Comic Book Closet

So Long, Frank

2010-05-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

My life has been mad. It took this to get me posting again. Because here was a guy whose response to a career-ending impairment was to teach himself to be just as awesome with a different hand. I thank whatever powers (God? Crom?) that his family life reached, if not a measure of peace, then a ceasefire before his passing, though I fear those divisions will now spring up anew.

A lot of people are posting art of Conan or Death Dealer of Vampirella or what have you but as much as Frank might've loved drawing all that stuff, remember, that's only part of the picture. Only part of the man. So I've chosen to highlight something else he loved: Ellie, who preceded them into death last year. One hopes they're together. One hopes for many things.

It's always surprising, what deaths outside my immediate family affect me. Michael Jackson was a huge part of my childhood and reminded me of playing with my brother, who passed away in 2007, so whether he was a sinner or saint his death still hit me hard. Michael Turner, same way, for same reasons. I wasn't sure how to react when Don Messick died...here was a personal hero (at a time when voicing animation was a real life goal) and I knew nobody I could commiserate with...nobody I knew even knew who he was! I didn't even know anybody online who gave a shit!

But those I can suss out more easily. I've only gotten interested in Frank's work in the last five years, though, always appreciating them as pretty images but never looking deeper, and certainly never learning anything about the man and his life. So while this is a tremendous loss for the comics community (hell the film community, the dungeons and dragons community, the art community) I'm a bit baffled that it's hitting me, personally, so hard. I wonder why that is.

And I think, perhaps it's because while Mike Wieringo's death was affecting and the loss of Steve Gerber was moving (and re-raised the dialectic he had engaged with his work), Frazetta to my mind is one of the gods. I missed a lot of the deaths of people like Jack Kirby or Bill Finger simply because I wasn't paying attention. People like Gene Colan and Stan Lee and, Crom help us, Sergio Arigones aren't long for this world. And now Frank is gone. There was always that hope, that expectation in the back of my mind, that I would meet the man, maybe on a pilgrimage to his museum. Not to get anything, even an autograph, but just to say thanks for everything. Ah well...

So long, Frank.

Now a major motion picture.

2010-04-24T04:26:00.001-07:00

Kick Ass reminds me of Fight Club. Really. Not because I think gratuitous violence is a legitimate symbol of societal remonstration, or because both films equate sex and death for a young audience ready to embrace that message. It's because Roger Ebert hates both movies, and a Louisiana high school senior named Kohen just wrote a letter to his local newspaper calling for Ebert's retirement because the critic found "Kick Ass" to be morally reprehensible. I did the same thing eleven years ago when Ebert condemned "Fight Club." I don't know if Kohen got his article printed verbatim, but I remember my poor letter had the misfortune of being dissected and de-contextualized in an op-ed counterpoint piece. (If there's one great thing about the internet, it's that deconstructing another person's argument to make them look foolish is no longer the exclusive privilege of douchey newspaper editors.)
Kohen feels that Kick Ass mirrors Thoreau's message of Civil Disobedience, and contains a heartwarming story about family. He also claimed that it made him want to read the comic. I wonder how much Thoreau he'll find in it.
Kick Ass and Fight Club are just two examples of how Hollywood can sometimes improve upon the source material, or at least make it palatable to large audiences (apologies to you hardcore Chuck Palahniuk fans.) The Book is always better than The Movie of the book, right? Right?
There are times when this just isn't true. Going back to at least The Graduate, there are books that are actually more enjoyable as films. Add Jaws and The Godfather to that list, as well as Interview with a Vampire. It is somewhat infuriating that this ever happens, because I WANT the book to be better than the movie. (In the case of Mark Millar books though, it isn't hard to find things to improve upon.)
These kinds of films are rare and Kick Ass is certainly one of them. After ten years, I'm still on the fence about whether Fight Club is or not, but I certainly connected to the film more. I do wonder though, if Kick Ass has the staying power of Fight Club. That film still sparks heated debates on message boards, and many of its catchier lines have been absorbed into the pop culture vocabulary. A decade from now, will we be quipping "Fuck this shit, I'm getting the bazooka"?

Gestalt Psychology and Batman

2010-04-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

I became frustrated with my psych assignment this evening and decided to make a realistic attempt at including Batman to spice things up. Luckily, this was fairly easy, because the question asked me to describe six, specific principles of Gestalt psychology and give a "personal example" of each one. I'm not Bill Finger, but for me Batman counts as a personal example. What follows is the paper I submitted.

(If you came here following a text-specific search string, Hi Mrs Bengough! I put my paper online. That's not against the rules, right?)

Gestalt psychology is the study of the way we perceive the environment around us. Founder Max Wertheimer argued that perception is conceptually driven, organized along consistent rules that allow us to see the whole image, rather than simply a collection of pieces. Gestalt psychology introduced many of the basic principles of perception, including: the Figure/Ground principle, the Law of Similarity, the Law of Closure, the use of Relative Size in depth perception, Perceptual Constancy, and the Law of Prägnanz.
The Figure/Ground principle is the brain's ability to automatically separate various elements of an image into main and auxiliary parts. The figure typically has a defined shape, and holds some significant degree of perceptual meaning apart from the background. On the iconic cover of the classic comic book Detective Comics #27, (the first appearance of Batman,) the caped figure swinging through the air is clearly the focus, distinct from the buildings and even from the larger figures in the foreground. Although there are several characters pictured in the image, the uniqueness of Batman's costume signifies him as the main subject of this scene.
Another axiom of Gestalt psychology visible in the Detective Comics #27 cover is the Law of Similarity. This law presupposes objects of similar size and shape are part of a whole. The buildings in the background are all perceived as part of the contiguous cityscape, not as individual structures. In a related instance, the Law of Closure lets the brain fill in the missing pieces from an image to form complete shapes, even when part of the shape is obscured. The law of closure allows the viewer to recognize the objects as buildings in spite of the figures in the foreground occluding various lines, angles, and intersections that would clearly define the structure.
Detective Comics #27 also contains a clear example of the depth-perception principle of relative size. When objects are assumed to be similar, the larger object is perceived as the closer one. (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2012) Although the drawing of Batman is physically much smaller than the drawing of the two men in the foreground, the mind presupposes that all these men are roughly the same size and therefore Batman must be further away than the two thugs. This is also readily apparent in the disparity between the size of the hats worn by the two men in the foreground and the hat dropped by the man being carried by Batman in the background.
The various hats also provide a solid example of the idea of perceptual constancy. This is Gestalt psychology's name for our ability to perceive objects as unchanging, despite dramatic variations in sensory input. The three hats are different colors, sizes, and viewed from different angles, but there is no question that all three hats are of the same type. Perceptual constancy also applies to the figure of Batman himself. As viewers are naturally familiar with the human body, it is no stretch to assume Batman has feet, even though they are not visible on this particular cover.
The Law of Prägnanz is what allows us to separate the comic's title from the action scene below. The mind automatically constructs the simplest, most reasonable interpretation of a given scene. While it is theoretically possible Batman is swinging in front of a giant "Detective Comics" banner surrounded by floating letters and numbers, the law of Prägnanz suggests that the comic's title, while part of the overall image, is separate from the costumed figures and buildings below.
Each of these Gestalt principles describes a way the brain organizes and analyzes information. Without this series of basic rules, the visual processing center would be constantly bombarded by a deluge of unintelligible sensory signals. It is only through this carefully codified series of careful assumptions that I am able to enjoy Batman!

Wikipedia is Down!

2010-03-24T11:01:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia is down so hard you can't even check the blog to see why it's down! I personally suspect those villainous vandals over at Encyclopedia Britannica.

Umm... while you're here, check out my favorite thing ever posted to this blog.

Ten for Tuesday

2010-03-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

1. From Seattle: JQ has done a lot of things right lately, so I hesitate to bitch. But stop with the line about Spider-Man's marriage "shackling" the character. It's fine if you believe that but use a different line, because every time you use that line you just remind people who are otherwise enjoying the Spidey books how idiotic that story was. You could have introduced a bunch of new Spidey villains if Spidey was married. You could have put a concentrated effort into redeeming Spidey's old villains and bringing them back to the fore. You could have had Aunt May shack up with the elder Jameson and had Jonah become mayor. You could totally have brought Harry back from the dead (Goblin regeneration, Norman doing crazy Frankenstein things, dead-harry-was-a-Skrull). You could have made White Venom with a married Spider-Man...hell, considering the history and interplay between MJ and Brock in the title, it might have made it more interesting! And what, out of all this, does Spidey have to be single to accomplish? None of it! So he has had a few dead end relationships and a little casual sex with Felicia. Is that worth it? Really? And if Marvel likes being "realistic" then allow me to point out that Peter could still date around and nail Felicia if he was married to MJ...guys do it all the time! Some are outright cheaters, some are polyamory, but it happens. And if you think that's an unfavorable idea because it makes Peter look douchey, guess what? Making a deal with the devil does that, too.

2. From Seattle: Lian Harper was barely a character. She was a plot generator. Get Lian to safety, protect Lian, find Lian, have Lian make fun of Wally's name. Her death in Cry for Justice isn't as much of a loss as, say, Sue Dibny, but that means it's also hard to argue for her death. This wasn't a character a lot of people were attached to; emotional staked weren't raised by this character's inclusion. There is no bittersweet promise of stories never told. Her role was purely symbolic...killing thousands of people is bad, killing one little kid with a face and a name is evil. And surprise, surprise, people are pissed. Because it's cheap. It's lazy. It expects the reader to pull emotion and interest and anger out of nowhere because, look, dead little girl! That's not just lazy, that's Cobra-Commander-kicks-a-puppy-to-show-he's-evil lazy. Worse, her death becomes one more stitch in the fabric of female misfortune in (especially DCU lately) comics, existing only to make some male characters slightly more interesting (Ollie is mad! Roy is sad! Prometheus is bad!) for a brief moment. So people don't hate the story because it was a well told story, because it was "emotionally charged" and that's what art is supposed to do. They hate the story because in a miniseries filled with half-assed plotting, bad characterization, shaky logic, questionable morality, and a generally mean-spirited tone, the denouement managed to be all of the above at the same time and threw in "kind of sexist" to boot.

3. YouTube and Wikipedia are powerful tools but when their Wonder Twin powers activate they take the shape of awesome and the form of every band's discography. I don't have a problem with this since so many of these groups, artists and labels seem either permissive or complicit in the availability of this material but I think the expectation is that if you hear it and like it you're supposed to go buy it. I'm not sure how I feel, then, about pages that also link to torrents of the songs (or shows, or whatever). Badly?

4. This past arc in Batman and Robin has been far and away better than the previous two. The first arc was kind of slipshod, as the series found its feet. The second arc had more Jason Todd, who has officially become the new Joker in terms of overexposure, and a big showdown with the Matador from Daredevil. The arc with a crazy undead clone Batman set against the backdrop of the just-glimpsed London mirror of Batman's world, however, was very fun. I'm calling it a very good comic but if it had wrapped up in 2 issues I'd be stamping it with "great."

5. In my article on superhero weaknesses I neglected to mention another recent favorite, Seance, whose powers fail if he's wearing shoes and, in consequence, floats around barefoot in stretch pants like some sort of Radical Edward gone horribly wrong. You can take this as a tacit endorsement of the second volume of Umbrella Academy, incidentally.

6. Please, please, please let the Arkham Asylum sequel feature Solomon Grundy. Not as a playable boss, unless it plays very much like a God of War cyclops fight, because I got tired of the first game's "muscle guy boss fight" routine the first time I had to go through it. Just record some dialogue, have him in a cell, maybe muttering his namesake poem...maybe responding to a few prompts from Batman before going silent? You've already got Mark Hamill there, guys...

7. Is there anything preventing DC from publishing a Thundarr the Barbarian comic? If not, then where the hell is it?

8. I would like to see the Fables relocated to Lemuria, personally. I would like to see a fableworld born of theoretical history, bound to the Mundy where the Adversary probably never thought to check.

9. Old Trash Film I'd Make Into A Cult Broadway Musical: The Brute Man, with Rondo Hatton. And Mickey Rourke would star.

10. Things are far from smooth over here but they're a little better than they have been. However, we're going to take this opportunity to shift gears on the site a little. So, probably no more DAILY links for the foreseeable future. But more real articles to come. Whee.

Link: "Get me some new films."

2010-03-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

I love this poster, you guys...

If you were listening to NPR yesterday you heard Jack Handey reading the title essay from his new book, Things I Would Say To The Martians. If you've heard it already you know it's awesome. If not, then check it out right now.

2010-03-09T18:07:00.001-08:00

Sunday our dog got shot by somebody. Also we've had to go house hunting with about a week or two notice. As such, drink service will be suspended until turbulence subsides.

A Shot of Amazing (Adorable Edition)

2010-03-08T20:32:00.000-08:00

This is our daughter. From the future. She is asian.

Avengers Assembly 6

2010-03-05T08:12:00.001-08:00

Two-Gun Kid

Tactical Advantage: Kid is a marksman on par with Cap or Hawkeye, a fast draw and handy with a variety of firearms, including modern weaponry. His time-travel adventures give him a little firmer footing than some Avengers, like Triathlon or Echo, in those situations. He is also a gifted tracker and former lawyer, both of which come in handy in his capacity as a bounty hunter and (former?) member of the Initiative. For someone in a world he never made etc, Matthew has an awful lot of contacts out there that run the gamut. It goes without saying that he has an expansive knowledge of the American southwest. For what it’s worth, he can ride a horse; I always thought it would be cool if he got the Black Knight’s old horse somehow. Speaking of which, he has Hawkeye’s old sky-cycle right now, which is awesome. +3

Tactical Disadvantage: Guns are really only very great at one thing, and it’s a thing the Avengers try to never ever do Unless Absolutely Necessary, which it far too often turns out to be. So, essentially, Matthew’s one trick – shooting stuff – is one that he isn’t even allowed to fully exploit in most Marvel Comics, lest he become a vest-wearing Punisher. He’s also an obvious weak link in the field, an easy first target to reduce the number of opponents, demoralize the team, and break the line. Still, there’s nothing about Matthew that makes him a specific liability. Just a general one. -2

Headliner: Not for fifty years or so. +1

Look: It’s a Kirby Western motif; just different enough to identify but otherwise built out of a kit. You love it or you don’t. Guess what? +1

Founder: No. +0

Matthew Hawk nee Liebowicz (How did I not know this? Thank you, internet!) is an awesome character. Hell, he was awesome at the time, with quick-draw stories full of colorful rogues and outrageous situations. It was like if George Lucas fell in love with Crash Corrigan instead of Commando Cody or Scrooge McDuck. Transplanted to the Marvel Age and carried through to modern times, the character has a self-assure charm and neat hook that has endeared him to many. He’s the definition of a fan-favorite. Yet he never really took off in popularity as he might. A few factors go into this…some people just don’t like Western chocolate in their superhero peanut butter. Some people look at Matthew’s outfit and think Sherriff Woody more than Clint Eastwood. But a lot of the reason he never stuck around is that superheroes (and depending on your definition Kid certainly qualifies) aren’t allowed to just be nice, likable, heroic, and fun; they must also be tortured, disturbed, transgressed, or transgressive. “Interesting” or “complicated” or “serious.”

Not every character needs a rape in their past or a dead party clown at their birthday; these Western characters had plenty of skeletons in their closet already (those who weren’t in the closet…). That's the business, though: Ralph Dibny was a fan favorite, a guest star who at best could hope for being a co-star and getting the occasional mini. Ralph didn’t become important until his pregnant wife was murdered and her rape outed. For whatever reason, those creators who have used Matthew have mostly shied from doing this, preferring to let him return to limbo. It seems those are the only two options. Still, could be worse. He could be Ronin.

Now, again, I love Two-Gun Kid and I would love to have him on, say, my dream Avengers roster. But I cannot let my personal feelings cloud my judgment here: he is far from the quintessential Avenger. I think he’s a great character, sure; as originally written he had a similar motivation (helping others is the right thing to do) and supporting framework (“Matt, the Two-Gun Kid was just here!” “Aw shucks!”) as Superman, only with lots of cowboys and gorillas (ok so exactly like Superman, then). But all of his skills can be duplicated by other, more versatile or more powerful Avengers, all of whom are more popular and longer-lived. He’s a hero but so has Jarvis been whenever the need arose. On a Keith Giffen-style “pick the personalities, not the superheroes” Avengers he would be an awesome addition. Otherwise…it’s supporting cast territory for Matthew Hawk. Damn but time traveling cowboys are bittersweet. +2

Total: 5

Once an Avenger, always an Avenger; he’s just not much of one.

Aww, don't be sad, Matt. Next week is the first installment of this feature to get a negative score!

Link: Still Alive

2010-03-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Valve released a tease of Portal 2 recently via an update consisting of audio files which, through a complicated series of conversions to Morse code and image coordinates, are clearly signs of GlaDOS trying to find a signal or worming its way into the interwebs or something. The response to this has been immediate and voracious. What I'm hoping is that this is just the beginning of a follow-the-breadcrumbs game that will ultimately outdo the awesome ilovebees in the act of baing an ad campaign-as-gaming experience.

Ten for Tuesday - Wednesday Edition

2010-03-03T05:24:00.000-08:00

Hey there, sports fans. A bit of an upset here at HQ has taken up oh so much of my time and looks to do so for the foreseeable future. Still adjusting to the new kinks in the schedule so updating, while it will continue, is going to look a little more random. I think it will balance out with some of the longer articles we have coming but if you notice a daily link go up the next day, well, pretend you don't notice. That being said, even though the rest of the crew acquitted themselves admirably yesterday, I still have some thoughts I'd like to share with you, and these mini-blogs are fun to do, so here goes.

