Links, rambling, etc.

—There were some real bombshells in Grant Morrison’s interview with Newsarama about Final Crisis, and he seemed awfully candid about Countdown To Final Crisis being something that was not only unconnected to his Final Crisis, but something he’d apparently prefer his readers ignore.

Of course, DC creators talking shit on Countdown is nothing new. Geoff Johns took umbrage with the portrayal of The Rogues doing drugs on Newsarama, Greg Rucka wasn’t thrilled to see The Question II pop up in its pages, editor Mike Carlin gave weekly “I don’t even want to talk about this shitty comic I’m editing” interviews with ‘rama, and Dan DiDido gave several interviews in which he essentially said “Mistakes were made.”

Morrison’s defensiveness is perhaps understandable, but his ire towards fans and online commentators seems wildly misplaced. It’s not our fault DC decided to do a 51-part weekly prequel to the series they commissioned Morrison to do and then didn’t have them line up properly.

It was a terrible, terrible idea that lead to some of the worst comics DC has ever published and, I believe, severely hurt their direct market standing in general (Countdown, while technically a financial success for the company, was accompanied by a drift downwards across their line, particularly in books tying into Countdown).

Short of unmaking the decision to publish a weekly prequel series to Final Crisis, the only thing DC could have done to correct course was to have Morrison and J.G. Jones rework parts of Final Crisis to match-up with Countdown (Although it’s worth noting some of the confusing bits in FC didn’t even match up to Morrison’s own comics featuring the characters, particularly the bit where Superman talks to the League like they don’t remember when New Gods used to sit next to them at the table).

It probably would have been a better choice than to do nothing, although I imagine irritating Morrison is the last thing anyone at DC wants to do, since the only books they have that are doing well are the ones by Morrison and the ones by Geoff Johns.

Of course, by doing nothing, it hurts both Countdown and Final Crisis, at least for those who read both or (like me) at least paid attention to both.

Morrison’s continuity’s-not-everything argument in the interview seems pretty preposterous given the project he’s working on—a story about DC continuity.

Now, it’s about more than tat as well, but a lot of DC writers, and none more so than Morrison, equate DC’s publishing history with its fictional history; the shared setting of the superhero line with the fictional DC Universe, a universe within our own universe. If it’s not at all important, why has Morrison devoted his comics writing career to exploring the nature of reality and the way fictional realities intersect with “real” reality?

Or, more pertinent to Final Crisis, why are you writing the supposed “third act” to a trilogy of Crisis comics whose raison d’etre was merely to make some sense out of the continuity of Gardner Fox and Roy Thomas comics from decades ago?

What was most depressing about the interview, aside from the sympathetic depression I felt for anyone who blew $152.49 on Countdown to Final Crisis solely because they thought it might be pertinent to Final Crisis, is that Morrison makes it sound like DC editorial forced large portions of the plot of Countdown upon Paul Dini and his fellow writers.

If they weren’t writing about the New Gods and the Monitors, but were allowed to just do whatever they wanted, might Countdown have been different? What if Dini was just given a greenlight to do whatever the fuck he wanted, and we got a weekly about his favorite characters, another year-in-the-life-of-the-DCU series like 52, only with Dini’s favorite characters (Harley, Poison Ivy, Zatanna) and perhaps those that his fellow writers knew best (Hawkman, Jonah Hex, the new Freedom Fighters, the Birds of Prey, the Teen Titans)?

Countdown had other problems, of course, including exceptionally poor editing (even for continuity in the original, film sense of the word; like things looking completely different from page to page, or scenes contracting each other rather than the comic book sense of the word), writers and editors who seemed unfamiliar with the characters they were working on and the attempts to tie in to other just as ill-considered comics (Amazons Attack, the death of the Bart Allen Flash, Salvation Run, etc).

After reading Morrison’s interview, now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Paul Dini “show-running” a bunch of competent writers might have been a formula for a decent weekly comic series after all, if he himself wasn’t being show-run by un-credited “writers.”


—Did you hear the news about Chuck Dixon? According to a brief post on his message board he is “no longer employed by DC Comics in any capacity.”

Newsarama and Comic Book Resources both tried to cover the (almost-)story (here and here), but since neither DC nor Dixon wanted to talk with either of them about it, there’s nothing to report beyond here’s who Dixon is and what he’s done and is doing for the company; he declined to comment; DC declined to comment as well.

Remember a while back when the state of comics journalism was a topic of conversation in the comics blogoshpere for a week or two? Well, here’s a nice illustration of how impossible it is to cover certain personnel aspects when neither the company nor the creator is inclined to talk. There are only two sources, and if both say no comment, well, what are you going to do?

It can be frustrating for comics fans because so many of us care so much about things like who’s writing which characters, and there’s no shortage of information about these sorts of things when the companies and creators want to sell the books, but when there’s a chance of someone looking bad, they (understandably) clam up.

And why shouldn’t they? Of what benefit is it to DC to slag off Dixon? Or for Dixon to slag off DC? There are only so many comics companies, and for the types of stories Dixon has made a career writing, DC is about 50% of his possible employers. It doesn’t do him any good to aggravate them in anyway, even if this break is due to something he did to aggravate them. (That is, there are so few bridges in the industry—two, really, if you’re just talking big budget, direct market super-comics—that not only is it easy to see why someone would be careful about burning bridges, but why they wouldn’t even want to carry matches).

Of course, as media consumers, we’re conditioned to think we deserve answers; that we have a right to know. Certainly we do when it comes to government, and if it has to do with celebrities from film, music or sports, there’s enough popular demand to motivate some media to do whatever it takes to satiate the public’s curiosity.

But if this one guy is no longer writing the two comic books that stores in North America were only ordering somewhere around 60K copies of (combined)? It’s not like Newsarama’s going to pay to have someone go through Dixon’s garbage, or CBR’s going to get a mole hired as a cleaning guy at DC HQ to get to the bottom of it.

I’ve gotta say, as a person who was reading both of Chuck Dixon’s current DCU projects (and someone who’s read about eleventy-hundred Dixon-written books in my life), it struck me as bad news. I know I’m often quite dismissive of Dixon’s work in my weekly reviews of it, but if he’s not exactly a great super-comic scripter, he’s not bad either, and rock-solid reliable. I may hardly ever love one of his comics, but I never hate them either.

I’m sure I’ll probably drop both Batman and The Outsiders and Robin in the near future, depending on the creative teams (Joe Kelly and Norm Breyfogle on BATO and John Rogers and Dean Trippe on Robin would get me to stick around, though). I was already on the fence with both, and was probably going to drop the latter now that the Spoiler resurrection arc was over anyway.

I honestly can’t even imagine what could have caused the break though. Was DC so disappointed with Dixon’s inability to sell huge quantities of those books? Because it’s not like they don’t have, like, a decade of sales data to reflect Dixon’s usual performance and the size of his fan base.

Was it a creative disagreement? It’s hard to imagine, as Dixon seems like such a professional, go-with-the-flow guy. He survived all those Bat-crossovers of the ‘90s, he wrote gay characters Midnighter (in Midnighter and Grifter) and Grace and Thunder (in Batman and The Outsiders) after making public his discomfort with gay characters in super-comics (but let’s not get back into that; suffice it to say I disagree with Dixon on that point, and found his statements disappointing and somewhat hypocritical), he did yeoman’s work on Batman and The Outsiders, coming in as the third writer announced before the first issue hit stands and dealing with a tumultuous cast of characters that changed every month depending on what was going on in other books, and he had the somewhat thankless task of trying to un-write that dumb-ass “War Games”/”War Crimes” storyline regarding The Spoiler and Leslie Thompkins in Robin.

So if it was something on Dixon’s end, it’s hard to imagine what it could be—did DC give him an ultimatum to either write a story where Tim Drake gay marries Connor Hawke or lose all his books?

Like everyone else who reads Dixon’s DC books, I’m curious and would really like to know. But I understand that doesn’t mean anyone’s ever actually going to tell me.


—Tom Spurgeon had a pretty funny reaction to news that the American Medical Association Alliance is pissed at The Incredible Hulk for having a cigar in General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross’ mouth: “any kid that wants to start smoking because he or she identifies with Thunderbolt Ross in the new Hulk movie has a lot more to worry about than cancer.”

You know, I just walked out of the screening less than 48 hours ago, and I don’t recall William Hurt actually smoking the cigar at any point, although I do remember it being in his mouth. Certainly he didn’t do anything cool with it, like blow smoke rings or posing in front of exploding buildings with it after destroying a giant robot.

Do kids really start smoking cigars because they see characters in movies smoking cigars? Even mustachioed old military men villain characters? Perhaps the AMA has research asserting that they do. I find it hard to believe that there’s really any more danger that impressionable 13-year-olds will start smoking cigars after seeing this than that they’ll grow moustaches or join the army.

