The fourth volume of Lone Wolf & Cub, The Bell Warden, is excellent. I enjoyed it more than any other volume so far, in part because it got right into the things that I really enjoy about the series. Lone Wolf & Cub has a couple of major draws for me: the historical fiction aspect and the way Ogami’s quest affects Daigoro. The Bell Warden digs into both subjects, and is stronger for it. There may be a bit of buyer beware below, so, you know, be wary.

Parting Frost is the third of the four stories in this volume, and probably the best of all of them. Ogami only shows up toward the end, allowing the bulk of the tale to be all about Daigoro. It’s a very sad story, as it opens on Daigoro being left alone and wondering about his father. After he realizes that his father is late, he decides to go out and find him. If his father died in battle, so be it. Daigoro will simply die, as well.

What’s striking about the story is just how capable Daigoro is. He’s smart enough to know that no one will be inclined to help him, so he sets out on his own. He knows that his father goes to temples to pray after an assassination, despite walking the assassin’s road. He seeks out a number of them, before finally stopping at one, exhausted and hungry. He gives up and sits down under the stairs of one. The text doesn’t say it outright, but it’s clear that he’s prepared himself for death.

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Newsarama has DC’s advance solicits for September up, and there’s a couple of interesting bits.

THE WEB #1
Written by Angela Robinson; co-feature written by John Rozum
Art by Roger Robinson & Hilary Barta;co-feature art by Tom Derenick & Bill Sienkiewicz
Cover by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau
Variant sketch cover by JG Jones
Spinning out of August’s “Red Circle” event from superstar writer J. Michael Straczynski comes the new ongoing adventures of the selfish rich-boy hero the Web, and the mysterious-undying Hangman. Writer/director Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) and artist Roger Robinson (BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS) spin the tales of The Web, a man who has only recently come to understand the burden of true heroism. He’s fighting crime on his own terms, and for his first mission he’s hunting down the men responsible for killing his brother!

TEEN TITANS #75
Written by Felicia D. Henderson; co-feature written by Sean McKeever
Art by Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson; co-feature art by Yildiray Cinar & Júlio Ferreira
Cover by Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson
Variant cover by Andy Clarke
Come celebrate our gala 75th issue with an all-star cast of Titans past and present! Joining this issue for the extravaganza is new ongoing writer Felicia D. Henderson, a co-executive producer on TV’s hit show Fringe! Don’t miss this start to a fresh new take on DC’s premier teen team!

No, the interesting bit is not the annoyingly vague sell copy. “Our hero has a mission! Our team has a fresh new take, which is unlike the other new takes we’ve had over the past four years! Fringe! Comics!”

Felicia D Henderson and Angela Robinson are both black women. Felicia Henderson, in particular, gets a whole gang of goodwill from me just because she wrote for Fresh Prince, Family Matters, and, to a lesser extent, Moesha.

My question is– is this the first time Marvel or DC have employed two black female writers? Is it the first time they’ve employed one? Comics historians, do your duty.

(The rest of the solicits are snoozles.)

Geoff Johns and Ethan van Sciver’s Flash: Rebirth #3 explains Barry Allen’s bowtie (again), features a race between Flash and Superman (Flash wins, because the other races were for charity), and the return of a Flash villain (surprise!). It’s bringing a very Silver Age character into a modern context, resulting in the kind of story that Barry hasn’t really appeared in before, to my knowledge. It’s kind of like Green Lantern: Rebirth, which was the revitalization and redemption of a Silver Age icon whose time had passed some years before. The new Supergirl is the old Supergirl, the new Kid Flash used to be the Flash, and Green Lantern is doing a story that springs from, what, eight pages from twenty years ago?

And I’m bored.

I’m not on the “DC sucks, Marvel rules!” tip, because a lot of Marvel books are boring me in a different way than most of DC’s current output. I’ll read a book if an interesting team is on it, obviously, and I buy a gang of Vertigo. But, when I think of what I’m least interested in currently, DC is the first thing on my lips.

It was the Flash/Superman race in Flash: Rebirth. I’m a Flash fan. It’s obvious, and I’ve written about my love for certain stories featuring character before. At the same time… the race was just another in a long line of nods at a time that was over before I was born. That’s the only reason it existed. It’s like a Family Guy joke– “do you remember when?” I don’t know what it added to the story except “Barry is a jerk now” and “Superman is slower than the Flash.” The bowtie thing– I don’t get it. Who cares about his bowtie? Is this something I’m missing? Does it hold some special significance, other than a woman he just met gave it to him, and he later married her?

