A longtime showbiz journalist and fan's thoughts on comic books, movies and other cool stuff.

Tag: DC Comics Page 2 of 4

The teaser trailer that made ‘Batman’

I have strong memories of seeing this teaser trailer playing many times in late 1988 and early 1989 at the Gallagher Theater in the Student Union at the University of Arizona. It was the first time I recall hearing of people paying full admission to a theater just to see the trailer.

(Side note: When I was a kid, we called these previews, not trailers. I know why they’re called trailers, as they used to run after the movie back in the old, old days. But why we still call them trailers when previews makes more sense eludes me. I can’t even remember when the term trailer came back into fashion.)

I was not yet much of a DC or Batman reader at that time, and therefore only tangentially aware of the controversy around casting Michael Keaton. So this trailer was really the first look anyone had at this movie and it sold it completely and totally.

The importance this movie had at the time for comics is easy to underestimate in this day and age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there was a time in the 1980s when comics fans knew the medium was full of storytelling gold while the general public still thought of comics as kid stuff and the Biff! Pow! Sock! of the Adam West series defined the idea of comic book adaptations. This was going to be the movie that got comics noticed! That proved to the world that they weren’t just kid stuff! And then everyone would flock to comics shops to get in on the hobby, making all those collectible issues the die-hards had been hoarding for years worth a literal fortune!

Some of that came true, some of it didn’t. But I still think this is one of the best uses of a teaser trailer in modern movie history.

Happy! is upbeat, but not ecstatic

Happy! #1-4 (Image Comics, $2.99 each) is a creator-owned miniseries from Grant Morrison — his first in a long while after a very long stretch writing big superhero franchises for, mostly, DC Comics. 
The art is by Darick Robertson, of Transmetropolitan and The Boys fame, and the pair are quite well matched for this story of a cop turned hitman whose life is saved by a flying blue horse named Happy that appears before his eyes and guides him through a rough Christmas misadventure. 
Robertson’s art really sells this hard, and mostly succeeds. The story itself reads like Morrison is channeling Warren Ellis, though maybe that’s just the unavoidable Transmet link, and works reasonably well without rising to the level of Morrison’s signature work. I think three issues might have worked better than four, but it makes for a decent, slightly off-kilter read with some really nice art.

Braga’s TNG miniseries is great Star Trek comfort food


I’m a long-time Star Trek junkie. The original TV series became an instant favorite when I was 6 years old and it was shown each afternoon after school in syndication. Star Trek: The Next Generation was an immediate favorite of mine when it came on the air in 1987 — at a time when there was almost no sci-fi, fantasy or genre fare to be found anywhere on TV — and it remains one of my favorites.

Star Trek: The Next Generation — Hive #1-4 (IDW, $3.99 each) boasts as its key selling point a story by Brannon Braga, who was a writer and eventual executive producer on TNG and many of its theatrical and television followups. The key influence here is the 1996 feature film Star Trek: First Contact, which Braga wrote with Ronald D. Moore, and is generally regarded as the best by far of the four TNG movies.

This series begins in the 29th century, by which time the Borg have fully assimilated the entire galaxy and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard reigns with the Borg Queen as Locutus. Realizing the Borg have hit a dead-end, he concocts a time-travel plot to alter history. Back in the 24th century, the Borg seek the help of the Federation to stop the alien Voldranaii, which they claim they cannot assimilate and which poses an equal threat to both civilizations. 
That set-up is enough to get me on board for all four issues, especially when the script by Terry Matalas and Travis Fichett, and the art by Joe Corroney convey the classic feel of the show so well. As has often been the case with Star Trek comics, the storytelling style of the TV show comes off as a bit slow and talky. But it retains the spirit of Star Trek and the heyday of the DC Star Trek comics (the best ever done for the franchise, I think) from the 1980s and 1990s enough to make me think there’s still a future for TNG outside some horrid J.J. Abrams-style reboot.

DC Quick Reads: Punk Rock Jesus, Dial H, He-Man

I get review copies, sometimes. Here’s three from DC I read recently:

Punk Rock Jesus #1 (DC/Vertigo)



Punk Rock Jesus #1 is the best new comic I’ve read from DC/Vertigo in ages. It’s an old-fashioned, black-and-white indie comic about a reality show that’s going to take DNA from the shroud of Turin, clone it and “bring back” Jesus Christ. Written and drawn by Sean Murphy, it’s full of that good ol’ punk-rock indie spirit of the early 1980s and comes off as a mad little bit of all right.

Dial H #1 (DC Comics)

Dial H #1 is written by acclaimed sci-fi novelist China Mieville, and proves that it’s not always easy to transition successfully from one medium to another. Honestly, I was completely lost in this story — I don’t think I understood anything that was happening in this story, so I won’t be picking up any further issues. The Brian Bolland cover, however, is quite nice — though that’s not saying anything new.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe #1 is another book that confounds me. I was never a fan as a kid, being just old enough to have stopped playing with toys or watching cartoons by the time this one came along. I know next to nothing about He-Man or the story, so I’m definitely not the target audience for this book. This appears to be a complete reboot, starting over at the beginning and showing how blond woodsman Adam begins the journey that will transform him into He-Man. We only get foreshadowing of this, so He-Man isn’t even really in this comic. It’s pretty standard stuff for DC these days, and I do give the book props for looking better than a He-Man comic has a right be, thanks to Philip Tan and Ruy Jose. What’s most disappointing to me is that this is written by James Robinson. Yes, James Robinson, the guy who wrote such great comics as The Golden Age, Starman, Leave it to Chance, Bluebeard, etc. And he’s writing a toy comic for DC. Maybe he’s a big fan of the character and wants to do it, but it seems like a big problem for the industry if a guy as talented and established as Robinson is reduced to doing a toy revival comic instead of something original that could reach a wider audience than adults who once played with He-Man toys.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe #1
(DC Comics)

‘Batman: Earth One’ is redundant and pointless

It’s taken almost three years from its first announcement for Batman: Earth One to arrive, and reading it the same weekend The Dark Knight Rises was released in theaters, the only questions to ask is: Why?

