GeniusboyFiremelon

The Annotated Chemical Box UPDATED

2012-01-07T01:27:00.008-05:00

I recently appeared as a guest on The Chemical Box podcast to talk about comics and movies and writing about comics and not having time to watch movies.

[NOTE: THE PODCAST IS NOW POSTED! GO, LISTEN!]

These are the Top 10 Annotations for the episode.

1. The Golden Age spaceman comics of Basil Wolverton are good.

2. This guy doesn't like Rob Liefeld much, but he's dead wrong and you can tell just by looking at the sweet art he uses as examples. Also: Rob Liefeld drew THIS kernel of greatness.

3. Alec likes Savage Dragon comics a lot, especially this one but also all these ones.

4. Joey likes Suburbia, mostly because it was written by this guy, but also because it was directed by this guy, and stars this other guy. Tim agrees.

5. Mark Bagley used to be good. Oh wait, no he didn't.

6. We didn't talk about this movie at all.

7. Abhay didn't like this comic very much, and we wondered why the men-in-suits-shuffling-paperwork genre was popular with podcasters with bad taste.

8. Michael Deforge wrote and drew this just so Joey would have something to do for a month.

9. This is definitely NOT the best comic ever. But THIS may be!

10. There exists a demarcation in the world. On the one side, those who think they like movies but are actually quite ignorant and possibly evil. On the other side, those who actually like movies and have immense knowledge and insight. You can tell you're talking to someone in the former category because they continue to insist that this is a good movie, even though everyone else in the world knows they are wrong. I mean, yeesh!

Splash Page Holiday Special! Go. Listen.

2011-12-23T10:25:00.003-05:00

Chad Nevett and I return -- one last time (unless we decide to do it again someday) -- to the podcast that made our fame and fortune around the world.

THE SPLASH PAGE PODCAST!

In this special, LONG, holiday edition, we talk about our Best of 2011 lists, where the layer of escapism actually appears in our comics reading, and why this is such a banner year for Joe Casey comics.

Chad makes some kind of appeal on behalf of Jonathan Hickman's "Ultimates" comics, but while he was talking about that stuff, I was thinking about how pretty Javier Opena's work on "Uncanny X-Force" has been.

Anyway, we're glad to be back, even if it's just for this special edition, so go on over there and spend two-and-a-half hours of your life listening to two guys talk about something they love. And comics too!

Reader's Guide to the New DC Universe

2011-09-18T20:41:00.004-04:00

I've been working on this all summer, over at Tor.com, but I've neglected to mention it here on the blog. Please forgive me for the oversight.

Basically, it's my 800 words on each and every new DC title launching in September, based on the interviews and solicitations and the previous work of the creative team(s). All 52 of them. Plus an overview about the whole thing and the digital distribution angle. It's the most comprehensive look at the DC relaunch that you're likely to see, because I was crazy enough to write about all of these series with so many damned words.

I'll probably end up being right about 85% of it all, too. Enjoy!

READ: TOR.COM READER'S GUIDE TO THE NEW DC UNIVERSE, by me!

Blackhawk at Tor.com

2011-06-17T07:32:00.004-04:00

Tor asked me to write a piece on the history of Quality and DC's "Blackhawk" series, since it is one of the lesser-known properties to join the relaunch this fall.

I mean, we all know who Blackhawk is, but the average Tor.com reader might not be familiar with some of the character's greatest hits, and it's not like Absolute Blackhawk is on the reprint schedule anytime soon. Though I would buy it, of course, assuming it reprinted either (a) the swinging 60's superhero years, (b) the Evanier/Spiegle run, or (c) Chaykin's three-parter, which was THE FIRST HOWARD CHAYKIN COMIC I EVER READ AND THAT WOULD PROBABLY EXPLAIN A LOT ABOUT ME.

Anyway, my history of Blackhawk turned into a piece about Blackhawk throughout the ages and, oh yeah, Will Eisner is racist. I didn't intend to go there, but as I read the DC Archives edition of the first "Blackhawk" stories, I just couldn't give Eisner a pass. He sometimes gets a pass for Ebony White, but Ebony White PLUS Chop-Chop? A pattern of foul racism derailed my "Blackhawk" retrospective a bit.

Still, I marched on. Go READ: Such a Man is Blackhawk.

The DC Relaunch and Reasonable Readers of all Types

2011-06-09T06:39:00.003-04:00

I wrote this week's piece for Tor.com mostly because Ron Marz and a random fan were debating how much to freak out about DC's relaunch. The fan (or fans -- maybe it was more than one) seemed to think everything in the past would cease to exist, and all his DC comics would be meaningless now. Marz didn't agree. At all.

Of course, now we know that Marz is part of the DC relaunch (which I'm happy about, because he's a good guy and a hard-working writer), but I don't think that's really all that significant in the debate. What's important is...the two fundamentally different way people read comics. And that's what I wrote about.

Go, read: "What Does it Matter? Stories and Comic Book Readers" at Tor.com.

BLASTOFF: I Write for Tor.com Now

2011-06-04T10:31:00.004-04:00

Hey, you know Tor Books, the imprint (now) of Macmillan, and publisher of authors such as Larry Niven, George R. R. Martin, and Robert Jordan?

I am now the weekly comics blogger for their website.

If you haven't been following the goings-on at Tor.com, and I'll be honest and admit that I only started checking it out when they contacted me about working for them, then you probably don't realize that they have a Nebula award-winning original fiction component AND a vigorous blog, covering a wide variety of geek culture topics like books and movies and, yes, comic books. I didn't realize any of this until they reached out to me, but, man, it's a damn good site, and I'm not just saying that just because they wanted to hire me.

(Would I have taken the gig if it was a crappy site? Maybe, maybe not. But I sure wouldn't have bragged about how good the site was!)

So go check out Tor.com, and read my first weekly post (which actually debuted a few days ago, but I'm just getting around to telling you about it): Xombi -- Monster Hunters and Mysteries.

I wrote it a week before the DC relaunch announcement, and I have no idea how "Xombi" will fare in the 52-ongoings version of the DCU, but enjoy that comic while it lasts!

And between Tor.com, Comic Book Resources, and Marvel.com, (and this very blog you are now reading!), I will be all over the internet this summer, with or without a podcast.

DC Speculation: The Play-at-Home Version

2011-05-31T22:19:00.004-04:00

I've been hearing that DC will relaunch all of it's comics with new #1 issues and slightly modified (streamlined) continuity after "Flashpoint" for a few months now, and DC has confirmed the rumors today.

The day-and-date digital announcement is actually more surprising, and it's a bold move. I imagine the conference room in which that decision was made featured an oversized dry erase board with the words "day and date digital" on one side and a gigantic question mark on the other side.

At least it's SOMETHING. Though, unless the digital prices drop substantially, here's what I imagine will happen. Readers with iPads will slowly start to wean themselves off weekly comic shop visits, and then they will realize there's no real hurry to buy comics day-and-date on their mobile devices, since there's no way any of the digital content will be out of stock, so they'll wait for a sale. Then they'll lose interest. Then realize that life without comics isn't that big of a deal. Maybe they'll read Chris Ware hardcovers once a year, and that will be enough.

But until that happens, DC will kick of FIFTY TWO new monthly series in September. The "monthly" designation doesn't necessarily mean ongoing, I'll point out. I'm guessing maybe 30 firm ongoing series and 22 miniseries. 52 ongoing series would be waaay more than they have now, in the DCU. It could happen, though. We'll see.

Here are some of my gut feelings about what we might see (and even though I have some contact with some of these creators, I have not yet asked them about any of this -- it's pure guesswork on my part):

Scott Snyder writing two big ongoings -- probably a Superman book (to complement the supposed Morrison Superman series) and the Batman main title.
Jeff Lemire writing a "Smallville" series and maybe...Nightwing and the Outsiders.
Paul Cornell writing Flash.
Sterling Gates writing two ongoings. I'm thinking the Kid Flash series announced a few years back might finally show up, in a new form. Maybe he'll be on the Multi-Colored Lanterns series. Or, no. He'll write the Cyborg solo ongoing.
James Robinson will surely do more than just Hawkman. Don't be surprised to see him on an Atom series as well. Or, if the New Gods are in play, something from that pile of toys.
Judd Winick will write a Red Hood ongoing.
I think they must have courted Brian Azzarello for something. I wouldn't be shocked to see an Azz-written Suicide Squad comic. That would be a good fit.
I also expect a resurrection of some other classic titles, with new versions of the characters. Like the Secret Society of Super-Villains, perhaps, based more on the JLU interpretation. Or World's Finest, with a youngish Superman and Batman teaming up.

Overall, I'm looking forward to the relaunches. Besides the current DCU work of Morrison, Snyder, and Lemire, and an occasional Johns or Cornell book, the DC Universe is stale and uninspiring right now. I just hope the relaunched series pair some superior artists with the good writers. The thought of, say, Eddy Barrows on a Grant Morrison comic doesn't encourage enthusiasm.

BACK! And then some. Plus: Sol Star at the Movies

2011-05-30T23:21:00.004-04:00

Okay, after my way-too-long hiatus, I'm back to begin a stint of semi-regular blogging. I don't want to promise daily posts, or even weekly posts, but you can be sure that I will keep this blog relatively up-to-date on my comings and goings, since I have a new writing gig that I'll be promoting pretty darn soon, along with whatever else keeps me busy over the summer.

(And, sadly, no, I didn't keep up with the sketching, and that's just not something I can devote myself to these days, when the paychecks are coming in for my writing, not my drawing.)

I put a little picture of John Hawkes here to remind myself that I'm only halfway through "Winter's Bone" and I really have no interest in watching the rest of it, even though everyone tells me it's a great film. Does it get better after the first hour? I mean, sure, it looks good, but it's a hell of a lot less interesting than, say, David Gordon Green's "Undertow," which is kind of a similar white trash on-the-run tragedy, and that movie didn't get anywhere near the accolades as "Winter's Bone." Maybe I'll watch the rest of it before I judge it. That would probably be smart.

And, hey, did you see that I write for Marvel.com now, too? I turned a Walt Simonson phone conversation into two Marvel.com posts and two "When Words Collide" columns, mostly because it was a pretty fascinating conversation, but also because Walt Simonson had a LOT to say. Looks like I might be doing some other things for Marvel.com over the summer months.

I'm sort of caught up at work too. I mean, I'll never really be caught up. But I can see over the pile of papers on my desk, now. I'm not buried like I was.

Also, it turns out that we canceled The Splash Page podcast. Well, I suppose I canceled it, by saying, "I'm done." And Chad didn't want to carry on without me, though I would listen to him and Sean Witzke talk every week if I could. But it's probably for the best that they aren't doing that, so I'll have an extra three or four hours a week to get things done.

Um, how has everyone been?

A Double Secret Hiatus

2011-02-02T21:33:00.001-05:00

Okay, the weekly Sketchblog has been awesome, but I just haven't been able to keep up with it at all between my work, my family, and my recent stupid illness. It may also have helped if I didn't have to go outside and snowblow my driveway twice a day for the past 35 days.

So, yes, this blog is on hiatus until Spring. Until I can figure out how to make time to do more things in 24 hours.

Sketchblog Week 7: Keith Giffen

2011-01-03T00:05:00.003-05:00

Each week, I try to carve out time to spend one hour a day sketching, building up a set of skills that should, we all hope, show improvement over a one-year period. Sometimes I'll draw by copying comic book artists, sometimes I'll draw from life, sometime I'll draw from how-to books, and other times, I'll just sketch with whatever is at hand. This is WEEK SEVEN of a 52 week experiment to see how well I can learn how to draw.

I could draw like mid-to-late 1980's Keith Giffen all day, every day. I love this stuff. This week's study comes from "Dr. Fate," a four-issue miniseries published in 1987, with art and covers by Keith Giffen.

I can't help wondering how much this comic influenced Todd McFarlane. Look at the way Giffen draws capes here. Look at the teeth in the upper left (and this miniseries is all about gods of order and chaos and lots and lots of giant teeth -- Kent Nelson even has a giant-toothed mouth in his belly for most of the story). This comic debuted during the same month as McFarlane's first issue of "Detective Comics," and about a year before Venom made his first appearance. It doesn't seem like McFarlane could have seen this comic before he started drawing Batman's cape with a zillion folds, shooting out in an expressionistic way, but the similarities are obvious. Maybe Giffen drew something else cape-heavy before this (though I can't think of what), or maybe they were inspired by Michael Golden's capes. I don't know.

What I do know is that Giffen's work in this Dr. Fate comic is some of my favorite art in any comic ever, ever, ever. It was a joy to sketch some studies of this stuff.

I had the most success once I just went straight into inks after roughing out some basic shapes. That's how I sketched the most detailed image on the top left: big, blocky shapes, then all rendering with pen and brush and sharpie. I love the look of it, and though the purpose of this year-long experiment isn't to fall in love with my own drawings but to learn and improve, I can't help but see how much the attention to detail -- and the layering of blacks and whites -- adds a sense of depth to what is an incredibly odd, almost abstract, but beautiful composition.

Yeah, man, I could wallow in this Keith Giffen glory forever. And I didn't even look at any Ambush Bug comics this week.

NEXT WEEK: I'm open to suggestions! Someone scratchy, maybe. Cowan? Sienkiewicz?

Sketchblog Week 6: Nothin' Doin'

2010-12-27T23:55:00.003-05:00

Yeah, I didn't sketch at all last week. Well, that's not exactly true. I did draw out some character sketches for a top-secret project Television's Ryan Callahan and I will be working on in 2011. But I didn't draw any Keith Giffen sketches like I wanted to.

Too much Christmasing! I'll be back next week with some studies of Giffen!

Sketchblog Weeks 4-5: Alex Raymond

2010-12-20T00:05:00.002-05:00

I bought a new sketchbook last week, not because I had filled up the old one, but because the old one was an unwieldy, sewn-binding, cloth-covered thing that wouldn't stay open very well for sketching and scanning.

The new one is wire-bound and smaller, easier to carry around and use and scan.

I did draw a few "Flash Gordon" sketches in the old book, but now I can't find it. You'd think a giant blue book would be easy to find, but I guess it's not. Especially when you have thousands of books it could be mixed in with.

So here are some images from the new book. Mostly inked with a practically dried-out brush pen. The two on the top from studies of the Checker "Flash Gordon" reprints, and the bottom two from the second volume of IDW's "Rip Kirby" hardcover series.

What struck me about trying to draw from the "Flash Gordon" strips was how hard it was to see what Alex Raymond was actually doing, through the years of degraded quality and then the imperfections of the Checker reprints. (It's like a color xerox of a color xerox, of a shoddy printing job to begin with.) Plus, I'm sure Raymond worked much, MUCH larger than print size, and the panels in "Flash Gordon" are tiny.

Another thing that struck me is that though my memory of Raymond's Flash work is that he had classical figures and imaginative scenery, when I was looking at the architectural designs I was surprised to see that his fantasy backdrops were almost Dr. Seussian. His backdrops had an organic strangeness that contrasted with the almost-Renaissance figure work. I know "cartoonish" can be a derogatory term, but in this case, Raymond's cartoonish quality helped to create a sense of wonder in his alien landscapes.

Contrast that with the bleak photorealism of "Rip Kirby," and it's as if there are two Alex Raymonds, each with a major impact on the look of comic books (and comic strips, of course). Obviously, Dave Sim has spent the better part of two years exploring the Alex Raymond photoreal style in his own study of the genre (or artistic mode), but I'm sure much more can be said about how much Raymond's "Rip Kirby" style impacted the look of late Silver Age and Bronze Age comics. That's not what I'm interested in doing here -- I'm interested in drawing and seeing what comes out of my pencil and inky tools -- but someone could tackle that topic, I'm sure. Maybe someone like you.

Me, I'm content to sketch away and leave such heady discussions for other parts of my life. Like writing Monday columns for CBR. Or arguing with Ron Marz and Dean Trippe on Twitter.

NEXT WEEK: Speaking of xeroxes of xeroxes (and after reading last month's "Doom Patrol" and "The Outsiders," and talking to Joe Casey about unpublished 1980s comics) I'm thinking that I might want to dive into some Keith Giffen. Maybe mimic some of the different phases of his career and see what it looks like filtered through my pencil. It just may be a very Ambush Bug Christmas!

Sketchblog Week 4: Alex Raymond Will Wait

2010-12-13T01:07:00.004-05:00

Splash Page Podcast: Special Guest Joe Casey

2010-12-11T01:35:00.003-05:00

This week's special episode of The Splash Page podcast features Chad Nevett and I talking about comics and Doc Savage and other amazing topics. And, oh yeah, Joe Casey joins us for the entire three hours.

He tells us about "Butcher Baker" and a million other things, like what it was like to work during the golden age of Wildstorm, how comics criticism is often better than actual comics, and the secret work of Bob Fleming and Keith Giffen.

Listen! Splash Page Podcast Episode 38 (The Joe Casey Episode)

Sketchblog Week 3: Tezuka

2010-12-06T00:05:00.001-05:00

Each week, I spend one hour a day sketching, building up a set of skills that should, we all hope, show improvement over a one-year period. Sometimes I'll draw by copying comic book artists, sometimes I'll draw from life, sometime I'll draw from how-to books, and other times, I'll just sketch with whatever is at hand. This is WEEK THREE of a 52 week experiment to see how well I can learn how to draw.

Boy, I do not have an affinity for this stuff at all. I figured I would stretch myself and play around with some manga images this week, and who better to look at then Osamu Tezuka? I have had a love/not-hate-but-indifference relationship with his work over the years, with a fondness for his stranger comics but a real lack of interest in his more popular work (like "Astro Boy," which I can appreciate as a cultural institution, and as the basis for "Pluto," but I really can't read for any sustained period without completely spacing out).

But Dash Shaw's recent "Comics Comics" post on the Tezuka art book, and the documentary included, in particular, reminded me that I need to give Tezuka some more focused attention, and the documentary is a fascinating look at the grind of producing comics, even when you are a master of the form. (I picked up the book and the documentary immediately after reading Shaw's post, because I have no impulse control when it comes to awesomeness.) I also just happened to watch the brief CBR TV interview with Keith Giffen, who draws nothing like Tezuka (though I need to do a WEEK OF GIFFEN during this year of Sketchblogging, I think), and he refers to mainstream comics as "volume work," which is just about the most accurate and concise description I've ever heard for the kind of stuff pumped out by Marvel and DC. That doesn't mean that quality can't exist, but the name of the game is volume, it's about producing, feeding the fans, and that's really the point.

So, yeah, back to Tezuka. Even though I have the Tezuka art book and a variety of other work by him ("Black Jack" and, especially, "Dororo" as my two favorites, probably), I decided to focus my sketching this week on the third Dark Horse volume of "Astro Boy," just to see what happened when I took Tezuka's tiny panels and blew them up in sketch form.

I couldn't get Astro Boy right, ever. Not even close. He's just a few basic shapes, but he looked like a demented teddy bear every time I tried to draw him. And I was fascinated by the weird abstractions Tezuka would use as he cranked out these pages (if his work schedule in the documentary is to be believed). That sketch on the top left is based on a panel from the final story in the book, and that's really how Tezuka drew that guy's right arm and leg. Just these humps, these blobs of shape. His version looks more jaunty and has more movement than mine, because, as I said, I can't help but do demented versions of Tezuka. I have no sense of the fluidity of his line -- or I can't come close to replicating it -- and my ability to draw "cute" is completely nonexistent. For now at least.

