The twelfth and final issue of Steve Niles and Kelley Jones’ limited series Batman: Gotham After Midnight comes out this Wednesday, leaving me no Kelley Jones Batman comics to look forward to in the foreseeable future. This is devastating news. You would think given this twelve-issue series, hundreds of pages worth of Elseworlds stories and a long, late-nineties run with Dough Moench and John Beatty on the Batman monthly, I should have more than enough comics full of Jones’ Batman to re-read, and that maybe Jones has said all he has to say about the wacky world of Batman.

You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. He continues to surprise me with every issue of this series which, okay, isn’t really the greatest-written Batman story ever and, sure, reads a bit like a very poor poor man’s Long Halloween at times, but I still keep coming back to it to see Jones’ increasingly ridiculous Batcave architecture, the many absurd vehicles Batman tools around town in, the Bat-gadgets that look as if Dr. Seuss had a had in designing them and the may over-the-top ways the characters’ costumes, anatomy and whole settings reflect their moods and attitudes.

Hurry back, Kelley Jones Batman!

Luckily, there are many other releases this week with which I can seek to console myself. Let’s take a look at what looks good, what looks bad and what looks really bad, after the jump.

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Tony Millionaire, the creator behind Drinky Crow’s Maakies Treasury, will be signing copies of his new book at the Fantagraphics Store in Seattle!

Maakies follows the adventures of the alcoholic and eponymous Drinky Crow, along with his drunk monkey friend Uncle Gabby. The series has since been adapted to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.

Millionaire will be signing 6-9pm on Saturday, May 9th.

The long-awaited Phonogram 2.2 comes out this week, and I’m stoked to have a print copy rather than just the version on my computer for review. There is also a new Garth Ennis Battlefields book and Madame Xanadu #10, so I’ve got a wide range of reading materials. (Magic! Hipsters! Battle! Time-travel!) But is there anything I’m missing?

(If you suggest Michelle Obama “Female Force” I will have to smack you.)

Over on his blog at Marvel.com, associate editor Nathan Cosby has given a six-page preview of the upcoming Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers title, written by Chris Eliopoulos and art by Ig Guara.

Just to give you a taste of what’s over there — I present a panel of Frog Thor!

See how mighty the Amphibian Asgardian is? Best line of the preview: “I must stop lifting strange objects.” You tell ‘em, Froggy!

This goofy series, following in the footsteps of the wildly popular Marvel Zombies and the less-wildly popular Marvel Apes, is scheduled to be out May 6.

You may have read a few weeks back about Project Rooftop’s contest to redesign Dick Grayson in the wake of Battle for the Cowl, but now the web site is going to take on the Ol’ Canucklehead himself, Wolverine.

Here’s a nice highlight from the Project Rooftop people themselves:

He’s rocked his classic blue and yellow tights, his brown and orange variant, the Weapon X mission gear, the one-handed Age of Apocalypse attire, his Ultimate Universe duds, the New X-Men black and yellows, his new X-Force mission suit, the movie costumes, and of course, the naked VR training look, which not everyone can pull off.

Among the judges are Wolverine writer Jason Aaron and artist Ron Garney, who pulled off a nice little story called “Get Mystique!” as well as the current series Wolverine: Weapon X. Grand prize equals the Wolverine Omnibus, a signed copy of Weapon X #1, and the hardcovers for Wolverine: Enemy of the State.

MovieGab had a few pics up today that might give a few fans a heart attack:

Megan Fox in her prostitute’s outfit in Jonah Hex. Seriously, fellas, jaws off the floor, you’ll wreck your keyboard.

Fox is looking to make her mark as a genre superstar, having already starred in the Transformers franchise, being attached to a film adaptation of the late Michael Turner’s Fathom, as well as being constant rumor-bait of any and every upcoming Wonder Woman film.

Jonah Hex, the story of a disfigured Confederate gunslinger, stars Josh Brolin and is scheduled for 2010.

