Cue the Welcome Back, Kotter theme music: At a live press conference from NYC’s Midtown Comics today, Marvel unveiled “Fear Itself,” a line-wide event beginning in March. Featuring a prologue one-shot by Ed Brubaker and Scot Eaton, tie-ins, spin-off stand-alone miniseries, and an April-launching seven-issue core limited series by Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen, it’s very much in the vein of past mega-events like “Civil War,” a comparison company personnel made repeatedly at the presser. If anything, it sounds even bigger than “Civil War,” as the two core Marvel franchises who’ve traditionally been kept at arms’ length from the big events of late, the Hulk and the X-Men, look to be playing an integral role right along with the Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and so on.

As such, it’s a marked departure from the post-”Dark Reign”/”Siege” direction of the Marvel Universe, which has seen the era of big line-spanning events give way to franchise/family-specific crossovers and mini-events like “Shadowland,” “Second Coming,” “World War Hulks” and “The Gauntlet,” under the loose “Heroic Age” banner.

The past year, during which smaller events were the norm at the company, has seen a marked decline in sales, and editors like Tom Brevoort have noted that fans appear to be confused and overwhelmed by the proliferation of smaller events, even though the thinking behind them (along with avoiding creator and reader burnout on the bigger crossovers) was that they’d be less demanding of consumers’ energy and cash than the mega-events. Now, correlation does not imply causality, and there are any number of explanations for slack sales besides the relative merits of different event-comic business models, from the overall economy to price hikes on individual titles to readers simply being less interested in the stories on hand.

Keep in mind that DC’s sales have suffered, too, the success of “Blackest Night” and “Brightest Day” and even the franchise-specific “Return of Bruce Wayne” (not to mention future plans for “Flashpoint” and “War of the Green Lanterns”) notwithstanding. But by returning to the mega-event model, Marvel appears to be saying that in their eyes, at least, a change was needed, and the way to move forward was to go back to what worked in the past.

As a pundit, I find this stuff pretty fascinating. As a reader and critic, I don’t give a crap — all that really matters to me is that the comic in front of me be entertaining. Personally, I think “Fear Itself” has a lot of potential in that regard. “Straight-up supervillain comes hard at all of the superheroes, even the gamma and mutant ones” is a long-overdue structure for a Marvel mega-event, which from “Avengers Disassembled” onward have all either pitted heroes against heroes (“Disassembled,” “Civil War,” “World War Hulk”) or heroes against villains who appeared to be heroes to someone, at least (“House of M,” “Secret Invasion,” “Dark Reign,” “Siege”). An old-school good-vs.-evil crossover from character-conscious talents like Fraction and Immonen could be just what the doctor ordered this spring and summer. And judging from Marvel’s move away from the business plan they announced with much fanfare when unveiling “Siege” over a year ago, that’s what they’re banking on.

Then earlier this month, Marvel flipped the script, offering a rare Deadpool variant of the upcoming Wolverine #1 relaunch in exchange for every 50 covers they receive from Marvel event tie-ins, specifically books from the X-Men: Second Coming and Siege events.

How’s that working out? Let’s find out, courtesy of the Twitter account of Vice President-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort:

An update on our current Marvel book-swap. With one week to go till cut-off, we’ve gotten less than 15% as many books as we did ring-books. In other words, for every 3 Marvel books returned, we’d previously gotten 20 ring-books. Could be that people wanted the SIEGE variant more.

… or, as one could infer, it could be that the Siege and Second Coming tie-ins eligible for this trade genuinely sold through to readers better than the Blackest Night tie-in “ring books” did, so retailers have fewer unwanted leftovers to unload. But far be it for Tom Brevoort to tweak the competition!

The Siege #3 variant that broke the Internet in half

Remember when Marvel offered to send retailers a rare Deadpool variant of Siege #3 in exchange for every 50 stripped covers from various Blackest Night “power ring promotion” titles they received? Remember how the comics Internet lost its collective marbles over this? Well, Marvel’s doing it again — but this time, they’re offering retailers the chance to unload unsold event-comic tie-ins published by Marvel themselves.

According to Marvel, the publisher will send retailers a Deadpool variant version of Wolverine #1 in exchange for every 50 stripped covers it receives of a slew of tie-ins to their X-Men: Second Coming and Siege events. The eligible issues include New Mutants 12, Uncanny X-Men 523, X-Force 26, X-Men Legacy 235, Avengers: The Initiative 34, Dark Avengers 15, Dark Wolverine 84, Mighty Avengers 36, New Avengers 64, Thor 609 and Thunderbolts 143.

Obviously, there are some big questions here: Why must Marvel continue to childishly taunt and tweak itself, even going so far as to encourage retailers to destroy their own comics? And how long will the likes of Brian Michael Bendis and Matt Fraction put up with this outrageous insult before taking their business elsewhere?

Scalped

With the school year ending and summer arriving faster than you know it, now’s the time to update your summer reading list — and there’s no better place to find some good stuff to read than right here in our weekly What Are You Reading? column. This week our guests are Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt, the creative team behind The Sixth Gun, published by Oni Press. You’ll be seeing a lot of Cullen and Brian over the next few weeks here at Robot 6, so here’s the perfect opportunity to find out what comics they’re into.

*****

Brigid Alverson

Neko Ramen

Lots of manga came in the mail this week, so I’m having a good time. From Tokyopop, I have Neko Ramen, which is a collection of four-panel gag strips about a cat who runs a ramen shop. Like Snakes on a Plane, the title pretty much embodies the concept. Four-panel gag manga (4-koma) are not usually funny in the same way gag strips here are, and the structure is different, so they often don’t travel well. This one does, although the humor is pretty goofy, relying on a mix of cats acting like humans, cats acting like cats, and human customers trying to sort it all out. I wouldn’t watch a full-length film based on this premise, but broken into short strips, it works OK.

My Girlfriend’s a Geek is a gender-reversed twist on the usual Train Man/Genshiken story, because in this case the otaku is not a nerdy guy but a confident woman. Taiga is a college student who has a thing for girls who are slightly older than him. He sees a beautiful girl through a window, applies for a job at her office, and gets it, but at first he seems to get nowhere. What Yuiko is hiding from him is that she is a fujoshi, a girl otaku, who sees Taiga only as a human version of the fantasy boys in yaoi manga. Ed Sizemore really didn’t like it, finding Yuiko’s objectification of Taiga “unsettling.” I haven’t gotten that far into it yet, so I’m enjoying the romantic-comedy aspects and Rize Shinba’s lovely artwork, but I may end up agreeing with Ed when I’m done. We’ll see.

Sean T. Collins

Wilson

Dan Clowes and minicomics are how I spent my last two weeks. Click the links for reviews of what I’ve been reading…

Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes: Clowes’s New York Times Funny Pages strip reads like a trial run for his next comic…

Wilson by Daniel Clowes: Never mind the backlash — this mean-spirited comic about the price of being mean-spirited is a black-comedy masterpiece.

Jumbly Junkery #8-9 by L. Nichols: This one-woman anthology series is manic creativity in minicomic form.

Henry & Glenn Forever by Igloo Tornado: Tom Neely and friends pay tribute to the undying love between Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins. The feel-good comic of the year.

The Numbers of the Beasts by Shawn Cheng: A children’s counting book using mythological monsters, e.g. “Nine are the heads of the hydra.” Gorgeously drawn.

Wiegle for Tarzan by Matt Wiegle: In this not-very-autobiographical minicomic, the author asks for your support as he runs for New York State’s official Tarzan. Yes we can!

Chris Mautner

Little Sammy Sneeze

I picked up Sunday Press Books edition of Little Sammy Sneez by Winsor McCay back on Free Comic Book Day, as my local store was having a 20 percent off on everything discount and I’d been eyeing the book for quite a while. I’m glad I got it because while it doesn’t match the heights of McCay’s Little Nemo, it does have some odd merits on its own.

As his name suggests, Sammy has got one hell of an achoo — it sends, billiard balls blowing, frightens elephants, sends just about everything flying every which where and creates general chaos and devastation in its wake. Each strip is paced almost exactly the same: Adults are engaged in some important adult activity and Sammy gears up for a mother of a sneeze, which always lets loose in the next to last panel (the final one usually involving him getting a kick in the rear). As many reviewers (and the book’s contributors) note, what’s odd about Sammy is his complete laconic attitude and steadfast refusal to alter his ways. He never says a word and never seems to learn to use a handkerchief. You get the feeling the boy ain’t quite right in the head.

What’s equally interesting to me however, is how utterly oblivious the adults are to Sammy’s sneezes. There he is, taking several minutes to wind up but everyone else seems to busy engaged in their own petty matters to pay any attention. It’s suggests a bit of an editorial on McCay’s part, especially as the Sammy strips are paired with McCay’s Hungry Henrietta. That strip follows a young girl who, as a baby is basically fed whenever she’s upset and, as she grows (she ages a few months every strip), her parents become mystified at what an enormous appetite she has. It’s the helicopter parenting of 1905 I suppose, though there’s something selfish in in the family’s inability to understand Henrietta’s behavior that coats a somewhat sad veneer over the whole enterprise, which is what makes it so fascinating in the first place.

