S.H.I.E.L.D. #3 - “The Theory of Eternal Life” (Jonathan Hickman, Dustin Weaver, with colors by Christina Strain and Justin Ponsor; Marvel Comics) I’m starting to feel like I can post the same review for this title once every two months. I love Hickman’s ambition and his eagerness to both embrace and subvert classic Marvel themes. Dustin Weaver’s art seems to improve with each issue, and despite some small problems in the first issue, Christina Strain has done a wonderful job. This issue introduces our villain, the man who has perverted the Brotherhood of the Shield:  Sir Isaac Newton. Hickman fills in more of the gaps in early Marvel/S.H.I.E.L.D. history (complete with a battle between Galileo and Galactus(!)) while offering the reader a fun-house mirror reflection of a traditional Marvel villain origin story.

Over the last two issues, I’ve been most interested in watching Hickman lay the groundwork for a secret history of the Marvel universe, but for the first time, I think I’m more interested in his efforts to effectively integrate historical figures into a superhero universe - how does one transform a person from a famous mathematician and physicist (described by some as the greatest genius that ever lived) into a Marvel supervillain? The secret history is still fascinating, as we get some hints about how S.H.I.E.L.D. was corrupted, why the Dark Ages happened in the MU, but the compelling part is watching Hickman “sprinkle [his] Jack Kirby/Stan Lee fairy dust” over these famous polymaths. Hickman fully embraces the weirdness… hell, the flat-out silliness that lies at the foundation of the Marvel Universe. This issue is an homage to the pulpy genre fiction that lies at the core of modern superhero comic, complete with a melodramatic (caped!) villain who explains his motivations in a lengthy didactic monologue to a restrained captive. Read this comic and tell me that Hickman’s Newton isn’t an Enlightenment version of Dr. Doom.

I was initially bothered by the historical inaccuracies — the fall of the Umayyad caliphate marked the beginning of the “Islamic Golden Age”, not the “darkest of ages”– but as I read the book a second time, those details became less important. After all, this is a story from the perspective of the villain, a character who embodies the best and worst of the Enlightenment that he inspired. Hickman casts Newton as a larger-than-life figure, both the brilliant polymath that we are familiar with and a brutal man who stands for the evils of colonialism and early imperialism (as Doom himself stands for post-WWII totalitarian states and the Red Skull stands for fascism). This is most evident in the one emotionally affecting scene of the book, where Newton beds Morda, the Deviant woman.

This scene reflects a uniquely Marvel take on imperialism/colonialism, with the Deviants standing in for ancient/indigenous culture. Isaac Newton seduces the native woman under false pretenses to gain access to the secrets of her culture - evincing awe while harboring feelings of disgust and superiority to her people. Newton was a step away from giving the Deviants blankets infected with smallpox.

Despite the beauty of these brief scenes, this book still leaves me a little cold. Weaver, Strain and Ponsor are still doing some breathtaking work - I particularly love the transition between the scenes in Italy and Iraq and the page below, which is eerily reminiscent of a static filled vintage instructional video.

I can’t deny that this book is formally brilliant. I love Hickman’s commentary on the Marvel Universe and his love of embedded narratives, particularly in the Galileo scenes: Newton tells Nostradamus a story in 1953 about Galileo in which Galileo tells a story in 1582 about Al-Azdi in 750 completed by the contemporary Newton. I can’t wait to find out whether my suspicion that Newton is Leonid’s father is proven correct (see Leonid’s vision in the last issue), and what the true meaning is of Nostradamus’ vision, and the link between S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hickman’s “Four Cities” arc in Fantastic Four. But the flaws are all still there. The dialogue is still stiff and overly portentous. The characters are flat archetypes, and I hope that Hickman plans to flesh them out a bit more in coming issues. I think it’s fine for a writer to use archetypal characters that speak in heightened language if s/he thinks the story demands it, but any character in a story, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, should be rich and fully realized. Every single character. Hickman has Newton say all the right things, but it all feels empty. What motivates Isaac Newton? What are the stakes of this coming conflict for him? What was it that he believed, that made him so different, so unique? I can only hold out hope that Hickman will explore that more in forthcoming issues. For now, I’d say wait for the trade if you’re not already buying this.

Shadowland: Power Man #1 (Fred van Lente, Mahmud Asrar; Marvel Comics) In a perfect world, mainstream superhero titles would be published in a hefty trade paperback format on a quarterly or biannual basis. I’ve always maintained that the best way to read some of my favorite writers, from Grant Morrison and Ed Brubaker to Brian Michael Bendis and Paul Cornell is arc by arc. I find most single issues frustrating, and the experience is akin to having a prose book pulled out of my hands just as I complete a chapter. In this first issue of Power Man, Fred van Lente proves me wrong with a near-perfect 30 page comic. It’s an old-school first issue that introduces the protagonist and his supporting cast, sets the stage for some early challenges, and hints at an intriguing mystery. Van Lente’s sharp dialogue, keen wit and excellent sense of pace transform a book that could have been an obvious update of the “Hero for Hire” theme into something special. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still interested in seeing how Van Lente plays with the moral dilemma faced by Victor, but I was struck by how often I smiled while reading this book. I would like for this book to be more specific to the community and neighborhood that it depicts, but that’s a minor quibble. A clever wit goes a long way.

Thunderbolts #147 (Jeff Parker, Kev Walker; Marvel Comics) - This is quickly becoming my favorite book at Marvel. David said all there is to say about Luke Cage, but let’s talk about John Walker. Walker was introduced by Mark Gruenwald in his classic Captain America run as a morally compromised wannabe patriot. This was a guy who paid a villain to give him powers and hired some buddies to stage superhero battles (who he later killed in a fit of psychotic rage). Gruenwald used the character to satirize the American Right during the Reagan era (particularly in the classic “Captain America No More” arc), and Walker’s been the token blowhard conservative ever since. As readers of the Avengers corner of Marvel know, he later joined Dan Slott’s version of the Mighty Avengers (don’t bother reading) and was crippled during Parkers’ contribution to the Siege crossover. Parker’s used Walker sparingly throughout the first few issues of his run, mostly to nod at his toughness or authoritarian streak. One thing that stuck with me in an earlier issue was when we saw Walker refuse prosthetics, a commonplace interaction in the real world that must be rare in a Marvel universe filled with advanced technology. The message - Walker had learned his lesson. No more shortcuts. Parker continues the theme this issue with the soon to be classic confrontation between Walker and escaping prisoners. Parker could have had Walker call for help, or have a weapon. Instead we see one man against many. No weapons. No magic. One leg.

The best part of this scene? That third panel, where Walker wavers, just a little. In that moment, you’re reminded that this confrontation could have, should have gone the other way. Of how much will it took to stand straight on one leg.

Oh, and I can’t forget Kev Walker. His linework is unique, dynamic and clear. His action scenes improve with each issue. What I love most about Walker’s art is how he evokes a clear sense of specific place, particularly in the scenes on the Raft. He transforms the prison into a character in its own right, a source of sublimated tension for the heroes. We’re all familiar with the role of prisons in the superhero narrative. Within the story, they stand for the failure of civil authorities to effectively manage or contain threats. For the reader, prison reminds you of the endless nature of these comics. Watching Lex Luthor carted off to jail reminds you that the escape is inevitable. In Thunderbolts, the Raft, designed to hold the worst of Marvel’s villains, is intended to fly in the face of that age-old theme, and Walker seamlessly blends traditional and modern ideas about “supermax” prisons into its design. Walker’s Raft features the steep, craggy bluffs we associate with Alcatraz, classic holding pens from middle of the century prisons and ultramodern force fields and security cameras. This allows him to manipulate the tone and the atmosphere of the book without moving location, sometimes even on a single page.

Brief Recommendations

Incredible Hulk #611 (Greg Pak, Paul Pelletier; Marvel) Greg Pak’s writing on the Hulk is just breathtaking. I was a big fan of Peter David’s work on the character (he was the only one who really got the Hulk to work on a monthly basis), but Planet Hulk/World War Hulk followed by Pak’s work on this title surpasses it.

Daytripper #9 (of 10) (Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba; Vertigo/DC) Go buy this now.

Power Girl v2 #15 (Judd Winick, Sami Basri; DC Comics) This is surprisingly good.

The Left Bank Gang (Jason, Fantagraphics Books) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce as cartoonists that pull a heist. Go read this now.

Miscellany

Black Bolt and Gorgon of the Inhumans by Eric Canete.

Brightest Day is still terrible, but this is a great image by Ryan Sook. Click through for the larger image. h/t DC Universe: The Source.

Tucker Stone and David Brothers collaborated for a four part series of articles on 4th Letter! and The Factual Opinion analyzing Don McGregor, Billy Graham and Klaus Janson’s Panther’s Rage story in Jungle Action.

The variant cover to Vertigo’s American Vampire #6. This is an absolutely gorgeous image. Rafael Grampa’s work never disappoints.

Via Mike Lynch and Mike Thibault, a 1932 era nightclub map of Harlem by E. Simms Campbell, an African American cartoonist known for his work with Ebony Magazine. Click through for a more detailed view.

Links of the Week

• Frank Miller’s wack Gucci ad, featuring Chris Evans and Evan Rachel Wood has surfaced. h/t The Beat.
• Mike Dorf of Dorf on Law explores legal positivism and the “right answers” thesis in a column providing advice to 1st year law students.
• James Kwak on management consulting myths.
• Variety has a great piece on how Netflix is changing the American film industry.
• Sometimes internet memes are good. Here’s F*ck You, the new track by Cee-Lo Green.
• Angela at Post Bourgie explains how the Boondocks fell off.
• via Gawker, a trailer for AMC’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Looks pretty good.
• Steven Shapin of the London Review of Books tells us why French food (professionally made in France) fell off in a review of Michael Steinberger’s Au Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine. Once I actually get to France, I’ll be sure to weigh in. :)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic Monthly entered the “phantom zone” to complete a book, and has mostly handed his blog over to a dream team of creative people and public intellectuals. Here are some highlights: Cynic on the popularity of fraternal groups in the black community; Hua Hsu on Inception and memory palaces; the art of the leak, Brendan Koerner on supply-side solutions to the suicide rate, the impact of an artists’ personal behavior on ones’ admiration for their work; Ricardo Gutierrez with amazing mixes (1, 2) and comments on audio engineering; Sara Mayeux on white privilege, stop and frisk, what we talk about when we talk about immigration (and part 2),and how laypersons can learn more about the criminal justice system; G.D. of Post Bourgie on Donovan McNabb; Alyssa Rosenberg on music; Ayelet Waldman on incarceration; Mark Kleiman on drug policy, criminal justice, early gangbanger fiction , incentive management and classified information; Andy Hall on the Civil War; and Mr. Len on being a fan. Read them all, they’re brilliant.

Next week (or soon): Fantastic Four, Batman, Black Widow, Superman/Batman and Bulletproof Coffin!

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Wolverine Origins #50 by Daniel Way & Will Conrad (Marvel Comics)
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni Press)

We’ve talked about Scott Pilgrim before, particularly in FBBP #96. Be forewarned, we follow up on some of the discussions from that podcast, not to mention spoiling the crap out of the entire series.

There’s been less FBB talk about Daken (aka Daniel Kenneth Way), but Jamaal has been reading the book all along, and shares his thoughts on the evolution of both Da*Ken*s. We know Daken’s taken on The World, but does he Get it Together? Is this either young man’s actual Finest Hour? Find out this week!

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“Big Time” sees Dan Slott take over as sole Amazing writer, and the book’s frequency will drop from thrice-monthly to twice-monthly. Some have seen this as a repudiation of the whole “Brand New Day” paradigm, whether that means “a thrice monthly book doesn’t work” or “the creative teams have disappointed” or, most colorfully, “JOE QUESADA IS A BIG DUMMY AND PETER WOULD NEVER MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL AND I AM VERY ANGRY ABOUT EITHER THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MARRIAGE OR POSSIBLY ALSO SPIDER-GIRL BUT MAINLY I JUST HATE MARVEL”.

I can’t speak to the last group, but personally I think BND has resulted in some very enjoyable characters, and several of the main BND players (Slott, Marcos Martin, Zeb Wells) are sticking around, so I can’t imagine this change was spurred by a perceived failure of the creative teams. Many people have pointed to the sales numbers on Amazing this year as proof of that, as sales are down considerably from the lofty heights of a few years ago. Brand New Day, they have argued, has seen Amazing drop from selling over 100,000 copies a month to under 60,000.

While that isolated data point is true, it doesn’t give you the whole picture. Sales have dropped considerably from the point they were at immediately before BND, but there are many factors:

1. Monthly sales have declined in general in the past few years. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe trades/digital comics/piracy have eaten into monthly sales, maybe the mania around Civil War and Infinite Crisis was unsustainable.
2. By putting out three issues a month, Amazing Spider-Man is selling a reduced number three times a month rather than monthly, or perhaps even less than monthly, as Amazing was plagued by delays during its hottest run of the decade.
3. Sales of BND should be compared not just to past performances of Amazing Spider-Man, but the secondary Spider-Books it effectively replaces.

If you look at the past decade, the first two years of Brand New Day have resulted in higher overall sales than any other publishing configuration attempted:

There are a few things that skew these numbers, primarily:

• Amazing Spider-Man #583, which, fueled by Obamamania, sold over half a million copies. Granted, other “big” skew numbers, but rarely to that degree, and unlike new #1s, anniversary issues, and comic-spawned Events, Marvel cannot generate another mainstream tie-in of that level.
• “One More Day”, which ran across all three then-running Spider-Man books in 2007, and essentially replaced the final issues of Sensational Spider-Man and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man with de facto Amazing Spider-Man issues, pushing the numbers for non-ASM books artificially high for 2007.

So a revised chart would look like this:

Looking at the eight years leading up to BND, it’s very clear why the Thrice Monthly ASM model was adopted:

Secondary Spider-Man titles never sell well at all compared to the main title. This isn’t even taking into account anthology style books — Webspinners, Spider-Man Unlimited, Tangled Web, Spider-Man Family, the current Web of Spider-Man title — that traditionally sell so poorly that including them in the data seemed unfair. Even Tangled Web, the highest-profile iteration of this sort of book, with stories by high-profile creators like Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan, Paul Pope, Greg Rucka, Eduardo Risso, and others couldn’t maintain sales above 30,000, and all of the other books dipped under 20,000 before being unceremoniously canceled.

This is hardly unique to Spider-Man: look at Marvel and DC’s Classified and Confidential books, Marvel Comics Presents, Astonishing Tales, and so on: the superhero market doesn’t care for anthology books. Some properties seem capable of maintaining strong sales across multiple titles — the X-Men franchise for instance, or the recent Bendis era of Avengers and Johns-run Green Lantern franchise. Though the Superman and Batman books aren’t really supporting multiple top-selling books at the moment, they’ve certainly both had two (or more) top-selling titles at once in the recent past. But Spider-Man has seemed incapable of pulling that feat off in the past decade. Let’s look back, shall we?

Spider-Man in 2000: 24 issues | 1,231,314 total copies sold | Average Issue: 51,305 | Average ASM: 52,882 |Average Non-ASM: 49,728

The Spider-Books were at their closest to parity this decade back in 2000, but only because the entire franchise was at such a low point. Shortly after the Clone Saga, all three Spider-Books crossed over in “The Final Chapter”, which resulted in the cancellation of all three books:

• Amazing Spider-Man, which had run for 441 issues and thirty-five years
• Spectacular Spider-Man, which had run for 263 issues and twenty-two years
• Peter Parker: Spider-Man, which had run for 98 issues and eight years

Of course, all this meant was two new number ones! Amazing Spider-Man relaunched under Howard Mackie and John Byrne, and Peter Parker: Spider-Man under Mackie and John Romita Jr. Why Spectacular missed out on the relaunch in favor of Peter Parker isn’t clear; obviously it had a longer pedigree, but perhaps Marvel had memories of Peter Parker’s 1990 launch (as plain ol’ Spider-Man) where Todd McFarlane sold some insane number of polybagged issues to speculators.

The Mackie/Byrne/JRJr run continued into 2000, though with Byrne getting replaced with Erik Larsen and eventually Romita taking over art duties for both books. At a little under 53,000 copies per issue, this is presumably the lowest Amazing Spider-Man’s sales have been in its history: I only have access to numbers going back to 1996, but even the depths of the Clone Saga never dipped that low.

The Mackie era of Peter Parker lasted through the first half of 2000, with an Erik Larsen one-shot leading into a run by Paul Jenkins and Mark Buckingham. None of the personnel changes affected sales appreciably, as the book gently descended from around 54,000 sales in January down to 46,000 in December. With Jenkins’s run, Peter Parker focused mostly on one-shot stories exploring Spider-Man’s relationships with his supporting cast and villains, which sounds dangerously close to an anthology, but perhaps the consistent creative team kept this from sinking into oblivion.

Spider-Man in 2001: 24 issues | 1,562,044 total copies sold | Average Issue: 65,085 | Average ASM: 77,647 | Average Non-ASM: 52,523

Has it really been almost a decade since Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada took over? One of “Nu-Marvel”’s definitive early successes was handing Amazing Spider-Man over to J. Michael Straczynski, who began with June’s Amazing Spider-Man#30, keeping Romita around as artist. Though initial orders for JMS’s first issue were only around 77,000 copies, by year’s end sales were nearing 100,000 copies a month, and sales for their first nine issues averaged around 88,000 copies per issue, a huge improvement over Mackie’s run, which by March had dipped below 50,000 copies an issue.

Over in Peter Parker: Spider-Man, the Jenkins/Buckingham run continued, albeit with a few art fill-ins. Peter Parker kept to done-in-ones, including the well-remembered #35, “Heroes Don’t Cry”, that followed a young boy who idolized Spider-Man. Whether it was due to the positive buzz the run was receiving, a general upswing in the comics market, or carryover from the succes of Amazing, sales on Peter Parker rose in 2001, starting around 46,000 and peaking mid-year with sales near 60,000, before settling back to the low fifties by year’s end.

Spider-Man in 2002: 23 issues | 1,781,781 total copies sold | Average Issue: 77,469 | Average ASM: 103,916 | Average Non-ASM: 57,125

Amazing only shipped ten issues in 2002, though each issue averaged over 100,000 copies and JMS/JRJr picked up an Eisner for Best Serailized Story, so I’m sure no one worried too much about a couple of delays. Not much to say but that this was a winning combination for all parties, and is a run Marvel unsurprisingly continues to keep in print to this day.

In contrast, I had completely forgotten what was going on in Peter Parker in 2002, as Jenkins’s much-longer-than-I-realized run continued, with a Zeb Wells/Jim Mahfood two-parter (#42-43) that I would love to revisit in the context of Wells’s more recent work on Spider-Man. After that came “Death in the Family”, a well-promoted Green Goblin storyline that gave Peter Parker its best sales of the decade, topping out at 66,000 for its conclusion. After the oversized #50 in November, Wells returned for another run that maintained a decent chunk of the “Death in the Family” audience.

Spider-Man in 2003: 27 issues | 2,235,647 total copies sold | Average Issue: 82,802 | Average ASM: 100,263 | Average Non-ASM: 66,588

Year Three of the JMS era of Amazing saw the book make up for last year’s delays by releasing thirteen issues, which again averaged above 100,000 copies per issue, though that number is only buoyed that high by two milestone issues: thanks to Marvel’s renumbering policy, Amazing Spider-Man #50 and Amazing Spider-Man #500 both came out in 2003, selling 114,000 and 149,000 copies, respectively. Without those two issues, average sales are closer to 95,000 per issue, which still makes for a remarkably popular and enduring run on a book.

Peter Parker: Spider-Man came to a close in 2003, with six more Wells issues featuring a variety of artistic collaborators including Sam Kieth. Sales had dropped below 50,000 by this point, which was likely a factor leading to Peter Parker getting replaced by Spectacular Spider-Man in July. Spectacular saw Jenkins return to Spider-Man, this time with Humberto Ramos as his collaborator. Whether due to the new #1 or the Venom-centric storyline “The Hunger”, Spectacular sold fairly well, starting out at 118,000 copies but dropping down to just above 60,000 by the end of the year. The relaunch helped sales, but not drastically.

Spider-Man in 2004: 36 issues | 2,586,896 total copies sold | Average Issue: 71,858 | Average ASM: 85,403 | Average Non-ASM: 54,202

Whether it was standard attrition, an artistic changeover from Romita to Mike Deodato, or the divisive “Sins Past” storyline, Amazing performed below previous years in 2004, with thirteen issues averaging around 85,000 copies a month, which is still a very solid performance for any book over forty issues into a run without any major events or other sales-boosters.

Spectacular Spider-Man continued its Jenkins run in 2004, but gone were the shorter vignettes, replaced by a string of trade-ready longer stories featuring iconic Spidey villains like Venom, Doctor Octopus and the Lizard. The latter was drawn by Daimon Scott, who I never realized had worked at Marvel. After that came a one-shot by Jenkins and future BND MVP Paolo Rivera before Spectacular became an Avengers: Disassembled crossover for six months. Then 2004 ended with two done-in-ones featuring a Poker game and Mindworm, both of which I enjoyed at the time but associated with Jenkins’s earlier run on the book. None of these things affected Spectacular’s sales much, as it hovered between 47-55,000 copies per issue all year long.

2004 also saw the launch of a third mainline Spider-Man book for the first time in about five years, Marvel Knights Spider-Man by Mark Millar and Terry Dodson. Sales started strong — the first issue topped 130,000, but by December’s MK Spider-Man #9 sales had dropped to around 64,000; significantly higher than Spectacular, the other secondary title, but also well below Amazing’s level. Like Spectacular before it, secondary Spider-Man titles — no matter the promotion, characters, or creators involved — never seem to be able to achieve sales on the order of the core book.

Spider-Man in 2005: 32 issues | 2,088,287 total copies sold | Average Issue: 65,259 | Average ASM: 75,580 | Average Non-ASM: 58,483

JMS continued his Amazing run in 2005, with sales continuing to drift slowly downward, averaging around 75,000 copies sold a month for the first nine months. “The Other” boosted sales back up closer to 80,000, marking the start of two trends: Amazing Spider-Man being in permanent event mode for the final two years or so of the JMS era, and Amazing garnering higher sales than secondary Spider-Books during crossovers, even in a situation like “The Other” that continued directly from one book to the other.

Spectacular, perhaps in a last-ditch effort to buoy itself up to the level of the flagship book, began the year with “Sins Remembered”, a follow-up to “Sin Past” written by JMS-protege Samm Barnes. Featuring some vintage Greg Land covers from before we knew to recognize Greg Land faces, it did nothing to boost sales of the book, which continued to drop further below 50,000. By its final Jenkins/Buckingham reunion issue (#27, April 2005, recycled for those Heroic Age Pedestal covers) sales had dropped to 45,000 copies, the lowest a mainline Spider-Man book had been this decade.

In its stead, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man launched in October as part of “The Other”. Like any #1, sales were brisk, around 85,000, and only dropped to 72,000 by the third issue. MK Spider-Man wrapped up its Millar/Dodson run with sales around 60,000, a number that dipped to 47,000 within six issues of Reggie Hudlin and Billy Tan taking over. Sales were buoyed by “The Other” for the final three months of 2005 back into the high 60,000s, but again, this is around 75% of the sales of Amazing even though they were all part of the same serialized story.

Spider-Man in 2006: 33 issues | 2,334,145 total copies sold | Average Issue: 70,732 | Average ASM: 115,117 | Average Non-ASM: 54,087

For all of his recent complaints about Civil War and crossovers and Marvel’s “impeded creative freedom”, JMS benefitted greatly from being in permanent crossover mode in 2006. Amazing only managed to get nine issues published this year, but all nine of them were part of The Other, Road to Civil War or Civil War proper, and as such sold an average of 115,000 copies apiece. Granted, this was a heady time, where somehow books like Ms. Marvel, Heroes for Hire, and Thunderbolts would sell over 70,000 copies if they had “Civil War” on the cover, but Amazing still put up incredibly strong numbers.

If only the same could be said for the other Spider-books. Following the end of “The Other” in January MK Spider-Man #22, the book changed its name to Sensational Spider-Man, bringing on Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Angel Medina as the new creative team. After an initial “Feral” arc, the book began to tie into the Civil War-era changes in Spider-Man’s status quo. Despite Sensational’s featuring of the Iron Spider armor and the media-grabbing “Spider-Man Unmasked” storyline, sales hovered in the 50,000s, dropping to 48,000 by December 2006. Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man suffered a similar fate, coming out of “The Other” with around 60,000 readers but dropping even further, to around 42,000 copies sold in December. Despite the huge amount of attention and sales the Civil War event brought to Spider-Man, the success did help these secondary titles.

Spider-Man in 2007: 26 issues | 2,094,660 total copies sold | Average Issue: 80,564 | Average ASM: 121,267 | Average Non-ASM: 52,715

February saw the kick-off of “Back in Black”, an event that seemed to exist solely to vamp long enough for JMS and Quesada to finish “One More Day”. For whatever reason, “Back in Black” gave Friendly Neighborhood and Sensational a boost that none of the other Civil War banners could not, with both books jumping to nearly 70,000 copies in February. But the boost didn’t last long, and both were down to their pre-”Black” sales by the storyline’s end.

Over in Amazing, sales continued to be incredibly strong through its final Civil War issues into Back in Black. Sales climbed even higher for “One More Day”, the four issue story that took over all three titles for the last four months of 2007, averaging about 120,000 copies apiece. Though again, parts 1 and 4 of OMD were part of Amazing and outsold the two non-Amazing chapters by tens of thousand copies, suggesting that the word “Amazing” guarantees a higher level of sales than any other adjective available.

Okay, that’s a lot of numbers. More number crunching is forthcoming looking specifically at Brand New Day, but for now, the takeaway is that the shift to a more-than-monthly Amazing Spider-Man title was more than justified: it was almost required. Sure, there are dozens of characters and creative teams that would kill to sell 40-50,000 copies a month, and that’s a very comfortable level for any book published today, but most characters aren’t Spider-Man. It had to be frustrating to be working on an iconic property that was celebrating unprecedented success at the box office, and even had one spectacularly successful monthly (or nine-times-a-year in 2006-7) book on the shelves, and to see every other attempt to capitalize on this sink so low. All arguments about marriage and Faustian bargains aside, three Amazing Spider-Man comics a month was a no-brainer on paper. How it turned out in reality, we’ll look at soon.

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And they say Geoff Johns doesn’t do long-range planning.

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I had thought that the source of the template had been discussed in the blogosphere, and was going to link to it. But when I went looking I couldn’t find it. So here: it’s Mark Buckingham’s cover to Spectacular Spider-Man #27, the final issue of the last run that title got.

The initial solicitations didn’t even bother photoshopping out all of Buckingham/Spidey’s webbing:

At least they fixed that by press time.

My intent is not to rake Marvel over the coals or otherwise shame them; they’re only “swiping” from an earlier cover they had previously commissioned, and hopefully threw Buckingham a couple bucks for his inadvertent design work.

Great, now I can link to this tomorrow. A tip of the hat to David Brothers, who definitely chatted with me about this back when Marvel’s May solicitations were released.

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Brief Bloom.

Batman and Robin continues, beginning the “Batman and Robin Must Die!” arc, which Morrison has stated is “R.I.P. as farce.” Each issue is named after a classic gothic painting; this one is “The Garden of Death” by Hugo Simberg, pictured above. Many shots and events in this book are deliberate evocations of events in “R.I.P.”, so I recommend a rereading before engaging in any close analysis of this story.

And, as usual, the links to my other annotations:

Stuff here (original Batman run, current Batman and Robin)

Stuff at Comics Alliance (Return of Bruce Wayne #1, #2, #3; Batman #700)

Page 1: This is a deliberate inversion of David Mazzucchelli’s cover to Batman #404 , the first part of Frank Miller’s “Year One” storyline. Of course, Bruce and Thomas are transposed. And instead of “Mother. Father. Yes. I shall become a bat,” we see “My wife. My son. Yes.” And then the rest…

Page 2: The first panel represents the domino effect that the Joker talks about later, the chain reaction of death. Note the dominos are the first we’ve seen in the book so far that are white dots on black slates. This is the first big desecration of this arc, as Morrison basically places the cross of Bruce’s defining moment and inverts it into the birth of a complete monster. Obviously this is a version of Simon Hurt/Thomas Wayne that’s in keeping with the lies told about Bruce’s family in “R.I.P.”; he’s clearly afraid that Martha Kane-Wayne knows a major secret - maybe the secrets of Barbatos and Wayne Manor’s hidden room - and is trying to make sure it dies with her.

Page 3: “This is Simon Hurt, Who He Is and How He Came to Be” comes to a conclusion with the graveyard scene, Thomas Wayne paying Joe Chill off for the hit, again echoing Chill’s statements earlier back in #673 - remember when he said that someone paid him to kill all the Waynes? The third panel is maybe the pinnacle of superhero comics in the 21st century, featuring a full-out 120 Days of Sodom orgy sequence complete with Professor Pyg being used as a horsey by a dominatrix in a demon mask whipping two bound naked ladies and Simon Hurt pouring a bottle of champagne on an emaciated lady’s back, wearing Thomas Wayne’s original tuxedo batsuit.

Oh, and this entire sequence is red and black, of course.

So what *is* this sequence? Well, Hurt once said that he wore Mangrove Pierce’s skin like he’d wear a suit - I don’t think that was a literal thing, but I think Hurt is a master of disguise, much like Batman and the Joker; I think, further, that he’s actually fully created this entire fictional backstory for himself as the villainous Thomas Wayne, as a part to play. Morrison’s entire Batman run has focused on acting (both in stage and disguise form), and here we have Simon Hurt wearing Thomas Wayne’s skin. Of course, he may even be a Thomas Wayne (the one from 1765) himself, but that’s yet to be seen.

I don’t believe we’ve seen Hurt’s media rep before.

Page 5: The 99 Demons - who, I have a sick theory, are the descendants of the Miagani, because I mean where the hell did they go by now anyway? - have already taken up residence in Wayne Manor. It’s interesting that Hurt only pulled these guys out to use after the original R.I.P. affair - I wonder if he has little pockets of minions all around the globe.