If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

The DC Bullets softball squad is through with their spring training!

Coming on the heels of a successful 2007 season, in which they made the playoffs during the inaugural season of the New York Media softball league, the Bullets regressed during a frustrating 2008 season. Perhaps it was the managerial change, going from the calm hand of long-time head coach Joel “It’s easier to make pot shots at the coach when it’s not me” Press to the high energy antics of Adam “Stop picking on me” Schlagman. Perhaps it was a series of debilitating injuries, with stalwarts Fletcher “Switch-hitting” Chu-Fong and Dougie “Let’s test that pitcher’s fielding” Harrison both missing chunks of time. Or perhaps they’re simply not very good.

But it’s a new season, 2009, and the Bullets will unveil some new rookies, new uniforms (!), and a rejuvenated fun, yet winning attitude at the North Meadow, Field #2 in New York’s Central Park on Thursday, April 30, against the Paris Review.

For the 2009 season, the New York Media league will have six teams: defending champions BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, High Times, Daily Beast, WNYC and the Bullets, and at least another half dozen non-league games are scheduled to keep the team sharp during the long summer months.

As the Bullets prepare for 2009, here are some of the statistical leaders from last season’s 5-13 (1-9 in league, 4-4 non-league) finish:

AVERAGE
Adam Schlagman = .635
Joe Hughes = .619
Nel Yomtov = .600

HITS
Adam Schlagman = 33
Michael Lorah = 25
Nel Yomtov = 24

RBIS
Michael Lorah = 20
Patrick Brosseau = 17
Nel Yomtov = 11
Jay Kogan = 11

RUNS
Andrew Arnold = 17
Adam Schlagman = 14
Jay Kogan = 14

Among the season’s big games: April 30, season opener against Paris Review; June 1, first League game against WNYC; June 11, first game against defending champion BusinessWeek; August 6, vs. Marvel Comics.

So if any fans are in the area, stop by Central Park’s North Meadow, Field #2 on Thursday, April 30, at 5:30 pm.  The Bullets guarantee a spectacle, though hopefully the 2009 squad can avoid 2008′s comedy of errors.

Image by Capcom, courtesy of Marvel.com

Can I get a big bad hell yeah? It’s been rumored for months, but tonight on Marvel.com, they finally confirmed it: Marvel vs. Capcom 2, quite possibly the best 2D fighting game ever, is coming to LIVE and PSN. I can’t wait to own this for a third and possibly fourth platform (already have it for Dreamcast and PS2), and for any who missed out on the notoriously hard-to-find home editions of the game, this’ll be a great chance to have a ton of fun with over 50 awesome characters. Online multiplayer is confirmed (some may say obviously), and Marvel’s got a trailer to remind everyone of the awesomeness. No word yet on the release date, but they do say this year.

Update: PSN will have the exclusive demo this Thursday, according to the Playstation Blog. More info at that link about which characters/features are in the demo. (Thanks for the tip, FunkDoctor!)

As you may have read a few weeks back, DC Comics Art Director Mark Chiarello, the mastermind behind Wednesday Comics, had alluded to Paul Pope doing a “1950s style sci-fi strip.” As soon as he said that, we’ve all been waiting for this:

Straight from the Batman: Year 100 creator’s Flickr feed, a page of the upcoming Adam Strange adventure in Wednesday Comics. Pope has already made some big splashes in the past, not just with Year 100 but also with a prequel comic for the upcoming Star Trek film, which appeared in Wired Magazine.

Wednesday Comics, a 12-issue weekly series printed on newspaper-sized broadsheets, will be out in stores July 2009.

And knowing… is half the battle.

This weekend has gotten a double-shot of news regarding G.I. Joe: Resolute, the long-in-development web series by Warren Ellis. The finale of the series, which aired this weekend, is scheduled to be up on the Adult Swim web site some time today.

