So So Silver Age

Hey look! New content!

2006-08-04T22:50:00.000-04:00

So... haven't been reading new stuff lately (as I mentioned in the last post). But Franny and I each have an article in this month's edition of that nifty online zine, The Comic Foundry.

True to form, Franny writes something intellectual, citing actual theories and forming coherent sentences.

I, on the other hand, write something that is equal parts ZOMGFLAIL and fanboy snark.

So go, check that out. Let us know what you think, and maybe we'll do that again.

...If you're here because you Googled one of us after reading our stuff in CF, welcome! Please take a look at the "Best Of" links to the right, and enjoy your stay.

Creative titles are overrated

2006-05-25T23:13:00.000-04:00

So. I haven't written in a very long time. And there's a very important reason why.

First off, I didn't want to come in here after Franny has written some very well-composed, articulate pieces about very good indie comics and sound like "that guy" on comics forums, the asshole who rants about the most inane shit:

But that feeling quickly passed. I'm passionate about comics. When I'm passionate about something, I tend to swear like a sailor. And I still think dumb shit like the O RLY? owl is really, really funny. So fuck trying to be "academic" and "safe for work."

So the real reason I've been silent for so long? I got tired. I got really, really fucking tired of new comics. I'm tired of One Year Later, I'm tired of Infinite Crisis, and saddest of all, I'm really tired of 52 and I haven't even read a damn page of the thing.

That's what made me realize it. After I graduated from MSU earlier this month, I moved away from my beloved comics shop back to my parents' place in Saginaw. So I haven't read any new comics for over three weeks.

And, amazingly, I don't miss them at all. I've missed the first three issues of 52 and I couldn't care less.

I had way more fun reading old issues of Action Comics Weekly than I did reading most of what's come out in the past four months. And that's sad.

Seriously, people. In ten years 52 will be in exactly the same position Action Comics Weekly is now. Some of it is pretty good, some of it is eye-gougingly bad... and all of it will be in the quarter bin. So why freak out about it? I have so many other things I'd rather spend my energy on. Like playing World of Warcraft and doodling little pictures of Art Spiegelman getting sexually harassed by furries.

So! Here's to the old ones, the bad ones, the cracktastic ones. Here's to the issues in your longbox you'll love long after the latest crossover has been retconned out of existence.

For the first time in my life, I'm without my precious, mile-long pull list.

And it feels pretty good.

Palomar

2006-04-29T19:48:00.000-04:00

Starting to read independent and experimental comics is like entering any fandom, although I think many creators in the genre would bristle at that term. Success at finding something you like is much more likely if you have a friend to guide you and make recommendations. The good stuff comes largely through word of mouth--if you go only by books that get big shiny recognition, you end up with Jimmy Corrigan, which may be revolutionary but is absolutely no fun to read.

I am a very suspicious reader. But I can say with certainty that my latest read, Gilbert Hernandez's half of Love and Rockets, is absolutely deserving of the heaps of praise it has gotten in the several decades since it debuted. I picked up the trade hardcover edition Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories because I intended to look in it for traces of a codex legacy--I'm working on a paper for a class on American Indian rhetorics that's trying to imagine a decolonial history for the comic book. While I didn't exactly find what I was originally looking for, the work had obvious connections to other literary and comic book texts.

All of Gilbert Hernandez's stories in this collection take place in the fictional town of Palomar, which he glosses as meaning "pigeon coop". This world-building impulse can be traced back to two sources--Gabriel García Marquez's town of Macondo, featured in One Hundred Years of Solitude as well as DC Comics' own fictionopolises like Metropolis and Gotham. He actually references the ironic connection to Macondo in the text, but the Metropolis link is extra-textual. His author bio mentions a childhood love of Superman, and to me as a reader, the impulse to create a fictional town with a vague geographical location is as much a legacy of DC in his work as it is a legacy of that other super-famous South American writer.

That's a fun detail that makes my literary brain happy, but it's also an engaging read. The portrayal of small-town life is really...authentic. That's always a problematic word to use, but the characters truly felt like real people to me. I'm not from a poor Mexican rural town, so I can't really judge it on accuracy there, but as far as human nature goes, G. Hernandez understands souls passing through this world.

I was surprised as to how much disability there is in the work. This relates to the feeling of authenticity--in the real world, disabled folks are everywhere, they just end up invisible in many forms of media. If you know what to look for they are everywhere in superhero comics, but I had discounted indie comics from my search (more because I know a lot more about superheroes than I do anything else). I was short-sighted--the town of Palomar embodies what James Trent describes as the oldest form of reaction to people with disabilities (mental in his case, as his book was Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States). They are integrated into the community because there is no other possibility. One man is referred to sometimes as "Martín el Loco" but ultimately he is just another part of the town. I'm not sure anyone has ever done a disability-related analysis of the work but it merits further thought.

I'm still a little skeptical of all the praise Love and Rockets has received for good portrayals of women, as it is written by men, but it's very similar to the situation with Y: The Last Man. Dudes get gold medals for not being violently sexist. But I digress: the women are really cool characters, not judged by the author's gaze for being as sexually active as the men in the series.

Anyway, I loved what I have read so far, and since there is WAY more to read where that came from, my next stop will either be the Jaime Hernandez half of stuff or G. Hernandez's later works following his central character, Luba, and others after they leave Palomar.

My first comic

2006-04-21T17:30:00.000-04:00

It's no longer "first comics week" but I have no concept of time other than it is flying, so I'm going to tell you about my first comic anyway.

As a young child, I was something of a female chauvinist. I didn't have any feminist analysis of oppression or hate men for any patriarchal sense, I just thought boys were gross, as well as everything that was even nominally male. Toy dinosaurs and trucks weren't actually male, so they were okay, but any anthropomorphic or humanoid toy had to be female for me to play with it. I had a rocking horse on springs that was technically named "Thunder" but I renamed it Jill so she could be a girl. Needless to say, I hardly had any Ken dolls. Actually, I never had a real Ken; I had Mr. Heart, the dad of a family of dolls, an Aladdin doll, and Prince Phillip doll from Sleeping Beauty. However, I had (still have) dozens of girl dolls. They took over my bedroom and were finally relegated to one half of the basement.

Suffice to say, when Marvel released a Barbie comic book, I was all over it. My first comic books were Barbie Comics #1 and Barbie Fashion #1 (they came bundled together). I have no idea what was in it or what the story was like, but it was pink and there were paper dolls and lots of pictures of clothes.

I do remember that it had a letters column. One letter has stuck in my mind to this day--a guy wrote in a few issues in after he had read his little sister's Barbie comics. He said that he was tired of ultra-violent comics like The Punisher and it made him happy to see that there was at least one Marvel comic book out there that told cute, funny stories without any gore.

There were Marvel company ads for other titles they sold, and I especially recall their ads for X-Men because I assumed all the characters they showed were boys, including Storm. I was ridiculously surprised and pleased when Fox Kids first aired the X-Men cartoon and I found out that she was a girl. If there were even a few girl X-Men I could make a concession and like them, even though there were boys too. (In the end I liked Rogue much better. Maybe I would have gone the other way if they used her costume from Claremont's leather years, but as it was Rogue had awesome hair and a cool belt.)

My one frustration was that there were never any superhero Barbies to play with. I really, really, really wanted X-Men Barbies. The closest they ever came while I was a kid was Flying Hero Barbie, who was pink and glittery--not like any X-Men I knew. The release of Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and (ugly) Batgirl barbies along with Elektra, the Invisible Woman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy dolls made my heart happy for the current generation of weird little girls who want their dolls to kick butt as well as have hair long enough to brush and lots of interesting outfits to wear. And, of course, I bought some for myself. Supergirl and Wonder Woman are wearing each other's costumes right now and sitting on top of my toybox. Seriously.

Waiting for Scott McCloud

2006-04-06T11:03:00.000-04:00

Two men sit in a room. Neither knows why they are there. A table, or perhaps a picture of a table repeated over and over on the page, lies between them. There is a door, exquisitely crosshatched, and a window.

“Do you think there is a world outside that door?” asks the man in the mouse mask.

“I assume so,” replies the man with fat lips and blank glasses. “The world does not cease to exist when it is not observed by humans. A tree has life outside of human consciousness, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t. Know what you mean, that is. Do you know why we are here?” He takes off his mouse mask, throwing it on the floor, to reveal another mouse mask. You no longer see the first mask, but despite this, you assume it continues to exist.

“You asked me that. No.”

They stare blankly at each other for a moment.

“Do you have a name?” asks the man with fat lips.

“Art Spiegelman.”

“Let’s go.”

“We can’t”, says Art, “We’re waiting for Scott McCloud.”

“So what do we do while we wait?”

“We could hang ourselves.”

“We don’t have any rope.”

Art grimaces. “We could draw ourselves hanging ourselves. We are cartoonists, aren’t we?”

“Oh. I guess we are.”

They draw.

The man with fat lips asks: “Do you have a mouth?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you did, because all my sensory evidence implies that you are talking to me. I assumed you had a mouth, but when I thought about it, I realized that I could not see it. Isn’t that strange?”

“Scott McCloud would call that closure, the process of seeing the parts but observing the whole."

“I don’t understand how that relates to whether or not you have a mouth, Mr. Spiegelman.”

Now that they have both said this, you become uneasy about the continued existence of the mouse mask on the floor. You no longer see it, and are apprehensive about whether or not it continues to exist, as you previously assumed. Perhaps this mouse mask only existed in your mind in the first place.

“I have a stylized face, do I not, mister…”

“Sacco. I’m Joe Sacco. Look, can you take off your mask? It’s really bothering me. I’d like to see your face in better detail.”

“Ah, but how then could you relate to me? The less detail there is in my face, the more people my face can describe. Besides,” Spiegelman continues, “Isn’t your face just a mask anyway? Facing outward from the day you were born?”

Sacco stands up and begins to pace.

“That’s ludicrous. My face is my face. Besides, I’m a cartoonist. I know about faces and drawing. I’ve made comic books about genocide, for Christ’s sake. But I draw in great detail—stylized and distorted imagery at times, to be sure, but with great detail. And I don’t think this makes it harder for people to relate to my comics than if they starred an army of stick figures.”

“What is real, Mr. Sacco?” Spiegelman takes off his mouse mask to reveal a human mask. He places the second mouse mask on the table, where you can see it. It continues to exist.

“Oh stop it. I draw in detail because I believe that detail, as well as my strategies for drawing interviews, give my work realism.”

“Remember, I am a cartoonist as well, Mr. Sacco. I did Maus. Both parts.”

“Congratulations. Frankly, I found your characters hard to tell apart from one another. If the only distinguishing feature of your individual characters are their attributes, their clothes, hat, accessories, then you are not working hard enough.”

“But my work is about the arbitrariness of the Holocaust—how it conflated individuals into one group identity to be extinguished. From the point of view of the Nazis, all Jews were the same. I reappropriated this sameness as well as the image of Jews as vermin, as mice, therefore transgressing the original meaning and purpose of the image. Anyone reading my book knows Jews do not all look the same in the real world, but in a cartoon world, characters do. Cartoon worlds, like that of Disney—“
Spiegelman pauses to spit on the ground.

“—have cultural connotations of niceness and happiness. I’m subverting those happy memories to tell a story about memory. The story is not about exactly how many Jews died in the Holocaust—my father couldn’t even remember exactly all the details of his own experience. My use of cartoons places my story in the realm of concepts.”

Sacco puzzles over this, while Spiegelman removes his human mask. You look away, and when you look at the next image, you see it has disappeared. You do not know where it went. His face is that of a mouse.

Spiegelman continues: “You are a reporter, are you not?”

Sacco nods.

“Your comics report on facts. It is only proper, according to McCloud, that you use great detail. Your works are in the realm of the physical world, and communicate the materiality of violence and warfare. Facts and dates, while never absolute, are nonetheless more important in your work than mine.”

“Does the level of detail I use on the grass in the background of my panels really affect how I present my facts? Most of those facts are stated in caption boxes or dialogue balloons."

“Ah, but the detail communicates materiality,” Spiegelman says with italic emphasis. “It gives the facts weight and physical presence, which lends to their credibility in the audience’s eye.”

“Okay, fine. Be vague and lacking in detail if you must. But why are we doing this in the first place? What’s the big deal about cartoons? I’m a big deal in comic books, and I don’t even know why,” says Sacco.

“Cartoons have a kind of acidic potency for clarifying a situation because they're reductive."

“Reductive, eh? This room is pretty acidic and reductive. I think I’m going to leave.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you. You assume there’s something out there, but there’s only something there because you believe it to be so. Neither of us has any sensory evidence that there is anything outside. Nothing can be seen through that window. Your perception of reality is an ‘act of faith, based on mere fragments’."

“I’ve had it with you! “Closure” is the only way the world makes sense! If you stop believing that things exist outside of your sight, then you’d go mad! I’m leaving.”

Neither man moves.

***

Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman sit at a kitchen table, reading an essay by Franny Howes titled “Waiting for Scott McCloud”.

“This is terrible,” Spiegelman says. “She makes me out to be some kind of McCloud worshipping murine Zen master. And the assignment was to write a fictitious conversation between the two of us about Understanding Comics. She never even mentions the book.”

“But we were obviously talking about it, I mean, closure and all.” Sacco sips his coffee. Scent lines, a visual metaphor, rise from it, as if from a cartoon pile of feces. However, there are no flies, and there is no evidence to indicate that it smells bad. Thus, you assume the coffee is hot and fragrant.

“But what was her point? That we’re all postmodern weirdos?”

“Be nice. I think she was saying that while it is not the be-all, end-all of theories (signified by my character’s vocal protests), McCloud’s theory of abstract cartoons really does help to explain the difference between our styles. We are both realists, but your realism is a fuzzy realism of memory, and mine is a hard-edged realism of fact.”

“But you address memory in your work as well.”

“Yes, but I don’t problematize it. Part of reporting is sorting out the unreliable sources before you construct your article/comic book/whatever, and only using reliable sources, thus eliminating this question. In contrast, Maus, especially part II, has a strong concern with how to represent memory, especially when you show yourself pondering how to draw Françoise, or being besieged by the media, as well as every part that involves discourse with your father."

“What about all that mask stuff? And whether or not the world exists?”

“Duh, Art. It was an abstract attempt to grapple with McCloud’s notion of closure. She’s merely illustrating through text the phenomenon’s importance, and pointing out its action in the mind of the reader. By pointing it out and problematizing it, she draws attention to it, in the same way that McCloud illustrates it by having the world behind the little boy disappear without him watching it, or stating that he has no legs."