This is not a bad comic, by any stretch. It’s well-written by DC’s chief creative officer, Geoff Johns, and features some very nice art by Gary Frank. Like Superman: Earth One, this is a 144-page original hardcover graphic novel selling for $22.99 aimed at new readers by retelling the origin story as though it were happening today and updating certain elements to make that work.

So we have many of the familiar elements: The shooting deaths of Bruce Wayne’s parents, his struggle to find the path of becoming Batman, and being successful as Batman. We also have the younger Jim Gordon, who’s struggling with being a good cop in a corrupt city. And of course, the two form an uneasy-at-first alliance that we know will become a pivotal relationship for both.

The biggest differences this time around is that Alfred is much younger, and as a former soldier is a much more gruff and ornery bastard type character. We also have an interesting introduction for Harvey Bullock, who arrives in Gotham seeking to lift his fame and fortune above the success he’s had hosting a real-crime TV show in Hollywood.

Most all of this content has been much better before in Batman: Year One. And I don’t know that we really need yet another ongoing version of the character after the reboot of The New 52 and seemingly forgotten efforts like All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder and the endless variations of Elseworlds.

Also, this book doesn’t change the status quo of Batman as radically as Superman: Earth One did for the Man of the Steel, making it seem even more superfluous. And with the success of the many versions of Batman on film, in television and those DC Universe original animated movies, the need to radically update and constantly remind people how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman appears even more ridiculous.

It will be interesting to see how much further DC goes with the Earth One line, the very idea of which was trumped by The New 52. Short of a sales success on a par with Superman: Earth One, which is certainly possible, I see this dropping off fans’ radar quickly. For new readers, I still think Year One is better than Earth One.

Breaking a 26-year weekly comics buying habit

It’s now been six weeks — or maybe eight; I don’t remember — since I last walked into a comics shop and bought a stack of new comics. And it may be a long time, if not ever, before I do so again. If it sticks, it would mark the end of a 26-year habit that has brought me tremendous joy but whose time may have finally passed on.

I could trot out a bunch of reasons for this change that have nothing to do with the comics themselves — namely, that there’s precious little time for me to read comics and the money spent on them is better used elsewhere with a 10-month-old in the house.

But the real reason is that comics — by which I mean mostly mainstream, superhero comics — have over time gotten so, well, small, that I have finally lost interest.

But let’s back up for a second.

I began buying and reading comics because I loved the cool stories they told. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was nowhere near enough sci-fi, fantasy and superhero material around to satisfy my appetite for it. I had loved animated superhero cartoons as a kid, graduating to stuff like Star Trek, Space: 1999 and, of course, Star Wars, which arrived when I was the perfect age — 7 going on 8 — to love it completely. And I wanted more. By the time I was a teenager, the sci-fi and superhero content boom inspired largely by the success of Star Wars had begun to fade out. There was almost no sci-fi on TV, and the few attempts that were made in the genre like V or the imported Max Headroom were short-lived or terrible or both. Star Wars was, apparently, done after about 1986, with the Marvel comic canceled and no other new content to come for about the next five years. Star Trek was still around with a new movie every other year, but that just wasn’t enough; The Next Generation was still a couple years way. I liked science-fiction novels like the Dune series and Childhood’s End, but comics’ visual nature and the shared universes they offered were much more interesting. 

And I ate it up, which was easy to do because comics were cheap. Taking $20 into the comics shop meant you could walk out with 10 new issues and maybe eight recent back issues. The collecting aspect was part of the fun — every new store might have the issues you’re looking for at the price you can afford — as was the simple pleasure of looking at art. Classic comic book art is a wonderful thing to look at and admire, and the old-style work that was done with traditional pencils and ink had a lot of personality. An easy way to start an argument at the comics shop was to ask people who was the better artist: John Byrne or George Perez. It was the same with writers — you could after a while tell who wrote what without looking at the credits. And there was plenty of new material to explore, beyond just Marvel or DC. When you got bored with The Amazing Spider-Man or Justice League, there was American Flagg! or Watchmen or Jon Sable: Freelance or The Adventures of Luther Arkwright or Concrete or Love and Rockets to move on to.

All of which made comics seem like an evolving and innovative art form that was vastly underappreciated by larger culture. In a word, comics were big — they were immersive, delivered old fashioned action thrills and were often much smarter than anything on TV or playing at the local cineplex. Comics felt like they were ahead of the curve — that everyone would find this stuff as great and fascinating as we readers did if only they gave it a chance. I think fans’ desire to see their favorite comics on the big screen came from a real need to prove that comics were worthy of attention, that they were ahead of the curve.

Comics kind of got that wish with the speculator boom. The 1990s really were the best of times and the worst of times. There were a lot of astonishingly bad comics that sold zillions of copies, but also some of the very best comics ever came along during that decade. Even the increasingly cynicism of Marvel and DC was masked by the fact that there still was some spark in their characters and in their books — something that excited readers whether they were kids who got turned on to the medium by the X-Men cartoon series or longtime collectors.

