Now, four years later, the fact that Jason Todd sucks has once again become a fact of nigh-universal agreement. His apparent death in Batman: Battle For The Cowl was widely cheered: whatever time in the sun the character might have had was long since past. Jason Todd sucks. Everybody knows this.

But they didn’t have to know it. There was no good reason that Jason Todd’s return had to be so sucky.

A recap, first, if we will. The idea of Jason Todd’s return was stoked by Jeph Loeb’s teasing of a Jason/Batman fight in Hush, his extremely popular (and mediocre) epic Batman story. Sure, in Hush the Jason Todd reveal turned out to actually be Clayface, but that didn’t matter – bringing the idea forward like that primed the pump, much like Grant Morrison mentioning in Wizard how Batman undoubtedly had a contingency plan for every member of the Justice League primed the pump for Mark Waid writing “Tower of Babel” years later.

There’s a good reason for it: “what if Jason Todd came back” was a really good idea. Forcing Batman to relive his greatest failure – and the implicit criticisms of his method that are inherent in Jason Todd’s presence – is goddamned great story fodder, because under normal circumstances Batman is a very difficult character to believably threaten or damage. He’s Batman: he’s the best at everything always. That’s why he’s Batman, but this makes it hard to create an antagonist who can really get to him. The Joker and Two-Face and all the rest can be external threats to Batman, but they really can’t get inside his head and make him doubt himself. Jason Todd, however, could do that.

It would work on multiple levels: Batman’s mistake with Jason wasn’t that he failed to save Jason from the Joker, but that Jason should never have been Robin in the first place, and neither Batman nor Jason would realize that.1 Jason could potentially blame Bruce not only for his death but for the death of his mother as well (completely wrongly, of course, but good melodrama is good melodrama). And, of course, there was the potential that Jason would not forget his general inclination towards justice, but instead take the Punisher route. (Which of course happened, sort of.)

Why did it take so long? I think the two major obstacles to doing it were firstly the difficulty in resurrecting Jason (which was the lesser problem of the two, given that we are talking about superhero comics in general and a hero with a major villain whose superpower is essentially resurrection via Lazurus Pit in specific), and secondly the inertia of beliefs in the comics community. Comics – especially superhero comics – is a community that is very conservative when it comes to abandoning tried-and-true beliefs. For years it was gospel that Jason Todd was a sucky, unpopular character, and any resurrection would poison the Batman franchise.2 What wasn’t considered was that Jason didn’t necessarily have to be resurrected as Robin, and that was why the Jeph Loeb tease worked so well; it turned preconception on its head.

So what went wrong? It certainly wasn’t the original story that brought Jason back. “Under the Hood” isn’t one of the all-time classic Batman stories, but it’s very solid: beautiful Doug Mahnke art for most of the story, a reasonable, sensible plot arc, an absolutely killer costume for the Red Hood (it’s such a great update on the original Red Hood costume – it’s streamlined and cool, but with a real underlying sense of sheer malevolence to it), and occasional clever turns of phrase by Judd Winick, who is one of the truly overly maligned comics writers of the last few years; Winick has his flaws to be sure, but I can think of a good dozen writers or more who have committed any number of greater sins.3 There are mistakes: Jason is revealed before the big dramatic reveal to Batman, for example (in a move that is so counterintuitive to basic story considerations, I can’t help but wonder if an editorial need to sell more issues wasn’t involved), and the use of the Black Mask is kind of corny, and Winick really, really sucks at writing the Joker. But as plot-driven comics go, “Under the Hood” is entirely okay.

And, although Superboy Prime punching time was indeed lame and one of the silliest things to come out of comics in years, an instant in-joke for comics fans everywhere, DC handled it properly with respect to Jason: Prime’s time punches resurrected Jason in one page and the rest of his “new origin” ignored it, and indeed Jason eventually got dipped in the Lazarus Pits to get the resurrection job fully done, in keeping with the Batman mythos. So it wasn’t that either.

What happened? A lot. First off, “Under the Hood” wasn’t a self-contained story: somebody at DC decided that it would be best to keep Jason around. This was understandable, but if you’re going to do something as major as bring Jason Todd back (and bringing him back was the Batman equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb), you can’t give up on the Batman/Jason story and do something else without making it look like DC has a bad case of attention deficit disorder. This was of course exactly what happened. First off, Jason showed up in Nightwing, in one of the truly freakish stories of the last decade, where he impersonated Nightwing for a time, and then fought Nightwing, and then for a brief period of time he was turned into a sort of tentacle monster thingie. This was exactly as good as you think it was, assuming you thought “wow, that sounds bad.”

