I spent a chunk of this weekend celebrating (memorializing?) this week’s end of Mark Waid’s Superman-Gone-So-Very-Bad series Irredeemable, re-reading the whole thing (and catching up, too; I’d gone to trades somewhere along the line, and had then managed to lose track somewhere around Vol. 7, so there were 10 or so issues that were brand new for me), and realized towards the end something that, in retrospect, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed before. Namely, Irredeemable was Battlestar Galactica for superheroes.

By Battlestar Galactica, I’m hoping that you’re already ahead of my explanation that I mean Ron Moore’s 2004 reboot/reimagining of the show, instead of the 1970s original; for one thing, Waid’s superhero series lacked cyborg dogs or intergalactic casinos, even if I strongly suspect that Dirk Benedict in his prime would’ve made a great Charybdis in an imaginary Irredeemable movie. But the Moore version took the show’s central concept seriously, and provided viewers with a world where things kept getting worse, and the odds for the survival of the human race ever longer, no matter how valiantly our heroes kept fighting, an d… well, that’s kind of what happens in Irredeemable, too.

In both stories, too, you quickly come to realize that the grand stakes of what’s happening is ultimately backdrop for the personal stories of their central characters, whether it’s Starbuck’s death-wish-turned-rebirth and renewal or the slow death (transformation?) of Qubit’s optimism and morality in the face of repeatedly terrible, tragic events. Both Irredeemable and Battlestar Galactica offer glimpses into just how “bad” the actions and intentions of self-styled “good people” can become in impossible circumstances, but there’s more to both than just wishing to tear down heroic ideals; after all, there’s something noble and heroic in the fact that characters in both universes refuse to give up despite the mind-numbing horror they’ve witness (and, in some cases, been party to); for all he’s done wrong, for example, there remains something weirdly inspirational about Qubit’s belief that he can still manage to save the world even when a dramatic, extreme final solution has been unleashed by the world’s governments.

(Both stories also offer cautionary tales about people who proclaim themselves saviors, in Gaius Baltar and Charybdis; beware people who want to tell you that they’re here to save the world, they say, as if seeing what happened to the Plutonian wasn’t enough.)

Irredeemable shares the moral complexity of BSG when dealing with its villains, as well; as scary and seemingly “evil” as the Plutonian seems to be at the series’ start, by the time the character has been taken off world – Is that a spoiler? It happened more than a year ago, so I’m hoping it’s not — and we see what he dreams of, it’s clear that he’s as lost and powerless as everyone else, and impossible not to feel for him and wish for his redemption, as impossible as that seems.

One final parallel between Galactica and Irredeemable is in the ending of both, which I won’t spoil as much as I want to. I think the latter handles its ending in a far more satisfactory way, without the stretching and seeming desperation of tying off/tossing off some plot threads in order to close up shop in time, but there’s … something in what happens in the two that makes me feel as if they’re not a million miles away, nonetheless.

All of this is meant to say: Irredeemable has quietly, slowly been a series that’s pushed and pulled at ideas of superhero morality, picking at and deconstructing cliches and ideas heavily sewn into the DNA of the genre in the same way that Battlestar Galactica did for science fiction, but without nearly as much praise or attention being thrown in its direction. With tomorrow’s #37 finishing the whole story up, I hope that changes; that more people can read the whole thing in one sitting, like I did, and see the threads pull together and the story unfold in total and realize just how damn good the whole thing really is. It’s been just over three years since we were told that Mark Waid was evil, but like so much of Irredeemable, that’s misdirection: He just writes like the devil, it seems.

Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.

Batman, Inc. #1

Chris Arrant

If I had $15, this ever-lovin’ comics fan would first pick out Dark Horse Presents #12 (Dark Horse, $7.99). First off: John Layman and Sam Kieth doing an Aliens story, can you believe that? That debut, coupled with the return of Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus, makes this another DHP worth buying. After that, I’d jump into Prophet #25 (Image, $2.99) to see Brandon Graham’s rollicking story with special guest artist Farel Dalrymple. The creators lined up on this Extreme Comics revival continue to impress me, and I’m excited to see new work by Dalrymple here. Third up would be Secret Avengers #27 (Marvel, $3.99), and I’m all hyped up to see how Rick Remender handles the touchy subject of Marvel’s original Captain Marvel. As for the artist, I’m still waiting for Renato Guedes to wow me the way he did before he jumped from DC to Marvel; the previews for this show some promise, so I’m excited to see the entire package.

If I had $30, I’d double back to get the return of Batman Incorporated #1 (DC, $2.99). Grant Morrison’s schedule, along with the New 52, seemed to harpoon this title last year, but I’m hoping this is some attempt to right that ship. Next up would be Fantastic Four #606 (Marvel, $2.99), seeing Jonathan Hickman come full circle as his run nears conclusion by going back to where the FF started: with four people in space suits. Ron Garney is an interesting choice to draw this one, and his take on the Thing is right up there with Stuart Immonen’s. Last up would be Irredeemable #37 (BOOM! Studios, $3.99). I admit I switched to trades a couple issues ago, but I’m jumping back in — spoilers be damned — to find out the end to this story. I’m a little bit morose that artist Peter Krause isn’t the one drawing the finale given all he put into this, but Diego Barretto is an able artist to draw what Waid has set out for this final issue. Oh, hey, I’ve got $5.06 left so I’ll live up to the the title of this Robot 6 feature and get some food: a hot dog from Voodoo Dogs in Tallahassee. Have you seen their new commercial?

If I could splurge, I’d finish eating my hot dog and pick up Comic Book History of Comics (IDW Publishing, $21.99). I’ve failed at life when I couldn’t track down all six of these issues on my own, but IDW offering it all up in one package saves me from that level of hell. Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey have put on a master class here in doing bio comics, especially bio comics about comics, and as a journalist, comics fan and would be comics writer myself this hits all the right spots for an engrossing read.

