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Shade #4

Chris Arrant

If I had $15 I would be in comics heaven, starting with Shade #4 (DC, $2.99). I’ve loved what Cully Hamner and James Robinson have done so far, but seeing Darwyn Cooke drawing this issue knocks it up to a whole new level. It’s like seeing David Bowie sit in on an up-and-coming band’s gig one night. Next up would be the reunion of Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen in Secret Avengers #21 (Marvel, $3.99). I was halfway hoping they would break from the serious tone of the title and revisit the inanity of Nextwave, but the preview dashes that hope; still, excellent work of two guys at the top of their game. Next up would be Invincible #87 (Image, $2.99), promising an all-new level of beatdown for Mark Grayson. Lastly, I’d get Jason Aaron’s fresh take on Marvel’s mutants with Wolverine and the X-Men #4 (Marvel, $3.99). Part return to basics and part brand-new day, seeing Logan having to be the respectable one and not the plucky wildcard is fun, and the cast Aaron’s assembled is great.

If I had $30, I’d continue reading Aaron with Wolverine #300 (Marvel, $4.99). Jokes about the constant renumbering/reshuffling/rejiggering of Aaron’s run aside, it’s been a swell ride and looks to be heading up to a finale of sorts. Next up would be Batwoman #5 (DC, $2.99). Williams’ art continues to impress, and while the story doesn’t match up to his levels with Rucka on Detective Comics, he and Blackman are striving for something I haven’t been able to fully understand yet. Lastly, I’d pick up Northlanders #47 (DC/Vertigo, $2.99). Artist Declan Shalvey is an inspired get for this series, really showing off what he can do outside Marvel’s Thunderbolts.

If I could splurge, I’d dive into Eric Powell’s adaptation of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (IDW, $19.99). Putting Powell together with Twain isn’t an obvious team-up, but given Powell’s depth of work I’m interested to see how it turns out.

Hand of Fire

Chris Mautner

If I had $15, I’d probably get Papercutz’s latest Smurf collection The Return of Smurfette, which is nice to see, because I was kind of worried about her.

If I had $30, I’d put down the Smurfs book and pick up Hand of Fire, a new prose book by blogger, author and scholar Charles Hatfield about the one and only Jack “King” Kirby and his legacy. I’ll read just about anything about Kirby, and Hatfield is a great writer, so this is about as close to a must-get for me as possible this week.

While there aren’t many under $30 I’d buy this week, there are a number of splurge-worthy books, including a hardcover collection of Brooklyn Dreams by J.M. DeMatteis and Glenn Barr, a series I had slotted for a future “Collect This Now” and now shall thankfully scratch off my list; Before the Incal, a $99 prologue to Jodorowsky and Mobieus’ sci-fi epic, this time featuring art work by Zoran Janjetov; and the Steve Ditko Omnibus Vol. 2, which contains more Silver/Bronze Age Ditko goodness than you can shake your oddly gesturing hand at.

The Steve Ditko Omnibus, Volume 2

Graeme McMillan

It’s a weird week for me this week; if I had $15, more than half of it would go on IDW’s Cobra Annual 2012 ($7.99), which promises to tell the origin of the new Cobra Commander. I know, it’s a toy tie-in book, but I’ve been enjoying the ongoing Cobra series so much more than I would’ve imagined, so this one is definitely on my list of things to read, as is Secret Avengers #21 (Marvel, $3.99), a reunion for Nextwave‘s Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen and one that I really, really hope doesn’t rehash old jokes as much as let the two creators play with the medium they enjoy as much as they possibly can.

If I had $30, I’d probably grab a handful of superhero books I’ve been trying to keep up with lately: Batwoman #5, Batman and Robin #5, Legion Lost #5 and Green Lantern #5 (all DC, $2.99). Just to mix things up, I’d also see how X-Men Legacy #260.1 (Marvel, $2.99) is, and whether Marvel can continue their X-book winning streak in light of the successes of Wolverine and the X-Men, the relaunched Uncanny X-Men and the critically acclaimed Uncanny X-Force recently.

Splurge-wise, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind: The Steve Ditko Omnibus Vol. 2 HC (DC, $59.99). I loved the mix bag of the first volume, and this second edition has the complete original Hawk and Dove. Just sit me down with this one and come back to get me in a few hours; I’ll be fine by myself.

Spera, Volume 1

Michael May

If I had $15, I’d grab my usual series, Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE #5 ($2.99) and X-Men Legacy #260.1 ($2.99) and also finish up the likable Avengers 1959 with #5 ($2.99). I’d top off the pile with the latest issues of two series that I’ve only recently fallen in love with: Batgirl #5 ($2.99) and Batwoman #5 ($2.99).

If I had $30, I’d add Demon Knights #5 ($2.99), a series I’m enjoying, but would love to see slow down enough for me to get to know some of these characters. To that I’d add Lewis Trondheim’s new book Monster Mess ($9.99).

There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to splurge on, like the first volume of The Intrepids ($16.99) and the first volume of Archaia’s Dark Crystal anthology ($19.95), for instance. I’m extremely interested in G. Willow Wilson and David Lopez’s take on CrossGen’s Mystic ($14.99), too. But if I had to pick just one thing, it would be Josh Tierney’s Spera ($19.95), about a couple of princesses and a fiery dog who have to save their kingdom.

American Barbarian

Back in 2010, when Thomas Scioli started bolstering his online presence and entered the realm of webcomics with American Barbarian, I was curious to see how things would play out (as may or may not have been obvious in my June 2010 interview of him). I’ll be honest and admit that now, more than a year later (and with far more of the project online to read), American Barbarian far exceeds what I expected. As much as I have always enjoyed and respected his Kirby-influenced approach to visual storytelling, after reading this double post Apocalyptic tale, I am far more impressed with Scioli’s funky ear for dialogue. It’s like reading a 1970s comic written by a minimalist version of David Mamet. Doubting my quirky endorsement of the work? Then realize AdHouse is collecting the webcomic for a 256-page/6 ” x 9 ” /hardcover release early this year. If you don’t trust my tastes, then you should definitely trust AdHouse publisher Chris Pitzer. To mark the upcoming release, Scioli and I did another of our quick email interviews. Before diving into the interview, let me take a second to agree with JK Parkin’s sentiment in this post, back in June, that DC Comics should have considered Scioli for one of the New 52 titles that it launched back in September. So I was surprised to learn (as you can read in this interview) that DC did not contact Scioli when assembling the creative team for the new OMAC title. As I edited this interview I realized it was hard to find my favorite part of our discussion, but it may be the revelation that the look for Two-Tank Omen came to Scioli in a dream. A close second was learning a bit about his next webcomic, Final Frontier. Feel free to chime in with your favorite part of this interview and/or Scioli’s work in the comments section, please.

Tim O’Shea: As an independent creator, the job of marketing your work falls to you. Do you think over the years, you have gotten more comfortable marketing yourself? On a related note, how did you decide upon doing this one minute trailer for American Barbarian?

Thomas Scioli: Even the largest comics publishers don’t seem to have a budget for promotion, so I’d say any creator, independent or mainstream, can benefit from doing their own promotion. It’s something that I’ve never been comfortable with, but do out of necessity. I think I have gotten better about it, because in the beginning, it would give me crippling anxiety, now it’s just mild trepidation. The idea for doing a trailer came from having seen other people do it. AdHouse’s own Afrodisiac trailer and [Top Shelf's] Infinite Kung-Fu [trailer] are two that made an impression on me when they made the rounds. It got me excited about those two works, so I wanted to do the same. I’d been dabbling with animation, back when I started AmBarb so it was a natural outgrowth of that, too. Once you start doing a webcomic it isn’t long before you realize, hey, why not just do a cartoon?

O’Shea: Did AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer contact you regarding the possibility of an American Barbarian book, or was it the other way around?

Scioli: It happened pretty organically. Comics is a small world, independent comics is even smaller. We’d been hanging out on the convention circuit. Chris had expressed an interest in American Barbarian from pretty early on, but there’s a wide gap between interest as, “that’s something I’d like to read” and “that’s something I’d like to publish.” When I got closer to finishing the book, I knew I had to start pitching it to publishers soon. I was dreading the thought. Chris had bought an American Barbarian pinup I did for the program book and art auction at HeroesCon 2010. At HeroesCon 2011, our tables were adjacent. One of the most common things people ask me at conventions is “When are they going to reprint the first Godland hardcover?” Since it’s been out of print for many years and goes for ridiculous prices online. The idea occurred to me, “Hey, Joe and I own this, so just because Image doesn’t want to reprint it doesn’t mean some other publisher might.” I half jokingly turned to Chris and said, “Do you want to publish a reprint of the first Godland hardcover?” Chris said no, but that he’d like to publish American Barbarian. It was as simple as that. I was ready to say yes right then and there, but I decided to wait until I got home and think about it first. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I had a long list of reasons why AdHouse would be the best possible publisher for it. And I like Chris so much, that the idea of working with him made it easy to say yes.

O’Shea: To you, what are some of the larger benefits to teaming with AdHouse?

Scioli: Before AmBarb, my audience was largely the wednesday comics store audience, viewing my work mainly from a Kirby nostalgia direction. When I started going all-in on webcomics, I noticed a totally new audience discovering my work for the first time. I think being with AdHouse gives it a different context where the full range of things I’m bringing to the table can be highlighted.

I feel like Chris Pitzer is strong in areas that I struggle with. He’s got a great understanding of book design, which is really important for a project like this that is going from an online context to book form. He’s focused on making the book an interesting object in and of itself. Since this is a work that I created entirely on my own, it wasn’t commissioned by a publisher, the main thing you need is a publisher who understands presentation. I know American Barbarian will get the attention it needs and not get lost in the shuffle. AdHouse’s line seemed to me to be carefully curated. Each release really counts. It’s gotten to a point where each new AdHouse book is kind of an event, you know? The Josh Cotter books, then Afrodisiac, then Duncan the Wonder Dog, Pope Hats, Forming. I feel like AdHouse has had this great track record of quality, where I’m benefitting from that goodwill, that American Barbarian is the next AdHouse book and that that means something. I think it’s a great way to have your work presented.