After that, Winick got his hands on Jason again, but this time around in the pages of Green Arrow, where he used Jason as a foil for Oliver Queen. The story was inoffensive; bland, maybe, but nothing outright bad. This would mark the final high point in Jason Todd’s DC comics return, and that a nothingish story like this one would be considered a “high point” should explain how bad much of Jason’s return would overall be.

Because up next was Countdown to Final Crisis, the legendarily shitty DC weekly series. In this series, Jason was teamed up with Donna Troy and Kyle Rayner to hunt for Ray Palmer for some reason. I don’t quite remember why, to be honest. Some universe-saving thing. Countdown was so bad I’ve struck most of it out of memory. What I do remember is Jason Todd donning the “Red Robin” costume from Kingdom Come at some point, which is a mistake in and of itself because the Red Robin costume is fucking ugly; Alex Ross has certainly had his share of costume design successes, but also a few stinkers, and Red Robin is among his worst. It’s like a grade-school parody of what “grown up Robin” should look like.

The other problem with Countdown and its effect on Jason was its scope. Countdown was, shitty execution aside, a cosmic-level story about the birth and death of universes. Jason Todd is a really fit, smart guy with some guns and a fancy knife and Batarangs.4 One might begin to see that Jason was on a stage he was never meant to occupy. On the scale of Countdown, Jason Todd inevitably ends up looking like a pussy compared to Kyle “I have Ion power” Rayner and Donna “I’m like a second-rate Wonder Woman” Troy, and when you look bad compared to Donna Troy – one of the great unlikable, pointless trainwrecks in DC comics history – you’re in the wrong damn comic book.

Hell, Batman only barely gets away with being in massive universe-bending crossovers, and he does it mostly on the basis of A) being a master planner and B) being Batman Who Is The Best At Everything. (And even then, smart writers minimize his use. Batman does not play a large role in Crisis on Infinite Earths, or Invasion!, or Final Night, or indeed most of the successful massive DC crossovers of the past twenty years.) Jason Todd isn’t a master planner, and even if he were he never got the chance to plan masterfully within the story. What’s more, he can’t be the Best At Everything, because he’s Batman’s ex-sidekick and therefore by definition isn’t as good at everything as Batman is. The entire storyline of Countdown would inevitably diminish Jason; there was no way it could do anything else.

After that, the Red Robin costume got dragged out again for another Jason story, this time in the pages of Robin. The story was not especially bad, but had that same inessential quality that all Robin comic books have; when you’re reading Robin, it might as well come with a big stamp on it saying “you’re reading about Batman’s sidekick, what do you expect? We save the cool shit for Batman.” Anyway, Jason Todd got shown up to look like a horse’s ass in the story, but given that he’d spent a whole year looking like a chump in Countdown this was nothing new. Jason Todd was now the official whipping boy of the Batman family; it had taken about a year and a half to completely trash all of the dangerous quality that was the essence of his appeal.

Which brings us to Battle for the Cowl, wherein Jason decided to become the new Batman, but the Killer Evil Batman Who Kills People. (Wearing a Batman costume that was, I am sure, purposefully lame and ugly.) In this wretched story that only served to draw out the obvious and inevitable conclusion of Dick Grayson taking over as Batman – and everybody, absolutely everybody knew Dick would be Batman – Jason was portrayed as having gone more or less crazy. He was outwitted repeatedly by both Tim and Dick, made to look like a chump numerous times; his only advantage was that he was willing to kill people, and in seventy-five years of Batman comics, the only thing that is certain is that a willingness to kill is never an advantage.5 Jason essentially took over the role played by the Reaper in earlier Batman comics. Do you remember the Reaper? He was a chump who was obviously there only to lose to Batman.

That’s what Jason Todd is now; the chump. His importance was always defined by the fact that he was a credible threat to what Batman stood for and believed in, as opposed to being a credible threat to Batman’s physical health; now he’s been neutered about as definitively as one can neuter a character.

