Two entries this time. This first list is from Kyle, one of my oldest friends. I hit him up over IM and bullied him until he gave me his list. I also bullied him into having a 100-item pull list once, too.

Ha ha ha. Eat it.
1. Mr. Mind
2. Darkseid
3. Zatana
4. Warren Ellis
5. Grant Morrison
6. Mike Choi and Sonia Oback
7. X-23
8. Scott Pilgrim
9. Matt Fraction
10. Ed Brubaker
11. Iron Fist and the Other Weapons
12. We3
13. Runaways
14. Jamie Madrox
15. Layla Miller
16. Jubilee
17. Drax
18. Cammy, Drax’s spunky sidekick
19. Both Annihilation series
20. Invincible
21. Watchmen
22. Transmetropolitan
23. Molly Hayes
24. Batman: The Animated Series
25. Nextwave
26. Tim Drake
27. Explaining crazy comic book stuff to people who aren’t keeping up fully with the series.
28. The resulting look on peoples faces when you are explaining that crazy stuff… ranging from confusion, to the inevitable “WTF!” look when explaining DC continuity.
29. Humberto Ramos
30. Justice League Unlimited
31. Heath Ledger as the Joker
32. The Current Wildstorm Universe… never believed it would go that far.
33. Planetary
34. Paul Jenkins
35. Kingdom Come
36. Jerk Batman
37. Captain Marvel from the Peter David series
38. Harley Quinn
39. The Daughters of the Dragon
40. “52”
41. Black Bolt
42. Anytime Black Bolt talks
43. “Son of M”
44. Kabuki
45. “Fables”
46. “Y the Last Man”
47. Echo
48. The Tick
49. “Maus”
50. Chris Latta… voice actor for Cobra Commander and Starscream.

This second list is from 4l reader Lt. Ken Frankenstein. He’s got some great picks here.
1. The second time I read Grant Morrison’s The Filth and it finally all made sense.
2. Reading Alan Moore’s Watchmen at thirteen years old and having my mind completely blown.
3. The cover of Avengers #4.
4. The last eight pages of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, which get me all misty-eyed every time.
5. Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, the best comic being published right now.
6. The Human Bomb losing it and murdering Dr. Polaris, a moment of unbridled greatness in the otherwise lackluster Infinite Crisis.
7. Matter-Eater Lad, my favorite underused member of the Legion of Superheroes.
8. The first twelve or so issues of Mark Waid’s relaunch of the Legion of Superheroes.
9. The Death of Captain America and the return of Bucky Barnes.
10. Jack Kirby’s Fourth World. All of it.
11. Miracleman #16, the most violent, disturbing, heartbreaking comic I’ve ever read.
12. The last page of Ex Machina #1, the ballsiest moment in superhero comics.
13. The second to last page of Civil War #2, the second ballsiest moment.
14. Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, any time they interact.
15. Geoff Johns, the Michael Clayton of the DC Universe (He’s a fixer. See Green Lantern: Rebirth and especially his run on Hawkman)
16. Ares setting himself on fire and having Hercules fastball-special him into a crowd of warriors. All while wielding twin uzis.
17. Lone Wolf and Cub and Akira, the twin high watermarks of manga.
18. Barry Allen’s sacrifice in the pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
19. Brian Michael Bendis’ New Avengers, the ultimate shot of adrenaline into a long-running franchise.
20. Alan Moore’s “For the Man who has Everything,” and its note-perfect translation in Justice League Unlimited.
21. 52, the DCU’s year long mad-science experiment.
22. Mark Millar’s Ultimates, or, “The Avengers if The Avengers were Assholes.”
23. Brian Michael Bendis writing Luke Cage
24. Brian Michael Bendis writing Daredevil
25. Alex Maleev Drawing Daredevil
26. Frank Castle meeting Bullseye for the first time in Daredevil #181. “You might do something stupid. Get yourself killed. I’d like that.”
27. Art Spiegelman’s Maus
28. Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, one of the weirdest comics of all time
29. Wonder Woman as portrayed on Justice League Unlimted and in Grant Morrison’s JLA
30. Plastic Man serving as the JLA’s resident Ace Ventura.
31. The ‘White Martian’ story arc of Grant Morrison’s JLA, where Batman and Wally West exhibit true greatness.
32. Ultimate Spider-Man, Bendis’ baby.
33. The original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby run of Fantastic Four.
34. Superman: Red Son, especially any scene with Lex Luthor.
35. Christopher Reeves as Superman.
36. John Williams’ Superman theme.
37. The Dark Knight.
38. Batman nightmarishly unleashing a swarm of bats in Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One.
39. Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark
40. Civil War: The Confession, the moment where everything was, ironically, worth it.
41. Superman vs. Captain Marvel in Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come.
42. Two-Face coming full circle in The Long Halloween: “Two shots to the head. If you ask me, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
43. Two-Face breaking convention at the end of Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum.
44. The Joker as a concept.
45. Jason Rusch: Firestorm.
46. Deadshot’s casual “C’est la vie” murder of Plastique in the Justice League Unlimited episode ‘Task Force X,’ the most brutal moment I’ve seen in a children’s cartoon.
47. Venom as drawn by Todd Macfarlane.
48. The first four or five story arcs of Fabien Nicieza’s Cable & Deadpool.
49. Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, the ultimate counter-culture comic.
50. All-Star Superman #5, the prison issue. My favorite Superman comic ever is one where he never shows up in costume.

