Number three is a little shorter than numbers one and two due to unavoidable technical difficulties (Thanks, Garageband!). However, we hit the ground running with couple of interesting conversations.

-We talk about the honor and nobility, or lack thereof, of certain types of supervillains. This leads to a conversation about why certain acts by villains cause fans to get worked up.
-What’s the secret connection between Megan Fox and Chuck Dixon? What does Wonder Woman have to do with torture? I don’t know, but I sure do make an amazingly ill-advised comparison between two of these!
-We get down to the nitty-gritty after (not much of a) smooth segue that and discuss the sex lives of two heroes: Connor Hawke and Wolverine.
-Having sex in front of your mom– cool or uncool?
-Guess which one hooked up with a ghost. Guess which one has a big ol’ pile of dead girlfriends.

As ever, you can listen or download to the podcast here on 4l!, subscribe to the podcast-specific RSS feed, or even subscribe on iTunes. If you dig us, review us!

It was only yesterday when Nick Fury got Dr. Doom to explain his behind-the-scenes role in Ultimates 3 and how it led to what’s going on in Ultimatum. Then Wolverine and Kitty Pryde hung out because there’s nothing important going on anywhere at the moment.

Let’s finish with that scene, then take a trip to Magneto’s place for punch and pie.

In case you’re wondering what the hell Magneto and Sabretooth are talking about, here, knock yourself out. The very fact that this song exists boggles my mind to this day.

And you see that final Hawkeye panel? In the original, he says, “That’s gonna leave a mark.” NO IT WON’T. THAT IS SABRETOOTH.

Tomorrow, ManiacClown and I will close out yet another week. It leads to a legitimately badass final page, other than how Storm looks like some kind of alien cripple doing an interpretive dance. You’ll know it when you see it.

Day Seven!

As we last left our Ultimate heroes, Yellowjacket bit off the Blob’s head out of revenge and Wolverine found Nightcrawler lying amongst the poo-gas. Now we continue with the X-Men and see what Thor and Captain America are up to.

Those X-Men sure don’t give a shit about the millions of other people who died. Muties are so elitist. Yeah, I said it.

Thanks to ManiacClown for the usual assistance. I really only mention his name and bold it out out of habit these days. Maniac Clown, dudes.

Tomorrow we’ll get more Thor fun as well as Multiple Man.

Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

Yesterday saw various baseball games called off due to rain. Plus Human Torch and his dad drowned. Hey, if it means I don’t have to look at Johnny Storm’s ugly hair anymore, I’m for it.

Now, some more devastation.

ManiacClown was too busy with real-life work to help out, but he did insist on making a JFK Jr. joke in terms of Angel flying underwater. Not cool, man. Not cool. Though, to be fair, I was planning on referring to Ultimatum’s disaster as “9/11 and Katrina have a baby”.

Tomorrow it’s all about Reed and Sue with a little bit of Namor tossed in there for you.

Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

Yesterday was literally the calm before the storm, as we got to briefly check in with the Fantastic Four, the Ultimates, as well as Spider-Man and his amazing friends. You know, that’s pretty rare for a Loeb comic. We got FIVE single pages without the sudden, blatant two-page spread. It’s a start.

Now let’s push forward.

Huh. I didn’t intend this, but if you look at those thumbnails, it looks like Thor has suddenly transformed into a big, bald guy.

Thanks to ManiacClown. The second page was more or less his baby. Now it’s stuck in my head.

Tomorrow it’s time for the tragedy to begin. I mean tragedy in terms of the story. I mean… You know what I mean!

Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

The weekend of chunky guys dressed like Colossus and hot women dressed as Slave Leia has come to an end. I myself had a great time, spent with hermanos from this very site and a whole bunch of guys from Funnybook Babylon. Sadly, Thomas “Wanderer” Wilde deemed himself “too broke” to consider joining us and Hoatzin would have probably involved a gigantic plane ticket paid in rare diamonds, since he’s from Europe. I don’t know. I really have no grasp on how that type of thing works. Besides, Hoatzin seems to have vanished from our planet. What happened to that guy?

This one movie sent the other movie into space.

Day One

Last year I got to New York the day before the con started, which allowed me enough rest and whatnot. This year I had to come in the first day of the event and kill time until David Uzumeri came in from Canada, since he was in charge of dealing with the hotel. I walked straight from the Port Authority bus terminal to the Javits Center, which tired me the hell out.

After getting my swanktastical press pass, I met up with hermanos and Joseph of FBB. They were at a panel starting up that was a screening for a new Will Eisner documentary. Since I was tired from all that walking, I decided to stick around and watch it. I found it interesting in the sense that I honestly didn’t know all that much about Eisner, which is almost a sin if you’re a comic fan. The four of us (David U. showed up towards the end) mostly agreed that while it had some fantastic stuff in there, such as taped conversations between Eisner and guys like Kirby, the sum of it was incredibly dry.

Shortly after, we went to the panel on online journalism, with guys from Newsarama and CBR there. It wasn’t as good as the comic blogging panel from last year and mostly focused on arguing over criticism vs. getting press releases. Once that was done with, I was rested up enough to do some wandering.

