It’s not hard to see that Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano: Ours is going to end horribly for everyone involved. The book opens with pictures of fifteen characters, eight boys and six girls. They are the main characters of the book, the ones who will be piloting the giant robot against whatever threats care to invade Earth. Save for one younger girl, they’re all in the seventh grade.

The cast feels distressingly large. Not helping matters any is the way that the characters fade into a vague blur shortly after they each deliver personal introductions. We know their names, we know their ages, we know their relationship to each other (friends, with a sidebar for family), and that’s it. We’re instantly faced with a cast that means nothing to us.

Generally, large casts can mean a couple of different things. In the case of Lord of the Rings, a large cast is an opportunity for an author to tell several stories at once by splitting the cast into smaller, more manageable pieces. In Uncanny X-Men or Legion of Superheroes, a sprawling cast allows for serial storytelling that has a fresh, but regular, cast. In Bokurano: Ours, the cast is so large because basically all of these children are going to die.

The story should sound familiar to fans of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Fifteen young kids sign a contract to play a game with a giant robot. They soon find out that the robot is real, the threats are deadly, and the robot is powered by their lives. After the threat is defeated, a person’s life force is sapped and they fall down dead. Later, when another threat appears, another pilot is chosen and the process is repeated.

Bokurano: Ours feels like a counter-shonen comic. A lot of shonen comics, like American adventure comics, revolve around wish fulfillment. The scrawny nerd gets powers, the village idiot finds out that he’s the most important person of all, a fighter becomes the best in the world, and a dumb kid no one likes ends up being the only person who can save the world.
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Thank you, those people who requested it.  I like when people miss the stuff I write enough to ask about it, but I’m not doing a play-by-play of the team-up/crossover, and here’s why:

Have you ever eaten a bad egg salad sandwich?  If you have, you’ll know it put you off eggs for a while.

I don’t think it’s a mystery to anyone what this month’s egg salad sandwich was, and even though I just sampled a corner, it put me off a lot of things.  I don’t want to think about people acting like jerks because continuity says they have to, or because they were in a relationship and apparently the only way to make that interesting is to have them fight.  I don’t want tragic, convoluted history or recriminations.  I don’t want one character to be all grrrrrr and dark.  I don’t want a crossover event for which I have to read a bunch of books in order to get one story.  I don’t want a female character framed in a rifle sight at the end of the issue, because apparently the only way I would be interested in reading the next issue is if a hero’s friends, family, or love interest is on the chopping block.

(Also I hate the art and the way they stick Leslie’s head on a twenty-year-old body in a clingy dress.)

Yeah, I read and I’m going to keep reading Batgirl, and next month’s issue looks good.  But I’ve eaten some very bad egg salad.  Those issues are like a quiche.  I know there’s some good stuff in there, like Babs and St Nick finally having a good time, flirting, each knowing that the other one has a secret and being intrigued by it.  I just don’t have the stomach for it right now.

Since I’m spending all this time talking about every Wrestlemania match, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick gander at what didn’t occur at Wrestlemania. Here’s a list of the various pre-show matches.

Wrestlemania 6: Paul Roma defeats the Brooklyn Brawler
Wrestlemania 7: Koko B. Ware defeats the Brooklyn Brawler
Wrestlemania 8: The Bushwackers defeat the Beverly Brothers
Wrestlemania 9: “El Matador” Tito Santana defeats Papa Shango
Wrestlemania 10: The Heavenly Bodies defeat the Bushwackers
Wrestlemania 12: The Bodydonnas defeat the Godwinns to win the Tag Team Championships
Wrestlemania 13: Billy Gunn defeats Flash Funk
Wrestlemania 15: Jacqueline defeats Ivory, D’Lo Brown and Test win a battle royal where the last two survivors get a tag title shot at the PPV
Wrestlemania 17: Justin Credible and X-Pac defeat Steve Blackman and Grand Master Sexay
Wrestlemania 18: Rikishi, Scotty 2 Hotty and Albert defeat Mr. Perfect, Lance Storm and Test
Wrestlemania 19: Lance Storm and Chief Morley defeat Kane and Rob Van Dam
Wrestlemania 21: Booker T wins a Raw vs. Smackdown battle royal
Wrestlemania 22: Viscera wins a Raw vs. Smackdown battle royal
Wrestlemania 23: Ric Flair and Carlito defeat Chavo Guerrero and Gregory Helms
Wrestlemania 24: Kane wins a battle royal to earn a match against the ECW champion at the PPV
Wrestlemania 25: Carlito and Primo defeat John Morrison and the Miz in a Lumberjack Match to win the Unified Tag Team Championships.

Now on with the chlorophyll.

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Over a year ago, I took my enjoyment of the WWE Royal Rumble match and turned it into a week-long list. Watching 20+ 1-hour matches wasn’t too hard and I think it came off pretty well. The one true way to follow it up would be to give the same business to all 25 Wrestlemanias, only as a twelve-day countdown. It’s a tall order.

For one, there are more Wrestlemanias than Royal Rumbles. Secondly, each show lasts somewhere between 3-4 hours, with Wrestlemania 20 lasting a full 5 hours. I had my work cut out for me, so I spent the last two months watching every show in random order. The last major problem is how do I rank it? With the Royal Rumbles, I was only ranking the Rumble matches themselves and that isn’t TOO hard. With all the Wrestlemanias, there are over 250 matches in total.

Some lists I’ve seen don’t so much rate the shows as wholes, but as a handful of moments. A couple good memories or a couple bad memories can paint a full picture in your head about how the show was, even though you’re missing out on all the other bells and whistles. So here’s how I decided to do this.

