I got a text from Gavin earlier letting me know that This Week In Panels was going to be late. He’s got no internet thanks to Storm, who is apparently running wild out in New Jersey. While Gavin waits to get his power and internet back (and I assume the arrest and trial of the weather witch), you guys are gonna have to wait about seven days for a super special This Fortnight In Panels.
They pull me back in.
And for serious, I wanted to be out. I wanted to do a series of optimistic posts looking at promising upcoming comics. I wanted to make it so the titles of the posts ended up being the lyrics to ‘Tomorrow’ from the musical Annie. Because, that’s why. Then I see Ian Sattler responding to people being upset with Cry for Justice like this:
“I’m happy it upset people because it means that the story had some weight and emotion.”
Mister Sattler is a very nice and gracious man, whose job it is to sell this series, so I understand him trying to put a good face on it but – come on. We’re not teenagers anymore. Not every kind of attention is good attention. People aren’t responding the series because it has emotional weight. People responded to All-Star Superman or New Frontier because they had emotional weight.
People are upset because it’s an 1) unpleasant, hacky gimmick, in a 2) clunky, unecessary story, establishing an 3) already-established character trait while 4) taking away the originality of at least three different characters.
The reason it got such a big response is because people could point to one book and talk about how it distilled the worst of the status quo in comics right now.
The penultimate pages showed Carol Danvers and Tony Stark getting all shouty and arguey. Then Shanna the She-Devil, Ka-Zar, some tigers and the mute Black Panther who isn’t Captain America in disguise this time hang out in Central Park. Things suddenly get cold. What could this mean?
That’s all for this week. ManiacClown would strangle me if I didn’t at least feature the Farmville SHIELD image he made for a throwaway gag. Really, the guy would just give me updates about stuff I don’t understand. Never played Farmville and never plan to. Here you go.
Stay tuned for this Wednesday as my 12-day Wrestlemania Countdown begins, tough guy!
To wedge myself out of the pit of mild crankiness I’ve been in regarding comics, I have started looking ahead to things that I look forward to.
Thank you, The Brave and the Bold, for seemingly being an impossible title to bog down in misery, no matter what medium you are in. Here we have a female team-up book, a happy-seeming story, and complete indifference to current continuity. It has everything I’m looking for in a book.
Moreover, it has Barbara Gordon as part of it all. This is the kicker for me. She’s a sentimental favorite, and while I think her role as Oracle is great character development, I can’t get over the fun she had as Batgirl. I’m always willing to see more of that. This and Wonder-Con, another reason to look forward to April.
Yesterday’s adventure involved Thor having the mistress of the afterlife take care of his hammer. Then Tony Stark and Carol Danvers started going for the jugular. Let’s continue on with that.
This was one of the more difficult Ultimate Edit installments to write based on the matter of what we were critiquing. Back when we first started doing these, we laid down some ground rules and made certain things off-limits. The main one being Jeph Loeb’s personal tragedies relating to his son, Sam. The whole point here is never to make fun of Jeph Loeb the person (who I’ve heard from many is a genuinely nice guy), but of his writing.
A lot of Jeph Loeb’s writing has become very much Sam-based, and that is completely understandable. Captain America: Lost Son was more than anything Jeph’s attempt to come to terms with his son’s passing. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I respected what he was doing. He would continue to make minor references to his son in his work, which was fine, but it’s become more and more apparent that it’s something he can’t push himself past. Most of his work revolves around it, basing the adventures on father/son relationships and the grief related to it. Hell, look at why Magneto killed everyone in Ultimatum.
For those who haven’t read the original, the Iron Man narration boxes tell the story about how Tony Stark met a young boy named Sam in a hospital who was dealing with cancer. It was the boy’s horrible experiences and eventual death that inspired Tony to become Iron Man and create the Ultimates. The whole overuse of Sam is beginning to dilute the message and the seriousness of it all, at least in my eyes. It makes me think of when Puff Daddy used to talk about Biggie Smalls so much that on one skit show, Jamie Foxx (I think) played the role of Puffy and would randomly start pointing up and yelling about Biggie. The crowd laughed pretty hard at this, showing that the whole thing has resorted to becoming self-parody. It’s disheartening to see that this is the direction Jeph Loeb has been leading into.
It’s a touchy subject, but I wanted to get it off my chest.
Enough about the serious stuff. Let’s move to stupid stuff, like Farmville.
Thanks to ManiacClown, who spent WAAAAY too long working on that Farmville image. Join us next time as the big villain shows up and more sex is had. No, not by the villain. Maybe in the next issue.
Ron Wimberly’s been in Japan for the past few weeks, making me mad jealous. I’ve only been once, in the fall of ’08 for a work trip. All expenses paid was nice, but staying only a week was too short. But them’s the breaks! I did buy about five hundred bucks worth of clothes, though!
Ron’s been busy, drawing comics and making connects. He’s got a big deal coming up, so I’ll let him (and Benetton) tell it:
On Saturday, March 13th, Benetton Japan will be hosting a live paint show by an American artist, Ronald Wimberly, to celebrate Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku’s renewal opening. During the event, which takes place from 3pm to 9pm, the artist will be painting on a big screen in the window, which will be reported live on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/benettonpress.
So, details:
Where: Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku‘s official Ustream channel
When: If you’re EST (where Brooklyn at), 0100-0300 Saturday morning. For those of us in PST (From Oakland to Sac-town, the Bay Area and back down), you can check it out from 2200-0000 on Friday evening. For those inbetween… do the math.
Who: Ron Wimberly, aka dπ
What: Live painting
Tune in, you might see something cool. In the meantime, check out the kid’s site, revisit his Black Future Month interview, or get familiar with GratNin. You can also read the press release.
