For a couple days, my neck of the woods has been victim of a pretty bad rainstorm. The kind that has people calling into where you work just to ask if you have power because they don’t and they need some place to be. The kind that has you find new routes getting home because there are trees littering the streets and, in one case, crashed into a house. The kind where you lose your cable, but are fortune enough to still have electricity and water, unlike half of the town.

So without any internet during this time, I decided it was finally time to get to reading Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass.

I picked up the hardcover last week because the movie trailer makes it look fun and the JRJR art is really nice. Unlike my associate hermanos, I don’t normally hate on Millar. A lot of the time, I enjoy his work. I even didn’t mind anything about the infamous Red Skull flashback in Ultimate Avengers #5 until Millar pussied out about how even though Skull forced a woman to horrifically murder her husband and then tossed a baby out the window, he would NOT be committing any rape, no sir. Such an idea is unbefitting of a reimagining of a proud Nazi war criminal. No, dead children plus horrific murder plus ordered rape is only good enough for a reimagining of the Kingpin these days.

It’s that inability to commit that leads to my problem with Kick-Ass. I feel that the comic is really, really good… up to a point. Then the lynchpin is pulled out and the entire thing seems to implode. I’m going to be getting into some major spoilers, so if you’re waiting for the movie, this isn’t the article for you.

Read the rest of this entry �

First Wave is exactly what I need right now.  No tragedy porn, no endless continuity, no terrible life-altering baggage; there’s just Doc Savage’s disregard for keeping his nipples covered and Batman’s Fearsome Bat-hug.

I also love that the victim looks about ten times as horrified at Batman saving her than she did when she was being threatened by a man with a rusty knife and poor dental work.

They pull me back in.

And for serious, I wanted to be out.  I wanted to do a series of optimistic posts looking at promising upcoming comics.  I wanted to make it so the titles of the posts ended up being the lyrics to ‘Tomorrow’ from the musical Annie.  Because, that’s why.  Then I see Ian Sattler responding to people being upset with Cry for Justice like this:

“I’m happy it upset people because it means that the story had some weight and emotion.”

Mister Sattler is a very nice and gracious man, whose job it is to sell this series, so I understand him trying to put a good face on it but – come on.  We’re not teenagers anymore.  Not every kind of attention is good attention.  People aren’t responding the series because it has emotional weight.  People responded to All-Star Superman or New Frontier because they had emotional weight.

People are upset because it’s an 1) unpleasant, hacky gimmick, in a 2) clunky, unecessary story, establishing an 3) already-established character trait while 4) taking away the originality of at least three different characters.

The reason it got such a big response is because people could point to one book and talk about how it distilled the worst of the status quo in comics right now.

The penultimate pages showed Carol Danvers and Tony Stark getting all shouty and arguey. Then Shanna the She-Devil, Ka-Zar, some tigers and the mute Black Panther who isn’t Captain America in disguise this time hang out in Central Park. Things suddenly get cold. What could this mean?

That’s all for this week. ManiacClown would strangle me if I didn’t at least feature the Farmville SHIELD image he made for a throwaway gag. Really, the guy would just give me updates about stuff I don’t understand. Never played Farmville and never plan to. Here you go.

Stay tuned for this Wednesday as my 12-day Wrestlemania Countdown begins, tough guy!

To wedge myself out of the pit of mild crankiness I’ve been in regarding comics, I have started looking ahead to things that I look forward to.

Thank you, The Brave and the Bold, for seemingly being an impossible title to bog down in misery, no matter what medium you are in.  Here we have a female team-up book, a happy-seeming story, and complete indifference to current continuity.  It has everything I’m looking for in a book.

Moreover, it has Barbara Gordon as  part of it all.  This is the kicker for me.  She’s a sentimental favorite, and while I think her role as Oracle is great character development, I can’t get over the fun she had as Batgirl.  I’m always willing to see more of that.  This and Wonder-Con, another reason to look forward to April.

Yesterday’s adventure involved Thor having the mistress of the afterlife take care of his hammer. Then Tony Stark and Carol Danvers started going for the jugular. Let’s continue on with that.

This was one of the more difficult Ultimate Edit installments to write based on the matter of what we were critiquing. Back when we first started doing these, we laid down some ground rules and made certain things off-limits. The main one being Jeph Loeb’s personal tragedies relating to his son, Sam. The whole point here is never to make fun of Jeph Loeb the person (who I’ve heard from many is a genuinely nice guy), but of his writing.

A lot of Jeph Loeb’s writing has become very much Sam-based, and that is completely understandable. Captain America: Lost Son was more than anything Jeph’s attempt to come to terms with his son’s passing. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I respected what he was doing. He would continue to make minor references to his son in his work, which was fine, but it’s become more and more apparent that it’s something he can’t push himself past. Most of his work revolves around it, basing the adventures on father/son relationships and the grief related to it. Hell, look at why Magneto killed everyone in Ultimatum.

For those who haven’t read the original, the Iron Man narration boxes tell the story about how Tony Stark met a young boy named Sam in a hospital who was dealing with cancer. It was the boy’s horrible experiences and eventual death that inspired Tony to become Iron Man and create the Ultimates. The whole overuse of Sam is beginning to dilute the message and the seriousness of it all, at least in my eyes. It makes me think of when Puff Daddy used to talk about Biggie Smalls so much that on one skit show, Jamie Foxx (I think) played the role of Puffy and would randomly start pointing up and yelling about Biggie. The crowd laughed pretty hard at this, showing that the whole thing has resorted to becoming self-parody. It’s disheartening to see that this is the direction Jeph Loeb has been leading into.

