November 2009 looks back on November 1954, as I take apart an issue of Astounding Science Fiction at io9.

Very Bat-heavy segment this week. I will tell you this, one of these panels annoyed the hell out of me.

Riddle me this! Why doesn’t Tony Daniel take photographs of letters and numbers?

Amazing Spider-Man #611
Joe Kelly and Eric Canete

Batgirl #4
Bryan Q. Miller, Tim Levins and Lee Garbett

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An oldie but a goodie. In honor of our Batgirl-centric fourcast and Esther’s latest Batgirl play-by-play, I wanted to post one of my favorite sequences from Batgirl: Death Wish.

A bit of context: one year ago, Batgirl lost the use of her pattern-recognition skills due to some ill-timed telepathic mental adjustment. To repair this flaw, she sought out and fought Lady Shiva. In exchange for fixing her, Shiva demanded one thing: a fight to the death one year in the future. Batgirl, when faced with a choice of being mediocre for a lifetime or the greatest for a year, took her challenge, was healed, and threw herself into her Bat-persona. She stopped crimes, ignored her social life, and rose to Olympian heights. And now, one year after her rebirth, she must face Lady Shiva and die.

Words by Kelley Puckett, art by Daimon Scott. Pages 7, 8, and 11 are my favorite. Great storytelling, choreo, and layout.

I’ve started writing for AOL’s Comics Alliance. I’m going to be doing a few pieces a week, as of this week, and you can check out my posts here. So far, I’ve written about Astro boy vs Pluto and done a brief history bit on the pulps, with an eye toward DC’s Batman/Doc Savage Special.

Bookmark it, RSS it, do whatever the kids do these days. Twitter it, I guess. Put it on Friendster or AOL Chat or whatever.

Let’s start this review with a look at Batgirl #7.  What’s that you say?  It’s only issue four?  I don’t care.  We need to look at this awesomeness.

Now, to issue four.

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so I’ll just let y’all judge these quotes from IGN’s The Final Days of Dark Reign interview with Brian Michael Bendis and Brian Reed yourselves:

On Ms. Marvel’s identity crisis

Bendis: “Carol Danvers is awesome. She’s another character where there’s a lot going on in her own series. But she’s in every single issue I’ve written over the last six months, so there’s a lot going on with her. But what’s interesting is if Moonstone is sleeping with all of the Dark Avengers, they might not realize later which Ms. Marvel they had been sleeping with, and there might be trouble down the line.”

On Moonstone’s secret weapon

Bendis: “Now Moonstone I’ll probably get some letters on. She’s going to be using sex as a weapon, not because that’s what I feel women do, but because that’s what I feel this mentally ill woman would do in close quarters. She started with Marvel Boy and will begin making her way through the team.”

’nuff said.

Just some station identification type stuff-

-Thanks to a word in my ear from Matt Jett, I’ve added Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Stumbleupon links to the bottom of each post, rather than the obtrusive and ugly ShareThis popup box.

-If you’re logged into your Twitter account and someone here says something infuriating/horrible/hilarious/stupid, just click that Twitter button and you’ll be taken to the Twitter web interface with the title of the post and link ready to go. Edit away, hit Update, and bam, you’ve twittered 4l!. Congrats.

-Facebook blah blah blah, Share links, blah blah blah, college, blah blah blah, too many family members on it, can’t talk about keggers and strippers and drugs any more, blah blah.

-Reddit is like digg, innit? We’ve got digg and Reddit now, you should use both.

-StumbleUpon Sure, Stumble us. Do that.

-Someone happened upon a post I wrote a couple years ago about the Top 3 black women and was so offended by my statements about Storm that she had to drop in and condescend a little because I am clearly totally wrong. I’m only posting this here because Tucker wanted to call attention to something I said down in the depths of those comments. So, you know, if you want to see me be mean to somebody, g’head. My general rule of “all smart dumb cats be quiet on the internet” still applies.

Last time, I discussed the first few issues of Chaos Comics’ Undertaker, as well as the specials that came from it. The Undertaker, Paul Bearer and a newly-created character the Embalmer each hold a Book of the Dead and are going to war over who can get all three Books and become the ruler of Stygian, Hell’s prison. Meanwhile, Kane is sneaking around, watching the Undertaker and Mankind is able to see that some of the wrestlers in the WWF are really demons in disguise.

Just for shits and giggles, for those of you reading who don’t follow wrestling or haven’t followed it for long, here’s a list of some of the Undertaker’s silliest storylines:

– Fought a nearly 8-foot-tall dude who wore a muscle suit with fur covering the shoulders and crotch. Their “epic” battle at Wrestlemania 9 ended with this big dude, Giant Gonzales, chloroforming the Undertaker. This got Undertaker a win via disqualification and they always have to sidestep this fact when they go over how the Undertaker is undefeated at Wrestlemania and show a highlight reel.

– A match was set for Survivor Series of Lex Luger and his patriotic American guys vs. Yokozuna and his evil foreigners. Due to a last-minute injury, they needed someone to step into Luger’s team. This spot was filled by the Undertaker, who proceeded to do a lengthy promo that compared his gimmick to what America is all about. He ended it by growling, “Let freedom RIIIIIIIING…” and opened up his jacket to reveal a 1776 American flag stitched on the inside. Lex Luger saw this and got way too pumped about it.

– Undertaker had a match against Yokozuna where you won by stuffing your opponent into a casket. Just about every bad guy in the WWF came out to help Yokozuna by ganging up on the Undertaker and shoving him in the casket. As the casket is wheeled away, the big screen above the entrance shows a camera inside the casket, where the Undertaker promises he will return. Then he (or Marty Janetty in an Undertaker costume) flies off into the heavens on strings.

– The Undertaker delivered a Dominos pizza to Leslie Neilson as part of the lead up for the Undertaker to fight his evil doppelganger.

– The Undertaker had a rematch against Yokozuna, this time with Chuck Norris there to make sure nobody interfered this time.

I can go on with this for days. To be fair, I do really love the Undertaker and he has had his share of kickass moments. Like that time Paul Bearer did an interview from the safety of his own home and Undertaker burst in, yelling, “Did you think I forgot where you live?!” and pummeled the everloving hell out of him. Then it cut to the arena’s locker room, many miles away as Kane went into a hysteric crying rampage and Mankind had to try and calm him down. That was neat.

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Let’s say you’re reading the editorial on a comic, or an interview with a comics professional, or maybe just scanning the solicits for upcoming comics, and you see something that seems a little off.

Something a little inappropriate; both gruesome and coy.  Something that hints at terrible, momentous events but is played off as a detail. 

Something, in other words, that is guaranteed to get the serious and touchy fans burning up their keyboards.  And that is, kind of, the point.  (Or part of it.  The other part is the fact that comics professionals don’t take comics quite as seriously as fans – and a good thing, too, considering many of them work in close proximity and have sharpened pencils on hand.)  Interviews and editorials are meant to garner publicity, and unhappiness usually shouts louder than contentment.  Especially on the internet.

That’s where you get to the problem with shouting your unhappiness with this prospective storyline; it’s kind of like giving a kid a candy bar every time they throw a tantrum.  In time you will end up with a toothless, tantrum-prone child and a shortage of snicker bars and an alcohol problem.  I may be stretching the metaphor.

My point is, though, how does one criticize a company’s choices in a business where almost any publicity is good publicity?  Because the only way I can see turning these things to my advantage is telling you guys that clicking the ads on this site registers a formal complaint.