–For my money, the best superhero was invented back in 1962 by Stan Lee & Steve Ditko. Peter Parker, Spider-Man, is as close to perfect a concept as you’ll find for a superhero. On a most basic, “who is this guy?” level, Superman is defined by his innate God-like goodness. He’s Moses writ even larger, sketched out on a cosmic level. Captain America, too, has that same innate goodness. Batman is defined by his anger at one very bad day. Hal Jordan as Green Lantern is a man in an occupation. Wonder Woman is heir to a lineage of, if not outright heroism or adventuring, then at least mythological significance.

Spider-Man, though, is defined by his imperfect humanity. He got powers, went for the quick thrill, and his own arrogance led to him paying an agonizing price. His heroism since then is due to guilt and finally recognizing what it is that he was meant to do. “With great power comes great responsibility” isn’t just a pithy saying. It’s the Golden Rule and a positive way to live your life. If you have the ability to do something, then you should. It’s that easy. It’s that hard.

As a character, I feel like Spidey is one of the precious few genuinely inspirational superheroes out there. Too many of them are perfectly formed and flawless. Superman preaches being good and Batman preaches being good by doing the hard thing. Spider-Man tells you to be good, but also allows for the fact that you can, and will, screw up. Those screw-ups may be catastrophic, but you will recover and life goes on. Spider-Man would not exist without Peter Parker being a selfish human being.

–Kaare Andrews wrote and drew Spider-Man: Reign, a four-chapter comic book about the end of Spider-Man. José Villarubia colored it. The art hasn’t aged as well as I hoped over the past few years — the 3D CG work looks a little too obvious, mainly — but it’s still as good as I remembered. It’s one of my favorite Spider-Man stories, and to be perfectly real, the last two chapters hit me about as hard as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 or Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura’s I Kill Giants. It’s not for reading on public transportation, if you’re at all attached to these characters.

–Reign is an explicit homage to Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. There are newscasters named Miller Janson and Varr Magnuson (or Jones–it changes), for one thing, and there are several other parallels that hammer the homage home.

DKR is interesting, because I think it’s a story that has near-universal appeal. It’s a story about one last job, for one thing. It’s about a man coming out of retirement to do something only he can do. It’s about coping with old age. It’s about respect and revolution and paranoia and Ronald Reagan. There’s a lot to like about it, and what I like the most is probably that it’s about the fact that everyone has something they are good at, something only they can do or are led to do. When you aren’t doing that thing, when you’re avoiding it, you are less than you should be. There’s this line about how the rain on Bruce Wayne’s bat-emblazoned chest is a baptism. Being the Batman is a religious experience for him. It’s not just about fighting crime. It’s about being who he is.

–Spider-Man: Reign is about who Peter Parker really is. When the book opens, he’s old, bearded, and getting fired from a florist. He’s pathetic, and going nowhere. He’s not Spider-Man any more. He’s just an old and tired man. He sees his dead wife when he goes home and sleeps alone. He has no friends. He has no life.

What Reign gets right is that Spider-Man is a role that Peter Parker plays. Peter (and it’s funny that I think of him in my head as “Peter” instead of “Parker,” like he’s an old friend, so please bear with me and my attachment) is an orphan who was raised by his aunt and uncle. He’s meek, awkward, and dorky. He’s not uncool, exactly, so much as not traditionally cool. He’s the kind of person who would grow up to be a regular guy, once he escapes the toxic and fake classifications of high school.

When he’s Spider-Man, though… that’s when he puts on a personality. Spider-Man is funny, exciting, and daring. He’s all the things that Peter Parker believes a hero should be. There are points when Peter is clearly visible beneath the mask, times when his put-on confidence and expertise crumbles under the weight of a cosmic threat, but that only serves to highlight just how human Spider-Man really is under his mask.

Spider-Man is the suit that Peter Parker wears to be a hero. The jokes, the confidence, all of that derives from who Peter is, but it isn’t who Peter is, if you follow. Spider-Man is Peter Parker Plus, a purer, stronger version of his day-to-day life.

–Early on in Reign, at the cusp of Spider-Man’s return, J Jonah Jameson visits Peter Parker. Jonah is excited to see him. He’s a believer now. He knows Peter was Spider-Man. He mentions that Peter seemed immortal to him, that he “thought you’d be twenty forever.” He gives Peter a package. Inside the package is a camera, one of Peter’s old ones from back in the day. Peter’s spider-sense wiggles.

Jonah goes outside and runs afoul of the fascists who police New York City. Peter picks up the camera and drops it, realizing what the fabric the camera is wrapped in really is. Jonah’s become a victim of police brutality. Peter realizes that the fabric has eyes. Reflective eyes. Eyes that show him as old, weak, and beaten. Jonah has been beaten bloody, but begins apologizing. “I’m sorry. So sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it, my boy. We have so much to talk about.” Page turn. Full spread of an old man wearing a black Spider-Man mask falling out of the sky.

Peter’s captions: “I’m not even there. I’m watching from far away. And all I know is that the mask… the mask thinks it’s funny. It’s laughing. Laughing.”

Meanwhile, Spider-Man dives into battle and cracks wise the whole way down. He mocks the thugs even as he effortlessly takes them apart.

Peter can’t take it. He can’t take the laughter. He turns off the volume and thinks about his past. He thinks about Uncle Ben’s murderer, “a yolk-filled body broken on the ground.” He thinks about the pressures his family put on him. He thinks about Aunt May telling him that he’s her life. (“But I don’t want to be your life.”) He thinks about Mary Jane telling him they’re connected forever, and that he’ll always protect her. (“What if I can’t?”) He thinks about Uncle Ben, the hole in his head still smoking as blood runs down his face like tears.

There’s a tangible difference between Peter Parker and Spider-Man. That difference is what makes Spider-Man so golden. With the mask off, Peter is just a man. With the mask, he’s bigger than anything else.

–Andrews uses masks as motifs throughout the story. Spider-Man is restored to his former glory after Jonah delivers the mask. Masked heroes and villains are dubbed super-terrorists because they go against the order of things. The thugs who police New York look identical, thanks to their masks. The black mask has a different meaning than the red mask. When Kraven kills Spider-Man and takes his trophy, he removes Spider-Man’s mask, not his head. It goes back and forth — order and chaos, chaos and order — but it’s always about freedom.

A child is murdered in chapter two. His name was Kasey, and he was fighting on Jameson’s side. Kasey’s death spurs another, unnamed character into action. She holds up his beanie and realizes that it’s a ski-mask. When the alien invasion hits and everything’s gone south, the girl’s first move is to run to where she knows a lot of people are. She knows that she can’t outrun the aliens… but she can outrun the other people. She didn’t even realize what she was doing as she did it, but she looks back and something changes. She grabs a pipe. She rings a bell. The aliens leave.

“I just needed to do something,” she says. “Anything. Besides running. My shoes — they don’t quite fit anymore. We can’t rely on them any more. The old men. They can’t show us how to live. They took our city and made it a cage. They only hurt us. Stop running. Stop hiding. It’s time we became something more than what we are.” Another kid says that if they at out, then the authorities will hurt them and their families both. The girl looks at the mask and says, “Only if they know who we are. We’ll use masks.”

The old men turned NYC into a cage in the name of protecting everyone. The youth understand that this is completely unacceptable. If they don’t do right by you, you take it, by any means necessary.

–Spider-Man, as a story, is universal. We can all relate to him, one way or another. A side effect of being universal is that it’s also open to reinterpretation. Kyle Rayner, Green Lantern, is very much in the Spider-Man mold. So are Richard “Nova” Rider, Virgil “Static” Hawkins, Miles Morales, and plenty more heroes. Each reinvention, assuming the quality is there, reveals another aspect of Spider-Man and shows just how far that concept can be stretched before it breaks. At the root of Spider-Man is us, and us includes 7 billion people. There’s a lot of wiggle room there.

The girl is the Carrie Kelly of Reign. She provides a hard dose of morality to the story, despite doing nothing more than witnessing Spider-Man in action. She stands up against men twice her age or more, armed with just a bell and her voice. When she runs into Sandman, agent of the Reign and the man in her way, it turns out she’s got a lot to say.

