Admit it: You would have read the hell out of Brandon Graham's Gen 13

On an early page of Walrus, PictureBox's publication of a sketchbook of Brandon Graham's (which you can get for half-off if you order before January 2), the artist describes the sorts of things that show up in his sketchbook, and one broad category he described was "Fantasy Football," which he described thusly: "I like coming up with what I would do with mainstream comics to make them into something I'd be into...have they ever put Aquaman inside an alien ocean that's inside a giant fish?"

Er, I don't know, but that would certainly be a pretty awesome Aquaman story, particularly if written and drawn by Brandon Graham.

Speaking of fantasy football, that's the sort of thing I really wish the New 52 reboot would have dabbled in, outside-the-box, let's-try-appealing-to-new-readers stuff like Brandon Graham writing and drawing a new volume of Aquaman where he's inside an alien ocean that's inside a giant fish, although obviously "Just Getting Geoff Johns To Write Aquaman For a While" worked well enough for them financially (Personally, I think Johns went too far into trying to make the character "cool," making him too bad-ass, too powerful and too defensive, but I never thought there was anything particularly broken with Aquaman in the first place; I'm definitely of the There's Now Such Thing As a Bad Character, Except For Geo-Force. And Red Tornado. And, like, 35% of the X-Men school of thought). (As it turned out, of course, DC wasn't terribly adventurous in picking creative teams or new directions for their rebooted line, and it turned out to be more of a numbering scheme and fashion move than anything else; even Marvel's fairly modest ideas like, say, Doing a funny crime book about Spider-Man's lamer super-villains or Having Mike Allred draw us a comic or Letting the Phonogram team have an Avengers title for a year seem radical in comparison to most of the initial The New 52 books. Oh well; maybe DC will throw Scrooge McDuck bags of money at Graham for Aquaman: Earth One.)

Anyway, at the top of this post is one of Graham's final fantasy warm-up sketches, a Gen 13 line-up consisting of original members Roxy and Fairchild, plus Static and Brainiac 5.

Gen 13, if you're not aware, was a superhero comic created in the early '90s by writers Jim Lee and Brandon Choi and drawn by J. Scott Campbell, set in Lee's original WildStorm Universe, which was first published at Image Comics before the imprint was sold to DC Comics. Like a rather astounding amount of the Image founders' creations, it borrowed quite liberally from Big Two super-comics, using barely-veiled analogues of Storm of the X-Men and The Human Torch of the Fantastic Four in its cast. It was about a team of five very '90s teenagers—one was even code-named Grunge—with superpowers, learning to use their powers, X-Men style.  It was mostly pretty terrible, but featured exciting art that lots of comics readers liked at that time, and the three females on the team had a habit of having their clothes fall apart, particularly Fairchild.

Adam Warren wrote and drew it for a while—first as a series of miniseries, then as an ongoing—and it was awesome then. Later DC rebooted it repatedly, as with their entire WildStorm Universe line,  and it seemed to get worse and less popular each time they did so. Finally the WildStorm imprint was shuttered, and the WildStorm Universe and many of its characters were folded into the new DC Universe created in the 2011 New 52 reboot, along with the old DCU and the publisher's "Vertigo Universe" characters.

DC hasn't tried a New 52 Gen 13 series yet (and seem to be shying away from using any WildStorm characters at all in the New 52-iverse), but they did put Fairchild in this book...

...which lasted about as long as one might expect in 2013.

Static got his own short-lived title—Static Shock—which was one of the first books to generate the sort of he said/he said post-mortem bickering of the creative teams that has characterized much of the New 52, and I imagine Brainiac was in one of the two Legion titles DC launched out of the reboot, both of which I think are cancelled now, but I don't care, because it's the Legion (You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe for the New 52 Legion, they hired a writer who has been writing Legion comics off-and-on for about as long as I have been alive).

Anyway, look at that sketch, then close your eyes and  imagine: DC Proudly Presents Gen 13 by Brandon Graham!