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1. Stan Lee never left. He consistently farmed out half-baked IP for the past decade and entered into more than one bad-faith licensing deal. I'm not sure why his working for BOOM! to create another superhero universe is worthy of the Gabbo-like advertising BOOM! has been doing. The best that can come of this is not another Marvel Universe but another 7th Portal, some IP that can be exploited for international markets that can't get Spectacular Spider-Man for some reason. (7th Portal used to have their own ride at Canada's Wonderland but I couldn't find it on their website. Did I miss it? Did they replace it with Snoopy?) All that being said, with people like Mark Waid and some other A-to-H-listers doing the actual chores on the book, it looks to be a case of "Stan Lee strings some solid ideas together and modern creators try to make that framework into really awesome comics," which is more or less what the MU is right now. And it does inspire confidence that BOOM! has so many excellent titles, including superhero titles, coming out right now. They really have exploded! And I do love Stan Lee, but as an elder statesman, or like Sean Connery. In some respects they'll always be the greatest but the last great many projects they've been attached to have been all gas and no spark and this is coming from somebody who liked Stan's version of Batman! But make no mistake, True Believers, the draw on these as-yet-unrevealed titles is BOOM!'s track record, not Stan's.

2. I love the Avengers and all but the man who has bought all of Marvel's Avengers titles and intends to buy every one of their four-to-4+ new Avengers titles, including a new New Avengers title, extends beyond the realm of the superfan to me. I begin to wonder if it ceases to become fanaticism and becomes susceptibility to branding. It's amazing to me that something like Avengers Academy couldn't be used as a way to re-purpose the trademark on the Defenders or something. I will say that of all the Marvel launches the non-Kurt-Busiek one that piqued my interest the most was the new Thunderbolts direction. Now I've always had a love-hate-love relationship with the Thunderbolts and the last (one two three...wow) six 'new directions' for the book have either left me cold or at the very least been problematic. This new direction, however, is basically a non-Norman Osborn-oriented Suicide Squad led by Luke Cage. The roster is non-powered white supremacist terrorist Crossbones (ha!), the Juggernaut (bitch), Moonstone, another person who can phase through matter (only it's Ghost, who is cooler), and MAN-THING. On the one hand the team is heavy on punching and intangibility but on the other hand Luke Cage is leading a Man-Thing equipped Suicide Squad so who cares?

3. Copper, by Kazu Kibuishi, is a good comic. It's a comic that skews young and it's short but it's good, and the book that just came out is very well put together.

4. In my head, Ultron has always sounded like Cobra Commander.

5. Nick Simmons ripped off a bunch of creators to make a crappy comic. This kind of thing is far more prevalent in comics than you'd think and I doubt many people would give as much of a damn if this wasn't a kid on a reality show involved. That said, the politics of the internet are curious, and this whole incident reminds me as much of Penny Arcade as it does Gil Kane. The net is fiercely anarchistic when it comes to freedoms it should be allowed, including with the work of others, yet democratic in its rage and draconian tyrant in its proposed punishments. I honestly wonder how many people furious about this swiping incident torrented the images they're posting or burned a friend's copy of the anime. I honestly wonder how they can see a difference between the two actions: the plunder of a creative output for free (to the creator's detriment, robbing him of royalties) and the, well, plunder of a creative outlet for free (to another's fiscal benefit, in essence misappropriating royalties). Is it because Nick Simmons then has the gall to charge for his book, when the complete Bleach library is available for peer-to-peer? It's an ugly situation, but it's an ugly situation all around.

6. I don't understand people who don't like Sgt. Hatred. I don't understand people who didn't like Ponyo. I don't understand people who hated Donna Noble. I can parse their arguments but they don't fit into any hole in my mental game of Operation. I can't extract any reason from these decisions without buzzers going off and wanting to do something else. I begin to wonder if it's just because the internet hates ginger people for some reason.

7. With my X-Box dead (oh shut up, fanboys; of the four people I know with PS3s, three of them have suffered more in their few months of ownership than I have since the 360 came out) my gaming options have become limited to whatever's on the Wii and what older games I can find to purchase for my PS2. The Wii may be selling better than underwear and it may be far from the one-note gimmick-fest console it is derided as but what it is is a vast ocean of mediocrity. Part of the problem during the Gamecube administration was that Nintendo started to seem almost hostile to third party developers. They've turned the tables somewhat now. The hardware limitations still seem dismissive of people wanting extra polish on their games but that can be forgiven since too many games try to pass off polish as game. The Wii still has the capability of supporting games like Braid or Killer 7 or even a scaled-back-graphics Portal, and these are some of the critical darlings of the last several years. No, the problem is that the approval process for Wii and DS games seems to involve a blindfold. Games are given a coat of cheap paint and resold under a new name. There are approximately 813 Diner Dash derivatives. Cold Stone Creamery has a game. Dear Nintendo: you have the power to end this.

8. Big props to neilalien. I love fans like Neil or Ragnell who become synonymous with being fanatics for a certain character just by writing and commenting about them extensively for a really long time. I don't know why. Maybe because I don't have that affection and attachment to a specific character, so I like seeing what that's like? Maybe because I fantasize about being internet famous. Neil has better reasons for his interfame than just his fanaticism, though; there's also his longevity and tenacity. He recently celebrated ten years of blogging and podcasting about the Sorcerer Supreme, making him something of a patron saint among comics bloggers. I know he doesn't read blogtrash like this but...kudos!

9. So one of the episodes of Brave and the Bold that CN has bumped to the end of March or later involved Batman dealing with Joe Chill, the guy responsible for the giant penny in the Batcave and the remorseless murders of Batman's parents. This would have been a tricky episode to pull off during the now-classic Batman animated series, which had a much darker overall tone by far. How the hell are they going to pull that off on B&tB?

10. I really hope they rush a DVD of the recent Day of the Triffids remake at BBC. I don't know if BBC America or Syfy intends to rebroadcast the show soon or not. I don't even know if it's any good. Frankly, I don't care. I just want to see Eddie Izzard shotgun some mutant plants to pieces.

Link: Playing with Cards

2010-03-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

So, Daniel threw this at me. And I read through and found this.

I used it. It is AWESOME. Don't worry, once I get around to it I'll start posting about what I've been using it for but, suffice I threw in a few Major Arcana and they also came out nicely. Turned out four levels of a dungeon with all the minor arcana and those four Major.

Moon, Devil, Wheel, and Tower. The Tower ending up as the heart of the dungeon.

Ohohohoho!

Ten for Tuesday (supplemental)

2010-03-02T18:37:00.000-08:00

Guest Ten for Tuesday by CBC Blogger Michael Marvin (and friends.)

1. Thanos is coming back, which we kinda figured when Magus showed up in War of Kings, but this does kinda step on his little denouement with Death. Marvel's cosmic happenings have kinda been living in their own little Franklin ball, and the fallout from the Kings stuff needs to be felt by the folks back on Earth. Yes, even the Hulk folks.

2. Speaking of Dan Abnett, the only Warhammer 40K novel I've ever read is Ravenor, which isn't very good. It is always amazing how these licensed properties that all seem to share so much common ground- novels, comics, film, video games, collectibles, etc can produce such disparate levels of success across the spectrum, especially given the marketing assumption that licensed properties represent a "safe bet." I think I should be drawing a conclusion here, but I'm new to this whole "ten things" bit.

3. I was talking to my dad about pre-WWI science fiction and he tells me to come look at something, we go downstairs and on the bookshelf behind his DVDs is a huge stack of Tom Swift books from 1912 that are in incredible condition. Just sitting there.

4. My favorite animated show of all time, so help me, is ReBoot. The content-free internet teaser last year left us hardcore fans drooling, but Mainframe/Rainmaker has never handled itself particularly well with regards to promotion and they've really dropped the ball so far on the supposed new trilogy. The comic was great, and free, and dovetailed nicely to fit within the framework of the original series. It also didn't leave anywhere for the story to go.

5. Sometimes I hate the Oscars for not being based on my opinion. I like Christopher Plummer, isn't that enough for him to win?

6. I was lured into Superhero City on Facebook, and it isn't any worse than any of the other identical fantasy or crime or sci-fi themed games except that "superhero" is a catchall genre for all of the above. It's not fun, either, and the fact that people pay real money to purchase in-game currency is baffling. I was also particularly miffed that I put some thought into my character's bio, only to find that that function is not accessible to other players.

7. Speaking of, a couple of the bloggers on CBC used to write superhero stories to amuse one-another on an old "create your own superhero" site. I later became an administrator and promptly banned an IP range that included the entire continent of South America in an effort to stop single troll. This is a true story.

8. (Courtesy of Josh) So, I'm watching Supernatural again. Don't ask me why, it's a long story, suffice to say that it has everything to do with the fact that it's Hunter: The Vigil: The Show. Seriously. I hate that I don't have the WB, or is it the CW now? I don't even care.

9. (Courtesy of Menda) I love Bananas. I love the Sonic Drive-Thru. I love buying Bananas at Sonic, which is what I tried to do today. They wouldn't let me have three at once, and they wouldn't tell me why. I've hired a Private Investigator.

10. Daniel: oh so yknow this right? http://www.letsbefriendsagain.com/2009/01/27/it-gets-white-out-later/ And how it got funnier the more it became apparent that this is what was going to happen?

Michael: yeah

Daniel: and now the big twist of Blackest Night that everybody is talking about is that the White Lantern isn't Hal but Sinestro, the Space Nazi
That's...sure a thing, huh?

Michael: I don't think I need to point out to you that it happened in issue #52... spooky
wasn't Sinestro prophesied to be the savior of the GLC?

Daniel: yeah under the "it worked out so well for hayden christiansen" reasoning

Link: Read Across America Day

2010-03-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

It's Read Across America day, which also commemorates the birthday of one Theodore Geisel, known colloquially as Dr. Seuss. It has always amazed me that Seuss is considered an advocate for childhood literacy; partially because of his famed ambivalence toward children, but mostly because the character of his books relies so heavily on the artwork. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Seuss. I had Fox in Sox memorized word-for-word growing up, I loved the Lorax until he started shilling for Hot Topic, I've even played Horton in Seussical. Geisel's work is undeniably enjoyable, but lets look at the breakdown: your average Seuss book is 20% linguistic patter, 30% repetition, and 50% stylized artwork. The picture-to-word ratio is strangely reminiscent of comics, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a member of the elementary education community who would accept even the mere suggestion that comics have educational potential.

Anyway, Read Across America is a pretty good program, and "give a kid a book" is a message I can get behind. A word of caution, though:

(confession: I've been waiting for a chance to use that image.)

Link: It's time to light the lights

2010-03-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Paul O'Connell.

The Wicker Man is a movie close to my heart and worthy of a whole article one day but that is neither here nor there. What is here (or more accurately there, at the link above) deserves some special consideration. Is there an internet equivalent of an Eisner? Can we invent one?

Avengers Assembly 5

2010-02-26T15:10:00.000-08:00

Iron Man

Tactical Advantage: Iron Man is 100% tactical advantage. As an individual he can hold his own strength-wise with the Hulk, out-fly almost anybody, and has more firepower and offensive capabilities than any five Avengers standing next to him, not to mention extensive pan-sensory input mapping out his local environment to minute detail and feeding him global information updates by the millisecond. The Iron Man armor alone is both a global data processor and an entire military front. At its heart is Tony Stark, who can weaponize anything, engineer any tool, and break any machine. He has resources out the wazoo, and his vast wealth should not be underestimated as an asset…he has even floated the Avengers as an organization for much of their existence. His extensive experience with SHIELD means that he knows all their tech intimately (and since that’s basically HAMMER’s tech now, that’s a good thing) and Nick Fury probably personally owes him a beer. If Iron Man’s armor doesn’t have the required gadget don’t worry…he can swap it out for one of a dozen other specialized armors with even more specific or esoteric tools. And if that’s not enough he can always call out Rhodey or, nowadays, Pepper. +10

Tactical Disadvantage: Tony Stark is a volatile personality; even when he’s not entirely compromising the team or outright betraying/fighting against his comrades he’s still the cause of more than enough turbulence. He also has a lot of enemies, and though most of them are B-listers compared to fighting the Mandarin or Absorbing Man they can sure round out a Masters of Evil in a hurry. It must also be remembered that Stark’s technology itself has come back to bite Tony and the Avengers in the buttocks. -2

Headliner: Yes. -1

Look: Even Iron Man’s crummy armors help the lineup look dynamic. +1

Founder: Yes. +1

Iron Man, Iron Man
does whatever raw iron can
sit around, oxidize
he’s got rec-tan-gles for eyes
look ouuuuuuuut he is an Iron Man…

I’ve always said “Pity the poor Iron Man writer.” His ratio of awesome villains to filler is almost worse than Daredevil’s, stories (like his life being dependent on his armor, or losing his business, or his tech being used against him) get repeated every few years, and Tony Stark is just straight-up one of the hardest to like of Marvel’s classic heroes. Additionally, Tony is a great character but recently a lot of terrible things have been done with him to the point where he was basically a supervillain and not for the first time.

The thing is, these things reset over time. Every saint sins and Iron Man realizing what a bastard he is and atoning for it is one of the two major prongs of his character, along with surviving a series of techno-related maladies no matter what. Iron Man will inevitably be a good guy again, given enough time. So I’m forced to divorce what has been going on recently from Iron Man as a whole in determining whether he makes a great Avenger…and he does. A wealth of technical expertise, worldwide intelligence and financial connections, and an arsenal of walking arsenals, and someone who has not only led the team but ensures that there is a team at all. He has always been a douchebag but he has also been a part of some of the most important moments and periods of Avengers history, a constant throughout the team’s turbulent times. +5

Score: 14

As controversial as he has been over extended periods of his life, Tony’s score would still have scored a little higher if it weren’t for the fact that he could just send Rhodey or Happy or Pepper or Rick Jones in his armor and chances are nobody would notice. But there’s one thing they can never replace:

Link: This one ring would totally rule them all

2010-02-26T08:58:00.000-08:00

I am 100% down with this campaign to get DC to issue some retailer incentive Legion of Super-Heroes flight rings to coincide with the book's upcoming relaunch. How this could not make sense is beyond me. Order Legion, get a ring. Boom, straight up. I would make it to the store to snag one, I know what much, and I'm one person who thought the DC ring incentive plan (as it was executed) was an exercise in petard-hoisting.

Honestly, I don't see how this can not happen, eventually at least, but if you don't want to take that chance you can send DC a postcard. If you do this, please, please write something effed up on the front of it. I'm starting my own campaign to get people to send DC Post Secret entries in the form of a petition for free plastic toys.

AV Club has Bronze ones

2010-02-25T15:12:00.000-08:00

So the excellent Gateways to Geekery series over at the AV Club has again turned to comics with Noel Murray wading in to offer advice on dipping your toes into "Bronze Age comics," defining the age roughly as 1970-1986 which to me covers a lot more ground than is strictly representative of a movement or even a collection of movements but hey: I don't work for the AV Club.

That said, I have a bit of a problem with this article. Typical GtoG articles explore some small node of subculture within subculture, like semi-obscure musical movements or esoteric literary fare. This is an article on comics from 1970-1986. That's superhero comics, non-superhero comics, alt comix, the dawn of the grim-n-gritty trend, the rise of the direct market, creators' rights and major independent press, the relaxing of the Comics Code Authority, the often-more-graphic "graphic magazine" market, etc. Previously, they've featured articles on EC Comics and Love and Rockets which were on-message: niche within niche, somewhat daunting, here's where to start. Their article on superhero comics meant dealing with a much more expansive subject but they handled themselves fine; it's hard to argue with All-Star Superman, after all.

It's not that the article badly written, either, as Noel hits the nail on the head in pinning down the problem with far too many comics of the era as trying to be far too serious. There's telling a serious story and there's telling a wild, ridiculous or borderline insane story and being way too serious about it, and it's a problem comics struggle with still today. But there's a lot going on in the period he's covering that isn't adequately addressed.

Nor do I approve of his conclusions. Manhunter may be a good place to start reading Bronze Age books as it's a blast, but it's also inherently a place to stop reading. There's just so little of it. About 3 normal issues' worth or so, if I recall. That's not much more help than saying a good way to break into 17 years of comics is to read this one issue of this one book, bro. Now to the author's credit from there he expands on a list of possible next steps, listing some books that are indeed some of the best from the era, but hardly logical signposts for the people first venturing into this catalog who need hand-holding; there's not much "if-then" here. If you like Manhunter then you might like ElfQuest? Sure, yeah, maybe...If you like ElfQuest then you might like Heavy Metal? I guess so?

It just seems like an off installment, is all. It's hard to expect much from an article trying to pin down A) a period still considered somewhat nebulous and much-debated by comics nerds B) with unending variation in genre, tone, style, subject, and content C) for the sake of someone who has decided to jump into comics feet-first at one of the most tumultuous times in their history. And the advice we come away with is "Try this one story, then maybe consider reading Howard the Duck or Tomb of Dracula?" I like Walt Simonson and all but ATTENTION AMERICA: JUST GO STRAIGHT TO READING TOMB OF DRACULA GUYS. IT IS AWESOME. Assuming you're just a dude trying to read some comic you can bypass a lot of concerns about social relevance and genre booms by hitting one book that is not only at the crux of a lot of the major developments of the period to the point of being considered emblematic of them and a quintessential Bronze Age book, it also takes almost no foreknowledge going into the title (Heard of Dracula? Good.), the title itself stays relatively self-contained, and the art is awesome. Plus, man, I tell you, Dracula gets up to some crazy shit.

Dracula more or less wins this one.
Next issue is "The Wildest Party."
Dracula is so awesome.

Seriously though, read the article. It mentions some good comics. It's just not a much better sampling than you'd get from asking around on a message board. Props to Murray for the Astro City shout-out, though. Respect.

Link: Conan O'Brien is a-twitter.