The industry of comics has, like every other aspect of showbiz and publishing, had to struggle with the changing landscape of making it work in the 21st century. If you had told me 20 years ago how easy it was to publish, promote and distribute comics in the digital age, I would have expected the doors of creativity to swing wide open and deliver a new Golden Age of super cool stuff. But instead, we have come to an industry that’s dominated by monopolies or near-monopolies. Its increasingly corporate nature has slowly but surely wrung the innovation and fun out of mainstream comics almost entirely. Even more sad is the creative decay, the decline in quality of comics and their near-universal slavish devotion to imitating other media or less-interesting elements of comics’ own past. I swear, I hope to never again read another superhero comic that uses first-person narration in captions. It was different when Claremont did it back in that 1982 Wolverine series, but it’s been run into the ground so much since then that by now it’s gone all the way through the planet and is halfway to Mars.

Marvel and DC were always conservative, always very corporate on the business end of things. But the last successful new character (i.e., one proven capable of headlining a solo series and not being derived from another character) created at either company that I can recall in the last 20 or so years is Deadpool. The only breakout characters — ones known to some degree in the greater population — from the entire industry are indie creations like Hellboy, Bone and Spawn.

The Big Two are not alone. The overall trend in entertainment has increasingly been over the past 20 years in general and the past 10 in particular toward exploiting established properties over any kind of investment in the new. It’s telling to look at such companies as Warner Bros. Animation and Hasbro Studios and seeing them admit they have no interest in creating new properties because it’s much easier and more reliable from a business standpoint to continually exploit and re-exploit the library.

The same must be true at DC and Marvel, though they avoid saying it. Given both companies’ history with creators from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to Jack Kirby, no experienced comics creator with a great idea is going to give it to either company under traditional work for hire terms. And even if there is some kind of co-ownership agreement worked out where the creator gets a share or say in the use of their creation, it’s never going to be worth a corporation’s time or money to deal with the restrictions such a relationship would impose on them when they have so many other properties they own outright and can do with whatever they choose whenever they choose to do so.

The same issue has plagued pretty much all of entertainment, except maybe for TV, where the demand for content is high enough that new ideas can still get a shot. But look at the big studios’ biggest releases, the ones they pour tons of money into in the hopes that the payoff will be flush enough to keep everything going. They’re all mined from other sources — adapted or recycled from elsewhere. Even book publishing has gotten in on the act with silly ideas like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I find it fascinating that so many properties are tied up now that public domain titles have become popular fodder, like the upcoming John Carter movie and competing feature projects based on Snow White and Frank L. Baum’s Oz books.

The problem with this approach is that universes that do not grow are by definition stagnating. Adding new characters, new stories, new series is essential to maintaining healthy long-term interest, and that simply does not happen anymore at either publisher. When you think back to the most interesting eras for either publisher, it was when they were doing new things. When Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others were creating the Marvel Universe, each new series was a major event. Each new storyline promised the potential of a new character as cool as Silver Surfer or Darkseid. It’s true for other publishers, like Valiant Comics, which for me evoked similar excitement during its earliest days when Jim Shooter was writing everything and sometimes even drawing the books. It was a cohesive universe that was growing organically and it was exciting to watch — until Shooter was forced out and a more conventional, short-term vision rather quickly began to unravel what had been done to that point.

On the indie side of comics, there are some bright spots. I still think some of the most exciting books of the 1980s and 1990s to discover were unique indie books, like Bone, Strangers in Paradise, Cerebus, From Hell and Stray Bullets. Dark Horse remains what it was back then — a unique mix of decent licensed comics and some really cool, high-quality creator owned comics like Concrete, Hellboy, Sin City and John Byrne’s Next Men. Dark Horse has always taken chances, and I continue to appreciate that, even though a lot of the newer original content they’ve come up with leaves me a bit cold. Image still publishes some of the coolest comics these days and are welcome as one of the few places left that is open to creator-owned comics.

The biggest problem with most indie comics — and with creators new to the comics field — is they seem to consider comics like a first draft of a movie proposal more than a medium of its own. When I was on staff at Variety, I got tons of horrible comics published by wannabe filmmakers who thought that, since comics were hot, all it took to get their script bought and made was to turn it into a comic first. There also were established filmmakers who sought to forestall studio intervention on the creative front by establishing their stories as comics that studios could not change without risking a Comic-Con backlash. In short, with a few exceptions, I haven’t found too many indie books that deliver the kinds of thrills and alternative takes on adventure stories, superheroes, whatever that rivals the best indie work of the past. Add to that the inability of most of today’s creators to get a book out on a regular schedule, with consistent writing and artwork, and even the most promising series can arrive stillborn (I’m looking at you, Nate Simpson’s Nonplayer).

So it is that the comics business has dwindled to a de facto single distributor in Diamond, a near duopoly on the publisher’s end with Marvel and DC splitting more than three-quarters of direct market sales between them, and a stagnant creative field that seems happier treading water and imitating sub-par movies or TV shows than coming up with anything really new. And the constant reboots and alternate universes, from Ultimates to All-Star to the New 52 just became wearying. Why can’t we move past origin stories anymore?

And it finally got to me.

After more than a quarter century, I found reading the last big stack of Marvel and DC books I brought home at tremendous expense to be the last thing I wanted to do. Trying to read the last few of them was incredibly difficult — the art was detailed but unclear, the scripting was clever but not informative, and the stories inched along at so slow a pace, with so little happening on any given page or in any given issue, that nothing registered as being remotely interesting. Six weeks later, or however long it’s been, I not only do not miss my weekly comics shop visit but I feel somewhat relieved. I no longer have to keep track of what I have and don’t have, what the big crossover of the moment is, or how much it’s going to cost and whether I can still afford it.

