Happy 92nd Birthday, Jack Kirby

Thank you for: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Amazing Adventures, The Avengers, Black Panther, Captain America Comics, Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, Challengers of The Unknown, a slough of crime comics, Destroyer Duck, Devil Dinosaur,  Fantastic Four, Forever People, Green Arrow, The Incredible Hulk, Journey Into Mystery, Justice, Inc, Kamandi, Machine Man, Mister Miracle, The New Gods, O.M.A.C., inventing romance comics, Sgt Fury And His Howling Commandos, Silver Star, Strange Tales, Strange Worlds, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish, The  Newsboy Legion, The Demon, The Eternals, The Inhumans, The Losers, The Mighty Thor, The Sandman, World of Fantasy, The X-Men and so, so much more.

See Also: Ten Reasons Fantastic Four #51 Is My Favorite Comic Book

I’m just cranky and old and it’s best to just let me putter around with my own characters so I don’t think too much about this stuff.

1.
I’ve read and very much enjoyed Mark Millar’s ridiculous, over-the-top reinvention of The Avengers known as The Ultimates* since it began coming out. Even with its delays and too-cute mugging for the audience, it had just enough intelligence and wherewithal to keep me engaged and entertained, even if I knew it wasn’t a very good comic at all.

2.
Apparently, Marvel’s doing something with the Ultimate universe, rejiggering it and rebooting some things**, and one of those things was Millar creating an expanded Ultimate Avengers teams out of the mess. They’re pictured above, for your edification. There’s some of the usual people that years of reading Avengers comics mean that I like to see in an Avengers lineup: Cap, Thor, Iron Man. There’s also a few people that probably wouldn’t be on any Avengers team that I picked, but I’m not running Marvel comics, so hey, whatever.

3.
The thing that’s troubling to me is kinda simple and stupid and old mannish: among all these superhero types, there’s girl-with-guns (Black Widow,) purple-guy-with-guns (Hawkeye looking suspiciously like the Hate-Monger,) and black-guy-with-guns (Samuel L Jackson.) That’s three people with guns out of a lineup of eleven. That means that over a quarter of the Ultimate Avengers solve their problems with guns. That strikes me as overkill.

4.
It should be noted that one person using guns as part of a team of people with amazing powers and abilities strikes me as overkill. Guns are so common and ugly and silly***, particularly in a world where a living god could use his hammer to banish you to another dimension or a super-soldier hyped up on mega-dope from the 40s can disarm you with a thrown shield before breaking your jaw with his elbow. I think it was a wise man (Batman) who said guns make you stupid. They tend to make superhero comics stupid, too.

5.
So I guess I just talked myself out of buying Ultimate Avengers. OK, then.

^*Not being a meth-headed loony who gets their kicks from that sort of thing, I chose to ignore Jeph Loeb’s run as much as possible. I know that The Blob ate The Wasp , which I’m sure gave someone, somewhere, the best erection of his life.

***I’m fine with guns in gun-friendly titles or movies or whatever. It’s just that they don’t work for me in superhero comics. That’s why I like the Punisher off on his own most of the time with very occasional ties and crossovers with the Marvel universe.

If Comic Book Romance Were Real

There’s probably a million ways to connect these dots.

Watching Tokyo Gore Police the other day got me to thinking about that sort of schlocky sci-fi horror (see also: Tetsuo: The Iron Man and The Machine Girl) and how it serves as the ultimate evolution of tokusatsu like Kamen Rider and Ultraman. They frequently have many of the same attributes: Kamen Rider episodes begin with a brief explanation of his origin: “Kamen Rider, Takeshi Hongo, is an modified human. He was altered by Shocker, an evil secret society with aspirations for world domination. Kamen Rider fights against Shocker for the sake of human freedom,” while Tokyo Gore Police‘s protagonist Ruka is captured by the biotechnological freak she’s been hunting and becomes one of the monstrous “engineers” that she’s been trained to fight against for decades. It’s interesting how Japanese gore films act as thematic commentary about kid-friendly entertainment even as they find new ways to shock, disgust and entertain their audience by using familiar tropes to quickly hook the audience and then subverting them for dramatic effect.

