Batman #684

If you were on the fence about buying this issue of Batman after two years of non-stop LSD-induced Grant Morrison fun, just take a look at the cover, enjoy it and buy something else. It’s not really worth reading this last part of a two part story trying to wrap things up while extending them at the same time.

Dennis O’Neil was the editor of Batman for something like 15 years through the eighties and nineties(in fact the batman trade I’m reading right now is edited by him) and did a good amount of work writing the book back in the 1970’s before Frank Miller showed up and turned everything on it’s head. I’ve found his 70’s work, which is being reprinted in full this winter in hardcover, to be okay. Not good, not bad, but just…that’ll do, pig. This time around it’s just a step down. Nothing horrible but certainly not really worth your 15 minutes either.

There’s apparently an alternative cover. I liked it more just for the great Nightwing thinks Batman is dead shot.

I can’t decide if it’s O’Neil’s fault or not. The basic idea is to make everyone real sad because post RIP batman might be dead or he might not be. But everyone is sad and lonely and kind of afraid of the future. So in this issue you get the cops being bummed out that they actually have to do their jobs and you get nightwing sulking around, which is a shame because lately I think I’m the only person who sees the amazing potential in Nightwing becoming an astounding interesting character. I think we have one issue of Batman left before all of the bat books go on hiatus until battle for the cowl(which I am very doubtful of) begins. Then we’ll get Andy Kubert and Neil Gaiman on a two part Batman story ripping the title off of an Alan Moore Superman story from the 80’s. I’ll keep buying Batman because I love the character and I’m excited about reading “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader” and seeing Gaiman write something that isn’t a derivative children’s book that’s actually for high school goth girls.

Green Lantern #36

Sometimes I think about quitting superhero comics and just reading good indie stuff and human interest stuff and focusing more on reading traditional novels, devouring some classics in my spare time. Then I see things like this:

and I say, “ah, fuck it. Tolstoy can wait”

The complete mindfuck of the green lantern books has been that a year ago after the epic that was essentially empire strikes back of Geoff Johns’ GL trilogy ended, the final page basically said “oh, in 2009 the dead will rise, create their own army and go to war with all of the living. your loved ones are not safe.”

and so it goes on and on and the different corps are established and armies are built, strongholds are made, the book of Oa is rewritten and slowly and surely with major character development and fantastic art and action, we get to march towards mount fucking doom with Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis.

If you aren’t reading green lantern you are fucking with destiny.

shameless self-promotion

hey, I’m selling stuff on Ebay to try to pay my rent and generally be more economically powerful.

if you know some emo kids who don’t know that emo means electric guitars, I’m selling 15 Bright Eyes CDs.

Right Here

If you like Cosmic Police enforcing the universe and sometimes getting to sit back and have a beer, I’m selling 3 Green Lantern books

All three Green Lantern Corps trade paperbacks

If you like zombies, bad ass suspense writing and really good characterization, I’m selling five Walking Dead trade paperbacks

The first 30 issues collected in five trades

If you like Joss Whedon or Brian K. Vaughan, I’m selling Whedon’s entire run and some of Vaughan’s work on Runaways

Runaways Volume 2 issues 19-30

if you like the Justice League or Brad Meltzer(whose book I was pimping just last month), I’m selling a whole bunch of Justice League comics by him and Dwayne McDuffie and right now it’s dirt cheap.

JLA comics are good for you

or if you like Warren Ellis, fucked up science fiction or horror comics, I’m selling two Strange Killings books

9 issues collected in two books

Feel free to pass that info on to anyone you know who is a nerd.  The auctions end around midnight tomorrow and I’m trying to bank enough money off of ebay sellings to pay this month’s rent.

New Comics Day

I’m going to start doing this differently.  Instead of listing all the crap, I’m just going to list what’s worth buying.  Here we go.

Out today – 10/09/08

All-Star Batman and Robin #10 should be in my home today, but a criminal said cunt and Americans are a sad sensitive bunch, so call copies are being burnt and the book is being reprinted in a neutered and bleached version.  What do you expect if you put a crazy old bastard like Frank Miller on a book?  Poor form.

100 BULLETS #95 $2.99 Vertigo

Brian Azzarello is winding down his long-running crime series and I’m starting to wish I’d bought more than three issues of the damned thing.  I might start buying up the trades soon, as I’ve been contemplating it for some time.  I think these are worth checking out if you aren’t watching your budget.

BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #21 $2.99 DC

Half-naked Bat-Girl, typical Gotham business.  This title looks to get real interesting next month.