(I was going back through the Gary Panter Picturebox massive book o' goodness last week, because it's amazing, and Panter talks about how he could never get away from the cuteness of his style, and he eventually just figured out that he had to embrace it. I clearly do not have an affinity for cute in my own sketchbook, even though I like it when I see it.)

Maybe I'll come back to this kind of proto-manga approach at the end of the one year experiment and see if I can pull off Tezuka's seemingly simple style with any kind of accuracy. Clearly, I have a lot of work to do.

NEXT WEEK: I don't know. Maybe I should take Guglie's advice and dig into some Alex Raymond. Guglie knows what he's talking about!

Sketchblog Week 2: Moebius

2010-11-29T06:00:00.002-05:00

Each week, I spend one hour a day sketching, building up a set of skills that should, we all hope, show improvement over a one-year period. Sometimes I'll draw by copying comic book artists, sometimes I'll draw from life, sometime I'll draw from how-to books, and other times, I'll just sketch with whatever is at hand. This is WEEK TWO of a 52 week experiment to see how well I can learn how to draw.

I'll admit that I have already broken the "one hour a day" sketching regime rule, though this week it was because of the holiday and family responsibilities, and as selfish as I can be, I can't really say, "hey kids, I'm going to ignore you during this Thanksgiving vacation because I have to copy some French guy's pictures of people wearing funny hats."

I did spend a few nights with the Moebius books cracked open in front of me and that pen and ink flowing, but it was not even close to a full hour each night.

For most of these sketches, I skipped the pencil stage entirely. Except for Arzach on the top left, I drew all these directly with a fine point marker. I wanted to focus more on texture than structure this week, and I found this week's sketches to be an interesting contrast to the bombastic anatomical contortions of the John Buscema Marvel figures.

You may be wondering why I went with Moebius this week, and I suppose I am too. "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" was an obvious, and sentimental, first step on this experiment of mine, but to go with Moebius second? It's not like Moebius is my favorite artist, or even an artist I necessarily had planned to emulate in the long run. It might have made more sense, from a building-from-the-ground-up approach, to go to Eisner next, and do something with his how-to books. Or even to go with Kirby, which is really at the core of the lessons Buscema was demonstrating. Or to go with someone contemporary, as a contrast to the classic superhero style. Quitely, perhaps.

Yet Moebius seemed like the perfect contrast. And though he's not my favorite artists, I do like his work a whole heck of a lot. With Moebius, particularly the work I chose to focus on, which comes from the Epic reprints from the 1980s (though I avoided Blueberry, mostly because that seemed more conventionally illustrative and less Moebius's signature style), you get the anti-Buscema in a lot of ways. His figures are reservedly posed, compared to the dynamic anatomy of Buscema. Moebius noodles around with detail and cross-hatching and stippling, while Buscema is all bold lines and masses of shadow. Moebius also goes clear line with some of his comics, and the clear line style is the antithesis of the curved, pencil-thick holding lines of a Spider-Man in action.

And, ultimately, I just wanted to try something new. Texture over form. Ink more than pencil. And see what came out.

NEXT WEEK: With America and Europe already represented, dare I make my way to manga territory so soon?

Sketchblog Week 1: The Marvel Way

2010-11-22T06:00:00.004-05:00

Sketchblog Week 0: It Begins

2010-11-15T20:08:00.006-05:00

I may one day return this blog to the comic book and pop culture commentary it once was, but since I spend my extra-curricular hours writing columns for CBR and recording Splash Page podcasts, I don't feel compelled to write about any of that stuff here. Basically, if you're a regular old-timey Geniusboy Firemelon blog reader, you probably know what I've been writing about or talking about elsewhere. If not, go check out my other projects and my Twitter feed (and honestly, a lot of what I once wrote about here, I mention, in much more succinct form, over there).

So what I've decided to do, for the next year, is to use this sort-of-dormant blog to track my progress through an experiment that I once mentioned on a Splash Page podcast a few months back. Part of my quitting-the-CBR-Review-Team was about (a) enjoying comics as a reader, but also (b) creating comics of my own. I have a few writing projects in the works, but I also have another plan: to teach myself how to draw.

I want to unlearn everything I know about drawing and relearn it. I want to spend at least one hour a day, every day, drawing. I used to draw all the time, but then, as I got busier, and my teaching and comics criticism career went into overdrive, I just stopped. I haven't really drawn anything -- other than margin doodles when I'm taking notes in a meeting -- in a couple of years. And I love to draw. Or I used to, anyway.

So I'll document this relearning how to draw experiment, as I fill up sketchbooks and improve my drawing skills week-by-week. I have a plan. I will undergo a grueling comic book training regimen. I'll draw from life, from how-to books, even from the lessons in the Famous Artists School. I'll copy pages from my favorite comics, and I'll get advice from my artist friends. Maybe I won't get any better, but I suspect I will, and I'd like to share what happens along the way.

This first little sample, above, is a one-page comic I drew for my daughter today, when she asked me to draw her something, after seeing me crack open an old sketchbook last used in 2002, well before she was born. I'm posting it here because that's what I'm starting with -- it's a quick little comic, but it shows the basic lack of skill I'm working with. This is the starting point. In one year I will redraw this same one-page story, and it will, hopefully, look like something worth reading.

Each week I'll post a collection of sketches and drawings based on my week of study and practice, and I'll provide some commentary about what I'm learning along the way. And because I'm going to start at the beginning, and unlearn what I know in order to relearn -- or really learn -- how to draw comics, I'll start with the first book, and the first artist, that I ever tried to learn from. John Buscema, and "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way." Join me in a week, to see if I learned anything from studying the work of the late Professor Buscema. By the end of this experiment, a year from now, I suspect I'll end up pretty darn far away from "The Marvel Way," so I figure this is a good place to start.

This is about me exploring all aspects of comic book art, from the inside out, with a critical mind, but it's also about returning to the tactile experience of the creative act. I'll be copying and reflecting, drawing and redrawing, but at the end, I should be ready to start making marks for myself. Making comics, from the ground up.

Influence Map: This is the Truth

2010-09-12T16:57:00.004-04:00

The odds of me contributing to an internet meme are slim, but this "Influence Map" thing just looks so nice and pretty when it's done, I couldn't resist. And this map shall guide me for the rest of my days. Click to explore.

I had a ton more influences to add to this, but I pared it down to the essentials. It was tough, but it needed to be done. And this map is me.

Baltimore Comic Con 2010

2010-08-26T01:44:00.003-04:00

I will be at the Baltimore Comic Con this weekend, doing what it is that I do.

For your convenience, I have circled, in red, where I will be during the convention, so you can find me more easily:

Hellblazer Blogathon Today

2010-07-17T21:19:00.003-04:00

Chad Nevett is spending 24 hours writing about "Hellblazer" during his blogathon to raise money for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. As I type this, he's halfway through, and if you want to follow along (or see what you missed) go over to GraphiContent right this very minute!

I've only read about 1/3 of the stuff Chad's writing about. I read almost all of the Delano issues, and then I ended up abandoning the series in the middle of the Garth Ennis run, which is widely considered the high-mark on the series. I just didn't care about Constantine at the time, I suppose, but I should go back and reread all of that stuff, and pick up the Ennis issues I missed.

I do like the bits of the Azzarello run that I've read -- which is basically "Hard Time" -- and I bought that for the Corben art. I said it on Chad's blog and I'll say it again here: Richard Corben is the best artist to ever work on "Hellblazer," and he's had some seriously stiff competition. But he's Richard Corben. And he got to draw a Constantine-in-prison comic.

Blogathon! Go read it. And support the effort.

Rockin' the Rockwell: Got Ink Workshop

2010-07-16T14:27:00.005-04:00

A great week of comics with a great group of students. We learned about the history of comics, the artistic stylings of Skottie Young, the act of superhero creation, and how to structure a story. And More!

Super-awesome stuff, all around. Here are some of the participants, with some samples of their work from today's character creation session (photographed in reverse, Photo Booth-style):

FLASHBACK: Callahan and Wolk on Bendis's "New Avengers"

2010-07-15T21:06:00.001-04:00

Here's a flashback for the faithful readers. This was a conversation between Douglas Wolk and me, scheduled to hit the old Sequart website just as Douglas's "Reading Comics" was making its debut in 2007. We focus on a single issue of Bendis's "New Avengers," and without the context of what will end up happening in "Secret Invasion" and beyond, we speculate and ponder. It's time capusule fun for the whole family!

A GeniusboyFiremelon Flashback:

Douglas Wolk: Thanks for inviting me to this little back-and-forth. I should mention for the benefit of our readers, before we get started, that I suggested we should discuss this week's issue of New Avengers--before either of us had actually seen it. And I have no idea if you've been reading New Avengers anyway; I'm curious about your reaction either way.

But--oh, why pretend? Topic A is, of course, the pair of assertions you made in your CBR interview about your Grant Morrison book that have raised the blogosphere's hackles. Here's the first one, for readers who haven't encountered it yet, in a discussion of some of Morrison's intertextual tricks and thematic schema:

I always get really frustrated with people who say "I don't get it" or "it just doesn't make any sense." I just think that people who say that are just bad readers. They just don't know how to read.

And here's the second:

I listened to an interview on Comic Geek Speak with Matt Fraction. It was about how "Casanova" has all this subtext going on but it's also just a really cool spy story, but one of the Comic Geek Speak guys was just talking about how he couldn't read "Casanova;" that he just didn't understand it. He gave it four issues and it was just over his head. And there was this whole debate about whether or not comics have a deeper meaning; whether something like "Casanova" has a deeper meaning, and this guy who hosted the Comic Geek Speak show really believes that there is no deeper meaning. He just says "no."

"No" to "Casanova" in particular?

To any comic books. His defense was, "Well, whenever you guys play up the deeper meaning of anything, I just don't think that stuff's there. I think you're reading too much into it." That's a criticism I hear a lot. "You're reading too much into it. Those meanings aren't there." As a teacher, I face that with students studying literature as well. First of all, I don't understand that philosophy. But my counter argument is, it is there, because I've just shown you it being there. And then their retort is always, "That's not what the author intended." I don't care what the author intended, that's what the effect of the writing is. It doesn't matter if the author intended it if that's what's there.

I'd like to tackle the second one first--and this will eventually get around to New Avengers, I swear. What you're talking about here is what lit-crit types over the last 60 years or so--especially the New Critics, as they had the good sense to call themselves--have usually referred to as "the intentional fallacy." (Only sort of related to the Pathetic Fallacy from Fables.) The short version, in the words of W.K. Wimsatt, is that the "poem" (for which read "work") is "detached from the author at birth"; that once it's in the world, it means whatever it means.

Now, this is a useful critical tactic--and since my first important literature instructor was Helen Vendler, who's more or less the last of the New Critics (Jim Starlin miniseries coming soon!), it's the tradition in which I learned to think about art. There are also some useful modified versions of "it doesn't matter what the author had in mind," including "what the author had in mind matters, but not necessarily more than any other interpretation," and "to the extent that the author doesn't communicate what she had in mind, she's failed." (Which speaks to your first hackle-raiser, I think; unilaterally making readers the "bad" ones in the equation suggests that authors are infallible.) I mean, it is interesting what authors (and other creators) intend; that's why people like to read afterwords and liner notes and such. If something's interesting to me, then it matters to me, Q.E.D.

But, remember, I'm the guy who's got the tattoo of the brick from "Krazy Kat": I think it's a fact of life that the message sent is not necessarily the message received. (And that, right there, is a great example of subtext in comics. The brick Ignatz throws at Krazy is a brick for sure, but it's not just a brick.)

One of my favorite rationales for text-interpretation, actually (New Avengers comin' soon! Not kidding!), is at the beginning of Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin, a fat and fascinating book of extremely close readings of Bob Dylan's lyrics. Dylan may not have intended to build "Not Dark Yet" out of the same set of words as Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," or to paraphrase lines from Mother Goose again and again in the course of his Under the Red Sky album, Ricks says, but the fact is that he did; it's in there, and one of Dylan's enormous strengths as an artist is the fact that he's incredibly well-read and can process all the stuff he's read, consciously or unconsciously, into lyrics that evoke a thousand other things. He's a great transformer, which is one of the most important things that artists do.

This brings us, at last, to the SPOILERY realm of New Avengers (not New Avengers/Transformers, I'm afraid). There's one big logical flaw in this issue, which is that the team concludes on the basis of Elektra's corpse being a Skrull that there's a full-scale Skrull invasion on. And we know from all the "extratextual" stuff going on--on Newsarama and Wizard Universe and so forth--that there actually is a Skrull "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scenario happening. (That also makes the "thought balloon" trick in Mighty Avengers make a lot of sense; the only way we can know particular characters aren't Skrulls is if we can read their minds, which through the magic of comics we can!) Still, it would've been just as reasonable for the team to conclude that a Skrull had replaced the dead Elektra half an hour before. That would invalidate this whole story's premise, of course...

For that matter, the "we can't go public about the alien invasion because everyone would think it was just a hoax" business doesn't hold water in the Marvel universe, where everybody knows about the Skrulls already and there's an alien ship shaped like a big rock hovering over Manhattan in half the comics published this month. But what Bendis is particularly good at is character work, and there's a lot of it this time. I love Luke and Danny not talking to each other, Peter dealing with his terror by wisecracking and acting on his usual responsibility trip ("I did what I could!"--why having a few pounds of something sticky on the front of the plane would be helpful isn't clear, but hey), Wolverine pointing the finger at himself along with everyone else.

My biggest reservation about this storyline is that it depends on a deep, deep knowledge of Marvel continuity to make sense, despite all the expository dialogue in the first half of this issue. (I am fairly sure that the chatter about Jessica not breastfeeding the Nameless Skrull-Baby is somehow related to the Skrulls/milk calculus in this issue from 1983, which is not exactly playing fair, even though I think it was referenced in this miniseries a mere twelve years ago.) Here's a question for you, though: should it be a baseline assumption that a New Avengers reader should be willing to do some research on the Internet to make sense of the plot of #32--not the subtext, but literally what the characters are talking about? If not, does that make her a "bad reader"?

And here's another question on "bad reading": I kind of don't get what's happening on the last few pages of this issue. From the first-page recap, I get that the EMP from Mighty Avengers knocks out the power on the jet; Dr. Strange casts some kind of a spell that... you know, does a thing. Or doesn't. After the plane crashes (and all the non-invulnerable types appear to be knocked out but conveniently not permanently injured or dead), we see: a pair of reaction shots of Spider-Woman (green eyes? does that mean she's Skrully? she's always had green eyes, I think!), Wolverine eyelessly growling at her and quickly getting beaten in a fight, and then walking off with Skrullectra's corpse, evidently to bring it to Tony. But this issue, and especially the final scene, is absolutely packed with reaction shots, and I have no idea if they're supposed to mean something, and if so what. (Bendis likes to use wordless sequences to communicate stuff with lots of emotional import, and it's easy for even very good artists to screw those up if their drawn "actors" don't get the message across. Remember Black Bolt's impenetrable gestures at the end of the Illuminati special? I loved the parody of that sequence in the Mini-Marvels story in World War Hulk Prologue...)

The upshot is that there's been some kind of breakdown between Bendis's authorial intention and my reading of this issue's final scene. Does that make me a bad reader, Bendis a bad writer, Yu a bad artist, or some combination of those?

My reply (which I'll translate into html before posting--after giving you a chance to respond) (oh, and by the way, like most Wednesday addicts, I pretty much read everything, so yeah, I'm familiar with Bendis and New Avengers):

Timothy Callahan: That's a lot to think about, but before I get into my reading of New Avengers #32 (which I do, in fact, read regularly, along with almost everything on the comic shop wall), I'll address my grand (and potentially controversial) claims about "bad readers." As a once-upon-a-time Philosophy major (before turning to the MUCH more profitable English academic track), I have a tendency to posit a philosophical stance and see how substantial the counter argument becomes. It's a technique as old as Socrates. Remember the time he debated Euthyphro about whether or not piety should be based on a literal reading of the myths? That was the good old days. Socrates, by the way, was against a literal interpretation, while Euthyphro was in favor of it. Ah, the old metaphorical vs. literal debate, whatever happened to that? Oh, wait, that's what WE'RE doing. (By the way, if Socrates had grown up in the 1980s, like I did, he would have known that the best way to settle this age-old debate is by having a breakdance battle, so what do you say, Douglas?)

If I were to elaborate on my definition of what makes a bad reader, I would say a bad reader meets at least one of the following conditions:

(1) He or she is unable or unwilling to understand the literal meaning of the words or images in a text.
(2) He or she is unable or unwilling to understand the connections between words and images in a text.
(3) He or she is unable or unwilling to recognize figurative language in a text.
(4) He or she is unable or unwilling to recognize irony in a text.

I base these conditions on the way language is acquired and the development of the skill of reading. Children, learning to read more proficiently throughout school, get better at these four conditions of readership as they become more experienced (try using irony with pre-schoolers!), and the same thing is true for second language learners (try listening to a joke told in Spanish if you've never made it past Spanish II in high school--you probably won't "get it.")

Given a complete text (whether it be a poem, novel, film, or comic book), a good reader should be able to be able to meet at least the four conditions given above. The problem rests in the case of incomplete texts, and that's what New Avengers #32 is. And it's not just incomplete because it's the thirty-second chapter of an episodic, open-ended series. It's an incomplete text because it's part of the much-larger Marvel Universe story, which has been going on for decades.

A quick note here: In his book, Reading Comics, Douglas refers to the Marvel and DC comics as part of two "grand corporate narratives." The implication being that even if you read every Spider-Man comic ever published, it's still an incomplete text, because it's just one chapter in the larger, Grand Marvel Narrative. Douglas doesn't say in his book that incomplete texts (like a given writer's run on title) cannot be read and analyzed, but I'm saying that it's problematic because an incomplete text relies far more heavily on outside knowledge for basic understanding than a complete text would.

So, let's look closely at New Avengers #32 (and your questions about the issue) with the knowledge that we're dealing with one tiny part of one tiny chapter in the Grand Marvel Narrative that has been in existence since before we were born.

Like you, I have significant problems interpreting the conclusion of the story, but, as if we're reading a fragment of Hamlet, Act II (why is that kid so bitchy?!?), we're dealing with incomplete information. I presume Spider-Woman's motivation will become clear in a future issue, but for now, we're left with the information on the page, and here's what makes interpretation so difficult:

Leinil Yu, as stylish as he is, doesn't convey literal information very clearly. Take page one: The inset image of Peter Parker saying "So no one is going to talk?" doesn't look much like other versions of Peter Parker presented in the Grand Marvel Narrative, and because we only see a slight portion of his costume in an earlier panel, it's difficult to discern, even if you are familiar with Spider-Man, who this character is supposed to be. To test this theory, I asked my wife, who knows her super-heroes but doesn't necessarily read comic books very often, to read the first few pages of New Avengers #32, and tell me who says, "So no one is going to talk?" She said: I don't know. I don't recognize him. When I pointed out that it was Peter Parker, she said, "it doesn't look like him." It's no big deal to figure out who's talking if you are a regular New Avengers reader, but this is just the first example of this incomplete text relying on significant outside knowledge (that Spider-Man has a new costume, that Yu draws people with a lot of lines on their face, etc).