Mind MGMT #1

Graeme McMillan

If there’s one thing that forgotten masterpiece SeaQuest DSV taught the world, it’s that everything is better with a talking dolphin. No surprise, then, that if I had $15 this week, the very first thing I’d pick up would be Mind MGMT #1 (Dark Horse, $3.99), the new series by Matt Kindt that is described by the publishers as involving “weaponized psychics, hypnotic advertising, talking dolphins, and seemingly immortal pursuers” amongst other things, including a mystery about why every passenger on a commercial flight lost their memory. Color my curiosity tingled. The other must-grab for me is the return of Batman Incorporated (#1, DC Comics, $2.99) which will hopefully have its mojo back after its break. It started well and finished well last time ’round, but some of the middle …? Well, let’s just say that Grant Morrison’s version of the Internet would’ve been awesome in a world without Tron and leave it at that.

If I had $30 this week, I’d fight random strangers for my own copy of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s Comic Book History of Comics (IDW, $21.99), because – well, it’s Van Lente and Dunlavey (everyone who’s read Action Philosophers knows what I mean; everyone who hasn’t, you should fix that really soon), and it’s comics history done with style, wit and not just a little smarts. Having missed some of the single issues, I’ve been looking forward to this collection for awhile.

When it comes to splurging, I’m going with the Uncanny X-Force: Otherworld Premiere HC (Marvel, $24.99). I’m somewhat agnostic when it comes to X-Force despite many people smarter than me trying to convince me otherwise, but I loved Captain Britain and Excalibur back in the day, so this might be the best chance I’ll have – not to mention the … third? fourth chance, maybe? — to get into this series once and for all.

Also, that is a great advert, Chris, even if the guy is totally not eating the hot dog at the end. Seriously, dude: COMMIT.

Steve Ditko Archives, Volume 3: Mysterious Traveler

Chris Mautner

If I had $15, I’d join the prevailing crowd and pick up the first issue of the new Batman Incorporated series. Like Graeme said, the past iteration was hit and miss (though nowhere near as schizophrenic in quality as Morrison’s run on Batman), but I’m hoping this reset offers a fresh start.

If I had $30, I already have the four Ignatz issues, but I won’t let that stop me from recommending Interiorae, Gabriella Giandelli’s dark and occasionally surreal look at the drab lives of various people living in an apartment complex. This new version of the atmospheric – downright moody even – book allegedly is an improvement on the color printing, so newcomers may be getting the better deal here.

Splurge: More Steve Ditko? Why, certainly! Courtesy of Mysterious Traveler, the third volume in editor Blake Bell’s ongoing collection of early Ditko work, this one largely taken from Tales from the Mysterious Traveler and This Magazine is Haunted.

Dark Horse Presents #12

Brigid Alverson

Pickings look kinda slim this week.

If I had $15, I’d have money left over, because the only thing that appeals to me on this week’s list is Dark Horse Presents #12, which features the return of Steve Rude and Mike Baron’s Nexus. I’ll slap down $7.99 for that, and everything else in that issue will be bonus content.

With $30 in hand, though, I’d add on Holliday, a dark look at the story of Doc Holliday from David Dabbs and Nate Bowden, just because I like a good western once in a while, and this looks like a good western.

And if I’m feeling flush, I’d splurge on Makeshift Miracle, the print edition of Jim Zubkavich’s webcomic, illustrated with luminous paintings by Shun Hong Chan. It’s available online for free, but it sure would be nice to have a paper copy to keep.

Godzilla #1

Michael May

If I had $15, I’d start with the relaunch of IDW’s Godzilla ($3.99) by Duane Swierczynski and Simon Gane. Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters got kind of sloppy at the end, so I’m glad to see the monsters get a fresh start. And speaking of fresh starts, I’m also interested in Jeff Lemire’s take on Justice League Dark ($2.99) as an “Indiana Jones-type action-adventure” with treasure hunting, globetrotting, and “satellite members” like Frankenstein, Andrew Bennett from I, Vampire, Etrigan and Doctor Mist. I couldn’t get into Peter Milligan’s take on the series, but this sounds right in my wheelhouse. Next, Chris has made me hungry … for voodoo! Voodoo #9 also comes out this week, but instead I’ll snack on Dominque Laveau: Voodoo Child #3 ($2.99). [I wouldn't typically hijack this column's sub-title with something only I picked, but the only thing I could come up with for this week's popular pick was "Batman Incomplete Protein" and I just didn't want to do that to you.] Finally, I’d join Chris in reading Prophet #25 ($2.99).

With $30, I’d add some more single-issues to that pile, starting with All-Star Western #9 ($3.99) and Aquaman #9 ($2.99). Graeme sold me on Mind MGMT #1 ($3.99) with “talking dolphin,” so I’ll grab that. And I’ve been interested in Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse’s Resident Alien #1 ($3.50) since it was first announced. I love the combination of sleepy, small town murder mystery and alien lurker.

My splurge for the week would be Showcase Presents: Sea Devils, Volume 1 ($19.99). I’ve always been intrigued by the fantastic Russ Heath covers to those early issues and Bob Kanigher’s name promises a brilliant level of whackadoo in these underwater adventures.

Dark Horse editor Rachel Edidin misread the word “batarangun” on Twitter as “batarangutan,” and now, thanks to artist Mike Maihack, the rest is glorious history.

This morning’s exclusive announcement on The View of the impending nuptials of Northstar and Kyle Jinadu in the pages of Astonishing X-Men probably didn’t go quite like Marvel envisioned, as a giggling Joy Behar could hardly wait for the applause to subside so she could ask, “Do you think Batman and Robin could come out of the closet now?” And Whoopi Goldberg’s more heartfelt observations about the diversity represented on the cover of Astonishing X-Men #51 were quickly forgotten so they could move on to the next item about an unfortunate typo on the sign for the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

But as awkward (and, some would suggest, over-blown) as that promotional rollout for this wedding may have been, Robot 6 contributor Graeme McMillan reminds us that it could be worse by taking us back in time to 1987 and “the tongue-in-cheek ceremony” at Shea Stadium for Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson — officiated by Stan Lee, and attended by 50,000 baseball fans. Below, you can watch Entertainment Tonight‘s coverage of the publicity stunt, as well as the bizarre and excruciatingly long preview on Good Morning America in which the interviewer asks “Spider-Man” and “Mary Jane” whether they would have “children that were like, you know, little spider-babies or would they be normal, human babies.” You can also check out the much shorter segment on The View.

