It’s been an interesting week for Dr. Doom. Wait, let me rephrase that: Dr. Doom has been a total jerk this week! Yes, I know being a jerk is his thing, but he’s gone the extra mile lately. In Dark Avengers, he’s rude to Osborn and his henchmen for saving his life. In Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil, not only does he double-cross Magneto, but the entire miniseries is reasoning to make Doom even more of an asshole. Then you have Dark Reign: The Cabal. In one segment, he burns alive two of his servants just to make sure Loki is who she says she is.

Plus there’s the first segment, written by Jonathan Hickman and Adi Granov. I thought it was a cool segment (I love Granov-drawn Venom), but… I just didn’t think they went far enough. So I went back and fixed it up. The first page is untouched, but I’d like to think that the rest of it is an improvement.

Interesting that Doom thinks that Noh-Varr and Ares won’t stand for Osborn’s shit for too long. Plus I guess we’re getting the Spider-Man movie Goblin armor in comic form once Osborn gets tired of being Iron Patriot.

I know that I’m Mister Push Comics Forward Break Them Characters Give Us The New-new, but I do have one continuity-based pet peeve. I really dislike it when creators take established characters and regress them, or just change them entirely, in order to fit them into the story they want to tell.

There are plenty of examples out there. The most egregious are probably Bobby Drake, Iceman, and Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, with Sam Guthrie, Cannonball, bringing up the rear. Bobby and Johnny were the hot-headed youngsters of the X-Men and Fantastic Four, respectively, and Sam is pretty much the poster-child for the second generation of X-Men. All three have gone from immature, mistake-making, and newbie heroes into grown-up, mature, and seasoned adults.

Bobby is an Omega-level mutant with an insane amount of control over ice, and therefore water, and has come to terms with that. Johnny has wielded the Power Cosmic a couple of times, saved the world several dozen times, and seen planets, dimensions, and time periods other people don’t even dream about. Sam was trained by the son of the X-Men’s best strategist, who was himself a child of war. He also had the benefit of being trained by two generations of X-Men, and when he struck out on his own, he found success.

The problem is that when a writer has a story that needs an impetuous kind of fella, or a newbie to make a dumb decision, or someone to show just how mature or smart another character is… guess which dudes are the fall guys.

Reed Richards has gone through the “ignoring his family for the benefit of science by the way he is a jerk” cycle a fistful of times now, most recently in Mark Millar’s Civil War. You’d think that Cyclops’s turn as the depressed and distant loner would be over after New X-Men, a story designed to push him past that, would never happen again. Or that Beast Boy, who is like thirty years old and should get a new name, would be written as something other than a horny teenager. Nah.

This is something that’s been bugging me more than usual lately, since the three biggest guys in comics have all been doing it. Mark Millar, Brian Bendis, and Geoff Johns have all taken characters who had established personalities or gimmicks, tossed it out, and slotted something new in because they needed X so that they could write Y. Rather than creating X, they just took Z and turned it into X. And that’s lame.

I brought visual aids. Read the rest of this entry �

This is several days late, but like I’ve said, computer troubles. Read it anyway.

Secret Invasion has come and gone. Skrulls are old news and now the more beloved villains are beginning to step forward, forming their own little Evil Illuminati. Fittingly, they all counter the original Marvel faction in their own way.

– Tony Stark is replaced by a more ruthless businessman/inventor in Norman Osborn, who shares similar ideals on unity among the powerful.
– Reed Richards is replaced by Victor Von Doom, his eternal rival when it comes to his intelligence.
– Charles Xavier is replaced by Emma Frost, who, while heroic, could potentially do some more underhanded things to help her race. Then again, look at who I’m talking about. Xavier’s done some shady stuff already. Bendis originally wanted Magneto for the role, but you know how it is for that guy.
– Doctor Strange is replaced by the Hood, the magical avatar of the Dread Dormammu himself.
– The enigmatic and overly powerful Black Bolt is replaced by the more enigmatic and more powerful Loki, now in a female form.
– Namor, once a proud king able to own the room with his regal presence, is replaced by a meeker, disheveled and more desperate shell of himself.

Norman puts together his own Secret Society concept and tries to sell it onto the others. The two main points of interest are the mystery man – which I will get to in a second – and the suggestion by Doom to Namor that this will all lead into some kind of massive supervillain Civil War in the future.

That discussion is for another time. Let’s discuss the mystery man.

“If you so choose as to even lift a suspicious eyebrow towards me and mine… you and my friend here will have some words. Emma, you’re a psychic, I can feel you poking around in my head now… You read minds… Tell me… Am I lying?”

“No.”

“Something for even a goddess of mischief to think about.”