O’Shea: In the webcomic’s first chapter for several panels before his arrival you inject small panels teasing the impending arrival of Two-Tank Omen in a manner that reminded me of Walt Simonson’s teases for Surtur. Did that serve as an inspiration for you?

Scioli: I’m a fan of Thor, so it might be in there somewhere. It’s probably closer to the buildup to the introduction of Galactus, since the buildup and intro happen within the same chapter. Ditko tended to do more of the Surtur-style multi-issue buildup to a villain’s intro than Kirby did. Didn’t they mention Dormammu for months before he actually showed up in Dr. Strange? Spiderman always seemed like it had lots of silhouetted mystery villains hanging around making plans for ages before they’d actually make a move.

Specifically what I was thinking of, and I think it will be more apparent in the print version, is that I had an idea in one of my notebooks to have a subplot going on in a small panel at the bottom of each page, and to have that bottom panel slowly get larger and larger until it engulfs the entire page. I eventually found a use for that idea here, in the buildup to Two-Tank’s arrival.

O’Shea: Is it me or did you enjoy writing the dialogue for American Barbarian’s brothers and father? I cracked up when you had his dad telling the king: “you’re going to have to eat some shit.”

Scioli: Yes I did. I had to make that choice for this comic, how do people talk? I’d been doing the high and mighty fantasy speech in 8-Opus. I wanted to take a break from it and see if I could get away with some more direct, less polished speech. While I’m drawing, I’ll write temporary dialogue in the margins as a placeholder for when I can fill in something more polished. I’ve talked to some other artists who also do this, too. I thought it might be interesting to have them speak in that “first draft” dialogue. “Eat shit, Submariner!” rather than “Taste the full cosmic fury of mine awesome hammer Mjolnir!”

O’Shea: When Rick is carving revenge into his fingers you went to a completely different art style in two panels (pages 10 and 11) of Chapter 2, in fact at least with 11 it looks like it is a photo of actual hands. What lead you to try those panels that way?

Scioli: I don’t know. It was something that just came up in the course of doing it. I hadn’t planned to do it that way, until I sat down to draw it. I knew I wanted to reserve the right to draw any page any way I wanted to. That’s part of the freedom of webcomics. I knew fumetti, watercolor and collage were tools that I hadn’t used before in a comic, so this seemed like a good place to do it. In a lot of ways that’s the emotional focal point of the whole story, so if you’re going to do it somewhere, that’s the place for it.

O’Shea: Am I right in assuming you love designing zany-looking characters. Who do you consider among the American Barbarian cast to be the most outlandish looking character?

Scioli: You’re right, that’s my favorite part of the job. The most outlandish has got to be Two-Tank Omen. That was one that came to me in a dream, so I don’t feel like I “designed” it as much as some of the other characters. Gali-Leo is pretty weird and he was one that was very carefully constructed.

O’Shea: At what point in the story planning did you realize: “I want to have Rick driving a Honda in the opening to chapter 3!”?

Scioli: I wanted him to roll down the hill in some kind of vehicle. At first I was kind of picturing something like in the Simpsons driving game where you utterly destroy your car and drive around in a frame with no tires.

Eventually I decided I wanted this to be another point to include some photo-collage. That’s actually my car.

O’Shea: How is plotting and pacing for a webcomic different than your approach in your past projects?

Scioli: Here’s a big difference, which worked out really well: there’s no set length for the chapters. Each chapter is as long or short as it needs to be. I had 14-page chapters, 40-page chapters. Originally I had concieved of this as a 10-part monthly mini-series comic book. That means that I would’ve had to cram the 40-page chapter into 20-some pages or pad out the 14-page chapter. It lets the work breathe and find its own pace.

I also like how you can release it a page at a time. In a monthly comic, the only page that lingers is the last page. You have to wait a while for that next chunk of story, so that’s where the cliffhangers go. With a webcomic, every page is a cliffhanger. As a creator, you hate the fact that something you labored over can be read so quickly. The people who followed the comic as each page was posted read it in a timeframe that was a lot closer to the timeframe I created it in.

O’Shea: Am I right in thinking you love to use thought balloons for comedic effect (I am thinking in particular of the line “I thought that douche was her boyfriend” from Chapter 5).

Scioli: I’m a big believer in the thought balloon. It lends itself to humor of course, since it’s viewed as a quaint relic, but I think you can use it for serious effect, too.

O’Shea: The webcomic is currently at chapter 10. How many chapters will be covered in February’s release?

Scioli: There will be 10 chapters total, but chapter 10 is pretty long. That’s the whole story. After the story finishes, ambarb.com will host my next webcomic: Final Frontier.

O’Shea: Care to divulge some more details about Final Frontier?

Scioli: It’s the most straight-up superheroey thing I’ve ever done. There’s a whole universe of characters doing all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s tangentially related to American Barbarian.

O’Shea: Are there any extras that the American Barbarian book is going to offer?

Scioli: There are extra drawings and sketches scattered through the book as chapter breaks or design elements. There’s an awesome map of American Barbarian’s world on the endpapers. There’s no backmatter. The book is pretty much all story. The story ended up being a lot bigger than I thought it would be. That last chapter just kept going and going.

O’Shea: In a recent Twitter exchange with Kurt Busiek, you noted that there is a lack of plot (much less subplot) in some comics. How did that come to be, in your opinion?

Scioli: I disavow anything I post on Twitter. Anything I say on there is usually only how I feel at the moment I tweet it, and I usually disagree with it immediately.

I think that because Kirby-style action comics story-telling is my baseline, which is very plot-heavy, everything else tends to seem to my eyes, leasurely and anemic by comparison. But I probably tend towards an over-reliance on plot mechanics and need to learn to more fully utilize the other components of storytelling.

O’Shea: It’s a simple opinion at its core, but I still have to ask (based on this tweet) what is it about the writing process that is so enjoyable for you?

Scioli: That’s where it feels like you’re really playing with toys and having fun, when you’re in those early stages of figuring out the shape of it. The day-in-day-out drawing of a comic has its own set of rewards, but things happen so much more slowly, it’s not as enjoyable. I think it’s also because my early work was so much more focussed on the drawing. Writing was something I did to facilitate the things I wanted to draw, where now I’ve accumulated enough experience that I actually have feel like I have things to say, and a way of expressing them.

O’Shea: Please tell me that DC contacted you when they decided to include OMAC as part of the new 52?

Scioli: They did not. DC is the one big four company I’ve never done anything with. OMAC is a lot closer to what I’d like to see from mainstream superhero comics, a focus on visual bravura and clearly-choreographed action. It’s got that joy in the drawing process that I’d just mentioned. I’d been enjoying Giffen’s recent penciling work leading up to it. It’s beautiful. It’s my favorite of the new 52, and tellingly enough it’s by far the worst-selling. I know better than anybody what a tough sell the fake Kirby thing can be.

Few careers in comics are as full of bizarre happenings and unanswered questions as Steve Ditko’s — and yet it often seems to me that the crowning strangeness of Ditko’s six decades (!) as a cartoonist is his popularity, the fact that even the most unadventurous of comics readers know his name and are at least familiar with his work in passing.  Ditko’s work is almost aggressively non-mainstream, and grows more so with every passing year.  He happened to be in the right place at the right time once, when an angular, surrealistic strip with a near-pathological lead character and the unlikely name “Spider-Man” hit it big with a generation of comics readers on the lookout for something different.  But even Ditko’s most famous creation only really took off once he walked away from it, leaving John Romita to smooth the rough edges from a strip that Ditko lanced through with menacing shadows, an urban landscape on the brink of decay, and an attitude that danced between aspiration and hatred, pulling back the curtain on the dark side of youthful energy.

It might be going a bit far to call Ditko the first cartoonist to run from his mainstream success, but he certainly did it in a more uncompromising manner than anyone before had (with the possible exception of Jack Cole).  Most journeyman artists of the mid-1960s, especially those with styles as idiosyncratic as Ditko’s, would have given all they had to find themselves working on a book as successful as Spider-Man was at the time.  But Ditko chafed at the humanist ideals Stan Lee overwrote his stories with, and struck out for better things he never found, moving through just about every company in the business of publishing comics, experimenting as a self-publisher before most action artists even understood that such a thing was possible, and by the time the page above was drawn, ending up in the role of elder statesman during the black-and-white alternative comics boom of the late 1980s.

The acerbic visual style and soldier-stiff insistence on total control evident in everything Ditko does makes him an odd fit indeed for the role of populist hero that he’s been shoehorned into by Spider-Man’s inexplicable continued popularity.  Much easier to place him in is the narrative of the cartoonist’s cartoonist, an artist of consummate skill, craft, and individual vision whose genius hits with those who appreciates such things but never with the wide audience it deserves.  And indeed, after the random happenstance of a few years’ collaborative superhero comics that kicked him into the limelight, Ditko never really did connect with a reader base of any significance.  One of the reasons why can be seen above: while his ’60s work had enough illustrative punch and dazzle about it to stand next to that of Jack Kirby, Ditko began working toward a new, harsher ideal almost immediately after he left Marvel, paring back his style and doing more and more work in black and white.

Later-period Ditko leaves pyrotechnic picture-making behind for a tightly gridded, simplified approach whose dominant goal is to communicate as much information with as little as possible.  It’s still eminently recognizable as Ditko’s work, but the atmospherics and amped-up splashiness of his earlier work are gone, replaced by a cool, monochrome consistency.  Ditko’s modern comics read as fluidly and easily as type, usually getting across the bulk of what they’re saying without relying on the words in the balloons.  There’s a reason for this shift: these days Ditko is almost exclusively engaged in making “message” comics about his Objectivist philosophy, which takes so much exposition to communicate the details of that the pictures need the design-heavy, streamlined style Ditko uses on them.

