Every Day Is Like Wednesday

Captured by the Sinestro Corps, Green Lantern Guy Gardner is brought before their leader with just the minimum charge left in his power ring. Guy immediately expends this last bit of energy attempting to attack Sinestro, and so his ring-generated costume dissipates. Sinestro is in the middle of monologuing about his Fear Engine super-weapon when he glances over his shoulder to see that Guy doesn't even wear a pair of underwear when he's in his uniform, so, with his ring-generated costume gone, he's now standing there naked.

The look on Sinestro's face in that third panel, drawn by Ethan Van Sciver, is maybe my favorite single image of the week, and there were a lot of great images in this week's comics. Writer Robert Venditti does a pretty swell job with the entire Gardner/Sinestro scene, actually; despite their many battles over the years, those two just don't quite fit together right as archenemies the way Hal Jordan and Sinestro do.

Hal Jordan and The Green Lantern Corps: Rebirth #1 by Robert Venditti, Ethan Van Sciver and Jason Wright

Ethan Van Sciver, who has collaborated with Geoff Johns on Green Lantern: Rebirth, Flash: Rebirth and DC Universe: Rebirth, obviously really like Green Lantern. Given the artist's talent, prestige and past sales, one assumes he could pick whatever titles he wants to work on for DC, and yet he keeps returning to various Green Lantern comics, most recently a minor miniseries about John Stewart, Guy Gardner and other members of the GLC lost in an alternate universe.

And here he is again, teamed with Johns' successor on Green Lantern, writer Robert Venditti.

This particular Rebirth one-shot is more of the bridge variety than the sample of what to expect variety (as is the Nightwing special, below, actually), essentially moving us from where Venditti left Hal Jordan (rather abruptly, it must be said), catching us up on where everyone else in franchise is at the moment and then having a rather pivotal, if slightly silly scene altering Jordan's current status quo.

That status quo? Well, last time we saw him, he was battling a version of his post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint self (the "Emerald Twilight" Parallax from the pages of Convergence who made it into the New 52-iverse much like a Superman, a Lois and their son Jonathan did). He won the fight, but in the process turned himself into a being of pure green energy.

In this special, in an event that is both kind of awesome and kind of stupid at the same time (something it shares with the best of Johns' Green Lantern writing), the big, green, energy version of Hal creates energy constructs of a rock, an anvil and a huge hammer, and then forges his own Green Lantern ring, each blow knocking him back into his flesh and blood form and sending ripples throughout the extended cast: The Corps, White Lantern Kyle Rayner, Agent Orange Larfleeze, Star Sapphire Carol Ferris and so on.

Naturally he's successful, he says his oath and he wills away his trench coat in favor of his traditional GL costume and flies off and towards the pages of Hal Jordan and The Green Lantern Corps #1. Venditti seems to be now doubling down on business from Johns' run, with all of the variously-colored Lanterns and a mysteriously aged Sinestro (who, after goring gray, looks remarkably like a pink Vincent Price) in a Parallax-powered Warworld taking Oa's place in the center of the universe.

The continuity is a little glitchy if one tries to match this up with various other books. For example, I guess there are still two Hal Jordans and two Parallax entities in the universe (The Convergence Jordan will have a Parallax entity semi-possessing him too, right?), and I have no idea how this matches up to what we've been seeing the pages of Justice League in the "Darkseid War" arc, or even Green Lanterns...although I suppose this issue could be set before Green Lanterns: Rebirth...?

That aside, I imagine if you've liked Johns' Green Lantern, particularly from about the "Emotional Spectrum" business on, then Venditti and Van Sciver have successfully set the stage for a new comic that you will more than likely also like, although do be warned that Van Sciver was here for the special and not the ongoing, which will be drawn by Jordi Tarrogano and Rafa Sandoval.


Nightwing: Rebirth #1 by Tim Seeley, Yanick Paquette and Nathan Fairbairn

The Grayson iteration of the Dick Grayson character--who became Agent 37 of super-spy organization Spyral after having his secret identity outted to the world and faking his own death--was never built to last, and, personally, I never thought it made a whole lot of sense if you thought about it for too long (like, a minute), but co-writers Tom King and Tim Seeley managed to tell some really surprisingly great stories during the two years or so of that particular status quo, and had a great handle on the character of Dick Grayson.

It's something of a relief then to see that Dick is reclaiming the codename and costume of Nightwing (even if how they put the secret identity genie back in the bottle was fairly cheap), and that Seeley is sticking with the character in the new, upcoming Nightwing book.

For the Rebirth special, Seeley's paired with Yanick Paquette, and the pair devote themselves to tying-up various loose ends left over from Grayson and other Dick-specific storylines (like "Robin War"), as Dick narrates (pointing out, on the first page, where he got the name Nightwing) his way through a hang-out session with Damian Wayne and, later, Batman, all the while saying goodbye to various characters from Grayson. He attempts to say goodbye to his former Spyral boss "Matron" (Helena Bertinelli, who is about to become The Huntress and, in fact, is shown suiting up; she'll be in next week's Batgirl and The Birds of Prey: Rebirth #1), he hangs out with Midnighter in order to defeat "Project: Killicorn" (My favorite part is when Dick says that Midnighter refers to them as "arch-frenemies" or "nemesisters," although the Killicorn is, of course, a close second) and runs one-last mission with Tiger, who is the new leader of the new and less-evil Spyral.

Finally, there's some more Court/Parliament of Owls stuff, which looks like it will dominate at least the first story arc of the upcoming Nightwing.

As I said, I wasn't a big fan of the entire Grayson milieu, despite what King and Seeley were occasionally able to pull off with it, but this particular issue does a pretty good job of filing all that stuff away without blowing it up, so that characters and concepts can be returned to if needed in the future. That's wise. I particularly liked Dick's interactions with Midnighter who, remember, was created as a sort of Batman parody, and is always defined in relation to Dick's first and greatest partner.

Like, um, every comic book DC has published in the post-Flaspoint DCU, this would be a hell of a lot better if there weren' a reboot accompanying the introduction of The New 52. For example, prior to that reboot, we knew that there was a legendary Kryptonian hero named Nightwing, we knew that Dick had a long-time relationship with Superman, since he was Batman's junior partner throughout their entire "World's Finest" relationship and Chuck Dixon and Scott Beatty even wrote a nice scene in their 2005 "Year One" Nightwing story arc in which Superman suggests the name to Dick.

In the New 52, I can't recall if Superman and Dick Grayson ever even met until after Grayson became Agent 37.

Also, the climax involves Dick looking at his original, retconned Robin costume in its glass case in the Batcave and, I don't know, maybe it's me, but I just can't get used to seeing that costume and thinking "Dick Grayson's Robin" costume, as it looks more like a Tim Drake costume from some videogame adaptation.

When he does finally suit up as Nightwing, it's worth noting that he's wearing a new costume, this one with the blue and black color scheme he wore for most of his career as Nightwing, only with an abstract "bird head" shape to the blue V element, like that of his costume from Batman: The Animated Series. I think the costume from the Dixon/Scott McDaniel run of Nightwing is his best costume, and this is close enough, certainly better than the red and black costume of the first New 52 Nightwing series.