Tucker Stone compares baby killing at Marvel vs toddler killing at DC:
We at Marvel have always worked to support the trend towards ultraviolence–our readers like it, we like it, and you’d have to be fucking terrified of money to put a leash on Mark Millar. But we’ve always tried to remember that, at the end of the day, we’re making a product, a bit of fun, and that if we take it too seriously, if we try to make some kind of philosophical statement about justice or heroism, we’re going to end up with a dour, boring slice of poorly written shit.
How do you like your brutish and child-like extreme violence? Do you like it to look deeply into your eyes, desperately asking if you get it? Do you understand what has to happen to make a good man do wrong? Do you see how he can’t stop killing, as if he’s developed a taste for blood? Did you see those bloody socks? Do you get it? This is horrible, do you finally understand the stakes?
Or do you like it to be off the cuff violent, an act done simply because That’s What Bad Guys Do, something borrowed from Crank 2 or the best of crime cinema? No message, and no meaning beyond, “Yeah, this guy? He’s a douchebag.”
Our last installment featured the end of the Ultimates vs. Defenders fight with Son of Satan stealing Mjolnir from a very stupid Valkyrie and then escaping with the rest. Meanwhile, Thor has gotten bored of being king of the mountain and wants to escape the land of the dead. Hela will grant him that wish, but she wants something in return.
This first page might be a little not-work-safe.
Real talk: despite all the crap I give Loeb, I found the original scene between Tony and Carol to be really well-written.
Thanks to ManiacClown, who can’t get past how much Ka-Zar looks like Skwisgaar Skwigelf from Metalocalypse. Join us tomorrow as we finish that scene, get an aside from Captain America and Zarda, then see what Ka-Zar and Shanna are up to.
Okay. You ordered a bunch of Marvel Omnibus titles from Amazon as part of The $14.99 Glitch and they’ve been cancelled. You probably knew they would do. But you may have received a previous e-mail saying that you would get at least one at the magic price. Or maybe Amazon never got round to emailing you at all, they just deleted the order from your account. And you’re feeling a bit miffed.
I’m geting reports that people who have complained, even using the Amazon Call Me Back feature on the website, have been getting recompense from the multinational online retailer.
[…]
Me, I’m not complaining. I don’t think Amazon owe me anything. I understand however, that you may feel differently.
If you feel differently, you’re the laziest kind of crook there is. Tucker Stone breaks the situation down better than I can right now:
But when they get called on it, what do they say?
“I’m going to file a class action lawsuit” – some random infant, repeated exponentially
That’s the kind of response that would make George Washington weep. A class action lawsuit? Really? That’s the legacy you want written across your face, attached forever to your name?
Crime is a holy profession, and to join its brotherhood is to put oneself alongside this country’s greatest heroes. After oil and weapons production, it’s the most successful industry on the planet, with a storied history that stretches further than any religion. Getting caught out in it–even if all you did was take advantage of a gigantic corporation’s obvious pricing error–is something that should be handled with nothing short of the pride of a Dwayne Michael Carter. Playing the hurt consumer in this situation is the equivalent of standing in the door of the bank after the ATM accidently farts out an extra 20 and refusing to hand it over. It’s spitting on the flag, it’s saying that you’re only willing to play the game if everybody agrees to do it by your rules, and your rules are these: you can’t have done anything wrong, because it’s somebody else’s fault.
Amazon doesn’t owe you a single solitary thing. They’d be well within their rights to cancel every order and not lose a few thousand bucks. There’s even a note in their TOS that sometimes, on occasion, books are mispriced, and sucks to be you if they charge you the full price. Until the book ships, they do not charge your card, meaning that there is no sale. That means they owe you nothing until the book leaves their warehouse.
So to call them up and ask for a refund for time wasted ordering obviously mistakenly marked down books makes you something like a jerk. They don’t owe you anything. If anything, you owe them whatever the actual price of the book you ordered was. It’s a blessing that they honored any of the orders, considering it was such an obvious cheat that we were all taking advantage of. I got a few Ultimate Spidey HCs and I’m pretty happy about that. I didn’t get a Tomb of Dracula, but so what? I don’t expect Wal-mart to let me buy eighteen computers that got marked down to 50 bucks because somebody dropped a decimal point, and they’re under no obligation to let me do that.
Basically, don’t be the old lady at Kroger with a fistful of coupons, trying to game the system and score a dozen eggs for free and getting pissed off and demanding recompense when the manager is like “Sorry, we’re all out.” You played the game with a few aces hidden up your sleeve. If you lost, so what? You lost what, ten minutes of your time? A couple megabytes off your bandwidth for the month?
Get real.
What happened on Day Three? Let’s see, the duo of Hawkeye and Iron Man were doing pretty badly against the Defenders until Captain America showed up with what seemed to be Xena Warrior Princess and the Glamazon Beth Phoenix. They turn the tide and start whipping some Defender tail. A tail that Hellcat surprisingly does not have. During all this, Zarda punches Luke Cage in the nuts and prevents the possibility of Ultimate Danielle Cage.
We move forward.
Here is a quick cutting room floor panel. The expression on his face sells it so well:
Thanks to ManiacClown for the Thor dialogue. Speaking of Thor, I only noticed during the editing, but Frank Cho snuck in some uncensored bare breasts on that page. I blacked it out, but in the original spread you can see it in-between the panel of Thor sitting on the throne and the panel of Hela unmasking. I guess Frank Cho is to boobs as Leinil Yu is to Howard the Duck.
More bare breasts tomorrow, but these will be the comic book hair-draped-over-the-nipples kind.