Let me tell you a thing about hope! Hope has three daughters: Anger at the state things have fallen into. Courage to fight to make things right. And the third daughter is truth. And she won’t hide her true face any longer.

Sandman watches her preach. His throat goes dry, “even for sand.” The girl has his eyes. She turns to stone right before his eyes and says “Nice to meet you.” She’s stronger than he is. Sandman says that she’s “more like cement than sand.” When the soldiers open fire, she stands there and takes it.

This is Spider-Man. Anger, at his failure to protect his uncle. Courage, to go out and make sure it never happens to anyone else. And truth — the idea that heroism is something that you must do, if you are able to do it. Standing tall against tremendous, insurmountable odds, and refusing to move. An unstoppable force breaking against an immovable object. Right versus wrong.

The girl, like Carrie, is carrying on in the name and spirit of the star of the book. Spider-Man as inspiration, both inside the text and out of it.

–Spider-Man is about family. The never-ending battle for Peter Parker is how much time he can spend being a superhero instead of tending to his aunt or girlfriend. How much does Peter have to sacrifice to do this thing he must do?

In Reign, Peter struggles with family. He feels like he let them down. Peter knows what they expect of him, and he knows that he’ll fail them. Everyone died. The radioactivity in his body poisoned his wife. He failed his uncle. His aunt still died. His family wanted him to be one thing, but he couldn’t do it. He failed. Time took its toll.

On Mary Jane’s deathbed, he spends some time reminiscing about their time together. “I remember the day we met,” he says to her silent form. “The electricity tingled down my neck. You already knew it and you told me. I hit the jackpot.” He goes on and on. “My chest was too small for what you did to my heart.” “I wanted to tell you so much, but words didn’t have enough… so I tried to show you.” Bu his radioactivity is killing her, and the last thing he hears her say is “Go.” He leaves the room, off to stop another crime, and she dies while he’s out. He comes back to an empty room.

He’s in the middle of a horrific encounter with MJ’s corpse as this goes on. He spills his regrets and tears. “I once said that I’d sooner rip out my still-beating heart from my own chest before I ever hurt you. I’m a liar.”

MJ’s corpse, being pulled along by Doc Ock’s tentacles, says “Stop being silly. That last day… you never let me finish. I tried to tell you, ‘Go… go get ’em, Tiger.'”

(This is the part that murders me every time.)

This is why Spider-Man is about family. You think you’re a failure. You think you can’t live up to the expectations of others. You think that you should have been able to protect them, even when things beyond your control prove otherwise. You internalize all of this guilt and horror and self-loathing… and forget that your family is there for you, no matter what. Love is way deeper than that. On her deathbed, Mary Jane wanted Peter Parker to go do what he does. She wanted him to be Spider-Man, and all he felt was guilt over being Spider-Man. He didn’t understand that she loved all of him, Peter and Spidey both, and that he didn’t fail her at all. He became exactly what she wanted him to be. He was the man she loved, up until her dying moment.

–Peter Parker buried his red & blues in Mary Jane’s coffin. It’s blatantly symbolic. His love died and so did his drive, blah blah blah. More than that, though, is the fact that that action equates Spider-Man and Mary Jane. The two are irrevocably linked. Now, he’s Spider-Man because of her, rather than Ben. She saw the best of him. It actually reminds me of something from El-P’s “TOJ”:

Everything you said, I took it all to heart
And you spurred a change in me
Before I could become a new sun, I had to fall apart
And I can see that now, and I wish you well
‘Cause you saw what was good in me
And I’ll be God damned if I didn’t see that myself

If you want to summarize Peter and MJ’s relationship, that’s it right there. Mary Jane is a rider. She makes him better simply by believing in him, and in making him better, she makes the world a better place. Everything has a point. Everything happens for a reason.

Spider-Man lost sight of the truth, and was lost for decades.

Even as a hallucination, Mary Jane knows the truth. I love the sequence where Mary Jane smiles shortly before something forces Spider-Man into action. She’s driving the car when Spidey hallucinates, too. You can see her fabulous red hair behind the wheel. She knows the truth. He never remembers putting on the mask, but the outcome is always the same. “Woo-hoo!”

–Spider-Man is such a perfect hero because his relationship with his villains is so personal. Spidey’s best villain is undoubtedly Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin, a best friend turned enemy. But for some reason, he has intensely complicated relationships with all his major villains.

I don’t mean Batman/Catwoman complicated, either. That’s the kind of complication that derives from cheap wish fulfillment and lazy writing. Plus, Spider-Man and Black Cat’s relationship is infinitely more interesting. I’m talking Norman Osborn complicated, where one of his worst villains is also a corrupted father figure. Doctor Octopus complicated, where the older man is bent on proving himself to the younger man or obsessed with their status as children of the atomic age. Lizard complicated, where a beast erupts from a kind man who wants the best for his family. Sandman complicated, where the villain becomes a hero after being shown a better way. Morbius, Prowler, Vulture, Chameleon, Kraven, Electro, Rhino, and more — Spider-Man has been fighting these dudes since he was fifteen years old, and they have actual relationships beyond the punching and kicking. They can sit and talk as easily as they can throw a punch, and often have.

This is true in Reign, too. The Sinner Six — Kraven, Sandman, Electro, Hydro-Man, Mysterio, and Scorpion — are released from prison and sent after Spider-Man. They all have grudges to settle with Spidey. Jonah comes to Spidey because of their history. Venom is the prime mover behind the alien invasion, and it’s doing it in part because of their past together. Recognizing the truth of his relationship with MJ made him put the tights back on.

With Spider-Man, it always comes back to relationships, healthy or otherwise.

–Andrews makes a big deal out of people watching what’s going on. There’s a newscast that runs throughout the series. Jonah hacks everything with a screen and livestreams Spider-Man’s fight. Families gather around TVs and mothers cover their children’s eyes and everyone watches. In watching, they learn. In learning, they realize that they have no choice: they must act. They fight back against the Reign. They protect each other. They save each other. They lift each other up. Spider-Man is a role model. The girl sees Spider-Man and realizes that he’s just an old man. “Weak. Like the rest of us.”

But if an old man is willing to fight for what he believes in, what excuse do you have?

Spider-Man watches, too. He loses a fight when he realizes that Kasey has been killed. He watches what people do around him. And then he acts. The things he sees require him to act. He has the power, so he has the responsibility.

–Spider-Man’s got jokes. This is one of the most important parts of the character. He isn’t a stand-up comedian, or even particularly good at telling jokes. He’s just got a quick wit and a mouth that runs faster than he can think. He’s talky, he’s jokey, and he just won’t shut up. Andrews nails this aspect of the character.

Even when an aged Peter is old and morose, Spidey comes out of the gate with jokes, stunts, and flips. He’s a showman. It doesn’t really matter whether the jokes are a cover for fear or whatever. What matters is that they exist. They put him and the people he’s rescuing at ease. They break down the walls of aggression between him and his enemies, replacing it instead with mocking humor or genuine emotion. Peter remarks again and again that the mask is laughing, and that’s true. You can’t have a deadly serious Spider-Man but once or twice.

I wrote about a ’90s Spider-Man story where just that happened in 2006. I called it “No Laughing Matters,” a better title than I usually come up with. Spider-Man not laughing in that story mattered because it was a sign that Spider-Man was wrong. Spider-Man isn’t Batman. You can’t graft the most unpleasant parts of Batman onto Spider-Man and still expect to have Spidey.

I like how many aspects of that story are reflected in Andrews’s Reign. I hadn’t considered them in relation to each other before now, but they fit together like puzzle pieces. Shrieking is the type of story that benefits from the contrast between the Spidey we know and love and a darker, meaner version. “I am the Spider!” works once, and just once, because we all know that the Spider is actually the guy with a joke and a wry smile on his lips. That’s where these stories fall short.

Andrews doesn’t overdo it with the jokes. He uses them to great effect. Spidey tells Mysterio to never dress like a man’s dead wife… unless he pays you to. Spidey sings The Ramones once he puts the red and blues back on. He tells a knock-knock joke before he storms the tower with the end boss in it. He handles the big Electro and Hydro-Man team-up with ease. Scorpion tells Spidey that he can do anything with his new duds. Spider-Man says, “Can you fly?” as he kicks him out of a window. He tells a joke as he’s being beaten to death by aliens. And it all feels so right, so Spider-Man. Put him in dire straits and he’ll go to hell with a grin on his lips and a joke in the air.

