I'm no explosives expert, but...

... I think Batwing is engaging in some serious CYA behavior in this week's Justice League International Annual:

"The device was small. Undetectable." Seriously, dude?

Let me make it easier for you: HIS ENTIRE TORSO IS COVERED IN EXPLOSIVES.

Batwing scans for explosives like I scan the refrigerator: "Honey, where's the mustard?"
"It's in the fridge."
"I don't see it."
"Sheesh, it's right in front of you."
...
"The jar of Grey Poupon was small. Undetectable."

Boom.

Rob

Clark + Diana? For now, maybe.

DC recently announced a Superman/Wonder Woman romance (starting in tomorrow's Justice League #12), and I'm curious to see what DC does with it. My biggest fear is that it will derail some of Brian Azzarello's plans for Diana in the regular Wonder Woman comic; it seems more of a Superman storyline than a Wonder Woman one to me, although that's mostly because Wonder Woman has been refreshingly free of crossovers with the rest of the DCU.

Kissytime.

I don't think it will last at all -- probably a year, maybe a little more -- but that doesn't mean I think it's not worth doing. (That remains to be seen by the stories we get.) Hopefully both characters will be treated with respect throughout the storyline, and the relationship will be dealt with maturely once it ends. I like the idea of exes in the DCU -- relationships which were once one thing and are now another. If they want to do that with Superman and Wonder Woman, that's fine with me. It's a big step, but it doesn't have to be a disastrous one.

Interestingly, AP writer Matt Moore writes this in today's story about the couple: "One aspect that did not survive the relaunch: Lois Lane's role as Superman's love. She's still around, but the two have never dated, nor are they likely to."

That's gullible to the point of ridiculousness. Moore is swallowing whole this temporary PR push, and ignoring everything we know about these characters (not just Superman and Wonder Woman, but all long-running, serial fiction characters) periodically reverting back to their iconic forms. Not only is Lois likely to date Superman, but history indicates she's all but guaranteed to. In the unlikely event that the Superman/Wonder Woman couple sets the world on fire (and I honestly don't think it's even intended to; I think DC wants people to buy it, but they don't necessarily want us to like it or root for it), it'll take ten years instead of 3-5, but Lois and Clark are ultimately bound to fall back into each other's orbits, and eventually date (and possibly marry) once again. Lois's gravity will always pull Clark in, and rightfully so.

Which is why the deviations are so potentially interesting to me. But whether they crash or fly is all in the execution.

Rob

But It's Just So Hard to Care, Every Time I Do That Thing I Do

A couple weeks have gone by, and have I done the thing I do about which you do not care? Oh yes, my friend. Twice.

A look at DC's digital releases for November 3 and the deluge of November 10.

Rob

This Thing I Do That You Will Have No Interest In

Over at the Captain Comics site, I've been blogging once a week for the past two months about DC Comics' digital releases through Comixology. It's largely a game of pattern recognition -- DC launched its digital initiative a couple of months ago, and I've decided that there might be something to learn by keeping track of what books it releases, when, and with what frequency. Primarily it's an exercise in bookkeeping. Most people that read this blog who'd be interested in such things probably know that already.But there are a handful of you -- hey Greg! hey Geoff! hey Rob! -- who might not.

So here's a link to the latest column, and here's a link to the lot of 'em. And while you're over there, consider stopping by the boards, too -- it's really the friendliest comics site around.

Rob

Walking with Superman

So there's this year-long storyline in Superman in which our hero decides to take a walk across the breadth of America. He doesn't explain his motivations for this, though it seems to be precipitated by a woman slapping his face because while he was in outer space, her husband died of cancer, which she believes he could have cured somehow. Superman was off in space at the time, trying to keep 10,000 other Kryptonians from conquering Earth (under which rule, presumably, her husband still would have died). But the details don't matter too much to me (though the notion that this is actually happening as a reaction to Superman witnessing his own people wiped out a second time is intriguing). In new writer J. Michael Straczynski's first story, Superman gets slapped, Superman goes walking. And -- I hoped -- we would get a year's worth of done-in-one stories where Superman would come into a city, identify and solve a problem, and then walk on. He's Shane, he's The Lone Ranger, he's Superman.

