While all the bloggers are at San Diego, the rest of the freaks are apparently in New York City. Except for me. I’m in the suburbs, about a half hour drive from New York City. That’s close enough, right?

I’ve talked before about my experience of seeing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Again, I say that I can’t in any good conscience call it good, but I can call it incredibly worth watching due to being too strange to exist. Words are only words, though. Finally, I have something to show you.

Now, since I’ve seen the show, there was a major upheaval. The show was shut down and rewritten because Julie Taymor is fucking crazy and had some overly-strange/stupid ideas in there. A lot of the bad stuff was removed. For instance, everyone loved Patrick Page’s portrayal of the Green Goblin, yet he was killed halfway into the story and only appeared for the rest of it as an illusion meant to torture Peter. In actuality, the true villain of the play was the Greek mythological character Arachne. Now they’ve scaled back Arachne’s role considerably and gave Green Goblin the keys to the villain throne. This in turn caused them to drop a musical number where Arachne sings about… well, shoes. Yes, really.

To make up for this void, Bono and Edge created a new song for Green Goblin which Rolling Stone described as, “the Grinch singing Lady Gaga, with an Abba-esque chorus.” WOW. That rose up my list of shit I needed to see.

Luckily, the Late Show with David Letterman had a Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark-based show where he had Edge and Bono as guests. Check out the final segment of the show.

There’s so much insanity in there, I don’t know where to start. I’ll just let you enjoy it as you repeat viewing it a dozen or so times.

The DCU blog has a preview of Teen Titans #89, when Damian joins the team. 

Here is some sample dialog:

“The only joke that I see is Beast Boy.  My first order of business will be kicking him to the curb.  We’ll call him if we ever need a talking chipmunk.”

“Should have left it alone, One-Eyed Jackie.”

“You’re funny.  Look even funnier when I take out your other eye.”

List of things Damian should not be saying:

1.  Nicknames.  This is a kid who calls Alfred ‘Pennyworth.’

2.  Sentences with dropped articles.  This is a kid who calls his dad, ‘Father.’

3.  Contractions.  I don’t think Morrison’s Damian ever really used them.

4.  The phrase ‘kick him to the curb’ or any slang that would be seen before the turn of the last century.

Renting Damian out to various titles is good.  He’s a funny character and an obnoxious little snot.  They’ve got that part down.

One of the main reasons he’s funny, though, is the fact that he’s a child who speaks like an 18th century vampire.  The kid was raised by a family of functionally immortal aristocratic ninjas.  Having him talk like that smart-ass kid from around the corner doesn’t work on any level.  This character has one of the most recognizable ways of speaking in the DCU.  The only character easier to single out through speech alone would be Bizarro.  A few obnoxious remarks just don’t cut it.

Just when I decided I was fine with not going to this year’s Comic-Con, what with the crowds, and no place to stay, and five days of eight-dollar hot dogs eaten while crouched in the corner of a convention center, Geoff Johns tweets that The Blue Beetle will be a live-action TV show.

Let me say that again:  the 24 issue run that I have pimped time and time again, and that I consider one of the best books in comics.  Ever.  Is going to be a live-action TV series, with previews at Comic-Con.

Damn you, Cruel Fate.

That being said – for all the Blue Beetle fans out there: it is time to start dancing.  Dance!  DANCE RIGHT THERE IN YOUR CHAIR!

This is so fantastic.  Here are five things I hope will happen.

1.  John Rogers and Keith Giffen are involved in this series.

2.  They keep The Family Reyes.  That is one of the best, sweetest, wisest, and yet imperfect groups of people I’ve ever seen in any form of media.

3.  They also keep La Dama.  I loved her as a villain.  She was one of the few villains in comics who was motivated by specific and understandable goals: family, security, and money.  So many villains are just motivated by an abstract desire to be evil.

4.  The Lonar Excursion, complete with tiny little fuzzy aliens whose language translates to hilarious lines.  My favorite one part?  Where they just tried to drink Brenda’s blood, and got beat up by Brenda and Lonar, and then came back all, “eep eep eep” and the translation was:  “We’re cool, you’re cool. Let’s all just be cool.”  You said it, ewok rip-offs!

5.  Oh god you can’t have a Jaime Blue Beetle series without Guy Gardner!  Please, please, please, please.

6.  The Ultrahumanite, too.

7.  This is just to say that The Blue Beetle also had the storyline with the best title. Ever.  Seriously, read comics all your life, you will never beat this one.  It’s one in which Eclipso wants to rip the heart out of a super-powered baby to – something.  That doesn’t matter.  What matters is that the issue was called ‘Total Eclipso: The Heart.”  My god.  It’s full of stars.

8.  I know this is a long shot, but I’d love for Ted to be in there.  It’s canon that he wanted to retire and be an inventor, and that the scarab didn’t work for him.  Don’t get me wrong, I like The Peacemaker, but Ted is just so sweet and goofy and smart and ridiculous.  I miss the guy.

That turned into eight things and every one of them is essential.

Anyone who has picked up a DC book in the last few weeks has seen the preview for the upcoming Green Arrow series.  It’s technically perfect.

A woman runs alone at night through a moodily-lit, nearly-deserted city.  A gang of men follow her.  They’re wearing outfits that wouldn’t mark them as especially threatening in real life, but in comics are basically thug suits – black leather jackets and boots, with patches of their hair shaved.  This type has been causing trouble for women in moodily-lit cities since the thirties, and will probably continue causing trouble for them in the twenty-second century.

