The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak: Playing Totally For Type

Lone Wolf and Cub: Dragon Tiger Cloud Wind
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

In this chapter of the greatest comic ever, the Wolf comes upon one of the men he left behind, a former samurai still living in the exact place where he last saw the Wolf: the day the Wolf seconded the samurai's former lord's seppuku. There's no hatred or ill feelings to be found on either side, and while the conclusion is totally foregone, it's delivered with a sense of respect for the ideals the story promotes. It isn't the first time that Koike plays a scene with that kind of emotion, but that doesn't make it any less lovely. The action is, of coruse, a demented pleasure to witness, with the most graphic violence handed off to the Wolf's shadow. The opening ten pages--silent but for a few cries of death--is a masterful depiction of slaughter that introduces the man far better than any dialog ever could.

Plastic Man Archives Volume 4
By Jack Cole
Published by DC Comics

While this volume has some of the best covers you'll see (if you're reading these things in order, which is totally pointless but probably the only way people are reading them, because they have numbers on them, see: assholes like me), there's a limit to how long you can stare at Woozy WInks believing an Eskimo woman is pawing at him when, in reality, he's being sexually harassed by a lusty polar bear, and that limit is probably the same amount of time it's taking you to parse this description. If you hold out until the last story--that's 180 pages of holding out, by the way--you'll be rewarded by the sight of Plastic Man turning into a gigantic whale for the purposes of seduction. Your mileage may vary, or whatever that asshole phrase is, but it's a sight that is totally worth your time. He turns into a horny red whale!

Amazing Spider-Man #677
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Emma Rios and Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

There's no better statement on the question of whether super-hero comics is in a weird, stupid place regarding their business state of affairs then the fourth page of this comic, which is an advertisement for a goddamned wax museum in Hollywood. Deal with that one for a second: an advertisement for something that's only interesting to the most antisocial deviant tourists on God's green Earth, a location that has no appeal other than the fact that, if it burned down to the ground, absolutely every warring group on the planet could come together and hold hands under the banner of not giving the remotest fuck. That's the absolute best thing that somebody at Marvel Comics--which is owned by a gigantic multinational entertainment conglomerate--could come up with to plaster into this comic. Spin some huckster positivity out of that, Sergeant Pepper. (The comic is excellent, if that still matters.)

Fatale #1
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips and Dave Stewart
Published by Icon Image, hey maybe things are getting fun again

Containing some of Philips finest panels yet--first up that car flip, second the street scene--and adding another accomplished notch in the belt of the best colorist working, Fatale is a reward on a purely visual front. But the area where it might be even more interesting is on the writing front. Horror--if that's what you call the dreck currently ladled out by the shit merchants at IDW--is the prize pet of the low rent High Concept Kids, a loosely descriptive term I just came up with to define people who come up with 4 to 6 issue mini-series that are usually based around plot construction methods learned from Lego, i.e. taking Jack Bauer or Dexter clones and shuffling them together with bang up ideas like "zombies with ties" or "vampires with clits", plus a heaping dash of BBC references, cuz it's classy. Brubaker's the first real writer in a while to fuck with this stuff, unless you count Alan Moore's really weird rape sequel to Fish Police.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Every Good Boy Does Okay

Gantz Vol 20
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Gantz stopped being good not too long after it stopped featuring hardcore sex, but that's no excuse for opening up to the cast to include a bunch of uninspired vampires (most of whom seem to be operating at a heightened state of arousal that is never explained, acknowledged and worse, never capitalized on) and having these vampires behave as if the Gantz-ian regulars are some long standing mortal vampire enemy. It's not a huge surprise that things have gone down the always treacherous road of "let's explain this shit"--that's pretty much par for the course in science fiction stuff that goes on to long--remember when Star Wars tried to explain the Force?--but the fact that you know why something is a bad idea doesn't make it any less tedious to wade through. That being said, the portion in this volume where the spree-killing sociopath (let it never go long forgotten that one of this series main heroes is a sexed up version of Anders Breivik, with all that pesky racism firmly intact) puts on the Predator's chameleon suit and kills 40 people with a samurai sword in the streets of suburban Japan is as irresponsibly compelling as the violence in Gantz always is. If Oku could stand to return to his other obsession--ridiculously oversized breasts, and the heavy panting obsessives who would storm Hell to motorboat betwixt them--he'd quickly find that all would be forgiven.

SF Supplementary File #2A-2B
By Ryan Cecil Smith
Self Published

While the previous SF Supplementary File was a brief mini-comic exploring one of SF's many team members, this issue--split into three limited edition minis, two of which have been released--looks connected to its parent series in theme only. Described by its creator as a "hand-drawn....hand-written reproduction" of a Japanese work by Matsumoto Leiji published in 1979, the comic sees Smith hewing pretty respectfully towards the original work in the same way that he does with his Two Eyes of The Beautiful comics, a similarly designed take on Kazuo Umezu's horror work. And while it seems like a limited exercise--in some ways, it's a heavily choreographed edition of one of those theme sketchbooks people used to not be able to shut the fuck up about--Smith's sincere approach and formidable design skills lift the experience safely into the realm of honest-to-goodness art.

Godland #35
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Tom Scioli & Bill Crabtree
Published by Image Comics

While there's way, way too much talking here for this to be anything more than a tolerable issue of Godland---in all seriousness, anyone who thinks the most exciting thing for Tom Scioli to draw is pointed fingers and turns of phrase should have their nuts stapled directly to their tongue, sack still intact--the final pages, where Adam Archer (our personality deficient hero) has his official team-up with Friedrich Nickelhead (our Joe Casey stand-in, dial turned three degrees north of Extreme) come as close to redemption as one could hope for.

Spaceman #3
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Eduardo Risso & Patricia Mulvihill
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

Although the body screams for more of the violence that closed the last installment, the head understands: for death to mean something, it is best if the audience cares about the living. And while we're completely down that road for the detectives, exasperated and estranged as they may be, as well as with our victim heroes (an ape man bearing our national failure and the orphan girl who heralds the cultural demise), the rest loll like meat in the butcher's window. That's fine, actually: it's only the cheap optimism of the dumb and enslaved to theorize that pop celebrities are more than the shallow face they wear, and it's a mark in Azzarello's favor that he honestly depicts them as the frauds they'll forever be. If anything rings false--and little does--it might be the hint of a heart of gold heard in the hooker's final cry. But even that could play by Queensberry; she is still naked, after all.

Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes!
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Chris Burnham & Cameron Stewart
Published by DC Comics

There's something kind of unnerving about reading a DC comic that has all the requisite trappings of a photoshoot in Penthouse magazine, and yet decides to go completely sexless. (Schoolgirls, locker rooms, a latex skirt wearing headmistress and that "watch your rear" closer--ask any 14 year old what story that's telling.) It's almost as if Stewart and Morrison are making some weird comment about the state of geek culture today, the way it wishes to advance its backwards sexual attitudes by loudly proclaiming that sexual attitudes need not exist at all in any form, along with the even more disturbing pretense that the highest art should go should be a place where the smallest hands can still reach it. All this tolerance is cute, goes the rejoinder, but maturity dictates that the language of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was never meant to cover the hurt feelings of 40 year olds obsessed with the My Little Pony franchise: intended or not, the big message of the Morrison/Stewart exercise in Stephanie Brown-ing is that some comics should just grow the fuck up.