The “black sun” that Hurt refers to is the eclipse that’s occurring every time Bruce Wayne jumps forward in time - note that it always occurs when Bruce LEAVES, though, not when he arrives, so it’s totally possible that Bruce is already back by the time this scene takes place. Hurt’s promise to corrupt Damian seems to imply that this is the event Damian was referring to back in #666 when he mentioned that he made a deal with the devil to save Gotham City.

Page 6: This page ends the flashforward, and serves as a total contrast to the first page of “R.I.P.” - just as that story ended with a declaration of Batman and Robin’s immortality, this immediately proclaims their very fragile mortality.

Page 7: Damian’s silhouette entering the hospital seems similar to Hurt entering the mansion a few pages ago, doesn’t it? Or to Le Bossu entering Hurt’s castle at the beginning of #676. And the lineup of cops is similar to the lineup of 99 Fiends waiting for Hurt’s entrance, too.

Page 8: Joker’s phrasing that something “went out in his head” is similar to Lane’s phrasing back in #672, that the sleeper personality awoke when “the Bat-Signal came on in [his] brain.” Obviously Joker’s lying, though - this IS his latest incarnation, whatever silver-tongued demon it may be - notice that his word balloons are normal, and his entire speech pattern is at complete odds with all of his previous depictions. Since when has he said “So I mean, obviously”? Dick then recaps everything we’ve already discussed up in these annotations about dominoes, bones and the boneyard, confirming that Joker was “digging up” the “bones” of his own crimes, and that he faked searching Naberius, and essentially planted the domino on him, back in #11.

The domino Dick’s holding seems to be different from the four-one model he “got from” Naberius, so I’m not sure where it came from.

Page 9: AND I was right about the double meaning of domino! But not its connection to the 99 Fiends’ domino masks. Dick gives his version of Scott Summers’s “I’ve been outsmarting you since I was a teenager, Magneto” speech from New X-Men. And the Knight shows up to clear up that, unfortunately, Joker did not in fact write an entire true crime novel to back up his cover.

Page 10: I’m not sure why Dick just says “sane?” - is he questioning Joker’s claim to sanity? I guess that’s the easy answer. I’m not sure what Joker’s referring to with “that first Domino of Death” - is he referring to the Joe Chill incident in Hurt’s memory, where we saw the first domino fall? Or does he mean the first Black Glove member he killed to get revenge and planted a domino on? I guess we’ll find out later.

Page 11: I love how Irving and Morrison portray Gordon’s barely contained atomic rage; we’re talking about the dude who shot his daughter in the spine, killed his wife and forced him to undergo hours of extreme psychological and physical torture while placed in the most degrading conditions. Jason’s come back; at this point, Gordon’s suffered infinitely more than anyone wearing a costume by the Joker’s crimes, but he knows the only way to truly win against him is to do things by the book and not go all Vic Mackey on his ass. The last panel is clearly the Joker trying to provoke Dick, continuing to push down dominoes; the only major question is why. If the Baron Samedi thing last issue was on purpose, then he’s not acting as bawdy as he should be for the Loa of Lasciviousness. (Grant, you can use that one.)

Page 12: Of course Dick takes Gordon in the Bat-subwaycar; can’t pass up the chance for yet another train reference. Again, the Bruce whose odd behavior Gordon is referring to is Hush, whose adventures as Bruce are being chronicled in Batman: Streets of Gotham especially.

Page 13: It certainly seems like the mayor IS in league with the Black Glove and Hurt, doesn’t it? First he disseminated that fake info to the press back in R.I.P., and now Gordon’s refusing to keep him onside. Not to mention that Hurt’s rolling in with Senator Vine, who I expect to die in spectacular fashion at the Joker’s hands. He couldn’t let a finger go free.

Page 14: Here we see Gordon arriving in the Bat-Bunker, encouraging Dick to shed all doubts that the Joker is planting in his mind - the complete inversion of the scene in #677 where Bruce brings Jezebel Jet to the Batcave for the first time, and she does nothing BUT plant doubts in his mind. Dick’s starting to see the big picture with the solar eclipse, but he apparently hasn’t made the connection with the black sun over the cape and cowl in the Batcave; either that, or he makes it in this arc and then goes off to the events of Return of Bruce Wayne. I am also choosing to believe Gordon’s use of “big black boots” is a clue to the rumored upcoming Morrison/Reznor collaboration; it is also possible I am retarded, but sound off in the comments!

Page 16: This must take place after #700, since Dick is getting ready to rock the escrima sticks again. Morrison seems to be really going with viral themes in a lot of his recent works; or, perhaps, there’s a more literal connection between this viral addiction infection and Darkseid’s Anti-Life dissemination system. I can’t figure out any apparent symbolism in the name Lieutenant Bilbao; Bilbao’s a city in the Basque country of Spain founded by a dude named Don Diego (like Zorro!), but that’s all I can think of.

Page 19 : The first two panels pretty definitively provethat everyone’s right, and it’s all a terrible put-on. Which almost makes me wonder if Joker’s game is that he actually IS trying to help - but the joke is that he expects nobody to believe him, so when they all go down in flames he’ll be able to gloat on the ashes for proving him right about some point about human trust. This entire interrogation scene is evocative of the Batman/Joker interrogation from “Dark Knight”, including the discussion about chaos. And the last panel, of course, is Joker’s “bat-signal” turning back on in response to Damian. It’s difficult to know whether he truly expected this development or not.

Damian’s speech in general, about how there’s no such thing as chaos for the Joker and it’s all planned, is also a direct inversion of Joker’s speech to Batman about how only Wikipedia works with rules, structures and clues. This is the complete counterargument.

Page 20: Damian’s obviously read his case files, since the symbolism of beating on the Joker with a crowbar can’t be lost on him. Much like the Black Glove threatened to destroy Batman’s mind in R.I.P., here we have Damian basically calling the Joker’s bluff, threatening to beat him in the brain until he’s mentally retarded (much, again, like what happened to Jason! Remember when he came back, he was brain-dead for a while until Talia threw him into a Lazarus Pit).

Page 21: The dominoes on the bottom are a clear visual cue that what’s going on here is a direct consequence of whatever occurred in Hurt’s screwed-up memory of what happened in Crime Alley. I imagine we’ll have to wait to see exactly what that means.

Page 22: R.I.P. debuted a new Batmobile, so Must Die! has to blow one up.

And as for the last panel? The ominous shot of a White Glove? Is that Alfred, or perhaps a Dollotron (unlikely, since the wearer seems to be wearing a sleeve, and the glove ends at the wrist rather than higher up like the Dollotrons’)? Or could it be a new anti-Simon Hurt? Bruce Wayne himself? I have no idea.

Page 23: And here we have Blackgate as the big prison set-piece rather than Arkham from R.I.P. Don’t forget that Jason Todd got thrown in there too, so I’m sure we’ll see him in the next arc or two. The final panel, with one of the 99 Demons presenting the mask, is reminiscent of when Le Bossu brought Joker his weapons in R.I.P.

Page 24: And, of course, this full-face shot of Professor Pyg is a reference to the last page of #676, which featured an almost identically framed shot of a villain (this time the Joker) in a cell being recruited/broken out by the Black Glove/Simon Hurt. And, of course, it’s sort of momentous for Pyg to finally declare something perfect.

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Intriguing Announcements

• David Brothers of Comics Alliance reports that Marvel plans to release Thor and Loki: Blood Brothers, a motion comic produced with studio Magnetic Dreams that will be released in April of next year (around the time the Thor movie is scheduled to premiere). The Spider Woman motion comic was pretty terrible (and I still don’t understand the appeal of motion comics at all), but this image looks very cool. Marvel is introducing a new method of animation for this project, which will incorporate more “movement and dynamic action”. I just hope that the animation looks better than the infamous Marvel cartoons from the 1960’s. Brothers notes that Blood Brothers “is based on Robert Rodi and Esad Ribic’s 2004 miniseries Loki, [a] fully-painted series [that] took a different route than most stories about Thor. Rather than being cast as the villain of the series, Loki explored Marvel’s Asgardian mythology from the trickster’s point of view. He was a sad and melancholy character, and demonstrated a depth of character rarely seen in his usual appearances.” It’d be interesting to see if this project hints at the direction Marvel Studios will go with the Loki character in the Thor film. Marvel’s done a decent job of creating compelling villains in the Hulk and two Iron Man films, and it’d be great to see that trend continue. According to Brothers, the teaser for this comic is a ‘San Diego Comic Con exclusive, but may show up online at some point in the future.

Grant Morrison Corner

Image via Robot 6 .

• Rich Johnston announced that Grant Morrison will be working on the screenplay for Sinatoro, an interactive thriller that wil be directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer.

The film, which Morrison describes as a “hallucinatory road trip into the American psyche” will incorporate some of Morrison’s ideas about interactive/participatory entertainment in both the narrative and the production process. Check out Johnston’s interview with Mortimer and Morrison here.

• In other Grant Morrison news, he announced the new chapter in his historic run on the Batman family of titles - Batman, Inc . at the Batman: the Return panel on Friday. According to Morrison, this will be more of a team book in which Bruce Wayne develops a Batman franchise of sorts. According to a must-read interview with IGN, Morrison will use this series (which will feature art from Yanick Paquette) to introduce a well-integrated Batman who is more capable of incorporating the philanthropeneurial methods and tactics that one would associate with Bruce Wayne (i.e., replicating effective demonstration projects). He also has some great comments on video games, Supergods, Roy Thomas’ classic Kree/Skrull War Avengers arc (!) and dreams. David Brothers has more details in his Comics Alliance recap. CBR interviewed Dan Didio here. Morrison will also collaborate with Geoff Johns on an untitled project of some kind. The trend of superhero franchises also continues with Geoff Johns’ Speed Force , which will follow the adventures of heroes from the Flash corner of the DC Universe.

• Jonathan Hickman and Carlos Pacheco will collaborate on an Ultimate Thor miniseries for Marvel in October, which will be released digitally, day and date, through Marvel’s ComiXology iTunes application. There’s no word on whether the series will also be released through the company’s Digital Comics Unlimited initiative. Ultimate Thor will explore the emnity between Thor and Loki. I like the character sketches that have appeared on iFanboy and Comics Alliance, but I kind of wish that this was treading new ground. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Sebastian Fiumara are also collaborating on a Loki miniseries that will come out this October.

• In 2011, Marvel will bring back Strange Tales for a second volume, featuring the work of… let’s just say almost everyone in indie comics who didn’t contribute to the first Strange Tales mini. According to Robot 6 , this series will be spread out over three giant-sized issues. The site provides an exhaustive list of contributors, including: Alex Robinson, Dash Shaw, Farel Dalyrmple, Frank Santoro, Gene Yang, Gilbert Hernandez, Harvey Pekar, Jaime Hernandez, Jeff Lemire, Jeffrey Brown, Jhonen Vasquez, Jillian Tamaki, Jon Vermilyea, Kate Beaton, Nick Gurewitch, Paul Hornschemeier, Paul Maybury, Rafael Grampa, Shannon Wheeler, Terry Moore, Tim Hamilton, Tony Millionaire, Benjamin Marra, Sheldon Vella and Ty Templeton. I’ll say this - it’s cool that all of these creators are getting checks from Marvel. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first volume (which felt a little too tongue-in-cheek), but I’ll give this a whirl, especially with a cover by Rafael Grampa.

• David Lapham’s doing a Kull miniseries for Dark Horse this November with art by Gabriel Guzman. I’m not very familiar with Kull, but he’s a proto-Conan character developed by Robert E. Howard. Lapham discusses the project in more detail at CBR.

• I don’t play video games, but a Suicide Squad videogame? Consider me on-board. Diane Nelson, the newly enshrined president of DC Entertainment, noted that this game was a part of a broader effort to put more DC characters in videogames produced by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Robot 6 reports that “[t]he studio’s video-game publishing unit has undergone dramatic expansion over the past few years, acquiring developers TT Games, Snowblind Studios, Rocksteady Studios and Turbine Inc., and in March announcing plans for a new game-development studio in downtown Montreal.” It’s far too premature to reach any conclusions on this, but this looks like the kind of positive-sum collaboration between the content businesses at Time Warner that she discussed in her early interviews with the Beat , Newsarama and Comics Alliance. It particularly fits with her principle of “creat[ing] the best content for each medium while maintaining the integrity of how these characters and stories were designed for the physical books “.

• Top Shelf unveiled some artwork from the second chapter of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:Century , scheduled for release in 2011.

Set in the late 1960’s, this chapter will feature the League encountering the counterculture. From the solicit:

“CHAPTER TWO takes place almost sixty years later in the psychedelic daze of Swinging London during 1968, a place where Tadukic Acid Diethylamide 26 is the drug of choice, and where different underworlds are starting to overlap dangerously to an accompaniment of sit-ins and sitars. The vicious gangster bosses of London’s East End find themselves brought into contact with a counter-culture underground of mystical and medicated flower-children, or amoral pop-stars on the edge of psychological disintegration and developing a taste for Satanism.”

via Robot 6.

• Kieron Gillen, author of FBB favorites Phonogram, Dark Avengers: Ares, S.W.O.R.D., Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter, Thor, and that recent Loki special, will be the new writer on Generation: Hope , which will follow the stories of the five individuals who became mutants at the end of the Second Coming crossover. The art looks terrible, but it’s Gillen, so I kind of want to give it a shot. He does a great job of selling the premise at IGN.

• Archaia announced that it will bring Cyclops , a French graphic novel by Alexis Nolent (Matz) and Luc Jacamon to the United States in the spring of 2011 as a mini-series. This gorgeous looking book, originally published in 2006, is a futuristic story about the blurred lines between combat and entertainment in a world where war is privatized. Take a look at CBR’s interview with Matz for more.

• At the Vertigo: On the Edge panel, Shelley Bond, edtior of John Constantine: Hellblazer , announced that Constantine may be getting married in the 275th issue. I’m amazed that the series has lasted so many issues and that the character is about a quarter-century old. Current writer Peter Milligan’s work on this book has improved by leaps and bounds since his underwhelming first arc, and I’m really looking forward to this. Check out the hilarious cover for issue 272, the first issue of this arc at the link.

• In other Vertigo news, Rich Johnston reports that Karen Berger confirmed that all Vertigo characters (other than Constantine) that started in the DC Universe were returning to the ‘editorial mandate’ of the DC Universe. Our own Chris Eckert raised some interesting questions about the veracity and relevance of this story. I assume Rich reported what he heard, but I still think this is a non-story (but a fine topic for a brief blog entry). Vertigo hasn’t done anything interesting with Swamp Thing in over a decade, and the titles featuring ’shared characters’ such as Zatanna and Madame Xanadu are almost always a creative and commercial disappointment. I think that Berger was correct when she stated that “Vertigo is at its very best when creating new and interesting comics.”

• Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios are telling the next chapter in Norman Osborn’s life with the five issue Osborn miniseries, due in stores this November. According to a great interview with the two creators conducted by Newsarama, the story will take place in the Third Wing of the ‘black prison site’ that Norman is transferred to after his downfall, with five unidentified individuals DeConnick describes as “the cream of a particularly nasty crop”. I loved DeConnick’s work on the Rescue and Sif specials, as well as her contribution to Girl Comics. I’m looking forward to see what she does next.

• Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman (the team behind the recently cancelled Atlas) have been announced as the new creative team on Marvel’s Hulk series (which follows the adventures of Gen. Thunderbolt Ross as the ‘Red Hulk’) in September 2010. In their first arc, entitled “Scorched Earth”, Ross will grapple with the legacy of the Intelligentsia, the consortium of villains that Ross worked with in the “Fall of the Hulks” crossover. Check out these initial character sketches from Hardman, via Comics Alliance. If anyone can resuscitate this creatively bankrupt title, its Jeff Parker.

Goon Interlude

Things That You May Think Are Important

• Brian Bendis will add the Red Hulk to the cast of the Avengers book in November. h/t Robot 6.

• Winners were announced on Saturday for the 22nd Annual Eisner Awards. The Beat did a liveblog. Craig Fischer provided some insights into the nomination process.

• Speaking of Will Eisner, his classic A Contract With God is being adapted into a feature film, with principal photography scheduled to begin in 2011. The directors on the project (according to the press release) include Alex Rivera (”Sleep Dealer”); Tze Chun (”Children of Invention”); Barry Jenkins (”Medicine for Melancholy”); and Sean Baker (”Prince of Broadway”). via Robot 6.

• Robert Kirkman discussed The Walking Dead, Astounding Wolfman and Skybound , his new vanity Image imprint at the Image Comics panel. For more, click the link.

• Marvel announced a new Power Man and Iron Fist title written by Fred van Lente with art by Wellington Alves that will be released this August. The five-issue miniseries will spin out of the events of the Shadowland event, and will feature Iron Fist and a new Power Man.

• John Byrne will bring the Next Men series, which has been on hiatus since 1995, to IDW. IDW previously collected existing material in two oversized black and white volumes. A third will come to stores this September.

• Marvel may revive some properties from Crossgen, the famed (and embattled) comic publishing company from the early aughts. CrossGen went bankrupt in 2004, and its assets were purchased by Disney later that year. Tim O’Shea of Robot 6 listed six series he’d like to see return in 2011.

• DC premiered a trailer for its long awaited massively multiplayer role-playing online game, DC Universe Onine , entitled “Who Do You Trust?”

• Frank Miller confirmed that Xerxes, a prequel to the blockbuster comic and film 300 would be released in 2011.

• Marvel will end its immensely popular Amazing Spider Man: Brand New Day series after over 100 issues in October with the “Origin of the Species” storyline penned by Mark Waid. Dan Slott will take over the title, which will now be bi-weekly, with issue 648. Spider Man will still have an impressive artistic team, as Slott will work with Humberto Ramos, Marcos Martin and Stefano Caselli. The ‘brain trust’ of creators behind Brand New Day gave a great interview to Comic Book Resources, which can be read here. Slott noted that the readers would see Peter Parker live up to his potential in coming months, [add after IGN interview].

• Zeb Wells is teaming with Clayton Crain to bring back Carnage for a five issue miniseries in October. Check out the IGN interview with Wells here.

Tron trailer interlude

Movies and Television Stuff

• Linda Hamilton will play Chuck’s mother in the fourth season of the cult favorite series. via i09 .

• Steven Spielberg gave panel attendees a glimpse of a trailer for Falling Skies, an alien invasion series premiering next summer and featuring Noah Wyle.

• Anne Thompson collects some of the trailers and teasers that premiered at the Con, including Tron, Megamind, and the new Pirates movie.

• Alan Ball showed the audience at the True Blood panel footage of upcoming scenes from the current season. In a separate panel, Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse series that the television show is based on, announced that the eponymous protagonist will never become a vampire.

• If you’re still watching V , executive producer Scott Rosenbaum leaked some details of season 2. Click through for spoilers.

• MTV is bringing the forgotten Teen Wolf franchise to a televsion series starring Tyler Posey.

• NBC is introducing T he Event , a dramatic series targeted at fans of ABC’s Lost . h/t Vulture .

via i09, which got the pic via Coming Soon .

• As reported by a number of outlets, Mark Ruffalo will be portraying the character of Dr. Bruce Banner, a/k/a the Hulk in the Joss Whedon helmed Avengers movie.

• Speaking of i09, Annalee Newitz filed a post about Jon Faveau’s upcoming film Cowboys and Aliens on the site that actually made me a little optimistic about the film. I’ll give you four words: Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.

• At the Green Lantern Emerald Empire panel Saturday afternoon, Geoff Johns announced that a Green Lantern animated series would be coming to the Cartoon Network. In other superhero animation news, Brian Bendis will be writing for Animated Ultimate Spider-Man and Peter David will be contributing to the animated version of Young Justice (via iFanboy ).

The great tv critic Alan Sepinwall offers his views on the smaller tv panels in a piece filed for Hitfix.

RED Interlude

Whew! That’s everything that I caught over the last few days. Well, everything but this….

Yes, that’s the Infinity Gauntlet. According to IGN, the Gauntlet will be a part of Odin’s collection of treasures in the upcoming Thor movie. With that, it’s time to take my leave. If there’s anything I missed, or if you have projects that you’re looking forward to, feel free to post in the comments. There’s always a flood of news coming out of these events, and one’s bound to miss something.

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I realize this isn’t blockbuster news on par with movies coming out or someone getting stabbed, but it’s been over twenty-four hours and I haven’t seen this reported anywhere else. Granted, none of the big sites have posted write-ups for this panel, which aside from Johnston’s bombshell didn’t contain any real news. But I’ve listened to audio of this panel (available at DCComics.com) and can’t find any mention of this. The audio file is only fifty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds, and trails off as Berger languidly polls the audience on their interest in different books being reprinted in the Absolute format, so it’s possible the panel ran one hour on the button and those final two minutes and twenty-seven seconds contained Berger’s confirmation. I realize it’s also equally possible that she confirmed it in a venue other than the official mic’d up portion of the panel.

I don’t mean to suggest that Johnston is making things up out of whole cloth, but context for her statement is important. If this means that DC proper is going to gain sole custody of the DC characters, that seems like something of blow to the imprint, but it only affect a small of Vertigo’s output: only four of the nineteen finite/continuing series Vertigo has put out in 2010 deal with any DCU characters. Of those four, one — Unknown Solider — is on the way out due to low sales. A second — Madame Xanadu — is ending, though that seems to be more a case of the creators moving on than a forced ending due to sales. That only leaves House of Mystery and Hellblazer, two books that are selling well and have people discussing longterm plans for their respective books on this very panel. Very few Vertigo “revamps” of DCU characters have had any longterm effect, as the list below illustrates, and while there always exists a chance of a breakthrough Sonic Disruptors or Amethyst series coming out of Vertigo in the status quo, that isn’t the direction the line has taken in the past decade.

If the statement means that Vertigo is going to be sharing the characters with DC, that change in status quo is almost meaningless, save for a few characters.

Since its inception in 1993, the following existing DC Universe characters have received the Vertigo treatment:

• Angel & the Ape: given a Vertigo mini-series in 2001, have not appeared anywhere since save for a story in DCU Holiday Special 2009 and a cameo in Darwyn Cooke’s Solo
• Animal Man: Vertigo series ended in 1995, has been regularly appearing in DCU titles for over a decade. Has not appeared in a Vertigo title since 2000’s Totems
• Brother Power, The Geek: Got a Vertigo one-shot in 1993, appeared in 2000’s Totems, did not appear again until last year’s Brave & the Bold #29
• Congorilla: Got a Vertigo one-shot in 1999, the same year he appeared in Martian Manhunter Annual #2. Has since been a member of James Robinson’s Justice League.
• John Constantine: Since his Hellblazer series went Vertigo in 1993, hasn’t appeared in any DCU books aside from some winking crowd scene cameos. Is currently Vertigo’s longest-running book, and if you ignore renumberings, the fourth longest-running book at DC behind only Action Comics, Detective Comics, and Batman.
• Creeper: Vertigo published Beware the Creeper in 2003, a book that bore no direct connection to the DCU character of the same name, who received a 2006 DCU mini-series and is currently appearing in The Outsiders
• Deadman: The 2006 Deadman series bore no connection to the DCU’s Boston Brand, and was swiftly canceled due to sales. Boston Brand has continued to appear in the DCU for the past several decades, currently in Brightest Day (thanks to reader XQ for reminding me of this one)
• Doom Patrol: Vertigo series originated as a DCU title, was cancelled in 1995. Currently on its third ongoing DC series this decade.
• Doctor Occult: Got a Vertigo one-shot in 1994 and appeared sporadically as a supporting character in other ex-DC Vertigo books (Sandman, Books of Magic, Trenchcoat Brigade). Continued to appear in DCU titles throughout. Has not appeared in a Vertigo book since 2002.
• Doctor Thirteen: Got a Vertigo one-shot in 1998, has not appeared in Vertigo books since. Has since been revamped in the DCU in Tales of the Unexpected.
• Haunted Tank: Received a Vertigo mini-series in 2009. Is slated to re-appear this September in a G.I. Combat one-shot
• Human Target: Appeared in various formats under the Vertigo banner 1999-2005. Revived this year as a DC book by creator Len Wein, to tie into the television series
• Jonah Hex: Last appeared in a Vertigo mini-series in 1999. Has had a DCU ongoing series since 2006.
• Losers: Andy Diggle and Jock’s Vertigo series had no real connection to the DCU characters, ended in 2006.
• Mister E: Hasn’t appeared anywhere since his last Vertigo appearance in 2002.
• Prez: Has not appeared since 1995’s Vertigo one-shot Prez: Smells Like Teen President.
• Phantom Stranger: Received a Vertigo one-shot in 1993, appears sporadically in Vertigo titles up to and including the currently running Madame Xanadu. Has continued to appear in DCU titles throughout this time.
• Sandman: The Endless are apparently only allowed to appear with Gaiman’s blessing, which was given to Grant Morrison in 1998 and to Paul Cornell this year. Many of Sandman’s supporting characters originated in the DCU, and they alongside his own non-Endless creations appeared in a plethora of The Dreaming branded series over the years, though not since 2003.
• Sandman Mystery Theatre: Series ran from 1993-1999, revived for a mini-series in 2007. Characters continued to appear in DCU titles throughout the book’s run, including a crossover with Starman.
• Sgt. Rock: Had a Vertigo-branded OGN in 2003, has since had two DC-branded mini-series and a run in Wednesday Comics.
• Shade the Changing Man: After a nearly fifteen year layoff, has been brought into Hellblazer by Peter Milligan. In the interim, appeared in various cameos in DCU books
• Swamp Thing: Saved for some recolored cameos in Ambush Bug: Year None, has not appeared in any books since 2006. Has appeared in DCU books since his “move” to Vertigo.
• Tattooed Man: Got a Vertigo mini-series in 1993, has since appeared in the DCU, name has been taken by a new character currently appearing in Titans.
• Tim Hunter: Has not appeared since his third title ended in 2005
• Tomahawk: Got a Vertigo one-shot in 1998, has since appeared in DCU mini The War That Time Forgot, as well as various cameos
• Uncle Sam: The 1997 Vertigo mini-series has a tenuous connection the DCU character Uncle Sam, but the DCU Sam was a recurring character for most of the 1990s and has since had two mini-series and a forthcoming ongoing
• Unknown Soldier: Vertigo character does not appear to be related to the DCU character at all, who has recently returned to the DCU in Blackest Night.
• Zatanna: Got a 2003 Vertigo one-shot, has since been used regularly in the DCU and has recently been given her own ongoing

So in terms of characters that Vertigo still “owns”, you’ve got Swamp Thing and John Constantine as the Big Guns, and Mister E, Prez, Shade the Changing Man, and Tim Hunter as the rather smaller guns. Vertigo still has custody of Constantine and Shade for the forseeable future, and I’m not really sure who’s clamoring on either side for a Prez/Mister E/Tim Hunter revival, so this conversation really comes down to Swamp Thing.

Swamp Thing is a character near and dear to Vertigo and Berger. It was one of her first editing jobs (alongside the original House of Mystery) series, and she edited all but five of Alan Moore’s seminal run on the series, which in turn was the foundation for “sophisticated dark fantasy” books that sprung up in its wake at DC in the 1980s. Berger would go on to edit Hellblazer, Animal Man, Sandman, and Shade the Changing Man. While these are all books with a recognizable protean Vertigo feel, they were also deeply rooted — particularly Animal Man, Sandman, and Swamp Thing – in the DC Universe proper. She would take these books with her to the Vertigo line, but since 1993, Vertigo has never been able to recapture the earlier success of any of these characters, save Constantine.

Swamp Thing has certainly languished, commercially if not creatively, since Moore’s issues, despite runs by many worthy creators including then-up-and-comers Mark Millar and Brian K. Vaughan. At the time of the original series’s cancellation in 1996, the character was briefly allowed to appear in a number of DCU titles like Aquaman and Batman, but appears to have since been brought back into the Vertigo-only fold, a pool that’s really just Swamp Thing and Constantine at this point. I can’t blame Berger for feeling proprietary over these characters, but at a certain point, perhaps it’s time to give someone else a crack at making them work for contemporary audiences.

So while, if true, this change of custody might be seen as a loss of power for Vertigo, the online reaction on the Bleeding Cool Forums (which as of this writing is the only place to report this) characterizing this as “very troubling news”, confirming that Vertigo is a “dead imprint”, and other angry proclamations of doom — mixed in with, I should point out, several people asking why this is being treated in such a way — is rather confusing. Again, if this is actually happening. Which I wish some of the other news sites would bother to confirm.

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I don’t wish to suggest people cannot lament their favorite underdogs: at least some of us at FBB are outspoken fans of Air and Young Liars, and while none of us cared much for Greek Street, I don’t wish to make light of its fans. But people — and I am focusing on the most prominent mourner, Rich Johnston — need to be realistic about their love of spectacularly unsuccessful projects.

After the cancellation of Air, Unknown Soldier and now Greek Street, this feels like a bit of an epidemic. Another sign that Vertigo is suffering from undue attention from above. Will people please stop cancelling my favourite comics? Especilly the ones that seemed to have legs!

He also lamented the entire Vertigo line:

So now of course I’m suddenly also fearful for DMZ, Northlanders, Greek Street, Sweet Tooth and Scalped. Who do I need to pray to to keep the likes of these on the books?

Obviously, Rich was right-on to worry about Greek Street, but let’s look at the June sales numbers for all of these books:

*No issue of Scalped in June, numbers taken from the May issue

Seems pretty logical, the three lowest-selling books are the ones on the chopping block. Granted, the distance between the seven books isn’t that great, under 5,000 copies, and conventional wisdom has been that books selling under 10,000 are subject to cancellation, even with Vertigo’s lowered expectations. But as Johnston points out in his own articles, trade sales are a big part of Vertigo’s success. Looking at the past twelve months worth of trade sales through Diamond, let’s look at these same seven books:

(Amazon Sales Rankings taken the evening of 20 July and are probably absolutely meaningless)

DMZ, Northlanders and Scalped, though performing only marginally better than the doomed books on a monthly basis, are all several years into their runs. While there’s been attrition on the monthly level, it appears they all enjoy a fairly robust life in collections: though it’s over four years old, the first volume of DMZ appears to be outselling all of the newer trades from the canceled books, both in comic shops and on Amazon. One could argue this is an unfair fight, since these surviving books have had longer to find an audience, and if you gave them time, they would flourish. But none of the surviving books ever had sales as low as Air, Greek Street or Unknown Soldier, and there is little to no precedent for a book suddenly finding a new audience a year or more after it debuts. Greek Street in particular, though the numbers were skewed due to its $1 first issue, shed over 70% of its initial audience in its first year. The only ongoing in the history of Vertigo to do that badly was the late, unlamented Deadman revamp helmed by Bruce Jones. Most successful Vertigo books lose less than 40% of their audience in the first year: DMZ lost 22%, Lucifer lost 31%, Fables and Y the Last Man gained readers between their first and twelfth issue.

