Comics Of The Weak: Someday This Industry Might Get Itself A Tyra Banks To Call Its Own, But This Year Probably Won't Be It

Batman # 680
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Tony Daniel, Sandu Florea & Guy Major
Published by DC Comics

Things about Batman RIP that are pretty fucking terrible, regardless of how many long-form explanations on why they are not terrible get written by people who would probably like it just as much if it were written by Jeph Loeb and featured an entire storyline where Gotham City was saved by a street-smart urchin who can speak Latin and knows how "to breach firewalls."

-That would be the covers, which have all been by Alex Ross, and have succeeded only in the contest that Alex Ross is having with himself, which is to make himself into the greatest embarrassment of super-hero comics ever by tracing nude photographs of his favorite Jiffy-Lube employees "posing" before painting super-hero costumes over them.  Bags of shit--but "he's my fav-ritt!!"

-Tony Daniel being whatever age he is now, because it's too young to be drawing what will probably end up being the only work of his career that anyone cares to look at in 10 years, when he will have gotten better and no one will know that because he'll be handling whatever version of the Birds of Prey that DC is still hawking as "comics for, y'know, chicks or something."  Sure, he's sort of kind of gotten better at one or two things, but for god's sake--what the fuck is this guy doing handling a marquee title?

-The fact that this storyline is ending, and that they're going to try to follow it up by having Neil Gaiman copy Alan Moore, which is sort of like saying that they're going to have a sequel to Watchmen written by Judy Blume.  "Are You There God?  It's Me, Rorschach."

-But yeah, rest of the stuff is pretty solid.

The Boys # 23
Written by Garth Ennis
Art by Darick Robertson & Tony Avina
Published by Dynamite Entertainment

It's sort of interesting to contrast an issue starting off a story arc in the Boys to a comparable issue of Garth Ennis' aborted Hitman series from DC, which is the closest familial relationship this one has in the dude's catalog--Hitman being less a vanity project existing because of the man's name, and more an attempt to find wheat out of the chaff of a summer event cross-over called "Bloodlines," which was DC Comics trying to create new comics characters despite not publishing much of substance with the ones they already had, like fucking Superman.  Ennis wasn't a big enough dog then for Hitman to last, and he had editors that probably forced him to insert gunplay wherein he would have preferred talking--ergo this issue of the Boys, which continues the ABC dynamic of the series, where the Butcher character gets his latest assignment from a woman who hates him while the woman's assistant does something gross (in this case, fondling himself when a paraplegic woman rolls by), then Butcher goes back to tell the team about the new assignment after some degrading sex with the woman.  Then it ends with a joke about how, something something, super-heroes are kind of homosexual.   Of course, if you're reading it in trade--and the trade for the most recent arc that ended with the previous issue of the series, # 22 was released the exact same day as # 23--then this first chapter probably flows seamlessly into the next, with none of the bump/replay tendency that shows up when you read a trade of anything that wasn't written in the last six years or so.  Of course, you also get to enjoy the saving of income, if that matters to you, since the trade ends up costing less then the amount of issues it contains.  So the only question that remains with The Boys is this:  do you need to buy the John Cassady variant cover, or are you a fucking grown-up?

Chas: The Knowledge # 4
Written by Simon Oliver
Art by Goran Sudzuka & Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

Chas The Knowledge is the Vertigo equivalent of Marvel's Last Defenders, in that no one is reading it, it's about characters that will never receive this much focus again (because of the first reason), it has a really strong writing pedigree from a writer whose best work got canceled (again, first reason), and it's taken up 80% of it's running time to get to the point.  But then again, this is Vertigo, and it can be argued that "getting to the point" is not really the publishing line's modus operandi, and it's about a cabdriver who is (eventually) going to fight a demon who has the knowledge and power of a much younger cabdriver, and the majority of its drama comes from hoping that the protagonist will cheat on his wife; to top it off, they played out a four issue feint pretending that John Constantine was going to do something other than drink, use drugs, and curse at children.  Instead, it stuck him in the Paris de Gaulle and had the airplane workers go on strike, apparently for the purposes of realism.  So yeah, it's probably something you should read, because hey:  that description doesn't really sound like anything else, does it?  And hey:  the knowledge of cabdriving!  Finally being used as a weapon!

