Myriad Issues talks to Leigh Walton

If you treat your comics as newspapers from a fictional universe, there’s no reason to read them twice. Marvel and DC have essentially told their readers that any given issue is not important—it’s only important as long as it connects to this network of events, or because it contains a certain plot point, they’re creating stories that can be replaced by reading a spoiler on a blog. And when you create that type of story, you have to follow that logic to its natural end, and relish the ephemerality. Make the best piece of disposable entertainment you can! Make it look like the other kinds of disposable entertainment that we understand.

God only knows why Marvel hasn’t had Spider-Man get sucked into a techno-dimension and lead into a summer crossover where part of the story is exclusively on MySpace or Marvel.com, or an alternate reality game that reveals what Dr. Doom is up to, or a chance to get text messages from Captain America if you give us your phone number. Play up the NOWness of it. You missed it? Oh well, you’ll catch up; that’s how these things work.

Comics are junk. Embrace it.

Esther is a real life friend of mine who I regularly talk comics with. I’ve been bugging her to write something for me, ’cause I think she has a great POV, and I finally have proof that peer pressure and pestering works! She sent over a list of five things she likes about comics. Read on, and hopefully she’ll be back for more.
-djdb

1. Rafael Albuquerque
The most recent example of Albuquerque’s art is in Superman/Batman #51. It’s an appropriate book for him, because Albuquerque is one of those always-underappreciated artists who can differentiate between Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent without going directly for the glasses and the spit curl. Clark Kent has a sunny expression, a chin that could only work on Superman or John Travolta, and the thick neck of a guy who is always the most muscular person in the room. Bruce Wayne has a scowl that blots out daylight and permanent lines of concentration over his eyes. Albuquerque has a talent for using subtle differences in facial features and musculature to give each character a different face and a different body. Too often, in comics, the reader is unable to tell characters apart until the colorist gets to them. It’s something special to be able to make two of DC’s most similar looking heroes unique.

2. Kevin Maguire
No one can finish a book drawn by Kevin Maguire without checking the cover to find out who the artist is. No one who has read one book drawn by Kevin Maguire can fail to recognize his style if they see it again, even if it were only a doodle on a cocktail napkin. I can’t think of another artist who is that skilled and that willing to be so gloriously silly. Kevin Maguire’s characters have faces made out of putty with the kind of expressions you might see if you hit the pause button during a Jim Carrey movie or an old Warner Brothers cartoon. Take any mildly funny scene and Kevin Maguire’s art will put it over the top. What’s more, instead of limiting Maguire to comedy, this style makes tragic moments even more poignant, because character’s face twist with recognizable pain instead being stuck in a stock pose. A lot of people think Maguire’s style isn’t pretty, and often they’re right, but I’m glad there is an artist who will sacrifice prettiness in order to let the characters express as much emotion as they are supposed to feel.

3. Roger Robinson
Which isn’t to say that I can’t appreciate prettiness. Have you seen Robinson’s work in Gotham Knights? The man draws cheekbones that can cut glass. And I haven’t seen that many moodily lit abdominal muscles since the movie 300. All that, and he doesn’t sacrifice expression or context. His subjects are beautiful, but they are subjects in a story, not objects in a pin-up. That’s impressive.

4. Amanda Connor
The Green Arrow and Black Canary Wedding Special really played to Amanda Conner’s strength, and not because of the subject matter. Playing to Amanda Conner’s strength means giving her a huge panel, the bigger the better, and filling it with people. Conner’s style is clean enough to keep the page from looking cluttered and she plans well enough to place little visual jokes that lead the reader from one part of the page to the next. Every character is looking, talking, or reacting to at least one other character. As a result, huge group scenes stop looking like a flat jumble of bodies and faces and become a number of little action panels, depending on which part of the page the reader is focusing on.

5. J.H. Williams III
A lot of artists have a style. J.H. Williams III has every style, including his own. In Batman #667-669 Williams draws a large group of characters, each of them penciled and shaded differently. And he’s not shy about throwing in pages that show a massive black fist superimposed over an exploding plane, or pages in which the panels form a huge pair of bat wings. Instead of distracting from the story, William’s art makes the arc into something both surreal and self-contained. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and something that should be shown to anyone who doesn’t consider comics ‘art.’

Julian Lytle hit me with fifty… and then fifty more.