But still, Johnston maintains that the only reason these books were canceled was due to mucking around from Diane Nelson and Dan Didio, and that prior to their “undue attention” these books would’ve kept going. But historically, Vertigo has canceled books selling considerably better than any of these three. Check out the sales figures for the final issues of these books:

If there has been any change in their behavior over the past several years, it seems as if it has been to let books sink lower than before, as five or six years ago, books selling over 10,000 were up for execution. I want to make it clear, I have no real insight into the goings-on at Vertigo: the sales figures released to the public are incomplete at best, and there are all sorts of variables I’m not privy to — the nature of creator contracts and payments, sales outside of Diamond Comics Distribution, international reprints, planned licensing deals, the cost of printing, all sorts of stuff — that have changed from the launch of Deadenders ten years ago and now. I’m sure there are solid reasons that books used to be canceled with sales much higher than some of today’s enduring series. But looking at all of this, I have no idea why anyone would postulate these books are being canceled because of “undue attention from above”, beyond baseless rumor-mongering.

Speaking of baseless rumor-mongering, after Keith Giffen relaunched Legion of Super Heroes with the divisive “Five Years Later” storyline in 1989, he went seventeen years before he got another assignment that lasted for more than a twelve issue run. Look it up: sure, his runs on Justice League America and Justice League Europe went longer, but those were hit titles he started prior to Legion. Until he lasted all fifty-two issues of layouts on 52, he never had more than a twelve issue run from 1989-2006. He even had mini-series — PunX, Beast, Tattered Spirits — left incomplete or finished by other writers. You want to look for a conspiracy, follow the Disgruntled Legion Fans. That’s where the real secrets are buried.

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Quick note: Sorry for the lengthy delay between columns, but my time has been consumed by increased work responsibilities and wedding planning. I will try to stick to a weekly schedule going forward.

Daytripper # 8 (Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba; Vertigo/DC Comics)
The cover is perfect. Gabriel Ba presents us with an idealized domestic scene, with Bras’s wife Ana preparing to read one of his stories/ letters to their son Miguel. The room is bathed in a light that forms Bras’ silhouette. He is the emotional center of this family, even in his absence. For the first time, we get a completely Bras-less issue, and we are left to imagine the man that Bras had become through the eyes of his wife and son. I suspected that the events of the previous issue foreshadowed a permanent change from the now familiar narrative structure of this series, but the tragedy that suffused every page of this issue was kind of shocking. The last issue had a sense of foreboding that began once Bras found out that his friend was living in the wilderness, but this is on an entirely different level.

Ba paints a portrait of someone who has incorporated the life lessons learned from his distant but loving father and his mercurial, insightful best friend and completed his journey into manhood. He has found a healthy balance between his professional life as a working writer and his role as a loving father and husband. It’s the best of both worlds, but Ba sprinkles the story with little nods to the discipline and adherence to ritual that the couple adopts to maintain that work/life balance. Sending regular e-mails and love notes from the road. Getting up early to have breakfast with the family before work. Calling your husband when he’s away on business to make sure that he stays connected to the real world (i.e., the world of the family). It’s tough to tell a story about love and loss without drifting into sentimental cliche, but these little moments, along with the scenes when we see the challenges Ana faces whenever she is solely responsible for her job and Miguel for long stretches of time, or when she complains about his smoking, help keep the story emotionally grounded.

Moon continues to demonstrate his visual storytelling skills this issue, particularly through his use of color to define the mood of a particular scene. The dark blues of the master bedroom at night perfectly convey the loneliness Ana faces when Bras is gone, just like the summery yellows of the classroom evoke childhood memories. Ba returns to the classroom after the family learns of Bras’s death, and his use of a muted palette that captures the change in atmosphere as the room transforms into the place where a scared child eulogizes his father is masterful.

I’ve said this a few times in the recent past, but it bears repeating: go buy this book! I know some people are waiting for the trade, but I think that there’s a unique pleasure in reading Daytripper as a series of interconnected stand-alone stories. This issue has a subtle poetry that may be missed if its just seen as a chapter in a longer story. Then again, it’s impossible to know until the trade comes out.

Tomorrow’s Pull List Today

You know where this has to start….

The much-awaited conclusion to Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series comes out today (today’s comics today?) and I think I can confidently predict that it will be a candidate for book of the year.

Atlas #3 (Jeff Parker, Gabriel Hardman, Ramon Rosanas; Marvel Comics)
Bob’s the man! I’m really going to miss this book when it’s gone.

Black Widow #3 (Marjorie Liu, Daniel Acuna; Marvel Comics)
I was afraid that the Black Widow ongoing would be overly focused on her romantic entanglements with A-list male Marvel heroes (Bucky-Cap, Iron Man, Wolverine), but Marjorie Liu proved me wrong with the second issue. This may be one of the few mainstream superhero ongoings that can consistently pass Alison Bechdel’s famous “Dykes to Watch Out For” test. Daniel Acuna’s art is growing on me with each issue. I love his character’s faces. This preview may be the first time that I’ve actually been interested in Lady Bullseye as something other than a plot device. Check out the preview.

Amazing Spiderman #638 (Joe Quesada, Paolo Rivera, Joe Quesada, Stan Lee, Marcos Martin; Marvel)
Paolo Rivera is the only reason I’m reading this. I may even ignore the word balloons. Click through to see the full image.

Thunderbolts # 146 (Jeff Parker, Kev Walker; Marvel Comics)
This is one of my favorite books at Marvel. Parker just hits it out of the park on every issue.

As always, check out Comic Book Resources for more previews.

Miscellany

-Dan Panosian, via JK Parkin of Robot 6.

-Oli Lee, covering Bob Layton’s classic Iron Man cover for the Covered blog. I love the melting Spider-Man in the bottom left hand corner.

-Ron Salas, with a 1960’s inspired Nick Fury for Comic Twart.

-Wake Up! - This is the cover to the joint album by John Legend and the Roots entitled Wake Up! via Nah Right. Check out the first single, “Wake Up Everybody”, featuring Common and Melanie Fiona here.

-Gavok, of 4th letter with a remixed version of a page from J. Michael Straczynski’s embarrasingly bad Superman #701.

This poster captures the pure essence of Brightest Day. If you think this is intriguing, Brightest Day may be for you.

Links for the Week

• Bill Murray thought that Garfield was written by a Coen brother.
• The Unwanted, a comic by Joe Sacco for the British Guardian, tackles the impact of mass immigration on Great Britain. via Forbidden Planet’s excellent international blog.
• Cynic fills in for Ta-Nehisi Coates with a brief, yet intriguing post on the link between fraternal groups in the African American community and the kinds of online communities built around MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. I’d love to see him write more on the subject.
• The official Pedro Tejeda dessert is unveiled.
• Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post have begun a comprehensive examination of the U.S. national intelligence superstructure in Top Secret America. The Post has done a great job with the site for this story. Check out the response from think tanks here and the intelligence community here.
• Are you a supporter of cutting edge independent film? Hell, do you just like movies that are entertaining? Check out the trailer for Elliot Loves. The filmmakers are raising funds to complete the film through Kickstarter, and if you’d like to contribute to the cause, click here.
• A TED presentation by Naif Al-Mutawa, the creator of the 99, a superhero comic featuring characters who derive their power set from the 99 attributes of Allah. Apparently, there’s a crossover with DC’s Justice League of America in the works. There are also plans for an animated series, and the creator is exploring theme parks and video games. This strikes me as an ill-conceived (but well-meaning) blend of unsubtle political messaging and I.P. exploitation, but check it out for yourself.

See you next week, with reviews, links, commentary, and retractions(!). Oh, and I’ll probably have something to say about that little get-together in San Diego. In the meantime, you can catch me tumblin’ at Conservative Radical.

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IIM Annual #1 was also Marvel’s first day-and-date digital release, so we take a look at that, which devolves into an argument about marginal value and price points. Maybe we were all coming off World Cup Fever, but it gets feisty.

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Amazingly enough, I don’t think this sequence even cracked the Top Three for things that bothered me about this issue!

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To be sure there have been good recent examples of blocky cover design elements that instantly define a line of books:

While some people complained about all of these designs, particularly Civil War and Siege and how about half of each cover’s space is devoted to “design”, at a glance you immediately recognize these as Ultimate/Civil War/Final Crisis/Siege titles. Marvel’s been going nuts with these lately, giving crossover events and even individual story arcs a unique unified cover design:

I’m not in love with all of these (though Stark Disassembled and PunisherMAX both look so nice that I nearly regret being a trades-only guy) and yes, most of them also involve blocking out areas. Blockiness isn’t really the problem, considering that practically every comic ever is going to be quadrilateral. But at the very least they have distinct cover schemes. On the other hand, check out the following selection culled from only the past two years of DC titles:

Banners! Banners!! Banners!!! This isn’t even counting all of the ‘SECOND FEATURE’ banners that appear on top of some DC titles, or more often along the bottom because some other banner is already on top: that’s right, DC is now resorting to multi-bannered covers. Banners are approaching the abused status that colons suffered during the dark period of Countdown Presents: The Challengers of the Beyond: The Search for Ray Palmer: Wildstorm though I pray DC finds help before they hit that low.

Then again, yesterday saw the release of Action Comics #890. Action has had a banner for the past thirty issues, with New Krypton/Origins & Omens/World Without Superman/Codename Patriot/World Against Superman/Last Stand of New Krypton cluttering things up for over two years, often with a “Second Feature: Captain Atom” banner running along the bottom. Finally, with a fresh new creative team (Paul Cornell & Pete Woods) and a new lead character (Lex Luthor), you’d think Action Comics could slip loose the surly bonds of ugly banners, right?

Just kidding!

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Spoiler Alert: I will be revealing plot details of all three books (particularly Daytripper).

Thanos Imperative #1 (Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, & Miguel Sepulveda, Marvel Comics): I’ve been looking forward to this book since it was announced, but feel a little underwhelmed. I enjoy the Abnett and Lanning take on Marvel’s sci-fi influenced books, but this issue just didn’t work for me. I don’t want to review this book in detail until the mini-series is complete, but here are two quick possible reasons why it didn’t work:

1) I’m not familiar with the work of Miguel Sepulveda, but this art is painful, and I’m not sure why. His storytelling is generic but effective, which is no small feat in a sprawling space epic featuring a large cast. Sepulveda cleverly chooses to give the characters natural proportions, anatomy and postures, which not only heightens the impact of the fantastical elements of the story, but reminds the reader that this book is essentially a war comic, despite the occasional colorful costume. The problem is that the figures look like they are pasted into static backgrounds, which is incredibly distracting. They kind of look like Colorforms . I wonder if Sepulveda (or Jay David Ramos, the color artist) used heavy lines to outline the characters in this issue. Perhaps I’m completely off-base. But panels like the one below didn’t work for me.

2) I love the interactions between the familiar DnAverse characters, particularly in the introduction. I’m also pretty committed to the Marvel space epic. I’m worried about the absurdity that lies below the surface of this book. I’ve already lost interest in the conceit that a universe where life wins is a universe filled with cancer (and led by Captain Mar-Vell, who died of cancer in our universe! Get it?). Even though Abnett and Lanning do a wonderful job on the dialogue of the heroes and supporting characters, their antagonists are still mustache-twirling ciphers. The Revengers seem like a bad joke.

But these are minor things. In the end, I don’t know if I care about the central concept of this book. I hate Lovecraft. Always have. I don’t know if I can get past the sheer folly of blending Lovecraft with space fantasy. The notion of ‘many angled gods’ with tentacles inspires laughter. I fear that this will be a well executed book about an idea that I just can’t take seriously.

S.H.I.E.L.D. # 2 (Jonathan Hickman & Dustin Weaver, Marvel Comic): I honestly don’t know what to think about this issue. If this were a buyer’s guide, or if I gave letter grades to comics, this would get a ‘must buy’ or an ‘A+’. At the same time, I don’t know if I can heartily recommend this issue as an individual work - even though you should buy it - because its success entirely depends on whether Hickman satisfies any of the mysteries he raises (or explores the themes he identifies) in a satisfactory manner. Although we learn a little bit more about Leonid and his father (?) the mysterious Night Machine, the characters are still archetypes. So for the time being, this is a book of ideas.

Hickman advances the two storylines introduced last issue:  a time-traveling Leonardo da Vinci helps Leonid achieve self-enlightenment en route to a confrontation with the Shield High Council, and the Dark Man confronts Shield agents Nathan Richards and Howard Stark. Both storylines introduce new mysteries: What do Leonid’s memories mean? Is da Vinci seeking to reform Shield or destroy it? What the hell happened when Richards displaced the core?

Hickman begins this issue by showing us S.H.I.E.L.D. as it wants to be seen: “a global projection of ideology’”, an organization that promotes democratic values by protecting the world from external threats. This vision becomes progressively darker as the reader progresses through the first page - equality becomes a singular will which transforms into ‘forced serenity’.

By the second page, we see SHIELD as it actually is:  a cultish organization shrouded in mystery and obsessed with fate and superstition. Weaver’s neoclassical Immortal City is a perfect reflection of S.H.I.E.L.D., whose High Council stands on the shoulders of a Renaissance era genius.

It will be interesting to see how Hickman explores the tension between the competing visions of the agency in the coming months.

The bi-monthly schedule of this book is a little bit frustrating ; we get the next issue in August. But if Weaver and Strain can turn out something this amazing each issue, it will be more than worth the wait. The two effortlessly transition from modernist to realist to surreal within the space of a few pages, with battle scenes equally inspired by John Woo and Jack Kirby.

Pick up issue three in August.

I can’t do it without you.

Daytripper #7 (Gabriel Ba & Fabio Moon, Vertigo) - Ba and Moon hit it out of the park again with another phenomenal issue which departs from the traditional formula of this series. Each of the last six issues have focused on an important moment or experience from different parts of Bras’s life. Each ends with a now-familiar ‘twist’ that demonstrates the importance of making every day count, because we are never promised tomorrow. This format has helped us understand Bras in a more fundamentally honest way than if the story was told in a straightforward manner, if only because of the fact that the way that a person dies can provide insights into how that person lived. This issue departs from the formula in seemingly minor ways — Ba relies more heavily on narration and flashback — culminating in a conclusion that departs from the typical Daytripper ending in a pretty chilling way. On the second read, the ending feels almost inevitable, like the conclusions to those old EC horror/morality tale comics. A quick aside: we are trained as readers to view predictability as a storytelling flaw, but when the story’s this well constructed, the questions that are raised by the storyteller become more important than the element of surprise. We expect Bras to die at the end of this issue, but the questions raised about the nature of friendship - and when one should let a friend go - are haunting.

This version of Bras is 38 years old. He has a successful marriage and career. After six issues, he’s finally got his shit together, and is dealing with the travails of being a minor celebrity. When we catch up to him, he’s on his way to Sao Paolo to find Jorge dos Santos, his long-vanished friend from last issue. Ba shows us Bras’s search, interspersed by vignettes from key points in their friendship. At first, we almost think that Jorge’s just one of those guys that’s fallen off the grid and living off the land. As the story progresses, we start to get dark hints that there’s something terribly wrong.

He gave up.

When you strip away the heightened elements of the story, this is a familiar conversation to anyone with a ne’er do well friend. Someone who seemed to be stronger than us in youth, but found it difficult to deal with the challenges of adulthood. This issue is a reminder that many dreams don’t come true. Some stories don’t have a happy ending. Sometimes, when we fall down, we don’t get back up. So much of this series has focused on the lessons that we learn in our journey through life, and I think this may be the final one for adulthood - sometimes, it’s just too late.

This issue also introduces a new mystery. This is the first issue where Bras’s death was absolutely necessary to the plot. In the previous six issues, the break between the story and the death was clean - you could almost read the death scene out of all the previous issues and get a straightforward narrative. But in this issue, the death was central to everything, which makes me wonder how the brothers will frame the ninth issue. This miniseries is a real gem, if you’re not picking it up now, please buy the trade when its released.

Links!!

• Would you like to be inspired by free, independent hip-hop? Go download The Inspiration 3008 - Episode IV: The Shake-Up, by Moe Jiggz. It’s great and its free. Listen.
• David Brothers discusses race, statistics, and mainstream superhero comics in a post that features hypnotic Kanye West and Drake gifs.
• Hamas follows the Rorscharch Doctrine in the Gaza Strip.
• Buenaventura Press, publisher of the acclaimed Kramers Ergot 7 anthology, has announced that it closed its doors six months ago in response to legal and economic pressures.
• Caitlin Flanagan wastes her prodigious writing talent by writing a tiresome polemic disguised as a trend piece about the impact of an imaginary ‘hookup culture’ on young women. Matt Yglesias, all-purpose blogger at ThinkProgress deflates the piece with data. Ross Douthat, opinion writer for the New York Times, pivots off of the article to critique the sexual revolution.
• Mindless One amypoodle entertainingly annotates the second issue of the Return of Bruce Wayne miniseries. A representative quote: “The hypertime deniers could learn a lot from Superman’s childlike, enquiring approach here. It’s probably a disguised appeal for them to actually read whats on the page instead of the script going on in their head about weird and drugs, whilst at the same time one of those throwaway Morrison lines that tells us so much about the character in question. Oh yeah, and I’ve just noticed that Mandelbat has Barbelith for an eye.”
• Have you not the decency to require decency in the marketplace? Jeff Strabone muses on the responsibility of the government to regulate corporate misbehavior in a hilarious, insightful essay for 3 Quarks Daily. In an unrelated piece, James Kwak reminds us that the financial crisis and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were not caused by cognitive biases, but willful misbehavior.
• Michael Cohen asks why the American Left has been reluctant to challenge President Obama on the war in Afghanistan in an essay for the New Republic. Andrew Exum writes a great response post urging the ‘Left’ to think critically about the war and counterinsurgency doctrine.
• Will Drake’s debut album Thank Me Later be the last debut hip-hop album to ship or sell 500,000 copies? Bavu Blakes thinks so.
• This is a bit late, but check out David Brothers’s take on the first issue of Heralds by Kathryn Immonen, Tonci Zonjic and Nathan Fairbain. I’ve been keeping an eye out for Immonen’s work since reading the brilliant Moving Pictures webcomic that she produces with her husband Stuart, but the quality of Zonjic’s art is an unexpected treat. David gets it - “Zonjic draws these big, spacious panels, with tons of background work. He does several that are page-width, he does some head-on, some overhead, and then, when things start going bed, he throws in this panel that’s set at somewhere between thirty and forty-five degrees, diagonally skewed, and from a point of view that’s about two feet higher than eye-level.” Check it out. The second issue’s even better than the first.
• A moving story about two writers. One is more successful than the other. Go read it.
• R.I.P. Al Williamson, the legendary artist best known for his contributions to E.C. Comics, Star Wars and Flash Gordon, died at the age of 79. Marc Bernardin, Jimmy Palmiotti and Heidi MacDonald of the Beat have obituaries.
• Matt Seneca breaks down Frank Quitely’s 23 panels from Grant Morrison’s recently released Detective Comics #700.
Wednesday’s Pull List Today

Amazing Spider-Man # 633 (Zeb Wells, with art by Chris Bachalo, Emma Rios, Tim Townsend, Jaime Mendoza & Victor Olazaba, colors by Antonio Fabela) “Shed” part 4



Wells and Bachalo turn it up to ten for the conclusion to this dark, brilliant arc.

Heralds #3 (Kathryn Immonen, with art by Tonci Zonjic & James Harren, colors by Nathan Fairbairn, June Chung)



I love the exhaustion and resentment emanating from that second panel.

See you next week!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/13/avenging-the-week-pt-7-standing-on-mens-shoulders-or-locking-them-in-a-studio-with-a-mic/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/13/avenging-the-week-pt-7-standing-on-mens-shoulders-or-locking-them-in-a-studio-with-a-mic/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/28acPaDDPMQ/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/10/dcs-cover-designs-actively-antagonizing-james-burke/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:08:22 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2763 Sometimes the Internet sends you down a rabbit hole. This past weekend, after the latest round of Ridiculous DC Convention Panel Statements (from RDCPS stalwarts Ian Sattler and Bill Willingham) I began to wonder: what exactly does Ian Sattler do as DC’s “Senior Story Editor”, besides make bizarre statements on panels? I never found a job description or even what he did before he became Senior Story Editor — though it seems like he wrote for Comics Alliance under the name Ian DeLaurentis a few years back — but I did stumble upon a post Sattler made on the DCU Source Blog a year or so back.

It concerned Brian Stelfreeze’s covers for Final Crisis Aftermath: Ink. They were designed to form an interlocking portrait of the Tattooed Man, and frankly the design is pretty awesome:



I had no idea this was going on, and while I don’t know that it would’ve changed my mind about skipping the FCA minis, the extent of attention this received was part of a blog post on the DC site. If you missed that, you probably didn’t notice these covers were meant to connect. Certainly no one informed the DC production department:



Between the top banner, other cover clutter, and inconsistent color values and art cropping, it’s no wonder these interlocking covers didn’t get any attention. It’s a shame, because it was some creative work from Stelfreeze.

On the bright side, the Ink cover collage received better treatement than Mike Mayhew’s much-heralded set of covers for the recent trainwreck JLA: Rise and Fall:



Not my favorite set of covers by a longshot, but Mayhew took the time (and DC presumably paid the money) for a bold four-cover tableau. So how does this look in printed form?



Oh. Putting aside DC’s recent fetish for borders and banners, these aren’t even the standard covers: they’re 25:1 variant incentives. Variant covers are never going to be racked or purchased by a casual reader that might theoretically impulsively check out all of RISE AND FALL; they’re immediately put in sleeves behind the counter and sold to collectors at a premium; and while I don’t pretend to know what lurks in the heart of people who purchase variant covers, one imagines that exclusive cover art plays a significant role. Why not let those covers breathe, then?

I realize that none of this affects me directly, since I wasn’t planning on buying either of these storylines, nor do I purchase variants covers; I barely buy single issues, and when the collections of DC Comic I Actually Care About are released there will be an entirely different trade dress paradigm I can complain about. And trust me, I will. But so long as DC is commissioning these covers and trying to focus their energies towards single issues, why not do it right?

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/10/dcs-cover-designs-actively-antagonizing-james-burke/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/10/dcs-cover-designs-actively-antagonizing-james-burke/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/INqIH5tW9vA/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/08/fbbp-126-four-number-ones/#comments Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:13:07 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2747 As a follow-up to our theoretically award-eligible podcast Three Number Ones, Funnybook Babylon planned to look at Four Number Ones, the Billboard #1 singles on our respective birthdays!

Sadly, due to a quirk of fate, our birthdays are paired closely together, so we only have two number ones:

“MacArthur Park” by Donna Summer (Chris & Jamaal)
“Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes (Joseph & Pedro)

So we had to go with our backup plan: reviewing comics. I think we can all agree those are a couple of wretched songs; will the comics be any better?

Atlas #1 by Jeff Parker, Gabriel Hardman, & Ramon Rosanas (Marvel Comics)
Avengers #1 by Brian Michael Bendis & John Romita Jr. (Marvel Comics)
Legion of Super Heroes #1 by Paul Levitz & Yildiray Cenar (DC Comics)
Secret Avengers #1 by Ed Brubaker & Mike Deodato (Marvel Comics)

Listen and learn!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/08/fbbp-126-four-number-ones/feed/ Atlas,Avengers,Brian Michael Bendis,Ed Brubaker,Jeff Parker,John Romita Jr.,Legion of Superheroes,Mike Deodato,Paul Levitz,Secret Avengers Four First Issues reviewed: Atlas #1, Avengers #1, Legion of Superheroes #1, Secret Avengers #1 As a follow-up to our theoretically award-eligible podcast Three Number Ones (http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/05/19/fbbp-99-three-number-ones/), Funnybook Babylon planned to look at Four Number Ones, the Billboard #1 singles on our respective birthdays! Sadly, due to a quirk of fate, our birthdays are paired closely together, so we only have two number ones: "MacArthur Park (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3rEzI0PtPA)" by Donna Summer (Chris & Jamaal) "Bette Davis Eyes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-RdAzkKlXY)" by Kim Carnes (Joseph & Pedro) So we had to go with our backup plan: reviewing comics. I think we can all agree those are a couple of wretched songs; will the comics be any better? Atlas #1 by Jeff Parker, Gabriel Hardman, & Ramon Rosanas (Marvel Comics) Avengers #1 by Brian Michael Bendis & John Romita Jr. (Marvel Comics) Legion of Super Heroes #1 by Paul Levitz & Yildiray Cenar (DC Comics) Secret Avengers #1 by Ed Brubaker & Mike Deodato (Marvel Comics) Listen and learn! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 55:23 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/06/08/fbbp-126-four-number-ones/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/b_KMMsJ9AL8/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/25/avenging-the-week-pt-6-the-chronic-break/#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 19:34:04 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2700 This is going to be a very busy week for me in the real world, so this’ll be a light one. I hope that these links and random commentary will tide you over until next time. This week: Farel Dalrymple, the Roots, comics art, The Things We Should Be Discussing, links, and Tomorrow’s Pull List Today!



I think we should all have a little Farel Dalyrmple to start off the week. This panel is from a Spider-Man/Silver Surfer story that Dalrymple is doing for the second volume of Marvel’s Strange Tales anthology. I had mixed feelings about the first mini-series — the first issue was great and the next two were forgettable — but I’m really looking forward to this. At the very least, it might help introduce more fans to Dalrymple’s amazing art, which some may be familiar with from the acclaimed Omega the Unknown miniseries written by Jonathan Lethem. What did I think of that miniseries? Let’s just say it’s still on my Amazon wish list, but you can check out the thoughts of my fellow FBBers here. Darlrymple’s also responsible for Pop-Gun War, which is very cool-looking and on the list of comic books I need to buy.

Non-comics related interlude:

“Dear God (M.O.F.)” by the Roots featuring Jim James of My Morning Jacket. Go buy How I Got Over, the eleventh Roots album when it comes out on June 22nd! New York Magazine’s Vulture blog has the streaming version here.

Miscellany

• Via Bill Reed of Comics Should Be Good, Jason Wood of iFanboy briefly explores the price elasticity of demand for mainstream superhero comics. Wood theorizes that the success of $3.99 comics over the last month demonstrate the relatively inelastic demand for superhero comics. It’s an interesting analysis, but I’d be really interested to see what the demand looks like several months from now when the dataset is a bit bigger.

• Warren Ellis requests a remake/remodel of Wonder Woman on the Whitechapel message boards, with some pretty stunning results. I have a soft spot for the one by Paul Sizer (l.) and Payno (r.), even though the contributions from Ed Sludden ,Francundo and JamesSmith3 are also impressive. Check out the whole thing, it’s a lot of fun. Mildly NSFW for people who don’t have IT departments filled with hippies.



• Alex Segura of DC’s Source blog revealed the latest in DC’s series of 75th Anniversary variant covers - a remake of the classic Gil Kane Green Lantern cover by Frank Quitely. Kevin Melrose of Robot 6 got a great full version of the cover, as seen below:



Wow. Quitely can do no wrong in my book.

• Tom Spurgeon identifies some of the discussions that he would like to see more of in the comics community. Go give it a read, Spurgeon has an interesting perspective on the industry and fandom. Of the three areas that Spurgeon discusses, the one that sounds most interesting to me is the first: whether we (as consumers, critics and an industry) are adequately considering the moral implications of reprinting archival material. We tend to view this issue from a consumer perspective, so the mere existence of this reprinted material appears to be an unalloyed good. Spurgeon reminds us to consider the risk that an artist’s legacy can be jeopardized by reprinting material that “collects sub-standard material visually or is otherwise poorly conceived, or is poorly executed”. This risk is negligible for well-known creators with a cemented legacy, but its easy to imagine how this could be could be a serious problem for overlooked or unappreciated creators from earlier eras. He also raises the question of whether the artists are being justly compensated for their work, which is far more complex than simply figuring out whether the publisher is complying with the terms of the initial contract. I would concede that this is an important issue, but I think that critics and journalists would probably play the biggest role in these kinds of discussions, and I think that there’s a chance that the conversation could devolve into the kind of message-board nonsense that surrounded the Siegel and Kirby lawsuits. I agreed wholeheartedly with Spurgeon’s post attacking the comics industry for failing to take steps to heal the wounds of the past, but it’s important to remember that a lot of readers subscribe to a trendy hybrid of economic Darwinism and unrestricted freedom of contract which leads them to believe that parties to a contract should be strictly held to the explicit language of the agreement. A partial explanation for these beliefs is that a lot of readers don’t know anything about contract law, intellectual property law, art law, or economics. But if I’m being honest, I’d have to admit that it can be attributed to an ideological gap, which leads me to wonder if a conversation about morality vis a vis compensation will be a positive sum discussion.

I imagine that Spurgeon’s third point will garner the most headlines in the superhero corner of the comics blogosphere, namely that he’d like to see more discussion about “what these [mainstream superhero] comics are actually saying about the concepts they engage.” I’d argue that a number of critics, including the writers of the Mindless Ones blog, Joe McCulloch, Sean Collins, Plok and David Brothers are actively engaged in this discussion, but that’s a minor quibble. I think that we (critics and readers) spend far too much time embroiled in discussions about market share, accessibility, sales charts and box office grosses, all of which detract attention from the work. In a strange way this reminds me of Chuck Klosterman’s recent appearance on Bill Simmons’s ESPN podcast, in which he persuasively argued that viewers of Lost should evaluate it as a television show instead of a marketing event. We should spend more time evaluating books on their merits. Check out the terrible, terrible interview with Noah Berlatsky that started this conversation, and related posts by Sean Collins and David Brothers.