It's after that first story that the comic actually gets going, though. There, Morrison and Chris Burnham continue the weird amalgamation of candied violence and neon exploration that's been their beat for a while now; call it Joker comics, his absence makes more sense that way. With the weight of continuity having been abandoned--like Marvel's hands off approach to Uncanny X-Force, Batman Incorporated stories now are free to operate without any of the "help" that produced prizewinners like Countdown, Trinity and Superman: The Gigantic Pussy That Everybody Can't Stand--Morrison is freed of expectation or responsibility. It's a refreshing feeling, and while the Incorporated recap that closes the issue serves mostly as a reminder of how messy and ill-thought Incorporated seemed at the time, it's difficult to fend off the sensation that somebody decided they might still have something to prove, after all.

Wonder Woman #4
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang
Published by DC Comics

While this issue is primarily the conclusion of the new "origin" of Wonder Woman (short version: a penis was involved this time), it's also the issue where her new personality is completely introduced. The short version of that is that she's sullen, pissed off and based off the final pages, probably guilt-ridden as well. We'll have to see if that personality shift is here to stay, but for now, it's a welcome one. As Dave Sim decisively proved, women are inherently angry creatures; petulant and cold beings who wander the land ruining everything fun. It would only stand to reason that the "Wonder" of women would be the worst version imaginable, a hellish, screaming harpy addicted to the genocide of joy. This is also the issue where Cliff Chiang draws Brian Azzarello into the comic, playing the part of Ares, which only cost him a blow job.

which him did i mean

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Just Saving Myself Til I Get Raped

Thunderbolts #165-6
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Kev Walker, Declan Shalvey Terry Pallot & Chris Sotomayor
Published by Marvel Comics

Part of this is the last issue of the time-travel story arc (otherwise known as the get-us-the-fuck-away-from-Fear-Itself story arc to everybody except the one guy I know online who liked Fear Itself), and it is as pleasant as any well-drawn comic about...these people...who are super-villains....pretending to be heroes in World War 2...can be. It's fine. No, it's pretty good! Okay, it's just what it is. Then, you know, like a week or something later, there's another fucking issue and it's like--this book is like assplay. You dig it for a while, you sort of get really into it, but then it becomes an expectation, and sex becomes this thing involving lots of plunging fingers and dirty talk that's getting too edgy along with the most cursory and ill considered handjob one thought possible, and handjobs are already the closest thing to a dictionary definition of "cursory" as you can get. Nobody is saying stop! There's no reason to get like that about it, you want feelings and honesty, sometimes feelings and honesty aren't going to be like cold ice cream. They're going be about how I feel like you're treating me like i'm only good if i'm a dirty whore who always wants fingers in the ass, and Melody Beattie be damned to hell with her churlish grin: sometimes you're responsible for my feelings.

Amazing Spider-Man #674
Written by Dan Slott
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Klaus Janson & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics

Giuseppe Camuncoli is a guy that DC wasn't able to provide with a super-hero comic to draw, which is pretty funny when you consider that DC will probably publish a comic book that looks like it was drawn by that four year old who writes Axe Cop at some point in the next two weeks. Of course, Camuncoli has to go through the necessary hazing that occurs with the bump in pay (going from Daken Dark Wolverine to ASM is the equivalent of going from being a Wal-Mart greeter to being that girl that Leatherface hangs on a hook). In this case, the hazing is in the form of being colored by Frank D'Armata, and if there was an award given to people who hate super-hero comics for their ability to hate super-hero comics, there would be absolutely no contest, because Frank D'Armata has dedicated his entire career to making super-hero comics the ugliest thing on the planet, and all the rest of us just sit around talking shit about Geoff Johns outside conventions. That motherfucker punches the hate card everyday. You left your guns at home.

Incredible Hulk #2
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portacio, Billy Tan, Michael Broussard, Eric Basaldua, Scott Hanna, Joe Weems, Jay Leisten, Don Ho, Crimelab Syndicate & Sunny Gho
Published by Marvel Comics

This comic isn't even that horrible--it's got some really tough art moments, but it's really just mediocre shit at the worst--but man, this is one major clusterfuck of a publication. Beyond all the names listed above for the art, there's two people on a "production" team, there's a credited "special production thanks" to Top Cow...hell, as much as there's an urge to point out the shittiness of the comic, it can't be ignored that this thing is employing way more people than just about anything else on the market. If one third of the comic's being published today employed whatever lopsided method of production is being employed here, the American economy could right itself in a scant few months.

BPRD Hell On Earth Russia #2-3
Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Art by Tyler Crook & Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics

While this year has seen the worst happen to the BPRD series (the loss of Guy Davis), Tyler Crook and Dave Stewart have ably plowed forward and done the best they can with an obviously thankless task. And it's worked fine--the two parter that got Crook's feet wet won't be remembered for anything beyond that one part where the guy's guts got ripped out so he could hold candles instead, and that image was a good one--and Russia has been a rapidly paced get-it-done story that plays well to Tyler's previous experience. This is still a good comic, and while it's unlikely to survive too many more shitty spin-offs written by people other than Mignola & Arcudi, it'll still be...i don't know. It'll be good. It won't give you AIDS or barf on your mother at your dad's funeral. It's still a comic. It won't get you pregnant.

Wolverine & The X-Men #1-2
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Chris Bachalo, Tim Townsend, Al Vey & Jaime Mendoza
Published by Marvel Comics

The truth of the X-Men is that what once made them so necessary to people--the fact that they were the most well-honed version of the soap operatic spandex continuity porn that replaced standard super-hero comic entertainment--has now made them toxic to the rest of humanity who lack the required background knowledge to make sense of their intense convolution. Everybody on this television show has fucked someone else on this television show, everyone has died, quit, changed politics and personalities and in some cases entire flesh, and the best jokes that can now be made are graphically off-putting smug meta references to bodies of history: all of which are delivered at the loudest possible volume in the hopes that "being startled" will be confused in the reader's mind as "being entertained." And while Marvel's choice to attach Bachalo to the project means there's a chance we shall once again see the hideous midget Wolverine, it's also attached to Jason Aaron on script: and his solid run on Ghost Rider aside, Jason Aaron has written more Wolverine-is-crying stories than every other Wolverine writer combined. And while comics are all about--well, they're supposed to be about--inclusion, the truth is that people who enjoy or want to read Wolverine crying stories should be put on a fucking watch list, along with Catholic priests, assistant football coaches, corpulent meat wheelbarrows, guys who live off an allowance given to them by their wives, old racist drunks who use ex-Zuda creators instead of anti-depressants, people who have sex while watching Family Guy, and anybody that has a tiered system of email addresses.

Captain America & Bucky #624
Written by Ed Brubaker & Marc Andreyko
Art by Chris Samnee & Bettie Breitweiser
Published by Marvel Comics

The previous issue of this comic was the weird "let's go to concentration camps" issue that Marvel makes all of its writers do every six months (hey, you come up with an explanation), and who can get into concentration camps anymore after that episode of Human Giant where the Shutterbugs talk about Kidcentration Camp? Or Maus. You know, that's the problem with Ed Brubaker, actually. Because of his past as an Ignatz-swilling Porcellino-balling dude with chest hair, everybody knows he's read Maus, and so you keep hoping that Bucky is going to have an adventure with Art Spiegelman's dad, and Art Spiegelman's dad knew how to party, even in pajamas.

Bowman
By Pat Aulisio
Published by Retrofit Comics

Anytime comics have jokes in them about pot brownies, they should come with a signed affidavit that says The Person Who Made This Comic Is Young Enough That It's Okay That They Still Think That Pot Brownies Make For Good Comedy, because otherwise the reader will spend the whole rest of the time--which could have been kind of enjoyable, since there's that whole Kirby's Kubrick (by way of Panter's creeps and Ryan's blacks)--sneering so hard that the muscle starts to spasm. (This rules also applies to the fucking Asshole only phrase "nom nom", but since that showed up on the same page as the pot brownies, some bit of amnesty is allowed.)