After that post appeared, I was reminded that Sullivan’s Sluggers was originally solicited a couple of years ago by Image Comics, so I asked Smith about that as well as his extremely successful use of Kickstarter. As I’m writing this, Smith and Stokoe’s book has raised more than $40,000 in pledges. Their original goal was $6,000, and there are still 24 days to go.

Michael May: Sullivan’s Sluggers was originally solicited through Image. What can you say about why it’s not being published there now?

Mark Andrew Smith: We know how many copies of Sullivan’s Sluggers retailers ordered. We were going to end up working for four years to make the book (working for free) and end up losing a lot of money to do it. Sullivan’s Sluggers through Kickstarter made more business sense, and selling direct from the creators to the readers. So it was a matter of stay put and don’t rock the boat or take a risk for once and change everything.

We chose the second option and I wouldn’t go back, not in a million years.

I absolutely love Image as a publisher. They are the best publisher in the world. I love the people that work there and they’re the best at what they do, which is putting out great books. I believe strongly in the principles of their founders. So this was about comic shops ordering too conservatively because Diamond has a no-returns policy (if retailers order books that don’t sell, they’re stuck with the bill).

The Kickstarter model has room for publishers and also room for retailers. Comics are small right now and this is growth, and it helps the creators ,who should be at the top of the pyramid but are actually almost under it, to actually benefit and be rewarded for their labors.

Kickstarter books need to be published and printed by people who know what they’re doing and have a lot of experience with that. So I could see publishers charging a fee for production and publishing in the future for Kickstarter creators to streamline things for publishing so that book quality stays high and has consistency.

Sullivan's Sluggers

I think in the future this will be a normal thing. Kickstarter will be there to fund projects but also to be a creator-centered distribution system.

I’d like to see a summit of creator-owned publishers get together in a room and sign a deal that they’ll stand strong to so they can do business with creators using Kickstarter and that it’s not Diamond-exclusive.

Sullivan’s may be published at Image at some point. I need to talk with them. I hope I don’t cause them any trouble, and I believe in my heart that what I’m doing here is right. We have to take care of ourselves financially, and we shouldn’t take the financial hit for retailers not ordering enough for us to at least break even and do the book for four years for free (which is as horrible as it sounds to do everything for free).

I think that needs to be in the creator bill of rights that the creators should betaken care of first instead of last like it is in this distribution system. The creator to has the right to be the (or at least a) retailer and we’ll see more and more of that in the next few years.

The Sullivan’s Sluggers campaign has obviously been very successful. What does that mean for your plans? Since all of the pledge amounts were going towards copies of the books, is it as simple as just increasing the print run? Or will you have to find other ways to use the extra money? Does that just translate into a larger payday for you and James (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?

The more books people buy the cheaper it is to print because higher print runs cost less money. Our goal is to get Sullivan’s into the hands of as many readers as we can. This isn’t really a fundraiser to meet a goal as it is a creator centered distribution model direct from the creator to the reader.

The sky is the limit.

There should be money to be made at the end of everything. That’s how businesses work and it should be the standard in comics that we make art and we make money. But, the sad thing is that most folks these days throw their hands up and go “Hey, it’s comics!” like we’re supposed to work for free (because we’re artists and artists aren’t supposed to make money). They act like we’re supposed to give everything away for free without getting anything for it and that if you make money you don’t love the art side of it.

Marvel and DC are businesses and their entire point is to make money, so why shouldn’t people in the creator-owned world be able to benefit and make art and money? I think this is hilarious, one-dimensional thinking. I wouldn’t ask my worst enemy to work their job without pay.

Sullivan's Sluggers

Extra money will help us out and also go towards new projects and speeding things up. I personally would like to hit 100K so I could do comics full time for the year, which I think I deserve after nine years of making comic books for free and just giving it away. I cannot drive this home enough: it’s okay if your creators make money and enjoy a better quality of life so that you don’t have to donate to a health fund for them when they’re older because they’re so poor. You should take care of them now. It should be that way and I think with new distribution methods it will become that way.

Are you comfortable disclosing how many pledges were for digital copies vs. printed copies?

Two days in we have 74 backers for only the digital copies. But book backers get digital copies as well. We have 721 print-copy backers as of now, two days in. We have 27 days left, so those numbers will increase more and more.

Obviously, what happened with Sullivan’s Sluggers isn’t automatically repeatable by every other creative team, but what do you think this says about the future of Kickstarter as a distribution tool for independent creators?

Kickstarter is growing, and there’s a community right now that retweets and Facebook-shares and helps and promotes other people doing their comics. It’s beautiful. I have a fan base, but I don’t have a book out all the time to promote, so it makes sense throughout the year to help other people by promoting their work. Then when it’s my turn those people come through and are supportive of my endeavors. This year I’m going to take $300 and just make a point to only buy comics on Kickstarter because the projects are interesting and I want to support them.

Kickstarter is the other distribution outlet that’s the monopoly-buster and one that benefits creators first.

Nick Fury was co-created by Stan lee and Jack Kirby. A fictional WW2 army hero. He was reintroduced later as a cold-war spy. A Jack Kirby creation. But then Jim Steranko got a hold of him and transformed him into something else entirely. Steranko injected 60’s pop-culture and sensibilities into the character and his book. Fast forward to 2000, when Marvel decided to reboot their entire universe in a separate line of books called the ‘Ultimate Universe.’ In 2002, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch launched The Ultimates which reinvented the Avengers. A team assembled by a very different Nick Fury, modeled with the actor’s permission after Samuel L. Jackson. You tell me. Are any of these guys even the same character? Or are they different characters with the same name?”

