ULTIMATE COMICS: X-MEN #1: Yes, I know, it’s not a nu52 #1 or even a DC #1, but I wanted to start off by mentioning it because it’s easily – easily – better than almost every single DC nu52 #1 so far. Animal Man is really the only one that gives it serious competition as quality goes. (And remember: I was raised as a DC fanboy, not a Marvel maniac. Saying this sort of thing goes against my natural comics grain, which is why DC’s gradual slide as a company pains me so deeply.)

UCXM is a great comic because it is both a good comic book and a good #1 issue. The two are not the same thing. A good comic is a good comic; a good #1 issue fulfills certain tasks. A good #1 issue, to my mind, does the following:

PREMISE: It establishes what the comic is fundamentally about and why it exists. Action Comics is now about Superman’s first days as Superman. FF is about what the Fantastic Four do when one of them dies, and how they deal with it. Animal Man is about a superhero who’s really not much of a superhero per se, but he’s a decent family man and has to deal with super-weirdness anyway.
PIECES: It identifies all (or at least most) of the major story elements of the comic. Action Comics introduces Superman, Lois, Jimmy, Lex, Metropolis and The Daily Planet. FF introduces the entire Future Foundation and what they do. Animal Man introduces Buddy, his family, the idea of the Red, and the concept that Buddy isn’t really your average super-dude.
PLOT: It gives you a reason to want to read the next issue. Action Comics, after establishing that Superman’s powers are still growing and leaving a lot of question marks, ends on a cliffhanger. FF‘s first issue ends with Valeria inviting Dr. Doom to join. Animal Man ends with the revelation that Buddy’s daughter may have superpowers as well, and they are creepy and scary ones.

UCXM fulfills all of these, and ambitiously, because it does no less than create a brand new status quo for the X-Men that never been used before. If you haven’t been following Ultimate comics lately, the long and short of it is this: mutants aren’t the next step in evolution, but instead a biogenetically engineered weapons program that got out of hand. The civil rights metaphor is officially killed off for the Ultimate X-Men once and for all, because as Ultimate Johnny Storm points out, if mutants got their powers because of gubmint meddling or weird science reactions, then who with superpowers isn’t a mutant?

But, while establishing his new status quo (Premise), Nick Spencer makes sure to establish what his cast (Pieces) are all doing: jumping from scene to scene as the few remaining X-Men and a few newcomers who were introduced in the barely-anybody-read-it Ultimate X react to the news and declare their intentions to act or just sit around in jail, each of their inclusions demonstrating that Spencer clearly has plans for them. And then, right at the end, Spencer drops his bomb, which is just so goddamned ambitious I have to bow down and give kudos. I’m not going to spoil it easily, but I’ll put together a footnote here revealing it if you want to know.1

It’s a great comic because it is extremely well-crafted and because it reinvents a wheel that seemed impossible to reinvent. It’s a great #1 because at no point does it forget what it has to do for a new reader. Now, how many of the nu52 this week managed that?

SUPERGIRL #1: This comic is essentially one extended scene – Supergirl hits Earth, fights battlesuits until Superman shows up. That is literally the entire comic. There is no reason this comic could not have been, say, five pages long. Brian Michael Bendis looks at this comic and says “wow, that’s awfully decompressed.” Of our three Ps, it barely bothers with any of them. And it’s not a terribly compelling comic in any other respect anyway; this comic is completely skippable.

CAPTAIN ATOM #1: The solicits sold this as Dr. Manhattan: The Series, which was certainly interesting. It’s not that thing; at least not yet. But it does set up Captain Atom’s supporting cast and introduces him as a superhero efficiently enough, as well as laying out the major plotline (namely, “are Captain Atom’s powers gradually killing him”). It ends on a pretty generic cliffhanger, but all in all this is a Perfectly Acceptable Comic and a decent enough #1 issue which gracefully demonstrates the three Ps. But I probably won’t bother with the second issue.

BLUE BEETLE #1: A hard reboot starting with the origin issue: everything a new reader needs to know about the history of the Reach and the Scarabs are dealt with in the first six pages, and then it’s on to introducing Jaime and how he become bonded with the Scarab. It’s not a bad #1 by any means, although my personal preference would have been to introduce the bonding earlier – but it’s not a good comic, mostly because of the truly dumb decision to transform Paco into a thugged-out gangbanger. No, really – they did that. (You probably missed it because everybody was so hepped up about the sexist revisions this week that they forgot the kinda racist one!)