It’s a touchy subject, but I wanted to get it off my chest.

Enough about the serious stuff. Let’s move to stupid stuff, like Farmville.

Thanks to ManiacClown, who spent WAAAAY too long working on that Farmville image. Join us next time as the big villain shows up and more sex is had. No, not by the villain. Maybe in the next issue.

Day Seven!

Ron Wimberly’s been in Japan for the past few weeks, making me mad jealous. I’ve only been once, in the fall of ’08 for a work trip. All expenses paid was nice, but staying only a week was too short. But them’s the breaks! I did buy about five hundred bucks worth of clothes, though!

Ron’s been busy, drawing comics and making connects. He’s got a big deal coming up, so I’ll let him (and Benetton) tell it:

On Saturday, March 13th, Benetton Japan will be hosting a live paint show by an American artist, Ronald Wimberly, to celebrate Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku’s renewal opening. During the event, which takes place from 3pm to 9pm, the artist will be painting on a big screen in the window, which will be reported live on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/benettonpress.

So, details:
Where: Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku‘s official Ustream channel
When: If you’re EST (where Brooklyn at), 0100-0300 Saturday morning. For those of us in PST (From Oakland to Sac-town, the Bay Area and back down), you can check it out from 2200-0000 on Friday evening. For those inbetween… do the math.
Who: Ron Wimberly, aka dπ
What: Live painting

Tune in, you might see something cool. In the meantime, check out the kid’s site, revisit his Black Future Month interview, or get familiar with GratNin. You can also read the press release.

Our last installment featured the end of the Ultimates vs. Defenders fight with Son of Satan stealing Mjolnir from a very stupid Valkyrie and then escaping with the rest. Meanwhile, Thor has gotten bored of being king of the mountain and wants to escape the land of the dead. Hela will grant him that wish, but she wants something in return.

This first page might be a little not-work-safe.

Real talk: despite all the crap I give Loeb, I found the original scene between Tony and Carol to be really well-written.

Thanks to ManiacClown, who can’t get past how much Ka-Zar looks like Skwisgaar Skwigelf from Metalocalypse. Join us tomorrow as we finish that scene, get an aside from Captain America and Zarda, then see what Ka-Zar and Shanna are up to.

Day Six!
Day Seven!

What happened on Day Three? Let’s see, the duo of Hawkeye and Iron Man were doing pretty badly against the Defenders until Captain America showed up with what seemed to be Xena Warrior Princess and the Glamazon Beth Phoenix. They turn the tide and start whipping some Defender tail. A tail that Hellcat surprisingly does not have. During all this, Zarda punches Luke Cage in the nuts and prevents the possibility of Ultimate Danielle Cage.

We move forward.

Here is a quick cutting room floor panel. The expression on his face sells it so well:

Thanks to ManiacClown for the Thor dialogue. Speaking of Thor, I only noticed during the editing, but Frank Cho snuck in some uncensored bare breasts on that page. I blacked it out, but in the original spread you can see it in-between the panel of Thor sitting on the throne and the panel of Hela unmasking. I guess Frank Cho is to boobs as Leinil Yu is to Howard the Duck.

More bare breasts tomorrow, but these will be the comic book hair-draped-over-the-nipples kind.

Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

Rants are like flame wars; I tend to regret them.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of my life.

All right, the last part was just to complete the allusion.  Still, a moment’s post in anger tends to have long consequences.  (The first, of course, is a lot of hits.  There’s nothing like a rant to get people clicking, and I can’t blame them.  I love a good internet fight, too.) 

Sometimes you’re wrong.  Sometimes what you are ranting about gets reversed, taking away the anger and making you look like a goof.  And sometimes time goes on and you just don’t care as much as you once did, while the rant stays as fresh and angry as ever.

So, I probably should have anticipated the moment when David switched off the podcasting equipment after my second rant about Cry for Justice #7, and mentioned that the writer had gotten death threats.

Oh.

Obviously, death threats are illegal, creepy, and stupid under all circumstances.  But there are other responses that, while legal and lighter, also make me feel bad for The Ranted.

The thing about a small community on the internet, is that when something happens, it can be hard to get away from it.  People all read the same thing at the same time, and they respond at the same time.  Sometimes they (like me) don’t read the original material, but see the event discussed on another site, and respond to that.  The more people write, the more people read, the more people respond, the bigger the thing gets, and often, the angrier people get about it.  Because it all happens at once, all that anger blasts out, and while each outburst of it might be in correct proportion to the event, the collective response can be bigger than the offense.

I’m not saying that any part of a response is wrong, or that people are wrong to write what they think (Except, of course, for the death threats.  For crying out loud, people!), but at the same time I can’t help but feel sorry for people who made one decision that just happened to implode the internet.

This isn’t my only response, of course.  Like I said, I like an internet fight.  Also, in situations like Cry for Justice, I often hope that big kerfuffles like this will inspire the company to reverse their decision.  Much as people like to pretend otherwise, they know that comics companies at least try to give them what they want.  Still, I feel a twinge of guilt for being part of the internet rage machine vomiting lava over someone.