– Scott Kurtz, on renewed calls for proper credit, and compensation, for
Jack Kirby’s contributions to the Marvel Universe

Perhaps the biggest news to come out of the Comics: Philosophy and Practice symposium in Chicago last weekend was the revelation that Chris Ware’s upcoming graphic novel Building Stories will not be presented like your traditional graphic novel but will instead be offered as a collection of little mini-comics of various shapes and sizes. The publisher Pantheon has some official pictures on its Tumblr.

This isn’t the first time someone’s attempted something like this (Vol. 5 of the Non anthology comes to mind, as does one of the recent Closed Caption Comics offerings), but the fact that Ware’s doing it with a major publisher like Pantheon holds the promise of great things. My expectations are high on this one.

West Coast Avengers #1

Comics | When 4-year-old Anthony Smith didn’t want to wear his hearing aid because superheroes don’t wear them, his mother emailed Marvel to ask if they had any pictures of superheroes wearing a hearing aid. Not only did Marvel editor Bill Rosemann respond with an image of the cover of 1984′s West Coast Avengers #1, which featured Hawkeye wearing a hearing aid, he also had artist Nelson Ribeiro transform Anthony into a superhero, Blue Ear. [Concord Monitor]

Publishing | Former Marvel editor Jody LeHeup, who let go by the publisher in October during a round of layoffs, has joined Valiant Entertainment as associate editor. [press release]

Conventions | Rich Lopez has a gallery of photos from last weekend’s Dallas Comic Con. [The Dallas Voice]

Thor: The Mighty Avenger #4

Creators | Roger Langridge gives more details on why he made the decision not to work for Marvel or DC Comics in the future. “Marvel’s shabby treatment of its founding creators, particularly Jack Kirby, has been a bone of contention for a lot of people since the 1980s, at least, so that underlying sense of discomfort was always there. It was the legal decision against the heirs of Jack Kirby last year that was the thing that made me think, ‘You know, I probably shouldn’t be doing this.’ The cartoonist Steve Bissette wrote a very articulate and passionate blogpost that was widely circulated at the time of that ruling, and I read it and nodded my head and thought: Yeah, it’s probably time to get out. I didn’t make a big noise about it at the time because the thing I’d just written for Marvel, John Carter: A Princess of Mars, hadn’t yet come out, and I didn’t think it was fair to drag my collaborator on that book, Filipe Andrade, down with me if there was a backlash. I didn’t feel it was my place to make that decision for him.” [Comic Riffs]

Greg Rucka

Creators | Brian Michael Bendis and Greg Rucka discuss Rucka’s new novel Alphas, writing, their children, the Internet and conventions. “You had Tweeted last week about you had retired from conventions. I think I’ll be following those footsteps very soon,” Rucka said. “I don’t think I can see myself doing conventions for very much longer. One of the things that you get consistently at conventions or bookstores or signings, if you last, is what is your advice and how do you do it. And I always end up saying the same thing. It always comes down to commitment to your craft. That’s the only thing you can control. You cannot control anything else. All you can control your relationship to your work and the effort you’re willing to put into it, and how willing you are to recognize that you’re never going to be good enough and that you always have to get better. There aren’t many trades in the world, and this is an artistic trade, but when you’re writing for a publisher, for money, there are not many trades in the world where you can say what you know is not enough. There’s always more to learn. You can learn the tax code for 2012 and you’ll be covered for 2013. But the thing you wrote yesterday and the thing you write tomorrow, you pray to God that is a qualitative difference that what’s coming out tomorrow will be better than yesterday because of what you learned.” [Mulholland Books]

Creators | Jessica Abel and Matt Madden discuss their upcoming book Mastering Comics: “In Mastering Comics, we return to all the topics covered in DWWP [Drawing Words and Writing Pictures] and work to not only deepen students’ understanding of things like pictorial composition and design, inking, and story structure, but more importantly, to broaden it. DWWP is a highly structured book, with 15 chapters that build carefully on one another, and it intentionally doesn’t offer a big palette of choices for how to make a comic. This is so that the tasks in the book can be achievable, and readers will come out of the book as cartoonists. But of course, we’re very aware that there are endless ways to make comics, and MC is where we try to open those floodgates and point students out in new directions.” [MTV Geek]

Justice League Dark #9

Creators | Jeff Lemire shares some details about his upcoming run on Justice League Dark, noting that readers can expect the book to feature more “Indiana Jones-type action-adventure, treasure hunting and globetrotting” than Peter Milligan’s issues. [USA Today]

Creators | Writer David Hine talks about his upcoming Image series Storm Dogs, about a mostly-female team of space police investigating a string of murders on a planetary backwater. [The Beat]

Creators | Ales Kot and Riley Rossmo discuss their upcoming Image graphic novel Wild Children, which is about about “a group of high school kids who take their peers and teachers hostage because they’re upset with the education system.” [Hero Complex]

Creators | Underwire creator Jennifer Hayden talks about drawing comics as memoir: “The interesting thing to me about drawing a memoir is that it can give you a chance to let other characters refute what your character is saying in the story. I’ve drawn some difficult memories about my mother in my upcoming book. Just using prose, I would have had trouble conveying what a pain in the ass I was being at the time, how I was helping to make things difficult. Drawing it, I can make it clear on my mother’s face just what she thinks of me and what a little creep I’m being. I was so relieved to discover this as I was working. But most importantly, the drawings make the relationships between characters crystal clear. And that, more than anything, is what I’m reaching for.” [Her Circle]

Commentary | Joe Gross lists five comics “that deserve your support,” including Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? and Goliath by Tom Gauld. [Austin American-Statesman]

Commentary | David Brothers discusses the right and wrong way to cuss in comics. [4thletter!]

Advice | Marc Alan Fishman has some words of wisdom for budding webcomics creators, including the importance of deadlines (yes, even on the web) and some reassuring words on finding one’s voice. [ComicMix]

“One of the major iconic DC characters will reveal that he is gay in a storyline in June,” Courtney Simmons, DC Entertainment’s senior vice president of publicity, confirmed to ABC News following the weekend revelation by Co-Publisher Dan DiDio that the formerly heterosexual figure will become “one of our most prominent gay characters.”

