And so it appears in the preview of Battle For The Cowl #2. . . oooops, spoilers already . . .

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Along with my regular copy of Superman/Batman, which was worth the three dollars I paid for it the moment I hit the page in which Superman, shrunken down to nanite-size, starts a journal about how alone he is but how he won’t give up hope, and completely subverts his own epic by spelling ‘diary’ as ‘dairy’, I picked up The Flash: Rebirth, on a whim.  After some very close reading of the lengthy exposition speech bubbles, I still have a few questions.

Flash fans, this is your chance to shine.

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We’re almost done with yet another week of this awful Morrison mind-scramble crap. God, what a hack. Between this and his Seven Soldiers run, I don’t even get why the man gets any work. Did you even read his New X-Men run a few years back? The guy who followed him was SOOOO much better.

But enough about that. Yesterday’s update saw some incomprehensible garbage involving Rubik’s Cubes and Metron as a tard. I don’t know, Final Crisis sucks. Let’s move forward!

As always, thanks to david “hermanos” brothers for helping me with this. He wanted me to remind you that a new Seaguy miniseries comes out today. Make sure to stay far away from that tripe. The last one was bad enough. Fucking Morrison.

We’re almost done with this week. Tomorrow, we get Darkseid at a rave and a guy with a bunch of bubble monitor things wrapped around his head. You can see a preview here.

Who knew? The Silver Age Comics blog has the lowdown.

Supergirl is, by a wide margin, the most important female character in comics during the Silver Age. Only Wonder Woman even has an argument, and given the wretched state of that feature during the 1960s, I don’t think many people will make the case.

Seems like it should be more of a big deal, doesn’t it?

And now for something completely different.

DC has just announced a new weekly.  It’ll be oversized, sixteen pages, and feature one-page stories about all kinds of different DCU characters.  There will be the typical characters like Batman and Superman but Wednesday Comics, the title of the weekly, will also bring all of DC’s obscure characters into the limelight.

The thing about me is I hate and fear change.  I’m also not a fan of disorder, and I know these things won’t fit in my long-boxes.  And yet, I cannot resist this.  Standalone stories.  Random characters.  I’m there.

You?

Dwayne McDuffie: I wrote a scene set at their gravesite that I recently had to quickly rewrite into something not very good.

Matthew Murray: Do you actually enjoy writing JLA? It just seems to be constant editorial rewrites and bad art.

McDuffie: No, I don’t.

To be honest, I wouldn’t like writing JLA either if I was paired up with an artist with zero storytelling skills, multiple tie-ins and interruptions due to crossovers or just editorial mandate (no one but Dan Jurgens cares about Tangent Comics, DC), and having to clean up Brad “Write First, Think Later” Meltzer’s crappy subplots.

I think back to this, back when I was excited, and this, when the shine first started wearing off, and then this, coming a year later, in which I don’t even want to read a series I was hyped for and features characters I love because I know it’s going to be subpar.

I said it in 2007:

Step 1: Hire a quality writer, one known for doing right by your characters.
Step 2: Pair him up with a T&A artist or two, neither of whom are known for their ability to convey emotions beyond Angry, Shocked, and Aroused.
Step 3: Hamstring the writer by making him tie into your crappy stories that have nothing to do with the book he’s writing.

Turns out I was right.

Well done, DC Comics.

(thread on McDuffie’s forum here, via the new scans daily)

Reading about Oracle always tangles me up in logistical questions.  Does second-life work like that?  Can a guy really open up a wall in a game?  When a woman screams in real life, does it make any sense at all that her avatar starts screaming, too?  Because I think she would be too busy screaming to tell her character to scream.  Then again, maybe it’s pre-programmed that they scream under certain circumstances.

And how does one explode a human head, anyway?  I first thought it would happen with an explosive device, but that couldn’t happen unless said device were pre-planted in said head.  The second idea was heating up the liquid inside the skull with microwaves, but it seems like that would get the excess liquid to bubble out the eyes and nasal cavities.  Unless it happened fast enough to heat the liquid instantly, which brings us back to an explosive device.

While I may not be much of a second-lifer or skull-exploder, I do know my Babsology, and more importantly, my superheroes.  The series is called The Cure.  The first issue chronicles the villain’s desperate, yet evil, attempts to save his desperately ill daughter.  It also makes much of the hero’s misery over her grievous injury.  Babs is going to have to choose whether to heal the girl or heal herself.  Being a hero, she’s going to heal the girl.  There is a way that set-ups like these go.  In fact, this is the way that this set-up has already gone in Birds of Prey.

And so, of course, I’m hoping it goes the other way.  Part of this is because of my shameless bias for Batgirl Babs.  Part of it – let’s say that I’ve had it up to here with stories that come complete with forgone conclusions.  My heart drops a bit each time I see summaries that go along the lines of:  “Will Batman kill the Joker this time?”  “Is this the end for Lois and Clark?”  “Is Batman dead?”  The answer is always ‘no.’  Always.  Without exception.  We know it the moment we pick up the solicit.

This time, I’m hoping for a surprise.

I just saw the preview for Justice League 31 on the IGN website, and something in it really bothered me.  This something has been bothering me for a while in comics.

Dinah decks Ollie, her husband, because he embarrassed her.  It isn’t playful roughhousing, or a light smack on the shoulder, or even a slap.  She punches him, and he gets up and says that he deserved it.  Then Hal Jordan, Ollie’s friend, says that he deserved a lot more than that.  Then they go on with the discussion.

I. 

That.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Let’s run that the other way.  Ollie comes up to Dinah and punches her in the face hard enough that she’s knocked to the ground.  When she gets up, he tells her that he punched her because she’s his wife and she embarrassed him.  Do you think there is a chance in hell that she’d agree?  Or that her friends would also agree and the discussion would go on?  No.  Ollie would go the way of Hank Pym.  He’d get thrown out, beaten up, and his character would be marked as a disgrace for the foreseeable future.

This isn’t Batman and Catwoman fighting because they’re on different sides of the law.  It isn’t the friendly wrestling matches, or even the full-on fights that we see between vigilantes when things get heated.  This is one spouse, in this case the more highly trained martial artist, beating another spouse for not toeing the line.  This has happened before with Ollie and Dinah.  This is not okay.  This needs to stop.

During the panels of a Con, there is often a tug-of-war going on between panelists and attendees. The attendees ask question after question, trying to pull any possible information out of comics publishers, while the publishers bob and weave, trying to – all right, I’ve gotten a dodge ball metaphor in my tug-of-war metaphor, but the point is, the panelists try to keep as much information to themselves as possible.

And this year no one had to work as hard to duck the fast-flying continuity questions as Ian Sattler, the senior story editor at DC. Even at the sparsely attended Sunday Conversation panel, trying to get fans to stop asking continuity questions was like trying to pry a British Bulldog off a burglar’s ankle. Read the rest of this entry �

Azrael is the member of the Batsquad I know least about.  He was long gone, continuity-wise, by the time I started reading comics.  The first issue of the new Azrael: Death’s Dark Knight didn’t make me regret that one bit.

It’s not that the book is bad.  It’s just that I don’t care for Azrael.  I can’t exactly pin down why.  The guy’s self-righteous, yes, but self-righteousness is Batman’s stock in trade.  And yes, he does go crazy and try to kill people pretty regularly, but Superman does that as well.  Azrael actually succeeds in killing people, but of course, that’s what the Secret Six do and I love them.  That’s what back-from-the-dead Jason Todd does, and I like him.

That’s right.  Old Azrael ranks below Jason Todd in the Bat hierarchy. 

Azrael fans: What, if any, selling points does this guy have?