The Battle for the Cowl so far is comprised of three main books, numerous associated mini-series, and a few scattered one-shot tie-ins.  I’m not strongly affected either way by most of these, but this week two of those one-shots loom large in my mind.

The first is an example of the perfect tie-in.  It shows us something we never would have seen if we were following a conventional narrative, and offers us something truly different from the norm while still maintaining the tone of the world for which it was created.  That one was Battle for the Cowl: Arkham Asylum.  Written by David Hine, it takes us on a tour of Arkham Asylum, and for once focuses on the less gruesome aspects of the institution.  Jeremiah Arkham narrates the story, not in the usual hard-boiled tone taken by the Gotham crowd, but with sincere sadness that he hasn’t been able to help the inmates. 

While we sense that he is somewhat unhinged himself, he’s an eccentric and an idealist, not the usual film-noir lunatic.  He finds picks a few inmates who pose no threat, and leads them out of the ruined structure.  In the end, before the final, worrying sting, he expresses the hope that he can rebuild the asylum so that it lives up to its name – so that it can be a true asylum for those who are unable to survive in the conventional world.  It’s refreshing, it’s sobering, and it’s creative.

Sadly, I only really got to thinking about how excellent it was while reading Battle for the Cowl: The Network.  Well, now I know something about myself, at least.  Pissiness is a bigger motivator than honest admiration.

So let’s get to it! 

Well, first thing’s first.  Huntress’s costume has been changed back to a glorified bikini.  And why?  Because the promotional poster for the event, drawn by Tony Daniel, has her back in her Jim Lee costume.  I don’t see why this would necessitate a costume change in the actual book any more than the ‘The Real Power In The DCU’ poster would necessitate putting every woman in the DCU in a white evening dress, but I guess that’s how they’re going to play it.

Honestly?  I didn’t even notice the costume change.  A girl fighting crime in a bikini doesn’t catch my eye anymore.  What made me notice was the characters in the story can’t stop picking at the new outfit.  Batgirl, still with a perfect command of the English language, mentions it once.  Oracle mentions it later.  Both talk about how impractical it is.

I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s a jab by writer at a mandated costume change.  Maybe he’s was trying to have his cake and eat it, too, by putting Huntress in a two-piece bathing suit and still snarking about it.  I’m not sure who made the decisions to regress Huntress sartorially. 

I just know that the decision was also made to regress her personally.  When the villain announces that he will start murdering two hostages if the heroes don’t murder one, Huntress pulls her crossbow and is about to take a hostage out when Batgirl knocks her aside.  This is the deal-breaker for me.  Cass is back on the moral high ground, but she had to knock Helena off it to get there.  Never mind that in continuity we haven’t seen Huntress kill in years.  Never mind that we’ve never seen her kill that casually.  In the end, the plot of this book involves the worst mistake a team book can make: cutting off one character at the knees to make another character look good.  That’s never the way to go.

In short: Buy Battle for the Cowl:Arkham Asylum.  Leave Battle for the Cowl: The Network on the shelf.  And stop making women fight in swimwear.

I know that I’m Mister Push Comics Forward Break Them Characters Give Us The New-new, but I do have one continuity-based pet peeve. I really dislike it when creators take established characters and regress them, or just change them entirely, in order to fit them into the story they want to tell.

There are plenty of examples out there. The most egregious are probably Bobby Drake, Iceman, and Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, with Sam Guthrie, Cannonball, bringing up the rear. Bobby and Johnny were the hot-headed youngsters of the X-Men and Fantastic Four, respectively, and Sam is pretty much the poster-child for the second generation of X-Men. All three have gone from immature, mistake-making, and newbie heroes into grown-up, mature, and seasoned adults.

Bobby is an Omega-level mutant with an insane amount of control over ice, and therefore water, and has come to terms with that. Johnny has wielded the Power Cosmic a couple of times, saved the world several dozen times, and seen planets, dimensions, and time periods other people don’t even dream about. Sam was trained by the son of the X-Men’s best strategist, who was himself a child of war. He also had the benefit of being trained by two generations of X-Men, and when he struck out on his own, he found success.

The problem is that when a writer has a story that needs an impetuous kind of fella, or a newbie to make a dumb decision, or someone to show just how mature or smart another character is… guess which dudes are the fall guys.

