Two Secret Six comics by Simone/Ostrander in a row?! I must have good karma.
Adventure Comics #6
Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul
Amazing Spider-Man #617
Joe Kelly, Max Fiumara and Javier Pulido
The WWE Royal Rumble is on its way later this month. If you recall, last year I wrote up a seven day long review and ranking of all the Royal Rumbles from worst to best. Currently, I’m fresh into working on my Wrestlemania Countdown, which I can hopefully get done by mid-March, what with having to rewatch 25 3-4 hour shows. Right now, that’s not important.
Neither is this 108-Man Royal Rumble from Japan, but it’s a fun waste of time. It’s a big New Years get together between Big Japan Pro Wrestling, Dramatic Dream Team and Kaientai Dojo and you can tell that it’s New Years because when there’s one minute left in 2009, things get interesting.
I know only a handful of these guys from watching CHIKARA, but that doesn’t prevent it from being entertaining. Enjoy a man who can eliminate people from the ring with his mind, a guy who’d rather sit in the corner and snack than wrestle, the Japanese Shawn Michaels, a Hulk Hogan blow-up doll, a man with a giant turnip head and a gay rapist.
Here’s an excerpt from a press release Marvel sent out yesterday:
In an effort to provide assistance to comic retailers in 2010, Marvel is offering retailers an opportunity to turn unsold comics into an extremely rare Siege #3 Deadpool Variant!
Retailers – for every 50 stripped covers of the following comics sent to Marvel, you will qualify to receive one FREE Siege #3 Deadpool Variant. The 50 stripped covers can be any combination of the comics listed below and all submissions need to be received at the Marvel office at the address below by Tuesday 2/16/2010. Also included with the stripped covers must be your store contact information including Diamond Account # and email address.
Stripped Covers To Be Sent:
Adventure Comics #4
Booster Gold #26
Doom Patrol #4
Justice League Of America #39
Outsiders #24
R.E.B.E.L.S #10
Ooh, that’s shots fired.
Let’s pull this apart piece by piece, okay? Top to bottom.
First is the timing. This is the first real week of comics news in 2010. Last week was Christmas recovery and fairly light. This week, DC has been slinging high profile announcements left and right. Among other things, they’ve shown off Gail Simone being back on Birds of Prey with some crappy artist, a preview of Jock’s take on Batwoman with Greg Rucka, a look at the Return of Bruce Wayne, and Keith Giffen is getting a Justice League book. Fan-service announcements all, two trying to recapture past glories and two pimping big deals. Add the announcement of Brightest Day, their new biweekly comic and probable spine of the DCU, into the mix and you have a big week just three days in.
This press release is aggressive and instantly controversial, the type of thing that makes people want to argue about it ad nauseam. It’s sharp and pits the two companies right up against each other, upping the ante on the competition between the two companies. It also disrupts DC’s grip on the news cycle in a very major way. At the time of this writing, the Robot6 article on Gail Simone’s return to BoP has 32 comments. The piece on the press release has 107, despite being posted several hours later. Marvel pushed DC right out of the limelight with something that is sure to cause discussion (fights) for days to come.
Second is the subtext of the press release. The first line begins, “In an effort to provide assistance to comic retailers in 2010[.]” Marvel is positioning itself as doing the retailers in the Direct Market a favor by allowing them to trade unsold books for a rare variant that’ll go for big bucks. Essentially, they are saying “We are the good guys. Those other guys did you wrong, but we’ve got your back.”
The subtext doesn’t end there. The books that are part of the promotion have one thing in common: they were all part of DC’s Blackest Night promotion, where ordering 25 or 50 copies of each issue gave retailers the chance to order a bag of plastic rings. That promotion was a huge success for DC, with several books moving as many as thirty-five thousand more copies than they did the month before. They ran the sales charts for November 2009. It left DC holding seven of the top ten spots in the Top 300 sales chart, up from six in October and September and four in August.
Some retailers required customers to purchase a book to get the rings, others treated them like the giveaways they were intended to be and gave them out like candy on Halloween, and others, the worst of the lot, sold the rings on their own. Conventional wisdom and anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that the books stayed on the shelves. The sales charts for December seem to suggest the same thing- once the promotion was over, a few of the books involved lost roughly twenty thousand readers. Past experience suggests that that fall will continue into January. (I’m rounding these numbers off, by the way. To compare for yourself, look at the October, November, and December charts. I’m an English major, I can barely count to ten.)
