The new solicitations for July are out and Marvel looks to have quite the month. Annihilation 2 begins, Iron Fist takes part in Mortal Kombat for some reason, we get the conclusion to Ash Williams vs. Zombie Sentry, Deadpool and the Great Lakes gang get their own special, Eddie Brock gets his own story arc, Captain America makes friends with Optimus Prime, Namor does his thing and Thor makes his mighty return.

What really gets me excited is this blurb:

GIANT-SIZE MARVEL ADVENTURES THE AVENGERS #1
Written by Jeff Parker
Pencils and Cover by Leonard Kirk
Remember your history-The Avengers didn’t thaw out Captain America, and Kang the Conqueror became Master of the World throughout all time. To make a brighter future, our heroes have to go to the 1950’s and enlist the help of The Agents of ATLAS! Plus extras!

Now that is a comic worth looking at. I’ve already discussed Agents of Atlas here and there. It’s a great miniseries and it’s nice that Marvel looks to be trying to sprinkle their appearances through their various books. Gorilla Man is set to show up in X-Men: First Class, Namora is going to be a player in World War Hulk and now this.

I love how the cover is actually an update of the What If issue that created this “Avengers-before-the-Avengers” concept. Of course, back then, 3-D Man was a member of the team.

If you’re unfamiliar with Marvel Adventures: Avengers, you might be wondering why Storm is there in Thor’s place. Marvel Adventures is like the all-ages version of Ultimates. Instead of grim and gritty, we get a new continuity that has a friendlier, Saturday morning cartoon feel. As kiddy as it sounds, it’s actually pretty high-quality.

The roster is Captain America, Iron Man, Storm, Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine and Giant-Girl (Janet Van Dyne with a more useful gimmick). Yes, each issue is self-contained, but they cluster together to create story arcs. The first issue has them fight Ultron. The second issue has them fight the Leader. The third has them fight Baron Zemo. This all ties together into the fourth issue, where those three villains start up the Masters of Evil.

The second arc focuses on Loki. Somehow they’ve brought Loki in as a major Avenger villain without a single mention of Thor. Even more impressive is that they introduced Juggernaut as a villain without a single connection to Xavier or the X-Men. His new origin is actually really good and they tossed in the option of redemption if they ever want to make him like he is now.

Not to mention that there’s an issue where the team gets transformed into a bunch of MODOCs (C is for Conquest here. That’s good enough for me). Seeing them drive the Leader to tears by making fun of his inferior, “tiny” head is priceless.

I’m a couple issues behind, but damn if this series didn’t surprise me with its fun factor. I haven’t been this pleasantly surprised with a comic since Marvel Megamorphs.

No. Really. Megamorphs was good. I’m serious.

What’re your perfect comics? I’ve got a few. Kraven’s Last Hunt. Flex Mentallo. Daredevil Born Again.

The two most recent (and I referred to these previously as nigh-perfect, but they got an upgrade) are Jacen Burrows and Garth Ennis’s 303 and Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba’s Casanova. They’re both just tightly packed, written, and drawn slices of excellence. Everything about them clicks and they’re both easy reads.

Those are perfect books. On a smaller scale, there are perfect pages.

These are the pages that give you the stupid grin that comics should. They can be full of import and absolutely serious or completely irreverent. Spider-Man’s “I’ll kill you,” after being told that Norman Osborn is going to kill Normie. “The rain on my chest is a baptism” from Dark Knight Returns, along with the mutant fight in the mud.

Little slices of perfection.

Here’s a few of my recent favorites. Two from 303 #03, one from Punisher War Journal #6, and the page from Casanova #1 that sold me on the series. Words by Garth Ennis on the first two and Fraction on the last two. Art by Jacen Burrows (303), Ariel Olivetti (Punisher WJ), and Gabriel Ba (Casanova).

Two soldiers talking about rifles (I particularly love the line about the difference between NATO weapons the AK-47), one soldier marching off into destiny, Frank Castle’s righteous indignation (“We gotta steal a car. I’m going to Mexico and I’m gonna shoot that guy in the face.”), and Casanova Quinn being both irreverent and awesome (“I don’t know– I have weird brain things. Maybe it would work different for you.”)

Good comics.

Chris Wiltz at ImajiMation Studios shot me an email the other day with a link to the Blokhedz animation test that was shown at NYCC ’07.

Check it out here, and check the website at Blokhedz.tv for more info. PopCultureShock has the hi-res trailer, but you’ve got to reg to download it, I do believe.

Hot stuff.

