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.

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.

Rants are like flame wars; I tend to regret them.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of my life.

All right, the last part was just to complete the allusion.  Still, a moment’s post in anger tends to have long consequences.  (The first, of course, is a lot of hits.  There’s nothing like a rant to get people clicking, and I can’t blame them.  I love a good internet fight, too.) 

Sometimes you’re wrong.  Sometimes what you are ranting about gets reversed, taking away the anger and making you look like a goof.  And sometimes time goes on and you just don’t care as much as you once did, while the rant stays as fresh and angry as ever.

So, I probably should have anticipated the moment when David switched off the podcasting equipment after my second rant about Cry for Justice #7, and mentioned that the writer had gotten death threats.

Oh.

Obviously, death threats are illegal, creepy, and stupid under all circumstances.  But there are other responses that, while legal and lighter, also make me feel bad for The Ranted.

The thing about a small community on the internet, is that when something happens, it can be hard to get away from it.  People all read the same thing at the same time, and they respond at the same time.  Sometimes they (like me) don’t read the original material, but see the event discussed on another site, and respond to that.  The more people write, the more people read, the more people respond, the bigger the thing gets, and often, the angrier people get about it.  Because it all happens at once, all that anger blasts out, and while each outburst of it might be in correct proportion to the event, the collective response can be bigger than the offense.

I’m not saying that any part of a response is wrong, or that people are wrong to write what they think (Except, of course, for the death threats.  For crying out loud, people!), but at the same time I can’t help but feel sorry for people who made one decision that just happened to implode the internet.

This isn’t my only response, of course.  Like I said, I like an internet fight.  Also, in situations like Cry for Justice, I often hope that big kerfuffles like this will inspire the company to reverse their decision.  Much as people like to pretend otherwise, they know that comics companies at least try to give them what they want.  Still, I feel a twinge of guilt for being part of the internet rage machine vomiting lava over someone.

Some of you have been following the Nick Simmons controversy.  Long story short, Nick Simmons, son of Gene Simmons, drew a manga titled Incarnate for Radical Publishing.  Three issues in, people began noticing that some panels and characters bore a striking resemblance to art in other comics.  Comics like Sandman, Bleach, and even some amateur stuff on Deviantart.

And by ‘striking resemblance,’ I mean, ‘someone owns a lightbox.’

Internet drama ensued, until yesterday Mister Simmons ended it with an apology on Comics Worth Reading.

This was simply meant as an homage to artists I respect, and I definitely want to apologize to any Manga fans or fellow Manga artists who feel I went too far. My inspirations reflect the fact that certain fundamental imagery is common to all Manga. This is the nature of the medium.

I am a big fan of Bleach, as well as other Manga titles. And I am certainly sorry if anyone was offended or upset by what they perceive to be the similarity between my work and the work of artists that I admire and who inspire me.

Well, that settles it, doesn’t it?  Nothing appeases a group of fans like a guy telling them that he’s sorry about how totally wrong they are.

I won’t echo the Comics Worth Reading sentiment about this.  I’ll only note that the guy released the statement ‘through a representative’.  I’m not sure what kind of representative doesn’t realize that this will make things worse.  Maybe Simmons insisted.  It would have been better if he had just hunkered down and waited for people to forget about all of this. 

Well, better for some.  I often enjoy a good internet pile-on, and if he keeps issuing statements like this, the fight could last for a while.

Gina Torres talked to Wired Magazine about the excellent Crisis on Two Earths.  Here’s the quote that went rocketing around the blogosphere.

There aren’t really any skinny bitches in the world of comic books…they’ve got muscle. . . . What I love about superheroes, and Superwoman in particular, is that in that comics world they’re all curvaceous. They’re strong.

I grew up in what must have been the most friendly high school in the world.  I look at Glee, Mean Girls, and Can’t Hardly Wait, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gossip Girl, and almost every other portrayal of high school and it might as well be some kind of costume drama.

Who grows up in schools like this?  In lives like this?  I know there are always a few vocal idiots, but I haven’t noticed a war being declared between ‘skinny’ and ‘curvy’ women, ‘popular’ and ‘unpopular’ women, or really any other kind of women.  At most, the groups are pretty indifferent to each other.  More often, they get along just fine.

And yet every quote, every TV show, every comic, and every movie seems to imply that this war is going on. 

Where are they getting this from?  Is there some secret battleground of which I am unaware?

Sometimes I think that the only reason anyone says stuff like this is they’re trying to sell this fantasy of conflict.  It might make a decent trope in fiction, but in real life, it doesn’t make sense.

Cut, because you might be at work and I’m posting a scan from a freaking Garth Ennis comic.

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This issue of Wonder Woman ends with something I had just about given up on seeing; sunny skies.

I’ve had to gnash my teeth over Wonder Woman for a long time, now.  She’s a character that I should like, but mostly I don’t.  She’s in a world I should like, but mostly I don’t.