Yu also violates some basic rules of visual storytelling. Take page 3, for example. The transition from panel 5 to panel 6 breaks the 180 degree rule. The "camera" jumps from in front of Spider-Girl to behind her, making the conversation unnecessarily disorienting. It doesn't help the sake of clarity that, in the very next panel, the emphasis of the panel and the context of the previous panels, indicates that Spider-Woman is saying the lines which apparently (given the later context) belong to Wolverine. And that's just one page of awkward storytelling.

So, to recap: we're dealing with an incomplete text with unclear visual storytelling, which RELIES on visual storytelling in the last few pages of the issue to convey important information. You are definitely NOT a bad reader if you're confused by New Avengers #32.

Thus, we are left to interpret meaning. And, once again, I don't care what Bendis "intended" to convey in the sequence at the end. Although I might be curious to know what he had it mind so I could compare it to the sequence as executed, I firmly believe that the intention is irrelevant if it's not conveyed in the text itself. Bendis might clarify some of the things muddled by poor storytelling choices, but if he said "Spider-Woman is revealed to be a Skrull agent at the end," I would reply, "no, she isn't!" It's unclear. She might, in fact, turn out to be a Skrull. Sure. But at the end of New Avengers #32, all we're left with is a very suspicious Spider-Woman who steals the other Skrull body and lays a breakdance-battle-caliber smackdown on the apparently rabid Wolverine.

I think Yu's storytelling is excessively unclear and Bendis's reliance on prior knowledge, assumptions, and Yu's artwork makes for a bit of a mess. But because, once again, it's an incomplete text, I wouldn't say Bendis is a bad writer because of this one issue. Nor would I say Yu is a bad artist, even with his panel-to-panel continuity problems in this particular issue. Because it's a fragment. The stuff that's unclear will most likely become clear given enough time (and enough mega-crossover issues, which will almost certainly cause their own type of unclarity).

As another thought, the Grand Marvel Narrative relies on extensive contextual knowledge, and this issue is no exception, but it also relies on that knowledge to be imperfect. For example, some of the very same characters on the New Avengers team have been, in past issues of other comics, replaced by Skrulls at one time or another. Iron Fist once turned out to be the Super-Skrull in disguise! None of this information is referred to in New Avengers #32, and the characters behave as if this whole any-of-us-might-be-a-skrull routine is something new and dangerous.

In many ways, to be an ideal reader of a Marvel comic book is to be totally aware of every comic book story ever, while simultaneously being able to forget about any individual issue that doesn't correspond to the current direction of the Grand Marvel Narrative. What a weird way to tell a story!

To be a good reader, however, you just have to be willing to read and put forth (at least in your mind) an interpretation of the text, with the knowledge that it's an incomplete part of a much larger whole. You might even recognize the paranoia-in-an-enclosed-space allusion to The Thing from Another World or the subtext of mistructs which stems from Spider-Woman's history of duplicity. But what a good reader should never do is say, "I don't get it" and leave it at that.

Douglas Wolk: Interesting take on the "bad readers" issue, but I'd like to rise to your bait, and counter it by inverting your conditions. (And, of course, you know as well as I do how loaded "bad" is. But we're stuck with it for the purposes of this discussion; let's just imagine however many sets of quotation marks you like around it.) I do think the way you're framing the issue puts the entire burden of understanding a text on the reader, and as you note, New Avengers #32 is kind of a mess as texts go. So let's think for a moment about how those conditions might shift all the blame to the creator. A bad cartoonist, let's say:

1) Is unable to create words or images that can be understood easily with their intended literal meaning. (Yes, I think intention is important here. "Unwilling" doesn't apply, though: I can imagine cartoonists who _deliberately_ obscure their work's literal meaning--the first example that jumps into my head is Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor Von Eeden's Thriller...)
2) Is unable to create comprehensible connections between words and images in a text.
3) Is unable to make potentially figurative language in a text function in a figurative way.
...And I don't know how to make the "irony" term fit this one. I considered something about being unable to create texts that resonate beyond their literal meaning, but I think I'd rather award extra credit for that ability than take points away for lacking it...

As for the incompleteness of New Avengers #32, though--well, there are different kinds of incompleteness. The "incomplete" exception you suggest gives any Marvel or DC superhero comic an out for both bad readers and bad cartoonists, since no author or reader can have read the entire Grand Marvel Narrative or Grand DC Narrative. (Insert Mark Waid joke here.)

Yes, this issue of New Avengers isn't a complete story. But it's a complete commercial unit of a piece of entertainment--I paid my $2.99, and that's what I got--and so I think it has the obligation to be comprehensible. I don't ask it to be dramatically complete, I'm just asking it to make sense. That's not a complaint of not making sense in the way that people complained that Seven Soldiers #1 didn't make sense (it did, actually--every bit of it was there for a reason, and I will personally explain any sequence of it to anyone who posts a bit that confused them and explains what didn't make sense to them about it). But I am as close to an ideal reader as Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Yu could reasonably ask for right now, and with all the good will I can muster and a fairly strong working knowledge of Marvel continuity (including every issue of both New Avengers and Mighty Avengers), I simply couldn't parse significant chunks of this story.

Now, it's true that Yu isn't so hot at making a lot of the characters look like themselves (pg. 4, panel 1: the dialogue is the only cue I had that that was Hawkeye), but I didn't have a problem with the page 3, panels 5-6 transition--the "camera" is actually only swinging 120 degrees, and we get two good cues as to what's going one: we see Spider-Woman turning her head, and the dialogue is consistent with everyone's speech patterns. (Peter's just made one wisecrack, and he follows Spider-Woman's jab with another one; Wolverine is continuing his monologue from two panels earlier, with the "and if any of that is true" bit.) I also think it's possible to break the 180-degree rule in comics and get away with it if you do it in a smart enough way--there's actually an example of it that I reproduced in the Jaime Hernandez chapter of "Reading Comics," where Hernandez handles it so smoothly that it took me years to notice that it was a little raspberry at the 180-degree principle. (You can see it here.)

The bit of visual storytelling in that scene that raised my eyebrows, actually, is page 4, panel 4. Echo's got a mean expression on her face, but where exactly is she sitting in the plane? From going back and looking at pg. 2, it looks like she's sitting opposite Spider-Woman, to the right of Dr. Strange; nobody's sitting in the seat opposite Wolverine, to the right of Spider-Man. But Echo is deaf--she reads lips. Can she see Wolverine's face? And noticing that reminded me of some earlier issue of New Avengers--I don't remember which, and I'm a few thousand miles away from my longboxes--in which Echo-as-Ronin responds immediately to something Iron Man says, despite the fact that she can't see his face. Is that a clue? Or is it just sloppiness? If you're planting clues, you cannot afford sloppiness.

In any case, I can't agree that Bendis's intention is irrelevant, because whatever Bendis's intention was here is going to become Marvel canon; it'll be the extratextual information we'll need to understand future stories. We're going to find out what it was, one way or another; where it really should have been made clear, though, was here.

Timothy Callahan: I do place the onus of interpretation fully on the shoulders of the reader. A text has no responsibility to "be" anything. It doesn't have to be entertaining, or suspenseful, or funny, or even clear. It simply has to exist. Then it's up to the reader to figure it out. But, I think the reader should be expected to read the complete work before making a critical interpretation (as it's unfair to the work, for example, to interpret the entire text on the basis of a paragraph alone). As you point out, since nobody has read the entire Grand Marvel Narrative (although Peter Sanderson would probably be more likely to have done so than Mark Waid), no reader can ever make a fully-informed interpretation of any Marvel comic book, which absolutely lets the creators off the hook.

So, let's revise that standard of "complete work," for the sake of the practicality. Let's say the "complete work," in the case of a serialized Marvel comic, is a sequence of issues in which a main plot goes through a beginning, middle, and end. That is a much more reasonable expectation for the reader, but it still leaves us with an incomplete text in New Avengers #32, and thus, an incomplete interpretation. So I still have problems with jumping to conclusions about narrative issues which might be resolved more clearly when read in a larger, more complete context.

You say that a comic book which you purchased for $2.99 has "the obligation to be comprehensible." I don't know that it does. Why do you expect it to be comprehensible simply because you paid for it? I go back to my earlier point: a text has no responsibility to "be" anything.

But Tim, you would surely say, this is a piece of commercial entertainment, and thus the reader should be able to expect entertainment, and unclear, nonsensical storytelling is not entertaining in the case of New Avengers #32. I'm not sure I agree that it's not entertaining because it's unclear, but I do agree that it is quite unclear (with the reservation, once again, that it might be more clear in a slightly larger context).

So let's jump right out and assume it's unclear, but not intentionally. For the sake of argument, we'll say that Bendis and Yu are attempting to be a bit subtle (in the sense that this isn't a Silver Age comic book in which every line ends with an exclaimation point. She's a Skrull!!! I'm a Skrull, too!!! etc.), but overall they are trying to give us the information we need to fully understand the story.

I agree with you that they have failed by those standards, even though I can still comprehend the basic plot of the story which runs something like this: they are all paranoid that the rest of them are Skrulls, they crash, Spider-Woman zaps Wolverine and walks off with Elektra-Skrull's body.

It's not a non-sensical series of words and images, so it doesn't fail in that most basic regard, but it fails to fully justify the Spider-Woman turn-of-events at the end. It doesn't just ignore the "why is she doing this question?" which is a fair mystery to leave hanging, but it ignores the "what exactly is she doing and what do her facial expressions mean on that page when Wolverine growls at her?"

The most obvious interpretation, that she is a Skrull herself, is based on the visual emphasis on her green eyes on that page. Jessica Jones's baby had green eyes in the previous issue, and that was supposed to be a clue of some sort, though that was just as vague in its implication. But did Spider-Woman, as you point out, NOT have green eyes before? isn't that her natural eye color? (It is her eye color throughout the issue.) And if it's not her natural eye color, how is a reader, even a pretty-close-to-ideal reader like you or me supposed to know the green eye thing is important?

So that is an example of sloppy storytelling, especially considering how supposedly dramatic the final few pages seemed to be. It felt like watching the climax of a whodunit, except all of a sudden the audio went out.

The other thing that complicates interpretation of New Avengers #32 is that Bendis has a history, as you point out, of sloppiness with regard to bits of potential storytelling information. If you continually have to play the game of "is it a clue or a mistake?" then your interpretation is always going to be suspect (at least in your own mind). Then again, if you COMPLETELY ignore authorial intent: "was it a clue or a mistake? It doesn't matter!," then you can just interpret the text incorporating even the mistakes into a theory of meaning. It's actually exactly what Marvel used to encourage with the No-Prize. Interpret our mistakes as canon and win an imaginary prize!

I don't mind giving Bendis the freedom to be vague at the end of the issue, personally, as long as the Spider-Woman sequence is explained in the next issue. So, in that case, I require something from a text. I guess I don't require a complete story that makes sense just because I paid $2.99, but I require something from a text if it is part of a larger, unfinished narrative: I require it to complete the story eventually. Perhaps even that is an inappropriate expectation in the Grand Marvel Narrative (which will never, presumably, end).

So?

2010-07-13T21:27:00.001-04:00

You want updates?

I can't believe I've abandoned this blog for so long. I can't believe I've abandoned you.

I will return, shortly.

When Words Collide: Three Digressions on GØDLAND

2010-05-19T16:44:00.002-04:00

When Joe Casey asked me to provide the critical essay for inclusion in the second "GØDLAND Celestial Edition," I said, "hell, yes!" And I had plenty of ideas of how I would approach a retrospective/analysis of the series. Then I reread Tom Spurgeon's essay in the first volume, and he basically said most of the things I was going to say.

Then I reread issues #13-24 with a notebook by my side and my critical faculties at their most incisive and started making mad lists of whatever I noticed or felt worthy of comment in an essay. I ended up with a long list and random bits of genius dialogue and imagery that I just had to make note of. I mixed it all up in my brain and felt that the fancy hardcover collection deserved more than just a few thoughts, so I came up with my "Twelve Digressions on GØDLAND," one digression for each issue, even though they aren't tied to any strict chronology.

You'll have to buy the Celestial Edition Vol. 2 to get all twelve (and who wouldn't want the Celestial Edition, anyway? It's gonna be gorgeous), but I'm giving away the first three for free in this week's "When Words Collide" column. And maybe if you're nice and you get my blog up to 1,000 visitors per day, or get me to 666 Twitter followers by the end of the month, I'll post some more for your reading enjoyment. It's all about the give and take. Until then, think GØDLAND!

READ: Three Digressions on GØDLAND!

Absolute Absolutes

2010-05-18T06:00:00.001-04:00

I wouldn't call "Green Lantern: Rebirth" my favorite comic book series. Not even close. I liked it well enough at the time of its release, and I thought Geoff Johns did a surprisingly good job making some kind of sense out of the Parallax ridiculousness and bringing Hal Jordan back in a way that erased the sins of the "Emerald Dawn"/Gerard Jones era without ignoring them.

But I somehow now own it in three different formats: single issues, hardcover collection, and now the Absolute edition. I bought the single issues during release, and caught up with all the Johns Lantern HCs during the "Sinestro Corps War" when my local shop had a 50% off sale, and I felt the need to own the comics in a format that I could throw at slow moving squirrels or something. And I am incapable of resisting an Absolute edition. It's by far my favorite format to read comics in. Oversized and bulky. Absolutes are immersive experiences.

Turns out, that just like so many other Absolute editions, I like "Green Lantern: Rebirth" even more reading it at this size. Ethan Van Sciver has never been one of my favorite artists. He strives for Brian Bolland but lacks the structure to hang all that rendering on. Yet at the Absolute size, his work looks great. And it helps that "Green Lantern: Rebirth" is the best work of his career. Far better than "Flash: Iron Heights," which was his previous benchmark, and far, far better than his recent work on "Flash: Rebirth."

So, yes, "Absolute Green Lantern: Rebirth." I am no sorry I own this. Not one bit.

And when I mentioned Absolute editions on Twitter, some folks asked for recommendations, so here are my Top 10 Absolute Editions, in order of ones-I-would-bring-to-a-desert-island-and-read-and-not-burn-in-a-fire-to-keep-me-warm.

#1. Absolute Watchmen. Dave Gibbons at this size is like the Mona Lisa giving you a high-five.

#2. Absolute Dark Night. Frank Miller doesn't just draw comics. He carves them.

#3. Absolute DC The New Frontier. Darwyn Cooke's finely crafted masterpiece of superhero spectacle is a bit cold and lifeless. But in this format, you can crawl around inside its sculptured majesty.

#4. Absolute Promethea. J. H. Williams III. He draws good.

#5. Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths. The story is pretty terrible to actually read, but George Perez's art has never looked better.

#6. Absolute Ronin. Euro-manga explosion, inside Frank Miller's pen and ink.

#7. Absolute Sandman. All four volumes. Why not?

#8. Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Both volumes. Out-of-print, but classic. And Kev O'Neilly.

#9. Absolute Death. Chris Bachalo is an amazing artist, and even if this book unnecessarily reprints issues from Absolute Sandman (seriously, who buys this and not Sandman?), it's still, you know, Chris Bachalo.

#10. Absolute JLA/Avengers. Pure eye candy.

I don't own Absolute Planetary or Absolute Authority, but when they're reprinted, I'll be able to build a house with them. Alex Ross in Absolute format? Nah.

Splash Page Podcast 16: Siege, Siege, Sentry, Siege

2010-05-17T06:00:00.000-04:00

This week's Splash Page podcast is mostly about "Siege" and Chad and I mostly disagree about everything. Except how terrible the "Sentry: Fallen Sun" comic was. That's just a fact. Nothing to disagree about there.

What else do we talk about? Pretty much everything that's important in life and/or comics.

And all in a single, extra-long episode this week. Because that's what we're all about. Quality, in a compressed dose of limited quantity.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 16!

Oberon Sexton REVEALED!

2010-05-16T01:00:00.001-04:00

In the build-up to Oberon Sexton's recent reveal in "Batman and Robin," I'm sure many of us tried to see if his name was a clue. We knew Oberon was the king of the faeries and we knew Sexton was a keeper of a churchyard, and Oberon Sexton himself was called the "Gravedigger." But so what? It didn't seem to lead anywhere.

Then Oberon Sexton turned out the be the Joker, which wasn't really that much of a surprise since Morrison had mentioned Joker as a looming presence in the series in interviews. But still, why the name "Oberon Sexton"

Reader Dennis McNicholas e-mailed me and pointed out the possible joke: If Oberon is the name of the king of the faeries, he's also the "fey king." Oberon Sexton is "fey king" (or faking) being the Gravedigger. It's a joke, kids!

Iron Man Noir #2 Review

2010-05-15T08:45:00.002-04:00

This is better than you might think, mostly because Scott Snyder knows what he's doing, even if Manuel Garcia's pencils are not well-complemented by the inks and colors on this issue.

Then again, I would probably regularly buy a series about Captain Namor and his grumpy seafaring adventures. "Captain Namor and the Giant Squid from Dimension X"? Yeah, I'd be all over that.

Oh, and everyone dies at the end of this issue. (But not really, I bet.)

Read the REVIEW.

Siege #4 Review

2010-05-14T06:03:00.003-04:00

Yes, it's time for me to get back to linking to all my reviews, so you can keep up with the most accurate and informative and exciting and sometimes typo-laden opinion in comic books.

Today, I'll spotlight my review of "Siege" #4. It's a comic I read. It's basically Marvel's version of the final paragraph of the Gettysburg Address, covered with salsa, and thrown into the end zone into the arms of a free Plaxico Burress.

I Will Buy This Sean Murphy Poster to Help My Children Learn the Alphabet and their Marvel Comics History

2010-05-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

When Words Collide: Joe Casey Says Stuff That's Fascinating

2010-05-12T07:00:00.000-04:00

On Monday, my long-awaited interview with Joe Casey finally hit the internet: I Interview Joe Casey for When Words Collide.

Casey clearly didn't have a great time with his most recent work-for-hire experience at DC, and he even spills a whole lot o' beans about an abandoned "Justice League Academy" series that might have happened in an alternate reality where DC Comics didn't take so long to get a project off the ground.

Oh, and I'm writing the big honkin' essay on "GØDLAND" that will appear in this summer's "GØDLAND Celestial Edition, Vol. 2." I'll provide an except of that piece in next week's column, to tease and inform.

I really want to see a Damian Wayne and Offspring team-up comic. Written by Joe Casey and illustrated by Sean Murphy. I'm sure we'll see that happen a few years from never.

Moore and Morrison and Deconstruction

2010-05-11T11:00:00.002-04:00

I received an interesting, insightful e-mail from Jason Faris a couple of weeks ago. According to Jason, he's an "autodidact, comic book enthusiast, energetic fictional advocate, moral philosopher and budding comic book author; currently posing as a mild mannered 33 year old father of twin seven year old boys and working as a cubicle jockey in the Midwest." Well, that sounds pretty good (except the cubicle jockey part, since I keep picturing a tiny little man surrounded by large gray walls covered with memos and photos of cats).