Please note that Nightwing will be drawn by Javier Fernandez, so if you love Paquette's art here, don't expect to see it on a monthly basis.


New Super-Man #1 by Gene Luen Yang, Viktor Bogdanovic, Richard Friend and Hi-Fi

DC has moved Gene Luen Yang from Superman to a brand-new book, featuring a brand-new character of his own creation, and rather than a demotion, it seems like this new book will have the potential to make far better use of Yang's writing talents (His time on Superman was bogged down with telling one-third or so of the story about Superman losing his powers and secret identity, which was never really resolved satisfactorily).

This new Superman, er, Super-Man is Kenan Kong, and he is a Chinese teenager. Not a Chinese-American teenager, mind you, but a Chinese teenager. Living in China. This immediately promises an unusual direction for a superhero, especially a Superman, narrative, as a character known for fighting for "Truth, Justice and The American Way" doesn't transplant directly into a non-American country, let alone one that is still Communist and currently America's next most powerful economic and military rival.

Kenan's father lists a different set of ideals when ranting against the corrupt government in one panel: Truth, justice and democracy.

The other interesting choice is to take a more Spider-Man origin route, and make Kenan an arrogant jerk who, one assumes, will learn in future issues that with great power comes great responsibility...or that he will at least stop being such a jerk as Superman's powers more-or-less transform him into a more Superman-like figure (Remember at the climax of All-Star Superman, when Lex Luthor gained Superman-like powers and found himself more-or-less infected with empathy and goodness, as his new super-senses unlocked a new understanding of humanity?).

When we first meet Kenan, long before he's super-powered, he's not only an arrogant jerk--which one could say of the 1994 Superboy, whose personality Kenan's reflects in several aspects--he's also a bully, stealing the lunch from a smaller, chubby classmate who can't fight back.

In a moment of stress, he acts heroically, and is basking in newfound fame until his father deflates him, and we learn about a tragic event in his life, one that is an intersection connecting his father's political views, his lashing out against that particular target and even Superman. By book's end, Kenan has volunteered for an experiment conducted by a mysterious Dr. Omen to grant him super-powers.

Naturally it works, or else there would likely be no second issue, and Kenan becomes the Super-Man of China. And, in a last-panel reveal, when he seems out of control, he's faced with The Bat-Man and Wonder-Woman of China.

Yang's story, from conception to dialogue, is all on point. Superman's been around in every medium imaginable for just about ever, so pretty much any time someone comes up with a new take that can explore little-seen aspects of the character deserves at least a slow clap, and while putting Superman in different countries and cultures has been done in short, imaginary stories before (most commercially successfully by writer Mark Millar with 2003's Red Son), but Yang's story has the advantage of being "real," and, by not using the Superman character himself in a Superman story he has the opportunity to do things he wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

I admit to being pretty disappointed by penciller Viktor Bogdanovic and inker Richard Friend's art in the designs. I really like the design of the new Super-Man costume (which I've mentioned before), and i particularly liked the way that it substituted one of the other primary colors in the original Superman's costume as the primary primary color--although, because I am dumb, it didn't occur to me until I read this issue and saw the little stars like those on the Chinese flag on his shoulder that it likely had as much (or more) to do with red being China's color than it did with making a striking opposite to Superman's own blue-dominated costume.

The Bat-Man and Wonder-Woman are similarly cool designs. The Batman is big and blockly, like the Dark Knight Returns Batman, colored with the blue, gray and yellow that American Batman abandoned so long ago. Wonder Woman on the other hand, is in green, and doesn't look much of anything like any other Wonder Woman, save for the fact that she also has a luminous lariat (pink-ish rather than gold). All three costumes have the stars on the shoulders, and matching borders around their chest sigils.

But Bogdanovic's art has a generic quality to it, so much so that it is not immediately his and, were a reader presented with it in a comic with no credits, it would be impossible to assign it to him rather than any of another dozen or so artists that have worked regularly with DC in the past five years or so. This book, despite the high-profile author, despite the unusual and unusually compelling premise, just looks, stylistically, like any other DC comic.

As I said the other day, that may be a deliberate choice, to make the entire narrative more subversive by making it look more like every other DC comic, but I think it is instead just a poor pairing of art team and writer. Once this is collected into a graphic novel, it will sit very uneasily alongside all the other books Yang has written that fill library shelves, both those he illustrated himself, those he collaborated with other artists on and even the licensed, franchise comics he's done, like Avatar: The Last Airbender.

It's a good comic book, but it really should be a better one.

Hey kids! Comics!

Last week was the debut of the print version of DC's new Sensation Comics, their digital-first Wonder Woman book, in the style of Adventures of Superman. If you were at all worried that it might make a genuine effort of courting new readers from beyond DC's existing fanbase, worry not; the first two-thirds of the issue are written by Gail Simone, drawn by Ethan Van Sciver and deals with Wonder Woman fighting Batman's villains. Also, there's little chance of it filling the void of Wonder Woman comics appropriate for children, as it does include the above page.

But she doesn't really kill all of Batman's enemies! She's just imagining doing so. That was maybe the second-weirdest part of the Simone-written story, which I reviewed at some length for Robot 6 today. The weirdest part is page 18, drawn by someone else entirely. Given what came immediately before and immediately after, I wonder if page 18 reflected a last-minute editorial change to the story, that Van Sciver either didn't want to draw or didn't have time to draw.

On page 16, Wonder Woman's Amazon reinforcements show up. On page 17, we see Poison Ivy's vines take some of them out, and the Penguin pushing a button, triggering an explosion. And then, on page 18, we see Wonder Woman telling her Amazon army that it is now a rescue mission, and shows them saving civilians from a burning building. I suspect in the original version, the bomb was meant to kill the Amazons, and someone said it was either too extreme, or that the Amazons are pretty much constantly being killed in every story they appear in, and they decided to change that.

Or I don't know, maybe EVS drew the book out of order, and ran out of time before drawing 18. Anyway, weird book. I've added it to my pull-list though; this first issue isn't very good, but I'm looking forward to those to come based on the announced creative teams.

Wait, maybe that's the third weirdest part. Her "Wondarangs" were pretty damn weird, too.

It's not like part of her costume is also a razor-sharp projectile that returns to her hand when thrown.

Also! I wrote about Fantagraphics' latest Peanuts gift book, Waiting For The Great Pumpkin, for Good Comics For Kids. It's Charles Schulz's Peanuts, so obviously it's good. What I found particularly interesting about it though was that it featured the strips in which Schulz introduced the Great Pumpkin concept; most of those strips are new to me, despite being so familiar with the concept from that Halloween animated special I used to watch annually as a child.