A greater concern is character Bruce Banner’s reckless behavior. Not only is he infinitely more likeable than Ross—he’s smart, good-looking, knows martial arts and makes out with Liv Tyler—but he engages in even riskier behavior than cigar-chomping. Dude subjects himself to massive amounts radiation; surely that poses a greater risk of cancer than smoking, doesn’t it?


—The new Punisher movie doesn’t look very good based on that preview, but then, Punisher movies in general always seem redundant to me, since he’s essentially a Marvel Universe version of a movie vigilante.

The only Punisher movie I would really be excited to see would be a panel-for-panel adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank.

That, or maybe Punisher 2099, which Mike Sterling recently drew attention to on his site.


—A couple weeks ago, I posted about a Brave and The Bold team-up between Batman and Black Canary, during which Batman admitted to himself that he like-liked Black Canary, and she accused him of being “jealous! Jealous!” of the crooked Earth-1 doppelganger of her dead Earth-2 husband.

I had wondered why two single superheroes with so much in common and such obvious attraction to one another ever hooked up.

Well, it turns out that they did lock lips before, and Dorian Wright of postmodernbarney.com fame has the scans to prove it. He then follows it up with a post detailing the end of their almost-romance.

No wonder Batman didn’t attend their wedding.


—While I’m linking to comics bloggers having fun with old comics featuring our favorite Justice Leaguers, make sure you spend some time at Rachelel Goguen’s Living Between Wednesdays this week. It’s Martian Manhunter week there, and it’s every bit as awesome as it sounds.


—I’ll be doing a themed week here at EDILW starting on Sunday. Although it won’t feature the World’s Greatest Martian Detective; it’ll feature this guy.


—I’m hoping to devote July and August to another round of The Justice League Ice Cream Social, covering everyone who’s ever been a Justice Leaguer (whom I didn’t cover last year).

If you weren’t reading last year, it’s basically a poor daily sketch of a Justice Leaguer eating his or her favorite frozen treat, usually accompanied by some lame attempt of humor or other. I have no idea why I started decided to do it, but people seemed to dig it, and it was fun to do, and hey, I can’t let Bloodwynd, Yazz, Snapper Carr and Aztek go un-included.

If you have any non-Justice League DC heroes you’d especially like to see, let me know; I did the math a while ago, and I think there will be some days of the summer left over after I do all of the official roster.

Then maybe I’ll shoot for an Avengers Ice Cream Social in 2009. Nothing like planning ahead!


—I just read prose book Bears: A Brief History by Bernd Brunner, and it was fantastic. Extremely informative, both wide-ranging and thorough, remarkably short, very well-illustrated, accessible to those of us who know next to nothing about zoology and beautifully designed. If you have any interest at all in bears—or just think that old timey cover of a dude punching a bear looks cool—I’d highly recommend this book. By far the best brief history of bears I’ve ever read.

Yes, it is the only brief history of bears I’ve ever read. But still…!


—Finally, during Sunday’s way-too-long examination of JLA: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, I posted this charming image of a group of Justice Leaguers all joining hands in a circle and agreeing that they should all reveal their secret identities to one another:

On closer examination, I noticed that The Atom apparently abstained:

Not only is he not holding hands with his fellow heroes—and wouldn’t that image have been even more darling with a tiny, little Atom dangling between the hands of two of his full-size fellows?—but he doesn’t say “Agreed!” either. There are only six tails on that bubble, but seven super heroes. Unless Hal Jordan is the one who didn’t say “Agreed!,” since he prompted the response by asking the question…?

At any rate, it was his wife who would go ahead and murder The Elongated Man’s wife in Identity Crisis, proving The Atom was right that perhaps it was better they keep their secret IDs to themselves after all.

Thursday night links

I said links, not lynx, dammit!

(Note: Every Day Is Like Wednesday is getting on the green bandwagon, starting with recycling. Specifically, recycling old jokes).



1.) I could Harley resist: I felt honest-to-God temptation to pick up this week’s issue of Countdown yesterday. Not because it looked very good—Did I see what I think I saw? Batman’s satellite took over Apokolips?—but because the back-up origin did. It was that of Harley Quinn, drawn by Bruce Timm.

That was the second time I had to talk myself out of dropping $2.99 for two pages during the series’ run; the last was Kyle Baker’s Mr. Myxyzptlk origin.

I believe that might have run in the issue in which this happened:



Oh hey, when I just clicked over to dccomics.com to see if they had the Harley origin up yet, I noticed they had The Scarecrow by Kelley Jones already too, and I totally missed it. One of my favorite characters by one of my favorite artists would have been particularly hard to resist, so I suppose it’s just as well it ran in an issue I neglected to even flip through.

Well, I’m sure they’ll collect all of the origin back-ups form both 52 and Countdown into a big Secret Origins trade at some point…


Related: I finally found someone other than an anonymous Newsarama poster or four who likes Countdown. Or at least likes it enough to tell people not to complain about it on his blog: Mr. Dorian Wright.

Wright’s wrong about one thing though—there’s no way in hell Salvation Run is going to have much of anything at all to do with Final Crisis.

If it were, then Morrison would have had a co-plotting or “based on concepts and ideas by” credit in it (and likely Countdown too).

And while I know a lot of us have a tendency to deify Morrison, I’m sure that even if he isn’t the genius I sometimes make it sound like he is, I’m quite confident he’s not so stupid as to come up with a plot like that of Salvation Run’s, which I complained about last Thursday, and probably shouldn’t get into again.

But I suppose we’ll all see if reading SR was a complete waste of time for those just interested in Final Crisis in a few months.



2.) Ask, and I shall receive?: After reading Jeffrey Brown’s incredible graphic novel The Incredible Change-Bots, I wished aloud that publisher Top Shelf had a Top Shelf Direct arm to produce toys based on their comics.

Well, according to Blog@Newsarama, Devil’s Due is granting my wish—and the wishes of Incredible Change-Bots fans everywhere. Click here for Brown’s designs, which call for an eight-page mini-comic to be included (!!!).



3.) Please buy this trade so they’ll keep putting more out: I was pretty excited to see the solicitation for a second collection of the seminal Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League run in DC’s solicits on Monday. They’ve released the first few issues as a trade on several occasions, and trade-collected both of the reunion special type series (Formerly Known as the Justice League and the second-best arc of JLA: Classifed, “I Can’t Believe it’s Not the Justice League!”), but the middle of their run has remained some of the best DC comics never collected for a ponderously long time.

If you didn’t read these books the first time around—or find ‘em in quarter or dollar boxes since—I can’t recommend this highly enough. This is from pretty early in their super-long run, back when Maguire was still drawing most of it and the team had yet to transition into a predictable sort of sitcom set-up. It always had a mixture of serious drama, goofy humor and superhero action, but at this point in the run, the superhero action was higher than it would be later in the run.

This collection will include Justice League Annual #1, Justice League International #8-#13 and Suicide Squad #13.

That’s the moving day issue that establishes the Justice League embassies (and has that sweet cover), two issues of Millennium crossovers (Eat it, Secret Invasion!), two issues dealing with The Construct and the fact that Max Lord is a cyborg (later to be Superboy-punched away just so Rucka and company could use Lord as their villain for some dumb reason)*, the crossover with Ostrander’s Suicide Squad (featuring the Batman vs. Flag battle that totally ruined one of Batman’s cowls), and this story



from back when Bill Willingham used to be a penciller. So you’re definitely going to want in on this.



4.) I would have preferred a Welcome Back, Frank adaptation: I was kinda surprised to hear that The Boys was being optioned for a film adaptation, although I guess I shouldn’t be—Hollywood will have to release some incredible flops based on comic books before the current trend subsides for a while. I haven’t kept up with The Boys since the first arc, figuring I’ll read it in trade eventually if I ever find myself without a Garth Ennis book to read (not likely, considering the man’s output).

I didn’t think it was terribly good, personally, but that’s not what surprised me about it being potentially adapted to film. Rather it’s that the book is so heavily dependent on analogues to other superheroes with their own movie franchises. For example, the one arc I did read dealt with a Justice League-type super-team and (a less closely modeled) Teen Titans-type super team.

Movies heavily relying on brand-name analogues have been successfully made before, of course—The Incredibles and Sky High spring most immediately to mind—but I can’t help thinking of Wanted here, which seems to be a situation in which they removed all the superhero analogues from the comic and ended up with a movie that bears very little resemblance to the original.

If The Boys is about the Justice League and Teen Titans being sexually deviant assholes, or Batman and Robin being totally gay, or Iron Man fucking anything he sees (I’m guessing on those last two, as I haven’t read the arcs, just reviews of ‘em), and they take out all the superhero stuff, will The Boys lose that which makes it exciting in the first place?

I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud here. It should be noted that since DC once published the book until they grew uncomfortable with the jokes at their characters’ expense, then there’s not much chance of a movie getting made without their lawyers taking note of any similarities between their heroes and the analogues potentially being lampooned.