GREEN LANTERN CORPS #1, NIGHTWING #1, LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #1: I’m doing these three together because they’re basically all the same: decent enough comics, mostly failures as #1 issues. Nightwing is a little better than the other two, at least taking up a page of Dick Grayson monologue to explain who Nightwing is and why you should care, but these are mostly just ongoings with new #1s for the sake of reboot consistency, as have more than a few others been. (Legion is particularly impenetrable, which is especially disappointing given that Paul Levitz previously wrote what I consider to be the best “jump right in” introduction to the Legion, or any superhero comic for that matter, ever in LSH v2 Annual #1.)

BIRDS OF PREY #1: This is comic #2 to stagger out of the wake of the “hey let’s make Barbara Gordon walk again and be Batgirl” thing – as of this issue I’m not sure if Dinah and Barbara ever worked together or if the Birds existed or what in the postboot, and it appears to be a conscious choice to not address that issue at all, but instead just sort of throw it at people familiar with the preboot comic so they can be distracted by the unanswered question, which – what? The new character, Starling, is not explained particularly well at all. It’s a shame, because there are elements of this comic that are good: the fight scene flows well and the cliffhanger ending is solid. But on the whole it’s a really weak first issue.

WONDER WOMAN #1:This comic is mostly an incoherent mess. It’s pointless as a #1 – seriously, it doesn’t say a damn thing about who Wonder Woman is or what she does or anything – and the way it’s paced makes this just about unreadable as a single issue. It’s quite possible that, as the first chapter of a trade paperback, this will be quite readable in its larger context – I mean, the craft is quite clearly there, as you would expect from Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. But as a single issue, no. Not even close.

BATMAN #1: This is good. I haven’t read a comic with Greg Capullo art in forever, but he’s always been very solid on art duties and he fits Batman quite well. There’s not much you need to introduce to a new reader about Batman, but this comic covers the high points – Batman wants to improve Gotham both as Bruce Wayne and as Batman, and there’s a decent framing device to explain all of the various Robins. And the cliffhanger ending, although of course obviously a red herring, is a solid foundation for a story. Probably the best nu52 book of the week.

CATWOMAN #1: See, from a #1 issue standpoint, this comic does everything right: it sets up Selina’s situation, gives her a plot, introduces the major players in the comic for the first little bit, and there’s a cliffhanger ending. The problem is that the cliffhanger ending is Catwoman and Batman fucking, which from a craft standpoint reduces Catwoman’s importance – I mean, the last four pages are a conflict where the question is “will Selina get to have sex with Bruce.” The story’s title is a reference to them doing it. That’s just a terrible, terrible idea.

RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS #1: Yeeeeeeeeeeaahhhh that was shitty.

1. “My name is Kitty Pryde. I am sixteen years old – and this is the story of how I became the most hated and feared terrorist in the history of the United States.” [↩]

It’s a crazy thought. Honestly, I think it’s a crazy idea to even try, because I think that reboots eventually necessitate retelling of old stories because a character is more than the sum of his or her origin. (You couldn’t even write a completely clean “Hawk and Dove”, for example, because the character of Hawk is defined by the loss of his brother and having to deal with the rage and grief that he can’t control, and the character of Dove makes this explicit by never quite fitting into his life the way that his brother did. So either you have to rush through Don’s career and retell his death, or you’re not really rebooting the character.) But if I did it, acknowledging the fact that it’s crazy and unworkable and probably in the long run not that commercial (yes, the #1 issues are selling well. #1 issues always sell well. Call me in a year when it’s gone down to “The DC 37!”) …then here’s what I’d do.

1) It wouldn’t necessarily be a shared universe. I know that I’ve argued passionately in favor of shared universes, and as a general rule I’m in favor of them because they make coming up with story ideas easier, but I really do think that this is something I’d take a long hard look at before I signed off on it. MGK had a long and excellent post about how some characters don’t belong in the same universe, and if you’re restarting everything from scratch, this is one of those things you can decide not to do. Batman seems a lot less like a crazy person living out his childhood revenge fantasies when you don’t have to keep explaining away why he doesn’t just recruit a couple dozen superheroes with actual powers to help him keep the peace in Gotham. Adam Strange became an explicit nightmare to write once you had to start trying to figure out ways to keep him away from Rann in a shared universe where every third person had a spaceship. And so on…it might be fun to organize the universes by thematic consistency.

2) It would be more ethnically diverse. There really is no reason, apart from nostalgia and white male privilege, why the Big Seven heroes of the DC Universe should be six white guys and a white woman. Aquaman could have a look more reminiscent of a Pacific Islander, while Green Lantern could be Chinese. Wonder Woman could actually look like she comes from Greece instead of having classically WASPish features, and the Flash could be Hispanic. Really, the only one of them that should be a white male is Batman, because his origin is tied up in being Gotham “old money” and the sense of struggling against a background of white male privilege that didn’t save his parents from being mugged and killed informs the story. But yes, even Superman could be any ethnicity you wanted him to be.

