a plus), and it felt very much like a proper first issue.

If I had ONE criticism of the book, it would be that it's a full 22 pages for the $2.99, instead of the now-usual 20-pages-for-a-DC-book, which means that issue #1 doesn't have a letter's page, and, thus, doesn't have any kind of "introduction and here's what we're thinking!" kind of text pieces that all of the best first issues have.

Here's how much I liked it -- so far today, I have not LET a single customer out the door without a copy of the book in their hands. I don't think I've done THAT since the SANDMAN days, actually. The downside of THAT is that, as I write this, I have exactly one copy left for sale, and I'll be sold out in the next 10-15 minutes. (reorders, sadly, take 2 weeks to turn around in the current system, unless you're willing to pay usurious shipping rates)

Which leads me to the next "here's how much I liked it" -- I've just placed a reorder equivalent to nearly 200% my initial order.... and I'm not sure I've ever quite gambled that big (well, proportionately) in a long-ass time.

So, yeah, when you go into your LCS, tell them you really would like a copy of XOMBI #1 -- it's a pretty exciting comic -- and if they're out (which they might be, I bet most stores ordered just barely above pre-orders), tell them it's Diamond order code is JAN11 0259, and that you want them to reorder it for you.

I thought XOMBI #1 was absolutely EXCELLENT.

-B

Hibbs kicks around some of 3/9/11

Hitting the ground running, too much on my plate... (and I blew too much of my morning by reading those transcripts that Rich posted...) BOOSTER GOLD #42: It's looking extremely likely that Booster Gold is going to keep being published at least through issue #50 (though, given sales figures, I really wouldn't give it a lot of hope past that...), which is pretty amazing when you consider that his first series only lasted 25 issues!

Giffen and DeMatties have mostly been bringing the bwah during their run here, but this issue was fairly serious and straight forward. I was pretty deeply amused by the "tada, time travel!" nature of having last issue's cliffhanger, and also not letting it derail the book.... but the very nature of time travel completely gutted this issue's plot/premise.

The cover asks "Who is the Perforated Man?" and on the very first page you meet the character it is BLINDINGLY obvious who it is. I mean, even the first line of dialogue is a big flashing arrow. But the fact that it is who it has to be completely removes any possible jeopardy from the story, since we know enough about the character's past and future to know that the situation can't be anything but temporary. (wow, what a tortured sentence that is when I'm trying to write that spoiler-free!)

Add the fact that this is a two-parter (well, at least), I'll have to go thumbs-down on this issue. Pretty EH on the Savage Scale. It's too bad, because I'd somehow be crazy pleased if BOOSTER GOLD somehow made it to triple digits...

One other thing to observe is that this month marks the return of the letter pages to the DC line (well, at least on the ones that are actually on schedule! So not in, say BATMAN, INC.), and I'll say that, no matter what, at least having the "next issue's cover" back makes the whole experiment a success for this reader. On the other hand, there's no sense in bringing the page back if all it's going to be is mindless glowing praise, and direct exhortations to buy other books. I know, I know, it is only month one, and, probably, none of the current DC editors have any real prior experience working on lettercols, but each and every one of them I read this week was utterly weak-sauce and unentertaining.  I'd also use that "in the spotlight" callout to go title-specific with backlist, rather than a line-wide promotion, but that may just be me...

SUPERBOY #5: I've been digging this comic way more than I would have ever thought possible -- the writing has been fun, and the art pretty swell -- but the Kid Flash/Superboy race here really didn't work for me, because the story made it clear that it wasn't a race at all -- they even stop and sit down for a long conversation in the middle of the book!  Boo, hiss! Also: "Changeling"'s real name is GAR, not GarTH. Garth is Aqualad Tempest, who, yes, is also a Titan, but is not in this comic book, being dead and all. An editor at DC comics, editing a Titan-related comic book should, you would hope, know that. Sadly EH.

Parenthetically, I finally watched a few episodes of YOUNG JUSTICE, and was really shocked to see that the NEW Aqualad has a completely different origin in the comics and the TV show. What's the point of trying to tie these different versions together then? Especially when Garth is in the cartoon, too... weird.

TITANS #33: Speaking of Titans... well, this isn't really Titans, and it's just ugly and gross on nearly every level, and every month I'm shocked that I still have sub customers for this. I suspect they're waiting for the comic to go back to being about the Titans, and they don't want a whole in the numbering when that happens, though I suspect it will be canceled before then, because the franchise really isn't strong enough to support two titles. This went subs-only at Comix Experience with the third issue of this "new direction" because the second sold ZERO rack copies, and in reading through this before putting it in a subbers box shows me really why that is: this pretty much stinks. There's the continuation of junkie-Arsenal where it's clear that no one involved has ever done drugs before, and with 100% less deadcatswing; there's two disjointed subplots about the Atom and Osiris/Isis that read like they have nothing to do whatsoever with this comic; there's a "gasp-shock" antagonist reveal that made me go "wait, who is that supposed to be?" instead; and one of the most gratuitously gory endings I've seen in a comic in a long time. In short: this book is CRAP.  Also, it features the line of dialogue "Capture them all. With extreme prejudice." Um. How do you do THAT? By saying "Ching chong! Ching Chong!" while fighting Cheshire? Saying to Arsenal "Great Frog really sucked, and hippies smell?" Seriously? What the fuck?

NEW AVENGERS #10: I found the modern section to be kind of amusing with Susperia's rants about the Avengers "cheating" and all, and the semi-false jeopardy of Mockingbird's wound (though, seriously, Dr. Strange can't teleport her to a hospital directly? Really?), but I don't see what the flashback stuff had to do with anything, or why I should care whatsoever. Plus it was really hideous, I think even John K (UK) might agree? There were two issues of NewAv about 2-3 months back that were essentially "The Domestic Adventures of Luke and Jessica, co-starring the Avengers", and I thought THOSE were super-swell issues, but this is pretty overpriced for what they give you, and Bendis has been writing Avengers for what feels like forever, and it has never felt less relevant to me than now. I dunno, I'm old and bitter about comics these days, but I can't muster anything better than a very low OK for this?

SIGIL #1 (OF 4): I only vaguely remember the CrossGen series (those books all blur to me), but this appears to have nothing whatsover to do with that version? Hm, wiki says the protagonist has the same name, but there's a gender switch here with a change of venue. It looks like this looks the most (to me) as "Meridian", actually, but I guess the point is that none of the original version matters at all? Fine. On it's own merits, this was fairly EH -- oddly the "fantasy" sequences seemed fairly clever and strong, but the "real world" stuff just seemed to ring incredibly false to me. Maybe it was the antagonists of the girl gang or whatever. They felt about as real as "Debbie Duck" did way back in STARBRAND. (God, I'm dating myself again, aren't I?) -- there's just not enough of the setup properly laid out in this first issue to make me want to come back for issue #2, but at least it's only $2.99, so there's a plus. EH.

ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #155 DOSM: Other than "I don't see HOW this is a 'prelude' to 'Death of Spider-Man'?" and that it has a "This scene never appears in this comic" cover, I quite liked this issue. Nice bits of characterization, and some downright killer art from Chis Samnee. Bagley's back after this, but seeing Samnee's work on the book, I'm not sure I want that anymore. So yeah, I liked this, which is nice to leave on an upbeat note: VERY GOOD.

As always: what did YOU think?

-B

Why We Cease To Care

Comic sales are down, as we all know; people are reading less of the periodicals, and, in many cases, walking away from the hobby altogether. It is my belief that, in almost all cases, this is the very fault of the publishers. Here, for me, are four examples of why, in the form of four "reviews":

BRIGHTEST DAY #21: There's just three issues left of this, and we still don't have any real idea of what the end of BLACKEST NIGHT actually meant, what is driving the white lantern, how the seemingly unconnected resurrected heroes are connected to anything whatsoever, or really what any of it means.

In the last few issues we've seen: the Hawks seemingly get immolated and die again, Aquaman lose his hand (again) and seemingly die again, and now in this issue Martian Manhunter seemingly die again (though, ugh, the symbology, along with Firestorm, is the classic elements: Fire, Air, Water and now Earth, which sort of makes me think that they're going to make these character the new Elementals, and I WAY hope that's wrong)

But I'm just tired of all the torture and the agony, and the just general level of unpleasentness that's been grafted upon the four "leads" here -- and grafted it is: the four antagonists ("Deathstorm", Hawkgirl's mom, Mera's people's war leader, and D'Kay) (see, I can't even remember the names of half of them, which shows you just how memorable they were) NEVER EVEN EXISTED before the start of this storyline, and these "epic struggles" therefore have just no weight or meaning to me as an individual reader, as they don't actually flow from CHARACTER, but from artificially induced INCIDENT.

So, yeah, this is the "tentpole" of the DCU right now, and, once again, it's looking like an excuse for, shall we say, Torture Porn of these characters, and that based upon FALSE INCIDENT. Jeez, no thanks!

The sole saving grace of this issue was that J'onn went down with equanimity, but if I was paying cash money for these comics, I am certain I would have dropped it last issue after "cut off Arthur's hand, and rekill him" happened.

Breaking faith with your audience, EVEN IF YOU ARE PLANNING A THIRD ACT REVERSAL, is seldom a good idea because that audience may not even be there to SEE that reversal.

I'm thinking this is kinda AWFUL, sorry.

FIRST WAVE #6: This is where the scare quotes really come in, because I can't "review" what I haven't read, and I stopped reading this like with issue #3 because the delays between issues made me stop caring.

I've said it before: in this busy busy world with 900+ TV channels, and all fiction of all kinds being ETEWAF, and more words being published on blogs than any thousand humans could even HOPE to consume, the real commodity is ATTENTION.

Bi-monthly (or worse) series that don't not only kick your ass, but then makes a fluffy pillow from the remains, snuggles you tight, then rekicks that ass, can NOT hold the audience's attention.

The entire "First Wave" concept was brutally beaten to death in it's crib because:

1) The core series didn't come out in a six-month time frame

2) Spin-off books weren't held until AFTER THE COMPLETION of the core relaunch series TO SEE IF ANYONE CARED

3) And the spin-offs were both too expensive for the content, AND didn't launch with the "right" creative teams from day one.

"First Wave" is a MASTER CLASS in how you DO NOT launch and market a "line" of comics. It also, I think, shows why you CAN'T launch a "line" of interconnected comics in the first place -- it's insincere and managed, and the audience can see that coming a mile away, and wish to have nothing to do with your cynical ploy to take money from them.

GREEN LANTERN #63 (WAR OF GL): You're going to be hard pressed to find a bigger GL fan than me, and, even more specifically, a bigger Hal fan. "Who is your favorite character?" would always get an unflinching "Hal Jordan!" from me, even before he was cool... and even when it was the darkest days of Parallax and all that shit. Magic wishing rings are just cool.

I'd really like to read a comic book about Hal Jordan. Not "one he appears in", but a comic ABOUT Hal Jordan, where his character and motivations dictate the actions, not outside incident and plothammering.

Geoff Johns had it right for a really long time -- something like the first three years of the book it was actually about Hal. But around "Sinestro Corps War" he let his love of incident take over. Now, we were all cool with that, because it was fun and clever, and big and 'splodey, and at least the root of the idea was rooted in Sinestro's character.

And then came "Blackest Night", and same thing, kind of -- I mean, he HAD been building to this at least from the "Rebirth" mini-series, and "dead superheroes walk the earth" and the entire "Rainbow Corps" is a funnish High Concept, and, what the hell, we can let it go because, at least, it appeared he always wanted to get HERE.

But now that the "here" of BN is done and gone, I at least, get the sense that we're totally into "making it up as we go along" territory, and the book called "Green Lantern" really barely has "Green Lantern" in it, and even if it does, it doesn't matter that it is Hal -- this could have interchangeably been Kyle, or John, or, hell,  Nadroj Lah of sector 4182 for all of the practical difference it would make to the story -- Green Lantern hasn't been the protagonist of his own story in something like 3-4 years?

