SeeBelow*

OG Seebelow Re-Revived! Gets new costume! Joins JLA spinoff!

2011-06-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

DC Comics ready for a risky yet relevant publishing change

Here's a sneak preview of the Geoff Johns and
Jim Lee Bobblehead dolls from Funko!

(source)

As excited as Dan DiDio is about DC Comics' newest initiative, the company's co-publisher knows he can walk the hallways of the DC Comics offices in Manhattan and pick up the same vibe from his co-workers.

And if he doesn't, out come the whips and scorpions.

"If we can convince the people here we're doing something brand-new and fresh, we have a good chance to really get the people outside on board," DiDio says.

That’s what we call in the trade “A mighty big if,” partner.

DC will re-number its entire line of superhero titles, beginning with all-new No. 1 issues starting Aug. 31 — 52 in all, including a new Justice League No. 1. Fittingly, the publisher put its creative superteam on its trademark superhero superteam.

Super!

Guided by writer Geoff Johns and artist Jim Lee, Justice League will begin its first year with an updated secret origin reflecting DC's new initiative, giving the group a reason for coming together that it lacked when the league first appeared in 1960. And while it will ultimately boast 14 members, at its core will be DC's A-list do-gooders: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and Aquaman.

"The approach is very much about who they are behind the masks and how they interact together and how these personalities mix," explains Johns, DC Entertainment's chief creative officer. "With the world's greatest superheroes, how does that team actually work? Do they all get along? Being able to pull together and see how that relationship is forged and continues to grow has to be at the heart of that book."

As you peruse that awkward mess of a sentence, keep in mind that this guy is a writer, folks.

For Lee, working on a team book is a different experience than a Superman or Batman, both of which he illustrated in recent years.

"When you have a Green Lantern mixing with a foil like Batman,

Batman is a BAT, Jim. You’re thinking of Foil-Man.

you get scenes that are comic-book history.

Or are “something that happens every month in Justice League already”.

There's the epicness of it all.

Right there! There it is! All the epicness!

You're dealing with iconic characters and you want to give them all equal grandeur and weight."

Well, no, no you really don't. In a character-driven story - especially one with an exceptionally large cast - you want to have inequality between the characters in order to have tension, which drives the story forward and gives characters the opportunity to react, grow, perform and generally define themselves in the context of the plot. Ideally, you have some characters whose roles are almost exclusively supportive and secondary, so that they help give structure to the larger story of the primary characters. This gives a story focus, and if you make everyone equal in value then you disperse the tension out across everyone and the story appears lackluster and devoid of emotional consistency. BUT HEY this guy is the artist, I'm just busting his balls now ...

In the rollout of the revamped DC Universe, some titles will return, a lot of titles won't

(low whistle)

and DC will have a wider range of books starting in September, DiDio says. In addition, three-quarters of the creative teams will be shuffled around — series that are successful and writer/artist combinations that work well together won't be tweaked too much, he says.

I'm not really sure why you'd mess around with the teams that currently work just fine at all, but tweak away, man. It's your company.

"We've got a new set of creators coming in with new voices in the DC Universe," DiDio says. "We really want to bring a new energy and excitement to our books."

"We also have a lot of the same shitty old creators coming back to the books which I already thought sucked so bad we needed to relaunch the entire line. The new DC!"

The characters also are getting a makeover. While most of the specifics are still top secret, Lee says he worked with both staff and freelance artists to redesign costumes in a contemporary way as well as alter the physicality of many heroes and villains to modernize the DC Universe.

"You're trying to have your cake and eat it, too," Lee says.

Finally, something to like about all this business – cake.

"You're trying to keep the iconic elements there, but at the same time freshen up the look so that people are intrigued by what they're seeing and hopefully come and sample the wares."

“So they almost definitely should not have put me on this gig” said Lee, dismissively recalling Heroes Reborn.

The recent emphasis on diverse characters such as lesbian superheroine Batwoman, Hispanic hero Blue Beetle and African-American adventurer Cyborg (who will be a core member of Johns and Lee's new Justice League) also will continue.

Wow, they got one of everybody in there! Say, didn’t we have an Asian-American Atom around here somewhere? Whatever happened to that guy? Oh, that’s right, he’s dead in a matchbox.

There’s a particular irony in DC claiming to have an ‘emphasis’ on diversity - beyond how many of their ethnic and gender atypical characters they’ve chosen to kill off in recent years (although, to be fair, they killed off just about everybody at one point or another). More than that, though, they took their only two characters who’ve relied on prosthetics and appliances to overcome disabilities – one-armed archer Roy Harper and paraplegic Barbara Gordon – and made them whole-bodied again.

"Diversity" in fiction is more than just counting skin color, it's about depicting the unique struggles and experiences of sub-groups and sub-communities within a larger population. While they're promoting Cyborg as the African-American guy on the front of their pamphlet, they're conceiving of him not as the victim of traumatic injuries who requires his prosthetics to survive (as he was, you know, originally conceived) but as ... - well, read on for that. But, essentially, "diversity" seems to mean "You can't sell action figures if they're in a wheelchair".

"He's a character I really see as the modern-day, 21st-century superhero," Johns says of Cyborg. "He represents all of us in a lot of ways.

“I’ll name one.”

If we have a cellphone and we're texting on it, we are a cyborg — "

You can always tell when Johns has been talking with Morrison.

that's what a cyborg is, using technology as an extension of ourselves."

That is totally not what a cyborg is, Geoff. Cybernetics is expressly the scientific study of human physiological functions and the use of artificial mechanical means to replace them. That Cyborg has a manufactured eye which transmits visual information to his brain, that's what makes him a cyborg. That he can access Yahoo! Sports without an iPad isn't.

What Johns is describing is "using tools", and by that definition I'm a cyborg every time I pick up a hammer. By that definition, we've had cyborgs since the Paleolithic era, and every time a chimp uses a twig to flush termites out of a mound, then he's a Chimpborg. By that definition, I'm a cyborg every time I slap a male prostitute in the face with my dick. Hold on ... I've said too much.

There will also be a lot of diversity in the products as well, DiDio promises.

There’s that word again.

"It's not just about straight superhero characters and stories.

“You saw we got Batwoman, right?”

We're going to use war comics, we have stories set in mystery and horror, we've got Westerns."

Groundbreaking. There's nothing more modern than the comics they published back in the Fifties.

While Lee allows that this kind of wholesale change is risky for DC, it's far more perilous to play it safe

By definition, it is never more perilous to play it safe. What monkey journalism school drop-out did they hire to write this thing?

and not periodically examine these characters and how they relate to the readership.

"It's part of our jobs to make sure that these characters stay dynamic and relevant," Lee says. "And that's what drove us on a creative level to make these kinds of changes."

And certainly not an attempt to make our comics lawsuit-proof by erasing all the Siegel, Kirby and Alan Moore contributions or to distract people from the economic swipe we've just delivered to brick-and-mortar comic shops or how by effectively having pulled out of those venues we'll have taken a shot at the indy and alternative markets which it's hard to argue were competitors at all. Dynamic and relevant, that's why!

OG Seebelow Revived! Gets own book from "new" DC (is cancelled two months later)

2011-06-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

DC Comics unleashes a new universe of superhero titles

How sick are you of this picture already?

(source)

DC Comics has a new strategy to be No. 1 in comic books: all-new No. 1's.

Yes, DC will be doing number ones all over the place!

Starting this summer, the publisher will re-number its entire DC Universe of titles, revamping characters such as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and others from its 76-year history for a more modern and diverse 21st century.

Or, in the case of some characters like Wonder Woman, re-re-revamping them. Again. Also, nice to know that the 21st century is more modern than all the other centuries that have been or will be. That's modernity for you - it's contemporary!

The first book to be released under this new era: Justice League No. 1, out Aug. 31. The series by writer Geoff Johns and artist Jim Lee reunites the famous lineup of Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Wonder Woman and Aquaman.

I’m guessing they would have called Martian Manhunter but his phone doesn’t get service on Mars.

Taking the place of the alien outsider who stuck out like a sore thumb among the ethnically consistent faces of the world’s premiere superhero collective will be a black dude.

Johns promises a focus on the interpersonal relationships within DC's trademark superteam. "What's the human aspect behind all these costumes? That's what I wanted to explore," he says.

“But instead it ended up being a lot of explosions and stupid dialogue, like I usually do.”

In September, an additional 51 first issues will make their debut, introducing stories that are grounded in each character's specific legend but also reflect today's real-world themes and events.

That sounds … groundbreaking.

It's wonderful that they're launching 52 new titles (or, if not wonderful, then "pretty much what comics companies do, publishing titles"), but if the goal is to draw in new readers and get them emotionally (and, more importantly, financially) involved with the new books and new looks, then surely the question isn't "how many titles they are launching" but rather "What's their commitment to these titles?"

DC Comics under Dan Didio has a pretty inconsistent history with follow-through on any of their big ideas. With that in mind, what is his dedication to what appears to be a Pre-Re-Implosion Universe? If a book isn't selling after three issues, does it go down the drain? How will that resonate with the new readers he's trying to generate?

Some of these books are going to be slow starters out of the gate, that's just to be expected when you've got 52 new number one issues starting up all at once.

The lion's share of the market attention is bound to go to the Bats and Capes, Rings and Tits, so what happens when one of these titles inevitably dips below 30,000 by their second or third issue? Does Didio plan to exercise any kind of sticktuitiveness with all of these new franchises? Justice League is bound to go the distance, but how much loving care is he going to be willing to shell out for Justice League Dark (which is just like the regular Justice League only with Dark Chocolate instead of Milk Chocolate. Coming this Christmas, look for Justice League Peppermint and Chunky Justice League with Raisins).

Lee spearheaded the costumes' redesign to make characters more identifiable and accessible to comic fans new and old.

“I changed how they looked so people would recognize them better. Like, you know how in movies when an escaped criminal goes to a plastic surgeon and gets his face changed and goes back to get revenge on the people who ratted him out, the first thing everybody says is ‘Oh my god I totally knew it was you because you looked so different!’ … well, that’s what I’m doing here.”

V-collars make characters more accessible. Haven’t you read Understanding Comics?

"We really want to inject new life in our characters and line," says Dan DiDio, co-publisher of DC with Lee.

“Any ideas on how to do that?”

"This was a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today's audience."

“We’re starting at what I like to call ‘an arbitrary point that comprises no discernable milestone.’”

In an even more important move in the competitive comics industry, DC is making all of the re-numbered titles available digitally via apps and a DC website the same day they arrive in comic shops. It marks the first time that a major comics publisher has done so with its popular superhero titles.

You know what this is going to do? It’s really going to stick it to comic shops. By the end of the year, I fully expect that about ninety percent of all the comic shops in America will dedicate no more than a single wall to print versions of new comics, and instead stack their shelves with a seemingly limitless supply of toys, action figures, statues, tee-shirts, keychains, magnets, baseball caps, novelty glassware, Heroclix and other licensed comic book-related collectibles. Mark my words, I have seen the future*!

In all seriousness, I do wonder how much the same day availability of digital comics will ultimately affect comics retailers/ While I was being flippant**, I honestly rarely find a comic shop where the actual comics comprise more than five or ten percent of the store stock - out of six in my immediate area, I can only think of one that even HAS a back issue section, or a reasonable selection of alternative and indy titles. I honestly have no idea what this will do to brick-and-mortar options, except I'll continue to not really go into them all that often. I'm full up on Heroclix.

(*And it looks like the mall)

(** …the butler was murdered!)

The company has come in second to Marvel every year since 2002 in market share, according to Diamond Comic Distributors.

Can’t you let them have this one, solitary moment of happiness, USA Today?

While the two companies are making millions off movie adaptations of their comic books, print sales for both have dropped in recent years, as new technology gives readers many more options.

For instance, “seeing movies” instead of “reading comics”.

"We're allowing people who have never bought a comic book in their lives to download them on portable media devices and take a look," Lee says.

“Before now, we strictly prohibited them from doing that, using remote controlled drones and off-duty border patrol agents.”

"Having the ability to give people access to these comics with one button click means we're going to get a lot of new readers."

"And there's no way they could just not click that button, right? Right?"

Who Watches the Watchmen: Again?

2010-02-03T13:16:00.000-08:00

Over at Bleedingcool.com, Rich Johnston asserts a comically frightening hypothesis. His ear to the pavement, Rich indicates that his sources have revealed to him the possibility of not only a sequel to The Watchmen film, but a number of miniseries and on going projects exploring the history of the franchise.

Despite the rumor that the events in Watchmen took place in one of the new post 52 universes, Paul Levitz had always put the kibosh on any expansion of the franchise. One presumes it's just another bizarre manifestation of his challenging relationship with Alan Moore. It seems that expanding on the franchise is something of a dirty fantasy for Don DiDio. With Levitz stepping aside, indications are that DiDio has made expanding the Watchmen franchise a pet project.

With any luck this will generate a vindictive and angry screed from Moore that will require a thesauraus for proper comprehension.

[Get Ready for Watchmen 2] BleedingCool.com

Party Planning Tips!

2010-01-15T09:33:00.000-08:00

Party supply site ThePartyWorks.com offers several suggestions for planning a Superman-themed party for your kids. You know, Superman?

The Man of Steel,
the purveyor of good deeds
the destoryer of bad deeds

Yeah, him. Don't knock yourself out preparing a fancy spread for your birthday tyke, not when ...

Not many people know this, but Superman secretly craved hamburgers and hot dogs and while we do not know for sure, this menu makes for easy outdoor cooking with no mess in the kitchen. Add chips, cut-up vegetables, condiments, popcorn and beverages.

Looking for fun activities? Why not sing this specially crafted Superman birthday song!

Happy Birthday Song

Add a word to the standard song that is sung before the candles are blown out and the cake is served.

HAPPY SUPERMAN BIRTHDAY TO YOU,

HAPPY SUPERMAN BIRTHDAY TO YOU,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO SUPERMAN ERIC,

HAPPY SUPERMAN BIRTHDAY TO YOU!

And now the part that would have made my head explode when I was six:

Birthday Cake
Decorate the cake with a Superman cake topper or emblem or create your own. Add red, white and blue frosting and decorations that carries the Superman color scheme perfectly.

AAAgh my six-year old brain ...

Excerpts: How much worse could Superman IV have truly been?

2010-01-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

The incidental music alone is a more serious villain than Nuclear Man...

Dial Ф for Fakeski!

2010-01-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

Here's an amusing, really nicely designed, and completely ersatz version of Leon Trotsky as Tintin.

The dead giveaway is the date 1922 - Tintin was first published in 1929, which is easy to remember, since everyone knows Hergé's's boy reporter is responsible for causing the Black Tuesday stock market crash. If memory serves (I don't have my own Tintin books at hand) this isn't a version of any particular Tintin book, but rather of a logo that appears on the title pages of most editions.

There's a selection of several more equally fake and attractive covers at English Russia

It's not clear to me exactly what might be the point of all this, especially since I neither speak nor read Russian. Still, I could hardly post that without also posting this.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is one of the few of the series I still haven't read. When I was a real obsessive about these things, back in the last 70s, I don't think an English translation was even available. Certainly the earliest Tintin books are pretty problematic with the advantage of renewable energy powered 21st century hindsight, what with the racism and drinking and smoking and adorable terriers with the power of speech (hey, so THAT'S what's missing from Mad Men!)

Superman: The Man of Tomorrow That Almost Was

2010-01-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

Superman is about as iconic as you can get. He transcends the super hero medium of comics and offers a reflection of a nostalgic mid century America that never really existed. To many people he embodies the very values and presence of an America that we wished was real.

Which is all the more impressive when you consider that depite his outward resemblance to us, he is not human. Tossing about city buses and swimming in lava aside, it's sometimes easy to forget that Kal-El was born on Krypton and launched from that dying world to our own in a suped up* space crib. I think the residents of Smallville and Metropolis both can thank their lucky stars that the instinctual behavior of Kryptonian infants didn't include punching and staring intently at the ceiling until it catches on fire.

How much would it blow your mind though, if I told you that Superman was originally conceived of as a HUMAN?! Is your mind blown? Is it laying about the floor like the contents of a can of beans left unopened on a burner for too long?**

The totally awesome website Lettersofnote.com has featured, and translated, a letter that Jerry Siegel wrote to Russel Keaton in 1934. Siegel was looking for an artist for Superman and pitched the idea to the Buck Rogers artist with a brief script detailing a significantly different origin story for Clark Kent.

Notable differences include Kent being human, instead of alien, thrust back in time from a dying earth by the last man alive. Thankfully the last man alive was not a telephone repair man, and he had the capacity and resources to construct a time machines. Additionally, this Clark Kent was raised in an orphanage, and delighted in public displays of his strength.

Keaton turned down the offer, and it was another four years before Superman finally ended up with Joe Shuster and National Allied Publications.

* See what I did there? I'm very clever.
** My father actually did this. Big mess. Beans everywhere. Beans!

Superman: The Man of Tomorrow [Lettersofnote.com]

Superman: Secret Origins 1 and 2 quick impressions

2009-11-04T12:04:00.000-08:00

Yet more evidence that I post too much here.

Anyway, not a real review, just some impressions.

Gary Frank's a good artist but he needs to tone down the "I'm INSAAAAAANE" expressions he uses for characters. I can handle it on Lex Luthor, cause, well, he's Lex Luthor. It's just weird looking at a picture of Lana hiding in a cornfield when the expression on her face says "They'll never find the bodies."

Also, so far Gary's trying way, way too hard to draw Clark Kent/Superboy to look just like Christopher Reeve. There are a few panels in this comic that approach pure mastery... the full page spread where Superboy catches Lionel Luthor's truck as it prepares to go splay is really well done all told... but it's detracted significantly when I look at the next page and I see teen Chris Reeve staring out at me.

The plot tries to incorporate pretty much every Superman as young boy scenario out there, from Byrne's football playing popular jock kid to the classic Silver Age bookworm version to Smallville (complete with heat vision whenever Lana Lang kisses him) and as a result, it's kind of messed up. It doesn't help that it's Geoff Johns so I expect everyone to die horribly on every page. Lex Luthor's story works pretty well so far, however, and I liked seeing Lena Luthor again.

The Legion of Super Heroes appearance worked pretty well. I liked that Lightning Lad alone was more concerened with young Clark as a person rather than a legend or a fundamental part of the time stream, and his manipulation of Brainiac 5 worked elegantly enough. I was happy they didn't include the original "The Legion fucks with his head first" aspect of the story, as Clark comes off as more shy and timid in this version and it would have seemed like kicking a puppy.

In fact, one of my main problems with the story is that they're overselling the shy and timid aspect. At one point Clark asks Saturn Girl what he did wrong in a way that makes him seem rather slow witted. This isn't a major concern, but it's still kind of weird.

And there's a Krypto appearance in issue #2. Can't say anything bad about Krypto.

Clearly, this is a re-retcon of the retcon of the Silver Age origin when Byrne took over the book. That origin was itself built out of many previous Golden and Silver Age tweaks to the story. Since it's Geoff Johns, I'm honestly relieved at how much it doesn't deviate from what you might expect. I'm cautiously willing to read more.

The Awesome Insanity of the Golden Age Superman

2009-10-21T01:16:00.000-07:00

I talk about this a lot, but seriously: the Golden Age Superman was purely batshit. I've been rereading the Superman Chronicles, a series of reprintings of all the old Siegel and Shuster Superman stories, and man, is he one murderous, grinning psychopath. Superman will impersonate a sports figure, declare war on rigged pinball machines, or destroy the wall of a radio station to announce to a town that he's essentially decided to destroy all of their cars if they cross him. He enjoys being shot at, stabbed, and poisoned because it gives him the chance to show off how nothing can hurt him, and he'll actually destroy an entire slum on the off chance the US Government will replace the ruined buildings.

I suppose we should be glad he didn't decide to try that in New Orleans.

I just get such a massive kick out of raving asshole Superman. Let's not mince words: the Siegel and Shuster Superman is a crusader against social inequity, a champion of the little guy, and a grinning, smug as all hell complete fucker who is just itching to fuck with you before he throws you into the harbor. He will deliberately crash head first into your propeller if you try and fly to safety, too.

I wish I had scans of the issue where Superman, in his Clark Kent identity, comes upon a man who has committed suicide after realizing his purchase of stock in an oil company has ruined him because the two gentlemen running the company prefer selling shares to actually drilling for oil. In short order Superman buys all the stock available in the company (coming right out and saying that he wiped out Clark Kent's savings to do it... at one point he buys $5000 worth of stock from a buyer, in 1938, implying that Clark Kent's got some cash stocked away) then runs out to the derelict well the company owns, knocks out the night watchman, and drills for oil himself until the well strikes some. We're then treated to the spectacle of the fraudulent stock swindlers hiring goons to kill Superman (in his cover identity as 'mysterious guy who buys stock in worthless companies that suddenly aren't') because he refuses to sell his shares back to them, followed of course by the inevitable 'Superman lets the goons kill him, then gets up and beats them half to death while smirking' sequence.

We then get Superman demanding a million dollars for his shares: the crooked oil men pay, because the well is worth many millions. Superman promptly changes into his costume, breaks into their homes, kidnaps them, drags them to the well and forces them to watch as he destroys the derrick and throws a gasoline cocktail into it, setting it ablaze. That's right, Superman set an oil well on fire. Perhaps it's even still burning. The best part is, he pockets the million dollars.

It's majestic, in its way. Sure, the evil oil guys had it coming. They even hired assassins, so you really can't feel bad for them. But the magnificent bastardy Superman displays as he methodically dismantles their lives, toys with their thugs, and finally takes all their money while burning down their property is just... I mean, seriously, why can't we have this Superman around when we live in the age of massive govenment bailouts? Then again, do we really want to see Superman hanging Bernie Madoff from a flagpole? I know most people would probably not accept Superman heading into GM and destroying the place over its safety record. Not to mention pretending to be an undead spectre just to screw with a hit and run driver. (I seriously cannot get enough of 'Superman as car safety demon'.)

I get why Superman had to mellow out, and I'm a huge fan of the complicated Weisinger-era mythos of the character. But man, every time I read one of these stories (Superman versus giant yellow rats on Luthor's volcano island! Superman vs pinball machines! Superman vs... Yale, I guess? I'm not sure. Some ivy league college football coach who hires assassins to stab opposing players, I don't know if the sport was just rougher back then) I'm just in awe of how didactic, bombastic and even outright insane (Superman forces a munitions manufacturer to join a foreign military in order to gloat as the guy almost gets killed a few times, then forces the opposing generals into a fist fight, and this somehow fixes everything) these stories get. The Ultra-Humanite first tries to take over Metropolis' cabbies, and when this fails, he unleashes the Bubonic Plague! With no stops in between! He doesn't go from cabbies to, say, ambulance drives, he leaps straight from "I will control all the gypsy cabs in Metropolis" to "I will wipe out 90% of all humans and make a superior race" in one go.

Of course Superman routs him, because if there's one lesson to these stories, it's that scientists can never win against brute force that's very smug.

Uncomfortable Comics Truths 4 - The Kirby Era Edition

2009-10-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, Jack Kirby didn't shit rainbows and lactate wonder. A very good artist, professional, and seemingly a wonderful guy, but come on: he did Dingbats of Danger Street. It's pretty clear that his work on the legendary run on FF was only helped by the presence of Stan Lee to help rein the guys more elaborate fancies in. This isn't to say I don't love the idea of a small planet of vampires and other monsters in Dabney Donovan's basement, much less the idea of Superman fixing everything by playing the film version of Oklahoma at it. But take Darkseid, for example. Since Darkseid is basically a god of pure fascism, it's difficult for most writers to avoid failing to actually use him effectively in a story. The best stories involving Darkseid outside of Kirby's work are ones where Darkseid actually acts, which is rare: the best non Kirby Darkseid story for my money is stil The Great Darkness Saga because (gasp) Darkseid is an active force of evil and menace throughout the story! He does things! He turns an entire planet into a bust of his head just to be a dick! Compare this to "Legends" where Darkseid's evil plan involves daytime talk television. I realize I'm blaming Kirby for what people did with his creations here, but it's not Kirby's fault, it's the fault of the ridiculous fetishization of his work. Still, Darkseid's a less compelling villain than half of the ones ripping him off, because they at least get to go around doing evil things. Darkseid gets to sit around and talk to Desaad.

You do have to give Kirby credit for understanding that the Marquis De Sade was pretty up front about tyranny and how he'd go about it. So many writers just use Desaad as a sniveling henchman and toady, but Kirby always depicted the relationship between the two much more subtly. Desaad is often the only one willing to tell Darkseid off. Admittedly, he usually ends up paying for it. "Once upon the throne of kings" and all that. I wish other writers could grasp that complicated relationship: when Paul Levitz managed to have Darkseid actually miss Desaad, he got the point of what Desaad does for the figure of Darkseid as an evil force. (Then again I hail from a country where people are totally okay with torture so maybe I expect too much.)

Please, though, fuck the Eternals. It's not even that they're a bad idea, it's just that Marvel already has too many cosmic entities patterned after various mythological figures. The Eternals would work perfectly as a stand alone, doesn't interact with the Marvel comics in any way story/setting, but having Ikaris and Thor hang out is just too weird. Thor actually is a god! It's weird! Having the actual Greek gods running around in a setting with cosmic powered immortals who were thought to be the Greek gods is just storytelling hash, you end up with story after story trying to reconcile the two. And frankly, multiple stories (even ONE story) that are just excuses to explain minor points of comic book trivia aren't really compelling. I was surprised that I didn't hate Gaiman's Eternals more. (I honestly don't have any major complaints about it even. I was surprised too. I didn't like it, but it didn't actively enrage me.)

They used to call Marvel "The House of Ideas" but aside from Kirby, Ditko and a few others like Steranko it often seems like the only idea was "Wouldn't it be neat if the skies rained shit down on superheroes?" which, to be fair, was a fairly novel idea at the time. (I'm actually giving Ditko incredibly short shrift here, which is totally unfair of me, but bear along) - stories like Brave New Day bore and disappoint because they borrow heavily from the "Look at all the crap Peter Parker has to go through" without any of the "Lost city full of whacked out freaks" aspects of Marvel's Silver Age. What Marvel needs now is a passel of wildly creative types and a moderately clever guy with a real editorial flair to round them all up and make them produce good stuff without letting their egos out of check so that we don't get a year of Norman Osborne running the world.

Why I am an entire pain in the ass

2009-10-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

Go read this webcomic.

Most people read that, maybe snigger a little at the clever Linux joke or don't get it because like the majority of human beings they could not care less about computer operating systems. Either way, they get that its a joke, laugh or don't, and move on.

I spend six hours saying "But there's no way for your nerves to interact with the USB port in any useful or meaningful way! You'd need more hardware than currently exists, it's not just a software problem, he'd just have to rip the USB port out again later and install whatever adapter will allow chemical based nerve impulses to be read by a USB device" and then we're off to the races and it takes me days to get my brain to slow down and laugh at the joke.

This is entirely the fault of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. You have no idea how many hours of time I obsessed on just how loud Black Bolt actually would have to be to blow up a city by speaking.

Uncomfortable Comics Truths 3

2009-09-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

Walt Simonson is not immune to the lure of a paycheck gig. Evidence: his run on the World of Warcraft comic book. How bad is this comic? Well, ignore for a moment that it's a tie in to a video game. Ignore for a moment that the first issue opens with an amnesiac awakening on the shores of a strange and hostile land. Ignore for the moment that the art team has rotated around so much that the book has no coherent look and characters have gone from emaciated to hyperinflated in the space of an issue. No, no, all you need to know about this comic is that Walter Simonson placed the following dialog in it: "We will feed them a diet of steel!"

Seriously, no one loves Walt more than I do. But this is hire and salary, man. This is Jeremy Irons doing the Dungeons and Dragons movie with that especial flair that says "I want some additions to that Irish Castle I bought." This is "Weezie and I aren't getting any younger and I want to buy a jaccuzi" in four colors. Go ahead and find a couple issues of this book. It's as if Walt took a nap while he was scripting it.