1) X-books from 1991-1999
2) Generation X drawn by Chris Bachalo
3) That ill cover to the old Who Killed Jean DeWolfe Spider-Man trade
4) Erik Larsen on Amazing Spider-man
5) The First pages of X-Men #1 drawn by Jim Lee with the X-men in a training session
6) X-men #4 where they are playing Basketball
7) Jubilee in all her Mutant awesomeness
8) Backlash by brett booth
9) Back in the day when Savage Dragon and Pitt would guest star in almost every Image comic
10) Michael Turner on Witchblade
11) Joe Madueira on Uncanny X-Men
12) Storm in punk rock gear and no powers with a Mohawk
13) X-Men Series 1 trading cards all drawn by Jim Lee
14) Marvel Universe Trading Cards Series 3
15) Spaceman Spiff
16) Kandea
17) Kaneda’s jacket and bike (it’s an ensemble)
18) Mad Love
19) Dark Knight Returns
20) A Dame to Kill For
21) Kingdom Come
22) New Frontier
23) Darwyn Cooke
24) Bruce Timm
25) Gen 13
26) Humberto Ramos
27) Crimson and Out There
28) Geoff Johns’s Teen Titans Run
29) New X-Men By Grant Morrison
30) The Fourth World by Jack Kirby
31) Spider-Man
32) Galactus
33) Batman
34) Superman
35) Crisis on Infinite Earths
36) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
37) Luke Cage beating Dr. Doom for his cash
38) Dr.Doom
39) Inhumans by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee
40) Earth X, Universe X and Paradise X (with Heralds)
41) The Legion of Super Heroes
42) SUPERBOY-PRIME
43) Love and Rockets
44) Mike Mignola
45) 7 Soliders by Grant Morrison and various artists
46) 52
47) Akira
48) Naruto
49) Calvin and Hobbes
50) Peanuts
51) The Crew
52) Priest’s Black Panther
53) Bendis writing Luke Cage
54) The New Avengers arc with the Hood drawn by Lenil Francis Yu with no inker
55) The Crew’s White Tiger aka Kasper Cole
56) The Master of Kung Fu
57) The Phantom
58) The Authority By Ellis and Hitch
59) Planetary
60) Alan Moore
61) Alan Moore and Travis Cherest on WildC.A.T.S.
62) Cyber Force
63) The Justice Society of America
64) Captain Marvel (Fawcett)
65) The Ultimates 1 and 2
66) Ultimate X-men By Millar and BKV
67) Dazzler
68) Boom Boom
69) NextWave
70) Dragonball
71) TMNT
72) Concrete
73) Elfquest
74) Jason Todd
75) Robin
76) Runaways
77) Young Avengers
78) The Metal Men
79) Rusty and Skids
80) New Mutants
81) Adam Pollina on X-Force
82) War Machine
83) Ed Brubaker’s Captain America
84) Casanova
85) Umbrella Academy
86) Marc Silvestri on Uncanny X-Men
87) Watchmen
88) Podcasts
89) San Diego Comic-Con
90) New York Comic-Con
91) Alex Ross
92) Moebius
93) Gambit charging a bike to blow up the Phalanx creature the X-men fought
94) Secret Wars
95) Maus
96) Sinestro Corps War
97) The Punisher
98) Preacher
99) Cliffhanger
100) Capcom’s Marvel fighting games

Me and Julian are from the same era of comics, man. Jim Lee X-Men, Jubilee, Moebius (who remembers that Silver Surfer story he did?), Gambit… it’s all dope.

Here’s his #5, for example:

I learned the word “cripes” from this comic. No joke.

My review of Special Forces #3 is up at PCS. I got a shout on today’s Journalista,, too.

It’s unfortunate when someone has to accept their limits. Today, I’m accepting my limits as a writer. You see, back in the day, I used to write for a site that reviewed fighting games. There was one game that I intended to review, but I just couldn’t get it done. Then I started writing here and decided that the same game would make for a good 4L article. After playing the game for a few minutes, I decided to put it off for a while.

Maybe it’s a mix between the game being so unplayable and the belief that I could never do it justice. Luckily, the internet’s in its YouTube phase and I don’t have to explain. I can show you the horrors and let you judge for yourself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the arcade game Avengers in Galactic Storm!

It should be a rule that every time Thor enters a room, there’s an announcer yelling, “THE MIGHTY THOR!”

To give you an idea of how ridiculous this game was, here’s a list of the playable characters: Captain America, Black Knight, Thunderstrike, Crystal, Dr. Minerva, Shatterax, Korath and Supremor. Cap is the only one on there I’d have any interest in playing as. Others like Iron Man and Thor are only assist characters, including Clint Barton Goliath, who is portrayed as a laughable, giant fist stretching across the screen.

