DC Reboot Round-Up, Part Four: The Test Tube Babies

Previously, on the DC Reboot Round-Up… In an attempt to prop up flagging sales, DC Comics has decided to hit the reset button on their super hero continuity and go for a more action-oriented (some say, “Nineties-Style”) focus. The degree of change to each character is predicated entirely upon sales. So Batman barely changes at all, while Hawkman (for instance) gets a major overhaul. Other changes include Wonder Woman getting pants, and Superman losing his underwear.

Now we move on the experiments, books DC’s launching in hopes of capitalizing on the more diverse interests of the wider digital audience they hope to find waiting for them out there on the world-wide interwebs. There are war books and westerns, but first we’ll be looking at something that I (though not DC) am calling their “Dark Line.” A group of books that seem designed to be a sort of “Vertigo-Light,” corporate-owned supernatural characters having adventures that, while perhaps a bit… well… darker than your average DC super hero title, don’t go the Mature Readers route, either.

This is the sort of thing out of which Vertigo itself grew, of course, back when DC was having such good luck with their mature readers Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Sandman titles that they decided to create a separate imprint for them. And they did something similar a few years later, when Starman, The Demon, Hitman, Chase, and maybe a few others formed a small group of edgier (but still all-ages) comics set in the DCU. So this is hardly new territory for them.

If anything in the reboot seems geared toward me and my interests, these books are it. So let’s see how they fare…

Justice League Dark

The Team: Peter Milligan and Mikel Janin

The Premise: When threats too weird for the regular Justice League arise, that gap is filled by the team of Shade the Changing Man, Madame Xanadu, Deadman, Zatanna and… John Constantine?!

The Appeal: The sheer “what the fuck” factor will no doubt spark some Fanboy interest here. I know I’m planning to check out the first issue, anyway, just to see if Pete Milligan can pull this off. It’s Constantine that’s the problem, of course. The rest of these guys can function just fine in the spandex world. But Constantine? I don’t have a problem with them re-establishing him as a citizen of the DC Universe. It’s fun to have him pop up and put one over on Superman every now and then. But having him join an organization that would call itself the Justice League of anything just seems… Wrong? Silly? Out of character? Maybe all of the above.

As for mainstream interest… Maybe? Constantine’s the only character anyone who’s not a huge funnybook dork is going to be familiar with, and they’re probably going to wonder why he’s not American…

DC Reboot Round-Up, Part Three: Franchise Free-For-All!

Before we launch off into our discussion of DC’s rebooted “family” franchise titles, a quick aside: The DC brass have been making the rounds, doing their best to sell funnybook retailers on Fall initiatives that are, in part, designed to put those very people out of business. They’ve been facing understandably tough crowds, but in the process it seems a bit of the company philosophy behind the reboot has been revealed.

First and foremost, DC will be all about the action, post reboot. “No more talking heads!” is one phrase they’ve apparently been tossing around. Which, near as I can remember, isn’t something DC’s been doing anyway, but okay. That does seem to be the predominant trend out there in the world of cutting edge pop comics these days, and it’s probably a good model to attract new young readers. As long as you couple that with words like smart, funny, or cool… You’re on to something. Unfortunately, those are NOT words they’ve been tossing around, so… Hrm.

Another interesting tidbit is that they’re aiming the reboot at males between the ages of 18 and 34. Or, in other words, the same people who are buying their books now (or does the average DC Fanboy come in at 40 or above these days?). Actually, to be fair, I’m sure they’re talking about males between the ages of 18 and 34 who don’t already read comics. Which is most likely an achievable market that’s worth expanding into, albeit one in which DC will be facing an awful lot of competition. I would hope, though, that this is just the initial wave they’re talking about here. The market for women and teenaged girls is potentially even more massive, and DC already has properties and publishing lines in place that could be marketed toward them with very little effort, as well. Of course, they’ve marginalized Vertigo sufficiently at this point that maybe that’s not in the cards for them after all…

At any rate. With all that in mind, let’s get back to those solicits, starting with maybe the most important super hero of them all...

Action Comics

The Team: Grant Morrison and Rags Morales

The Premise: Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Oh dear god in heaven! It’s a MAN!!!

The solicit for this one is kind of sparse on the details, but Morrison himself has said that this book will be telling the story of Superman’s earliest days in the cape, sort of an “angry young Superman” take that looks at how he operated initially in the new history, and how the world responded to their first super hero. It’ll apparently be a slightly more vulnerable Superman, too, one who’s still growing in power as his cells soak up solar radiation, and thus might still be hurt by, say, an exploding shell bursting on his chest.