Dystopian Future Captain Cold (drawn by Ethan Van Sciver) and Dystopian Future Batman (Jesus Merino and Dan Green), The New 52: Futures End FCBD Special Edition #0, May 3rd


Hawkman (Mike McKone), Justice League United #1, May 14th


Power Ring (Doug Mahnke and Scott Hanna), Justice League #30, May 21st


A polar bear (Dan Jurgens and Mark Irwin), The New 52: Futures End #3, May 21st


Frankenstein (Aaron Lopresti and Art Thibert), The New 52: Futures End #4, May 28th


Swamp Thing (Paul Pelletier and Sean Parsons), Aquaman #31, May 28th

If one were making fun of DC Comics' over-reliance on extreme violence and gore, and frankly bizarre fascination with the dismemberment of superheroes and supervillains, one might suggest that their Free Comic Book Day offering might simply consist of nothing but various characters having their arms chopped off. But sometimes DC makes it really hard to make fun of them, as this is actually the climax of their Free Comic Book Day offering:
Sure, their special #0 issue of the upcoming weekly series Futures End isn't just 22 pages of super-people having limbs cut off in splash pages, but it's not that far off either. Set 35 years in the future, after most of Earth's population, super and otherwise, has been decimated, it features the deaths of about ten super-people, not counting all of those who have already died and been transformed into Deathlok-like corpse/cyborg hybrids (i.e. the rest of 'em).

One could question the wisdom of the publisher offering this particular comic for Free Comic Book Day, their once-a-year opportunity to reach out far beyond their base to try and recruit new readers into reading comic books in general and DC comics in particular (Hey, I just did!). This is, after all, the first chapter to a weekly series set in a dystopian future (i.e. where nothing matters or counts) and the New 52-iverse, which will eventually culminate in some 40 one-shot special issues with collectible covers in September, the contents of which aren't yet decided upon or even in the works yet.

That said, I'm not sure what might have been a better book to promote. DC also offered an all-ages comic, a straight reprint of Teen Titans Go! #1, of course, but if they were to publish a gateway comic to their New 52 line of books, as would obviously make sense for them to do, what could they have done instead? Batman Eternal is their other big weekly series, and while it's already in-progress, it's only four issues in...perhaps they could have reprinted and gave away Batman Eternal #1...? Perhaps, but that was already gonna be a hit, right? A weekly series not starring Batman (well, this will star a Batman, just not the Batman) and not produced by DC's best-selling, best-reviewed writer Scott Snyder could probably use the promotional push of FCBD. The thing is, this promotion is aimed at people who already read DC comics, and maybe some Marvel comics (There are some awfully unfortunate parallels to Marvel's Age of Ultron in this comic, even if Age writer Brian Michael Bendis' plot was already a staple of Hollywood science-fiction blockbusters).

For better or worse, this comic does present a perfectly accurate picture of the DCU at the moment, and thus serves as either a welcome mat or a moat to potential DC readers, depending on their personal tastes and/or tolerance for superhero body horror and gore (Note this is rated "T for Teen," meaning "Appropriate for readers age 12 and older" and that it "may contain mild violence." The wording of this always cracks me up when I look at images like the above and below; that's mild violence! Imagine the "moderate violence" of T+ book, or the "intense violence" of a Mature book!)

I think Comics Alliance's Chris Sims did a pretty accurate (and, as always, amusing) job of talking about the book in terms of its demonstration of the publisher's idea of putting their best foot forward. So let us, instead, focus on the comic itself, shall we?
First things first, I want to say I really, really like the logo for this comic. As I don't have a lot of positive things to say about the rest of the comic, I thought I should note one of the few things that is genuinely well-done. I like the circuit-board lines behind "FUTURES", I like the slight echo of the Brother Eye logo around the "N", and I like the way the "52" is rendered, with the 2 simply and upside-down 5. Good job, Whoever Designed The Logo!

The credits don't actually appear until a two-page spread featuring some uncolored imagery from the next issues, the first issue, after the end of the story. There are four writing credits—Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen—although, as Sims said, there's little-to-nothing recognizable as the work of those individuals within (The closest I can think of is that the story reminded me quite a bit of Jeff Lemire's overlong "Rotworld" story arc in Animal Man, a story set in a dystopian future where all of the world's super-people were transformed into hideous monster versions of themselves).

There are five art teams involved: Ethan Van Sciver, Patrick Zircher, Aaron Lopresti and Art Thibert, Dan Jurgens and Mark Irwin and, finally, Jesus Merino and Dan Green. Van Sciver and Jurgens are the only two I really recognized enough to notice and think, "Oh, this is his scene" or "I guess this is where they take over." The best I can say of the art is that the character designs are cool, much cooler than I expected in many instances, and each art team is strong. There are no bad or hard-to-read pages in this whole book.

Giffen also picks up a credit as "art consultant," which is a strange credit. I wonder what that entails? For past weekly series, particularly and most consistently 52, Giffen provided breakdowns for the other artists.

The story opens in Central City, "35 Years From Now," with Van Sciver drawing. What does the world of 2049 look like? Well, the sky is red, the moon has a big, glowing Brother Eye eye shape on it, and various unshaven characters have formed an uneasy alliance, to protect civilians from "the bugs."

I didn't recognize any of 'em except The Flash, who looks just as he does in 2014, save for a bushy gray beard, and Captain Cold. There are three dudes with machine-guns; a bald guy with a long white beard who looks a little Oliver Queen-like, a blonde guy with long hair and a long beard, and another guy with an eye patch. I don't know if they are old man versions of DC characters or not; if so, they are DC characters without super-powers.

The door to their stronghold is broken down by two creepy cyborgs that apparently used to be Wonder Woman and Hawk (from Hawk and Dove, one of the very first of the New 52 books to get canceled). They're basically just superhero torsos attached to giant robot spider bodies, with swords for hands, glowing red lights all over and Brother Eye-branding on them (Wondy's tiara, for example, features Brother Eye's eye where the star used to be).

These are really weird, rather creepy designs, and a refreshing change from the expected, humanoid shaped cyborgs or robots.

Page three brings us the first on-panel mutilation of the book, as Wonder Woman chops the hands off Captain Cold, or "Leonard" as he's simply referred to here, which initiates his cyborg-ification and use of "eye" for "I" puns:
After Flash kills—or re-kills, I guess—the heroes-turned-robot monsters, he is approached by Frankenstein (the version from Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke's Seven Soldiers miniseries, and the star of the Lemire-written Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE ongoing, another early casualty of the New 52 relaunch).

He offers Flash the choice of either joining Brother Eye willingly or being destroyed, and when Flash responds "Go to hell, you monster" (there's that mild language of the T-for-Teen comic), Frankenstein unbuttons his shirt for the most fucked-up thing I've seen in a DC comic in...forever...?
Why yes, that is Black Canary's face, stitched into Frankenstein's torso. Or maybe it's her whole head, as the next panel has Frankenstein saying, "...just her lovely voice," and the face in his chest screaming, while Flash is skeletonized by sound waves.

Congratulations Van Sciver and whoever wrote this page; that is some messed-up, scarly-looking shit that will stay with me.

Frankenstein than narrates to no one in particular for a page, showing the extent of the world's Brother Eye-ification.

Batgirl's torso built atop the Bat-signal, which is now a Brother Eye-signal! The Amazons of Paradise Island as four-legged robot things (Good news, Wonder Woman! Your sisters will be de-petrified at some point. Bad news? They will all be killed and turned into torso spider-bots), standing above the skeletons of Deathstroke the Terminator and a Green Lantern! Aqua-spider-bot-man underwater! And, in London, this...!
Even as a robot, that guy's always smoking...