Finally, here are the amazing endings. Beautiful.

A few months back, I suppose inspired by the internet anger at One More Day, Tom Brevoort made mention on his blog how puzzled he was about part of the reaction. Back when The Other happened, people were annoyed as hell that Spider-Man had those crazy new powers, like his newfound wrist spikes. Now that they’ve gone back to webshooters and removed his new powers from the table, people are angry again. Why is that?

It brought me to realize that change in comics has two parts. One is the change itself. The other is the use of that change. Why was everyone annoyed? Because even though The Other was over-hyped and boring, it’s amplified when you realize that they hadn’t done anything with it. Peter David tried to use the spikes here and there in his Friendly Neighborhood run, but that was pretty much it. Not only did The Other make his powers seem stupid, Marvel made no effort to make us believe otherwise. They just shrugged and gave up on it.

It makes me think of how some people generalize The Death of Superman. Some say that any real comic reader knew that Superman would be back in a short time and that the whole thing was rather pointless. In that over-simplification, you ignore how that entire story (maybe without all the mourning issues) brought so much to the Superman mythos. First, it gave us a villain who, while used badly over the years, is still considered an iconic monster. One Superman villain was redesigned into a more fearsome and recognizable form, while another was redesigned into an interesting tweener character. Then we got two new superheroes with staying power and the groundwork for Hal Jordan’s descent into madness.

Hell, look at Hal Jordan! I mean he’s so handsome and dreamy and—sorry. Look at how many people frothed at the mouth at Green Lantern: Rebirth and the first few issues of his series. Without the return of Jordan, there wouldn’t be Sinestro Corps and the two Green Lantern series wouldn’t be nearly as fantastic. It paid off in the end.

I’m going to take a moment to look at four changes in comics, each an example of one of the four possibilities. A good change that worked out, a bad change that didn’t, a bad change that paid off and a good change where the ball was dropped. Maybe this will be a series. I don’t know.

Read the rest of this entry �

Matt Cruea, long-time 4l reader, did his own list of 50 things he likes about comics here.

In addition to that, I’ve been getting some responses from fans with their own. Here are 50 things Matthew Bensen loves about comics:

1. X-Men 132 – “Okay suckers – you’ve taken yer best shot! Now it’s my turn!” (back when Wolverine was still cool)
2. Spider-Man fighting the Juggernaut
3. Secret Wars – The Hulk holding up a giant mountain, the X-Men getting their asses handed to them by Spider-Man and Wolverine cutting off the Absorbing Man’s arm
4. The Michael Jackson Beyonder from Secret Wars 2
5. The Miracleman series – despite the fact I had to pay a trillion dollars on Ebay to get the back issues
6. Stormwatch’s evil Henry Bendix
7. Avengers #274 – Hercules getting his ass handed to him by the Masters of Evil because he is drunk
8. Deathstroke the Terminator and his creepy relationship with an underage Terra
9. An idiotic Ultron, who for some reason felt compelled to build himself a robot bride (Jocasta)
10. All-Star Superman
11. The boxing tournament set up by the Champion in Marvel Two-In-One Annual #7
12. A deaf Hawkeye nearly missing his shot with Mockingbird
13. Crisis on Infinite Earths
14. When the Invisible Girl became an Invisible Woman
15. The Headmen
16. The paparazzi getting naked photos of She-Hulk while she is sunbathing
17. Jonah Hex
18. Bullseye tossing a scalpel at Matt Murdock just to test his wild theory that he may be Daredevil – then hightailing it out of there
19. Changeling and Kitty Pryde making out on Metron’s chair
20. Thor being transformed into a frog
21. A drunk Colossus getting into a fight with the Juggernaut
22. Geoff Johns writing the Justice Society
23. Doc Frankenstein
24. The Claremont/Miller Wolverine limited series
25. Thor fighting the rest of the Ultimates
26. Ultimate Wolverine trying to kill Ultimate Cyclops on a mission just so he can steal his lady – only to have everyone later forgive him for this betrayal
27. Robin giving up the short shorts to become Nightwing
28. Jericho’s blond ‘fro and chops
29. Tony Stark as a drunk
30. Thor’s trysts with the Enchantress and her sister
31. Woodrue’s autopsy of Swamp Thing
32. Morrison’s Animal Man
33. Fables
34. Wormwood’s escapades in Leprechaunia
35. The Thing’s girlfriend who was also a thing
36. Ozymandias dismantling Rorschach and basically telling him to give up
37. Storm’s Mohawk
38. Captain Hero pounding in Iron Fist’s head while trying to wake him up from a trance
39. When Sobek eats Osiris in 52
40. Emperor Doom
41. The last page of Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1 which shows all of the villains together
42. Kraven’s Last Hunt
43. Dazzler’s walkman and rollerskates
44. Because the 90’s eventually ended and good comics returned
45. Because Jim Lee still manages to produce art every once and a while
46. John Stewart’s arrogance leading to the destruction of Xanshi (because the Anti-Life creates a yellow bomb) in Cosmic Odyssey
47. The continuous cover for the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe
48. Ed Brubaker comics – Sleeper in particular
49. God Loves, Man Kills
50. The fact that Marvel never sold out and brought Captain Marvel back from the dead – oh, wait…