No, it’s another “remember when?”

Answer: Yes.

“Interested yet?”

Answer: No. I’m tired of watching reruns.

IGN interviewed Greg Rucka about the upcoming Batwoman feature in Detective Comics. There are a couple of things I wanted to pull out and call attention to.

You know, nobody wants to read, and we certainly didn’t want to write an after school special. But as you’ll see in the origin, there is a moment when she has to pay a huge price for the fact that she is gay. She has to sacrifice something of incredible value to her just to be true to herself.

Ten bucks says that she falls victim to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The concept art mentions a military background, and Rucka emphasizes that she isn’t Batwoman for the same reasons as Batman. Say if she were driven to serve, and it was something she truly believed in, and she was bounced out of the military? She gets back to Gotham, does the alcoholic thing for a while, and suits up, because she’s going to help people one way or another. Sound plausible?

But she is the first mainstream superhero who starts out of the box gay. And arguably she’s going to be the most prominent gay superhero.

What definition of mainstream is Rucka using here? There were a few characters in X-Statix a few years ago, and fifteen years ago we had what’s probably the best gay couple in comics– Donner & Blitzen, from Milestone’s Shadow Cabinet and Heroes.

Milestone isn’t obscure– it was published in cooperation with DC Comics, is fondly remembered by many, and sales don’t appear to have been too bad up until it closed its doors. What’s up with that?

As an aside– I don’t know if you noticed this, but IGN managed to misspell Renee Montoya’s name throughout the interview. Good going, guys. Way to, I don’t know, keep up the high standards.

(from marvel’s x-men #8, words by scott lobdell, art by jim lee)

This is one of those scenes that stuck out to me when I was a kid. Going from a picnic to a fight to a pie in the face to a plot twist is classic X-Men. This was the beginning of a downtime issue, which is another X-Men staple. The team would play baseball, go to a bar, or sit around doing nothing after the end of a big arc. This issue ended the drama of Bishop joining the team and a Wolverine-centric story in Germany, and led into an X-Men/Ghost Rider crossover set in New Orleans, where they all went up against the Brood in the NOLA underground. In hindsight, it’s pretty ridiculous, but still fairly funny. Gambit tended to get all of the best lines and scenes in old X-Men books.

This was also back when the book had a strange tone. There was a lot of droll and self-conscious humor throughout the book, verging on actual meta-commentary. It’s nice to see and gave the book a fun, off-kilter kind of feel. I’m not even going to mention the “Gotta be da shoes” Gambit/Jubilee bit.

Well, maybe I will later. But not right now.

For today only, apparently, the new Mos Def record is only four bucks on AmazonMP3. AmazonMP3 is basically my choice for getting mp3s online. It’s easy, fast, and the prices are great. There’s always a great sale on, usually a 50 Albums for $5 deal, and then there’s one-offs like this.

The album itself, other than being a good deal for 4 bucks, is about 45 minutes of distinctly Mos Def music. It isn’t so much that he’s been moving away from hip-hop so much as interpolating a lot of his own influences and creating a sound that’s kind of like neo soul, kind of like rock, kind of like jazz, but undeniably hip-hop.

I don’t know if Mos has a radio hit on this one. I hesitate to call this a personal album, but it sounds like one he made because he wanted to, rather than to simply get on the charts with a hit single and finance another house or wife. One song is entirely in Spanish, which is an interesting choice and vaguely reminiscent of “Umi Says” from Black On Both Sides, while others feature non-standard beats or cadences. “Auditorium,” featuring Slick Rick, features a long beat drop between Mos and Rick’s verses, as the song essentially fades out and starts over, creating an interesting sound. The guest appearances are kept to a minimum. Talib Kweli shows up for History, Georgia Anne Muldrow sings on Roses, and Slick Rick on the previously mentioned Auditorium.

I don’t know that I have the vocabulary to accurately describe what I like about this album, but I do like it. At four bucks, it’s an easy risk to take. Worst case, you can give the DRM-free mp3s to a friend who might like it more than you.