Perhaps even more interestingly, not long after All-Star Superman wrapped up, Morrison also said that he’d like to do just such a “Year One” take, incorporating the character’s early righteous anger and Depression-era social activism. So I’m hoping we see some wife beaters and evil landlords getting tossed out of windows in this book, or maybe a corrupt politician or two being bullied into public admissions of guilt. But that’s just speculation and wishful thinking.

The Appeal: As a huge Grant Morrison fan, I’m a little biased here, but I’d imagine it would be pretty broad. Morrison’s already shown that he has a rock-solid understanding of the Man of Steel that’s proven popular with Fanboys, intellectuals, and mainstream readers alike. His one weakness in terms of the mass audience is his penchant for complex narratives that require actual thought on the part of the reader. His Final Crisis series, for instance, was so demanding that it drove many Fanboys into a rage. But his recent work has shown him incorporating that sort of thing into stories that still work for people who are only looking at the surface and just like to be wowed by cool ideas.

On the artistic side, meanwhile, Rags Morales is a solid draftsman of the type traditionally assigned to the Superman books. His clean lines and clear storytelling make his work easy for inexperienced funnybook readers to follow, and he has just enough flair that his stuff’s not boring to look at, either. I’ll be most curious to see how well he works with Morrison. Artists with more traditional styles don’t always deal well with the more bizarre ideas he throws at them. I like Rags’ stuff, though, so we’ll see.

DC Reboot Round-Up, Part Two: Gonna Be a New World

In Part One of our analysis of the DC Reboot, we waxed cautiously optimistic. Change is always just a little bit exciting, and the prospect of a drive to push comics into the faces of more readers than they’ve had in a good long while is heartening for an industry that’s been dying on the vine in recent years. But it’ll all be for naught if the books themselves aren’t any good.

So, armed with Bleeding Cool’s list of the September solicits, I’m going to sit down and take a critical look at what we currently know about all 52 series debuting in September. Of course, none of these comics have come out yet, so this will be pure speculation, based on what the solicit says, and the track record of the creators involved in each book.

Also, I should probably admit that I’m not really the intended audience for these comics. I like super heroes, and like to read good comics about them, but I'm a tough audience. I like to work a bit as a reader, and if I'm not given any work to do, I need to be dazzled by audacity so I don't get bored. I tend to prefer personal, quirky, idiosyncratic projects to this kind of corporate-owned-and-orchestrated stuff. So since DC doesn’t currently employ very many writers or artists I’m a fan of, I won’t be buying many of these books myself. Consider this more of a clinical look at the reboot, then, dissecting the books’ appeal to the Fanboy Nation, and to this mysterious audience of casual readers DC’s courting on-line. It’ll get smart-assed from time to time, I’m sure, but I’ll try to keep my personal biases clearly identified as such.

And with that, away we go…

Justice League

http://themultiverse.info/2011/06/01/geoff-johns-jim-lee-new-creative-team-for-justice-league/

The Team: Geoff Johns and Jim Lee

The Premise: At the dawn (or at least second breakfasts) of the age of heroes, Batman brings together a team to combat a mysterious threat too big for him to tackle alone.

This book will be launching in the past to establish the heroic foundation of the rebooted DCU, then (according to Jim Lee) moving on to the present day. This new JLA origin story works fine for me, considering the way the modern interpretations of these characters interact, and will probably make a lot of sense to readers familiar with the team mostly by reputation. No word on the exact final line-up, but we know the book will at least feature the original core six: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and the Flash. Oh, and Cyborg. Which-- whoa, weird! Cyborg is now a founding member of the Justice League?! Guess he's replacing Martian Manunter. Which, I should add, does nothing to endear this book to me at all. At. ALL.

The Appeal: For me, zero. I love the Justice League, but this creative team is like my own personal funnybook Kryptonite. AND they seem to be taking Martian Manhunter off the team, in case I forgot to mention, which not only makes this the worst Justice League book evar(!!1!), but also gives me even more reason to hate them.