3) It would break with tradition. Not so much in the specific details of the stories; the last thing you want is gimmicky “You thought Sinestro would be a bad guy, but in this reality, it’s Kilowog who gets a yellow ring!” twists. But honestly, the usual stable of reliable comics pros are the last people you want writing these series. Get some people who aren’t big comics fans, writers who come out of a different background and aren’t as likely to want to get their favorite stories back into continuity. The original Crisis benefited greatly from having people who were writers first and fans second picking up the reins after the universe changed, and a new DC Universe needs more Alan Moores and fewer Grant Morrisons. (And yes, Grant Morrison is a traditionalist. Anyone who thinks Grant Morrison is constantly innovating and coming up with new ideas just hasn’t read enough Silver Age comics to know what stories he’s homaging.)

4) It wouldn’t just be a bunch of superhero books. This is one thing they’ve done pretty well in the new DC Universe. There’s a fantasy series, a few horror comics, some war stories…we’re still light-years away from the era where only a few superheroes could carry their own books and Jerry Lewis was a major seller, but they made an effort. There’s still room for improvement, though. A relaunch of Adam Strange wouldn’t hurt, for example.

5) It would actually be a reboot. Despite claiming that this is a fresh new start and a jumping-on point for new readers, the DC Universe is picking up about five years into the story, and furthermore, it’s very clearly picking up where the old universe left off in a lot of cases. It’s hard to even pretend that the “new” Green Lantern isn’t meant to be just a continuation of the old, and Hawk and Dove is more or less taking Brightest Day as a part of its continuity…and that says nothing of the fact that Batman is on his fourth Robin in five years. DC either wants new readers to feel welcome or it doesn’t. “Rebooting” while keeping the same convoluted storylines and lack of exposition is the worst of both worlds. (OK, that was just blatant editorializing.)

That’s for starters, at least. Any thoughts on how you’d reboot a 75-year old comic book universe? Share them in the comments!

DEATHSTROKE #1: You know what’s the absolute best way to establish a character as anything other than a badass? Have all the other characters talk at length about how much of a badass he is. Like, have some characters explain that he is going to do something totally badass, and then when he does it then they can say “that was so badass” and then just keep going. I’ve always kind of liked Deathstroke even in his recent “sucky Darth Vader” mode he’s been doing the last decade or so, but this Deathstroke I rather dislike.

RED LANTERNS #1: This gets my nod as a strong contender for Least Essential Comic of the new-52 relaunch. Was there really a major contingent of fans demanding a series about Atrocitus? (Yes, I get that everybody likes to say how awesome the Red Lantern kittycat is, but come on – it’s one joke that wasn’t that funny to begin with. Dex-Starr is the DC Universe equivalent of “the cake is a lie”.) In any case, the comic itself is just kinda meh, and putting Ed Benes on it makes the whole thing feel like one of those three-issue-long “ongoing series” Image put out in 1995 where you never knew anybody and never cared.

GREEN LANTERN #1: Has all the strengths of Geoff Johns’ usual Green Lantern work, except instead of jerking off about Hal Jordan he actually acts kind of like a douche, and Sinestro is much cooler than Hal so having Sinestro assume centre stage (sort of) for an issue is nice. But really, this isn’t a #1 and everybody knows it: it’s just the new issue of Green Lantern, making absolutely no pretense at even attempting to be a jumping-on point, explaining nothing at all. Compared to this issue, last week’s Static Shock is a 22-page Who’s Who entry.

SUICIDE SQUAD #1: Three words: Thin. Amanda. Waller. (Other than that – and Harley Quinn’s outfit – it’s kind of meh.)

FRANKENSTEIN: AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E. #1: This was a lot of fun. I’ve never been a fan of the S.H.A.D.E. concept, which comes across too much as “it’s GI Joe, but weird and with monsters!” for my tastes. But I like Frankenstein, and the latest retooling of the Creature Commandos concept doesn’t feel tired for once, which is a minor miracle at this point.

RESURRECTION MAN #1: Basically Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning picking up where they previously left off with this comic, but they make a concerted effort to provide a soft introduction for new readers – which isn’t hard, given that Resurrection Man’s concept is pretty straightforward and his plotlines mostly unresolved. A bit more exposition re: the Body Doubles would have been a good idea, though, as they come across as low-rent Harley Quinns. (Then again, they weren’t really ever anything more than that.) In any case, this is a good solid comical book.