And these problems, I expected, wouldn't be entirely super-villain oriented. In walking on Earth, Superman would be encountering the recession, corporate greed, pollution, maybe the effects of global warming, who knows? It'd be a return of the Social Justice Superman from the Golden Age. The guy who kept landlords from raising their rents and evicting goodhearted people. The guy who puts the heat on corrupt senators. This guy (click to enlarge and read):

"You can announce that henceforth my mine will be the safest in the country"

 And to a certain extent, I was right. In the most recent issue, #702, Superman walks through Detroit. He encounters tons of people who are out of work, but he also meets up with some technologically advanced aliens living incognito in one of the city's neighborhoods. They fight, they talk, and Superman wonders whether to evict them from Earth or not. (They've fled a tyrannical government, and argue that their situation was no more tenable than an exploding planet.) Basically, he tells them they should be doing something for the community.

Later on, Superman brings them a guy who's sick and obviously dying, and they use their technology to heal him. And then Superman has an idea, and this happens (click to enlarge and read):

"It is expected that as many people as were fired during the automobile shutdowns will be rehired to handle the wave of equipment slated to be produced by these factories."

Immediately. Detroit's unemployment problems are solved!

Now, this is definitely over-simplifying real-world issues. I got to the point where the aliens set up a medical research firm and gave everyone jobs, and I thought "Oh, come on!" But then I realized something:

That's exactly how something like this would have been handled in the Golden Age. Find a problem, find a solution, and Outta Here! (I mean, look at how that Golden Age mine-safety story was wrapped up. In one panel!)

And while that isn't necessarily satisfying to today's readers (it wasn't initially satisfying to me), I think it's an interesting choice for JMS to make, particularly because it goes against the grain. And I have to consider -- do I really want five issues with pages devoted to the aliens putting this company together? There's something to be said for getting it done and capping it off with a happy (though facile) ending.

When this storyline started, my biggest hope for it was that it would give us done-in-one stories of the "Social Justice" Superman of the Golden Age. And in this issue, that's exactly what we got.

So now that I've seen it, I've got to decide... is that really what I wanted?

I'm not sure. It's still not entirely satisfying to me, but I have to admit it's something of a catharsis to see someone essentially punch unemployment in the face.

Rob

Bat-Call-Of-Duty-4 Must Look AWESOME.

Okay, we know Batman is big on the Bat-bling. He pimps out his car, his motorcycle, his helicopter (a whirlybat!), his plane... when these things are comin' at ya, you know who's behind the wheel. It's all part of the "strike fear into the hears of criminals" motif he's got going. Ever since his parents died, this is the shit he lives for.

I understand. It's a big deal, and a guy's gotta have hobbies. But as I was looking through this month's Batman 700, I finally got around to looking at the four pages of Batcave schematics -- the sort of thing that bores me to tears, usually. And I noticed this inset picture, of the Bat-Computer.

It's shaped like a bat.

I love this. It's like, after all those other things, he just couldn't help himself. He just had to spring for the Bat-monitors. "I know know one will see it but me, Robin and Alfred, but... can't I just want something nice? Is that so wrong? I'm rich, I can afford it. A guy can only have so many batarangs, right? Besides, if it's not bat-shaped... I mean, no one will know, but I'll know. I just... I don't want some normal, square-shaped computer nagging me in the back of my head, throwing me off my game. No, I've gotta go with the bat-shape." Batman has become as obsessive-compulsive as Little Dot.


Now I'm dying to see what the Batcave toilets look like.

Rob

Okay... SLOWLY spreading like kudzu

I've *finally* got a new post up at Blog@Newsarama... though I can't seem to get the proportions right on that illustration for the life of me. It's simple pixel division, but something keeps squatting the image down to a square.

Rob

DCU: Decisions

I just read issue 1 of DCU Decisions at lunch—and it was better than I expected. It's co-written by Bill Willingham, one of my favorite writers (and a conservative) and Judd Winick, a writer I used to like a lot but now tend to avoid like the plague (and a liberal). I expected Crossfire in comics form. What I got was very different.

There's actually very little discussion of real-world politics in this (although we learn that Green Arrow is voting Democratic—gasp! shock!—and can infer that one other longtime, well-known character is likely to vote Republican). But mostly, it seems to be focusing on the interpolitics of the superhuman community, and how Green Arrow's decision to endorse a (fictional) candidate in the Democratic primaries (which he initially does as a misstep during an interview, rather than intentionally) could change how heroes conduct themselves in public and relate to each other in private.

