Know what sucks about character death?

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Here’s a question*. Do you think that people who are interested in reading Vixen: Return of the Lion, with words by G Willow Wilson and pictures by CAFU, care about this?

The correct answer is no.

Vixen is a series that is a repositioning of a recently reintroduced Justice League character who hasn’t appeared regularly for years. Batman appears on a few pages out of the issue as a guest star on a rescue mission. There’s no mention of his troubles in RIP– he’s just Guest Star Batman. Guest Star Superman, Guest Star Red Arrow (ugh), Guest Star Black Canary, and Guest Star Black Lightning round out the cast.

No one cares about Batman RIP because it doesn’t matter in the context of Vixen. How about we kill this continuity spider-web stuff and just stick to the shared universe approach? “Hey, it’s Batman! I like Batman, and even though he is currently Jean Paul Valley in his ongoing comic, I’m not enough of an anal-retentive OCD nerd to care!”

I’m not saying that you should never acknowledge things… but use some discretion. It’s worthless here.

On the flip side, this is kind of hilarious. One of my favorite things about Marvel is that they don’t throw anything at the wall to see what sticks– they throw everything.

For those of you who don’t know, Midnight Sons was Marvel’s ’90s supernatural line. Morbius, Blade, Hannibal King, Frank Drake, Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, Vengeance, and Marvel’s other supernatural characters were in a supergroup, or loose affiliation to this supergroup, called the Midnight Sons. They fought vampires, satanist mummy people, demons, Mephisto, and whatever other vaguely supernatural enemies decided to come calling. They were about as edgy as you’d expect, too. The satanist mummy chick had her pentagram on her right breast, for example.

Anyway, it’s the kind of idea that you’d never expect to make a comeback, but so far we’ve said that for Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Bucky, Hellcat, Captain Marvel, Moon Knight, and so on- you get the picture. Marvel has a habit of revitalizing their b, c, d, and z-list in a way that’s either genuinely entertaining or entertaining on a curiosity level, at least temporarily.

I can’t promise it’ll be good, but it’s almost sure to be more interesting than the latest Superman origin re-telling.

*This question takes place after Secret Six Discussion, but before Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Basically, this is a pretty good way to show that retcons are pretty much a lame storytelling device. Nine times out of ten, it’s just another way of saying, “Welp, we screwed up and we don’t want to have to deal with the consequences.” Sometimes it’s something like, “We need this character to be in this position for this story to work and don’t want to do the in-betweening.”

Retcons can be used well, but by and large, they are about sidestepping consequences. Hal Jordan murdered a whole bunch of people, and so far, it seems like his punishment is to get called a stupid earthman and sneered at once every eight months or so. Why? Because he’s Hal Jordan, Hero, and DC Comics needed him to be a Green Lantern for some reason. Sinestro? He ain’t dead! Why, he faked his death! Why? Because Hal Jordan needs Sinestro as a villain. Jean Grey isn’t dead, she’s just in the bottom of a bay. Why? Because we need a team featuring the original X-Men. Prometheus? He hasn’t been looking like a buffoon all over the DC Universe for years. He’s been all locked up, who is that other guy? He’s just some guy who acts just like him, has the same gimmick, costume, personality, and powers.

This is stupid. There’s dozens of other ways to get around Prometheus being an idiot. Faulty tech. A deep-seated fear of Batman (it worked for Deadshot). Slumming it and trying to stay off the radar. Anything but “it wasn’t him, nope.”

That’s just lazy.

The things you learn when you mess around with the subtitles on your Batman: The Animated Series DVDs.

Although in Spanish, Batman is still called Batman, Bruce Wayne’s name has changed to Bruno Díaz.

I’m guessing this is an across-the-board name change, and not just a blip for the animated series.  Does anyone know why it was necessary?  Does ‘Bruce Wayne’ mean ‘Your mother’s a whore,’ in Spanish?

This week gave us the final issue of Marvel Zombies 3, written by Fred Van Lente with art by Kev Walker. Despite the history of the series, I still have to say… this is totally worth reading.

I’m not joking. It’s actually really fun.

The first Marvel Zombies was decent. Not great, but it was a good enough read just because Kirkman had so many toys to play with. He had an entire universe to desecrate as he saw fit. Marvel Zombies: Dead Days was a boring disaster of a prequel that barely answered any of the questions brought up in Marvel Zombies. Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness was better than it had any right to be. And Marvel Zombies 2? Oy.

