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.

Convalescence

San Diego Comic-Con is a hell of a thing. It is something that any genre geek working a job that coughs up two weeks vacation and pays enough to allow you to drink anything higher-end than Country Club Malt Liquor aspires to attend. Attendance requires almost a full year of planning – if last year was any guide, then the presale for next year’s passes for this year’s attendees will be in two or three weeks, and we’ll be booking our backup hotel room by the end of August – and attendance, which is something that one ostensibly does for fun, is completely and utterly physically crippling.

I am writing this at 6:14 a.m. Eastern time. This time yesterday, I was sleeping through 3:14 a.m. Pacific time. Today, however, I have been up for an hour, having awakened with a terrible stitch in my side from sleeping in my own fucking bed. I have a recurring, rolling fever that is giving me something that feels remarkably like the douchechills, and my lower body, after five days of almost nonstop walking, feels like I forgot to keep up on some Winter Hill Gang bookie’s vig. I have the remainder of the week off of my day job because I have long since learned that five days at Comic-Con plus two days travel requires six days of recovery time – two weeks would really be better, but I want to keep that job that allows me to take off for two weeks at a time – in the middle of a crunch delivery time, no less – to gawk and cosplayers and buy odd comic books, exclusive action figures and t-shirts that the the mechanics of the video game Portal to make off-color jokes.

And make no mistake: I obtained all of those things… and they are being shipped to me via a very expensive UPS transaction. Because if I’d had to physically haul all of that through the airline system yesterday, I’d have shattered like old carnival glass.

Kick In The… Ah, Forget It: Jim Carrey Disavows Kick-Ass 2, Mark Millar Responds

Kick-Ass 2, the movie adaptation of Mark Millar’s and John Romita Jr.’s first sequel to Kick-Ass (which itself was made into a movie with much of the same cast as the first Kick-Ass 2 movie three years ago), is scheduled to open in the United States on August 16th. And considering that it has been a big summer of superhero movies so far, what with Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel, with The Wolverine and R.I.P.D. on the way, one would think that the Universal Studios would be excited to ramp up the publicity machine, maybe including a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, with some of the stars of the movie, including the biggest name, Jim Carrey, who’s playing Colonel Stars and Stripes in the flick.

Yeah, you’d think that, except, you know… you’d be pretty fucking wrong.

I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to e

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

I meant to say my apologies to others involve with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

Okay, this is a tricky thing to comment on. Because on one hand, you’ve gotta respect a guy who’s willing to publicly state a conviction, and stand by it. And God knows that gun violence in the United States is a serious issue that is worthy of continued debate.

On the other hand… did you read Kick-Ass 2, Jim? Hell, did you at least watch the first Kick-Ass movie? And if you did either: can Universal Studios expect a refund check for your fee?

You’re Just A Guy In A Suit: Man of Steel Review / Observations

Editor’s Note: I was born in spoilers, Colonel; you can’t get more ruinous than that.

Man of Steel is a pretty decent superhero movie, if not necessarily the best Superman movie if you’re a purist about the character… but if you are, you’re probably off in a dark room somewhere writing hate messages to Dan DiDio about the New 52 reboot and scoffing at the sheep running to movie theaters when there’s a perfectly good Superman DVD with Christopher Reeve’s picture on it on your shelf, and you don’t give a fuck what I think about Man of Steel anyway.

Which is a shame (not that you don’t care what I think; hell, before I’ve had at least three beers, even I think I’m an idiot), because in most of the ways that matter, director Zack Snyder gets the character right. Snyder’s Superman is a man of two worlds who has made the conscious decision to favor and protect humanity over anything else. He’s generally humble and patient and wants only to be trusted to help us. And Man of Steel screenwriter David S. Goyer, probably remembering the shitstorm he himself created in Action Comics #900 when he implied Superman would be renouncing his United States citizenship, makes it abundantly clear that the Superman of Man of Steel is all about The American Way.

But Snyder and Goyer chuck a certain amount of what your average guy on the street would consider to be Superman canon. Superman never really is the Last Son of Krypton here, and the whole secret identity conceit is kinda thrown out in all the ways that most people would consider to really matter to the character. And it’s a little odd that our first introduction to Superman is at gunpoint in the desert so that he can turn himself in to American authorities; I’ll tell you this: Batman wouldn’t put up with that kind of happy horseshit.