Now, Marvel is taking a shot at what is basically DC’s biggest sales success in ages, and doing it in such a way that wipes the foundation for that success away. Suggesting that the comics didn’t sell implies that the entire draw for the increased orders were the bags of plastic rings, which honestly probably isn’t that far off from the truth. REBELS is an enjoyable book, but even for a Blackest Night tie-in, it got a huge bump. Comic fans like collecting stuff.
So, top to bottom:
1. Marvel is saying, “DC left you holding a bunch of stuff you cannot sell.” It’s a serious diss, attacking DC’s entire reason for being. Regardless of the quality of the books (I’m fond of REBELS myself), DC needed a gimmick other than good storytelling to sell these comics. If a comics company needs plastic rings to sell comics… well, you do the math on that one.
2. The timing is kicking sand all over DC’s big week. It’s a release calculated to cause controversy, gain a lot of attention, and piss people off. It’s very, very public, and definite shots fired.
3. Deadpool, as in the cover boy of the “extremely rare Siege #3 Deadpool Variant,” is a copy of Deathstroke. Marvel is shipping a cover with a knock-off of a DC character, one who has enjoyed inexplicable success over the past year, in exchange for stripped DC comic books. That’s just salt in the wound, isn’t it? A cheap shot nestled inside a larger cheap shot?
Marvel’s promotion is cruel. Taking DC’s big win last year and big week this year and upending them in an attempt to put DC in its place is fairly messed up. At the same time, it isn’t exactly inaccurate. Despite DC’s big month, Marvel still won November ’09. It’s definitely a cheap shot, but… it’s kind of funny, isn’t it?
This release is the kind of aggressive posturing we haven’t seen out of Marvel since Jemas and Quesada simultaneously pissed DC off forever and rocketed Marvel back into the limelight. It’s Marvel thumbing its nose at DC and reminding them who has the market share advantage. Basically, Marvel is M. Bison and the gang, and DC is Guile.
Verdict? Ouch.
You may have noticed that whenever hermanos goes on about how great a certain comic is, he has an Amazon link. That’s great in that it takes care of the cost of this site and all, but part of me resents it. You see, as I’ve mentioned time and time again, I work at Barnes & Noble. I know what Lex Luthor feels like every time he’s forced to work with Superman. At least he isn’t shilling Kindles or any of that bullshit. nook is the way to be.
What I’m getting to is that recently the stores have started to sell Marvel hardcover trades for excessively cheap prices. I’m talking $7. It started with the first Dark Tower trade, which made sense because they marketed the hell out of that comic to the public, all things considered. Then I found out that a nearby store had a bargain hardcover of Death of the Stacys. Just the other day, we got the first hardcover of Supreme Power, which has the first 12 issues plus the first regular appearance by the Squadron Supreme. All for a little over a fifth of the original price. That’s pretty nifty, so I investigated further.
Here is a list of the bargain hardcovers you can find. You can either find them at BN.com (mostly $3.99 each, plus shipping) or just go into your local B&N and ask for them to order it for you. The quantities are very much limited, so if anything catches your eye, go for it immediately. They’re in order from biggest quantity to lowest.
Killraven
New Avengers v.6: Revolution
Silver Surfer: Requiem
Supreme Power v.2
Spider-Man: One More Day
Spider-Man: Reign
Punisher War Journal v.2: Goin’ Out West
New Fantastic Four
Red Prophet v.1
Defenders: Indefensible
Mighty Avengers v.1: The Ultron Initiative
Wolverine: Evolution (Black & White)
Marvel Zombies: The Covers
What had me singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” today? Sure, my week brightens around Wednesdays. And sure, I was still riding high on the leftover Batmanderthal vapors. But this is what really kick-started my morning:
The Birds of Prey are back! And they’re being written by Gail Simone!
Of course scans_daily is all over this, including the mysterious blacked-out figures in the background. Creote is the front-runner, as far as speculation goes, for the big figure.
There are more contenders for the flying figure. They include
1. Misfit – Charlie Gage-Radcliffe (Yeah, yeah. “Dark Vengeance.” Not my favorite.)
2. Batwoman – Kate Kane (I’d think she’d be up front in the picture, though.)
3. Batgirl – Bette Kane (That could be interesting. And I’m pretty sure she’d be pissed to see how many people have stolen her moniker.)
4. Manhunter – Kate Spencer (Very unlikely.)
5. Spoiler/Robin/Batgirl – Stephanie Brown (I don’t think Gail Simone has ever written her before. That could be cool.)
Simone states that the two new characters are a pair, which cuts down on a lot of possibilities. I suppose they could be Creote and a very interestingly posed/surgically altered Savant. The ruling theory, though, is that they are Hawk and Dove in some new iteration of the pair. We’ll know in spring. Until then, I’m humming the rest of Oklahoma!, and keeping hope alive.
