Over at The Mary Sue they’ve posted a gallery of DC New 52 themed Valentine’s Day Cards so you can wear your geek on your sleeve as you profess your love to that special girl or guy that you may or may not be stalking. For example:
“I get a side-kick out of you”? Really? We here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office think these can be improved so that you can say what you really feel.
New and improved and totally within Fair Use boundaries, after the jump.
It has been 17 months since DC blew up their entire line of comics, shuffled all their creators around to different books, and blew up their entire history of continuity. You know, for everyone except Grant Morrison, who has been allowed to continue his Batman saga that started several years ago in Batman Incorporated like it’s still 2009… or sometimes, considering all the Silver Age characters Morrison’s shoveled into that storyline, like it’s still 1959.
And the New 52 reboot was an unqualified success. It put DC over Marvel, in both sales numbers and dollar earnings, for the first time. It refreshed the classic characters of the DC Universe for a new generation. Truly, those 52 books signalled the start of a thousand-year uncontested reign. Nothing could stop them. They would march to victory on a road of bones. They would drive their enemies before them, see them broken, and hear the lamentations of…
What’s that? DC’s cancelling six more books?
Whoops.
“Such sad music. The saddest thing I can imagine…
Ironically, I’d spent the last week editing my book for the sake of my old friends…I gave everyone what they wanted: a sunny remembrance. I realized that carrying all that horror inside me was a small price to pay…
The book was a smash and because it was the only real accounting of our careers, it became the truth…
…’It’ll never be like it was when it was new, but there’s still plenty of life in this old baby.'”
-Hollis Mason, Minutemen #6
Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to work at DC Comics in 2013.
There you are, at one of the inarguable pinnacles of the comic book industry. You’re working for one of the Big Two, making the best page rates available in the American comics industry, working on some of the highest profile books there are. You never have to buy your own drinks at any comic convention in the civilized world, and thousands upon thousands of aspiring creators envy you your day-to-day existence… and yet it is, where the rubber hits the road, a job. You have a boss, and you call him and he or she tells you what you are going to be working on, and you have a choice: you either do it, regardless of how inane or Sisyphean your assigned task is… or you don’t, and hope that you can keep working in your little niche without being singled out and fired.
Put on top of that the particular an individual realities of DC Comics today: you work for a company that, less than 18 months ago, blew up the underpinnings of all their books in the interest of saving them, despite being only a year or so out of Blackest Night, which put more asses in DC Comics’s panels at San Diego Comic-Con than I’d ever seen before. And since that demolition, the company has busily spent its time examining every element of those new books under a microscope, reportedly making last-minute changes and nitpicks every step of the way, causing several high-profile creators to defect to Marvel. Management has mandated new directions and has then apparently fired people when the new directions are seemingly not the right new directions, with boss-favorite creators being given the assignments in the aftermath… and all of it under the daily direction of Bob Harras, the Editor In Chief who was Marvel’s Editor In Chief during the late 1990s. So you’re working under the sure and steady hand of a man committed to raising sales at any cost – and if that cost is cancelling a book, revamping any character, or demanding a crossover, character rape or supporting character murder, so be it… all while in the back of your head, you’re hearing things like, “Clooonnnneeeee Sagaaa…. Chrooooommmiummmm covvverrrrss…”
Now let’s imagine you are one of the creators assigned to the Before Watchmen project: a project that almost no one in comics fandom wanted, if they weren’t actively opposed to it. A project that, by its very existence, implied a comic publisher that was willing to actively and enthusiastically fuck over one of its (former) A-List creators in the interest of making a little money right fucking now, long term consequences be damned. And let’s say you are asked to work on one of these Before Watchmen books while employed by a company where you can see your fellow creators being fired by email, or having their books yanked to make an opening so that one of the Golden Boys can write a book starring fucking Vibe: what do you do?
Well, if you’re Darwyn Cooke, you write a final issue of Minutemen where the narrator makes a terrible mistake, writes the truth about it as best he can while allowing himself to be bullied into severely editing himself for the good of the people around him, and makes the decision to walk away from the whole mess, so that the people foolish enough to follow him can have their chance at things.
I might be – hell, I probably am – reading too much into Minutemen #6, but as a comic book? It could make one hell of a resignation letter.
Well, the good news is that professional people with some weird forms of PKE Meters have cleared the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office of any signs of water damage and / or Black Mold. The bad news is that the entire ordeal took a lot more time than I anticipated, and beyond that, now my dreams of chucking the workaday world of comics blogging in favor of a home-grown psilocybin farming business (but I still own the name Boston Baseboard Shrooms! And all it’s subsidiary rights!) have officially gone tits up.
And the worse news is that, even as the Home Office has been cleared for human habitation… yeah, heavy windstorms in Boston have knocked out our Internet. Meaning that we can only do a quick update today, using my aged cell phone as a half-assed Wi-Fi hotspot, in clear violation of my terms of service, and way outside the scope of what the good folks at Westinghouse Electrical Notions and Radio Communication Geegaws intended.