Plus there's a mystery, which is nice.

I kind of expected something that people on both sides of the political aisle would find something to hate in this book, but so far it seems a little to vague for that, and quite possibly better for it.

(Something of interest to me is that this cover seems to have gone through several iterations. The first one was saw—and maybe it was never intended as a cover, just promo art—was the Green Arrow endorsement poster. Next is this cover, which I took directly from DC's website a couple of minutes ago. But the cover I actually bought off the stands is this cover with one addition: "Heroes Don't Vote" is spraypainted over the poster. I wonder if this addition is the reason the comic was pulled from last week's shipment and delayed until this week? Maybe someone at DC or Warners thought the cover would be seen as an actual, unambiguous endorsement of a Dem?)

Rob

Will the Real Mavis Trent Please Stand Up?

This is Mavis Trent, a supporting character in the Silver Age Hawkman series, a museum curator who would vie for Carter (Hawkman) Hall's affections, even though he was married to Shayera. (I found this image at Scott Tipton's Hawkman retrospective.)


She appeared at least into the 1980s Hawkman series, where it's possible she was killed. (It might have been a fakeout, though.) After that, I lost track of Hawkman for a while; it could be that she appeared in Hawkword, too. If she wasn't dead, that is.

But wherever she appeared, there was one place you could count on her not being:


A Marvel comic. The shiny lady in the center is Mavis Trent, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who is (unbeknownst to her bosses) doubling as a muckraking blogger for True Believers, a TMZ-style website in the Marvel universe. (It's also the name of the comic, written by Cary Bates and drawn by Paul Gulacy.) It's a fun read, looking at the seamier side of the Marvel universe. But I've gotta wonder what bus Mavis took to get her from Earth-1 to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier.

Rob

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

March, 2009.

It looks much lighter than recent Batman shows (to say nothing of the new movie!) -- and man, is it ice cream to me. And that theme music!

Rob

Flash: Rebirth

Sweet.

Rob

Alan Moore Knows the Score

And now he needn't be the only one. You can play, too!

It's like someone at DC and Warners realized that it's actually impossible for Moore to be madder at them than he has been for years. Might as well go for broke.

Rob

Okay, now they're trying to make me laugh

Here's the latest in a series of horrible covers for DC's Titans comic: Here, pretzel-loving Princess Koriand'r notices a few stray crumbs on the corner of Nightwing's mouth.


This cover is somewhat better than Joe Benitez's recent efforts, but ugh just the same. For Christ's sake, someone rob a bank or something. Anything to stop the kissing.

(Curious to what the inside of this book's like? Kevin Huxford documents the atrocities of issue 2. Not for the faint of heart or the sharp of vision.)

Rob

My New Favorite Superhero Costume

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Most Excellent Superbat!


Yes, it's ugly as hell.

And I know it's ugly as hell. It's a ridiculous amalgamation of Superman's and Batman's costumes by a Japanese superhero. But look at that yellow.

In the margins of the Final Crisis Sketchbook, there's a note from artist J.G. Jones explaining that the shapes are the shapes used in the negative space in Superman's stylized "S" design. But it doesn't explicitly state why they're used.

He's Japanese. The S has no literal meaning for him. It's just a shape. The space around it are just shapes. And to those hero-worshipping kids (and perhaps much of the DCU's Japan), those are the shapes that symbolize Superman.

And as butt-ugly as it is, the solid thinking underpinning this costume impresses the hell out of me.

Rob

Matt Sturges: I Like the Way He Thinks

My hopes are high for new Blue Beetle writer Matt Sturges. First of all, he's co-writer of Jack of Fables, which among its other virtues, has sported what is arguably the greatest comic book cover of all time. But in Jack, he and Bill Willingham have fleshed out the most thoroughly despicable cad ever, and crafted a relentlessly inventive side-trip in the Fables universe.

Blue Beetle Jaimie Reyes is nothing like Jack. He's a genuinely good kid. He wants to do right by everyone, no matter the cost to himself. It's a classic superhero moral outlook, mixed in with all the drama of high school life. It's one of DC's best books, and more people should be reading it.