Fantastic Four #600 & FF #12
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mike Epting, Juan Bobillo, and 800 other people
Published by Marvel Comics

When they come, and they're gonna come, they're gonna ask you why you liked Jonathan Hickman comics right before they take you away. And truthfully, no more secrets, we know why you like 'em. But they're gonna come anyway, and when they ask, they're also gonna ask why you didn't just call your dad on the phone, because that's how far away he was the whole time. You didn't need this pacifier. You just needed the courage to tell that man you loved him.

Dude, he loves you too. He just loves football more.

Butcher Baker The Righteous Maker #7
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Mike Huddleston
Published by Image Comics

While this really is the smash 'em up genre comic that all arts comic people should be fucking around with (the coloring in this comic alone is a gigantic rebuke, a challenge that few seem to realize is directed right at them), it's still a book that's weirdly paced and somewhat half-cocked--really, the best way to explain it would be to say "imagine you've only read one comic, and that comic was Elektra Assassin". Sure, there's Godland characters in other garb, and there's the Liquid Television does gag stuff, but this is mostly thought experiment and binge drinking. Don't be surprised if you open the 40th issue and it's just a bunch of rants about peak oil, followed by a couple of panels of a pornographic mustache.

Gantz Volume 19
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse

One of the plot threads from previous volumes--the one where a certain amount of points will allow one of the Gantz fighters their freedom--finally winds its way towards a sort of conclusion, with the big reveal that, on top of escape, points can be redeemed for the resurrection of the dead. While there's definitely a bit of philosophy 101 to be played with here--think the question of whether a boat remains real when years of repair and replacement have given you a boat with none of its original parts--it looks like the story will skip right through that and just play video game logic. In keeping with the Gantz Method (which is way hornier than the Socratic), our lead watches as the entire room use all their points to resurrect his friends, his girlfriend, and then he goes home to masturbate some more. This comic is never going to end.

Wonder Woman #3
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang
Published by DC Comics

This is an okay remix of the Wonder Woman origin, but don't lie: when you heard (if you heard) that the Wonder Woman origin story was "being changed" in such a way that certain Wonder Woman fans were chapped off, weren't you secretly hoping that Azzarello was going to write a comic where it turned out that Wonder Woman's secret origin was that she was dead, and he was writing a straight up military action thriller about how Steve Trevor flew around the world in a stolen fighter jet getting revenge on God?

It would have been like this:
What's Wonder Woman's secret origin?
That she's DEAD.
DUDE THAT'S AWESOME

Red Hood and the Outlaws #2
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Kenneth Rocafort
Published by DC Comics

Beyond the boilerplate Starfire-as-cum-receptacle stuff (as Dan Didio once said, that girl's got an ass is like a wet bucket), the other main problem with Red Hood and the Outlaws is that it's way, way more interesting a comic than most of DC's 52 output. It doesn't achieve actual comics quality the way something like Wonder Woman does, and it doesn't bleed with Continuity Based Importance the way Justice League does, but it does make very specific choices, have unusual (because it's flashy Top Cow shit, or so I've been told) art, and, because of Lobdell, it doesn't read like the last five years of DC's output. You know why the New 52 thing is failing, already? I mean--you already know, unless you're crazy person. It's failing because it's the same guys who were making the comics you didn't like before. They didn't change. Magically restarting DC Comics didn't make Tony Daniel a more interesting writer, they didn't make Frank Quitely's schedule more open, they didn't cure Rags Morales addiction to draining all of the fluid out of the human form. Didio still can't write a comic. Johns can still only write one. Putting Lobdell on a book--even one as fucking wack-metal as this, which is an attempt to combine the movie Threesome with a children's cartoon, plus cults, gigantic swords and a Dream Whore--means, for the first time in years, that DC has a comic that isn't like every single other DC Comic they publish.

Well, except for the fact that it's still pretty shitty.

Deadpool Max II #2
Written by David Lapham
Art by Kyle Baker
Published by Marvel Comics

Now that the Disney/Marvel meet-those-quarterly-projection heads are making themselves heard, there's no question that books like Deadpool Max II are heading for that place Judge Dredd sends the mentally handicapped in Mega City One. The only question now is whether or not David Lapham and Baker are aware of that, because if they are, we just might be entering the final stretch of let's-fuck-around comics. This is so much a better comic than all of those things by Eisner where people try to solve their familial problems. For instance, when somebody in this comic has a problem with the women in their lives, they take those anti-boner pills they give to child molesters. Have you read A Family Affair? It's a good 30 pages of fucking dialog, and nobody gets to screw anybody. And it certainly doesn't have Cable in it.

Haunt #19
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Nathan Fox
Published by Image Comics

The highest point in this comic is the beginning, when it seems like Joe Casey is doing a riff on that part in Cobra where it turns out that there's an axe-cult killing motherfuckers, and the second high point is when it seems like Nathan Fox is picking up on that Cobra reference by drawing the female sex lead so hideously that she almost looks to have replaced her human flesh with a garbage bag painted in human flesh colors, because if there's one thing that's way too intense for 8 year olds, it's Brigitte Nielsen as a romantic lead, she's essentially Dolph Lundgren with breasts, that's why Rocky IV has such an impact. (Everybody likes it when robots fuck themselves.) And yet: if there's one thing the Haunt character isn't, it's interesting enough to make you forget about Sylvester Stallone's performance in Cobra, which--while not the generally accepted definition of good--is still more striking than this.

Punishermax #19
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Steve Dillon
Published by Marvel Comics

Check this out:

Steve Dillon has drawn more comic books than most people have read, and while few people regard him with the same amount of respect they give to the 40-something father of four who just took their bagel order, and Steve Dillon has drawn pornography, and Steve Dillon has drawn Judge Dredd, and yet Steve Dillon has somehow managed to never draw panels like the one above. That is a new thing. It's not a great thing. But it's new, and it is all his.

Uncanny X-Force #16-17
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Jerome Opena & Dean White
Published by Marvel Comics

Outside of Daredevil, what super-hero book can go dick to dick with Uncanny X-Force? Hell, outside of the Hernandez/Woodring/Marti level shit, what any comic can? It's not Remender on his own--it's not even Remender plus Opena, because these same dudes did Punisher comics, and that shit worked about as well as JT Krul's initial run on Green Arrow. It sucks to say it, but truth-to-truth, smash-to-smash: character counts, and Deadpool/Wolverine/Fantomex are 2011's equivalent of an engorged vulva knocking on your door right after your girlfriend dies of a miscarriage in your arms. Answer it, my moist friend. It's the Lord's own sustenance.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: New York Convention Edition

Back Issue Hunting

Despite the fantastic selection that Lone Star, Time Machine and Joe Koch's place has to offer, there's still a couple of comics that I've always got an eye out for. It isn't a physical list that gets adjusted, just a mental one consisting of the various back issues I've long told myself I'd buy on sight if they happen to cross my path. One is the "Joke Book" issues of the Acme Novelty Library, either of the first two Rubber Blankets, and then there's Panter: Panter, Panter, Panter. As witnessed in the picture above, I was able to track some of those down--lazier still, it was all from one guy, who it turns out I had already dealt with once before: at the last New York Comic Con, when he sold me some a Rocco Vargas hardcover and some magazine called "Voyager". Schizo was just something of accidental interest that I'd wanted to pick up mostly to see the infamous letter's column, which totally lived up to the hype. Fast Forward is an old Pirahna (DC) comic, an anthology issue featuring a stellar zombie story by Kyle Baker. There's also a short piece by Stephen DeStefano and Bob Rozakis in there that I really liked. Take a look at this, it's the very beginning:

I love the way the picture's appearance changes in that third panel, and I love the way the changes work in relation to the one in the middle, making the pictures themselves comics as well, but only to us, the reader. Neat stuff.

