Crowdsourced Batman: The Movement #1 Review

Somewhere, the kids from Anonymous are shitting themselves with glee, because with The Movement, they’ve got their own comic book. And they’re superheroes and everything. Except they have custom facemasks instead of the omnipresent V For Vendetta masks, because not even those guys want to face the wrath of Alan Moore.

Okay, lemme take a step back. I was not a part of 2011’s Occupy movement, because I have one of those job things, but I walked past the Boston incarnation at Davis Square every day because they were between the job thing and one of those bar things. And while you can argue about that movement’s (Movement! Get it?) motivations, success or failure, it was pretty clear to a daily passer-by that, at face value, it was a group of people who were committed to battling corruption, policing themselves and providing their own version of social services. Also marijuana, but mostly those three things.

Write Gail Simone’s The Movement #1 takes those three concepts, throws in the social crowdsourced vigilante justice of Anonymous, mixes them up with a healthy dollop of superpowers, drops them into a DC Universe city so filthy and populated by killers, filth and dirty cops that it makes Gotham look like the city from Logan’s Run, and tries to show us what Occupy and Anonymous might look like in a place where something like that might not only be needed, but where no one can stop them.

Which is an interesting concept, but is it any good?

The Octopus Strikes Back: The Superior Spider-Man #9 Review

Editor’s Note: Sorry, but this has to be. The spoilers of an old life must make way for the new.

At the end of 2012, Spider-Man writer Dan Slott got a lot of attention boosting attention to his long run on The Amazing Spider-Man by, well, killing The Amazing Spider-Man.

The move caused an uproar amongst long-time Spider-Man fans, who acted like Slott stole Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey and then beat her with it about the nead and neck. It was interesting to watch: hundreds upon hundreds of long-time comic fans – fans who have seen almost every damn character of any prominence die and come back to life over the years – acting like they were incapable of understanding that Spider-Man’s death was obviously temporary. Of course Spider-Man’s gonna come back to life; Marvel would no more kill its flagship character than it would hand over the keys to the shop to slashfic writers for whom English is a second language.

However, the move got a lot of press and led to a lot of printings of The Amazing Spider-Man #700, so from a business standpoint, the move to kill Peter Parker was a success. So four months later, what does Dan Slott do for an encore?

Double Murder

I knew I knew you, I knew I knew you. But you ain’t you. You can’t be you… There ain’t no coming back. This is the really real world, there ain’t no coming back. We killed you dead, there ain’t no coming back! There ain’t no coming back! There ain’t no coming back!

– T-Bird, The Crow

Man, Dan Slott isn’t interested in making any friends these days.

Slott’s Twitter feed has been lighting up all day from people who are, shall we say, miffed at Slott over the events of The Superior Spider-Man #9. In the way that Simon Weisenthal was miffed at Josef Mengele. Or the way Alan Moore is miffed at Dan DiDio. Or Joe Quesada. Or Dave Gibbons. Or pretty much anybody.

So as soon as I got to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop making frivilous references to Mengele, the first thing I did was read The Superior Spider-Man #9. And while I don’t want to spoil anything (at least not until I review the issue), I can safely say that the reason so many people are affected is that, well, Slott’s done it again… which actually is a spoiler, but fuck it. If you actually figure it out, my defense will be that my brain has been taken over by an evil scientist: Dr. Jack Daniels.

So there’s that big Octopus-scented shot coming across the bow this New Comics Day, but that’s certainly not it for new comics. There’s plenty of other books just out, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

There’s some good stuff in there, huh? There’s the new book by J. Michael Straczynski and Ben Templesmith, Ten Grand, the new Gail Simone book The Movement, Brian Buccellato’s new pulp superhero book The Black Bat, a new Hawkeye and Age of Ultron, plus a bunch of other cool-looking stuff!

But you know how it is: before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. So until we can get that done…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!