Bags and Boards

Notes: Coover, Brokeback Pose, Fatale, Movies and the Cover of the Year

2012-01-03T14:32:00.000-08:00

Some links of note:

Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter does a very enjoyable interview with Colleen Coover, whose work I particularly liked on the short stories in X-Men: First Class (the comic, not the movie) as well as in Banana Sunday.
Here's a hilarious Tumblr account from The Beat called The Brokeback Pose, devoted to all those cover shots of scantily clad heroines twisting in just the right way to show off all their assets in two dimensions.
As long as we're talking about women comics characters, you could do a lot worse than to track down the few issues that made it out of Broadway Comics' Fatale. I recall it was a good series that was getting better, but in the free-fall sales era of the mid-1990s, quality was rarely a factor in determining which companies and titles stuck. Jim Shooter talks about the creation of that series on his must-read blog here.
Roger Ebert explains the decline in moviegoing is due to high ticket and concession prices, an increasingly annoying moviegoing experience, and the poor quality of most movies. I can't dispute any of those, and think the price and quality issues also affect comics much the same way.
Artist Dave Johnson does a great job on his blog of running down the good and the bad in each week's batch of comic book covers. Now he's picked his cover of the year, the super-cool Joker image Jock created for Detective Comics #880.

The Joy of Anthologies: Why 'Dark Horse Presents' Rocks

2012-01-03T13:16:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite reads each month is Dark Horse Presents, which was relaunched this past summer after a more than 10 years of being out of print and a few years running as an early digital comics title on MySpace.com. It's an excellent reminder of the value of anthologies and of the rewards (and perils) of sampling material you most likely never would have tried.

I rarely read the original DHP, which had a long run as the publisher's flagship title from 1986-2000. The original series was, as I recall, a normal size black-and-white comic book that helped launch everything from Paul Chadwick's Concrete to Frank Miller's Sin City and John Byrne's Next Men. I did, however, enjoy other anthologies, including the occasional issue of Negative Burn and, being a big 1980s Marvel fan, Marvel Comics Presents, of which i own a complete set of all 175 issues. (And before anyone asks, I somehow completely missed Action Comics Weekly and have yet to read an issue. I've never heard anyone talk about it or recommend anything in it.)

The new DHP deviates from the comics anthology norm by being in color — the market for black and white these days appears limited to folks well-established in that format such as Jeff Smith and Terry Moore — and being extra thick, with most issues clocking in at 80 pages. That makes each book nice and thick — you could line up a nice run of these on your bookshelf and they would look pretty cool — and continues the prestige format of the 1980s that I still like quite a bit.

The content, though, is the real reason to buy this book, and I say that acknowledging right off the bat that not everything in here is good or even things that I like. But any book that serves up new Concrete short stories as well as new serials from the likes of Howard Chaykin, Neal Adams and Jim Steranko is worth a look. Of those, I like Concrete the best because I think the character works very well in that format and Chadwick always produces thoughtful material. Chaykin's "Marked Man," a pulpy tale of a thief hiding in plain sight, also is a good read. Adams' "Blood" is, however, a mess to read with really nice art — very much like Batman: Odyssey though not as out of place here as it is on that iconic character.

A lot of that stuff I would probably buy and read even if it was published on its own. So when the books also include entertaining series I'm only somewhat familiar with, like Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, Michael Gilbert's Mr. Monster and Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson's Beasts of Burden, it's a real bonus. And then there's some completely new stuff that adds even more to the mix, my favorite so far being Eric Powell's one-off short "Isolation" in issue #5.

Again, not all the features are to my liking, but skipping over a story every now and then is a lot easier when it's one of 10 or so stories in the book. And getting 10 or so stories, including a few brand-new serials or one-shots each issue, is a much cheaper way to try new material or read up on new creators than buying a couple full issues of just about anything else. The joy of anthologies comes in finding new things you didn't expect and liking them. I'm having the same experience with prose, working my way through for the first time Harlan Ellison's original Dangerous Visions volume on my Kindle. I'm enjoying that experience for many of the same reasons. The other thing I like about this kind of anthology is it will get you eventually in on the ground floor of something cool, some new comic that will debut in the pages of DHP and go on to be a hit on its own, either as a comic or something else.

I hope DHP sells well enough to be around for a long time — and that its success prompts more publishers to put some of their weight into projects like this that allow for the kind of experimentation comics desperately needs to stay a vital and interesting medium.

Drinking to a Happy, Comics-Filled 2012

2012-01-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm celebrating the new year today, so a happy 2012 to everyone! These beers are served in some of the excellent Toon Tumblers my wife gave me for Christmas. I especially love the Dave Cockrum X-Men design. See you soon!

Heavy Lifting: DC Comics — The New 52 Omnibus

2011-12-14T21:42:00.000-08:00

Getting back to DC's New 52, there's an interesting event element to the relaunch that is exemplified by the omnibus edition of DC Comics: The New 52.

This is a massive book — thicker than any comics collection I can think of. Even Dave Sim's Cerebus collections of Church and State, which was told in 60 or so issues, took two super-thick paperback volumes to tell. According to Amazon.com, which is selling the book for $89.99, it weighs 7.7 pounds! Dimensions are 11.3 x 7.4 x 2.8 inches, and 1,216 pages. Compare that to Cerebus: Church & State Vol. 2 at 630 pages and 1.8 pounds, and Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus Vol. 1 at 1,088 page and a whopping 8.8 pounds!

This obviously indicates some advances in publishing technology, as it was only about 12 or so years ago that DC released a slipcased, hardcover edition of Crisis on Infinite Earths and said publicly that it was unlikely to be reprinted in that format because it was so difficult to manufacture so thick a volume. Of course, since then, there have been several reprintings of the series in different formats, including an Absolute edition.

I think this is a title that will not stay in print for a long time, because it's such a strange collection. There's no complete story here. It is simply a snapshot of this crucial month in which DC relaunched all its titles. That may make this in time a particularly pricey collector's item, though at $150 new it's already pretty pricey.

The presentation on this book is nice, though it is so thick that copy and panels near the spine can be hard to read. I recall no double-page spreads in these issues, but this format would make such pages difficult to read at best. The design of the dust jacket is terrific, with a great spine design and a Jim Lee-drawn Justice League spread printed onto the actual hardcover underneath.

And I can't help but wonder if it would be at all feasible to do a volume two, and possibly make the entire DC Universe line available to die-hard fans in a single monthly book like this. That would be pretty cool if highly unlikely.

Next: More comments on The New 52, the anthology series Dark Horse Presents and a look at X-Men: Regenesis.

New 52 Notes: Green Lantern books, OMAC, Supergirl, Wonder Woman

2011-11-23T17:50:00.001-08:00

Reading Green Lantern #3 and Green Lantern Corps #3, I’m impressed by the quality of the latter, technically second-tier title for delivering the kind of action and outer-spacey adventure I like to see from the title. Though it got quite cluttered in the second issue, the “Ring Slayers” story shines again in a very good third issue. The former also is very good, but I don’t recall Hal Jordan ever being this much of a hot-headed jerk. Reading these together, it almost feels like Hal and Guy Gardner swapped roles.

OMAC #3 delivers pretty much the same story as the first two issues did — Kevin Kho lands himself in an odd place where he has to fight a powerful and turns into OMAC to win the day. It’s still good, but overly serialized in a bad way and the overall plot is being pushed too far into the background. I still love the art, which has obvious Kirby roots but also a nice modern sheen to give it a contemporary look.

In retrospect, I think the first two issues of Supergirl should have been one issue — either a condensed version of the two-part story or a double-size issue. It just reads that way to me. Supergirl #3 takes things in a different direction, as Supergirl tries to find out the truth about where she is and how she got here and acquires a new (at least I think he’s new) nemesis in Simon Tycho. So far, I like the writing on this book and the take writers Michael Green and Mike Johnson have on the character. The art takes a slight detour here, with Bill Reinhold’s inking and Paul Mounts’ coloring darkening the overall bright look of the first two issues. It’s not an improvement, but it’s definitely not the kind of bright and inviting look that seem to best suit this character.

Wonder Woman #3 was the best issue to date of the series, which itself is one of the best of The New 52. It’s hard to say too much about this without giving away rather significant origin-related spoilers. But just about everything in this comic book works, from Brian Azzarello’s plot and script to the art by Cliff Chiang and outstanding colors by Matthew Wilson. Excellent stuff.

Checking Out 'Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts'

2011-11-22T13:15:00.001-08:00

Last week, I had a chance to see the new documentary film Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts in its Los Angeles premiere screening at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood. This is the second movie — I have to resist my tendency to call any movie a "film," because very few of them are made with it anymore — from the Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, publishers of such fine tomes as my own Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen (buy it now!). Their previous film, Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods, was a bona-fide hit with comics fans and got a lot of attention in the mainstream press and was screened at conventions and film festivals. The Ellis version is made by the same filmmakers, headed up by director and film editor Patrick Meaney and d.p. Jordan Rennert — both of whom attended this L.A. premiere screening.

Here's the trailer for the film:

Like the Morrison doc, Captured Ghosts is an engaging portrayal of the writer behind such huge comic book hits as Transmetropolitan, Planetary, StormWatch, The Authority, Global Frequency, Red, NextWave, Doktor Sleepless, Ministry of Space, Ocean, Desolation Jones, Strange Kiss, Bad World and FreakAngels. The film follows a typical path of starting at the beginning and detailing Ellis' life from childhood through to becoming a writer and his extensive impact on the industry. Meaney and his crew do a great job of keeping a movie that is probably 95 percent talking heads moving at a fast and entertaining clip. There is a lot of ground to cover in this movie because Ellis is the most influential writer of comics since Chris Claremont (more on him in a bit).

I first came across Ellis' work on Transmetropolitan, of which I picked up the first three issues after seeing some good reviews online in the ancient internet days of 1997. It instantly became my favorite series of the moment — due in no small part to the lead character being a kick-ass journo — and set off a bit of Ellis-mania. When the one-two punch of Authority and Planetary hit in 1999, Ellis had definitely arrived and the rest has been, as they say history. Though his presence in mainstream comics has dwindled in recent years — mostly by his choice to work with a publisher like Avatar that will allow him do anything he wants without the interference that working on Marvel or DC properties entails — he's still one of the most popular and well-known writers in comics.

The movie has a slightly different approach than Talking With Gods, as Ellis himself is self-deprecating and even humble when talking seriously about his work and its impact. A lot of the portrait comes through from the interviews with writers and artists and editors he's worked with over the years. Many of those tales are quite sweet and touching, most notably the story of how Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick first met on the old Warren Ellis Forum, began dating and now are married with two children.

The many interviews — Meaney says he did about 50 of them for the movie — is a who's who of comic book creators and other celebrities, and runs a huge gamut from Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, John Cassaday and Joss Whedon, to Wil Wheaton, Patton Oswalt and Helen Mirren, who starred in the movie adaptation of Red and is from the same town in England as Ellis. The pacing manages to keep it all very entertaining and packs in a lot of information. It's clear from all this that Ellis is much-admired as a writer and valued as a friend.

For those who know Ellis' biography and bibliography, there's not a ton of new information save for some details on Ellis' life prior to his breaking into comics writing and some neat bits on Ellis' reputation among serious futurists. And there's not much information that puts his accomplishments into perspective, especially for non comics readers. It's all a bit jumbled and even though you come out of it feeling entertained, it's still not really clear from the film why what Ellis has done is of such note.

And it's a problem compounded for viewers not familiar with Ellis, his comics work or the comic book industry in general. One Variety colleague of mine said the film was "interminable" for non-comics folks and a far cry from Terry Zwigoff's classic Crumb. I can't disagree on that point, but I also don't think this movie is made for anyone other than fans of Ellis and his books who want to know more about both subjects. And as such, it's a success, and a film well worth checking out.

In the Q and A after the screening Meaney and Rennert said they had interviewed Ellis in two day-long sessions a year apart. They shot at a Holiday Inn in England near Ellis' home because it is the only hotel in the area that has a room that could accommodate Ellis' cigarette habit. The bulk of the interviews were done in the intervening year, and the film cost about $10,000 to make, with much of the donations coming from Kickstarter.

To see the film, head over here and scroll down for a list of upcoming screenings or here to pre-order the movie on DVD; it's due out in February.

Which is about as natural a segue as there is to mention Meaney's next project, a shorter documentary on Claremont's run as X-Men writer from 1975-1991. (The project has reached its funding goal on Kickstarter, which is good news.) The project is called Comics in Focus: Chris Claremont's X-Men and will include a round-table discussion between Claremont and his former X-Men editors Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson in its 45-minute run time. It looks like a great project, and I look forward to seeing it when it comes out.

Check out this cool early look at the project:

Links, Layout and Other Housekeeping Notes

2011-11-22T13:07:00.001-08:00

Readers may have noticed some tweaks to the design of this blog. I decided last week to update the links and did something screwy to the previous design, which I created in Artisteer, and could not restore it the way it was. So I took the opportunity to create something similar but different. It was nice to find that Blogger has really updated its template and layout functionality, so I no longer need Artisteer to get a look that I like.

Secondly, I updated a lot of the links so they should all work. If you find one that doesn't, please let me know. Also, if you have a comics-related site that you think should be included, let me know and I'll add it asap.

I've had a few folks approach me with some sponsored links — easy enough to figure out which they are. If anyone else is interested in sponsored links or buying an ad, let me know and I'm sure we can work something out.

And lastly, if anyone's interested in just giving a donation of any kind to support the blog, I've added a Paypal donation button at right. No donation is required, but any amount you feel like sharing is much appreciated.

Reviews: Hulk #1, DD #5, Cold War #1, Last of the Greats #1, Aquaman #2, Justice League #3

2011-11-16T21:01:00.001-08:00

The Incredible Hulk #1 was better than I expected. Not having read the book in years, I missed out on and don’t understand most of the Red Hulk stuff or what mental state Bruce Banner and the Hulk are in these days. I therefore expected to be confused, but wasn’t, though I’m sure it helped that I recognized the Mole Man’s underground minions. Writer Jason Aaron did a good of job of putting it all together and making sure there was some actual action in a first issue. The art by Marc Silvestri et. al was quite good — definitely Silvestri’s distinctive style but amped up with some nice detail that came through quite well in the inks and was well-complemented by Sunny Gho’s colors. That said, I”m not interested enough in the Hulk to make this a regular read at $3.99 a pop.

Daredevil #5 is another terrific issue from Mark Waid and Marcos Martin. This reads very, very smoothly and is clear enough that I think the average reader could pick it up and understand pretty much the whole thing. It looks incredible, too. Martin and colorist Javier Rodriguez deserve very high marks for making such a great-looking book.

Cold War #1 is a new, period espionage thriller from John Byrne that I was mildly disappointed with because I thought Byrne had done such a great job on the revived Next Men series. This isn’t quite as good as that, as it’s just a bit too restrained and dated. The dated part is on purpose, as though this is a series Byrne has wanted to do for decades, i.e., a time when this kind of thing would have been much more relevant. It’s still a nice modern Byrne comic, though, with solid art and decent storytelling. It just doesn’t have the kind of zip that a book like this should have.

The Last of the Greats #1 by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Brent Peebles is for me a tough one. I like the concept, which is that seven alien beings came to Earth and used their powers to solve many of mankind’s problems in return for demanding control and fealty from the people of Earth. People then turned on them, and all but one were killed. The issue begins with six humans coming to the last of these aliens, dubbed the “Greats,” and asking for his help with a fairly big problem. But I think the execution is talky and exposition heavy, and think this could have been much more compelling by show more than telling.

On to the DC relaunch books, Aquaman #2 was about the same as the first issue — a story that’s slick and commercial if not particularly deep — but it was the cover that struck me the most. My first thought was it was a recolored version of the cover to Star Wars #64, my least-favorite issue from the original Marvel series. It’s close enough to be an homage — or a swipe if you’re so inclined — but it’s far too distracting for me and I don’t know I will remember much else about this particular issue.

Justice League has been getting better with each issue and #3 is the best yet. Finally, we get to meet Wonder Woman, and she both charms and kicks ass. The action kicks into high gear with a huge invasion from Darkseid’s minions, while writer Geoff Johns delivers a nice chunk of the ongoing Cyborg origin subplot. It’s interesting to note the ways in which Jim Lee’s art has evolved as well as the ways its stayed the same. The finale’s introduction of Aquaman gives him a hairstyle, facial hair and costume straight out of 1996. Some other details, like the cops on the first page also look a bit dated. But the way Lee draws his heroic figures — both men and women — has improved tremendously from his days on The Uncanny X-Men, with anatomy and posing that’s overall more realistic and more solid looking. Wonder Woman here is a far cry from the somewhat plastic looking sexy Psylocke from way back in the day. Anyway, issue #4 looks like it’s going to be a barn-burner.

That’s only a fraction of the stack I’m looking to get through, so I may just stay up late and read funny books until my eyes pop out of my head to get a look at more New 52, the Fear Itself epilogues and more X-Men: Regenesis.

Ranking DC's New 52

2011-10-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

We're now about halfway into the second month of DC Comics' The New 52, and I'm now at the point where I have to pick and choose which books I really want to follow and plunk down my own money for. So I made a list and found it quite interesting.

The good news is that I am buying more DC Comics than I was before the relaunch, when I was pretty much just getting the core Batman books.

Starting with the books I liked enough to stick with, these are the titles I have bought the second issue for already:

Action Comics
Animal Man
Batgirl
Detective Comics
O.M.A.C.
Batman and Robin
Batwoman
Batman

These books I definitely plan to buy the second issue of:

Justice League
Wonder Woman
Superman
I, Vampire

That's 12 so far, just one title less than a quarter of the New 52 offerings.

These books I am very likely to pick up, availability and funds allowing:

Supergirl
Aquaman
Batman: The Dark Knight
Superboy
Green Lantern Corps
The Flash

So if I pick up those books, that means DC got me back for 18 of the 52 books. Again, that's not too bad — it's a lot more than I was getting.

These books just missed the mark for me, and I could reconsider:

Green Arrow
Swamp Thing
Deathstroke
Green Lantern
Blackhawks
Teen Titans

I admit that I had picked up Green Lantern #2 at the store last week, but changed my mind and put it back once I saw Love and Rockets: New Stories, Vol. 4 was out.

These titles were the mediocre group of the bunch — not bad, but also neither interesting enough or good enough to make me want to come back. And I'll admit, some of these surprised me.

Batwing
Hawk and Dove
Justice League International
Men of War
Static Shock
Stormwatch
Demon Knights
Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.
Grifter
Legion Lost
Mister Terrific
Resurrection Man
Birds of Prey
Blue Beetle
Captain Atom
DC Universe Presents
Legion of Super-Heroes
Nightwing
All-Star Western
The Fury of Firestorm
Green Lantern: New Guardians
The Savage Hawkman
Voodoo

That's a full 23 our of 52 books that fall into that category, nearly half of the line.

And then, there's the titles I actively disliked or thought were flat-out terrible.

Red Lanterns
Suicide Squad
Catwoman
Red Hood and the Outlaws
Justice League Dark

Again, not bad, but the relaunch hasn't really improved the quality of DC Comics, despite all the hype. I wish that the publisher had taken the time to dig deeper in terms of talent and offered up more surprises. They only get one shot at this — at least for the time being — so I would have liked there to be more comics that I could wholeheartedly recommend to both lapsed fans and new readers.

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #11 (Feb. 1963)

2011-10-16T17:28:00.000-07:00

“A Visit with the Fantastic Four” and "The Impossible Man"

Script by Stan Lee

Pencils by Jack Kirby

Inks by Dick Ayers

Letters by Art Simek

Another, much more successful experiment than the previous issue, this is a rare issue with two FF stories that is refreshing, fun and entertaining. Interestingly enough, Stan Lee writes in the intro to the second Marvel Masterworks volume of Fantastic Four stories that this issue was extremely unpopular at the time. Fans in particular disliked the Impossible Man as being too "silly" for so "serious" a comic book as The Fantastic Four.

Meet Willie Lumpkin, who Stan
played in his cameo in the 2004 Fantastic Four movie

This issue starts off with the behind-the-scenes story that Lee writes was inspired by the many fan letters Marvel had been receiving on the title. It has a lot of really fun little moments, starting with fans lining up at the newsstand to get the most-recent issue of the FF comic and a kid running down the street thrilled that his letter got published on the fan page. This great little story offers lots of fun bits, including the introduction of Willie Lumpkin and a lot of background on the FF themselves.

That background offers some particularly interesting tidbits, including details of Reed and Ben's service in World War II. This book has them in college together before the U.S. entered the war, so that would mean Reed and Ben would have have roughly been born in the early 1920s. That would have made them both about 40 in the comic – roughly the same age as Stan and Jack themselves were when they did this story. Not sure how old Sue's meant to be, though she can't be too much younger than Reed as it's said they have known each other since childhood and grew up as next door neighbors. Johnny, of course, is supposed to be about 16, which makes it unlikely he cheered on Ben during his football years, as the story says. I also liked the detail of Reed having worked with the O.S.S. in the underground behind enemy lines in Europe, which is not a detail that had registered with me.

Don't dis Sue in front of Reed and Ben — you don't want to make them angry.

Then there's the best part of the story, which is the defense of Sue from the critical letter writers. For some reason, fans have always wanted Sue out of the book and I remember it still being an issue when I was reading the book in the 1980s. I like this idea of having the characters defend her, rather than Stan doing so in a letters column — it just has a bit more weight and is more effective at pointing out the idiocy of such comments.

I suspect this story was pretty much all Stan's idea — it's light-hearted, heavy on the dialog and very character-centric. Maybe it was just an idea that didn't lend itself well to the kind of blowout splash page that Kirby has done in the past, but it is a very well written and well drawn story that demonstrates just how far the comic has come in its short lifespan.

The Thing hanging off the side of the Fantasti-car
is perhaps the only panel in the second story I really like.

The second story, introducing The Impossible Man, is a little more standard but still goofy enough to make it a good pairing with the first tale. The Impossible Man himself is fairly annoying — kind of an impish character similar to Bat-Mite or Mr. Mxyzptlk. And the way the story pans out isn't exactly the most innovative thing ever put on paper. But, like the first tale, it does demonstrate the overall improvement in the book. There's a lot more consistency in how the characters look from issue to issue, the dialog is better and fits better with the overall pacing and storytelling. The silliness of the Impossible Man is mitigated by this being a short, 11-page story — a full issue of this guy would have been way too much.

Lastly, this issue wraps with a regal pin-up of the Sub-Mariner in his underground lair. It may also be of interest to note that this issue was previously presented with the stories in the opposite order in older editions of the Marvel Masterworks series. I think the order is significant in this case — the genial nature of the fan visit tale makes the Impossible Man story go down a bit more smoothly.

All in all, this is a surprisingly satisfying issue, and truly off-beat. I wonder if the reaction fans had been more positive, if we might not have seen more two-story issues and visits with the team from Kirby and Lee.

'Captain America,' 'Punisher' and 'Daredevil' relaunched with unexpected style, substance

2011-10-13T21:52:00.000-07:00

Before I delve back into DC waters, it's been interesting to notice that Marvel has been relaunching a lot of titles lately as well, though without anything like the fanfare that DC has been getting.

In addition to next month's relaunch of Uncanny X-Men — the very last long-running title from Marvel or DC to get a new first issue — Marvel recently relaunched Captain America, Daredevil and The Punisher. I had started thinking about this piece a while back when only one or two issues of each was out, but now there's four issues of DD out and three each of Cap and Punisher.

Let's start with Captain America, which seems to have gotten a new first issue to coincide with the release a few months back of the movie. That's not a bad move on Marvel's part, and it's one I'm surprised they haven't used to greater effect in the past.

This isn't much of an introductory first issue, but it really doesn't need to be. Comics fans know who the characters are and the basic setup, while readers new to the character who saw the movie will be in pretty much the same place. There's a nice connection to the movie with the first issue opening on the funeral of 91-year-old Peggy Carter that also introduces Sharon Carter, a.k.a. Agent 13.

