What’s on tap for Fourcast! #5?

-A special conversation about how Jack Kirby would’ve done the Transformers
-Our theme music is still 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental
-Special guest podcaster, Jeff Lester of Savage Critic(s)
-We debut a new segment called You Made Me Read This! I got Esther to read the first hardcover of Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo’s Fantastic Four. Esther didn’t like it for what, in hindsight, is a very good reason.
-Our conversation about FF leads into a conversation about the different approaches DC and Marvel take.
-And… scene.

This one was a lot of fun, and I’m actually a little scared of which book I’m going to have to read. I’m pretty sure she mentioned this book… and goodness, have mercy! 🙁

Some Fourcast! notes–
-We’ve got one more podcast next week (07/06), also guest-starring Jeff Lester, and then we’re taking off the week of 07/13 off. We should be back in business the week of 07/20 with a pre-San Diego Comic-con show.
-Fans of the Character Continuity Clash Comics/Continuity Off/Comics Are Seriously Dumb/whatever will really like the 07/06 cast, I’m, betting. Tell your friends.
-Esther and I are both planning on attending SDCC, and we may end up doing a show from the show, so to speak.
-We’ve got real microphones! You won’t hear them on this podcast, or next week’s, but we’ll be using them going forward. I’ve got high hopes, as it’ll make everything from recording to editing much easier.
-We hit 1000 listens the other day. You guys rule.

The usual podcast stuff:
You can subscribe via podcast-specific RSS feed, site-wide RSS feed, or iTunes. Review us if you like us, review us if you hate us, and call us dumb down in the comments.

There’s really something to be said for educational comics.

Not genuinely educational ones (perish the thought), but ones that guide the inexperienced reader through the labyrinth of nuttiness that was the golden and silver ages of DC comics. 

Batman: The Brave and the Bold, is a comic aimed at kids, just like many comics were during the forties through the seventies.  This makes it a particularly good place to unearth all of those silly, funny, and imaginative characters that populated the comics world back when the medium was light-hearted, episodic, and frankly ridiculous.

The series also serves as a guide for those of us who are new to comics, and looking for something other than wikipedia to introduce us to older characters.  Each team-up is a fun, fast way to learn about some ancient character from a source that doesn’t expect any knowledge of the reader.  So you get an explanation of each character’s backstory, motivation, and abilities.

It’s a fun way to catch up on tone and continuity of long-lost characters, and I recommend it to anyone who isn’t willing to page through forty years worth of comics to find out what they might have missed in the old days.

As usual, Jog did it better than I was going to:

Almost every ‘superhero’ page in this comic is like that, often crashing across double spreads for maximum exhibitionism. It’s not enough for Batwoman to take on a gang of villains; inset panels must transform into red-tinted lightning bolts raining from the sky. Perversely, it’s not a quick read at all, since these vainglorious layout do everything to grab your attention as soon as you turn the page and force you to linger on their contours, even as, say, a panel of Batwoman getting into costume is shaped as an arrow, guiding you to the next image in a way that draws screaming attention to the obvious act of reading in sequence.

I may have some thoughts later, but I enjoyed Batwoman’s first issue.

We’ve got a surprisingly DC-centric Fourcast! this time around. Highlights:

-We’ve got theme music! It’s 6th Sense’s 4 A.M. instrumental. It’s licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. 6th Sense / CC BY-NC 3.0. I dig his work, so it was a treat to find “It’s a 6th Sense Beat Yo!!” on the Free Music Archive. 6th Sense is a great producer. I play about 30-some seconds after the intro and before we get into it, and then the full track at the end of the cast as an outro. Hope you dig it!
-We get right into a discussion of Brave and the Bold #24, courtesy of DC Comics, Matt Wayne, and Howard Porter. We both enjoyed it, though I’m not sure that’s clear on my part, and we both had a few misgivings about Porter’s art.
-A brief digression into the relationship between Static and Blue Beetle. Here’s the image in question, from Heroes #4, written by Matt Wayne, drawn by Chriscross:

It’s a good series, I hope DC reprints it asap.
-Michael Johnson, Mike Green, and Francis Manapul’s Superman/Batman #61? That’s a fun comic right there. The Mash-up story has been really dumb, but very fun, and between Penguello and Brainycat, has some awesome designs.

-We get into our Continuity-Off at the end. Esther explains Supergirl’s past boy/girl/horsefriends, while I break down Gambit’s tortured past. Or is that torturous? I can’t tell sometimes.

We’ll be back in a week with the beginning of a DC vs Marvel knock-down, drag-out, fight to the death.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being right.  Oh, the smugness.  Oh, the false sense of righteousness.

I have said, repeatedly, that Superman/Batman is a great comic.

And in issue #61, I was proven right, yet again.  Fantastic art by Francis Manapul, a well-written story by Michael Green and Mike Johnson, a ton of in-jokes, a surprising yet logical conclusion, and on top of all that?

Read the rest of this entry �

This is… This… I don’t know. It just is and I made it.

With apologies to Jack Kirby and Dan Walsh.

When you ask a certain type of person what kind of comics they like; well, first they’ll correct you.  They will say ‘graphic novels.’  And then they will tell you that they don’t have one specific interest, they just like high-quality graphic novels.

While I can admire a search for the best quality products of a medium that you like, I’ve always felt a certain contemptuous pity for those people.  Really?  Just ‘high-quality’?  Just ‘good’?  Just ‘insightful’?  These people are either liars, or are the stunted, gnarled, embittered kind of jerks who will tell you that they only listen to classical music and NPR.  Sure, their taste is unquestionable and their likes and dislikes as pure as the driven snow, but – really?  They have no guilty pleasures?  No specific areas of interest?  No morbid curiosity?  No nostalgic favorites or fannish loves or goofy objects of affection?  It just seems so flavorless and bland.