In the world of People Who Aren't Me, however, this book is a perfect storm: it‘s being positioned as DC‘s flagship series, and Johns and Lee both have massive fan followings that could combine to make this a funnybook store sales juggernaut. I’d guess that it’s going to have good mass appeal, too. Johns’ storytelling style is very mass-audience-friendly, and the fresh start may limit the amount of history he tries to pull in. Lee should be fine, too, but as long as I’m talking about him…

The fact that DC’s chosen Jim Lee to redesign their characters in a way that appeals to a fresh new 21st Century audience cracks me up. His sensibilities might have looked fresh 20 years ago, but now? I dunno. This is symptomatic of the biggest problem I see with the new line in general: how are they supposed to draw in a new audience when the books will, for the most part, be done by the same people who are doing non-mainstream-friendly versions of them now, and guys who were popular with huge funnybook dorks 20 years ago? But more on that as we progress…

DC Reboot Round-Up, Part One: They Shoot Fanboys, Don't They?

It’s an interesting time to be a funnybook fan.
 
That is, of course, a Chinese curse, and I’ve seen many of my fellow fans reacting in that spirit. But in spite of the turmoil, I have to admit, I’m kind of excited. Sure, on the one hand, the industry is dying. Sales are terrifyingly low, and getting lower. Partially, that’s because of the recession, and partially because of competition for the audience’s leisure time from more novel (and free!) on-line content. I mean, even I must admit that I’ve spent more time reading about comics in the last month than I have reading actual comics. But that, in part, is because of anticipation for what’s coming up in the immediate future. Which brings me, in roundabout fashion, to my topic for today: The DC Reboot. Now that all the solicits are out, and some of the basic questions have been answered, it's time to take a look at the plans and try a little "big picture" analysis based on what we know so far...

Reboot? Relaunch? Rehash?

Come September, DC Comics will be starting all their comics over from number one, with an altered history and a different attitude. Some characters will be different, some won’t change, and still others won’t exist at all anymore. They’re insisting that it’s not a “reboot” of their shared universe, that the continuity the Fanboy Nation holds so dear to their hearts still “counts.”

And, sure. They’re not changing much for Batman or Green Lantern (rather wisely not fixing what ain’t broke), but you know… It sounds to me like they’re making some pretty significant changes here. No super heroes in World War II? An aloof Supergirl who doesn’t like Earthlings very much? The Authority (okay, Stormwatch) exists alongside the Justice League? The public doesn’t like or trust masked heroes? Wonder Woman in pants?!

And then there's this:

Wh- Where are his underpants?!??!

Not Dead Yet...

Stepping out of character for just a minute (which is to say, all Nerd Farm gags aside)…


It’s been kind of quiet around the Dork Forty of late, but don’t think that’s because I’ve lost interest, or have run out of things to say about the funnybook business. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve just been preoccupied with other interests of late: music, movies, role-playing games, books with words in them… As I’ve always said, and seldom shown around here, I’m an all-purpose dork, and other things have captured my attention. But I hope to get things back on track around here soon. I’ve been following comics all through this little blogging vacation, and have lots to talk about. Later today, in fact, I should be weighing in with a look at the upcoming DC reboot...

At Last! A Long, Rambling Discussion of Batman!

So the nerd wranglers have been givin’ me funny, kinda worried, looks lately. Askin’ me if I was feelin’ okay. They were obviously hintin‘ at somethin‘, but I couldn‘t figure out what. But then, just last night, I found an autographed photo of Adam West on the door to the bunkhouse, and it all fell into place. Nerd wranglers are a superstitious lot, afraid of angerin’ the Funnybook Gods. None of ’em wanna work for a man who forgets what’s really important. And well… I guess it HAS been awhile since our last serious discussion of Batman.

There’s lots of reasons for that, and you could probably track them if you went back and ferreted out all the reviews I’ve done on the run of Grant Morrison’s Batman Inc. to date. But even I can’t see taking the time to do that, and lord knows I love the sound of my own voice. So just let me boil it down for you now: the book’s seemed a little too… obvious thus far for me to really feel the need to dig in and write about whatever deeper meanings and complexities are folded into it. Now, I’ve been trusting that this obviousness is surface only, and that eventually some keystone issue will drop, shedding new light on all these preliminaries and making them much more than the sum of their parts. And, hey presto, it seems that issue dropped just recently, with…

Batman Inc #6
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Chris Burnham

(And it’s all SPOILER, all the time, from here on out, so… you know… You have been warned.)

Entitled “Niktomorph,” this story really is the capstone for the series’ first arc, the issue that defines the whole Batman Incorporated concept, and what it’s supposed to accomplish. Niktomorph translates roughly as “nightshape,” which is ultimately what Bruce Wayne is building here: an ever-shifting and difficult-to-trace global bat-presence, multiple agents acting as one to fight evil wherever it rears its head. In becoming ubiquitous, he’s also becoming more legendary, spreading the new world-wide Bat-Myth amongst the underworld, using his various agents to generate even more confusion as to who and what the Batman is.