If you’ve spent more than two minutes at this site, you may have noticed that it absolutely blows to navigate through. You want to look for that time I ranted about Wolverine? Check Google, because chasing through the archives will probably take you two hours.

That’s at an end… hopefully. I finally put in a Table of Contents page. You can see it under “Pages” on the right side of the screen. Here we have a majority of the 4L articles, split up into little groups. And a big group for David’s articles, the show-off. Plus you can actually get a little blurb about what the article in question is about.

Give it a test drive and tell me if you come across any mistakes.

I really should replace that Green Arrow image with a headshot of Ruin from Superman, but I can’t find a decent enough image of him. Damn me for coming across that arc towards the end.

Let me go ahead and get this out of the way. Gail Simone on Wonder Woman got the same reaction from me that J. Torres doing a fill-in on WW did. None.

I haven’t liked her last year and a half of work or so. Villains United was okay, but I didn’t even finish Secret Six. BoP started off great (that first year or two was stellar), too, but even that feels like it fell off. Gen13 and All-New Atom? No thanks. I don’t know, I think that my tastes are changing or something, but her work just doesn’t click with me like it used to. No slight to her, or at least I hope not, it just ain’t my thing.

It got me thinking, though. Who could get me to read Wonder Woman? I came up with two names who I think would be pretty dope on the book, and both of them are even female-type people!

Louise Simonson and Ann Nocenti.

C’mon, don’t even say you wouldn’t read that.

Weezie deserves it. X-Factor, New Mutants, Man of Steel… Steel. She’s paid her dues ten times over. I shouldn’t even need to explain this one. She’s apparently written a WW novel, but I haven’t read it. I think she’d be pretty awesome on the book.

Ann Nocenti wrote some of my favorite Daredevil stories, did a Batman/Poison Ivy book a few years back with John Paul Leon (I think, it may have been John van Fleet?) that was pretty solid. I will love her forever for creating Typhoid Mary, the best she-villain that isn’t named Harley Quinn. (I really, really like Typhoid Mary and Harley.) I think that Nocenti could do a pretty bomb off-kilter WW book and deliver a book that would defy more than a few expectations. Dante’s Inferno ala Diana Prince. Or even something real world and political, she’s good at both kinds.

I may not be excited for Gail on WW, but either of these two would make me jump for joy. Shoot, Weezie is the reason why I’m going to be reading Marvel’s Mystic Arcana when I don’t even really like two of the four characters involved (Scarlet Witch and Black Knight. Magik is generally better as a kid, and Sister Grimm has a dumb codename but is pretty cool.).

Anyway, yeah. Give me Weezie and Ann. I think that they’d be worth it.

Also, c’mon Marvel, reprint this thing already.

From Geoff Johns’s forum:

First things first, I haven’t done any of the fill-ins because, beyond JSoA and GREEN LANTERN, I’ve leaped ahead on ACTION COMICS and am already working on the last half of 2007 and into 2008. Kurt and I are totally in sync and have laid out the plans for 2007 and 2008 and it’s always a pleasure to work with him in the same Superman-verse.

Much like WONDER WOMAN, the last chapter of LAST SON will be in ACTION COMICS ANNUAL #11 later this year when Adam’s finished with it. This, quite frankly, allows us to move ahead and get our work on Action Comics coming out monthly with the stories we want to tell.

Donner and I resume our Action run with Eric Powell’s three issue arc “ESCAPE FROM BIZARRO WORLD” which we’re already working on. I’ve seen the first several pages and Eric is doing fantastic work.

I’ve really been enjoying Action Comics, so it’s nice to see that Last Son will finish and we’ll get some Eric Powell books this year.

However, DC has thoroughly botched two launches through late creators: Action Comics and Wonder Woman.

Last Son was supposed to be six issues long. It was supposed to end this month, or maybe last month. We have seen three parts of it. The bad part is that Last Son was good and supposed to be monthly. I’m sure that the trade will be wonderful.

Wonder Woman is going to have five writers over 13 issues. Allan Heinberg, Will Pfeifer, Jodi Picoult, J. Torres, and Gail Simone. Gail is definitely an improvement, but to be quite honest I don’t know that she’s enough of an improvement. Her latest work has left me kind of unimpressed. I mean, a Barney joke in Gen13? What?

Anyway, this is a textbook example of how to screw up a big-time relaunch.

Small wonder that Marvel is beating the pants off DC in numbers. Eight out of the top ten books are Marvel, with only JLA #6 charting for DC at #6.

Something’s gotta change. DC isn’t working and OYL turned out to be a non-starter.