I picked up Ganges #2, my introduction to Kevin Huizenga, on Tucker Stone‘s recommendation, so it’s only fitting that I bite Nina’s Virgin Read gimmick, right?
I’d heard of Huizenga before, of course. He made several Best Of 2008 lists, but I’d never really bothered to check him out. I dunno what it was–maybe being a little wary of trying new things, hopping onto a book I knew next to nothing about, maybe just being a little dumb–but I didn’t get around to it until I ended up at APE ’09 with a list of books from Tucker to keep an eye out for. I was short on money, long on time, so all I got was Ganges #2. I mean, I didn’t even know that it was about a guy who can’t sleep. I found that out weeks later. I came into this colder than cold.
My first reaction when I started reading Ganges was a mixture of confusion and surprise. The first panel is clearly a menu from a video game, and the next few panels hit all of the video game staples. I saw a select screen, some platforming, some exciting zooms, and a little fighting before it all went weird. The next ten pages are a blur of bizarre shapes and experiments in symmetry, all filtered through the language of fighting games. There are health bars and charge meters, and there’s even a bit where the black figure (player one) checks his upgrades and moves in a pause menu.
Huizenga uses the large-sized page to great effect here, as he moves from relatively normal-sized panels to one- and two-page spreads. The level of detail and complexity of the figures in the image expands drastically as they warp from form to form. There are no words, save a few text boxes in Japanese, so the art stands on its own.
It’s weird and it’s different and it immediately showed me that Ganges #2 is not what I thought it was. I was expecting mopey autobio, a distant cousin of Blankets with better artwork, and instead got something that was well worth the hype.
The game is something that Glenn Ganges is playing while his wife sleeps in bed. After a sequence where he restarts the game and gets back to it, a caption informs us that Glenn used to play a game called Pulverize when he worked for an internet startup. From that point on, I was instantly hooked. I got my first job when I was 14, doing web design (I think in Front Page and Notepad.exe) for a local non-profit. We left work at around 630. The boss left an hour earlier. Someone on staff had a copy of Quake II, and soon that last 45 minutes of work (just in case the boss came back) was game time. We had custom skins and everything.
Ganges #2 is about how people come together. While everyone in the book has their own problems and worries, Pulverize becomes an equalizer. In the game, they’re their avatars. Nothing more, nothing less. Playing together gives them a common ground to stand on, strengthening bonds and turning people from coworkers into something akin to friends. But not exactly- at the end of the day, the camaraderie is fleeting. Pulverize brought them together, but in a very specific way. The friendship was like watching a movie through a piece of glass, a little foggy, a little distant, and not quite real.
But even still, Huizenga shows how these kinds of relationships can be important. When layoffs begin at Ganges’s company, they send off one employee in grand fashion. Their bond may not be the thickest there is, but it is a bond, nonetheless, and valuable simply because it brings people together. The connection existing in that moment is what counts, not how long-lasting it is.
By the end of the book, the story is nothing more than an anecdote, something you could tell in ten minutes over drinks. In the book, it’s framed as just that. We see Ganges playing the game, the caption tells us about the time he was really into another game, and then the story ends.
Despite that, Ganges #2 is never boring. The video game that serves as the glue for the story is interesting, basically GeneriQuake, but what’s important is that the game puts the people on a level playing ground, allowing Huizenga to illustrate differences of personality by how they approach the game. It’s an obsession for Glenn, and something he hides from his wife, behaving a lot like a cheating husband when he works late and lies about it. His boss plays it because he thinks it’d be good to bond with the team, but soon quits. It’s a calculated decision, not one he did for fun, and as authentic as his relaxed posture when asking his employees about whatever small detail he’s latched onto as being the best way to relate to them. He’s fake.
Ganges isn’t at all what i expected. Taken on its own, #2 is a comic about nothing. A guy plays a game, we read a brief story about his past, then he gets some water from the sink and plays again. That’s it. But, the story is deeper and more entertaining than that summary suggests. It’s a comic about people and how they interact, held high by shockingly good art. The first ten pages show that Huizenga can do some amazing things with storytelling and the rest of the book shows his strong grasp of body language and how to make talking heads interesting.
I’m going to try to pick up the rest of Ganges (numbers one and two, which are in stock at Fantagraphics.com) and do another review, this time knowing exactly what it’s about going in. I think it’ll be interesting to see how my assessment of the series and Huizenga’s work changes. Based off Ganges #2, though, I expect to enjoy both.
Oh, yeah.
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!!!!!!!!!!!!
Life is beautiful.
Which is my way of saying:
