Random thoughts on comics

Joss Whedon’s Runaways is just not very good. In places the writing is absolutely cringe-inducing. If your comic is going to be horrendously late it could at least show signs of more than the absolute minimum of effort being spent on it.

I bet Adam Strange has a really bad credit rating on Earth and would have trouble getting a home loan or something.

On JLA Classified going away: editorial gave a lot of big-name creators runs on the book, and the only consistently good run was Giffen/DeMatteis’ last word on the JLI characters. The rest was uniformly boring, and average at best. Yes, even the reunion of the Stern/Byrne team; yes, that Simone/Garcia-Lopez nonsense; yes, the long-awaited Kid Amazo arc; yes, the Warren Ellis arc; yes, even the introductory Grant Morrison arc. So yes, the book degenerated quickly into JLA Inventory Drawer Adventures, but I can’t point the blame entirely at editorial on this one.

Speaking of squandered chances at writing the Justice League, while I do generally like Brad Meltzer’s work I am sorta pissed that in his Justice League of America #0 he brought up all these possible interesting and cool things he could have covered during his JLA run but then the two things he actually followed through on were “So Roy and Hawkgirl totally hook up” and “I always thought Geo-Force and Vixen got a bum rap.” And when Alan Burnett got a three-issue run recently he didn’t even bother to pay attention to any of the individual characters’ speech patterns. That must cut down on writing time, anyway.

The current DC Infinity Inc. book is bafflingly pointless. Infinity Inc. is the junior JSA, but since no one at DC seems to know that, the series has no hook and no audience. Even with Pete Woods coming onboard for art that thing’s gonna be cancelled within the year.

I like Secret Invasion but we’re only one issue in and I’m already getting really tired of dumb “hey look it’s this character if they were a skrull MAYBE THEY’RE A SKRULL but probably not” covers for random books.

Awhile ago in JSA Geoff Johns gave Batman a line referring to Dr. Mid-Nite that was something like “Dr. Pieter Cross believes himself to be blind. In reality his vision has increased to cover all spectrums, but he doesn’t realize it.” Then Batman doesn’t, like, tell him that or anything. What a dick. This was like four years ago and they never brought it up again, I assume because they realized it made no sense at all.

Mark Waid writing Superman as a vegetarian is one of those things where Waid fell in love with his own ‘bit’ despite the fact that it makes no sense and even contradicts his beloved silver age lore (beef Bourguignon with ketchup, anyone?). Maybe stuff like this is why Waid will never be put on a Superman title as the regular writer after all, he kinda seems to shoot himself in the foot a lot as a writer. The Brave & the Bold seemed like the perfect book for him, as did Legion of Super-Heroes, but even when paired with rock-solid artists Waid was only able to make those into B+ books at best. It’s been a long while since anything Waid wrote was in that A-level category.

Oh, speaking of Legion: Here’s a real “haha what the fuck” moment — rather than actually write a review of Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st Century #3, a kid-aimed comic based on the cartoon series, this guy decides instead to use the space to tell us over and over how much he’d love to fuck Infectious Lass, maybe with Saturn Girl thrown in for good measure. It starts off “Ever since I saw her in Superboy number two-o-one, I fell in love with…Infectious Lass. She looked exotically hot. She had the power to give you fever…” and goes downhill from there.

I just learned that Kobra was created by Jack Kirby. That makes him even cooler than the fact that he’s one of the only villains ever to have his own book. Kobra needs to be reimagined by Grant Morrison and, oh, let’s say Justiniano.

At this point, Vertigo has evolved to the point they should just acknowledge they can’t keep a Swamp Thing series running and give the character back to the DCU. I can see where enforcing the strict divisions was necessary at the beginning because otherwise Vertigo wouldn’t have been taken seriously as a separate imprint, but now the most successful Vertigo series have no connection to anything outside of themselves (or other Vertigo series) so letting the DCU stuff go wouldn’t hurt the company any. It’s not like Constantine is needed back in the DCU, but Swampy is. They don’t need to maintain character exclusivity to keep doing Vertigo mature-reader non-continuity reimaginings of DCU concepts anyway.

Neil Gaiman noted in the intro to the Legend of the Green Flame that there was a time when he was fast-tracked to be the new hot DCU writer–he was all set to take over Swamp Thing after Rick Veitch, but that all went to hell after they shitcanned Rick’s Swampy-inhabits-the-cross-of-Jesus-of-Nazareth story. And Sandman does feature a lot of DCU standards in its early years, from Oreo-chomping J’Onn J’Onzz to Element Girl and Lyta, Lucien, Cain, Abel, Matthew, etc. But sometimes I do wonder what we would’ve gotten had Gaiman done more relatively straight DCU stuff–obviously it’s unlikely we would’ve gotten an awesome Green Lantern Corps or Teen Titans out of him, but what could he’ve done with Arion? Amethyst? Hercules? Isis? Dare I say it–Shadowpact?

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