Comic fans, set phasers to “thunder.”

Dateline Hollywood Daily has reported that Chris Hemsworth, recently seen as Captain George Kirk in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, has been cast to play Thor, the God of Thunder, in the 2011 film by Marvel Studios and director Kenneth Branagh.

According to Nikki Finke:

Chris had read for the part of Thor but wasn’t given a test because a casting director had nixed him early on. I’m told Chris’ younger brother Liam (who’s also a ROAR client) then tested for the role of Thor, but Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige passed. Then, after a conversation with Ward (“You’ve got to reconsider Chris, he’s your guy”), Feige decided to let Chris read again. And once Marvel put him on tape, it was “Oh my god”. Branagh came to town last week and saw the Chris test and made the final casting decision today.

The 25-year-old Hemsworth has been a bit of an unknown in America, only coming to our attention with the Star Trek reboot, but he has performed in more than 170 episodes of the Australian soap opera Home and Away. He has also recently won the lead role in the upcoming remake of Red Dawn.

That said, Finke’s track record has not been spotless: she was the one who fanned the unsubstantiated rumors this past summer of Dan DiDio’s demise as head of DC Editorial, suggesting that Jonah Hex writer Joey Palmiotti or Flash: Rebirth editor Joey Cavalieri would assume the mantle. (Battle for the Cowl indeed!) But if Finke is correct on this rumor, what say you, Rama readers? Is Hemsworth worthy of Mjolnir’s might?

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2009 Glyph Comics awards.

From the press release: The Glyph Comics Awards recognize the best in comics made by, for, and about people of color from the preceding calendar year. While it is not exclusive to black creators, it does strive to honor those who have made the greatest contributions to the comics medium in terms of both critical and commercial impact. By doing so, the goal is to encourage more diverse and high quality work across the board and to inspire new creators to add their voices to the field.

As Johanna noted, it is both a good and a bad thing for one comic, in this case Zuda’s Bayou, to sweep these awards. It’s great for a webcomic about to be released in print to be so acclaimed, but does it just point to a dearth of comics about nonwhite people?

G. Willow Wilson’s Vixen took Fan Favorite, Black Lightning from Final Crisis was chosen best male character, and Unknown Soldier #1 (which I just read this week and which will get its own post soon, I promise) won best cover. The Rising Star and Best Reprint were The Hole: Consumer Culture and Me and the Devil Blues V1, respectively, but Bayou took as many awards as the other books put together, winning Story of the Year, Best Writer, Best Artist, Best Female Character, and Best Comic Strip.

Clearly, I’ve been missing an excellent comic, so I’ll be sure to make up for it by picking up the print book when it comes out.

TalentHunter.com, a site that looks for movie extras and the like, was circulating the following notice to its users this week:

Don’t get mad — get The Rage!

Fangoria will be hosting a midnight screening TONIGHT of From Dusk Till Dawn creator Robert Kurtzman’s film, The Rage, at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Not only will Kurtzman be in attendence, but so too will star Andrew Divoff. Fangoria will also be giving out copies of the Rage DVD, a limited edition Dr. V Life Mask, as well as copies of the Fangoria Graphix comic Beneath the Valley of the Rage — coincidentally enough, the associated editor on this book was none other fangorithan Blog@ and Best Shots captain Troy Brownfield.

The film chronicles the tale of Dr. Victor Vasilenko, whose brutal experiments with the Rage serum yielded some horrifying results. When these test subjects made their escape, their remains were consumed by vultures, creating some even worse monsters. You can see a trailer for the film right here:

The grey sky threatened rain most of the day, and perhaps trusting the evidence at their fingertips, most of the Popular Science squad elected to remain ensconced indoors. As a consequence, Thursday afternoon’s softball game became more of an intramural effort, with three members of Popular Science joined by a whopping six Bullets and one good Samaritan who happened to be present at the field. The Bullets still fielded a full ten-person squad.

Despite both teams’ line-ups being from the DC roster, the Popular Science team continued a trend of early inning offensive onslaughts against the Bullets’ pitching. The Bullets’ own Adam Staffaroni highlighted Popular Science’s first inning with a two-RBI triple. One of the Science’s own players slammed a two-run homer in the second, and the Bullets quickly found themselves in an eight-run hole after two innings, trailing 8-0.

In the third inning, however, Popular Science’s fill-in starting pitcher, one Dan DiDio, began to tire. Perhaps it was the jetlag from his trip to Bristol. Perhaps it was those achy old limbs. Whatever the cause, the Bullets surged back with a three-run home run from Joel Press and two-run jack from Adam Schlagman. DiDio helped his cause, getting back one run for Popular Science when he notched an RBI single in the fifth after the Bullets’ third baseman (who may have been the author of this post, but he did go 3-3 with 2 runs at the plate, so there!) threw a possible inning-ending groundball into right field to extend the frame.

