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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If a child ever asks about the logic holes that come from the proposed existence of Santa Claus — such as how he can carry all those presents and travel around the world in one night, breaking into homes with no chimneys and devouring all the milk and cookies without anyone noticing — you just need to tell them one thing:

Santa Claus has both the Power Cosmic and the Speed Force. Problem solved.

Marvel needs to reveal that Santa is really the secret herald of Uatu the Watcher. He’s been watching everyone and knows who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, and while he cannot interfere directly, he has his jolly herald reward their behavior.

Also, just saw Punisher: War Zone. It’s like Blade in the way that the beginning and end are awesome, but there’s a lot of dullness throughout the middle. It’s like X-Men 3 in the way that characters are named after comic counterparts who barely have much to do with them. But it’s also like the last Rambo movie in being an over-the-top crazy killfest. So if that’s what you want, buy your ticket and enjoy.

Not a comic article today, but hopefully it’s still worth your time.

I have a very healthy relationship with my brothers, Geremy and Justin, though in this site’s 3 years, I never brought either of them up. Justin is currently a schoolteacher while Geremy is… something else. Something else entirely.

He’s always been big into music and his various musical exploits had evolved into a rock group called The Fever, which hung around New York City several years back and released several albums during their tenure. He took the helm as lead singer. Here, have a music video.

He’s moved onto other projects since the band broke up, including the creation of the short-lived MTV advertisement character Chunky Pam. He later created a non-MTV video with her about our homeland, New Jersey. Cameo appearance towards the end by my brother Justin as the Sopranos-esque mystery man at the diner.

Nowadays, he’s got a gig working for Diesel, the jeans company. For their site, he writes and directs short movies that even I have trouble wrapping my head around. But he’s my brother and I love him, so I go with the flow.

The pride and joy of the Diesel video collection is The Rise and Fall of Pete the Meat Puppet. He wrote it, directed it and even performed the overly catchy song. Watch it and enjoy your impending nightmares.

You might be better off just going to the YouTube page for it, since they have it in high def.

Looks like the short is taking off a bit, since it got featured on G4’s Attack of the Show. Sweet.

Geremy’s warned me about how Pete looks even more messed up in color and showed me a picture to prove his point. It’s… not pleasant.

He was also behind Hair Bath, a series about an attractive woman disturbingly obsessed with your hair.

You can check out more of his stuff, including the further adventures of Pete the Meat Puppet, at Diesel.com. Send in your hair if you can fit it into your schedule and buy… Diesel jeans…? I guess?

(Really, though, I don’t know what the fuck.)

Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the Eighth Grade, is sweet, funny and almost egregiously cute.

The heroine, heavy on moxie and light on foresight, falls to earth in a rocket and displays the boundless good cheer we expect of the Super family. It seems she’s stuck, and in true Super tradition, Clark decides that the best way to deal with this is to slap a pair of glasses on her, give her an alliterative name, and send her to school.

There things go as well for her as you’d expect them to go for someone with no understanding of any culture on earth. You’d think her question about when machines will rebel would at least get her a Terminator fan or two as a friend.

Although there was only one cosmic adventures and lots of eighth grade, I really liked this comic. I liked that the Superfamily came together across several dimensions to help Supergirl out. I liked the art. And I loved the fantastic Silver Age monologues:

“I bet I just need to calculate the relative orbits of Argo and Earth. Then, if I can fly high enough to make it into orbit, I can probably use the gravitational forces of this planet to slingshot me back into quasi-space! It’s foolproof! . . . . AIIEE! I have no powers under my native red sun! Why was I so foolish?! Now I crash to the ground!”

Worth checking out for adults. Worth buying for kids.

This is incredible. I jacked it from Xclusives Zone, major props to Shaun Boothe for doing it.

There are the only two things I like enough to hang as posters on my wall. One is the original art to this:

The other is this.

The man is a superman.

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.

I’ve never been a fan of character death. The impact of a character’s death on any particular story seems a poor trade for all the stories that they could be in. The latest trend of characters coming back to life seems to be unpopular with most people, but I love it. That said, I would kill off the Joker in a heartbeat. He’s mean.

So. What character would you gladly see the last of? And what would be the best death for them?