None of which means I stopped reading comics or have no more interest in comics. I’ve been focusing on artwork of late, and have found myself interested in the recent bounty of classic comic strip reprints. I’m well into the first volume of IDW’s The Complete Terry and the Pirates, by Milton Caniff, and digging the hell out of it. I also have a bunch of vintage graphic novels I plan to catch up on, including digging into the rest of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing and an Al Williamson Flash Gordon volume I picked up a while back but never got around to reading. I also want to dig into the Williamson and Archie Goodwin strip Secret Agent X-9, and I  still have a few holes in my run of 1960s X-Men comics to fill.

There’s a lot today’s comics could learn from guys like Caniff and how well he used the weekly and daily formats. In many ways, the classic comic strip could foretell the way forward for comics, as all media have been moving toward shorter, more intense bursts of content. As we’ve gone from newspapers to magazines to web home pages to blogs to Facebook and now to the 140-character limit of Twitter, short and sweet chunks of story seems like the natural way for comics to go. A comic book series used to deliver 12 stories a year; and even when there was a multipart story, each part was still complete enough in itself to be interesting. Now, with four-, five- and six-part stories the norm, you get only maybe three complete stories a year. I think is part of the reason the established comics franchises are split into so many books — you need four or five series at that storytelling pace to keep up. I would love for decompression to be declared officially over and for comics to go back to being, well, comics.

If they do that, I might at some point come back. That could happen next week, next month, next year or never. But until then, I’ll be taking my comics interest into a past that’s largely new to me and promises to be a lot more fun.

‘Before Watchmen’ is like gambling and smoking: Legal, but probably not a good idea

It’s time to revisit the saga of Alan Moore and Watchmen.

In case you missed it, DC Comics made public its long-rumored plans to publish this summer a series of Watchmen prequel miniseries using a variety of the industry’s top talents. The plans call for more than 30 issues in the project, with one arriving each week. Covers for a lot of the first issues have been released and the press release included a supportive quote from original Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons.

As soon as the news hit, the debate and bitching began over whether this was appropriate to do given the long-standing dispute between DC Comics and Alan Moore, with many fans and more than a few professionals showing the same kind of moral cowardice seen in the Superman copyright dispute and cheering on DC and calling Alan Moore a dick for not going along with the idea.

Among the rationales used to justify the “Moore is a jerk” arguments are:

  • Moore had discussed at the time Watchmen came out the possibility of doing some prequel stories himself. 
  • Moore has used other authors’ characters in his own work, most notably in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, even encountering a small bit of copyright controversy for Peter Pan in the U.K. 
  • Moore, like everyone else in comics, has used and built upon characters others created to advance their career with the understanding that others will do the same with their characters. For example, Moore got his big break in American comics writing Swamp Thing, which was created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson. 
  • Allowing creators to make their stories and characters off limits would be the equivalent of saying Superman should have ended after Siegel and Shuster stopped doing it, and that would be terrible! 
  • There’s also the argument that he signed the contract he signed and can’t complain about it now. If he really wanted to retain all the rights, he and Gibbons could have self-published Watchmen

All of which are poor arguments, in my opinion.

It always helps to go back to the facts and look at how we got to the place we’re at. Before that, an aside: Most of my books and magazines about comics were put in storage in the garage to make room for my daughter, meaning the many Moore interviews from years past I planned to cite in this post are not available to cite in the kind of detail I would like. I will try to approximate with online sources where possible. If I get the specifics wrong, let me know; I’m pretty confident having read up on this for many years that I’ve got it straight.

Most folks know Moore, who had become a writer of note in British comics, came to DC Comics in the early 1980s to write Saga of the Swamp Thing. The book had been slumping in sales and a new approach in Moore was needed to keep it going. Moore understood the job quite well: This was a mainstream American comic book that was distributed on newsstands with the Comics Code Authority seal, so there were limitations already in place on the types of stories that were going to be acceptable in a horror-tinged but still all-ages title. Moore succeeded rather well in reviving interest in Swamp Thing, and sales began to rise. The book was acclaimed in the fan market and began to draw the attention of the mainstream press, which was where the problems started. The shadow of the anti-comics crusade still lingered in the early 1980s and some of the powers that be at DC or over DC became concerned that a sophisticated title like Swamp Thing, even operating within the restrictions of the Comics Code, could attract unwanted attention to DC and the entire industry. 

For those who don’t remember, one of the less-savory aspects of the Reagan revolution was a censorious impulse that lead to Attorney General Edwin Meese conducting a major investigation into the evils of pornography with an eye on restricting access to that kind of material even for adults. This also was the time when parents’ reaction to PG-rated movies like like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which features a beating heart being pulled from a man’s chest, put enough pressure on the movie industry to create the PG-13 rating. It also was the era when Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator Al Gore, lead a charge to restrict sexually suggestive lyrics in rock and pop music. So DC was not too far off base to worry about some of that energy could be turned comics’ way, because it already had with a number of conservative law enforcement officials prosecuting comics shop owners for selling objectionable material to minors.

The result was that DC made Swamp Thing one of its first titles to carry the label “Suggested for Mature Readers.” Many fans expected this would have been perfect for Moore, who obviously could take it darker. But the real result of such a label was to reduce quite significantly the distribution of the comic. Without the Comics Code seal, there was no newsstand distribution, and even local comics shops would cut back their orders of the title and be wary about who they sold it to for fear of being prosecuting. That fear was strong enough for many to simply not bother to carry such a title.

