This is several days late, but like I’ve said, computer troubles. Read it anyway.

Secret Invasion has come and gone. Skrulls are old news and now the more beloved villains are beginning to step forward, forming their own little Evil Illuminati. Fittingly, they all counter the original Marvel faction in their own way.

– Tony Stark is replaced by a more ruthless businessman/inventor in Norman Osborn, who shares similar ideals on unity among the powerful.
– Reed Richards is replaced by Victor Von Doom, his eternal rival when it comes to his intelligence.
– Charles Xavier is replaced by Emma Frost, who, while heroic, could potentially do some more underhanded things to help her race. Then again, look at who I’m talking about. Xavier’s done some shady stuff already. Bendis originally wanted Magneto for the role, but you know how it is for that guy.
– Doctor Strange is replaced by the Hood, the magical avatar of the Dread Dormammu himself.
– The enigmatic and overly powerful Black Bolt is replaced by the more enigmatic and more powerful Loki, now in a female form.
– Namor, once a proud king able to own the room with his regal presence, is replaced by a meeker, disheveled and more desperate shell of himself.

Norman puts together his own Secret Society concept and tries to sell it onto the others. The two main points of interest are the mystery man – which I will get to in a second – and the suggestion by Doom to Namor that this will all lead into some kind of massive supervillain Civil War in the future.

That discussion is for another time. Let’s discuss the mystery man.

“If you so choose as to even lift a suspicious eyebrow towards me and mine… you and my friend here will have some words. Emma, you’re a psychic, I can feel you poking around in my head now… You read minds… Tell me… Am I lying?”

“No.”

“Something for even a goddess of mischief to think about.”

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I love love songs. No joke– I think that they’re one of the best uses for music. I even like different kinds of love songs. If put to the test, my favorite kinds would be, in order from most to slightly less most, heartbreak songs, cheating songs, and then straight up love songs. I don’t know why that is, but it is what it is.

I’m inclined to like songs about heartbreak. I don’t know why, maybe an inner romantic or mope or something. I tend to like them, though, which is why I was looking forward to Kanye’s 808’s and Heartbreak. While I’m sort of ehhh on the autotune, the concept for the album was solid. It sounded like an album that was at least partially built for me. Love Lockdown came out and I kind of both love the drums and the video. I feel what he’s talking about in the song, too, so there’s that. Scandalous comments about how he doesn’t listen to hip-hop in his place because it’s “too nice” aside, I was looking forward to it.

In the end, I was almost completely disappointed. The beats were tight, but Kanye’s autotuned vocals don’t stand up to the concept or the music. It comes off feeling heartless, which I guess was part of the point, but he seriously needed some heart for this album to be a success for me. I dig Welcome to Heartbreak (with Kid Cudi) immensely (“Chased the good life my whole life long/ Look back on my life and my life gone/ Where did I go wrong?” is incredible), and I think that Amazing with Jeezy is probably my favorite cut off the album, but the other two-thirds of the record left me flat or irritated. I can’t think of a single reason to listen to Robocop, for example, nor the song with Wayne. Heartless is mediocre. Say You Will is Kanye doing his best “That’s the way love goes”-era Sade impression (including the song itself), which is a lot like my well-tested “That’s the way love goes”-era Sade impression– not very good at all and the last thing you want to hear. Paranoid isn’t awful, but it’s a bit too ’80s keytar rock for me. It sounds like it should be on the Scarface soundtrack right next to “Rush Rush Get the Yeyo.”

808s and Heartbreak got me thinking about complete packages. No matter how inclined you are to like something, it still needs to be quality in order for you to actually like it. I’m inclined to like 808s and Heartbreak, but the end product didn’t measure up. I’m inclined to like Jubilee and the New Warriors, but the book that featured them was lacking.

I’m inclined to like Justice League of America #27, because I like Milestone, I love Dwayne McDuffie’s writing, and the JLA is okay I guess. I didn’t like it because Ed Benes’s art kills the book for me.
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I try not to read internet rumors.  Most of the time they just get me riled about something dreamed up by someone on a message board.  Unfortunately, this means that sometimes I get bad news in public places.  That can be unpleasant.  A few weeks ago in a comics shop, some friends told me that Birds of Prey was getting cancelled.  I won’t get into details, but there was loud wailing involved.  Loud, sustained wailing.