But we do have a bit of news: Warner Bros. has released a teaser trailer for their latest upcoming animated, direct-to-video feature. It’s gonna be Superman: Unbound, and based on a Geoff Johns written and Gary Franks drawn series in Action Comics back in 2008. Now, I’m not the biggest Superman fan in the world, but I have never seen a bad DC animated feature, and this one looks to be just as solid.
The feature’s gonna star the voice talents of Matt Bomer (from White Collar) as Superman and Molly Quinn as Supergirl, And you can check out the trailer after the jump… in theory, assuming my shaky, improvised Internet access holds (and if it doesn’t we’ll fix it when we have more signal).
I now know where Walter White got all the cash he’s keeping in that storage unit in Breaking Bad: from The Joker. Because the only possible explanation for how Joker could not only take over and gin up Arkham Asylum the way he did in Batman #16, but set up the amusement park in the intricate way he did in Nightwing #16, is with a pile of azure crank so big it would make Tony Montana reconsider his life choices.
Nightwing #16 continues this month’s series of individual penultimate chapters of the Death of The Family event, which means that Joker is finally springing his trap against Nightwing. And, as in the beginning of this month of stories as established in Batman #16, Joker’s trap is so elaborate, hideous and wide-ranging that you will have a moment, while reading the story, where you say to yourself, “Um… Joker would have to have a team of trained engineers, including outsourced talent, to be able to pull this off. How does one find a demolitions engineer in another city? Do you go on Monster.com and search on ‘explosives,’ ‘9-11 hoax,’ and ‘Lyndon LaRouche’?”
So what writer Kyle Higgins has done here is to create a deathtrap so wide-ranging and intricate that it almost beggars belief. We have elements here that would require significant travel, transportation and varied expertise to pull off, not to mention days and days without sleep to do it in less than a few months. And on top of it, it almost requires Joker to know that Dick Grayson is Nightwing, so if DC decides to back off that plot point when the series is over, they’re gonna have a real problem unless someone along the line gives Joker some kind of meatball lobotomy, or maybe bring in Superman under the assumption that New 52 Supes has the same power set as Christopher Reeve in Superman II.
It’s almost an insurmountable challenge… but Higgins redeems himself by making Joker’s motivations and explanations for taking action against Nightwing somewhat compelling, even as the scope of what his motivations have led him to do simply beggar belief.
Well, he mostly redeems himself.
Plotwise, Batman #16 doesn’t hold up too well if you stop and think about it for too long. The idea that a single inmate, no matter how ruthless or deranged, could not only take over an entire insane asylum under the nose of law enforcement (not to mention the inevitable cavalcade of starfuckers and psycho groupies that would surround Arkham like flies on shit. Don’t believe me? Ask Carole Anne Boone), but would somehow have the resources to modify and booby trap the place in the way Joker does in this issue is implausible on a good day. Throw on top of that that the ending of the whole thing is gonna seem a little familiar if you’ve seen The Vanishing, and this is a story that could swirl the tubes pretty quickly, if you spend too much time contemplating the particulars behind it.
So on that basis, I’m going to recommend – and I don’t do this very often – that you just don’t stop and think about Batman #16 too much.
Seriously, don’t think about it. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the logistics of how Joker could have gotten his hands on the sheer number of victims he has on hand without anyone missing them, or where he found the team of contractors to build the carefully machined and electrified death traps without mentioning to anyone what they were working on, or how he had the time to wait on craftsmen to build that Batman Throne… even though, seriously: I ordered a custom-made bed about two months ago, and I’m still waiting on that Goddamned thing, but Joker gets a throne on demand? I’m seriously thinking about going back to that furniture store and filling it with gas… or at least a different kind of gas than I did last time. Maybe that’s why it’s taking so long. But I digress.
So yeah: try not to get bogged down in all that nitpicking, unrealistic shit. Because if you do, you’re gonna miss one hell of an atmospheric story that shows just how driven and plain old badassed Batman is, and which uses really pretty extreme violence and disturbing situations to show just how dangerous and committed Joker is.
Editor’s Note: And one last quick review of the comics of 1/9/2013 before the comic stores open with this week’s new books…
I’m not gonna lie to you: the Rotworld crossover between Swamp Thing and Animal Man hasn’t really been grabbing me in the way that I’d originally hoped. I’ve found it to be relatively engaging, but at this point, it feels like it’s been going on damn near forever, with one overriding problem that’s been tickling me through the whole thing: where’s the rest of the DC Universe while all of this is going on? We’ve seen the world in ruins, and Superman, Batman and other ancillary superheroes afflicted by the Rot in these titles, and yet over in Detective Comics last week, Batman was happily battling Joker gangs while a new Penguin sets up shop.
So being isolated, the stakes of Rotworld have felt smaller than they should… but I really don’t want to hold that against Rotworld, because I really do want to see more isolated storylines, regardless of a publisher’s greater continuity, if only so I can stop hearing so many sighs from my co-editor Amanda when we walk into our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop announcing, “Attention, patrons! In a moment, I will be giving myself an event… and then I will become fatigued!”