That's followed by five rather tedious pages of superheroes sacrificing their lives in a battle against robotic foes—Blue Beetle and Green Lantern John Stewart battle the "assimilated" versions of Booster Gold, Superman and Amazo, who was already a robot, while Grifter and Amethyst, Princess of Gem World fight Superman and the assimilated John Stewart.

We then get to the crux of the issue, and what appears to be the premise of the series. In the Batcave, Batman (a white-haired Bruce Wayne) is putting the finishing touches on his time-travel device while being second-guessed by Batman Beyond (Terry, like from the cartoon; interestingly, this Batman Beyond isn't the same one from the Batman Beyond comics DC has been publishing. At least, he might have the same costume and the same secret identity, but the world he is comic from is clearly not the world of those comics, which was filled with very different versions of many of the heroes glimpsed in these pages. So this is a Batman Beyond, but not the Batman Beyond from the Batman Beyond comics. Got it?)

At one point, Batman tells Batman Beyond that he won't live in Brother Eye's world, at which point BB responds, "Then you and Mr. Terrific should never have built it."

So as in the post-Crisis, pre-New 52 continuity, Batman Bruce Wayne created Brother Eye. I always thought it was weird that DC never did anything with that weird-ass plot point brought up in the lead-up to Infinite Crisis; apparently, Batman had an ultra super-secret, sentient A.I. spy satellite for years, and they never went back to tell any stories about why he had it and how he might have used it in the past. It seemed like such an obvious Batman story to tell, and one more interesting than any of the Batman fights Two-Face for the 402nd time stories they told instead.

Anyway, in this future continuity, Batman built the satellite with the help of Mr. Terrific, from the canceled comic Mr. Terrific, who was on Earth-2 in the pages of Earth 2 last I knew (Mr. Terrific, Grifter, Amethyst, Frankenstein...they could probably have called this Canceled Comics Cavalcade instead).

Batman's radical plan to save the world is to go back in time and stop Brother Eye from ever being built by killing a man. Whether the man is Mr. Terrific or Bruce Wayne isn't clear, but it sounds like they're talking about killing Terrific, since once Bruce has his arm chopped off and takes a mortal wound (see above) he tells Terry not to contact Bruce Wayne in the past. Or Superman.

At no point do either of the Batmen mention to one another that the whole traveling back in time from a dystopian future where machine makes war upon man to kill the person who will create the operating system that controls the evil machines is basically just the plot of Terminator.

Batman Beyond makes the jump in the nick of time, but A.L.F.R.E.D., the AI in his suit that is not at all like J.A.R.V.I.S., the AI operating system named after billionaire superhero Tony Stark's butler, only to discover that he missed his target, and only traveled back to five years from now, 2019, not 2014. So Terry might be able to watch the live-action Justice League movie on DVD, but he might be too late to stop the horrible future from occurring, as the thing he traveled into the past to prevent "is already in play."

"Damn," Batman Beyond says, and not whatever stupid future swear he used to say on the cartoon. Slag? Shway?

It might be the most derivative comic in recent memory, with almost nothing original about it—save for the cool robot designs and the horrifying use of Black Canary's face—but it was very well drawn, and I plan on reading the next issue. If it can maintain this level of quality artwork and so-stupid-it's-entertaining, big, dumb, ultra-violent action, it might be worth spending a few weeks, months or even a year with.

(Okay, let's try this again.) Please forgive the title for this too-long-in-the-works blog post. I'm not crazy about it, but it seems apropos given the subject matter: The collection of a Gregg Hurwitz-written, Ethan Van Sciver and Szymon Kudranski-drawn story arc from Batman: The Dark Knight. You can't tell from the cover that DC chose for the collection, but the story arc details the origin of, and an epic confrontation with, the villain The Mad Hatter, so the "Mad" of the sub-title refers to a Victorian brand of insanity, and not the child-like angry emotion the grumpy Batman posing on the cover seems to be projecting.

There's an awful lot of solid craft on display throughout the book, and, for the most part, Hurwitz's script is inventive, fairly tightly-plotted and boasting a few original ideas and even some nice, sharp writing. It has its problems though, probably more and bigger problems than it has attributes, and it read to me like a very strong second-to-last draft to an excellent Batman story arc, with those problems in the script being rather easily repaired after a conversation with an engaged editor (Mike Marts, the book's editor, apparently didn't see or have the same problems with the story that I did...and I imagine successful prose novelist and professional comics writer Hurwitz wouldn't place much value on the criticisms offered by a semi-professional comics critic he's never heard of, but I'm going to go ahead and write them up anyway).

I previously reviewed Batman: The Dark Knight Vol. 3: Mad at Robot 6, and that short-ish, eight-paragraph review accurately reflects my reading and opinion of the book, but I did want to re-address it here, as I can devote more time, space and attention to it—as well as share some images from it—in a way that wouldn't have been quite as feasible at Robot 6.

This format also for a better enumeration of the books many virtues, its many more problems and, of course, its occasional ugliness. It's one thing to talk about how poor Kudranski's artwork is in places, but it's much easier and more effective to show you an image and say, "Look at how ugly this is."

So....


THE GOOD


1.) I really, really like how Ethan Van Sciver draws Batman's cape. Van Sciver has drawn Batman on several occasionas in the past, at greatest length in the 2004, two-part miniseries Batman and Catwoman: Trail of the Gun.

The Batman he draws here is technically dressed in the over-fussy New 52 costume, complete with huge metal gauntlets (with grooves corresponding to the scallops on the forearms) and the bat-shaped kneepads.

Van Sciver sells the armored-up Batman costume pretty well in general, though. There's a scene where we see Batman suiting up, and what used to be his cowl is shown to be a standalone helmet and neck brace now, complete with a visor that lowers the mask portion over his face.
Where Van Sciver deviates is in the drawing of the cape, which, like the one he's drawn on Batman in the past, resembles enormous bat-wings. Now, having Batman's cape flare out like giant bat-wings is an artistic flourish that pretty much everyone who has ever drawn Batman has engaged in before, but Van Sciver goes a step further, drawing the cape with umbrella-like structures running through it, as if it were built by Batman to resemble bat-wings, rather than simply being a cape that an artist can draw to look more like bat-wings during dramatic scenes.
Additionally, Van Sciver's Batman can wrap his cape around himself, occasionally resembling a bat with its wings folded around itself. I think that looks pretty cool.

2.) Van Sciver's adventurous lay-outs. Did you know that Batman has been dating a concert pianist named Natalya Trusevich since...well, for about two years now? (Our time; about a year his time). If you haven't been reading Batman: The Dark Knight, chances are you didn't. While I haven't been reading all of the Bat-books religiously, I think I'm pretty well caught up on them all at this point, and I don't recall Trusevich appearing anywhere other than Dark Knight.

About halfway through the first issue of this story arc, Bruce Wayne and Natalya have an intense conversation in which she expresses her displeasure at his secretive lifestyle and apparent unwillingness to commit; she also hints that she might know what his big secret really is. Eventually, they decide to part ways. The entire three-page sequence is layed-out in two tiers, with smaller, square panels running across the tops of the pages, and the rest of the page dominated by a close up drawing of piano keys, with the white keys serving as additional panels, broken up by the black keys.

