Funnybook Babylon

A little over two years ago, DC launched their “One Year Later” revamp/relaunch, with a year-long weekly series 52 as its centerpiece. Layout artist Keith Giffen described the book’s appeal to fans:

I call [it] the NASCAR book, because nobody goes to a NASCAR race to watch the cars go around in circles. You go for the crash. You hope for that blistering, horrifying crash. People are going to be watching 52, waiting for us to screw up… it’s not going to happen.

And he was right; people came to 52 looking for blood, but the series never “crashed” off its weekly schedule and was generally well-liked. Its weekly successor, Countdown [to Final Crisis] may have not been as successful or well-liked, but no one could argue that it wasn’t on time! But while both 52 and Countdown kept running on time, these bastions of punctuality served as a smokescreen for the fiery wreckage that was DC’s Demolition Derby of Scheduling, a/k/a “Pretty Much Every Non-Weekly Book DC Published”. A lot of books have had production problems in the past two years, but when the history books are written the “Last Son” storyline in Action Comics will likely go down as The Didio Era’s biggest disaster. And trust me, there have been plenty of other candidates.
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Here is part two of this weeks’ podcast.

We talk Didio’s take on Politics, and talk a bit on Secret Invasion and crossovers in general, and talk a bit about the Egyptian graphic novel confiscation. Check it out, and tell us what you think.

 

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Hey all. Most of you will not know who I am, and shame on you. I’ve made a brief appearance during the NYCC podcasts, but the Secret Invasion has inspired me to actually write an article to help you all figure out whom to trust. So I took a break from drinking (ok, that’s a lie, there’s a scotch by my side), and would like to share some observations. I’ve been re-reading nearly all of Brian Michael Bendis’s Marvel comics from the past few years. While some series have been mostly dead ends (Alias, I’m looking at you, though it was nice to re-read it, just because it’s a good series), New Avengers and Mighty Avengers are, as expected, chock full of clues.

At first, some people seem to think that the ending of New Avengers #40 is misdirection. In a flashback, it shows Skrull Princess Veranke planning to infiltrate Earth disguised as Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman. But since it’s not explicitly shown that she does replace Drew, it does not necessarily indicate that Spider-Woman is a Skrull. It could simply be misdirection. I hate to be the bearer of bad news (ok, that’s another lie), but it’s not misdirection. “Spider-Woman” is a Skrull. I would like to point first at New Avengers #30. Most of the team is suspicious of Clint Barton, (who was thought to have died in “Disassembled”, and was apparently resurrected in House of M, as shown in New Avengers#26), and Dr. Strange casts a spell to prove that Barton is indeed who he says it is.

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My great discovery at the NYCC was that Archaia Studio Press is printing comics that aren’t just about adorable mice wandering in well drawn woods with swords. They have an incredible range of comics. Unfortunately, I hadn’t heard of a single one of them before the con. I picked up a few of their books, flipping through their selection and grabbing the ones that caught my eye, and I came home with a few books that were *quite* good. There seems to be something in the air over at ASP, because they are creating some high quality work that’s been overlooked, at least by me and my local comic shop.

I’ll start with a review the first two issues of ‘Some New Kind of Slaughter ~or~ Lost in the Flood (and How We Found Home Again) Diluvian Myths from around the world’ written by A. David Lewis and drawn by MPMann.

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45 minutes of Iron Man movie discussion and some stuff about comics?! I don’t know what these crazy cats have been up to, FBB is a wasteland recently. That will change soon.

 

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David Lapham has returned to the internet with a blog. You will not be surprised by its URL.

http://davidlapham.blogspot.com/

Feel free to go over there and comment on his promo article for Young Liars about how much you wish he was working on Stray Bullets instead. I hear he loves it when people do that.

So far, he’s promised us harrowing tales from his childhood, which is the stuff I’m primarily looking forward to from the blog, but has posted only nice little tidbits about Young Liars, which the FBB Braintrust did not very much approve of, and Orson Welles, which to my knowledge the FBB Braintrust has no real feelings on one way or the other. Still! It’s good to see him excited about things, and having fun majorly interacting with the net for the first time in recent memory (though El Capitan Books could probably use a website where I can give them money in exchange for their comics), but since he’s one of the best creators in comics today, hopefully he won’t spend too much time giving us free what he could be drawing pictures of and charging for.

Seriously, stay away from the Internet, David! It will bring you nothing but tears.

Via this blog, Check it.

Nothing snaps you out of your own myopic view of things faster than a little story like this:

Magdy El-Shafie, author and cartoonist of The Metro, widely regarded as the first Egyptian graphic novel, last week received a summons to appear before the state prosecution service following the confiscation of his novel from the publisher, Malameh. Mohammed El-Sharqawy, head of Malameh, also received a summons, this time following 15 days spent in prison as a result of his participation in the 6 April strikes.

According to the state prosecution service, El-Shafie’s graphic novel, his first, contains obscenity and libelous references alleging corruption on the part of prominent Egyptian political figures. The confiscation of the novel has caused some in Egypt’s cultural community to recall previous such incidents, including when the novel A Banquet for Seaweed by Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar was confiscated on similar charges in 2000.

You can read a translated preview here. The lettering and presentation of the art is pretty crude, but I’m sure somethings were lost in the scan and translation there.

It’s pretty sad that what seems to be the first graphic novel with adult themes written in Arabic is forced to be subject to censorship. Not much else one can say.

