The Other Guy: Justice League / Lobo #23.2 Review

Editor’s Note: Mess with th’ Main Man any you buy yourself oceans of spoilers!

Well, that wasn’t as bad as the leaked design art made it look. Then again, it couldn’t possibly have been.

There was a lot of Internet nerd rage over Kenneth Rocafort’s new design of Lobo, and a lot of that rage included the terms, “Twilight,” “metrosexual,” and “Bieber only more effeminate and probably white due to liberal application of semen.” And I’m guessing that that was based on the fact that the dude is named “Lobo.” The world is full of wuss-looking swordsmen who fluidly chop apart all comers before moving on to woo the maidens fair. After all, Orlando Bloom doesn’t get more ‘tang than an astronaut because he is a credible-looking medieval warrior. If it takes you more than five seconds to realize that Genghis Khan could kill Orlando Bloom just by thinking about it really hard (if Khan wasn’t busy thinking about whether to make Bloom his woman), then you don’t need fantasy literature because you clearly are living in one.

The problem has been that name. If you’re gonna call that mincing pretty boy Lobo, you’re gonna piss off anyone who is a fan of The Main Man, even though writer Marguerite Bennett has tried to make it clear that this character is a completely different guy than the Lobo that we all know and love, and that that design was not a redesign of the traditional Lobo. But that is an easy thing to forget or to put aside when all you have is a drawing, labelled “Lobo”, of a dude who looks like he’s a sword away from being a regular at Tower of Power night at the Manhole Club.

Well, the story is now here, in Justice League #23.2, and having the whole package in front of you makes it clear that this dude is not Lobo. He’s got the same name, and he is gunning for Lobo, but it’s a different guy. And that went a long way toward taking some of the sting out of my initial reaction to that concept art.

What took a lot of the rest of that reaction out was the fact that Rocafort didn’t draw this issue. Which means that the “new” Lobo looks a lot less like a clown and leather fetishist’s fantasy about who’s on the other side of the glory hole.

And all things being equal, it’s actually not all that bad.

The Neverending Story: Justice League #23 Review

Editor’s Note: But evil hasn’t been imprisoned, Pandora, only spoiled!

So here we are: with Justice League #23, and the final chapter of The Trinity War. Now, let’s take a minute and look back at how we got here.

Two years ago next week, DC Comic released the final issue of Flashpoint, which closed out the DC Universe as it had been since Crisis On Infinite Earths back in 1986, and ushering in the New 52 era. And in both books – and in every new first issue that DC released in September, 2011 – DC Editorial made sure that we were shown the mysterious hooded woman (who was eventually identified as Pandora), with the implication being that she had some major part in the implosion of the pre-rebooted (Pre-booted? The Old 52? Pre-52? Post-Crisis Trapped In The Body Of A – ah, fuck it) DC Universe, and that her story would give us the real skinny behind the whole shakeup.

Over the intervening two years, we learned that Pandora was part of a troika of supernatural beings, including The Question and The Phantom Stranger, and that she was trying to dispose of her box (this is the space where I deleted seven different childish jokes) to eliminate evil. Which led us to The Trinity War, where all the members of the various Justice Leagues (which means basically every hero in the DC Universe minus O.M.A.C.) came together with Pandora as a major player, and the hopes that we might finally get an answer about Pandora’s role in the reboot, once the story ended.

So did we? Nah! Turns out Geoff Johns had a surprise up his sleeve for the ending of The Trinity War! He didn’t write one!

Somewhere, Joss Whedon is thanking God he cast his lot with Marvel Comics.