Check the video for Casa Bey, courtesy of NahRight and MySpace:
Mos Def – "Casa Bey" – The Ecstatic – 6.9.09

While I’m on the NahRight tip, here’s a few more links:
–Mighty Mos Def: The Underground Album, a collection of some of his early-ish work
–Mos Def on the streets of Osaka kicking acapellas
–Mos Def Casa Bey acapella
(CurrentTV is really going in, I’ll have to start paying more attention to their coverage.)

from milestone’s static shock: rebirth of the cool. words by dwayne mcduffie & robert l washington iii, art by john paul leon.

(i’m done. that’s 13 weeks of black comics– 6 guys, 6 chicks, and a resurrection batting clean-up. you can’t tell me you can’t find comics starring black people any more. we’re out there, superheroes or not.)

I managed to pull myself away from Final Fantasy VII long enough on Saturday to record another Fourcast! with Esther. Of course, the looming specter of technical issues ended up eating about twenty minutes of what we recorded, if not more, but we pulled it out in the end. You can tell that there were issues because my headset suddenly changes sounds with five minutes to go. Whoo!

Here’s the breakdown:
-We open with a brief chat about the unnamed Secret Six, courtesy of Gail Simone and Nicola Scott, and beefcake. Did I call beefcake gross? No, but I did call Bane’s chest gross. Look at it.

-Look at that chest.
-Next up is Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s Batman and Robin, where we praise the book, namecheck frequent commenter ACK (holla!), and critique Quitely’s art.
-Thomas Wayne can beat up your dad.
-Dumb comics, like Spider-Man: The Short Halloween, are fun comics!
-No, wait, dumb comics are bad comics as we discover in a new segment that is as-yet unnamed. Esther explains the history of Dinah Drake, later known as Dinah Lance, while I go into a brief overview of the Clone Saga.
-Neither of us escapes unscathed.
-At the end of the show is a surprise for you, listener! And also one for you, Esther!

Kapow! We’ll see you in… seven days?! What new development is this?!

(boilerplate stuff: subscribe to the podcast-specific RSS feed, or grab us on iTunes. feel free to drop a review on us!)

Lone Wolf and Cub volume 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger
Writer: Kazuo Koike
Artist: Goseki Kojima
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
ISBN: 1569715041
319 pages

All told, it took me about an hour to read Lone Wolf & Cub volume 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger. I was surprised when I realized it, but there are a lot of wordless pages in this volume. Koike backs off the scripting some and lets Kojima really work his storytelling and show off some solid swordfighting. It works out for the better, as this volume moves along much faster than the previous one, due in part to the variety of stories inside.

The Flute of the Fallen Tiger keeps up the 60 page story. This time, we get five stories, chapters fifteen through nineteen. In order, we’ve got “The Flute of the Fallen Tiger,” “Half Mat, One Mat, a Fistful of Rice,” “The White Path Between the Rivers,” “The Virgin and the Whore,” and “Close Quarters.” “Half Mat” is definitely my favorite of the five, though “Flute” is a great story, as well.

“Flute” is a story I recognize, since it is essentially the ending of Shogun AssassinShogun Assassin. I was surprised at how faithful the movie was to the book, since my understanding was that it was a hatchet job. I’ve uploaded the relevant portion of the film and the ending of the chapter for comparison’s sake. The sequence from the film is one of my favorite martial arts flick quotes, so it was definitely cool to see it in action.

The jewel of the book, for my money, is “Half Mat, One Mat, a Fistful of Rice.” The title is a reference to a philosophy that a character espouses during the story. He says that when you sit, you take up half a tatami mat. When you sleep, you take up a full mat. Finally, your stomach holds a mere fistful of rice. That, in essence, is what life means. Everything else is artifice, simply words that actually mean nothing.
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The Black SuperHero Blog has a post up on “Superhero,” a short film about a young boy who finds an amnesiac dressed as a superhero. Here’s the summary from National Film and Video Foundation South Africa:

A white amnesiac finds himself stranded in the middle of an arid landscape dressed as a superhero. He’s assisted and spurred on by a young black boy who wholeheartedly believes that he is a superhero. But as the man’s memory returns he discovers that he’s been anything but a hero.

It’s a short film, and I’m definitely interested in seeing more of it. Hopefully it’ll get an online release or something soon.