Michael May at Blog@Newsarama has posted an interview with Sturges that's worth checking out in its entirety. Here's the part where he assuages my fears that the title will take a massive swerve in direction:

One thing that’s really important to me is that I want Blue Beetle to continue to be a book that’s as fun for my twelve-year-old nephew as it is for me and my friends. I think you do that by being smart but not oblique, and clear but not condescending. Kids don’t want dumbed-down versions of grown-up comics; they want smart comics about things that matter to everybody, and without the adult content that would send them either to therapy or detention.

And here's the part where I find out he obsesses over the same things I do:

I’m pretty thoughtful about comedy; Bill Willingham and I have had conversations about which is the funnier item to poke someone with: a spatula or a slotted spoon. You’d probably think spatula, which would be the right answer in prose, because spatula is a funny word; but visually, a slotted spoon is actually slightly funnier. Because it’s rounded.

And here's my favorite part:

I have this green t-shirt that I bought from the CBLDF one year at the San Diego Con. It’s got James Kochalka’s Fancy Froglin on it and he’s saying “I am wearing little pants to hide my genitals. It is the law!” I always get a second look when I’m wearing that thing, which is funny, although one time I forgot and wore it to pick my seven-year-old daughter up at school, which was less funny.

I have this teeshirt too. But it's too small for me, so I passed it on to Kathy. Who wears it to paint, because there's no way she's gonna wear it out of the house.

Long story short, I think Blue Beetle's in good hands.

Rob

My In-Store Flip-Thrus

1) Say what you want about Countdown, but comics may not see a finer moment this week than Mary Marvel repeatedly clubbing Donna Troy with Kyle Rayner's unconscious body. There's glee in that there panel. Pure, maniac glee.

2) Titans #1? I need to consult with a polytheist: Judeo-Christian tradition does not have enough gods to convey how assuredly god-awful this book looks. It stings the eyes and makes the brain cry uncle. Maybe the captions are good, but there was nothing in the art to make me want to risk reading even one.

Rob

Inspiration, Move Me Brightly

Scipio has a really interesting examination of DC's villainous "inspirational poster" house ads at the Absorbascon. I'm always fascinated by his essays on the iconic underpinnings of comics; this one's no exception.

Rob

Great Moments in Fanboy Hyperbole

So I've been rereading the infamous issues of Justice League of America in which the traditional League disbanded and Aquaman set up a new, less powerful League in its place. His rationale was dedication: Too many original Leaguers were on other missions when they were needed by the JLA, so he only took on people who could devote themselves entirely to the group. (This echoes the authorial complaint the the JLA is tough to write because of all the coordination between the characters' solo books. "Dedicated" Leaguers = No Solo Books.) Because of the location of this group's initial headquarters, this group is known as the Justice League Detroit.

Anyway, I've discovered that the book, while flawed, isn't the stinkfest it's often remembered as. Unlike the by-the-book issues of JLA before it, it actually feels like it's trying something new. It's as concerned with characterization as it is action, even if the characterization isn't particularly deep. There's down-time; we get to see the Martian Manhunter learn to make chili. That has to count for something.

And as an added bonus, there is simply some great hyperbole in the letters columns, as old-school JLA fans fired off frothing complaints. My favorite comes from Michael Pickens of Utica, Ohio, writing to JLA editor Alan Gold in the lettercol of issue #239:

"Congratulations, Mr. Gold. By allowing this drastic turn-around, you've committed the most irresponsible error in judgment since Judas Iscariot."

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, a few issues later, someone says that Aquaman is "worse than Hitler." Think I'm kidding? Tell it to Mark Ryan of St. Louis, Missouri (issue #243).

Rob

This Is The Sound Of My Jaw Dropping

In retrospect, that Titans ad looks pretty good. This one (the cover for issue #3) has so much stupid packed onto a single page that it's hard to know where to start. Chin-sucking Starfire? Rubbery Flash? All the cheesy Photoshop lens flare effects?

Naw, it's gotta be Sharper-Image Cyborg. He looks like something you dangle over your flower pots to make your weed grow faster.

Rob
(Remember, you can click the image to enbiggen the awfulness!)

Any Questions?

Yeah, just one: What the holy hell is going on with Flash's anatomy? Is he smuggling deli ham under his armpit or something? And after more than three years of putting her at the forefront of the DCU, the Powers That Be still can't come up with a viable superhero name for Donna Troy?

Okay, that's three questions. But seriously: no matter how happy I am to see the 80s-era Titans back together, this art makes baby angels cry.

Rob