DC Comics: The New 52

When the 2012 Free Comic Book Day line-up was announced, some folks mistakenly assumed that gold-level offering, DC Comics: The New 52 Special Edition would simply be a reprint of previously published material. As revealed on The Source today, that’s not the case.

The comic will feature “art by legendary illustrator Jim Lee and other top talents” and will “include a new story by New York Times bestselling writer Geoff Johns.” In addition, the book will also include previews of DC’s second wave of New 52 titles, including Batman Incorporated, Dial H, Earth 2, G.I. Combat, The Ravagers and Worlds’ Finest. They also say to stay tuned for “more surprises to come.”

In addition, the Free Comic Book Day site also has more information and a preview from Image 20, the 20th anniversary anthology of “six, all-new original stories promoting upcoming Image Comics titles.” Two of the titles will be Revival by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton, which you can preview on the site, as well as G-Man by Chris Giarrusso. The other stories will be announced at a later date.

The FCBD site also has previews from several other FCBD titles, including Oni’s Yo Gabba Gabba and Bad Medicine titles, and Viz’s Voltron Force, among others, so head over there if you want to check them out early.

Update: Apparently I misread the initial post and thought Jim Lee was drawing the new Geoff Johns story, but based on Brian Hibbs’ response in the comments section below, that may or may not be the case. I’ve updated the post above.

Neil Gaiman

Internet | Sandman co-creator Neil Gaiman joined with Trent Reznor, Aziz Ansari, OK Go and 14 other members of the creative community in signing an open letter to Congress against the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. “We fear that the broad new enforcement powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could be easily abused against legitimate services like those upon which we depend. These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process, causing collateral damage to the legitimate users of the same services – artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result,” the letter states.

Warren Ellis and Fantagraphics have also come out against the bill, while Peter David, who is against the bill in its current form, takes aim at those who “endorsed the piracy, supported the piracy, enabled the piracy, felt their own actions weren’t piracy, and now refuse to accept the consequences of their own actions.” ComicsAlliance has posted an editorial against the bill and rounded up webcomic reactions to the blackout. [NeilGaiman.com]

Alex de Campi

Creators | Artist Jimmy Broxton, a.k.a. James Hodgkins, shares his side of being asked to leave Ashes, the sequel to Alex de Campi’s Smoke that held a successful Kickstarter campaign last year. “… I’m incredibly sorry about the whole thing, and for me, it’s not just about the money, or lost earnings, or how Kickstarter works, this has come as a huge creative blow. I had committed to spend the next year drawing Ashes, the script is quite brilliant, Alex is an extremely talented writer, I very much wanted to be part of something that I thought was going to be special. I hope people can see that commitment from the work I have already produced for the series.” De Campi responds on Kickstarter, relating what she contends was a tumultuous collaboration process in which she “felt bullied” by Hodgkins. [The Beat, Kickstarter]

Retailing | Ryan Haupt argues that better comics shops are one solution to the problem of piracy, a notion that gets some pushback in comments. Regardless, he does make some good suggestions as to how comics shops can improve (some are obvious, yet widely ignored) and points out the problems with buying comics at bookstores. [iFanboy]

Retailing | ComicsPRO President Joe Field talks up the sixth annual meeting of the retailer trade and advocacy group, being held Feb. 9-11 in Dallas. [Flying Colors Comics]

DC Comics

Publishing | DC Comics Co-Publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee talk at length about the thinking behind the company’s line-wide relaunch. “I’ve been using the expression ‘death by a thousand cuts,’” DiDio says. “There are a lot of things that we could have been doing better across the line: We could have been writing better, we could have been drawing better, we could have been editing better, we could have been marketing better. By doing the relaunch it allowed us to examine every aspect of our business and look at it from a point of view of if we were building a business today, how would we build it? How would we create characters? What types of stories would we tell? How would the world feel? And we changed the interior look of our books and we changed the exterior of our books. And by introducing the same day digital aspect, it forced us to rethink our production process. We were faced with a lot of delays. And we were losing loyal fans who were coming week in and week out because the books weren’t there. And we had to make a new commitment to deliver our product on time. People said to me, ‘How’d you let things get so out of control?’ It’s like one day waking up and you’re 30 pounds overweight. You’re not exactly sure how you got 30 pounds overweight, but you know you didn’t eat 30 pounds of food the night before. It just happened.” [Fast Company]

Awards | Sarah Glidden’s How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less won a 2011 MEOC Middle East book award, presented last month at the Middle East Studies Association conference in Washington, D.C. [Middle East Outreach Council]

Jennifer de Guzman

Publishing | Jennifer de Guzman announced that, after 10 years, she has left her position as editor-in-chief of SLG Publishing: “My decade SLG was, I suspect, like no other decade anyone has spent working anywhere. I had great co-workers and got to work with fantastic creators, all of whom I will miss very much. (Though because this is comics and a community like no other, we will always stay in contact.)” [Possible Impossibilities]

Retailing | Chris Powell, current general manager and chief relationship officer for Texas-based comic chain Lone Star Comics, has accepted the newly created position of executive director of business development for Diamond Comic Distributors. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund board member will start his new position in March. [ICv2]

Miles Morales

Publishing | Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso answers questions about Miles Morales, the new Spider-Man of the Ultimate Universe: “When a little boy or girl looks at Spiderman, they do not see race. They do not see anything but the bright colors and the human shape. I think it is very easy for them to project themselves into that suit and to imagine themselves in that suit. Part of the thrill for me is knowing that there are little boys who will now pick up a Spiderman comic and see that after the adventure and the mask is peeled back he will look like them. As a Hispanic, it is nice to see Spiderman’s [...]  last name resemble the last name of my son.” [Fox News Latino]

Publishing | SanJose.com profiles SLG Publisher Dan Vado, who talks about why he started working in comics: “I think comics decided for me; I don’t think I really had any choice. There was never any point where I said, ‘This is what I’m gonna do.’ Comics was always something I was going to do while I’d figure out what it I was gonna do, and I guess I never really figured it out.” [SanJose.com]

Kate Beaton

Publishing | The Beat names its comics industry People of the Year. [The Beat]

Creators | Brian Wood chats about his upcoming Dark Horse series The Massive: “The world it inhabits is sort of a minefield of current events, of divisive politics (global warming, regime change, corporate bad-behavior, etc) but all that has sort of come to pass by the time the story opens. The damage has been done, and so its less about why/how things got so bad and more about, okay, what do we do now? Powerful social themes, but not political in the same way DMZ is.” [Suvudu]

Creators | Comics writer and filmmaker Kevin Smith answers questions about women and comic shops as he touts his new TV reality series Comic Book Men: “This is a show about these four dudes who work in this store. There are no women [in the store] yet…There should be a Comic Book Women, and good willing, there’ll be a spinoff Comic Book Women, and I’ll make shit ton of money.” [ThinkProgress]

Super Pro K.O., Vol. 1

Creators | Jarrett Williams discusses his work on the Oni Press graphic novel series Super Pro K.O. [Spandexless]

Creators | Writer Kyle Higgins looks at what’s ahead for DC’s Nightwing. [USA Today]

Comic art | The collaborative art blog Relaunched puts out the call for contributors to “Watchmen Too,” a Watchmen 2 theme month. [Calamity Jon, Save Us]

Commentary | Don MacPherson looks back at some of his favorites of the previous year. [Eye on Comics]

Fandom | When asked during a 60 Minutes interview whether his company was thin-skinned, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason popped his claws: “We’re like Wolverine and our skin has been melted off, and we’ve had Adamantium fused onto our bones.” [Nerd Reactor]

Justice League #5 was scheduled for release Jan. 18, according to the Previews catalog as well as the publisher’s own website, but recent information from Diamond Comic Distributors suggests it won’t make that date.

Issue 5 isn’t among the titles the distributor has scheduled to ship Wednesday … or the week after. Robot 6 emailed DC comment and a revised release date, but has yet to receive a response.

Although a late title clearly isn’t unheard of, this one is intriguing for two reasons: first, because it’s the flagship of DC’s “New 52,” and second, because the creators involved, writer Geoff Johns and artist Jim Lee, are also company executives who, at least indirectly, oversee the line editors whose responsibility it is to make sure books ship on time. It’s important to note the reason for the lateness can’t be connected to Johns or Lee; the blame could fall on any step of the production chain.

While DC hasn’t responded to our earlier inquiry, we did find a comment made by Co-Publisher Dan DiDio during the lead-up to New 52 regarding this this potential issue.

“[Timeliness is] more hard-line than in the past for several reasons, and one is that it’s the largest concern we’ve heard from retailers on a continual basis,” he said in an interview with Newsarama. “They’ve been concerned in the past about our inability to put out books on a consistent basis, especially the books that people are looking for.”

DiDio stressed that DC has a “contract with the retailers” and the fans for consistent releases, and admitted that sales have suffered when the publisher released late books in the past.

He specifically guaranteed “100 percent delivery,” which this delayed Justice League #5 would break from, saying, “There’s nothing more frustrating for me or any of the fans, I’m sure, to be excited about something then not be really sure when it’s coming out.”

Update (11:17 a.m. PT): A DC spokesperson responded that Justice League #5 is now scheduled for release on Jan. 25, just one week after its original date. The Diamond’s tentative shipping for Jan. 25 list doesn’t yet reflect that information.

Update (3: 38 p.m. PT): A DC representative has since tweeted: “We can confirm that Justice League #5 from @jimlee and @geoffjohns is indeed hitting shelves next week.”

Update (5:19 p.m. PT): DC has clarified its previous statement, tweeting: “Sorry for the confusion: Justice League 5 will hit shelves on January 25th.”