Comic book adaption movies are pretty hit and miss, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is when we start to see comic book adaptions which are clearly transparent money grabs made by studios who think any property is ripe for adaptation. Worse than that, though, are the reverse: movie, tv or novel properties made into comic books with no real purpose or goal other than "We gotta rip a hunk of that pig off as fast as possible." Pretty much every Buffy, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc etc comic is like this, even the ones written by the people involved in the original property: go ahead and read Joss Whedon's Buffy comics for some of the most self indulgent tripe ever published.

There is no good way to transition from the first three paragraphs to this next one, so here goes.

The return of Barry Allen? No one cared. Well, no, no one cared outside of the weird cabal of endless nostalgia addicts running DC Comics. To be fair, Marvel proved they're not immune with Brand New Day, the comic which supplies us all with the hot Spider-Man trying to get laid by random women action that has nothing to do with, say, spinning a web any size or catching thieves just like flies. (Doesn't anyone read comic books for violence anymore, I ask you?)

Comic books where the art looks as if the artist picked up a copy of Entertainment Weekly and decided the cast of, let's say Fringe (just to pick out one show with actors who look constantly surprised) will be playing the Avengers this month are just impossible to read without snickering. "Yeah, I think Pacey was a good choice to play Thor this month!"

Let's not even discuss Greg Land. We all know he photoshops porn stars and wrestlers into costumes, let's just pretend it's not happening.

It's totally happening though. But again, let's pretend it isn't.

The common uncomfortable truth linking everything I said above? All of these comics sell. People buy bad video game tie ins, bad movie tie ins, comics with traced/photoshopped art, self indulgent nostalgia trips and we're only going to see more of all of them to come.

News: Warners realizes it owns DC

2009-09-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

I'm guessing the conversation went something like this...

WARNERS EXECUTIVE 1: Did you see those stories about Disney buying Marvel?

WARNERS EXECUTIVE 2: How could I miss it? It was all over!

WARNERS EXECUTIVE 1: They got a ton of free press out of it and are going to get to control all those characters in the long run.

WARNERS EXECUTIVE 3: We should've bought Marvel, damn it!

WARNERS EXECUTIVE 1: I You said it!

WARNERS EXECUTIVE 2: I wonder if there are any other major comic book companies we could purchase.

INTERN: Uh... you mean besides DC?

WARNERS EXECUTIVE 1: What's that?

INTERN: You guys do realize you already own DC comics, right? Batman? Superman? The only comic book library that's deeper and richer than Marvel's?

WARNERS EXECUTIVES: WE WHAT?

Captain America: Rebirth - You are so fucking boring that you make me sad

2009-09-07T07:37:00.000-07:00

There you go.

Seriously, two issues in, and I'm so fucking bored I'd rather go read something by Chuck Austen. At least by now Chuck would have tried to convince me that Lutherans are out to use a Volton-style robot to convince the Beast he's the reincarnation of John the Baptist or something.

To sum up: Sharon Carter shot Captain America with a gun that didn't kill him but instead put him into some weird form of time stasis that leaves a corpse behind and yet jumps your mind around between points in time. Or he's jumping around in time because Sharon blew up the device the Red Skull was going to use to put his mind in Cap's body once he fished it out of time. Or he's jumping around time so we could have yet another anguished scene of a time traveler who knows the future but can't change it what the fuck they did this exact fucking story back in Death Be Not Proud when Cap went back and had to watch helplessly as he and Bucky tried to stop Zemo and the rocket plane at least that time had size changing robots fuck this.

Meanwhile, the good guys (including cyborg-arm Bucky 2009, who's not dead) stumble around like idiots and are routinely out-thought by Norman Osborn. Frankly, I find the recent attempt at Marvel to build up Norman Osborn laughable. This is a guy who once impaled himself on a 'cross of tin', guys. Him and his 'New Avengers'... you might as well have Kraven the Hunter come back from the dead as the next villain, at least he unambiguously beat Spider-Man, he didn't just steal the dude's baby. You know what I see when I look at Norman Osborn? I see his bad orgasm face in that story where he knocked up Gwen Stacy with super-fast aging twins that looked like Gwen and Peter's kids because that's who they were supposed to be before Marvel editorial decided it would be better if I had to see Norman Osborn have an orgasm instead. And yes, I'll admit it may well have been the most evil orgasm ever committed to paper, but that doesn't make me scared of him as the prime villainous mover of a story.

Two issues in and its so bloody tedious. Something better happen soon, that's all I'm saying.

I'm gonna go reread my Sleeper tpb's now.

Uncomfortable Comics Truths 2

2009-09-04T23:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, comic books objectify women. Look, I'm willing to cede that they also objectify men as being at once hypertrophic and yet sexless, smooth crotched aliens, but come on, women in comic books? Even the women who managed to be portrayed as strong, heroic and independent instead of hostage fodder have boob windows half the time. I'm amazed there's no super hero woman named Rackelin with big red arrows on her costume pointing to her amazingly round, drawn with a compass and a protractor, inhuman breasts. The arrows can come up from her 3 inch waist.

The real issue is not that Batman has a ward in short pants. The issue is that Batman has run through three (four?) of them at this point. Not to mention ancillary hangers on: Batman, the dude who lost his parents in an alley, spends a tremendous amount of time trying to build a new, surrogate family made up of himself, his ridiculously competent zen master commando medic butler, and a legion of angsty teenagers. Wayne Manor is second only to Xavier's School as far as putting teens in costumes at this point.

Last time I said Superman was lazy. Well, here's how that works: this is a dude who has, at points in his career, been shown to move planets around. Even if you ignore that, in a recent comic book he blew up an object the mass of Earth's Moon before it crashed into us. We're talking ridiculous, near godlike power. Which he does nearly jack with, if you think about it. It's not surprising Zod in Superman II thought we were his pets. If anything, it's Superman's hands off policy that allows the people of Earth the illusion of free will, I suppose.

Even ignoring things like friction (yeah yeah frictionless aura) how does the Flash avoid killing everyone and everything around him? Mass increases as you approach C (the speed of light) and it's been shown in at least two comic books that the Flash can approach light speed in order to increase his mass enough to punch out a Kryptonian-class enemy. Does he have the ability to control his mass? Because otherwise every footstep he takes at near light speeds should crack the planet in half as his mass approaches infinity. How does he manage not to cause the atmosphere to follow him around? Seriously, thinking about the Flash for any length of time could actually drive you into a Lovecraftian gibber fit.

Spending more than five seconds worrying about the physics of a comic book character means you're goddamn horribly broken somewhere in your head, by the way. The Flash isn't real. Calm the hell down.

But he should cause shockwaves that would pulverize cities!

He's. NOT. REAL.

Almost all supervillains have really, really stupid plans. Granted, they can't all be as bad as when Chuck Austen had exploding communion wafers cause the Rapture, but even guys like Luthor and Dr. Doom come up with some astonishingly ridiculous plans from time to time. (My favorite Doom plan is the one where he took over the world using neuro-gas, only to expose himself to the gas and forget that he had absolute control over everyone. Seriously, right now, if Doom realized it, he could just tell everyone to obey him and they would. We'll assume that the gas has worn off by now because Doom tends to give people orders all the time and you think he'd get suspicious the second time Spider-Man said "Yes sir!" and left.) Frankly, if all the super heroes were busy that week, it's likely that Darkseid would be foiled by, say, a cat.

Cerebus is a marvel of independent comics publishing. Many of the stories Dave Sim chose to tell were masterful. That being said, a lot of them suck, are insanely overwritten, boring, or even trite, and the guy's thesis on gender relations sounds almost as insane as Oscar Kiss Maerth's theories on human evolution. Most comics fans know this already, but I've had six people now come up to me with a shellshocked look after having discovered Cerebus for the first time and then being exposed to Sim's essays. So in case you haven't read him yet,he's a genius, and he's written an absolutely painful essay.

Seriously, the Flash isn't real, stop worrying about the planet collapsing into his gravity well as he approaches infinite mass.

Yes, I do actually worry about that from time to time. How fast, exactly, does one have to be going before one's mass is greater than the planet Earth?

It's a comic book it's not real!

Can someone explain to me why the Punisher is still being published, by the way? Are comics readers just that hungry for Mack Bolan pastiche?

The First In Our Exciting New Series of Exclusive Pro Insights!

2009-09-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

How To Write Comics Like Geoff Johns
by Geoff Johns, Totally The World's Greatest Comic Book Writer

Sometimes, fans will come up to me at Cons, or reporters will email me, or sometimes I sit down at a table at a fancy restaurant right next to a bunch of people who are already eating dinner and don't have any idea who I am and I'll just start eating right off of their plates, and these people, they'll ask me "What's the secret to writing an exciting Geoff Johns comic book?" or they'll get all angry and yell "Who are you? What do you think you're doing?" and then they tell me to get away from them and leave their shrimp scampi alone and I run away before the manager can throw me out of the Red Lobster. But what's the writing secret behind one of my totally awesome comic books? Wow! What a question!

I guess I never really thought about what makes those fifteen or sixteen scripts I dash off every month so special and appealing - I just put pen to paper and the words flow, LOL! So I called my good friend Greg Rucka for help. "Greg," I said, early this morning around three a.m., "I've been asked what makes my comic books so great, and I don't know what to say!" Greg mumbled something like "Geoff, 52's over, I can't take the blame for any more of your gory newsprint executions."

LOL, "GORY!" What a great word!

"Why don't you call Grant," he said (Grant Morrison scares me, Greg knows that. He's just being a silly-billy).

But anyway, I asked again and Greg started telling me how all stories have to have things in them, to give them "Struck Sure" - whatever that is - things like Plot, Conflict, Motive ... a whole bunch of things! I wrote them down, and then thought real real hard about how my stories must have lots of those things, because they're so popular! So, "with that in mind" (that's a smart thing Grant Morrison sometimes says, in his scary Scotchman accent), here's my list of ways that you can write just like my totally excellent comic book stories!

All stories have to have "conflict," I guess, which is basically a thing that happens when someone has a knife and tries to stab you with the knife and you don't want him to stab you with the knife. The stabbing is like a conflict! Personally, what I think makes for a good conflict is screaming, explosions, or there being a whole lot blood everywhere all the time. If you're writing a big "event" comic, then consider a screaming explosion of blood - that's extra conflicted!
People say that it's really difficult to write human emotions. These people are dumb - there's only seven emotions, and each of them has a color, and you can't feel more than two at a time. Easy-peasy!
An "Antagonist" is a guy who throws a lot of explosions at the hero. A "climax" is when most of the explosions happen, and the "denouement" is the part where someone's head gets punched through.
It's really important to "build tension" in a story. That means you don't just have explosions happen, sometimes the bad guy gets to say something really sarcastic first and THEN the explosion happens.
All characters have to have motives, which is a thing that makes them want to do the things they're doing. For instance, bad guys? They're usually insane, or zombies, and that's their "motive" for being evil. Now you know what a motive is, but you should come up with your own motive, because those two are my motives and I don't want you stealing my ideas.
Movies and plays are usually divided into three acts: The Setup, The Confrontation and The Resolution. I don't know why they don't just make explosions of screaming blood happen all the time instead, because that's what I do and it seems to work out okay. I don't even know what a "resolution" is, but I guess it's probably when the hero vows to never let any explosions happen to his loved ones ever again. (PS When he does that is a really good time to get his wife and kids killed)
Everybody knows the "Big Three" characters, but there are lots of lesser-known characters floating around who have "potential". Potential is a word that means "getting your arms torn off or your heart punched out for no reason". Potential is my favorite thing.

And there you have it - twelve great tips on how to write excellent comics just like me! More than anything, though, I think the most important thing is for a comic book writer to retain his sense of childlike wonder towards the world, to be able to look at it through the eyes of innocent youth - I mean, not TOO young, not like six or seven years old or anything gay like that, but maybe like thirteen. You know, puberty, when everything was really confusing and aggravating but you could get into some of the movies that totally showed tits sometimes or a guy getting stabbed in the chest, and they weren't really any good but they were SHOCKING and provoked a reaction and you confused that with any sense of worth? Either that or also you can just crib from old Mark Waid comics too. Peace out!

-Geoff Johns

News Item: The Mouse Makes a Bid on Stan Lee

2009-08-31T08:13:00.000-07:00

I don't know about anyone else, but I was a bit surprised to learn that Disney very likely will be buying Marvel this morning. Approved by the board of directors of both Disney and Marvel, the transaction comes down to $50 a share, or about $4 Billion.

Robert Iger, CEO of Disney said "This transaction combines Marvel's strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney's creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories"

As part of the deal, Disney will acquire total ownership of Marvel, including "more than 5000 characters." Ike Perlmutter, current CEO of Marvel will oversee Marvel properties under the direction of Disney.

I'm not sure what to think of this. My instinct says it sucks, at the very least from the perspective of market and product homogenization. The deal still has to be approved by the Marvel shareholders, and has to pass some anti-trust barriers, but I think it's safe to assume it's a done deal.

Disney to Acquire Marvel Entertainment [Marketwatch.com]

Uncomfortable Comics Truths 1

2009-08-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

I have no idea if this will actually become a series. Anyway:

Animal Man is basically just Ambush Bug but taking itself much more seriously.

Batman is essentially every bit as impossible as Superman. Yes, that's right: even a billionaire with years to dedicate to training in exotic martial arts and criminology couldn't do all that stuff. Let's be honest: Tony Stark is a far more realistic portrayal of how a billionaire who decided to fight crime would go about it. Drunk off his ass and in a armored suit that kept bullets from hitting him, and with as much ordnance as he can possibly afford. (Thankfully, realism in comic books is completely unimportant.) If you're one of those fans who says things like "Batman is a self-made man" (if you don't count the billions of dollars he inherited, I guess) or "I like Batman because it's possible anyone could be him if they trained hard enough" (no amount of training will allow a normal human being to defeat 20 armed men) then you're kind of missing the point of comic books.

Man-Thing came out before Swamp Thing. Man-Thing's first appearance is cover dated May of 1971, Swamp Thing's in July of that year. That's right: Swamp Thing is in fact a retread of Man-Thing. Don't worry, they're both ripoffs of the Heap anyway.

For a guy who constantly complains about his terrible luck, Spider-Man has nailed some ridiculously attractive women over the years.

Wonder Woman was created to be a bondage fantasy. No matter how you try and dress her up as a symbol of feminine empowerment, she's still a bondage fantasy in a star spangled unitard. Go ahead and read some of her Golden Age appearances, she comes right out and tells people she's going to tie them up and make them submit to her. It's not subtle. Moulton-Marston was a complicated fellow.

Behind the Scenes videos that showcase the creative teams of comics should make sure that they don't showcase people who look like their souls have been replaced by pure evil after a long, painful hollowing out process. (Seriously, rent the new Green Lantern straight to DvD video and watch the Blackest Night preview, you will be convinced that at least two of the people involved are themselves zombies.) Victor Garber is ridiculously well cast as Sinestro, btw. The guys voice just oozes menace.

The Ultimates was never really all that good. At best, it was old Avengers scripts with tits and violence thrown in. At worst, it was written by Jeph Loeb so they ramped the incest up to 11.

Superman's lazy.

No, seriously, he's lazy. Really really lazy.

Frank deCaro's Batman Collection

2009-08-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

PHI 120: Introduction to Humanism and Hellboy

2009-08-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves Hellboy. Well, I guess, some people probably don't, but they're communists. And not the good kind, the bad kind, that invade Connecticut and make everyone wear mittens in the summer.

And, I guess, there are probably people who haven't read Hellboy, like say, Yanomamo warriors, appellate judges or philosophy 120 professors. There's no hope for the first two, but the latter is in luck.

Sara Cole, writing for Popmatters.com, has produced an article that not only covers the origins and essential details of the Hellboy story, but also delves into deconstructing the titular character's motivations, Mignola's attempts to define what constitutes humanity, and adds a little sprinkling of Giambattista Vico to tie together the conclusion. It's the perfect article for someone who's never heard of Hellboy, but wants to have a coffee house conversation about what it means to, you know, really be human, and a demon.

The Boy Who Would Be The Beast of the Ap ocalpyse: Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Mythology, and the Human [Popmatter.com]

Living in the basement, Geoff? Really?

2009-08-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

So, either you read Legion of 3 Worlds or you didn't. I did, because George Perez was drawing a Legion of Super Heroes stories with three Legions of Super Heroes in it. (Is that how we work the plural of Legion? The Romans didn't make that clear for me when dealing with Legions of Super Heroes.) I'm neither a huge fan nor a detractor of Geoff Johns, if only because I keep remembering that there but for the grace of God we could have had Chuck Austen as the hot DC writer instead.

And to be fair, I don't dislike Johns' take on the Legion. Sure, it's yet another retcon, but come on: we've had so many Legion reboots by now that they were running out of cute ways to combine numbers with the word 'reboot'. Johns' approach - every Legion you ever read about is valid because they come from one of many DC fictional universes - is at once Silver Age enough to tickle me (and I'm long on record as having disliked what Crisis on Infinite Earths did to the DC Multiverse) while it does for the Legion what they somehow missed doing back when there were sixty million alternate Supermen, Wonder Women, Green Lanterns and Hawkmen... it gives them the same metafictive weight as their 2oth/21st Century predecessors. I'm okay with Waid's Legion being the Legion of Earth-Prime. I'm okay if not actually excited with the Adult Legion of the Johns' Action Comics run being around and still interacting with Superman. I'm okay with the Connor Kent/Kon-El clone Superboy being back from the dead (although I really don't get the Lex Luthor connection) and Bart Allen, too, why not?

No, my real problem is with Superboy-Prime, the alternate version of Superman from Earth-Prime who first debuted in a DC Comics Presents back as Crisis on Infinite Earths and who went from an earnest young kid with the power of a Superman and no idea how to live up to it (and who was even aware of Superman, since in the DC Universe's fictional metacommentary on itself Earth Prime is supposed to be OUR world, and so OUR comics are what's published there - basically, you and I live on Earth Prime.) to a monstrously egotistical and moronic teen jackass who punches people's heads off while whining that no one likes him.

The reason I hate the kid, though, isn't that he's a strutting, preening jackass who blames everyone but himself for every bad thing that's ever happened to him, though. Shit, if that's all it took to set me off I'd have had a meltdown within five years of my birth. No, what pisses me off is that the kid is effectively a kind of smug, leering in-joke at comics fandom.

I'm the first to admit that I find fans and fandom irritating. I used to post occasionally on Scans_Daily, after all, and I found their attitude of entitlement and sneering contempt for the people actually making the comics they read unbearable and pretentious. Even as I partook in it. Shut up, I know I'm a hypocritical asshole. Anyway, when you get to the end of a comic book it's taken months and months to get out (hey, you hire George Perez and tell him he can draw any member of the Legion who has ever existed, what the hell do you expect to have happen?) and you see the ultimate villain of the story lurking in his parents basement demanding grilled cheese sandwiches while posting menacingly to DC Comics messageboards then the joke, she is dead.

I'm not saying its not apt.

I'm just saying it's not particularly funny or clever. It's too easy. Yes, we get it, Superboy-Prime is what those annoying trolls on message boards would be like if they had Superman's powers. Thanks, Geoff. We needed this in depth exploration of nerdraging. It's compelling storytelling.

It's a shame, too, because I actually like the majority of what Johns is doing with the Legion, and I'm interested to keep reading it. I like that he's embraced competing narratives, different versions of the LSH and found a way for them to all coexist while still writing the stories he wants to write. I liked his idea for the Time Trapper as a sentient, rebellious timeline that constantly changes and reinvents itself in its battle with the Legion, unable to determine which of the many timelines and realities it can see is the one it has to destroy. I even liked the idea of Superboy-Prime's punishment being what he'd always longed for, a return to his home, only to find the people he'd wanted and loved no longer could stand the sight of him.

But the basement scene? Frankly, it's too much like saying "Get it, get it?" after you tell a joke. Yeah, we get it. If you really feel you have to explain the joke this much, man, it's probably not all that funny.

Chip Kidd Shows Part of His Japanese Batman Toys Collection

2009-08-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

"During his presentation at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Chip Kidd shows the various Japanese Batman Toys he came across during his project, Bat Manga."

My terrifyingly long Watchmen review that's completely irrelevantly late

2009-07-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

Before I subject you to this, let me but apologize for having been away from the site for so long only to come out of my hole to post this long, vitriolic, intensely late review of a movie that's long since slid from the movie theatres. Since Leonard and Jon have been posting Watchmen stuff, and Brodie's rocking the Spider-Man posts, I got to feeling guilty. I have been busy (trying to get a new job, pray for me) but that's no excuse.

Anyway, here's my crazy long angry Watchmen piece.

In 1998, Gus Van Sant decided the world needed a remake of Psycho, the by-then world famous movie by Alfred Hitchcock. He assembled a cast (including Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche) and proceeded to make a film so rigidly derivative of its inspiration (which was not, by the way, the novel Psycho by Robert Bloch, the source of the original movie - Van Sant went so far as to bring a DVD of the original film to the set and recreate continuity errors from the first film) that it failed to provide any real energy or tension of any kind. In attempting to slavishly homage the first movie, Van Sant created sterile, lifeless film rather than art.

In watching Zach Snyder's version of Watchmen, several scenes in particular were so thoroughly and blatantly intended to be reconstructions of panels from the various issues of the original limited series that they may well have been simply lifted from the book and displayed on screen in the original Gibbons art. Yet, much as Van Sant failed to provide anything the source he was adapting did not already say and in the process made a film that fell to the floor of the theatre with a wet thud, Snyder's Watchmen crashes through the screen as dead as the dogs it so lovingly hurls through windows, their skulls split open. Worse still, not only does Snyder often fail to take any real time to adapt the original source in any way aside from using it as a storyboard, when he does decide to make changes he almost universally detracts from the story.

Watchmen is a twitching ruin of a film wrapped up in the most colorful tinsel Snyder could find, a movie which not only insults the intelligence of the viewer no matter his or her relationship to the source material - my wife, who has not read the comics nor has any intention of doing so, found the movie so tedious and the violence so pointless and lacking in narrative weight that she
almost fell asleep, kept awake only by a particularly bad job of balancing the sound in the theatre and some scenes that took the gore a touch over her comfort level, while I was grinding my teeth any time Matthew Goode opened his mouth. Seriously, what the hell was he doing? - but manages to be plodding and tedious despite constant hyper-kinetic scenes of violence and sex.

Honestly, part of the reason I hated the movie so much is that it's boring, once you get past the eye candy.

It's not bad in a MST3K sort of way. It's competently shot, most of the actors range from good to
very good (Malin Ackerman seems to be on heavy horse tranquilizers for much of the film and I've already mentioned Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt, a performance made possible by the Snidley Whiplash Foundation) with particular praise being due to Patrick Wilson's performance as Dan Dreiberg.

Billy Crudup's Manhattan was serviceable, although it was somewhat marred for me by his choice to deliver his lines in a voice not entirely dissimilar to that of an ATM machine. Still, the flashback sequence gave him more of a chance to turn in a nuanced performance in a very few lines and he did an excellent job making John Osterman seem like someone real and human in
that time. Matt Frewer turns in a delightful small performance as Moloch, Stephen McHattie does good work as Hollis Mason even if Hollis himself feels completely out of place in the film, a gun on the mantle that never gets fired.

Again, my wife turned to me at one point and said "Whatever happened to that old guy?" and I
had to explain that he was supposed to end up dead. I was even pleasantly surprised by Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in their roles as Rorschach and the Comedian, respectively. There were scenes that, taken out of the context of the greater film, worked very
well. I thought the credits as a means of establishing the world weinhabit in the film was inspired, music choices helped reinforce the period, and the visual effects were often inspired or purely gorgeous.

Unfortunately, a lot of people (including director Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse) spend an awful lot of time and effort desperately constructing a meticulously exploded world detail by detail, only to forget to provide this elaborate construction of almost breathtakingly stylized violence, elaborate grotesqueries, exquisite images and fetishization with anything to say.

Considering that the original source that was so thoroughly dissected and pinned to the screen for us by these people was so fraught with ideas, the effort that must have gone into avoiding them to the degree that Watchmen does as a film is rather staggering. You have to have real talent and work very, very hard to manage to take the original comics, reproduce much of them so faithfully that it's like walking into a gallery of photographs of the pages taken at odd angles and yet prevent all but the most broad strokes of the original story's themes and ideas from coming through.

In a way, it's a triumph, a masterpiece of style beating substance brutally and throwing it out of a window so we can lovingly watch each shard of glass float suspended before plummeting to the ground below.

Paradoxically in a 'adaptation' that fails on many levels to adapt anything, a film where the director and writers seem resistant if not outright horrified at the idea of trying to make the story inhabit the new artistic medium it's being created in, rather taking the original text as a kind of animatic or storyboard, the film also manages to fail when the screenplay or director feels compelled to deviate from the source. The reason Ozymandias' plan had a chance of succeeding in the comic is because, in a world on the brink of nuclear armaggedon, a gigantic squid monster appearing in New York and killing half a million people with a psionic death scream was so alien that it would not immediately cause the calamity it was intended to prevent.

But having Dr. Manhattan appear to have blown up several cities across the world presumes that the hostile nuclear armed powers of the time would wait to launch their missles and not simply let everything fly the second a big explosion took place in a major city. I'm sorry, but
it doesn't make any sense at all. The second Moscow went up, missiles would be headed for the USA, especially when the movie clearly shows us that Moscow is already under attack by Adrian's device before it moves on to New York.

Sure, the explosions are keyed to Dr. Manhattan's energy signature. Why would that keep the Russians from nuking the US? The Russians expect Dr. Manhattan to do things to them. They know he's American. They're afraid of him. The movie spends two hours pointing out that they're willing to go to the brink of war in the face of him. In order for the plan to have worked, New York would have had to have been hit first. So in just this one example of the film deviating from the original story it manages to butcher it and makes itself insipid even if you don't remember the original story at all. You're trying to prevent nuclear apocalypse?

You don't nuke people! The giant squid works precisely because it is absurd, ludicrous, so completely out of the pale that its sheer implausibility forces people to stop before unleashing their own destruction while also providing an enemy that is unfathomable, alien and yet still
possible to defeat (since clearly the body in the New York City aftermath is dead) while Dr. Manhattan as global annihilation is familiar, as nuclear as the other warheads, and provides at once no more threat than the stockpile of warheads we've already had mentioned several times in the film, while also being totally unstoppable.

Why should his act unite the world? They can't do anything about it. There's no 'alien corpse' to give the world a rallying sign, nothing that can be stood up to and fought. There's just a blue god who wipes cities off the face of the earth for the terrible crime of being populated by a species that... was about to wipe those cities off the face of the earth.

Similarly, the film manages to steal the great impact of the final encounter between its protagonists while still striving to reproduce it panel by panel: it's awesome to see Dr. Manhattan punch through the glass roof of Adrian's redoubt, but not only does the story fail to deliver any of the real tension (we never have to consider Adrian as possibly being right thanks to Goode's performance channeling Vincent Price's later years on mescaline) but when Rorschach dies, we get Nite-Owl watching it happen, which changes his complicity in events and makes the romantic movie ending almost obscene. You know, the one where he and Laurie make out in his living room while talking about the omnipotent blue boogeyman keeping the world in line and Laurie delivers Dr. Manhattan's best line (the one that rebuts pretty much everything Adrian has ever done or worked to do) gutting the last chance for the film to make a point like a trout in the process.

Every creative decision made in the last third of this movie to deviate from the source ruins it, while every creative decision to hew blindly to the source in the first two thirds leaves it devoid of any real identity or message. Like I said, it manages an almost impossible feat, you really almost have to admire its sheer craft. It's like watching a team of masons painstakingly craft an outhouse out of Belgian Marble.

I could go on. The scene where Rorschach reveals the reason for his violence and brutality is weakened by elision: removing the scene with the gas can, hacksaw and handcuffs makes a simple, brutal explosion of violence out of what had been a far more complex turning-in, a murder that is also an act of violence by Rorschach against who he had been.