I'm still reading GL -- and this issue was OK -- but I stopped buying the collections (Blackest Night was my last... and I didn't bother with "BN: GL" even). I gave up on "GL Corps" even earlier, and I've only read a single issue of the third GL spin-off (mostly because Guy is AWESOME as a FOIL, but really painfully dull as a LEAD) -- and it's all because it really has nothing to do with that cool-ass Hal Jordan fighting the Tattooed Man or something with a giant green boxing glove.

And, see that (parentheses) in the title? "(War of GL)"? Yeah, this is the launch of another multi-month, multi-book storyline, which means we're going to be even more multi-months where the book isn't even about it's lead. *sigh*

I'd like Green Lantern to be the actual protagonist and motivating spark of the comic called "Green Lantern", please.

WOLVERINE BEST THERE IS #4: There's a certain amount of sense to give an inherently violence-driven character like Wolverine (His powers are metal claws, and the ability to heal from any wound!) a "Mature Readers" comic. A certain amount of sense.

And, if I'm going to do that, yeah Ryp is probably the artist I want to try and get to draw that -- I love the cat's style, and I've always thought he should be a super-star artist.

Here's what you DON'T do however, from a marketing perspective:

1) Flood out the market with ongoing series and "the one shot of the month" so that when you try and consolidate and relaunch a monthly no one even knows that you're doing that.

2) Create a "family" of books to surround it (Daken, X-23, also monthlies!)

Those are bad enough and an uphill climb for titles, but then they make the two specific-to-this-book dumb ass moves:

3) take a "dirty" artist like Ryp, but give the books COVERS by a "clean" artist like Bryan Hitch. I understand that Hitch is "hot", but you can't put work that SO stylistically different from the interiors and expect that ever to work in any universe. The customers think "Oooh, clean Hitch!" when they pick it up and go "Ugh, NOT!" when they put it down

4) Make a book "Mature readers", ESPECIALLY with putting that huge ugly PMMC-style "warning" label on the cover, AND THEN BLACK OUT THE SWEARING. Are you fucking kidding me? Or, as the book would have it: "Are you ####### kidding me?"

Obviously, it doesn't help that you've got a story that is, at best, a two parter and its stretched out over what I imagine is going to be six issues, filled with a whole lot of pretty uninteresting antagonists who get page after page after page of their backstories and motivations and techniques which the protagonist just passively sits there and takes it.

Sadly, this is AWFUL stuff, but the marketing behind it is even worse.

What do YOU think?

-B

Dipping a toe back in

[I'm kinda cheating a little bit here, because this isn't about comics, per se (Thursday for that, I suspect, once I've read some of this week's books)] One of the things that happens when you own a comic book store is that people expect you to magically know everything even tangentially related to comics, but especially movies. I've had people asking me for weeks what I think of Joss Whedon's AVENGERS film, or about THOR.. and there's not so much I can say, is there? I have no magical insight, and, in fact, I try to avoid reading "movie news", so I'm actually surprised when the movies comes out.

In fact, I'm probably the WORST person to ask about comic book movies, these days because I have a seven year old. Oh, I'll go to movies that a seven year old can watch (though, really on most of them I leave that to the grandparents), but I'm having a hard time recalling exactly what the last aimed-at-adults movie I saw in the theaters actually was. Tzipora and I made several tries to go see INCEPTION, but we never actually made it (for a variety of silly reasons)

So, I wait for DVD... and, even worse, I usually wait for DVD from the San Francisco Public Library. You can put yourself on waiting lists before the films are even released, and it's not unusual to be person #127 in line for a new or popular film. Buuuut, the upside is that they're free (well, I've already paid my taxes for them, that is), and they're delivered to your local branch, whcih we're already going to 2-3 times a week as it is.

But this puts me months and months and months behind the zeitgeist.

Case in point: just this last week I watched two films I've been waiting some time for -- KICK-ASS and SCOTT PILGRIM.  *Now* I can finally tell people what I thought of them, and just about the point where no one cares any longer! Yay! So....

KICK-ASS:  I totally thought that the comic book "lost the thread" of the story once Hit-Girl was introduced, and KA himself had less and less to do with the comic, but in the film version I thought this was much less of a problem. In fact, the film is really more about what an ineffectual boob KA is, so to have him upstaged in his own movie is almost clever.

And Hit-Girl is just an awesome character in the movie -- pretty much everything one would want, and a portrayal that worked for me in a way that the comic simply didn't. On the other hand, this is a movie my wife had ZERO interest in watching, and after watching it, I couldn't find anything to recommend it to her, in particular. (Ben really wanted to watch it, but that was a big "NO WAY, DUDE!" from day one)

So yeah: Shiny action, loud coarse vulgarities, lots and lots of gore, and a cute little girl in the middle of it all. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but after it was over I felt reasonably cold -- it's all 16 year old boy wish fufillment, with 16 year old boy insecurities -- dude, the 10 year old girl is better than you are! -- and that's about it.

Really only one thing stuck with me, this weekish later, and it's something really kinda stupid and throwaway and insider, and maybe I'm even reading in to it something that isn't actually there. In the old 50s Superman TV show, thugs would routinely empty their chambers at Supes, then kind of stare in disbelief, then throw the empty gun at him. Christ, what can THAT do?

But there's this little eensy bit in one of the big fights where Hit Girl runs out of ammo, and she kind of stares at the gun in disbelief, then she throws it at her attacker. A absolute perfect reversal of that moment. Like I said: I have no idea if that was even intended -- it's an obvious enough bit of business that didn't have to be inspired by Superman, but I'm going to keep believing it was intentional, because I really really liked that.

So, yeah, I'll give KICK-ASS a GOOD while I was watching it, but only an OK days after the fact (hows that for being an inconsistent reviewer?)

(Also: Aside to Millar [yeah, and Bendis, and anyone else publishing an Icon book] -- given that "Icon" is *effectively* self-publishing, can y'all take a little personal responsibility on your Final Order Cut-off notifications? It is EXTRAORDINARILY TIRESOME to place your "final" orders for KICK-ASS 2 #2 week after week after week (or the latest POWERS, etc.) Please please please don't put a book on FOC unless you're SURE you're ready to go to press. Anything else makes you look bad, and turns us into liars when we start telling customers "yeah, three weeks. Er, no, three weeks now. Um, no, three weeks NOW" Thanks!)

(Also? 4+ months between issues? Not good)

SCOTT PILGRIM VERSUS THE WORLD:  Walking into this one I expected very little. For the most part I find Michael Cera extraordinarily uninteresting as an actor, for example. Plus, I was pretty concerned that you could cram 6 books into a single movie, and have it work well (or at all)

And yet, I liked the film, in certain ways, even better than the book -- Knives, for example, is pretty fully realized in the film in a way I didn't really think she was in the comic; and I got a stronger sense of specific time and place, and I thought the music was very effective in the film.

Even Cera, I thought, showed some relative "range".

At the end, I told Tzipora that she might even like it (I dunno how the video game stuff would go over for her, though), which is always the Big Move. This strikes me, maybe, as one of those films that is going to to be a "cult classic", like, dunno, BIG LEBOWSKI or something. (Unless the video game stuff dates it out too much)

Either way, I enjoyed it immensely -- VERY GOOD.

OK, that's me warmed up (well, still warming up, aren't I?) -- comics later in the week, and, here's hoping for twice-weekly for at least the next 3-4 months...

What did YOU think?

-B

Look, Up In The Sky: Graeme On The First Post-JMS Superman

From the very first page, you can tell that someone new is handling SUPERMAN #707. After more than half a year of a passive, dickish Man of Steel walking across America and coming across either standoffish and dick-like or curiously naive, the first page of the issue has Superman doing three "super" things - Stopping a bank robbery (with bullets bouncing off his chest!), saving a girl's life (by stopping a train! With his bare hands!) and grabbing a falling helicopter. It's as if new writer Chris Roberson thought, "People might need a reminder why Superman is awesome." The true fun starts on the next page, though; the inescapable point of Roberson's first issue as "scripter" - Although Straczynski's hand is evident in the "We're real people in the middle of America and life is hard for us real people" interlude in the center of the issue, there's enough in this issue that feels at odds with the rest of "Grounded" to feel as if Roberson is rethinking the story as a whole, instead of just writing dialogue for someone else's plot - is that something is wrong with Superman. He says it himself, without realizing it, multiple times ("What good is the truth, Miss Lane, if it just causes suffering?" being the most telling, even moreso than "Everything used to be so clear. Truth. Justice. The American way. But now? Now, I'm not sure about anything" at the end of the issue), and it's pointed out to him a couple of times, as well. We get a potential explanation as to why - mind control of some sort, courtesy the woman who's been following him across the country - and a hint at a possible solution, courtesy of the guest stars on the final page (One of whom seems to be Super Obama, which makes me wonder if guest artist Allan Goldman misinterpreted some direction to draw the presidential Superman from Final Crisis #7), but that almost doesn't matter: By saying "This is Superman when he's broken," Roberson immediately makes "Grounded" into a story that has much more potential than the one JMS seemed to be writing (If nothing else, it begs the questions, "How does he get 'better'?" and "What does it mean for Superman to be 'fixed'?", both of which are more interesting than "Can Superman walk across the country?").

It's not enough that Roberson pulls the story - and the character, and the series - out of a nosedive in surprisingly short time, though; he also demonstrates though a couple of different techniques that he gets what's been missing from the character in recent months, and it's not just Superman saving the day - there's a welcome... I don't want to say "retro," but a welcome use of thought balloons and shout-outs to some of Superman's more obscure powers that suggests that Roberson is ready to bring some of the imagination back to the character, some level of the fantastic and, well, less grounded elements that make the character so worthwhile. There's something genuinely endearing about reading Lois point out that Superman doesn't actually need a cellphone without it coming across as too snarky.

The issue isn't perfect - Roberson leans a little too heavily on the "something is wrong with Superman" thing with three fairly blatant teases in one issue for my taste, and Goldman's art throughout is fairly lacklustre, like a blander Fernando Pasarin but without the acting chops - but it is solidly Good, and compared with what Superman has been suffering through for the last four installments of this story, feels like the franchise is finally back on the right track again. Now, let Superman get back to being Superman, bring on Chris Samnee as artist and you'll have something ideal.

Thor Vs. Thor! Graeme Compares DeFalco/Frenz To Fraction/Ferry

Let's start 2011 off with a controversial statement: Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz's THE MIGHTY THOR is great. No, wait, that's not controversial enough. How about this? Comparing it to the current Matt Fraction/Pascal Ferry run only points out the latter's flaws all the more clearly. I picked up #393-400 of Thor at the recent Excalibur 50% off New Year's Sale, here in Portland; there wasn't a great deal of forethought in the purchase, I admit. Pretty much, it was "Wait, each issue will be less than a dollar? And it's a pretty heavily Kirby-influenced run, I seem to remember... How bad can it be?" The answer turned out to be "Not bad at all," with issues that pretty much hit all my highpoints in terms of what I'd want out of a Thor comic's tone, (melo)drama and scale. In many ways, it made me convinced that DeFalco and Frenz were a creative team out of their time - If the exact same run had been published ten years later, it would've been lauded as a wonderful retro pastiche and exercise in Kirby revivalism, but instead, it came as Marvel turned towards a new style in artists like Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and was still too close to leaning on Kirby and Buscema clones visually to really appreciate those styles as styles just yet.

(Frenz channels Kirby amazingly well in these issues, but he also does something that's very subtle and very, very enjoyable: He also channels Walt Simonson. It's only for Lorelei, the Simonson-created sister of the Enchantress, but look at the body-type and the finishes that Frenz gives her. It doesn't look out of place with the rest of the characters, but it's definitely there: He's reinforcing the looks given to each character by their creators, instead of just blindly turning everything into Kirby pastiche.)