#12 was why I kept reading Ex Machina. I got the Free Comic Book Day issue from Kyle way back when. I checked it out, read it, and was like “Eh, that’s all right, I guess, but I don’t know if I’d buy it.” Then I got to the last page. And then I started buying Ex Machina. I switched to trades when I realized its pacing, though. Here’s the last two pages, for reference:

Geoff Klock writes “Remarkable: Morrison’s Authority:”

Morrison has re-envisioned how to make this book work like it did in the first few issues of Ellis’s run. Ellis’s Authority are supposed to feel HUGE but after a few issues we are deadened by the constant battles and HUGE begins to feel regular. With this final page, just one character suddenly feels MASSIVE again – you believe he COULD start World War Three on his own. As the Doctor, the team’s Shaman, says in this issue, in this world they cannot but be monsters, trampling on natural laws until they break. Implicit in Ellis’s story was the feeling that his “heroes,” in spite of the fact that they saved the world, were really bad guys – killing indiscriminately, changing the world as they saw fit, and answering to no one. Morrison’s protagonist from the first issue says it explicitly, asking the team, who identify themselves as the good guys, how they KNOW they are good guys. In terms of both physics and ethics, their whole world has been turned up-side-down – or right-side-up.

Watchmen will be coming out in March and, no doubt, the first few screenings will be almost entirely packed with comic book fans. The book, to comics fans, has a status somewhere between The Catcher in the Rye and the moon landing. It not only changed their lives, it marked a turning point for comics in general, taking a more critical and nuanced look not only at superhero characters, but at the concept of superheroes in general. Alan Moore presented a deeply cynical vision at the way the world would look if it had to interact with a group of dangerously powerful people with big egos and flexible morals. The book made every fan who ever fantasized about the fourth wall dissolving consider that it might turn the world darker and more dangerous rather than more exciting and fun. Watchmen wasn’t a book, it was an event, and so I’m guessing that the first few screenings will alternate between awed silence and wild cheering.

What about the screening after that? If the movie had come out a year or two after the novel’s publication, it would have knocked the socks off of people whose standard for superhero movies was Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, but will today’s audiences be aware of it as anything more than another film that is ‘based on a graphic novel?’

The color scheme is from The Dark Knight and 300. The sense of the alienation of powerful beings from everyday people is from Superman Returns. The idea of a superhero as something the public is afraid of is in movies from Hancock to The Hulk.

As for the public being right to fear superheroes, even Peter Parker turned to the dark side for a while, and he was played by Tobey Maguire. From outright immoral supers, like the ones in Wanted, to the heroes of Sin City, who had the welfare of the downtrodden at heart, but whose skills tended towards being able to quickly dispose of bodies, to the neurotics of superheroes being milked for comedic value in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, to Batman, one of the most straight laced of superheroes, being tangentially involved in the deaths of super villains, it’s more difficult to find a superhero movie in which the superheroes are unquestionably good than it is to find one that looks at them through more jaundiced eyes.