Tomorrow’s Pull List Today

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne # 2 (Grant Morrison & Frazer Irving, DC Comics)



It sounds so simple when he explains it!

Dark Wolverine # 86 - (Daniel Way & Marjorie Liu with art by Stephen Segovia and Cam Smith, colors by Marte Gracia, Marvel Comics) Reckoning, part Three of Four



I suspect that Skaar won’t be mewling by the close of this issue.

Fantastic Four # 579 - (Jonathan Hickman with art by Neil Edwards & Andrew Currie, colors by Paul Mounts, Marvel Comics) Future Foundation, Part One



I have to admit, this is rousing. Ugly, but rousing.

The Thanos Imperative: Ignition #1 (Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning with art by Brad Walker & Andrew Hennessy, colors by Wil Quintana, Marvel Comics)



Why I love Thanos, in five sentences.

Secret Warriors # 16 (Jonathan Hickman & Gianluca Gugliotta, colors by Sunny Gho & Imaginary Friends Studios, Marvel Comics), Wake the Beast, the conclusion



This is going to be thrilling.

7 Psychopaths # 1 (Fabien Vehlmann & Sean Phillips, Boom! Studios)



I’m a sucker for Sean Phillips.

You can find larger versions of all of the previews above at Comic Book Resources.

Next Week: Reviews! Unsolicited Commentary! Links!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/25/avenging-the-week-pt-6-the-chronic-break/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/25/avenging-the-week-pt-6-the-chronic-break/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/8Kj7ITmn8ps/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/18/avenging-the-week-pt-5-back-to-the-trap/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 19:01:21 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2693 This week we briefly step back into the world of mainstream superhero comics with reviews of Dark Avengers and Batman: Return of Bruce Wayne. I also take a quick look at the recent Glyph Awards, and lay some links on you. Spoilers below.

Dark Avengers #16 (Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Deodato, Marvel Comics) Over the last year, Dark Avengers has been the most consistently entertaining and challenging book in the Avengers line, but its final issue lacked any sense of dramatic tension, which is par for the course for the post-Siege Avengers books, but kind of disappointing nonetheless. It’s an obligatory thirty page long epilogue that sets readers up for the Brightest Day Heroic Age a/k/a the return to a slightly modified status quo. Bendis positions the characters for the next arc in a pretty inoffensive way, although the sequence featuring Daken induced an eyeroll. I have two problems with Bendis’s writing in this issue, both of which relate to his characterization of Norman Osborn, and which illustrate broader concerns with Dark Reign as an event. Put simply, we haven’t been given a clear enough picture of what Osborn has accomplished and what he stands for, which undermines the two key subplots that explicitly rely on them.

I’ve always thought that one of the more interesting elements of Dark Reign was Bendis’s’ development of Osborn. He was not a typical mustache-twirling maniac, but a tough and capable (if somewhat morally compromised) man who had the potential to save us from ourselves and who was brought down by his personal shortcomings. Think J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon. The problem is that while Bendis successfully created an atmosphere that supported that view, he never had the character perform the actions that would justify that reputation. Osborn gives a climactic, character-defining rant in this issue, but if you’ve been following this story from the beginning (glumly raises hand), it feels a little empty. In Dark Avengers, we have seen Osborn as a master manipulator and competent field leader. I think that he was more successful at containing the Sentry than any other Avengers leader. But that wasn’t enough to make me think that he could’ve done more. What makes the story of Richard Nixon a tragedy was that he brokered peace with China, created the Environmental Protection Agency, and developed a political strategy that has kept the Republican Party relevant for half a century. The fact that he couldn’t escape his bitterness or his paranoia was what stopped him from being great. When was Osborn’s China moment?

Bendis’s unwillingness to give Osborn a coherent political philosophy compounds this problem. One of the more interesting subplots in the book resolved the status of Victoria Hand, Osborn’s second-in-command. Over his previous thirteen issues, Bendis has done a great job of developing this flawed and complex character, and Hand’s arc concludes this issue with her inevitable redemption. Bendis executes the scene in convincing fashion, but there’s a moment in which she defends her alliance with Osborn by arguing that she was swayed by the “promise of an agenda I completely and wholeheartedly agreed with. And I was very excited to make the world better and safer than it has been for a very long time”. The implication (to me) is that Osborn represented a change from the previous regime, but it raises an obvious question - was Osborn’s approach to this much different than Tony Stark’s? I know that Hand is talking to Rogers, who had his own differences with Stark, but the tone of her speech gave me the impression that she was drawing a contrast between Osborn and his predecessor. Both men believed in an all-hazards approach to preemptive deterrence, supported the Superhuman Registration Act and shared an obsession with low-probability high-impact events (which is likely meant to be a timely link to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “one-percent doctrine”). Other than Osborn’s partnerships with bloodthirsty mercenaries, criminals, and Eastern European dictators, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of daylight between the two.
I acknowledge that it’s dangerous to parse the politics of works like this - I think that mainstream superhero books are most effective when their politics/ideology are intentionally incoherent or vague to some degree - but I think that Bendis put the politics at the forefront of this issue, and should’ve done a better job of following through.

Return Of Bruce Wayne #1 (Grant Morrison & Chris Sprouse, DC Comics) - I love Grant Morrison but until recently his Batman work has been an intensely frustrating read. I don’t mind the surreal, convoluted storylines that benefit from exhaustive annotations or the fact that he’s always self-consciously trying to create something great. It’s the painfully inconsistent art. Morrison’s the type of comic book writer who needs an artist adept at visual storytelling. Morrison understands that comics are a fundamentally a visual medium and layers his stories with hints, clues and allusions that need to be portrayed by a good artist. As a reader, it’s hard to appreciate the resonant spaces that Morrison leaves in his work when the art is sloppy or incoherent. The first issue of this bi-weekly miniseries demonstrates how much Morrison’s writing benefits from an artist who knows how to tell a story.  Return of Bruce Wayne is firmly embedded in Morrison’s DC Universe and can be seen as a sequel to both Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis, as well as a companion piece to Morrison’s Batman & Robin. You don’t need to know much at the beginning of the series other than this:  Batman is believed dead by most of the world but is actually stranded in the past. Other than the ‘Bat-family’ - Red Robin, Robin, Alfred Pennyworth, and Dick Grayson (the new Batman) - no one knows that Bruce Wayne is still alive. Sprouse’s clean, sharp line work on the characters is a wonderful contrast to the surreal elements of the story (particularly the ever-changing skies). All of the characters in this story (including Batman) are portrayed in a naturalistic manner, which helps ground a story where everyone is an archetype. The story is simple. Bruce Wayne encounters cavemen who are classic archetypes found throughout Western fiction - the leader, the warriors, the prince, the fool, and the villain. In this issue, we are exposed to a version of Bruce Wayne that may be more recognizable to our parents, a guy who’s a good fighter but not a hypercompetent one, a hero who doesn’t just rely on his decades of physical and mental training but on luck, his utility belt, and the timely intervention of an unexpected ally. Morrison and Sprouse bring us the best of both worlds - a book that fits perfectly into a wonderfully complex narrative that’s almost a decade long and that works as a light, fun read. Check out some great annotations of the first issue by FBBer David Uzumeri at Comics Alliance .



Glyph Awards!

I’m not an awards kind of guy, but it’s hard to not love the Glyph Awards. The awards were created in 2005 by the just retired comics journalist Rich Watson, author of the eponymous Glyph blog, to celebrate both great comic books with “black themes” and creators of color. Every year, the awards honor books that I love or desperately need to read. For a list of the nominees, check here . Here’s a quick look at the winners from the ceremony last weekend with a tiny bit of commentary:

Story of the Year: Unknown Soldier #13-14 (Joshua Dysart & Pat Masioni, DC/Vertigo)


I have a copy of the first Unknown Soldier trade sitting unread on my bookshelf behind Alec, Tomb of Dracula and a great non-fiction book on the rise of India. I’ve heard great things, and need to make the time to read this. Even though I can’t vouch for the quality of Unknown Soldier, there’s something cool about the fact that a non-superhero story won this award. The winning story can be found in the second volume of Unknown Soldier, Easy Kill (which has an awesome cover).I’ve read two of the other nominees - Luke Cage Noir (written by Mike Benson and Adam Glass with art by Shawn Martinbrough) and War Machine: Iron Heart (written by Greg Pak with art by Leonardo Manco), and thought both were good.

Best Writer: Alex Simmons, Archie & Friends

I know nothing about this guy, but he’s amassed an impressive resume over the last two decades. According to the Archie fans website (h/t David Brothers), Mr. Simmons is a writer of juvenile mystery novels and biographies; a critically praised playwright (of Sherlock Holmes and the Hands of Othello); and the founder of the famous Kids Comic Con. He’s also the Educational Outreach Director for New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. In his post on this year’s Glyph Awards, David noted that Mr. Simmons wrote Archie & Friends All-Stars Volume 3: The Cartoon Life of Chuck Clayton, which seems like an interesting book - it’s one of those stories that gives some depth to an overlooked character while teaching kids how to draw comics, map out plots and develop new characters. This sounds like a perfect gift if you have a young relative who’s curious about comics.

Best Artist: Jay Potts, World of Hurt
Best Male Character: Isaiah Pastor, World of Hurt
Rising Star Award: Jay Potts, World of Hurt

And the trend of creators and work that I’m unfamiliar with continues! World of Hurt is a webcomic created, written and drawn by Jay Potts (who’s a paralegal by day) that celebrates the Black action films of the 1970’s. Potts is inspired by the art of Al Williamson, Alex Toth, and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, among others, and you see their influence in his art.



This looks great, and I can’t wait to check it out. World of Hurt looks like a less tongue-in-cheek Black Dynamite. David Brothers has a great interview with Potts on 4th Letter, and Potts has a description of his comic here. I’m definitely adding this to my RSS feed.

Best Female Character: Aya, Aya: The Secrets Come Out (Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie, Drawn & Quarterly)
Best Reprint Publication - Aya: The Secrets Come Out (D&Q)


This is a great looking series that Joe and David have been raving about for years. I think it’s time to check it out.

Best Cover: Luke Cage Noir #1 (Tim Bradstreet)
Fan Award for Best Comic: Luke Cage Noir (Mike Benson, Adam Glass & Shawn Martinbrough, Marvel Comics)



This is a very cool cover for a great, if flawed miniseries.

Best Comic Strip: The K Chronicles (Keith Knight)


I must check this out.

Links!

• Ulises Farinas is a genius. Check out his awesome short comic pitting a Starro-controlled Superman against DC heroes, and his amazing one-panel comic entitled Batman is a Hoarder. Someone needs to hire him. Hat tip to Laura Hudson of Comics Alliance. Speaking of Comics Alliance, you should also check out David Uzumeri’s cool piece on the merits of ‘Shed’, the recent horror-inspired story by Zeb Wells and Chris Bachalo in the last three issues of Amazing Spider-Man.
• The CIA has a black prison at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. Sigh.
• Gothamist interviews Brian Wood, creator of DMZ, Northlanders, The New York Four, and Demo.
• Mark Ruhlman teaches us how to grill a sausage.
• Google tells us how to save the news.
• The Dark Magic of Structured Finance!
• Central Asia, Opium and Conspiracy Theories
• Do you like futuristic soul concept albums? I know you do! Listen to Janelle Monae’s songs on Youtube and at MySpace. Then buy her new album The ArchAndroid (only 7.99 on Amazon!). You want more? Check out Nikki Lynette’s new mixtape Roses N’ Guns (a fusion of hip-hop, rock, pop, and r&b) here. More? Damn, you people are greedy. For some old-school quality hip-hop, check out The Sandwhich Shop USA, the new mixtape (over Roots instrumentals) by Don Will and Von Pea of Tanya Morgan.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/18/avenging-the-week-pt-5-back-to-the-trap/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/18/avenging-the-week-pt-5-back-to-the-trap/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/UDbRPneU-rY/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/17/batmannotations-batman-and-robin-10-12-batman-vs-robin/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 00:54:32 +0000 David Uzumeri http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2662 For those of you who missed it, I already annotated Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1 over at Comics Alliance. You’ll continue to find those annotations there, while Batman and Robin will remain here.

It’s been a while and there’ s a lot to talk about, so let’s get into it.

“Batman vs. Robin” Part One: “The Haunting of Wayne Manor”

Page 3: The fund for railroad accidents mirrors the overall “Mexican Train” theme of this arc. It seems likely that the Thomas Wayne being referenced here is the devil-worshipping Thomas Wayne of 1765 rather than Bruce’s father, and this is how he’s attained his wealth as Simon Hurt. (More on the Thomas Wayne of 1765 = Simon Hurt theory later).

Page 4: In light of the later-revealed fact that all of these deaths are jokes on the part of the new persona of the Joker, it seems appropriate to investigate them here. The Russian General/Alligator joke didn’t hit me at first, but Google searching reveals that there’s a highly bleeding-edge war-boner-inducing helicopter coming to the Russian military known as the Alligator. Equally interesting is that the Russian general was already killed by the Joker back in Batman #681, which suggests that this death was staged (or Morrison forgot, which is fairly unlikely). It’s notable that Jezebel Jet’s death is different from the public ones of the others, since she’s known to be killed by Talia with her Ninja Man-Bats back in #681 as well.

Page 5: The oil sheikh/peanuts joke is rather well known and is detailed here. I’m not sure how Sexton/Joker’s final statement to himself reflects on his new persona, about good men always finding shovels to dig with - is he referring to Batman, or does he now see himself as a “good man”?

As for the entire Sexton/Joker reveal that comes later, I just want to touch on how it illuminates an overriding motif: while it’s still unclear whether Hurt or Joker is the domino killer, Joker’s new persona reflects greatly on the domino/Mexican Train thing. In the game Mexican Train, unused dominoes are kept in the “boneyard”; the boneyard, of course, is a synonym for a graveyard, which relates both to Sexton’s last name and the name “Gravedigger.” There are two interpretations of this: either Joker is the domino killer, distributing the dominoes as he kills, or he’s being framed by Hurt, and he’s digging up the dominoes/bones from the boneyard to prove his innocence. Or maybe it’s a reference to the fact that all the Black Glove victims, as well (seemingly) as all of Hurt’s goons, wear domino masks.

Page 6: Nerdy note: this entire vista is in the exact same perspective as the entirety of the Ultima Online RPG.

Page 7: Dick’s reference to Tim’s surety about clues being sent from the past is largely chronicled in the first twelve issues of Red Robin. The mentioning that the cave system has been use since the Stone Age makes it fairly clear that the Batcave is the same cave from Return of Bruce Wayne #1.

Pages 8-9: The portraits, in order. We last glimpsed them back in Batman #680, when they were boobytrapped by El Sombrero.

Mordecai Wayne - Probably Bruce, from the upcoming Return of Bruce Wayne #2.

Thomas Wayne - This is where things get weird. A Thomas Wayne is not mentioned in Batman 452-454, the original Peter Milligan/Kieron Dwyer story that introduced the demon Barbathos/Barbatos. The only place I can find any reference to him prior to this, as a matter of fact, is this mysterious page, which has enough references to seem authentic but seems to be largely a work of speculative fanfiction on the part of the author. Still, this seems to be the only pre-Morrison reference to a devil-worshipping Thomas Wayne as part of the “Dark Knight, Dark City” crew.

Darius Wayne - Referenced in Rick Veitch and Tom Yeates’s Swamp Thing #86 as the guy who built Wayne Manor. In that story, Tomahawk ends up in the Batcave and grabs a magic rock related to Swamp Thing (the Claw of Aelkhund) from a huge bat, which seems like it could be Barbatos.

Joshua Wayne - Batman: Shadow of the Bat #45, by Alan Grant and Mike Dutkiewicz, told the story of Joshua Wayne, who died protecting a slave on the Underground Railroad. It’s likely he might be the Cowboy Bruce from ROBW #4, just as Mordecai is the one from #2, since his portrait also contains a clue to the future in the form of the Barbatos casket.

Solomon Wayne - Joshua’s brother, he was a high-class judge who built a bunch of gothic buildings in Gotham (which might line up with Bruce’s statement in RIP - that the streets are a machine to make Batman). Appeared in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27.

Alan Wayne - Alan was Solomon’s son, and spearheaded the development of Gotham’s railroads (Greenberger encyclopedia) - which again backs up the entire Underground Railroad/Mexican Train background of Bruce’s family. His only previous appearance is in a text piece by Scott Beatty (using the in-DCU pen name Cecil Longacre) in the 1997 Batman Secret Files. In Morrison’s run, as we’ll see, his grave forms the centerpiece of the “Garden of Death.”

Kenneth Wayne - Kenneth was Alan’s son, and started Wayne Chemical. He apparently died early, and his wife Laura was a big prohibition activist after that. Also only in the Secret Files.

Patrick Wayne - Started WayneTech, ran the company through both World Wars. Only in the Secret Files. Thomas’s dad, and Bruce’s grandfather.

Silas Wayne - Great-Uncle Silas debuted along with this portrait gallery back in Batman #120, in a story where he was disappointed that Bruce was such a milquetoast. By the end of the story, he died, but not before Bruce told him that he was Batman, making him proud.

Thomas Wayne - Bruce’s father, obviously. I’d never realized that Martha was previously of the Kanes - so Bruce and Kate are probably cousins.

The Miagani tribe - from Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson’s “Batman: The Cult.” Back then, they were basically just a bunch of Native Americans who lived around Gotham - they weren’t mentioned as having any specific relationship to the Bat.

Page 10: It seems likely that Joshua, as well, is Bruce, although that would contradict his earlier appearance in Shadow of the Bat - unless Bruce shows up after Joshua’s death/disappearance and takes up his identity. The casket seems to somehow contain Barbatos.

Page 11: Not only is the constellation Orion, but the painting features a horse’s head and flaming boats, and Orion is near the Horsehead and Flaming Tree Nebulae. The best guess for the meaning of Orion is Bruce sending a clue to the future about the circumstances around his disappearance - his final case was the murder of the New God Orion in Final Crisis, who was the God of War (which Darius Wayne here is participating in). Now we hit the part of the story where Morrison has the characters start to vocalize the theories the fans are having - maybe Bruce is still around now! Maybe he’s Oberon Sexton!

Page 12: Joker’s exceptional hearing was remarked on back in Batman #663. I’m still not sure what the numerology about 99 Fiends comes down to - I thought maybe it’d correspond to a set of double-twelve dominoes, but no luck. I do like how Hurt refers to them as his storm crows, though - if he’s some sort of older, evil, more primal Batman, then he’s got this army of anti-Robins complete with domino masks. (Well, some of them.) Everything else is from classical demonology - the Third Hierarchy refers to Sebastien Michaelis’s 1613 classification of demons. They’re basically the king shits of the demon world - they’re the fallen archangels as opposed to fallen cherubs and other divine scrubs. The Mexican Train is a clear double entendre - both the domino game and the fact that Hurt is literally going to take a train from Mexico.

Page 13: The four members of the 99 Fiends that we’ll meet this arc: Belial (a brother-sister team) (”two beautiful angels in a chariot of fire”), Duke Zepar (apparently the patron saint of date rape and dressed like a soldier) and Naberius (”like a crow” - fits his outfit). These are just Hurt’s hired goons, but he’s clearly riding the devil/demonology schtick hard, like any self-respecting crime boss in the DC Universe should.

Page 14: The horsehead over the fireplace ties in with the Orion/Horsehead Nebula thing. Mordecai’s absence from the portrait gallery makes sense - if Wayne Manor is less than 300 years old, and his Bruce’s Mordecai adventure takes place in 1765, then it wouldn’t have been hung immediately since Wayne Manor hadn’t been built yet. From the comments about Joshua and Solomon on the Underground Railroad, I’m starting to wonder if Hurt’s Mexican Train isn’t going to go directly to the Batcave.

Page 15: I guess Batman sees the horsehead, puts it together with the Orion clue, and then presses pressure plates behind the roses/’flaming trees’/stars to trigger the secret passage.

Page 18: Notice how Batman goes into a secret passage that is literally “sub rosa.” Damian’s movements are swift because of the spinal takeover.

Page 20: At first, I thought this was the room they summoned Barbatos in from 1765, but a scene next issue throws that out. I presume the Thomas there is the devil-worshipping Thomas Wayne, who at this point is almost definitely Simon Hurt.

Page 21: The “corpse-road” is uncovered in #12; the “garden of death” is reportedly the title of issue #13. Alan’s crypt is supposed to form its center, so this is it.

Part Two: “Boneyard”

Page 1: The way Hurt just throws out symbolism here, you’d think he was trying to give me an aneurysm. The W in Hurt’s back, while repeatedly flagellated, looks to be an old wound; I (stealing from Something Awful’s Broseidon) would suspect Bruce carving a W into his back, Zorro-style, at some point in the past. Hurt’s dialogue here continues to imply that he’s Wayne - that he has something his in Gotham to reclaim from pretenders, that he’s Bruce’s dark twin (possibly a reference to the pre-Crisis mentally damaged Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s brother).

Pages 2-3: This page is basically a Jack T. Chick tract’s worst nightmare, with a total douchebag taking advantage of penitence to commit “spectacular new atrocities.” Then again, the priest’s probably Catholic to go along with the penitence theme, so Chick would hate him anyway. I like to think that the DEA agent who capped the priest was Hank Schrader.

Pages 4-5: The rail tunnel, probably built by Alan, and the end of the Underground Railroad that leads to the Corpse-Road. I imagine these are all events we’ll see in Return of Bruce Wayne. As for Dick’s comment about the paint being new, within a year - it’s likely it was all Simon Hurt, during R.I.P., which was six months before the beginning of Batman and Robin.

Page 6: “Pantomime poseur” would be a pretty accurate description of YOU right now, Mistah J.

Page 7: I presume Vepar is reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards in a play on the inverted cross - the idea of the devil being the anti-God. Gnostic types, these. I assume Joker is a “scented dandy” because he’s doused himself in enough cologne and whatever else to hide his natural chemical smell.

Page 8: I love Damian’s “DAMN!” face in the fourth panel.

Page 10: The line “death stroke” makes it pretty clear at this point that this guy is Slade Wilson, Deathstroke, super-assassin and possibly most overused DC Comics character of the 2000s. He’s basically a super-badass mercenary with swords and guns who blamed the Teen Titans for the death of his child, so he has a sincere personal mad-on for Dick Grayson that led to him straight up annihilating the entire city of Bludhaven back in Infinite Crisis.

Page 12: Notice again that the corpse-road is a railway - this is definitely how the Mexican Train will arrive.

Page 13: While Alfred clears up how this lines up with “Cataclysm” for the continuity nuts, I presume the painting of Joshua Wayne was located here since he set up the Underground Railroad connection with the Batcave.

Page 14: The Miagani tribe is discussed earlier, and we see its origin in Return of Bruce Wayne #1 as Bruce inspires Anthro’s grandson to fight back against Vandal Savage. I’m unsure what the energy source mentioned is, since this room is apparently empty later. It could be whatever’s inside the Barbatos casket.

Page 15: Actually, looking at Naberius’s statement, I’d bet it is Barbatos. Unsure why he says the 99 fiends have no master, considering Hurt is clearly their master - is it supposed to be some sort of criminal democracy?

Page 16: I love how Joker makes a legitimately excellent detective, largely because he had to be that brilliant to match wits with Batman for so long.

Page 17: Well, at least the speech therapy from #663’s certainly been working out.

Page 19: The appearance of the domino on Naberius’s body is curious, since it breaks the countdown of the earlier dominoes - we’ve gone from 12/12 to 12/11 to 12/10 and now to 4/1. Simultaneously, we never actually SEE Joker take it from the body - it’s fully possible that he faked its retrieval when he was carrying it all along. It’s still totally up in the air whether Joker or Hurt is the real domino killer - something which definitely makes Damian wonder as well regarding the differences in MO. It’s also interesting that Joker seems to be completely cognizant of Barbatos as well.

Page 21: I’m still totally confused by Damian’s hitting Dick making his Bat-symbol pull off of his shirt. It seems to be fully on in the first panel, but for the rest of this issue and next its ends are slightly removed from the fabric. I’m honestly not sure what it’s supposed to symbolize. Joker also totally knows about the 99 fiends.

Page 22: Deathstroke’s “permission to terminate” line is a play off of his name Deathstroke “the Terminator.”

Part Three: “Mexican Train”

Page 1: I’m still lost as to what’s actually going on with the bat-symbol here - is it really just from Damian hitting him from the shovel? Maybe it’s to try to symbolize that he’s less than Batman now that he’s fighting Deathstroke? I have no idea, honestly, that doesn’t seem right.

Page 2: Deathstroke’s so eager to cripple Grayson, not kill him - but to break him, to be his Bane. Talia’s comment about Dick corrupting his daughter refers to an arc in Devin Grayson’s Nightwing, #112-115, where Dick tried (and succeeded) to do exactly that. It was cut short by Infinite Crisis, however.

Page 5: I wonder if Damian’s comment about Slade wearing him “like [a] glove” ties into the whole glove/weapon motif, since Damian’s being used as a weapon by his mother and Deathstroke, just like the Black Glove was Dr. Hurt’s weapon.

Page 8: Is Damian blaming himself or Dick for the fact that he got angry? It could go either way from the dialogue.

Page 9: Sexton’s request not to be taken to a hospital is explained later when he’s revealed to be the Joker. I wonder if, at this point, Sexton is still planning on trying to lie to Dick and Damian, or if he’s going to tell them the truth.

Page 10: The giant bat Dick’s fighting in the top panel is the same as the giant bat Bruce wore in the first issue of Return of Bruce Wayne. I’m sure the river, much like the railroad, will bear some degree of significance - maybe the river will be a sort of metaphorical River Styx in the next arc, since Doctor Hurt will probably set up the Batcave as a sort of Hell to go with his demonology theme.

Page 11: Morrison’s playing fast and loose with the history here, combining the architect Van Derm from the ’90s Alan Grant history (where it’s bought by Solomon and Joshua) with Rick Veitch’s Darius Wayne origin for Wayne Manor.

Page 14: The Bludhaven incident Dick’s referring to occurred at the beginning of Infinite Crisis #4, when (sanctioned by Alexander Luthor) Deathstroke and the Brotherhood of Evil drop Chemo on the city, turning it into the radioactive wasteland Darkseid used to incubate in between the Infinite and Final Crises.

Page 16: If Damian 2.0 is going to be ten years younger than Damian 1.0 - I’m just saying, he’d be 10 when Damian was 20, just old enough to become his Robin. And if he’s made from the same augmented DNA combinations etc., if he’s the same kid, with the same upbringing, then he’ll probably rebel, too. Unless Talia switches things up, of course. This also brings up the whole nature/nurture question etc. which I can’t really figure out where Morrison stands on.

Page 17: David Brothers told me “I hope I can be a worthy one, mother” was Damian’s “I shall become a bat,” and it’s pretty damn close to that definitive.

Pages 18-19: In case you couldn’t tell Dustin Nguyen was helping out with this issue, check out these layouts and that cityscape. First off, note how ALL of Hurt’s goons here have domino masks. The “him” that Vine is talking about is almost definitely the Joker, with the “foes he cannot defeat” being, of course, Batman.

Page 20: This certainly seems to confirm some kind of mystical nature to Barbatos - it’d certainly have to be there to have Thomas Wayne survive.


Page 21: We never see the cape and cowl placed here - Batman’s taken them off by the time we see him on the last page of Final Crisis. The eclipsed sun is likely a reference to the eclipse (and probably continued eclipses) that signal Bruce’s journey through time - perhaps the Miagani later found Batman’s cape and cowl and enshrined them there, below the black sun that took their man-god away.

Page 22: There are a lot of comments made about Damian being a shitty detective - first by himself back in #666, earlier this arc about the mansion-Clue and now here with Joker slagging on him.

Page 23: It seems kind of unfair for Morrison to unload the dog collar and heart attack ones now rather than earlier, since we only had the alligator gag to go by. The cardinal/collar joke is pretty straightforward, but I don’t get the newspaper tycoon/heart attack/mistress one and none of the explanations I’ve seen really gel, other than that it probably has something to do with William Randolph Hearst.

Page 24: Baron Samedi - “He is usually depicted with a top hat, black tuxedo, dark glasses, and cotton plugs in the nostrils, as if to resemble a corpse dressed and prepared for burial in the Haitian style. He has a white, frequently skull-like face (or actually has a skull for a face) and speaks in a nasal voice. He is a sexual loa, frequently represented by phallic symbols and is noted for disruption, obscenity, debauchery, and having a particular fondness for tobacco and rum. Additionally, he is the loa of sex and resurrection, and in the latter capacity he is often called upon for healing by those near or approaching death, as it is only Baron who can accept an individual into the realm of the dead.” This fits in pretty well with Morrison’s labeling the next arc, “Batman Must Die”, as “Batman R.I.P. as farce” - and engaging in Voodoo and the loa is all stuff Morrison’s mined before, especially in The Invisibles.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/17/batmannotations-batman-and-robin-10-12-batman-vs-robin/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/17/batmannotations-batman-and-robin-10-12-batman-vs-robin/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/cbuuoQBpvGI/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/13/fbbp-125-geoff-jeff-jeff/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 13:57:36 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2652 The Funnybook Babylon Podcast is back at full power and looking at a trio of books written by a trio of homophonic dudes!