Reed Richards has gone through the “ignoring his family for the benefit of science by the way he is a jerk” cycle a fistful of times now, most recently in Mark Millar’s Civil War. You’d think that Cyclops’s turn as the depressed and distant loner would be over after New X-Men, a story designed to push him past that, would never happen again. Or that Beast Boy, who is like thirty years old and should get a new name, would be written as something other than a horny teenager. Nah.

This is something that’s been bugging me more than usual lately, since the three biggest guys in comics have all been doing it. Mark Millar, Brian Bendis, and Geoff Johns have all taken characters who had established personalities or gimmicks, tossed it out, and slotted something new in because they needed X so that they could write Y. Rather than creating X, they just took Z and turned it into X. And that’s lame.

I brought visual aids. Read the rest of this entry �

I was recently going over David’s post about DKSA, and his point about how it exorcised some of the grimness and misery that DKR introduced into superhero comics.  While I think that he makes a good point, and one echoed by Miller himself, when he described that in DKSA he was comparing superheroes to the pantheon of Greek gods – with their failings, their enthusiasms, and their various eccentricities.

However, I have to disagree with David.  Not because I don’t think he has correctly interpreted the way DKSA changes the tropes set up in DKR, but because my difficulties with Miller’s Batman aren’t really about his grimness.

David concludes his essay with this:

Where we’ve had paranoid and grim Batman for the past fifteen years, Miller gives us one who’s faking grim but skipping like a schoolboy on the inside. Where we’ve had an utterly miserable Batman who figures out ways to trap his friends, Miller delivers a Batman who believes in the strength of others and trusts his fellow warriors.

DKSA is an exorcism. It takes all of the grim and gritty from DKR and the ensuing years and turns it on its head. It’s a push toward day-glo superheroics and away from miserable heroes. The moral of DKSA is “Superheroes are cool!”

My problem with Miller’s legacy isn’t, primarily, the grimness and misery.  That may sound strange, considering I’ve written essay after essay about my love for the lighter side of comics, and my desire for more comics to embrace fun and imagination over dark storylines.  However, it’s not the misery itself I object to, but the balance between light and dark.  I enjoy some angsty melodrama and some brutal violence as much as the next gal, I just feel like modern comics is stuffing me full of pretzels and not offering me any water, if you know what I mean.  I few more light-hearted stories, comics, or comic lines would be refreshing.

However, it’s not Batman being a miserable and paranoid that bothers me when I’m reading DKR.  It’s Batman being, how shall I put this?  A double-barrelled bastard.  Yes.  I believe that’s the technical term.  Read the rest of this entry �

In this interview, Matt Brady asks Dan Didio about, among other things, Jason Todd’s recent killing spree.  Didio responds with this:

Let’s take this one from the very beginning. When a story is going to be told where we feel that a character crosses a moral line, we just don’t put that in arbitrarily. We think through how that affects everyone around him, and what the long-term ramifications of that action will be.

The perfect example of that was when Wonder Woman killed Max Lord. We thought that all the way through – we saw how that affected the relationship between Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. We saw what happens when that relationship breaks down, and how that affected the entire DC Universe, as well as how it was ultimately resolved. We saw those causes and effects all the way through. Or another case – Identity Crisis – we saw those events, the effects of those events, and how they played through the DC Universe. Every time that we try to do a major story where we feel a moral line has been crossed, there are always ramifications because of it. Things that you’re mentioning with Jason – of seeing him kill – are all potential stories for the future. Unless he doesn’t make it out of Battle for the Cowl, these are all story beats that we’d like to see play out throughout the DCU, and they’re all fodder for future storytelling.

Although I can see the point that he is trying to make, and although I recently wrote about this very issue as it pertains to Jason Todd, Didio’s response rings false to me.

In the first place, can’t any development become a set up for future stories?  If Jason Todd were to unexpectedly come into his own and become the hero of Gotham City, wouldn’t that be a good set-up for future stories?  It could be a call-back to the earliest version of Batman, a man who carried a gun and who regularly killed criminals while still being a respected hero.  If Jason Todd were, instead, to be captured, it would also be a set-up for future stories.  The Batfamily would have to band together to get him out.  If Jason Todd were turned into a frog, it would be a set-up for future stories.  (Best.  Zatanna story.  Ever.)  Since this justification can be given for any story at all, it becomes meaningless.  It doesn’t matter that an action can cause interesting events in the future if there is no reason for that action happening now.