5.) Good start, but needs work: This week’s Lying In The Gutters column had an interesting (albeit only “amber,” meaning it’s of the second of three stages of incredulity) dealing with DC’s new approach to dealing with their late book problems:

Sources close to freelancers inform me that DC Comics has a new in house policy for pencillers. Aside from very specific contracted creators…any penciller contracted to work on a monthly book must deliver complete turnaround of 22 pages of work in four weeks. Not a month, four weeks. If that schedule isn't maintained, they'll pull pages and assign them to other creators. And you may run short of future work. A reduction in quality is more acceptable than a reduction in quantity.


Rich Johnston went on to site the recent issues of Wonder Woman in which Ron Randall helped the Dodsons out, with Randall drawing some pages and the Dodsons others.

In theory it sounds like a great idea—if nothing else, putting out there that deadlines should be treated as just that is a step in the right direction—but in practice, the results of those particular issues weren’t all that great. It would have been far better to have simply had Randall draw all 22 pages of those books, and save the Dodsons for a Wonder Woman annual or miniseries or special or something.

I said my piece about how DC should address late books in an illustrated piece last summer, and don’t think anything I can say here now will necessarily improve upon what I said there.

Johnston’s summation that “a reduction in quality is more acceptable than a reduction in quantity” is kinda scary; like I said in response to Matt Idelson’s DC Nation column soul-searching about DC’s late books, the choice between good work and on time work is a false choice.

There are plenty of artists capable of delivering 22 pages a month, and it’s those artist who should be getting the plum assignments.

I’m sure there are some people reading Batman and Wonder Woman because they like Tony Daniel and the Dodsons, but far, far more of ‘em are reading it because of Grant Morrison and Gail Simone and Batman and Wonder Woman. (One of the lessons of 52 and Countdown, I think, is that DCU readers and fans place a greater emphasis on the writers, events and punctuality more so than the quality of the art).

As for the “name” artists with some amount of perceived market heat, save them for stuff other than the regular DCU books that need to keep their schedules.


*According to commenters in the comments for this post, these two issues dealing with Max and the construct aren't actually about him becoming a cyborg or whatever. I think it's the start of the story seed that will eventually lead to/inspire the whole cyborgification story much later on, but this isn't that story at all. Sorry for the mistake; I could have just doublechecked what those issues were actually about if they weren't filed away in plastic bags in a long box in a closet. One more reason why DC should totally trade-collect the hell out of this series!

Meanwhile...

Here’s a completely accurate one-panel, no-word review of Kazuo Umezu’s Reptilia:


Would you prefer a review with more words? Well then, you should check out this week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics column—it’s chockfull of words about Reptilia.



Meanwhile, elsewhere in the blogosphere…





Grim and gritty, or just grim and shitty?: Over at When Will The Hurting Stop, Tim O’Neil makes fun of what must be the stupidest thing I’ve seen in my weekly in-shop flip-throughs of Countdown. Putting aside my knee-jerk nerd reaction (But Mxyzptlk is a fifth-dimensional being! How can a third dimensional being like Prime hurt him? And why how does Mxy vomit? Does he even eat food? Or have a digestive system?), what’s really galling about this scene isn’t merely the usual ludicrous darkening of DC’s superhero universe, but the target of that darkening on display here.

I mean, Mr. Mxyzptlk is perhaps the single silliest, goofiest concept ever attached to Superman, a character whose history is bursting at the seams with silly, goofy concepts. While the ‘80s reboot saw the culling of a lot of that Silver Age silliness—the various super pets, his cousin from Krypton, Jimmy Olsen’s total awesomeness—Mxy survived, the least plausible, least realistic element of modern Superman comics.

From the outside looking in, the character is a symbolic representation of everything that’s lighthearted, fun, funny and childlike in the Superman mythos.

So of course he’s chained, beaten, tortured and scarred in the pages of Countdown.

I’ve always assumed it was unintentional that so many of the characters symbolic of fun in the DC line have been raped, killed and tortured in the last few years, that the same relative unpopularity of the characters that allowed them to be made into fun or funny characters also made them disposable (That is, you can get away with a lot more in your depiction of Blue Beetle than you can Batman). But it’s only been a matter of months since they buried Impulse, and a few weeks since they slaughtered everyone in that Teen Titans special, and now they’ve got their mischeivous fifth-dimensional imp shirtless, shackled and puking his guts up.

Surely at some point the thought must have crossed someone’s mind that eventually this is going to start looking like a conscious campaign to pervert everything fun left in the fictional universe.




Wonderful!: If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Project Rooftop for a slew of Wonder Woman costume redesigns by some very talented folks, with responses from the usual commentators, plus special guest commentators, like current Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone.

Long time readers know Wonder Woman is a popular subject of conversation here at EDILW, and I think her costume is something pretty problematic in general.

That thing is constantly being tweaked along a rather small spectrum of changes (with only mod “New” Wonder Woman and biker shorts-and-bra Wonder Woman really breaking out of that spectrum), many of them so subtle the artists paid to draw her don’t always take note (The shape of her belt, the shape of the design on her bodice, the cut of her boots, etc).

The result is that Wonder Woman’s costume is constantly being messed with, but never really changes much.

What really struck me while looking through the designs on Project Rooftop (I posted Maris Wicks’ at the top there; I love the invisible horse, and the look on her Wondy’s face as she rides it; a Wicks Wonder Girl one-shot from Earth-Justice Riders would be aces, wouldn’t it?), were the comments like, “This would be good for Donna Troy or Wonder Girl, but looks a little young for Wonder Woman.”

You know, Donna Troy and Wonder Girl have had a succession of some truly godawful costumes. While Wonder Girl finally has a decent one (the jeans and Silver Age Wonder Girl top look), Donna’s still wearing an extremely uncomfortable mixture of her Perez red leotard re-colored to resemble a night sky.

Isn’t it weird that there are all these great designs for Wonder Woman costumes literally just lying around the Internet, and DC dresses their gals as they do? It seems like a real shame.

Also, it’s interesting how much enthusiasm there is for the characters, by so many very talented artists, ones so passionate about the characters that they put the necessary thought and time into creating these costumes, and it’s being spurred on by a third party. Wouldn’t it be nice to see DC try to harness the energy of these sorts of events somehow? Like, by hosting their own contests, with the winner getting to draw a Wonder Woman back-up story or something, or even just publishing a book full of pin-ups and costume designs? I don’t know, I’d buy a book full of pages of Project Rooftop redesigns of DC hero costumes, but maybe there isn’t a very big market for it.

Or would DC actually getting involved, making something like this “official,” just kind of ruin the spirit of it?

I don’t know, it’s just kinda odd that there’s so much interest in and excitement about Wonder Woman in the world—as evidenced here, and in the recent Wonder Woman Day—but there seems to be so much less interest and excitement about her within DC’s line of comic books, in which Wonder Woman has been bad to unreadable for the last few years, and spin-offs featuring her and her supporting cast have generally been much, much worse (Amazons Attack, Wonder Girl, JLoA, Teen Titans, Countdown etc).

Oh, but back to Wonder Woman costume design, if DC actually took on one of these for the “official” Wonder Woman costume, I’d go with Daniel Krall’s:


It’s really a nice mix of the costume in the original Golden Age book (still the best Wonder Woman comics) with the interest in mythology that has become increasingly important in post-Crisis Wonder Woman comics.

In addition to those posted at Project Rooftop’s page, the runners-up have all been posted here. Check ‘em out.





This is why comic book characters should always just say “@#$%!”when they swear: Comic Book Resources’ critic Hannibal Tabu kinda sorta almost starts an interesting conversation in this week’s “Buy Pile” column, regarding usage of the “N-word” in comics, using white creators Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s usage of it in The Boys to bring comics into the traditional dialogue of who gets to say it in popular entertainment, whether keeping it, um, taboo grants it too much power, and so on. Tabu gets into it a bit deeper at his myspace blog, where he can be a bit freer in discussing swear words.

Tucker Stone, whose caustic commentary makes his “Comics of the Weak” reviews among the most fun to read each week, obliquely makes fun of where Tabu draws the line in his own review of the last issue of The Boys:



You know, because a comic that doesn't have respect for common decency, contains graphic violence, sex and language, satirizes every aspect of mainstream comics including dead creators, ridicules American shame regarding hetero-,homo-, and ear canal sex, should somehow know better than to use a racial epithet. Cut a guy’s face off, put it on a pizza, but God forbid you drop an n-bomb. That's Across The Line.



As a white guy, these kinds of conversations can be pretty awkward to enter into, particularly when it’s started by someone who says that white fiction writers can’t put the word in the mouths of fictional black characters. (Can we talk about talking about it, then?).