The woman keeps running, coming to a wooded area.  The men behind her shout crude, insinuating, but PG-rated threats, their intent unmistakable.  Eventually one of them catches her.  Escape is impossible.  All is lost.

Suddenly, something knocks him off of her!  A voice calls out in the darkness.  Enter the hero.

Like I said, the technical perfection of the sequence is obvious.  There is even some subtle detail work that clues the reader in on the state of things in the city.  For example, the woman being chased runs right past a police station without even trying to go in.  Clearly, the law isn’t being enforced in that city.

Don’t even pretend that that sequence, older by far than comic books, doesn’t draw in readers.  It hasn’t stuck around because it’s useless.  It’s a situation that is recognizable, horrible, and yet comforting, because any reader knows that it’s a set up for the hero’s entrance.  There isn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that the hero will make an entrance.  It’s a set up for an iconic hero, and DC does well with iconic heroes.

The trouble is, it’s the set up for any hero.  Any hero at all.  You could paint over Green Arrow on the first splash page and no one would be the wiser.  As previews go, this one is giving us a hero, but it isn’t giving us any hero in particular.

Some readers will have noticed that I’ve been struggling with the Green Arrow book for the past . . . ever.  I think that if I could just accept that the book isn’t ever going to go in the direction I hoped it had, Robin Hood and his Merry C0-Heroes, I might just enjoy the solitary Oliver Queen in his urban forest.  At the same time, throwing away every other Arrow in for this guy, who is interchangeable with any other hero in the DCU, it seems like a bad trade.

Gina Torres talked to Wired Magazine about the excellent Crisis on Two Earths.  Here’s the quote that went rocketing around the blogosphere.

There aren’t really any skinny bitches in the world of comic books…they’ve got muscle. . . . What I love about superheroes, and Superwoman in particular, is that in that comics world they’re all curvaceous. They’re strong.

I grew up in what must have been the most friendly high school in the world.  I look at Glee, Mean Girls, and Can’t Hardly Wait, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gossip Girl, and almost every other portrayal of high school and it might as well be some kind of costume drama.

Who grows up in schools like this?  In lives like this?  I know there are always a few vocal idiots, but I haven’t noticed a war being declared between ‘skinny’ and ‘curvy’ women, ‘popular’ and ‘unpopular’ women, or really any other kind of women.  At most, the groups are pretty indifferent to each other.  More often, they get along just fine.

And yet every quote, every TV show, every comic, and every movie seems to imply that this war is going on. 

Where are they getting this from?  Is there some secret battleground of which I am unaware?

Sometimes I think that the only reason anyone says stuff like this is they’re trying to sell this fantasy of conflict.  It might make a decent trope in fiction, but in real life, it doesn’t make sense.

What had me singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” today?  Sure, my week brightens around Wednesdays.  And sure, I was still riding high on the leftover Batmanderthal vapors.  But this is what really kick-started my morning:

The Birds of Prey are back!  And they’re being written by Gail Simone!

Of course scans_daily is all over this, including the mysterious blacked-out figures in the background.  Creote is the front-runner, as far as speculation goes, for the big figure.

There are more contenders for the flying figure.  They include

1.  Misfit – Charlie Gage-Radcliffe  (Yeah, yeah.  “Dark Vengeance.”  Not my favorite.)

2.  Batwoman – Kate Kane (I’d think she’d be up front in the picture, though.)

3.  Batgirl – Bette Kane (That could be interesting.  And I’m pretty sure she’d be pissed to see how many people have stolen her moniker.)

4.  Manhunter – Kate Spencer (Very unlikely.)

5.  Spoiler/Robin/Batgirl – Stephanie Brown  (I don’t think Gail Simone has ever written her before.  That could be cool.)

Simone states that the two new characters are a pair, which cuts down on a lot of possibilities.  I suppose they could be Creote and a very interestingly posed/surgically altered Savant.  The ruling theory, though, is that they are Hawk and Dove  in some new iteration of the pair.  We’ll know in spring.  Until then, I’m humming the rest of Oklahoma!, and keeping hope alive.

An oldie but a goodie. In honor of our Batgirl-centric fourcast and Esther’s latest Batgirl play-by-play, I wanted to post one of my favorite sequences from Batgirl: Death Wish.

A bit of context: one year ago, Batgirl lost the use of her pattern-recognition skills due to some ill-timed telepathic mental adjustment. To repair this flaw, she sought out and fought Lady Shiva. In exchange for fixing her, Shiva demanded one thing: a fight to the death one year in the future. Batgirl, when faced with a choice of being mediocre for a lifetime or the greatest for a year, took her challenge, was healed, and threw herself into her Bat-persona. She stopped crimes, ignored her social life, and rose to Olympian heights. And now, one year after her rebirth, she must face Lady Shiva and die.

Words by Kelley Puckett, art by Daimon Scott. Pages 7, 8, and 11 are my favorite. Great storytelling, choreo, and layout.

’nuff said.

Blogging’s going to be light today since work and other things have occupied my time lately, but I did want to share this sequence from (the as-yet uncollected) The Boys #34. Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra came up with a pretty good (and brutal) way to use World War II in a superhero book. I usually like my World War II pure, but this? This is clever. I snipped a few pages out, but this is still followable. And if you can’t tell by the cover, you probably shouldn’t be clicking this at work.

Dynamite needs to drop this trade asap.

Woke up this morning and saw that Robot 6 had the good stuff: a brand new trailer for Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s Afrodisiac, published by AdHouse Books.

I want this book. C’mon, y’all, this book is right up my alley. I’m the guy that talks about black people and comics all the time and this is a comic about a black guy. 2 + 2 = Real Talk!