Wonder Woman came up right before the con, a preview issue kind of thing. I feel the same way about Wonder Woman as my wife did, actually. The only other Wonder Woman comic I've ever bought was when the series crossed over with Superman during that Sacrifice story, and I thought those were terrible comics. (Because they are terrible comics.) This current thing that Azzarello and Cliff are doing is, in fact, pretty  great. I like reading the book not because it's better than DC's other books by comparison (although it is) but  because it's just a smartly written and extremely well drawn comic book, regardless of what surrounds it. Both of these guys deserve a win, too--Azzarello got completely fucked by whatever Rags and DC did to the First Wave stuff, and Cliff's been out there in the covers only hinterland for too long now. As long as the comic stays this good, I'm sure the pangs of what should have been will pass before long.

Bumping

Right after I saw those Rubber Blankets I was soon to buy, I saw Jared Lewis. I knew that meant Sean and Katie Witzke were not far behind, and I was thusly treated to a fine conversation with one of comic's most valuable squadrons of influence. We departed outside to talk shit, which we do better than most. It was a glorious, glorious collection of moments, interspersed with public proclamations of support for Brandon Graham and Simon Roy, who had by then announced the greatest announcement this Comic Con was to deliver. (The Prophet thing.) I also had the latest in a multi-year stretch of pleasant con conversations with Tim Callahan. He's smart, funny and capable of having a disagreement about Scalped's level of quality (still sticking up for the "it's not a complete piece of shit" camp) without turning into a big red faced crybaby, and that's so rare a feat that I might petition the Harveys to start a category for it.

Get Your Shit Together

I bumped into Tim right after my first failed attempt to use the convention for a few of the primary things I would expect it to be explicitly for, which is to find out A) what a publisher is publishing and B) how to get those things so they can be sold in a store or at the very least C) get some contact information for the magical geniuses who can answer those super difficult questions. Because why have that? Why have a catalog, or a release list, or even a business card? Why do any of that shit? What are you, some kind of pedophile?

Anyway, that first experience was, hopefully, just a freak occurrence. The rest of the time, the smaller pubs seemed pretty excited to extol their various wares. (Abrams especially. I like those people a lot.) Still. In an environment where kid's comics are less of a priority to almost everyone concerned, who doesn't have their shit together enough to have a schedule of releases, a business card, a catalog, or at least somebody with a basic understanding of what their company does (or how their products are distributed) manning their booth? More and more, the supremacy of Graphix comics seems to not only rest on their aesthetic quality, but also on the simple fact that they hired actual grown ups to man the phones.

Everybody Is A Liar Except _____

Last year, there was this one comic that got canceled and it's cancellation turned into this ridiculous Tea Party event where everybody and their mother chimed in to pretend that they'd secretly preferred gushy romantic comedies over action films all along, when in reality this was just the latest opportunity in the 900th episode of "I'm going to tell you how fucking much I hate you personally for not liking the things I like, because that's how I exorcise my personal sense of shame over the amount of my fiscal solvency I have dedicated to things that I have only a base emotional connection towards, things which are for some reason still continually failing to fill the gaping void in my black, black heart, i mean holy shit i even got some bitch pregnant and it didn't slow the pain down even one bit". Everybody wrote blog posts about the comic, it stayed canceled, a bunch of made up "new readers" (some of whom were fictionally female as well as fictionally existent) all died in a big omg-who-will-buy-the-comics-now fictional bonfire, and then we all moved on. And so hey, it turns out that the sales on the fucking thing were just fine, and it got canceled just because the publisher wanted to move the artist onto a different book, and the artist wouldn't budge until he was reminded that, hey, this is fucking comics, and artists are allowed to have one vote and that vote is always YES SIR. The only choice you get is how loud you want to yell it.

I Would Have Walked 5000 Miles

My favorite story out of the con is the one that may not even be true, so devoid as it is of any corroboration outside of everybody who got tanked on Saturday night and then said that yes, it was totally true. But yes, IF Ron Marz really did grab Rich Johnston in a headlock and then proceed to punch his head and face multiple times on the con floor, I believe that might even be the best convention story of the decade. It's the kind of fight that everybody wins, especially America. (Rich Johnston is not American.) Awesome.

The Only Thing I Have To Say About Sexism Is That I'm Not it

I used to think it was some kind of latent sexism, but every time i've ever seen an attractive woman dressed up in some kind of fantasy/super-hero costume, I've always immediately thought to myself: "You don't need to do that. You're pretty." (I've never had the reaction to a picture of a woman playing dress up, just when I see them in real life.) I just assumed it was some ingrained bit of white male hookum, not the sort of thing I would explore, just a thought I didn't need to worry about as long as I didn't act on it. It's just a barnacle. But then, on Saturday, I saw a good looking man...in a costume! It was some kind of Jedi/cyberpunk thing where you could see his abs. And I had the thought! I looked right at him and immediately thought: "Come on, buddy! There's no need for you to do that!" So I guess I'm not sexist after all. I just think cosplaying should be left to people who are plain and/or unattractive. Who knew!

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: Generally Speaking, There's No Learning Curve To Intercourse

Gangsta Rap Posse #2
By Benjamin Marra
Published by Traditional Comics

While it would be an argument worth having, let's go all in on some off-the-cuff hyperbole: this issue of Gangsta Rap Posse features one of the top five best Ben Marra drawings of all time. It's not the one where the Bootsy Collins lookalike gets his knife-throwing chest blown apart, and it's not the one where a Wile E. Coyote-mimicking George Clinton catches a four-way golden shower, all of which are awesome. No, it's the one after the mayor gets mildly chided for his incredibly racist langauage, that panel where he cranes his head back and, open-handed, holds out his palms. It's a perfect piece of concise storytelling, the sort of choice that you see everytime a tale needs to describe a character completely but has zero time within which to do so. More than any line of dialog, that dual movement--the head craning back, mouth closed, while the hands go up in exasperation: it's the equivalent of somebody injecting a syringe of understanding directly into your cerebellum. You know without a shadow of a doubt that this guy is one weak, piece-of-shit motherfucker, and that whatever happens to him is going to be fully deserved and yet will still probably not be enough. And even though you have to read through the rest of the comic to get to the panel where his brain beckons three lazer guided bullets (thwmp,thwmp,thwmp) on an express trip right through his skull seconds after he's finished ejaculating all over himself, it's only the extremity of the violence that come as a surprise. Who are you fooling, guy? You knew where that cat's story was heading the second his chin went up.

Red Lanterns #2
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Ed Benes
Published by DC Comics

This is the one that's about the super-people (they aren't really heroes or villains) who vomit acidic blood and count a cat amongst their members. Their leader, Atrocitus, spent a solid portion of the first issue soliloquizing to the corpse of Krona, who is a member of that race called the Guardians that look exactly like what Smurfs would look like if they decided to make hyper realistic movies about Smurfs. His soliloquy was pretty awesome, the sort of purple prose that seems to have been born out of a cross between Stan Lee, Alan Moore and the break-up diary of a 15-year-old Zola Jesus fan. This issue includes more of that monologue, but this time, it's being used to set up the upcoming plot instead of detailing the status quo, and as a result is far less entertaining to read. In the middle of the monologuing, the comic takes a quick break to remind you of the A-Team nature of the Red Lanterns (if your rage is "worthy", and you can find them, you too can have vengeance wreaked on your behalf--just scream!), and then it goes on back to the talking to a dead body thing. It's weird how all of that is so much better than Swamp Thing, but it totally is.