–Amazing Spider-Man 316 was my first comic. I can’t believe I don’t have it memorized. I think I still have it kicking around my apartment somewhere. It was a David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane joint, and they hooked me. I loved, and still love, how McFarlane drew Spidey’s webs and the creepy positions McFarlane put him in. I liked Michelinie’s soap opera script. I got lucky and managed to talk somebody into giving me that first Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks as a gift as a kid, and that let me go back to the Lee/Ditko source. I was a regular reader of the Spider-Man newspaper strip during the ’90s, when Alex Saviuk was drawing it. Later, when I got older, I got to experience the Romita/Conway/Andru years and JMS and JRjr’s run was waiting for me when I came back to comics. The first 130 or 140 issues of Amazing Spider-Man are some of my favorite comics ever, even over and above the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four that everyone else thinks are the best. How could you not love those stories? Peter Parker grew up, met girls, went to college, and got on with his life. They’re beautiful.

Spider-Man is that one guy who made comics for me, above and beyond any other character. The guys who shepherded him over the past fifty years have had a huge effect on my taste in comics art and writing. The character they’ve created is one I’ve fallen in love with slowly. I didn’t even know it happened until it did, really. I probably thought to myself “Spider-Man is the best hero” and then realized it was true. A couple of his spinoffs and variations, most notably Static, are super important to me. I’m not a characters over creators guy at all, but he’s still a character I’ll check in on, just to see what’s new in his life.

I’m glad that Andrews and Villarubia did Spider-Man: Reign. It’s a book aimed directly at the heart of a Spider-fan like me, a guy who grew up with this schmuck who rocks red and blue and tells bad jokes. It feels like it was written for me, because it hits so many of the things I love about Spider-Man.

You can buy it on Comixology for eight bucks, total or on Amazon for twelve. I think it’s worth reading, if you like this guy like I like this guy. It’s a nice farewell to an old friend.

Real talk: this strip by the cartoonishly handsome and devilish duo of Chris Haley and Curt Franklin got me a little choked up when I first read it, and again when I dug it up just now to think about so I could write about it.

I’m really, really attached to Spider-Man. Amazing Spider-Man 316 was my first comic, and I was hooked. Spider-Man was the reason I got into comics, and I only bailed on them because the Spider-Man books got pretty bad once Onslaught hit. When I came back, it was thanks to Daredevil, but I soon found my way over to JMS & JRjr’s pretty good run on Amazing Spidey and had a grand ol’ time. I even liked their 9/11 issue. As a kid, I’d be willing to bet cash money that I sang one line louder than all the others on Wu-Tang’s Enter the 36 Chambers. Which one? This bit from Deck on “Protect Ya Neck”: “Swinging through town like your neighborhood Spider-Man!” Even Deck throws a little extra into it on the song.

Spidey’s the best superhero, the pinnacle of the genre. He’s the best because he’s the closest to us. When he gets powers, he tries to get money. When he messes up, he feels real guilty about it. He’s a working class type of dude, someone who has a skill and exercises it to the best of his ability. He has family drama, job drama, school drama, and girl drama. I love Static dearly, but he’s an updating of a classic. I got a lot out of Spider-Man. He’s us. He’s me. He’ll forever be my favorite, even when I’m not reading or enjoying his comics. Those early Ditko issues are re-readable like crazy, and that’s not all. The first 130, 140 issues of Amazing Spider-Man are a long sprint of pure quality, where the worst the stories get is “Huh, that was weird, but drawn really, really well.” He’s been defined and redefined by Romita, Kane, Saviuk (more for the newspaper strip than his time in the ’90s), McFarlane, the other Romita, Bagley, and Skroce… so much of my taste in artists can be traced back to Spider-Man. I followed McFarlane from Spider-Man to Spawn, even, and that got me into Image.

Spidey’s a big deal for me. I like him, from concept to Platonic ideal, quite a bit. I mean, I’m not crazy or nothing, but I have spent more time thinking about Spider-Man than is probably healthy for a grown man. I’m fond of ol’ webs.

I like that Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli created Miles Morales for Marvel. I’ve got a lot of younger cousins, and I spent a lot of time being around or mentoring younger kids when I was younger (middle and high school-y) thanks to the Boys & Girls Club or YWCA. I think that the next generation should get to experience the sheer joy and… I don’t even know, confidence or happiness or something. The amount of positivity I got out of reading and thinking about Spider-Man as I grew up. (I just looked down and I’m wearing tokidoki’s first Spider-Man t-shirt. I don’t usually wear comics clothes, usually basically meaning never, but apparently I make an exception for Spider-Man. Total coincidence, I swear.) I think that Spider-Man has legs that most superheroes don’t, for a wide variety of reasons, and he should be continuously reinvented for new contexts and shared. Miles is a good step in that direction, and I hope he sticks around a long time.

All that aside, though. Curt and Chris absolutely nailed how I felt about the Miles Morales thing. I look at that strip and I see myself in both of those kids. That’s a good feeling, even if I can’t quite put it into words. I think the word I’m looking for is “beautiful.” So yeah–go with that.

On the other hand, I like this strip because I’m pretty sure I share a sense of humor with Curt and Chris, and this cracked me up near to tears the first time I read it, too. Something about Reed Richards’s face and the captions on the bottom. The “EVERYWHERE” hits like a drum sting in a horror movie.

One of the nicest things about the complicated mess that is the production of mainstream comics is watching creative teams grow comfortable with each other and up their game. Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s duties evolved over the course of their classic run on Daredevil, Walt Simonson worked with Sal Buscema on a lot of his Thor. Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson. Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov. Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso and Trish Mulvihill. Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke. Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke. Garth Ennis and John McCrea.

You know what I’m talking about–you can tell when people are really in sync and just black out on a comic. The other day, Marjorie Liu said something that got me really excited to see a comic. “The last issue of X-23 is going to be entirely silent, thanks to @philnoto’s magnificent visual storytelling skills.” Consider my interest piqued.

Noto, of course, barely needs any introduction at all. Not if you pay attention to ill artists. He’s the guy who drew these shots of Sharon Carter, X-23 & Jubilee, Luke Cage & Storm, the best Robin, this smile, Domino, and Black Widow. His style is super clean, and if you aren’t a fan, you need to get like the rest of us who know from good.

Liu, on the other hand, has quietly turned into one of Marvel’s best weapons. She turned X-23 into a character worth checking in on, and she did her best work on that book while working with Phil Noto and Sana Takeda. For her to feel comfortable enough with Noto to make the big finale of a series she’s guided from inception to execution a silent issue — something that I’ve rarely seen done well — is great. That makes me want that comic.

That’s exciting, and it’s exciting in a way that I’m rarely experiencing with cape comics these days. The writer/artist relationship is one of those things I associate with cape comics above all, mainly due to their assembly line nature. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes it crashes and burns to an absolutely absurd extent. And sometimes, things like this happen. It’s one of the most pleasurable things about reading cape comics.

I grew up on Marvel comics. I liked them as a kid, but our relationship is more complex now. It’s honest. I like a lot of things Marvel does. I dislike or ignore several other things. But overall, I think of Marvel fondly. They’re where all my favorite heroes came from, and their artistic bench is deep. I write about comics online, including Marvel comics. Sometimes I love them and slobber over them for weeks. Sometimes I hate them and write about why. I try to do it without breaking down into ad hominems and all the garbage that litters comics internet. I’m a smart dude, too smart to fall into those traps. I think my posts reflect that. I even have this unspoken rule about cursing on 4l!. Excepting times when I’ve quoted other people, I’ve probably cursed less than ten times over the however many years I’ve been writing for 4l!. I don’t not-curse. I just like the challenge of expressing displeasure without going for the easiest routes. (I think it’s sharpened my sword, personally, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I say this to point out that I’m far from a Marvel hater. I did some freelance work for Marvel.com last year, and I’m not the type of guy who can work for someone he hates, no matter how many cool drawings of Spider-Man are on the checks. Just last week, me and David Uzumeri found an obvious error on Marvel’s website that let people grab jpgs of comics published in the past and, from what I saw, as far as two weeks into the future. Rather than updating the investigative/conjecture post we came up with, I emailed someone at Marvel directly. I’m not a hater, and I was surprised when Marvel editor Stephen Wacker came to my site and treated me like a hater after I expressed my opinion on the creative team changes over at Marvel.