Jason “died” a totally unconvincing death at the end of Battle for the Cowl, his already tarnished image taking another hit. It’s a shame, because in a (temporarily) Bruce Wayne-less world, Jason becomes even more relevant to Dick being Batman; he’s the Other Brother, the one gone bad, the one who learned all of Batman’s lessons but never understood their meaning. There could have been a truly epic story of a duel between Dick and Jason. It’s not impossible that this could still be the case, but it would require fans overlooking all of the new baggage DC has given Jason Todd in the past two years. And that’s a lot to ask; it’s hard to buy Jason as a serious antagonist now.6 In professional wrestling terms, Jason Todd’s been jobbed out.

And what’s worse, unlike in professional wrestling, you can’t just throw Jason into a different feud to build him up as a threat again; Jason Todd is defined by what happened to him as a part of the Batman family, and throwing him against, say, Booster Gold won’t do anything except seem random. For better or worse, Jason Todd’s resurrection has been squandered about as greatly as one can squander a great story idea; he’s the poster boy for How Not To Do It. And that’s a shame.

1. Dick Grayson might have, but that is neither here nor there. [↩]
2. This was especially firmly believed at least in part because of the popularity of Tim Drake. Speaking of which, why is Tim Drake so popular? He’s really, really boring; I can’t think of a single Tim Drake Moment that was unique to the character, rather than just the expected reaction of anybody dropped into his situation. He’s very generic. [↩]
3. Plus, Barry Ween. [↩]
4. Or are they Redhoodarangs? This was never adequately explained. [↩]
5. And also that hot chicks dig Batman. [↩]
6. He may show up in Batman and Robin – I think Grant Morrison is probably the only writer left at this point who can use him and not have fans outright laugh. [↩]

When you need a photographer, you can’t just settle for some down-on-his-luck freelancer. You need the best: someone with the composition skill of Ansel Adams and the balls and timing of Eddie Adams.

You know who you go to when you need the best, don’t you?

Damn straight – you hire Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.

Top comment: Rex is already a better writer than David Brooks. — tinheart

ITEM! Marvel Comics have the rights to Marvelman! Oh my god, how amazing is that? Marvel, Marvelman, it’s like God intended this to be! Okay, so maybe Marvel doesn’t necessarily yet have the rights to the Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman stories that are the only reason anybody other than the most devoted of British comics nerds gives a shit about Marvelman, but I’m sure that twenty years of lawsuits will all go away now. And if they don’t – well, given how well the Sentry has proven that a Superman analogue character can fit into the Marvel Universe, I know I can’t wait for a Captain Marvel (Shazam, not black lady or alien guy) analogue to fit into the Marvel Universe! I totally bet Norman Osborn hires him and then WHOOPSIE Kid Marvelman rapes the entire population of Melbourne to death. And then Hawkeye will go on TV and say “see? Norman Osborn is bad.” All this and more, brought to you by the pending Marvelman creative team of Zeb Wells and Phil Jiminez!

ITEM! Longbox announced a whole new bunch of companies that make, like, one comic apiece signing on to their digital download service. Meanwhile, Marvel announced their brilliant new digital delivery content model: comics on iTunes! Well, sort of comics. They are comics with “animated panels and voice-over work from popular actors.” (I bet you didn’t know Tony Stark sounds just like Seth Green!) Given how critically brilliant that whole “Watchmen The Motion Comic” thing was, I’m sure this will be every bit as good! And come on, it’s Marvel Comics – is there a comics company with a better track record of digital delivery than Marvel?

ITEM! DC Comics has finally acquired the rights to T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Dan Didio explains he’s been trying to get that done for a long time. (This may or may not explain a whole lot about DC Comics.) Apparently the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents will be brought into the DC Universe, which will be great because look how well that worked for the Milestone superheroes!

ITEM! Red She-Hulk was originally going to be Dark She-Hulk but they changed it at the last minute. This is all part of the plan for World War Hulks next year! The year after that comes Civil Wars! And then possibly Red Reigns. Says Joe Quesada: “Pluralization is the new dark. Or possibly red.” New titles from Marvel will include renaming Deadpool Redpool. He will also get a new costume, which will be even more red than previously!

ITEM! Jeff Smith does more Bone comics. (I actually have nothing sarcastic to say about this, other than possibly a potential comparison to The Silmarillion.)