Jason had some things to say about Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, and after I responded positively to his e-mail, he revised and expanded his comments a bit, and so I present it to you now. Jason Faris's thoughts on Moore/Morrison Deconstruction, with my commentary afterward:

It is not to shocking or original to suggest that within the last 30 plus years no writer has had as great an impact on the comic book medium as have Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. These two giants have, in fact, much more in common. Both are self educated, both come from working class but liberal families, both grew up in the British Isles during a period of economic down turn, both are self professed magicians, and both of their work is shrouded in the esoteric with a suggestion of the subversive. How is it then that their work is rarely complimentary and at times directly in opposition? Both are consummate craftsman, both intellectually stimulating and brilliantly playful, but with a very different energy and affect on the reader. Both are innovators of unbridled imagination but have a completely different impact on other writers or would be imitators. How is it that these two men with so much in common could have bodies of work that are so strikingly different. I think the starkest and most telling difference between them is in their approach to the iconic figure and conversely how they use these figures to address or reflect realism.

The iconic figure is something/anything that is instantly recognizable. There are two very basic ways to interact with these figures. The first is to instill them within the bounds and boundaries of realism, to imagine them human. The second is to honor their inherent unreality as something 'other', to mythologize them.

The so called "deconstruction" of the superhero probably didn't originate with Moore. In fact a number of English books featured significantly darker heroes and anti-heroes. That period in English culture was socio-economically predisposed to mistrusting brightly clad primary color optimism. A cultural situation that America found some resonance with in the 80's, most notably with works like the Watchmen. In the long run this was essential for the medium to be elevated literarily. To show what could be done with the form. Additionally, reimagining these pure iconic figures as containing the frailties of the eras and insecurities that spawned them gives us access to them, updates them for a more cynical and more modern audience. It seems in retrospect like a no brainer, inevitable. Moore's real strength and the true evidence of his incomparable genius lie in his remarkable ability to craft a story and imbue a modern literary psychology within the medium of sequential art. Moore’s playfulness resides in this craft.

This deconstruction of iconic literary figures and archetypes is a hall mark of Moore's career; in fact it dominates almost the entirety of his work. The goal of this, one must imagine, being to use these iconic figures as a mirror into ourselves. What would getting the savior who so brilliantly sparks our cultural imagination be like? How small would we seem in his presence?

Morrison is no less interested in "realism" but to him these iconic figures are already "real". To paraphrase Morrison himself, “The real deal offers no emotional weight, no cathartic release, and no dramatic structure”. It is not necessary to "bring these figures down to our level" they are already pure expressions of ourselves, and he respects them as such in and of themselves. The superhero for instance doesn't need a human motivation to do good. The Superhero is simply the figure mankind has invented who always does good. Superman is the greatest invention of man not because he is a perfect expression of man but because he is man’s perfect expression of a savior who “loves everyone and always wins”. This is where Morrison's infamous 'weirdness' comes from. He is dealing with shiny abstract ideals and interacting with them on this mythic level as though their rules are as real as ‘the real deal’. These figures however don’t live in our world accept to the degree that we live in theirs. Neither do they necessarily abide by our rules.

I think asking for faith in the iconic figure in and of itself takes real guts and isn't as obvious a departure in today’s increasingly cynical society. This is why his work pops and crackles with energy. He is looking not to the past for where these ideas came from, or anthropologically into the dark recesses of our cultural psychology (though he does do this at times) so much as using the best tools we have for imagining our own greatest potential, looking to where we are/could be going. This is also why the apocalyptic and/or paradigm shifting event feature so prominently in his work. Morrison is asking where we are going. What is next? Morrison’s playfulness is unchecked (at times recklessly so) as his craft is subservient to the myth. He is always looking for the best ways to manipulate his work to accentuate these alien ideas. Reality is stranger than fiction so a realistic fiction must be very strange indeed.

There is much more one could explore in this exercise. I am not sure of what pragmatic value it would be beyond merely to support what is stated above. I am sure one could explore the Manichean vs Anti-Manichean relationships in their work, their very different views on adaptations and otherwise embracing or refuting the elements of a capitalist and information age. But I think the above is a succinct attempt to outline the root of these relationships.

My first thought is that it goes back to what I've said before about Moore as an ironist and Morrison as an absurdist, but by spinning his thoughts around both writers exporation of "the real," Jason looks at the differences in a fresh way. I think he's basically right when he talks about Moore exploring the psychology of the characters while Morrison explores the iconography, since the characters are, as Morrison has said, "realer than we are" already.

I also think about the development in literature in the ages since industrialization. I'm talking masterpieces of fiction and poetry here, in a simplified, Survey of Lit 101 kind of way. But, basically, as industrialization in Europe grew more oppressive, the poets and artists and novelists turned toward Romanticism, idealizing nature and purity over man-made artifice.

We get that in comics from the Golden Age through the Silver Age, even if the idealized "nature" was the nature of "super-science" more often than not. (But think of how the evils of industrialization have always been at the heart of comic book villainy, from organized crime to brainy scientists to robots.)

In literature, Realism followed Romanticism, so we get Charles Dickens exploring social class and we get Emil Zola exploring the grim working conditions of the common man.

In comics, we get the Bronze Age.

While Modernism and Postmodernism take up the entire 20th century in literary terms, as the disillusionment sets in around WWI, followed by vast influenza outbreaks and tragedy and, in America, the Great Depression. So we get T. S. Eliot and we get Ernest Hemingway and we get James Joyce. All of whom, in their Modernist ways, interested in psychological realism and the fragmentation of society.

That's Alan Moore, circa 1983-1987. Modernism in comics.

Grant Morrison, coming in at the tail end of those years, immediately brings the Postmodernism, and "Animal Man" #5 is the epitome of that, with the metafiction, with the commentary on the Modernist mode.

So I can't help but think that Moore and Morrison compressed 100 years of literary development into about five years of comic books. It took a while for comics to catch up to what literature had been doing for decades, but once they broke away from the simplistic Romanticism, they started catching up really quickly.

Of course, this ignores the influence of the underground comics and even the EC comics and anything else that's not Moore or Morrison. But that's how this game is played.

What do you think?

Splash Page Podcast 15.2: Esteem, Hellboy, Wizard!

2010-05-10T20:45:00.002-04:00

How great is that Richard Corben cover? If you don't think it's one of the greatest images to ever grace a comic book blog and or comic book shop, then you are a person who keeps an address in crazytown, one block over from insanity house.

So. Second Splash Page episode of the week. What do Chad and I talk about? Oh, everything.

Creators who have risen or fallen in our esteem. Hellboy. Longboxes. Wizard magazine. Jack Kirby's Eternals. Very sad X-Men. Iron Fist. And more.

Done in an extra low-key, smooth grove style.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 15.2!

Splash Page Podcast 15.1: Beast Boy, Thor, Gods!

2010-05-10T08:00:00.001-04:00

Brian Cronin was nice enough to devote a few days of "Greatest Stories" month at Comics Should Be Good to Chad and I, mostly based around a long-ago discussion of Warren Ellis vs. Geoff Johns.

And then I went and chose Garfield Logan as my character, and the internet shrugged its shoulders.

We also talk about "I, Zombie" #1 and plenty of other comics this week. And I mess up the intro (twice, basically) but Chad doesn't bother editing it out because he wants to show you how human we are. Or how bad I am at saying words in a row.

Listen: Splash Page Podcast Episode 15.1!

When Words Collide: A Whole Lot O' Content

2010-05-09T21:55:00.003-04:00

Wow. Checking back, I realize that I haven't regularly posted links to my "When Words Collide" column at CBR since June of last year. Sad, really.

I won't bombard you with a list of everything I've written for CBR since then, but here are some of the things I've written in the past few months, in reverse order (the most recent stuff first):

1. Dancing with the Destroyer: How Robert Kirkman reinvigorated a Golden Age DC character and made me weep with joy.

2. Kevin Colden, Man of Mystery, Man of Scandalous Intent: The first mature-readers Zuda series and an interview with the Eisner-nominated man behind it. Yeah, that happened.

3. A Tale of Two (Comic Book) Cities: New York's MoCCA Festival vs. the Boston Comic Con? How many winners can there be? Answer: all of them. (Plus, Jack Kirby Bronze Age goodness.)

4. Frank Miller's New Gods: I linked to this when I posted the Miller story in its entirety, but it's still something worth mentioning because it's (a) Frank Miller, and (b), Jack Kirby, and (c) Darkseid. Three of my favorite flavors.

5. Brendan McCarthy is a God of Spiders and Other Things that are Good: I ruminate on "Spider-Man: Fever" and other important topics. Mostly awesome ones involving drawings by McCarthy.

6. Retcon Reviews: My controversial ironic take-down of such critically-acclaimed masterpieces as "Secret Wars II" and "Ultimatum." Zing! Take that, people who got paid to write bad comics!

7. Jorge Molina's Marvel House (Style) Party: Here's a guy trying to carve a career in mainstream superhero comics. What is that like? I wonder. So I ask.

8. Fifteen Must-Have Collected Editions that Sort of Came Out Already, Mostly: This was basically a way to remind myself what I should buy in recent months, and let people know about the goodness inside. If you're curious, I have since bought six of the books on the list. Guess which ones, and win a prize!

9. Scott Snyder: Who is This Guy? If you don't already know, Scott Snyder is the next big thing, and I've known that for a while. Plus, he's a teacher. And that makes him doubly cool. Not as cool as "American Vampire." But close.

10. Bendis, Bendis, Bendis: I spent a month writing about Bendis, including a list of the "Bendis Top Ten," plus a Three-Part Examination of the Bendis Daredevil: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3!

If you've been reading all the WWC stuff all along, thanks! If not, it looks like you'll have plenty of fun and informative and probably mind-blowing catching up to do.

Splash Page Podcast 14.2: Who, Hickman, Legion Espionage Squad!

2010-05-09T21:44:00.002-04:00

Chad = big fan of "Babylon 5." Yet he hasn't been watching the new "Doctor Who." I'm pretty sure "Doctor Who" > "Babylon 5." No. It's a fact, actually.

So we talk about that. And tons of comics. Tons!

Like ones starring Dash Bad Horse, even if he doesn't appear in the issue. And ones starring Superman, even if barely appears in the issue. And ones starring a whole batch of warriors who operate in secret. And a family of four, with fantastic powers.

And John Romita, Jr.

Listen: Splash Page Podcast Episode 14.2!

Splash Page Podcast 14.1: Freebies, Bendis, Arkhammy!

2010-05-09T21:39:00.003-04:00

Free Comic Book Day happened. We talk about that. Or we talk about how it's going to happen. One or the other.

And we talk about what's going on in "Detective Comics" and "Captain America" and other things of great import. Like "New Avengers" #64. Life-altering conversations, I'm sure.

And more.

Listen: Splash Page Podcast Episode 14.1!

Splash Page Podcast 13.2: Energy, Unity, Style!

2010-05-09T21:32:00.002-04:00

This is where Chad and I develop a four-point mapping system for discussing all comic book writers. I'll expand it into a WWC column or four at some point, but we basically quantify every major writer according to our new, completely made-up, criteria. But it guides our discussion of a few important comics of the week.

Like "Who Won't Wield the Shield" and "Joe the Barbarian" and "DV8" and "The Spirit."

Comics, all!

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 13.2.

Splash Page Podcast 13.1: Babs, Bullets, Better Comics

2010-05-09T21:28:00.002-04:00

This is the episode where we talk about the now-infamous "Brave and the Bold" #33, the one where Batgirl dances. Then gets shot in the spine. No thanks to her superhero pals!

I think I explain my critical approach to comics in this podcast, or say other smart things about smart topics. Or not.

I'm sure it's a good one, though, because it has a discussion of Cliff Chiang, and anything involving that man always comes out great. Unless it's "Brave and the Bold" #33. Totally not his fault.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 13.1!

Splash Page Podcast 12.2: Straczynski, Doc Savage, Chad Writes Comics

2010-05-09T20:48:00.002-04:00

J. Michael Straczynski writing about Superman walking across the country to learn about himself, to learn about America? Yeah, we talk about that.

(I think. We recorded this a while ago, so maybe we talk about something completely different.)

We also probably talk about "Doc Savage" #1 and Chad's history as a writer, including his comics that are so famous, they ended up on a t-shirt.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 12.2!

Update Attack: A Promise to Readers Young and Old

2010-05-09T20:40:00.003-04:00

I've been neglecting the updates here. If you were going by this blog, you'd think Chad and I stopped the Splash Page Podcast at episode 12.1. But we didn't. You'd think my When Words Collide column at CBR ended a few months back. It didn't. You'd think I'd stopped doing reviews. I Haven't.

I just need to get back into the habit of keeping everyone informed AND provide some new content for this blog on a regular basis. So here's what I promise: I will link to every podcast, column, and review I do. And I will provide at least one new-content post a week. Let's get this "Geniusboy Firemelon" train back on its magical, day-glo tracks!

Want to see me tackle something in a post? Give me a topic to talk about in the comments!

Albany Comic-Con this Weekend. Who's Going?

2010-04-22T20:03:00.003-04:00

This Sunday, April 25th, I'll be at the Albany Comic Con (at the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road). The doors open at 10 AM, and you know who else will be there?

Ron Marz. Keith Dallas. Matthew Dow Smith. Terry Austin. Todd Dezago. Joe Staton. Fred Hembeck. Declan Shalvey. And more, I'm sure.

It's a good little show, getting bigger every year. So look for me, and say "hey."

I'm sure I'll run into Alan David Doane in Albany, and did I mention that my review of "Millar & McNiven's Nemesis" #1 recently ran over at his "Trouble with Comics" site? Well, it did. I wrote far more words than I expected and it captures how I feel about that comic and so much of Mark Millar's work.

See you in Albany!

Splash Page Podcast Episode 12.1: Frank Miller! More!

2010-04-19T00:08:00.003-04:00

The booze, the broads, and the bullets -- we talk about them all in this week's Splash Page episode. It's Frank Miller, non-stop. Except for all the time we spend talking about other things. Like our new theme song. And MoCCA. And other things.

Besides that, it's Chad and I talking about Frank Miller and why I don't think the "Wolverine" miniseries is very good. And more!

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 12.1!

The Splash Page Podcast, Episode 11.2: I'm Sorry

2010-04-17T22:50:00.003-04:00

I forgot to post a link to our second podcast from last week, but that's not why I'm sorry.

I'm sorry because I spent more time talking about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight" #34. Or, as I like to call it: Brad Meltzer likes Alan Moore comics, but has really bad taste, example #infinity.

Chad and I also talk about other important things, like bad readers, bad teachers, and good comics.

LISTEN: The Splash Page Podcast Episode 11.2!

Tales of the New Gods: Nativity by Frank Miller

2010-04-12T08:00:00.004-04:00

The subject of this week's WWC column -- Frank Miller's New Gods story from "Orion" #3 (click a page to enlarge):

The Splash Page Podcast, Episode 11.1: Talking, Shielding

2010-04-11T21:30:00.003-04:00

I bumped into some people on my world travels this weekend who said, "hey, I love the podcast you and Chad are doing." Thanks for saying that, people of the world.

And because of your love, we talk about podcasting in this week's meta-podcast which also provides a snapshot of the CBR review staff -- per popular demand -- and a debate about Jonathan Hickman's new "S.H.I.E.L.D." comic. Is it really great, or just great? That seems to be the point of contention.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 11.1!

The Splash Page Solocast: Callahan-Style

2010-04-04T19:12:00.002-04:00

With Chad away on some kind of Easter mission into the hinterlands, we couldn't get together to record the normal Splash Page Podcast this week. (Not that we ever actually get together, but we are both online at the same time, and that counts for something. And we couldn't even do that this weekend.)

So what you get instead is the first Splash Page Solocast, featuring me and me alone. No nonsense about wrestling or Canada or why Geoff Johns is not awesome. Just me talking about what I read last week, what I've been working on, a whole lot of Bendis and Finch "New Avengers" talk, a shout-out to "GØDLAND," and message board idiocy. The usual. But without Chad. And more serious, because it's not like I'm going to try to make jokes on my own behalf and then laugh at myself.

Oh, and I refer to Brendan McCarthy as Peter Milligan at one point, which is pretty dumb.

Other than that, I'm sure it's some kind of brilliant episode. Chad's Solocast will follow on Monday, if all goes according to plan. Then back to normal next week.

LISTEN: The Splash Page Callahan Solocast!

Splash Page Podcast 10.2: Feiffer, Chad's Prejudice!

2010-03-31T20:52:00.001-04:00

This is the episode where I explain Jules Feiffer to Chad, and Chad explains his prejudice toward southern accents to me. Plus, we talk comics, like Scalped and the Incredibles.

And other important stuff. Like what I'm going to submit for my "When Words Collide" column. Except that already happened. It's like a time capsule in an internet audio can.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 10.2!

Splash Page Podcast 10.1: Deadshot, Clooney!

2010-03-29T03:54:00.003-04:00

So just as we start recording, my headset mic starts to sputter and blink and stop working. That was annoying. Luckily I had an external mic and a different set of headphones nearby, so I used those for this week's Splash Page Podcast, but now my audio sounds like I was recording from inside a fish tank.

If you can get past that, I'm sure you'll find a lot to like about this episode, as Chad and I spend most of the time making fun of stuff and barely make any valid points about anything. Well, I mean, I make plenty of valid points, but they are couched in humor and irony. And Chad, I don't know what he's talking about half the time. He hadn't even heard of Jules Feiffer until ten minutes ago.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 10.1!

Splash Page Podcast 9.2: Vampires, Soldiers, Superheroes

2010-03-28T10:38:00.002-04:00

I haven't linked to the Splash Page podcast episode 9.2 yet? I assume you all subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or some magical internet app that I don't understand. So these postings are probably superfluous anyway.

But maybe not. Maybe you check this site every day and await further updates. Those "daily" updates I mockingly reference in the masthead. Ha!

Well, here's the second part of last week's podcast, then. Where we talk about "American Vampire," "Batman," "Battlefields," "Joe the Barbarian" and who knows what else. It's good, though. I assure you.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 9.2!

Splash Page Podcast 9.1: Siegey, Wrestley

2010-03-22T06:00:00.000-04:00

I'll be reviewing "WWE Heroes" for CBR this week, but Chad and I talk about the comic in the Splash Page Podcast and we may or may not have anything nice to say about it.

We also talk "Siege" #3 and some other related stuff.

Plus, I tell Chad about "Amazing Heroes," a magazine that he had never heard of in his life! Crazy, I know.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 9.1!

Splash Page Podcast 8.2: Swampy, Dr. Strangeriffic

2010-03-21T08:04:00.002-04:00

I never posted a link to part two of Episode 8? Well, here you go.

With Episode 9 coming very soon, now's your chance to listen to the Splash Page Podcast ep in which Chad and I sort of wrap up our "Sandman" discussion, talk about other random comics of the week -- like that fancy Dr. Strange black and white book with Frazer Irving in it -- and probably say plenty of other smart stuff.

Like how "The Anatomy Lesson" is the best single issue ever. I think I say that. Because it's true. I don't know. Listen for yourself and judge.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 8.2!

Splash Page Podcast 8.1: Amazonian, Sandmanny.

2010-03-14T22:00:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time, I scored a TON of comics on the cheap from a little store named Amazon.com. I talk about that a little and then Chad Nevett get into our usual comic chit-chat and possibly make fun of a whole bunch of people and or fictional characters.