I don't know that it necessarily worked better than it might have otherwise, but it was interesting at any rate, along the lines of what J.H. Williams III was always doing in Batwoman.

There's another sequence later, a two-page splash in which Batman is seated at the Bat-computer, surrounded by floating holographic "windows" representing different pages or screens, akin to what Tony Stark was using in the Iron Man movies, in which Van Sciver draws the scene from a high angle, looking down, and we see Bruce in the middle of this whirlpool of data and he does his computerized detective work.

Say what you will about Van Sciver's work (I generally like it, myself), but here it's exceptionally interesting looking.

3.) Hurwitz and Van Sciver fairly completely re-create The Mad Hatter, for a highly original take. Hurwitz similarly gave new, not-really-needed origin stories to The Penguin (in 2011's The Penguin: Pain and Prejudice miniseries with Kudranski) and The Scarecrow (in 2012 Batman: The Dark Knight story arc "Cycle of Violence," with David Finch).

Debuting way back in 1948, The Mad Hatter is actually one of the oldest and vital of the Batman villains one's likely to see in usage these days. While his portrayal has changed over the decades and from medium-to-medium the same way so many of the other Batman villains of a similar vintage have, he was generally a man obsessed with committing crimes having to do with hats (his desire to possess Batman's distinctive cowl being one source of their conflicts), or having to do with Lewis Carroll's Alice books, or some combination of the two.

As for his modus operandi, he's an ingenious scientist who has created a means of effecting limited mind-control, generally by putting a mind-control device near the head of another person. Like in a hat, for example.

The Carroll obsession has been the dominant portrayal for the last few decades, perhaps owing to the influence and success of the Batman: The Animated Series episode that served as his origin story ("Mad as a Hatter," which is right up there with the Mr. Freeze episode in my esteem). Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale gave him an origin story in 1994's Batman: Madness—A Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special (collected in Batman: Haunted Knight), in which it was rather heavily implied that he was a pedophile and in which the character was dramatically reduced in size.

As for other Hatter stories, he played a minor role in the two Loeb/Sale "Year One" epics Long Halloween and Dark Victory, hearned an arc in the Greg Rucka-written, limited color pallete of Detective Comics (2001's #758-760), was spotlighted in the second Joker's Asylum miniseries and Gail Simone used him in one of her early Villains United/Secret Six stories, mostly to make jokes about him having sex with hats.

Hurwitz's new origin finds young Jervis Tetch as the good-hearted son of a good-hearted Gotham City haberdasher, who one day hopes he will take over the family business. He has a lot of friends, including a beautiful blond girl named Alice Dee, with whom he shares on perfect little-kid date. When he reaches adolescence however, it becomes apparent that he's just not growing as fast as his peers, and Alice only likes him as a friend.

He starts wearing a top hat and lifts to look bigger, and he starts taking an experimental drug to make him grow. It doesn't work, but it does have some pretty dramatic side-effects, including making him irrationally angry and causing him to start losing his hair at a young age.

He grows up to become a Gotham City supervillain, of course. His grand scheme here is to use his mind-control technology to stage a grand re-creation of that one perfect day he spent with his Alice, which means sets need constructed and actors need cast. Despite his ability to control minds, he also coerces people through threats and violence.

In addition to his origin tweaks and his new-ish, altered appearance—which include eyes that don't look in the same direction at the same time—Hurwitz's Mad Hatter drinks various teas, each of which creates a particular effect on him. For example, before his climactic battle with Batman, he blows a handful of "Special Tea Psycho" in Batman's face, making the Dark Knight hallucinate. The Hatter drinks the same blend to give him adrenaline and get him ready for a fight.

I don't necessarily like all of the differences between this Mad Hatter and previous ones, in the same way I don't think Hurwitz improved either The Penguin or The Scarecrow by his tweaks to those characters, but I appreciate the fact that he is taking advantage of the New 52 reboot to reinvent characters, to do something new instead of simply doing something over.

4.) Van Sciver's covers are really good. You can't really tell from the one that DC used for the cover of the collection, which is really only the right half of the cover from the issue that shipped during gatefold cover month, which they almost called "WTF? Certified" month.

But a few of them are full of creepy, crazy, sometimes grotesque imagery. For example:


I particularly like the little "Cheshire Bat" in the second of those covers above, the one for issue #17 (Wow, looking at the covers as published, DC sure covered up a lot of Van Sciver's art with text, didn't they?)

5.) I thought this was funny. Even if I have a hard time imagining Batman saying "nope" when a "no" would do just as well.

6.)"Bata-Mining." The second issue opens with the perviously mentioned two-page spread of Batman in the middle of a maelstrom of glowing, holographic computer windows, with Alfred approaching to deliver a cup of steaming hot tea.

"There's no record of Jervis Tetch anywhere, but the Bata-Mining software traced a few wire transfers from his account before he disappeared."

When Alfred responds, "Down the rabbit hole?" and Batman shows that he's not in the mood with a simple e of "Alfred," our favorite super-butler responds with the barb, "Apologies. But is it really worse than 'Bata-mining'?"

I love the idea of Batman as an obsessive-compulsive brander, slapping Bat-logos on everything and making his tools and possessions his by adding the prefix "Bat-" to them. That said, when I first saw the word "Bata-mining," I thought it was a typo, because "data" is a real word, and Batman's usual pattern would be to simply refer to what he's doing as, say, "Bat-data-mining."

But it was just a set-up for an Alfred zinger, so that's cool.

7.) "He's a freakin' pterodactyl." In the final issue of the story arc, Batman arrives at police headquarters and finds his Natalya Trusevich's corpse embedded in the glass of the Bat-signal (more on that in the "bad" portion below). After taking an entire panel to mourn for his murdered girlfriend...
...Batman grits his teeth, leaps to the roof, dashes across it in a Neal Adams-style run, his cape stiffening around him like bat-wings while an enormous bolt of lighting fills the night sky.

"I've never seen him like that," Commissioner Gordon says to one of the several anonymous police officers around him.

"He was like a stealth bomber," one of them replies, offering a simile that makes no sense at all (Other than the fact that Batman and a stealth bomber both have wings and are black in color, I guess...?). "The Bat's gone insane."

"He's not a bat anymore," Gordon says. "He's a freakin' pterodacytl."

That bit of dialogue reminded me of Geoff Johns' writing, as it occupies that same rather dumb/sort of awesome territory that Johns' writing so thoroughly owns. I can't tell if Hurwitz means it to be funny, I can't tell if if he means it to be funny in the precise way that I find it to be funny and I can't tell why exactly I find it so hilarious, but the "he's a freakin' pterodactyl" line cracked me up.