Or, as Bruce himself puts it in the story: “Wayne arrived in Paris, Batmen sprung up … Batman’s in Hong Kong. Batman’s a girl. Batman‘s in Australia … Batman is everything you fear.” He even goes so far as to fabricate (I think?) extreme actions, spreading a story that he tattooed ‘child molester’ onto the forehead of a slave-purchasing celebrity pedophile in Australia. The terror campaign against crime has gone global. Welcome to Planet Gotham.

Hey, I Was Reading That!

DC Comics Presents Night Force 100-Page Spectacular #1
by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan, and Bob Smith

So DC recently put out this reprint book of one of my favorite early-80s funnybook series. The team behind Tomb of Dracula, reunited on a new horror series? That was like getting a new Sex Pistols album or something! My young mind reeled! I HAD to have that, and I bought all 14 issues of the series, hanging on right through to the bitter (bitter!) end. Fast-forward 29 years, and this thing comes out. And, since I can't re-read the original comics anymore due to an unfortunate allergy to decaying newsprint, I picked it up.

The story holds up pretty well. Far better than I expected, in fact, especially after reading Wolfman's really kind of dreadful early Tomb of Dracula work last year. Sure. There's still some achingly bad dialogue here and there, and the story's emphasis on the Soviet occult/parapsychology program does make it a bit dated. But Gene Colan's artwork is (as always) just gorgeous. And on the whole, it's a neat little supernatural mystery with interestingly flawed heroes. And it stars maybe my favorite of the corporate spandex magical mystery men: Baron Winters. Part Phantom Stranger, part Barnabas Collins, and part con man, Baron Winters has a pet leopard and a house with doors that open onto other times and places. He's mysterious and cool and just sleazy enough to keep him relatable.

The story concerns an attempt to summon up and harness Evil itself, at the cost of the sanity of a young woman who's serving as an unwitting psychic conduit to the experiments. But a pair of Soviet spies want her, too, and lead Our Heroes (the doctor conducting the experiments, and a washed-up alcoholic hack reporter) on a merry chase back to Russia, where...

Well, this collection doesn't reveal what happens once the story gets to Russia. Because for some reason, DC decided to only collect the first four issues here, and it leaves off with everyone packing off for Commieland, the story an issue or two away from its conclusion. That's right. They collected the first Night Force arc, and didn't reprint the whole thing!

What the fuck, man?! Who thought THAT was a good idea?! If I thought that this was the first of a series of these "100-Page Spectaculars" collecting the series, I'd be fine with it. But the big "One-Shot" logo on the cover says pretty decisively that it's not gonna happen. So again... What the fuck?! I paid eight bucks for this shit, and you're not even gonna give me the whole story?! I can't decide if this is a case of gross editorial incompetence or very poorly thought-out corporate hucksterism. But whatever's going on... I don't cotton to it! Not one damn bit!

Grade for the Story: B
Grade for the Publication: F. Minus.

Back in the Saddle: Funnybooksinreviewarego!!

So it's been a busy coupla weeks 'round here on the nerd farm, and I'm not gonna lie to you: it's still pretty damn busy. But not so busy that I can't strap in for some quick reviews this week...

Invincible Iron Man #503
by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca

Fraction delivers a really nice wrap-up to his battle of wills between Tony Stark and Otto Octavius this time around, with Stark finally giving in and begging Doc Ock to stop the timer on the nuclear device he's holding over New York's head. Which, as it turns out, isn't acually a bomb at all. Ock lied, and Stark fell for it. But in a situation eerily similar to the dark future we saw in issue 500, Stark caved. He caved, and called Octavius "master" to save lives. Which is, of course, the real difference between Stark and the other arrogant geniuses Fraction's compared and contrasted him with over his long tenure on the title. He may have sat back and laughed at the ignorant masses with Madame Masque in his younger days, but when the chips are down, Stark will do anything, including debase himself, to save them.

On the flip side, Fraction does cheat on the conclusion of his Pepper vs Electro and Sandman battle, allowing the bad guys to slip away without any real explanation to make room for a few pages of "Fear Itself" crossover. But the character work that precedes that spandex plot cop-out far outweighs any disappointment I might have felt. This was good work, made better in light of the long-term writing. Or, in other words, it's exactly what I look for in franchise work-for-hire super hero comics.