I think Tabu’s got a damn good point, and I know Quentin Tarantino’s liberal usage of it in his films always rings false and seems in particularly poor taste to me, but I haven’t given usage of the “N-word” by comic book writers the same sort of thought I’ve given its usage in other media, like film and music (And I think I’ve heard it several billion times in music at this point in my life, almost exclusively by black performers, with the sole exception of Patti Smith’s Rock ‘n Roll Nigger, and covers of the same).

Perhaps that’s because it comes up less often in comics than in other media, or perhaps it’s because fewer people read comics than watch movies or listen to rap music, and thus there are fewer people pontificating on the opinion pages and cable punditry shows on the language used in comics.

At the moment, I’m kind of having a hard time thinking of instances of it being used in comics, actually. Tabu mentions Brian K. Vaughan using it in Y: The Last Man but I don’t remember it, nor do I remember it being used in Ennis’ Punisher arc “Kitchen Irish,” which Tabu also mentions (What sticks with me most about that story was the amount of violence—there was a dude whose job was to saw people into small pieces—and Indictment #26 of the religious/ethnic violence in Ireland from Ennis).

I’m pretty sure it was used in Dock Walloper #1, by a racist character in a period piece set in the early part of last century, but which was also written by a coupla white guys (I think; one interesting thing about comics is that so many of the creators are just names, and often times there’s no way of telling what race the people who make them actually are; for example, I have no idea if Jimmy Palmiotti, who wrote Dock Walloper with white guy Ed Burns, is black or white or neither).

Did James Sturm use it in his baseball story at the end of James Sturm’s God, Gold and Golems? I think he might have had an angry member of the crowd use it in reference to the big, black guy who later plays the golem, but, again, I don’t recall.

As a critic, I’m not sure it’s responsible to publicly say something like, “I’ll never review another comic by this writer, because he did something in his story I find morally repugnant.” (Actually, Tabu said, “This column is officially done with the work of Garth Ennis.”) But then, the field of comics criticism is a little different than, say, literary criticism or film criticism, in that the space between professional, semi-professional and amateur critics is so much smaller, and it’s so much easier to become a critic (Basically, anyone with an Internet connection can become a critic, and reach roughly the same audience; there’s relatively little in the way of print criticism). Some of the better comics critics may or may not get paid for what they write (i.e. be “professionals” in the traditional sense) or not get paid very much, or paid less than critics who aren’t quite as astute. (For example, I’m not sure how much Tom Spurgeon makes for the work he does, but he seems a much better comics critic than those who write for, say, Entertainment Weekly or The Onion’s A.V. Club, who most certainly are “professional” in the traditional sense; likewise, pretty much everyone at TheSavageCritics.com is a better critic than pretty much everyone at Wizard, but the former get a share of donations, as I understand it, while the latter get some sort of paycheck).

The weird thing about Tabu’s protest is that due to the specific nature of his column, the fact that he reads everything for free, and only buys a few of the books, with those being bought constituting the designation of what’s best, there’s no real economic component to a boycott of Ennis’ future work (I should probably here note that I read Tabu’s column every Thursday morning, and kinda like the set-up; if nothing else, it’s a unique way of rating comics). In fact, if “The Buy Pile” just completely ignores The Boys, it may prove more helpful to the book; a negative review a month is probably less helpful than no review at all, you know?

Finally, as someone notes in a response on Tabu’s myspace entry, Tabu himself noted that he knows lots of black folks who use the word regularly (including his significant other), which seems to indicate that Ennis having a black character use it in casual conversation is simply observant, naturalistic writing, not the same as Ennis himself using it to describe black folks.

As for Ennis’ usage of the word in The Boys, I can’t say how appropriate or inappropriate it actually is, as I lost interest in and dropped the series a long time ago, and am just going off the one panel Tabu posted and what he had to say about the book.

I did read enough issues—the first four, maybe?—to understand that it’s a series devoted to trying to be as outrageous as possible, so the presence of the “N-word” doesn’t seem out of place there, and if Ennis is simply putting it in the mouth of a black character using it in casual conversation, it doesn’t strike me as offensive, particularly in relation to all the other stuff going on in that book, some of which Stone alluded to in his review.

So I don’t know—is this just the same old debate we’ve seen over movies, music and daily conversation, with the same old questions? Who can say it? When can they say it? Is it better to say it a lot and rob it of its power, or never ever say it at the risk of keeping it powerful? Or is there anything specific to comics as a medium that bring a fresh angle to the discussion? Or to criticism, of comics or otherwise, that brings a fresh angle?

I don’t know. Like I said, Tabu almost kinda sorta started the conversation, but not really, so I’m not sure where we can go from here anyway. Personally, I don’t see anything comics-specific about the debate, but if anyone does, I’d be very interested to hear about it.

Nothing but links

In lieu of the scans and jokes about Captain Marvel I had planned for today (stupid lady using the library scanner all afternoon when I grumble grumble), please enjoy some links, all numbered for your convenience...


1.) I know how crushed you guys were on Wednesday night when you clicked on over to Every Day Is Like Wednesday for the comics blogsophere’s most hastily written reviews to see what I thought of the new Omega The Unknown series, only to find my Weekly Haul Omega The Unknown-less. Diamond shorted my store, and as of Saturday had yet to get them all of the books they were supposed to have shipped them by Tuesday.

But now your wait is finally over! As I was eventually able to find a copy and review it, and you can click on over to Newsarama.com to read my review of it in today’s Best Shots column.

Just make sure you stop reading before you get to the comments section, because shit gets stupid in there, as it all too often does.

(For the record, Booster Gold is one of my favorite DC super-comics at the moment, and is among one of DC’s better written and drawn books, while my interest in Iron and the Maiden stops at the fairly amusing title, which makes me think of a funny band).

And if you need a refresher course in the original Omega The Unknown series, might I suggest this excellent post from a very handsome comics blogger: Fifteen Random Thoughst about Omega The Unknown Classic.

For more bonus Caleb content, I also reviewed the first issue of DC’s new Simon Dark series by Steve Niles and Scott Hampton.




2.) See that picture above? That is a terrible digital photograph, taken by the tiny little camera embedded in my lap top screen (which flips everything, so you’d follow the panels right to left, not left to right), of the last page of the original Omega The Unknown on the right, and the last page of the new Omega The Unknown on the left.

You can see how similar they are, with the last panel being the exact same.

Well, with one difference.

In the new version, the doctor’s dialogue is “…take the form of the Greek letter Omega?”

In the original, the doctor’s dialogue was “…take the form of the Greek letter Omega!” with the dialogue bubble growing spikey like a scream/shout bubble, rather than a plain old dialogue bubble.

Based on how these two panels alone stack up, one must conclude that the original was more exciting.

Need more evidence? In the lower right hand corner of the last panel of the new version, the word “Continued…” is lettered, and that’s the last word the comic has to offer.

In the original, beneath the last panel ran these words: “Next… Mystery, menace, and madness… James-Michael in Hell’s Kitchen--A super-being on the skids--And the chaos called--The Incredible Hulk!”

Mystery, menace, madness, chaos, and The Hulk, plus some other stuff too? Holy shit, that’s going to be awesome!



3.) Speaking of Newsarama, I’m sure you’ve already heard, but, if not…

I have no idea what it means yet, but I’m hoping it means Lou Dobbs will be joining the Best Shots review team…



4.) Go read Dick Hyacinth’s thoughts on the change. They’re smart.



5.) Tom Spurgeon has a fantastic review of JLoA #13 up. It doesn’t reach quite the heights of brilliant hilarity that his Flash #13 review did (Hey, what’s with Spurgeon and the #13 issues of DC super-comics?), but it’s good stuff. I particularly liked it because his opinion mirrored my own (and that of many others), but he conveyed it with the sort of remove I can never muster, being so close to the characters and their world. Since I tend to think of the DCU as a real place (because I’m mentally ill, I guess), when I see the Injustice League, I immediately start thinking, “Huh, that’s weird these guys just did this last year, and are going to do it again next week at the wedding we already saw…” whereas Spurgeon notices things like the fact that they’re name betrays an inherent ridiculous and the fact that seeing them after a 30 year absence from seeing all of DC’s big villains aligned isn’t the least bit exciting to him.

I wonder why DC sends Spurgeon things like Countdown, Flash #13 and this issue of JLoA. I’m sure there are books at DC that are much, much, much, much (much, much, much) more likely to get a positive review from Spurgeon (the just-concluded Batman arc, All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, maybe the Eric Powell issues of Action, et cetera).



6.) I don’t know why I continue to be so fascinated by a comic book I quit reading months ago, but I am. CBR rumormonger Rich Johnston kinda sorta reports on something related to Countdown that is potentially interesting. His column is here, but the here’s the relevant portion:



I understand that there are a number of DC creators who have worked on the "Countdown" series who are expressing deep misgivings about their future workload.

LITG previously reported that Mike Carlin was intending to "heavyweight up" the series, bringing in big name creators in light of sliding sales, and now certain existing talent on the series has found themselves not knowing what their next job will be, if it's there at all.

