This column, I think you’ll dig. Hawkman creative teams announced, a chance for me to toot my own horn and immediately be smacked down to earth by a fan letter, and some hot DC previews. Plus some other choice stories. Oh yes, you will dig this issue huge. It is not beat, no. It is actually quite boss.
A Murder, A Gaggle, A Flock of Hawkman News
Expanding his reach in the DCU for at least a month, Ed Brubaker heads over to Hawkman #27 in April for a one-shot, “Lives Past†issue of a pre-winged Hawkman.
Joining Brubaker will be his Sleeper partner, Sean Phillips, illustrating a tale of a early 20th century incarnation of Hawkman. No maces or ancient weapons in this one – it’s all about dames, heaters, and getting whacked.
Fly south for the winter and read Newsarama
This May, HAWKMAN takes off in a new flight pattern under the guidance of the new, regular creative team of writers Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (THE MONOLITH), artists Ryan Sook (ARKHAM ASYLYUM: LIVING HELL) & Mick Gray (PROMETHEA), and cover artists Greg Land (Sojourn) & Jay Leisten!
“This assignment combines a couple of things I’ve been working toward: straightforward super-heroics and gritty crime,†says Sook. “Those are two things that I haven’t had a chance to do in comics yet. I’m looking forward to jumping on and doing the best I can with it.â€
Perch on a wire and check out Newsarama
Wow, some excellent creative teams lined up for post-Johns/Morales Hawkman. Very cool. Unfortunately, I am faced with the same problem that bedeviled me with Johns run on the title. I just don’t think I like Hawkman as a solo character. Within the confines of JSA I enjoy him greatly, in particular with his recent role in Black Reign as a warrior spoiler to his teammates’ heroes. Johns is a creator I have often expressed my respect of. Morales is perhaps one of my favorite artists working for DC these days. Yet, upon reading Hawkman in his own series, I found myself to be just uninterested.
Therefore, it is will caution that I look upon these new teams. I like each one of them, I have liked their past collaborations. But what if I just don’t like Hawkman? Perhaps he is just one of those characters that just can’t interest me on his or her own. Still, with these teams, I guess it would be silly for me not to at least give Hawkman and his solo title another look.
Here at 411, We DO Talk About Bite Club
DC has provided Newsarama with the first four pages of Howard Chaykin and David Tischman’s Bite Club shipping from Vertigo in April.
When we spoke with the creators about the new series which tells the story of organized crime run by vampires in Miami, the creators said:
The roots of the series lie in both Tischman and Chaykin’s love of three types of stories, those dealing with the mob, vampires, and families. “Frankly, I like immigrant novels as well, and to a certain extent, this has that sensibility too,†Chaykin said. “We’re dealing with a family that’s been in the landscape we’re talking about, but they’re still newcomers to a certain extent, and the world is just getting used to them, and they’re getting used to the world. But they’re not aliens in terms of the vampires that we’ve seen before. These are very much culturally, part of the landscape in Miami. It’s a very South Beach story.â€
Get a transfusion…of knowledge at Newsarama
Any comic book with Chaykin’s name on it is worth picking up and his collaborations with Tischman are a source of smart storytelling. My first introduction to them, The Secret Society of Superheroes, stands out as notable amongst the glut of JLA miniseries/Elseworlds series that sprung out of the rebirth of the team following Morrison’s debut. Great stuff and well worth a look.
This book would appear to be more of the same. The concept behind it, Central and Southern American vampires and vampirism as a viral infection without the supernatural underpinnings has some basis in previous works, but has a unique vision of its own. With Winick’s just completed run on Blood and Water, (and dating back to Preacher’s Irish vampire Cassidy), DC is offering up some great vampirism tales that slug off the trappings of Anne Rice that overrun the genre the last time it was in vogue.
Me 2 Censorship 0
According to a report in the Detroit News, the state’s 83 county prosecutors have agreed not to enforce House Bill 4360, which became law on January 1st. Regular Newsarama readers will recall this to be the new amendment to Michigan’s current law which would bar bookstores and retailers from displaying materials deemed to contain sexually explicit material. The non-enforcement of the law will stand until a federal judge rules on a challenge to the law mounted by many groups, including the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
As reported by Detroit News reporter David Shepardson, the law doesn’t elaborate on what defines a book that is “harmful to minors.â€
To read the first victory against censorship I am taking credit for click here Newsarama
Earlier this month, the District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas issued a Memorandum Opinion and Certification Order in relation to the challenge the CBLDF and co-plaintiffs filed against an amendment to Act 858, which would require any content deemed “harmful to minors” to be both segregated in a different region of a retail outlet, and blinded, with 2/3rd of the cover obscured from view.
And here is the second Newsarama
Finally, some great news on the censorship front. Pretty much anything I have had the opportunity to talk about in reference to this sort of thing since I started has been bad, or at least seemed the portent of bad things to come. But this, well this makes a First Amendment fan like myself smile.
I, of course, wish that the legislators of both states did not pass the laws in the first place, so that time was not wasted on a law that prosecutors will not enforce, but, beggars cannot be choosers. It is heartening to see clearer heads prevail and a law that was ill-advised and ill-conceived fall by the wayside. I will take a moment to reiterate that I am sure that the law was not championed with any sort of intentional malicious or freedom limiting evil conspiracy. Still, even a well intentioned law is only as deserving of passage as its basis in the principles of the state and the country and its construction. Both of these laws ignored such factors in the hopes of creating a quick fix “solution†to all the evils that bedevil children from America’s newsstands. The prosecutors’ choice not to enforce these laws shows an impressive intelligence and maturity on their part. No one wants children to be exposed to dangerous or explicit materials, but blanket proclamations with ill defined borders will ultimately do more harm than good.
So, thanks, from me, Timothy Stevens, to you, sirs and madams of Arkansas and Michigan. You have truly made my day.
A New Direction for Aquaman…That, Like, Never Happens
“I’m 100 percent committed to Aquaman!” enthused the series new artist Pat Gleason. He and writer Will Pfeifer are the new creative team for DC’s resident sea king. After an earthquake hits San Diego, thousands are dead and much of the city is underwater. It’s a gruesome tale as Aquaman swims through San Diego’s ruins looking for survivors. Gleason spent some time away from his drawing table to give us some details about this underwater saga.
All kidding aside, check out fishboy at Pulse. Oh, Aquaman will be there, too (man, I am too hysterical).
Okay, so I know we are talking Aquaman here. And I know that the name of this arc, American Tidal, could possibly one of the worst puns ever (and I know because I am responsible for a lot of bad ones here every week). I know all of this, I do, I swear. Here’s the thing though, even knowing all of that, the panda bear floating slowly, silently, through the water in the opening pages of Aquaman #15 is one of the saddest, eeriest things I have seen in a comic in quite sometime. Looking at it for too long literally makes me queasy. I am hardly an anti-animal dying in fiction advocate (I hate Dante’s Peak almost entirely on the basis of the fact that the filmmaker’s decided to sacrifice a grandmother to save a family rather than their dog. This is not to say there are not a lot of other reasons to hate that movie) so it isn’t some socio-political thing for me. There is just something so brutally serene (trust me, pick it up, you’ll get it) about the scene that it is difficult to shake. Who knows if this arc or direction will catch on, but Gleason should take comfort in the fact that he has created one of the most effecting images of this (admittedly young) comic year.
Chiarello Treads the Frontier
Those yearning for the Silver Age of DC Comics are currently enjoying Darwyn Cooke’s take on the era in New Frontier, a six-issue limited series that began in January. Issue #2 is on sale this week, so we caught up with editor Mark Chiarello to get some details on what makes the SA tick and why people should be checking out this series.
What some may not realize are all the behind-the-scenes things an editor does before the average comic reader ever gets to see the finished product. Chiarello gave us some of the details about his work life. “It’s the editor’s job to hire the talent, babysit the talent, coax the work out of the talent, cheer on the talent, steer the talent in the right direction, make sure the talent gets paid, edit the work, organize the work, run the work through the Production Dept, check the proofs, and pray that you’ve done everything right when the printed comic comes back from the printer,” he said, barely stopping for a breath. “All DCU projects have to run the Paul Levitz/Dan Didio gauntlet, so the best rule of thumb is, you’d better love what you’re pitching to those guys or they’re not going to. Deciding on a project is easy: if it’s awesome and unbelievably cool and will rock the comics world, than that’s the one to pitch.”
Don’t fear the Silver Age at Pulse
As Chiarello rightly points out, this is a Silver Age story done well for the now. It concerns a time past and a comic reality that is no longer ours, but it does not feel routed in the time. These are Silver Age characters told in a way that seem perfectly in place with today’s comic books. As he said, it is no more a period piece than Saving Private Ryan or Gladiator. This is not a nostalgia trip. Even though we all know how this ultimately will go, the story is smart enough to play it as this is the first time we have seen these tales. In the end, it does it well enough, that it actually feels that way, too.
I know much has been made of Hal’s resistant to killing and the fact that it is taken to unrealistic degree. I am inclined to agree that it seems unlikely that any branch of the Armed Forces would gladly put a man in the field who blatantly states his intention of not killing regardless of circumstances. That does push the envelope of the believability, but hey, this is also a world featuring aliens, power rings, and super fast men. In any case, this slip-up by Cooke hardly derails the book for me and the atmosphere he creates quickly washes away whatever difficulties I might have had with Jordan’s declaration and the rather odd decision of the US to accept it.
Chiarello has the opportunity to work on some promising projects in the future, too, it appears. Sale, Loeb, Lee, Pope, Chaykin, and Corben? That is quite a future docket.
Things Big, Green, and Made of Rotting Vegetable Matter That Have Not Dated Daron
The Swamp Thing is returning … but this might not be the Swamp Thing you’re expecting. It’s determined that Tefe is a force that must be eliminated, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s just going to sit back and let “daddy” destroy his little girl, even if she is a bit mental and unstable. Hey which of us hasn’t become a “bad seed” to our folks at one point or another? Writer Andy Diggle and artist Enrique Breccia are working on the six-part opening Bad Seed arc. We tracked Diggle down in the bayou and asked him for some details on Vertigo’s new series.
Go down on that bayou at Pulse
It seems like every few columns there is one title I feel I should write more, but just cannot seem to find much to say about it. This is such an article. Swamp Thing has a long history with DC, but it is a history that has had little crossover with my own comic book reading. Moore’s Anatomy Lesson, which I have read, is one of the creepiest, boldest reimagining of a fairly C-level character that I have read (perhaps tied with the road that Morrison took Animal Man down), but that was some 20 years ago and I have done little to check in on the Green Fellow since then. Thusly, though I feel right guilty about it, my hands are a little tied on this article. The art previews seem suitably creepy and Diggle is on a hot streak right now with his work on Losers. Perhaps we have another sleeper hit on our hands here?
YES! Cover Text All Up In This Piece! E-Yah, E-Yah!
March’s issue #20 of StormWatch: Team Achilles has received a throwback of a facelift. Instead of the originally solicited cover, the new one will feature word balloons and tell a mini-story. Big deal? Well, kinda. Look at all the comic book covers the next time you’re in the shop. Anything stand out in particular? Anyone in the major publishers have word balloons on them, indicating that the characters actually speak, or that what’s inside is something that you can actually read?
StormWatch writer Micah Wright agrees with you – he was the one, in fact, who championed through the new cover design for his series.
Can Micah possibly survive this terrifying situation? Find out this ish at Newsarama
First, I just have to note for myself that this article seems disproportionately long given the subject matter they are discussing, word balloons on one cover. Having noted that, I own up to the fact that I often waste many a line of text on things that would seem unworthy of such attention, so I get it. And I am so with them on this.
I have decried the sameness and/or unhelpfulness of a lot of covers as of late in the past. While I don’t advocate cover text as a specific way out of this rut, I am glad to see that someone is trying something. The cover should tell us a story, not THE story, mind you, but some slice of it that makes you open it up. It shouldn’t be misleading, making you think that events will happen in the book that will not. For example, one of my first TPB’s was Spider-Man: Assassin Nation Plot and in the introduction Jim Salicrup discusses and apologizes for a cover that makes it seem as though Spider-Man and Sabretooth face off when they in fact do not. This is the sort of cover that should be avoided. A cover also should not be generically interchangeable. I believe I proposed a one to two pinup style cover for every 12 issues of a book in an earlier column and I still say that is fair.
Long story short, because I too seem to have run on, I applaud Micah Wright and Wildstorm. It is time to at least re-explore our comic book cover roots and see what we can mine to created eye-catching intriguing covers.
Oh, but could we please avoid the “Because YOU demanded it†covers? I never demanded any of that stuff. Like, ever.
23 for 24
The organizers of 24 Hour Comics Day have announced the first 23 stores to host cartooning creativity marathons. On April 24th, these stores will bring together amateur and professional cartoonist who want to push their creativity to the limit. Each cartoonist will try to completely write and draw a 24 page comic, normally a couple months of work, in 24 straight hours.
“We expect to have hundreds of cartoonists taking advantage of 24 Hour Comics Day to take the 24 hour comics challenge,†explains Nat Gertler, founder of 24 Hour Comics Day. “While many of them will work in the comfort of their homes, others are already signing up to create their comic at these events, with the support and camaraderie of their fellow cartoonists. The participating stores will make sure that everyone has food and drink and take care of other concerns, so that the cartoonist can stay focused on the creative effort.â€
Get the coffee a-brewing and frantically race to Pulse
I won’t waste much time of this great idea other then to point you toward the website and encourage anyone who lives in the areas where there are shops participating to check it out for a little while or if you have talent yourself, give it a shot. Who knows, it just might be your big break.
SNEAK PEEKS LIVE AT DCCOMICS.COM
ACTION COMICS #814 – FEB040239
ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #627 – FEB040240
GREEN LANTERN #176 – FEB040259
BATMAN: HARLEY & IVY #1 (of 3) – FEB040228
BITE CLUB #1 (of 6) – FEB040301
Y: THE LAST MAN #21 – FEB040317
TAKING AIM AT THE GRIMACE
I believe (although I could be very wrong) that bookstores sales wise, manga outsells “American†comic collections, but overall in the U.S., American superhero comics are king and manga is a far more niche industry.
That’s a bizarre comment, considering that the top monthly manga title, Shonen Jump, outsells the top American comic book by several hundred thousand copies every month. I’d have thought someone in charge of writing a news column about the comic book industry would be better informed.
-Josh Fugate
Wow, I am so tempted to be a jerk here. But, I’ll be good. Or, try anyway.
As for me being better informed, perhaps you are right. I have never made much of a secret of the fact that I am not very hip to the business end of comic book dealings or that I am a grad school student with non-existent ties to the industry who writes this column for free twice a week. To see that I am not plugged in seems a bit redundant. That being said, I was basing my comments on the sales information I have, that being the Diamond list that we all are quite familiar with. On that, manga does not touch the Batmen and X-Men of the industry. If these numbers are an inaccurate reflection of the amount of manga sold on a monthly basis in America, then I do apologize. I did not mean a personal slight on the art style or Shonen Jump in particular. I was just writing from the information I had based on the Diamond order information. If you could point me toward a website or listing that could provide me with more accurate American sales figures, I would greatly appreciate it and it would do much to make sure that such events would be avoided in the future.
To recap, I apologize for my (possibly) misleading comment. If Shonen Jump does indeed outsell every US comic in the US on a monthly basis, then I obviously looked at the wrong sales figures and that was my error. Please put me toward more accurate U.S. sales figures to avoid such mistakes in the future.
See, I was respectful. And people worry about my manners. Ha.
Well, with that bit of egg on my face dealt with, I am off. Remember to send in your best comic related memory for free comics! You have two more weeks and the stuff I have got is good so far, but I know some of you out there can give the submissions I already have a fun for their money. Naldypsycho and JohnZ3, I am looking to you two in the least to pitch something in.
Until next time, remember, Un Gajje sees, Un Gajje comes, Un Gajje conquers