Meanwhile, American adults who liked to watch Green Lantern fly around in space with a magic wishing ring as part of the cast of Super Friends can just go read Blackest Night to get the same effect.

Sean Witzke found some more of those dots the other day in a blog post I’d bookmarked but not read yet. I am the worst plagiarist ever.

You know, Japan…

…when I got my hands on a manga titled Addicted To Curry that’s about a curry shop struggling to get back on its feet after the mysterious disappearance of its chef/owner, I thought I’d be reading a more personal take on stuff like Oishinbo. I was looking forward to enjoying a comic about food and family and how they’re intertwined.

This is what I got before the table of contents on the first volume:

That’s Yui, the book’s 14-year-old co-lead.

Just once, I’d like for this sort of thing to not fucking happen. Could you work on that, please?

WEDNESDAY COMICS Penny Pinchers: Prepare For An Assault From The Maths

An email from a friend stated the following:

A typical $2.99 comic book is 32.6 cents/ square foot (22-6×10 inch pages)

Wednesday Comics is 13.6 cents / square foot (15-14×20 pages)

The standard $2.99 comic book costs 2.38 times more per square foot than Wednesday Comics.

You can skip to the bottom if you read comics you don’t enjoy and don’t want to be lectured to.

OK, here’s the thing. People email me wanting to know what I think about things. Not, like, things I care about, but things like DC’s upcoming Blackest Night or the return of Steve Rogers. I think it’s nice that people want to know my opinion on something that obviously means something to them, but (and God, this sounds even more egotistical than usual) I don’t spend any time at all thinking about that sort of thing anymore. Over the last year or so, I’ve started to create more than react, and I’ve opted to be more positive in general about comics, sticking to talking about what I like and actually want to read versus whining about matters that don’t interest or excite me at all. So, if you want to know what I think about comics happenings along these lines, the answer is more-than-likely going to be “I’m not.”

If DC wants to do a Green Lantern-themed remix of Marvel Zombies, that’s fine. It’ll probably sell very well to the sort of people who want that sort of thing. (I actually really enjoyed The Sinestro Corps War, but that seemed to fill up my space magic-ring-themed mega-event reserves to their required levels pretty handily, with the upcoming Wednesday Comics strip by Busiek and Quinones keeping things topped off.) If Marvel wants to resurrect a character that nobody with half a lobe in their skull thought would stay dead, that’s fine. I’ll read it in the book format because I think Brubaker’s done a bang-up job with the title, and I’ll write a one-off comic strip about how the marketing stunt around it ended up doing at a fictional comic shop because that’s the sort of thing people like, but I can’t imagine devoting any real thought to the matter unless it was my bottom line that was being affected by the whole issue.

In the past couple of months, I’ve seen some people who I thought were smarter get caught up in grinding out content about what they hate about comics, and it baffles me. Why rehash the “news cycle” that Newsarama and CBR are working when you can celebrate how cool, how vital comics are by pointing out smaller titles that you enjoy? Don’t get me wrong: there’s some reviewers whose insightful savaging of the mainstream is something I enjoy and look forward to, but they’re actually coming up with useful analysis of the medium and its trends, not pissing and moaning about how comics aren’t what they think they should be and how Dan Dildio (I swear I saw that yesterday) needs to fuck right off.

(The short version: If you don’t think you’ll like something, ignore it. Something better will come along. That’s what I do and don’t you want to be just like me?)

Kitty Pryde fans, ladies and gentlemen.

Via an email exchange with Mike Sterling.

Search term suggestions on Google.com are powered by the Google Suggest service. Google Suggest communicates with Google while you type in order to offer suggestions to you. All the information you send to Google — such as searches you type or ones you select in Google Suggest — is protected by Google’s privacy policy. When providing suggestions, Google Suggest doesn’t refer to anyone’s personal searches; it uses information about the relative popularity of common searches to rank its suggestions.

Think about it, won’t you?

Just Imagine…the Superman Family in the 90s (and today)!

Everyone likes to go dancing with their friends, but when a famous DJ comes to Metropolis’s biggest after-hours “rave” party, Jimmy Olsen becomes…Lost In The K-Hole!

Superman’s Girl Friend has traveled through time and space, seeing things that nobody else could imagine, but is even she ready to join the newest outsider movement and become Lois Lane: Cyberpunk Princess?

Superman has his hands full thanks to an automotive club where thrills are more important than safety and a quest to finish first leads his pal to the other side of the world in Jimmy Olsen: Tokyo Drifter!

Your mom and dad sure wouldn’t “get” the new wave of girl groups cropping up around the country, but one reporter gets in deeper than she expected when she fronts up and coming band L7! Find out what happens when Lois Lane Joins…The “Riotgrrl” Movement!

Being Superman’s pal has made Jimmy Olsen the most famous teenager on the planet, but is even he prepared for the fireworks when MTV comes to Metropolis and Pauly Shore Steals Lucy Lane?

Superman finds himself with a new rival for Lois Lane’s affections when the future of law enforcement joins the Metropolis police department! Can the last son of Krypton compete When RoboCop Comes To Town?

A Rough Guide To Webcomics Made By Twitter Users. (Part Three)

OK, here’s the last part of my look at webcomics that were sent to me by their creators over Twitter. Thanks to everybody that participated and I’ll likely ask people to shoot me some URLs again sometime next month for the second round. If you’ve not caught up, here’s part one and here’s part two.

Strange Candy by E.Snodgrass, A. Brownlow, K. Olympia, and J.Baird
A fantasy humor manga with no shortage of in-jokes and cultural references for those in the know. From someone on the outside looking in, it’s like a glitter-covered tax form: confusing and shiny. It has been going on for eight years, however, so there must be something going for it.

Strip For Me: Complex by Douglas Noble
Smart, apocalyptic science fiction with a rough-hewn look to the art that builds the mood very nicely. This one’s in its infancy but looks to have a lot of potential.

Supertrue!!! by Max Huffman
Max Huffman’s journal comics are a scream. He needs to do more. Someone get him on that.

Tech-Diff by Donna McGarry and David Shirley
This purports to be “A comic following the life and trials of Crag Smashface, his long suffering room mate Mel and his idol the world’s greatest super hero Emo Man.” In reality, it seems that there’s no real characters, no story, just “jokes” that frequently require an intimate knowledge of whatever the creators are into at any given time.

The Black Cherry Bombshells by John Zito & Anthony Trovarello
I’ve never quite clicked with this popular Zuda strip about post-apocalyptic Las Vegas and the titular girl gang. The storytelling seems very choppy to me, depending more on the next high concept than anything else and while the art has improved dramatically, it rarely manages to pull off the action sequences this series thrives on.

The Elves of Lleu Garnock by Irene Pitcairn
A longform, derivative fantasy comic. If the title appeals to you, then you’ve got nothing to lose by taking a look. I will say that the art gets cleaner and stronger over the run, reminding me a bit of both Linda Medley and Colleen Doran.

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats by Adam Koford
An unstoppable juggernaut of meme-meets-classic-cartooning that I very much enjoy. It’s amazing how he’s built two characters that speak almost exclusively in sampled soundbites. I discussed Koford’s new book previously.

The Mighty Jambo by George Beedham
A superhero-slacker comic that, frankly, starts off pretty dire but improves massively once it becomes about the punching and shooting. Beedham’s art improves along with the story with his storytelling becoming stronger as the strip continues, but I will say that his adherence to comic book art makes for occasionally odd webcomic moments, such as the frequent double-page spreads that require the reader to click to view them in another window.

The Night Owls by Peter Timony and Robert Timony
Oh, this is a heck of a thing that the Timonys are doing. A retro strip that moves along at a fair clip, with each individual page containing at least one and sometimes multiple plot beats. It looks downright gorgeous too.

The Suckerboys by Jim Thorpe
A very nicely-drawn strip that doesn’t really do anything new, as it features two slackers with nerdy inclinations, but chugs right along anyway. Thorpe’s art is a high point: his facial expressions are dead on and his characters’ body language serves as a nice primer to other creators.

Things Change by Derik Badman
I’m sort of shocked I’ve never come across this one before. A thematically-dense comic that circles around the idea of metamorphoses with art that’s greatly accentuated by Badman’s use of two-tone color schemes on the majority of pieces. The beginning seems a bit “and now it’s time for the author to masturbate about how great he is,” but after that it’s a very engaging, very human piece of work.

Willow’s Grove by Karl Kleese
Cute animals get kidnapped by aliens and try to find their way back to Earth. The art seems a bit stiff to me, but there were enough chuckles to keep me going through the entire archive so far.

Xeno’s Arrow by Greg Beettam and Stephen Geigen-Milller
There’s something very 1980s-black-and-white-indie about this science fiction comic, and I mean that in a good way. The dialogue’s feels a bit contrived, the setting (a group of aliens escape a massive intergalactic zoo) a bit too familiar, and the art hits a lot of the same notes that Keith Giffen did after he discovered Muñoz’s work, but it all comes together just so to make a comic that’s comfortable and interesting. Funny, how that works out.

A Rough Guide To Webcomics Made By Twitter Users. (Part Two)

Aaaand I looked at some more strips from people who submitted their URLs to my hateful gaze. You may want to also look at Part One. Part Three will be up on Friday hopefully.

Harmless Free Radicals by “Fenmere, The Worm”
I really enjoyed the strips I read from this (a chunk from the early days, and the last 30 or so updates.) The earlier strips have a “very good for a college newspaper” feel and while more frequent updates would really help the flow of the strip since it moved away from the gag format to a longform narrative, there’s clearly a lot of thought put into the characters and the art is very easy on the eyes.

I Can Draw Better Than This by “Fenmere, The Worm”
Another comic by the creator whose name makes my teeth grind like a motherfucker. I Can Draw Better Than This is experimental, sometimes funny, and occasionally a pure distillation of comics. I love the presentation more than the (good, to be sure) comics: it’s drawn on index cards and photographed, which leads to the only complaint I have: the comics should be larger.

I Rule The Night by Kevin Colden
You guys, I thought Colden’s Fishtown was good and showed a lot of promise but this shit is fire. I don’t want to say anything about the plot because, honestly, the initial reveal about the lead is too good to spoil, but the 21 pages on Zuda so far had me chomping at the bit for more, even if he’s working on themes touched on by creators Alan Moore and Rick Veitch among others. Gorgeous and blackly funny, it’s easily the best thing I’ve seen on DC’s webcomic site.

Kitsune Kiki by Samuel and David Thomas
Superbly polished, highly derivative American-made manga.

Nemu Nemu by KimonoKitsy Studios
If you can handle too-cute, baby-talking stuffed animals more than I can, then this manga webcomic is likely made for you. I just do not have that kawaii gene outside of Yotsuba and Hello Kitty, I suppose.

Not Artistically Strong by George Beedham
Truth in advertising, I suppose, but I actually was pretty charmed by Beedham’s very British (there’s enough Doctor Who gags to qualify this strip for the Gallifreyian Medal Of Nerditude,) occasionally very funny look at his life. Autobiocomics are a dime a dozen, particularly on the web, but it’s nice to see someone manage to be both self-deprecating and sure of themselves.

Par for the Core by “Fenmere, The Worm”
We’ll come back when he’s got more than a half-dozen pages up of this interesting-looking comic about parkour.

Requiem by James Roden
It’s a science-fiction comic done using CGI with a backstory that reads like it belongs in an RPG manual. It’s pretty much the platonic ideal of what I’m not interested in, but I can definitely see it having an audience out there among people who masturbate to Kim Stanley-Robinson and David Brin novels while logged into Second Life.  (I’m teasing.  Honest.)

Sam & Lilah by Jim Dougan and Hyeondo Park
A gorgeously-drawn, lushly-colored romance comic that is so damn celebratory that I can’t help but think it’s worth a look, even if my back teeth still ache from the over-the-top cuteness.

Shades by David Berner and Harsho Mohan Chattoraj
This ongoing superhero story feels a lot like an early Warren Ellis comic for Avatar, but without his trademark dialogue. (Speaking of dialogue, though, the writer admits that the latest installment features a near-direct lift from The Dark Knight Returns. I admire that sort of honesty, even if it seemed closer to a tribute than an out-and-out swipe.)

A Rough Guide To Webcomics Made By Twitter Users. (Part One)

So, I asked people on Twitter to give me a shout if they made a webcomic.  Thanks to “retweets” (blergh) by Deb Aoki and a few other people, I got quite a nice batch of responses.  I’m going to divide this up into three parts so it’s a bit more manageable for everyone and hopefully you’ll actually click on all of the links that interest you versus being overwhelmed.

Abandon: First Vampire by Greg Carter and Eliot Dombo
Manga-influenced online graphic novel about a vampire who has adventures while confronting her past.  There’s quite a lot of stabbing in the first bit, so I will probably go back to check out some more.

Alternate Delusions by Tim Volpe
One of those comics that feels very quaint, with the Zentraedi-like bulk of poorly-drawn, geek-centric strips like User Friendly looming over it menacingly.

Children of the Tiger by Melissa Stone
From the site’s “about” page: “It is a webcomic by Melissa Stone that is based on her novelette of the same name. It will be four parts in length.” That translates to “Not for Kevin, but if you like that sort of thing, you can do much, much worse.”

Cold Iron Badge by Stephen Geigen-Miller and Patrick Heinicke
A fantasy-world police procedural.  Think Life On Mars meets Lars Brown’s NorthWorld.  I imagine I’m in the minority when I say I like the earlier look of the strip compared to the more manga-influenced style being used right now, but I do like what I’ve seen of the characters and their world.

Construction Paper Angst by Topher McCulloch
It’s a semi-auto-bio-comic that’s been recently revived.  Points for the clever use of construction paper, however there are penalties for the sporadic nature of updates and impossible-to-decipher writing that surely seemed funny to the author at the time.  We’ll call it a wash.

Dark Side of the Horse by Samson
The wordless strips here really, really sing and I love the two-tone art.  It feels very much like a classic strip that’s been unearthed, and that’s a good thing.

Dragon’s Fall by William Alexander Righetti and Irene Pitcairn
This hasn’t started yet, but the people involved mentioned it anyway.  So, you know.  There will be something there soon.  The “cover” posted has nice coloring.

El Gorgo! by Mike McGee and Tamas Jakab
We’ve been over this before.  This is better than you deserve.

Entry Level Hipster Garbage by Max Huffman and Ethan (Who Has No Last Name Listed)
When you go to the site, you get confronted with some page that is like “The series has launched,” but go and click on “First Comic” or “Latest Comic” and you’ll see that the title does a good job of explaining it.  A lot of the jokes here seem a bit forced, but I really like Huffman’s facial expressions and how he conveys action in his sketchy style.  It’s nice to see a comic that isn’t rendered to the nth degree.

Fera by David Shirley
“Follow the adventures of this rag tag group as they travel the lost planet of Mu.”  Imagine my disappointment that this is not about the KLF having said adventures.  Not my cup of tea at all.

Finn-Strip by Jarmo
I suspect I would appreciate the near-sociopathic pride in being Finnish if I were, in fact, Finnish.  I do like the art in some strips much more than others.

George by John Norton
It’s interesting that I read a big swath of a comic with the exact style of face that I hate (see also: User Friendly) and jokes that were pretty hackish without really feeling like I was wasting my time.  Maybe it was the Two And A Half Men effect, where things are moving along just enough to keep you engaged even if you know there’s better out there.

Hamstah Powah by Samuel Boyd
It’s about hamsters having crazy adventures with “jokes” that make no sense.  I’m sure it’s wildly popular with a certain sort of person.

So my friend Rebecca’s first graphic novel was Watchmen…

…and she asked me to give her pointers for the next time she’s at Barnes & Noble. I wrote her a very long email in response. Here it is.

Rebecca:

The problem with starting reading comics with Watchmen is that it’s like you started watching movies with Seven Samurai or Citizen Kane and suddenly find yourself in a video store that mostly has Michael Bay or Peter Greenaway movies, either too loud and bright or too arty for their own good. On top of that, Watchmen is full of metacommentary and symbolism on the art form, a book as much about superhero comics and their tropes as anything else, and that’s why it’s held in such regard by a lot of people. Anyway, I tend to gravitate towards stuff that’s a bit more pop and smart, no matter what the genre. To make it easier on you, I’ve picked stuff that meets some basic criteria:

1. It’s easy to find via your local bookstores, at a comics shop, or on Amazon.
2. It’s as self contained as possible, meaning that you won’t have to know the ins and outs of continuing superhero universes to enjoy them.

Vertigo was started after DC Comics (who published Watchmen) realized there was a market for more mature comics, both superhero and otherwise. In fact, Grant Morrison’s Animal Man was of of the impetuses for the new line, as it featured a C-List hero discovering the metaphysics of comic books. Popular Vertigo series in trade include Y: The Last Man, Brian K Vaughan’s story about what happens when every male on the planet dies except one (I’m not crazy about it, but it has a lot of fans) Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (I am not making this up. It’s splendid,) Transmetropolitan (Warren Ellis does Future Hunter S. Thompson,) and Hellblazer (Sometimes great, sometimes blergh. The early material by Jamie Delano is very, very creepy and Garth Ennis’s early stories are wonderful and carry a lot of the humanity I’ve discussed with Preacher.) I also very much enjoy Brian Wood’s DMZ, about a near-future New York City that’s become a demilitarized zone after a civil war splits America into two nations. It’s currently ongoing and so you’ll be able to read new trades of that every few months, or actually buy the issues.

You know, it just occured to me that Vertigo also published Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta, but that seems pretty obvious, as it’s the same writer, the same publisher, and had a movie of its very own that wasn’t nearly as good as the book. Another favorite from the bearded mage of comics is From Hell, a monster tome exploring the Jack The Ripper murders that Top Shelf put out as a massive phonebook. Art in that is provided by Eddie Campbell, one of those artists that right-thinking people love. There’s also The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, drawn by Kevin O’Neill. I may have to establish some trust before you walk down that path, considering how disastrous the film version was. (Crap, I might have to do that with From Hell too, right?)

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was released the same year as Watchmen and is often paired up with it. It’s a very well-done story about a retired Batman coming back to clean up Gotham City and influenced the “mainstream” Batman comics for years because a lot of people missed the distinctly satirical notes in Frank Miller’s writing. It’s dense, vibrant, and will keep you guessing until the final pages – Bruce knows how things are going to end, but no one else does. It was written by Frank Miller, whose Batman: Year One is also pretty essential, not least for David Mazzucchelli’s art and the very human angle taken on Batman’s origin – the book belongs to Jim Gordon as much as it does to Bruce Wayne.

The Scott Pilgrim series from Oni Press is very hot at the moment, and for good reason. This manga-influenced epic takes place in a fun video game reality where one 20-something has to defeat his new girl’s seven evil ex-boyfriends to win her heart. It is really, really incredible, particularly once Bryan Lee O’Malley gets started. There are five of these out now. Just buy them all at once because that’s how you’ll read them. Oni has also published Queen And Country, a fine series of stories featuring British secret agent Tara Chace. The reason Greg Rucka’s work stands out here is that it feels very real and handles the realities of the job deftly.

:01 First Second is a New York-based publisher of graphic novels for kids and adults and they’ve put out some great reads including Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (an ambitious look at racial stereotypes that manages to work in the Monkey King), The Professor’s Daughter by Sfar and Guibert (a girl and a mummy fall in love in early 20th-century Paris), and Gipi’s Garage Band, a frank and engaging examination of youth and what even the most amateurish music can mean to its players.

My favorite comic series of all time is probably Love and Rockets. Fantagraphics has not numbered their very nice new trades, but you should start with Maggie The Mechanic for Jaime Hernandez’s material (which starts off being about chicks who fix rockets and quickly takes a left turn into punk chicks living in southern California with diversions into gang life and professional wrestling) and Heartbreak Soup for Gilbert Hernandez’s comics (which are about a tiny Central American village and the people who inhabit it.)

These are just starting points. I’ve not included Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s splendid All Star Superman or the original Runaways or Sean McKeever’s Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I’ve also not mentioned my friend Jeff Lemire’s Essex County stories or Criminal or The Invisibles or any of a million other comics I love, including a slab of the weird, wild world of Jack Kirby. Once you get started, come back to me and tell me what you liked and didn’t like. We’ll see if I can point you in the right direction.

Kevin

Four items, three of which are not unabashed bits of Star Trek enthusiasm.

1.
The second issue of El Gorgo has been printed and is waiting for your Paypal information. Sure, you could read it in its entirety for free, but I honestly think these guys deserve your pocket change for actually printing a comic about a gorilla luchadore and making it much better than it actually had to be to keep me entertained.

2.
A second printing of the first issue of Glenn Brunswick and Dan McDaid’s Jersey Gods is hitting stands this week. I’ve been promising them a letter of comment for some time but I am quite wary of doing this as I’m afraid it’d wind up being one of those unabashed “Oh my god like you guys are so good and Glenn’s script is super-witty and sweetly romantic while managing to capture the cosmic bigness of the gods in the story and that Dan McDaid, boy, he can draw real good and when are you guys going to start a fan club with a button set and a newsletter I’d be the first member” sort of things, but suffice it to say that if your local shop has a copy of #1 and #2 in stock on Wednesday, you’d find yourself a better human being if you deigned to spend money on these books. You’ll notice them by their fine covers by Mike Allred and Darwyn Cooke, two gentlemen that you may have heard of.

3.
I got the trade for Secret Invasion because I remembered liking bits and pieces of it in single issues while being put off by the way the series hung together as a periodical. I can’t help feeling that is comes off as being really sparse despite having quite a lot of talking and punching. I read the entire 8-issue series in about an hour and didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Am I alone in thinking that there’s no real depth to the work and that thematically, it’s pretty barren? Yeah, there’s plenty of rah-rah Marvel Fan Moments that I genuinely enjoyed (Maria Hill versus Jarvis on the Helicarrier in a sequence that should have been in one issue instead of spread across three, Nick Fury stone-cold shooting aliens in the face) but it left me cold in the end, feeling like a means to an end instead of a story in its own right.

That said, that Thunderbolts crossover trade was a lot of fun, mostly because I enjoy Norman Osborne vamping it up and being all arched eyebrows and hissed commands when he’s not in the public eye.

4.
Man, that new Star Trek trailer, huh? Sure is something, isn’t it?

Reader Participation: I Have A Question About Green Lantern Comic Books

From what I can tell, the Green Lantern books have now spent a large chunk of about two years of storytelling to internecine combat between various factions who share the whole lanterns-and-rings motif. I actually quite enjoyed The Sinestro^* Corps War and can see the appeal in exploring these new groups, but are the Green Lanterns still fighting people who don’t vomit blood or have oath and magic wishing ring on top of the rest of the junk that’s going on in the universe they’re supposed to be protecting? Is that being addressed?

*Sinestro. Were Genocidus or Stabbicon such great guys that they didn’t see that one coming? (Yes, it’s a hacky gag, but really. Sinestro.)

Scans_Daily is dead. Fuck ‘em.

Point 1:
So, apparently if you run a LiveJournal community in which members post scans of big chunks of comic books that are on the stands right now and then whine about the spoilers those chunks contain, it’s not actually a marketing device, despite any remarkable powers of disillusionment you may have. Yes, a lot of vocal people have said that Scans_Daily helped sell them comics, but do you really think that the people who read the juicy bits to stay on top of things and ignore titles the rest of the time are really going to raise their hands to be counted?

Point 2:
No, the 5-page previews Marvel and DC send to Newsarama and CBR are not the same thing at all and everyone should know better than to even use that argument. Should the companies look at ways of marketing themselves to the LJ demographic? Perhaps. Should people feel it’s their right to post entire issues piecemeal to talk about how off-character some people from X-Factor were? No.

Point 3:
I can’t believe people are defending someone telling Peter David to die in a fire. Yes, it’s a too-common piece of internet hyperbole, but if a community is going to act like a group of internet brats, they’re going to be treated as such. Surprise, kids, welcome to the real world, where actions like being a complete dick to another human being have consequences.

