Occasional Thoughts: Deja Vu All Over Again

X-Force is #1 on the sales charts, Larry Stroman is on X-Factor, we have another Invasion!, and Valiant's restarted.

Deja vu, anyone?

Then again, I always felt that everything in comics eventually comes around again. It's just part of that "it's a small world after all" thing.

I loved the art on the new "X-Force," but spiritually I find it the sibling of the Liefeld orginal. It's all about fight!fight!fight!fight!cool!cool!cool!cool!

We can criticize certain comics, but look at the numbers.

The best-selling DC comic is All-Star Batman and Robin. We can laugh at it all we want, but the fact is that many many comic book fans are buying this comic, and most probably a lot of people who do not classify themselves as fans. The top selling comics, I have to believe, attract readers outside of the fandom.


Why All-Star Batman and Robin is a top-selling book:
a) It's a Batman book not tied up in continuity
b) Jim Lee has name cachet
c) Frank Miller has name cachet beyond comics

Again, we can criticize books like ASBAR and JLA, but they are bringing in the cash for DC.

Which brings me to DC's newly-announced 2nd JLA book, Justice League.

Two Justice Leagues sort of apes Marvel's new Avengers -- but then again, DC did this successfully (at least for a while) in the late 80s.


There was also the attempt to extend the JLA franchise with Justice League Elite, which I think failed because its desire to be so very "different" from the regular book, with a lack of iconic characters outside of Green Arrow and Flash. The issues that became another JLA spin-off book, JLA Classified, were originally assigned as arcs for the regular title.

I think having James Robinson pen this new JLA book is interesting, given his work on Starman, but it is hardly a slam-dunk. Starman was an awesome book but came out some time ago. The question becomes: can he bring that magic to Justice League, and will the mass market who have propelled ASBAR and JLA to such heights cotton to his direction on the title?

As for the inciting incident that helps form this new team:

"That event? A murder. Unsurprisingly, neither DiDio not Robinson are saying who will be taking the upcoming dirt nap, only that it’s tied to Final Crisis, and that the League’s response causes a schism."

Which brings us to another deja vu moment:


Meanwhile, the Marvel/Stephen King cash cow continues with an adaptation of The Stand. Remember how Marvel used to adapt all that Clive Barker stuff and it really didn't seem to make much of a splash What happened? With books like Dark Tower, Anita Blake, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and World of Warcraft, licensed material seems to have made a strong comeback.

So will DC's new Chuck book suck or not?
I know there has been some snark about how some retailers are selling the Buffy issue where she has lesbian sex as "come and get your Buffy lesbian sex comic right here, yeah!"


Back when Northstar "came out" in the early 90s, retailers, at least in Brooklyn, did the same thing. "Teh gay book, it might be worth money some day, come buy it!" You know, except Northstar didn't have any gay sex in that book, because gay male characters aren't allowed to have that in comics (only hot women).

Finally, I love the way some male comic readers freak out at the faintest suspicion of penis on their covers:
I say: more penis on DC's covers! More penis!


See, this all leads back to why we don't have more comics where male characters wake up in bed with each other after having sex.

And that's all I got.

The Occasional Morning Show

picture from Global Graphica

Quick Bits:

Comics Worth Reading takes a look at the sales numbers for Archie Comics

Progressive Ruin has a review of the (apparently kinda violent) animated Turok DVD

Here is a strange post finding a metaphor for Scientology in the Green Lantern Corps (does he have a field day with L-Ron from Giffen's JLA? Oh yes he does).

Firefly's Nathan Fillion will voice Steve Trevor on the Wonder Woman animated film, so geek out.

Angry Zen Master wonders if the Oscars might be a little racist...

...at any rate, the awards show seems to have been a bit anti-Brad Renfro



A commenter yesterday reminded me of the phenomena in parts of the comic book industry and fandom of qualifying a female comic creator's success -- having the need to "explain" or attach an addendum to a woman's comics career, not letting them stand on their own merit.

During the course of my comics career, I've heard others "qualify" the accomplishments of many female comics professionals in one of three ways:

1. She slept her way to the top.

2. She got in through the business through a boyfriend or husband, not because she was talented.

3. She is a lesbian.

Let's take a look at each of these qualifiers briefly.

"She is a slut" is popularly bandied about even to this day, especially concerning women with high degrees of success. In the use of this qualifier, all the female's accomplishments mean nothing because of a supposed affair or series of affairs.

Sometimes a woman's success in the comics industry will be qualified with "well, she was just the wife or girlfriend of so-and-so," as if the person in question really didn't possess any talent and any achievements she made are really no more than "favors" the company paid to the boyfriend or husband in question.

When all else fails, the qualifier "oh, she's a lesbian" might be used. I used to hear this one about older women in the field a lot. While fine when the woman in question is actually a lesbian, there are a number of non-lesbian women this qualifier has been applied to. I suppose the motivation of this qualifier is two-fold: the speaker means some sort of derogatory connotation (a result of their own homophobia), and there is also the need to explain away the female's success as the result of something "different" about them.

