This Week in Panels: Week 203
August 11th, 2013 by Gavok | Tags: panels
Yo, hey! ThWiP time. Light week this time around, what with it being me, Gaijin Dan, Space Jawa and Jody. First time in forever there’s been no overlap in panel choices, so that’s a thing.
I have a review up of the newest Axe Cop cartoon at Den of Geek. Tomorrow it’ll have my review of the Archie Comics Sonic/Mega Man crossover, so give that a look if you remember.
This week I read Burn the Orphanage from Image, which I highly suggest. It’s essentially any given Final Fight/Streets of Rage brawler game written in comic book form, starring the well-rounded hero, the big, strong guy and the street-smart young woman. No turkeys found in drums in this issue, sad to say.
Okay, let’s do this like Brutus.
Atomic Robo: The Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur #2
Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener
Avengers #17
Jonathan Hickman, Nick Spencer, Stefano Caselli, Marco Rudy and Marco Checchetto
Batman ’66 #6
Jeff Parker and Jonathan Case
Batwing #23
Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Eduardo Pansica
Blue Exorcist #48
Kazue Kato
Burn the Orphanage: Born to Lose #1
Sina Grace and Daniel Freedman
Deadpool Kills Deadpool #2
Cullen Bunn and Salva Espin
Dragon Ball Z #26
Akira Toriyama
Hunger #2
Joshua Hale Fialkov and Leonard Kirk
Injustice: Gods Among Us #30
Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo
Jaco the Galactic Patrolman #4
Akira Toriyama
Mega Man #28
Ian Flynn and Ryan Jampole
Naruto #641
Masashi Kishimoto
Nisekoi #85
Naoshi Komi
One Piece #716
Eiichiro Oda
One-Punch Man #23
ONE and Yusuke Murata
Superior Carnage #2
Kevin Shinick and Stephen Segovia
Swamp Thing #23
Charles Soule, Kano and David Lapham
Toriko #244
Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro
Transformers: Robots in Disguise #20
John Barber and Andrew Griffith
World Trigger #25
Daisuke Ashihara
I’m really digging Superior Carnage. It actually has very little to do with Carnage despite him being the title character. It’s really about the Wizard, following up on his constant failures in the pages of FF. His brain is falling to pieces, he’s dying and all he wants is to pull off one major, fiendish plot to make his clone son proud of him.
Injustice is interesting this week in the sense that it’s Tom Taylor basically saying, “Look, I can write a good Superman comic. I really can. It’s just that this is what I’m stuck with.”
Sometime in the next day or so, I’ll have a post up about something infinitely stupid and entertaining that’s been keeping me distracted lately. Until then, here’s that awesome Smooth McGroove cat… with his awesome cat.
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Let me tell you, that first panel takes on a WHOLE different meaning when your sleep-deprived brain misreads “death” as “pants.”
Also, kid, your problem with superman isn’t that he’s becoming increasingly erratic, dangerous, and domineering, it’s that he won’t stop whatever he’s doing to help Joey “Us-Plain-Folks” McMiddleClass whenever he got bike problems? Maybe that’s a valid point of view, or maybe that’s utter bullshit and ‘inspiring’ isn’t defined as ‘constantly aching to meddle in the minutia of random people’s lives’ you self-absorbed suburbun parasitoid.
@Drakyn: Looks to me like that kid in the Injustice panel actually defines “inspiring” as “gives people an example of goodness and basic human decency to aspire towards”.
@Prodigal: But his definition’s example is based in incredibly minor actions that are only special insofar as they pertained to him. If fixing a guy’s bike was all it took to be as nice as Superman, he shouldn’t give a damn because his neighborhood’s probably got half a dozen Superman-moral people on it already. The real reason he’s complaining is because he’s an audience surrogate who’s talking about how gosh darn great Superman was in comics back when HE was a kid and how Superman’s been RUINED and is now GRIM AND GRITTY.
Even ignoring all of that, he’s still obnoxious because he’s watching Superman become a more successful version of Doctor Doom before his eyes and the best way he can express his issues with that is to talk about how Superman fixed his bike once when he was a kid and man now that’d NEVER happen no way, he’d probably not even care. He’s like those people who try to comfort you after a relative’s funeral by talking about how much it hurt when their dog died.
Atomic Robo! Thank you.
@Drakyn: The bike thing was just one example of Superman engaging in simple human decency – it’s something that would inspire others because if someone with the kind of power and responsibilities Superman is willing to take the time to fix somebody’s bike, maybe the rest of us could try and help folks out sme, too.
As for the value of grimness and grit? I’ll take All-Star Superman over Injustice any day.
@Prodigal: So, Superman could inspire people to also do small, helpful favors for people that really don’t actually need them all that much. Because that’s what that was: he helped an upper-middle-class blonde blue-eyed white American kid fix his bike. So that that same middle-class blonde blue-eyed white American kid could grow up to complain to us about how much this newfangled Superman sucks, because he too saw Man of Steel and was totally disappointed.
The writers of Injustice are very happy you reached your conclusion because that’s exactly where they wanted their ridiculously hamhanded narrative to take you, which is the same place this sort of what-if always goes: If Superman Ever Changes Anything, It Will Make Him Hitler. And then we’re told that’s bad not because we’ve got a psycho Ubermensch running over the planet, but because Superman isn’t pulling cats out of trees anymore and that’s not like how comics were when I was a kid. That’s the real tragedy, that is, that’s the real root of the problem. It’s a straight-line slippery slope; you fail to fix a bike, next thing you know you’re lasering dissidents with your eyebeams.
Whenever I read this sort metafictional stuff from a creator, particular a DC creator whose name rhymes with “Prawns” or especially “Spliffen”, I think of that classic Achewood quote:
“What do you think you’re running from? THE DISEASE IS INSIDE OF YOU!!!”
Whoa, is that Cookies from Spider-Ham in Avengers #17?
http://www.4thletter.net/gavok/venom/porkgrind.jpg
@Dorey Mifaso: I laughed.