Unlike most of last month's DC debuts, Captain America has a very distinct tone and feel to it that is tailored quite well to the character. My original thoughts were that it was a bit decompressed, but on a second read I think it's far from being the worst offender in that category. The second issue does drag a bit, however, with much of the first half of it devoted to back story before stuff starts happening. The third is another good issue, and writer Ed Brubaker has surprised me by writing comics arcs that are structured like they used to be, with enough going on in each issue to keep me interested.

The best part of this series, though, is the exquisite artwork of Steve McNiven on pencils, Jay Leisten on inks and especially Justin Ponsor on the harder-than-it-looks task of coloring. McNiven does a terrific job of truly choreographing the action scenes. When Cap hurls his shield, you can follow it on its ricocheting path with a clarity that's usually lacking. And the fights are overall realistic and yet suitable to a character with Cap's abilities.

Not only that, but the art is pristine in its clarity and full of details that add to the story and not distract. Leisten deserves a lot of credit for doing a fantastic job of old-fashioned inking — making everything look better, sharper and clearer.

Ponsor's colors also are detailed, and normally I dislike when the colorist adds to the image through highlights and shading that wasn't there in the line art. But those details are done extremely well, and bolster the excellent palette of colors that Ponsor brings to the book. This is light, airy and clean, where a lot of coloring is dank, dark and muddy.

A few final notes: I like the cover design, which puts the logo front and center and very large so it's easy to read and, in fact, hard to miss on the stands. The one drawback is that this is one of Marvel's $3.99 books, and if I didn't enjoy what I read so much and appreciate the care that went into this book, I'd complain about it a bit more.

Moving on to The Punisher, which boasts Greg Rucka as the writer and Marco Checchetto as the artist. This is a character who seems very tough to write and do well, because most fans have different answers to the questions of how realistic The Punisher should be, how violent and how much he should interact with the Marvel Universe at large. Rucka delivers a solid mix of all three, without ever becoming excessive — a pretty amazing feat in itself.

This opening arc sees the Punisher getting drawn into a gang war after a clash at a wedding kills some 30 people including the groom. Most of the story is told through the eyes of others — the cop who's slipping info to the Punisher, an aggressive young reporter, and a few of the bad guys. The Punisher himself is scarcely seen in the first issue, but his presence is felt very strongly. By the third, the Marvel interaction becomes clearer with an appearance by the Vulture, who looks a lot different than the old Spider-Man villain I remember.

Rucka definitely writes good crime stories, and this is a very slick, very entertaining crime story with the Punisher at its heart. It's complemented by some very sharp visuals from Checchetto — an artist I'm not familiar with — and good coloring from Matt Hollingsworth that brings definition to the murky world Checchetto is drawing. Even the production value is high, and the book's slick paper and high-quality reproduction all add up to a very nice package. As with Captain America, the covers by Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary and Paul Mounts are well designed and eye-catching, with the logo spread very big and very legibly across the top.

The result surprises me. I haven't read much Punisher in ages, but find this one quite interesting because Rucka's put enough story into each issue to make it so. It also helps that, after the extra-long first issue, the price dropped from $3.99 to $2.99. I'll keep buying it for a while at that price.

This also is what I would consider a very good first issue. If you had never read The Punisher, this introduced Rucka's conception of the character and the story well enough to be entertaining to a new reader. Quite a coup, when this is something like the seventh Punisher #1 Marvel's published in the last 25 years.

Lastly, there's Daredevil, a character whose definitive run was the then-groundbreaking visceral violence and grittiness that Frank Miller made his specialty. DD has been rebooted a number of times — not as many as Punisher or Cap, but this is I think the third first issue for the character since 1964.

Writer Mark Waid does the unexpected in Daredevil — rather than try to one-up the Miller version, he goes back to the original, lighter version of the character and then modernizes it to make it feel completely and utterly modern. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone pull this off as well as it is in the first four issues of this comic.

Story wise, there's a lot going on and a lot of things that look like they'll continue to pay off. I hadn't noticed until re-reading them that this series starts — just like in The Punisher — with a crashed wedding that involves mobsters and a key event set at the Cloisters in New York City. There's also some old Marvel villains from the fringe, like Klaw and Spot, though they're used to great effect.

The real key to pulling off Waid's stories is some of the best art I've seen in a superhero comic in ages, from Paolo and Joe Rivera, with excellent colors from Javier Rodriguez. Issue #4 and a back-up tale in the first issue feature art from the also-excelling Marcos Martin, colored by Muntsa Vicente. The art is more than just pretty pictures — though they are that — it's excellent storytelling applied with a degree of economy, clarity and style that is all too rare in comics. From the first issue alone, the way the Riveras draw how Daredevil sees a character like Spot and Klaw is simple, inventive and something that completely works as a 2-D drawing. The two-page spread of Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson walking the streets in the back-up story of the first issue, the way Captain America temporarily blinds DD in the second issue, the oddness of Klaw in the third and a fight with lions in the fourth issue are all extremely well done. The covers also are excellent — the first and fourth issues in particular are clever, graphic and extremely appealing.

Daredevil is a seriously fun comic book and an absolute joy to read.

DC New 52, 4th Wave, Pt. 2: I, Vampire and, yes, Teen Titans nail it

2011-09-28T18:04:00.000-07:00

OK, I just finished reading the final six debut issues of the New 52. Reading them all has been fun, but it's a lot of comics. I don't know when I last read this many comics in one month, but it's been a long while.

Onward:

The Savage Hawkman #1 is confusing for me because I don't understand the idea of the Nth Metal. I thought Hawkman was from Hawkworld, but I guess it's all been changed. This issue begins with Carter Hall trying to rid himself of the Nth Metal and any connection to Hawkman. He fails, of course, and goes missing while some of his colleagues dredge up a mystery object from the ocean floor. It eventually unleashes all kinds of nasty and Carter finds himself morphing back into Hawkman to fight it. As you can tell, the story, by Tony Daniel, is pretty average. What I really liked was the art by Philip Tan and the coloring by Sunny Gho. This is a nice looking book — it has a painted look, though close inspection reveals that to not be the case. I don't have an emotional connection to Hawkman, so I doubt I'll be back, but this is a decent comic.

After getting a lot of criticism last week for the portrayal of women in the New 52, we next come to Voodoo #1. Another Wildstorm refugee, this one sees the former member of Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S. working as a stripper while being investigated for some reason by a couple of agents. Turns out, she's an alien with telepathy who finds it easy to learn about men as a stripper because they're guards are down while they watch her. It's not much of an explanation, but it is one. The end also indicates that the stripper locale is a one-issue affair, and the plot will move on into some more interesting areas. The art by Sami Basri is, as you'd expect for a story set in a strip club, replete with women wearing skimpy clothes and in various levels of undress. The biggest problem with this issue is it doesn't deliver enough of anything — mystery, character, suspense, plot — to make me want to stick around. It's just thin, and hangs on a reveal that anyone familiar with the character had already figured out.

Justice League Dark #1 is a silly book that tries to jam together characters unsuited to a superhero into a superhero team. This should be called Justice League Vertigo, as it features Madame Xanadu, John Constantine and Shade: The Changing Man, as well as Deadman and Zatanna. Like Justice League International, there's not much of a connection here to the main Justice League title save a short appearance by Batman. The story is pretty standard "assemble the team" stuff, but it hurts just a little bit to see characters like Constantine be forced into a costume story when they're just not made for it.

Batman: The Dark Knight #1 has some really pretty artwork from David Finch, but otherwise feels completely superfluous. Batman and Detective Comics still feel like the "real" books, and this and Batman and Robin are spinoffs that will come and go while the others remain the center of the Bat-verse. This is still a decent Batman comic, but it's the kind that's aimed at the die-hard fan and completist. On a side note, there's one really odd, prominent panel of a female Arkham inmate wearing a skimpy outfit that includes a thong with a bunny tail on it. I'll wait to see what the reaction is to that.

I, Vampire #1 managed to overcome my longstanding dislike of vampires and I really enjoyed it. This may be the breakout original title of the New 52 — I really hope it is. It's deftly written by Joshua Hale Fialkov and sports some really incredible artwork from Andrea Sorrentino. I don't think any description of the plot will do it justice, just go read it — even if you can't stand vampires.

And the final first issue of the New 52 is Teen Titans #1, from Red Hood and the Outlaws scribe Scott Lobdell and veteran artists Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund. Thankfully, this was a lot more like Lobdell's script for Superboy than for Red Hood. It starts with the mistake-ridden, overconfident debut of Kid Flash, followed by Tim Drake — who has kept the Red Robin moniker — assembling a new team. It's got the same sort of snappy pace and dialoge that Lobdell is known for, and he makes it work quite well with these characters. I expect the ret-con of Wonder Girl will prompt some outcries. It appears her previous connection to Wonder Woman is gone and her powers are quite different. But she has a personality — perhaps still at this point a stock personality, but she still has one — as does Red Robin and the cocky new Kid Flash. I have long found Booth's figures to be a bit stiff, but this is a big improvement from his 1990s efforts with Wildstorm and the X-Men books at Marvel, so good for him. While I am not the biggest fan anymore of teen books, I still might give this shot based on the energy that this first issue delivers.

And with that, the pile of New 52 comics sitting on top of a longbox in my office is complete. I'd love to know what anyone else thinks of these books. Do you agree with my take, disagree, partially agree? Send me links, comments or emails if you're so inclined. I'll be taking a look at others' reviews and expect to post some kind of wrapup before the second issues hit starting next week.

DC New 52, 4th Wave, Pt. 1: Aquaman, Flash, Superman outshine the rest

2011-09-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

The finish line is in sight for DC's New 52. Look for a post that kind of sums up a take on the overall project in the next day or so. Obviously, it's been a big hit for DC, which announced yesterday that all 52 books have sold out of their first printings and going back to press. Three titles have shipped 200,000 or more and eight more have shipped more than 100,000. That's a huge boost for the direct market, where the 100k mark has been a tough one for any book to crack.

I still have a few books in the final batch to read, but in the meantime, here's my thoughts on the books I've read so far.

There should be more books like Aquaman #1, which I found to be a very entertaining and action-packed comic book. This is another very slick entry, with some terrific artwork from Ivan Reis and Joe Prado. Writer Geoff Johns tries very hard to make Aquaman a convincing action hero and mostly succeeds. I expected that having everyone think of him as a joke would not work at all, but it turned out to be fairly amusing in the end. I also think it's funny that the logo imitates the one invented for the fake Aquaman movie from the Entourage TV show. At the very least, this is the best Aquaman comic in a long time, if not ever. It's up to you to decide if that's a significant achievement or not.

Next is yet another The Flash #1, this one from co-writer and artist Francis Manapul and co-writer Brian Buccellato. This was much improved from the rather ponderous take Johns had on the character in the previous reboot, or even the previous short-lived version before that I have trouble remembering anything about at this point. I found this to be a solid, nice-looking Flash comic. It doesn't invent the wheel, but it's pretty much spot on for what an average issue of this title should read like. If Manapul can keep it up, will be a consistently entertaining title.

The Fury of Firestorm, The Nuclear Men #1 appears to be a full reboot of the character, and is a straight-forward origin story that shows how the Firestorms got their powers and introduces a big, scary villain for them to fight in the next issue. We meet Ronnie Raymond, star high school quarterback, and Jason Rusch, student journalist. They clash and very quickly develop a dislike of each other — so of course they are bound together as the new Firestorms. The art by Yildiray Cinar has a slightly funky, retro feel to it that, combined with the very traditional origin story, makes this a bit of a throwback. It's not bad, but nothing about this is interesting enough to make me stick around for another issue.

I've enjoyed the occasional issue of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti's Jonah Hex series, though I was not a regular reader of that series. They continue with the re-titled All-Star Western, which brings Hex into the new local of Old West Gotham City. That means there's folks like Amadeus Arkham around as Hex investigates a gruesome crime of a more urban nature as a kind of a proto-Batman. The art by Moritat, who drew some great issues of Elephantmen, is muddied by a dull, overwhelming color palette. To be honest, I preferred the previous take on Jonah Hex, and the changes that seem to by trying to make this more interesting to superhero fans only make it less so.

Blackhawks #1 feels like it was created about 1995 for WildStorm and somehow never saw print until now. That means it's sometimes a confusing book, but the crazy energy and slick art carry it through the rough patches. This is a new take on the Blackhawk concept, with the team now being some kind of super-secret government strike team. The plot part is the confusing part, so I'll just skip over it and talk about the cool art, which has Graham Nolan of 1980s Detective Comics on layouts and Ken Lashley on finishes. Beyond that, I can't really cite any specific reasons for liking this, so maybe it's just a bit of nostalgia for those old-time '90s comic books. I'll give it another shot.

I didn't know what to expect from Green Lantern: New Guardians #1, but went in with some trepidation because the cover includes one member from all the different-colored Lantern Corps and therefore be related in some way to the confusing Blackest Night and Brightest Day storylines. That was not the case here, which is a full reboot and retelling of the origin for the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern. This book also is an assembling of the heroes, as we meet the other six Lantern folks who will come together to join the New Guardians. This works better as a single issue than most attempts at this type of story, but it still feels like a tertiary book in the Green Lantern franchise.

I will be very interested to see what other folks think of Superman #1, which I thought was a terrific comic book. Written and with layouts by George Perez and finishes by Jesus Merino, this is an action-packed superhero book in the best 1980s tradition. There's a lot going on in this book, both with Superman and the world he lives in. It may not all make perfect sense, but there is an admirable economy this story as it introduces so many characters, concepts and tweaks to Superman lore while also giving some crazy old-school action. I expect some will find it overwritten and cluttered, but I prefer a comic that throws a lot at the reader and picks up the pieces that work later on to the decompressed storytelling of recent years. I'll definitely stick with this one.

Only six more first issues to go ...

DC's New 52, Wave 3, plays it safe except when it comes to sex

2011-09-27T14:56:00.000-07:00

The final batch of first issues in DC's New 52 arrived Monday this week instead of Wednesday. I've already read a few that I quite like, but I have to wait until tomorrow because of the embargo. That leaves me with today to catch up and go through all of last week's books, which contained more than its fair share of bombshells.

FYI, due to some of the topics that came up in this week's books, the language used below may not be suitable for all ages. Proceed at your own risk.

Top book on the pile is Wonder Woman #1, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. As you might expect from Chiang, the book looks great and is well colored with an appropriately moody palette by Matthew Wilson. The story is a pretty significant deviation from the typical Wonder Woman story, getting into an area I think you could call occult, except it deals with Greek mythology so maybe that's a better way to describe it. But it is darker in tone and look that the shiny, bright take on Wonder Woman that has prevailed over the years at DC. I'm not sure how effective this is as a first issue, however, because not much is explained. Diana doesn't even appear until halfway through the issue, where she's found sleeping naked (though covered) in a London flat. It's not clear what the set up is, who she's supposed to be or how she's intended to fit into the world. I think Azzarello and Chiang have a bit more leeway based on their reputation to get things going in the next couple of issues, and this was much better than the Odyssey revamp of last year. So, this is promising.

Dick Grayson gets his old costume and book back with Nightwing #1, which was a competent if completely average superhero comic. The art by Eddy Barrows and J.P. Mayer is nice, and I enjoyed the scenes where Dick returns to the circus he grew up in to say hi to his friends. I don't know if anyone has ever done that idea before, but I thought it was a nice touch here. The superhero-ing part of the book was less thrilling, and I really wish the industry would institute a ban on the hero narrating the story in captions. That was interesting and effective in 1982 when Chris Claremont popularized it on the first Wolverine miniseries, but it's been overused to death. How about having characters talk to each other once in a while? It might be a good trend to start.

I really wanted to like DC Universe Presents #1, featuring the first part of a new Deadman story by Paul Jenkins and Bernard Chang. It almost completely won me over, too, because this is a good character and Jenkins does some interesting things with it. But somehow it just didn't cross the finish line and I'm not entirely sure why. The art's well done, though not as stylish as I remember Chang's art being in the past. Maybe it's just that a character called Deadman is a bit of a downer, and this needed a bit of brightness in it to keep it from just being dim.

Batman #1 is one of the slickest releases so far, and I mean that in a good way. Scott Snyder writes a really good Batman, and this debut pulls in a lot of elements and kicks off a pretty good mystery. It also looks fantastic, with Greg Capullo on pencils bringing just a hint of Todd McFarlane-style cartoonyness that recalls, for me, the much-beloved Batman: Year Two arc of 25 years ago. It's slickly polished by inker Jonathan Glapion and the result is a book that any Batman fan, old or new, should be able to get behind.

Green Lantern Corps #1 was surprisingly violent, which is not something I expect from this particular franchise. It's all in service to the buildup of the story to introduce a very serious and grave threat to the Corps that should make a nice backdrop for the lead characters of Guy Gardner, John Stewart and Kilowog to tackle. It was the character stuff that I most liked about this issue, even though it didn't make much sense to me. I don't see why Guy wants a full-time coaching job, when he seems too busy as a Green Lantern to even begin to fulfill that role well. I have a soft spot for both Guy and John, so this may turn out to be the GL series for me if they can keep it up.

Blue Beetle #1 is a complete reboot of the most-recent version of the character, the Jaime Reyes one. This is a typical origin story, that establishes where the Blue Beetle power comes from, how it gets to Earth and how it ends up affecting Jaime. Not having read the previous Blue Beetle series, I don't know how different this is from what was done there. It's OK, kind of the typical high school stuff comics readers have known and loved since Peter Parker was a lonely student at Midtown High, though with a Latino flavor and set in Texas. The art by Ig Guara is solid, and it works OK as a comic book but does nothing to really elevate it past pure middle-of-the-road mediocre to must-read level.

Captain Atom #1 is at about the same level as Blue Beetle. It's a competent setup for a series, but offers nothing really new to set it apart. The script by J.T. Krul takes no real risks with a character that you could do just about anything with. And Freddie Williams III's art is surprisingly sketchy, which I think is the wrong style for this character, who I think would work better with a clean, technical look. I can't help but compare this to the recent Dark Horse run of Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom, as the good Doc and Captain Atom are very similar characters, and while neither sets the world on fire Captain Atom seems the lesser of the two.

OK, now things get interesting with the awful Red Hood and the Outlaws #1, by Scott Lobdell and Kenneth Rocafort. This was another of those titles that, being brand now, I hoped would offer something surprising and different. Instead, we get the most juvenile, pandering book of the bunch. The book starts with Red Hood, a.k.a. the former Robin known as Jason Todd, breaking out Red Arrow from a prison. Hood's aided by Starfire, formerly of the New Teen Titans, and the three of them sit on a beach, have sex and agree to team up for some outlaw-ish "jobs," the first of which goes wrong. This book got a lot of deserved criticism for its portrayal of Starfire as a super-hot amnesiac who'll fuck anyone who asks, while Red Hood and Red Arrow act like Jersey Shore castoffs who are drinking and high-fiving each other over getting to fuck Starfire like they're on spring break. Now, I get that there are a lot of young men and boys in the DC target range who act like this or would like to act like this. And there's no denying that a lot of this kind of skeevy behavior on the part of the guys and the girls goes on in frat houses and at spring break bashes every year. But the appropriateness of this in a DC Comic rated "T for Teen" is at least questionable. But the biggest problem by far is the degradation of Starfire. This is a character who, in the original New Teen Titans comics, was certainly a bit voluptuous, but also was far from stupid or casual. Her romance with Dick Grayson developed convincingly over time and turned out to be quite sweet, normal and responsible for folks in their late teens. I remember what a scandal it was when a single panel implied Dick and Starfire shared a bed, and how much smoothing of ruffled feathers writer Marv Wolfman had to do to defend that idea. The other thing that strikes me is that the best-known version of Starfire would be from the animated Teen Titans series, in which she was a skinny, sweet, kind of shy girl. Anyone who likes or expects either version of the character is going to be horrified to see Starfire so blatantly turned into a walking, talking fuck toy for a pair of quite unlikable characters for whom it's apparently OK to be assholes because they're "outlaws." I don't know how much blame to lay at the feet of Rocafort, who is a terrific artist, because I don't know how much of a say he had in the story. The book does look nice and he draws a very sexy fantasy girl. But the overall package is just one that makes me think there's no point to this title than to be shocking, stupid and quite insulting to readers of all ages and genders.

Birds of Prey is a title that I've tried and read for short stints a number of times in its long run. The idea is great, the title is great, but I've always found it never quite achieved the scale it needs to be the megahit it could and probably should be. Birds of Prey #1 does nothing to change that assessment, though it definitely rises above the middle of the crop. This is a new version of the Birds team, with Black Canary still in charge but, with Oracle now back in the Batgirl costume, the team now includes Poison Ivy, Katana and what appears to be a new character called Starling. Not every team member appears in this first issue from writer Duane Swierczynski, but Black Canary's character and the intro of Starling are compelling enough to hold the center. There's some good action in here too. And I like the art, by Jesus Saiz, though I would like a little more detail and coloring that's less dark.

Supergirl #1 is one of my favorites from this week. It offers a compelling introduction for Kara from writers Michael Green (of the Green Lantern movie) and Mike Johnston, and some very stylish art from Mahmud Asrar and Dan Green. Most of this issue is a big fight scene, with Supergirl discovering her powers and kicking some serious ass, and it's quite well done and a lot of fun to read. The finale, in which Superman arrives, makes me think it was a mistake for DC to publish Superman #1 in the final week of September, as he's appeared as a cameo in a number of other issues now without his new status quo having really been established. Either way, this was a fun one.

Legion of Super-Heroes #1 is very much standard-issue Legion. I've tried a couple times to get into the Legion, but either I'm not finding the good stuff or it's just not my cup of tea. The stuff I have read that I like is very similar to this story, from Legion veteran Paul Levitz and artist Francis Portella. I don't know if this has any appeal to new readers, but I imagine it'll make the Legion's many fans happy.

Lastly, we have the other bombshell of the week in Catwoman #1, the climactic scene of which caused a huge outcry because, well, it shows Batman and Catwoman rather explicitly having sex. Thankfully, DC upped the rating on this one to Teen +, so those 12-15 year olds won't be exposed to it. Before I talk about the sex scene, I'll talk about the rest of the issue, which I thought was decent. Catwoman has always been a sexualized character, from the old comics to the 1960s TV show to Batman Returns and, I'm sure, in the upcoming movie The Dark Knight Rises. It's part of her appeal, that she's a villain who's also so tempting in many different ways to Batman. She's often been shown as willing to use her sex appeal to get what she wants, again it's part of the modus operandi. I think a non-sexy Catwoman would be a boring Catwoman.

The specifics of the way writer Judd Winick and artist Guillem March try convey that she's sexy are questionable. Laura Hudson at Comics Alliance wrote an excellent piece and explained why she had a problem with the character's face not appearing until the third page while the first two were full of closeups of her cleavage and butt. I get the point but I don't think there was any malice in it — it's a common technique that only becomes an especially notable backfire when you get to the end of this issue.

The final scene consists of Batman showing up at Catwoman's place, they fight and the fight slowly turns to stripping off gloves and clothes and a particularly creepy final splash page of them seemingly in coitus. This crosses a whole bunch of lines that it would have been best to not cross, and there's a lot of reasons for disliking it from the general distaste of having to think about things like Batman's erect penis penetrating Catwoman (a sentence no one with taste ever wanted to hear uttered) to what it says about how DC's creators view women.

I think the relationship between Batman and Catwoman should remain a kind of tense, will they or won't they thing. The conflict for Batman is that he's attracted to her but she's a thief, and for him to give in on this and either let himself be seduced or use his costume and cape and resources for the mundane purpose of getting laid is beneath him. I think it's less problematic for Catwoman, who always has used sex and has a more flexible morality than other characters. I know Catwoman has been recast from being a straight villain to a kind of anti-hero in the past 25 years, but it's that conflict and that ability she has to operate in these murky areas that define the character. Which doesn't mean I think it's good for her character to be portrayed having sex with Batman in such detail. It's just gross, and I thought so just as much a few years ago when Frank Miller and Jim Lee did a scene in All-Star Batman where the Caped Crusader has sex with Black Canary on a rainy pier at the Gotham harbor. I also remember hearing morning zoo deejays making fun of the scene in the 1989 Batman movie where Bruce and Vicki have sex. The joke was something along the line of what kind of sound effect will appear on the screen (a la the 1960s TV show's infamous "Biff!" "Pow!" "Pop!") and thinking they weren't wrong. They were assholes, and one of them may have been Glen Beck, but they weren't entirely wrong. And the X-Force: Sex and Violence miniseries of a few years back in which Domino made explicit references about wanting to or having given Logan a blowjob were not sexy, just icky.

