So, it appears that because of slow initial sales of the Wonder WomanDVD made Warner Brothers rethink their plans to make a Batgirl animated movie.  And what’s more, it caused them to rethink making a Batgirl: Year One animated movie.

This saddens me. 

In fact, it caused them to rethink making any movie with female leads.  This angers me, a little.

Let’s focus, for now, on the saddening part, and what we can do to fix it.  For starters, there is an internet petition already started to restart the Batgirl: Year Oneproject.  I know, I know, internet petitions suck.  However, I’m very much of a ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ mentality these days, and so I signed it and hope you will, too.  I also hope you will blog, will ask questions at conventions, and will, if you’re old fashioned, drop DC a letter talking about how much you’d like a Batgirl:Year One movie.  That is, if you do.  And if you don’t, well, you’re a fool.  Below I will list the reasons why I think that even if Wonder Woman had sold badly entirely, and not just initially, it would be a good idea to make a Batgirl: Year One movie.

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-Continuity Off!
-Esther has Captain Marvel!
-David has Captain Marvel!
-Wait, what?
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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I can’t embed it, but here’s the second Scott Pilgrim vs The World trailer. Enjoy it, yeah? It looks good.

edit: Found a non-Facebook embed:

Welcome back for another week. It’s been a pretty damn good week for comics, even with that Rise of Angst miniseries. A really full week, too. Reader Space Jawa sends in one for Ultimate Enemy, which I heard was a pretty big letdown. Sure, it’s going to lead into the next miniseries, but there’s apparently no closure.

Amazing Spider-Man #632
Zeb Wells, Chris Bachalo and Emma Rios

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2
Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving

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In a few days, the WWE’s latest show NXT ends its first season. This new experiment is reaching the end and I thought it would be a good idea to look back at this idea. The short of it is that I think NXT started out strong, got borderline unwatchable for a while, then started getting good again towards the end.

But looking a little deeper into it, I notice what a brilliant show it’s been, at least in concept. The concept of a mistake is an interesting one in wrestling because most of the time, you can only see it in hindsight. A lot of the time, the wrong aspect gets blamed and allows for the same mistake to be made again and again. That’s a lot of what makes TNA so sad, in that it’s run by Vince Russo, Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan – three guys who couldn’t own up to a mistake if their lives depended on it. Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it and TNA is proving that right.

The WWE machine has the occasional ability to see what went wrong and modify it in future attempts. For instance, Vince McMahon had the idea of having a handicapped wrestler. He thought it would make for the ultimate underdog hero and hired Zach Gowen, a trained wrestler with only one leg. The “handicap = underdog” idea was sound, but the execution failed. Gowen wasn’t exactly the most threatening individual and his one-legged offense stretched the suspension of disbelief to the utmost breaking point. A short while later, the WWE tried the same concept, but made the handicap something that’s fictional to the man portraying the wrestler. Hence, Eugene, a mentally-challenged wrestler whose drawbacks only existed within the story. Despite some flaws (hotshot booking, writing themselves into a corner and the wrestler letting himself go), he was a bigger success than Gowen.

NXT is a big amalgamation of different WWE ideas into something new and mostly fun. You see aspects of what they were trying to go with the first time around, but they’ve improved their process. Let’s take a look.

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The Fourcast wields the power of the gods. The very gods, themselves!

I wrote up this short piece on how JT Krul and Geraldo Borges’s Rise of Arsenal got the way heroin works wrong. While proofing before posting, I realized that I didn’t care enough to post it. Rise of Arsenal got everything you can get about heroin wrong, including how to freebase and the effects of the drug. It’s lazy and stupid and pointless. My post was going to be called “Rise of Arsenal: Wynken, Blynken, and On the Nod” which is some kind of perfect storm of stupid and amazing, but no–not worth it. Rise of Arsenal is lazy and stupid and doesn’t even have a villain. There’s no conflict beyond “Will Roy Harper shoot up?” I can’t even get mad about it.

Instead, here’s something I posted three years ago. I think it still applies.

Read good comics instead of getting mad about bad ones.

And I love it.

The best thing to emerge from Blackest Night? Read the rest of this entry �

Anyone who has picked up a DC book in the last few weeks has seen the preview for the upcoming Green Arrow series.  It’s technically perfect.

A woman runs alone at night through a moodily-lit, nearly-deserted city.  A gang of men follow her.  They’re wearing outfits that wouldn’t mark them as especially threatening in real life, but in comics are basically thug suits – black leather jackets and boots, with patches of their hair shaved.  This type has been causing trouble for women in moodily-lit cities since the thirties, and will probably continue causing trouble for them in the twenty-second century.

The woman keeps running, coming to a wooded area.  The men behind her shout crude, insinuating, but PG-rated threats, their intent unmistakable.  Eventually one of them catches her.  Escape is impossible.  All is lost.

Suddenly, something knocks him off of her!  A voice calls out in the darkness.  Enter the hero.

Like I said, the technical perfection of the sequence is obvious.  There is even some subtle detail work that clues the reader in on the state of things in the city.  For example, the woman being chased runs right past a police station without even trying to go in.  Clearly, the law isn’t being enforced in that city.

Don’t even pretend that that sequence, older by far than comic books, doesn’t draw in readers.  It hasn’t stuck around because it’s useless.  It’s a situation that is recognizable, horrible, and yet comforting, because any reader knows that it’s a set up for the hero’s entrance.  There isn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that the hero will make an entrance.  It’s a set up for an iconic hero, and DC does well with iconic heroes.

The trouble is, it’s the set up for any hero.  Any hero at all.  You could paint over Green Arrow on the first splash page and no one would be the wiser.  As previews go, this one is giving us a hero, but it isn’t giving us any hero in particular.

Some readers will have noticed that I’ve been struggling with the Green Arrow book for the past . . . ever.  I think that if I could just accept that the book isn’t ever going to go in the direction I hoped it had, Robin Hood and his Merry C0-Heroes, I might just enjoy the solitary Oliver Queen in his urban forest.  At the same time, throwing away every other Arrow in for this guy, who is interchangeable with any other hero in the DCU, it seems like a bad trade.

Just an experiment, maybe an ongoing thing if you like it.

What’d you buy and read today? Any books we should be looking out for? Any surprises? Let’s talk about this week’s books, or even books you’ve read recently that aren’t from this week. The comment box is yours. Have at it.