Welcome to this week’s edition of This Week in Agents of Atlas. We have a lot of Agents of Atlas this time around, so let’s get to the Agents of Atlas!
(Not shown: the Agents of Atlas backup story in Incredible Hercules)
Amazing Spider-Man #618
Dan Slott and Marcos Martin
Authority: The Lost Year #5
Grant Morrison, Keith Giffen and Jonathan Wayshak
Originally, I was going to write up a silly post comparing Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno to the Thor vs. Superman fight from JLA/Avengers, but halfway into that write-up it hit me how it was too stupid, even for me. With that botched, I feel the need to post something.
Many of you know of Something Awful and their Photoshop Phridays. Recently, they did a two-parter with the theme being “Movies + Video Game Names”. The concept is taking a movie poster/DVD cover/whatever and altering it so that the title is that of an existing videogame. For instance, changing the title of Footloose to Dance Dance Revolution or changing Hell Comes to Frogtown to Battletoads. It’s simple and lacks excessive Photoshop skill (or Paint Shop Pro skill in my case), but leads to some very funny and creative images. Here’s part one and part two.
A couple of my entries made it in, which rocks, but in the end I had way too much fun making these and couldn’t stop myself. Here’s a gallery of what I’ve done to waste my time.
Marvel recently released the Deadpool variant cover to Siege #3, the one that’s tied to their promotion involving Blackest Night covers. Here it is:
Never change, Marvel.
I did a thing on Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy’s Joe the Barbarian at Comics Alliance.
It’s a brief over on storytelling in Grant Morrison books. An excerpt:
Reality and fiction feed off of each other in many of Morrison’s works, existing in a state where one is entirely dependent upon the other. Sometimes, they two realities are one and the same. Sometimes, the lines between the two of them are just a little blurred. “Joe the Barbarian” falls firmly into that latter group. Joe himself says that he is a stereotype, just like the bullies who torture him at his father’s gravesite. On at least some level, he’s aware of the fact that everything is a story.
If you didn’t buy Joe the Barbarian this week… you made a mistake. It was only a dollar. Go back to your comic shop and pick it up.
Does anyone remember a certain Bat story that came out a while ago?
Batman is out at a strangely casual event with the Justice League. It’s something between a company party and a training retreat. They make their way through various scenarios in an out-of-the-way place, and everythings going fine at first.
Then things start getting strange. Even though an event should have ended, it keeps going on and on, the conclusion retreating farther and farther the closer he gets. A town that should be in one place is in another, and is completely deserted. One moment it’s day, the next it’s night.
At first Batman thinks that it’s the work of a supervillain. The rest of the Justice League doesn’t agree, however, and insists that everything is normal. Batman begins to suspect his friends are either deliberately testing him, or under some sinister, greater power.
Then it all becomes clear. None of it is real. He’s dreaming, trapped in his own paranoid mind, and he has to wake up.
Then I wake up. (Bam! Did you see that twist ending? I sure didn’t.) Yes, I twisted it all up on you (though the above story probably was published sometime back in the sixties), meta-style. I know, there isn’t anything interesting about listening to someone else’s dreams.
There is, however, something interesting about listening to someone’s inadequacies. The reason the setting kept changing randomly was my brain being unable to hold onto the narrative. Everything that happened was obviously a dream. It’s just that I didn’t know it was a dream. Batman did.
Apparently, there is a Batman inside my brain. And he’s smarter than I am.
My only hope now is to eat, drink, and laze myself flabby so that he decides I’m inadequate and doesn’t try to take over my mind and force me to fight crime in my sleep.
This one comes courtesy of David Uzumeri, who spotted this headline on Marvel.com and wasn’t quick enough to write a post about it first! Did Tom Brevoort get a promotion from Executive Editor to Vice Prez? Congrats!
edit: Thanks to Graeme McMillan, who asked someone in Marvel who said that yes, Brevoort is Vice Prez. Congratulations! Brevoort’s edited some of Marvel’s best books, including the Waid/Ringo Fantastic Four, Joe Casey’s Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, some of Priest’s run on Black Panther, and, Gavin’s personal favorite, Double Dragon.
We’re about a week and a half from February, so I figured it was high time to talk a little about Black History Month ’10.
I made a mistake focusing so much on superheroes and the past in the last two Black History Month marathons I’ve run on 4thletter!. This year, for the third volume, I want to do something different. I want to focus more on context and more on the future. Sometimes, that will involve examining the past, but I’m hoping that it won’t be so… bitter.
I’m twenty-six years old, black, and male. I grew up listening to rap, jazz, and gospel. I like movies where everyone smokes cigarettes, violence lurks in dark corners, and bad men do bad things. I’ve been reading comic books since I was six or seven years old. Superheroes, rap, and crime fiction are in my DNA. The only black experience I know is my own, but over the next few weeks, I’m hoping to both clearly illustrate my personal experience and to step outside my comfort zone.
