There are so many reasons people wished they could have Superman’s powers. The strength, the flying, the speed, the eye-lasers, the x-ray vision… er… Pretend I put “x-ray vision” in there a couple more times. It’s always funnier that way. Anyway, one of the cooler things about Superman’s powers is his ability to slowly storm forward as criminals empty clips into his chest and continue firing in horror and futility as the bullets keep bouncing off his body. I’m sure Batman wishes he was from Krypton just so he could do that every other hour. Superman doesn’t even need to do it! He could zip over and steal the guns if he truly wanted. He only does it for the kicks. That has to be the most gratifying thing you can do as a crime fighter.

Luke Cage exists for the sake of doing this bit whenever he’s in a bad mood. He also exists to show that black people can have bad fashion sense too, but that’s beside the point. Luke Cage’s main superpower is walking forward while armed bad guys shit themselves. The difference is that he loses a lot of shirts. Really. Luke Cage goes through more shirts than Bruce Banner.

Heheh. I wonder if he knows that in 30 years, that’s going to be a stinging insult.

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Hey, you know who was kind of a cool character? Orpheus.

Black Mask slit his throat and wore his face as a mask during War Games. He hasn’t been mentioned since, I don’t think. It’s been three years.

His buddy Onyx? She got stabbed by Jason Todd. No word on if she lived or died, because she also hasn’t been mentioned. It’s been a couple years on that front, I think. It was pre-IC.

How many reviews have you seen online for Percy Carey and Ron Wimberly’s Sentences?

I’m thinking again.

I have been fairly quiet in the past few weeks, haven’t I? I’ve got good reasons for it, I swear. In fact, I’ve got three good reasons– Heavenly Sword, Folklore, and SOCOM: Tactical Strike.

No, I didn’t pull a Joe Mad. I wrote the strategy guides for those games. This may come as a surprise, but writing strategy guides, among other responsibilities, tends to suck all the drive out of writing for fun! Plus, I’ve felt like sleeping for a week and man is it hard to write when you’re passed out.

I’ve got some breathing room, now, and my new project (secret!) involves very little writing, so I plan to come back in full force. I need to talk about why Frank Miller really hasn’t fallen off, why Jack Kirby’s New Gods saga has quickly turned into one of my most favorite story arcs (and I’m not even done with it!), and tons of other things. I figure I should talk about black people and comics, too, I guess. Is that my shtick yet?

We’ll see how it goes, but don’t call it a comeback! Actual words next time, I promise.

BLACK PANTHER #34
Written by REGINALD HUDLIN
Penciled by FRANCIS PORTELA
Cover by SALVADOR LARROCA
“GANGSTA LEAN,” PART 3
It’s clobberin’ time—in the arena and in the streets, between the Gangsters and Panthers, and between the Fantastic Four and the elusive, malicious Golden Frogs!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$2.99

Full solicits here.

Diamond in the back, sunroof top…

Amazing Spider-Man #121 and 122 are without a doubt two of Spidey’s most important issues in his 45-year history. In these two consecutive issues, he both lost his girlfriend Gwen Stacy and ended up killing his big villain Norman Osborn. Since then, the latter has been undone and the former has been beaten into the ground with Peter’s whining and made worse with that stupid baby retcon.

In retrospect, #123 is also an important issue. It’s the first meeting between Spider-Man and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire.

Luke Cage was still a very new character at the time with about a year to his name. He spent that first year mostly fighting low-rent hoods and some corny villains that I’m sure we will never see reinvented into 21st century badasses. By his eighth issue, he crossed paths with Dr. Doom, his first interaction with a mainstream Marvel character. It also led to the absolute greatest issue of any comic ever. The internet agrees with me.

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It still surprises me that Double Dragon died out completely. You’d think we’d see a remake or sequel for the Wii or PS3 around this time, but nothing. No flashy resurrections like Ninja Turtles or Transformers. It just died, unless you count the re-release on the Gameboy Advance.

The game’s story was pretty basic. Billy and Jimmy Lee are two brothers with identical fighting skills. In a slightly decrepit future, their mutual girlfriend Marian is shot by a machine gun-toting cyberpunk and taken away. The brothers have to fight through legions of punks before saving Marian. In the NES version of the game, they couldn’t get the 2-player co-op to work, so they just made Jimmy Lee evil. Ignore that.

Several sequels were made, each playing up the same formula. Marian gets kidnapped and the brothers beat up street gangs in retaliation. Some of these games added weird mystical stuff to the series, like demonic gymnast crime bosses and evil mummies. There was a fighting game made for the Neo-Geo, but I never played it. Around then, the series took a turn for the worse.

A cartoon series was released and it was pretty bad. Instead of plainclothes martial arts vigilantes, the Lee brothers were full-blown superheroes. This led to a movie with a similar plot that was atrocious. In the videogames, the brothers teamed up with the Battletoads in a completely random crossover. Double Dragon 5 was released, but in actuality, it was a lame one-on-one fighter tie-in to the cartoon.