I’ve written about how the Wonder Woman mythos doesn’t do much for me.  Birds of Prey was my version of Amazon Island.  Up until Canary left, it was a long-preserved team.  It was all-girl, all bad-ass, all the time.  Since it was not one of the hottest-selling books it was a sheltered island, out of the way of the major continuity events, where some of the lesser known female characters could thrive.

Yes, I know that there is going to be an Oracle mini-series, and while Barbara Gordon is one of my top five characters of all time, I’m going to miss the rest of the Birds.  Canary was at her best with a team that she could have fun with, not fight with or mother.  Huntress was an awkward fit everywhere else in the DCU, too independent to be one of the bats, too bat-oriented to get away from them.  In Birds of Prey she got a chance to shine, and take control.  And of course there’s Zinda, who is one of the most fun characters in the DCU.  There’s Manhunter, who had her own book cancelled recently.  Even Misfit was growing on me.

When a favorite character of mine loses a book, I always wonder if I’ll see them again.  Being too unpopular for a book, but just popular enough to be noticed, is often a recipe for death when big events come up.  I feel like Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans.  “Stay alive, no matter what occurs!  I will find you!”

I also mourned the end of The Blue Beetle, but at least I know that Jaime will be preserved in Teen Titans.  Also, I think that, as stages of grief go, I am still firmly routed in ‘denial.’  Jaime will come back.  I know this.  He must.

Birds of Prey has catapulted me into ‘bargaining.’  What would it take to get the Birds back.  How would it be possible to drive up readership?  Let me rephrase that.  How would it be possible to drive up readership besides having a Babs, Dinah, and Helena three-way in each book?  (Yeah, I’ve seen that fanart.)

As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  What I have is a steadfast love of comics that are light, fun, and just a little nutzo.  My ideal Birds book would be a cross between the early Indiana Jones movies and Bruce Lee on pixie stix.  Three-to-five issue arcs, each one being a separate adventure.  Fast, fun, and ass-kicking.  I’d like constant wisecracks, mild indignity, ninja stuff, at least two issues in which people run to get out of the way of giant boulders, and Misfit as Short Round.  That’s Short Round, not Mutt.  Sorry, Shia.

I think the book was doing best with its four core characters; Babs, Helena, Dinah, and Zinda.  As said before, Misfit could be Short Round.  And, of course, since Indy got a new girl every movie, there could be a rotating spot for the last member to keep things fresh.

But hell, I’d favor an eighteen-person team in a somber, noirish book comprised of thirty-issue all-event storyarcs if I thought I’d be getting my Birds back.

What would you hope for in a Birds book?

There is nothing I would love more than to post the next installment of We Care a Lot or an article on Dark Reign that I was prepared to have up by the middle of today. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, that’s not going to be.

My computer is dead! Murdered! Moltar, serve the first course!

Calling Dell’s support number has proceeded to change me from being the owner of a dead computer to the owner of a dead computer that’s in a million pieces. Then the moron on the other end of the phone decides, after having me take it apart piece-by-piece, “Uh… yeah, your motherboard don’t work too good. That must be it.” Then he dials over me, hangs up and I’m supposed to pay for that shit!

Fuck that guy. I’m taking it to someplace local tomorrow to be fixed up (and be put back together), but I can’t say how long I’ll be without any computer access. But I will be back and I’ll be doing posts with a higher comment count than that list hermanos just came up with!*

*no, I won’t

See you soon. I hope.

Tonight marks the release of the first Green Arrow since 2001 that has not had Judd Winick as an ongoing writer. So naturally, I was curious to see what direction the series would take.

It was interesting. I was hoping that Green Arrow and Black Canary would turn a little lighter and happier. The Arrows seem like the JSA to the Batclan’s JLA; based on the same concept, but allowed to be goofy. It doesn’t look like they will be using that goofiness in the upcoming story, but the writer, Andrew Kreisberg, seems to have a good sense of the characters and fits their natural humor into the story.

