I wrote up this short piece on how JT Krul and Geraldo Borges’s Rise of Arsenal got the way heroin works wrong. While proofing before posting, I realized that I didn’t care enough to post it. Rise of Arsenal got everything you can get about heroin wrong, including how to freebase and the effects of the drug. It’s lazy and stupid and pointless. My post was going to be called “Rise of Arsenal: Wynken, Blynken, and On the Nod” which is some kind of perfect storm of stupid and amazing, but no–not worth it. Rise of Arsenal is lazy and stupid and doesn’t even have a villain. There’s no conflict beyond “Will Roy Harper shoot up?” I can’t even get mad about it.

Instead, here’s something I posted three years ago. I think it still applies.

Read good comics instead of getting mad about bad ones.

And I love it.

The best thing to emerge from Blackest Night? Read the rest of this entry �

Anyone who has picked up a DC book in the last few weeks has seen the preview for the upcoming Green Arrow series.  It’s technically perfect.

A woman runs alone at night through a moodily-lit, nearly-deserted city.  A gang of men follow her.  They’re wearing outfits that wouldn’t mark them as especially threatening in real life, but in comics are basically thug suits – black leather jackets and boots, with patches of their hair shaved.  This type has been causing trouble for women in moodily-lit cities since the thirties, and will probably continue causing trouble for them in the twenty-second century.

The woman keeps running, coming to a wooded area.  The men behind her shout crude, insinuating, but PG-rated threats, their intent unmistakable.  Eventually one of them catches her.  Escape is impossible.  All is lost.

Suddenly, something knocks him off of her!  A voice calls out in the darkness.  Enter the hero.

Like I said, the technical perfection of the sequence is obvious.  There is even some subtle detail work that clues the reader in on the state of things in the city.  For example, the woman being chased runs right past a police station without even trying to go in.  Clearly, the law isn’t being enforced in that city.

Don’t even pretend that that sequence, older by far than comic books, doesn’t draw in readers.  It hasn’t stuck around because it’s useless.  It’s a situation that is recognizable, horrible, and yet comforting, because any reader knows that it’s a set up for the hero’s entrance.  There isn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that the hero will make an entrance.  It’s a set up for an iconic hero, and DC does well with iconic heroes.

The trouble is, it’s the set up for any hero.  Any hero at all.  You could paint over Green Arrow on the first splash page and no one would be the wiser.  As previews go, this one is giving us a hero, but it isn’t giving us any hero in particular.

Some readers will have noticed that I’ve been struggling with the Green Arrow book for the past . . . ever.  I think that if I could just accept that the book isn’t ever going to go in the direction I hoped it had, Robin Hood and his Merry C0-Heroes, I might just enjoy the solitary Oliver Queen in his urban forest.  At the same time, throwing away every other Arrow in for this guy, who is interchangeable with any other hero in the DCU, it seems like a bad trade.

Click ’em if you got ’em.

Read the rest of this entry �

Over at Rich Johnston’s blog, some b-team scrub named Ryan Mullenix wrote up a post in response to Chris Sims’s piece on the racial politics of DC’s current style. Sims’s piece was good, and I liked seeing frank discussion of racial issues on a big-name site. Mullenix’s piece… well.

I did it better a year and a half ago.

I’ve got a gang of problems with the piece. There’s no citations, no context, nothing that explains what was going on in the books, no creative teams, no historical context, and nothing worthy of examination. It’s a loose collection of anecdotes piggybacking on a pretty good piece in an attempt to troll for hits. It’s lowest common denominator work at best, and cynical hit-whoring at worst. If you can’t even spell somebody’s name right… well, the craft shows.

These lists do no one any favors. All they do is arm people for crappy, hysterical battles where both sides are too busy shouting to do any listening or learning. “Well CASSANDRA CAIN is ASIATIC!” You couldn’t get any more specific than that, man? What’s more, you couldn’t find something better than some outdated way to say “asian?” Is Cass Cain a member of the Nation of Gods and Earths? You couldn’t take the time to figure out which type of Latino Kyle Rayner is? You couldn’t spell Teth-Adam correctly?