I’m not saying that Watchmen shouldn’t be made or that it has nothing to contribute. That would be like arguing against the filming of an Elmore Leonard story because the world already has enough heist movies. If anything Watchmen deserves more acclaim for originality, since it was one of the books that pioneered the more skeptical view of superheroes that has become the standard.

However, there is no denying that that view has become the standard. It’s odd that the innovation and influence of Watchmen in the medium of comics will probably lessen its impact when it becomes a film. Success has a price.

“When I speak, respond with the first word you think of. One.”
“Two.”
“Life.”
“Two.”
“Death.”
“Two.”
“Murder.”
“Happens.”
— Dr. Bruce Wayne and Two-Face from Elseworlds: The Batman of Arkham

For the past month, graphic novels have been doing quite well at the Barnes and Noble where I work. Sure, the Iron Man, Hulk and Hellboy stuff were doing fairly well over the course of the summer, but once Dark Knight arrived, everything flew off the shelves. I was put in charge of ordering in just about anything Batman-related that would sell. I mainly went with anything Joker and/or Two-Face themed. Surprisingly, Dark Knight Returns sold out early to the point that all of the warehouses were out of it. Great foresight there, guys.

Joker stuff sells like crazy, especially Killing Joke. Even the hastily scrapped-together biography we got on Heath Ledger has been taking off. Two-Face stuff, on the other hand, has been eating it. Nobody cares about Harvey, sad to say.

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Myriad Issues talks to Leigh Walton

If you treat your comics as newspapers from a fictional universe, there’s no reason to read them twice. Marvel and DC have essentially told their readers that any given issue is not important—it’s only important as long as it connects to this network of events, or because it contains a certain plot point, they’re creating stories that can be replaced by reading a spoiler on a blog. And when you create that type of story, you have to follow that logic to its natural end, and relish the ephemerality. Make the best piece of disposable entertainment you can! Make it look like the other kinds of disposable entertainment that we understand.

God only knows why Marvel hasn’t had Spider-Man get sucked into a techno-dimension and lead into a summer crossover where part of the story is exclusively on MySpace or Marvel.com, or an alternate reality game that reveals what Dr. Doom is up to, or a chance to get text messages from Captain America if you give us your phone number. Play up the NOWness of it. You missed it? Oh well, you’ll catch up; that’s how these things work.

Comics are junk. Embrace it.

Esther is a real life friend of mine who I regularly talk comics with. I’ve been bugging her to write something for me, ’cause I think she has a great POV, and I finally have proof that peer pressure and pestering works! She sent over a list of five things she likes about comics. Read on, and hopefully she’ll be back for more.
-djdb

1. Rafael Albuquerque
The most recent example of Albuquerque’s art is in Superman/Batman #51. It’s an appropriate book for him, because Albuquerque is one of those always-underappreciated artists who can differentiate between Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent without going directly for the glasses and the spit curl. Clark Kent has a sunny expression, a chin that could only work on Superman or John Travolta, and the thick neck of a guy who is always the most muscular person in the room. Bruce Wayne has a scowl that blots out daylight and permanent lines of concentration over his eyes. Albuquerque has a talent for using subtle differences in facial features and musculature to give each character a different face and a different body. Too often, in comics, the reader is unable to tell characters apart until the colorist gets to them. It’s something special to be able to make two of DC’s most similar looking heroes unique.

2. Kevin Maguire
No one can finish a book drawn by Kevin Maguire without checking the cover to find out who the artist is. No one who has read one book drawn by Kevin Maguire can fail to recognize his style if they see it again, even if it were only a doodle on a cocktail napkin. I can’t think of another artist who is that skilled and that willing to be so gloriously silly. Kevin Maguire’s characters have faces made out of putty with the kind of expressions you might see if you hit the pause button during a Jim Carrey movie or an old Warner Brothers cartoon. Take any mildly funny scene and Kevin Maguire’s art will put it over the top. What’s more, instead of limiting Maguire to comedy, this style makes tragic moments even more poignant, because character’s face twist with recognizable pain instead being stuck in a stock pose. A lot of people think Maguire’s style isn’t pretty, and often they’re right, but I’m glad there is an artist who will sacrifice prettiness in order to let the characters express as much emotion as they are supposed to feel.