We continue our look at the adventures of our Friendly Neighborhood Steve Borden. First, another wrestling history lesson.

This Ghoul storyline looks like it’s really meant to be a mix between two “mystery man” storylines WCW had done a year or so before the comic came out. The first was the infamous Black Scorpion storyline. WCW had done Sting vs. Ric Flair to death. They needed to give Sting a new rival. They came up with the Black Scorpion, a masked man with a distorted voice that would appear in taped segments, taunting Sting. He would bring up their past and how intimately they know each other. Then he’d do magic tricks because, you know, he’s mysterious and stuff.

WCW didn’t actually have any good ideas of who the Black Scorpion would turn out to be, so in the end, they just made him Ric Flair, thereby totally defeating the purpose of this storyline.

The other “mystery man” storyline involved a wrestler called the Halloween Phantom, who defeated the Z-Man at the pay-per-view event Halloween Havoc before unmasking. The following issues are more in tune to this one.

As any wrestling fan can tell you, most of these stories turn out to be convoluted messes by the time they’re done. Kind of like the Clone Saga, now that I think about it.

The next issue (we’re on #4, if you’ve lost track) begins with the new tag team of the Diamond Studd and Stunning Steve going up against the fictional cannon fodder Jersey Jerry and Mangy Matt. First a little something on Stunning Steve.

Read the rest of this entry �

DC released a teaser image a few months back for DC Countdown. It made the usual run around the comics blogosphere, in part for the graphic (read: hilarious) violence shown in Max Lord’s turned around neck and the Atom’s tiny, tiny arm poking out of the dirt.

(Max Lord and Dudley Soames go to the same chiropractor.)

There was also some talk of DC’s alternate Earths and blah blah blah. There was something about this image that was bugging me and I could never quite put my finger on it. I’ve found it now, though.

Superman is clutched to Wonder Woman’s bosom, sitting awkwardly, and sobbing his laser eyes out.

Uh, no. That’s stupid. It’s stupid on an Olympic level.

Superman wouldn’t cry. That isn’t in his character. Never happen.

Superman died once. Died in the arms of the woman he loves. His only concern was that she, and the rest of the city, was safe. He didn’t weep. He only stopped once he found out that he’d saved the day.

Superman is, like it or not, a father figure. He’s the hero that other heroes look up to. Having him crying is just ridiculous. It doesn’t fit his character. In All-Star Superman #1, he’s told that he’s going to die. His response?

“There’s always a way.”

Think about when you were a kid. When your dad was crying or upset, that’s when you know when things were serious. No kid wants to see that. It’s terrifying.

That’s the effect that Superman crying would have on the populace.

That’s why Superman will never cry. He’s too much of a hero for it. He’s too Superman for it. He knows the effect that would have on people. It’d be like seeing your father cry, but worse.

Superman: Back In Action got it right. Even in a country that distrusts him and doubts his identity, he is still the hero. He isn’t going to break down and get upset, he’s going to do his job.

All-Star Superman got it right. He isn’t going to cry and moan about his lot in life. He is going to live, fix it if possible, but if not– that’s okay. Life will go on. In the meantime, he’s going to give life his best shot.

Keep your weak Superman. He’s an imposter, a liar, a fraud, a coward, and a cheat.

He is the Man of Steel, not the Man of Kleenex.

More on fathers later.

Norman Osborn would be the worst celebrity partner for $10,000 Pyramid ever.

Contestant: Okay, okay. Animals. Cages.

Osborn: Spider-Man?

Contestant: No, no. Peanuts. Signs that tell you not to feed the animals.

Osborn: Ah. Spider-Man.

Contestant: Pass. Er, hm. Bread. Biscuits.

Osborn: Spider-Man.

Contestant: No! Cookies. Um… cupcakes!

Osborn: Things that sound like Spider-Man!

Contestant: NOT SPIDER-MAN!

Osborn: Spider-Man?! Where?!

Contestant: Stop that! Jeez… Cakes! Pies! Brownies! Freaking bread!

Osborn: Things that you bake…

Contestant: YES!

Osborn: …for Spider-Man!

Contestant: NO! Pass. He’s a superhero. Wears red and blue, but now wears black. Shoots webs. Has a movie coming out. Made you kill yourself.

Osborn: Miss Stacy!

Hi. I still exist. I’ve just not been comics-oriented for weeks on end.

In the meantime, my Internet buddy Christopher Bird, known far and wide for his rewritten Photoshops of Civil War, is trying a new campaign: “Christopher Bird Should Write Legion of Super-Heroes.”

I’m not a Legion fan, but those of you who are might get a kick out of this.