In Red Robin #12, Tim is a nice guy, surrounded by friends, who makes logical decisions, and narrates his actions using personal pronouns.  He’s considerate, grateful, and relaxed about relying on others.

The difference between this and the Tim we saw a year ago is so staggering that is almost produces vertigo.  What it does produce is an actual desire to read the book.  Hey look!  A hero who is dedicated, sincere and considers others!  And also flies around having adventures and fighting villains.  It is what I want to read in a comic book.  Who’da thunk?

I do wonder what it is that happened that makes everyone suddenly want to get into Tim Drake’s pants.  Did he have a birthday sometime during the run, because having a teaser for a storyline entirely devoted to getting the hero to impregnate Ras Al Ghul’s daughter doesn’t seem like something DC would do pre-eighteen.

I have to admit, I hope that they follow that storyline up, though.  And I hope they play it for laughs.

Oh, Ras, and you thought Bruce Wayne was a – well, yes, a tough nut to crack.  Just wait until you try enticing Tim Drake.  This is a guy whose last voluntary kiss was in a dank cave, surrounded by the corpses of clones of his murdered best friend.  You will have an easier time getting pandas to mate.

(Anyone know why Ras has given up on having a son himself?  He’s a good-looking, no-shirt-wearing millionaire.  It can’t be hard for him to find a woman.  And he has a lot of time.  If he spent as much time on dating sites as he did on trying to get Bruce to have sex with his daughter, he’d have an army of sons by now.)

I hate reality TV, and I don’t think I’ll be particularly interested in Stan Lee’s Superhumans, which will feature real people whose genetic differences result in seemingly-impossible abilities.

I have found, however, a deep repository of mean-spirited trashiness within me that I think they could tap.

If the people on the show have the last episode be a fight between the measurably-different people and all of those ‘indigo children’ and ‘crystal moms’ (or ‘indigo moms’ and ‘crystal children’), I’m in.  I would buy a TV to see that.

I almost don’t want The Return of Bruce Wayne to come out.  I almost want them just to release snippets of it forever.  As anyone on this site knows, comics are incredibly frustrating.  There are many more ways to disagree with someone’s take on a book, situation, or character than there are ways to agree.

And yet there are times when being neck-deep in comics trivia, continuity and drama pays off because it gives you the right background you need to fully experience moments of pure joy.

That’s pretty much how I feel whenever bits of The Return of Bruce Wayne are released.  This psychotic little series makes me happy whenever I see it.  I don’t usually care, even a little bit, about variant covers, but look at that one.

I just want to pinch his cheeks and say, “Arrrrr,” like some demented motorcycle revving up.  Having the actual series come up seems like it could just spoil everything.

But before we begin?  Anyone know how Batman got from charred corpse to flying in a metal spaceship?

It’s tough to make a superhero movie.  Once upon a time you only needed was spandex or tinfoil, a few wires, and actors willing to wear spandex and get lifted by wires.

Lately, though, the superhero movie and the big-budget action movie have merged, to the point where you shouldn’t even bother looking at a cape until you have the kind of money that can buy you and exploding helicopter.  TV shows, after Smallville, aren’t much different.  Some people say those shows look cheap.  I’ll go ahead and quote Dolly Parton on that:  It takes a lot of money to look that cheap.

At the same time, there are other media that, because of these new-fangled visual telegraphs that the kids call ‘computers,’ could make a come back.  Everyone has already discussed the coming of the new age of webcomics being produced on a daily basis.  Yeah, the money isn’t huge now.  Wait.  There will be ways to wring dollars out of this, especially when conventional media is dying down.

Mostly, though, I’m waiting for the new version of the radio plays that they used to have way back when.  It didn’t work once stories moved to TV.  Radio became the exclusive domain of songs.

Now it’s not the domain of anything much anymore.  You can download songs from your computer and listen to them anytime.  If you want to discover new music, there are hundreds of websites devoted to just that.  I asked David the other day how long it’s been since he’s purposely listened to the radio.  It had been years.  Same for me.  The times I do listen to the radio – in stores or in a friend’s car – the only ads on right now are mattress discount warehouses, non-mainstream concert promotions, and debt consolidation services.  It is grim.

At the same time, though, podcasts are getting more and more play.  And they’re getting it for stuff that no one would put on the radio.  Is there a station on earth that would play me and David talking about comics and whatever sitcoms pop into our heads at the moment?  Really not.  And yet we have thousands of people listening to us jabber for a half an hour a day.

It can’t be that much harder to jabber out a story.  Think about it, the editing programs and sound effects could be pretty much gotten for free, and all that it takes to record is a script, a laptop, a couple of microphones, and a few people willing to sit around a living room for an hour every week.

It seems like the way to go for doing dramatic stories on the cheap.  All of you out there on the visual telegraph.  Have you heard of any podplays like this?  Would you listen if you did?

For the last few years, DC has had a ‘Sunday Conversation’ panel at the end of Wonder-Con.  Although by that time I’m usually fishing around in my back for snacks I might have forgotten about last week and stealing extra paper towels from the bathrooms to use as tissues due to the first ugly stirrings of that year’s Con Crud, I always go. 

