Not only have zombies been done to death, but the joke about zombies being done to death has been done to death. If you’re going to do a zombie story these days, it has to stand out. I mean, from what I read of the Marvel MAX miniseries Zombie, it seemed really run of the mill. You need to change the ingredients to the zombie lore by either adding or subtracting. The Marvel writers removed the brain-dead instinct of the zombies to make Marvel Zombies interesting. Chris Ryall and Ashley Wood added robots and amazons to make their two miniseries (Zombies vs. Robots and Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons, of course) catch your imagination.

Awakening, by writer Nick Tapalansky and artist Alex Eckman-Lawn also removes a piece of what we usually subscribe to the zombie mythos. The entire concept of zombies is scary for a multitude of reasons and one of those is that once they’re on the scene, civilization dies in the blink of an eye. They’re dumb and slow, but they gain numbers like nobody’s business and become unstoppable, turning the world into ruins containing only several hundred survivors at best. It is rather frightening, but is it always necessary? You toss away the sudden apocalypse and you’re still left with shambling shells of humanity that only exist to tear you apart, no matter who you used to be to them.

The story takes place in Park Falls, where there have been a series of horrific murders and missing person reports. Our main character is Derrick Peters, a former police officer who finds himself investigating this phenomenon. He has only one real lead and it’s testimony from Cynthia, the town’s resident crazy woman (complete with SARS mask).

“If what Cynthia told me is true, it would fit with what’s happening here – to some degree, anyway. But it seems a little too bizarre to accept. And coming from Cynthia, there’s always the potential for… inaccuracies. But if what she’s saying is true, then the shit is about to hit the fan.”

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AMBIDEXTROUS: MIRANDA, CASEY & THE COOL – NEWSARAMA

Brandon Thomas, aka the best Robin writer since Chuck Dixon, is launching a new series named Miranda Mercury. It looks like the proverbial bomb diggy, so go check it out. He also interviews Joe Casey, which is just a plus.

PETE WOODS: TO INFINITY – NEWSARAMA

I love Pete Woods, and it’s nice to finally see him on a book that looks good in writing as well as in art. I’ve been fighting against buying the Amazons Attack hardcover, but Woods’s art makes it hard to miss.

Plus, there’s this:

While most of the locations have been established for the book, we haven’t seen much of them, so there’s plenty of wiggle room as far as design goes. Steelworks is the most exciting of those. Here we have John Henry Irons- the Tony Stark/Reed Richards of the DCU- who knows what sort of weird bleeding edge tech he’s got sitting around. The possibilities are endless…

John Henry really is, isn’t he? He’s Superman’s go-to gadget guy. Hopefully Milligan plays with that some. All we need next is for the redesigned Eradicator to make a comeback and I’ll be happy.

I used to feel kind of sorry for Iron Fist, despite not having read many of his comics. It’s stupid to feel that way for a fictional character you know little about, but I did. Everyone always thought highly of Luke Cage, but nobody ever cared for Iron Fist. Did Iron Fist get shoved back into center stage by Brian Michael Bendis? Did Iron Fist ever review old Twinkie ads with Doctor Doom and a talking fish? Have you ever heard anyone wax poetic about that awesome comic where Iron Fist beat up Doom? No, not really. All he got was a bunch of jokes about his name and costume, all while being referred to as Power Man’s sidekick.

Even Bendis didn’t seem to give him much love. If you look at Iron Fist’s appearances in Daredevil under Bendis’ pen, it feels as if he writes him out of necessity. In every appearance he makes, he’s standing firmly in Cage’s shadow. All he ever does is help out Cage. He’s the supporting character of a supporting character. Granted, Bendis did give him that awesome scene in the Pulse where Danny got all tense and insinuated that Jessica Jones is a whore. I like Jessica and all, but that was flat out hilarious.

His facial expression after that just says, “Whoa, that may have been a bit over the line… but really.”

It was Bendis’ lax treatment that made Ed Brubaker’s reveal that Danny Rand was filling in for Daredevil one of the all-time best revelations in comics. It worked out so well. It didn’t come out of nowhere, but Iron Fist was so low profile in his background actions that it wasn’t obvious. Then it succeeded to both push Iron Fist out of Luke’s shadow and give him a new lease on life by giving him his own critically acclaimed series and a spot on the Cage-led New Avengers.