DC Comics has unveiled Jim Lee’s T-shirt design for Free Comic Book Day 2012 featuring the current lineup of the Justice League. The image is an homage to a classic Justice League of America illustration by José Luis García-López, which you can see below.

The T-shirts will be available for order in January’s Previews catalog, with proceeds benefiting promotional efforts for FCBD.

Justice League #3

“Should Batman kill the Joker?” is a perennial favorite among superhero fan conversation topics, always leading to a variety of different answers. A Golden Age appearance aside, Batman’s bosses at DC Comics have always answered the question the same way, however: Hell no.

Part of the reason for that is practical. You don’t kill off a popular, money-making character (well, you can now and then if it will make more money, but then you have to bring the character back to life somehow). Part of it is smart franchise management. If Batman kills off his enemies, then he runs out of guys to fight awfully quickly. There’s a reason Spider-Man has such a big and colorful rogue’s gallery to fill movies, cartoon and toy lines with, while The Punisher  doesn’t. But a big part of it has to do with Batman’s characterization. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to not kill a mass-murderer you find yourself in deadly combat with on a bi-monthly basis, and sure, it makes even less sense to go out of your way to save the life of said mass-murderer as Batman regularly does for The Joker and his other foes, but then, dressing up as a bat to fight crime doesn’t make much sense either—Batman’s weird, and that’s what makes him so appealing. Of course his moral code is weird too.

The red, un-crossable line Batman has drawn between beating someone within an inch of their life and actually killing them is one shared by most superheroes. The hero pushed to the limit finally getting the villain at their mercy at the climax and forced to decide whether or not to end the villain’s life of evil once and for all is a staple of super-comics.

And it hasn’t changed all that much in the years since, say, “The Trial of The Flash.” Particularly in the DC Universe (The Marvel heroes embraced killing foes en masse during 2008′s Secret Invasion, in which they went to war with the alien Skrulls).

Wonder Woman famously killed Max Lord in the heat of battle in 2005, and it lead to year’s worth of stories in which her fellow heroes debated with her over whether or not it was a just act. She was even on trial in the international criminal court for a while.

Green Arrow killed the villain Prometheus at the climax of controversial 2009-2010 series Justice League: Cry For Justice, and it lead to a weird storyline in which his fellow Leaguers tried to bust him and he ended up being exiled form his hometown.

And during the 2009 story arc that introduced the Red Lanterns in Green Lantern, space policeman Hal Jordan wrestled with the idea of his bosses executing his mentor-turned-archenemy Sinestro.

As you may have heard, the DC Universe has changed quite a bit since then.

I haven’t been reading very many of “The New 52″ books as they’ve been released. In fact, I can count the number I’ve been reading on one hand: Justice League, Justice League Dark, Aquaman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman.  But even among that very small sampling, I’ve noticed a trend emerging.

In the pages of Aquaman #2, by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis and Joe Prado, Aquaman and Mera confront the humanoid creatures called The Trench:

In last week’s Green Lantern #3, by Johns, Doug Mahnke and a whole mess of inkers, Jordan is confronted my a member of the yellow Sinestro Corps, and deals with him thusly:

And in this week’s Justice League #3, once more written by Johns and drawn by Jim Lee and Scott Williams, the various heroes of the Justice League confront Darkseid’s armies of parademons. I was a little surprised to see such an aggressive, ruthless Superman doling out pain to his foes:

But I was more surprised still to see this image, in which Superman takes off a Parademon’s arm and head:

Even the new sword-wielding Wonder Woman, who chose a maiming blade over a capturing magic lasso in her first appearance and, in this particular issue, chops limbs off like she was chopping vegetables, doesn’t take anyone’s head off in this issue.

I suppose the argument could be made that these aren’t human lives. The Trench are humanoid, though, and speak, so they’re clearly a bit more evolved than animals. That yellow Lantern is an alien instead of a human, but so too are all Lanterns save a handful (and hey, Superman’s an alien too, and maybe Mera, or are people from different dimensions more ultraterrestrial than extraterrestrial…?). I’m not sure how “alive” the new Parademons are, and they certainly have a lot of mechanical and/or robotic looking bits to them, but they also bleed, and I didn’t see Superman X-Raying their chests before ripping them apart, or Aquaman checking one’s pulse before shoving his trident into its back.

Basically, the New 52 Joker might want to lay low until the New 52 Justice League work through their collective issues.

Rub the Blood

One of the more interesting projects to pop up on Kickstarter lately is Rub the Blood, “an Art Comix tabloid that explores the lasting influence (for better or worse) of the Early 90′s Collector Boom comics of Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, etc. on today’s most fringe underground cartoonists.”

Co-edited by Pat Aulisio and Ian Harker, the project fittingly draws its name from a 1990s cover gimmick and features contributions from a variety of art comix pros. In addition to Aulisio and Harker, contributors include Josh Bayer, William Cardini, Victor Cayro, PB Kain, Keenan Marshall Keller, Peter Lazarski, Benjamin Marra, Jim Rugg, Thomas Toye and Mickey Z. Rub the Blood will debut at the 2011 Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Fest.

Aulisio and Harker were kind enough to share a few thoughts and details about the project and its inspiration with me; my thanks for their time.

JK: Where did the idea originate to put this anthology together?

Ian: It’s been something we’ve kicked around in various shapes and forms for a few years now. The joke was that one day Rob Liefeld will be just as adored among the art comix crowd as Fletcher Hanks is now.

Rub the Blood

Pat: Pretty much what Ian said, although I would add we were shooting around various ideas of some sort of tribute book involving “an art comic take on _____” and the idea of doing a tribute to the original Image Seven, and each person in the anthology would take on characters from each creator. It eventually ended up being just about Rob Liefeld and Extreme Studios mainly.

JK: Your Kickstarter page describes the project as “an Art Comix tabloid that explores the lasting influence (for better or worse) of the Early 90′s Collector Boom comics.” In your opinion, what are some of the “better” and “worse” elements of this particular era of comics?

Ian: Well, the collector’s boom thing inspired a lot of young artists from my generation. I was probably 12 years old when I saw the 501 Blues commercial with Rob Liefeld. The idea that a 16-year-old kid could draw comics professionally made the whole thing seem real. It was in a way the first dose of do-it-yourself ethos I ever had. These guys were all semi-naive artists creating their own characters; before that you only had the characters that were around for decades. I felt like I could be a part of it. Looking back, though, I think the boom was a net-negative for comics. It essentially killed the newsstand pipeline that brought new readers to comics and drove away a lot of skilled cartoonists who could actually tell a clear visual story. You don’t really get to choose what comics you come up on, though; I think those comics stay with you in one shape or form for the rest of your life. The first generation of underground cartoonists came up on EC and you can always see that influence in those guys. That’s what Rub the Blood is about, letting the demons run wild.

by Thomas Toye

Pat: Well, I was still in grade school at the time, and I vividly remember the X-Men Swimsuit Special, in particular the image of Psylocke with dinosaurs in the background done by Jim Lee, and me and my friends talking about having sex with all the women from X-Men in the 90s even though we had no idea how to have sex. So I guess you can say the oversexualization is a “worse” aspect of the collectors boom, but it’s true I can say those comics helped me discover sexuality and learn about the female anatomy (albeit incorrect) at a young age.

Another thing around the collector’s boom was trading cards. I collected the shit out of Marvel’s various card series of pin-ups of your favorite heroes, and learning about their history and stats on the back. I loved those and still have them all in a box rubberbanded together by series. You would get a trading card in the first issues of X-Force by Rob Liefeld and X-Men by Jim Lee.

And Wizard Magazine came out of the collector’s boom. Now they’re just a company of shitty comic conventions and no actual magazine. That’s where the infamous “Captain America with boobs” image Rob Liefeld drew was printed.

Rob Liefeld had a clothing line of oversized T-shirts with giant images of his comic covers.

Variant covers were also crazy then, too. I remember an issue of Gen13 had 13 variant covers, and the sad thing is you know there were people out there that bought 13 copies of the same comic because they thought it would be worth a ton of money in the future.

Stuff like this happened:

That original VHS was sold for like $29.95.

Swimsuit specials, trading cards, magazines based around comics, clothing lines, special edition variant covers, VHS specials … basically none of that shit would happen nowadays, which in the end is actually probably for the worst. I would take on any of those projects (we actually did make a VHS special, too!)

JK: And for those who don’t know, what’s the significance of the title, “Rub the Blood”?

Ian: It was the tagline on the cover of Bloodstrike #1. It was a gimmick cover that featured a dried-blood effect. I remember obsessing over this when I was a kid; I never really understood the damn thing.

Pat: Ian told me about this, and when we were just deciding to try to organize this, I was shopping for comics at a thrift store and found an unopened copy of it for 25 cents. The blood effect still worked! That’s when I knew we had to do this book for sure.

JK: How did you go about recruiting the creators who are working on the anthology?

Ian: Me and Pat have a lot of like-minded attitudes about comics. Pat’s philosophy on life is “Yeah Dude.” Rub the Blood is about the spirit of sitting at your mom’s kitchen table when you are 13 and drawing anatomy that you don’t understand. Like I said, there is a DIY ethos to that, and I think there is a spiritual kinship with the attitude of art-brut comix. Brian Chippendale has said in interviews that he never intended to draw like Gary Panter, he always wanted to draw like Jim Lee (I’m paraphrasing.)