2010-02-25T14:03:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's him. Yes, it's new, so there isn't much there. Regardless, this is appointment internet here, people. Watch This Space, as they say.

Link: Tom Beland speaks

2010-02-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

I had been wondering what happened with True Story, Swear To God. I'd even recently emailed Tom Beland to ascertain what collections I had missed, thinking that I've just been overlooking them! But no; as this article explains, the series was on an extended hiatus due to injury. There's lots of other great bits in there as well, so do yourself a favor and check it out. The next issue of True Story comes out March 3rd, if I recall correctly, and the second collection from Image will be issued shortly after that.

Ten for Tuesday

2010-02-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

1. Speculation about the new new new LOSH featuring a Teen Lantern has me intrigued. The name "Teen Lantern" has been thrown around to dismiss the idea of GL having a sidekick as inherent silliness, which was always laughably when you'd see Hal Jordan or Kyle Rayner flanked by Stewart and Gardner who were unquestionably acting as sidekicks. And it's hard to argue anything is too goofy for the GLC as it's a concept that fits a lot of different kinds of stories. Yet a LOSH Lantern makes a lot of sense and even the name "Teen Lantern" seems hardly out of place on a team with Cosmic Boy and Princess Projectra. Maybe it's me, but I'm a sucker for Legionaries based on existing DC properties, like Thunder. I love LOSH as its own thing but I'd read an entire second series starring Thunder, Teen Lantern, the future incarnation of Prince Khufu (who himself wears a be-winged Helm of Nabu), Kid Metamorpho...

2. Can't get into Death Note. I'm not slamming it, I just haven't gotten into it yet.

3. What is the Grail of uncollected comics in this age where almost everything gets collected? It might be Pogo, come to think of it, since its collections are spotty and mostly out of print from what I can tell. A complete Carl Barks Ducks? With the international reprints I confess I've lost track of the gaps, if any still exist at this point. Probably Marvelman/Miracleman, which is just as tangled as ever if not moreso. Marvel has yet to produce anything approaching substance even in their hints about the work to come. They may as well have announced Batman was joining the Avengers...Achem. Reprints. I tell you what I want is for Dark Horse or somebody to snatch up the license for Lupin III and actually get the complete series on the shelf, or series of series as it were. Also, whatever happened with the rest of Get Backers? Why haven't we seen these series return when other Tokyopop properties have resurfaced?

4. Thanos getting his roll on in Marvel's generally-pretty-good cosmic books sounds good. It SOUNDS good, but I begin to wonder how many cosmic dominoes are left for the Annihilation group to tip. Has the Stranger shown up yet? Is the next arc Stranger-centric? Talking about limitations, I like Thanos as a character but he also seems like he has about four good stories in him and those have surely been done by now. If they manage to come up with any new ground for him to cover I'll be pleased...surprised, but pleased.

5. On that subject, still not buying the Everybody Trusts Norman angle. Nope. I've heard a lot of rationalizations for this but none of them jive. It's too Maxwell Lord-y.

6. Came into possession of an old Mad Magazine where Mike Hammer turns out to be running SPECTRE because he's pissed James Bond stole all his readers. Awesome idea. I remember that on the Animaniacs, too, with the Bosco stand-in masterminding the Warners' demise. There's even a bit of that in the current Captain America story that's causing way too much controversy. It's a good gag. I don't have anything else on the topic but it's a good gag, one I intend to rip off someday.

7. I'm all for giving Geoff Johns guff for his split personality writing but it seems, to me at least, that Mark Millar gets off comparatively easily. He writes like a sledgehammer and he interviews like Muhammad Ali. I'm not saying he hasn't written some good comics but they're in the vast minority of his material; not just Jekyl and Hyde but, specifically, Moore's Jekyl and Hyde, where the good side is all diminutive and emaciated because his id has run rampant and leeched life away. Not that he doesn't get shit for it, because he does, but he probably could do with getting more.

8. Disney's Little Mermaid has aged so, so much better than Aladdin has.

9. Try reading the last issue of Phonogram with Mean Green Mother From Outer Space in your head. Then come back and remind me that I am sort of awesome.

10. Saturday's blogathon didn't quite go as planned and I've been severely under the weather since then, but I've got more reviews and some cool list-style articles coming up, along with a lot more essay-ish stuff which I much prefer writing. Stay frosty, closeteers.

Link: Bertie Wooster is vengeance, Bertie Wooster is the night

2010-02-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

MGK's brief fiction asides (an political rants) are becoming more of a draw than his (very fine) comics criticism. He started these Wodehouse impersonations recently and this one caught my eye for obvious reasons.

Link: No Ozymandius statue? Oh right, right...

2010-02-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

Tom Spurgeon (who is awesome) has a list up about a few comic book/cartoonist statues he felt worth showcasing (apart from the Walt Disney statue in Orlando and such). That Superman is probably the best known but the Astro Boy is my personal favorite.

Epilogue

2010-02-20T21:22:00.000-08:00

When I realized that this past Thursday was going to be the one year anniversary of starting this blog I wanted to do something cool. There was a time when I was involved with some smallish social networking sites, when I "worked" at Cracked, when I could still get potential interview subjects to email me back...There was a time when I was doing anywhere between 100-500 visitors a day with thousands showing up when I'd get linked somewhere high profile. My move last summer destroyed any rhythm I'd established and it wasn't until the start of the year that I was able to get this thing going again. I wanted to mark that...that I was still doing this, by God...We slapped this thing together in sort of a hurry, as a consequence, and while I think it shows I don't regret it at all.

The Blogathon has gone well, and it hasn't. Joshua, Michael and Menda have been wonderful in providing content and they'll continue to do so in the future. And I feel like, as a "reader drive," this stunt may have worked. That said, major connectivity issues and some unexpected errands in the waking world derailed this project at several points, and for that I apologized. I didn't get to everything I wanted to do. Even my collaborators didn't get to everything they wanted. But rest assured, in the days and weeks to come we'll finish off any pieces in-progress and get them to you.

If you enjoyed some of the work you saw today, drop us a line. Better still, drop somebody with influence in the comics blogosphere a line.

We've got a number of new features I had hoped to debut but, alas, that will have to wait. Look for them soon. We're also going to try to keep the Twitter from going back into mothballs so watch for that. If you're new, check out the archives.

Tomorrow there aren't any posts planned but who knows, something might come up. If not, regular posting resumes Monday. I can't promise we'll keep this kind of pace but we'll try to please.

I've been announcing an impending announcement a few times lately. Well, we're going to see how this week plays out and talk amongst ourselves before we come out with anything. It's not free ponies or anything awesome but it's special to us and we hope you'll like it, too.

Thanks to everybody who spread the word about this and have a good rest of the weekend.

L.A.R.P. Live Avatar Role Playing

2010-02-20T20:07:00.000-08:00

The Na'vi people of Hometree, Wisconsin.
I'm so sorry, but I had to post this.

Blogathon Singalong, Track 8

2010-02-20T20:01:00.000-08:00

5 Things the New Spider-Girl Needs To Do

2010-02-20T18:42:00.000-08:00

1. Look to the past. Crazy Eight was cool and all but a lot of Mayday's rogues gallery seemed weak. Of course, anybody's villains might seem lame compared to her father's, some of the best supervillains ever. I say, rip them off...but in a loving way, like the way Marvel villains appear in your existing Marvel Adventures book. Familiar enough to be great, different enough to be fun. Go with the motif you established of young versions of existing villains. Not to mention that you have all of Marvel villains to riff on this way, since Spider-Girl is going to be your only set-in-the-future title.

2. Don't look so much to the past. Spider-Girl and co. were unintentionally hilarious because every issue was tied so heavily to Marvel continuity but it was only pre-Clone Saga, Tom DeFalco continuity. It was bizarre. Focus more on "generic future Spider-Girl" than on making this a continuation decades old plots. Don't count on people knowing about the previous Spider-Girl stories or caring, by the way.

3. Stop the future. Every other Marvel future is absolutely horrible. Spider-Girl is the only one cheerier than King Lear. Have Mayday personally thwart some of the great threats that promised to send her world spinning into one of those futures. I mean otherwise she has about eight years until Days of Future Past, right?

4. Outdo her father. Spider-Man avoided being on any regular team until recently. Peter sat in the same job for years before moving on to teaching which didn't make him much more money. He endured public scorn and persecution for years. He still lives in the concrete shadow of his dead Uncle. We have a Spider-Man that they keep hitting the reset button on already, but Mayday not only doesn't have to follow her dad's path she shouldn't. Hell, have her follow her mom's path! Or start her own online news site as opposed to working for the Bugle's.

5. Earn this. Spider-Girl was a good book but it can't just be good, or good enough to stay afloat. People are taking one more chance on this property and the future of other major Marvel women may hang in the balance. The future of the now-rebooted Marvel Adventures line may hang in the balance. The future of out-of-continuity series like this (and GALACTA!) may hang in the balance. I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry. It's not fair to ask you to shoulder both a gender and a generation but many series and characters have gone into the fray before you. Many of them never got second chances. Count every issue as precious. OH! And May should have a new Spider-Mobile that's one of Nick Fury's old cars. That'd be sweet.

Link: Great Calvin and Hobbes Article

2010-02-20T17:37:00.000-08:00

One of my many favorites

I came across a very nice article on Bill Watterson and in the same vein Calvin and Hobbes. Nevin Martell focuses on and celebrates Watterson's ability to take us to entertaining and child-like adventures while at the same time saying something so profound about human nature.

"It's pretty mind-blowing to experience something that you expect to be nothing more than ordinary, only to find that it is changing the way you look at the world. (Kind of like stumbling across the Beatles on the radio in 1964 sandwiched between Harry Mancini's Pink Panther theme song and a Jan and Dean tune). Calvin and Hobbes was intended to transcend the funny pages, but no one could have guessed just how far."

Blogathon Singalong, Track 7

2010-02-20T17:19:00.000-08:00

I like this version better. Deal with it.

Link: Famous Twitter Dad Will Be Played By Shatner

2010-02-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

William Shatner has officially signed on to play the dad of shitmydadsays on the CBS pilot. I certainly hope his performance will be similar to his 'spoken word interpretations' of Sarah Palin's twitter on The Tonight Show.

The Jazz Riffing of Galactus!

2010-02-20T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Super Hero Squad Show finale is tonight and I'm liveblogging it on our Twitter. This is the debut of George Takei in his capacity as Galactus, devourer of worlds. I'm sure it will go well; Galactus has fared well in animation but if you want to see something effed up just take...a look...at...THIS:

Ears EARS EARS!!!....

Achem. This is far from the strangest position Galactus has found himself in, though. It seems like his stories are an almost 1-1 ratio of looming sub-Lovecraftian Jim Starlin-style cosmic indulgences and absolute craziness. Both sets have provided some awesome stories and moments over the years. By no means a complete list, here are some of my favorites:

I make no apologies for my love of the Impossible Man. He hailed from the planet Poppup where the people weren't free-thinkers like him, so he decided to be crazy everywhere else in the universe instead. Mostly Earth. So when the FF were faced with the twin problems of Galactus and Impossible Man they allowed one problem to solve the other. Reasoning that a boring hive-mind existence was no existence at all, IM led the Big G to Poppup where Galactus proceeded to chow down on Impossible Man's entire race. It did give him a wicked case of indigestion though. In the above comic, from late in What If?'s lifespan, Impossible Man seizes the Infinity Gauntlet and plans on using it to destroy Galactus out of revenge (even though it had been his idea) before Silver Surfer convinces him to just reconstitute his world instead. Galactus all tied up and waiting to die tickles me.

Hercules' mini-series was great stuff if you like that sort of thing (and you should). During it, Herc got Galactus thrashed on some Olympian-roofied in an attempt to get him Can't-Eat-Planets-Drunk and Galactus took off his big purple hat. This was explicitly stricken from continuity immediately and is ignored by fans who prefer Byrne's characterization of Galactus as an unknowable, shapeless force but there are a lot of images of a helmet-free Galactus out there and they all look like this so I don't see what the big deal is.

Spidey ate something that disagreed with him and he tripped balls. Aunt May gained the power cosmic and sated Galactus' eternal hunger with Hostess Twinkies. This was the Super Mario Bros. 2 of Marvel Team-Up.

During one memorable John Byrne story Galactus was weakened past any point seen before and after a severe beatdown Dr. Strange cast the Visions of Hoggoth or something on Galactus, making him feel every death. It made a kind of sense; why shouldn’t he be susceptible to a sorcerer so powerful the Living Tribunal hears him out, especially when ol’ highpockets is at his lowest ebb? However, during the Fantastic Four cartoon of the 90’s this story took a little bit of a different turn. They kept the scene but changed the cast. This time Galactus’ psyche was pummeled by the Penance Stare of Ghost Rider. Now Ghost Rider is cool and all and powerful in his own right but he’s not Dr. Strange powerful. Not to get into an argument about superhero dick length or anything but if GR can’t punk out Morbius he then Galactus should be able to pick his teeth with his humerus.

After a while Reed Richards got tired of Galactus messing around and turned him into a star because that's just how Reed Richards rolls. This upset the cosmic balance and let loose a creature called Abraxas who was determined to kill every Galactus in the multiverse and erase creation with the Ultimate Nullifier. He tricked the FF into reassembling it for him by throwing a decapitated Galactus skull still in its helmet at the Earth like Uni-Baby. He was defeated when Franklin Richards and Valeria von Doom (Doom and Susan Richards' grown daughter from a parallel universe) turned Galactus back into a real boy again. This somehow destroyed Abraxas and turned Valeria into a fetus inside Sue Richards' tummy, which means...pluh? Also, Abraxas straight up slapped the Watcher and stole his sash. This was his awesome supervillain costume.

Ultimate Galactus turned out to be just a whole bunch of spaceships that would generate liquid metal Silver Surfers and send them to planets ahead of time to set up Heaven's Gate cults. The film version of Galactus stuck closer to this portrayal, giving us a Galactus who was basically the space storm from Star Trek with Galactus' burning hat in the middle.

During the JLA/Avengers crossover a few years back the Green Lantern villain Krona ripped Galactus apart to learn how the universe was created. When he didn't get an answer he decided, echoing Crisis on Infinite Earths, to build a house out of him. This was metal.

Reed Richards didn't learn from the last time he uncreated Galactus so, when Johnny was a Galactus' herald for a while (long story), Reed sucked out all of his Galactus juice and turned him back into regular old Galan, last man of Taa. He walked around New York with the FF as they tried to convince him that Earth was worth sparing. Galan was apathetic about the ordeal and just walked around eating streetdogs and pretzels. Galactus, consuming NYC cart food. Nice.

Meanwhile, back in Marvel's alternate realities, the world of the Earth X comics was...complicated. Suffice to say that the plot revolved around the Celestials' experiments in evolution and how it paid off in yet another dystopic Marvel future and revealed, among other things, that Thor and the Asgardians were just hyper-evolved shapeshifting aliens like the Skrulls who became what mankind needed. Well, when the denouement rolled around the only thing that could stop the Celestials was Galactus. Unfortunately, Reed has turned Galactus into a star years earlier. But THIS time he had a contingency plan. Sure enough, Galactus showed up and slaughtered the Celestials only to reveal himself to be Reed's son Franklin, who had himself become so hyper-evolved that he turned into Galactus just because there wasn't a Galactus around at the time.

That's nothing compared to the time that a bunch of heroes turned into zombies and ate the Silver Surfer, which then enabled them to eat Galactus, which then turned them into Galactus Zombies who traveled the universe and ate everything that exists.

There have been plenty of other awesome Galactus moments out there, be they canonical sci-fi wingdings or twisty turny weirdo reinterpritations. I'm looking forward to the next step in Galactus' pop culture evolution...Adam Warren's GALACTA!

What's your favorite Galactus moment?

Blogathon Singalong, Track 6

2010-02-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

A Supervillanelle

2010-02-20T14:59:00.000-08:00

I am a writer of poetry who has, of late, been a writer of not-much-poetry. To rectify that I intend to work my way slowly through the Wikipedia listings for poetic forms and create some manner of "filk poetry" to post here from time to time as a way of getting back into practice. Enjoy or don't.

---------------------

Let fall my sturm and drang
As Kang has come for time
Now time has come for Kang

All those opposed shall hang
Insurgency their crime
Let fall my sturm and drang

Let battle armor clang
And vines of conquest climb
Now time has come for Kang

The air of battle’s tang
Machine and blood and grime
Let fall my sturm and drang

This world has felt my fang
Sweet victory sublime
Now time has come for Kang

Now Valkyries have sang
The conquest of Kang Prime
Let fall my sturm and drang
Now time has come for Kang

Ultimo, v1

2010-02-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

Ultimo is at once such a by-the-book boys’ manga and such a typical Stan Lee joint that I’d be ready to declare that Stan had finally found another long-term collaborator to built a partnership on if Ultimo was any good at all.

Ultimo is about a group of anti-aristocracy bandits in ancient Japan who discover a Stan Lee straight out of the 36th chamber, if you'll allow me to mix my ethnicities with my metaphors. He's tooling around the woods with two robots who are powered by the spirit of pure good and the spirit of pure evil. They have enormous gauntlets that transform into crazy weapons for crazy attacks. One of the bandit leaders is so good (?) he imprints himself on the "good doll" named Ultimo, who agrees to serve him in overthrowing the nobility.

That didn't work out, though, and we are transported to present day where the reincarnation of this bandit leader finds a busted-up Ultimo in a junk shop and repairs him with a hug. Then Vice (who is pure evil) shows up and rips a bus in half to stick it to Ultimo. Vice is being controlled by a shiftless layabout with rat teeth. Ultimo gets hurt and Yamato (the reincarnated bandit) tries to wake him up by pledging his devotion, which looks so much like they're about to make out that the girl Yamato likes uninvites him to her party.