Welcome to May 2008, gang! There’s quite a bit of neat looking stuff coming out, but obviously the event of the week (perhaps the fortnig– month– dare I say the entire 3Q FY2008?) is the long-awaited release of Geoff Johns, Richard Donner & One of the Kubert Brothers’s “Last Son” storyline, announced at SDCC 2006, started five hundred and sixty days ago in Action Comics #844 and now, finally, seeing completion. The magical journey this story has taken deserves its own article, which is will receive shortly, but in the meanwhile here are some other things you can buy if, like me, you’ve totally forgotten what even happened in “Last Son:”
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The first lettered preview of Final Crisis is up at Entertainment Weekly, which clearly has had a new editor promoted who’s a comics nerd, considering the recent coverage of Secret Invasion, Spider-Man: New Ways to Die and now this.

It’s five pages, from the middle of the comic - it’s known the book starts off with Anthro, for one thing, and Morrison’s script for the first page describes a transition at the beginning. EW says the title of the first issue is “DOA: The God of War”, which certainly fits with the events of this preview.

PAGE ONE:

“Terrible” Dan Turpin Don’t Got No Time For Super-Yahoos

The narrator here is “Terrible” Dan Turpin, a Metropolis police detective used in the the original Fourth World Saga by Jack Kirby who later had a long run as a supporting police character in the Superman books in the late ’80s and ’90s. In the original Kirby books, the war between the Gods was reflected in the war between men on the streets of Metropolis, especially that of the police (represented at that point by Turpin) and Darkseid’s Earthly crime syndicate Intergang, led by 52 antagonist Bruno “Ugly” Mannheim (named so because he is pretty goddamn ugly).

Turpin’s narration in the first panel is mysterious; it may make more sense in the context of the larger book, exactly what the “good idea” is that humans have used to kill themselves. Either way, this is a sentiment that will surely play a larger role in the book, and perhaps be an argument in favor of Anti-Life and man submitting his will to the Evil Gods. Read the rest of this entry »

Pedro,

The accounts of the book burning were easily the most chilling aspect of the book. For me, it really undermined the moral authority claimed by comics critics of the time. Although it’s hard to ignore the legitimacy of some of the arguments, namely that comics of the time weren’t very good, were often made in bad and exploitative working conditions, I wonder why Dr. Wertham, Senator Estevauer and other critics paid so little attention to the actions of some of the people that adopted their cause. This was particularly the case with the extra-governmental wing of the anti-comics movement.

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That’s a Fox News question, by the way. The answer is “Yeah, he is.”

Kean is in hot water right now in our little corner of the blogalaxy, and it’s all because of this (by way of Rich Johnston’s Lying in the Gutters):

The above is from the original version of this interview that he conducted with Marvel writer Paul Cornell about the upcoming Captain Britain and MI:13 book over at Newsarama, before either he or his bosses realized exactly what asking a question like that second one — let alone publishing it — said about them as a media outlet. To be fair, Newsarama has always needed a copy editing filter to go between their collective brain and mouth, but this isn’t some grammatical or syntactical miscue that someone should have caught before hitting the Post button — and Newsarama appears to recognize this on some level, because they’ve not only purged the above passage from the published interview, but also made a half-hearted attempted to get rid of the discussion about it in the following forum posts attached to the article. Unfortunately, as I’m sure they’re well aware, this is the Internet. It ain’t that easy. Read the rest of this entry »

So, I’m browsing through Midtown’s posted cover images because I’m a nerd for trade dress when I come across this:

JLA presents AZTEK by GRANT MORRISON (with mark millar)

OUCH.

I understand that Grant Morrison’s the company man and Mark Millar isn’t at this point, but Aztek was a full creative partnership between the two, and I highly doubt that Marvel would minimize Morrison’s name if they were reprinting Skrull Kill Krew. This is about on par with having GREG RUCKA in big letters on the upcoming Gotham Central hardcovers with a little “ed brubaker” at the bottom. Ow, guys.

Due to events in DCU #0, Funnybook Babylon would like retract the articles
Darkseid, A Dictator Who Sought to Eliminate the Free Will of All Living Things, is Dead and Bartholomew Allen, Police Scientist and JLA Milquetoast, Dies.

We’d also like to let the listeners of our podcast know due to various activities, there will not be a podcast this week. We’ll be back next week with more content and a high quality podcast. Have a good weekend.

Well, it’s out, and at least it was only fifty cents.

Somewhere in the Illustrated Dictionary of Idioms, this issue’s cover is next to “The whole is less than the sum of its parts.” It’s cowritten by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns, two industry juggernauts whose talents should perfectly patch over each others’ faults. It’s got art by a laundry list of the best talents not on exclusive contract to Marvel Comics. It’s got a clear mandate and a fresh start, and should be an ideal introduction into the current status quo of the DC Universe mythology for new readers, while also acting as an informative and enthusing tease for the next year or so for existing readers. This was what they sold the book as, and what we got was impenetrable to the former camp and redundant to the latter.

That said, a lot of people might have some questions about it, so inspired by the inimitable Douglas Wolk I’m going to try to go through this page-by-page and outline the notable aspects and creative forces behind each segment through the lens of examining the major Manichaean theme behind the issue.

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Hey everybody, Free Comic Book Day is nigh, but if you want to pay for your comics, here’s what to expect on the shelves this week! (This got delayed a bit by technical difficulties, so it’s now a combination of analysis and review!)

A lot of books one or more of us approve are out: Action Comics, Ex Machina, Green Lantern, Immortal Iron Fist, New Avengers and X-Men Legacy all have new issues out that I don’t really have anything to say about. Elsewhere, creators we like (David Lapham, Tony Harris, Karl Kerschl) are on books we’re probably just buying because we like them. Plus there are a ton of trades/graphic novels/squarebound funnybooks out this week that deserve your attention. Read the rest of this entry »