With Marvel Zombies 2, Kirkman had done away with all of his unending potential, replaced with five issues of writing himself into a corner. I enjoy Kirkman’s work, so I stuck with it just to see where it was leading, but the ending was underwhelming as hell. Finally, even I was done with the series.

Thomas Wilde suggested I give Marvel Zombies 3 a shot based on the first issue. I’m glad I took him up on that. They’ve moved in a very different direction that brings back the potential for fun and over-the-top stories of mayhem. How? By bringing it into Marvel 616.

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Between enduring the holidays and following it up with Ultimatum Edit, I’ve been a bit exhausted. That’s why I haven’t been doing any updates. Luckily, hermanos has been doing well enough. Esther too, though hermanos has to overshadow her posts with comments that are twice as long. Jerk.

Oh, hey! The new What If issues came out over the past month. Not a great batch this year, but there were two really good issues in there. One is What If: Newer Fantastic Four, which is a sequel to the Mike Wieringo tribute, also featuring the Mini-Marvels conclusion to World War Hulk. Even better is the issue that came out last week, based on Doctor Doom holding onto the Beyonder’s power from Secret Wars. Beautiful art and a perfect ending.

When I finish the We Care a Lot series, I think I’m going to redo the Top 100 What If Countdown. Enough has come out since then to justify it.

We Care a Lot is on a slight hiatus. Nothing too drastic. After all, I need to get my installment about Hybrid up for Black History Month. It’s just that I’ve been spending the past week or so getting ready for another series of articles.

You see, hermanos just did his whole rap countdown. It wasn’t comic-related. So if he’s doing his series of non-comic countdown articles, then damn it, so will I!

It’s coming.

One last thing, I’m going to be checking out all three days of New York Comic Con. Which of yous guys can I expect to see there?

Something strikes me as a bit out-of-sync about All-Star Batman and Robin.  Now, now.  Settle down.  I’m not trying to start anything.

What jumps out at me is the juxtaposition of the outrageous, film-noir-on-acid dialog by Frank Miller, and the finely drawn art by Jim Lee.  Although Lee’s intricate art serves the story well in large-scale panels, like the fold-out wide shot of the Batcave, it seems like the characters need chunkier lines and more high-contrast colors to have the same impact as the words.

Still, I wonder if my reaction to this is based only on the fact that this is the first time I’ve seen this type of art work paired with Frank Miller’s writing.

Does anyone think that this type of art suits Miller’s style just as well as the art we’ve seen in DKR?  Or better?

Does anyone else have examples of when an artist seems perfectly paired with a writer, or when it’s a match made in hell?

Yet another installment of Ultimatum Edit Week comes to a close today. Last time, we saw the infamous Blob sequence. That’s really all that needs to be said.

Let’s get this over with.

And that’s that. I’m wondering if that last page is an homage to the Xorn reveal from Morrison’s New X-Men.

ManiacClown and I will be around for the next round, I’m sure. In the meantime, please check out our Rifftrax of Frosty Returns. Sure, the holidays are over, but the thing is only 75 cents and the quality is a lot better than our previous project.

As for me, it’s time to get back to writing those wacky Venom articles. See you later, folks. Thanks for reading.

Week 3!

Yesterday’s installment was all about Thor going into the afterlife to go save Valkyrie. I don’t even know what she’s doing in Valhalla in the first place. She died by drowning. You don’t get into Valhalla for weak garbage like that.

No matter. We continue Thor’s quest and move onto that scene. God help us.

ManiacClown is entirely to blame for the second page. I’ve seen Rocky Horror Picture Show maybe once in my life and that was years ago. That was enough.

Tomorrow we finish the week off with a confrontation between Xavier and Magneto. Surely, it will fail to capture the greatness of their battle from the second Japanese X-Men cartoon intro, where they fight by blasting Xavier’s mind rays against Magneto’s magnetic rays.

Day Seven!

Greetings. Yesterday, we saw Reed Richards (the man with no brain), Dr. Doom (the tin man with no heart) and Zarda (the woman with no characterization) banding together to go find the eye-patch Wizard. Then we saw Thor fly around, looking for Valkyrie. Does he find her? We’ll find out in just a moment.

Hope you’re not too burned out by the holidays.

Those are some tiny, tiny panties.

ManiacClown is like the Babel Fish of Thor-speak, so God bless him. He’s also informed me that Hela isn’t connected to Valhalla at all.

We’ll be back tomorrow with the first Ultimatum Edit of the New Year. And there’s no better way to celebrate than with a page so awful that it dwarfs both that above Hela page AND that one Ultimates 3 Hank Pym page in pure badness.

Day Six!
Day Seven!