Yes, This is Being Published: Brightest Day #1 (DC) by Geoff Johns, Peter Tomasi and a Big Bag of Artists

Underground (Image Comics) by Jeff Parker & Steve Lieber (collected edition out this week)

Sweet Tooth Volume 1: Out of the Woods (DC/Vertigo) by Jeff Lemire (collected edition also out this week)

This was a happy accident, the Trio of [Geo/J]effs, and one we may follow up on in the future. What show would you guys like to see? The Briancast? The Petercast? The Sarahcast? The Bongcast? Let us know!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/13/fbbp-125-geoff-jeff-jeff/feed/ Brightest Day,Geoff Johns,Jeff Lemire,Jeff Parker,Steve Lieber,Sweet Tooth,Underground Reviews of Geoff Johns's Brightest Day, Jeff Parker's Underground and Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth The Funnybook Babylon Podcast is back at full power and looking at a trio of books written by a trio of homophonic dudes! Yes, This is Being Published: Brightest Day #1 (DC) by Geoff Johns, Peter Tomasi and a Big Bag of Artists Underground (Image Comics) by Jeff Parker & Steve Lieber (collected edition (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CBYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.undergroundthecomic.com%2F&rct=j&q=jeff+parker+underground&ei=Lp_rS7DfNoP_8AaZ1sD6BA&usg=AFQjCNGzJz48ZnBRNuiBL9Oe68SY-vcmhQ&sig2=PfvDmJGo98RTYlXjjKCzTw) out this week) Sweet Tooth Volume 1: Out of the Woods (DC/Vertigo) by Jeff Lemire (collected edition (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401226965/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=10EWYYNT1HDD0KYTAG5B&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846) also out this week) This was a happy accident, the Trio of [Geo/J]effs, and one we may follow up on in the future. What show would you guys like to see? The Briancast? The Petercast? The Sarahcast? The Bongcast? Let us know! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 52:00 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/13/fbbp-125-geoff-jeff-jeff/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/jepMA2-iVX0/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/07/avenging-the-week-pt-4-rookie-season/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 20:54:26 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2616

Fight to grow old
Fight to be humble
Fight to stay bold
And then one day, fighting doesn’t make sense
Spending time together’s just another expense
I just want to love, but I ain’t been right
How can I do us and can’t keep on the lights?
This is my plight
I don’t have a plan
Tomorrow is far, I’m talking distant lands
But that’s not true, I do what I can
I work so hard that my face stays tan
Beg you to meet me, work ’till you know me
Sleep with the world, and still feel lonely
I just want to love, and be loved back
You just love to dance, I can’t touch that

-Allure (Must Have Been Love), T.Shirt X Darvin Silva, Tan-Face Children EP.

I love debut works by new comics creators in the same way that I love first albums, or a director’s first film. It’s thrilling to watch an artist discover their voice and articulate ideas that have been percolating for a lifetime. I’m often so caught up in the creator’s exploration of the form that I tend to forgive flaws far more than I would for an established creator. It’s hard not to suspend judgment for these kind of books - every page feels like it’s bursting with enthusiasm and creativity. The final product tends to be something fearless, unburdened by convention. Sometimes there’s nothing better than consuming art without any preconceived expectations. No track record, no established characters, no legacy to live up to. Just the creator and the page.

Second Thoughts (Niklas Asker), Top Shelf



This is the debut from Niklas Asker, a Swedish artist and designer and offers an emotionally honest look both at the challenges that couples face and the compromises that we all make as we get older.

The narrative is deceptively straightforward - Asker tells the alternating stories of two individuals, one a novelist suffering from writers’ block, the other a photographer, who are in romantic relationships that have reached a crisis point. The two narratives are explicitly linked by an encounter at the airport, but the subtler links are even more intriguing. Although both narratives are told from the protagonists’ perspective, Asker exclusively uses dialogue in the first story to create a sense of distance, while using text captions for the other to create an exagerrated sense of intimacy. At first, it seems like Asker is engaging in the kind of formal experimentation common to first-time creators, but he’s using one story to comment on the other - the remote story helps us understand the intimate one, and vice versa. Asker’s visuals complement these shifts in perspective, especially in the sequences where we see the world through one character’s eyes without hearing their thoughts, or are shown depictions of photographs to illustrate a story narrated by the other. These contrasts help to add depth to what could have been a pretty banal story.



I’d like to go further, but I’m reluctant to spoil anything. So I’ll say this - I first read this book on the train, distracted by ambient noise, The Ghost of Christopher Wallace and Tan Face Children. I loved Asker’s visual style, which seemed authentic without striving for photorealism, and his impressive use of shadow and light. I thought the book effectively captured the moments when love is born and vanishes in a pretty cool way. I couldn’t figure out what to write for this week, so I decided to take a stab at reviewing this book. So, I read it a second time. After my second read, this book is on my short list for ‘Best Books that Jamaal’s Read in 2010′. You need to read this - it’s only ten dollars and runs about eighty pages. The dialogue’s pretty spare, so it’ll be a quick read. Put it down for about an hour. Pick it up and read it again. Slowly. Pay attention to the details. Awesome, isn’t it?

I’ll just say this - this book is a fascinating portrayal of an artist using the creative process as a tool to investigate the contents of their consciousness. Through fiction, the artist can explore paths not taken, and engage in explorative play that clarifies the dilemmas that they may face. In that context, the ending becomes as bittersweet as it is inevitable. Go buy this book. Asker helpfully offers a preview of the first ten pages on his website. New York Magazine’s Vulture blog has a pretty cool slideshow here.



Mesmo Delivery, Rafael Grampa, Dark Horse

Mesmo Delivery is another book that delights in confounding expectations. The story is simple. An ex-boxer who resembles a dimwitted Brock Samson teams with a seedy Elvis impersonator to transport mysterious cargo across the desert. They stop in a small town for a brief pit stop. Chaos ensues and we find out that none of the characters are what they seem. Grampa’s art and visual storytelling skills are amazing. His layouts are impressive, particularly in the fight scenes. Even though this is a brief, self-contained story, it feels epic. A review for Comic Book Resources described this art as a “mad love child of Basil Wolverton, Simon Bisley, and I don’t know, Frank Quitely”, but Grampa’s attention to detail and unique perspective bring to mind Paul Pope and Japanese woodblock prints. This is beautiful work. Go buy it.


Miscellany

Chris Sims of Comics Alliance explores the racial politics of the trend towards reactionary storytelling in DC Comics, with a follow-up on his blog. Sims argues that an unintended consequence of the nostalgic revival that has taken hold of the publisher over the last decade is a ‘whitewashing’ of many of its notable franchises, as the white Silver Age/Bronze Age versions of characters like Green Lantern, Firestorm or the Atom replace Latino, African American or East Asian incarnations of the characters. It’s a well written piece, but I have two quibbles. As Sean Collins points out, the problem of character diversity in the DC Universe has its roots in the overuse of ‘legacies’ - when an older character is replaced by a younger hero with the same name and a similar powerset. When DC creators initiated this practice in the 1950’s, it was a fresh way of linking the new universe they were building with classic forgotten characters from the Second World War and longstanding properties like Batman and Superman. Unfortunately, over the last three decades, it’s become a crutch, a cheap short-cut used by DC writers to evoke an emotional response from readers. Legacy properties handcuff DC to the past - after all, how forward looking can its fictional universe be if ‘there always has to be a Hawkman or even a Flash’? So, on some level, Sims is pointing out that there is a particularly regressive trend in DC’s otherwise reactionary storytelling. This is still a meaningful insight, but we should all acknowledge that the problem can’t be solved by ‘moving forward’ and reinstating Jason Rusch (Firestorm) or continuing to tell stories featuring Jaime Reyes (Blue Beetle). We also need to realize that having the ‘African American Firestorm’ or the ‘Mexican American Blue Beetle’ is just as essentialist as characters with powers that relate to their race or country.

The second issue I have with the piece may seem a little bit more didactic, but bear with me. Sims notes that “Geoff Johns … is personally responsible for regressing Green Lantern, Flash, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Hawkman, Aquaman and others”, but otherwise diffuses responsibility for this trend among creators, “DC”, and the “majority of readers”. If you’ve been following the interviews, leaks and rumors about DC for the last number of years, not to mention some of the message boards, it’s obvious that many DC editors and fans want a Silver/Bronze Age revival, but it’s less clear whether this has inspired the recent bout of resurrections. I think that it’s unhelpful to view these groups as some kind of monolith interest group that wants Ronnie Raymond to be Firestorm or Barry Allen to be the Flash. Some of these creators and fans want a return to simpler storytelling - sometimes with less moral ambiguity, sometimes with less violence or fewer ‘mature’ themes. Some want to ensure that legacies continue - a through line that runs from the 1940’s to the present day. My theory has always been that comics readers (myself included) are like voters - we have inchoate preferences and interests, but lack the patience, time, and expertise to really master any details. In the context of voting, this means that we elect the guy who seems like he has a worldview similar to ours, and then we support the individual policy positions he takes, regardless of whether we really have opinions about the specific subject. For comics fans, this means that we buy books written by the person who effectively taps into our broad preferences, and mostly disregard his or her particular quirks. Geoff Johns (like Mark Waid before him) is an expert at tapping that nostalgia vein, which is what people really want.

This is important - because the problem of a single creator who is the current creative force behind DC has a very specific set of preferences (DC must look like it did in 1978!) is far less intractable than the problem of excessive nostalgia among DC fans, or a retrograde culture in DC editorial. We all joke (okay, we’re not joking) about the incompetence of DC’s editorial staff, but there’s only one guy who wanted to bring Barry Allen and Ronnie Raymond back.

Links!

• A conversation between Brian Hibbs and Tom Spurgeon
• Dan White is selling a collection of his hilarious comic strip Terminus, and Zip Comics Number One (which collects GO ROBO 4!, LAST SUMMER and JACKIE GOES TO HELL. Dan White is a hilarious cartoonist whose Terminus strip has been a highlight of the Mindless Ones blog for almost two years now. Go support him and buy the book. Go!
• David Uzumeri, Chris Eckert and some other guys review Wilson, Daniel Clowes first original graphic novel published by Drawn and Quarterly. Who are those ‘other guys’? Only Brian Hibbs, Abhay Khosla, Jog, Sean Collins, Tucker Stone and Douglas Wolk, a/k/a the Murderer’s Row of comics reviewers. Or if you’re not seventy years old, would the Dipset of comics criticism be more appropriate? If you added the contributors to 4th Letter and the Mindless Ones, could they be the Dungeon Family of comics blogging? Who would be Cee-Lo?
• Frank Frazetta died yesterday at 82 years of age. He was a brilliant illustrator and painter. I’ve read quite a few tributes to his legacy yesterday, but I think that Charles Hatfield of the Thought Balloonists put it best:
  

  “Sensuality, grace, heat. Lushness.Romanticism. Pulp. Exoticism. Barsoom, Cimmeria, Opar. The delirious, fecund world of men’s adventure fiction after Rider Haggard, Burroughs, and Howard, balmy and self-absorbed in the hot afternoon of late colonialism.”

  Boing Boing, Paolo Rivera, Comics Comics, and Jim Mahfood (NSFW) put up a representative sample of Frazetta’s work.

• Economist Tyler Cowen wonders whatever happened to the surprise marriage proposal.
• The Village Voice takes us inside Brooklyn’s 81st Precinct, with shocking results.
• Does teaching law from casebooks lead to overlawyering? (Yes.)
• Malcolm Gladwell on spies. You know, some people hate on him, but I think he’s one of the best long-form journalists in the business. Other than Michael Lewis, who’s even close?

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/07/avenging-the-week-pt-4-rookie-season/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/07/avenging-the-week-pt-4-rookie-season/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/12kt8ecc3U0/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/04/fbbp-slimcast-1-joseph-jamaal-talk-black-widow/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 02:41:20 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2604

In an effort to present more unsolicited opinions on comics, Funnybook Babylon proudly presents THE SLIMCAST: shorter shows featuring our regular panel and guests briefly discussing the issues of the day. The stars have not been aligning for our traditional full-crew sprawling podcasts in recent weeks, but rest assured they will return soon.

ON THIS SLIMCAST: Joseph and Jamaal convene on the eve of the summer blockbuster Iron Man 2 to look at Marvel’s recent attempts to boost IM2 co-star Black Widow’s place on the stands.  The Widow was introduced the same month as Daredevil and Doctor Octopus (and to be fair, The Rabble Rouser and El Toro) but has never received the attention many of her contemporaries have enjoyed.

To combat this, Marvel’s put out several Widow-centric books recently. Joe and Jamaal review last year’s Black Widow: Deadly Origin mini-series by Paul Cornell, Tom Raney and John Paul Leon. They also sample the first issue of the new Black Widow ongoing series by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña. Is Marvel building up the Widow as comic character befitting her movie star status, or is this Blade all over again? Listen and learn!

Plus: Jamaal makes his 2010 Supreme Court Justice Fantasy Draft Picks!

And check back later this week as Chris and David survey the wreckage of New Krypton and the Superman family of comics!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/04/fbbp-slimcast-1-joseph-jamaal-talk-black-widow/feed/ Black Widow,Daniel Acuna,Iron Man,John Paul Leon,Marjorie Liu,Mike Carey,Tom Raney A leaner meaner podcast, featuring Joseph and Jamaal's takes on Marvel's recent Black Widow Blitz (http://funnybookbabylon.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/slimcast.jpg) In an effort to present more unsolicited opinions on comics, Funnybook Babylon proudly presents THE SLIMCAST: shorter shows featuring our regular panel and guests briefly discussing the issues of the day. The stars have not been aligning for our traditional full-crew sprawling podcasts in recent weeks, but rest assured they will return soon. ON THIS SLIMCAST: Joseph and Jamaal convene on the eve of the summer blockbuster Iron Man 2 to look at Marvel's recent attempts to boost IM2 co-star Black Widow's place on the stands.  The Widow was introduced the same month as Daredevil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_%28Marvel_Comics%29) and Doctor Octopus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Octopus) (and to be fair, The Rabble Rouser (http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/rabblero.htm) and El Toro (http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/eltoro.htm)) but has never received the attention many of her contemporaries have enjoyed. To combat this, Marvel's put out several Widow-centric books recently. Joe and Jamaal review last year's Black Widow: Deadly Origin mini-series by Paul Cornell, Tom Raney and John Paul Leon. They also sample the first issue of the new Black Widow ongoing series by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña. Is Marvel building up the Widow as comic character befitting her movie star status, or is this Blade all over again? Listen and learn! Plus: Jamaal makes his 2010 Supreme Court Justice Fantasy Draft Picks! And check back later this week as Chris and David survey the wreckage of New Krypton and the Superman family of comics! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 24:27 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/05/04/fbbp-slimcast-1-joseph-jamaal-talk-black-widow/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/8PwEoBLg044/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/25/avenging-the-week-pt-3-in-memory-of-edition/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:12:37 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2591

In this trife life, there ain’t nobody you can trust
Plus, there’s no justice, it’s just us
In fact, watching your back, it be a must
And each and every day around the way gats bust
And jealous so-called friends will try to set you up, it’s called betrayal

-Keith Elam, a/k/a/ GURU, Betrayal

Loki shall have battle with Heimdallr, and each be the slayer of the other. Then straightway shall Surtr cast fire over the earth and burn all the world; so is said in Völuspá.

-Glyfaginning (English translation) , a depiction of Ragnarok.

Siege: Loki (Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie) - There’s something about Kieron Gillen’s writing that reminds me of Alice Munro. I know, I shouldn’t compare one of the best living writers of short fiction to a writer who’s relatively at the beginning of his career, but here we are. They both have this uncanny ability to create fully realized and emotionally honest characters with concise prose. In a few pages, you may not know everything about the character, but you develop an instinctive understanding of the complex and contradictory stew of emotions and rationalizations that define them. The beauty of this approach is that it expands the reader’s horizons - in Phonogram: The Singles Club, one doesn’t even have to be familiar with a genre of music or a particular social/cultural scene in order to empathize with the central characters. Both writers also have an amazing ability to illuminate the mundane; to remind us of the intense paradoxes that lie at the core of seemingly ordinary things. As a writer of mainstream comic books, Gillen is able to supplement that with a Matt Fraction-like ability to generate clever premises for his books - ranging from the light/dark fantasy book about pop music, magic and obsession to a sharp satire of pop war movies filtered through the prism of a War God training an elite squad of troops. This week he brings us the story of what happens when a God of Mischief tries to escape his destiny, providing a unique insight into the nature of one of Marvel’s most interesting villains. By the end of this issue, you understand how Loki could simultaneously be the god of chaos, mischief and evil. In Comic Alliance’s roundtable review of this issue, David Uzumeri drew an analogy between this issue’s Loki and the Superman villain Mr. Mxyzptlk from the Alan Moore classic “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” In the climactic sequence, Mxyzptlk explained that he had spent a thousand years making mischief, and wanted to see what it would be like to be evil for a millennium. It’s a good comparison, and I would only quibble in this regard: I think Gillen’s trying to tell us that this truly dark side of Loki has always been there. The Gods (in their arrogance) always underestimated him, and never understood how much he hated them. So this isn’t about change. This is about freedom.

This issue is a master class in concise storytelling. The story moves briskly with a minimum of exposition - instead of explaining Loki’s plan, Gillen gives us a ring-side seat to watch it unfold, from Loki’s perspective. By the end of the book, I felt like I was introduced to an entirely new character. It’s not just that Loki’s capable of great evil, or mayhem, but that he’s a fully realized character with some qualities that I can actually identify with. It’s hard not to admire his struggle, particularly once we know exactly what he seeks to escape. Who can’t find something to admire in a quest for freedom? Gillen and his frequent artistic collaborator McKelvie find interesting ways to collapse the distance between Loki and the reader throughout the issue. Loki frequently turns to look directly at the reader, implicating us in his many deceptions, and the whole story is told from his perspective, further encouraging our emotional engagement.



Gillen deftly incorporates behind-the-scenes details and insight into events from Siege, the New Mutants tie-in, and Thor without overburdening the story with continuity. His fresh though brief takes on classic Marvel villains Mephisto and Dr. Doom and assorted Asgardian gods contributed to a really fun read. McKelvie continues to be one of the most underrated artists in the business, and turns in some beautiful work. I also kind of love the debased rock star undercurrent throughout the issue, whether seen through McKelvie’s portrayal of Loki, or in his hilarious take on Hela.



One thing I wondered about at the end of this book is whether Loki actually achieved his goal. He’s free. Free to…. terrorize Asgard, battle his hated enemy, and lose. Loki is still Loki. A fictional character who can’t escape the trappings of the narrative. He will overreach, because that’s what he does.



Daytripper #5 (of 10) Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba) This is a wonderful book that exceeds my expectations every month. For the uninitiated, Daytripper is a laconically paced post-modern fable about one man’s journey in life. Each issue takes place over a short period — ranging from a single day to about a week — in a single year of a man named Bras’s life and focuses on a moment that helped define him as a person. In the first four issues, we’ve seen Bras reconcile himself to his father’s legacy, experience the birth of his first child and consummate a passionate love affair. One real risk of a story like this is that the plot can feel overly familiar; nearly every issue fits neatly into an established archetype. Moon’s lyrical and emotionally honest storytelling more than compensates for any cliches.

This issue, entitled ‘11′, explores Bras’s childhood, and is set during a weekend visit to his grandmother’s house in the country. We see how Bras’s early relationship with his family shaped the man we’ve come to know in the first four issues. Moon briefly shows us the roots of Bras’s issues with his dad, who is portrayed as a man struggling (unsuccessfully?) to maintain a balance between his responsibilities as a father and his needs as a writer.

For the second time in the series, we’re taken out to the country, which gives Ba the opportunity to let loose with his inventive visual style - portraying the natural world plays to his strengths as an artist.



Ba evokes a sense of wonder and joy with this issue, reminding me of what it was like to be eleven and playing made-up games with my cousins. Dave Stewart is the colorist here, and he gives Ba’s art a painterly quality that contributes to the nostalgic vibe of this issue.



I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Justice League of America v2 #44  (James Robinson, Mark Bagley) - If you had told me fifteen years ago that  Robinson and Bagley would be the creative team on Justice League, I would have been intrigued. I loved Robinson’s work on DC’s Starman, the Golden Age miniseries and Firearm. Bagley’s work on New Warriors and the Amazing Spider Man was a fresh alternative to the over-rendered style that was popular in superhero books of that era. I haven’t followed the careers of either creator very closely over the last decade, but Robinson’s work on Superman, Batman and the Cry for Justice miniseries was incredibly disappointing. So when I was told that this issue of Justice League was pretty decent, I decided to check it out. The verdict - it’s readable, if not a return to form. Robinson gives us a more vulnerable and tentative Justice League filled with characters who are trying to figure out their role in society (Congorilla, Starman?) or are trying to follow in the footsteps of their mentors (Batman, Donna Troy). In this issue, which is a tie-in to Brightest Day, the team investigates a mysterious asteroid strike and confronts Etrigan. This is a pretty standard superhero story that makes some efforts to explore the team dynamic. It’s not bad at all, but I still wish that Robinson would write books that play to his strengths as a writer. Bagley does a nice job, but isn’t asked to do anything particularly interesting.

Links of the Week:

• Henry Louis Gates and Brad DeLong on the “slavery blame game” (man, is that one offensive term!)
• Grant Morrison talks to Comics Alliance, MTV’s Splash Page and Topless Robot about Batman (yawn…)
• Paul Pope talks to Aint It Cool News about Battling Boy, Batman: Year 100, his work process, and his European and Japanese influences. (great interview!)
• Blue Cheese Scallion Drop Biscuits !
• The Definitive GangStarr Story, by Ronin Ro from a 1994 issue of the Source
• A reminder : white supremacy killed Abraham Lincoln
• Does Tom Hanks exist in Tom Hanks movies?

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/25/avenging-the-week-pt-3-in-memory-of-edition/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/25/avenging-the-week-pt-3-in-memory-of-edition/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/yXX4YrYy9Vw/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/20/stay-positive-chris-looks-at-dcs-july-solicitations/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:27:58 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2564 Reader, my two most recent posts have been spiteful missives directed at funnybooks. Most of the other things I’ve been working on are critical of comics as well. I do not wish to simply curse the darkness, so when I looked at yesterday’s DC Solicitations, I struggled mightily not to focus on the negative. So here are some nice things DC will be doing in July, assuming they do not change things and make these books returnable:


Batman #701 (Grant Morrison & Tony Daniel)
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #4
(Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart)
Batman & Robin #14 (Grant Morrison & Frazier Irving)
Joe the Barbarian #7 (Grant Morrison & Sean Murphy) - Who could imagine, I’m excited for a GMo QUAD-LASER in July! And he’s collaborating with two of his Seven Soldiers running buddies! And Sean Murphy, who is killing it on Joe! And Tony Daniel, who is… uh… providing a narrative consistency with “Batman R.I.P.”! I feel pity for David’s annotatin’ arm come July, but am otherwise unabashedly excited for the barrage of Morrison Batmanalia coming this summer.

Sparta: USA #5 (David Lapham & Johnny Timmons) - Like The Beast Must Die over on Mindless Ones, I’m distracted by Johnny Timmons’s overly photo-referenced art in Sparta. But like TMBD, I’m powering through it to follow Lapham. It’s getting to the point that stiff photoreferenced work is just this era’s Thing You Must Endure, like muddy proto-Vertigo coloring and the awkward introduction of computer coloring and lettering. How many otherwise enjoyable comics were marred by grotesque lensflares, ridiculous character-specific fonts, and panel upon panel awash with different concentrations of brown and purple? Many! And yet comics soldiered on. One day, this too shall pass.



Demo v2 #6 (Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan)
DMZ #55 (Brian Wood & Andrea Mutti)
DV8: Gods & Monsters #4 (Brian Wood & Rebekah Isaacs)
Northlanders #30 (Brian Wood, Riccardo Burchielli) - I’m behind on all of Wood’s projects since I buy almost exclusively trades these days, and their stand-alone nature keeps me from wanting/needing to peek at a friend’s copy to “stay current”, but man, what a workhorse. Plus, it seems like Wood is single-handedly attempting to create a gender balance at DC — yes, I know Andrea Mutti is a dude — with his collaborators. This isn’t to suggest any sort of “affirmative action” action, they’re all great choices for the books. Check out that Fiona Staples cover — if I’m not careful, Wood and company might convince me to buy a Wildstorm Universe comic!

Brightest Day: The Atom Special #1 (Jeff Lemire & Mahmud Asrar) - This has all the hallmarks of trouble; an up-and-comer is slotted in writing a side book for a big event. DC’s squandered the talents of otherwise enjoyable writers like Sean McKeever, Jason Aaron, Ivan Brandon and others on editorially-dictated books that peter out in the shadow of Big Events. But giving actual comics people a shot at working in the DCU is something I’ve been craving for awhile, and I’m holding out hope that Lemire will be given the room to quietly work his charms on Ray Palmer, free of too many magic wishing rings or crazy ex-wives. Stranger things have happened; it wasn’t so long ago that we somehow got improbably long runs of a Dylan Horrocks Batgirl and a Jon Lewis Robin. I wish Lemire’s Atom wasn’t relegated to a backup in the nineteenth Legion of Super Heroes revamp of the decade, but this is not a perfect world.

Doom Patrol #12 (Keith Giffen, Matthew Clark & Ron Randall) - I imagine it isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but after a somewhat rocky start and a brief flirtation with plastic rings, Giffen and Clark have found their groove. It’s probably not everyone’s thing — your love for meta-commentary involving Oolong Island, Ambush Bug and Danny the Street is almost certainly less than mine — but I hope this iteration of Doom Patrol breaks the streak of ever shorter series (87, 22, 18…) for “the World’s Strangest Heroes”. If not just to prove Jeph Loeb wrong, then to get more of Clark’s adorable Cheeks:



Justice League: Generation Lost #5 (Keith Giffen, Judd Winick & Joe Bennett)
Booster Gold #34 (Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Chris Batista & Rich Perotta)
Ex Machina #50 (Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris) - I’m still not a fan of the Maxwell Lord, Evil Mastermind story, and the Giffen/JMD Metal Men story was not my cup of tea, but this creator/character combo has built up enough good will since the 1980s that I’m willing to give this thing a shot. And hey, if nothing else it’s an excuse for Tony Harris to do a couple dozen more sweet covers now that Ex Machina is wrapping up. I was following Ex Machina in trade, then stopped buying those when DC started releasing oversized hardcovers. The third one of those is coming out in May, out of how many, four? five? I wonder how long it will be before I find out how Ex Machina ends?



Gotham City Sirens #14 (Paul Dini & Guillem March) - There’s no way I am reading this book. But the cover (at left) is a nice reminder of how appealing March can be when his art isn’t full of ass shots and hastily-erased nipples and genitals.

Detective Comics #867 (David Hine, Scott McDaniel & Andy Owens)
Batman: Arkham Reborn (David Hine & Jeremy Haun) - David Hine’s Arkham one-shot was one of the few bright spots within last year’s Battle for the Cowl event, and I’ve heard nice things about the Arkham Reborn mini-series. Perhaps Hine and McDaniel’s arc in Detective will continue to be an enjoyable sidebar to Bat-Family? It could happen!

Batman: The Bat and the Beast (Peter Milligan & Andy Clarke) - I’ve always liked the idea of “anthology” books in this mold, though they frequently end up as a dumping ground for moldy inventory stories. I have no idea of this story’s provenance, save that it was sandwiched so well between completely unappealing stories that I didn’t even realize Milligan was on Batman Confidential. But at $12.99 for a complete Batman story, I can definitely see impulse purchasing this.

Hellblazer #269 (Peter Milligan & Giuseppe Camuncoli) - Speaking of Milligan! I know we’ve trashed his Greek Street and Hellblazer work on the podcast, though I was a bashful supporter of the latter. It’s picked up since then, and I’m excited to see Milligan following up on the Kathy George/Troy Renzer cameos from earlier in his run. Perhaps because of this storyline, a third collection of Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man is due in July, a mere six months after the second. At this rate, the entire series will be collected by 2015. I guess DC’s trade department needs to prioritize their releases; it’s not like there’s a Shade movie coming out this month or anything.

The Losers Book Two (Andy Diggle, Jock, Alé Garza, Ben Oliver, &c.) - Oh wait, that wouldn’t help anything. The Losers, based on Diggle/Jock and company’s series, was initially collected in five volumes. Those are falling out of print — in the case of the last volume, it’s already long gone — and DC opted to consolidate the series into two big volumes, logically named Book One and Book Two. All solid planning — except the second book isn’t coming out until August, just in time for… the DVD release, I guess? Why on Earth isn’t this book out now? I can understand DC’s sluggish pace when they’re collecting new books — I’m sure they’d rather I be buying DMZ, Ex Machina and Hellblazer in single issues and then again in collections, but this is almost directly stating, “What, capitalize on a potentially successful motion picture? Nah, we got some more plastic rings to make. You know, for our real fans.”



Action Comics #891 (Paul Cornell & Pete Woods)
Superman #701 (J. Michael Straczynski & Eddy Barrows) - A Lex Luthor solo book by Paul Cornell and Pete Woods? Sign me up! More John Cassaday covers? Ditto!

So why are they putting cluttered, ugly David Finch covers on Action Comics, and giving JMS/Barrows the John Cassaday covers? DC was so close to having a complete package that excited me out of the Superman Office for the first time since… well, probably since I was thirteen and thought Reign of the Supermen was badass.

Wow. I’m not sure if my attempts to stay positive were successful, but I did my best, I really did. DC has products I want to buy, but sometimes they make it difficult  Did I miss anything good? Does anyone have reason to crush my fragile positivity? Let me know.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/20/stay-positive-chris-looks-at-dcs-july-solicitations/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/20/stay-positive-chris-looks-at-dcs-july-solicitations/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/nIPcaqjpStA/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/18/why-wont-people-stop-swiping-mark-millar/#comments Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:52:42 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2547 There’s already been plenty of coverage elsewhere of Mark Millar’s hissyfit about getting his idea of Vampires vs. Superheroes “swiped” by the X-Offices. I think Mark’s onto something: just as he introduced the concepts of gay superheroes and “a superhero comic set in the real world”, I see no reason to think he didn’t also create the concept of superheroes fighting vampires. After all, wasn’t he the guy who introduced us to Marvel Zombies? So just how far does this swiping of Millar go? Look below and be horrified!





Shocking! Simply shocking! I’d expect some up-and-comers to rip off a master like Millar, but Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz? John Byrne and Art Adams? Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan? JACK “KING” KIRBY? I’m disappointed in all of them! Why won’t they stop swiping Mark Millar?

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/18/why-wont-people-stop-swiping-mark-millar/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/18/why-wont-people-stop-swiping-mark-millar/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/FWDvX7k8FUk/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/16/avenging-the-week-pt-2-how-the-world-ends/#comments Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:37:52 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2497 This week - Cooke shows us how it’s done, Hickman and Weaver keep us guessing, and MoCCA is predictably awesome. Note - Spoilers Below!