It's OK to imply sex — even casual sex — between characters if it works for the characters and the story, but this kind of explicitness with these two characters violates all common sense and good taste, and denigrates all the work involved. And it's a shame, because I think without the sex scene, this was shaping up to be an OK comic book. But instead it's something to denounce and decry and get upset about.

Tomorrow: The beginning of the end of the New 52 launch month! Superman! Aquaman! Blackhawks!

The New 52, Wave 2, Pt. 2: Green Trumps Red, Superboy and Deathstroke Surprise

2011-09-26T13:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the long delay in New 52 reviews and other series. I had a lot of assignments come in that I had to get off my plate, which is great news for any freelancer but it means the blog gets delayed.

One story I wrote is of note to folks here, which is my article on Sam Register's running of Warner Bros. Animation and the studio's surge in production and success in brand building. One of the big examples is the upcoming DC Nation show, which is still hard to peg down in terms of content, but it will include some sweet-sounding animated shorts that I think fans will get a real kick out of. DC Nation is due to start airing on Cartoon Network next summer. The story ran in Variety and, if you're a subscriber and can get past the paywall, you can read it here.

A couple other stories I've done for the current issue of Animation Magazine that may be of interest include my story on the making of Batman: Year One, which I think is really good; and this story on MTV Animation, including the return of Beavis and Butt-head, as well as a new toon called Good Vibes that turned out to be a nice surprise.

I continue to be lucky enough for DC publicity to still be sending me all the New 52 issues, as I have had no time to even hit the comic shop for the past few weeks. I've had to refresh my memory on the rest of the releases from the second week of the New 52, and changed my initial opinion in a few cases.

Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #1 was a bit of a disappointment even though there's nothing wrong with it. I love the title, but expected a little more crazy and a lot more fun. Instead, we have a fairly standard setup as Frankenstein is now working for the Super Human Advanced Defense Executive and is sent on a mission to save a town where monsters are stripping the skin off people. Also, Frankenstein's wife went in on the mission first and has gone missing. He's joined by a quartet of new, monster-like agents and there's a some nice fighting scenes. The art by Alberto Ponticelli is solid, though somewhat generic for a monster-themed title, and Jeff Lemire's script lacks the wit, characterization, or the kind of just plain weirdness that would have set this apart. I think the Wachowski Bros.' Doc Frankenstein series of a few years back was a much more fun take on a very similar idea.

A number of reviews of Green Lantern #1 say it's very much a continuation of the previous Green Lantern run. I don't know because I wasn't reading it before now. This impressed me, however, as one of the most new-reader friendly books so far. Written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Doug Mahnke and Christian Alamy, this issue finds Hal Jordan no longer a Green Lantern and living jobless and in need of cash on Earth. Meanwhile, Sinestro somehow is once again a member of the Corps and would like to change that, leading to him approaching Jordan about some kind of deal. I think you could give this comic to anyone who saw the Green Lantern movie and they'd be able to follow it no problem. It features Hal, Carol Ferris and Sinestro, all pretty much as they were in the movie and easy to identify. The art is clear and I think the story has enough interest for such folks to enjoy it and want to read more. For die-hard fans, it's probably little different from reading Green Lantern #68.

Red Lanterns #1, on the other hand, was a colossal mess and one of my least favorite books in the New 52. I had a hard time following this one at all as none of the characters were introduced or given any kind of sympathetic characterization. I know the Red Lanterns use the power of rage, and that explains the overall nasty tone and dark imagery of the book. But without some kind of clarity to the story or a character through which to latch on to, this was just an unpleasant experience that I have no interest in revisiting.

Resurrection Man #1 feels like a book out of time, reminding me very much of something DC or Wildstorm would have put out in the 1990s. Which is not a bad thing, per se. I know this was a cult hit series from the late 1990s and the original writers, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, are back. I still felt a little lost here, that I would better understand everything going on here if I'd read the original series. Basically, the hero comes back to life each time he's killed with a new power. Here, he comes back, boards a flight to Portland that goes wrong in a lot of ways. I liked that this had action and some nice art from Fernando Dagnino that evokes the feel of early Vertigo titles. But it still didn't grab me. I don't see the reason for this title, but I could be convinced. That's a maybe on issue 2.

I was interested to see what Scott Lobdell, best known for being one of the most prolific Marvel writers of the 1990s and a longtime writer on X-Men, would do at DC. Superboy #1 is definitely on the good end of the Lobdell spectrum, which means it's a pretty fun book, with light, breezy and fun dialog. The art by R.B. Silva and Rob Lean is not what I expected from the cover, which is by Eric Canete. It's got a bright, open-line approach and works very well with the story. Oh, yeah, the story: Superboy is being grown in a test-tube from some kind of Kryptonian biological sample. We've seen that before, from the 1994 version of Superboy. I also liked that this series slips in Caitlin Fairchild from Gen 13, even though she's only partly confirmed as being that character. This looks like it will be an entertaining book about young superheroes, which Lobdell did quite will on early Generation X. I don't know if this will hold up and still be that interesting after 12 issues, but I did dig this first issue.

And the final book in this week's New 52 releases is Deathstroke #1, which threw me for a loop that I liked quite a bit. This starts out kind of slowly, with the sort of story you'd expect about the character as he was introduced so many years ago in The New Teen Titans. This time, his employer saddles him with a team and Deathstroke goes along with, until he doesn't. And that twist took me by surprise, in a good way. Writer Kyle Higgins in one fell swoop makes this the most ruthless book in the DC Universe, and he does it by keeping the character of Deathstroke intact. The art by Joe Bennett and Art Thibert is quite nice, but the thing that really works for me was that this book really took my by surprise. Obviously, they can't pull off this kind of twist every issue, but I'm intrigued enough to try another.

Next week: Wonder Woman! Batman! Supergirl! And more!

The New 52, Wave 2, Part 1: Batwoman's worth the wait

2011-09-16T22:07:00.000-07:00

After a few work-intensive days, I finally finished reading all this week's releases in The New 52. This week was very different from last week, with the best entries coming from unexpected sources and some of the books I thought would at least be strange and interesting falling short.

Again, I'll do these in the order I read them, and likely break them up into multiple posts to make it easier to read.

Batman & Robin #1 comes only two years after the previous Batman & Robin #1, which was a blockbuster by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. This version is by Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason and Mick Gray, and features the same Robin (the Damian Wayne version) and a different Batman (back to Broce Wayne from Dick Grayson). The crux of the issue is the relationship between the two, with Bruce addressing various family issues and explaining himself to Damian. There is some action in here, but the overall tone focuses on the the relationship with the result being a fairly slow and not especially exciting first issue. The art is often dark and murky to the point where it's a bit tough to follow and pages look like a sea of ink. Neither element makes this a particularly compelling debut and I can't see this appealing much beyond the Batman completists.

Mister Terrific #1 is another reasonably solid comic book that I think could have been better. I think it's admirable that DC has put out so many books with non-white lead characters (Static Shock and Batwing being the other two to date), even as they've gotten so much flak from fans about the dearth of female creators and characters. I'm not exactly familiar with this character, who I think previously appeared in the JSA. The script by Eric Wallace and the arty by Gianluca Gugliotta and Wayne Faucher is all solid but not spectacular. It's all pretty standard first-issue superhero stuff, that I wish was in some way more memorable than it is.

Suicide Squad #1 has a terrific cover, though I had to read the interior of the book to figure out that it's Harley Quinn front and center there. This issue sees the SS team assembled, sent on their first mission and enduring some torture. This is a book that really could have benefited from a more straight-forward approach to the storytelling. A title like Suicide Squad suggests a high-concept series with a heavy dose of crazy, and instead it's a slow-moving, somewhat unpleasant story with lots of scenes of torture in it. It just doesn't stand out.

Ah, Batwoman #1. At last. Much delayed, this one was definitely worth the wait. Yes, Greg Rucka has moved on, but J.H. Williams III is still drawing, and working on the stories with W. Haden Blackman. This looks absolutely amazing, with appealing and distinctive characters engaged in a clear, interesting story. Plus, it's super sexy and realistic in a way that shames that the typical bubble-boobed heroines that normally pass for "sexy" in comics. There's no reason to not pick this up. Excellent.

Legion Lost #1 was aptly named — I was lost. I have never had much luck at penetrating the continuity of Legion of Super-Heroes, though I do recognize a couple of the characters in this book. Apparently the premise is a group of Legionnaires are lost on present-day Earth. Not much else was easy to absorb from this issue. Introductions are important and, on the second- and third-tier books, there may not be a chance to draw an audience down the line the way you can with a high-profile first-issue.

I liked Grifter #1 a lot more than I expected to. It's less of a superhero story and more of a straight action story. Writer Nathan Edmonson and artists Cafu and Jason Gorder capture some of that old-time Wildstorm energy for this globe-trotting tale. The art was really attractive, but the story wasn't quite crazy and strange enough for me to be sure I'll come back for a second issue.

Demon Knights #1 is overall a pretty good comic. For one, even though it's got Jack Kirby's Demon in it, it's more of a fantasy comic with lots of action. Uniqueness of genre, some appealing depictions of the characters and pretty good art from Diogenes Neves and Oclair Albert take this pretty far for me. Like a lot of these books, there are issues with characters not being terribly well introduced or there being enough interesting story, but in this case there's enough charm to overcome the shortcomings.

Next: Red! Green! Superboy!

'Pariah' slickly covers familiar ground

2011-09-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

Pariah is indicative of the current state of indie comics: It's a high-concept story that's slickly produced and has some kind of movie ambition and/or Hollywood connection or talent behind it.

First, the book itself. Pariah #1 starts with Brent Marks, who we're told is a "Vitro," which makes him superhumanly smart. Completely isolated from other Vitros, he lives a miserable teenage life in Ohio, where he can't meet girls at high school and hates his brain-dead parents. But he's also got this idea for a working interplanetary spaceship and has started building components for it in his room. Then, an explosion at a weapons research laboratory that employs a large number of Vitros releases a deadly toxin in the air, making Vitros persona non grata. Brent runs afoul first of some bullies, then of the law and is captured for what is certain to be a nefarious purpose.

The high concept here is the idea of Vitros, which is based on real world research that indicates genes can be modified before birth — i.e., in vitro — to achieve certain genetic outcomes. I wish this had been explained in the book itself, though. I learned this fact from the press kit that came with it.

(As a total aside, this was one of the best press kits I've ever seen for a comic book release. It included several professional-quality press releases, bios of the creators, a bookmark, printouts of reviews, a hand-written note from the publicist, a copy of the book and even synopses of upcoming issues.)

The book is well done on every level. The writing is good, with snappy and believable dialog and instantly recognizable characters. The story is by Aron Warner, who was a producer on DreamWorks Animation's hugely successful Shrek series, and Philip Gelatt, an up-and-coming comics writer.

The art is excellent, which is no surprise since it's by Brett Weldele of The Surrogates fame. The production values are top-notch. And it's a nice book overall.

Which leaves me thinking about the big picture, and that's where i wonder where this is all going and whether it's going to be worth the ride. The synopses of issues 2-4 indicate they will be very similar, introducing other Vitros in other parts of the country while undoubtedly slowly advancing an overall plot. The series is meant to run 12 issues, so I imagine there's a finale in mind along with plans for an eventual movie or TV version.

But the biggest problem is this effort still feels incredibly familiar. The troubled teens with powers has been done to death in comics from X-Men to Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's Demo, which is the comic Pariah reminds me of most.

The good news is that this is loads better than any other stealth movie as comic book idea I've seen in ages. The bad news is that for all its slickness, it doesn't offer anything new or different enough for me to want to come back for issue two. And that's exacerbated by knowing that the next three issues will mostly introduce three more Vitros and the meat of the plot won't really get started until at least issue #5. That's a lot of time and money at $3.99 a pop to ask of an audience.

For more info on this book, including a preview of the first issue, visit www.pariahonline.com.

Small Press: Diamondback is Unpolished but Enthusiastic

2011-09-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

Every so often, folks send me an email asking if I'll take a look at and review their comics. For a long time, I had no time to do so, but a couple of recent requests piqued my interest and so I'm going to do a couple of these indie reviews before I dig into this week's tantalizing pile of The New 52, sitting since yesterday afternoon on my desk.

I have here the first two issues of Diamondback, published by Colorado-based Anasazi Comics, each $3.99 for 24 pages in color. Written by Jeremy Lee, who created the series with Michael Andereck, Diamondback is set in an "anarcho-capitalist" future in which all government has collapsed and the only justice you can get is what you pay for. In the massive Denver City, a man named Jack Cody's wife is killed in a gangland gunfight. Lacking legal insurance, his child is taken from him and Jack is sent to prison, where he makes socks and his soul dies. He's pulled out after a year by a an agent named Cowboy, who believes Jack also can be an agent for the Carroll-Dodgson company and begins training him. Jack takes on the name and identity of Diamondback, and he and Cowboy immediately clash with the big boys of the agency game at Dyja International, which forms the spine of the first two issues.

There are some interesting tidbits in here and I think this could be developed into something that works as a story and would be quite interesting as an action tale with some social commentary in it. The execution leaves something to be desired, even though it makes up for its many technical flaws with sheer enthusiasm. I wish the script had an editor who could make sure that the concepts in the book were clearly explained.

Frankly, if you want to nitpick this, there's a lot to pick on. But the ideas and characters somehow still came through to me, despite things not being terribly well explained or introduced the way we're used to.

The artwork by Nick Bove has many of the same issues. If you want to, you can critique it to death for problems with perspective, anatomy, clarity, etc., but the story still gets through. The designs of the future city in particular offer some interesting glimpses of what this world could be. The biggest problem with the art is it's just not delivering much to convey this world and these characters as physical things — as it is, the images are flat and two-dimensional, though there is some improvement already evident in the second issue.

I don't know that I can really recommend this to anyone as a great reading experience. It's kind of a throwback to the kind of stuff that flooded the market in the various small-press boom times. But it does have tons of enthusiasm, and I like that comics is a medium where these things can see the light of day and have a shot at not just developing an audience, but at getting better.

This book is not yet available through Diamond, so if you want to check it out for yourselves, head on over to www.diamondbackcomic.com, www.anasazicomics.com or to Facebook and ask them how you can get a copy.

New 52, Week One, Pt. 3: JLI, Swamp Thing, Batwing and Static Shock

2011-09-10T15:30:00.000-07:00

Delayed slightly by a short-lived, mildly annoying illness and tons of work and baby duties, here, now, are some thoughts on the last batch of releases in the first full week of DC's The New 52.

Swamp Thing #1 is a very tough comic to do, because no matter how good the book is it always has to live in the shadow of great runs by Alan Moore and the original run by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. Also, after nearly 20 years as a Vertigo property, I find it somehow incongruous to see Swamp Thing appear alongside Superman and other mainstream superheroes. None of which has anything to do with this particular story by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette. I"ll start with the art, which I found to very good and atmospheric and, appropriately, lush. I had to double check the credits because I was sure those distinctively-inked faces meant Kevin Nowlan was working on this issue, but it is all Paquette. Snyder's story does a decent job of resetting the character and his Alec Holland alter ego in the DC Universe, but still failed to really sell the idea as a good one. The horror elements were good. But I don't think this version of Swamp Thing is distinctive enough to work as a Swamp Thing comic for established fans, while this is easily, I think, the most confusing first issue for neophytes.

I was surprised in a good way to see Justice League International among The New 52. I am, as regular readers of this blog will know, a fan of the Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis run on the title from the late 1980s. Those writers haven't returned for this version, which is written by Dan Jurgens with Aaron Lopresti and Matt Ryan on art — all solid superhero creators. The key to this seems to be Booster Gold, who Jurgens created a long time ago and whose series he was writing and drawing before it ended with Flashpoint. The supporting cast includes JLI stalwarts Guy Gardner, Batman, Rocket Red, Ice, Fire and Batman, along with Vixen, a Chinese hero named August General in Iron and a cheeky brit chick named Godiva. The premise is a little odd, as the United Nations agrees to form its own Justice League that it can control, under the leadership of U.N. Intelligence Chief Andre Briggs. So the JLI has no relation to the other Justice League, even though Batman's in both. The story itself is decent but not spectacular. It has a plot that it clearly tells, with a couple of character moments that old fogeys like me will be familiar with but may appeal to the newbies. There's foreshadowing of conflicts, a cliff-hanger ending, some mid-level superhero action and it all looks very clean if average. All of this makes it hard to recommend one way or the other — it's far from bad, but it's nothing special enough to go out of your way for unless you already like these characters and this concept.

Static Shock #1 is perhaps the most standard first issue of the bunch, running through the standard story points of introducing the hero, his supporting cast, the premise and giving him a first villain to fight. I admit to not having read really anything about this character after about the first year of the original Static series from Milestone in 1993-94. I know there was a cartoon, and I know this was a signature character for the late Dwayne McDuffie. But this doesn't match up with anything I remember liking about those original comics, which to me evoked Steve Ditko's early Spider-Man work. This is a just a lot more generic. The story is by Scott McDaniel (who also does the art) and John Rozum, with Jonathan Glapion and LeBeau Underwood on inks. I really wish this book was better, but I fear this will be one of the first on the block for cancelation.

The last book on the list is Batwing #1, by Judd Winick and Ben Oliver. This is another book I was hoping would be a surprise simply because it's new. And it's a bit of a mixed bag, mostly because it didn't grab me the way I expected it to. This is a new character, sort of spun out of the idea of Grant Morrison's Batman, Incorporated idea, about David Zavimbe, who is, essentially, the Batman of Africa. His secret identity is as a police officer in the city of Tinasha in the Congo. The city is corrupt, there is plenty of rather ghastly crime and no one to fight it except Batwing. The first issue sees Batwing fight his new nemesis, Massacre, and establishes the setting, etc. It reads OK and looks very nice, but I think the reason this didn't grab me is it just feels like old DC. Most of the new books seem to have attempted to put in more plot and tell the stories clearly — this feels sparse and slow. It also doesn't show much of Africa itself, which I would have thought to be a major source of cool imagery and therefore a selling point for the book. I'm not sure it's future looks much better than that of Static Shock, but the concept is one that I think could work well with a more energetic take on the material.

And that's it for week one! Plenty more to come next week ...

Batgirl Surprises, 'Tec Shocks and Two New 52 Surprises

2011-09-07T22:20:00.000-07:00

It appears that Batgirl #1 by Gail Simone, Ardian Syaf and Vicent Cifuentes is the surprise hit of The New 52, becoming the first book to sell out in many stores. It's no surprise that Simone writes a great Barbara Gordon, but I was especially impressed by the artwork. Not only was it attractive looking and nicely polished, but the coloring by Ulises Arreola really added to the tone of the book without sacrificing clarity. I keep harping on this point, but coloring has been a real weakness at both Marvel and DC in recent years and it's nice to see DC make a concerted effort to improve the coloring in their comics. The story was very engaging, though I missed exactly how Babs got the use of her legs back. The new outfit is very cool and the book is overall just a good bit of fun. I'm not sure why this particular book is so in demand — it could just be pent-up demand for seeing Barbara back in the cape, but I think there's more going on here and I hope the book continues to be as much fun to read as this first issue.

OMAC #1 was a book I thought had potential right from the start. This was a great concept for the character when Kirby came up with it back in the 1970s, but its original run was cut short and no one has ever quite found the right mix. But Keith Giffen, getting back into the Kirby mode he exhibited years ago on Legion of Super-Heroes, really delivers a story that gets the Kirby spirit right. Working with Dan DiDio as co-writer and Scott Koblish as inker, this is another action-packed and fun comic book that evokes the King's work in every panel and twist and turn of the story. That it does so without seeming dated is an impressive feat that few other Kirby imitations have succeeded in doing. This is exactly the sort of book I was hoping to find in the New 52 — an unexpected surprise that delights and entertains.

Detective Comics #1. The last time we saw a Detective Comics #1 on the stand was March 1937, and this is the title from which the company derives its name. (Yes, DC Comics does mean Detective Comics Comics, and trying to correct that lack of logic is just as pointless as trying to get people to stop saying ATM machine.) So, this is one of the titles that changed the least, with writer and penciller Tony S. Daniel moving over to 'Tec from the same job on the just-concluded run of Batman. Daniel does raise the bar here. The storytelling is better, the color is better and the scripting is better than his recent Batman run. He's also telling an especially intense story with a conclusion that is already getting a lot of shocked responses online. I admit that it surprised me, by being both unexpected and particularly gory for a Batman comic. But it does make me want to read more.

Green Arrow #1 is another example of the kind of book I was hoping to find in the New 52. Now, Green Arrow has never been a character I've been especially fond of. He is, after all, a guy with a bow and arrow. I walk my dog in Lower Arroyo Park in Pasadena, and see archers there almost every day at a public range down there. Archery just isn't threatening to me in the same way that firearms would be, even in a safe setting like a shooting range. As a character, Green Arrow has always been a bit of a caricature, going all the way back to his role as the voice of hippiedom in superhero comics when he teamed up with that square dude Green Lantern way back in the early 1970s. This new Green Arrow keeps Oliver Queen as the hero, but updates him to be much more modern and less one-note. Gone is the goatee, and Queen is like a young Steve Jobs who runs a major tech company as a side job to playing superhero. He's assisted by tech girl Naomi and skeptic Jax. The book is, again, heavy on the action and it plays like vintage late 1980s DC, courtesy of writer J.T. Krul, penciler Dan Jurgens and inker supreme George Perez. The art really helps sell this book, as both Jurgens and Perez are veteran superhero artists who seem to relish the opportunity to revisit a more fun take on this character. This book would have easily fit into the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths relaunches of 1986-1989, which makes me very happy because that's perhaps my favorite era of DC Comics.

One more post to wrap it up.

First Batch of New 52 Releases Delivers Solid Comic-Book Entertainment

2011-09-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, life is great. Yesterday afternoon, FedEx rang my door and had me sign for a package from the publicity folks at DC Comics. Quickly tearing open the package, I found inside all 13 of this week's releases of The New 52.

It was tough to not just stop working and dig right into the big pile. I took a little break and read Hawk & Dove #1 followed by Action Comics #1. I read the rest of the books last night and now will delve into them for your reading pleasure.

The good news is these books are overall quite good. After the mild letdown of Justice League #1, I found every one of the 13 new books to deliver a satisfying and entertaining story. These read a lot like comics from the late 1980s or 1990s, with more story, more action and fewer talking heads than superhero comics have delivered of late. They also have some sharp art and, thankfully, overall good coloring. The books look quite sharp. I still wish there was some kind of introductory text page and maybe a house ad promoting comic shops, explaining digital availability and an ad offering subscription info.

I don't know how truly new readers will receive these books, but I give DC great credit for doing a pretty good job delivering on material that I think has a wider appeal than superhero comics have delivered in a while.

So, let's go through them, one by one. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but if you're a stickler you might want to wait until you've read the books to proceed. Also, this may take multiple posts.

I started with Hawk & Dove #1 just because a comic by Rob Liefeld always evokes some kind of interesting reaction. Yes, the anatomy on the cover is awful, but the image still has that unique energy Liefeld brings to his projects. Inside, the story by Sterling Gates was better than I expected, though in a crazy, comic-book kind of way. It at least delivers on action, complete with monsters, zombies (or maybe monster/zombies) and a close call between a plane and a national monument. The books keeps it simple, though some of the ideas in here are a bit puzzling (what is a "science terrorist"?) if you think about it too hard. The dialog is a bit hammy, especially from the slightly one-note characterization of Hank Hall as a hothead. Still, this works in a very basic way thanks to lots of action and a couple of good twists toward the end.

Action Comics #1 is THE high-profile book of the week, featuring Grant Morrison and Rags Morales' anticipated revamp of the Man of Steel. And boy, does this get the blood pumping. If you go back and read my take a few months back on how to fix Superman, it looks like Morrison had a lot of the same ideas. This issue is all about the action, and features some great, gritty sequences. Morrison takes Superman back to the beginning — this version of the character is surprisingly similar to the original concept by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. This Superman is a crusader, tackling the powerful interests of Metropolis that are otherwise above the law. His power levels also are scaled back and he leaps more than flies, and has the potential to be hurt. This Superman also is young, but not mopey — he's out there acting on his convictions and doing what he sees as right. This is a great first issue and it succeeds at being an exciting and fun take on the Man of Steel.