And I can say this because I without a doubt know that those people, when I tell them I like the Batsquad and the Arrows and have an irrational prejudice against Marvel, pity me just as much.

As well they might.  I’m a character-based-fan.  That?  Is like attending a Rolling Stones concert, making it backstage, and spending the whole time talking about your favorite member of the Monkees.

There are many humiliations to being a character-based-fan.  Start out with the fact that, prestige-wise, you are the lowest rung of the ladder (and considering you’re already into comics, that’s a really low ladder to begin with).  Add to that that artist-based-fans can flit to one book or another, ignoring all plot and dialogue and rhapsodizing about a page layout, and writer-based-fans can camp out for a story-arc or two before moving on.  A character-based fan is pretty much stuck in a book forever.  We’re like those frogs who get put in cold water, and then don’t jump out when it’s heated up, boiling ourselves to death.  But at least the frogs go quietly.  Character-based-fans are the ones at Cons, arguing with a panel of uncomfortable comics-professionals about how our character would never do that, while the audience hisses at us.

We’re the idiots who get into ‘who would win in a fight’ arguments and talk about the logistics of what Batman can carry around in his utility belt, and complain about how terrible a comic is while they’re buying it.

Still better than yakking about the artistic merits of Lost Girls, though.

Well, it’s finally happened.  I’ve finally bought Booster Gold.

Sure, many of my friends told me that it was well-written, fun, heartfelt, not too burdened with mega-continuity, and featured a lot of creative adventures.  It was, in short, exactly the book I said I wanted to be reading.  Except I wasn’t reading it.  Because this is something that you should know about me.

I hate and fear change.

Yes, you can take that into account any time I make another grumpy-old-lady ‘what are comics these days coming to,’ entry.

I got into Batman because I saw it as a child, and then my reading habits slowly expanded, usually whenever Batman teamed up with another character.  Picture me as one of those neolithic hunter-gatherer groups, the ones that tended to move whenever the sea level dropped and new land was exposed.  I’m slowly traveling through the comics world, moving whenever a book’s profits drop, exposing some previously undiscovered link with Batman that causes a team-up.  I wandered over the isthumus of Batman to the new Blue Beetle series, and when it was cancelled and became a back-up for Booster Gold, (and this issue of Booster has a Batman appearance that I am sure is no coincidence), I followed it to this series.

Which involves time-travel, saving Batman from never existing, showboating, a smart-mouth sidekick, and an idiot savant with a mentor called ‘Rip Hunter.’  Ah, yes.  This is a comic.

And this is the best time to be a comic fan.  The honeymoon period.  When you don’t worry about artists, writers, or continuity.  You have a character you love, a story you’re interested in, and a nice little stock of back-issues to wade around in.  Life is good.

A lot is made of how, in comics, readers can/will/are supposed to identify with certain characters.

I’ve talked a lot about how, when I was a kid watching Batman: The Animated Series, Batgirl was my favorite character.  A girl, running around, having adventures, kicking ass, taking names and sassing Robin was just about the coolest thing little Esther had ever seen.  And while I can’t deny that I feel a certain personal investment in Barbara Gordon, exulting in her triumphs and enduring her failures, I don’t think that’s the same as identifying with her.  Most of the characters in the Batverse are too perfect to identify with.

Identification also depends a great deal on the reader as well as the character.  When you were a kid you might feel a kinship with a fictional child, but when you’re an adult, often you look at the same character and think, “What a brat.”

Have you ever felt a strong connection between yourself and a comics character?  And if so, does the connection endure, or has it faded?

Newsarama has DC’s advance solicits for September up, and there’s a couple of interesting bits.

THE WEB #1
Written by Angela Robinson; co-feature written by John Rozum
Art by Roger Robinson & Hilary Barta;co-feature art by Tom Derenick & Bill Sienkiewicz
Cover by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau
Variant sketch cover by JG Jones
Spinning out of August’s “Red Circle” event from superstar writer J. Michael Straczynski comes the new ongoing adventures of the selfish rich-boy hero the Web, and the mysterious-undying Hangman. Writer/director Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) and artist Roger Robinson (BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS) spin the tales of The Web, a man who has only recently come to understand the burden of true heroism. He’s fighting crime on his own terms, and for his first mission he’s hunting down the men responsible for killing his brother!

TEEN TITANS #75
Written by Felicia D. Henderson; co-feature written by Sean McKeever
Art by Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson; co-feature art by Yildiray Cinar & Júlio Ferreira
Cover by Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson
Variant cover by Andy Clarke
Come celebrate our gala 75th issue with an all-star cast of Titans past and present! Joining this issue for the extravaganza is new ongoing writer Felicia D. Henderson, a co-executive producer on TV’s hit show Fringe! Don’t miss this start to a fresh new take on DC’s premier teen team!

No, the interesting bit is not the annoyingly vague sell copy. “Our hero has a mission! Our team has a fresh new take, which is unlike the other new takes we’ve had over the past four years! Fringe! Comics!”

Felicia D Henderson and Angela Robinson are both black women. Felicia Henderson, in particular, gets a whole gang of goodwill from me just because she wrote for Fresh Prince, Family Matters, and, to a lesser extent, Moesha.

My question is– is this the first time Marvel or DC have employed two black female writers? Is it the first time they’ve employed one? Comics historians, do your duty.

(The rest of the solicits are snoozles.)