Cullen Bunn

It seems like lately I’ve been reading more prose and non-fiction than comics, and a lot of my comic reading involves delving into some of the books that inspired me in my youth. I could go on for hours about my “go-to” books—my all-time favorites—such as Micronauts and Dreadstar and Man-Thing. I’ll steer away from those until some other time. Instead, here are a few graphic novels and comics that I’ve really been digging lately.

Batman and Robin #13

BATMAN AND ROBIN by Grant Morrison

I probably don’t have to encourage most comic fans to read this one. Here’s a secret, though: I’m not a huge Batman fan. I like the character, sure, and I have a ton of back issues stowed away in the long boxes hidden in the basement. But he’s not a character I go out of my way to follow. So, this is for the non-Batman fan. It was Morrison’s run on New X-Men that got me back into comics after a long hiatus, so I was excited by the prospect his take on the “new” Batman. He plunges the reader right into the new Batman and Robin pairing, and I didn’t miss Bruce Wayne at all. The new characters (especially Scarlet and Flamingo) alone are worth the price of admission. There’s a little Batman back story that may cause brand new readers to stumble just a bit, but not much. If you’re passingly aware of the Caped Crusader, you’ll be able to keep up without a problem.

Jack Kirby’s THE DEMON and DEVIL DINOSAUR

One from Marvel. One from DC. Both from the 70s. Both awesome. I just re-read these series in the collected formats. Holy Cow! Talk about no-holds-barred craziness! These are the types of books that hook readers with their wild plots and eye-popping character designs. And it’s not some sense of nostalgia that fuels my love for these books. Okay … maybe a little … but that’s only part of it. The most important thing about these stories, written over thirty years ago, is that they show a level of fun and creativity that I often fear is lost in newer comics. As a writer, I aspire to capture some of that anything-can-happen wonder in my work.

AMERICAN VAMPIRE by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King

Finally a vampire comic for horror fans! I guess there’s nothing wrong with Lestat and company, but I’ve always preferred my bloodsuckers to be a little more down and dirty, and that’s what I got with the story of Skinner Sweet, the first American Vampire. If this series keeps going the way it has, it will quickly become one of my favorite Vertigo series. Hey, it’s got the Old West and the Roaring Twenties, two eras that are obviously near and dear to me, and I’m eager to see the history of the titular character unfold.

SIEGE by Brian Michael Bendis

When I picked this up, I really just wanted to read a story about superheroes beating each other up. That’s what I got, too! It was a lot of fun, and it’s interesting to see the culmination of events that were set into motion years ago. A book like this, which seems a little tight with just four issues, is all about moments of coolness, like Thor’s entrance in issue 1, Captain America’s arrival on the final page of issue 2, and Iron Man’s appearance in issue 3. Wait a sec! All my favorite bits are when characters arrive on the scene. Well, I guess Bendis writes damn good entrances.

SCALPED by Jason Aaron

When I first started reading comic books, I would have never thought that a book like Scalped would by one of my favorite titles. Here’s a book that has everything going for it. A great premise. A terrific cast. A suitably damaged protagonist who can “break it off” when he needs to, and a complex, evolving storyline that never lets you get too comfortable. One of the things I like most is that I started out thinking this was the story of Dashiell Bad Horse, but as the tale unfolds, I’m thinking this is really crime boss Red Crow’s story.

SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING by Alan Moore

Again, there’s probably a little nostalgia here. When I first read Alan Moore’s take on Swamp Thing, it was when my younger brother bought a bunch of them at the flea market. The stories have been reissued in some beautiful hardcover editions, so I couldn’t help but dive back into them. It’s strikes me that the individual covers to those early Moore issues really couldn’t prepare the reader for the shock and awe awaiting them. The covers often looked like your standard monster vs. monster fare. There’s nothing wrong with that. I love that stuff! But when you opened the book, you were thrown into this poetic, creepy, disturbing world that changed the way American comic creators approached horror forever. And if that wasn’t enough for me, the confrontation between Arcane and the “new” Swamp Thing still makes me giddy with the level of whoop-ass unleashed on the page.

Vol. 8 of Pluto

A Bunch of Them There Manga Books

Lately, I’ve been getting into a lot of manga titles. It started with an exploration of J-Horror in comics, because I wanted to immerse myself in the surreal creepiness of books like Uzumaki and Tomie by Junji Ito. The structure of those books is appealing to me, but I don’t know how they manage to suspend my disbelief from beginning to end. In Uzumaki, most of the stories (especially in the beginning) stand on their own, and the horror gets more and more bizarre. I guess it’s a little like reading someone else’s nightmare. It’s tough for comics to be truly scary, but these are definitely unsettling.

I think it was Brian who turned me on to Death Note and Parasyte, both of which I enjoyed from beginning to end. What I like most about these stories is that the creators really take their time developing the characters and letting the plot unfold, sometimes over the course of dozens of issues. Along the way, they manage to toss complication after complication into the mix, so there’s always something new to keep the reader’s attention, even in the midst of page after page of exposition. I just really dig these complex plots and characters … and the more fantastic elements are always a lot of fun.

Currently, I’m reading Pluto, which for a book inspired by an episode of Astro Boy is a damn fine mystery. Again, this one is focused on character development rather than robotic battles. I went into this one without knowing a whole lot about it, and I think I’m better off for it. I’m only three volumes in, but the stories of North No. 2 and Brando were surprisingly sad and touching.

Brian Hurtt

When I was first asked “What Are You Reading?” I kind of panicked. I stay pretty busy, I’m on a budget, and I have this constant guilt about not reading enough comics. So I started to put together a list of what I’ve been reading recently that I could recommend. I really hoped that I could come up with 3, maybe 4 books. That’d be fine. That’d be enough. I had to stop my list at 10. That surprised me. So, what follows, are a few titles from that list—the ones I’ve read most recently and was most excited to share.

Dungeon Twilight: The New Centurions

DUNGEON: This is one of my all-time favorite series! It’s a great day when I walk into a store and see that a new volume has come out. My only complaint is that there aren’t nearly enough of them (translated to English) and they don’t come out often enough. Just this week I picked up Dungeon Twilight: The New Centurions.

I really have a hard time describing this book to people when trying to recommend it. It is sort of a parody of fantasy or sword and sorcery comics but at the same time it is so much more. At first glance, it is very cartoony, with all the characters being anthropomorphic animals and monsters, and you immediately think it’s a “funny book”. And it is a funny book. But it’s also, at times, dark and violent and sometimes existential and sad.

One of the things that is really interesting about this series is the rotating cast of French creators. Every volume, as far as I can tell, is either written, or co-written, by the series creator’s Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat, Vampire Loves) and Lewis Trondheim (Little Nothings, Harum Scarum). They also dip in and do art chores from time to time as well as some other French luminaries like Blutch and Christophe Blain and many more.

I’m absolutely in love with all these creators so it only makes sense that if you put them all in the same universe and let them run wild that the final product of that will be something that I can’t resist. There is this quality that they all share and I describe it as immediacy. There is an immediacy to the art and the quality of line. Nothing seems labored over—it’s like a pure love a just drawing exudes every panel. It’s kinda hard to convey. But that immediacy also extends to the storytelling. You are given an almost stream of consciousness sense to the plotting—like the creators have no idea what an outline is. It may be a quality that is intentionally brought to the stories by masters of storytelling—kind of like jazz masters who are so intimate and knowledgeable of the art that they can then break it down and improvise. But I’m constantly left with the sense that they’re making it up as they go along—until the end, when the whole journey comes together beautifully.

But maybe I’m just over thinking it. It is just a funny book, after all.

Fantastic Four: World's Greatest

FANTASTIC FOUR: WORLD’S GREATEST: I’m one of those people who finds Mark Millar hit or miss. In fact, the only time I ever really enjoy his work is when he’s working with Bryan Hitch. I loved Ultimates. I liked Ultimates 2. I wasn’t sure what to expect from their work on the Fantastic Four. Now, the Fantastic Four, similarly, is hit or miss. I really like the FF but I tend to like them best when the series most closely resembles the tone, imagination and scope of Lee and Kirby when they were in their prime on this series. I’m a big fan of John Byrne’s run on the book in the 80′s (in my opinion, along with Simonson’s THOR, one of the best series of the 80′s). The last time I was compelled to pick up FF was when Waid and Weiringo were on the book. So it was with trepidation that I picked up the recent Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest (collecting FF #554-561). My concerns were laid to rest pretty quickly. I found a series that was as exciting and epic as any previous incarnation while at the same time adding depth to the characters (especially Sue and Reed) without sacrificing their core personalities. It goes without saying that the art is amazing. Nobody stages epic action like Hitch and he’s firing on all cylinders here. This book was exactly what I wanted from a post-millennial FF book and has guaranteed that I will be back for more.