With those 18 words, Simmons drastically narrows the list of candidates, eliminating such popular guesses as Vibe (he’s neither a major character nor an iconic one) and Hawkgirl (she’s a … she). However, Simmons’ quote also raises the question of just what DC considers “major” and “iconic.”

Fox News, ensuring plenty of website traffic, asks, “Could Superman be gay?” while across the Atlantic, the Daily Mail ponders, “Is Batman gay?” DC obviously won’t go that iconic — their Earth-2 counterparts are off the table, too — but beyond that, there’s the issue of how DiDio presented his announcement (or, rather, his response to a question from the Kapow! audience): The implication is that the character hasn’t yet appeared in the New 52, something supported by Batman writer Scott Snyder, who clarified this morning on Twitter that “the announcement was ‘a character not seen since the relaunch will come out as gay.’” (He followed that with the assertion that “Bruce’s orientation is Gotham.”)

That even further reduces the list of contenders: We’re now looking for a major iconic male character who’s not appeared since DC’s linewide relaunch last August. But … we’re not necessarily holding out for a hero. Note that neither Simmons nor (apparently) DiDio said “superheroes”; they said “characters.”

So maybe the online speculation about Wally West is misguided, and we should instead be looking in the direction of the assorted rogues galleries. Ra’s al Ghul, anyone?

Halfling and Wizard

First up this round is the above shirt from Threadless, generically named “Halfling and Wizard.” Any similarities to trademarked characters is purely coincidental.

Green Lantern Equation

Fans of TV’s The Big Bang Theory might recognize this one, as the character Sheldon wore it on an episode earlier in the season. Honestly I’m not sure what it means, as I don’t know what the guitar pick thing in the first panel is supposed to represent. Maybe a dead alien? Anyway, if you’re smarter than I am, you can find this one exclusively at The Comic Center of Pasadena.

Sex Bob-Omb

WeLoveFine.com recently held a design-a-Scott Pilgrim-shirt contest, and they’ve announced the winners … which include the above Sex Bob-Omb shirt. You can find all the winners here.

And finally, Kitson has introduced a whole line of official The Dark Knight Rises T-shirts, featuring Batman, Bane and Catwoman. They’re a little pricey for me, but they do look cool.

Most papercraft dolls, as cool as they are, are stumpy little blocky deals, but My Paper Heroes has an Avengers set that smashes the old look. The link will lead you to downloadable PDFs with everything you need, including a variant hairstyle for Black Widow’s Iron Man 2 look, a helmet for Captain America and more. Unlike Widow’s feelings about giant, flying leviathans, I can totally see how that’s a party.

John Rozum lets readers take an in-depth look at his process in a recent post on his experiment at writing a comic script using the Marvel Method. For those unfamiliar with the term, the Marvel Method is the approach developed by Stan Lee during the early days of Marvel in which Lee would provide brief outlines of the events in a comic book issue (as opposed to a full script), let the artist draw the whole thing, and then come back and add dialogue over the finished panels. The advantages of that format include letting the artist have a lot of creative input, while also requiring less time from the writer (meaning that someone like Lee could write a ton of books at the same time).

But, as Rozum points out, there are disadvantages as well:

I went into it thinking it would be freeing and allow the artist a bigger hand in determining the choreography of the action sequences and interesting ways to depict the more normal day-to-day life sequences. What happens, and this is by no means the fault of the artist, is that the story comes back looking fantastic until you sit down to the dialogue for the art. Expressions and body language are wrong for supporting the proper feelings being conveyed in dialogue, characters are on the wrong side of panels (or even missing) disrupting the flow of speech between them, the panel that requires the greatest amount of text will be the smallest on the page, as often ends up happening to the panel which should be the largest and most dramatic. Important props end up missing, etc. This happened even when I provided a plot that actually broke everything down page by page and provided an overview of the emotional character arcs and thematic nature of the story.

Instead, Rozum prefers to give artists all the information they need to understand the story and has found that this is surprisingly liberating for many of the artists he’s worked with. “For a long while I felt guilty, like I was micromanaging everything and not letting them have as much input, but my guilt was erased when no artists complained and often would commend me for putting so much thought into the script that it would often trigger ideas of their own and that they felt like they had more room to explore how they want to depict the story.”

He adds, “Something I always emphasize with any artist I work with is that even though my scripts are detailed and broken down panel by panel, they should feel free to reconfigure that if they think they can do it better in fewer panels, more, etc. This usually works marvelously (no pun intended).”

Faith Erin Hicks

“When I first started doing webcomics back in the dark ages of the early ’00s, word of mouth was how people found your stuff, but it was on a much smaller scale, and much slower. You’d have to get your comic passed around via e-mail, or posted in forums or linked to by other big artists. The whole crazy gag/meme/weird fandom social media comics thing didn’t really exist back then, so maybe people were doing more original stuff, but that’s just from what I remember and might not be true. I’ve never been a big fandom person. I feel like online comics nowadays are perhaps more mainstream, whatever that word means. Like everyone’s making comics and everyone’s passing comics around and comics are just this one part of the Internet, like cat pictures or whatever, rather than this specialized section, which was how it felt when I first started making them. Comics back then felt… I guess kind of niche. Now they’re part of the rainbow of fun that is the Internet. It feels like a good thing to me, but I’m sure there’s a downside to it. I guess people could complain that the craft of online comics is slipping, like, ‘Oh, this stupid gag comic about He-Man gets a million tumblr notes, but this impassioned comic about one’s state of being only gets 400.’ But I don’t even really see that, because it seems to me that the good stuff is always rising to the top. Sure, stupid He-Man comics will always get popular play, but whatever, that’s the Internet.”

– Faith Erin Hicks, in a thoroughly entertaining interview with Tom Spurgeon about how she got started in comics, her latest project Friends with Boys and much more. Maybe what we need is an impassioned comic about He-Man’s state of being.