In addition, Hasbro has announced some toys for the upcoming Joe film, Rise of Cobra. Thus far, we’ve got a 12-inch Baronness figure (complete with recruitment mini-poster) as well as a Destro 2-pack figure set, housed inside a copy of James “Destro” McCullen’s history of his ancestors.

This is why I wish there were still letter columns in the backs of all comics: How cool would it be if Dr. Scott of Politedissent.com were to send letters containing all of the information in this post directly to editors? Pretty cool, I’d say. Well, at least we have the Internet for this sort of thing.

Another week, another instance of a surprising amount of violence in a DC comic: Chris Smits wonders how much action is too much action for Superman’s Action Comics after reading the brutal, bloody battle  between Ursa and the new Flamebird in Action Comics #876. (Link via WFA).

The Australian behind the most popular Canadian superhero: On Saturday, The Australian offered a nice, thorough, easy-to-read overview of the road to and making of the new Wolverine movie, with plenty of conversation with star and producer Hugh Jackman.

“Suddenly, that material seems to have reached critical mass, and even the snootiest readers have realised they’ve been missing something”: Michael Gaber begins his review of Rutu Modan’s Jamilti and Other Stories for The Guardian with a rather incisive few paragrpahs about the mainstream media’s difficulties in reviewing comics and graphic novels at all. Check this out:

In this climate, reviewing new graphic work is both easier and more difficult. It’s no longer necessary to convince people that comics can be more than Batman or the Beano. On the other hand, anything with any merit tends to get overpraised and is routinely spared the sort of critical scrutiny brought to bear on everything else, from a new Zadie Smith novel to the latest Star Wars flick. The mainstream press almost never measures a graphic novel’s actual achievement against its unfulfilled potential. New converts, reluctant to show their cluelessness about the ninth art, merely parrot the publishers’ hype.

Yeah! That’s also a good argument for why mainstream media venues that pay the best should just hire comics critics to handle their comics criticism for them. Any editors in the reading audience? If so, I might be able to think of someone to recommend…

“Seth’s fabrications have the air of truth”: Speaking of good reads, check out this thorough piece about Seth and his work from The Walrus. (Link via Drawn and Quarterly).

Big in Sweden: Jeffrey Brown was in Stockholm, Sweden, and was interviewed on Swedish morning show Nyhetsmorgon, and Top Shelf has video here. It’s pretty fun; the introduction is in Swedish, so I didn’t understand a word of it, aside from “Yeffrey Brown,” but the actual interview segment is in English with Swedish subtitles.  It still freaks me out when I see Brown and real life and realize that he doesn’t look exactly like his cartoon avatar, though.

Art to take Pryde in: I’m pretty sure I’ve previously mentioned Floating World Comics’ “Full of Pryde” art show, in which you favorite artist provide pictures of X-person Kitty Pryde to benefit the Oregon Hemophilia Treatment Center.  Well I’m going to mention it again, because it’s great art for a great cause. You can read more about the May 7 event and see the entire list of contributors here. (Can these images be bound and sold in a comic or book format? Because I’d buy the hell out of that). You ca see artwork from contributors including Bryan Lee O’Malley, Joelle Jones, Rob G, Nathan Fox and more here.

On Friday, I posted regarding the notion of trimming titles from your regular budget. Throughout the conversation that followed, a number of salient points were raised on many sides of the issue. Upon reflection, we thought that it was only fair to pose the converse question.

That is: in the past several months (let’s say, since October, as the big economic freak-out began), have you actually added any books to your regular buying patterns?

We all know that it’s a tough decision to drop a book, but adding one can be perplexing too, particular in the face of a) rising costs or b) potentially needing to drop a book to create space in your budget.

So, let’s hear from you. Is it all subtraction, or have you made some pick-ups as well?

Batman #686 and Detective Comics #853 

DC Comics

Story by Neil Gaiman and Art by Andy Kubert

We all know that Batman isn’t really dead. But it’s nice to see a death of Batman story turned into a sweet Neil Gaiman confection. You can read “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” now as there are fully stocked shelves with the story appearing in Batman #686 and Detective Comics #853 at your LCS.