THE BAD

1.) The Tweedles as henchmen. Golden Age Batman villains who have been around even longer than The Mad Hatter (and The Riddler), the Tweedles debuted in 1943. They don't actually have a lot going for them; they were basically identical twin criminals who fought Batman and Robin by rolling and bouncing around on their fat bodies. I can't really recall reading many stories to feature the Tweedles, let alone good stories (Garth Ennis/John McCrea's four-part Demon arc "Hell's Hitman" featured them in a minor role, and Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen's TEC #841, featuring "The Wonderland Gang," was nicely drawn and kinda clever). So it's really not that big a deal that Hurwitz here reduces them to mere muscle—Van Sciver has drawn them as big, bulky, egg-shaped men resembling slightly more realistic, tougher-looking versions of the Tweedles in the Tim Burton directed Alice In Wonderland—but it still seems, at least conceptually, off or wrong to so demote the characters.

2.) The savagery of The Hatter. In this story arc Hurwitz essentially turns The Mad Hatter into a differently-themed Joker; a soul-less mass murderer with a three-figure body count who kills calmly, casually and on a frequent basis (All of Batman's rogues seem to be turning into Joker-like mass murderers these days, which really rather stretches one's ability to suspend disbelief regarding the state and federal government's willingness to keep passing out not guilty by reason of insanity verdicts to men and women who are no longer just serial killers, but mass murderers and terrorists. Hell, even Harley Quinn recently murdered what had to be scores of people when she bombed children all over Gotham City in the pages Detective Comics #23.2).

In a flashback, The Mad Hatter kills a pet rabbit as a child. During the "casting" process for his memory re-enactment he guns down anyone whose forced audition he doesn't like. He snaps the neck of one underling with his bare hands. In one particularly memorable scene, he has the Tweedles set a stepladder down in front of one of his underlings, and then climbs up it and plunges his thumbs into the man's eye-sockets.

When he finally tracks down Alice Dee and finds that she's now a middle-aged wife and mother of three, smoking a cigarette while ironing laundry in front of the television, he beats her to death with the iron (This scene is actually staged somewhat tastefully, as Van Sciver draws the Hatter striding away from the murder scene still clutching the gory iron, blood splatter on his face, while the bashed-in head of the corpse on the floor in the background is obscured by The Hatter in the foreground. Yes, that actually counts as tasteful for DC Comics in the 21st century).

At one point in the narrative, he orders all of his mind-controlled thralls to drown themselves. When Batman asks how many, Gordon responds, "Hundreds. All ages, genders, ethnicities. And kids, too. Children.."

And, of course, The Hatter has Batman's girlfriend Natalya Trusevich killed. He kidnaps her and tries to beat Batman's secret identity out of her, calling in one of the Tweedles to take over punching her for him (This scene is drawn by Kudranski, so its dark, blurry and doesn't make much in the way of realistic visual sense, so it's not as upsetting as it could be. There are a few red panels with black blood splatter, and the sound effect WHAM!, and then we see an image of Trusevich with liquid, presumably blood, on her face.)

Finally, they throw her out of a helicopter with terrific aim, her body landing directly atop the Bat-signal on the roof of police headquarters.

3.) The cliches of Natalya's death. So the reason superheroes usually give for justifying the fact that they keep their identities secret is that, if their villains ever discovered their true identities, they would immediately go after their friends and loved ones, hurting these innocent associates as a way to get at the heroes. In Batman comics and other stories, this is usually played as a sort of tragic, romantic tension: Aflred and others worry that Bruce Wayne will never truly fall in love or find a romantic partner with whom to spend his life, Bruce always meets amazing women and comes close to forming a real relationship with them, only to pull back, not wanting to jeopardize his life's work of dressing up like a bat to fight crime and/or endanger them.

Sometimes he does actually share his secret identity, and then the women totally get killed.

As mentioned previously, Batman breaks up with Natalya early in this arc because his secret life is coming between them.

Later, Batman has a creepy dream or memory about his parents, in which his mother tells him that what the really wants for him, above all else is "to be known. Really known, by another person." Like, Biblially? "There's a fear in showing all the parts of ourselves to someone else," but when you do, and they accept you, "that's the most wonderful thing in the world."

So Bruce Wayne gets in his Batplane, flies over to Natalya's, drags her to the window, where he's left it in park and flies her to the Batcave, saying "THis is who I am" over and over again.

They then do it in the Batcave. This is another Kudranski-drawn passage, so there's no telling where or what they did it on—does Batman keep a mattress or Bat-futon down there for such occasions? Is there a big bed behind the giant penny? Who knows?

Natalya frets that she's late for her concert performance, and that she'll never make it in time, but Batman flies her there in his Batplane and drops her off—one of the perks of being Batman's girlfriend.

But wait, what's this? One of The Mad Hatter's many hat-wearing, mind-controlled spies has seen Natalya exiting the Bat-plane, and he calls it in. The Hatter sees Natalya, and immediately thinks she would be the perfect person to play his Alice in his memory re-creation. So he kidnaps her.

And, as previously stated, attempts to cajole and beat the secret of Batman's identity out of her, tortures her and, ultimately, kills her. So, in, like, a matter of hours Hurwitz reenacts the worst case scenario justifying Batman never telling anyone his secret identity: Better to simply bang broads and keep secrets from them.

It's cliche and it's a bizarre example of fridging a supporting character to one of the few superheroes who has absolutely no need to be motivated by the death of a lover or loved one because that's kinda sorta always been his whole deal and it makes Alfred and Batman's mom look like a couple of dumb a-holes for suggesting Batman pursue a relationship not built completely on lies sometime.

The speed of this whole cycle of events really makes the cliches seem even worse, too. There's no drama, this isn't something anyone struggles with; Batman shares his secret identity, and before the day's over the woman he shared it with is totally dead.

4.) Batman on the warpath. Also as previously stated, when Batman sees what The Hatter and Tweedles have done to Natalya, he loses his shit, turning into a "freakin' pterodactyl" (Hundreds of anonymous victims? That's sad and all, but it's not the same and losing your lover, I guess).

He hops in his Batplane and flies straight from the murder scene to The Mad Hatter's secret base. When Alfred suggests that Batman maybe wait a bit, as he's in no state of mind to tackle the villain, Batman responds, "Let me be clear, Penny one. If you try to stop me, I will run you over."

What a dick.

So Batman beat the shit out of a bunch of mind-controlled muscle, and brutally attacks the Tweedles: One he shoots with some kind of Batarangs-on-a-Batline bolo thingee that pins him that entwines him in wire and pins him to the wall, leaving him begging "Please...the pain...don't..."

The other he punches so hard that he knocks his jaw off, leaving it dangling grotesquely by the skin.

And then he gets to the Mad Hatter who, remember, despite all his evil acts, is still a spindly, four-foot-tall guy wearing platform shoes.

Our hero flying kicks him. He picks him up and throws him. The Hatter starts to crawl away on his knees, and Batman kicks him in the face, dislodging two of his teeth. "P-Please!" Hatter begs, and Batman gets on top of him and just starts pounding him in the face; The Hatter cries and begs him to stop, Alfred shouts in Batman's ear piece "Good God. You're going to kill him!" And Batman's angry face is covered in the Hatter's sprayed blood.

Batman gives him one more uppercut, sending him flying unconscious into a nearby pool, where the bleeding villain begins to sink face first. Batman turns away, and Alfred starts cajoling him through his earpiece:

Pull him out.

This isn't you!

You don't do this!

You can't. You can't do this. Because then it will be true. Then you'll be no different than them.

It's that last bit that apparently got through to Batman, as it caused him to stop, then turn around and dive into the water to rescue The Hatter.

Having Alfred talk Batman out of killing a foe in a vengeful rage is all well and good, but Alfred's particular argument here isn't very compelling, and it's hard to imagine that getting through to Batman at that particular point in time.

Alfred is essentially finding equivalency between The Hatter (and his ilk's) killings and Batman killing The Hatter. But, remember, The Mad Hatter has killed hundreds of innocent Gothamites, including children, for no reason. The Batman, had he gone through with killing the Hatter, would have killed one—just one—person, a person who had murdered hundreds of innocent people and would, in all likelihood, continue to kill. The scales aren't exactly even in this case, Alf.

A police officer would have shot The Hatter the moment the fight began. The President of The United States would have ordered a remote controlled drone to fire a missile at him for killing far fewer Americans, had he done so in a different country. Batman drowning the Mad Hatter here, even under these circumstances—in which Batman clearly has the upper-hand and comes across more as a bully than a righteous warrior—is hardly in the same ballpark as what The Hatter has done.

I know "Should The Batman Kill?" is a popular topic of conversation for comics fans and Batman fans, and I'm strongly in the "Hell no, never" camp. Practically, it doesn't make a lot of sense, as if Batman did kill, his rogue's gallery would end up looking more like The Punisher's than that of, say, Spider-Man and The Flash. Personally, my explanation for why the Batman shouldn't kill would be that he swore an oath to his dead parents, maybe as a child, that he would never take a human life, never put anyone through what he went through (even if The Hatter or The Joker deserve to die, maybe they have friends and family?); I imagine that as he faces more and more evil, Batman will realize the practicality of occasionally having to kill his most monstrous foes, but he would take that vow to his parents so seriously that he wouldn't bend or break it, no matter how illogical it might seem (Because Batman's crazy; I used to like the "broken" conception of the character, but Grant Morrison andDean Trippe and other's have convinced me that Batman-as-crazy person may not be as good or even as likely a reading as the Batman-as-super-sane person, so now I think of Batman as an extremely mentally healthy genius, with only two real manifestations of insanity: His obsessive-compulsive need to label everything with a bat, and his pathological refusal to kill under any and all circumstances, up to and including doing really crazy shit, like resuscitating a dying Joker).

Anyway, Batman got so mad he almost killed someone here, which is fine—we've seen that happen, what, 9,000 times before? This instance struck me as a little apalling mainly because of what a mismatched fight it was—The Hatter, like The Penguin, isn't exactly in Batman's weight class, and here he doesn't even have any weapons or get in any good blows; it's a beatdown more than a fight. And because of the particularly false-sounding rhetoric that Alfred used to talk him out of it; surely a "What would your parents think if they saw you now?" or something in that vein would have been better than a "If you do kill this one mass-murderer, you're practically committing an act of terrorism." (Alfred, unlike Gordon or any of the Robins or the folks that generally talk Batman out of beating people to death when he's really pissed off is actually in the unique position to be able to effectively evoke the memory of Batman's parents).

5.) Batman doesn't do anything to stop The Mad Hatter. The weirdest thing about this story, for me anyway, was that once Batman learned that it was The Mad Hatter behind the rash of kidnappings discussed on the very first page of the story arc, and that he knows the Mad Hatter is using his mind control technology to "take" people, Batman doesn't sit down and start working on a way to counteract the mind-control tech.

They never really get in to how it works (radio waves? Wi-fi?), but a signal is sent from somewhere to all the other where's, giving The Hatter control of the actions of anyone wearing one of his hats. Batman figures this out pretty quickly, but he doesn't sit down at his work bench with some generic circuit boards and a little electrical tool with a blue light on the tip of it as expected, coming up with a countermeasure—some way to block are override the signal.

Instead, he spends him time searching for The Hatter via raiding warehouses and interrogating a Tweedle (why, couldn't he track the hat-signals?), and then going on a date.


THE UGLY

Van Sciver draws four of the six issues in this arc, and Kudranski the remaining two (The collection also includes Dark Knight Annual #1 by Hurwitz and Kudranki, in which Batman psychologically tortures but doesn't capture or arrest villains The Penguin, Scarecrow and Mat Hatter).

Kudranski is fucking terrible.

Beyond that, though, his art doesn't look the least bit like Van Sciver's, and he doesn't even stick to the designs Van Sciver has established for the characters, so no one and nothing looks alike in the two distinct views we're given within the storyline.

I think this might have been the very worst part of the story; if you haven't read this comic, what do you make of this rorschach of a comic book panel?
Did you guess that it's obviously a bunch of drowned corpses being washed out of a drainage pipe...? If so, you sure made sense out of that image quicker than me. I had to puzzle over it for a while, eventually gave up and read the narration and dialogue for clues, and then went back to figure it out.

Compare it to Van Sciver's drawing of the same thing, from one of the covers to the story arc:
The human bodies washing out of a drain pipe are a little easier to recognize there, huh? Even though on the cover t hey are merely a bit of background design and not, you know, the whole point that the image is devoted to conveying.

Here is a bad scan of the maybe the worst of Kudranski's work in the book, which is from the annual that serves as a sort of back up to "Mad":
If you need context, Batman has tricked The Penguin, The Mad Hatter and The Scarecrow to meeting at The Arkham Detention Facility For Youth.

There, Batman scares the bejeezus out of them through various means; I think he doses them with Crane's fear gas, but it's not entirely clear. At any rate, after they relive their greatest fears and aspects of their new, Hurwitz-conceived origin stories, they all end up unconscious at the bottom of a big, grand staircase. The above page shows them waiting for the night to end and the sun to come up.

As you can see, Kudranski just dropped the same image of the background in, and then placed the same image of the three characters atop it, only altering them slightly in the last panel (and messing with the lighting).

What he doesn't do is position them in anyway that makes any sense. So that The Penguin, supposedly lying on his back, is levitating above the floor. The Hatter, in the backgorund, is drawn as if kneeling on his knees, but, as you can see, he's actually floating above the ground as well.

That is not a good page. It's not even a bad page. It's...well, I went with ugly, because "The Good, The Bad and The So Appalling I Can't Believe It Even Saw Print" didn't have the same ring to it...

So hey, what did you guys do this afternoon? I spent, oh, a few hours writing an incredibly long post about Batman: The Dark Knight Vol. 3: Mad by Gregg Hurwitz, Ethan Van Sciver and Szymon Kudranski. It was in a list format, discussing the several positives (like the scene above) and many, many negatives of the storyline, its conception and execution. I had actually started it Friday night, by re-reading the collection and taking some notes, and then spent this afternoon filling in the list with paragraphs of commentary, including a few digressive mini-essays about some of the issues raised by the story.

I saved repeatedly, but I guess there was some broken HTML in there somewhere, and I told myself I'd find it before posting—I didn't think that was enough to block saving, but apparently so. Anyway, I then spent a little more time scanning images, and broke for dinner. When I tried opening NPR in another window for company while I cooked, the computer completely froze and I had to forcibly close my browser. "Are you sure you want to do this?" the computer asked, "You will lose any unsaved changes." But since I had been saving my changes, I figured I'd be okay.