For all the ridiculously overwritten dialogue - intentionally so, and with tongue-more-in-cheek than DeFalco gets credit for, I think; there's a line in #400 where Ron Frenz "tells" DeFalco in story that Stan Lee should get royalties for every word DeFalco writes, which shows a nice sense of self-awareness - there's a wonderful pace and economy to the writing, as well: Each issue advances the story but also has an arc of its own (Thor starts one issue captured and imprisoned, and by the end of the issue, he's escaped and on the run, for example - the villain isn't defeated, but our hero has accomplished something and the reader gets a sense of a beginning/middle/end in the chapter), and the overall storyline constantly builds in intensity and overblown scale as it goes on. There's a real sense of "Think we can't go any further? Well, look at this!" to it, and that's very much to its benefit; by the time we've reached the final issue, so much is going on, and so much seems out-of-control, that the pace alone convinces that this battle "means" something.

It's that sense of... I don't know, intensity? Pace? Scale? that really pulled me to contrast these issues with the first four Fraction/Ferry issues of the current Thor run. I've said elsewhere - Wait, What?, I think - that one of my biggest problems with the run to date is that things don't really make sense, but upon reading the DeFalco/Frenz issues, I realized that what it really is is that I'm given too much time to realize that things don't really make sense. There's been plenty of commentary that Fraction's Thor is slow, and that's true, but it's not just that it's slow-going - there's also a lack of kinetic energy to keep going, keep reading to find out what's going to happen next and oh my God you won't believe what's on the next page. Instead, Fraction and Ferry have mistaken acres and acres of foreshadowing and portentousness for epic scale and importance, and spend too long telling us that bad things are coming instead of showing us why we should believe them.

(I'm sure that many out there will complain that the scenes of destruction on various realms by the World Eaters demonstrates why we should care, but I don't think that's true; it's destruction without any context and without any characters to empathize with - 52's issue of alien apocalypse without the familiar PoV concepts like the Green Lanterns or characters like Captain Comet, if you will - and so it's almost meaningless. "These are bad guys who can do bad things, they're important," the pages say, but it's all intellectual, there's no heart. And isn't heart one of the things that we should expect most from epic tales? Aren't they stories that stir our emotions, more than anything?)

It doesn't help that we see re-runs of these scenes of contextless foreboding and destruction taking up precious real estate of the issues time after time. Familiarity breeds boredom, if not contempt, after all, and by now we've had four issues of being told that "something terrible is coming" but it's still not here yet, and in the meantime, very little else has happened. Again, it's about pace: Fraction and Ferry's Thor isn't exciting or engaging on an emotional level because everything seems to take so long that there's no urgency or intensity to any of it, and the characters are... well, unheroic: "The bad guys are coming and the good guys don't have any time to prepare! I mean, sure, they've had four issues if they'd only listened to the guy explaining everything over and over again for pages at a time in the first three issues, but Thor was busy sulking."

(Another aside: I wonder if the difference between Marvel heroes' reactions to tragedy - From stoic inner angst that would rarely seep out in public in Stan's day, to self-involved disconnection with what's going on in the rest of the world today - could be seen as a reflection of the times, or some comment upon them? It's amusing to remember the idea that Dark Reign would make all of Marvel's heroes into put-upon Spider-Mans, because what's happened is that they've all somehow become Spider-Man in attitude, as well. It's not just Thor's attitude in this story; look at Balder, as well, in #618: "What can Asgard do for you? The same thing we can do for ourselves. Nothing.")

Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe I'm just too old for Fraction and Ferry's adolescent Thor, all pretty, if static and oversized, pictures - Ferry's line is very particular and great, I know, but I think that Matt Hollingsworth deserves equal praise for his work on the book. That said, I really do think that there's something lacking in terms of storytelling in the book... an energy, perhaps, or timing being thrown by the constant, massive panels dominating pages or spreads for empty emphasis - and promises of satisfaction delayed. I do feel like an old man for preferring DeFalco and Frenz's take on the same ideas (Literally, in some cases; both arcs feature an overwhelming attack on Asgard and the return of Odin), as if I'm steps away from telling people to get off my lawn and turn down their rock and roll music, but there just seems more interest, more happening, more life in the stories from 1988 than the ones from 2010. The latter may be cooler, I'm sure, but the former has much more to say and wants you to give you reason to listen.

Thor #393-400: A surprising Very Good, Thor #615-618: A pretty Eh.

NEW YEAR; SAME JACKASS: ABHAY, COMIC BOOKS, RUCKUS, WOO-HAH!

Real quick: I couldn't figure out how to register to post a thank you note on the Comics Journal site, so a quick thanks to Dirk Deppey. Many is the morning that I started my day, stumbling out of bed and heading straight to read my "news" from off the Journalista blog Mr. Deppey wrote for many years.  It was a lot of mornings thinking, "Why can't you just eat breakfast like a normal boy? Why is this how you choose to spend your first waking moments? Why can't you ever just be a normal boy? Why?? Just put on some underwear already, at least." So... thanks  for that (?) and best wishes in the future to him.

This one is primarily about X'ED OUT, JOE THE BARBARIAN, BATMAN, THE INVISIBLES, and... I like to think that everything I've ever written about, at the end of the day, is about the healing power of love. So, you know: that, too.

* * *

Two books featured on many of the Best of 2010 lists I've seen are essentially the same exact book. How did that happen? Same exact book, at least how I read them. I refer here, of course, to Grant Morrison, Sean Murphy, and Dave Stewart's death-by-diabetes hijinx-adventure JOE THE BARBARIAN and Charles Burns's Tintin on the Island of the Bad Hipster Haircuts adventure X'ED OUT.

Both seem to tell the exact same story: a generic character (JOE's dull non-descript boy, X'ED OUT's equally-if-not-more-dull non-descript hipster) suffers a medical trauma (diabetes and/or unidentified head trauma) that triggers each to mentally flee into a kingdom built out of childhood fantasies (X'ED OUT's allusions to Tintin, or JOE's allusions to action figures, superheroes, 1980's cereal-box heroes), wherein a colorful adventure is had at the same time as a story about the dull character's medical trauma is presented for the reader's edification. Both notably received more attention for art than story (maybe even more specifically, for inking than for any other facet, though the colors to both may be more praiseworthy). I read both naked. Both feature as a dominant element the main character being motivated by his relationship with his pet from the real world in the fantasy universe. And neither concluded in 2010.

Dude: Same book.

X'ED OUT is basically just JOE THE BARBARIAN but for rich people. X'ED out is for fancy gentlemen, with butlers and prep school accents, who model part-time for the LL Bean Catalog, and can spend $20 for 56 pages of an incomplete comic-- repeat: $20 for 56 pages of an incomplete comic. Swimming pools, movie stars; lakes, boats, friends and noodle salad. "Do you like my new comic book? Why, it's almost European. Do you like my monocle? It helps me get out of jail free for I am the Monopoly Man."

On the other hand, JOE THE BARBARIAN is plainly for meatheads, morlocks, weirdos. Paper stapled together, bar-code slapped onto the front cover, right on top of the art-- wait, wait, is the comic done yet? Fuck it, close enough-- get it out the fucking door. They put the price of the book on the cover twice: once at the top of the cover, another time above the advertisement for the company website that they also placed over the art. Videogames and sneakers are advertised on the back covers-- the hot teen fad in 2010 was teens using Axe Body Spray to light themselves on fire, but I guess Chiat Day is still working on the ad campaign for that.

X'ED OUT has a quote from "R. Crumb" on the back cover. JOE THE BARBARIAN's fourth cover comes with a quote from IGN, a videogame website. One gets reviewed by the New York Times (well: aka Douglas), New York Magazine, the Guardian and Book Forum; the other was one of MTV Geek's top ten books of the year and was well-reviewed by Ain't It Cool. Respected, legitimate, likely-soon-to-be-bankrupt publications remark upon X'ED OUT's significance, shortly before all discussion of the book disappears from this Earth. The other gets reviewed by video-game websites, underneath flashing web-ads touting the number of polygons in 50 CENT: BLOOD IN THE SAND; then, if other Grant Morrison comics are any indication, gets discussed endlessly, ENDLESSLY by blogs, comment threads, obsessive-compulsives, argued over, flamed, dismissed, over-praised, ridiculously over-praised, sickeningly over-praised, oh god enough already over-praised, annotated, footnoted, cross-referenced, and finally re-reviewed upon release of an ABSOLUTE ULTIMATE JIZZ-BOMB EDITION. Cue: streamers, should old acq-uaint-ances be forgot, vomit, and ... scene. WELCOME TO AMERICA!

Red states, blue states, yooks, zooks, fuck it-- and yet: setting all of that aside, substantively? Substantively? Dude, same fucking story! Same exact fucking story in both comic books.

What is that exactly? Both books, hitting most of the Top 10 lists as mentioned above. Both books striking a chord. Why's a story about the fantasy lives of boring characters hitting a chord in both the "mainstream" and the "arthouse"? Why was 2010 this year in Walter Mittys? Or why do you figure two major comic creators, from what has become two different Comics-- why do you think they both found themselves on such similar creative terrain?

* * *

... You want to do those questions...? Nah. It's been done. Yeah: let's not do those questions.

I mean, we could go that way, but bo-ring. Cue me making some lame jokes about unemployment figures, end with a sappy, melodramatic finish, high-five, and cue youtube video. Eh. It's just been done. Bad economy, shitty lives, quiet desparation, blah blah blah-- that'd be too boring no matter how naked I get (e.g. completely). I'm sure I'll do that sort of thing again, and soon, because I am a one-trick fucking pony, but ... let's not start a new year that way, at least. Hopefully that sort of talk is just 2010 shit anyways.

So, instead: setting aside the why, how do you figure the right and wrong of the story that's being told here?

I would argue the fun part of X'ED OUT, the part that certainly sold me on the book when I read the reviews, were the Tintin sequences, not watching Wiley Wiggins's uneventful journey through some minor strata of the performance art world. Same thing with JOE THE BARBARIAN: the fun parts is watching Sean Murphy draw his fantasy universe, and its pop culture inhabitants-- monsters, cameos, pop culture, invention.

The fun of the Story is thus arguably rooting for debilitating diabetes / nebulous-head-trauma. If I have a complaint with X'ED OUT: not enough head trauma. I did not get $20 worth of head trauma from that comic-- I think reviews have maybe way oversold how much head trauma is in that comic. The ratio of shitty-hipsters to Tintin way, way favored the former, for my tastes. The Tintin stretches that reviewers have trumpeted are concentrated at the beginning of the comic and at the end of the comic, and there is a long middle of not-Tintin inbetween the two. So, I for one hope the main character's physical condition deteriorates significantly in future volumes so we can dance the dance what brought me.

I really hope that the main characters spend less time in reality, and if that means watching the little generic brat from JOE THE BARBARIAN die or Cobrasnake's pool boy from X'ED OUT going into a coma, so be it! Entertain me, disease-- anything but more drawings of icky old reality.

... What?

* * *

Okay, no:  nothing in X'ED OUT explicitly states, "It's a good thing to go into a fantasy universe rather than face the cruelty of reality." If anything, X'ED OUT suggests the opposite, suggests the main character deserved the brain trauma.

The Long Middle is about the comic's main character creating a second fantasy universe for himself, one the reader doesn't see on the page, but one I'd figure more of the population will grok than the Tintin sequences: the brain trauma seems to be the result of the main character having created an elaborate fantasy in his head concerning his romantic interest, a Quiet Fucked-Up Girl-- a fantasy which has nothing to do with the reality of how awful she is.