Pat: Me and Ian have worked together on a variety of different things for a while now, and to have a curated anthology we do together was just a obvious step in our comic relationship. We have the same taste, and together we know enough awesome cartoonists. We came up with a dream list of people to get involved. For the most part, everyone that’s in the book we had some sort of pre-existing relationship with before. Except for Bald Eagles, I think Ian met him once, but we were both just big fans of his work and the insanity that he isn’t published more. We contacted him and since then, he’s been one of the most entertainingly insane cartoonists to work with and talk to. Love that guy!

JK: Have you guys already seen some of the contributions? If so, what can fans expect?

Ian: A lot of gnarly drawings and comics. Big boobs, pouches, big guns, shoulder pads. They just don’t look the way you’d expect.

Pat: Your new favorite comic ever.

Pat Aulisio and Josh Bayer's Conon

JK: Besides through Kickstarter, where else can folks buy the book?

Ian: People will have to wait and see. We’re kind of just working it on the convention circuit and seeing where it goes from there. If you really want one the best thing to do is pledge for a copy on Kickstarter. This thing is intended to be a one-off weirdo artifact more than anything else.

Pat: Each contributor will get a decent amount of copies, so you’ll have a variety of different artists to buy it from either on their websites or at art shows, conventions, etc. It’s almost better without wide distribution. It’s one of those things you have to go through an effort to get. But if you want to distribute our book go ahead and contact me! We can work something out!

JK: You’ve already hit your fundraising target on Kickstarter. What do you plan to do with any extra money above and beyond it?

Ian: We could go a few ways with it, but it’s definitely all going into the book itself. That could mean more copies, more pages, better format, maybe all of the above. 50 percent of our print run is going to the contributors either way. They did an awesome job.

Pat: It’s all going into making the book BETTER.

JK: What else have you been working on lately, or have planned to release over the next few months?

Bowman

Ian: Me and Pat will be co-editing the next issue of our newspaper-comic Secret Prison for the first quarter of 2012, and I’m also working in the embryonic stages of an even more preposterous project with Box Brown for late 2012 based on the groundbreaking manga Garo.

Pat: My new three-issue comic series-turn-graphic-novel, Bowman. The first issue is out in November from Retrofit Comics. I already started inking issue #2. It’s an epic life-spanning adventure of lost astronaut David Bowman. I’m also doing a long-form, snail-mail jam comic based around Conan the Barbarian and a talking duck with a Spider-Man mask with Josh Bayer titled The Unforgiving Blade of Conon. That is coming out the same time as Rub the Blood. Me and josh are doing a signing Friday, Dec. 2 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Jim Hanley’s Universe in Manhattan. I also got a Xeric Grant comic I’m applying for to try to get the last of that opportunity. It’s a 32-page collection of various anthology work I’ve done the last year and a half.

Rub The Blood is a unique anthology put together by Secret Prison editor Ian Harker and Yeah Dude Comics‘ Pat Aulisio, pulling together some of the most esoteric of Art Comix vets as well as more well-known creators like Jim Rugg (Afrodisiac) and Benjamin Marra (Night Business). The book’s title is a not-so-subtle homage to an early 1990s cover promotion for Rob Liefeld’s Bloodstrike #1 where the blood depicted on the cover had the feel of velvet. Rub The Blood will debut at the 2011 Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Fest in early December, and will presumably be available at subsequent conventions.

I intended to post this last week as the project was soliciting donations via Kickstarter, but by the time this post came up they’d already reached their $1,000 goal — with only 16 backers. It shows that although not everyone in comics remembers this era’s artwork fondly, those that do really do. Although they’ve reached their goal, you can still donate to increase the print run and be a part of this revival. Check out the Kickstarter site to donate and see the video, which includes a 90s era WWF background music track.

Jim Lee's Spy vs. Spy custom toy

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Mad Magazine feature “Spy vs. Spy,” and to celebrate, the magazine created a blank “Spy vs. Spy” toy and asked various artists to customize it. They’ve been sharing them over on their blog since around the time of the San Diego Comic Con, and in New York this weekend they’re unveiling one by DC Comics co-publisher Jim Lee.

You can find more of them on the Mad blog The Idiotical, or in person at the New York Comic Con.

But the quality of the comic book just didn’t really meet those high expectations.

There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of the most obvious, and one I saw cited most often in the slew of reviews and reactions I’ve since seen online, is that it fails to meet even the most basic, vague promise of its own cover: It’s not a Justice League comic, as the logo says, and it doesn’t features the characters pictured on the front. Two of them star in the book, and two more cameo, but it read more like The Brave and The Bold featuring Batman and Green Lantern…albeit a theoretical version of The Brave and The Bold, perhaps written by Brian Michael Bendis for an eventual trade collection of the first six-issue arc, as DC’s various Brave and the Bold books almost always tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end in each and every single issue.

While waiting a month or so for DC to dole out the next dollop of their Justice League comic, I thought I’d revisit some previous attempts at introducing a new Justice League to the world in a new Justice League comic. A pattern quickly emerged.

This volume of Justice League is quite different from all previous ones in terms of its slow start. The one it seems to bear the closest resemblance to is the Brad Meltzer Justice League of America #1 from 2006, which spent almost a year finalizing its line-up, but it did feature much of the initial line-up (and the characters pictured on the cover) in its first issue.

How did those other creative teams manage?

The Justice League first appeared in 1960’s Brave and the Bold #28, in a story written by Gardner Fox and penciled by Mike Sekowsky.

Sekowsky’s now iconic cover featured the five lesser members of the League engaged in a pitched battle with “Starro The Conqueror!”,  whose size and big staring eye helped disquise the fact that he was basically just a big starfish (Perhaps if the League had a bigger line-up, he would have been a squid).

It is perhaps unfair to judge Geoff Johns script for this year’s Justice League #1 against a script for a 1960 comic, given how much has changed. From the industry to the audience, from storytelling conventions to product distribution, very little about comics today is analogous to the comics of 1960.

That said, in some ways, Fox’s job seemed even more difficult than Johns’ job.

As his was the very first Justice League story ever, Fox had to introduce the whole concept of the superhero team to his young readers, few of whom would have been familiar with League pre-cursors Justice Society of America. He then had to introduce all seven members, characters the readers would have had some familiarity with, but wouldn’t have grown up with as near-constant pop culture presences the way today’s readers have. And he had to explain why these seven would form a team (it’s not like Silver Age Superman needed a running crew), and wrap it up in about 25 pages. (Where Fox had it a bit easier than Johns was that, as the first, readers didn’t really have anything to compare it against; there weren’t any previous incarnations fans could say they prefer, or rival publishers doing the same thing better).

Fox does it. Not only are all five of the characters on the cover, and the villain they’re facing, in the book, but so too are Superman, Batman and new character Snapper Carr.

The book opens with a splash page featuring all seven characters, a “roll call” that would become a staple for JLA comics, and a paragraph of text announcing the League and it’s goals of stamping out all wrong-doing:

Foes of evil! Enemies of Injusitce! To the heroes of The Justice League of America all wrong-doing is a menace to be tamped out–whether it comes from outer space–from the watery depths of the seven seas–or springs full-blown from the minds of men!

Banded together to fight all foes of humanity, the mightiest heroes of our time battle the menace of…STARRO THE CONQUEROR!

Fox employs the text-heavy scripting of the era as much-needed shortcuts, introducing the characters in narration boxes, having them thought-balloon information to themselves and announce what powers they’re using when they do so, and it gets the job done: If this was the first time you had ever encountered any of these heroes, you’d have a pretty good idea of who they were and what their various deals were by the time Snapper Carr is made an honorary member on the 25^th page.

It’s perhaps worth noting too that Fox begins the story with the League already formed. By the end of the  veryfirst page, Aquaman is signaling the Justice League of America to warn them of Starro.

The origin of the Justice League wouldn’t be told until 1962’s Justice League of America #9, in a story entitled “The Origin of the Justice League!”

That version of the Justice League stuck around more or less until 1985-86′s Crisis On Infinite Earths. Sure, there were some big changes, with characters coming and going, and, the biggest change, the relocation of the team to Detroit and the replacement of some of the original seven with brand-new characters, but it wasn’t until 1987’s Justice League #1 by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire and Terry Austin that the direction changed radically enough to justify a new #1 issue (something obviously employed much more rarely back then).

Maguire’s cover, like Sekowsky’s first League cover, would become an iconic one, something he himself riffed on more or less constantly since. It featured the entire team striking a pose, and looking up at the reader.

The line-up was a pretty radical departure from either the original concept (“The World’s Greatest Heroes”) or the previous iteration (leftovers from the Satellite Era training new kids), mixing old hands like Batman, Martian Manhuter and Black Canary with characters plucked from the corners of DC’s character catalog, but it was the tone more than anything else that set this iteration of the League apart—it was character driven, it was fun, and it was funny, while (at this early point) still being an action-packed superhero narrative.

This issue also featured everyone on the cover inside its pages (although Dr. Light didn’t appear in costume), and Giffen didn’t resort to a roll call, text page or any shortcuts in doing so. He  simply begins the story at the point where all the Leaguers are in the same room at the same time, and then he and DeMatteis introduce them through their dialogue and actions. In fact, by the twelfth page the initial line-up has been introduced, and the team manages to complete their first mission before the end of the book.

How did Giffen and company accomplish so much in so little space, especially since the storytelling conventions of 1987 are that different from those of 2011? (That is, pages weren’t split equally between text and art, and in neither year were there long paragraphs of narration hectoring the reader with information).

Well, I imagine it might have something to do with the fact that Justice League #1 had plenty of pages with eight-to-ten panels on them, and only a single full-page splash, whereas Johns and Lee have a single seven-panel page, with the bulk of the book consisting of three-to-five-panel grids, and four full pages devoted to splashes (a one-page splash devoted to the first appearances of Green Lantern and Superman, a two-page splash devoted to the first appearance of Batman).

Once Giffen and DeMatteis ended their run in 1992, the two Leagues they created would further splinter into more Leagues, and various Justice League books would start, end and rebrand with almost delirious frequency.

It wasn’t until 1997 that someone would come along and say, “Hey, remember in the 1960s how the Justice League was DC’s A-List heroes in a single book? We should do that again!”

And so Grant Morrison was teamed with artists Howard Porter and John Dell for JLA #1, which reunited the original League line-up, only with Flash II Wally West and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in for their late predecessors.

Morrison managed to get six of the seven characters on Porter’s first cover into the book (Aquaman was mentioned in the first issue, but wouldn’t appear on-panel until the next issue), and he introduced all six of them rather thoroughly, in terms of who’s who, who can do what, how they interact with one another and even provides a few hints about what their lives outside of costume are like (Here I’m going to point you to Brendan Wright’s post “JLA #1 vs. Justice League #1″ on his blog The Wright Opinion, where he breaks down the first issue of Morrison and company’s first issue, page by page, highlighting all of the new information revealed in each page for new readers).

More importantly, Morrison doesn’t waste time on that introduction, but does it on the fly, with the issue being devoted to a threat. A spaceship lands on the White House lawn, a team of superheroes pour out of it and announce they are here to save the world, and they immediately begin transforming Earth for the better in myriad ways, turning Earth against the old heroes of the Justice League in the process—but something’s up with them, and the League realizes that Earth is actually in the process of being bloodlessly conquered by villains disguised as heroes.

How did Morrison and company get so much done in so little time? They waste far less space on panels and pages than Johns and Lee did, that’s for sure, but there are still a few splashes—a full-page splash introduces the bad guys, and the space ship landing appears on an almost-splash (a small, in-set panel acts as a second panel in what would otherwise be a splash).

They do employ a lot more panels per page than Johns and Lee, but the book is hardly jam-packed with nine-panel grids, with most pages sporting around five panels.  The main shortcut Morrison takes is by telling chunks of the story through news reports, a la The Dark Knight Returns. In a sense, the villains’ conquering of Earth is fast-forwarded through via these reports, while the action involving our heroes coming together and interacting with the villains is all dramatized.

And, again, Morrison opens with the League already more-or-less formed (they’re in the process of taking over from the old League in this issue, and won’t get their new headquarters until the end of the first story arc) and already enaged in a serious conflict.

Looking back at Johns and Lee’s opening, then, the main obstacles keeping the issue from being a real Justice League comic seem to be the amount of panels per page, and Johns’ strategy of telling the origin story in a more movie-like fashion, in which everything happens on the “screen” in more or less real-time for the viewer/reader.

The panels-per-page problem isn’t necessarily a problem-problem; Lee’s art is certainly more action-packed than Sekowsky’s, Maguire’s or Porter’s, and the few panels per page is something a generation that grew up on manga can appreciate, maybe even expect—it’s more of an economic problem than anything else. And I mean economic both as having-to-do-with money (Theirs was, after all, a $4 comic book that read like 1/3 of the $2 JLA #1 or 1/10 of the ten-cent Brave and the Bold #28) and story economy; one-issue in, readers have only seen two-and-a-half scenes).

The other problem could have easily been solved by an in medias res set-up, with Johns beginning the story with the League already formed (Most of the other “New 52” books seem to be doing just that, intent on filling readers in on the new origins and/or what has changed and what hasn’t later on). Choosing to begin “Five Years Ago,” and telling the story of How The Justice League Came To Be isn’t a bad choice, or the wrong choice, but it is one that differs greatly from past first appearances of the Justice League, and did contribute to the somewhat unsatisfactory read.

The trade, however, might turn out to be killer. I guess we’ll find out in six-months.

Little Island Comics

Retailers | Little Island Comics — “the first kids comic book store in North America–maybe even the world” — opens its doors today in Toronto. The store is owned and operated by The Beguiling, and is located around the corner from the flagship store. The store will hold an official grand opening in a few weeks. [The Comics Reporter]

Publishing | DC Comics co-publisher and Justice League artist Jim Lee discusses his work on DC’s flagship title, which came out in digital form last Wednesday, the same day it hit comic shops. “It’s also setting records digitally. I can’t give numbers, but on the first day it set a record for us,” Lee tells Heidi MacDonald.

That leads Tom Spurgeon to throw a flag on the play: “… it looks like DC won’t be releasing its New 52 digital numbers but will feel confident in making claims on their behalf. It also looks like comics sites will then repeat this claim as news, perhaps qualified by source or as a claim but still putting that information out there. This should stop. I think DC has a really dubious history with using the hidden portions of their numbers to PR advantage — call it the ‘I have a girlfriend in Canada’ of sales analysis. My take is that this practice has intensified slightly ever since the numbers have become smaller and therefore more crucial. When in the 1990s sales on mainstream comics dipped to the point where people questioned the profitability of certain issues of certain titles, perhaps leading to a line of analysis about mainstream publishers making books at a loss for market share advantages or to knock other comics from the limited stand space, we were sometimes assured that there were sales elsewhere we didn’t know about that pushed certain comics over this projected threshold.” [Salon, The Comics Reporter]

Justice League

Comics | Glen Weldon explains DC’s New 52 relaunch to the rest of the world. [NPR's Monkey See blog]

Comics | Not interested in this New 52 thing, even after reading Weldon’s explanation? Relax, there’s plenty more out there: The writers at Sequential Tart recommend 52 non-DC comics coming out in September. Looks like it will be a good month! [Sequential Tart]

Comics | KC Carlson discusses the guidelines for first issues, including the need for a good issue #1 to be self-contained: “A first issue that is Part 1 of 6 is, by definition, no longer a first issue. It’s a first chapter of a potentially great collection/graphic novel. Your first issue should be both widely accessible and a satisfactory read. A complete story is the best way of achieving that.” [Comics Worth Reading]

Comics | In his latest What’s Wrong With You? column, Josh Flanagan delivers beatings all round — to creators, for not doing a professional-quality job on creator-owned comics, and to readers, for sticking to the Big Two and not wandering further afield. Good discussion, with suggestions for good creator-owned comics, in the comments. [iFanboy]

Casanova

Creators | Martyn Pedler delivers a great Matt Fraction interview for fans of Casanova, in which Fraction discusses process, the autobiographical nature of the book and his dislike of “the addicted and tortured artist cliché”: “I loathe it. It is monstrous. It has killed my friends. I knew people who are dead now because they believed that without being fucked up they couldn’t create, couldn’t express themselves, couldn’t live. This cult of bullshit that surrounds these dead kids — and make no mistake, Kurt Cobain, Jimmy Hendrix, they were children. I think about what I knew at twenty-seven and I didn’t know fucking anything. I’ve gained the wisdom to realize I know nothing about wisdom. We just went through all this stuff again with Amy Winehouse. It’s one of the worst fictions of pop culture. It’s worse than Kangaroo Jack. It’s monstrous bullshit and it kills people.” [Bookslut]

Creators | Blankets creator Craig Thompson is all over the place these days; in this story, he talks about his newest graphic novel, Habibi, and how writing and drawing it over the past seven years intertwined with events in his real life: “I started working on Habibi after a devastating breakup; at the point of the reunion of the characters in the book, I felt I was starting to make progress in the relationships in my life. I went from a little “emo boy” to much more of an adult in a relationship over the course of working on Habibi.” [Library Journal]

Detective Comics #1

Creators | Tony Daniel discusses his run on DC’s relaunched Detective Comics. [USA Today]

Creators | Ian Brill announced that after three years as an editor at BOOM! Studios, he’s left the company to pursue a career as a writer. [Brill Building]

Conventions | Ferret Press publisher Dara Naraghi explains why he won’t be attending Mid-Ohio-Con, which is now owned by Wizard World. [PANEL, Via]

History | Noel Murray traces the history of the newspaper comic strip, its precipitous rise in popularity, and the reasons why the medium is in trouble today, with plenty of examples. [AV Club]

Webcomics | Delos reviews Sarab, a webcomic by Arien Artemis in which the readers are allowed to vote on which of two paths the protagonist will follow. It’s like choose-your-own-adventure but with shared decision-making. [Art Patient]

Reviews | Tucker Stone looks back at Darko Macan’s Cable work. [Factual Opinion]

Reviews | Charles Hatfield reviews The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1969. [The Comics Journal]

The Flash #139, the beginning of the end

I’m pretty sure every other DC-Comics blogger in the known universe will be doing this, but for me it is an imperative: from now through the end of the month, this space will give short, probably reactionary, and likely ill-considered reviews of all 52 new titles. Not surprisingly, then, this week is all Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1.

* * *

I liked Flashpoint #1 pretty well. I thought it was a promising start to a story that — in a daring departure for a big event — could stand on its own without universe-altering ramifications.

Of course, that was in early May, a lifetime ago.

While Flashpoint #5 finishes that story, it does so in a way that feels maddeningly hollow. Not the epilogue, mind you — that sequence just manages to avoid mawkishness, and is a well-done counterpoint to the end of issue #1. No, my problem with issue #5 (and to a lesser extent with the miniseries generally) is the way in which writer Geoff Johns apparently just decides he needs to wrap things up.

SPOILERS FOLLOW for Flashpoint #5, and later for Justice League #1 …

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Naturally, this is similar to one of my complaints about Flashpoint #1: that the issue didn’t end with Barry Allen, the Flash, getting his speed back. I thought that would have given the story a nice shot of momentum, not to mention optimism. However, to paraphrase one of my old writing professors, you don’t review what you would have done, you review what was done.

