Siegel and Shuster's Greatest Creation!

Ever wonder where Batman learned to do that thing where he hits thugs with other thugs?

SAM "SLAM" BRADLEY: Cracking Skulls With Skells since 1937!

What's This?

The advance solicitations for DC's August books have a few things that caught my eye. For example:

ACTION COMICS #854, it’s a desperate battle for Superman, a turning point for Jimmy Olsen, and a deadly radioactive threat for Metropolis! Will Mr. Action live or die? And what will the future hold for Krypto? Plus: giant monkey!

THE ALL-NEW ATOM #14, Ryan Choi, Donna Troy, Jason Todd and Bob the Monitor continue to search the Nanoverse for Ray Palmer.

METAL MEN #1
Written by Duncan Rouleau
Art and cover by Rouleau
... But the greatest threat lies in Le Cabinet Noir and its bid to control the natural order using dangerous lieutenants like the Nameless, an armored being that feeds off the blood of the innocent and controls the Gogoloth, giant stone Golems made of Granite, Bizmuth, Onyx and Lime.

Giant monkey? Bob the Monitor? And an all new Metal Men series featuring Evil Metal Men?


Did someone at DC miss the memo? Superheroes aren't supposed to be fun!

"Fun" doesn't sell. Superhero comics are supposed to be set in the real world and feature shocking revelations that change everything forever.

Who wants to read about giant radioactive monkeys? Or cosmic beings with surprisingly mundane names? Or personable robots on insane adventures fighting giant monstrous beings?

Besides me, I mean.

Not Comics-- But AWESOME

Just to prove the point about how fiction brings cities to life, here's an excellent short story my friend wrote about the last days of Venice.

It's good readin'!

Bat-Mite Vs. The '90s!

As long as I'm on this kick, let me just enter my favorite moment from World's Funnest into The Ring:

The set-up, omnipotent loser fan boy and physical embodiment of the silliness of the Silver Age, the Bat-Mite, fleeing a cosmicidal Mr. Mxyzptlk, crashes into the DC Universe, circa 1999, as over-rendered by Doug Mahnke:


To say he's displeased with the state of superheroes is perhaps a gross understatement:


Really, Lobo never stood a chance:

NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME!

This just in:

MARVEL UNIVERSE TO CHANGE! AGAIN!

Here, let me take a crack at guessing the "shocking revelation" that "everything has been leading to" but at the same time "you never saw coming":

Wanda "Deus Ex Machina" Maximoff reappears, mutters "No more...

...superheroes"

and everything goes white!

LINE WIDE CROSSOVER! EVERY BOOK RETITLED AND RE-GENRE'D!

Amazing Spider-Man is now "Picture Perfect," rom-com about struggling photographer and model/actress wife!

New Avengers is now "Avengers," police procedural about an elite F.B.I. squad!

Wolverine is now "Logan's Run," Keuroac-ian stories about a surly tough who rides across America, living and loving!

Uncanny X-Men is now "Gifted," high-school dramedy about students at a boarding school for troubled geniuses!

Captain America is now "Captain Rogers," 80 year old World War II veteran solves murders in small town!

Fantastic Four is now "Weird Chemistry," work place comedy about a science lab!

The Incredible Hulk is now "Banner," dark drama of man dealing with his violent tendencies!

Iron Man is now "Gears of Industry," political drama of weapons manufacturer with a conscience set in today's high tension climate!

and so on and so forth...

For six straight months, Marvel will truly change their universe by publishing NO SUPERHERO BOOKS, forcing the retailers who buy only DC and Marvel books to stock something different and making Marvel Zombies discover how many other types of stories can be told in the comics format, and hopefully getting those same readers to admit they can enjoy a comic book, even if it doesn't involve someone in tights shooting lasers out their eyes!

Oh, if only...

The Character of New York City

One of the tropes of superhero comics is that the hero and his city reflect each other.

Scipio Garling at the Absorbascon has written extensively about the fictionopolises of the DC Comics world, the imaginary cities that, over time, have established themselves as architectural echoes of their protectors: the neo-futurist Metropolis is home to the Man of Tomorrow; cloud enshrouded gothic Gotham is haunted by Dark Knight; Central City has the wide open spaces needed for a hero who can encircle the Earth in under a second; even the quiet and pastoral Smallville reflects the hopeful and nostalgic Adventures of Superman when he was a Boy.

This theme is an updating of the more classic trope that the king embodied the country he ruled, and as he faired, so faired the kingdom. L'État, c'est moi, as King Louis once said.

But what of the Marvel heroes, the ones who work a) in real places and b) almost entirely in New York. How can New York BE Spider-Man AND Iron Man, Daredevil AND Dr. Strange, and each member of the Fantastic Four as well?