But we also talk "Sandman," the Neil Gaiman epic that has either fallen out of favor or has become such a venerated classic that no one bothers to actually look at the comics anymore. Its legend, its reputation, has surpassed its actuality. Is it just a goth/emo comic for the 1990s? Is it good-to-middling fantasy? Is it amazing?

Chad and I talk about the first sixteen issues of the series and... well, you'll have to listen to find out.

LISTEN: The Splash Page Podcast Episode 8.1!

Splash Page Podcast Episode 7.2: Demotastic, Marvellous (Boy)

2010-03-13T00:35:00.003-05:00

Chris Bachalo, I love you, but this is the worst costume design you've ever perpetrated on the world of Marvel characters who started out as proto-Ultimate universe characters and later turned into Dark Avengers and now are completely marginalized in the back of poorly-written comics. And if Chris Bachalo didn't design this costume, I forgive him.

This podcast episode is all about Noh Varr, except the parts where we talk about "Demo" and "Ultimate Avengers" and a bunch of other stuff.

Oh, and we answer the cliffhanger from Ep. 7.1 Sort of.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcase Episode 7.2!

Splash Page Podcast 7.1: Controversy! Pulp!

2010-03-07T20:35:00.003-05:00

Two episodes again this week, because we love to talk about comics. And sometimes we say stuff about "Punisher: Butterfly" and "Girl Comics" and "First Wave." We court controversy by daring to criticize one of those comics. Bold, we are.

Oh, and I pimp "Project Rooftop 2.0," because I'm all over that.

And, other stuff.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast 7.1!

Splash Page Podcast 6.2: Marvels Project, Scalped, More!

2010-03-02T19:00:00.003-05:00

Another podcast in less than a week? Yes, because though I promised we'd stick with a once-a-week schedule, Chad and I just had too much to say last week. And we didn't want you to miss it.

In this episode, we talk about specific comics from the past week, and probably make fun of some and talk in hushed, reverent whispers about others. I'm sure we said some really smart stuff, some really dumb stuff, and quoted at least one television theme song starring Tom Wopat.

LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast Episode 6.2!

Splash Page Podcast 6.1: Stahlmaster, Humanization!

2010-02-28T15:39:00.004-05:00

In the first of two episodes this week, Chad Nevett and I address some complaints about decompression, and what it means to humanize superheroes, and the comics stylings of Steve Englehart. We also talk about "Blackest Night," because that's what I think of when I think of humanized superheroes. Or the opposite.

Batman with a beer does not make an appearance, but he's with us in spirit. Moustachioed, creepy spirit.

LISTEN: Splash Page Episode 6.1!

Splash Page Podcast Episode 5: Johnsy, Joe the Barbariantastic

2010-02-21T22:18:00.003-05:00

This week, Chad Nevett and I talk about the new DC executive restructuring/promotions even though we really have no insight into the topic whatsoever. But somehow, I make it all about me.

We also talk "Joe the Barbarian" and Fraction's Uncanny effort to bring the Morrison x-continuity back into play.

It's kind of a shorter episode, because I had to write a whole bunch of stuff this weekend, and so I ditched Chad a bit early.

Oh, and we talk about curling.

Listen: Splash Page Podcast Episode 5!

The Splash Page Podcast, Episode 4: Daytrippy, Listy

2010-02-16T19:34:00.002-05:00

We have this podomatic PRO account now so we can keep this podcast alive. Basically, we ran out of room with the free account -- over 600 downloads of the first few episodes will do that to you, apparently. So now you should have no problem listening to Chad and I talk comics. No more, "blah blah blah make a donation" message. At least for now.

This week, we talk about "Daytripper," "Batman and Robin," Jim Starlin, and kind of list our Top 5 DC runs of the last 5 years, but that's a pretty dull topic and we get past that with appropriate swiftness. And, for the record, we'll stay away from any sort of lists from now on. Lists on blogs are great. Lists on podcasts are like listening to someone read a list.

Listen: The Splash Page Episode 4!

Splash Page Podcast Episode 3: Ghosty, Clandestiny

2010-02-07T13:46:00.002-05:00

One episode a week from now on. That's all you're getting, and it will be damn good. This week, Chad Nevett and I talk about Jason Aaron's now-concluded "Ghost Rider" run, Alan Davis and vague memories of "Clandestine," the true protagonists of "Secret Warriors," and some other gems of wisdom, I'm sure.

Listen, learn, love.

Splash Page Podcast Episode 3!

The Splash Page Podcast, Episode 2.3: Redeeming, Corrupting

2010-02-04T20:04:00.002-05:00

You're right. Three episodes of "The Splash Page" podcast in one week is too much. Chad and I are like kids taking Uncle Steve's car for a spin, and we just took it too far, too fast.

We're going with the more traditional one-episode-per-week format from now on, which will allow us to (a) spend less time recording, (b) give Chad a break from so much editing and posting, (c) focus on quality over quantity.

Actually, part (c) probably isn't going to happen, as it will still just be us talking about whatever comic-related stuff comes across our desks that week. But we'll try to make it better. For the people.

One last huge chunk of Episode 2 for you to listen to, while you wait for next week's conversation to hit the streets. In this one, we talk about Mark Waid comics, and a whole lot of other stuff? If I remember correctly.

Splash Page Podcast Episode 2.3! Listen and learn.

The Splash Page Podcast, Episode 2.2: Crying, Reviewing

2010-02-01T18:57:00.003-05:00

It's time for ANOTHER episode of the Splash Page podcast. This thing is like crack and Chad Nevett and I are injecting it straight into your geeky veins. Three times this week! I know, you'd better be careful.

In this episode, it's me talking "Cry for Justice," a bunch of talk about how we approach reviews, and I'm sure plenty of other stuff. I don't know, I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but I know it's genius.

The Splash Page Podcast, Episode 2.2!

Splash Page Podcast 2.1: Greg Rucka, Punisher

2010-01-31T18:00:00.002-05:00

This week, Chad recorded the podcast on his end, which made for a far better episode -- actually several episodes, delivered a few times this week in bite-size chunks of 30-45 minutes each -- and superior sound quality. My mic is too loud, but at least you can hear everything this time, as we talk about Greg Rucka's Batwoman, and a whole bunch of other stuff like, um, the Punisher? And more!

The Splash Page, Episode 2.1, Podcast-style!

Things I Neglected to Mention in a Future Podcast: Article MCMLXXXIII

2010-01-30T09:40:00.004-05:00

Our upcoming Splash Page podcast(s) may or may not feature a discussion about superhero morality, and I completely forgot to talk about Geoff Johns's "JSA" run, in which Atom Smasher (better known to those of use who used to read comics when they were AWESOME as Nuklon, the man with the stylin' mohawk) killed to prevent the death of further innocent victims. I think adding Geoff Johns comics to the discussion would have made Chad Nevett's head explode, so it's probably better that I left it out.

Nuklon, teaching lessons about superhero morality (and fashion) since 1983.

Sometimes We Need a Little Jack Kirby

2010-01-28T19:00:00.002-05:00

The Splash Page, THE PODCAST, Episode One

2010-01-24T16:51:00.006-05:00

As promised (or threatened), Chad Nevett and I produced a comic book podcast. A few things your should know:

1. Even though Chad and I have worked together for years, we have never spoken to one another until this recording.

2. My computer couldn't handle the awesomeness, and crashed at 8-10 minute intervals as we spoke about various comic-related topics.

3. So we completely lost our entire opening about "Joe the Barbarian" and "New Avengers."

4. And we lost plenty of other stuff too.

5. But it's not bad for a first episode, and I was able to piece together enough bits to make a nearly-hour-long episode out of whatever was saved from our discussion.

6. It's posted on the Geniusboy Live feed, so you can find it by searching for that on iTunes, though it takes about 24 hours to show up there after it's first posted on the feed.

Until then, you can listen to it HERE.

If you demand more episodes, we will try to make it happen. Somehow. With fewer technical difficulties.

Best Comics of 2009. My List. The CBR list.

2010-01-01T21:55:00.002-05:00

I devoted a "When Words Collide" column to my Best Comics of 2009, and I submitted that same list to CBR for their cumulative, democratically-determined "Best of" list. (Last year, the list I submitted was a bit different than the one I posted in my column, because of something to do with reprints being allowed or something -- I can't remember, but I know it was a slightly different list.)

The blurbs I submitted to the CBR list weren't all used, so here's what I sent in, for anyone interested:

1. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
Elegant, overpowering, clean, and as messy as humanity. This is what graphic novels can be. This is what "Asterios Polyp" is.

2. Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe, by Brian Lee O'Malley (Oni)
One volume away from the finale, O'Malley lets his protagonist grow up a bit, but doesn't leave the genre-smashing fun behind.

3. Detective Comics, by Greg Rucka and J. H. Williams III (DC)
The best artist in comics working off a pulpy Greg Rucka script? Yeah, this is the stuff.

4. Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye, by Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart (Vertigo)
This is a comic from the future sent back through time to make fun of the Disney buyout of Marvel before it was even announced. Also: it's gorgeous.

5. Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka, by Naoki Urasawa (Viz)
Some have hyperbolically called this the "Watchmen" of manga, and that's not all that far off. But it's quieter than "Watchmen," and about a lot more than just comics.

6. Scalped, by Jason Aaron and Various (Vertigo)
Whether it's tight single-issue stories or expansive, series-long narrative threads, Jason Aaron is creating something special here. Frankly, it has ascended to become one of the best serial narratives ever.

7. Batman and Robin, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Philip Tan (DC)
The first three issues are some of the best Batman comics ever. Frank Quitely is a master of comic-book-fu.

8. Punisher, by Rick Remender and Various (Marvel)
Giddily trashy, this would be the cult comic of the year if it weren't so unabashedly appealing to the mainstream. But this is still a subversive little gem of a superhero comic.

9. Wednesday Comics by Various (DC)
Pound for pound, penny for penny, you couldn't ask for a better weekly dose of comic book art. Worth the price just for the Karl Kerschl.

10. I Kill Giants, by Joe Kelly and JM Ken Nimura (Image)
A story unlike any other this year in a comic that didn't look like anything else this year. Engaging, powerful stuff from Kelly and Numura.

Overall, the CBR list was surprisingly diverse, and I think that's because of the lack of clear, consensus Marvel or DC picks -- "Detective Comics" and "Batman and Robin" were the only two superhero books in the Top 10. Last year, five superhero comics cracked the consensus Top 10. I also think the edition of the Robot 6 bloggers added some much-needed diversity, and "Driven By Lemons" wouldn't have made as much of an impact on this list without their votes, I suspect.

Basically, with each of us submitting our Ten Best, and with a lot of diversity of choices, it probably only took a few people to rank something in their personal Top 10 for it to rank in the Top 25 overall.

I've seen some criticism of the list already, and it's different than the criticism of last year's democratic picks. Last year, even I criticized the list for ranking mediocre superhero comics too high ("high" meaning "low," number-wise), while this year the criticism from the message boards is about the "obscure indie picks" in the Top 25, and the idea that these comics don't represent what was covered on the CBR main page throughout the year.

I wouldn't call most of the picks obscure -- some readers even named "Asterios Polyp" as obscure, which is just an ignorant statement -- but it is interesting to think about whether CBR has a responsibility to cover the best comics throughout the year, not just the popular ones. I'd love to see that, and with "Comics Should Be Good" and "Robot 6," plenty of non-Marvel and DC comics are discussed, but the reality is that the site is about mainstream, mostly superhero comics. That's the audience. When I write columns about "The Drifting Classroom" or reviews of "Powr Mastrs," that kind of stuff gets practically no hits. I write those things for myself, and to raise awareness. But they aren't the kind of profitable articles for CBR that something like my "Top 10 Geoff Johns" column was.

What do you think? Should CBR focus more on the "good" comics throughout the year and not just wait until the end of December to point out the best stuff? Is it a problem that the list doesn't reflect the bulk of CBR's mainstream emphasis? Is it a bad thing when a list makes you look up some new comics you may not have heard of? And in what universe is "Batgirl" even a Top 100 pick?!?

Looking Forward to 2010

2009-12-31T11:19:00.002-05:00

Blackest Night #6: My Fears Were Unwarranted

2009-12-30T21:16:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned this before, but the way the CBR review team selects comics to review is in a kind of "draft" format. We each pick a comic to review, pick another one for round two, and then since some of us review more than others, we pick whatever's left as a "free-for-all," naming the books we'll write about. We try to mix it up so the same people aren't always reviewing the same comics, but a lot of it depends on what's available, whose local shop gets which comics, what's available via preview pdfs, and what people are willing to shell out money for. Because I had to pay for that terrible Scott Ian/Sam Kieth "Lobo" comic, I didn't end up making much money from the review, for example.

I mention all this because even though there was only a single new release this week to "draft," and even though CBR commissioned two reviews for it, I decided to pass on reviewing "Blackest Night" #6.

In the past month or two, I've reviewed a couple of Geoff Johns comics, and I've given them some of the most negative reviews I've ever given a Johns comic. Anyone who reads this blog, or my CBR columns, knows that I'm a supporter of Johns's work. I like his straightforward, forward-thinking plot structures. I like his pacing. I like the way he knows how to bring in the superhero spectacle.

But the last arc in "Adventure Comics" was a disaster. "Flash: Rebirth" has stumbled. And the most recent "Green Lantern" issue was the worst one so far.

And between all of that and my increasing Blackest Night fatigue -- (Really? Just more zombies and more punching of zombies? That's it?) -- I decided that I wouldn't be the right guy to review the newest issue of "Blackest Night." I just wasn't in tune with what Johns was doing lately. It was a case where a review of "Blackest Night" from me at this point would just be setting the comic up for a negative review. I have no interest in continually attacking a comic or a creator.

But I was wrong about this. "Blackest Night" #6 is event comics done right. It wasn't that I was finding Geoff Johns comics annoyingly shallow. It wasn't that I had Blackest Night fatigue, it was that these other comics just weren't very good.

In this issue of "Blackest Night," John Stewart flies up with an entire planet of Black Lanterns chasing after him. That single image by Ivan Reis is much more effective that the entire plot of the recent "Green Lantern" issue where he's fighting them off. And "Blackest Night" #6 doesn't even have a lot of plot, but it has dramatic moments -- the heroes assembling, the "deputies" rising into action, with rainbow spendor.

Yeah, "Blackest Night" is goofy, melodramatic fun. But this issue proves that it is fun. And this is the kind of stuff Geoff Johns does right. Big-time superhero spectacle. Cosmic insanity. Comics.

The Splash Page: Comics and Wrestling, Because We Like Tight Pants Part 1

2009-12-29T19:49:00.008-05:00

Remember when Chad Nevett and I used to write a weekly column for Sequart.com? That site will return one day, I'm told. Or maybe not. But then we did this Splash Page stuff on our blogs and even at CBR this summer. It's pretty much all I ever post here at Geniusboy Firemelon these days, but I'll make that up to you sometime. I'll buy you a nice present or something. Until then, read this week's installment, which is mostly about how much we hate fans. Makes us seem like a couple of jerks if you ask me. Which is probably true. Jerks who are correct, though.

Chad Nevett: In this edition of the Splash Page, I'm not exactly sure what to expect since it's a bit more broadly conceived than usual. I want to talk about wrestling and comics. As many who pay attention to what I write know, I'm a big wrestling fan and write for the wrestling section of 411mania.com in a few different ways. Recently, I pissed some people off (while amusing others) by dedicating one of my weekly random thoughts posts at Comics Should be Good to wrestling but paid lip service to comics in the process. Tim, as many probably don't know, recently attended a live WWE event as, apparently, his son has become a fan of wrestling and, like the good dad that he is, Tim has tried to participate in that interest when possible. So, we've got a big fan and a dad who may or may not hate it... and we've got comics. I don't know how this will all fit together, but let's see anyway.

I've never actually understood the disdain or attitude that some comics fans direct toward wrestling since the two don't strike me as that dissimilar, particularly superhero comics. Both revolve around people fighting, often dressed in outlandish or odd attire, there are good guys and bad guys... even the fans are similar in the way they behave and discuss their respective choices of entertainment. Actually, the similarity in fans is where I first made the connection, so it seems really weird for comics fans to be so down on wrestling. What's your take on wrestling so far, Tim? I imagine it's mostly just been WWE programs you've seen. Do you find it to be 'entertainment for morons' as some do?

Tim Callahan: As I read the backlash against your talk of wrestling in your "Random Thoughts" on CSBG, I couldn't help but wonder: would wrestling fans freak out if you spent part of a wrestling column talking about comics? I'm not sure that they would. So that would seem to make wrestling fans more open and accepting than comic book fans. Just throwing that out there. It's all speculation of course, but since you do write a wrestling column, you should try it out and see if comic book fans are the more closed-minded of the two.

With that said, after seeing WWE Live, I'd have to say that I'd rather hang out with comic book fans any day. You know those stereotypical comic book guys? Those ones with the sweatpants and fanny packs and beards who can wax poetic about Englehart's Avengers all day? I'll hang out with them every day for a year before I'll hang out with the wrestling fans at the Times Union Center in Albany. These people -- this mass of kids and adults -- were rude and dumb. Little kids and their parents shouting "you suck" over and over. People paying $10 a pop for glowsticks just so they can hold up an "X" sign for Triple H. "Beat the Shit Out of Him" clarion calls from the crowd.

The guy behind me was the best, though. With his wife and two little boys. He swore constantly, berated his wife when she said that Randy Orton was "just a character," and then told his son to calm down while he, himself, was yelling and screaming at Randy Orton, calling him a "wannabe has-been." Then he insisted on telling the Miz, loudly, that he was not, in fact, awesome. As if this dude was the voice of reason.

To be fair, I didn't get any beer spilled on me, so the crowd was better than the average Fenway Park horde, but this is the level of idiocy I don't understand regarding wrestling: Sheamus got DQ-ed in the main event, giving John Cena the victory in the bout for the World Championship. Now I've only seen like three episodes of Smackdown and/or Raw in my life (all of which in the past two months as my son has grown increasingly obsessed with wrestling), but even I know that a title can't change hands as the result of a disqualification. And is John Cena really going to win the title at an untelevised house show in Albany? Of course not.

Yet the crowd was ecstatic when Cena won, as if they saw something magical. And then when the announcer explained that he couldn't win the title that way, they booed and booed and jumped up and down as if this was shocking news.

So are all these people in the crowd so stupid that they don't actually understand what it is that they're watching? I mean, they have the "You Can't See Me" hats and the DX t-shirts and the glowsticks and yet they don't understand how the shows work? Or are they playing along, like those people who dress up and sing along to Tim Curry in those midnight "Rocky Horror" shows?

Because, from an up close perspective, these wrestling fans -- or the vast majority of them -- seemed mean and dumb.

CN: I've been to a couple of live WWE events (a taping of "Smackdown" and this year's "Royal Rumble") and had a great time at both. The yelling and chants are part of the experience -- like amped up behaviour at a sporting event. Some people can go a bit over-the-top, but the audience's participation is part of the performance. The example you cite, that the title won't be dropped at a house show is good: it won't be, but what fun is it if everyone watches the match with that attitude? Part of the live show is getting into it a bit and putting that energy out there in order to get the best performance out of the wrestlers. It's not fun if you act completely logical. Cena wins, you cheer; he doesn't get the belt, you boo. It's what's expected and the audience should play its role when possible.