Spiegelman looks resigned. His face wrinkles with frustration. “Fine, Sacco, you win this round. For all I know, I’m a fictional character merely conceding to make a rhetorical point, but you still win.”

With that, Sacco and Spiegelman disappear and are replaced by something infinitely stranger. Who’s to say this has not happened before, and will not happen again?

GODDAMMIT GEOFF JOHNS, GET OUT OF MY TEETH

2006-03-30T13:59:00.000-05:00

Reading Green Lantern Rebirth #5, I said to myself: Oh for Gods sake, he better not waste too much time next issue with Batman. Just hit the bastard and get to the real fight. The next month?

KRAKK.

I've always wished for Arisia or Katma Tui to come back to life... and I'd really love Arisia to come back as this sexy butch broad who doesn't take shit from anybody...

In Green Lantern Corps: Recharge, I got a butch version of Katma Tui. Close enough.

I've always wanted to see Hal break the Cyborg Superman in half for what he did to Coast City. (I cannot overstress my visceral hatred of that character.) Reading the previews for May's comics, who do I see on the cover of Green Lantern 12?

Oh, fuck yes.

Walking home yesterday with my comics under my arm, I planned in my head an entry about Steve Englehart's run on Green Lantern Corps... specifically, the issues where Kilowog heads off to the USSR, and the Earth GLs have to deal with the conflict of being heroes for the whole planet vs. their status as Americans. I've told Franny that I'd really love for someone to update that story... After all, you had 7 people with weapons of mass destruction living in a compound in southern California. It's not a stretch to imagine an administration that would declare them a terrorist cell and a threat to homeland security. Or, at the very least, they'd make a lot of other countries very, very nervous.

About ten minutes after formulating that thought, I opened this week's Green Lantern.

Arguing the political complexities of Green Lanterns. While fighting ROCKET REDS, for God's sake!

Literally everything I've ever randomly hoped for in Green Lantern over the past couple of years has been delivered to me by Geoff Johns.

...I swear to God, if I had any fillings I'd be checking them for radio transceivers right now.

Franny, who is always the voice of reason when I lose my shit over things like this, said it's most likely because Geoff and I have a lot in common: Michigan native. MSU alum. Unreasonable obsession with Hal Jordan and test pilots.

But still. It's spooky as hell.

And as long as there might be a chance I've got a psychic connection to Mr. Johns, the Lord and Master of DC Continuity, here are a couple of requests:

*Hal and Guy watching the MSU vs. U of M football game. Hal wearing an MSU T-shirt just to piss Guy off.

*Boodika beating the ever living piss out of Hal in revenge for the loss of her ring and hand.

*More gloriously slashy Hal/Kyle moments.

*Hot hot pilot makeouts between Hal and Cowgirl in the back of an F-15. (Yes, I know it's not even remotely comfortable/possible from a positioning standpoint. It's my fantasy. Shut up.)

*The untimely death of Carol's husband Gil during the course of 52

And if any of this actually happens... well, don't say I didn't call it first.

Sorry for the radio silence...

2006-03-28T22:01:00.000-05:00

Amy and I are both sick, I more than her, so we've been temporarily unavailable to snark. As soon as I acquire some beneficial pharmaceuticals things should get rolling again.

I'm not actually calling Brian K. Vaughan sexist, read to the end

2006-03-05T03:49:00.000-05:00

I am almost caught up to the present issue of Y: The Last Man. Kalinara just wrote about how people assume she would like the series and she is not interested in it. I have been pondering my attitudes toward Y for some time; they are decidedly mixed, and braided with my feminist outlook on comics and media in general. Bear with me while I wax intellectual.

This is not a simple issue of good versus bad portrayals of women. It is possible to argue that a work like Y is problematically sexist despite having widely recognized "good" portrayals, whatever that means. Nobody can agree on how they want their group to be represented. It's a fact of the politics of representation: there's no consensus on the images that "should" be presented, nor is there agreement on who should get to make the representations in the first place. It is agreed, however, that peoples' privileges are inescapable and influence their work. Brian K. Vaughan is a man, and despite ideological and artistic intentions, his male privilege (the unspoken benefits of being male, invisible to people who grow up as men in our society but highly visible to those who do not have them) makes it inherently biased.

My intention is not to roundly condemn Vaughan as sexist; that would be counterproductive and he does not deserve the label, at least in the conventional sense. However the issue of representation and privilege really bothers me in the case Y and the "unmanned" scenario. The idea of a society without men has long been a staple of feminist philosophy as well as speculative fiction. I'm going to bet you can't name any work that deals with this. Yet most readers of this blog know about Y; it has gotten huge attention within the comics community and from the media at large. Vaughan is always posting in his blog about the latest plug for his ongoing series (Ex Machina and Runaways too...but that's another essay entirely) in magazines like Jane or Entertainment Weekly. He is an excellent writer. It is a well put together series. The apparatus works. I read it. But it still makes me furious. A man gets media attention and fame for writing about a world without men. I know Pia Guerra is the co-creator and artist. But she does not get nearly as much attention for her work on the series as Vaughan does; maybe if she drew tits a little bigger she could get some work on Witchblade, but I'm not holding my damn breath.

Vaughan uses an old trick to diffuse this situation within the series itself; Yorick Brown, the man, actually talks to another character about how ironic it is that a man is still the center of attention even after the world is now entirely run by women. By acknowledging that a narrative situation is weird or improbable, it feels less so to the reader or viewer. It's something I've heard many times as a screenwriting student, and it doesn't work on me.

And yet, as furious as the series and the hype surrounding it makes me, I have more than once cried with emotion from reading it. It tells a really engaging story about characters that resonate with me, Yorick most of all. Catholicism is actually a very prominent theme in Y, and as a nice Catholic girl with social justice sensibilities, I can relate to the story of a nice Catholic boy with social justice sensibilities who just happens to be the last man on earth. The subject is treated seriously and with respect; what do you do as a Catholic when there are no priests left? Does your God cease to exist? Has the tie been severed? I feel like Vaughan and I would have a lot to say to each other about the idea of someone keeping their faith close to them even when it seems ludicrous to do so.

Yorick Brown is obnoxious and wonderful. He makes obsessive pop culture references and dreams that he is a science fiction hero, yet he is deeply troubled by committing violence. In an inversion of the fantasy-journey narrative of strapping hero, frail wizard, and naive princess, he is definitely the princess, while female companions are strapping and arcane, respectively. He is a male survivor of sexual assault and he believes in true love. He used to write Knight Rider fan fiction and described himself as having a punctuation fetish. He has been dismissed by some as a typical "lovable loser" character; but what does it mean to be a loser? What is the difference between a "loser" and a "real man"? This is Yorick's dilemma.

Ultimately, Vaughan is using the unmanned scenario to explore manhood and masculinity through a character who is decidedly not the American ideal superdude, who is a composite of anxious shortcomings thrust from being a guy to not just being a man but the man. And ultimately, it serves feminist purposes to reevaluate and reflect on the meaning of masculinity. It has been a tenet of transfeminism and gender activism in the last decade that gender roles are not only oppressive to women. And Y will certainly get read more widely and taken closer to heart than many gender treatises I can think of.

I retain my righteous anger that women should be the ones to write about what women would do if left to their own purposes in an unmanned world. There's definitely a part of that anger epoxied to my own frustrations as an unpublished woman writer. Call me jealous; I am. Some part of me hopes that a series like this will open the doors for women to write brilliant transgressive gender fantasies, be published by a DC or Marvel imprint, and get loads of wonderful shiny press. Another part hopes that this will be written by me.

I'll spare you any more details or confessions. It's time to go to bed.

"Enfreakment" is a real word

2006-03-02T14:01:00.000-05:00

So I finally finished my paper on superheroes and disability. FINALLY. I took an incomplete in the class because I couldn't get it done. I didn't realize how hard it would be to write academically about something I talk about all day, every day, that is a part of my material existence. Both comics and disability are, and combining them...wow. I realized I had way too much to say to fit in 30 pages and still include enough evidence. I ended up citing way more secondary sources that I originally planned to, because when you want to make a general statement about a character or summarize their origin story, it's much easier to just hit the DC Encyclopedia, even though it not always accurate.

On a fun note, there are certain words that you get to use in disability studies that just make me grin. Like "enfreakment" and "freakery". That would be the process of creating a "freak" (as in side show freak) and the spectacle of viewing and exhibiting a freak, respectively. Also, supercrip, which I talked about a way long time ago when I first started this beast of a project. Then you get the usual academic words that are hip right now: interrogation, subjectivity, embodiment, materiality, discourse.

Lastly there's my favorite thing: transgressive reappropriation. I love transgressive reappropriation. In my opinion, it is the solution to every problem of representation in comics. Except for gay stuff. That might be an overstatement, but it's still cool. What it basically means is reclaiming stereotypical/negatively portrayed disabled characters and finding value in them, taking them back and making them cool. Temporarily able-bodied people have appropriated the images of disabled people in their work, and this is the phenomenon of disabled people taking those images back. (I got this from Mitchell and Snyder's Narrative Prosthesis for any academic types interested. But they didn't make it up. I think they got it froM Garland Thompson. I'm a DS newb so I haven't read all of her stuff yet.) This is especially important for images of disability; there are so many out there, specifically in comics, that creating new disabled characters in order to have "good" portrayals of disability would be excessive. It would be more efficient, and probably more pleasing to fans, to take old disabled characters and use them progressively. (It doesn't really work for gay characters because there aren't any to reappropriate.)

I ended up not talking for an excessively long time about this in my paper either...eventually I got to the point where I had to wrap things up, and an extensive discussion of transgressive reappropriation as well as the iconicity of ability ended up not getting written. Someday they will.

So...the question is, should I post the paper in its entirety here? Some of you might laugh at it in the sense that I have to define "mutant" and explain what the JSA is. I also am not actually sure if I'm right about what I said about Doctor Mid-Nite and I don't want to get shot down. The alternative is re-writing the sections in blogger discourse as opposed to academic discourse for your reading pleasure. Maybe I'll do both. Leave a comment if you have a preference.

Because how do you remember Elvis? You KNOW how you remember Elvis.

2006-02-15T22:22:00.000-05:00

You know that bit from Denis Leary's No Cure For Cancer where he talks about how someone should have shot Elvis in the head back in 1957 -- before he got fat, pretentious and bloated -- so we could remember him in a nice way?

I've just been thinking about that bit a lot lately, is all.

Love comes in four colors. (And yes, I'm still bitter over Sue Dibny.)

2006-02-14T12:49:00.000-05:00

Another day of work is nearly over
You must have seen the whole thing on TV
Seventeen more city blocks and I can almost smell you
Waiting at the windowsill for me

It's our forty-first anniversary

But we don't look a day over twenty-three
Not in this life
Not in this universe
We were still in high school when I met you
If you believe the continuity

I rescued you from robots
And untied you from the tracks

And you pretended not to know that it was me
We didn't even kiss
Until issue #26
This world still feels like 1963

I love this life
I love this universe

And you'll keep my identity a secret
And you will know the touch beneath my glove

I may go out every night and risk my life for strangers
But you're the only girl I'll ever love

Gwen Stacy isn't dead, she's only sleeping
And Elektra isn't evil or insane

Those bastards at the Pentagon can't really kill Sue Dibny
No more than they could kill off Lois Lane

And I swear to God there'll be hell to pay
If anybody tries to take you away

Forget this life
Forget this universe
You're everything I need

You are my life
You are my universe

They'll have to go through me

Lyrics from "Four Color Love Story," by The Metasciences.

Happy Valentine's Day, folks.

"Good" graphic novels and tears of ink

2006-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

This past week, I read Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, a graphic novel that's really graphic reportage/graphic journalism/something that implies it really happened and distinguishes it from, say, Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew. Because it's not an obvious difference. Previously, I posted on City of Glass, and prior to that, I read Maus volumes I and II. These are all class assignments. We are also doing Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, Phoebe Glockner's Diary of a Teenage Girl, and another book to be decided.

I am pushing to read a volume of Gaiman's Sandman in that slot, preferable Endless Nights, the 11th postscript volume of standalone stories, or volume four, Season of Mists. (I am really abusing the italics tag in this entry.) However, I have realized that this will not happen, because neither meets the requirements of Comics As Literature. To be a member of the C.A.L. canon, a work has to fit two of three descriptions, other than being a work of sequential art:
1. boring and/or incomprehensible
2. autobiographical, semi-autobiographical, or featuring a character with the same name as the author
3. about genocide or mass murder

Comics As Literature, pioneered by professional indie blowhard Scott McCloud, is a concept that really bothers me. Not because comic books are not literature, but because I believe they are all literature. When the majority of comics are excluded and denigrated so that a few prestigious authors can get read in college classes and be discussed by the Modern Language Association, a great disservice is done to the medium, this medium, this medium that is my blood. My heart speaks in the language of comics. I think comics and piss comics--when I cry, they are tears of ink, and when I fall on the ground, there is a great THUD outlined in bold black jagged lines.

McCloud is adamant about comics being a valid medium, and getting comics accepted into the literary canon, and yet his dismissal in Understanding Comics both of superhero/adventure comics and the very act of collaboration undermines this effort. The prioritization of abstract/cartoonish work produced by comix-auteurs and published by independent presses over collaborative work reaching a more popular audience thoroughly pisses me off. It makes me really fucking angry.

He explicitly states, as if it were some obvious fact, that collaboration between a writer and artists (penciller, inker, letterer, colorist) gets in the way of artistic expression. Only someone isolated in an isolated, Drawn and Fantagraphics Quarterly world could ever get away with this statement. Collaboration is the bread and butter of the low, mean, my-god-joe-the-teeth, Kryptonite, radioactive platinum, silver Spear of Longinus, Seduction of the Golden Innocent comics that I love and what the universe ultimately knows as the comic book. If collaboration is a barrier to art, then I am the Queen of Spain.

This is terrible and bitter. But when my professor describes Superman as a "guilty pleasure" compared to the illustrious Art Spiegelman, who I am dead sick of, I have to fight to keep ink from leaking down my cheeks. My words come from the heart in four colors and all this bullshit makes me sick inside.

City of Glass; PMS; robots.