So on its own, Rotworld has been entertaining, if dragged out a little longer than it probably needed to be… and taken on its own, Swamp Thing #16 is the biggest, pulpiest, most fun piece of it so far.
What the fuck is going on over at DC Editorial?
Back in November, when Vertigo announced they were cancelling Hellblazer, they tried to lessen the blow by hyping up the new DC Universe-based book Constantine, with Robert Venditti as the announced writer. Just a few weeks later, when they announced that Duane Swierczynski would no longer be writing Birds of Prey, they made a big deal of the fact that they had brought in Skullkickers writer Jim Zub to take over, trotting the poor bastard out to do interviews where he espoused how excited he was to have the opportunity, and talked about all the ideas he couldn’t wait to bring to the book.
That, however, was then. Today, DC released their April solicitations, and yeah: neither of those guys are going to be writing those books.
Somewhere along the line, someone between DC Editor In Chief Bob Harras and the individual titles’ editors decided to replace those writers with pretty much no notice (at least to the reading public) until the solicitations dropped today, with those solicitations indicating that Constantine will be written by Jeff Lemire and Ray Fawkes (who was originally to replace Gail Simone after she was fired from Batgirl… you know, before she was rehired), and Birds of Prey to be taken over by Amethyst writer Christy Marx. Apparently. At least for now. At this point, my co-editor Amanda is frantically hitting F5 on her email, checking to see if perhaps she is the next writer of Birds of Prey.
Between these moves and the aborted firing of Gail Simone, I can’t personally remember a case where, at the editorial level, a bunch of last-minute creator changes were made on books where the replaced creators were reasonably well-publicized, and all before their first issues even came out. Sure, you see it with artists sometimes, but normally only after deadlines start to become an issue (hi, Mark Silvestri!). So what the hell is going on at 1700 Broadway, guys? Did Robert Venditti nail the wrong guy’s wife? Did Jim Zub leave an Upper Decker in the Editorial Department men’s room? Or the ladies’ room? Or maybe Geoff Johns’s Aquaman cap?
Well, Harras and DC Editorial Director Bobbie Chase did an interview with Comic Book Resources to try to explain some of the reasoning behind the sudden moves. So… what the hell, guys?
DC’s Human Bomb miniseries, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Jerry Ordway, is one of those books that just sort of showed up at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop asking the paying customers if they want to see – or smell – why they call me The Human Bomb, without a lot of fanfare. Kinda like Phantom Lady and Doll Man by the same writing team a few months ago, and their pre-New 52 Freedom Fighters before it, Human Bomb seemed like another low-publicity, low-stakes attempt on the part of Palmiotti and Gray to make someone , somewhere, give a damn about the Freedom Fighters.
And therein has always lain the problem with these books for me: I don’t really care about The Freedom Fighters. Even as a 37-plus year reader of comic books, The Freedom Fighters have always, to me, been that group that got their asses quickly kicked in Crisis On Infinite Earths, and whose members have had a couple of distinguished appearances in James Robinson’s The Golden Age and Starman. Otherwise, The Freedom Fighters was nothing more than the team with Uncle Sam, the girl with the boob shirt who isn’t Power Girl, Other Hawkman, and the dude in the stupid radiation suit.
Well, the dude in the stupid radiation suit was The Human Bomb. And that is really about all I know about The Human Bomb – I didn’t even know the guy’s secret identity until I read The Human Bomb #2 (and, having read the character’s Wikipedia page for background this review, even his identity is something new for the Post New 52 era). And I therefore have no idea if the new origin being presented in this miniseries is historically consistent with the original tale or not. But what I can tell you is that what is here is a pretty interesting, Cold War style story of sci-fi paranoia, fit into the modern New 52 world, with some detailed, damn fine art straight from the guy who inked the character in Crisis On Infinite Earths. It’s Invasion of The Body Snatchers if Dr. Bennell could blow shit up by touching it (and if you could trust the government to pay attention when you started shrieking about Pod People), and it’s actually pretty entertaining.
Update, 1/11/2013, 10:10 a.m.: Jeff Trexler at Comics Beat has a pretty detailed rundown of the decision and its overall meaning.
It was probably a foregone conclusion, given years of contracts and lawsuits and back-of-the-check work for hire agreements and thousand upon thousands of court hours – sweet, sweet lawyer-billable hours – but it appears that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has all but given the rights to Superman to Warner Bros.
In a decision handed down earlier today, the court asserted that an October lower court decision that denied Warner Bros.’s claim that a letter, sent to Warner in 2001 by one of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel’s heirs, constituted the acceptance of a settlement offer over the whole rights mess and therefore meant that the question of who owned what and when and why and under what threats of which ruinous lawsuit or where the promise of torture was made and how. So with that issue resolved, it means that, unless someone wants to take this to the Supreme Court – assuming the Supreme Court wants to spend time talking about comic books – Warner Bros. owns the rights to use Superman pretty much lock stock and barrel.
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