Walrus is a really fun book. I plan to discuss it at greater length, and not get sidetracked into fantasy publishing, in a near-future post.

You Know Who Should Write Wonder Woman? Adam Warren

I am not, nor have I ever been, a DC Comics editor. But I do have a lot of opinions about DC Comics, and I do have a blog, two things that, in combination, inevitably leads to a lot of armchair editing of DC Comics, which is practically the same thing, only I don’t get paid and my opinions and decisions are never reflected in the actual comics.

But other than that? Pretty much the same thing.

With my credentials thus established, please, take it from me—one of the hardest decisions DC editors have to make is which creators to hire to work on their characters, and these decisions become all the more difficult when it comes to a character like Wonder Woman, which is one of the company’s (and comics’) most recognizable and important characters, but lacks the resiliency of, say, Batman or Superman, characters who can support a dozen simultaneous titles.

For example, say you’ve just done away with your multiverse in a year-long series, and you’re going to completely reboot Wonder Woman’s fictional history, divorcing her from her World War II roots in an attempt to make her character as timeless as that of Batman, Superman or Spider-Man. Who do you trust with this monumental task? Whoever it was that said, “Why not let George Perez handle it?” seems to have chosen wisely; Perez lost a bit of the good stuff—Steve Trevor as love interest and Etta Candy as sidekick—but otherwise did a pretty perfect job.

Or say you’re relaunching your entire line of universe comic books with a reader-friendly event (Like “One Year Later”) flowing out of a soft(er) continuity reboot (The Infinite Crisis multiverse re-creation), who do you trust to make sense out of these various shuffles between what’s canon and what’s not, while simultaneously redefining the character for a new generation of readers? Maybe that guy who writes for TV, and did a 12 issue delay-plagued Marvel maxiseries once?

You see how simply choosing the wrong writer can lead to a real mess, like the one the Wonder Woman monthly is currently in (Relaunching with a new number one in June of last year, only three issues shipped in 2006, and an accelerated publishing schedule is just now catching the title up to where it should be—#12—although sales have fallen from over 130,000 with #1 to about 59,000 with #8).

Fortunately, there’s an easier way for DC editors to make these decisions. They could just ask me who should write their titles, and I’ll tell them.

For example, who should write Wonder Woman?

Adam Warren, that’s who.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Gail Simone has already been announced as the next regular writer of the series, a state of affairs I’m eagerly looking forward to, and doing these Wonder Woman Wednesdays posts as a means of counting down to.

But I still say Adam Warren for Wonder Woman. If not the monthly, then certainly on a one-shot. Or miniseries. Or original graphic novel. Or as the next writer of Wonder Woman, after Simone leaves.

What would make Warren such an ideal Wonder Woman writer? Wait, did I say writer? I did, didn’t I? Well, I didn’t mean he should just write it, he should also pencil the title.

Let’s take Warren’s art first. I’ve always enjoyed Warren’s art style, which is obviously quite heavily influenced by anime and manga (and was decades ago, back when most of America’s biggest digest-devouring Naruto-ites hadn’t yet learned to read). I think it’s safe to say that American readers are now quite ready to embrace such an artistic style en masse, and that Warren’s manga-esque look is a style that is probably even more likely to appeal to more people than even the work of such popular past Wonder Woman artists as Perez, Phil Jimenez and John Byrne.

And it’s worth noting that, with Warren, it’s not just an affectation, a cynically adopted surface gloss to his work—the man understands the speed line, the big eye, the dewy eye and the reversion to super-deformity, but he also understands how to build a page, how to progress a story from panel to panel and how to lead a reader's eyes through his pages. He can draw the way manga artists draw, not just draw images that resemble those drawn by manga artists (If that makes sense).

What would a Adam Warren Wonder Woman look like?

