A penny saved is a beating earned, chump!

Friday Night Fights is back, baby. FnF up!

“I am not what I was before,” the silence says. “I am anger, I am madness, I am the spider. And God help you if you get in my way.”

No, really. This arc has been pretty bad, and the new issue? Terrible. Why?

Because we know how this ends. We’ve been here before.

Spider-Man: No Laughing Matters is a post I wrote last September about a pre-Clone Saga arc I liked a lot. In it, Spider-Man gets really angry, starts beating people up like crazy, and has an aunt on her death bed. Things between him and Mary Jane are really tense and he can’t quite manage to open up. It’s a story that has Spider-Man ready to kill… but he pulls back at the last second and remembers who he is.

Does any of this sound familiar? This arc was better 13 years ago, guys.

Images with sweet, sweet Bagley art from that story arc. The four pages of Peter reacting to Aunt May being hospitalized are better than anything Back in Black gave us.

And one of my favorite covers:

Back in Black is hollow.

With all this talk about various TV properties going to comics, I’ve thought of something that desperately needs to be an maxiseries, preferably with art by maybe Scott McDaniel, Adam Warren, or even better, David Aja of Iron Fist fame. Someone good at action and flashy.

The Last Dragon.

Don’t act like you wouldn’t watch it. You would. This movie was “The Warriors” for a new generation. The only movie I watched more often than this was Transformers, or I guess maybe Ninja Scroll, but I’m not 100% on that.

Well, well, well. If it isn’t the serious, elusive Leroy Green. I’ve been waiting a long time for this, Leroy. I am sick and tired of hearing these bullshit Superman stories about the wassa legendary Bruce Leroy catching bullets with his teeth. Catches bullets with his teeth? Nigga please.
–Sho’nuff, the Shogun of Harlem

Sho’nuff is the meanest, the prettiest, the baddest mofo low down around this town. It’s just too bad that Leroy Green has got the glow.

Sho nuff.

Oh… that is so wrong.

We’re back for part two of our look of WWF Battlemania. Before starting, I should point out that Sensational Sherri, who was featured in the last article, has passed away at the age of 49. That’s a huge shame. Add another line to the list, I guess.

On a happier note, I’d like to mention that the Wrestlecomics part of 4th Letter got featured on the Wrestling Observer (twice!) and Figure Four Weekly Online. That’s pretty sweet, as Wrestling Observer is like the wrestling equivalent of Newsarama, only with maybe a shuffled step higher.

Continuing on issue #3 of Battlemania, we get to a story involving the Ultimate Warrior that I thought was actually pretty good. It’s shocking. Even more shocking was when I discovered the reason it was so good. Dwayne McDuffie of all people wrote this thing. That’s right. The guy who will soon be writing Justice League of America wrote a story about the Ultimate Warrior. I’m not knocking the guy in any way, and I do understand that you write what you can get, but I think it’s just such a random realization. Next you’re going to tell me that this guy wrote a Double Dragon comic.

Huh? He did? Oh. Well, now I know what I’m reviewing in the future.

“Follow Your Spirit”: Ultimate Warrior’s Workout
Ultimate Warrior vs. Sergeant Slaughter

We start the story with neither the Warrior nor Slaughter, but a battle royal in a second-rate gym filled with generic no-names. One of these generic guys is Ben Bradford. While the announcer mentions that Ben is a bit unorthodox in his wrestling style, he continues to dominate the match. In the front row is Lewis, Ben’s little brother. Lewis is confined to a wheelchair and is a major wrestling fan and art enthusiast.

Ben wins the match and is announced the winner. As a special surprise, his trophy and prize money are delivered by the Ultimate Warrior himself. Warrior holds Ben’s hand up and congratulates him on his victory.

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Interview with Aubrey Sitterson on Marvel’s Indie Anthology.

At that time, the only name confirmed for the series was the aforementioned Dash Shaw with a Doctor Strange story. Sitterson has revealed to Newsarama additional names for the project such as Paul Pope, Johnny Ryan, James Kolchalka and Michael Kupperman. “[This project] gives us the opportunity to work with some amazing talents that we generally don’t get a chance to work with because of the types of comics that we produce,” said Quesada in “New Joe Fridays”.

They had me at Paul Pope.

I’ve been interested in Kochalka and Kupperman (Tales Designed to Thrizzle guy?) for a while now, but haven’t had a chance to scope anything but brief bits of his art in GIS or in random forum threads. This should be cool.

In fact, I want that Jacob Chabot FF story right now. Those two pages are great and that art is awesome.

DEATHBLOW #7

32 pages, $2.99, in stores on Sept. 26.

Half machine, half dinosaur, 100 percent OSAMASAURUS.

Yes.

SUPERMAN/BATMAN #40

32 pages, $2.99, in stores on Sept. 19.

I also really, really like this Dustin Nguyen cover for Superman/Batman #40. Yeah, it’s got Batman with his hand over Bekka’s chest, and if she’s Orion’s wife she’s gotta be a take-no-crap kinda gal, but it’s just so… elegant? It’s like a piece of fine art. Not to mention the machinework. Nguyen is really one of the best out. I love this image.