The one thing that bothered me about the issue was the massive seven-page flashback of all of Olliver Queen’s continuity. It is narrated well, sustaining the theme of the storyline; ‘A second can change your life.’ I can see why it was put in. The cover of the issue features the phrase: “A New Era Begins”. The author is essentially acting as if this is the first issue that the reader had picked up.

The trouble is, it isn’t the first issue that any reader has picked up. If you are flipping through Green Arrow and Black Canary #15, the odds are vanishingly small that you are unfamiliar with the characters. Not only that, but the flashbacks have been coming hard and heavy in this series. Green Arrow: Year One wasn’t that long ago. Then there were the flashbacks in the Black Canary mini-series, the flashbacks in and around the wedding, the flashbacks when Ollie was missing, Ollie’s re-hashing of his relationship with Connor when Connor was in a coma. There was even a thorough discussion of the history of Black Canary and Green Arrow in Birds of Prey.

So taking seven pages out of a story to recap it all again feels like being next to a drunk guy at a party who’s telling a fantastic story about a wild night he had with a friend. Trouble is, he’s so drunk that he forgot that you’re the friend. You kind of want to shake him a little and say, “Dude. I know. I was there.”

Despite this, it’s worth picking up for the sting at the end, and the fun family meeting in the middle. We’ll see how it develops next month.

I was going over Google Reader and saw an interesting post on When Fangirls Attack. The text just said “2008: The Year of Misogyny,” so, being a fairly bright and curious fellow, I clicked on through to see what was what.

The post opens with a cheesecake motivational poster and then outlines all of the terrible things that have happened to women over the past year. I’ve seen it linked in a few spots, so I figure it’s a Thing. It’s a pretty gruesome list, and a little hard to read. Shabby treatment of female characters, female characters getting brutalized, and so on. The author asks “Aren’t you angry? If you aren’t, then why? And if you are, what are you going to do about it?”

Well, let me tell you something. After reading it, I was pretty angry. I was angry and fuming and thinking and realized that, as a race blogger, I owed it to my people, black and american and both, to examine the plight of black people in comics in 2008.

As you can tell by the title of my post, I am not happy! The list below is non-exhaustive, as I’m sure worse things have happened, but these are the ones I know of or have read. You may wish to listen to this song or this one in order to make it through this terrible list.
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First of all, I apologize for the title of this entry.

I’m not particularly well-versed in Green Lantern lore, but I’ve noticed a few trends in how people respond to Hal versus how they respond to Guy.

Even discounting the Kyle fans, Hal seems to be the less popular of the two. Among fans, an appearance by Guy gets cheers, while Hal is viewed as business as usual. There are a lot of reasons for that. Hal is business as usual for Green Lantern fans. When a character has been appearing pretty regularly since 1959, it’s a lot harder to keep up his appeal compared to the guy who, despite a shortlived series of his own, gets added in for spice every now and again. Guy is the more extreme character, and extreme characters tend to be interesting.

But Guy has his own deficiencies. Deficiency. Okay. He’s a jerk. A biggun. However, that deficiency is also his strength, as a character. Why? Because every character and every writer makes it clear that they know he’s a jerk. Once that happens, once the text makes it clear that the story is about a jerk who also happens to do good things, it’s possible to relish the outrageousness of the character the same way we can relish the violence and the spandex costumes.

Hal, on the other hand, is a Hero. He is shown as not only the first Green Lantern, but the best Green Lantern. The sense I’m getting from diehard Green Lantern fans is that the outrage is not just about the mistakes Hal makes, but the fact that he is being sold as the One True Lantern. Because of that, all of his flaws, from his odd courtship with Carol Ferris to that little tantrum during which he almost ended the Universe, are being excused or ignored. And so Guy, with his rudeness, sexism, arrogance, and sometimes outright meanness is popular, and Hal is reviled.

Maybe a little accountability goes a long way?