Stormwatch #1 was a slightly more confusing read for me. The plot centers on the new Stormwatch, which includes as members the Martian Manhunter from Justice League and most of the cast of the Authority, as they are faced with no less than three interesting challenges: Finding the superhuman known as Apollo, dealing with something very strange on the moon, and a third mystery involving a horny mystery in the Himalayas. There's definitely a different vibe to this book that recalls in ways the spirit of the best Stormwatch/Authority stories (most of them written by Warren Ellis).

Animal Man #1 was a true standout for me, with a terrific story by Jeff Lemire and equally good art by Travel Foreman. This one really is the best of all worlds, as it recasts the lead character into a new role, makes him and his family interesting characters in their own right and features some unique action and promise of more to come. I know I've read comics drawn by Foreman before, but he's obviously raised his game significantly because I was never blown away like I was with this issue.The colors by Lovern Kindzierski are also outstanding. I have to put this up there with Action Comics as the best of this week's bunch.

Men of War #1 surprised me. War comics have never been my favorite — Marvel's 1980s series The 'Nam being the lone exception — because I usually find them either unrealistic or too chaotic, confusing and repetitive to follow. This book, however, avoided all those issues while at the same time recasting the venerabel Sgt. Rock into contemporary times. In the lead story, Ivan Brandon delivers a story full of soldi war action (with a tantalizing hint of the superheroic) and good character development. The second story, Navy Seals: Human Shield, by Jon Vankin and Phil Winslde, is even more compelling than the Rock story. It's a bit more procedural, but it's done clearly and vigorously, leading to a compelling cliffhanger.

More in the next post.

Reviewing DC's Justice League #1 in print and in digital

2011-09-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

I haven't reviewed new comics in a while, though I've had a few requests and will get some comments on those books up in the next day or so.

In the interim, DC's New 52 kicked off yesterday with the release of Justice League #1. I got a copy from DC, and found it to have some good points and some bad. I also tried the digital edition on my iPhone and that spurred lots of ideas on what works and what doesn't about that format.

But first, the comic itself is good but not great.

Jim Lee and Scott Williams deliver some fantastic looking art. It's attractive and highly detailed and colored well by Alex Sinclair. And while Lee's never been the very best storyteller in comics, he's also much better than he used to be and the book is an attractive and easy read.

As usual, Lee's designs for Batman, Green Lantern and Superman are powerful and modern. I especially like the intense detail Lee and Williams give to Green Lantern's powers.

I almost think the art is too detailed, though that may just be my middle-aging eyesight speaking. When this gets collected into a slightly larger format like a hardcover, I think it'll look even better because there will be a bit more room for these details to shine.

The script by Geoff Johns is a bit more mixed. This issue takes an approach similar to that of the first episode of a TV series. We start knowing nothing, get a big splash of action with Batman, and then introduce some conflict as Green Lantern shows up and the pair head straight for a confrontation with Superman. There's also a sub plot introducing Vic Stone, who eventually will become Cyborg. The issue is quickly paced and reads well, though some of the dialog is a bit stiff.

And that's it. That's all that happens. There's some decent action, some decent characterization and a solid finish, but there's just not quite enough story here to build the anticipation that I think would make readers truly excited to come back for issue two. It's close, but if this was a double size issue that featured at least a glimpse of all the characters on the cover and conveyed a sense of where this was going, it would have been a much stronger read.

I expect reactions to this book will be all over the place. Something like this brings so many pre-conceived notions and inflated expectations with it, that there is no way it will play the same way to any two readers.

So the copy I received from DC was the digital combo pack version, which costs a dollar more than the regular version and includes a code for downloading the digital version of the comic.

I have not been a regular reader of digital comics. Part of it is just that I prefer to read comics in print and part that I haven't really enjoyed my attempts to read comics on a computer screen. I don't have an iPad, which seems to be the ideal device for reading digital comics, and my iPhone is great but I just can't see myself reading many comics on so tiny a screen.

Still, I tried it out on my iPhone and it worked quite well. The code, which is printed on the inside back cover, is a fairly long 32-character alpha-numeric code. I can imagine some folks might get frustrated at having to type in such a long code for each digital comic, but it worked for me on the first time. I entered the code at the website on my laptop and Justice League #1 was assigned to my ComiXology account and available to read on my iPhone instantly.

Reading the comic on the iPhone was a good but not perfect experience. The art looked good and the way the phone transitioned from panel to panel was intuitive and easy. I kind of liked turning the phone every so often to get the displayed panels to fill the screen. What things got problematic was on the larger images — panels that take up half a page or more. It was just not easy to see what I was looking at in those panels. I expect the iPad would not have the same issue.

What this digital experience left me wondering, though, is why DC is packaging its comics in two editions. Why charge an extra dollar for the digital code instead of just making them packaging them together in a single product? I think comics are expensive already without having the option of paying even more for another edition of the same thing. When I buy music, either on CD or digitally, I have the right to listen to it on my computer, my iPod, my car stereo, my living room, etc., for no extra cost. I'd be far more likely to read digital comics if they came with the print comics I'm already buying at no extra charge.

Similarly, I would think anyone who pays the full price for a digital comic should have the option to get a print copy if they want it. And It's not at all clear to me if DC (or anyone else) is offering digital subscriptions similar to the way iTunes sells a Season Pass for TV shows. A reasonably priced digital subscription plan that included print copies is something I would think hard for people to pass up, while at the same time having the potential to boost readership in both print and digital.

With the first huge wave of first issues set to arrive next week, I find myself hoping for surprises. Everyone's going to read Grant Morrison's Action Comics #1, but what I would really like to find is a few hidden gems from further down the list. I'm playing wait-and-see on these books and want to look at them before I decide which ones to pick up. But I really hope this experiment makes room for the kind of fun, strange and interesting mainstream comics that the major publishers have had trouble making a go of in recent years.

Beyond that, we'll see.

Wilma Flintstone in Batman? Joker in X-Men? It's all in the coloring ...

2011-08-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

It's strange the things you notice when you're reading a comic. Take this panel from DC Retroactive 1970s Batman:

"Oh, Willlllmmmaaaa!"

I don't know if this was intended by writer Len Wein and artist Tom Mandrake or if colorist Wes Hartman is just having a bit of fun. Of course, The Flintstones is part of the Warner Bros. animation empire, just as the DC Universe is.

It reminds me of this panel from X-Men #130, about which artist John Byrne later said he had hoped colorist Glynis Wein would pick up on his idea and color it in green, white and red. Here's the printed panel:

The joke's on Scott and Jean.

Oddly, Byrne also has said in interviews that he realized as a child that he could write stories with the best of them when he came up with an idea for a TV series about cavemen who had prehistoric equivalents of modern conveniences long before The Flintstones came on the air with much the same idea.

I admit I liked the three Retroactive issues DC publicity was kind enough to send me, though I admit to not being interested enough to buy any more of them. This is a good idea for a project, and the reprints were nicely chosen, but it should have been spread out over more than a month. Six specials each for the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s at $4.99 a piece ads up to a whopping $89.82, which is way too much.

X-Men: Schism Takes the Low Road to Mediocrity

2011-08-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

In Marvel and DC’s near-constant onslaught of mega-events to drive sales, the X-Men titles that popularized the gimmick have fallen victim to one of the most underwhelming and skeevy events in its history with the arrival of X-Men: Schism.

I have a lot to say about this one after reading the first three of five issues in the series, so consider yourself forewarned. I also think I need to explain why something like this is worth writing about in detail when it really would be easier to just roll my eyes, say “it stinks!” and move on to something worthwhile.

Comics are the only reason where I’ll bother being critical like this because the comics is so dominated by superheroes and franchises from Marvel and DC that the failure or success of any one such franchise has a much greater ripple effect than it would in any other medium. When something like X-Men (or Batman or Spider-Man, etc. — take your pick), which has so long been a dominant creative and commercial force does just about anything, you just can’t ignore it the same way critics can pass over, say, Sucker Punch, Glee or a new album from David Archuleta.

So here we have X-Men: Schism, a five-issue miniseries that sets the stage for the next relaunch of the entire line this fall. It’s written by Jason Aaron, with each issue drawn by a different artist. Carlos Pacheco and Cam Smith draw issue one, Frank Cho is on issue two and Daniel Acuña does it all on issue three. Alan Davis is slated for issue four, with Adam Kubert apparently on issue five. There also are no fewer than four editors credited on the book, which makes the errors in execution even more questionable. Plus, these books aren’t cheap, with the first costing $4.99 for 32 pages of story, and issues two and three cost $3.99 for 22 pages of story each.

If you’ve missed the premise for this series, it’s about a dispute between Cyclops and Wolverine that forces them to go their separate ways with each taking a number of fellow X-Men to form two distinct factions. This will lead to several relaunched titles, including a new Uncanny X-Men #1.

So this series should be attempting to get fans excited for what’s promised to be a “new” era for X-Men comics. Unfortunately, “new” is the last thing that Marvel appears interested in delivering when it comes to the X-Men, and Schism is guilty of rehashing some very old and worn concepts at the very core of the story. None of this is new for Marvel, but the company has had some success in recent years by executing its rehashed material in an engaging way, and it’s the failure to execute well on pretty much any level in the first three issues of X-Men: Schism that truly sinks them.

So Marvel’s big idea for setting up the future of the X-Men starts by reviving two ancient concepts: The Sentinels, which first appeared in X-Men #14 (Nov. 1965), and the relatively youthful Hellfire Club, who first showed their faces in X-Men #129 (Jan. 1980). Both have been used in literally dozens of X-Men comic-book stories in the intervening years — some of them good, some not so good. To make an impact with either of those ideas requires a fresh new take on them and some exciting execution, neither of which is present in X-Men: Schism.

First, these are not some new, scary, super-advanced Sentinels that pose a serious threat to the mutants of the world. They are, instead, old Sentinels that have been in storage for decades and, in most cases, don’t even work. The only twist is the idea that every nation in the world has a secret stash of Sentinels on hand in case they have a “mutant problem.” The few working Sentinels are handily dispatched by the X-Men, with little dramatic payoff.

The real crux of the story so far is the new Hellfire Club, which is composed of a quartet of super-smart, rich, evil children. Yup, children. They’re lead by 12-year-old Kade Kilgore, who murders his father and claims his place running a legitimate arms-manufacturing company.

Any time the villain turns out to be a super-smart child, whether it’s in an episode of Star Trek or The Twilight Zone, or a comics character like Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass or Anarky from late-1980s issues of Detective Comics or even the X-Terminators that spun out of X-Factor in the late 1980s, it’s a device that’s rarely good for anything more than adding shock value. But the more realism you want in your comics — and with Marvel and DC both wanting every comic to be movie worthy, trying to appear realistic is paramount on every title they publish — the less you can take the idea of “evil” children seriously.

So Kilgore, the new Black King of the Hellfire Club, starts out as a cliche of fiction that is completely devoid of believability even on the level most superhero comics require. He murders, he plots, he doesn’t care about anything other than himself — and the reader has almost no reason to care or believe that he is anything other than a stereotypical character.

Still, it’s possible that even with two weak concepts that Marvel could still turn this into something interesting with some clever execution. And how far short this series falls on any such standard is the most disappointing element. It’s one thing to not come up with a brilliant premise for every single comics crossover, but a company like Marvel has the resources and the talent to avoid the kind of sloppiness found here.

This is "Switzerland," and most definitely not the U.N. General Assembly in New York. No.

Swiss security guards prove
global stereotype! Film at 11!

X-Men: Schism #1 begins with four pages that poke fun at the idea Wolverine appears in so many comics that he’s exhausted. Cyclops, however, needs Wolverine to accompany him to an "international ams control conference in Switzerland."

“Switzerland,” however, must be code in the Marvel Universe for the United Nations in New York City. Unless, of course, the economy in the Marvel Universe is so bad that the U.S. is exporting overweight tough-talking security guards to the land of chocolates, accurate clocks and secret banking. Speaking of security, this “arms control conference” appears less secure than a concert at Staples Center.

You can't really see it, even in print, that there are supposed to be people at those desks.

Cyclops and Wolverine have a long conversation that runs two whole pages and supposedly occurs as Cyclops walks toward the podium, meaning it happens in full view (and, I presume, earshot) of every delegate in the place. None of which you can see because they’re washed out in a mudslide of bad coloring.

The copy is full of little mistakes. I know there’s not 100 percent English-major agreement on this point, but the words “insure” and “ensure” are not interchangeable. Most dictionaries and style guides will tell you the former involves buying a policy and the latter means to make certain.

Then, Cyclops' speech is interrupted by a world leader who looks a lot like Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So much so, that the panel looks lifted from this particular image:

I want you ... to take art lessons!

This is a pretty blatant swipe, but what’s a shame it’s not even that effective. With no identification, this guy looks like some average joe who just walked into the international arms conference in Switzerland from the street. I know it’s got photo reference, but some kind of visual cue that this is a world leader (maybe a tie, or something?) would have helped. Even more embarrassing — the artists drew the world leader with six fingers. Count 'em.

This guy, who is not Iranian President Ahmadinejad, goes to 11.

Then, we get Quentin Quire. I must have missed his coming back from his death in Grant Morrison's New X-Men as well as his physical transformation from a skinny teen to a big hulking adult. (No one tell Kitty that you don’t have to be stuck at age 14 for a couple of decades.)

"You're double dead, dad!"

The rest of the issue concerns the return of various sentinels and the emergence of Kade Kilgore as the Black King of a new Hellfire Club. Kade is 12 years old and kills his father by kicking him out of a flying car — and then shooting him in mid-air. I still can’t figure out how that works.

I was very disappointed in the artwork of Carlos Pacheco. This generic kind of work is not what I think anyone who had read Avengers Forever or Pacheco’s previous late-1990s run on X-Men would expect from the artist. This is blocky, pedestrian and just plain dull, with none of Pacheco's previous style to be seen. I would not have known Pacheco drew this book without looking at the credits. And the coloring, credited to Frank D’Armata, was a real detriment to the overall look of the comic.

Kitty kicks off the "ew" factor in this series. Nobody over age 14 should want to think about that.

Rogue busts out in X-Men: Schism #2

The Kade Kilgore story, which was already strange in the first issue, gets weirder in the second with the debut of his playmates. There’s three of them, and none of them are properly introduced. But apparently, they’re paying some space aliens what at first seemed like $4 billion in cash (what they would do with American currency is beyond me) and is later clarified to be $4 billion in “untraceable intergalactic credits.” It’s never explained where the Hellfire Club or Kilgore got any amount of space money, let along 4 billion quatloos’ worth of it. And that’s probably for the best, given that answering that question in any fashion would only compound the idiocy of the whole idea.

And you thought Anakin was annoying.

Oh, and the little girl villain has a lightsaber, which she uses to chop off alien limbs left and right. Again, explaining this would do more to expose how ludicrous it is, so maybe it’s best that it’s just kind of there.

So then, Quentin Quire just shows up on Utopia and Scott protects him. This was a scene that made me long for the days when superheroes used their powers instead of just talked at each other endlessly like they were stuck in an episode of The West Wing. Would it have killed this story, which is severely lacking in action, to have had an old-fashioned blow out when characters meet?

My satellite service doesn't carry the Museum Opening Channel.

The logic gets even stranger when Cyclops‘ reaction to all this is to pull a PR stunt and send some X-Men to the opening of a mutant museum in San Francisco. And of course, this event is being televised because in 21st century America there’s nothing TV audiences like more than to watch a museum reception live and as it happens. The only museum opening I recall making anything close to national news was the debut of the Getty Center in 1997, an event we spent weeks writing stories about at the L.A.-area newspaper I worked for at that time.

(I think the convention of using live news coverage on TV to narrate events without using captions or dialog between the characters involved is yet another instance of people simply copying Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns rather than write something original.)

But apparently, such coverage in the Marvel universe is so dependable and popular that Kilgore plans to use the high-profile event to debut the Hellfire Kids.

Perhaps Frank Cho's greatest contribution to
this issue: Rogue unzipped!

The art on the second issue is by Frank Cho, best known for his comic book and strip Liberty Meadows and extensive good girl art in other places. As with Pacheco, you’d be hard pressed to guess from the printed comic that Cho had anything to do with the art, aside from the cover and a few interior panels featuring particularly busty portrayals of Rogue and Emma Frost. The stiff facial expressions and overly talky script, combined with more dank coloring, results in an unfortunate look that barely improves on the murkiness of the first issue.

Moving on to issue three, the art gets a huge boost from the arrival of Daniel Acuña, who delivers some stylish art. Since he does all the art, including colors, this issue is the first to not look like it was dragged through a mud pit. But there still are some issues with the art. A few panels have questionable perspective and anatomy — enough to pull me out of the comic and try to understand what I’m looking at. There’s also some questionable portrayals — Magneto in particular lacks the powerful build and sleek costume that have helped define the character’s look in recent comics.

Better art for X-Men: Schism #3

It’s too bad the story doesn’t improve. It starts with the Hellfire Kids disrupting the museum opening and Cyclops and Wolverine both heading off to help out. We finally get an introduction to the Hellfire Kids, who are given names and revealed to be the heirs to a family that has profited from slave trading relationships stretching from Earth’s own slave trade to the modern version of selling human slaves to aliens; a descendant of Frankenstein who’s so touchy about the family connection I can’t help but hear Gene Wilder saying, “It’s pronounced Fronk-en-steen!”; and a girl who shares with 37 cats inheritance of her deceased hotel entrepreneur mother’s estate.

Where are the X-Babies when you need them?

Cyclops uses a jetpack to get to San Francisco from Utopia. He apparently missed the memo from Batman that cool comics characters don't wear jetpacks unless they're drawn by Dave Stevens and called The Rocketeer.

While Cyclops straps on a jetpack and imitates The Rocketeer on his way from Utopia and Wolverine fits San Francisco traffic, the Hellfire Kids start shooting weird alien weapons at the X-Men. It’s a confusing sequence. For example, we see Colossus with some kind of Alien-style face-hugger on his head, but we don’t see that it got there because the Hellfire Kids are firing these things from a gun of some kind until the next page. The Hellfire Kids take out all the X-Men at the event, which means they beat Emma, Colossus, Namor and Magneto.

This is the worst line in the series — so far.

Only naive, innocent little Idie is left, and she causes some serious havoc, and how she responds unexpectedly becomes the crux of the whole issue. Wolverine wants her to wait for him to get there and handle the dirty work of taking out the Club and their guards; Cyclops gives her permission to do what she finds necessary. So when she torches the place and people die, it’s all on Cyclops. The issue is, however, tabled to next issue by the arrival of a big spidery Sentinel.

The next issue, which is due out Sept. 21, looks from the preview art to be (finally!) an issue with some action in it. It’s also drawn by Alan Davis, who I don’t think has ever drawn an ugly comic in his life (though I’m not sure Marvel’s colorists won’t find some way to muddy it up).

There’s lots of other very small things that cumulatively yank you out of the story and undermine the ability to take any of this seriously.

Among them:

In most states, saying this to a 12-year-old
boy would earn you prison time.

Kilgore’s father is beyond a caricature. Has any CEO of a weapons manufacturing firm ever bragged about their wares being half off? And even in the United States, I don’t think anyone can buy a weapon online the same way you would a book from Amazon.com.
There’s so many throwaway lines that are of questionable taste and offer no benefit to the story. Examples:
Kitty saying to Logan “Yeah, but you also showed me how to use a sword before I was old enough to wear a bra.”
A Hellfire Club member saying “Our previous plan was to simply exterminate the mutant race and perhaps throw an orgy every year on the anniversary.”
Blocked out swearing, such as this line from Kilgore: “Any of you morons #%$@ this up and I will hack your entire family tree into kindling and burn you atop the pile.”
A Hellfire Kid saying, “I farted.”
And Kilgore saying, “I haven’t had sex yet, so maybe I’m wrong ... but I can’t imagine it feeling better than this.”

This is rated T+, but still. Ugh. This is really not a good series of comics, and I don't think there's much chance for rescuing it in the final two issues. Having read this, it's no surprise that the reaction has been somewhat muted and the book failed to break the top 10 selling comics in the direct market for the month of June.

This kind of sloppy work is disheartening and indicates a rather steep drop in quality. Given the relaunch is coming up with the same creators, I can only hope that Marvel keep the reboot button handy and be ready to bring in some fresh talent and let them loose to try some new ideas.

I think you can blame the stink for this one on Marvel.

Good Nonfiction Books About Comics, Part 5 - Comic-Book Movies and Mutant Cinema

2011-08-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of books about comic book movies, in part because I don't think there are many out there that are not direct tie-in books. I have a few of those, including Frank Miller's Sin City: The Making of the Movie, The Art of X2, The Spirit: The Movie Visual Companion, and one or two more. Reference works are common, including Comic Book Movies by David Hughes and John Kenneth Muir's comprehensive and readable (though pricey) Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television.

Of actual books on comics movies, I only have a few, including my own. So I'll start there with a quick recap of how Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen came to be.

I was attending the first New York Comic-Con in February of 2006, enjoying the show despite having to endure a type of winter weather that had long been absent from my life. On the final day, I walked the floor of the Javits Center and came across the booth of Sequart, manned by Julian Darius and Mike Phillips. Julian had just released his book Batman Begins and the Comics, now re-released under the title Improving the Foundations: Batman Begins from Comics to Screen. He told me about the book and how it analyzed the movie scene by scene citing and analyzing how the comic book source material was used through the movie.

I immediately liked the idea and asked him if they were planning any more books like this. Julian said he was planning one on the then-upcoming Superman Returns. I asked if they had any plans for X-Men, which at that point was also coming soon with X-Men: The Last Stand. Mike said that was a good idea but they were mostly DC guys and didn't know anyone who could write it. My brain went off and I said I could do it, and after a quick listing of my credentials we agreed to talk about it after the show.

A few weeks later we'd worked out a deal and I started writing. I found writing it to be alternately enjoyable and aggravating. A structure came easily, but finding time to devote to writing it in between other gigs that paid the kind of money I needed to keep the lights on was harder than I thought. Revising it also was tough — I felt like I could have revised it endlessly and made it a bit better with each draft, but then it was never going to get done.

Getting the book finished and revised took longer than expected and the book's original target release date of autumn 2006 quickly revealed itself to be optimistic. Sequart did a great job in getting a small batch of an early version printed up under the title X-Men: The Movie Trilogy and the Comics for the 2007 New York Comic-Con, complete with a cool cover illustration from Kevin Colden. Concerns about trademark lead to the revised title of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, as suggested by Julian, and another round of revisions was made before the book became final.

Reaction to the book at that NYCC was a surprise to me. Interest was limited among fans, most of whom already had strong opinions about the movie and familiarity with the source material.

The final version of the book was completed later that year and thus began a frustrating process in gaining distribution for the book. There was some technical issue with getting the book listed on Amazon — which took much longer to resolve than anyone expected. By the time all was repaired and the book was up on the site, a lot of key momentum had been lost as interest in the movies had dwindled after X-Men: The Last Stand.

Having watched each of the movies in the trilogy now dozens of times in writing the book, I think the X-Men trilogy will go down as a trendsetter that got the comic book movie off the ground. But they've been outpaced in terms of quality by subsequent, more interesting comic book movies.

The biggest puzzle for me is the strength of antipathy fans have toward The Last Stand. I agree with most that it falls short of X2 in most regards. But having watched it many times I also think it's really not that much worse than X2 or X-Men. Most of the antipathy centers on Brett Ratner, whose public persona is about as far removed from that of Bryan Singer as you can get. But Ratner really was a hired gun on that movie, brought on just a couple weeks before shooting was to begin. Ratner's focus was on finishing the movie on time more than making a personal impression on the material.

The real fault for the movie's problems lies with Fox, which set an impossible shooting schedule for the film and got cold feet when it came to following through with the Dark Phoenix storyline.

The movie works, I think, pretty well up to the point where Professor Xavier confronts Phoenix at her parents home and she disintegrates him. After that, the Phoenix storyline is dropped until the end of the film. And that ending changes the original story significantly from Jean as the hero, sacrificing herself because she knows she can't control this level of power, to Wolverine becoming the hero and killing Jean even though he loves her. On the surface, it's similar, but deep down, it's quite different.

The other thing The Last Stand did well was to just unleash the characters into the action. On the first two films, Singer offered up inventive but short action sequences that always felt restrained. And it worked to keep the audience hungry for more because it gives the creators a place to go. But I don't know that his instincts would have allowed him to deliver the kind of satisfying mayhem that Last Stand delivered.

In the end, I'm proud of the book, enjoyed the experience of writing it and learned a lot about my own personal strengths and shortcomings in the process.

If you're interested in more, check out the book's page on Sequart.com here, where you can read a sample chapter on previous movie and TV adaptations of X-Men and order the book. You also can get it from Amazon.com here.

Comic-book movies are definitely evolving. It'll be interesting to see where Marvel goes once they've done two or three movies each with Captain America, Iron Man, Thor and the Avengers. It'll be just as interesting to see if DC can recover from the dismal reception of Green Lantern and figure out how to make the likes of Flash and Wonder Woman into good movies. And with Sony already re-inventing Spider-Man, the pressure will be on Fox to find some way to make good with new versions of Daredevil and Fantastic Four. Comic book movies are sure to stick around for a good ten years — it's just what they will look like and whether audiences will tire of them that is up for debate.

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #10 (Jan. 1963)

2011-08-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

“The Return of Doctor Doom!”

Script by Stan Lee

Pencils by Jack Kirby

Inks by Dick Ayers

Letters by Art Simek

They might have titled this story, "Lo, There Shall Come — A Stinker!" The previous nine issues all saw improvements of one kind or another, but this issue is truly weak in every respect. This issue is, in fact, so bad that all I can really do with it is do a quick run through and make some snarky comments about it, so here goes.

This issue begins with Reed trying to figure out how Sue's invisibility power works, using a big machine that looks like a cross between a howitzer and a vintage camera. Far from Kirby's best splash page, it's made even weirder by the fact that the Human Torch is assisting Reed by taking notes while in full flame mode. It's so odd, that it gets a mention in Sue's dialog, just before the "4" signal appears in the sky and the trio assume Ben's in trouble and rush off to help.

And it just gets weirder from there.

Someone needs to tell Reed nukes are
unsafe to keep around the house.

There's a two-page sequence in which Reed, Sue and Johnny all rush to the scene of the signal that is perfunctory and embarrassing in just about every way. It starts with Reed stopping Johnny from using his flame on a jammed "nuclear lock mechanism" because it's so sensitive to heat. I'd love to know what was going through Stan's head when he came up with "nuclear lock mechanism" and exactly how making a lock nuclear would be a benefit in any fashion. Especially since it doesn't seem to work. Then Reed tries to stretch his arm under the door all the way to the Fansti-car hangar, only to instead get his hand all the way to the Pogo-Plane hangar instead. Exhausted, his arm snaps back to him like a rubber band.

The trio finds Ben at the apartment of Alicia Masters, now officially dubbed Ben's girlfriend in a caption, and find he just wants to show them the statues she's made of their villains.

Then we get to what I'm sure was the scene that most motivated this issue, as Lee and Kirby themselves appear for the first time in a Marvel story. Doctor Doom shows up at their studio and uses them Reed to a trap. Lee obviously loves this scene, giving himself some crackerjack dialog. Kirby, meanwhile, shows enough restraint to not even show his (or Lee's) face in the scene.

That's the corner of Stan Lee's head on the left. I wonder if Doom's destroying one of the famous
FF ashtrays that was produced in the 1960s. And I still think Stan Lee needs to appear on Mad Men.

Having captured Reed, Doom recounts an unconvincing and rather silly rationale for his return from space. Having been last seen in issue six plunging into deep space, he found a race of aliens that are stereotypically very advanced yet totally naive. They hook up Doom with their body transfer technology and return him to Earth. Using the alien technology, he switches bodies with Reed. They fight and the rest of the FF show up and, naturally, help restrain the body of Doom and put him in a prison made of impenetrable plexiglass.

Returning to Reed's lab, Doom starts making — of all things — a shrink ray that he tests on some animals he stole from the zoo. He somehow talks the trio into thinking that the shrink ray is the answer to all their problems, though his explanation for why makes absolutely no sense. Of course, the ray won't do what he says — instead, it'll shrink the FF into nothingness. Nice.

Back in the cell, Reed of course finds a way to escape and goes to Alicia's apartment. Sue just happens to be visiting and whacks him over the head. Ben and Johnny come over and they take the body of Doom with Reed's mind back to the Baxter Building.

Just thinking about how this might
work makes my head hurt.

Logic completely leaves the story as Johnny uses his power to project a heat mirage of a stick of dynamite being used at a nearby construction site into the lab. The Doom mind in Reed runs, while the Reed mind in Doom tries to save everyone. Convinced the mind switch is real, Doom is shocked enough that the switch somehow reverses itself. The FF then turn the shrink ray on Doom and he dwindles into nothingness.

The transfer is undone.
This is not Kirby's most dramatic work

As you can see, nothing makes sense in this story and nothing of importance seems to happen. We learn little about Doctor Doom, and almost nothing happens among the FF either. Kirby's art lacks the scope and innovation of recent issues, and Lee's script only hampers any potential for salvaging anything decent.

This reminds me of those lame clip-show episodes TV series used to do when they had no decent script and the season was ending and it was a lame way pad out the episode. Lee and Kirby are lucky that their lackluster handling of Doom in this particular issue didn't undermine future stories that would secure his position as the series' premier villain.

Good Nonfiction Books About Comics, Part 4

2011-08-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

I don't have nearly enough books in the category that this post covers: Books about the art and lives of specific artists. I think there are a lot more out there, but for some reason I don't have as many of them as I thought I might.

I'll start with The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino, which I bought at a convention directly from the publisher and it was an autographed copy. I only met Carmine once, and it was at a convention and I simply said how much I had enjoyed his art on the old Marvel Star Wars series. That series was the one that got me reading comics and I had, as a kid, mixed feelings about the art. First, the comic was a lot better as soon as Infantino came aboard with writer Archie Goodwin. The stories were cool, fun to read, easy on the eyes and had some very clear storytelling. On the downside, none of the characters in the comic looked like the actors from the movie. That part bugged me enough — especially after seeing the bang-up job Mike Vosberg did on Star Wars Annual #1 — to write a letter to Marvel about it. All of which digresses from this book, which is an amiable recounting of Carmine's career as he remembers it. That's both a good and bad approach — there's lots of good little anecdotes and plenty of cool artwork throughout the book, but there's not much criticism. That leaves a few areas of comics history — especially during Infantino's tenure as top editor at DC Comics during the late 1960s and early 1970s — no closer to any kind of definitive history than we were before. Still, fans of Infantino's artwork should get a real kick out of this volume.

Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier is a very solid and enjoyable read that attempts to cover the life and work of Jack Kirby in a single volume. Given the sheer amount of writing that Kirby's generated over the years, it's obviously not going to be possible for any such book to cover every single thing Kirby did in the detail his fans would like. (For that, I always understood Evanier also was working on a much more detailed biography of Kirby that, I assume, will be published at some point in the future.) But this is a very solid account of Kirby, packed full of his amazing artwork and photos and well worth the time of die-hard and casual fans alike.

If you can't get enough Kirby, then there is always The Collected Jack Kirby Collector. I have four volumes of this series, and expect a few more have come out I don't own. These are terrific for getting into not just the specifics of Kirby's career, but also his impact on the field and fans. The articles range from scholarly examinations of Kirby's work to vintage interviews the artist gave over the years to recollections from people who either worked with Kirby or were just huge fans of his. Each volume also is generously illustrated with Kirby art, often photocopies of his original pencils. Reading this much about a single artist can be a bit overwhelming, so I read through these somewhat slowly, taking my time between stints to avoid Kirby burnout.

Mythology: The DC Comics art of Alex Ross is a beautiful art book packed full of Ross' amazing paintings. No one really captures a sense of how classic superheroes would look in the real world quite the same way Ross does, with his extensive use of models, photo reference and an amazing talent for producing finished art that looks photographic. I think in a lot of ways, Ross' art is better suited to being displayed in this kind of glossy format than in actual comic book stories, where painted art can slow down the reading process because it demands to be looked at. I bought my edition at a signing Ross did to promote its release a number of years ago at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood. Putting on my Variety hat, I asked him what his favorite comic-book movie was. His answer: RoboCop.

Tim Sale: Black and White is a lovely art book produced by Richard Starkings' Active Images. Printed in stark black and white on glossy paper, this book really shows off Sale's atmospheric art to great advantage. The dark, inky pages are easy to get lost in, and there's a career retrospective interview in there to boot. I think this particular book was released around the time Sale's art was making a big impact on the TV series Heroes, back in its first season when it was quite the hot property.

Last on this list (for now) is Brush with Passion: The Art and Life of Dave Stevens. This was a gift I received from a fellow comics fan on my 40th birthday and really loved digging in to. I had long known Stevens' work from various pin-ups and, of course, The Rocketeer. But this books goes a lot deeper and shows some of his contributions to many other projects, including such great films as Raiders of the Lost Ark and the long-form music video for Michael Jackson's Thriller. It is a satisfying portrait of the artist, written mostly as autobiography but, unfortunately, finished by other hands after Stevens died from cancer a few years back.

One other volume that springs to mind is another TwoMorrows project, the Modern Masters series. I picked up the John Byrne volume at least in part because of some of the sketches from Byrne's days at Charlton and later on X-Men. I also was pleasantly surprised to read Byrne talking about his days as a kid in Edmonton, Alberta, which is my hometown, and recognizing a couple of the places he described. In particular, I remember the newsstand at the downtown Eaton's department story, which was right inside the front door and well-stocked with magazines, newspapers and paperbacks, though not too many comics by the time my teen-age collecting years kicked in. I also enjoyed Byrne's brief recollection of Mike's, a famous newsstand on Jasper Avenue that always had several spinner racks stuffed full of comics. I once made my father trudge over there on his way home from work to pick me up a copy of Star Wars #1 that I had seen there the day before but not had the 35 cents to pay for at the time. Here's a story on Mike's, which went out of business just a few months before my family moved to the States, complete with a photo of its distinctive neon sign.

I think I have one more post for this series, this one on comic book movies, including my own tome, Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen.

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #9 (Dec. 1962)

2011-08-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

“The End of the Fantastic Four!”

Script by Stan Lee

Pencils by Jack Kirby

Inks by Dick Ayers

Letters by Art Simek

Another big leap forward for the series in a story that’s as off-beat as anything done in Fantastic Four previously.

There’s a lot to like in this story. I love the idea that the group loses its fortune on the stock market and has to sell everything off. Namor’s oddball idea of buying a movie studio and tricking the team into making a movie is just plain weird, but it gives Kirby in particular a chance to draw in some real-life movie stars. The fight between the Thing and Namor is particularly good, and the overall results are good enough to overcome some huge holes in the plot.

The cover to this issue is one of the best to date, giving a terrific tease for the story inside. Namor’s confident pose and the rundown Baxter Building, complete with broken and boarded up windows, are perfectly executed details. I also love the coloring — I don’t know if anything could properly recreate that lovely shade of reddish orange used for the background.

Page one of this issue — an excellent example of good comics.

Almost any class or advice on writing includes the point of beginning your story as late as possible, and the first panel of this issue is a great example of why. In a single page comprised of three panels, Lee and Kirby establish that the FF have lost their fortune, plan to sell all their possessions to pay their debt, and that Namor sees this as the perfect opportunity for revenge.

The second page is equally cool, as Reed tries to fend off a crowd of debt collectors and the heroes’ powers and personalities are set up for new readers.

Ben doesn't play with dolls.

Alicia Masters returns in this issue as Ben’s “friend” when he takes a break from the FF and heads to her apartment. It’s not explained how she’s handling life after the death of her father in the previous issue. Their relationship is not stated as romantic, but it’s implied as she presents Ben with a gift of a white knight puppet doll. I find it hard to imagine that Ben ever played with dolls, so his acceptance of the gift is a sweet bit of characterization.

The movie idea is an interesting one, but it’s full of weird moments and plot holes, starting with the FF hitchhiking from New York to Hollywood in just a few days.

Jack Kirby does Bob Hope (and Bing Crosby) well enough to rival Dave Thomas.

S.M. Studios’ lot is packed with real life stars, including James Arness, “Miss Kitty.” Charles Bronson, Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Jack Benny. This sounds like an idea Lee would have come up with, but Kirby does a very nice job of making the stars identifiable. Lee has said many times he always wanted to be in the movie business and moments like Ben’s run-in with Jack Benny foreshadows the success Marvel found on the big screen thirty-odd years after this issue was published.

The reveal of Namor as the studio head is another interesting moment, as he’s shown wearing a green suit with a yellow ascot that would be very much in style today. He’s also smoking with a cigarette holder, which is an odd habit for an underwater king to have picked up.

Yikes. This is bad.

Lee and Kirby show they’re getting the balance right on this book between action and character, with a series of fun moments including Johnny blowing his advance on a cool car and riding around town with some hot chicks; Ben showing off at Muscle Beach; and Namor wooing Susan at a fancy nightclub.

The shooting of the movie is the strangest part of this story. For one, the locations make no sense. We’re told Reed’s shooting in the Mediterranean, Johnny in Africa and Ben on the beach near Hollywood. I like the way Reed uses his powers on an otherwise unremarkable foe. And there’s all kinds of wrong in Johnny’s sequence as he fights a tribe of primitive Africans who use a magic potion that makes them flame-proof. The fight itself is OK, but the portrayal of the Africans is just embarrassing. For some reason, the natives are colored with a kind of grayish-brown color in the Masterworks edition I’m reading. I don’t know if that was the color used in the original comic, but three’s all kinds of weird and uncomfortable in this segment.

Some thoughtful superhero action from Jack Kirby.

Namor’s fight with Ben, however, is easily the coolest part of this issue. The sight of Namor jumping up and down on Ben’s shoulders to drive him into the ground is cool enough. But then Ben gets hit by lightning and reverts for a moment (yet again) to his human form. Namor easily clobbers the human Ben and returns to claim Susan’s hand in marriage as his prize. Namor, obviously, knows nothing about women, as he’s surprised when she tells him there’s no way that’s ever going to happen.

So Namor and Sue then fight, with Namor pulling out all kinds of new powers from electric shocks to radar vision. The last panel of page 21 gives us what I think is the first real panel of Kirby crackle in this series, and it rocks.

When the three male members of the FF show up, Sue wins the day by defending Namor from her comrades and also demanding that he live up to his end of the bargain and pay them for the movie. He agrees, and once again walks off slowly into the ocean.

The final panel shows the triumphant FF attending the premiere of the movie, which can’t have been any good considering there was no script and the movie is in theaters only “weeks” later.

But the flaws in this story matter less than the overall tone and feeling of the tale, as the series is starting to really find its groove and get comfortable enough with itself to take some risks and experiment with some funky new ideas that no DC hero comic of the era would have attempted.

It only took about forty years for this scene to come true.

Good Nonfiction Books About Comics, Part 3

2011-08-09T15:45:00.000-07:00

This time, I look at the how-to-make-comics books on my shelves.

Alan McKenzie's How to Draw and Sell Comic Strips was the first book I ever saw that specifically devoted itself to this particular topic. I saw it in the bookstore at the University of Arizona when I was a freshman in 1987 and was particularly interested in seeing what comics scripts looked like and how pencils differed from inks — both topics that seem to always confuse fans when they first ask about them. McKenzie's book featured some nice historical material on comics and some great tips on how to learn to draw everything you need to be able to draw to do comics. He creates a sample comic in the book, complete with a full script, pencils, inks and colors. The book also covers production issues as they were in the day, i.e., lettering pages before they were inked and how to hand separate color plates. It's a great book, even though it did nothing to help me learn to draw. My efforts in basic drawing class earned me only one of only two C's in my college career, convincing me that drawing was not where my talents lay. It looks like this has been revised and updated for a couple of new editions, and should be pretty easy to find if you are so inclined.

Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art is a classic in the field and the first book to explore the specific qualities of comics as an artform. I enjoy this book more now that I've read a significant amount of Eisner's work. The book appears to me to be more useful for artists who already know how to draw in applying their skills to comics. As I've discovered, it's not easy to learn to make art (and, I imagine, to teach it) when so much of the experience is subjective and difficult to communicate through words.

I almost put Writers on Comics Scriptwriting in the interviews section, but decided that this book by Mark Salisbury (and its sequel volume) fits better in the how-to category. This is a very nice collection of lengthy Q-and-A interviews with top comics writers on the craft of creating comics. Among the folks in volume one are Peter David, Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Kurt Busiek, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid and Warren Ellis. Volume two (by Tom Root and Andrew Kardon) covers Brian Azzarello, Dave Sim, Brian K. Vaughan, Mark Millar, Geoff Johns, Mike Carey, Kevin Smith, Greg Rucka and Brian Michael Bendis. I believe both books are currently out of print, but they are worth tracking down if you're interested in writing comics.

Along the same lines is Panel One: Comic Book Scripts by Top Writers and Panel Two: More Comic Book Scripts by Top Writers, both edited by Nat Gertler. Each volume includes a number of complete scripts by such talents as Busiek, Dwayne McDuffie, Jeff Smith, Neil Gaiman, etc. They're fascinating for how different they all are, from formatting variations to overall tone. Most of the books whose scripts are published in these volumes are indie books that are easy to track down for comparison to the final product.

Another good overall primer on the thought that goes into comics is The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics, by Denny O'Neil. This was part of an entire series DC did a few years back on how to make comics. While it does less in terms of showing complete scripts, it does discuss what goes in to making a comic work in the DC Universe, up to and including examples of how to map out and execute mega-crossovers.

There is no equivalent book from Marvel, but I do want to point out that anyone interested in seeing how books are put together on that side of town to track down the Rough Cut editions of Avengers (Vol. 3) #1, Thor (Vol. 2) #1, Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #1 and X-Force #102. These editions feature the complete plot and the pencils to those issues, giving a nice look at Marvel-style writing.

Few names are as well-regarded in the field as Alan Moore, so it's a no-brainer that Alan Moore's Writing for Comics from Avatar Press is well worth the read. This is a slim volume that collects a couple of essays Moore wrote on the topic, and they talk mainly about approach and execution with few examples. Moore's scripts are legendary for being long and extremely detailed — try to read the full scripts in the supplementary volumes in the Absolute Editions of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and see how far you get before mental exhaustion sets in.

Lastly, there's Comic Book Lettering: The Comic-Craft Way, by Richard Starkings and John "JG" Roshell. I include this because I used to do print design and production work and enjoyed this peek at how to put all the pieces together exactly into the final package. If you don't want to know what point size and kerning settings to use on comics type, this may not be for you. But reading this would be essential for anyone looking to letter a comic.

Off the Shelf: Saga of the Swamp Thing, Vol. 2

2011-08-07T14:13:00.000-07:00

It was more than two years ago that I read the first volume in this new hardcover series collecting the influential mid-1980s series by Alan Moore et al. and wrote about it here. I finally bought the second volume a few months back while visiting Santa Barbara and just got around to reading it now.

Pretty much everything I said about the first volume stands for the second. This collection deals largely with the relationship between Swamp Thing, his former life as Alec Holland and with Abby. It is Abby at the heart of these stories, as the meat of this book is the confrontation between Swamp Thing and Abby's husband Matt Cable.

Moore's handle on the craft is still improving here, leaping by bounds per issue, and he avoids the kind of obvious superhero confrontation that would have been very easy and pleasing for fans in favor of a story and a resolution that is much more thoughtful, mature and will resonate for years to come still.

There's also some fun in here — with "Pog," an issue in which Swamp Thing meets some aliens that are surrogates for the cast of Walt Kelly's Pogo. This sounds like a disaster, but Moore manages to pull this off and make it work within the series and without being so incongruous, goofy or in love with itself that it breaks the spell.

The series concludes with a stunning issue in which Swamp Thing and Abby admit their love for each other and he allows her to see the world as he does. The techniques used here foreshadow the bulk of what Moore did with Promethea, and works completely and beautifully. The excellent art by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben make it completely natural to slowly turn the book in your hands until it's sideways and then back again.

It's amazing to look at these stories and realize how much DC and Vertigo built on the ideas and techniques Moore pioneered even in the first year and a half of his work on Saga of the Swamp Thing. It also is hard, if not impossible, to imagine that any comic produced in 2011 could have even half the impact that this series had in 1984 and 1985.

I hope I get around to reading Vol. 3 sometime before 2013.

First Look at Henry Cavill as Superman in 'Man of Steel'

2011-08-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

Warner Bros. released today the first image from Zack Snyder's upcoming Man of Steel movie, featuring the first image of actor Henry Cavill as Superman.

Here's the pic:

I admit to quite liking this. As great as Christopher Reeve was, I think it's a good idea to steer clear of trying to imitate what he did and find a new version of Superman for the big screen.

This image shows a powerful, muscular Superman that's a bit more in line with the original concept of the character, as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. I like the long, heavy cape, but think we could try and do away with every superhero having some kind of 3D plastic emblem glued to their chest.

Snyder stumbled with fans on Sucker Punch. While not a great movie by any means, I didn't think it was as horrible as everyone else did, at least in part because it delivered exactly what the trailers promised.

I do think Snyder is a good director. He may not have the kind of grand cinematic vision that changes the artform, but he does have a surprisingly good grip on the details and can pull off complicated movies pretty much on time and on budget.

The casting also is really good on this. Amy Adams, Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Coster, Diane Lane, Michael Shannon, Julia Ormond and Russell Crowe all should be much more interesting than the cast of Superman Returns.

I'm also glad they're not making Lex Luthor the villain this time out, but we have already seen Zod so I don't know why we need to revisit him when there are so many other Superman villains out there to choose from.

After the jump, you can read the press release that came along with the photo. What do you think, Superman fans? Does this look good to you, or is it cinematic Kryptonite?

"MAN OF STEEL" REVEALED

Much-anticipated First Look at Star Henry Cavill as Superman

BURBANK, CA, August 4, 2011 — Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures have provided the first look at the new "Man of Steel," revealing star Henry Cavill as Superman in the film from director Zack Snyder.

The film also stars three-time Oscar® nominee Amy Adams ("The Fighter") as Daily Planet journalist Lois Lane, and Oscar® nominee Laurence Fishburne ("What's Love Got to Do with It") as her editor-in-chief, Perry White. Starring as Clark Kent's adoptive parents, Martha and Jonathan Kent, are Oscar® nominee Diane Lane ("Unfaithful") and Academy Award® winner Kevin Costner ("Dances with Wolves").

Squaring off against the superhero are two other surviving Kryptonians, the villainous General Zod, played by Oscar® nominee Michael Shannon ("Revolutionary Road"), and Faora, Zod's evil partner, played by Antje Traue. Also from Superman's native Krypton are Lara Lor-Van, Superman's mother, played by Julia Ormond, and Superman's father, Jor-El, portrayed by Academy Award® winner Russell Crowe ("Gladiator").

Rounding out the cast are Harry Lennix as U.S. military man General Swanwick, as well as Christopher Meloni as Colonel Hardy.

"Man of Steel" is being produced by Charles Roven, Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan and Deborah Snyder. The screenplay was written by David S. Goyer, from a story by Goyer and Nolan, based upon Superman characters created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster and published by DC Comics. Thomas Tull and Lloyd Phillips are serving as executive producers.