Except they don't know that that's what's going on.

They do now.



I understand why Johnston constructed that the way he did, to give maximum punch to his big reveal. (I think it’s a big reveal; but the stop light picture next to it is blinking “caution” not “go,” so that means it’s something that’s probably true but not definitely true, right?)

But I really wish he would have constructed it more clearly, because I’m not quite sure what he’s saying. Is it that creators working on Countdown are going to get booted from the title? Or that they won’t be getting any future work?

Because if DC’s going to punish anyone for creating such a shitty comic book, it’s probably going to be the writers. And since Paul Dini’s plotting, he seems to be the one in need of the ass-kicking, but I can’t see why he’d get one, as his name remains big and profitable, no matter how bad Countdown is.

Sean McKeever has two ongoing titles, Birds of Prey and Teen Titans. The former sells poorly enough that I could see it being cancelled at some point (particularly since the title’s become lost without its co-star in it), but Titans? I can’t see DC yanking McKeever off it so soon after putting him on it. It’s not like his first issues were as godawful as Adam Beechen’s.

“Graymiotti” also have an ongoing, Jonah Hex, which constantly hovers around cancellation, plus they should have at least seven more months of work on Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters.

Tony Bedard’s only ongoing is Batman and the Outsiders, but since it’s Batman, that’s gotta be a pretty safe gig, right? I always feel a little bad for Bedard, since he’s the guy DC seems to call to write bridge stories between other people’s stories. I can’t decide if that’s a great compliment to his skills (“Let’s call Bedard! He can do anything! If anyone can straighten out these disparate stories by Judd Winick, Brad Meltzer and Gail Simone it’s him!”) or an insult (“Oh man, we need to kill three months in Supergirl why we get the contracts signed, who do we call?”).

Adam Beechen’s only got a limited going right now, Countdown To Adventures. And he’s also an awful, awful, awful writer (At least from what I’ve read of his—Titans, five issues of Robin, two of his Countdown issues and much of his JLU stuff.)

But then, he’s only one creator, and Johnston’s piece said “a number of DC creators” (yeah, yeah, smart ass, one is “a number”).

Whatever the case, it seems awfully unfair to blame Beechen or any of the others for how bad Countdown is. I’ve seen good stories from all six of the writers who get credit for the series elsewhere, and the biggest problems in Countdown come from the plot points the writers who aren’t Dini have to deal with. I mean, there’s no way you can make a Mary Marvel Gets Black Adam’s Suddenly All Different Superpowers and Becomes a Totally Evil Slut story make sense.

As someone who had his brain assaulted by a half-dozen issues of the series, I sure would like to see someone get punished for how bad it is, but it seems to me that the greatest problems with the series like with editors Mike Marts, Mike Carlin, and whoever it was who sat down with Dini and concocted this dumb-ass plot in the first place.

Of course, Johnston could have been talking about the artists, whom, yeah, are doing a terrible, terrible job. Thing is, they are all pretty great artists, who have done good work elsewhere. Have they been given enough lead time? Have they been given model sheets so they know what the characters look like? Is anyone editing the art? While the art on Countdown has been universally bad—event the covers have been, on the whole, rather terrible—I hope DC doesn't think that's why people don't like Countdown as much as DC wants them to. The very same readers put up with often times subpar art work on 52, but because everything else worked so well, we just forgave it as a symptom of too little lead time (Having revisited some triangle era Superman comics though, I'm less inclined to forgive 52's sub-par art then I was at the time.

You can get the Kuberts (who don't seem to be doing much of anything) or Jim Lee to pencil a few issues, you can get Alex Ross to paint the covers, but that's not going to solve the inherent problems in the series, it's just going to help sales a little. Oh, wait...

The Best Part of Superman: Doomsday

I realize I was pretty hard on DC’s direct-to-DVD Superman: Doomsday film last week. I suppose I should take some of the responsibility for my own disappointment. After all, “direct-to-DVD” translates pretty directly into “not good enough for theaters,” and, well, Jesus, just look at some of the stuff that gets put in theaters. Still, I was expecting something at least as good as JLU, and perhaps that’s my fault for expecting it as much as their fault for failing to deliver it.

Anyway, I don’t want to sound like I didn’t like anything at all about the movie.

I mean, I thought it was pretty funny that the hot Metropolis nightclub Jimmy works as a paparazzo at is called “Nite Club.”

And that animated Kevin Smith is so much skinnier than real-life Kevin Smith.

And, um…I guess it was pretty cool when Superman grabbed Doomsday by the roof of this mouth to flip him.

And…uh…hmm. Well, that’s really about it from the feature presentation, but I did find the special feature documentary about the creation of the original death of Superman storyline from DC Comics quite fascinating.

While the subject matter isn’t the making of the film I had just watched, this short film is of a similar nature to the “making of” featurettes that are so common on DVDs these days, just focusing on something other than the DVD feature.

Certainly it amounts to little more than PR, and if there is a compelling documentary to be made about that time DC Comics killed off their flagship character, DC Comics isn’t really the right company to make it.

Is it a good documentary? God, no.

But is it interesting, and fun to watch? It sure is, particularly for those of us interested in the creation of comic books and the industry as a whole.

Consulting comics.org, I see that was 15 going on 16 when Superman died in late ’92, and I was just starting to get into comics. As that much maligned decade of the comic industry was dawning, the TSR/DC co-production Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the only extremely occasionally released Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles books were the only comics I was regularly reading. But I was starting to feel the siren call of the DCU, thanks to the house ads and checklists that ran in AD&D.

Armageddon 2001 got me to pick up a couple of self-contained annuals featuring Batman, and Norm Breyfogle’s expressive art drew me to an issue of Batman (featuring a ventriloquist’s dummy with a tommy gun, as I recall), and I soon discovered there were scores of Breyfogle-drawn Bat-books in the back issue bins.

The Doomsday storyline would be my first exposure to Superman, beyond the Dan Jurgens Armageddon 2001 annual in which Superman wore gloves and fought Batman, and his brief appearance in the Death In the Family trade I’d bought (which also featured Batman and Superman fighting, come to think of it).

A neighbor kid had heard about the upcoming death of Superman and thought the books would be worth a lot of money someday, and he wanted to buy them. But since his mom didn’t want him going into the creepy comic shop in the creepy downtown part of my hometown (he was a gradeschooler) and knew I’d sometimes stop there on my way home form school, she gave me the money to buy those Doomsday fight issues for him. I would read them before passing them on (probably bending spines and leaving fingerprints, then decreasing their “value.” Ha ha!), and got hooked. With the actual death issue, I bought my own as well (I opened the polybag though, so there goes that investment), and hopped on for the whole year-long “Word Without a Superman”/ “Reign of the Supermen” storyline.

Considering how much time and energy I would eventually devote to the DCU, that year or so worth of Superman comics holds a special place in my heart, since it was a real gateway to the DCU in a way that the Batman comics I read weren’t; everyone showed up in there at some point. When I occasionally reread some of them these days, I’m sometimes struck by how dated they are in their details of the DCU’s fictional history (Lex Luthor posing as his own son from Australia, Supergirl being that Matrix thing I never completely understood, some guy named “Bloodwynd” being on the Justice League, the Hawks wearing red, et cetera), but it’s still an impressively rich and detailed story, in terms of the size of its cast and the different points of view the storyline was infused with, and the number of new characters and concepts introduced.

Looking back from 2007, I’m not sure which is more remarkable—That DC was able to sustain what was essentially a weekly Superman comic book for a year without the benefit of its star even appearing (kinda like what Ed Brubaker and company are attempting with Captain America now, only at least four times as often), or how influential the world-building those creative teams engaged in would end up being. I mean, Geoff Johns has been using Cyborg Superman to great effect in Green Lantern, Steel and Superboy have had been near-constant presences in the DCU since, and so on.

But enough about me.


(Above: Bloodwynd wears a golden circlet encrusted with jewels on his left thigh. I just wanted to point that out.)

The documentary features talking head interviews with Karl Kesel, Roger Stern, Jon Bogdanove, Louise Simonson, Paul Levitz, Jerry Ordway, Dan Jurgens, Jenette Kahn, Mike Carlin, Tom Grummett and Brett Breeding, only two of whom I’ve actually ever seen images of before.

These interviews are all rather brief and perfunctory, but I found it interesting just to see these creators’ faces and hear their voices, after having been familiar with them as names in credit boxes for so long. Comics is an interesting field in that the spectrum of celebrity varies so much from creator to creator. Read just about any novel, and you’ll see a photo of the author on the back of the jacket. But man, I’ve read scores of comics that each of these people were involved with, and I couldn’t pick most of ‘em out in a line up. I could be standing in a bank line behind all of them, and I wouldn’t be able to pick any of them out, although I might think to myself, Hey, that nerdy dude up there looks a little like Paul Levitz, doesn’t he?