Accordingly, for a story centered around the Flash, Flashpoint waits until halfway through its last issue before uncorking some real super-speed action. The rest of the time, Flash and his allies try to figure out how to stop this particular version of DC-Earth from destroying itself. This is certainly a noble goal, and well within Johns’ optimistic, altruistic Flash characterization. Issue #3 also explains why Barry doesn’t try to change the past himself (his speed hasn’t fully returned, and it’s not within his power set anyway). However, it means Flashpoint must meander around a scorched Earth for another issue and a half before Professor Zoom, the Reverse-Flash, reveals the plot’s big secret.

To his credit, Geoff Johns had done a great job building the Reverse-Flash into a formidable, almost terrifying, villain. Able to change anything in history and ignore any negative personal consequences, Zoom has been subtly eating away at Barry’s life until (and I am still not sure of the mechanics) Barry himself inadvertently shattered the timeline. In response — and in the tradition of puzzle-minded Flash stories — one might imagine Barry finding a way to turn Zoom’s own abilities against him, perhaps leaving Zoom in an inescapable time-loop of some sort. Instead, issue #5 finds Barry at Zoom’s mercy, until Batman somehow sneaks up on one of the fastest man alive and stabs him through the chest. If I were more charitably inclined, I would call that ironic; but as written and drawn it seems more like a gratuitous popcorn-movie death, complete with one-liner.

Only then, it seems, do Batman and Flash realize that the key to “saving” the world is for Barry to stop himself from trying to save his mother’s life. Thus, Barry blames himself for the world of Flashpoint, and calls himself “selfish” for the time-trip which empowered Zoom, even though Zoom changed history in the first place by killing Barry’s mother and framing Barry’s father for the murder. Johns gives Barry some degree of closure about his mother’s death, and there is at least a hint that she may even be alive in the New-52 timeline, but the equities still don’t square to me. Barry wasn’t being selfish in trying to correct what a supervillain did, he was trying to restore his own timeline. What’s more, Barry’s Flashpoint time-trip reveals that the New-52 timeline is a product of some other cosmic calamity, which I suppose will be addressed in a future Flash or Justice League story. It could even be next year’s big summer crossover, featuring the end of all the New-52 books….

Anyway, it continues to bug me that Barry’s mother is retroactively doomed, ostensibly so that he can be “more interesting.” I am also bugged by the notion that the big climax of Flashpoint hinges on a previously unseen character (who I guess could be Kismet, the embodiment of the DC Universe, but probably not) and the setup of yet another big-event storyline.

Ultimately, I am disappointed in Flashpoint. Although it stayed largely focused on the Flash/Batman relationship, it digressed into world-building scenes which proved unnecessary. The hints of global collapse in issue #1 soon turned into more direct teases for the various ancillary miniseries, and the time spent anticipating Subject 1/Superman paid off with a few panels of him attacking Aquaman and Wonder Woman. The world of Flashpoint was so far gone that Barry’s inclination towards saving it seemed almost laughable. The miniseries offered no hope that any of Barry’s old JLA colleagues would work together again, and the motley band of superheroes introduced in issue #1 never coalesced into a reasonable replacement. Again, it goes back to the miniseries’ slow, and eventually somewhat arbitrary, pacing; which in turn may well owe a lot to its format.* Since it built to that emotional epilogue, Flashpoint might have made a nifty Brave and the Bold Annual, or even a taut two or three issues — but in the end it succumbed to big-event bloat.

* * *

Similarly, at first I wasn’t overly impressed with Justice League vol. 2 #1 (written by Geoff Johns, pencilled by Jim Lee, inked by Scott Williams, and colored by Alex Sinclair). However, I emphasize “at first.” Overall it’s a decent start for the new League, and an uncomplicated way to attract new (or lapsed) readers.

Most of the issue follows Batman, Green Lantern, and an amped-up Parademon (the Apokoliptian answer to the Super-Skrull?) as they tear through Gotham City, chased initially by the GCPD. After the two heroes find a device the Parademon leaves behind (which I presume is a Mother Box), GL speculates that it’s connected to the Superman who lives in Metropolis. Off they go, in the end giving GL the opportunity to get punched out by the Man of Steel. There’s also an efficient introduction of star athlete Victor Stone, helping his high school run up the score while failing to garner any attention from his dad.

Justice League of America #184, part 2 of 1980's JLA/JSA adventure

This is not a groundbreaking plot, although the execution is mostly good. (There were a couple of confusing page transitions, a failed moment which might have been another “Batman has to pee” joke, and a panel or two where the Parademon’s transformations weren’t quite clear.) Essentially, from what I gather, the New-52 Justice League’s origin centers around them meeting, and presumably defeating, Darkseid. This is fine, in a serviceable way, mostly because this will be the first time the Leaguers have faced Darkseid. If this were the Brad Meltzer or James Robinson Leagues coming together to fight Darkseid, it would have to be something extra-special (kind of like Morrison and Porter’s classic “Rock Of Ages,” come to think of it). Even when Gerry Conway, Dick Dillin, and George Pérez used the Fourth World for 1980′s JLA/JSA crossover, it was pretty cool, because the Fourth World was still fairly new at that point.

Now, I am far from a new reader, so this next bit might not ring entirely true. However, if this were my first superhero comic book in a while, I think I might be inclined to stick around. Surely not by accident, it features three DC superheroes who are definitely familiar to the general public. It casts one of those heroes (GL) as cocky and makes him something of a comic foil for Batman, but it doesn’t do so at the expense of GL’s dignity. For all intents and purposes, it then uses Victor as a new character with whom new readers can presumably identify. It’s also a fairly-well-told action story which hints at bigger things to come. Obviously the League will fight Darkseid; obviously Vic will see half his body replaced with cybernetic parts; obviously the world will come to trust superheroes, and the Justice League above all.

As a longtime reader who’s seen just about every JLA relaunch**, I liked Johns’ general approach to the characters. Reading the GL/Batman scenes, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Emerald Buffoon in All Star Batman #9, also drawn by Jim Lee and Scott Williams. Naturally GL looked better by comparison here, but I think the JL characterization — new ring-slinger is full of himself, can’t believe someone would do this without powers — stands well on its own. The brief glimpse of fire-engine constructs handling Gotham’s collateral damage was a nice touch, and the kind of crossover detail I expect to see in a Justice League book. (Not to mention GL hitting the Parademon with a fire truck. That definitely appealed to my inner 13-year-old.)

While I’m still somewhat leery about setting Cyborg’s League adventures before his time with the New Teen Titans, I will say that this issue’s scene fits broadly with Vic’s pre-accident history. In NTT vol. 1 #1, we see his frustration at being essentially disqualified from any kind of athletics, thanks to his new abilities; and later we learn how the accident exacerbated a shaky relationship with his dad. It says something, I think, that the story seems to fit better with New Teen Titans continuity than it does with the original Fourth World; but I’m not prepared to grade it on that basis just yet.

Nevertheless, nothing in this issue reassures me that Johns, Lee, and company won’t spend an inordinate amount of time once again wandering from moment to moment before realizing it’s issue #6 and they should probably have an ending. Chasing a Parademon across the rooftops and through the sewers of Gotham is fine for a teaser, especially with Lee’s pencils; but subsequent issues will need to be more substantial. Similarly, while Johns and Lee do well with just Batman and Green Lantern, before too long they’ll have seven regular Leaguers to juggle. There is a lot of detail in Justice League #1 — thanks mostly to Lee and Williams’ intricate work, and Sinclair’s complementary colors — but not a lot of subtlety. As widescreen as the Justice League is supposed to be, its cast sometimes needs a more careful touch. (I did like Johns’ relative lack of first-person narrative captions, because it kept the narrative fairly straightforward.)  Indeed, although I liked Brad Meltzer’s first issue (2006’s Justice League of America #0, drawn by a variety of folks including Jim Lee), I had similar concerns about it, and we saw how that turned out.

Justice League of America #0

Mostly, though, I think Justice League #1 should encourage new readers to come back for the rest of the story. I base this largely on my experiences with newspaper comics. If I decide to start reading Dick Tracy (now by Joe Staton and Mike Curtis) on some random weekday, ideally it won’t be too long before I see at least one classic Tracy element: Dick himself, the two-way wrist gizmo, or some misshapen villain. Likewise, if I read a comic called Justice League, I’d like it to feature at least two, and preferably three, characters who don’t normally team up (outside of the League, of course), fighting something only the League could handle. This fits those criteria, plus it includes Johns’ clever take on the GL/Batman relationship, and some fine storytelling (especially with the GL constructs) from Lee. In terms of previous League debuts, it doesn’t have the quirky wit of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire’s Justice League or the scope of Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA. However, it is more focused than Meltzer and Ed Benes’ first issue and less scattered than James Robinson and Mark Bagley’s, and it starts playing with the big toys right away. So, good job, Justice League, for starting the New 52 pretty well.

Next week: Action Comics, Animal Man, Batgirl, Batwing, Detective Comics, Green Arrow, Hawk and Dove, Justice League International, Men Of War, OMAC, Static Shock, StormWatch, and Swamp Thing!

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* [I do give the main Flashpoint miniseries credit for shipping on time, with no last-minute changes in creative team. I didn’t get ‘em all, but unless I missed hearing about a delay, I think all the tie-in miniseries also shipped on time too. Given DC’s history with delays, that’s worth noting.]

