CORRECTION: Apparently Jack Kirby’s name is listed in the credits of Marvel’s The Avengers, a film I have not seen. I was under the mistaken impression that he was not credited in two films I did see recently, Thor and Captain America.

In Thor, the credit “Based on The Marvel Comic Book by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby” is placed in the latter half of the end credits, in between those for Stand-Ins and Production Supervisor.

In Captain America, the credit “Based on The Marvel Comic by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby” is placed in the latter half of the end credits, in between those for Stand-Ins and Supervising Sound Editor.

In Marvel’s the Avengers I do not know the placement of the credit. It may also be easy to miss. A story circulated last month in which Stan Lee seemed to indicate Kirby’s name was not in the credits for the film. This was later confirmed to not be true. Having seen neither the film itself nor the corrections, I passed along this incorrect statement. Jack Kirby is credited in Marvel’s The Avengers. He just isn’t being paid for it.

Plenty of other pundits have remarked on this — Steve Bissette, Tom Spurgeon, David Brothers, our own Jamaal Thomas to name just a few — and recently Spurgeon provided a handy list of all the creators whose work led to the Avengers becoming a billion dollar movie.

That list reminded me of a comment from a few months back, in response to another good Kirby post from Brothers. RS David said:

The result of the Kirby trial changed the way I purchased comics too. Essentially, I cut out all Marvel comics focused on Kirby creations (unfortunately that included Parker’s Hulk, but still buying Thunderbolts).

On one hand, this is a perfectly rational response. Marvel’s lack of respect towards the Kirby estate is a massive, prominent thumb in the eye of treating comics creators like human beings. If you’re not prepared to go cold turkey, dropping the books most clearly built off Kirby’s unrewarded labor seems like the logical thing to do. But in practice, this is a tangled web.

Like both Davids, I’m a fan of Jeff Parker. I’ve enjoyed his creator owned work like Underground with Steve Lieber and Bucko with Erica Moen. But I also love his work at Marvel, particularly in light of our mutual affection for weird unexplored corners of Marvel’s shared palimpsest history. He (along with Kev Walker) brought back Doctor Dorcas, for goodness sake! As much as I look forward to Parker’s next wholly original project, I can’t deny that Parker dredging around in Marvel’s corporate-owned sandbox also pushes a lot of the right buttons for me as a reader.

Parker’s two primary books at presents are Hulk and Thunderbolts. The Hulk was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, so it’s clearly a “Kirby book”. Though it scarcely features Bruce Banner, its titular Hulk is Thunderbolt Ross, another Lee/Kirby creation. But the book’s primary hook — that Ross is now the Red Hulk, with his own unique set of circumstances — is an idea created by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness. Or Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. One of the two, but definitely not Lee or Kirby. Granted, no one would be thinking about new version of the Hulk without the original Lee/Kirby version, but the specific Hulk book Parker is writing would not exist were it not for Loeb/McGuinness. The rest of the book’s regular cast features almost exclusively non Lee/Kirby characters, Kirby’s solo creation Machine Man excepted. Most remarkably for a 21st century superhero comic, Parker and his artistic partners have created a whole set of new characters for the book, including Red Hulk’s robotic confidante Annie and villains like Black Fog, Zero/One, Omegex, General Fortean, and Dagan Shah. Alongside Gabriel Hardmann, Patrick Zircher and the rest of the Hulk artists, Parker has created a whole rogue’s gallery in a couple dozen issues. Obviously any book called Hulk will owe a huge debt to Kirby (and Lee), but it’s hard to think of another Marvel book on the stands that owes as much to its current writer as Parker’s Hulk.

But let’s look at Thunderbolts. It’s true, it’s not a “Kirby” title in the same way Hulk is — the title wasn’t even developed by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagely until three years after Kirby’s passing. But at the same time, in the same way that Red Hulk is a reimagining of a Lee/Kirby creation (General Ross/The Hulk), Thunderbolts was born as reimagining of the Masters of Evil, a team that debuted in Avengers #6 by… Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

The original Thunderbolts team consisted of Busiek/Bagley created new identities for pre-existing characters:

• Atlas (Goliath/Power Man, created by Lee/Kirby)
• Citizen V (Baron Zemo, the son of the first Baron Zemo created by Lee/Kirby, the son was introduced by Tony Isabella, Roy Thomas, and Sal Buscema)
• Mach-1 (The Beetle, created by Lee and Carl Burgos)
• Meteorite (Moonstone, created by Marv Wolfman and Frank Robbins)
• Songbird (Screaming Mimi, created by Mark Gruenwald and John Byrne)
• Techno (The Fixer, created by Lee/Kirby)

So from the outset, the Thunderbolts were a reskinned version of a team co-created by Jack Kirby, featuring half a roster of characters co-created by Jack Kirby. They also spent their first year squatting in the home of the Fantastic Four, and their first major storyline culminated in a battle with the Avengers. Like Hulk, or really nearly any Marvel superhero comic without Spider or X in the title, it’s hard to avoid having Kirby’s fingerprints everywhere.

Fifteen years later, Parker’s run of Thunderbolts alongside Kev Walker, Declan Shalvey and others does not feature as heavily a Kirby-created roster. Alongside Fixer, Songbird, Mach-V and Moonstone the cast includes:

• Luke Cage (created by Archie Goodwin and John Romita)
• Man-Thing (created by Lee/Thomas/Conway and Gray Morrow)
• Satana (created by Roy Thomas and John Romita)
• Centurius (created by Jim Steranko)
• Boomerang (created by Lee and Kirby)
• Mister Hyde (created by Lee and Don Heck)
• Ghost (created by David Micheline and Bob Layton)
• Crossbones (created by Mark Gruenwald and Kieron Dwyer)
• Troll (created by Parker and Walker)

Of course, all this splitting hairs about “how many Thunderbolts members have to be created by Kirby before it becomes a Kirby book” is moot in a month or so, when the book is renamed Dark Avengers.

None of this is to diminish the contributions of Jack Kirby. When Marvel boasts of its “library of over 8,000 characters featured in a variety of media over seventy years“, every one of those eight thousand characters has parents. Most of them have some aunts and uncles who have shepherded them to profitable adulthood. Some of them are still waiting for the right Big Brother or Sister. And while Lee and Kirby are the most prolific patriarchs, there are hundreds more. And none of them are reaping the benefit of their “children” making it to the big screen (or any of the other countless uses across all media) either. Jack Kirby is a potent lightning rod to call attention to this, both due to his unmatchable output and the depths of depravity of his treatment by Marvel. But it’s worth remembering everyone else, too.

Which brings us to Stan Lee. There’s no question that Lee has benefitted greatly by his position as Editor-in-Chief, Chairman Emeritus, and the namesake of “Stan Lee Presents”. He plays a definite role in the continued lack of credit given to Kirby and for all we know countless other creators. But at the end of the day, he’s still a creator who hasn’t received what he is likely owed in a just world. When David Uzumeri linked me to last week’s Grantland article on the topic of Lee, Kirby, and The Avengers, he highlighted the following Lee quote with scorn:

I’ve never been one of these people who worries about [creator ownership/profit-sharing]. I should have been. I’d be wealthy now, if I had been.

It’s a ridiculous statement from a man who has an Executive Producer credit on all of those Marvel movies that are closing in on making ten billion dollars. Lee is unquestionably wealthier — and has accrued more wealth from Marvel’s movie boom — than Kirby or Ditko or Heck or Wolfman or Colan or Wein or Friedrich or Claremont or anyone else who molded these superheroes into multimedia icons. I’m certainly not lining up to console Stan Lee about his finances. But at the same time, Lee has to live in a world where characters he co-created making billions of dollars for someone else. In a world after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, after Spawn, after Hellboy, after Sin City, after The Walking Dead, that has to nag at him. People rightly lament that Marvel has profited immensely from the work of Jack Kirby, yet they refuse to even given his estate a few meager scraps of that windfall. Lee has gotten a sweeter deal than Kirby, but it’s important to remember he’s still only gotten scraps. In his own muddled, sometimes infuriating way, Lee should be a sympathetic figure just like Kirby. Just like Siegel and Shuster. Just like almost every creator who has contributed to the Marvel and DC “Universes”.

I still support agitating for better treatment of the Kirby, Siegel, and Shuster families. I try to remain optimistic that one day they’ll get at least a tiny fraction of what they deserve. But I hope when that happens, Kirby shifts from lightning rod to the first domino that starts a chain of better treatment for everyone else as well.

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I. But What About the Wonder Woman Bracelet?

Let’s start with the good things.

Chiang and Akins’ redesign of the Olympian Gods is truly inspired. We’ve become accustomed to versions of the Greek gods who looked like idealized humans exiled from a Botticelli painting. They are noticeably non-human, with a physical appearance that mirrors their specialties/concepts that they embody. One great example of this is Akins’ redesign of Poseidon.

I’m a little surprised that no one’s thought of this before – if Poseidon is the god of the sea, why wouldn’t he look like a mighty sea creature?

I’m particularly enamored by Chiang’s redesigns of Apollo and Hermes. His Apollo (God of Light) absorbs so much light and energy on a constant basis that his skin is as dark as ebony, with the only color coming from his eyes. Hermes, the messenger of the gods and God of travel is a lean slightly inhuman looking god built for speed with slightly avian eyes and the feet of a bird.

Even Chiang’s more traditionally human looking gods are larger than life avatars for ideas and passions common to us all. Hera’s not just a queen betrayed; she’s all queens – hell, all women – who have been betrayed by their spouses. We’ve seen Ares as the perfect warrior, but Chiang gives us an Ares who represents all warmongers – is it just me, or are there echoes of a modern Leopold II in Chiang’s depiction?

Chiang’s Wonder Woman is equally brilliant. There have been many great versions of Wonder Woman, from George Perez to Adam Hughes to Colleen Coover, but I don’t think anyone’s captured her martial qualities quite like Cliff Chiang. She’s lean, powerful and larger-than-life. Diana doesn’t look like she needs super powers to overcome her adversaries.

That said, it is too bad that her costume doesn’t include pants. It’s an implausible element that takes the reader out of the story, particularly since Chiang creates an almost naturalistic world in other respects – all of the characters are proportioned and clothed in ways that feel more authentic than other superhero comics. In a scene at a nightclub in the third issue, it’s striking that the revelers look like actual people at a nightclub.

There’s still some idealization going on – there aren’t many overweight or unattractive or non-standard looking human beings in this book – but there’s something meaningful about the fact that none of the characters have impossible proportions. Chiang’s figures make one realize just how much balloon breasts, impossibly narrow waists and steroid fueled physiques have become the norm in superhero art.

Chiang’s naturalism also helps sustain a sense of wonder that is frequently absent from mainstream superhero books. One of the features of the shared universe model of storytelling in the superhero genre is that the impossible becomes almost ordinary. The heroes in the Marvel and DC universe are operating in a world filled with super science and magic. The skies are clogged with flying men and rocketships. In a world like this, the dramatic stakes are pretty low by default unless there’s a global threat of some kind. Competent creators can get around this by making the stakes meaningful to the characters involved, but there’s still not a sense that you’re reading about something that’s out of the ordinary for anyone involved. That’s one of the great things about superhero narratives in other media, that sense of amazement when you first see Tobey Maguire climb up a wall or Christopher Reeve rise into the sky. Chiang evokes that “you will believe a man can fly” vibe throughout the first four issues. Although this is a series that is firmly set in the DC universe, Chiang makes the reader feel like the book takes place in a world where the Greek gods are the only conceptual entities and Wonder Woman is the only hero.

Chiang’s thoughtfully choreographed action scenes help establish the book’s dramatic stakes by successfully maintaining an illusion of plausibility. The fights in the first four issues are simple and coherent. There are no wasted movements and one gets the sense that the combatants are actually employing some kind of strategy. As a result, the reader has the sense that the battle has consequences and the characters are facing some kind of actual risk in combat. Everything feels meaningful.

II. The Sun of A King

Azzarello’s writing in the first few issues is fantastic. His dialogue is more restrained than usual, notwithstanding a bunch of awful puns. Although his first arc touches on some overly familiar themes, Azzarello’s career long exploration of moral ambiguity and tragedy is still fascinating and repulsive in equal measure. The characters that he introduces in the first few issues (especially the women) are flawed, complex and wonderful. He skirts on the edge of nihilism while maintaining a sense of optimism through the first few issues of the book. He’s also far too willing to tweak the collective noses of those who (rightfully) view Wonder Woman and the Amazons as feminist icons. It’s still early, but the book’s already starting to feel like an endless Shymalanian procession of twists. You thought the Amazons were some kind of single sex utopia? Not only are they a martial, prejudiced society fearful of outsiders, they massacre the fathers of their children after conception and exchange the kids for weapons!

I’ve always imagined that creators working on books featuring classic DC characters must find it difficult to depict them as fully realized characters while respecting their iconic status. Stories about idealized mythic avatars are interesting if they are finite or if the creators focus on the world around them. I like Morrison and Quitely’s All Star Superman as a discrete work, but I have different expectations from an open-ended serial. If you expect me to feel fully engaged in your long form story, the protagonist has to feel like a fully realized character. I appreciate what Wonder Woman stands for, but I’ve always thought that her stories were better when she’s treated as more than a symbol.

Although Azzarello’s Wonder Woman is a recognizable human being, she’s also a bit of a mystery, a sharp contrast from earlier approaches to the character. Since Crisis on Infinite Earths, creators from George Perez to Greg Rucka attracted reader interest by making the character relatable, by letting us inside her head. Whether a diplomat or warrior, the reader felt like they knew Diana. Azzarello and Chiang are determined to force the reader to abandon any preconceived notions about the character in the first issue, so we don’t get any lengthy speeches or exposition about Diana’s mission. We don’t know what she thinks and she says little. We learn about her through her actions.

The first three issues are all about misdirection and delayed gratification. Azzarello and Chiang don’t introduce Diana until about two thirds of the way through the first issue, but once she’s there, Chiang makes it impossible for the reader to focus on anything else.

The reader waits three issues before we see Diana do something that’s truly superhuman (even though she’s in a couple of great fights before that sequence).

After the first issue, I thought that Azzarello was going to use a story about a seemingly ordinary person who is forced to contend with an unfamiliar environment filled with magic and life-threatening danger to reintroduce the reader to the Amazons and the Greek gods. It’s not only a classic story model, but an elegant way of highlighting the differences between the pre and post relaunch versions of the title without the use of excess exposition. Having Zola as the point of view character would also complement Chiang’s efforts to set these adventures in a believable setting. But Zola is not our Dorothy or our Alice. She’s not even our Dane. By the end of the third issue, I realized that the first arc’s not about what happens when you’re pregnant with the child of a god and his other children want to come after you, but what happens when you are that child and that god’s wife has targeted you with her righteous rage.

These issues are great because the creators were simply telling honest stories that lack contrivance with fully realized characters while recognizing that, yes, this is a superhero fantasy -melodrama taking place in a heightened reality. It’s hard to balance the two, but the few creators who get it right remind me why I still read superhero books. Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang came close in the first few issues of Wonder Woman.

III. Things Fall Apart And Tend To Shatter

So how did they get it so wrong in the last few issues?

The first problem was that when Cliff Chiang went away for a few issues, all of the flaws and tics in Brian Azzarello’s writing became magnified. All the puns started to seem louder and more preposterous. Atkins was a capable fill-in, but as I briefly noted in the last piece, it just wasn’t the same. I liked Akins’ character designs and he had some beautiful layouts (particularly in the confrontation between Poseidon and Wonder Woman in issue 5), but his figures were a little less fluid, the action scenes just a tad more ordinary.

Then Chiang came back. Wonder Woman got better, but it’s not quite the same. It’s still entertaining, but I’m more aware of the potential problems. After seven issues, I think that Azzarello’s done a nice job of depicting the contradictions, myths and fissures that lie at the core of the Amazon society. But he’s playing a dangerous game. Wonder Woman and her society are more than symbols, but it’s impossible to ignore her legacy or what she means to generations of women who may have never even read the comic. You can’t remove the book from its historical context. Wonder Woman is a feminist role-model. So the scrutiny of Azzarello’s revisions to Wonder Woman’s mythos and backstory is completely justifiable. I’ve always thought that comic book creators should be given a lot more leeway to interpret characters as they see fit as long as the story is compelling. I try (with mixed success) to not impose my particular preferences about individual characters on a story. We all have ideas about what comprises the core or the essential nature of these iconic characters, but it’s important to allow the creators to tell their story. I might prefer to read stories about the versions of Captain America that appeared in stories by Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Mark Gruenwald and Ed Brubaker, but I’m not opposed in principle to a depiction of Captain America as an Ugly American if the story is well executed. The problem with Millar and Loeb’s “Ultimate” Captain America is that their satire of the American conservative movement and the military industrial complex lacked subtlety and wit, not that their version is not the ‘real’ Captain America. Warren Ellis’ depiction of a Captain America who authorized torture in his Secret Avengers arc would have been interesting if he gave the reader insight into how an ostensibly honorable man became ethically compromised.

But Wonder Woman is different. I understand why some will view Azzarello’s provocative transformation of the Amazons as some kind of reactionary shot at their feminist legacy. I’m not sure those people are wrong, but I also think Azzarello’s made the Amazons more human. Many of us have had parents who’ve told us comforting lies about our pasts. We all live in nations that have troubling origin myths. We lose an idealized fantasy of a utopian single-sex society, but we gain something that’s more interesting, more honest. Maybe Azzarello and Chiang are trying to tell us a story about a broad range of complicated women (Wonder Woman, Hera, Hippolyta, Zola) with a diverse set of experiences and emotions. On the other hand, there’s also a substantial risk that Azzarello and Chiang will repeat the mistakes of creators in the ‘90’s who confused cynicism with realism. A story that confounds the reader’s expectations by reinterpreting accepted views on a character’s motivations or history can be an interesting way of reminding the audience that the world is complex and exists through multiple perspectives (Moore/Gibbons’ Watchmen, Miller/Sienkewicz’ Elektra: Assasin, Moore/Campbell’s From Hell). It can also be a cheap short cut designed to convince people that the YA fantasy book that they’re reading is actually “mature” or “adult” (Straczynski’s Amazing Spider Man run, Brubaker/Hairsine’s X-Men Deadly Genesis).

After eight issues, we’re at a major inflection point for the series. Azzarello, Chiang and Akins may tell us a story of a noble woman struggling with the complicated legacy of her family and her people. Or we’ll get a series of revisionist cynical ‘twists’. This is the part where I’d usually make an ambivalent commitment to continue reading the book. I want to write that we’ll just have to see if Azzarello can live up to the potential of the first four issues or if Akins’ arcs will start to better complement Chiang’s brilliant work.

Even though I’d recommend the book with some reservations to others, I can’t do that. I don’t want to punish Azzarello, Chiang and Akins for the sins of their employer, but the baggage associated with an ongoing superhero book published by DC is a bit too heavy. Wonder Woman has potential, and I’m interested in seeing how it evolves, but if a book’s not special (or features work from a great creator working exclusively with the Big Two), it’s just easier for me to turn to books that lack that baggage. I still haven’t finished Habibi. I need to finish re-reading Alec: The Years Have Pants. I’m still making my way through BPRD (which is just gobsmackingly brilliant so far) and plan to explore the other parts of the Mignola-verse. I still have to pick up all those volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub. Wonder Woman might be a great book someday. It’s just not enough of one right now.

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Indeed, what can be said about Countdown that has not already been said about the Vietnam War?  It was a quagmire, an unwinnable war of attrition that even the planners could not find a graceful way to end. It left a psychic scar on the nation, and destroyed the best years of countless young men’s lives.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as Vietnam. If nothing else, Countdown provided the spark that led to me blogging about comics. And if you don’t think that’s a good thing, fine: it also provided us a near-perfect lab specimen of what an Editorially Driven Comic Book looks like. To a certainly extent, everything you can say about Countdown is true of nearly every Big Two superhero comic:

• It was published to fill a hole in the schedule
• Non-Executive-Staff creative members were treated like interchangeable cogs, comic-producing machines
• Plot Events (and importance to the companywide Uberplot) were privileged over what would be traditionally called “story” and “character”
• It received constant “comics” “media” attention on the big blogs despite no one, not even the interviewers and DC employees extruding the book weekly, seemed to care in the least

Countdown may have been a lightning-in-a-bottle, textbook demonstration of what you get when the entire publishing line of a company is hashed out by people who have never been hired to be creators on a dry erase board, then handed down piecemeal to people actually hired to be creators. But it isn’t the last. From countless Blackest Night tie-ins (now with free prize inside!) to Marvel’s endless series of Avengers Presents: We Need Some Movie Tie-Ins, from Avengers vs. X-Men to Before Watchmen, we are seeing a shift towards ever more editorially driven comics from “The Big Two”. All of the gradual, glacial movement towards treating superhero comics as something that might exist because a creator had a compelling story seems to be eroding. Of course, this exists in all media: just as there Has to Be an issue of Batman every month, there also has to be a few dozen episodes of CSI shows every year, an appropriate number of Star Wars Extended Universe novels, a Battleship motion picture, whether anyone has the perfect idea for it or not. But the ratio of “someone has a good idea they have pitched” to “someone in marketing decided this needs to exist” is growing more and more lopsided.

I’ve already written a lot about Countdown. In the weeks to come, I will probably write more. But in honor of its fifth anniversary, I thought I would let the people responsible for Countdown tell their own story. Thanks to nearly every major Comic News site purging their archives since 2007, this was no small task. Most of these interviews had to be scraped out of message boards and caches. It’s as if the Internet itself does not wish to dwell on the recent history of the comics industry. Regardless, I have exhumed:

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS: AN ORAL HISTORY

Dan Didio, Executive Editor, DC Comics: I was involved heavily in the early stages of [Countdown], establishing who the main characters are and what the primary goals of the series would be. That’s pretty much what I’ve done.

DIDIO: I’d say about 75% of the concepts that are being created [at DC Comics] are editorially driven. And realistically, at that point, we are trying to figure out bringing in the best people for the job. One of the tougher aspects of the job is waiting for people to pitch you ideas, you know?

Grant Morrison, writer of Final Crisis: Well, the way it worked out was that I started writing Final Crisis #1 in early 2006, around the same time as the 52 series was starting to come out, so Final Crisis was more a continuation of plot threads from Seven Soldiers and 52 than anything else. Final Crisis was partly-written and broken down into rough issue-by-issue plots before Countdown was even conceived, let alone written. When Countdown was originally being discussed, it was just a case of me saying ‘Here’s issue 1 of Final Crisis and a rough breakdown of the following six issues. As long as you guys leave things off where Final Crisis begins, we‘ll be fine.’

Mike Marts, initial Countdown editor: I think the initial ideas for Countdown were born sometime last summer [2006] in the diabolical mind of Dan Didio…but our first actual story conference with head writer Paul Dini and layout artist Keith Giffen happened in early November.

Paul Dini, Countdown head writer: Dan Didio was the ultimate web-weaver, I guess you would say, in that he cast us all in various roles in Countdown. He had ideas in mind for writers or writer teams he’d like to bring into the mix the same way he had ideas for artists. He came to me with the intent of taking what was, at that time, the skeleton ideas for Countdown and giving them to me and getting us all into a discussion of where we could go with these storylines.

DIDIO: [Countdown is] a weekly comic, and that’s probably where most of the similarities begin and end between Countdown and 52. The way Countdown is constructed is different from how 52 was done. With 52, we had a team of four incredibly talented writers working in unison to produce each issue. As we called it, it was the first comic book rock band, or super group, I guess, working together on the story.

What’s being done with Countdown is different in the sense that the sensibilities and the way we assembled the art on the 52 side is now being done on the writing side. We’ve got one head writer in Paul Dini, who’s working in conjunction with the editor on the book, Mike Marts, and together, they’re breaking out the story on a week by week basis. Paul has written the overall outline for the entire year, and together with Mike, they get on the phone with the individual writers of the issues, and together, they break the book out page by page.

MARTS: Dini was great in that he had an extremely detailed weekly outline of Countdown in before the end of ’06.

MARTS: A lot of the story pieces were in place prior to me coming over to DC [in September 2006], but as soon as I came in, I was approached. What Dan had said to me was that he wanted someone who was unencumbered by everything else that had taken place over the last few years to be connected to it.

DIDIO: the best part about Mike, and I use this as a real plus now, is that he was unfamiliar with so much of the DC Universe. Being a Marvel guy for so long, which I’ve forgiven him for [laughs], he wasn’t as familiar with our characters and our stories. The best aspect of that is that in creating a weekly book, we’re hoping to attract new readers – so here’s the guy who’s running the project that actually has a fresh set of eyes, and is unfamiliar with some of the characters and the stories that took place prior to this.

DIDIO: The reason why we changed from Mike Marts to Mike Carlin had nothing to do with anything Countdown-related. It was simply due to the fact that the Editor’s seat on the Batman books came open and Mike Marts really wanted to work on those titles. Because of that, I had to hand a series that was up and running at full steam – and encompassing the entire DC Universe – and at that particular moment, it made sense to hand it over to Mike Carlin, because he was so intimately involved with everything that was going on. It just made for an easier transition.

Mike Carlin, second Countdown editor: I had a big target on my head since I was the only other person who’d done anything weekly before… the process is only different for me because we would all get together to plot Superman… Writers, pencilers, inkers even colorists… On Countdown, Paul Dini and Marts and Dan Didio worked out the story long before I was even on the book!

MARTS: For the first four books, we’ve brought in Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, Adam Beechem, Sean McKeever, and Tony Bedard. These are our key writers who will be working with Paul in the beginning, but also that doesn’t stop us from bringing other writers in to work on the project… If we choose to crossover with another storyline or a book which is being driven by another writer, we can allow that writer to come onboard and tell their portion of the story inside Countdown and working with Paul. That way, there will be a real feeling of cohesiveness between the series and Countdown, but it also allows the writer to maintain some level of input and control over the character they’re writing on a monthly basis.

In case anyone is curious, this never happened.

MARTS: [The artistic lineup is] pretty much set…the artists that readers will see over the first ten or so issues are for the most part our “core” group: [Jim] Calafiore, Lopez, Saiz and Magno.

Calafiore drew four issues (50, 45, 39, 36), Lopez drew parts of three issues (48, 43, 37), Saiz drew six and part of a seventh (51, 46, 38, 34, 30, 19, 12) and Magno drew eight (49, 44, 42, 33, 27, 25, 22, 8). In all, the “core” group had art appear in only 21 out of 51 issues, with the bulk of the series drawn by eleven other pencillers and a total of sixteen inkers.

DIDIO: [The writers are] involved much more than readers may think. We created the story bible which charts out what’s going to happen with each one of the major characters month by month, and in some cases, week by week. From that, Paul has an idea of how he’d like to break down the story on a page-by-page basis, and he works that out with the writers and the editors. So there’s an open discussion going on between the writers on the book, as well as the editors involved on how the book breaks down.

Tony Bedard, writer of eleven issues of Countdown: Keith [Giffen] would lay out the issues before they were scripted. We would all get together and discuss it on the phone, then Dini would do his plot breakdowns. I mean, it’s all there more or less. [Giffen] would also add little bits of business and storytelling and stuff, and then I would script from there. I’d say there’s a little less choreography going on from [the individual writers'] standpoint. It’s funny, because in some ways that’s a little less creative perhaps, but in other ways you have to step it up with dialogue and funny lines and stuff like that.

Sean McKeever, credited writer of twelve issues of Countdown: I’ve never actually seen Dini’s massive, big outline. [The characters introduced by McKeever in Countdown #34] may have been something that Dan DiDio brought in, it may have been something that one of the other editors said this would be a cool character to bring in, or it may have been something that Paul wanted. I couldn’t tell you for sure.

BEDARD: Being on the inside of Countdown, I don’t know what it’s like for [writers on other DC books] trying to pick up on what’s going on in there. My guess is that folks who aren’t working on the team don’t see every piece of the puzzle. We’re trying to play our cards close to the vest a little bit.

MCKEEVER: I did have an outline for the whole thing to start, but never the detailed bible. I think part of that is because it’s always been very fluid, and it was more of a need to know thing.

Adam Beechen, credited writer of ten issues of Countdown: There have been a few occasions where DC has said, you know what, plans have changed – we’ve got this coming up that we want to do and we need to tie it in somehow to Countdown, and we need to alter the storyline of Countdown somewhat to accommodate this or that.

DIDIO: I don’t want to diminish the level of involvement the other writers have, because they’re all adding to the story, and making key contributions, and they’ve al been incredibly professional in regards to how it works, but it’s all structured a little differently than it was with 52, because so much of what was done in the beginning was done with Paul, Mike and myself.

BEDARD: I’m not setting the overall direction of the book, so in one sense I’m trying to make sense of the particular chapters that I get and make them sing, but on the other hand I’m also waiting to find out the ultimate pay off on a lot of these things. I don’t know if that sounds clueless, but I don’t want to know all the stuff. I like being a reader as well.

