DC Comics Think-Piece Follow-up #2: The Next Round of New 52 Cancellations

Earlier in the week I had a piece up at Robot 6 about the semi-announced cancellation of The Savage Hawkman, and what it meant for The New 52. It was a poorly-selling comic that looked terrible, had a series of terrible writers and artists attached, went through the too-standard creative roster chaos of so many New 52 books, and rebooted one of the company's most notoriously complicated character's origins...immediately after the publisher's most popular writer Geoff Johns finished spending an entire year setting the character up in a new direction built on the years of work Johns had done to salvage the character.

On Friday, DC officially announced Hawkman's cancellation, which was part of a culling involving five other New 52 titles: Deathstroke, The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Man, The Ravagers, Sword of Sorcery and Team 7.

They join the following New 52 titles in the trash-heap of books launched in September 2011 or later that didn't make it: Blackhawks, Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, DC Universe Presents, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, G.I. Combat, Grifter, Hawk & Dove, I,Vampire, Justice League International, Legion Lost, Men of War, Mister Terrific, OMAC, Resurrection Man, Static Shock and Voodoo.

Few of those books are terribly surprising to see on a list of cancelled books, and many of them seemed canceled upon announcement: Did anyone think The Ravagers or a Team 7 were going to last, for example? Others seemed like books that theoretically might have worked, if handled differently, like Sword of Sorcery, for example, which repackaged Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld into a generic New 52 superhero fantasy with standard DC house style art (the result of which, it's worth noting, looked nothing like the animated version airing on Cartoon Network) with back-up stories in a $4 book (And the creative team consisted of an animation writer who had a hit series in the 80s, when my 34-year-old, mother-of-three sister played with the dolls that cartoon was designed to sell, and the artist of the pre-New 52 Wonder Woman, many of the DC titles DC regarding as so unworkable that they needed to scrap it).

Let's look at some of the trends among this cavalcade of canceled books, to see exactly what it is the direct market's super-comics readers are rejecting about these books (beyond their lack of Batman):

1.) Rob Liefeld: Liefeld was the artist for Hawk & Dove, which was one of the first New 52 books canceled. He took over writing duties from Sterling Gages on the last three issues.

Liefeld also wrote Grifter and Hawkman, books he also provided occasional cover art for.

He also took over as writer and artist for Deathstroke.

Those last three books were all canceled after he left, and he didn't launch them, but rather followed the original creative teams. But it's safe to say he failed to save any of them, and, whatever blame or credit he deserves for them, the fact remains: Every New 52 book Rob Liefeld worked on during his time at DC has been canceled.

2.) Wildstorm: Grifter, Team 7 and Voodoo were all titles based around properties that began at Wildstorm studios, which DC the business absorbed and DC the fictional universe absorbed in the last issue of Flashpoint. Team 7 had a mix of Wildstorm characters and DCU characters. The title of The Ravagers wasn't a Wildstorm property, but its cast prominently featured at least one Wildstorm character.

The only book rooted in the Wildstorm universe that remains uncanceled at this point is Stormwatch, which features characters from the Wildstorm book's The Authority and Stormwatch. It was one of the initial books launched in September of 2011 and is still standing, so that's a something of an achievement for a New 52 book, however I don't expect it to last too many more months. Jim Starlin is coming on board as its third writer (if I've counted correctly), and Starlin's recent DCU work has generated rather abysmal sales and nothing approaching satisfied, let alone good, reviews.

3.) Drastic Reboots: Is it significant that the two franchises that are doing the best since the relaunch are the Batman franchise and the Green Lantern franchise? Certainly both were popular before the New 52boot as well, but the many, many books in each franchise have managed to not only not get cancelled, but hang on to their creative teams a lot longer than many other books. These are the two franchises that, for the most part, ignored the reboot as well.

In the Batman franchise, Batgirl III Stephanie Brown disappeared and was replaced by the healed and de-aged Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon's hair and mustache are red instead of white now and the Robins have all had their origins messed around with and their costumes uglied up, but, other than that, the comics weren't drastically reinvented and, for the most part, the creators seem to be be ignoring aspects of the reboot. With Green Lantern, some of the characters' origins have been tweaked but, again, for the most part the books are carrying on as if the reboot never happened—certainly pre-New 52 events like the "Sinestro Corps War", Blackest Night and "War of the Green Lanterns" all still happened and are being continually built upon.

Let's look at the books that got canceled in contrast, though. Hawk & Dove, Firestorm and Savage Hawkman were three books that featured characters who Geoff Johns wrote in year-long, biweekly series Brightest Day, following his work with them in Blackest Night and setting them each up with promising new status quos: The reboot yanked them in new, random directions.

Justice League International didn't really make any goddam sense, and was nostalgia title full of nostalgia characters, all of whom had their histories removed out from under them and were being introduced to us as if for the first time. Like the three books mentioned above, most of its cast starred in a year-long, bi-weekly series (Brightest Day: Generation Lost) setting them up in a new direction for a new title that never actually materialized.

Team 7 was apparently set in the past, and was meant to reveal important things from the past lives of various New 52 versions of characters like Deathstroke, Black Canary, Steve Trevor and Grifter as well as set up major conflicts in the New 52.

DC Universe Presents introduced rebooted versions of characters in each arc.

Ravagers included in its cast brand-new versions of long-time DC characters like Beast Boy (who was now red instead of green) and Terra.

4.) Anything Other Than Superheroes: All of the New 52 books are superhero books, but quite a few of them have attempted to mash-up superheroics with other genres of comics. And a lot of them didn't last long.

Blackhawks, Men of War and G.I. Combat were military/superhero books. Team 7 may have been, too (It's one of the few comics I just can't bring myself to even look at; I can't imagine I'll ever read any issues of this new Teen Titans series either, even out of morbid curiosity).

I, Vampire was a horror/superhero book.

Sword of Sorcery was a fantasy/superhero book.

The only mixed-genre books DC is still publishing seems to be Demon Knights, which is a sort of medieval Justice League featuring Etrigan the Demon and other magical characters from that time period, and All-Star Western, which features Jonah Hex in a lead story and a 19th century Western hero of some sort in the back-ups.

There's also Threshold, which looks like it might be a sci-fi/superhero mash-up, but it's hard to draw the line between those genres, given how much they bleed into one another.

Of those, I think Demon Knights and Threshold are unlikely to last another six-to-eight months. All-Star Western will likely last until its pried from Palmiotti and Gray's cold, dead hands.

5.) Black folks: Mister Terrific, Static Shock and Voodoo all had black leads, while Firestorm had two leads, one black and one white. Is that significant? (If it is, it sure is depressing).

The only book DC is publishing with a black lead character that hasn't been canceled yet is Batwing, which starred a minor character from the first volume of Grant Morrison's Batman Inc. Batwing has been buoyed several times by its participation in Bat-Family crossovers.

It sells extremely poorly though and has had several creative team changes. April's issue will apparently feature a new character becoming Batwing. It won't be a terrible surprise if Batwing gets canceled in the next few months.

Green Lantern Corps, like Firestorm, has two leads: One a black man, the other a white man. Sales on that are just fine.

DC seems committed to publishing comics with lead characters who resemble their readers, and the fact that Mister Terrific, for example, got his own title in The New 52 relaunch was heartening, even if it didn't last long (and even if DC isn't currently employing any black writers...kind of too bad Wallace, for example, didn't get a chance to try another book, while other writers can fail, fail and fail again and keep getting new work from DC).