The sci-fi site io9.com has a sneak peek at Chip Kidd’s new graphic novel Batman: Death by Design, which focuses on Batman’s relationship to the physical structures of Gotham City. 2000AD artist Dave Taylor illustrates the story, which involves a series of construction-site mishaps that occur during Gotham City’s building boom. Says Kidd:

I started thinking about living and working in New York, and one of the great tragedies was the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in 1963, because it was a beautiful building needlessly torn down. As somebody who has to use the modern Penn Station, it’s a horrible, stifling thing, after they threw it in the basement of Madison Square Garden. And there were these Manhattan crane collapses in the spring of 2008. I thought, “How could these two things possibly be related?” Batman is very much about architecture, as he uses the buildings as transportation and defense. Great Batman stories always incorporate architecture in some way, but I hadn’t seen a story that particularly dealt with that.

I can’t agree more about Penn Station, and it’s interesting that Kidd picks up on something we are all aware of and makes it explicit. Check out one of the pages below, and more at i09. The book is due out May 30.

“I’ve been thinking that I’d like to see the next book take a different direction than the last,” she wrote. “Not just a Volume II, but something new to offer. And I’ve been ready to do something different as well. I’d like to tell some stories that mean something to me, with a personal connection.” To that end, she’s been studying her hometown and the people there.

“I am trying to find the tone I’d like, and practice a different way of telling stories,” she said. “Collections of small stories that paint a big picture. It’s the little moments that interest me, human, and funny, and sad, because that’s life. Relatable, and real. I figure now was the time to do it since I impulsively start drawing those stories anyway, and have sketchbooks full of little scenes. If I made this book it would be a smaller think than Hark!, quieter, but I wouldn’t mind.”

She’s already started posting some comics that demonstrate what she’s talking about and the results are — as she says — funny, sad and very human.

The full list of winners:

Best Writer: Scott Snyder

Best Artist: Sara Pichelli

Best Superhero or Sci-Fi Movie: X-Men First Class

Best Game or Toy: Arkham City

Best TV Show: Game of Thrones

Best Publisher: DC Comics

Best Comic Hero: Batman

Best Newcomer: Sara Pichelli

Best Trade: The Walking Dead

Best Ongoing Series: Detective Comics

Best Limited Series: The Dark Angel Saga

Man of the Year: Scott Snyder

Sandman Slipcase Edition

DC Entertainment will release a slipcase edition of Sandman this November, collecting all 10 volumes of the landmark series by Neil Gaiman and friends. The slipcase will retail for $199, which is about what you’d pay if you bought all the books by themselves at full price. Amazon has it available for pre-ordering for $125. (Update: the price went up today to $179).

According to Gaiman, the collections are recolored, using the recolored Absolute Edition pages of the first few books.

Less than a year after Dan DiDio indicated that DC Comics wouldn’t alter the sexual orientations of existing characters in the New 52, the co-publisher revealed Saturday at the Kapow! Comic Convention in London that he’s changed his position.

When asked by a fan during a convention panel why race or age could be changed in the relaunch but not sexual orientation, Bleeding Cool reports DiDio responded that a previously established heterosexual character will be reintroduced as “one of our most prominent gay characters.” Bob Wayne, senior vice president of sales, added that like President Obama, DiDio’s stance “has evolved.”

It’s a significant shift from July, just before the relaunch, when DiDio told the gay and lesbian magazine The Advocate, “One of the things we’re very focused on doing for these types of stories is rather than [change an existing] character, we want to make sure that this is the basis of who that character is right from the start. So if we’re going to introduce a gay character in Teen Titans, we want to make it a new character and make sure that is an iatrical part of who he is, or who she is, right from the start so we can really lean and grow with her or him.” (Note: That’s probably supposed to be “integral,” not “iatrical.”)

The New York Post weighed in this morning, suggesting that DC “could be feeling the gay heat ” from Marvel, which appears poised to wed Northstar to his boyfriend Kyle next month in the pages of Astonishing X-Men.

Naturally speculation has already begun as to the the identity of the newly gay DC character, with the DC Universe Gays blog floating everyone from Shazam and Kid Eternity to Vibe and Hawkgirl as possible candidates.

Hot Dog Beach

Welcome to What Are You Reading?, our weekly rundown of what comics and other stuff we’ve been checking out recently. Today our special guest is cartoonist Austin English, creator of the graphic novel Christina and Charles and publisher of Domino Books.

To see what Austin and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click below.

Michael May

I’m finally digging into some comics I picked up at C2E2, starting with Ryan Kelly’s Funrama #2. You guys, it’s so cool. Funrama #1 felt like a goofy riff on Chris Claremont-era X-Men comics so that Kelly could scratch an itch and do something light-hearted and different from his usual, Vertigo-type work. That’s so not a bad thing, please don’t misunderstand me, but this second issue, though still weird and entertaining, gets deeper and hints at even further depths for Kelly to explore in future issues. It’s obviously still a way for Kelly to blow off some fun steam, but the main character – a high school superheroine named Raccoon – feels more real than the first issue’s Mutant Punks. It’s also surprising that he explains the name of the comic by using it in the story. I won’t spoil how, but it was a revelation to discover that Funrama is more than just a generic name for what I thought was going to be an anthology of loosely connected stories. Kelly’s doing some real world-building and even though he’s obviously having a great time doing it, he’s also building in some sinister elements that will pay off later. I highly recommend tracking him down at a convention for these or ordering them through his website.

Fury MAX #1

I also read Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov’s Fury MAX #1, but that was much less fun. I was all set for a great, no-holds-barred, Cold War adventure, but mostly it’s just Nick Fury looking grumpy while reluctantly helping France defend its interests in Indochina by… well, having a lot of meetings, apparently. The supporting cast is more interesting than Fury, but I’m not dedicating $4 an issue to reading about those guys. Not even if Nick Fury gets to say the F-word.

Finally, I re-read the first volume of Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea. I’m getting ready to continue the series and wanted to remind myself of the story. What I really reminded myself of though is how gorgeous and evocative the artwork is. There are lots of great pages and panels, but one in particular still haunts me with its power to communicate the awe and fear that come with swimming in incredibly deep water. Can’t wait to dive into the rest.

