On yesterday’s New Comics day, retailers like my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me if I hate the Scott Lobdell’s depiction of Starfire so much, why am I using it to hide the front of my pants, received a postcard from Marvel. And unlike every other postcard received since the dawn of email, which describes how much your mom loves Paris but is having trouble making BM after all that brie, this one was a little more mysterious:
Well, it’s over now. DC’s New 52 first issues have been replaced by all second issues… except for the new first issue.
Yep, that’s a new DC first issue of Huntress, which I’m sure was released due to popular demand for the character and because the story and art are exemplary, any not because it occurred to Dan DiDio that it might be nice if Robin also had someone to grudge fuck on a rooftop.
Also in this week’s take are the latest issue of Garth Ennis’s The Boys and Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker. We also got the new Walking Dead and Invincible from Robert Kirkman, along with Skullkickers, Brian Michael Bendis’s Moon Knight, and a stack of the New 52 week one books we liked enough to keep covering through issue two.
And not only that, my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me if he has to call me by my rap name (Spunkmaster Rhino P-P), threw in a bunch of free DC Comics promotional bags and boards, brightly printed with a reproduction of last month’s Justice League #1! Meaning that at least five of this week’s books will, over the course of years, leach that image onto their back covers thus rendering them utterly and completely worthless, which is a hell of a way to treat Action Comics #1… even when it’s the one by Grant Morrison, which you could only retire under if you had 75 of them to make a blanket for your park bench.
So as always on Wednesday, Amanda and I need time to read these books so we can review them for you throughout the week. So thus endeth our broadcast day.
See you tomorrow, suckers!
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. But what do you care? It’s not like you were gonna read Hawkman anyway.
And, as usual, one last Wednesday morning review before the comic stores open…
For good or ill, we’ll end our coverage of DC’s New 52, which officially ends today with a new batch of #2 issues, with The Savage Hawkman #1. The Savage Hawkman is the story of Carter Hall, who has a harness made of Nth metal that allows him to… um… fly and stuff… and he… has… yeah, sorry. The problem is I don’t care about Hawkman. The problem is that nobody cares about Hawkman. The only person who cared about Hawkman was Hawkgirl, and nobody gave enough of a fuck about Hawkgirl to leave her alive.
The upside of that general apathy is that it allows writer Tony Daniel to try almost anything he wants to make Hawkman interesting for a new generation. The downside is that what he tries feels like throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Almost literally.
Daniel opens this new chapter in Hawkman’s rebooted life by showing how exciting it is to be Hawkman… by having him be a depressed alcoholic who hates being Hawkman so much he tries to kill his costume with a flare gun.
Let’s take a moment and examine that, shall we? As a New 52 book, this is meant to make new readers excited about characters they aren’t familiar with. And Daniel has decided to introduce us to this new Hawkman by telling us that:
The Sudafed finally mixed with the Jack Daniels and made a mellow, Earth-friendly body-meth, which gave us enough energy to complete Episode 3 of the Crisis on Infinite Midlive’s Podcast: The Fistula of Justice!
Thrill to two drunk sick people as they talk about the impact of the New 52, DC Comics’ new Neilsen Survey (Which sadly didn’t include the obvious question: Orange nip slip: horrifying moment or the most horrifying moment?), the overriding post-Catwoman question: are superhero comics sexist (“What’s wrong with being sexist?” “Not sexy, sex… Jesus, you really are a monster, aren’t you?”), and our sleeper favorite books of the week!
And to answer some questions from the show that are enigmas, wrapped in riddles, covered in mucous:
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Enjoy the show, sucker! And if you don’t, just hit that “Don’t Look” link up there!
Well, it’s official: Image Comics has announced that they’re going to make their most popular characters, including Spawn, The Savage Dragon and Witchblade, available via an alternative distribution channel. They’re taking the big step away from the comic store and into the arena that most teens are most enthusiastic about and are likely never to stray away from: Pogs!
Whoops! Sorry, flashed back to 1994 there… actually, if you replace “Pogs” with “digital downloads”, you have exactly the same story that broke earlier this week… including the likely longevity and outcome.
Image announced that starting this week they’ll be releasing all of their books, including Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Invincible, and Those Other Books You Don’t Care About, as day-and-date available downloads from Graphic.ly.
