(Seriously, I have like the worst cold ever, I’ve been all ugh for like two days now and the only thing I have in the hopper is this. I usually wait three or four weeks to post a new one of these because I like to space them out but I want to get some content up before I keel over and die of the coughing, so here we go.)

One of the things I’ve said before that I love about the Legion is the variety of setting, all these weird planets (and, to be fair, normal planets) that can have drastically different ways about How Things Work. Coluans literally worship the concept of scientific research, Titanians don’t have a justice system like anybody else because they don’t need one because they already know if you’re innocent or not, Naltorians invented the concept of “pre-crime” ages ago, Tromians aren’t afraid of death because they believe in change as a spiritual systemic concept, the Khund have a belief system somewhere in between modern-day anarchic Satanism and Klingon warrior ritualism, et cetera. All of these societies recognizable to a standard (IE, “our”) perspective, but nonetheless different and with ramifications upon the non-cognizant intruder. (Or, as I once called it, the “Wesley Crusher Gets In Trouble On The Eden Planet” syndrome.)

Well, what about Rimbor? For years it’s been more or less a generic “bad seed” planet. It has gangs! And crime! And… well, that’s mostly it. Ultra Boy is known to have a rough background because he’s from Rimbor, but what does that mean in larger context?

The thing that interests me is that Rimbor, even in Mark Waid’s reboot where the United Planets was essentially a going-stale utopia, was a crime-ridden scum planet. That has potential, because the fact that Rimbor was gangland central even in a utopically-designed collective implies to me that the United Planets knew exactly what Rimbor was and purposefully tolerated it.

Consider, firstly, the concept of Rimbor as galactic equivalent of Australia. In the early days of quantum warp travel, humanity stupidly decided – not for the first time – that the solution to all societal woes was to get rid of “the bad elements,” and that the humane way to do this was to exile them to a nice lush planet somewhere out of the way. Unlike Australia, they actually got the “lush” part right this time: Rimbor was a resource-rich world, teeming with life, almost an Earth 2.0. And thus they dumped all the criminals they could manage and all those people who weren’t actually bad or anything but made the mistake of being the wrong person and the wrong time on Rimbor, and considered the matter done.

Unfortunately, the most powerful gangs had scientists in them, and the gangleaders quickly realized that they had all the means to get off Rimbor if they could manage it. Major gangleaders coalesced power around themselves, all attracting followers with the intent of getting the hell off Rimbor. Generations passed, and what happened on Rimbor became fairly unique; political power became neither hereditary nor democratic, but remained strictly a matter of personal charisma. Mistabigs and jonniroyales arose as the new leadership, each attempting to make his leadership permanent beyond their own lifespan, each failing. In an era where personal communication was instantaneous and widespread, and on a planet where destructive power was essentially impossible to coalesce on a permanent basis, progress only happened in incremental spurts.

But it happened, and four hundred years after Rimbor was colonized, they recontacted the United Planets (now utopic as planned, albeit with several false starts). The UP was somewhat horrified at the chaotic morass that was Rimbor (“one large jumpergang of a planet,” said one councillor), but wiser minds realized that, even in a utopia, there would be malcontents and rebels. So the Rimborian Compromise was introduced into UP law; a lengthy document that can be summed up in one sentence.

“On Rimbor, laws are technically optional.”

On Rimbor, enlistment in the Public Service was entirely a matter of choice (and one not often made); it bred hordes of free thinkers, philosophers, and artists alongside the criminal class which dictated day-to-day affairs planetside. (Most times the free thinkers and artists were criminals themselves. Way of the world, don’t you know.) Corporations flocked to Rimbor to maximize their profit potential by having a corporate base where law could be reformed at will, working in cooperation with the mistabigs; Silverale, 3B, S.O.D.E.R. and OmniNewsTimeNet all call Rimbor their home now. The UP’s best soldiers come from Rimbor, because having to know how to win a knife-fight from the age of six tends to make you tougher than average.

Rimbor is large and chaotic and dirty, but it’s also the third richest planet in the United Planets (after Lexor and Earth). Teachers throughout the UP tell their pupils about the dangers of “lawless Rimbor,” which has a dual purpose – both to revile the greater portion of their classes and to keep an eye on those attracted to the idea of it. The Crime Planet is the back alley of the United Planets, but not by accident; when you need to find something in a hurry and you don’t care how you get it, Rimbor is always there, and someone can probably help you for the right price. But be sure to watch your back: the only lasting rules on Rimbor are the rules of the street. Don’t trust anybody; keep your secrets close; don’t trust anybody; fight on your own terms; and don’t trust anybody.

I’m sure all of this tells you a little bit about the character of Ultra Boy, of course. But that was kind of the point.

NEXT TIME: A Legion member with Issues ™.

Step 1:

Step 2:

ME: So apparently the trailer for Watchmen will run in front of The Dark Knight.
FLAPJACKS: Because they are both comic book movies. I get that!
ME: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe they could run a trailer for the new Terminator in front of it as well, because they both have Christian Bale in the movie. And then maybe a trailer for Traveling because they both have Aaron Eckhart in it. And then – no, wait, Heath Ledger is dead, that one doesn’t work.
ME: It’s also available online.
FLAPJACKS: So we should watch it then.
ME: Aren’t we going to go see it this weekend? On a big screen?
FLAPJACKS: That would mean, like, waiting and shit.
ME: A cogent point.
FLAPJACKS: So let’s watch it now.
ME: All right.
We start watching the trailer.
ME: “In 2009, everything will change.”
FLAPJACKS: Previously, in 2008, the first thirty seconds of the trailer are watching the hairs on Billy Crudup’s arms stand up.
ME: Owlship looks cool.
FLAPJACKS: Yes. Hey, when did Silk Spectre plunge through a burning building and land with great agility on her feet in the comic book?
ME: I believe that did not happen.
FLAPJACKS: Oh.
ME: Adaptation!
FLAPJACKS: Originality!
ME: …wow, the “fling the Comedian through the window” scene seems… familiar.
FLAPJACKS: “THIS! IS! WAAAATCHMEN!”
ME: I thought we’d declared that joke dead.
FLAPJACKS: It’s relevant, because he also made 300. So it can be used this time.
ME: Can’t you come up with something better?
FLAPJACKS: “THIS! IS! AN OVERLY PRECIOUS SOULESS PASTIIIIIICHE!”
ME: Never mind.
FLAPJACKS: Ozymandias looks… what is it, when something is exactly the opposite of “intimidating”?
ME: Not intimidating?
FLAPJACKS: More than that.
ME: I just think he looks like a little kid playing dressup.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe that’s sharp, purposeful cultural commentary.
ME: It is a brief look at Rorshach! Does his mask go oogy with the moving blots? Rewind it! I want to see if his mask goes oogy.
FLAPJACKS: I don’t think it goes oogy.
ME: Crap.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe it’ll go oogy later.
ME: Okay, fair is fair: Dr. Manhattan looks exactly as creepy as he should look.
FLAPJACKS: I concur.
ME: …I think Vietnam is entirely greenscreened.
FLAPJACKS: I think your mom is entirely greenscreened.
ME: Shut up.
FLAPJACKS: Oh, quit whining. We’re supposed to be surprised that there’s greenscreening in a Zach Snyder movie? Did you even see 300? I think that title actually referred to the number of animators they had rendering CGI cliff faces.
ME: The Comedian also looks badass.
FLAPJACKS: Well, if you can’t make the Comedian look badass, you shouldn’t even bother making the movie in the first place. Making the Comedian look badass is easy. Making Nite Owl look badass, on the other hand, is hard.
ME: Nite Owl looks like a cheap Batman ripoff.
FLAPJACKS: Cultural commentary! He’s playing with our preconceptions! And stuff.
ME: Hey, can you see Dr. Manhattan’s dick in the trailer?
FLAPJACKS: …okay, why do you care?
ME: Look, we get an extended shot of full-frontal Manhattan in this trailer, I want to know if Zach Snyder is out to pervert the minds of nerd America.
FLAPJACKS: He could make it worse?
ME: Rewind, I wanna see.
FLAPJACKS: …I think they made his groinal area glow so brightly you cannot make out individual parts.
ME: Zach Snyder, you wuss.
FLAPJACKS: Well, I don’t think Billy Crudup wants to… well, maybe he does want to expose himself to teenagers. How would I know?
ME: “The most celebrated graphic novel of all time.” Wait, nobody told me this was Maus.
FLAPJACKS: That’s not fair and you know it. Come on, it’s Watchmen. It’s entirely fair to give it those props.
ME: All right, I guess – NO! NOT CGI PADDY HAT SOLDIER!
FLAPJACKS: He had four CGI kids and a fifth one being rendered!
ME: What will we tell his wife?
FLAPJACKS: Something in binary. Do you speak binary?
ME: Fuck no.
FLAPJACKS: Well, let’s not tell her anything then.
ME: Agreed.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, there is Rorshach’s mask going oogy for you. Are you satisfied?
ME: On that level, at least.
FLAPJACKS: And there’s the Mars jewel ship.
ME: Pretty cool.
FLAPJACKS: So, how do we rate this trailer?
ME: In terms of being a good trailer, A. In terms of making me think the movie will not be dogshit… I dunno, B minus.
FLAPJACKS: I’m closer to B plus.
ME: Yeah, but you like all that stylized compu-fighty stuff Snyder does.
FLAPJACKS: We will have to agree to disagree. Except about Nite Owl looking lame. We agree there.
ME: But do you think it was on purpose?
FLAPJACKS: …probably not.
ME: A ha.

I am not joking. Spider-Man: The Musical. It’s coming to Broadway.

If that’s not crazy already, get this: it’s being directed by Julie Taymor (The Lion King, Across the Universe, Titus) and scored by Bono and The Edge (U2, being self-righteous douchebags).

Producers are holding an open casting call for the roles of Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and a mysterious “Principal Woman”. The Principal Woman should be “female, 25-35 years old [with] amazing rock vocals. Think Sinead O’Connor with a Middle Eastern/Bulgarian/Greek twist. Foreign, world music types are great, foreign accents are great.”

Okay, Spidey fans: with this description in mind, who is the female villain in the Spider-Man musical? Discuss.

From the email inbox:

Hey – I love reading your I Should Write The Legion things, but writing is only half of a comic. So my question is – who would be your ideal artist(s) for the Legion when you get to write them?

Firstly, I feel it’s important to emphasize that, although I appreciate the vote of confidence with the “when” rather than the much-more-deserved-and-appropriate “if,” that the odds of me ever writing comics period are small. There are two ways to break into writing comics for the “majors”: either be very successful at writing other media or be reasonably successful at writing comics on an independent basis. Given the arc of my career both as a writer and in everything else, I simply don’t have the time to pursue the second and the first, while certainly possible, remains unlikely.

I say this not to disparage myself, because I am awesome of course, but to remind anybody watching that “I Should Write The Legion” exists, as it always has, for two reasons: for me to refine my storytelling and pitching process (because every post is, in essence, a practice pitch to an attentive audience – which, it should be noted, is different from pitching to, say, an editor), and for me to enthuse about how awesome the Legion of Super-Heroes is.

I would like to stress this to onlookers: if you want to write comics, for the love of Christ do not follow my example.

That having been said, to answer the question:

1.) with a bullet: Takeshi Miyazawa. If I had any authority at DC I would be offering Miyazawa fucking gobs of money to come draw Teen Titans or Legion or Supergirl or Robin or anything with teenaged heroes in it; I can’t think of any comic artist working today who so excellently marries the manga artistic style with the Western superhero style. Other artists might be able to likewise draw the shit out of the Legion, but I can’t think of anybody else whose art in and of itself carries with it the potential to expand the reading audience just by its very nature. (Plus, Miyazawa is just fucking amazing and I would love to see him draw Brainiac Five.)

2.) Adrian Alphona. Is he even doing anything right now? Regardless, I love his designs and his detailed-yet-distorted artistic style. AND he can keep to a monthly schedule, which earns big points in my book.

3.) Michael Ryan. The fact that I have listed three artists in a row who are notable for working on Runaways is not an accident; Marvel have done a ridiculously good job giving that book excellent artists who are capable of drawing teenaged superheroes without having them appear too adult or too infantile. Ryan’s backgrounds are crazy good.

4.) Skottie Young. I just love his stuff. I know this is not a universally shared opinion, but so what – it’s my list, nyah nyah nyah. I think he would draw a wicked awesome Shadow Lass. And a wicked awesome Blok. And a super-double-plus wicked awesome Validus. And the lightning effects for Lightning Lad! Just imagine what Skottie Young would do with THAT shit!

5.) David Baldeon. Apparently currently the artist on Robin, which I don’t read regularly, but he also filled in on an issue of Blue Beetle a while back and I really loved his clean character work and design sense. Reminds me of a more stylized Chris Batista in a way.

So that’s my top five. There are plenty of others I could rattle off: Amanda Conner, Freddie Williams III, Peter Snejberg, Chris Sprouse, even Mike Krahulik. And Francis Manapul is excellent, and his only downside is that it’s only a matter of time before he’s transferred to a higher-profile title. But it’s all moot, anyway, so in the end I vote for whichever one that will give me money and power and women.

Look. I know it’s not your fault that DC’s direct-to-DVD movies have been largely mediocre thus far, but come on:

Wonder Woman should not have a face that looks kind of like a horse.

I mean, it is Wonder Woman, she’s supposed to be an athletic paragon of female beauty and stuff. She should not look like a horse. Really, you could put together a list of what not to do when drawing Wonder Woman, and right at the top there would be “make her look like a horse.”

And if you have to make her look like a horse, couldn’t she at least look like a really nice horse, rather than… this?

I’m just saying. Nobody wants to buy Wonder Horseface.

A woolly mammoth appears, hell-bent on destruction! What do you do? What do you do?

Well, maybe you nut up, if your name happens to be Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.

Let’s talk about a core character.

A lot of Legion purists think that the Legion is not the Legion without Superboy. Needless to say, I am not one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all the old Superboy and the Legion comics from back in the day, and the premise is sound, but sometimes you just have to point at something and say, “no, not now.” Superboy in the Legion is a “no, not now,” because the comics market has shifted in terms of what readers expect – and this isn’t just a “cater to the hardcores” move either, because the one thing old comics readers and new share alike is the desire to sense that the comics they are reading “matter.”

Now, of course, the comics themselves can’t “matter,” because we all know the drill – it’s a sequential, serial art form. Illusion of change. And so forth. But “mattering” isn’t about the end result, but rather the suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t matter that at the end of the day, deaths are frequently written away and reversed, that character positions remain static by corporate design. What matters is that we can forget about that and indulge ourselves in a story that has the illusion of real change.

Well, guess what: Superboy sucks at that. It’s really hard to suspend disbelief in static continuity when one of the stars of your comic magazine for certain is going to be fine, because he has to grow up to be Superman like we all know he does. It’s not a coincidence that the Legion’s most universally acclaimed creative period (Paul Levitz’s run) as well as its most creatively experimental (Keith Giffen’s v4) happened mostly or entirely without Superboy.

When people accept this, their first instinct is to turn to a replacement Superboy. Bring Kon-El back from the dead! Have Chris Kent grow up and become the future Superboy! These have the wonderful ability to be lose-lose situations, because the hardcores are going to bitch and whine about a replacement Superboy who isn’t “the real one” and everybody else is going to look at the poor writer desperately shoehorning in some total nobody replacement Superboy and say “oh, they’re just catering to the hardcores.”

However, Supergirl, on the other hand, has absolutely none of that baggage. And indeed, I’m going to argue that the Legion is not only a good place for her to be, comics-wise, but indeed the best place to be.

For starters: quick, name Supergirl’s place in the modern-day DC Universe. Trick question: she doesn’t have one. She’s been shuffled around from team to team (the Outsiders? the Teen Titans? the new Justice League comic James Robinson is writing?) and been given half a dozen characterizations (none of which have really worked that well). From a functional standpoint it makes sense to put her in the future, because in the future there won’t be a dozen writers all trying to put together her personality from scratch at once.

But it also works from a literary standpoint as well. Supergirl can fill the role that Superboy used to fill: the inspiration of the Legion made flesh. (Okay, so she’s not Superman, but so what? She’s not exactly no big deal, you know.) But in addition to that she works as a character in the Legion in her own right. Given that I’ve previously mentioned how much I love the concept of Alexis Luthor, a natural rivalry is right there: the heir of Luthor versus a timelost survivor of the El family. And of course, using Supergirl offers one the chance to finally explore her relationship with Brainiac Five properly, and truthfully I think there’s a story there that could simply be epic.

But mostly I like it because in the Legion, Supergirl isn’t redundant (as she so painfully is in the modern day DCU, a marketing gimmick roughly transformed into a character with her own, frequently unreadable comic). In the Legion, Supergirl is the big gun. She’s the living reminder of why the Legion exists in the first place. She’s in the one place where she can finally live up to her own potential without having her cousin outshine her constantly.

Oh, and one more thing.

She arrives in the future – once again – by accident. And while she’s there, she learns something: less than a day after her return to the past, she’ll die. In a manner befitting a superhero, saving an entire galaxy, to be sure. But she’ll die, you can be sure of that. She can’t stay in the future forever – sooner or later the timestream will start to stress and fracture if she doesn’t go fulfill her destiny. She is marked.

So while she’s in the future, she decides to help as many people as possible. That’s what a superhero does, and Supergirl is a superhero – and in the future, she’ll finally get the chance to be a legendary one.

EDIT TO ADD: Hoo boy.

Well, now that “women in refrigerators” comments have started to show up along with the flame mail, let me re-emphasize a paragraph:

It doesn’t matter that at the end of the day, deaths are frequently written away and reversed, that character positions remain static by corporate design. What matters is that we can forget about that and indulge ourselves in a story that has the illusion of real change.

Let me further add that characters being fated to die is not precisely the same as killing them off. Even if it is part of history, it’s not carved in stone. I seem to remember this season of Doctor Who promising the death of a companion and weaseling out of it. (Not particularly well, if we’re being honest, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to do it and have it be satisfying.)

Supergirl in the Legion means she’s on one of the most (and maybe the most) powerful superteams in comic history. Do you seriously think they wouldn’t have something to say about that? Do you seriously think Brainy, the smartest person in history, wouldn’t stretch his intellect to the breaking point to find an escape hatch?

Superhero comics are fundamentally about doing the impossible in the name of the greater good, six times before breakfast. This is just the most extreme iteration of that. I’m not going to say whether or not the Legion would succeed at finding a way to prevent Supergirl’s death. (Suspension of disbelief. Also, not giving away the cow. Et cetera.) But they would try. And that’s the important thing.

As a further bit of explanation, and to demonstrate where I’m coming from, I will go through this week’s offerings and tell you how I plan to consume them. My rampant downloading will no doubt anger some comics professionals, but until that new copyright bill gets ass-rammed through Parliament I’m not technically breaking the law (since I’m not offering the items for download and thus “trafficking” the materials).

Note that wherever I mention “download,” it is shorthand for: “download, read it, then delete it soon thereafter.” The stuff I tend to download and keep tends to be either stuff I don’t own and is out of print (Golden and Silver Age stuff), or stuff I already own and want a digital copy of for my own use (my complete runs of Starman, Hitman, et cetera).

So:

ALL NEW ATOM #25: Download, if it’s not too much trouble to find it. This is the sort of comic where I am not really invested in the story; if I were at a shop, I might pick it up, leaf through it, then put it back down and never think about it again. Mostly because I have downloaded probably about half the issues of this comic, and every time my reaction is the same: “….eh.” It’s not a bad comic, it’s just kind of there. (Sorry, Gail Simone!) This probably adequately describes at least half – if not more – of my comics downloading.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #564: Download and read. It’s really easy to find the newest Spider-Man comic for downloading, and I like following the storyline. I just don’t particularly want to pay for it. When the first trade is released, if it’s a reasonable price (read: less than the pure chiseling that was the pricing on the World War Hulk trade), I might pick it up on a whim; the stories in the comic thus far are enjoyable Spider-Man stories but entirely disposable, so I don’t feel any particular urge to own this.

(Sidenote: I own the entire run of JMS’s ASM in trade, which is another run of Spider-Man that I first read online through downloads. Yes, I (mostly) liked JMS’ Spider-Man run, and especially liked it when he was working with John Romita Jr., so sue me that the new, unmarried Spider-Man isn’t as interesting to me. Maybe in fifteen years when death’s cold fingers are a bit closer to me and I desperately want to relive my childhood, okay?)

Also, I can’t remember if this is a Dan Slott issue or not, but I download anything Dan Slott writes just in the hopes that it pisses him off a little. I even download Avengers: the Initiative, which I don’t even read or like. FEEL MY FIT OF INTERNET PIQUE, DAN SLOTT!

ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #10: Maybe download? This is probably on par with All New Atom for level of interest; I just find it mediocre. Whatever interest I have stems from leftover curiosity about what “officially” happens to Angel after the show ends, but that’s dropping fast thanks to the incredibly ugly art on this comic.

AVENGERS INVADERS #3 (OF 12): Download, because I am curious to see if they can go anywhere after the deeply retarded second issue, where the Invaders figure out that they’re in the future and then more or less arbitrarily decide that the Avengers are Nazis because of an offhand comment made by Bucky. Likelihood that I will ever pay money for this comic in any form: practically zero, because it is terrible. But I love a trainwreck.

BATMAN #678: Download because it’s Morrison. Might buy in future, I dunno. Grant Morrison is a great writer and all, but a lot of fans tend to forget that when he screws up, he pancakes hard. Then again, I have lots of Grant Morrison stuff on my bookshelf, so the odds are generally good I buy it eventually. Then again again, I don’t have The Filth. Then again again, when they put out the inevitable one-volume collection of All-Star Superman i will probably buy it, despite having already bought the initial hardcover.

BILLY BATSON AND THE MAGIC OF SHAZAM #1: Download, read, strictly first issue “try before buy” basis.

BLUE BEETLE #28: Download and read with eventual plan of purchasing trade if/when it comes out; I already own the first three trades of this title and will buy the fourth when it comes out, and the fill-ins thus far have been decent so I figure the fifth will join them.

BOYS #20: As Blue Beetle. I own the first two trades, eagerly await the third. I just don’t like having to wait for the trade and I refuse to buy a fucking comic book twice.

Some may argue that the cost of the floppies is a purchase price for immediacy, and that is a fair argument. It’s just one I’m going to ignore entirely. Guess what, comics: I’m your market. There are a lot more of me than there are completists willing to buy every issue they’re interested in reading right away, and I spend a fair amount of coin on you so it’s not like you don’t get anything out of me.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #16: Download, wait for trade again, already have the first two, thoroughly entertained by this title, happy to buy it in trade, not going to wait.

FABLES #74: Same again: I have every Fables trade and the 1001 Nights of Snowfall hardcover.

HOUSE OF MYSTERY #3: Download, because you know what? I missed the first two issues entirely. (This is the downside of downloading comics as your primary means of reading them on a weekly basis.) I’m curious, what can I say. (This, incidentally, shows one of the strengths of the downloading-at-very-low-cost delivery model for comics; there’s a lot more opportunity to try out a book. It’s a lot less common now for someone to pick up a random issue of a book like this for a tryout basis.)

JOKERS ASYLUM THE JOKER #1: Prior to copypasting the “coming out this week” list from Savage Critics, I didn’t even know this existed, so what the hell. Back in my purchasing days this might have been an impulse purchase. Now, not so much.

JONAH HEX #33: I’ve been thinking about getting the first trade of this for a while now. Not that downloading this issue will influence me one way or the other. But it’s on my “maybe” list. The problem I have is that most of the stories in Jonah Hex tend to flow together in a sort of same-ish way.

LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #43: Will buy the actual issue. Legion is the one comic of which I buy single issues because I just like having the single issues, even though I buy the trades. Which is fine. I understand that for some people this is what they feel for every comic. (Not for me, though. The trade paperback release this year that made me happiest were the reprints of the old Denny O’Neil Question series, because I thought “thank god, I can finally get rid of those fucking single issues.”)

MANHUNTER #32: Probably download? I’m not emotionally connected to this book like it seems the entire rest of the comics internet is. If it’s stuck in front of me I’ll read it, I guess. (And yes, I read the earlier issues, I know it’s quality product, it’s just not a story I’m really that interested in.)

MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #41: Same as Manhunter. I’m not in any rush to find this and read it, but if I see it, I’ll download it, read it, delete it, and fifteen minutes later I’ll be hard-pressed to tell you what the story was about, but I’ll remember being vaguely entertained.

NORTHLANDERS #7: See, I love Brian Wood’s other work, but this is another case where I read maybe the first two issues, liked it, then lost track of it entirely. I’ll probably pick up the first trade when it comes out, because my memory of it is good. (Of course, sometimes that backfires – I read the first few issues of Desolation Jones online, thought it was good enough, then bought the trade and hated the ending and sold it at a used books place.)

PATSY WALKER HELLCAT #1 (OF 5): Wait, there’s a Hellcat limited series? Well, huh. I don’t care, but I’m impressed there is one. (This really has little to do with the topic at hand. I am digressing.)

RANN THANAGAR HOLY WAR #3 (OF 8): I read the first issue and it was so bad it almost became good. (Almost.) I might download this just for laughs, if I don’t have to look too hard for it. That “looking hard” for a download of this title involves maybe a minute’s worth of clicking tells you how invested I am in reading another issue of this comic.

SECRET INVASION FRONT LINE #1 (OF 5): Another train wreck waiting to happen. I eagerly await the new adventures of Sally “Stupidest Bitch In The Marvel Universe” Floyd. What stupid thing will she say this time? Truly, Paul Jenkins is one of the great comedic minds of our time.

SQUADRON SUPREME 2 #1: Yeah, I’ll give it a look. And then probably lose interest again, just as I usually do with this revamp of the Squadron Supreme.

SUPERGIRL #31: I kind of download this one every month, in the hopes that I will see a Supergirl that I actually want to read about and maybe even spend money on. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m optimistic.

TRINITY #5: Maybe this week it gets good.

WALKING DEAD #50: Another “download until the trade comes out” one. I like Walking Dead.

And that’s that.

Lister Sage, in comments from the previous post:

Maybe the biggest problem with comics is not the direct market, it’s not the price, it’s not even that kids aren’t reading them, maybe the problem is the general reluctance of people nowadays to just sit down and read. Newspaper sales have been getting poorer and poorer as well.

The problem with this hypothesis is multiple.

Firstly, kids love to read them some manga. Remember, when we talk about declining sales of comics, we’re only talking about western comics. Manga sales are great and manga publishers (other than TokyoPop, which has its own special set of individual problems) are entirely content with the current state of affairs (or at least a lot less worried than American publishers are).

Secondly, kids love to read in general. Three out of four kids still read for pleasure according to most studies, and in an age where they have TV, video games and intertubes, seventy-five percent is actually a hell of an achievement as far as the simple joy of reading goes. So it’s not that either.

Third, the decline of newspapers has less to do with people not liking to read and more to do with the fact that I’m not going to spend fifty cents on a newspaper when the same news is available on the internet for free, and usually from the same newspaper anyway. The newspaper industry is currently trying to figure out a new revenue model in an age where their old model has lost relevance. (Sound familiar?)

And I would say that the entry barrier to kids reading comics is hell yes price. Individual issues are expensive investments for kids, especially considering what you get (twenty pages of story for two bucks minimum?). Compare that to an issue of Shonen Jump or even an Archie digest. (Again: why don’t the big two issue digest editions of comics? DC used to do this. Their digest editions of Adventure Comics were formulative for me as a youth.)

I’ve argued before for a new delivery model for comics as necessary to keep the business alive in the long term.

Before I go any further discussing it, let’s tack on one more reason why going to a download-supporting sales model is a good move for comics companies: the electronic transfer of .cbr files is vastly more environmentally friendly than the continued printing of single issues (“floppies”). I’m not suggesting that .cbr files immediately replace floppies on a permanent, one hundred percent basis; however, I think that the gradual shift from floppies to digital is already underway, and it is healthier for comics companies to accommodate it and profit from it rather than fight it on the basis of supporting an outmoded method of sale which has only resulted in a gradually decreasing audience.

So, what should this model look like? Well, let’s make a few bullet points, first, about what people like about digital comics right now.

They are free. Now, obviously, a for-profit business can’t offer all of its product for free, but this tells me that the individual price of a downloadable comic (whether a definite, tagged price or a price derived from average use of a purchased e-collection) has to be low. Very low.

They should be .cbz or .cbr files with high-quality images. Some will argue that comics companies should pursue a more protectable format. This is stupid because there is ultimately no such thing; copy protections are more easily broken every day, and besides, the success of .cbr and .cbz files is not something that arose out of a vacuum; people tinkered with zipped collections of jpegs and PDF image collections before finally settling on .cbr and .cbz for their online comics reading.

This is a perfect example of the market determining its preference for delivery, and it is stupid to fuck with the market – especially when .cbr and .cbz files can so easily be encoded with ad pages and when the interface doesn’t easily lend itself to skipping the ads sight unseen. (Hell, some comics scanners already include the ad pages.)

They want to download the issues and possess them themselves. Or, more simply, Marvel’s “storing house” plan is, for the moment, a bad one. Maybe down the line consumers may become more receptive to the idea of “stored ownership,” of owning the right to consume an artistic work stored elsewhere. But right now it’s probably not great shakes.

They aren’t interested in locked material. No consumer ever is, and DRM-laced creative product only enhances the public desire for an unlocked, pirated version. This is why music companies are finally giving in and releasing unlocked mp3s.

They prefer individual issues. Although in a digital world there’s no need for arbitrary issue individualization (if I want one megafile of, say, Preacher, I can have one rather than individual issues), readers still prefer that the serial format continue to be recognized as such and distributed in such a manner. This is worth knowing because some people have suggested removing the monthly serial format altogether as part of the digital move, and I think this point argues otherwise.

Now, if we consider these points, what potential business models exist for online comics vending? (Marvel and DC will both, no doubt, try to have their own online store, regardless of the fact that this is stupid and we already know, thanks to the music industry, that it won’t work, so let’s ignore company-specific strategies and look at broader concepts.

The “dip a toe in” model. This is the most timid strategy I came up with beyond “do nothing and hope it works.”

Pick a low-selling title in which you have critical faith. Let’s say Blue Beetle.

Put the entire thing online in the following manner: Webcomic-style page layout (“one page per day/one page per click”). Your online version of the comic is black-and-white, rather than full colour, and it publishes one to three months behind the actual issue on the stands.

This is the most timid model because at heart, it uses the internet not as a delivery system but as a marketing tool; revenues will still primarily be derived from hard-copy sales of the comic (in floppies or trades), relying on fans to want to read the story “the moment it’s available” rather than in three months’ time, relying on fans to want to spend money to read the comic in full color, et cetera. In short, it’s a stopgap solution at best, designed to placate the internet-hungry crowd by doing as little as possible while still being able to honestly point at it and say “hey, internet!”

And it’s still better than doing nothing.

The “iTunes.” .cbr files available for download on a pay-per-issue basis. Simple. Straightforward. Easy to understand. Downloads of this sort should be relatively up-to-date; initially maybe a month behind printing schedule, tops. (The beauty of an online delivery system is that when the time is right, switching to simultaneous digital delivery is essentially instantaneous.)

The benefit of the system is simple: it’s a familiar model that already has some success. The downside is that its cost to the consumer ramps up very quickly (AKA “who the hell actually spends ten thousand dollars to fill up their iPod” syndrome) and it’s really a very poor model for profiting most highly off the enormous back catalogue possessed by most major publishers. Finally, it becomes difficult to balance pricing – companies tend to become enamoured of a single tier price (“99 cents an issue, cheap!”) regardless of whether that price is, you know, any good or not. (And digital comics should be way cheaper than 99 cents per issue.)

The “eMusic.” .cbr files available for download from a central site via a subscription model: ten dollars a month gets you, oh, let’s say thirty downloads. These are full-color, high quality downloads. Ads are permissible so long as they aren’t perniciously overexposed. Again, you may start out delivering digital issues on a delayed-action basis then shift forward as the market alters.

Many companies aren’t fans of this strategy because they always look at the model in terms of lost potential revenue. “Fifteen dollars for thirty downloads, that’s thirty-three cents an issue! If comic fans were buying those thirty issues in the store, they’d be spending over a hundred dollars on our books! A hundred is more profit than fifteen, even when you account for additional cost of production!”

The reason this argument is crap is because New Avengers sells one hundred thousand copies per month and Thunderbolts sells thirty thousand copies per month. Many of those New Avengers readers, reading a Marvel comic regularly as they are wont to do, are presumably at least willing to read an issue of Thunderbolts – they are not, however, willing to spend the three dollars plus to buy the copy of Thunderbolts. Thus, the revenue loss is essentially neutralized, with one key difference; under the eMusic scenario, the consumer may, after trying out an issue or two of Thunderbolts, go buy the trade paperback.

Since the vast majority of consumers under this model are the sort who would only purchase one or two books per month, what the remaining downloads per month amount to is nothing less than free advertising. Needless to say, this is the model I support, as should all right-thinking individuals.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get me some ribs. Happy Canada Day.

So Poptown and Sims and Church are busy competing for the “most 90s comic book cover ever,” and I think I have a contender right here.

I would like to make the additional point that DarkChylde more perfectly encapsulates the 90s comic experience than any of their entries, because as a title it lurched from pathetic tiny publisher to pathetic tiny publisher for the better part of a decade, finally collapsing with a “Last Issue Special!” one-shot in 2002.

Okay, I know that Tomahawk is DC’s Revolutionary War hero (complete with vaguely NAMBLAesque sidekick situation, just so you know he’s a DC property), but even so, the idea of a dastardly villain who is a British officer is still kind of comical. It’s totally a mindset thing; you have to initially shake off the mental image of him saying things like “Pip pip, cheerio, old boy – oh, Tomahawk, you dasher, you’ve winkled my plans but good, you Yankee devil you!”

But I really love the art here, because it really does make Lord Shilling look like a nasty badass, or like Jason Isaacs’ total bastard character in The Patriot (a movie which, while often kind of silly, at the very least had Jason Isaacs in it – plus, Donal Logue as A Racist Who Learns A Lesson!) – competent, merciless, and one hundred percent All Business. Lord Shilling doesn’t have any superpowers beyond being an excellent athlete and a brilliant spy, but he doesn’t need any powers to fuck you up. And if you beg Lord Shilling to show you a gentleman’s mercy, he’ll do it by cutting your throat open. He’ll be polite, though, and wait until after you’re dead to remark upon how bloody stupid a request that was.

Really, the more I look at Lord Shilling, the more I like him. He’s from the other school of British characters, the James Bond/John Steed/anonymous badass SAS colonel mode. He’s exactly what a good bad guy should be: competent, cool, can shoot your eyebrow off at fifty paces with a flintlock pistol, and likely has a cutting remark for any situation, even when Tomahawk barely manages to one-up him.

Still – shame about the wig, though.

ITEM! The Middleman debuts on the teevee. Unlike a lot of the comic blogosphere, I didn’t read the comic first, so I have the benefit of not having any expectations when considering it as a TV show, and I will say this: while entertaining enough, the dialogue (wherein you can practically hear the panels changing) often errs too far on the side of tweeness. Yes, I’m glad there’s a television show with gun-wielding gorillas and ray guns and robot receptionists, but it’s a bit too stylized in its execution for me to be completely blown away. I’d give it a solid B with room for improvement, and pilot episodes frequently have kinks they need to work out. We’ll see if it continues being overly precious.

ITEM! You know what’s surprisingly good? The “JLA Goes To The Tangent Universe” miniseries DC is publishing. Now, given all the immense amount of crap DC has published regarding different universes over the last year, I honestly expected this comic to be terrible, and Ron Marz on the writing skills didn’t particularly give me hope as I’ve never been a fan – but it’s really quite decent in an understated way. Partly it’s because the Tangent Universe was always pretty decent and revisiting it is pleasant (and Marz is doing a decent job not overplaying the “JLA reacts to different universe” bit in a hamhanded manner), and partly it’s because the path of the Tangent world (with the Tangent’s Superman, a near-omnipotent psychic, taking over as a dictator) is dramatically different from standard superhero fare in a way that seems unforced and genuine, and partly it’s because Marz is really hitting all the character voices really well. It’s just a decent little superhero comic, and that’s just fine.

ITEM! I’ll just echo again what everybody else already said: The Incredible Hulk is pretty good. Not Iron Man good, but good. And Lou Ferrigno remains awesome.

ITEM! Trinity continues to underwhelm me. I mean, never mind that the whole “entire DC Universe jerks off over how awesome Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are” thing is one I have never particularly enjoyed, but additionally it smacks of telling-not-showing. I figure, if you’re going to write a comic about the three of them, I don’t need to be told over and over again how special and important they are. Presumably if someone buys the comic they already think Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are pretty great shakes, and do not need to see the rest of the JLA getting their asses kicked and then praising Heaven when the almighty frigging Trinity shows up.

But beyond that, the comic is just kind of bland. I say this with disappointment, because Kurt Busiek is probably one of my most reliably favorite writers; I greatly enjoyed his run on Superman – I thought the Prankster issue in particular was one of the best in years. (Honestly, somebody should just pay him a lot of money to write a series where he gets to write short arcs about minor nobodies in a superhero universe if we can’t get Astro City on a regular basis.)

ITEM! On the other hand, Secret Invasion continues to be mostly pretty good, with most of the tie-ins both recognizing the comic-book lunacy of Earth being invaded by little green men and running with it while simultaneously managing to successfully convey the paranoia of the Body Snatchers-like plot points. It’s a really tricky balancing act to pull off and Marvel is doing it with nearly a dozen books, all simultaneously. Sure, there are some minor gripes to be made about how the third issue of the main series was basically a placeholder, or how Mighty Avengers serving as a backstory book is probably a bit of a waste, but these are at best secondary complaints; the primary issue is the quality of the story being told. And it’s really good. (High point: the return of Lyja in the Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four mini, which also has the Richards children operating a tankbot.)

ITEM! Chuck Dixon John Nee Dan Didio blah blah bling bling blah. I have literally no opinion to express about this; like many comic fans I don’t like the direction DC has taken over the past year, but like many comic fans I am also relatively clueless as to how much of that is Dan Didio’s fault, and I don’t like to rely purely on gossip when offering forth opinions (well, not always, anyway). So I got nothing to say there.