3. Roger Robinson
Which isn’t to say that I can’t appreciate prettiness. Have you seen Robinson’s work in Gotham Knights? The man draws cheekbones that can cut glass. And I haven’t seen that many moodily lit abdominal muscles since the movie 300. All that, and he doesn’t sacrifice expression or context. His subjects are beautiful, but they are subjects in a story, not objects in a pin-up. That’s impressive.

4. Amanda Connor
The Green Arrow and Black Canary Wedding Special really played to Amanda Conner’s strength, and not because of the subject matter. Playing to Amanda Conner’s strength means giving her a huge panel, the bigger the better, and filling it with people. Conner’s style is clean enough to keep the page from looking cluttered and she plans well enough to place little visual jokes that lead the reader from one part of the page to the next. Every character is looking, talking, or reacting to at least one other character. As a result, huge group scenes stop looking like a flat jumble of bodies and faces and become a number of little action panels, depending on which part of the page the reader is focusing on.

5. J.H. Williams III
A lot of artists have a style. J.H. Williams III has every style, including his own. In Batman #667-669 Williams draws a large group of characters, each of them penciled and shaded differently. And he’s not shy about throwing in pages that show a massive black fist superimposed over an exploding plane, or pages in which the panels form a huge pair of bat wings. Instead of distracting from the story, William’s art makes the arc into something both surreal and self-contained. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and something that should be shown to anyone who doesn’t consider comics ‘art.’

Julian Lytle hit me with fifty… and then fifty more.

1) X-books from 1991-1999
2) Generation X drawn by Chris Bachalo
3) That ill cover to the old Who Killed Jean DeWolfe Spider-Man trade
4) Erik Larsen on Amazing Spider-man
5) The First pages of X-Men #1 drawn by Jim Lee with the X-men in a training session
6) X-men #4 where they are playing Basketball
7) Jubilee in all her Mutant awesomeness
8) Backlash by brett booth
9) Back in the day when Savage Dragon and Pitt would guest star in almost every Image comic
10) Michael Turner on Witchblade
11) Joe Madueira on Uncanny X-Men
12) Storm in punk rock gear and no powers with a Mohawk
13) X-Men Series 1 trading cards all drawn by Jim Lee
14) Marvel Universe Trading Cards Series 3
15) Spaceman Spiff
16) Kandea
17) Kaneda’s jacket and bike (it’s an ensemble)
18) Mad Love
19) Dark Knight Returns
20) A Dame to Kill For
21) Kingdom Come
22) New Frontier
23) Darwyn Cooke
24) Bruce Timm
25) Gen 13
26) Humberto Ramos
27) Crimson and Out There
28) Geoff Johns’s Teen Titans Run
29) New X-Men By Grant Morrison
30) The Fourth World by Jack Kirby
31) Spider-Man
32) Galactus
33) Batman
34) Superman
35) Crisis on Infinite Earths
36) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
37) Luke Cage beating Dr. Doom for his cash
38) Dr.Doom
39) Inhumans by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee
40) Earth X, Universe X and Paradise X (with Heralds)
41) The Legion of Super Heroes
42) SUPERBOY-PRIME
43) Love and Rockets
44) Mike Mignola
45) 7 Soliders by Grant Morrison and various artists
46) 52
47) Akira
48) Naruto
49) Calvin and Hobbes
50) Peanuts
51) The Crew
52) Priest’s Black Panther
53) Bendis writing Luke Cage
54) The New Avengers arc with the Hood drawn by Lenil Francis Yu with no inker
55) The Crew’s White Tiger aka Kasper Cole
56) The Master of Kung Fu
57) The Phantom
58) The Authority By Ellis and Hitch
59) Planetary
60) Alan Moore
61) Alan Moore and Travis Cherest on WildC.A.T.S.
62) Cyber Force
63) The Justice Society of America
64) Captain Marvel (Fawcett)
65) The Ultimates 1 and 2
66) Ultimate X-men By Millar and BKV
67) Dazzler
68) Boom Boom
69) NextWave
70) Dragonball
71) TMNT
72) Concrete
73) Elfquest
74) Jason Todd
75) Robin
76) Runaways
77) Young Avengers
78) The Metal Men
79) Rusty and Skids
80) New Mutants
81) Adam Pollina on X-Force
82) War Machine
83) Ed Brubaker’s Captain America
84) Casanova
85) Umbrella Academy
86) Marc Silvestri on Uncanny X-Men
87) Watchmen
88) Podcasts
89) San Diego Comic-Con
90) New York Comic-Con
91) Alex Ross
92) Moebius
93) Gambit charging a bike to blow up the Phalanx creature the X-men fought
94) Secret Wars
95) Maus
96) Sinestro Corps War
97) The Punisher
98) Preacher
99) Cliffhanger
100) Capcom’s Marvel fighting games

