–You Made Me Read This returns from limbo!
-David read Christopher Moller’s JLA: League of One!
-Wonder Woman hears a prophecy and betrays her friends so that she can fight and die against a dragon! Batman menaces a wood nymph! Superman is a baby about things!
-Esther read David McGuire’s Gastrophobia!
-It’s the best tale of single motherhood since single motherhood was invented!
-We talk about other mythical comic stuff, including a brief mention of Superman as a centaur!
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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Ah, what a world we live in where Booster Gold himself (well, Keith Giffen too, I guess) is the one carrying DC these days. Let’s get with the panels.

Avengers Academy #1
Christos Gage and Mike McKone

Batman #700
Grant Morrison, Tony Daniel, Frank Quitely, Scott Kolins, Andy Kubert and David Finch

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-Yo, tell ’em why you mad, son!
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music
-Yo, Esther, tell ’em why you mad!
-It was Justice League: Cry for Justice #7, a James Robinson/Mediocre Artist Medley joint. You know the one– everybody got mad about it last week.
-Esther was gonna get her hate on, but there were a few days between the point where that hand of hers was glowing with an awesome power, its burning grip telling her to defeat DC Comics.
-Instead of flipping DC a Shining Finger, we have a fairly measured, if frustrated talk about violence in comics.
-We’re talking about scale of violence, involving the family, “this time it’s personal!” and so on. Also how tragedy can turn a character toxic.
-I may mention a Tiny Crisis and make Esther cackle.
-We lighten it up at the end with some stuff we like about comics.
-Esther likes Brian Azzarello and Rags Morales’s First Wave #1.
-I like Viz’s One Piece 3in1 and accelerated release schedule.
-See you, space cowboy!

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-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music
-Guess what movie we’re talking about!
-No, really.
-We talk some about DC’s past animated features, their upcoming live action slate, and how horrible Daredevil was.
-I thought the tangent where I diss Kitty Pryde and Joss Whedon was much longer, particularly considering that I go “Why am I talking about this?” at the end of it, but it was relatively short! Just F-Y-I.
-Catch the movie on Amazon on DVD or Blu-ray.
-See you, space cowboy!

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Two superhero flicks are coming out on DVD & Blu-ray in Feb- Planet Hulk and Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Planet Hulk hits the first week of February, while Justice League comes out February 23rd.

Pardon the blatant marketing, if you’re looking to buy them on any format, give some thought to pre-ordering them through our Amazon referral links. Amazon doesn’t charge you until the item ships, and if the price drops between now and when the movie ships, you get the lowest price automatically.

Planet Hulk is going for $14.99 on DVD and twenty bucks on Blu-ray. Justice League has a Two-Disc Edition for $14.99 and a Blu-ray for $25.99.

So, yeah, if you’re interested- give them (and us) a pre-order.

Oh hey, Dwayne McDuffie posted 45 seconds of the upcoming Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths on his site!

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.

I don’t care if this clip is over a year old. I just discovered it and I can’t get enough of it.

A couple weeks back, Johns and Katz finished off their spectacular run of Booster Gold, bringing us some closure, while opening several new plot threads. A lot happened in there that I enjoyed, including the scene with Booster and Batman. Yes, sure, you can complain about how Batman remained completely silent about finding photos of a beaten and tortured Booster when he found Joker’s camera circa Killing Joke, but I dug it. Not only because Batman, the big superhero cynic, was giving Booster the well-deserved props, but because it went both ways.

Fact is, Booster hated Batman more than any other superhero. That’s a damn lot. What’s that you say? Hal Jordan? No, Hal Jordan didn’t really hate Batman. He was more submissive to what Batman had to say against him and was at most irritated. Superman? More disappointed than anything else. Red Hood? Just confused in a frustrated way. Booster Gold, on the other hand, outright tried to MURDER Batman!

I still remember when Countdown to Infinite Crisis happened and people were frothing at the mouth to see how Booster would react towards Batman. Ah, that was a fun scene.

So anyway, the new issue of Booster Gold finally had Booster and Batman bury the hatchet. That’s cool.

But another big moment involved Rip Hunter’s reveal that he brought back Booster’s sister Goldstar. Now, I understand that only a handful of comic readers have read anything with Booster in it outside his Justice League/Blue Beetle team-up stuff, so I’m sure there’s quite a few of you wondering who this is. It’s a logical thing to wonder, since other than an earlier flashback, she hasn’t been seen for about twenty years.

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I’ve talked about the differences between Marvel’s What If comics and DC’s Elseworlds comics before, but another major contrast has made itself apparent to me. They are both about taking a cool out-of-continuity concept and running with it as a full story. The problem with Elseworlds is that a lot of the time they get bogged down by either the need for familiarity (how many times has Kal-El become Superman when the entire idea of the story is that Kal-El is not Superman?) or the over-complication of the storyline.

Take JLA: Destiny for instance. The four-issue miniseries is based on a concept that is so full of promise that it could have carried the story itself. They could have just plugged it into the DC Universe and let loose a great story. Writer John Arcudi decided not to, seemingly going for more of an epic clusterfuck of a story. So this big twist in DC history is made into part of a bigger theme. It also becomes merely a subplot to the whole miniseries and this big shocker that should have been the selling point for the comic isn’t fully revealed to the reader until the third issue.

A couple years back, when I first read Destiny, I scoured online for reviews. I’m too lazy to check now, but all the reviews I found were for the first two issues only. Some didn’t make it past the first. Nobody knew what the point of the story was yet and had no indication that they were going to discover it in the final two issues, so everyone dropped it like a rock.

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