DIDIO: With Countdown, Paul is the head writer, and broke down the overall story, and is in communication with all of the other writers, so it runs a lot smoother. Realistically speaking, we have a weekly conference call between Paul and the writer who’s working on that week’s issue and that writer can change, based upon availability, so that way, it doesn’t slow down the process as you’re waiting for other people to turn in work.

DINI: In Countdown, each week I go over the beats of the upcoming issue with the editor and the writers. If new ideas arise, [I] amend the series’s outline before writing the script. I then review the final script before it is sent to the artist. Once drawn and given dialogue, it is reviewed yet again. We have to make sure the tone is right and that we’re keeping the ultimate vision of the story line.

Jimmy Palmiotti, credited co-writer of fifteen issues of Countdown: We discuss and go by a general outline where we should be going and all the points that have to be hit. When it goes to specific details and dialogue, that’s where we go in and add our “flavor”.

DIDIO: The writers actually do the execution of the book, and then Paul does the finished polish on the dialogue.

BEDARD: It’s all there to build from, and if he has specific ideas for jokes or cool visuals or whatever, he’ll specify those. I think Paul’s background in the collaborative process of TV writing gives him a good feel for leaving each of us room to bring our own inspiration to each issue.

BEECHEN: Everybody is bringing something very different to the table and it’s going to be very exciting

Scott Kolins, artist on four issues of Countdown: I looked at the Countdown job as more “fitting in” and not as a “Scott Kolins” book. I didn’t want readers to stop reading the story and look at the Scott Kolins art.

BEECHEN: Another thing that has worked out really well is that the voices have been unified. You can’t look at an issue and say that it is clearly an Adam Beechen issue because it is so much different than the other guys. That is not the case. To me it feels like we are writing with a unified voice. That is a testament to Paul and Mike.

BEDARD: Because of the way the book was set up, it was not as collaborative as I would have liked. I got to collaborate with [head writer Paul] Dini a lot one-on-one. It was mostly each of us hashing out our particular part with him, rather than everyone in the same room figuring out the whole tale.

MCKEEVER: We all went into it with the best of intentions and we were all very excited. It started out fun, and a neat challenge, but it became more and more trying as the series went on. As with Bedard, Palmiotti, Gray and Beechen, I had very little say. As time passed, we were promised a more prominent role, but the reality was we wound up having less and less to do with it.

BEECHEN: The way I understand it, and even I’m not privy to all the details of Final Crisis, is that some of the storylines that are happening in our book are going to wrap up and some of them will carry over into Final Crisis.

DIDIO: I’m also suspecting that we’ll pick up more readers as we get closer to Final Crisis because people are going to want to see what the line is between Countdown and Final Crisis itself.

MORRISON: The Countdown writers were later asked to ‘seed’ material from Final Crisis and in some cases, probably due to the pressure of filling the pages of a weekly book, that seeding amounted to entire plotlines veering off in directions I had never envisaged, anticipated or planned for in Final Crisis.

BEECHEN: But these stories are going to shake DC up. These stories are important stories.

BEDARD: Countdown is going to be huge: it deals with the whole DC Universe and it’s a game-changing story. The repercussions of the story will echo through the DCU for a long time to come.

PALMIOTTI: The best part of the whole project is being able to see the work make such an impact on the whole DC line and be involved with that.

DIDIO: The introduction of the Pied Piper and Trickster, and that particular beat might just seem like two Flash villains showing up for no particular reason, but quite honestly, it’s something that’s so very important to everything that’s going to be going on in the DCU.

Frank Tieri, writer of Countdown Presents: Lord Havok & the Extremists: It was something I saw in the Dan DiDio interview you did a little while ago– this question of whether or not a series like Lord Havok and the Extremists is “necessary” or “important”. I’ve seen this way of thinking before—people so worried whether a tie-in is necessary/ not necessary to the event in question—and honestly, I really think those people get too caught up in that nonsense.

BEDARD: But one of the things that I liked about Countdown and wanted to see reflected more out there was this whole drumbeat of the New Gods getting killed and how it kind of increases in tempo and you get a sense of something big going on. Because that is a huge storyline that’s going to really pay off big.

Justin Gray, credited co-writer of fifteen issues of Countdown: As an overview of the series I can understand a certain amount of impatience and frustration with the ebb and flow of the story. However the importance of the story to the DCU and impact it has on Final Crisis dictated how certain issues would unfold.

DIDIO: I will say that one of the richest areas of DC’s history that we’re using [in Countdown] is a lot of what Kirby’s Fourth World is about. So much of what Kirby created was brilliant in regards to its ideas and concepts, and what we’re trying to do is realize a lot of what he created, and really bring it into the universe as a whole.

MORRISON: Back in 2006, I requested a moratorium on the New Gods so that I could build up some foreboding and create anticipation for their return in a new form … instead, the characters were passed around like hepatitis B to practically every writer at DC to toy with as they pleased, which, to be honest, makes it very difficult for me to reintroduce them with any sense of novelty, mystery or grandeur.

DIDIO: The New Gods are appearing everywhere lately, and that’s not by accident. It’s not a coincidence that we’re starting to see them in the various series.

PALMIOTTI: Like I said, I was not familiar with them at all and realized that I had to look [New Gods supporting cast members Deep Six] up on the internet and figure who the hell they were and why would a reader care.

Jim Starlin, writer of the Countdown tie-in Death of the New Gods: Since Kirby’s initial run on the characters others have presented them with mixed results. Looking back I’d say at least half of the past New Gods series have done more harm than good. So for me, Death of the New Gods is half honoring Jack Kirby, half mercy killing.

MORRISON: Dan DiDio knew I wanted to delve deeper into the mythology of Jack Kirby’s New Gods as I’d adapted it for my Seven Soldiers series, so we talked about doing a big project that would put the New Gods back on the map.

DINI: Basically we’re going in a different direction with the New Gods. You will see Scott Free and you will see some of the other characters showing up in Countdown, but the interpretation of some of those characters in Seven Soldiers is pretty much the Seven Soldiers version or “universe”.

DIDIO: What we’re doing right now is reestablishing Darkseid as the premiere villain or one of the premiere forces in the DCU.

MORRISON: Obviously, I would have preferred it if the New Gods hadn’t been spotlighted at all, let alone quite so intensively before I got a chance to bring them back but I don’t run DC and don’t make the decisions as to how and where the characters are deployed.

DIDIO: Originally, we were going to do Countdown to Final Crisis #0 – that’s what Countdown has been counting down to: 51 to 0 – 52 issues in total, a year’s worth of work. Ultimately though, what happened was that when we were looking at how #0 was being created, we realized that in collecting Countdown to Final Crisis, it would be hard to collect the #0 issue, because it would leave us on a cliffhanger at the end of the book. We felt that probably wasn’t the best way to end a book, so we decided to end all the Countdown stories with #1, and therefore make the #0 issue separate.

MORRISON: To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, when we started work on Final Crisis, J.G. and I had no idea what was going to happen in Countdown or Death Of The New Gods because neither of those books existed at that point.

DINI: After sixteen months of Countdown, my writer’s office resembles a nineteenth century bear pit. It’s time to clean up. On the floor next to the shark head are twelve unopened boxes of Countdown comps that Rashy has stacked into a fort.

MORRISON: The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sight of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis.

DIDIO: If you’re creating stories just for the sake of having events to tie things together with no real meat on the bones, then you’re going to have event fatigue because you have all this promotion and drive and anticipation, but you’ve under-delivered on what the expectations are. That’s what some people felt about what Countdown to Final Crisis was. They felt it didn’t build properly off the event or for the amount of anticipation they had for the series itself.

Andrew Hickey, founder of the DC Countdown Blog: I’m going to review Countdown in a different manner to the way in which 52 has been looked at. I’m going to look at the comic every week and review it, make predictions, say what’s interesting about it, but I’m also going to post brief reviews of the other DCU titles I’m reading, and look at how they tie in. (4/15/2007)

BRADY: [Asked] why they liked Countdown, another fan said, “I was expecting a train wreck and didn’t get it.” To which DiDio said should be used as a back cover quote on the trade.

Neither this, nor any other quotation from a review of the series appeared on any Countdown to Final Crisis trade.

HICKEY: I have now dropped Countdown. The extent to which there will not even be a pretense of a story in this comic has become painfully clear. Everyone involved in the production of this series should be ashamed of themselves for producing such meretricious drivel. But not as ashamed as I am for supporting them. (7/14/2007)

DIDIO: One expression that I find humorous is “editorial mandate.” I feel that expression gets thrown around a great deal. The role of the editor is to assemble and be responsible for whatever project they are in charge of. Whatever talent they hire, that is an editorial mandate. They choose to hire that talent. [...] So when you say “editorial mandate,” please understand that whatever book you hold in your hand, at the end of the day, is there because of an editorial mandate to create that book. End of story.

CARLIN: If you think about it too much you will die!

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In the summer of 2011, I came up with a plan. I would collaborate with Chris Eckert on a post previewing DC’s relaunch of its line of superhero comics, and write a series of brief posts in subsequent months that would discuss the creative successes and failures of the initiative. I was cautiously optimistic about the initiative in the first few months, despite some early disappointments. Even a month ago, I still cared about five or six of these books. I was going to write a post on Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang and Tony Akins’ Wonder Woman and Francis Manapul’s Flash and follow that up with a post on the two stand-out miniseries of the post-relaunch period at DC – Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Jamal Igle’s the Ray and James Robinson’s Shade.

I’m not sure that I can do that anymore without acknowledging my growing concerns about reading books from either publisher. I don’t think I can pretend that controversies about DC’s attitude towards the creators who work on the books it publishes don’t have an impact on whether I will buy (or can recommend) their books.

I’m still fascinated by some of the narratives related to the production of the work. The potential implications of the growing consensus that artists are the primary draw for the new DC books are fascinating. I hope DC (and Marvel for that matter) come to realize that these titles should (and do) reflect the creative vision of the artists on the book. There should be as much thought and consideration behind selecting a fill-in artist as there would be in choosing a fill-in writer. I’m also interested to see the medium term impact of Johns and Lee on the corporate culture – it’s still very early, but I could easily imagine DC finding creative ways to distinguish itself (as an employer) from Marvel. Although it appears that there’s a lot of editorial interference, we don’t hear the same complaints about working conditions or contracts.

I’m just far less interested in the actual product, especially as my options for genre comics without a legacy of exploitation continue to grow.

II. Insisting on a Declaration of Hate

I was never going to purchase or read any of the series in the Before Watchmen event. It’s not just the Moore controversy. If Watchmen taught us anything, its that stories are more important than characters and that the best stories have endings. I don’t care about any details of the Comedian’s biography that don’t appear in the original Watchmen series. When I close the book, I feel a sense of satisfaction, not a hunger for more. I wouldn’t be interested in Before Watchmen if DC got Moore to endorse it and write one of the books. Although the creators’ rights/dignity argument against Before Watchmen was compelling, it wasn’t particularly significant to me, as I would never be part of the audience for a Watchmen prequel. So it didn’t have much of an impact on my feelings about the rest of DC’s line of books.

Quick aside: I’m part of the generation of fans for whom Watchmen was a formative experience. I’ve always been able to define my relationship with superhero comics by my feelings about Watchmen. Sometimes I wonder if its value as a totem exceeds its value as a story. When I was in junior high school, I thought that Watchmen was a masterfully composed story featuring compelling characters that challenged my simplistic notions of right and wrong. In my evangelical phase of comics fandom, I cited Watchmen as an example of what was possible in superhero comics. I thought that its success would be an incentive for publishers to give creators the room to innovate. I believed that the success of Watchmen could be ammunition for the next generation of creators who want to push the envelope from within the system. When I quit reading comics the first time, Watchmen represented the wasted potential of superhero comics and the horrible. I’ve quit and returned to comics a few times since then, and I think that my opinions are a little bit more settled. Watchmen is a great book. I think that’s enough.

Over the last few weeks, everything changed. DC’s promotion of the Before Watchmen event rapidly went from unsavory to downright offensive. It wasn’t the cheesy ‘viral’ marketing tactics or the audience plants. It was the series of interviews where the creators working on the project (most notably J. Michael Straczynski) responded to Moore’s concerns about the use of one of his signature works with mockery and bad faith arguments that pretended to ignore the difference between stealing famous literary characters to create an original new work and expanding on another’s work over their loud protestations. Grant Morrison must have been giving lessons on how to dissemble about the ugly nature of contract negotiations in the American comics industry.

DC’s approach to Before Watchmen indicated that the company remains committed to never missing opportunities to miss an opportunity. I understand that DC Comics has every legal right to publish material based on the original Watchmen series, but it should have renegotiated the contract with Moore/Gibbons out of its own long range rational self-interest. I know that wasn’t an option for DC after the release of the Watchmen movie, but it should’ve been taken care of at some point after his departure from DC in the late 1980s. Moore may have been receptive to a deal exchanging the rights to the book for a commitment to publish material with DC in the future before his well-publicized conflicts with DC over Wildstorm and the Watchmen movie. As Heidi MacDonald noted in her brilliant post on the topic, it’s hard to imagine a creator like Moore (an eccentric genius who creates popular, critically acclaimed work) getting treated this way in any other lucrative culture industry. Although Straczynski’s comments were technically correct, he disregarded one of the practical realities of deal making for top tier creators in any culture industry – everything is subject to renegotiation. We all know that most creators in culture industries don’t have the bargaining power/resources to allocate contract risk in a fair manner, so corporations exploit that comparative advantage to profit from most unforeseeable contingencies (like the unexpected strength of the trade market). At the same time, if a corporation rationally concludes that the benefits from a continued partnership with the creator outweigh the advantages in the original contract, it has an incentive to renegotiate. DC had that incentive. It’s hard to imagine that DC wouldn’t have profited more from a continued partnership with Moore than a Before Watchmen series.

At the same time, I recognize that DC can’t unring this bell, and can’t afford to ignore the potential profits from Watchmen spin offs. I can’t imagine that Alan Moore would be willing to give anything to DC in exchange for ownership rights to Watchmen or even his silence about this project. I also understand that DC made every effort to get the best (most mercenary) talent for this project. I would never presume to judge the creators who decided to work on Before Watchmen (especially if the fees were anywhere close to the ones suggested by Dirk Deppey). At the same time, this controversy reminds me that:

“[T]his is just what happens in comics–that this is just the tradition in comics–characters get passed from one creator to another and that’s just how it is–why is it like that? And, where did these characters come from in the first place? Did they all spring from the brow of Zeus, fully-formed? Or, was there somebody who created them at some point? Was there a sort of Jerry Robinson or Bill Finger? Or, was there a Siegel and Schuster? Or a Martin Nodell or a Gardener Fox [sic] who got robbed? And then, of course the attitude–and I probably shared in this when I first started working for American comics–the attitude now is that it’s just toys in the toy box, isn’t it? You get to play with your favorite toys from the DC or Marvel toy box. Yeah, I don’t want to do that anymore. Those toys were pried out of the fingers of dead men, and were pried from their families and their children. That’s just wrong.”

Moore was talking about the dilemma of the modern creator, but he might as well have been referring to the unending conflict between Marvel Comics and the heirs of Jack Kirby. Over the last few months, Marvel’s intensive promotion of the Avengers movie served as a constant reminder of its refusal to share any of the profits of Jack’s legacy with his family. A multi-billion dollar franchise and the family of the creator doesn’t even get crumbs from the table. The worst part is that one could easily imagine a scenario in which Marvel resolved this matter in a way that benefited both parties without losing revenue or diluting its claim to Kirby’s creations. I know, I’m the one who wrote that “they’ve always been bastards ”. Marvel’s refusal to resolve the dispute with the Kirby family in an amicable manner should mean any more in 2012 than it did in previous years. It’s just that the endless promotion reminds me that the stakes and rewards are astronomically higher.

This isn’t really about Moore or Kirby, but what they represent. Plenty of other creators, many of whom are far less well known than either man, never received proper credit for their work, signed terrible contracts and will not share in the enormous revenue generated by their creations. This is the original sin of the American comics industry. Let’s stipulate that things have improved. Creators are better compensated, have more options and the age when contracts were on the backs of checks is over. We all have a better appreciation for the potential value of the characters and concepts created in comics. At the same time, the ongoing litigation (with creators and their heirs) and the stories about older creators struggling to survive make it hard to forget that the foundation for Marvel and DC’s wealth was laid by exploited labor.

So what can we do? To what degree are we willing to compromise the pleasure we get from a cultural artifact in order to take an ethical stand? I think the answer depends on how we choose to define our relationship with comics as an art form and an industry.

Are we members of a thriving community dedicated to a unique art form? Or are we simply consumers of entertainment products featuring our favorite characters? There’s something very freeing about being a consumer. You can limit your engagement with the industry to buying comics at your local store, from Amazon or on Comixology. You can care about creator’s rights to the extent that they are protected by criminal and civil law. Your purchasing decisions can be purely defined by the quality/entertainment value of the work. If you’re a customer, it’s all about choice. In contrast, if we self-identify as members of a community, we feel an obligation to assume an expanded sense of responsibility to our own, even if they signed a bad contract.

I’d prefer to be a member of a community. There’s nothing dishonorable about limiting one’s engagement with industry to consuming the product, even though I would hope that readers who make this choice try to be ethical consumers by paying some attention to the conditions under which the books they enjoy are created.

Creators are more important than fictional characters and corporations. They are more important than the fifteen minutes of entertainment that I get from reading a good Marvel/DC superhero comic, or the two hours plus of ‘entertainment’ from a superhero action movie. I don’t know if that means I should stop reading comics published by Marvel or DC yet. I want to continue buying books written and drawn by some of my favorite creators, many of whom don’t publish work independently or for other publishers. I don’t really want to boycott either publisher (though I understand why some do). I like contributing to not-for-profits or other funds that support creators in need of help, but that just doesn’t feel sufficient.

I’m not quite ready to quit, but Moore’s words keep echoing in my mind.

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The #1 Comic Five Years Ago was Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America #1

Last month Captain America died, and this month Jeph Loeb begins mining his core competencies — jumping onto hot properties, using his rolodex of Big Name Artists, and working the untimely death of his son — into one mega-selling mini-series. Spoiler alert: we’ll be seeing more of Fallen Son in the future.

DC’s big push five years ago was World War III, a series of one-shots designed to accomplish the questions that 52 initially promised to answer: what happened in between Infinite Crisis and One Year Later. The actual 52 book addressed these questions elliptically at best, focusing instead on doing globe-hopping adventures focusing on a core set of characters. What remained for World War III was a series of fill-in creators using 52 star Black Adam’s genocidal rampage as an excuse to show him rip Father Time’s face off, punch Robotman’s head off, tear Frankenstein Jr.’s arms off, pull Terra’s heart out and keep it as a trophy, and literally bathe in blood. In between they answer questions that had already been addressed in the eight to ten issues of “One Year Later” books already published, such as:

• How did Supergirl end up back from the 31st Century? Supergirl is shown coming out of an unexplained time portal back into the 21st Century.
• How did Jason Todd find himself in New York pretending to be Nightwing? Jason Todd is shown in New York dressed up as Nightwing, saying he plans to adopt the identity of Nightwing.
• How did Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Bullock get their jobs as cops back? Both are shown coming back on the job, and being welcomed back to the job by colleagues.
• Why does Jason Rusch form Firestorm with Firehawk now? Why is Martin Stein missing? The two are shown merging to form Firestorm, while commenting on the absence of Profesor Stein.

There were other “mysteries revealed”, but they all pretty much fell into the category of tautological answers. “Why does Alan Scott work for Checkmate now?” “Alan Scott is working for Checkmate now.” That sort of thing. Still, 52 was enough of a phenomenon that all four WWIII issues were Top 20 books, making it plus 52 a full 40% of the Top 20.

Alongside issues of indie stalwarts like Optic Nerve and Love & Rockets, it’s been five years since the first issue of Johnny Hiro and the last (so far) issue of Superfuckers. Both of these are warm, funny Pop Comics. Fred Chao’s Hiro is a magic-realism romantic comedy about young New Yorkers. It’s a cheap and easy comparison, but  Hiro reads a bit like a more mature Scott Pilgrim, if you replace most of the video game/indie rock signifiers with Japanese film homages and surreal cameos from David Byrne, Alton Brown, Grand Puba and Mayor Bloomberg. The first volume of Hiro is getting reprinted by TOR this summer, and Chao is working on the second volume. I can’t wait.

Superfuckers is a strangely endearing look at what would happen if the Legion of Super Heroes were all cast out of Harmony Korine films. There have been plenty of “what if superheroes were baaaaad” stories, from Wanted to Watchmen, Brat Pack to The Boys, all the way back to Superduperman and probably some Tijuana Bible about the Flash showing his dong or something. What sets Superfuckers apart is that you don’t get the impression that Kochalka is trying to criticize superheroes; he’s just telling a story about a bunch of horrible jerks who have superpowers. It’s no more an indictment of superheroes than Childrens Hospital is a damning portrait of the Americal medical system. It is, however, superfunny.

Other Books Released Five Years Ago This Month

• Nova #1, Richard “Dick” Ryder’s fourth ongoing series, and by far the most successful, running for three years when the previous three lasted twenty-one, eighteen, and seven issues respectively. Spinning out of Annihilation, the series ended with the start of 2010′s Thanos Imperative mini-series, where Ryder apparently died. Sam Alexander is the new Nova in town, and he’s already appearing in Marvel’s big AvX crossover and on the pleasantly goofy Ultimate Spider-Man television series, so it’s possible this series closed the book on Dick Ridin’ in the Marvel Universe.
• Amazons Attack #1, an event featuring Amazons Attacking the United States, which was revealed on the last page to be a cunning plan on the part of Granny Goodness to control the Amazons into getting killed off so that she could train a group of unpowered, mortal women to become a new army of Amazons that she could control. Amazons Attack also has the distinction of being one of the few (only?) Event Comics that actually caused the sales of comics tying into drop. It was under these conditions that DC chose to slot in best-selling author Jodi Picoult‘s run on Wonder Woman.
• And in the world of indie books that might still be readable half a decade later, April 2007 saw the American release of Garage Band (reviewed on FBBP #10), Gipi’s excellent graphic novel about youth and music and change. Amazon seems to be blowing out both Garage Band and Gipi’s similarly great Notes from a War Story (check out Jamaal’s review) and both receive a universal FBB Seal of Approval: literally A Bargain At Twice the Price.

The #1 Comic Ten Years Ago was Transformers: Generation One #1

Here is another blip that was heralded as The Savior of the Comics Industry: 1980s Toys Turned into Comics. Though there are still cottage industries built around Transformers and G.I. Joe over at IDW — bolstered no doubt by both properties being turned into feature film franchises — the return of Robots in Disguise to comic shops was the start of a real fad. In coming months, we’ll see the revival of Masters of the Universe, Thundercats, Voltron, Battle of the Planets, Ghostbusters, and probably other forgettable cartoons that turned into forgettable early 2000s comics. But this was the start of it all.

Marvel was still dominant this month, with fifteen of the top twenty spots and a 41% unit share of the industry, though there are few if any “milestone” issues among their releases. The most memorable book from their line a decade ago is a curio now: Captain America #1, the relaunch of the book under Books of Magic writer John Ney Rieber and John Cassaday. It was an attempt to reposition Captain America as a response to 9/11, from the issue’s alternately evoking a World War II patriotic mural and a stark FIGHT TERROR message on the second issue’s cover. This creative team only lasted six issues, with Cassaday leaving after the sixth issue, and Reiber slipping into “story by” credit the next issue, handing the book off to Chuck Austen. This volume of Captain America limped along under a variety of creators for awhile, but has long since been eclipsed by the 2005 series launched by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. But not everyone has forgotten it: Tim Callahan took a look at the full series just last week, but it was under the theme of “no one remembers that run before Brubaker’s.”

Speaking of things no one remembers, DC was taking a real beating ten years ago. The only books to crack the top thirty were Kevin Smith and Phil Hester’s penultimate issue of Green Arrow, an issue of JLA, and four parts of the Bruce Wayne: Fugitive event. What books were DC developing to combat this slump? How about Superman & Savage Dragon: Chicago, a follow-up to 1999′s Superman & Savage Dragon: Metropolis? Written and drawn by Erik Larsen, this seemed like the half of the crossover Image was meant to publish, but instead it came out through DC. It had orders of 18,386 in the direct market.

The same month, John Byrne launched a creator-owned DC Universe series Lab Rats featuring a group of teens investigating the paranormal. The book debuted with orders of 25,841, easily outstripping Byrne’s frequent nemesis Larsen, but 25,000 was a dismally low number for a Big Two launch a decade ago. Later Byrne would call Lab Rats, “the book that was killed by the internet. Trashed, savaged, shredded before the first issue had even come out. Retailers refusing to order it even for customers standing there with money in their hands.” This is why I have been calling Bergen Street Comics’s decision not to stock shelf copies of Before Watchmen as “Lab Rats all over again !”

Lab Rats lasted eight issues, and in the final issue Byrne killed the entire team and destroyed their organization in a confusing time paradox, as is his wont. When asked why on his forums, he explained:

When the time came for LAB RATS to go away, whether it was in 12 issues or 12 years, I wanted to make sure no other writer could toss off a reference to the characters in some other book. You know — as has happened too many times before, now. Isn’t it a pity we now have to deal with an industry in which one has to go out of one’s way to bulletproof — as much as possible — one’s storylines and characters? Can we imagine such a thing in the Golden or Silver Ages? Of course not. But, then, the people doing the books back in those days were actually deserving of the title “professional”.

This is a fascinating position for someone whose body of work includes extensive runs on Superman, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, and other books that referred to and often revamped characters created by people not named John Byrne during the Golden and Silver Ages. In fact, his last gig prior to Lab Rats was X-Men: The Hidden Years, a series explicitly devoted to writing retconny stories that slot themselves in between established pre-Claremont X-Men stories. I suppose that’s just Roy Thomas and Arnold Drake’s fault for not making X-Men so “bulletproof” that Claremont, Wein, Cockrum, etc. could not reference the characters later on. And had that happened, Byrne may have never gotten his big break drawing X-Men and he would not deserve the title of “professional” and… whoa. Byrne really does love time paradoxes!

This month also marks the 10th anniversary of me Legitimately Reading Manga. I am sure that I picked up some loose issues of Akira or Bubblegum Crisis or Lone Wolf & Cub before 2002, but based off a glowing review on artbomb.net I picked up April 2002′s Great Teacher Onizuka volume 1, and eventually collected the entire series, along with dozens of others over the past decade. It’s a fun read, and I definitely see why it is a smash hit, though (like so many other shonen manga) I really could have done without the semi-nude teenage girls, the lovingly rendered panty shots, the incessant statutory rape humor. That’s a natural part of the book — following street punk Onizuka as he stumbles into a teaching job he is hilariously ill-suited for — but there’s making the jokes and there’s lingering on the girl’s locker room for what feels like half a volume. GTO often fell into the latter camp. Still, a fun read and my doorway into a lot of great books.

Other Books Released Ten Years Ago This Month

• Halo & Sprocket #1: The blogosphere probably best knows Kerry Callen as the artist behind Great Comics That Never Happened on Comics Alliance and lots of other entertaining take-offs of bygone comics. But before that, he created H&S at Slave Labor, a whimsical series about a robot and an angel stuck living in the suburbs and trying to understand humanity. It was apparently pitched (and ran?) as a newspaper comic strip for a brief period, and that’s reflective of its breezy feel. I hadn’t thought about H&S for years, and am excited to see there were two collections published, the second seemingly full of material I’ve never seen.
• Dumped: Here’s another book I haven’t thought about in years. Andi Watson put out a bunch of books over the 2000s that didn’t seem to quite fit in. After the fantasy-filled Skeleton Key, Watson put out Slow News Day, Breakfast After Noon, and Dumped, all exceedingly non-fantastical relationship stories. I enjoyed them all (especially BAN) but lost track of Watson, who continued to do work for Oni while also writing some pre-Season 8 Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the hilariously ill-fated Bill Jemas re-imagining of Namor as a teen romance book. Marvel just released 15 Love, a story originally commissioned back around this time. I haven’t read it either, as I was waiting to hear someone — anyone, really — give it a review. Did anyone read it?
• My Friend Dahmer #1: Ten years before it became an acclaimed graphic memoir, Derf published a version of this story as a one-shot comic. I guess he went to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer? I’ve never rated Derf’s alt-weekly strip that highly, so I didn’t pick this up in 2002. If I keep hearing good things, I might have to give him a chance in 2012.
• Midnight, Mass #1: Speaking of someone who was not given a chance in 2012: John Rozum, ladies and gents! Midnight, Mass. was basically The X-Files if it starred Nick and Nora Charles. Originally conceived as supporting character/spin-offs from Rozum’s Xombi book at Milestone, they instead got two fun mini-series at Vertigo that I best remember for some striking covers courtesy of Tomer Hanuka.

The #1 Comic Fifteen Years Ago was Uncanny X-Men #345

April 1997 marks the dawn of Diamond Comics’s reign as an Effective Monopoly, as Marvel Comics returned to Diamond after declaring bankruptcy in December of 1996 and folding their disastrous Heroes World experiment in March. Many people like to point to some of the truly awful comics Marvel put out in the 1990s as the cause of this bankruptcy, but it’s not true: Marvel’s publishing was generally a profitable arm of an unwieldy, poorly organized amalgam of properties that Ron Perelman bundled in the hopes of selling the company before it all collapsed. That doesn’t mean they weren’t bad comics, just that they didn’t bankrupt the company.

