This summer, over the 4th of July weekend, I will be at CONvergence in the Twin Cities, for the benefit of anyone who wants to attend and geek out with me. (Paul Cornell will also be there. I won’t be upset if you tell him that you came for him and not for me. We’ll both know the truth.)

But whether or not you show up, there is something you can do for me. I’m on a panel about great bad comic book villains, the kind who are so absurd and ineffectual that you just have to love them. (Like the Hypno-Hustler, the Big Wheel, Doctor Demonicus…) And so I’d like you to chime in, in the comments section, on who you feel absolutely needs to make it into this hour-long panel. Who would it be inexcusable to leave out? Who is such a hilariously lame menace that he/she gives Stilt-Man and Toomazooma the Living Totem a run for their money? Your chance to influence an hour of comics-based silliness begins…now!

Something I have needed to do for some time, so your patience is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: Note that the second question allows for multiple answers.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

On the Twitters, Tim O’Neil and I had a discussion/argument about the use of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3. Tim (that link is to his Mandarin essay) is a huge fan of the Mandarin, considers him to be Tony Stark’s definitive archenemy, and thinks the movie did wrong by him. I am a huge fan of the Mandarin, consider him to be Tony Stark’s definitive archenemy, and think the movie handled him in the only way the movies can do it. SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR IRON MAN 3 SO STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED AND STUFF.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Now, I know that Tomahawk is a perfectly respectable Golden Age character who lasted for over a dozen years as a feature in various DC anthology comics and then had his own title which lasted for twenty-two. He had a great villain and a bunch of unimpressive or ill-considered spinoffs, so you know he was popular. Basically, he is an important part of comics history.

That having been said, I look at this picture and just EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW and that ruins it completely. Tough break, Tomahawk. Next time, don’t be so amazingly creepy.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Looking for a comic artist, 4-5 pages, superheroic, unpaid – just a fun thing somebody suggested and I wouldn’t mind doing. Interested parties can email me.

There are some comics out there that for some reason just didn’t get the kind of success they deserved. ‘Leave It To Chance’, the series by James Robinson and Paul Smith, was a huge critical success that won the Harvey and the Eisner Awards for Best New Series in its first year, and yet it only ran for thirteen issues, the last appearing in 2002, seemingly never to be seen again. And yet ‘Wolverine: Origins’ ran for fifty issues. Sometimes there ain’t no justice.

Because the thirteen issues that did run were absolutely fantastic. The series was a high-concept blend of elements from ‘Doctor Strange’, ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘His Dark Materials’, although the series itself predated at least some of these. It concerns Chance Falconer, the daughter of a famous wizard and mystic guardian, who’s eager to follow in her father’s footsteps. Her father, who has been a powerful wizard long enough to know that it’s a hard path to walk and is filled with pain and heartache to spare, forbids her from studying magic. This goes about as well as you’d expect these sorts of things to go, not because Chase is willful or disobedient but because she knows without being told that her father has made tremendous sacrifices for the sake of the world, and she’s mature enough to want to grow up to be her father’s daughter. So she makes friends with a small dragon (yes, it’s shades of Paul Smith’s X-Men run, but the man draws freaking adorable baby dragons, so fuckit) and goes about helping people in her own small way with her own modest magical talents.

The stories are well-written; the character of Chance is charming, and the supporting cast is great as well. (My favorite moment is when the dragon is batting at a computer’s screensaver like a kitten.) The series is collected in two volumes, and I really don’t want to say anything more for fear of spoilers. I will say this, though. When people read ‘Justice League: Cry for Justice’ and wondered just what the fuck happened to James Robinson, they said it because they were all thinking of series like this.

Well, that trailer got just about everything absolutely right. The music is appropriately triumphant. The overall message is about the hope Superman instills in others. Most of the action shots are of him saving people (well, except for where he is super-fighting Zod and holy shit does that ever look great).

I am stoked. I’m going to have to donate money to the CBLDF or some other comics-related charity in the cost of my ticket to feel okay with giving DC any of my money with all of their bullshit treatment of creators (and particularly the Siegel and Shuster estates in this case), but daaaaaaaamn.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.