As far as the past is concerned, it is what it is. We’re stuck with what happened and we have to live with what we have. I’m bored with getting angry over things that happened ages ago, and I’m tired of being mad at comics. I’d much rather talk about the future. There are a lot of things happening that I like and I’m hoping to shine a light on them. Life is good, man.
I want to thank everybody who pointed me toward a bunch of black creators. There are a lot of people I’d like to talk to, but my own weakness with their work or time constraints prevented me from getting in touch with them. Sometimes I just couldn’t get into it for whatever reason. Sometimes, honestly, I just didn’t have anything to say. I have some people lined up whose work I enjoy, though, so keep them fingers crossed.
Posts won’t be daily this year. Quality over quantity. I’m currently planning two or three a week, not all of them from me. I have a lot of ground I want to cover, and I’ve done a lot of thinking about this over the past year. At the same time, by this time last year, I had ideas for every single post written down. This time, I’ve just got a few blocked out, some little more than titles, and am gonna be flying by the seat of my pants and trusting that it’ll come together in the end. I may fall flat on my face, I may end up retreading old ground, I may end up writing something good. I dunno. Time will tell. I’m still taking suggestions as well, so if you’ve got ’em, shoot ’em on over.
Stay tuned.
Gail Simone being back on Birds of Prey is kinda like a big deal. I’m pretty sure that Esther is still going “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” even today. She’s gotta be hypersonic by this point.
Anyway, I liked the old BoP. Those first 12-18 issues or so are some of Simone’s best work, and I didn’t even really mind Ed Benes’s art back then. But, the new announcement bugs me because of DC’s history with announcing fan-pleasing things and then doing half the job on them, at best.
-Spoiler dies in a sexualized and degraded way. Fans form Project Girl-Wonder in protest of the way her murder devalued her character. A couple years later, DC Comics brings her back, completely sidestepping the issues behind people were mad at her death. She’s just… back.
-DC makes a big deal about the return of Milestone, a well-loved company that featured a truly multi-cultural cast. Rather than bringing DC Comics up to the modern day with regards to portrayal of race, the Milestone books are effectively quarantined. They were shuffled off into a series as filler between big-name runs (Mark Waid and JMS) and their reintroduction took place in Dwayne McDuffie’s already-hamstrung run on JLA. And then, in the end, they drop every Milestone character except for Static. They wanted a new toy and jerked everyone around to get it.
-DC announces the return of fan-favorite Gail Simone’s fondly remembered Birds of Prey, with art accompanied by Ed Benes. Simone on Benes: “[H]e also does lovely, subtle acting, and tremendous facial expressions and body language. I think he brings a very fiery European influence that is a wonderful remedy to some of the tired vaguely manga and video game-esque influences we’ve seen lately.”
And, well, I realize that Simone can’t trash her artist (that would be unprofessional), but that doesn’t actually reflect reality. Benes’s men have one face, his women another, and they all have the same flat, empty expression. The body language tends to be of the “crotch or butt thrust directly at the reader” variety, and the “subtle acting” is so subtle as to be nonexistent. The “fiery European influence” would be better termed “draws kinda like Jim Lee used to, only with bigger boobs,” and the “vaguely manga and video game-esque influences” is the kind of annoying strawman people pull all the time without actually naming names. Is she talking about UDON? Humberto Ramos? Paul Pope? Joe Madureira? Ed McGuinness?
Benes is a bad artist for comics, is my point. His storytelling skills are subpar, his love for T&A gets in the way constantly, and his people all look the same. There are numerous other artists DC could have paired Simone with to make a book that would be the girl power monthly it should be- Nicola Scott, for example, or the Lopez brothers from Catwoman. They’ve proven that they can draw realistic, funny, and attractive women, and, most importantly, they have strong storytelling skills. The Lopezes in particular do great work, even with a varied cast, in a style that would fit the tone of Simone’s BoP.
But hey- Ed Benes. DC says he’s nice? I say he’s polite.
Y’all can have him, though.
Ooh, welcome to Name Drop City, where the comics are good and the girls are pretty!
-Noted comics critic David Uzumeri of Funky Babylon gives us an intro
-Theme music: 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental
-What’re we talking about? Comics internet! Who we read, what we like, what we dislike, and so on.
–Twitter is David‘s favorite comics site, and at recording time, David Uzumeri‘s open letter to DC Comics was the big thing.
-Peter David and Gail Simone: sometimes they get into heated arguments with people on the internet. Here is Jim Halpert from The Office doing an impression of what Esther does when things like that happen:
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