Johnston says that Mullenix “seems to find a striking overall theme.” I think he found the exact sort of thing that makes talking race online such a pain in the neck. I think he found a surefire, cynical, and effective way to log some fat hits for advertisers. I think that he didn’t say anything worth reading. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m wrong.

But people who don’t know anything should speak when spoken to.

* finally, I’m not sure I understand either Sean Collins’ piece on superhero regression or the piece that inspired it, but it seems to me kind of dopey to pin racial diversification on swapping people out of costumes. The worlds that the superheroes live on have such a hopelessly retrograde and inadequate sense of anything other than their white people that I don’t hold out for them ever getting better.

-Tom Spurgeon, Random Comics News Story Round-Up 05/12/10

He’s right, of course.

Most cape books barely have a handle on decent characterization, and expecting the Big Two to catch up with reality is dumb. Sorry, Charlie, but that just ain’t gonna happen.

I’m not saying that they don’t manage to do nice things with colored folks sometimes. I quite liked Jason Rusch as Firestorm, and Jaime Reyes as Blue Beetle gave DC a nice Spider-Man character. Cassandra Cain had a fantastic hook, and John Henry Irons was a nice twist on the super-scientist character. Even boring old John Stewart is not without his charms.

But, when you get down to brass tacks–all of these are third stringers and supporting characters now. And guess who gets the axe when the time comes to up the ante? Guess who can fade into obscurity with minimal impact on the status quo? If you expect the Big Two to push a more diverse or realistic cast rather than pandering to the idea of legacy or iconic characters… well.

How’s that working out for you?

Fellow fourth letterers, I have been . . .

Read the rest of this entry �

In Red Robin #12, Tim is a nice guy, surrounded by friends, who makes logical decisions, and narrates his actions using personal pronouns.  He’s considerate, grateful, and relaxed about relying on others.

The difference between this and the Tim we saw a year ago is so staggering that is almost produces vertigo.  What it does produce is an actual desire to read the book.  Hey look!  A hero who is dedicated, sincere and considers others!  And also flies around having adventures and fighting villains.  It is what I want to read in a comic book.  Who’da thunk?

I do wonder what it is that happened that makes everyone suddenly want to get into Tim Drake’s pants.  Did he have a birthday sometime during the run, because having a teaser for a storyline entirely devoted to getting the hero to impregnate Ras Al Ghul’s daughter doesn’t seem like something DC would do pre-eighteen.

I have to admit, I hope that they follow that storyline up, though.  And I hope they play it for laughs.

Oh, Ras, and you thought Bruce Wayne was a – well, yes, a tough nut to crack.  Just wait until you try enticing Tim Drake.  This is a guy whose last voluntary kiss was in a dank cave, surrounded by the corpses of clones of his murdered best friend.  You will have an easier time getting pandas to mate.

(Anyone know why Ras has given up on having a son himself?  He’s a good-looking, no-shirt-wearing millionaire.  It can’t be hard for him to find a woman.  And he has a lot of time.  If he spent as much time on dating sites as he did on trying to get Bruce to have sex with his daughter, he’d have an army of sons by now.)

From Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal 2, with words by JT Krul and art by Geraldo Borges:

What do the judges say?

Swing and a miss, b.

I almost don’t want The Return of Bruce Wayne to come out.  I almost want them just to release snippets of it forever.  As anyone on this site knows, comics are incredibly frustrating.  There are many more ways to disagree with someone’s take on a book, situation, or character than there are ways to agree.

And yet there are times when being neck-deep in comics trivia, continuity and drama pays off because it gives you the right background you need to fully experience moments of pure joy.

That’s pretty much how I feel whenever bits of The Return of Bruce Wayne are released.  This psychotic little series makes me happy whenever I see it.  I don’t usually care, even a little bit, about variant covers, but look at that one.

I just want to pinch his cheeks and say, “Arrrrr,” like some demented motorcycle revving up.  Having the actual series come up seems like it could just spoil everything.

But before we begin?  Anyone know how Batman got from charred corpse to flying in a metal spaceship?