But when Ditko loosens up and sets his energies to more straightforward work (invariably genre-inflected), it’s easy to see how pure and visceral the style he’s been brought to by necessity can be.  The page above communicates so much with so little: three of its panels are simply shots of a white cube set into black space, and three more pin tiny, helpless figures in vortexes of floating geometric shapes.  And yet we get all we need to feel the page as it’s intended: the single, chiaroscuro close-up shot in panel two provides a dominant emotional tone for the page, and from there forward we watch an archetypal human figure caught in a pattern of constant, traumatic geometric/environmental change.  We too are drawn into a holding pattern by the perfect, almost yin-and-yang level of balance between black space and white space on the page, which brings a deep level of impact to these small, tightly gridded, highly abstract panels.

Ditko, for whom communicating abstractions is so important, here turns that skill to a classic “there’s no way out” horror-story ending by tormenting his character with basic shape and line rather than anything more concrete.  It’s almost a cubist approach to horror, with the page’s gradual fade from the strong whites of the first panel into black more responsible for the sinking feeling it puts across than anything else.  It’s this kind of thing, not sparkly heroic action, that Ditko always did best, using the most rudimentary forms available to create something that blends menace and complexity and cool detachment into something both beautiful and highly unsettling.

Don Newton and Dick Giordano provide a classic Batman cover

Sometimes it’s been hard for me to process the New 52 as anything but an amorphous mass of, well, Newness. In this respect, DC’s October solicitations are helping to define that mass, with details like the five-year timeframe and Superman’s work boots.

Still, despite the promise of widespread change — and the somewhat-irrational implication that those who aren’t curious now will be left behind later — it’s been fairly easy for me almost to ignore the solicits, and just buy the books when they come out. After all, presumably DC is after new (or returning) readers who don’t follow the solicits and aren’t attuned to the spoilers.

Besides, the October solicits also include some attractive reprints; so let’s get right to it, shall we?

* * *

WHEN TRINITARIANS CLASH; or WORLD’S FIGHTIN’-EST

Here’s the thing about Justice League #2: by now, 25 years after Dark Knight Book Four, a Superman/Batman fight is nothing new. However, the relationship between these two characters is one of DC’s most primal. Each taps into a different set of reader-identification impulses: Superman represents wish-fulfillment, and Batman stands for a more practical approach. In a very real sense, Batman’s enduring popularity is bound up with readers having chosen his brand of practicality over Superman’s embrace of fantasy.

The fact that this fight will play out as part of the Justice League’s new origin adds another layer of meaning, because Batman’s mere participation in the League has occasionally been deemed incompatible with his characterization. In fact, while the Justice League itself facilitates the interaction of genres (fantasy, mythology, space opera, etc.), its members tend to be more similar to Superman than to Batman; and so Batman’s pulp-style tendencies are often downplayed in fights with the likes of Despero and the Lord of Time. Therefore, this is not just another Superman/Batman throwdown. Instead, it has the potential to define Batman’s role in the Justice League, and by extension across the reintroduced superhero landscape.

Or, you know, Batman could have even more of an advantage, since Superman’s powers are still developing.  Plus he’s probably got a lot of prep time.

WHO’S WHO

Classic DC names showing up in unexpected places: the Signalmen (plural of an old Batman villain) in Justice League International #2; Brainstorm (old JLA villain) in Mr. Terrific #2; N.O.W.H.E.R.E. (an acronym from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol) in the second issues of Superboy and Teen Titans; and Amazing Man (onetime member of the All-Star Squadron; successor joined the Justice League) in OMAC #2.

MINISERIES MAKING A COMEBACK

Count me among those excited for the return of Batman: Odyssey – not necessarily because I enjoy the series on its merits, but because it’s another chance to speculate about what Neal Adams wants to accomplish with it. I mean, even All Star Batman & Robin had its own place in Frank Miller’s Batman stories. Odyssey apparently exists apart from anything Adams has ever done with Batman, except maybe some demented version of those Power Records comics.

Speaking of standing apart, the new Shade miniseries – the second one, remember, since James Robinson and a handful of fine artists did four issues with the character in 1997 — sure seems like it’s not for the uninitiated. Rather, it feels like the next best thing to Robinson actually restarting his Starman series after a ten-year absence. And why stop with Starman? Maybe The Shade will refer to Robinson’s current Justice League work, which in October will only be out-of-date by a month. I’m trying not to be sarcastic here, because Robinson has a history of ignoring editorial mandates about continuity. Much of his Elseworlds miniseries The Golden Age (drawn by Paul Smith) laid the groundwork for Starman, so in a sense Robinson has always been playing in his own little corner of DC’s superhero line.

COLLECTIONS

The reprints and collections in this crop of solicits are really quite good. Among the $7.99 issues, Mark Farmer and Alan Davis’ Superboy’s Legion stands out almost on eye-candy value alone. It’s lighter than the team’s original Nail miniseries, but it doesn’t go nuts with the cameos like Another Nail did.

Somewhat more serious is JLA: Age Of Wonder, which essentially puts Superman, Starman, Green Lantern, et al., at the dawn of the 20th Century. In scope and tone it reminded me of Superman: Red Son, because both deal with good intentions gone awry on a global scale. However, AOW doesn’t try to be as satirical as Red Son, so in that respect I liked AOW more. Worth the $7.99, definitely.

Can’t quite say the same for the two-issue reprint of Superman: Secret Identity. On one hand I’m glad it’s being reprinted, because it’s a gorgeous, affecting take on a “real-world” Man of Steel. The only caveat I have about recommending this edition is that DC should have just reissued the 2004 paperback collection. Sure, the two new $7.99 issues will be cheaper (the paperback was $19.95 seven years ago), but they won’t be as durable; and this is a story you’ll want to read many times.

It should surprise none of you that I am a big fan of literary annotations. Besides annotated versions of The Hobbit and A Christmas Carol, and Jess Nevins’ League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annotations, I have Leslie Klinger’s three-volume New Annotated Sherlock Holmes — so of course I’m signing up for Klinger’s Annotated Sandman. (It’s cheaper than the Absolute editions, too!) Now maybe I will finally feel smart while reading Sandman….

Volume 2 of the Steve Ditko Omnibus reprints a lot of odds and ends from the late ‘60s through the early ‘00s. If you’ve always wanted to read Ditko’s Hawk & Dove, or an arc from the Prince Gavyn “Starman” feature (written by Paul Levitz), and you don’t mind a collection with two issues of Man-Bat, a handful of “Odd Man” shorts, and some random Legion of Super-Heroes issues, then this is the book for you.

Last month DC solicited a new Justice League Archives, but I still didn’t expect to see a new Legion Archives in these solicits. We’re well into the ‘70s at this point, and well past the point that a casual Legion fan could just jump into this hardcover series. (Previous Archives have been discounted on eBay, but Volume 8 is out of print and pretty hard to find.) Maybe a combination of the Showcase Presents books and the later Archives will do. Besides, if this keeps up, the Archives might just catch up with that Great Darkness Saga collection I have already.

I’m also glad to see — finally! — a second Wonder Woman Chronicles. Many, if not all, of these stories have already been reprinted in Archive form, so it’s nice for someone like me (who, again, didn’t have the resources to devote to every Archive series) to catch up on the Amazing Amazon’s most imaginative era.

BATMAN COLLECTIONS

One thing about reading early-‘70s Batman comics is that the collections tend to focus on particular topics — all the Neal Adams issues, all the Ra’s Al Ghul issues, the Manhunter saga, etc. — and you lose sight of the larger month-to-month context in which these issues first appeared. That’s why I’ll be getting Showcase Presents Batman Vol. 5. I want to read stories like “The Demon Of Gothos Mansion” (from Batman #227) alongside more familiar classics like “Secret of the Waiting Graves” and “One Bullet Too Many!”

“The Demon Laughs” (now collected in the $7.99 format) came out in 2001, some time after the wholesale creative-team shuffle which followed “No Man’s Land,” but it’s still a good example of ‘90s Batman. It’s from Chuck Dixon and Jim Aparo, two of the period’s signature creators, and the story’s a good marriage of creators and characters. (Probably similar is the Catwoman: Guardian Of Gotham miniseries, which I haven’t read.) By contrast, Dwayne McDuffie and Val Semeiks’ “Blink” (which came out a year after “Demon Laughs,” and which also gets the $7.99 treatment) offered readers a respite from constant Bat-crossovers.  More importantly, t’s a neat story in its own right, earning a Legends of the Dark Knight sequel not too long afterwards.

Of course, if you want the last hurrah of the ‘90s Batman creative teams, step right up to the new edition of “No Man’s Land” collections. After “Knightfall” and its sequels expanded the Bat-line pretty much irrevocably, the books crossed over constantly for the rest of the ‘90s, culminating in a post-apocalyptic storyline which took a year to tell and covered a year in the life of post-quake Gotham. It reduced the Batman mythology to very basic elements: one man (and his small group of associates) trying to bring justice to a hellish city broken by corruption and crime.

Finally, back when DC announced a Gene Colan Batman collection, I mentioned how great it would be to have a similar book for Don Newton — so thanks, DC, for following up on that. Between the Colan book, the upcoming Marshall Rogers collection, and this one, my shelf will soon be full of stellar Bronze Age Bat-art.

POTPOURRI

Although I’m willing to give Peter Tomasi a chance as Batman And Robin’s regular writer, issue #2′s mention of a more violent Robin suggests that some of the nuance which Grant Morrison gave Damian is being eroded. To be fair, Tomasi knows his Bat-history well enough that I expect him to distinguish this storyline from 1988′s “did Jason Todd just kill that guy?” arc. By the same token, though, you’d think this would hit a lot of the same beats.

Glad to see Seven Soldiers’ Shining Knight on the cover of Demon Knights #2.