Brain Bleach: Kenneth Rocafort Ruins Lobo

Take a good long look at the picture of the Main Man, Lobo, over there to the left. Drink it in, because the artist who teamed up with Scott Lobdell to help ruin the launch of Red Hood And The Outlaws in DC’s new 52 is at it again. Cheesecake master extraordinaire Kenneth Rocafort has redesigned indestructible space antihero Lobo for Marguerite Bennett’s take on the character in upcoming Justice League #23.2: Lobo. Gone will be the over muscled, heavy metal biker look that has been the character’s hallmark for decades. Instead, Rocafort will be giving us an athletic-looking, sanitized Lobo with the vapid features of a plastic surgery victim. Indeed, Lobo seems to be getting the full PG-13 makeover, as was similarly inflicted on John Constantine with the demise of Hellblazer. Huzzah for mediocrity! Check it out, after the jump.

Spandex Is The Fabric Of The Future: DC’s SDCC 2013 Trinity War Panel

I have been hearing about DC Comics’s The Trinity War crossover for what feels like every week since DC launched the New 52 Reboot. God knows that DC wanted to tease the Goddamned thing right out of the gate, what with sticking Pandora (or, as we knew her at the time, “The Hooded Woman,” or perhaps, “The Obvious McGuffin,” and sometimes, “The Stalking Chick With Psoriasis Seriously What’s With The Hood Is She Hiding A Third Eye Or Some Kind Of Suppurating Nipple On Her Forehead” (at least in our Home Office).

Well, we are almost two years into the DC reboot, and now we finally have our war. It started in last week’s Justice League #22, with Shazam (nee: Captain Marvel) tossing half a beating on Superman before Superman apparently wiped out Doctor Light’s head with a stern gaze, and it will continue through just about all the main Justice League related titles, including the upcoming miniseries Trinity of Sin and then dealing with the fallout in September, during Villains’ Month, in the Forever Evil miniseries. That’s a lot of story considering how long its taken to kick the damn thing off.

But kicked off it has, and since it started one week before the San Diego Comic-Con, that means that DC was ready to talk about it. And talk about it they did, in a dedicated panel discussion yesterday, moderated by VP of Marketing John Cunningham, with writers Geoff Johns, Jeff Lemire, and Ray Fawkes, and Group Editor Brian Cunningham. And quite a panel it was, teasing that the Trinity War might tear the various Justice Leagues apart, allowing the villains to win, and for John Constantine to gain the powers, and costume, of Shazam.

Wait, what?

Trinity Civil War: Justice League #22 Review

Look: I am never gonna hate too much on a comic book that gives me Superman fighting with Captain Marvel. And yes, I know that DC wants me to call him Shazam now. But I am old and crochety, and frankly? I am proud of the self-education I gave myself, back in the days of the 1970s Shazam! Saturday morning TV show, to call the character “Captain Marvel” rather than “Shazam.” Because I didn’t want to look stupid to the older comic book fans who lived on my block. And they did call me stupid when I called that guy “Shazam.” You hearing me, DC Comics? You listening me to digress like a sonofabitch?

Anyway. Justice League #22, the opening of the long-teased The Trinity War crossover event, gives me a good couple of pages of Superman and Captain Marvel tuning each other up. And as someone who remembers, as a young kid, waiting feverishly for Justice League of America #137 to show up in the spinner rack of my local corner grocery store (where they knew me by name and asked me to stop pretending the lime Ring Pops were Green Lantern power rings if I wasn’t gonna pay for one), seeing that makes me remember my youth and makes me predisposed to like a comic book.

And I did like Justice League #22… up to a point. As a kickoff point for a big crossover, it gives us a few examples of solid and believable characterization (and a few that aren’t – would someone at DC decide what kind of person Superman really is in the New 52?), it drops enough groundwork to let us believe that we’ll finally get the full story on Pandora – the mystery woman from all the initial first issues of the New 52, remember? – and if gives some good, solid, hot, sweet, superhero-on-superhero action.

If it has an Achilles’ Heel, it is that it is currently 2013. Which means that any continuity-wide story that features half of its superheros kicking the crap out of the other half is doomed to feel kinda like a lift from Marvel’s Civil War, or last year’s Avengers Vs. X-Men.

You Know, For Kids!: Justice League #21 Review

Captain Marvel occupies a strange place in the superhero comics world, in that he is a character that occupies about a thousand places in a million different fans’ hearts.