Do you see the Superman logo on that cover? It took me a second, but it’s there. Very cool.

There is a lot to like in the new DC solicits. I might have to dedicate a whole post to it.

There’s not a lot to like on scans_daily, on the other hand. I mean, it’s a suggestive scene. That’s kind of the point. He’s seducing her to the darkside, so to speak. To see it as forced oral, though, is a bit much. I mean, look at his arms. No way does Maximus have a 36 inch penis. But, hey, that white highlight on her cheek must be you know what!

Ugh, I’ve got to stop clicking on links to parts of the internet I hate. Personally, I blame Tejeda.

And now we’ve got Hollywood Zombies. That link is straight up NSFW, so don’t look at it at work. There’s no nudity, but plenty of tasteless gore and creepy humor. Here are its ratings descriptors: :wtf: :psyduck: :nws: :nms: :aaa: :911:

I thought the first Marvel Zombies was tasteless, but funny, and promptly left the rest of the franchise alone. Dead horse and all that, you know? I guess what I’m saying is that zombies are the pirates of 2007: a dead joke. This card set eclipses pretty much everything out of the Marvel Zombies line, though. Wowsers!

(I do have to say that a Mobile Zombie Galactus Corps is still a hilarious idea, which is why I’m reading the Black Panther arc featuring them.)

:quagmire:

’nuff said.

Courtesy of Pedro Tejeda at Funnybook Babylon, a piece on why Falcon being burned alive on the cover of Captain America 29 really isn’t that bad, dudes. Also, he calls me a “respected black man,” and I just cannot turn that down.

But, really, though, he makes some good points.

I personally feel that the reason, it went over our heads is a slightly more sinister one than us missing the malicious intent hidden in the cover. I hate the fact that a lot of people look at this cover and just see a black man on fire. In some cases, people don’t even mention Snap’s name at all. It’s as if no matter how much the character is developed, advanced in status, or just outright written, readers won’t be able to get past his skin color.

This is the catch-22 that lies at the heart of trying to fix comics. It can make people too cautious, and keep [group] safe and out of danger and… boring. It can be too overzealous and make [group] into a victim. Where is the middle ground? Is there one? That’s the question that everyone has to answer for themselves.

I really like Brian Azzarello’s Loveless. It’s a Reconstruction-era Western, with all that entails. The latest issue, the one that dropped this week, features kind of a lot of black dudes getting lynched and buried. A massacre is the centerpiece of the book. Men come into a township and murder every single able-bodied black male in front of their families. The families don’t even get to cut down the bodies.

It’s harsh and it’s ugly and it’s offensive… and it’s kind of a really good comic series. If I was a different person, I can pinpoint exactly what problems I’d have with the series and be right.

How’d I decide this? Why? I think it’s because I trust the writer to be better than what the story could be. I can point and say “Atticus is going to do this, this, and this” over the course of the next story arc to make this crime right. I don’t feel malicious intent in this, just an attempt to tell a story as it should be told.

“Where do you draw the line?” is something that you should think about, sometimes. Just realize that, a lot of the time, your reasons won’t be consistent or make sense.

I’ve been putting out vinyl since ’93 and never looked back once
And y’all trying to chase me
You don’t innovate because you can’t innovate
It’s not a choice despite what you might tell your boys
Keep your identity crisis under the table
I always knew who I was and I’ll always be more famous
-El-P, “We’re Famous”

“What the fuck is DC anyway?” Mr. Quesada said, stoking the fires. “They’d be better off calling it AOL Comics. At least people know what AOL is. I mean, they have Batman and Superman, and they don’t know what to do with them. That’s like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can’t get it up. What the fuck?” (Paul Levitz, DC’s president and publisher, declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson.)
—The Observer, 04/28/02

Joe Quesada, EiC of Marvel Comics, gets a lot of crap.

To be honest, a lot of it is deserved. Marvel has done some bone-headed stuff under his rule. Losing Grant Morrison, the Heroes for Hire thing, giving Greg Land work, almost firing Mark Waid, and so on. I’m sure you have a laundry list of reasons to dislike the dude. He’s got a big mouth, too, and doesn’t hesitate to open it.

But, and here is the rub– it’s his fault that comics are so good right now. Let me explain.

There is a philosophy that a president, I think it was President Rickard, used to have. Okay, it was Truman and I was reaching way too hard for the Prez Rickard joke. Anyway, it’s “The buck stops here.” In other words, if you’re the boss, all the bad crap that happens is your fault, whether you had a direct hand in it or not. It’s a way of taking responsibility for things that your organization does. It’s also a way of blaming the head guy in charge for everything and anything.

Turn that around, though. Doesn’t the head guy in charge deserve some credit for the good things, too? I think so.

Joey da Q is not the best guy around, I won’t deny that. Marvel is hardly perfect. But, he’s trying, and I can respect that. Obviously, the credit for these decisions should be shared with his editors, the creators, Bill Jemas, and Dan Buckley, but Joe Q should get a slice of that, as well.

This is pretty long, and I cover a lot of stuff, from comics to sex to race to dissing the competition, so click through.
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