Grade: A-

Fables #104
by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and Steve Leialoha

Oy. My happiness with the current Super Team arc lessens with each passing issue. Any time this book goes "meta" and starts discussing the fictional underpinnings of the magic that connects the Fable Homelands with the Mundy World, my eyes glaze over. So this continual discussion of super hero tropes, and how they have to balance the team correctly to make the magic work properly, just makes me want to stop reading. And that's not even mentioning how much I despise fucking Brock Blueheart, the talking animal Boy Blue cultist that also makes me want to stop reading, every time he walks on-screen. It's all far too cute for my taste, and the promise of it being followed by another saccharine story about Bufkin the talking monkey in Oz does very little to make me want to keep buying.

Gone Fishin'

So things are gettin' pretty busy around the nerd farm right now, and the next couple of weeks might be a little light on the postings. But we'll be back in full force in May, with more funnybook reviews, a look at A Game of Thrones (book and TeeVee version), and the too-long-in-coming continuation of our history of the Comics Code Authority!

Super-Spies, Thunder Gods and Gender Benders: FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!

So here we are, another week older, another week wiser, another week heavier with new funnybooks to discuss…

Journey Into Mystery #622
by Kieron Gillen, Dougie Braithwaite, and Ulises Arreola

I have to like Marvel’s marketing strategy here. They’re giving Thor a new number one to better-capitalize on the upcoming movie (which I don’t think ever works, but whatever). But rather than completely abandon the original numbering they just returned to less than two years ago, they’re treating the new Thor as a separate series and restoring this series to its original title: Journey Into Mystery. Which is one of the better monster/suspense series titles ever, and one I‘m finding myself surprisingly happy to have back on the racks.

Series writer Kieron Gillen is embracing his title in earnest, too. It’s still a Thor comic, of course, but more of a Thor spin-off starring the young Loki, recently reborn and as-yet-unformed. Gillen is sending his young god of mischief off on a literal “journey into mystery,” a quest that will decide exactly what sort of Loki he will be. I’m finding it pretty compelling so far. Gillen’s Loki is clever and sharp-tongued, and driven by a refreshing mix of curiosity and enlightened self-interest. This first issue plays a little like a children’s fantasy novel, with Our Hero following a trail of bread crumbs left behind by his former self and realizing that it’s part of a larger scheme that he’s going to walk into anyway, if he wants to be his own man.

It’s a nice take on the character, and one more in line with how he was often depicted in the myths. “God of Mischief” too often morphs over into “God of Evil” in modern depictions of the Norse gods, but he’s a much more complex figure than that. There’s every indication that the Vikings admired Loki’s cleverness, even though it was of a type they also believed you couldn’t entirely trust. He exists in a queasy sort of grey area, one that I hope Gillen exploits to the fullest.

On the artistic side of things, the book is apparently being colored and reproduced directly from Dougie Braithwaite’s pencils, which gives the work an illustrative texture that’s difficult to attain with ink. I wouldn’t call the artwork beautiful or anything, but I like the feel of it. It suits the book, I think, and that’s what’s really important in the end.

Grade: B+

Casanova: Gula IV
by Matt Fraction, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Ba

The reprints of Gula wrap up this issue, and the cat’s out of the bag on what I still consider the best twist ending ever. I have to admit, though, that I’d forgotten how Fraction cheats on it a little here at the end. [SPOILER] The way I remembered it, Seychelle’s artificial life tech had been behind the transformation of Casanova into Zephyr, but he’s just as shocked as the rest of Our Heroes to realize the truth. Which means that Fraction doesn’t actually explain how they did it at all. I’m okay with it, don’t get me wrong; in a world of weird-ass super-science and Life Model Decoys, a little gender-bending DNA manipulation is far from outside the realm of possibility. But an explanation, even one as glib and incomplete as the one I just tossed out there, would have been nice. [/SPOILER]

He makes up for that, though, with the fascinating manifestation of guilt we get from Cas. Faced with Newman Xeno’s choice to fire the gun or re-write history and die, Casanova chooses to go back to his own timeline and die, leaving his friends and family where they were if he’d never made the dimensional jump that started the series. Of course, he’s not really making that choice out of altruism; he thinks he’s really messed things up, and would rather die than face the guilt. Fortunately for us, though, the decision to fire the gun’s really not up to him, and so we get to watch the juicy aftermath. Speaking of which…