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I’m going to have a big post about Comic Con later in the day, but something caught my eye today and I felt I needed to make mention of it. Back in the mid-90’s, DC released a commercial to the masses about their comics. It was well-produced and even though at that age I couldn’t name half the characters shown, I still thought it was pretty badass.

It would show character art of heroes from that era and morph them into other characters as the announcer went on. Here’s a quick transcript, minus the echoing female voice:

Announcer: DC. Incredible action. Astonishing adventure. The coolest heroes. The hottest heroines. And the most outrageous villains…

Darkseid: TOO TOUGH FOR TEE VEE!

Announcer: …in the universe!

Lobo (with an animated mouth and a voice that tries way too hard to be animated Wolverine): This ain’t yer daddy’s comic book, fanboy!

Announcer: DC Comics!

I never got the whole “too tough for TV” thing. Didn’t they have Batman: The Animated Series around that time?

Maybe you remember this. The only reason I still do is because a fairly local comic shop, Zapp Comics, used the same commercial. After DC decided to stop using the ad, Zapp just took the same commercial and added their store’s information to the last few seconds. It’s weird that they would do a commercial that doesn’t even mention Marvel in any capacity, but like I said, it’s a well-produced commercial.

They aren’t the only ones who do this. A quick search on YouTube helped me find the same commercial, only with information from Humungo Comics in Pennsylvania tacked on.

Why do I remember this commercial and bring it up? Because they still play it! I just saw the damned thing on TV less than an hour ago!

Yes, it’s a nice ad, but it’s been like 12-14 years. Look at all the dated stuff in that commercial. Murderous Hooded Green Arrow, Yellow-Ringed Guy Gardner with the G jacket, Deathstroke shown as one of the “coolest heroes”, Matrix Supergirl, Catwoman with her huge curly hair as one of the first villains shown, MOTHERFUCKING LEX LUTHOR JUNIOR! I could have sworn I saw Evil Raven in the commercial I saw on TV, but she’s not on the YouTube video.

I know comic shops may not have the revenue necessary to make a flashy new commercial every few years, but at this rate, some kid will be watching this and Lobo’s one-liner will be wrong. Those actually were that kid’s daddy’s comic books.

With Secret Invasion on the horizon, you can bet your ass that there’s been plenty of theories and speculation. Bendis has given us some major hints and claims that ideas have been there since the beginning of New Avengers. The Raft, the House of M, the Civil War, Taskmaster going back to his original costume instead of his badass hoodie ensemble, and others are all the fault of the Skrulls in one way or another.

I’m not going to spend this post going over who I think is probably a Skrull. But since you asked: Dum Dum Dugan, Spider-Woman, Hank Pym and maybe Thing and Luke Cage. Spider-Woman is still a hero despite her Skrullitiousness.

Comedian and cartoon rat Patton Oswalt mentioned having read the first three issues, thanks to being good friends with Bendis. One of the more interesting quotes in his blog entry is, “As it stands right now, someone’s holding a possible key to stopping the Skrulls, and it’s the LAST person in the Marvel Universe you’d want with that info. And no, it’s not Dr. Doom.”

Some think that this means Marvel Boy, which would make sense in a way, since Brevoort admitted to him being in the first issue. I, on the other hand, think he’s talking about the Hood. Some things to think about:

1) Not even Brother Voodoo could see through Dr. Strange’s illusion at the New Avengers secret headquarters. With his cat-eyed vision, Hood saw through it easily. Hood’s magic trumps Strange’s magic.

2) Secret Invasion is supposed to involve the Skrull gods. I believe that the creature that gives Hood his powers is one of these gods. We know nothing about it other than its appearance and the powers it gives Hood. One of these powers is making him so invisible that NOTHING can detect him. Compare that to the current crop of Skrulls who are so advanced that NOTHING can detect them either.

3) On a Skrully level, the Hood’s recent actions could work into their plans. Not only is he distracting the New Avengers, but he gets Dr. Strange to leave the team and his plan is generally about fucking with the superhero population.

4) Despite all the whining about how much Tigra got smacked around, keep in mind that it was only Hood who got to do anything to her. With witnesses. Every instance of the Hood attacking a hero could be explained away, such as Wolverine will heal, shooting Strange leads to that deus ex machina, and when he gets ready to shoot Iron Fist, Tigra shows up to stop him. The SHIELD agents, I’ll get to in a sec.

5) After his defeat at the end of New Avengers Annual #2, the Hood starts talking to someone. Possibly himself or the creature that gives him his powers. Look at his final line.

Is he really talking about the Avengers?

This leads me to ponder one of two scenarios for the Hood. First, he may be a pawn of the Skrull god and not even know it. He’s helping the invasion against his own interests.