2006-01-25T14:28:00.000-05:00

Carpal tunnel is a bitch. I might say that along with Andrew Jackson, homophobia, PMS, trolls, and lactose, it is part of my Gallery of Rogues. I'm not sure who or what is in Amy's rogues gallery, but I can guess that Ron Marz probably has a strong presence. He and his army of androbots.

I took the day off today because I'm being mind controlled by the PMSculator and I don't want to accidentally decapitate any of my classmates. So what do I do? I blog.

The two of us are both taking Comics and Animation in America this semester (AMS 270). This is the first time I have ever had a class with Amy, and she has managed to make me giggle uncontrollably while covering the Holocaust (via Maus, of course) by taking notes in cartoon form and drawing herself punching Scott McCloud (right cross: KRAK! My God, Joe, the teeth!). What the unassuming internet does not know is that she is actually quite a good cartoonist. She stopped doing a lot of art after she quit her online drawing forum, even though she has *two* tablets, but I think I have finally convinced her to be my collaborator on a comics project. Here's to hoping.

I should go to the library and watch some Korean television drama for my Asian Film class, but I'd rather sit here and start work on a script to give her. I haven't done any creative projects of substance other than some poems since I finished One Dozen Black Roses, my last screenplay.

Anyway, the actually comics-related portion of this post is that I just finished reading City of Glass, which is a comics adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (the latter did Batman: Year One) of a novel by Paul Auster. It was assigned for our comics class, and it is terrific. It is a detective story, but the detective is fake, and it reminds me more of Jorge Luis Borges's "Death and the Compass" (aka Muerte y la Brujula) than any crime story I've ever read. It is about the power of lies and words to shape reality, and if you don't like postmodern stuff where the author shows up in the story, stay away. However, if you are somewhat depressed by the state of your superhero pull list (like me) and looking for a great high-concept graphic novel, I highly recommend it. I am sure Amy will not be drawing cartoons of herself punching the author of this work.

What's wrong with this picture?

2006-01-06T23:43:00.000-05:00

Geoff Johns shuffles into Dan DiDio's office, clearly upset.

"Hey, Dan, I've got a problem."

"What's the matter, sweetie? Come on over here and tell me all about it."

DiDio winks flirtatiously. Johns pulls a chair up to his boss's desk.

"Gosh, this is really hard to talk about. I've been having--"

DiDio cuts him off. "Is it that time of the month again?"

Johns stares across the desk in horror. "No, that's not it at all. You see, I'm really uncomfortable with the climate around this office."

"Was Jim Lee being mean to you again? I can talk to him if you want, but you've got to toughen up. It's time to be a big boy, Geoff. There's no crying in baseball, if you know what I mean."

Johns's frustration increases. He knew this was going to happen. But he tries again.

"I don't mean to sound whiny, Dan, but I think this office has a problem with..."

"Come on, spit it out."

"Sexism. There, I said it. This place is sexist. I can't walk through this building without a dozen people wolf whistling or calling me 'baby'."

DiDio rolls his eyes. "What did I say about toughening up? Boys will be boys, after all."

"It's not just that. Hardly anyone here will look me in the eye when they talk to me--they're always staring at my chest."

"Well, you are showing it off all the time, leaving the collar unbuttoned on those hot little oxford shirts. If you don't want men checking out your merchandise, cover yourself up for once."

"But Dan, George Perez can't keep his hands off me! I was trying to talk to him about the art for IC #3, but I can't get anything done with his hand inching up my thigh. I ran out of the room. What else could I do? Then afterwards, he told all the other guys in the office that I'm a cocktease."

DiDio sighs. "How do I know that that even happened?"

"What?"

"How do I know that you don't just want attention? You show off that cute little butt in those tight khaki pants all day, and then when that doesn't get you noticed, you go around making baseless accusations. I bet you're just jealous."

Johns stands up from his chair. "Dan, I thought you would understand."

And that was the day that Geoff Johns quit comics forever. But there was another cute writer to take his place, one who didn't complain about being ogled by his peers, constantly disrespected, and assaulted by his editor. So no one even noticed that Geoff was gone.

In totally uncontroversial news...

2006-01-05T18:56:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you realize something that should have been obvious much sooner. I submit for your approval or scorn a comparison: on the left, Rahne Sinclair, my beloved New Mutant Wolfsbane, as drawn by Ryan Sook. On the right, my beloved girlfriend, Amy, in an undated webcam photo taken earlier during our college career.

I think this is very funny. However, to my knowledge, Amy is not a were-lesbian.

A Very Special Green Lantern Special

2006-01-04T16:15:00.000-05:00

As promised, I now present to you Green Lantern Special #1. I figure, why dwell on violence against women in comics when there's such a...unique example of racial violence in my collection as well. I love "very special episode" comics. I have two different copies of the mini where Death and John Constantine talk about fighting AIDS. But this one...is just bizarre. The worst thing is that while a large part of the issue is about how bad apartheid is, it concludes that the freedom fighters are as bad as the government because they also engage in violence.

The setup: Hal Jordan is always broke. John Stewart, trying to get him to stop sleeping on his couch, tells him to go steal diamonds from South Nambia while nobody's looking. They couldn't possibly miss them, right? But they catch him. This is very bad.

But it gets worse. Since John Stewart has a public identity as the Green Lantern, when South Nambians see Hal stealing from their mine, they assume it was John. John gets extradited to stand trial. In a racist country. With apartheid.

The South Nambian authorities try to coerce John into signing a fake confession. And then they beat him up some more.

Hal visits John in jail and convinces him to use his ring to break out. He does so and initiates a large scale prison break. Then he joins up with another guy who broke out to fight apartheid and destory rich white people's property. But there's more. As it turns out, in busting up the prison, John also freed a MURDERER!

The boy can't do anything right...at least with Christopher Priest writing him. In the end, John almost helps in a terrorist attack against the South Nambian government, but Hal shows up to stop him (after some coersion by everbody's favorite bastion of law, Superman).

Yay for Hal getting punched in the face...sorry, Amy.

Hal and John's relationship in this era is described very accurately as schlemiel and schlamazel. A schlemiel is a bumbling idiot, and a schlamazel is a chronically unlucky person. To put it one way, the schlemiel is the guy who always spills his drink, and the schlamazel is the one he is spilling his drink on. Hal does a lot of things that cause him no problems but make John's life pretty miserable--a sad cycle of mistakes and consequences.

Some things are worth ignoring canon for.

2006-01-02T18:33:00.000-05:00

So I finally got the Showcase Green Lantern trade for Christmas. I've really enjoyed reading it, both for the history (the origins of major characters, the first time Hal uses a boxing glove construct, etc.) as well as comparing this version of "rookie Hal" to the versions presented in Emerald Dawn and DC: the New Frontier.

But one panel stopped me cold.

I absolutely refuse to believe Hal Jordan went to college. You'll never, ever be able to convince me otherwise. I don't care if it's canon, I don't care if the image of Hal as Idiot Frat Guy works on a certain level. Some things are more important.

I know, deep down, this conviction is all wrapped up in my ideosyncracies that equate Hal Jordan with both Chuck Yeager and my dad, neither of whom graduated from college. But there's more to it.

It is extremely important that not all of the Green Lanterns of Earth have a college degree. They should be as socioeconomically different as possible. To present them any other way is ignoring one of the most profound elements of the whole Green Lantern mythos.

That is: in order to be a Green Lantern, you need to be two things:

completely honest
totally without fear

That's it. Honesty and fearlessness. It doesn't matter what race you are, or what class you're from, how much money you make or how much education you have.

As long as you're trustworthy and brave, as long as you work hard and believe in justice, you can gain the power to overcome any obstacle -- to do anything you can imagine, as long as you have the willpower to see it through.

The Green Lantern Corps has no officers, save for the symbolic (and now defunct) three-member Honor Guard. Rookie GLs defer to their seniors because of experience, not hierarchy. All Corps members are treated equally, whether they're an Air Force test pilot, an architect from the inner city of Detroit, a gym teacher with a disability, an out-of-work graphic artist... or an over-idealistic lesbian from Middle-of-Nowhere, Michigan.

They each have an equal shot at proving themselves worthy of the ring.

They're not perfect people, of course. They bicker over women and harbor petty grudges. They say dumb things sometimes and get hit on the head a lot. But for all their faults, all their flaws and all their failures, they represent a single, beautiful, absolute truth:

Strive to be the best human being you can be, and someday your rocket ship will come.

I can believe in that.

Captain Jackson's feet of clay

2005-12-22T12:12:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I dressed up like a superhero and patrolled my city. Amy and I tried it on Halloween but we were nothing compared to the two dozen Ninja Turtles on the streets, not to mention the pair of Transformers. (There's nothing like a college town on Halloween.) People thought she was Robin Hood and I was...some kind of hooker maybe? I got some weird stares, which got weirder when I explained in great detail who I was supposed to be.

The point is, unbeknownst to either of us, Jackson, Michigan has had its own superhero since 1999: Captain Jackson. I'm really sad that I never knew of this guy until, following his alter ego's arrest for impaired driving, he was unmasked in his local paper.

I first heard about this through a better and more sympathetic piece in the Detroit Free Press today entitled "Unmasked, Hero Is Human". The reporter even compares the rise and fall of Captain Jackson to a DC Comics storyline. However, I think it's really more like a Marvel storyline, as I am pretty sure the exact same thing has happened to Daredevil at least twice.

The Free Press article says that the Captain has been unreachable since his unmasking and has ceased to go on patrol. But I sincerely hope that this civic defender can bounce back from this plot twist. I don't mean to condone drinking and driving, but I feel he deserves another chance. Maybe he needs a new creative team. Or maybe his teen sidekick, Crimefighter Girl will take over the flowing purple mantle, ushering in a new era for the city of Jackson.

Here's to hoping. Good luck, Captain Jackson, wherever you are.

A preview for what I will be scanning over Christmas...

2005-12-17T04:28:00.000-05:00

Greetings, all. It is I, the quieter, shorter, insomniac half of this blogging team. What follows is a little preview for the comic I am taking home to scan this Christmas. I do not own a scanner, but I have a digital camera...

I present for your consideration: The Green Lantern Special #1, 1988, by James Owsley, Tod Smith, and Denis Rodier. The title is, "WITH THIS RING...!" And it addresses the timely problem of apartheid in a country called South Nambia. I think it's supposed to be near Qu'rac.

Fairly early in this issue, John Stewart gets stripped naked and whipped by South Nambian cops. AAHHH! THEY TOOK AWAY HIS PENIS!!!

I know you all just can't wait until I get this properly scanned. Remember, kids, racism is bad, but extraterrestrialism is worse. Hug an alien today.

OMGOMGOMGOMG

2005-12-16T15:07:00.000-05:00

There is a God.

Behold:

My prayers have been answered.

There is a God in Heaven, and he's got a fucking awesome sense of humor.

Where have all the letters gone?

2005-12-06T14:44:00.000-05:00

It seems like every few weeks, I start off a post with an apology for the lack of posts, and then post a mega-long entry. This is no different. (Scipio, I don't know how the hell you can keep posting short entries several times a week -- maybe I don't know when the hell to shut up.)

Anyway, hopefully once the semester is over on the 16th I can get back into some heavy posting over break.

I was sorting through my comics last night, trying to put together a Microsoft Access database so I can search quickly and easily for a certain author, penciller, or event.

And as I usually do when I flip through the comics of my youth, I started to wax nostalgic.

I miss letter columns.

They used to go on for pages, plus maybe a letter from the editor in chief. It's where more than a few comics creators got their first publication in a book. Like most bygone things in comics, it's one of those things I never really got the chance to participate in and regret.

My all-time favorite letter column was in Gerard Jones' Guy Gardner -- fans would write in and Guy himself would answer, his response usually laced with not-quite-curse-words he must have picked up from Lobo ("fraggin'," "bastich," etc.).

But letter columns have been largely replaced by comics blogs. Comics fans are still cheering and bitching about their favorite topics (costume changes, deaths, who is Earth's Green Lantern), but the mood is different. Now some hide behind avatars and pseudonyms -- letter columns used to publish your whole address, for God's sake. There's a certain honesty that comes from people knowing your real name instead of GLFan2814 or some such nonsense. People took more care in writing their arguments. Once you sent off a physical letter, that was it -- if someone misinterpreted your argument, you couldn't immediately respond and go, "No, you idiot. You weren't even listening to what I said." Or if you wanted to, you'd have to wait another month or two to respond.

Letter columns haven't died completely, of course. I can't speak for the independent labels, for starters. Mark Waid's Legion of Superheroes respond to their own letters in a way that is even more postmodern and meta-fictional than Guy Gardner's ever was.

But my personal favorite is what's currently running in Young Avengers. Even if you've sworn off Marvel comics (I'm looking at you, Scipio), you should really pick up this book. Given the fact that it sprung out of Avengers Disassembled, it's surprisingly accessible to people with only a vague awareness of who any of these people are. But I've already extolled the virtues of YA in the past -- let me get to the point.

In the letters column of this book for the past half-year, there has run an ongoing debate about homosexuality in comics. It's hilarious, because the argument started long before Asgardian/Wicca and Hulkling were revealed to be dating.

Most of the furor centered around a letter by some guy named James Meeley, published in YA #3:

"A super hero comic is not the platform for exploring 'sexual identities,' especially for characters who are teenagers. [...] I would hope that you and Marvel would not be so gung-ho to pander to every taste within society that would would forget that comics were never meant to be an outlet for changing society's view or forcing sensitive issues to be discussed among the readership. They are meant, first and foremost, to entertain in an all-ages type of manner."

I cut for length, but you get the gist. The point about comics not being a venue for discussion is ironic: the entire next letters column was filled with various responses to Meeley's letter. He himself was responding to another letter-writer, Philip Gasper, who expressed hope about positive gay characters in comics.

And for the record, as long as I'm discussing the argument: These representations are important. It's not a matter of them not being "real people." To someone out there, they're representations of themselves. They're someone they can relate to.

What an awful place comics would be if they were only populated by white, heterosexual, traditionally masculine men and their one-dimensional sidekicks. (And here I roll my eyes at Hal Jordan and his mechanic, Thomas "Pie-face" Kalmaku.)

And comics have long been a place for social commentary and discussion of mature issues, even when they involve teenagers. Roy Harper's addiction to heroin. Oliver Queen's new ward Mia's contraction of HIV. Stephanie Brown's pregnancy. And that's just off the top of my head.

But I digress.