The sex scene between Laurie and Dan managed to be rather faithful to the comic while at the same time totally missing the point (and being quite frankly a lot more like a bad Cinemax film than I was expecting). And Rorschach's narration, which works fine in the comic, actually could have benefited from some pruning in scenes where we have tools like music to help set a mood.

In the end, if I had never seen the comic book, I would have dismissed Watchmen the movie as a
visually interesting, ambitious failure on the level of Ang Lee's failed Hulk movie. But because I know how much better it could have been, I end up totally disgusted with it. It abandons the heart and mind of the original in an attempt to stuff and mount the body after pulling them out.

Sewer Diving: Fear is a Slinking Cat I Find Beneath the Lileks of My Mind

2009-07-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

Those of you familiar with the work of humorist-writer-scold James Lileks will also be familiar with the sensation of thinking that he’s a schmuck even when you agree with him. Such is the case with his recent review of Watchmen.

Lileks is a very good humorist, and a skillful and perceptive archivist of cultural detritus. He is also, unfortunately for those who enjoy his work in those fields, a pedantic and short-sighted right-wing scold, an inveterate foe of the unconventional, and one of the worst cultural critics in the world. He’s wonderful at finding something funny to say about things, and terrible at finding something intelligent to say about them, with a keen grasp of what they are and no grasp whatsoever of what they mean. He also only knows seven things, and the two most important are these: The Sixties Ruined Everything, and Anyone Who Doesn’t Like Conventional American Politics And Culture Is Basically Just A Dad-Hating Punk Who Smokes Dope And Complains About How, Like, Mall Security Guards Are Totally Fascists, Man.

These points are hammered home in spades with Lileks’ Watchmen review; we both disliked the movie, but for distinctly different reasons. Let’s take a look.

The characters. Small point, but I wish the movie had characters I enjoyed. Silk Spectre was awful; Nite Owl was pudgy-dull, with all the gravitas of a hospital administration bureaucrat, and yes I know that’s the point; Dr. Manhattan was interesting, inasmuch as whispering superbeing with cerulean salami hangin’ free is interesting, but you have to admit it’s difficult to identify with a character who has Mars as his personal chill-pad.

It appears not to have occurred to Lileks that Alan Moore made Dr. Manhattan difficult to identify with for a reason, and if it had, he would have complained about it. He goes on to say that the most unpleasant characters are the most interesting ones, a banal observation to anyone who has paid any attention to the development of the novel for the last 150 years or so, but a shock to Lileks, who writes books but does not read them. It will no doubt come as a surprise to him in a decade when he’s nosing through his daughter’s freshman-year coursework and he discovers that Madame Bovary is not especially likable.

I dislike any movie that makes me wonder whether that’s a good Eleanor Clift impersonation.

Lileks, apparently, lives in a world where he is constantly inundated with movies that demand of him a judgment on the quality of their Eleanor Clift impersonations.

The source material. Look. I love graphic novels

Name three.

and this one gets props for upending the Superhero Mythos when it did, but great writing it isn’t, and brilliant insight it lacks.

Sure! It’s only the most highly praised book in the history of the comics medium; but great writing it isn’t. One wonders, if Watchmen lacks it, what graphic novel he thinks contains actual brilliant insight. The Avenging World? Ironwood?

I much preferred “Marvels,” which came along later, and had better art

Well, of course you did.

the illustration in “Watchmen” never bowled me over, and the coloring was often horrible.

There’s a lot of smart comics fans who would agree that Dave Gibbons’ art wasn’t the best fit for Watchmen, but the coloring? Seriously? His enjoyment of what’s widely regarded as the best superhero comic of all time was ruined by the coloring?

From here in 09 I could smell its 80s roots - dated, sorry, tired politics that lack anything other than sullen adolescent angst and dorm-room bong-session insight.

And here we get to the heart of it: Watchmen was an anti-authoritarian book with a rebellious (and arguably leftist) viewpoint, and from Lileks’ neo-Zhdanovite soap bucket, nothing with those qualities can possibly be any good. Never mind its intricate structure, its clever narrative, its savage moral lessons, its masterful dialogue, its thematic daring, its heartrending emotional moments: it is clearly of, by, and for a bunch of snotty dope-smoking pseudo-intellectual teenagers.

Reminded me of the Dark Knight comics: Reagan was President, which somehow explained why the cities were such horrid dystopias. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? Some how?

Just in case you’re missing the subtlety here, Lileks is accusing Frank Miller — one of the most conservative creators in the comics industry, and a guy who unabashedly glorifies the totalitarian vigilante aspect of Batman — of being a leftist tool.

Same here: the reign of Nixon (Jeezum crow, Nixon) ties in with urban decay, filth, moral calumny, and all those incidents of debauched decline Rorschack [sic] decried as he walked the mean streets.

Ha ha, those crazy hippies! Still attacking Nixon, just as if he still had some kind of cultural or political influence on America! This sentence is so ridiculous it’s hard to know where to start: did Lileks somehow miss the part of Nixon’s presidency where the country was plagued with urban decay and moral calumny? Did he think that Rorschach — the book’s most obviously right-wing character — was decrying conservative rule? Did he even pay attention to how things were during Nixon’s term of service, and the reason he was driven from office?

I may be particularly sensitive to this stuff because I get rashes when the ideas and tropes of the Sixties are trotted out as prima facie truths - as though a reference to Vietnam and a snippet of Simon and Garfunkel is like some scriptural quote I’m expected to swallow without question.

Actually, he gets rashes when the ideas of the Sixties are mentioned at all.

One exchange stuck out - by which I mean, it made me roll my eyes so hard I almost tipped the couch over. “What happened to the American Dream?” Owl-guy says to the Comedian, after they’ve dispatched a late-night demonstration demanding more police, instead of masked vigilantes. “It came true!” grins the Comedian, meaning, all the violence and oppression and fear and war.

The Comedian, of course, is presented as an amoral nihilist, but that won’t stop Lileks from vaporing about this throwaway line:

It’s all very deep when you’re in high school and the ‘rents are being total Nazis. At this point, though, no one’s used the term “American Dream” without scare quotes since the second episode of “Laugh-In,” so any piercing insight may ping off the skins of viewers who don’t stamp around the mall glowering at the Phonies.

And there we go again: anyone who questions the rightness of Lileks' grandpa’s conception of the greatness of our country is a huffing, puffing, teenage jerkoff who hates Dad and Santa Claus and sulks around the house spelling America with three Ks. Any criticism whatsoever of the country, its economic system, or even its leadership (when that leadership happens to be Republican) reduces you to this Holden-Caulfield-Meets-Abbie-Hoffman stereotype.

It’s an artifact of the 80s counterculture, an echo of the dyspeptic souls who masked their hatred of humans with high-flown concern for humanity, a bizarre example of reality denial: the war they insisted was an inevitable outcome of the US posture in the 80s never happened, so they remake the era with Nixon at the helm and kill millions to force us to come to our senses so we won’t do the thing . . . that we didn’t do.

Because Reagan did not actually carry out the nuclear war ‘80s liberals nervously feared he would, the criticism of his overaggressive, pointlessly expensive, and often ineffective Cold War gunboat diplomacy is therefore a “bizarre example of reality denial”, and those citizens of this and other countries who feared that America or Russia might annihilate their families in order to make a political point were consumed with a “hatred of humans”. Also, it’s funny that he says liberals have to invent a false reality in which a third-term Nixon brings America to the brink of war in order to fight communism, since in our (real) world, the actual Nixon considered nuking Vietnam, and supervised the illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia which killed tens of thousands of people. Who needs fake Nixon when we’ve got the real thing, eh, Jim?

Its thematic tone-deafness and utter obliviousness to what made the Watchmen comic so good in the first place (hint: nobody, but nobody, thinks it was its politics) make this a perfect example of why Lileks should stick to what he’s good at. Funny he is, but a good critic he isn’t, and any insight he lacks.

Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week - 7: The Scorpion

2009-07-28T05:16:00.001-07:00

Has it really been a week of Spider-Man butt whuppins already? Yes, my friends, I'm afraid we've reached the end.

Today's villain is Mac Gargon, aka The Scorpion, a villain who has always tried to use his mechanical tail to stick a sharp protrusion into Spider-Man's thorax, but a bigger thorn in Spidey's side has always been J. Jonah Jameson.

That's Jameson, the publisher of The Daily Bugle, in the foreground, gleefully looking at a copy of his paper with a picture of Spider-Man getting his butt whupped on the front page. Apparently there's also something that delights JJJ on the back page too, possibly a particularly hilarious installment of "Hi and Lois." Jameson has always hated Spider-Man, various explanations have been offered over the years, but none of them have really ever done the job. I think the simplest explanation is just that Jameson is a jerk and it's just Spider-Man's bad lick that he's gotten the biggest helping of that jerkery.

But while we do have a picture of Spider-Man getting his butt whupped on the paper, as we can see outside of the window, our favorite arachnid came back for a round two and ended the week victorious! Poor J. Jonah Jameson, in a moment he'll hear the tapping, turn around, and realize he's going to need to run a correction in tomorrow's edition. That guy has to print retractions more often than Spider-Man gets his butt whupped. And as you've learned over the past week, that's kind of a lot.

Tomorrow: I don't know. Do whatever you want tomorrow, this is really the last one of these!

Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week - 6: The Green Goblin

2009-07-27T05:19:00.000-07:00

Today's installment of Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week is another cover version of a famous Spider-Man cover, this time going all the way back to the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #39, drawn by John Romita (who I talked about back in the first installment of this series).

Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, is generally considered Spider-Man's #1 bad guy, his arch enemy. I guess killing the hero's first true love will earn you that kind of cred. That's probably why, when Spidey first made it to the big screen, GG got to be the villain. Sadly, in that movie he dropped all the purple parts of his costume. Less fashion daring meant he seemed a lot less daring all together. Shockingly, after three movies and four villians, we have yet to see a shred of purple cloth yet. Here's hoping if Mysterio ever makes it to the movies, he won't be forced to be less fabulous.

For an older guy, Norman keeps up on his work out regime pretty good, doesn't he? Either that or it's the Goblin serum that keeps his glutes so tight.

TOMORROW: In our exciting conclusion, we present a picture of Spider-Man getting his butt whupped AND Spider-Man triumphant, all in one picture! How can his be? Find out when the Scorpion strikes!

Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week - 5: The Vulture

2009-07-26T08:32:00.000-07:00

Spider-Man's butt whuppin' for today comes courtesy of The Vulture, aka Adrian Toomes. The Vulture debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #2 and is, therefore, the first classic Spider-Man villain (issue #1's villain was perennial B-lister The Chameleon).

The vulture's power? His suit slightly increases his strength, and he can fly. That's it. And the great thing about The Vulture? That's plenty. He's always been totally confident about his ability to get away with anything based on these mild and pretty common powers. "No one can stop a man who can FLY!" he would yell, flying away from a crime, unconcerned with the fact that he certainly could not fly faster than bullets.

Another great thing about The Vulture - he's old. Super crime is usually a younger man's game, what with all the running around and punching. Middle aged men in the business usually take more of a criminal mastermind
role than a physical thievery modus. The Vulture, however, is a card carrying member of the AAERP (American Association of Evil Retired Persons) and he's out there scrapping and runnin' with the youngins.

Writers over the years have fretted, repeatedly, that The Vulture's old age make him an unintimidating enemy, replacing him with a younger protege, replacing him with three upstarts. Recently, they've replaced him yet again with a acid-spitting mutant cannibal (and the only interesting scene in that story was when Spidey went to talk to old Adrian in his jail cell about the new guy). The simplicity of Adrian's powers, the unusual aspect of his age, and his general creepiness are the things that make him such a strong and memorable character. I don't know how many times new writers will try to replace him, but I do know they'll always come back to the original.

TOMORROW: Green grinning Goblins come out to terrorize!

Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week - 4: The Lizard

2009-07-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

Curt Conners was a brilliant scientist who had a hard time dealing with the fact that he'd lost an arm (I don't know how. Possibly it was fed to a crocodile by an immortal child). One day, curt noticed that lizards are able to re-grow tails that they lose and figured that maybe if he bonded lizard DNA with his own, he might grow back that missing arm.

Incredibly, Curt had figured right! Unfortunately, he did not also figure out that it would turn him into a crazy human-hating man/lizard monster (and, for some reason, give him the ability to control reptiles).

Here, the lizard has whupped poor Spider-Man good and is trying to find the quickest way to take him back to his lair in the sewer. You just know once he gets out of this Peter isn't going to just throw the costume away, either. He's going to try washing it and washing it and washing it, but it will never be OK to wear it again.

TOMORROW: The wings of the Vulture!

Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week - three: Electro

2009-07-24T05:08:00.000-07:00

BONUS: Click here if you'd like to see the static/non "animated" version of this picture.

Max Dillon was working on power lines (lookin' in the sun for another overload) when he was struck by lightning and given the power to conduct and control electricity). It's a little known fact that the same thing happened to Benjamin Franklin after the kite and key incident. He took to using his electrical powers to punish those who had voted against the turkey as the national bird and to terrorize French prostitutes (or something like that. I'm more up on my comic book villains than American history).

Also in today's picture is Peter Parker's dear old Aunt May. I'm not exactly sure what brought Electro to Aunt May's kitchen in the first place. I think maybe he was casing one of the neighbor's houses and then was drawn there by the inviting aroma of wheatcakes. What are wheatcakes, you ask? They appear to be what you and I and everyone else call "pancakes" (occasionally "griddle cakes" or sporadically "flapjacks"), but what Aunt May calls "wheatcakes." Perhaps they have a higher wheat content. I don't know, Aunt May won't give me the recipe. Anyway, she's dropping them now, so it looks like there won't be wheatcakes for anybody. Thanks a lot, Electro.

When he's not playing supervillain, Electro also has a career in movies, having starred in films such as "The Flamingo Kid," "Rumble Fish" and "There's Something About Mary (Jane Watson)."

TOMORROW: Near the lair of The Lizard!

Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week - 2: Kraven the Hunter

2009-07-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

Today's installment of SMGHBWW is a cover version of the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #293 drawn by Mike Zeck and featuring Spider-Man villain Kraven the Hunter. I've taken the liberty of replacing the empty costume Kraven is holding in the original with an unconscious Spidey because otherwise this wouldn't be a picture of Spider-Man getting his butt whupped so much as a picture of Spider-Man being buried alive (and not actually in the picture).

Originally, Kraven was a big game hunter who had hunted every kind of dangerous animal the world had to offer and came to New York City seeking the challenge of the most dangerous prey of all - Spider-Man! The storyline this picture came from was the classic "Kraven's Last Hunt" in which Kraven has gone a bit (more) insane from his years of being defeated by Spidey and vows to finally kill the web-spinner and then replace him as a better Spider-Man.

KRAVEN'S PLAN
Step one: stop wearing pants.

Step two: When you finally get a net on Spider-Man again - just shoot him for once (with a tranquilizer).

Step three: Bury him (strike that, hire someone to bury him)

Step four: Get naked and eat a ton of Spiders to become the new Spider-Man.

Step five: Find foe Spider-Man needed help to beat (Vermin the Rat Man? Really?). Beat him 'til he cries for mommy.

Step six: Having proved yourself better than Spider-Man, commit suicide.

Oh, that Kraven. Did he know how to have a good time or what?

Tomorrow: Electro! Wheatcakes! Animation (kind of)!

A Free Gift from Us to You: ComicCon Bingo

2009-07-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

Visiting San Diego this week for the world's largest unholy paean to America's most venal and petty forms of entertainment? Well, compete with your fellow gawking tourists in the land of merchandising and mouth-breathing with this handy high-res version of COMIC CON BINGO!

(click for the high-res printable version, and enjoy, nerds!)

Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week - One: Doctor Octopus

2009-07-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

Spider-Man is my favorite superhero. This week, his flagship title, The Amazing Spider-Man, reached its 600th issue, so I've decided to post a week-long series of drawings celebrating Peter Parker's more colorful alter ego.

What's one of the things we love most about Spidey? His perseverance. His tenacity. His drive to keep fighting, no matter how overwhelming the odds. How he takes a liken', but keeps on tickin'.

Another great thing about Spider-Man is his fantastic roster of villains, arguably the best in comics, inarguably one of the best two (lots would probably give Batman's loony louses the top spot). The web-head's colorful criminals are a compelling group of nutjobs who are also pack a visual punch.

So, starting right now and for the next six days (I'm doing two today to catch up to where they've been posted elsewhere already), we'll highlight these two aspects of the Spidey charm by presenting a series of drawings of some of Spider-Man's most fearsome foes handing him his hat.

First up on our parade of pain is the tubby tentacled terror of Doctor Otto Octavious, aka Doctor Octopus, aka Doc Ock! Poor spidey's being pressed to the pavement, the world seeming to crash in around him, Mary Jane in peril, and the doc about to deliver the big finish with a manhole cover.

Doc, like all the villains we'll be highlighting during Spider-Man Gets His Butt Whupped Week, was created in an amazing flurry of creative genius by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko during their inaugural tenure on The Amazing Spider-Man. Never before or since has some a classic collection of rogues debuted in such a short amount of time.

I drew this installment early on, before I realized that all the bad guys were going to be Ditko and Lee creations. Had I realized that, I might've put Betty Brant or Gwen Stacy in Doc's clutches instead of MJ. Mary Jane isn't really a Ditko creation, even though she technically appeared briefly in a couple of Ditko's issues. In those appearances, though, she was kind of like the neighbor in Home Improvment, always a flower in the foreground or something obscuring her face. She didn't dress anything like the mod party gal we came to know later and we never even saw her signature scarlet locks. I guess you could credit Ditko with creating Mary Jane's breasts, which isn't all bad, but the rest of the look goes to Ditko's artistic successor, Jazzy John Romita.

Ditko may have been the great creator, but I think Romita's pencils are the ones that really created the definitive look for Peter Parker and his pals in most people's minds, and while Ditko deserves all the praise he gets, I think we sometimes forget that.

Next up: a cover of a cover and a wild whuppin' courtesy of Kraven the Hunter!

Open Forum: After The Watchmen, What Next?

2009-07-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

You may have seen Grant Morrison's recent interview regarding his upcoming Multiversity series for DC, wherein he promised a sequel of sorts to Watchmen, using the original Charlton characters on which Moore's landmark creations were based. With that and the release of the film on DVD today, I got to thinking about that old saw regarding whether any sequel to Watchmen is even possible - so i pitched the question to our Seebelow contributors; Assuming that it was Alan Moore returning to these characters, what stories do you think are left untold in Watchmen?

Jon • For my part, I am utterly uninterested in seeing anything about the world that follows the culmination of Adrian Veidt's master-plan - particularly given Moore's recent trend towards dense symbolist utopias. I think there are smaller stories that have greater inherent gravitas than a post-telepathic-squid future and some sort of speculative second generation peace built on inherited fear. (I also harbor the suspicion that, were Moore being honest with himself, he'd come to realize that there are only two stories which can come after Watchmen - either Ozymandias takes up the habit of reinforcing his Pax Phobium every few years with new spins on the old telepathic alien, and the public grows lax and restless with the idea of nebulous threats, eventually turning to new/old enemies OR he doesn't do that and everyone goes back to their old ways even sooner. We've alreadfy seen how catastrophic fear of an unseen enemy affects the world, and it doesn't change us as much as the Outer Limits would have us thing ... As I saw in someone's sig file once; 9/11 was our giant telepathic squid, and it didn't change anything).

As for what stories scream out to be completed; I think the general answer would be "The Adventures of the Minutemen," which is a very general request but certainly one that is testament to Moore's ability to breathe life into these characters who moved in an only transitory fashion across the page. Personally, the one Minuteman whose life I'm most curious about is Hooded Justice - it's only alluded to, but certainly definite, that the Comedian killed Hooded Justice, but the circumstances of that meeting and the events leading the guy who might have been an immigrant strongman but you can never tell with Moore sounds fascinating to me.

Likewise, and given Moore's penchant from langorous tales of exotic sexuality, I think the story of the Silhouette begs to be told. I'd love to see him re-approach that character ... if I remember correctly, she never even receives a line of dialogue in the book (ed - Leonard corrected me, she has exactly one great line), but she was immediately fascinating for all her excesses against assorted taboos.

For more modern subjects, in rereading the book this time, I was drawn into The Comedian's breakdown following his discovery of Ozymandias' hidden island, and strongly believe that a story covering that timeframe would be terrific, and would create an even greater depth for the world of the Watchmen.

Leonard • This is a pretty good topic, and one that I’ve unsurprisingly given a lot of thought to. For my part, I share Jon's interest in both Hooded Justice and the Silhouette, but the Minuteman whose untold story hooks me the most is poor ol’ Byron, the Moth-Man. The one time we see him, he’s clearly insane, and Hollis hints that he’s also been shattered by alcoholism, but he’s not just a run-of-the-mill DT-plagued drunk; you have to think that in Moore’s world, there had to be some underlying issue that forced him down the path of drink and madness, and I’d be keen to know what it was.

The events that triggered the passage of the Keane Act are also a perennial candidate for the Greatest Watchmen Story Never Told, as well. It doesn’t seem like it would play out as simply as it did in the comic: Dr. Manhattan aside, and it’s unlikely too many people would openly badmouth him, I can’t see how the extremely limited activities of five non-powered costumed crimefighters would so enrage the public. They’d all be limited in geographical range; even someone as skilled as the Nite Owl/Rorschach team couldn’t cover more than a few miles or thwart a few crimes a night, so it hardly seems possible that they’d be putting the cops out of business. And even if they were particularly brutal and unconstitutional, well, the American public has always been pretty forgiving of that from authority figures, particularly during the real-world Nixon Administration. I suspect there was something more, something bigger behind the passage of the Keane Act.

Finally, just because they’re always more interesting than the heroes, I’d like to get a few stories of the super-villains the Minutemen and their successors faced. We know who Moloch was, but we don’t know what he did, or how he rose to a position of such power as a mere stage magician; and it might be a kick to see Captain Axis, the owner of the giant gorilla mask at Minutemen HQ, and “Dusk Woman” or “Twilight Lady” or whatever her name was in action.

Austin • I was always really interested in how Moloch could foil or escape a real-life wizard like Dr. Manhattan as well, but what really made me go 'uh...' was what was happening behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains in the early days of Dr. Manhattan's time in the Army.

Matt • I've actually been musing about the comic books of the Watchmen universe for quite some time. For some reason I imagine Gold Key doing really well with their TV show adaptions and stuff. But in general I wonder what the fiction and especially the fantastic fiction of that world was/is like. We know there's no Superheroes... did Dr. Manhattan destroy science fiction? Did Heinlein write any of the semi-trippy novels he's famous for? Did Moorcock? Did the first wave of revival interest in Lovecraft take off?

No Vietnam, no Watergate, and a big blue glowing American god: what did they dream about? Read about? Think about?

Ed • I think, of all the material in Watchmen that I'd like to see readdressed, it's the Tales of the Black Freighter. Is the Black Freighter a ghost ship? Does it harvest fallen souls, or create them? Is there any connection between this boat, and Moore's other Black Freighter, the Nautilus? Where did the other members of the crew come from? I keep meaning to reread these portions of the book, and the supplemental material to see what other info I can glean, but I also keep meaning to clean garbage out of my front yard and wash the dishes too.

RJ • I'd like to see a short story about a once-successful Hollywood producer. Maybe a Robert Evans-type, pretty successful in the 1970s, but then had a string of flops and is now closer to Harry Zimm. No one's returning his calls, he can't scrape together funding for a new picture to save his life. He has a shoddy little office above a taqueria a couple of blocks off of West Sunset Boulevard, full of posters and props from his career, all covered in dust. Some afternoon, he's just sitting there at his desk, finishing off a bottle of Clan MacGregor when the phone rings. The person on the other end says she has foreign investors looking to put up large amounts of money for an elaborate horror film to be shot somewhere in the tropics and the failed producer is just the man they think could put the whole thing together and would he be interested? How about for a huge fee upfront and a generous percentage of the gross and foreign distribution? Oh, sure, they'd even throw some funding toward the film he's been wanting to make for years- a personal project- a picture about the sinking of the Maine. Wonderful! A comic book writer is working on a draft of the horror screenplay right now. One catch- the whole thing has to be rather secret, you see, as it involves some new processes and special effects other studios would simply love to get their hands around.

Also- the designers at Veidt's toy division- "We spent eight months on these! 'No enemies anymore'?!? That's bullshit! Jesus christ, we even laid out the fucking catalog. Damnit, I should have taken that gig at Mattel."

Twits: Blackest Night

2009-07-20T11:56:00.001-07:00

File under: We all deserve what we get.

Mostly, I feel sort of bad for Ghostfinder. He appears to be having some sort of meltdown.

Art: Why don't you just shrink the entire world?

2009-07-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

I was looking at a collection of photos from the 2009 Venice Biennale over at the wonderful Big Picture Web log, when number 19 caught my attention.

A visitor looks at a work by US artist Mike Kelley "Kandors full set 2005-2009" on show during the opening of the Punta della Dogana in Venice on June 3, 2009.

"Kandors"? It can't be. I mean, it sort of looks like it, but do they actually mean that Kandor?

Yes. Yes ,they do.

Mike Kelley’s synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk updates earlier holistic Utopias of harmony and universal communication – from the early-20th-century experiments of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin to the multimedia design environments of the 1960s – by introducing another key 20th-century myth of reconciliation and salvation: Superman. The title of the show, ‘Kandors’, references the eponymous city on Superman’s home planet of Krypton that was saved in miniature form under a bell jar by the superhero and transferred to his ‘Fortress of Solitude’ after an evil alien had shrunk Kandor and its inhabitants to the size of a toy. This transportable city-in-a-bottle is emblematic of Superman’s traumatic childhood and symbolic of the double loss he suffered of both his parents and his homeland.

Very interesting, beautiful and surprising to find.

The 2009 Venice Biennale [boston.com/bigpicture]

Mike Kelley [Frieze Magazine]

OG Seebelow: A Scene From the Metropolis Press Club, 1958

2009-06-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

Written after reading the latest Showcase Presents: Superman Family collection.

(Bar at the Metropolis Press Club. Midday, midweek, June, 1958. Reporter 1 sits at a stool. Reporter 2 comes up, sits next to him, signals the bartender.)

REPORTER 2: Martini please, Eddie. Extra dry.

REPORTER 1: Hey, Mike.

REPORTER 2: Hey, Hanretty. (takes drink) Thanks. Could I get a burger, too? Medium-well? Thanks. So, how's tricks over at the Star-Sentinel?

REPORTER 1: Pretty good. How about over at the Planet?

REPORTER 2: Same as usual. Chasing down a story on the "Gloves" Moretti mob. Thought I'd stop in for lunch.

REPORTER 1: Yeah, same. Oh- hey... haven't seen you in a couple of weeks. Looks like I might be getting the foreign correspondent assignment.

REPORTER 2: Say, that's great! Congratulations- hey, Eddie! His next one's on me, okay? So, when do you start?

REPORTER 1: Looking like June. There'll be a couple more meetings, but Lewis says it's pretty much mine.

REPORTER 2: That's just great. Wow- foreign correspondent. That's a hell of a beat.

REPORTER 1: I know, I know.

REPORTER 2: How'd you do with the tests?

REPORTER 1: Tests?

REPORTER 2: Yeah- you know, with everyone pretending not to know you.

REPORTER 1: I'm sorry?

REPORTER 2: Come on- where you come into the office one morning, everyone pretends not to know you, someone else is sitting at your desk... you go home, your apartment's got some other guy in it, your stuff is in storage?

REPORTER 1: I... ah... I just asked Lewis about it, he took it up with the managing editor, who talked it over with the editor in chief...

REPORTER 2: Really? Superman didn't clear out your apartment and hire an actor to live there?

REPORTER 1: Superman? Why would-

REPORTER 2: To give you the cold shoulder bit, really sell it.

REPORTER 1: What?

REPORTER 2: Yeah, we all did it to Jimmy Olsen last week, to see how he'd hold up, if he'd figure it out. It's all so you won't be trapped by (looks around, whispers) spies.