And as bad as these comics may have been, they still sold! Witness Uncanny X-Men #345, by A Team of Editors who told Scott Lobdell, Ben Raab, Joe Madiuera, and Mel Rubi What To Do. It’s a prelude to Operation: Zero Tolerance, and features the first appearance of Maggott, who has two slugs that eat things to give him power I guess? I don’t know if I’ve actually read things with Maggott in them. He got killed in Frank Tieri’s Weapon X series, but was resurrected during the Necrosha event. I am trusting the Internet on this. Over in X-Men #65, they also introduced Dr. Cecilia Reyes, who I am pretty sure has never died but Wikipedia says that she may have also died in Weapon X.

The other big thing fifteen years ago was Amalgam Round Two, a series of one-shots featuring merging of Marvel and DC characters like Lobo the Duck and Thorion of the New Asgardians. I seem to recall hearing a couple of these were fun, but I don’t know that I ever read them.

Yeah, I really wasn’t reading any superhero comics in 1997. Neither was David Brothers: as we discussed in the last FBB podcast, he had given up a year earlier during Onslaught. But unlike David, I was still reading comics. Here’s a representative sampling of what I was picking up:

• Dark Horse Presents #120, featuring Evan Dorkin‘s last (to date) Hectic Planet story
• Dork #4, with the second Eltingville Comic Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Role-Playing Club story
• Jinx #7, the final issue of Brian Michael Bendis’s crime series to get published through Calibur
• Eightball #18, including the conclusion of “Ghost World“
• Squee #1, Optic Nerve #4, Stray Bullets #13, Paradise Sucks: I don’t really have anything to say about these except they’re fifteen years old now.

If I wanted to pretend I was an even hipper teen, I would pretend that I picked up Finder #3, The Waiting Place #1, Bacchus #24, A Distant Soil #19, and Hate #27. But I didn’t. I didn’t read those until later. I list them all just to remind everyone who likes to say that “comics sucked in the 1990s” that there were tons of great comics put out in the 1990s. Don’t let Maggott be the poster boy for a decade!

The Number One Comics Twenty Years Ago was X-Men #9

Not much new to say here: Jim Lee’s X-Men was still dominating the scene. Lee’s time with Marvel was almost over. Fellow Image co-founder Todd McFarlane had released his last Marvel book in 1991, and this month marks the end of Rob Liefeld (X-Force #11) and Erik Larsen (Spider-Man #23) as Marvel artists. This was still a Ghost Rider crossover.

Elsewhere in the industry:

• Green Lantern Mosiac debuts, ostensibly a John Stewart solo book, and therefore ostensibly DC’s second book with a black protagonist after Black Lightning. There had been periods where Stewart was the primary Green Lantern, as well a brief period where Shiloh Norman was the co-title character of Mister Miracle, but both series still featured the original (white) hero in a leading role. Co-created by Gerard Jones and Cully Hamner, Mosiac would last eighteen issues.
• Infinity War #1 by Jim Starlin and Ron Lim: The sequel to Infinity Gauntlet featuring a Cosmic Egg, Thanos’s first face turn and a lot of evil doppelgangers. This series is best remembered as the source of that six armed demon Spider-Man that recently popped back up in Carnage by Zeb Wells and Clayton Crain. It also led to two of the goofier aspects of Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan’s sublimely goofy run on Fantastic Four: Susan Richards is infected by her evil duplicate “Malice” and begins wearing a ridiculously revealing outfit and being mean to everyone, and the Thing gets his face sliced up by Wolverine and is afraid to let anyone see his ugly, infected mug.
• The second Marvel Swimsuit Special came out, with a weird framing story by Dan Slott, explaining that Pip the Troll teleported a bunch of heroes to Monster Island and then used the Mind Gem to persuade them to have a beach party instead of fighting. If you ever wanted to see Slott write commentary on a bunch of trashy softcore shots of superheroines (and Typhoid Mary!) along with pin-ups of Cable, Punisher, and Thanos in swimsuits, this book is for you!
• Sam and Max: Freelance Police #1 came polybagged with the debut issue of Dirt magazine, the male counterpart to Sassy that was edited by a group including Spike Jonze. As a youth, I discarded the magazine with a Crispin Glover cover feature, never listened to the free tape featuring an unreleased Nirvana song, and instead devoured the funnybook about the rabbit and the dog on the moon. What life might have been, had I chosen a different object out of this polybag!

GIMMICK COVER WATCH: We’re really getting into the Gimmick Age here. Spectacular Spider-Man had a full-on HOLOGRAM to celebrate Spider-Man’s 30th birthday, while Guardians of the Galaxy #25 had an etched foil cover to celebrate a Guardians of the Galaxy comic lasting more than two years. Silver Sable & the Wild Pack and Rust each had debut issues with appropriately hued foil.

My notes claim that Youngblood #3 has a glow in the dark cover, but I’m not sure why I thought that. It does have the first appearance of Supreme, in a five page sequence written and drawn by co-creator Brian Murray. There’s also a pin-up promising that BLOODSTRIKE IS COMING SOON, which means that we’ve now seen almost every Extreme property currently being revamped turn twenty. All except Glory, who won’t appear until 1993.

GOING FURTHER BACK

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO – APRIL 1987

Batman Annual #11 featured “Mortal Clay” by Alan Moore and George Freeman, a Clayface story that is, to my knowledge, one of the few Moore stories DC owns that has not been expanded out into a Big Event in the past decade.

It’s also been twenty five years since Peter Parker proposed to Mary Jane in Amazing Spider-Man #290 by David Michelinie and John Romita, Jr. For many of you, this may lead you to recall fan outrage at the dissolution of their marriage in One More Day. For the more senior readers, it may lead you to recall fan outrage at their marriage. For younger fans, this may lead you to wonder when Spider-Man was ever married, because it definitely wasn’t in the movies or the new TV show.

Also celebrating a silver anniversary: Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future, Chris Ware’s entrance into the comic book world. This comic was a reprint of a series of college newspaper strips Ware did. I am relatively convinced I found this in a quarter bin once, years ago. But I’ve never found it, and so I am starting to think it was a dream. Then again, I just recently found a box containing a bunch of issues of Warrior, about a dozen Jack Kirby Kamandi issues, and Chuck Austen’s comic adaptation of the Halle Berry Catwoman film. It is possible for me to buy anything. And I do mean anything.

THIRTY YEARS AGO – APRIL 1982

Twenty years before Transformers ruled the comic charts, He-Man and Superman teamed up in DC Comics Presents #47.

Avengers #221 asked who would be joining the team, with lots of wild card possibilities. The two members joining thirty years ago were She-Hulk (for the first time) and Hawkeye (rejoining after one of his many “THAT TEARS IT, HAWKEYE’S CUTTIN’ OUT!” moments). Since then, nearly everyone on the cover has been an Avenger — I think ROM, Dazzler, and Silver Surfer are the only ones who haven’t been part of at least one Avengers line-up. The idea that an Avengers line-up featuring Luke Cage, Spider-Man, and Wolverine would be WAY-OUT is probably foreign to many of today’s fans.

In some impressive long-term planning, New Teen Titans #21 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez introduced (unnamed, in shadows) the Monitor and Harbinger, sowing the seeds for Crisis on Infinite Earths several years later. This issue also introduced Brother Blood, a villain contractually obligated to come back at least once every time they revamp the Titans. A back-up story by Wolfman and Gene Colan introduced the Night Force, currently starring in a revamp mini-series by Wolfman and Tom Mandrake.

Speaking of Wolfman and Colan, their version of Dracula (and his supporting cast) popped up thirty years ago in Uncanny X-Men #159 by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz. This was far from the X-Men’s last tussle with vampires, though both Marvel and Mark Millar would try to convince you these books never happened a few years back.

THIRTY FIVE YEARS AGO – APRIL 1977

Jack Kirby, well into his fourth decade of making funnybooks, introduces Mr. Machine/Machine Man/Aaron Stack/X-51 in 2001: A Space Odyssey #8. It’s been thirty-five years and I’m still not sure anyone’s figured out what to do with this character: is he a robot struggling to understand hoo-man emotion? A self-actualized, stretchy version of the Vision? A mutant-killing machine? Bender? He’s clearly got that Kirby Magic, because they’ve kept trying to use him for thirty-five years now. As a testament to that magic, DC decided to relaunch New Gods this month, almost five years after the cancelled the books out from under Kirby. Gerry Conway and Don Newton had the honors of working on the Before Watchmen of their day.

The same cannot be said for The Quintronic Man, created by Len Wein and Sal Buscema in Incredible Hulk #213. Or maybe, as per the Marvel Universe Appendix site, he was created by Bill Mantlo, John Buscema and Tom Palmer. I suppose this is for the courts to decide when the Quintronic Man movie hits. (The saddest thing about this joke is that the least likely part of it is any of the five people mentioned seeing a dime from the movie, much less fighting over their zero dollars in court.) Also called “The Five-in-One Threat”, the Quintronic Man was basically just a creepy early prototype of Voltron, except it could not split off into five tigers. It actually resurfaced recently, in Joe Casey and company’s Last Defenders, where the two(?) Quintronic Men sadly lost their creepy gargoyle faces. I like to think the Quintronic Man was the inspiration for the performer Mr. Quintron (inventor of the Drum Buddy!) but I realize this is almost certainly not so.

This amazing cover turns 35 this month. I could tell you why Prankster shoved pennies in his ears, but that doesn’t explain Superman’s murderous anger over it. Nothing in the story does, really. (Superman Family #184 by Neal Adams)

But surely the most important comic from April 1977 was Star Wars #1: a tie-in to some cheesy movie that hadn’t even come out yet, the book was farmed out to some kid named Howie Chaykin, who drew a really off-model cover. According to Jim Shooter, Star Wars (and Roy Thomas’s efforts to pick up the license) helped save Marvel from filing for bankruptcy nearly twenty years before they actually did.

FORTY YEARS AGO – APRIL 1972

Brave & the Bold #102 features a conflict between Batman and the Teen Titans over the relative grooviness of THE COMMUNE OF DEFIANCE! But first, in the words of Mark Waid, the panel that launched a thousand Grant Morrison scripts:

Elsewhere in comics… well, Kirby was still plugging away on the Fourth World. Turning forty this month: Lump, who you may remember as the thing messing with Batman’s mind during Final Crisis (Mister Miracle #8) as well as Forager, whose sister(?) you may remember knocking boots with Jimmy Olsen in Countdown to Final Crisis (New Gods #9)

FORTY FIVE YEARS AGO – APRIL 1967

What do you get for the man who ate everything on his forty fifth birthday? This and a million other fat jokes were made possible for Spider-Man when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Wilson Fisk, The Kingpin, in Amazing Spider-Man #50.

FIFTY YEARS AGO – APRIL 1962

Doctor Doom turns fifty! Look how young he looks! (Fantastic Four #5 by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby)

Doctor Light also turns fifty. He seems like a pretty reasonable guy, not some crazy rapist… (Justice League of America #12 by Gardner Fox & Mike Sekowsky)

SIXTY FIVE YEARS AGO – APRIL 1947

Per Degaton debuts in All Star Comics #35, created by John Broome and Irwin Hasen. I have never really understood Per Degaton’s deal. Is he an evil Archie Andrews from the future?

Superman and the Prankster have a complicated relationship with coins… (cover by Wayne Boring)

SEVENTY YEARS AGO – APRIL 1942

Jack Kirby draws Thor for the first time!

See you in May!

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Check out this gallery of some of the comics we end up discussing!

Plus: Bronze Age DC, the Death of Superman novelization, Marvel’s Star Wars comics, the Ultraverse, Frank Miller in Spanish, Marvel Knights, and much much more!

Coming up next: more Origin Stories, with the rest of the FBB Gang.

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This is how screwy our sense of our own history is. Most people in comics don’t realize that the Senate vindicated us. After due consideration, the United States Senate decided comics books were not a cause of juvenile delinquency. We were vindicated.

Miller is only telling part of the story here. You can read transcripts of the entire set of hearings here, but four our purposes let’s skip to Kefauver’s summary:

Majority opinion seems included to view that it is unlikely that the reading of crime and horror comics would lead to delinquency in a well-adjusted and normally law-abiding child.

Huzzah! Vindication, right?

The subcommittee believes that this Nation cannot afford the calculated risk involved in the continued mass dissemination of crime and horror comic books to children.

Uh oh…

It is the consensus of the subcommittee that the establishment of this new association, the adoption of a code, and the appointment of a code administrator are steps in the right direction. [...] The subcommittee intends to watch with great interest the activities of this association and will report at a later date on this effort by the comic book industry to eliminate objectionable comic books. At any rate, the subcommittee is convinced that if this latest effort at industry self-regulation does not succeed, then other ways and means must- and will- be found to prevent our Nation’s young from being harmed by crime and horror comic books.

The Senate Subcommittee may have rejected Wertham’s brand of “BAN THIS SICK FILTH”, but they hardly lionized the comics industry. While there’s a solid argument to be made that the Comics Code was a gross overreaction, it came not after a vindication, as Miller posits, but after a “Get Your House in Order, Or We Will” shot across the bow, much like the film industry’s self-imposed Hays Code. Miller, however, continues to run with the “vindication” argument:

Why then, the Comics Code? Abject cowardice, maybe? Maybe, partly, but not entirely. The answer may just make you all a little sick to your stomachs. You see, comic publishers in the 1950s had a problem. This problem had a name. Its name was William Gaines. William M. Gaines was the rarest of creatures, a brilliant publisher. His EC Comics outsold everybody’s else’s comics by a long shot because they were better than anybody else’s comics. By a long shot. The other publishers couldn’t compete with him. Not fairly, anyway. So they used the free-floating fear of the time to shut him down.”

There is no denying that Gaines gathered an incredible array of talent at EC Comics, gave them unprecedented freedom and visibility, and consequently produced comics people are still talking about sixty years later. But the myth of EC’s martyrdom has reached crazed levels over the decades. Miller points to the Code’s part A10 through A12 that states:

(10) The crime of kidnapping shall never be portrayed in any detail, nor shall any profit accrue to the abductor or kidnaper. The criminal or the kidnaper must be punished in every case.
(11) The letters of the word “crime” on a comics-magazine cover shall never be appreciably greater in dimension than the other words contained in the title. The word “crime” shall never appear alone on a cover.
(12) Restraint in the use of the word “crime” in titles or subtitles shall be exercised.

Someone might see this as an attack on EC’s Crime SuspenStories, a title that is specifically condemned by Wertham. But Wertham’s image section also singles out All-Famous Crime (Star), Crime & Punishment (Gleason), Crime Detective (Hillman), Crime Reporter (St. John), Crime Smashers (Trojan), Hunted: Crime Never Pays (Fox), and True Crime Comics (Magazine Village). Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay (currently getting reprinted at Dark Horse) predated and largely inspired Crime SuspenStories along with a slew of imitators: all the above-mentioned, plus Crime Must Pay the Penalty, Fight Against Crime, Crime Casebook, Crime Mysteries, Anti-Crime Squad, Crime & Justice, All-True Crime, Famous Crimes, Crimes By Women, Real Clue Crime Stories, and a dozen or so other short-lived books that cashed in on the fad. The elimination of crime comics cut across the board, not just against EC.

Likewise, the ban against titles containing “horror” or “terror” might look like some sort of attack on EC, but while it instantly eliminated Vault of Horror (Crypt of Terror was renamed Tales from the Crypt in 1950) it also took out Adventures into Terror, Beware! Terror Tales, Tomb of Terror, Weird Terror, Startling Terror Tales, Terrors of the Jungle, House of Terror, Tales of Horror, Weird Horrors, and Horror from the Tomb.

The code was absolutely designed to neuter and/or kill off the troublesome attention-getting genres of Crime and Horror, but the perception that EC was the only game in town for those types of comics — or even the most popular ones — is a misconception. Likewise it’s a misconception that EC was outselling everyone else in the game. Though circulation figures for the era are few and far between, a couple of sources I found put the ceiling of EC’s circulation in the neighborhood of 400,000. That’s half of Crime Does Not Pay’s peak according to Matt Fraction, and well below sales of over a million copies that kiddie books like Walt Disney Comics & Stories or even Superman were enjoying at the time. The idea that all of the other publishers conspired to kill EC Comics with the Code is dubious at best, but ascribing it to anger over being outsold by EC seems to be explicitly counterfactual.

People like clean narratives. The narrative of Bill Gaines and his gang of geniuses threatening to dominate the comics industry before being taken down by cowardly crooked publishers, even after the US government vindicated their brilliant comics is a great narrative. And it’s no question that Gaines assembled an incredible group that deserved better. There’s also very little doubt that the majority of publishers in 1954 were far more interested in profit than art, and treated creators accordingly. It’s a sad fact that both these conditions — underappreciated and undercompensated artists, shady publishers — are hardly unique to the time and place that brought about the Comics Code. Miller’s speech is a terrific rallying cry against those conditions in general, but it’s frustrating to see the oversimplified Fairy Tale version of 1954 trotted out for such a noble cause.

On a lighter note, I find it amusing that Miller also trots out a pair of common sentiments in the opening of his speech:

1) Moreso than any of the other talented creators at the company, Jack Kirby was the Primary Creative Force at Marvel Comics (Miller goes so far as to redub “The Marvel Age” “The Kirby Age”
2) The greatest creation of the Marvel/Kirby Age is Spider-Man, the most prominent Marvel character Kirby had no significant input into

There are many reasons to lionize Kirby, even at the expense of his collaborators. A big one in 1994 was Kirby’s recent passing, and the fact that Stan Lee was still Corporate Spokesperson Emeritus for Marvel at the time, so they were doing all the public praising Stan really needed. Kirby also has a wider breadth of contributions — both within the Marvel “Universe” and across the industry in general — than anyone else. I understand why “Kirby is #1″ and “Spider-Man is #1″ are not inherently contradictory statements. I just think it’s funny when they come two paragraphs apart.

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Look, I’m not a fancy marketing whiz. I’ve never worked at an ad agency or anything. But I have been on the Internet for a long time, long enough to remember when Mondo 2000 was a thing and Boing Boing was just a zine and Douglas Rushkoff was still a doe-eyed optimist about the potential of CYBERIA and memes were something you would namedrop while shouting over Rave Til Dawn at that warehouse club from Hackers, not a picture of a dog talking to someone on a telephone with captions in an Impact font.

So please believe when I tell you, I don’t think you know what viral marketing is. Or maybe it’s not you. Maybe I need to address this to bloggers out there, and the “viral” wording isn’t from DC itself. But…

Comic Book Resources:

Before Watchmen” Goes Viral With Online “New Frontiersman… The articles, entrenched in the 1977 universe of “Watchmen,” serve as a piece of viral marketing that has extended to the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, where paper copies of the 1977-vintage newsletter are being given out at the DC booth.

Comic Book Therapy:

DC Comics Launches Before Watchmen Viral Site

Comicbook.com:

Using The New Frontiersman as a sort of viral marketing site for Before Watchmen is in keeping with themes and literary devices used in the first series

And so on. Viral marketing, as much as it is an actual thing that you can define, is supposed to be subtle, infectious, mysterious. It’s supposed to get people talking, searching, wondering what’s going on. And admittedly, a fake newspaper is a more “interesting” thing than a WordPress template (or Baby’s First Flash Site) containing a few marketing one-sheets and some promo art. But when you set up a domain that redirects to dccomics.com,  link to it from the official DC Comics Twitter and your official Watchmen promotional Twitter,  have a big ol’ banner hyping it on your Watchmen site (and your main corporate site), have your boilerplate copyright info right there at the bottom of the site, and print up copies of the material to hand out at your official convention booth? That’s what I imagine people in the business call plain ol’ marketing.

If that’s what we’re calling viral marketing now, we might as well just automatically append “viral” to the front of everything.

“I just saw a pretty sweet viral trailer for The Avengers before that Three Stooges movie, looks fun.”

“You know what I found in the pocket of an old coat? A viral JIMMY OLSEN MUST DIE badge promoting Countdown.”

“That viral feature on Dark Knight Rises in EW still hasn’t sold me on the Catwoman costume.”

“I picked up the viral hardcover of Flex Mentallo this weekend, not crazy about the viral recoloring.”

“Viral marketing” is a pretty dumb, debased phrase to begin with, and I probably did not need to point out this mote when there is a mountain range of bullshit in the eyes of everyone involved with Before Watchmen. But somehow, this annoyed me as much as all of the other doubletalk, doublethink, and crassness involved with the project. The fake newspaper is not even a particularly original idea: I could show you the ones DC did for Invasion, Transmetropolitan, the Death of Superman, or the five hundred Daily Bugles Marvel has put out in the past twenty-five years. Some of those were actually kind of clever, too.

But still, who can’t get swept up in the hype? Let me make a bold prediction about the plot of one of these books. From Bleeding Cool:

I’m told that JMS’s version of the Comedian may be rather controversial in that it’s a very different take on the character, that neglects certain established aspects of the character for a fresh approach that will, and I quote, “people’s minds are going to explode”.

If there is one thing that keeps the Comedian from being a good ol’ fashioned blood ‘n’ guts wisecrackin’ badass anti-hero that DC can sculpt a franchise out of in a series on Earth-NofuckYOUalan by Chuck Dixon and Paul Gulacy, it’s that whole bit where he rapes Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre. Now, despite repeatedly calling Alan Moore out for being a big crybaby, I have no doubt that JMS and everyone involved with this project has the utmost respect for Watchmen, the classic series that somehow created itself under the ownership of Time Warner. They would never mess with such a pivotal scene in the comic. So how to solve this problem?

It’s simple, and a trick that JMS loves to use. Sally Jupiter’s daughter Laurie is married to Dr. Manhattan, the omnipotent nudist who can probably time travel, right? What if Sally asks her son in law to send her back in time, where she tells a young Comedian that the two of them have a wonderful daughter who carries on the Silk Spectre legacy, and that no matter what, he must impregnate her with Laurie at a pre-ordained time. No matter how much the contemporary Sally fights back, she has given pre-emptive/retroactive consent, which means it wasn’t rape.

There you go! The Comedian is redeemed, and people’s origin stories are a faux-profound, nonsense circle-of-life. Tell me that isn’t right up JMS’s alley! Then try to tell me with a straight face you’re expecting something better than this idea in the actual book.

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This time out I made a point to include when certain characters were created X years ago this month, and mention who created them. I know I’m late to the party as Tom Spurgeon has been posting for the past month on this very topic. While there’s no doubt that all the attention given to the monumental work people like Siegel, Shuster, Lee, and Kirby contributed to the comics landscape is deserved, and their treatment by the corporate benefactors of that work has been almost universally abhorrent, it’s also important to remember that there have been hundreds if not thousands of other creators working in the trenches, putting their backs into tilling the soil upon which Marvel and DC’s fertile IP grows. They’re not getting any money for their characters showing up in movies or video games or toy lines either. The literal least we can do as Team Comics is acknowledge they did stuff that made comics we like now possible.

The #1 Comic Five Years Ago Was: Captain America#25

Yes, it’s already been five years since Captain America died. Or is that “only”, since in five years Cap died, was replaced by Bucky, Skrulls invaded, Norman Osborn took over the country, Cap came back, took over SHIELD, watched Bucky die, found out Bucky didn’t really die, and he is now going to war against the X-Men. Either way, it’s been five years.

It’s also been five years since Buffy Season 8 launched out of Dark Horse. It, along with the previous month’s Dark Tower debut, briefly seemed to signal for some a Way to Save the Comic Book Industry: not just transmedia licensed books, but transmedia licensed books with the direct involvement of the creators. I can’t really think of many examples that have popped up in the past five years, but like Stephen King working on Dark Tower comics, Joss Whedon working on Buffy comics got people excited. After multiple reprints, the first issue of Buffy Season 8 sold nearly 200,000 copies, making it the best-selling female-fronted book since Fathom #1 way back in July 1998. Like Dark Tower, the bloom has gone off the Buffy rose, though at nearly 30,000 copies last month’s Buffy Season 9 #6 has retained a stronger audience than Marvel’s King books.

Another book turning five is Adam Warren’s Empowered, a book David Brothers reps hard for, but one I still have not read. I’m slowly working through Lone Wolf and Cub and the Hellboy/B.P.R.D. mega-sagas thanks to Dark Horse Digital, and Empowered is next on the docket. I really do have a disgusting backlog of things to read, though. For instance I picked up Jeff (Sweet Tooth) Lemire’s Complete Essex County a year or so back from one of Top Shelf’s regular sales, and still haven’t gotten past the first chapter Tales from the Farm, which also turns five this month. Other books debuting this month include Matthew Thurber’s 1-800-Mice and Rick Veitch’s Army @ Love. Where were you when you first laid eyes on these titles? That was where you were half a decade ago.

The #1 Comic Ten Years Ago Was: New X-Men #124

New X-Men #124 wasn’t a significant issue or anything; it was just happened to be a book in the midst of a popular run on a month where there weren’t any big debuts. DC put out a new Hawkman book by Geoff Johns, James Robinson and Rags Morales, the fourth or fifth attempt to give the character a viable ongoing. This time out it lasted 49 issues (66 if you count the Hawkgirl revamp) which for Hawkman is the equivalent of a blockbuster 300 issue magnum opus. Marvel’s response was their second (third if you count Nightstalkers) Blade series, released under the MAX imprint in conjunction with Blade II hitting theaters. Solicited as an ongoing by Christopher Hinz and Steve Pugh, it was quickly downgraded to a six issue mini-series. Time and again, Blade has proven to be a hard sell without Wesley Snipes involved.

Elsewhere in the comics world of March 2002, Gail Simone landed her first Big Two writing gig with Deadpool #65. Whether this is an occasion of celebration or a date that shall live in infamy will be up to individual tastes. But alongside Studio Udon, Simone created two characters in this issue recently seen in David Lapham and Kyle Baker’s Deadpool MAX series: Agent X and “Crazy” Inez Temple. (Speaking of Baker, his biblical graphic novel King David turns ten this month too.)

It’s also been ten years since Dark Horse began the first comprehensive US translation/reprinting of Osamu Tezuka’s masterwork Astro Boy.

The #1 Comic Fifteen Years Ago Was: Superman #123

Fun Fact: Though they’re riding high on the sales chart now, DC had a nearly five year drought between #1 books a decade and a half ago. After Superman #123, DC wouldn’t top the charts again until December 2001 with the release of DK2 #1. Electric Superman was one of several big “events” DC orchestrated in an attempt to regain the mass media attention that his death garnered back in 1992. After Superman died and came back, Clark Kent died. Then Superman died again. Then Lois and Clark got married. Then Lois left Clark. Then Superman turned blue. Then red. Then back to normal and he tried to take over the world. Then Lex Luthor became President. It all sorts of blurs together. This one was a big seller, though!

The fourth issues of Dork and Optic Nerve hit the stands in March of 1997. Fifteen years later we’re up to Dork #11 and Optic Nerve #12. Of course Evan Dorkin and Adrian Tomine haven’t been sitting on their thumbs, both have many other irons in the fire. Dorkin’s currently working on the excellent Beasts of Burden with Jill Thompson (reviewed on FBBP #132), television work alongside his wife Sarah Dyer, and various other comics projects. Tomine released his first graphic novel Scenes from an Impending Marriage last year, does a lot of illustration work, and is spearheading Drawn & Quarterly’s excellent reprints of Yoshihiro Tatsumi‘s work. Still, there’s something great that I miss about 1990s comics where you’d get an irregularly published pamphlet with whatever the cartoonist has been doing for the past several months. Tomine seems to feel the same way, if the last Optic Nerve strip is any indication. Curated graphic novels are great and all, but who doesn’t miss the weird letters, album sleeves, pin-ups, experiments, music recommendations, sketches and proto-blog-aggregations of books like these, or Palookaville #10, Acme Novelty Library #10, or Action Girl Comics #10, all books released in March 1997?

Other books turning fifteen this month:

• Xero #1 by Christopher Priest and Chriscross, one of DC’s late 1990s books where they shared ownership of the characters with their creators. Chris Claremont’s Sovreign Seven is perhaps the better known example. Xero only lasted twelve issues, but depending on how you count it, it’s only the third (fourth if you consider Green Lantern Mosaic as a John Stewart solo title) ongoing starring a black character in the DC Universe, after Black Lightning and Steel .
• Resurrection Man #1 byDan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Jackson Guice. The original RM lasted a respectable twenty-eight issues, and Abnett and Lanning were recruited to write the currently running revival last year.
• Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone by Adam Warren, an Elseworlds that signalled his debut outside of what was still considered the manga “ghetto” in 1997. It’s certainly the first time I was aware of him, which is a sad statement in a way: after years of working on acclaimed adaptations of the Dirty Pair and Bubblegum Crisis franchises, the thing that raised his profile was an alternate-universe one-shot of a then-moribund DC property.
• The Tenth #1: I couldn’t tell you anything about this book besides the fact that its covers suggested it was riding the wave of the Bad Girl Phenomenon (check out the protagonist’s outfit!), but it’s historically significant because it’s the writing debut of one Tony Daniel, current hit writer of Batman.
• Ka-Zar #1 by Mark Waid and Andy Kubert, a high-octane creative team that worked hard to make people care about Ka-Zar. It didn’t work for me, but I also wasn’t really buying superhero comics at the time and have never read it. Has anyone? Is it worth checking out the recent reprints?