Secondly, Gotham has been rather heavy on set-up lately, while being light on story.  Remember War Games?  It was a multi-title, multi-month event that set up Black Mask as the ruler of the city.  Then he didn’t do much.  Then he was killed.  Now he’s back.  And he’ll have, I suppose, a lot of competition for supremacy, since Face The Face was a long story that set up White Shark as the crime boss of Gotham City.  Where has he been lately?  Maybe he was bumped off by whoever it was who came out on top in Gotham Underground.  The name escapes me, since I’m pretty sure there have been no stories told about them, either.  Or maybe he’ll fight the Al Ghul family, headed by Ras, Nissa, Talia, Ras, Talia?  It’s not that DC hasn’t published some great ongoing stories.  It’s just that I’ve been hearing a lot about a set-up for future stories and comparatively little about the stories themselves.

Finally, there is Didio’s line, “Unless he doesn’t make it out of Battle for the Cowl, these are all story beats that we’d like to see play out throughout the DCU.”  Didio has a tongue-in-cheek interview style that doesn’t always come through in writing, so perhaps he’s making a joke.  If he isn’t, the entire paragraph falls down.

I don’t want to descend into angry fanism, but I’m growing a bit tired of hearing that no decision is arbitrary, that there haven’t been any mistakes in characterization, that there will be a justification for a certain character’s actions in a year, another book, an unannounced-and-unplanned-yet-possible storyline.  There should be a reason why a character acts a certain way.  That reason should have something to do with the character’s actions, attitudes, or immediate wants.  “We can write about it later,” is not that reason.

from marvel’s New X-Men Vol. 7: Here Comes Tomorrow, words by grant morrison, art by marc silvestri

My Scott & Jean is accepting change. Opinions change, people change, stories change, characters change, and comics change. Gambit and Rogue had a “will they or won’t they?” relationship when I first started reading comics. Cannonball was on the verge of becoming a great leader. Iceman was learning just how powerful he really is. Scott and Jean were going through relationship troubles. And so on.

When things last that long, they stagnate.

New X-Men was the last great X-Men story. It told a tale that of drama, death, and revenge that, in the end, was solved by love. Jean Grey is basically the main character of Morrison’s New X-Men. Despite having grown apart from her husband after he went through some serious trauma, she loves him. She’s grown-up enough to let the relationship go without any drama or mess. She laughs, and tells her husband to live. It was easily the most mature thing to ever happen to that relationship, which has been fraught with Claremont-style fairy tale love and forced drama.

It’s over, let it be. It’s time for something new.

I’ve got no interest in Green Lantern: Rebirth, Flash: Rebirth, the return of Babs Gordon as Batgirl, Johnny Storm and Iceman being dialed back to being idiots because writers are too lazy or too infatuated with the first time they read them (whatever happened to that friendship, anyway?), Cyclops going back to being cold and aloof, the X-Men going from thriving minority to endangered species, or any of that crap. Leave 1985 in the past, because we have been there and done that.

Stories shouldn’t last forever.

A few days ago, Leigh Walton, marketing coordinator of Top Shelf and writer of Picture Poetry, hit me on the instant messaging machine. “Have you been following ‘Tikboom’ on Top Shelf 2.0?” he asked. I hadn’t, and while we talked, I caught up on Tikboom.

It turns out that Tikboom basically rules, and you can see the proof here. It’s a light-hearted story starring three little creatures (Cake, Turtle, and something that almost definitely isn’t a banana). They’re pretty pissed at global warming, like all good creatures, and set out on a quest to stop it. What follows is a tale involving ice cream, a nuclear bomb, and an octopus. It has this very care-free feel to it that I enjoy, and the art is equal parts cute and expressive. I’m also extremely fond of the hand-lettered sound effects. That kind of thing shows both careful attention to craft and a willingness to use all of the comics page as art. I wish more people employed letters-as-art– John Workman is definitely one of the major reasons why I love Walt Simonson’s Thor and Orion as much as I do.

The comic is cute and funny in a way that isn’t cloying. In fact, the humor comes off pretty deadpan to me sometimes. Characters say funny things, but the humor isn’t punctuated with a guy pulling an oh-so-wacky-whooooooaoaooaaoaaaa-Jim Carrey face or anything. It’s just funny. It doesn’t need parlor tricks to make you laugh. The bit where the turtle is talking to the cop in chapter three and slipping, falling, and explaining that the giant missile is not a car, it is a missile, is solid gold to me. It’s just good, straightforward humor. Show your friends.