Each match gets rated 0-10, based on how much I liked it. It doesn’t have to be a great technical exhibition. I know a long while back, Dave Meltzer voted Hogan vs. Andre at Wrestlemania 3 as “negative four stars”, but I’m not Dave Meltzer. I rated it high because it’s an epic match that tells a good story. I’m not going to point out what number I rated each match (I don’t want that to be the focus), but I will tell you this: there’s only one Wrestlemania match I’ve considered SO BAD that I had to give it a zero. I’ll let you guess that one. It isn’t in today’s update.

Anyway, each match is rated 0-10. Every main event and top title match (WWF/WWE Title and World Heavyweight Title) are counted twice, since they have more emphasis on the show. The exception is the Bret Hart/Shawn Michaels Iron Man Match, which I count as three matches. Then there’s “the atmosphere”, which counts as two matches. The atmosphere is the grab bag of miscellaneous stuff from the show that isn’t part of an actual match. Backstage segments, in-ring segments, intro videos, the arena’s setup, musical segments and so on. The bells and whistles of the show. When all that’s done, I average out the tally and give it a final score. Sounds fair, I think.

The two things I don’t take into consideration are the national anthem segments in the beginning – because it’s silly to have to compare them – and the dark matches/Free for All/Heat matches. Though I will hold it against the show if there’s a fairly high profile match during the pre-show that really should have been on the PPV.

Oh, and I’m going to toss in the YouTube videos of WWE Legends of Wrestlemania’s rivalry packages when we get to those specific matches. They rule too much not to.

Just about every Wrestlemania list I’ve seen considers Wrestlemania 9 the absolute worst Wrestlemania. Not me. Check it.

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For a couple days, my neck of the woods has been victim of a pretty bad rainstorm. The kind that has people calling into where you work just to ask if you have power because they don’t and they need some place to be. The kind that has you find new routes getting home because there are trees littering the streets and, in one case, crashed into a house. The kind where you lose your cable, but are fortune enough to still have electricity and water, unlike half of the town.

So without any internet during this time, I decided it was finally time to get to reading Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass.

I picked up the hardcover last week because the movie trailer makes it look fun and the JRJR art is really nice. Unlike my associate hermanos, I don’t normally hate on Millar. A lot of the time, I enjoy his work. I even didn’t mind anything about the infamous Red Skull flashback in Ultimate Avengers #5 until Millar pussied out about how even though Skull forced a woman to horrifically murder her husband and then tossed a baby out the window, he would NOT be committing any rape, no sir. Such an idea is unbefitting of a reimagining of a proud Nazi war criminal. No, dead children plus horrific murder plus ordered rape is only good enough for a reimagining of the Kingpin these days.

It’s that inability to commit that leads to my problem with Kick-Ass. I feel that the comic is really, really good… up to a point. Then the lynchpin is pulled out and the entire thing seems to implode. I’m going to be getting into some major spoilers, so if you’re waiting for the movie, this isn’t the article for you.

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Cut, because you might be at work and I’m posting a scan from a freaking Garth Ennis comic.

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This issue of Wonder Woman ends with something I had just about given up on seeing; sunny skies.

I’ve had to gnash my teeth over Wonder Woman for a long time, now.  She’s a character that I should like, but mostly I don’t.  She’s in a world I should like, but mostly I don’t.

When the book gained Gail Simone as a writer, I was absolutely sure I would like the book, and at the beginning I did.  Then came Genocide, and the Nemesis/Wonder Woman break-up and the slaughtering of pregnant women and the crows, and – I picked up some issues, but I kept putting them down.  It was well-written and well-drawn and the character was interesting, but (despite my last entry here) I couldn’t take any more misery.  I wanted Diana to win something; a fight, a game of chess, a church raffle, a free super-sizing of fries with her happy meal.  Anything. 

And now, for the first time, things are looking up for Diana and the rest of the characters of Wonder Woman.  It feels like a break with the past, and a new, more trimphant era beginning.

I couldn’t think of what to write for this entry.  First I scanned links on When Fangirls Attack, and Scans Daily, and various news sites, but I couldn’t think of anything I really wanted to write about, so I just clicked random links and googled random things for an hour, until I found myself, once again, reading the-blackcat’s Batman and Sons series.

The Black Cat, posting on deviantart and on livejournal (as the_dark_cat) did a series about Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim, and baby Terry living together as a family and the wacky domestic adventures they get into.  It’s syrupy and ridiculous.  It runs completely counter to the Batman tone and almost everything that is happening in comics right now, and it is one of my favorite things to read. 

I cannot believe how much I love this series and everything in it.  It’s not just the silly adventures – it’s the artist themself.

This is an example of someone how knows their comics so well that they have clearly gone nuts with it. 

That’s a scene at Chris Kent’s birthday party.  Yes, that’s the Creeper handing out balloons to Jade and some kid I don’t recognize because I don’t know comics as well as this person does.

Later Terry gets into a scuffle with the youngest Arrow kid, not only because in the limited number of strips that The Black Cat has created he has been established as a kind of pushy baby, but there has also been established a feud between the Bats and the Arrows, with the Supers acting as peacekeepers.

Let me put this bluntly:  This is a person who should be hired.  To do this.  Because this is freakin’ fantastic. 

There are in-jokes, there are sharply delineated characters, there are visual gags, there is a sense of timing and flow to the panels, and every strip tells a story.  Some stories are poignant, and some are sweet, and some are mean, and most are funny.  I recognize that this is not everyone’s kind of story, and that it has to lean on the Grim Bat Mythos to stand.  Still, this artist has it all, and is giving it to us in these strips.  I wish they could get paid for it.  And I wish that I could pay for an issue every month.

As always; Spoilers.

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Spoilers for the latest issue of Red Robin.

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