For Moore, this effectively means that DC was rewarding him for successfully reviving Swamp Thing under the restrictions placed on it by reducing his potential audience to a fraction of its previous size. I don’t know if Swamp Thing sold well enough for Moore and his collaborators to earn sales incentives, but it doesn’t take a math wizard to see what the distribution change would mean for that income. To Moore, his success was punished and not rewarded — a recurring theme for many top creators in the history of comic book publishing.

Still, Moore continued to work for DC, eventually signing contracts to allow DC to publish what would become Watchmen and for V for Vendetta. These contracts are the meat of his disputes with DC. At the time, DC was not allowed by its ownership to publish material to which others held the copyright. On V for Vendetta, Moore and artist David Lloyd had begun the strip in Warrior magazine in the U.K., but the publisher folded before the story was completed. Moore and Lloyd held all rights to the material, and DC wanted to re-publish the completed parts of the story in color and have Moore and Lloyd complete the tale.

I’m sure at first the idea of the temporary copyright transfer seemed like a great solution. At the time, the American comics market was almost exclusively periodicals, with only a handful of graphic novels and trade paperbacks having even been tried. Those, too, rarely stayed in print long. DC at the time likely had no trade paperback collections or plans in place to create the kind of book backstock they are now well known for. With no precedent, there was no reason to assume that the series would be printed as a series of comics and then essentially go out of print with the rights reverting to Moore and Lloyd after a short time.

Taking a bit of speculation on my part here: this arrangement must have seemed quite radical and forward thinking at the time. Getting DC to put in a contract a copyright reversion clause for a comic’s creators must have seemed like an incredible and hopeful breakthrough for those interested in creator rights. Moore must have felt like he had helped make progress that all creators could benefit from and that he had avoided with his own creation the traps that befell the likes of Siegel and Shuster and Jack Kirby.

The same deal was struck for Watchmen. A lot has been made in the past week that the original idea for Watchmen was to use the Charlton Comics characters. The argument is being made that Moore should not complain about the copyright dispute over Watchmen, since it was originally going to use characters owned by DC Comics and the versions that ended up in the final story are inspired, based on or ripped off, depending on your perspective, from those same characters.

And that’s an interesting argument but ultimately is one that fails to hold water. There are similarities, but there also are enough differences to make the characters distinctly different, especially in a legal sense. Fans who make this argument seem to overlook its implications for all kinds of comics characters. Following it could open up arguments that the Fantastic Four is ripped off from Challengers of the Unknown, X-Men from Doom Patrol, Man-Thing and Swamp Thing from The Heap, Hawkeye from Green Arrow, and on and on. That DC Comics needed a contract with Moore and Gibbons that transferred the copyright to the publisher is all the proof you need to show that even DC at the time thought they were distinct enough to need to clear the rights.

Most fans know what happened from here on out: Watchmen and V for Vendetta were published as a series of comic books and then collected into book editions that have remained in print and strong sellers ever since, preventing the copyright reversion from kicking in.

For the most part, I think DC was simply lucky in this deal. They realized they had a cash cow and have milked it for all its worth for the past 25 years. Yes, they stuck to the letter of a deal that benefits them tremendously, and from that perspective Moore et. al are just plain out of luck. But DC is violating the spirit of the deal, as the terms of the contract were drafted to make the copyright transfer temporary, and that’s where Moore is correct and DC is in the wrong.

Yes, the contract has always entitled Moore and his collaborators to royalties from sales of Watchmen. It’s clear, however, that the money is less important to Moore than ownership and control of his work, and he has given away his share of such proceeds to his collaborators. I think this is the one point that really puzzles some people. In the Superman copyright case, it’s all about money at this point. The Siegels have no interest in making new Superman comics, they want the money they are due from having recovered their share of the copyright to the character as of 1999. Same with the Kirby family claims — it’s about getting a piece of the very large pie Kirby helped create. And in America, where getting rich or dreaming about getting rich is the real national pastime, a lot of folks don’t understand how Moore can complain about all this when he is still getting paid. Obviously, the principle of the matter is what’s important to Moore, and he has the courage to call out the industry for its abuses and to walk away from it.

DC Comics’ decision to now create Watchmen derivative works after 25 years, against the wishes of Moore in particular, violates the spirit of the deal even more. That a lot of professionals are chiming in with the sentiment that Moore should just get over it and let others play with his work kind of amazes me. Watchmen is not in the same work-for-hire category as Fantastic Four or Green Lantern, which were created to be ongoing series. It was created to be a stand-alone, independent, creator-owned work and its creator feels — rightly, I think — that DC Comics is exploiting a loophole in the deal that allows them to hang on to a property they had originally only borrowed and intended to return to its creators.

I’ll briefly discuss some of the criticisms of Moore’s position that I listed earlier but have not yet addressed:

  • Yes, Moore had discussed doing prequels himself. But to say Moore’s plans to write prequels to a project he expected to own means that others can do it without his permission for the publisher that failed to return it is ridiculous. 
  • Yes, Moore has used other authors’ characters in his work. Those works are, however, now in the public domain and can be used by anyone. The copyright, which was originally held by the authors themselves, has expired on them and the authors themselves are long gone. 
  • Had Siegel and Shuster had control over Superman, then it’s possible they might have retired the character. He surely would be very different from the Superman we know today. That would have been a more human outcome for Jerry and Joe and their families — as for the rest, I don’t think it really matters. The world at large and comics would have gotten along just fine without Superman. 

If you have read through all of this, you surely have realized I will not be buying or reading any of the Before Watchmen comics. In many ways, it’s yet another sign of mainstream comics’ slow creative and commercial decline. DC and Marvel have such a stranglehold on the market and have become in the past two years in particular even more corporate minded and creatively bankrupt that it’s hard to find any fresh air left in this medium. Independent comics have so slim a share of an already slim market that it seems there’s no place for talent to develop and, as soon as it does, it’s sucked up by the DC and Marvel machines, which are, unfortunately, about the only ones left who can offer creators enough work and compensation for them to make a living at comics.