Okay; sure; I can check that box on my W-2. Good times. The main character's fantasy version still seems to be trapped in a "I'll Save Her" fantasy, too, which... Oh, brother.

The only thing we're told about the Quiet Fucked Up Girl is that she's a cutter whose hobbies include violent ex-boyfriends and sadomasochism-- so, good luck with all of that, Peter Brady's tennis coach. Maybe placing her next to the personality vacuum that is the main character has a fun-house mirror effect, which makes her seem worse than she is. But the main character's romantic pining that goes on for her, especially watching him selectively create memories of their relationship using old photographs (noooooo! no, Patrick Fugit's black swan, no!), for me, that was all like watching a girl with a healthy interest in sex for her age wander into the woods in a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie. It's the creepiest thing in a comic otherwise full of cycloptic lizardmen, midgets-in-diapers, and maggots.

The comic even suggests the main character's dad is broken the same way-- I liked that part. And that cover-- a main character staring at a fantasy egg, with his hand to his heart suggesting a heart-ache that this fantasy image of femininity is causing him-- well, it's a little on the nose, but heck, it works.  (Or is his heart on the other side...?  Well, heart's actually in the center, but ... Whatever-- you get my point).

Maybe "the danger of becoming trapped in fantasies" is a generous reading of the book, though, a generous way of justifying why the lead female character in it is so underwritten. I suppose someone else could see that fact as a failing of the book-- here's another comic about how sex damages women and the travails of innocent boys with bad haircuts coping with that fact...? I don't think that charge would work with BLACK HOLE but it'd be easier to lay out at X'ED OUT's feet, the comic's contents being so thin to date. (God, I feel like I should be able to make a Belle & Sebastian joke here but-- I really don't pay enough attention to lyrics to make a Belle & Sebastian joke. The only thing I think about when I hear one of their songs is how awesome it'd be to date a girl in the LL Bean Catalog. Am I close? I think I'm probably pretty close).

Who knows? As much as my opinion about X'ED OUT has improved while writing about it, there's really just not enough comic here to really guess what it's going to ultimately add up to or say, making it feel a little silly to get especially enthusiastic over it. Unless you focus solely on the storytelling or what comic dudes have taken to call "mark-making" (and which I guess I still call drawing), where I'd rather defer to my betters. And regardless of the thematic contents, I think my original point holds:

If the best part of the book is the fantasy Tintin sequences, isn't there an inherent message being sent by the form regardless of the content?

* * *

As for JOE THE BARBARIAN... well...This being a blog entry about a Grant Morrison comic, I think I'm obligated by Blogger Code to act the fool by overdoing how much I read into his comics. So: let's talk about Grant Morrison, and since JOE's not done, and since I have attention disorders, BATMAN.

Not being into Morrison's BATMAN began to rankle. The internet loved them some Morrison BATMAN so I recently sat down finally last month, and read the damn thing (and/or re-read-- I'd dipped a toe in now and then, before, to poor results).

The good news: up until FINAL CRISIS, it mostly made sense, and Morrison's told an extremely straightforward story once the bigger shape of the thing comes into focus. Good? It has moments, good (JH Williams) and bad (when the Magical Negro stereotype shows up to give Batman a clock radio...? I didn't read your way-too-lengthy annotations, internet, so the significance of that Bagger Vance cameo was lost on me).

The bad news: I think Grant needs our help. There are a million pages of annotations for this comic on the internet, but... Have any of those annotations mentioned how this whole thing is a giant cry for help? Is that why all those annotations are so long?

If you'll agree with me that X'ED OUT is JOE THE BARBARIAN, BATMAN is basically the same story as THE INVISIBLES -- but written by a very different person. I mean, granted-- yes, the majority of his major work has been about the relationships between writers and the fictions they create. The Grant Morrison character is the author of ANIMAL MAN, the Chief is the author of the DOOM PATROL; NEW X-MEN climaxes with Jean Grey becoming the author; FINAL CRISIS has its Monitors; the same ideas are present for the FILTH, SEVEN SOLDIERS, maybe the 10th issue of ALL STAR SUPERMAN, etc.

But THE INVISIBLES and BATMAN are both specifically about writers who become trapped within their fictions. Same story. The differences, though, between the two are stark and sad.

THE INVISIBLES is about a writer Ragged Robin who becomes trapped within her story, and the story climaxes with the characters of this fiction uniting to free her, and thus themselves from the fiction they're all trapped in. That idea is found elsewhere in the work, as well-- most effectively at the end of Volume 2, where King Mob walks away finally from the spy persona he'd trapped himself in and blows up a Bruce Wayne figure's mansion in order to free that character of his fictions.

THE INVISIBLES was a comic about the prisons our fictions can be-- the prison of fictions of racial identity, sexual identity, and most of all, the prison of the the fiction of good and evil. Similarly, the crux of Morrison's BATMAN story also arises from a suspicion of the power of fiction, but ... goes a different way with it..

Morrison's BATMAN is about a writer, Batman, who becomes trapped in a book he's written, the "Black Casebook." This book leads to his ... well, not his death, but to Batman punching a helicopter at the end of BATMAN RIP, which then in turn leads to his "death" in FINAL CRISIS. Specifically, the Batman is confronted by the god of evil, shoots said god of evil in the head, which in turn somehow (?) helps to cause the god of evil to be hit by his own evil powers which are steered into him by two characters both named the Flash who dress identically, all of which somehow (?) lead to Superman singing the god of evil away, which in turn... something about Superman fighting a space vampire outside of space-time, which relates somehow to the events of a 3-d spin-off mini-series that I still have never read...? I don't know. Ask the internet; internet fucking loves the space-vampire; I'm probably missing out.

(I should pause for those few of you who don't pay attention to the current state of mainstream comics; just Mickey Mouse elementary stuff for the rest of you, rest of you can skip this part, but just in case: many if not most of the critically lauded mainstream comics of the moment are indecipherable unless you read usually-terrible "multi-title crossovers"-- people may recommend the current runs of CAPTAIN AMERICA, IRON MAN, or BATMAN to you, but unless you're also willing to read CIVIL WAR, SECRET INVASION, SIEGE or FINAL CRISIS-- there's really no point as major plot points will just appear and disappear at random from those works. Morrison at least has the advantage of having been the author of the multi-title crossover that thoroughly derails his BATMAN run, though this is small comfort, because as set forth above, his series required you to read other series, which in turn required me to take off my clothes. Of course, it's all some kind of sick, black joke that this has happened AFTER mainstream comics finally began to become collected into convenient collected editions and sold in bookstores to casual audiences, or that the authors of the multi-title crossovers have usually been writers who themselves benefited from not having their major runs interfered with previously, but... unfortunately, not a joke that's remained funny over the last five to six years and counting that companies and creators have pursued this scorched-earth strategy. But: Short-Term Strategies, For the Long-Term-- that's on the crest).

Anyways, Batman's "death" then leads to his rebirth in THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE miniseries, which climaxes in Batman being presented with a choice by the warring gods of evil and knowledge between non-existence and existence. In choosing existence, Batman then himself becomes the author of Batman which is signified by Batman hand-writing a critical moment from his origin story. The comic concludes immediately after Batman again becomes an author, for what I think is at that point the fourth time in Morrison's run. The adventure now continues in BATMAN INC. where Batman drags schlubby Japanese guys away from their girlfriends and into his grubby, violent fictions. (Indeed, Batman is now only a writer but a modern mainstream comics writer, insisting we read spin-offs of lame characters no one really wants to read when they could be reading about Batman instead. Schlubby Japanese Guy is Brother Voodoo to Batman's Whoever-the-Hell-Thought-the-Audience-Wanted-More-Brother-Voodoo).

So.

On the one hand, we have THE INVISIBLES where evil is an illusion, and our heroes triumph by freeing the author of the harsh fictions that imprison them. I'd suggest this is a valuable story, as the fiction of good and evil continues to be a dominant motivation for war, racism, etc. But instead, on the other hand, we have BATMAN, where evil is a dark omnipresent force of the universe that the author can only defeat by submerging themselves completely into a ridiculous fiction.

And I don't understand that difference other than to just guess that something sad has happened. The more you skim the extremely-lengthy annotations (no interest in condensing stuff down, guys?  Really?), or investigate the comic, the worse the picture that emerges of the Morrison BATMAN-- long stretches of dialogue that apparently repeat obscure Silver Age Batman comics, interview excerpts that reference bizarre, pointless plans to "make sense" of a wildly inconsistent publication history, micro-details like red-black motifs that apparently arise out of two or three pages of the long-forgotten DC UNIVERSE #0 one-shot; one annotation-- I'm sorry but I don't remember which-- puzzled over whether a character's name was a micro-reference to the fucking giant penny in Batman's cave(!).

Even to the extent the themes I'm talking about here are all intentional, this doesn't really sound healthy, any of this. Granted, *I'm* asking about what's *healthy behavior* on the *internet*, but...

Still: it don't.

However much his BATMAN run might have concluded in some bizarre out-of-nowhere affirmation of friendship, it's such a lonely comic. It's not difficult to read the BATMAN annotations and imagine Morrison himself as no longer King Mob, but become Ragged Robin-- trapped now, trapped by his career, trapped by a DC Universe he's wished "alive," trapped in a room with old Silver Age comics, gone sad trying to figure out how he can get them to make sense. THE INVISIBLES was about authors and fictions, but it was also about music, poverty, ex-girlfriends, and poetry. BATMAN is about Batman, wall-to-wall Batman, a black hole of Batman that life can't escape. Earlier iterations of the Morrison Public Persona talked about drugs, travel, jeet kune do; modern era Morrison Public Persona writes silly, angry screeds about how bad comic fans on the internet are in the back of Mark Waid comics. Get off his lawn, kids! (On the Savage Critic scale, I'd put Morrison's letter column rants about the internets as OKAY, because I did like the Phantom Zone shout-out at least, which places him slightly ahead of Matt Fraction's much vaguer letter column rant about the internet, which I'd rank as EH, but both obviously, way, way behind Dan Slott telling that one dude to Fuck Off, which I'd put at VERY GOOD, probably the best thing of Dan Slott's I've ever read. 2011: this site is going to rank the shit out of everything this year!)

So, regardless of how JOE THE BARBARIAN turns out, it kind of doesn't matter for me because-- because I've read Morrison comics since goddamn high school, he's meant just the world to me since then, and something's just not right here, guys. I mean, I don't know what all this adds up to, but: instead of annotating every panel of his next comic book, could somebody maybe please instead take the guy dancing?

* * *

Retreating into a fantasy universe-- well, we probably all had our reasons to do that sort of thing in 2010 (and/or every year before that, if you're anything like me). But damnit, it's a new year, and it can be a new start-- New Year's is my favorite holiday; no other holiday is so hopeful. It's an entire holiday based upon irrational hopes-- I love every second of it. I love it to death. Fuck Halloween, fuck Christmas, fuck Thanksgiving: if you're a fan of those, that's fine, good for you, but what I'm saying is-- New Year's. Maybe my favorite comic in 2011 will be that one where the girl goes to Israel. I don't know-- that's supposed to be a good comic-- maybe that happens; who knows what this year has in store for us? Maybe the next volume of X'ED OUT, the main character gets a haicut, and goes to Israel and he becomes best friends with that girl, and learns about seashells or how telescopes were invented, and re-discovers how great reality is. That'd be a great comic-- no one would see that plot twist coming.

And maybe that can happen for you or I, too. 2011 can be that year for any one of us.  I mean, whatever the right or wrong, we create these fantasies, and sure, they damage us, but what's the alternative but to go back for more, shit-eating grin, hat in hand, once that new year comes around?  All we need is a barber, some plane tickets, and maybe some Judaism. All things well within our reach. This can be the year you grab for those dreams.

2011: The Year We Desperately Grab at Judaism Because None of this Other Shit Is Working Anymore.