I can understand not being into that especially since I'm usually more subdued than the average fan as well. But, you're right, some people do get far too into it and say stupid things or take it too seriously... but, how is that different from comic fans? Having been on both comic and wrestling sites, there's little difference between the two, honestly. Maybe that's an interet thing, but take a trip over to CBR's forums and read the comments to 411mania articles and watch as the rudest, most narrow-minded people come out. It's a fan thing.

(My favourite live experience was at the "Royal Rumble," by the way, where one of the matches was fan-favourite face (good guy) Jeff Hardy against Edge, a heel (bad guy), for the WWE Championship. Now, Edge is Canadian and we Canadians are notorious for cheering our countrymen no matter what their status is (face/heel) and I'm a big fan of Edge, not a fan of Jeff Hardy, in addition to that face. So, I freaked this little kid in front of us out by cheering for Edge and booing Jeff Hardy. He could NOT believe that someone could like Edge and hate Hardy. We had fun with it as he cheered louder for Hardy in response to my booing...)

Then again, there are different 'levels' of wrestling fandom, usually separated by the terms 'marks' and 'smart marks/smarks' (though, 'marks' isn't used really except in cases like this too much). Marks are the people who buy into it, while smarks are the people who see it for the fiction that it is, but appreciate it for who gets pushed, how good a match is, and stuff like that. I know that I tend to watch wrestling in an oddly metafictional way where I'm usually commenting on how well something is done, if a storyline makes sense, why one wrestler is getting pushed with a lot of victories, while another is being buried... Watching it the way that I tend to read more than anything.

To Be Continued at GraphiContent !

The Splash Page: "Dark Reign" and Stuff I Don't Care to Talk About

2009-12-20T23:36:00.004-05:00

Here's what happened: Chad Nevett bet me a dollar that I couldn't keep the conversation to just plot and character. And he won that bet pretty handily. Who they hell can just talk about the characters and the plot all the time? These things aren't really happening. These characters are not real people.

I will never pay him that dollar, though.

Oh yeah, the discussion started on Chad's blog, and continues below:

CN: In "Dark Reign," I pretty much only saw what happened in the Bendis titles, "Secret Warriors," and "Dark Reign: Zodiac" with random issues of other titles thrown in for reviewing purposes, but you got a wider view, I assume. How do you think the event played out beyond the stuff I read?

TC: I don't really know. I read "Punisher" and that used "Dark Reign" to brilliant effect, I thought. (Even to the point of Norman Osborn getting so annoyed at Frank Castle that he had him chopped to bits.)

But besides the stuff that you cite above, I don't know how it's really affected anything. "Thunderbolts" was interesting for a little while, as we had double and triple agents in play, but I dropped that series once it crossed over with "Deadpool" and became terrible. "Amazing Spider-Man" has barely been impacted, beyond the "American Son" storyline, which was decent enough. Obviously the space stuff with "Nova" and "War of Kings" hasn't been impacted at all. Neither has the X-Men stuff, really. I mean, there was the Utopia crossover, and I guess that could have been sparked by the Osborn-in-power plot, but it could have happened without it.

Let's step back, though, and look at the bigger picture. "Dark Reign" has given us plenty of comics with Norman Osborn and company flying in and stirring up trouble, but what has Osborn and his crew actually accomplished so far? They haven't really accomplished anything, have they? Are they just the mechanism through which Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man can again be best buddies? Is that all this has been about for the past year? Because that's clearly what it's building towards.

CN: He had the Punisher killed. And... yeah, he didn't really do much. He had some good talks with the Sentry. For all of the talk about how things got worse with him in charge, Osborn didn't really abuse his power in any extreme ways. He acted like a jerk at times and made deals with some bad people, but other than that... Though, "Uncanny X-Men" did cross over with "Dark Avengers" and was a big part of "Dark Reign" during the summer. His impact on the mutant community is probably the biggest thing that came out of "Dark Reign" aside from setting up the Holy Trinity of Avengers to reunite. It's almost likes Osborn was a means to an end rather than a driving force.

For all of the talk about there being too much Norman Osborn, do you think that was the case? As you pointed out, a good chunk of the Marvel universe barely interacted with him. He was mostly confined to the Avengers family of titles -- or are the Avengers the same as the Marvel universe at this point?

TC: I don't think there was too much Norman Osborn in the end. There was just enough. I mean, he's the big bad of the entire universe right now, so his presence should be felt almost everywhere, even if he's not doing anything or showing up at all.

Maybe his ineffectual "Reign" is a commentary on all positions in government. That even a really bad guy can't get anything done with all the hoops and red tape.

What do you think about "Dark Reign" coming to an end? Are you looking forward to this big Asgardian climax to the whole thing?

CN: The Asgardian plot (and the way the story apparently begins) doesn't have me too enthused, but I am looking forward to another Bendis-driven story. He's been the driving force behind "Dark Reign," so I like that there will be a consistent tone and voice and the characters will continue to sound and act like they have this past year. Nothing would be more annoying for "Dark Reign" to have characters acting one way and "Siege" having them act another. Also, I'm still holding out hope that Noh-Varr will show up and do something that proves me wrong for being so disappointed/frustrated. I am such a sucker.

One big thing I'm looking forward to is the promised revelation regarding the Sentry where Bendis has promised to lay all of his cards on the table and tell us the whole truth about the character. I've rather liked his work with the character (despite it not matching up entirely with the original mini-series) and am glad that we're finally going to get the whole story. A lot of people don't like the character and I don't understand why. He's a terrifying character and one that fits well into the Marvel universe, a universe of horribly flawed gods where the more power someone has, the crazier they seem to be. I think his power level would probably suit him better in the cosmic setting where he would fit in better, but, otherwise, I dig him a lot. Mentioning the cosmic thing just made me realise that the most obvious 'past Sentry story that we all forgot happened' is to do a Jim Starlin-esque bit where the Sentry travels the universe (as Superman has a few times) and goes through some trippy mindscape stuff by teaming up with Adam Warlock or something. Hot damn, I love that idea. Screw it, bring back Jim Starlin and have him write the Sentry. I'd like that, I think.

TC: The Sentry is widely hated because he only ever does two things: (1) shows up as a deus ex machina, or (2) runs off crying. So if Bendis can make the character more than that, then, yeah, that's some kind of victory.

I liked the Jae Lee art on the Sentry's original series, but that's about it. I would have preferred the Rick Veitch version. Too bad that never got off the ground.

And, hell yeah, let's see the character do some space trippy stuff with Adam Warlock. I'd be all about that action. (I don't think that's going to happen, though. I think the "lay all the cards on the table" will be something far more mundane.)

I am curious to see what Marvel does post-"Asgard Attacks." Quesada wants the company to take a breather and just tell classic stories set in the Marvel Universe, with no major events. That sounds good to me, but it's been so long since the comics have been that way, that I wonder which series will thrive and which series will falter because of it. Seems like Bendis needs these kinds of uber-plots in his Marvel stuff, even if he's designing them, but he has shown in "Ultimate Spider-Man" that he's much better when he doesn't have to worry about event-thinking. And clearly Brubaker has kept "Captain America" churning along quite nicely without paying any attention to the events in the mainstream Marvel U once Cap died. His only stumbling block has been the release schedule of "Reborn," and how it doesn't line up with the return of Steve Rogers elsewhere. That's annoying, but hardly his fault.

What writers and series do you think will thrive in a no-more-events-for-a-while kind of status quo?

CN: Bendis's Avengers book(s) should thrive, I hope. I'm really looking forward to Matt Fraction on "Thor." I know, I've been down on Fraction a bit lately, but his work on the character previously has me convinced that this run will be nothing but solid gold. Honestly, I'm still struggling to think of what titles are heavily affected by "Siege" (or any events) that a lack of events will make them a lot better. Maybe a freer status quo will lend itself to a general feeling of creative freedom throughout the company where writers won't worry about what's going on anywhere else and just go wild. Maybe we'll get a return to an earlier-in-the-decade-Marvel level of quality. Wouldn't that be something?

TC: I'm sure the plots and characters will be improved all around.

That was my pathetic attempt to circle around to the beginning. Let's never talk about just plot and character again, okay? (Ever.)

Thoughts on James Cameron and "Avatar"

2009-12-19T20:42:00.002-05:00

So we all went to see "Avatar 3D" today (and by all, I mean Television's Ryan Callahan (@TheTVRC), my wife, my son, and I -- my daughter didn't want to see it, and she would have been bored and restless anyway). Here are some thoughts.

1. TheTVRC pointed out that James Cameron's movies tend to age poorly because he's always right on the cutting edge of new cinema technology. That is true. And it will surely be true for "Avatar" as well, though it looks pretty damn good for a movie that's so CGI-heavy.

2. TheTVRC also pointed out that the movie (SPOILER, of sorts) features a literal deus ex machina, so there's that.

3. My son gave a thumbs up during the movie and an even bigger one at the end. His verdict: it's the best movie he's EVER seen. (He's 8, but he's seen a lot of movies.)

4. My wife had a headache afterward.

5. As the aliens-as-American-Indian thing became more and more clear (and I joked about this being "Pocahontas in Space" based on the trailer, but I didn't realize how James Cameron didn't even try to make up an alien culture, except superficially), I thought to myself, "if Wes Studi shows up as the tribal chief, that would be perfect." Wes Studi IS the tribal chief, and it's perfect. I mean that sarcastically. Because it's dumb as hell to be so on-the-nose.

6. "Unobtainium" is what the bad corporate guys are trying to obtain. On. The. Nose.

7. Giovanni Ribisi plays the Paul Riser role, though his future fashion sense is slightly better than Paul Riser's future fashion sense.

8. If we did not watch the movie in 3D, I'm not sure I would have sat through the whole movie. The first hour is just setting the scene, over and over and over. It's a Disney 3D attraction of "Alien Landscape." Minus the 3D, what is the appeal of hour one?

9. The final battle is pretty damn awesome, though. Really awesome.

10. The movie's pretty clearly about the insurgents slaughtering American soldiers, which is shocking for a big Christmas release. The audience literally clapped at the end.

11. There is not one twist or turn in this entire movie. The plot line is straight.

12. But that final battle IS awesome, as I said. The last 30 minutes makes up for the first two hours of Mr. Jimbo's not-so-wild 3D ride.

Here's Where I Scoff at Others

2009-12-19T12:43:00.002-05:00

Brian Cronin's democratically-created list of the Best Comic Book Storylines Ever has fully revealed itself. And now I have to scoff at some entries, because they deserve it:

"Age of Apocalypse" at #12? Yeah, this was a great storyline, at making me stop reading about the X-Men.

"Under Seige" at #17? A bunch of bad guys attack Avengers mansion? Oh, it was a whole lot of bad guys? Well, then I guess it does deserve to be in the top twenty.

"Civil War" at #18? If you've been following me on Twitter, you know my son has just started reading this series because of his interest in the "Ultimate Alliance 2" game. The jury's out on whether he likes it or not. But as one of the best storylines of all time? Even if he thinks so, he is wrong.

Millar's "Ultimates" and Meltzer's "Identity Crisis" tie at #26? It's appropriate that they tie, because they both make superheroes sexed up and trashy. But they aren't very good.

"Infinity Gauntlet"? Even Chad Nevett didn't vote for it.

"Secret Wars"? "Hush"? "The Death of Superman"?

I know this was based on votes for unabashedly favorite storylines of all time, so there's no reason to scoff. But I do.

When readers hold comics like this junk up as the best ever, well, I think we can do better.

My Daughter is Famouser than I Am

2009-12-12T07:46:00.004-05:00

You may have seen some of my pull quotes on such collected editions as "Spider-Man Noir" and "Fantastic Four: Some Stuff By Millar and Hitch that Didn't End Well," but I have yet to be credited for my fancy praise on the FRONT of any comic book.

Someone else in my house has beaten me to it (click to see the cover in all of its Callahan-esque glory):

Splash Page: Are Mainstream Comics Increasingly Lame, or is it Just Us? (Part 1 of 2)

2009-12-06T20:31:00.007-05:00

You know the routine by now, Chad talks, I talk, we all talk. This week's topic: What's going on in mainstream comics these days, and why is the overall feeling one of funkiness, but not in a good way?

Chad Nevett: In our column discussing Warren Ellis and Geoff Johns, Tim made a rather bold statement that I will quote now for those who are too lazy to go back and find it: "...the mass of mainstream superhero comics is floundering in the second half of 2009." Now, Tim is a bold man and is taken to making bold statements that he then backs up. It's something we share and bond over (our collective boldness). At the time, I let it slide since we'd talked a lot and this seemed a perfect topic for another column. Well, that column is this one. Tim, expand upon and defend what we said a while ago, quite possibly just because it sounded big and exciting and cool without thinking it through entirely (as those are the funnest things to say, I must admit).

TC: Okay, that was a few weeks ago, so let me get back into that mindset. Wait for it. There. Got it. Maybe.

I was talking about the general feeling I have that if you created a line graph of the overall quality of superhero comics from 2008 through 2009, you'd see a pretty high standard of quality for a while, and then it would start to dip in maybe February or March of 2009, and continue its downward slide through the summer and fall of this year. I base that not just on the amount of comics I just plain stopped buying this year (and while I was easily reading 25-30 comics a week in 2008, I'm down to 8-10 a week right now), but also the distinct lack of chatter about these superhero comics from the internet intelligentsia.

(The above graph has been peer-reviewed and independently confirmed by at least seventeen comic book scientists.)

Whether it's David Brothers or Douglas Wolk, Geoff Klock or Jog, the guys that had been commenting on mainstream comics have seriously cut back on their own discussions, and even when those critics weren't buying that much stuff to begin with -- Klock, even in 2008, had cut back to only a few titles -- they were part of some larger conversations about superhero comics.

It seems like that spirit of enthusiasm has died down across the board as this year has plodded along, month by month.

Maybe it's the Morrison lull that I'm feeling -- or we're all feeling -- with the giddiness of "Final Crisis" and "Batman" being replaced in recent months with the atrocity of the most recent "Batman and Robin" arc. I'll take Tony Daniel over Philip Tan any day, if I were forced to make such a choice. Or maybe it's the kind of events we're seeing now compared to last year. I don't think "Blackest Night" is aesthetically worse than "Secret Invasion," but Bendis's event comic at least sparked plenty of discussion. With "Blackest Night," the conversation amounts to, "who's going to come back as a zombie next?" And even though you may or may not enjoy the series -- I do, and you don't -- nobody seems to care about the answer to that question. And justifiably so.

Even the good-but-not-great stuff like "Immortal Iron Fist" and "Ghost Rider" has disappeared, or barely comes out, this year. And what has it been replaced with? Not much. Not many new voices in comics this year, really.

And we don't even have "Wednesday Comics" to look forward to anymore, as 2009 draws to a close.

What's your take on all of this?

CN: As I said at the time of your statement, I don't necessarily disagree. I'm buying the same amount of books, if not one or two more, but the increase in the books I'm buying hasn't come from the superhero genre, but from Vertigo, which keeps hooking me with their one dollar first issues, or from mini-series that won't be around in a few months. Then again, this week, I've reviewed four comics for CBR, all superhero books, and three of them were given four stars... Granted, one of them is "The Boys," which is a superhero book technically and may not factor into the above. I wonder if the actual quality has decreased or if it's just that there was a certain energy, a buzz in the air, last year that just isn't here now -- which has nothing to do with quality necessarily. I think people are just tired. It's been a long few years and "Secret Invasion" and "Final Crisis" looked like the end of the big events... the points both companies had been working toward and neither paid off in the way that anyone expected/wanted. Both events left people feeling let down and I think the mood shifted then. There have been a few high points since, like the day "Batman and Robin" #1 came out, but, really, no one cares as much.

But, there are still plenty of books with good quality. I mean, there's "Detective Comics"! JH Williams III! And there's also... yeah, I don't know. "Captain America" has been replaced with the lesser "Reborn" mini-series. The Avengers books are at the same level of quality as always (which is good-but-not-great). "Thor" sort of fizzled out as "Siege" had JMS leave the book with a whimper, not a bang. And... dammit, you're right. I can't really defend things. Why are we reading these books still, then, Tim? Please help me out...

TC: Exactly. Though you may have given a few four-star reviews in recent weeks, and certainly I have as well, the really great superhero books are few and far between. Maybe the average quality has stayed the same, but there's less excitement about a few key books. Brubaker's "Captain America" feels like a generation ago, because this "Reborn" stuff is coming out too slowly, and though it's in keeping with what's been done with the character before, it just feels, I don't know, a bit too stale. Bucky-Cap was interesting on his own, and it seems like Brubaker could have kept him going by himself for a while. Disappointment is a good word, and it fits for the anticipation-and-then-release of the event books last year, too.

"Detective Comics" is probably the only superhero monthly I really and truly love right now, but that lasts for exactly as long as Williams III draws the pages. "Punisher" is second -- and I know you hate that one -- and "Batman and Robin" is third, just because the most recent arc killed me. It was a weak sixth issue, to be sure. I think it will rebound with Cam Stewart on art. Strike that. I know it will rebound with Cam Stewart and become a #1 comic in my heart and mind again. But for now, I can still taste the Tan.

And even when we do give some of the superhero comics 4 stars or more this fall, how much of that is based on the overall weakness of the comics? I mean, would "Dark Avengers Annual" have been a four-star comic if it came out in the same time period as a "Captain Britain," and "Iron Fist," a "Final Crisis"? Those were four-star books a year ago. The scale slides. It has to. Otherwise you'd have to compare every comic to "Swamp Thing" #21 and "Animal Man" #5 and whatever else lands in the "greatness" range, and most of the stuff we praise in a given week would be, from a long-term perspective, completely average. Everything would get 2.5 stars except one or two things a year.

I may be overstating that, but that's the general feeling I get about this season of comics. Not that they're bad. Just that something's missing.

To be continued at GraphiContent!

Splash Page: Almost the Best of the '00s (Part 2)

2009-11-30T19:43:00.002-05:00

You can read Part One over at Chad Nevett's blog, but here's part two of our discussion of why Chad refuses to make a Best Comics of the Decade list, and what might have been on it if he had broken down and compiled such a thing. Also, I say stuff.

TC: Now, getting back to things I know you have read, would Brubaker's "Captain America" make your list for the decade? Would anything by Brubaker make it? And how about Bendis? His influence on the the superhero comics over the past decade is hard to ignore.

CN: Considering "Captain America" has placed on my top ten lists for the past two years (and may make 2009's list for all I know... having not made that list yet), I think it would have a good shot at making the best of the decade. "Point Blank," "Sleeper," and "Criminal" would probably beat it out, though. So, actually, "Captain America" probably wouldn't make the list... particularly one limited to 20 works, if only because Brubaker has done better work elsewhere. Not a slight against "Captain America" at all, just that the three series I mentioned are better.

Brian Michael Bendis is an oddity for me. I did a blogathon this past year centered around his Avengers work and enjoy those titles quite a bit, but not much of what I've read of his output stands out as 'best of the decade' material. Then again, I haven't read his two most critically acclaimed works of the past decade: "Daredevil" and "Powers." Again, a case of not having enough money to get everything or titles beginning at a time when I didn't have the money. Of the Bendis stuff I've read, he wouldn't make the list. But, I think if I did a top ten writer of the decade, he would, if only because while no single work of his stands out, he is consistently good. There isn't a lot of his output that I've read that I've actually disliked.