And really, props to Marvel for posting Meeley's letter, misguided as it may be, and keeping the debate alive. It was really refreshing to see an honest discussion about what comics could and should be that didn't degenerate into "LOL STFU FAG" like I see on too many forums.

To quote Young Avengers writer Alan Heinberg:

"To me, one of the most remarkable aspects of this discussion is that it began with the topic of sexuality and quickly evolved into a thoughtful consideration of the nature and purpose of comics as art.

"You guys make me proud to be a fanboy."

I wish Marvel and DC would run more letters columns, whether they're silly and snarky in the line of Guy Gardner and Legion of Superheroes or more serious and intellectual as seen in Young Avengers.

Blogs are an interesting and entertaining replacement, but there's something about seeing your name in print in your favorite comic book that is so freaking cool. The closest adrenaline rush a blog can create in that respect is to have a creator comment on an entry (Hi, Gail, if you're still reading).

Or, perhaps, letters columns of years past really were as immature and superficial as modern forums, and I'm just sugar-coating through my nostalgia.

Thoughts?

Observing our site's statistics...

2005-11-29T21:48:00.000-05:00

By far, the most common referral to this site is from a Google Image Search for the word "Homoerotica."

I find this totally hilarious.

Once a Green Lantern, Always a Green Lantern.

2005-11-25T11:25:00.000-05:00

So Kyle Rayner is getting his own series as Ion, scripted by Ron Marz.

And I am one of those Green Lantern fans. So I'm sure you can imagine, I am none too pleased.

Changing a Green Lantern into something different-yet-related-to-the-mythos is nothing new. Parallax. Sentinel. Warrior. The man-Guardian savior of the Mosaic.

But you know what? They all failed. All of them.

When will comics companies learn that these gimmicks don't work?

And then, of course, there's Ron Marz.

I've tried to keep my comments where I call creators out by name to a minimum, especially since many of them -- like Marz himself -- surf the Internet.

Some people think it's uncouth for a fan to spit vitriol at creators, particularly when the creators can read it. But I really don't care if Marz knows I have zero respect for him. He hasn't done anything to earn it.

Because now that Marz is gaining a toehold in the Green Lantern universe again, Jade might as well have a giant target painted on her forehead.

”There's a sacrifice in [Rann-Thanagar War] that impacts Kyle in a major way,” revealed Marz. “As it has a number of other times in Kyle's life, tragedy serves as a catalyst."

Run, Jade, run! This man isn't capable of creating drama without slaughtering a female character!

Or worse yet: Alexandra DeWitt gets reborn from all this Crisis hoo-hah, just so she can get killed again!

You might think I'm making too much of the Women in Refrigerators thing. But I offer as my evidence: I have never met a female fan of Ron Marz. Ever. Not in person, not in all the vast reaches of the Internet. I don't think they exist.

There are some (like in the Newsarama forum thread for the topic) that think this issue will manage a year, year and a half tops before it caves in. I disagree. There's enough misguided Green Lantern fans out there that still think Ron Marz is a good writer. So this series could last for three years, five years or more.

But better writers than Marz have tried and failed to alter the Green Lanterns.

I can wait.

They won't nuke Metropolis, but Themyscira is fair game...

2005-11-13T14:55:00.000-05:00

I just cracked a cold one to mourn the passing of Wonder Woman. Her book is getting cancelled in February and I'm sure she's going to get a craptastic reboot after Infinite Crisis. Nobody will reboot Action Comics or Detective Comics because of the "legacy" but they'll walk all over Diana and make Steve Trevor never exist and write her out of history...up yours, Dan DiDio. Suck my left one.

I am working on the disability research, really...I'm just terrible at keeping a blog. Really. My livejournal is no better, it just has more quizzes. So once I have something to post here that isn't hand scribbled notes or critical theory goblety gook it will go up.

A ring, an oath, and a fan

2005-11-01T08:57:00.000-05:00

Well, November starts NaNoWriMo month, and both Franny and I are involved.

My project is also part of fanfic100, a marathon project of --

Yes. I'm going to be writing 50,000 words of fanfiction. Stop laughing.

But it got Franny and me going about whether or not fanfic qualifies as art.

Before I start that discussion, I think it'd be best if you had a better awareness of where I'm coming from as a fan. So, here's one that readers of my livejournal may have read before I shifted my comics thoughts over here:

Once a Green Lantern, Always a Green Lantern: My lifelong love affair with comics and why I somehow involve Hal Jordan in every conversation I have about the DC Universe

"I want to start writing those essays about comics in my LJ," I told Franny. "But I don't know where to begin."

"Start with Hal," she said. "You know you have to start with Hal."

But really, my love of DC Comics does not start with Hal Jordan.

It starts with the Justice League.

I couldn't tell you which was the first comic I ever read -- I've read comic books for as far back as I can remember. It was probably something from Archie, or Disney. (The first comic I ever bought, for the record, was the Super Mario Bros. 3 book put out by Valiant comics.) But I do recall my first superhero story: the Justice League, Giffen/DeMatteis's era, fighting Starro the Conqueror. The comic belonged to my cousin Justin, and he let me read a stack of his comics so I would stay out of his and my brother Guy's hair for an afternoon.

Starro the fuckin' Conqueror. Now there was a villain. Giant starfish, latched onto your face, took over your body. Not the stealthiest guy in the world, though. Mind-control-based sneakiness is considerably more difficult when, you know, you've got a fuckin' starfish on your face. But I digress.

I was in love. I recall being absolutely entranced by Fire, a foul-mouthed pyrokinetic Brazilian who looked essentially naked when she went "flame on." (Sexy? Yes. But I was maybe seven when I read this story. I had no concept of sexy.)

So Guy and I started reading DC Comics. Sometimes I wonder what kind of comic fan I would be had I grown up reading Marvel. But Marvel's continuity at this point was so convoluted, it seemed impossible to jump in. You couldn't know what the hell was going on unless you could refer back to 30 years worth of back issues. (These were the days before Marvel created the Ultimate universe, a simplified and streamlined version of the original continuity.) Marvel made no fucking sense. So, we became DC fans by default.

We drew our own comics. Since there were two Justice Leagues during this time (one in America and one in Europe), it seemed conceivable that anyone could have their own Justice League. So Guy and I created Justice League Carrollton. (Teeny little township near Saginaw, MI, for those of you keeping score at home.) Given my obsession with all things Green Lantern, it may interest you to note that it was Guy who got a power ring in our Justice League. But it made sense -- the current Green Lantern was named Guy, so Guy had a personal interest in him. I was Rocket, a pyrokinetic (although I didn't go full-"flame on" like Fire did). I also had phasing abilities -- stolen from Phase from DC's L.E.G.I.O.N., not Kitty Pryde.

The members of the League were our friends from school, including Stopwatch (a mutant-like character (he was a Marvel fan) with the ability to halt time for a few moments), Blue Lantern (a Green Lantern who had been struck by lightning, making his power ring blue and removing the weakness to the color yellow), and Nightstar (based on my friend Katie, she could control and produce light). We made a single one-subject notebook full of full-color stories -- unfortunately, that notebook has been lost forever.

We would later make another generation of comics under the "Z Comics" publishing label, starring updated versions of our characters with some new allies. Those comics, I still have. All of them. And once I get a scanner I'll show you a few. But that's a subject for another essay.

Being fans of Star Trek and space exploration in general, it seemed only natural that Guy and I would be fans of Green Lantern. Intergalactic space cops with a ring that could do anything you wanted it to. How cool is that? We started buying the Green Lantern monthly.

It was the summer of 1992. That's when I met Hal.

Green Lantern #25. Hal literally comes out of nowhere, coming to claim the right to be Green Lantern of Earth. Guy and Hal settle the argument with an old-fashioned fistfight -- a knock-down, drag-out brawl that pits the grey-templed Hal against the youthful, angry Guy.

And Hal kicks his ass.

I immediately sided with Hal because Guy was on Guy's side -- sibling rivalry. Like the decision to read DC over Marvel, it started out by pure chance. But Hal was cool. Here was a guy my dad's age that still had the guts to be a superhero. Who had the stamina to push through the pain of sore muscles and aching bones to win a fight when it really mattered.

And it was a fun monthly, too. Gerard Jones is a witty guy, and M.D. Bright's pencils put the perfect smirk on Hal's face. Green Lantern was clever, it was exciting, it was different. Here was a guy with real, human problems. Knees that ache in the morning. A long-time girlfriend that is looking to get married -- not out of pure love, but out of a lack of other options. Balancing the needs of a city with the needs of his sector with the needs of himself. It was all so incredibly compelling.

And I had no idea it would be all over in two years.

It seems so strange -- that I would develop such a deep, intensely personal bond with Hal as a character in such a relatively short period of time. But then again, two years is about the span of time between the release of Nevermind and Kurt Cobain's suicide, isn't it?

The beginning of the end was the death of Superman. Sure, it was a marketing ploy, but the stories that came out of the aftermath, World Without a Superman and Rise of the Supermen, were actually pretty interesting. But it was during Rise of the Supermen that it would all begin to fall apart. The Cyborg Superman, one of the four Supermen in the story line (the other three being Steel, Superboy, and The Eradicator) was revealed to be a villain working with the alien marauder Mongul. The two set up a base of operations on Earth in the form of a city-sized war machine -- but first they needed to clear a city-sized piece of land.

So they blew up Coast City, Hal Jordan's hometown.

To make the long and painful story of Emerald Twilight short, the loss drove Hal insane. He killed or maimed most of his fellow Green Lantern Corps members, destroyed the Central Power Battery on Oa, and became the villain Parallax. The last Guardian of the Universe, Ganthet, tapped young Kyle Rayner to take up the last remaining Green Lantern ring.

In all fairness, I should have liked Kyle Rayner. After all, it's every Green Lantern fan's dream to have a Guardian randomly walk up to them and say, "Here it is, kid. It's your turn, now." Here's a guy who was living the dream -- this punk kid in a flannel and a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. Kyle was a comic fan, for Christ's sake. He was one of us. I should have loved him. But I couldn't. Not at the expense of Hal. Not at the expense of the Corps.

And yet, Guy and I stuck with the title for a little over a year -- through Kyle's girlfriend Alex being killed within a week of him getting the ring... through Zero Hour, which pitted the entire DC Universe against Hal -- up to Green Lantern #64.

Well, Guy may have read issues after that, but I didn't care. That one was it for me.

It was the second part of a two-issue fight between Hal and Kyle. Hal beats down on Kyle and the Justice League without much effort. It looks like Parallax's evil will triumph -- but Kyle shames Hal into leaving Earth: "I can't give up. That's not what I hero would do. That's not what a Green Lantern would do." Hal bows his head in defeat. "I... I can't go back to the way things were. I realize that now. I also realize this ring doesn't belong to me. I'm not Green Lantern anymore. You are."

The issue ends with guest pencils by M.D. Bright. It's a flashback to the Coast City days -- Hal finds a boy's lost dog, Skipper. "You're my hero. You make Coast City the best place to live in the whole world." The flashback fades to Hal, sitting alone on an empty, alien landscape. Tears in his eyes. His knees pulled up to his chest. His face, an expression of pure agony.

That was it. I was done.

I wouldn't step foot in a comic shop again for over seven years.

Guy and I stopped making comics. They just weren't fun anymore.

I looked for something else to fill the void. Something full of angst. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles fit the mold quite nicely. Reading Anne Rice led me to White Wolf's roleplaying game Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM sites led me to several interesting goth sites on the Web. I began to notice something: on several of these sites, there were shrines set up to a white-skinned girl in black clothes and eye of Horus makeup.

Her name: Death.

Death led me to Sandman, Neil Gaiman's stunning series. It didn't register as a "comic" where my vow against the medium was concerned -- it was largely devoid of superheroes, and you could buy the collected trades at bookstores. I began hunting down the volumes, buying as many as I could afford wherever I could find them. Once, I bought six at the Virgin Megastore in New York City. I had all six read by the time the twelve-hour bus ride back to Saginaw was over.

Three years and two hundred dollars later, I had all ten volumes.

Neil Gaiman had rekindled my love of comic books. I started clinging to my old Green Lantern back issues. I would rant loudly and at great length about Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour to anyone who would listen. I started reading all the great stories I had missed out on. The Watchmen. The Dark Knight Returns. Batman: Year One. Crisis on Infinite Earths.

When I came to MSU, I checked out 21st Century Comics. I noticed a new comic for the week -- The Spectre. I had heard somewhere on the Internet that Hal Jordan was the Spectre now. I decided to check it out.

The story centered around Hal and his niece, Helen. He had taken her into his care after Hal's brother and sister-in-law were murdered. Deciding that Helen couldn't possibly have a proper childhood around a godlike superhero, he tries to send her away to live with distant relatives. Helen's angry reaction on the front porch of her new parents' home shook me to the core.

"It's like I've always loved you! I've always believed you were gonna be a part of my life! ... Fine! Fine! Be that way! But I don't ever want to see you again, Uncle Hal! NEVER!"

My. God. It was exactly what I thought when I had read the Emerald Twilight story so many years ago. I've always believed you were gonna be a part of my life. I don't ever want to see you again. Good God, Helen even looked like how I did when I was that age. And the look, the look on Hal's face when she closes the door -- it still brings tears to my eyes.

I had to put the book down. My hands were shaking. I couldn't deny the power that the Green Lantern mythos had -- that Hal had -- over me any longer. I started picking up back issues with a passion and a fury that has taken a mighty toll on my wallet these past few years. But it didn't matter. It was like phoning up an old flame and discovering she still loves you after all these years.

So imagine my unbridled joy when I learned that Hal Jordan was coming back from the dead. That he was going to wear the Green Lantern ring again.

On February 16, Hal took up the ring for the first time in eleven years. And hell yes, it choked me up. The DCU may be a screwed-up place to be, but as long as there is the Corps, all is not lost yet.

So now I've come full circle. Back to reading Green Lantern comics. Back, perhaps, to drawing my own comics.

Back to comics being fun again.

The Superhero and the Supercrip: Yes, I'm Allowed to Say That

2005-09-30T14:41:00.000-04:00

Since a lot of people who might be reading this don't know me in real life, I have to back up and explain some stuff before I get to talk about supercrips. I am an undergraduate student double majoring in Social Relations and Film Studies at Michigan State University. (Yes, both Amy and I drink the same water/breathe the same cyclotron particles that made Geoff Johns what he is...) Social Relations is an interdisciplinary political science/sociology major focusing on race, class, and gender analysis. I love it. I am currently taking my senior seminar in it, the capstone class for my degree, and the topic of my seminar is "The Politics of Normal: Rethinking Disability".