Going to the bottom of the fifth, with time of the Bullets’ field permit dwindling, the Bullets trailed 9-8. The bottom of the fifth opened with back-to-back-to-back singles, loading the bases with no outs and bringing up the top of the Bullets’ order. Lead-off hitter Schlagman’s fly ball to deep left field allowed runners to tag up from both second and third bases, tying the game and leaving the winning run only feet away. Left fielder Vince Letterio decided that Schlagman’s strategy worked once, and so he followed with a fly to deep left field. The throw home was late, and the Bullets rallied for their first win of 2009.

Final score: DC Bullets 10, Popular Science 9. DC Bullets record 1-1 (0-0 in league play).

So, in the wake of this week’s season finale of Smallville, “Doomsday,” there was a little matter of a letter that Clark Kent composed in the event of his passing, as the Red-Blue Blur, that Lois Lane was instructed to run in the Daily Planet. 
It was only for a few moments at best that the viewers got a glimpse of the letter as Clark (Tom Welling) was typing it out.  As a service to the loyal viewers, I made it a point to transcribe the letter in its entirety…

To the citizens of Metropolis:

You have welcomed me into your city and allowed me to make it my home. I will always be grateful for that. Which is why I cannot leave without saying goodbye. This newspaper has made me into what you think I am — an example, a symbol, a “hero.” But the truth is, I’m simply one of you. The only difference is that my days in the shadows and my nights on the streets have allowed me to see what you’ve lost sight of — the good in each of you.

I’ve seen regular people do extraordinary things. I’ve seen you help each other up after you’ve been knocked down. I’ve seen you stand together when times are tough. And I’ve seen the smallest act make the biggest change. If I’ve done anything right, I hope it’s help you realize one person can make a difference in the lives of others — that Metropolis doesn’t need a hero. Have faith in yourself, and you will find hope in each other.

Remember, it’s not the mask that makes the hero. It’s the choices we make and the desire to do what’s right. I’ve seen that desire in all of you. It inspired me to promise I would do everything in my power to protect this city — but I can’t promise that I’ll be around forever. One day, there may be a fight I cannot win.

But if that day comes, please, keep fighting without me to make the world a better place. Be the heroes I know you are.

~ The Red-Blue Blur

Gene Luen Yang’s last book was 2007′s extremely well-received American Born Chinese, a book I feel quite comfortable calling “brilliant”  without worrying if I’m over-praising it. Derek Kirk Kim is responsible for 2004′s whip-smart  Same Difference and Other Stories, and for writing 2007′s Good As Lily, one of the better books from DC’s abandoned Minx line. The pair collaborated on The Eternal Smile (First Second), an extremely inventive and imaginative work that features a remarkable breadth of cartooning skills and styles, and I expect you’ll hear a great deal of well-deserved praise  for the book in reviews of it.

So I’ll seize the opportunity to be contrarian: The Eternal Smile is a disappointment. It’s an anthology with three different, standalone short stories, with nothing in common between them save the creators and the fact that in each case, there’s a twist that reveals that they’re not about what they at first seemed to be about. Comparing it to American Born Chinese might be unfair, but the three narratives, one book structure begs the comparison, and in doing so underlines the new book’s greatest weakness.

In American Born Chinese, Yang started with what seemed like three incredibly disparate story threads, and braided them all together by the end. In The Eternal Smile, there are impermeable walls around each story, which would be perfectly fine if they managed to add up to something greater, or play off of one another in some way, but that never occurs. And the book certainly head-fakes that it’s going somewhere, what with two back-to-back stories prominently involving frogs. The whole is exactly equivalent to the sum of its parts, so what’s the point of adding them all together in the first place?

That’s the downside of Eternal Smile, that it’ s not a truly great work of comics. It’s still a long, long way away from being a bad comic though, and if a comic can’t be be great, well being pretty great isn’t too shabby an accomplishment either.

The opening story, “Duncan’s Kingdom,” deals with a young knight who goes on a quest to avenge the death of his king and win the princesses hand in marriage. In the process of doing so, he stumbles across something strange, and learns that things aren’t what they seem at all. I’d rather not spoil the twist, and I feel I’ve already sucked some of the excitement out of your reading by even mentioning that there is a twist, but suffice it to say that what’s really going on is rather banal. There are highly dramatic events, but they ring false, like someone’s ideas of what would be highly dramatic events. The style of this piece is a slightly-cartoony, boys adventure style, which makes the turn seem all the more subversive.

I think the second story may be the strongest, and perhaps the creators themselves would agree, as it’s where the book gets its title from. “Gran’pa Greenbax and The Eternal Smile” is a one-for-one parody of Carl Barks‘ Scrooge comics, in which a greedy, miserly frog, his ill-treated and poorly paid nephew with a speech impediment and his nieces with rhyming names and color-coded costumes seek out a get-rich scheme, only to run afoul of Gran’pa’s rival greedy, miserly, rich rivall, who is more ethnic than our hero.