CROSSOVER WATCH: 1997 was smack-dab in the middle of a period where every company was crossing over with every other company. It was supposed to guarantee boffo sales. This month was no different. Fifteen years ago, fans got to see dream teams like Batman vs. Aliens, Azrael/Ash, and Spider-Man/Badrock.

The #1 Comic Twenty Years Ago Was: X-Men #8

Same as last month, Jim Lee’s X-Men ruled the charts. David Brothers still loves this stuff, and this issue features the Gambit/Bishop pie fight he discusses. It also features the first appearance of Bella Donna, Gambit’s ex-wife who I am told has made her triumphant return from limbo in this month’s Scarlet Spider #3, just in time for her 20th birthday.

It’s also been twenty years since Flash #62, Mark Waid’s first issue in what was a landmark run for both Waid and the Flash. Waid would go on to write or co-write nearly ninety issues of the series over the next eight years, introducing Bart Allen, the Speed Force, Wally West’s marriage to Linda Park, and other building blocks to the Flash mythos. It was a remarkable run on a Big Two book, made all the more impressive in that it was Waid’s first big writing gig if you do not count Impact Comics, and I certainly do not.

Over at Image, Youngblood #2 introduced Jim Valentino’s Shadowhawk in a back-up feature. I guess Shadowhawk was pretty popular for awhile, and he falls somewhere on the mediagenic landmark First Black/HIV-Positive Superhero charts. Then again, so does Youngblood’s own Chapel, introduced last month. Rob Liefeld, not to be outdone by introducing twelve members of Youngblood in the first issue, introduces another dozen characters in the second issue, as Youngblood’s encounter with Prophet (unrecognizable in his new revamp courtesy of Brandon Graham, Simon Roy and friends) is interupted by the Berzerkers: Wildmane, Battleaxe, Grey, Psi-Storm, Cross, Kirby, and Darcangel. They’re on the run from Lord Darkthornn and his Disciples of Doom. Darkthornn is basically a Darkseid ripoff, but it’s okay, because Kirby is a cigar chomping dwarf who says “heckuva” almost as much as The King himself did. Amazingly, The Berzerkers eventually got their own mini-series.

GIMMICK COVER WATCH: 1992 was smack-dab in the middle of a period where every company was doing gimmick covers. It was supposed to guarantee boffo sales. This month was no different. Twenty years ago, fans got to pay extra for a green foil cover on Incredible Hulk #393, a silver-ink cover and a fold-out pop-up centerfold in Ghost Rider #25, and multiple covers (all bound onto one copy) in Lobo’s Back #1.

GOING FURTHER BACK

TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO – MARCH 1987

Iron Man #219 features the debut of The Ghost! Created by David Michelinie and Bob Layton, the mysterious spy and original Occupy Wall Streeter appeared sporadically to bedevil Iron Man for about twenty years before being brought onto the Thunderbolts team by Andy Diggle and Robert De La Torre in 2009. Since then, he’s become a staple member of the team, and is rumored to be taking over the Iron Man mantle in the near future thanks to this promotional image.

I have always loved that “print some line art in another color” effect for invisible people.

Also debuting this month: Rictor in X-Factor #17 by Louise and Walter Simonson. Rictor has bopped around with a number of X-Teams over the years, currently appearing in Peter David’s modern incarnation of X-Factor. After a series of implications and abandoned storylines in X-Force during the 1990s, David explicitly established Rictor’s homosexuality as he entered into a relationship with teammate Shatterstar. The two first kissed in X-Factor v2 #45, which makes it the first gay kiss featuring a superhero co-created by a husband and wife and a character created by Rob Liefeld that I am aware of, unless I am forgetting Rob Liefeld’s influence on the work of Roy & Dann Thomas or Tom & Mary Bierbaum.

Speaking of social relevance, both Daredevil #243 (by Ann Nocenti and Louis Williams) and Power Pack #30 (by Louise Simonson and Val Mayerik) tackled the same topic: that Crack is Bad. This may seem quaint now, but both were years ahead of Pee-Wee Herman.

Elsewhere this month, Dark Horse released Paul Chadwick’s Concrete #1, and Harrier Comics put out Deadface #1, introducing Campbell’s Bacchus. Though neither character is currently appearing in any comics today, they’ve been mainstays of the creator-owned comics landscape for decades. Concrete is up at a great price on Dark Horse Digital, and Bacchus is set to receive a pair of omnibus collections later this year from Top Shelf.

THIRTY YEARS AGO – MARCH 1982

Contest of Champions #1 came out, the first “mini-series” from Marvel Comics. Originally intended to accompany the 1980 Olympics, it was pushed back because America boycotted the Red Soviet Moscow Olympics that summer. I’m really curious what changes this book underwent in the intervening two years, because its story involves heroes from around the world competing on international teams at the behest of the cosmic Grandmaster and the embodiment of Death. It also introduced a bunch of International Heroes, almost none of them of any lasting consequence. It is one of the first “event” comics, though.

Meanwhile in Captain America #270, JM DeMatteis and Mike Zeck introduced Marvel’s first gay supporting character, Cap’s old Brooklyn buddy Arnie Roth. While he was never explicitly identified as gay, they did everything they could to established that lifelong bachelor Arnie was in love with his “best friend” and “roommate” Michael.

Regardless of the lack of details, Arnie’s tearful reunion with his “friend” Michael inspires Cap to finally declare his love for Bernie Rosenthal, making for a suprisingly sensitive if coded depiction of a gay couple in a comic from 1982.

THIRTY FIVE YEARS AGO – MARCH 1977

Incredible Hulk #212 by Len Wein and Sal Buscema introduces Constrictor, a mercenary who has appeared regularly throughout the Marvel Universe. More recently he became a more heroic figure in Dan Slott’s Avengers: The Initiative series. Shown below in his first appearance, he was hired to kill Hulk’s old pal Jim Wilson, who years later would become part of the Black Heroes Who Are HIV Positive trend alongside Shadowhawk and Chapel.

March 1977 also saw the release of John Carter: Warlord of Mars #1, a comic adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs character who recently became one of Disney’s biggest film flops. The run was recently reprinted in omnibus form, and while I’ve never heard much prsie for it, it does feature early work by luminaries such as Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Frank Miller, George Perez, and Walt Simonson, as well as journeyman efforts from veterans like Marv Wolfman, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane.

FORTY YEARS AGO – MARCH 1972

It was a Sweet Christmas in July March forty years ago, as Luke Cage, Hero for Hire made his debut. Created by Archie Goodwin and John Romita, Hero for Hire #1 was the first superhero comic featuring a person of color in the title role, and the first issue also features the first appearances of Shades and Comanche. Fun fact: though he makes frequent use of the exclamations “Sweet Sister!” (first used in HFH #3) and “Christmas!” (first used in HFH #11), Luke Cage does not utter the words “Sweet Christmas” until Bill Mantlo and George Perez took over Luke Cage, Power Man with its twenty-seventh issue. Here’s a video of the late and sorely missed Dwayne McDuffie explaining why Luke would be saying any of this.

FORTY FIVE YEARS AGO – MARCH 1967

Everyone’s favorite Unfathomable Cosmic Being with Three Faces, the Living Tribunal debuts in Strange Tales #157. LT was created by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Marie Severin. He was last seen being unfathomably cosmic and freaking out the squares — or Absorbing Man at any rate — in Avengers Academy #7.

FIFTY YEARS AGO – MARCH 1962:

The Hulk! Though the original Hulk series was something of a flop, canceled after only six issues, this first issue by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby still sets the template for the character for the past half century. Bruce Banner, Rick Jones, General “Thunderbolt” Ross, and Betty Ross all make their debut in this issue, along with the far less iconic Gargoyle. Subsequent issues of the book saw Hulk do battle with the Toad Men, Mongu, Tyrannus, General Fang, and the Metal Master. It’s probably a good idea that this series was put on the backburner, as outside of the initial concept, Lee and Kirby were not firing on all cylinders here.

Also debuting this month, satellite Rogue Abra Kadabara in Flash #128. Created by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, Abra was last seen in the Flashpoint mini-series Secret Seven.

And last but not least, Mark Waid was born fifty years ago (March 21, 1962), thus allowing the aforementioned Ka-Zar and Flash books to get published.

SIXTY FIVE YEARS AGO – MARCH 1947:

• Longtime C-list DC villain Sportsmaster debuts in All American Comics #85, created by John Broome and Irwin Hasen. He wasn’t given the name “Sportsmaster” until later, and several villains have held the title. A Sportsmaster was last seen getting his heart ripped out by Plastic Man in Flashpoint.

So there is your punctuated comics history for March. A goofy Golden Age character getting his heart ripped out by a fallen hero in the middle of an overheated alternate reality crossover. Sounds about right.

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Quick(ish) confession: I have a troubling tendency to attribute the authorship of corporate superhero books to the writer by default, particularly when the art’s mediocre. Sure, I spend time thinking about the choices made by the pencillers, inkers, colorists (and sometimes the letterers), but tend to consider them contributors to the writer’s creative vision. It’s an easy and astonishingly lazy way to read comics, but that’s the way they seem to marketed most of the time. Still… no excuse.

The writing has only been interesting to the extent that it serves the needs of the story that the artists are telling. Batman‘s entertaining because of the contrast between Capullo’s post post Bronze Age art and Snyder’s horror/thriller inspired writing. Animal Man is great because of how Lemire’s absurdist gothic horror prose complements Travel Foreman’s body horror. I love Wonder Woman and like Brian Azzarello, but without Cliff Chiang’s spare, expressive art, the story loses some of its meaning: it goes from a gripping tale of a warrior struggling with family and identity to a pretty standard superhero book. Chiang strips the book of the artifice that’s bogged down earlier volumes while retaining the iconic quality that’s central to Wonder Woman. His action scenes are plausibly staged and brutally efficient in a way that grounds a story steeped in Greek mythology. Tony Akins does a nice job and all, but it’s an entirely different book in his hands.

The other books I’ve sampled from the first relaunch wave have been maddeningly inconsistent. The first few issues of Action Comics and Batwoman were pretty good, but painfully slow pacing, reduced page counts and questionable storytelling choices have wasted much of that early promise. Williams is growing as a writer, and Morrison still shows some flashes of brilliance, but there’s something missing from both books.

So, some thoughts on the new 52 books:

Batman: “Guys like Wayne… they don’t get the way the city works the way we do.”

Scott Snyder is now one of my favorite authors of Very Good Superhero Comics. He doesn’t reinvent the wheel with Batman, but his story is crisp and engaging. After all the postmodern gymnastics of Morrison’s run, there’s something satisfying about effective genre work. The first arc is a well told mystery/thriller/horror story, complete with a shadowy conspiracy rooted in Gotham’s untold history.

The elevator pitch? Starlin/Wrightson’s The Cult meets Morrison’s Leviathan mega-arc in Batman Inc. It’s a story that we’ve all read before, but Snyder and Capullo don’t lose sight of the fact that horror/thriller narratives are far more effective when the protagonist at the center of the story is a relatable human. Good horror requires a genuine emotional response from its audience, and its very difficult to provoke one if the audience doesn’t feel a sense of investment in the fate of the protagonist. We need him/her to serve as our surrogate. We need to imagine that if circumstances were a little different, this could be happening to us. I think this is particularly necessary for superhero comics, a world where the stakes are always low because we all know how these stories are going to end.

Another Quick(ish) Aside: With all the practical, editorial and genre constraints, I’m honestly amazed that anyone can write a half-competent long form superhero story for the Big Two. It’s easy to imagine how someone could write a cute 8-22 page story inspired by some by-gone era of comics, but it’s a lot harder to picture how a modern writer can tackle a multi-issue run of a book like The Avengers. It just seems impossible to balance the demands of the marketplace, which want stories about their favorite characters that are new but feel familiar, with evolving standards of writing and art. We expect creators to tell emotionally honest, plausibly staged stories with naturalistic dialogue. We also want them to tell the stories that appropriately evoke the stories we recall reading as children with characters who can’t evolve in an unchanging world (the world must always look like the one outside your door). It’s certainly possible to do both. It’s just that if one’s telling stories about characters whose lives are not the sum of their experiences (to paraphrase Noah Millman, they don’t have pasts, they have histories) in a static world, it’s hard to explore real world issues in an honest way. It’s a tough needle to thread, and I don’t envy anyone who has to do it for a living.

Anyway, back to the point. Snyder’s Wayne is relatable. He’s the brilliant, capable and arrogant man we all recognize from modern Batman comics, but he’s human in a way that he hasn’t been for a very long time. Capullo’s character design and figure work close the deal. His version of Bruce Wayne is friendlier, more open, quicker to smile. He’s not happy, but he’s someone who’s capable of joy, of mischief.

After reading the first three issues, I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Bruce Wayne smile so much. Snyder and Capullo’s efforts to make Batman a more human character infuse the story with added meaning. Snyder and Capullo’s supporting characters are equally engaging, from Lincoln March and Commissioner Gordon to Alfred and Det. Bullock.

Snyder’s plotting is top notch – read the first six issues in a sitting and you feel a creeping sense of claustrophobia and panic as Batman’s world slowly collapses and he begins a journey into madness.

If you’ve been reading Grant Morrison’s Batman, this might sound familiar. Consider this a remix – same story beats, different arrangement. Snyder explores Batman’s brainwashing through the lens of horror (I’m reminded of a poppier Shock Corridor) while Morrison seems to be channeling late Bond. Both writers trap Batman in an endless recursive maze, but in Snyder’s version, Bruce doesn’t look like a brave hero struggling against a psychological assault. He just looks like a victim in a traditional horror narrative.

Capullo’s art takes this book to the next level. His clean, dynamic art upsets expectations about what a dark thriller comic should look like, and is a perfect counterpoint to Snyder’s narrative.

His Batman feels classic, which heightens the impact of Wayne’s psychological breakdown in the fifth issue.

I also love the parallels they draw between the illegal surveillance state erected by Batman (the bunkers, the scanners in the coroners’ office) and the dark opposite of that state created by the Court of Owls, with lairs secreted in Gotham’s power centers and an underground labyrinth.

That’s not to say there aren’t some issues. I’m willing to accept that the Court of Owls has operated in Gotham from the shadows for centuries. But the little details bug me. For some weird reason, the notion that Gotham City has its own nursery rhyme about the Court feels ridiculous, as does the notion that five gangs run the smuggling rackets in Gotham and have divided the five subway lines between them.

Unfortunately, Batman falls back to the pack with the sixth issue. The art is still great and the story is competently executed, but everything resolves a little neatly. Batman recovers from the psychological attacks of the previous issue too quickly.

I’ll keep reading, but the book has lost a little bit of its charm.

Batman’s a fun, diverting read. It is not a transcendent masterpiece. But it’s worth your time.

Action Comics: A man whose books demand to be read twice

I don’t quite know what to feel about this book. Okay, cards on the table. After Grant Morrison’s infamous comments on Superman, DC Comics and Siegel and Shuster in his interviews promoting Supergods, it’s hard to be emotionally engaged with his work for hire superhero books. There is a war going on that no one is safe from, and he’s on the wrong side. It’s one thing to do work for hire on a character or book that’s been the subject of an ugly copyright dispute. It’s another to deliberately misrepresent the industry’s sordid history of exploiting creators or to pretend that contracts aren’t always subject to interpretation (or fail to address unanticipated advances in technology or changes to the marketplace). I refuse to believe that Grant Morrison doesn’t know that contracts are always subject to interpretation and frequently fail to address unanticipated advances in technology or changes to the marketplace. I don’t think that he’s unaware of the complex facts behind the legal dispute. Now, to be fair, I also disagree with Abhay and Sean Witzke’s suggestion that Morrison wrote these things to justify changes to the Superman property that would strengthen DC’s hold on the franchise. First of all, I don’t think that Morrison’s changes to the property will have any impact on the Siegel/Shuster litigation. But more importantly, I think we should take Morrison at his word. Morrison may have just been expressing his sincerely held beliefs. One possibility is that Morrison wasn’t talking about the past, but about the present and the future. The “big two” publishers are still evil (maximizing profit, minimizing labor costs), but the information asymmetry that defined the first seven decades of American comics has declined. There aren’t many unforeseeable uses for superhero properties anymore. Creators have more options and a better appreciation of the potential value of their work. The contracts are still borderline adhesive, but they aren’t on the backs of paychecks anymore. I think Morrison may have been trying to suggest that modern creators should go into contract negotiations with their eyes wide open, and appreciate the risks of opting for short-term gains (immediate compensation) over long-term uncertainty (the property which may be more valuable than you thought).

Of course, even if you disregard the curious analogy between Golden Age and modern creators, there are still a lot of problems with Morrison’s statement. He seems to assume that creators have the resources and bargaining power to modify contract terms that would reallocate risk/ownership, which is ludicrous.

Or maybe Morrison’s just a lot more conservative than we thought he was. We make the mistake of defining creators by their work and public image. Just because a guy is capable of writing brilliantly subversive fiction doesn’t mean that he can’t be an economic conservative with a strong belief in the free market and creative destruction.

I’d like to be angry. I want to write some six thousand word screed about how the publishers are villains, the creators are exploited, the readers are fools and the press are cowards. It’s true. But I knew that when I first started reading comics on a regular basis back in the 1980′s, and my dad told me about what Marvel Comics did to Jack Kirby. I knew it when the Image guys left Marvel Comics. Or when I went to conventions and saw the lack of creator diversity. If you’ve ever gone to a convention and talked to the poor old men who gave their productive lives to an industry that treated them like garbage, you know exactly what you’re supporting. I’ve known what this industry was like for most of my life. I’d feel like a hypocrite if I treated Morrison’s comments, or the Siegel/Shuster litigation as the straw that broke the camel’s back. I understand why people are boycotting Marvel/DC, or writing strongly worded essays about DC’s recently announced Watchmen projects (the less said the better), but I’ve never had a honeymoon with the industry. I’ve always known they were all bastards.

With that said, I can’t pretend that Morrison’s comments don’t color my opinion of his work or dampen my enthusiasm for any of his future projects. I picked up the first few issues of Action Comics and the recent double-sized Batman Inc. special, but the magic was gone. Profundity turned into ‘rhymin’ for the sake of riddlin’”. I used to enjoy the annotations written by David Uzumeri and the fine folks at Mindless Ones for the insights they provided into Morrison’s work, but now I just read them for entertainment value.

So, Action Comics.

This is what every origin story should look like: a compelling story that introduces the reader to the characters. At the end of the first seven issues, we understand Superman and Luthor without knowing their biographies. We don’t always need to start at the beginning.

Morrison and Rags Morales (with a welcome assist from Adam Kubert) deliver a multilayered narrative that explores Superman from multiple perspectives: his future supporting cast, his current and future antagonists, his romantic interest, and even the ship that brought him to Earth. Although Morrison and Morales demand the active intellectual engagement of the reader, who must continually interpret and fill in gaps in the narrative, the burden is somewhat lessened by their clear storytelling and frequent pay-off/”holy shit” moments. It also helps that Morrison/Morales evoke the spirit of the classic Silver Age Superman stories here: when you think about it, this is essentially a youngish Superman confronting Luthor, Metallo and Brainiac. The two issue interlude with the Legion of Superheroes goes from good to great when you realize that it’s modernizing all the good parts from those classic Superman (or Superboy) team ups with the Legion in the 1950s and ’60s. These nods to the past are the sugar that helps the medicine go down.

The only problem with a story that aims to deliver a holistic exploration of a character as iconic as Superman by focusing on his early adventures is that unless the reader feels fully engaged with the characters, she might be alienated by the absence of drama/stakes. Even though I love Morrison’s clever games with structure and chronology, they have a distancing effect that’s not (yet) entirely offset by his character work.

Quickish Aside #3: I don’t generally have a problem with alienation in fiction, but I’ve always thought that the contrived elements of the Marvel/DC narratives (the various suspensions of disbelief and the commercial/marketing decisions behind creative choices) make emotional engagement more important. I need more than intellectual engagement from my superhero comics, regardless of whether the creators involved are telling plot or character driven stories. I need to feel like I’m following well rounded, fully realized individuals making meaningful choices that don’t feel overly deterministic. In short, I need a story with real emotional stakes, and for all the cool bits in this book, I don’t think Action Comics has any. The outcomes of every conflict in this story are never in doubt.

I appreciate how difficult it must be to simulate risk in a Superman comic. He’s Superman, after all. Readers of superhero comics are commonly asked to suspend their sense of disbelief in a number of ways. We are asked to believe that these characters can do amazing things, that the laws of physics can be warped to accommodate epic fight scenes, or that people with powers will automatically put on costumes and become heroes or criminals. A person who didn’t read Superman books could be forgiven for imagining that the biggest logical leaps with the character relate to his powers or secret identity or the fact that an alien from another galaxy looks just like a handsome European guy. But that’s not it. When you read Superman books, you’re asked to believe that there’s some chance that the most powerful hero in the universe will not prevail over his enemies.

Morrison comes tantalizingly close to solving this problem while thankfully avoiding the conventional origin story arc by focusing on a point in Superman’s career where he had all of the idealism that we recognize without the wisdom or almost perfect judgment that make Superman a mythic (and legendarily difficult to write) character.

We don’t start with the destruction of Krypton or Superman’s first adventure in Metropolis. We start with a recognizably human Superman who instinctively wants to solve everything, but knows little about how the world really works. Morrison’s Luthor is equally strong. He combines the traditional elements of the character – vain, power hungry genius who hates Superman – but adds characteristics that make Luthor a little bit more relatable. I’ve loved past versions of Luthor, particularly late Bronze Age Luthor, corporate raider Luthor and early President Luthor, but this is the first one who feels like he could be a real person.

Morrison almost solves the stakes problem by focusing the reader’s concern on Superman’s struggle for acceptance in Metropolis instead of his conflict with Luthor or his later battles with Metallo and the Terminauts while laying the foundation for the threat of Brainiac.

We’re never asked to believe that Luthor and the rest have any chance against Superman, but it’s easy to imagine that Superman might lose (or be unable to gain) the hearts and minds of the citizens of Metropolis. The only problem with this is that Morrison doesn’t really have the space (at least in the first seven issues) to turn Metropolis from a generic New York like city into a place that feels authentic and filled with real people; contrast Metropolis with Opal City from James Robinson’s late, lamented Starman. At this point in the series, it feels like Superman’s trying to gain the approval of a generic city while fighting enemies that pose almost no real threat to him.

The two issue interlude/flash-forward featuring the Legion of Super Heroes was pretty good. There were some of the flashes of the brilliance that I’d expect from a Morrison comic – an elegantly structured plot involving time travel, a clever update of an old Silver Age trope, an unbelievably audacious hiding place for super-villains – but the villains were so rote and one dimensional that the story was a little unsatisfying.

Morrison’s always been great at telling stories with fully realized characters (even his more schematic/didactic ones), but the lack of stakes in the book so far has a distancing effect that’s hampered my enjoyment of the story. It’s the dark side of telling stories that take place early in a hero’s career, particularly if that hero is Superman. I admire Morrison’s structure, am a bit intrigued by the characters, but just don’t care about the story so far.

For all my Morrison talk, the success of this series is entirely dependent on Rags Morales. If he gets the tone right on a consistent basis, this will be one of DC’s strongest books. If not, it’ll be one of Morrison’s interesting failures. The results have been mixed so far. His art was especially effective in the first issue. The storytelling was crisp and effectively communicated the scope of the story.  The sequence with Superman and the train was particularly well done…

…but I was a little less enthused with Morales’ work from the second to the most recent issue. His figures looked rougher, more unfinished and his storytelling became a little less clear. That wasn’t the worst part. The worst was the googly eyes. Too many distracting panels where characters’ eyes were pointing in different directions.

I’ve still got hope for Morales. His work in the most recent issue, particularly the storytelling, dramatically improved. Most importantly, his take on Luthor is genius: slightly pudgy and resentful looking. I also love the timelessness of Morales’s Metropolis. It almost feels like the book is taking place in the thirties and the twenty teens simultaneously.

Given Morrison’s track record, it’s only a matter of time before his plots start to catch up with his structure. I know it’s easy to clown Morales, but I feel like there’s a lot of potential for growth here. Some of the sequences that I found frustrating the first time were pretty good on a second read.

I’m still conflicted. I’m not totally happy about enjoying a comic written by a guy with such problematic views, but I think I’ll keep reading. After all, I’d probably still buy books from Miller and Byrne if they were any good.

Justice League: “I’ve always hated talking to masks.”

Justice League is all surface. This first arc is about getting the band together and into conflict with Darkseid, and that’s exactly what we’re getting. No nuance, no layers, no commentary about anything. I enjoy commercial superhero action comics targeted at a wide audience, but I think it’s fair to expect that even those projects should have something, anything to say about conflict, the nature of heroism or the world we live in.

There was one good scene in the first two issues. It happens early, when Green Lantern meets Batman. The brief conflict between the two is less predictable than I would have expected. The third issue was less amateurish, but still pretty abominable. After that, I just decided to stop.

Jim Lee still draws pretty pictures, but his layouts are either confusing or purely functional. It’s not bad, exactly, but there’s nothing particularly interesting going on. Johns is not at his best, with flat characterization, generic action scenes and dialogue that feels lifted from a mid-90s van Damme movie.

I know this makes me sound like a cranky old man, but I’m also not interested in the superhero team as rock band metaphor, where everyone is an arrogant, over-entitled jerk. I kind of miss the days when the members of a superhero team were decent, altruistic people who had some kind of personal connection. That’s not to say that we should go back to the milquetoast Silver Age. I think there’s a lot of room for interpersonal conflict and intrigue among people who are fundamentally decent. It might take a little bit of work to explore that conflict, but I think the results would be fruitful (and a little less predictable).

Next time: Francis Manapul’s Flash and Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s Wonder Woman.

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The #1 Comic Five Years Ago Was: Civil War #7

Has it really only been five years since Civil War? On one hand, it seems like there have been at least a dozen events and big status quo shifts since All The Union Employees Stood Up to Tell Cap to Give Up. On the other hand, the very first FBB podcast was recorded in the immediate aftermath of said Civil War. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been doing this for five years, but here we are.

This month is also the fifth anniversary of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born #1, the first in Marvel’s line of officially authorized Stephen King comics. It was a big deal, with midnight release parties at comics shops, and nearly 200,000 copies of the first issue sold. Five years later, the ninth Dark Tower mini-series The Way Station debuted at 15,367 copies. I assume they’re still solid seller in collected form, but long gone are the days of midnight release parties. On the other hand, five years into its run, The Dark Tower is still out-selling Static Shock, Mister Terrific, Black Panther, and Villains for Hire.

Speaking of Black History Month! it was five years ago this month that the late Dwayne McDuffie became the first writer of color to work on an ongoing Superman title with Action Comics #847. This, if my calculations are correct, give writers of color exactly 1 out of 1,935 issues of ongoing Superman books. This is a real coup for the New 52, which as of the May solicitations is merely 0 for 18.

Speaking of Black, Spider-Man: Back in Black began five years ago! Has it really been that long since Aunt May got shot, Spider-Man threatened to kill a lot of people and the Kingpin broke open a table full of cash in his prison cell? Yes. Yes it has.

The first New York Comic Con took place five years ago, as you may have noticed if you listened to that first FBB podcast. Among the things announced at that panel: DC’s Minx line, a series of graphic novels marketed towards young women. To check out our reviews of some of those books, you can check out a brief discussion of New York Four and Water Baby on FBBP #53, a guest review of Plain JANES by Gabe Mariani, Jamaal tackling New York Four, and FBBP #75, a post-mortem of Minx after it was shuttered about a year after its launch. I haven’t revisited any of these books in quite some time, but I remember a few of them quite fondly, and they can be picked up pretty cheaply these days:

• Emiko Superstar by Mariko Tamaki and Steve Rolston
• Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm
• Water Baby by Ross Campbell

Fun fact: David Hahn’s recent Image mini-series All Nighter was originally going to be a Minx book! You can read the whole first issue on Hahn’s site.

Also announced at NYCC07, Daredevil: End of Days, a mini-series written by Brian Michael Bendis and David Mack and drawn by Klaus Jansen and Bill Sienkiewicz. I had almost forgotten about this project, and assumed it dead, but last summer Bendis confirmed it was still coming out, with a scheduled Fall 2011 release. We’re still waiting!

Other new books of note from five years ago: Jeff Smith’s Shazam: Monster Society of Evil, Mark Waid and George Perez’s short-lived Brave & the Bold revamp, and the wretched (sadly not completely) prose Batman #663. But what about five years before that?