You can see him in this post, which was about why double-shipping as Marvel has implemented it devalues the artist and hurts the comic, and this one, where I talk about instances (including a Marvel example) when art changes have been done, or will be done, in cool ways. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I’m expressing opinions, obviously. David Uzumeri, a good buddy of mine, disagrees with me. He understands why I think the way I do, and I understand the way he thinks, too. I’m not giving the sermon on the mount, here. I’m talking about something I like, and how something else interferes with that thing I like. I skirt up against the edge of insulting someone, but it’s still framed as my opinion of his work, rather than his person.

And when Stephen Wacker finds the post, rather than ignoring it (which is cool) or engaging in discussion with me on the issue (which is rare, but totally awesome), he came out firing shots at commenters and generic pundits before finally condescending to me. He implied that I’m just looking for something to be mad about (a stupid and incredibly ignorant argument to make), that I hate Marvel because I love Image (he did this in the comments of a post where I praise a Marvel comic, and shortly after commenting on a post where I praise other Marvel comics), and then he betrays the fact that he didn’t even read my post before commenting. Instead of addressing my points, he talks about things I don’t even mention, he calls me defensive, he calls me angry, and he generally turns the passive-aggressiveness all the way up in every single interaction he has with me and other commenters. He tells me that I’ve bought into Marvel vs Image before asking me why I think the time I complained about will be different. I tell him this:

I’m not buying into any shtick, and I can’t believe you’d even say something as stupid as that. Especially this idiotic rivalry you’re trying to pitch–did you miss the part where I praise Immortal Iron Fist to the high heavens and point to it as an exemplar of what can be done with multiple artists? I could’ve talked about T-bolts, another Marvel book that does well with this sort of thing, or like Chris Arrant says, DC’s Animal Man. In the post itself I explain exactly what you’re asking me to explain.

But yeah, since you want to come at me with condescension and disingenuous arguments, but sure, let’s get into it.

Other than the “Image-GOOD!/Marvel-BAD!” schtick you’re buying into (congrats to Image marketing for that coup!), what makes you think this isn’t the case here?

I don’t think that’s the case here because you went for the pass-agg condescension instead of explaining what Kano or Samnee bring to the book and how well they work with Waid. We all know they’re good artists, obviously, but how do they fit into the structure of DD? What do they add to the recipe? It would take you two entire sentences to do that. “Chris Samnee’s clean style brings to mind the swashbuckling Daredevil we haven’t seen in a while, and Kano has an incredible aptitude for fight scenes. Pham’s blockier style is somewhat reminiscent of JRjr’s run on Daredevil with Ann Nocenti, and I thought he’d be good for this story because it’s a big classic cape comics action story.”

That’s why I don’t believe you. Instead of talking to me like a grown man or pointing me toward some interview on Marvel.com, you treat me like an idiot. I’m not one of those douchebags who constantly harass you online. I hate Kbox. Why do I get treated like him for saying “Yo, I don’t like this, and here are several reasons why?”

and he says this:

You are very angry. I can see why what with it being a discussion of comics and entertainment.

I don’t believe i’m at your beck and call to explain my creative choices at your bidding, but I do interviews regularly, so my advice would be to look there and or ask our PR people for an interview. (though given your needlessly hostile tone, I’m not sure that’d be such a great way to spend my time.)

Essentially though anyone on DD or any books I oversee is there because I like them (except for Paolo who’s here because he’s dating Waid).

Who’s KBox? Is he an enemy of some sort? I don’t think you’re an enemy for what it’s worth. I don’t even know you. You’re just wrong about some stuff as are some of your posters here.

And setting aside my surprise at getting u madded (it is the penance stare of the internet, and for a brief moment, I saw the shape and color of my soul), “You’re not the boss of me” is an incredible response to an intentionally provocative request. Either way, I admitted defeat and bailed out. I knew that it was going to go nowhere but south, and frankly, I had paying work to do that was only slightly less frustrating than arguing with this guy.

I could point out more and more of his garbage. He left 18 comments between 1130 and 1430. They’re all generally the same–wondering where we get off telling him what to do (we aren’t, we’re talking about what we think is a problem on a site that isn’t his [it’s mine]) and what, should he just stop publishing Daredevil because some, snerk, “pundits,” heh heh, don’t like Chris Samnee? And when someone says no, we all like Samnee, and you’re not talking about the discussion at hand, he switches tactics again to something else.

I put an end to things by banning him. He said this in a comment: “Again I’m under no orders to deliver whatever information you or David might command at a given moment. The books speak for themselves.” and you know, I’d had enough. No one’s commanding anything. I’m one voice on the internet. My commenters, all fifteen of ’em, don’t have enough buying power to sway anything. Except for a couple bad apples I have to keep on track, my comment section is pretty good. It was all rational conversation. More of it agreed with me than I expected, but whatever, there were still good discussions down there. We’re not commanding anything. We’re doing the exact same thing people do in comic shops.

But let’s recap. I state an opinion on a website in a pretty respectful and civil manner, other than saying that I don’t like one guy’s artwork. Commenters pop up and agree or share stories about books they liked. Wacker shows up and poisons the entire well with his passive-aggressive behavior and constant disses. When called on it, he doubles down, because we are so mad that we just gotta get our Marvel five minutes hate in. When called on that, he doubles down again, because this time we just don’t like the artists. And on and on down the toilet. Later, after a couple hours of nonsense, he @s me on Twitter. I tell him:

@StephenWacker Dude, seriously, fuck off out of my twitter feed with your condescending bullshit. I’m not interested.

— david brothers (@hermanos) February 27, 2012

I’m frustrated at this point, and trying to decide whether or not to ban him or let him have it out with the commenters. He makes it a point to @ several people I spoke to on Twitter about the argument. I lose my temper and tell him off. Pow.

I called it quits on the argument in the morning, and then he kept on with it and I stopped that, too. I wasn’t going to post about it because the whole situation was embarrassing. I haven’t gotten into many public fights with creators or other writers, but it always looks stupid in hindsight. I’m not that guy. I thought I learned this time because I stepped away. I was gonna stick to my resolve until I see this on my way home from work:

So, okay. Maybe it’s an innocent favorite. Maybe he really liked how I said what I said. But considering how unbelievably childish and passive-aggressive this guy has been all day, I’m going to take this as a shot. I hate being condescended to, and he got under my skin. An hour or so ago, he follows me on Twitter. So fine. Here. Listen.

Stephen Wacker: I’m not your enemy. I’m not those guys that follow you around and ask who would win in a fight, Spider-Man or the Hulk. I’m not that guy that commissions explicit Spider-Man porn while typing missives about how Marvel doesn’t know anything about the real Spider-Man with his withered claw of a jerking hand. I didn’t particularly care about the spider-marriage going away. I don’t spend all my time talking about comics I hate. I’m not even a The Comics Journal guy, not even close. I’m not that dude.

I’m that dude that’s been very fond of your books. I praised Brand New Day to the high heavens, and it still has some of my favorite Spider-Man stories ever. I read and enjoyed 52. Daredevil? Punisher? Avenging Spider-Man? Osborn? Shadowland Elektra? I’m that dude who buys your comics and talks them up to his friends. I buy the floppies and then the trade because I’m too stupid to realize how small my apartment is. I’m your customer, homey, specifically yours over the past few years, and, in a way that I’m growing increasingly uncomfortable with, I’m also your free PR. But that’s a neurotic meltdown for another day (or a day in November 2011, I think, but tomato, tomato.) I buy your books, I read your books, I enjoy your books, and I like the creative teams you tend to pick out.