Among their newly announced books are ones starring a Japanese woman and a Hispanic young man. The publisher has a ton of great black characters, although chances of launching successful books featuring some of them given other factors listed here might be a challenge (Read: The reboot). Still, I both hope and expect to see Cyborg, Steel, Black Lightning and Vixen monthlies attempted eventually (Cyborg seems particularly easy, as it could be so closely tied to the hit Justice League series—he's the only member without his own title at the moment. I think Steel is a harder sell in the rebooted continuity, as the original Steel who filled in for the dead Superman had an appeal the new version lacks, although Action Comics did seem to effectively work the Good Guy Version of Lex Luthor angle).

I suppose a fifth Green Lantern title starring John Stewart is always possible (especially if new Green Lantern Simon Baz takes over his role in Green Lantern Corps, too). I'm not sure what the legal status of the Milestone characters are, but Icon and Rocket seem easily exploitable, as would be Hardware (particularly if there isn't a Steel monthly, and another stab at a Static book, maybe one that isn't horrible). I like Hero (from Superboy and The Ravagers), Jakeem Thunder (although splitting off Earth-2 from the DCU likely makes hims unusuable in his own New 52 title) Amazing Man II (although maybe he's relegated to Earth 2 now too...?) and Skyrocket, although none of them are marquee names (Then again, neither was Voodoo, but she got a title).

Looking at that list of commonalities between the new 52 books that didn't make it is a little depressing, isn't it?

Obviously DC's shouldn't (and I honestly don't think they will) stop publishing comics with black characters in title roles.

And I imagine they will continue to attempt different genres, although at this point, they may be running out of titles and characters to try out (Space Cabblie? Warlord? Adam Strange? Gotham Central?)

They can't do a whole hell of a lot about the reboot at this point, save for de-rebooting or re-rebooting, which I do think will happen eventually, but maybe not for a few more years yet. Perhaps they will try to focus on introducing new characters and concepts, or building on characters and franchises in a way that doesn't come off as dramatic or extreme as, say, Beast Boy in The Ravagers (A smart way to go forward might be to a be a bit more elliptical about what exactly "counts" as continuity and what doesn't, ala the Green Lantern and Batman books and, to a certain extent, Wonder Woman (other than the origin of the Amazon's and Wonder Woman's parentage, the book doesn't really contradict anything that came before, it just goes off in its own direction, independent of Wonder Woman history/continuity).

Hiring Rob Liefeld won't be a problem, given the enmity that likely exists between the publisher and the artist after his dramatic bridge-burning via Twitter.

And maybe laying-off trying to make stars out of the WildStorm universe characters won't hurt. A Shazam or Orion or Plastic Man or Secret Six or Robin monthly might make more sense than a Majestic or Deathblow or Grunge or WildCATS or Zealot one in the near future.

The first two replacement books DC announced may indicate a change in direction. These include The Green Team by the writing team of Art Baltazar and Franco and artist Ig Guara, which is a revival of a concept from a 1975 1st Issue Special. That's the writing team of Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures (plus a few issues of the slightly more serious Billy Batson and The Magic of Shazam) teamed with the artist for The Pet Avengers. That's pretty promising (at the very least, the tone should be quite different than that of the other 51 books).

The other is some weird Gail Simone-written, Freddie Williams II-drawn book that sounds kind of vague and uninteresting, but it's complete lack of mention of any DCU characters at least suggests it may be a book cut from whole cloth, which is an interesting direction for DC. Particularly since the New 52-heralded more intense and focused period of IP farming.

52 - 6 + 6 = 52

As DC Comics enthusiasts and comics news monitors are no doubt already aware, DC announced the imminent cancellation of six of the 52 titles they launched as part of last September's "New 52" publishing initiative. They also announced six replacement titles, answering the oft wondered-over question of how long they would spare failing titles from the scythe, and how would they address such needs given the fact that the specific number of titles was so integral in the creation, naming and overall promotion of the line.

The six canceled titles are Blackhawks, Hawk and Dove (not a good sign for The Savage Hawkman), Men of War, Mister Terrific, OMAC and Static Shock. None of these are terribly surprising, as some of them seemed created to fail.

There was no reason to believe either of the two war books would do well, as an extended Jack Kirby homage, the popular online, well-reviewed OMAC only had so far to go, and Mister Terrific's main selling point among DC's fanbase, the character's long history with the Geoff Johns-shepherded JSA/Justice Society books, was removed by the continuity reboot. (Similarly, one wonders—even if only idly—if a Hawk an Dove series might have sold better in an un-rebooted DCU, given that it would have been launching out of the rather successful Brightest Day and the very successful Blackest Night, instead of standing solely on the shrinking popularity of 90s phenomenon Liefeld and the residual hype of DC's unprecedented PR push).

Somewhat saddeningly, although also no real surprise, is the fact that two of the above titles were solo ones featuring black men, leaving only one book starring a black man in the "New 52" (That's Batwing, which has the valuable crutch of being a Batman family book to support it). It's my understanding from reading people who read it that OMAC starred a Korean-American protagonist, although there's no evidence of any particular race, ethnicity or nationality in the blue, finned hulk appearance of the title character.

Also, it's worth noting that the cancellations seem incredibly sudden, as changes were already announced on the creative teams of a few of those books, most notably—as in, I can remember them—pencil artist Rob Liefeld taking over writing duties on Hawk and Dove and Static Shock getting a new writer (It's third writing team, I believe, if you count the writer who was announced on the book before it launched, but didn't actually script the first issue).

These are the six new books replacing the six old books: World's Finest by Paul Levitz and George Perez and Kevin Maguire (starring The Huntress and Power Girl, rather than Superman, Batman and Robin); Dial H by China Miéville and Mateus Santoluoco, another new take on the Dial H For Hero concept; G.I. Combat by J.T. Krul and Ariel Olivetti; The Ravagers, a Superboy and Teen Titans spinoff by Howard Mackie and Ian Churchill (which I'd prefer have been named Superboy and The Ravagers, just because its echoing of Superboy and The Ravers would amuse me, although I am amused that no one at DC seems particularly aware of what the verb to ravage can mean, particularly archaically); Earth 2 by James Robinson and Nicola Scott; and, finally, the return of Batman Incorporated by Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham, a title that was apparently canceled due to the continuity reboot that accompanied the "New 52" launch, as it walked-back many of the changes and history that made Morrison's run on the Batman franchise possible.

From these new books, we can at least partially deduce what DC thinks is working right now. For one thing, more Batman never hurts. Incorporated will join Batman, Detective, Batman and Robin and Batman: The Dark Knight as a fifth ongoing monthly Batman book starring Batman Bruce Wayne himself. Add in Batwoman, Batgirl, Nightwing, Catwoman, Batwing and, if one wants to be generous, Red Hood and The Outlaws (starring former Robin Jason Todd, and bearing a bat-symbol in the logo) and Birds of Prey (co-starring Batgirl and other Batman allies and antagonists), that's a full dozen Batman family books, accounting for almost one-fourth of the "New 52."

The other spin-off is Ravagers, which would presumably tie-in to Superboy and Teen Titans (The Ravager was a member of the pre-reboot Teen Titans cast, and the character has apparently played a role in the post-reboot Superboy). Both books seem to be performing about as well as they were doing a few years ago at DC, but the company is apparently pleased enough with that to grow the franchise a bit.