Gantz # 2
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse Manga
Originally published by Shueisha, 2000

As is becoming the litany with modern comics, "oh how we can look to the East to see them done right." Containing all the same basic complaints leveled at some of the mainstream comics output, like bizarrely oversized breasts on a woman with a tendency to dose herself in water and wear nothing, graphic violence that would make Cronenberg blush to his roots, Gantz continues to say "Hey, if you want some motherfucking exploitation, we'll give it to you raw, because we've got manga for kids that nobody confuses this crazy-ass shit with."  On top of that, Gantz inserts a Flash Thompson clone alongside it's selfish Peter Parker analogue, and then brilliantly twists it up by making Flash into a guy who is almost creepy in how much he fetishistically craves the approval of our young dorky protagonist.  Hell, when was the last time Flash Thompson went so far as to shove his body parts into a razor sharp meat grinder and got to watch his entire forearm split in half Ichi The Killer style just so he could sort of attempt to save the life of a whiny Spider-Man who ran off and left the naked girl to fend for herself?  Hiroya Oku makes Wolverine comics look like a pamphlet from The Church of Jesus Christ of The Latter-day Saints. 

Justice League of America # 25
Written by Dwayne McDuffie
Art by Ed Benes, Doug Mahnke, Darick Robertson, Shane Davis, Ian Churchill, Ivan Reis, Christian Alamy, Rob Stull, Joe Prado & Pete Pantazis
Published by DC Comics

There's nothing as cheap as a throwaway anniversary issue--it's the comic book answer to a clip show on the Simpsons, except the Simpsons at least inserts little acknowledgments that what they are doing is as lazy as shitting your pants.  Besides the complete lack of foresight that went into adding Darick Robertson to the mix, an artist who draws Batman in such a fashion that it looks like he'd just as soon gnaw his own arm down to the bone as "save the day," portions of the script for this issue pretty much consists of Dwayne McDuffie trying to follow up Grant Morrison's old Animal Man story, not realizing that just about every single person who gets the referencing is about as interested in the mediocre tripe that is a 2008 Justice League comic book as a four year old would be in Wittgenstein's language game.  It's only an apple because we agree it's an apple, and guess what nobody gives a shit about?  Whether or not Red Tornado is a member of the Justice League. 

Nightwing # 149
Written by Peter Tomasi
Art by Don Kramer & Jay Leisten
Published by DC Comics

So when Nightwing has fear-toxin based hallucinations of being attacked by Poison Ivy, is it his id or his ego that adds the five pounds to her tits?  Is it the dope or his brain that lowers the height of her dress, so the breasts spill out like an oil slick?  Goddamnit, there's a good portion of comic readers, non comic readers, male and female alike, who dig on some low-cut gowns and some cleavage--but what, exactly, does it add to this particular story?  The fight scene?  It doesn't add to sales, because it's not like Nightwing has enough in the T & A department on a regular basis that anybody is going to add it to the wank file next to a stack of whatever Aspen Entertainment is offering.  It's not even there for enough of the comic for it to get a good session finished, which means you have to go find that "Blackout" Superman cross-over where he married an island girl and she kept taking off her clothes.  It's just Poison Ivy pulling a rumpshaker for a couple of panels, and it's Don Kramer drawing it (and brother, Don Kramer ain't no Adam Hughes.)  Oh well.  At least it ends with an innocent women getting shot in the stomach, and then dying in pain, so that there can be a turgid little scene where Nightwing is crying in a torrential downpour, played completely seriously.  That's definitely what Nightwing, the series, needed.  Another moment where a super-hero memorizes a dead chicks name so that he can remind the reader in thought bubbles for the next year or so and say things like "I wasn't fast enough to save...fuck, what was it?  Lauren?  Maxine?  I don't know, some broad.  Anyway, i've got to head over to the Cloisters and bang some groupies."