I’m not that other guy. I’m me, and I’m over here talking about something I like and my concern about something I see as being a problem with that thing I like. I’m not ranting or screeching out unintelligible complaints. “I like this, but this new thing? I dunno, I’m worried.” And somehow, that gets me treated like the scumbaggiest of your target audience? I get accused of demanding things to you when I wasn’t even talking to you in the first place? I ask in the post for consistency in the comics I spend three and four dollars on a couple times a month, I guess that was the demand? Is that where we are now? You either get blind, unquestioning fealty or I’m an enemy?

I don’t make big proclamations about boycotts or quitting series or whatever whatever. It’s easier to just do it and not tell anybody. Not everything is a statement. I’m not going to do that here, either. But, Stephen Wacker. I want you to do one thing. Look at yourself, look at how you treated somebody who committed the cardinal sin of expressing concern about something he likes and wants to continue liking, and then think about whether or not being talked down to, insulted, and harassed is something that would make me want to keep buying Marvel comics. That’s not a threat, either. I’m one drop in a bucket that’s several hundred thousand people deep, I know, but take a step back and look at yourself and maybe conduct yourself with some class instead of immediately pulling the knives out.

All right, listen. Lean in close. I want to let you in on a secret, okay?

I want you to buy Adam Warren’s Empowered Deluxe Edition Volume 1. It hits your local comic shop this week, but if you’d rather get it off Amazon, you’ll have to wait until 03/13. In exchange, though, it’ll cost you just 37 bucks instead of 60. The choice is yours. (edit: The HC is in-stock on Amazon as of the morning of 02/29)

That’s a steep price for a comic, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. It’s a nice hardcover with Empowered volumes 1 through 3. For your money, you’re gonna get 712 pages of sexy superhero comedy, including 40 pages of bonus material like sketches and designs and ideas. It’s a pretty good deal, I’d argue, and I already own all these books. If the price is too steep for you, and you have some way to enjoy digital comics, give some thought to picking up digital versions of the series. They’re 7.99, which is a steal. If you don’t do digital comics, then you should buy Empowered Volume 1 in print, maybe?

I’ve written about Emp and Warren’s work a lot. Maybe more than anyone else on comics internet? I dunno — probably, if I had to guess — but that’s mostly irrele except to point out that if you want to know about Emp, I’ve got you covered. A (surprisingly thorough) selection:

-I talked about his fantastic runs on Gen13 (you’ll not find a teen comic better, for my money, even though I guess the cast was early 20s by that point?) and Livewires. You can find his Gen13 (with a variety of artists, including a not-terrible Ed Benes!) in a couple of volumes– Gen 13: Superhuman Like You and Gen 13: Meanwhile. Livewires Vol. 1: Clockwork Thugs, Yo is kinda-sorta the type of hard sci-fi I’m not into, but Warren makes it work, and throws an ill espionage angle onto the whole works. I can’t recommend them highly enough. They’re clever, they’re pretty, they’re well-plotted, and they’re just good comics. Everybody who likes “fun” in comics, whatever that means to you, should pick them up.

-I reviewed Empowered 6 for ComicsAlliance. It’s the volume that comes after the incredibly devastating emotional landmine that was volume 5, and it’s pretty good.

-I did another Empowered thing for CA, about why the sex scenes work so well in this particular cape comic and not so well in others, but it isn’t up yet. I’ll edit it in when it goes live, if that happens in the next couple days. The short version is “It’s funny and makes you care about the characters before they get down to the old in-out.”

-I typed a little about Empowered: The Wench With A Million Sighs and why it’s a good jumping-on point. You can buy it here.

-I typed at length about Adam Warren’s writing abilities, and how his work on Iron Man: Hypervelocity with Brian Denham was a brutally effective way to do an Iron Man story. It’s all about the ideas and pushing things forward using real-world cutting edge technology, rather than like… boring looking robots and smart cars. I like this bit I wrote:

Adam Warren is an idea guy in the best possible sense of the phrase. If you want to kick something into high gear, really peel back what makes it work and throw a whole bunch more stuff into the mix without breaking your character, he’s the man to come see. Hypervelocity is what Iron Man should always be like. Something fresh, something moving at Mach 8, and something that takes something from real life and makes an ill comic book concept out of it. Warren just pours ideas onto the page at a rate no other writer can match. He drops them out there into the world where they’re just aching to be explored.

Of course, the trade’s out of print and Marvel hasn’t put up the digital version. Dig this one up, though. It’s a trip.

-Remember The Dirty Pair? Warren worked on those back in the day, and I wrote about that, too. They’re a dynamic duo, masters of disaster, and a whole lot of fun to read. Good luck finding trades, but definitely check your local comic shop for the hookup. I like these a lot.

–The character of Sistah Spooky in Empowered is actually a really deft and fantastic exploration of black pathology. Hating the skin you’re in, wishing you were white (or at least not-black)… it’s all self-hatred and it’s all poisonous. And this gem is hidden in what looks like a fluffy and sexy superhero comedy. I mean… yowza, I can’t really over-state how awesome it is that Warren did this, and that it was intentional. It’s a lightning bolt out of the blue, the saddest thing in the world, and totally great, too. You want emotional resonance in your funnybooks? Spookums has so much of it that your head will spin.

-Finally, I did a 5800 word interview with Warren around the time Empowered 5 dropped about a lot of things. His process, his tools, his history, his craft… we cover a lot of ground. It’s still pretty interesting, and it’s cool to see hints of stuff that ended up being worked into the book. I’m pretty sure one thing he says hasn’t been seen in cape comics before has been seen in Emp since, but I don’t want to ruin it. It has to do with the character Mindf–k, though.

-Oh yeah. If you want to see images, click any of those posts, or check out his deviantart.

If all of that can’t convince you to buy some Empowered… I dunno, man. There’s cute girls and buff guys in it, I guess? Will that do the job?

I said that artist changes due to double-shipping mainstream comics devalues the artist. Not all art changes are evil, though. Sure, some of them are of the Final Crisis variety and result in terrible comics, but every once and a while, people get them right. Artist changes, guest artists, however you want to call them–they can be used tactically, as a way to showcase an artist or add a little extra punch to a storyline.

This may be weird, but follow along for a minute. One of the best examples of the way a guest artist can make something extra dope is a song. It relates to my point about unwanted art changes being like new actors showing up in old roles in a movie or a song changing direction mid-stream. It’s Big Boi’s “Fo Yo Sorrows,” off that Sir Lucious album:

It happens around 0:55. Too $hort, the legendary rapper out of Oakland, pops up to drop four bars and then bounce. That’s a quarter of a verse. It’s a cameo, but it goes deeper than that. At 0:47, Big Boi flips the word “bitch” just like $hort made famous, and then says that $hort was one of his favorite rappers. For Too $hort to pop up on this song for something that’s little more than a cameo is ill. It’s rappers playing around and having some fun. It’s not really a guest spot. It’s something you smile about, because you’re in on the joke.

That’s the feeling that art changes should give you. A little spike of glee, or a chance to explain to everyone you know exactly why what just happened is so good.

The Immortal Iron Fist did it well, for the most part. The flashbacks to adventures of other Iron Fists were drawn by a variety of dope artists, each one tackling a different Iron Fist. David Aja drew the modern pages, and his art served as connective tissue between the flashbacks. He set the tone and stage for the book, and then when the story required that the tone and stage change, Travel Foreman, John Severin, Russ Heath, and Sal Buscema tagged in to get it done. Aja is Big Boi, and John Severin is Too $hort. He brings with him a history and pedigree that people on the inside will get, while others will just go, “Yo, that looked pretty cool.”

Big Boi/Matt Fraction/Ed Brubaker had a good reason for their guests showing up, too. It’s not just a willy-nilly thing. There’s a point. It’s an enhancement, rather than someone just plugging another gear into the mix so that the machine goes faster. It turned Immortal Iron Fist into a jam comic. It provided variety.

There’s a really good example of what I’m talking about coming up later this year. Prophet started life as a Rob Liefeld/Dan Panosian joint. As part of the big Extreme relaunch, it’s currently in the hands of Brandon Graham, Simon Roy, Richard Ballermann, and Ed Brisson. It’s really good, actually, part of the continuously rising wave over at Image. Graham is writing, but working closely with Roy to make the story the best it can be. Sometimes that means layouts, other times it means Roy making sure that Graham’s on point or vice versa. It’s a collaboration. And there’s going to be guests popping in. From Graham’s blog:

So I’d written on here before that Prophet would come out 6 times a year but some cool shit has happened and now it’s going to be 12 issues a year monthly.