Back in 2002, SNK Playmore was set to release a follow-up fighting game called Rage of the Dragons, but the licensing fell through. Hence, the characters became Billy Lewis, Jimmy Lewis, Mariah and Abubo (rather than Abobo).

This comic, released by Marvel, came out in 1991. This is several years before the cartoon and the movie and the game where they fight a giant space rat named Big Blag. Instead, this is right around the time when Double Dragon 3 was released on the NES. Despite that, the series strays from loyalty to the games. Yes, Billy and Jimmy beat up punks and Marian is there, but besides that, the comic goes out into left field to add color. It’s more similar to the cartoon in ways, with the mystical superpowers and off-the-wall villains. The comic doesn’t even have Abobo in it!

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Punisher: War Journal #12 came out this week. The whole Hate-Monger storyline went on a little too long, but since then, things have been looking up. The Bucky issue was a nice diversion and now we have this entertaining World War Hulk tie-in.

Here are three pictures of the issue for you. It’s okay, these aren’t much in terms of spoilers, unless you’re anal about it. Each picture is set-up for what you just know is going to be some sweet, sweet payoff.

Stuart is better than Microchip ever was. Stuart is an artist.

That last page and everything that follows makes me believe that Matt Fraction knows who I am and wrote this issue specifically to make me happy. If you enjoy it too, good for you, but that was never the point. It’s all about me. So there.

(Thanks, Mr. Fraction!)

In other news, Runaways is really losing me. Straying from the core plot mixed with delays makes me forget what the hell is going on.

Stay tuned tomorrow. I’m going to have a nice, full article up. I made it. For you. For Christmas.

There is a great interview up at CBR featuring Grant Morrison, Tim Kring, Mike Mignola, and Johnathan Lethem. Go check it out.

Morrison said superheroes are representative of certain qualities and as such they need to be allegorical of other concepts in order to appeal to more adult readers. As an example, Morrison explained that when he was young he liked The Flash as drawn by Carmine Infantino simply because his bright yellow boots looked so cool due to their “awesome huge treads.” Now that Morrison is older, boot design isn’t enough to make the character appeal to him. Now Morrison likes The Flash because he feels he is representative of urban living and urban culture due to his speed. Morrison explained that lives of superheroes are huge cosmic version of the way human beings live, and that if they were not based in the lives of ordinary humans, they may not have an appeal.

I love that man so much.

Weird Wonder Tales #3

Year: 1973
Writer: Various
Artist: Various
Synopsis: Weird Wonder Tales is a collection of older Twilight Zone-type stories reprinted together. There are four of them here and none of them have much to do with that cover. No mud monsters attacking people in cemeteries here.

The closest is the first story, which begins with our female protagonist being assaulted by a fish man crawling out of a muddy canal. Things calm down immediately, as the fish man means no harm. He’s part of an underwater race of fish people and got lost. Now he’s on the surface and people run and scream from him. The woman allows him to stay at her place for the night so he can continue the search the next day. The fish man remains at the woman’s place longer than expected, but keeps giving her gifts like pearls and other jewelry. She comes to realize that this creature is in love with her. On her way to find the creature and confront it, she finds the police are in her shed, brutalizing the poor guy. Turns out that the fish man had been robbing jewelry stores for these gifts.

And then…

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Has he totally lost it, or has he, like Alan Moore, looked upon the legacy of his ’80s work and run screaming in the other direction?

Alan Moore has spent the past 15 years reinventing himself to be Grant Morrison. Has Miller spent the past few years doing something similar?

Bear these two quotes in mind when you answer:

I’ve seen all these characters of my childhood fall into disarray. They’ve become neither fish nor fowl. Those of us who wanted to test the boundaries of what a superhero comic book could do, unfortunately broke those boundaries and the results have not all been very good. We pushed against the old walls, and they fell-but nothing much has been built to replace them. And now the roof is leaking and the sewer’s backing up. So I’m taking this romp through the material again and showing just how spiffy this stuff is. I’m doing it without cynicism and giving my best. I’m also having a very good time.

What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles. The elegance of Gil Kane is gone. You don’t see the sheer joy of Green Lantern’s power ring. The magic of somebody like the Flash-somebody who’s able to move so fast that you can’t see him move-is gone. There’s no sense of the basic wish that any of these characters have.

I think anyone who’s working on a superhero comic should be obliged to write down in one sentence what the central wish is of the character. Every story has to play to that theme. “Adolescent power fantasies” isn’t just a tired cliché; it’s too broad, too crude. There’s more than that to these characters, the good ones, anyway. As it is, I don’t know who these characters are anymore. I don’t know why they do what they do. Why Green Lantern became a drunk driver when he can fly always loses me. And I’m told they turned him into a mass murderer as well. The fun’s gone out of it. I want to try my hand at bringing it back.