2011: The Year We Make a Brand New Very Best Friend.

2011: Clothing optional.

2011: This is What the Fantasy Universe Inside My Head Looks Like, and I Go There Once a Year, No Brain Trauma Necessary.

But it really can happen!

Graeme on X-Men: Ce n'est pas un événement comique

As above, so below: I've told you about my guilty pleasure of the year already, and now it's time for its opposite number: The book I kept buying, just out of dread curiosity and something indefinable: X-MEN. Or, to use its subtitle, X-Men: Curse Of The Mutants. Or, to use the title it should've had, X-Men: No, Seriously, What The Hell Is This. You may remember, before this series launched, such solicitation promises as "Why have vampires targeted the mutant population? And who's the jaw-dropping new member of the X-Men? The answers to these questions will dramatically alter the Marvel Universe" and "The Curse of The Mutants leaves the X-Men forever scarred!" And, having read the six issue core storyline in full now, I have to say: I think I might be the one scarred from this experience.

It's not so much that the series is bad, because it's not - It's just that it's also not good, or even okay. It's barely there, a void with a trace of lackadaisical contract fulfillment all the way through it. Even allowing for the traditional hyperbole of hype that surrounds any new project launch, X-Men is a staggering disappointment considering what was promised: Yes, Paco Diaz's art is nice enough, but the story... the story... Well, let's start by answering those questions from the solicit, shall we?

Why have vampires targeted the mutant population? Because Dracula's son - who's now in charge of all the vampires, having killed his dad off in an earlier comic that really should've been part of this run, but isn't because, hey, it's comics - wants them to team-up against the humans or something. I'm not entirely sure what his plan actually is, and it never really gets properly explained beyond "You're a minority! We're a minority! We're the same! As long as you ignore that we're undead and want to destroy humanity, but details!"

Who's the jaw-dropping new member of the X-Men? No-one. I think this bears repeating: No-one joins the X-Men during the course of this story. Sure, Blade comes along and helps out, but joining the team? Not so much. Maybe jaws were supposed to drop because it didn't happen. Anyway, he's gone by the end of the sixth issue.

Oh, and here's an extra one: What about the Marvel Universe has been dramatically altered as a result of this storyline? Nothing. In fact, let's be completely honest: Beyond Jubilee being turned into a vampire, the only thing that this storyline did was undo the death of Dracula and rise to power of Dracula's previously unknown son Xarius, which only happened a month before X-Men #1 came out. So, instead of dramatically altering the Marvel Universe, this storyline actually restored the status quo, more or less. "Dramatic!"

I can't help but think that this storyline was rewritten somewhere along the line, maybe in response to it not really having the sales and/or fan impact that it was supposed to. Part of that is due to that whole "restoring the status quo" thing, but it's also because I'd like to give Victor Gischler the credit for not having always planned to have what should've been a large scale set-piece (The amassed vampire army attacking the X-Men's floating island base) happen, essentially, off-panel. Or, for that matter, plot devices like "We remote-control switched off Wolverine's healing power so that he could become a vampire and now that he is a vampire, we're remote-control switching his healing power back on and look! He's normal again and he'll kill all the vampires! Off panel!"

I may be too kind in giving Gischler that credit, mind you; there's a lot happening off-panel throughout this storyline, not least of which the death of Dracula and recovering of his body, both of which happen in other comics altogether, despite being fairly central to the plot here. Never mind the fact that, after he's brought back to life by the X-Men, Dracula pretty much leaves the book until he shows up to take command of the vampires again, which - par for the course here - happens without much drama or reason to be interested. That's a weird hallmark of the six issues here: Everything that you feel should have some level of dramatic tension, interest or whatever just... happens. Sure, there may be some posturing from one or more of the characters, but there's never any excitement or resolution or anything that the reader actually gets to experience. In six whole issues.

(The resolution of the storyline is actually a great example of this: Having slaughtered the vampire army off-panel in the previous issue, the X-Men go all out to attack the vampire stronghold to rescue Jubilee. Once they get there, they break in, off-panel, fight off the guards, off-panel, and by the time they get to Dracula and his cronies, there's a stare-off before Dracula gives Jubilee back to the X-Men. The only action to be seen is Cyclops knocking Blade out - with an eye-beam to the back, weirdly enough - to stop him from attacking Dracula. Because, of course, the X-Men have no issue with Dracula, they had a problem with his son, who's now dead. The end.)

There's a certain futility in being disappointed in a superhero event comic for failing to live up to its hype; it's like being annoyed when the sun sets every evening, after all. But Curse of The Mutants does more than just fail to live up to its hype: It's almost entirely disconnected to the hype, not only failing to answer the questions from the hype (or, really, even acknowledging them. Was the solicit written based on plans that changed in the writing? I guess so) but failing to offer anything to replace those questions. I couldn't tell you why I bought all six issues of this storyline - Part of it was a car-crash quality, I admit, part of it was wondering if it would ever actually go anywhere close to the pre-release hype, but beyond that...? I have no idea. Inertia? Masochism? - but now that they're over, I have no idea whether I feel like it's been a waste of time and money, or a strangely hypnotic example of accidental zen anti-event comics. Let's be safe and just say that they're Awful, shall we?

Graeme's 2010 Guilty Pleasure: Justice League of America

Apropos of nothing, I re-read James Robinson's run to date on JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA over the weekend - in part because I hadn't read the latest issue by that point, and wanted to remind myself of what was happening before I did - and, as I did so, I realized two things. Firstly, it's actually a book that I've come to really love, despite itself. And secondly, I can completely understand why that "despite itself" might be such a problem for everyone else. Let's get this out of the way first of all: Robinson's JLA is very, very different from his Justice League: Cry For Justice. It's not as overwrought or, thankfully, as overwritten, and tonally it's much lighter and more constructive than the mini that preceded it. In fact, one of the things that I like about it is how much it's contributed to the DCU, whether it's a new German superteam (The Elite Guard, who are apparently using repurposed Rocket Red technology) or a new magical society on the dark side of the moon, ruled by the golden age Green Lantern. He's also brought in STAR Labs for the first time in a long time, it seems like, and uses forgotten or underused characters like Naiad, Josiah Power or Sebastian Faust in a way that feels less like Easter Egg cameos but something more organic, and I really enjoy that - That he makes JLA into a book that's somehow bigger than the team itself, and more of a book about the DC Universe.

It's something that spills into the story arcs, which skew towards the epic wherever possible: Something is destroying the multiverse! Something is causing all the people with environmental superpowers to go insane! There's an ambition to what Robinson's trying to do, and it really appeals to me. So much so, in fact, that it allows me to overlook the (admittedly, fairly obvious) problems with the book. For one thing, there's the scattered nature of the plotting - Less so now, thankfully, but the first six issues of Robinson's run was marked by some amazingly disjointed plots and two complete overhauls to the team's line-up, one happening midway through the third issue of the new line-up and essentially happening off-panel with little explanation. Presumably, a lot of that was editorially mandated (Even if some of it makes little sense: Cyborg was seemingly written out to go... nowhere?), and a plot that started his run took two issues off before continuing for three issues before disappearing for another six issues.

There's also the issue of the art. JLA has been a book that's historically never really worked artistically for me since maybe Adam Hughes' JLI run way back when (with the exception of Doug Mahnke's art in the last run), and viewed in that continuum, Mark Bagley's art is definitely better than Ed Benes' or Howard Porter: Characters are in proper human proportion, and page layouts are clear and understandable. But - and this may be inking, in part - there's a generic quality to the faces, and everyone looks about seventeen years old. Which, you know, works great on Ultimate Spider-Man, but not so much here. Things aren't likely to get better with Bagley's departure, as Brett Booth - one of the few comic artists whose work I'd honestly classify as ugly - is set to take over as regular penciller. I hope it'll surprise me, but I'm not holding my breath.

I know that I should classify JLA as a guilty pleasure: I'm well aware that it has large flaws, but there's something about its spirit and ambition, about its sense of fun, that makes me love it nonetheless. Much like the equally-flawed-yet-addictive X-Men Forever, it's something that I find myself looking forward to, and wanting more of as soon as I'm finished with each issue. Objectively, I know that it's probably only Okay, but for whatever reason, I wouldn't feel right calling it any less than Good.

Coming up next: My 2010 Guilty Non-Pleasure.

Assessing the Bat-line as 2010 ends

(I really wanted to title this with a "NaNaNaNaNaNaNaNa", but thought it was too soon after Graeme's Flash joke last post)

What is kind of awesome about Batman is just how infinitely malleable he is as a character -- not every single note hits all of the time, but for the most part Batman can be a grim avenger of the night, or a smiling Pop-infused Caped Crusader; he can fight lunatic gangsters, or space aliens; he can call Robin "Chum", or he can say "-tt-" a lot. He can be a pirate and a cowboy and a knight and a superhero and... well it seems like there's very little Batman can't become, under the right hands (witness the 47-million different "Elseworlds" books -- Batman fits more of them, better, than ol' Clark does)

In comics, Grant Morrison seems to get this pretty well -- and, in a way, his entire run of recent Batman comics has been a way to embrace all of the disparate versions of the character over the year (it is almost as if this is an inversion of Alan Moore's famous line about "this is an imaginary story. But aren't they all?" with a "these are all true stories, regardless of the source of that imagination"), and he makes it explicit with the debut of BATMAN, INC. which very nearly makes Batman into Captain Universe ("The Hero Who Could Be You!")

(Though let me also underline the "Batman: the Brave & the Bold" cartoon also has this "it's all true!" sensibility, which works crazy better than you thought it would as a cartoon...)

As I said before, a whole lot of the eventual success of this model is going to fall on creators whose initials don't invoke a car company, there has to be a certain amount of cohesion at the center, but I thought it was worth a look at the batfamily of titles as a (semi-) whole as we reach the last month of 2010.

BATMAN: THE RETURN: Let's start with this one because it is a clear enough demarcation point. This is the one-shot that "bridges" "The Return of Bruce Wayne" to "Batman, Inc.", but to me, it was a pretty blah, nothing cash-grab of a comic that added really nothing whatsoever to understanding of what's going on. In fact, the only thing I found memorable about it, two weeks after having read it was that GM kinda inverted the dead-brilliant eight-word summation of Superman's origin from ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #1 in taking the original "I shall Become A Bat!" and stretching it out over a half-dozen-ish pages. Yeah, that kind of summarizes what I thought of this comic overall, really:  Stretched out. and pretty AWFUL, really.

(This does give me a great place, however, to link to Colin Smith's fairly brilliant takedown of JMS'" Superman Earth One" via comparing it to GM's "ASS" in four parts:

http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/2010/11/making-sense-of-straczynski-daviss.html

http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/2010/11/truth-what-straczynski-daviss-superman.html

http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/2010/11/stick-together-what-straczynski-daviss.html

http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/2010/11/brain-beats-brawn-what-straczynski.html

...enjoy!)

BATMAN, INC. #1: Yeah, this is what the Bat needs to be relevant in the 21st century -- a million possible Batmen, of all cultures, and styles. On paper, this is the best idea for Batman in years. As an actual first issue of a comic it was solidly GOOD, though I don't think we're really going to be able to judge this too much until we have 3 or 4 arcs done and we see where it gets taken. But I really liked the interplay between Bruce and Selina, and I especially liked the call-back to the 1960s Batman TV show in the "next issue" space (much like Geoff Johns really smart "this year in..." bits in THE FLASH and ADVENTURE and whatever). I want more, and that's the most important bit.

BATMAN #704: Tony Daniel does a good enough job with the "main" bat-book, even introducing a few new characters (one of which might stick, maybe?), but I can't say there's anything in there that made me think "more, now!". I'll go with OK

DETECTIVE #871: Scott Snyder and Jock tackle the "flagship" book, with a focus on Dick's Batman. It's a bit grim and atmospheric for what I want from a Dick Grayson comic -- I kind of want Dick to be the Laughing Daredevil Batman, rather than mini-Bruce -- but I certainly liked it enough to want to read more. Solidly GOOD.