The main assignment for the class is a 30-35 page research paper on some topic relating to disability studies. Most people are doing policy analyses, as everyone in my college (subdivision of the university) is very politically oriented, and most are going to law school. I, on the other hand, loathe policy analysis. It quite literally makes me want to stab myself through the hand with a pen. However, I do love cultural studies, and fortunately we get to do a lot of more of that than policy stuff. You know what counts as cultural studies? Comic book analysis. You know who has the largest catalogued collection of comic books in any library, anywhere? Michigan State. Is there any other topic that I would rather write thirty-five pages about? Probably not.

Which brings me to the title of this entry. I am currently writing the rough draft of my research proposal for a paper studying the various and changing portrayals of people with physical disabilities in mainstream American superhero comic books, from 1960 to the present. I AM SO EXCITED. This is such a cool project. And it's even more exciting that I can't find anything else written about it. That's a good thing, because there's a possibility that I might be able to get an American Studies/pop culture studies journal to publish the thing when it's done.

I doubt any disability rights activists or historians of disability read this blog either, so it might come as a surprise to you that "supercrip" is a fairly commonly used term to describe a particular portrayal of people with disabilities. It has two threads: the idea that people with disabilities should be admired because they are "superheroes" just by participating in everyday activities (living independently, dating, going to school, holding a job), and also the image of people "overcoming" their disabilities to achieve superhuman feats that most able-bodied people do not attempt, such as a blind man hiking the Appalachian trail or performing a ballet in a wheelchair.

Part of my paper will interrogate this cultural myth and to what extent it is present in portrayals of disabled characters in comics. Is Barbara Gordon a supercrip? What about Daredevil? Professor X? What about disabled villains? In my opinion, it is really comic book writers who have had to overcome their characters' disabilities in order to write them as complex human (or mutant) characters, instead of relying on stereotypes.

Then there are models/themes/myths about disability that do not occur in the real world, but only in the realm speculative fiction. There are characters who have a disabled alter-ego but turn into a superhero; I can only think of two off the top of my head, Thor and Captain Marvel Jr., but I want to see if there are more. There are characters whose superpower is also disabling, such as Rogue. Similarly, there is the common image of characters who have a brilliant mind or great psychic power "trapped" in a disabled body: Charles Xavier, Oracle, Hector Hammond. (This myth reminds me a lot of portrayals of Stephen Hawking IRL.) Then there are people whose bitterness about becoming disabled leads them to become supervillains, like Zoom. There is also the difference in portrayal between characters who are disabled from the time they are created, or very nearly their first appearance, and the use of disability as a plot device, ie. Knightfall, Killing Joke, and Wonder Woman's blindness.

A useful tool of analysis I am using is the list of the "Six Pitfalls of Disability Fiction". They have been articulated in the works of other authors but the following succinct list comes from "An Examination into the Portrayal of Deaf Characters and Deaf Issues in Picture Books for Children" by Isabel Brittain, published in the journal Disability Studies Quarterly:

1. Portraying the character with an impairment as "other" than human: otherworldly in a negative or positive senseÂextremely "evil" or "good", likening the character to vegetable matter, forging links between the character and animals
2. Portraying the character with an impairment as "extra-ordinary": the character's ordinary humanity is not described but is represented either as a negative or positive stereotype
3. The "second fiddle" phenomenon: the character with an impairment is neither the central character within the narrative nor fully developed, merely serving to bring the central character/s to a better understanding of themselves or disability
4. Lack of realism and accuracy in the portrayal of the impairment: the author neglects to properly research a particular impairment resulting in inaccuracy of portrayal
5. The outsider: the character with an impairment is portrayed as a figure of alienation and social isolation
6. Happy endings: the author fails to see a happy and fulfilled life being a possibility for a character with an impairment

My hypothesis is that early portrayals of disabled characters were more likely to fall into these stereotypes than contemporary ones, and that permanently disabled characters are portrayed more progressively than what happens when an able-bodied character becomes disabled through a "grim and gritty" plot device. But I don't know for sure--I have a lot more research to do. And on that note, I invite comments and suggestions from anybody who has any ideas whatsoever. I will be posting extensively about the project on here, now that I have something I'm passionate to write about, and hopefully it should be a nice distraction from all the Infinite Crisis and House of M bother that's pissing me off right now.

I missed you, Intarweb! I'm back!

The slow but sure return of Homoerotica Friday

2005-09-23T05:55:00.000-04:00

I need to put some real content up here. School is getting me down... I sincerely apologize for not bringing the funny.

But. Homoerotica Fridays. It's hard, putting a good post together. Without a scanner, I've got to sift through the dreck of the Internet, searching for some yummy.

For you, gentle readers. I do it all for you!

This week, I wanted to find something that wasn't ripped off of scans_daily. So, I went hunting on Flickr.

I found this:

...and I couldn't stop laughing. Maybe because it's something I would do myself, if I had access to a digital camera right now.

So there you have it, folks: the adorable Kyle Rayner and his weakness for... um... yellow.

Look! It's a meme!

2005-09-15T20:07:00.000-04:00

Which Legionnaire are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm Andromeda. Which means I grow up to be Power Girl, depending on which version of Kara's origin story you believe.

Which means I get to beat ass and have breasts of epic proportions.

I can live with that.

...And We're back!

2005-09-06T11:41:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the extended period of radio silence, kids. My computer crashed, a new semester at MSU started, and I discovered the beautiful, addictive joy that is World of Warcraft.

I've been wanting to post something ever since I read Batman #644, something to add my voice to the echoes of rage over the man known in some circles as WTFingham and Willinghamfucktard. I had composed at least six versions of a good rant, but I couldn't bring myself to bring any of them to a satisfying conclusion. It just wasn't worth the effort.

So I took a long look at my pull list, and a surprisingly large number of them filled me with either depression (in the case of Batman) or apathy (all of the Infinite Crisis miniseries, with the exception of Villains United.)

So I quietly dropped them. No fanfare, no ranting, just the simple declaration: I would rather special order the 2nd or 3rd print of a really good comic than eagerly buy the 1st edition of one that sucks.

I'm totally with Damon here: the Rann/Thanagar war is a perfect example of a comic trying to do way too damn much all at once. (Long-time readers will note I predicted R/T's suckitude back in June.) I can only help that Dave Gibbons will do better when he can focus solely on Green Lanterns.

Life's too short to read shitty comics. And I don't have the bank to spend on substandard books, either, what with my newfound Warcraft addiction and everything.

So. A return to the funny! A return to Homoerotica Fridays!

A return to being happy about good comics, for the love of God!

There's a reason why Braniac is truly terrifying...

2005-08-11T15:30:00.000-04:00

...and it's not just because he comes with 10 clicks of pulse-waving evil.

Braniac ate my hard drive. There's no saving it. Dr. Mid-Nite did all he could, but I'm going to have to buy a replacement. I can only hope Babs fares better in next week's Birds of Prey.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on my Weeklong Thesis of Slash. It's just going to be a hell of a whole lot less illustrated. (It also means no more Homoerotica Fridays, at least for another week or two.)

Posting will be light on my end for the next few days as I shift from our summer apartment to MSU's dorms.

But, as promised, I will post my epic parody of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow and the back stories of The Flash, commonly known as the Hard Traveling Heroes era. It's one of my all-time favorite storylines. Neal Adams' pencils are a joy to look at. His Dinah Lance is pretty and feminine in a way that modern "pin-up" pencilers like Terry Dodson and J. Scott Campbell can't even touch. The story telling easily guides you along the page. The anatomy is gorgeous... and I've never seen anyone draw a better angry face.

Denny O'Neil's writing, on the other hand, alternates between the idealistic:

There's a fine country out there someplace! Let's go find it!

to the romantic:

...A modern Robin Hood, a green-clad warrior with a laugh like the roar of a mountain river and arms like steel cables...

to melodramatic crack:

Some hideous moral cancer is rotting our very souls!

to misplaced social awareness:

My ward, Speedy, is a junkie!

to, well... um, he meant well:

THIS BLACK MAN LETS IT ALL HANG OUT!

The story arc also included Hal Jordan accidentally getting high on a bad batch of canned mushrooms, which is hilarious.

It's iconic, it's melodramatic, it totally deserves to be made fun of. Coming soon.

2005-08-11T10:04:00.000-04:00

This isn't comics related, but it is very nerdy.

The producers of Parts: The Clonus Horror are suing the producers of The Island for copyright infringement. (Variety broke the news, but I'm having trouble linking to the story.) I'm personally very happy to see Parts in the news, as it is one of my favorite MST3K films. And The Island is a total ripoff.

My name is Franny Howes, and I am a writer and a warlock.

2005-08-09T15:34:00.000-04:00

My mom reads my livejournal. Not the friends-only posts, as she doesn't have a login herself, but the public ones. Lately, that's consisted mostly of surveys. She told me she likes reading the "interviews with myself" that I post. She compared them to a scene in the movie The Committments where one of the guys keeps pretending he's being interviewed on TV. I think that's a fun way to think of memes. I encourage all bloggers to interview themselves regularly. I think it could be a fun format.

On a different note, my 21st birthday is coming up on August 31st. (Amy is supposed to be throwing me a Batman party as I threw her an excellent dry 21st birthday party last year. I promised her I wouldn't drink this year if she gets me a balloon with Nightwing on it. They have them at the Sam's Club in Saginaw, we saw them.) It is the time of year other than Christmas where I can make a list of trade paperbacks and graphic novels and not have to buy them myself. I know I want the Runaways hardcover and my own copy of Archer's Quest but other than that, if anyone has any recommendations that aren't by Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, or Frank Miller (as I have read or purchased all I intend to buy those fellows...damn you Miller for degenerating into suck) I would appreciate them.

Finally, I have a theory regarding Alan Moore. For I-don't-know-how-long he has introduced himself publicly as, "My name is Alan Moore, I am a writer and a warlock." As he is a warlock. And his perpetual feud with DC is bubbling up right now. I believe he attempted to lob a curse upon Dan Didio and it was somehow deflected onto Keith Giffen. I doubt it was a mistake or a miss, as Moore is a serious warlock, and mighty scary. Didio must be practicing countermagick of his own and transferred the curse to the poor fellow. How else could you explain such a prodigious body count among the guy's characters? Other than a sociopathic editor, that is. Or maybe irate Rosicrucians. Those buggers are scary.

2006 is gonna be a good year.

2005-08-06T22:00:00.000-04:00

Being a total fanboy means getting insanely excited about things that don't even exist yet.

Like a Justice League RPG for the PS2 and XBox.

Not an action fighter. A role-playing game, people. As in, leveling up. As in, adding people to your party.

Featured super heroes will include Superman, Batman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, and Zatanna, instead of traditional seventh meber, Aquaman. Each super hero will possess unique super powers that are character-specific, creating a variety of fighting styles for players to utilize while battling the forces of evil. Gamers will have the power to bring classic super heroes of the "Justice League of America" to life, customize their skills and engage in one-to-two player cooperative combat throughout interactive and destructible environments.

Translation: It's going to be Marvel Legends in the DCU.

Oh, happy day.

On the toy front, I've got a 13-inch cloth-costume Hal Jordan action figure to look forward to. From the look of him, he's got about the same level of articulation as the unnervingly-adorable 9-inch figure from Hasbro sold at Target a few years back.

And, God help me, the mask comes off.

I know some people around here do not share my love of Hal Jordan, but they are wrong.

My first blog meme sniff

2005-08-05T11:32:00.000-04:00

It's a gay Friday... sort of.

It's the Gay Meme, tagged by Scipio, who posts hilarious and lovely scans. (Honeysuckle? So hot.)

1. Are you single or in a monogamous relationship?

Dude. There's a damn reason we do the blog together. We're practically married.

2. How long have you been with your partner/significant other/boy/girlfriend?

About 3 years now. Ish.

3. How did the two of you meet?

We lived on the same Honors College floor here at Michigan State for two years, and just hit it off.

For some wierd reason, I distinctly remember her wearing this shirt that said "Pie for Strength!" on it when she first introduced herself. It was from this restaurant place near a mountain, so it was the only food climbers could snag before they went up. Pie for strength.

Whenever I see her wearing it now, I smile.

4. What do you like to do together?

Franny will tell me every so often that we need to live in the real world more. We talk about comic books a lot. We're total movie junkies (it feels like we've watched at least 60-70% of Paul Newman's filmography by now, even though we're not even close).

She's also been dragging me to a lot of parties lately, which I really don't mind going to as much as I say I do. Kind of like how we go to a HeroClix tournament and I say I don't plan on playing but I'm always pleasantly surprised to find she made me a damned team anyway.

5. If you are single, what would life be like with your ideal
spouse/partner?

Let's see... I'm living in an apartment with my girlie. We play HeroClix, Magic, and roleplaying games, run an entertaining comic blog (it's funny to me, dammit), read a damn lot of comics, goof around with action figures, watch excellent and slashy movies, get drunk every so often and generally get cuddly whenever we damn well please.

Yeah. I think I'm rocking that "ideal life" right now, yo.

Since my known membership list for the Gay Blogger's Union is quite short, I'm going to pass this off to Franny, if she'd like to add anything else. Or any of my lovely commenters...

Um. Derf.

I was never very good at handing off the stick. It's why I never did relay races when I was on the track team. Well, that and the fact that I can't run worth a damn.

But I digress.

Also: I've got an appointment with an Awesome Tech Buddy (tm) Sunday to fix my poor, broken computer. (I'm getting real damn tired of using Jean Paul Valley, y'know?)

If all goes well, next week will be a chock-full-of-scans week devoted to analyzing what makes a character slashy.

If it does not go well, I'll post the text-only IRC/AOL chat parody of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' run on Green Lantern, to console myself with The Funny.

2005-08-05T11:21:00.000-04:00

Scipio tagged us! Gay relationship meme:
1. The latter. 2. 2 years 10 months, minus a brief hiatus in Winter 2003. 3. We lived across the hall from each other in the dorm freshman year. I was wandering around trying to meet people and I ended up in Amy's room. She fell in love at first sight. It took me a while but eventually I returned it. (Her version of the story is much more interesting as she has a better memory for squishy romantic details than I.) 4. Read comics, talk about comics, argue about comics, watch movies, play Magic, play Heroclix, play RPGs, lurk in the darkness, and be sickeningly cute. 5. N/A.