REPORTER 1: ...

REPORTER 2: It was tough, getting the whole staff to play along, but you know, when it's friggin' Superman, you tend to listen, you know?

REPORTER 1: Right. No, uh... they just, uh, looked over my clips.

REPORTER 2: Huh. Well, if that's the way they want to run your paper over there...

REPORTER 1: Uh, yeah.

REPORTER 2: (looks at watch, to bartender) Hey- you know what? I'd better get that burger to go. I've gotta get hustling on that deadline. Tomorrow, we're ceasing publication for a week- the whole paper's staff is playing themselves in a Superman movie out in Hollywood. Anyway, congrats on that foreign correspondent job. See you in a week! (leaves)

REPORTER 1: Yeah, thanks. (to himself) And that's why they have the lowest circulation in town. (to bartender) Another scotch rocks, please.

The Superman Story (A repost)

2009-06-29T16:24:00.000-07:00

Expect this to be a review in parts as I simply kept finding more and more images I wanted to scan and more and more of the frenetic, high Silver Age plot I wanted to either gently chide, openly admire or even more openly mock. I'm still figuring out the new scanner, but I really have wanted to review this paperback my wife found for me in a second hand store for quite some time now.

Entitled "The Superman Story" it's a black and white paperback reprinting of Superman's origin and, at the same time, it's a hilariously convoluted... well, why should I spoil it for you? We won't even get half way through all of the crazy in this one little paperback today.

I love the idea that he knows he can melt steel with his eyes, but it never occurs to him that if he does that with glasses on he'll melt the lenses. I know I would do that.

Yes, the Metropolis World's Fair. You see, while the rest of the world has to share one World's Fair, the city of Metropolis gets a completely separate World's Fair of its own. This is why I love Marty Pasko. Well, this, and the fact that he wrote this story, where we find out that Superman is subconsciously hypnotizing every single person he meets.

Anyway, here we are at the Metropolis World's Fair and its magnificent Superman Pavilion, where throngs of onlookers will pass between Superman's magnificent thighs, directly underneath a twenty foot high super scale replica of his spandex clad genitalia, and enter into a display that contains some of the most magnificent artifacts in Superman's long history of crime fighting.

For instance, Superman is fully willing to donate the only thing in the world that can kill him, freakishly mutate him or permanently steal his powers

Yeah, I personally might have balked at that. Not old Supes, though. As long as they stick the Kryptonite behind leaded glass he is totally okay with what is essentially a glorified carnival having the radioactive rocks that are more or less his only real weakness just displayed for any rube to break the glass and take him out.

The pavilion is ostensibly part of an attempt to donate money to charity, probably because Martin Pasko realized that it wouldn't be very Superman-like to go in for a huge celebration of, well, himself without some more noble motivation than 'wow, a big statue of me, cool!' I don't hold it against him - the fact that a guy who looks just like Colonel Sanders ends up being the dude behind the whole thing, or that Colonel Sanders is really just a puppet for an even more sinister mastermind (I know, you're wondering who could possibly outdo Col. Sanders as the story's villain... well, read on, my friend, although I won't actually be answering that question tonight... I am a tease.) is really more important than whatever flimsy justification we needed to embrace to get us scenes like this.

Yes, that's Jor-El's infamous shooting of his son's dog into space. The best part is, the narrative chooses to show us the death of Krypton via Superman's use of a telepathic memory probe he invented as a teenager by studying a cache of Kryptonian weapons that included devices that could project convicted criminals into another dimension where they were doomed to exist forever as bodiless phantoms. This is so awesome. It's like you or I discovering how to invent an iPod by studying the gas chamber, really. You'll also notice the totally demented subplot of this story, which is that while wandering around the Superman pavilion coming insanely close to revealing his secret identity to a crowd of gawkers and pointing out exactly where in the exhibition hall they can find the only rocks in the world that could kill him dead, Superman is also having his memories stolen and downloaded into a clone of himself being grown and aged to adulthood at an accelerated rate in the basement.

No, seriously. That's what's happening. Did I mention that I love Marty Pasko?

So yeah, there's a Blazing Saddles homage of Smallville in the basement. Everything Superman is remembering upstairs, his clone is being walked through with a fantastic beanie on his head below. And this is just a subplot. Of course, this does beg the question of what things, exactly, Superman is remembering upstairs. And the answer is, the Kent family and their incredible sense of laissez-faire when it comes to parenting. As you can see in the following picture, the Kent family knows that if you coddle your children they'll ultimately grow up to be no good. So it's best to let them get rough and tumble with the livestock as soon as possible.

Some folks might not let their toddlers play with angry cattle. But if Jonathan Kent learned anything from his own father, it was that if you spare the gore, you spoil the child. Also, I know full well that in the back of Jonathan's head, he's secretly chortling at all the stumps he'll be able to pull up without breaking any more axles on his Zetar. Martha, meanwhile, is told by her son that he can see objects through walls and decides, basically, to haltingly restate that very fact in case the kid didn't remember what he just told her two seconds earlier. Then again, these are the folks who, upon finding a baby near the site of an exploded rocket ship, just cover the whole thing up and get away with it, managing to conceal not only the extraterrestrial infant but also his tremendously advanced spacecraft complete with a prototype faster than light engine composed of materials that actually become nigh-indestructable in our solar system. They may seem like simple farm folk but it's clear that the Kents taught Jason Bourne everything he knows about thwarting the US Intelligence community.

Anyway, after making sure that their super-baby meets all the criteria in their checklist, Jonathan makes him wear balloons and flies him around like a kite.

You never believe me, do you? You know, Jor-El gets a lot of grief for basically depopulating Krypton's pet stores in order to fire every monkey and dog he could get his hands on into space, but at least he was trying to save everyone in his world from a violent, explosive death. What the heck is the reasoning behind Jonathan and Martha's decision to raise their adoptive son to wear a leotard and get shot at, and at what point in that process did the balloon harness first crop up? Were they drunk? I don't know if they make moonshine in Kansas but I have to wonder. Soon, however, our young hero to be gets to meet his best friend.

If you think I'm going to snark on a picture that cute, you're wrong. Is that not the cutest thing? Look at his little tail wag! He's so glad that Jor-El strapped him into an untested missile and launched him into the cold, cruel vacuum of space. He's like Laika with a happy ending. Most people don't get why Krypto is such an integral part of the Superman mythology. Jon Morris once made an excellent point that Superboy is the boy who ultimately gets his every wish granted, and it's not until he grows up and matures and stops wanting the selfish things of a childhood heart that this quality fades... the safe arrival of Krypto on Earth to become Superboy's confidant and friend certainly fills that kind of role.

The reason I love Krypto is for scenes like the above. The idea that the ultimate good son and formative hero requires the stabilizing influence of a good dog to romp with, and the unique bond they shared as the only other being who could possibly understand the subtle differences in life as a super being at that time, in that place, just warms all the cockles of my horrible, blistered, black heart. Love for that dog coats each nook and cranny in an emotional Thomas English Muffin of contentment.

Not all was peaches and cream in Superman's trip down memory lane, however. We do get to see that Kryptonians who are shot into space and crash land on alien worlds use every part of the spaceship when they decide to become superheroes. Even the cockpit!

He uses his baby blankets, the seatbelt, the cockpit glass, a sliver of the frame as a needle, and even the seat upholstery to make his boots! Seriously, it's like that ship is a buffalo and he's a stereotype.

I may dig the copy out again and post more of it if folks are interested. Heck, I have scans of all sorts of old Superman stories to make fun of.

Posted at 11:20 PM | Permalink

Sewer Diving: Shaenon K. Garrity is a Very Brave Woman

2009-06-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

Before there was an internet, comic book devotees were able to pretend that they were actually a bunch of smart, tasteful folks who were largely misunderstood. Now, of course, we know that they are awful, stupid, maladjusted cretins who should be shunned, or possibly arrested. But few people have the wherewithal to actually dive into the reeking sewer pipes that are comic book message boards and present the world with concrete proof; that's why we all owe a debt of gratitude to Shaenon K. Garrity.

Last week in her Comixology column, Garrity visited the forums at Comicon.com, the Comics Journal, DC, and Byrne Robotics, among others, doing a fine job of amateur anthropology by unearthing the sexism, racism, mindless contrarianism, and massive dysfunction that can be found there. It's a fine, funny, and very perceptive piece of writing; she not only tallies up important categories like average reading level, typical dismaying thread topics, and frequency of Tom Spurgeon, but also makes some keen observations about how quickly it takes for any mention of race to degenerate into moronic white-people bitching (approximately 2.4 seconds) and how comics fans act when there are no women around (in other words, all the time). She also hones in on how, curiously, none of these folks actually seem to like comics very much; "if there's one thing comic-book fans hate, it's comic-book creators," she notes. Good thing they're all getting their stuff off of BitTorrent, anyway.

[Insert Your Joke Here]: Charting the X-men Nookiescape

2009-06-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

I've often heard the claim that comic books are simply soap operas for teenage boys. This is, of course, ridiculous. Comic books aren't about complex romantic relationships tempered with unrealistic domestic entanglements, foreign espionage and the intricacies of a dynamic hospital staff.

Everyone knows that comic books are really about escapist wish fulfillment for middle aged man children, women with anatomically impossible gifts, and ultra violent psychopaths with dubious qualifications as foster parents. Oh, and complex romantic relationships tempered with unrealistic domestic entanglements and foreign espionage. None of that hospital crap though.

The romance connections between comic book characters is something that every writer treats differently. Some make it a focus of character motivation and growth, and others treat it with a distance and disdain that illustrates how little experience they have with it themselves.

It's never really been questioned that there is a certain amount of romantic entanglement between some characters. What I'd never really realized before is simple how much of it there is. Not until I saw this obsessively detailed chart of the romantic connections between X-man characters.

Two things become immediately clear. First, some people have a lot of spare time. This kind of detailed rendering of social connections, including different rankings for activities from flirtation to dating, to marriage, requires some real dedication to your craft. Your craft presumably being unhealthy voyeurism of comic book characters.

Secondly, Wolverine is a veritable nexus of Getting Some. Guys like Wolverine is why your work place has to have a regulation on fraternization. Apparently the ladies like a fellow who appears to stuff his t-shirts with shag carpet and might accidentally kill them during one of his frequent fevered nightmares.

After giving this chart a couple of look overs, my favorite part has to be the complexity. There are few normal relationships in the X-men. There are so many complications that the chart is difficult to make any sense of. My favorite part is that a special dotted line had to be added to indicate a relationship with someone from an alternate reality, because it happens so frequently.

X-Men Universe Relationship Map [UncannyXmen.net]

Review: Criterion DVD release of Prince Namor's "The Fantastic Four"

2009-06-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Fantastic Four (1962)
Review by RJ White

Criterion Collection (USA) | Region 1, NTSC | 1.85:1 (16:9 enhanced) | English DD 2.0 Mono | English (FHI) Subtitles | Director: (Prince) Namor

For years, this, the first (and only film) directed by Prince Namor, was only viewable via the stray late night television screening or on some nth-generation awful dub from a dealer at a comic-book convention. Now, however, various ownership and legal issues have finally been ironed out and Criterion has been able to put out a very extensive DVD release for a film many have only heard about.

The story's pretty well-known- in the early 1960s, not long after their disfiguring accident and entry into the public eye, the short-lived "science vigilante" group the Fantastic Four (Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards, Susan "Invisible Girl" Storm-Richards, Ben "The Thing" Grimm and Johnny "The Human Torch" Storm) fell upon some financial hardship, due to poor investments. Monarch/industrialist/part-time terrorist Prince Namor of Atlantis (sometimes known as the "sub-mariner") decided to privately fund a film starring the team. Namor even started his own production company to produce the film, but the whole thing turned out to be some sort of elaborate scheme in which he had planned to kill them. Thwarted somehow, he went back into the sea and the film was completed by an uncredited Samuel Fuller.

With this story behind it and such a legend built up, the film has a lot to live up to. Here's the thing, though- it isn't really very good. It's mainly just a bunch of fight scenes, in which each member of the Fantastic Four gets their own set piece. The entire thing is strung together by a thin plot involving some sort of vacation or assignment by the military- it gets a little muddled. Then, out of nowhere, Prince Namor occasionally shows up and it sort of becomes a film about the making of the film. In that way, it's a little revolutionary, I suppose, as this sort of meta commentary on itself, but in that case, they should have just set aside any sort of fictional narrative and made the thing as a documentary. Ah, well, at any rate- it did very well at the time, particularly in the Midwest and South, where the antics of the Fantastic Four had only been seen on television or in magazines and for many years, much of the public in other areas of the country assumed the team was just the creation of some sci-fi B-movie screenwriter. The performances are fair at best, with the exception of the late Mr. Grimm, who could have maybe pursued acting or television as a career, were it not for the whole being-covered-in-orange-rocks thing.

The extras are superlative and provide some surprising insight. Prince Namor, though defeated, still went through with the distribution and, in some cities, promotion of the film (Trivia note: The company Namor established for the production of the film later co-produced some documentaries by the Maysles Brothers). Also, I definitely have to applaud the restraint of the producers in not using documentary footage or photos from Phil Sheldon's Marvels franchise. You can't swing a dead cat while talking about any of these people without hitting some material from that and it's great that the Criterion producers didn't go to that well once again.

To sum up- the print is excellent- the quality of the materials and extras are up to Criterion's usual high standards. It's a shame that the centerpiece- the film itself- isn't of comprable quality, but it serves as a very interesting artifact of a bygone era.

Extras
- 2000 interview with Namor on The Charlie Rose Show
- 1985 interview with Samuel Fuller in which he briefly discusses his role in directing and editing portions of the film
- Newsreel piece on the film's opening at Grauman's Chinese Theater
- Outtakes from Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm's recording sessions for promotional radio spots. (They get a little blue.)
- Theatrical trailer
- Interview with John Pierson on Prince Namor's role as a pioneer of early independent film
- Commentary by pulp magazine publisher Stanley Lee, who, with with advertising legend Jacob Kirby, produced issue 9 of the licensed 1962 "Fantastic Four" children's comic dramatizing the film's production
- Commentary by film historian and critic Leonard Maltin
- Ten-page production booklet, including pages from the 1962 "Fantastic Four" children's comic.

DVD cover design by Kevin Church

It's A Wrong Idea: The Ultimate Universe

2009-06-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'll admit that I never quite understood the purpose of Marvel's Ultimate Universe - outside of the canny and obvious one, that it created the opportunity to expand the franchise of Marvel's top books and characters and pack a few extra must-have books into an already fit-to-bursting comic rack full of Spider-Mans and X-Mens. Beyond that sheerly back-rooms decision, however, the reason for the existence of the thing always exceeded me.

I had been taking one of my periodic breaks from comics when the Ultimate Universe debuted, and was a few years into it before I even noticed it. That it was ex-continuity was clear enough, particularly as modest changes appeared to have been made to the fashions of Wolverine and the Fantastic Four. By the time a streamlined, black-highlighted Captain America, a technological Thor and a heavy industry Iron Man made it into the roster, I became curious enough to begin reading.

I went in with a preconception, one which I thought made for common sense. With the recent runaway success of Marvel's X-Men and Spider-Man movies, and a plethora of other films on the way, I assumed that the Ultimate universe would constitute an accord between the summarized continuities established in the film and the traditional continuity of the regular books. Going in, I expected that the Ultimate universe would bend heavily in favor of the film universes and use them as a jumping off point to introduce characters and situations outside the two-hour purview.

But no, they didn't. Ultimate Spider-Man, in many ways, bears fewer resemblances to the film than (god help me, I hate this shorthand) "616" Spider-Man, and likewise the same for the Fantastic Four and the Hulk. so, no, it was no compromise with the films.

Still, I assumed that the Ultimate Universe would be something of a modern-gen comic writer's dream - a chance to make cohesive the expanded continuity of long-established, iconic books. I went into Ultimate Fantastic Four expecting that here we would see the disparate elements, created in the perpetual rush to fill pages and not waste the distribution slots, united into cohesive whole; Galactus and Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, the Skrulls, the Cosmic Rays and the stolen spaceship and Diablo and Mole Man and all the dozens upon dozens of other character and events of the first fifty issues of the original FF sewn together into a linear, interdependent story.

But, Ultimate FF - like Ultimate Spider-Man, X-Men, Ultimates and so on - was no less episodic than the source material.

And it was there where the one advantage of the Ultimate Universe fell apart: a fresh start on continuity. That it was a writer's playground, and a showcase for artists by way of the "wide screen" mentality of storytelling, was fairly clear. Starting from scratch with just the names intact, the writers could begin telling stories without the readers needing to memorize forty years' worth of previous continuity. It was no longer necessary to know, for instance, that Storm was a New York-born, Africa-raised child thief who ended up in Cairo after briefly being worshipped as a goddess in central Africa, had claustrophobia, is now a queen, and was the de facto leader of an underground clan of mutant savages. She could be re-created from basic ingredients.

However, the problem with fresh starts is that they can't stay fresh forever, and the Ultimate Universe now comes with its own backlog of convoluted history. Jumping into the character's history now, the reader - especially one who already did know the above about the mainstream Storm - has to experience some sort of crash-course in picking up the essentials - a relationship with Beast here, with Wolverine here, born in Cairo, an illegal alien in New York, a tragic secret in her past, former friends and now archenemies with Lady Deathstrike ... it's now no less confusing to recount the Ultimate versus the iconic.

There's also the flaw that all of these fresh starts seemed to represent a chance to slough off the conceits and prejudices of the 1960s, and yet it all ended up almost worse. In the rush to find Ultimate versions of everyone, senseless "Ultimate Vision" and "Ultimate Red Guardian" have shown up, amounting to far less than the sum of the parts of the predeccesors, while attempting to even the playing field between certain female "housewife" superheroes and their male counterparts, all the writers could think to do was make the formerly underappreciated female sidekicks into scientists, just like their heroic hubbies. The watered-down 'me-too'ism of the Ultimate Wasp and Ultimate Invisible Woman is not an improvement over having been an accessory, frankly.

So, ten years into the Ultimate Universe, and all I really know about it is that the writers got to do whatever they wanted, they got to swear more, they're killing the whole thing off under the man who is kryptonite to decent writing, Jeph Loeb, and in the end it all feels like a terrifically long issue of What If where the premise was What If All Superheroes Acted Like Assholes Most Of The Time?

It's a terrible shame, because the Ultimate Universe had the opportunity to be more accessible, more streamlined, more mature, more interrelated and more essential than its mainstream impetus, but instead, in the end, it appears to have been only louder, vulgar, and briefer.

[Insert Your Joke Here]: Darkseid Minus the New Gods

2009-06-17T12:21:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of Garfield Minus Garfield, The Fourth Letter brings us Darkseid Minus The New Gods.

You can leave your mask on

2009-06-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

Attention: fans of both comic books and sadomasochism. Starting today, you can finally own your own pair of official Batcuffs.

Catwoman whip sold separately (I assume).

All sorts of people aren't really dying who never really died before

2009-06-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Look, I apologize in advance: I wrote this thing a while ago and it's huge, and I have no way to make it smaller.

The Superhero Comic Book was born, more or less, in the late 30's with the invention of Superman. (We can argue if Mandrake or The Phantom count as costumed super heroes some other time, okay?) Followed by Batman, the Green Lantern, the Flash, Captain America and a cavalcade of remarkably brightly colored men and women (like the Phantom Lady, who wore a remarkably skimpy costume decades before Ed Benes was a twinkle in Michael Turner's eye... wait, Ed Benes isn't Michael Turner's son? Oh. Well, neither of them was alive back then anyway.)

The superheroes inherited the moral code of their pulp forbears like Doc Savage, the Spider and the Shadow, as seen by Superman standing there grinning while people died to poison gas or Batman using an airplane machine gun to mow down mindless deformed giants. As such death was a relatively common, and relatively final, affair.

Major villains like Hugo Strange, the Ultra Humanite, the Joker or Lex Luthor were an exception, but the way this was dealt with was also befitting the pulps which were comics direct ancestors. Basically, You Never Saw The Body. Island headquarters would explode, mad clowns would fall off of cliffs like Moriarty in greasepaint, vats of chemicals would have strategically placed vents that led to fast moving rivers.

When a writer creates a suitable villain he or she is often loathe to lose such a useful tool, and so You Never Saw The Body. After a suitable amount of time had passed, the villain would return, cackle some about how the hero had thought that those dinosaur robots had killed him but no, and now the time was ripe for revenge, hahhahahahhahhahahhaha. It was all very ritualized.

Some characters, meanwhile, were created entirely so that they could die. Thomas and Martha Wayne were effectively 'born dead', so to speak. They exist only to be dead so that Batman has a better reason than an insane fetish for his actions. The entire populace of Krypton were born to die, (depending on if the writers have bottle cities in their particular version) to get blown up as a lesson in hubris.

Uncle Ben is dead, baby, and Peter Parker is not ever getting over that one because then he'd probably stop running around in a red and blue unitard and we'd have to call the comic "Peter Parker, the Unremarkable Regular Man". Even Howard Mackie didn't go that far and he cloned just about everyone else in the book.

However, neither of these categories includes when main protagonists die in comic books.

This is because at first, that didn't happen. How would it? Superman's not going to die in his own comic book. This constraint bothered some writers so much they came up with the 'Imaginary Story' so that they could have their cake and have Luthor poison it to death with Kryptonite too.

The invention of super hero comics that were considered even less real than the usual monthly adventures of a space alien who looked just like a beefy white dude and could melt things by looking at them and fly, or the nocturnal adventures of a rich orphan and the teenager in hot pants he kept around to distract psychotics helped stave off the authorial lust for blood for a while. But it couldn't last forever.

The first death I really remember in comics is the death of Ferro Lad.

Ferro Lad, a member of the 30th century Legion of Super Heroes, sacrificed his own life to save Earth from an alien creature called a Sun Eater, which yes, ate suns. Ferro Lad's death was a very rare event in comics at the time, the death of a heroic figure, even if he was more famous for dying than he was for anything he did while he was alive.

It's interesting to note that in death Ferro Lad became more famous and respected as a Legionnaire than he ever would have been had he lived. On the other hand he didn't have to call him self "Sir Prize" or have Proty as a pet either. Ferro Lad's death became one of a select few deaths in comic books that seemed relatively inviolate, like that of Captain America's partner Bucky or the X-Man Thunderbird, more or less heroic deaths onscreen (so to speak).

At the same time that this process was underway, we also had the introduction of more 'realism' in comic books. Super heroes could have troubles with money, with women... in short, 'realism' effectively meant 'We're going to make these bastards suffer like a modern day Job'. Marvel Comics pioneered this trend with comic books showing the Fantastic Four going bankrupt, Spider-Man's relentless drumbeat of financial and personal calamity (your aunt is dying because you gave
her a blood transfusion and you have radioactive blood and did we mention that you're trapped under a giant machine?) as just two examples. Writers in the 70's and 80's who wanted to live up to this kind of pressure to make life suck eventually just had to kill somebody.

In 1973 (I was two) Gerry Conway did it. He killed off Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy.

Apparently, he did this because the writers didn't want to see Spider-Man get married, believing this would age the character too far from his roots as a troubled teenage character. This makes sense in the strangely static, status-quo enshrining milieu that is the superhero comic book. While it is true that as the decades pass changes are made to characters (for instance, the modern Batman would not be as quick to shoot people as he was in the 30's, as the character did not yet suffer from his now infamous aversion to firearms) the comics medium in general tends to return to certain core tenets and achieves a sort of equilibrium as a character gains more history. At the time Gerry Conway was writing the death of Miss Stacy, he was one of only a few people to write a Spider-Man comic book following the departure of the character's co-creator Stan Lee. He was, effectively, blazing a trail for how comic books would handle the idea of real, lasting change, and his decision (supported by the editors of the time) was to deal with it by killing Gwen before it could happen.

Ironically, this did indeed prevent one kind of change... Spider-Man would not be a comic book starring a married man for another decade or so... but caused quite another. The semi-innocence of the Silver Age died alongside Gwen, as the men and women who were now taking the reins of storytelling at both Marvel and DC (and who had spent the previous decade reading the comics themselves) became both more insular and more willing to go to extremes to prevent the comics from falling victim to 'change'. Gwen's death was followed hard-upon by that of her killer, Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin, and we wouldn't see him again for another 300 issues of the comic.

Yes, that's right, his death was so final (he impaled himself on his own rocket powered glider in an attempt to kill Spider-Man, and we saw him die right in front of us, not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story) that it lasted almost two decades. That kind of death is almost unheard of in comics nowadays, however.

The result of the constant brinkmanship between those who wanted to change things and the inherent status quo of the medium led to more and more shocking deaths, deaths that happened 'in front of the camera' or more accurately on the very page. While villains could still get away with You Never Saw The Body, the 70's and 80's became a much more uncertain time for the friends, family and even the superheroes themselves.

The ultimate manifestation of this trend was Marv Wolfman's Crisis on Infinite Earths. Not even counting an infinite array of universes which all died before page 1 of the miniseries, we have a heck of a death toll in this comic.

Without even going to pick up the trade, I can list Psimon of the Fearsom Five, Kole, Dove and Aquagirl of the Teen Titans, the Red Bee (hah, the Red Bee died way before this, I just like mentioning the poor guy), The Red Tornado sorta (I'm not sure what Marv intended here), Peacemaker from the Charlton books, someone in a Green Arrow costume (I have no idea who that guy was, as it was the old costume), and of course the Flash (Barry Allen) and Supergirl (Kara Zor-El). Also some of the Global Guardians die in one panel or even off panel because Marv had a lot to cram in here.

Now, I've written at length about Crisis before and I expect I will again (for now, let me just say that never before or since has a comic book looked so good, been such a fun read, and yet totally screwed up an entire publishing company for more than two decades the way Crisis did) but here, the real effect of all these deaths ceases to be shocking or astonishing and just becomes tedious after a while.

Seriously, when the Earth 2 Robin and Huntress, the daughter of the Earth 2 Batman and Catwoman, die along with Kole it's all I can do not to yawn at this point. Whoopee, they died, so what? They didn't even have lives anymore anyway, thanks to Marv's relentless meat cleavering of everything fun and interesting about the DC multiverse concept.

After Crisis, comes the deluge. In this case, the deluge of 'reboots'. Oh, all the colors of the rainbow. And in this age of rebooting (which coincidentally comes around the same time as the one - two hammerblows of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns) we see whole periods tossed out in an attempt at making comprehensible the fevered dreams of a four color medium, and hoo boy do we see death.

I won't say it was all bad... John Ostrander wrote Suicide Squad, and that was a damn fine comic... but in general, the 80's and 90's were the time of blunt force trauma applied to comic books. Spines were broken over knees (the guy who broke Batman's back actually looks like a Mexican Luchador) and Superman actually died, killed by a rip-off of the Hulk.

Green Lantern went evil and killed his own comic book, and then a new Green Lantern came around just in time to give us all the concept of 'fridging' as his girlfriend of two issues is killed and her body jammed into a refrigerator for no other reason than to shock us. It fails, of course, because by this point what's left?

All of this would be bad enough if not for that status quo I mentioned. See, sure, you can break Batman's back and have someone else dress up in the costume in order to make some weird sort of morality play about how bad it would be if someone like Batman killed people while shooting bat shaped ninja stars.

Sure, Superman can die and be replaced by a teenage boy, an alien machine that acts
like Mack Bolan, an eeeeevil cyborg one step away from a swipe of Reed Richards, and an african-american guy drawn by Jon Bogdanove, who had at this time mastered the art of making me stare at the comic book in shock and horror at character designs that seemed more appropriate for Song of the South than a superhero book. But eventually, even if you kill off Aunt May and tell us that Spider-Man is in fact a clone of himself, things have to get back to the status quo, because the status quo is how you explain the comic book to people who haven't bought it yet and want to know what it is about.

Go ahead, try and break the Clone Saga down for a new reader who doesn't know who Spider-Man is. I'll wait. You want some help?