I enjoyed seeing how the pair systematically parodied elements of the duck comics, and their portrayal of the Scrooge character as a complete monster. After the twist—which will be quite familiar from other stories you’ve encountered in other media, but is used to great effect here—things get quite deep, and this is one story I had to read over again as soon as I finished, this time to see how the knowledge of the twist beforehand effects the pre-twist portions of the story. (A quibble: If the Disney analogies are meant to comment on Walt Disney, Carl Barks and the Disney corporation somehow, the meaning seems muddied by conflating the three, and likewise conflating animation and comics).

The final story  is “Urgent Request,” the sad story of a shy, put-upon office drone woman who gets an email from a Nigerian prince requesting funds from her, and not only does she comply, she does so repeatedly, building up a relationship with the prince, even if it only exists in her mind. The character designs in this story are all short, stocky and cute, the characters having Hummel figurines proportions and soft, squishy looking features. The bulk of the story occurs in small, single-color panels, each far away from one another on pages dominated with open space, but when our protagonist sees her prince, the panels open up, growing bigger and gaining color.

Despite my disappointment that it wasn’t as good as I assumed a Yang/Kim collaboration might be, and that the book amounted to a collection of three single comics stories with little relation to one another, it’s still well worth a read for comics fans, if only to see what two important creators have been up to and to taken their extremely impressive formal accomplishments.

“The wonky business model was only part of the problem”: James Vance offers an interesting essay about working for the short-lived comics company Tekno, which specialized in the sort of attach-a-marquee-name-and-apostrophe-s-above-the-title publishing strategy that Vance sees as a forerunner to the model employed by the more recent short-lived comics company Virgin (Link swiped from Spurgeon)

“But even then, they’d have to be gay chicks who are into poorly drawn green chicks, and that’s gotta be a pretty niche crowd”: The Inkwell Bookstore blog tackles “craptastic covers from upcoming comics” All-New Savage She-Hulk, Youngblood, Pride & Prejudice and If’n Oof. Hey, that Youngblood cover says “not final cover” on it, so maybe Liefeld will look at some photo-reference of Barack Obama before submitting the final version.  (Link stolen from Journalista)

“Neil Gaiman has the ability to be a crossover artist”: Black Book has a neat little Q-and-A with Stephin Merritt, the frontman for, like, four of my favorite bands. The topic at hand is his work on an off-Broadway stage version of Gaiman’s Coraline, and he talks a bit about Gaiman’s ability to tell a story that is so flexible (in addition to the original prose novel, it’s also a graphic novel, a movie and now a stage play). If you read the piece, make sure you stick around to the end, in which Merritt drops a tantalizing idea for stage show.

So that’s where cameras come from: I always assumed a camera factory of some sort was involved, but Chris Sims sets me straight with a few strange panels of a Spider-Man comic.

Round and round, the Red Circle has turned — and now we know who’s behind the wheel!

DC’s blog, the Source, announced today the art teams for J. Michael Straczynski’s miniseries the Red Circle, due out August 15th. This project was once a proposal for the Brave and the Bold, but since became a spotlight for the one-time Archie Comics superheroes. So the lineup as we know it:

- For the Hangman, a former doctor turned immortal, Tom Derenick (Smallville) will team up with the always-original Bill Sienkiewicz (New Mutants).

- Meanwhile, Roger Robinson (Batman: Gotham Knights) and Hilary Barta (Fear Agent) will work on the Web, a one-time playboy turned hero.

- Greg Scott (Gotham Central) will perform art duties for the amnesiac pyrokinetic known as Inferno.

- Finally, Scott McDaniel (Nightwing) and Andy Owens (Fray) will take on the Shield, who was created as a sort of human weapon to protect the country.

They totally had me at Roger Robinson, an insanely underrated artist if I’ve ever seen one. His work on Gotham Knights is easily my all-time favorite Bat-run. But Straczynski has an interesting, sort of Seven Soldiers kind of vibe to this system, based on this quote:

This is where it gets really interesting. All four books are connected. One book sets up the next, then sets up the next, via interrelated actions. Each book slides off the next, showing the interconnectedness of the world, how fate can launch a bank shot from one person to the next. The Circle of Life, again reinforcing the Red Circle motif.

What say you, Rama readers? Do you find Red Circle — wait for it — well-rounded?

It’s just a rumor, but it’s flying over Twitter. According to TVGuide:

#falltv Sources tell TVGuide.com’s Matt Mitovich that Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse is “looking really good” for a Season 2 renewal.

We’ll try to bring you news as soon as we have it, but if it’s true, this makes me happy.

UPDATE: The rumors appear to be true.