Of the remaining books, Earth-2 seems like one that's been in development for a while now, although Robinson and Scott were previously announced to be working on "a JSA book." This new title is pretty suggestive, as is the hint about the book's premise offered at DC's blog The Source: "The greatest heroes on a parallel Earth, the Justice Society combats threats that will set them on a collision course with other worlds."

So too does Dial H, based on the creators involved. The previous take on the concept didn't last too terribly long, it's one of the DC concepts with the most pure potential—since it is a concept, and not a character or set of characters—and from editor to cover artist, it seems like a prestige book.

Both World's Finest and G.I. Combat, which will feature the G.I.'s vs. Dinosaurs "War That Time Forgot" up front and "Unknown Soldier" and "Haunted Tank" back-ups look rather thrown together, considering the creative teams and how often those premises have been explored in the recent past. The logic of doing another military book on the heels of the cancellation of two other ones is questionable, but then, all three of those war comic concepts are more on the "Weird War" side of things, and I find all enormously appealing (In Showcase Presents reprints, anyway; none of those creative teams particularly wow me).

As with the "first wave" of New 52 books, the talents called upon to create them seem to be almost exclusively old hands. In many cases, the same old hands that were making DC comics from 2003-2010 or so: James Robinson, Grant Morrison, Nicola Scott, Chis Burnham, Paul Levitz (again?!), George Perez, Kevin Maguire, J. T. Krul, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Ian Churchill. I like the work of at least five of those folks immensely, but, again, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of effort put into recruiting and developing talent, and some of these guys have had plenty of opportunities to not sell comics (Levitz and Krul spring immediately to mind) in the very recent past, and/or have been pinballed around the new line (Perez, who was on Superman and Green Arrow in different capacities recently).

The exception is Miéville, a somewhat prominent and popular prose fiction writer whose appearing here can be viewed by the comics industry as a legitimate "get." Olivetti was drawing for DC around the turn of the millennium, but has more recently been working at Marvel, where his style has devolved into something I quite dislike (that may be as much a matter of taste as quality, though). Mateus Santolouco's name is familiar, but I can't recall reading work he's done. Howard Mackie, a quick search informs me, wrote a bunch of '80s and '90s Marvel comics I never read, and thus he would seem to fit in the "New...To DC" category along with Scott Lobdell (Superboy, Teen Titans, Red Hood).

Since three of the six books canceled featured non-white male heroes as stars, it's worth noting that none of the books replacing them do (At least, not that we know of; maybe The Huntress and Power Girl in the new "New 52" World's Finest will be a black and Korean-American transvestite, respectively; if I'm leary of reading a Levitz comic in 2012, despite the presence of two such great artists as Perez and Maguire, than that kinda high-concept would definitely push me over the fence).

I'm not sure what they could do to replace one Korean-American hero with another, as I can't think of any characters in DC's catalog with that specific ethnic background. DC's non-martial artist Asian characters of any ethnicity or nationality reservoir isn't very deep. It would have been easier to replace Static Shock and Mister Terrific with another book—or two!—featuring black, male heroes though.

Black Lightning is probably the most obvious choice, having been one of the relatively few black men to headline his own DC ongoing monthly for a while, and is a character that could benefit from the Ultimate-like reboot of the DCU, given how rooted in a particular time the character's name (and costume!) is (Although DC did just make an effort in that direction pre-reboot with Black Lightning: Year One). Steel would have been another, although DC is employing him elsewhere, in the back-up features in Action Comics.

Post-reboot, Cyborg would certainly make sense (he's the only member of the current Justice League line-up without his own title at the moment). Does DC still have the rights to the rest of the Milestone catalog...? Because Hardwire and Icon or Icon and Rocket would make sense (and certainly wouldn't be any less likely to succeed than a G.I. Combat).

There's also...Okay, actually, I guess that's probably the end of that particular list, particularly since legacy characters like The Manhattan Guardian and Mister Miracle II might prove problematic. (Any other black DC superheroes that could conceivably carry their own book for at least as long as G.I. Combat or Hawk and Dove...? I would read a Black Manta or Amazing Man book, but I can't imagine too many others would be into that. I certainly can't imagine a Black Racer or Herald or Vykin or Orpheus or, um, Freedom Beast book. I would love to read a book entitled John Stewart, The Black Green Lantern or, even more simply, The Black Green Lantern, but of that I'm positive I'm the only one who would).

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Even more surprising to me than the fact that DC would be tinkering so heavily with their new line so few months into it is the news that Rob Liefeld, the artist whose Hawk and Dove was among the six canceled titles, would be given three existing "New 52" books, to write—was his writing ever something anyone liked about any of his books?—or to write and draw.

That makes little sense to me—"Hey, the market didn't seem to like that one thing you did; how about we try having you do three things now?"—but I am not a DC Comics editor. I don't know why they are doing this thing, but I suspect that Liefeld and DC may have colluded just to make the piece I wrote for Robot 6 the other day completely irrelevant almost as soon as I hit the publish button.

The book Liefeld will be writing and drawing will be Deathstroke, which is interesting because Liefeld created Deadpool as a homage/analogue/clone of Deathstroke. I can't imagine how the change in creative reigns will affect the inside of the comic—I haven't read a single page of Kyle Higgins and Joe Bennett's run, and never read an entire, full-length comic book story of Liefeld's—but holy smokes, compare the Liefeld-generated image DC released to the Simon Bisley-drawn Deathstroke covers:One of those things is not like the other, huh?

Liefeld will also be plotting Savage Hawkman, which is currently written by another artist, Tony Daniel, and Grifter which, eh, who cares? I suppose it's interesting to see that one Image founder will be working on a character created by another, even if it's Liefeld just writing Lee's Grifter, rather than drawing him.

I learned something about Youngblood this week.

I learned a bit more about Rob Liefeld's Youngblood this week, as I prepared to read and write about Joe Keatinge and Ross Campbell's Glory #23 (a piece you can read at Robot 6 by clicking here).

For example, do you see that guy on the Youngblood cover above, to the left of the guy with the arrows? Do you know what his name is? I would have guessed Othello, or Black And White Cookie Man, or The Line or, more likely, Hardline.

But I would have guessed wrong.

His name is actually Die Hard. Yes! Die Hard. In 1992, four years after the release of the film Die Hard, Rob Liefeld named a character after it!

Who are the other five members of Youngblood pictured on the cover of #1? Road House, Predator, Point Break, Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout? Ha ha ha ha! (My apologies to anyone who made that joke 20 years ago; I'm new to Liefeld's oeuvre).

Anyway, there's a post about the new Glory over at Robot 6. How many words can I spend to simply say "This is pretty interesting" and "I like this okay"...? Click on over to find out!

Okay, now DC is just acting out.

Included among today's announcement of new DC titles are an all-new, all-different Teen Titans, the solicitation of which seems to suggest that at least some of the titles and characters will be completely divorced from their post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint continuity.

After you've had a good look at Brett Booth's rendering of some of the ugliest costume designs I've ever had the displeasure of encountering—I'm not a violent man, nor do I believe that violence is the answer to almost any problem, but Jim Lee deserves slapped very, very hard for each and every one of those character designs—peruse this copy from DC's announcement of Teen Titans:

Tim Drake is forced to step out from behind his keyboard when an international organization seeks to capture or kill super-powered teenagers. As Red Robin, he must team up with the mysterious and belligerent powerhouse thief known as Wonder Girl and a hyperactive speedster calling himself Kid Flash in TEEN TITANS #1, by Scott Lobdell and artists Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund.