Basically, it’s a random assortment of DC people to come by and talk about comics.  No announcements.  No selling anything.  They just sit around and talk about the old comic book stores they used to haunt, what parts of comics they love, and some banter with the audience.  It’s just yakking about comics, which is why most of us go to cons in the first place.

This year, however, I heard JT Krul talk about fan involvement, and how they try to work out the best stories.  He mentioned that at a previous con, Dan Didio had come to him and told him that the Cry for Justice story reaction really wasn’t what they had wanted, and that they had worked for five hours on how to respond, story-wise.

As someone who has grown out of her juvenile, “They all just sit around, stroking white cats and laughing and figuring out how to piss off the fans,” phase, but is still plenty juvenile enough to throw tantrums about storylines, especially that one, the remark caught my attention.

I know that comics creators want to write a good story, and also a popular story.  Although I’ve seen gallows humor from people who had made some unpopular calls, everyone wants their work, and their vision, to be enjoyed by everyone.  I also no that they never get that.  There is no story so safe, so brilliant, and so popular that it doesn’t have a few people frothing at the mouth.

While Cry for Justice continuity had more than its share of detractors, I’ve seen at least some support for it almost everywhere.  I wonder, what is it that makes creators decide to ‘work’ on a story they’ve already planned?  It can’t be just fan reaction.  Spend the entire day measuring that, and you won’t get anything else done.  Trust me. 

Is it the overall scale of the reaction, or the vehemence?  Is it how long it’s sustained?  Or whether stop the usual tongue baths that they give out at conventions and start complaining when they meet creators face-to-face?  Is it the way people point the finger of blame at different people, or is it whether or not they use that old, “I’m not buying DC/Marvel/Boom/comics anymore!” 

. . . Oh, let’s face it.  If I knew, there’s no way that I’d use that knowledge wisely.

I’m ambivalent about the Batman and Robin run so far.  There are some great characters and the stories have all the lurid pulp appeal that a Batman fan could want.  At the same time, there are places in which Morrison heaps on needless complications that detract from the overall story.  (What was the point of making Jason Todd a redhead with a gray streak?)

But I’m intrigued by the fact that Deathstroke popped up in the last issue.  The character has basically been used out in the last few years.  He’s come to be a generic villain, which is a shame given the unusual character he started out as.  Morrison, however, does not do generic villains.  I’m willing to bet that Deathstroke is in there for a reason.

I’m wondering what reason, though.  Deathstroke, in every iteration, seems extremely unlike a typical Morrison character.  Morrison’s characters, although they vary considerably, all share a febrile, hallucinatory energy.  Deathstroke has always been the grizzled, plain-spoken mercenary/soldier.  It’s an incongruous match, and I’m interested to see how the writer and the character match up.

Ideas?

And I like it. 

Lex Luthor has always been one of my favorite villains.  Well, any character can be my favorite or least favorite depending on how they’re written, but I like the concept behind Lex a lot better than I do most villains.

For one thing, businessman Lex is not the kind of villain who will kill everyone in the room.  The Jokers, the Deathstrokes, and the Prometheii made me pretty sick of that.  Luthor is the type to slowly, surely, brilliantly grab for more and more power.  He undertakes plans with a specific and productive end and doesn’t just go for off-the-charts death and destruction.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t emotion and insanity in there.  Luthor’s main motivation has always been more clear and – for me – more understandable than the motivations of other villains.  When he got a Lantern Corps ring, his motivation was Avarice, but for me, he’s always been ruled by envy. 

This is a guy who prides himself on being the master of the universe, and all of a sudden a bigger, stronger, more powerful, and more popular guy shows up.  In his city.  And that guy isn’t even of Luthor’s own species.  I can just feel him burning with frustrated rage and jealousy, and twisting it around in his head until he has the moral high ground. 

And when you put him in a business suit, he has to keep himself restrained enough to keep that moral high ground, at least in his own head.  It makes for a great drama, great stories, and great, stable, continuity.

At least in theory.

*sigh*

Maybe that cover’s just a fantasy sequence.

Spoilers, of course.

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At this point I stick to the DC side of the Faux Comics War merely because I’m not prepared to memorize the continuity, seek out the current stories, (Seriously, Marvel, what is wrong with your website?) and be enraged about the twists of yet another universe full of superheroes.  There are only so many hours in a day.

Still, there are a few characters out there who are fun enough and simple enough for me recommend wading hip-deep into murky water of weeklies, if only to pick up an issue or two for when DC weeks are lean.

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The trick with interviewing comics creators is not coming off like that kind of fan.  You know the one: the fan that takes things personally, gets overly involved in every story arc and character moment, and generally makes life miserable for anyone unlucky enough to get their attention. 

This is particularly hard when you most definitely are that kind of fan, especially when it comes to – oh, I don’t know, let me pick a character out of a hat – Batgirl.  I admit, when I came up to Bryan Q Miller, the current writer of Batgirl, I was bouncing on my heels a little.  Despite everything, though, he agreed to an interview.

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