A few hours later, dinner cooked and eaten, part of a Godzilla movie watched while I digested and my over-heated laptop having spent some time cooling off, I returned to the computer in order to insert the images and post the piece when, to my horror, I discovered the last three-fourths of it were lost. Then I spent another 45 minutes of my day trying to figure out a way to recover it, but I was completely stumped and could find no answers on the Internet or through the "help" areas. It wasn't in my history and blogger, so far as I can tell, doesn't save drafts the way some other blogging whatchacallthems do (I've idiotically, accidentally erased pieces I wrote for Robot 6 and Good Comics For Kids in the past, for example, but been able to find previous drafts, minimizing the re-writing needed).

Now, I could have re-written the post. I still had my notes, after all, part of it was saved, and, having just written it, I remembered the gist of what I was trying to say. In fact, if I rewrote it now, it would more likely than not be a better post, as I would have actually written a second draft of it, which is something I never do (As you can probably tell from the less-than-sterling quality of the writing). But I've already wasted, let's see, the majority of one entire Saturday on talking about a mediocre comic book for a few thousand words, and don't really want to spend/waste any more of my life on it.

So this is basically just a post explaining why there's not a bigger, better post here in its place.

Sorry! But trust me, I'm much more irritated about it than anyone else could possibly be.

Sorry posting has been a bit lighter than usual this week, but I have a good excuse: I've been doing just as much writing-about-comics, I've just been doing it elsewhere. For example, I have reviews of the two latest Toon Books at Good Comics For Kids this week, newcomer Thereza Row's lovely Hearts and Lilli Carre's better-still The Night Parade.

At ComicsAlliance, I have an interview with cartoonist Michael DeForge about his excellent Ant Colony.

At Robot 6, I have a column featuring short-ish reviews of Batman: The Dark Knight Vol. 3: Mad, Empowered Vol. 8, Justice League Dark Vol. 3: The Death of Magic and X-Men: Battle of The Atom (In brief: Problematic, and I'll probably revisit here later in a format here at EDILW; good; bad; surprisingly, even shockingly good).

A few days ago over at Blog@Newsarama, I noted that DC had removed an upside-down cross from Frank Quitely's cover image for Batman and Robin #15 between the time the book was originally solicited and the time it was actually printed and shipped to shops (something I had idly suspected may occur when I first saw the cover, given a few other recent-ish examples of DC removing potentially offensive to someone imagery from their covers featuring Batman or Superman).

Well today I got a small stack of books from my nearest comic shop (reviews tomorrow; I'm still reading a few graphic novels that were in the mix), and had a good chance to study the wraparound Crime Syndicate vs. Justice League cover by Ethan Van Sciver.

It looks like this: It's not perfect, but it is a pretty exciting cover image, with really big, colorful figures beating on each other in exciting action poses. If you read Bleeding Cool because you have to at least occasionally check it out for work (because you are a semi-professional comics blogger), you may recall this post by Rich Johnson from way back in August, in which he pointed out that artist EVS apparently slipped a little coded message into the image as it was originally solicited, with the an S, a T, an F and a U among the letters on the sign Donna Troy was being punched through, reading STFU, an acronym for, you presumably already know, Shut The Fuck Up.

Well, if you compare the two images, you'll see that DC decided to remove the F and change the U into a J, removing the coded message.

Obviously, like a the other cover changes discussed in my post at Blog@, it's not a very big deal, and, if anything, is somewhat comforting, as it let's us know for sure that, yes, someone somewhere at DC does look at the covers to see if there's anything that might give anyone something to freak out or complain about or launch a campaign against corrupting funny books over. (At least some of the time, anyway—I'm not sure why whoever takes the STFUs and upside-down crosses off the covers doesn't also nix the blood-puking covers).

It's kind of too bad that they just stopped with those letters, however. I mean, if someone was going to go to the trouble of fixing part of this cover, why'd they stop there? Why not ask EVS to do something about Ultraman's weird right arm? Or the fact that EVS drew a different version of Power Ring than the one that appears inside the book? (This Power Ring is the Kyle Rayner equivalent from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's JLA: Earth-2 original graphic novel; the Power Ring in the story is the original, Hal Jordan equivalent, back from the dead just as Hal is).

Or the just plain insane amount of cleavage Dona Troy is showing?

In Wednesday's post about the week's new comics, I mentioned page 16 of Batman Unseen as a perfect example of both writer Dough Moench's and artist Kelley Jones' particular strengths, and how they work well together.

I tried to explain it in words, but a pictures worth a thousand of 'em, and this page is composed of a half dozen little pictures.

It's a scene in which two gunmen try desperately to shoot down and kill an invisible man that they know is somewhere in the room, before he can kill them. Obviously, a pretty challenging scene to communicate, but they do a hell of a job of it through extremely specific sound effects and Jones' background patterns in key panels. The explanatory line "He caught it!" seems superfluous.

Here's a scan of the page:
And I just love that last panel.


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I've seen the above image, the cover to Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, a couple of times over the course of the last few days, accompanying stories about Nickelodean's purchase of the TMNT (A move which I'm afraid I don't have much of anything to say at this point. I'm not sure exactly what it means, and while it seems unfortunate from a symbolic standpoint, I don't actually know how it will impact the turtles comics. I hope it won't interfere with any collections of the clasic material; I'm looking forward to reprints of plenty of issues in trade form still).

That image is, what, 25 years old now? I've probably seen it off and on over the course of the last 20 years or so. And yet I never noticed until just this morning that Donatello, the turtle on the far right holding a staff, is also carrying a sword on his back.

I don't know why this blows my mind exactly, but it does...particularly because that sword must have been perched on Donatello's shell there for decades and for some reason I never noticed.


This cover image, for September's Blackest Night #3, is much, much younger, and has only been around since around June or so, when DC would have first solicited the issue. I didn't notice until just yesterday, when I was looking for a Blackest Night cover image for a post on Blog@, but there are little Lantern Corps symbols floating around in Firestorm's hair/flame thing. Neat.


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Red Sonja looks awfully comfortable for someone wearing a metal top and sitting on a stone chair, doesn't she?


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Here's Marvel Editor-in-Cheif Joe Quesada talking to Kiel Phegley about Marvel's upcoming event series Siege:

I personally feel that the big events are an important part of our publishing arsenal, but if we keep tapping that vein, it would eventually be a tool we wouldn't be able to use any more because it would wear out its welcome.

I love that sentence. Is it even possible to work any more metaphors into it?


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Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine had a post recently dedicated to has got to be one of the most horrifying comics stories ever published by a Gaines: "Peter and Pinky in Meat Land." It's the charming tale of a little boy who is visited by a magic elf that tells him about the origin of cooked meat (a Chinese boy discovers the charred bodies of his dead pigs after a barn fire and notices that they taste delicious), and then transports the boy to an actual slaughterhouse, so he can see where meat comes from (i.e. slaughtered animals).

The story was published in a 1947 issue of Tiny Tots. I assume every tiny tot who read it grew up to be a vegetarian because holy shit you guys. This is the most fucked up comics story I've ever read, and I'm pretty sure its not even trying to be fucked up..