That looks and sounds like a "Heroes Reborn" Teen Titans, and has to appeal mainly to the same people. Can you imagine a fan of the Teen Titans or Young Justice cartoon seeing that image and deciding they want to start reading that book?

I experienced a brand-new feeling while looking at that image: Aesthetic pain.

And then there's this:

It’s up to the living avatars of war and peace to root out the hidden forces who look to plunge the country into a deadly civil war in HAWK AND DOVE #1. The exciting new series will be written by Sterling Gates and illustrated by legendary superstar comics artist Rob Liefeld.

A comic that seems designed specifically to appeal to the Rob Liefeld fans who liked his earlier work, before he started drawing mutants for Marvel and starting and abandoning comics of his own for Image. (His brief run on Hawk and Dove was in 1988, when I was 11).

I like how they announced Liefeld as the artist, too, as if he's going to get more than one, maybe two issues out before this goes on hiatus or fill-in or replacement artists are called in. As with Jim Lee on Justice League and David Finch on a second volume of his Batman: The Dark Knight series, this is one book that seems guaranteed to go off schedule immediately.

UPDATE: I wonder if the whole point of this post on The Source from Jim Lee was to assure the panicked fans who saw the Teen Titans cover above that it was mostly Brett Booth's fault, and that he was just a sounding board? If that's the case, then I think Lee deserves slapped once for each of those costumes, but, after each slap, he should be instructed to "Give this to Booth for us."

Diving into Deadpool

According to popular twentieth century comic book artist/industry bad word Rob Liefeld in a recent Newsarama comment thread, his co-creations Cable and Deadpool are now “the center of the X-Universe and Deadpool is the most popular character in comics, soon to be fronting 4 monthly titles.”

That’s not remotely true, of course.

Even if you define “comics” as “American superhero comics,” Deadpool was outsold in August by titles featuring Captain America, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine’s son, Batman, Dick Grayson-as-Batman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, The Flash Barry Allen, Batwoman and Batgirl III (That’s not counting team and ensemble titles, of which plenty of others out-sell Deadpool, but comparing Deadpool to The Fantastic Four or Justice League doesn’t seem fair).

And as for how many titles Deadpool fronts, Marvel’s only announced three (and how long will that last?). But even if it is four, Deadpool’s still not fronting as many as Batman, Superman (when he gets back in town), Wolverine and probably Spider-Man, depending on the month.

I thought it was kind of astonishing for Liefeld to be bragging about Deadpool’s current popularity, precisely because it seems so very surprising.

His relatively long-running (for modern comics) solo title was cancelled in 2000 at #69, to make way for short-lived Agent X, which featured a Deadpool-like character who ended up not being Deadpool. Whether it was cancelled originally due to low sales, or as part of an ill-advised rebranding that killed it, Deadpool was title-less for a few years, at which point he returned in Cable & Deadpool, which lasted fifty issues before getting axed.

When he got his own title again in 2008, it apparently proved successful enough to justify more and more Deadpool comics. From outside Marvel’s offices, it’s not clear why they feel comfortable putting out multiple Deadpool comic all of a sudden. The main title is selling respectably—50,000-ish units in August—but is hardly a hit book.

Maybe it’s a relatively rare instance of the character itself being popular enough to moves 50,000 books, so Marvel can hire writers and artists who don’t cost as much as those at the Mark Millar/Brian Michael Bendis level, and thus its cheaper for them to produce Deadpool, making it a more profitable book?

I have no idea.

But it seems quite remarkable that in so little time Deadpool went from sharing a title to having two ongoings—Deadpool and Deadpool: Merc With a Mouth—with a third one, Deadpool Team-Up, set to start publication next month.

What accounts for the sudden surge in relative popularity? I can’t guess.

Maybe it has something to do with his appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which I haven’t seen yet, but which I understand features a Deadpool that’s pretty different than the comics version), or the announcement of an upcoming Deadpool movie starring Ryan Reynolds.

Maybe Marvel is just being extremely shrewd and short-term profit-oriented (surprise!). That is, perhaps someone at Marvel HQ noticed that the Deadpool solo was doing surprisingly well and/or making a lot of profits due to how cheap it was to produce compared to hit comics, and they decided to strike while the iron was hot and sell as many Deadpool comics as possible while Deadpool comics seem to be selling.

At any rate, hearing about all these new Deadpool title announcements has had me wondering about the character and his popularity. I thankfully missed his introduction in the nineties (I never liked Liefeld’s art, even as a teenager reading a couple of Image books), and have never been very interested in Marvel’s mutant comics.

As I’ve mentioned before, I could sort of see what people could see in the character. Aspects of his look and personality seemed borrowed from Spider-Man, but he also had guns and killed people like The Punisher, and, of course, he had ties to the X-Men, and a whole lot of people really liked the X-Men for a really long time. I just couldn’t see it for myself, because I never really looked.

A few months back, I finally got the opportunity to do so, when I was gifted a moving friend’s comics collection, which included a sizable run of Deadpool comics, with only a few holes here and there. It was among the first of that wheelbarrow full of old comics I read (runs of Cable, Gambit and some various X-Men comics are still in a pile, daring me to read them), in order to satiate my curiosity about the character.

So over the course of a couple of weeks, I worked my way through a bunch of Deadpool comics, and typed up my thoughts on them while doing so.


Deadpool #44

This is the earliest Deadpool issue I have, and although it’s from the summer of 2000, it’s worth noting just how much Marvel comics have changed during these past nine years.

The cover has the old, pre-little red box with white “Marvel” Marvel Comics logo, it has the little box in the upper left corner for a picture of the lead character (which I believe originated in response to the way comics used to be racked, in spinner racks. So even if most of the cover were obscured by the rack or the comic right below it on the rack, a browser would be able to spot the character in the corner), it only cost $2.25 and it was approved by the Comics Code Authority.

This story is entitled “Cat Trap (Or: Wakanda Merc Are You?),” and is the first part of a two-part crossover with Black Panther. It’s written by Christopher Priest, who was also writing Marvel’s Black Panther ongoing at the time, and drawn by J. Calafiore.

I like Priest quite a bit, and his superhero books are ones I’m always glad to find in back-issue bins (I managed to track down his whole Justice League Task Force run and have just about completed his run on DC’s The Ray, but have a long way to go with his Black Panther yet).

He’s one of those writers whose name I’m surprised I don’t see more often any more. He’s great with character, he’s very funny (often without being silly) and he seems to be constantly trying new and different ways to tell the same old stories.

As this story starts, Deadpool is apparently sharing an underground base with a couple of roommates—villains Titania and Constrictor—and as the story opens, it’s been infiltrated by The Reverent Michael Ibn al-hajj Achebe, whom as far as I can tell is basically just an off-brand Joker.

He hires Deadpool to kidnap the new Black Panther’s leopard, Preyy (with two y’s…not sure how that’s pronounced). The new Black Panther is, apparently, Erick Killmonger (Best. Name. Ever.), who is filling in for T’Challa while he…sits in a chair in some weird, undeground Wakandan Star Wars-looking labyrinth of wires and sci-fi stuff, I guess.