GRIFTER #1: Lovely Cafu art, but Nathan Edmonson’s story is just clumsy and Cole Cash doesn’t feel like a character so much as someone just sort of reciting lines he’s supposed to recite. At the end of the issue, he puts on his mask. Why does he put on a mask? Absolutely nothing about that makes sense! It’s just a “this is a superhero comic, so this con man who went through a traumatic experience is now gonna put on a mask because he’s a superhero.” This comic wants to be an exciting pilot episode of an awesome genre TV show, leaving questions unexplained and plot points vague, but instead it just feels sort of unfinished.

MISTER TERRIFIC #1: You know how people say it’s hard to write a truly brilliant character convincingly when you aren’t as brilliant as they are? This is a good example of that. It’s actually not a bad comic book as first issues go: it sets up the premise and introduces the character in the way that a #1 issue should, and it’s not boring. But the superheroic “brilliant scheme” is him turning the London Eye into a magnet to hold up a guy in battle armor, which is sort of low-rent 1960s Spider-Man as ingenious superhero plans go, and the climax is that something is manipulating Mr. Terrific so he can recognize that a politician is a hypocrite. (No. Really.) Also, answers the question of what happens to Power Girl in the nu52: she’s Michael Holt’s non-superpowered love interest! CUE NERD RAGE.

LEGION LOST #1: It’s a more focused Legion of Super-Heroes adventure/quest comic. It’s good. Not great: just good. It would have been great if the comic did more to flesh out the seven primary characters’ personalities; it feels a bit rushed in terms of plot versus character development. But it’s okay.

SUPERBOY #1: Probably the most pleasant surprise so far of the nu52 – this was a comic I was expecting to be a trainwreck, and instead it’s a very well written sci-fi comic. At present it’s only a superhero comic in the loosest possible sense (a Rose Wilson cameo, Lois Lane shows up investigating as she is wont to do). But Scott Lobdell is trying to write a pretty neat story here about the construction of personal morality, and there’s more thought in this book than in many of the other nu52s combined. Recommended highly – this is one of those comics where the thought that went into it is evident from the first page.

BATMAN AND ROBIN #1: First of two Batbooks this week that redeem last week’s double shot of the lousy Batgirl and much much worse Detective Comics (which I didn’t discuss, but suffice it to say that it was terrible in just about every possible way that a Batman comic could be terrible). This is a decent Batman comic which does a lot of work to demonstrate the relationship between Batman and Damian-Robin while still telling a Batman Inc. story without having to go into a lot of backstory to explain the concepts of that comic. In short, this is Perfectly Good Comics. And that is fine. I mean, I know we were all saying stuff like “every one of the nu52 has to be a grand slam out of the gate,” and that’s not actually a wrong analysis in a lot of respects, but it wasn’t gonna happen and it didn’t happen, so let’s call this one a success even though it’s probably only a strong B+ level comic at best.

BATWOMAN #1: Batwoman’s arc in Detective last year was sublime stuff; this looks to continue the trend even without Greg Rucka writing it. The usual brilliant artwork from JH Williams, of course (this time shifting between the “regular” Batwoman art and a style I would almost describe as a Geof Darrow-influenced clear-line for depicting the interactions between the police officer love interest and normal citizens). CONTINUITY NOTE: Bette Kane, in training to become Flamebird all over again, refers to having been a former Teen Titan, which – I thought the Teen Titans were now no longer around before Tim Drake founded them? Who knows. But this is a damn good book.

EDIT TO UPDATE BECAUSE PEOPLE KEEP BUGGING ME ABOUT IT: DEMON KNIGHTS #1: This comic was okay, siding on good, but everybody jizzing about it needs to acknowledge the fact that right now it’s a competent fantasy comic that’s mostly all prologue so far and that doesn’t mean we should go all Special Olympics to cheer it on. It’s perfectly all right, but it’s nothing I would call excellent (and I would call both Superboy and Batwoman excellent and I think Demon Knights is in this week’s second tier of #1s, alongside Frankenstein and Resurrection Man). I think a lot of its acclaim stems from the fact that it’s a sword-and-sorcery comic and it actually exists (much like how some people were applauding Men of War for being a war comic, although Knights is a much better comic than Men of War was).

Also Etrigan doesn’t talk in rhyme and what is the point of using Etrigan if he doesn’t talk in fucking rhyme I ask you. I’m sorry, but my Etrigan is a rhyming, evil dickhead. Period. I am biased in this respect.