ITEM! Did you know Lost and Chuck and Heroes are coming back for another season? Well, they are! I bet you didn’t know that! The producers had special panels to tell fans that the upcoming seasons would be “more awesome than ever” and that “we’ll tie together a lot of unanswered questions,” and “you’ll be blown away.” Amazingly enough, the producers of Jonah Hex, Twilight: New Moon, Iron Man 2, Avatar, Tron Legacy, and Prince of Persia all said exactly the same thing! There’s going to be a whole lot of blown away fans next year! (The producers of Glee also said all of this, but the fans just asked them where the vampire zombies were.)

ITEM! PRACTICALLY NOTHING EVER HAPPENS OR IS REVEALED AT SAN DIEGO THAT FUCKING MATTERS. THE ENTIRE FUCKING THING IS LIKE A MOVIE TRAILER THAT LASTS FOR A FUCKING WEEK!

LIKED

– The Hurt Locker is really, really good; tense action sequences combined with an outstanding performance by Jeremy Renner make for a goddamn fantastic movie. (Of course, the movie’s best sequence is the sniper battle – not in small part because that is when Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce and David Morse show up as British commandoes in a “hey, we’re actual movie stars” moment.) Kathryn Bigelow deserves more work than she gets.

– I enjoyed Race to Witch Mountain more than I probably should have. At some point somebody is going to make a movie worthy of the Rock’s talents; he’s simply so effortless in light action comedy flicks in a way that most actors simply aren’t. (Possibly because he is very big.) Race isn’t that movie, but it’s good enough for popcorn and a rental.

– The Blackest Night issue of Green Lantern was more what I wanted out of Blackest Night: IE, superheroes beating the shit out of super-zombies and vice-versa.

DIDN’T LIKE

– With each week I grow less enthused about Wednesday Comics. The Superman strip is just a goddamn embarrassment; in three weeks there has been approximately 700 percent more “Superman whining about his life” than “Superman punching things.” Bear in mind that this is the strip running in USA Today – somebody at DC seriously thought that Superman whining was the best possible thing to expose DC Comics to a wide audience. The Batman strip is only marginally better than the Superman one is; I don’t think it’s too much for Batman to do something in three weeks of a Batman strip. The Metamorpho strip, more and more, seems like Neil Gaiman slumming for kicks (in a bad way). There are still good points (Paul Pope’s Adam Strange, Kyle Baker’s Hawkman), but they’re increasingly few.

“Along with showing several clips from the first episode, the voice actors did a reading of a scene written just for the panel. It surrounds Doom’s quest to acquire a convention-exclusive ‘My Little Pony’ collectible at Comic-Con.”

Got to see Green Lantern: First Flight yesterday, and… well, I kinda give it a thumbs in the middle.

continue reading "First Flight"

You really have to wonder about comic book writers sometimes and if they’re not just playing a gag on you. Such is the reaction I get when I look at The Gang. They look like a comic book writer got inspired on a trip to Bulk Barn. “Hey, what if we had no-name brand X supervillains?”

Hence, The Gang. You have Brains, with the red uniform, who is the Smart One. You have Kong, with the green uniform, who is the Strong One. You have Ms. Mesmer, in yellow, who is The One With The Gimmick. And you have Bulldozer, in blue, who is Also The Strong One. (Presumably they felt that Ms. Mesmer having a thing was almost too individual, so they doubled down and made Bulldozer a shorter version of Kong with a slightly different fighting style.) If The Gang were pills, they would all be generic aspirins.

No coincidence that they made their debut in The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl, quite possibly one of the dullest comic books of all time. (Seriously, go track it down sometime. Then pawn off the books on somebody else. That is how dull they are; you have to witness it to understand it. They are the event horizon of dull.)

I want this entry to be longer, but The Gang is just so goddamned plain. It’s like talking about vanilla ice cream, and not good vanilla or French vanilla or vanilla mint; The Gang are the vanilla ice cream you get for $2.99 at the back of the freezer, the one you know probably gets made with artificial vanilla extract and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. It tastes like inoffensiveness.