So when it comes to reviewing Man of Steel, I’m gonna pretty much leave it at: yeah, it was pretty good. Because I’ve only seen the movie once, and by the time I’m finishing this article up It’s been three days since I saw it, so some of the details aren’t going to be as clear as they could be in my mind. But I am going to make some observations about some things about the movie that I noticed, and a couple of things that have driven some people who saw the movie apeshit, but which instead make a lot of sense to me having had a few days to give them some thought.

The first of those observations being: the greatest accomplishment that Man of Steel makes is that it puts on the big screen the first relatively true adaptation of Miracleman #15.

Brain Drain: Paul Jenkins Leaves DC, Writes Open Letter And Gives Interview Guaranteeing He Will Never Return

I’m about a week late to the party on this one, but the parade of talent walking away from DC Comics has added Paul Jenkins, who did the opening Deadman arc on DC Universe Presents, as well as a pretty decent fill-in on Stormwatch, and until recently was writing Batman: The Dark Knight.

Jenkins apparently has made the decision to walk away from both DC and Marvel to work exclusively for Boom Studios, currently writing Deathmatch for them. Which is fine; creators sometimes make the move to creator-owned comics from the Big Two – if I wrote comics, I’d be pounding on every indie publisher’s doors with creator owned ideas in the hopes of getting a TV contract and the keys to the Rich Guy’s Pissoir where Robert Kirkman currently pisses into Perrier.

Jenkins, however, rather than simply walking away to pursue his own projects, took a page from well-known people person Rob Liefeld and dynamited all his bridges by publishing an open letter regarding his reasons for leaving DC at Comic Book Resources:

I hope those reading this will agree the discussion will be worth their time. I feel that we are once again moving in the wrong direction, creatively. I’ve been down this road before, and it’s a road we can and should avoid. I don’t need to tell you what Greg Rucka and numerous other respected creators have already told you – that the Big Two have removed their focus away from the creators and towards the maintenance of the characters…

I know when it was a lot easier, and that was back in the days of Marvel Knights. In those times, Marvel had been in bankruptcy, and they had little choice but to allow the creators the freedom and trust that so many of us deserve… I look back on “Inhumans” and “Sentry,” on my Spidey runs with Bucky [Mark Buckingham] and Humberto [Ramos], and on various successes with “Wolverine: Origin” and others, and I know – because I was there – that they succeeded in large part because I was given freedom to create without being handicapped by editorial mandates. It just hasn’t been that way for a while. In recent years, I have watched, helpless, as editors made pointless and destructive changes to scripts and artwork that they had previously left alone. It bugs me that the creators were a primary focus when the mainstream publishers needed them, and now that the corporations are driving the boat, creative decisions are being made once again by shareholders.

Wow. Okay, there’s certainly an discussion to be had about the state of both Marvel and DC in the age of the blockbuster superhero movie, and after each publisher has either been bought up by a huge multinational corporation, or more closely folded into the huge multinational corporation who already owned them. God knows that, as a reader in the early 2000s, I felt like there was a sense of experimentation and a focus on new kinds of stories that I hadn’t felt from almost anyone outside of Vertigo Comics since the early 90s.

But I thought that DC’s New 52 was supposed to replicate that feeling by blowing continuity out of the water and starting over with A-List creators and allowing them to run wild with these long-running properties, right, Paul?

Right?

Demon In A Bottle In A Paper Sack: Iron Man 3 IS Tony Stark’s Alcoholism Story

Editor’s Note: It’s pretty much impossible to discuss the plot of the movie without, you know, spoiling it. So if you want to remain pristine on this, give this editorial a pass until you’ve seen Iron Man 3.

Ever since the news that Iron Man director Jon Favreau had hired Robert Downey Jr. to play Tony Stark in that first movie, there has been an implied promise that, at some point, we would see an adaptation of the classic Demon In A Bottle story arc in one of the Iron Man movies. Sure, Downey was an Academy Award winning actor, but in the early 2000s, he was better known as a reckless drug addict who spent as much time in front of a judge as he did in front of a camera. For good or ill, that history was part of why comic fans got so excited about Downey’s casting as Tony: when the time came to touch on the alcoholism story, it would be fronted by a guy who knew what it was like to lose damn near everything he cared about to substance abuse.