Chris Mautner

Animal Man Vol. 1: The Hunt — I really liked the first issue of this series, so I was quite disappointed to find it didn’t really deliver on that initial promise. The menace and weirdness hinted at in the first chapter turns into a rote “evil supernatural force seeks to destroy everything” plot, complete with a “young child is the only one that can save us from oblivion.” It’s a very old, rote plot, and writer Jeff Lemire doesn’t really do anything to bring a fresh spin on it, apart from the gore (and this may well be the goriest book in DC’s stable right now, which is saying something). Indeed, even the dialogue between Animal Man and his daughter seems off at times. The only real saving grace here is artist Travel Forman, whose angular, clean style really serves the grotesque horror aspect of this story well. Unfortunately, I understand he’s leaving the book, and with him, so goes my interest in it.

Wonder Woman: Blood

Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Blood — Is it just me or does Wonder Woman seem like a supporting character in her own book? As though Azzarello, like so many other writers down the line, can’t quite figure out what to do with her, or perhaps he just had a story about the Greek gods he’s been wanting to use for a long time and this was his big opportunity. Whatever the case, and despite the complete reversals of her mythology and various battle scenes, she doesn’t seem to come to life here, the interest clearly seems to be on the various gods and the lady pregnant with Zeus’ baby. This is far from sloppy work — Azzarello’s a decent writer and Chiang is an excellent artist, and god knows it’s better than just about any other WW book I’ve read in the past 15 years — but all the same, I felt myself fighting to stay interested in what happened to any of these characters. Also: Why doesn’t the pregnant lady just terminate the pregnancy? I realize it opens a whole political and ethical kettle of fish to even pose the question, but still, c’mon.

J. Caleb Mozzocco

Two Wednesdays have passed since I last contributed to this feature, which means I’ve picked up two handfuls of new, single-issue format comic books from the local comic shop, which I reviewed here and here.

Thanks to Marvel’s accelerated publishing schedule, it seems like half of such books I read now are new issues of Daredevil.

Speaking of comics I read but reviewed elsewhere, I finally caught up with the Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors collection, which includes the first seven issues of DC’s short-lived, $4 Guy Gardner series, the one with the blood-puke cover (It’s full of rather amazing, I-can’t-believe-they-actually-published-that scenes, including a climactic puke duel, in which the burning blood-puking heroes take on a villain who pukes live snakes), and I finally finished Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles of The Holy City, which is maybe Delisle’s best work to date, partly because of how his skills as an observer and cartoonist continue to sharpen and strengthen, and partly because of the subject matter (And if you’ve ever read any of Delisle’s previous “chronicles” work, you know what a big deal it is if this is his best work to date, since his worst work to date has been so great).

Level Up

I also read Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham’s phenomenal Level Up, and felt kind of mad at myself for having waited so long to read it—it’s a rather amazing coming of age (repeatedly!) tale with a particularly peculiar premise that Yang and Pham manage to pull off beautifully. Pham’s artwork is really something to see here, featuring a simple, homemade look —dabbed-on water color, shaky panel borders, visible pencil lines, the texture of the paper the original art was produced on reproduced in the finished product—that belies the craft and attention to detail its conveying.

I hope someone very smart is currently writing a book about the literary work coming out of the first generation to have grown up with video games that directly alludes to that body of shared experience, as there seems to be a lot of it, in both comics and prose. This is, of course, another example.

And check out that cover design: when you hold the book in your hands, it actually looks like you can play the cover. I’m not ashamed to admit I tapped those buttons for a few minutes before and after reading.

Saving the best for last, this week I also read Michael Rabagliati’s Paul Has A Summer Job, one of the cartoonists semi-semiautobiographical graphic novels about his protagonist Paul. This one chronicles Paul’s summer as a counselor at a camp for disadvantanged children. Rabagliati is one of the best there is when it comes to moving a pen across paper. The very basic, very simple task of making a black line on white space is something he does so well that each and every individual panel is a work of art in and of itself. If you wanted to spend hours and hours cutting this book apart with a pair of scissors, and rearranging all the panels at random, it would still be a beauty to behold.

Paul Has A Summer Job

That said, the story all those beautifully chosen and executed lines are in service of is a great one, alternately funny and poignant in the way one’s own memories of one’s own eighteenth (and/or seventeenth and/or nineteenth or twentieth) summers are. The ending, in which we check in with Paul 20 years or so later than the events that occupy
the bulk of the book, totally broke my heart. In a good way.

It’s not often I read a comic book that makes me tear up at the end. At least, it’s not often enough.

Oh, and I also read Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse Vol. 2 by Ming Ming, but I’m afraid it was no damn good. I like the premise of this series, which basically just removes the giant robots and mysterious alien angels from the original Evangelion story, and has the protagonists all attending the same Japanese school, now facing off against angels who possess the bodies of teenagers in hand-to-hand combat. It’s smaller in scale, and gives a reader an opportunity to hang out with the characters in a different context, one that allows for more time spent with those characters.

But it is, surprisingly, deadly dull. I thought I’d try this second volume to see if the series grew on me, but aside form the funny first chapter—in which the kids perform a Christmas pageant, with Asuka as the Virgin Mary and Rei going method in order to play a horse—its mainly devoted to Shinji dithering over the things Shinji dithered over in the other, previous versions of the story.

Tom Bondurant

This week I finished the I … Vampire! paperback, which collected the feature’s original run in House Of Mystery plus a Batman team-up from Brave and the Bold. Writer J.M. DeMatteis is credited as Andrew Bennett’s creator, but he only wrote a handful of these stories before Bruce Jones and then Dan Mishkin & Gary Cohn succeeded him. Artist Tom Sutton’s contributions tie everything together, since he pencilled and/or inked most of the stories. Regardless, there’s no real authorial vision, and not much sense of an overarching storyline beyond Andrew’s quest to defeat his ex-lover Mary and her Blood Red Moon organization. That’s disappointing, but the stories themselves are pretty decent. Andrew fights racist politicians, travels in time, and (in one of the series’ harder-to-swallow mini-arcs) learns the truth behind a new cancer vaccine. (Whenever I write the history of Earth-One, I will be sure to include those few months when cancer was apparently cured.) Actually, one of the hardest things about reading this book was the knowledge of Andrew’s future I learned in one of DeMatteis’ later series, the late-’80s incarnation of Dr. Fate. It didn’t really spoil things for me, but it sure made Andrew’s history that much more complicated.