All three qualifiers, ultimately, are meant to distract from the woman's actual work and have them judged by factors other than their comic creating/editing skills -- whether those factors are real or, more often, imagined.

Complicating matters are people in the industry who really do hold out to women as an opportunity for advancement a sexual option, and people in the industry who simply end up in romantic situations with their co-workers and hires as the result of a more-or-less innocent day-to-day familiarity (as opposed to an exploitative agenda).

At any rate, perhaps the sex lives of women in comics is none of our business, unless they themselves wish to make it so.



The third annual Glyph Comics Awards -- honoring the best in black comics and creators -- were announced over the weekend. Multiple nominations went to Fabian Nicieza for JSA CLASSIFIED #28, Jeremy Love for Zuda's BAYOU, MF Grimm for Vertigo's SENTENCES, Dwayne McDuffie for his run on FANTASTIC FOUR, and Kyle Baker for NAT TURNER: REVOLUTION and SPECIAL FORCES.

An interesting note in terms of the nominees for best character in both the male and female categories -- while Luke Cage and Amanda Waller received nods, DC's "Legacy" characters, with the exception of David Lapham & Eric Battle's The Spectre in Tales of The Unexpected, did not.

Perhaps, as in the case of Nicieza on the Jakeem Thunder story for JSA CLASSIFIED, it is all a matter of getting talented and sensitive writers who approach diversity in the comics they write as something organic to the story.


Why isn't Nicieza writing JSA??

Three From WWII: The Twelve #2, JSA #12, Project Superpowers #0

With JSA, The Twelve, and now Project Superheroes, it seems as if superhero narratives about WW II (or, rather, those of the capes-and-masks set who fought in the conflict) are the hot topic in comics. Not that they ever really were an obscure topic in the medium. Maybe there has been a continual hearkening back to that time of real heroes and villains because that black/white dichotomy was the fuel by which the comic book superheroes operated.

I've always been a big fan of the Justice Society and the All-Star Squadron. I consider Roy Thomas the master at these narratives, skillfully weaving the lives, personalities, histories, and words of a huge cast while at the same time crafting stories that both echo the past but somehow remain relevant.

There are three World War II superhero team books on the stands at the present (Image Comics' upcoming Next Issue Project possibly making it four). Let's take a quick look at their most recent issues:

The Twelve #2
The mini-series is billed as a "book-length thriller," and it certainly lives up to its name. Last issue dealt with a lot of exposition, tracing how this team of superheroes from the 1940s ended up in our present; but #2 really delves into the histories and motivations of the characters, setting up a number or intriguing bits that will most certainly be crucial plot points later on. The art in this book, by Chris Weston, is a stand-out; the full-page shot of Captain Wonder cradling his wife's grave is particularly exquisite. Looking forward to more.
Rating: A








JSA #12
I really wanted to like this issue -- I mean, with gorgeous covers like this by Alex Ross, how can you not like it? Several reasons. First, though Geoff Johns is certainly an accomplished writer, he clearly needed tighter editing in this book. The opening, with an ensemble cast futzing around at the boxing ring, was muddled and went on for far too long.

Plus, I have a really hard time believing that Jakeem Thunder, even given his young age, would spout out "Who's the Asian hottie?" when first faced with the new Judomaster. If there was any character who I pitied in this issue, it was her, being surrounded by a bunch of back-slapping assholes.

The sequence with John Irons was also in need of some editing/quality control; John's opening dialog with his wife sounded like pure exposition devoid of any human quality. And Dale Eaglesham's art, while reminiscent of that great Stephen Sadowski work on the previous JSA, has occasional difficulty in getting from point A to point B in the visual storytelling.

In fact, the only saving grace of this issue, as far as I was concerned, was the introduction of the new Amazing Man, a character I always liked. Clad in a new dasheeki-inspired costume and possessing a backstory interwoven with the Katrina tragedy, he is a character I want to know more about (and who bears more than a passing resemblance to Ving Rhames. Or Jim Brown. Pick your era.).

Rating: B-

Project Superpowers #0
Speaking of Sadowski, here he is in the debut issue of Project Superpowers by Dynamite Entertainment -- again with a cover by Alex Ross. I really enjoyed this book, and appreciated the unexpected twists and turns the story took. Project Superpowers has more in common with The Twelve than JSA, in the darkness of the storyline and the far grayer tone of the heroes' mission and morality.

That said, Jim Krueger's writing could have been edited down a bit, for the sheer volume of words used; though of course in any first issue there is need for a certain amount of exposition.

As for the look of the book, the art direction by Alex Ross for the book really shows. And the designs of such classic characters as The Black Terror, The Face, and "The Death-Defying Devil" are truly eye-catching and an added value to Dynamite's stable of properties.

Rating: A-