He is simultaneously the Big Red Cheese who fought talking mescal worms with his gentleman tiger Tawky Tawny, while he is also the generic 1970s superhero who rode around the desert in a Winnebago punching dudes and talking to a big nipply globe on the dashboard, and at the same time he is the horribly damaged and tragic character who beat Superman to a standstill before sacrificing himself to save the world in Kingdom Come. Hell, there are times when I can’t think of the character without remembering my early 2000s drunken tirade that Dan DiDio should give Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham a million bucks a piece to complete their Miracleman story using Captain Marvel, since Miracleman was never anything but a royalty dodge on The Big Red Cheese anyway.

My point is, each version of Captain Marvel means something to somebody, and paying service to one means that you stand a real chance of alienating fans of the others. Slap a big C. C. Beck smile on Captain Marvel’s face and the Kingdom Come fans think you’re yanking their chain. Make him tortured over the adult horrors he’s witnessed as a superhero and you piss off the fans of the childlike original. Put him in a Winnebago out in the middle of the desert with a creepy old dude and you’ll never see the outside of a jail cell again.

This was the line that writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank were trying to negotiate with their Shazam backup story in Justice League for the past several months. And to be honest, when it started, I thought they botched it; Billy Batson was a petulant little bastard who I would have rather seen get scabies than superpowers. But that, however, was a while ago. This month’s Justice League #21 is devoted to the conclusion of the Shazam story… so the question is, not that it’s all said and done, who did Johns and Franks piss off?

Really, probably nobody. There’s enough elements of the classic kids’ Captain Marvel here to at least pay service to those fans, and enough modern realism so that he doesn’t stick out from the New 52 continuity. And the conclusion is, in fact, really pretty good. Not perfect, but fun enough to be worth the ride.

Although the people hoping for RVs and “Mentors” are gonna be furious… but seriously, fuck those people.

You Damn Fool! You’re More Useless Than Aquaman: Justice League #15 Review

Since last year’s New 52 relaunch, Geoff Johns has made it his personal mission to rehabilitate Aquaman’s reputation. Which is a somewhat Quixotic task, since Aquaman never had much of a reputation to begin with. I remember years ago, when superhero Underoos were finally released for sale, my mom brought me to the store late enough that all that were left were Aquaman Underoos… and I told her that I would rather parade around the schoolyard in tightie-whities than suffer the indignity of having to pretend to be Aquaman. I was 28. But that’s not the point.

But hey, everyone has an unlikely dream that they harbor deep in their hearts, and I don’t begrudge Johns his, even though I don’t think he’s quite delivered on it thus far. Hey, I have the secret fantasy that someday I, a bloated and drunken 41-year-old, can smack the home run that wins the Boston Red Sox their third World Series victory since 1918 despite never having played even Little League baseball, so I’m not gonna rank Johns out too much for his dream to make Aquaman cool, despite it arguably having a lower chance at success than mine.

After fifteen months of chasing the dragon, Johns has begin phase two of his unlikely Aquaman resuscitation (actually, given Aquaman’s inability to carry his own book for longer than seven years despite more than 70 years of history, perhaps “presuscitation” is a better word) by making Aquaman the focus of a big Justice League event, Throne of Atlantis. So finally, Johns has his main chance to give Aquaman some relevance, not only in his own title but in the DC Universe proper, by making the poor, fishfucking sonofabitch the focus of a story… but for it to work, the story better be a good one.

World Building: Man of Steel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt May Be Involved In Justice League Movie

Update, 7 p.m.: According to Sydney Bucksbaum at Hollywood.com, Gordon-Levitt’s representatives have “refuted the rumor entirely.” Of course, one time I had representatives “refute” the “rumor” that I had “run over” an “elderly person” while I was “hammered.” At least they did until my representatives negotiated a final “plea agreement.” So for now, I guess this will remain, as it did this morning, a cool-sounding rumor.

