Leave Your Spandex At the Door 21.08.06

News

This is Leave Your Spandex @t the Door, packed neatly every week for your enjoyment.

Still counting towards the triple digits, this is column 97, bringing you:

-Advance Reviews for Marvel comics next week: The Order, Amazing Spider-Man, Wolverine, Thunderbolts and X-Men

-Panel of the Week voting

-Dan DiDio versus reality-

-Assgate

-Who are the Authoriteens?

-Battle of the Thors

For daily updates and even more reviews, videos and commentary, keep checking the LYS@D daily blog. and subscribe to the RSS feed.

This week in comics…

PANEL OF THE WEEK VOTING 19.08.07

Each week I’ll be posting the 3-4 most memorable panels from the week and putting them up for a public week-long vote. The winning panels gets posted on the sidebar and earns boasting privileges over lesser panels…

This week: No funnies, but lots of dramatic splash pages!

Vote for your favourite:



Panel A: ‘Nuff Said (FRIENDLY NEIGHBOUR HOOD SPIDER-MAN #25)


Panel B: Just begging to be re-captioned! (COUNTDOWN #37)


Panel C: The Blue Beetles Reunion Tour (BOOSTER GOLD #1)

ADVANCE REVIEWS:


WOLVERINE #56
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: Howard Chaykin
Marvel Comics

An honest-to-Gawd good Wolvie story? No, excuse me, a GREAT Wolvie story! One that doesn’t involve an umpteenth battle with his stereotypical nemesis, doesn’t rewrite his origin, doesn’t involve hidden or resurfaced memories! A story that’s self-contained, new-reader friendly and doesn’t tie in to the X-titles but features Wolvie as a character on his own strength?

Please, pinch me!

Jason Aaron (a new Vertigo voice: SCALPED, THE OTHER SIDE) is doing a short stint, paired with Howard CHAYKIN! Hmm, keep pinching, this is too good to be true.

Logan wakes up in the bottom of a dark pit, without knowing how he got there, while a man with a massively huge chaingun keeps shooting at him every five minutes to keep him trapped. The story follows the life of the man with the gun, the poor slob named Wendell, his every day life from the time he wakes, to when he goes into work, greets the sexy secretary he can’t have, takes over machine-gun duty, chats with the monster-in-the-pit, punches out and heads home again.

Aaron weaves a fascinating character in the hired goon, with his utter misery of an existence and instant familiarization magnet for the reader. Logan takes a back seat in the story, staying in the shadows and acting as the catalyst for the goon to address his life and his choices. Logan is smart and cunning, vicious and ruthless. Totally dreamy and a major hard-ass, finally! Good to know the castration didn’t hold.

Of course, Aaron isn’t here for more than a few issues. Time to wake up.

Grade: 8.5/10


THUNDERBOLTS #116

Writer: Warren Ellis
Artist: Mike Deodato Jr

Marvel Comics

Warren Ellis has recovered the Midas touch.

Anything he touches these days, turns to gold. Thunderbolts being the prime example of a continuity-boggled, why-is-it-still-here titl, where Ellis came in, stripped it away to the bare bones and built around it a hard-edged psychological thriller about a team of killers on a leash, locked away in a dank prison headquarters and sent out by a certified loon to kill and maim for an adoring public. Publicity spins, neuroses and psychoses, and of course cannibalism. LOVE!

Deodato is at last in his element, on a book where he can shine and stretch his talent above and beyond the sterile cramped style he first became famous for.

Interesting note, how current continuity is suddenly creeping in the book with this issue. First the Order makes the Breaking News during the news feed opening scene/recap, and then the dangling Captain Marvel thread from Civil War is quietly put to rest. Now this could have easily been the editor telling Ellis to put in a small mention that Captain Marvel is no longer the warden of the Negative Zone. Ellis of course picks up that bit of info and instead of info-dumping it in a random caption, he weaves it into the conversation between Norman and Moonstone, and even manages to utilize it to squeeze in a sick joke and further shade Osborn’s demented persona.

Plot spoilers/teasers: This issue starts the new ‘Caged Angels’ storyline dealing with the reaction of the criminal community to the Thunderbolts new cushy position. Why should only this handful of murderous savages benefit from Stark’s new project? Why can’t all the other killers get arrested and get set up with nice digs, a license to kill and their personal multiple-articulation action figure? Norman and Moonstone make plans, Leonard Sampson lurks behind the scenes, poor Penance gets emo-er by the panel, Songbird finally takes charge showing actual promise as a leader, while Venom has… a character moment?

Grade: 7.5/10


X-MEN #202

Writer: Mike Carey
Artist: Humberto Ramos

Marvel Comics

Something evil is brewing here. Disparate strands are coming together, in the third part of the Marauders storyline, with the X-Men truly bruised and beaten. ‘Or are they?’

But let’s backtrack. It’s not really the Marauders is it? Marketing has been very fishy into diverting attention from what is really happening right now in the x-titles. It’s not -just- the Marauders. It’s Mr sinister and the Marauders, along with Exodus and the Acolytes, along with Mystique and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. It’s all three major X-baddies working together ‘Secret society’ like. On the opposite front, Mike Carey is rolling in all the mutants available in his repertoire, fighting back with Whedon’s lost-in-continuity crew, the New x-Men students and whatever remains of his own team after half of them turned coat and the rest just croaked.

Along the way Carey is bringing together elements from every past x-writer’s tenure and tying together dangling threads left and right. From Vargas and the Dreams of Destiny from the ill-conceived (and executed) X-Treme X-Men, Dark Mother from Weinberg’s short Cable run, to Ravita Kao from Astonishing, the Dark Beast and the Genoshan labs from Claremont’s Excalibur relaunch, the concentration camps from Tieri’s Weapon-X, the Black Womb experiments from Nicieza’s pocket x-universe, the Mutant designer drugs from Casey’s run and so on. Somehow Carey makes everything fit neatly together and get acknowledged, creating a grand x-tapestry the likes of which we haven’t seen since the mid-90s with Scott Lobdell heading the franchise during the X-Cutioner’s Song, the Phalanx Covenant, the Age of Apocalypse and beyond. (I wonder if we’ll also see X-Force/X-Statix somehow fitting into this puzzle)

Plot spoilers/teasers: Cannonball and Iceman are the last surviving members of Carey’s team and they’re going all macho-hero-guy on the turncoat Sunfire, with Iceman actually being cool instead of play-acting. These two characters work great together as the eternal team-rookies who stick together, picking up their friendship where Lobdell left off 10 years ago. The Big Three baddies reveal their plan and the connection between the recent attacks, at the same time as the remaining X-Men realize the truth. The New X-Men with Kitty and Colossus (a nice nod to the Age of Apocalypse’s Generation-Next title) fend off an attack on the institute and defend the Books of Destiny, while Emma reveals an ace up her sleeve. Rogue is still comatose, Cable is still dead, and the whole cast is still looking bizarrely angular and attractive thanks to the impossible anatomies that only Humberto Ramos can pull through.

In the back-up feature, the two Beasts compare notes, ‘our’ Beast gets his hands dirty and some intriguing discoveries concerning the M-Day situation see the light. Endangered Species has been non-stop fun, and the best model for how weekly comics should be. Each installment is sufficiently self-contained, each 8-pager following the central character into a different corner of the X-verse, yet still carrying forward the overall plot. There’s more stuff advancing the plot in a single weekly 8-page installment of this, than a whole month’s worth of Countdown comics. Maybe we can look forward to an actual weekly X-verse title in the future, in the same vein?

Grade: 7.5/10

THE ORDER #2

Writer: Matt Fraction
Artist: Barry Kitson

Marvel Comics


The Order is California’s home-grown government-sponsored, media-friendly superhero team, based on the Greek Pantheon. Tony Stark is Zeus, high commander high on government dough; Pepper Potts is Hera, team leader from a safe distance with a next generation iPhone; Henry Hellrung is Apollo, field leader, recovering alcoholic and washed-up actor with his tongue firmly planted between his Iron-highnesses rivets. The rest? Well, we’re slowly finding out.

Fraction seems ready to teach Advance Team-book Plotting and Character Introductions 401. Many new team books today fall into common traps and lose their readership’s interest by the middle of the opening arc. They either force a massive info-dump on the reader in the first issue, throwing all their cards on the table but failing to catch the reader’s interest with any one character (SHADOWPACT being a more recent example), or they push plot decompression to the limits by taking one issue to introduce each member of the team, with the team not appearing together until the 6th issue of the story, by which point the readers are so bored the series is canceled (don’t believe me? Look for back issues of THE CREW or the Tsunami NEW MUTANTS relaunch). Fraction knows the golden cut here; The team is already in place from the first issue, with each issue featuring a done-in-one adventure that furthers the overall plot, interjected by the audition interviews of one member each issue; keep the reader interested with action, qualify the ‘team’ title, while you slowly introduce the cast one by one forging a connection between each of them and the reader. Think of the idea behind MIGHTY AVENGERS but executed properly.

The first issue was dedicated to Henry Hellrung or Anthem, while #2 spotlights Becky Ryan, the team’s Venus or as the story title dubs her: Teenager of the Year.

Becky is the Marvel Universe’s answer to pre-drugs Britney Spears. a child celebrity, winning pageants, selling platinum albums, etc, with a sunny disposition and a repressed personality after growing up with an adult constantly dictating how she should act and look, what she could eat and how she should think, if that.

In the interest of poetic justice, Fraction grants this girl the power to ‘be whatever [she] wants to be’. The next scene cuts to Becky ecstatic at the prospect of super-punching a coimmunist bear in the face. She is a superhero actually having fun. And that communicates well from her to the viewer/reader.

I think it’s at this point I thought to myself ‘This is so good. I’m so happy I could punch a bear too’. Once in a while, a book comes along which pushes certain buttons and becomes an instant favorite, like love at first read.

PREACHER, X-FORCE/X-STATIX, NEXTWAVE, FABLES, RUNAWAYS, YOUNG AVENGERS; When the ORDER was first announced I had a good gut feeling, and the first issue touched on a lot of favorite soft spots, but it wasn’t until this second character introduction that I realized this is the book that’s going to get me running every month to the comics store to read .

What else goes on in the issue? A Who’s Who of Russian criminals attacks, from trolls to Bears and metal-plated commie chicks. Someone dies (but that was obvious since last issue). The team’s Hestia/P.R. shows up and she demands to be cherished. Nixon Bobblehead helps reach an important decision. A former Order member copes with life without fame. The bluetooth sword speaks. Much kicking, punching and running on water. Euthanasia. Nuclear bombs. Giant seafood. Becky rules. (but we already covered that)

This is the gold ‘cool’ standard superhero comics should aspire to.

(Did i already mention I’m in love with this book?)

Grade: 9/10


AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #543
Writer: J. M. Straczynski
Artist: Ron Garney
Inker: Bill Reinhold
Marvel Comics

Yes, the scene on the cover DOES take place inside this comic. And without wanting to give away too much, I wouldn’t rush to my store on Wednesday to make sure I got the collector’s issue of Aunt May’s second death to put on ebay. Most. Misleading. Cover. Since-that-Uncanny-X-Men -one-by-Joe-Casey-where- Logan-was-kissing-Jean-Grey- and-grabbing-her-booty

Aunt May is still hospitalised, Peter is still emo about it, and the police finally wise up and pay Dear Sick May a visit. JMS pushes Peter to his limits here, driving him over the edge by having him confront the real consequences and significance of his outlaw status. Ron Garney finally eases in the artistic seat of the title (too little too late?), establishing mood and emotions with the simplest details.

It would have been sob-worthy and a tissue-thon, if not for the jarring annoying geek voice in my head SCREAMING that Mary Jane was already a famous super-model and a Hollywood actress before her husband became the most famous face on television with his unmasking. Yet she parades around pretending to be Jane Average ‘Mary Riley’ without anyone making the connection, and Peter himself goes ‘undercover’ as a nurse leaving his face uncovered, again without anyone noticing. Peter David wisely gave him an image inducer to project his Ben Reilly persona for school, why not use it here?

PAD again did a better job dealing with both the repercussions of Peter’s unmasking (actually acknowledging and using his extended supporting cast), and with his anger state. The Black Costume of course still feels exactly like it is: a cheap marketing ploy/tie-in to the movie.

Grade: 5/10

MIGHTY AVENGERS #7: ASSGATE

(full cover here)

Here’s your chance to get in on the latest cover controversy early. And this baby really has it all.

  • Claw-fisting (ouch. and check out Sentry’s positioning:)
  • Man-rape!
  • Barebottom super-heroines (Ms Marvel seems to have moved down to thongs to salvage her dipping popularity)
  • Bootylicious cheesecake (Wasp’s is so diproportionate that it’s blocking the camera)

At least everyone is getting equal opportunity sex-ploitation here, Marvel has learned from the previous H4H debate

INTRODUCING: THE AUTHORITEENS


“Listen up guys and dolls! We’re the Authoriteens and we’re here to prevent the kabloo-ing of, like, the Multiverse!”

(or my ‘GEN13#11 rules’ review)

No, Gail Simone isn’t on crack, trust me, it all makes sense later on.

Who are they? What do they want? Where do they come from? Why weren’t they on the cover instead of the Tranquility Goths a.k.a. the Liberty Snots? (although Mangacide is seriously cool)

(no kidding, I almost missed the issue, I thought they were showing up in #12 only)

The Authoriteens premiered at the end of Gen13 #10 and are the warped creation of Gail Simone who obviously has an itch on her funny bone — and it’s about time! As much as I am ecstatic with the leaps and bounds she has made in the industry, I do miss those wacky YABS columns and her Deadpool/Agent-X/Killer Princesses/Simpsons runs where anything went and you could see the insanity take root, settle down and live am long and prosperous life.

So, er, back to the Authoriteens.

They’re exactly what you feared: the teenage versions of the Authority, coming from an alternate world where everyone is a teen. (let’s not delve too deep in that, shall we)

They are:
DAYBREAKER: the dim-witted teen Midnighter. He can run the same routine in his head a thousand times, and still mess up. Aparently straight/denial and with a cast regular at Jackass.

KID APOLLO: guess. Prefers Babies to G.I.Joes but he would still totally fry that blonde bitch to get to Ken’s stable. Total powerhouse.

THE INTERN: get it? the junior version of the Doctor. brilliant. He’s the snotty know-it-all in class who loves info-dumps.

CONTRACTOR: get this one too? junior Engineer. She mainly floats around and uses weird words. Experiencing serious early growth. She likes to frug.

NESTLING: Her eggs bring all the boys to the yard. Total tramp according to Daybreaker. But then again that would be like taking sex tips from your kid brother.

JACK HATFIELD: The teen version of Jack Hawksmoore. The Spirit of Small Towns. Think Smallville to Metropolis. Brilliant (applauds)

What else did we like in GEN13 #11:

-Finally someone points to the elephant in the room and explains the discrepancies between this and the rest of the Wildstorm relaunch titles. Namely that every other title picked up where last continuity left off, while Gen13 was the only title that rebooted. Now we finally learn that the kids’ souls got transferred to their new cloned bodies upon their death, and there was some more inexplicable cosmic mumbo jumbo that will probably tie into Final Crisis or Worldstorm or whatever. So the kids have literally re-launched, withuot prior knowledge of their lives, but unknowingly drawn towards each other and the people/places they knew. Sweet.

-Gen1, or the Gen13 babies!!

They’re so cutesy! I want to see a whole army of cloned babies going up against the teens! Gen1 times a hundred! Baby havok! Shit will fly! (erm… ok). They’re cute.

-The sequence between the gutters: brilliant! When the Intern takes Roxy and Rainmaker on a tour to the intricacies of the Multiverse, they literally step between the Gutters, in a fitting tribute to Morrison’s ANIMAL MAN, the mother of all 4th wall breakers, and John Byrne’s SHE-HULK. The kids walk through panels, climb down them and even walk around old Gen13 vol. 1 covers
If you’re going to do a 5-page info-dump, you might as well give your reader a flashy setting/locale to distract him from the abuse.

What we DIDN’T like:

-oh, the art… needles, sticking in! Not a good choice to have the fill-ins in this issue, and certainly not a wise choice to get Sunny Lee to do the 4th wall breaking art. Was the deadline demon so dire?

Sure he managed to do the above page right, but when it came to the one on our Left, he delivered a whimper when the script was seriously calling for a BANG. It’s a page featuring the teenage/Kid version of all current Wildstorm titles. It’s Wildkitties. It’s Stormwatch PHD in primary school, it’s the Planetary as toddlers. It’s… mostly covered by the two honking figures of Roxy and Caitlin, and it’s hastily put together, a 5 minute sketch each at most. Boo :(

[you can check out more pages from the issue over at SCANS DAILY, and scroll down to the comments section for a fun exchange between Gail and the post’s author who wouldn’t believe that it was really Gail posting there ]

DAN DIDIO VERSUS REALITY

uh-oh, someone’s losing here

From Dan DiDio’s Countdown interview at Newsarama

Sure, there’s damage control, there’s plausible deniability…

…and then there’s the old ‘if we smile and reassure them,+ noone will notice the iceberg’


NRAMA: […] so lets go through that door of fan reaction to Countdown. You and I have talked about this before – that online fan response and reaction is different from personal fan response and reaction, and neither is necessarily connected to sales for any given project. I don’t want this to get into a discussion of the validity of the groups of responses, but rather, and again, from your chair, what have you heard, and what channels is that coming through?

DD: The channels that are carrying a lot of the reaction that I’m seeing are coming from the stores themselves and from fans that I’m at conventions with. I attend multiple conventions throughout the course of the year, and I’ve gotten a very positive reaction to what’s going on.

Given that there seems to be a very vocal – and I don’t know its size – group of fans online that is counter to that hasn’t really affected sales at all. I find it humorous that information that comes to me from online is erroneous in regards to the actual sales figures. I find it humorous that certain retailers decide to make blatant statements about how they’re going to be striking back at the book by making returns, when in fact the portion of books that they’re actually returning is less than 0.01% of the books that we sold. The reality is that the sales are there, the strength is there, and I have a lot of faith in regards to how the series works and how it’s moving forward. […]

[…]For me, Countdown is the best-kept secret success we’ve got going right now. It’s a book that people are enjoying, reading, and looking forward to. I still have people telling and showing me that they like the weekly comics. People are not “tired” of weekly comics – they buy comics on a weekly basis as it is. […]

That was Dan DiDio, in the blue corner.

And over here, in the red, we have Reality

(courtesy of the Beat and DC Comics month-to-month sales)

05/2006: 52 Week 1 â€" 140,971 [143,611]

05/2006: 52 Week 2 â€" 128,393 (- 8.9%) [130,704]

05/2006: 52 Week 3 â€" 123,982 (- 3.4%) [126,913]

05/2006: 52 Week 4 â€" 121,440 (- 2.1%) [125,297]

06/2006: 52 Week 5 â€" 111,895 (- 7.9%)

06/2006: 52 Week 6 â€" 110,028 (- 1.7%) [111,732]

06/2006: 52 Week 7 â€" 110,188 (+ 0.2%) [112,618]

[...]

03/2007: 52 Week 47 â€" 92,676 (- 0.9%) [ 94,151]

04/2007: 52 Week 48 â€" 94,715 (+ 2.2%)

04/2007: 52 Week 49 â€" 94,681 (- 0.0%)

04/2007: 52 Week 50 â€" 97,073 (+ 2.5%) [100,214]

04/2007: 52 Week 51 â€" 94,934 (- 2.2%)

05/2007: 52 Week 52 â€" 102,075 (+ 7.5%)

By the 7th issue of 52, sales had stopped declining and had leveled off, with small increases and decreses here and there. The 1st issue sold a phenomenal 140k, and the lowest sales of an issue were 92k for issue 47

05/2007: Countdown #51 â€" 91,083

05/2007: Countdown #50 â€" 83,752 (-8.1%) [85,564]

05/2007: Countdown #49 â€" 81,484 (-2.7%) [83,188]

05/2007: Countdown #48 â€" 79,810 (-2.1%) [81,828]

06/2007: Countdown #47 â€" 77,504 (-2.9%)

06/2007: Countdown #46 â€" 76,362 (-1.5%)

06/2007: Countdown #45 â€" 74,918 (-1.9%)

06/2007: Countdown #44 â€" 73,971 (-1.3%)


Meanwhile COUNTDOWN launched (with #51) at 91k sales (lower than the lowest-selling issue of 52.
It has kept losing readers steadily with every issue with no real sign of leveling off, already beneath the 75k barrier. That’s 20,000 pissed off readers voting with their wallets in 8 short weeks.

Yes, Dan, the internet is crazy and shouldn’t be taken into account.

I particularly admire the Newsarama interviewer’s noble efforts every week trying to get the point across to the editor, that Countdown IS an inaccessible mess, filled with continuity errors, in dire need of editorial boxes to help the readers understand where they can get the full story to be able to understand what exactly is happening.

BATTLE OF THE THORS

Sourcing IGN.com, there’s two men rumoured to be in the lead to play Thor in the upcoming Matthew ‘Stardust’ Vaugn-helmed movie adaptation of the long-running comic.

ROME’s Kevin McKidd versus WWE’s Paul Levesque a.k.a. HHH

versus

one is a proper actor with great TV credit, the other is a pro-wrestler turned actor, most notably playing a henchman in Marvel’s Blade Trinity.

Does acting ability really weigh in in this case? It’s THOR!! For all his Old English attitude and his Thou’s and Shall’s, he’s not really that much demanding a part performance-wise. All you need is Godly presence, and Levesque is overflowing, he’s practically Thor in his day-to-day life!

I’ll leave you with these:

Notice the family resemblance?

This blog is officially Gay for Thor.

(p.s. Thor should have a beard for the movie and I’m prepared to go on the streets and protest for it)

Aaaaand on that sexy note, that’s a wrap for this week! I’m waiting your comments and feedback through email to Manolis@gmail.com. If you self-publish your own comics or represent an Indy comics company, add me to your press release list, and I will run your news in this space every week.

Manolis Vamvounis
a.k.a. Dr. Dooplove


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ah, the good old Dr Manolis, the original comics Greek. He's been at this for sometime. he was there when the Comics Nexus was founded, he even gave it its name, he even used to run it for a couple of years. he's been writing about comics, geeking out incessantly and interviewing busier people than himself for over ten years now and has no intention of stopping anytime soon.