Anyway, it’s a whole lot of back-story, but I got through it without giving up and throwing the comic against the wall, as when I try reading X-Men comics form this period, so Priest is clearly doing something right.

The story itself is pretty simple. Because the new Black Panther, whom narrator Everet K. Ross calls “KillPanther” is hanging out with the Avengers during this period, Deadpool must fight the Avengers.

(In another sign of how old this comic is, The Avengers consist of Triathalon, Iron Man, Hank Pym, The Wasp, and She-Hulk.

So after a few pages of back-story filling-in, there’s a lot of rat-a-tat-tat banter between various players, and then a fight scene. Priest stays outside Deadpool’s head for the most part, so his craziness makes him seem more remote and amusing than when he’s played more sympathetically, as a point-of-view character.


Black Panther #23

“Cat Trap” continues in BP, which is drawn by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond (So now the characters all look bigger, rounder and more realistic than they did under Calafiore’s flatter, more jagged and compact figure work).

Deadpool and his roommates have been captured by The Avengers, who go to Wakanda looking for their captured teammate Triathalon (Deadpool teleported him along with Preyy).

Velluto’s Deadpool is really weird looking; the featureless face makes the head look extra tiny atop the titanic body Velluto gives his superheroes.

There’s a lot of fighting in this.


Deadpool #45

This is apparently the climax of Priest’s run on the title, in which the specific circumstances he set up are all taken away. Titania’s revealed to be, um, another character (I probably don’t need to worry about spoilers on nine-year-old comics, huh?), Deadpool and his roomies lose their pad, and a curse ‘pool’s been suffering from—in which he is given the face of Hollywood actor “Thom Cruz” is taken away.

Priest gets some gags out of that, but man, I hate when superhero comics half-use real celebrities and public figures like that. Either give him the face of Tom Cruise or don’t. You can say “Tom Cruise” in a comic book without getting sued, particularly in circumstances like these where it’s clear you’re not trying to pretend your Tom Cruise is the real Tom Cruise (Tom the Dancing Bug gets away with it pretty regularly). And if you’re afraid Cruise might be too litigious, try a different celebrity (Maybe Freddie Prinze Jr. woulda signed off? He was cool being in The Ultimates).

But by going with “Thom Cruz” it just calls attention to the fact that you’re—the writer, the editor, the company, the company’s lawyers, whoever—wants to make a particular joke, but is afraid to. And nothing is less funny than caution.


Deadpool#46-#48

This is the launch of a new creative team…or at least a new writer, Jimmy Palmiotti. It’s a three-part storyline entitled “Cruel Summer,” and it’s basically a noir-ish sort of crime story in which a femme fatale seduces Deadpool before turning on him.

It’s executed well enough, although the femme’s betrayal lacks much impact because it’s so hard fto imagine a beautiful woman seriously falling for Wade Wilson who, under his mask, has a Freddy Krueger-like face of red, peeling skin over various pits and boils.

What makes this story arc really special, however, is the art. It’s provided by Paul Chadwick, with Ron Randall on inks.

Man, look at this stuff:

Just gorgeous.


Deadpool #49

Palmiotti gets a writing partner in Buddy Scalera, and Chadwick is gone, replaced by Michael Lopez (Jon Holdredge replaces Randall on inks). This one’s entitled “Cat Magnet,” by which they mean “Pussy Magnet,” but apparently didn’t think they could get away with it (Still Comics Code approved, by the way).

Basically, the story consists of Deadpool, his scarred face disguised, meeting one remarkably scantily clad and sexually aggressive woman after another, often in unlikely places—including an ER nurse and a package delivery person. Deadpool would have to be stupid not to suspect that something is up, but if he does, Palmiotti and Scalera don’t share his suspicions with the reader.

As it turns out, each of these women are the same person, his shape-shifting ex-girlfriend Copycat. (Ah! So the title has a double meaning!)

The cover is by Kevin Nowlan. This run sure has a lot of great talent on covers. It also credits Chadwick and Randall on art, and fails to mention Scalera. Makes me wonder what was going on behind the scenes as these were coming out. The original creative team sure didn’t last in its original form very long at all.


Deadpool #50-#51

Check out these two covers, one by Arthur Adams, the other by Darick Robertson (The latter of whom even Bob Kane-inizes his signature. Neat).


Palmiotti and poor, never credited on the cover Scalera are joined by Darick Robertson on pencils (Holdredge is still inking).

That Robertson sure knows his stuff, and it’s nice to see his art on this old, grittier paper with more comic book-y coloring. There are none of the weird computer coloring effects that are endemic to Marvel comics these days. The skies are drawings of skies, not photos dropped in. Ditto the cityscapes and the moons. It’s all just nice, bold drawings, with nice, bold bright coloring. Beautiful.

This is probably the strongest of Palmiotti’s run (that I’ve read), in which he applies a standard element of superhero comics to Deadpool just to see what happens. In this case, it’s giving Deadpool a sidekick, Kid Deadpool.


Deadpool #52-#53

A two-parter featuring Deadpool versus two scantily clad, serial-killing twin teenage sisters with Barbie doll bodies. It’s pretty silly-bordering-on-stupid stuff, and it was in this issue that I noticed something that would grow to be a pet peeve of mine throughout this experience, the pop culture references.

They’re easy to make and can be funny, but they sure don’t have much shelf life. I think I noticed it here simply because the narration boxes mention Jennifer Lopez’ Oscar gown on the first page, and the second page has a character refer to the killer sisters as “those two Brittany-looking twins.” In 2001, “Brittany-looking” had a different meaning (and certainly different connocations!) than it does in 2009, and I wonder what it will mean, if anything, if this is read in 2019, or 2069 (I don’t think it will be, but still)

Oh, another new art team for this “Talk of the Town” storyline. It’s Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning, and their work is pretty nice.


Deadpool #54-#55

And now it’s time for a guest star! It’s a two-part Punisher story, drawn by Georges Jeanty and Holdredge. Two great covers, by the two artists probably best associated with The Punisher at this period in his career:

Deadpool doesn’t really translate to Tim Bradstreet’s realistic world as easily as Frank Castle does, does he?

This story is a continuation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s initial Punisher story, Welcome Back, Frank (which Palmiotti inked). It turns out, Ma Gnucci had a single, surviving relative, who would inherit all her money after her untimely death, so long as the condition of her will is met—her death must be avenged.

So Ma’s nephew Peter Gnucci hires Deadpool to kill The Punisher for him.

The two killers fight and fight and fight and—surprise!—neither of them dies.


Deadpool #56

It’s the end of another creative team’s run, although, to be fair, the word “team” might not really apply, given all the comings and goings. For this issue, Palmiotti himself is gone, and Scalera gets the sole writing credit. Karl Kerschl’s on art now, inking himself.

With this single issue, Scalera does a deck-clearing story along the lines of the one Priest provided at the end of his run, with all of the supporting characters being sent away from Deadpool, and his home again getting destroyed.

The issue is divided into two plots.

One follows Deadpool trying a variety of Wile E. Coyote-style traps to catch and kill a super-speedster named “The Street Speeder,” whose costume is yellow and blue and who says little other than “Meep meep” (GET IT?!).

The other follows Copycat disguised as Deadpool to go on a date with and then beat the hell out of an X-person. Siryn, I think. I suppose I should be thankful I got this far without a single reminder that Deadpool is technically an X-Men character.

This, by the way, is the first one without the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval on the cover. There’s no Marvel replacement rating either though.