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Batwoman was in Crime Bible: The Five Lessons of BloodThe Question #3 last week. It’s the first time I thought this version of Batwoman was kind of cool, and it’s generally a good comic that you should be reading. Anyway, I noticed an interesting thing: Matthew Clark made some sly but noticable changes to her design. It’s an improvement.

On the left is Alex Ross’ original design. On the right is Batwoman from the issue in question (hehe), as drawn by Matthew Clark. Note the streamlined cowl, the more realistic gloves, the actually functional looking utility belt, the lack of superfluous and poorly placed bat-symbols and best of all: The ridiculous high heels appear to be gone.

Pretty cool huh?

I got no content for you today, but I do have this:

Iron Fist is awesome. I just wanted to be part of the magic, is all.

The current incarnation of 4l.net turned two years old back in late November! I forgot to blog about it, though.

Torchbearers is a new community founded by Cheryl Lynn. It’s an offshoot of the Ormes Society slash link dump slash info stash slash place to celebrate black people in comics.

I’m in.

With the first Essential Luke Cage collection so fresh in my mind, it didn’t take me too long to finish off his solo series. Essential Luke Cage, Power Man Volume 2 covers from issue #28 to #49, plus an annual that Chris Claremont wrote. That’s good, since we’re cheated out of an issue. Power Man #36, which claims that “Chemistro is back! And deadlier than ever!” is really just a reprint of #12, the only Chemistro appearance up to that point. The nerve.

On the subject of them messing with us, the back cover of this book promises a guest-starring role by the X-Men. Bullshit. The closest we get is one panel of Iron Fist saying, “I just met the X-Men the other day.”

Except I didn’t read this for the X-Men cameos. I read this because back in the 70’s, the blaxploitation man-tank named Luke Cage was a ridiculously fun protagonist who beat up any jive sucka that looked at his metal tiara the wrong way. The last trade ended with a wacky, but somewhat heartfelt story about a dumb wrestler with a terminal blood clot who finds and drinks a random can of Super Soldier Serum and temporarily reaches his peak physical condition. It’s weird, but it has it’s right at home with the rest of the series and keeps the momentum going into issue #28.

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I honestly hadn’t heard of this comic until I was futzing around with the graphic novel display at work. Glancing at it, I figured it was probably just some crap comic about Tony Montana prior to the movie’s story. Then I saw that John Layman wrote it. I haven’t read much of the man’s work, but House of M: Fantastic Four was the best side-story to the House of M event and Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness is the highlight of the entire Marvel Zombie experiment. That got me interested enough to read the back cover, where I discovered it was a sequel. Hey, why the hell not.

I should get this out of the way first: I’m not the biggest fan of the movie Scarface. It’s been years since I’ve last seen it, but the problem for me that it was too long a movie to be carried by only one likeable character. Tony Montana is an awesome character, but he’s the only thing the movie had going for it. None of the other characters did anything for me. I still respect the movie and wouldn’t mind giving it another go one of these days.

But wait… Isn’t Tony Montana dead? Didn’t the movie end with the crazy gunfight where a coke-filled Tony got riddled with 500 bullets before being shot in the back by that Terminator-looking guy? Now, around the same time, a Scarface videogame called the World is Yours was released and dealt with this by going the What If route. Before he can get killed, Tony finds a passage to escape through, recuperates and plans his comeback. Scarface: Scarred for Life, on the other hand, is a comic book. Like Wilson Fisk and Barracuda, charismatic comic book mobsters have a talent for surviving the most insane maimings.

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There are so many reasons people wished they could have Superman’s powers. The strength, the flying, the speed, the eye-lasers, the x-ray vision… er… Pretend I put “x-ray vision” in there a couple more times. It’s always funnier that way. Anyway, one of the cooler things about Superman’s powers is his ability to slowly storm forward as criminals empty clips into his chest and continue firing in horror and futility as the bullets keep bouncing off his body. I’m sure Batman wishes he was from Krypton just so he could do that every other hour. Superman doesn’t even need to do it! He could zip over and steal the guns if he truly wanted. He only does it for the kicks. That has to be the most gratifying thing you can do as a crime fighter.

Luke Cage exists for the sake of doing this bit whenever he’s in a bad mood. He also exists to show that black people can have bad fashion sense too, but that’s beside the point. Luke Cage’s main superpower is walking forward while armed bad guys shit themselves. The difference is that he loses a lot of shirts. Really. Luke Cage goes through more shirts than Bruce Banner.

Heheh. I wonder if he knows that in 30 years, that’s going to be a stinging insult.

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