JASON AARON: Okay, I realize this is a cheat. I was going to just tell everyone that I was reading Scalped, that it is the best ongoing on the stands, and it’s generally all around awesome. There really isn’t anything I can say about Scalped that hasn’t already been said by everyone else. It’s a testament to his writing that a book that, conceptually (a crime series set on a Native American reservation), didn’t really appeal to me ahs become my favorite ongoing series. It’s a book that has a rich ensemble (the main character, Dashiell Bad Horse, disappears for a whole arc and you don’t mind) and is emotionally and psychologically dark and complex–all the while, being a great thrill ride. But, I couldn’t mention Scalped and not also mention where it has taken me.

I wonder if Aaron hopes that his work for Marvel might in some way be a gateway drug to discovering, what is obviously a more personal work, Scalped. I know that it has actually been the opposite for me.

I don’t generally read a lot of superhero books, I just tend to dip my toe in here and there (usually when Ed Brubaker is involved). But, in the past couple weeks I’ve found myself tugged toward the Marvel Universe. Specifically, the work of Aaron. Already a Scalped fan, I found myself in the possession of the first arc of Aaron’s PunisherMAX series. This was essentially a Kingpin origin story. I’ve never found the Kingpin more compelling, smart and dangerous as I did in this series. The Punisher, in this series, is more of an engine for the story. He seems less a character and more a force of nature. Kind of like the character of Shigur in No Country for Old Men. And Aaron’s command of the comic language is on full display here with flashbacks and parallel narratives—just a wonderfully constructed comic. Did I mention that Steve Dillon delivers some of his trademark, mundane ultraviolence? The arc that just started in the series features Bullseye. Hell yeah. Ya got me, Mr. Aaron. I’m sold.

So there I was. I loved Scalped. I was intrigued enough to pick up PunisherMAX and I loved it. So what am I to do when I see Astonishing Spider-Man and Wolverine…written by Jason Aaron? Not something I’d pick up, generally. But, with Aaron’s name on it I’ve gotta give it a chance, right? Well, glad I did. Again, he does a does a great job of constructing this dual narrative, with two distinct and iconic comic voices, and all the while making it look easy. It has that sense of pure fun and adventure that superhero comics, on a whole, seem to have lost. It’s a book that I want to read on the floor of my living room on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I’m on board. And I’m also compelled to go seek out some of his other recent Marvel work. From Scalped to Spidey and Wolvie–well played Mr. Aaron.

Some of the other books I wanted to write about but didn’t have the space for: CRIMINAL, SCOTT PILGRIM, HELLBOY/BPRD, Fraction’s INVINCIBLE IRON MAN and Matt Kindt’s 3 STORY.

and now for the honorary throwing things we don't like into the Sun.

Let’s move on, shall we?

Just like we moved on right about this time last year. There came a time when the shock value of Norman Osborn becoming the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. wore off and we realized the Marvel Universe was in for a Twilight Zone of a year. Evil was media friendly, good was outlawed and there was no way this was going to last. The reader just had to sit tight through Dark Reign and wait for this whole nightmare to be over.

Well, Siege is now officially over, the last issue of the four-part story handed over to us this week. Unofficially, this Event book should have been over in January, when Marvel announced that the dawn of an exciting new era would occur by bringing back the old establishment. Civil War really did change the face of modern Marvel Comics for about three years now, the idea of vigilantism and government restrictions explored in a way that flies in the face of a lot of Silver Age convention. You can’t just put on a mask and run around, there are precautions to take, family to think of, morality to debate. There’s more than just the greater good to think about.

And I think we’ve all had enough time to think about it. Personally, I miss that all important line between good and evil. Spend enough time in the gray area between them and you lose your distinctiveness. Dwell on topics long enough and readers get bored, itchy and unhappy. So the long, drawn out blockade between realism and four-color storytelling is at least coming to an end, the long term battle still not won. Characters are going to be shuffled around, new teams made, some younger ones fostered in and we’re all in it to win it for this new Heroic Age.

Well, everyone but the villains.

(WARNING: No Spoilers.  Because really, ‘the bad guys lose’ is a little like Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father- Oop!  Ruined that one!)

In the time between Civil War and now, so many villains have come out of the woodwork, into their own factions, gained powers and notoriety that it’s foolish to think that every one of them got caught in Oklahoma and will be sent to jail. The Raft obviously doesn’t work, see the first issues of the New Avengers to see this in action. These men and women have been motivated, given a taste of the good life and then lined up to be taken away by… who exactly? The police? The Initiative? Certainly not H.A.M.M.E.R. as it’s a good guess that will be disbanded and regrouped either into S.H.I.E.L.D. or a new acronym (perhaps the Global Reaction Agency for Mysterious Paranormal Activity, G.R.A.M.P.A.? Sure it doesn’t evoke weaponry or armor, but they’ve been getting the job done in Mighty Avengers). Still, that’s not exactly an overnight job, the Avengers are going to need a few weeks to reassert themselves into all new flavors and colors. No offense to the men and women in uniform, but I’d rather not have them have to face off against the Wrecking Crew and the Mandrill. It’s why we have our superheroes, so that when crime escalates, the common man can look to the skies and have help from the super human.

What’s going to happen to the fallen villains? Do you think we’ll ever hear of them for awhile? The Hood’s gang was a who’s who of petty despots, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men (you get the idea), all working on a street level for their own evil needs. Obviously, some are not going to want to work with another villain ever again as the fall from ‘grace’ is going to smart something fierce. But not everyone is going to feel that way. Some of them are going to enact some prison justice on each other (most notably Madame Masque and the Hood). Leaders will rise up and organization will return. The Masters of Evil used to be some guys who didn’t like the Avengers for busting them all the time, a new incarnation could be a lot worse and hold more of a grudge against society itself than society’s protectors.

Much like the ‘mutant population’ problem that hit its bloom in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, we have a lot of new and old bad guys that are still going to be around at the end of this big epic storyline and they don’t sweep themselves under the rug so easily. Heck, we’ve just spent years watching the New Avengers hiding from law enforcement and still making an impact on the world. The threat created by Norman’s Reign isn’t over, it just won’t be put on the cover of Time Magazine.

Much like Bendis’ past epic tales of valor and woe (Avengers: Disassembled, House of M, Secret Invasion), this is not an ending but a beginning. Which kind of sucks because I was really hoping for an ending. It’s not too much to ask for a definable threat, an opposing force, a battle that stretches both sides to their limits with one or the other becoming the victor, definably defeating the threat. For Avengers: Disassembled, the threat was chaos until it became the Scarlet Witch who was taken away. In House of M, it was reality until it became the Scarlet Witch who escaped. In Secret Invasion it was the Skrulls until it was Norman Osborn who was untouchable and the Skrulls packed up and left. No one was defeated, they all just sort of got knocked down and slunk off to be a dangling plot thread for another day. Here, a big host of major villains attacked an unreasonable enemy, were defeated and now… they slink off too? They get “trials” and “sent to prison”. What about the people of Broxton, Oklahoma? There’s gotta be like five of them left after the whole affair, where are their picket signs? Stamford, Connecticut gets city blocks destroyed, those people riot! Broxton I think will fade quietly back into folklore or maybe go off to wherever the Skrulls went.

Maybe they’re all hiding out with Wanda. Like purgatory expressed as a big white light explosion where all of Bendis’s plot endings go to wait it out.

As a reader, we can chose to forget all that.  Comic book canon is ours to keep, certainly not Marvel editorial’s and that’s why this is Our Universe.  Facing front, we can look forward to this all new, all different Heroic Age and the redress that follows, leaving our sorted past behind us.

Siege #2

Marvel’s Siege #2 sold 108,429 copies in February, according to ICv2.com’s latest sales estimates. Remarkably, that’s only 55 copies fewer than the first issue sold in January.

This means one of two things: Either this is the most amazingly rock-solid issue-to-issue performance of an event comic ever or, more likely, as chartwatcher Marc-Oliver Frisch points out, Diamond knocked 20 percent of Siege #1′s sales off its January chart to account for returnability. Either way, it seems the earlier hue and cry that Siege is some kind of flop need to be significantly dialed down.

Look, I have no idea what Marvel’s internal sales expectations for Siege were or are. I know that the “seven years in the making” hype creates the sense that this was supposed to be the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and thus sales comfortably beneath those of a late-run Blackest Night issue give the impression of failure. But at the same time, Siege is way shorter than any of the other events Marvel has done in recent years, suggesting the company and creators had a different view of its structure and goal than, say, Secret Invasion. They also started promoting its follow-up, the line-wide “Heroic Age,” more or less concurrently with Siege itself, and in a way that pretty much assured readers of the outcome of the series — in other words, Siege has been treated as much as a means to the end of “The Heroic Age” as an end in itself. All in all, it comes across as a very different beast than Blackest Night does across town.

Meanwhile, Siege isn’t the only title with some mysterious sales-chart goings-on going on. Blackest Night #7′s 130,613 copies appears at first glance to represent an amazing 30-percent increase over Issue 6′s first-month sales of 100,651, and that’s pretty much how ICv2 reported it. But keep in mind Issue 6 was first sold during Diamond’s “skip week” between Christmas and New Year’s, meaning it actually shipped the week before it went on sale; retailers who failed to sign an embargo agreement received their copies the first week of January instead, and thus 35,344 copies’ worth of sales ended up showing up on the January charts rather than the December charts. Thus, Issue 7′s performance represents a drop of around 5,000 copies, not an increase of 30,000. Blackest Night is still the hottest thing in monthly comics these days by a long shot, but it’s not adding a third of its readership with its penultimate issue, any more than it lost a third of its readership in December.

