Quite a bit has happened since I last wrote about NXT. We had the season finale, which came across as rather strange and anticlimactic at first, only to be retroactively interesting based on recent events. Wade Barrett is the favorite to win the entire night with virtually everyone agreeing that he’s the most well-rounded of the finalists. When the NXT losers are interviewed in the crowd, even Darren Young – the one who had something resembling a feud with Barrett – sings his praises. As if hinting you with a swerve and swerving that swerve, there is no twist and Barrett is voted over both Justin Gabriel and David Otunga.

Then six days pass. On last Monday’s Raw, Barrett gives a seemingly generic, yet somewhat enigmatic interview about how the winds of changing and how something big is about to go down. The main event is John Cena vs. CM Punk as voted by the fans (which came off as the best choice, though you just know the company was hoping Cena would fight Mysterio or Swagger). Barrett arrives for what appears to be your usual spot where the heel messes with the champ as a way to informally challenge him and psyche him out. Then we see this…

…and all bets are off. What follows is the coolest 15 minutes of WWE action in years. Please don’t fuck it up, wrestling writer guys. Please don’t fuck it up.

With the fan discussion that’s followed, there’s been a lot of fun things to come out of the NXT/John Cena beatdown. There are a bevy of nWo parodies, like this one done by Renaissance Spam. Also came the Tubedubber mash-ups with this one by Gonz being my favorite. Give it a minute or so to get going, but the Otunga/ref punch syncs perfectly.

My favorite fan response has come from a guy by the name of Jerusalem. He’s a guy I know from Something Awful’s forum, in this case more specifically the Wrestlehut 2K sub-forum. The guy is witty, a class act all the way and always goes the extra distance by making animated gifs based on just about every wrestling show that doesn’t have the stink of Vince Russo’s never-ending failure.

With the NXT Invasion segment, Jerusalem made a bunch of gifs, but added a little extra. I very much dug his text-based mash-up and thought I’d share it with the rest of you. Enjoy.

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batman 700: words by grant morrison, art by frank quitely, tony daniel, andy kubert, and david finch/richard friend.

I was thinking about picking up Batman 700. Morrison hasn’t been hitting for me like he should lately, but Quitely’s always worth a look. I was even willing to look past buying a book with art by Tony Daniel and David Finch, two of my least favorite artists. Except I read the PDF preview on DC’s site after David Uzumeri shot me a link and had all my goodwill sapped right out of me. For five bucks (!) you get eight Tony Daniel pages, nine Andy Kubert pages, six David Finch pages, and somewhere between one and eight Frank Quitely pages, with the difference being made up by the certainly-capable-but-not-Frank-Quitely Scott Kolins. For those of us who went to public school, that’s thirty-one pages for five bucks. Add seven pages of pinups (Shane Davis, Juan Doe, Guillem March, Dustin Nguyen, Tim Sale, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Philip Tan) and a couple pages of Batcave layouts by Freddie Williams II and you’ve got a book I don’t think I want any more. Five bucks? Get real.

Great art + great story = comics worth buying. That’s the rule.

I know I’m picking up Captain America (Ed Brubaker/Butch Guice) and Heralds (Kathryn Immonen/Tonci Zonjic/James Harren). Amazon just emailed me to say that Icon Vol. 2: The Mothership Connection is on the way. That’s a Dwayne McDuffie joint. I’m not sure which artists are involved, because it’s an odd mix of Icon issues. I know the Buck Wild stuff is in there, though, which means we get some Doc Bright. I’m psyched to reread it.

Shame about there not being any other Milestone books on the schedule, though. I’ve got the two Icon volumes, the Brave & the Bold: Milestone book, and the Hardware and Static trades. With the exception of the JLA trades that reintroduced Milestone (which I didn’t buy because every time I look at them I want to fire shots DC’s way) (don’t forget industry rule 4080) I think that I own all of the currently in-print Milestone books. We’re missing Xombi, Blood Syndicate, Shadow Cabinet, Heroes, and a few odd miniseries or one-shots. Wise Son and Milestone Forever. C’est la guerre, I guess.

What’re you folks buying, or not buying, as the case may be? Any trades you wish happened? I’d kill a man dead for Flex Mentallo, and I may be adding “more Milestone trades” to that list.

Alert reader elad, during the last podcast, was good enough to point me to the Execution of Mister Mind in the old Captain Marvel Adventures.  It was just as good as I imagined it would be.

Better, even.

What’s even better – someone I know from my local comic book shop brought in the full color, massive trade of the Captain Marvel Adventures and let me see how this went down in glorious color.  (Take that, proponents of e-comics, of which I technically am one.  Oh well.)  Highlights include the foreman of the jury declaring that they didn’t even have to leave the room to decide whether Mister Mind was guilty or not.  They knew right away.

All I could think, from Captain Marvel acting as the prosecuting attorney to the verdict to the teeny, tiny electric chair that they strap Mister Mind into, was this needs to be a Law & Order episode.  The pacing is perfect for the ‘dun duns’ and the work out that Jack McCoy’s eyebrows would get through the whole thing would be epic. 

But I’d settle for an animated short added on to a straight-to-DVD movie.  I love that dead worm.

This is already better than any Mortal Kombat game that exists.

My reaction to the debut of Bat-Girl.