Well, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko did something very clever: they carved up New York and placed their heroes in the neighborhoods that fit best:

Industrialist Iron Man is a leader of Wall Street;

Dr. Strange has the sweetest Greenwich Village bachelor pad and lifestyle ever;

Daredevil fights on the side of the angels in Hell’s Kitchen;

And Spider-Man’s at his very best as the hero of Queens.

And the Fantastic Four, well that’s extra clever. While the Baxter Building fits neatly into the Mid-Town collection of art deco skyscrapers, the members of the team reflect New York's four boroughs.* Ben Grimm is Brooklyn-born and bred; hot-head Johnny Storm is a Yankees fan and ladies man like any Bronx boy aspires to be, motherly Sue Storm fits into the more residential Queens (and I'm guessing is a Mets fan, just to annoy her brother), and is there a better name for a Manhattan-ite than “Mr. Fantastic”?

Later writers would add Luke Cage, Hero for Hire of Harlem, and the Punisher, scourge of Sheepshead Bay. And with each story, with each issue, the city would gain more and more personality, more and more character, until it seemed to breathe.

Which is why I think it’s kind of silly when fans and Joe Quesada insist Marvel Comics take place in “the real world.” The Marvel Universe just isn’t real. Not just that super-powered soldiers and alien invasions would warp the course of history, but by their very legendary nature, superheroes imbue any city they exist in with mythic qualities.

When seen through the mask of Spider-Man, New York becomes a fictionopolis, a place as alive, as full of personality and absurdity and horror and hope as any Metropolis, as any Gotham.

When Spider-Man swings through Manhattan, New York lives!


* “Jon, everyone knows Staten Island doesn’t count.”

Page One...

That's how far into this year's issue of All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder I got before I found something that When Fangirls Attack will be bitching complaining talking about for the next week or so. (sorry to beg, again, but does someone have a scan? Thank you, Sleestak. May Haley Mills fill all your dreams!)


It's Frank Miller's Wonder Woman, angry at "Man's World," angry at "Man's Dreams", angry at "Man" and yelling at "Sperm Banks" to get out of her way.

And it just does NOT let up! She wants to kill Batman. She wants the Justice League to kill Batman. She wants to take over the world. And she is angry! ANG! REE!

But, SURPRISE! All she really wants is a good humping from Superman!


I mean, WOW!

Frank Miller is either brilliant or insane and I'm not sure I care. It's just so... so so AWFUL that it has gone around to becoming spectacularly entertaining, then terrible again, than ridiculously entertaining again!

It's obviously an enormous practical joke at this point, right? Since the rest of the issue is just Batman running around, thinking about how awesome it is to be, and I quote, "the goddamn Batman," Alfred hitting the gym, and Dick Grayson picking up an axe. And that's it! That's what we've been waiting a full year for! Andy Kaufman, in his prime, couldn't have figured out a more surreal product to unleash on the market.

I get the people who are offended by this book. I understand the people who are amused by it ironically. But is there someone, and I mean anyone, out there who loves this book AND takes it at face value? Is there really a reader who digs on Wonder Woman hating the Patriarchy, Superman blindly following orders, and Batman being a sadistic psychopath?

And is Frank Miller playing to that reader, or pissing in their soup?

And how weird is it that DC releases this absurd collection of adolescent male fantasies on the same day it releases The Plain Janes, their first book specifically aimed at teenage girls? And the same day they release Batman #665, which, with its hard-boiled narration, hookers with hearts of gold, uber-corrupt monster cops, and Andy Kubert's Jim Lee-esque art, reads like a knowing parody of All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, like Grant Morrison's trying desperately to out-Miller Miller, which, apparently, he just can't?

Because, let's face it, you cannot out-crazy crazy. You can't reason with it either. You can only try to contain it.

p.s. In the name of total honesty, I didn't actually buy All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, I skimmed it in the store. No, I saved my money to buy Satan's $@#%* Baby.

God help me.

This Way to the Exposition

Mark Waid is a comic book writer that, if nothing else, I respect. I enjoy a lot of his work, and while I can't say he's my favorite writer, he's certainly one of the best at the technical craft of serialized, sequential art. So it's interesting to hear him engage in self-criticism in the same interview at Comic Book Resources that launched yesterday's post:

Robert Taylor: Biggest weakness?

...Mark Waid: ...my dialogue comes off as being a little too expository sometimes.

RT: Can you explain that a little more for me?

MW: Har de har har.

I've heard criticism of Waid's over-explanatory dialogue before and I understand it. In The Brave and the Bold #3, for example, the villain takes a page to explain who exactly each member of the Fatal Five is to a room of hostages who really don't care.

And while it does sound a little unnatural to hear the villain rattle off player stats, at least Waid understands one important fact: Exposition is Necessary. Sometimes it's a necessary evil, but it is always needed.

Remember, every comic is someone's first comic, especially an intentionally new reader friendly book like The Brave and the Bold. So some readers just won't know who the Fatal Five are. Probably even less are familiar with the new Blue Beetle. Heck, it's conceivably someone's first time reading about Batman. (okay, not really...)