Two caveats are necessary here. The first is that in evaluating the two series’ relative performance, I’m not making any qualitative judgments, pro or con, about their writing, their art, their core ideas, the way they stem from and lead into other storylines, and so on. Introduce that many variables into the equation and you’re talking about something very different than the simple notion of whether these books are performing to their publishers’ expectations. (For what it’s worth, I’ve got shelves full of books by both Brian Michael Bendis and Geoff Johns, and read a roughly equal number of comics from both publishers, and know and like and have collegial working relationships with tons of folks at both companies. I’m Switzerland, baby.)

The second caveat — as is probably evident from the way tens of thousands of sales for both books have mysterious disappeared and reappeared from the charts at one time or another — is that the sales charts for comics are astonishingly opaque. I’m not Marc-Oliver Frisch or Paul O’Brien or John Jackson Miller or Milton Griepp, so I’m probably about to get some of this wrong. But as far as I know, we’re really looking at sales from the publishers to the retailers, not the retailers to the customers, first of all. And we’re extrapolating specific sales from that weird Diamond index system, not actually being told by Diamond how many copies sold. And we’re only looking at the direct market, not all the other sales avenues available to publishers. And there are tons of hinky variables, like that skip week or returnability, that can skew the numbers in a way that isn’t always immediately apparent or disclosed. And you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a creator who will tell you just how wrong these estimated sales numbers that everyone bats around each month really are. And ultimately this kind of situation is much better for determining overall sales trends (given that all the built-in errors are, at least, probably consistent over time), not confidently calculating the month-to-month fates of individual titles. In short, in the absence of rock-solid, specific, total sales numbers backed up by a transparent methodology and provided by either Diamond or the publishers themselves, there’s a degree to which we’re all the blind men feeling the elephant. It’s just that in this case, the Siege elephant feels healthier than some doomsayers believed.

Blackest Night #7

Publishing | The penultimate issue of DC Comics’ Blackest Night miniseries led a weak February in the direct market, which saw comic-book sales slip 3 percent from the same month a year ago. Sales of graphic novels, on the other hand, actually rose 1 percent — the category’s first increase since March 2009 — which the retail news and analysis website ICv2.com notes is “somewhat remarkable given that over 12,000 copies of Watchmen were sold in February 2009, over 10 times the number sold in February of 2010.”

Blackest Night #7 sold more than 130,000 copies, followed at No. 2 by Marvel’s Siege #2, with about 108,400. They were the only titles to break 100,000 in February. ICv2 notes that sales of Blackest Night increased some 30 percent from the previous issue’s first month while those of Siege were virtually unchanged. That seems like an impressive performance for both titles.

The 13th volume of Vertigo’s Fables topped the graphic-novel chart with sales just shy of 12,000, followed by the Kick-Ass Premiere Hardcover with just over 9,000. [ICv2.com]

Wandering Son, Vol. 1

Publishing | Deb Aoki speaks with Gary Groth, president and co-publisher of Fantagraphics Books, about the company’s newly announced manga line. [About.com]

Publishing | Mark Siegel, editorial director of First Second Books, talks briefly about the publishing imprint’s moves into webcomics with his Sailor Twain, or, the Mermaid in the Hudson, Amir and Khalil’s Zahra’s Paradise, and Derek Kirk Kim’s Tune. [ICv2.com]

Publishing | Sarah Morean talks with cartoonist Box Brown about his experience with Kickstarter, the social-networking fundraiser site. [The Daily Cross Hatch]

Publishing | U.K. publisher Titan Books is searching for a senior acquisitions editor for “illustrated books in the art, comics reference and related categories, plus graphic novels.” [The Bookseller]

San Diego Convention Center

Conventions | Jennifer de Guzman, editor-in-chief of SLG Publishing, considers the “sometimes touchy” relationship between San Diego and Comic-Con International. [PW Comics Week]

Conventions | Rick Klaw reports on the comics-related elements of last weekend’s STAPLE! Independent Media Expo in Austin. [San Antonio Current]

Creators | Bob Minzesheimer profiles legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who discusses his new memoir Backing Into Forward. [USA Today]

Creators | Writer Fred Van Lente (The Incredible Hercules, Marvel Zombies 5) has signed an exclusive agreement with Marvel. [Comics Alliance]

Red Robin #13

Creators | Fabian Nicieza will be the new regular writer of DC’s Red Robin beginning with June’s Issue 13. [The Source]

Creators | Caroline Small wraps up a two-part interview with cartoonist Nina Paley. [The Hooded Utilitarian]

Creators | Ryan K. Lindsay interviews Justin Greenwood, artist of the Oni Press series Resurrection. [The Weekly Crisis]

Creators | John Geddes spotlights Mark Rahner and Robert Horton, creators of the Western-horror series Rotten from Moonstone Books. [USA Today]

Siege #3 Deadpool Variant by J. Scott Campbell

Well, this oughta be to partisan DC and Marvel fans what a new Tim Burton movie is to people with Hot Topic gift cards. Outspoken Marvel Vice President-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort has asked fans to launch a write-in campaign to determine whether he’ll hand a copy of the infamous Deadpool variant for Siege #3 — the very book Marvel is offering to send retailers in exchange for copies of unsold Blackest Night “ring” tie-ins from DC — to DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio.

In a possible tip of the hat/tweak of the nose to the postcard-writing campaign DiDio launched to determine whether Wonder Woman would get a #600 anniversary issue, Brevoort says that if he gets 50 postcards telling him to give DiDio the variant, he will … but if he first receives 50 postcards telling him not to, he won’t. Brevoort later went even further, saying if he first gets 50 postcards telling him “to stop with all this stuff” — presumably the chops-busting of DC that’s become his trademark — then that’s what he’ll do.

So what’ll it be? To give, not to give, or to pipe down entirely? First to 50 wins!

Brevoort says the postcards (one per person, please) may be sent to his attention at Marvel, 417 Fifth Ave, New York, NY, 10016. Start licking those stamps!

But, like I said, the use of the word Siege as a seat is long out of use. Nowadays, it summons up great armies clashing and some walls to embattle, siege weapons and general’s tactics. A siege is essentially a waiting game: if you cannot take a location by force, you surround it, isolate it and then wait them out for weakness or surrender. This waiting game could last moths, or even years so it all comes down to planning and timing.

If you look at it from an angle, one could even say that the heroes of the Marvel Universe have had villainy sieged for about, oh say seven years. Villains had already moved into positions of trust or complacency with the new millennium of storytelling, so the heroes could have just backed off, waiting for the villains to grab all this power and enact all their plans at once so that the center could not hold and eventually the heroes would win out. In New Avengers, Spider-Man has said this expressly about Norman Osborn, you can’t fight him head on. You wait until he makes his mistake (and he will) and then take him down.

If the current and final chapter in Bendis’ story arc is more a metaphorical Siege than just the taking of Asgard, I think it’s the most poorly planned and timed siege since the Turks at Vienna.

Wiki the historical reference above or just roll your eyes and click below to hear some thoughts on what Brian Michael Bendis tells us about writing and ourselves.

And, for the record, this isn’t going to be about sales or fan reception or the over-arcing theories behind Event Books as a whole; better men have take on those issues this week. This is about reading two issues that took maybe an hour or two’s worth of fictional time over two months. New Avengers #62 came out after Siege #2 and since shipping schedules made me read it out of order, my own pacing is thrown off by being dragged backwards through real time for fictional time. This is about doing the same stunt that kicked off Civil War, but without the issues of thought provoking debate and lead-up to the government action which divided loyalties that took up quite a few issues for just Norman Osborn throwing himself at an outrageous target in a couple pages. This is about ending Siege #2 in a dramatically suspenseful note and ending Siege #1 on an guy startled out of his chair. This is about all the hugging in New Avengers #62.

Hang on a minute, I like to think you’re asking yourself. Siege just started! Stop with the nitpicking! But lets take a look at Bendis’ track record on Event Books and and note some symptoms: Avengers: Disassembled started out of nowhere and the destruction of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and ran screamingly through three issues (at least on the Avengers title). House of M was about three issues too long and dragged in comparison to the story that got them there in the first place. New Avengers and Mighty Avengers were used as complicated clip shows during Secret Invasion, bouncing from the present to the past irregularly while Secret Invasion itself lead up to an ending that barely solved its original premise if at all. Dark Reign has been going on for a year and I don’t think I’m alone in saying it’s more than worn out its welcome.

The stories have been great. This is fact. We continue to see the Marvel Universe through Bendis’s unique viewpoint. His voice had moved Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. No matter what storyline issues I may have, there is no doubt that the style and the storytelling have been rock solid from an exceptional writer. Love it or hate it, he’s been incredibly consistent in tone and theme on the Avengers for around six year, not something to take lightly. His Spider-Man is so good (how good is it?), it’s so good that fans immediately went to his Ultimate Spider-Man the moment the wall-crawler’s movies announced their revamp. He is so solid (how solid is he?) that even Ultimatum could no shake the foundations of the Ultimate universe he built.