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Heralds #1 was written by Kathryn Immonen, drawn by Tonci Zonjic, colored by Nathan Fairbain, and lettered by Clayton Cowles. Here are four reasons why it is worth your time.

You know what I’m very fond of? Kathryn Immonen writing Patsy Walker. Immonen turned Patsy Walker (former model, ex-wife of the Son of Satan, ex-Avenger, former Queen of Boringtowne) into a fun and exciting character. She went from being a character you can slot into any story where you need a generic superhero into one that leans when she talks and swaggers when she walks. Patsy loves being a superhero. She devours life and is into what she does. Sure, blah blah power, blah blah responsibility, all of that stuff matters. Yeah, whatever. Who cares? Patsy does it because she likes doing it. And if she gets to punch some scientists? Shoot. That’s icing on a super-cake. Immonen and Patsy are killer together, like arsenic and old lace.

Variety in art is vital. Tonci Zonjic is ill. Pay attention to what everyone is wearing on this page. Emma’s in a dress and a cropped jacket. Patsy’s wearing a logo tee and red pants. Monica’s got a leather jacket and red button-up shirt. She-Hulk and Valkyrie both shop at the big & tall store, but they’re wearing different jackets. Five women, five different hairstyles. Four people in panel seven, four completely different acts and very descriptive body language.

You know the best part of this page? Patsy’s tongue and posture while she pours something that’s undoubtedly supremely alcoholic. The bitten tongue says a lot. Part of what it says is, “The rest of you artists need to step your game up and learn how to use acting in your work.”

Layouts matter more than people realize. A lot of artists approach comics like movie storyboards. Scads of horizontal panels stacked on top of each other, only breaking the format for a two-page spread. Others stick to a nine-grid like their lives depended on it, which can result in a comic that feels staccato. Neil Edwards, the guy who does fill-ins on Fantastic Four right now, never met a panel he didn’t want to tilt at a 45 degree angle for no reason at all. Brian Bendis likes doing two-page spreads of talking heads.

What Zonjic gets is that the sweet spot is somewhere in-between all of these approaches. Your panel layout counts as storytelling. Zonjic draws these big, spacious panels, with tons of background work. He does several that are page-width, he does some head-on, some overhead, and then, when things start going bed, he throws in this panel that’s set at somewhere between thirty and forty-five degrees, diagonally skewed, and from a point of view that’s about two feet higher than eye-level. To increase the effect, Nathan Fairbain colors it a sickly red tone, a color that appeared in the book only one page previous and is decidedly unnatural. And the next panel–chaos. No gutters, just Emma hulking out while a phone rings. From 0 to FUBAR in four panels. Kapow.

Exposition hurts. Immonen gives you just enough to follow along. Why? Why not. Who cares exactly what happened? If it’s relevant to the story, you’ll find out when you need to find out. If it ain’t relevant… who cares? This is how exposition should work all the time.

-Let’s talk about last week’s comics!
–Batman Confidential 45. Words by Kevin Vanhook, pencils by Tom Mandrake, preview
–Red Robin 13. Words by Fabian Nicieza, pencils by Marcus To, preview
–Heralds 1. Words by Kathryn Immonen, pencils by Tonci Zonjic, preview
–Dong Xoai, by Joe Kubert, Amazon link
-Esther doesn’t like to see Batman in anything but crime-based circumstances in Gotham, but she sure did enjoy his battle against zombies and werewolves in New Orleans in Batman Confidential.
-She also got a pleasant surprise out of Red Robin, one of the rare Bat-books where everyone gets along (mostly) and three bros just kinda hang out, broing it up on the rooftops of the city.
-David likes Heralds because Kathryn Immon rules and Tonci Zonjic rules and Franke Raye rules. It’s a no-brainer.
-He also digs Joe Kubert’s Dong Xoai, in large part because he doesn’t know exactly how to talk about it.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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Week 37? In a row?!

Pretty ho-hum week this time around. Only a handful of comics on my menu.

Avengers Prime #1
Brian Michael Bendis and Alan Davis

Avengers: The Origin 3
Joe Casey and Phil Noto

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A serious topic came up about how characters who are minorities who happened to be legacy characters like Ryan Choi are killed off so their caucasian counterparts can return and how they feel like they are being cheated or sidelined out of their roles. Sattler took a more serious tone. “It’s so hard for me to be on the other side because it’s not our intention. There is a reason behind it all. We don’t see it that way and strive very hard to have a diverse DCU. I mean, we have green, pink, and blue characters. We have the Great Ten out there and I have counter statistics, but I won’t get into that. It’s not how we perceived it. We get the same thing about how we treat our female characters.”

–Ian Sattler, DC Nation @ Heroescon

You walked into this one, man.

And honestly, if you think blue characters count toward “a diverse DCU,” you’ve got some issues… problems you need to iron out.

One Con Glory is nerd romance set over the course of a convention, encompassing the eternal themes of love, self-discovery, and plastic action figures.

The heroine, Julie, is a comics and general nerdery reporter, come to the con in a professional capacity to cover the events and interview the big players.  In an amateur capacity, she’s come to find a Glory Gilmore action figure.  Glory Gilmore is a minor heroine in a minor team, and so Julie has her work cut out for her.

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