Then there is another robot boy named Envy or Jealousy or something shows up, and then he shows up again in a flashback which is back with the bandit fighting nobles again but later than the first time. It turns out one of the nobles owns Envousy because Stan Lee - excuse me, Dr. Dunstan - seeded various robot boys throughout time. Then, in the future, Jealvy and the reincarnation of the noble who owned him offer to buy Ultimo.

Characters are in this story in the sense that individual drawings have individual names, and I know it was written because these drawings say words to each other. This is not Stan's finest hour, whatever part of the hour was his to begin with. The art is fine but not my cup of tea. I cannot recommend the book on its own merits. However, I can say that the interview at the end, where Stan says he thought the idea would be good because "I didn't know if they had robots fighting each other in Japan" or something to that effect, just absolutely tickles my funny bone.

My Store

2010-02-20T11:25:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking about this again lately. What would I do if I found myself running a comic book store? Obviously I'd be left with whatever stock existed when I came in but let's assume it's a perfect world. Let's assume I have a bank loan that will pay for everything I need for my business and I can pick and choose my entire stock. I'd probably stock a couple of shelves of RPG books and supplies and maybe a box of toys every once in a while. Some anime. I'd have to seriously learn a lot about running a business...

But let's say I got to pick what went on my bookshelves. I'd have the first volume of a lot of series. I'd have a lot of standalone books or collected-in-one editions. And I'd stock about 100 full series. It wouldn't be all I'd carry, mind; I'll have some traditional longboxes full of old and new comics and I'd try some different things...

Anyway. So I'm stocking 100 complete series, in addition to a whole bunch of other comics. What are they? I'm glad you asked...

1. Sandman
2. Lone Wolf and Cub
3. Astro Boy
4. Lupin III
5. Tintin
6. Asterix
7. Dragonball
8. Transmetropolitan
9. Cerebus
10. Usagi Yojimbo
11. Jack Staff
12. Girl Genius
13. Garth Ennis’ Punisher MAX
14. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing
15. Hellboy
16. Sin City
17. Jack Kirby's complete Fourth World
18. Groo
19. First 100 issues' worth of Fantastic Four
20. First 100 issues' worth of Spider-Man
21. First 100 issues' worth of Avengers
22. First 100 issues' worth of Thor
23. Hellblazer
24. Hitman
25. Runaways
26. Astro City
27. Eisner Spirit
28. Other Eisner Books
29. Best of EC
30. Superman Showcases
31. Batman Showcases
32. LOSH Showcases
33. Y the Last Man
34. Fables
35. Uncle Scrooge
36. Savage Dragon
37. Invincible
38. Top Ten
39. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
40. Promethea
41. Judge Dredd
42. Kane
43. 100 Bullets
44. Criminal
45. Miller DD
46. Bendis DD
47. Ranma ½
48. Maison Ikkoku
49. Bone
50. Complete Peanuts
51. Naruto
52. Akira
53. True Story, Swear To God
54. Battle Royale
55. About 20 collections of Star Wars comics from various epochs
56. About 10 collections of Doctor Who from various epochs
57. Early Marvel Transformers
58. Early Marvel GI Joe
59. MAD Archives
60. Hot Gimmick
61. Scott Pilgrim
62. Dr. McNinja
63. Simpsons
64. Futurama
65. Captain Marvel Showcases
66. Boneyard
67. Lt. Blueberry
68. Witchblade
69. Preacher
70. DMZ
71. Queen and Country
72. Amelia Rules
73. Madman
74. Godland
75. BPRD
76. Sleeper
77. Monster
78. Strangers in Paradise
79. Oh! My Goddess
80. Yotsuba&!
81. Berserk
82. 30 Days of Night series
83. Powers
84. Mouse Guard
85. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
86. Spider-Girl
87. Batgirl
88. Planetary
89. Invisibles
90. Global Frequency
91. Authority
92. Skeleton Key
93. American Splendor
94. Concrete
95. Seven Soldiers of Victory
96. The Tick
97. Umbrella Academy
98. THUNDER Agents
99. Soulsearchers and Co.
100. Jonah Hex

A few things here. First, left out some titles I know for certain I'd stock in existing inevitable mega-collections. There's also some stuff on here that is out of print, or whose rights are a little bit tangled, but since we're already assuming a perfect world I'm just going to assume these kinks get ironed out (I mean I'm not going as far as to assume I'm getting an Essential Rom or Marvelman reptints any time soon, but still).

With longer series and families of series like Spider-Man and Batman (and Uncle Scrooge) I'd be hand-picking the best 100 consecutive issues or so to be representative of the series on the shelves. Star Wars collections would be chosen more or less at random (though I'd try to get some early Marvel stuff, some Tales, and some Tag and Bink in there), as would the Doctor Who and Dredd. Some gigantic series like Cerebus and Hellblazer, though, I would endeavor to maintain complete collections of; people who like Spider-Man don't always like this Spidey book or that Spidey book but if somebody is following John Constantine for 12 volumes they're probably going to stick it out for the rest. Besides, stuff like Spidey and Batman will have about five new collections out each month, so in the end it balances...

I tried to have a decent sample of international comics including manga but while I've read a lot of comics and a lot of manga I'm not nearly as well-read in that as some. Also, while I have no problem stocking books I don't personally like, I'm not going to go out of my way to stock something like Death Note which is in every big bookstore (so is Naruto but Naruto is a license to print money).

This is just the tip, though. I have a lot of ideas, most of which would probably not work in practice. What series have I left off this list that you would include if it were your store?

New Doctor Who Promo!

2010-02-20T10:59:00.000-08:00

5 British Historical Figures The Doctor Should Meet

2010-02-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

Of the new series of Doctor Who each season has brought the Doctor face to face with at least one major English historical figure. Fans are sort of divided about these episodes. Personally I think 3/4 have been good for different reasons and the one that just really doesn't work for me, Tooth and Claw, fails largely because while the Doctor vs. a werewolf is a cool idea the werewolf himself is just so boring. Now we know this trend is going to continue. Matt Smith is going to meet Vincent van Gogh, presumably in the years when he was teaching in England. But what does the future hold? On the one hand, relying too much on plots like these leads to both sameness (the Doctor apparently gave everybody their best ideas) but also gimmickyness; Doctor Who does not need to become Quantum Leap. There's also the temptation to have him running into fictional figures like Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes which should be avoided at all costs. For the near-future, though, with scripts no doubt already being tinkered with for 2011, the question is "Who's next?" I have a few humble suggestions:

Adam Worth- This was the real Napoleon of Crime that Sir Arthur based Moriarty on. Now again, the temptation would be to have the Doctor and company stuck in the midst of a war between Joseph Bell (the inspiration for Holmes) and Worth, which leads to inspiring the stories in the first place. But that's not what I want to see. I want to see a story where Worth and the Doctor are on the same side, where Worth gets in over his head with some time-wandering alien baddie and latches on to the Doctor as his "partner" in solving the problem. Very Talons of Weng-Chiang, if done well.

Horatio Nelson- Nessie and the Sea Devils be damned (although I am looking forward to the return of the latter), I want to see the Doctor fight off a sea monster. Some giant, creepy serpent. No? Well then sirens. Mermaids. Mermaid sirens. Lord Nelson would of course keep a few carrier pigeons as pets in his quarters.

Charles Babbage- It's a natural to have the Doctor present at the invention of the nascent computer. Perhaps some alien force wants to see what Babbage's brain can do with more information and better equipment, trying to create a computer that would even outdo the supercomputers in Doctor Who. Maybe the Doctor just needs another set of eyes while trying to fix his TARDIS.

Geoffrey Chaucer- Chaucer and friends are sitting around the table at a roadside in, pounding down grog and slapping each other's backs as they swap stories. As they pick up another round a stranger sits down at the table, and he smiles and laughs as the stories go around the table. When the tale comes to him, though, his story is far darker than anybody guessed, of a dark creature that has stalked the roadside...and may be in the inn now!

Henry VIII- We're talking Robert Shaw Henry VIII, not Sexy Tudors Henry VIII. People forget that Henry was a clever guy for the most part, and it would be interesting to see such a big-as-the-sky personality clash against the Doctor's.

Blogathon Singalong, Track 5

2010-02-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

Blogathon Singalong, Track 4

2010-02-20T09:13:00.000-08:00

A Shot of Amazing

2010-02-20T08:56:00.000-08:00

Taking a break from Comics for a minute to view one of the most amazing pictures taken at the Olympics.Huffington Post: "We're sure there's some sort of context."

Hey, Kids! Comics!

2010-02-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

When people say there aren't any comics for kids any more I just stare. I don't know how they define their terms but that's just so obviously not true that it is stunning. Do they mean that the mainstream MU and DCU titles aren't as kid-friendly as they used to be? These books always indulged in dark themes and pushed the boundaries of what they could get away with in terms of subject matter, violence and sex. If anything I'd say the current self-rating system used by the big two...specifically labeling mature readers titles and breaking other titles down by age group...is far more effective than the old Code Approved/Code Unapproved model. You know, as long as the parents pay attention, that is. My parents screened my reading material; they had to, or I would have read everything, and at eight years old I was not ready for the Stand.

But while there's a lot of stuff in the mainstream parents might find inappropriate there is still plenty in the mainstream that is. Even if there weren't, Marvel and DC both put out Spider-Man and Batman comics geared specifically to be suitable for younger readers. Even if that weren't the case there is such an amazing host of manga out there that kids can enjoy. Even if there wasn't there's BOOM!'s Disney books. There's still wonderful all-ages comics from Europe that can be found in a number of big book stores.

In fact, if you walk outside of the Graphic Novels and manga shelves in the bookstore and go to the kids' department, you'll see that book publishers don't even seem to be discriminating between publishing traditional prose, sometimes-heavily-illustrated books and comics. It goes way beyond just Bone, although let's talk about that or a minute: Scholastic published the Rose miniseries that Jeff Smith and Charles Vess did, which means that kids can get the entire mini for $10.99...that's less than 8 cents a page for Charles Vess, which is awesome. While you're there pick up Smile! and some Lunch-Lady and maybe Magic Pickle! There's Missile Mouse, there's quasimodo-comics like Diary of a Wimpy Kid...Not to mention a whole host of kid-friendly comics online and the fact that they can legally download a lot of the great comics for kids from "back in your day."

I'm just asking. If you think there's no good comics for kids any more what exactly are you basing that on? Are you saying that there's not a lot of good all-ages comics on the direct market? Even that's not really true; excellent series after excellent series comes down the Diamond pipeline only to remain unsupported in the comic shops. Is it that there's not a lot of kids comics or all-ages comics that you like enough to buy which also last a decent length of time? Once you've qualified such a statement to that extent and narrowed your focus so much, are you really saying anything at all?

Oh, and go read Smile! everybody.

Blessed are the Weak

2010-02-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

Superman, strange visitor from another world. His only weakness: kryptonite, a darkly ironic twist that renders the only remains of his devastated homeland highly toxic to him. Aquaman, king of the seven seas. He fights alongside the Justice League whether they’re in Metropolis or in space, but if he’s out of water too long he’s kaput. Batman, dark defender of Gotham City. Um…you can kind of shoot him.

What's your favorite superhero weakness? Back in the day these were used to inject a little drama into the lives of godlike superheroes to keep things interesting or humanize them. I mentioned earlier how Thor would revert to a lame doctor if he lost his hammer for thirty seconds. If Iron Man's armor ran out of juice his heart would stop. If Wonder Woman was ever tied up she would lose her fabulous powers altogether. They've fallen out of vogue as time went by as being illogical or gimmicky but when handled right a superhero's weakness can give a whole new factor for creating stories that can be worth exploring. The problem is that everybody associates superhero weaknesses with inanity akin to the goings-on in, say, an episode of Captain Planet, whose weakness was essentially everything and whose stories were some of the hackiest stuff on TV. Like secret identities and costumes, though, there is value in the convention as long as one doesn't try to stretch that particular nickel farther than it deserves. Some weaknesses change over time or disappear altogether but they often show back up, so maybe there is at least some value in them. So what's your favorite superhero weakness?Here's a few of mine:

You have to mention the Green Lanterns whenever superhero weaknesses come up in conversation. Their weaknesses were pretty debilitating, at least as they were originally presented. These days GLs can affect the color yellow by wanting to a lot, but once upon a time a schoolbus hurtling towards Hal Jordan could still be a cliffhanger in a book where characters opened portals to pocket dimensions and repelled alien armadas solo. The color yellow as a weakness was one thing but Alan Scott's vulnerability to wood means that even now, as essentially a living god, he can be taken out by breaking a chair over his back (BONESAW is reeeady!). Recently DC has introduced a slew of new Corps, the most interesting of which (for me) are the Blue Lanterns. They also have the best weakness: they're powerless unless hanging out with a Green Lantern! When the two are together a Blue Lantern can light suns or supercharge a GL's ring but on their own...hope without willpower...their power is as potent as platitudes.

Firestorm and Marvel's Molecule Man both have pretty much the same power, the same tailor (who is blind), and the same Achilles heel. Both could rearrange the atomic structure of any substance and transform it into pretty much anything they could think of...as long as the substance was inorganic. They could turn robots into umbrellas with a wave of their hand or build fortresses out of water with a thought but when faced with a bear, a dude, or wood (again with the wood...) they were helpless.

The Darkness from the Top Cow title of the same name possesses powers along the lines of GL and Firestorm's: he can create anything he wishes as long as he understands how it works...but only in the dark. What's more, if he fathers a child the power passes to them and he dies, meaning that this is about the only superhero whose weakness is "ever having sex." Unless there's a Chick Tract I missed, that is...

Mon-El's weakness is pretty ridiculous. It's lead, if you don't know. Now in the emptiness of space it might be rare to find a yellow death-bot or a cloud of spores and from planet to planet wood may not even exist as we know it...trees could be made out of metal or something. This is DC Comics here. But when your weakness is lead, I mean...that's like if your powers didn't work in the presence of carbon or oxygen. Being vulnerable to lead means this character (who is otherwise as powerful as Superman) can be defeated by plumbing and house paint, and God forbid there's ever a team-up with the Metal Men. It's a fundamental element; there's no escaping it anywhere in the universe. It's amazing he survived long enough to go into the Phantom Zone!

Martian Manhunter is famously vulnerable to fire, which is just as bad. He's only vulnerable to fire itself though, as in the actual chemical exchange, because otherwise every time he used his Martian Vision (which is sometimes more nebulous "omega effect"-ish energy but often is used interchangeable with Superman's heat vision) his head would explode. Plastic Man, on the other hand, is vulnerable to any kind of extreme heat or extreme cold, either of which forces him out of his semisolid state and incapacitates him as either a brick or a puddle.

A lot of these are more well known, of course. Even characters like Gladiator, Marvel's Mon-El riff, have crippling weaknesses, and excusing a very specific radiation (a reference to Mon-El's lead weakness) his powers are directly tied to his self-esteem. If he doesn't feel like he can kick your ass then he can't kick your ass. He's a superhero who's powered by the Secret. On the flipside, Acclaim's run of X-O Manowar saw the armor given to someone who was absolutely fearless and, since the armor reacted to protect its wearer from threats, he got absolutely destroyed because he didn't think the thing that killed him was much of a threat. So it's a superhero whose weakness was machismo.

There are plenty of other heroes whose powers are also their weakness (other than, y'know, metaphorically, in which case this article would be about every superhero ever). Firestar, who started life on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, has the power of super-microwaves which, for a long time there, were contributing to making her sterile. Busiek helped undo that wrinkle in her character but her radiation powers are also a likely contributor to her recent brush with breast cancer (thanks for that, by the way). Sleepwalker was a mystical being from the astral plane stranded in the mind of a human, so he could fly around and save the day as long as his host was asleep; if he ever woke up, Sleepwalker vanished. Even fairly recent creations stick with the built-in weakness convention; Empowered (of the comic of the same name) has a super-suit that gives her awesome power unless it gets the slightest bit of damage, in which case all its power disappears and leaves her helpless amidst a gang of villains, ready to be tied to a chair (a riff on Wonder Woman's old weakness; appropriate since both started as essentially fetish comics). The absolute best example we've read in recent years is that of Atom Eve from Invincible. She has awesome cosmic power like Firestorm, able to turn anything into pretty much anything else, and her powers even work on organic matter! Of course, rebuilding matter always leaves a little mass or atomic residue left over but no problem: Eve just internalizes the excess mass and expels it from her system later. The more she uses her power the more she has to poop.

The maddest, silliest, most fundamentally bone-headed weakness, though, belongs to Captain Marvel Jr. You know Captain Marvel; he says SHAZAM to gain the powers of the gods and if he says SHAZAM a second time he reverts to young Billy Batson. Okay, fair enough; SHAZAM is easy to get through a day without saying. Freddie Freeman, though, does not say SHAZAM to become a superhero. He says "Captain Marvel." See the problem? Freddie sees a bad guy. He shouts "Captain Marvel!" and becomes a superhero. He flies over to stop the villain from stealing a TV and the dude says "What? Who are you?!" If Freddie tries to say "I'm Captain Marvel Jr!" then poof (SHAZAM): he turns back into a kid with a bum leg. He can't even get as far as saying Jr! He can't even introduce himself to other superheroes without giving away his secret identity. For a while there he started going by CM3 to avoid just such a situation. Guy was so desperate to gloss over the chink in his armor he named himself a chemical compound.

Recession Comics

2010-02-20T05:09:00.000-08:00

What's the best way to spend 4 bucks at the comic shop? A single comic can be 4 or 5 dollars before tax. What's the best bang for your buck in that circumstance? Captain America? Daredevil? The Goon? Invincible? Outsiders? Okay, not Outsiders, but still...

I ask because I feel like there is a huge segment of the direct market customer base who just can't talk themselves up to shelling out five bucks for one title. Whatever the reasons behind the price, it's too steep by half for 20 pages featuring 1/6th of a story, or that's the attitude I hear.

Concerning this dilemma I say, when was the last time you bought a back-issue?

Stores are still choked with old comics, be it a stack of unsold comics from two months back to boxes of Youngbloods in the back room. Some of these were artificially inflated the moment they go off the shelf because Wizard Said So but with Wizard holding less and less sway I expect that sort of instant hike to disappear in time. Not just for that reason, though; the abundance and speed of reprint collections mean that even if you miss an issue from a run it's usually just as easy and sometimes comparable in cost to just wait for the collection.

Digging through those longboxes is a good way for the retailer to move product. It may break down differently from dollars spent on the latest Detective Comics on a spreadsheet but Diamond takes money made off of old comics as well as it takes money from new ones. You can still find a lot of great deals and surprises. Then, of course, there's that comic shop staple "the dollar bin." The dollar bin is usually about 8-12 longboxes full of comics from various periods, as recent as a few months ago or from back in the 70s. The same four bucks to get a comic from last week can get you Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter #1-3 and a comic where a nearly naked Mister Fantastic fights off a triceratops with his pants. You can't tell me that doesn't make sound sense, especially when your alternative is not getting comics, which is just...too horrible to think about.

Well, just...turds.

2010-02-20T05:05:00.000-08:00

Technical difficullties brought things down to a halt last night but we're still apace on content if not time.

Speak of the Devil #2

2010-02-20T01:48:00.000-08:00

In November 1985 The Flash died. Dr. Manhattan left us for Mars. Blue Devil? He was floating through space with some C-list Omega Men. But the issue doesn't start with that. No this is a Special Crisis Crossover, so it starts with alternate versions of every Blue Devil supporting cast member, including Dan Cassidy himself. This was a confusing fucking time to start reading comics, because the beginning of every issue introduced characters who were guaranteed not to matter by the end of it, and the characters I recognized from issue to issue- like Pariah and Harbinger- weren't the kind of thing to build a fanhood around. (Then again I ended up building my fanhood around the box art from the Super Powers Collection.)

So we meet all these alternate versions, all of whom quickly get sucked into a black hole on page 3. Next we're treated to a splash of Blue Devil and four top contenders for worst Omega Men character ever: Rynoc, Zirral, Shlagen, and Doc. I could go on about Rynoc's "Kang at the Shrine Circus" look, or Shlagen's inexplicable head-sperm appendage, but nothing quite compares to Doc. The dude has a cinder block television for a head. The group is quickly beamed aboard the ship of the alterna-friends. Alterna-Norm has a cybernetic eye. Turns out, on Alterna-Earth... well I'd better let Alterna-Marla explain it:

Which of course led to Charlie Chaplin's laser-powered cane and movie studios landing on the moon. No, seriously, that's the next page. Also there's a shot of the Alterna-Verner Brothers crew blowing up a ship with the Paramount logo. People start Crisis-ing out of existence and BD does something with magnets to rip out Alterna-Norm's cyber eye before he disappears. With the mundies gone, Dan and Rynoc get down to fighting until pieces of the ship start disappearing. Turns out everyone's still around, and TV-head explains why. Both Dan and Alterna-Dan get down to building a super-science Franklin stove that they can all hold hands around. Blue Devil just made a hand-holding joke to The Phantom Stranger over in Blackest Night, but this time around it was Daniel Cassidy's own idea!

Everything works out, but the Omega Men have an appointment on Vega they need to get to, and fast! Alterna-Marla has a plan, but before that there is an absolutely awesome ad page. I'll share my favorite parts with you at the end of this paragraph. The entire crew heads for the ship's expansive movie theater (because naturally, full-sized movie theaters exist on location everywhere a movie is being filmed, even in space.) They use the movie projector to send the Omega Men directly to Vega. This, of course, begs the question why do they have a standard Star Trek style teleporter in the front of the ship if they've got this simple, unlimited-distance version hiding in the back? Actually, it's possible the film projector teleportation only works if the target area is full of columns, since both Harry Hokum's audience chamber and Jock Verner's Roman Senate inspired office are the only two places we see people sent to. The issue ends with technical problems in the projection booth, and (thankfully) this is the last time we'll ever encounter the Alterna-Supporting Cast (although I support Alterna-Sharon's decision to spend the whole issue in a metal bikini when everyone else is rocking space-jumpsuits.)

One of the letters in the editorial column comes from Beau Smith, which is that special kind of weird that comes from realizing people existed outside of your previous awareness of them. Most of the letters are about issue #14, Kid Devil's introduction in a fun story about an airline hijacking. Simpler times, my friends.

Next Time: Blue Devil #23 (Firestorm vs Blue Devil!)

Blogathon Singalong, Track 3

2010-02-20T00:47:00.000-08:00

How To Suddenly Enjoy Thundercats Way More

2010-02-20T00:16:00.000-08:00

Lion-O's trusted sidekick and comic relief is not named Snarf. He's actually just somebody with tourettes. "Snarf" is actually the Thunderan equivalent of "fuck." As in "I want to Snarf your brains out." His real name is probably Steve or something. But the Thundercats are such huge jerks that they make fun of him mercilessly for his condition. They basically nicknamed him Fuck and thought it was so hilarious they never stopped. And he has to either just ignore them out of spite and be separated from the last survivors of his homeworld OR he has to grin and say "Yep! That's me, good ol' Fuck! Fuck, fuck fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck..." But that doesn't mean the psychological gouges don't just go deeper and deeper every day...

Adds a whole new dimension to a show sorely needing one. You're welcome.

Fan Art Feature #11

2010-02-19T23:59:00.000-08:00

Aquaman 3 by ~VoteQuimby on deviant ART

Blogathon Singalong, Track 2

2010-02-19T23:36:00.001-08:00

Speak of the Devil #1

2010-02-19T23:18:00.000-08:00

Speak of the Devil
Unlike most comic fans, I rarely ever got to have my own comics as a kid. I'd beg my friends to bring their comics to school and let me read them at lunch, but for whatever reason I was afraid to tell my parents I liked comics for years (the Sergio Aragonez-esque marginals that bordered all my homework should've been a tipoff.) Mid 86 I was in the first grade and sick at home with the flu. My parents both worked and this was the first time in my life I was home alone, (although I sadly spent the day in bed- actually being sick on a sick day sucks.) The bright point was undoubtedly when my dad came home to check on me on his lunch break. He handed me two comics. The first was a fairly pedestrian post-Secret Wars issue where Thing quits the Fantastic Four by shouting "I KILLED BEN GRIMM!" The other was slightly more noteworthy: Dad had inexplicably brought me an issue of Daredevil: Born Again. This was and is an incredible comic, but in retrospect it is a terrible first comic. Still, I was hooked. Since comics were apparently ok as long as I was sick, I asked for another issue of Daredevil. The third comic I ever owned, the one that accompanied Dad's apology (the snag had been an incredibly brilliant fluke; it must've been a Wednesday,) became my new favorite, and would contribute heavily to my atypical comics taste throughout the decades that followed. It also helped ease the frustrating reality that I would have to wait until my Freshman year of high school to finish Born Again. What comic could have supplanted Frank Miller's most legendary Daredevil story ? (Ok, second most.) You guessed it: DC's Blue Devil.

For those of you unfamiliar with Blue Devil (or only familiar with Shadowpact Blue Devil,) Daniel Cassidy was originally a stuntman and special effects wizard who became permanently trapped in his super-powered monster costume. The costume just happened to give him super strength, invulnerability and a few esoteric abilities (such as the power to shoot bubbles- useful on stage 4 against Heat Man.) The monster was a Blue Devil (hence the creative superhero moniker,) and Daniel quickly used his new powers to star in more movies and occasionally fight muggers and robots, seemingly as much for the PR as out of heroic necessity. If you're imagining Booster Gold meets Hellboy by way of Mysterio, you're closer than you think. Daniel's other power, though, was as a "weirdness magnet," which comes off as an unnecessarily cumbersome descriptor until you read an issue, after which it's like, what the fuck else would they call it? I never steadily collected BD, and although I did manage to pull two copies of the final issue, my collection is few and far between. I walked into the comic shop last Thursday with six dollars in my pocket, knowing I couldn't afford anything but curious if the old haunt was still there (I just moved back to Ohio after ten years.) I walked out of the comic shop with five vintage issues of Blue Devil, which I will spend five posts detailing for you. I'm going to talk about everything, the awesome bits, the lame bits, the inside jokes, the ads, everything that tickles my fancy. (Actually, I'll probably miss a lot.) I'm doing this mostly because it's the kind of thing I can get away with, but also because, in a year of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, I was a stalwart Blue Devil fan.

We'll start with Blue Devil #12 (May 1985.) While Nazis were stealing the Liberty Bell over in All Star Squadron (thanks in part to Liberty Belle, actually,) Blue Devil was busy posing for People Magazine. This is actually the first page of the comic, with all the writing and art credits worked into the Magazine cover, as well as a nod to BD creators Cohn and Mishkin and... what's this? This People weekly is addressed to Mr. M Metallo, 123 Supervillain Ln, Metropolis!? That's right, bitches, Metallo reads People. That right there is a wellspring of joke material, but I don't want to embarrass myself in front of Chris Sims (because you're all about to go link him to this blog, right?) Turns out the magazine is in the hands of two former Metallo henchmen, who are breaking into his secret hideout (nestled inconspicuously over on Supervillain Lane,) to steal some awesome technology, but are thoughtful enough to bring in the mail first. By page three we meet the "Shocking Villain!" promised on the cover, Shockwave, who you might recognize as an obscure heavy from that arm of Intergang obsessed with the metric system. There's also one of those infuriating Oreo decoder ring ads here. Let me save you some time, the answers are Unscrew, Lick, Munch, Dunk, and Eat. (Go ahead with a joke, Mr. Sims, you've earned it.)

Page six introduces us to Daniel's employer, movie studio mogul Jock Verner, head of Verner Brothers. One of the great things about Blue Devil is that this is a spinoff book from something that happened in a subplot of one issue of Firestorm, which means it's so far below the radar that nobody is really going to raise a fuss if they take pot-shots at the parent company. Jock Verner is the Tom Manning of the series: barking orders, chomping cigars, abusing his power, and willfully failing to reconcile the hero's monstrous exterior with any inner qualities. Verner's unabashed 80's greed and Ralph Spoilsport-worthy fashion sense help downplay the motivations shading Cassidy's own less than perfect heroic image. Oh also half of page eight is a cutaway shot of the Daily Planet at night with a narrator-aside about how hard it is to make a living as an insurance salesman in Metropolis. Just in case you were curious. Then a building explodes and Shockwave and his conscripted henchmen head for Hollywood in Metallo's other flying saucer. Shockwave reads People too, and knows that Cassidy is going to be at a movie premier. Back in Hollywood, Dan is cruising in his Pink Cadillac when he accidentally cuts off Larry Bolatinski (who will use "you cut me off in traffic" as an impetus to become the supervillain Bolt in future issues- not kidding.) At the premier BD poses for the cameras, verbally assaults and physically threatens the guy who signs his paychecks, and chastises a theater patron behind him for not reading his interview in People.

Shockwave and co burst through the movie screen, and BD proceeds to call him "Shortwave" before getting punched. The onomatopoeia here is, I kid you not, "PLOW." (that name again...) The next couple pages collect the ensuing fight, but there are a couple cool ads in there, including one for Bonkers candy (Starbursts stuffed with darker, oilier Starbursts,) and an ad for The Shadow War of Hawkman. Then, suddenly, there are four panels of Jason Blood at Mardi Gras. The cover promised me Etrigan, and here he is. Sadly as soon as the transformation rhyme is over, it's back to the fight. Etrigan appears nowhere else in this comic, but he's name-dropped on the cover and in the preview for the next issue. Bah, anyway, Dan's trident shows up on its own and gives him a renewed vim and vigor. Gopher uses the Bubble gun on some henchman, (did everyone but me beat that level?) and Jock Verner's personal driver Van Vannucci gets in on the action. Gopher, aka Eddie, is Blue Devil's sidekick by the way, a P.A. who quite literally got the job by being someone's nephew. BD uses the bubbles on Shockwave who threatens to tear apart the whole city. Smash Cut to a single panel of Green Lantern John Stewart yelling at his TV.

Suddenly Blue Devil gains the upper hand, but he also starts calling people "Mortal" (never a good sign when heroes do that,) and Shockwave bounces off of him like a pre-suck Robbie Baldwin and lands face down in the concrete. Blue Devil commits a quick hate crime (unless... is Blue a minority?) and the issue ends on a cliffhanger with a "There is no Daniel, only Zuul" moment. The tag threatening that Etrigan will be disappointed if you don't read the next issue. I know for a fact that Etrigan spends the entire next issue riding a bus cross-country. I wonder if there is any record for lowest panels-in-the-comic to name-on-the-cover ratio.

The letters column is full of the kind of blissful pre-internet joy where the sarcasm was exclusive property of comic editors, and letter writers were all eager, clever, and generally complimentary. Praise for issue 8 was unanimous, one lad gushed over guest artist Keith Giffen and pointed out every inside joke in that issue. Another fellow asks about a Blue Devil movie (and hilariously mentions the "Superman Trilogy," the poor unsuspecting fool,) and the editors suggest that any comic book character less popular than Superman doesn't have a snowball's chance of ever getting a movie. Heh. If only someone had remembered to tell Mark Millar.

Next up: Blue Devil #18 (Special Crisis Crossover!)

Face Front #10

2010-02-19T23:13:00.000-08:00

Hahahaha ohhh..Oh god, HAH!...ohhhhh god....

Joe Mad you so crazy.

I'm going to take the somewhat controversial position that Joe Madureira cannot frigging draw. Well, that's a bit harsh...he can draw, he just doesn't have the restraint a lot of great comics artists have. It's the difference between Goldfinger and Goldeneye. One is a slow-building story relying on spying, intrigue and character-building so that when awesome things happen you care, and major importance can be conveyed with simple actions. One is an orgy of sound and light that can't get past salivating over something it loves to do its own thing, a place where no deed has any meaning in context beyond being another in a long series of exclamation points in the script.

I understand that people criticized Joe over his part in the video game Darksiders which I've yet to play. I wonder what they expected.

Joe made statements in the past to the effect that true, great comics are created when the writer and artist are the same person, and while that can be true (Bone, Cerebus) it's not ironclad. Any criticism one could level at Twilight - that it's a fairly genericized by-the-numbers wish fulfilment designed, that it panders to a vague demographic, that it succeeds partly on borrowed superficialities which have been fetishized by a certain subculture- can be leveled squarely at Battle Chasers. Battle Chasers featured stock characters, borderline cliche situations and relationships, and an unending series of buckles and pads. It took about four years to squeeze out 8 issues and the series ends rather abruptly.

Yet this series is very well-remembered by a certain subset and I don't understand it. I want you to look at the image above. That is Red Monika. Picture that book shipping today. Yeah.

Everything Battle Chasers did well was done better by Tellos, which had art by the late Mike Wieringo. Comparing the two books sort of makes my point about Joe Mad, because Wieringo's panels flow. His storytelling is crisp and clean. He tells his story using panels and panel transitions...using comics. Madureira tells stories using drawings. Difference. Not saying he's a bad person but while he can draw, his actual comics never live up to the drawings. So we can stop remembering his work so fondly.

The Power of Shazam

2010-02-19T23:00:00.000-08:00

I know I’ve said this a few times now but for all the grand ideas Grant played out or teased in Final Crisis my favorite parts were maybe five or six brief, brief scenes where he played with various Fawcett characters like Sivana and Tawky Tawny and I really wish he’d do a stretch on Captain Marvel next.

I’ve tried to figure out before what exactly draws me so to the idea of Captain Marvel. The comics themselves are usually good and all but the idea, the trappings and default status quo of Captain Marvel, captivates me. There is the argument that the Cheese represents the purest sublimation of adolescent power fantasy, an argument I’ve made before…If you’re a kid what’s cooler than the power to turn into a superhero, or a grown-up, much less a superhero grown-up? It worked for Prime, which owes Captain Marvel in the same way Peter Schilling owes David Bowie.

It’s more than that, though. There is something almost magical about this extreme of superhero conventions, where the hero is absolutely untouchable and is at best mildly inconvenienced by even the direst of circumstances. Where he grins, cracks a bad joke, and effortlessly flexes his way out of some byzantine trap designed specifically to destroy him using super science or magic artifacts. An antagonist whose irascible “Curses, foiled again!” attitude is as endearing as the gee-whiz heroics of the protagonist, embodying a resourceful mix of arrogance, cowardice, impatience and short-term memory loss. A small army of hangers-on follow on both sides, ranging from real threats to novelties to absolutely useless.

It’s stories where magic and science trade baseball cards like old chums and consequences are never so grim that there isn’t time to crack wise with a talking tiger.

That’s when it hit me:

Captain Marvel is He-Man. Holey Moley!

This is one of those realizations that is so obvious in retrospect yet somehow changes everything, like the day you realize that Indiana Jones really, really sucks at his job. My love for the world of He-Man, patched together from several different sources all in the name of selling plastic, knows few bounds. This isn’t an ironic, “haha gay jokes” kind of love, either. The plots may seem quaint, the characters and situations may be simple, and the animation may be slowwww but…damn, y’know?

I remember that part of the rationale for de-powering Superman Post-First-Crisis was that omnipotent characters made for boring stories. I disagreed. As with He-Man, Captain Marvel was effectively omnipotent throughout most of the stories I read and those stories were anything but boring; just because you’re invulnerable and can juggle planets doesn’t mean you can’t be suddenly transported to a world where space chickens are being killed by demonic pollution. Maybe you’ll be turned into a doll. Maybe you’ll travel time and meet President Roosevelt! Maybe you’ll turn green and grow an octopus for a head!