So what’s the deal? I love his writing, but I hate the timing and pacing of his event books. When Captain America died, Brubaker and the editorial above him were still able to work around and with all the issues dedicated to memorializing Steve Rogers and, up until Reborn, were never overtaken by the scope of their story. Bendis himself wrote one of the finest runs on Daredevil, an opus that moved through symphonic movements in carefully crafted and executed story arcs that are all part of the whole. When he needed to use Bullseye, he had to wait for Kevin Smith who at the time was promised the next showdown between Daredevil and his deadly nemesis. He waited, his stories continued without pause and when Bullseye was finally released to him, all of what he’d been waiting to say with the character and the task of bringing Bullseye up to the present was told in a vicious extended fight scene and everything moved on to the next aria.

This tells me that one man can make a difference. Daredevil’s stories could be managed as a thematic whole, like a man who juggles chainsaws expertly, but when more characters in a dozen different flavors are being used to tell a larger epic as well as their own private stories, then you’re juggling with chainsaws, torches, bowling balls and balancing on a unicycle. Make no mistake, chainsaw juggling is awesome but the more you add spectacle to it, the more difficult the trick becomes.

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t wait for Siege to come out in trade. I’m sure it’d be better and less frustrating to wait and see how this all plays out in one big swoop, but I’m impatient and probably far too attached to my Marvel Universe. I also can’t stop looking at Bendis’ past works as a road map for what’s to come. I know where it could go wrong, I’ve seen it before, but it’s not fair to the unknown future. However, knowing this about myself, my expectations and pre-judgments, I can not only understand a little something about the interaction between a reader and the writer and recognize my own limitations, but I can learn to work around them and eventually overcome them.

After all, no one is perfect.

So why, as Marvel Vice President-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort points out, are people saying it’s a flop?

According to ICv2′s sales estimates, Siege #1 sold 108,484 copies. That’s just a hair above the 106,444 copies purchased of the month’s No. 2 comic, DC’s Green Lantern #50, which is the eighth issue of a Blackest Night tie-in arc. Blackest Night proper’s sixth issue sold 135,695, well above the figures for the launch of Marvel’s much-hyped event.

A longer-range comparison makes for grim reading, too. Veteran number-cruncher Marc-Oliver Frisch of The Beat ran down some stats at his blog:

In April 2008, Secret Invasion #1 sold an estimated 250,263 units. In May 2008, Final Crisis #1 followed with 144,826. January 2009 saw Dark Avengers #1 (118,579), June Batman and Robin #1 (168,604) and July Captain America: Reborn #1 (193,142). Also in July, Blackest Night #1 came out with estimated sales of 177,105—and none of the five subsequent issues of Blackest Night released to date have fallen below 135,000 units.

Were one to go further back, the comparison gets ever more lopsided. Civil War #1 debuted with first-month sales of 260,804 in May 2006 and added tens of thousands more copies with reprints and reorders. Even World War Hulk #1, a comparatively “minor” event that doesn’t really factor into the Avengers Disassembled/New Avengers/House of M/Civil War/The Death of Captain America/The Initiative/Illuminati/Secret Invasion/Dark Reign/Dark Avengers/The List/Siege mega-story, sold 178,408 copies in its June 2007 launch.

So those are the numbers. But what do they mean? If you’re judging by the arguments of the comic-website commentariat — which isn’t always a great idea — they mean that DC has Marvel running scared. By this logic, yes, Reborn #1 beat Blackest Night #1 that first month in much the same way that Secret Invasion #2 beat Final Crisis #1 back in the day. But since then, Blackest Night has over-performed to the point where a tie-in title as deep into its story arc as Green Lantern #50 can give Marvel’s biggest launch in over a year a serious run for its money. Moreover, that plastic-power-ring promotion may be a lousy way to gauge reader interest in, say, R.E.B.E.L.S., but it certainly speaks to the popularity of the rainbow of Lanterns that drives Blackest Night. Meanwhile, the long-simmering rivalry between Marvel and DC has recently heated up again, at least on Marvel’s side, spearheaded by the House of Ideas’ controversial offer to swap unsold “ring books” for a Siege variant and by the outspoken commentary of Brevoort. Put the former together with the latter, and you’ve primed the pump for at least some of the audience, particularly the ones annoyed with Marvel to begin with, to believe that Marvel’s actions stem from insecurity — and to point to the sales of Siege as Exhibit A. Factor in the fannish goodwill toward newly minted DC honchos Jim Lee and Geoff Johns and you’ve got the recipe for a bona fide backlash.

And that’s even before you come to the more subjective question of Siege‘s content. Robot 6 guest contributor Tim O’Neil made a case against it based on Siege‘s comparatively slow pacing and relatively indirect lead-in from the “Dark Reign” books, while Frisch compared “Dark Reign” to DC’s similarly ambitious “One Year Later” line-wide branding, in that it debuted to high sales and reader acclaim only to lead to a sales die-off that arguably, outside of titles by Johns and Grant Morrison, persists for the company to this day.

However, there’s more to the story than just a tale of two event comics. For starters, stories of Marvel’s demise have been greatly exaggerated: Marvel continues to enjoy a commanding lead over DC in terms of market share for both units and dollars, regardless of who falls where on the top of the charts.

But more pressingly, in January, Siege and Green Lantern were the only titles to break the 100K barrier. Books with sales levels that would have qualified them to be healthy midlist workhorses a couple years ago are now Top 10 titles. The threshold for a “hit” has dropped dramatically across the board.

Is this “event fatigue” in action, as Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has long warned? Is it a sign that the Great Recession has finally caught up to the buying habits of comics readers? Is it a long-overdue course correction for a direct market artificially buoyed by Watchmen and the Obama issue of The Amazing Spider-Man the previous year? Is it just the age-old fact of life that sales in January stink? Hell, this is purest spitballing, but could expensive Avatar tickets have taken a chunk out of readers’ genre-entertainment allowance? Is it, as Frisch and O’Neil argue, a problem unique to Siege‘s specific strengths and weaknesses? Is it a sign that readers are really just waiting around for “The Heroic Age” and the slew of (re)launches — Avengers, Secret Avengers, The Age of Heroes — that it will bring, as critic David Uzumeri suggests?

Frankly, I have no idea. That’s way too many variables on way too many fronts, from economic to editorial to creative, for me to feel comfortable even speculating. I do think it’s a bad sign when the Direct Market, a system all but custom-built in every conceivable way to sell big superhero comics, is evidently having this much trouble doing so, but damned if I know what the culprit is.

Regardless, as to the notion that Siege #1 is a failure, its editor Tom Brevoort is unsurprisingly having none of it. In a pair of tweets that inspired me to take up the topic in the first place, Brevoort wrote:

Also amazed at how fans irritated at me have decided Siege [is] a bomb. As the best-selling title last month, I’ll happily take more bombs. But if I couldn’t take their shots, I’d have curled up into a little ball during Civil War.

With “The Heroic Age” set to square off against Brightest Day in a few months, I’m sure the shots will continue to be fired at both sides …

Rescue

I guess I missed the fact that Tony Stark’s former assistant Pepper Potts, who put on her own set of armor recently in the pages of Invincible Iron Man, actually has a codename now. She’s aptly called Rescue, and she’s getting a one-shot in May courtesy of writer Kelly Sue DeConnick.

The comic will tie into Marvel’s Siege event, as the character moves from being a superhero’s assistant to being a full-fledged superhero herself.

“But now she’s given the opportunity to don the mantle herself,” DeConnick told Marvel.com. “She doesn’t have to be support staff anymore, not a plot device, not tied to the train tracks, not doing her part to make exposition less obvious. She’s stepping into position not only as a heroine, but as a protagonist. That’s really interesting to me because it’s completely foreign territory for Pepper; it’s way out of her comfort zone. Doubt and fear are not emotions with which Pepper’s accustomed. Having the opportunity to be with her and sort of metaphorically hold her hand as she makes her way through this particular minefield, creatively, it’s a great place to be.”

from Captain America Reborn #6

A few days ago, I noticed something…odd going on in both Captain America: Reborn and Invincible Iron Man: The giant flying robots with long tentacles presiding over the apocalyptic future glimpsed by Cap sure looked an awful lot like the possibly Starktech-derived “sentries” that have been bedeviling Tony Stark in the hallucinatory dreamworld he’s been stuck in throughout his recent coma. My suspicions deepened when I saw The Beat’s DC month-to-month sales analysis number-cruncher Marc-Oliver Frisch point the same thing out on Twitter — the first time I saw anyone talking about it online. Then io9′s Graeme McMillan took the ball, and the scanner, and ran with it.

