In Red Robin #12, Tim is a nice guy, surrounded by friends, who makes logical decisions, and narrates his actions using personal pronouns.  He’s considerate, grateful, and relaxed about relying on others.

The difference between this and the Tim we saw a year ago is so staggering that is almost produces vertigo.  What it does produce is an actual desire to read the book.  Hey look!  A hero who is dedicated, sincere and considers others!  And also flies around having adventures and fighting villains.  It is what I want to read in a comic book.  Who’da thunk?

I do wonder what it is that happened that makes everyone suddenly want to get into Tim Drake’s pants.  Did he have a birthday sometime during the run, because having a teaser for a storyline entirely devoted to getting the hero to impregnate Ras Al Ghul’s daughter doesn’t seem like something DC would do pre-eighteen.

I have to admit, I hope that they follow that storyline up, though.  And I hope they play it for laughs.

Oh, Ras, and you thought Bruce Wayne was a – well, yes, a tough nut to crack.  Just wait until you try enticing Tim Drake.  This is a guy whose last voluntary kiss was in a dank cave, surrounded by the corpses of clones of his murdered best friend.  You will have an easier time getting pandas to mate.

(Anyone know why Ras has given up on having a son himself?  He’s a good-looking, no-shirt-wearing millionaire.  It can’t be hard for him to find a woman.  And he has a lot of time.  If he spent as much time on dating sites as he did on trying to get Bruce to have sex with his daughter, he’d have an army of sons by now.)

As of yesterday, Captain America had a heated conversation with Valkyrie. A conversation SO heated that Valkyrie’s been balling up her fist. Time for something actiony to happen.

Tomorrow, ManiacClown and I will be back for dragons, orcs, jungle folk, tigers, and post-coitus. See you then.

Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

Welcome back for another round of edits. For those who don’t remember what happened in the first issue because they were distracted by Ultimate Red Skull suddenly crying about his daddy issues in Millar’s Ultimates comic, the Defenders have returned from obscurity with special powers and enhancements. It’s like that episode of Gargoyles with the Pack, but without that kickass Australian Dingo guy around. Dingo ruled. They stole Mjolnir from Valkyrie, Loki and an army of monsters invaded and Tony Stark introduced Carol Danvers to at least three STDs.

And now, we move forward.

Thanks to ManiacClown for warning me that having the pointing Captain America say, “Only you can prevent forest terrorism!” is a little too much of a stretch. We’ll be back tomorrow with more from Cap and Valkyrie.

But my point remains: Dingo ruled.

Day Two!
Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

I hate reality TV, and I don’t think I’ll be particularly interested in Stan Lee’s Superhumans, which will feature real people whose genetic differences result in seemingly-impossible abilities.

I have found, however, a deep repository of mean-spirited trashiness within me that I think they could tap.

If the people on the show have the last episode be a fight between the measurably-different people and all of those ‘indigo children’ and ‘crystal moms’ (or ‘indigo moms’ and ‘crystal children’), I’m in.  I would buy a TV to see that.

Iron Man 2 has been released and I checked it out last night. Personally, I enjoyed it, but doubly after having read the Alexander Irvine novelization. Much like with going from the graphic novel of Kick-Ass to the movie Kick-Ass, the transition from a weak telling of a story to a strong telling of a story can make such a difference based purely on the comparison.

I always love doing this little experiment of checking out the novelization of comic book movies, then seeing how the final product compares. I’ve been doing it for the past few years and they’ve always seemed to be based on the full version of the story. The novelization is what the movie is like before the editor cuts off chunks. Sometimes this works out for the better (Incredible Hulk). Sometimes this works out for the worse (Spider-Man 3). There’s even the first Iron Man, where the second act had to be refilmed and edited around just to make the Air Force happy.

Iron Man 2 is a different beast, since it doesn’t appear to be based on the full version of the screenplay, but of an earlier, incomplete version. There are plotholes and loose ends riddling the story that the movie is nice enough to fix. Even better, some of the climactic moments are so ridiculously underwhelming that the final cinematic output is a godsend.

Let’s take a look at what was changed.

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I almost don’t want The Return of Bruce Wayne to come out.  I almost want them just to release snippets of it forever.  As anyone on this site knows, comics are incredibly frustrating.  There are many more ways to disagree with someone’s take on a book, situation, or character than there are ways to agree.

And yet there are times when being neck-deep in comics trivia, continuity and drama pays off because it gives you the right background you need to fully experience moments of pure joy.

That’s pretty much how I feel whenever bits of The Return of Bruce Wayne are released.  This psychotic little series makes me happy whenever I see it.  I don’t usually care, even a little bit, about variant covers, but look at that one.

I just want to pinch his cheeks and say, “Arrrrr,” like some demented motorcycle revving up.  Having the actual series come up seems like it could just spoil everything.

But before we begin?  Anyone know how Batman got from charred corpse to flying in a metal spaceship?

Hey, remember when I said this was going to be a 5-parter? Make that 6. I should really learn to count better.

In the first installment, we took a look at Marvel’s A-Team from the mid-80’s. The show faded away, but Mr. T remained Mr. T. While he did have some projects here and there, such as the ever-memorable Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool, Mr. T didn’t really enter the 90’s with any steady piece of media. If he was going to appear in a comic book, he wasn’t going to be B.A. Baracus or any fictional character. T would have to be T.

In the mid-90’s, the company NOW Comics was filled with a myriad of interesting choices for licensed comics. Green Hornet and Terminator? Not bad. Speed Racer and Ghostbusters? Unorthodox, but still fully acceptable. Three Ninjas and Married… with Children? Then you have to vocally wonder what the Christ. Not only that, but the Married… with Children comics included a miniseries where the Bundy family gets powers from cosmic radiation and become the Quantum Quartet. I get the douche chills just thinking about it.

Mr. T would also get some play from NOW with Mr. T and the T-Force. The series lasts a whopping ten issues, longer than any other Mr. T series to date. Well, ten issues that I know of. Wikipedia suggests that there were eleven issues and there were certainly more announced within the comics, but I haven’t seen any evidence of issue #11. Though there also appears to be an annual that came out during the series’ existence. I’ve found absolutely nothing on it online outside of a Scans_Daily post showing Mr. T fighting a dude who looks like a cross between Spoiler and Phantasm.

The series ultimately works like Marvel’s Nextwave in that each arc is done in two issues. Unlike Nextwave, each arc is done by a different creative team. That means there really isn’t any true arc to the comic. Just a series of subplots and callbacks to supporting characters.

The main problem with the series is how Mr. T himself just doesn’t seem to have anything going on. While he’s shown to be a landlord, he has no actual personal life. He just goes around stumbling across people who need his help. B.A. Baracus helped people all the time too, but he still had his own personal problems to deal with. The army was after him, he had to deal with Murdock’s nonsense and his fear of flying. In Mr. T and the T-Force, Mr. T’s life seems just a little too perfect to the point that they rarely even show him in any real peril. So much that whenever anyone pulls a gun on him, he disarms them at the snap of a finger every time. I’m going to keep a tally on that.

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True story: Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is one of my favorite comics. It’s a great story, with fantastic art, and I’ve loved it ever since I first read it (which was as an adult). I like it so much that Boom! Studios’ rerelease of the series in a couple hardcovers has been tempting me, even though I own an older Gemstone edition.

It’s the story of how Scrooge McDuck went from pauper to super rich fat cat. There are tons of real-life guest stars, all done up ducks-style, and it’s just a rocking good story. Boom! posted a few pages of the book on their press site and said that we can post them around. So, y’know, enjoy. I have fantastic taste, and believe me when I say that this is a classic book.

It’s tough to make a superhero movie.  Once upon a time you only needed was spandex or tinfoil, a few wires, and actors willing to wear spandex and get lifted by wires.