X-Men Schism #5
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Adam Kubert, Mark Roslan & Jason Keith
Published by Marvel Comics

I've been doing physical therapy for the last couple of weeks to recover from a broken bone, and so unfortunately I can't really get into this comic due to the way it depicts violence. Not that it's upsetting, but that I just can't get past how quickly the fight would be over the second that Wolverine sticks a claw through Cyclops' deltoid muscle. That would just be it, he'd be done forever. He'd be apologizing and crying and screaming (if he didn't pass out, and he'd probably pass out), and not becuase "Cyclops is a pussy", I actually like Cyclops, but man--that is just way too much fucking pain. You get your deltoid perforated, you're in the hospital immediately. It's going to take months and months before you can pick up a golf ball. Still, even if I'd been able to buy into this comic, there still would have been the stumbling block that, five issues in, it's still not clear what the  basic problem is. Cyclops wants to slaughter bad guys, so does Wolverine, but they can't agree on which age to set the enlistment minimum? How is that a disageement that requires fisticuffs and bombs to figure out? These guys are supposed to be best friends.

Thunderbolts #164
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Kev Walker, Terry Pallot, D'Auria & Martin
Published by Marvel Comics

If you wanted to write a recipe for failure, there's no quicker way to go about it then to ditch your most entertaining characters and focus instead on the benchwarmers, who you've jettisoned backwards in time. And yet, while that's a brusque and cruel way to describe the plot that Jeff Parker's taken with his Thunderbolts, it's what he did, and it worked.

If there was a better example of Fear Itself failing to prove the value of those big round-up meetings that Marvel's various writers use to "architect"-uralize the various strands of comic book community, it could definitely be the Thunderbolts portion of the equation. Post Siege, Thunderbolts was the strongest of the various Avengers-related titles that Marvel was putting out. During Fear Itself, a series that prominently featured at least one of the Thunderbolts team and would therefore seem to be one of the book's most deserving of spotlight and attention, the book languished on the vine. And while Marvel seems to have fully embraced the editorial dictation style of comics--despite DC's consistent publication of 20 page pamphlets of proof that said method results in dire, hellish comics--this current Thunderbolts storyline reads like a writer going "well fuck it, can I at least take the guys you don't care about back in time, then?" The result is, so far, the most vibrant and engaging story since those first few issues. Hyde chucking bodies into Man-Thing's coma-rendered silent maw, the gooftastic 50's get-ups, and the first two page spread Kev Walker's had that stands eye-to-eye with his heaven-sent work on ABC Warriors: this comic just jumped back to the front of the line.

Action Comics #2
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Rags Morales, Brent Anderson & Rick Bryant
Published by DC Comics

If there's one thing that Grant Morrison is good at but never gets credit for, it's that he does decadent shit in super-hero comics in a way that doesn't seem sleazy. (There's one exception I can think of that comes to mind: when the Joker cut his own tongue in half. But considering what keeps happening in every recent issues of Detective Comics, it's highly probable that Tony Daniel threw that in on his own.) Most of the time though, Morrison manages to pull off the very thing he seems to have wanted to criticize Mark Millar for: Grindy, too-old-for-genre FX channel twists. He gets credit for the way he traffics in horror stuff, like Pig in Batman & Robin or the galloping terrors in that Final Crisis spin-off, but not so much for the other things, the things he (and his readers) know would be a little bit embarrassing to explain if somebody actually asked what you were reading on I Bet Strangers Will Ignore The Ketchup Stains And Be Impressed By A Prominent Display Of Watchmen Day. This issue of Action goes down that road apiece, focusing on the story of Lex Luthor's attempts to go all Jack Bauer on a tied-to-chair Superman, and while the resulting experience doesn't manage to go anywhere in terms of plot, it still gets to be a relatively decent single issue experience. It's a bunch of jerk-offs trying to torture Superman: who doesn't want to see that? People who hate having a good time, that's who.

Casanova Avaritia #2
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Gabriel Ba
Published by Marvel Comics

I can't remember which comics reviewer/blogger/oversharing baby it is that made the claim that there's never a right time to include violence against animals in a story, but I sure wish I could, because how fucking wrong would a copy of this issue make them? It's great too, seeing that image of violence-against-pandas juxtaposed with one of this website's own personal shudders, which is a scene where the comics creator pops up in story. Because, honestly, this might be the first time since Jim Aparo drew himself in as an active player in a Batman story that the trick worked. (In that same issue, Bob Haney was depicted with a shotgun and no home phone, a classic example of how you make the fudge realer.) There's just something about this particular run on Casanova--maybe it's Fraction's confrontational attempt to exorcise whatever memories his reader's have of the guy who used to excitedly tell you about why he threw in a Liquid Swords reference, maybe it's that Dustin Harbin's fragile glass lettering makes every line seem more drunk with meaning, maybe it's that the plot seems redacted by memory, black sharpies across the script. Whatever it is, this is an exciting, exciting, comic. It's gnarly, unfriendly and ungainly, but it's still a story. Feeling like an out of the loop party crasher--this is definitely what a five dollar comic should be like.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: I Think I'm Gonna Need To Reboot The Way We Kiss

Action Comics #1
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Rags Morales
Published by DC Comics
Pages Looked At: 113%
Amount I Honestly Read: 62%

This one's a snooze festival, population everybody who read it, but hey, maybe you've accidently started a relationship with somebody that you would rather put in a coma and shove off a bridge. If that's the case, this is totally up your alley. The art is funny. There's a part where Lex Luthor is drinking a can of soda, and then it turns into one of those skinny Red Bull cans, and then all of this miniaturization of cans climaxes in the thing disappearing into Lex's hand. The rest of it is just a strange looking comic where Rags Morales tries to confuse the reader by drawing all of the character's faces differently from panel to panel. Other than that, it's a really boring comic. Pretty much a complete failure, especially when you remember that the same writer did a Superman comic that was qualitatively about 8000 times better not but a few years ago.

The Big Lie #1
Written by Rick Veitch
Art by Veitch and Erskine
Published by DC Comics
Pages I Looked At: 100%
Amount I Honestly Read: 45%

This might have not been published as part of the new 52, I can't remember. It was a new number one though, the first issue of this really weird series where the hero (Uncle Sam, from that Alex Ross comic) shows up just to talk to the reader about something called the Noble Lie, which is this thing where somebody spends so much time on the Internet that they think they have a degree in Knowing Lots Of Philosophical Shit. But then the guy--Uncle Sam--isn't there for the rest of the comic! And the rest of the comic is about some lady traveling back in time to 9/11 so she can show a boardroom full of people proof of how 9/11 really happened, and she has the proof on her iPad, and so everybody in the room keeps interrupting her to ask about iPads, and you know--it's my own fault, that you don't believe me right now. But this is true, this is a real thing, and they really do take a bunch of breaks during the Hey 9/11 Was An Inside Job portion of the drama to make jokes about iPads. And then everybody dies anyway, because it's a comic and comics are short, and then it's over and Uncle Sam uses a bunch of old timey slave-era slang--that part is really weird--to tell you in this gee-shucks fashion what a shitty American you are, guy reading this comic, because you don't sit around talking about 9/11 being an inside job. But hey, The Beat thinks this one is a "great comic", and a decent portion of their freakshow commentors agree. Sometimes pizzas have tomatoes, whatever that saying is.