(I wonder if this is changing due to the Internet, the rise of the blogosphere, the influence of conventions and the conscious cultivating of a celebrity culture to comics, or if I just spend more time in fan circles now. Like, I’ve seen pictures of just about every creator I read regularly now—and many, like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Paul Pope, Warren Ellis, Rob Liefeld and Brian Michael Bendis are people I wouldn’t only be able to pick out of a police line up, but probably a crowded New York City street corner— but I had no idea what any of the crators I was regularly reading back in the ‘90s looked like. Back then, I thought Kelley Jones was a woman at first though too, so it may also just be a matter of me being an idiot.)

Also interviewed are a couple of New York retailers, who give some first-person accounts of the consumerist hysteria that ensued when word got out that Superman wasn’t long for the world, and Brian Cunningham of Wizard magazine, who seems to have patterned his own hairstyle after Superman’s. I’m not really familiar with Cunningham, but I admit to sneering as soon as I saw where he was from. He provided the necessary fan perspective, and Idon’t mean to degrade the man here or anything, but I thought it was a little sad that in creating this film, DC turned to Wizard for an authoritative, third-party, industry watcher’s perspective on the event.

I don’t know how many magazines that were active in the early ‘90s are still active (Maybe Wizard is the only one?) or if websites like Newsarama.com were around as far back as then (Was their an Internet back then? I didn’t discover it until it had already existed for quite a few years, on account of me being an extreme Luddite). But Wizard seemed like a poor choice, simply because this is just one more example of one of the Big Two legitimizing Wizard as the face of comics journalism. I don’t know, maybe Tom Spurgeon or The Comics Journal folks were asked to appear and laughed in the faces of those asking, and maybe Matt Brady of Newsarama.com didn’t want to participate, but increasingly Wizard seems irrelevant to me, as the Internet handles the fan-stuff faster and better, and the mainstream media start paying more and more attention to comics, and I can’t help feeling the market would go ahead and kill Wizard off if only DC and Marvel didn’t devote so much time and energy into subsidizing it with their ad dollars, participation in coverage and granting the magazine “scoops.”

Anyway, the film jumps from talking head to talking head, occasionally lingering on art from those comics (which all looks extremely good blown up here), recounting in breif the John Byrne relaunch of the franchise, and the circumstances that lead to the storyline. Originally, they had planned a yearlong marriage of Superman and Lois story, but since they had to wait until the Lois & Clark series was ready to marry their Superman and Lois (as the plan was to synch the two events up), it left the Super-books with a year to fill.

And this is what they chose to do.

A lot of the specifics will be familiar to anyone who’s read any of the trades of these stories or of other’s from the era, as they recount the way the “triangle” books worked and the Super Summits, several of which are captured on film.

These segments are kind of revelatory, and while I hate to turn this post into another stiff arm of Countdown, it is remarkable that DC was able to produce such a (relatively) excellent Superman monthly 15 years ago, but have had such a hard time making a coherent weekly this year. Even 52, which I enjoyed enormously from the first issue on, had art that was quite sub-par. I forgave that at the time on account of it being a necessary evil of a weekly book, but then when you consider the Super-books of the ‘90s, that excuse evaporates. I noticed this too while reading the out-of-print Panic In The Sky! trade I recently found a copy of, and the whole death of Superman epic is just another reminder.


(Above: "Panic In the Sky!" featured Brainiac versus pretty much the entire DC Universe, and it was totally awesome. The trade, naturally enough, has long been out of print).

Why is it that those storylines came out on a weekly basis, and had high-quality art on par with the art in every other DC book at the time (if not better than many of them), while 52 and, even more so, Countdown, look so ugly, rushed and messy? I suspect it boils down to lead time, the Super-books were plotted out well in advance, and Countdown seemed to be more of an “Oh shit! We need another monthly, and we need it to start in three months!” But, in theory, Countdown could have had just four regular pencil and inker teams, each of which would take one week’s issue, and would thus only be doing as much work as they would on a monthly, although the story would be weekly (In theory. I’ve been downright shocked at how bad some high-profile DC books look of late. This past week, for example, JLoA and Teen Titans, the latter of which has had some real bad luck with artists, seemed just awful when compared to so much Big Two output).

Watching this documentary—and reading trades or comics from the period—also makes the lack of quality in Countdown’s writing seem mystifying as well. Is this another matter of not enough lead time, or a problem of the one writer as showrunner, with a team of writers fleshing out plot beats strategy of comics production? Because the Super-books had just about as many writers as Countdown, and yet these stories were all incredibly tight, and made sense from issue to issue. The extreme variance in writing quality is a bit mystifying when you realize that Countdown, “Panic in the Sky!” and the death of Superman stories all share an editor—Mike Carlin. Although Countdown launched with another editor, so Carlin can only be blamed so much for the lack of quality in the book.

But, as this documentary reveals, Carlin and all of the writers and artists would gather for summits, Carlin would break out these giant poster-sized boards and together they would all plot a year-long story, dividing up the pieces of the story. It seemed like a lot of brainstorming went on there, with pretty significant details suggested from all quarters. For example, the Four Supermen of the “Reign” storyline came about because each creative team had their own ideas about what a Superman coming back should be like, and it was, according to the doc, something they were debating until Simonson suggested they use all four, giving each team their own character and subplot to advance (and giving us two of the stronger new characters of the decade, Steel and Superboy, and Geoff Johns fuel for Green Lanterns stories 15 years later).

The convention season scuttlebutt is that a third weekly is planned. I hope DC is already working on it (although I doubt it), and that it will follow a production pattern similar to the one here instead of the top-down, TV-writing approach of Countdown. Clearly the former has lead to more readable comics than the latter. (But if Carlin’s editing Countdown, he can’t possibly be leading a summit on next year’s weekly at the moment, can he? Sigh.)

But enough about Countdown.

Back to the alleged subject of this post, in addition to the look into the process of the how Superman comics used to be created, the documentary also does a nice job of capturing some of the strange media coverage of the event, and the comics culture of the ‘90s, showing how the creators took the surprise celebrity status they received, with the kind of attention and adulation that was usually reserved for the likes of Todd MacFarlane or Rob Liefeld going, temporarily anyway, to the likes of Mike Carlin.

It’s a neat little trip down memory lane, to a time when comics was a collectable market and media coverage of the medium was still new.

It’s pretty striking to watch all the footage culled from TV news and the flashes of newspaper headlines in 2007, after Captain America had died, and seeing how the media of the early ‘90s did the same thing as the today’s media, in terms of equating that comic book icon with America itself, and trying to make the story of his death out as a broader cultural statement than the more obvious reading that, Hey, maybe this comic book company would really like to sell some more comics, and doesn’t have much to say about the “End of History” that followed the Cold War or War on Terror.

It’s also interesting to watch knowing all that would follow. The Death of Superman era, creatively, commercially and even culturally, genuinely seemed innocent and exciting, and the commercial aspect of wanting to sell more comics aside, there was something pure about it (Unless the creators are all really great actors, they seemed to have been really caught of guard that anyone other than regular DC readers cared about what they were doing at all).

But those of us who stuck around afterwards know exactly what it lead to for DC. Batman in a wheel chair, replaced by a darker, more ‘90s successor. Wonder Woman kicked to the curb for a darker, more ‘90s successor. Green Lantern turned evil and replaced by a new character. Green Arrow killed and replaced by a new character. Aquaman maimed and given a new, darker look*.

The success and attention the Death of Superman storyline may have caught DC off-guard when it originally hit, but they wasted no time in trying to replicate it, each attempt leading to diminishing returns. (See also Dan Jurgens twelve to fifteen different Doomsday projects to follow).







*To be fair, I enjoyed all of these stories. The Batman one went on a bit too long and didn’t go far enough—Jean-Paul Valley really shoulda killed some dudes, as the revulsion the regulars felt for him was a tad force. After all, he was simply a marginally more brutally violent asshole vigilante than the brutally violent asshole vigilante they were used to working with. And that Wonder Woman story? Good God did that suck. But otherwise? I was on board with all that stuff, even Hal going over to the darkside, and while the conversion likely felt forced to a lot of people, if anything is going to turn someone psycho, the genocide of his entire home town of millions oughta do the trick. Besides, when he was “evil” he was only trying to get enough power to resurrect the city, and thus if he killed someone, he did so knowing that if he’s successful, he could totally bring them back to life. I was disappointed when he died simply because Parallax, lame thought the name was, had the makings of a great villain.

I probably won't read this comic. But here are 4,000 words about it anyway.

The premise of DC’s December series Countdown: Arena is a simple yet somewhat high concept one. Here’s the pitch: We’ve got this all-new Multiverse, in which many popular parallel continuitiverses of DC’s now have their own “Earth” and can crossover with the DCU proper, right? So let’s have a big old Battle Royale with, like, all of the Batmen fighting each other, and all of the Supermen, and on and on until we’re down to, like, the Blue Beetles.