Well, Iron Man 3 is out. It is, as of this writing, the final turn as Tony Stark that Downey is contracted for (although if Kevin Feige has a brain in his Goddamned head, he will offer Downey anything he wants to do Avengers 2, up to and including Stan Lee’s left testicle), and from all advance reports, it was not going to be the Demon In A Bottle story that we’ve been hoping for since 2008 – hell, considering the very first thing we ever see of Tony Stark in any movie is his hand with a Goddamned drink in it, they might as well have promised it to us.

Well, having seen the flick, I can tell you that director Shane Black has excised almost all references to Tony’s drinking… and yet you should make no mistake: this is Tony’s long-awaited alcoholism story. The story fairly reeks of being a first-draft Demon In A Bottle story, with all the overt references to actual, you know, drinking, removed. But if you look for the signs, they’re there… like being around a dude in a nice suit and clean hair, but whose sweat smells faintly of Jack Daniels.

Crowdfunding Will Not Save Us: Thoughts On The Veronica Mars Kickstarter

Editor’s Note: Please be advised that this long-assed editorial is written by someone who knows exactly fuckall about the television and motion picture industries. So the opinions therein are bourne purely from a dude who has spent more than 40 years watching niche properties flare up on the horizon, getting excited in anticipation like every other genre geek, and being disappointed after they pass. Plus, I’m hung over right now.

The world of genre TV and movie fans went mildly apeshit this week when Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell, the respective creator and star of the mid-2000’s CW show Veronica Mars, put up a Kickstarter project to fund a Veronica Mars major motion picture. At launch time, it seemed like a longshot – they were asking for $2,000,000 within 30 days, which was more than any other Kickstarter had ever set as a funding goal, but Thomas said in the project’s description that the deal with Warner Bros., who owns the actual rights to the property, had already agreed to greenlight the movie (albeit for a limited theatrical release) if they hit the ambitious funding goal.

When I heard about the project, it sounded kinda ridiculous to me. Trying to scrape up two million simoleans from a fanbase just in the hopes of getting a genre flick made seemed about as productive to me as clapping your hands to keep Peter Pan alive, or clawing futilely at a Fenway Park beer counter’s security barrier ten seconds after the seventh-inning stretch.

Friendly Fired: DC Makes Last-Minute Writer Changes To Constantine, Birds of Prey

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?

How Low Can You Go? – Amanda’s Picks For The Comic Book Low Points Of 2012

2012 is firmly at our backs. Congratulations, everyone. We made it.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but we had some real time encounters with abject, stinking failure in 2012 that make me all the more grateful to move on and away from it. From the weird decision to fire and then almost immediately rehire Gail Simone, to the baffling continued employment of Greg Land, to the need for some high profile comics creators to make odd and unnecessary comments about Batman’s sexuality because they can’t seem to stop giving Playboy interviews while in the thrall of a mescaline bender, there was plenty to color the comics enjoyment experience last year. And, after all the dust settled from the complaints of former employees about creator rights and other assorted Twitter bitching, sometimes, just sometimes, there were the comics themselves that were the problem.

Here are my picks for the top five comic book disappointments of 2012, after the jump.

Hangover: Rob’s Biggest Comic Disappointments of 2012

It is New Year’s Day, and thanks to about fifteen glasses alternating between Milwaukee’s and Lynchburg, Tennessee’s finest products last night, it feels like my brain has been taken over and occupied by Doctor Octopus. Or at least part of Doctor Octopus. Part of Doctor Octopus after a meal of bad sushi and piss-warm Chango. And to add insult to injury, I flipped on the TV this morning to be subjected to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which, as comic book movies go, certainly is one (man, Stringer Bell and Sailor Ripley sure have let themselves go).

Chuck on top of that steaming mess that there are no new comics until tomorrow, and nothing whatsoever apparently going on in the world of comics, and what we have is a new year that, so far, is… disappointing. And with that feeling in mind, and 2012 at our backs, it seems like as good an opportunity as any to revisit the biggest disappointments in comics and geek culture that occurred in 2012.

And given that the memory is so fresh, we might as well start with (although this list is in no particular order):