So a little while back I asked if anybody was interested in a “brief collaboration,” and I got a pretty healthy response. The reason I asked was because of this and this and particluarly this (seriously, I love Kevin’s dialogue there), and I decided that I wanted to do one.

But then a whole a bunch of ridiculously talented artists contacted me (and continue to do so! Because it’s not like I set a deadline on it!), and really, I have never been the guy who only eats one Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the package, you know? So a bunch of these are coming up in the near future.

First off, we have Sheli Hay, starting us off with exactly who you think this blog would start this thing.

(First, let me apologize for the lack of a post last week. My job is dealing with a whole bunch of new regulations that rolled out on September 1st, and I wound up working 57 hours that week to help out. Blogging kind of fell by the wayside as a result; normal service has resumed now that I’m down to a relatively sedate 50 or so. Now, on with the post!)

Recently, MGK said in one of his posts that ‘Flashpoint’ was the worst crossover since ‘Millennium’. I think this is a little unfair…to ‘Millennium’, an early crossover that should still probably count as more of a “fascinating failure” than a “flawed success”, but did and does have some things to recommend it. Compared to the ambition, energy, and the sheer work that went into “Millennium”, “Flashpoint” is exposed even more as the lazy, slapdash retread that it really is.

For those of you not familiar with “Millennium”, it went down like this. The Guardians of the universe, at that point in DC history, had left the universe to go make nookie with their female counterparts, the Zamarons. But they had announced that there would be a new race of Guardians to take their place, because the universe kind of needs them. “Millennium” opens up with one Guardian and one Zamaron showing up on Earth to announce that the new Guardians would arise from a group of ordinary human beings, and that they had come to find them and teach them about their new role in the scheme of things.

This isn’t a bad start to a crossover; it goes a long way towards explaining why the Guardians have taken three times as many Green Lanterns from one planet as they have from some entire sectors, and the idea of seemingly ordinary human beings who have a great cosmic destiny is a classic trope that can be well-handled. The actual people involved (the so-called “New Guardians”)…well, let’s give credit where it is due and point out that it was a real and earnest effort to create a racially diverse group of protagonists that included an openly gay man and a Muslim woman, two groups that are more underrepresented now than they were in a mid-80s crossover. But we should also admit that this was the mid-80s, that Steve Englehart’s attempts to inhabit the mindset of his ethnically diverse cast resulted in some painfully awkward stereotypes, and that the resultant superheroes were frequently and powerfully lame.

But of course, it wouldn’t be much of a comic-book crossover if there was no conflict, and this one had as its villains the Manhunters. I forget whether this was the point at which they revealed that all the Manhunters and the Manhunter organization and everything “Manhunteresque” was actually a front for a group of androids that were the Guardians’ first attempts at creating a universal police force, or if that had been known already and this was just where the Manhunters’ master plan was revealed. But basically, the Manhunters decided that they’d just seen off one group of Guardians, and the universe didn’t need another, and they were going to scuttle the attempt to create a new breed of Guardians before it started. And building off of the events of ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’, they had found that sphere that Harbinger had recorded the entire history of the DC Universe on, which turned out to be kind of a bad thing for her to do on account of how she had used the Monitor’s technology to find out the secret identities of every superhero in the world.

This meant that the Manhunters had known for a long time who the Guardians would turn to in order to protect their successors, and had planted “sleeper agents” all over the world. So there were lots of shocking betrayals, as long-time supporting cast members turned out to be androids or traitors (or, in the case of Laurel Kent, an android traitor.) This was a pretty good idea for a dramatic story (at least, good enough that they would shamelessly rip it off in a couple of decades for “Infinite Crisis”), and it did give us one of the best crossover moments ever as Batman shows up in Commissioner Gordon’s office to tell him about the situation. He says as he’s climbing back out the window, “The Manhunters have placed sleeper agents all over the world,” and Gordon pistol-whips him across the back of the head, shoves him out the window, and says, “I know.”

This is followed up on in Batman’s own book, which is something else worth commenting on; after hearing comics fans’ complaints about two consecutive crossovers where the tie-ins were meaningless “red sky” issues that just had the logo on them to get completists interested, “Millennium” actually had events in the main series that were followed up on in that week’s actual comics. A major character’s death happened in one of the tie-ins, the heroes found out about the bad guys’ base in a tie-in, and basically the main series was just the spine of a much larger story. Which means that the “Millennium” trade paperback makes the series seem a lot worse than it was. It also gave comics fans a whole new area of complaint: “Why do I have to buy every single tie-in just to find out what’s going on?!?!?!?!?!?!”