So here’s the schedule:

Starting Jan-

#21(number 1 in our hearts) -#23 art by Simon Roy (Jan’s Atomic heart), then #24 &25 are drawn by farel dalrymple (pop gun war) I’m drawing #26 and Giannis Milonogiannis (Old city blues)is doing # 27- 32. I think we’ve come up with a cool way to make this work storywize.

The situation isn’t too dissimilar from Marvel, and I’m sure a lot of people will say it isn’t different at all. There’s a comic, and the people making it want it to come out more frequently, so more artists are joining the team. The original draw of the series was the Graham/Roy/Ballermann/Brisson team, and that’s changing. I think that there’s a difference here, but a very, very fine one. I don’t think the difference is “I like these guys,” either. I like a lot of them dudes who are coming onto books I like, too.

Instead of just slipping new dudes into the rotation to boost the schedule, editor Eric Stephenson and writer Graham have found artists to work with and crafted the story around them. My understanding is that each artist will be working on a story tailored for them, rather than simply being used to keep the ship on track. All of the artists are doing covers, too, I suppose as a type of introduction. There’s a creative reason here, and I think that has more value than the purely economical reasons Marvel has to have artists playing musical chairs.

Here’s the covers for Prophet 22-24 and 26. The covers are by Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, Giannis Milonogiannis, and Brandon Graham, in that order.

They have absolutely distinct styles, right? Roy & Ballermann’s palette is dusty and soft, Dalrymple’s muted and night time-y, Milonogiannis’s is aged, and Graham’s is soft, but in a different way than Ballermann’s. Firmer, maybe. Roy & Ballermann’s art is rough and loose. Dalrymple is detailed and gloomy. Milonogiannis is… I don’t even know the right word for it right now. Majestic? Ominous? I get the feeling of mankind making contact with an entirely alien and apathetic intelligence, something that sees us as being beneath its notice. And Graham’s cover for 26 reminds me of nothing so much as the passage of a lot of time.

Things like this make art changes into events. It’s not just “Oh, we want to make people buy this book sixteen times a year instead of twelve.” It’s “We want this book to be the best it can be.”

I think it’ll work. I’m looking forward to finding out.

Marvel’s been double-shipping comics lately, taking advantage of an increased shipping schedule to pull a little more money from their fanbase. As a result… the quality and consistency of their books has slipped over. Here’s a quick copy/paste from my buddy Ron Richards’s Marvel May solicitations post that does a pretty good job of explaining the situation:

To put it in perspective, here’s a rundown of several single issues coming out in May. Series that previously featured a “hot” artist who received critical and fan praise, and the artist replacing them:
Secret Avengers #27 – you loved Gabe Hardman on this book that JUST relaunched with a new creative team, so HERE’S RENATO GUEDES!
Ultimate Spider-Man #10 – you loved Sara Pichelli and her new take on Ultimate Spider-Man, so HERE’S DAVID MARQUEZ!
Ultimate Comics The Ultimates #10 and #11 – Esad Ribic blew your minds with the opening chapters of Hickman’s run, so HERE’S LUKE ROSS!
Scarlet Spider #5 – you loved Ryan Stegman after he launched this title, so HERE’S NEIL EDWARDS!
Fantastic Four #605.1 – you loved Steve Epting, so HERE’S MIKE CHOI (Speaks for itself after last week’s Green Lantern #6 atrocity)!
Defenders #6 – you loved Terry Dodson, so HERE’S VICTOR IBANEZ!
Daredevil #12 – you loved Paolo Rivera SO HERE’S CHRIS SAMNEE – oh wait, this is a good one…
EXCEPT, next issue…
Daredevil #13 – you loved Paolo Rivera and Chris Samnee, so HERE’S KHOI PHAM!
Don’t mind me, my head’s too busy spinning.

That’s a lot of changes. Most mainstream artists can just about keep a monthly schedule. Previously, you’d see two stable art teams alternating arcs on a book to keep the book on schedule and with something of a cohesive look. With the double-shipping, stable art teams are looking less and less likely.

Daredevil is a good example of what I’m talking about, and why these art changes are so frustrating. At launch, it was announced as a book that would feature Mark Waid writing with Paolo Rivera (and his pop Joe Rivera inking him!) and Marcos Martin alternating on art duties. Javier Rodriguez was going to color Rivera, Muntsa Vicente was going to color Martin, and Joe Caramagna was going to letter all of it. That’s a good team–an astounding one, honestly. Alone, Rivera and Martin are beasts. Putting them on the same book is like having putting on a concert with fifteen Michael Jacksons on stage at once, or going to a basketball game that’s Jordan on Jordan. (It’s a pretty good comic.)

By the time we hit issue 13, we’ll have seen Rivera, Martin, Kano, Chris Samnee, and Khoi Pham illustrating the book. That’s five artists over thirteen issues. Some will have done one issue, others just a few. And on a certain level, sure, all of these artists are pretty good. Daredevil is going to be a good looking comic regardless, and will presumably remain well-written. But on another level, good looking isn’t a binary proposition. Martin’s good looking is different from Rivera’s good looking. Samnee and Kano are two entirely different types of good looking. With alternating teams of two, you can maintain a real visual identity. That’s what a stable art team does–it gives the book a look. Bringing in five artists onto a book in just over a year is far from stability. It’s another hoop for your suspension of disbelief to jump through so you believe in the story.

I saw a Marvel editor going off on Twitter about how artist switch-ups aren’t a problem, because hey, you’re still buying the comic, aren’t you? What’s the deal? It’s not like they’re ugly. I disagree. Vehemently disagree, in fact.

Think of it like this. When you hopped on Daredevil, you hopped on for Waid, Rivera, and Martin. They set a specific mood with their first issue. For another artist to tag in, even a good one, muddies that mood. Samnee doesn’t draw like Kano, who doesn’t draw like Martin, who doesn’t draw like Rivera. Rivera and Martin are complementary (though perhaps not as complementary as Javier Pulido and Marcos Martin, another killer duo), and their mood (which is aided and abetted by Waid’s script, of course) is a very specific thing.

When you begin adding to that mood, Daredevil becomes a different comic. It’s like if the actors changed forty-five minutes into a film, or if the new hot single by your favorite artist changed BPM and singers halfway through, but kept the same subject matter. It’s not that strange a comparison, I don’t think. There’s a skipped beat there. Every artist is unique, and swapping an artist out of one story (and make no mistake, Waid is clearly scripting one story) and slotting another in changes that story fundamentally.

I’m actually having a hard time explaining why because it’s so obvious and basic to me. It looks different, and comics are a visual medium. You don’t just read comics–you look at them. The art matters, and when the art changes, the story changes. All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder is such a beautiful hot mess because Jim Lee is the quintessential superhero artist of our day and Frank Miller scripted a story that needed a more cartoony, flexible style. I talk about it here a little, but Lee is simultaneously the best and worst choice to illustrate what Miller was trying to do. If Miller drew ASBAR, it would have been received differently. It follows, then, that Lee’s ASBAR is not Miller’s, just like Rivera’s Daredevil is not Kano’s. It isn’t a value judgment. It’s an objective fact. Blue is not red, but they are both nice colors. Same thing.

These changes also have this unwanted effect of devaluing the artist, in a way. It sets the writer up as the prime mover on a comic book. The writer is the one constant in all these creative changes, and that changes the conversation from “Waid and Rivera are doing Daredevil!” to “Rivera is drawing Waid’s Daredevil next issue!” There is a difference there, and it affects how we think and talk about comics. It gives the writer ownership of the book, and makes the artist secondary, despite the artist being such a huge part of the success of the book.

(I realize that I’m giving short shrift to the inkers, colorists, and letterers here, but please believe that I love you guys, and do not wish to underestimate your influence. Pardon my shorthand.)

I don’t expect every creative team to stay together forever. But the constant musical chairs, right when things are getting good, is off-putting. We’re paying more money for less content, and we can’t even get consistent content. I understand why Marvel double ships comics, but am I really going to keep buying two issues a month when the creative team is compromised like it is on so many books in the latest round of solicits?