Why not turn our eyes to some of the younger, newer writers? I don't think it's a secret that "Casanova" will make your list and would make mine, but what about the rest of Matt Fraction's output? I have a fondness for his earlier work pre-"Invincible Iron Man," I guess you could call it, while you've stayed a pretty staunch supporter. What's Fraction's presence like? Then, there's Jason Aaron who you've gushed over for the fantastic "Scalped" and the (in my opinion) inconsistent "Ghost Rider"... there's also Brian Wood with "Demo," "Local," "Northlanders," "DMZ," and other works. Do these newer, younger writers make their impact on your list much? I'm sure the best from each would be in contention on my list, but I'm not sure they would really be represented as fully as more established guys like Ellis, Ennis, Casey, and Morrison.

TC: "Ghost Rider" has been a pretty great ride with Jason Aaron powering across the Marvel landscape, but, no, it wouldn't make my Best of the Decade list. As you can imagine, "Scalped" is on there -- though you'll have to wait and see how high it ended up -- but nothing else from Aaron made the list, though he's probably my second favorite writer over the past year. He's coming on strong at the end of the Aughts.

Fraction is represented twice -- or one and a half times, depending how you divvy up the "Immortal Iron Fist" credits -- and, yeah, "Casanova." Man, that's a great comic. But nothing else from Fraction even makes my preliminary list. His "Invincible Iron Man" and "Uncanny X-Men" are good versions of those characters, but I have problems with the art on both titles, and they haven't even come close to "great comics" yet. Put a Ba or a Moon on either of those series and I might change my mind.

Brian Wood has done some very good work as well. I'd say I'd rank "Local," "Northlanders," "Demo," and "DMZ" in that order, but even "Local" wouldn't make my Top 20. He was certainly represented a few times in my preliminary list. But I haven't liked a couple of the recent "Northlanders" arcs as much as the first few, and I've completely dropped "DMZ" from my pull list this fall.

Neither Ennis nor Casey even made my preliminary list, though Ellis did. And Morrison, certainly.

As for my take on Bendis, I'd say that his best stuff is actually "Powers" and "Ultimate Spider-Man," though the former suffers from weak endings to story arcs and the latter had thousands of Mark Bagley pages. Both made my preliminary list.

How about non-mainstream comics? Anything from the indy comic world that might have made your list? I have a couple in my Top 20. And this was the decade of the original graphic novel explosion into the bookstore market. Did any of that stuff crack into Top 20 territory for you?

CN: I've only read the first three hardcovers of "Ultimate Spider-Man," but I'd rank it below his Avengers work (if you take all of his Avengers work as a whole) if only because of my own hang-ups with teenage superhero stories.

"ACME Novelty Library" by Chris Ware would probably be top five material. I'd even guess top three at least. There are simply not enough good things that I can say about his work. As I said last year, while many focus on his art, I am drawn strongly to his writing, his ability to capture the loneliness and despair that people face, the inability to communicate, and the pure self-centered nature that we all have to varying degrees. But, honestly, Chris Ware is a given -- or should be. (And I know he'll be near the top of your list...)

I think Eddie Campbell would have a decent shot with "The Fate of the Artist." Chester Brown's "Louis Riel" would also have a shot. Not sure about something like "Parker: The Hunter," by Darwyn Cooke, which seems to have a very good chance of making my 'best of 2009' list, but it's too new to really judge for the decade. Some books have earned their place after years of love and it's hard to tell how things will hold up. I don't doubt this will, but you never know.

This area of comics is where I feel like I haven't read enough... because I haven't. Money, distribution, immediate interest... it works against me giving this area of comics as much attention as I should.

One book I see mentioned that I really question making the list, I must admit, is "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," a title I enjoy a lot, but... in that harmless entertainment sort of way. How does it stand in your eyes?

TC: Right now, I have "League" in my Top 5, actually. Though I think the first series actually came out in 1999 (or at least that's when it started), so I don't know if that means that only Vol. 2 and "Black Dossier" and the first "Century" book qualify. Screw it, I say it all counts because its a 21st century comic, mostly. I know what you mean about "harmless entertainment," but everything on my list could be described that way. Except maybe the Clowes and Ware and Mazzucchelli stuff. That's hardcore entertainment.

But if "League" is harmless because it's just basically a fiction game -- a kind of All-Star Squadron for literary types -- I'm fine with that. And, you know what, I bet it would crack my Top 10 for the decade if it was just the "Black Dossier" alone. That thing is ambitious, even if it is just part of Alan Moore's playful scheme to romp through the various literary eras and styles. I think the Dossier is going to get a critical reappraisal any day now. It's better than anyone gave it credit for when it came out.

I think Cooke's "Parker" book is his weakest work to date. It looks great, but the story is as cold as a wet polar bear in winter. (I'm trying out some folksy sayings all of a sudden.) And Eddie Campbell's work is sloppier than a mule at dinner time. (I don't know what that means, but "Fate of the Artist" didn't crack my Top 40. Maybe I need to reread it and remember why.)

So, now that you've thrown out a dozen worthy titles for a possible Best of the Decade list, have you reconsidered doing one? Because all the cool kids are doing it.

CN: Nope. This will have to do for all those who want one from me. Take all of the titles I mentioned, put them in a random number generator and BAM! best of the decade list for you to marvel at and admire and disagree with.

TC: I did that. And "All-Star Batman and Robin" at #1? Nevett, you're crazy!

Johns vs. Ellis: The Final Stats

2009-11-04T20:35:00.003-05:00

If I had to combine my Top 10.25 Geoff Johns list and my Top 10 Warren Ellis list from various recent "When Words Collide" columns, it would look like this, with Ellis in bold:

20.25. 52

20. Blackest Night

19. Infinite Crisis

18. Legion of 3 Worlds

17. Avengers

16. Ultimate Galactus Trilogy

15. JSA

14. Flash

13. Action Comics

12. Teen Titans

11. Desolation Jones

10. Crecy

9. Astonishing X-Men

8. Aetheric Mechanics

7. Adventure Comics

6. Global Frequency

5. Thunderbolts

4. Green Lantern

3. Nextwave

2. Planetary

1. Stormwatch/Authority

Yes, Ellis "wins" handily. But what does he win, besides my adoration?

Final Crisis Aftermath Aftermath Hits THE SPLASH PAGE: Part 1 of 2

2009-10-31T19:06:00.005-04:00

Chad Nevett and I are back with another installment of THE SPLASH PAGE, this time on the finale of the "Final Crisis Aftermath" comics. Our last discussion prompted some heated debate, plenty of comments, a couple of follow-ups from Chad and I, and several responses from angry fans. Will this week's SPLASH PAGE provoke such reactions? Maybe I should interject something about Geoff Johns's awesomeness...

Chad Nevett: Five months ago, Tim and I discussed the first issues of each of the four "Final Crisis Aftermath" mini-series that DC put out, each launching out of an idea or character featured in "Final Crisis," and we said that we'd check back in on the books when they finished. Well, the two that we both stuck with, "Escape" and "Dance" finished, so here we are. When I suggested the topic to you, Tim, you weren't sure there was anything to discuss. Why? What did you eventually think of "Dance" and "Escape"? Also, you buy everything... no "Run!" or "Ink"?

Tim Callahan: I stopped buying "Run" and "Ink" along with a dozen other comics that I no longer had any time to read. I found them just piling up in the "to read" pile, along with stuff like "Amazing Spider-Man," "Mighty Avengers," "Batman: Streets of Gotham," and some other mid-level comics. As my "to read" pile grew, and my time was filled up with more any more work-related and family-related activities, I just had to stop the bleeding somewhere. I did really enjoy the middle couple of issues of "Run" -- it turned into a crazy z-list supervillain romp pretty quickly, and I might finish the series eventually. "Ink" I just don't care about at all.

And, honestly, I ended up not caring about "Escape" by the end, either. I didn't think Marco Rudy was an amazing artist or anything, but I lost interest in the issues he wasn't drawing, and I don't even know what that series was even about in the end. What was it about, really?

"Dance" was the best of the bunch, but it faltered in the middle (because of the change in artists, probably), though it did finish pretty strongly. For me, it followed an inverse pattern compared to Joe Casey's other fall project: "Dark Reign: Zodiac." I liked the first issue of "Zodiac," LOVED the second issue, but thought the final issue was a bit disappointing. With "Dance," it was strong in the beginning, weak in the middle, and good at the end. I don't know if that means anything, but I found the contrast interesting. Though Nathan Fox's art trumps any page of "Dance."

Part of my lack of engagement in these "Final Crisis Aftermath" comics is that all my comics are in storage right now, awaiting our move to the new house (which should have happened by the time this "Splash Page" hits the interwaves), so I can't go back and read either "Dance" or "Escape" from start to finish. Maybe they are better than I remember them being. Maybe worse. What say you?

CN: What was "Escape" about? A lot of promise that doesn't really turn into anything that great. I know what you mean about the lack of Marco Rudy. His replacement, Cliff Richards, is on the same level when it comes to actual drawing skills -- their figures aren't that far apart -- but, man, Rudy was doing some fantastic layouts. Very inventive stuff that worked with whatever the idea/theme of that issue was. I loved the idea of having a page in the shape of a pawn from chess near the beginning of the issue and, then, an upside-down pawn at the end when things had gone south. That willingness to do a little more work made "Escape" a visually interesting series until he left. After, it wasn't as much. Although, Richards did some great work in the final issue.

Storywise, it was weird for the sake of weird it seems. All tests to prepare Nemesis (and everyone else) to be a member of the Global Peace Agency... except we never really learn that the GPA is about. I think Ivan Brandon set himself up to fail with those obtuse, surreal first issues that didn't really lead to anything. It was actually a very mundane story in the end, one that didn't approach the broad themes and ideas of Morrison's work as we thought it would. Maybe it will read better as a whole, I haven't had a chance to reread the whole series yet.

"Dance" also suffered from art changes, as you said, but was the best of the bunch. Joe Casey exploring the tropes and make-up of superhero teams, young superheroes, capitalist superheroes, and whatever else is always going to be worth three bucks each month. The end was stronger than I think most people realise since it was a subtle point about how wanting wealth and fame isn't the opposite of being a hero as many seem to think, that the Super Young Team can have both. Except Casey doesn't hit you over the head with that idea, he just hints at the question: what's the difference between Bruce Wayne/Batman and Tony Stark/Iron Man and the Super Young Team except that the Super Young Team doesn't take off the costumes? Not only that, it was a book that discussed these ideas and concepts while having an interesting 'coming of age' story as the main plot.

Now that the books have finished, do you think any of them are worthy follow-ups to "Final Crisis"?

TC: Here's an anecdote for you: As I was cleaning up some loose comics and throwing them in boxes, I came across "Dance" #5, flipped though it, and realized I had somehow never even read that issue. So I stopped my packing and read the sucker. It was really good, and it made issue #6 even better now that I know the lead-in. Duh. Amazing how that works! But I just assumed that I'd forgotten the previous installment in the haze of getting ready to move and the general overflow of too many comics in my brain. No. I just hadn't read the penultimate issue.

So to answer your question, I would say YES, "Dance" is a worthy follow-up to "Final Crisis." Is it better than "Final Crisis"? Hell, no, but it's at least about something. And though "Run" might have turned into a fun romp, and it did -- though I don't know how it ended -- and though "Escape" may have begun as something cool and different, only "Dance" actually said anything interesting about the role of the superhero.

Maybe it's just that Super Young Team is the best concept coming out of "Final Crisis." Maybe it was hard to screw it up. (I know it would have been easy to screw it up, though, because I've read comics inspired by Grant Morrison concepts that have been pretty terrible. I won't name any names, but, well, they all have tended to be terrible if Morrison thought them up and someone else wrote them. Except "Dance.") I just love Most Excellent Superbat's mask and partial Superman "S" shapes on his costume that become pure abstraction when removed from the "S" shield context (so much so that the cover artist paints them as triangular shapes instead of parts of the Superman insignia). And I love how the whole team is just an analogue for the original JLA but so they represent the essence of a classic superhero team while being totally wired into the now. I love the exaggerated pathos and the playfulness.

"Dance" was good. Even if the art was annoyingly inconsistent.

What about you, do you think "Dance" or "Escape" were worthy follow-ups? Do you think they even work as follow-ups at all? Because the "Escape" tie-in seems less than essential.

To be continued at GraphiContent!

Warren Ellis vs. Geoff Johns HITS THE SPLASH PAGE (Part 2 of 2!)

2009-10-18T19:30:00.005-04:00

I'm back! And with me, as usual, is Chad Nevett. We kicked off a discussion about "Cynicism vs. Sincerity" that turned into "Warren Ellis vs. Geoff Johns," and you can find the first part of that discussion over at Chad's blog. Read that, then come back here for the rest of the debate (as posted below)!

CN: One thing I wanted to bring up is the recent idea that Geoff Johns is both mocking people who read his books while, at the same time, capitalizing on them. The end of "Legion of 3 Worlds" springs to mind immediately -- aka the end of "Wanted." Now, Ellis has an interesting relationship with his fans that can be combative in a friendly way (I think), but I can't think of an instance that shows such open disdain for his readers either. What do you think?

Tim Callahan: Wow, is that a way for me to segue into another "good readers vs. bad readers" rant? No? Well, then I'll keep it simple: The Superboy Prime stuff isn't about mocking the readers, it's about mocking ridiculous fanboy whining. That can't be wrong, can it? Sure, some of the readers are ridiculous fanboy whiners, but they deserve the mockery they get. Or maybe they don't but I find it funny enough to let it slide. That's probably more true.

And, as I have pointed out, Superman's rogues gallery has always been a critique of the reader! It's part of the tradition!

Here's my problem with most Ellis comics, and it's a critique I've heard about Grant Morrison's work, but I don't think it applies in that case -- I do think it applies to Ellis, though. His comics are more about the idea than the execution. His stuff tends to fizzle out because it's not usually tightly plotted and the initial idea, or burst of ideas, might be exhilarating, but the stories aren't capable of sustaining the ideas in any meaningful way. I'm thinking of the fizzle in the last third of "Planetary," the last half of "Global Frequency" (which was, at best, sustained by the variety of artists, not the writing), his "Astonishing X-Men" run, the "Ultimate Galactus" Trilogy. They all get worse as they go on.

I'm making it sound as if I don't like any of those comics, when I like them (in some cases) very much, but I do think his weakness is in his pacing and plot structure and character development -- aka the storytelling basics. And Johns is really good at those things, even if his concepts and ideas begin from a weaker starting point.

And, for me, it's that cynicism again. A cynicism that appears on a structural level in Ellis's work. You might say that "Ellis wrote a comic book where things were saved by love," but it didn't feel like such a comic when I actually read it. It felt like an intellectual exercise. A comic about emotion that was itself emotionless.

I can't believe I've put myself in a position to argue on behalf of an emotional reaction to a comic when I have spent much of my critical career arguing against such things. Crazy!

Chad Nevett: Ellis's stories often are about ideas. He's a very idea-heavy writer, one that researches things extensively and works that into his fiction. I disagree that it's more about the idea than the execution (at least in the general sense since that would vary work to work). Let's take a very recent example: "Planetary" #27 where people focused on the pages of technobabble and ignored that the issue was about Elijah Snow possibly ending the world to save his friend. It was character driven completely, fuelled by passion (as evidenced in numerous arguments characters had), and, yes, filtered through a lot of theoretical physics... but that's not Ellis's problem. What I keep getting the sense from people (not just you) is that they choose to read Ellis's work in a specific way, much like people go into Morrison's comics assuming they won't get it. They assume Ellis is the cynical idea-heavy guy with no heart and that's what they get, partly, because he is that in some ways and, partly, because he doesn't hit you over the head with the emotional stuff. It's not that it isn't there, it's just there in a way that doesn't scream "Okay, now you people out there should go 'Awww!' and feel warm and fuzzy inside!"

But, addressing your argument that his pacing, etc. is weaker, again, I disagree. I'm not even sure I accept your premise that Johns is good at those technical matters from the work I've read. Ellis's pacing is a lot clearer and straight-forward. His string of three-issue minis from Wildstorm show this off quite well. "Fell" is very tightly-paced and structured -- and I connect with the main character. From the work I've read from Johns, it's very choppy and all over the place -- as I said before, Johns tries to cram too much in, most of it unnecessary to the story in the hopes of hitting those 'character moments' except they don't add to the story. He reminds me of a more verbose, continuity-obsessed Mark Millar, obsessed with making fanboys cream their jeans instead of telling a cohesive, well-plotted story with interesting, engaging ideas.

TC: But in "Planetary," how was that supposed friendship established? We're told that they're friends, we're shown it a bit, but it's not earned. It's Elijah Snow saving his friend only because Warren Ellis says it is. I certainly didn't sense any real friendship between the characters. Johns, on the other hand, goes for the heartstrings. When Tim Drake and Conner Kent talk, their friendship is obvious on every page in their dialogue, their reactions to one another. It's palpable. With Ellis, it's just words. It's the concept of friendship without the hard work of establishing the friendship.

And, yes, Johns is taking advantage of years and years of continuity to bolster the friendship, but I haven't actually read those "Young Justice" or "Superboy" comics involving Tim and Conner. He sells their friendship in just a few scenes much better than Ellis does in a few issues.

And I wonder about the "verbose" concern. Surely Ellis is, on average, as verbose as Johns, if not moreso. We should pull out some random Johns and Ellis comics and do a word-per-page count and see. The difference, of course, is that Ellis's verbosity is usually spent with his characters explaining something he read in some culture or science article, and Johns's verbosity is usually spent describing aspects of the hermetically sealed DC Universe. (So you may not care as much about Johns's words, and therefore they seem more oppressive.) Also, I don't think "Blackest Night" #1 is representative of Johns's other work. I like "Blackest Night" -- I like its ridiculous conceit and the bombast -- but the first issue was more verbose and stilted in a Brad Meltzer kind of way than what we normally see from Johns.

What have you actually read of his work, by the way? Because if you're basing it primarily on "Green Lantern: Rebirth," "Infinite Crisis," and the opening of "Blackest Night," then I can see where the "choppy" and "continuity-obsessed Mark Millar" comments come in. But his "Flash" run was different. So was "Teen Titans." So is "Adventure Comics."

CN: The 'verbose' comment of yours is right. I guess the difference, then, is that when Ellis has characters talk a lot, I don't mind, whereas I do with Johns. It could be that I like Ellis's dialogue more.

I have read "Infinite Crisis," the opening of "Blackest Night," and then issues of "Green Lantern," "Teen Titans," "Justice Society of America," and bits and pieces from other places. Not nearly as extensive as your reading of Ellis, but that's because I've yet to read a Johns-penned comic that's made me want to read another. Honestly, what it comes down to is that I can see the man has talent, I just find him boring. Because I don't feel a strong connection to these characters, none of his work has any impact on me.

I also don't like his approach to superhero comics whereas I love Ellis's. Johns bases stories very much on what characters he likes, which ones he wants to push and place front and center. Ellis bases his stories on what will make for a better story. The lack of fondness he has for superheroes that people often decry makes for stories where the characters that you read about are there because they serve the story, not nostalgia or fan-obsession. I mentioned this elsewhere, but I've often considered Ellis as the example in mainstream superhero comics of the 'Professional Writer' who takes a job and does the best job he can because he's a writer -- Johns represents the much larger group in mainstream superhero comics, the 'Fan Writer.' And I don't want anyone to think that I'm calling that group unprofessional, it's just that their first goal, often, seems (key word right there) like it's 'honoring' these characters and the history rather than serving the story. That can sometimes lead to better stories, ones that build on the past and come off fantastic... or they can not. The same can happen to the 'Professional Writer,' of course, but that's the approach that I find clicks with me more often than not.