The Man With the Getaway Face by Darwyn Cooke (IDW Publishing)



Darwyn Cooke continues his adaptations of the Parker series of novels by Donald Westlake (under the pseudonym of Richard Stark) with this limited edition preview of The Outfit, due for release in October. According to the introduction, Cooke planned to adapt Westlake’s books in chronological order, but had to eliminate The Mourner and compress The Man With the Getaway Face to a single chapter in order to include The Score and Slayground.

One of the best things about reviewing comics is the impetus it offers to revisit a creator’s work. When I first read The Hunter for the podcast I had mixed feelings. I think that my issue with Hunter was something akin to the uncanny valley effect in cinema - the art from the first chapter of Hunter brilliantly evoked mid-century New York City –- at least the Don Draper version of it — and I unfairly expected that the narrative would match the realism of the art. As a result, I had a lot of problems with the second half of the book, when the conflict shifts to one between Parker and the “Outfit” (the Mafia). I couldn’t buy into the notion that Parker would be able to embarrass the mob in that way without suffering a quick and severe reprisal. I know, I know. In retrospect, that was as unfair as critiquing the realism of terrorists in a Die Hard movie. All the same, I didn’t respond well to the shifts in tone.

I had none of these problems with The Man With the Get Away Face. In twenty four short pages, Cooke reminded me why he is one of the best cartoonists working today. He sticks to his plan for the series to use only black and one other color; this time he switches up his palette from Hunter’s cobalt-chrome monochrome against cream paper to a tannish brown. The story here is simpler, a simple heist carried out by desperate criminals, two of whom make fatal mistakes. You know exactly what’s going to happen by the time you finish reading the fourth page. In lesser hands, this would feel generic, but the familiarity gives Cooke room to demonstrate his visual storytelling abilities. The chapter is filled with silent sequences which not only heighten tension but also focus the readers’ attention on each panel. The character of Parker is famously inaccessible, but in these stretches one almost identifies with the character, obsessing over the minutiae of the heist, trying to think one step ahead of the partner that you know will betray you. It’s a light read, but incredibly fun and flawlessly executed.



An extra thanks to David Brothers for not only telling me that this book was released at Wondercon, but pointing me in the direction of Bergen Street Comics, which brought some copies from the convention. If you’re in the Brooklyn area, you definitely need to check this store out. It’s the kind of place we all dreamed of having when we were young men. For two interesting perspectives on Parker, check out Dan Nadel’s review for Comics Comics, and Tucker Stone’s for Comixology. David explains why the Outfit was the right choice for the next adaptation, here. I’m going to go re-read The Hunter now.

S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver (Marvel Comics): This is a book that should be right in my wheelhouse. S.H.I.E.L.D. explores the history of S.H.I.E.L.D., an agency that began life as Marvel’s version of the CIA/MI6, and has since become the publisher’s take on the national security establishment as a whole. This book sort of spins out of the events in Hickman’s Secret Warriors, which follows Nick Fury (erstwhile director of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and his new black ops unit, where we have discovered a dark world of betrayal nested within the more conventional spy narrative that we had become familiar with over the decades. It is revealed that S.H.I.E.L.D. is really a part of Hydra, the terrorist organization founded by Nazis and upper level officials of imperial Japan in the wake of World War Two (we later find out that Hydra itself is an agency that is thousands of years old, with roots in the third dynasty of Egypt).



But that’s not why I’ve been looking forward to the book. I’ve been awaiting this issue with bated breath for one reason:



This inspired me to dream of other historical figures as agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Odegei Khan? Alexander Hamilton? It also led me to wonder what the appropriate critical standard for a book like this should be: a pop book that focuses on the ‘great men of history’ (a commenter on 4L described this as the “[h]istorical Celebrity genre that’s arisen in the wake of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, or something that seriously grapples with history and culture in an accessible way, more like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt.

So, here we are. I’ve read this book twice in preparation for this review and still don’t know what to think. There’s a lot of promise here. We follow the protagonist Leonid as he’s introduced to the S.H.I.E.L.D. High Council, and is told the origin story of S.H.I.E.L.D., which can almost double as a creation myth for a world powered by thought. Hickman does a pretty impressive job of balancing the demands of the marketplace with his desire to grapple with some interesting ideas. He uses artifacts of Marvel history and flashes of familiar names and faces — Howard Stark, Nathan Richards, Apocalypse — to not only serve as a kind of safety net for readers yearning to see familiar characters and settings, but also set the stage for the kind of dialogic narratives that Grant Morrison has become famous for at DC Comics. The history of the Marvel Universe is in play, and the reader is invited to use it to theorize and impose meaning on the narrative.

This issue panders to my desire for narrative complexity and ambiguity in superhero comics. Hickman is at his most effective when he’s weaving a conspiracy, and he does some of his best work in this issue. At this point, we have been introduced to S.H.I.E.L.D., an organization that claims to “be a safeguard against the things that would stop us from becoming what we are supposed to be” - pushing humanity to reach its potential while protecting it from external threats. We also know that they have some kind of adversarial relationship with the Night Machine, who appears to stand for inspiration (”a necessary change”) and an end to secrecy (he’s there to “tear this place [the secret city] down”). We know that the High Council, along with all of the historical figures (Imhotep, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Zhang Heng) make reference to the final fate of man, which could be hopeful or ominous. I think that it’s very important to remember that we don’t really know anything else. We can assume that the frame story is true, but we can’t necessarily accept the Council’s characterization of the role that the historical figures played in the evolution of S.H.I.E.L.D.

In 1952, we see an organization obsessed with secrecy (the quiet math, the hidden arts, the silent truth) in an underground city. The truth is hidden. History is secret. The weird thing is that Hickman’s historical S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are all men who weren’t just known for being polymaths or geniuses, but for being singularly inspirational figures. Imhotep brought medicine, engineering, and from some accounts the papyrus scroll. Da Vinci was an artist, scientist and inventor that “advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics”, among other achievements. Galileo is the father of modern astronomy and physics. Zhang Heng was a brilliant poet, astronomer, and engineer who developed the world’s first seismometer. When Hickman introduces us to them, they are all seem fully engaged with the world, all doing their work in the clear light of day - da Vinci has the weird Council helmet and Imhotep’s iconic headdress in the open on his shelf. None look like they are a part of a silent or hidden movement, which leads me to think that this may be a story of an organization that lost its way.



Dustin Weaver’s art complements Hickman’s writing throughout this issue, adding a dynamic element to what could be a static comic of ideas. Each scene, from the introduction to the Egyptian battle with the Brood and Zhang Hengs’ encounter with the Celestial, feels visually distinct. We don’t just feel like we’re traveling through time, but through genre.

The first issue also sets the stage for an exploration of the nature of institutions and authority, which brings to mind both Morrison’s run on The Invisibles and (bear with me here) Warren Ellis’s recently concluded run on Planetary. I am running the risk of doing a great injustice to the complexity of both books by summarizing at all, but one idea explored in The Invisibles is that paternalistic institutions are necessary for early stages of human development when we need protecting, and that they can be discarded when we are sufficiently evolved and self aware. In contrast, Ellis’s Planetary argued that these bureaucracies crush imagination and stifle potential under the guise of protecting us. I’m very interested to see how Hickman explores this theme in future issues.

With all that said, I still find it difficult to wholeheartedly recommend this book. It’s filled with interesting ideas, but lacks any compelling characters. Without that, S.H.I.E.L.D. is just an intriguing illustrated essay. At this point in the story, everyone feels like a type or a cypher. The dialogue feels inauthentic; there’s very little that distinguishes Galileo from da Vinci. I wish that we spent a little bit more time with Leonid before he was abducted by Messrs. Stark and Richards - I would have developed some stronger stake in the story. I have a lot of questions (especially why ‘the spear’ decided to recruit ex-Nazis and high level officials in imperial Japan, and whether it’s a coincidence that the fathers of the two most important people in Marvel history after this series takes place (think about it - Fantastic Four, Avengers, Illuminati) are Shield agents), but I don’t know if it’ll be enough to sustain my interest in the long-run.

MoCCA Wrap Up

The MoCCA Festival reminds me why I love comics. Great atmosphere, friendly publishers (especially Top Shelf, First Second and Buenaventura, even though I’m sure everyone was awesome), and an endless array of mind-blowing books that remind me how little I know about comics. I was there for a few hours this weekend, and managed to catch a pretty cool panel featuring Alex Robinson, Becky Cloonan, Douglas Wolk, Eric Reynolds and Nick Bertozzi on the best comics of the past decade, moderated by journalist/blogger Brian Heater. Although they made some conventional picks (Fun Home, Jimmy Corrigan), it was refreshing to see some unusual choices (Nick Bertozzi’s penchant for picking books that were published decades ago and reprinted in the aughts, Cloonan’s selection of BPRDM). One interesting thread throughout the panel was the relative accessibility of the featured works – with the highlight being the brief conversation between Eric Reynolds and Brian Heater about the accessibility of Jimmy Corrigan, one of Reynolds’ selections. Reynolds convincingly argued that Corrigan was the kind of comic that he would give to a neophyte reader, and that the book was not depressing, but complex.

For an official wrap up of the con, check out Heidi MacDonald’s post at Publisher’s Weekly [http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/456224-MoCCA_Festival_Bounces_Back.php ] (and don’t miss her more personal piece on the Beat).

Here are some books I picked up:

• Second Thoughts, by Niklas Asker
• Alec, “The Years Have Pants”, by Eddie Campbell
• Caboose, by various (edited by Chuck Forsman & Max DeRadigues)
• One Page Wonders Story Circles: The Plight of the Emerging Writer,
Matthew Swanson, Robbi Behr, Idiots Books. Check out this site too.
• The Here, by Eroyn Franklin
• Haberdash, by Chris Sinderson and Tim Hall
• Darjleeing Tea/Cardamom cookie, by Amelia Coulter, courtesy of Chris Sinderson (Darjleeing and Cardamom is the next jump-off flavor!)
• Drawing on Yourself, Ursula Murray Husted w/ a cool sticker.

Here are some things that I have added to my growing Amazon wish list

(1) Kramer’s Ergot 7, edited by Sammy Harkham - I always knew that this book was something special, but seeing it in person… wow. I was dumbstruck by the contributions from Chris Ware and Tom Gauld, but I’m sure that everything else in the book is equally great). Shout-out to the folks at Buenaventura that didn’t complain about me pawing over their book.

(2) Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle - I’ve always meant to pick this book up, and the panel (which chose Deslisle’s other book, Pyongyang as one of the books of the decade) reminded me how much I wanted to read this. If you haven’t read Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, it’s definitely worth a pick-up.

(3) West Coast Blues (with Jean-Patrick Manchette), You Are There (with Jean-Claude Forest), and It Was the War of the Trenches, Jacques Tardi. I saw this at the Fantagraphics table and was instantly entranced.

(4) X’ed Out, by Charles Burns. You already know.

Links!

(1) Joss Whedon to direct Marvel’s new Avengers movie.

(2) David Brothers, Chad Nevett, Tim Callahan, Tim O’ Neil and Sean Witzke dissect Frank Miller in their cross-blog Bullets, Booze and Broads series. Check out the index here.

(3) Marc Ambinder tackles the socio-economic/political structural forces behind obesity

(4) Michael Cohen (of the must-read Democracy Arsenal) punctures the “myth of a kinder, gentler [counterinsurgency] war”

(5) Glenn Greenwald continues the good fight with the case against Elena Kagan and Cass Sunstein for the Supreme Court.

(6) DJ Premier’s memorial mixtape for the legendary Malcolm McLaren

(7) Christopher Walken goes home

(8) Remembering the Rwandan Genocide, 16 Years Later

(9) How to recruit an extremist

Next Week – We take a look at Siege Loki by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, and the Savage Axe of Ares by Gregg Hurwitz, C.P. Smith, John Barber, Jefte Palo, Ted McKeever, Duane Swierczynski, and Leonardo Manco. I’m going to also try to get through some of the books I got at MoCCA (not the Campbell book, I still have to work for a living!)

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/16/avenging-the-week-pt-2-how-the-world-ends/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/16/avenging-the-week-pt-2-how-the-world-ends/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/xb-ompcWZFc/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/12/a-reminder-identity-crisis-was-a-terrible-mystery/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:55:35 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2499 There are many reasons not to like Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer’s best-selling murder mystery book for DC Comics. I’ve railed against it before, including in an embarasingly sloppy proto-FBB post you can read here. But even if you don’t mind its push towards “Superhero Decadence” or a dozen other charges against the book, it’s important to remember that it was an absolutely wretched murder mystery. To illustrate this, earlier today I wrote up a summary of the story from the culprit’s — SPOILER ALERT — perspective. Originally this was just a message board post, but I decided to remind everyone of this important Identity Crisisfact.

“Hi, I’m Jean Loring and I miss my ex-husband Ray Palmer. I know I dumped him for another man and divorced him years ago, and it’s clear he still carries a torch for me. How can I get back together with him? I’ve got it! I’ll borrow his superhero costume with unique White Dwarf powered shrinking powers and while using it for the first time, attempt to non-fatally harm one of our friends, using the rationale that this threat against superheroes’ loved ones will cause Ray to want to reunite. Even though he already wants to reunite.”

“Who should I use as the victim for this dangerous ruse? While I have a Rolodex of even the best-kept secret identities, I suppose I should target Sue Dibny, universally loved and publicly known wife of Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man. This is perfect, because today is the day of her husband’s big birthday party, and every hero in town will be heading over to her house. That’ll shake everyone up! And she’s pregnant! Perfect! Good thing I scheduled an appointment to meet with my ex-husband at the precise time I decide to commit this crime, that’s a perfect alibi. Hope he’ll be late!”

“Oh no! It appears that my untrained walking on Sue’s brain has caused her to die! Who knew? Good thing I had the foresight to bring along a flamethrower, “just in case” I end up murdering her. I can burn her corpse! I don’t know why I think that will mask my footprints on her brain, and it’s also completely illogical that none of my actions were detected or recorded by the most advanced security system in the universe. But hey, I guess today is my lucky day because the flamethrower I USED FOR NO REASON implicates Sue’s old rapist in the murder, even though I didn’t know about the rape! Oh, and my husband was half an hour late, leaving me plenty of time to wipe the blood and soot off my clothes. Good thing I’ve got such a solid gameface, he doesn’t suspect a thing!”

“Huh, turns out the rapist was mindwiped and didn’t know about the rape either but somehow intuited that he was going to be blamed for the murder anyway. Lucky me! Now I will fake a murder attempt on myself in order to draw Ray closer, even though he’d haven taken me back before all this if I just asked. In order to avoid actually dying by my own hand, he’d better arrive precisely on time for this meeting in order to save me, even though he was a full half an hour late to our last meeting for reasons no one ever thought to question! And since I improbably left no trace at my first murder for absolutely no adequately explained reason, it won’t be suspicious that the security systems don’t detect anyone but me!”

“Perfect! Ray and I are back together! But I had better do one more murder just to tie up loose ends. This time I don’t want to get my hands dirty, so I’ll just get in touch with the Calculator, a criminal mastermind so secretive that not even Batman can track him down. And since I can do that for no justifiable reason, I might as well somehow know who Robin’s family is, despite having dumped by Ray before Tim Drake ever became a superhero. Through my buddy Calculator, I’ll hire a fat loser who only commits crimes with boomerangs to do this third murder, so people will know it is connected to the two previous murders that didn’t involve boomerangs at all. And since I can do absolutely anything at this point, I might as well sneak an untraceable gun into Tim’s dad’s house for him to use against Captain Boomerang! Sure, this will tip off the heroes as to who the third victim is, but so long as the many different people on the case who can move faster than light are somehow occupied at the time of the murder, that won’t matter. Hopefully Mr. Drake and Captain Boomerangwill somehow attack and kill each other at exactly the same time, so that no one will be around to ask questions. I just hope no one questions why this third murder was different in every possible way from the first two!”

“Ha, what do you know? No one seemed to care that the first two murders were performed by a SILENT AND UNTRACEABLE PHANTOM and the third one was a fat guy kicking down a door going “HEY I’M CAPTAIN BOOMERANG AND MY MURDER OF YOU IS GOING TO MAKE ME REAL FAMOUS! ME, CAPTAIN BOOMERANG, MASTER OF THE BOOMERANG. THIS ONE MURDER, NOT THE THIRD IN A SERIES, WILL CERTAINLY PUT ME ON THE MAP!” Nope, that didn’t raise any red flags at all for anyone. And my husband’s back with me! Everything’s coming up Jeannie! I sure hope I don’t accidentally blurt something out that only the killer would know right before I have sex with my superhero husband!”

“Shit.”

~fin~

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/12/a-reminder-identity-crisis-was-a-terrible-mystery/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/12/a-reminder-identity-crisis-was-a-terrible-mystery/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/-8Cx9Cjf7TQ/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/09/avenging-the-week-pt-1-the-origin-story/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2472

Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

-John Updike

Hello. The quotation above is reflective of what I’d like to do with this column. It’s an idealized view of criticism that I plan to strive for in this this column. I expect to fail on a pretty regular basis, but it’s always important to have a goal. The plan? A weekly review and potpourri/linkblogging with commentary column. Warning: Spoilers below.

Fantastic Four #577 (Jonathan Hickman, Dale Eaglesham, Paul Mounts): I can almost feel Dale Eaglesham’s confidence steadily building with each issue of this title. He is producing some truly unique work that evokes a sense of wonder and limitless possibility. This is the legacy of Kirby, of the Challengers of the Unknown, of Doc Savage. Eaglesham’s distinctly masculine portrayal of Reed Richards effectively reminds the reader that the character is not just the absent-minded professor, but the curious explorer. Eaglesham reminds you (in only a few panels) of the forgotten elements of the other members of the group, whether it’s Johnny’s humor (which has often been portrayed as narcissism or immaturity), Sue’s confident, subtle brilliance, or Ben’s… Yeah, that’s been a bit of a missing piece so far.

In this issue, Eaglesham particularly shines in capturing the majesty of the ‘Universal Collective’, the third city in Hickman’s Prime Elements arc.



This is true widescreen storytelling. Eaglesham conveys the importance of the arrival of the ‘Universal Collective’ before they even utter a word. This is what I imagined when reading my dad’s old sci-fi magazines as a kid. He effectively captures the spirit of the Silver Age without indulging in mere nostalgia.



“The Fantastic Four is supposed to be about adventure and big ideas and not ponderous, long-winded issues about the environment with Mole Man. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to do big stuff, but we’re going to go fast and exciting.” - Jonathan Hickman (Marvel interview)

Unfortunately, the work that Eaglesham is putting in is paired with uncharacteristically uneven writing from Hickman, who has become my favorite Marvel writer not named Pak, Fraction, Bendis or Brubaker. I thought he showed tremendous potential with The Nightly News, Pax Romana, and Transhuman. I really like Secret Warriors, especially the most recent arc. When Hickman was announced as the new regular writer on Fantastic Four, it was hard not to feel some excitement. He did an amazing job on the Fantastic Four: Dark Reign miniseries, and hints of his long-term vision for the book in interviews with Marvel and Newsarama seemed to indicate that readers were going to get one of those sharp middlebrow superhero books that justify the habit - a contemporary, intelligent spin on a classic legend by a writer who was aware of continuity and history without being trapped by either. I was prepared for a career-defining run that would help guarantee the success of some of Hickman’s more challenging projects. The first arc, ‘Solve Everything’, fit the bill, with multiple incarnations of the Infinity Gauntlet, a room filled with lobotomized Doctor Dooms, and a plot that cleverly explored the various aspects of Reed’s personality. The second is more of a mixed bag. Some parts of this arc remind you that he’s building the foundation for the best version of the title since the Byrne run of the 1980s. He deftly nods to Abnett and Lannings’ work on the cosmic corner of the Marvel U (much of which originated in FF) without alienating non-readers. He is unafraid of making these ‘new’ Inhumans truly strange, a refreshing change from the past.

Other times it feels like the world-building undermines the storytelling. The second half of this issue consists of a rambling lecture from The Wayfinder, the Inhuman herald for the Universal Collective. He’s there to recap the story of the Inhumans, introduce the Universal Collective, and act as a living foreshadowing device. I understand why this is necessary (we have to know the players in the game), but it read like an Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry. The plot — Something lands on the moon! The FF go to investigate! — slows to a crawl, and character development (for the Four or the Universal Collective) is non-existent. We know that the group is important, and that they all seem to be matrilineal societies, but we aren’t given any reason to care - even after the last page reveal. Hickman introduces some intriguing ideas in this issue, but those ideas should have been paired with a compelling story. This issue will probably read differently once collected in a trade - hell, it’ll probably look brilliant in an omnibus - but in this format, it left a lot to be desired.

Blackest Night #8 (Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Oclair Albert & Joe Prado): I don’t know if there’s anything that I can add to the great takes on Johns’s Green Lantern run offered by Zom (of the must-read Mindless Ones blog) and Chris Bird. This book was just unreadable. I’m not the biggest fan of Johns’s writing style, but was always impressed by his ability to give nostalgia a contemporary feel in the Green Lantern and Flash books, and effectively write books like Justice Society of America with huge inter generational casts of characters. There’s nothing wrong with the ‘big summer blockbuster’ style of event book, but this was a textbook example of terrible storytelling, especially when you compare it to Brian Michael Bendis’s Marvel event Siege. Both books are the end of long multi-year storylines: Blackest Night is the culmination of Johns’s Green Lantern storylines dating back to Green Lantern: Rebirth, and Siege appears to be the final link in the chain of events that began almost a decade ago with Bendis’s Avengers: Disassembled. The final arcs of both have been dominated by seemingly unstoppable villains - Nekron, the embodiment of death, and Norman Osborn, the head of H.A.M.M.E.R. (essentially the czar of Marvel’s national security infrastructure). The way that Bendis and Johns chose to resolve this central conflict - how to defeat the unbeatable enemy? - helps illustrate the problem with Blackest Night. In Siege, Bendis took a pretty original approach to ending the ‘reign’ of Osborn (the primary antagonist of the Dark Reign storyline) by simply bringing him down like a politician instead of a super-villain. Osborn presented a threat that couldn’t be dealt with in a traditional manner, and it was fitting that a public humiliation (the world seeing his true face) was the key to his downfall. Bendis has been building to this for a year, and it was thrilling to see that moment when the general public saw that the emperor had no clothes. In contrast, Nekron’s invincibility was rooted in his very nature: how can one kill the embodiment of death? I won’t spoil the answer, but it’s pretty obvious - for a clue, remember that these energy entities (Parallax, Ion, etc.) need hosts or avatars to maintain their link to the material world. The real problem isn’t the what, but the how - Hal Jordan gets the information via an info dump from a tertiary character in the miniseries, killing any momentum that the book may have had. There’s nothing worse than having someone else solve the protagonists’ problems for them, particularly when it feels this staged.

X-Men: Second Coming #1 (Craig Kyle, Chris Yost, David Finch): Sometimes I like to imagine a world where Chris Claremont never wrote the X-Men. It may have also been a world in which Iron Fist was as popular as Wolverine and Misty Knight rocked bondage gear. In any event, its a world in which X-Men Second Coming might have been an interesting book. Second Coming is a part of the seemingly endless series of books that grapple with the Claremont legacy (specifically the “Days of Future Past” and God Loves, Man Kills bits), blending time-traveling mutant cyborgs and redheads with ill-defined but near infinite powers and villains who are like some weird neo-Nazi/jihadi/Bircher militiaman mix. All this book needed was a speech that quoted Nietzsche and Martin Luther King. With all due respect to Mr. Yost, whose work I still enjoy on the stabby X-Men, I think it’s time for me to get off this ride.


Miscellany

The invaluable Stephen Bissette recently completed a twelve part series on his blog entitled SpiderBaby Archives: The DC/Marvel Ratings Debacle 1986 - 87 - Forgotten Comics Wars, Or: How Angry Freelancers Made It Possible for A New Mainstream Comics Era (Including Vertigo) to Exist. The series combines interview snippets, comic art from the period, and found documents for a perfect blend of memoir and reportage. It’s a long but wonderful exploration of censorship, obscenity, artistic freedom and the ever-present DC Comedy of Errors. It also inspired David Brothers to ask whether warning labels/rating systems are ever really appropriate. It’s immensely difficult to uncouple the question of whether some form of labeling is workable from questions about obscenity, censorship, and audience composition (the age-old “are comics for kids?”). However, one important lesson that I took away from Bissette’s series is that the victories of the creators of that era combined with the success of Dave Sim, Fantagraphics, and the alternative comics movement have led to the creation of a marketplace in which we really can make those kinds of fine distinctions.

For my part, I strongly believe that artistic freedom of expression is a core human right, and find most censorship abhorrent - even when imposed by a publisher in the context of a work-for-hire relationship. However, consumers should also be given as many tools as possible to make appropriate choices for themselves, and informative labels could be a part of that process - especially if they were implemented in a thorough and transparent manner. It’s tough for an outsider to discuss this in any intelligent way, though - I suspect that the sheer number of publishers and channels of distribution have reduced any one stakeholders’ ability to transform a label into a censorship system (in contrast to the film industry) and the radical expansion of the consumer base over the last twenty years combined with the huge success of a number of books aimed at mature audiences has dispelled the traditional assumption that comic books must be suitable for all audiences. In the end, it’s all just speculation. Bissette’s series starts here, and it’s pretty easy to follow the the rest of the series through links at the bottom of each post.

Closing Links

Here are some interesting things that I’ve come across in the last week (warning: may not be comics-related):

- Sharespost, a new website designed to “make private equity liquid” is trying to generate a thriving secondary market for private corporation stock, triggering insider trading and registration concerns.

- Nas reminds you that he’s still one of the best MCs doing it on the New York is Killing Me remix with Gil Scott Heron (!)

- Kevin (of Closet Cooking) brings us a simple recipe for Meyer Lemon Pesto and Feta Pasta with Shrimp

- Noah Tucker, a writer for Registan (a great blog that covers politics and news throughout Central Asia) has an amazing post on the human costs of revolutions.

- Michael Cohen (of Democracy Arsenal) explains why the surge in Iraq is still a critically important foreign policy debate.

Next week? Reviews of comics released April 7th and 14th (almost certainly including S.H.I.E.L.D.). Lengthy asides about comics stuff. Random links. A brief review of Darwyn Cooke’s The Man With The Getaway Face (hint: it made me completely reconsider The Hunter). If David Brothers hasn’t already given out his extra copies, enter the contest on his site.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/09/avenging-the-week-pt-1-the-origin-story/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/04/09/avenging-the-week-pt-1-the-origin-story/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/MPHZXjyw_IM/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/03/27/fbbp-124-greek-street-and-unwritten/#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 16:10:03 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2470 Funnybook Babylon has notice a trend: first issues from Vertigo are often given lukewarm or negative reviews, but once the series develops, we change our tune. It happened with Air, it happened with Young Liars (at least for some of us), and as we’ve previously panned the first issues of Greek Street (Episode 107) and Unwritten (Episode 99), we decided to give each series a second chance to impress. So reviewed today:

Unwritten v1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

Greek Street v1: Blood Calls for Blood v1 by Peter Milligan and Davide Gianfelice

Did either book turn things around? Will second volumes of either book be added to the Funnybook Babylon Library? Listen to find out!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/03/27/fbbp-124-greek-street-and-unwritten/feed/ Air,Greek Street,Mike Carey,Peter Gross,Peter Milligan,Vertigo Two Vertigo series (Greek Street and Unwritten) are given second chances to impress Funnybook Babylon has notice a trend: first issues from Vertigo (http://funnybookbabylon.com/?tag=vertigo) are often given lukewarm or negative reviews, but once the series develops, we change our tune. It happened with Air, it happened with Young Liars (at least for some of us), and as we've previously panned the first issues of Greek Street (Episode 107 (http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/07/24/fbbp-104-two-greeks-and-a-cry-for-justice/)) and Unwritten (Episode 99 (http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/05/19/fbbp-99-three-number-ones/)), we decided to give each series a second chance to impress. So reviewed today: Unwritten v1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity by Mike Carey and Peter Gross Greek Street v1: Blood Calls for Blood v1 by Peter Milligan and Davide Gianfelice Did either book turn things around? Will second volumes of either book be added to the Funnybook Babylon Library? Listen to find out! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/03/27/fbbp-124-greek-street-and-unwritten/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/HlJDpTYNLzI/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/03/15/batman-and-robin-s-8-and-9-blackest-knight-parts-2-and-3-batman-vs-batman-and-broken/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:56:54 +0000 David Uzumeri http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2430
Batman and Robin #8

Batman and Robin #9

After the extensive infodump of last issue, these two issues are FAR more streamlined as we ramp up to “Batman vs. Batman” and the return of Bruce Wayne. In this installment: The Bug Black Voice of Gotham City! The Bible of Crime! And… Batwoman! Come back soon for Batman and Robin #10, and a look into the Wayne family’s lineage, but until then let’s see what further clues we can divine from “Blackest Knight.”

Additionally, I’d like to give a shout-out to the superb amypoodle at the always-sublime Mindless Ones, who put together an insanely compelling counter-theory to mine about Simon Hurt. It’s great stuff, and you should really check it out, as I’ll certainly be keeping it in mind in the months ahead.

Batman and Robin #8 – “Blackest Knight” Part Two: “Batman vs. Batman”

Page 1: Now we’re flashing back to Kate’s infiltration and arrival. It’s been forever since I’ve seen Mary Poppins, but I recall Van Dyke playing a lower-class coal miner sort of character with a soot-blackened face, so that certainly matches her description. The Prophet Martyr Mannheim is referring to Bruno Mannheim, former head of Intergang during 52. “Hail the rock and the rage!” is a cry that’s been going around the DCU for years now, associated almost always with Crime Bible cultists. It celebrates the first murder (Cain murdering Abel in rage with a rock). “The bomb and the blast” is a new chant, presumably to represent the more modern tool of murder.

Page 2: King Coal’s claim that Newcastle will be the New Jerusalem of Crime echoes Mannheim’s ambitions in 52 for Gotham City. The “hole in everything” that Coal makes echoes similar claims made by both Simon Hurt (“I am the hole in things, Bruce, the piece that can never fit”) and Darkseid, as well as the black hole at the bottom of the multiverse that Darkseid fell into, which is appropriate since Darkseid is behind this plot. The fact that the Crime Bible prophesied this implies that it didn’t get discredited after the events of Final Crisis. The guy in the van working intel for Batwoman is Colonel Jake Kane, Kate’s father and Alfred figure.