In the end, “Millennium” did have a lot of problems. Booster Gold’s heel turn and subsequent betrayal of the bad guys is so ineptly handled that even the writers didn’t seem to know what side he was on (I actually asked; Englehart was firmly convinced that Booster Gold was cynically switching sides to whoever seemed most likely to win, while Dan Jurgens said that Booster was always a good guy and was playing the Manhunters for suckers by exploiting his reputation as a greedy cynic.) The actual New Guardians were incredibly stupid, both in their specific concepts and in the general idea that creating a new breed of Guardians of the Universe would result in just another super-hero team, and their series only lasted twelve issues. And a lot of the writing, in retrospect, feels clumsy and stilted. But it’s worth remembering that the tentpole crossover was in its infancy back then, and the writers and editors were feeling out a lot of the rules as they went along. There was a very real honesty to it that I admire, an attempt to really do something worthy of their readers’ time and money instead of just this year’s crossover, and it did a lot more right than it’s remembered for.

I somehow don’t think people will be saying the same thing about “Flashpoint” in 20 years.

Any artists interested in a brief collaboration – other than those I’m already working with – shoot me an email? I have an Idea.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #1: The reason people keep calling this “like a comic you get with an action figure” is because it’s just that: it’s very generic and barely does anything. Geoff Johns has a few good lines, and Jim Lee is still an excellent superhero artist (a terribly boring costume designer, mind you, but a great artist), but you could have Alan Moore and George Perez teaming up to create the greatest superhero book of all time and if it was twenty-four pages of Batman and Green Lantern snarking at one another plus a brief fight with a parademon it would still be boring.1 There’s just no there there; it’s empty and moribund, and all the craft in the world can’t disguise that. Surely we can aspire to better than competency for DC’s supposed flagship book? (See also: John Solomon’s old complaint about webcomics where the first installment is “hey everybody here’s my cast and I promise exciting fun times starting with next week” and apply it here.)

ACTION COMICS #1: This is a really great comic in all respects, except that the Blue Jeans Superman costume is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Every time I see it in a panel I am reminded that I am reading a Superman comic where Superman is dressed like a dork. It just takes me out of an otherwise first-rate Superman book, which hearkens back to Superman’s 1930s trustbusting roots in a way that feels organic and unforced and fresh, and gets Clark’s Lois and Jimmy early-relationship dynamics right, and has Clark exploring his growing powers in a neat way, and on top of all of that comes up with some clever minor revisions to the Superman mythos (either Clark or Lois are working for a paper other than the Daily Planet? Whaaaaaa?). But seriously, it is like Grant Morrison saw the Super-Armor costume and thought “well, I can top that.”

JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL #1: Surprisingly tepid. There are some good ideas here (Batman being an “unofficial” member of the team who shows up despite nobody in power wanting him there) alongside some odd ones (Godiva? Really? I mean… really?) and Yet Another Guy Gardner Tantrum, but this book doesn’t have any of the personality I think everybody hoped a new JLI comic would have and that Generation Lost in fact did have. It’s not terrible by any means, but it’s very much Just Another Team Book, which has to be regarded as a disappointment given the brand in question. Also, Vixen is once again so obviously just there to round out the demographics that I mentally have started calling her “Token.”

GREEN ARROW #1: Basically Green Arrow is a hero who is also kind of a douche, except it’s not Guy Gardner-style entertaining in the least.

STORMWATCH #1: You kind of have to love that Paul Cornell’s answer to the redundancy of Stormwatch in a universe that already had the Justice League is to say that Stormwatch are the real defenders of Earth and that the Justice League are posers, and to have the Martian Manhunter be the one to say that to boot. That takes balls I didn’t think anybody writing for DC still had. Plus, it turns out that this book is the temporal successor to Demon Knights, Cornell’s other nuDCU comic, and that’s cute. I’m not sure how long all of this will last before the DC Importance Police show up and remind us all that Hal and Barry and Ray Palmer are so much cooler than anybody else you guys, but for now it’s amusing and a decent book.

OMAC #1: It’s twenty-two pages of Keith Giffen doing an extended Jack Kirby homage. Because I like Keith Giffen as an artist and a writer, I will not use the words “jacking off” to describe this in any way.

BATWING #1: This was really quite decent. I don’t think it’ll last very long, but they’ve clearly gone and worked up an entire African superheroing mythos for the backstory of the comic, which I can appreciate even if it’s only to have victims for Batwing to avenge, and the art and story are genuinely strong. This was probably the nicest surprise of the first week’s batch of #1s and I hope I’m proven wrong and that DC can write a book about an African protagonist that their core audience of fanboys (who are their lifeblood and we all know it) wants to read. I don’t think I will be, though.