So are we looking at the seeds of some post-Heroic Age event years in the making? Tough to say, but if you read behind the lines of what Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has said about Marvel abandoning the event-comics model following the conclusion of Siege, it sure sounds like the line-wide crossover is not dead, just resting — waiting until such time as creators and readers alike are less ground down by the constant barrage of “this changes everything.” And if you’re gonna start dropping hints about some distant-future event, the final pre-Siege story arcs of titles starring key characters like Captain America and Iron Man make sense as the places to do it.

Now, Stark’s belief that the robots may be derived from his own technology, plus the fact that they’re called “sentries” and they follow the orders of a mysterious figure called “The Bureaucrat,” helps the IIM sequences read like allegory: H.A.M.M.E.R. chief Norman Osborn using the groundwork laid and technology developed by former S.H.I.E.L.D. head Stark to create a fearsome new world order, using the Sentry as his chief enforcer. But there’s really no such “it’s just a dream” interpretation to be had with Cap.

I’m curious as to whether we’ll see something similar go on in other titles — Thor, say, just to round out the Avengers’ Big Three. Also, the fact that they’re giant hero-hunting robots whose name begins with the letters “s-e-n-t” makes me wonder if the X-Men will be involved somehow; given its basis in alternate futures, the upcoming X-event Second Coming could be a logical place to look. Finally, it can’t be coincidence that the ‘bots are called “sentries” in a universe where the Sentry is making the kind of waves he’s been making lately, can it?

Now, add to this, say you have a younger brother.  Or a little sister, or a son or daughter.  Someone of the next generation set who is totally enthralled by your collection of figures.  In great childlike wonder they ask you about each and every one, amazed by all the stories they represent.  It’s great to see someone love something dear to you and it’s a great bond that helps me sell comics and connects us all through our fandoms.  If you’ve never explained a comic book plotline that you love (no complaints now) to someone younger than you, please do so at your earliest convience.  They’ll think you’re a genius for knowing the tale and you’ll be reminded of your own viceral reactions to the story at hand.

Anyhow, you have your Megos and your sister/brother/son/daughter/etc. seems to love them as much as you do, so you eventually relent and let them play with your figures.  They very gently take each one from you, go off to the living room and then suddenly POW!  BANG!  BOOM!  CRASH!  They’re smacking them together as part of some terrible fight.  Plastic clicks against plastic, some are catapulted off the couch, others are mauled by childlike enthusiasm and small, but dangerously strong hands.  They’re having a ball, you’re cringing in the corner.  Or ready to run and yell because those are YOUR toys!  Play nice!  Those are collector’s items!  You’ll RUIN them!

But at the same time… you used to play like that with them.

(eventual SPOLIERS: for Siege #2 ahead, but really I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard by now.  Bendis likes a good death in his event books!)
Oh, don’t give me that; everyone at one time or another has broken a toy in their lives.  Whether on purpose, due to shoddy craftsmanship, due to an accident, everyone has gotten a little too rough and had a foot go missing.  Or a rubber band snap.  Or even just a figure not looking the same way anymore, some paint rubbed off, some scratch here and there.  In your imagination, these figures have flown the surface of the sun, they’ve all be secret agents who’ve had to hide under seat cushons, they’ve had to war amongst themselves because you never got any villains or (for the ladies in the house) had to go on dates in a Barbie dream car.  Toys were meant to be played with (unless they’re made by Todd MacFarlane) and to be put through the rigors of your imagination.  Otherwise they just sit on a shelf, collect dust, pose from time to time and live small, sheltered, uninteresting lives.

As you watch this younger person in your life throw his or her arms into the air with a giant “Ka-POW!” and that back of throat rumble explosion noise that is given to every child at the age of five and you watch your figures burst forth to knock against furniture, have their uniforms or tunics pulled askew, maybe lose a boot under the couch, bonk into a window, you should be reminded of what toys can do, how they can live under the right imagination.  But, most likely, you’re thinking of how much they’re losing in value, how much they need to be preserved and played with ‘correctly’.

What I’m trying to say is I’m tired of watching the Sentry rip things in half.  It was cool once and now it’s so much a cliche that the story stops for me when I have to see it again.  I groan, I roll my eyes.  I get mad because that’s Ares!  The GOD of WAR!  That’s not fair or right!

But it’s the story.  It’s the imagination to wonder what comes after that, what happens because of that and doesn’t that look totally awesome-rad-cool to see his guts spilling out all over the page like that and what can possibly defeat the Sentry now.  It’s not the toys or how I want them to be, but how we use them to tell someone something else about anything our imaginations can devise.  Playing with toys roughly is not a bad thing, as long as they are not broken and then discarded.  Even broken toys can tell some amazing stories.

I betcha Hercules and Phobos are going to be making a trip sometime to Hades to get Ares back.

BN tie-ins sent to Marvel (photo by Tom Brevoort)

“Turns out nobody has any extra copies of those ring books…” Thus tweeted newly minted Marvel Vice President, Executive Editor Tom Brevoort this morning. And based on the accompanying picture, which showed a stack of covers for Blackest Night tie-ins that were part of DC’s recent power ring promotion, your sarcasm detectors were right to go off there.

It’s anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but the photo, and a subsequent pic documenting some 300 mailed-in covers from a single store, show that some retailers at least are both willing and able to take Marvel up on its controversial offer to retailers to exchange one Deadpool variant of Siege #3 for every 50 copies or covers of DC’s “ring books” they receive.

But will the initiative be a success overall, for either Marvel or the participating retailers? Does all the publicity for it factor in positively or negatively? Those probably aren’t the kind of questions you can answer with an iPhone photo, but we’ll see.

New Avengers: Finale!

April will see both the conclusion of Marvel’s Siege four-issue miniseries and the apparent end — certainly only temporarily — of the Avengers franchise.

That’s right, the publisher’s solicitations preview lists the series finales of The New Avengers, Dark Avengers, The Mighty Avengers and Avengers: The Initiative. It also solves the mystery of what comic writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Bryan Hitch have been collaborating on: It’s a 64-page one-shot called New Avengers: Finale.

“Siege ends the Avengers … and this is how I find out?” Bendis joked late this afternoon on Twitter.

References to “the Age of Heroes” and “the Heroic Age” are sprinkled throughout the solicitation text, making it a safe bet that at least some of those titles will quickly return as part of a new status quo teased back in November: “Witness the Marvel Universe triumph over its greatest challenges ever as the Heroic Age ignites! Still lurking in the shadows are forces of evil and cosmic-level threats, but a new spirit of hope, courage, and the selflessness at the heart of heroism will rise up. The most extraordinary tales ever will be told in this Heroic Age of the Marvel Universe. The Age of Heroes is upon us!”

The New Avengers debuted in late 2004 in the aftermath of the “Avengers Disassembled,” followed in 2007 by The Mighty Avengers and Avengers: The Initiative, and in early 2009 by Dark Avengers.

"Wanna trade?": unintentional commentary from Geoff Johns, Art Baltazar & Franco's Tiny Titans #25

It’s a Tom Twitter Twofer today! Perhaps unsurprisingly, Marvel Executive Editor and Twitter king Tom Brevoort took to tweeting on the topic of Marvel’s offer to exchange unsold copies of the Blackest Night tie-ins that were part of DC’s successful power-ring promotion for a rare Deadpool-themed variant-cover version of Siege #3. His opening statement:

I see there’s a lot of chatter about our SIEGE #3 offer, so I have to ask the question: how is this bad? We’re making no money on the deal (actually losing a little) but it will put some more much-needed cash in retailers’ pockets, And if your retailer doesn’t have these books in stock, excellent! Good on them, they ordered appropriate to their customer base. But while no retailer wants to hurt their relationship with DC, we’ve been hearing from lots of them that they’re happy we’re offering this. As for the stripping, that’s all about making it cheaper for these guys to send the books back. But we’ll take complete copies too. And sure, send the stripped insides to the troops–well done, you! They tend not to keep comics mint on the battlefield in the first place. And while we listed the titles we’d be taking–all of the “ring” books– we never mentioned either DC or Blackest Night at all. Not a knock. And if DC wants to make their own offer, let ‘em! That’s cool too, if it frees up deadlocked capital for retailers to order new stuff.

As the responses — many of them antagonistic — from Brevoort’s followers started floating in, a few prominent strains in the editor’s thinking emerged. The one that struck me most stemmed from questions as to why these Blackest Night tie-ins, which came packaged with various Lantern Corps rings, were singled out for return, as opposed to Marvel’s own Dark Reign tie-ins. Brevoort’s argument hinged on the rings, which he appears to see as fundamentally deviating from the Direct Market’s core mission of selling comic books, and thus making it harder for cash-strapped retailers to accurately gauge customer interest:

We heard from a number of retailers who got stuck with books chasing rings and decided to do something. We’re not making any money on the deal, but we are helping our retailer partners during a tough economic time. Making sure that our retailers can keep the doors open if they tied up a lot of cash on inventory they can’t move. We’re doing this because we’re in the business of selling content rather than Cracker Jack prizes. And we need retailers to be able to keep the lights on and afford to order next month’s books. [Marvel won't be accepting trade-ins for unsold Dark Reign and The List books] because there, what we were selling and what the retailers were buying were the books. But DC can if they want to! Retailers ordered those books for the content–that’s part of the job, knowing your clientele. I think smart retailers know how to gauge the interests of their clientele most of the time and order appropriately.

My two cents? Plenty of retailers seem to be willing to go on the record both pro and con on the offer — see this piece at Comics Alliance, for example — so I’m not sure if fear “hurting their relationship” with either of the publishers involved is that much of an explanation for who’s saying or not saying what, one way or the other. Also, I think it’s pretty clear how people got the idea that this is something of a shot against DC and Blackest Night, given that no matter what the initial press release said or didn’t say, the books it listed were all DC Blackest Night tie-ins. Finally, anyone who’s gone to a comic shop knows that selling nerd-related tchotchkes and gewgaws is, for better or worse, an integral part of many stores’ business model. So while the plastic rings undoubtedly introduced some unpredictability into retailers’ monthly orders, I’m ultimately not sure how different it really was from predicting how interested readers would be in tie-ins that didn’t come with toys — or books with variant covers, for that matter.

That said, the notion expressed by some of Brevoort’s Twitter interlocutors, that this is a conspiracy to get retailers to pull otherwise viable Blackest Night books off the stands, doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush — if retailers feel like they can sell their copies, why take money out of their own pockets and take a flyer on a random variant? Brevoort pretty much says this repeatedly. He also dispels the idea that stripping the covers is some sort of extra insult or attempt to suppress the books, rather than the usual postage-saving mechanism by which many publications are returned.

Of course, Brevoort wasn’t the only industry figure to riff on the controversy. Blackest Night author and Earth 2 retailer Geoff Johns got in a little snark in response: “A Deadpool variant is anything but rare. Trust me. I own a store.”

My question is this: If this is the comics biz’s equivalent of this week’s Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien controversy, who’s who? On the one hand, Blackest Night‘s Hal Jordan is the heir to the Green Lantern mantle just like Conan inherited The Tonight Show, while Siege‘s Norman Osborn is nothing if not a cut-throat corporate type. On the other hand, Osborn’s got funny red hair and Jordan’s got a prominent chin…

It’s incomparable, inconceivable that you could read the first issue of this mega event and know what is to come.  The first piece of the puzzle isn’t going to tell you what the picture’s looks like, even if it’s a corner piece.  So what do we do, friends?  Do we read Siege #1 and give it a value judgment, based on what we know and have heard?  Or do we sit back, bag it up, place the issue into the long or short box and wait for #2 the way hard men swallow their emotions only to find themselves teary-eyed at a championship sports event?

Or do we compare it to Star Trek?

(WARNING: … actually no spoilers for Siege below, but some for first season TNG’s Encounter at Farpoint.  Awkward.  If you hate Star Trek, you’d probably want to turn back now.)

Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with my Distinguished College’s fantastic treatise on how to fix Star Trek: Generations, though the timing was impeccable.  Instead, it’s because I recently got my very own copy of Memories of the Future, Wil Wheaton’s high school yearbook of his days on the set during the first season of Star Trek: the Next Generation.  A long sentence to describe a very simple book, Mr. Wheaton brings his childhood memories alive and makes them a part of yours; he also takes a few jabs at the script in a way we all know to means that we like them.  It’s a great book (a fantastic podcast too!) and it’s reminded me how much I love Star Trek’s second crew.  So I popped in Encounter at Farpoint, the first two-parter for the very first season of an all new, all different Enterprise and saw a malevolent trickster god amuse himself with the weaker points of the human condition and a little light bulb dimly went off above my head.  While Q judges and tests a leader to see if he is worthy despite his savage and violent past, The Siege has Loki who has already knows his leader of choice, Norman Osborn, is savage and violent, but it will certainly test the rest of the heroes to see if they can overcome their splash page battle tendencies, take a step back and learn who’s really behind it all.

Not following me?  Let’s look at some some real threadbare comparisons:  Encounter at Farpoint is a two-part episode that heralds the arrival of an all new show that will follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, Star Trek from the late ’60s.  Siege is a five-part mini-series than heralds its own new age of ’60s favorites; while Encounter at Farpoint pt. 1 has no cliffhanger and sort of passes the torch between the old and the new, we’d be foolish to think we could get something like that from the first issue of anything, let alone a big event.  Big events end in splash pages, people jumping, secret reveals that arrogantly demand you pick up more comics to make heads or tails of them.  TV shows don’t get that luxury so they have to act like an appetizer and get you hungry for more.

Here’s another one: the infamous ‘Years in the Making’ subtitle.  Star Trek: the Next Generation came about because fans of the original series worked their fingers to the bone to create one of the first modern fandoms of our lifetime.  TNG wasn’t the direct result of this but the idea was formed from a combination of fans, marketing and box office success.  Parts of TNG were old scripts or plot points from the discarded Star Trek: Phase II, the TV show idea that was shelved to do Star Trek: the Motion Picture instead.  By the time Encounter at Farpoint was aired, a lot of stars had aligned and a lot of hard work had come to rest.  Siege had a similar sort of hodgepodge background and beginning; I don’t think the road from seven years ago to now is as clear and as true as some might have you believe.  While Bendis could easily have had this endpoint in mind the moment he put pen to paper all those years ago, I think he has been and other books have been shaped by their surroundings.  Parts from this discarded idea, character motivations from another storyline or effects from this or that mega event have all come to this point, time and story, I would even go so far as to say the shortening from the eight part minis he’s done before to the five-parter he’s got in front of us today might have been shaped by we fans who want a tighter, less expensive story.

Both Siege and Encounter at Farpoint give us familiar positions and roles to play, just with new actors and new character motivations.  Right from the start, Captain Picard is no James T. Kirk, though both serve their function as Captain of the Enterprise with flying colors.  Kirk’s a more hands-on guy, Picard likes to talk things out and keep the phaser fire to a minimum, but both are leaders of men.  There’s a super-smart science guy, a heart-on-their-sleeve doctor, danger and discovery, all of these basic facts let us know we’re watching Star Trek, it’s just the details that make the show its own creation.  Siege, likewise, has very familiar roles: the whole opening six-pages are even noted as the same premise for Civil War; Norman Osborn gets a war the same way America started its ‘civil war’ for the Superhuman Registration Act.  Captain America, while different and most likely changed from his death experience, will most likely take a side in this and will drastically effect how we readers see this battle.  In fact, if you think about it, there’s been a subtle little formula to these mega events, starting with Avengers: Disassembled.  What our heroes are fighting is rarely the cause of their fight to begin with: the Avengers fought a variety of personal and external catastrophes to learn that the Scarlet Witch was behind it all.  In House of M, they fought the machination of Magneto, thinking he used the Scarlet Witch to create this other world when it was Quicksilver all along.  The Hulk fought the Illuminati and the ‘world’ (essentially New York) only to learn that he’d been set there to conquer because of war buddy Miek’s deception.  Y happens because of Z when it’s really X the whole time; in this latest case, it’s Norman leads the fight against Asgard because of the trickery of Loki.  Could it be that simple, that the formula is so well laid out that we can skip that part and go right to the story rather than the surprise or will this be the triple axel comic event writing and there will be this third figure manipulating even Loki?  While we certainly know everyone’s place and position, it’s hard to tell what they’re going to do.

Another trope that Encounter at Farpoint and Siege share is that oh so very frustrating lack of closure.  Encounter at Farpoint isn’t meant to tell you a whole story, beginning, middle and end.  It’s supposed to put everything in place for the season to come, then throw out some themes and ideas that are interesting enough to the viewer that they’ll come back to see how those themes and ideas are used for the next however many seasons.  Q shows up with an unanswerable quest of proving humanity is more than just their history, the great mystery was pretty mild in terms of scope and the Enterprise just sort of shrugs its shoulders at the end of the show and shuffles off.  Not explosive or climactic to say the least, but it does what the first episode or pilot should do, start something greater than itself into motion.  Bendis is a fantastic pilot writer, able to take a lot of new ideas and themes and character motivations and put them all into place.  I’m not that sold on his ability to end a story coherently (Avengers: Disassembled: Magneto collects his daughter and leaves, House of M: all a ‘dream’, Secret Invasion: left fielder Norman Osborn catches the ball and runs with it for a year, Skrulls give up), but I do trust him to tell us all a little something new about the familiar places and setting of the Marvel Universe.

Most importantly, and this is the problem I run into a lot with the first week of a mega event, is that you really can’t judge anything by anything anymore.  Out of Civil War, could you have guessed how much that would lead to events in Secret Invasion?  Could anyone have known at the start of World War Hulk that the incredible Hercules would have his own fantastic breakout new series?  If viewers had judged Encounter at Farpoint as the end-all and be-all of Star Trek: the Next Generation, then we would have never have gotten the Best of Both Worlds, Yesterday’s Enterprise, Chain of Command and countless other eye-poppingly fantastic TNG episodes.  Looking at Encounter at Farpoint again and the series finale, ‘All Good Things…’, you can see how far we’ve come.  The seed was planted and the final tree is majestic and beautiful.

Let’s hope Siege flourishes.