Batman's first Robin, after fifty years, is too old to wear short pants? Fine, we'll let him grow up. He's now in his twenties (yes, a character that debuted in 1940 is now in his twenties, oh my, I'm shocked at the frenetic pace of comics) but we'll get another kid to dress up in the Robin costume. Amazingly, the fans don't like the new kid, especially after the writers decide to make him smoke and possibly kill people and in short, not act at all like Robin? Heck, most people reading the comic don't really get that it's a new kid anyway? Okay, then we'll let the readers vote to see if New Robin dies or not. Whoops! The readers have spoken, time to kill the New Robin. But that leaves us without a Robin!

Okay, so we get another kid to wear the costume. This one, we'll have act like Robin. Problem solved! Batman keeps his Robin.

So of course, Superman doesn't stay dead. We rebooted history, so now Ferro Lad doesn't stay dead because he never died at all. Hal Jordan (The Green Lantern who turned evil, not the one who had his girlfriend jammed into a fridge) dies instead of him, but he not only doesn't stay dead, he actually doesn't stay dead twice. The entire freaking Guardians of the Universe don't stay dead. Heck, that second Robin everyone voted to kill doesn't stay dead! Green Arrow gets his arm cut off, blows up, and is replaced by his own son, and even that doesn't stop him from being raised from the dead by the dead Green Lantern we mentioned before, just before that guy comes back from the dead all the way himself.

And now, twenty plus years later, the Flash who died in Crisis is coming back from the dead, while Supergirl (Kara Zor-El) is alive, even though it's completely incomprehensible as to whether or not she's supposed to be the Supergirl who died or not. Even the Multiverse is back: At this point the only people Crisis on Infinite Earths has managed to kill was the Red Bee, and he didn't even die in it!

When the Martian Manhunter recently died during DC's huge Final Crisis event (which I like to call Rock of Ages II: The Rockening) people outright wondered how long it would take for him to come back from the dead at his own funeral.

When your fictional universe has people betting on how long you stay dead, death has lost its sting. Marvel's no better: not only has Norman "I was impaled in the chest with a rocket" Osborn come back from the dead, he's now in charge of the US Government's superhuman regulation agency. Thor died twice and came back from Ragnarok. Several people who died were in fact Skrulls and are not dead after all, and while Captain America is still dead (although not for long), his sidekick turns out to have NOT died, so we have Bucky alive, a cyborg, a former Russian secret agent, and now Captain America.

Hawkeye died because of the Scarlet Witch, who then brought him back from the dead and had sex with him. Spider-Man's Aunt May died, turned out not to be dead, almost died again and was saved from death by the Marvel version of Satan when Spider-Man's wife Mary Jane Watson sold their marriage to him, because getting married ages Spider-Man too much, but deals with Satan are perfectly okay. I guess he forgot Uncle Ben when he was making deals with Satan, but on a happy accident note the whole deal brought his dead best friend Harry back from the dead too! Coming soon, DC Comics will be publishing a major summer crossover about people not staying dead, in fact.

The best career move a character in comics can make is to die at this point, frankly.

[Insert Your Joke Here]: Superman vs Batman, The Oh, SNAP!Bitch No You Dinnit... Edition

2009-06-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

Batman with the tight inside jab, from Infinite Crisis...

Superman with the long right and a body check, from Action Comics ...
OOF, that one's GOTTA hurt!

Open Forum: The Worst Team-Ups Ever ...

2009-06-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

Jon: GALACTUS VS DARKSEID - THE HUNGER
Or, as I'm fond of calling anything with the big planet-eater in it, "GALACTUS: HUNGER WAS THE CASE THAT THEY GAVE ME."

The pitch for this must have taken less than eight seconds; Just the time needed to place a phone call across town and utter the words "Galactus consumes Apokalips." Kirby nerdgasm aside, the premise is paper-thin and the story brings out the worst in both characters; Galactus' ponderous planet-munching preparations and Darkseid's sleep-inducing soliloquizing. The absence of heroes hurts - I found it tricky to give two Apokaliptian shits about Parademons dying in droves - and the utter non-starter of a plot trickles down to a neverwas ending, and all in all it's as pretty a picture of sound, fury, and a noted absence of significance for which you could ever wish.

Matt: (Three-Way Tie) SUPERMAN/TARZAN - SONS OF THE JUNGLE and the two BATMAN/PUNISHER crossovers
Chuck Dixon and Carlos Meglia take what could have been an interesting story and just butcher it. Meglia can be a good artist but here he let his penchant for freakishly distorted faces and anatomy just go buck wild, and Dixon phones it in with a suboptimal writing performance that makes me sad every time I read it. There's so much potential wasted here. It's set in a weird alternate late 19th/Early 20th Century (there's dirigibles) but Dixon opts for the old and tired "What if Superman's rocket landed in the Jungle and he was adopted by the apes instead of Tarzan, who ends up going home and being unhappy as a British lord" approach. The Tarzan as unfulfilled aristocrat is fine, but Superman as jungle lord was already done in a far superior story where Kal-El grows up to be Mowgli from Kipling's Jungle Book.

This time around Dixon just seems bored with the whole thing. Why not just do a story where 1930's Superman (you know, the one who could jump really far and have cannon fire knock him down) meets an older, wiser Tarzan who has been at the whole adventuring shtick for years? That would have been interesting, This is just bad.

As for the Batman/Punisher stuff, unless it's 1930's Batman (who gleefully murders people) there's only one way this story should ever end. Batman kicks the crap out of the Punisher and takes him to jail, end of the story. It's even worse when we have to read the adventures of Azrael as Batman, who makes the Punisher look SANE. All in all, this is just slop. It's not even fun slop.

Austin: PRESIDENT BARACK H.OBAMA AND SPIDER-MAN
I gotta be honest with you – I haven't read this. I am a great admirer of both Spidey and Cool Barry Smooth, so I'm just awarding this thing "Worst Team Up" on the basis of it's terrible, terrible cover art.

Seriously, that's not a portrait, that's not even a caricature. That's just a drawing of a face that's been colored brown and that doesn't bear any notable resemblance to the ostensible subject. I'm not asking for Vermeer or even Nast here. I just want it to be recognizable. I don't think that's too much to ask.

Leonard Pierce: SUPERBOY & THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES
Oh, sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time. A lot of things seemed like a good idea back then. The idea was this: National Periodical would give their brand-spanking-new super-team, the Legion of Super-Heroes, a boost by getting them involved with Superboy, the teenage iteration of the most popular superhero in existence. It was, at least in theory, a well-conceived team-up; the Legion was a teenaged group that meshed well with the adolescent version of the Man of Steel, and they were suffused with the sort of pulpy sci-fi trappings that were then popular in the main Superman titles. Writers would get to tell new Superboy stories, and the Legion, then just getting off the ground, would receive a boost in popularity. Pages in Adventure Comics would be filled, new fans of both Superboy and the LSH would be created, and lots of x-ray spex and copies of Grit would be sold.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Fans of the “Superman is a Dick” site know that it’s easy to see Supes acting like a horse cock jerk if you take many of his Silver Age stories slightly out of context; people who have actually read Silver Age Superman stories in their entirety know that it’s just as easy to see Supes acting like a horse cock jerk by reading them entirely in context. But for every dick move Kal-El pulled during those years, he got paid back a hundredfold when he first started to hang around with the Legion of Superheroes, because the writers of these stories used the ever-entertaining device of time travel as a platform for Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl to pretty much fuck with Superboy’s head non-stop for no real reason than to be assholes.

Much like actual teenagers, the LSH acted like a bunch of petulant, bratty creeps who pick on people out of pure boredom. Using their futuristic foreknowledge of Superboy’s entire history, they repeatedly travel back in time to mmind-fuck him just because they can. It’s carried off as all-in-good-fun hijinx, but to Superboy - whose entire culture was eradicated soon after he was born and whose relationship to his adopted homeworld was complicated at best - it must have been agonizing. You’d think a bunch of aliens would be more sensitive to that, but no: the Legion just kept showing up to put the zap on poor teenage Clark’s head because there was nothing good on holo-TV. “Hey, Superboy! We’ve denied you Legion membership because you’re a big fuckup who failed all our rigged tests! No, JUST KIDDING, you’re in,” went a typical story. “Hey, Superboy! Guess what! All of Smallville has turned against you and hates you forever! No, JUST KIDDING, we set that all up, everyone loves you, ya big galoot,” went another. “Hey, Superboy! Your adoptive parents are dead and we ate Krypto at a Mongolian barbeque,” was probably the next one, or something like that.

The LSH, in almost every early team-up with Superboy, seemed to delight in nothing more than playing pointlessly cruel pranks on Earth’s greatest hero, and then uncrossing their fingers at the end and having a good laff.

It didn’t end there – they carried this routine over to Kal’s cousin Kara, also known as Supergirl, putting her Kryptonian tit in the wringer for similar cruel laugh. Luckily for her, and for anyone who was getting a little tired of the Legion’s arbitrary, mean frat-boy escapades, Kara figured out a way to stay in the 31st century indefinitely, which led to a downturn in the hazing as the LSH membership began to fear what would happen if she went all Carrie on them. But it still stands as one of the ugliest ‘friendships’ in superhero history, and in light of what they did to him in those early days, Superboy’s incredibly harsh decision to toss Mon-El in the Phantom Zone for a few thousand years gets a lot easier to understand.

Ed: THE "NEW" FANTASTIC FOUR #347-349
For three issues the Fantastic Four were replaced by The Hulk (as Mr. Fixit), Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Spider-Man. Why were they replaced? The short answer is that Walt Simonson had a stroke following a mid day Nyquil binge. The long answer doesn't make any sense, but involves a crash landed Skrull who takes out the FF in less than five pages and tricks the replacements into doing her bidding, looking for an egg. For some reason the Mole Man is also involved.

When you combine an unstoppable giant in a tacky mob suit, the animated spirit of vengeance, an unkillable hairy dwarf with bad table manners and a sticky photojournalist dressed in his pajamas, you rather expect them to take on something of importance. This team combined two of the most powerful heroes in the Marvel Universe with an immortal sociopath wielding fancy cutlery and, well, Spider-Man. Instead of going up against Loki or Kang, they were pitted against the Mole Man and a ship full of Skrulls about as deviant and dangerous as the Keystone Cops. Spider-Man did save the day by using his webs to grab an egg though. Seriously. I wish I'd made that up.

RJ: RICHIE RICH AND CASPER
At one point, Richie Rich was the X-Men of Harvey Comics. At his height, approximately 163 titles a month were dedicated to the "Poor little rich boy." That's a lot of pages to fill. Often, the solution was to fallback to the Hanna-Barbera formula- just pile on the new characters when you run out of story ideas- to keep Ernie Colon busy. Or, slap the red bow-tied oligarch scamp together with an existing character, which is exactly what the company did for forty-five months in the Richie Rich and Casper title.

Sure, there's the Oh-Hey-Casper-Is-Richie-Rich internet chestnut, almost as old as the Batman-and-Robin-Are-Totally-Gay gag, which the series sort of puts down, by having the two very similarly-faced titans in the same story. The catch is, Richie Rich always sees his meetup with Casper as some sort of dream, even when it's in the middle of the day and he's wide awake. EVERY TIME. They'll go off on some adventure and billionaire Richie Rich, no matter the evidence against, always chalks it up to an Ambien episode. Of course, they'll get through the story and even though there will be reams of physical evidence afterward, young master Rich will still insist up and down that the whole episode was nothing more than a figment of his imagination.

One of the odder occurrences of this melding of the worlds of the living and dead involved Richie being trapped in a cave on the vast Rich estate (which spans three or so counties). Casper, through some contrivance ends up in the same cave and is somehow powerless to pull Richie's dainty white shoe out of a crack in the floor. Instead of finding some other way to free the pre-pubescent billionaire, he decides the next best thing is to impersonate him so that no one notices his absence. So, he goes to the Rich mansion, cuts one of Richie's mother's wigs (what?) to approximate his doppelganger's middle-part, steals one of the kid's 100 identical suits and spends the day as a much paler imitation, one to which no one is the wiser. Whether or not this story was meant to be some sort of deeper commentary on the transience of material possessions or Richie Rich as some sort of super-rich cipher, is left up to your interpretation.

At any rate, these monthly team-ups pretty much followed the same formula, starred two almost-identical characters and typically ended up enacting no reaching change on either characters' regular storylines. So, pretty much no different from their more superheroically-oriented counterparts.

News Item: Not all Super Heros have boring lives, just most of them

2009-06-02T15:06:00.001-07:00

Super Heroes have personal lives. It's not something we see a lot of. Mostly because it's really boring. After you've seen Luke Cage battle evil, why would you want to watch him do his taxes? Or heat up a Hungry Man in the microwave?

There's a market for everything though, and some people just won't be satisfied until they see Batman sitting down for a late night coffee, the Hulk walking his dog, Spider-Man peeing against the side of a building. Wait, what? Wonder Woman engaging in her favorite pastime of sexual dominatrix... now hold the phone.

Photographer Ian Pool has used the everyday lives of Super Heroes as the focus of a recent series of photographs. Mixing what appear to be action figures with live sets and models, he's created some, well, some interesting images. Evidently Darth Vader can use the crapper without getting out of that life support suit. Who knew?

Super [Ianpool.com]

Open Forum: Greatest Team-Ups Ever

2009-06-02T10:01:00.000-07:00

Comics have thrived on team-ups, the chance meeting of two dynamic characters to battle menaces too overpowering for either of them individually. The Seebelow* contributors opine upon their favorite crossovers ...

Leonard: DR. DOOM & THE SUB-MARINER
I’ve never been a huge fan of team-ups, which are usually forced and unnatural pairings meant to drive up sales of a less popular hero by sticking him on a hastily conceived mission with a better-known character. I made an exception, though, for Marvel’s 1970s series Super-Villain Team-Up, a surprisingly well-executed book that rather caught my fancy at the time.

SVTU was appealing right from the start, because as everyone knows, villains are always more interesting than heroes. It also benefited from featuring as its central character Dr. Doom, my all-time favorite super-villain and the original big poppa of Marvel mischief-making.

And I’ve always been mildly intrigued by the notion of villain team-ups; it’s hard enough to find friends who share your interest in, say, bowling or model railroads, so how do people like the Hillside Stranglers, who shared a mutual love of torturing prostitutes to death, ever get together? Add to this the fact that some issues were written by the always-entertaining Steve Englehart just before he jumped ship to DC for a while, and you’ve got a pretty entertaining stew going.

It was a stroke of genius to team up Victor Von Doom and Prince Namor. Both were Fantastic Four villains with rich and elaborate histories and special reasons to hate on the FF; Doom (rightly) blamed Reed Richards for tampering with the experiment that cost him his beautiful face, and Namor had a bone on for Sue Storm. Better still, the two of them, like most genuine aristocrats, were rampaging egomaniacs who couldn’t begin to fathom why they couldn’t get what they wanted; Doom was totally unwilling to admit that Reed Richards might be as smart as he was, and Namor could never, er, fathom why Sue would go for a nebbishy braniac like Reed instead of a manly hunk of sea-brawn like himself. The two came together as part of an elaborate scheme against the FF, but almost immediately began plotting against each other for no immediately discernable reason other than that they’re two huge jackasses who would plot against a fire extinguisher if their beds were in flames. Throw in that they soon got involved with the murderous Dr. Lemuel Dorcas, who held the title of Marvel super-villain with the stupidest name until the appearance of Turner D. Century, and it all made for a read that was way more enjoyable than it had any right to be.

Eventually, as all good teams do, it started to fall apart. Namor got traded to the Seattle Mariners and was replaced by the Red Skull, who was just as big a star in the firmament of Marvel villainy as was Dr. Doom, but whose Nazi motives were entirely incomprehensible to Vic. “Fuck this guy,” you could almost hear him say under the metal mask, and he was gone by the 16^th issue, replaced by the Hate-Monger, who, in his secret identity as Adolf Hitler, still holds the title of worst super-villain of the 20^th century. It just wasn’t any fun without the two explosive egos of Doom and Namor to carry the title, and the last few issues were a slog. But boy, was it fun while it lasted.

Ed: SPIDER-MAN VS WOLVERINE #1
Wolverine is constantly being pitted against enemies far more powerful than himself and left to rely on his staggeringly terrible table manners and shiny cutlery to stab his way out of any trouble. Spider-Man is frequently overlooked as an ything except a sticky photojournalist in his pajamas when he is actually one of the smartest scientists on the planet with super human strength, agility and resilience.

Jim Owsley has taken these two characters who are so often mishandled as simple caricatures and wove around them a story that is not only believable and realistic given the circumstances, but features absolutely zero ninjas. I think we can all recognize this as an oddity for the late 80s. The action of the story is little mor e than a backdrop to some pivotal character development for Peter Parker.

Peter doesn't kill people, and Wolverine is a certifiable lunatic with little regard for human life. They meet in East Berlin on the trail of some KGB assassins. At first, each thinks the other is a commie agent, but then Logan gets laid and it all g ets sorted out. They team up to fight some Red Scare baddies. In the end, Logan's lady turns out to be behind everything and for reasons that I'm sure only make sense to a female KGB assassin who just had sex with a cigar smoking Canadian Tribble, she asks Wolverine to kill her. Because he just had sex with her, he agrees.

At this point Spidey arrives, cops an attitude and battles Wolverine for the right to not kill her. It's a great fight, and they eventually discover what we should have known all along, that they're actually a pretty even match. Even the rather typical Peter Parker emo trip at the end of the book is handled well and it becomes a pivotal element in the development of Spider-Man's character.

Also, if you're into that kind of thing, Wolverine murders like two hundred people and uses his nose to solve mysteries.

Jon Morris: DC COMICS PRESENTS #27-29
An unfortunately overlooked classic from what was admittedly a typically poor example of the Bronze Age team-up book (none of which were exactly beauty contestants either). It introduced the villainous Mongul, derided at the time for being nothing more than a Darkseid knockoff, but unsaddled - unlike Darkseid - with the "Ultimate Evil in the Universe" sobriquet. This meant that Mongul had all the menace but none of the inertia of his near-likeness, making him the actual, active threat Darkseid could never be.

So this fast-paced three-parter not only introduces a heavy-hitter bad guy, but also sees Superman fighting against Warworld - a battleship bigger than most suns - pits him in a dirty knockdown/drag-out against The Martian Manhunter, makes hostages of Superman's entire supporting cast, and ends with Superman attempting to pierce the veil of the afterlife itself and throwing soupbones with the Spectre in order to rescue Supergirl from the clutches of death. On top of all that, writer Len Wein actually had Superman tackle a few of the occasional moral dilemmas inspired by his powers and responsibilities. Top notch Bronze Age storytelling, even if it rarely gets its due.

Matt Rossi: SUPERMAN VS MUHAMMAD ALI / BATMAN VS THE INCREDIBLE HULK
Seriously, go read Superman vs Muhammad Ali. Neal Adams art, Denny O'Neil in one of the few stories he ever wrote where Superman gets treated with respect and not that weird "WTF do I do with this guy" manner O'Neil usually managed (Sand Superman? Really?).

Both Superman and Muhammad Ali come off well, you get a rather breezy story involving alien invaders, the former Cassius Clay claims superiority as Earth's defender in the face of an alien invasion fleet because Superman's not even from Earth and in the end, even the evil alien's champion (the aliens are actually called The Scrubb!) is convinced, by Muhammad Ali's and Superman's respective heroism, to turn against his corrupt leaders. Plus Muhammad Ali figures out who Superman really is, putting him in a club that included John F. Kennedy for "real life people allowed to know who Superman is in the comics." This story doesn't take itself too seriously, is a fun read, and has a pretty solid fight sequence between Superman and Muhammad Ali on a red sun planet where Supes does okay but gets whipped, as we would expect.

Batman vs The Incredible Hulk: Batman gets turned into paste. NEXT.

Okay, so that's not how it went. But you have to hand it to Len Wein, Jose Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano: they took a gamma irradiated bat eat and made one hell of a nice green silk purse out of it. The idea of Batman fighting the Hulk in any significant way was so ridiculous in 1981 (this was before Batman became a walking plot device) that the story tackles it right up front: the first confrontation between Batman and ol' Jade Jaws consists of Batman praying he isn't going to get turned to pulp or have his back broken (not for another decade or so, Bats, don't worry) before finally managing to gas the gamma goliath.

The real action in this story, however, involves the Joker working feverishly to cure The Shaper of Worlds, a cosmic level Marvel entity with no real imagination but the power to reshape reality. When the Joker manages to trick Batman into helping him convince the Hulk to provide enough gamma rays to cure the Shaper, we get Joker as king of reality, a surreal series of pages beautifully illustrated by Garcia-Lopez and Giordano and we get to see the Hulk with floppy clown shoes and Batman with a red clown nose. Trust me, the entire book was worth it for that one scene. That, and Batman angrily decking the Joker for letting the Hulk go in alone to face an out of control COSMIC ENTITY WITH THE POWER OF A GOD and then running in to make sure the Hulk doesn't have to die by himself. It's actually a really good read. I left out where Bruce Wayne tries to help cure Bruce Banner. Bruces bonding! All in all, this should have sucked, but Wein and the talented artists pulled one out.

Austin: The Question #17

Denny O'Neill's 1986 reinvention of The Question is still a controversial subject among big fat dweebs like me and, probably, you. Ayn Rand enthusiast and bona fide artistic genius Steve Ditko invented the faceless mystery man, like he invented so many of his characters, as a one dimensional mouthpiece for his Objectivist rantings. Denny O'Neill wanted a mouthpiece for his own beliefs, however, which were sharply at odds with Ditko's. Lucky for him, then, that DC had purchased Ditko's creations from Charlton comics lock stock and barrel, and as a grand old man of the company, O'Neill could pretty much do what he wanted with any of 'em. Or he could have if it wasn't for that meddling hippie Alan Moore, who was writing the Charlton Characters into a magnum opus that would kill most and leave the rest unrecognizable. Since DC wanted to keep all their cash cows healthy, they convinced Moore to tinker just enough to avoid instant confusion and so his version of The Question became Rorschach of the upcoming truly shitty looking blockbuster, Watchmen.

In the Question #17, Vic Sage aka The Question is following a lead to Seattle. Hub City, Vic's home turf is apparently a plane ride sufficiently far from Seattle that he can read a dense, critically acclaimed graphic novel on the way, although not so long that he can actually think about what he's read, as we shall see. Or maybe Vic's just a big dummy, and not really a Zen monk on a personal quest to make sense of the universe after all, because although he recognizes Rorschach as a kindred spirit, he fails to realize that big R is a wrecked-up, doomed, paranoid psychopath and instead decides he "kicks ass." Whenever an object that should be pitied becomes admired, trouble is sure to follow. Sure enough, Vic decides to kick ass instead of follow his usual course of meticulous detective work unsubtly symbolizing his own introspective musings. In brief, The Question bulldozes in on the bad guys, is captured, and in the course of escaping, just about literally runs into Green Arrow, in one of my all time favorite closing Splash Pages. Ollie never looked so butch in that elfy-looking hooded doublet he was wearing back in those days. TO BE CONTINUED!

Consequently in the Question #18, Vic is held captive by a better-known mouthpiece for Denny O'Neill, and another one he didn't create but instead totally rewrote to fit his own uses. Green Arrow is pretty reasonable, altogether. Most of this issue is the two of them talking – The Question wants to be untied but Green Arrow doesn't know him from Adam Strange, and needs to be convinced that he's not just some small time hood. Finally GA is convinced by Q's incredible insights and so relents whereupon they go after the criminals, quoting Sun Tzu the whole way, and yes, Kicking Ass. Although the lesson of the last issue was 'if you blunder in like a bull in a china shop, yours is the ass that's gonna get kicked."

This Team-up is my favorite because it's full of metatextual hooha. Not only do we get the "Flash of Two Worlds" aspect of different versions of the same character colliding, but it brings up all kinds of stupid continuity nerd issues: Watchmen is published by DC in our universe, who publishes it in the DC universe? Is there a DC universe version of THIS comic, since it's published by DC, too? Is there an infinite regression of Alan Moores and Denny O'Neills writing comic books within comic books within comic books? Are we living in a universe written by a Moore or an O'Neill? All that happy horsecrap. Also, as I editorialized earlier, not only is O'Neill paying tribute to Moore's tremendous creation by writing it into his own pet project, he's taking the opportunity to deflate some of the more misguided hype around it. Lord knows how many fanboys I ran into around 88-89 who thought that Rorschach was the bees' knees and didn't see the limits and dangers of his point of view. I may have even fallen victim to some of that myself! Of course most of the blame, or credit maybe, for this goes to Moore himself for making the demented Rorschach such a powerful and appealing character that not even a whole chapter devoted to turning his rancid psyche inside out could fully demystify him – "The Abyss Gazes Also" probably validates his viewpoint as much as condemns it in the view of many readers. (Ask fellow Seebelower Leonard Pierce sometime about how Moore sets up political and personal conflicts in the Watchmen characters sometime – I double dog dare you!) But still, that's only half the story! The second half, where The Question and Green Arrow storm the evildoers' hideout is pretty good, if more conventional, stuff too. O'Neill knows that comics readers want action and plenty of it, and he writes a great sequence that's brilliantly illustrated by Denys Cowan, involving the two of them staking out the lair as they debate the merits of trust vs. suspicion and whether it's possible to recognize inner qualities or only outer. Then they shoot arrows, punch people and race snowmobiles while oversimplifying one of the greatest short philosophical works in history. Who could ask for anything more?

Open Forum: Do Superheroes Drink Revisisted

2009-05-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Frankly, we had a lot of jokes left over on this topic ...

Ed: Wolverine famously enjoys himself a brewski. What isn't generally well know is that Logan's healing factor reacts in a peculiar fashion to the consumption of beer, converting it into Nyquil. It takes a lot of Nyquil not to kill Cyclops as he sleeps.

Jon: I've been giving a lot of thought to Wolverine's drinking habits, particularly his famous predilection towards beer. You'd assume he'd be drinking some particular Canadian brand, but the more I look at the guy, I'm thinking - you know, he's this life-long bachelor with a string of illegitimate children, and everyone in his immediate circle of friends is (to be kind) half his age, if not much younger, or in fact a bunch of thirteen year-old girls. So my thought is that he drinks PBR, and also he's been listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Matt: The Silver Surfer explains to you that in his endless voyages through the ponderous ebon void, studded with the flickering fires of creation itself, he has never found an elixir that can take from him the memory of his beloved Shalla Bal, with who he drank Rose-colored bubblewines from the banks of a crashing river before our world had even risen from its own tumultuous origins. He keeps going on about this for quite some time.

Leonard: Black Widow drinks an incredibly expensive brand of Russian cognac. She lets her dates buy her two or three rounds and then she seems to get really drunk and flirty, and asks them to try it. Five rounds later they're being escorted out of the restaurant by a team of paramedics with an industrial-strength stomach pump, and she orders another snifter (her ninth) and finishes her meal with a tight, knowing little smile on her carmine lips.

The Wasp will only drink alcohol if it meets two of three criteria: (a) frozen, (b), containing passion fruit, and/or (c) ending in "tini" but not starting with "mar".

Booster Gold likes Kahlua and Coke. Meet him just once; you’ll find out within five minutes, when he asks you if you’ve ever tried Kahlua and Coke, like he does everyone. He’s downright evangelical about it. (Batman almost vetoed his JLA membership over the issues.) The sad thing is, he thinks it’s a crazy drink from the far future, and that us poor 21st-century peasants will totally have our minds blown when he introduces us to Kahula and Coke, and the fact that pretty much everyone in America first tried it at 14 while raiding their parents’ liquor cabinet never dims his enthusiasm.

Ghost Rider drinks at least a fifth of 100-proof Jack Daniels every half hour. It just runs out the bottom of his skull and drips all over his leather jacket, but he keeps drinking it just the same. Occasionally the flame from his head will catch it afire, making a lovely blue-orange flame that burns for long minutes, suffused with the smell of scorched cowhide.