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Seeing as how Hoatzin and hermanos have been getting so much attention for the criticism pile-on for Greg Land in light of him being the sour milk in the bowl of X-Men cereal… whoa! I’m not sure how I feel about that metaphor.

Anyway, I too have made a discovery about Mr. Land. I found an old sketch of Land’s from Ultimate Fantastic Four and noticed it looked a bit off. There’s something strangely familiar about this scene.

Maybe I’m just looking at it too hard. I don’t know.

By the way, Solenna updated her Peabody Award winning Greg Land/X-Men #500 gif. Good for her.

Marvel’s panel on the X-Books at Wizard World Los Angeles just ended. Check here for Newsarama’s coverage, here for CBR’s. The most interesting news? Matt Fraction is joining Ed Brubaker on Uncanny X-Men as co-writer starting with issue 500, with rotating art duties by the Dodsons and Greg Land.

Wow. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Fraction and Brubaker are two great tastes that taste great together, and the Dodsons are fine artists, but Greg Land? Seriously? Haven’t people caught on to his plagiarizing ways yet? Why is he on a comic that matters? He’s going to make that book annoying to read at best, unreadable at worst. Just look at the cover for issue 500 alone:

Let’s play “Spot the Ripoffs”!

– Warpath, Cyclops and the guy behind Cyclops have exactly the same body. Land has used it at least once before.
– Tattooed guy on the left and Colossus have exactly the same body.
– Wolverine and long-haired shouting man in the background on the right have exactly the same body, only Wolverine’s head is different. Land has used it at least once before. I distinctly recall Ultimate Namor in this pose as well, but I don’t have the relevant issue at hand.
– Land has used Cannonball’s body at least once before.
– Land has used Rogue (is that Rogue?)’s body at least once before.
– Land has used Storm’s body at least once before.
– Land has used Pixie’s body at least once before. It also happens to be the one with that ridiculous porn face made immortal by Ultimate Scarlet Witch. Very appropriate for a sixteen year old girl!

This is from spending maybe five minutes looking at this image and skimming through four issues of Ultimate Power. I could probably find a lot more if I spent effort on this. Maybe I’d even find the photographs he traced these from. Come on now. This is absolutely ridiculous. Why can’t we have an artist that actually draws?

I really like comics. Sequential art is possibly my favorite medium. But unfortunately not all comics are good and sometimes it’s necessary to show some tough love. Occasionally one must criticize books that fail at their intended goal and examine what precisely went wrong, for the sake of comics, because comics should be good. The recently completed White Tiger, written by Tamora Pierce and Timothy Liebe and drawn by Phil Briones and later Al Rio and Ronaldo Silva, happens to be one of those books.

Although it’s a niche book, I feel it deserves closer examination for a variety of reasons. It’s a spinoff of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s fantastic definitive run on Daredevil. It’s a comic about a legacy character. It’s a comic about a female character. It’s a comic about an ethnic character. It’s a comic by a popular novelist (and her husband) doing their first comics work. It’s also a comic that, so far, has done very badly in sales, dropping from 24,663 copies for issue #1 to 13,621 copies for issue #5.

Although stellar sales figures shouldn’t be expected from a niche book by an unproven creative team, the fact that the book shedded over ten thousand readers in the course of issues 1 to 5 means people just plain aren’t liking it. In an industry where new characters, even legacy characters, are hard to push and both ethnic and female characters are rare, it’s sad to see a book about a new ethnic superheroine fail so badly. But why did the book fail? After reading it, I have come to a conclusion: It’s a bad comic book, in just about every way. Let’s review. Bear with me: This will be long. Read the rest of this entry �

Superhero vs. superhero. Over the past couple years, it’s almost become the new status quo in the Marvel Universe and still gets a good amount of play in DC here and there. Whether it’s hatred, misunderstanding, bureaucracy or mind-control, it’s everywhere. With things like Daredevil vs. Punisher, Civil War, World War Hulk and pretty much any inter-dimensional crossover like Marvel vs. DC, JLA/Avengers and Captain Atom: Armageddon there are many miniseries based on the simple idea of our favorite heroes duking it out with each other.

It makes sense. There’s a certain feeling of bragging rights and uncertainty that comes from these fights. If there’s a story about Superman fighting Parasite, then there isn’t much mystery. We know Superman is going to come out the winner because Superman is our heroic protagonist. But toss him in against another heroic protagonist like Captain Marvel, Martian Manhunter or Green Lantern (on a good day) and we don’t know what to expect.

Originally conceived as an Olympic tie-in until the US pulled out of the Moscow Olympics, the Contest of Champions was not only the first hero-on-hero miniseries, but it was the first big crossover miniseries. This is the comic that would set the trend for Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars. It was only three issues and normal-sized, but I’m sure at the time it seemed really epic. Even now, I’d say the first issue had that feeling. I can only imagine what it would be like back in the 80’s to see all these superheroes together in the same room.

The writing credits go to Mark Gruenwald, Bill Mantlo and Steven Grant with Romita Jr. doing the art. So it’s got that going for it.

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