Good list, yeah? A few of these are things I’d entirely forgotten about, but loved when I saw them. If you’ve got a list, send it over or link back. I’ve got more to come, too.

Joëlle Jones took a stab at redesigning a few of the X-Women, with colors by her friend Terry Blas.

Props to Khux for the find.

by Tobey Cook

What was originally going to be a piece in tribute to the late, great Mark Gruenwald last week quickly ballooned into something much more than what it was intended to be. So with that in mind, I bring you what I hope will be the first in a series I call Magnum Opus. What I’ll do here is spotlight a miniseries or trade that to me has a special place in my collection. This article’s highlighted miniseries will be Squadron Supreme, because it’s easily my personal favorite and has so many things it brought to the table as to changing the way comics had been written up to that point. It’s also the first major maxiseries I remember buying as it was coming out on the stands every month. It featured some decent art from Paul Ryan, John Buscema and one other artist during the 12-issue run.

For my first treatment I decided to choose a book that I think has held up pretty well – Squadron Supreme. Each member of the team was loosely based on a character from DC Comics’ JLA. You had Hyperion as the Squadron’s Superman, Power Princess (Wonder Woman), Nighthawk (Batman), and even a Skrull analogue to Martian Manhunter in the Skrullian Skymaster! While the names of the characters weren’t exactly original, Mark Grunewald decided he wanted to use them to do something that hadn’t been done in comics before – what happens when the heroes decide they can fix the world’s problems?

The basic premise of the maxiseries is that the Squadron, having just recovered from a battle with the alien Overmind, returns to a world that is in ruins. Seeing that the only way to fix the world’s problems is to take matters into their own hands, Hyperion decides that they must find a way to repair the damage that’s been done. Despite the fact that the people mistrust and despise the Squadron, Hyperion comes up with Project Utopia, a way to, as he puts it – “abolish war and crime, eliminate poverty and hunger, establish equality among all people, clean up the environment, and cure disease.”

However, not everyone agrees with Hyperion’s plan. Nighthawk, one of the Squadron’s founding members, resigns in protest believing that the Squadron has no right to force people to bend to the Squadron’s will.

Tensions are further put to the test when the Squadron decides to use a behavior modification machine to ‘rehabilitate’ criminals, even going so far as to use it on some of their former enemies – Quagmire, Foxfire, Shape, Lamprey, and others. This proves to be the most controversial move the Squadron would make, and prompts Nighthawk to join up with the Squadron’s enemy Master Menace in order to find a way to reverse the behavior modification process.

There are so many moral dilemmas in this series – much more than any Marvel series at the time, and it proves the old theory about absolute power corrupting absolutely. A couple more highlights of the series are Squadron member Tom Thumb’s search for a cure for cancer and a brief foray by Nighthawk to the mainstream Marvel Universe to get help from Captain America and The Avengers (not coincidentally written by Mark Gruenwald and illustrated by Paul Ryan, the same art team) to stop the Squadron.

If you’re looking for a book that will give you a good, solid read, look no further. The first printing of it is a bit difficult to find unless you’re an avid EBay fanatic, but it’s been reprinted several times since then as it’s a pretty solid seller for Marvel. What’s so important about the first printing? Mark Gruenwald’s ashes were mixed with the printing ink.

That’s it for this installment of Magnum Opus. If you have any comments or suggestions, or would like to recommend a book for a future column, feel free to drop me a line in the comments below.

Click here, scroll to the bottom, and vote for Genius.

Thanks.