It’s not a bad idea, and one that, in theory, I’d be all about. (Some of my favorite DC stories of all time will be fielding candidates for this battle royale).

Like pretty much everything these days on their slate, however, DC’s taken a pretty decent idea and tried to render it as terrible as possible. (Um, based on what I know so far since I haven’t actually, like, read the series yet).

First, the series will be tied into Countdown (hence the title).

Now, I don’t know if you still read Countdown or not, but I read the first six issues or so, and that book is just awful. Unreadable, even. I know some people do read it, so maybe unreadability is jus a subjective thing, but when I see the word “Countdown” on a comic book, I think, “Well, that can’t be very good.”

As for the way in which it intersects with Countdown, it involves, according to the brand new Countdown: Arena website that just went up, “the villainous Monarch” building an army of superheroes to do battle with the Monitors.

Now, here we have a problem, because apparently Monarch is not Hank Hall, as was revealed in Armageddon 2001, a two-part miniseries that bookended a summer of Annuals tie-ins across DC’s whole line in the summer of 1991 (Fun fact: This is when I started reading DCU comics semi-regularly. Another fun fact: This was sixteen years ago, which means that I am old, but also that DC is premising part of the greater Countdown story on a sixteen-year-old story which they have not collected in trade, meaning you either read it sixteen years ago and remember/care about it, or you don’t and thus might be a little lost. Or might not, since it’s a different Monarch. But you probably won’t care at all if you didn’t read it).

No, this Monarch is actually Captain Atom. Apparently. I guess. When this was first revealed in Countdown, they miscolored his skin, so he appeared to be a generic white guy, instead of the metallic-skinned Captain Atom. There is a long, boring anecdote about why Captain Atom being Monarch is clever, the cleverness of making Captain Atom into Monarch first forwarded by Robert Washington III in short-lived mid-nineties series Extreme Justice (Fun fact: That is the single worst title for a DC Comic book ever. But the series isn’t as terrible as it’s title, at least, not towards the end, when Amazing Man II, Firestorm I and the freaking Wonder Twins get involved).

Now, I’ve read Armageddon 2001, its sequel, its other sequel, Zero Hour, Extreme Justice and the JSA issues dealing with Extant, the villain that evolved out of Monarch.

But I can’t tell you what’s up with Monarch/Captain Atom at the moment in the DCU, because I didn’t read the miniseries where Captain Atom visited the about-to-be-rebooted-anyway WildStorm Universe (I want to say Captain Atom: Armageddon, but that seems too lazy a title to be real), nor did I read Battle For Bludhaven, the last half of Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters or most of Countdown. I think that’s where all this current Captain Atom business has played out, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, for a reader to get the premise of a series, that seems like an awful lot of required reading ahead of time, doesn’t it?

So, for some reason, heroic Captain Atom is now “villainous,” and he’s beginning “the last chapter of his campaign against the Monitors.” Since the Monitors seem to be evil themselves (except for Bob, I guess), I’m not sure why fighting them makes Captain Atom villainous, but then, I guess he is forcing heroes to fight to the death, so I guess that’s pretty villainous. (Why he’s doing this instead of just recruiting them all, and why so many of them are willing to kill different versions of themselves, will hopefully be explained in the comic itself, should you choose to buy and read it.)

The characters will be culled from the WildStorm Universe, the new versions of the old versions of the alternate Earths of the DC Multiverse, and such popular and/or classic Elseworlds tales as Superman: Red Son, DC: The New Frontier and Batman: Gotham By Gaslight.

Okay, that part sounds kind of fun, right? I mean, Gay Batman versus Vampire Batman? Commie Superman versus Superman-in-Batman’s costume? There’s some potential here, right? I’d eat that up with a spoon. Some of the most fun DC Comics I’ve ever read have involved alternate versions of the DC characters from different continuitiverses interacting with, fighting with or murdering one another. I mean, that’s pretty much all Evan Dorkin’s Superman and Batman: World’s Funnest was, and that’s a desert island DC comic if ever there was one.

Of course, for such an idea to work, the creators need to be up to the task, and I’m not so sure they are. The writer is Keith Champagne, and I don’t want to slam the guy, but I really haven’t seen enough of his work to even form an opinion of it. He finished up Geoff Johns’ remarkable JSA run pretty well (if we just pretend the Paul Levitz arc that followed it never happened, which I’d highly recommend doing) and I understand he did some Green Lantern Corps stories I never read, and then of course he helped turn a memo from his editors into the continuity patch dump World War III. In all instances, it’s hard to tell how much input Champagne himself had. So seeing his name attached here as writer doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but, at the same time, it doesn’t inspire revulsion, either. (If Judd Winick or Adam Beechen, for example, were writing this, I don’t even think I’d be able to devote this much thought to the subject).

The interior art or the series will be provided by the art team Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens, who have a stellar run on Nightwing under their belts, in addition to some Batman stories, Richard Dragon and, most recently, Green Arrow Now, I quite like their art, and it’s easy to see how they ended up with this gig.

If you’re sitting around a table with some DC editors and throwing out names of pencilers that draw good fight scenes, I’d suspect McDaniel comes up pretty early in the game. He was incredibly adept and bringing Gotham rooftops to life, constructing complicated fight scenes and chase scenes all over them using the old multiple images of the same character in the same panel to denote motion trick to wonderful effect. I don’t think Dick Grayson has ever seemed more like an acrobat than when McDaniel was drawing him.

I don’t think he’s right for this series, however, in part because of how idiosyncratic his artwork is. Put bluntly, McDaniel’s art always looks like McDaniel’s art, which is almost always a good thing. The one place where it becomes a bad thing? When you’re illustrating a book full of characters that should look like different people drew them.

While a lot of the alternate versions of these characters have pretty wild costume designs—you wouldn’t confuse Gotham By Gaslight Batman for the DCU Batman of the time, for example—others dress almost the exact same as their DCU counterparts, and are distinguished by the artist.

Vampire Batman wears DCU Batman’s costume, for example. You know it’s Vampire Batman because he’s got the three-foot-long bat-ears, the three-hundred-yard-long cape and swollen gargoyle build of a Kelley Jones Batman…with fangs. Now, I actually really like McDaniel’s version of Jones’ design of Vampire Batman—it’s super-cute—but it doesn’t look a damn thing like Jones’. The appeal of that series wasn’t just that Batman was a vampire, but that he was a Kelley Jones vampire.

Looking just at the Batmen picture, it’s hard to tell Gotham By Gaslight Batman from Liberty Files Batman (so hard, that when the site went up Friday night, the images matched up to the wrong write-ups; it’s since been corrected); they’re basically differentiated by their coloring.

What really differentiates them isn’t their costume details, it’s that one is drawn by Mike Mignola and the other by Tony Harris.

In almost every case, Elseworlds books were defined by their artists. The stories themselves tended to be empty gestures, since nothing that happened mattered once you shut the book—they weren’t based on anything that came before, and they wouldn’t continue elsewhere—and were usually more about mixing and matching characters (Batman as Frankenstien’s monster, Superman as Tarzan, Superman as Batman, Batman as Green Lantern, et cetera) and settings (What if Superman’s rocket landed in Gotham, or on Apokalipss, or in the Soviet Union, etc) and, in a few cases, media (Batman: Nosferatu, Superman: Metropolis, Justice Riders, etc).

The best of the best did tend to have points beyond having fun with simple riffs on pop culture icons—Both Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come and Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier offered sort of meta-commentaries on the comics industry, for example—but by and large I would say that Elseworlds were defined by the people who created the art for them.

Batman: Thrillkiller wasn’t about anything so much as how awesome it would be for Daniel Brereton to go crazy with the Bat-characters. If Justice Riders is worth a damn at all, it’s because J. H. Williams III is such an awesome artist and designer. JLA: The Nail and JLA: Another Nail? Hundreds of pages of Alan Davis drawing every single DC character he could cram in.

Given the way the artists define these characters then, the ultimate way to create this book wouldn’t be to have McDaniel and Owens illustrate it. God no. You’d want to get a penciler with adequate storytelling chops and fairly generic figure work—say, Dan Jurgens—to lay the thing out, and then bring in the characters’ creators to finish their own characters. So if Amazonia Wonder Woman is going to fight Justice Riders Wonder Woman and New Frontier Wonder Woman, then you have a fight scene that’s a jam session between Phil Winslade, Williams and Cooke.

Is it unrealistic to get those three, plus Davis, Jones, Mignola, Ross, Frank Miller, Killian Plunkett, Scott Shaw and whoever else created the characters doing battle in this series to all contribute art? Yeah, maybe. Should one of the Big Two comics companies be able to pull it off? I would hope so.

