The Battle for the Cowl so far is comprised of three main books, numerous associated mini-series, and a few scattered one-shot tie-ins.  I’m not strongly affected either way by most of these, but this week two of those one-shots loom large in my mind.

The first is an example of the perfect tie-in.  It shows us something we never would have seen if we were following a conventional narrative, and offers us something truly different from the norm while still maintaining the tone of the world for which it was created.  That one was Battle for the Cowl: Arkham Asylum.  Written by David Hine, it takes us on a tour of Arkham Asylum, and for once focuses on the less gruesome aspects of the institution.  Jeremiah Arkham narrates the story, not in the usual hard-boiled tone taken by the Gotham crowd, but with sincere sadness that he hasn’t been able to help the inmates. 

While we sense that he is somewhat unhinged himself, he’s an eccentric and an idealist, not the usual film-noir lunatic.  He finds picks a few inmates who pose no threat, and leads them out of the ruined structure.  In the end, before the final, worrying sting, he expresses the hope that he can rebuild the asylum so that it lives up to its name – so that it can be a true asylum for those who are unable to survive in the conventional world.  It’s refreshing, it’s sobering, and it’s creative.

Sadly, I only really got to thinking about how excellent it was while reading Battle for the Cowl: The Network.  Well, now I know something about myself, at least.  Pissiness is a bigger motivator than honest admiration.

So let’s get to it! 

Well, first thing’s first.  Huntress’s costume has been changed back to a glorified bikini.  And why?  Because the promotional poster for the event, drawn by Tony Daniel, has her back in her Jim Lee costume.  I don’t see why this would necessitate a costume change in the actual book any more than the ‘The Real Power In The DCU’ poster would necessitate putting every woman in the DCU in a white evening dress, but I guess that’s how they’re going to play it.

Honestly?  I didn’t even notice the costume change.  A girl fighting crime in a bikini doesn’t catch my eye anymore.  What made me notice was the characters in the story can’t stop picking at the new outfit.  Batgirl, still with a perfect command of the English language, mentions it once.  Oracle mentions it later.  Both talk about how impractical it is.

I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s a jab by writer at a mandated costume change.  Maybe he’s was trying to have his cake and eat it, too, by putting Huntress in a two-piece bathing suit and still snarking about it.  I’m not sure who made the decisions to regress Huntress sartorially. 

I just know that the decision was also made to regress her personally.  When the villain announces that he will start murdering two hostages if the heroes don’t murder one, Huntress pulls her crossbow and is about to take a hostage out when Batgirl knocks her aside.  This is the deal-breaker for me.  Cass is back on the moral high ground, but she had to knock Helena off it to get there.  Never mind that in continuity we haven’t seen Huntress kill in years.  Never mind that we’ve never seen her kill that casually.  In the end, the plot of this book involves the worst mistake a team book can make: cutting off one character at the knees to make another character look good.  That’s never the way to go.

In short: Buy Battle for the Cowl:Arkham Asylum.  Leave Battle for the Cowl: The Network on the shelf.  And stop making women fight in swimwear.

I was recently going over David’s post about DKSA, and his point about how it exorcised some of the grimness and misery that DKR introduced into superhero comics.  While I think that he makes a good point, and one echoed by Miller himself, when he described that in DKSA he was comparing superheroes to the pantheon of Greek gods – with their failings, their enthusiasms, and their various eccentricities.

However, I have to disagree with David.  Not because I don’t think he has correctly interpreted the way DKSA changes the tropes set up in DKR, but because my difficulties with Miller’s Batman aren’t really about his grimness.

David concludes his essay with this:

Where we’ve had paranoid and grim Batman for the past fifteen years, Miller gives us one who’s faking grim but skipping like a schoolboy on the inside. Where we’ve had an utterly miserable Batman who figures out ways to trap his friends, Miller delivers a Batman who believes in the strength of others and trusts his fellow warriors.

DKSA is an exorcism. It takes all of the grim and gritty from DKR and the ensuing years and turns it on its head. It’s a push toward day-glo superheroics and away from miserable heroes. The moral of DKSA is “Superheroes are cool!”

My problem with Miller’s legacy isn’t, primarily, the grimness and misery.  That may sound strange, considering I’ve written essay after essay about my love for the lighter side of comics, and my desire for more comics to embrace fun and imagination over dark storylines.  However, it’s not the misery itself I object to, but the balance between light and dark.  I enjoy some angsty melodrama and some brutal violence as much as the next gal, I just feel like modern comics is stuffing me full of pretzels and not offering me any water, if you know what I mean.  I few more light-hearted stories, comics, or comic lines would be refreshing.