Punisher War Journal # 24
Written by Matt Fraction & Rick Remender
Art by Howard Chaykin & Edgar Delgado
Published by Marvel Comics

When Brian Michael Bendis decided to end his game-changing arc on Daredevil by locking the blind lawyer up in prison, it made things sort of exciting to see how Ed Brubaker would handle the conundrum of getting the dude out, since it's not like there's a market for forty issues of a blind dude brewing up potato vodka and avoiding anal rape.  What Brubaker turned in was, at the time, pretty decent, but the publication of this latest issue of Punisher The Only Reason To Read This Is Chaykin War Journal succeeds in making Brubaker's work on Daredevil look like something Harold Bloom would respect--Fraction and Remender's method extends to the Frank Castle character walking out the front door of prison when the power goes out.  And that's after he ended the last issue by incarcerating the character solely at the behest of the character's own choosing.  So yeah, when you've written yourself into a corner, here's a new way out:  don't even fucking try.  After all, with Gregg Hurwitz completely screwing up Punisher MAX with the use of "feelings", it's not like anybody gives a shit about this little corner of Marvel anyway.  

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Best Super-Hero Team Up Is, Always Will Be, The Wu-Tang Clan

Comments

[Tim O'Neil]

Couple 'o' Thots:

Don't know if you know this, but Tony Daniel actually has 15+ years experience in the industry. This is as good as he's going to get.

Was Hitman aborted? It lasted five long years and a handful of specials. I think that
s a good run, and if anything, it was probably a bit flabby in the middle.

[Tucker Stone]

There was some random interview where Garth claimed that he had more that he'd wanted to do with Hitman, as opposed to Preacher, which he'd referred to as "finished." That's where the aborted line came from. I've only read those trade collections they have for the first 20 or so issues--but yeah, I can imagine it getting a little flabby. It's certainly laced with affection though. I really got the sense that Ennis loved writing the character.

Oh, I'm fully aware that Tony Daniel has 15 years experience. It's just that Batman RIP is the first time I've ever seen him make any notable improvement.

[janna]

Looks like somebody already beat me to The Hitman comment. I usually wouldn’t encourage anyone to pirate comics. But let’s face it; DC will never collect the rest of the series and The Old Dog and Closing Time were really good storylines…

Also, I got the super-special black and white cover for The Boys #23. Should I feel bad for contributing to the decline of the comic book industry?

[hugh stewart]

I wonder what the kids are going to think about Gantz when they get to (spoiler warning?)

PRETEEN BLOWJOBS

[Tucker Stone]

It bugs me that Hitman still isn't collected when I hear that DC plans to repackage the entire Impact line, which anybody could easily find an entire collection for less then a nickel.

And Hugh--it went unmentioned above, but I have to say that I'll love Dark Horse forever for using the honest "Explicit Content" warning sticker instead of the silly "For Mature Readers" thing.

[Kenny]

What happened to last week's The Economist vs The Idiot? This might not make me sound so great, but I depend on that article for my weekly dose of world news!

As for DC and collections, I'm still pissed they've never gotten around to collecting Milestone or pretending like they might. Look, I don't care about Icon vs Superman, but I do care about the interactions between Icon, Raquel, and the rest of Dakota.

Sorry, small tangent. I'm just tired of DC not getting that they have lots of great stuff to collect and market that is better than fanfiction Superman and Batman dreck.

[Tucker Stone]

Kenny, with Baltimore on one end and the role of best man at a wedding on the other, the time that Econ required was squashed to nil. Something had to give, and I was further along with Comics of the Weak. My apologies.

Good news though-they do plan to put out trades of the Milestone stuff, around the time the characters merge with the DCU proper.

[Kenny]

It's all good, Tucker. I forgot about your Baltimore experience, even though I read both your and Nina's columns about it, because I'm kinda dense. I never even considered you had a personal life. I was just mostly afraid you were ditching the Econ article due to your newfound comics' blogsphere fame.

And collections of Milestone comics? Really??? That stuff is difficult for me to find on torrents or in back issues, so this is *awesome* news. It's still too bad they're being lumped in with the DCU, but whatever.