Welcome back!

In our last installment, Hawkeye and Iron Man continued to talk about stuff (their favorite bands, chicks who’ve broken their hearts, the Matrix) until a bunch of angry dudes with superpowers showed up randomly. Sucks especially for Hawkeye, since nearly everyone on the opposing team appears to be bulletproof.

How will our heroes (if you can call them that) get out of this alive?! HOW?!

Join ManiacClown and I tomorrow as we watch the Ultimates continue to fight the Defenders. Then we get a special appearance by everyone’s favorite Ultimate Edit mainstay! Then again, I’m only assuming he is.

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

Yesterday, Iron Man flew by a burning building to have a heart-to-heart with Hawkeye, who seemed down. With everything squared away over the course of two pages, Hawkeye is in better spirits. Read on as stuff happens.

Thanks go out to ManiacClown, who continues to be confused at the length of Clint’s ammo compared to the depth of his magazines.

More fighting tomorrow.

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

It had to happen. Jeph Loeb returns to the Ultimates cast with his new series New Ultimates, this time accompanied by Frank Cho. Naturally, ManiacClown and I have returned to take it to task. For those who are lost, check out the previous installments of Ultimate Edit and Ultimatum Edit. Go on, I’ll wait.

Now, then. Let’s get this show on the road.

We’ll continue tomorrow as Tony and Clint make some new friends. Wow, two pages into a Loeb comic and there hasn’t been an action sequence two-page spread yet. Somebody get Guinness on the phone.

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

Some of you have been following the Nick Simmons controversy.  Long story short, Nick Simmons, son of Gene Simmons, drew a manga titled Incarnate for Radical Publishing.  Three issues in, people began noticing that some panels and characters bore a striking resemblance to art in other comics.  Comics like Sandman, Bleach, and even some amateur stuff on Deviantart.

And by ‘striking resemblance,’ I mean, ‘someone owns a lightbox.’

Internet drama ensued, until yesterday Mister Simmons ended it with an apology on Comics Worth Reading.

This was simply meant as an homage to artists I respect, and I definitely want to apologize to any Manga fans or fellow Manga artists who feel I went too far. My inspirations reflect the fact that certain fundamental imagery is common to all Manga. This is the nature of the medium.

I am a big fan of Bleach, as well as other Manga titles. And I am certainly sorry if anyone was offended or upset by what they perceive to be the similarity between my work and the work of artists that I admire and who inspire me.

Well, that settles it, doesn’t it?  Nothing appeases a group of fans like a guy telling them that he’s sorry about how totally wrong they are.

I won’t echo the Comics Worth Reading sentiment about this.  I’ll only note that the guy released the statement ‘through a representative’.  I’m not sure what kind of representative doesn’t realize that this will make things worse.  Maybe Simmons insisted.  It would have been better if he had just hunkered down and waited for people to forget about all of this. 

Well, better for some.  I often enjoy a good internet pile-on, and if he keeps issuing statements like this, the fight could last for a while.

Gina Torres talked to Wired Magazine about the excellent Crisis on Two Earths.  Here’s the quote that went rocketing around the blogosphere.

There aren’t really any skinny bitches in the world of comic books…they’ve got muscle. . . . What I love about superheroes, and Superwoman in particular, is that in that comics world they’re all curvaceous. They’re strong.

I grew up in what must have been the most friendly high school in the world.  I look at Glee, Mean Girls, and Can’t Hardly Wait, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gossip Girl, and almost every other portrayal of high school and it might as well be some kind of costume drama.

Who grows up in schools like this?  In lives like this?  I know there are always a few vocal idiots, but I haven’t noticed a war being declared between ‘skinny’ and ‘curvy’ women, ‘popular’ and ‘unpopular’ women, or really any other kind of women.  At most, the groups are pretty indifferent to each other.  More often, they get along just fine.

And yet every quote, every TV show, every comic, and every movie seems to imply that this war is going on. 

Where are they getting this from?  Is there some secret battleground of which I am unaware?

Sometimes I think that the only reason anyone says stuff like this is they’re trying to sell this fantasy of conflict.  It might make a decent trope in fiction, but in real life, it doesn’t make sense.

Cut, because you might be at work and I’m posting a scan from a freaking Garth Ennis comic.

Read the rest of this entry �

This issue of Wonder Woman ends with something I had just about given up on seeing; sunny skies.

I’ve had to gnash my teeth over Wonder Woman for a long time, now.  She’s a character that I should like, but mostly I don’t.  She’s in a world I should like, but mostly I don’t.

When the book gained Gail Simone as a writer, I was absolutely sure I would like the book, and at the beginning I did.  Then came Genocide, and the Nemesis/Wonder Woman break-up and the slaughtering of pregnant women and the crows, and – I picked up some issues, but I kept putting them down.  It was well-written and well-drawn and the character was interesting, but (despite my last entry here) I couldn’t take any more misery.  I wanted Diana to win something; a fight, a game of chess, a church raffle, a free super-sizing of fries with her happy meal.  Anything. 