JS, you're up.

The 'Haven is so lonely

2005-08-01T10:45:00.000-04:00

In honor of Amy's computer being as broken as Max Lord's neck, I am declaring it Weird Text Message Monday.

Back in May when I first started at my summer job, I had a very difficult time adjusting to a 9-5 schedule. (Didn't you know lesbians were nocturnal?) So to break up the monotony, I took up the habit of sending Amy text messages from comic book characters, usually Roy Harper. Here are some highlights.

Hi Dick...had an accident with a C4 arrow today so I'm taking the rest of the day off. How's the mafia? J/K Work sucks, miss you. -Roy

Her response:
you do know that its the FEATHERED end that points at you, right? Ill be home as soon as I pick up comics for Tim. <3 D

My reply to that:
You're such a...youthful ward. No wonder we get along.

Next time: Amy will be debuting her deconstruction of what exactly makes a couple of guys "slashy", and also her interpretation of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow as portrayed in an IRC chat. OMG I <3 Heroin J/K!!!!111

I'm not dead, but my computer is.

2005-07-29T14:36:00.000-04:00

My computer mysteriously forgot some major component of its operating system.

Long story short, I'm going to be separated from my scans collection for a while.

How does this affect you? Well, it means no more Homoerotica Fridays -- at least for a while.

But there shall be a whole week of lovely scans posts to celebrate my computer's triumphant return once we get it up and running again. I promise.

It's a damn shame that the thing is busted, too, because I've got a hell of a whole lot to be excited about in the comics world.

The Spirit is getting his own monthly -- by Darwyn Cooke.

I love Darwyn Cooke. If you've met me in person, chances are I've tried at least once to get you to read DC: The New Frontier. Or his issue of Solo. Because they are awesome.

If there's anyone I trust to pick up where Eisner left off, it's Cooke. Because The Spirit has a legacy of being a smart, sexy series with stunning visuals. And I've seen Cooke do smart. And sexy. And I hope to God he maintains the tradition of the series' famous introductory splash panels.
The return of The Brave and the Bold

If this is what a post-Infinite-Crisis DCU is going to include, you can sign me up. Justice League Unlimited has shown that you can go outside The Trinity (or even The Big Leaguers) and still tell an exciting story.

And I won't lie: the total fanboy in me is absolutely howling for a Green Lantern/Batman issue.
JSA Classified

Written by Geoff Johns, penciled by Amanda Conner and starring Power Girl~~'s breasts~~, this is a highly entertaining read. I'm really digging Conner's art style, which just cartoony enough to suit the slightly goofy angle to the story. It's a damn shame that it's Adam Hughes' cover, not Conner's, that's being put out for the second printing. Oh, well. If Hughes gets more people to read this book, I won't mind.
This week's issue of Flash

OH GOD. What's the one thing that you can do to end an issue that beats the return of Professor fucking Zoom? THIS. Oh God damn you, Johns, for knowing exactly which buttons to push. I had to put down the issue and compose myself halfway through. My hands were shaking for several minutes after finishing. Oh damn you, you bastard. Damn you for knowing exactly how to get a deeply visceral reaction out of me.
Batman Begins for the PS2

Holy God, I love this game! I'm such an 8- and 16-bit kid, and I've never been very good at 3d environments. But this game rocks on levels of awesome I haven't felt since I played Earthbound for the SNES. To emphasize the film's themes about fear and stealth, you sneak around the shadows and use the surroundings (crates, pipes, tankers) to scare the bejeezus out of your enemies, swoop down and take them out without being seen. One of the meters shown for your enemy is his heart rate -- you can actually see how much he's pissing himself before you cold-cock him. It's so beautiful I could weep. It totally indulges every fanboy Batman fantasy and then some. I highly reccommend it.
Marty Nodell is cooler than you

Martin Nodell, creator of the Green Lantern (and an all-around nice guy) has promised that he'll do everything he can to make the trek out to Charlotte, North Carolina for HeroCon 2006. Considering that by then he''l be what, pushing 91? This blows my mind. Not only that, but he says he'll front the cost so an indie publisher or artist can come, too.

I've had the extreme pleasure of meeting Nodell and this just falls right in line with how genuinely upstanding I think he is. I wish I had the coin to truck it out to the south next summer.

Hell. Maybe it can be a graduation present.
Daughters of the Dragon

This is Marvel, so I'm not quite sure what the hell it's all about. Franny makes incoherently happy gurgling noises where Misty Knight is concerned (she was overjoyed to see her cameo in House of M, for example), so I'll take her word for it that it's a good thing.

See you once I get the bat-computer up and running again, kids.

It's a sad, sad day in geekdom.

2005-07-20T16:45:00.000-04:00

Today, we lost two great men in fandom.

James Doohan -- Star Trek's Scotty -- and Jim Aparo, co-creator of Batman and the Outsiders and the artist for The Brave and the Bold.

Jim Aparo -- he's known for bringing life to a great many characters, but for me, the work I will always remember him for is Batman.

Maybe it's because you'll always remember your first. Bruce Timm's work on Batman: the Animated Series notwithstanding, Jim Aparo's Batman was my introduction to the character. I came into comics during the Knightfall storyline, and the visual storytelling from those books is as good (and in many cases, far better) than all Batman stories to come.

I prefer Aparo's Batman over Neal Adams', and that's saying a lot.

He's definately a hidden gem of comics art. Last I checked, you could get an original page from his run on Batman for under 60 bucks. That's a damn shame.

***

It may surprise some readers of this blog, but Scotty was my favorite Star Trek character long before I fell in love with James T. Kirk.

It's easy (and rather amusing) to make fun of most of the acting in Star Trek, both on the various television series and the movies. It's mostly melodramatic, over-the-top... but James Doohan as Scotty was rarely so.

Watch Star Trek II and see Doohan cradling the broken and bloody body of Scotty's nephew Peter Preston. I dare you to watch that scene without reaching for the tissues.

Or the scene in Star Trek IV, using a personal computer:

Scotty: "Computer?" (nothing.) "Computer?"
Businessman: "Um, just use the mouse."
Scotty: (picking up the mouse like a walkie-talkie) "Heloooooo computer."

That's comedy gold, people.

My all-time favorite issue of the Star Trek comics is a Scotty issue, as well. Star Trek Annual #3, by Peter David, Curt Swan and Ricardo Villagran. (It's also available in the Best of Star Trek trade paperback.) Scotty reflects on the deaths of Peter Preston and his wife, Glynnis.

It's beautiful. I've read it a hundred times and it still chokes me up.

***

You will be missed, gentlemen. Oh God, you will be missed.

You know, I did read good comics this week... sort of.

2005-07-17T13:23:00.000-04:00

After snarking over most of this week's comics haul, I must say I did read two comics this week that were pretty good.

No, scratch that. One was not too bad. One was fucking spectacular.

The pretty good one? JLA #116. It gets bonus points for being the one story arc that rehashes Identity Crisis without making my brain hurt too much. That said, I wish the DCU could just let that story the fuck go. I liked it, it had its merits and flaws -- and for the love of God, it should have been over a year ago.

But. I digress.

It's an alright read. Carter's a hardass and that's entertaining, Ollie gets to be snarky, and it's fun watching Geoff Johns' beloved Saint Hal float over everything. (Seriously. His feet never touch the ground in this whole damn issue. It may be an easy way to get around layout problems, but it's an amusing coincidence.)

It's kind of sad that this is the best thing that came out this week for me, though. It's ok, but comics should make my heart race, dammit. They should make me want to read the next issue desperately.

They sure as hell shouldn't rehash a story that should have died a long freaking time ago.

Can we go back to this, please?

Slash pairing qualification: beating the holy hell out of each other

2005-07-17T12:16:00.000-04:00

This week, I'm going to shift gears on Homoerotica Friday -- that is, an illustrated discussion on what makes a character appeal to slash fans. (And if you're coming here from Scans Daily, a lot of these scans are going to look familiar. For that, I apologize.)

One of the biggies is if two characters fight all the time. And I don't mean that married-couple bickering, either. I mean really wailing on each other. Something about a couple of fellas getting all sweaty together and resolving their issues with brute strength and phallic objects.

Can't say as I blame them.

This is the sort of thing slashing Oliver Queen is built on (it's a long standing belief in fandom that Ollie punches everyone he wants to have sex with). But this week's example of this principle comes to us from The Outsiders, issue #11.

This is after Roy's taken five bullets to the chest in an earlier issue. He gets disabling flashbacks to the incident when confronted with guns, and is considering retiring. (It's a bit hard to be a vigilante when any punk with a gun can make you panic.)

Roy's in the Outsiders "danger room," shooting at practice targets to see if he still has it. Dick, watching Roy practice, challenges him to a fight, and tries to help him work through his problem with guns... in the special kind of way that can only come from being raised by Batman.

Warning to dial-up users: these pages are roughly 200KB each.

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6

The second panel on the third page:

You want to know why I read Outsiders, despite all its flaws? That's it, right there.

That's the stuff fics are made of, kids.

More comics, more reviews

2005-07-14T15:23:00.000-04:00

Midway through this week's comics haul, and so we hit the books that are just sort of... there. Not bad, not great, they're the midrange filler that comprises the majority of everyone's comics collection.

This week's representatives: Desolation Jones #2 and Rann/Thanagar War #3.

To sum up how I feel about Desolation Jones right now, let me quote the title character:

Ex-spook porno producers steal an ex-spook colonel's private stash of Hitler's home-made sex flicks? GAAAAAAAH!

Given the action of the first issue, everyone sits around and talks. It's a ton of semi-confusing exposition. It's one of those books that hold a trade paperback together, but as a single, it lacks flavor.

J.H. Williams III's art is nifty, though, and there are some genuinely nice moments -- but there's not a hell of a whole lot you can do to follow up the Hitler porn and the gimp-smashing of the first issue, and that's all there is to it.

Where Desolation Jones doesn't do enough, though, Rann/Thanagar tries to do too much. Dave Gibbons needs to calm the hell down. He's trying to cram actions and subplots that might have enough room in a TPB or an ongoing series into a 6-issue miniseries.

And they need to stop bolding every other word in the issue. I don't know if it's Gibbons trying to add emphasis or Nich J. Napolitano being overly enthusiastic, but the effect is annoying as hell.

The art is nice, but the panels are crowded and claustrophobic. It's a lot like the layout problems I had with Return of Donna Troy, actually. There's just too damn much going on, too many people, too many species and not enough answers.

And not enough Kyle. I really like Kyle. And I'd be lying if I said watching him fight zombie Thanagarians wasn't fun as all hell.

Comics review part three: Green Arrow #52

2005-07-14T12:17:00.000-04:00

When an issue's title is "Identity Crisis... again," you know that can't be a good sign.

Let's count the moments Amy rolled her eyes at this book:

1) The razor-sharp dialogue!

Mia: Holy crap.
Conner: Yes.
Mia: They blew up our digs?
Conner: Yes.
Mia: Wild.
Conner: Yes.

2) Judd Winnick putting teenage slang into Mia's mouth reads like my dad trying to sound cool. I should never see the word "mondo" in a comic, ever. If this gets any worse, Mia's going to actually say "OMGKTHXBYE" on-panel, and I'm going to be forced to break something.

3) "Because you need a white girl to play one of the leads." "One-- it's because you're talented, and two--yes. Mr. Hobson thinks we might get sued for discrimination."

4) Tom Fowler's pencilling makes everyone look like they were made of putty. Whenever someone opens their mouth, their jaw dislocates and slides to the side, or protrudes their lips an inch away from their face. Limbs twist like Gumby. There's next to no foreshortening. Ollie's pupils refuse to line up, so it looks like he has a lazy eye. Conner continues to be a tan white kid. Why am I so intimidated to put together an art portfolio, if this is what it takes to get a job drawing comics?

Come back, Phil Hester and Ande Parks. I miss you.

5) "Help me find Dr. Light!" When you quote something, it should, at the very least, be a poingant allusion. all this does is confirm Winick's critics that he can't come up with a story on his own.

The cover, on the other hand, is lovely. The archery isn't perfect (but it's far from the worst I've seen), and Zatanna looks great as well. I just wish I got the Zatanna/Green Arrow team-up issue that it advertised.

That would have been a fun read.

Comics review for week of July 13: Batman #642

2005-07-14T11:42:00.000-04:00

And so the review of this week's haul continues, working from the crappiest comics to the best.

The second-worst book this week? Batman #642.

Let me say this: there is no reason Batman should be a bad book. Ever. As one of the Big Three, you have to assume that this is going to be one of the books most-read by people who don't ordinarily read comics. Especially with the movie out, you have to put your best stuff forward.

The writing leaves me lukewarm, mostly because there's not a whole lot of it. The book averages maybe a dozen words per page. The characterization rubs me the wrong way (Killer Croc deliberately lets a roomful of innocents go, but he's still a threat to civilians? What?). And then there's the dialogue:

Killer Croc: Why? Why do you care if [The Mad Hatter] dies?
Batman: The same... uh... reason I care... if you do.

If Killer Croc has an easier time constructing a sentence than Batman, you know you're not doing it right.

The art isn't that hot either. It's not eye-burningly bad, but the blood looks so fake it could be ketchup. There's a reason I prefer black blood in comics -- I've never seen anyone do red blood properly. Killer Croc looks like someone dropped a jar of strawberry dessert topping on his head, which is hardening into a shiny lacquered shell.

Also: can we get Dr. Scott to call bullshit on the fake medical science in this issue? I'd love to watch someone smarter than I am tear this issue a new one.

The obligatory snarking about All-Star Batman & Robin

2005-07-14T11:21:00.000-04:00

Dear Frank Miller:

On the whole, I really enjoy your stuff. I loved Year One, Dark Knight Returns, and Sin City. I even liked Dark Knight Strikes Again, and trust me -- I've taken a lot of shit defending that book to people.

When you defend the benefits of a writer to some of the most vehement detractors this side of Rob Liefeld, you expect some good shit in return.

All I got was shit.

See, it doesn't hurt when Liefeld does shit art for Teen Titans. I expect him to suck. So when he meets my expectations, I don't mind so much.

But you? You used to be so good. I still show Batman: Year One and Dark Knight Returns to the non-comics-reading people I know to get them into Batman.