Deadpool #57-#59

The title received a pretty radical makeover with #57, and I wonder if it caused much—or even any—confusion among comic shop patrons the week it was released. It certainly confused me, when I sat down to try and put all the Deadpool comics in order to read.

Marvel ditched the logo with the character image in the corner (the image shape had, over the months, shifted from a rectangular one to a circular one). The new logo is in a completely different smaller, thinner font, and is actually much smaller than the name of the storyline. In fact, based on the logo, it seems like it is an entirely different book, one called Deadpool: Agent of Weapon X.

Adding to the confusion is the big #1 on the cover, with a smaller “57” under it. So this looks like the first issue of a new series, but it is actually the fifty-seventh issue of an old series in disguise (This doesn’t seem to be a matter of Marvel relaunching and retaining their old numbering, as they sometimes did, because “Agent of Weapon X” and this weird numbering only lasted three issues).

The covers for these three issues, by the way, are by original Weapon X series artist Barry Windsor Smith, and they are thus fairly awesome.

Here’s the cover of #58, in which Smith must draw a trio of terrible costume designs:
Deadpool’s temporary new look makes him look like a little KGBeast, doesn’t it?

The new writer is Frank Tieri, and the new, more steady art team is Georges Jeanty and Holdredge.

Tieri seems on pretty sure footing with all the Marvel super-people and shadow organization intrigue, and while his version of Deadpool is a zany, agent-of-chaos type of character, the rest of the narrative doesn’t conform around Deadpool’s personality. That is, the story would be pretty straightforward and serious if you plucked out Deadpool and plopped in, say, Wolverine, which is probably how it should be.

While I like the way Tieri constrains the comedy to Deadpool’s character instead of the structure of the book in general, I don’t think his Deadpool is particularly funny, and he seems to go for an abundance of pop culture gags. In Deadpool’s very first panel, for example, he mentions that “Barbie Girl” song (the existence of which I had completely forgotten), Liberace, VH1’s Behind The Music, Magilla Gorilla, The Weakest Link and Gilbert Gottfried.

The plot involves the old Weapon X re-starting as a free agency, offering alumni like Sabretooth and Deadpool amped-up powers and resources if they come to work for them. In Deadpool’s case, he gets his face back, but he can’t reconcile working with Sabretooth, who’s been killing and eating people left and right, and some of the other bad guys—especially the agency sets its sites on his ex.

Sabretooth totally murders her, by the way.


Deadpool #62

I’m missing two issues, including the final “Agent of Weapon X” one (presumably, he avenges Copycat without actually killing Sabretooth), and the first issue of the next arc, which is also designed to look like a stand alone miniseries.

This one’s called “Funeral For a Freak,” and once again has the little confusing numbering going on. (This is also, by the way, the first cover featuring the little image of a red, white and blue ribbon above the silhouette of the World Trade Center towers. I guess I never noticed when these first arrived on Marvel covers and when they went away, but they seemed to be there for a while).

Tieri, Jeanty and Holdredge engage in an odd mid-nineties, “Death of Superman” era parody, in which Deadpool is seemingly killed (he actually just has amnesia and is living on the streets) and is replaced by four different new Deadpools. No idea how it started or ended, as I only have the second and third parts of the arc.


Deadpool #67

In some ways, this is the best of the Deadpool issues I read, as it’s the first in which the writing is very sharp and the art’s really great.

It’s written by Gail Simone, who is perfectly at home writing superheroics and comedy simultaneously, and the art comes courtesy of Udon studios—I’m not sure who does what on art chores, as the credits don’t parcel out credit by the task, but from pencil to colors its all well done, boasting the look of anime cels-as-panels that Udon was doing so well at the time.

Having missed a few issues, it seems Deadpool’s status quo has changed quite a bit again, but it wasn’t too difficult to feel my way through the issue. Deadpool is hanging on to a shrunken Rhino, whom he’s using as a key chain, and is tasked with body-guarding Dazzler, in all her disco roller-skating glory.

While this is the all-around best creative team I’ve read on the book, even they didn’t last long. According to comics.org, they took over with #65, and the series was canceled with #69.

If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'm afraid I'm about to go Full Nerd on several topics

1.) Rob Liefeld does a Rob Liefeld parody: Please visit Newsarama.com to see Rob Liefeld’s special variant cover for the last issue of Youngblood, which featured a bad drawing of President Barack Obama on the cover, and a few different drawings of Obama in the back-up story, each repeated multiple times in consecutive panels to reduce the amount of drawing that needed to be done to complete the short story. If your first thought when you heard Liefeld was drawing Obama on the cover of an issue of Youngblood was that it meant Obama would have giant shoulder pads or a million little pouches or a gun as long as he is tall, well, Liefeld just sucks the fun of making fun of him right out, since here’s Obama with a giant gun.

Matt Brady points out that the Obama’s over six-feet tall, which would put Chapel, whose posing next to him at seven foot and change. He looks more like eight-foot-something to me, but man, height aside, look how big Chapel’s arm is compared to Obama’s, how big his head is compared to Obama’s, how big his crotch bulge is to Obama’s. Basically, Chapel is a shaven Sasquatch.

Note Obama’s left hand…or the absence of it. Is it in his pocket? Hidden behind his body? Plugged into the gun? Does he just not have a left hand?

Anyway, the point is this: Rob Liefeld still isn’t a very good artist, and he shouldn’t draw non-Rob Liefeld characters, particularly real people, because he’s no damn good at it.

In other news, I just drank a cup of water while writing this, and man, that stuff is wet.



2.) It occurs to me that maybe my review of Battle For The Cowl #1 wasn’t negative enough: I read fellow Newsarama contributor Richard Renteria’s review of this week’s big Batman release, and it’s not a positive review. Renteria had harsher criticism for the writing than for the art, which is the opposite of myself, but he had some good points about some of the weaknesses of the book. I think writer/artist Tony Daniel’s hands were probably tied pretty tightly, since he was writing a story with 80 different characters that all had to start in once place that he didn’t get to determine and will presumably all end in a place that he won’t get to determine. But it was a very bad comic book.

A lot of the characterizations seemed rather unrealistic and, well, off to me, although I can’t say that Daniel was definitely writing the characters out of character. For example, Tim Drake/Robin didn’t really seem like Tim Drake/Robin to me in a lot of instances, but then, it’s quite possible that, despite the fact that I kind of grew up with Drake and used to think I knew him really well, he may have changed quite a bit, and that’s why he seems so different. I haven’t been following the Bat-books the way I did five to ten years ago, after all.

Some super-specific nit-picks…

—Richard mentions he has a hard time believing that just taking the Batman out of the picture could spiral the city into chaos so quickly (It’s only been a few weeks since Batman “died”/disappeared, according to Robin's narration). Certainly if it was just up to Nightwing, Robin, Alfred and the police, it’s not hard to see Gotham going to hell, but there’s about a dozen vigilantes throwing in to help out, and it is hard to believe that Batman’s many protégés with access to all his resources can’t seem to deal with ordinary street crime and gang wars even with the help of Black Canary, Wildcat, Oracle, Batgirl and others (As for Joker-level supervillain-y, none are on the street at the start of the story).

Additionally, The Black Hand had all but eradicated all crime in Gotham prior to “Batman R.I.P.,” as part of their efforts to take down Batman (Remember when Morrison’s run started, he had Batman go on vacation because there just wasn’t enough crime for him to fight in Gotham).