Detective Comics #1
Written by Tony Salvadore Daniel
Art by T. Salvodore D.
Published by DC Comics
Pages Looked At: 100%
Amount I Honestly Read: 100%

While Mr. Matt Seneca took a break from Google Buzzing with White Shasta and Blaze Larmy to point out that Tony Daniel's reference o' homage doesn't extend beyond the books alphabetically shelved next to the ones he had some involvement in, there's still something left on the table to shake ones head at in this piece of shit, like the line "Gotham is a hellhole and it always will be" which is immediately responded to with the line "Like HELL it will". So much in comics should be said out loud before it gets written down, but that might interrupt the parts of the day where TSD lifts freakout pages from Preacher.

Batwing #1
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Ben Oliver
Published by DC Comics
Pages Looked at: 63%
Amount I Honestly Read: what's two pages? Two pages.

This comic seems to be for people who watched that movie The Crazies and got pissed off that the day wasn't saved by M.A.N.T.I.S., and considering how well recieved the Saw Goes Brucing thing is going down lately, maybe that's a whole bunch of people. How fucked up is it that, after this horrible piece of shit comic that no one will ever enjoy reading is cancelled, Dan Didio will use it as an excuse at a convention for why nobody wants to read about black super-heroes? How fucked up is that the same assholes who retweet cutesy Powerpuff drawings of Elektra going "tee-hee-hee" are going to argue in some weird, locked up inside due to lonely logic that he's sort of right because wook-ie, mew makes Excel sheet tumblr face with my spawe time. Fucking trashheaps. I'd give 'em both cancer. You too, Jesus. Where were you when those people on the last page of this Batwing comic got their heads cut off inside a school for book learning? Were you hanging out with your lazy friend Allah, who didn't help them either? Batwing.

OMAC #1
Written by Dan Didio
Art by Keith Giffen
Published by DC Comics
Pages Looked at: 100%
Amount I Honestly Read: 30%

The coloring in this comic is so hardcore ugly that you want to go backwards in time to the guy who was excited about Mark Chiarello being named as "guy who will fix DC's horrible art" and punch that guy in the face for his dumb, unfounded hope, even though that guy is you. And while the only reason you're noticing the shitty coloring is because you got on board to check out this sort of amazing Kirby-esque Trencher-style art that Giffen brings to the table, you notice it's shittiness nonetheless. Thankfully, it's just ugly enough to make the thing a weird search for meaning type of experience, which is good, because reading any of the dialog will seriously impinge on your ability to get an erection ever again, even if your mom is Mandy Fisher and she wants to take you camping.

Men of War #1
Written by Ivan Brandon
Art by Tom Derenick
Published by DC Comics
Pages Looked at: 100% of the main story, 1% of the back-up
Amount Of It I Honestly Read: 100% of the main story, 0% of the back-up

While being a fan of first person shooters might make you think my favorite part of this comic was the part where it opened with the main character woozily waking up mid-battle and flashing back to reveal his own origin (I was on pins and needles, waiting for the comic to tell me which button lets me skip through the cutscene), the best part is actually, by far, the part where the main character--who is one of Sgt. Rock's kids or something like that--gets told by a couple of high-ranking military types that they have interviewed every single person he has ever served with, and all of those people thought that he was the best man they had ever had the distinct pleasure of meeting. It's very specific about this, and that's all kinds of sweet. That's more of a wish-fulfillment moment than a power ring or a night with 90's era Demi Moore. Can you imagine how it would feel to have two authoritative types sit you down and say "we've done the research, and everybody who has ever met you said that you are totally fucking awesome"? To be told there wasn't a single hold-out? Dude, don't lie. Don't you dare. That would feel totally amazing.

Casanova Avaritia #1
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Gabriel Ba
Published by Icon

The biggest problem Casanova has always had has been its unfortunate timing--in a better world, it would be getting published by somebody who just wanted it to come out and exist, but in the one we live in now, it has to pretend towards being some kind of "story", which is never going to be as interesting as what it should be. It should be a place where Gabriel Ba can take Matt Fraction's oft-confusing verbiage and self-referential gamesmanship and chase after making them into singular moments of the insane and weird. It might end up being irritating, but no more so than it already is to watch the book struggle to appease the needs of a genre it would be better off without engaging with at all. Some of us just want to like something that's new, you know? Something that's coming out. This is it already--so lovely, so plush. But if only it were given the room to blow itself out, and up, even further! To be stranger, to drown in undiluted block cartoon sex appeal and guns and jokes, or whatever else filled up the lines.

Suspect Device
By Various
Published by Josh Bayer & Edwin Vazquez

This is one of the best things I've read since Love and Rockets 4 and Lose, a tripped out Cadillac of comics. It's printed on newsprint and acts on the reader like something you'd find in the trunk of a serial killers car, an experiment comic (not experiment-al) where each cartoonist takes a panel or two from Nancy (the Bushmiller Nancy) and draws something out of it. Some of the cartoonists come back for more, some don't credit themselves with their real names, some do huge Panter rip-off art styles and others do fluctuations of their own. So little of this is bad, it's the opposite of anthologies, almost everything in her kicks ass. It's funny as hell. Scary. So good.

Batgirl #1
Written by Gail Simone
Art by somebody
Published by DC Comics
Pages Looked at: 5%
Amount I Honestly Read: 0%

No sir, not a chance. I want to have kids someday.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: This Is Like Having Sex With A Spanish Teddy Ruxpin

Captain America and Bucky #621
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Chris Samnee
Published by Marvel Comics

This is a pretty likeable comic--pretty heavy on the whimsy, like all the scripts were written in a field under a tree and they're all around nice-lookin' too--but each issue has had one little pit you gotta spit out, like a bad pear in a bag, a something-something, we all got one. (Metal rakes on concrete, if you're asking.) In the first issue, it was the way Brubaker set up Bucky's Final Training Round, which consisted of a teenager being set upon by grown ass men for an audience made up of "some dude" and Steve Rogers, who grunted and mumbled in a nearby Jeep, like he was going to a drive-in with the old guy who hires Arnold in Predator. In this issue, it's when Steve and Bucky--who is a totally nice looking boy, but sometimes appears to be a totally nice looking girl--head out to meet an undercover secret agent type who works at the fair. That's all well and good, but isn't it gonna blow Mister Undercover's cover for Steve to show up fully decked out in a tan I'm An Army Dude outfit? Isn't that sort of why the dude ends up dead by the end of the evening? Punching, sure, but c'mon. Dude got killed.

Graveyard of Empires #2
Written by Mark Sable
Art by Paul Azaceta & Matt Wilson
Published by Image Comics

Two issues into this four issue mini-series, and it's becoming pretty obvious that Mark Sable really doesn't want to write a comic about zombies at all. Which is totally understandable! Still, you have to wonder what he thinks is going to happen when zombie readers show up--because really brah, non-zombie readers are only going to arrive upon something like this by accident--and find out that the comics spends most of its second part (of four) flashing back before the zombies attack, after an entire first issue that didn't really do anything with zombies until the last couple of pages, which is when everybody went "ah, zombies". If he's doing it this way in preparation of whatever movie deal he's shooting for, then it even makes less sense--there's no reason to start cutting the budget this early, that's what producers are for. Oh well. If you're just looking for a sleazy warsploitation comic, or you want to look at Paul Azaceta but have an allergy to Northlanders, this is the only current available option, as long as you ignore all the other options ever made, as they are all currently available. But if for some reason you can only choose amongst the most recent single issue comics that have been published--there is no reason why this is the case, but I like thought games, in thought games I still live at home and we sleep in family bed--then Graveyard of Empires is the best option to fulfill your needs.