However, it’s not Batman being a miserable and paranoid that bothers me when I’m reading DKR.  It’s Batman being, how shall I put this?  A double-barrelled bastard.  Yes.  I believe that’s the technical term.  Read the rest of this entry �

I got back in town today, after a short trip down south, and I picked up my comics, including Green Arrow and Black Canary in which our heroes are having marital trouble (more on that, later), Oracle: The Cure on the cover of which Barbara Gordon legally changes her name to Boobara Gordon (more on that, later), reviewed the posts for the last few days, including David’s entry about Frank Miller and his grim n’ gritty image (more on that, later) and read the latest Newsarama Interview with Dan Didio in which he explains Jason Todd’s latest killing spree (boy, have I got a lot to do), and then I read Superman/Batman.

In Nanopolis,Superman has been shrunk by the Prankster, and Batman shrinks himself to go after him.  As they navigate through a shrunken world, mysteriously able to breath, despite being small enough to not be able to inhale oxygen, both are picked up as the saviors of different groups of beings.  Batman is picked up by a nomadic tribe of micro-organisms who have been enslaved by nanites, which the Prankster scattered around his lab.  Superman is abducted by the nanites themselves, who wish to use his energy to grow larger and take over the world.

Meanwhile Robin and Steel stay in the lab, trying to maintain contact with Batman and Superman, while the Prankster keeps up a running commentary while tied to a chair.

That story is a giant loon, fed on nothing by nuts and crammed into a whack-a-mole machine.  I dare you to read that without feeling better about life in general and comics in particular.

It’s not that I don’t like Ollie and Dinah’s ongoing soapy drama, or the fact that Jason Todd is back and conflicted.  It’s just that this story, and this series, is the distilled essence of comics.  Imaginative, convoluted, ridiculous, and fun, it manages to take its readers to other worlds.  It’s equally generous to its characters dealing out very little death and limited angst while still giving them a wider range of emotions than they’re allowed to display in just about any other comic.

It warms my heart to know that any loonball story I might think up, and I’ve thought up a few, could be matched or topped by whatever the next story of Superman/Batman is.

(Also, two different birthday parties are mentioned in this particular arc.  If this story ends with cake in the next issue, I am seriously going to do a little dance in the comics shop.)

Previously in the Venom series, our anti-hero got in a dumb adventure with Wolverine that ended with Venom saving the life of a government guy by the name of Agent Daryll Smith. As you’re about to see, Smith would be a major part of Venom’s latter day good guy exploits.

There are only 11 months of his series left. The sad truth is, Venom has nothing to do as a character at this moment. He left San Francisco behind, his ex-wife has walked away from her supporting role and he doesn’t have any real long-standing villains to build up against. He’s just hanging out in New York City, dealing with whatever comes after him. Even the Hunger made a point of how monotonous it’s getting.

What Venom needs is direction.

On Trial (Venom #50-52) is again by Larry Hama, with Josh Hood doing art. It’s always interesting to see the change in the Marvel landscape through this series. If you look back, you see so much change in the previous four years. We saw Peter Parker’s fake parents, Scarlet Spider, Spider-Ben and now we’re back to a story with regular, old fashioned Spider-Man. Not only that, but we have several namedrops of the whole Heroes Reborn garbage.

Read the rest of this entry �

I fell out of love with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. I thought the first volume was strong, the second volume less so, and I don’t think I even finished The Black Dossier. I’d changed or the series changed, I’m not entirely sure. It just wasn’t my thing. The series has moved to Top Shelf now, and the beginning of the fourth volume drops in April.

I gave the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume a look. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910 #1 (of 3) is a mouthful to say and a handful to read. It’s the first third of the new LoEG story, and, as the title suggests, takes place in 1910. The story itself will take place over the course of the 20th century, but this particular tale takes what seems like a very short period of time.

There are a few principal characters in the story. Jenny, daughter of Captain Nemo, has forsaken her father and his wishes for her life and gone to live in London. Rather than a life of luxury or spent lopping the heads off pirates, she ends up washing dishes and scrabbling for a living. Life sucks, in other words.

Mina is back and she’s leading this incarnation of the League. The team (which includes Allan Quatermain Jr. [a rejuvenated Quatermain], Anthony Raffles, and Orlando) is investigating a possible apocalypse, and doing a so-so job of it. There’s some light infighting within the group, and Mina seems constantly frustrated with her team, which provides some fairly interesting tension.