It would seem I have more to say about the current state of comics, so I’ll save that for my next and possibly last post.

Heavy Lifting: DC Comics — The New 52 Omnibus

Getting back to DC’s New 52, there’s an interesting event element to the relaunch that is exemplified by the omnibus edition of DC Comics: The New 52.

This is a massive book — thicker than any comics collection I can think of. Even Dave Sim’s Cerebus collections of Church and State, which was told in 60 or so issues, took two super-thick paperback volumes to tell. According to Amazon.com, which is selling the book for $89.99, it weighs 7.7 pounds! Dimensions are 11.3 x 7.4 x 2.8 inches, and 1,216 pages. Compare that to Cerebus: Church & State Vol. 2 at 630 pages and 1.8 pounds, and Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus Vol. 1 at 1,088 page and a whopping 8.8 pounds! 
This obviously indicates some advances in publishing technology, as it was only about 12 or so years ago that DC released a slipcased, hardcover edition of Crisis on Infinite Earths and said publicly that it was unlikely to be reprinted in that format because it was so difficult to manufacture so thick a volume. Of course, since then, there have been several reprintings of the series in different formats, including an Absolute edition.

I think this is a title that will not stay in print for a long time, because it’s such a strange collection. There’s no complete story here. It is simply a snapshot of this crucial month in which DC relaunched all its titles. That may make this in time a particularly pricey collector’s item, though at $150 new it’s already pretty pricey. 
The presentation on this book is nice, though it is so thick that copy and panels near the spine can be hard to read. I recall no double-page spreads in these issues, but this format would make such pages difficult to read at best. The design of the dust jacket is terrific, with a great spine design and a Jim Lee-drawn Justice League spread printed onto the actual hardcover underneath. 
And I can’t help but wonder if it would be at all feasible to do a volume two, and possibly make the entire DC Universe line available to die-hard fans in a single monthly book like this. That would be pretty cool if highly unlikely.
Next: More comments on The New 52, the anthology series Dark Horse Presents and a look at X-Men: Regenesis.

Ranking DC’s New 52

We’re now about halfway into the second month of DC Comics’ The New 52, and I’m now at the point where I have to pick and choose which books I really want to follow and plunk down my own money for. So I made a list and found it quite interesting.
The good news is that I am buying more DC Comics than I was before the relaunch, when I was pretty much just getting the core Batman books. 
Starting with the books I liked enough to stick with, these are the titles I have bought the second issue for already:
  • Action Comics
  • Animal Man
  • Batgirl
  • Detective Comics
  • O.M.A.C.
  • Batman and Robin
  • Batwoman
  • Batman
These books I definitely plan to buy the second issue of:
  • Justice League
  • Wonder Woman
  • Superman 
  • I, Vampire
That’s 12 so far, just one title less than a quarter of the New 52 offerings. 
These books I am very likely to pick up, availability and funds allowing: 
  • Supergirl
  • Aquaman
  • Batman: The Dark Knight
  • Superboy
  • Green Lantern Corps
  • The Flash
So if I pick up those books, that means DC got me back for 18 of the 52 books. Again, that’s not too bad — it’s a lot more than I was getting. 
These books just missed the mark for me, and I could reconsider:
  • Green Arrow
  • Swamp Thing
  • Deathstroke
  • Green Lantern
  • Blackhawks
  • Teen Titans
I admit that I had picked up Green Lantern #2 at the store last week, but changed my mind and put it back once I saw Love and Rockets: New Stories, Vol. 4 was out. 
These titles were the mediocre group of the bunch — not bad, but also neither interesting enough or good enough to make me want to come back. And I’ll admit, some of these surprised me.
  • Batwing
  • Hawk and Dove
  • Justice League International
  • Men of War
  • Static Shock
  • Stormwatch
  • Demon Knights
  • Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.
  • Grifter
  • Legion Lost
  • Mister Terrific
  • Resurrection Man
  • Birds of Prey
  • Blue Beetle
  • Captain Atom
  • DC Universe Presents
  • Legion of Super-Heroes
  • Nightwing
  • All-Star Western
  • The Fury of Firestorm
  • Green Lantern: New Guardians
  • The Savage Hawkman
  • Voodoo
That’s a full 23 our of 52 books that fall into that category, nearly half of the line.
And then, there’s the titles I actively disliked or thought were flat-out terrible.
  • Red Lanterns
  • Suicide Squad
  • Catwoman
  • Red Hood and the Outlaws
  • Justice League Dark
Again, not bad, but the relaunch hasn’t really improved the quality of DC Comics, despite all the hype. I wish that the publisher had taken the time to dig deeper in terms of talent and offered up more surprises. They only get one shot at this — at least for the time being — so I would have liked there to be more comics that I could wholeheartedly recommend to both lapsed fans and new readers.

DC’s New 52, Wave 3, plays it safe except when it comes to sex

The final batch of first issues in DC’s New 52 arrived Monday this week instead of Wednesday. I’ve already read a few that I quite like, but I have to wait until tomorrow because of the embargo. That leaves me with today to catch up and go through all of last week’s books, which contained more than its fair share of bombshells.

FYI, due to some of the topics that came up in this week’s books, the language used below may not be suitable for all ages. Proceed at your own risk.