Daredevil #2
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Paolo Rivera, Joe Rivera & Javier Rodriguez
Published by DC Comics

While this issue comes up short on the Marcos Martin front, Paolo Rivera continues to bring an A-game that I'm ashamed to admit I didn't even know he had, while Mark Waid continues moving this title back into straight-up-spandex-stuff and away from Oh Shit I Fucked Some Girl And Now She Is Dead, this time with a basement full of crazy robots. There's also a fight with another super-hero. That's pretty much it. Fight with super-hero (that looks really great), some jokes with the shlub friend (those are just fine), a set-up that lets Daredevil use his powers, and then...crazy 'bots, in a basement. This comic really does make everything around it look completely dire, just from a basic craft level. It's lovely, lovely work.

Flashpoint Project Superman Man O'War Number Three
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Lowell Francis
Published by DC Comics

Zero idea what this was supposed to be about, just thought it was funny that it takes place in the time between a couple of pages in Flashpoint and will be continued in a later issue of Flashpoint. You know how people who don't read super-hero comics--I'm not talking about Drawn & Quarterly types, I'm talking about real people that don't read super-hero comics--always try to talk shit about super-hero comics, and they're always just off by a little bit, but it's enough that you kind of feel like defending super-hero comics, even if you basically agree with them that almost all super-hero comics are fucking terrible? Like, somebody will talk about how there was a rape in Identity Crisis, but then they'll amp it up a little too much, they'll describe something "they heard about" that actually didn't happen, like a scene where Lex Luthor was getting head while watching a video of the rape, it was in Superman, you know, those issues where he wore the green suit, I think Jeph Loeb wrote 'em, that kind of thing? Well, those people: that's who this issue of Project Superman is for. It's a comic that actually takes place between two scenes in a much bigger "more important" comic, a comic that you absolutely do not have to read to understand Flashpoint, but you better not try to read on its own unless you want to be totally, irrevocably lost. This is one of those super-hero comic that people who hate super-hero comics make up when they're trying to explain why they don't read super-hero comics. So next time, cut them a break. In their leg. Do it with a knife. Because they probably exploit women for sex, just like Peppermint Patty. And she's a vampire. Also? AIDS. You read that right. AIDS.

Uncanny X-Force #13
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Mark Brooks, Scot Eaton, Andrew Hennessy, Andrew Currie & Dean White
Published by Marvel Comics

While X-Force seems to be rapidly nearing the point where it'll stop being an engaging X-Men comic for those of us who like our paste pre-chewed and turn right back into a regular X-Men type comic with a bunch of detailed convultions about who-blew-who, and which paddleboat they did it in, it's not totally there yet, and the prospects of a much better art team may still bring this fucker out of the power dive it's been in for the last month or so. This thing's failings are to be expected, even if Marvel hadn't decided to pump the thing out like they needed comics to plug a busted toilet main--it's a story set in some alternate reality that most of us don't-give-a-fuck-at-all, that's-why-we-read-X-Force readers know shit about, and its cliched beats are only aggravated further when having to plow through not one, but two Wolverines as they argue and pick at each other over the pleasures of mating with a still breathing Jean Grey. (Based off of Miss Grey's outfit, the apocalypse did little to diminish the global supply of latex and those invisi-bra cup things.) Oh well, as they say: this relationship was never meant to last for the long term.

Batman Incorporated #8
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Scott Clark & Dave Beatty
Published by DC Comics

So weird. You should probably see what it looks like. Here's what it looks like:

The whole comic looks like that. It's terribly irritating to read--not in that way where "I had to pay attention and I don't wanna, this must be lousy", just in that way where the visual part of your brain knows that what it's seeing is the unfinished components of 90's era computer imaging, and it keep setting off an alarm in the logic center of your brain, saying "hey, we've moved past ugly shit like this, there's no reason to look at ugly shit like this"--and ignoring that part of your brain, which is basically just trying to help you, that weird feeling is called struggling against biological self-preservation, and there's just no getting around how obnoxious that is. And for what, really? A Batman comic? A Batman comic that fails to do any of the stuff you go to Batman comics for? Something unfun, being unfunny? Something boring? Hell, there's people in the world, bosses and coworkers, subordinates and subordinance, those things can be unfun, unfunny, boring: they probably aren't this strident, either. What it's most like is being yelled at by somebody from another room that you don't have any obligation to listen to--after a while, you just stop paying attention, becuase hey, fuck them: they ain't the boss a' you.

That stuff Grant Morrison said in that interview was pretty irritating, even when you go into it knowing its just really smart marketing, because seriously: it's Rolling Fucking Stone. When's the last time Rolling Stone was even kinda/sorta relevant? They have pretty fantastic political reporting, don't get me wrong, but we're talking about a magazine that still talks about your favorite Led Zeppelin tunes and treats the Kings of Leon like they're on the cusp of relevance. And that isn't to say that Led Zeppelin sucks, just to say that my dad listens to Led Zeppelin and you don't get to be a relevant culture magazine if you're advertising dad shit all the fucking time. I don't want to be an old piece of shit anymore than anybody else does, but oh well and guess what: I'm an old piece of shit who went to high school when Kurt Cobain was still alive, boo hoo. And if I'm capable of realizing that magazines that do cover pieces on Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd is too old, even for a piece of shit like me, then yep, you better do something super-controversial to get me to pay attention to whatever it is you're putting between those adult diapar advertisments. Getting the premier comics writer--which he still gets to be, because Seven Soldiers rules your dick--to talk shit about comics premier artiste is sure going to wrangle up the blood, no matter how congealed it is. Does it matter that he didn't make any sense? It shouldn't, really. We're talking about a guy who still tells people he got kidnapped by hung out with aliens, even though he's clearly had enough time to have sobered up and realized that no, of course that didn't happen, why would that happen, what a crazy night that was, i'm so glad I didn't get her pregnant, aliens you gotta be kidding me--why not go ahead and let him think he's a working class hero, who lives in a gigantic house where he wears a purple suit, being pissed on by the likes of Chris Ware, who doesn't live in a gigantic house and seems to spend all his time listening to ragtime music. Ha ha ha! Fucking ragtime music! Like an asshole! Isn't that what assholes listen to? All the time? Dickhead! Fuck that dickhead!

Kind of lost the plot there. Wouldn't it be weird if Grant Morrison wrote a comic that you could climb inside, and when you got inside you could have sex with Batman? My biggest fantasy--i'm being really naked and honest with you guys right now--is that I could climb inside a Batman comic and become Lyla Garrity from Friday Night Lights. And then I'd have a three way with my wife Nina and Tim Riggins. Not the actors, mind you. I want to live in East Dillon and be a cheerleader, but I want my real wife to be there, and I'll be a lady with lady parts. And I'll do it lots. Inside a Grant Morrison Batman comic set in East Dillon. That's my dream. I dream it every night.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

 

Comics Of The Weak: Quit Calling Yourself A Creator, Everybody Goes To The Bathroom

The New Avengers #15
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Mike Deodato & Rain Beredo
Published by Marvel Comics

This is a serious, adult comic about a Marvel character named Squirrel Girl, who was part of something called the Great Lake Avengers, which is one of those things that, in the upside down reality that is super-hero comic book fandom, that world where you're a fucking freaky freak-freak if you don't want to eat deep fried lamb covered in cashew butter ice cream off of a frozen antelope tibia while rooting for the Disney legal team to go thorax-deep in scat fingering Jack Kirby's corpse while Stan Lee's gigantic white chompers gnaw whole chunks of stringy flesh out of every 12-year-old girl's nethers when they dare to say "Apologies, but I prefer Twilight" in close proximity to the meat wheelbarrow or that creep with the hat who keeps pretending that editing Spider-man comics is hard (if it were hard, wouldn't they have hired somebody that doesn't embarrass America?), in that fucked up world, you're the asshole if you don't know where Squirrel Girl comes from. You're the dripping tooled shit covered prick of the world if you can't immediately call up a bunch of fond memories of that time Squirrel-Girl-did-this or that time Squirrel-Girl-did-that, blah blah blah, and now you can't come sit at the dirty-t-shirt cum-stains where grass-stains should be jean jacket table with the Sergeants of 40-year-old lead miniature girlfriends, all because you don't have some cornball best-man-style monologue to deliver about how the Great Lake Avengers were the surrogate back-patter you had in place of a best friend, and now you'll just have to go and sit at the table where all the assholes (those people who know when there taxes are supposed to be paid, those people who don't need a boycott as an excuse to not watch movies they know in advance are going to be shitty, those jerkwater foxes who don't need Eve Laurence to dress like Starfire to consumate some masturbation) are sitting. They call it the referendum.