The #1 Comic Ten Years Ago Was: The Dark Knight Strikes Again #3

That’s right! The epic conclusion of DK2, delayed and reworked after the terrorist attacks of the previous September, hit the stands a decade ago. Pretty much everyone hated it when it came out, though opinions have warmed considerably since then, with Brothers offering a fine appreciation of the book a few years back. I probably haven’t read it since its release, but even at the time I enjoyed it for what it was, a big noisy Kurtzman explosion, a sacred cow committing suicide. There were bits I found distasteful, and I’m tempted to give it a new read, in a world where we have seen Post 9-11 Frank Miller in full flower in the ghastly Holy Terror.

What other comics are turning ten?

• Cage: the Brian Azzarello and Richard Corben Marvel MAX series that somehow David Brothers has never blogged about
• Power Company: Kurt Busiek and Tom Grummett’s short-lived corporate superhero team book for DC. Though actually, eighteen issues isn’t a bad run at all these days.
• The Order: No, not that one. This one spun off from Busiek and Larsen’s brief Defenders run. It was about the core members of the Defenders turning evil and trying to run the world Authority style, while Nighthawk and the B Team fight back working out of the playroom of a New York City mansion owned by the parents of the new Valkyrie, a spoiled teenage heiress. Also there is Papa Hagg, a Jamaican midget wizard floating around. I dug this up recently from my old comic boxes, definitely an odd footnote in the Defenders franchise.
• Taskmaster: No, not that one either. The UDON Studios one where Taskmaster got a modern Spy Guy outfit and a certain subset of the Internet fell in love with it, cursing his subsequent return to the far superior Flamboyant Skeletor costume.

I don’t know that any of the following are historically significant, but looking up shipping lists, I definitely bought Blue Monday: Lovecats, Stray Bullets #23, and Dark Horse’s Chris Ware Rusty Brown Lunchbox ten years ago. I miss both Blue Monday and Stray Bullets. I do not miss the Rusty Brown lunchbox, as it’s currently sitting on my shelf, taking up space. I never even ate lunch out of it!

The #1 Comic Fifteen Years Ago Was: Uncanny X-Men #343

I think that’s Gambit and Rogue on the cover? This is from the tail end of Scott Lobdell’s run, with art by Joe Madureira. I have not read this portion of X-History at all, and in fact superhero comics in general are a weird void for me around here. Marvel was in the midst of Heroes Reborn and the Clone Saga, DC was at a loss for what to do with their marquee characters after they killed and resurrected them. Books like Superboy and the Ravers were being published.

For lack of anything better to do, superheroes were just crossing over willy-nilly: Wildcats/X-Men, Shi/Daredevil, Cable/Prophet, Silver Surfer/Weapon Zero, Mars Attacks the Image Universe, and the sadly never-published Power Rangers Zeo/Youngblood were all solicited this month.

To make matters worse, February 1997 also marks the final month of Milestone comics with Hardware #50 released, though solicitations would trickle out for another month or two. Static #47 and Icon #44 were announced but never released. The fact that these books got pre-orders of between 4,500 and 5,700 show just how far the bottom had dropped out of the market in general and Milestone in particular, putting the books at or below the sales of titles like Cavewoman, Cyberfrog, New Bondage Fairies and Marvel’s unreleased move tie-in A Clueless Valentine .

This month also marked the (temporary) end of the Punisher, as Punisher #18 marked the end of his abortive revamp after a series of insane crossovers (Suicide Run, Countdown, Over the Edge) killed the golden goose that was 3-5 Punisher comics every month. For the first time in nearly a decade, March 1997 saw a complete lack of Punisher on the Marvel publishing slate. It wasn’t until almost two years later that Punisher returned to the scene as a crazy murderous angel in a Marvel Knights mini-series, and not until summer of 2001 that he was given his own ongoing series again. He’s had five books since then, but that’s just how Marvel works these days.

So dark were these times for superhero comics that I was reduced to having 25% of my superhero pull list (alongside Morrison’s JLA, Starman, and Hitman) be Ghost Rider, a book I bought solely due to a sick allegiance to Ivan Velez Jr.’s Blood Syndicate. But there were signs of life.

Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley launched Thunderbolts fifteen years ago, creating one of the few new enduring properties of the last two decades. Over at Acclaim, Christopher Priest and Doc Bright debuted Quantum & Woody, a great meta-comedy title that served as the stylistic template for Priest’s revamp of Black Panther a few years later. And in the indies, Linda Medley launched Castle Waiting and Jon Lewis debuted Spectacles. Paul Pope put out P-City Parade, one of his many oddly sized one-shots from this period that are always getting moved around my apartment because they don’t really fit anywhere. And though they weren’t special issues, February 1997 also saw new issues of The Invisibles, Preacher, Bone, Cerebus, and other fine titles. It wasn’t all gloom and doom. You just had to squint pretty hard to see past the bloody wreckage of the speculator boom.

The #1 Comic Twenty Years Ago Was: X-Men #7

Speaking of the speculator boom! We weren’t quite There yet in February 1992, but all the pieces were falling into place. DC’s core franchises were all sort of wandering aimlessly, Marvel had gotten a taste of that sweet gimmick cover/polybag money in 1991, Valiant was ascending and Youngblood #1 hit the stands. As an adolescent fanboy I wasn’t immune to all the excitement, and had just started picking up the X-Books now that boring ol’ Chris Claremont had left. I don’t remember anything about this issue, but it looks like it had Omega Red in it! Over in Uncanny X-Men #287, the X-Traitor storyline was launched, which would eventually lead to Onslaught. DC had Justice League Europe #36 on the stands, marking Keith Giffen’s departure from the only DC book I regularly read, exactly five years after he and JM DeMatteis relaunched it. And first issues? There were a bunch!

• Cage: The little-remembered Marc McLaurin/Dwayne Turner revamp where Luke traded his yellow shirt, tiara and first name for a permanent Onyx Madface.
• Shadowman: The original psychic saxophone-playing avenger of the night! Don’t let Night Man fool you! Between this, Quantum & Woody, and the two Cage books, I wonder if companies deliberately launch titles like these for Black History Month.
• John Byrne’s Next Men: Recently returned at IDW, Next Men was a big deal, as it was a top level talent from The Big Two leaving and doing his own superhero book elsewhere. I know he’s an industry punching bag these days, but Byrne was huge in the 1980s, routinely mentioned in the same breath as Miller and Moore. He and Miller went on to form the Legend imprint at Dark Horse, and Byrne encouraged Mike Mignola to try his hand at doing a creator-owned book called Hellboy, assisting young Mignola by hyping the book up in the pages of Next Men and helping him script the first mini-series. I have absolutely no fucking clue what is going on in the current Next Men title, besides Byrne apparently grinding some very strange axes against William Shakespeare and the Civil War, but twenty years ago Next Men was an important stepping stone in the industry.
• Youngblood: …but not as important as Youngblood. Sure, the actual comic itself is terrible, so bad that a recent reprint had Joe Casey go in and completely rewrite all the dialogue. It still barely makes sense, never mind in context with the following issues. And sure, only five years later the Youngblood brand was so debased that it was crossing over with Power Rangers Zeo in a book that got under 10,000 pre-orders and never saw print. But without Youngblood, there might not be an Image. And joke all you want about some of the wretched excesses of Image in the 1990s, but without Image there might not be a Brian Michael Bendis, Brian Wood, Jonathan Hickman, Kieron Gillen, or a Jamie McKelvie in the comic book industry, to say nothing of all the books without “Blood” or “Blade” or “Spawn” in the title that they’ve published over the past two decades. Books like…
• Madman: That’s right, Image published a good sized chunk of Madman and Atomics! Mike Allred is doing a good job of reminding everyone of this anniversary, with stuff like the big 20th Anniversary Coffee Table Book that just came out. One of these days I will actually read that Gargantua hardcover collection, at which point I might buy this anniversary book. I realize they have almost no overlap in material, I just feel guilty about dropping $100 on a book without having actually read the other.
• And in a one-two punch directly at the heart of FBB4L comrade Gavin “Gavok” Jasper, this month marks the twentieth anniversary of Marvel’s WCW World Championship Wrestling comic, which Gav dutifully reviewed awhile back. It’s also the twentieth birthday of CARNAGE, who debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #361. And it only took him nineteen years to appear in a comic worth a damn !

Other significant multiples of five:

TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO: Frank Miller wrapped up his work on Batman: Year One with David Mazzucchelli, and Elektra: Assassin with Bill Siekiewicz.

THIRTY YEARS AGO: Team America, the Heroes Who Do Motorcycle Stunts, not to be confused with US1, the Heroes Who Drive Semis and Talk on CBs, debut in Captain America #269

THIRTY FIVE YEARS AGO: Sha Shan, Flash Thompson’s Vietnamese assassin/battered girlfriend/physical therapist, debuts in Amazing Spider-Man #108

FIFTY YEARS AGO: Thanks to Johnny Storm’s irresistible urge to burn the hair off of hobos and drifters, Namor the Sub-Mariner returns in the pages of Fantastic Four #4, providing the first explicit link between the 1960s Marvel Comics and 1940s Timely Comics. This issue is very likely the Secret Origin of Roy Thomas, Mark Gruenwald, Geoff Johns and many others.

SEVENTY YEARS AGO: The Newsboy Legion make their debut in Star Spangled Comics #12. It would be nearly thirty years before Flippa Dippa joined to make the team complete.

So there you go. HISTORY! Does everyone feel old now?

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This isn’t the gritty noir Daredevil modern readers have grown to expect:

It contains a critique of factory farming!

Philosophical (and physical) fights about feminism! (And DD joking!)

The Inhumans! (And philosophical fights about societal ethos!)

Ultron!! (And fights about the notion of free will and perfection!)

And that’s before everyone literally Goes to Hell.

It’s an awesome read, though the issues we dug up to discuss (DD #270-282) are largely out of print. That shouldn’t stop you from seeking them out of the back issue bins, or reading the earlier part of this epic run collected in Typhoid Mary and Lone Stranger. A decent portion of the run is also up on Marvel’s Digital Store.

This is a long one, but chock full of things to discuss: we drifted off into conversations about the heady topics hinted at above, the terrible implications of Inhuman society, why Quicksilver is better as a turbo-dick, Alan Moore’s Supreme, recent issues of Secret Avengers, and Nocenti’s upcoming run on Green Arrow.

Coming up: more podcasts! Got something (or someone) you think we should have on the show? Let us know in the comments.

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I haven’t stopped reading comics (as evidenced by my Twitter feed), but between the controversies about salaries and work conditions at Marvel Comics, the Kirby (and Ghost Rider) litigations, diversity in mainstream superhero books and day and date digital comics, I’ve found it easier to simply disengage from the debate for a bit. I think we’ve been having the same conversations about the comics industry for the last twenty years, and nothing really changes. We’re still asking Marvel and DC to improve working conditions for creators and to respect their creative rights. We’re hoping that they treat the writers, artists and editors who were responsible for creating their most valuable intellectual property with kindness, respect and honor. We want them to realize that attracting a workforce with diverse backgrounds and experiences will foster innovation and lead to more interesting and original stories. We want them to learn how to effectively market and sell their product to a wider audience, many of whom will never set foot in a comic store.

I feel like I’ve been trying to balance my love of some Marvel/DC books with my disdain for the management of both publishers for most of my life. They’re never going to change. Neither am I. That doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to rail against their unjust and/or shortsighted business practices, but… I guess I just need a break sometimes. Maybe it’s holiday malaise, even though this might have been the best holiday season since I was eight years old.

Quick comics update:

I’m still all-in on digital comics. Wonder Woman and Flash are the best books to come out of the DC relaunch. Nate Powell’s evocative Any Empire was exceptional. I finally finished reading Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog, and it was one of the most moving experiences that I’ve had with a comic book. I don’t like saying things like this, If I was foolish enough to come up with a top ten list, I’d add Gabriel Ba and Matt Fraction’s Casanova: Gula, Rick Remender’s work with Jerome Opena, Esad Ribic, Rafael Albuquerque, Billy Tan, Mark Brooks, Scot Eaton, Rich Elson, John Lucas, Andrew Currie, Andrew Hennessy, Dean White, Jose Villarubia, Chris Sotomayor, Matt Wilson, Richard Isanove and Paul Mounts on Uncanny X-Force and Mike Hawthorne, Tony Moore and Jerome Opena on Fear Agent, Mark Waid, Javier Rodriguez, Paolo and Joe Rivera and Marcos Martin’s Daredevil, Mike Mignola, Duncan Fregedo, Dave Stewart, and Clem Robins’ Hellboy: The Fury and Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal: Last of the Innocent. I still need to read the new issue of Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges, the new Love and Rockets by the legendary Hernandez Brothers, Craig Thompson’s Habibi and Michael Kupperman’s Mark Twain book.

Outside of the arbitrary top ten, I’ve been catching up with older books that I’ve discovered (or revisited) this year, like Zot!, Empowered, Finder, Concrete and Tomb of Dracula. All in all, a pretty good year for comics.

I could write about comics for the next few thousand words, but even thinking about the endless debates is exhausting. So, an aperitif. Let’s talk about music. I love soul/rhythm and blues music, even more than hip-hop. I loved Undun, but it hasn’t gotten the spins of Weather, Good Things, Echoes of Silence, As Above So Below, Back to Love or Betty Wright: The Movie . But when I was a younger man, I had a troubled relationship with contemporary rhythm and blues music.

Like many of my generation, classic soul, funk and R&B music was the soundtrack to my childhood. I have fond memories of listening to Stevie Wonder after I finished my homework, trying (fruitlessly!) to copy the dance moves of Michael Jackson, the Temptations and the Four Tops and being moved in ways that I was too young to understand by Marvin Gaye and Prince.

Then I got older. I transitioned from listening to my parents’ LPs to buying my own audio cassettes. I still loved the music of my childhood, but I needed to hear music that spoke to my experience.

It’s a familiar story – the “rebellious” teenager driven to embrace culture that’s completely different from what their parents like. As a child, my tastes (in culture that wasn’t created for children) were entirely shaped by those of the adults around me: their music, their books, their movies and television shows. When I entered adolescence, I craved music and culture that belonged to me in the same way Motown or Stax belonged to my parents, or Michael and Prince belonged to my older cousins and younger aunts/uncles. I wanted my own classics. I wanted R&B music that spoke to me the way it spoke to them decades before. I got great music in that pre-neo-soul era, from Cooleyhighharmony and Poison to My Life and Toni Braxton . But the music that spoke to me? That was hip-hop. It was CL Smooth and Q-Tip. Nas and Ice Cube.

Hip-hop music felt new, alive, vibrant, while even great R&B was unable to escape the shadow of the sixties and seventies. There was a shining moment when R&B artists wanted to create music that was rhythmically, melodically and thematically complex, but it felt like that moment had passed.

The productions and vocals were still compelling, but it just wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted singers to talk about the messy world that I lived in, where love and romance were inseparable from politics, friendship, culture or identity. When I listened to R&B albums, I felt like I was transported to a fantasy world where romance took place in a vacuum.

I just couldn’t relate. Everything in my life — love, school, sports, politics, music, religion, race — all seemed to happen simultaneously. It was all integrated. Love, romance and relationships bled into every corner and crevice of my life, and it was hard to appreciate music that didn’t somehow reflect that reality. The words that were sung just seemed to come from a different world.

I think that’s one of the reasons I loved hip-hop. Yeah, some (okay, most) MCs tended to imagine a world where women and romance existed at the very margins of life, but they were so good at capturing the other painful contradictions of being a young black male that I found it easy to forgive its problems and excuse its misogyny.

There are a lot of things to love about this song – the flawless production, the evocative lyrics, Nas’s perfect flow – but its embrace of life’s messiness is what makes it a classic. On “Memory Lane”, Nas fuses hope with melancholy and a sense of premature nostalgia that captured my early teen years (pretending that we’re wise beyond our years, sagely alluding to a dark golden age of roller rinks and crack kingpins).

My feelings about R&B changed with Brown Sugar, Plantation Lullabies and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite and the rise of neo-soul. So it took me a long time to realize that the stories that I was looking for — that I should have been paying attention to the whole time — could be found in the music, not the words.

Books were my first love and I tend to approach everything — comics, movies, music — through that prism. I always see/hear the words first. Even now, when I first hear a song, my attention is focused on the singer/MC, but I’ve come to appreciate that the voice is just an instrument that shouldn’t be privileged over any other.

I know, this is one of those things that most music lovers just instinctively know. For a very long time, I was the only music fan in my peer group who heard primarily the verse or the vocalist instead of the beat. I dismissed Group Home. Scoffed at Janet. I was a very foolish young man.

There is something special about a song like this that’s wholly unrelated to Janet’s words. It’s how Jay Dee’s beat combines with Janet’s voice to invoke an acute sense of nostalgia and regret, with just a hint of optimism. It wouldn’t sound the same with a different vocalist – there’s a delicacy to Janet’s voice that’s irreplaceable. She doesn’t have the best voice or range in the world, but she’s great at reminding you what it feels like to be in love.

Or look at “DD”, by the Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) a remake of Michael Jackson’s 1988 classic. Tesfaye utterly transforms the song without changing a single word. The spareness of the production (rock-ish in the original, electronica-ish in the remake) in both versions draws the listener’s attention to the singer’s voice.

I listened to the original recently, and was pretty surprised: I had forgotten how little traditional singing Mike does on this song, opting for his patented “harmonious sing-song” voice. I loved the song, but for some reason, the hook/chorus were the only bits that stuck in my mind. At the time, Michael took great pains to foster an all-ages image. Even his romantic songs had a bit of a chaste quality. On “Dirty Diana”, Michael struggles to maintain that image while giving us a glimpse into the groupie filled world of a pop celebrity. For a moment, he’s just Michael Jackson, the man forced to negotiate a world filled with endless sexual propositions from female admirers. It’s clear that he has little sympathy for them. There’s something harsh and judgmental about the way he sings “[t]his time you won’t seduce me”. He’s not tempted, he’s angry. There have been a number of pop songs about the women that bed musicians, but this is one of the few that manages to not only be dismissive of the seducer, but immune to the seduction. Michael wants to exorcise her from his life. He’s not interested in her as a sexual object. She’s Dirty Diana, after all.

Tesfaye embraces the darkness of the original, but adds layers of meaning and ambiguity. He starts where Michael does, but falters almost immediately. When Diana took Michael in her arms, it sounded like the opening feint of a battle, but with the Weeknd, it almost sounds like the first chapter of a romance. The Weeknd is tempted. You feel his certainty slipping away with each verse. When he sings “that’s okay, hey baby do what you want” on the second verse, the noticeable tremor in his voice also suggests that both are vulnerable: he is reminiscing about an encounter that touches him a little bit more than he’d like to admit, and (if you take that section as a literal recreation of her attempted seduction) she’s more hesitant than her words imply. The facade slips, just a little. The choruses start off in a less aggressive place than the original, and get progressively softer until the lighter, more feminine voice overwhelms the deeper, masculine one. The seductive fan is far more sympathetic in this version, more than an Odyssean siren.

In the hands of the Weeknd, “DD” is transformed from a cautionary tale into something that feels a little bit more human and tragic. It’s the singer and the producer that define the real meaning of these songs, not just the lyrics. Once I realized that, all the songs that seemed maudlin and generic acquired new meaning. Who knows, one day I may even start to appreciate New Jack Swing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go back to Anthony Hamilton.

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• Action Comics by Grant Morrison, Rags Morales and others
• Batman & Robin by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason
• Batman by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo
• Batwoman by JH Williams III and Haden Blackman
• Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang

We also talked about the overall “success” of The New 52, how we as readers should judge the success, how much digital comics should cost, and how Apple should really sell Chris an iPad for ten dollars. Seriously. It would be great PR.

What New 52 books are we sleeping on? What books are we insane to enjoy? Why aren’t we reading something not published by DC? All good questions, and it’s up to you, the FBBArmy, to tell us!

COMING IN 2012: More Avenging the Week, more Girl Talk, more podcasts, and A Cavalcade of Davids!

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Now, I understand that’s a loaded statement. There are three main reasons someone might say “It Could Be Worse”.

1) A variation on #firstworldproblems: This is not my intention in the least. We’re all writing about funnybooks. People have interests — really, people need interests — beyond Big Picture Social Justice. I don’t think anyone believes that Catwoman is more important than famine, disease, slavery, or oppression. The idea that you should not express displeasure unless you’re actively being murdered is insane. So no, that’s not what I’m saying.

2) Back In My Day We Walked To School Uphill in the Snow: Yes, as first worlders with first world problems, we are pampered. We have clean water to drink and food to eat and smartphones to look up where to eat that food and disposable income to buy comics and unpredecented outlets from which to conveniently broadcast opinions about said comics. Putting aside my personal White Heterosexual Male privlege for a minute, I know that many of the people who I most enjoy reading the opinions of wouldn’t have been given that outlet a few generations ago. A few more generations back, they wouldn’t be able to vote or own land or marry their chosen partner or who knows what else because society could be unfathomably, cartoonishly, shitty not that long ago. I know all of that. But again, just because you’re not being actively Jim Crowed or disenfranchised or murdered does not mean you should not express displeasure at the problems you encounter in today’s less obviously shitty environment.

3) Things Can Get Better: This is what I am trying to say.

I’ve been an active Comic Book Person for nearly a quarter of a century, and I can say with some confidence that Things Were A Lot Worse fifteen years ago. While largely a cultural relic, the Android’s Dungeon style comic book shop, a smelly and insular girl-fearing nerd warren that justifiably frightened any number of potential female (and less

Before last month’s New 52 relaunch saw the debut issues of Batgirl, Batwoman, and Wonder Woman crack the Top 20 Books of the month, the only books of the past five years which achieved such high rankings were the Blackest Night Wonder Woman mini-series, a handful of the Batwoman Detective Comics issues, and two dozen issues of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight. Scanning the rest of the 2000s are similar slim pickings: the first few issues of the mid-decade Supergirl and Wonder Woman relaunch, the first issue of a Red Sonja relaunch,and that’s about it.

But travel back to the late 1990s, and the Top Twenty Sales Chart is chock full of ladies. And what ladies they were! It was the Bad Girl Era, and books starring Angela, Darkchylde, Dawn, Fathom, Glory, Lady Death, Shi, Tomb Raider, Tomoe, Witchblade, not to mention the conspicuously buxom and undressed casts of Ascension, Battle Chasers, Danger Girl, Gen 13, and other books were major hits. Check out these covers: these were best-sellers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I recently stumbled across a couple issues of Previews I inexplicably kept for over fifteen years, and the sheer volume of skeezy Bad Girl content pumped out and (presumably) read is staggering. And it’s not just this sort of soft-softcore junk! I haven’t even scratched the surface of the sexually suggestive advertising! The Swimsuit/Lingerie issues! The weird photo covers! The trading cards! The statue of a robot performing cunnilingus on a naked lady! The Bad Girl comic that — I swear I am not making this up, and a copy is on its way to my house as we speak for review purposes — had an “interactive CD-ROM comic” called VIOLATION: THE RAPE OF HARI KARI.

I mention this all because all of this blew my mind when I found it, and in the comic weeks I want to write about all it. This was — at least in part — the state of things in Team Comics in 1997. None of this shit would fly in 2011, nor should it. And while that is a very low hurdle to leap, it does provide hope. The state of women in comics is better now than it was fifteen years ago, and if people keep working, it can (and should) improve further. But if anyone thinks it’s never going to improve, that it is forever a Boys’ Club cesspool, just remember that it has been worse. And hope that down the line, we can point at 2011 as a “Could Be Worse” milemarker.

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Ann Nocenti Tapped to Revitalize Green Arrow

I haven’t really cared about Green Arrow since the Longbow Hunters series from the late eighties. From the perspective of preadolescent Jamaal, Mike Grell’s Oliver Queen was one of the few DC characters that felt like a real adult. He didn’t seem naive (Superman) or emotionally damaged (Batman) or boring (Green Lantern, Flash). He was driven by passions that I didn’t entirely understand but associated with adulthood. And he had facial hair, like my Dad, my grandfather and Tom Selleck. Reading the Longbow Hunters felt a little like getting a pass into a secret club. I lost interest in both the book and the character as I got older. I’ve read a bit of Andy Diggle’s acclaimed miniseries, but it didn’t stick. So when DC announced the new Green Arrow series as part of their relaunch, I was less than enthused. My interest declined further when the creative team and premise (“callow Steve Jobs with a bow and arrow”) were announced. I was convinced that Green Arrow was a book that I couldn’t possibly be bothered to read.

So, why am I eagerly awaiting issue 7 of Green Arrow? Ann Nocenti. For the uninitiated, Ann Nocenti is a writer, editor, documentarian and journalist who’s best known for her work on Daredevil in the late 1980′s and the Kid Eternity series for Vertigo in the early ’90′s. She’s also the creator of the X-characters Longshot, Mojo and Spiral. Nocenti’s a forgotten almost-great, part of that generation of American writers of superhero comics who came to prominence in a time of transition, as the conventions that promoted a highly stylized, almost theatrical style of writing was beginning to fade, but the comparatively naturalistic approach to superhero comics writing popular today had yet to emerge. Nocenti never let the reader forget the fundamental humanity of the characters she was writing, even when she placed them in absurd circumstances (Daredevil v. Ultron!). With all due respect to Frank Miller, she was the first writer that made Daredevil seem like a real guy (and one of the few writers who didn’t seem to forget that the character was blind).

Nocenti problematized one of the core notions behind superhero comics (and some defense lawyers) – that one person can bring justice to the world. In Kid Eternity, she engaged in a trippy exploration of ethics, the media and the nature of consciousness with amazing art from Sean Phillips. In retrospect, it was a deeply flawed work, but was definitely the product of a writer with an interesting voice.

I lost track of Nocenti after Kid Eternity. She did a few small projects, a Typhoid Mary mini here, a Batman story there, but for the most part, she was ghost. Nocenti went on to become a journalist and filmmaker. She covered prison reform, did a cool sounding documentary set in Central Asia. In recent years, she’s dipped her toes in the game – contributing to the Girl Comics anthology and Daredevil 500 (3 Jacks w. David Aja, one of the best Daredevil stories since… her work on Daredevil).

Now she’s back with a pitch for Green Arrow that manages to be conventional and promising at the same time – James Bond meets Steve Jobs with just a touch of social awareness. I know, this does’t sound much different from the pitch above. I just know that Nocenti will do something interesting with it, even if its unsuccessful.

Pull quote from her interview with Josie Campbell at Comic Book Resources:

“I think people’s strengths are kind of, in some way, their flaws. Green Arrow is a thrill seeker and he shoots off and does stuff, but there are repercussions to this shooting off and doing something. I’m going to play a lot with the notion that if you are going to be an impulsive, reckless hero, your heroic instincts better be pretty right on. What I think about is sports; Wayne Gretzky has to know where the puck is next and he has to get to it, no matter what. The long distance runner has to endure a huge amount of pain, they have to develop a tolerance for pain. If [Green Arrow] slams himself off to do something, his instincts have to be unerring — like shooting an arrow. So I’m going to fool around with that, I’m going to fool around with the double edge of his strengths also being his weaknesses, in a weird way, and I’m going to give him some really awesome new women to play with!”

Marc Bernardin on Static Shock

Static Shock was always my least favorite Milestone Media property. Don’t get me wrong, I think the book was an incredibly cool idea, and both the comics and the cartoon series were well executed. It’s just that I was outside the target demo when both were released, so neither held my interest. Plus, I’ve just never been a big fan of teen heroes. I’m glad the books are out there, but they’re just not my cup of tea.

So how did I find myself reading the new Static Shock series? I was bored and David “Marcus Junius Brutus” Brothers recommended the book. Turns out that I loved the first two issues. John Rozum and Scott McDaniel told a fun, fast-paced story about a young hero struggling to balance his personal life with school and his career as a superhero in a new city. It’s a premise familiar to every fan of superhero comics (SpiderMan, Blue Beetle or Invincible to name a few), but Rozum and McDaniel’s took a different approach than most by removing the sense of existential angst that pervades many teen superhero books. Rozum and McDaniel’s Static was a bright, refreshingly ordinary African American teenager who found real joy in his powers and his life as a costumed adventurer. It was far from a perfect book (the layouts needed work and the antagonists were frustratingly generic), but had promise. So when Rozum announced his departure from the book, I was pretty disappointed.

Enter Marc Bernardin. If you’re reading this column, you’re almost certainly familiar with the excellent pop culture writing Marc’s done for sites ranging from Gawker’s io9 blog to Entertainment Weekly, and should be familiar with his work on Alphas, a great show on Syfy about heroic metahumans who aren’t superheroes. He’s also responsible for the underrated Highwaymen mini and the Genius one shot for Top Cow.

Bernardin is part of an increasingly common breed of superhero comic writers who combine an intimate understanding of the history and conventions of the genre with an irreverent spirit and dedication to modern storytelling. I think Bernardin has the potential to be great and Static Shock could be his shot at entering the second tier of superhero writers⁽¹⁾.

I’m really looking forward to this one.