None of the villains are particualrly menacing. They’re more like little marionettes dancing around in a fairy wonderland. We go through numerous scenarios of how Batman could have died including the most implausible case involving Alfred being the Joker. But, quickly and with style, we learn that these are only scenarios. This may even all turn out to be a bad dream.

As befitting a Gaiman tale, childhood and slumberland play a pivotal role. We see Bruce Wayne and his mom share great joy in the reading of a bedtime story. This scene takes on greater and greater significance as the story progresses, as it shines light on the deep recesses of Batman’s mind, and brings us full circle to a surprising ending of sorts. What’s not to like? Add to that the lush and intricate art work of Andy Kubert who does yoeman service as he brings to life various Batman eras in styles from each period.

However, I think that Gaiman piles on too many scenarios for how Batman could have died but maybe that goes with the territory. The point is, in this story, that it really doesn’t matter how you die but that someday you’re going to die anyway. And that’s something profound for anyone to mull over, especially if you’re Batman. An opportunity is lost in moving this promising theme forward since the Batman in this story is endlessly saying that he’s not a quitter and he’s there to save his city making him sound more like a third rate politician than an inspiring legend. It’s as if Gaiman gets caught up in a spin cycle where he feels obligated to reverence. He even has Robin pretty much say that Batman died for our sins. 

All in all, it’s a good effort but I’m lost as to whether anything was really said. The fun stuff in this two part story is seeing Batman from various eras, some of the metaphysical playing around on Gaiman’s part and the curious ending which brings to mind, in a way, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Maybe that’s what happened to the caped crusader. In the end, it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s probably all a bad dream and you’re going to die anyway.

The jungle adventure genre just isn’t what it used to be.

Popularized by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and the work of Edgar Rich Burroughs in the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century, and then given new life in pre-code Hollywood, tales of safaris into darkest Africa, noble wild people raised in the jungles and battles to the death with wild animals are very much a product of their times.

And, as such, the stories don’t lend themselves well to re-telling, at least not in a modern milieu. Africa—as well as most of the rest of the world—is no longer so dark. The acts of wrestling rhinos and slaying gorillas has lost its luster now that the great beasts are endangered. And let’s not even get into the casual racism of pop culture in the first few decades of the 20th century.

In short, popular imagination has transformed so much during the course of that century that we don’t regard the jungle in quite the same way we used to. It’s not longer a deadly, dangerous challenge awaiting to be explored, conquered and made use of; now it’s seen as a dwindling, fragile resource in need of respect and protection.

So if you’re going to do a jungle adventure story, you’re probably going to want to set it in the past, right?

Steven E. de Souza, the screenwriter who has been working with Devil’s Due Publishing to restore Golden Age heroine Sheena, Queen of the Jungle to comics shelves, didn’t go that route, which, frankly, surprised me.

I was even more surprised by the fact that it worked.
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Just when I think I can’t love this comic any more, Gillen and McKelvie set out to prove me wrong. Rue Britannia was fun to pick apart, and 2.1 was just a cotton-candy bite of pure bliss. but this one made me feel.

Where Phonogram 2.1 was about the magic of dancing–and mostly about dancing by yourself–2.2 is about the magical ability of songs to transport you to a different place and time. It’s about memory, sure, but it’s more than that. Certain memories almost get trapped in a song, and when you play it, they come rushing back out. Sometimes good, sometimes bittersweet, sometimes wretched, but always twice as strong as they would be had you just thought of them without that song playing.

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Pantheon Books has just released a new paperback version of Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken With Plums, originally released in hardcover in 2006.

This is terrible news.

Well, for me, anyway. See, I already have that hardcover version. And then the softcover arrived in the mail. Surely I don’t need two versions of the same book, and, for bookshelf sake’s space if nothing else, I should probably get rid of one of them. And therein lies the problem.