** [By my count, this is the fifth first issue of an ongoing series featuring the main Justice League team: 1960's Justice League of America vol. 1 #1, 1987's Justice League vol. 1 #1, 1996's JLA #1, and 2006's Justice League of America vol. 2 #0. Interestingly enough (to me, anyway), until 2006 each series had spun out of an earlier anthology or miniseries: the originals in The Brave and the Bold, the future JLI in Legends, and the “Magnificent Seven” in Justice League: A Midsummer’s Nightmare. However, it is at least the eighth time the team has been relaunched from the ground up, including the Detroit League (1984), JLI (1987), the Dan Jurgens JLA (1992), the post-Zero Hour JLA (1994), the JLA JLA (1996), the Meltzer League (2006), and the James Robinson League (2009). That’s an average of 3 3/4 years since 1984, so we’ll see if this group can make it to issue #45 relatively intact.]

Justice League #1 second printing cover

As we learned hours before its official debut, Justice League #1 has sold out – at the distributor level, at least — leading DC Comics this afternoon to unveil a familiar image for the second printing. It’s the Jim Lee-drawn promotional image that leaked out in June (before Wonder Woman was put back in her traditional shorts), sparking widespread speculation about the identity of the team’s 15th member. The image has since appeared in the banner for DC’s official blog, and in marketing materials for the September relaunch.

It’s understandable that the publisher would want to repurpose the image; it’s Lee artwork ready and waiting to be placed in a digital file and sent to the printer. But shoe-horning the horizontal illustration into the vertical space leads Firestorm and Green Arrow to be obscured by the UPC symbol and DC logo, respectively, and poor Mera to have her head chopped in half. Granted, she’s endured harsher treatments over the years …

DC Comics executives have lined up this week at the company’s blog to commemorate the midnight debut of Justice League #1 and, thus, the official kickoff of the much-discussed line-wide relaunch, writing about all the work that’s gone into the initiative, their hopes for the titles, and so on. But when it came Jim Lee’s turn this afternoon, the DC Comics co-publisher and Justice League penciler let his artwork do the talking as he debuted a double-page spread from the second issue.

“Sometimes a picture says a thousand words,” he wrote. “What will YOU say about DC Comics-The New 52 come tomorrow?”

Comics sales: DiDio says overall sales in the direct market are flat, but periodicals are softening, because people are shifting to trades, converting to digital or falling out of the market entirely because of the lack of interest or money. Lee brings up piracy as a possible factor as well. On the other hand, despite the problems at Borders, mass-market graphic novel sales are up.

Prices: DiDio’s take on rolling back the cover price to $2.99:

While we didn’t show increased sales because of it, I believe that we didn’t have the level of erosion that would have occurred if we had decided to push our books to the higher price point.

So, it didn’t make things better, but they would have gotten worse without it. Lee chimes in that $2.99 is a better price for bringing in new readers, and he adds an interesting point:

… the history of comics has been one of price inelasticity, where fans could not be induced to buying something at any price, and yet were willing to pay a very hefty price for books that they absolutely love. It’s not necessarily the best or healthy approach for the industry. We should really have a situation where being able to hold the price points down should show benefits in sales.

I think what he’s saying is that they can’t force people to buy something they don’t want, even if they price it cheap.

The New 52: Really, this topic has been beaten to death at this point, but if you’re just back from a vacation at the North Pole, DiDio provides a nice, quick summary of why they are bothering: The characters were dated.

Event fatigue: Are readers sick of complicated multi-series crossovers? DiDio sticks his fingers in his ears and says, “I can’t hear you!” Well, not exactly:

DiDio: First things first. What retailers have identified as event fatigue is usually what we see as a weak story that is not exciting or interesting to the fans themselves.

[ICv2] We were trying not to say that … (laughter)

DiDio: No — that’s the reality of it. The reality of it is that “event fatigue” only means that they don’t like what they’re reading. It doesn’t mean that they’re tired of big stories, or tired of multi-part crossovers. They just want to make sure that it has value and weight.

And Flashpoint has done quite well, thankyouverymuch. Also, the New 52? Not an event, so there’s no problem:

Now when we get to 52, people are identifying this as an event and this is not an event, therefore I guess they can’t get fatigued.

Lee chimes in that any events will be driven by the desires of creators, not the need to fill up the market with books.

Digital sales: With the launch of the New 52, DC is doing something unprecedented in the industry: Releasing all titles in print and digital on the same day, at the same price. Lee sees this as an opportunity to not only increase digital sales but increase sales overall by bringing in new and lapsed readers:

Our initial sales data from a year and a half of digital sales shows it’s a slightly different reader, shows that we’re reaching people that aren’t necessarily near a comic book shop or don’t live near a comic book shop.

Piracy: Lee gets it:

… the fact that the bit torrent sites are updated the day the books come out, the fact that they’re so accessible and the fact that the trades are still selling very well, speaks to the fact that people are still following the hobby, but in an illegal way. If you give a lot people the opportunity to buy the content legally that we’ll some conversion of people who are illegally downloading them to legally paying for content if they can get it day and date.

While he doesn’t quite connect the dots, it suggests that the drop in periodical sales may be linked to digital piracy — people are getting their fresh content online but buying trades to keep. It isn’t that different from the webcomic model, really, except that it’s illegal. Of course, DC is gambling that people will pay print prices for digital, and so far that hasn’t worked out all that well, although those legit customers he mentions — the ones who don’t live near a comics store—may be willing to do so.

Younger readers: DiDio’s response to the question about getting kids to read comics is rather disappointing, at least to me:

Right now we’re determining kids as being teenagers at this moment and that’s where our focus is with the New 52 books. But we’re also still publishing a kids line for 11 and younger, and that hasn’t changed at all.

That makes the whole kids’ line seem like an afterthought. It’s too bad, because kids love superheroes and there are lots of opportunities to do superheroes well for kids, but no one seems to be interested. There’s no point in doing separate outreach to teenagers; they hate that. They think of themselves as adults and want to read adult comics.

There’s a lot more in the interview, and it’s well worth taking the time to read, but that’s the meat of it. And for a refreshing followup, check out Heidi MacDonald’s wide-ranging essay on the carnage at the end of DC’s current run and the promise of digital.

DC Comics: The New 52

Ahead of the release on Wednesday of Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1, signaling the beginning of its line-wide relaunch, DC Comics has kicked off a promotional assault in the mainstream press to sell “The New 52″ to a broader audience. While USA Today, with a circulation of 1.8 million the second-largest newspaper in the United States, looks to be the hub for coverage, DC has also reached out to publications like the New York Daily News, the New York Post and the Boston Herald. Here are the highlights so far from the 11th-hour push:

• A spoiler-heavy preview of Flashpoint #5 in USA Today lays out how the dystopic, casualty-strewn world depicted in the crossover got that way.

• USA Today takes a broad overview of the relaunch, talking with DC Co-Publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee, Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, and a couple of retailers. “There are plenty of angry customers over this,” says John Robinson, co-owner of Graham Crackers Comics chain in Illinois. “I’ve heard the usual ‘I can’t believe they’re doing this,’ ‘They’ve betrayed us,’ etc. I’d say about 60% to 70% of those protesting the loudest will still end up buying the stuff. There’s just too much hype and interest — even the haters are curious.”

• The newspaper also hones in on the publisher’s new same-day digital strategy, which debuts Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET when Justice League #1 will be available for purchase digitally. Hank Kanalz, senior vice president for digital at DC Entertainment, acknowledges the challenges of getting the initiative off the ground: “Some books are working really far ahead of schedule, some are down to the wire, and it’s just a matter of coordinating and about overcommunicating. We have to make sure it goes off without a hitch, which is why we’re not sleeping right now. We’re going much wider to a mass audience than ever before, so it’s a matter of making sure we have everything ready to go.”

• A longish feature in the New York Daily News begins with the changes to Superman — no marriage, no living parents, no red trunks — before widening its net to include fan reaction, Cyborg’s addition to the Justice League and Barbara Gordon’s return to the Batgirl identity. “By making these kind of changes, we would restore a lot of the things that we wanted to have in the characters and also set the stage for really cool stories that we couldn’t do before,” Lee says. “And that we could achieve by rolling back the experience on the characters, so they’re not in the prime of their careers, they haven’t battled their arch-nemeses a million times, saved the world countless times. We felt that was a richer, more fertile ground to mine for all the characters.”

Batgirl #1

• The New York Post, meanwhile, focuses entirely on Barbara Gordon, touching upon the controversy surrounding her move from Oracle back to costumed crimefighting as Batgirl. The article is accompanied by a preview of Batgirl #1, which includes a flashback to the events of The Killing Joke.

• DiDio gets blunt about the motivation behind the relaunch in the Boston Herald: ““We wanted a shock to the system to get people reading.”

• Talking with Complex, writer Judd Winick delves into his titles Batwing and Catwoman, as well as the challenges in attempting to reshape the DC Universe: “This is a cataclysmic shift. If there is a point that I wanted to make it’s that this has not been easy. I mean, it’s fun, no lie, but it’s really been hard, hard work. Everyone has had to rewrite scripts, check outlines, do it again, all with the edict of ‘Just make it better. It’s just not there yet. It’s just not doing it. It’s not fun enough, it’s too convoluted, too much like the old. This should feel fresh.’”