I buy cape comics because I like seeing what a small, dedicated team can do with these old characters I grew up on. Spider-Man has no value in and of himself. I might get curious about a series featuring Spider-Man and Hypno Hustler, but without a strong creative team, it’s nothing. It’s worse than nothing. Uncanny X-Force is a dumb idea on paper. It’s the team of X-Men that go out and murder people at night. But it came roaring out of the gates with Rick Remender, Jerome Opeña, and Dean White firing on all cylinders, including cylinders I didn’t even know Marvel had. That team made that series. By issue eight, Billy Tan was drawing the book, the quality took a nosedive, the magic was broken, and I bailed out. Why was Tan drawing it? Because Marvel shipped six issues of the series between the cover dates of May 2011 and July 2011, tossed out another two in October, and will consistently double-ship the book from February to April.

Uncanny X-Force 17-22 feature five different artists. That’s seven issues, including 19.1. There’s no in-story reason for the double-shipping. It just happens. That’s not a problem? It’s enough of a problem that I quit the series, and I’m absolutely positive that I’m not the only one. Maybe it’s just us elitist hipster douchebags dropping books over changes, but I doubt it.

Boiled down, though, my only request is this. If you want us to pay four bucks for 20 pages of comics, then at least let us trust that the reasons we’re reading the series are going to stick around. Let us get a story from a creative team that’s had time to grow together and get in sync. If you want us to pay more for less, at least do us the basic favor of giving us something approaching consistency.

I hit a slight snag in my Invisibles continued reading when I realized I went from the first volume to the third volume, only barely noticing.  It did seem strange that suddenly two characters were kidnapped and threatened by space beetles, but then again the entire thing started out with a sixties/seventies pastiche, that seemed to both come from and go to nowhere.  For those of you rolling your eyes, call it a lack of understanding in how Morrison works.  That’s fair.  But give me credit for my faith in the dude, continuing the story even though it seemed to jump.

That being said, I think that jumping ahead a book and then retracing my steps seems to be in the spirit of my decision to read them in the first place, so I’m going to go ahead and take a look at what I see.  For those who are struggling to place the book, it begins and ends with retro pulp teams whose stories brush against the main villain, revealed in this book to be a group of bug like aliens which are going to take over the Earth.  Agents of the aliens have kidnapped King Mob and Fanny, and are torturing King Mob who is talking about stories (the retro tales) as a way to cover up what he knows.

Since I’m no connoisseur of fictional torture and don’t have the stomach to become one, let me say that the torture scenes are creative and visceral, and turn my attention to the other parts of the book.

We get Boy’s back story, and how she seemed to be the middle ground between her angelic brother and her devilish brother – until it turns out we had the brothers switched around.  Artist Tommy Lee Edwards has a style that syncs up well with the bleak winter in New York that he’s depicting, and that’s the most visually arresting part of the book, even though other talented artists are given very flashy things to do.

But that’s a standard review of a comic book.  What about The Invisibles story?  Well, the story is still going, really, and that’s all you can say for it.  Although this volume can be summed up as a story – the rest of the Invisibles pull together to rescue the kidnapped Fanny and Mob, it doesn’t unfold in a way that actually lends itself to story telling, as opposed to telling about a bunch of things that happened in sequence.  The macro story, the one that’s being told over many volumes, feels good and relaxed.  Although it’s more pulled-together than the first volume, it still gives me the impression that story is what happens in between Grant Morrison saying what he wants to say.

Which is fine, since the things he wants to say are about adding shading and moderation to characters.  Moderation is not typically prized in comics, especially in a comic like this, but it’s a rare and wonderful thing, all the same.  Jack Frost (or Dane) begins to pull his character together instead of slaloming between endangered waif and bad seed.  King Mob is less of the unflappable, invincible icon he was in the first volume (I was about to say that being tortured will do that to you, but when does Batman look one bit more vulnerable when being tortured?  Never.  DC wouldn’t allow it.).  Boy, or Lucille, was one of the more even-keel characters from the start, so the backstory just adds a little depth to what otherwise might be a moderator.

The one place that the story falls is the same place that most stories fall – magic is magic.  When a hero has magic ability, it’s there whenever the situation is grave enough that it needs to be there.  That’s not necessarily bad.  You could say that about any facet of a story.  The cavalry will arrive when the author needs them to and if the author needs them to.  They’ll disarm the bomb if that’s how the story goes.  It’s just that magic needs a focal point, a switch that’s well established and yet not obvious to flip when the going gets tough.  When you use magic, you need to secure to an emotional solution instead of a practical one.  It didn’t feel like Dane, even with the famous vision of Jesus that he experiences in this volume, was up to doing battle with something that big, and then healing his dying friend.

Then again, if I wanted that emotional build-up to make sense, I should perhaps have read volume 2.  We’ll see if it all adds up when I do!

When looking at scanned print comics, one thing usually sticks out. Unless the scanner takes great care, each page will differ in size just a little bit. Scanners use Fit Width to make sure all the pages are the same width, but unless your scan is perfect (or you go back through later to crop for consistency, though that has problems of its own), you’re looking at pages that may be sized 1280×1028, 1280×1020, or 1280×1030, as a few random examples. It’s not a huge deal for the reader, and really you’ll only notice if you’re paying close attention, which I imagine is why this is generally true of comics that were physically scanned. There are a few other things that are specific to print scans, too, like the occasional hair that got scanned in, artifacts, evidence of where someone joined a two-page spread, and moire.

The new hotness are digital scans. Common sense suggests that the scanners take the digital comics themselves, strip them out of the reader, and then package them up. They don’t just use the iPad screenshot function, either. The scans are higher quality than that, and aren’t subject to the brightness setting on the iPad. They’re also of a uniform resolution — a recent digital scan of Daredevil is 988×1500 throughout, save for a two-page spread and one other exception. The recap page is 995×1500. Ultimate X-Men #7 is 1280×1943. Avengers 22, which wasn’t even released digitally but was released as a digital scan, is 1280×1944.

It’s possible that these are just print scans, sure, but not likely. I’ve been talking through this conundrum with David Uzumeri for a couple of weeks now. We’re both interested in the technology behind how this works, if only for curiosity’s sake. We got our Nancy Drew on and found something interesting. We’re pretty sure that the digital scans of Marvel’s comics aren’t being scanned by who or how you’d think they are.

Print scans tend to be around 150dpi or higher, for the sake of image quality. The recent digital scans I’ve looked through have been 72dpi. Most of them have been created using Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Windows, though a couple scanners use CS5. There’s an aura of perfection around these scans that makes it unlikely that someone is just posting print comics with a digital tag for the sake of shenanigans.

Where do these they come from? They’re not iPad screenshots. I don’t think it’s someone taking screenshots off ComiXology, either. The images are too clean and too perfect for that, plus ComiXology’s web reader sucks. Good luck getting anything readable out of that thing. Edit: Several people have pointed out that it’s actually really easy to pull images from ComiXology using simple functions that are built into your web browser. I tried it out and yeah, man, I was totally wrong there. My bad.

A clue. Here’s the print cover to Daredevil 9 and the digital scan cover right after it.

They look fine, right? Both are totally reasonable covers, and the lack of UPC feels right for digital comics. The rub, though is that digital comics have a copyright notice on the cover, every single time. “©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved. WWW.MARVEL.COM.” The digital scans don’t have that warning, and show no sign of it having been photoshopped out.

Here’s the raw cover from the solicitations:

Now, unless the scanners are carefully photoshopping in the logo each time (they aren’t, don’t be ridiculous), then something’s up. The plot thickens when you realize that the font and placement of the credits on the cover on the legit digital version differ from the digital scan. It doesn’t differ a lot, usually, but the fonts are visually different and sometimes the credits are off by a few inches. In this case the credits are different.

There’s a chance the scanners could have figured out how to hack ComiXology to dump the pages, but would still require buying a whole lot of comics once they go live and processing them immediately. Considering how small the digital scan groups are, that’s pretty unlikely. All of the DC scans slowly trickle in after 2pm EST, their official release time. Scanners aren’t likely to obey idiotic online street dates, and they can’t scan books without buying them. That limits them to ComiXology’s release time.