Detective Comics #881
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Jock & Francesco Wario Francavilla
Published by DC Comics

The main reason this comic is confusing is obvious to anyone--the story was cut short when DC decided at the last minute to reboot their entire continuity, forcing Scott Snyder to come up with a new Batman arc for the new Batman comic he's doing with a new Batman artist. (That thing where they said the reboot was planned in advance? That's an actual full on lie, just so we're clear.) So Snyder had to come up with an abbreviated ending to his story, and he gave it to his artists, and these were the drawings they came up with to hide under the mountains of text on the page. (This is why the comic looks and reads like some late 80's joke about stereo instructions.) But there's a secondary reason why this comic is confusing, and that's this: it isn't a Batman comic. It's a comic about a cliched psychopath blathering endlessly to his most recent victim, and at the end, Batman shows up. But when he isn't there, what you're stuck with is page after endless page of a boilerplate crazy guy talking to his sister, who--because the only movie anybody at DC has ever seen was one of the Saw movies--he has just stabbed in the paralyzed legs with knives, both of which he has left in the paralyzed legs, which he only did so that he could pull what appears to be a tablecloth off of them like he's some kind of crazy magician. (Ta-da!)

Fear Itself #5
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Stuart Immonen & Wade Von Grawbadger
Published by Marvel Comics

The best part about Fear Itself isn't going to happen for at least another ten years, because that'll be when Matt Fraction does an interview with whatever 2021's version of cross-comics-promotion-internetty thing is and finally reveals that he and Stuart Immonen had actually joined Steve Bissette's Marvel boycott months before the thing even became a public thing for cardboard city builders and recycling addicts to participate in. And really, while it takes balls to not read shitty comics (except for Daredevil, Deadpool Max and Uncanny X-Force) or watch shitty movies, it takes a lot more balls to boycott the very product you're actually in the process of creating and cashing checks off of the publication of, and that has to be the reason that Matt Fraction is making this horrible, horrible comic about how Iron Man is a crybaby life's-not-fair type and Spider-Man thinks saving people from burning buildings and kill-crazed Nazi robots is less important than hanging out with his shithead cockless milkslurping friends (who, if memory serves, are a bunch of ugly versions of Big Bang Theory characters that all hang out in the most half-ass imitation of the Friends coffeeshop since the How I Met Your Mother bar booth). Alternatively, it could be that Matt Fraction lost his fucking mind when they made him participate in that ridiculous "Marvel Architects" photoshoot, as that's what would happen to any sane person when they saw up close what Ed Brubaker was doing with his facial hair while at the same moment Brian Michael Bendis screeched "mincing, i'm mincing, mincing like I've never minced before". But then I saw that upcoming Casanova cover with the panda bear, and that's when I decided I liked the boycott idea more.

BPRD Hell On Earth Monsters #2
Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Art by Tyler Crook
Published by Dark Horse Comics 

The first issue was better than this, the second, but then again, there's a major character death hiding in classic unheralded fashion--apparently?--so maybe the praise that came down last time around was just a little too much, and now it's time for the requisite overcorrection. Therefore: the colors is in this are limp, and yet the credits page still says Dave Stewart. The behavior of Kate Corrigan is more similar to the Paul Hornschemeier character that Tyler Crook weirdly draws her as, but there's Arcudi & Mignola's names front and center. Overall, there's something off and unwieldy here--it's just not that good a read, and coming on the same week as The Fury, it's post-Mulder X-Files banality is all the more an aggravation.

The Spirit #17
Written by Howard Chaykin, Will Pfeifer & Paul Levitz
Art by Brian Bolland, P. Craig Russell & Joe Luis Garcia-Lopez
Published by DC Comics

While some might prefer the Howard Chaykin/Bolland female bodybuilder team-up, and others might get themeselves aflustered for Will Pfeifer's engaging journey into figuring out how many Art History references he can convince P. Craig Russell to draw, it's the Levitz story that'll most likely make you run screaming for the typewriter, only to find disappointment your wingman: there's no letters column to fire that missive towards, this is it, the Final Issue of the supposed-to-be-the-Shadow Spirit comic. And yet--there's something here, the idea of a guy like Levitz writing a story about--well, a guy like Levitz, an older gentleman still attached to a dying print industry, getting one last adventure with one of his inspirations and fantasies. So what if that adventure ends with the Levitz stand-in being crushed to death by his mountains of unwanted print media, his entire existence shrugged off by the random costumed hero who--unlike everyone else in that old man's world, as the story itself tells--just so happend to be the only person who knew that old man's name.

Hellboy The Fury #3
Written by Mike Mignola
Art by Duncan Fegredo
Published by Dark Horse Comics

The easiest way to point out how good Hellboy comics are is to cast them alongside the shit they end up sharing shelf-space with. Just place one of these comics alongside anything else, and the comparison is so striking it hurts, and that's not just on the level of finished product, but all the way down in the constituent parts. Coloring: these look better than all DC or Marvel comics, even the rare ones where the artists are allowed to handle that part themselves. Writing: these are stronger, more cohesive stories whose references call to library cards and years of fannish obsessions. (Compare that to something as overly praised as Detective Comics #881, a comic whose main story was pirated off of quick scans of the internet popular Psychopath Test from a few months ago, a trick Scott Snyder learned from Google News copy n' paste hero extraordinaire, Warren Ellis). Visually: Duncan Fegredo's Hellboy style--something he cribbed only in part from Mignola layouts, the rest all his own, a seamless mixture of synthesized inspiration--began building a visual crescendo back in the drumbeats of The Storm's fall battles that concludes here with a bloody winter's cacaphony of collapse and brutal savagery, smashed heads, plunging claws and gut-to-throat cries of sorrow.

It doesn't do The Fury justice to play this game, of course. To couch these comics in better-than language, to lambast the surrounding tripe gives the tripe a merit it doesn't deserve, ranking them categorically belies the lie that they are related beasts. It's not only unfair, it's unseemly.

And yet...why not do it anyway? Why take the high road? Why pretend that it shouldn't be pointed out that other comic books--even other Mignola comics, like the anemic Baltimore--just don't belong in the same room with the accomplishment that this thing is? Shit--utter shit--like Fear Itself and Green Arrow and whatever that Flying Grayson thing is that lurks behind those awesomely out-of-place Cliff Chiang covers--continues to show up, often outselling Hellboy, all the while adamently refusing to learn anything from the model and maturity that Mignola has continuously provided for these many years. It's like DC and Marvel are that crazy woman on the View, that loudmouth slime who worships volume and indignation as if that will remake the world into the hard lined lair of simplicty her jello brain ejacualates itself to sleep in fantasy of. Why not call the ball as it lays and say thusly: these stories are better than comics deserve. Hail, hail.

-Tucker Stone, 2011