—Robin narrates that “Nightwing and Batgirl assembled The Network-- a group of our most trusted allies to help out in a crunch.” I haven’t kept up with Batgirl much since that awful, only quasi-in continuity “Boy Wanted” arc of Robin, but assembling groups doesn’t really seem to fall within the quiet, remote young woman who was completely mute until her late teen’s skill set. It’s certainly odd she would be involved instead of, say, Oracle, whose entire skill set is gathering information and acting like something of an air traffic controller for superheroes.


—Richard also mentioned how unlikely it was that, perhaps particularly during a time of such widespread unrest, all of the Arkham inmates were being moved from a prison back to Arkham Ayslum by bus. At night. The ease with which villains escape Arkham has long been a pet peeve of mine, but, again, this is something that isn’t necessarily Daniel's fault, as it’s been going on so long now.

In his first story arc for Batman: Shadow of The Bat, Alan Grant wrote a story called “The Last Arkham” which was about a new, hard-nosed administrator coming to the asylum, completely remodeling and updating it, and making it more or less escape-proof, to the point that the impossibility of escape from Arkham was a plot point in the storyline (That is, how was the murderer committing his crimes while inside a locked room?). I’m pretty sure that, despite the fact that the new administrator Jeremiah Arkham stuck around from that story, as did the villain it introduced (Mrs. Zsasz), the security level at Arkham was never really addressed again.

You’d think a billionaire with bottomless pockets like Bruce Wayne would have by now donated a billion or so to Arkham Asylum or gotten on its board of directors or done whatever it would take to make sure it was, like, the most secure and escape-proof facility this side of the Phantom Zone.

Anyway, in this story, all of the inmates are freed (like in “Knightfall” or Batman: Dark Victory...or was Long Halloween the Loeb/Sale series that had the mass Arkham break out?), and this time the asylum itself is destroyed, in an awkwardly staged panel (In which Black Mask says “Light it up, boys!” after the explosion).


—Black Mask is able to force all of Arkham’s inmates to follow him by giving them each “a chemical implant” as part of their sedatives, an implant that can be radio activated to cause their deaths. It’s not a bad method of controlling a bunch of people that would otherwise be uncontrollable I suppose, but I thought it was a pretty funny way to try and control a bunch of lunatics. Like, only a crazy person would disobey a man who could have them instantly killed, right? But oops, the Arkham inmates are all completely crazy!


—Daniel’s decision to focus on Robin/Tim Drake’s detective skills was well done, and was certainly in keeping with the character, but what was up with the part where he starts laying out evidence about the mysterious new killer Batman to Dick Grayson? Drake’s all like, it’s someone good, with experience, maybe someone we know. He uses batarangs designed by Bruce Wayne, and he had a bat-rope, so he’s obviously someone on the inside.

But neither of them goes on to state the obvious—it’s Jason Todd—not even when Drake is thinking to himself about the new Batman. How many options are there, really? The two former Robins know it’s not one of them, which leaves one of the two Batgirls, whom they’ve been working with, Alfred, maybe The Spoiler or Damian al Ghul, or, oh yeah, the only one of Batman’s former sidekicks who ever went on to become a murderous vigilante, Jason Todd.


—Robin refers to Batman as “my father” while narrating to himself, and it took me a few seconds to remember that Bruce Wayne adopted Tim Drake, so he’s technically his father now. Drake’s father has only been dead a little over a year now (DC time), and it’s strange that a character whose always felt really guilty about his relationship with his father would quit thinking of him as his father and embrace Batman in that role so quickly (I think Tim also changed his last name to Wayne, which doesn’t seem quite like something Tim Drake would do to me either, but yeah, I know, there is not real Tim Drake and he’ll do whatever his writers tell him to do).


—Damian al Ghul sure doesn’t seem a bit like Damian al Ghul. Not only does he seem more teenage in his appearance (and the fact that he’s interested in a girl), but he’s oddly incompetent. At one point he’s menaced by Killer Croc, and is so helpless with fear that he’s unable to do much more than scream for his mother. He even calls her “Mommy" instead of “Mother,” as he usually does.

Now I'm not saying Killer Cros is a total pussy or anything. Certainly I’d be afraid to take him on (I’d be afraid to fight a six-inch iguana without a very long, sturdy stick, actually), but the Damian that went off on his own to kill The Spook and his gang and took down Robin before shouldn’t have all that much trouble going a few rounds with Killer Croc, whose basic fighting skills range from wrestling to biting and gets his ass kicked by Batman, Robin and Nightwing on a more-or-less monthly basis.


—It’s not clear to me when Damian became so thoroughly embraced by the rest of the Bat-family. I haven’t seen him since “Batman R.I.P.,” but Alfred and Robin certainly didn’t like him one bit during that story, and it’s odd that Nightwing and Oracle not only tolerate him as they do here, but go so far out of their way to worry about his safety and seek to protect him.


—Wait, Killer Croc chased down a speeding Batmobile on foot and then shouldered it off the road…?



3.) Whoever ends up being Batman, it looks like there’s going to be a new Robin: If you read any DC Comics this week, then you’ve seen the DC Nation page, in which we see four panels of pencil art by Frank Quitely. Actually, the sentence of text from Dan DiDio that accompanies it refers to it as “some very special art for a very special new comic series” and says the title and team can’t be announced yet.

The artist is clearly Frank Quitely, the writer is almost definitely the frequent Quitely collaborator scheduled to start writing Batman again soon Grant Morrison and the title is apparently Batman and Robin, seeing as how these panels feature Batman and Robin (And Morrison confirmed it in an interview).

But who are the individuals who will be wearing the Batman and Robin costumes? It’s kind of hard to guess, because of Quitely’s style. His Batman looks like the Batman he’s drawn before, but I suppose his Dick Grayson in a Batman cowl might look the same.

In the DC Nation image, the Robin seems to be holding his breath as a form of pouting, the way little kids do, which makes it seem as if Damian is going to be Robin instead of Tim Drake.

This image at IGN also seems to indicate a very young Robin, and while it’s not inconceivable that it’s Tim Drake being drawn more like a teenager than a grown man than usual, the costume is a different one than the one Drake’s currently wearing, and resembles a heavily altered version of the one he wore when he first became Robin.

Batman has a new costume too. Well, at least a new belt. I would assume it’s supposed to be Bruce Wayne in the suit, as it would be strange for Morrison to bring Nightwing into his Batman story in such a big way now after barely mentioning him throughout the rest of the run (he didn’t really have any involvement until “Batman R.I.P.”).

If it’s anyone other than Wayne though, Nightwing/Dick Grayson seems the obvious candidate. That issue of Battle For the Cowl has Drake and Alfred trying to talk Nightwing into becoming the new Batman while he resists doing so, the variant cover for the issue featured a figure that was half Nightwing and half Batman, and on the front page of dccomics.com they posted links to two different Nightwing origin stories along with the origin of Batman and some Battle For The Cowl related stuff.

I'm not sure if anyone's ever pointed this out before or not, but Rob Liefeld doesn't seem to be a very good artist

Few industry figures are as controversial as Rob Liefeld, who neatly divides almost everyone who experiences his comics work into either the love him or hate him camp. Actually, sometimes it sort of seems that everyone is in the hate him camp; I only personally know one comics reader who likes his work, and comics critics seem pretty unified in their assessment of his work as something between a joke and an aesthetic crime.