BOOSTER GOLD #12 $2.99 DC

Due to some kind of government program that rewrote my memory, I forgot to buy anymore of this title after issue two and I just never got around to picking it back up.  Shame too with Rick Remender working on it.

DAREDEVIL PREM HC GUARDIAN DEVIL 10TH ANNIV DM ED $24.99

Although I tend to gravitate towards trades, this hardcover of Joe Quesada and Kevin Smith rebooting Daredevil back in 1998 is only five dollars more than the softcover.  Add in that it’s an anniversary edition and probably has some extras packed in there and I think it’s probably worth the five dollars that you don’t have to really pay for anyway if you buy it on Amazon.

DARKTOWER TREACHERY #1 (OF 6) $3.99

I like stephen king.  I like Peter David and I LOVE Jai Lee.  The last mini-series of Dark Tower expansion stories was considerably less entertaining or emotionally involving than the first one so I really hope this one has some bite to it.

DEADPOOL #1 SI $3.99

In the nineties I remember Deadpool being a dickface Spider-Man who made fun of Wolverine a lot.  It’s a #1, so I’ll give it a shot.

DEAD SHE SAID #3 $3.99

Bernie Wrightson and Steve Niles doing what they do best – finely drawn retro horror.

ETERNALS BY JACK KIRBY TP BOOK 02 $24.99

This book would have been so much more appealing if both were bound together, it would have been under 400 pages the presentation would have been so much better.  It doesn’t help that this second and final batch of Eternals stories by Jack Kirby are generally regarded as garbage because the book had lost readership by the halfway mark and he was forced to incorporate various Marvel characters to try to boost the book.  That didn’t work, but it did make the work suffer.  I’ll still be buying it but I’m much more excited about Daniel Acuna’s work on the new ongoing Eternals series.  Daniel Acuna is a BAMF.

EX MACHINA #38 (MR) $2.99 Wildstorm

Although in the later issues of this series, as it winds to it’s conclusion in a storm of mediocrity, it’s become boring, I’m still planning on riding it out until the end.  I think I should have just kept reading the trades, they seem to work considerably better than sequential issues.

FINAL CRISIS REVELATIONS #2 (OF 5) $3.99

Greg Rucka is dicking around with the Specter and Rene Montoya in a pretty okay sidetracked trip from Final Crisis.  I’m just glad the whole thing will clock in under 30 issues.

GEN 13 #22 $2.99

I still haven’t made up my mind about this whole World’s End event, but I’ve bought every involved Wildstorm title since the reboot two years ago and I’m still interested in what Jim Lee and company have planned.

GOTHAM CENTRAL HC VOL 01 IN THE LINE OF DUTY $29.99

Grek Rucka and Ed Brubaker doing crime noir in Gotham without much interference from Batman.  Lately DC has been putting out some nice hardcovers, see JLA Deluxe, so I’m completely on board.  Plus, I’ve been buying up anything that Rucka or Brubaker write lately.  These guys know exactly what they’re doing.

GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #12 $2.99

I decided to pick up this book last month on a whim and was pretty much unaffected.  Good enough to be read, I suppose.

GREEN LANTERN CORPS #28 $2.99

FUCK. YES.  You NEED to be buying both GL books.

RED SONJA #37 $2.99

I’m thinking about starting to read this.

SIMON DARK #12 $2.99

I’m getting this, but I don’t really want to read it. Sad, really.

The same can be said about Trinity, which unfortunately is still coming out.

STAR TREK MIRROR IMAGES #3 $3.99

Watching an evil Kirk conspire against a Captain Pike with a serious case of the douches has been pretty entertaining, but it’s just making me want to see a rehash of that mirror images that Enterprise did a few years back, when Scott Bakula was a pirate-style jerkbag and the enterprise were these swashbuckling assholes keeping secrets from their own government and trying to essentially take over the empire.  Fuck, that was a great episode arc.

WOLVERINE #66 3RD PTG MCNIVEN SKETCH VAR (PP #830) $2.99

I’m happy to see that this issue is seeing a third printing and issue #67 is getting a second printing, not just so Mark Millar gets some well deserved money, but so that many more people can read this story because it is FUCKING PHENOMENALLY ENTERTAINING.

WONDER WOMAN #24 $2.99

Gail Simone’s run on Wonder Woman is coasting along at a decent pace but I’ve yet to see her do anything new.  Unfortunately everything she’s done on this title has been a follow-up to the previous writer’s loose ends.  I’m ready to see her make this her own now that DC has taken her off of nearly everything she was doing last year.