Key Quote:

“The thing that defines a hero is choice. They choose to do the hard thing when everyone else would do the easy one. They choose to put themselves in harm’s way. So we need to know more about the kind of person who makes that kind of choice, especially one so young.”

David Hine announces Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred

Hine’s Bulletproof Coffin was one of the best comics of 2010. The sequel sounds even better.

Rick Remender and Gabriel Hardman take on Marvel’s Secret Avengers

With all due respect to Messrs. Brubaker and Ellis, Rick Remender is the perfect writer for this book. The elevator pitch for Secret Avengers is intriguing – Steve Rogers’ black ops strike force tackling the threats that the regular Avengers are too busy/overwhelmed to deal with – but the execution was always lacking. It should have been a perfect blend of geopolitical intrigue, Steranko inspired spy hijinks and zany Marvel continuity. Brubaker wrote the book as a second class Avengers title. Ellis’ version was fun, but generic. I only read one issue of Spencer on the title, but it was one of the worst comics of the year.

In the last year, Rick Remender’s become one of the best writers at Marvel, working on books that shouldn’t work. Flash Thompson as special ops Venom? Another ‘pro-active’ X-Force death squad? (Yes, a death squad.) Remender tells an entertaining, fast-paced action story in Venom while addressing both addiction and the challenges faced by a disabled veteran. In X-Force, he just tells the best story featuring an X-team since Grant Morrison while exploring the nature of evil.

In an interview with Marvel’s Tim Stevens, Remender described the book as “international and interdimensional. Grounded and crazy”. I can’t wait until issue 21.1.

Of course there’s also the incomparable Gabriel Hardman…..

Two quotes this time:

Remender’s Secret Avengers will introduce the Adaptoids,

“sentient, hyper-evolved descendants of the original Super Adaptoid; they are much more powerful, with unique powers of adaption. Sentinels hunt mutants, Adaptoids hunt Avengers!”

“The opening arc will have a big secret war, a big secret new world, a big secret new race, a big team death, a big secret team betrayal, and maybe even begin a secret affair.”

Comixology/Graphic.ly/Newsstand

I’m all in on day and date digital comics initiatives. I buy all my DC and Dark Horse comics online. Once Marvel comes to its senses and puts Parker, Pak, Remender and Waid’s books online, I’ll buy those too. In the future, I may only buy print comics as objets d?art (like Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp or Thompson’s Habibi).

One minor drawback of the systems created by Comixology, Graphic.ly and Dark Horse is that I’m unable to subscribe to the periodicals that I know I plan to buy – books like Action Comics, Sweet Tooth or Hellboy. First world problems anyone? Seriously, I’m not complaining, but it would be a cool feature.

I also think that it might be a boon to creators and small/independent publishers, who need a digital marketplace that not only helps them build and sustain an audience, but lowers the shelf position advantage of the larger publishers. The Direct Market for comics is a well-designed Marvel/DC comic delivery device, and something like an iTunes podcast store for digital comics could help level the playing field. It also might relieve some of the deadline pressure faced by some creators (who work for Marvel/DC) and create new opportunities for the handful of independent creators who still publish print comics in a periodical format.

So I was extremely excited when I read that Graphicly was opting to participate in Apple’s Newsstand, a folder that organizes magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in one place for users of ios5 devices (iPads, iPhones, iPod Touches). Once you subscribe to the media, Newsstand automatically updates the app in the background whenever new issues are available. It’s like delivery, “only better”. The potential for periodical comic books is obvious. You could subscribe to all your favorite comics and have them ‘delivered’ to your device once they are released. Check out David “Aaron Burr” Brothers’ great piece on Graphicly’s announcement for Comics Alliance (that includes an interview with Graphicly c.e.o. and founder Micah Baldwin). This is the first step towards the “broadcasting” of digital comics.

I was vaguely surprised to read that Comixology didn’t immediately jump on board. Comixology c.e.o. David Steinberger tweeted the following after Graphicly’s announcement:

“Apple Newsstand subscriptions charge every month, whether or not the comic ships. Comics ship late. So, no comiXology newsstand yet.”

Chris and I happened to run into Mr. Steinberger at the con, where he explained that Newsstand uses a time based subscription system in which the subscriber pays a fee for a particular time period. In a typical model for a monthly comic, subscribers will be charged for the book every month, whether or not the comic actually ships. He expressed concern that if a comic doesn’t ship on time (or ship at all), the subscriber would be charged.

I’m not too worried about this. First of all, let’s define the scope of the problem. For the purposes of this discussion, the problem only arises if a book does not ship in the month that it was scheduled for publication. If you’re a subscriber to a monthly book, this means that you receive 11 comics at the end of the year instead of 12. We’re not talking about books that ship a few weeks late, but books that would ship an entire month late.

I think Graphicly (in collaboration with publishers and creators) selected the initial cohort of Newsstand books verrrry carefully. The titles that are part of this initiative are pretty high profile, and the creators involved have a reputation of putting work out in a timely manner. I doubt that one of these books will be more than a week or two late. In the unlikely event that one of these books ships extraordinarily late (i.e., one month or more), it’s hard to imagine that the company wouldn’t remedy that situation by ensuring that subscribers get an additional book or providing some sort of credit or refund.

I’m even less concerned about Graphic Policy’s suggestion that Newsstand could be a disincentive for publishers to double ship books as a part of a promotion. At first, I just assumed that (a) this was not a problem faced by independent publishers/creators and (b) Marvel and DC would probably do whatever it was they did for print subscribers – either giving them those issues for free or working with the subscribers to extend the duration of the subscription. But that’s not a good answer, is it? So, I asked our resident expert. Chris informed me that almost all of Marvel and DC’s ongoing monthly titles shipped 12 issues in 2010, which suggests that subscribers to those books may not be adversely affected by bi-weekly promotions.

Personally, I’d love to see Newsstand adopt a unit-based subscription system (even one that auto-renews would be an improvement) that charges customers for a fixed number of units – so we can pre-commit to arcs, etc. Another intriguing possibility would be a pre-order system that charges upon shipment of new issue.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in the coming months. I’m particularly interested in the implications of Newsstand for other independent creators, especially those who publish irregularly, since publishers can set different time frames and billing options for Newsstand subscriptions.

Brandon Graham and Simon Roy on Extreme Studios Prophet.

It’s easy to lose yourself in the lush, fully realized worldscapes created by Brandon Graham. King City was a revelatory experience. You could spend hours poking through the snippets, hints and suggestions of narratives that litter his site.

So the idea that Brandon Graham will be tackling Rob Liefeld’s Prophet is pretty exciting. Long story short – Prophet was Liefeld’s riff on Kirby’s OMAC. A super soldier wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape. It wasn’t Liefeld’s most inspired idea, but there’s some potential there.

I’m not familiar with Simon Roy’s art, but it looks extremely promising. It almost appears influenced by European comic artists.

Brandon Graham put out a preview of the new Prophet series on his site. Check it out.

No Fear, No Loathing, Just A Pleasant Experience: New York Comic Con 2011

Okay, on to the Con:

My personal highlight of the Con? For the first year, my wife agreed to accompany me to the Con on Friday. She’s not a comics fan, but she loves art and is a pop culture aficionado. She got to meet Peter Beagle, author of the classic Last Unicorn novel (and got an autographed copy), picked up some awesome posters and cool t-shirts from Archie and Cyanide & Happiness.

I was only able to make it out to one panel on one day of the Con. I saw R. Sikoryak, Michael Kupperman (as Mark Twain), Sam Henderson, Danny Hellman and Emily Flake perform the hilarious Carousel Slideshow at the cavernous Hasbro stage located in the North Pavilion. The Hasbro Stage was the worst possible location for a dramatic reading of comics – a loud, distracting environment filled with autograph seekers, gamers and those who needed a break from the crowds. Somehow, the five panelists made it work, with Hellman’s Death of Baron Vapid and Flake’s Dangers of Halloween were real standouts. Of course, Kupperman was awesome (he is Kupperman, after all) and read from his new book, Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010.

The Haul

-Nick Dragotta, from the powerful (mostly) silent final issue of Fantastic Four (588). The issue follows the death of the Human Torch and documents the family’s struggle to adjust to his absence. The image above shows us what happens when the smartest man in the world runs out of answers. Reed Richards is coming to terms with the fact that he can’t solve everything. I love the small details in this page – the slouch, the bags under his eyes, the hand hanging carelessly off the arm of the chair. If you’ve ever felt burned out, exhausted at the end of your rope, you know just how Reed feels in this moment. Dragotta works digitally now, so I was able to cop a print at a super affordable price. Over the last couple of months, Dragotta’s been working with Joe Casey on the criminally underrated Vengeance miniseries.

-Jill Thompson’s famous proposed re-design of Wonder Woman. Beautiful work.

-Habibi, by Craig Thompson. I’ve been trying to avoid reviews of this, but couldn’t help from reading the thoughts of Eddie Campbell and Nadim Damluji on the book. I’m not far in the book at all, but I believe I may end up siding with Mr. Campbell. Time will tell.

That’s all for today, but coming soon… Chris and I revisit the DC 52!

(1) You may be asking yourself who else is in my non-scientific, completely subjective second tier. The aforementioned Fred van Lente, Rick Remender, Scott Snyder, Jeff Lemire, Kieron Gillen, Jason Aaron, Jon Hickman, Paul Cornell and Greg Pak. I’ll add Kelly Sue DeConnick once I read more of her work, but Rescue and Osborn were stellar. I kinda want to put Bendis here, but I’m torn. I love his work with Sara Picelli on Ultimate Spider Man, but his formulaic writing on the Avengers books, Scarlet and Brilliant kick him down a notch.

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One of the harshest criticisms of Superhero Comics as Boys’ Club of late comes from Colin Smith in his review of The Ultimates #1, entitled “Yet More Stories For Boys“. It the review, he points out that the book features an almost exclusively male cast, with females relegated to background support roles with minimal dialogue. From this, he extrapolates that Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribic, Marvel Comics, and the whole of “Common Comics Culture” is careless misogynistic and does not believe women have worth beyond sexual conquest.

Putting those claims aside for the moment, I’m not entirely sure why Smith chose to focus on Ultimates #1 over all of the other comics published in August. On one hand, it’s a high profile, heavily promoted first issue. It’s also part of Marvel’s budding day-and-date digital rollout. But it’s also only one of eighteen ongoing team books that Marvel released that month. The other seventeen team books (Alpha Flight, Astonishing X-Men, Avengers, Avengers Academy, FF, Generation Hope, Heroes for Hire, New Avengers, New Mutants, Secret Avengers, Thunderbolts, Ultimate X-Men, Uncanny X-Force, Uncanny X-men, X-Factor, X-Men, X-Men Legacy) are all more gender equitable. Every book has a woman on the cover, and aside from X-Force they all have multiple female team members. The only three team books with a single character on the cover (Alpha Flight, Generation Hope, New Avengers) feature a female cast member (Aurora, Idie Okonkwo, Squirrel Girl) in that role. I haven’t read all of these books, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that women have prominent speaking roles in all of them.

Granted, that could get Marvel as a whole off the hook for this specific problem, but it doesn’t address why Ultimates was such a Boys’ Club. Smith isn’t wrong in that regard, all the major roles in the book are filled by men. Why did Hickman and Ribic have such a male-dominated cast? It’s important to remember that even though this is a first issue, this is either the sixth or ninth volume of “The Ultimates”, depending on how you feel like counting. So while it’s Ultimates #1, it’s also effectively Ultimates Part 63.

Those previous sixty-three issues were written by Mark Millar, Jeph Loeb, and Charlie Huston. Those writers introduced twenty-seven individuals identified as members of the Ultimates: Black Panther, Black Widow, Black Widow II, Blade, Captain America, Carol Danvers, the Falcon, Giant Man, Gregory Stark, Hawkeye, Hulk, Iron Man, Karma, Nerd Hulk, Nick Fury, Perun, Punisher, Quicksilver, Red Wasp, Scarlet Witch, the Spider, Thor, Tyrone Cash, Valkyrie, War Machine, and the Wasp.

Of those, only nine were women, and seven of them are effectively off the table when Hickman picks up writing the book.

• Black Widow – Betrays the team and is killed in Ultimates 2

• Carol Danvers – Forced to resign from S.H.I.E.L.D. in Avengers vs. New Ultimates

• Karma – Only appeared as a reserve member for three issues in Ultimate X-Men, presumably dead, in hiding or in a prison camp as per the Ultimate Universe’s status quo policy on mutants

• Power Princess – Returns to her home universe in Ultimates 4

• Scarlet Witch - Killed in Ultimates 3, currently appearing as a hallucination, ghost or a magical being in Ultimate X-Men

• Valkyrie - Killed in New Ultimates

• Wasp – Killed in Ultimatum

That leaves the second Black Widow and the Red Wasp, two characters introduced by Millar to replace previously murdered women. At the end of Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates, Black Widow II was placed in charge of the Ultimates’ “Black Ops” team, but expresses doubt about working with her ex-husband Nick Fury. The Red Wasp, on the other hand, had scarcely appeared in the book since Ultimate Avengers #5. She appears briefly in UA #17, helping Perun prep for battle.

Before anyone points out the inherent skeeviness of killing off four female cast members, take note that Giant Man, Gregory Stark, Iron Man, Nerd Hulk, Perun, Quicksilver, the Spider, Thor, and Tyrone Cash were also gruesomely killed over the course of the past decade of comics. That’s literally half the team. Of course, Iron Man and Thor (and Quicksilver) got better, while none of the women did. Okay, Scarlet Witch might be back in Ultimate X-Men, and Valkyrie is still around as a mistress of Hela, but they’re not back on the team at any rate.

Millar also introduced and killed off swaths of all-male reserve crews — the Giant Men, the Reserve Captains America, and the Rocketmen. One All-Male-Revue spared complete annihilation was the Captains of Europe, who appear in Hickman and Ribic’s Ultimates #1. This leads Smith to bristle at the notion that European military concerns would ever be so gender-biased:

Yet not a single one of the European “Excalibur-class super-soldiers” who’re on display are anything other than conspicuously male. It’s something which I doubt real-world sensibilities over here on the other side of Pond would ever accept, but then politics doesn’t really appear to be Mr Hickman’s strong point.

These European Super-Soldiers were created by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, two men who are in fact from Mr. Smith’s “side of the pond”. It’s also worth noting that in Ultimates #2, these Super-Soldiers are being killed en masse by the Children of Tomorrow, a far more gender-balanced group of killers. While it’s anyone’s guess whether or not a new version of this project will emerge from the ashes — and whether the new class will be a bunch of white dudes again — I cannot imagine reaction would’ve been any more favorable towards Hickman had he decided to add a bunch of diversity to the Super Soldier program only to immediately slaughter them. But it’s not just genocidal fascist utopians who are swelling their ranks with women in Ultimates: upcoming covers and previews also suggest that a number of female heroes — Black Cat, Black Widow II, Susan Storm, Spider-Woman, and others — will be joining the team in the near future.

I realize some of this may come off as an apology for Marvel. It’s a lot to expect a reader’s initial response to a flashy first issue to take into account years of past stories, or to look at previews of upcoming issues. Realistically, not manyreaders will have all of this knowledge. Each reader is obviously entitled to their visceral, personal response to a piece of media. But at the point you fancy yourself a critic/journalist/pundit/whatever it is you’d call people in the blogosphere, there ought to be some expectation of consideration and thought.

This isn’t to wash all blame away from Marvel, or Hickman, or Ultimates fans, or any combination of creators and publishers and fandom. But to use a single issue to condemn Hickman and Marvel is at best foolish and at worst intellectually dishonest. Jonathan Hickman’s script for Ultimates #1 does not exist in a vacuum. It’s one of dozens of scripts commissioned by Marvel every month. It’s one of dozens of scripts that has been written to get the characters in the book to where they are in this issue.

Further, The Ultimates a modern adaptation of a half-century old comic book, The Avengers, which was created by two middle-aged men during the same timeframe that the second season of Mad Men occurs. In the formative first year of that book, there were six team members and five of those six were WASPY white guys. Four of those white guys have, in the past decade, been the stars of a series of six movies that have grossed over two and a half billion dollars at the box office. There are at least four more films featuring them (as well as Ultimates stars Hawkeye and Nick Fury) coming out in the next two years that Marvel hopes are going to net them another couple billions of dollars. While this is a mercenary motive, the focus on these characters may prove to be a more powerful force towards the gender make-up of this book than the interior sexism or bias of any individual creator.

Smith accounts for this in some conciliatory comments after his initial blog post, insisting that it’s the “Common Comics Culture” to blame, and praising Hickman, Ribic, and White as “undoubtedly highly competent creators”. Of course this comes after an entire essay focusing on how bad and misogynistic (or foolish and misogynistic) people at Marvel have created a bad comic. And that seems the be the takeaway from the links that first brought the article to my attention:

“What is Marvel Comics doing to its women? Could it be that there is some kind of corporate mandate in effect, like the ones that govern the movies–unstated rules that women have to be peripheral and background, and god help us if there is more than one in a story?

I don’t even know what to say to this hypothetical, as it’s demonstrably untrue given practically any Marvel book with a cast of more than a couple people. Of the books I read, I know that books like Avengers Academy and Thunderbolts both have several female characters that are front and center in their stories. I realize this is damning with faint praise, and even if they’re well-written the women in many other books fall into neat categories like Love Interest and Support Staff, but that’s part of the problem with making statements like the one above. It’s a depressingly low bar, and one that is easy for companies to meet. It’s the equivalent of “I’m not racist because I didn’t use any racial slurs.” If fandom really wants to hold the Big Two’s feet to the fire — about gender equity, diversity, or any other important issue — let’s not make it easy for them to weasel out of it.

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But don’t take our word for it! The first eleven issues are available digitally over at Comixology, or you can purchase the first three volumes (Out of the Woods, In Captivity, and Animal Armies) wherever finer books are sold.

We also take a look at Animal Man #1, part of DC’s New 52 line. We liked it too! We also like digital comics, the kind DC and Top Shelf and Dark Horse have been putting out lately. We are full of love lately!

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We’ve setup a nine course meal with wine pairing at wd~50, owned by Wylie Dufresne, a Michelin star winner and molecular gastronomy chef. If this award-winning restaurant doesn’t entice you enough, wait until you hear who you’ll be dining with… C.B. Cebulski, writer and talent scout extraordinaire hosts this once-in-a-lifetime dinner with Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Entertainment, Joe Quesada and Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Axel Alonso. This is your chance to be wined and dined with some of the most important people in comics. It all takes place at 8:00 PM on Friday, October 15 and includes a nine course meal and wine pairing. It is open to only ten fans. The cost is $550, but the opportunity is priceless!

I’ve got no problem with outrageously expensive meals, haute cuisine, or molecular gastronomy. In fact, I’ve eaten at wd~50 before and paid for the nine course tasting menu. It costs $140, but is fantastic and a unique experience, which is more than I can say for many of the $15 hamburgers and $25 entrees I’ve had at allegedly more reasonable restaurants. I can (and have) made a perfectly good pork shoulder at home, but I’m never going to pull off a trippy deconstructed Eggs Benedict like wd~50 does. I heartily support the notion that people coming to New York for the Con plan around eating any of the crap available at the Javits or the surrounding wasteland and put the money saved towards splurging on a nicer-than-you-normally-go-for meal at any of the hundreds of fine restaurants around town. But even at the upper end of that spectrum like wd~50, the menu price for this nine course meal with wine pairing is $225. The price for this dinner is double that.

Where does the extra $225 go? Even if you consider this dinner could be in the private dining room in the wine cellar, that bumps the tasting menu up $15 to make the total base meal cost $240. Factor in the 22% service charge ($52.80) and the 8.625% sales tax ($20.70) and your cost is up to $313.50, still leaving $236.50 unaccounted for.

Is that extra money — nearly enough to pay for someone to accompany you to a non-NYCC-organized trip to wd~50 — really just going towards what amounts to an appearance fee for Cebulski, Alonso and Quesada? Are they profiting from this meal? Is Reed Exhibitors? My first impulse is to assume that proceeds are going to the Hero Initiative, CBLDF, or another worthy cause. But I didn’t see any indication of that in the press release, nor on the page promoting the event.

Full disclosure: if for some reason anyone cared enough to set up an event where I’d get to eat at a Michelin restaurant for free so long as I shared the table with some people who wanted to meet me, I would totally do it and not care about how much the other parties had to pay for their meal. Maybe that’s why the press release is titled “Wanna Go On A Date With Marvel?”, because the fans are buying Marvel the meal. That’s all well and good, and based on my extremely limited interaction with them I imagine that Cebulski, Alonso, and Quesada are all charming dining partners. I just hope no one expects them to put out on the first date.

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I’ve been thinking about canon, alternate takes on Marvel/DC properties, cultural ownership and the artificial rules of storytelling in fictional storytelling over the last couple of days. I’m still working through some ideas on the latter two, but I want to spend a little time on the notion of canon and the possibilities suggested by Jon Morris’s DC Fifty-Too Project. For the unfamiliar, Jon Morris, an independent cartoonist and creator of the hilarious Jeremy: The Complete Strip Collection, among others, was inspired by DC’s relaunch of its main line of titles. DC Fifty-Too was a challenge issued by Morris to 52 cartoonists to imagine their own version of a new title using DC characters. The results were spectacular, a reminder of the potential locked in DC’s vast library of characters, possibilities that will remain unrealized due to restrictions of continuity or canon or the conservative preferences of editors and readers. It was the same sense of loss that I felt after reading Brendan McCarthy’s pitch for a post-apocalyptic Jimmy Olsen book or James Stokoe’s brilliant Spider Nam idea. I’d love to read these projects, whether as one-shots or limited series or ongoings, and it’s a shame that none of these projects will ever see the light of day.

I dream of a world where the “Big Two” publishers of comic books in America (in the direct market) were committed to healthy, positive sum competition and active engagement with fans. In this imagined world, readers would not only have access to “official” versions of the narratives they love, but offbeat work from independent creators featuring the franchises they know and love. In this world, publishers recognize that there’s nothing to be gained from creating or enforcing “canon”. For the purposes of this argument, I’m adopting the definition expressed by the Teatime Brutality blog: “the franchise owner’s authority to tell [the audience] how to conceptualise the components of [the] franchise”. The franchise owner will always have that authority, but what would happen if it chose to exercise self-restraint? It would be a refreshing acknowledgement of the fact that for Marvel and DC, canon may be unnecessary.

Compare the two publishers to other immensely popular cross-media franchises – Star Wars, Star Trek and Dr. Who. The owners of all three exercise restraint in unique ways, whether by incorporating independently produced licensed material into their narrative universes (through officially sanctioned “expanded universes”), embracing fan fiction, or most radically, rejecting the notion of canon entirely. Not only do these franchises operate within vast fictional universes complete with arcane world and character continuity, they operate across multiple media, with television shows, books, comic books, movies and games. The core concepts, stories and characters in these franchises are so powerful, so…mythic, that they’ve become deeply embedded in the national consciousness. The owners of these franchises can afford to exercise discretion. I don’t know if Marvel and DC have matched the overall commercial success of these franchises, but I think it’s safe to say that their respective narrative universes are at least as culturally significant. Significant enough that they won’t be diluted by authorized use in multiple narratives, even if they conflict and are in the same medium.

Brian Michael Bendis, one of Marvel’s most valued creators, suggested as when he noted that the Ultimate Spider-Man title he wrote was no less canonical than the one in Dan Slott’s book, or Sam Raimi’s film for that matter. This statement should be a harmless reflection of conventional wisdom, but was considered a provocation to traditionalist comics fans. The funny thing is that many of those fans fell in love with these characters in “non-canonical” stories. How many fans first encountered Superman as played by Christopher Reeve, Spider-Man in a Saturday morning cartoon, or Batman in The Dark Knight Returns? Is the X-Men film trilogy (and two prequels) any less canonical than the periodicals published by Marvel? We can choose to privilege one over the other, but in reality, both are the “real” X-Men.

The time when creators at both publishers were pressured to align stories across media is long over, especially at Marvel Comics, where books like PunisherMAX and the Ultimate Universe titles sit comfortably alongside the traditional titles and there is no expectation that the Marvel movie universe match the “canon” of stories set in the Marvel comic universe (or vice versa). Even DC is taking baby steps with its All-Star and Earth One lines of titles. Both publishers even occasionally publish anthologies of off-beat stories featuring their characters written and drawn by creators who traditionally work outside the superhero “genre”. The relative success of these experiments suggests that an audience may exist for “out-of continuity” books featuring Marvel/DC properties. The continued success of the core titles for both publishers implies that readers won’t be confused by multiple versions of their favorite characters, even if one undermines the other. Mark Millar’s version of Captain America may be an implicit critique of the traditional version of the character, but Ed Brubaker’s Roosevelt Democrat Captain America is still doing just fine, as are the Captain America film and Avengers animated series (which prominently features a more traditional Captain America).

So, this leads me to my modest proposal: Marvel and DC should loosen the reins on their franchises in print (soon to be digital) media. I almost want to recommend a mixed approach to publishing that includes direct production and licensing, but that raises some quality control and oversight problems. So, lets steal an idea take inspiration from the world of film. A digital imprint curated by a panel of respected creators with diverse experiences in a variety of genres. Something between a independent film festival and a film studio division specializing in micro budget pictures. Creators with the winning ideas get funding to complete the project on their own terms, a reasonable share of any revenue generated and an honorarium. One other thing – and this is the crucial bit – these projects should be produced in the collaborative style common to ‘alternative’ comics instead of the editorially driven bullpen model. Think Ultimate Comics produced in ICON-like conditions.

These stories would have the potential to offer us something more than familiar characters in unfamiliar milieu, or a fresh coat of paint on a rusty franchise. At best, they can serve as vehicles for creators to explore the deeper meaning of properties in a way that’s not possible in traditionally produced work. It’s the difference between Jason Aaron’s Wolverine book, a superbly crafted, but ultimately conventional take on the classic character and Rafael Grampa’s version (in the recent Strange Tales collection) which interrogated the deeply troubling implications behind the character’s obsession with violence. I don’t know if there’s an audience for this, or for that matter, if any creator would be interested in doing this. I just know that I’d love to read more stories featuring Marvel/DC properties created outside their traditional production systems.

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What’s mildly surprising is that no one seems to be talking about Flashpoint — good or bad. I certainly had my problems with the first couple issues, and droned on at length about in a roundtable at Savage Critics earlier this summer. Maybe everyone else kept thinking about the event during the summer, but I sure didn’t! Not just because I didn’t care for it, but because even DC’s marketing machine quickly abandoned it in favor of the long stream of hype about The New 52. We’ve been told the titles and creative teams, shown the covers and logos, been told about the Day & Date Digital, been given questionnaire answers by the creators, and very soon we’ll be offered the actual comic books that are part of this Bold New Era of DC Comics. But what about Flashpoint? It’s the big Summer Event that leads into this Bold New Era, and while it’s far from over — there’s still the final core issue to come — it hasn’t particularly gotten anyone talking. Maybe it’s event fatigue. Maybe the Flash just isn’t as bankable as Green Lantern, even with Geoff Johns at the helm. Or maybe it’s because Flashpoint is a glorified Elseworlds/What If?/Age of Apocalypse rehash where it seems like the creative teams forgot halfway through that the elevator pitch is The Butterfly Effect and not A Warmed Over Riff on Warren Ellis’s Ruins.

Regardless, it has one thing in common with those other stories. DEATH. GLORIOUS DEATH. Given that everything is going to be returned to The New Normal at the end of it, DC has gone hog wild with killing people off in Flashpoint. It’s not just “shocking” death scenes for beloved intellectual property: the Flashpoint Earth got seriously depopulated. It’d be Ra’s al Ghul’s dream, if he weren’t a little kid who only appears in one panel of World of Flashpoint for some reason. Forget boring decapitation of superheroines, Flashpoint has it all!

• Gorilla Grodd conquers the continent of Africa, killing “over half” of all humans en route to a planned extermination of all of them (Death Count: 500,000,000 and rising)
• Aquaman sinks the majority of Europe, including Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portgual and parts of Austria, the Czech Republic, etc. (Death Count: Let’s be conservative and say 300,000,000)
• Wonder Woman raises the United Kingdom up to form a mountain fortress, systematically exterminates all males, apparently kills a lot of women in work camps/Mengele experiments too (Death Count: 30,000,000 males, presumably a few million females)
• A three mile swatch of Chandigarh was wiped clean in India (Death Count: “Hundreds of Thousands”)
• The Chandigarh event drives India and Pakistan into prolonged conventional war (Death Count: “Countless” but let’s just say 2,000,000)
• “Anarchists” in Brazil and the surrounding area have been at war with an occupying Nazi force from 1945-2011 (Death Count: How do you even estimate that? How does that even work?)
• Superman’s rocket hits Metropolis rather than Smallville, destroying a swath of the city (Death Count: 35,000)
• Alaska is apparently entirely overrun by zombies, does not warrant a mention beyond a map in the background (Death Count: 700,000)
• 627 sectors of the Universe (out of 3600, or about 17%) have been consumed by Nekron and his Black Lanterns, with half of the surviving sectors suffering “incursions” (Death Count: Let’s say one fifth of the Universe)

That’s a lot of death! Enough that it starts to lose all meaning. But don’t worry, Funnybook Babylon has cataloged a list of all of the ninety or so named characters — many of them beloved DC properties, many less so — that have been graphically murdered throughout this event. And we’ve still got one issue to go, who know knows? We might even get to see something really exciting, like Batman getting his heart ripped out and fed to him, or Superman’s head exploding! The Flashpoint braintrust really like those sorts of deaths.