Point 4:
“It’s just the internet” doesn’t cut it when it’s directly connected to copyright violation. If you’re going to act as a unauthorized, evangelical marketing device, you’ll also have to act like a responsible group of comics fans sharing some scans (we all do it, that’s fine) while respecting the creators and copyright holders. This is especially true when you are posting scans of comic books that are in stores and available to purchase.

Yes, I tried to be an active part of Scans_Daily for a while, because a few people in that community seemed to genuinely love comic books old and new and wanted to share that enthusiasm. I stopped when people told me I wrote the characters of my own webcomic incorrectly.

Edited To Add: Brigid Alverson did a good roundup of the Scans_Daily closure and made some points that I think are worth discussing. I also disagree with them, hence my comment there.

Well, at least someone thinks I was on the right track.

Variety‘s review of Watchmen:

Yet the movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there’s simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated. As “Watchmen” lurches toward its apocalyptic (and slightly altered) finale, something happens that didn’t happen in the novel: Wavering in tone between seriousness and camp, and absent the cerebral tone that gave weight to some of the book’s headier ideas, the film seems to yield to the very superhero cliches it purports to subvert.

Why I will not be seeing Watchmen.

Despite being an avid fan of Watchmen, purchasing multiple copies over the years and tracking down issues of magazines like Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal from the period of the series’ release, I can’t help but look down on the upcoming cinematic version (you know, the one with the action figures, coffee, condoms, ad nauseum.) If you know me, you’ve heard me scream that Watchmen is at its core a comic book, much like Citizen Kane is a movie. It uses its medium’s strengths and weaknesses to the story’s advantage throughout, doing things that can’t work on screen, even if you take each and every panel from the book, carefully edit the voiceovers into it, and ensure that each line of dialogue is exactly as it appears on-page. I can go on and on about the technical aspects, but there’s a more important element that’s sitting at the core of my misgivings about this slick-looking piece of superhero cinema.

Watchmen is at its core a drama. Yes, there’s a mystery that brings its main cast of players together, but it’s really about broken people and the fucked-up lives they lead. Laurie and Walter’s respective relationships with their mothers; the way Dan’s nostalgic values and fierce devotion to an intellectual ideal leads him down a lonely path; Adrian and Jon’s parallel devotion to logic, with the first becoming more alien as the other is held aloft as the height of humanity – all of these make the book work, and that’s where the real power of Watchmen lies, not in the (elegant and rewarding to be sure) investigation into the murder of Edward Blake. Even as they peel apart the superhero meme, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons devote a considerable amount of the book’s pagecount to exploring the common man in all its diversity (the newsstand vendor and the kid who reads pirate comics, the lesbian couple’s relationship woes, the psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with Rorschach.)

It’s this elegant dissection of people that allows Laurie’s realizations about her father to have a greater impact that the multiple pages devoted to Veidt’s final solution and its implementation. Moore is telling a story about everyone while Snyder, with his video game cutscene aesthetic and the stilted, too-mannered performances that pervade the clips available of the film, seems to have missed that point entirely, focusing on the costumed identities and the mystery. Yes, these are a few short pieces of scenes from a movie with a 2+ hour running time, but they seem quite telling. The riot scene from the 70s becomes high camp thanks to music by KC And The Sunshine Band and a jump that takes place in slow motion because it looks cool. Laurie and Dan’s re-emergence as superheroes is positively generic in its execution, lacking charm and tension entirely. Perhaps in the context of the film, these scenes have more power, but as someone who has read the book at least a dozen times over the years and knows how each beautifully-constructed simulacrum of a scene from the book fits into that story, I can’t help but pre-judge.

The more I see of the film version of Watchmen, the less I like it, and perhaps more importantly, the more I dislike what it represents: the dumbing-down of something greater for the sake of a false “authenticity” that’s apparent only to those shallowest of readers of the source material. Zack Snyder may have a made a movie that’s called Watchmen, features a cast of characters directly from the book, and liberally makes use of the book’s contents, but I’ll be very surprised if it has any of the original’s heart.

If I Ran Marvel Comics…

…this would be the first cheap cash-in move I’d make.

Reader Participation: One-sentence series pitches for existing franchises.

My Fantastic Four begins with the heat death of the universe and ends at the dawn of time.

Put yours below.