This Week in Comics: 7/25/12

This week in comics, Saga #5 still doesn’t exist for some reason, National Comics launches with Eternity #1, and Image continues to blow minds with Prophet.

National Comics: Eternity #1

This Week in Comics: 7/18/12

This week in comics, Saga and Justice League are sold out at my shop so I don’t get to read them, Carol Danvers returns to the spotlight in Captain Marvel #1, and Mark Waid completely rocks.

Decent book. Terrible cover.

Review – Suicide Squad, Vol. 1: Kicked in the Teeth

Suicide Squad: Kicked in the Teeth

Though I found the opening issue of Suicide Squad to be something of a guilty pleasure, I quickly found I wasn’t alone in my tentative praise of the book.  Though I didn’t pick up the second issue, Suicide Squad‘s reception was relatively positive, and when I learned that it was the first New 52 title to break the inevitable downward sales trend and action start selling up – for the curious, it’s picked up about 4,000 steady new readers since February – despite not having any crossovers, I was interested to see what the book was all about.

This Week in Comics: 7/11/12

This week in comics, Frankenstein, Demon Knights, and The Shade continue to impress, Image launches a pretty fantastic new title in Revival, and we can finally stop giving a crap about owls.

Pictured: A scene that is still a good 15+ years off from where this issue ends.

This Week In Comics: 4th of July Edition

This week in comics, America America America America!  Also, Animal Man breaks out of its slump!

Why this cover? Because I forgot to pick up Action Comics #11 this week. To be fair, my comic shop files it under S for Superman, rather than A for Action Comics, and I disagree strongly with that policy. I understand it, but still, that’s just not reasonable. I’m open to debate on that claim, though.

This Week In Comics: 6/27/2012

This week in comics, Before Watchmen: Nite Owl shows us why we should have feared this whole silly prequel business more, Abnett & Lanning launch a new superhero book for Boom! and two of Gotham’s many, many massive criminal conspiracies clash in All-Star Western.  Would you like to know more?

Everyone is super hostile to the kindly old man inviting them all into his house. It’s like a gritty retelling of The Sandlot.

This Week In Comics: 6/20/2012

This week in comics, Avengers Vs. X-Men finally gets a little life in it, Northstar gets real married, and Saga returns to save us all from mediocrity.  Enjoy!

New 52: The Next 3 Cancellations (and 4 New Titles)

He’s coming… to CANCEL YOUR BOOKS!

So, last Friday, DC announced four new titles for their New 52… and DC fans know what that means: four titles have to go on the chopping blocks.  And after the VERY surprising announcement a few weeks back that Justice League International would be the first of those four cancellations, DC has finally announced what the other three books leaving us will be.

Just like last time, I want to talk a little about the books that will be disappearing, as well as what we can expect from the new titles.

This Week In Comics: 6/6/2012

This week in comics, DC’s attempt to cash-in on Watchmen 25 years too late (and a few years too late for the film) begins with Before Watchmen: Minutemen, Boom! launches some a pair of new ongoings, and Morrison kills Clark Kent, that bastard!

Swamp Thing #10 wins this week’s award for Most Misleading Cover, ignoring the book’s creepy imagery and muted colors for a bland-looking fight that doesn’t actually happen. It also wins the award for Molestiest Cover, unfortunately.

Love and Marriage, Astonishing X-Men Edition

Astonishing X-Men #51 (cover from Hero Complex)

Perhaps the best article I’ve read on the issue of Northstar’s impending nuptials belongs to Andrew Wheeler over at Comics Alliance.  Though he is himself a gay man who hopes to get married some day, he makes a number of solid points against the upcoming marriage – most notably, that comic book writers treat weddings as ‘endings’ – a view he himself shares, saying that “marriage shifts a character’s status quo in a way that is fundamentally reductive.”

While I personally disagree with that assessment, what I can’t deny is that comic book writers do not – and they’re the ones who will be in charge of charting the paths of Kyle and Jean-Paul after the wedding, not me.  Love and marriage have a pretty horrible history in comic book land, all things considered.

New 52 News: Justice League International Canceled

Justice League International #12, bein’ funereal…

To the surprise of… well, everyone who is paying any attention at all to sales charts, DC has a seventh canceled series of its New 52 relaunch: the mid-selling, semi-popular Justice League International - a particularly baffling decision given that fully half the company’s line is selling less than it.

According to Dan Didio in the DigitalSpy article above, the reasons for the cancellation are: “It was selling okay, but we had greater expectations for that line. There’s a lot of those characters that I feel we’ve told a lot of stories with, so at this particular moment we’ll give the title a rest, and maybe give some of those characters a rest.”