BATMAN & ROBIN #17: The book that was started FOR GM, that's continuing without him. I'm not so sure how I feel about this, really, because at this point it kind becomes "yet another Bat-book" -- this book needs to find a hook, and find it fast. Having said that, Paul Cornell and Scott McDaniel turn in a decent enough job here, with a pretty interesting new Oddball Villain.. like I said, this book just needs to find it's own unique Hook. A low GOOD.

BATWOMAN #0: Well, not batman, per se, but probably the book I'm most looking forward to besides INC. Rucka did a pretty astonishing job in making Kate a well-rounded character, and I want more. This "zero issue" doesn't have much meat to it, really, but it sure was an attractive 16 pages. On the other hand: only 16 pages of story content, foo. I'll go with OK because of that.

BATMAN STREETS OF GOTHAM #17: Ostensibly a bat-book, but really it's the Hush comic. Which might be alright if this "Hey, he stole Bruce's face!" plot actually tied in at all to anything else that's going on in the bat titles. I don't know, I never thought Hush was much more than a decent McGuffin at best, but this doesn't seem like enough to hang a series on, and I pretty don't much care what happens next. EH.

BATGIRL #15: One thing these low issue numbers all clumped together makes me think of: man, they just basically rebooted Batman  in the last year and a half, didn't they? This one is fairly cute and charming, and absolutely weightless. I don't care, but I don't not care, y'know? OK

RED ROBIN #17:  Here's another book desperately in desperate need of a premise. The problem is it was launched on "Tim believes Bruce is alive, and this is his quest" and now that Bruce is back... well, what does this book exist for? It isn't bad or anything... just kinda pointless. I sort of think Tim either needs to become a Bat himself, or to become an "uber-Robin" of some sort that, dunno, finds and trains new Robins? But I'm-dealing-with-dangling-plotlines-and-am-not-inherently-compelling-myself thing? Not going to work in the mid- or long-term. EH.

BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #??: I couldn't tell you. It's dropped into "subs only" sales here, feeling like the place when spoiled inventory went to die. I have a mildly hard time seeing this last another year... unless they really have that much inventory to burn off these days. INCOMPLETE

SUPERMAN/BATMAN #78: Also a book that feels driftless and only there for completionists. Constantly changing creative teams and premises doesn't help either. Without a singular and focused creative team this one should probably be retired, too.

Nor did I read the latest AZRAEL (and neither are you, as far as I can tell!) or GOTHAM CITY SIRENS, but I don't really consider either of those "bat" books, myself.

How are YOU feelin' the bat-reboot?

-B

Aaaaa-ahhhh! Hesavedeveryoneofus! Graeme Gets Dastardly With The Flash

I promise, I wasn't really looking for a pun to start this off, but this one was unavoidable. With the sixth issue finally out a couple of weeks ago, I finally had a chance to sit down and re-read THE FLASH #1-6, only to realize that Geoff Johns let the story run away from him early on, and couldn't quite catch up. Get it...? "Run away... from... him..."? Oh, okay; I'll just say what I mean, then. I'd hoped, before re-reading, that the weird disjointed feeling that'd plagued me reading these issues as they came out would, if not disappear, then be lessened by the experience of getting everything in one sitting, watching all the pieces fall into place without months of waiting in between. But instead, the opposite happened; it seemed to become more obvious that the pacing of "The Dastardly Death of The Rogues!" is really badly off, and for reasons that don't seem apparently obvious. Reading the first four issues in particular evoke a strange feeling of deja vu: Wait, didn't we see the Flash spend a few pages performing what should be a visually impressive feat of superspeed before being confronted by the time-traveling Renegade Task Force last issue? The plot doesn't really get going until the series' fourth issue, at which point there's at least enough of a premise put forth that we finally get some forward motion. The problem then becomes that it's a fake out - Essentially, the entire arc is a series of "What if this happens? Only joking! Here's something unexpected interrupting to make sure that the cliffhanger isn't really followed up on!" delays and false starts; insert your own "Who'd've thought The Flash would have trouble getting up momentum?" jokes here - and the resolution to the plot gets pretty much squashed into the final chapter, where it becomes unconvincing and, because it not only ends with foreshadowing for Flashpoint next year but also doesn't really address the McGuffin that took up the last half of the story, pretty unfulfilling.

Not helping, sadly, is Francis Manapul's art which is lush, attractive, beautiful and entirely wrong for the series. This isn't a dig at Manapul, whose work I really do like; it's just that his attempts at the large-scale spectacular action scenes never seem to ring true to me, and instead, I find myself drawn to his quieter moments - which he himself seems to enjoy himself, it seems. I can't quite say what would work as a speedster style for me, but Manapul's brushwork and toned art seems more leisurely, more relaxed and at odds with the non-stop, impatient world that we're supposed to believe Central City has become.

The annoying thing is, there's actually a lot to like about The Flash, when taken out of context: I like the Barry and Iris relationship, the concepts behind a lot of the new status quo (That Barry will, by his actions, teach the forensics department the value of taking their time and valuing their jobs, for example. Or that people in Central are generally pushy and impatient), and Manapul's art. But none of it has managed to really come together in a way that works for me, yet. It's sad; I like Johns' work, normally, and had high hopes for this series after his short run with Manapul in Adventure Comics, but based upon the first arc, The Flash is a high Eh, or Okay at best. Here's hoping for better in future issues.

Abhay: MOVING PICTURES.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: First of all, for those of you reading this on the 11th of November, Happy Veteran's Day, and thanks to our nation's veterans for the sacrifices they've made.  This essay... wasn't written with Veteran's Day in mind-- it just happened that I got this done this evening.  It's not really ABOUT the sacrifices veterans have made but World War II does come up in a fashion, so... If you're especially sensitive about veteran's issues today, you know-- put this one away for a day, and come back to it later.  I apologize at the outset if anyone who's served finds this in bad taste.  But enjoy your day and sincerely, we all thank you again for your service. Okay.  So.

MOVING PICTURES by Kathryn & Stuart Immonen was published by Top Shelf earlier this year and has been nagging at me since I read it back when.  That book is a starting point for, you know, some chit-chat which you can find under the jump.

*1: The "Review"*

Initially released as a webcomic, MOVING PICTURES is a slim novel about a Canadian woman in Nazi occupied Paris, being interrogated by a Nazi officer with whom she is having a sexual relationship in order to survive. The interrogation, in part, touches upon the true story of efforts to hide significant art from the Nazis, who intended to loot Paris of its artistic treasures.  The story is about gradually understanding the motivations of this woman and her struggle to remain emotionally alive in the midst of this historic turbulence.  The characters are depicted with hard angular lines, anything soft about them having been scraped away by historical events, leaving dot eyes, ruler-straight noses; bleak backgrounds are frequently rendered in silhouette, a Paris so drained of life that all artistic detail has been stripped away.

It's a pleasant enough book, if you haven't read it. I don't know if I'd go much beyond pleasant. It's a classy book, is what it is, classy enough to like, but maybe too classy to actually love...?  It's more character study, than drama, more focused on Betrayal and People Using One Another, than in explaining any details of the war or the occupation-- it may be the case that I just tend to be more interested in the latter.  Also, by design, the frigid main character doesn't make it easy for the reader to make a real emotional connection with the material-- though I will say that it was a much more interesting book after a re-read, once I'd understood  the character's motivations, if that helps, if you're the sort of reader inclined to re-read.

An argument could be made, though, that its "classiness" betrays the subject matter.  Other than heavy blacks on a few of the drawings, the occupied Paris depicted in MOVING PICTURES ... It doesn't seem an especially rough place to live.  The main character references a missing man-- "Things just seem to dissappear.  Even the man I used to buy bread from every morning.  Just gone."-- but... That's it?  I suppose I always imagined the Holocaust being a terrible experience for more reasons other than it making it difficult to obtain a decent quantity of gluten in my diet.  Shit: I need to cut down on my carbs.  I'm trying to diet.  Fewer carbs?  Sign me up for Nazi Occupied Paris.  As long as there are almonds.  I'm on the Miss Eating Shitty Food and Pretend To Not Miss It by Eating Almonds like a Goddamned Nitwit diet.  It's fantastic.  Loving life.

Who knows, though?  There was a famous, somewhat controversial photography exhibit a few years ago of the good times the French had in occupied France-- women in bikinis, shopping customers, crowded nightclubs. I doubt that's any more "true" than any relentlessly bleak portrayal either, but...

For those more interested in the visceral pleasures of genre, there's not much here to derange the senses.  With the story being presented in a  stripped down cinematic style (i.e. all anyone is doing right now!!!), the book occasionally does resemble a movie you'd stumble across on TCM--  but the TCM version would have had some rewarding thrill to it somewhere.  Did you ever see GREEN FOR DANGER?  It's a British thriller set during the V-1 bombing attack on Britain, made in 1946-- pretty much with the war still as a fresh wound, and yet that movie had comedy, mystery, romance, this terrific jump scare.  I don't know.  There's a sort of Romantacizing of Tragedy that the privileged sometimes indulge in, the relentless bleak depiction of poverty being a classic example-- "We were too poor to purchase senses of humor."  That can be kind of its own dishonest flattery of the upper class audiences that tend to patronize that sort of entertainment, maybe.  Maybe.

All that being said, MOVING PICTURES is still an entirely pleasant book-- a sincere effort at adult work by comic creators usually working on much less interesting mainstream books.  I enjoyed how the book doles out information, bit by bit, how story information unravels as the main character's composure unravels.   And it's slim enough that it does manage to maintain some suspense for its entire duration.  I actually think it's a book that will end up being kind of a reference point for me in the future in a very unhealthy way, for arguments about webcomic release formats, or "Why can't other mainstream creators work in a book like MOVING PICTURES every couple years, in the middle of their non-stop onslaughts of mediocrity?"  That sort of thing. Gasoline for arguments I shouldn't be making, but will anyways on account of being an ass.  Merry Christmas to me.

*2:  War-- What Is It Good For?*

But gosh: World War II.  You know?  World War II and comic books.

As early as 1941, Captain America is punching out Hitler...

The Joe Kubert collection-- "The Unknown Soldier is not dead-- He is one of us!"

Jack Kirby and Sgt. Fury; Kirby and the Losers. Wikipedia: "Kirby recalled that a lieutenant, learning that comics artist Kirby was in his command, made him a scout who would advance into towns and draw reconnaissance maps and pictures."  Jack Kirby comics killed fascists.

Into the 60's-- Warren's BLAZING COMBAT, say.  And on and on from there.

British comics, too.  COMMANDO, say...

Factor in movies.  Factor in video games.

Factor in Republican Party cosplayers.

Factor all of that in, and then reconsider MOVING PICTURES, a serious character drama... but one set during a war that's been turned into a cartoon.

Just think about Hitler.  Hitler went from being one of history's all-time crappiest guys to, per Godwin's Law, a Bogeyman of Conversations on the Internet.  "Hitler basically murdered the entire gypsy population of Eastern Europe, plus also, he's a good sign that the Television Without Pity thread for the latest episode of BLEEP MY DAD SAYS is headed South...?"  STRIKE TWO, HITLER!

I've killed roughly 5.2 zillion videogame Nazis over the years.  I've seen Nazis stabbed with knives and flags, exploded by grenades, rockets, and mortars, shot by pistols, machine guns, and tanks, melted by Arks of the Covenant.  I've watched Jim Brown pour gasoline and grenades onto Nazis while Telly Savalas butchered Nazi hookers.  If you include Illinois Nazis, I've also seen Nazis get into some pretty damn hilarious car accidents.

