Last Wednesday saw the release of Alpha Flight #0.1, the first in what appears to be a second wave of comics in Marvel’s Point One Initiative. Revealed first in late October and making its debut on the shelves in February, Marvel decided to start focusing on certain issues of their various series as jumping on points. It’s similar, at least to me, to DC’s One Year Later comics that existed after the events of Infinite Crisis half a decade ago, only without the shakeup factor of it all. They simply give us a bunch of $2.99 comic issues that claim to be a great place for a new reader to start with and move forward.

I’ve seen people review the Point One books in batches, comparing what worked and what didn’t. I even thought of doing that myself, but then I took a second to notice that it would be pretty unnecessary. What reason could I possibly have to review those? For instance, I read Jeff Parker’s Hulk as is and enjoy the hell out of it. So of course I would love Hulk #30.1. I’m already on board for the series. To me, it’s just another great issue. I’m not the intended audience for such a review.

But you know who would be good for this kind of thing? People who would read Hulk #30.1 despite never reading the 29 prior issues. Same for Avengers #12.1 and Wolverine #5.1 and so on. If this is Marvel’s attempt to bring in new readers, I need to get me a hold of some new readers! Namely, I need a crew from the DC side of the tracks. It was a long and tortuous search (fifteen seconds, give or take), but I figured on a perfect trio for this experiment.

First up is Esther Inglis-Arkell, the Clobberella of the 4thletter! New Justice Team. Since she and I have had shockingly minimal interaction over the years on this site and she stands firm on DC ground, Esther was ideal for this. Joining Esther is Was Taters, a friend to this site for all the work she regularly does for This Week in Panels. Lastly, I introduce my real life good buddy Andrew, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for the past five and a half years.

Before we get started, let’s hear from our guinea pigs.

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-You Made Me Read This!
-I made Esther read Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, and Jimmy Palmiotti’s violent Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank
-She made me read L Frank Baum, Eric Shanower, and Skottie Young’s sublime The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
-“Made” may be the wrong word for that last one.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!

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Okay, this bullshit has gone on long enough. I’ve been slacking and it’s inexcusable. This week I’m making up for it. Seven days in a week. Seven posts by me. I need this and I’m going to make sure that I get it don–zzzzzz

Huh?! Oh, right. ThWiP update. While I’m joined by the usual batch of helpers in David Brothers, Was Taters and Space Jawa, I also get first-timer Ryan Donovan joining in. He’s got a blog, too!

Alpha Flight #0.1
Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente and Ben Oliver

Avengers #13
Brian Michael Bendis and Chris Bachalo

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I remember when I first saw a link to this video years back, someone remarked that he had never felt like a wrestler believed in his own storyline as being real as Savage right here. I have to agree. The guy is just SO INTO what he’s saying that it’s nothing less than phenomenal.

“Macho Man” Randy Savage (Randy Poffo) is one of those guys who defined my childhood. When I first started watching wrestling, he was in his Macho King phase, accompanied by Queen Sherri. The story going on was that the champion, the Ultimate Warrior, didn’t consider him worthy of a title shot. Savage got his revenge by interfering in the Ultimate Warrior’s title defense against Sergeant Slaughter at the 1991 Royal Rumble (my first PPV) and costing Warrior the belt. This led to a feud that hit its end point at Wrestlemania 7 where the loser had to quit wrestling.

Savage lost but still found his way back via a fantastic feud with Jake “The Snake” Roberts months down the line. While his match with Warrior was the beginning of him stepping down from his prime, he remained entertaining for his remaining years in the company. He mostly did commentary, but had a unique spot as the top tier legend who hung back and allowed the others to do their thing, stepping back into the ring every once and a while, usually because he felt he had no choice. His feud with Crush was the story that had me the most enthralled during the lead-up to Wrestlemania X. Shortly after, he went to WCW and I saw very little of him for the rest of his in-ring career.

I did end up watching his work from before I started following wrestling and appreciated his MADNESS even more. The guy was one of the most unique and colorful among a pantheon of unique and colorful individuals. Despite being overshadowed by Hogan and Warrior, Savage was easily my favorite of the three. He felt like he was in their league, but didn’t rely on their “win button” gimmicks. He was a better worker and came off as an actual competitor rather than an invincible superhero.