MEN OF WAR #1: I like war comics. This is a lousy one. I get that the idea of “war comic in a superhero universe” is a good one, but other than a token superhero-related disaster – one so generic that this could be set in any universe at all, one that could have as easily been a meteor strike because it was just that abstracted – they instead spend an issue writing a terrible war comic, one where a soldier lures a bunch of enemies into a cave and then comes out with an assault rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other like he’s Arnold circa 1986, except it’s a beefy white dude with a moustache instead because you can still have those in war comics.2 Then there’s a backup story where the soldiers have to make the tough call of whether or not to kill an insurgent girl child soldier, which is actually a great idea for a war comic short story, until it turns out that she’s not a soldier at all and instead an evil terrorist was using her as a decoy, which sucks. Garth Ennis would not use this comic as toilet paper.

SWAMP THING #1: A really good start to a comic that seems to remember that Swamp Thing is supposed to be a horror book, and generally heads in that direction, and is only marred by the fact that Yanick Paquette is forced to demonstrate, yet again, that there is not a single superhero artist on the planet who can make the Super-Armor look good.

STATIC SHOCK #1: Perfectly acceptable comics, but feels like issue #47 of an ongoing Static Shock series rather than a fresh #1. Static’s powers are poorly explained, and that doesn’t matter to me because I’ve already read all the Static comics there are, but maybe in a #1 issue that comes alongside a reboot of the entire comics universe the comic is in, the writers could possibly take a panel to explain who the hell Hardware is and why he is in my Static comic, on the assumption that someone who wants to read this as their first comic – and remember, this is a comic slightly tied into a once-successful cartoon – could know the basics about Static’s MO? I mean, I get that not every issue can or should read as a potential reader’s first issue (I think that trope can oversimplify the comics reading experience), but I think that rule should always apply for the first issue of a book.

HAWK AND DOVE #1: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAA oh god they’re serious

LATE ADDITION: BATGIRL #1: Wow, this was lackluster, and I never thought I’d say that about a comic written by Gail Simone. I mean, Simone has made one or two mistakes as a writer – everybody has – but she’s never written a comic I would honestly call “boring” before. But Batgirl is a boring comic, despite it ostensibly doing what a first issue of a superhero comic should – I mean, there are the requisite number of fights and everything. But the constant narration is overwrought in the extreme, the choice to make Barbara’s physical return as Batgirl a sort of sequel to her Oracle days via some odd unexplained miracle of spinal regrowth is just weird, and the most interesting thing about the entire comic turns out to be that now Commissioner Gordon is also a redhead like his daughter.

1. Also it would make reference to the sex life of Nostradamus, who in this continuity would also be a legacy precursor to Blue Beetle. [↩]
2. And when they are Harvey Bullock, but that’s it. [↩]

In the recommendations made to Jim after his recent post, mixed in among the thirty thousand odd recommendations of Avengers Academy (which isn’t bad by any means, but seriously, it’s not even in the top dozen things Marvel is putting out these days) were a couple for Uncanny X-Force, which I wanted to echo because UXF manages to be a massively entertaining comic despite having the uber-tired premise of “we’re the X-Men who totally kill baddies,” which should earn it some sort of award for operating under a handicap.

It’s a good comic for two reasons: it has consistently good art, and Rick Remender knows both what he wants to do with the characters and the larger story he wants to tell, which is why he’s selected characters that benefit that story. Wolverine, obviously, but a supporting cast of Psylocke, Fantomex and Deadpool all work well – and then there’s Archangel, and the biggest coup Remender’s managed on UXF is that he’s finally pulled the trigger on Warren Worthington, who was always basically a boring character with wings when he wasn’t being Archangel, by turning him into the next Apocalypse.

Remender rightly saw that Warren was only ever even slightly interesting when he was at war with his evil self, which suggests that the evil self is what was really interesting all along, and thus far that appears to be the case: evil Archangel is much more interesting than good Archangel/Angel ever was, not least because he’s such an atypically pleasant and polite murderous maniac. And best of all, given the most recent issue, it appears that this character shift is going to stick for the next few whiles, if only because as of the events of issue 14 I can’t see a way that they can redeem him any time soon.

Which is good, because the X-Men, as a franchise, should float a character from good to bad or vice versa from time to time: the best villains in the X-books are always those who have sort of a point, and Archangelypse (who, after all, only wants to commit mass genocide so that humanity can eventually survive the coming of the Celestials) fits the bill. Besides, with Emma Frost and Magneto and even the likes of Legion, Scalphunter and Frenzy ending up all in the X-Men’s ranks, it was well past time that one of the X-Men turn bad to balance the scales.