Ed: MODOK loves a Cuba Libre.

Matt: The more I think about it the more convinced I am that Superman's a beer drinker. Dude grew up in Kansas.

Jon: I know most folks say that Superman doesn't drink, and sure, why would he (or for that matter, why wouldn't he, just to be a jerk, or to get on YouTube? "Watch me down this crate of Fleischmann's in forty seconds and not yak!"). Still, I like it when Superman has the occasion to go into a bar (in the comics, that is, not in Superman III, for reasons that are self-evident). This is because of what is possibly my favorite movie trope, wherein the good guy goes into a bar, and the bartender asks him "what's your poison," and the guy replies "Milk." And every time, there's some sort of situation which proceeds subsequently thereafter, either the bartender giving the guy a hairy eyeball, or a bunch of other tough guys gather around the milk-drinker and start pushing him around, and then a fight breaks out and, naturally, the milk-drinker just lays fresh tile with anybody giving him shine. And then, you know what happens? You know what happens every time? THEN THE BARTENDER GIVES THE GUY HIS MILK! He had it all the time! Of COURSE the bar stocks milk! Of COURSE the tough guy bar where tough fuckers are throwing soup bones and shivving each other and having at Jodie Foster on the pinball machine twenty-four seven has milk, they need it for the White Russians.

Austin: Luke Cage - Guinness Stout with a shot of Jagermeister dropped in the glass. That's called "Black on Black Crime" and it's Luke's job to eliminate black on black crime! It's also nasty as hell but gets you fucked up fast, which is very important.

Brodie: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles drink PIZZA SHOTS! DUDE! RADICAL!
COWA-AWESOME!

[Insert Your Joke Here]: Rao's Homemade Sauce

2009-05-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

Just like Mom-El used to make!

Now, you- leave your "joke" in the comments.

Open Forum: Do Superheroes Drink?

2009-05-27T10:03:00.001-07:00

We here at Seebelow* drink, and we've all been to conventions, so we know that comic book creators drink, but the real question is: Do SuperHeroes Drink? The question was put to the Seebelow* staff...

Brodie: One time when he was in high school, Peter Parker snuck one of Uncle Ben's beers and drank it alone in his room. When he stumbled to the bathroom later that night, he accidentally knocked over Aunt May's favorite vase. Aunt May assumed the fragile boy had caught a chill, but Peter knew the beer was to blame. Haunted by guilt over the incident for days afterward, Peter vowed to never touch alcohol again. "I can't! I don't dare!"

Matt: Based on rereading Avengers #200 for the post I just made, Superheroes DON'T DRINK ENOUGH.

Jon: As a rider to Matt's sentiment, I think we know that whatever Ms.Marvel drank, it contained enough rohypnol to get a rhinoceros raped.

Brodie: Elongated Man drinks Gingold for the stretching, Southern Comfort for the crippling inferiority complex.

Jon: Nowadays, all the Elongated Man drinks is formaldehyde and rainwater that's seeped through six feet of dirt.

Leonard: Wonder Woman literally never drinks anything but wine. She goes through at least three bottles a day, and once, when Superman asked her if she wanted water with a meal, she said "To go swimming?"

Matt : Tony Stark stares at your joke with cold contempt. He loves each and every variety of alcoholic beverage human beings have invented as if they were his own children. He would probably also stick metal pour spouts into his own children, he is after all insanely drunk.

Leonard: Dr. Strange doesn't drink at all (it would disqualify him from scolding Clea for her once-a-year birthday champagne), but sometimes when he's out with the guys, he claims to be a connoisseur of single-malt Scotch whiskey. Everyone knows he's a poseur, though, because he pronounces their names all wrong. (He says his favorite is "Del Winey".)

Matt: Hal Jordan likes Body Shots. Many an alien belly button has been encrusted with lime and salt after Hal passed through. (Then again, we also know Hal enjoys 13 year old girls, like Wolverine, as long as they use power rings to give themselves adult bodies first).

Jon: Haha, silly, Wolverine is not a 13 year old girl!

Matt: Wolverine most certainly is a 13 year old girl ... on the inside, where it counts.

Ed: In a fit of gluttony, the Blob once drank the entire contents of a 1981 Volkswagen Scirocco's gas tank on a dare.

Jon: Man, so did I.

Ed: Robin found the key to the Wayne Manor wine cellar when he was twelve. Since then he's been steadily and resolutely drinking tens of thousands of dollars of Louis XIII de Rémy Martin cognac. Rémy Martin estimates that Bruce Wayne is responsible for nearly 2% of their global sales, yet strangely, Wayne admits that he has never tried any.

Austin: How the hell does that "Bruce Wayne drinks ginger ale and pretends it's champagne" schtick work anyway? Rather poorly I imagine. Sure, I can buy that he's got a couple-three hoity-toity gentleman's club waiters and bartenders on the payroll that he trusts to keep mum about this kind of thing. But he can't possibly rely on this little clique of bat-mixologists full time when he's gadding about town keeping up the irresponsible billionaire playboy routine. Sooner or later someone is going to pour him some actual fine champagne and he's gonna have to drink it. My theory is that it depends on who's writing, as befits the most famous Mary Sue in fiction.

Grant Morrison's Batman drinks absinthe.

Frank Miller's Batman drinks Mickey's Big Mouths.

Grant Breyfogle's Batman drinks Zima (per Leonard)

Bob Kane's Batman drinks straight rye.

Denny O'Neill's Batman drinks whatever he saw James Bond drink in his last movie.

It doesn't matter, though, because his nanda-parbat drunkenness suprpression training and bat-sober-up pills kick in when they need to.

Brodie: The Thing will drink damn near anything... as long as it's on the rocks!BA-ZING!

Battle for the Hoodie: The Return of Batman Jones!

2009-05-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

Battle for the Cowl concluded yesterday, and unlike American Idol, the title went to exactly who everyone assumed it would. That's not to say there weren't surprises in Battle For the Cowl #3, though. Even more surprising than the miraculous reanimation of Rod Stewart's corpse on Idol were these three panels (realigned for this blog):

Now I've never heard of Batman Jones before, but not being the biggest Batman-fan ever (or Kurt Busiek), I figured there was a strong chance this was a returning character I'd simply not ready about in the past.

Turns out, I was right. Kind of. Read all about the original Batman Jones here.

I have no idea why, but I'm already looking forward to seeing more of this modern incarnation of Batman Jones and 'm not even kidding.

It's A Wrong Idea: Zen Intergalactic Ninja

2009-05-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

The mid 80s was a nutty time for comic books. Alan Moore and Frank Miller had pretty much shut the door on the Bronze age, and the industry was falling all over itself to mistake 'complex characterization' for 'needlessly violent and probably wearing a dark coat.' Sales at the time were primarily generated by the demographic I represented at the time; stupid teenagers with pocket money who thought comic books were a wise investment strategy.* Also, ninjas were at the height of their relevance and popularity. It was a scary time.

In 1987 there were a few ways you could guarantee a book would sell at least the first issue. It could feature ninjas. It could have a title that followed the formula "Age+Affliction+Martial Arts Occupation+Animal." It could be Gritty. Or, it could have some sort of shiny, flashy, cover gimmick. As the combination of martial arts occupations and animals dwindled, ninjas and cover gimmicks became the mainstay. It's should be no surprise that 1987 is when I bought the first issue of Zen Intergalactic Ninja. It slacked off a little on the second rule, but it's generally understood that observing all four was pretty tacky anyway.** Not that Zen escaped being tacky.

The issue was held closed by a metallic blue sticker, it caught the eye from across the room and said "You'll have to ruin my collector's value if you want to read me. Better buy two!" If there was any doubt that this first issue would indeed have some value as a collectors item, a passage at the top of the page clearly states "COLLECTORS EDITION." This is followed by the confusing "Includes Never-Before-Seen Material." Quite frankly, never before seen material is something I rather expect from a first issue.***

The cover art features a naked blue man with questionable anatomy, and no mouth, holding a stick. He's scowling, I think, it's hard to tell with no mouth. Rendered against a solid black background in an air brush style that can loosely be described as "Not Good Enough For A Van" the cover manages to display little to no information about the setting, the story, the character, or why he's wielding a length of carved bathroom plumbing. You just gotta buy the book and break that shiny collectors seal.

Unfortunately, even after you do that, few of your questions will be answered.**** The setting turns out to be some kind of luddite swamp planet that has no signs technology or civilization other than a lady sitting in a glowing bubble. I don't expect alien planets to be festooned with spring break revelers waving their titties from a balcony or a Starbucks pastiche every 200 meters, but I think it's reasonable that any planet featuring a lady in a glowing orb protected by creatures with manufactured weapons have some rudimentary signs of industrial infrastructure. Maybe a sidewalk or something.

The story takes a staggering, but standard, 28 pages to detail a hike through a swamp, a few fight scenes and a negotiation for trade of precious jewelry. This all sounds reasonable until you discover that the fight scenes are generally concluded in 3 panels, and the negotiation consists of little more than a mugging, that again takes no more than three panels. Zen spends more time leaving his insectoid space ship and returning to it than he does anything else. Fortunately, to break the tedium of watching him hike, we're treated to Zen blasting out quality one liners like "Zen's Koan: Where there's bubbles, there's trouble!" This is a line that is so preposterous, on so many levels, that I feel the book should have been subtitled "I hate you."*****

The characterization of Zen is as thin and brittle as injera******, but not nearly as tasty. Reading this book you never really understand where Zen is coming from, or why. We get the vague idea that he does what he does as some sort of mercenary. Which is a pretty ninja thing to do, but not really very zen if you ask me. On the second to last page we're gifted with two whole panels of introspection that deliver most of the character's available motivation. Whatever he does, he's been doing it for three hundred years. Which, if you ask me, is a long time to be wandering swamp planets and beating up silent broads.

Bad story and shallow characters are nothing new for comic books though, not even in 1987. It's a popular fad among comic book writers to explore a popular character by making them unappealing and offensive to a degree that devoted fans of the character are driven to the internet to complain endlessly about just what color Bat-Man's shirt should be.******* Many of these comic books choose to balance the insipid stories with interesting art. Perhaps the beloved character, transformed from a noble crime fighter to a psychotic potty mouthed kidnapper, will stand in dramatic light and yell with gritted teeth and bulging neck veins. Kids love that shit.********

Zen Intergalactic Ninja is bolder than that though. This book doesn't need the crutch of art to foist its confusing dishwater story on the audience. In fact, the art appears to be something of a side issue. A minor element of the artistic statement the creators are attempting to make. So minor, that it may have been left as a task for a child. Or perhaps a well trained elephant with access to art supplies.

The entire book is illustrated with an air brush technique that takes liberty with perspective, anatomy and consistency to a degree that would make Rob Liefeld blush and mutter. Zen's head changes shape from panel to panel. His musculature is rendered in ways that are frightening and surely painful. The masking between elements appears to have been done with a garden spade. Each creature depicted appears to have an individual light source for every muscle and chitinous bulge. It's perhaps no surprise that the element most accurately and carefully rendered in this High School Art Fair style are the breasts of the unconscious antagonist. They are the sort of breasts that defy gravity and reality in the way only a teenager can believe and cosmetic science can produce.*********

I have it on some authority that Zen Intergalactic Ninja has reached a degree of cult status over the years, getting treatment from the likes of Mike Mignola, Sam Keith and Mike Esposito. Quite frankly, this astounds me. It's like drawing a smiley face on a broken brick and hurling it through your neighbor's window. Sure it has a pretty smile, but it still broke the vase that grandma's ashes were in.

Several years after this opus first issue was released, Steven Stern and Dan Cote, who created Zen, sold the property to Archie Comics and changed the focus of Zen from Hardened Space Ninja Mercenary Thief to Environmental Hero With A Message For Kids. From what I can tell, this was the defining moment in the publication history of the book. Remarkably, despite all of the problems, this book has, and in contrast to the general rule that 'anything claiming to be a collectors item is typically no such thing', the first issue of Zen Intergalactic Ninja retains a relatively high resale value. According to Comic Book Price Guide, my issue of Zen Intergalactic Ninja prices above $12.

From what I hear Zen had something of a revival in 2008 and Devil's Due Publishing said it was going to release a new ongoing series. The DDP website is mysteriously bereft of any information about a past, present, or future, Zen comic. Even the Zen Intergalactic Ninja official website makes no mention of it, so I can only presume that at some point last year DDP woke up from a coke fueled Vegas bender and realized they'd made a mistake. With any luck Zen is as dead as every other ninja from the 80s.

Except Sho Kosugi. He's cool.

*Pro tip: it's only an investment if you ever sell it.
**The 80s were a time of excess though.
***First collectors issue! 28 pages of reprinted art and a five page letter column!
****Note: The book will never explain how he keeps his stick attached to his back when he never wears a shirt.
*****I hesitate to call it dialogue, because it's never really clear if Zen is talking out loud.
******That's a tasty thin Ethiopian bread. Look it up.
*******I'm looking at you Frank Miller.
********Still looking at you Frank. Seriously, cut that shit out.
*********The misogynistic tendencies of comic art something that should be touched on in more detail later.

Son of Origins: Buyer's Guide for Comic Fandom Ad, 1975

2009-05-17T22:35:00.000-07:00

From Plop #18, 1975

No Thank You: Comics We Will Never Read, Week of 05/20/2009

2009-05-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

We here at SeeBelow* are devoted readers of all kinds of comics: good, bad, and really quite unbelievably bad. But there isn't enough time for us to read everything, and to be honest, there's a lot of stuff issued each and every week that we wouldn't touch even if we were stuck in a doctor's waiting room for all eternity. So every Friday, we'll check in on Comics We Will Never Read.

“The Greatest American Hero” Mini-Series (Catastrophic/Arcana Studio), $3.50
The incompetent superhero series you mildly tolerated as a child is back, in shabbily drawn comic book form! Special bonus pathos: it’s written by GAH actor William Katt, who has plenty of time on his hands these days.

Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time”: Eye of the World #0 [Previews Exclusive Cover] (Dabel Brothers Productions), $3.99
At last count, Robert Jordan’s turgid “Wheel of Time” series of fantasy novels stands at 827 volumes, to be expanded before completion depending on how well the current installment sells. So why not spend even more money on a comic book adaptation which, given the current pace, will be finished sometime around the year 3014? Special bonus variant cover version so they can charge more money!

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #1 (DC), $2.99

Okay, with Joe Casey at the helm, there is a slight chance this might be readable (though, with Chriss Cross doing the art, there is a much less slight chance it will suck), but seriously, how many fucking Final Crisis spin-offs are there going to be? I mean, is DC fandom really dying to find out what Japan’s “Super Young Team” are doing après-Crisis?

The Boys: Herogasm #1 [Virgin Variant Cover] (Dynamite Entertainment), $2.99

Garth Ennis brings us more superheroes having loveless, abusive sex. There’s not a single appealing word in that title other than “The”.

Let’s Find Pokémon Crystal! Softcover (Viz Media), $11.99

Let’s not and say we did.

The duty of a writer of pastiche is to resemble the original - Thomas and Windsor-Smith vs. Busiek and Nord on Conan

2009-05-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

(Reposted from my now defunct typepad site)
It's hardly a suprise that I enjoy Robert E. Howard's writing, I've said it enough times. As a result, my hesitation to read the recent relaunch of an ongoing Conan series by Dark Horse Comics may or may not be surprising. On the one hand, I enjoy every single Conan story written by Howard himself, but on the other, I can't stand Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp or Robert Jordan's attempts to write him. And I've had mixed feelings about Kurt Busiek as a writer in the past. I've liked parts of Astro City but disliked Marvels, and haven't felt strongly enough about his other work one way or another.

It doesn't help that I've been re-reading the original Roy Thomas stories as Dark Horse has collected those, and frankly despite an ominvoric attempt to take every REH story that's not nailed down and adapt it as a Conan tale (and some stories neither about Conan nor written by Howard - at one point, Thomas adapts C.L. Moore's classic Shambleau which basically takes balls of molten steel the size of small planets... why not adapt Moby Dick? Hell, who knows, maybe he did, I haven't read past volume 6 of the reprints yet) Thomas does a really good job of making a Conan who resembles the original, a lot better than most fans of Howard would be prepared to admit, I think.

This is in part due to a general hostility towards the 'non-canonical' interference of later authors interpolating their own versions of Conan, generally less intelligent, less interesting Conans to be sure, and to be fair Thomas' Conan is less intelligent and capable than Howard's is. But Thomas isn't writing straight pastiche here, he's adapting the character and his milleu to the comic book form, and paradoxically to bring Conan to four color life it's actually necessary to present him as, well, less superheroic. This is most easily seen in the development of the series from the first few issues, which are drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith in a rather typical Kirbian four color style and which feature time travelling wizards, pictures of moon landings, and apes straight out of the silver age. Frankly, they don't work. It's only when Thomas and Windsor-Smith focus on Conan's exploits as a young, untried thief and adventurer new to the southern lands of the Hyborian Age that the series begins to find itself, and frankly in order for that change to work Conan cannot seem as indomitable and omnicapable as he often does in Howard's work.

Yeah, I can't believe I just argued that for Conan to work in the comics he has to be toned down, but it's true, at least for the first issues of Thomas' run. Howard's character is admirable because, in his first appearance, he's already an experienced man, a former reaver, a King, learned in both lore and the hard language of violence, still capable and willing to draw steel but not the fur-clad near savage he once was, and because Howard chose a non-linear way to produce new Conan stories we always met him at some different point in his career, always informed of his ultimate destiny but able to see him through new eyes... a young savage in Zamora climbing an elephant tower, a reaver along the southern coast called Amra the Lion, a frontiersman on the Aquilonian border to Pictland. Thomas' series, on the other hand, was progressing in a linear fashion from younger to older, and as a result Conan needs room to change and grow in a way that he didn't in Howard's stories. For the most part, it works. It helps that, despite the general sneering of the Howard fan at the comics, Windsor-Smith's portrayal of the man helps capture the 'panther-like ferocity' so oft remarked by his original chronicler.

To see Barry Windsor-Smith's work on Conan in Volumes 1 through 4 of the collections is to see an artist continually improve in almost surprising leaps and bounds. The artist who draws the first few stories would seem a pale imitation of the man who painstakingly illustrated Red Nails if not for the fact that we know it's the same man, and while Smith has never been a bad artist, it's telling to say that if Gil Kane had done two issues of the book at the early stages of the run, Smith might well have never come back to it. But by the end of his run, he could leave the book in Kane's hands and then decide to return, and in fact was even a better choice for interior artist on the title. Considering how much I love Gil Kane as an artist, that's saying a BIG something, but it's still true. As good an artist as Kane was, by that time Smith was even better. He perfectly suited the character and subject matter.

Having said that Thomas did a better Conan pastiche than some of the most famous authors ever to touch the character, and having said that Smith did wonderful, character defining art for the book, how then do I rate Busiek and Nord, the writer and artist who launched the modern series?

They do themselves proud. In fact, I was very surprised to find that, while I still prefer Thomas and Smith, I really enjoyed Busiek's take on the character. Unlike some of his superhero work, which can be somewhat drenched in maple for my taste, Busiek writes a sparse, lean script on the six plus issues of the book collected in the Dark Horse paperback entitled The Frost Giant's Daughter and other stories. Unlike Thomas, who often chose to adapt REH stories about other characters into Conan stories, or non-REH Conan stories, or even non-REH, non-Conan stories if he liked them enough, Busiek appears to be taking the established Howard stories and using them as a frame to give himself room to write all new tales of the Cimmerian. It allows him to stamp the stories as his own from the start without being nearly so beholden on the interpolations of writers like Carter and De Camp, although it's clear that like them he keeps the essay A Probable Outline of Conan's Career by Clark and Schuyler somewhere in mind, in terms of the chronology of Conan's career. I found myself impressed by Busiek's ability to present Conan as smart, young, eager, brave, and vicious in turn in his stories, while still retaining just enough youthful naivete to believe the legends of lost Hyperborea. Nord, for his part, usually does a rather remarkable job portraying the moody and violent land of the northern Hyborian wastes, and might well be at his best in the issues set in Hyperborea itself, where Conan confronts the horrible cost of the magical paradise he's come so far to discover. Nord's art isn't perfect - at times he renders the future King of Aquilonian with a simpering, slack-jawed grin simply not suitable for a man who would rather let a poet stab him than destroy an artist, but such missteps are rare.

Luckily, in the volumes I have assembled I can compare and contrast the two creative teams by looking at one story they both adapted: Howard's The Frost Giant's Daughter. Nord and Busiek choose to open with scenes of headless bodies laying dead in the snow as seen from above, while Thomas and Smith give us a vast panorama of the dead against the white with two small figures in the center of the dead, two last warriors coming to blows alone amidst the corpses. Nord chooses vivid, jagged motion and grotesqueries to set the piece in a distinctive style, while for Smith there is instead a clean, stark spareness to the lines as Conan slays the last member of Hymdul's band and later chases the daughter of Ymir across the snowy wastes, intent on catching her for his own lusts. I can't say which approach is better. I prefer Windsor-Smith's rendition of the daughter of Ymir and the frost giants, but Nord's dynamism is visually appealing and suits the story well.

In the end, an old man prefers that which he came to know first, but I can't say I dislike Busiek and Nord's work on Conan so far. It's some of the best work Busiek's ever done.

McFarlane wants to do another Spawn movie, which proves once and for all that I did something very evil in a past life

2009-05-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

I mean, what else is there to say about it? Who was clamoring for a new Spawn film? Whoever you are, I hate you more than every language ever created by human beings can possibly convey. It would take me twenty years just to invent the grammatical structure of a new language entirely dedicated to talking about how bad Spawn is for me to explicate how very much I hate this idea.

In other words, I don't like Spawn very much and I don't want a new Spawn movie. Just let it die already!

Game Theory: Who Is Superboy?

2009-05-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine was asking me, the other day, about the Superman Family, and the plethora of Super-Boys and Super-Girls, and if there was ever a Super-Woman (There have been a few, and none of them have been any good really), and mostly he was trying to get me to help him wrap his head around Super-Dog.

"Was there really a super-dog?"
"Yep, Krypto, he was Superman's pet dog from Krypton."
"What the -? Really? Did he have super powers?"
"Sure, he was super strong, he could fly, he had heat vision..."
"Was the heat vision in black and white?"

What I ended up telling him was that you don't really have to get your head around Krypto, you need to get your head around Superboy. And what you need to know about Superboy is that his real super-power isn't that he can fly, or is super-strong, or is invulnerable, but rather that he is the boy who gets everything he ever wished for.

Superboy is a kid who loses his home and his kind, loving parents, and then immediately acquires another home and another set of kind, loving parents. Some time later, he's bemoaning that he hasn't got any sort of super-playmate with whom he can romp among the asteroid belt nor fly around the sun, and lo and behold, that very same issue, along comes his own personal pet dog from Krypton, complete with super-powers and ready to play!

He worries that his parents are so very old, and so that they can continue to care for him, they become young! He mopes that he hates lying to his friends and wishes he didn't have to hide his secret from them, and then voila, in the same story his trustworthy pal Pete Ross happens upon Clark changing into Superboy during a particularly violent storm, and becomes his secret confidante! He grumbles that he has no other super-powered teenage friends to share his burdens, and taa-daa, super-powered teenagers from the 30th century appear as if by magic!

(One of the things which used to bug me about the old Superboy series - and which did on Smallville as well - was how the younger versions of the Superman cast all made their way through Smallville eventually, meeting Clark Kent or Superboy along the way. Teenaged Lois Lane, reporter Perry White, Aqua-BOY, young Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen, they all traipsed through Smallville at least once and made Superboy's acquaintance, long before they gathered together as adults. Now, I see that as more of Superboy's wish fulfillment, that the people he meets whom he likes are wished back into his life as he grows older).

The wishing power only works, though, when Superman is a boy, and the wishes are selfish. When it's time to become a man, when he adopts responsibilities rather than chooses to be cared for, then it doesn't work - which is one of the sadder things about Superman, and one of the reasons I like the folk components so much.

His adopted parents finally do die, at the same time that Superboy is leaving Smallville and becoming Superman. He cannot save them because he no longer wants them to live to take care of him, but to live because he loves them, and to live for themselves. For the same reasons, he can never free his friend Mon-El from the Phantom Zone, nor enlarge Kandor (I know he eventually did, but he shouldn't have had), nor marry Lois Lane (or Lori Lemaris, or Sally Selwyn, or so on), and really should never be able to have children, because these are all wishes for the safety and happiness of others, and that he has to fight for, and ultimately fight for them only to fail.

So, you know, that's kind of neat.

[The image for this entry comes from the terrific blog, The Magic Robot]

It's a Wrong Idea: Eminem/Punisher

2009-05-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

Ever since his historical crossover with 1950s remnant Archie, The Punisher has been looking for another weedy white guy who is overly jingoistic about his hometown and cruel to women to team up with. He’s finally picked one, and now over on Marvel.com, you can read the story of Eminem and the Punisher: Kill You.

Or you can just skip it since I read it for you.

Written by Fred Van Lente with art by Salvador Larroca, the story starts out with Frank Castle arriving after an Eminem Concert and murdering all of Slim Shady’s security gaurds. Why? We find out it’s because he’s there to save Eminem from being killed by hired hitman Barracuda. Of course, he could’ve simply warned them, helped them protect the rapper, or even probably stayed at home and let them do their jobs themselves, but instead he murders innocent men, which results in Barracuda actually kidnapping both Eminem and the Punisher.

It’s pretty much all that stupid.

****in' ****, indeed, Marshall. ***in' ****, indeed.

Once kidnapped, Barracuda for reasons that are briefly but completely unsuccessfully explained, does not kill Eminem nor the Punisher, but instead takes the on a boat ride from Detroit a few hours out into Lake Eerie (I guess) and plans to kill them by throwing them into the water instead.

Now we’re dealing with a story about two ostensibly heroic or at least likable* white dudes teaming up against the stereotype of the scary giant black man who says things like “I be freezin’ off my favorite parts” and, honest to God, at one point gives us an “Aw HELL no!”

Eventually Eminem borrows a chainsaw from an ice-fishing Gene Hackman (conveniently, the elderly angler is a BIG fan of the misogynist rapper) and gruesomely hacks up Barracuda while the Punisher does juuuuuust barely more than nothing.

Thanks, Gene. And I loved you in "The French Connection."

If this comic was supposed to make me more inclined to buy Eminem’s new album or Punisher comics, it fails pretty miserably on both counts. Also, it fails to make a single "Punish Yourself" joke in the whole comic. See, I'm barely familiar with Eminem's oeuvre and I was still able to quickly out-clever this whole self-satisfied "aren't we badass" affair.

For a much more enjoyable Eminem/Superhero comic connection, just watch the video for “Without Me” again. It takes itself a lot less seriously.

* There's really no indication that these guys are meant to be likable, but I have to assume that was the intent.

It's A Wrong Idea: Identity Crisis

2009-05-12T08:02:00.000-07:00

Deep breath, Matt. Take a deep breath.

The problem I had with Brad Meltzer's Identity Crisis when it first came out was the same problem I'd have later with Marvel's Civil War storyline. Well, one problem I had with both of them, anyway. Each has so many problems, really. It's somewhat like running to the bridge of a listing ship and finding out that not only has it hit an iceberg, but that command of the vessel has been assumed by the world's foremost naval disaster fetishist. He's masturbating furiously at the wheel while the boat sinks into the icy waters of the Atlantic.

In short, the thing's a disaster and instead of knowing that, the person in charge is thrilled with each and every second of it.

The basic plot structure of IC is a murder mystery, which is probably why Meltzer was hired to write it in the first place. Sue Dibny, wife of the Elongated Man (Ralph Dibny, a loveable Plastic Man derivative with an interest in detective work) is murdered and her corpse incinerated. Then suspicion falls on Doctor Light, a 70's era villain who modern audiences know less from his appearances in Justice League and more for getting whupped by the Teen Titans a lot in the company of guys named Psimon and Mammoth.