Second, the Hood has been fucking with the Skrulls longer than we’ve known. This whole time he’s been able to see through their tricks and knows that the hero community will never work with him on this. His whole villain team-up idea is really just his own way of dealing with the Skrull threat by trying to get them to kill what he knows to be Skrull imposters. Some of those SHIELD agents were probably Skrulls, possibly covered up by other agents after they were killed.

Tigra is in on this. All those acts of humiliation was a game.

Secret Invasion is the most fun comic book guessing game since Identity Crisis. At least it’ll probably have a better payoff.

“There’s no such thing as bad characters, just bad writers.” – Unknown

It’s the truth. Especially in a medium where characters rarely have one set writer, sometimes not even one at a time, the quality of a character is largely decided by how they’re written. But sometimes a character needs a little more effort to work; characters with no set goal or motivation, a lack of personality or simply an outdated concept. Tigra is one of those characters. She never struck me as interesting in anything I’ve read featuring her; She was either just kind of a generic urban vigilante with a cat theme or caught up in the plights of some society of cat people with a convoluted history that I couldn’t care less about. But recently Marvel seems to have been making people more aware of the character, by making her the one who betrayed Captain America in Civil War, the person the Hood beat the crap out of to set an example in New Avengers and as one of the characters in the House of M: Avengers miniseries. So if you’re going to bring her to the readers’ attention, the least you can do is make her compelling. That scene in New Avengers was the first time I’d felt any sort of emotion towards the character, but it hasn’t been followed up on so far and it’s unclear if it will be (although I’m still holding out since Bendis tends to write stories with a slow burn). So here are some things I would like to see happening with the character to make me interested in reading about her:

– Politely ignore the cat people stuff. It’s unnecessary baggage and too goofy to take seriously in this day and age. There was a Tigra mini a couple of years back by Christina Z and Mike Deodato Jr. that did exactly this. It wasn’t very good because the writing was too cheesy, but at least it tried to do something new with the character and give her a place in the universe. Oh yeah, she became a cop at the end of that mini. That was sorta interesting. Whatever happened to that?

– Change the name while you’re at it. “Tigra” makes it sound like she should a member of the Thundercats. Either go for the Luke Cage angle and get rid of the name altogether (“Greer Grant” has a nice enough ring to it), or change it back to the more generic yet elegantly simple “The Cat”.

– Change the outfit. It makes her look silly. Yeah, I know, she’s confident about her sexuality, blablabla. Lots of people (real and fictional) are confident about their sexuality, yet they generally don’t walk around in a bikini all the time. Besides, we all know the real reason she’s dressed like that. It’s not even a practical outfit, since very rarely is it drawn as giving any sort of support. The only thing it’s good for is removing the impact from dramatic scenes. She doesn’t need a superhero outfit anyway, much in the same way Wolverine doesn’t need one. She has no secret identity anymore and her look is distinctive enough to not warrant a flashy costume. Like I mentioned, she’s supposed to be a police officer now, so put her in a police uniform.

– Yeah, she’s a police officer! That’s one of the things that always appealed to me about Savage Dragon, that he was a cop who got super powers but chose to stay a cop in favor of becoming a generic superhero. Focus on that idea and it’d both give her a unique role in the universe and be the perfect opportunity to show the Initiative in action; Superheroes actively working together with the police force. And, hey, holy crap, guess who’s the new top dog in Marvel’s criminal underworld? The Hood. The guy she’d have a very personal reason for going after. This stuff practically writes itself.

In fact, this can all be brought back to simply remembering that she’s a cop. That one story element from a five year old miniseries suddenly makes the character relevant again. This really isn’t that hard.

I’ve worked at Barnes and Noble for a little over two years and we’re getting ready for yet another painful holiday season. More customers = higher potential for people with something completely wrong with them.

I think it was on the Something Awful forums, but I remember someone once complaining about how B&N never discounts graphic novels ever. I had to think it over for a second, but the guy was right. In all the time working there, I don’t remember a single sale for anything graphic novel related, except possibly Alex Ross’ Mythology.

Maybe it says something about the industry’s success, but that’s changed a lot. Back during October, the hardcover trade for Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness went 20% off. That’s an interesting precedent, considering despite the many, many copies sold of Marvel Zombies (at least in my store), even to the point of the warehouses being out of copies, it always remained list price.

As of today, there is a pretty impressive amount of discounted comic titles. I’m pretty certain this counts for every B&N. Off the top of my head:

– Heroes Volume 1
– Black Dossier
– Gunslinger Born
– Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman
– 300
– Absolute Sandman Volume 2
– Shooting War
– Marvel Encyclopedia
– DC Encyclopedia

Not a bad batch. Well, the Wonder Woman thing probably sucks, but B&N has a boner for Picoult and I’m interested in seeing how that sells. I think it’s about time the Marvel and DC Encyclopedias get an update, especially the latter. DC Encyclopedia still claims that Dr. Light killed Sue Dibny.