Lately, though, the superhero movie and the big-budget action movie have merged, to the point where you shouldn’t even bother looking at a cape until you have the kind of money that can buy you and exploding helicopter.  TV shows, after Smallville, aren’t much different.  Some people say those shows look cheap.  I’ll go ahead and quote Dolly Parton on that:  It takes a lot of money to look that cheap.

At the same time, there are other media that, because of these new-fangled visual telegraphs that the kids call ‘computers,’ could make a come back.  Everyone has already discussed the coming of the new age of webcomics being produced on a daily basis.  Yeah, the money isn’t huge now.  Wait.  There will be ways to wring dollars out of this, especially when conventional media is dying down.

Mostly, though, I’m waiting for the new version of the radio plays that they used to have way back when.  It didn’t work once stories moved to TV.  Radio became the exclusive domain of songs.

Now it’s not the domain of anything much anymore.  You can download songs from your computer and listen to them anytime.  If you want to discover new music, there are hundreds of websites devoted to just that.  I asked David the other day how long it’s been since he’s purposely listened to the radio.  It had been years.  Same for me.  The times I do listen to the radio – in stores or in a friend’s car – the only ads on right now are mattress discount warehouses, non-mainstream concert promotions, and debt consolidation services.  It is grim.

At the same time, though, podcasts are getting more and more play.  And they’re getting it for stuff that no one would put on the radio.  Is there a station on earth that would play me and David talking about comics and whatever sitcoms pop into our heads at the moment?  Really not.  And yet we have thousands of people listening to us jabber for a half an hour a day.

It can’t be that much harder to jabber out a story.  Think about it, the editing programs and sound effects could be pretty much gotten for free, and all that it takes to record is a script, a laptop, a couple of microphones, and a few people willing to sit around a living room for an hour every week.

It seems like the way to go for doing dramatic stories on the cheap.  All of you out there on the visual telegraph.  Have you heard of any podplays like this?  Would you listen if you did?

For the last few years, DC has had a ‘Sunday Conversation’ panel at the end of Wonder-Con.  Although by that time I’m usually fishing around in my back for snacks I might have forgotten about last week and stealing extra paper towels from the bathrooms to use as tissues due to the first ugly stirrings of that year’s Con Crud, I always go. 

Basically, it’s a random assortment of DC people to come by and talk about comics.  No announcements.  No selling anything.  They just sit around and talk about the old comic book stores they used to haunt, what parts of comics they love, and some banter with the audience.  It’s just yakking about comics, which is why most of us go to cons in the first place.

This year, however, I heard JT Krul talk about fan involvement, and how they try to work out the best stories.  He mentioned that at a previous con, Dan Didio had come to him and told him that the Cry for Justice story reaction really wasn’t what they had wanted, and that they had worked for five hours on how to respond, story-wise.

As someone who has grown out of her juvenile, “They all just sit around, stroking white cats and laughing and figuring out how to piss off the fans,” phase, but is still plenty juvenile enough to throw tantrums about storylines, especially that one, the remark caught my attention.

I know that comics creators want to write a good story, and also a popular story.  Although I’ve seen gallows humor from people who had made some unpopular calls, everyone wants their work, and their vision, to be enjoyed by everyone.  I also no that they never get that.  There is no story so safe, so brilliant, and so popular that it doesn’t have a few people frothing at the mouth.

While Cry for Justice continuity had more than its share of detractors, I’ve seen at least some support for it almost everywhere.  I wonder, what is it that makes creators decide to ‘work’ on a story they’ve already planned?  It can’t be just fan reaction.  Spend the entire day measuring that, and you won’t get anything else done.  Trust me. 

Is it the overall scale of the reaction, or the vehemence?  Is it how long it’s sustained?  Or whether stop the usual tongue baths that they give out at conventions and start complaining when they meet creators face-to-face?  Is it the way people point the finger of blame at different people, or is it whether or not they use that old, “I’m not buying DC/Marvel/Boom/comics anymore!” 

. . . Oh, let’s face it.  If I knew, there’s no way that I’d use that knowledge wisely.