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Ever since Marvel Studios’ Avengers movie made about a bazillion dollars earlier this year, it was all but a foregone conclusion that Warner Bros. would be coming out with a Justice League movie. You know, unless for some reason they hate money. Watching a movie about a superhero team make beaucoup delores, to the point it has only been beaten by blue people fucking or young lovers freezing to death in the frigid North Atlantic (again: blue people fucking. Pow! Thank you folks, I’ll be here all week! I work here!), and then leaving your own superhero property on the table, would be less a poor management decision than terminal self-destructive whiskey insanity.

The Justice League movie has quietly been in pre-production since Warner Bros. won the latest battle for the rights to Superman against the estate of Superman creator Joe Shuster about a month ago, but without a lot of detail as to how they were gonna proceed. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy had ended, with both Nolan and Batman actor Christian Bale saying pretty strongly that they wouldn’t be involved in anything else Batman-related. Zack Snyder was deep into production on Superman movie Man of Steel, but he’d said back in March of last year that Man of Steel wouldn’t be part of any Justice League movie. So all initial indications were that Warner Bros. was planning pull a reverse of Marvel Studios, and just make a Justice League movie, spinning individual heroes’ movies off of that.

But that was then, and $623,279,547 Avengers movie dollars ago. Today, it looks like there might be some moves to make Justice League tie not only into Man of Steel… but into Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

Some Will Win, Some Will Lose: Superman Ownership Ruling Opens Door To Justice League Movie

The other day we linked to the at-the-time breaking story that a Federal Judge in California had ruled that, in a nutshell, DC Comics does not owe any ownership of the character Superman to the estate of the character’s co-creator Joe Shuster, who before the decision looked to be able to claim half the character’s copyright in October, 2013, giving DC and parent company Warner Bros. the right to exploit the character in any way they see fit (cue synth-heavy porno music).

The short version of the story is that, between DC’s1975 lump-sum and pension payments to Shuster and co-creator Jerry Siegel, combined with a separate 1992 settlement DC made with Shuster’s sister for another lump sum and a $25,000 annual pension (EDITOR’S NOTE: between issues, trades and convention travel, I about that much per year on my comic book habit), the judge ruled that the creators’ estates have gotten all that they are owed from DC Comics. Proving once again that, the next time you have what you think is a million-dollar idea, you should find a lawyer who thinks you should hold out for something closer to that million before you sign anything… and if you’ve already signed, you should listen very carefully to the other guys’ lawyer to hear if they say anything along the lines of “fuck off money.”

Shuster’s estate will probably appeal – it’s not like there’s a lucrative future in throwing up their hands and going after that sweet, sweet Funnyman cash – but this ruling has a couple of immediate circumstances, even beyond the effect of making Diane Nelson cackle with relief…

The first being that it greases the skids for Warner Bros. to start serious work on a Justice League movie. Which is now expected in the summer of 2015.

Rebound: Justice League #12 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve had the blues, the reds and the pinks; one thing’s for sure: love spoils.

Well, that’s the end of the first year of the first post-reboot Justice League since Crisis On Infinite Earths back in 1986. That Justice League, at the end of its first year, had established itself as a solid action book with an interesting character-based humor element… and was already on its way to becoming far more focused on the comedy than it was on the action. It short, its best days were already gone by that first anniversary, having given or on its way to giving Guy Gardner a 70s sitcom level personality change, The Martian Manhunter an Oreo fetish, and Booster and Beetle a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme of the month.

So how does Justice League #12 compete? Well, by going in the opposite direction, coming out of an only okay character-based story while promising, in a Geoff Johns patented epilogue, action-packed tales including an attack by Atlantis, battles between Superman and Batman and Shazam, and a possible conflict between The Justice League and the recently-announced Johns and David Finch produced Justice League of America.

Oh, and it seems that we will spend some time witnessing Superman boning Wonder Woman. But you already knew that, and we’ll get back to that in a minute.