Me and Julian are from the same era of comics, man. Jim Lee X-Men, Jubilee, Moebius (who remembers that Silver Surfer story he did?), Gambit… it’s all dope.

Here’s his #5, for example:

I learned the word “cripes” from this comic. No joke.

My review of Special Forces #3 is up at PCS. I got a shout on today’s Journalista,, too.

It’s unfortunate when someone has to accept their limits. Today, I’m accepting my limits as a writer. You see, back in the day, I used to write for a site that reviewed fighting games. There was one game that I intended to review, but I just couldn’t get it done. Then I started writing here and decided that the same game would make for a good 4L article. After playing the game for a few minutes, I decided to put it off for a while.

Maybe it’s a mix between the game being so unplayable and the belief that I could never do it justice. Luckily, the internet’s in its YouTube phase and I don’t have to explain. I can show you the horrors and let you judge for yourself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the arcade game Avengers in Galactic Storm!

It should be a rule that every time Thor enters a room, there’s an announcer yelling, “THE MIGHTY THOR!”

To give you an idea of how ridiculous this game was, here’s a list of the playable characters: Captain America, Black Knight, Thunderstrike, Crystal, Dr. Minerva, Shatterax, Korath and Supremor. Cap is the only one on there I’d have any interest in playing as. Others like Iron Man and Thor are only assist characters, including Clint Barton Goliath, who is portrayed as a laughable, giant fist stretching across the screen.

Finally, here are the amazing endings. Beautiful.

A few months back, I suppose inspired by the internet anger at One More Day, Tom Brevoort made mention on his blog how puzzled he was about part of the reaction. Back when The Other happened, people were annoyed as hell that Spider-Man had those crazy new powers, like his newfound wrist spikes. Now that they’ve gone back to webshooters and removed his new powers from the table, people are angry again. Why is that?

It brought me to realize that change in comics has two parts. One is the change itself. The other is the use of that change. Why was everyone annoyed? Because even though The Other was over-hyped and boring, it’s amplified when you realize that they hadn’t done anything with it. Peter David tried to use the spikes here and there in his Friendly Neighborhood run, but that was pretty much it. Not only did The Other make his powers seem stupid, Marvel made no effort to make us believe otherwise. They just shrugged and gave up on it.

It makes me think of how some people generalize The Death of Superman. Some say that any real comic reader knew that Superman would be back in a short time and that the whole thing was rather pointless. In that over-simplification, you ignore how that entire story (maybe without all the mourning issues) brought so much to the Superman mythos. First, it gave us a villain who, while used badly over the years, is still considered an iconic monster. One Superman villain was redesigned into a more fearsome and recognizable form, while another was redesigned into an interesting tweener character. Then we got two new superheroes with staying power and the groundwork for Hal Jordan’s descent into madness.

Hell, look at Hal Jordan! I mean he’s so handsome and dreamy and—sorry. Look at how many people frothed at the mouth at Green Lantern: Rebirth and the first few issues of his series. Without the return of Jordan, there wouldn’t be Sinestro Corps and the two Green Lantern series wouldn’t be nearly as fantastic. It paid off in the end.

I’m going to take a moment to look at four changes in comics, each an example of one of the four possibilities. A good change that worked out, a bad change that didn’t, a bad change that paid off and a good change where the ball was dropped. Maybe this will be a series. I don’t know.

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