What the three had in common was their penchant for insane ramblings. It’s something that’s sadly missing from the business these days, outside of R-Truth’s recent heel turn. Savage, though, was the tops. The guy had this deranged intensity that had you hanging on every word. The man had ten million ways of telling you that he was going to beat you in a wrestling match and they were all amazing.

He had his own identity that’s so distinctive that he doesn’t fit into its own archetype. Hogan tends to be synonymous with wrestling, but Randy Savage is only synonymous with Randy Savage. He’s so specific that to ape his style in any way sticks out like a sore thumb.

I could go on, but it’s late and I’m beginning to ramble. The psychedelic, beef jerky-peddling cowboy was entertaining as hell and I’ve always respected how he was one of the few 80’s wrestlers to hold onto his money responsibly and give himself the ability to earn a wonderful life in retirement, as long as it lasted. It’s a punch to the gut that he intended to make some kind of media comeback, having recently resurfaced in a video announcement of his new Mattel action figures and again for the recent WWE All-Stars video game. According to him, 2011 would be the year of the Macho Man.

Whether he was a face, a heel, a king, a groom, a champion, a spokesman, a commentator, an ill-fated rapper, a superhero talkshow host’s grandfather or a cartoon parody of the Champion of the Universe, Savage never failed to make me smile. He was larger than life and there will never, ever be another man like him. R.I.P.

(coincidentally, this is what the inside of my brain looks like)

–five manga for hollywood

–jacques tardi is pretty cool

–digital comics, censored comics, blah blah blah

-I wanted to keep with my new format of discussing two works or bits of art I liked, but I’m on the run eating today, in addition to flirting with burnout and depression simultaneously!

-Brief bites, like the old school ciphers of two or three weeks ago. New format returns next week. Fewer complaints, too, I hope.

-The promised album reviews will have to wait, too, ugh

-One bit of art I liked from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira:

-That coach is the greatest.

-Sometimes I go through phases of really believing that cape comics have a chance of evolving and sticking around, rather than navel-gazing their way into oblivion. And then I see the sales charts and find out that John Rozum and Frazer Irving’s Xombi shipped 12k and get depressed and bitter. Twelve thousand is pretty bad, particularly in today’s crappy comics market.

-I keep forgetting that the echo chamber that is the people I correspond with isn’t made of the traditional direct market consumer.

-Cape comics fans don’t want new, or diverse, or fresh, or even really interesting. They want what they have always had, but maybe slightly different from the last time. Maybe a new face, but not too new, in some old clothes, or an old face back from the dead and a little sexier.

-David Finch’s incredibly ugly, boring, and awful The Dark Knight came in at #4, and a couple books saw sales spikes for Reign of Doomsday.

-This is the comics industry we’ve built, and it’s gross.

–About as gross as this.

-Knowing how the sausage is made makes it harder to like comics, I think. My mistake.

-I think that the Mindless annocommentations for Batman Inc may be more entertaining than the comic they’re discussing.

-The death of Carlos Trillo is a bummer.

-Mainstream comics: I’m currently regularly buying Hellblazer, Heroes for Hire, Hulk, Power Man and Iron Fist, and Xombi.

-That’s my “pull list.”

-They’re consistently good, fairly free of stupid event-based shenanigans, and just tell good stories, month-in, mouth-out. Those are the most basic things that’ll get me to buy a comic.

-(The art on Heroes for Hire is frustratingly shaky, though.)

-I buy a lot of trades and digital books, too, but these are the only ones I buy on any sort of schedule beyond “Oh, is that out?”

-I realize that my Xombi complaint is pretty much “Why don’t people like the things I like” *throws teddy bear against the wall*, don’t get me wrong. But, that doesn’t make the fact that new books do not, and apparently will never, sell any less depressing.

-My policy is generally “Like what you like, because who cares,” but sometimes I slip.

-But it’s whatever. I’ll read something good this week (probably Hellblazer, which sells less than Xombi but has the benefit of being a Name comic in some way), forget about the fact that most comics fans don’t share my taste, and go back to gushing about how great whatever the last comic I read was.