It may give "the fans" a thrill to catch something that the casual reader just can't, but if someone who hasn't read comics for the past ten years is constantly left in the dark, then they're also going to be left in the cold, and just walk. The Fuck. Away.

You can't just throw, say, the Ultra-Humanite at the heroes and expect the reader to care without somehow explaining who he is and why he's a threat. When Dolores Winters pops up in the poorly-written Justice League of America #8, the casual reader has no reason to care at all because Brad Meltzer doesn't stop to explain that Winters is the Ultra-Humanite. And that the Ultra-Humanite is a body-hopping evil genius, who is also sometimes a giant white ape, as John Rogers explains in just one (1) word balloon in the much, much better Blue Beetle. (Really, why aren't more people reading that book?)

It used to be, comics had narrators who flat out told the reader what he or she needed to know to enjoy a particular issue, usually the writer/editor, who provided backstory and pointed to the issues in which those stories took place. Every Marvel Comic was (still is?) supposedly being told to you by Stan Lee himself, in his own inimitable style. Or if not the writer, than a host like the Crypt Keeper or the protagonist like Wally West in Waid's run on The Flash told the story directly to the reader.

In the wake of Watchmen, as superhero comics became more self-consciously filmic, narrators were more or less discarded as distracting artifice. Which is an acceptable artistic choice but it meant the thankless job of exposition fell to dialogue between characters.

Done well, and the reader never notices he learned something. Often, however, it's either Authority Figure explaining the plot to the Plucky Hero ("We believe Hitler is looking for the Arc of the Covenant. Here's why that's a bad thing..."), or it's Character A reminding Character B about something that Character B knows all too well ("Wow, you must be really angry that your girlfriend was brutally murdered yesterday by a gang of robot ninjas.")

But, and this is important, badly done exposition is better than no exposition at all.

Yes, the pleasure of ongoing stories is building on what came before, but not everyone read what came before and it's silly to expect them to have. So unless you want to just give up on new readers (and those without exceptional memories for details), you need some way to let readers know what's going on. Serial television shows employ "Previously on BLANK" segments before each episode to catch viewers up. Following that example, Marvel's been using title pages to re-cap the plot, to some good effect. And if you're not going to use a narrator to explain who and what everything is, then you're going to need to have characters speak in Waid's expository style now and then.

Or you could just have The Phantom Stranger explain everything. He's good at that.

What's Wrong With "Fun"?

Everything that's wrong with the current market for superhero comics, in one sentence:

“Fun” automatically kills off a lot of your sales.

says Mark Waid in this interview at Comic Book Resources (hat tip, Graeme McMillan at Blog@Newsarama).

Geez, that's depressing. I really love FUN superhero stories (including Waid and George Perez's The Brave and the Bold) and to hear that fun books aren't viable because the general comics buying audience isn't interested, is in fact repulsed by fun, is just baffling and disheartening.

I can't imagine NOT wanting to read a book my friends tell me is enjoyable, saying "Oh, I don't want to read Marvel Adventures: Avengers. I might be entertained!"

It seems "fun" and "interesting" are not the same thing to most comics fans. Judging from sales charts, the comics buying audience wants books about familiar superheroes, preferably acting in large groups, in stories that will have "repercussions" on later books. And since a "fun" book sounds like the opposite of a "serious" book that has "serious consequences", I guess most buyers don't feel "fun" books are worth spending money on.

But what's the point, then? Why buy crossover books that feature your favorite characters if you're not actually enjoying the books you're reading? If it's just to catch up with the characters, well, that's what the internet is for! And the internet is free!

And, once you've freed your wallet from the shackles of continuity porn, you can spend your hard-earned money on truly rewarding reading experiences, like Manhunter, The All-New Atom, Blue Beetle and, for the love of God, The Brave and the Bold. And if you're worried that "fun" isn't for you, well, a wise little bull said it best:

One thing I noticed is that the comics I like best are fun. That doesn't mean that they're funny (tho' they can be) or all have happy endings or are all written 'specially for kids (or even little stuffed bulls), but just that they are fun to read and when you turn the last page you can't wait to get next month's issue! John once described this as a comic that has a "sense of awe and wonder" and I guess that is as good a way as any to describe it. But I would describe it this way: COMICS OUGHTA BE FUN!

Some Say the World Will End in Fire...

I've been entering the Friday Night Fights for two weeks now, but last time Bully up'd the ante by throwing the nigh-omnipotent Dark Phoenix into the ring—then challenging us to come up with anyone, and I mean anyone, who could make her even sweat.

But let's face it, the best she managed to destroy was the Earth. Whereas for Mr. Mxyzptlk:

DESTROYING THE EARTH IS MERELY A MEANS TO AN ASS-KICKING!