Currently in production, "Man of Steel" is slated for release on June 14, 2013 and will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Good Nonfiction Books About Comics, Part 2

2011-08-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

Lengthy interviews with comics creators have produced some fantastic reading over the years, particularly in the pages of The Comics Journal, which borrowed from the traditions of Playboy and Rolling Stone to set the standard for comics. As I said in my recent post about covering the junket for Captain America: The First Avenger, this kind of writing is surprisingly tricky to do well. It's also produced some of my favorite reads about comics, as well as a few clunkers. I'll start off by crediting The Comics Journal, of which I have dozens and dozens of individual issues packed up in a box somewhere. But this is about the bookshelf, so here are some more of my favorite good books about comics:

The X-Men Companion I and II were published by Fantagraphics in 1981 and 1982, culled largely from material that had already appeared in the magazine. But when I came across it in 1990 or 1991, again at Bookman's in Tucson, it was a revelation. The interviews by Peter Sanderson are excellent, and span the entire run of the comic up to that point. Interviewees include Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, Terry Austin, John Byrne and a joint interview with Claremont and then-editor Louise Jones about the future of the book. That these interviews were done at a time we now consider early in the book's history, it's fascinating to read about how these stories came together and where everyone expected to take the book in the future. I also very much loved the excellent reproduction of so much art in the book — most of it blown-up black and white reproductions from Marvel stats that look absolutely fantastic. Because of this book, I promised myself that if this material was ever reprinted in black and white I would have to buy it, and I did so when Marvel started its Essentials line around 1997.

The Comics Journal Library has offered some similar volumes of more recent vintage. I particularly enjoyed the oversize volumes on Jack Kirby and Frank Miller. I also greatly enjoyed the excellent volume on comics writers that collected vintage interviews from the magazine's early days with Claremont, Gerry Conway, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Archie Goodwin, Alan Moore, Denny O'Neil, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and Harlan Ellison.

I also enjoyed other publications' efforts at doing interviews, including the late, lamented Comics Interview. This magazine created several collections that found their way into my collection, including a Batman volume released in 1988 or 1989, around the time of the first Tim Burton Batman movie; and a mid-1980s special on X-Men that included interviews with then-artist John Romita Jr., Louise and Walter Simonson, editor Bob Harras and, of course, Claremont. I have many random issues of this title stored away elsewhere, and am interested in the recent collected edition that has been made available as an online print-on-demand premium edition.

A book I rarely see discussed anywhere is Comic Book Rebels, a 1993 volume by Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette. This book, subtitled Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics, features interviews with an outstanding group of creators from Scott McCloud and Moebis to Dave Sim, Richard Corben, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Todd McFarlane, Frank Miller, Harvey Pekar and Will Eisner. Again, I don't know why this book isn't talked about more, but it's especially fascinating to see these folks talk about the challenges the industry faced in the days before the internet and before even the heights and crashes of the direct market.

Titan Books has in recent years done some nice interview books focused on specific comics characters and franchises. Comics Creators on the X-Men and Comics Creators on the Fantastic Four, both written by former Marvel editor in chief Tom DeFalco, are solid works that cover those characters up through about 2005 or so. It's especially interesting to read the X-Men book after going through the X-Men Chronicles, as many of the same folks are interviewed, though 25 years later. I understand there's a Spider-Man volume as well.

Last on this list is Eisner-Miller, which collects a weekend-long conversation between Frank Miller and Will Eisner on everything from comics history to the sexiness of inking. I wrote about this book here when it first came out and was pleased to see that some quick skimming showed it still holds up. It's especially nice to have this book capture the views of Eisner late in his life, as he died not long after the book came out.

I had meant to include in the previous post an invitation for folks to comment on their favorite books about comics — either what they think of the books I've mentioned here or any that I've missed that deserve a look. From the looks of my list, I likely have two more posts in this series: one on how-to books and one on books that focus on the careers or life of a specific creator.

Covering 'Captain America: The First Avenger'

2011-08-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

Chris Evans stars in Captain America: The First Avenger.

I should mention that I occasionally write for Newsarama.com, and wrote for them some articles on Captain America: The First Avenger.

These usually involve attending a junket, which consists of some combination of a press conference, roundtable interviews and one-on-one interviews. Nine times out of ten, these junkets are held at the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny in Beverly Hills, so anyone who's looking for a star sighting in L.A. could do a lot worse than to hang out at the valet station of this hotel. For example, while waiting for my car after the Cap junket, actor Jason Bateman pulled up and hopped out to meet with some publicists working on, I assume, something related to Horrible Bosses or The Change-Up.

Anyway, in addition to getting to see the movie in 3D a week early on the Paramount lot, I showed up at the Four Seasons for a press conference with the filmmakers. On the panel were director Joe Johnston; screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; and Marvel Studios execs Kevin Feige and Louis D'Esposito. You can read what came of that session here.

That was followed by roundtables, where a hotel room is set up for groups of journalists — usually around a dozen or so at a time — to interview the talent. These are strictly timed and usually very short, forcing the interviewers to jockey for position to ask their questions before your 10 minutes with Chris Evans is up. For Cap, the actors did the roundtables, and we got a few minutes with Evans, the charming Hayley Atwell and Sebastian Stan. Read what came my group's short session with Evans here.

Sometimes there even is a takeaway or, more accurately, a gift bag offered to the press. The bag at Cap included an action figure, a collectible cup from Dunkin Donuts, a copy of the soundtrack on CD and a Cap-branded copy of Norton Internet Security 2011 that is useless to me because I only work on Macs. There also are production notes with bios, credits and information on the making of the film for journalists to use as reference.

The third and final piece I wrote from the Cap junket was this review, which most people reading this blog will be able to compare with their own views on the film now that it's been out in theaters for three weekends.

A lot of sites will take some of these interviews and transcribe them into Q and A style interviews. I've tried to do that in the past, but have come to the conclusion that it's a huge pain in the ass and not nearly as effective as writing a more traditional news story. Writing an article, you can put the appropriate emphasis on what people say in interviews, provide context and get the point across much more clearly. Transcribing an interview is a tedious process that exposes the vast divide between the way people use language when they talk and clear writing. The latter is almost always better, devoid of the filler language most people are never aware is used unless you have to try to write it out. Email interviews are almost always better for quick Q and A's. Long audio interviews like you'd find in the Comics Journal would require a lot of back and forth, editing and copy editing to get to the published state.

I managed to see Captain America: The First Avenger a second time when my wife and I had the opportunity to leave the house without the baby while some friends babysat for us. I liked the movie more the second time, and even though I enjoyed the 3D on the first viewing, I saw the 2D version the second time and it didn't affect my opinion of the experience in the slightest.

I think Avengers looks like it's going to be the blockbuster of 2012, and I'm impressed with how well Marvel Studios has pulled off this big plan to build to it, starting way back with the first Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. I liked Thor okay and thought X-Men: First Class was terrific, so the summer's been good for Marvel movies.

I was less impressed with Green Lantern, which was never obviously terrible but was so formulaic in the way it told the origin story and so rigidly followed the conventions of superhero movies that it just never added up to anything memorable. Green Lantern 2 needs to go in a different direction, so I suggest they reduce Hal Jordan to a cameo and make the movie about Guy Gardner, John Stewart and G'Nort. It most likely would tank at the box office, but at least people would have a reaction of some kind to what's on the screen, even it's just that two of those three characters are annoying as hell.

Kirby Copyright Verdict Should Surprise No One

2011-08-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

I wrote a lot about the copyright case between the family of Jerry Siegel and DC Comics over Superman, but I have a lot less to say about the recent ruling against Jack Kirby’s children. Read the ruling here.

From a legal perspective, nothing should have surprised anyone about either of these cases. The facts in the Siegel case make it an ideal candidate for copyright termination while the Kirby case always depended on making a convincing argument that Jack didn’t work under work for hire rules. The depositions posted at 20th Century Danny Boy a few months back were fascinating for the details they mined about how Marvel operated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But nothing in that testimony did anything to refute the idea that Kirby was a freelancer doing work for hire.

I wish this had at least gone to trial, so that we could hear the arguments the Kirbys’ lawyer, Marc Toberoff, planned to make in this regard. But Kirby’s life and work have been pretty thoroughly documented by this point and there appears to be not even an inkling of a smoking gun document somewhere that would turn the tables.

The Kirby and Superman cases are similar in at least one way: Neither would have been necessary had the corporate owners of DC and Marvel simply stepped up to the plate and done the right thing by giving credit to and sharing even a sliver of the wealth these artists generated for them.

Comics artist Stephen Bissette has written a lengthy post at his blog urging comics fans to engage in a boycott and stop buying any Marvel products derived from Kirby’s work. He’s picked up this idea from the success of one DC fan’s efforts to ask DC creators and execs at Comic-Con why they haven’t hired more female creators or publish more female characters. It didn’t take much — she asked the questions at several panels and it got some buzz in the comics press — but it did result in a statement from Jim Lee and Dan DiDio saying they would hire more women creators. I don’t think most fans will stop buying FF, Thor, Hulk or X-Men comics on those grounds. But bad publicity helped put some pressure on Marvel during Kirby’s art return dispute with the company in the 1980s. It also helped Siegel and Shuster get a deal in the mid-1970s for an annual stipend and health benefits. Maybe it could work again.

It would be the right thing, the moral thing for Marvel to honor Kirby’s contributions with credit and a share of the immense profits it generated.

I’m also interested in this argument Bissette has linked to that questions the legal basis of corporate ownership of copyrights and the entire work for hire concept. The United States is a very friendly place for corporations, so I expect we’ll never see corporations lose their rights to own a copyright. In fact, the opposite is likely — that corporations will get more rights and extend copyrights even further beyond the limited terms called for by the Constitution.

The best lesson for comics creators to take away from all this is to create your own characters, your own comics and don’t sell them to the first publisher that offers to put out your book. Comics as an art form and as an industry needs new ideas and new books. Much of the malaise many fans feel comes from the fact that the market is so dominated by Marvel and DC characters that are, in most casts, between 50 and 75 years old. They’re great characters, but it might be time to make some new ones, or the industry and the art form risk dying off along with the audiences that are still hanging on to ideas that increasingly struggle to be relevant to the lives of readers living in the 21st century.

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #8 (Nov. 1962)

2011-08-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

“Prisoners of the Puppet Master!”

Script by Stan Lee

Pencils by Jack Kirby

Inks by Dick Ayers

Letters by Art Simek

Some of the formula that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had figured out for the title was starting to settle in at this point, with the opening argument between the Thing and the Torch being both familiar and executed very well. The argument this time begins when Reed asks Johnny to keep Ben out of his lab. Ben throws a temper tantrum worthy of a 2-year-old and storms off, followed by Sue.

While they argue, they spot the first act of the mystifying Puppet Master, who uses his ability to make people do anything he wants by making little puppets of them from radioactive clay and then making them act out his wishes in miniature play sets. His first act is to make an apparently random man jump from a bridge to his death.

So, yes, the Puppet Master is one of the silliest villains in all of Marvel. Nothing about his power makes sense. Neither does his oddball physical appearance, or the fact that he was married at one point to the mother of beautiful blind sculptor Alicia Masters.

Alicia is the most significant new element introduced in this issue, and she takes on a fairly major role in the life of Ben Grimm and in the Fantastic Four comic book. In this issue, we really don’t learn too much about her, other than that she looks a lot like the Invisible Girl and is blind. And in Stan Lee’s typical melodramatic fashion, the blind girls sees the man behind the rocky visage of the Thing and falls in love with him — just as Reed has made progress on a way to reverse the Thing’s transformation.

This guy is a few years too early for the Gwen Stacy auditions.

The plot gets quite silly. In addition to creating puppets, the Puppet Master can create giant robots and a mechanical flying horse that can outrace the Human Torch. There’s also a prison riot before a simple matter, uh, trips up the Puppet Master, who falls to his death very much like his first victim. That leaves Alicia behind to be consoled by the Thing.

Excellent compostions, lettering —
and no background, but who cares

Reading this issue for the first time in ages, Kirby’s art makes it seems better than it really is. Kirby’s work is more confident on this issue. He has a better grip on who these characters are and what they look like. At the same time, he’s getting better at drawing them using their powers and putting them into action sequences. The Thing in particular gets some nice sequences in which he gets to tear a huge armored door out of the wall and builds a cage around rampaging inmates. Kirby’s chapter splash pages remain particularly compelling, and its worth noting how well he composes these panels.

You can see Kirby get a better grip on techniques like this in this issue.

These three panels sum up a lot of the appeal of early Marvel comics, and shows a lot of heart.

I have no idea what the reaction was to this issue when it came out, but I would think it would be somewhat reassuring to see the quality hold in most areas because so many comics that start out promising hit a wall about eight to 12 issues in and never recover from it.

Excellent storytelling in just three panels! This sequence would fill an annual these days.

The last thing I’ll say is that the cover to this issue is surprisingly weak. It’s very cluttered and uses an unusual shade of orange (at least it’s orange in the Marvel Masterworks version and looks like orange on comics.org). It also has some of that line-thickening that happens when the stats of the original art get a few generations too removed from the original. For example, the issue number and the white copy at the top of the page just turn into block shapes without good definition. That’s a shame considering how much Masterworks cost to buy, but I don’t know how much Marvel could do to fix it without access to the original art or hiring an artist to do some touchup or a re-creation.

Another great splash panel that delivers a sense of both power and scale.

Good Nonfiction Books About Comics, Part 1

2011-08-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

Finishing the Blake Bell book on Steve Ditko reminded me that I really enjoy nonfiction books about comics, comics creators and the comics industry. I also realized I have quite a few such books and they might make for an interesting post. Then I started listing them and realized it might take several posts.

So here’s the first one, focusing on books that offer historical overviews or essays about comics as a medium or specific comics characters

All in Color for a Dime and The Comic-Book Book, both edited by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson. These are very influential books in comics history, being collections of essays about all kinds of topics from Jingle-Jangle Tales to Captain Marvel. All in Color was first published in 1970 and became a rare and expensive find by the time I learned of it, so I had to wait for the 1990s re-issue. The Comic-Book Book was one of the first books on comics I got, as it was commonly available in used bookstores. I picked it up the first time because of Don Thompson, whose reviews in Comics Buyers Guide I enjoyed reading quite a bit in the last few years before he died.

Superman: The Complete History, Batman: The Complete History and Wonder Woman: The Complete History, all written by Les Daniels and beautifully designed and filled with amazing images by Chip Kidd. These are really solid and fun books to read and look through, even though there’s something about them that feels restrained and somehow corporate in tone. The book on Wonder Woman was the most interesting to me as her history is written about less frequently, even though it’s perhaps the most oddball and interesting of them all.

The Comic-Book Makers by Joe Simon with Jim Simon. I checked this out of a library and then had to return it before I finished reading it because I was moving. But it was interesting enough for me to seek out when it came back into print years later. An excellent look back at what it was like to work in the Golden Age of comics from one of the most-accomplished creators of that time.

The Comic-Book Heroes, by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones. The original, 1984 edition of this was a book I coveted for a long time before I got to read it. I first saw it in the Waldenbooks at Paradise Valley Mall in Arizona sometime in late 1986. I desperately wanted to read it because it was the first history of comics I had seen that covered the era I was most interested in — the superhero books from the Silver Age on. Being a broke teenager, it took me a while to come up with the cash to buy the book, by which time the sole copy at the store had been sold. I didn’t see another copy until a few years later when I was in college and one turned up at the excellent Bookman’s store in Tucson. I devoured the book and loved it, especially for how compelling it was in recounting not just what happened in the books but the companies and people who were creating them. It also had some great criticism of a lot of comics of the time. Needless to say, I re-read this book several times and was thrilled when an updated version came out in 1996. That version was even better than the original, expanding the original book to cover everything that happened in the 1980s and up through the insanity of the speculator market and through the crash. Jones, of course, saw much of this first hand as a prolific scripter for both Marvel and DC, and the book is full of interesting details. If a third version were to be produced, I would be first in line to buy it.

Perhaps even more compelling is Jones' Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. This one goes all the way back to the dawn of the comics business and focuses in particular on Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz as they start and build DC into the industry powerhouse. This is full of well-researched details and exposes a shadier side of the industry. The battle over Superman waged between DC and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster is central here, and the details are both fascinating and heartbreaking. There’s plenty of other great stuff from the Golden Age and even a look at the circumstances that created the comic book in the first place. Another absolute must-read.

Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics and DC Comics: A Celebration of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes, both by Les Daniels, seem like they’d be natural bookends. The Marvel edition is a surprisingly solid, warts-and-all history of the publisher from the days of Martin Goodman up through the heyday of superstar artist Todd McFarlane. It does a very good job of covering all the bases and features lots of very nice cover reproductions and vintage photographs of creators. There’s even an illustrated “how-to-make-comics” section and annotated reprints of some vintage stories. The DC version, however, is nowhere near as interesting because it doesn’t weave the details into as interesting a narrative. Instead, it’s episodic and focuses a lot on how successful DC characters have been in other media. The Marvel book is better, but the DC version is still interesting for the photos and artwork.

I already wrote a ways back about Watching the Watchmen by Dave Gibbons, and had a chance to talk to Dave about the making of the book. I wish this kind of documentary evidence was readily available for more seminal comic book series. Basically, Gibbons kept every drawing and every scrap of paper related to the series and presents here in astonishing detail the work that went into making this important book. Gibbons also writes down his recollections, and it all adds up to a fascinating look at what creating comics can be like.

One more for this post: The Photojournal Guide to Comic Books, photographed by Ernie Gerber. There were four volumes in this series, with the third and fourth devoted exclusively to Marvel. These were very hot and expensive when they first came out, featuring color photographs of the covers of thousands of comics. It wasn’t comprehensive, but it included all the historically significant books from the Golden Age up through the 1980s. Today, the internet does this kind of thing better with extensive online photo galleries that can be searched and viewed with ease. But I still admire these and pull them out on occasion to thumb through because I always spot something interesting I hadn’t noticed before.

Next: Great comic book interviews.

The Fascinating, Frustrating Enigma of Steve Ditko

2011-07-10T17:58:00.000-07:00

I love books about comics, the comic-book industry and the people who make comics. I wish there were a lot of them, because I think it’s worthwhile to document these events and people while we still can.

Which brings me to Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics, $39.99), in which author Blake Bell examines the life and work of one of comics’ greatest enigmas.

Almost anyone interested in superhero comics knows Ditko was the artist who co-created The Amazing Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with Stan Lee. Those who go a bit deeper will know that Ditko also created some cool characters at DC Comics in the late 1960s and 1970s, including The Creeper, Hawk and Dove and Shade, The Changing Man. A few more willl remember him for doing layouts on the cult 1980s Marvel series Rom, and a dedicated few will have perused Ditko’s independent creations such as Mr. A. But given that Ditko has refused to be interviewed or appear in public for decades now, little else is really known about this artist, who created some of the most unnerving and interesting comics in the medium’s history.

Bell does the best job of any attempt I’ve ever seen to bring together everything we know about Ditko’s life and work. The result is fascinating, frustrating and eventually presents a sad portrait of an immense talent that withdrew from the world and denied it of his work and himself of the audience, acclaim and success that was easily within his grasp.

Unlike Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and most of the artists that broke into comic books in the so-called Golden Age, Ditko always wanted to work in the field. He was part of the first generation of comic book fans, specifically seeking out work and a career drawing and writing stories like those they had admired as children and fans. Both the quantity and quality of Ditko’s early comic book work surprised me. The glimpses Bell offers of the 1950s stories for Charlton and the company that would become Marvel are fascinating and have a quality that makes the idea of tracking down the best of those tales very attractive.

Where the tale of Ditko’s career starts to go off the rails is in the early 1960s, when he starts subscribing to the philosophy of Objectivism as put forth by author Ayn Rand primarily in the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I got about as far into Rand as I did with L. Ron Hubbard’s Mission Earth, and stopped reading the book before getting through even 100 pages of her preachy, boring and profoundly awful worship of fascist ideals.

The specifics of Rand’s philosophy aside, Ditko obviously found something in it that, at the very least, obsessed him. Obsession is a common theme with comics — fan is short for fanatic and everything about comics from the collecting to continuity to trivia to cosplay evokes some level of obsession. Whether there’s a direct connection, I doubt we’ll ever know because there are so few details about Ditko’s life, even in a book as relatively thorough as Bell’s.

To read about how Ditko’s strict adherence to Objectivism infected his work, of how he sought to inject Randian ideas into first Spider-Man and then series like Hawk and Dove, The Creeper, The Question, Blue Beetle and Shade and then walked away at the first sign of conflict is sad. It’s even sadder to see how much he pored into his Objectivist-inspired works like Mr. A while passing up repeated opportunities for commercial success at nearly every opportunity the moment they demanded even the slightest compromise of his ideals is even sadder.

It’s almost impossible to imagine, given what little we know, that Ditko hasn’t spent most of the last 40 or so years in the same studio with little to no contact with the outside world. No mention has ever been made of him having sustained a romantic relationship (though Will Eisner said in Eisner/Miller that Ditko has a son), or enjoying much of anything outside of ruminating over Rand or drawing comics.

Could Ditko be a first-generation fanboy, an 83-year-old whose life was spent obsessing first over comics and later over a juvenile political philosophy that only makes sense within a self-imposed bubble? Is he that cut off from the world, that afraid of compromising even the slightest ideal that he’s completely shut himself off from the world around him? Is he happy with his life and his work? Or does he have regrets?

It’s not like Ditko has been completely silent, though he mostly has put his side of things out in letter and essays that disallow any kind of direct questioning. I was similarly annoyed and frustrated by Ditko’s lengthy essays in The Comics newsletters (passed on to me by Batton Lash shortly after I served as a judge for the Eisner Awards a few years back). He’s also written letters of protest to various magazines and writers, though he never makes himself available to answer questions. I found it odd that Ditko has no problem lambasting Stan Lee in writing but, according to an episode Bell recounts, got along famously with Lee at their last meeting to discuss a potential comics project sometime in the early 1990s. Does Ditko lack the courage to voice his convictions in a public forum, where he and his ideals can be tested and questioned?

I truly hope not, but it’s hard to argue that Ditko’s adherence to Objectivism hasn't cost him dearly. He’s passed up chance after chance to continue to make comics with impact, that speak to and entertain a wide audience while bringing him more personal acclaim and financial success than he’s found doing his small-press rants.

Nothing would make me (and, I’m sure, Bell) happier than for Ditko to come forth and answer some of these questions. Unfortunately, that seems highly unlikely, leaving only the chance that some clues to his life and work will come to light only posthumously.

The Strange, Fleeting Fun of Jack Kirby's 'Devil Dinosaur'

2011-07-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

Devil Dinosaur Omnibus

Jack Kirby was always a powerhouse comic book artist, but his work in the 1970s is among the most amazing of his career as well as the most divisive. I say divisive because Kirby’s work in that decade took some often strange turns — sometimes producing amazing classics and sometimes producing fascinating failures.

I have to place Devil Dinosaur in the latter category. This short-lived series only ran eight issues in 1978 and, according to Tom Brevoort’s introduction in the Devil Dinosaur Omnibus edition I just finished reading, it was an attempt by Kirby to capitalize for Marvel on some interest an animation studio had in the Kamandi series he created for DC.

Kamandi itself was an oddball series, reportedly inspired by the Planet of the Apes movies, the first issue of that series prominently featured a destroyed Statue of Liberty and was set in a post-apocalyptic future full of mutated half-animals and, of course, the titular last boy on Earth. Even though Kamandi borrows its premise at least partly from a popular movie series, that comic book’s storyline had somewhere to go.

Not so Devil Dinosaur, which flounders partly because it’s a pretty thin concept to begin with and partly because there’s not really any place to take the story. For those who’ve never read this series, Devil Dinosaur is a T-Rex style dinosaur living in prehistoric times who is burned by a mad mob of early human “small folk” and emerges bright red in color. He teams up with a young “Dawn-Man” named Moon-Boy, and together they defend their valley home from various threats.

A typical panel from Jack Kirby's Devil Dinosaur.

The first problem is that Devil Dinosaur is not human and can’t speak. Kirby constantly attributes human emotions to Devil, both in the narration and through Moon-Boy’s dialogue, such as loyalty and a willingness to fight. But in the end,he’s still a dinosaur drawn so that even Kirby can’t get any kind of expressiveness into his fang-filled face. And Moon-Boy’s habit of shouting out plot points and talking to himself may be in the good tradition of comic book heroes, but it’s also very strange with a partner who can’t even add a “Great Scott!” to the discourse.

The first three issues concern threats from various beasts and tribes of ape-like men attacking Devil and Moon-Boy, and in each case Devil’s too strong and strong-willed for anyone to beat for more than a moment.