X-MEN MAGNETO TESTAMENT #1 (OF 5) $3.99

Nazis.  Little Magneto.  Inherently expected violence.  Game on.

YOUNG LIARS #7 (MR) $2.99

It’s a safe bet to buy anything Vertigo’s putting out.  And there’s David Lapham for support.

Ebay Flux Capacitor Adventures in Variated Timelines

Today some stuff showed up from the internet.  I usually buy some impulse comics in addition to looking for deals on various things that would fill in the enormous collection/library that I one day hope to share with many friends that I might someday attain.  This means that, barring a miracle that the USPS takes a break from their intense douche-baggery, I get old stuff every week.  This is kind of like show and tell.

I didn’t read DC or any independents in the 1990s when I was a teenager.  In fact, I didn’t really read anything that wasn’t x-men related.  I have a short year or so of Spider-man comics from around 1992, when they did the Clone Saga thing, but that threw me off of Spider-Man and I have yet to come back aboard 16 years later.  I was entirely unaware that independent comics were happening, that Dark Horse was doing all these great licensed property comics and developing their own universe, or that Image and Wildstorm were essentially creating massive story lines with great art.  I’ve yet to be able to determine why, but after the X-Men cartoon came out, I was never aware of anything but X-Men from 1992-1998 when I stopped reading comics due to an expensive obsession with music and CD collecting.  When I came back to comics in 2004, mostly due to Joss Whedon’s X-Men relaunch, it took me about six months to discover guys like Ben Templesmith, Steve Niles, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and a huge group of English writers had been doing tons of work that I had missed out on.  This was, of course, in addition to the horrifying revelation that DC had done a ton of great content in the nineties that I had missed out on.  Some of this work was the Tangent line, an attempt to create an entire new universe using classic character names but infusing them with new abilities, personalities and settings.  This was all done through the use of one-shots, each featuring a different character.  A few of these showed up today.

the Green Lantern issue was why I really bought this lot of four issues, which also included Secret Six, The Superman and the Joker.  It was interesting and not at all related to the cosmic ideas that the Lantern comics in mainline DC continuity that has drawn me in, but it was more of a mystical revenge story written by James Robinson of Starman fame.  Along with the other issues, the art was better than the writing of this particular issue, in this case being done by J.H. Williams III, but this isn’t to say Robinson’s outing into the unknown was bad, it was just really out there without anything to fall back on.  I found it refreshing and unappealing at the same time, though I ultimately liked it.  I intend to buy the three trades that have all of these one-shots bound together, hoping that reading them in that format will tell a story that assumes some semblance of continuity and sense, not just vignettes of the unknown.

I also managed to win Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’ Stardust softcover for about five dollars, which is a deal considering it’s a $20 book.  I’ve been trying to go around and buy up Gaiman’s relatively small amount of DC work from the 80’s to the 90’s and this trade will make four Vertigo books of his that I now have for my graphic novel library if you don’t count the three massive Absolute Sandman books I’ve been buying as they come out. There are so many versions of this book – the trade, the mass market novelization, the big $40 hardcover illustrated, there’s even a damned movie and at some point they put it out in single issue format, but this is the only version I really need, though a few years ago I got the MMTPB for X-mas and have yet to take a peek at it.  I’m excited to dig into it.

And finally, as a continuation of my absence from DC Comics in the 1990’s, I managed to find Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, the entire mini-series that acted as both a sequel to and bridge between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis.  The books essentially try to tie up loose ends and establish a solid time line and continuity throughout the whole of the DC Universe.  Jerry Ordway and Dan Jurgens do an excellent job plotting this out and the art is classic 90’s superhero art.  Great Stuff.

no swearing in Gotham

Rich Johnston seems to have gathered the proper scans of why the newest All-Star Batman and Robin has been recalled and any copies have been destroyed per DC’s request. language that hurts boring people and retards who think that MURDERERS AND CRIMINALS don’t swear like the rest of us.

Where my opinion differs is that this is a depiction of realistic dialogue, I’ve heard harsher things thrown at a clerk who didn’t have a douche bag’s specific cigarette brand. I think this book could be considerably better and perhaps sell more copies if they’d just slap a vertigo logo on there and tell the boring vanilla people to leave it on the goddamned shelf and buy Paul Dini’s Detective. Bitches.