We soon discover that Sue was in fact assaulted and raped one day while alone on the Justice League satellite by Doctor Light, who was then discovered by about half of the JLA. They then decide to allow Zatanna, the magician member of the team (You know, the one who wears fishnets all the time) to use magic to wipe Dr. Light's knowledge of the rape he's committed from his mind, and also to tinker with his personality to make him less effective at evil.

Batman finds out and so they also wipe his memory of their wiping Dr. Light's memory.

There's more awful to this story, and it's been five years since it came out so I probably don't need to worry about spoilers even if I thought it could be spoiled, but I'm going to take some time to go over why the central conceit of the story strikes me as somewhat ridiculous.

It's clear that Meltzer loves the Satellite Era of the JLA. It came clearly through in his later run on Justice League itself. with the Red Tornado storyline, and it comes through here as well. Meltzer's JLA is the one that forgave Snapper Carr for trying to kill them as the Star Tsar, the one that fought Dr. Light in the first place. I don't doubt that Mr. Meltzer knows that the satellite computer contained an alien being or that the satellite was constructed using Thanagarian, Kryptonian and even Oan technology. As someone who read a lot of those same JLA comics, the idea that the writer of a major event comic was also steeped in them didn't exactly bother me, until I read IC.

I'm sorry, but having Sue Dibny murdered and then having her rape years before be the suspected catalyst for the murder (and worse, having it turn out that the aforementioned rape didn't really have anything to do with her death, so it's pointless and horrifying, albeit a classic red herring) manages to take those late silver/early bronze age JLA comics and spits on their corpse. Not only does it reduce Sue to an object, her only purpose in the story to be raped and murdered so that we get dramatic tension between superheroes and get to see the formerly fun loving Elongated Man reduced to emotional ruins, but it also flies in the face of the same JLA that once forgave a man for trying to kill them.

The satellite era JLA as they appeared in the comics of the 70's and 80's would not tamper with criminal's brains. They weren't Doc Savage and his men in a pulp era story, they were costumed super heroes at the tail end of the period where, at most, they might have their relevance questioned in a story. Furthermore, while Dr. Light was always portrayed as a villain who would attempt to kill the JLA in various light-based deathtraps, it's a pretty far jump from that to cackling, sadistic rapist. The whole thing plays out like a fumbling attempt to inject 'relevance' into comic books that are nearly twenty years old. I have no doubt in my mind that Brad Meltzer knows and loves the JLA, and yet, his first choice when writing the very characters he loved was to make them morally complicit in covering up a rape, to the point where they even violate Batman's mind to do it.

This conceit aside (and it's a bad one to start with - I mean, the story goes so far as to make Sue Dibny be pregnant when she's killed to amp up the pathos) the story that unfolds from it doesn't really do it any favors. We have Deathstroke the Terminator defending Dr. Light (who, as we just pointed out, often held off the whole JLA, including Superman and Green Lantern) from a group of super heroes in ridiculous badass style, we have the current Robin's father getting killed by Captain Boomerang for no real reason that I can determine aside from keeping alive the somewhat ludicrous 'The families of super heroes are in danger from an unknown killer' subplot, and both Captain Boomerang and his target die for it. At least we get a male supporting character's pointless death to serve the purpose of affecting the superheroes in addition to a female supporting character. Since we can't change the superhero, we'll just kill everyone he knows for drama.

And in the end, as I mentioned before, Sue Dibny's death had nothing at all to do with her rape at the hands of Dr. Light. No, like every new episode of Law and Order you've ever seen late at night on A&E while waiting for something else because you didn't think you'd need a Tivo (don't even try and figure out who all those people are, everyone you remember from the show is dead or quit years ago) the ultimate secret is that Jean Loring, one of Sue's friends and a former superhero wife herself, is in fact behind everything. The reason? She decided she wanted her ex-husband Ray "The Atom" Palmer back, and so instead of going to him and saying "Hey, Ray, I'm still in love with you" she thought it would be better if she stole his size-changing belt and went on a walkabout inside her best friend's brain to scare all the superheroes so that her ex would come see if she was in danger.

The worst part about this plan? It actually works. Ray comes back to save Jean from a staged hanging and ends up in bed with her, which just makes the eventual denoument of this whole sordid mess (locks her up in Arkham and vanishes) even more painful. I mean, Jean was a lawyer. A successful one, too. Also, while Ray was struggling with a teaching position at a minor league college and playing superhero on the side, Jean was off having extramarital affairs (and even eventually leaving Ray for the guy she'd been sleeping with) and was hardly pining for Ray. (To be fair, Ray ran off to South America and hooked up with a six inch tall alien princess, so... never mind.) So in the process, one female character manages to get raped, then murdered so that another female character can become a neurotic, obsessed murderer who kills people in order to get her ex back.

Did I mention that she didn't mean to kill Sue? That she accidentally murdered her friend by walking inside of her brain but luckily happened to have a flame thrower with her to incinerate the body? That's some good thinking there. Imagine if she forgot the flame thrower? Likewise, Jack Drake (Robin's father) died because Jean hired Captain Boomerang to kill him, but she sent Jack a gun and a note warning him because she didn't intend for him to die. That's right, she hired a dude who is so skilled with a boomerang that he can face off against a man who can run at the speed of light but she totally figured that gun she sent would even things up. The fact that Boomer managed to get shot at all is the rough equivalent of Bill Buckner's infamous slip up during the 86 World Series, it's a fluke that really shouldn't have happened.

So we have a formerly intelligent, successful woman reduced to deranged idiot who plots out crime sprees, another formerly intelligent, successful woman reduced to a charred husk (and oh no, she was pregnant! Because being burned to death isn't bad enough people) and a loving flashback to the satellite era JLA, with added rape and mindfuckery. This is not even mentioning that in a story with Superman, the Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, the freaking Batman... nobody puts this thing together? The JLA stands around like idiots for seven issues.

I've barely even mentioned stuff like Deathstroke making chumps of six superheroes because, you know, whatever. The story's already so stupid I can't bring myself to care that it jobs the JLA to make a guy named Deathstroke the Terminator look good. Seriously, pare that name down. I also didn't really heap enough scorn at the idea that we needed a magical brain wipe to explain why Dr. Light was played more for laughs when Wolfman and Perez used him in The New Teen Titans. I mean, I was okay assuming Wolfman wrote him differently because he wanted to use him less as a dire threat and more as a foil, but then again that was because I didn't know about his being a rapist.

If Meltzer thought that making Dr. Light a rapist would in any way restore credibility to him as a villain, he was wrong. Instead, we get a story some years later where Dr. Light is turned into a candle after kidnapping several women, dressing them up as the Teen Titans, and raping them. You know, I'm so glad we as a society have moved away from silly, fumbling Dr. Light and towards hardcore rapist Dr. Light.

In the end, Identity Crisis is a love letter to the satellite era JLA stories, but it's so misguided and deranged that it comes off less like a love letter and more like a smeared page of notebook paper covered in strange stains talking about how it will always, always, alwaus love you and if you leave it will have to kill you. Plus, it kicked off Infinite Crisis, or as I like to call it, Captain Superboy's Head Punching Extravaganza. I'm sure we'll rant more about that later.

It's A Wrong Idea: Marvels

2009-05-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

[Originally posted at Gone&Forgotten]

Had a chance this weekend to re-read Marvels, the much-ado-about comic which Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross helmed, back inna early 90's or so. It's not exactly Watchmen, or even "The Watchmen of its day," but I suppose it's still correct to call it "pivotal" since it spawned so many superhero stories told from the everyman's perspective (By which I mean "Everything Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid wrote after that, pretty much.")

For those of you who missed out, the book follows photojournalist Phil Sheldon through more'n three decades of living alongside and photographing super-heroes in action. Oh, and being outraged - OUTRAGED, I TELL YOU - at the lack of gratitude felt among the steak-and-potato set for the cape-and-cowl set.

I was impressed as hell when I read this thing the first time around. Alex Ross art aside (though I still think it woulda looked better on newsprint, retro-billy as I am), they did some interesting things - like the fact that Phil Sheldon's photographic portfolio is composed largely of famous covers and splash panels from assorted Marvel titles down the years, thus retroactively inserting him into these famous scenes and making him an essential element to their history. Also, that the mutant girl in issue two or three, I forget, is from this old EC Wally Wood story, but that's neither here nor there.

In any case, rereading it now, I find it pretty weak. Characters are one-dimensional, dialogue is flat, and I think it's inarguable that the whole story could have been told in a single issue. Mostly, though, this story is more of a superhero porno than Hustler comics ever was. If you'd like to see a comic fan whack off over his childhood idols (and adulthood idols, for that matter), this is the series for you.

Marvels spends an inordinate amount of time in abject idol worship. Whereas the dynamic established is between normal human and superhuman, the basic message of this book is "Anyone more powerful, glamorous or ostensibly superior to you should be lauded and glamorized without question or criticism." Or at least, "Fail to question authority, kids, anyone who claims to be working for your best interests deserves your undying gratitude!"

Let's face it, I love me some goddamn super-heroes. But in comic books, not real life, and there ain't no two ways about it. If they REALLY existed - and I'm talking about even established, captured-the-hearts-of-a-nation super-types existing, here - I'd be up in arms about 'em, presuming I found time to leave my bunker.

I mean, why exactly would I be head over heels for masked, anonymous vigilantes whose basic concept of 'justice' involves superceding or downright abusing three amendments to the Constitution? And should I be even more excited about the ones decked out in costumes promoting an ideology, or who represent the interests of a non-populist institution, all the while participating in public displays of force which one could only call "A tad intimidating?"

Top of my head, take Iron Man for example. Metal-headed motherfucker in question is the 'private bodyguard' of an old money playboy billionaire, and the head of security for his pet pocket multinational industrial munitions corporation - you know, the one with all the government contracts for developing weapons to be used by the top secret and wholly unaccountable espionage/anti-espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D.

And hey, not only is he this corporate errand boy for a war profiteer, he's also a member of an organization which has access to classified government documents worldwide, and on which he serves next to a ranking American military officer and living symbol of the national policy. Oh, but hey, he saved New York from that guy who erases stuff with his magic gloves, so I shouldn't suspect his motives.

Put any of these guys in real-life analogs, and is it any surprise that the hoi polloi in Marvels give no love to the Avengers? Say you had a team composed of a one-man arsenal under the employ of Haliburton, a jingoist military figure, a representative of the same pantheon routinely invoked by batshit neo-Nazis, and then a pair of Westchester WASPs with a trust fund and a federal grant keeping them living la vida Kennedy, all of whom have the power to bust into your secret crime lab-slash-birthday party and arrest your ass ...

At one point in the story, Sheldon yells at superhero detractors in the street, something like "What do you want - THE WORLD TO ACTUALLY END?" Wow, good point Phil, except ... yes, the superheroes save the world from being destroyed, but the folks who're trying to destroy the world are pretty much the flip side of their coin. Even having lost an eye early in the story, I can't believe that Sheldon somehow neglects to notice that there are just as many super bad guys as there are super good guys. Shouldn't a trained, experienced journalist be able to draw from that a notion that the powers and costume alone do not make a saint of every one of these psychos?

But then, Phil Sheldon isn't a character, he's Kurt Busiek's personal science fiction fantasy twin. Sheldon is passionate, respected, experienced and widely-traveled, he's reported from the front lines in Europe, he's waded into riots and natural disasters, he's even sacrificed a part of his body to be 'where the action is.' What better waldo to send into a 'fictionalized world' where nobody respects super-heroes, am I right? Is Kurt Busiek writing a story about heroes and their role in respect to the common world, or is he writing the ultimate foot-stomping fanboy assault against a community which still thinks any man in his thirties who reads "Spider-Man" is a virgin, a loser and a 'tard whose home address leads directly to his parents' basement?

Clue: It's the latter. Phil Sheldon isn't proselytizing to his neighbors and peers, he's yelling at your mom.

Superheroes in comics are a fucking fantasy world, where noble actions are rewarded with glory and warm fuzzies, or at least they are when you tell the story from the superhero perspective. Tell the story from the perspective of the common man, and ... jesus Kurt, why didn't you just ask Ross to draw Sheldon sucking superhero cock. He can start with the C-List, Iron Fist and Ant-Man maybe, then move up to Captain Mar-Vell and Ghost Rider, the fan favorites. Issue four, it's a World's Greatest Superheroes/Largest Gangbang at the Baxter Building! Prince Namor, eh, and you say you're on the list? You're a friend of Magneto, you say? Mister Magnus didn't leave a guest pass for you ...

I sound like I'm angry at the book, which I sort of am. Maybe not at the book itself - which is, at the worst, a pale counter-humanist fable - but at the legacy of "realistic super hero" comics it created, and the collective insult to the intelligence which followed.

Mark Waid is the greatest offender, as the few normal human beings who manage to make their way into his comics (thanks for destroying the best supporting cast in comics, Mark, Flash became so much better when every issue guest-starred every fast super hero ever and a mouthful of pathetic psuedo-science about 'speed forces' ...) do little more than reassure the hero that he is loved, admired and necessary. Rain as much destruction on a city as you like, all the citizens care about is that you saved the day, Fantastic Four! Let's give them a standing ovation, we'll clear the bodies later.

Maybe this sticks in my craw because America, as a mass, seems to be losing its ability to generate even the merest spark of common humanity, empathy or community. Everyone thinks they're goddamn Stone Cold Steve Austin, that they're a loner badass and that common ethics and manners ain't nothing much more than the setup to the joke where they cram a beer can in your eye as a punchline. And when this cavalier irrelevance of humanism starts to infect the escapist fantasy which - in my youth, anyway - is supposed to ennoble selflessness, responsibility, and flat-out heroism in the minds of kids...

Well, man.

And Marvels. Man, Kurt, whatever it is you were trying to do, I have to ask ... "What have you done?"

No Thank You: Comics We Will Never Read, Week of 05/13/2009

2009-05-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

We here at SeeBelow* are devoted readers of all kinds of comics: good, bad, and really quite unbelievably bad. But there isn't enough time for us to read everything, and to be honest, there's a lot of stuff issued each and every week that we wouldn't touch even if we were stuck in a doctor's waiting room for all eternity. So every Friday, we'll check in on Comics We Will Never Read.

Manga Shakespeare "Othello" Graphic Novel (Abrams), $10.95

One surefire way to deaden our interest is to take a perfectly acceptable idea and turn it into manga for no discernable reason. We're mildly curious to see why the Moor is portrayed in the same vaguely Asian way as all manga characters, but not enough to pony up eleven bucks to watch a cutesy-fied, big-pupilled Desdemona get strangled to death.

Terry Moore's "Echo" #12 (Abstract Studios), $3.50

The key words influencing our decision here are the first two.

History Of The DC Universe Trade Paperback [New Printing] (DC), $12.99

Wow, a chance to pay 13 smackers for a 'history' that has already been superseded by events before it even hits the stands! DC treats its continuity like a hooker it has chained up in its basement, driving many good people insane; why on Earth would we enable them by buying something its own editors haven't paid attention to in years?

How To Cosplay. Vol 1 (Graphic-Sha), $24.99

Er, no. No thank you.

Hardy Boys Hardcover Vol. 17: Word Up (Papercutz), $12.95

Yes, it's the same old Hardy Boys adventures you enjoyed when you were young, assuming you are now very old, only in comic book form! With bad art and storytelling! Plus, they're all like NOW! And HAPPENING! And URBAN, as witnessed by the use of hip-hop slang that was outdated in 1986! Also? Manga.

Things What I Like: Scout

2009-05-06T11:26:00.001-07:00

Earlier in the week I spent some time talking about my love of post apocalyptic fiction. I did so as an opening for a review of Wasteland, which is a fine book by any measure. I would be remiss though, if I neglected to mention what is, perhaps, my favorite comic book in the genre.

Scout.

In 1986, just five years after graduating from the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Timothy Truman launched Scout with Eclipse. Truman was riding the success of the Grim Jack franchise he had established with John Ostrander earlier in the 80s and Scout ended up being another well received title, if not as popular as Grimjack had been.

Scout ran for an initial 24 issues and was relatively unique in the genre of post apocalyptic fiction for two reasons; the catalyst of the apocalyptic setting, and a native American protagonist who wasn't patronizing to the native American community*.

Throughout the 80s, and even into the 90s, the clear majority of stories in the genre had a nuclear exchange, or more rarely a non-nuclear war, between the two most prominent super powers the world had ever seen; The Soviet Union and the United States of America. This was a natural reaction to the fear and paranoia that the cold war had given rise to and if you aren't old enough to remember the cold war, it's difficult to explain just how pervasive these scenarios were**.

Instead of featuring a nuclear wasteland as a setting, Scout had something more subtle and a little smarter. In it's own way, more likely and therefore believable. In Truman's apocalypse the environmental policies of the US had led to greater and greater ecological devastation. This wasting and polluting of the nation's resources led to increasingly harsh sanctions against a USA in ever deepening financial trouble. The result was a breakdown in law and order, with lost confidence in the government and people taking the law into their own violent hands. In 1986 it seemed a little far fetched. In retrospect one wonders if Truman is prescient***.

The titular protagonist of the story is Emmanuel Santana, an Apache Indian and former Army Ranger. He's a man with demons, literally. Santana is beset by visions and visitations from demons and gods out of the myths of Apache spiritualism. They play the roles of both tormentor and guide, pushing Santana along a path of destruction that has other Apache demons in their sights. These spirits are very real for Santana, but the audience never receives any confirmation or their corporeality , and there is some ambiguity as to whether or not Santana is actually in communion with ancient spirits, or has simply been driven insane. Despite this, Santana believes in them fully and they are each powerful catalysts and motivators in Santana's life, featuring prominently as characters in the story.

Truman treats both Santana and his spiritualism with a degree of respect and accuracy that wasn't common at the time and is still somewhat unique. The roles of the spirits and their character traits are taken directly from the Apache mythology, lending them an authenticity not often seen in American comics****. Truman rarely, if ever, delves into cliches of the American western mythology, instead relying on science fiction and fantasy elements to carry the mysticism. The spirits and Santana himself are simply who they are, straight characters played against the background of a crumbling and increasingly insane world.

The series continued after its initial 24 issues with a few short run books and even as an insert in Truman's first album, Marauder by his band The Dixie Pistols. In 1988 Scout; War Shaman was started, picking up the story 10 years after the end of Scout. The US is in even greater disarray and appears to have faced a complete or nearly complete breakdown in law and order. Santana has found a measure of peace with his wife and two children in a hidden oasis of relative comfort. When his wife dies Santana's peace is dismembered and he, his boys, and his returning demons, leave their protected valley to search for a new home, crossing paths with both old enemies and old friends. Grudges die hard when the world ends.

Scout: War Shaman was among Truman's finest series in my opinion, with art and scripting that was much tighter and cleaner than in the first volume. Unfortunately, the flood that led to the demise of Eclipse comics in the early 90s gave Scout and Scout: War Shaman a Kirk sized double fist to the gut. The flood wiped out the inventory of back issues making the book scarce. ~~When the company went under, Todd McFarlane bought the IP for the entire Eclipse catalog. This led to years of rights conflict for Truman; not only for Scout, but also for Grim Jack as well.~~ Two more additional Scout series had been planned, but never saw the light of day for what should be obvious, but frustrating, reasons*****.

CORRECTION: In the comments to the original article, Truman himself has responded to some inaccuracies. Truman is sole copyright and trademark owner for Scout, and there has never been an ownership conflict with Todd McFarlane or anyone else. It appears that I convoluted some of the details surrounding the problems with Grim Jack, which was publised at First rather than Eclipse, with that of Scout. He goes on to explain how problems with Grim Jack have been resolved and even mentions that Grim Jack: Manx Cat will be published by IDW later this year.

In recent years, trade paperbacks of the first 16 issues of Scout have appeared from Dynamite Entertainment, yet for some reason the remaining 8 issues have, to my knowledge, yet to be collected and reprinted. Nor have there been any trade collections of Scout: War Shaman. ~~I can only presume that this is the result of more rights issues.~~ Unfortunately, if you're a fan of the series like I am, then the only way to get the entire story is to scour boxes for single issues that are getting more and more difficult to come by. It's a book that's worth the search though, and if you've never read it, I recommend starting the quest now.

Originally published at Roninspoon.com [roninspoon.com]

*Not played by Anthony Quinn.
**Try to Imagine if American Idol went to war with The Daily Show and both had large stockpiles of weaponized sub-prime mortgages that could be launched from gay weddings, potentially destroying millions of cute cat videos in an uncontrolled DRM storm.
***Remember to start stockpiling water and ammunition!
****See also: Jonah Hex
*****As if you really need more reasons to get a hateon for McFarlane.

Fearsome Fauxs: Cinco de Me-OW!

2009-05-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!

FROM MEXICAN BIKINI BATMAN WOMAN*!

*At least I think that's a woman.

It's A Wrong Idea: Don't Fuck with the Jesus, Mang!

2009-05-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, Rick Veitch (he only became Roarin' later) was fired from Swamp Thing by the Vertigo bigwigs for blasphemy. All he wanted to do was show a cartoon horror salad monster giving comfort to Our Lord and Savior at the moment of His greatest sacrifice! Surely no one could could foresee that might cause offense. Anyway, "The Roarin' One" has received and completed a commission to reproduce the cover image for that lost issue, and here it is.

It may be instructive to compare it to this image from Jim Starlin's "The Death of Captain Marvel" which while equally bizarre in its combination of pulpy kidstuff and beloved religious iconography managed to get published.

The lesson here, I guess, is you can rip off the Pieta and replace Christ with a masked blond hunk from space, but don't have a compost boogieman give Him a cuddle.

Things What I Like: Wasteland

2009-05-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

I've always been fond of apocalypse stories, even though I frequently misspell the word and find it a bit tough to roll of the tongue. It's not the word's fault though, many of these problems are my own. I don't hold apocalypse's semantic problems against it.

As a kid I loved the Mad Max series, and virtually any other story that featured dirty men with long hair dressed in football gear roving the wasted ruins in a hodge podge of recycled vehicles. Which I guess is kind of odd considering how overwhelmingly depressing stories about the end of the world can be. What with the mutants, and the cannibals and the rape gangs.*

The Apocalypse makes for compelling drama though**, and despite the dreary setting, most end of the world stories are built on the foundation of hope. Hope that in the absence of all of our technological wonders, and in the aftermath of a total breakdown of civilization, there remains a chance that heros can rise and perform good deeds, even if it is often for the wrong reasons. The plot of these stories resonates with the audience because it reflects the very real fears that most have about the delicacy of our world. Whether it's from environmental mishap or nuclear exchange, there is a persistent, and frankly arrogant, belief among humans that we have the power to destroy the earth we inhabit.

Providing an audience with an environment they can connect to is very important in engaging their attention and the aftermath of a collapsed civilization provides a convincing setting for contemporary fantasy. People turned off by most genre fiction for the unrealistic and unbelievable backdrop of either dragons and elves or of space flight and aliens, have little to no problem imagining themselves as a hardy survivor of the apocalypse.

All of which is a very long introduction to Wasteland, via a love letter to the genre of the apocalypse.

I saw the trade collection of the first six issues while browsing a bin at the Phoenix Comic-Con, I was immediately drawn by the hauntingly beautiful Ben Templesmith cover. It's evocative of the entire genre and immediately signals, "THIS STORY IS ABOUT SURVIVING THE END OF THE WORLD." Furthermore, it tickled my memory, as did the first few pages. I'd clearly seen parts of this story before, perhaps in a preview book from a previous con, or perhaps in a fevered dream brought on after unwittingly insulting a Voodoo Queen on the bus.

I picked up the book immediately, how could I not?*** Antony Johnston has presented a rare story. A subtle combination of epic plot and archetype characters delivered in a lean package that reflects the setting. There's no significant dialogue until page five and the protagonist doesn't speak until page eight. For most comics that aren't G.I. JOE #21, this would be a problem. Johnston makes it work and he does it in such a way that it not only doesn't negatively impact the story, but actually reinforces the oppressive setting of the desert wasteland the story is set in.

To support this dearth of words, Christopher Mitten's illustration is equally lean without being sparse and delivers engaging visuals. The ink reflects the story and outlines the important and bold elements while implying with subtlety the background and supporting elements. This is art that immediately and efficiently tells you what's going on. With no written introduction and minimal dialogue, the setting, character archetype, antagonists and motivations for the first act of the story are immediately and clearly established. Mitten has great lines and uses them like a surgeon, deftly rendering both action and motivation.

The audience isn't directly presented with any information about what caused the breakdown in civilization****, or indeed which civilization it may have been that failed, or when it may have happened. By the end of the sixth issue, we still don't know what the catalyst for the apocalypse is and it doesn't matter that we don't know. While that information is an element of the plot, and like the mysteries surrounding all the main characters, the details of what happened in the past are rationed out at a pace that keeps you wanting to learn more and searching the background and dialogue for hidden clues. This story isn't about what caused the fall of man though, like almost all apocalypse stories, it's about good people trying to survive in a world that's been overrun with the tyranny of the strong and morally compromised.

I think Wasteland is an extraordinarily well assembled story, and I'll be on the lookout for work by this writer and illustrator in the future. You don't have to take my word for it though, you can download the first issue from the official website in .jpeg, .pdf, or .cbr.

There's another lengthy story here about new media savvy publishers and adopting to digital distribution markets, but I'll save that for another day.

http://www.onipress.com/thebigwet/index.php

Originally published at Roninspoon.com [Roninspoon.com]

*I suspect this says something very deep and troubling about me as a person, but I choose not to investigate it.
**John of Patmos knows what I'm talking about.
***I have extraordinarily poor impulse control, one of many reasons I'm not allowed access to an open bar without a handler.
****I'm guessing "out of control government biomedical research", or "simultaneous bankruptcy of Krispy Kreme and White Castle." Both would be devastating.

Back to the Roots: The Golden Age Was Insane

2009-05-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I love the Golden Age of Comics is because the heroes were far less likely to put up with your shit. Take the Batman, for example. Batman in his original appearances wasn't this ridiculously omni-capable crimefighter who hated guns and would never, ever kill anyone. Oh my no. The Batman as he appeared in his earliest appearances was a creepy bastard who enjoyed terrifying random passers-by and who would shoot you with a machine gun mounted on an airplane at the flimsiest pretext imaginable. That truck there? It contains gigantic monster freaks made by Hugo Strange, and so Batman has to shoot the drivers to protect us all. Really. And if shooting doesn't work, he'll strangle them to death by dropping a lasso around their necks and hanging them with the airplane.

"He's probably better off this way." Jesus, Batman. That dude might have had a family before a crazy criminal scientist made him into a gigantic monstrosity, you could at least pretend you hesistated before you snuffed him.

I'm not arguing (right now) that all superheroes should revert to their Golden Age personalities. As much as I love the Golden Age Superman's total disregard for human life, dignity or even the basic freedoms we all take for granted (if you don't believe me, here's the GA Superman crashing headlong into an airplane hoping to kill the Ultra-Humanite and here he is breaking into a radio station to inform the city that he's going to wreak havoc on their cars until they obey his traffic safety commands - he threatens the announcer with bodily harm just because he can) I don't really want to read him acting that way in a modern comic book. But I do find the cold, malevolent Batman of the late 30's to be an awesome character.

For example, while heading out to sea to eventually save his then-fiancee from a vampire monk, Batman takes the time to scare the living shit out of everyone just because he can.

Don't even try and tell me he's not enjoying himself there. That little smile as he stares down at the people (random pedestrians, no less) tells us all we need to know. This Batman isn't a grim, obsessed loner haunted by the deaths of his parents. He's working his grief and rage out by terrorizing the city. Fighting crime is the pretext here, it's all about scaring the living shit out of everyone.

Frankly, I miss this and wish we'd get to see a hint of it in the modern portrayals of the characters. Like I said, I don't want entire issues where Superman goes apeshit and decides to force us to enact clean water laws and enforce them by breaking into the offices of the EPA and hanging their administrators over improperly cleaned Superfund sites until they start weeping and pissing themselves, but I would like it if every so often you got the sense he might. Not often, but once in a blue moon people would remember that there was a godlike alien living among them who could, in fact, smash into the Pentagon and hang a four star general off of a flagpole if he felt like it, and there really isn't much we could do to stop him if he did. Just ask Hitler and Stalin, who Superman captured and handed over to the League of Nations before all that messy WWII stuff could happen.