-That comic’ll probably be Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

If David can post about music every week, and Gavin can talk about wrestling, then I figure I can bring up my own little causes from time to time.  This one is getting posted here so I don’t bother my friends with it for weeks.  Plus, it involves the news, and since the news is pretty much entertainment these days, we might as well include it.

The head of the International Monetary Fund, a man named Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a maid at the hotel where he was staying.  Naturally, everyone in the world braced themselves for a wash of idiocy, and not a moment too soon.  One infuriatingly stupid contributor to the flood was Ben Stein, with a post that there is no way in frozen hell I’m going to link to.  He publishes several defenses of Strauss-Kahn, some valid, some utterly moronic.  Many of them are based on classism and add up to tautologies – people in high positions shouldn’t be seriously suspected of sex crimes because if they were suspected of sex crimes they would never manage to be in high positions.  And around we go.

But here’s where we get to the most off-putting part of the argument.

What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I love and admire hotel maids. They have incredibly hard jobs and they do them uncomplainingly. I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman’s word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker’s is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it’s done.

This is why I love the age of the internet.  It’s possible that, back in the day, this paragraph might have passed under the radar.  Now, we’ve all seen pages and pages of internet commenters using just this form. 

“I like black people.  I think they’re great.  On the other hand . . . ”

“I’m not sexist, but . . . ”

“Some of my best friends are Jewish!  But I’ve had some terrible experiences with . . . ”

If you have to state that you don’t have a problem with a certain person, or group of people, you are moments away from behaving in a way that indicates exactly the opposite.  No one has to add a disclaimer when they’re making a statement that is honorable and accurate.  No one has to tell their audience that they don’t hate someone unless they’re about to do everything in their power to show that they do hate someone. 

Stein could have simply said that the woman’s statements should have been more thoroughly investigated before any action was taken.  Depending on the facts of the case that could be debated.  He didn’t say that.  He pointed out that the woman was a maid.  Then he made the disclaimer, lest anyone think he had a problem with the fact that she was a maid.  Then he listed several terrible things that maids did to him over the years, mentioned that some maids were “complete lunatics” and thieves.  He finished off by implying that the police should doubt the maid’s word.  Can anyone name a group of people who they ‘love and admire,’ but who they would talk about that way?

So I’m going to take away the disclaimers, and re-write the first half of the paragraph the way Ben Stein actually meant it.  “The woman was a maid.  I don’t like maids.  I don’t respect them or trust them.  I’m sure this woman isn’t any better than the rest.  I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me.”

The ‘few minutes of investigation’ is clear hyperbole, so we’ll leave that behind.  The Riker’s Island reference leads back to an earlier point  in which Stein said that Strauss-Kahn’s ‘lifetime of service’ to the IMF merited better than putting him in a common prison with other common prisoners who were suspected of awful things like . . . sexual assault. 

I don’t know who’s guilty or who’s innocent.  What I do know is that Stein’s piece is the most lightly-coded way of saying, “the rich, powerful, and connected deserve better justice than the poor and obscure,” that I’ve ever seen.

this was going to run elsewhere, but didn’t, so now it’s here instead. i’d have done it different if i wanted it up here, almost definitely (this reads stilted to me), but hey, i wrote it, so it’s probably worth reading.

The assembly line nature of mainstream comics has allowed for a few alchemical relationships between members of a comic’s creative team. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby turned Fantastic Four into one of the best loved franchises in comics, Frank Miller and Lynn Varley revolutionized how comics were printed in Ronin, and Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant made All-Star Superman and We3 among the most beautiful comics out. I’d like to add another team to that list: Mike Mignola, Richard Corben, and Dave Stewart, creators of today’s Hellboy: Being Human.

Pick your poison: Mignola, Corben, or Stewart. Stewart is one of the best colorists in the business, an Eisner winner, and a guy you can count on to make any comic book better just by showing up. Mike Mignola is one of the best success stories in comics, having spun off a silly idea he had once into two of the best series in comics and a couple of solid movies. And Richard Corben… he’s been in the game for over forty years, knocking out classic comic after classic comic. Together, you’ve got a powerhouse team that can do anything. "Anything," in this case, is "some of the best Hellboy stories ever."