When the book gained Gail Simone as a writer, I was absolutely sure I would like the book, and at the beginning I did.  Then came Genocide, and the Nemesis/Wonder Woman break-up and the slaughtering of pregnant women and the crows, and – I picked up some issues, but I kept putting them down.  It was well-written and well-drawn and the character was interesting, but (despite my last entry here) I couldn’t take any more misery.  I wanted Diana to win something; a fight, a game of chess, a church raffle, a free super-sizing of fries with her happy meal.  Anything. 

And now, for the first time, things are looking up for Diana and the rest of the characters of Wonder Woman.  It feels like a break with the past, and a new, more trimphant era beginning.

It’s no secret that comic books are adolescent power fantasies.  They’re about being the smartest, the strongest, the toughest, the meannest, and above all, the one who gets things done.  Kids have little power and fantasize about growing into someone who does.

I don’t see the need to stop reading comics when we’re out of adolescence, since most of the adults still don’t have control over most of their lives.  I suppose you could argue that some people do, particularly the ones who don’t read comics, but I believe that if they did, the world would either be a much better or much, much worse place.

So the fights, the flamboyant outfits, the adventure of comic books, is easy to understand.

What about the pain?  Spider-man took off, in part, because Peter Parker’s life sucked before he was a superhero and after he was a superhero.  Superheroes, for all their power, get clobbered.  They lose at love, they lose loved ones, they lose battles and companions.  Theirs is a world of nonstop pain, and a lot of the pain is theirs.  Why are they so popular?

There are lines about how conflict is necessary for drama, and that old-chestnut, ‘realism’ appears in many justifications for comics melodrama, but I don’t think that’s it.

I think we like their misery because their misery ends in fights and adventure and over-the-top emotional outbursts, and ours doesn’t.  Personally I would like it if a lot of the things that make me sad or angry could be resolved by putting on a cape and doing battle with my enemy.  I’d like if I could solve any problem by smashing a motherbox, or a bomb, or some other high-tech or magical macguffin.  I can’t.  That’s not the world I live in.

A comics character loses someone they care about and it’s time to hit and kick and scream and the world hangs in the balance.  We lose someone we care about and, more often than not, it’s time to sit and feel sad, to acknowledge that our lives are lesser for losing them, to know that there is nothing we can do about it, and to realize we’ll be lucky if we find one person who cares enough to try to comfort us.

A comics character has a violent tantrum, and it solves their problem.  We do, and it makes our problem worse. 

A superhero sees a problem with society and he shoots, punches, or uses magic until it’s a little better.  If we see it, most of us realize it takes a lot of boring, frustrating, detail-oriented work to change things even a little bit for the better.

Put aside the capes and the silly names, and much of comics’ appeal is this:  It is so much nicer to be angry than it is to be sad.

I couldn’t think of what to write for this entry.  First I scanned links on When Fangirls Attack, and Scans Daily, and various news sites, but I couldn’t think of anything I really wanted to write about, so I just clicked random links and googled random things for an hour, until I found myself, once again, reading the-blackcat’s Batman and Sons series.

The Black Cat, posting on deviantart and on livejournal (as the_dark_cat) did a series about Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim, and baby Terry living together as a family and the wacky domestic adventures they get into.  It’s syrupy and ridiculous.  It runs completely counter to the Batman tone and almost everything that is happening in comics right now, and it is one of my favorite things to read. 

I cannot believe how much I love this series and everything in it.  It’s not just the silly adventures – it’s the artist themself.

This is an example of someone how knows their comics so well that they have clearly gone nuts with it. 

That’s a scene at Chris Kent’s birthday party.  Yes, that’s the Creeper handing out balloons to Jade and some kid I don’t recognize because I don’t know comics as well as this person does.

Later Terry gets into a scuffle with the youngest Arrow kid, not only because in the limited number of strips that The Black Cat has created he has been established as a kind of pushy baby, but there has also been established a feud between the Bats and the Arrows, with the Supers acting as peacekeepers.

Let me put this bluntly:  This is a person who should be hired.  To do this.  Because this is freakin’ fantastic. 

There are in-jokes, there are sharply delineated characters, there are visual gags, there is a sense of timing and flow to the panels, and every strip tells a story.  Some stories are poignant, and some are sweet, and some are mean, and most are funny.  I recognize that this is not everyone’s kind of story, and that it has to lean on the Grim Bat Mythos to stand.  Still, this artist has it all, and is giving it to us in these strips.  I wish they could get paid for it.  And I wish that I could pay for an issue every month.

Judd Winick’s Jason Todd resurrection story, Under the Hood, is coming out in straight-to-dvd animated movie form this fall.  So far, they’ve released few details.  There’s talk about how the story will be dark.  And there is a model of Nightwing.

This angular style seems to be the new trend in animation. 

Batman from the The Batman Strikes.

Martian Manhunter from Crisis on Two Earths.

Seriously, every superhero’s head seems to be modeled on Tahmoh Penikett’s skull.

There is also a quote from Judd Winick.

“What I loved best about it is that it had a really amazing beginning and a really strong ending, which pretty much most movies ride on.”

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