Okay, it didn't really take.

Still, I enjoy the Golden Age, where Batman shot people in their sleep because he was pretty damn sure they were vampires, or possibly werewolves. It was a simpler time.

Black And White Boom: KZ Comics

2009-05-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

KZ Comics was a short-lived, Texas-based independent publisher which popped up during the post-TMNT/Cerebus funny animal and black&white indy publishing boom of the 1980s.

KZ publisher Tom Zjaba has put the entirety of the KZ Comics catalog online in a barebones HTML format for the perusal of any interested parties (He also links to poker and blackjack games, enjoy those).

Besides the company's flagship character, Colt the Armadillo, or their other offerings such as the Dungeons&Dragons-inspired Unicorns Kings, the time-travelling Terminator clone The Eliminator, and naturally - since it was the 80s - The Middle Aged Government Tested Atom Splitting Radioactive Democratic Lefthanded Freelance Green Beret Koala Bears, you can see Zjaba's current efforts with a much more skilled collaborator - but, unfortunately, a still-stunted writer's toolbox - on the webcomic Tabloid.

Of greater interest is Tom Zjaba's "Untold Stories" behind each and every issue, where he examines in fascinating and inexplicably minute detail the decisions, reactions and realities of each and every issue which passed through the KZ Comics catalog. The stories he tells are the same stories of other amateur publishers taking advantage of the sudden and, in retrospect, seemingly inexplicable popularity comics enjoyed in the 1980s not only as potentially serious literature but additionally as sound financial investments. Fledgling artists and writers whose skills were inarguably ill-prepared for the spotlight suddenly found themselves the proud poppas of pop culture phenomena and kiddie books selling for double and triple figures in the immediate aftermarket.

As they said of the lions parading around Niagara, pride goeth before a fall. Yet these indy guys in the heyday of the brief renaissance of the Reagan years only ever developed a sense of pride because they were granted a certain level of comfort - comfort which failed them when the printers, distributors and comics shops began to close their doors in droves, and the sustainability of a comics-based economy proved to be a tetch short-sighted.

I feel for these Tom Zjaba, and I'm touched and impressed by the sincerity of his big hopes and the simplicity of his aspirations. It takes a lot of courage to talk about one's failures, and it takes something additionally ... different ... to talk in exhaustive detail about the minutae of the pedestrian process of making a comic book. He represents a certain sympathetic pathology in many small-press publishers, I recommend spending some time to read the greek tragedy of his company's short-lived flight.

For anyone who cares, here is the history of KZ Comics, a company that came and went with the black and white implosion. But unlike many other companies of that era, it was conceived years before. It was just a matter of luck that it came out during that time.
KZ Comics stands for Karolczyk and Zjaba. It was started back in grade school by myself, Tom Zjaba and a friend of mine, Dave Karolczyk. This was back in the 1970's. Later, my cousin Dave and myself formed the company as Dave Karolczyk lost interest in creating comic books. My cousin and I would write and draw stories and give them to each other to critique. It was done more for fun than anything else.
After I was out of high school, I found a comic book called Swords of Cerebus. I bought a few of them at a comic book show and loved the stories. They were collected versions of the Cerebus the Aardvark series and it inspired me to create a similar character. I had toyed around with the idea of doing a western comic book, as I was tiring of doing strictly super heroes. So I went to work on creating a western hero who was not human. At first, I thought about having him be a cow. But it just seemed silly. I even toyed with a human cactus among other ideas.
Then I went to my handy collection of animal cards for inspiration. They were a collection of animal cards that I ordered from a magazine and they sent more every month. As I looked through there, I came across an armadillo. It was a western animal, it had the hard shell and it made for a good animal. I had the animal, now all I needed was a name. I started thinking about what would be a good name. For some reason, the Colt 45 gun came to mind and I liked it. Colt the Armadillo was born!
I then went to work on a story of Colt. It was nearly identical to what later became issue #1. For some reason, when I finished it, I really liked the story and thought it had potential.

It's the confidence you have to love.

Link: KZComics.com

Peanuts by Charles Bukowski

2009-05-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

Peanuts by Charles Bukowski [Progressive Boink]

15,000 Comics: Harlan Ellison on Daredevil

2009-04-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

Calamity Jon was raised in a home filled with comic books – his parents collected them before he was born, and continued to collect them as he grew up. By way of nickel bins, swap meets, garage sales and being the recipient of other people’s lost interest in their collections, he eventually had a collection of at least 15,000 comics by the time he hit college. Ten years later, and several more thousand comics attached to his collection, he got sick of it and divested himself of all but a handful. In this feature, he tries to catalog every comic he’s ever read from memory …

15,000 Comics to go, starting ... NOW!

Daredevil #208/#209 – I’m not doing myself any favors by jumping into this project a measly two comics at a time, but as Daredevil comics – and, in fact, all comics – go, these two are unique. Arthur Byron Cover provided the story in issue 209, and made an assist (I’m thinking he must have been a continuity guru) on issue 208, with David Mazzuchelli turning in a superb and yet not-quite polished set of pages on the interior. Whooptee shit, but bear with me. The writer of 208 was Harlan Ellison.

I think, at this point, I’m thirteen years old, and there are two things I love; first off, Daredevil. It’s the first comic I ever collected with my own money (I started with #164, Expose, 1979, written by Roger McKenzie and drawn by the Miller/Janson team (Wally Wood assisting on inks, awesome), a flashback to Daredevil’s origin told while DD rests in a hospital bed after a showdown with the Hulk - I hunted that issue down in short order after buying this one - during which he’s visited by a small platoon of Marvel luminaries, including the Thing, Power Man, and Iron Fist, all three of whom had captured my juvenile imagination). The other thing I love is Harlan Ellison. I’m a sci-fi nerd at this point, but I’ve got one foot in the Arthur C.Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury camp, and another with Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock. So on the schoolbus every morning and every afternoon, I’ve got copies of “I Have No Mouth…” and “The Beast That Shouted Love…” or “Deathbird Stories” (my favorite, until Angry Candy) and so on.

So yeah, Harlan Ellison writes an issue of Daredevil, I damn near broke both wrists reaching with rocket-engine speed for the racks.

It’s an intriguing take on the deathtrap motif; Daredevil finds himself lured into a mansion of automated death by a robot disguised to look like a human girl and which has a hydraulic system which simulates the human heartbeat. Unlike most comic book deathtrap stories, we don’t enjoy the courtesy of watching the hero struggle against the danger from the perspective of the mastermind – in fact, by the time DD finds out who’s caused his troubles, the deathtrap’s master architect is long dead and barely even enjoying the revenge offered beyond the grave. It was an evocative, maybe modernist way to tell the story, to wrap the reader in with the hero's dilemmas - nothing that radical, but even today few writers dare to keep the reader in the dark about anything except the most blatant cliffhangers and bog standard twist endings.

Besides the evocative storytelling, Daredevil was more human and vulnerable in these stories than any hundred other so-called “regular people” superheroes. Batman WISHES he were this prone to the threat of death and injury – DD manages to escape every menace, but is battered, bruised and beaten at the end. Every fall takes the wind out of him, every trap has him scrambling to survive. He even begins the story beaten and out of breath from an off-camera interruption into an everyday robbery. At no point was Daredevil overcoming the threats with omnipotent superheroic panache, it was scraped knuckles all the way.

This, combined with Ellison’s use of a casual, hip patois for DD’s internal monologue (Daredevil swinging for the fences with the occasional “baby” and “Sonova(good old comic books, they never finish the cuss)” like his old beatnik alter-ego Mike Murdock or, more likely, kind of like Harlan Ellison actually speaks) had me riveted. What can I say, I'm easy.

The thing I’ve learned as a Daredevil fan is that you often have to wait for the good issues – DD will be a solid, even excellent superhero comic for a year or two, at which point the creative team will change and then you’ll have two, three or even five or six years of bland, unreadable garbage. Ellison’s issue, and the subsequent followup kept me reading until Miller returned a few years later. #208 stands as one of my ten favorite issues from a series which has had a LOT of great stories.

(As an aside, I always kept an eye out for more of Arthur Byron Cover’s work, reasoning that if he’d been a compatriot of Ellison’s that he must be a writer to watch out for – I never came across his name on the shelves, although I see that he did the novelization of the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, and I can’t help but wonder if he was able to capture Brian Blessed’s enormous “GORDON’S ALI-IVE??” with the magnitude it deserved)

Issues covered in this article: 3 (I’m borrowing #164 against the time I decide to do a complete DD rundown)
Issues to go: 14,997 (jeez!)

It's A Wrong Idea: Avengers #200 - An Autopsy

2009-04-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, look, I would love to be able to give Avengers #200 a loving look back. I really would. Unfortunately the book was atrocious. Going back and re-reading it is like opening up a can of peanut brittle and there’s regular peanut brittle in it, and you’re thinking hey, shouldn’t this be full of comedy spring-loaded false serpents and then someone comes along and shivs you from behind with a filth encrusted knife.

I exaggerate. Avengers #200 doesn’t even have the shock of a knife when you were expecting toy snakes. It’s just unremittingly dull and awful, Hannah Arendt’s maxim about the banality of evil in pointillist four color newsprint. It’s not even bad enough to be entertaining, which makes it even worse.

I wasn’t there when this book was written. I have no idea of the rumor presented here is true or not. I can believe it, however, because the comic book reads like a horrible, stitched together monstrosity like Ultra the Multi Alien, except lacking even the miniscule amount of charm that character had.

What we have here is a comic book where one of the main characters is, effectively, abducted to Limbo (not Catholic limbo… or maybe it is? I’ve never been too sure about how Marvel thinks it all works, maybe Immortus wasn’t baptized as a kid or something) and impregnated in order that the person impregnating her can get her to give birth to him. Yes, he gets her pregnant with himself. This plan is entirely in order that the character doing the impregnating (Marcus, son of Immortus and some nameless woman he fished out of the water after the Titanic sank… I’m not kidding) can be ‘born onto Earth’ since, as the son of a guy who hangs around in Limbo and a woman who was supposed to drown in one of the greatest naval disasters of the 20th Century, Marcus can’t exist in our world without Bad Stuff Happening.

That paragraph hurts my brain to read it, and yet, it’s not as stupid as this comic book. I’ve failed to capture the continuous squick as Ms Marvel, the woman who gets kidnapped into limbo and used as the womb in question (seriously, why do comic books so often feel the need to create costumed super hero women and then immediately use them as hostages or worse, reduce them to their biological functions right off of the bat?) runs the gamut of emotions from distaste (having no memory of having been made pregnant in the first place) to horror and confusion (as her weird baby ages to adulthood in a matter of days) to lust for the baby she just delivered that day.

And since he grows up to look like Vincent Price with a ‘fro, the incest squick is only increased by the fact that every time the guys speaks I hear the opening narration to ‘Thriller’ in my head.

I honestly think there could have been an awesome comic book here. We have a lot of great stuff happening in the background of the ridiculous extradimensional rape and incest pony show.

“Wait a minute” you might be saying “You didn’t mention rape!”

Well, okay, that’s fair. I didn’t directly say that Marcus rapes Ms Marvel. The comic book itself shies away from saying this. But it doesn’t shy hard enough.

So, not only does Marcus (who, apparently, we’re supposed to feel sorry for) abduct Beethoven and Shakespeare and force them to help him score, most likely with ‘a subtle boost from Immortus’ machines’) but then he gets tired of waiting for Ms Marvel to let him knock her up with himself, so he uses those same machines on her.

We get an earlier scene where Marcus just admits that’s how Immortus got his mom to go along with the program. Immortus, master of Time, lord of Limbo, built an actual sex machine.

So both Immortus and his kid think it’s perfectly okay to abduct people from anywhere in time and use wacky machines to more or less get them to have sex with you. Oh my, that’s not creepy at all. Now, I think that hanging the 200th issue of one of Marvel’s biggest comic books on the mystery of who got Ms Marvel pregnant is pretty weird to begin with. This is a comic book with an actual Norse god, the personification of American ideals, a man who made himself the most advanced portable weapons system on the planet, a woman who can shrink down to the size of a wasp and blow open a steel door by pointing at it, an android who married a mutant who can change reality… and they’re spending the issue dealing with Ms Marvel being pregnant.

Even with all the Immortus/Marcus/Limbo baby born on Earth makes time go freaky stuff, that’s pretty thin gruel to hang the 200th issue on. Still, like I said, this might have worked out. We get to see Iron Man punch out a dinosaur, a medieval knight stab a robot woman in the chest and break his sword, and Captain America almost punches a smart mouthed baby.

In a way, this story is a real trail blazer. Decades before Brad Meltzer would bring us rape, mind control and forced amnesia in Identity Crisis Shooter, Michelinie. Layton and Perez somehow managed to break that ground here. I don’t mean to imply that Identity Crisis’ mail flaw is that it rips off this story, because it doesn’t and also it isn’t: Identity Crisis is awful in its own amazing way. We’ll get back to that someday. But Avengers #200 manages to be boring (yes, a story where a Norse god delivers a half-alien woman’s baby, who was conceived in another dimension, and yet it’s boring… there’s dinosaurs and robots and it’s still boring) and creepy at the same time.

The best part (for a very particular value of best) is when, directly after hearing how Marcus kidnapped her into limbo, dazzled her with history’s greatest experts in poetry, music, and getting dressed up really nicely, then used machines to control her mind so that she’d sleep with him Ms Marvel decides that she will willingly go into Limbo with her baby who is now a fully adult Vincent Price impersonator. This is after he’s knocked her out once and said the line “Forgive me, mother. Forgive me… my love.”

Stop staring at me like that I didn’t write it Jim Shooter probably did.

So Thor, Norse god of Thunder and also apparently of opening portals in space time so that Ms Marvel can have sex with her own baby who raped her so that he could exist in the first place, does just that. And off Ms. Marvel and Marcus go to cohabitate in Limbo. I’m really starting to think it’s not Catholic Limbo, I don’t think I could have missed that in catechism.

The ending to this story was so creepy that even Chris Claremont, a fellow who is no stranger to rape in comic books (he has Warren Worthington, the Angel, get dragged down into the sewers and stripped of all his clothes in order to be forced to marry another mutant named Callisto) thought this had to be dealt with. He brings Ms Marvel back to point out the whole ‘he used machines to make me love him’ bit that’s directly stated and then immediately glossed over here in a later Avengers Annual.

But aside from the horrible, insane, crazy-ass subtext that Immortus and his son are both effectively rapists who use machines instead of rohypnol, what does this story have for us? Well, we can thrill to multiple scenes of Carol Danvers (Ms Marvel’s real name) giving birth while everyone wonders how she could be doing so when she wasn’t even pregnant the day before. Then we thrill to scenes of the baby growing up fast and giving Captain America shit until Cap nearly belts him before Iron Man restrains him and calmly suggests they back off.

Yes, Captain America wants to punch a baby and Iron Man stops him. The 80’s, ladies and gentlemen. We also have a subplot where Jocasta, an android, tries to get the Vision, a synthezoid (basically an android made out of artificial flesh) to have sex with her only to be blocked by his wife, the Scarlet Witch, who is a mutant. I’m sure it was a continuing thread in the book at the time (robot girl loves robot boy who is married to human woman oh the soapiest of operas) but man, I really don’t care. Captain America almost punched out a baby and you’re wasting my time with this, story, you fail in every conceivable way. (Yes, I made that joke. No, I don’t apologize.)

Lots of Avengers fight lots of time lost stuff in scenes that tantalize us with the faint whiff of potential. Perez and Layton draw the hell out of this comic. Seriously, having George Perez and Bob Layton illustrate this thing is like having Michaelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci lovingly render a prolapsed colon.

The ‘meat’ of the story consists of a mostly naked Marcus working on a machine that will supposedly make it okay for him to stay in our world only to have Hawkeye blow it up because he doesn’t trust the guy.

I don’t blame him.

Then we get the horrific denouement. All in all, the comic just sits there after you’ve read it, as horrible and pathetic as an incontinent old terrier simultaneously attempting to eat, defecate on and fornicate with your right leg.

It's A Wrong Idea: Adventures In The Rifle Brigade

2009-04-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

When people talk about Garth Ennis, they tend to talk in glowing terms. They applaud his grasp of human nature, his witty dialogue, his dark humor. Or, they just shout a lot. Like, at the moon, or a tree, or maybe a passing dog with floppy ears. Frequently, whther they're complimenting his work or denouncing it, they talk about some of the really messed up things his characters do. A fair example is Arse Face, the teen suicide idol from Ennis’ premiere selling book, Preacher. You see, Arse Face was a little under the weather when Kurt Cobain elected to eat a bullet. Idolizing the singer, the young man decided to suck on the barrel of a shotgun too. Only he lived, horribly scarred. After surgery his face was pinched in and looked like… An arse! HAHAHA! Get it? Oh wait, except no one in the US knows what the bloody hell an arse is. It’s Brit slang for ass. See? His face looked like an ass. Oh man, comedy gold.

Preacher is full of archetypes so profound and over the top that they border on caricature. An Irish vampire, who’s a drunk! A small town preacher, who has doubts about his faith! A rural American man, who is a sociopathic killer and enjoys sexual congress with dead fish! Oh my! Ennis sure has turned a critical eye on our society! Ennis just doesn’t do subtlety very well, if at all. His oeuvre is hyper violent sadism combined with off color humor. The narrative, such as it is, is usually employed in service of connecting scenes of unhinged sadomasochistic meat product rape with effervescent beheadings and detailed examinations of cannibalism.

Despite that, Preacher was a phenomenal success. You can talk a lot of trash about the book, but it resonated with audiences and made a pile of money. Making a Pile of Money is just about the only barometer for success that the comic book industry has left. You can draw your superheroes sporting bandanas constructed from a multitude of pouches, with three foot long ankles hinged like a rabbit, and fingers with more joints than Tommy Chong, but as long as shmucks lay down cash for each of the nine variant covers, the industry will treat you like Einstein with two brains and a meter long phallus.* What I’m getting at, is that success in comic books has less to do with the quality of your work than it does with the audience’s capacity for self loathing.

Which isn’t to say that Preacher, or Ennis, is without merit. For what it’s worth, I bought Preacher and I enjoyed it. Most of it. There were good parts, parts that shined. In characters like the Saint of Killers, Ennis has created some enduring mythology. His approach to the Scion of Christ and a global Catholic conspiracy that spans centuries is constructed in a fashion that far outshines Dan Brown. Ennis’ use of a John Wayne hallucination to serve as narrative device sounds hokey, but works exceedingly well. There are bits of Preacher that work great, and display that Ennis is capable of being a good storyteller.

So when I saw Adventures In the Rifle Brigade for sale, I opted to pick it up. The cover promised some WWII action, and I was interested in seeing just how far off the rail Ennis could take the Second World War. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Perhaps a critical examination of the war from an alternative perspective, delivered in between combat scenes of nearly surreal amounts of gore.

What I did not expect, was a clumsy satire of WWII adventure stories populated by characters so puerile as to surpass caricature and dive straight into toilet humor, only to leave the toilet behind as the story scrambled down the pipe in search of more juvenile material, as if it was saying to itself in shuddering tones "this poop isn't poopy enough." It seemed as if the lesson that Ennis learned from Preacher was “I’m not very good at delivering subtlety, so why bother?” Three of the six members of the eponymous Rifle Brigade (which is really more of a squad) never vocalize anything other than their catch phrases. Fortunately for the reader, they repeat their catch phrases with such frequency that you never expect anything else from them and when they shake up the delivery a little bit with an exclamation point, or the entire phrase in capital letters, you can really tell they’re emoting extra hard.

Satire is an art. It requires a complete and accurate knowledge of the subject, a biting witt, and a degree of subtlety to deliver humor in a fashion that the audience won’t expect.** Repeating the same joke over and over, is not the way to accomplish this goal. I’m familiar with the axiom that repetition is the crux of humor, and despite repetition being the crux of humor, it requires a certain flair and restraint.

One of the principle jokes of the books, repeated numerous times, is the relationship between Capt. Darcy, a proper English officer and adventurer, and Lt. Crumb, a rather effeminate and modern young British Officer in what I suspect is supposed to poke fun at the generation gap felt among the old and new guard of the British Military during WWII. Capt. Darcy is very manly. Very gentlemanly. Very British. T. Darcy has something of a crush on Darcy. At least once per combat scene, Crumb will become the target of violence and believes himself to be mortally wounded. He begs Darcy to bestow on him some intimate act. At first a kiss, as the books progress the requests become more ribald. Darcy is flustered, but always relents out of sense of duty to the young officer. At the last minute, Just as the request is to be granted, it’s revealed that Crumb is not wounded at all, and he recovers, refusing to admit what has transpired. HAHA! He is confused about his sexuality!***

The story itself is just this side of nonsense. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that the narrative hinges on retrieving a misplaced testicle that was formerly attached to Hitler. For reasons that aren’t really clear, the testicle appears to have some magical properties. At one point it is accidently ingested by one of the Rifle Brigade (BY THE GAY ONE! HAHAHA!) and what follows is a nightmare of ethnic stereotyping wherein the man goose steps about and shouts in nonsense faux German before vomiting up the Evil Essence in a black wave of putrescence that seemingly immobilizes the enemies.**** With the enemy soundly vomited on and no other obstacles in their path, the Rifle Brigade return to England for a cup of tea and a shot of a dusty warehouse filled to the brim with testicles in specimen jars. I guess the point of the story was, the British like balls? Frankly I don’t know.

Reading the Rifle Brigade is an exercise in stamina and masochism. It requires you to be a fan of Ennis’ work, or a 10 year old boy fascinated by genital jokes. I persevered this book on the hook that if I just read one more page, the pay off would certainly be there. Just one more panel, and something interesting would happen. That bit of Ennis brilliance never came though. There was no introspective moment for the characters; they are static. Their circumstances are not changed, and it’s not even clear if the war was negatively or positively impacted by their actions. The story exists in a void of causality that leaves you wondering why you bothered reading it.

* Yes, I'm talking about you Liefeld.
** This is why I never attempt it.
*** Gay is hilarious!
**** No seriously. This not only happens, it's the climax of the book.

Who Watches The Watchmen: Get Dressed?

2009-04-28T12:35:00.001-07:00

Officially licensed Watchmen Halloween costumes [Rubies Costumes]

PR and Q / OG Seebelow: You know how you guys think nothing could be worse than The Spirit?

2009-04-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

How much yes? Fuck yes is how much.

Brett Ratner to Direct Youngblood Film [Newsarama]

The Indian production company Reliance Big Entertainment has optioned Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood for film treatment, with Brett Ratner attached to direct, this according to Variety.

“Most* of the great graphic novels are gone, and ‘Youngblood’ is one of the few comicbooks left** with tentpole potential,” Ratner told the trade. “It was a real personal passion project for me, and a lot of people wanted (‘Youngblood’), but the amazing thing about the guys at Reliance is the speed with which they’re able to move***.”

Reliance has also acquired the rights to French graphic novel Fly Wires (which will be renamed Infinity) for Ratner’s production company as well.

Both projects are being fast-tracked for production.****

This won't the Ratner's first foray into the world of comic books. He directed Marvel/Fox's 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand following Bryan Singer's departure from the franchise to direct Superman Returns.

* Or, apparently, "all", if they've sunk this low
** I wouldn't tentpole Youngblood if it were one of the few comicbooks left
*** I don't expect Liefeld exactly dragged his feet in accepting any and all offers
**** "Quick, make the film before someone reads the book!"

Related Youngblood news:
First Look - Obama in Youngblood [Newsarama]

PR and Q / OG Seebelow: Lesbosuccubatfemme.

2009-04-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

DC readies lesbian Batwoman for take-off [The Guardian UK]

Fans at Comic Con in New York this week were treated to a sneak preview of DC Comics's highest profile gay superhero, Batwoman, described by her creator as "the kind of sexy that makes you think of a succubus with a very bad attitude"*.

With fiery red hair, a skin-tight leather cat suit and knee-high red stiletto boots - complete with a blood red bat symbol on her ample chest - Batwoman, the alter ego of Kathy Kane, is set to make her debut on bookshelves this June in Detective Comics 854. Her appearance follows the shock – apparent – demise of Bruce Wayne, the multi-millionaire philanthropist who has protected the streets of Gotham City as Batman since 1939.

Writer Greg Rucka said that Batwoman - who first appeared in 1957 but was killed off in 1979 - was "exceptionally cool".

"Yes, she's a lesbian. She's also a redhead**. It is an element of her character. It is not her character. If people are going to have problems with it, that's their issue," he told Comic Book Resources. "Frankly, she should be judged on her merits.***"

Kane was first outed in 2006 when it was revealed that she was the former lover of Gotham detective Renee Montoya. She has made passing appearances in the comics since, with June's outing**** to be her most high-profile.

"Nobody has really seen her. They don't really know who this person is*****," said Rucka. "You are going to figure out what she does, why she does it and who she has to help her. I obviously get into what makes her different than Batman. They share a lot, more than including a bat. But they have different techniques and different approaches.******"

He expects readers to be shocked when they read the first issue. "I think people are going to fall out of their seats," he said, providing the first few pages of the comic at his blog.

* I'll have you know, all the succubi I've known have been absolute sweethearts.
** Oh, she's multi-dimensional.
*** For instance, have you heard that she's the kind of sexy that makes you think of a succubus with a bad attitude?
**** OH COME ON
***** Some sort of lesbian Batwoman?
****** For instance, Batman is the kind of vindictive drive that makes me think of a minotaur with heel spurs. Totally different scene.

I like Greg Rucka and everything, but these talking points are b-to-the-ullshit. Over in his own Livejournal, Rucka is kicking up a fuss over fans making hasty pre-judgments of the character, specifically as assuming that she's going to be ... well, some sort of succubus with a bad attitude, I suppose. In particular, he's grossly offended at the notion that she's just another hot lesbian in stiletto heels produced to titillate the market and generally reducing female homosexuality to a heterosexual masturbatory aid. Rucka's response is to, arguably, obsess over the conditions of the criticism rather than the intent, as he points out that Batwoman's boots are clearly quite functional and clearly not stilettos. He also follows up with this shot, showing us plainly that those boots are made for kickin', and there's certainly nothing gratuitously sexual about the character ... not at, um ... not at all ... not, um ... ... ...

Tits. A top so tight that you see each delineated boob and areolae. Oh, and a bit of a cameltoe.

BAD ATTITUDE.

Who Watches The Watchmen: Does it come with a split-open dog's skull pen holder?

2009-04-27T10:49:00.001-07:00

Rorschach Desk Blotter [Things From Another World]

Who Watches the Watchmen

2009-04-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

As more and more reviews of Watchmen come in, I think my favorite to date comes courtesy of Debbie Schlussel who calls it a film fit only for a moron and a vapid, indecent human being Her site is a parental watchdog site which rates movies in terms of Karl Marxes, promotes books about the Islamic menace, and ends the review with a plea that "G-d help this country (minus Hollywood)." A glorious example of the oeuvre.

She ends her review with an anecdote about a woman she berates and loathes because the woman (a single mother, gasp!) presumes that her own ten-year old son "knows it's (movies) not real and he knows the difference between right and wrong." Debbie's estimation of this boy's future? "Her son is going to grow up to be messed up."

The "Watchmen" Lie: Hollywood Sends More Depravity Your Kids' Way Costumed as "Superhero" Flick [DebbieSchlussel.com]

While I'm on the subject of batshit Watchmen-related material, screenwriter David Hayter recently wrote an open letter to ... well, the haters, I suppose ... wherein he suggests that fans of the film are much like rape victims. Rape victims who fall in love with their rapists. And he means it as a compliment.

An Open Letter From WATCHMEN Screenwriter David Hayter [HardcoreNerdity.com]