Heya folks, it’s Jim.  Jim Smith.  I’m stating my name over and over because I’m about to ask for comics recommendations, and I’m trying to make sure everybody knows who’s asking.

So by November it looks like my pull list will be down to ten books: Alpha Flight, Captain America, Captain America and Bucky,Daredevil, Fantastic Four (or FF or whatever), Herc, Legion of Super-Heroes, Legion Lost, Secret Avengers, and Thunderbolts.  And Herc is ending in November, so that sucks.

This is perhaps the fewest titles I’ve collected in over a decade.  Admittedly, in these troubled times I should probably be glad to save money by buying fewer comics, but you have to understand my background–I used to have to drive 40 miles to the nearest comics shop, so I developed a strong urge to make each trip count.  Nine comics a month feels…un-American or something.

That’s why I’m here asking for books I should start picking up.  This is kind of self-serving, but it’s Labor Day weekend and I happen to know you have nothing better to do because the whole internet went on vacation but you’re checking this site for updates anyway.

Now, you’ll notice I’ve only got two DCU books on my list.  There is a good reason for that: DC has spent all summer trying to get everyone to try out any of their fifty-two titles, so I have had plenty of time to think it over, and only two of them really won me over, and that’s mostly because they pick up from two series I was already reading.  So there’s not much point in trying to sell me on any DCU stuff right now–yes, I know Grant Morrison’s writing Action Comics, and there’s really nothing else you can add that hasn’t already been taken into consideration.

Other than that, suggest whatever the hell you want, as long it’s a current ongoing monthly.  If I can read Alpha Flight, heaven knows I’ll try anything.

…was more like Flashpointless, am I right?

Honestly, this is probably the worst major comics event I’ve read since… probably Millennium. It was genuinely terrible, across the board bad: whole heaps of joylessness shoved into comic after comic after comic. I mean, we all knew that Flashpoint was just an excuse to hit the reset button so they could proceed with the reboot12, but all of the sub-events seemed designed to just be an exercise in demonstrating to the reader how very serious and dark this new alternate reality was:

• Batman: Knight of Vengeance: Thomas Wayne is a crazy murderer! So is Martha Wayne!
• Deadman and the Flying Graysons: The Amazons kill everybody!
• Citizen Cold: Captain Cold is a hero! But he’s not! So he kills everybody! Then he dies!
• Deathstroke: Deathstroke rescues his daughter – by killing everybody!
• The Outsider: The Outsider kills a bunch of people we like in regular comics!
• Project: Superman: Superman is held captive for years and years, until he breaks out… and kills a dude who was responsible for holding him captive!
• Grodd of War: Gorilla Grodd kills everybody in Africa who isn’t a smart gorilla! And then he throws a tantrum and kills some gorillas!
• Emperor Aquaman / Wonder Woman and the Furies: Both sides commit multiple genocides!
• Legion of Doom: I’m not sure. I tried to read the first issue and then I said “no, wait, this is dreck” and gave up. But, I am going to go out on a limb here – I’m betting a lot of people got killed.

And all of that is before we discuss the main series, wherein we learn that they made Captain Marvel grim-and-gritty in this universe. Captain Marvel. What the hell, DC.

I mean, how much killing does it really take to underscore the point that Earth-Flashpoint is a horrible place? At a certain point it all just fades into meaninglessness, a body count for the sake of a body count, all of it entirely without heft or import because it’s effectively an “imaginary story” giving the serial reader no point at which to sympathize or otherwise care about the dead bodies left in its wake. For a comics company that has predicated its existence on the idea of stories that “matter” to create an enormous Macguffin of a story that only exists to propel the company into its reboot is shocking for all the wrong reasons.

All the moreso because we already have a perfectly good example of a linewide “imaginary storyverse” event that was both entertaining and popular. Does anybody remember the Amalgam universe? Really, the comparisons between it and Flashpoint are numerous: an alternate universe with no “importance” beyond the event itself, explored in a number of smaller stories to offer up a hint of the enormity of describing an entire continuity in a dozen comics. Except that Amalgam wasn’t terrible.

1. I’ve said my piece about that already, but will add that >Justice League #1 is a boring, generic comic that seems to have no point other than let people play with Darkseid again. Someone on Twitter described it as “like a comic you get with an action figure,” and that is pretty accurate. [↩]
2. And did anybody really MISS Darkseid? [↩]