Batman #679

Written by Grant Morrison

Art by Tony Daniel, Sandu Florea and cover by Alex Ross

Part four of Batman: R.I.P. really heats up and brings the reader in by not making any fucking sense.  I have to say, for an issue where I was thinking to myself, “have I ever read an issue of Batman before?”, it was pretty good.  Only Grant Morrison can make you think you don’t know what’s going on when you’ve been consecutively reading Batman for three years without missing a single issue.  It might be because there are so many references to Batman plot lines from 35 years ago, it might be because suddenly Batman is in a purple costume, criminals have taken over the batcave, Alfred might actually be Bruce’s father but probably not, Nightwing is in Arkham asylum, you know, the little things.  Morrison brings the WTF by making huge, impacting situations occur off screen and then mildly referencing them, like when the Bush administration pretends like dumping an olympic size swimming pool of water down a guy’s throat because he was guilty of being Arabic on a Thursday afternoon is something that just happens, like when you take a shit and forget to flush because that article in Variety about Angelina Jolie’s kid was THAT good.

I tend to get sidetracked.  And yes, I will still defend Morrison to every fuckwit von douche who thinks Paul Dini is doing a better job doing Batman stories that accomplish nothing new.  Dini is writing vanilla sex in Detective, Morrison is doing a reach around on PCP, mushrooms, a handful of MDMA with help from a guy in a Godzilla suit, three chimps, four employees of the Jim Rose Circus and Phyllis Diller blown out of her mind of illegal Japanese pain killers with a David Lynch movie blaring in the background.  Morrison is sometimes confusing and the situation is risky but you know Godzilla has that healing love touch.

Batman 2: The Joker loves Jolly Ranchers

Barring the fact that the media campaign for this particular release cost more money than Operation: Desert Storm and the advertisement/propaganda charade that has been slowly churning for the past 12 months into an epic that makes the melodrama on myspace look tamer than a Martha Stewart Living episode, I did actually, for the most part, enjoy the film.  

 

As mentioned by Christopher Nolan in his introduction to The Long Halloween: The Absolute Edition, the two main focuses for Dark Knight were derived from the aforementioned Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale collaboration(about the Falcones and, essentially, the potential of Harvey Dent) and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, a book more Bat-fans have had jolly masturbation festivals to than any other modern “graphic novel”, and he essentially holds up his end of the bargain.  Though the Falcones are, at most, back-up characters for Ledger’s interesting interpretation of the Joker to kick around and eventually completely anally rape financially and physically.  Instead of focusing on the bigger picture of Loeb’s crime story, lamenting on the almost inescapable grasp the mafia has on Gotham City in Batman’s early days, Nolan uses that story as more of a background to introduce both Harvey Dent as a shining figure of the legal system and Jim Gordon as a cop who really is doing everything he can and is genuinely concerned, believing that Gotham is his, so he desperately wants to change it.  

In this facet of the film, Gary Oldman, who plays a phenomenally shitty curiously retarded and poorly interpreted Sirius Black in the Harry Potter film franchise, really shines as a character actor.  Having been strategically placed in the first of Nolan’s Batman films, Gordon is portrayed much younger by Oldman than the comic book audience is used to.  In Batman Begins Oldman wasn’t terribly good or bad at what he was doing, but the initial seeds for the character to grow into a much more important role in this film were planted and they truly pay off in this film.  During his assumed assassination I felt compelled to care for the character in a way that is rare for a live action role.  Nolan works very hard to establish, through subtle and non-cliche means, that Jim Gordon is a bad ass middle-aged guy who is fine with walking the line between the man and the Batman.  Additionally, Aaron Eckhart really shines as Harvey Dent/Two Face for 20 minutes in a way that I had not expected at all.  If the annoying advertising hadn’t spoiled the fact that Two Face would be in the damned movie, I probably would have been all the more impressed.  Still, Eckhart’s portrayal as a compassionately concerned district attorney, cocky and self-assured but very set in his goals of cleaning things up and making the legal system work in a legit manner once again, is so believable, so real a tangible character that it makes his transformation into Two Face at times disgusting to watch.  One can easily see the juxtaposition of law and lawlessness, order and disorder in his performance, making it hard for the viewer to ultimately find an apparent disgust for Two Face, as he’s really rather earned the right be so ready to shoot someone in the face for what he’s lost – his woman(luckily they’ve fired Katie Holmes and put Maggie Gyllenhal in her place who is considerably less grating and wretched), his body and that nifty coin he treasures – damn near everything.