Top comment: I’m surprised you didn’t notice that out of a group of criminals supposedly determined not to go to jail, the one named “Brains” is the only one not concealing her face. — 01d55

Top comments:

The above was, of course, translated from the original near-incomprehensible Donald Duckese by a team of crack cryptographers. — Keogh

Don’t you mean quack cryptographers? — Tornado Ninja Fan

LIKED

– Harry Potter and the Sixth Movie is decent. It’s not in the league of Star Trek or Up for summer quality, but it’s entertaining and well-made on all levels, which has been a fucking rarity in the land of the summer blockbuster this year. You have to really admire how the movies manage to take everything of quality out of the increasingly mediocre progression of books and ignore all the extra flotsam. (For example, Dobby has not shown up once since the second movie, which just goes to show you that the producers understand that Dobby is horrible in all ways.) This time around, Emma Watson really steps up her acting a notch, and Tom Felton makes Draco compelling and sad, which the book never really managed to do.

– Also finally got around to seeing Adventureland and was terribly impressed by it. It turns out Kristen Stewart can actually act when she is not in a shitty movie about sparkle vampires, and Ryan Reynolds’ turn as the park handyman/fading rocker is magnetic in the sort of way that Brad Pitt was in Thelma and Louise. And Jesse Eisenberg is like Michael Cera if Michael Cera wasn’t sometimes horribly annoying in a sort of “I need to punch you in the face” way.

– After a couple of marathon sessions I can safely say that Small World is definitely my frontrunner for “best board game of the year.” It’s quick (about an hour per session when people know the rules), strategic without being boring, has that random element that makes games interesting without being overly luck-based, and best of all it’s the sort of game that’s inherently funny. “A-ha! The Bivouacking Sorcerers strike with great vengeance upon your Dragon Master Halflings!”

DIDN’T LIKE

– Yeah, Blackest Night sure sucked.

Someone emailed me about this municipal tax change in Los Angeles, wherein “creators” are going to be taxed at the rate of “occupations and professions” rather than “wholesale and retail.” (WARNING: link contains lengthy comments section dominated by possibly-retarded Texan who turns the entire thread into a debate about whether or not Barack Obama is a secret Marxist and why Texas would be fine and dandy were it to secede.)

Thanks to Creators Syndicate and other such groups flexing their muscles, back in the 1990s creators were classified as “wholesale and retail” business, which has a lower tax rate. In Los Angeles, this matters, because a lot of creative muscle resides in the city. Anyway, Creators Syndicate is predictably throwing a hissy and threatening to leave. I particularly liked how Rick Newcombe, in his Wall Street Journal moanfest, complains that the city is “ignoring its own ruling” and that “the city is not bound by past rulings – only taxpayers are.”

Well, yes, of course that’s the case; any ruling on a tax situation in Los Angeles is going to be issued by the city clerk. Is the city clerk a judge? No. Are they a neutral party? No. The city clerk is an employee of the city of Los Angeles, and can reverse a previous ruling pretty much at whim because they’re only really expressing the tax preferences of the city. Sometimes those tax preferences will be “well, fuck it, we don’t want to get into a fight with Creators Syndicate right now.” Sometimes they won’t be.

And let’s be honest: classifying the job of creator as “wholesale and retail” is the most obvious kind of tax dodge in the first place, the sort of ruling that reeks of back-room gladhanding and favour-trading. Creators don’t sell their products on a wholesale or retail basis; they’re either working on a contracted basis or independently generating product that will be sold “wholesale or retail” only very rarely. The professions are more akin to what “creator” is; this reversal is merely a return to sensible tax policy, which is of course why people are screaming bloody murder.

…that over the course of Blackest Night, two things happen.

1.) A whole ton of DC characters are horribly and brutally murdered by zombies.

2.) A whole ton of DC characters who become zombies are miraculously revived so we can return to the status quo.

This is because Blackest Night is, I suspect, the apotheosis of Geoff Johns’ writing career. He gets to kill everybody and then bring them all back in the same miniseries!

Sometimes a good comic can make a big mistake. In Manhunter, that mistake was killing off the Monocle.

This is because the Monocle was a pretty goddamned great supervillain. First off, he has exactly the right amount of tragedy in his origin to be one of your more compelling supervillains. He was an honest businessman and a skilled scientist who got screwed over by greedy bankers (see? See? He’s even more relevant now) and then went the overreacting-because-he’s-a-villain route and started murdering them until Hawkman (who, as a good conservative, of course has to protect Big Bidness from the dangers of the little guy) stopped him.

On top of the great origin story, though, the Monocle brings more to the table. First off, he looks really cool. Full 40’s-style evening dress, complete with opera cloak? Bad. Ass. (Consider how many super-characters wear opera cloaks. It’s Monocle and the Phantom Stranger. That’s pretty rarified company.) And that’s before you get to the Monocle’s monocle, which could shoot lasers and strobe blinding lights and just generally be wicked cool.

Secondly, it’s not just that the Monocle looks classy – it’s that he is classy. When the Ultra-Humanite recruited him for the Earth-2 side of the Secret Society of Super-Villains, the Monocle was in retirement, having stolen quite a lot of money and not needing to be a criminal any more; it took the promise of humiliating Hawkman to lure him back. (This is because Hawkman is a dick and everybody hates him.)

So, the Monocle is cool. What happened? Well, first Brad Meltzer used him for the first time in eons for a brief walk-on in Identity Crisis, where he basically said the Monocle was not all that and a bag of chips. This was hardly the worst thing about Identity Crisis but certainly proof that the comic was flawed on every possible level rather than just being an otherwise okay comic with a big event that was a bad idea. But then, after that, Monocle was used in Manhunter, where he was A) depicted as a whiny coward and B) shot through the eye (and monocle) by Manhunter and killed instantly.

LAME. That moment was the low point of the entire run of Manhunter, an otherwise good comic.

There reasonably has to be a son or twin brother or something who can pick up the Monocle’s monocle and carry on. Good villain concepts are rare. Why waste one?

Jaime Weinman: “The thing that struck me most is that Mr. Weatherbee just seems to accept that once Betty has got a victim in her little school-approved torture chamber, it’s “too late” to stop her. Unless he’s just assuming that Veronica has already been suffocated to death and that Betty is trying to force the poison into her lifeless mouth. That’s just one of the things he has to put up with at his school.”

By Ty Templeton from Secret Origins #49, which will be reprinted approximately never. (Or when DC finally moves to digital throughput, which is about the same thing.)

LIKED

– Tales From Monkey Island Chapter One: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is the first Telltale games adventure “episode” ever that I felt really lived up to the promise of the point-and-click-and-grab-things genre. Most of their previous offerings have been marked by puzzles that fell somewhere in between “unintuitive” and “nonsensical.” But Tales‘ puzzles make sense; they’re not easy, but they’re not so obtuse as to ruin the fun of the story. (Which is fun, incidentally; the story is so far on par with the best Monkey Island games.)

– Wipeout Couples was actually even more enjoyable than regular Wipeout, which is one of the great “sit back and have a beer” teevee shows. Seeing people root for their spouses on the obstacle course (and cheer, and complain) makes it even more fun. Whodathunk?

– The Magic: The Gathering 2010 base set is just shitloads of fun. People complaining about the rules changes need to get slapped for a number of reasons. The base set has knights and dragons and genies and goblins and everything that should be in a Magic base set: the traditional archetypes and things that are awesome about Generic Fantasy Literature ™. And the new spells and cards are flavourful and well-designed.

MEH

– I know I’m going to get pilloried for this, but: Wednesday Comics. The strip quality was good to excellent overall (exceptions: the incoherent Teen Titans and the very been-there-done-that Metal Men and Demon/Catwoman strips), but a lot of the comics didn’t give me the feel of the old weekly serials they were trying to echo: they felt like first pages of short comic stories and nothing more. Which is fine and I enjoyed them, but I’m not gonna go jerking off over the thing because the first page of eleven or twelve stories is awesome; it’s just too small and early a sample for me to call it “good.”

I’d also call into question the value. People have been exclaiming how this is the same price as a normal comic, but normal comics are overpriced. The giant-size of the layout is nice, definitely, and there’s something to be said for the experience of reading a comic newspaper-style – but it doesn’t give me more story. In fact it gives me less. Yes, yes, I’ve seen multiple people talking about the “square foot of comics” measure as if that was somehow relevant (next up: “Wednesday Comics gives you 24% more wood pulp for your dollar!”). And if they were trying to echo the old serials, why wasn’t this thing printed on cheap newsprint and sold for a buck? That would have been a marketing revolution. As it is, it’s just another (admittedly novel) exercise in marketing to the hardcores, and I can’t get that excited over marketing to the hardcores, because that is what is killing superhero comics.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Lesbian Vampire Killers desperately wants to be the next Shaun of the Dead. Here is all you need to know: it is nowhere near being the next Shaun of the Dead. Avoid. Like the plague.