As a forced segue into a future article, Gunslinger Born was done by Peter David. I have one of his greatest comic issues ever coming to my mailbox any day and I can’t wait to review it. It’s a lost gem from my childhood that I had when I was like eight. Oh God, this is going to be sweet!

Has he totally lost it, or has he, like Alan Moore, looked upon the legacy of his ’80s work and run screaming in the other direction?

Alan Moore has spent the past 15 years reinventing himself to be Grant Morrison. Has Miller spent the past few years doing something similar?

Bear these two quotes in mind when you answer:

I’ve seen all these characters of my childhood fall into disarray. They’ve become neither fish nor fowl. Those of us who wanted to test the boundaries of what a superhero comic book could do, unfortunately broke those boundaries and the results have not all been very good. We pushed against the old walls, and they fell-but nothing much has been built to replace them. And now the roof is leaking and the sewer’s backing up. So I’m taking this romp through the material again and showing just how spiffy this stuff is. I’m doing it without cynicism and giving my best. I’m also having a very good time.

What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles. The elegance of Gil Kane is gone. You don’t see the sheer joy of Green Lantern’s power ring. The magic of somebody like the Flash-somebody who’s able to move so fast that you can’t see him move-is gone. There’s no sense of the basic wish that any of these characters have.

I think anyone who’s working on a superhero comic should be obliged to write down in one sentence what the central wish is of the character. Every story has to play to that theme. “Adolescent power fantasies” isn’t just a tired cliché; it’s too broad, too crude. There’s more than that to these characters, the good ones, anyway. As it is, I don’t know who these characters are anymore. I don’t know why they do what they do. Why Green Lantern became a drunk driver when he can fly always loses me. And I’m told they turned him into a mass murderer as well. The fun’s gone out of it. I want to try my hand at bringing it back.

Yep. It’s time for another edition of Ruin the Moment, distracting you as I work on the next Professor Marc article.

This is based on Tim Drake receiving the call that Bart Allen has been killed needlessly because DC wrote themselves into a corner.

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Good God. I’ve reached the point where I use the term “musings” on the internet. Shoot me.

I’ve been taking a break lately, due to several things holding me up and taking my time, like a crappy work schedule, Guitar Hero Rocks the 80’s and a bunch of crap you don’t care about.

In the meantime, a couple quick thoughts.

– I made like 15 new 4th Letter headers and then hermanos had to go and redesign the site. Fuck him! Though I have to admit, the new look is growing on me. I like the little “4th ____” gags in some of those headers. Took me a second to get why Ares is labeled “4th Planet”.

– If you didn’t know by now, Greg Pak is going to be doing a What If issue with a trilogy of stories based on Planet Hulk. One has Hulk land on the peaceful planet as the Illuminati planned. One has Bruce Banner land on Sakaar instead. The last, and most interesting one, is about Hulk dying in the warp drive explosion and his queen surviving to seek vengeance on Earth. This comic sounds awesome.

– Norman Osborn is the glue holding Thunderbolts together and making it readable.

– I just bought a ton of trades last week. Ant Man: Low-Life, because even though hermanos dislikes it, I give Kirkman the benefit of the doubt. Hyperion vs. Nighthawk, as it’s the only Squadron Supreme story I haven’t read other than that nine issues of hurt called Ultimate Power. Cassanova, because hermanos loves it so much and I dig that Matt Fraction. The Hood, because it’s BKV and I could go for a nice Marvel MAX title that doesn’t star Frank Castle or his oversized, black nemesis. Seven Brothers, because I’m in the mood to read something by Ennis that isn’t “heheh superheroes is fags”. And I bought Goon: Noir and 52 Volume 2 because… uh… well, there wasn’t really any thought process in those decisions. One is the Goon and the other is 52. That’s reason enough.

– CHIKARA show this Sunday in Philly at the ECW Arena. Come and join the fun.

– The cover image to Ultimates Volume 3 fills me with a strong sense of dread. Not only is this going to be an awful comic, but it’s going to be like a shotgun blast to the Ultimate universe. If this comic is as bad as I fear it to be, then the Ultimate line of comics will be at death’s door in probably two or three years. That’s such a damn shame.

– On the other side of the coin, the Marvel Adventures line is pretty fantastic right now. While the first issue of MA: Hulk wasn’t special, I absolutely loved MA: Iron Man’s initial issue. That’s the best reimagining of his origin outside of canon I can recall. Pick up Giant Size Marvel Adventures: Avengers if you’ve ever wanted to see a gorilla suckerpunch Wolverine in the back of the head through a closing time portal.

– Not comic related at all, but in the last couple weeks, I’ve dropped 15 pounds. Hells yeah!

Next time I’ll have actual content. I promise.