Page 3: The Gods of Evil being referred to are, of course, the Gods of Apokolips. Again, considering they’re all ostensibly dead, I’m not sure what’s left to worship – I’m starting to wonder if Morrison isn’t done with these guys just yet.

Page 7: Flashback to between Batman #683 and Final Crisis #6. Again, what’s interesting about this scene is that Darkseid is still planning for the future despite his imminent demise, and that those plans are still being carried out. Since these clones are all naked, I’m guessing Darkseid must have fabricated some kind of Batman costume to put on the corpse. Darkseid here clearly hasn’t been shot yet, so he must have known that he was going to Omega Effect Batman in the future and leave this clone body as a decoy. And considering what the Crime Bible prophesied, the entire thing is a startlingly complicated plan that would require considerable foreknowledge to know Dick Grayson would take the body on THIS night to THIS Lazarus Pit. Either way, it makes it clear the entire business of the prophecies in the Crime Bible is far from over.

Page 9: This is a stunning, stunning fight scene, and Cameron Stewart has really elevated himself to one of the absolute best fight choreographers in comics. I’m in awe of this stuff – the off-kilter panel borders is a trick that gets misused a lot, but Stewart absolutely annihilates it in this sequence (and throughout this arc). Amazing stuff.

Page 11: Lettering error!! “Gnn! Get him! Somebody…” is accidentally attributed to the crazy Bat-clone rather than Dick.

Page 12: The “twice-named daughter” is an ongoing Batwoman story that started in 52 and continued in her Detective Comics run. Originally it was implied to mean it was because she had two “names” (Kate Kane and Batwoman), but now Rucka’s been further complicating it to involve her twin sister Alice, who’s become a priestess in the Religion of Crime. I’m curious to see how much Rucka and Morrison dovetail their Crime Bible stuff in the future, if at all, since they’re both mining that well.

Page 16: I love screaming Clone-Bats on the gyro. Presumably the old dude with the lantern is Beefeater from last issue, as the clone takes the plane Dick flew there. (They probably should have taken Bruce’s voice out of the security system.)

Page 18: The batarang incident Batwoman’s referring to was back when Dick was Nightwing, and occurred in 52 Week 33.

Page 19: Morrison’s portrayal of Kate here is in stark contrast to her portrayal of Kathy Kane back in Batman #682 – Kate isn’t an emotionally needy, lovestruck girl; when she’s going to die in Batman’s arms, she doesn’t ask him if he loves her, she just comes up with a badass plan to come back from the dead. “Well hard,” as Beryl says next issue.

Batman and Robin #9 – “Blackest Knight” Part Three: “Broken”

Page 1: This arc would have been really funny if it was Black Canary, because then they could make tons of awful canary in a coalmine jokes. Or I could. Yeah, that’d pretty much be just for me.

Page 2: “I promised I wouldn’t let her down” – Dick’s statement here mirrors his one about Bruce, and interestingly parallels Damian’s situation with Sasha, where he promised not to let her down, in the short run at least, did. It’s turning into somewhat of a mantra.

Page 3: Going along with the Bat/Devil similarity (that #10 has only solidified as a theme), it’s appropriate that Cyril would refer to Dick as a demon.

Page 4: And here we start hearing CloneBats’s voice for the first time as he speaks in a guttural, challenged voice reminiscent of Bruce’s mishearing of “Zorro in Arkham” as “Zur En Arrh,” like everything he says is barely comprehensible as English.

Page 6: I always figured Batman would use an ergonomic mouse.

Page 8: The “sour blud” CloneBats is referring to is a double entendre for both his own diseased blood and Damian’s presence in the Wayne bloodline.

Page 9: As established in the Final Crisis arc in Batman, these clones were indoctrinated with all of Bruce Wayne’s life trauma and none of the humanity and love that placed that trauma in context. As a result, this clone is the titular “broken” being, and his attitude and memories reflect that: all he remembers is the failure and heartbreak, the enigmatic and hurtful relationship with Selina, the Robins’ relationship with the Joker, the physical agony of Bane amalgamated with the emotional agony inflicted by the Scarecrow, ruminations on loss, death, insanity and failure. The lack of context for the trauma is what drove these clones insane, just as it drove the three replacement Batmen insane back in the first half of Morrison’s run – and this clone attempts to contextualize his reaction, and the reaction of all of his euthanized peers, in the body of the Batman’s ULTIMATE trauma – gunshots, pearls and the loss of a family. This is the Clone Batman, who he is and how he came to be. Basically every part of this page is an A+ effort.

Page 10: This is where the connection with Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night event becomes clear – thematic rather than plotbased, here we have a Bruce Wayne zombie making use of psychological warfare on a stoic but terrified Damian. The clone Batman appeals to his biggest fears; that his father has no place for him, that he’s tainting his memory and bloodline. Damian – and we – are worried this might actually be true, especially since the only experiences this clone has to draw on are Bruce Wayne’s actual ones - but remember, it’s all of the trauma and none of the love. This also confirms without a doubt that Damian is, in fact, Bruce’s genetic son.

Page 11: The Lazarus Pit has always had a relationship with alchemy, so the four doors for the four elements are appropriate symbolism.

Page 13: I have absolutely no idea what Ice Cube is in this context – presumably some kind of military research facility. Morrison’s pulling out the military codewords here – “oscar mike” is “on the move”, “P.O.C.” is “point of contact”, the M.O.D. is the Ministry of Defense.

Page 14: And now the Batman clone’s turned into an amazing parody/twist of Frank Miller Batman, going on and on about breaking bodies and pressure points. Also, “Maximum Pane” would be an amazing supervillain name.

Page 15: Appropriate that we end our British adventure arc in Gotham with the series’ most famous Brit wielding a cricket bat. The clone’s still going on with the Frank Miller stuff until he’s dangling Damian over the side of Wayne Tower, when things get really telling.

First off, the gunshots are the ones in his head he keeps hearing that are driving him insane, the accumulation of all the violence Batman witnessed in Gotham. What’s interesting, though, is his mention of the city’s “bug black voice.” The references made in the next issue heavily imply that that voice is very, very real – Barbatos, the Demon of Gotham – and it’s totally possible that this fucked-up dark-mirror Bruce Wayne is actually attuned to it. “The sacrifice of a son” – Bruce Wayne’s entire childhood was sacrificed to the demon of Gotham to provide him with a champion.

Page 16: This splash page feels evocative of the covers of both Detective Comics #27 and Amazing Fantasy #15 without directly homaging either.

Page 17: Batman got here quick on the experimental RSO transport Jake Kane mentioned a few pages ago.

Page 18: I’m wondering if the screaming about Kathy just about the fact that Kate attacked him, or remembering whatever traumatic incident was alluded to (but never outright shown) back in #682. The threat to rip out and eat someone’s heart is definitely a nod to Blackest Night.

Page 19: Tremendous fight scene.

Page 20: First double-punch of the issue. Now the clone’s playing off Dick’s worst fears – that he’s going to become the single-minded, socially inept Frank Miller Batman caricature himself, just like Bruce was in danger of being shortly before Infinite Crisis.

Page 21: Dick previously dated (and got engaged to) the redheads Starfire (on the Teen Titans) and Barbara Gordon (Batgirl/Oracle). Kate’s being enigmatic with Batman about his chances with her because she’s a lesbian and opposed to… okay, I can’t finish that joke. Dick brings up the fact that the Crime Bible’s prophecies are still in play.

Page 22: Squire and Knight must have gotten that neutrino comms tech Colonel Kane used to find them, because they were able to find King Coal through all that rock. Also, issue’s second double-punch, which is definitely becoming a recurring bit.

Page 23: I like the reference to how Dick works “without a net”, since that’s what killed his parents when their trapeze swings broke. Alfred’s comment about Dick’s prior warning is referring to the events of the Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul crossover, which Morrison himself was involved in – basically, he gave Tim Drake a bunch of shit for wanting to take up Ra’s deal on resurrecting his parents. Dick’s reasoning here seems pretty spurious, but whatever. The last panel is a nice echo of the one of him staring at the Bat-suit in #2.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/03/15/batman-and-robin-s-8-and-9-blackest-knight-parts-2-and-3-batman-vs-batman-and-broken/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/03/15/batman-and-robin-s-8-and-9-blackest-knight-parts-2-and-3-batman-vs-batman-and-broken/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/NWP2iy-CMMA/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/02/26/fbbp-123-dc-editorial-shake-ups-event-fatigue-ipad-prognostications/#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:14:05 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2435 Just what it says on the tin: this episode, we put on our Speculation Stocking Caps and wonder aloud what the new DC Entertainment Executive Team announcement portends for the humble funnybook reader, and then add a pair of Wild Guess Earmuffs to the ensemble and wonder how we might one day read their output on the iPad!

Plus, we address a Mystery Listener’s concern about Event Fatigue! Does it exist? Do we suffer from it? Can it be solved by a Vitamin B12 supplement? If you have a cure for Event Fatigue or any other helpful advice, call into 347-AUNT-MAY and let us know!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/02/26/fbbp-123-dc-editorial-shake-ups-event-fatigue-ipad-prognostications/feed/ DC Editorial Shake-ups, Event Fatigue & iPad Prognostications Just what it says on the tin: this episode, we put on our Speculation Stocking Caps and wonder aloud what the new DC Entertainment Executive Team announcement portends for the humble funnybook reader, and then add a pair of Wild Guess Earmuffs to the e... Just what it says on the tin: this episode, we put on our Speculation Stocking Caps and wonder aloud what the new DC Entertainment Executive Team (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2010/02/18/for-immediate-release-dc-entertainment-names-executive-team/) announcement portends for the humble funnybook reader, and then add a pair of Wild Guess Earmuffs to the ensemble and wonder how we might one day read their output on the iPad! Plus, we address a Mystery Listener's concern about Event Fatigue! Does it exist? Do we suffer from it? Can it be solved by a Vitamin B12 supplement? If you have a cure for Event Fatigue or any other helpful advice, call into 347-AUNT-MAY and let us know! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 1:09:22 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/02/26/fbbp-123-dc-editorial-shake-ups-event-fatigue-ipad-prognostications/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/TBHmsNw_eNQ/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/28/batman-and-robin-6-and-7/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:07:03 +0000 David Uzumeri http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2307
Batman and Robin #6

Batman and Robin #7

The #6 annotations are so late partly because the issue seemed rather sparse to me and partly because Gavok over at 4thletter! just completely demolished the landscape of any of my commentary, so what’s below regarding that issue is heavily indebted to his realization about the nature of the story. Then, below, commentary on today’s #7, which is detailed and byzantine and littered with references and basically my wet dream as an annotator.

Cover: A clear reference to Prince’s classic Purple Rain.

Batman and Robin #6

Page 1: Fanservice for fangirls (and, I guess, pedophiles) of Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne. The phone poll metajoke is even more prominent this issue, and certainly on this page. I have no idea what to make of the way they produced the video - for a while I thought the colorist stuck a panel from an earlier issue in there, but I can’t seem to find it, so I have no idea who’s responsible for 1 8XX XXXX as a phone number, but it’s pretty distractingly amateurish.

Page 6: Jason Todd’s most famous alien-fighting experience was back in Superman Annual #11, the famous Alan Moore (there’s that name again!)/Dave Gibbons “For The Man Who Has Everything” story where he won the day by dropping the Black Mercy plant on Mongul and got a boner from staring at Wonder Woman. He traveled through parallel worlds in the Countdown weekly series/publishing disaster while a member of the never-called-such-in-the-actual-comic Challengers from Beyond alongside Donna Troy and Kyle Rayner. The middle panel with the old couple’s a pretty direct commentary on the bloodthirsty-public mentality that led to Jason’s death and, subsequently, what was really his modern origin story. (Does anyone really care about his time as Robin anymore? Let’s be honest here, Jason’s real origin story/central tic is that he’s the Robin who died under Bruce’s watch.)

Page 7: It seems a bit big on the inside, but the implication of the middle panel seems to be that Red Hood and Scarlet’s hideout was in the back of a huge truck - was that supposed to show that they’re trailer trash, maybe?

Page 9: Jason speaks the truth - he seems to have a real fourth-wall-breaking awareness of the nature of his appeal, so if Morrison chose to have Flamingo actually shoot Jason in the face, there’s really very little chance he’d stay that way for long this time.

Page 13: Three shots, nearly point blank, to the spine - the incident that Gavok references in the above link that neatly aligns with Barbara Gordon’s role in The Killing Joke, much as (as we will soon see) this arc and especially this issue act as a weird revisiting or mirror of that canonical story.

Page 15: The industrial garbage grabbing truck is a pretty strong metaphor for Jason Todd’s entire crimefighting approach - heartless, impersonal, the easy way out that causes a bunch of unexpected damage. Contrast with Batman #655, when Bruce Wayne throws Joker in a dumpster personally - Jason Todd is more than happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Page 17: As Gavok’s above link shows, Dick’s offer of help here (and on the next page) are highly reminiscent of Bruce’s offer of help to the Joker at the end of The Killing Joke.

Page 19: Robin only looked shot three times at close range earlier, but that’s a small detail.

Page 21: This whole arc was really heavy on identity and masks, wasn’t it? Which is pretty well-worn, well-trodden ground for a Batman story. With the exception of Scarlet, everyone in this comic is wearing a mask or adopting an identity that used to belong to someone else - Dick as Batman, Damian as Robin, Jason as Red Hood. Everyone was trying to step up into someone else’s shoes, and then Flamingo, the “Eater of Faces”, arrives at the climax to ‘eat away’ at the characters’ roles and faces. The story begins being about Batman and Red Hood, morally incompatible vigilantes in conflict; it basically finishes like a Wayne Family episode of Intervention as Dick offers Jason help and then they drag Jason away screaming about daddy issues. Their entire conflict was a mask in and of itself - it was never about Old vs. New Testament justice, it was about - as Jason put it in the first issue - “the revenge of one crazy man in a mask on another crazy man in a mask.” Flamingo may have tried to eat Scarlet’s face, but the face he REALLY ate upon his arrival in Gotham was that of their conflict.

Page 22: Oh hey, El Penitente is Simon Hurt! I jotted down a bunch of thoughts about that a while ago, and what the “W” scar on his back (and his predilection towards Bat-suits and self-flagellation) might mean. Oberon Sexton’s hotel room is littered with newspapers, the visible one of which is identical to the one at the end of Batman R.I.P. reporting on Talia’s killing of Cardinal Maggi due to his involvement in the Black Glove. It certainly casts Sexton’s red-and-black ensemble in a sinister new light, and brings into question the nature of the killer he’s supposedly following.

Page 24: According to Morrison, this body was (presumably) put back together, thrown into a bat-suit and placed in this secure location after the desecration of Bruce Wayne’s grave back in Blackest Night.

Batman and Robin #7

Page 1: We pick up right from the end of #6 with this direct reference to the final page of Final Crisis #6, with Superman holding the same body that Dick Grayson’s holding here. Cameron’s reference is pretty exact, down to the locations of the holes in the costume and the emaciated skeletal structure. The only thing that’s really different is that here Batman isn’t still smoking.

The issue’s title, “Pearly and Pit,” carries both a literal meaning (since the issue is about the British crime figure the Pearly King and his assistance in finding a Lazarus Pit) and a figurative one (Heaven and Hell - the Pearly Gates and the Eternal Pit). And, of course, pearls themselves always play an important part in the Bat-mythos because of Martha’s pearl necklace. (Get your mind out of the gutter, you back there.)

Page 2: An indeterminate period of time then passes and Batman’s evidently gone to Europe, for reasons we’ll soon discover. The gigantic Ferris wheel he’s saving the girl from is the London Eye, where he then jumps on a boat and heads south.

Page 3: I don’t recognize the building in the top panel; the W1 that Squire is referring to is slang for London’s West End (from its postal code designation). Batman is boat-hopping to Westminster Bridge.

Page 4: Now Batman car-hops while going west on Westminster Bridge, before jumping onto the Route 15 bus, which doesn’t appear to go anywhere near Westminster Bridge, so I should probably stop trying to take this scene so literally with regards to location.

Page 5: “Harridges” is a reference to monstrous London department store Harrods, into which Squire barges in, goes up an escalator and crashes through a window to pick up Batman, who swing off that crane after jumping off the bus on the previous page. (These fight scenes are exceptionally well-choreographed, even if I can’t work out the geographic details - I was gonna do a Google Map of the chase and everything!)

Page 6: St. James’s Park Station is the closest to Westminster Bridge, so that makes sense.

Page 7: Old King Cole is a British nursery rhyme, “Burning Black Heart” might be a reference to the Keane song, and King Coal is a term used to describe the now-dying British coal industry, a concept which comes up later. Smooth Eddie English, the “Pearly Prince”, is all dressed up as a Pearly King, the uniform of a charitable working-class British organization that’s apparently been co-opted by these costumed criminals. In other words, this book is WORKING-CLASS BRITISH AS HELL, going right along with Beryl’s background. The idea of pirate subway trains harkens back to Morrison and Stewart’s last DCU collaboration, Seven Soldiers: Guardian, where “All-Beard” Alan Moore and “No-Beard” Grant Morrison battled for control over the NYC subway system.

Eddie’s reaction to Batman’s appearance makes me wonder if the Pearly gang, like the Coal gang, are also familiar with the Crime Bible and the “Knight of the Beast” prophecy Batwoman references later.

Page 8: The man next to Batman is, despite my earlier statement (thank you, Internet and living documents!), the obscure DC Comics superhero Beefeater. The structure he’s in is royal British prison the Tower of London; all of the supervillains mentioned here are new creations - I imagine Dai Laffyn is a pun on “Die Laughin’”, Don Drummond might be a reference to the reggae trombonist, the Morris Men could refer to Morris dancing, the Highwayman is a pretty straightforward, obvious reference and I have no idea where Metalek the xenoformer comes from, although it certainly resembles Marvel’s Trull the Inhuman. The Pearly King of Crime is presumably the father of the Pearly Prince.

Page 9: It’s interesting that the King already has the dominoes in the map position.

Page 10: This conflict obviously isn’t limited just to London, as Newcastle is practically on the opposite end of the country - so it’s the old British city vs. country thing again, working class versus working class. I expect Pearly playing dominoes is a coincidence regarding the Domino Killer, since Pearly can’t do much in prison; then again, he apparently knew what Batman was looking for before he even arrived, so perhaps there is some sort of connection. I can’t seem to find any references to what “Donna” and “davina” mean, although from context clues I can guess they mean “woman” and “balls.”

Page 11: The comment about the Cauldron of Rebirth - clearly referring to the Lazarus Pit - hearkens not only back to Celtic mythology but also Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, where the original Cauldron had been taken to New York and used as the personal resurrection machine for Don Vincenzo. Also in Seven Soldiers, it’s revealed that the Cauldron of Rebirth was a gift from the New Gods to Aurakles - so, like the Omega Effect Bruce is trapped in, the Lazarus Pit is ultimately based on New God technology and magic.

Pearly’s hand is following a path on the domino-map, allowing him to maintain his vow of silence while also helping Batman for what he did for his son. The song he’s singing is, of course, a working-class folk song. I’m guessing Dick takes a picture or recording of the domino pattern and sends it to Cyril; Shipment X, as later revealed, is Bruce’s body.

Page 12: Well, at least Talia has the courtesy to call him MISTER Pennyworth. The surgery tank very faithfully replicates the one in Batman #665.

Page 13: Talia’s little note as Alfred leaves is probably a reference to pulling the trigger on some sort of kill order, leading to the next arc, “Batman vs. Robin.”

Page 14: Lazarus pits generally lie on ley lines or junctions of them. I’m not sure why midwinter has such a meaning to King Coal’s group, but I’ll trust Beryl (and any commenters who want to chime in) on it. Rendle Colliery seems to be fictional on Morrison’s part; I’ve got no idea if the name is a reference to anything, so, again, British assistance appreciated. The footprints are from the dudes carrying Batwoman’s coffin.

Page 17: Oxford Street is apparently a very busy street in the aforementioned W1. The chanting and twice-daughter are our first hints of what’s coming on the next page; back in 52, Batwoman was referred to the “twice-named daughter of Cain” by the Crime Bible cultists, who it seems the Coal gang are affiliated with. Hammer Films is a British group that made low-budget horror flicks.

Also, just like the Cauldron of Rebirth and Omega Effect are New Gods concepts, so is the Crime Bible that apparently led Batwoman and the Coal guys here.

Page 18: Batwoman, object of desire for Crime Bible cultists, makes her grand appearance.

Page 19: So midwinter is an excuse to use the whole Blackest Night title reference without actually having Black Lanterns around, it seems. The dialogue is accidentally switched around in the middle panel.

Page 21: Insanity has long been a standard side effect of the Lazarus Pit, used to explain the mental states of both Ra’s al Ghul and Jason Todd. The “what the whole world’s just been through” that Batwoman’s mentioning is likely the zombie epic that was Blackest Night.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/28/batman-and-robin-6-and-7/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/28/batman-and-robin-6-and-7/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/Jg--KBvcTXI/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/27/fbbp-122-2009-in-review/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:35:27 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2404 In our first podcast of 2010, FBB looks back in love, not in anger at 2009. For regular listeners, our favorite books are pretty easy to guess, but we try to throw some praise at some unsung funnybooks too.

Will we remain so positive all year? Are there still ring giveaways coming up? The two are likely related in some diffuse way.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/27/fbbp-122-2009-in-review/feed/ Air,Ann Nocenti,Asterios Polyp,Best of 2009,Daredevil,David Aja,Detective Comics,Scott Pilgrim,Strange Tales In our first podcast of 2010, FBB looks back in love, not in anger at 2009. For regular listeners, our favorite books are In our first podcast of 2010, FBB looks back in love, not in anger at 2009. For regular listeners, our favorite (http://funnybookbabylon.com/?tag=air) books (http://funnybookbabylon.com/?tag=batwoman) are (http://funnybookbabylon.com/?tag=air) Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 44:53 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/27/fbbp-122-2009-in-review/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/9d649kqno60/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/26/please-just-tell-us/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:04:44 +0000 David Uzumeri http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2398 DC Comics creative changes on stories from solicitation to publication for the month of January 2010, not including material released tomorrow morning (January 27) that has not had the credits page released in preview form.

Let me know if I missed any announcements that weren’t postings of preview pages.

Catwoman #83 - Fabian Nicieza & Julian Lopez replaced with Tony Bedard, Fabrizio Fiorentino, Ibraim Roberson and Marcos Marz
Batman: Streets of Gotham #8 - writer Paul Dini replaced with Mike Benson
Gotham City Sirens #8 - writer Paul Dini replaced with plot by Guillem March and script by Marc Andreyko
Blackest Night: JSA #2 - Tony Bedard added as co-writer with solicited James Robinson; Marcos Marz added as co-penciller with solicited Eddy Barrows
The Question #37 - Denny O’Neil added as co-writer with solicited Greg Rucka (announced)
R.E.B.E.L.S. #12 - artist Claude St. Aubin replaced with Geraldo Borges
Warlord #10 - artist Mike Grell only does two pages; bulk done by unsolicited Chad Hardin
Justice League: Cry for Justice #6 - artist Mauro Cascioli replaced with Scott Clark
The Web #5 - artist Roger Robinson replaced with Talent Caldwell (announced)
The Brave and the Bold #31 -artist Jesus Saiz replaced by Chad Hardin and Justiniano
Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #2 - Eduardo Pansica added as co-penciller alongside solicited Nicola Scott
The Atom and Hawkman #46 - Fernando Pasarin added as co-artist alongside solicited Ryan Sook
Titans #21 - Chris Batista added as co-artist alongside solicited Angel Unzueta
Superman: World of New Krypton #11 - Ron Randall added as co-artist alongside solicited Pete Woods
The Outsiders #26 - Don Kramer added as co-artist alongside solicited Philip Tan

Edited to add: For the sake of comparison - I don’t mean to turn it into a DC/Marvel shitfight, but it’s worth noting - here’s Marvel’s track record for January 2010 solicited titles. It’s better, but it’s far from perfect, and Previews apparently taking down their Product Changes archive (why would they do this? who does that knowledge hurt?) has made tracking down the announcements a bit more difficult than I expected. As above, let me know if I missed any announcements.

New Avengers #61 - Daniel Acuna added as co-artist alongside solicited Stuart Immonen (announced unofficially on Twitter)
Avengers: The Initiative #32 - artist Rafa Sandoval replaced by Mahmud Asrar (announced)
Amazing Spider-Man #617 - artist Javier Pulido does unsolicited backup (unannounced)
Web of Spider-Man #4 - Eric Canete draws third story originally solicited as “More” (announced)
Doctor Voodoo: Avenger of the Supernatural #4 - Alessandro Vitti added as co-artist alongside solicited Jefte Palo (unannounced)
Iron Man vs. Whiplash #3 - Andrea Mutti added as co-artist alongside solicited Phil Briones (unannounced)
Incredible Hulk #606 - unsolicited Red She-Hulk backup by Harrison Wilcox & Ryan Stegman; solicited for 607 on (unannounced)
Ms. Marvel #49 - Ben Oliver added as co-artist alongside solicited Sana Takeda (announced)
Avengers vs. Atlas #1 - artist Takeshi Miyazawa does unsolicited backup (unannounced)
Punisher #13 - Mike Hawthorne added as co-artist alongside solicited Tony Moore (unannounced)
Thunderbolts #140 - Sergio Arino added as co-artist alongside solicited Miguel Sepulveda (announced)
Realm of Kings: Inhumans #3 - artist Pablo Raimondi replaced by Wellinton Alves (announced)
X-Men Forever #16 - solicited mystery artist is Graham Nolan (unannounced)

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/26/please-just-tell-us/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/26/please-just-tell-us/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/KRYKjeuAwT8/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/15/final-crisis-annotations-epilogue-the-hardcover/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:13:19 +0000 David Uzumeri http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2385 Yeah, this is incredibly anal, but after the ridiculous amount of time I spent studying this book, I’d be remiss not to cap this off with a look at the collected edition.

But first, since I don’t think I’ve ever linked them at once like this: here are all of the original annotations/articles I wrote upon the book’s initial release.
Final Crisis #1
Final Crisis #2
Final Crisis #3
Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1
Final Crisis #4
Final Crisis #5
Final Crisis #6
Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #2
Final Crisis: Superman Beyond - On Mandrakk
Final Crisis #7

So: a catalogue of, as far as I can tell, every single change made to Final Crisis from single issue to collected edition. A lot of them are pretty interesting, and clear up stuff that I remember myself or other annotators pointing out. I’ve bolded the ones that are major, or of special interest (the one about the Anthro painting being in Gotham rather than NYC has rather interesting potential repercussions for the Return of Bruce Wayne storyline).

Final Crisis #1
Page 15: The reference to the LaGrange point (which was, I recall people saying, scientifically inaccurate) is replaced with “20,000 miles above sea level.”
Page 16: Empress is now colored dark-skinned, as per her original appearances in Young Justice.
Page 20: J’onn’s death panel (heh) is colored differently - in the original version, you can see a lot more of the colors of his costume, but it’s dominated by red in the hardcover.
Page 26: “New Earth” is now “Universe Designate-Zero.” “Universe 51″ is now “U-Designate-51.”
Page 31: Anthro’s “?” word balloon is moved from the panel where he paints the symbol on his face to the one to the upper-right, his silhouette standing up in surprise. This is presumably in response to people who thought the “?”’s placement in the original issue meant that Anthro was touching a symbol that spontaneously appeared, rather than one he was drawing.

Final Crisis #2
Page 18: In the fourth panel, John Stewart’s missing ring is drawn back on. It messed up the reveal later, when Batman noticed that Stewart punched Kraken from the ring imprint in her palm.
Page 21: In the second panel, after Kraken asks “Why are you LOOKING at me like that?”, Batman has a line of dialogue added, in small font: “That imprint on your palm…”, again presumably to make Batman’s thought process and the ring imprint from John clearer.
Page 23: Dialogue added, third panel, coming from the helicopter: “THIS IS A RESTRICTED AREA! STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” I guess to make it clear that Turpin was running from the ‘copter?
Page 24: A new line of dialogue, at the end of Kamandi’s statement in panel four: “Metron gave you a weapon!” is added after “Mister, they’re making slaves!” Also, they didn’t fix the typo where Good says “joylessy” instead of “joylessly.”
Page 29: The first panel has dialogue added: Jay screams “GAGGH!”, while Wally says “Jay, look out!”

Final Crisis #3
Page 4: The font issues with the German-specific characters are resolved, and the words display correctly.
Page 5: “NY Subway Extension” is changed to “Gotham Subway Extension.” This could be a HUGE clue - although it contradicts with what’s going on in Red Robin, if the symbol there is the same one that Anthro draws at the very end of the book, then that means Bruce’s bat-symbol drawing is under the rock just to its right, and that that’s where he came back to life. This would appear to line up with what we know about Return of Bruce Wayne.
Page 15: “Now that I think about it.” is placed in between “Hmmmmm” and Alan Scott’s balloon about Article X on the bottom panel.
Page 17: “Green Arrow and Black Canary ride again.” added after “I’M drafting you, Oliver. UP!”
Page 21: Superbat’s statement that “We’ve done this sort of thing before” (which was untrue) is replaced with “we’re the answer to all your prayers.”

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1
In general, all 3D effects have been removed from this issue and the next.
Page 21: After “A book with an INFINITE number of pages, all occupying the SAME SPACE”, “THAT’S why no-one can read it” is replaced with “of course no-one can read it.” Also, “We know the Ultima Thule’s onboard computer…” is changed to “According to Captain Adam, the Ultima Thule’s onboard computer…”. And finally, in what I can only presume is another mistake, “…and download instructions for its OWN REPAIR!” became “…and download MANUAL! Its OWN REPAIR.” Maybe they meant manual FOR its own repair?
Page 23: The word balloons on this page are all enlarged, since in the original comic they were smaller than those on any other page. Merryman’s dialogue is modified from “Why can’t I see anything?” to “So why can’t *I* see anything?”
Page 26: The final caption, “in the plague pit…”, is moved to the previous panel and replaced with “An unstoppable COUNTDOWN to COSMIC REVELATION has begun!”
Page 27: Merryman’s line “Seriously, this just doesn’t happen!” is removed, and the “Nobody’s special… nothing happens…” is moved to where that was. Also, words in the trade are bolded that weren’t previously - “NOTHING beyond the VOID, the BLANK, the ZIP, the ZILCH.” Also, “decisions”, “antagonize”, “magic word” and “Captain Marvel” get bolded.