Finally, there is Mac the Knife, the real Jack the Ripper, a secret cabal, and a crew of unnamed and fairly sinister London citizens.

The various stories progress separately, before coming together shortly before the end of the book. It’s a tried and true storytelling device, and one that serves to make the entire book feel like it isn’t just a few completely disconnected stories. On a higher level, it ties into the three-issue structure of Century itself, and makes me assume that we’ll get a similar payoff once it’s all done.

O’Neill’s art, even in the b&w proof I was sent, is still stellar. The same attention to detail that he’s put into his past work, including previous LoEG volumes. Evil schemers look about as they should, Mina’s almost permanent exasperation with her team comes through very clearly, and the action scenes are gory and shocking.

Todd Klein’s lettering, as well, is definitely up to par. Lettering is tough for me to critique– if the letterer does his job, as Klein has done here, it adds a lot to the book, but in an intangible, “no duh” kind of way. It’s easier to talk about a bad lettering job than it is a good one, and Klein does a good job here.

Moore’s writing still strikes me as very well-crafted and good, if not a little distant. I don’t know that I left the book truly caring about any of the characters, though I was definitely invested in their adventures. There’s just something intangible there that still doesn’t quite work for me.

One thing I enjoy about Moore and Grant Morrison is that they expect a lot out of their readers. Morrison expects you to keep up and take things in stride, and Moore expects you to know a lot. I came away feeling entertained, but a little dumb. I can get by with Morrison’s ultramodern take, but here is what I know about early 1900s British pop culture: nothing.

LoEG is stacked with references, many of them I’d never heard of. I caught the obvious ones, such as Nemo, Mina Murray, and Jack the Ripper, but Pirate Jenny and a few others caught me flat-footed. Regardless, I kept going, making the effort to put some extra thought into the book, and made a mental note to look up the names on Wikipedia once I finished.

Despite the light feeling of being a little lost, which actually added a lot to the experience of reading the book, I found LoEG: Century: 1910 a rewarding read. At its most shallow level, it’s a comic about some pretty awesome pirates and early 1900s secret agents. Of course, since it’s a book written by Alan Moore, there are a number of levels that you can enjoy the work on. It even works as a primer for British literature. If you liked reading about Orlando or Raffles, google them up and check out the old tales.

LoEG: Century: 1910 shows what happens as a group begins the long, slow spiral into oblivion (or so I assume), and clearly sets up some things for the future, as well. There are parts that made me pretty uncomfortable, particularly a certain act set to song toward the end of the book, and parts I enjoyed, such as exactly what happens when the League meets up with a secret society.

I don’t think that it’s perfect, but it does give me the feeling I remember getting back when I read the first LoEG book. It feels new, in equal parts due to the fact that I’m not very experienced with the characters introduced in this volume and because there is a very interesting story being slowly unfolded. I’m very curious to see where Moore and O’Neill take it next, both on a story and a “spot the reference” level.

Along with my regular copy of Superman/Batman, which was worth the three dollars I paid for it the moment I hit the page in which Superman, shrunken down to nanite-size, starts a journal about how alone he is but how he won’t give up hope, and completely subverts his own epic by spelling ‘diary’ as ‘dairy’, I picked up The Flash: Rebirth, on a whim.  After some very close reading of the lengthy exposition speech bubbles, I still have a few questions.

Flash fans, this is your chance to shine.

Read the rest of this entry �

Steven T. Seagle and Tim Sale’s The Amazon is an interesting tale, both from a story perspective and a historical one. It began life in 1989 at publisher Comico. This was a huge surprise to me, as I’d off-handedly assumed that Seagle got his start writing X-Men for Marvel. Regardless, The Amazon was their attempt at the comic books for adults that were arriving back in the day.

The Amazon was intended to raise some awareness about the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest via comic books. The narrator of the story is a journalist, Malcolm Hilliard, looking for a story. He finds his story in the form of an American man who has gone native with the local tribesmen and begun sabotaging the equipment. Hilliard plays the role of skeptic, refusing to believe in the superstitions of the local workers, and seeker of truth.

The original run of Amazon was colored, but this re-issue has been re-colored by Matt Hollingsworth, who does a fascinating job of making the Tim Sale of 20 years ago look similar to the Sale of 2009. The color scheme ranges from vibrant, but subdued, jungle to gloomy sunsets. Hollingsworth is one of the industry’s all-time greats, and was a great choice over Sale’s pencils.