I have no idea; I couldn’t find any images of a Warren Wonder Woman on the world wide web, but I did find these, all from his deviantART gallery, and they at least give us a good idea of how cool a Warren drawn Wonder Woman comic would likely be:



(There you have a drawing of a super-strong, flying DC superheroine who likes wearing red, white and blue.)




(Here’s Marvel’s Valkyrie, who wears a bathing suit and bracelets, not unlike Wondy.)




(And there’s a convention sketch of Medusa, a mythological character who has come to blows with Wonder Woman on more than one occasion.)


But let’s focus on writing for a second.

Warren’s latest non-Iron Man work has been Empowered, which stars a superheroine with an unfortunate habit of getting tied up and gagged during almost every adventure. In other words, her adventures tend to involve an awful lot of bondage, as do Wonder Woman’s. Or, at least, as Wonder Woman’s adventures used to—the innocent bondage of the Golden Age Wonder Woman was one of the elements Perez ditched in his relaunch, and which never seemed to return to the post-Crisis Wonder Woman’s adventures to the same extent that it was present in the Marston/Peters stories.

As anyone who’s read Empowered—and if you haven’t, you should; how many times do I have to recommend the damn book before you read it?—can attest, Warren has a fairly unique ability to be both sexually exploitive and respectful at the exact same time. His characters are in on the joke, and he lets us in on the joke, and his bondage and other sexual imagery is thus almost always of the sort that works on several levels simultaneously.

For example, there's this cover, from a Warren-written, Warren-illustrated Gen 13 story:

(Better drawn than Turner's Power Girl, less icky than that "Heroes For Hentai" cover)

Look, it's a sexy drawing of sexy ladies, naked, and tied up in what appears to be Hot Wheel tracks. That's hawt. And totally ridiculous. And isn't it ridiculous that people—inculding us—find it hot? And it's all a fantasy of that dunderhead in the foreground's anyway, inspired by exploitation films. And he's being punched in the face, and thus being punished for the sordid Hollywood-fueled fantasty. And look, there's Lucky Charms swimmng around his head, so this is like a cartoon, and thus not to be taken too seriously anyway.

Warren did the having-your-cheesecake-and-eating-it-too trick that he pulls off on almost every page of Empowered throughout his too-brief, 18-issue run on Gen 13. Which includes, for the completists out there, not only Gen 13 #60-#77, but also a two-issue fill-in (#43 and #44), Gen 13 Bootleg #8-#10 (the must-red “Grunge: The Movie” arc, available in trade, and the source of the above cover) and miniseries Gen 13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy. (All of which would add up to a swell omnibus, wouldn't it?).

He also repeatedly examined stereotypical tropes of various genres, particularly the superhero genre, but also manga, anime, and kung fu movies, as well as comic books in general, pop music and technology. It was a rib-tickling, navel-gazing comic book narrative about comic book narrative. All the while featuring sexy women, always scantily clad, and often in states of undress (That was kind of Fairchild's whole deal, wasn't it?). Warren may pack his stories with fan service, but it's the thinking man's fan service, and that makes all the difference.

I for one would love to see what Warren could do with the weird sexual politics—both overt and naïve—within the Wonder Woman mythos, as well as wacky Amazon technology and the DC Universe in general. (Is that single Titans Elseworlds special really Warren’s only DC work to date?)

And I'm willing to bet so would a lot of other readers, beyond the 20-30,000 people who will read Wonder Woman every month no matter who's writing and drawing it.

Finally, on a more superficial (and thus easier to communicate) level, there’s the fact that Empowered is by far the single best superheroine bondage narrative going, and doesn’t Wonder Woman deserve to have the creator of the best superheroine bondage narrative telling her story?

Similarly, Gen 13 featured an Amazonian bombshell with super-strength and super-smarts in Fairchild. And isn’t Fairchild but an off-brand version of Wonder Woman?

And, finally, if Warren could write so many well-realized female leads—Empowered, Fairchild and the other Gen 13 girls, the Dirty Pair—throughout his career, then certainly he could handle comics’ number one female lead, right?