TC: Well since this basically evolved (or devolved) into Ellis vs. Johns, and because this all started with my response to one of your lists, let's end it with some lists, since I'm obviously not going to convince you to read any more Geoff Johns comics anytime soon, but you can always convince me to read more Warren Ellis.

But I'll list the Top 5 Geoff Johns comics, and you list the Top 5 Warren Ellis comics, and we'll let our readers decide who's the best!

Top 5 Geoff Johns comics, counting down:

5. Flash
4. Action Comics
3. Teen Titans
2. Adventure Comics
1. Green Lantern

Honorable Mention: JSA (pre-One Year Later)

CN: Yeah, I've given Johns plenty of chances to impress me and he hasn't (aside from "Infinite Crisis" #2 with the basis of the crossover being the previous decade of DC's output has sucked, I dug that idea -- and I enjoyed talking with him once for an interview, which makes disliking his writing always a little annoying/depressing/guilt-inducing). But, my Top 5 Warren Ellis comics:

5. Red

4. Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E.

3. Planetary

2. Transmetropolitan

1. Stormwatch/The Authority (as that's one run/larger story, of course)

Honorable Mention: Strange Kiss/Stranger Kisses/Strange Killings/Gravel (again, really one series divided up into numerous minis)

I want to end it on one final thought: if we were to make this a top ten list... who would have the easier time coming up with a complete list without feeling like they're throwing works in to fill spots? I know the answer, of course, but had to get that little dig in there. That said, we haven't gotten to the truly epic column: where you call me out on calling Ellis a better writer than Morrison.

TC: Ha! and double Ha! I could easily do a Top 10 list on Johns without skipping a beat, and do another one for Ellis just as quickly (and "Red" sure as hell wouldn't be in there). Maybe we'll save that for a special Top 10 Showdown! Right after you try to justify your sleep-induced declaration that Ellis is in any way better than Morrison.

CN: It was lack of sleep... and I stand by it.

The TVRC's Tarantino 24-Hour Film Festival Line-Up

2009-09-06T18:50:00.004-04:00

This past week, in celebration of the recent release of "Inglorious Basterds," Television's Ryan Callahan hosted an ambitious film festival in the mean back alleys of Los Angeles. Though the line-up was an industry secret before, during, and after the event, my spies in the greater Koreatown area were able to intercept a memo about the clandestine screening schedule, complete with The TVRC's personal notations:

Pre-festival viewing:
Inglorious Bastards (Not any better the second time)
Manaja: A Man Called Blade (The last great Spaghetti Western)
Man Hunt (A must-see. A perfect companion for Inglorious Basterds)
Pan's Labyrinth (Not sure if you've heard of this film, but it's actually pretty good.)
Memories of Murder (Fantastic Korean police procedural. Same star director of the host)
Repulsion (One of the better crazy person films I've ever seen.)
The Big, Red One (Less erotic than expected. Great war film.)
Breaking News (From PTU director Johnnie To. Much better than PTU. Open shooting worth price of admission alone and since I watched it on my couch that price was only 3 dollars.)
Le Doulos (Yeah, this movie's great)

Actual Marathon Card (Card subject to change)
12 - Jackie Brown
2:35 - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
5:35 - Man Hunt
7:20 - Black Sabbath
8:50 - Blow Out
10:40 - His Girl Friday
12:15 - Battle Royale
2:15 - Used Cars
4:15 - Coffy
5:35 - All Monsters Attack
6:45 - The Killers
8:15 - Magnificent Obsession
10:00 - Pulp Fiction

Just missing the cut:
City on Fire
Lady Snowblade
The Great Silence
They All Laughed
Vanishing Point
Seven Men From Now
Kiss Me Deadly
The Killing

Now you, too, can pretend you were hanging out with The TVRC, drinking Mexican Coke and eating melted candy bars. If you're man enough.

Chad Continues to Roll Out the Bendis

2009-08-22T20:24:00.003-04:00

He's still got 12 1/2 hours of blogging, and already Chad Nevett has something like 17,000 words written about the Avengers comics of Brian Michael Bendis and the various spin-offs.

You should be over there reading his posts and entering the fray that is the comment section.

Last time I wrote 20,000 words over the course of a weekend, my wrists and fingers were numb for a week. Chad's probably a lot tougher than me, though. But he looks like he'll be way over the 20,000-word mark by the time he's done.

Bendis! Nevett!

The Factual Opinion All-Star Junior Varsity

2009-08-16T23:59:00.002-04:00

With Tucker Stone off spelunking in the Andes, the Factual Opinion HQ assembled an all-star partial replacement squad to address the big question of the week: which comics are good, which are not, and how can they all be mocked with elegance and sophistication?

The Factual Opinion All-Star Junior Varsity:

Jog
Tim O'Neil
David Brothers
Sean Witzke
Noah Berlatsky
Chris Mautner
and playing right field: Me

Watch and learn, internet.

Morrison's "Drivel," By Popular Demand

2009-08-10T19:15:00.000-04:00

SPOILER Alert

2009-08-05T23:56:00.001-04:00

Bet you didn't expect this guy to show up in a Marvel comic this week, did you?

CBR LOVES X-Factor

2009-08-04T12:12:00.004-04:00

Remember my one-star review of "X-Factor" that Marvel ended up using as a press release? Now they're using it as a house ad!

X-Factor: It deserves credit!

I Write for CBR, But I Dance Harder

2009-08-02T23:32:00.007-04:00

After making a promise to link to my CBR writing and, in general, update this blog a bit more, I have just simply failed to do anything. Twitter has abducted my blogging impulses and spit them out into short bursts of the clever. Or the not-so-clever but-merely-obvious. I suspect I'm not the only one who has fallen into its clutches and lost the will to blog. (Geoff Klock, do you feel the stare of kinship?)

Yet I've written so much for CBR over the past couple of months, and I have brought barely any of it to your attention. And you tell me that you sometimes don't even READ my columns or reviews unless I link to them here. I feel you on that. I don't read everything at CBR either (shhhhh, that's supposed to be a secret, because I tell everyone that I read all of their stuff all the time). I mean, I read my own stuff, because I always know that I'll find a typo that slipped by me the first time, and because I forget what I've written about ten seconds after I submit it (does anyone else have this problem, or is my memory just old and full of crusty bits?).

Really, it's about time I linked you to my recent stuff. So: I wrote a bunch of stuff about Captain America, way back in June. Remember Cap? Remember June? And an early review of/reflection on "Asterios Polyp" that I must have linked to already, but now everyone and their mother is all like "blah blah, it's the best graphic novel, blah blah" and basically just repeating the kinds of things I said way before they even saw the book. Try to keep up, okay everyone else?

What else? Oh, I had a bit of fun talking about the behind-the-scenes of the comic review and riled up Peter David in the process. I didn't do it on purpose, but it ended up stirring the pot o' X-fans nonetheless. Good times, I suppose, and it happened to coincide with something similar Roger Ebert talked about. Synchronicity? Or am I just a crotchety old guy too? Or maybe he was reading CBR and thought that he could steal my column topic and run with it? Maybe all of the above.

Then I talked up an obscure little title called, I think, "Wednesday Comics"? I don't know what happened to that series, but a couple of dudes keep trying to talk about it each and every week, even when one of them has no internet.

I dabbled in the world of cats and romance with Ethan Young, and then I celebrated my one year "When Words Collide" Anniversary the only way I know how: alone. I already told you about the New Awesomeness of SDCC 2009, so I won't bother linking to it here.

And I reviewed a TON OF STUFF. Like this comic about a guy who's really sad. And one about another guy who's kinda sad, but really, really fast. Nobody sad here, is there? And, oh, this review didn't get me any dates with the Shatterstar cosplay crowd. I don't even remember this one, but this one was Gruenwaldy! This one was disappointing, and this one made Joe Casey send me an e-mail, but now we're best buds so it's all good. This one was the best Daniel Way comic I've ever read, and this one was like that novel and TV show but TOTALLY different from what happened to Batman at the end of "Final Crisis" as someone pointed out to me vehemently in San Diego. This one has less ass hair than the first issue. This one features too little Bryan Hitch, and this one is pretty epic for a comic about two disfigured cowpersons. This one's rural noir, while this one is pretty good but not good enough for Andy Khouri. This one is like a tv show I wouldn't bother watching regularly, but isn't bad. This one has an Asgardian frog. This one: tends to piss people off unless they love it. This one I wouldn't take home to Mama. Dad, sure! This one's in space. This one's foldy. This one has big teeth. This one is too much splort and not enough anything good. This one was sent to me by an editor, but I suspect he wishes he didn't send it to me now that he's read the review.

Okay, now comment on all that stuff!

The Advent of the New Awesome: San Diego Comic-Con 2009

2009-07-27T21:59:00.004-04:00

This week's "When Words Collide" recounts my five days of adventure at SDCC 2009 (or CCI 2009, if you want to be accurate). Thrill to my breaking and entering exploits, my reckless convention floor non-buying behavior, and my celebration of all things awesome.

Read it, comment upon it, live it.

Comic Con 2009 Pics

2009-07-26T14:19:00.005-04:00

Brian Michael Bendis showed up in disguise so as not to attract attention:

Geoff Johns ruminated on the greatness of Grant Morrison, on camera, for all the world to (eventually) see:

They trotted out Castle Grayskull last year, too. I wonder what happens to it between Comic Cons:

Jeff Lemire and Josh Dysart read this blog every day and beg me to include more photos of them. So I do:

Special feature on the blu-ray "Watchmen" two-disc set. These three show up at your house and punch you in the face:

The Prez:

Penny!

Did you take the picture yet, I ask? No he did not, apparently.

Jonah may have won the Eisner for CBR, but Dean Trippe and I take all the credit whether we deserve it or not. You can't stop us. (Jessi Awesome's legs can't even get between us and our coveted Eisner.)

Jason Aaron wears his limited edition Morrison tribute glasses while talking about how his favorite comics are ones called "X" and "Men" and written by Chris Claremont:

My San Diego Schedule

2009-07-21T15:21:00.003-04:00

I don't have a San Diego schedule, suckers! I'm on vacation, going to the convention with Television's Ryan Callahan for pleasure, not profit. Though I'll thrill you with tales of my adventures in Monday's "When Words Collide" column.

And I'm interviewing Matt Fraction for a documentary.

And I'm being interviewed for a different documentary.

And I'm meeting with an editor who is interested in having me join a new publishing line.

Other than that -- no plans! I'll see you all in San Diego. And for those of you who can't make it, follow my Twitter feed for constant updates from the floor. As I have fun all week long.

(This is photo was taken in a quiet little corner of Television Ryan Callahan's new pad. Check out that Michael V. Bennett "Army Men" artwork!)

This Guy, I Like!

2009-07-15T22:42:00.001-04:00

I'll be stalking Kevin all weekend, and I hope you will be too.

Kirby, Steranko, Pope and More: My eBay Action

2009-07-10T05:30:00.006-04:00

As part of my Great Comic Book Reorganization efforts, I'm selling some comics on eBay!

You want some classic Jack Kirby Silver Age action? You can get it.

Jim Steranko? Yup.

Paul Pope? Absolutely.

Jerry Ordway and Todd McFarlane? Um, yes, but this list gets less impressive as it goes along, doesn't it. Yes!

Jim Aparo's pretty great, though, right? Jim? Aparo? "Batman and the Outsiders? No? YES!

Anyway, I offer a link to my aBay auctions because I want to sell this stuff to people I love and admire. Bid away, my friends, and if you're a Geniusboy Firemelon regular and you end up winning any of these auctions, let me know, and I'll throw in some other free comics as a bonus!

Alan Moore? File under "H" for "Has-Been"?

2009-07-06T01:06:00.003-04:00

The title of this post doesn't make any sense, but I couldn't think of anything else to use, so I figured I'd come up with something to start a blood feud between CBR's George Khoury and myself.

It's on, George Khoury. Bring the pain!

Okay, what this post is about is something much more mundane than Alan Moore's current relevance or my imaginary war with George Khoury: it's about sorting comics.

I'm literally in the midst of thousands of comics. They surround me, here in my geek lair, as I try to somehow make more space by putting all of them in unwieldy longboxes. I don't know how the physics on this kind of thing works, but I somehow think that if I take these piles and piles of comics that have been building up and slip them into my already alphabetically-organized collection of comics, I'll somehow have space to walk around and, I don't know, own other things besides comics. It's doomed to failure, I know, but I just can't leave these piles all over the place. One false move and I could lose a child in this mess.

So, here's my question for my faithful readers. How do you organize your comics? Specifically, do you organize them by title or by creator? Because what I've found is that I have my gigantic stacks of alphabetized long boxes (by title), a couple of Grant-Morrison-only boxes (that I separated when I was writing the book, and then just kept separate for convenience), three "Legion of Super-Heroes"-only boxes (same reason), and then piles and piles of comics I've purchased over the past two or three years (some of those "piles" have ended up in random longboxes, but completely unsorted, just to get them out of the way).

But my new system this time is to create more creator-specific boxes (or parts of boxes), because I find myself referring to some comics far more than others. Alan Moore's an obvious example, and it really doesn't make sense to have my copies of "Top 10" and "Miracleman" mixed in with incomplete runs of "Tailgunner Jo" and "Monsters on the Prowl." So, that would give me easier-to access Alan Moore comics. I've done the same with Matt Fraction, rounding up my scattered "Uncanny X-Men" issues just so I could write things that would make Ultimate Matt mad, and I've done the same with my Jason Aaron comics , pulling all the "Scalped" issues and "Ghost Rider" issues (and other sundries) into a single box.

Who else would you isolate and box separately? I'm doing it for Ed Brubaker, too, I think. Well, I guess I AM doing it, since I've kept his comics in a separate pile as I sort and alphabetize everything else. Garth Ennis gets his own box, basically on account of "Preacher" alone, but it will be nice to have his war comics and "The Boys" all in one place. Warren Ellis gets a box. So does Joe Casey. Mark Millar does too, as frustrating a writer as he is, because I can imagine doing some kind of retrospective on his work or referring to specific runs more than once.

Who else might you separate? Would you give Bendis a box or ten? Azzarello? Gaiman (even though I sold my "Sandman" comics years ago and have his good stuff in collected editions)? Kirkman? Giffen? Would you do it by artist? The more refined you get with a creator-based division, the more runs you break up and then it's hard to find that issue of "Jonah Hex" you were looking for because you can't remember which artists drew it without looking it up online and cross-referencing it with your collection.

What's your system, if you have one?

Cry For Justice: The Remixes

2009-07-04T04:24:00.003-04:00

Believe it or not, I don't exactly agree with Doug Zawisza's baffling five-star review of "Justice League: Cry for Justice" #1.

But I do agree with THIS.

And THIS.

"Cry for Justice," indeed. James Robinson may not live this one down.

Bagley and Williams III Fistfight in Heaven

2009-06-30T08:08:00.003-04:00

Since my last WWC column, I've been getting plenty of e-mails and Tweets from people defending Mark Bagley's work and saying stuff like "while it's true that Bagley couldn't have drawn 'Promethea,' Williams III couldn't have drawn 'Ultimate Spider-Man.'" Yeah, that's just plain wrong.

Why is it hard for people to accept that drawing is a skill and some people are better at it than others? Sure, there are plenty of fuzzy areas, and I would have trouble saying that J. H. Williams III is better than Dan Clowes, for example, but Williams III vs. Bagley? Really, there's no contest.

Williams III:

Bagley:

Plans Derailed. New Plans Taking Shape.

2009-06-21T22:57:00.002-04:00

As you can tell, after over a year of near-daily updates, I've fallen into a rut of inconsistency over the past couple of months. I had planned to come back from my blogging break re-energized and ready to write like crazy. Then I'd planned to come back from my family trip to Disney re-energized and ready to write like crazy. Then I planned to come back from my conference last week and, well, you get the idea.

But I just can't seem to get back to the daily update schedule anymore. For two reasons:

1) I'm not overly excited about any Marvel and DC comics right now. I have been writing about mainstream superhero-ish stuff for years, and even though I'm enjoying Grant Morrison's return to Batman and Geoff Johns's Green Lantern super-epic and Rick Remender's crazy riff on Punisher and Jason Aaron's greatness on Scalped, I don't know that I have anything new to say about that stuff. It's the same good stuff I've been raving about for a while and the same bad stuff that I've been railing against for a while. And CBR pays me to do those things, so it's difficult to do them for free when it's just more of the same.

2) I have a brand-new job. Two of them, actually. I've become English department head, and I've become Dean of Curriculum and Instruction at my school. My teaching load has lessened considerably, but now I have tons o' administrative responsibilities. With the school preparing for a very different composition of students and faculty next year, and with curricular changes to accomodate the new composition, I have a lot to do right now and all summer long. And then after that, forever and ever. It's an exciting time, it's a time to solve problems and lay the solid groundwork for a new year (and beyond), so it's a little bit tricky to find time to immerse myself in comics like I could, oh, a couple of months back. Also, do I have it in me to care what Domino is up to or what case Manhunter needs to solve next? Not so much these days.

I'll still be reviewing comics and writing columns for CBR (probably less reviews per week than normal, though), and I'll still be posting here occasionally, but I'll need to change the promise of "updated daily" on the masthead. I've got other priorities right now, and they're good ones.

As you're waiting for my next update, go ahead and read some "Asterios Polyp," if you were lucky enough to get an early copy. It's a great comic!

At a Conference -- Not Much Comic Action

2009-06-10T19:25:00.001-04:00

I'm at a conference for work this week, so I won't be updating until Saturday, but I'm trying to stop by the local comic shops while I'm out here in Newton, Massachusetts. I'll let you know if I find anything cool.

When Words Collide: Adventures in MoCCALand

2009-06-09T19:53:00.002-04:00

So there was this thing in NYC last weekend? MoCCA Art Fesival? Perhaps you've heard of it?

Anyway, Todd Casey and I hit the MoCCA Festival hard and came back with some stories to tell and some comics to read. My story popped up at CBR in yesterday's "When Words Collide." Read it and enjoy!

Review: Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3

2009-06-08T13:37:00.004-04:00

In the history of my CBR reviewery (and I've written well over 300 reviews in the past 15 months), I've only given the coveted five-star review three times. "Casanova" #14 got the perfect score. So did "All-Star Superman" #10. Now, another comic has joined that elite rank: "Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye" #3. Man, did I really like this comic.

You should read the heck out of the whole series and then eagerly anticipate the final three issue mini which, according to Cameron Stewart, we can expect in the summer of 2010!

EW on Asterios Polyp

2009-06-08T09:16:00.003-04:00

In the grade-A review of Mazzucchelli's "Asterios Polyp," Sean Howe of "EW" mentions the "nearly subliminal color symbolism" in the book. The symbolism is anything but subliminal -- it's an essential detail that's commented upon within the text. That doesn't make it any less great, though.

But it's like saying that the bat motif in Bruce Wayne's life is subliminal.