I used to think you could write powerful women. Carrie Kelley, the ladies of Old Town --

I really enjoyed Sin City -- but was I giving you too much credit in thinking that the girlflesh fanservice and the violence was you being ironic about the sensationalism in pulp novels?

After this issue, I'm starting to think I was.

Dear Jim Lee:

Your backgrounds are as lovely as they were in Hush. As a matter of fact, I think you should do them exclusively.

Because the crap you put in front of them in this issue isn't much to look at, yo.

I do not need ass shots of Vicki Vale. Ever. Not even a little bit. And yet, here she is, spending a good half of her appearance in her underwear.

For the record, I'm sick and tired of this everyone-has-a-few-too-many-vertebrae shit from you and Mike Turner, too.

And did Frank tell you to draw Dick looking down at his murdered parents in the same poses as in Year One?

Dear, you're supposed to hit him when he says dumb shit like that. It would save us all a lot of trouble.

P.S. Leave the EXTREME!!! Mid-90's style hair on women back in Image comics where it belongs.

KTHXBYE

Signed, me.

I was initially fascinated by the prospect of All-Star Batman & Robin. I had heard that this was essentially going to be Robin: Year One in the DKR universe. Maybe it was morbid curiosity, but I kind of wanted to see what turned Dick Grayson from a 12-year-old orphan into the psychopath in Dark Knight Strikes Again.

If this is the kind of shit I have to wade through to find out, I think I'll pass.

Warning: I'm going to talk about Marvel, race, and Captain Planet

2005-07-11T23:23:00.000-04:00

Amy is home for an extended long weekend of family nagging, being scraped by dermatologists, and delicious lead poisoning and so my mutant brain in a jar has been left to its own sinister devices. Usually this entails cooking experiments or giant lasers but I was feeling kind of introspective and didn't get much done.

In order to stave off the boredom of an empty, sweaty, shitty apartment, I reordered my run of Sandman (I recently acquired 3 early issues at a garage sale, squee of squees!) and settled down with some classic Chris Claremont New Mutants.

As I was savoring the delicious crack (and I mean that in the most loving sense--it's one of my favorite Marvel series, but 500 pound evil Xi'an Coy Manh does not make any damn sense) when I came to a realization that stunned me: I would not want to be on their team at all.

Usually, I would be more than happy should some merciful god reduce me to two dimensions and Mary Sue me into, say, Sandman, JLI, or the Outsiders. But I would loathe to have been written by Claremont in the 80's because he would have made me a huge freaking bitch.

While my beloved characters have their own personalities, they are still very stereotypical. Sunspot is the sassy Latin dude (he reminds me a lot of Fire but um penisy), Cannonball is a Southern gentleman-hick, Wolfsbane is...um, Scottish (and apparently there was no TV in Scotland in the 80's), and Dani Moonstar wears a freaking feather headdress so everyone is really, really sure she is an Indian. This is an instance of what I like to call Captain Planet diversity--the "one from this continent, one from that continent, make sure they have visual racial markers, and everyone gets an identifying accent" approach that dominated attempts at "diversity" until fairly recently.

Granted, this is the ideal that I was raised with, and it is not the same as tokenization. Apache Chief, Black Vulcan, and...um, the Asian wind samurai with no pants from Super Friends were tokens. They were minority characters grafted on to a pre-existing white team. The Captain Planet approach starts out with a multi-ethnic group and does not feature a white majority. Usually, though, there is at least one white American character, and his or her coming to terms with everybody's cultural differences is at some point an important plot point. Think again of Wheeler--fiery Irish-American from Brooklyn learning to appreciate cultural differences. Nobody was worried about Gee or Kwame learning about white people--it was all about Wheeler expanding his horizons.

Then again, New Mutants was more complex than that in who had to learn to understand whom, and there was an alien, a girl supposedly from Nova Roma aka ancient rome in the modern day (who later suffered terrible, terrible retconning), and a Russian girl raised by alternate universe Storm in a limbo dimension. But when things got messy, they had a slumber party, and it all worked itself out. There is still a lot of stereotyping in this strategy (fscking feather headdress) but it is an improvement. And unconsciously, for people who grew up with this stuff, it's an ideal. I am sure that this archetypical team is what ensured I would always be really uncomfortable wiht a room full of white people making decisions.

But I still wouldn't want to be in the comic. Personal disclosure: I am from Grosse Pointe. It is a suburb of Detroit infamous for wealth and snobbery. It's 90210 but colder and less interesting. It's 48236. But due to an excellent upbringing by conscientious, non-snobby liberals, I am not like everyone else you might know from that place. But if I had to be reduced as a teenager to a stereotype for purposes of creating a "one from column A, one from column B" team, and I had discovered my amazing powers in the Marvel Universe in the 1980's, I would have been the bitchy rich girl who had to learn to get along with poor people and Indians. And robots. And Russian girls from Limbo. (Monet from Generation X was somewhat like this, except she was also a genius and that made her cool. And Claremont would not have made me cool.) I would have been girl Cyclops! And no one would like me!

Thank Bob that Chris Claremont is not writing my life. As of now, I am instead fulfilling the tormented genius stereotype, teamed up with a working-class hero partner, with the lesbian subtype, and an odd-couple templated dropped on top, and everything is going just fine.

Slash goggles? More like slash cataracts.

2005-07-08T16:38:00.000-04:00

Seems The Absorbascon is tuning into the Slash Channel, with the latest poll concerning the gayest couples in comics.

It's a sizeable list, but I can't help but see all the ones he's missing:

Beast Boy and Cyborg.
Oracle and Black Canary.
Tim Drake and Kon-El.
Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy.
Nightwing/Robin and Batman.
Roy Harper and Dick Grayson.

For Christ's sake, where is Batman and Superman? I'm not a big fan of that particular fandom, but the covers for World's Finest are among the most eye-burningly gay that I've ever seen.

Hell, I'd even throw Hal Jordan and Barry Allen on that list, too.

Clearly, the need for Homoerotica Friday as an education tool is dire, indeed.

Homoerotica Friday: Birds of a feather...

2005-07-08T15:25:00.000-04:00

This one comes to us from Birds of Prey and I think it speaks for itself.

Babs, if I could get Dinah Lance to hold me like that, she could call me whatever the hell she wanted to.

The Comics Haul for July 7, 2005

2005-07-08T10:11:00.000-04:00

Small batch this week, but it's a good one.

Villains United is, far and away, the best of the four miniseries to come out of this whole Infinite Crisis hoo-hah. I'm a big fan of witty banter with supervillains, so it's supremely entertaining to see them bantering with each other. Catman an Deadshot continue to be delightfully gay ("I ain't gonna kiss you or nothin', Blake." "I'll cry when I have the time, Lawton.") and any and all references to Apokolips scare the crap out of me. Gail Simone's trademark humor coming out of bad guys ("She better be dead or I'll be pissed.") is positively delightful.

The Return of Donna Troy has taken a step up from fucking incomprehensible to only vaguely confusing. Then again, if you have to drag in all the continuity baggage each one of these former sidekicks brings with them, along with the fallout of the Rann-Thanagar War, I'm willing to forgive a lot of the confusion. It's hard to read the "order" in which characters speak, but for most panels, order is irrelevant -- these characters are trying to piece together what the hell is going on just as much as we are, so it makes sense to "hear" them chattering all at once and over each other's conversations. The most comprehensible thing in the issue is the foreshadowing of Donna and Roy getting together when this is all over, which is made so obvious it's almost a belabored point already.

It's kind of nice to hear a mention that it's Jade, not Nightwing, that leads the Outsiders (the good Mr. Winick has seemed to have forgotten that as of late), even if it is Nightwing that barks most of the orders here. And then, somehow, Phil Jimenez manages to work in odd little references (Tesseracts, "hobbits," and "That's no moon. It's a space station!"). I wasn't going to be the least bit surprised if someone said they had a bad feeling about this.

Overall, I like where he's going with this series, and he's slowly but surely gaining some focus. I just hope the readers will give him enough patience to pull it all together.

And, according to the advertising, the WildC.A.T.S cartoon is coming out on DVD! The thing is probably twice as awful as I remember, but this Wildstorm series was one of my guilty pleasures when I was younger... you know, before I developed any taste. The thing comes out on July 19, and I might get it once it hits the bargain bin... which should be around, oh, August or so.

Y: the Last Man continues to be awesome, even if it is really weird that Vaughan gets meta about himself ("It figures. An entire planet of women, and the one guy gets to be the lead."). The bit about being able to tell Yorick's a dude based on the frequency of his voice I call bullshit on, though. I may be biased by my own deep voice, but I don't think you can peg someone's sex based on whether they sing bass or soprano. But, hey! Canonically gay characters! Now, if we can only get the LBGT population in DC-owned comics to get out of the permanent-sidekick slot. (I'm looking at you, Vaughan. We all know Mayor Hundred is. Just come out and say it.)

Deflecting Arrows

2005-07-07T14:09:00.000-04:00

So it has been declared by Scipio over at the Absorbascon to be "Anti-Arrow Rampage Day". And he made fun of Roy. And that's just not cool with me.

It made me sit and think, just why do I love the Arrow family so much? I really hate getting into arguments as to whether a certain character or writer suck/rock/should be skullfucked (unless it's Devin Grayson because I have a very good case against her). I'm not good at defending my positions. I like stuff because...I like it.

But Roy is my man, despite his many and various bad costumes, inexplicably developed heroin problem, bad parenting skills, and frequently kidnapped child, and you don't randomly dis him and get away with it. Despite there being a lot to dis. Nightwing has done many inexplicably stupid things over the past few years, and nobody goes around accusing him of being a crappy character. They just blame "That Woman". So why don't the archers get the same courtesy?

Is it wrong for me to like a group of non-powered heroes with sunnier dispositions than the Bat family? I love Ollie. I think he is really cool, despite cheating on Black Canary, and considering I am somewhat of a man-hater, that's saying a lot. Am I that far off in thinking being able to pull a 103 lb bowstring and nock 29 arrows a minute is really freaking awesome? Think about it. That's one arrow every other second--the equivalent of lifting 103 pounds every other second. Count it out. It's amazing.

Finally, lest we forget, I remind you all that WAP is the sound of a left cross.

And what does Zatanna do?

She watches.

Homoerotica Wednesday

2005-07-06T13:48:00.000-04:00

OK, so I said I'd be back Monday and it's now Wednesday.

You can blame my new 14-day free trial of City of Heroes for that.

But I promised to bring the gay and God dammit, I keep my promises.

(Sorry, Ron -- no Thanagarian goodness... at least, not yet. I'm still looking. My Hawkman scans archive is a bit shallow.)

Let's call this week's installment: "I Can't Believe They Wrote That."

You know, those unintentional slips of script that make you wonder how in the holy hell they got it past the Comic Book Code.

Take this example from the old-school Teen Titans:

Let me just say that "rearguard archery service" is my new favorite euphemism of all time, ever.

Comics review for week of June 29

2005-06-30T15:49:00.000-04:00

Really need to update this thing some more.

No Homoerotica Friday this week -- Franny and I will be away from our respective computers for the holiday weekend. I'll try to put up something gay on Monday.

As for this week's comic haul... well, let's take a look. I'll try to be as non-spoilery as I can.

Batman: I don't know why, but this issue didn't do anything for me. Maybe I'm just burnt out over the whole Jason Todd thing, but this was a "take-it-or-leave-it" issue for me. It wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination -- indeed, the bit in the cave at the end was very nice -- but I'm just kind of bored already with the Rebirth of Robin II.

Batman Allies Secret Files and Origins: I think I liked the Batman Villains issue better, but that's just because Black Mask scares the bejeezus out of me. But I really did enjoy this one. The first story was heavy-handed and a little clunky -- and it reminded me of Tim Burton's Batman more than anything. The Commissioner Akins story was spot-on, though. Speaking as someone who doesn't know him very well, this characterized his relationship with the Bat quickly and cleanly. And the Cass/Tim interactions in the third story are great. And lo and behold! A cliffhanger ending that actually makes me want to read the upcoming comics!

Flash: Oh. Oh oh damn. Now there's a "family reunion" that's got me on edge.

Green Lantern: Okay, the woman pilot so felt Hal up. Oh sure, you may say it's gratuitous -- but admit it, you'd try it too if you were there. For me, the gratuitous bit is the scene with the superior officer. I may not know a hell of a whole lot about the military, but my bullshit alarm went into Red Alert mode when I saw that one. It doesn't seem like the kind of incident where you can just say, "Golly, sir, I'm awful sorry... Can I have a plane again now?" And the Jack-Jordan-dying-one-year-ago thing makes my brain hurt. The Spectre series told us Hal's older brother bought it in the Coast City explosion -- if you're trying to tell me that the last 10 years of real time happened in one year of comics, you're out of your fucking mind. One more instance of Geoff Johns insisting that the whole Spectre series Didn't Happen, I guess. But. I nitpick and bitch as an act of love. I'm really enjoying the hell out of this series so far.

Justice League America - Classified: Now, I'm a big fan of Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, and I've got to say I was really disappointed with these last two issues. If it weren't for the fact that the ending for issue #7 was so horribly sad, I would say they should have ended it right there. This feels like they had a four-issue story, but were commissioned for six. It just felt like they were trying too hard to be funny in this one, rather than let the funny bubble up naturally as a result of upbeat witty banter and self-aware pokes at the comics industry itself. And the final page -- seeing Ralph and Sue Dibny getting excited over trying for a baby and Ted Kord and Maxwell Lord grinning at the camera leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Despite the closing panel, Giffen's League does not live "Bwa-ha-happily ever after," and nothing's going to change that. Instead of reveling in their status as a wildly-out-of-current-continuity story, the ending feels like one last attempt to cram I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League into the main DCU storyline, and the less said about that, the better.

I'll stay with this title to see what Warren Ellis does with it -- from the previews, it looks like more OMG IDENTITY CRISIS THE JLA IS SO DARK RAWR!!! stuff. We'll see if the lord of Transmetropolitan can make the angst more interesting.

OMAC: When a book asks you to buy more comics with a cliffhanger ending, it had better be good. (Like, say, the bit I mention above.) This ending didn't do anything for me. Then again, I've never been a big Superman fan. I think I'll skip the tie-in crossover, but I'll stick around to watch the remaining members of Giffen's Justice League take the stage. But grim n' gritty bullshit that doesn't suit that team at all, and if #4 is as dark as I think it's going to be, I might end up dropping this miniseries.

Outsiders: One more name for the Women in Refrigerators list. What a waste.