I can't say that I hate his work, or even dismiss it too strongly, as I have very little experience with it. Most of what I've seen of it is couched in other people talking about it. For example, Dick Hyancinth's extremely insightful (and balanced!) look at his work in these posts, or this amusingly written list of "The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld drawings." (I think I might have "read" a whole issue of Onslaught Reborn, re-diaalogued by Christopher Bird, but I can't seem to find it now. Did I dream that? Because that's a pretty weird, nerdy dream, even for me).

Otherwise, the longest in-an-actual-comic-book exposure I've had to his work was, let's see, the few page Aquaman sequence he did in a Jeph Loeb-written jam comic Superman Christmas issue, where Superman gave presents to each of his League teammates (Liefeld drew the Aquaman sequence, which, at the time, impressed me as a nice bit of stunt-casting, given it was the '90s-designed bearded and harpoon-hand Aquaman), and a "Bloodwulf" short from 1993's Darker Image #1, which I remember hating more for the shocking writing than the art (It was an extremely transparent Lobo swipe/parody; since Lobo is already a parody character, it's kind of hard to read Bloodwulf as a parody when brazen plagiarism seems the more obvious answer).

But Youngblood? X-Force? Cable? That stuff? Never read any of it. The covers and pin-ups I've seen are enough to let me know that they are quite clearly not my cup of tea.

So last night I thought about Rob Liefeld's art for an hour or two, which is longer than I've probably ever thought about it before, and I had a thought about why it might look the way it does.

For the last month or three I've been doing a Tuesday afternoon column for Blog@ looking at the Diamond shipping list for the following day's releases, and I usually do a one-panel cartoon of some sort to accompany it. In this week' shipping list, the thing that jumped out at me the most was the number of Obama covers a whole month after the inauguration, including one for Youngblood, Liefeld's signature series (although he seems to have turned over the writing and art duties to others).

So that's what I decided to make my column header cartoon about this week.

Drawing celebrity likenesses is pretty damn challenging, and talented folks like Erik Larsen, Todd Nauck and Phil Jiminez have shown how much trouble they have with Obama in recent weeks. It was hard to imagine that artist with such a notoroiously...individual style would succeed where someone with somone like Jiminez, who has such a meticulous, photorealistic style stumbled.

I thought about drawing Obama (whose likeness, by the way, I'm also pretty bad at drawing, as you can see here and here; in my defense, I'm not a professional artist, and accept no money for my drawings, nor does anyone have to pay to look at 'em) with as many of the sorts of elements Liefeld is notorious for. Like giving Obama gigantic shoulder pads, a Cable-sized gun with no handle, a mouth full of a slime, 150 teeth, hidden feet, and so on.

As I was scanning through Youngblood covers though, I settled on trying to draw Obama in the same pose as this goofball with a goatee on the cover of Youngblood #8.



So looking at the image for a visual guide, I did a quick sketch of the pose:


When I sat down to do the final one, which turned out like this—
—I was surprised that once I drew the basic outlines of the figure (the head, the kidney bean shape of the shoulders, the arms and left quadricep) and then, well, that's about all there is to it.

From there, it was already time to move on to the filigree—the clothes, the face, the little Liefeldian lines. Usually when I try to imitate someone else's art style, even for a quick piece like this, it takes forever, no matter how simplified the art might be (Bryan Lee O'Malley, for example, uses very few lines, and yet it took me a dozen tries to make a Scott Pilgrim head that looked enough like a Scott Pilgrim head that I assumed readers would recognize my intent).

It occurred to me then that maybe Liefeld's art looks the way it does because he skips some of the steps often associated with drawing. Perhaps he just sketches out the basic shapes of the figures, and then finishes them, going from rough sketch to detail work without anything in between.

Now, I don't know how Liefeld works, or even how most comics artists work. But in the sorts of how-to books I used to read in grade school, and in the ones I see in the library today, the ones with the step by step instructions, they always start with a few broad shapes, and then get progressively more detailed.

Like, say there was a four-step process involved with instructions on how to draw a unicorn. Step one would be two big circles for the front and back of the body, and a little circle for the head. Step two would be drawing lines to connect them into a horse-like shape and drawing lines for the legs and so forth. Step three would be drawing the unicorn body around that shape. And then step four would be drawing the horn, the mane, the tail, the eyeballs, the whiskers, and whatever details you wanted.

But if Liefeld were to draw that unicorn, perhaps he would just go from the three circles from step one to the detail work of step four, without worrying how the pieces fit together exactly.

Does that make sense?

Let me try this. Okay, here's a (light, pencil) sketch of the basic shapes that seem to be in that pose at the center of the Youngblood cover.



Sorry it's so light. I shoulda used pen. Okay, I imagine that's how a lot of comic artists might start out a panel or image, if only to have a good sense of what amount of space they're going to dedicate to a particular figure.

From there, they might slim it down a little, and start to include lines that would represent the skeleton of the figure. They might start to draw the body within those rough shapes, making the head shape more oval and human, making the bean-shape of the shoulders a little more shoulder-y, filling in where the stomach might be, or the rest of the leg, or perhaps the other leg (I can't tell on that Youngblood cover if the brown pointy thing coming out of the central figures right pectoral is supposed to be his foot, or the point of a shoulder pad Badrock might be wearing).

So maybe that would look something like this—


And then, once the the space-staking-out shapes have been turned into something closer to the figure being drawn, the artist might finish the drawing, drawing the flesh and clothing over the imagined skeleton and muscles.

But perhaps Liefeld just puts the skin and clothes over the initial shapes, ignoring the human skeleton and muscles. That would explain not only why his figures are so wildly anatomically incorrect, but why there's no real consistency to the anatomic features. (What he does with a human body can't simply be excused as a style, because it's so inconsistent; he doesn't make the same choices over and over).

So that's my theory: Maybe Liefeld goes right from the vaguest shapes to a finished product, without bothering with the mechanics of the figures. I'm sure a lot of artists don't bother sketching out skeletons and bodies either, but I bet those artists can do so because they've drawn enough bodies that they can kind of intuit where the bones would and should be under the skin and clothes of the people they're drawing.

I can't imagine why he might do this. It's not a simple matter of laziness, although there's certainly an element of laziness to some of his work (Why isn't that jumping figure on the cover centered? Why is the one hand visible, but the other going off the page like that?). Certainly all those little lines, the arm hairs and wrinkles and skin folds and scars and shadows take a damn long time to draw, perhaps just as long as it would have taken Liefeld to make sure he was drawing the limbs the same length, or to glance at himself in the mirror and see if he could do that with his head, or look to his left and see where his forearm muscle began and ended.

It makes me a little sad to think about Liefeld's work at all, let alone to this extent. Because he's so popular and, as far as I've read, so rich doing the art he's done, there's little incentive for him to grow or change in anyway. Liefeld's art, as it's been and as it is, worked and continues to work for him.

And yet comics history is not going to be very kind to him. Sixteen years have passed since that shitty Bloodwulf story in Darker Image, and yet all that seems to have changed about his art is that it now involves computer coloring that didn't exist in the early '90s. Meanwhile, Jim Lee, another artist whose work in the early '90s did nothing for me, has grown into an almost completely different artist in those same years.

Of course, if you can't be a great artist, being a rich and famous one isn't bad as far as consolation prizes go...