My position against buying the new Teen Titans hasn’t changed, but I will say that the cover of issue #2 is an improvement. Probably because Red Robin’s glider wings are covered up.

I’m sorry to see House Of Mystery go, because I read it for the first year-and-a-half. At its worst it was still pretty diverting, and occasionally it was inspired. Its unique format tried to combine continuing characters with an anthology, and I thought it was worth supporting just for that. However, I never got into the continuing characters, and eventually I dropped it. Naturally, now that it’s being cancelled, I’m inclined to revisit it to see what I missed.

The fact that the THUNDER Agents paperback reprints all ten issues of the lame-duck series, and is still called “Volume 1,” gives me hope for future THUNDER stories.

Will I buy the 1,216-page DC Comics: The New 52? No. Does DC need me to buy it? No. If DC thinks there is a market for that $200.00 Taschen retrospective, surely it has calculated that neither set of prospective buyers includes me. Anyone who does get it, let me know what you think.

* * *

Well, that’s what jumped out at me this month. What looks good to you?

Batman Inc. #7

Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? Today our special guest if artist Tom Scioli, artist on Godland and creator of American Barbarian.

To see what Tom and the Robot 6 crew have been read, click the link below.

*****

Tim O’Shea

My part of this week’s What Are You Reading opens with writer Sam Humphries and artist Steven Sanders’ creator-owned one-shot, Our Love is Real, which the creators intend to self-publish/release. The book is not set to launch until July 6, but Humphries was good enough to send me a preview PDF. Here’s the creators basic pitch (which they suggest you file under “OMG/SCI FI/WTF) for the 24-page one-shot: “FIVE YEARS AFTER THE AIDS VACCINE…Plantsexuals riot in the streets for equal rights. Humans fall in love with dogs. And crystals are more than just jewelry. A chance encounter on the job changes a riot cop’s life forever as he finds himself caught in a bizarre love triangle that blurs romance, crime, and lust beyond recognition.” Pardon the pun, but don’t be turned off by the pitch. There are no graphic sexual scenes (though the lead character Jok cusses a lot). The story impressed me for how economic Humphries was with his words and his script for the story. He effectively covers a great deal of ground and is even able to work in a three-page fight scene with no dialogue. Oddly enough, I loved those three pages the most, because of Sanders’ dynamic art. Go to the website and check this story out.

Long before Fred Van Lente was cracking us up with the adventures of Marvel’s Hercules, he teamed with artist Ryan Dunlavey on Action Philosophers! The creators have just released The More Than Complete Action Philosophers, which collects all nine issues, but rearranging the philosophers’ tales in chronological order. It’s hard to single out any one aspect of this historical comedy, but for me, I love the panel introducing Saint Augustine drunk in two bed with two women, with the narrative blurb “Does this man look like a saint to you?”

Initially, I had planned on taking a vacation from buying any monthly comics this week, since I was literally on vacation. But then out of curiosity I let Google Maps tell me if there were any comic book stores within 30 minutes of where I was. That’s how I found out about Apocalypse Comics in North Myrtle Beach, SC. The store, which recently moved to a new location, probably has the best signage I have ever seen for a comics store (as shown in the photo). Another point in its favor? The comics are not laid out in alphabetical order, but rather they are divided up between independent, DC and Marvel. Better still, the independent titles are the first set of comics you hit when you walk in the store.

Speaking of independents, my son and I continue to love Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard’s Super Dinosaur (this week saw the release of issue 3).

In the mainstream, I have rarely bought a comic based on the cover but Batman Incorporated #7 (by Chris Burnham) sported a great cover. Yet the cover has little to do with the actual story, but fortunately the story inside is an equally good read. And given how I have a very hot and cold reaction to Grant Morrison, for me to praise his writing is not that common. After reading it, I will likely track down issue 6 at my local store.

Brigid Alverson

I have heard good things about Scott Chantler’s Two Generals, his narrative of his grandfather’s experiences as a Canadian officer who took part in the D-Day invasion, so I brought it along on my vacation for some summer reading. I’m not finished with it yet but it’s a fascinating book, filled with little details. On one page, Chantler shows his main character, his grandfather, in two successive frames, and the changes in his face between those frames speak volumes. I also keep noticing his careful composition; Chantler starts with a nine-panel grid but he breaks it frequently to introduce horizontal or vertical shapes, and more subtly, he balances the panels across the two-page spread, often mirroring an object or shape from one page on the opposite side. He also uses color in interesting ways, sticking mostly to a gray-green shade but using red in limited quantities for moments of violence or shock. It’s an amazing book and well worth the read despite the violence of the subject matter.

The other book I’m enjoying this week is Dave Roman’s Astronaut Academy. I go back a ways with this one, as Dave sent me the original mini-comics years ago, and the new version retains much of the silliness and childlike humor of the originals while reflecting Dave’s growth as an artist. The book is a series of short stories featuring different students in an outer-space school, with some unifying plot threads running through it, such as the competition between rich girl Maribelle Mellonbelly and spunky Miyumi San. Dave is a former editor for Nickelodeon Magazine (which was a treasure trove of good comics back in the day), and his style is cartoony and a bit exaggerated. It’s a fun read, especially for kids, who will really appreciate the silliness.

Tom Scioli

Rocketeer

Rocketeer Adventures #2: So far this series has been nicely-drawn and genial, so it’s a fitting tribute to Dave Stevens’ original series. The first story, by Mark Waid and Chris Weston features a Captain Marvel analog. There are probably a lot of references I’m missing in this story. The original Rocketeer stories were filled to bursting with authentic period detail and references to 1940′s pop culture, rewarding the careful reader. I imagine that’s something the various creators are trying to achieve with these new vignettes. I imagine Stevens would’ve found a sly way of including the actual Captain Marvel rather than an analog, the way Lamont Cranston made an appearance in Cliff’s New York Adventure. A quick google search didn’t reveal anything about a character called Aeroman, but the costume does look familiar, maybe an old Nedor character. Waid is fond of dropping in obscure references to old comic and pulp characters, so I’m sure there isn’t anything random about Aeroman. The story itself is attractively drawn and plays on the Rocketeer-worthy trope of the hero who saves the day, but gets none of the credit.

Darwyn Cooke’s story starts off in high style. The intro page, with it’s saturday matinee feel is so effective that when the story proper gets going in the next page it really hits hard. You can almost hear the narrator’s voice change from old-timey announcer to the hear-and-now. I guess each of these creative teams is trying to answer the question, what is the Rocketeer? What is a Rocketeer story? 1940′s Cheesecake? Darwyn’s story takes that on directly. A cliffhanger feel? Check. Cooke’s story ends with a cliffhanger hinting of a Cliff vs. the Nazis payoff. Geoff Darrow provides that next piece, but in the form of a double-page spread, rather than a full story. I was a little disappointed at first, but Darrow’s single image packs a lot of punch. This is the first time it’s occurred to me, probably from seeing Darrow’s art in a golden age milieu, that his spray of bullets motif is reminiscent of Fletcher Hanks’ flocks of birds that taper off into the distance. I wonder if that’s a conscious connection.

The issue is rounded out with a story by Lowell Francis and Gene Ha. It consists of a well-choreographed aerial gunfight. Superimposing blow-by-blow boxing announcers is a well-worn device in comics, but it works nonetheless.

Like the Escapist series from a few years back, I imagine they’ll go the rotating creators on short stories route for a few issues before sinking into a longer sustained run by a creative team. I’m enjoying these bite-sized strips and look forward to when they try something a little more ambitious.

Dave Stevens was just able to scratch the surface of his creation. I imagine he’d be very pleased if these new teams were able to excavate something really amazing from the concept. It seems like they’re well on their way to that.

Breed III

Breed III #2: Starlin is really good at getting new readers up to speed, so if you haven’t read Breed books 1 and 2 or issue 1 of Breed III, you’d still be able to get something out of this one. It’s unclear to me if this is a previously-drawn story from the 90′s that Starlin’s been sitting on, or if this is something he drew very recently, but it’s very strong stuff, as tight as anything he’s ever done. He was an early experimenter with computer graphics in comics, and that’s on display here. He has a very idiosyncratic and recognizable approach to computer effects. Some great MC-Escher-esque cityscapes and a hum-dinger of a double-page spread. Readers might recognize some familiar faces among the demonic fifth columnists in this issue. The best sequence is a very unassuming one. There’s a series of nuanced drawings that set up a punch very effectively. It give the punch real impact.

Batman Inc. #7: Between Grant Morrison’s books and the currently-delayed Batman:Odyssey, I’ve been buying more Batman comics than I have at any point in my life, except maybe the lead-up to the original Tim Burton film. This is probably the most interesting time to be reading Batman comics since Miller’s heyday with the character. This issue is my favorite so far of the recently-christened Batman Inc. series. Sometimes you can get some mileage out of the superhero genre by grafting some real-life situation that superhero comics haven’t gotten their hands on yet. For this issue Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham transposed the Batman myth onto reservation culture and came up with an entertaining read. I haven’t read Scalped yet, but I’m guessing it was an influence on this book? It’s got a lot of surprises which is hard to do in a 20-some page superhero comic. It’s got me looking forward to the next issue which seems to feature a Tron-like virtual world.

Eternals

Eternals #10 by Jack Kirby: Here’s a comic you can study and pore over. There’s a series of beautiful epic shots of a Space God casually causing a series of disasters in an underwater city, before swimming away with a school of whales. This issue is one of the peaks of this woefully underrated series, the sub-plot of Thena and Kro’s anti-love story in the land of the Deviants. It’s only the millionth time I’ve read it.

Invincible Iron Man

Invincible Iron Man: Fear Itself #505: It’s part 2 of an arc titled Cracked Actor (Bowie reference). I didn’t read part 1, but with superhero comics that’s usually a plus. It’s a nice little story, in the old-school Marvel tradition. There’s some cool apocalyptic imagery and a well-choreographed fight. This is a tie-in with Matt Fraction’s current line-wide crossover Fear Itself, which if you haven’t read, centers around classic Marvel characters getting evil Asgard-powered upgrades. In this one, Iron Man goes head-to-head with an amped-up Apokoliptic version of the Grey Gargoyle. The way GG’s super-sized powers are imagined here is very effective. Salvador Larocca’s layouts and linework are a lot more lithe than I remember them being in the previous Iron Man volumes I’d read. The depictions of Iron Man almost enter into John Romita jr. territory. I’m liking it.

Steve Ditko’s Package #1 from 1999: I don’t usually like Ditko’s late-late-era Randian tracts, but this one really delivered. Great art, great stories and he plays with the form in ways only someone with multiple decades of following his own muse can do. He rearranges the players in a murder story, creating something I can’t quite put my finger on in the repetition. In another story he has one of the most effective uses of a talking robot head I’ve ever seen. Maybe this is obvious to everybody but me, but this is the first time I’ve noticed how strong the similarity is between Ditko and Los Bros Hernandez. This “package” is composed of short stories of varying lengths, but they add up to something very satisfying and strangely unified. I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would. I’m partway through his book The Mocker from 10 years earlier and am also enjoying it. Ditko’s b/w work is made for b/w. The range of textures and visual vocabulary is intoxicating. I’d read one of these Mocker stories in color in the back of an issue of Silver Star. It did not work at all in color, but works gloriously in b/w.

Incredible Change-Bots 2: This series has been a nice gift to those of us who’ve sat through the Transformers film series. Aside from being cute and funny, these are rock-solid, good transforming robot stories, a genre I grew up with. I hope he makes at least one for every Transformers film.

John Byrne's Next Men

Welcome once again to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy based on certain spending limits — $15, $30 to spend and if we had extra money to spend on what we call the “Splurge” item. Check out Diamond’s release list for this week if you’d like to play along in our comments section.

Michael May

If I had $15:

There are a lot of great periodicals coming out this week, so I’d have some hard choices to make. With only $15, I’d concentrate first on those with the cheapest prices: the first issue of Dark Horse’s new Mighty Samson ($3.50), Atomic Robo and the Deadly Art of Science #2 ($3.50), and Mouse Guard: Black Axe #1 ($3.50). I’m already a huge fan of both Atomic Robo and Mouse Guard and – based on its concept and vague memories of stories I read as a kid – hope to become one of Mighty Samson too. I’d spend the last of my money on Northern Guard #1, because I’m a sucker for Canadian superheroes.

If I had $30:

I’d add Doc Macabre #1 ($3.99), John Byrne’s Next Men #1 ($3.99), and Strange Tales 2 #3 ($4.99). “Doc Macabre” is an awesome name and I love Steve Niles’ pulp stuff, I’ve been waiting 16 years for that Next Men issue, and the Strange Tales book has a Kate Beaton story in which the Avengers go to a carnival. I’d pay five bucks just for Beaton’s deal, but it’s also got a Thing tale by Harvey Pekar (and yes, Harvey Pekar is in the story).

Splurge:

Speaking of Steve Niles pulp: the Mystery Society collection ($19.99) comes out this week, as does Beau Smith’s Wynonna Earp: Yeti Wars ($17.99). Those should both be a lot of fun.

Graeme McMillan

Strange Tales II #3

I’m having the opposite reaction to Michael this week, with lots of more expensive items leaping out at me, but nothing seeming particularly urgent in the periodicals list. And so, if I had $15, I’d probably start with the second issue of IDW’s Dungeons & Dragons ($3.99) after loving the first so much, and then try out the debut of John Byrne’s reborn Next Men ($3.99), to see where his head’s at after all these years. I’d probably also pick up Marvel’s Strange Tales #3 ($4.99), because I’ve enjoyed enough of what’s come before, and really love Kate Beaton’s work… but that remaining $2.03…? That’ll remain up for grabs, I think.

If I had $30, I’d forget about Next Men #1 and put that money and some of the unused $2.03 towards Jason Little’s Motel Art Improvement Service hardcover from Dark Horse ($19.99). There’s something compelling about Little’s comics, which feel to me like a mix of Jessica Abel and Chris Ware, in some strange way. I only vaguely caught up with this as a webcomic, hoping to read it in print. And here it is!

As far as splurging goes, there’s an embarrassment of riches this week: Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s better-than-Earth-One-even-if-delays-in-original-release-killed-momentum Superman Secret Origin HC ($29.99)? The second volume of Judge Dredd Complete Case Files ($19.99)? A new Yotsuba! ($10.99)? But nostalgia wins me over again: I’d go for DC’s Tales of The Green Lantern Corps Vol. 3 ($19.99), which begins collecting Steve Englehart and Joe Staton’s “The Green Lantern Corps” run from the late ’80s that I loved so much. John Stewart was always my favorite back then. Followed by the kinder, gentler Kilowog.

Brigid Alverson

If I had $15…

Atomic Robo: Deadly Art of Science #2

I have to confess, there aren’t too many books that leap out at me and demand my attention this week. One that I must see, however, is the second issue of Atomic Robo: Deadly Art of Science ($3.50). I really liked the first issue, and I want to see more. That leaves just enough for the ninth volume of Yotsuba&! ($10.99), and I’m grabbing that because it’s that rare book that is funny to adults as well as children.

If I had $30…

I don’t know too much about it, but NBM’s latest Nicolas de Crecy graphic novel, Salvatore: Transports of Love ($14.99) looks like the sort of thing I’d like. It’s a weird fantasy about a dog who works as an auto mechanic and moves his shop to a mountain peak… yeah. Well, it’s something to talk about at Christmas parties, anyway.

Splurge…

Two things, which together add up to less than 40 bucks: I liked Nathan Edmondson and Brett Weldele’s The Light, especially Weldele’s art, so I would like to pick up the trade ($16.99). And Fumi Yoshinaga’s Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! ($10.99) is sort of a foodie’s tour of Tokyo, with Yoshinaga and a friend sampling the signature dishes of various restaurants. I have no plans to go to Tokyo anytime soon, but the book looks like fun.

Chris Mautner

Big Questions #15

If I had $15:

The trade collection of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions will be out next year, but I’m the impatient sort, so I’ll probably pick up the final issue, No. 15 ($7.95) this week. Nilsen earned his cred on books like Dogs & Water and Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, but Questions, which he’s been doing seemingly since before Dogs debuted, may prove to be a defining work.

I’ll also pick up the fifth issue of Highland Laddie ($3.99) though the next time they do one of these Boys spin-offs I might opt to wait for the trade …

If I had $30:

… as I did with Strange Tales. I’m anxious to see the third issue, but in this instance I’m holding off. Instead, I’ll pick up the ninth volume of Yotsuba&!, a book that never fails to charm just about every member of my family.

Splurge:

I already have a copy, but if you’re a Steve Ditko fan then your splurge item for the week should be Unexplored Worlds, the second volume in Fantagraphics and editor Blake Bell’s ongoing attempt to collect his pre-Code and pre-Spider-Man material. My splurge, however, is a $30 hardcover collection of Jodorowsky and Moebius’ Madwoman of the Sacred Heart. I know next to nothing about this book, but c’mon, it’s Jodorowsky and Moebius! The same folks who brought The Incal! How could it not be awesome? (please don’t answer that)

Green Arrow

Here’s another nice catch by blogger Corey Blake, who spotted the Trouble collection on Amazon last month — Blake points out listings for upcoming omnibus collections from DC featuring the works of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Unfortunately there’s little information on either collection. The description on the Jack Kirby one, due at the end of July, focuses on his Green Arrow work: “In 1957, following the dissolution of his partnership with Joe Simon, Jack Kirby returned to DC Comics. Among his new assignments was the Green Arrow feature that ran simultaneously in ADVENTURE COMICS and WORLD’S FINEST COMICS, pitting the Emerald Archer and his sidekick, Speedy, against a plethora of foes.”

The Ditko one, meanwhile, doesn’t have a description, but the cover artwork (which likely isn’t final) features Shade, the Changing Man … so it’s probably a safe guess that it’ll contain Ditko’s eight-issue Shade series from the 1970s.

Hellblazer: India

Hello and welcome once again to What Are You Reading?, where the Robot 6 crew talk about the comics and graphic novels that they’ve been enjoying lately. Today our special guest is Bill Reed, who contributes to our sister blog Comics Should Be Good!. To see what Bill and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click the link below.

*****

Tim O’Shea

Batgirl #15

If you’re not up for reading recent event books in the Bat family, Bryan Q. Miller and Dustin Nguyen provide a hilarious cartoon-esque three-page summation from Wayne’s parents death through all the Robins to Wayne’s return from the “dead” in Batgirl #15.

Matt Fraction’s approach to Iron Man and Thor is much on the mind of fans and critics these days, but for my time and interest, what really captures my attention in Thor #617 is the art. I’ve been enjoying artist Pasqual Ferry’s since his days in the late 1990s on Marvel’s Heroes for Hire. The Thor series, colored by Matt Hollingsworth and lettered by legendary Thor letterer John Workman, is just making for some stellar scenes.

It’s easy to bash DC editorial for some of the oddball decisions they make every month, but whomever the hell made the call to greenlight the quirky Paul Cornell-written Knight and Squire should be knighted themselves. It’s a book in which Cornell creates a universe where Marvel’s John the Skrull would feel right at home. And as a reader, it’s the most bemused I’ve been by a mainstream narrative in a while.

Sean T. Collins

Batman goes to Palomar! Okay, not quite, but this week I continued my LOVE AND ROCKTOBER project of reading my way through Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets in its entirety, while also reading a whole lotta Bat-books in one sitting. Click the links for full reviews…

Birdland: As seen here on Robot 6, this is Gilbert Hernandez’s porn comic, a joyous and optimistic (and filthy!) flipside to his often bleak Palomar work.

Amor y Cohetes and Fear of Comics: Two short story collections, the first from Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario, the second from Gilbert solo–wide-ranging, gutsy work among the best ever done in this form.

And just for fun, now that the current mega-arc has reached the end, I read the last 15 or so Grant Morrison Batman comics, alternating between Batman and Robin, Batman, and The Return of Bruce Wayne. (Click the link to see the order I put ‘em in.) Dense, thrilling, creepy, stuffed with beautifully choreographed action sequences, and imbuing Batman with an engrossing sense of mystery. it’s pretty much exactly why I read superhero comics.

Chris Mautner

Koko Be Good

I like the way Jen Wang draws faces. I like the way she draws round, ovally eyes that have just a dot of a pupil in them, and shades the area around them so the look like they’re going to sink back into the skull at any moment. I like how fluent she is with eyebrows, how she understands it’s one of the most expressive parts of a person’s face and uses it to help the reader gain insight into her characters. I like how they look like rolling hills when someone’s feeling inquisitive or sly. I like how everyone’s heads look like little eggs.

All that being said, I can’t say I cared much for her debut graphic novel, Koko Be Good. The book is about a carefree young woman (girl? I had trouble figuring out her exact age) who pals up with a shy, inhibited guy who’s heading for Peru with his girlfriend and they both affect each other in deep, meaningful ways. Despite the length of the book, the characters are rather ill-defined (especially a third young man who is unfortunately shunted to the sidelines for most of the book) and I found myself constantly asking unanswered questions about these characters’ behavior and pasts. Where is Koko’s family? Why does she behave like such a loon? Why does Jon put up with Koko’s nonsense and verbal abuse? Wang is reaching for grandiose themes about adulthood and responsibility here but they elude her grasp considerably. She seems to have trouble articulating her larger points and I felt like I was getting an incomplete picture of the characters and their lives. Still, great eyebrows.

Brigid Alverson

I’m greatly enjoying IDW’s Library of American Comics series, partly because I’m a pushover for classic newspaper comics and partly because they are so well done. To be honest, I never heard of Secret Agent Corrigan X-9 before I saw their collected edition, but the brief introductory essay got me oriented and I was ready to jump in. X-9 was the creation of Dashiel Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), but this volume starts in 1967, when the team of Al Williamson and Archie Goodwin had just taken over the strip. It’s sophisticated in that 60s way, with slinky women and chiseled men, and everyone is smoking cigarettes the whole time. The stories are delightfully preposterous, too, in the way secret-agent stories used to be. The art is stylish and rather dark, as befits the subject matter. Putting a daily comic strip into book format does point up one flaw that is inherent to the medium—there’s a lot of repetition, and characters say each others’ names way too often. Still, there’s plenty of action and a lot of twists, and this strip makes good reading in its own right as well as as a period piece.

I asked my teen-librarian friends for some recommendations recently, and they were unanimous on the subject of Hopeless Savages. Happily, Oni Press has just released a collected edition of the first three comics, and more are apparently on the way. It’s the story of a cheerfully dysfunctional family of punk rockers—mom, dad, and four kids, living the punk life in the suburbs. The art is dynamic and the characters are a bit stereotyped but easy to like; I’m only halfway through the first story arc, but I already know I’m here to stay.

Bill Reed

The problem with getting all my comics through mail-order is that I’m usually weeks (and streets) behind the rest of the blogosphere, but coming to these books in critical isolation allows me to view a work fresh, unswayed by outside opinions. Unfortunately, that means I won’t get my clammy paws on Atomic Robo for another few weeks! I have only just digested the following comics:

Spider-Man: Fever

The Spider-Man: Fever trade paperback, written and drawn by Brendan McCarthy, really should include Dr. Strange in its title, as well. A psychedelic tribute to the stories and mind-bending environments of Lee and Ditko, Fever involves Spider-Man’s soul being stolen by an extra-dimensional tribe of spider-beings, one of whom is the very spidey who bit Peter Parker that fateful day. By coincidence, Spider-Man’s body has crawled into Dr. Strange’s bathtub, and Strange has to journey down the drain to save his friend. McCarthy seems to make comics like Burroughs wrote novels, or Bowie wrote songs, cutting up and stitching together chunks of Ditko comics, old age mythology, and new age mysticism to create an effervescent, day-glo fever dream of a comic. No one makes comics like Brendan McCarthy; he is the only artist who can match Ditko’s surreal visualizations. That’s why McCarthy comics are always worth reading.

McCarthy’s longtime pal Peter Milligan weaves a similar path of magic and identity with the Hellblazer: India collection. As a neophyte to John Constantine, I’ve only read Milligan’s run on the title, which portrays Constantine as a bastard who is shocked to discover he has a heart, going to nigh-Orphean lengths to rescue his deceased girlfriend from death’s clutches. Ghosts rule the day, be they Englishmen transformed into demons, stealing Indian girls from the streets of Mumbai, or the specter of punk rock, come back to seek revenge on the conservative party. Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini’s clean and angular art works well for the titular arc, but Simon Bisley draws his issues as I always imagined Hellblazer comics to look: swathed in blood and grime, so enveloped in inky darkness that the reader finds him- or herself squinting to make out the details. Milligan comics are often a coin toss, but when they hit, they really hit. Hellblazer is a solid baseline smack– not quite the stand-up triple of Human Target, but it may get there in time.

I also follow a few webcomics religiously. Written by a six year old, Axe Cop (by Malachi and Ethan Nicolle) continually reunites me with my own inner child, the kid completely awed by these bizarre comics books. Awesome Hospital (Chris Sims, Chad Bowers, Matt Digges) combines the genre absurdity of Adult Swim series Children’s Hospital with over-the-top madness and excitement that only comics can provide. Lastly, everything by Kate Beaton is worth reading, mixing the art of sketch comedy with a critic’s eye toward history and literature.

Thor: The Mighty Avenger #1

Hello and welcome once again to What Are You Reading?, where the Robot 6 crew talk about the comics and graphic novels that they’ve been enjoying lately.

Today’s guest is Zom from the Mindless Ones blog. To see what Zom and the rest of the Robot 6 team have been reading, click below.

*****

Sean T. Collins

Love and Rockets: New Stories #3

I took last week off from What Are You Reading?, but in my defense, it was for good reason. For starters, I had a computer meltdown and an unrelated blog malfunction that really bollixed up my reading and reviewing schedule. On the positive side of the coin, however, I launched a whole new blog for myself! You can find it at seantcollins.com.

And that’s where you’ll find my latest slate of reviews for my increasingly inaccurately named “LOVE AND ROCKTOBER” project, wherein I’m reading my way through all of Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets collections.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #3: With Jaime Hernandez’s “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers” suite, we reach the latest Locas story–the darkest, and one of the best, to date.

Heartbreak Soup: Switching over to Gilbert Hernandez’s end of the series, this is our introduction to the small Central American town of Palomar and its fascinatingly randy inhabitants. Things take a turn for the bleak right at the end.

Human Diastrophism: Beto rains destruction down on the town in the form of a serial killer, an earthquake, a plague of monkeys, a team of hitmen, and some extremely dangerous ideas.

Beyond Palomar: Contains Gilbert’s masterpiece, Poison River, and the more lighthearted but still substantive Love and Rockets X.

I also took a brief break from LOVE AND ROCKTOBER to review Mome Vol. 20: Fall 2010, the strong anniversary volume of the Fantagraphics flagship anthology, which came out this week.

Click the links for full reviews!

Michael May

Birdhouse

I read Vernon White’s Birdhouse this week and enjoyed it for its uniqueness. It’s constructed like a fairy tale – a ruthless king keeps his daughter trapped in the castle until she marries a particular nobleman – but it’s also very current. People wear contemporary clothing, live in modern houses, and (for the most part) hold twenty-first century values. The king’s men don’t carry swords; they wield handguns and rifles. The plot itself also breaks cliche by putting the princess in charge of her own destiny. She needs help to escape, but there’s no one prince that she’s relying on to break her free. Instead, she seeks assistance wherever she can get it, which adds the unfortunate complication of putting innocent people in danger from her father’s agents. It’s a fascinating story and I’m sure I’m going to want to reread it sooner rather than later.

I do have a couple of issues with the book though. Though it’s a fast read, it could have been faster. It’s extremely decompressed to the point of distraction. Dialogue doesn’t always flow smoothly because each speaker gets her own panel to talk in, making the reader pause for an awkward beat between sentences. There could also be a lot more expression in the characters’ faces who are often quite wooden. It’s not that they have NO expression, but they’re limited to two or three emotions in what should have been a powerful, moving story. As it is, it’s interesting, but it had the potential to be even more.

Tim O’Shea

I’m curious to see where Jim McCann’s gonna take the Hawkeye & Mockingbird characters as the Widowmaker miniseries gears up; but before that can happen we had to read the latest issue of Hawkeye & Mockingbird (#6, and now the series is in undefined hiatus). As an old school fanboy, I crave anytime a writer puts Clint Barton and Steve Rogers in the same room; the character’s shared history is rich and McCann captilizes upon those dynamics effectively in this issue.

Superboy

Kudos to my pal Dugan Trodglen for pointing out to me the Jeff Lemire/Sweet Tooth vibe to the layout of Superboy 1. Lemire is writing the series, while Pier Gallo is the artist, but I’m fairly certain Lemire is suggesting some layout advice, judging by the opening sequence and later the one page with six panels wrapping around a circular shot of the Kent homestead. As Lemire notes in his recent piece for DC Source: “I saw how all of the themes that I loved exploring in Essex County and The Nobody could also be present in Superboy…small town life, community , family…it was all there. Only this time instead of filtering it through the metaphor of hockey, I could filter it through the metaphor of the super hero.” I really hope this is the start of a long, successful run for Lemire and Gallo.