The next few issues concern aliens coming to prehistoric Earth, forcing Devil and Moon-Boy to evade alien weapons and such, followed by an attack from the “Dino-Riders” and a final issue in which Devil falls through a time portal to 1978 Nevada.

Devil visits modern Nevada in Devil Dinosaur #9 (Dec. 1978), written and drawn by Jack Kirby, inks by Mike Royer.

Reading these stories, I can’t help but think there’s not too many more ideas that were going to really work with this series had it managed to continue beyond its meager nine-issue run. Unlike Kamandi, where all kinds of strange things could be invented and thrown into the plot, the prehistoric setting of Devil Dinosaur left the only believable opponents to be other beasts and cavemen.

Despite those limitations, Kirby’s scripting on the series is, I think, pretty good and on a par with a lot of the better-regarded series he did in this era.

It’s also interesting to note that there are no connections of any kind to the Marvel Universe — something that would just not happen anymore given the corporate demands for synergistic universes in comics.

An example of how Kirby could compose the hell out of any panel, courtesy of Devil Dinosaur #1 (April 1978).

The strongest element in the entire package is — no surprise, I’m sure — Kirby’s artwork. The early issues particularly have some fantastic compositions, designs and that distinctive Kirby design style. Every issue has a double-page spread right after the splash page, and each of the is worth soaking in and enjoying. Early issues also have some fantastic panels and sequences in which Kirby shows more command of composition and style than any dozen of today’s comics artists put together. The effort does seem to slack off a bit in the last couple of issues, however, perhaps because Kirby knew at that point that poor sales was about to claim yet another of his comic series.

In the end, these are some pretty-to-look-at comics that offer only a fleeting — if strangely satisfying — thrill.

Flashpoint vs. Fear Itself: A Much-Needed Win (So Far) for DC

2011-05-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

Flashpoint #1

Like most comics readers, I'm getting weary of big events. And the promotional materials for Flashpoint did absolutely nothing to interest me in this series. I've never been a big fan of The Flash, the premise of the crossover was, at best, murky, and the sheer number of spinoff miniseries and specials was disheartening.

But I have to admit that when I sat down and read Flashpoint #1 (DC Comics, 40 pages, color, $3.99), I really enjoyed it. (Full disclosure: DC's publicity folks sent me a copy.) And having found little to enjoy in the DC Universe of late, it was nice to find an enjoyable way back in.

I can't deny that there's a weird bit of nostalgia at work. This is an alternate universe crossover, with cool art by Andy Kubert and Bob Harras at the helm. It's like a flashback to 1995 and the Age of Apocalypse, which was easily the most fun crossovers of this type and an archetype for Flashpoint. I doubt I'll pick up many of the spinoffs, but I will definitely be back for Flashpoint #2.

Fear Itself #2

The other major summer event is Marvel's Fear Itself. Again, thanks to event fatigue, I hadn't paid much attention to the advance marketing on this book. This is a nice-looking book, with Fear Itself #1 and #2 (Marvel, color, $3.99 each) showing the Asgardians returning to Asgard, Odin being a jerk to Thor and a bunch of mystic hammers falling to Earth and empowering those who pick them up with the power to glow like Tron.

It's OK, though my first thought was I'd already seen this kind of thing in Kurt Busiek and George Perez's JLA-Avengers crossover a few years back and even in last year's Blackest Night. It also just feels more like a concept suited to a Marvel videogame than a major summer crossover, but that's likely just me. This isn't to say that Fear Itself is bad or that Flashpoint is good, but it is interesting how it's the intangibles that make one stand out — even if just slightly and for a moment — over another.

Who Can Canada Blame for Alpha Flight #0.1?

2011-05-19T18:07:00.000-07:00

Alpha Flight #0.1

The absence of posts on this blog has been exacerbated by the preparations for and the birth May 2 of my daughter, Kaya. All is fantastic here at Bags and Boards central as we've spent the last few weeks getting to know each other. I don't know if she will like comics, but she's going to have plenty of them around to pass the time with as she grows up.

One such comic is Alpha Flight #0.1, Marvel's third attempt to relaunch the once-successful 1980s series about a group of Canadian superheroes. As a Canadian who first read the group during the John Byrne heyday of the early to mid-1980s, this issue is a distinct improvement on some of the previous attempts, most notably the humor-infused Scott Lobdell effort that ran a mere 12 issues starting in 2004.

This effort does its best to restore a "classic" lineup with Guardian, Vindicator, Snowbird, Shaman, Aurora, Northstar and Marrina, but fails to distinguish itself from the mainstream mass of superhero comics and fails to do right by the basic premise of the series and its characters.

Written by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente, the story centers on a terrorist named Citadel who seeks to disrupt a federal election by taking out the power grid in Quebec. Alpha's called in and finds Citadel's got help from Kara Killgrave, who once was called Purple Girl and was a member of Alpha Flight in the late 1980s when scripter Bill Mantlo was slowly but surely doing his best to make Alpha Flight the worst title Marvel published. The election goes on as planned, with former Alpha liaison Gary Cody winning as the leader of the fictional Unity Party.

Art wise, this is a decent-looking comic but nothing special. The art is by Ben Oliver with Dan Green and colors by Frank Martin. It would be nice to see some zing in the layouts if they stick around for future issues. But without some better writing, the art's not enough to justify buying or reading this comic book.

One of the long-term problems with Alpha Flight has been the way successions of writers have completely messed up the personal histories of the characters. Mantlo was the king of this, turning Puck from a dwarf who overcame the pain of his condition into a man possessed by some kind of black genie and making the twins Aurora and Northstar into the descendants of elves from Asgard. He also killed off Snowbird and had Marrina go so crazy after becoming pregnant with Namor's child that the Avengers had to kill her. I'm not kidding — these are actual Alpha Flight stories, and they set a precedent for writers to crap all over these characters. Since then, Guardian's returned from the dead multiple times in a new body and, according to this issue, has a child with Vindicator that has vanished.

I don't know how you end up with everyone back in the places we find them in this issue, but Aurora and Sasquatch are still an item; Guardian and Vindicator are back together in Ottawa and more boring than they've ever been; Marrina is back from the dead but not quite looking like herself; Shaman is performing open-heart surgery on a First Nations reservation; and Snowbird is back under cover with the police writing traffic tickets in the streets of Montreal. Oh, and Northstar is back after multiple stints with the X-Men living in Montreal with a new boyfriend. (Did you know he's gay? Well, he is!)

The big question I have is this: If the writers are looking to take this comic back to basics, why would they be so sloppy with the details that show they understand who these characters are and the most basic understanding of Canada and Canadians that really is the only reason for this title to exist? Specifically:

Why is Snowbird writing traffic tickets for the Montreal cops when her power symbolically comes from the arctic? Her previous cover was as Constable Anne MacKenzie of the RCMP stationed in the Northwest Territories. It makes no sense that she's now a "commandant" — which is not a real rank with Montreal police or the RCMP and even if it was, a commandant would not be writing traffic tickets.
The take on Canadian politics is pretty funny. I have a feeling the Unity Party is meant to be some kind of anti-Alpha or radical conservative party, which is just plain boring compared to the real-world insanity of the Republican Party here in the United States.
When did Heather Hudson become a brunette? I guess it may have been previously established that she and James MacDonald Hudson got back together, but they're in no way a convincing couple.
Shaman was clearly established as being a member of the Sarcee tribe, which was primarily based in western Canada around southern Alberta. His medical practice was always a very basic, community clinic style of operation near Calgary. Here, he's performing open-heart surgery at the Grand Lac Victoria reservation in Quebec. Neither part of that sentence makes sense with this character.
Walter Langkowski and Aurora are barely introduced. All we know about them is they're an item. No mention is made of her being Northstar's twin sister. Also, which Aurora is this? She wears the original black and white costume with long hair, while on the cover she has the white and yellow costume with short hair she wore after Langkowski altered her powers slightly. Also, is she still a split personality?
As for Walter, no mention's made of his code name or where his power comes from. I know the source and nature of his power changed a lot over the years, so an explanation would be nice.
Marrina looks completely different. Makes me wonder if this is a new version of the character. The cover shows the classic version, so some explanation would have been nice.
Where's Puck? I might have missed the reason for this in another book.
And boy, do Marvel writers love to write scenes of Northstar being a positive, modern example of the gay superhero. After his recent run in The Uncanny X-Men, can't Marvel find something else interesting about him? Or is he doomed to be a one-note character? Here's one idea: he used to be a member of the FLQ, a terrorist organization that sought the separation of Quebec from Canada. (That may have been the only good plot point Bill Mantlo ever introduced to Alpha Flight, so of course it happened in Marvel Fanfare #28 circa 1985.)

The biggest failing about this comic is there is absolutely nothing Canadian about it. I know that may seem irrelevant to a lot of readers, but when you get right down to it, it really is the only reason I can think of for this comic to exist.

Ask a comic fan to explain what Alpha Flight is about and the answer will surely involve the phrase "Canadian superheroes." Therefore, these character need to be in some way representative of Canada, how Canadians relate to each other and the role Canada plays in the world. I don't know if Pak or Van Lente are Canadian, but given Marvel's track record on this post-Byrne, it wouldn't surprise me if Pak or Van Lente's sole experience with Canada was crossing the bridge at Niagara Falls and commenting on how there's a maple leaf added to the logo at McDonald's. (Don't laugh — I've had that tale told to me by more than one person.)

Again, I think it's important for a comic about Canadian superheroes have some kind of Canadian quality to it and Canada is not an easy place to figure out, even if you have lived there. It's in many ways a lot more regional than the United States and also a lot less known. I get that someone who's never been to New York could write an OK story set in New York because everyone absorbs the imagery and the icons through the media. But the same is not true for even the best-known Canadian cities like Toronto or Vancouver — and it's even less true for places like Ottawa, Nunavit, Victoria, Saskatoon, St. John, St. John's, Moncton, Quebec City or Red Deer.

This comic's failures would not be so obvious without the high bar set by Byrne in his 28 issues. Even though Byrne was not born in Canada and hasn't lived there in decades, he understood enough when he did Alpha Flight to inject as a theme Canada's struggle to define itself and maintain some control over its destiny and resources while dealing so closely with the incredibly rich, insatiable and friendly juggernaut that is the United States. Failing to inject something like this into the book leaves it no different from Avengers North, and not worth publishing or reading.

Fixing the X-Men: Shorter, crazier stories based in the real-world

2011-03-18T16:29:00.000-07:00

X-Men has been thoroughly dethroned as the top franchise in comics, replaced in sales and popularity among superheroes by Green Lantern, the Avengers and Batman. Sales are down, interest is down and the X-Men line is just kind of dismissed by bloggers and podcasters as a property coasting on past successes more than one that innovates, entertains and is a commercial success.

No one who’s read this blog or my book or spoken to me about it at a con or online will mistake me for anything other than a big fan of the X-Men. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize a ton of crappy X-Men comics have been published over the life of the title. But I do think the X-Men stands apart from pretty much every other superhero out there because its concept is capable of delivering a great deal more emotional depth. X-Men is, at heart, a science fiction concept that features many conventions of the superhero genre. You could do X-Men without code names, costumes, secret identities and crime-fighting elements that define most superheroes. But by making the X-Men mutants — granted powers by accident of birth — and turning them into a race or even a class of potentially dangerous people pitted against normal humans, X-Men has a greater potential to become something deeper and more significant than the superpowered cops commonly found in Avengers or Green Lantern.

The X-Men’s current decline easily began the moment Grant Morrison left New X-Men, ending the last great run of innovation the title has seen. That was 2004, and was followed in 2005 by Marvel placing renewed emphasis on the Avengers, beginning its ascension to the top of the charts starting with Avengers: Disassembled and The New Avengers. I think there were a lot of reasons for this shift, but the most interesting was that also was about the time that Marvel began planning to make its own movies. With the X-Men movies rights and profits locked up at Fox indefinitely, it simply makes sense for Marvel to put all its efforts into building up the Avengers into the most recognizable and profitable brand.

I dropped all Avengers books shortly after the recent relaunch because I think writer Brian Michael Bendis’ style has grown increasingly stale and lazy. How long can you quote movies from the 1980s in a pastiche of David Mamet and Kevin Smith before people stop calling it brilliant? How many issues can you write where superheroes sit around eating and drinking coffee and chatting about nothing while all the action happens off-panel? Bendis is on track to find out.

The X-Men books these days are not horrible, but they’re not great either. What they lack more than anything is the kind of wild energy and the constant sense of elevating danger that marked the best days of the series. The former is a problem that afflicts most comics these days, while the latter stems from the need for the X-Men metaphor to evolve and reflect the nature of being an outsider.

So how to fix that? I have some ideas:

Stop writing comics like they’re movies or TV shows and starting writing them like they’re comic books again.

This is a problem that affects most mainstream comics these days. It’s not uncommon for dialog scenes in superhero comics to run two or three pages, with four or five panels per page. This works for Tommy Schlamme on The West Wing, but in comics, it is extremely boring. Flipping through the current arc of The Uncanny X-Men, “Quarantine,” there’s a LOT of talking. The first issue, #530, starts with two pages of Emma talking to Kitty, followed by a page of almost-naked Emma talking to Scott, followed by three pages of Anole talking about getting sick, a page of Northstar and Dazzler having dinner, two pages of The Collective talking and one of them tearing up a convenience store, followed by a super-exciting two-page press conference, and on and on. Boring.

Similarly, a couple of issues later we get a big fight between Emma and Sebastian Shaw, while Northstar et al. are fighting the Collective in San Francisco. Despite most of that issue, #532, featuring some kind of action, these sequences still lack energy and fail to generate any kind of excitement. I think a lot of it comes from Land’s heavy reliance on photo reference. In theory, photos should make good starting points for comic panels, but in practice the artists who rely on photo reference produce work that looks stiff, or even frozen. Good comic art has a natural look and the storytelling flows from panel to panel and page to page. I don’t think you’ll ever get that flow cobbling together panels based on pictures from Sports Illustrated, TV Guide and the Victoria’s Secret catalog.

In movies and TV, time is valuable. In comics, it’s space. And wasting so much space and so many pages on endless dialog and stilted action simply runs counter to the strengths of comics as a medium. Add in the stretching out of storylines over four or six issues, which often ship late, and the number of people who wait for collected editions to read and it’s almost impossible to avoid material that feels stilted, thin and stretched beyond its limits. At a time when communication is speeding up and people are abandoning short forms of communication like email and blog posts for even shorter and quicker hits offered by Twitter and Facebook, this is an even worse approach. I don’t know why comics aren’t more focused on making each issue, each episode as jam-packed full of cool stuff as they possible can rather than boring everyone to death with decompressed, to-be-continued and irrelevant material.

Next: be subversive. I think good comics are a lot like good rock ‘n’ roll (or any good art): it must challenge the reader in some way. In comics’ case, that usually means being subversive in some ways. X-Men was always good at that, featuring characters who are always on the outside of society looking in. It’s a great premise for criticizing just about any aspect of society. And looking at the state of the world today, there is no shortage of things to criticize. However, X-Men in the post-Morrison years has been astonishingly conservative, sticking to an interpretation of the mutants and their relationship with society that fails to evolve and remains exceedingly safe.

Perhaps that’s to be expected. Both DC and Marvel’s books have felt increasingly like the products of a corporation in recent years, shedding the personalities that the artists and writers used to bring to them. It often feels like I’m not reading a comic anymore, but a marketing plan or press kit takeaway.

The antidote to this has to be taking some chances with X-Men stories, going beyond what’s been established in the past 48 years of comic books and take a few digs at society. The good news is there is no shortage of conflict in the world right now — economic, political, religious, racial — X-Men could easily tap into. The bad news is that Marvel is a big corporation and can’t be expected to court the kind of controversy subversive comics would bring.

So if anyone were to ask me what could be done to fix the X-Men comics, here’s what I would do.

Shorter, punchier storylines. Throw lots of strange ideas in there and see what sticks.
Get the X-Men off Utopia. Putting all these characters on a fake island where all they have to do is talk to each other has turned out to be deadly dull. This is a book that needs to connect with the real world, and they can’t do that on Utopia.
Return a sense of dread to the book. Claremont did this extremely well, by making mutants powerful enough that it was credible for normal humans to hate and fear them. He also had an ear for the kinds of arguments used in the media at the time to discuss divisive issues and shrewdly injected imagery from the Holocaust to great effect.
Tap into real world issues. The Holocaust imagery evoked a universal and undeniable sense of fear and horror in to the X-Men that stood in for a number of different interpretations of the mutant metaphor. It could be about race, it could be about religion, it could be about just being an outsider or it could be about being gay. For too long — ever since Claremont left in 1991 — X-Men has relied a little too much on the homosexual interpretation. A lot of this became more obvious for many folks after Bryan Singer’s movies. But gay rights have come a long way in the last 20 years, and no longer carries the kind of stigma it did in the 1980s and even in the 1990s. With the shrill political, cultural and religious environment found in the United States, there’s lots of ways to move beyond the Holocaust imagery and find new threats for the mutants based on real-life stuff that’s extremely compelling.
Put the X-Men in direct conflict with humanity. The idea of an all-out war between humans and mutants has been inherent in the concept from the start. It’s been 48 years since X-Men #1 — isn’t it time we saw this at long last? There’s enough X-books, and I could see this as a great new status quo for the X-Men for the next several years.

I’d love to hear what other fans have to say — fire away in the comments if you’re so inclined.

What awards mean, with a detour through the Eisners — plus Oscar picks!

2011-02-25T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'm going to use the 83rd annual Academy Awards, which are being presented this Sunday (in case you didn't know) as an excuse to talk a bit about awards in general and to make my picks for the winners this year.

First of all, I have my own rule about awards and their significance: The only thing any award signifies is the opinion of the people giving it at the time they're making that choice. It means nothing else. This means it's nice to win, but I'm not going to stop liking a movie I already admire if it doesn't win, and some movies can get all the awards in the universe and still be, in my opinion, complete crap.

That said, the thing that makes some awards more special than others comes down to who is presenting the award and the exclusivity of the award. The Oscars are a great example of both. Winners have the satisfaction of knowing that the industry — people who know what they're doing when it comes to making movies — admire their work. They also know that these awards are exclusive and subject to rules that are (for the most part) fair and inclusive of all the work that's been done in a particular year.

The exclusivity part is best illustrated by what happens when awards are not exclusive. For example, each year only five actors get nominated for best performance by an actor in a leading role, and only one wins. This means out of hundreds of potential choices, only one per year gets to take home the statue. That's a tough choice for people to make, but it usually means the winner has done something interesting or unusual to earn it. But if you started to, say, split the category up and award a best actor in a drama and a best actor in a comedy and maybe a best voice acting performance for animation, then the exclusivity of winning a best actor Oscar is diminished and it's not going to be as special. You would always end up with a debate over which of the multiple winners was the best and slights against someone who wins who others will say deserves it slightly less than another of the winners. So keeping the awards exclusive like this is something the Academy wisely resists, and there is a ton of pressure put on them to add more categories because the publicity and marketing machinery of Hollywood would love to have more races to run and those magical "Oscar Nominee" or "Oscar Winner" labels to slap on ads and DVD cases.

To bring this back to comics, when I was a judge for the Eisner awards back in 2005, there were a lot of discussions at the start of the judging process about whether we wanted to add, delete or merge categories. I resisted and argued against adding new categories, and against instances of expanding the number of nominees precisely because doing so undermines the exclusivity (and therefore the prestige) of the awards. Also, I thought making those tough choices was what we had signed on to do, so failing to whittle down the number of nominees to the typical five just because we couldn't bring ourselves to make a hard choice between two nominees was a cop out.

The one award I argued most vehemently against adding was one for best reality-based comic. My rationale was that comics don't really do nonfiction. You can stories based on real events, to be sure, but it always has to be adapted into a narrative and filtered through the creators into a form that is otherwise indistinguishable from any other comic. Prose and film can do nonfiction — you can present facts and make a case in both of those media without having to turn it into a story. In film, you can show directly people speaking, places and events as they happen. In prose, you can describe and relate the same sorts of items in a detached, third-person and factual manner. In comics, you just can't do that and still have the comic book medium be the best way to communicate the points you're trying to make. The most obvious case for this is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which is essentially an academic paper on the mechanics of comics done in comic book form. And for that, McCloud had to re-create himself as a character who narrated the chapters and moved through them in a linear fashion that essentially turned each part of the book into a narrative story. So, I argued against it and won the point. It lasted all of a years — the next year's group of judges felt differently and went right ahead and added the category.

The other trick for legitimizing your awards is to make sure that they are presented for specific works rather than to a person. If you look at the fine print, you'll see the Oscar's don't give an award for best actor, but for best performance by an actor in a leading role. Voters are choosing a specific work, which is different from voting for a person as best actor. If I think that, say, Jack Nicholson is the best actor every year and he's not in a movie this year (or not in one that stands out enough for awards attention) it would still be intellectually honest to vote for him as best actor, which would not be the case if the award is for best performance by an actor. It's a difference that gets easily glossed over, but I think it's an important one.

On to the fun part: My picks for this year's Oscars. (FYI, for folks needing help with their Oscar pool ballots: my track record in picking these things is not very good, so follow my picks at your own risk.)

Best Picture

Should win: Toy Story 3. I admit, I'm biased, having covered it extensively, but I still think of the nominees this was the most all-around entertaining and well-made movie I've seen all year.
Will win: The King's Speech. This is a good movie, and it's pure Oscar bait. And I'd like to think the academy is too smart to give it to The Social Network, which was good but not the groundbreaking film everyone seems to think it is. I think they're confusing the importance of Facebook in people's lives for the movie itself being important.

Best Director

Should win: Joel and Ethan Coen. They're always great, but of all the noms, True Grit was the one film that I think would have been completely different and far less interesting in the hands of any other helmer.
Will win: Tom Hooper. See above.

Best Actor

Should win: Javier Bardem (Biutiful). Is this guy ever less than excellent? Nope.
Will win: Colin Firth (The King's Speech). This is an excellent performance, and it will triumph because it also hits all the Academy's biases.

Best Actress

Should win: Natalie Portman (Black Swan).
Will Win: Portman. This is in a class by itself this year.

Best Supporting Actor

Should win: Christian Bale (The Fighter)
Will win: Bale. Again, nothing else is as memorable as Bale's Boston junkie.

Best Supporting Actress

Should win: Helena Bonham Carter (The King's Speech). I think she's horribly underrated in Oscar circles. She's always fantastic and was especially superb in this role. I usually love anything Amy Adams is in, but this wasn't her best role. Steinfeld would be my second choice — her performance was as essential to True Grit as Bridges.
Will win: Melissa Leo (The Fighter). She's very good, though I think her role is a bit too supporting in that the real conflict in that movie was between the brothers. Her role is not what I remember when I think of this movie.

Original Screenplay

Should win: Inception. I really dug this movie and felt it successfully pulled off more daring writing stunts than any other movie this year.
Will win: The Kids Are All Right. This movie was written about ad nauseum when it first came out here in L.A., so I'm sure it will win something and this is it.

Adapted Screenplay

Should win: Toy Story 3. Again, I'm biased. I think Michael Arndt did a great job on this script.
Will win: The Social Network. Everyone loves Aaron Sorkin for some reason.

Best Animated Film

Should win: How to Train Your Dragon. As great as Toy Story 3 is, I really loved this movie. Plus, I think it has a strong chance to pull off an upset, a la Happy Feet beats Cars.
Will win: Toy Story 3. By nominating it for best picture, it's nevertheless pretty clear how the Academy feels about this movie.

Best Foreign Film

Should win: Biutiful (Mexico).
Will win: Biutiful. This is one of those wild card categories, plus I admit to not having seen all of these. But Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu makes fantastic movies and I am hard pressed to imagine any of the others surpassing it.

Best Art Direction

Should win: Inception.
Will win: Inception. I can see Alice in Wonderland or The King's Speech playing spoiler, but the production design on this is pretty spectacular. Plus, Guy Hendrix Dyas is a great guy and he deserves it.

Achievement in Cinematography

Should win: True Grit. Roger Deakins
Will win: Deakins. Everyone loves his work, and this film really looks spectacular.