You know who else was great in that respect was Shazzan, my favorite of the characters from The Year Or So Hannah-Barbera Made Wall To Wall Awesome Action Cartoons. Shazzan was un-frigging-stoppable, and watching all the wizards and demons in the world try spell after charm after curse on him only for Shazzan to one-up them, make fun of them, and laugh at his own joke is still must-see TV. Hohohoho!

I would be full-on on board with Sivana and Skeletor teaming up. He already conspired to pit He-Man against Superman and it was surely the greatest comic book of all time. They’re reprinting it to coincide with the release of some truly righteous toys, which (along with the I’m-told-is-honestly-happening-no-backsies reprinting of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali), is proof of a just and loving force in the universe (Oh man, Ali vs. He-Man!). So, in light of the new management at DC, let me make a plea: you dudes need to get the rights to He-Man comics. I know CrossGen had a hard time with those rights when last they were exploited but that was a crazy guy with a compound and you guys are a facet of one of the five or so largest powers in media. DC is partly responsible for He-Man’s world so picking up these rights makes a kind of sense, and it’s not like you aren’t publishing a butt-ton of licensed comics right now.

Do the right thing. Give me some Gail Simone He-Man. You owe us for Minx.

Blogathon Singalong, Track 1

2010-02-19T22:45:00.000-08:00

Studio Ghibli's 'The Borrowers' Teaser Trailer

2010-02-19T22:41:00.000-08:00

An unfortunate lack of Hayao Miyazaki as director isn't very evident in this trailer, showing the same impeccable animation and whimsical ideas Studio Ghibli is known for. Miyazaki is still supervising, though, like he did with Pom Poko. ARIGURASHI NO ARRIETTY: The Borrowers will premiere in Summer 2010 for Japan. No information yet when there will be an American release date.

Swirly Knees, Look At These...

2010-02-19T22:34:00.000-08:00

I discovered my first regular (meaning “weekly-or-close-to”) comic shop (as opposed to “magical place visited maybe twice a year on way home from visiting relatives in hospital”) on the eve of a big sale. This was way, way before FCBD was a twinkle someone’s eye but as part of this particular sale they gave out BIG GRAB BAGS OF COMICS and like pencils and packs of raisins and crap.

But, yes, comics. And it is through this grab-bag that I learned one of my favorite little comic book tidbits.

Lobo as we know him took a long time to develop and barely resembled the character who first appeared in Omega Men #3…to the extent that fans of the Main Main sometimes disavow this version of Lobo altogether! Still, I like the Omega Men so I’m not prepared to divorce this retconned incarnation entirely from the history of Lobo. I prefer to think of him as, say, Mr Lobo Risin’.

Anyway, here’s a piece of trivia that could win you a $5 Store Credit gift certificate someday. Q: WHO was Lobo’s first victim?

A: Technically, it was Fred Hembeck.

Even as a kid I was already familiar with Hembeck thanks to some strips he had made for some Marvel annuals and backups. There’s no mistaking this gag, either: Lobo and associate show up to tussle and “Humbeck” is sent to investigate. In the Vega system, this is like sending the black guy out to see if Michael Meyers has left yet. Humbeck might as well be wearing a red jumper.

He finds Lobo and Lobo makes short, short work of him, allowing the captions to underline the gag in case anybody at home missed it:

Pretty neat, huh? Take that, Brian Cronin!

Link: King of Kong Takes Back Record

2010-02-19T22:17:00.000-08:00

Steve Wiebe, the focus of The King of Kong documentary, has reclaimed his world record in Donkey Kong Jr. That's great, but I want to hear about the poor, overshadowed schmuck who took it from him in the first place.

House Music

2010-02-19T22:16:00.000-08:00

Early last year our very own DCD interviewed the creator of MSPaint Adventures near the end of it's run of Problem Sleuth. The beginning of the interview truly says it all, if you haven't already read through one of it's stories, go ahead. We'll wait.

The most recent Adventure, Homestuck, expands the experimental nature of the original concept with the introduction of both swaths of excellent flash animation and music. Sweet, wonderful music reminiscent of the kind of 8bit game music we all know and love.

Don't forget to save.

Avengers Assembly 4

2010-02-19T21:54:00.000-08:00

Thor

Tactical Advantage: He’s a god. His power supply is plugged into every zephyr and monsoon and drizzle. He’s nearly as powerful as the Silver Surfer, has Hulk-class strength, and is as fast as a thunderbolt. Speaking of thunderbolts, his manipulation of the weather as a weapon extends beyond mere lightning zaps and cyclones. Thor could fell most enemies from across town but he chooses to get his hands dirty, wielding Mjolnir with a skill honed by centuries of fighting trolls and giants. He can throw his hammer, or use it to fly, or even to open portals to other worlds or times, and a number of enchantments on it keep it from being used by the enemy should he be felled in battle. He’s immortal and has all of Asgard on his side (even Hel and Loki on occasion) should he need them. So he has range, power, strength, speed, versatility, maneuverability, experience, backups, and, oh yes, he’s a god, which means he’s immortal (most of the time) and has special insight into godly matters, even those that extend beyond his pantheon. +10

Tactical Disadvantage: Time was, losing his hammer would revert him to a human with a bum leg. That’s not always the case, though. No, the big trouble with Thor is that while having a conduit to Asgard can be a great boon it can also be a great burden, meaning that Thor’s time with the Avengers or even his power level can be subject to the machinations of Loki or the whims of Odin or the enchantments of the uh, Enchantress. Eternity is a long time and Thor has a lot of enemies, most of which don’t mind burning down the whole team (planet!) just to get his goat (not the ones from his chariot though). Other than that, and apart from the occasional Ragnarok, there really is little disadvantage to having Thor around. -2

Headliner: Yes. -1

Look: Doesn’t matter which one, every Thor design looks awesome. +1

Founder: Yes. +1

Thor. HUH! He’s a god, y’all! What is he good for? Just about everything! Sing it again, HUH!

What you may not know about Thor and his fans is that Thor has so many fans and so many of his fans are rabid. When I say rabid I don’t mean “I buy every John Mayer album and see every concert” rabid, I mean “Y’know, John Mayer’s penis has a point regarding race relations” rabid. They’re mad. And they’re right. We’re getting into the Avengers’ Big Three now; some people will tell you that unless at least one of these is on the Avengers then it’s not really the Avengers, and there are those who will insist these three should always be on the team, kind of a Justice League approach to casting Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Of the Big Three, Thor’s book has the highest percentage of awesome comics. He’s a consummate Silver Age success story, straddling the line between Kirby’s later Fourth World and the madness of something like the Metal Men. It’s easy to see why Jack and Stan had a soft spot for him, in particular…

For the Thor fans, there’s no reason to not have Thor on the Avengers. I won’t go that far. I will say that a lot of the Avengers’ greatest villains and many of their middle-of-the-road villains got their start as Thor villains. You hear a lot about the creativity that went in to pumping out wild idea after wild idea on FF or Doctor Strange and cool new villain after cool new villain on Amazing Spider-Man, but the longevity of Thor’s rogues gallery really speaks to the creative powers invested in this book. In a way, though, it was one of the least Marvel titles at Marvel; Don Blake’s storylines never gelled for me, and later efforts to tie Thor to a more earthbound milieu have been mixed. Personally, I liked Eric Masterson…but that’s another article altogether.

As one of Marvel’s major properties, though, the Avengers are at the mercy of whatever is going on in Thor from month to month, and it has to bite for Hawkeye when he’s staring down his shaft at Radioactive Man or Absorbing Man just because these unstoppable demigods want Thor’s attention and don’t have his cell number. Still…it’s Thor. Of course he’s an Avenger!+6

Score: 15

Lock. He’s a must-have, or at least a must-consider. The biggest reasons he doesn’t rate higher is just that A) while the Avengers need Thor, he doesn’t necessarily need the hassle of being in the Avengers and B) some people find him a bit too…godly for the team. As a final aside, Thor is the most underrated member of the team in terms of deadpan comedy, and I hope that Bendis exploits this with the new Avengers lineup.

Are you ready?

2010-02-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

BONESAW is reeeeady!

Hours to go. In the event of technical difficulties on my end just hand in there. I'll have at least 24 big posts, at least 12 other regular posts, trying for 12 more, we're going to have the Twitter going...and I'm going to be posting some music along the way. Shooting for 48-60 installments before next midnight.

Posts will go up around the top of each hour but if one is late just check back in a bit. In the event that all connectivity is lost I'll get the promised content up as soon as possible.

Link: Grey is Great!

2010-02-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, as part of out blogathon (which begins tonight at midnight, central time!), we'll be live-blogging the finale of the Super Hero Squad on Twitter and posting up some related content. But for NOW check out this interview with Grey DeLisle, brilliant singer-songwriter-actress who is responsible for not only Ms. Marvel and Enchantress on SHS but many of your favorite characters from a whole host of shows! Found via Animated Superheroes.

Link: Daniel Called It (CoCo Edition)

2010-02-18T13:38:00.001-08:00

If you are already familiar with our editor in chief, Daniel Dean, then you know how easily he thinks things into existence. Two of the latest spot-on predictions were with Toy Story 3's plot and of course the new Ghostbursters movie - pointed out by Line Item Veto.

Well, he's done it again. On Conan's last show, Daniel said he hoped CoCo would grow the infamous strike beard after The Tonight Show wraps.

That amazing bastard.

Link: The New Architects! (UPDATED)

2010-02-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Call Genius Jones! DC has finally announced who'll be replacing Paul Levitz and it appears to be EVERYONE!

The above link will take you to the announcement on Bleeding Cool (not to single out Rich, he's just the first name I came to scrolling backwards) but over at Graphic Content all the players have weighed in on the news.

The message of the announcement is apparently "change but not really," and while the big three known names are drawing the most attention the big news for me is the inclusion of John Rood and Patrick Caldon, i.e. someone with 20 years marketing experience and someone with 25 years of running DC's numbers (meaning Caldon could have gone to see the Breakfast Club with Denny O'Neil!), as formal heads of state. The extent of their day-to-day involvement with DC's big brands is as yet unclear...hell, let's be honest, all the details are unclear at this point, clouded by buzz by the Lamont Cranston that is rampant internet speculation, which I certainly enjoy. So, until we actually know what's going on, I hope you'll all join me in a hearty "Zuh?"

UPDATE: Apparently Karen Berger is going to be taking her cues from DiDio now. I have to say that this has me less than rainbow-monkey-optimistic. You want to talk about "no fear" you talk about Berger and Vertigo, not DiDio and 52.

Link: Book-Books

2010-02-17T13:25:00.000-08:00

I run into the problem of people thinking I'm talking about prose when I'm not, or thinking I'm talking about comics when I'm not, because I call both subsets of fiction "books." A 32-page magazine is still a "comic" but I don't really discriminate otherwise between prose books or graphic books as literature or in language. Anyway, today's link regards book-books. I always feel a bit the fool linking to somewhere like the AV Club because I just assume everybody checks them eight times a day like I do, but there's an article on here about books they need to just stop trying to make films of. Honestly, today has had some neat tidbits but with the blogs still obsessed over Captain America, Kevin Smith and Toy Fair this is the best reading I've had all day.

Maybe this weekend's blogathon would be more successful if I renamed it the Toys-R-Us Exclusive Silent Bob/Bucky Barnes 2-Pak Blogathon.

Ten for Tuesday

2010-02-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

1. "It's so outrageous that Southwest Airlines discriminated against me! How dare they treat me like less than a human being and focus only on my weight! I'll show them: I'll launch an internet campaign of hate that will blossom into international multimedia coverage forcing millions more people to focus on my weight! Even better, now people who don't know who I am can know me as 'The Guy Too Fat To Fly.' I am a genius!" Seriously, Kevin Smith. I'm not nearly as fat as you and I have trouble on Southwest flights. Those planes are like somebody saw that bus jump from Speed and decided to build an airline around it. Don't act like you don't have Delta money. Also, Clerks was good once upon a time but I need more of an incentive to sit through another paean to 48 Hours.

2. The current "Let's reinvest dramatic equity in the classic Spider-Man villains" is going a lot better than the last time they tried it.

3. So we're watching Weeds a lot lately. And it really did remind me why I gave up on reading the Avengers books on a monthly basis. Every three or four episodes the series reaches a new status quo from which they could launch another three dozen stories. Then, through explicitly not communicating with each other or thinking things through, all the characters scramble around and send things right past bad to worst, and the only way to avoid ending the series entirely with every character dead or in jail is to abandon their platform and jump to another. Nothing is ever properly resolved, repercussions are selective at best, and story potential is tossed aside for "raising the stakes." And, again, so much trouble could be avoided altogether if the characters thought before they acted. It's still a fun ride...for a while, and then I have to take an extended rest from these characters. I'll be glad when this damn Heroic Age begins if only because we might...MIGHT be able to squeeze a year out of this before every single story ties into/spins out from a line-wide crossover of some kind.

4. I really am looking forward to the Heroic Age, though. Brightest Day looks like it might be fun, for that matter, but BD seems like its big selling point is a potential return to form for properties like Aquaman that only got as garbled as they did expressly so they could be returned to form.

5. I know that direct market retailers often have to subsidize their comic book earnings with other merchandise...shirts, statues, toys, posters. When do you draw the line with stuff like that, though? You have to at some point or else your store's bottom line is just buried in novelty plastic. I've known stores that had yarn strung along the ceiling like a madman's cat's cradle, action figures dangling overhead like stalactites, occasionally bonking customers. I've known stores whose entire counter was so covered in trading card boxes that the register had to be kept on a smaller desk behind the counter. Do you just stick to one kind of tie-in merch and take your chances? Do you buy just a little bit of everything? I confess, I don't know what I'd do in that situation. Any retailers out there?

6. I want to see the Mouse Guard fight a monkey. Like a howler monkey. Yeah.

7. I think a great way to underscore the theme of "fame is a story" in the Unwritten is to get an actual real-life celebrity in on the Twitter-style segments of the comic. And I think the only choice for that role is Wil Wheaton.

8. If Blackest Night and Brightest Day are, in part, going to lead to the revival or restoration of certain DC properties, maybe this could be a good way to hit the reset button on the Marvel Family? I ask because this whole emotion-war is territory Johns already covers in JLA/JSA Virtue and Vice, where the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man were loosed from the Rock of Eternity. Bringing that into this mess would be something that might make me perk up. This thing is the Lifetime Original Movie of spandex knuckledusters.

9. That said, post-BN, Ganthet as a Green Lantern is one of those obvious, awesome ideas. As is Amadeus Cho taking up Hercules' place in world events post-Siege.

10. This weekend's Blogathon is going to see the return of a lot of features and the debut of a lot of new ones as well. I'll be awake the whole time, posting like crazy, and we hope to see you in the comments. Tell your friends!

Link: "We ARE coming back though...right? Control?"

2010-02-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

When Stephen Colbert was beaten out for the renaming of a new space station module by the name "Serenity" I instantly knew what was up, as did every right-thinking nerd. If there's one group who can stuff a ballot it's our kind.

If you've ever watched the NASA channel on cable or satellite then you know what to expect in the above video: shots of charts and a still frame of an orbiting hunk of metal with the planet spinning away in the background. In this case it's the space station and the space shuttle docked together. But wait for it. Because about two and a half minutes in, they decide to tune the crews clock radio to the song a million Browncoats just can't let go.

1 Year Blogathon This Saturday

2010-02-15T21:24:00.000-08:00

On Thursday this blog hits 1 year old. In that time I've gone from about eight readers to as many as four thousand readers due to some odd promotion here and there on other sites. My extended leave of absence last year sort of killed any momentum I had gained in terms of attracting new readers though. So, even though making a big deal out of one year online might seem silly, this weekend I'll be holding a blogathon to both celebrate actually sticking with this and to hopefully attract some attention. Tell your friends, tip off some comics news sites, and most importantly tune in. Starting midnight Central time on Friday and continuing to midnight Central on Saturday, I'll be making one substantive post each hour, plenty of smaller posts sprinkled in, we'll be bringing the Twitter out of mothballs...my collaborators will be contributing articles as they're able.

I'm also going to take this time to announce that, pending the success of this stunt, we're planning on moving to a domain name and changing the name of the site. We're planning a lot of things, really, but I'll be honest: it will take a longer time to bring these things to you unless we can improve traffic.

So tune in Friday night and stick with us through Saturday. I will say something highly inappropriate at some point and maybe Joe Quesada will apologize to me. It'll be awesome.

Link: 24 4 Ever

2010-02-15T16:50:00.000-08:00

Everybody else is already linking to Toy Fair news but yeesh...it's late and I'm coming up doughnuts for something to put here. But, yes, a slew of Mego-style dolls for the Venture Bros., Big Lebowski and Twilight Zone all announced. I'm just going to link to the excellent Mego Museum so you can see them all at once. Enjoy!

Um...Happy Presidents Day!

2010-02-15T16:19:00.000-08:00

Weird to do this two days in a row, basically. Speaking of weird, who would have ever guess that last one would ever be the most controversial image?

Happy Valentine's Day!

2010-02-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

Link: National Snow Day

2010-02-13T14:26:00.001-08:00

The Associated Press tells me that there was snow on the ground in every state except Hawaii yesterday. Too bad we didn't get enough snow to construct one of the scariest aliens in the universe like this boy did.

State of the Blog: D'OH!

2010-02-12T18:32:00.000-08:00

So. Apparently I've been doing this with the current design for a long time and never noticed that comments didn't work. I thought I was just despised and ignored. I suspect I still am, but now you can tell me to fuck off IN PERSON! Well, using the comments link. It's fixed now. Feel free to post all your favorite Simpsons quotes in celebration.

