Monthly archives: February, 2010

Here are a few more things to close out what was an interesting week.

Brightest Reign

DC is clearly betting heavily on the Blackest  Night aftermath as the Brightest Day plans look quite a bit like what Marvel did with Dark Reign.  Tony Bedard will take over writing Green Lantern Corps while Pete Tomasi is moving over to launch Green Lantern Emerald Warriors, which will center around Guy Gardner.  Sadly those two books will not stand a chance in sales as most people will be spending their money on the main Green Lantern book and the twice a month Brightest Day book.

Bookscan 2009

Brian Hibbs has a very long but interesting look at the Bookscan numbers for 2009.  These are the numbers from the mainstream book market separate from the Direct Market.  There are quite a few interesting things that can be found from this.  I will quickly go over a few of the things I found interesting. (more…)

It has been one of those good weeks with a healthy dose of interesting new items.  Jim Doom already covered the strange case of Captain America and the Teabaggers, so here are few other things.

Brightest Day

DC has already made it official that Aquaman will be alive and well for Brightest Day.  Also the Brightest Day symbol will be the logo of a key hero to come out of the Blackest Night event.  I’m assuming this means whoever the White Lantern is will be using this symbol.

The 100 Minute War

Also from DC this week the announcement that the War of the Supermen will take place in something called the 100 Minute War.  The idea being that because it’s Kryptonians and the super beings of earth it would only last 100 minutes.  It sounds a bit silly but this is a good move by DC as it will be a 4 issue mini series along with the Free Comic For a Day zero issue all in the month of May.   (more…)

When I saw this story break this afternoon, my first thought was “It took this long?”

According to Fox News, the depiction of Teabaggers in the latest issue of Captain America has angered members of some Tea Party groups, proving yet again that we are in the midst America’s Most Sensitive Political Movement.

Dave Wiegel of the Washington Independent snapped some photos at an anti-stimulus rally in February — one of which being the now-classic “Tea Bag the Liberal Dems Before they Tea Bag You.” Apparently someone in Marvel’s lettering department used those signs as a visual reference for the Captain America issue, and now the Teabaggers are upset that a fictional representation of a Teabagger has been depicted holding a sign used by an actual Teabagger. Bowing to the anger, Joe Quesada has apologized.

To be fair to Quesada, his apology was qualified — he believes the mistake was not in offending the Teabaggers, but in tying the fictional protestors with real ones. It’s not an unreasonable argument, particularly from a business standpoint. To paraphrase Michael Jordan, Republicans buy comics too.

I wonder how long until the Teabaggers demand Brubaker be fired. In the above story, Fox News dug up a handful of Brubaker’s tweets, exposing him as a dirty lib.

And speaking of twitter, there’s been a little response there this afternoon. (more…)

I’m not very good at doing proper reviews so I thought I would try just giving some brief comments on the various books I read from this past week’s releases.

Scalped #34

This is the best thing I read from last week. I have a tendency now to let the arcs build up before I read them which I did here.  Things are starting to really hit the fan for both Dash and Redcrow.  It’s hard to talk about this book since you really need to just read it from the start to appreciate it, which I certainly recommend.  It’s like fallowing a great TV show like the Wire.

The Question #37

This is one of the Blackest Night back from the dead books.  Denys Cowan is still one of my favorite artist and he did not disappoint here.  Like the other back of the dead books it is not a must read but you do get exactly what you would expect from it.

Ghost Riders: Heavens on Fire #6 (more…)

Secret Avengers

Along with the already annouced Bendis written Avengers series the other new book in the Avengers line will be called Secret Avengers and be written by Ed Brubaker with art by Mike Deodato.

Return of Bruce Wayne

DC has some of the covers to the upcoming the Return of Bruce Wayne series showing more of Bruce in strange outfits from various time periods here and here.  I do like the wild west version.

iPad Irony

Rich Johnston over a Bleeding Cool is one of the biggest proponents of the “iPad is the comics game changer” belief.  I found it rather funny that he posted the preview pages of Batman and Robin #8 in a Flash based browser saying it was better then the basic image in the browser that DC’s blog uses.  Because of Apple’s lack of Flash support the iPad will not be able to use the way Johnston set it up, although the DC blog would work on a iPad.  It’s hard to change the game when you can’t even view all of the game.

Ultimate Comics Sales Drop (more…)

Rich Johnston over at Bleeding Cool mentioned mentioned that Dan Didio is allegedly going forward with putting together various Watchmen related comics in the form of prequels and spinoffs.  Paul Levitz,  despite his issues with Alan Moore, had always protected Watchmen from these sorts of things.  Now that Levitz has stepped down there is likely no one to stop it especially given the huge success of the trade from the movie hype.  Even though the movie is becoming a fleeting memory in people’s minds the original trade still continues to be a top seller with no signs of slowing any time soon.  So it is probably no surprise that Didio would want to take advantage of this and squeeze out everything he can from it.

At first look this sounds like a horrible idea.  Anything they did could never live up to the original, but I actually think it might be a good idea depending on the creative talent involved.  Obviously Alan Moore would never be part of it but Dave Gibbons is on good terms with DC.  Ideally Gibbons would at least over see projects like this much like he did with the Watchmen related merchandise around the time of the movie.  Len Wein, the original editor of the Watchmen, has been working for DC of late and would be another name worth having involved in this.  Wein did write the script for the Watchmen video game, which was basically a prequel based around Rorschach and NightOwl.  Beyond them there would be the various talent that worked on Moore’s ABC line comics like Zander Cannon, Gene Ha, Rich Veitch, and others.  I personally would love to see Grant Morrison do something with Doctor Manhattan.  I liked what Morrison did in Superman Beyond 3D with his own of version of the Doctor Manhattan/Captain Atom character.

Didio is usually pretty good about getting the right people on the right projects, so if this does happen it would be a honest effort and not just a quick money grab.  I for one would like to see happen.

My good friend Marc Streeter just launched his webcomic this week over at actionmanadam.com.  It centers around Adam a Canadian living in Christchurch New Zealand who is trying to find love.  Adam is based off a real life person both Marc and I knew.  The real life Adam was quite the character himself and unintentionally provided Marc with all the material he needed to make a entertaining comic.  Marc has coincided the launch with his birthday as a good way to remember it, so happy birthday to Marc and best of luck with the comic.

Webcomics

I must admit the world of webcomics is a bit foreign to me much like manga was before I made headway with that.  I’m not really sure what to think of them at this stage.  Some are done in a format like a comic strip and some are a comic book format.  I like that ActionMan is in the comic book format as that is my personal preference, much like Warren Ellis’ Freak Angels.  I’m familiar with the better known webcomics like pVp and Penny Arcade, but they never really caught my interest.  I have been regularly fallowing Karl Kerchl’s webcomic The Abominable Charles Christopher.  I enjoy it but it does leave me wishing that it was treated more like a comic book.  I have not had much luck finding other webcomics that catch my interest.  If anyone has any webcomic recommendations I certainly would appreciate them.  I would like to know what out there is worth reading.

Well, it looks like I was wrong, and Marvel’s new Avengers book is going to start at issue #1.

So since my first prediction was wrong, here is my next one — Marvel will only maintain this new numbering until the number of issues among all combined Avengers volumes equals some nice round number, such as 600.

The good news is that Bucky is still Captain America in this lineup. The bad news is that John Romita Jr. is drawing it. I hope Hawkeye is on the team.