The other side of Nolan’s promise to make a Batman movie that fans of the comics could follow, partially adapting Moore’s penultimate Joker story, kind of comes through.  I honestly can say that I don’t understand how everyone on earth is coming all over themselves with the postmortem congratulatory insanity.  The creepiness of solemn nodding and “he was great, now he’s dead!” in unison may have ruined an interesting interpretation for me, but I honestly don’t think it’s mind-blowing.  It seems to me that Heath Ledger watched Malcom McDowell’s interpretation of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange and added a phrenetic love of Jolly Ranchers and throat lozenges.  Certainly better than Nicholson’s cartoonish, almost Chaplin-as-the-tramp-inspired version of the Joker from Tim Burton’s 1999 vision of Gotham City, Ledger’s version wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t the mind-blowing experience early reviews led me it would be.  I do, however, really like the concept of a Joker that is more prone to random acts of violence, extensive planning and a real understanding of existentialism as he’s related to the rest of the world in this film.

That is, after all, the real method behind this movie. The concept of the Joker and Batman as a sort of chicken or the egg question is raised in Alan Moore’s seminal Joker story which greatly lends itself to the mythology of this film.  If there were no Batman, would there be no Joker, or would he just have a free reign of terrorizing people?  The question of if you stop Batman, do you stop the Joker?  An interesting question, as well as the idea that the only way to stop the man is to kill him, but the only person that can kill him is someone as resourceful as Batman and Wonder Woman is busy, so there’s no murdering to be done, therefore he’s just in and out of the system indefinitely.  I think that question of looming morality, the idea of not only can you do the right thing, but what is the right thing, is what makes those of us who don’t go for the Michael Bay intellect deficiency action film actually able to sit through Christian Bale’s horrible strep throat/”dude are you gonna cough that shit up or what” Batman voice.  Though I wasn’t blown away by Ledger’s Joker performance, I liked it and I generally liked the movie as well, but I’m saddened by the fact that we won’t ever get to see Ledger come back as the joker, hopefully to give Batman one of those lozenges he apparently loves so much.

Action Comics #855

Written by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner

Art by Eric Powell

DC Comics $2.99

Finally, after that painful-to-read Busiek arc, Johns is back with Richard Donner and in less than 30 pages we get to go to Bizzaro World, Pa Kent gets kidnapped and an entire Bizzaro Metropolis storms Superman.  It’s good, classic Geoff Johns storytelling and Richard Donner helping out doesn’t hurt.  I’ll be excitedly following this arc as it progresses and I hope Action continues to ship at such an astoundingly fast rate.  If my count is right, they put out three issues last month.

Eric Powell’s artwork is really great and well suited for this sci-fi type adventure story.  Nothing looks too realistic, but not entirely cartoonish either.  It’s a happy medium and I don’t think ultra-realism would help this story out, the whole story of going to another crazy backwards(and cubed!) world isn’t meant to be realistic, so Powell’s art works great with John’s fantastic setting and highly personalized version of Superman.

Don’t miss this arc.

Batman #667 & 668

Written by Grant Morrison

Art by J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart

DC Comics $2.99 

Grant Morrison has made a name for himself in mainstream comic books by taking old ideas that many people have forgotten about, revamping them, exploring old characters and concepts and making them very VERY relevant and fresh to the modern reader.  I’ve noticed that there are a few creators who are interested in old ideas who make them incredibly interesting again.  Alex Ross would obviously be an easy name to come up with when talking about old ideas being recreated.  Morrison’s work on Batman is no different, as far as resurrections of the past, than his work with Uncle Sam or Metal Men.  It’s different, great and pretty fucking entertaining.

Revisiting the Batmen of all nations in what would seem like a weekend getaway for Batman, Robin and a handful of “second rate wannabe Batmen” as Robin put it, Morrison turns this three part arc into a murder mystery weekend with a bunch of incompetent heroes who are past their prime and incredibly suspicious of each other.  It’s incredibly entertaining to see all of the various Batmen from different countries and how some of them resent Batman’s success, but they all have to work together, as they’re trapped on an island with a murderer on the loose.

Williams’ work is immediately satisfying and only gets better upon multiple viewings.  He’s particularly successful at rendering costumes that look like cloth, instead of the weird porno-spray painted bodies that usually dominate superhero comics.  He has a firm grasp on shadows and dark/light balances, which is great because most of this story takes place at night in a big mansion full of old relics and costumes.

Meanwhile, boring comic book nerds everywhere are crying because this story doesn’t have any typical villains and its’ not formulaic enough.  I think it’s fantastic and I think I see where this is leading and if Morrison is planning on a big family get together, it’s going to be one hell of a summer-ending arc.  I’ll also be excited if they keep cranking out two issues a month like this, it’s great for a manic reader like myself.