Achievement in costume design

Should win: The King's Speech, Jenny Beavan. I don't always notice the costumes when they're trying to be subtle, but I thought the costumes were used to excellent effect in this movie. I noticed what the actors were wearing without it being distracting at all.
Will win: Alice in Wonderland, Colleen Atwood. This is just a hunch, but the outfits in this were pretty spectacular and splashy in the way the academy sometimes likes to reward.

Best Documentary Feature

Should win: Inside Job. If you haven't seen this yet, it is the definition of a must-see. If you don't leave the theaters absolutely enraged, then something's wrong with you.
Will win: Exit Through the Gift Shop. This was a great year for docs, and this is easily one of the most bizarre and fascinating stories put to film.

Best documentary short subject

I have to pass on this one, because I've not seen any of the nominees.

Achievement in film editing

Should win: The King's Speech, Tariq Anwar
Will win: Anwar. This was beautifully edited, with much of its power coming from the pacing that Anwar gives it.

Achievement in makeup

Should win: The Wolfman, Rick Baker and Dave Elsey. Come on, it's Rick Baker! He's the whole reason this movie got made.
Will win: Barney's Version, Adrien Morot. But the Academy won't go for a werewolf movie, so I guess this will win.

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)

Should win: How to Train Your Dragon. John Powell
Will win: Powell. Hollywood has really taken to this score — and for good reason.

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)

Should win: "We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3. Music and lyric by Randy Newman.
Will win: Newman. This one sticks with you long after you leave the theater. And Hollywood loves Randy Newman.

Best animated short film

Should win: Day & Night. Teddy Newton.
Will win: Day & Night. The others are really well done films, but this was a terrific idea that works only in animation and really only in 3D. It may be the only 3D movie to come out this year where the 3D is truly essential to the experience.

Best live action short film

Again, I have to pass, having seen none of these. Look for tips on your Oscar pool elsewhere.

Achievement in sound editing

Should win: Toy Story 3. Great stuff.
Will win: Tron: Legacy. This one usually goes to a big effects movie and the sound work in Tron was very strong.

Achievement in sound mixing

Should win: True Grit. Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland.
Will win: True Grit. I can still hear this movie in my head, so good job.

Achievement in visual effects

Should win: Inception. Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb.
Will win: Inception. There was no cooler image in a movie this year than Paris bending. I think that will edge out the sequels in contention, while Alice in Wonderland isn't as seamless and Hereafter just plain lacks the volume of shots.

A Brief Remembrance of Dwayne McDuffie

2011-02-22T13:31:00.000-08:00

Comic book and animation writer Dwayne McDuffie has passed away, according to reports on all the major comics news sites. This is unexpected and tragic — McDuffie scripted the All-Star Superman animated movie that comes out today and appeared last week at the movie's premiere event.

McDuffie also was the first comic book professional I got to interview for an article. In my first job out of college, I worked as the special sections editor at the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff, Ariz. One of the special sections I was in charge of was a weekly tabloid section called Sundial. It was a weekly tabloid section that included the TV listings and about 13 pages of editorial content for arts and entertainment news. This was the only regular arts section of the paper, for which hard news and sports were the main focus. I wrote each week a couple of features and a bunch of shorter articles and a calendar for this section, filling the rest with relevant wire copy about what was going on in the TV, movie and book worlds.

I was totally into comics but felt my primary focus had to be on local arts. I didn't write anything about comics for almost a year, until the Death of Superman became a super hot topic everyone in town was talking about. So I dove in and wrote a long piece on the history of Superman. I was in touch with Martha Thomases, who was in charge of publicity at DC Comics at the time, and she helped me out with some reference materials and even a few advance copies of issues in the Death of Superman storyline. She refused my interview requests, however, saying the writers and editors were all off on retreat figuring out the next steps in the Superman story. I relate this only to explain how I got on the DC press list, so that when Milestone Media was launching a few months later, I got the press kit and thought it would be fun to fill my writing quota with a story about this new line of comics.

So Thomases arranged a phone interview with McDuffie, who I recall as being a very good interview in that he knew what he was talking about and very easy to talk to. We took a couple of diversions to talk about other things he had done and what was going on in comics in general. And the resulting article was published in the Feb. 20, 1993, edition of the Sun.

I have scanned in the story and present it below as a PDF. There are a couple of typos and punctuation errors, but re-reading it stands up pretty well overall. Read and enjoy.

mcduff1

There is a post-script to this story. That year was the first year I made the trip out to San Diego for Comic-Con. And while I was there, I ran into Thomases at the DC booth and she introduced me to McDuffie, who was signing Milestone trading cards. We had a nice little chat, he talked about how well Milestone was doing (so far) and he handed me a couple of signed cards to take away (I still have it, somewhere).

I've sort of bumped into Dwayne or seen him from across the room at many cons since then. As I've written more about animation, I've seen some of the shows he's written and enjoyed them. I've also been impressed by his ability to stand up and tell the truth about the portrayal of minorities in comics and the way the business operates.

I'm sorry to hear he's gone. He'll be missed.

Getting Superman back on track

2011-02-15T23:52:00.000-08:00

Superman is easily the most difficult major comic book character to nail down. He’s been through dozens of different interpretations — in comics and in other media. And he’s been revamped and rebooted more times than just about any other comic book character out there, and still falls short of expectations on a pretty large scale.

For the past 25 years, the Superman who appears in the pages of DC Comics has faced the law of diminishing returns when it comes to reboots. The 1986 reboot that began with Alan Moore’s "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" and continued into John Byrne’s Man of Steel was a solid success. It revitalized interest in the character, got a lot of mainstream press attention at a time when that was unusual for comics and even sold a lot of comic books for DC. Today, however, the time between reboots has dwindled from decades to years to what seems like months. Just in the past few years, DC has published a Secret Origin miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, J. Michael Straczynski’s Superman: Earth One original graphic novel. The main Superman books have also struggled to find a direction, with the long “New Krypton” concept giving way to Straczynski’s controversial “Grounded” storyline.

I read Earth One and I’ve read “Grounded,” and found both immensely disappointing, just as I found some of the spark that made Superman great in DC’s reissue of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali and in the earliest Superman stories as presented in The Superman Chronicles, Vol. 1.

Earth One has at its core the same idea Marvel had 10 years ago when it started the Ultimate line: Create a new, continuity-free version of the classic character with a modern, updated origin and style designed to hook the young readers that have made huge hits out of Harry Potter and Twilight. Like the Ultimate imprint, Earth One is ideally meant for a mainstream audience and not for the die-hard fans that frequent the comic shop each Wednesday.

This is an approach that can work, can generate some excitement. The early days of Ultimate Spider-Man in particular helped turn Brian Michael Bendis into a blockbuster comic book writer. Interestingly, the Ultimate line ended up being a hit in the direct market more than with the mainstream audience it was created for.

But where the early Ultimate comics brought energy and some inspired tweaks to established lore, Superman: Earth One lacks passion and reads like something created more to meet a marketing plan than to entertain. This version of the tale recasts young Clark Kent as an indecisive youth who heads into the big city with no idea of whether he’s going to be a scientist curing cancer or maybe a reporter at the Daily Planet. Then the aliens show up and he becomes Superman to fend it off — mostly because no one else can.

The main creative innovation seems to be to make Clark more “emo.” He mopes a lot, wears a hoodie, listens to his iPod and doesn’t comb his hair. Similarly, Lois is drawn to so closely resemble actress Jennifer Carpenter from Dexter that it’s plausible that the artist used a DVD set as photo reference.

Either way, there’s little joy in this tale, a point driven home by the grim, muted color palate. Clark is never happy and rarely cracks a smile. Lois never does anything to suggest why anyone would find her attractive. And the villains of he piece appear completely pieced together from other sources — the alien invasion rehashes the well-worn material of Independence Day and the villain, Tyrell, looks like Lobo’s stunt double. In the end, despite the grand pronouncements, press releases and interviews, there’s little sign that this could develop into a compelling vision of any kind for the Man of Steel.

It’s not even clear to me how this is supposed to make the character more appealing to young readers. To suggest that young readers will “see themselves” in so bland and cynical a revamp is insulting.

And yet, this book sold so well that another round of pronouncements appeared trumpeting the news that a sequel is in the works — though I suspect the sequel was already in the works and DC would have made a media fuss about it no matter how well the book actually sold.

It’s a similar problem with “Grounded,” which has been met with a lot less enthusiasm than Earth One. In many corners, this story has been roundly mocked as Superman gets sad and walks across America. The criticisms are well deserved — this is a bad idea, poorly executed (for the most part). It has some of the same problems as Earth One. This Superman also is unsure of himself, reluctant to act and fumbling around for answers. Unlike the Superman in Earth One, however, this version lacks the excuse of being an inexperienced youth to counter it. Instead, he just comes off as weak and indecisive — hardly heroic qualities. There really shouldn’t be this much crying in a Superman comic.

So what does work when it comes to Superman? There are some answers in Superman vs. Muhammed Ali, which DC recently reprinted for the first time since it first came out in 1978. This is easily one of my favorite comics of all time, because it’s just so damn cool. Aside from being the best art job Neal Adams ever did, this tale is proud to be a comic book and tells the kind of fun, crazy tale that can really only be told in a comic book.

This version of Superman is undoubtedly a hero and spends most of the book doing a lot of really amazing things. There’s spaceships to fight, natural disasters to avert, giant robots to duke it out with — even a bit of super-disguise in a key plot point. Oh yeah, and the fight of the century, complete with an all-star list of celebrities rendered with great detail on that amazing Neal Adams cover. (Side note: I was surprised the new edition didn’t identify Stan Lee on the cover. He’s clearly there, down in front, just to the right of Lex Luthor’s head. I mean, I can see DC not doing so at the time, but 30 years on it just seems like the record should be set straight.) I never tire of look at this book, though I still prefer my high-grade copy of the original to the new coloring and glossy paper of the reprint.

Going back even further, there is tremendous joy and a lot of fun to be found in the pages of The Superman Chronicles, Vol. 1. This series of trades reprints in color the Golden Age tales of the Man of Steel in chronological order. This first volume collects the Superman stories from the first 13 issues of Action Comics, New York World’s Fair Comics #1 and Superman #1. It’s easy to see why Superman was an instant hit in 1938 — these are bouncy, fast-paced and really fun stories.

And it’s extremely informative to see Superman stripped of some of his familiar elements. There’s no Jimmy Olsen, no Smallville or Ma and Pa Kent. Clark Kent works for the Cleveland Daily Star, not the Daily Planet of Metropolis. And long before Superman was fighting for “truth, justice and the American way” (whatever that means), he was “champion of the oppressed.” This Superman used his powers to take on and beat such threats as crooked politicians, war profiteers, mobsters fixing sports events, businessmen who ignored unsafe working conditions, swindlers selling worthless real estate and more. There’s no question in these stories that Superman is right to take on these kinds of real-world issues, and for the kids lucky enough to read these when they first came this must have been like dynamite. Today, of course, there would be no chance Superman would take on these kind of real world villains because the strange nature of American politics would make such stories into manufactured controversies.

Here’s a few other things that reading these stories have made clear about this character:

1. Superman works best when Superman is the real character and Clark Kent is the disguise. For some reason, the comics (such as Earth One) have increasingly moved toward making Superman the alter ego of Clark Kent. Yet I’ve never seen a version of this approach that works. To look outside of comics, the Superman of the classic Fleischer brothers’ cartoons and Christopher Reeve’s portrayal in the 1978 movie and its good sequel are beyond clear that Kent is the disguise. Pretty much every superhero that came after Superman has played the heroic role as the alter ego of the secret identity. So why make Superman just like everyone else?

2. The focus of a good Superman story is on Superman doing super stuff. The character has accumulated a large supporting cast including not just Lois Lane, but also Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Ma and Pa Kent, Lex Luthor, Lana Lang, etc. And too often it feels like writers are trying too hard to fit as many of these characters into every Superman story at the expense of a focus on the Man of Steel himself. How about not using Jimmy et al. too much for a while and see if anyone really does miss them?

3. Superman should return to being “champion of the oppressed.” I think it would be very interesting to set Superman against some of the oppressors of the modern world. Yeah, it would be controversial, something DC has historically avoided with Superman. But comics are often at their best when — like good rock ’n’ roll — they’re subversive, challenging the reader by doing something different. There’s not much of this spirit left in comics, especially in corporate superhero comics.

Lastly, I had most of this post drafted when I learned of the death of Joanne Siegel, widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. I never met her, but by all accounts, she was a pretty amazing woman.

Comics I like: L&R, Zot!, Next Men, X-Men Index, New York Five, 27, Who is Jake Ellis?

2011-02-03T12:48:00.000-08:00

I have several large stacks of comics on my desk right now, including a bunch of current superhero releases from Marvel and DC. Some of these are not recent releases, but most are, and indicate where my head is in terms of comics these days.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #3 (Fantagraphics, 104 pages, black and white, $14.99) contains one of the best comics stories I've read in a very long time: Jamie Hernandez's "Browntown." It fills in the history of Maggie's family with a story that is realistic, honest and true in every way that matters. Throw in a tale of "current day" Maggie, and some fantastic sex weirdness from Gilbert, and this easily is the best $15 you can spend in a comics shop.

Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection (Harper, 576 pages, black and white, $24.95) is really interesting to read for the first time so many years after having absorbed Scott McCloud's most famous work, Understanding Comics. That's because he obviously is experimenting with some of the ideas for comics storytelling he eventually put into Understanding Comics, and it's interesting to see those ideas put into practice with a real story. What I didn't expect from this book was how gentle and sweet it is, and how well McCloud's art style fits with the story. It's also a big, thick and satisfying read — complete with commentary by McCloud on each story. Another excellent read for a great price.

John Byrne's Next Men #(3)1 and (3)2 (IDW, 28 pages each, color, $3.99 each) were a pleasant surprise. I have been a fan of Byrne's work for many years and I thought his original run on Next Men was easily the best, most original thing he had ever done. I love a lot of the work he's done for DC and Marvel superheroes, but Next Men really stood out to me as the kind of comic top creators should be free to do. Having just re-read the entire original Dark Horse run prior to digging into the new issues only reinforced this in my mind, and I really think that the series would have been a huge smash and run for years had Image Comics and the speculator phenomenon not come along at the same time. But I have to admit disappointment in Byrne's recent work — especially such DC projects as the unreadable Lab Rats and underwhelming takes on Doom Patrol and The Demon. I haven't read his previous IDW stuff. But the first two issues of the revived Next Men really popped — the story picked up seamlessly and with plenty of surprises, and the art recalls Byrne's style from the time he did the original series and is more inviting and stylish than anything I've seen from him in years. I'm glad Byrne finally came back to this series and hope it's successful enough to encourage him to try more creator-owned material in this vein.

The Official Marvel Index to The Uncanny X-Men (Marvel, color, $19.99). I have always liked these indexes because it's a lot of fun to just flip through info on so many series in one convenient place. This is a complete revamp from the previous X-Men indices (published in 1987-89 and 1994), and while I like that things like variant covers and some behind-the-scenes creative notes are included, I do have a few complaints: Please, Marvel, number the pages — especially if you're going to say in the text things like "This issue has a 2nd printing variant cover, which can be seen on p. 165." Because I can't find p. 165 with no page numbers short of flipping through the book until I spot what I'm looking for. Second, I know space is tight, but using abbreviations for every title is a bit annoying even as I like that you added a year to each issue cited in this way. And lastly, if you're going to index the X-Men, it would be useful to treat the X-Men in the index the same way Marvel publishes the comics: As a line of comics. It's especially annoying when you have so many crossovers between The Uncanny X-Men and X-Men, and the index only includes the Uncanny side. I would hope a second volume is on the way to fill in those gaps. Still, I'm glad to have this and pleased is goes all the way up through 2009's Utopia crossover.

Back to singles: The New York Five #1 (DC/Vertigo, 32 pages, black and white, $2.99) surprised me by being a lot better than I remember The New York Four being. This sequel from writer Brian Wood and artist Ryan Kelly — about a group of young women finding their way through their freshman year at college in New York City — feels more appropriate to a college age than the younger first book. The full-size comic book format also lets Kelly's artwork really shine — it looks fantastic in all its detailed, gritty, urban black and white glory.

I picked up 27 #1 (Image Comics, 24 pages, color, $3.99) as part of an effort on my part to find something — anything — new to get excited about. And it's a good start. Scripted by Charles Soule with art by Renzo Podesta, this is a tale of a rock guitar god whose hand injury has put his career on the rocks. Until an unusual solution is offered that has its drawbacks. Printed in a slightly oversize "Golden Age" format, the art looks like it was actually drawn (instead of the heavily Photoshopped

Lastly, I snagged a copy of Who is Jake Ellis? #1 (Image Comics, 28 pages, color, $2.99), which presents an unusual take on the well-worn spy drama. Written by Nathan Edmondson, our titular hero is a spy who has a sort of imaginary friend who warns and advises him on how to do his job and get out of the sticky situations it lands him in. It's not clear either to Ellis or the reader exactly what this presence is, but it is nice (again) to read a first issue that presents enough of a new story to make me feel like I got my $3 worth. The art, by Tonci Zonjic, is clear, atmospheric and well-colored, making for a nicely designed package.

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #7 (Oct. 1962)

2011-02-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

“Prisoners of Kurrgo, Master of Planet X!”

Script by Stan Lee

Pencils by Jack Kirby

Inks by Dick Ayers

While issue #6 is one of the best early issues of Fantastic Four, issue #7 is one of my least favorites. While the previous issue had a complete and compelling story featuring villains we’ve already met and care about, this was an episodic mish-mosh of old ideas and clichés that doesn’t add up to much. Despite those flaws, it’s not a horrible issue — it just feels like filler. Perhaps this had to do with the series going from a bimonthly to a monthly publication schedule, and Lee and Kirby had to crank this issue out quickly.

This one starts with Kurrgo, who’s the sort of character that populated a lot of the pre-hero Atlas series. An alien whose planet faces destruction from an asteroid on a collision course, he thinks the Fantastic Four can save his people.

Then we cut to the banter-filled intro of our heroes, who this time are quarrelling over a “government dinner” being held in their honor that no one except Reed is interested in attending. The strange reasons they all have for not wanting to go prompt even stuffy ol’ Reed Richards to roll his eyes in one panel. This sequence segues into a scene where Johnny takes a shower and Ben cranks up the hot water as a joke. Johnny flames on and turns the water to steam, setting off alarms. Reed uses his powers to check all the vents before he puts two and two together and realizes the junior members are horsing around again. Finally, they all head off to the dinner in the Fantasti-car, waving at folks on the road below. All this is a kind of fun character bit, though it also feels like definite filler and a scene that goes nowhere. It also lacks the polish similar scenes in the previous issues have.

When Kurrgo’s ship finally arrives, Lee and Kirby have a giant robot emerge using images ripped straight out of the classic movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. The plot gets even more weirdly complicated as the robot sends out a “hostility ray” that turns everyone on Earth against the Fantastic Four. The heroes themselves see the effect take hold in the midst of their “government dinner” with members of Congress and have to escape the Capitol building and get back to the Baxter Building. Kurrgo’s robot awaits them at their HQ and tells them the only way out is for them to go with him to Planet X and help Kurrgo save it. They agree, and head off into space.

Up to this point, Kirby’s art this issue is serviceable but lacking the impact that the previous issue did. The fourth part of this story, however, changes that with a great splash on page 15 with the Fantastic Four floating toward the ground in a futuristic city using and anti-gravity device of some kind. The splash for part 5 of this story is another great one that foreshadows the kinds of compositions and designs that would define Kirby’s amazing work in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The story remains a bit of a mess as the Fantastic Four meet Kurrgo for some exposition about how Planet X only has two spaceships and needs to save its 5 billion inhabitants from the asteroid that’s going to hit in 24 hours. There’s an obligatory and strange fight scene that ends as Reed agrees to help. The solution is a pretty good comic book plot twist, as Reed develops a shrinking ray to reduce the size of Planet X’s inhabitants to the point where they can all fit on a single spaceship, with the Fantastic Four free to return to Earth in the other. This works great for everyone except Kurrgo, who tries to keep a non-existent antidote for himself only as a way to enslave his people only to miss the flight and presumably die in the asteroid collision.

A lot of the ideas in this issue are interesting, but they aren’t well developed because the issue flits from one unrelated idea to the next too quickly to cohere into a solid narrative. The result is a story that’s underwhelming in comparison to the previous issue in particular, but still had some charm and wit for the casual reader.

This was one of the stories adapted with some significant changes for the first Fantastic Four animated series that aired in the late 1960s. I saw this episode of the show in reruns sometime around 1992 or 1993, just before I read the comic book version for the first time in the Marvel Masterworks edition. Based on what I recall of my reaction, that episode did little to improve on the comic book version.

P.S.: I'm not dead, a.k.a., I'm back and have some stuff to say about comics

2011-01-31T16:43:00.000-08:00

As you can tell by the time stamps, I’ve been otherwise occupied for a while. I’ve been immersed in animation, writing news for Animation Magazine Online and long-features for The Hollywood Reporter on the making of some of the year’s biggest hits. I’ve also had some personal developments, namely preparing to become a father when my wife and I welcome our daughter later this spring.

And while I’ve been keeping up somewhat with today’s comics, the quality of what I’m reading has failed to inspire the kind of excitement that would compel me to rush to the keyboard.

But since comics have co-opted a large portion of my brain for most of my life, I just can’t give them up and find myself constantly drawn back to them.

These are interesting times for comics and 2011 promises to be one of the most volatile years for the business side since the not-so-fun days of the mid-1990s. This past week alone saw a few news events of note:

The death rattle of the Comics Code Authority. The code has long been irrelevant to comics. The last time I recall it even being worth mentioning was in the early 1990s when Milestone Media announced it would submit all its books to the code but would publish them with or without approval. Once their books came out, the seal seemed to appear at random — one issue, gone the next, then back again — and proved its irrelevance. Marvel dropped it almost 10 years ago, with the rest of the publishers slowly dropping it until only DC and Archie were left — and they both dropped it last week. It seems DC stuck with the code for so long because Paul Levitz, now departed as publisher, wanted to keep it. Now, with a new cost-conscious regime in place at DC, the fees DC paid to keep the code are obviously better spent elsewhere. More on the new DC (and Marvel) later.
The end of Wizard Magazine’s print edition, to be replaced shortly by yet another online iteration. This should surprise no one, but I think a lot of people were shocked enough to lose Wizard as a punching bag for the ills of the industry to reflect on how influential this magazine once was and how few people seemed to be reading it at this point. In the 1990s, it was required reading, and it remained a good bathroom or airplane read for quite a while afterward. Wizard would have stood a better chance of survival had it treated its employees and relationships with the rest of the industry with a bit more respect. I find it kind of funny that the Comics Buyer’s Guide, which in the past 10 years adopted a cost-effective take on the Wizard format, is still standing.
The comic book movie train continues to roll along at full speed. Three Marvel films are on the way this summer: Thor, Captain America and X-Men: First Class. DC has Green Lantern, with a big 2012 in the works with Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and Zack Snyder’s new Superman movie. How long this will continue, I don’t know, but that’s a lot of superhero movies and all show potential from what little we’ve seen so far.
There has been a lot of chairs and titles shifting hands. Former Marvel editor in chief Bob Harras takes over the same job at DC after more than a year working in other parts of the business. At Marvel, Joe Quesada rises to chief creative officer, holding the editor in chief’s chair out for Axel Alonso, who will be ably assisted by new VP of something or other Tom Brevoort. L.A.-based Top Cow reorganizes a bit, handing off some of its business operations to the central office at Image Comics.

And yet none of these changes have been able to keep the major publishers’ superhero lines from getting noticeably more stale from month to month — with decreases in sales to match.

There are a few interesting signs of life out there, but it’s the need to put on my critical hat and chime in with my two cents here and there on the creative and commercial problems facing comics. To avoid boring people to death, I’ll space it out into multiple posts, hopefully bringing some life back to the blog once again.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue the Fantastic Four Re-Read Project. I’d like to, but accessing those books is a little tough right now and I would like to see if there’s another way to build some blogging momentum before I try to go back to that pool. I have one unfinished post that I'll take a look and then we’ll see ...