Graphic.ly isn’t a platform with which I’m familiar, so I decided to check it out. And I have to tell you: compared to Comixology, which I tried the other day, Graphic.ly’s digital reader is VASTLY superior in that it allows you to actually be able to read the book. It blows things up to readable sizes and automatically follows from panel to panel to keep each image at maximum size and legibility.
This is not always a good thing. Because after literally 15 seconds of poking around to see what kind of books Image would be keeping company with, well, I found:
MISTER MOTHERFUCKING T.
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers about Spider-Island. It has spiders. Also, some other stuff. You have been warned.
Now if you insist upon using a comic story as a parable about a serious issue, Venom #7 is a much better way of doing it. But we’ll get to that.
This issue is a crossover issue to Marvel’s Spider-Island event that I initially picked up for only one reason: issue 7 of any book Rick Remender writes is the point where it stands a solid chance of going gloriously and disastrously off the rails.
Think about his 2008 run on Punisher, which he started in the middle of the Dark Reign event when Norman Osborne had managed to use public opinion and political intrigue to wrest control of SHIELD from Tony Stark even though he was woefully unqualified and The Green Fucking Goblin. While the X-Men remained neutral and the Avengers wrestled with ways to turn the tide of public sentiment away from Osborne even while it turned against themselves, Remender had The Punisher come up with an ingenious and crafty plan to turn Osborne’s fortunes by shooting him in the face.
That was issue 1. By issue 7, Remender had the straight-ahead, no-nonsense Punisher fighting zombies. And thus began a long, slow train wreck that culminated in the Punisher being killed and resurrected as Frankenstein. Reading Remender’s Punisher was like watching a Kardashian try to redefine pi in a room full of cocaine and NBA players: a hot mess I couldn’t take my eyes off of.
So when I saw Venom had reached the critical seventh issue, I wanted in on the ground floor of the implosion… so imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a damn good book, and arguably the best part of the Spider-Island event so far.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: guy meets girl. Guy becomes vampire. Guy bites girl. Girl turns into psychotic hell bitch bent on world destruction. You have? Well, then apparently you’ve met my downstairs neighbor. Or, more likely, you read I, Vampire, either in its current release or in it’s original incarnation, as a short story series in House of Mystery, when it was written by J.M. DeMatteis, between 1981-1983.
The relaunch is written by Joshua Hale Fialkov, whose run of good luck will soon see him taking over writing duties at IDW for Doctor Who as well. He is joined on I, Vampire by Andrea Sorrentino, whose work can previously be seen on God Of War and X-Files: 30 Days Of Night, published by Wildstorm.
Now, to the important question: should you read this book? Answers (and spoilers) after the jump.
You know, I reread some of my reviews on this site where I complain that the writing on some comic book sucks, or that the plotting is hamfisted, or that the writer’s betrayed the characters and sometimes I forget that there was a time in my life when, if you’d told me that someday I’d be able to get thirty comic books a week, or that I’d be able to have a place where I could spend all my time just talking about comics, well… I’d have shrieked “Stranger danger!” and run like hell. Seriously: have you looked at yourself? You must have a van.
But seriously: it’s easy to forget how much this stuff has meant to me over the years, or how seriously some of it has affected me. Partially because I’ve simply gotten older, partially because I’ve reached legal drinking age, and partially because I’ve decided that if they diagnose me with cirrhosis while I’m in a blackout, it doesn’t count.
But sometimes I see something that reminds me why I love this shit so much, and why it hooked me from when I was a kid. Something like this video of a four-year-old boy discovering the horrible truth behind the parentage of Luke Skywalker for the first time:
Due to continuing illness and other circumstances beyond our control, we are still working on this week’s podcast. We’re hoping to have it ready for later this evening or tomorrow.
If you normally spend your Monday lunch hour tuning in, we apologize for the inconvenience. If you absolutely can’t wait for the show, it is possible to simulate the experience of this week’s show by loudly snorting back snot and repeating “Scott Lobdell may be insane” in a nasal voice for 30 to 45 minutes.
Sorry for the delay.
So as of last Wednesday, DC had finally released all of their New 52 books. The release had gone generally smoothly, and while there had been some admittedly bad books and a little bit of controversy here and there, the deed was done, and now fans of the DC Universe could relax in the knowledge that the biggest and most disturbing changes were over.
Sorry – what’s that, Dan?
Okay… um… QUIET INTERNET LET ME THINK!
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