Soldier Field, from Siege #1

It may have taken a couple of weeks, but the Chicago news media have finally detected the coming destruction of 85-year-old Soldier Field in Marvel’s Siege #1.

The landmark’s explosive fate was revealed Dec. 3 in a preview sequence reminiscent of the razing in 2006 of Stamford, Connecticut — the Marvel Universe version, in any case — used as a trigger for Civil War.

“I’m not the biggest sports guy and I meant no disrespect to sports fans,” writer Brian Michael Bendis tells the Chicago Sun-Times, “but we needed something so horrendous to happen for [Marvel's superheroes] to be united again. Hopefully, this will ring in a new day for Marvel readers.”

Chicagoans don’t appear particularly alarmed by the development. In fact, they’d be okay with a little more devastation.

“Marvel people,” one commenter writes in the comments section of the Sun-Times article, “Next time, please fill the stadium with Illinois politicians before you blow it up.” Says another: “In the next issue they should blow up Wrigley Field.”

Siege #1 debuts on Jan. 6.

Batman R.I.P.

Thank heaven for Marvel’s delightfully candid Executive Editor Tom Brevoort. On slow news days like this frigid December Friday, what would we comics bloggers do without him? Brevoort once again took to his Twitter account yesterday to call ‘em like he sees ‘em about DC’s week-long wave of big, news-dominating announcements:

Nice to see DC showing some signs of life with all of their announcements. Competition is the lifeblood of the industry. Like any other pundit, I have opinions on what they’re doing, but it’s nice to see them trying stuff. Blackest Night won’t go on forever. And, honestly, it’s not much of a win if the other team doesn’t show up for the game, or sleepwalks through it. I’ll happily put our best efforts up against anybody else’s, win, lose or draw. And feel confident in a win most of the time. Also: Superman appearing in Superman comics? Genius!

He later responded to a request for comment on Batman: R.I.P. and subsequent storylines with the following:

I thought they botched the death, between RIP and Final Crisis. But I’m interested in anything Grant [Morrison] writes. Also, they’ve now got four issues of [Captain America:] Reborn they can look at when it’s time to bring him back. Expect Who Will Wear The Ears next[.]

And he joined a reader’s attempts to predict the follow-up to Blackest Night:

I’ll call it right now. Next big Green Lantern story: “Let Those Who Worship!”

Meanwhile, Brevoort talked up his own titles with this glimpse into the behind-the-scenes doings regarding the Avengers franchise:

Avengers post-Siege plans are now locked and loaded. Tore apart a great plan to make it even better and stronger. Killer line-up of stuff.

Now, I don’t think it’s being overly charitable to say that most if not all of the above was in good fun. Brevoort sums it up thusly:

Oh, I’ll sling mud (or at least talk trash) with the best of ‘em. But a competitive marketplace is good for everybody.

And a competitive editor is good for bloggers!

Hits a little too close to home?  I’m sorry; that’s bad and I do indeed feel bad.

Anyhoo, Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  Get smarter, says the credo.  Don’t fall for the same trick twice.

Hey everybody!  Siege: the Cabal came out yesterday!  Let’s go take a look inside, shall we?

(WARNING:  Spoilers for Siege: the Cabal, the first six-pages of Siege #1 and Dark Avengers Annual #1 reside below.  Yep, it’s a doozy this week, folks.)

Okay, so Siege: the Cabal is pretty much the start of the end of the line for the Year of Osborn.  This is going to be his last hurrah as, with all over-dramatic super-villains, too much power sinks your ship.  The beginning of the book puts it nicely by saying that most people when they reach this allotment of control and power hoard it for fear of losing all that they worked so hard to gain and, because they squeeze too hard, it all slips through their fingers.  Well, that’s the basic point of the mysterious purple-fonted majesty of the Other Voice Norman’s talking to.  It might be coming from the mask, his own mind, psychic influence or outer space at this point, it’s up for debate in any direction.  But Purple-Fonted Voice’s reasoning is sound: “Norman, do you know how men of power lose their hold?  It’s because once they get into power they worry so much about holding on to that power that they never do anything with that power.”

What Purple-Fonted Voice is forgetting is that when men of power’s reach exceeds their grasp, they can lose it all as well.  It’s fine balance of holding all the cards and playing them at opportune times; please see Doctor Doom in this issue.  He joins the Cabal as it suits him and he has players within on his team.  The moment Namor is out, a man he’s had a deal going with for quite some now (please go read the Sub-Mariner mini-series by Matt Cherniss, Peter Johnson and Phil Briones; you’ll be glad you did.  Ooh, and the Super-Villain Team-Ups where Doom and Namor- sorry, you get the idea).  Since Dark Reign: the Illuminati, those two have been planning to dump Norman Osborn the moment this ‘Cabal’ turned disadvantageous for them.  In Siege: the Cabal, Doom’s alliances are shaken, so he takes his ball and goes home.  Again, Norman Osborn bites off more than he can chew; Doom’s been in the global supremacy game longer than Norman.  He holds a lot of cards and plays them when the time is right, like now when Norman is taking advice from a God of Lies and stretching out beyond his reach.  Not even the President thinks it’s a good idea to go after Asgard and he fights zombies!

The Cabal now consists of Loki, Loki’s Lackey the Hood, Norman and well… Taskmaster.  Things are looking dire.  He can’t go in legally after Asgard (Thanks, Mr. President!) so Loki, the God of Lies and Trickery, suggests a plan: since it worked so well for the Super-Human Registration Act, why not engineer a highly public superhuman (in this case, godly?  mythic?) catastrophe that will force people to react and badly?

Why not?  Because you JUST SAID you did that back in Civil War!  That idea has been used, please shelve it and come up with something different.  Loki says “There was an incident.  An inciting incident.  It could have happened anywhere to anyone.  But it happened at a school.  Children died.”  Loki offers to create such an incident again and instead of saying, “No, that’s stupid because the American people wouldn’t have the exact same reaction a second time, they’d either oust me for not doing my job or witch hunt all the super-humans themselves, with say militia groups or a new form of -ism that causes mass hatred of empowered people.  Society would crumble, no one would trust anyone, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, no!  No, Loki, that’s a bad idea!  Let’s just use USAgent’s logic from the most recent Assault on Olympus and admit that the Asgardians are no more godly than Captain America, call them in for Registration and when they refuse, take ‘em out.”, Norman Osborn says nothing of the sort.

You can see I’ve probably thought about this way too much (I’d have the pages illustrated by Salvador Larroca!).

The first six-pages of Siege (no ‘the’, just Siege, like Cher or Sting) are the story of Volstagg the Valiant, Lion of Asgard.  In these six pages, he fights the U-Foes, throws down some Asgardian skills against the enemies and, when he’s tossed  back into the middle of a rather well attended football game, deflects a blasts from the terrible U-Fiends that’s so powerful the entire football field explodes into a panel of bright yellow energy and fire.  This can’t be good.  The preview is not only in Siege: the Cabal but Dark Avengers Annual #1, wherein Captain Marvel (Noh-Varr flavor) tries to find a place for himself on Earth now that he knows Norman Osborn is a loony.  Norman, not being one to let someone walk around thinking he’s a loony, sends the Sentry to go bring Noh-Varr back and a fight ensues because that’s what happens when you send the Sentry on errands.  Logistics of character motivations aside (why is the Sentry still with Norman Osborn when the Void and he were separated by Emma Frost in Utopia?  Isn’t the Supreme Intelligence dead twice now?), let’s just take this for what it is: a big four-color fight.  Noh-Varr throws big heavy things, the Sentry blasts big heavy blasts, it’s highly super-powered and incredibly well drawn by Chris Bachalo.  In fact, there’s this amazing two-page panel looking over Marvel Boy’s shoulder at the Sentry as he’s the only color in this near-wasteland of buildings and rubble.

click for full picture

Now, what’s the difference between this and the last panel of our six-page preview?

Both of them are superheroic battles causing great damage in their wake.  One is even done by some known criminals!   The other is Noh-Varr throwing a car with a bomb on it at the Sentry (just in case you might have been confused).  Both are in public, explosive, devastating and happen very quickly, no time for innocent bystanders to flee into harmless safety.  So where’s the difference?  Why is it that Siege is a four-issue mega event seven years in the making and The Destruction of the Dark Avengers isn’t?  Is the Average Man on the Marvel street that nitpicky about his wakes of destruction?

Then again, it’s a six page preview.  The next panel, everyone in the football stadium could be holding kittens and they go with the Register Gods idea above.  Patton Oswalt spoke rather eloquently about the Comics Fan’s ability to pre-judge and hate what they do not know, so this all might be just that: a pre-judgment of a series that Bendis took seven whole years to think up, devise and set in motion.  He’s been writing these books for a very long time now and people do not get paid for rehashing what someone else did coming up on three years ago just because it’s referenced in a couple panels.  Why get up in arms about previews that couldn’t possibly encapsulate the next four to five months of Marvel comics?  The three books that arrived this week are by no means everything there is to know about Siege, it’s a taste of things to come, just as the milk chocolate surrounds the delicious creamy peanut butter center of a Reese’s peanut butter cup.

Then again, fool me once…