The team has collaborated on Hellboy on five, six with the release of Being Human, separate occasions. The first time was 2006’s Hellboy: Makoma, or, A Tale Told by a Mummy in the New York City Explorers’ Club on August 16, 1993. This story took Hellboy to Africa and, in the cultural tourism that has made Hellboy such a fascinating series, through African folklore. In The Crooked Man, Hellboy takes a trip to West Virginia for a taste of good old fashioned Appalachian horror. The Bride of Hell sent Hellboy to France, and the flawless Hellboy In Mexico (Or, a Drunken Blur) sent Hellboy to (wait for it) Mexico (read our previous coverage of that classic here). Finally, Double Feature of Evil sent Hellboy to haunted houses and murky museums.

The easiest way to show why Mignola, Corben, and Stewart are so special is to spotlight their best work: Hellboy in Mexico. As far as I’m concerned, this was the best single issue of any comic released in 2010. It is, in essence, every Hellboy story. Hellboy‘s casual sense of humor, big action, folkloric inspiration, intense attention paid to atmosphere, and heartbreaking sadness are all in effect here. Mignola structured the tale as something Hellboy was telling his partner Abe Sapien, giving it a very personal and conversational feel. This isn’t someone recounting a happy time in their life. This is a bad memory and a source of emotional trauma for Hellboy.

Corben and Stewart (and letterer Clem Robins) handle the art chores, and the results are predictably fantastic. Corben’s Hellboy is straight out of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, with a bobbly, goofy looking head and jaw and a brawny physique. His monsters are even creepier, with their desiccated skin, disgusting claws, and missing chunks. The thick, doughy figures have real weight, and are pleasingly exaggerated.

Dave Stewart gets a chance to do some interesting rendering, thanks to Corben’s detailed pencils. Hellboy gains definition that he doesn’t have under Mignola or Duncan Fegredo’s pen, making for an entirely different reading experience. Mignola and Fegredo created a world littered with shadows and gloom for Hellboy to stride through. Stewart and Corben pull Hellboy into the realm of pop comics, thanks to Hellboy’s bright red skin tone contrasting with the muted, dusty palette of Hellboy in Mexico.

In short, Hellboy in Mexico is what comics are supposed to look like: a peek into another incredible world. It’s incredible, and this week, the team is back together for another shot.

Hellboy: Being Human features Roger, the homunculus Hellboy met fairly early in the run of Hellboy stories, on his first field mission. Here’s the solicit text, courtesy of Dark Horse:

A horrible witch and her zombie servant host a dinner party for a family of corpses, and Hellboy and Roger turn up to blast them all back to hell in this team-up story from Roger’s early days at the B.P.R.D.

This one’s a simple, personal tale of horror, showing us an early glimpse at how Roger and Hellboy grew to become friends and how hate can twist a life into an ugly mess. Being Human refers to Hellboy, Roger, and the witch who menaces them. What’s it mean to be human? Do you have to be homo sapiens, or is it something more?

Check out the preview below.

-Review show!
-We talk about what Esther bought.
-We talk about what I read, but didn’t buy.
-Comics!
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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It’s the Free Comic Book Day edition of ThWiP! Which is good, since I didn’t really get too many books on Wednesday and need some padding. I did end up picking up Journey Into Mystery, which I’m enjoying the hell out of. The adventures of a now-young Loki will always trump the adventures of a now-young Tony Stark. Goddamn 90’s comics.

I’m joined by my usual folks, David Brothers, Was Taters and Space Jawa. As mentioned, last week’s FCBD stuff is being used here. At least, the stuff I got around to reading through. The Inspector Gadget one didn’t do much to wow (wowsers?) me and it suffers from one hell of a editing mistake on the second page. In a big two-page spread, what should be the dialogue between Gadget and Penny in the middle of the spread is instead being said by a stack of luggage on the far right of the image. How did nobody prevent this?

New Avengers is the first panel in a while that I’ve posted where it’s more about, “Look how bad this is.” The modern plot is interesting enough for the five pages we get an issue, but the Chaykin-drawn “Bendis decides to make his own Agents of Atlas lineup” segments are the worst. I’d drop this book if I thought this was going to be a new status quo for the series.

Atomic Robo FCBD
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener and others

Batgirl #21
Bryan Q. Miller and Dustin Nguyen

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Spoiiiiiiiiiiilers.

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