Alfred the Butler: Beheaded in England by invading Amazons
Amethyst: Murdered either by Enchantress or Shade
Animal Man: Framed for the murder of his wife and children, made a prison bitch by Atomic Skull, nose bitten off and subsequently curb-stomped by Heatwave
Aqualad: Framed for the murder of Hippolyta, thrown off a balcony, stabbed through the chest
Arsenal: Killed by Oliver Queen and Vixen’s illegitimate daughter
Artemis: Punched in half by Britannia
Atrocitus: Head exploded by Sinestro
Atom (Ray Palmer): Lost a leg to cancer caused by his shrink-belt, head squished by Heatwave
Batwoman: Part of Grifter’s “Team 7″, killed by terrorists in Afghanistan
Black Adam: Ripped in half using a teleporter by Martian Manhunter
Black Orchid: Driven to suicide off-panel, probably by Shade the Changing Man
Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes): Recruited by Canterbury Cricket for his “Ambush Bugs” team, killed by Amazons on first mission
Captain Marvel (Billy Batson): Depowered by Enchantress, stabbed through the heart by Wonder Woman
Catman: Killed by Grodd, skull and spine ripped out and paraded around
Cheetah: Killed and possibly eaten by Etrigan the Demon
Citizen Cold: Killed by Iris West
Clayface: Dragged into an ocean trench by Aquaman, presumably dies after having his skull collapse and eyes pop out from the water pressure
Cluemaster: Killed when Plastic Man bursts out of his throat
Cockroach: Recruited by Canterbury Cricket for his “Ambush Bugs” team, killed by Amazons on first mission
Congorilla: Beaten to death, head ripped off by Grodd during a sparring match
Count Vertigo: Pierced through the heart by an Amazon’s spear
Dr. Fate: Pierced through the heart by an Amazon’s spear, apparently a favorite pastime of Amazons
Deadman: Killed by a building falling on him as Amazons Attack
Doomsday: Hooked up to a cybernetic helmet that allows other to “pilot” him, compelled to rip own ribcage open
Firefly: Recruited by Canterbury Cricket for his “Ambush Bugs” team, killed by Amazons on first mission
Firestorm: Jason Rusch burned alive by Heat Wave
Flash (Jay Garrick): Apparently killed in the accident that was supposed to give him his powers
Flash (Wally West): Killed by Citizen Cold to preserve his secret identity
Geo-Force: Transformed into a weapon by Aquaman, used to sink most of Europe
Giganta: Hal Jordan shoots her eyes out with cruise missiles
Golden Glider: Killed by Fallout in revenge against Citizen Cold
Commissioner Gordon: Throat slit by the Joker after being duped into shooting a little girl
Green Lantern (Hal Jordan): Goes on suicide run to detonate nuclear warhead into England, leaves engagement ring for Carol Ferris with his suicide note
John & Mary Grayson: Murdered by Amazons trying to obtain the Helm of Nabu
Green Lantern (John Stewart): Part of Grifter’s “Team 7″, killed by terrorists in Afghanistan
Hippolyta: Murdered by Artemis pretending to be Aqualad to spark a war for some reason
Adolf Hitler: Killed and presumably decapitated by Frankenstein’s Monster
Hush: Killed off-panel by Batman
Icicle: Head exploded by Jenny Blitz, frozen eyeballs shot at viewer
Isis: Tossed off the top of a train while pregnant by the Outsider
Joker: Is actually Martha Wayne, falls into the Batcave and dies
Kid Flash: Was trapped in the 31st Century disappearing like Marty McFly, then travelled back in time to somehow become the Black Flash, then I guess he ran so fast he became a White Flash, then disintegrated for some reason
Kilowog: Killed by Nekron in an alternate flashback to Blackest Night
Killer Croc: Stabbed in the skull by Batman
King Shark: Dies defending a circus from the Amazons
KGBeast: Shot to death by Ray Palmer piloting an Amazo
Klarion the Witch Boy: Driven to suicide off-panel, probably by Shade the Changing Man
Krypto: Starved as a government test subject, psychically manipulated into attacking a young Lex Luthor, put down with a Kryptonite shotgun
Hawkgirl: Stabbed to death by Grifter
Heatwave: Severely injured/scarred by Cyborg, presumably murdered off-panel by Plastic Man at conclusion of mini-series
Lois Lane: Shot dead by Amazonian soldiers after broadcasting news of their war crimes, ALSO killed by Subject Zero in a separate mini-series
General Sam Lane:Either choked to death or head crushed by Subject Zero in a rare tasteful off-panel murder
Lady Blackhawk: Part of Grifter’s “Team 7″, killed by terrorists in Afghanistan
Lock-Up: Eyes plucked out by Plastic Man
Machiste: Decapitated by Aquaman
Madame Xanadu: Dies for some reason so that Traci 13 can hear her dying words
Magog: Part of Grifter’s “Team 7″, killed by terrorists in Afghanistan
Man-Bat: Killed when a knife is shot out of a crossbow, through his heart
Martian Manhunter: Cut in half using dimensional teleportation by the Outsider
Max Mercury: Drained of the Speed Force and turned into a skeleton by Bart Allen/The Black Flash
Mera: Decapitated by Wonder Woman
Mindwarp: Had his manifested soul shattered by Enchantress, resulting in his physical body exploding into a fountain of blood. A new character
Miss X: Driven to suicide off-panel, probably by Shade the Changing Man. Last appeared in Action Comics #43
Mr. Freeze: Killed by Citizen Cold to preserve his secret identity
Mr. Terrific: Cut in half by a magical living statue in the Outsider’s headquarters
Mrs. Terrific: Decapitated by a magical living statue in the Outsider’s headquarters
Jimmy Olsen: Killed when Aquaman sinks Europe
Queen Bee: Recruited by Canterbury Cricket for his “Ambush Bugs” team, killed by Amazons on first mission
Poison Ivy: Killed off-panel by Batman
Ragdoll: Killed by an Amazon utilizing Lex Luger’s patented Torture Rack submission to its ultimate end
Raven: Had her manifested soul shattered by Enchantress, resulting in her physical body exploding into a fountain of blood
Rising Son: Has hole punched through chest by the Outsider
The Rogues (Fallout, Mirror Master, Tar Pit, Weather Wizard: Killed by Citizen Cold
Scarecrow: Killed off-panel by Batman
Scavenger: Broken in half over Aquaman’s knee
Sgt. Rock: Part of Grifter’s “Team 7″, killed by terrorists in Afghanistan
The Shark: Killed by Hal Jordan by colliding two jets
Simon Magus: Driven to suicide off-panel, probably by Shade the Changing Man. Only known previous appearance in Justice League of America v1 #2
Sportsmaster: Heart ripped out by Plastic Man
Steel: Killed off-panel at some point, making his niece Natasha a “fatherless” anarchist general attempting to overthrow Nazi-controlled Brazil
Stiletto: Driven to suicide off-panel, probably by Shade the Changing Man. Only previous appearance presumably in Detective Comics #630
Subject Zero: Human soldier given Kryptonian and other alien DNA, driven mad, killed by Superman
Tattooed Man: Stabbed by Ocean Master, accidentally electrocuted by Scavenger, explodes
Terra: Killed by Ocean Master, maybe
T.O. Morrow: Died at some point in the indeterminate past, dumbass Red Tornado robots do not realize his skeletal remains are not alive, await his instructions
Trigon: Driven to suicide off-panel, probably by Shade the Changing Man
Trickster: Murdered by Mirror Master for assisting Captain Cold
Vixen: Burned alive by Etrigan, presumed dead
Wicked Jenny Greenteeth: New magical cannibal character introduced, burned alive by Amazons
Zatanna: Body reduced to ashes after using “death spell” in a futile attempt to kill Enchantress

Exciting stuff, eh? Which death was the saddest for you? Are you Team Disembowlment or Team Decapitation? Tell us in the comments!

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We reviewed the five books up for the Best Single Issue Eisner. Obviously the Eisners have passed, and you all know who won, but that doesn’t stop us from having strong opinions about all five books. Those books are:

• The Cape by Joe Hill, Jason Ciaramella, and Zack Howard (IDW)
• Fables #100 by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and others(Vertigo/DC)
• Hellboy: Double Feature of Evil by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben (Dark Horse)
• Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom #1: “Sparrow” by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
• Unknown Soldier #21: “A Gun in Africa” by Joshua Dysart and Rick Veitch (Vertigo/DC)

Remarkably, not a single one of these books is available digitally! Well, IDW’s two entries might be, but because I don’t have a PSP or an iOS device, I have no way of obtaining — or even checking — to see if they are! The links above are to (four of the five) books’ trade paperback collections.

We’re still looking for things to talk about besides the same old things. Give us suggestions!

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At DC’s Vertigo panel, Derek McCulloch announced Gone to Amerikay, an original graphic novel about Irish immigration to the United States over the last 140 years that he worked on with Colleen Doran and Jose Villarubia. McCulloch described the book as a “historial epic with a crime story and a ghost story and a couple of love stories and all kinds of things in it”. Sounds intriguing. Here’s a preview:

Nate Powell, author of 2009′s Swallow Me Whole, a critically acclaimed comic about young siblings struggling with neurological disorders, premiered Any Empire, a new original graphic novel for Top Shelf Comics. In Any Empire, Powell explores childhood, fantasy, violence and the pervasive presence of military culture in America. Check out Chris Mautner’s interview with Powell for Robot 6. Any Empire is due in stores on August 9th. I can’t wait.

I love his use of negative space.

One Soul. A book by Ray Fawkes that simultaneously follows the lives of eighteen individuals from a number of time periods from gestation to maturity one panel at a time and weaves them into a narrative about spiritual journeys. It’s the kind of narrative that would make an excellent prose book or film, but a comic book? Fawkes raises the stakes by telling the stories in a unique manner that brings a mosaic to mind. In the words of iFanboy’s Paul Montgomery, “every page is part of a two page spread of 18 panels. Each of those panels is devoted to one of the 18 characters”. Confused? Check out an excerpt below.

I admit it, this is a cheat – this book was announced at C2E2 and is currently available at your local comic book shop, bookstore or Amazon, but I found out about it during SDCC, so I’m including it anyway.

Other Interesting Links

• Warren Ellis on the return of pitch competitions at the Big Two;
• The Mindless Ones provide invaluable annotations/commentary to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil’s new volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969.
• Plok muses about Steve Ditko, objectivism and what we should do if we encounter Ayn Rand on the road
• Milton Griepp presented his annual White Paper on the economic health of the American comics industry. Heidi MacDonald has the essential coverage for the Beat.
• Chris Sims has a fun interview with Jonathan Hickman on their trip back home from SDCC.
• Jamie Coville posted his invaluable set of recordings from the SDCC panels. Highlights include spotlights of Maggie Thompson and Roy Thomas, tributes to Dwayne McDuffie, Jack Kirby and Gene Colan, the 70′s Panel, Indie Comics Marketing 101, Filipino artists working at Marvel/DC and the viability of the printed comic book. via Robot 6

One More Thing: On July 28th, the US Southern District granted Marvel Comics’ motion for summary judgment against Jack Kirby’s estate, concluding that Kirby’s work for the publisher from 1958-1963 were “works for hire” as defined by the Copyright Act of 1909. In 1972, Kirby signed an adhesive agreement in which he assigned any property interest in any of the works he created for Marvel to the publisher. The Kirby heirs sought to terminate his assignment of his federally protected copyrights in these works purusant to the Copyright Act of 1976. After negotiations failed, Marvel went to court for an official declaration that it owned the property in question, since the agreement signed in 1972 also contained an acknowledgement that the work Kirby had done for Marvel was as an employee for hire. The court decided that there were no material issues of fact and that Marvel was entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Read the decision (pdf) here and commentary from Colleen Doran here. This is a tragedy for the Kirby family, but it’s hard to imagine a different outcome.

As Judge McMahon wrote, “this case is not about whether Jack Kirby or Stan Lee is the real “creator” of Marvel characters, or wheether Kirby (and other freelance artists who cerated culturally iconic comic book characters for Marvel and other publishers) were treated “fairly” by companies that grew rich off the fruit of their labor”. It’s important to distinguish between natural and legal rights – the court system is not the only (and sometimes not the best) way to resolve controversies. There are other ways.

Stephen Bissette (artist of Swamp Thing, horror anthology Taboo and Tyrant) recognizes this distinction, and advocates for a fan boycott of Marvel products:

“I don’t question the legal logic Marvel’s attorneys made, and the court decision reflects. However, nothing is being said about the conditions under which Kirby signed, and was pressured to sign, the contracts presented. I don’t think “extortion” is too unfair a word to use, particularly in the very public case of the Marvel artwork “return” contracts.

That is a moral issue here, and Marvel’s pattern of decades of effectively slandering, maligning, and dimissing Kirby and his legacy is, too.

If, in the 1970s, Neal Adams and Jerry Robinson hadn’t rallied around Siegel & Shuster, who had multiple signed settlement contracts with National Periodicals to wield against them, agreements they had signed over their lifetimes (agreements they and their legal reps—like Albert Zugsmith—had negotiated), nothing would have changed.

Adams and Robinson brought to the public the moral case, the moral outrage, over the treatment of the creators of Superman.

At that time, the legal matters were considered “settled.”

C’mon, folks: Jack changed a century, the medium, the industry, our lives, and Marvel.

Let’s change how the rest of this onfolding story goes.”

Read the whole thing. It’s an incredibly compelling argument. I’m tempted to say that this won’t make a difference. Marvel is an extremely profitable arm of a multibillion dollar media company and is far less vulnerable to collective action than it was fifteen years ago. I don’t know if readers would be willing to forgo entertainment for an abstract principle – the last boycott was about the quality of the books being published. I wonder if the majority of fans even know who Jack Kirby is, other than Stan Lee’s sidekick. I fear that any call to collective action will reveal the reactionary vein in comic fandom. I’m afraid that it won’t matter. But even if it doesn’t make any difference at all, I don’t know if I can justify continued economic support of an unjust system.

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“Writers don’t do stories specifically to piss off fans. Writers write stories about which they feel passionate and invested. As a reader, you’re entitled to one thing and one thing only: a reading experience in exchange for your purchase. And if you like that reading experience, the expectation is that you’ll come back for more. But the audience does not and should never be in control of the stories. Writers are writers because they know how to do what audiences don’t know how to do—tell stories that affect you and move you. It’s way tougher than it looks. Storytelling isn’t a democracy, you don’t get a decision in how the stories go. All you get is your one vote, with your dollars or your feet.”
—
Tom Brevoort, Marvel Senior Vice President of Marvel in response to a reader question asking “why [] writers persist on doing controversial directions/stories that are disliked by fans?”

Sean Collins of Robot 6 singled this quote out as part of a growing creator backlash against ‘fan entitlement’, including some comments from Brian Lee O’Malley about George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series and some…interesting comments made by Grant Morrison in his new book Supergods. It’s a weird faux trend that gives creators, journalists and critics an opportunity to attack their favorite straw man – the entitled ‘bad fan’ who we all use to externalize our insecurities around comics fandom. There’s a lot to say about this trend, but let’s focus on a very basic point – the question above illustrates fan confusion, not entitlement.

There’s nothing particularly controversial about Brevoort’s response. He was simply stating a truism in the kind of brusque fake tough guy way familiar to long-time sports fans. I picture WFAN’s Mike Francesa putting Vinnie from the Bronx in his place.

One could imagine a more responsive, if somewhat simplified answer to the reader’s question – for the most part, writers of mainstream Marvel Comics don’t persist in writing books that most readers actively dislike. Marvel is your typical profit-seeking enterprise in the business of selling comic books that readers want to buy, which creates a disincentive to publish widely disliked comics. But I suspect that this reader knows this already. So, a more precise response – what makes the reader think that fans don’t like those ‘controversial’ stories? Which fans is he referring to?

A lot of fans assume that they know what fans want. It’s understandable. They’re fans. Who would know what a fan would want better than a fan? They assume that their views and preferences (and those of the other fans they know, whether in real life or on the internet) represent those of comics fandom. It’s a comforting lie. As readers of these books, we need to come to terms with the fact that we really don’t know anything about what other readers want. We can look at sales charts as an imperfect proxy for fan preferences or dredge up anecdotes about the people who frequent our local comics store or who we interact with on social media, but we’ll still be unable to identify reader preferences with any real precision. I don’t know what book this reader was referring to, but there’s a very real possibility that he’s talking about a book that has a widespread audience. The world is bigger than your store, your neighborhood, your friends list.

I know how it feels. I thought the end of Civil War was a cop-out, Secret Invasion a waste of an intriguing premise, and that One More Day was a solution to a non-existent problem. Many, if not most of my friends agreed with me – if I posted an incisively cutting comment about any of the above on Twitter, in an online conversation or in my local comic store, I’d get nothing but positive reinforcement. But my village is not the world. The truth – and granted, this is relying on the imperfect proxy of sales charts – is that all three of those books were immensely popular and in all likelihood, the majority of readers enjoyed them. It’s always dangerous to assume that we know more than we actually do, to universalize our limited experience – and that applies equally to creators who have bad interactions with misanthropic fans. A guy on a message board who’s unfairly critical of the last volume of the Scott Pilgrim series of books doesn’t represent anyone other than himself.

I guess that if I was in Brevoort’s shoes, I would’ve told the reader to chill out and to remember that the book they hate may be someone else’s favorite book. If he (or she) doesn’t like a particular book, there’s always another one that might be preferable. I know, I know, it’s more fun to mock people who don’t ask good questions.

One other thing – It’s tempting to conclude that those who disagree with you are the ‘bad fans’ – the marginalized ‘other’, those who buy comics out of a pathetic sense of obligation, or as a sad investment or because they’re obsessed completists. Those people are out there, but we all need to deal with the fact that reasonable people hold a broad range of opinions. There are people out there who don’t like King City, who didn’t think Asterios Polyp was a work of genius, who weren’t blown away by Mark Waid’s first issue of Daredevil. I think those people are mad. But that’s not really true. To paraphrase film critic Mark Kermode, other opinions are always available. More on the Great Strawman Witch Hunt of 2011 later.

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All of the information below is cobbled from the enterprising folks who covered the Con in person – Laura Hudson, FBB4L co-chair David Brothers, Andy Khouri, Chris Murphy, Caleb Goellner and FBB alum David Uzumeri for Comics Alliance; Kiel Phegley, Dave Richards, and the rest of the Comic Book Resources news team; and Rich Johnston, Mark Seifert and Brendon Connelly for Bleeding Cool. I’m consistently amazed by the hard work that they do each year to provide us with news and capture the Con experience.

Let’s Go!

COMICS

Marvel takes baby steps into the world of “day and date” digital distribution : At this year’s convention, David Gabriel, Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Publishing, announced that the Spider-Man “family” of titles (including Rick Remender’s excellent Venom series) will be available to retail and digital consumers at the same time beginning with Amazing Spider Man #666 (the first part of the “Spider Island” crossover). Mr. Gabriel announced that the program will extend to the X-Men franchise of titles in November, with Uncanny X-Men #1 and Wolverine and the X-Men #1. He didn’t say whether the program would include the second tier (better) X-titles like X-23, Uncanny X-Force or New Mutants. Gabriel explained that Marvel’s transition to “day and date” digital distribution will be a carefully managed process scheduled to coincide with traditional entry points for new readers, an interesting contrast to the approach adopted by DC Comics. It appears that Marvel is implicitly acknowledging the possibility that the market for its comics is segmented – some fans of books in the Spider-Man franchise, for example, may have have different interests, needs and preferences than fans of the X-Men franchise of titles. A slow roll-out gives Marvel the opportunity to launch targeted marketing campaigns for the new initiative that are subtly distinct. I don’t know if this is part of the plan, but it will also allow them to work more closely with retailers during the implementation phase, which may allay some retailer fears.

We still don’t know whether there will be price parity, but here’s hoping for the best. I’d also be curious to know more about the delivery system. I can’t wait to read Parker, Remender and Pak books in a digital format.

DC Reboot Updates : I’ve decided that I’m going to wait for the books to actually hit the stores/iOS before I make any further judgments. So we’re going to look at some pretty pictures.

Action Comics (Rags Morales)

Supergirl (Mahmud Asrar)

The Flash (Francis Manapul)

Batwoman (J.H. Williams III)

Thunder A.G.E.N.T.S. (Frank Quitely) To be fair, I’ll never read this book, but you can’t tell me this isn’t a great cover!

Wonder Woman (Cliff Chiang)

Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE (Alberto Ponticelli)

Animal Man (Travel Foreman)

I, Vampire (Andrea Sorrentino)

Marvel Holds Serve : In its Next Big Thing panel on Thursday, Marvel announced that the creative teams on some of my favorite (read: I still enjoy buying them) Marvel books would remain unchanged, or in some cases, that the artist was going to be replaced by another competent artist.

Jeff Parker will team with Patrick Zircher to introduce “Hulk of Arabia” to the ongoing Hulk book (the one that follows Gen. Thaddeus “Red Hulk” Ross (ret.)). The story follows Ross as he seeks vengeance for the death of a close friend and clashes with his archenemy, a new Middle Eastern villain and the Secret Avengers. I know, it sounds silly, but Parker’s shown a real flair for grounding these kinds of high concept stories and adding layers of complexity that make for a compelling read, so I have high expectations.

Christos Gage is continuing his highly underrated run on Avengers Academy, and plans to expand the roster, move them to California (for old-time fans, the HQ of the old West Coast Avengers) and introduce a murder mystery. Per CBR, Jonathan Hickman teased that “the next two arcs [of FF] will explore a war that’s been teased for a long while, yet nothing will be presented in straight linear fashion while the arc after that will help draw his whole run to a close. “If you’ve been with us since the beginning, I think you’ll be pleased as punch”

Mark Waid is working with Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin on Daredevil. The first issue was published this Wednesday, and I think it may be the start of something special. For those who don’t follow me on Tumblr, I wrote the following:

“Do you realize that every strawberry on this table smells just a little bit different?”

Mark Waid’s back. This is how you reboot a franchise. This is how you escape a thirty year status quo. How you remind us that there was a time before Miller, Nocenti and Bendis. Its just so damn refreshing to see Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin express their talents on a book worthy of their talents. And that last page… I’m still surprised by my reaction to the last page, which I can’t say, so its left an untold fact. Let’s just say this: I wholly subscribe to the notion that one has to choose happiness in life. (this is a world without magic). The woman sitting next to me on my morning commute probably thinks that I suffered a nervous breakdown. And I think it’s time to call my dad.

This book is brilliant. Go read it.

Greg Rucka on the MU Punisher : Greg Rucka is the perfect choice for a Punisher series that takes place in the Marvel Universe. From Whiteout and Queen & Country to Checkmate and Gotham Central, Greg Rucka’s always done an amazing job of blending espionage, crime and suspense with superhero adventure comics. After “Valley Forge, Valley Forge” (the last arc of Garth Ennis’s legendary run on the Punisher MAX series), I thought I was done with stories featuring the Punisher. There was just nothing left to say. Aaron’s current work on the MAX book is okay, but its nothing groundbreaking. Remender’s gonzo take on the MU version of Punisher was incredibly entertaining, but in the end, it was just unsustainable. At the Amazing Spider-Man and His Avenging Friends panel, Rucka informed the audience that the series would focus on the people whose lives are affected by the Punisher’s actions, and that the Punisher will be silent (dialogue and thought balloons) for the first three issues of the run. If you’ve read Gotham Central, you know what to expect.

Zeb Wells and Joe Madureira team on Avenging Spider-Man: Zeb Wells is responsible for some of my favorite issues of the post-Brand New Day Amazing Spider-Man (such as the three issue “Shed” arc), as well as an impressive resurrection of the New Mutants title. So when he announces that he’s going to work with Joe Madureira on an action-heavy monthly Spider Man title with a new guest star every month, I’m on board.

The Massive : Brian Wood teams up with Kristian Donaldson on The Massive, a three part series following a group of environmentalists after an apocalyptic event. A precise, detailed look at a hostile future world in the throes of chaos and societal collapse. In an interview with CBR, Wood describes the story as “a global DMZ“. That’s all I had to hear.

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples present Saga : At Saturday’s Image panel, Brian K. Vaughan announced that he was returning to the world of comics with Saga, a new sci-fi creator-owned ongoing title scheduled to premiere in 2012 from Image Comics. The title, which Vaughan created in collaboration with Fiona Staples (also the artist on the book), will follow a unique family’s experiences during an intergalactic war. In an interview with Comics Alliance’s Laura Hudson, Vaughan revealed that he “plans for Saga to be even longer than Ex Machina, which ran for fifty issues.” It’s still too early to draw any firm conclusions, but this looks very promising.

Jonathan Hickman’s Creator Owned Projects: It’s great to see that Jonathan Hickman’s growing responsibilities at Marvel (FF, SHIELD and the new Ultimates series) will not prevent him from pursuing opportunities to work on creator-owned projects. At Saturday’s Image panel, Hickman announced that he was working on The Manhattan Projects with Nicky Pitarra (The Red Wing), which sounds like an action comedy starring the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project (he referred to it as “the Thunderbolts of Science”).

(via Nick Petarra )

Hickman also announced a second title scheduled for the coming year – Secrets, a more straightforward corporate espionage story with Ryan Bodenheim (Red Mass for Mars). It’s not clear how long Hickman intends either series to run – CBR speculates that both will either be 15 issues in length or run on an ongoing basis. Both titles sound intriguing. Hickman’s writing on his creator-owned projects has steadily improved over the years, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he’s capable of now.

Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss II: I’ve never read Black Kiss, Howard Chaykin’s twelve issue transgressive hard boiled miniseries from the late 1980′s, but I’ve certainly heard about it. Chaykin blended the genre elements associated with hard boiled detective fiction with his (famed) unapologetically explicit take on sexuality and other “mature themes” to create a comic so controversial that it shipped in a black plastic bag. In a recent interview conducted by Kiel Phegley for CBR, Chaykin describes the book as both a dark comedy (designed to poke at would-be censors) and a genre-spanning comic meditation on life in California. The first version, which was republished in a single volume by Dynamite Comics in May, is on my buy list, and I’m intrigued by the sequel.

Holy Terror

The first trailer for Holy Terror, a forthcoming graphic novel by Frank Miller for Legendary Comics. The project was initially intended for DC Comics as a “Batman v. Al Qaeda” project inspired by Miller’s emotional response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but now features an original character named “The Fixer” bringing justice to terrorists. I’m very wary of any project that invokes 9/11, especially ones that seem to lack complexity or nuance – I know that’s assuming a lot, but Miller described the project as a “piece of propaganda” and a “reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against”. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said “as I got into this I felt probably something close to what Jack Kirby felt when he created Captain America”. As Alyssa Rosenberg eloquently reminded us, this Long War is not World War II, and Frank Miller is not Jack Kirby. But…. it sure is purty. Check out the first five pages (pdf) here .

Speaking of beautiful things that I’ll never buy, check out this cover from Black Panther #525, with art by Francesco Francavilla. I like the creative team (David Liss & Shawn Martinbrough), but I just don’t like the direction of the title.

Fantagraphics to Publish the EC Comics Library: This is the most exciting comics-related news to come out of San Diego this weekend. Per Tom Spurgeon, Fantagraphics announced that it reached an agreement with William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. to reprint the fabled EC Comics Library. In the great Fantagraphics tradition, the books will not be reprinted as collections of the original titles (like Tales From the Crypt, Weird Fantasy or Two-Fisted Tales). In an interview with Spurgeon, series editor (and Fantagraphics co-publisher) Gary Groth noted that each collection will be in black and white, include miscellaneous support material, and will focus on specific creators (almost all comics legends) who wrote and drew EC comics from 1944 to the mid 1950′s in an effort to draw the attention of the audience away from EC as a brand to the individual stories crafted by specific creators. The first four volumes will include work from Harvey Kurtzman (Corpse on the Imjin and Other Stories, a collection mostly consisting of war and western stories); Wally Wood (Came the Dawn and Other Stories, a collection of suspense tales); Jack Davis (a collection of horror stories) and Al Williamson (science fiction stories) and will begin publication in 2012.

NOT COMICS

H+, a dystopian web series from John Cabrera and Cosimo De Tommaso, directed by Stewart Hendler and produced by Bryan Singer. The premise? A world where humanity has dramatically increased its dependence on technology, where the next big thing is H+, an implanted computer system that allows one to be connected to the internet 24/7. This sets the stage for a mass casualty event that changes everything. via Bleeding Cool

Haywire, Steven Soderbergh’s new high-concept action project. I think the trailer speaks for itself:

Green Lantern: The Animated Series : This series, which builds off the success (?) of the live action film, is scheduled to premier sometime in 2012 on the Cartoon Network. The sizzle reel premiered at San Diego. That’s a lot of mediocre CGI. I’d have to see a full episode before I passed judgment.