Avengers Assembly 3

2010-02-12T17:53:00.000-08:00

The Wasp

Tactical Advantage: Basically the same as Hank’s; she even came into the growing part these last several years. If Hank’s not around she always has a direct line to him, so there’s that (for that matter she can dial up Paladin if needed). But with the Wasp you get three things you don’t with Hank. First, you get range, as her stings give her an extra edge. Second, you get better mobility since she gains her own wings and doesn’t have to rely on ants. Third, you get the experience of being Avengers chairman during some of its toughest times, a position Cap gladly deferred to her when he came back to the team. And if Cap thought she was good enough to take orders from, who are we to dispute? Huh? WHO ARE YOU, HUH? Achem…Also, Jan is rich. She’s not Tony Stark rich but she has a lot of money and a diverse array of contacts to exploit if needed. It should also be said that she had a better control over her abilities for a longer period of time and (apart from her wardrobe) is perhaps the most consistent, staid Avenger so she knows everybody personally, hero and villain. And (sadly) as a woman she’ll be pretty underestimated much of the time. +8

Tactical Disadvantage: If she takes a serious hit it’s going to take her out of the fight more easily at that size. She also brings Whirlwind in tow, and he’s really rapey and can throw a monkey wrench into a fight (although by himself he’s not so tough). Ultron will probably mess with her sometimes, too. Also, most of the time her stings aren’t going to incapacitate a foe on their own (at least not Avengers-level baddies). Beyond that…I can’t see any downside! Jan is awesome, guy, c’mon. -2

Headliner: No. +1

Look: Christ…I hate to do this twice in a row but Jan’s costumes just average out in the end. +0

Founder: Yes. +1

Jan is fun, confident, adventurous, responsible (well, for the last 40 years-ish at least), friendly, experienced, independent, capable, and a little flirty. I think that she and maybe Hawkeye have been the biggest successes as Avengers in terms of personal growth and being non-stick enough to come through the crummier periods of their histories unscathed. But Jan still takes the cake because it would have been easy to just change her personality altogether once her tagalong debutante era ended. Instead, they folded it in like an egg in a cake, making it a facet of her character but building so much more around her. I think that for all the talk of Strong Female Characters people overlook Jan because she can be such a “girl” sometimes, or because she isn’t physically powerful. This is a mistake. Not only is Jan the heart of the Avengers, she has been the brains and soul on more than one occasion.

The Ugliness associated with Hank Pym hangs over her a little though, and she still spends a lot of time ping-pong-ing between dead-end relationships and going back to Hank. For this reason she is not everybody’s cup of tea. I think it makes her a more complete, flawed character but hey… She has also had her share of personal downs, including being a robot bug for a little while and being sort of dead right now outside the Marvel Adventures line. Even as a robot bug though she didn’t sink into a miasma of despair that came to define all her interactions (the Ben Grimm method). Instead, she kept her angst below the surface and made the best of a bad situation (the Hank McCoy method). By the time she got eaten by Onslaught she read like her old, perky self and artists even took a stab at making her robug design look cute.

It’s this simple: be it stealth or distraction, tactics or tussling, Wasp has always served a role in the Avengers. If you’re a writer and you don’t want her on your team then you have an uphill climb to making an Avengers book, as opposed to a “Group Of Superheroes Calling Themselves Avengers.” If you are an Avengers artist and you didn’t design at least one new costume for the Wasp then you’re not an Avengers artist, are ya, boy? I said are ya boy?! +6

Score: 14

Now that's a score. Janet Van Dyne is an Avenger. She may not be a must-have member but she's just shy of it. Please enjoy this lovely graphic...I forget who made it (contact me) but it's an awesome panorama of fashion.

Link: Everything I've Ever Wanted On Valentine's Day

2010-02-12T17:31:00.000-08:00

An ingenious mom/baker has invented the ultimate childhood Valentine. Your favorite character, a little love from your sweetie/mother, and HOLY MOLEY - A PENCIL! Getting new and pretty pencils as a kid was always exciting. Especially if Oswa.. uh, Batman was giving them to me.

Does that not interest you? Oh, well then. I'll bring out the big guns.

BAM! Darth Vader Rainbow Cake!

UPDATE: Five (Six) Points on the Cap Controversy

2010-02-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

1. The individual that started this ended his post with "Thanks for making patriotic Americans into your newest super villains." Which is not what happens here. A group is represented parallel to (and being used as a smokescreen by) an extremist group that has been around in comics for decades. These hate groups in comics aren't picky; in the past they've masked themselves in organized religion, secret societies, corporations, hippies, scientific research facilities, and circuses. It's what these groups do. If the issue had run two years ago it would've been an anti-Bush rally, or maybe a God Hates Fags picket line, or even centered around a writer's strike. But that's not what's happening in America right now. We're still seeing demonstrations for gay rights and protesting the war in Iraq; either of these would have served the purpose for this comic. But. People aren't talking about Iraq protests as much any more, and the media more or less ignores the gay pride marches by now since there's one every Thursday. People are talking about the tax protests, and art has to reflect life in order to be relevant.

2. Complaints about the way the group is represented seem curious. Marvel comics and even Cap comics in particular have a bevy of nice, wholesome rural and middle Americans in its comics so they're not employing a stereotype so much as employing a type. No claim or indication is made that all the people involved in such protests are racist. In fact I don't think Falcon is referring to the crowd at all when he refers to the "angry white people," but rather the group they're trying to infiltrate. There's no indication that the clientele of the bar and the tax demonstration has any overlap, and the only people outraged by Falcon's presence are a wrongfully-accused bartender (I'd be pissed, too) and an in-disguise-Bucky, whose racist comments are only echoed by actual Watchdog members. As far as the crowd being all-white, considering that the black population of Idaho is right at 1%-or-less and the state overall is over 96% white it would have been a little disingenuous to pepper the crowd with a level of diversity akin to the Burger King Kids Club.

3. Speaking of disingenuous, while most people in the tea party movement are not radical racist militiamen revolutionaries who hate the government and Obama in particular with a passion that burns like the sun, some of them are. Some of them are a lot, and thirty minutes in a crowd of them can tell you that. To act otherwise to play the innocent victim is either a sign of delusion or an outright lie. A lot of the people I talk to or read regarding the Tea protests are normal, level-headed people who I just disagree with. Some of them are fucking scary.

4. How exactly can FOX News claim that a specific bias being represented by someone claiming to represent the American people is wrong when that's their whole deal? It's MSNBC's whole deal now too, for that matter; let's not play favorites, they're both terrible, and CNN is sliding further and further down the wall to join them. I mean it's one thing when a work of fiction, one read by fewer than 100,000 people at that, takes a side on a political issue (not an industry, not even a company, but one issue of one comic by one writer) but surely it's another altogether when cable news is offering editorial as fact, selectively reporting only that which supports their talking points, promotes entertainment as news, and (while their viewership dwarfs any comic book's numbers) purports to speak for all Americans (excuse me, all "real Americans") when the highest rated cable news program today is watched by less than 1% of all Americans. And the network news is slowly becoming just as bad, and the BBC is losing credibility right and left, and the tabloid state is on the rise... Vilifying a political sub-group in Captain America may be in bad taste but when your entire business model is based on vilifying the opposing viewpoint (Hi, Mr. Olbermann!) then you really have no room to bitch.

5. It's a work of fiction and fiction is allowed to disagree with you and, indeed, itself, as different characters within the story often disagree with one another. Let's also not forget that there were two Captain Americas for a while, one "liberal" and one "conservative" in the form of Cap and USAgent (who even wore the Captain America costume and title concurrent to the original for a while) and nobody bought the "conservative" Captain America's comic, so it's hard to complain about any liberal sentiment in the comic as it exists. Which is another thing...John Walker was the first one to encounter the Watchdogs, so don't think it's not possible for somebody to show up and tell Cap and Falcon off for being so presumptuous about the attitudes of the heartland. And who even gives a shit what Falcon says or does about anything? A lot of the anger seems to center on his comments and attitude about this situation but, c'mon, it's Falcon. I even like the Falcon and even I don't care because nothing he says or does ever has an effect on anything ever ever. I hate to think how big this would have gotten if Thunderstrike dissed Sarah Palin...Crap, wait, does Terror Inc. have a birth certificate?

6. You know Marvel has gone as far as making Donald Rumsfeld the Red Skull and basically devoted an entire crossover to anti-Patriot Act posturing. I do think labeling the party in the comic was a mistake and due to a lack of communication and assumptions, and that's unfortunate, but conservative comic book fans are just getting pissed enough at Marval now?! This is what got national media coverage? Like three panels worth of clumsy dialogue in what has otherwise been a good comic for years, when "Republicans can go to hell" has been an undercurrent in much of the main-universe line for the better part of a decade? Over a book that 87,000 people read? You're worried about a generation of youngsters being manipulated into anti-Americanism when the exposure is about the population of a metropolitan city block? O'Reilley's children books do that without breaking a sweat.

Daniel called it

2010-02-11T02:41:00.000-08:00

Not trying to make a big deal out of this or anything, but I have a chatlog from 2005 where Daniel suggested this exact scenario and now Bill Murray has the same idea: that he should play a ghost in Ghostbusters 3. Of course there's no prize for being right, but this is far from the first time this has happened. If Daniel predicted, say, that an MMA Fight would replace aging Rockstars as the Superbowl Halftime show, it'd happen by the end of the decade. The guy is a regular Madam Xanadu. Err... something.

Link: Lego Madness

2010-02-10T19:59:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to cut back on all the profanity on this site but there's no other way to say that this is a goddamned Arnim Zola Lego figure and that is the tits. It's from a gallery of a gaggle of gorgeous figures that has me agog. Dude straight-up made both a Beta-Ray Bill and a Larfleeze. And the White Violin. Be my Valentine, internet maker of headless cyborg Lego Nazi.

Link: All of this has happened before.

2010-02-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

Remember when I posted this like a million years ago? Well, there's a new slightly synchronistic astronomical phenomenon I want to tell you about, and this one has a name: Object X. Now that might sound like the maguffin from an old X-Force comic but Object X is actually a cross-shaped faux-comet that People Who Science say comes from the same cluster of space objects that wiped out the dinosaurs. Read the article...it's pretty neat. But I showed you that to show you this:

All of this will happen again.

Yep. The Cylons killed the dinosaurs and they're coming back. We're frakked.

Ten for Tuesday

2010-02-09T08:30:00.000-08:00

1. I love Gorilla-Man, and it's no surprise that he has become something of a fan-favorite character...an immortal talking gorilla super-soldier is an easy sell. For years we've had to settle for Monsieur Mallah for our paramilitary primates, but no longer. That being said, it's kind of weird to see his profile being raised ever-higher while the Beast's series was canceled, Sasquatch is out in limbo, and other, similar bestial bombasicts languish in even deeper obscurity. That said, at least Man-Wolf is back in comics, which means that I will not settle for anything less than a Gorilla-Man vs. Man-Wolf story where Ken gets the moonstone and becomes Gorilla-Man-Wolf.

2. Did you know that "Gorilla Man" is also the name of a serial killer? I had forgotten that until a week or so ago. It reminds me of that mediocre SNL sketch where there were all these superheroes talking about how screwed they were if Superman didn't show up to save the day, and Paul Reiser as the Night Stalker discovered that everybody thought he was Richard Ramirez.

3. Thank God there's still only one black dude at a time in the Legion, by the way. I know, I know, most superteams have only one Person Of Color at a time, but when you have like forty members you don't have much of an excuse. I know that the current vogue is to bemoan the loss of pre-Crisis continuity and to shoehorn it in as forcefully as possible but you know what? Stuff like Tyroc was worth losing. And if you're going to keep bringing back Silver Age sacraments then I demand the return of Ugly Superman.

4. If there was ever a right time to revisit Howard the Duck as a film, it's now. It's true that its reputation as a historic bomb is against it but the steep irony people drench everything in, the Awkwardness As Comedy movement, and the proven marketability of lazily name-checking pop culture for a punchline means that the project might be able to actually find traction, albeit with webbed feet. A take done in the vein of Fantastic Mr. Fox or Zombieland that traded on both the original property and the specter of death looming over its reputation....It could be time.

5. Why does Kristen Stewart seem vaguely insulted to be in every movie I've seen her in? Why do all her line reads sound just a little sarcastic? Why is fidgeting an acting style now? MAKE EYE CONTACT, WOMAN. If you don't hear the Who every time you crack a bad joke then you don't get to act like David Caruso.

6. Speaking of which, I love the Who. I love the Who. But there's two of them now and their warbling through old standards is only endearing in the way an old tick hound is. Who looked at them and decided that these guys would light the Super Bowl Halftime Show on fire? Their dancing consisted of trying to bounce as much as possible without moving, a series of shrugs and undulations reminiscent of John McCain more than the fancy lads kicking over exploding amps. I mean they played the safest ClearChannel set list possible and then tottered off into the dark. If you want to trade on the goodwill of an aging band who set up shop where pop and metal meet, hell, the cut from the halftime show to a commercial featuring KISS. You want good ratings for your halftime show, turn to the Kiss Nation. Those people are insane.

7. Neil Gaiman writing Doctor Who is awesome, although I do wish that budgetary reasons hadn't bumped the episode to 2011. And Michael Moorcock's Doctor Who novel is pretty much a shoe-in to get adapted, isn't it? Is there any way we can get Terry Pratchett in on this? I imagine he could flesh out ideas like the Shadow Proclamation. How disappointing was the Shadow Proclamation? All the mentions of it in the show, I don't know, it just sounded more mysterious. Like a compact drawn at the end of the Time War, maybe, or even a declaration of authority issued by the Time Lords themselves (or even some darker agency, or the Guardians, or...). Instead it was more space cops. The Judoon were already space cops and the Shadow Proclamation is just a couple of Judoon and an albino? Weak ass sauce, Russel. Davies really did have a problem with spending his nickel too quickly with some of his big ideas for expediency's sake. Here's hoping Moffat's run is more level...

8. It is kind of effed that if if I go to a theater and see a movie years after it originally aired the tickets are cheaper. I can choose the same novel at about four different price points according to my budget. After a while CDs and DVDs and video games get marked down substantially by corporate, sometimes as much as 50%. Comics don't do this. A paperback Identity Crisis collection is going to run me about 50 bucks, or I can pay about 30 for a hardcover, or about 50 for the regular issues. Not that I necessarily want to reread Identity Crisis, I'm just saying...

9. I like ducks.

10. I 'm really liking the slow build they're doing on Brave and the Bold with this Starro subplot. It's a good way to build menace and add gravitas for a character who looks like a big ol' cookie.

More Avengers Ad Parodies

2010-02-08T14:04:00.001-08:00

Well, I thought it was funny...

Link: No Uma in sight

2010-02-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

If you didn't see the Late Show commercial yesterday and somehow haven't read about it on every newspaper and blog in the country then this reporter is not going to be the one to mess that up. Look it up on CBS.com and watch it, but then come back and read this piece from the New York Times about how it all came together. Fascinating, particularly in light of recent events.

Fan Art Feature #10

2010-02-06T13:14:00.000-08:00

The Ladies of Jack Staff by ~theadventurer on deviant ART

Link: Twitter is in the Danger Zone

2010-02-05T13:08:00.000-08:00

I loved Sealab 2021. Not at first, mind you, but after they had put together a little more original animation and got beyond "haha he said pudding" the show went from good to great, with Hank Murphy being one of my favorite cartoon characters now. Admittedly he's on a list of thousands but still. Then the studio, 70/30, went on to create Frisky Dingo. If you don't love Frisky Dingo then you sir, you sir, then you, sir, can get right out of my office, sir. Then came trouble. Season 3 became the Xtacles which only saw two episodes produced. Sadness reigned.

Then came Archer, a show I anticipated for months and which did not disappoint. Archer (Thursdays on FX) centers around Jon Benjamin's Sterling Archer, clueless narcissistic secret agent. It's interesting; as much as failure is a theme of the Venture Bros writers, Adam Reed and co. seem to be all about narcissism. I digress...

Following the tradition of Killface and Simon's MySpace pages comes Sterling Archer's Twitter account. Check it out: it's the gift that keeps giving.

Avengers Assembly 2

2010-02-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

Henry Pym

Tactical Advantage: Hank Pym’s major contribution to the team is in the form of his Pym Particles, obviously. They allow him to shrink to nigh-untraceable size or to grow taller than most buildings. Even his transition from ant-sized to normal backs a giant-sized wallop if put into an uppercut. His methods allow for the miniaturization or enlargement of weapons, equipment, teammates, or even buildings and vehicles. However, what should not be overlooked is Pym’s grasp of robotics, cybernetics, and, yes, even communication. Talking to insects sounds insignificant compared to some of the raw power on display in the Avengers but bridging the species gap to communicate with other life forms is a huge deal. This makes Pym a man to go to when trying to peacefully resolve a dispute with an enemy of paranormal origin…a super-diplomat, potentially, though that has been little explored. So you have super-strong colossus, potential interspecies diplomat, and agent of subterfuge all in one, plus he can ruin Dr. Doom’s picnic. “Ants! More ants! FIE ON YOUR BONES, HENRY PYM!”