A few weeks back I got into a Twitter discussion with my pal Johnny Bacardi’s about The Doom Patrol and he made me want to reconsider the series yet again with this week’s issue 16. What brought me back was Bacardi’s admiration for Keith Giffen’s ability to effectively mesh all the incarnations of the Doom Patrol into this current ongoing. I just had to snag this latest issue after it opened with Ambush Bug doing an informercial featuring Danny the Brick (yes, the one remaining bit of Grant Morrison and Brendan McCarthy’s Danny the Street character). When I was younger, I never got Giffen’s art. There was an ugliness to it that warded me off. Now as I’ve gotten older, I realized my younger self expected all great art to have the clean antispetic nature of John Byrne. Fortunately now I can properly appreciate the gritty nature of Giffen’s art–particularly when inked by Al Milgrom. I agree with Bacardi’s tweet from this week: “Just read DOOM PATROL 16- another excellent issue. Giffen and Milgrom get their Kirby on. I wish more people bought that book.”

Just to shock long-time readers of this column, I actually enjoyed Morrison’s Batman & Robin 16. The nonchalant banter between Batman(s) and Robin, as well as Alfred’s line (acknowledging the return of Wayne): “I presume we have permission to cheer.” provided for some great comedy (as did Gordon’s return to the police station).

If you want to see how the hot dogs get made, or at least good metaphorical hot dog comics be sure to read former Marvel editor Nate Cosby’s tumbler account. He’s doing a multi-part behind the scenes breakdown of comics he helped edit. So far he’s done SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE #5 & AGENTS OF ATLAS #1. The Atlas breakdown is an eye-opener in terms of understanding what a pain in the ass Jeff Parker was to edit. Seriously though, as a longtime Parker fan, it was nice to read about the struggles of getting a series I greatly loved from concept to actual execution. It’s like a DVD commentary track, if read aloud.

Chris Mautner

This week I read Unexplored Worlds, the second collection of pre-Spider-Man comics drawn by Steve Ditko. This handsomely designed volume mainly collects work Ditko did for Charlton, a mix of sci-fi, western and post-code horror stories. Ditko is in fine form here. The early, awkward stuff that graced Vol. 1 is by and large gone; he seems more sure of himself here, full of verve, dramatic angles and odd hand gestures. In some stories, you can see the groundwork being laid down for what was to come in a few years — there’s a sequence where a guy travels to another dimension where you can see the beginnings of Dr. Strange.

But the writing! Oh, gloryoski, it’s absolutely terrible. You can’t even enjoy it on a “so bad it’s good level.” It’s just plain awful. Editor Blake Bell all but admits as much in his introduction, where he notes that the stories don’t come to a conclusion so much as stop. It’s as though the writer suddenly realized “Whoops, I’m on the last page … Ok, the evil alien and the heroic space pilot shake hands and become friends. The end.” That actually happens more than once. In fact, there’s a bunch of sci-fi stories in the middle of the book that are almost identical in their cookie-cutter nature. Two of them actually use a joke about honeymooning at Niagra Falls as a rim-shot close out.

So, ultimately, it’s a book really best enjoyed by serious Ditko/Golden Age fans. All other comers will only be irritated by the material Ditko talents had to work with. No doubt he was too.

Brigid Alverson

Sasameke

Sasameke is a soccer manga with an unusual look: It’s drawn in a stylish, linear style with very little toning and big areas of white. The effect is enhanced by the large-scale format that Yen Press has chosen for it; the big pages show off the are nicely. The setup is standard-issue manga: Hotshot soccer player goes to train in Italy but comes back three years later with his tail between his legs, having failed at the sport. His companions include a sweet girl, a badass girl, and an alpha male who is the star of the soccer team. A nice sense of humor and fluid art keep this from becoming just another shonen manga, and the hefty volume (over 400 pages) should allow plenty of room for the story to develop.

It’s been a very manga week, as I am also reading Tokyopop’s How to Draw Shoujo Manga book. Stop yawning! It’s true that most HTDSM books consist of page after page of character designs — blond schoolgirl, dark-haired schoolgirl, blond hot guy, dark-haired hot guy with glasses — but this was written by the editors at Hakusensha, which publishes several manga magazines, and it’s the most nuts-and-bolts art instruction book I have ever seen. It’s really a manual for people who want to enter Hakusensha’s manga competitions, and it covers everything from the correct paper size for manga submissions to the importance of thumbnailing the whole story before starting to draw it. It’s not big and glossy and colorful, but it’s actually quite a good art instruction book, and an interesting read as well for the fan who wants to know how the sausages are made.

Zom

It’s hardly a secret that the Mindless Ones have a sweaty obsession with Grant Morrison so I won’t dwell on Return of Bruce Wayne or Batman and Robin. They’re not perfect, but for my money they’re the most ambitious superhero books on the racks, in part because they trade in that rarest of fictional commodities: atmosphere. I’m not going to spend too much time on Bullet Proof Coffin either as Sean Witzke covered it on this column a couple of weeks ago, except to say that it’s as much a demented psychological thriller as it is a deconstruction of the genre and an autopsy of fan obsession. I know there are readers who don’t like going to those places, but they’re missing out on some of the best comic art I’ve seen this decade. Matt Seneca talks on his latest podcast about the nineties being a golden age for “acid house” superheroes, a kind of hallucinogenic What If for the genre – Bullet Proof Coffin is a shambling resurrection of that sort of thing, and a very welcome one. I’m also mindful that I should probably keep my mouth shut about Orc Stain, again covered by Sean, a comic that reads like throbbing organic graffiti, and tragically shifts criminally low numbers. If H.R. Geiger had a sense of humour, a passion for colour and wasn’t completely mental he might produce comics like James Stokoe’s. Or maybe not. But your dad’s Fantasy Orc Stain ain’t.

POWR MASTRS

Talking of strangely compelling comics I’ve been rereading C.F’s POWR MASTRS in preparation for the release of the third volume later this month. It’s a mesmerising series that contrary to what you might have heard isn’t a) drawn by an exceptionally talented 5-year-old, or b) merely an exercise in dry formalism. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with formalism per se, formal experimentation for its own sake has it’s pleasures, but to describe POWR MASTRS in that way would be inaccurate, although it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that it isn’t very arty comics. In my view the book’s minimalist, naïve style isn’t designed to distance the reader from the work in an effort to foreground the craft, but to impart a vibrant creative energy similar to the sort of thing Frank Miller was going for in the Dark Knight Strikes Again. C.F. goes much further than Miller, the entire story has a dreamlike quality, albeit one grounded by internal logic. Ostensibly a questing narrative stocked with genre archetypes, POWR MASTRS is if anything further away from traditional Sci-Fi than Orc Stain is from Middle Earth. C.F. is committed to that most traditional of genre concerns, world building, but the world he’s building has much more in common with the surreal fantasy landscapes of our childhood imaginations than it does with most contemporary genre efforts. Which isn’t to say that the comic is childish, far from it, just that it’s more directly in touch with the weird qualities of unexpurgated imagination, and consequently all the more fascinating and haunting because of it.

In other books, I’m really enjoying Thor: The Mighty Avenger. You wouldn’t know it to look at the blog, but like most of my fellow Mindless Ones I tend to find superhero comics rather dull. Not because I’m not a fan of the genre, quite the opposite, it’s precisely because I have such high hopes for superhero books that most titles leave me cold. On the face of it then it might seem strange that I would champion a comic which some might be tempted to describe as conventional, but there’s an uncommon elegance to writer Roger Langridge and artist Chris Samnee’s efforts that I find immersive in the slack jawed sense of the word. The book works a gentle magic: the art is accurate and beautiful without being ostentatious, and the writing deftly combines familiar tropes from outside the genre – fish out of water, odd couple, love triangle, journey home – with more traditional superhero genre fair. The aforementioned gentleness permeates the refreshingly continuity light plot, which while focussed and economical lacks the brow beating insistence of most contemporary entertainments, so much so that the quiet wonder of Samnee’s rainbow bridge seems curiously emblematic of the whole venture: magical, meandering and understated.

From "Director of the Board," by Steve Ditko

The excellent blog Ditko Comics routinely unearths some rarely seen gems from Steve Ditko’s immense bibliography, and one last week really caught my eye.

Inside the pages of Charlton Comics’ Strange Suspense Stories #33 from 1957, Steve Ditko wrote and illustrated a five-page highly charged boardroom drama called “Director of the Board.” As the site owner describes it, it’s a “strange little story about an executive turning down a job applicant but encouraging him with the tale of a dream he had as a struggling young job-seeker, dreaming about taking the initiative and risks to rise in the company through any number of unethical actions.” Read on here for the full story.

Strange Suspense

Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1
Edited by Blake Bell
Fantagraphics Books, 240 pages, $39.99

I am in no way an expert where Steve Ditko is concerned. My knowledge of him and his work is pretty much equal to that of the average comics fan my age (co-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, also did Creeper and Shade, big Ayn Rand fan, has a thing for drawing hands). So I don’t feel I can offer some kind of quantitative analysis about Strange Suspense, a new compendium of pre-Code Ditko stories, and how it compares to his most famous and even current work.

I do, however, have a few thought that sprang to mind while reading the book that I thought worth sharing …

1) Maybe Wertham had a point. Most of the stories in Suspense are horror stories. There’s the occasional romance or gangster tale, but most fall into the Tales From the Crypt knockoffs. And boy are they gruesome. I don’t mean that they’re scary or unnerving. No, I mean they’re gross and way over the top in their portrayal of brutality and blood. In one story a conniving husband gets his forehead branded with a hot iron and then has his limbs chewed off by rats, so that we get to watch him crawl around on his bloody stumps for a few pages before he finally expires. In another, an ugly variation on Cinderella, the three stepsisters (who all turn out to be vampires) have their legs ripped off and displayed for the mother waring glass slippers. No wonder parents and other figures of authority went apeshit over this stuff. I’d have never let any of these comics within 12 county miles of my children.

2) I have a renewed appreciation for Al Feldstein. Which brings me to my next point. As frustrated as I get over the text-heavy nature of the EC horror line and their over-reliance on O. Henryesque “surprise twist endings,” it’s Faulkner compared to some of the material laid out here. I don’t know who wrote these tales — I’m hoping it wasn’t Ditko himself — but there’s little of the intelligence, wit or downright storytelling logic that EC editor and writer Feldstein displayed in his books. (Mind you: I’m talking about the dialogue and plotting here, not Ditko’s art, which I’ll discuss in a second.)

3) The monsters look cool. Ditko obviously from the get-go had a knack for caricature. His monsters and villains are far more visually interesting than his “normal” people. No wonder he gravitated towards the horror and supernatural stuff. And no wonder that Stan Lee later tapped him for all those monster stories Marvel did before the Fantastic Four came into being.

4) This is definitely early Ditko. The stories in Suspense feel clumsy and rushed at times, and show little of the grace and panache that decorated comics like Spider-Man and Shade: The Changing Man. The Mad-like “Car Show” shows that parody was never Ditko’s strong suit. “Paper Romance” feels as stiff as cardboard. Passers-by who glance at the title and think “Oh boy, Ditko” should be well warned that this these pages clearly codify a “portrait of the artist as a young man,” with all the stumbling about that such a label suggests.

5) That being said … the work contained in this hardcover (and kudos to Fantagraphics on the excellent and handsome production work) constantly reminds you of just how stellar an artist Ditko would prove to be. Occasional duds aside, a number of rather indelible and striking images remain, particularily on the covers, which, after all, had to be dramatic enough to get the kids to part with their dimes. You can sense though the artist’s restlessness and eagerness to grab the reader’s attention. The book is filled with tight close-ups of panicked faces, skewed points of view, lots of worm’s and bird’s eye angles, dramatic lighting,expressionist montages and more. By the end of the book, you can see the artist start to take form over the apprentice. Stories like “Bridegroom, Come Back” feature an elegant use of page and panel composition that would help thousands thrill to the adventures of a certain wall-crawler. For historians, both amateur and otherwise, who thrill to the prospect of seeing that maturity take place, this is the book for you.

Gekiga Jaws (one and two)

A Trip to the Moon and Dream Girl by Jim Davis

Hide ‘n’ Seek by John Stanley

White Indian by Angelo Torres

Still more Cobean

Wednesday’s Child and The King of the Ring

The Spirit by Lou Fine

Johnny Quick by Mort Meskin

Black Fury by Steve Ditko

Old MacDonald Duck by Jack Hannah

Mysta of the Moon

Disney and Marvel

Retailing | Could Disney’s planned $4-billion purchase of Marvel signal the return comic books to the mass market? “I see the Marvel acquisition by Disney helping to expand the genre of comic books and remove it from the dusty basement of the world,” says direct-market retailer Creswell. “I do see Disney stepping in and offering retailers outside of the direct comic book market incentives for selling Marvel products,” Creswell said. [Reuters]

Publishing | Long-struggling e-book site Wowio reportedly has informed publishers that payments for the second quarter of 2008 will be made by Nov. 15. Wowio, which was purchased last year by Platinum Studios, was sold in July to a holding company formed by Platinum President and COO Brian Altounian. [Bleeding Cool]

Long Beach Comic Con

Conventions | The inaugural Long Beach Comic Con kicks off today at the Long Beach Convention Center in California. Guests include Berkeley Breathed, Stan Lee, Tim Bradstreet, J. Scott Campbell, Amanda Conner, Geoff Johns, Dave Johnson, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Scott Lobdell, Dustin Nguyen, Darick Robertson and Mark Waid. The Long Beach Post and Gazettes Town-News have previews. [Long Beach Comic Con]

Events | 24-Hour Comics Day will be held Saturday at locations around the world. [24-Hour Comics Day]

Conventions | Heidi MacDonald posts her Small Press Expo round-up/wrap-up/photo parade. [The Beat]

Yotsuba&!, Vol. 6

Sales charts | Well, huh. The collection of Kevin Smith and Walter Flanagan’s Batman: Cacophany debuts as the No. 1 hardcover on The New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List. Elsewhere on the chart, Yen Press should be pleased that the sixth volume Yotsuba&! — the first new installment under the publisher’s banner — premieres as the No. 3 manga. [The New York Times]

Publishing | Diamond Book Distributors has signed an exclusive agreement with Tokyopop to distribute the publisher’s titles in the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning next year. PanMacmillan has handled distribution since 2006. [ICv2.com]

Publishing | SLG Publishing has reopened submissions after a two-month hiatus. [SLG Publishing]

Publishing | Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics Books answers five questions about the publisher’s output and the comics market. [Trouble With Comics]

Diesel Sweeties

Webcomics | I’m not sure this article delivers on its title — “What Newspaper Cartoonists Can Learn from Web Comics” — but it does spotlight how creators Richard Stevens and Howard Taylor make a living through their webcomics. [MediaShift, via Fleen]

Comic strips | Cartoonist Karen Montague-Reyes reflects on the unsuccessful newspaper syndication of her strip Clear Blue Water: “It got to the point where I dreaded getting my checks in the mail because it would tell you what papers dropped you or added you (the syndicate never told me beforehand).  I made my husband open them; I couldn’t even face them.  He’d just say, ‘Holding steady.’ Or, ‘Two drops this month.’ People would ask me what papers I was in and I didn’t know anymore because I chose not to know.” [Clear Blue Water, via The Daily Cartoonist]

Creators | Garry Trudeau discusses Doonesbury, deadlines, and the decline of newspapers: “Short-term, we’re probably OK. What’s not commonly known is that most print newspapers are getting by. It’s just the big, debt-loaded metros that are sinking fast. There will probably be enough paper clients to keep me going for the foreseeable future. I feel extraordinarily fortunate that I’ve been given the long run I have — if newspapers vanish tomorrow, I’ll have no grounds for complaint.” [News-Record]

Brother Voodoo, by Jim Rugg

Creators | Sean T. Collins talks with Jim Rugg about his Brother Voodoo story for Marvel’s Strange Tales anthology miniseries: “I like the weird ’70s Marvel characters like Brother Voodoo, Satanna, Morbius, ROM, Power Man and Iron Fist. Those characters are so transparently a marketing grab, yet the creators seem earnest in their effort and execution, for the most part. There’s a sense of anything might happen. You can almost see the duct tape holding these concepts together. They’re the second generation of Marvel characters, and they are so different than the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee model. It’s almost Marvel’s awkward teenage rebellion period.” [Marvel.com]

Creators | Abby Denson chats about her new graphic novel Dolltopia. [New York Daily News]

Creators | Steve Ditko: “Spider-Man’s Forgotten Father.” [Examiner]

Pop culture | Tor.com has launched its first “Steampunk Month.” [Tor.com]

So what is ignored/evaded is that there is a long, ongoing “status quo” in Marvel Comics company’s very existence and publishing that needs to be “broken”, “smashed together”.

There are periodic operational changes in the company’s “status quo” with different editors. But while these new editors create different personal styles, they all maintain the same editorial “status quo”, that same anti-hero premise.

Flash: Rebirth

• Really Ken? EW’s Ken Tucker declares Flash: Rebirth and Secret Warriors the “two best superhero comics written right now”:

For my money (at the comic shop most Wednesdays), both Bendis and Hickman write the best dialogue in comics. (Also check out the banter Bendis bats out in the equally-good Dark Avengers.) So there you have it, writers at their peaks: Johns a master of humanizing comics mythology, and Bendis and Hickman creators of conversation that seems real no matter how “super” the action is.

• Better late than never: The cast of Metabunker (Henry Sørensen, T. Thorhauge & Matthias Wivel) offer their picks for the best comics of 2008

• Rankin vs. Azzarello. The Oregonian’s Steve Duin looks at the two opening entries in Vertigo’s new crime line and does not care for the latter: “You can not over-state the smug stupidity of this graphic novel.”

• Tim O’Neil has some harsh things to say about Flash: Rebirth and Barry Allen in general:

Discount the first fifty or so issues of the great Silver Age run – as era-defining for DC’s Silver Age as Fantastic Four was for Marvel. After that, into the late sixties and seventies and eighties, who talks about Barry Allen? Seriously, in all my years on this blogosphere I have never – ever – seen anyone willing to wax rhapsodic about any issue of Flash produced in the twenty years between 1965 and 1985. I’m sure they’re out there, somewhere – but just look, for comparisons sake, how much keyboard time is spent lionizing relatively bad comics such as the Mod-era Wonder Woman and Bob Haney’s The Brave and the Bold. If there was anything interesting to be found in those twenty years of continuous publication, I have never seen anyone on the internet mention them, which is about as telling a barometer of fan interest as any I can imagine. If people cared, people would talk about Barry Allen – but no one does. Ever.

• Greg McElhatton reads Koren Shadmi’s In the Flesh and find “a little Shadmi goes a long way, and having his stories all collected together doesn’t do him any favors.”

• Brian Heater declares Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York, “one of Bell’s strongest work and a friendly reminder of why she has become on of the most celebrated storytellers to come out of the mini-comics scene in recent years.”

• The Onion’s Keith Phipps uses the awful Howard the Duck movie as a springboard to talk about the Steve Gerber/Gene Colan source material.

• Finally, at the risk of seeming like a shill, I should point out that Noah Berlatsky is blogging about every single issue of William Moulton Marston’s run on Wonder Woman. Here’s issue one. Here’s issue two.

“My Spider-Man/Dr Strange story is now at the half way point. It’s a three issue mini-series that will appear under the Marvel Knights banner, probably in the early summer. It’s been great fun drawing and writing the series, and Marvel seem to love what I’m creating so far. I’m coloring the book with Steve Cook, who designed the SWIMINI PURPOSE book for me a few years ago.

If Fantagraphics can’t have Dr. Strange, as Eric Reynolds suggested in August, this is equally as awesome.

McCarthy says he can’t show any art from the book yet, but he does share this piece, proclaiming he’s from the lineage of Ditko:

by Brendan McCarthy