Prometheus, the new project from Ridley Scott. There’s no footage available yet, but this looks like a throwback to Scott’s hard sci-fi classics of the late seventies and early eighties. The film stars Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace, with Idris Elba in a supporting role. There aren’t very many details about the plot, other than the rumors on Bleeding Cool, but its confirmed that this is a soft prequel to the Alien quartet of films. Damon Lindelof (co-creator of Lost) hosted the Prometheus panel, and had this to say (as reported by the Guardian):

“It [Prometheus] covers a vast expanse of time, past, present and future,” he said. “It doesn’t take place on Earth in any real significant way. The way we’re exploring the future is away from Earth and [asking] what are people like now? What have they gone through and what are they thinking of?

“Space exploration in the future is going to evolve into this idea that it’s not just about going out there and finding planets to build colonies. It also has this inherent idea that the further we go out, the more we learn about ourselves. The characters in this movie are preoccupied by the idea: what are our origins?”

Sounds intriguing.

And just to wrap everything up…..

I know, I know…. it’s a guilty pleasure that I’m not guilty about at all. Can’t wait for the second half of Season 4.

See you soon.

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In the middle of all of this tumult, we’re here to simplify things. The analysis of the digital initiative can wait for another day, as can any scorecards rating winners and losers within DC Comics. At the end of the day, the only thing we care about are good books. In that spirit, Chris and Jamaal have pored over press releases and early solicits to select the 17 books that may be worth picking up in September.

1) Action Comics (Grant Morrison, Rags Morales)
JAMAAL: If this was just All-Star Superman: The Ongoing, I’d be a little disappointed. But when Grant says that he wants “to try and create a new language for comics, a new kind of philosophy, a new kind of approach to storytelling that will do things that only comics can do and that even movies can’t match up with”, it’s like falling in love all over again.

CHRIS: Morrison’s still in “Don’t Ask! Just Buy It!” territory for me, but it’s still nice to hear that he wants to do new things with the character, not just relive the glory of JLA/Superman 2000/All-Star Superman. If anyone else was at the helm of what sounds like a thorough overhaul of one of the most If It Ain’t Broke superhero concepts, I’d be more skeptical. As it is, I’m only moderately cautious in my optimism.

2) Animal Man (Jeff Lemire, Travel Foreman)
JAMAAL: This is a must buy for me, mostly because Jeff Lemire is attached to this project. I’ve become an unabashed fan of Lemire’s work after reading the first two and a half volumes of his Sweet Tooth series. I like his writing so much that I even picked up a few issues of his run on Superboy. Yeah, that’s right, Superboy. Lemire’s flair for dark comedy and satire (see Sweet Tooth again) give me some hope that he will find a way to subvert the conventional sounding promotional language. I was a fan of the Animal Man title in the 80’s and ‘90’s, and always thought it was at its best when it managed to be both absurd and profound. If Lemire can bring a similar tone to his run, I’ll be on board for the long haul. My feelings about Travel Foreman are more mixed. I thoroughly enjoyed his work on the Ares: God of War limited series, but was less enthused with his work on Immortal Iron Fist (to be fair, he was replacing David Aja). I’m willing to give him a chance.

CHRIS: I still need to give Sweet Tooth a real shot, but Lemire is someone who’s work I’ve enjoyed in the past on Essex County and The Nobody . I think Animal Man is a character who can benefit from this “Dark” line’s return to the 1980s proto-Vertigo aesthetics. He’s never worked as a straightforward superhero, and going full “dark fantasy” towards the end of his first series was also a failure. Lemire seems like a solid candidate to hit that sweet spot. The problem is, what do you do with a character whose only landmark story is an unrepeatable writerly trick? It was a brilliant one, but Animal Man’s been struggling for a second act for over twenty years. Here’s hoping Lemire is the one to give him one.

3) Batman (Scott Snyder, Greg M Capullo)
JAMAAL: I’ve enjoyed Snyder’s run on Detective. He’s one of the few writers in the Batman group with an interesting spin on the “student becomes the master” status quo (Dick Grayson as Batman). He wrote a Dick Grayson who was competent, but approached crime fighting in a way that was easily distinguishable from his mentor. Even though I’ll probably pick up a few issues of the reboot, I’ll miss reading Batman stories with a protagonist who’s not omnicompetent or a walking metaphor burdened with layers of symbolic meaning, but a capable hero. Snyder’s Batman wasn’t the greatest fighter that ever lived and was a more compelling character for it. Im sure that Snyder can incorporate elements of his pre-reboot run into this series – Batman’s an exceptionally malleable property – but there’s nothing like following the story of someone who’s maturing into their job.

CHRIS: I was late to the Snyder Detective party, but enjoyed the Black Mirror arc when I read it recently. David Uzumeri’s been filling me in on Snyder’s big “Gates of Gotham” story, and I don’t know if the world needs another “Epic Secret History of Gotham” mystery hot on the heels of Morrison’s Return of Bruce Wayne, but it’s unfair to dismiss Snyder just because something’s been done before with a seventy year old character. Greg Capullo is an odd choice here, as I’m not aware of anything he’s done in the past decade-plus besides sort-of ape Todd McFarlane on Spawn . The cover to the first issue looks nice enough, and it’s nice to see Professor Pyg pop up as an enduring member of the Rogues’ Gallery. That question-mark-mohawked Riddler, though…

4) Batman, Inc. (Grant Morrison, Chris Burnham)
JAMAAL: The classic series continues… even though it feels less central to the Bat mythos than before, kind of a soft demotion. I’m just in it for a good story, so I’m still good.

CHRIS: This and Doom Patrol were two of the only mainline DCU books I was reading prior to this revamp, so it’s nice to see at least one of them make it through to the other side, even if it’s not until 2012.

5) Batwoman (JH Williams III, Haden Blackman, Amy Reeder)
JAMAAL: I love JH Williams, but I’ll believe that the Detox of superhero comics is coming out when I see it on store shelves. If it does come out, I’d be interested to see how Williams evolves as a writer over the coming months. I’m not familiar with Blackman or Reeder at all, but I’ll give them a shot.

CHRIS: Last month marked the fifth anniversary of all that mainstream media buzz DC received about their new lesbian Batwoman. I wonder who decided that September 2011 was the perfect time to capitalize on that attention, alongside fifty-one other books. I’m sure they’ll get some stories about this, The First Ongoing Series from Marvel or DC Which Stars a Lesbian As the Sole Lead and Also Has The Name of the Lesbian as Its Title and Isn’t Catwoman When Holly Robinson Was Catwoman for a Couple Arcs. Joking aside, I’m looking forward to finally reading this, but it would’ve been more exciting had DC struck when the iron was even remotely hot.

6) Demon Knights (Paul Cornell, Diogenes Neves)
JAMAAL: I’m still undecided about Paul Cornell. On one hand, I loved his work on Wisdom, Captain Britain and MI:13, and Black Widow: Deadly Origin. His run on Action Comics was poised to be a breath of fresh air into a moribund franchise. Unfortunately, my interest waned after the first few issues – Action quickly became a predictable (and slightly repetitive) tour of the “dark side” of the DCU. I was completely unengaged with his Knight & Squire miniseries. With all that said, I’m inclined to give Cornell another shot, especially on a supernatural title that isn’t embedded in the present-day DCU. Cornell’s unique approach to supernatural stories (see Wisdom, Captain Britain) and his talent for writing group books (see Captain Britain) could be a perfect fit for the book. In an interview with Newsarama, Cornell described this title as his opportunity to “develop a whole new world”, and I’m looking forward to see if he can pull it off. I loved Diogenes Neves’s work on the first two arcs of New Mutants, and think he can really shine on this series. Necrosha was a terrible crossover, but Neves did an effective job at communicating the sense of horror, fear and urgency felt by the characters. I think he’d be great on a supernatural action series like this. I’m also a sucker for series that have something to do with King Arthur (I own a copy of Camelot 3000).

CHRIS: I only know Diogenes Neves from paging through JT Krul’s Green Arrow. It would be cruel to judge him based on this, but his art worked fine in service of a terrible, terrible story. I haven’t been sold on any of Cornell’s DCU work, and I don’t share Jamaal’s enthusiasm for Arthurian legend, but I’m still willing to give this book a shot. That’s how much I liked Captain Britain , and that’s how much I’d like DC to branch out a bit.

7) Flash (Francis Manapul)
JAMAAL: I liked Manapul’s art on Johns’s last stab at Flash (it would have been a sublime silent comic book), but I have no idea if he can write a comic book. I have next to no interest in Flash qua Flash, so I think I’ll wait to hear more before trying this one out. If Manapul’s writing is half as creative as his visual choices, this could be an interesting book.

CHRIS: For me, Manapul said all the right things about his take on the character in this interview back when he started that Johns run, and hopefully this enthusiasm and fun can translate into his comics writing. I think the Flash can be the source of lots of fun superhero stories, so long as it’s more about The Fastest Man Alive solving problems while facing off against a bunch of weird science villains. As soon as it gets into overly-complicated family lineages and Back to the Future ripoffs and Negative Speed Force nonsense, I zone out. Hopefully Manapul will stick with the former.

8) Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE (Jeff Lemire, Alberto Ponticelli)
JAMAAL: One of my favorite creators at DC working on one of the best new DC characters from the last decade. It’s a no-brainer, especially if you add Andrea Ponticelli, who did a brilliant job on the Unknown Soldier series. On a side note, I love the idea of fully integrating concepts like the Super Human Advanced Defense Executive (SHADE) into the DCU. I know SHADE was technically part of the DCU since Seven Soldiers, but this series places the agency in the forefront. I’ve always thought that DC would be best served by positioning its super hero universe as a “fantastical place where anything can happen” in contrast to Marvel’s “heightened world outside your window” approach, and series like Frankenstein, Stormwatch and Sgt. Rock give me some hope that DC is moving in that direction.

CHRIS: I’ve seen some people write this book off as “Hellboy in the DCU”. I don’t see any problem with that at all. Frankenstein is probably the easiest sell of all of the Seven Soldiers revamps, but I hope this signals some more returns on the horizon.

9) Grifter (Nathan Edmondson, CAFU)
JAMAAL: Grifter was my favorite character from Wildstorm’s WildCATS series, particularly during the Joe Casey and Alan Moore runs, and it’s cool to see him finally debut in the DCU. Unfortunately, I think the Moore-Casey incarnation of the character – when he became a redundant merc/black ops agent – will be one of the few regrettable casualties of the “accessible” relaunch. I know this sounds crazy, but it almost felt like Moore/Casey’s take on Grifter anticipated the kinds of debates about structural unemployment and zero productivity workers that we’re having during this endless recession. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Anyway, Edmondson’s Grifter. Edmondson displayed a gift for clever dialogue and middlebrow spy drama with Who is Jake Ellis?, so this might be fun. Hopefully, he makes me forget that this pitch reads like an edgy take on “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s They Live. I hated T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (listen to our podcast for more on why Nick Spencer should find another line of work), but CAFU and BIT’s art was keen.

CHRIS: I haven’t really seen anything from Edmondson or CAFU, but frankly a DC version of Piper’s They Live character Nada — washed up and paranoid and living in a Daemonite Haunted World — could line up nicely with some of those interpretations of Grifter you mentioned, not to mention Morrison’s abortive run with the character. Just so long as his backalley fistfight with Holocaust/Keith David doesn’t end up taking four issues in a scene written for the trade.

10) Justice League (Geoff Johns, Jim Lee)
JAMAAL: I’m going to pick up the first few issues to see Johns’ approach to the JLA as iconic brand (if only so that I have material for future debates with David Uzumeri). I’m also legitimately interested in reading a book drawn by Jim Lee for at least a couple of issues.

CHRIS: I’m interested to see if we’ll actually be able to read a book drawn by Jim Lee for more than a couple of issues. This is one of the clearest “wins” for the New DC, as the Justice League book has been a pit of despair ever since its relaunch with Brad Meltzer. When the only memorable thing produced by five years of a Flagship Title are:

• An Eisner win for an issue dedicated to the proposition that Red Arrow and Vixen do not understand the concept of gravity
• What appeared to be an experiment about just how light-skinned you can make Vixen before people complain
• Red Arrow getting his armed ripped off leading to him freebasing heroin off an iPad and attacking Batman with a cat’s corpse

you know you’ve fucked up. One thing I’m genuinely curious about is how they fit Cyborg into the team. It certainly seems as if they’re going to rejigger history so that Cyborg is a JLA Member Since Way Back, which begs the question: Why? I know that a whole generation of fans and creators have affection for the Wolfman/Perez Titans, and apparently Johns thinks Cyborg has “untapped potential”, but couldn’t that be better served trying to resurrect Teen Titans, another would-be-flagship that has endured a rough half-decade? To be clear, this isn’t an argument against blackifying the Justice League: far from it. I’d rather have John Stewart on the team than Hal Jordan, but I know that isn’t happening. But if we’re going to insert a hero of color into the original Justice League, why Cyborg?

You’ve got Mister Terrific in limbo with the apparent phasing out of the Justice Society. Why not slot him in? DC has enough faith in him to give him his own series, and you could leave his whole backstory intact, just established he joined a different team after taking up some old dude’s mantle. Bruce Wayne/Michael Holt is a better character dynamic than anything I can think of with Cyborg and a Leaguer.

Why not Icon? I know his power-set and appearance are pretty close to Superman’s, but the same could be said for the Martian Manhunter, and he worked on the Big Seven. For that matter, why not Hardware? You get all of the technical angles you get with Cyborg, a cleaner set of retcons, and the bonus of Hardware having a discernible personality! I suppose these might be on shaky ground depending on the nature of the Milestone licensing deal, but I’d still like to see someone make use of the characters while they have them.

Why not Black Lightning? He’s actually got a history of being part of the League. Is it because his name has “Black” in it? I know that’s treated like a corny dumb joke, but can’t you just point to Black Adam, Black Alice, Black Canary, Black Condor, Blackfire, Black Hand, Black Mask, Black Orchid, Black Lanterns, Blackhawks, the Black Glove, the Black Casebook? It’s a shame to throw Jefferson Pierce under the bus because Seanbaby likes to makes jokes.

Why not Bloodwynd? He was in the Death of Superman and that book sold MILLIONS? Why not the Manhattan Guardian? Why not Flippa Dippa? Why Cyborg? Oh well. At least it’s not Freight Train.

11) Justice League Dark (Peter Milligan, Mikel M Janin)
JAMAAL: This has some potential, especially if one disregards the title. The last time I read Milligan on a quirky team book, it was X-Force/X-Statix. I’ve wanted to read a book about DCU John Constantine investigating mysteries with Madame Xanadu and Zatanna since Moore’s run on Swamp Thing (this would be perfect if Baron Winter made an appearance or two). At first, I was concerned that this would be Nightstalkers redux, but I had forgotten that DC’s always done a better job than Marvel of integrating elements of horror and the supernatural into its universe.

CHRIS: Unfortunately, the actual last time Milligan was assigned a quirky team book, it was Infinity Inc. That was a book with some interesting ideas, but suffered from a glacial pace and the fact that DC struck when the 52 iron had cooled down and turned rock solid. That said, Milligan is capable of greatness, and his ongoing run on Hellblazer has been very enjoyable. Hopefully that transfers over to a swinging single seldom-swearing John Constantine and company.

12) Legion of Superheroes (Paul Levitz, Francis Portela) | Legion Lost (Fabian Nicieza, Pete Woods)
JAMAAL: I was a big Legion fan during Paul Levitz’ first run in the 80’s and Keith Giffen and Tom/Mary Beirbaum’s controversial “5 Years Later” run in the early-mid ‘90s, so I’m always intrigued by new Legion-related announcements. Levitz’s recent run on the Legion over the last year has been extremely entertaining. I’m a bit concerned that these two titles may suffer from being relaunched without a change in the status quo, especially since the Legion’s always had a reputation for being inaccessible. I’m iffy on Fabian, but I’ll read an issue or two for Pete Woods, whose work I loved on Action Comics .

CHRIS: I’ve tried several times, but could never get into Legion, not even when my guy Giffen gave it the big relaunch with the Five Years Later storyline. It probably didn’t help that I tried reading that a few years after the fact when it was already clear that Giffen was on his way out and the Powers That Be were backpedalling furiously. And as much as the Legion’s bad rap has been that it’s “inaccessible”, I think it’s also been hurt by the fact that it’s off in its own little corner, where it doesn’t “matter” to hardcore DCU fans. I’m guessing Legion Lost is an attempt to remedy that, though this line of thinking leads to madness, death, and Countdown .

13) Static Shock (John Rozum, Scott McDaniel)
JAMAAL: It’s good to see a monthly Static Shock book on the stands, even though I’ve probably aged out of the target demographic. I’m too old to read any book featuring a teenage protagonist. I liked Rozum’s writing on Xombi, but it didn’t make me want to read him on a teen superhero book .

CHRIS: I’m cautiously optimistic about this, but I may have the opposite problem as Jamaal in that I want this to be FANTASTIC. I was a big fan of the original Milestone line, and basically kept my foot in superhero comics at a time where just about everything else was pushing me out. That youthful devotion led me to buy some really dubious comics — Ivan Velez on Eradicator and Abominations, Rozum on X-Files , Bob Washington III slogging through Birthquake-era Valiant titles — so I hope this isn’t another trip down that road. It shouldn’t be, but seemingly every decision DC has made since licensing Milestone has been wrongheaded. Static was a book with a strong supporting cast in and around Dakota — his parents and sister, his high school classmates, all the other Bang Babies coping with their powers — and in the first issue of his new series, a “mysterious tragedy” forces his family to move to New York? I hope they aren’t killing his mom off to make it “more like the cartoon”, but that’s my guess. I guess Blue Beetle has the “superhero with two living, loving parents” market cornered.

14) Stormwatch (Paul Cornell, Miguel Sepulveda)
JAMAAL: I’m a little intrigued by this spin on the Stormwatch concept – instead of a UN sanctioned global super team, we get a secretive strike force of powerhouses that (as implied by the solicits) will be a central player in the new DCU. It’s a fitting update for a post-bipolar world characterized by unconventional conflict between states and nonstate actors. I’d be interested to know whether any elements of the previous incarnations of Stormwatch/Authority (‘widescreen’ action-adventure storytelling, post-modern/morally ambiguous JLA) survive in the current series. I know Cornell recently mentioned that he and Sepulveda wouldn’t be ‘confined’ by the so-called “Wildstorm style”, but he seems interested in some of the ‘edgier’ elements of the prior runs and the scope of the story may lend itself to ‘widescreen’ visuals. I grew to enjoy Miguel Sepulveda’s art after the first two issues of the Thanos Imperative, particularly his inventive action sequences, and think he’s a great fit for the series.

CHRIS: This sounds more like a take on the Authority concept than the Stormwatch one, really. The solicitations indicate one of the team members will be Adam-One, the leader of the archetypal heroes from Wonderworld that showed up almost in passing during Morrison’s JLA, a contemporary to the original Authority. Then again, Miguel Sepulveda is calling Adam-One a “new character” in an interview, so who knows? The solicit text also indicates that the inciting event of this title will spin out of Superman #1, despite being scheduled three weeks before that book ships, so maybe we should take everything with a grain of salt. I will say this sounds more in line with some of the Cornell books I’ve enjoyed than Demon Knights .

15) Suicide Squad (Adam Glass, Marco N Rudy)
CHRIS: This one might be a longshot, but if you look beyond the hideous character redesigns on the cover, this book has potential. The Suicide Squad/Dirty Dozen concept is a great one for a superhero universe, and was great run in its original John Ostrander run. It’s a shame that the only time since then that it’s worked is when it’s called Thunderbolts, but I’m happy to see it given another shot. While I’m not too familiar with Adam Glass, he co-wrote Luke Cage Noir, which pleasantly surprised all of us, and demonstrated an all-too-rare skill in comics of understanding that criminal morality has gradations between “I must uphold the law” and “TIME TO DO SOME CRIMES BECAUSE I LOVE TO COMMIT CRIMES”, something that’s vital to a book like Suicide Squad. On art we have Marco Rudy, who still has a bit too much JH Williams III worship in him. Though as far as slavish devotion goes, that’s a fine choice. Hopefully Rudy continues to evolve — he’s only a couple dozen issues into his career! — and keeps up a regular schedule, and Glass provides entertaining scripts.

JAMAAL: I’m not as optimistic about this one, particularly since it’s so difficult to portray a morally ambiguous world in mainstream superhero comics on a sustained basis. I enjoyed Glass’ writing on the Luke Cage Noir mini, but I’m skeptical that he’ll be given the room to tell a story with that tone and maturity level in the mainstream DCU. And it’s really hard to ignore the terrible Harlequin redesign.

16) Swamp Thing (Scott Snyder, Yannick Paquette)
JAMAAL: There’s a better than average chance that this will be a critical and commercial success. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Scott Snyder’s exploration of the American character and creation myth through the lens of the vampire subgenre in American Vampire. It’d be interesting to see if Snyder brings a similar approach to Swamp Thing. On the other hand… I have no interest in reading more Swamp Thing books. I was a huge fan of Swamp Thing books in the 1980′s and ’90′s. Alan Moore and Rick Veitch’s respective runs on the book were formative childhood experiences. I enjoyed the straightlaced horror of Collins’ brief run on the book, and thought Morrison’s deconstruction of Moore’s run was a lot of fun. Even though I love serial storytelling and the eternal superhero narrative, I’m a firm believer in the idea that when some stories end, they don’t necessarily need to be revisited. Like Gaiman’s Sandman, Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, Ennis’s Preacher or…Ennis’s Punisher (controversy!). I know that’s not fair, but I’ve got to be honest about this. Not to mention the fact that the reintroduction of Swamp Thing in Brightest Day was awful and the solicits I’ve seen so far look kind of dumb.

CHRIS: I have to wonder how much interest the general populace has in another Swamp Thing story. I’m not that familiar with Snyder’s work — I read a few issues of Detective Comics I was handed, and thought they were Perfectly Acceptable Superhero Work — but people seem to dig him. I remember really enjoying Mark Millar’s lengthy run on Swamp Thing in the dying days of that run (can you believe ST ran 170 issues? I feel like hitting 50 issues is a rare diamond in this day and age) but I seemed to be in the minority, and attempted relaunches under Brian K Vaughn and Joshua Dysart were met with early, ignoble deaths. Do people really want or need new Swamp Thing stories any more than they want another Prez revamp? Or am I being a total hypocrite asking this while I enjoy the ninth major run of a writer riffing on a supporting character from that same run?

17) Wonder Woman (Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang)
JAMAAL: I’ve cared about the Wonder Woman title exactly two times – the post-Crisis relaunch helmed by George Perez, and Greg Rucka’s 2003-2006 run. After taking a look at the cover for Wonder Woman #1, this might be the third. I love everything Cliff Chiang works on. I’ve always had a strong response to Brian Azzarello’s writing – either I love it or it feels like a trainwreck. I loved Lex Luthor: Man of Steel and Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality, but hated his Cage miniseries and Loveless. As far as 100 Bullets goes, I loathed the first two trades, but I’ll give him a pass on that because everyone else I know (including a handful whose opinions I respect ;)) loves the series. I suspect that I’ll either love or hate this series, with nothing in-between.

CHRIS: I liked but did not love 100 Bullets , so I don’t know what that means for Jamaal’s respect for me. I’ve also never cared about Wonder Woman’s book, but I’m still willing to give this a shot because of the creators. Azzarello seems like a fresh voice, even though he already wrote Superman for a year, is writing a Flashpoint tie-in right now, and has been working irregularly in the DCU for the better part of a decade. He’s not a Superhero Guy though, and I trust that if nothing else, he’s going to do something interesting with the character. And he consistently works with some great artists: Chiang is no exception.

Now granted, the fact that we are at best cautiously optimistic about one third of the DC “New 52″ is not a great level of enthusiasm. But it’s still more books than either of us had any interest in earlier in the year. Is the DC line improved by this reshuffle? Will the renumbering matter? The digital initiative? We’ll take a look at that in our next post.

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“The middle of Beijing, it looks like.”

“Didn’t work. Where are these reinforcements you were telling me about?”

“We all did.”

“I figure I’m clear either way.”

“What the hell is she talking about? That’s not the Titania I’ve dealt with before–”

And lest you think this is some arty minimalist dialogue comic, no: our titular hero’s input is outstripped by that of Sharon Carter, Maria Hill, Steve Rogers, Sun Wukong, Prince of Orphans, Fat Cobra, Iron Fist, Titania, the Absorbing Man, and Dr. Strange. Rhodes gets about as much dialogue as an unnamed demon working for the tailless Monkey King. War Machine is just along for the ride, and this book could have very easily existed without him in it at all. Rough going for a character who recently had one book canceled out from beneath him in twelve misses, and whose current book is just barely above the Comic Book Mendoza Line of 20,000 copies sold monthly.

Still, let’s look on the bright side! Marvel doesn’t share its Distinguished Competition’s marketing tactic for summer movies. It could be worse! The cover to this issue could’ve looked like this:

Thank Heaven for small favors!

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But not everyone at DC got the memo about holding off on Superbook info until Friday — someone at DC’s Source Blog uploaded some of the Super #1 covers this morning. They were at these addresses, and presumably will be again in 24 hours or so:

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/files/2011/06/sm_cv1.jpg

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/files/2011/06/sg_cv1.jpg

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/files/2011/06/sb_cv1.jpg

Enterprising fans quickly discovered these images, and within minutes they were all over Twitter, tumblr, message boards, etc. Within a few more minutes, someone at DC realized their error. An hour or so later, these images appeared watermarked as part of a certain site’s EXCLUSIVE SCOOP!

Well shucks, why should one guy get to have all that fun?

Remember, you saw these covers FIRST at Funnybook Babylon! Unless you saw them the hundreds of other places they were previously posted!

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On the subject of the oft-delayed Batwoman #1:

It’s very important in several different ways [...] this is also the first time that we have a superhero title from a major publisher that features a lesbian protagonist.

You know, except for this lesbian Batwoman being the star of Detective Comics in 2009-2010. Or Rene Montoya being a main protagonist in Gotham Central, 52, The Crime Bible, and Final Crisis Revelations from 2003-2010. Or Holly Robinson taking the title role in Catwoman in 2006. Or Maggie Sawyer taking center stage in the 1994 mini-series Metropolis S.C.U. That’s not even counting team books: X-Men Legacy, Darkhold, Young Heroes in Love, Runaways, New Mutants, Dark Avengers, Shadow Cabinet, Heroes, Blood Syndicate, Legion of Super Heroes, Guardians of the Galaxy all featured (or feature currently) lesbians in their ensemble.

This isn’t even the first time DC has published a comic that featured this specific lesbian protagonist. We are into Year Five of DC touting Batwoman as their First Lesbian Superhero Ever. I understand that the statement “this is the first time that DC Comics has published an ongoing series with the name of a specifically lesbian — not LGBT, we’re talking strictly straight up lesbians here — character in the title where the titular lesbian is the titular character starting with the first issue” is not as attention grabbing. Sometimes you need to add a little razzle-dazzle to the press releases. But this?

In the first BATMAN #1 since 1930, New York Times bestselling writer Scott Snyder teams up with superstar artist Greg Capullo in his DC Comics debut!

I’ll allow the “first BATMAN #1″ thing since presumably they’re talking a book explicitly called Batman, thus disqualifying All-Star Batman & Robin #1, Batman & Robin #1, Batman Confidential #1, Batman: The Dark Knight #1, Batman Incorporated #1, Batman & the Outsiders #1 or Batman: Streets of Gotham #1,all of which have been Batman #1s in the past five years. And that’s not even counting the several dozen Batman Is In Some Sort of Mini-Series #1s that have been released in that same timespan. That’s a pedantic complaint, though I do remember them creatively touting Legends of the Dark Knight #1 as “THE FIRST NEW “SOLO” BATMAN BOOK SINCE 1940!” so that they could conveniently ignore #1s like Batman Family and Batman & the Outsiders.

And that’s the thing: Batman #1 came out in 1940. DC’s big press release says 1930. It’s a simple typo, but when you’re trying to drum up excitement about a historical event in the history of your very historical and famous superhero property, figuring out things like “how long has he been around?” seems like a good thing to get right.

Go check the first quote’s link: IGN.com apparently did their own factchecking and correctly say that the last Batman #1 was in 1940. But DC’s official blog still has the wrong year. It’s too bad they disabled comments, otherwise someone might have pointed this out to them!

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We’re taking a look at the Eisner nominees, starting with Nick Spencer. We read Morning Glories and Jimmy Olsen and… we apologize to his fans in advance.

Admittedly, we’ve been harsh to early works by creators like Jason Aaron, Matt Fraction and Jonathan Hickman before, and later came around to appreciating their talent. Why is this a pattern? We discuss that, pick apart Jimmy Olsen’s musical taste, try to remember what Rules of Engagement was, and much, much more!

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