Schulz Library

Education | The Center For Cartoon Studies’ Schulz Library in White River Junction, Vermont, was damaged over the weekend in flooding caused by torrential rains from Hurricane Irene. According to CCS Director James Sturm, volunteers called in Sunday night were able to remove about 70 percent of the library’s collection and move the remaining materials to higher shelves. However, he indicated to Tom Spurgeon that the building itself may be a loss. [The Comics Reporter]

Publishing | Jim Shooter, former editor-in-chief for Marvel Comics, shares the story of how DC Comics almost licensed the publishing rights to their characters to Marvel in the mid-1980s. Obviously the deal never happened, which Shooter said was due to a lawsuit by First Comics alleging anti-trust violations. [Jim Shooter]

Creators | Gail Simone discusses her upcoming work on Batgirl and Fury of Firestorm. [TFAW]

Catwoman #1

Creators | Judd Winick discusses the two titles he’s writing for DC’s September relaunch, Batwing and Catwoman: “We’re kind of taking her back to the core of what Catwoman is. I think if you grabbed 100 people on the street and asked them about Catwoman, they would probably have the gist of who she is. It’s like, ‘Yeah, she dresses up like a cat, she’s a cat burglar, she steals things, and she’s really crazy sexy.’ And that’s all you need to know, that’s it, and that’s what we’re going with. Back to the core of who and what she is. She’s beautiful, she’s dangerous, she’s addicted to danger, she’s addicted to being a criminal. She’s not a villain per se, she’s a criminal; she steals things, more because she loves the thrill of it and is addicted to the danger than that she needs money. It’s not like she’s squirreling away money to somehow retire to an island. It’s more about ‘I dig doing this,’ and whatever money she gets, she blows through it quickly.” [Complex]

Green Wake, Vol. 1

Creators | Kurtis Wiebe and Riley Rossmo discuss their Image series Green Wake, “by far the most successful comic to be written and illustrated in Saskatoon.” [StarPhoenix]

Creators | Darryl Ayo looks at the tendency of indie creators tend to go it alone, and he wonders what we might be missing because they don’t collaborate much. He illuminates the discussion with lots of examples. [Comix Cube]

Comics | The killing of Bucky Barnes leads Colin Smith to ponder on gimmicks versus story in superhero comics. [Too Busy Thinking About My Comics]

Comics | Jocelyne Allen enjoys Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat and Girl for its mix of wisdom and silliness: “The thing I love about Cat and Girl is the way it mixes ideas about class, gender, philosophy and all-around contemplative action with a cat that drinks paint and zombie Joseph Beuys.” [Brain Vs. Book]

Comics | Gavin Lees reviews First Second’s upcoming book Nursery Rhyme Comics. [Graphic Eye]

Organizations | Copyright and trademark lawyer Dale Cendali has joined the board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund as secretary. [press release]

Conventions | Small Press Expo has started a graphic novel gifting program to encourage libraries to acquire more indy graphic novels, and the first recipient will be in their home state of Maryland: The Montgomery County Public Libraries. [The Washington Post]

Atomic Comics' Chandler, Arizona, location

Atomic Comics, the nationally known Arizona retail chain, abruptly closed all four locations on Sunday, shocking staff, customers and industry figures alike. Although the closing of the stores in Mesa, Phoenix, Chandler and Paradise Valley was initially announced last night by multiple employees and creators, owner Michael Malve confirmed the news this morning in an installment of his weekly newsletter titled “My Final Report.”

“As some of you may have already heard, after 25 years of running a successful business, sadly and much to my dismay, I have shut the doors of Atomic Comics,” Malve wrote. “The villain in this tragedy is the economy. I had hoped to be the superhero and triumph over the recession, but sadly the economic downturn of the past 5 years has proven to be unsustainable.”

In the newsletter, which can be read below, Malve revealed he’s filed for bankruptcy, and that he and his family are losing their home, ” as we had secured it against our leases which we obviously have to break.”

“I know there are many people out there facing very similar situations in these difficult times and now I can definitely empathize with them,” he continued. “I have always been and will forever be an extremely optimistic person and will look at this situation as an adventure. I have very high hopes for the next chapter of my life.”

Well regarded nationally for its in-store signings, innovative marketing and sheer size — it was believed to be among Diamond Comic Distributors’ largest accounts — Atomic gained international exposure last year when its name and logo were featured prominently in Kick-Ass, the film adaptation of the comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. The chain began in 1988, when Malve opened Bubba’s Comic Store in Phoenix. A year later he moved to Mesa, renaming the business Atomic Comics.

Malve, a major supporter of The Hero Initiative, sent a weekly newsletter to colleagues, creators and publishers, breaking down sales at his four stores. Although Malve was forthright in the emails, grumbling about the state of the market, there apparently were few indications that he was on the brink of closing until he commented in his Aug. 17 report that, “I don’t know how I am going to afford September at this point.”

The news triggered immediate reactions from the likes of Jim Lee, Joe Quesada — “The best retailer I’ve ever met closed his doors” — Brian Michael Bendis, Warren Ellis, Kevin Smith and Dan Slott.

However, it also led some to try to pinpoint a cause, and to sound the alarm. Controversial retailer Larry Doherty chimed in, “If Mike Malve has fallen we could ALL be doomed. His genius in retail is the high water mark,” later adding, “Print runs are REALLY low. Publishers that market digital to the SAME customer base just put Atomic Comics out of business.” Retailer and promoter Jimmy Jay replied, “if Atomic has fallen, it didn’t happen overnight. [...] Digital didn’t kill Atomic, that is simplification.”

But then Rob Liefeld weighed in, writing, “Atomic Comics is a cautionary tale of hype over commerce. [...] Hate that this will turn into a blight on the comics industry when it is isolated to a specific chain, not all encompassing. [...] Once again, terrible news about Atomic Comics. Confident the AZ. Comic scene will recover and Malve will rise again.”

Note: The article has been edited to reflect the content of Malve’s newsletter.

Read the full text of Malve’s “Final Report” below:

My Final Report

As some of you may have already heard, after 25 years of running a successful business, sadly and much to my dismay, I have shut the doors of Atomic Comics. The villain in this tragedy is the economy. I had hoped to be the superhero and triumph over the recession, but sadly the economic downturn of the past 5 years has proven to be unsustainable.

For over 20 years I ran a successful and debt free business, provided jobs for up to 60 employees at a time, with some working for me for 16 plus years!  I saw profits of up to 5 million during our best years. My wife recently bought me a copy of the book, “ONWARD” by Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. I could really identify with some of the problems Starbucks had faced. Some similarities were that during the best of times, Atomic Comics, like Starbucks, expanded into high profile locations, but when the economy went sour, low sales could not support the higher rent at these high visibility locations. The leases at these particular stores which had originally provided the consumers with greater visibility and more foot traffic to our wonderful world of comic books, the higher overhead proved to be too much for Atomic as we faced declining sales.

As Atomic was seeing such success, we opened our headquarters which housed our shipping and receiving department, home base for our web store and worldwide mail order operation. We closed the headquarters down in May of 2010. I think the catalyst for Atomics’ downfall, as some of you may remember, occurred in October of 2006, just as the recession was beginning,  when a 16 year old uninsured driver, drover her car through the window of our Mesa Superstore, our largest and greatest revenue producer. This in turn caused a flood as the water main had been hit. This caused such severe damage and loss that we had to shut down for over 5 months. The damages were so severe we lost close to a million dollars in product. The loss of revenue due to being closed all those months as we headed into retail’s busiest season was astronomical. What really stood out to me was how many of Atomics’ customers were lost as we rebuilt the store. It seemed as if half our customers never returned. The great mystery to me is what exactly happened to all those missing customers. I can only speculate that once you take away the habit of weekly buying-it is hard to jump back into it. Since there was not another comic shop in the immediate area, I can only assume customers found other means to obtain their comics, maybe they started driving great distances to hit up other stores, some possibly went the way of the internet and are now ordering their books online or perhaps even downloading their books illegally, or maybe even some stopped collecting comics altogether.

I have some great memories of my regular customers, seeing these people week in and week out. Some for as many as 25 years of not missing a beat as they picked up their books. Bringing the new readers into comics by doing various promotions and events was something I enjoyed a great deal and will truly miss. Hopefully the customers and fans I cultivated will find new a new place to call home and get their geek on. To all my fellow comic book retailers out there, I truly hope you do not succumb to the same fate, can see this recession thru, and continue to be successful and flourish. I will be here rooting for you!  With DC’s September release of the #1’s, Marvel’s makeover of key books and continual growth, and other publishers working hard with some amazing new and exciting content, there is hope on the horizon for the direct market! I have enjoyed sharing thoughts and ideas with all these other retailers. Much love and appreciation to you all.

I have been blessed since day one to be surrounded by so many incredible people. There is no way that Atomic would have lasted all these years without everyone’s effort and support. To all of my employees past and present, friends in the industry, and business contacts I have made over the years, I plan on staying in touch. If I made a list of all the many people who have helped and supported me over the years the list would be lengthy beyond belief! So I’ll keep it short. At Atomic I would like to thank Bill Mitchell, Dale Worthington, Julian Moraga, and Mike Ueber. I have had hundreds of great employees over the years that went above and beyond as they dedicated themselves to making Atomic Comics a very special place. Someone who has given me an incredible amount of support is Ryan Liebowitz from Golden Apple Comics. He and his family have bent over backwards providing me with ideas and words of encouragement to keep me going. Ironically, Ryan’s father, Bill Liebowitz was my good friend and mentor when I opened my first store 25 years ago. I would like to thank and give credit to Joe Quesada, Mark Waid, and Jim McLaughlin for inspiring me to write this weekly report over a decade ago. It was conceived at Megacon as we hung out talking about the industry. I had already been writing a very informal monthly report just checking in on sales with the guys at Wizard magazine, but I don’t believe anyone was receiving true and accurate sales numbers until this weekly report began. I had wanted to portray a candid-no holds barred account of what was and what wasn’t selling. Lastly, I want to give a shout out and thank everyone in the comic and entertainment industry for their continued support over the years.