I’m not sure how much, if any, reconstruction went on with Tim Sale’s pencils and inks for the re-issue, but the art is still sharp. The book is largely made up of detailed landscapes and talking heads, and Sale does a solid job of rendering it all. He sells the expressions on the faces of the suspicious foreman, drinking workmen, and Hilliard.

Sale also does some fairly cool storytelling and panel composition work. The majority of the book is made up of horizontal panels, maybe four to a page on average. When we finally get to see our renegade American, the composition switches to page-tall vertical panels, emulating the experience of looking between trees in the jungle. There is also a particularly good panel that has a character hidden in the jungle, visible only by figuring out that a certain shadow isn’t.

Seagle’s done a solid job on the writing. The storytelling is separated into three tiers. There’s the standard dialogue, Hilliard’s internal monologue, and his article. The three intermix and coexist, and build an interesting picture of both Hilliard’s personality and distance between his own thoughts and how he approaches journalism.

The story definitely feels like the first chapter in a longer story, and may read better in trade, but this first issue is far from poor. Seagle does a good job building up the main character, setting up the conflicts, and even sneaking in a bit of education regarding the Amazon without coming across overly preachy.

I dug the first issue, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the series shakes out. If I hadn’t been told, I never would’ve guessed it was close to twenty years old. It’s well worth a look.

I think most of the people reading this have heard of Dollhouse.  It’s a series about a super-secret underground organization that rents out ‘Dolls’ out to the rich and powerful.  Dolls are men and women who have had their memories wiped, and have been mentally implanted with memories that allow them to complete a specific task asked for by the client.

A good enough premise, but a few things keep hitting me while watching.

Read the rest of this entry �

Reading about Oracle always tangles me up in logistical questions.  Does second-life work like that?  Can a guy really open up a wall in a game?  When a woman screams in real life, does it make any sense at all that her avatar starts screaming, too?  Because I think she would be too busy screaming to tell her character to scream.  Then again, maybe it’s pre-programmed that they scream under certain circumstances.

And how does one explode a human head, anyway?  I first thought it would happen with an explosive device, but that couldn’t happen unless said device were pre-planted in said head.  The second idea was heating up the liquid inside the skull with microwaves, but it seems like that would get the excess liquid to bubble out the eyes and nasal cavities.  Unless it happened fast enough to heat the liquid instantly, which brings us back to an explosive device.

While I may not be much of a second-lifer or skull-exploder, I do know my Babsology, and more importantly, my superheroes.  The series is called The Cure.  The first issue chronicles the villain’s desperate, yet evil, attempts to save his desperately ill daughter.  It also makes much of the hero’s misery over her grievous injury.  Babs is going to have to choose whether to heal the girl or heal herself.  Being a hero, she’s going to heal the girl.  There is a way that set-ups like these go.  In fact, this is the way that this set-up has already gone in Birds of Prey.

And so, of course, I’m hoping it goes the other way.  Part of this is because of my shameless bias for Batgirl Babs.  Part of it – let’s say that I’ve had it up to here with stories that come complete with forgone conclusions.  My heart drops a bit each time I see summaries that go along the lines of:  “Will Batman kill the Joker this time?”  “Is this the end for Lois and Clark?”  “Is Batman dead?”  The answer is always ‘no.’  Always.  Without exception.  We know it the moment we pick up the solicit.

This time, I’m hoping for a surprise.

I just saw the preview for Justice League 31 on the IGN website, and something in it really bothered me.  This something has been bothering me for a while in comics.

Dinah decks Ollie, her husband, because he embarrassed her.  It isn’t playful roughhousing, or a light smack on the shoulder, or even a slap.  She punches him, and he gets up and says that he deserved it.  Then Hal Jordan, Ollie’s friend, says that he deserved a lot more than that.  Then they go on with the discussion.

I. 

That.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Let’s run that the other way.  Ollie comes up to Dinah and punches her in the face hard enough that she’s knocked to the ground.  When she gets up, he tells her that he punched her because she’s his wife and she embarrassed him.  Do you think there is a chance in hell that she’d agree?  Or that her friends would also agree and the discussion would go on?  No.  Ollie would go the way of Hank Pym.  He’d get thrown out, beaten up, and his character would be marked as a disgrace for the foreseeable future.

This isn’t Batman and Catwoman fighting because they’re on different sides of the law.  It isn’t the friendly wrestling matches, or even the full-on fights that we see between vigilantes when things get heated.  This is one spouse, in this case the more highly trained martial artist, beating another spouse for not toeing the line.  This has happened before with Ollie and Dinah.  This is not okay.  This needs to stop.