Top book on the pile is Wonder Woman #1, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. As you might expect from Chiang, the book looks great and is well colored with an appropriately moody palette by Matthew Wilson. The story is a pretty significant deviation from the typical Wonder Woman story, getting into an area I think you could call occult, except it deals with Greek mythology so maybe that’s a better way to describe it. But it is darker in tone and look that the shiny, bright take on Wonder Woman that has prevailed over the years at DC. I’m not sure how effective this is as a first issue, however, because not much is explained. Diana doesn’t even appear until halfway through the issue, where she’s found sleeping naked (though covered) in a London flat. It’s not clear what the set up is, who she’s supposed to be or how she’s intended to fit into the world. I think Azzarello and Chiang have a bit more leeway based on their reputation to get things going in the next couple of issues, and this was much better than the Odyssey revamp of last year. So, this is promising.
Dick Grayson gets his old costume and book back with Nightwing #1, which was a competent if completely average superhero comic. The art by Eddy Barrows and J.P. Mayer is nice, and I enjoyed the scenes where Dick returns to the circus he grew up in to say hi to his friends. I don’t know if anyone has ever done that idea before, but I thought it was a nice touch here. The superhero-ing part of the book was less thrilling, and I really wish the industry would institute a ban on the hero narrating the story in captions. That was interesting and effective in 1982 when Chris Claremont popularized it on the first Wolverine miniseries, but it’s been overused to death. How about having characters talk to each other once in a while? It might be a good trend to start.
I really wanted to like DC Universe Presents #1, featuring the first part of a new Deadman story by Paul Jenkins and Bernard Chang. It almost completely won me over, too, because this is a good character and Jenkins does some interesting things with it. But somehow it just didn’t cross the finish line and I’m not entirely sure why. The art’s well done, though not as stylish as I remember Chang’s art being in the past. Maybe it’s just that a character called Deadman is a bit of a downer, and this needed a bit of brightness in it to keep it from just being dim.
Batman #1 is one of the slickest releases so far, and I mean that in a good way. Scott Snyder writes a really good Batman, and this debut pulls in a lot of elements and kicks off a pretty good mystery. It also looks fantastic, with Greg Capullo on pencils bringing just a hint of Todd McFarlane-style cartoonyness that recalls, for me, the much-beloved Batman: Year Two arc of 25 years ago. It’s slickly polished by inker Jonathan Glapion and the result is a book that any Batman fan, old or new, should be able to get behind. 
Green Lantern Corps #1 was surprisingly violent, which is not something I expect from this particular franchise. It’s all in service to the buildup of the story to introduce a very serious and grave threat to the Corps that should make a nice backdrop for the lead characters of Guy Gardner, John Stewart and Kilowog to tackle. It was the character stuff that I most liked about this issue, even though it didn’t make much sense to me. I don’t see why Guy wants a full-time coaching job, when he seems too busy as a Green Lantern to even begin to fulfill that role well. I have a soft spot for both Guy and John, so this may turn out to be the GL series for me if they can keep it up. 
Blue Beetle #1 is a complete reboot of the most-recent version of the character, the Jaime Reyes one. This is a typical origin story, that establishes where the Blue Beetle power comes from, how it gets to Earth and how it ends up affecting Jaime. Not having read the previous Blue Beetle series, I don’t know how different this is from what was done there. It’s OK, kind of the typical high school stuff comics readers have known and loved since Peter Parker was a lonely student at Midtown High, though with a Latino flavor and set in Texas. The art by Ig Guara is solid, and it works OK as a comic book but does nothing to really elevate it past pure middle-of-the-road mediocre to must-read level. 
Captain Atom #1 is at about the same level as Blue Beetle. It’s a competent setup for a series, but offers nothing really new to set it apart. The script by J.T. Krul takes no real risks with a character that you could do just about anything with. And Freddie Williams III’s art is surprisingly sketchy, which I think is the wrong style for this character, who I think would work better with a clean, technical look. I can’t help but compare this to the recent Dark Horse run of Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom, as the good Doc and Captain Atom are very similar characters, and while neither sets the world on fire Captain Atom seems the lesser of the two.
OK, now things get interesting with the awful Red Hood and the Outlaws #1, by Scott Lobdell and Kenneth Rocafort. This was another of those titles that, being brand now, I hoped would offer something surprising and different. Instead, we get the most juvenile, pandering book of the bunch. The book starts with Red Hood, a.k.a. the former Robin known as Jason Todd, breaking out Red Arrow from a prison. Hood’s aided by Starfire, formerly of the New Teen Titans, and the three of them sit on a beach, have sex and agree to team up for some outlaw-ish “jobs,” the first of which goes wrong. This book got a lot of deserved criticism for its portrayal of Starfire as a super-hot amnesiac who’ll fuck anyone who asks, while Red Hood and Red Arrow act like Jersey Shore castoffs who are drinking and high-fiving each other over getting to fuck Starfire like they’re on spring break. Now, I get that there are a lot of young men and boys in the DC target range who act like this or would like to act like this. And there’s no denying that a lot of this kind of skeevy behavior on the part of the guys and the girls goes on in frat houses and at spring break bashes every year. But the appropriateness of this in a DC Comic rated “T for Teen” is at least questionable. But the biggest problem by far is the degradation of Starfire. This is a character who, in the original New Teen Titans comics, was certainly a bit voluptuous, but also was far from stupid or casual. Her romance with Dick Grayson developed convincingly over time and turned out to be quite sweet, normal and responsible for folks in their late teens. I remember what a scandal it was when a single panel implied Dick and Starfire shared a bed, and how much smoothing of ruffled feathers writer Marv Wolfman had to do to defend that idea. The other thing that strikes me is that the best-known version of Starfire would be from the animated Teen Titans series, in which she was a skinny, sweet, kind of shy girl. Anyone who likes or expects either version of the character is going to be horrified to see Starfire so blatantly turned into a walking, talking fuck toy for a pair of quite unlikable characters for whom it’s apparently OK to be assholes because they’re “outlaws.” I don’t know how much blame to lay at the feet of Rocafort, who is a terrific artist, because I don’t know how much of a say he had in the story. The book does look nice and he draws a very sexy fantasy girl. But the overall package is just one that makes me think there’s no point to this title than to be shocking, stupid and quite insulting to readers of all ages and genders.