Because I have nothing better to do, let’s talk about what this means a little…

Review – Justice League International, Vol. 1: The Signal Masters

Justice League International, Vol. 1

There are a few books I gave up on within an issue or two of their launch, not because they were bad books, but because there was an overabundance of books I was more interested in, and I just don’t have the money to support every single title I see.  Dan Jurgens and Aaron Lopresti’s Justice League International was one of those books, and with my nostalgia factor never higher (thanks, classic JLI hardcovers!), I thought I’d give their first trade, “The Signal Masters”, the shot I denied the title in single issues.

The Trouble with Launching New Titles and Geoff Johns’ Justice League

Justice League #9

Like just about everyone else alive, I (for no discernible reason) am absolutely convinced that I know better than the myriad writers and editors at DC Comics, that my take on the New 52 would have been flawlessly executed, that all the mistakes they made – and I don’t think it’s any great revelation that massive, avoidable mistakes were made in the course of this enormous, ambitious project – could have been turned around if only they would have trusted me.

Which is stupid, of course.  The comic marketplace is a vastly different place than it was even ten years ago, and outside of seriously stepping out of comic shops and back into supermarkets (with the resulting drop in price and increase in age-restricted content that implies) they were never going to get their comics into many new hands… and I’m pretty sure that isn’t a feasible goal anyway.  No, they did a lot right, including the very necessary move to increase digital publication.

But one possible mistake they made that I think would be very fixable is in how they handled some of the relaunches.  Angry fans can and will claim that DC never gave their favorite canceled title a shot – though the relative dearth of this sort of outcry thus far suggests that DC picked the right titles to cancel quickly, and I’d bet the next cancellations will be met with similar silence – but, realistically, they were treated exactly the same as the rest of the New 52, given promotion, in-house ads, equal shelf space, etc….  DC treated Men of War and Batman roughly the same – and that, in my opinion, is the problem.

This Week in Comics: 5/16/2012

This week in comics, the Avengers and the X-Men settle their differences via walk-off (with special guest judge David Bowie!), Image wows with Dancer #1, and I confuse the plot of a major event comic with that of Zoolander to mildly comedic effect. Very mild.

Let’s dance!

This Week In Comics: 5/9/2012

This week in comics, owls get pissed at Batman, the Punisher fights zombies but stubbornly refuses to get at all groovy, and Vertigo drops a new anthology of sci-fi shorts.

Okay, he gets a LITTLE groovy.

DC New 52 – One Sentence Reviews, Part 33 (Final)

After reviewing and ranking 416 ongoing comics, in addition to reviewing dozens of miniseries issues and one-shots, my eight-month mission to read every DC New 52 issue published each week comes to an end.

I set out to do six-months, but was encouraged to keep going until the first wave of cancellations after month eight.  It was a harder undertaking than I expected, especially with real life (including a new baby, two jobs and recurring dental issues) encroaching on my comic book reading time.

Now I aim to ease back on my “ranting” and focus on some creative writing projects.  Also, I start a new job after next week, so I better focus on proving my worth to my new masters.

Anyway, as usual, each comic is scored out of five.  A final leaderboard ranks each title based on their average rating.

Warning, there could be spoilers ahead, although I try to avoid them.

DC New 52 – One Sentence Reviews, Part 32

I rated the last four comics I read this week all 4 or over … which was a relief because before that, only one issue had attracted as much as a 4.  So it was a hard slog through the start of this batch, with a strong finish at the end. 

As most of you will be aware, I’m going to wrap-up my One Sentence Review series with next week’s last batch of #8s.  I’m currently a full week behind and the leaderboard concept kind of flies out the window with the first round of cancellations and new titles coming online.

I expect to be blogging/reviewing less, at least for a little while, as I’ll be starting a new job this month and want to focus some energy on creative writing projects.  I’ve written the first two scripts for a comic book and want to write at least six issues, and I have a long-neglected novel in the works that I must reacquaint myself with.

I’ll post read/RANT articles when and if the bug bites me, though.

Anyway, as usual, each comic is scored out of five. 

Warning, there could be spoilers ahead, although I try to avoid them.

This Week In Comics: 5/2/2012

This week in comics, Action Comics #9 explores the multiverse, the Avengers and the X-Men do SOMETHING with each other, I can’t remember what, and DC’s New 52 New 6 officially begins with Dial H, G.I. Combat, Earth 2 and Worlds’ Finest.

I don’t have anything clever to say about the cover. This was just my favorite issue this week.

This Week In Comics: 4/25/2012

This week in comics, the “Rise of the Vampires” crossover concludes, “The Omega Effect” crossover concludes, and probably some other event somewhere concludes.

If there's one thing DC knows, it's this: People like bats and sparkling vampires. Two birds? Meet one stone.

DC New 52 – One Sentence Reviews, Part 31

Still behind, but starting to catch up.  It helped that there were a lot of good comics this week.  The first two I read were both 4.5s.

As usual, each comic is scored out of five.

Warning, there could be spoilers ahead, although I try to avoid them.