And now, for the first time, things are looking up for Diana and the rest of the characters of Wonder Woman.  It feels like a break with the past, and a new, more trimphant era beginning.

It’s no secret that comic books are adolescent power fantasies.  They’re about being the smartest, the strongest, the toughest, the meannest, and above all, the one who gets things done.  Kids have little power and fantasize about growing into someone who does.

I don’t see the need to stop reading comics when we’re out of adolescence, since most of the adults still don’t have control over most of their lives.  I suppose you could argue that some people do, particularly the ones who don’t read comics, but I believe that if they did, the world would either be a much better or much, much worse place.

So the fights, the flamboyant outfits, the adventure of comic books, is easy to understand.

What about the pain?  Spider-man took off, in part, because Peter Parker’s life sucked before he was a superhero and after he was a superhero.  Superheroes, for all their power, get clobbered.  They lose at love, they lose loved ones, they lose battles and companions.  Theirs is a world of nonstop pain, and a lot of the pain is theirs.  Why are they so popular?

There are lines about how conflict is necessary for drama, and that old-chestnut, ‘realism’ appears in many justifications for comics melodrama, but I don’t think that’s it.

I think we like their misery because their misery ends in fights and adventure and over-the-top emotional outbursts, and ours doesn’t.  Personally I would like it if a lot of the things that make me sad or angry could be resolved by putting on a cape and doing battle with my enemy.  I’d like if I could solve any problem by smashing a motherbox, or a bomb, or some other high-tech or magical macguffin.  I can’t.  That’s not the world I live in.

A comics character loses someone they care about and it’s time to hit and kick and scream and the world hangs in the balance.  We lose someone we care about and, more often than not, it’s time to sit and feel sad, to acknowledge that our lives are lesser for losing them, to know that there is nothing we can do about it, and to realize we’ll be lucky if we find one person who cares enough to try to comfort us.

A comics character has a violent tantrum, and it solves their problem.  We do, and it makes our problem worse. 

A superhero sees a problem with society and he shoots, punches, or uses magic until it’s a little better.  If we see it, most of us realize it takes a lot of boring, frustrating, detail-oriented work to change things even a little bit for the better.

Put aside the capes and the silly names, and much of comics’ appeal is this:  It is so much nicer to be angry than it is to be sad.

I couldn’t think of what to write for this entry.  First I scanned links on When Fangirls Attack, and Scans Daily, and various news sites, but I couldn’t think of anything I really wanted to write about, so I just clicked random links and googled random things for an hour, until I found myself, once again, reading the-blackcat’s Batman and Sons series.

The Black Cat, posting on deviantart and on livejournal (as the_dark_cat) did a series about Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim, and baby Terry living together as a family and the wacky domestic adventures they get into.  It’s syrupy and ridiculous.  It runs completely counter to the Batman tone and almost everything that is happening in comics right now, and it is one of my favorite things to read. 

I cannot believe how much I love this series and everything in it.  It’s not just the silly adventures – it’s the artist themself.

This is an example of someone how knows their comics so well that they have clearly gone nuts with it. 

That’s a scene at Chris Kent’s birthday party.  Yes, that’s the Creeper handing out balloons to Jade and some kid I don’t recognize because I don’t know comics as well as this person does.

Later Terry gets into a scuffle with the youngest Arrow kid, not only because in the limited number of strips that The Black Cat has created he has been established as a kind of pushy baby, but there has also been established a feud between the Bats and the Arrows, with the Supers acting as peacekeepers.

Let me put this bluntly:  This is a person who should be hired.  To do this.  Because this is freakin’ fantastic. 

There are in-jokes, there are sharply delineated characters, there are visual gags, there is a sense of timing and flow to the panels, and every strip tells a story.  Some stories are poignant, and some are sweet, and some are mean, and most are funny.  I recognize that this is not everyone’s kind of story, and that it has to lean on the Grim Bat Mythos to stand.  Still, this artist has it all, and is giving it to us in these strips.  I wish they could get paid for it.  And I wish that I could pay for an issue every month.

Judd Winick’s Jason Todd resurrection story, Under the Hood, is coming out in straight-to-dvd animated movie form this fall.  So far, they’ve released few details.  There’s talk about how the story will be dark.  And there is a model of Nightwing.

This angular style seems to be the new trend in animation. 

Batman from the The Batman Strikes.

Martian Manhunter from Crisis on Two Earths.

Seriously, every superhero’s head seems to be modeled on Tahmoh Penikett’s skull.

There is also a quote from Judd Winick.

“What I loved best about it is that it had a really amazing beginning and a really strong ending, which pretty much most movies ride on.”

Read the rest of this entry �