Barring that, the next best strategy would be to simply have a penciler capable of mimicking such distinct styles involved. It can be done. Think of Williams’ recent work on Batman, in which he aped the work of a half dozen distinct pencilers, and managed to integrate the various styles into a single story without making the differing inspirations seem jarring to the eye.

Or John Cassaday’s work on Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth, the plot of which called on him to imitate various other artists’ interpretations of Batman.

Or Mike Allred’s recent issue of Madman’s Atomic Comics, in which he drew every single panel in the style of a different cartoonist/comics artist.

Are those guys all too busy/expensive for a project of this magnitude?

Well, what’s Jon Bogdanove up to at the moment? Because he sure pulled off every Batman ever pretty well for an old Zero Hour tie-in.



The most eyebrow-raising aspect of Countdown: Arena is—well, it’s Dan DiDio’s assurances that it’s “fan-fiction at its finest" as if that were a good thing. But the second most eyebrow-raising is the fact that readers can vote on the winners of the fights. This will no doubt give some readers flashbacks to the DC vs. Marvel crossover (Fun fact: I just reread it a few months ago, and while I liked it okay at the time it was originally released—aside from the Lobo vs. Wolverine fight, anyway—re-reading it as a grown-up, I have to admit that it sucked super-hard, from cover to cover. And yes, “sucked super-hard” is a grown-up expression).

And, in fact, just like the DC vs. Marvel series, readers will have the opportunity to vote on a few of the most popular matches, with the writer selecting the other winners of the other fights.

It’s a kind of half-assed way to do it. I’m sure having the writer choose the winners makes for a far better story (although, admittedly, logic should dictate a lot of the outcomes—No way in hell would Vampire Batman get taken out by one of those guys who isn/t a passionless killer with super-vampire powers, for example). But if you’re going to open the thing up for voting, why not ride that gimmick all the way? Make it a comic by committee. At least it will stick out from other similar ventures (Um, just Marvel Vs. DC, I guess), and if it totally sucks, everyone can shrug and say, “Well, it was an experiment in storytelling, and we knew it would be more fun in seeing how it went than if we cam in and sure it ended up the way we wanted. And besides, you guys voted for it, so if you didn’t like how it turned out, well, you’re to blame too! Ha ha ha.”

We’re welcome to vote for the winners of the three-way battles between the Batmen, Green Lanterns, Wonder Women and Supermen, and the website offers up pictures of each group, plus a little write-up about what number Earth they’re from, and where you can read more about them.

The Batmen are from Earth-JSA: The Liberty Files, Earth-Gotham by Gaslight and Earth-Moench/Jones. There are more Batmen to choose from than any other character, and I imagine it was hard to come up with these candidates. Like I said, Vampire Batman would take these two in a matter of seconds logically, but popularity-wise, I don’t know. It must have been hard picking three Batmen that were all about equally popular. Like, if they put Dark Knight Batman in there, for example, I’m sure it would have been hard to find another two Batmen who could rival him in popularity.

I wonder if these are the only Batmen involved, or if there will be others too. Because I’d love to see Adam West trading punches with Frankenstein Batman, or AzBats versus Goddam Batman.

Of these three, two of them are from books that are still in print. The vampire trilogy is all out of print, but is about to be re-released in a single volume with a super-retarded title I’ve made fun of at great length already.

The Green Lantern category is, as the kids might say, wack. We have the Bruce Wayne of “Green Lantern: In Darkest Night” [sic]. This was a pretty goofy story, in which Bruce Wayne gets Abin Sur’s Green Lantern ring instead of Hal Jordan. I kind of enjoyed just seeing how thoroughly Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham mixed the two mythologies together, and it was very much of the mixing and matching for fun type of Elseworlds (This followed Speeding Bullets, and I remembered wondering if they’d try an Aquaman or Flash version of Batman next).

Then things get stupid.

The next Green Lantern is the one from Earth-5, which is the new Earth-S (Because a “5” kind of looks like an “S,” I guess), which is where the Fawcett characters were relegated when DC acquired them all.

So there is no Green Lantern of Earth-5. Or, at least, there wasn’t until now. Since his first appearance won’t be until December, I can’t imagine he’ll garner many votes, since he can’t possibly have any fans. Judging from the design, he’s Hal Jordan with a white Captain Marvel-style sash/belt, and buttons on his uniform. The big difference between Earth-5 and New Earth apparently being that the former’s costumes all more closely resemble those of Earth-Prime. It’s a pretty odd design, since Earth-S has always been set back in time, in the ‘40s, so you’d think that if they had a GL, he’d be more Alan Scott style than Hal Jordan style.

The third Green Lantern is from Earth-12, “a future world inhabited by a Batman beyond anything ever seen.” He’s also making his first appearance. Based on the write-up, you could maybe infer that this is the world of Batman Beyond, either the straight version that had it’s own comic book based on the show for a bit, or a DCU version of it (In one of Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman arcs, he featured a Batman in a Batman Beyond costume, but that Batman’s first name was “Tim,” not “Terry”).

But it can’t really be the GL from the Batman Beyond-iverse, since it already has a GL, and he’s aweome:



If it’s not, that’s two new Elseworld GLs, neither of which could possibly have any fans, up against one pre-existent GL.

That makes me wonder if this is really fan-fiction at it’s finest, because, damn, there are so many alternate GLs they could have used!

There’s at least three different Power Rings now, there’s Barbara Gordon with a GL ring from JLA: Created Equal, there’s Wally West as “Teen Lantern” from Brave and the Bold (set in the DCU past, but surely there’s an Earth where he stayed a GL), there are all of those GLs from Circle of Fire (ditto), to say nothing of these guys:








I’m pretty sure JLA: Riddle of the Beast and JLA: Island of Dr. Moreau had Green Lanterns that were pretty awesome too, but now I can’t remember them, and they aren’t prominently featured on the covers.

The Wonder Women, as mentioned above, are those from Wonder Woman: Amazonia, Justice Riders and “Earth-21,” which sure sounds like she’s supposed to be the one from The New Frontier, but it’s impossible to tell from the drawing (New Frontier Wonder Woman being mainly distinguished by the fact that she looks like Darwyn Cooke drew her), but the write-up states she’s from a world where “the Cold War has just ended and a new era of heroism is dawning.” Er, actually, the Cold War was just starting in New Fronteir wasn’t it?

At any rate, Amazonia and Justice Riders are mentioned, but New Frontier is not (it’s not indicated what book Earth-21 Wondy is form at all, actually; but it doesn’t mention that this is her first appearance either, if indeed it is.) At any rate, if it is the Wondy from New Frontier, then she’s the only one from a story still in print.

(Aside: I love Justice Riders Wonder Woman’s costume. It might be the best Wonder Woman costume of them all. Wonder Woman wearing pants! Nothing says feminism like a broad wearing pants!).

Finally, we have the Supermen. There’s the Superman from Red Son. There’s “Earth-31 Superman” who “hails from a darker version of the future as seen in the Superman/Batman series.” I read most of that title—having dropped it after the first Metal Men issue—and I have no memory of this guy. He looks just like our Superman, only with one of those stupid cell phones that clip onto his ear. Maybe this is the one from the story arc where Batman and Superman take over the world? “Absolute Power,” I believe it was called? The Jeph Loeb story where a bunch of crazy shit happens for no reason for six meaningless issues, and a pretty good artist draws it all? You know the one…

And finally there’s “Earth-15 Superman,” who hails from a world where people have evolved into near-perfect beings. This one wears a costume that looks like a mixture of the late, legally debated Superboy’s with Kryptonian gear. And he’s bald.



(Hey, look at me! I’m evolved into a near-perfect being, too!)

Bald Near-Perfect Superboy is making his first appearance here. Which is crazy, since there are scores of alternate Supermen, maybe as many as there are alternate Batmen.

Of all the contests, this one seems to be the most stacked, as there’s only one that’s even mildly popular. I guess if we can figure out whether or not Earth-31 Superman is “Absolute Power” Superman, then we’d know he’s basically the same as Red Son Superman, only without the cool costume and the fact that he’s a Communist.

There’s a link to the Red Son trade provided, but no link to whichever volume of Superman/Batman Earth-31 Superman is from. Odd, since every Superman/Batman story is available in trade.

Again, I hope there are other Supermen involved. Because I might be sorely tempted to buy any book in which Sunshine Superman fights the Electric Red Superman of Earth-8, or where the half-fifth dimensional imp Superman from the Superman line introduced in Grant Morrison’s DC One Million fights the Titano from the gorilla galaxy of the DC One Million Secret Files and Origins Special #1. Or Samurai Superman versus Crazy-Bearded Superman. Or…

God, I could do this all day. Maybe I’ll just close my eyes and imagine my own Countdown: Arena…It’s sixteen dollars cheaper, and it never crosses over with Countdown.

Uh-oh, looks like Mummy-Fighter Wonder Woman just accidentally ripped the shoulder off of New Wonder Woman’s blouse…