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[Koah]

Maybe lighting will strike twice! 







Or maybe... once?  Partially?  Can... can lightning strike partially?  Not really hit anything, just sort of go near it?

[Brentai]

You could hallucinate the lightning striking.

[sei]

Or that Stan Lee is still relevant.

[Thad]

Tomasi on Green Lantern Corps: I thought the Mongul/Black Mercy arc was pretty meh, but it looks like he's hit his stride in #27.  Good levity with Guy and Kyle opening a new Warriors on Oa, and a good new character in Saarek.

I'm frankly already sick of Blackest Night and it doesn't even start until next year.  Event Fatigue is a real thing, guys.

[Alex]

Next month is the time when I get back into the comics since Deadpool's new series is finally hitting.

...And he's all I have left at Marvel because Venom sucks and Spider-Man does more so now. 

[Thad]

Walking Dead #51: the major twist is sort of telegraphed within the issue, but is a pretty big shock within the context of the larger series.

Next month's cover shows Michonne's back.  (Or at least someone holding her katana.)  [spoiler]Seems fitting, now that she and Rick have something in common.[/spoiler]

[Thad]

[...] Superman #678 [...] changes to a Kirby style for the villain's origin story, bookended by a Frank Miller-style panel and a montage that I would probably say is Dave McKean-inspired (definitely an homage to SOMEbody on Sandman).

In the end, I was disappointed that it was so heavy on the Kirby influence and only played with two other styles, for half a page each.  I don't expect something like the Madman issue where Allred made an homage to a different artist in every panel (that would be pretty much an impossible task when facing monthly deadlines), but a little more variety would have been nice.

Buckaroo Banzai: The Prequel Of Hunan Bondage #1 does a little of this; it plays around with different art styles, different coloring techniques, and some rather cool panel layouts.  That may explain why it took two years between the last miniseries and this one.

The plot jumps around a lot, and I'm not quite sure what the hell is going on; I'm also not sure what the hell decade it's supposed to be.  If it's a prequel it should logically take place BEFORE 1984, and the hair, clothing, and attitudes toward the Chinese suggest that it does, but there's also a reference to CD's.

(And didn't Buckaroo meet Penny for the first time in the movie?  Maybe the "prequel" part only refers to the flashbacks?)

Course, I don't even remember Return of the Screw ENDING.  My recollection was that #3 was a cliffhanger and #4 just never came, but I must be wrong because those three issues have been collected and this new mini is another story entirely.

Anyway.  Buckaroo Banzai is probably not supposed to make very much sense anyway.

[Thad]

Astonishing #26: plot's thin, and dialogue's not up to Ellis's usual standard, though there's a good bit with Armor and near the end he makes Cyclops a sympathetic character (still has a rod up his butt, but now it's the "Hey, we have to kill people sometimes, deal with it" kind of rod up his butt).

Bianchi's art is real purty.  The costumes (Storm's in particular) are absurd but honestly pretty cool.  It's a really interesting change from Cassaday.  (What's he doing these days, anyway?  Planetary #27?)

Also, Beast is on the cover but appears nowhere in the issue.

[Thad]

FF #559: now THAT, my friends, is how you do a big reveal.

Also, nice to get a Johnny issue.  And nice to see that, as big a flake as he's been so far, he doesn't fuck around when lives are on the line.

[Mongrel]

"I'LL FUCK YOUR FAMILY!" "My family is well-armed!"

The Georgia thread reminded me of what may be one of my favourite comics ever. And it was never even finished (well, maybe someday... blah blah blah).

The Winter Men.

Good luck finding any information online about it. It was a miniseries originally slated to run to 8 issues, then was cut to 6, re-expanded to 8 and then cut down again. Sales numbers were embarassingly paltry. It finally ended with issue 5, with a sort of a placeholder ending and a promise to conclude in 'The Winter Men Special #1', which was never released, but would have have been a single double-sized issue.

The is was quite simply one of the best graphic anythings I've ever seen comitted to paper. Rather than attempt to explain it, I will just quote Warren Ellis' personal review:

"WINTER MEN...I think

it's probably the best thing

Wildstorm are publishing right now.

Nominally, it's the story of the

people who used to be Russian

mecha-piloting "heroes," as far as

I can see; the present day, and the

meat of the book, is one of them

as a drunken, comically immoral cop

in disintegrated contemporary

Moscow.  John Paul Leon turns in

the art job of his career, but the

standout, even in that company,

is writer Brett Lewis, who is writing

some of the best dialogue I've ever

read.  What DEADWOOD is to

American Western speech, WINTER

MEN is to transliterated Russian

conversation; it has a peculiar

cadence to it that makes you think

of subtitles, but rich with personality

and music.  Complete with arrowed

captions that point out and

translate local gestures.  I've re-read

the two issues I own a dozen times

each.  Go and look for the singles

-- four released, four to come..."

Ashley Woods also called it the greatest comic book he'd ever read from the Big Two.

Now... my question is: Have any of you ever read it?

[Thad]

No, but it makes a good segue into 1963, which I recently read and have been wanting to talk about.

1963 is a similarly-unfinished comic series from 1993, written by Alan Moore (Swamp Thing) and illustrated variously by Steve Bissette (Swamp Thing) and Rick Veitch (Swamp Thing), with inks by John Totleben (Swamp Thing).

As the title implies, the book is an homage to the Marvel books of the 1960's.  The first two issues are Mystery Incorporated, a sci-fi story about a family of four explorers, and The Fury, about a teenage superhero who supports his mother while mourning the death of his father; that issue features Sky Solo, Lady of LASER.  Next is Tales of the Uncanny, featuring a story about USA, a patriotic superhero from the '40's, and Hypernaut, a mechanical hero with a tragic secret.  Then there's Tales from Beyond, with N-Man, a giant, muscled monster, and Johnny Beyond, a dimension-hopping sorcerer.  #5 was Horus, Lord of Light, about an ancient god alternating between a modern secret identity and interaction with his mythical pantheon, and #6 was The Tomorrow Syndicate, which teamed up USA, Hypernaut, Horus, and N-Man with a married couple of size-changing scientists, Inra-Man and Infra-Girl.

Beyond the basic premises, though, Moore wrote the dialogue in an over-the-top, alliterative Stan Lee style, using catchphrases like "Say no more!", "Excalibur!", and "Be sure to see it's Sixty-Three!"  Each issue featured a lettercol and a Bullpen Bulletins-style news page, and those were where the parody ceased to be loving and got a little vicious -- Affable Al is a cheerful, no-talent megalomaniac who overworks his artists while claiming credit for their work and paying them poorly.  The Marvel Bullpen is replaced with the Sixty-Three Sweatshop, where the artists toil while Al sits in his air-conditioned office.

There are also fake ads.  They're pretty entertaining too.

Anyway, 1963 was also something of a rebuke to the Dark-and-Gritty trend of the day, and its final issue was to be an 80-page special where the 1963 characters traveled to 1993 and met the Image stable of Spawn, the Savage Dragon, and whoever the hell else Image was publishing back then, but it never happened.  Lee and Liefeld got busy, Moore and Bissette had a falling-out, and the Dark-and-Gritty trend started to recede.  So the closest we'll see to the intended denouement is the bit in #6 where the Tomorrow Syndicate travels to the future and the art style changes several times.

Anyway.  A great book, and highly recommended if anyone can find it.

[Thad]

Trinity #12: Probably the best bit of the main feature is the continuing story about the Trinity's personalities starting to bleed into one another.

And the backup story finally brings "our" Riddler in, and seems to put to bed the question of who Enigma is.  It's not a surprise, but now that it's out of the way, hopefully we can get more of his story.

[Romosome]

uh

didn't stan lee help create PAMELA ANDERSON IN: STRIPPERELLA

I really think in his old age Stan Lee just wants to be Hugh Hefner instead.

[Thad]

Madman #10: I love how the conflict that's so clearly depicted on the cover is more a thing that simmers below the surface in the story itself.  Frank doesn't want Luna Joe, he just wants Joe back -- and he feels guilty about Adam's death and wants everything to go back to the way it was.

As common as the guilt theme is for someone dating the girlfriend of a recently-deceased friend, it has a metafictional significance here, too -- whatever it was that killed him in the story, the real reason Adam died was to clear the way so Frank could date Luna Joe.

The father-son dynamic between Dr. Flem and Frank has an autobiographical component too -- Allred's father passed away recently, and I've seen a lot of his recent stories reflecting elements of that.  I don't know how much Allred's father was like Dr. Flem, but Flem's certainly an archetype here -- the father who cares deeply about his son but can't express it, who puts up a callous exterior rather than risk hurting him.  And this issue we hit a moment that's standard in every story of an adopted child: a key to his past, something to tie him back to his natural father.

The last-page reveal raises more questions than it answers; we're closer to finding out who the disembodied narrative voice belongs to but not quite there yet.

I don't think things are going back to status quo any time soon -- but Allred definitely seems to be working toward some kind of resolution to the Frank/Luna Joe/zombie Adam triangle.

Anyway.  This is one of my favorite books, ever.  Those not reading it may be better served in picking up the trades and starting from the beginning, but in any case I recommend it.

[Büge]

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'Save us!' And I'll look down, and whisper 'Aglets.'

[Thad]

So uh they're STILL releasing new JLU toys, TWO YEARS after the last episode aired?

Could someone please explain to me again how the five-year rule makes the slightest fucking bit of sense, at all?

[Bongo Bill]

$

[Thad]

Yes, I covered that part in the FIRST sentence of my post.  The show is clearly still profitable.

[Classic]

Do you think they would sell more toys because it was still on TV?

[Royal☭]

What?  I'm not being facetious here, but your question changes tense halfway through and I'm not sure what it is that you're asking.