Also, Garrett Morris. +6

Tactical Disadvantage: Well, for starters, remember how I mentioned his skill with robotics? A case could be made that he is…not so skilled. Having Pym around means that Ultron is pretty much always going to show up to kill you (admittedly he probably was going to anyhow). Also, Pym has proven himself somewhat unreliable at times, going off and getting split in two or establishing a new identity or dying from size-changing-stress or being stuck at 12 feet tall…and that’s before we even get into the unpleasantness (above), though to obliquely reference that let me just say that even when his relationships are going well they have a way of taking him out of Avengers business. And, of course, every advantage his powers grant comes with a disadvantage. Sure, you’re shooting energy blasts from the back of that Japanese beetle but you also pack a weaker punch and are more vulnerable to injury. As a giant, well, you sacrifice maneuverability. There’s also the fact that a number of Avengers can duplicate parts or wholes of his super-heroing assets (see below). -3

Headliner: No. He was when he started, but that doesn’t count any more. +1

Look: Some of his outfits have been brilliant, some have been atrocious, and most are more than a little arbitrary…let’s call this a draw. +0

Founder: Yes. +1

Between his many aliases, his wife, his successors, and people who ripped him off or traded powers for a while, Hank Pym probably accounts for a full third of the Avengers all-time roster, and that’s if you don’t count the Vision. He’s also a likeable enough character…unless you hate him. See, Pym has a history, an ugliness assorted with the psychotic break period of his career when he was first Yellowjacket. It’s strange, though, because Hank hasn’t been able to recover from this low point in his history like so many other characters have. I mean Iron Man was stomping around a few years ago doing everything short of making Carol Danvers wear a burqa and now he has people rooting for him because he got screwed even harder. Hank has been given redemptive moment after redemptive moment, retcon after retcon, and, well, of the chunk of fans who even give a rat’s ass about the old-school Avengers there is a giant (heh) contingent that just hates Hank Pym’s guts. When Mark “Subtlety” Millar was casting his Ultimates this is the only quality that drew him to Pym.

Personally, I think Hank is a consummate Avenger. He’s exactly what the team has shown off at the best of times, a Swiss army knife of storytelling possibilities, abilities, and generally a good guy. He reminds me a little of Alan Ladd in Shane at this point. Haunted by the terrible things he was responsible for in the past, always trying to give up the game but doomed to be drawn back in by circumstance and nailed to the cross one more time… Yet, it remains that having Ant-Man or some permutation thereof on your team is a good way to make sure a lot of people hate it before a single issue ships.

I will say that I hate it when people in more modern comics try to over-inflate his importance to the team, as an individual or as a super-dude, like this Scientist Supreme malarkey. And he doesn’t bring a lot of great villains to the table. But he is a non-iconic icon of sorts in the vein of Martian Manhunter who I think lends himself to all kinds of great story possibilities, and where else will those ideas be explored but the Avengers? +4

Score: 9

This is a safe number. It accounts for Pym’s integral role in every era of Avengers history while staying low enough that we can’t exactly call him a must-have Avenger, in light of his somewhat controversial past and not-exactly-stopping-Kang-on-his-own powers.

Spirit Journey Formation Anniversary

2010-02-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

It's my birthday! As good an excuse as any to report this image, my absolute favorite comic book cake I've found online...although this one is giving it a run for its money!

Don't don't don't don't stop The Beat GO!

2010-02-04T14:02:00.000-08:00

I have been remiss in waiting this long to wish Heidi MacDonald and her crew all the best in their transition from the underwings of PW to their new home at www.comicsbeat.com. Heidi (along with Sims, Rich, CSBG and Steven Grant) is one of the reasons I decided to start this site, as her work has always been a shining example in this blogosphere she so championed.

Everybody should swing by, check out the new site…offer some mad props.

Did you miss Hourly Comics Day?

2010-02-04T13:44:00.000-08:00

Hourly Comics Day is still one of the smaller comic book holidays on the calendar. Free Comic Book Day is Christmas, 24 Hour Comic Day is Easter (because pulling that one off has to count as a miracle), and San Diego Comic Con is some weird mix of Halloween, Towel Day and the First of May.

Hourly Comics Day on February 1st is still a quite impressive and often hilarious artistic hoedown where participants draw a new comic each hour. Expect it to go pandemic in future years. The above strip is by the patron saint of the project, John Campbell. If you haven't experienced it yet, click through and check out entries from John and dozens of other participants. It's a comics good.

Link: BATMAN'S PARENTS ARE DEEEEEEEAD!

2010-02-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

The above panel has been pretty famous on the net for a long time, kind of a sub-meme if you will. Now there's a site where you can put words into Batman's mouth even as he puts his hand across Robin's. The above image is one of mine; for some reason I thought it would be awesome to transcribe scenes from Waiting For Godot. Here's some more from Act II:

I'm awesome.

Link: Konami Code Websites

2010-02-03T07:48:00.000-08:00

I feel so, SO LAME linking to Wikipedia, but nevertheless this is pretty awesome. I don't even remember how I came across it...it's a list of websites where entering the infamous Konami Kode activates some hidden feature or Easter egg. I've only tried it out on a couple of things but, hell, I think it's cute. Especially with a couple of university websites and grad school pages being on the list? This is the kind of cool nerd thing that pops up everywhere that gives me a warm McLuhan feeling.

Ten for Tuesday

2010-02-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

1. As excellent as Scott Pilgrim is and as eagerly as I anticipate the movie and final book, what I'm really excited to see is where O'Malley goes from here. I don't know what his next project is but unless it's about a daughter coming to terms with a mother's suicide in 1950s Iowa I am there.

2. Avatar deserves to win Best Picture for the same reasons Jurassic Park deserved to win. Since that never happened, and JP wasn't even nominated in that category, well...

3. Related to #2, as far as "Oscar story lines" go, there's no way Cameron shutting out his ex doesn't make him look a little douchey.

4. I am four books behind on the Goon and, Jesucristo, NINE books behind on Usagi Yojimbo?!

5. I'm in a place where I don't feel like the direct market and the monthly comic book model is serving me at all and, more to the point, I live about an hour away from the closest comic shop. In a struggling economy with shitty gas prices and a devalued dollar I have to choose between affording comics or driving to the comic book store and driving home empty handed. It's confounding. It makes it hard, then, when I notice ripples of resentment for "the bookstore shopper," and geez, guy...I don't have a lot of choice.

6. If I was the band Fallout Boy (and my attempt to publish comics featuring myself was crushed early because somebody already owns the right to make Fallout Boy comics, the company owned by people who actually made the character up, shock of shocks) I would go the other way and pay Marvel a licensing fee to put supervillain Radioactive Man on the cover of my album.

7. Hey, Shinichiro Watanabe! Make another show already! Samurai Champloo was fun and cool and all but it was just a fix. I want another serious high.

8. When I fix the X-Box I'm going to sink some time into Mass Effect. No, the first one; I never played Mass Effect. Also I need a copy of Eternal Darkness for the Wii since I can't download old video games or find a decent rental selection out here in Mordor.

9. Marvel wouldn't let Warren Ellis make SHIELD a front for HYDRA and by proxy complicit in superhero terrorist acts, only for a team personally created by Nick Fury to go AWOL and fight the power behind HYDRA. So Warren went and changed things up, made a crazy comic and got canceled. Then Marvel published Secret Warriors. Guess what happens in Secret Warriors?

10. Let's be honest though, internet: NextWave was awesome but it probably should have ended around issue #25 anyway, so while it sucks that the book didn't stick around longer the book wouldn't be around today anyhow.

HAPPY GROUNDHOG DAY!

2010-02-02T10:35:00.000-08:00

Link: Wood is Good

2010-02-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

While researching an old issue of Mad for a friend, I came across this awesome look at Wally Wood's famous 22 Panels That Always Work. Must-read.

Link: Bill Watterson Speaks

2010-02-01T10:27:00.001-08:00

With the passing of the seminal Salinger last week, is Bill Watterson now America's best-known recluse? Maybe not, as here he shows up for the first thing you can call an interview in a long, long time. Seriously, outside of a few comments on the Charles Schulz biography a while back I haven't heard anything from the guy in, what, five years? Other people are already picking up on this, but since it's early in the day enough that it hasn't been reported EVERYWHERE...enjoy.

Link: Still more Axe Cop

2010-01-29T16:07:00.000-08:00

Everybody is talking about Axe Cop, but one thing we haven't seen linked much yet is this YouTube video showing the strip's co-creators in the process of writing the comic. Enjoy!

Avengers Assembly 1

2010-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

They're Earth's Mightiest Heroes; the Avengers. Whether West Coast or Great Lakes, New or Dark, the Avengers represent the best and brightest of the Marvel Universe. However, the mansion doesn't have a revolving door. Let's face it, some people belong...and some don't. Rather than dither about the relative worthiness of Luke Cage or D-Man, I've come up with a foolproof Not Scientific At All method of ranking every Avenger to ever be on the roster. The maximum number of points on this scale is 20...will anybody get a perfect score? Characters can receive negative rankings, as well; I'm looking at you, Deathcry. We'll begin this exercise with the founders but won't necessarily go in chronological order. Today, it's....

---------------------------------------

The Hulk

Tactical Advantage: Duh. The Hulk’s strength and invulnerability/healing powers mean that not only is he the big bowling ball you throw into the enemy’s front line but he’s also the biggest target on the team. With the Hulk taking everybody’s attention with his thrashing around he’ll soak up the enemy fire while the rest of the team sets up their own attacks or gets into position. In his human form he brings a scientific expertise on ballistics and radiation. Hulk can always just throw the enemy into space if things get to hairy. +8

Tactical Disadvantage: If the Hulk is reverted to Bruce Banner by scientific, psychic or magical means then he’s screwed. Additionally, the Hulk isn’t the most careful of teammates and can prove as dangerous as any other villain. He lacks patience which can lead him to charge into a trap or leap off after an escaping foe, splitting the party. -5

Headliner: Yes -1

Look: Classic. +1

Founder: Yes +1

The Hulk has historically been too volatile to include in the Avengers, despite being a founding member. At least, that was the excuse. For most of the 80s and 90s, Hulk would have made a fine Avenger, as either a scientist who turns into a shrewd, smart monster at night or as Super-Hulk, the unified Hulk who was a super-genius and super-powerful at the same time. Super-Hulk especially would have been a welcome addition, since this was a time when the Avengers’ other leading strongmen were all undergoing changes of their own that made their inclusions more problematic.

It’s a fair point, though, that the Hulk’s personality and powers have been in such major flux throughout most of his existence that it’s hard to know what Hulk you’re going to end up with, or whether that will be the same Hulk in six months’ time. This is especially true considering the Hulk not only has his own book but has supported several at a time with regular guest appearances all around the Marvel Universe. In fact, I’m a little surprised that the current Hulkarama (not to be confused, NOT to be confused, with Hulkamania) hasn’t led Marvel to start up a MAX Hulk book to go alongside their Punisher one. Seems like a logical call, to me…

Even Bruce Banner isn’t a known commodity. I mean when mood swings are your super-power that goes without saying. It doesn’t stop there, though; from writer to writer he becomes a milquetoast, a mad scientist, or Jack Bauer, and the Avengers would have to deal with whatever characterization was in vogue at the time. A lot of these would be very interesting to work with but you would not be able to count on working with any of them for long. Why set yourself up for essentially re-casting your Avengers all the time?

It also has to be said that anybody villain-wise the Hulk can bring to the table is outclassed in some arena by the other founding Avengers. Abomination is just another generic strong monster character who doesn’t hold a candle to Ulik the Troll (“NO, YOU lick the troll!”), other iterations of Hulk like the Maestro or off-brand models like Madman don’t hold a candle to even the Abomination, and his most iconic foe is in fact the Leader, whose basic deal is that he’s so smart his head has to be giant to fit all the brains. Thing is, that’s Egghead’s deal, too, and while the Leader is laughably more awesome than Egghead he’s pretty much the only villain besides Whirlwind Hank and Jan can bring to the table, so best to let them have that to themselves. Hulk as an Avenger is all risk, negligible reward, especially when Thor is standing like right there, guy. -2

Score: 2

That’s a score I can live with. He has a lot on his side and he’s a founder but at the end of the day he’s just not an Avenger.

Link: Hulk vs Rain

2010-01-28T15:09:00.000-08:00

While searching around for a specific image for one of tomorrow's posts I discovered that somebody had the entirety of James Kochalka's brilliant Hulk vs Rain online. If you haven't seen this then you owe it to yourself to click through now.

Link: PIZZA RULEZ!

2010-01-27T14:43:00.000-08:00

Catching up on what I missed. Thanks to Gorilla Mask. You're welcome to everybody else.

Hey, kids! (reflections on) Comics!

2010-01-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

There was an excellent piece of media skewering on the Daily Show recently. I understand that’s like saying that Sacha Cohen’s new character is a little offensive, but stay with me. You can watch the clip here, as John Oliver confronts the notion being kicked around by pretty much every cable news analyst that things were simpler/better/just more decent when they were kids.

I was preparing an article on my local drug store when I was a kid. Back then, even the local mom-and-pop grocery store carried comics…I bought Marvels in a town of about 3,000 people (“Four dollars?!” cried my dad, citing whatever the actual suggested retail of the book was. “For a comic book?!”). The thing about these comics racks though was that from week to week, month to month, you had no idea what you were getting because you were getting whatever was there, whether that was an Archie Ninja Turtles comic or Spider-Man or Sleepwalker or an old Tales From the Crypt reprint that scared the bejeezus out of me. You bought what was there or you got nothing at all.

Then there was my local Harco Drug. They had a steady diet of the same comics, making it actually possible to follow specific books and stories for more than one issue at a time. This was especially handy when Spidey and FF were coming out every two weeks with six-part stories (Now a six-part story is devoted to an old mob boss getting out of jail and blackmailing Gladiator, something that would have been told in about 8 pages at one time).

You didn’t necessarily read what you were a fan of. You read what they had.

The early 90s boom saw the spread into baseball card shops and large chain stores, of course. Wal-Mart at one time had a huge “Collectors” section at the front but I could find individual racks of comics throughout the store. This was prior to every Wal-Mart being a Supercenter, in a tiny little town that didn’t rent video games, and I could sometimes find comics in four different places in one Wal-Mart.

A couple of recent essays on the subject of where comics are, exactly, got me to thinking. Thinking about the Daily Show segment, thinking about my little trip down memory lane. And I’m prepared to make a statement.

I miss 1992.

This is the first image result for "1992 comic book."
I have no idea either.

It’s not that comics were better, although people tend to forget that there were awesome comics in the 90s. It’s not that I prefer folded-in-half Batman comics in Piggly Wiggly to the library quality volumes that adorn the shelves of every major bookstore, or the even greater variety and convenience of ordering online. I don’t even think the 90s, when every publisher was putting out as many books as they possibly could, holds a candle to the nearly endless options one has in searching out webcomics to read.

I do miss a time when I didn’t have to make a special trip out of my way to buy a comic book, an actual comic book and not a download to my iPhone, and read it while dinner was cooking. I do miss the adventurous spirit of reading anything, regardless of whether Grant Morrison or Bendis wrote it. And I’m sorry, webcomickers, I miss editors; a lot of pure dreck made it to press in those days but a lot was also screened out along the way, and for every truly brilliant webcomic right now they are about 9,000 crude, racist MS Paint adventures (excepting MSPaintadventures, of course).

It wasn’t a simpler time. It wasn’t a better time. People got royally screwed back then, the industry came close to collapse, and fan service led to fashions in art and storytelling that threatened to homogenize comics.

But people are getting screwed royally now. People remain unpaid now. The industry isn’t on the verge of collapse exactly but it is not healthy, and currently much predicated on a bubble of exploitation as much as the 90s were about a bubble of speculation. And we still have over-rendered drawings with lots of unnecessary little lines and every Marvel character talks like Spider-Man, and Wolverine is still on every cover. It’s just that now Deadpool is, too. Superman has been replaced by low-rent imitations and all those low-rent imitations are still running around today, even the ones that got killed some time ago. Batman is someone else again, specifically Dick Grayson again. Everybody is caught up in sales gimmicks and variant covers, Image is telling stories about splash pages going to war with each other, and Dark Horse continues to stay afloat mostly through George Lucas’ good graces.

Things change, but they don’t change as much as you think they do. The difference is that at one time I was too young or uninformed or naïve to know about how hard everybody from the creators to the retailers to the fans were getting screwed in some way on almost every deal. Now it’s all I can think about.

Things were never better, though. People don’t change. People around AD 10 and people of AD 2010 all bitched about the weather, made double entendres, crapped, complained about kids, and did hard drugs. And knowing this about human nature makes for real nostalgia, the pain of remembering, because it makes the problems of the present sting just a little bit more when you realize they were the problems of the past and we haven’t made much progress in ten years (or in 2000 years).

Again, this is not to say that there hasn’t been any progress. In 1992 I could buy Sandman but in 2010 I can buy the recolored, relettered Absolute Sandman with oversized pages and lots of “bonus material.” In 1989 my daily comic strip fix was either Garfield or I could fuck off. Self-publishing was once almost prohibitively expensive or prohibitively limited, with mini-comics moldering in local record stores and comic shops. Now printing and distribution are a breeze thanks to technological advances.

It’s a great time to be reading comics. But then it’s always a great time to be reading comics, so long as I take the good with the bad like the Facts of Life taught me. I don’t think the industry is going to break off and slide into the sea but neither are we riding on the back of a luck dragon into an ambiguously optimistic perfect future. We’re in a huge steaming pile of shit and we just have to keep using our solid gold shovels to dig ourselves out of it. Same as it always was. Things aren't so much better or worse, just different. But not that much different. I do miss thinking the pile was something other than a pile of shit, though. Kids are such dumbasses.

No, no, dig up, stupid!

Link: Attention Hou-Ston shoppers!

2010-01-26T12:28:00.000-08:00

General Zod's wig and costume from Superman II is on eBay. It's hard for me to say "bid now" since, well, for one I know that none of the people reading this have the money, and if they did they should be sending it to Haiti instead.

That said, if Mr. T is reading this, I implore you, sir, to buy this suit. General T is exactly what this world needs right now.

Link: Good Grief!

2010-01-25T12:24:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Neatorama for finding this.

EAT IT, KITE-EATING TREE!

NOT A KITE THOUGH!

EAT LASERS!

....INSTEAD!

pewpew

Link: Something you've already seen

2010-01-22T16:51:00.000-08:00

Here is that Chinese animation of Leno and Conan fighting as superheroes. Everyone has already seen this, but what are you going to do? It's a slow news day.