Last time on the Venom Marathon, we discovered that the symbiote is an entity that can extrude itself as a molecular filament and travel along communication cables. In other words, Carnage Unleashed is the greatest awful comic of all time. Yet somehow, Marvel brass decided that Larry Hama should continue writing the series.

Continue he did, with Sinner Takes All. Had they gone with a real numbering system, this would be Venom #31-35, meaning that we’re halfway into his series. I have fonder memories of this one merely because as a kid, I had the entire five issues. Boy were they big issues. The first four came with a Jury back-up story that I’ve never cared about enough to actually read. The fifth issue came with a quick Venom story that I’ll get to after this Sin-Eater business.

The artist here is Greg Luzniak (Ted Halsted takes over for the last issue), who had a really nice art style for the most part. The catch was that his Venom, as you can see, is a little bit overboard.

Yikes. From what I understand, Hama is less into the superhuman and more into badasses armed to the teeth, so this storyline comes more natural to him.

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The difference between continuity and shared universes is one of scale.

Shared universes work on a macro level. Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four live in the same city and sometimes run into each other. Daredevil hangs out with Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Spider-Man. Sometimes Ben Grimm runs a poker game with a bunch of heroes. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman consider themselves the best heroes around and sometimes get together to look at pictures of other heroes and sit in judgment of them.

Continuity, as its usually used, works on a micro level. Jean Loring did this thing in the past that led to this happening in the present. Spider-Man once fought a guy who knew a guy who was related to a guy who hates Spider-Man. Superman once had killed three guys but in the new storyline he didn’t, because they are back and angry and will Superman kill them again?

Neither of these are inherently bad. They can both ad flavor to stories. My main gripe tends to be with continuity porn, which Funnybook Babylonian Chris Eckert succintly explained as being “stories/sequences that really have no real dramatic or thematic reason for existing save for REMEMBER WHEN.”

Shared universes make for fun cameos. Sometimes Thor flies around in the background of a Spider-Man comic. Why? Well, he’s Thor, he lives in NYC, and he flies. Kapow! There’s a particularly fun issue of Spectacular Spider-Man by Paul Jenkins and Talent Caldwell where Spidey takes part in a poker game featuring the Fantastic Four, Angel, Black Cat, Dr Strange, and the Kingpin. Rather than getting bogged down in “Remember when we all fought in Infinity Gauntlet or Last Rites,” the point of the story sticks to the point of the story– a poker game. Their history is implied, rather than explained, and it works for the betterment of all involved.

The bad continuity, for me, is the kind of thing that tries to answer every quesiton ever, references things just for the sake of referencing them, or tries to solve old problems. It isn’t using the continuity to push the story forward so much as using the continuity as the story itself. Wolverine Origins was a good example, as the entire series’ reason for being was “Remember when this stuff happened to Wolverine?” X-Men Legacy is another continuity-based comic, though it’s more in the “using continuity to tell a new story” box for me.

I can’t get into the New Krypton stuff because it feels like it hinges too much on continuity, and the triangle numbering isn’t helping. Thy Kingdom Come over in JSA feels the same way. It’s slow moving, crowded with a bunch of faceless characters, and seems like it’s just there to remind you of a) Kingdom Come and b) Earth-2’s JSA.

What these stories have in common, at least for me, is that you feel like you’re missing something. There’s a story you didn’t read somewhere, or a connection you’re missing. It just doesn’t click.

While I was doing “research” for this post (asking others their opinion so I could steal their quotes and use them as my own), I realized that pinning this down isn’t as easy as black and white, good and bad. Like many other things, it comes down to quality.

I picked up Spider-Man: Round Robin: The Sidekick’s Revenge at a used bookstore. It’s Spider-Man, it’s Bagley, I bought it. It’s a shared universe book that doesn’t work. Basically, Moon Knight’s sidekick Midnight is back from the dead and he’s a villain. So, Spider-Man, Darkhawk, Moon Knight, Punisher, Nova, and probably some people I’m forgetting all team up to fight Midnight. It’s the shared universe at work, but it’s a mess in basically every way but artistically.

I know that my taste tends to run toward continuity free, or freeish, stories, rather than ones that build off something from the past, but that’s just me.