How much of my reaction to MOVING PICTURES was tainted by that?  Can I still have a reasonable reaction to a serious drama with Nazis in it?  Can I take those characters as characters, instead of just signifiers of Ultimate Evil?

Dress someone up in one of those fancy-schmancy costumes and can you want anything for them but death?

There's a quote in that Greil Marcus book LIPSTICK TRACES, if you want to go there-- a quote  from Michael Ventura:

"Entertainment isn't a suspension of belief, but a suspension of values.  It may even be said that this is the meaning of 'entertainment' as it is practiced among us:  the relief of suspending values with which we are tired of living and frightened of living without."

It's a little disconcerting, the World War II thrill-power, if you stop to think that people actually died or whatever.  But that particular war, particularly World War II, is just so effective as this guilt-free playground for our own fantasies of violence. Regular fantasies of violence aren't really a relief, or at least we would normatively say that they shouldn't be. But violence against the Nazis?  That does seem somehow more legitimate.  Who's rooting for Nazis to live?  Oh, there may be some that would say, "Well, dehumanizing anybody tends to be bad news, and that's sort of one of the big lessons you really should try to take away from that particular conflict."  But I think mainstream thought is quite justifiably closer to:  Fuck Nazis.  I think that's honestly where I come out. Consider the words of Albert Einstein:  "I loathe all armies and any kind of violence; yet I'm firmly convinced that at present these hateful weapons offer the only effective protection."  Or Mike Tyson:  "I want to kill people. I want to rip their stomachs out and eat their children."

I don't know, though. Does it interfere with your ability to appreciate what war actually is? Compare our entertainment that concerns WWII to entertainment that concerns the prequel, WWI.  Think for a second about Jacques Tardi's IT WAS THE WAR OF THE TRENCHES.  Now, let's note from the outset what an unfair comparison this is-- IT WAS THE WAR OF THE TRENCHES is a long-recognized masterpiece, just this year translated and released in Fantagraphics lavish hardcover Tardi line.  And it lives up to the hype-- even setting aside it's strengths as a story, man, the mud in that book:  Has mud ever looked quite so muddy in comics?  But setting all that aside, any sort of qualitative judgments, the presentation of war in TRENCHES is unmistakable:  Tardi's World War I is an indefensible crime, a cruel waste, the worst insanity of man regardless of which side of the conflict you were born on.

How do you wrap your arms around that?  War is war is war, but one remains horrifying while the other is the setting for HOGAN'S HEROES. How did that happen, exactly?

If WWI were The War to End All Wars, is World War II the War That Guarantees War for the Rest of Human Life?  Maybe more than any other, that was the war with BAD GUYS, which ... This being Veteran's Day, let's not get too political, so... That's maybe not always the case.  And so, games, movies, comics-- sure, of course, we want to never forget the sacrifices that were made, but... At least one way of looking at any depiction of World War II in those media is that they're arguably inherently good news for those interested in persuading future generations to risk life and limb for causes  where it's much, much harder to understand the right and wrong, and where the causes advanced may not be quite as worthy of the great sacrifice which is being asked.

*3:  The Creepy Part*

But MOVING PICTURES is not a violent comic-- there's not a drop of violence in the piece to be seen.  So "World War II as playground for violence fantasies"-- you might argue maybe that discussion isn't germane to MOVING PICTURES.  Okay, fine.  But if not violence, is there some other fantasy whose existence we might want to note in connection with this book?

Well.

The main character is a graceful woman with earnest goals forced into a sexual relationship with a Nazi.

So...

I mean-- look, I don't invent other people's fetishes, but... That kind-of is one for people out there.  And Nazi sex fantasies do kind-of seem to have a place in pop culture. I didn't see it, but that Kate Winslet Nazi-Titty movie THE READER, that was nominated for an Oscar, what, two-three years ago? Was that good?  I didn't see it but I saw that movie PRIVATE LESSONS once, which sounded similar, and hell, PRIVATE LESSONS was bad enough WITHOUT throwing the Holocaust in there, anywhere so....

Of course, for the more exploitative-minded, there are the nazi sexploitation epics, the Il Sadiconazista movies, which...

There was SALON KITTY, also known as MADAME KITTY:  "Tinto Brass' opulent epic film about a Nazi commander who overtakes the famous Salon Kitty brothel and packs it with new girls of good Aryan stock and impeccable National Socialist credentials. Their mission is to spy on their military officer clients and report back to their controllers about anyone who seems to be wavering from the Party line. The pubic-hair eating mutant from SS HELL CAMP also makes a surprise appearance in this film. [...] This was the second most successful of the Nazi Sexploitation films."

Or there's FRAULEINS IN UNIFORM, also conveniently known under the title FRAULEIN WITHOUT A UNIFORM, for audiences unappreciative of any subtlety in the titling of their Nazi smut:  "Swiss master of erotica, Erwin C. Deitrich presented this exploiter ... about women being recruited for "special assignment" by the Gestapo. ... [This] one goes light on the violence, but delivers plenty of naked chicks running around in battlefields as live shells explode around them. This bizarre flick is more offensive than other genre entries because the happy young recruits don't really get punished, and the Nazis aren't portrayed as bad guys! They just love sex and their Fuhrer!"

For more literate audiences, Taschen released a book of covers for post-war men's adventure fiction, MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES-- men's pulps mostly from the 50's and 60's.  Here are just a small selection of the cover-blurbs from the magazines featured:

• "HELPLESS MAIDENS OF THE NAZIS' TIMELESS CASTLES OF MADNESS AND HORROR"
• "TORTURED BEAUTIES OF HITLER'S PRINCE OF PAIN"
• "HELPLESS VIRGINS IN THE NAZIS' HARNESS OF TERROR"
• "A CRYPT IN HELL FOR HITLER'S PASSION SLAVES"
• "I DISCOVERED HITLER'S SECRET SIN GIRL CASTLE"
• "SOFT NUDES FOR HITLER'S DOCTOR HORROR"
• "STRIPPED VIRGINS FOR THE NAZIS' TORCH OF TORMENT"
• "TORTURED BEAUTIES FOR THE NAZI BLOOD CULT"
• "SOFT BODIES FOR THE NAZIS' HALL OF THE LIVING DEAD"
• "FETTERED NUDES FOR THE MONSTER'S COLLAR OF AGONY"
• "DAMNED BEAUTIES FOR THE NAZI HORROR MUSEUM"
• "SOFT FLESH FOR THE NAZIS' FANGED DOOM"
• "HITLER'S HIDEOUS HAREM OF AGONY"
• "THE TEENAGE NAZI SHE-WOLVES OF BERLIN"
• "YVONNE'S ORDEAL UNDER THE S.S. FLESH"
• "THE BELGIAN BEAUTIES IN THE NAZI MAD DOG PIT OF TERROR"
• "HOW THE NAZIS FED TANYA SEX DRUGS"

Those are only from a couple pages of this book, which is hundreds of pages long. Who was reading these stories?  The book suggests Ex-GIs, which is difficult to fathom. But if not them, who-- their kids?  "What was it like for dad in the war?  I know-- I'll read I DISCOVERED HITLER'S SECRET SIN GIRL CASTLE, and find out.  BEVERLY HILLS 90210 was right about you, library card!"

Oh, and of course, more recently, there was reality television star Jesse James, and the hysteria that ensued concerning (apparently false) rumors that he had, among his various well-publicized extra-curricular activities, made a dozen sex tapes with a "Nazi theme." Which sort of rhymes in a George Lucas kind of way with HOGAN'S HEROES star Bob Crane and his whole AUTOFOCUS party thing, those sex parties he filmed.  There was a time in this country when being the funniest guy in a concentration camp on television was a one-way ticket to Skank City.  That's just historical fact.

Personally, I suppose that I don't really get that connection, between Nazis and sex.  Who looks at an S.S. uniform and thinks, "Oh that reminds me... OF MY DICK"--?  Or I guess the more pertinent question it raises:  are there people fucking in Franco-Prussian War uniforms?  Why World War II and not any of the other conflicts in recorded history?  Vietnam, say:  Have you ever heard of pasty GOP dudes dressing up like Viet Cong?  Why have I never heard of Man in Black Pajamas erotic Republican cosplay parties?

But I guess it's just the usual character failing on my part.  I always want an explanation for other people's fetishes, even when the only explanation for my own weird shit is WHY WOULDN'T YOU LIKE THAT??  "Girl, dressed up like Huckleberry Hound, rolling around in spaghetti-- she knees me in the groin, cue me touching myself in a gentle but erotically insistent way.  Who wouldn't be super into that?  It's self-explanatory  And I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free, and I'd gladly STAND UP--"  Oh, Lee Greenwood-- you understand that boners are truly organs of mystery as much as organs of romance.  Only you and Angela Lansbury walk between those two worlds.

*4: The Grand Finale!*

A final thing, perhaps worth noting... again, at some risk-- welcome to my all flop sweat essay!... is how MOVING PICTURES feels sort of timely for geeks at the moment.  There is an aspect to MOVING PICTURES which is that... How much of the horror in MOVING PICTURES is the horror of woman forced to put up with sexual interest from a man she is not interested in?  As mentioned above, the horror of that situation is expressed in MOVING PICTURES perhaps to a greater degree even than the horror of being in Nazi-occupied Paris.  It's as palpable if not moreso a presence than the Holocaust.

And that horror feels sort of right now, sort of this year.

In comics, there was a recent flap where a webcomic creator politely expressed a distaste for creepy dudes telling her they wanted to put their creep-babies inside of her after one of her comics is released.  That itself echoed an earlier controversy this year in the videogame space, triggered by early reactions to the HEY BABY videogame, a third-person shooter that allowed women to murder men who cat-called to them on the street.  In each case the reaction of a particular sort of gentleman has been angrily flipping out so hard that multiple comment sections discussing the topics have had to be closed.

It's a very peculiar, kind of sad anger-- I guess because it always seems so wildly disproportionate to what actually is being  said. But it's also a very specific anger, and one I do have some sympathy to, one I'd suggest we're all probably equally susceptible to.  That anger the world is somehow lying by not conforming to our personal truth...? The anger when our fantasies of reality are shown to be untrue bullshit.  Whether it's a false understanding of reality based upon male privilege, or based upon some other fantasy-- Captain America punching Hitler, romantic love doomed by Nazi lust, that one about the pubic-hair eating monster (???), I suppose it is angering.  Sure, it is.  What an awful thing it is to wake up in a world where women identify you as a creep, Hitler went tragically un-punched, and where our great romantic loves as often as not reveal themselves to be ... uh, pubic-hair eating monsters (???).  And maybe that same anger lies, at least in some small part, at the root of any of the great conflicts worth talking about, whether wars between nations, class wars, wars of the sexes,  or wars on carbs, all the endless wars that will always be fought and will never be won.

Hibbs Galivants on 10/3

Six books from last week which I have something to say about (though, maybe nothing interesting!), below the jump!

BATMAN AND ROBIN #16: Say what you want about Morrison's Batman (some find it confusing), but he's pulled a very neat trick here at the end in adding to the character, expanding the possibilities of the franchise, and doing so in a way that doesn't invalidate anything before or (hopefully) after. I'm not sure that I can think of another run of a superhero book that so radically reinvents the premise of a character while zeroing-in on the core of the character so successfully. Well, no, maybe I can: Morrison's own DOOM PATROL run, maybe, or Moore's SWAMP THING (though that really isn't superhero, per se) -- I probably wouldn't put Morrison's ANIMAL MAN in that category though, because that was more about the meta, then Buddy Baker himself, per se. Either way, that little bombshell at the end of #16, which, presumably will be much expanded upon in the upcoming BATMAN, INC., is potentially a pretty big sea change for the Batman Mythos, and can, I suspect help keep the character relevant for a really long time.