Birds of Prey is a title that I’ve tried and read for short stints a number of times in its long run. The idea is great, the title is great, but I’ve always found it never quite achieved the scale it needs to be the megahit it could and probably should be. Birds of Prey #1 does nothing to change that assessment, though it definitely rises above the middle of the crop. This is a new version of the Birds team, with Black Canary still in charge but, with Oracle now back in the Batgirl costume, the team now includes Poison Ivy, Katana and what appears to be a new character called Starling. Not every team member appears in this first issue from writer Duane Swierczynski, but Black Canary’s character and the intro of Starling are compelling enough to hold the center. There’s some good action in here too. And I like the art, by Jesus Saiz, though I would like a little more detail and coloring that’s less dark. 
Supergirl #1 is one of my favorites from this week. It offers a compelling introduction for Kara from writers Michael Green (of the Green Lantern movie) and Mike Johnston, and some very stylish art from Mahmud Asrar and Dan Green. Most of this issue is a big fight scene, with Supergirl discovering her powers and kicking some serious ass, and it’s quite well done and a lot of fun to read. The finale, in which Superman arrives, makes me think it was a mistake for DC to publish Superman #1 in the final week of September, as he’s appeared as a cameo in a number of other issues now without his new status quo having really been established. Either way, this was a fun one.
Legion of Super-Heroes #1 is very much standard-issue Legion. I’ve tried a couple times to get into the Legion, but either I’m not finding the good stuff or it’s just not my cup of tea. The stuff I have read that I like is very similar to this story, from Legion veteran Paul Levitz and artist Francis Portella. I don’t know if this has any appeal to new readers, but I imagine it’ll make the Legion’s many fans happy.
Lastly, we have the other bombshell of the week in Catwoman #1, the climactic scene of which caused a huge outcry because, well, it shows Batman and Catwoman rather explicitly having sex. Thankfully, DC upped the rating on this one to Teen +, so those 12-15 year olds won’t be exposed to it. Before I talk about the sex scene, I’ll talk about the rest of the issue, which I thought was decent. Catwoman has always been a sexualized character, from the old comics to the 1960s TV show to Batman Returns and, I’m sure, in the upcoming movie The Dark Knight Rises. It’s part of her appeal, that she’s a villain who’s also so tempting in many different ways to Batman. She’s often been shown as willing to use her sex appeal to get what she wants, again it’s part of the modus operandi. I think a non-sexy Catwoman would be a boring Catwoman. 
The specifics of the way writer Judd Winick and artist Guillem March try convey that she’s sexy are questionable. Laura Hudson at Comics Alliance wrote an excellent piece and explained why she had a problem with the character’s face not appearing until the third page while the first two were full of closeups of her cleavage and butt. I get the point but I don’t think there was any malice in it — it’s a common technique that only becomes an especially notable backfire when you get to the end of this issue. 
The final scene consists of Batman showing up at Catwoman’s place, they fight and the fight slowly turns to stripping off gloves and clothes and a particularly creepy final splash page of them seemingly in coitus. This crosses a whole bunch of lines that it would have been best to not cross, and there’s a lot of reasons for disliking it from the general distaste of having to think about things like Batman’s erect penis penetrating Catwoman (a sentence no one with taste ever wanted to hear uttered) to what it says about how DC’s creators view women. 
I think the relationship between Batman and Catwoman should remain a kind of tense, will they or won’t they thing. The conflict for Batman is that he’s attracted to her but she’s a thief, and for him to give in on this and either let himself be seduced or use his costume and cape and resources for the mundane purpose of getting laid is beneath him. I think it’s less problematic for Catwoman, who always has used sex and has a more flexible morality than other characters. I know Catwoman has been recast from being a straight villain to a kind of anti-hero in the past 25 years, but it’s that conflict and that ability she has to operate in these murky areas that define the character. Which doesn’t mean I think it’s good for her character to be portrayed having sex with Batman in such detail. It’s just gross, and I thought so just as much a few years ago when Frank Miller and Jim Lee did a scene in All-Star Batman where the Caped Crusader has sex with Black Canary on a rainy pier at the Gotham harbor. I also remember hearing morning zoo deejays making fun of the scene in the 1989 Batman movie where Bruce and Vicki have sex. The joke was something along the line of what kind of sound effect will appear on the screen (a la the 1960s TV show’s infamous “Biff!” “Pow!” “Pop!”) and thinking they weren’t wrong. They were assholes, and one of them may have been Glen Beck, but they weren’t entirely wrong. And the X-Force: Sex and Violence miniseries of a few years back in which Domino made explicit references about wanting to or having given Logan a blowjob were not sexy, just icky. 
It’s OK to imply sex — even casual sex — between characters if it works for the characters and the story, but this kind of explicitness with these two characters violates all common sense and good taste, and denigrates all the work involved. And it’s a shame, because I think without the sex scene, this was shaping up to be an OK comic book. But instead it’s something to denounce and decry and get upset about. 
 
Tomorrow: The beginning of the end of the New 52 launch month! Superman! Aquaman! Blackhawks! 

Page 2 of 4

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén