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[Thad]

In other Millar news: Nrama interview teases his upcoming Ultimate Avengers.

[Kayma]

I am becoming more dissatisfied with Kick-Ass as each issue passes.

*sigh*

 

Haven't read past 3 yet, but I enjoyed it so far. I hope it doesn't disappoint me.

Scuba dude isn't, like, curving bullets, is he?

[Mongrel]

Not... yet.

[McDohl]

Apparently, Wizards of the Coast has been using DDP comics to do comics based on the various D&D IPs they own, as I went to the comic book store and noticed the Dragonlance logo on one of them.  I picked up the first two issues based on the first of the Legends Trilogy, Time of the Twins.  I'm really digging the art style, and the Legends Trilogy has been one of my favorites.

[Thad]

Hm, yeah, I knew they were adapting Chronicles a few years back.  Maybe I should check it out.

Gotta be better than the animated movie.

[McDohl]

The voice acting of the movie was fucking perfect.  The animation, not so much.

[Thad]

I posted my thoughts on the movie in February; not really much to add.

[Kashan]

These are some pretty good deals. I reccomend David Yurkovich and the soft cover of blankets if you don't have that stuff yet. $3 top shelf comix sale.

[Thad]

Nrama: Meltzer's started a charity to -- for starters -- fix up the boyhood home of Joe Siegel.  They've tapped a pretty big list of talent who will be holding auctions for the cause.

Latest: they've raised over $40K, mostly from $10 and $20 donations but of course the auctions going for thousands of dollars don't hurt, and construction's going to start in the next few weeks.

It's one of those tug-at-the-heartstrings stories, and absolutely appropriate for how Siegel wrote the original Superman -- the paragon, the symbol of our own better natures, the inspiration, and, above all, the guy who gives people a helping hand when times are tough.

An interesting sidenote from the story:

Writer Paul Dini will donate the autographed script for the unaired script episode of Batman: The Animated Series called "Batman/Superman: When Twerps Collide." Dini notes, "This Batman/Superman team-up segment was cut from a Batman direct to video that was ultimately never produced. It is a lost bit of DC animated history. Enjoy!"

A trip to Google shows no matches for "When Twerps Collide" besides this story.  A Mxy/Bat-Mite story, perhaps?  I'm hoping the winner of the auction shares with the rest of the class.

On another topic, I just found out that, now that Fourth World's been released in its entirety (such as it is), The Demon is getting a similar hardcover Omnibus edition.  Something to keep in mind for when I get a job and can buy $50 comic books again.  And have bought the last two Fourth World books.

[Thad]

Nrama: Amazing Spider-Man #573 to include 8-page Stephen Colbert story by Mark Waid.

[Thad]

FF #560:

Unsurprising: [spoiler]Mrs. Deneuve is Sue from the future.[/spoiler]

More surprising: [spoiler]Not just a few decades in the future, but 500 YEARS.[/spoiler]

More surprising still: [spoiler]she doesn't appear to be one of the good guys.[/spoiler]

While things don't overlap 100%, I think it's still fair to assume the dystopian future we're seeing here is part of the same timeline as the one in Old Man Logan.  If we assume that to be true, that means there's an environmental collapse AND a supervillain takeover, not necessarily in that order.

Are they connected?  Well, one hypothesis is that Reed's the Big Bad in Old Man Logan.

Case for: in Civil War, Millar wrote Reed as an amoral character who believed the ends justified the means, and had no problem throwing his friends into the Negative Zone "for the greater good".  Faced with the end of the world, this version of Reed could do some pretty nasty things.

Case against: But teaming up with Doom and Magneto to subjugate the human race is a bit of a stretch (no pun intended).  Millar also gave Johnny a pretty flexible set of morals for a few issues in there, but once the chips were down he didn't even hesitate to do the right thing.  Indeed, Reed's seeming much warmer and more grounded now than he did during CW.

Plus, while OML has thus far focused on a more diverse cast of Marvel characters like Hawkeye, descendants of Hulk and Spider-Man, and a namesake of Kingpin, I think the big bad has to be an X-Man.

Anyhow.  I'm guessing "probably not" on the Reed is the President angle -- though he probably has something to do with the heroes disappearing.  And I DO think the two catastrophes are going to turn out to be connected, but only tangentially -- Millar's stressed that, while these books tie together, it's not a crossover and they stand alone.

Speaking of, 1985 #5 gives the clearest tie to Millar's other books yet: [spoiler]it ends with a Big Reveal of Galactus, just like FF #559.[/spoiler]  Aside from that, transplanting the hero into the Marvel Universe changes the dynamic in entertaining ways -- New Yorkers totally unfazed by two-bit costumed villains in their midst, the Avengers' and Fantastic Four's respective reactions to his request for help, and...well, the solution's obvious.  There's one hero in the Marvel Universe who you'd go to if you wanted your crazy story to be taken seriously.

I've said before that man-on-the-street stories are my favorites, and this is a good one.  It also manages the proper symmetry for this kind of story.  (I remember being disappointed at a Masters of the Universe comic arc a few years back that featured Man-at-Arms trading places with an evil version of himself from an opposite universe; we saw the evil one running around Eternia, but never the far-more-compelling story of Duncan in the other universe.  Hell, you go back to Captain N and there was a Mirror World episode, and I remember being irritated that they never tried to team up with the good version of Mother Brain.)

[Thad]

The comic version of Treehouse of Horror is less a Simpsons comic and more an homage to pulp and horror comics of the EC era.  The art seldom adheres to the standard character models, and the writers often seem like they haven't actually watched the show in about nineteen years.  But if you don't get bogged down on whether it feels like The Simpsons, it's usually a damned good book.

This year's features three stories: 30 Days of D'oh by Steve Niles and Glenn Fabry, Murder He Wrote by Ian Boothby and Nina Matsumoto, and Homerstein Conquers the World, by Gilbert Hernandez.

30 Days is the least funny of the three, and is less about the Simpsons than the Wiggums.  It's a passable story about a zombie apocalypse, but where it really shines is Fabry's art, at once familiar and different, distinctly Simpsons but also distinctly Fabry, different and more detailed.

Murder is a neat paradox: of the three, it has the most recognizably Simpsons story (Boothby is a regular on the comic), paired with the most radically different art, in a black-and-white manga style by Matsumoto.  The contrast is neat.

Finally, Homerstein barely qualifies as a Simpsons story.  It's got Bart, Lisa, and Homer, but substitute any three generic characters and the result would be the same.  It's just fun Hernandez monster weirdness.  The humor is Hernandez whimsy rather than Simpsons satire, but it's charming (not less so for looking somewhat like the Groening doodles that characterized the original Tracey Ullman versions of the characters) and the man does great work.

All in all, a good read; best Treehouse of Horror probably since the Monsters of Rock one a few years back.

[Thad]

Marvel: Your Universe March on Ultimatum Saga is one of those free books the publishers periodically put out to try and get new readers up to speed and interested in what's going on.

Earlier today, I posted on the Real World board about a study showing that ads for prescription drugs don't actually increase sales.  That seems apt here, because I have always wondered who this audience is that reads these promo books and then goes out and buys what they're promoting.  Because, FCBD notwithstanding, I can't think of one I've ever read that hasn't been terrible.

This one is only an exception to that rule inasmuch as it is probably worse than any other I've ever seen.  Batman: The 10-Cent Adventure?  The 12-Cent Adventure?  At least they had original content.  Even that Secret Invasion one Marvel put out a few months back reminded me that Skrulls used to be fun.  Even if it totally failed to mention the time one of them impersonated Richard Nixon.  And Your Universe, the previous record holder, at least looked like it had some editors working on it.

This one -- well, its biggest mistake is that it tries to cover every single fucking Ultimate Marvel event since Avengers Disassembled ever.  In chronological order.  "The Scarlet Witch turned evil and then went comatose.  Meanwhile, Cyclops and Havok discovered they had a long-lost brother.  Then the Scarlet Witch came back and altered reality.  Then everything went back to normal, except there were only 200 mutants left.  Then they shot Hulk into space.  Then there was a Civil War.  Also, Hulk was fighting aliens.  Then Captain America died.  Then they tried to start a superhero team in every state, but they all got infiltrated by Skrulls.  Then Hulk came back from space.  Meanwhile, the mutants were fighting over a mutant baby, and Bishop betrayed them to avert his dystopian future, even though he already did that ten years ago in the Onslaught story.  Then Bucky became Captain America.  Also, Black Panther and Storm were part of the Fantastic Four for six issues, though that really doesn't matter and I'm not sure why I bothered to bring it up.  Then Spider-Man and Mary Jane made a deal with the devil and now they don't remember they used to be married, and also now there is a Red Hulk and everybody is a Skrull.  The end."  "Millions of years ago, the Fantastic Four went back in time and fought dinosaurs.  Then a few million years later Atlantis was destroyed.  Then a few thousand years later Nick Fury and Wolverine were in the Super Soldier program, and then Captain America got frozen in ice fighting Nazis who were really Skrulls but they're called Chitauri in this universe.  Meanwhile, Magneto and Xavier started the Brotherhood, then had a falling out.  Then a few decades later Peter Parker got bitten by a genetically enhanced spider.  Then Norman Osborn became the Green Goblin.  Then Xavier started the X-Men and Magneto sent Wolverine to kill them but he switched sides.  Then Nick Fury founded the Ultimates and found Captain America in a glacier.  Then the Fantastic Four started up.  And then Hank Pym beat his wife.  And then fifteen more pages of convoluted shit about Peter Parker's love life, time travel, clones, zombies, and about 300 character names that get thrown out with little or no introduction.  The end."

I mean, seriously, the only conceivable takeaway from all this is "The Ultimate Marvel Universe is well on its way to becoming as much of an epic goddamned clusterfuck as the original Marvel Universe."  I seriously cannot envision the person who reads this thing and goes, "Oh, cool, I really want to read more about Captain America and Spider-Man's mutant baby red Skrull Chitauri."

Even if I found a single one of those stories interesting on its merits (well...the first couple issues of Civil War were volume of The Ultimates was pretty good), the presentation here is just godawful.  You could read a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book beginning-to-end and the narrative would jump around less and make more sense, and you could spend an hour on Wikipedia and get the same information with fewer typos.

I just don't get it.  It IS possible to do a good free promo book; I get a stack of the fuckers every May.  But this...well, if people are looking for harbingers of the next comic industry crash, I nominate Marvel: Your Universe and March On Ultimatum Saga.

Well...that and One More Day.

Really, a couple things are striking about this.  One is that, while the Ultimate Universe is still small enough that it's technically possible to do a 24-page book that summarizes every story it's ever had, it's basically become a convoluted, hacky mess with little resemblance to its original, tightly-controlled vision.

I've noted before that Millar and Hitch's original plan for the ending of Ultimates 2 was to kill off both Tony Stark and Nick Fury, and that that would have been far superior to how things actually wound up going.  That goes DOUBLE now that I know somebody fucking retconned Fury to have superpowers.

The change comes from the fact that the Ultimate Universe was originally experimental; writers could do more or less whatever the fuck they wanted.  Then it became a victim of its own success and editorial started laying down rules about what the writers could and couldn't do.  Which is a pity, because it seems to me that what the editors SHOULD be doing is making sure books don't get published containing passages like this:

As Reed Richards neared completion of his Cosmic Cube, Sue Storm was lured to Siberia by Russian scientist Ivan Kragoff, who hoped to tap into the N-Zone energies within her to revive his dead love.  However his assistant, Sorba Rutskaya, hijacked the procedure, killing Kragoff and transforming herself into monstrous gestalt entity, The Red Ghost.  When news that Sue's plane had vanished, the Fantastic Four headed to Siberia, where, allied with the armored Russian hero Crimson Dynamo, they managed to destroy the Ghost.  In their absence Halcyon forces tried to snatch Reed's Cube, activating its defense program, which surrounded the city in a giant force field, drawing Thanos to come and claim it.  He and Reed engaged in a battle of wills to control the Cube, which Thanos, already experienced in its use, won, slaying Reed.  Using its power, Thanos swiftly took control of most of Earth's heroes, sending them to conquer Halcyon, but Thanos' rogue daughter, Atrea, revived Reed, and he launched a counter-attack, removing the Cube's failsafes so that it responded to Thanos' subconscious death wish, slaying him.

Even the last page "buy our shit" catalog is fucked up, having a section that looks roughly like this:

Ultimates 2
Ultimates 2 vol 1 TPB
Ultimates 2 vol 1 TPB

Ultimates 2
Ultimates 2 vol 1 TPB
Ultimates 2 vol 2 TPB

Seriously, I see SIX NAMES listed in the credits under Editor, Editorial Assistant, Assistant Editors, and Editors, Special Projects.  What the fuck does an editor actually DO?  Because I'm pretty sure it's not editing.

So, all right, if the point of March on Ultimatum Saga is to show why a big event like Ultimatum is necessary to clear out all the crap and restore the Ultimate Universe to something worth reading, then I won't lie -- this book TOTALLY MAKES THAT CASE.

Two other good things I can say about it: it's free, and it takes a very long time to read.  I've been finishing my entire stack of comics in a day or two the last few weeks, and it's been very frustrating; this took probably four times as long for me to get through as an actual comic.

[Büge]

So uh I hear God's a skrull or something...

[Mongrel]

[Thad]

So, you know who's GOOD at putting out free promo comics?  Fantagraphics.

A Peanuts Halloween is undersized, it's not full of overblown, convoluted, poorly-edited storytelling -- and it's a genuinely enjoyable way to kill 15 minutes.

No chit-chat, no setup, just a series of Great Pumpkin strips, and then an ad on the back cover for the Complete Peanuts series (now up to 1970).  The work stands on its own; no need to explain or editorialize or play it up.

It's well-timed, of course; It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is the first of the three Peanuts specials that mark the holiday season every year; people are receptive to a little bit of Great Pumpkin, and for a lot of people these strips (and cartoons) generate warmth and nostalgia.  Where Marvel's free giveaway book was "Here, we will help you understand this!  Now buy some shit!" this is more like "Hey, remember this?  This is nice."

As for the strips themselves -- well, Peanuts was never edgy by any stretch, but in its heyday, before it got stale, it WAS a decently amusing strip.  And, inasmuch as it's probably been twenty years since I actually read these strips, I was surprised by Schulz's skill at dealing with complex issues four panels at a time -- when you come right down to it, the Great Pumpkin is a pretty deft metaphor for religion, coming from a man who was conflicted about his own faith.

All this to say, A Peanuts Halloween takes me back to my childhood, while simultaneously giving me the opportunity to see its subtler touches through the eyes of an adult.  Thanks, Fantagraphics.  And one of these days I might try picking up a few volumes of The Complete Peanuts...but damn, it sure is expensive.

[A²]

Thanks, Fantagraphics.  And one of these days I might try picking up a few volumes of The Complete Peanuts...but damn, it sure is expensive.

That's pretty much the only thing keeping me from going to the bookstore and raping the clerks until they sell me those books.

God damn I love Peanuts. I have no idea why. But I just do.

[LaserBeing]

God damn I love Peanuts. I have no idea why. But I just do.

For some reason I love the idea that if an AI program actually gained sentience the first thing it would decide was that it really liked Peanuts. Somehow that just seems perfect to me.

[Brentai]

PRIME DIRECTIVES
------------------

1. PARTY HARD
2. PARTY HARD
3. PARTY HARD
4. YANK THE FOOTBALL

[Büge]

.

So, you know who's GOOD at putting out free promo comics?  Fantagraphics.

I agree. Good company. They're fast and inexpensive. I'd recommend them to anyone buying hardcopy versions of Banana Games, Spider Garden or Spunky Knight.