All the Marvel books arrive at once, though, and in pristine condition. There’s something undeniably fishy there. My first thought was that people were scanning Marvel comics they got on Tuesday at their comic shops, but if that were true, we’d see DC and Image books following that pattern, too. My second thought, and one that seems more reasonable and likely, is that there’s a leak somewhere in the supply chain.

Taken all together: There are covers that differ from any legit cover. Pages that are pitch-perfect. DPI that matches across the board. Recap pages that occasionally vary in size, just like they do in official Marvel electronic review copies. Every Marvel comic is available early and all at once on the scan site du jour. DC comics appear in a trickle after 2pm EST. By 7pm EST on Wednesday, every big two comic is available for download, but well before that, Marvel’s entire line-up for the week is ready to go.

It’s pretty clear from this evidence that there’s a leak somewhere along the supply chain. Someone’s getting access to a PDF, or something, and dumping it to JPG before releasing it to the net. Converting a PDF to a series of JPGs is simple in Photoshop, and once you set up a good action to save the images, this is something that takes no more than five minutes to do, RAM and size of PDF depending.

The PDF thing is easy to prove, due mainly to the janky fonts on the covers and in the issue. Whatever tool the scanners use to dump the jpegs doesn’t actually have the fonts the comics require, so we get a next-best and unobtrusive replacement. They use InDesign to dump, is my guess, and then Photoshop to re-size. You can actually see this error at work in all of DC’s preview comics, because the price and issue number are incorrect. (quick edit: check the comments for something I screwed up on the PDF front, though it doesn’t really change the thrust of the post…)

Actually, quick sidebar: DC’s preview images are enormous in size, usually weighing in at a megabyte a page or more. DC’s doing no post-processing on their previews, basically, so the pages are too large to actually read in a web browser comfortably, too high-res to be worth saving, and clear enough to see all of the weird PDF signatures that books have before they go to print. Dear DC Comics: you gotta do better with that. It’s embarrassingly amateur. Drop it to like 1280 on the long side and maybe 350 or 500kb max per page. Or, y’know, look at how every comics site reformats your previews and format it like that.

Anyway, if the DC thing doesn’t convince you, Uzumeri found a smoking gun. The photo is from the issue of Uncanny X-Men he bought on Wednesday. The clean image is from the scan.

The scan is missing the musical notes, which are presumably some type of font that the scanners do not have access to, or maybe a layer that was missed out of the source of the scan.

We found another gun in Daredevil 9. The captions on this page are from the following page. Daredevil is underground and tracking the Mole Man. The captions have nothing to do with the Black Cat, though it is funny how they almost work with the scene, at least in terms of how they’re positioned on the page.

Or this other other gun, in Winter Soldier 1. There’s a scene that’s out of place in the digital scan. Pages 11 and 12 of the digital comic come before page 7 in the digital scan. It’s a mistake that’s easy to make, but there’s a subtle transition between pages 6 and 7 in the digital comic that show it as a definite mistake. This is curious, because if you’re dumping a PDF, all the pages come pre-numbered. Did someone have a bum PDF or InDesign file?

The clean covers begin to make sense now, too. If I had to guess, I would assume that the copyright, credits, and UPC are separate layers in one file. When they export to print or digital, they can tick a box and show the UPC or copyright, depending on the requirements of the situation. Cover elements like the credits can be maneuvered around pretty easily, but the scans always have them near where they are on the printed comic. Actually, looking at the Daredevil cover… the credits and Marvel logo are terribly placed. They’re high enough that something should go below them. What is THAT about?

So, who is it? Who’s got the PDFs?

Who it isn’t:
Fans: The fans who scan use printed comics, or have figured out how to dump ComiXology’s images (maybe dipping into wherever Flash stores its cache?). This is too perfect for that, and the little problems that crop up are unlikely in that situation.

Retailers: I asked around and spoke to a retailer. Retailers do get electronic preview copies on their retail resource site, but strictly at Marvel’s whim. The last one they got was was Chris Yost and Ryan Stegman’s Scarlet Spider #1 around a month before that came out. Right now, there are no previews on the page. No previews mean no scans. Nah son.

Press: Marvel doles out preview PDFs on Thursdays, but they just have eight pages. When Marvel wants to use you to pimp some new comic of theirs, they’ll shoot you a link to a full PDF. The sheer volume of books available, though, suggests that it ain’t the press. Marvel’s got no reason to flood the press with books when the press is more than happy to review every Marvel comic every week.

ComiXology: This was my first guess, actually. They’d have access to the files, and they messed around and released Justice League several hours early, enabling scanners to get it up before it even came out last year. But the files are different than the actual ComiXology files in very specific ways. ComiXology would probably have the fonts needed to convert Marvel books to whatever digital proprietary format they use, too, so the fonts would look how they should. Not to mention the recap pages, which are specific to the digital edition due to how the indicia is formatted.

It’s not the fans, retailers, press, or ComiXology, I’m pretty certain that at least three of those are 100% correct. Let’s go back to Daredevil 9’s busted page. It is impossible for a scanner to make that mistake. There’s no way for it to happen. There are four different page elements that have been transposed onto another page, leaving the next page silent save for its hand drawn sound effects. If the text is a single layer on its own, though… I could see how that could happen.

Who it is:
Marvel?: That means that either the scanners have access to Marvel’s pre-press files, which is amazing, or someone who works closely with Marvel, whether on the production side or at the printer, is slipping a scanner PDFs. There’s no way that the lettering could be transposed by a third party, and the font issue suggests that it’s someone fairly high up on the supply chain.

One last smoking gun. The Ultimate X-Men 7 digital scan includes a page advertising the digital edition of the comic. There’s a big blank space where the redemption code should go. I don’t have a digital comic version of this to check, but I’m willing to bet cash money that no digital comic version of this issue would include an access code for the digital comic. This is from a print comic.

More proof: the indicia in the digital scans include the print indicia, included the date the comic was manufactured. In the case of Ultimate X-Men 7, it was between 01/20/2012 and 01/31/2012 by Quad/Graphics Jonesboro, in Jonesboro, AK. Every printed comic has this info in it. The digital ones have a seriously abridged version of the print indicia, and no info on the printer.

Messed up fonts, print indicia, missing digital comics redemption codes, the fact that Avengers 22 is available as a digital scan despite not being available on ComiXology (or on Marvel’s stupidly exclusive app), the standard DPI, the rigid resolution, the perfect scans… it’s obvious what this is. Someone’s got Marvel’s print-ready files before they’re finalized, and they’re slapping them up online as digital scans. Clever girl.

Marvel: your ship is leaking, whether it’s internal, an FTP hack, or on the way to the printer.

Edit: Thanks to Uzumeri’s dogged determination, we figured out what the hack is this morning. It isn’t a person, it’s a security leak, and we emailed Marvel about it.

one more edit: Marvel closed the hole we found, though I don’t think it’ll lessen how often or easily Marvel’s books can be pirated, except in a few very specific instances. This was one hole that was very easy to exploit. There are others that are completely unavoidable.

Yeah, I don’t know what happened to that title up there. Sorry. I’ll try harder next time.

I just remembered that Brandon Graham’s King City drops in about a month. 03/20! Preorders right now are sitting at around ten bucks for 400+ pages of one of my favorite comics. It’s a steal at twice the price. edit: King City is out in brick & mortar stores as of 03/07!

If you don’t know what King City is… man. I wrote a lot about it. Here’s twelve posts, here’s another post, one mo’ gin, and one mo’ one mo’ gin.

That’s a lot of words spilled over one book. I’m trying to think of a better way to sell you on this book…

If you like any or all of the below:
-Puns
-Jokes
-Fights
-Cats
-Cleverness
-Sharp dialogue
-Sex
-A realistic approach to relationships
-Fantasy
-Romance
-Butts
-Kickflips
-Knives
-Drugs
-Sex
-A drugknife you can have sex with

Then King City is probably for you. If you don’t like any of those, then you should read King City anyway, because it will make you like them.

Seriously though, ten bucks. Four hundred and some pages of one of the freshest books to hit comics in years. I don’t wanna overhype it, but it’s really good, y’all.