I’d be remiss and a jerk if I didn’t point out Top Shelf 2.0 as a whole, too. It’s updated Monday through Friday with something new for you to read. It’s also basically the best company-run digital comics portal out. Marvel, DC, and Top Cow all have digital comics portals, and all three leave something to be desired. I’ve tried to read Shadowline books where the scrollbars disappear, Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited is an unwieldy beast, and Zuda is slow.

Top Shelf gets it right. All you need to put comics on the web is a jpeg and a couple of arrows. TS2.0’s interface is simple. There’s a breadcrumbs header, which lists the site, the creator, and the title of the comic. You can click on them to go back a level. There’s a drop down box flanked on either side by two arrows. The arrows let you go forward and back, and the box has the pages listed. And beside that is another drop down, this time for related comics. Here you can find comics by the same creator or in the same series.

We’re all on high speed here, but that’s no reason not to keep it this simple. I’ve grown pretty fond of reading webcomics on my phone, and TS2.0 is basically the only comics company who’s doing it right. I realize that Marvel/DC need to serve ads or track views or whatever, but I honestly don’t even want to use MDCU. It’s clunky and ugly and awkward. If they had a TS2.0-style front-end, I’d be way more interested and way more likely to use it. As-is… eh, I’m okay without it. There are plenty of webcomics out there that actually want me to read them.

JPG. Couple of arrows. Keep it simple. TS2.0 gets it right.

Article by Fletcher “Syrg” Arnett.

It actually took me seeing the variant for this one to understand what the hell was going on with the regular cover. Apparently our pinup girl is holding one of Wolverine’s claws for some reason, completely independent of his arm.

Anyhow. The recap page is skippable, at this point they’re so bare-bones from trying to sum up things and keep the illusion of a coherent plot that it’s not worth it. All it gives us that we didn’t know is, “Yes you are really about to read a comic where Wolverine evolved from an otter.”

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Article by Fletcher “Syrg” Arnett.

If you’re still foolish enough to trust the covers, you might think this issue is action-packed. You’d be very wrong, though. Let’s see what our recap-writing buddy has to say this time.

See that movie reference there at the end? Yeah, I don’t think Jemas knew there was a Jurassic Period, because over the next two pages they all keep referring to it as “How long until Jurassic Park?”, “150 million BC — Jurassic Park”, and it’s rather irritating. Also irritating: we know damn well from the first issues that the time machine can send things to a pinpoint time. It’s how all the stuff arrived right where Al was when it was sent back to him. For some reason, this has changed all of a sudden, because now instead of just punching in “150 million BC” as a destination, they have to count up through the years at “50 million years an hour” and so they need to stick a young organism inside the time machine with them inside a bag made from Al’s future-shirt.

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Article by Fletcher “Syrg” Arnett.

Every time I see that cover, I keep thinking it’s Lockjaw, the Inhuman dog. Anyway. This time we get a recap page full of straight-up lies.

Shot 1 is actually them sending back the time machine, from last issue, sort of ruining the “last son” thing they were aiming for. Why they didn’t mention, “Oh hey Al has a time machine now!” is anyone’s guess. The origin thing I can’t really debunk, the love story is mentioned here for a second and final time (and is still using panels from issue 1 because it does not exist), and I don’t know how the hell Al got credit for capturing Spike Lee when he, uh… just walked out of the room, and left a confused Frank Castle to talk with the irritated director.

Now, issue 3 of Marville is entirely different from the last two. For one, they didn’t bring in an inker on this one, and the change actually gives it a look I like. This will, of course, be tossed out in an instant when this issue ends. The second is that there are no word balloons, thought bubbles, or for that matter, anything beyond “what will make this shot look the best”, no real in-between panels for motion in here. Dialogue and actions are conveyed in the script laid on top of the images throughout the issue. It’s almost like a storyboard.

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Article by Fletcher “Syrg” Arnett.

Note this classy cover by Greg Horn. We’ll be covering those in the next update, don’t you worry. But when we last left Marville…

Ah yes. I also forgot to mention there is no love plot. There is no pining or anything. I don’t know why the hell they added that to the blurb, probably because almost nothing from the first issue is going to carry over into this one and they needed to fill space. Also space-filler: the Kingpin blurb, but we’ll get to that.

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