Making the decision to file bankruptcy was very difficult and painful. I have had a very wide range of emotions.  My family and I are headed into uncharted waters which is very scary for my wife and I as well as our children. We are losing our home as we had secured it against our leases which we obviously have to break. I know there are many people out there facing very similar situations in these difficult times and now I can definitely empathize with them. I have always been and will forever be an extremely optimistic person and will look at this situation as an adventure. I have very high hopes for the next chapter of my life. I have the support of my wonderful wife, Andrea, my kids, Alexandra & Jack, many loving family members, and lots of great friends. My passion in life, second of course to my family, is the comic book industry, of which I hope to remain a part of in the years to come. I don’t plan on giving any public interviews and would like mine and my family’s privacy respected so we can work on rebuilding our lives.

Sincerely

Mike Malve

Atomic Comics name and logo in "Kick-Ass"

Atomic Comics name and logo in "Kick-Ass"

Update: Jhonen Vasquez shares his thoughts in our comments section: “Atomic was the first big signing I ever did, and the first I had done outside of California when I was first starting out. From the very moment I met the guy, Mike treated me not like the malformed horror most people see me as, but like a friend and a huge supporter of my work. Loved signing at Atomic then and for years on and I wish Mike and everyone from Atomic well.”

Justice League #3

DC Comics has unveiled the cover by Jim Lee and Scott Williams for Justice League #3, which puts Wonder Woman front and center as Lee and writer Geoff Johns “unleash the amazing Amazon [...] who joins the battle against a bizarre threat! And the not-yet World’s Greatest Heroes need all the help they can get!”

The 40-page comic, which goes on sale Nov. 16, features variant covers by Greg Capullo and Lee.

And, when you think about DC Comics these days, chances are you’re thinking of Jim Lee’s versions of the characters.

Beyond his current role as the company’s co-publisher, Lee’s become the company’s defining artist (ironically, perhaps, without actually working on a regular comic book series for quite some time). He’s the guy who draws the public face of the company’s stars.

Click on dccomics.com, and you’ll see Lee’s Justice League as the banner. Click to the company’s The Source blog, and you’ll see a Lee-drawn Trinity as the banner. Lee designed all of the characters for the publisher’s DC Universe Online video game. Lee redesigned much of the DC Universe for their upcoming relaunch (and quite radically so compared to the more modest DCUO designs). It was Lee who drew the company’s Google doodle a while back, and a great deal of DC-branded merchandise, from tennis shoes and to action figures, features Lee versions of the characters.

The pervasiveness of his visual influence extends to many of the artists chosen to work on the characters’ comic books, and the style in which they’re depicted—DC is too big a publisher to really have a house style, but there’s a loose majority style in which Lee’s influence is rather apparent.

So with visions of a high-collared Justice League dancing in my head as they usually do (Confession: I think about the Justice League the way some people you might encounter on a big-city street think about the CIA and mind control), I was at my local library the other day and noticed a big, huge, atlas-sized tome sitting on a cart, awaiting to be filed back where it belonged.

The cover featured a dramatically-lit Trinity, an outcropping of rock hiding their feet, standing above giant gold letters reading “ICONS” and “Jim Lee.” Picking it up—with an “Oof!” and the thought, I really need to start working out again—I saw that it was actually Icons: The DC Comics and Wildstorm art of Jim Lee.

Naturally I brought it home to pore over, thinking it might be some sort of Rosetta Stone to how Lee went from the guy who made Jeph Loeb’s totally random “Hush” story arc into something readable to becoming the guy who will define DC Comics for a generation (if the relaunch works out as they seem to hope it will, otherwise he might become known as the guy who made DC’s superheroes look silly for a few years in the 20-teens).

If nothing else, the book was about the size and weight of the Rosetta Stone.

I should note that this is not the Jim Lee book I would most want to read. The introduction gives a brief overview of his career, which I found fascinating enough to want to read more about it (Did you know he was studying to become a doctor, which might explain why his sense of anatomy is so much better than some of his early nineties superstar peers? Did you know he only gave himself one year to break into the comics industry, before returning to medicine? That’s crazy, but he did it!). And throughout there are quotes on various subjects from him regarding his technique and his thoughts on characters to be sort of tantalizing to process junkies, but it’s mostly just a tease of information here or there.

This, then, isn’t a work-focused biography of Jim Lee, nor a process-oriented survey of his work, nor an critical or aesthetic assessment of his work and influence between the time he founded WildStorm and the random, mostly non-comics work he did for DC after All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder went on its hiatus. Icons came out in 2010, and thus doesn’t cover some of Lee’s work that is just now becoming apparent (His work on the relaunch, the fact that he’ll be drawing Justice League hopefully monthly-ish).

Now, while I’d prefer to read those sorts of books about Lee—books I imagine will come at some point—it’s not really fair to criticize a book for not being what I’d prefer it to be, is it?

Icons is a big (9.5-by-12 inches!), fat (296 pages!) collection of Lee’s covers, sketches, pin-ups, panels from his comics work and other, lesser-seen images. It’s a coffee table book devoted to a pretty big chunk of the artist’s career, and one that makes an extremely convincing case for why Lee is currently superhero comics’ most popular artist, and the fact that he deserves much of that popularity on the basis of how talented he is.

Appreciation of art—any art—is subjective, of course, but I don’t think the same can be said of the recognition of the quality of art, and seeing some of Lee’s work from the aughts re-presented out of context, and at such a huge size, and often in different states of completion, certainly drives home the fact that, love or hate certain aspects of his style and aesthetic direction, that Jim Lee cat sure can draw.

Rather than moving chronologically, the book is divided into chapters based on characters, which has the unfortunate side effect of putting most of Lee’s good stuff at the front of the book (his work on the big DC heroes), before it dwindles off into shorter and shorter sections featuring his WildStorm creations like WildCATS, Gen 13 and others I had forgotten even existed(Deathblow, DV8, Divine Right).

The effect, then, is that the book begins with Lee’s best work (his most recent) and going backwards to his earlier nineties stuff, when his skills weren’t as sharp as they are now, all of his characters tended to look alike, and he was working from designs that were springing out of his own early nineties imagination, rather than ones that were refined by decades of the greatest superhero comics artists.

Luckily, it ends with a nice a gallery of his Vertigo covers and pin-ups (and man is it weird seeing Lee’s Spider Jerusalem, Death of the Endless and DMZ) and then a gallery of random images from throughout the entire span of his career covered here. The book, then, does end on a high note. Oh, and then there’s a ten-page Legion of Superheroes story Lee drew exclusively for Icons, a story in which Lee and Paul Levitz appear as characters.

Fans of Lee’s should like this, skeptics might find themselves converted, or at least look at his work in a new light—myself, I was not a fan of his work until more recently, and appreciated the way in which the book allowed me to see Lee improving by comparing pieces from one period to another in the book.

As for what it says about the future of Lee and the DCU he’s become such a central part of, it was a reminder that costume design is not Lee’s strongest suit—there’s a brief section on his redesign of Kyle Rayner’s Green Lantern costume (the one with the ribbing and dog-collar, which lasted from 2002 to 2006), and sketches showing attempts at redesigning Batman and Robin for All-Star, although all of these were eventually abandoned in favor of fairly standard costumes for both (Batman getting a big, blocky, Sprang-y Bat-symbol to differentiate him from Lee’s “Hush” era Batman).

The costume design in the Wildstorm section strikes me as something of an aesthetic nightmare, although it’s difficult to judge the effectiveness of the design with the audience from a remove. Certainly many of those characters wore those costumes for a long time, without changing them, or changing them only slightly, so a significant chunk of readers must have been able to look at this

without getting dizzy and thinking they never wanted to look at another superhero comic. I can’t say the same.

I don’t know if it’s simply the demands of the format of this book or if it’s telling that the vast majority of it comes from covers and other such single-image work, rather than panels from inside comics, or sequences from comics.

Lee eventually got quite good at expressions and drawing emotions in his characters, but the panels chosen are almost all splash-pages, with the rare exception of a sixteen-panel grid page from  ASBaRtBW #2, in which Batman and Dick Grayson talk in the cockpit of the Batmoblie.Even stripped of words, you get a sense of the conversation, and the intensity of the emotional content.

After spending a few hours looking at Lee’s last few decades full of work, and thinking about where he excels and where he doesn’t, I’m actually more excited to read Justice League #1 later this month than I was before. I  still think all of the costumes look worse than they did before the redesign, and I still think Lee versions of the standard costumes would have been an even bigger draw to readers, but I’m intensely curious about how Lee and writer Geoff Johns will work together.

I think Lee’s best storytelling work was on All-Star Batman, and on that particular project  he was working with a writer who also happens to be one of the best and most influential writer/artists to draw superhero comics (Frank Miller). Johns’ scripting tends to play to the bad habits of artists—a lot of splash pages (too many for a 20-page book, if you ask me), pages with only three-to-five panels, climaxes that turn on sudden, unexpected appearances.

I hope Johns manages to bring out the best in Lee, or at least allow him to continue to grow as a storyteller as well as an illustrator, although the fact that Johns is “just” a comics writer, rather than being Frank freaking Miller, makes me have my doubts.

But either way, after this retrospective look, I’m curious to see what Lee can draw in 2011 and beyond. He’s become the face of the DC superhero line, and in the coming months he’ll have the opportunity to prove whether or not he can be a much more vital organ, perhaps even its heart.