Next, not really comics, but close: reading 2005′s Star Wars Poster Book (by Peter Vilmur and Steven Sansweet), I was pleasantly surprised to learn another comics artist contributed to the first film’s early marketing. We all know about Howard Chaykin’s Comic-Con poster, but I did not know that Nick Cardy was brought in to touch up Tom Jung’s one-sheet. Among other things, Cardy added the droids to the iconic Luke-and-Leia-on-the-hillside image. I will literally never look at that poster the same way again.

Snarked!

Finally, I read the first collection of Roger Langridge’s Snarked! and enjoyed it greatly. I’m more familiar with his Muppet Show comics, so to me Snarked! has a slightly different rhythm, which took some getting used to. Past that point, though — and past the Gryphon’s superficial resemblance to Sam the Eagle — it was quite fun. I was expecting it to be a more complete story, but that just means I’m eager for more.

Brigid Alverson

I’m writing this aboard Amtrak’s California Zephyr, on a cross-country trip from San Francisco to Boston. My reading for the trip is Henry Kisor’s Zephyr, which is all about this train. Being a reporter, Kisor got to go behind the scenes with the crew and even ride with the engineer in the locomotive; he also talks about the history of trains, the history of this particular train route, and the places it goes through. The book was originally written in the 1990s, but I picked up the Kindle edition, which has photos and an updated afterword. Because, yes, I’m not just a comics nerd, I’m a train nerd too.

I’m going to be on a panel at BEA about hot graphic novels for the summer and fall, so I have loaded up my iPad with digital review copies and my knapsack with galley. The one that led all the rest is Raina Telgemeier’s Drama, a followup to her successful YA graphic novel Smile. This isn’t a sequel, but it’s in the same spirit, with a more sophisticated story. Telgemeier follows a group of middle-school students as they produce their school musical. The title has an obvious double meaning, as the story follows the romantic entanglements of the cast and crew, especially Callie, the lead character and the set designer for the show. Telgemeier has a good feel for situations and dialogue, and she includes both straight and gay characters in a matter-of-fact way that feels genuine. In terms of storytelling and technique, this is a more sophisticated book than Smile, and I hope it finds its audience as Smile did.

Austin English

The Duke and His Army by Emelie Östergren

The Duke and His Army

This is a rich book—to use a cliched phrase, it rewards rereading. The imagery is personal but not in a confessional way or in a style that is meant to bond the reader with the author. When I look at William Blake’s books, I feel uncomfortable because the imagery is so intensely felt and so alien. Something personal is communicated in those books, but not in a language I understand entirely. That makes them supreme works of art (to me). It’s on the reader to develop themselves to understand the intensity of what is happening. I’m not comparing Duke and His Army to Blake (that would be a silly and damning comparison for ANY book), but it does start scratching on that door of expression. There are patterns, sequences and anger here (‘You’re a hopeless woman, or are you in fact a woman? No, you’re to ugly and lack the discipline to be a man”) that is so strong but also so obscure. You understand it with some fraction of your emotional vocabulary and the rest you feel strongly impressed by.

Time Spent in Brandon Man by Jonathan Petersen

Time Spent in Brandon Man

I first found Petersen’s work in the Nog a Dod anthology edited by Marc Bell. It immediately stood out to be for its straightforward, stark qualities. But for Petersen, stark doesn’t mean conservative. There’s a real adventurous quality to the drawing—Petersen has a style but he approaches each drawing with fresh hand and eyes. Drawings are filled with hatching that Petersen uses expressively—his hatching doesn’t make something fade into the background. You get a little bit of comfort/fear/creative exhilaration from his densely hatched structures.

The story here unfolds in such a strange way. There is this basic quality to the plot–two friends in a new town. The characters speak in a way that is both funny and unsettling for their meat and potatoes style. ‘Here’s the shop for me, I like its best!’ I don’t agree/disagree with their statements and I don’t feel close or distant from them. Their situation feels equal parts funny and terrifying, a strong effect that Petersen achieves by being both casual and fiercely anti-casual all in the same line. ‘Here you are’ ‘Thanks’ ‘Lets go!’

Hot Dog Beach by Lale Westvind

This comic really excited me when I read it. Westvind has made a lot of comics, and I’d never read any of them until a few weeks ago. They are all very good, but this was my favorite. There’s a moment toward the end where a character begins pounding a car with her fists. The drawing gets so rubbery and then so muscular. Something about that combination hits this pleasure section in my brain so definitively. It’s like watching someone stand in front of you while their flesh melts AND gets electrocuted at the same time—somehow, their basic physical structure retains. That’s how Westvinds characters feel to me. Westvind includes a single drawing of a face on the last page that almost feels like her artistic manifesto: a stretched out grin, smooshed and lively, covered in zipatone.

The winners are:

Story of the year: Princeless, by Jeremy Whitley and M. Goodwin (Action Lab Entertainment)

Best writer: Jeremy Whitley, Princeless (Action Lab Entertainment)

Best artist: Sara Pichelli, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man (Marvel)

Best cover: Chew #27, Rob Guillory (Image Comics)

Best male character: Miles Morales, Ultimate Spider-Man; Brian Michael Bendis, writer, Sara Pichelli, artist; inspired by the character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (Marvel)

Best female character:  Adrienne, Princeless; created by Jeremy Whitley, writer, and M. Goodwin, artist (Action Lab Entertianment)

Rising star award for best self-publisher: Whit Taylor, Watermelon

Best comic strip or webcomic: Fungus Grotto, by Ms. Shatia Hamilton