The bigger question is how writers who don't have the initials "G.M." will fare with the concept. One thing that seems to happen with these kind of "sea changes" of the quo is that really only the originator knows just what do with it -- witness, say, post-Moore SWAMP THING. Veitch's run was terrific (but he was a Moore collaborator before that), but after that? No one whatsoever had a clue as to what to do with the "Earth Elemental" concept, and the grafting of the broader idea upon characters like Firestorm and Red Tornado turned out to have no legs whatsoever.

The difference, perhaps, in this case might lay in the "it's ALL true" framework Morrison has been constructing -- this move lets there be multiple versions and styles of Batman (I like Dick's "laughing Batman", personally), but if they each get as dull as the "average" Bruce-is story has been over the years, it isn't going to help very much.

Either way, this direction is fairly genius, and gives me more hope for the future of the character than anything, really, ever. EXCELLENT stuff.

DOOM PATROL #16: I think it might be worth noting that Keith Giffen actually illustrated this issue (is he the new ongoing penciller?), and that's just terrific. I'd pretty much forgotten how much I love his art. The story, with something or other about alternate universe versions of the DP wasn't anything special, but at least it was a pretty and compelling nothing special. I do want to note that I'm not so sure that the idea of writing out the Chief, after he'd just be written back in, was anything better than a meandering diversion (See? Kind of the Morrison problem, again), but I think this issue is well worth seeking out -- VERY GOOD.

GENERATION HOPE #1: Meh, I guess I get the desire to create the next new generation of X, but it strikes me that this worked much better as a background thread than as a premise for its own book. Plus, WTF was up with the completely blatant AKIRA rip-off? That made me want to never read this book again... EH.

SCARLET #3: the first two issues were fairly morally questionable (which is fine, seriously), but this one takes a sharp hard turn that veers closely into "repugnant". The measure of craft on display here means that I still liked it, but I'm questioning, in my own head, if this can go anywhere that I want to follow. Questioning is good, sometimes, though -- a solidly GOOD comic.

STRANGE TALES 2 #2: My first thought: if it didn't get in the way of his doing his "real" work, I'd be way way down with a monthly Marvel comic by the Hernandez brothers. I loved each and every inch of both Jaime and Gilbert's stories.

My second thought: WTF was up with that "Ghost Badge" story? I literally couldn't figure out why it was being published in this anthology, or what it had to do with Marvel comics. The fact it wasn't very good didn't help matters.

My third thought: isn't it really really deeply weird that "Alternative" cartoonists do a better job presenting a pretty much "all ages" Marvel comic than the "real" Marvel creators do?

Either way: this is some fine comics -- except for the Ghost Badge story, which drags the whole thing down to a mere VERY GOOD.

SUPERBOY #1: I don't know that I need or want a "Superboy" comic, but if we're going to have one, this would seem to be the way to do it -- Smallville-based, pretty fun, relatively teen-angsty. I thought this was a GOOD solid start.

As always, what did YOU think?

-B

Everything Keeps Happening: Graeme Catches Up On Brightest Day's First Half Year

So, now we're past the halfway point of BRIGHTEST DAY (#13 came out last week, and it's a 27 issue series, I think - That'll be the 26 announced issues, plus the #0 launch), and I feel like I'm less sure about what the series is actually about than I was three months ago. Okay, that's not exactly true; it's become clearer, over the last few issues, that the series is on some meta level, about rebuilding each of the leads as a viable character to be spun off after the series ends - Firestorm and Aquaman in particular, I think, have had scenes where a character almost says "So this is your new status quo, now," and Hawkman and the Martian Manhunter are both in the middle of storylines clearly designed to give them more urgency and, potentially, new arch-villains - but as fun as that is, it doesn't necessarily help Brightest Day feel any more coherent. With the recent change in pacing - characters now disappear for issues at a time, letting those remaining have more space for their stories to advance, something that I think is working out better than the initial "everyone is in every issue" approach - the series is starting to feel more and more like multiple different series pushed together without a throughline to connect them all.

Part of that, perhaps, is that the throughline - What, most likely, is the Brightest Day storyline when all is said and done - has been pushed out by all the other bells and whistles (J'Onn isn't the last green martian alive! Aquaman's wife was originally out to kill him and by the way, the new Aqualad is Black Manta's son! Firestorm has somehow vomited out Deathstorm, the hopefully sarcastically-named Black Lantern Firestorm, who's recreated all the Black Lanterns! Hawkman is, oh holy crap, I'm not even sure I understand anymore or care!). What I loved so much about the series' quarter-way mark, was that Geoff Johns and Pete Tomasi seemed to explain why the characters had come back to life and give the series a point... and then the following six issues have pretty much backed away from that, with the exception of the barely-there (and pretty wasted) Deadman arc that gets a couple of pages every couple of issues.

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually enjoying the series for the most part - Hawkman storyline aside, and Firestorm is beginning to lose me, too - but the further we get into the run, the more and more it feels like things are beginning to slip out of control in terms of the writing, and the more I begin to worry that the end of the series will either be rushed, completely unsatisfying, or less of an end than a "To Be Continued In All of These Awesome New Series." For now, though, Brightest Day gets an uneven Good.

Spider-Man And His Amazing Three Year Comeback

It's odd to think of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #647 as the end of an era, when the Big Time creative reshuffle is pretty much the same editorial team as Brand New Day editing a creative team that consists of the longest-surviving member of the Brand New Day braintrust and a revolving art-team that consists of Humberto Ramos and some surviving Brand New Day artists. It's really more of "a shift into an only-slightly different era," in a lot of ways, but saying that doesn't really allow for 64-page finale issues like this one. It's Good, I should say that now, but it's also not as good as BND at its best; there's too much of a sense of both, oddly, playing for time and rushing things, and a forced sense of occasion - Something that also plagued Mark Waid's "Origin of The Species" arc, I thought - and the result is something that's oddly unsatisfying despite all the different ingredients. One of the (unintended?) consequences it does have is making you realize how much writers like Fred Van Lente, Joe Kelly and Zeb Wells will be missed on the series, with their ability to balance making things seem fresh and also respectful of everything that's come before (Waid's talent on the series was something similar but different: The ability to use continuity in unexpected ways - I think Dan Slott, the new ongoing writer aims for somewhere between the two, but gets overwhelmed at times by the fact that he's working on a series that he clearly loves as a reader, and loses his nerve or lapses into fan service... even if he is the fan in question. Spider-Man brings out both the best and worst in him as a writer, which is both frustrating and exciting to see); their contributions are by far the best thing in the issue, surprising and silly and scary and sweet as needs be, showing off the versatility of the character.

(Waid's contribution, a one-page riff on the much-delayed Spider-Man musical, does manage to feature my favorite joke in the entire issue: "Fastest ticket lines on Broadway!" What can I say, I like the dumb/smart ones.)

The other thing that this issue makes you realize is how good BND has been for Spider-Man as a character, and as a series. Compare this to the JMS-era, and it's stunning to see how quickly the book has repopulated Spider-Man's supporting cast (and with mostly new creations!), and brought the tone back from the dark melodrama it was left to begin with; as much as BND was initially dismissed as retro, the three year run made changes that will hopefully stick as Big Time begins - I want to see more of Norah, Vin and Carlie, and Jonah as NYC Mayor, and Jonah Snr, and so on. It may not be the familiar characters - and I can't be the only one who notices that Harry Osborn is written out with the last issue of BND, just as he was written back in with the first, and after so much of the larger BND mythology revolved around him. Hopefully, he'll stay gone for a bit, to let the book move on - but Amazing Spider-Man has finally become the ensemble book it used to be, again, after far too many years of too many writers forgetting that part of its charm.

So, yeah. It's a good issue, and a weird capper to a three year run that started out weak but found its footing soon enough, and went on to make the mainstream MU version of the character the strongest he's been in more than a decade. As a prelude to Big Time next week, though, maybe it's a challenge: "We've built the book back up, Dan. Don't screw it up."

Long Live The Levitz: Grading Paul's First 6 Months On Both Legion and Adventure

I'll say this for Paul Levitz: He's got an amazing fast learning curve for making comics work. Or, at least, half of one. When LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #1 debuted six months ago, I admit to being disappointed by a script that seemed more expositional than enjoyable, and more predictable and awkwardly-paced than my (admittedly rose-tinted) memories of his 1980s run on the title would've led me to believe. But now that #6 is out, it feels as if the old magic is back. Oh, there've been some teething troubles, and a lot of the first six issues feel like the work of someone stretching muscles for the first time in awhile, and seeing how old clothes fit, to mix metaphors - There are plots that seem to flip between issues (That Earth Man as Green Lantern thing didn't really seem to go anywhere, and Saturn Girl stealing a Time Bubble to... not travel through time with... was also an odd moment - Not to mention the fact that Titan's destruction in the first issue seems to still feel like a dangling plot at best, or gratuitous at worst), and familiar threats that were introduced and dispatched so quickly as to feel weightless retreads (Darkseid's followers were surprisingly weak, and presumably laying groundwork for something down the road), but each issue has been a significant improvement on the one before. #6 in particular - A split issue, with two main stories and a one-page introduction to the Legion Leadership Election that reminded me more than anything of Mark Waid's letters page from his last relaunch of the book - offered up the best balance yet of characterization, plot and just plain cohesion that the series has seen yet, and something on par with Levitz' last run on the book.

(It helps that this issue is illustrated by guest artists Francis Portela and Phil Jiminez; for some reason, Yildiray Cinar's work is much more hit-and-miss on the series than I'd expected, based on other work I've seen of his. Perhaps it's the inking? But Portela and Jiminez both offer up solid work with personality in #6, and it really helps the story, I think.)

Weirdly, though, while Legion has been improving each issue, the same sadly can't be said for the companion run in ADVENTURE COMICS. It's not that the Superboy and The Legion: The Early Years sequence Levitz and various artists are offering up are bad, per se, more that they seem scattered and not necessarily fulfilling either their potential or purpose. Levitz has talked in interviews about these initial issues of Adventure as being created in response to a conversation with Geoff Johns about the lack of an entry-level book for the Legion, and in one sense, it works on that level - You get to see Superboy in the 30th Century for the first time, you get to see the origin of the Legion - but on another, it really doesn't. For one thing, the stories happen out of order: You get the early Legion in the first issue, then the current Legion remembering the origin of the Legion in the second, then the third issue presents an even earlier Legion than the first, before things settle into some kind of order for the next three. The worst part is, each of these time jumps happens without any kind of signifier for anyone who doesn't already know their Legion, just as stories that are shout-outs to existing Legion continuity happen without full context, so that they only really make sense to existing fans (Like this week's #520, which is about the "death" of Lightning Lad, and ends with him still in stasis, without any explanation about how he got out - Something that won't be followed up on anytime soon, considering the book jumps to "contemporary" Legion continuity with #521); some issues read as if they should be accompanied by a reprint to help you understand what's going on in the larger scheme of things. Even if each issue had a satisfying story in-and-of itself, it'd still fail as an introduction for newcomers, and will undoubtedly make for a very disjointed, disorientating read in collected format.

Again, it's something that seems to be addressed; starting with the next issue, the series is dropping the flashback format and starting to act as companion to the regular Legion book, with the Green Lantern subplot taking over for a couple of issues before Phil Jiminez jumps on and the series becomes, essentially, Legion Academy: The Series. There's something unusual about seeing problems in both books being dealt with so quickly, I have to admit, and something weirdly old-fashioned about the notion. Have I just gotten used to creators sticking to their guns even as readers jump off books in droves? Possibly, and that's both a depressing and telling thought. But, for now, consider the first six months of Levitz' third reign over the Legion to be a slow ramp from Okay to Very Good on Legion of Super-Heroes, and a slightly-less impressive uneven swing between Eh to Okay on Adventure. But what, as the man says, do you think?