Final Crisis: Submit
Page 25: Dialogue added after “Our entire world, our REALITY…”: “This circuit, this sign began to appear all over the world before all this started.” (referring, of course, to the Metron sigil).

Final Crisis #4
Page 3: “By the time you saw me ARRIVE, I’d already DRAGGED the guy through the shield” becomes the rather clearer “I was moving so fast, I’d already dragged the guy through the shield by the time the light reached your eyes.”
Page 8: “Maybe he’ll favor GRANNY GOODNESS” becomes “Maybe he’ll favor LIBRA, the Anti-Life that walks, maybe GRANNY GOODNESS”
Page 13: The star on Wonder Woman’s tiara is now filled in so it doesn’t look like a pentagram, and “Castellan Draper informs us that castle defenses will fail within the hour” is changed to “within 24 hours.”
Page 20: Shilo Norman’s skin color is now, correctly, black.

Final Crisis #5
Cover: The background is now dark blue rather than purple.
Page 1: “If you can prove…” after “But I can’t seem to account for my whereabouts…” is changed to “If Alpha Lantern Kraken can shed any light on that I’m ready to listen.”
Page 2: The “RINGS ONLY WORK IF YOU CAN THINK!” word balloons are split between panels two and three now, between WORK and IF.
Page 11: Shilo Norman is now black. Unfortunately, so is Sonny Sumo. Can’t win them all, I guess.
Page 13: “the Swiss border just… just got further away…” is now “just… just got closer…”, which I guess fits more properly with actual spacetime compression past an event horizon.
Page 14: To the relief of people everywhere who were bitching about this, “solve a RUBIK CUBE with” becomes “solve a scrambled RUBIK CUBE with.”
Page 16: The Justifier to the right in the top panel now also says “UP!”.
Page 17: When Libra says “We’re thinking about having YOU lead the rearguard action against the BLUDHAVEN BRIDGE,” the “Luthor” after that is removed, probably because it was redundant alongside Libra’s earlier comment about “…can you BELIEVE it, Luthor?”
Page 18: The “…Mokkari has FAILED you, Great One!…” speech is moved from being said by Mokkari to being said by Godfrey, so Mokkari’s no longer talking about himself in the third person.
Page 21: The “I. AM. THE. NEW. GOD.” word balloons are now more evenly spread throughout the panel, starting from about 25% in to the left and ending at the far right, rather than just taking up the first half of the panel as in the single issue.

Final Crisis #6
Page 1: Superman’s “You PROMISED you could RETURN…” word balloon is now semi-transparent near its right side, to show Superman’s getting pulled back to the present. “Excuse me, Superman” becomes “Excuse me, one moment.”
Page 2: “I’m being pulled back to my own time.” is added to the end of “Make it FAST, Brainiac 5.”, and that word balloon is also semi-transparent.
Page 3: The “I’m fading…” word balloon is now semi-transparent.
Page 13: Kalibak now says “Hhhhh” before the little asterisk, just to make SURE you know he’s dead, and that he also dies explicitly mid-word begging for help.
Page 15: “3 billion FREE HUMANS” becomes “1 1/2 billion.” Shilo’s properly black.
Pages 16-17: Black Shilo, light-skinned Sonny: Is this the only spread in the book where they got it right?
Page 23: “Libra, the man who became the GLOVE PUPPET of the Gods.” now has “A hollow vessel.” between it and “I’ll show you BALANCE…”
Page 25: “Beyond the reach of LIGHT” becomes “Nothing, not even light can escape his presence.”
Page 26: “Accept that the equation is PROVEN” becomes “Accept that the equation has solved the human problem.”

Final Crisis #7
Page 5: “Beyond these walls, there’s nothing left that isn’t DARKSEID.” becomes “Beyond these walls, there’s nothing left that isn’t the Forever Pit DARKSEID dragged us all into.”
Pages 6-7: The “Of how HE, just a MAN, had fatally WOUNDED the GOD OF EVIL” caption box is moved to the second page, just to the right of the rocket. The “And how we fought for what we BELIEVED in” box was moved from the fifth panel to the fourth, just below robo-Superman’s punching arm.
Page 16: The “BOOM” at the bottom is moved a bit to the lower-right, below Hawkman’s punching hand rather than to its upper left.
Page 18: Darkseid now says “not.” in little letters after Superman says “This was SUICIDE, Darkseid.” Wonder Woman says “Talk to me.” before “Darkseid is order.” Luthor’s “Libra WAS the Anti-Life Equation and now he’s not.” line is removed, since Luthor just hacked the Mad Hatter helmets, not the actual equation. And Darkseid says “not.” in small letters again in that last panel as well.
Page 20: “What used to be TIME is slowing to a STOP” is now “What was once TIME is broken now and blinded.”
Page 22: “You’re in the final stages of RADION poisoning, Darkseid. Your composite human ‘body’ unable to MOVE, let alone ACT.” is now “We’re almost at the bottom, where it all ends, where there’s no more future. You’re in the final stages of RADION poisoning, Darkseid.” After “HOW COULD I ASK FOR A BETTER GIFT TO DESTROY YOU WITH?”, Darkseid says “MY WILL BE DONE”, implying he’d use the Miracle Machine himself. Superman says “Everything’s just FREQUENCIES, vibrations” instead of just “Everything’s just vibrations.”
Page 25: Hal’s “Whatever they are, they’re OUR WAY IN!” is now “Whatever they are, they’re OUR WAY ACROSS THE EVENT HORIZON!” And, because it’s probably more appropriate since Mandrakk is a vampire, Superman now says “Not so easy when your prey BITES BACK, is it, Mandrakk?” rather than “fights back.”
Page 27: “LET THE SUN SHINE IN!” is now in a word balloon with jagged edges, to demonstrate shouting.
Page 28: The exiled animals are now from Earth-26 rather than Earth-35, correctly matching up with the Captain Carrot and the Final Ark miniseries. “Do you HEAR me? ‘Let all who worship evil’s might…’” now becomes “Do you HEAR that chant growing stronger? ‘Let all who worship evil’s might…’”, to line up with the small army of Green Lanterns who’re saying it at this point right behind him.
Page 29: “I summon the FOREVER PEOPLE OF THE 5th WORLD!” becomes “I summon the FOREVER PEOPLE OF THE 5th WORLD FROM EARTH-51 EXILE!”, just to make that clearer.
Page 36: “Fire lights his eyes.” is removed completely. “And then…” is added before “In a halo of blazing light”, and the “…old man passes like a dream.” caption box is moved to the final panel, before “Like smoke.”

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/15/final-crisis-annotations-epilogue-the-hardcover/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/15/final-crisis-annotations-epilogue-the-hardcover/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/MRMt0zzDsbA/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/03/bruce-wayne-a-man-of-wealth-and-taste-batmannotations-gaiden/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:25:42 +0000 David Uzumeri http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2329

What if there were an ultimate villain out there, unseen? An absolute mastermind, closing in for the kill? What if there existed an invisible, implacable foe who’d calculated my every weakness? Who had access to allies, weapons and tactics I couldn’t imagine. An adversary whose plots and grand designs were so vast, so elaborate, that they went unnoticed… until it was too late. How could I prepare for a challenge like that? Would I have the resources to deal with it? I’ve often wondered. If my hypothetical ultimate enemy can be imagined, I can’t help considering the possibility that he actually exists. Breathing… feels like drowning. And if he exists… if the king of crime is real… is he telling me his name?

- Bruce Wayne, Batman #674


From Batman #666

By the time we were about halfway through Batman R.I.P., and our esteemed British colleagues the Mindless Ones were divining hints from ancient Chinese wisdom, and I was still rambling on and on and on about goddammit no seriously they WILL reveal Alfred as the villain, there’s one thing we all agreed on: whether or not Simon Hurt was actually supposed to be the literal Devil, he certainly was a metaphorical one.

The question is - what’s the significance of that? If Simon Hurt is the Devil - or, as our li’l buddy Damian states there to the left, “may as well be” the Devil - then what does that mean? What, for all practical purposes, is the Devil?

Let’s talk it through. The Devil is a mythological creature, around since the dawn of human civilization, that serves as a cautionary example and inspires humans to do good through fear. He has pointy ears, and wings like a bat, and lives on through our culture as an eternal deterrent against crime - if you fuck up, you’re going to go to Hell where the Devil will tear the flesh from your bones and you will be in eternal torment. Nobody’s sure if he really exists - probably not, in our enlightened, post-religious, rational age, but you might even say he’s a sort of urban legend.

In short: Batman is, and always has been, the Devil. He inspires fear, he only punishes the wicked, he’s the Lord of the Underworld in Gotham City. So, who’s Simon Hurt? How can both he and Batman be the Devil? Certainly they both represent different aspects of the popular devil archetype - Batman is the deterrent Devil, while Hurt is the tempting one, the snake in the Garden of Eden.


Simon Hurt's temptation, from #681

So - who is Simon Hurt? He’s seemingly not supernatural, other than an apparent long life span; his methods are purely grounded and rational, employing a great deal of trickery and illusion, setting up massive games with innocent people based on Job-like bets. Comparisons to Fowles’s The Magus or the movie that kind of ripped it off, The Game, wouldn’t be at all inaccurate. And even when he tempts, he still punishes them eventually - he leaves the other fingers of the Black Glove to die at the end of “R.I.P.”, and when he calls Oberon Sexton at the end of Batman and Robin #6, he repeats the same thing he told them: “your sins have found you out.” It’s implied more than a little that even if Hurt isn’t Thomas Wayne or Mangrove Pierce, he still did know Bruce’s parents, and he seems awfully young for someone of that age. So: to Hell with it, let’s ascribe immortality, it’s a concept that’s certainly on the table ever since Nanda Parbat and the Lazarus Pits back in “Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul.”


Batman and Ra's al Ghul discuss immortality, from #671

So we have an immortal, unhinged devil figure, playing games with peoples’ lives (where he takes the pessimistic stance) and testing people by continuing to both tempt and punish. One who, according to the dialogue if not art of Batman #681, looks exactly like both Bruce and Thomas Wayne.


Gordon contemplates the enormity of Batman's mission, from #665

And now, we will also have Bruce Wayne running around 40,000 years ago, in a devil outfit, scaring the shit out of primitive man when they get out of line. For the next forty thousand years, operating as a primitive urban legend, becoming permanently entrenched in mythology and religion as an adversarial, frightening figure used to warn children and cowardly, superstitious adults against taking actions deemed inappropriate in society - crime, or sin. Not just metaphorical: Forty-thousand-year-old Bruce Wayne both inspires, and becomes, the Devil.


Bruce discusses the Second Batman's resemblance to Bane, from #665

And if Simon Hurt were 40,03X-year-old Bruce Wayne, it would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? His obsession with the Wayne line, the vast amounts of wealth, the knowledge of Bruce’s future… how else would he have known to create a faux Batman that resembles Bane years before “Knightfall” even occurred? Or that the next time Bruce wore the cape and cowl after “R.I.P.”, in Final Crisis, it would be his last (at least, from Hurt’s personal timeline). Morrison says that the title of this summer’s Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne will become “increasingly ominous as the story progresses,” and that the story will have an “apocalyptic countdown” - is Bruce Wayne going to go even more nuts over the coming 40,000 years, changed by so much death that he transforms into Hurt? Or is Hurt a new personality, implanted by the Omega Effect and the Life Trap? Hell, we don’t even know for sure how this version of the Omega Trap is going to operate.

What DO we know? We know that Bruce is apparently going to be various Waynes throughout history, including Puritan-era Gotham Village, something that this below panel certainly seems to be alluding to:


Gordon looks at Wayne family portraits, from #680

What we don’t know is how. Is Bruce going to be born into a different body for each life, or is he going to be effectively immortal and keep living new lives? If he is immortal, how? Is it a side effect of the Omega Trap, or is it the time he bathed in the Waters of Life in Nanda Parbat back in “Resurrection”? Or is he just hopping from location to location bathing in Lazarus Pits, and that’s what drives him, pun completely intended, batty?


Bruce contemplates Gotham's construction, from #679

At this point I’m off even speculation and just into randomly throwing questions into the ether, so: Robin and Batman, Cupid and the Devil, the Joke and the Punchline. It’s a role Batman’s always played, so it’s only natural that as he goes back to the dawn of time to play a part in shaping the evolution of humanity, he fill that societal role for the whole world rather than just his beloved Gotham - and God only knows what he had to do with that city’s development.

It also fits in with a lot of the hints given throughout the book. The quote I opened on, from right before the onset of “R.I.P.”, posits that this hypothetical ultimate enemy is basically… Batman Plus. Jezebel Jet exhaustively discusses the possibility in Batman #677, pointing out that the Black Glove shares Bruce’s obsessions with games and riddles and etc. - just on a larger scale. So if Batman is the Optimum Man, as Morrison keeps selling him to be - the absolute peak of humanity - then who could possibly best Batman but an older, more experienced Batman?


The Sensei informs Bruce about his shortcomings, from #671

“The victory is in the preparation,” Batman says - it’s what he taught Wingman (as revealed in #669) as well as Damian (#666). To become the pinnacle of human progress, Batman prepared - he prepared himself physically through martial arts, he prepared himself mentally through study and mastering the process of deduction, and after his incident in Infinite Crisis, he prepared himself emotionally by undergoing Thogal and “erasing the last traces of doubt and fear in [his] mind” (#681). By being Bruce Wayne, prodigal scion of Gotham’s reigning family, he prepared his surroundings with safehouses and hidden corporate holdings, an approach future-Damian takes to a hilarious but brilliantly lateral extreme by boobytrapping everywhere in Gotham with bombs. By raising Dick, and Tim, and inspiring Barbara, he prepares the future to continue his mission. Batman is nothing but preparation. So, a Batman with forty thousand more years of that? Well, that’d basically be the Devil.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/03/bruce-wayne-a-man-of-wealth-and-taste-batmannotations-gaiden/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2010/01/03/bruce-wayne-a-man-of-wealth-and-taste-batmannotations-gaiden/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/QE1GR6EmGMU/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/12/27/fbbp-121-luke-cage-noir/#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:33:02 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2331 The holidays were hectic around FBB Headquarters, as you may have inferred from our posting schedule. But we managed to record one last podcast for 2009 that takes a look at Luke Cage Noir, the latest in Marvel’s dusky crime-inspired Elseworlds series. We also tackle a frequently asked question regarding a beloved creator-owned series and the terrible things Chris says about it.

Do you want to know why we say such terrible things about something? Do you have questions and issues about Comics in 2010? Write us at the link on the sidebar, or call 347-AUNT-MAY and let us know!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/12/27/fbbp-121-luke-cage-noir/feed/ Adam Glass,Luke Cage,Marvel Noir,Mike Benson,Robert Kirkman,Shawn Martinborough,Walking Dead Luke Cage Noir reviewed, plus a burning question is answered The holidays were hectic around FBB Headquarters, as you may have inferred from our posting schedule. But we managed to record one last podcast for 2009 that takes a look at Luke Cage Noir (http://www.amazon.com/Luke-Cage-Noir-Premiere-HC/dp/0785139427), the latest in Marvel's dusky crime-inspired Elseworlds series. We also tackle a frequently asked question regarding a beloved creator-owned series and the terrible things Chris says about it. Do you want to know why we say such terrible things about something? Do you have questions and issues about Comics in 2010? Write us at the link on the sidebar, or call 347-AUNT-MAY and let us know! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 48:37 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/12/27/fbbp-121-luke-cage-noir/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/KO2eW8YkkXs/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/27/linkblogging-for-black-friday/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:00:32 +0000 Jamaal Thomas http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2314 Welcome to another round of FBB linkblogging, brought to you by your friendly Jamaal. All opinions expressed below are those of the author, and do not reflect the official position of the FBB mob.

(1) True Stories of the Core Marvel Universe , in which Chris Sims points out that the Marvel Universe is wacky! I really like most of Sims’ work, but I don’t see the big deal here. I like the Frankenstein version of the Punisher too, but I think it’s okay if other people don’t. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that a segment of the superhero comics reading audience is obsessed with continuity. I’m not in that crowd, but I don’t begrudge people their preferences.

(2) A great interview with Farel Darlymple conducted by Nick Gazin of Vice Magazine (hat tip to the Beat). Darlymple is a brilliant artist who should definitely get more attention. His new project (”The Wrenchies”) seems pretty intriguing.

(3) A jaw-droppingly great meditation on J.H. Williams III by Charles Hatfield of the Thought Balloonists. You should bookmark their blog.

(4) Two potentially interesting corporate comics stories:

(a) Rich Johnston reports that Marvel is initiating a ’special character policy’ to prevent intellectual property ownership disputes with creators.

(b) ICv2 notes that some Marvel execs will personally profit from the merger deal when it finally goes through, to the tune of millions of dollars in cash and stock. Tom Spurgeon writes what I think - ‘[t]he system works, sure, but for whom?’

I’d love to see someone explore both of these stories in more detail, especially the first one, which leaves a ton of unanswered questions: What’s are the terms of these Special Character Agreement contract? Does Marvel discourage/encourage creators to consult with attorneys prior to signing? Are any of these terms negotiable?

(5) Read this great interview with Eddie Campbell, conducted by The Rumpus. As always, Campbell’s views on publishing, comics, and art are fascinating to read.

(6) The Onion A/V Club brings you a list of the best comics of the aughts. This article has been poked at a bit for having some gaping holes, but to be fair, these kinds of lists always have some kind of glaring omission. They are always deeply personal, and reflect the evolution of ones’ tastes, expectations, and preferences over a decade. Some of the books that I’d put on my personal list, like Planetary, Authority, or the New Frontier, reflect a period in which I was excited that mainstream superhero comics could tell a truly intelligent story. Others, like Box Office Poison, or Bob Fingerman’s work, represent a time when I was still surprised to read good middlebrow comics. If those comics were published this week, would they still hold a cherished place in my heart? Probably not. But I’d still put them on the list.

With all that said, Heidi MacDonald, Sean Collins and David Pepose are totally correct about the absence of manga. That’s a pretty glaring omission. I’m embarrased to admit that I couldn’t put manga on my list either. Why? Because I don’t read manga, which is the one part of the comics universe that I know almost nothing about. I’ve heard Pluto is brilliant, and plan to start picking up volumes over the winter holiday. Any other suggestions?

Note: I do not like anything that’s even remotely cute.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/27/linkblogging-for-black-friday/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/27/linkblogging-for-black-friday/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/dl2DkvaYuz0/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/22/fbbp-120-love-shame/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:55:00 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2311 This episode, we discuss changes over at the Comics Journal and what that means for the blogosphere, plus answer your questions about love, shame, professional wrestling and enabling habits!

If you have questions or topics you’d like to see addressed in future podcasts, write us at editors AT funnybookbabylon DOT com, or take advantage of our new phone service:

(347)-AUNT-MAY

That’s right, New York’s own May Parker has taken time out of her busy schedule of working at a soup kitchen and fretting about her nephew Peter to collect questions for us. Treat her well, she’s a great ol’ gal!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/22/fbbp-120-love-shame/feed/ Avengers,Batgirl,Chris Claremont,Comics journal,Grant Morrison,Jeph Loeb,X-men Changes at the Comics Journal, plus YOUR e-mail and phone questions! This episode, we discuss changes over at the Comics Journal (http://www.tcj.com) and what that means for the blogosphere, plus answer your questions about love, shame, professional wrestling and enabling habits! If you have questions or topics you'd like to see addressed in future podcasts, write us at editors AT funnybookbabylon DOT com, or take advantage of our new phone service: (347)-AUNT-MAY That's right, New York's own May Parker has taken time out of her busy schedule of working at a soup kitchen and fretting about her nephew Peter to collect questions for us. Treat her well, she's a great ol' gal! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 59:05 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/22/fbbp-120-love-shame/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/v6Xwdovkpj4/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/12/fbbp-119-hellblazin-milligan/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:13:37 +0000 Joseph Mastantuono http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2308 This episode, we take a look at Peter Milligan’s recently started run on Hellblazer, as one of the original British Invasion writers becomes the latest in his gang to tackle one of the longest running monthly American comic books in print.

Does Milligan still have “it”? Does John Constantine? Are they both self-sabotaging, self-destructive British gentlemen of a certain age? Listen and find out!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/12/fbbp-119-hellblazin-milligan/feed/ Hellblazer,John Constantine,Peter Milligan,Vertigo A review of Peter Milligan's Hellblazer run This episode, we take a look at Peter Milligan's recently started run on Hellblazer, as one of the original British Invasion writers becomes the latest in his gang to tackle one of the longest running monthly American comic books in print. Does Milligan still have "it"? Does John Constantine? Are they both self-sabotaging, self-destructive British gentlemen of a certain age? Listen and find out! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 24:52 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/12/fbbp-119-hellblazin-milligan/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/v5UcllqXP_Y/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/05/fbbp-118-we-like-comics/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:09:24 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2296 Sometimes our tough love strikes listeners as a little too tough. We’re sensitive to concerns about our negativity — and our tendency to ramble on — and so here we have a brief conversation where each of us describe a recent comic we’ve genuinely enjoyed.

Want to be spoiled? Our picks lie below!

Jamaal likes: Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson
Joseph likes: Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction & Salvador LaRocca
Chris likes: Vigilante #11 by Marv Wolfman, Walt Simonson & John Paul Leon
Pedro likes: Spider-Man Family: Back in Black by Sean McKeever, Kano, David LaFuente & Others

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/05/fbbp-118-we-like-comics/feed/ Beasts of Burden,Evan Dorkin,Iron Man,Jill Thompson,John Paul Leon,Marv Wolfman,Matt Fraction,Salvador LaRocca,Sean McKeever,Spider-Man,Venom,Vigilante Four recent books one or more of our panelists enjoyed Sometimes our tough love strikes listeners as a little too tough. We're sensitive to concerns about our negativity -- and our tendency to ramble on -- and so here we have a brief conversation where each of us describe a recent comic we've genuinely enjoyed. Want to be spoiled? Our picks lie below! Jamaal likes: Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson Joseph likes: Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction & Salvador LaRocca Chris likes: Vigilante #11 by Marv Wolfman, Walt Simonson & John Paul Leon Pedro likes: Spider-Man Family: Back in Black by Sean McKeever, Kano, David LaFuente & Others Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 18:34 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/05/fbbp-118-we-like-comics/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/peF18FAmtXg/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/02/fbbp-117-the-umbrella-academy/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:50:29 +0000 Joseph Mastantuono http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2285 Rock ‘n’ Roll and Superhero Comics are two uniquely American creations of the twentieth century, and they share many traits — a patchwork Genesis story, arguments about who was really first, youthful rebellion, corporate co-option, a “British Invasion” coming along and showing up their American rivals, a decades-long struggle to be taken “seriously”.

But the two have had a very rocky relationship when they come in contact with one another:

1959 - Superman meets Pat Boone
1965 - The Thing and Human Torch meet the Beatles
1975 - Paul McCartney sings about Magneto and the Titanium Man
1977 - Howard the Duck meets KISS
1979 - Millie the Model meets Alice Cooper
1985 - Swamp Thing meets Sting (kind of)
1986 - The Transformers meet Bruce Springsteen (kind of)
1993 - Shadowman meets Aerosmith
1995 - No One was willing to meet Billy Ray Cyrus
1998 - Red Rocket 7 meets Just About Everyone

And now, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way (along with Gabriel Ba) has entered the fray with The Umbrella Academy. On a scale of 1 (Billy Ray Cyrus) to 10 (“Iron Man”), how does The Umbrella Academy stack up? Is this even analogous to the list above? The FBBP Action News Team investigates!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/02/fbbp-117-the-umbrella-academy/feed/ Gabriel Ba,Gerard Way,Umbrella Academy Review: The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba Rock 'n' Roll and Superhero Comics are two uniquely American creations of the twentieth century, and they share many traits -- a patchwork Genesis story, arguments about who was really first, youthful rebellion, corporate co-option, a "British Invasion" coming along and showing up their American rivals, a decades-long struggle to be taken "seriously". But the two have had a very rocky relationship when they come in contact with one another: 1959 - Superman meets Pat Boone (http://www.comicvine.com/supermans-girl-friend-lois-lane-featuring-pat-boone-in-supermans-mystery-song-come-sing-a-song-of-superman-pat-boone-and-lois-lane-are-singing-a-new-song-about-me-its-a-great-tune-but-i-must-use-all-my-super-powers-to-prevent-it-from-becoming-a-hit/37-116060/) 1965 - The Thing and Human Torch meet the Beatles (http://marvel.wikia.com/Comics:Strange_Tales_Vol_1_130) 1975 - Paul McCartney sings about Magneto and the Titanium Man (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTBukDar6vE) 1977 - Howard the Duck meets KISS (http://www.kissfaq.com/books/cameo1.jpg) 1979 - Millie the Model meets Alice Cooper (http://www.comicvine.com/marvel-premiere-alice-cooper/37-19850/) 1985 - Swamp Thing meets Sting (kind of) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constantine) 1986 - The Transformers meet Bruce Springsteen (kind of) (http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/transformers/14-1.jpg) 1993 - Shadowman meets Aerosmith (http://www.valiantfan.com/VALIANT/issue.asp?cn=561) 1995 - No One was willing to meet Billy Ray Cyrus (http://www.4thletter.net/2009/02/billy-ray-cyrus-the-marvel-comic-book-yes-really/) 1998 - Red Rocket 7 meets Just About Everyone (http://blog.newsarama.com/2008/05/21/red-rocket-7-10th-anniversary-collection-on-the-way/) And now, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way (along with Gabriel Ba (http://fabioandgabriel.blogspot.com/)) has entered the fray with The Umbrella Academy. On a scale of 1 (Billy Ray Cyrus) to 10 ("Iron Man" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GECit4oSpbk)), how does The Umbrella Academy stack up? Is this even analogous to the list above? The FBBP Action News Team investigates! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 36:45 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/11/02/fbbp-117-the-umbrella-academy/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/KD44UfdyBwY/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/26/call-for-listener-questions/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:14:15 +0000 Pedro Tejeda http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2274 Dear Listeners,

Did you enjoy the Listener Questions segment of our hundredth episode? Did you hate it because we didn’t answer your question? Do you still have a burning question for Joe?

Well, you have another chance to ask questions in a new ongoing segment. You can leave a question in the comments, or dare to take advantage of innovative Web 2.5 technology and call in to the Funnybook Babylon Hotline!

(347) 548-8377

Assuming we can work out this Web 2.5 technology, we might just play your question “on the air”!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/26/call-for-listener-questions/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/26/call-for-listener-questions/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/0Rg3XCCi_NU/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/19/huggabroomstik-live-on-tuesday-1020/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:12:04 +0000 Joseph Mastantuono http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2248 If you’re in New York City and you like the music you’ve heard on our podcast you should go see the band that provided us with our music. They’re performing this Tuesday at the Sidewalk Cafe at 11pm.

If you would like a primer before you check them out, listen to this musical retrospective and interview with Huggabroomstik frontman Neil Kelly.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/19/huggabroomstik-live-on-tuesday-1020/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/19/huggabroomstik-live-on-tuesday-1020/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/MAhdNxIMIe4/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/17/john-oxendine-is-norman-osborn/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:22:20 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2236 Okay, maybe not, but look at his hair. Look at it!



Oxendine is running for governor in Georgia, and was brought to my attention thanks to this amazing cartoon campaign ad, which is well worth watching. If a follow-up ad depicts a political opponent as a spider, somebody track down Mark Millar and shoot him for making Marvel 1985 real.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/17/john-oxendine-is-norman-osborn/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/17/john-oxendine-is-norman-osborn/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/JocmA1zQLW0/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/13/fbbp-116-planetary-post-mortem/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:05:04 +0000 Joseph Mastantuono http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2230 The Planetary retrospective rolls on with a podcast dissection of the series. WHERE IS THE FOURTH MAN? Sorry Jamaalamanaics, he was busy this weekend. But he’ll be back later this week in our Umbrella Academy review from the archives! Also, if you haven’t already checked it out, our Planetary Timeline has been updated with corrected images and more moments in the past decade of funnybook history!

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/13/fbbp-116-planetary-post-mortem/feed/ John Cassaday,Planetary,Warren Ellis A final look at Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary The Planetary retrospective rolls on with a podcast dissection of the series. WHERE IS THE FOURTH MAN? Sorry Jamaalamanaics, he was busy this weekend. But he'll be back later this week in our Umbrella Academy review from the archives! Also, if you haven't already checked it out, our Planetary Timeline (http://funnybookbabylon.com/planetary-timeline) has been updated with corrected images and more moments in the past decade of funnybook history! Chris Eckert, Joseph Mastantuono, Pedro Tejeda, Jamaal Thomas yes 57:23 http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/13/fbbp-116-planetary-post-mortem/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/g05TCiJBCNY/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/09/let-forever-be-a-planetary-retrospective-pt-2/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:27:32 +0000 Chris Eckert http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2219 As I discussed in our previous installment, Planetary finishes in a comics world quite different than the one it entered. Sure, Marvel and DC still have an effective oligarchy and pervert suit/nurse novel/ammonite pimp/fanmen still rule the land, but they do so in a different — and I will be so bold as to suggest better — landscape than what existed in 1999.

This timeline is a work in progress, and I know there are loads of important releases and business moves that I have not yet added to it, especially in recent years. If you think I’ve missed something, please let me know in the comments. But in the meanwhile, check out the timeline!

Thanks to Pedro for coding the thing in Flash, and thanks to the Gang of Davids (Brothers, Uzumeri, Cole) for input on dates and design.

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]]> http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/09/let-forever-be-a-planetary-retrospective-pt-2/feed/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/09/let-forever-be-a-planetary-retrospective-pt-2/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/funnybookbabylon/BsUO/~3/a11iMD4f9W0/ http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/10/08/fbbp-115-deadpool-for-president/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:50:17 +0000 Joseph Mastantuono http://funnybookbabylon.com/?p=2178