Young Avengers: I order one book from DC's noble competition. (Well, I've also been reading Franny's copies of House of M, but I don't have a lot of emotional investment in it. Hell of a lot easier on a newbie fan than DC's mega-crossover, though.) I've got to say, for a story that hinges off of Avengers: Disassembled and a metric fuckton of time travel issues, it's pretty accessible to a fan of the Distinguished Competition. And it's got one of the last remaining letters columns in comics, mostly talking about this "are they or aren't they?" business. Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is. There's a hell of a lot slashier teams that I can name than this title right now (Outsiders and Teen Titans come to mind right off the bat). But it's still quite cute, clever, and again -- there's a way to do a cliff-hanger ending well. I'd recommend this series to anyone, even if you've never touched the other side of the comics shop in your life.

Well, I'm out of here for the weekend. Hope all my American readers have a nice Fourth... I'll see you all on Monday.

Paying my dues to the Gay Blogger's Union

2005-06-24T16:00:00.000-04:00

So fellow Gay Blogger's Union member Scipio recently posted an homage to the Golden Age Black Condor, one of the most flaming heroes ever to be graced by four colors.

And you silly kids thought Spider-Man made you gay. Tsk, tsk.

In the comments, an anonymous poster brought up Hit Comics and the gaygaygay Stormy Foster.

But looking at Stormy dry-hump a Nazi on the cover of Hit Comics 24, I couldn't help but notice that I've seen that pose before...

...I saw it earlier this week in the previews for September DC comics, on the cover to Villains United #5.

There it is, kids. Catman humping Deadshot in full glorious color. Post-Crisis, post-Code, post-OhGodIThoughtYouPeopleKnewBetterByNow.

And that's following up the incredibly homoerotic "Eh, I don't want to kill you, let me cook you some eggs" scene in Villains United #2.

And people thought the Hulking/Asgardian hand-holding thing on the cover of Young Avengers was revolutionary.

I'm too much of a slash fan to say I mind the idea of Catman/Deadshot subtext, but God damn, man. Even I have limits.

I'd also like to say that "Homoerotica Friday" will be a regular feature here at So So Silver Age. The title comes from Nate Ebig, a guy from my drama club back in high school. His days of the week went as follows: Shitty Monday, Crazy Tuesday, Hump-day Wednesday, Naked Thursday, Homoerotica Friday and Lesbian Saturday. (The answer to the inevitable question of "Well, what about Sunday?" is, of course, "Sunday? Why, that's the Lord's Day!"

Green is the new black, or: Why Geoff Johns is one of my favorite people ever

2005-06-20T11:58:00.000-04:00

For those of you out there that don't pay attention to comic sales numbers, you may have missed something that makes me smile a great deal.

DC outsold Marvel for the month of May, both in market share numbers and the number one single issue.

Why you should care: this hasn't happened to DC in about a half decade.

So yeah, I'm excited. But that's not the real reason why I'm smiling.

The number one selling single for May?

Green Lantern #1.

Green Lantern: Rebirth #6 is number three.

Apparently giving one of DC's most infamously rabid set of fans exactly what they want is also highly profitable.

Who'd've thunk it?

Although I'm tempted to, I don't think you can put this surge in sales squarely on Hal Jordan's shoulders -- although perhaps Geoff Johns deserves a raise, especially given how well the minis spinning out of Identity Crisis are doing.

Villains United, OMAC Project and Rann-Thanagar War also make the top ten, in that order. Day of Vengeance doesn't show quite so well at #22, but I think DoV #3 is the best of the bunch so far -- don't count that mini out just yet.

And we'll have to see how fans react to the new Green Lantern series (especially how they handle Johns eventually leaving the book) before anyone can declare a comeback.

But the numbers for Green Lantern make it damn difficult to not smile, nod sagely, and say: If you rebuild it, they will come.

I am the Red-headed Stepchild of the Old School.

2005-06-17T22:57:00.000-04:00

So I was in Waldenbooks the other day, poking around their graphic novel/role-playing section (which isn't terribly large -- stores like Barnes and Noble have really hit them hard) and I saw something I haven't seen in a long time.

A spinner rack.

An honest-to-goodness spinner rack.

I haven't seen a spinner rack in years. I hadn't realized how much I miss them.

After all, I started my journey into comic book fandom in a 7-11, not a comic shop. I may have married the long box, but it's the spinner rack that was my childhood sweetheart.

It got me thinking -- you know, those melancholy thoughts that start with phrases like back in the day... when I realized the "old school" of my memory is still post-Crisis, which in the grand scheme of things isn't old school by anyone's definition.

Pre-Crisis. It's a little like asking your parents what they were doing when Kennedy was shot, or how they felt when we landed on the Moon. You can read about it, you can learn all the trivia and all the facts and dig through all the archives, but if you weren't there, you'll never be able to recreate what it was like when all of it was happening. You'll never know how it felt when it was new.

It made me sad, suddenly. I guess it was because I was suddenly hit with the realization: I missed out on Composite Superman when he was new and interesting, and we'll never see stories that glorious and ridiculous and spectacular again. Not ever.

You can't tell stories like that anymore. Not when we're so immersed in a world where superheroes have to always have one foot in the real, in flesh and blood and broken bones and human drama.

The Green Lantern Corps seemed to be the last remainder of that boundless-creativity style of storytelling; that's why I wept so bitterly and for so long over its destruction, and why I tremble just a little at the thought of its return.

I love the Silver Age. But I love it out of a childish jealousy, out of the fact that I missed out on it when it was here. It makes me sad to hear modern fans call Silver Age stories crack. Even though I myself have tossed around the term -- that is, any story that is utterly ridiculous, over-the-top, so out-there it generates Stupid Superhero Quotes or contains a critical mass of unintentionally homoerotic images. But I have never spoken the word in mockery. And they do. And that hurts.

So I don't fit in with the new breed of comic fans, that point and laugh at the Silver Age. But at the same time, I don't fit in with the older fans, the ones that bought and read the stories way back when. I don't know Snapper Carr as well as I should -- I get Earth-D and Earth-S mixed up all the time. I do a pretty good imitation of an old-school fan, but sooner or later I betray myself as a poser.

My love of the Silver Age is tied intimately to my love of aviation and the space program. Every so often, I'm hit with the awful, awful sadness that the great age of the test pilot was dead for a quarter century before I knew what an airplane was. So now all I can do is look at these beautiful, fantastic machines in museums and wonder: Why in God's name did we ever stop going to the Moon?

What happened to comics? What happened to all the stories about Superman being turned into pistachio pudding by alien invaders? What happened to Hal Jordan's adventures in the 58th century? What ever happened to Starro the fucking Conqueror?

Why did we stop going to the Moon?

Batman Begins: worth the price of a new seat

2005-06-15T22:31:00.000-04:00

I shall first get the fanwankery out of my system:

BARGLEFLARGLEChristianbaleBATBATBATBATBATcapeBOIOIOIOIOIOING.

That said, my review:

Batman Begins was everything I had hoped it to be: a terrifically well-directed, mostly well-cast, dark, angsty movie about a seriously messed up guy who finds a new identity in fighting crime.

I knew Christian Bale would be a great Batman from the start. I have had faith in him--I was right. I think about ten thousand people owe me five bucks.

Cillian Murphy, who originally tried out to be Batman but came in as such a strong runner-up that he got to be the bad guy (much like James Franco in the Spiderman movies), accomplished the daunting task of being scarily pretty and having maggots crawling on his face. You can see his beautiful blue eyes through the maggot mask. It's a nice effect.

Speaking of effects, Christopher Nolan was a very successful man-behind-the-curtain. He uses a lot of the fast cutting that fresh-out-of-indie filmmakers seem to be relying on lately (Aronofsky anyone? Not that I don't like Aronofsky...) but he does it well. Not letting the audience even see Batman for more than a split second when he first appears provided so much tension that I actually broke my seat. I'm kind of a big girl to be bouncing up and down with excitement.

Actually, the place I broke my seat at was when Bruce called his partygoers "phonies". I don't know if that was intentional, but all of us out there trying to grab the brass ring sure enjoyed it.

My main problem: Rachel Dawes. At first, I thought it was watching Joey from Dawson's Creek bob her head up and down in the WB Television school of acting style, but then I realized that that wasn't really the problem. My beef is that her character really doesn't have anything to do but act lawful good and look pretty-yet-slightly-less-pretty-than-Batman-as-to-not-be-distracting. She's just not very interesting. The Batman love interests that keep people's attention have to have tension--either "Oh my God, I'm in love with a convicted felon" or "Oh my God, your dad wants to destroy humanity". "Oh my God, you...knew me as a kid and are extremely wholesome" just doesn't cut it.

But Talia would have been too much to expect. The movie is good enough as it is.

Finally, I would like to note that while I maintained my composure (except for breaking the seat...) Amy wept openly. And dammit, if she didn't mention that in her post, I sure as hell am.

The obligatory Batman Begins post.

2005-06-15T22:01:00.000-04:00

As a (supposedly) grown-up comic fan, you tell yourself, "I will not freak out and collect everything with my favorite character on it. I will not blindly adore everything in a book (or movie, or what have you) just because some bits in it were very, very cool. I will exercise some discretion in my purchases. I will see the places where a story could be better, even if I loved it overall. I will critique as an act of love.

"But above all: I will not become a squealing fanboy."

A movie like Batman Begins makes it damn hard to abide by that standard.

Really. I could go on about how Ra's should never, ever rhyme with Häagen-Dazs or Katie Holmes's complete inability TO STOP TWITCHING LIKE A FREAKING BOBBLEHEAD EVERY TIME SHE SPEAKS.

Okay, maybe the Katie Holmes thing really did irritate me.

But Batman Begins is a solid film all around. It's been a long time since we've had a decent Batman movie, so I think that explains the kids who are going to howl with glee on forums as if it's the Second Coming. But I really think it can stand up to the hype.

Cillian Murphy as Jonathan Crane? Disturbingly, unnervingly pretty.

Gary Oldman is James Gordon. Oh God, it makes me yearn for a Year One movie -- with just Gordon's scenes.

The Ra's al Ghul we see here felt right to me. While he wasn't the environmentalist he's been written as, he seemed motivated by the same goals as his comic book version -- whatever means necessary for The Greater Good.

The Batumbler really makes me want to see a Dark Knight Returns adaptation. Come on, Miller! You've got the cinema bug now! Starring Mickey Rourke, too -- DKR Batman is Hartigan's brain in Marv's body wrapped up in a Batsuit anyway. And you know you can imagine Rourke saying, "rubber bullets... honest."

Ok, maybe I am freaking out like a fangirl here. I can tell, I'm abusing italics. That's never a good sign.

I've heard interview rumbles about sequels -- specifically, R-rated sequels. This makes my toes curl with glee. The Joker? There's a man who deserves an R-rated Batman movie, I tell you what.

Post-Franny edit: Ok, I admit it. I know I lose butch points or something, but the thing choked me up in some bits. But come on -- if geeks are allowed to get teary for the end of Wrath of Khan, you're allowed to snuffle a bit over poor, wounded Bruce ~~and how perfect it is when Gordon comforts him OH GOD~~

I'm not a hater, but that doesn't mean I have to like her.

2005-06-09T10:44:00.000-04:00

Devin Grayson is up for a Lulu of the Year Award for "work [that] best exemplifies Friends of Lulu's mission of promoting diversity in comics."

I have no idea how to feel about that.

So, whose side am I on? Mine.

2005-06-08T10:53:00.000-04:00

So. If I have a comic blog, I've got to pick sides in the Rann/Thanagar War.

Even if it is kind of sad that the Rann/Thanagar war in the comics blogs is more interesting than the one in the comics themselves.

OK, fellas, make your case.

Adam Strange: Why bother? It's clear you're going to support Rann.

Why's that?

Adam Strange: Dude! Ray guns! Jet packs! You've got a huge hard-on for all that Silver Age sci-fi crap!

This is true... even if you are a Flash Gordon rip-off.

Adam Strange: And I had an ongoing spot in the back pages of Green Lantern for a while. And Hal Jordan and I even had a two-issue adventure in the '90s series before he went Batshit Fucking Loco. He thought I was cool. And smart. And resourceful.

I seem to recall Hal got captured by Quardians in those issues.

Adam Strange: Well, yes, but --

And tied to a cross.

Adam Strange: But--

TIED. TO. A. CROSS.

Adam Strange: Well, I saved him, didn't I?

No, you didn't. You got your psychically-jacked-up 4-year-old daughter to save him. I don't recall you doing much at all.

Adam Strange: Well, at least I didn't need a 4-year-old to save my ass!

Not the way to get on my good side, ray-gun boy.

Hawkman: All the more reason to support Thanagar!

But you're... so... Republican.

Hawkman: You're going to base how you feel about an entire race on how you feel about one man?!

I didn't see you complaining about me judging Rann based on Adam Strange. And he's not even from Rann.

Hawkgirl: OK, so Hawkman's a tool. But you like me.

Yeah, but that's in the animated universe. The animated universe can even make a schmuck like John Stewart look cool.

Franny: THIS BLACK MAN LETS IT ALL HANG OUT!

John Stewart: GODDAMMIT I DID NOT SAY THAT!

Boy, don't make me get out the back issues.

Hawkgirl: Come on... deep down, you know a woman swinging a giant mace is pretty awesome.

Point.

Hawkgirl: And we invented TiVo. And nearly every comics blog you read daily supports us. You know we're going to win.

Rationally, yes. I know Rann is going to get its collective ass kicked. But just because I know you're going to easily beat the piss out of a people doesn't mean I have to be behind that. And the latest issue of The Rann/Thanagar War convinced me of that. "New Thanagar?" Screw that. I don't care if you don't have a homeland. That doesn't give you the right to invade someone else's planet, dammit.

Hawkgirl: But Adam Strange is still useless. You've got to admit that.

How about this: we just shoot Adam Strange and end the whole bloody business.

Adam Strange: NOW WAIT JUST A DAMN MINUTE --

Youthful Ward Love

2005-06-03T00:13:00.000-04:00

Welcome to So So Silver Age, a fanboi/grrl comic book blog belonging to Amy Payne and Franny Howes.

Amy: I have an irrational love of Green Lanterns in general and Hal Jordan in particular. I love all things Silver Age, even though the Multiverse died before I learned to read. Also, I swear too much.

Franny waits for the trade, Amy reads serials. Together, we fight crime!