Which one should I keep, and which should I lose? The hardcover is slightly taller and slightly wider, so the pages are a little bigger. And, by virtue of being a hardcover, it’s more likely to last longer, and stand up to being packed in boxes and moved from shelf to shelf or lent to friends.

On the other hand, I like the cover design of the new one so much better.

The hardcover had a dust jacket with a garish, neon-ish orange on it, and a cut out portion revealing the mysterious image of darkened, silhouette of a man carrying a case for a musical instrument, and looking more like a gangster or a spy than anything else. The softcover is all purple, black and white, and features a medium shot image of the protagonist, Nasser Ali Khan, seated below a tree and playing his tar, his face inscrutable. It matches the design of the 2006 paperback release of Embroideries, and will look better standing on a shelf next to it.

Oh man, I don’t know what to do about this two-copies-of-Chicken With Plums issue!

The new release isn’t all bad news though. Anyone who might have missed the original release—and considering Satrapi’s Persepolis movie came out in 2007, elevating her and her work to the next plateau of recognition, that’s probably a lot of folks— now has a second chance to hear about what may be her very best work.
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“The home-grown hero would only meet us in a public place and refused to reveal his ‘secret identity’”: Well, so-called “Real” superhero SOS wouldn’t be much of a superhero if he revealed his secret identity to a newspaper reporter just because the reporter asked, now would he?

Things that should not be: Superheroes combined with student-written musical theater. I feel quite comfortable saying that without having actually seen Hey, Boy Wonder! The Other Adventures of Ultraman, or any other student-written musical theater about superheroes. Just call it a hunch.

Sam Raimi is “hopeful” Kirsten Dunst will sign on for ‘Spider-Man 4′: So is Caleb Mozzocco. C’mon Ms. Dunst, don’t let Sam Raimi and I down!

Arkansas Congressman Receives “Superhero” Award: His costume could use some work though.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln has an awesome collection of government sponsored comic books: Walt Kelly and Pogo on how being gainfully employed is cool and how to monitor children’s television habits! Chic Young and Blondie on mental health issues! Bill Mantlo, Al Kupperberg, Herb Trimpe, Captain America and the Campbell Kids on energy policy! And scads and scads more. And they’re downloadable! I think I’ve just discovered what I’ll be doing with all my free time for…well, forever, I suppose. (Via this blog).

And Juliet Landau is co-writing.

I posted the other day about James Marsters‘ experience writing comics, but I have to say I find this interesting. After all, other than the writers of the TV series, who knows the characters better than the people who played them? Amber Benson notably has gone on from playing Tara on Buffy to working on Buffy comics to writing other comics, as well as novels and screenplays. Why not more?

It could just be a gimmick to get more fans of the series reading the comics, but I don’t know how many people would honestly read a comic written by an actor if they weren’t already inclined to do so. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see if it’s any good.

Eesh.

Parade reports that Terrence Howard, whose departure from Iron Man 2 has been widely discussed, has made some angry words on the upcoming film:

“Marvel made a choice, and it was a very, very bad choice,” Howard said. “They didn’t keep their word. They didn’t honor my contract. They produced a great bounty with the first one but they put it all in the storehouse and you were not allowed in.”

He wished Don Cheadle, who will be playing Rhodey in the next film, the best of luck, saying that it was due to the Cheadle he managed to get a role in the Oscar-winning Crash. But otherwise…

“I’ve seen the script, I know what’s going to happen, but I’m not revealing anything… I believe in karma,” he continued. “When someone does something wrong, you don’t have to get them back. Everything right will return the favor for you.”

This could be simply some bitterness, or could be indicative of a real drop in quality. While the first Iron Man film was written by the screenwriters of Children of Men, the sequel has been written by Justin Theroux, the screenwriter behind Tropic Thunder. Which is not to say he isn’t a good writer, but does pale in comparison. “I’m a dude, playing a dude, disguised as an Iron Dude!”