The show will return for 13 episodes, with an option for more episodes if required.  Return is seen likely for Fall.

It’s the 15th of the month and that can mean only one thing, new product on sale on MattyCollector.com.  This month you have your choice of the new Justice League Unlimited Legion Of Super Heroes 4-pack..  On sale RIGHT NOW for $30 + shipping.

Or Zodac the Cosmic Enforcer from the red hot Masters of The Universe Classic line. On Sale right now for $20 + shipping.

The servers seem to be a bit slow this morning and you might have to wait in a “virtual line” to place your order, but just hang on.  All reports so far are that they are all still available… but they won’t last forever so get over there!

DC’s The Source blog is showcasing some of Mark Bagley’s first pencils from his upcoming Batman run. And they look . . . well, here’s a taste.

Show of hands . . . who’s on board? Check out the rest at The Source.

(Above: A blistering critique of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy in Latin America)

Everyone knows that in last year’s Dark Knight, Batman symbolized then-president George W. Bush, and whether director Christopher Nolan was celebrating or castigating Bush’s prosecution of the “War On Terror” depends on how the viewer sees Batman in the film (Or, more likely, how one thought of Bush before even walking into the theater).

Likewise, it’s common knowledge that in last year’s Iron Man, the lead character was portrayed as an avatar of American industrial, military and technology might, and the noble ways it can be used to better the world—without killing.

The X-Men? People think people think they’re stand-ins for oppressed minorities in our culture like gay folks, but everyone knows they really symbolize the alienation felt by comic book fans.

Spider-Man? He symbolized the adolescent coming of age experience, as he gained access to the whole new world that puberty offers. He also demonstrates a fear of women that isn’t pathetic so much as macho. And speaks to the importance of chastity and abstinence in modern society. And was a symbol of the millennial metrosexual. And 9/11.

Scanning Hollywood blockbusters for potential political and cultural subtext, or even just a good opening with which to assign a meaning, has long been a popular pastime for people who get paid to fill column inches—on the limited space provided by pulp, or in the infinite space of the Internet—and it seems to be one they engage in more often and with less consideration these days.

Personally, I love reading such pieces. A great deal of them are quite well written, and can provide enough evidence to support a particular reading. Some of them end up being completely ridiculous, but even those are fun to read in the way ridiculous, unsupportable arguments can be.

Writing for Canadian news magazine Macleans, Mark Steyn says he’s having less and less fun with the practice of comparing Spock to Obama and Bush to Emperor Palpatine.

“Truly this is the Age of the Superhero,” he writes in a recent piece, “And it’s beginning to bother me.”

He begins by brandishing his comic book bonafides—he grew up reading comics, he once met Stan Lee, etc.—and brings up the fact that he too has read meanings that may or may not have actually been there into superhero flicks (Spider-Man, he once thought, seemed to justify the Bush administration’s concept of preemptive warfare, since if Spidey would have stopped that burglar for the smaller, more insignificant crime of robbery, he wouldn’t have later killed our heroes Uncle Ben).

His problem with Hollywood turning into a superhero movie factory isn’t merely one of aesthetics and quality, although he offers some amusing observations on that subject:

The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt. In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.

Rather, the real downside is that such filmmaking has helped Hollywood “off an awkward hook”; studios don’t produce movies about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, the failed “War on Terror” (which is currently being reframed in less cosmic terms by the new administration), and the causes and casualties of these conflicts. Instead, they bounce colorful characters open to interpretations around a big screen, and leave it to viewers to attach the messages they want to read.

Steyn takes issue with “several comrades” of his who saw Dark Knight’s villain The Joker, who just wanted to “watch the world burn,” as “incisive analysis of al-Qaeda”:

But I don’t think so. Terrorists enjoy the body count, yet, unlike the Joker, they do have an end rather than just means. The notion that they merely “want to watch the world burn” is more readily applied to your average Hollywood studio. For almost a decade, the summer blockbusters have avoided saying anything about terrorism, Islam, 9/11, Bali, Beslan, Madrid or London, but they do like to “watch the world burn.” And so they opt for explosions and fireballs and shattering glass and screaming civilians unmoored from any recognizable reality.

I can buy that. Al-Qaeda and similar terrorist groups might not have a rational end that can ever be achieved, but even if its just a fantasy goal it’s a goal, and its far different than The Joker’s, which was apparently trying to drive Batman crazy, or prove everyone can be tempted to be as evil as him, or whatever.

Then there’s this:

Some studio vice-presidents just want to watch the world burn. So we have movies about nothing. You can discern subplot if you wish, but in the end what 99 per cent of moviegoers notice is the stuff that’s not sub-: he’s dressed like a bat!…

You can debate allegory and metaphor, but once upon a time you didn’t have to—even with superheroes. The very first issue of Captain America showed our hero punching Hitler in the kisser right on the front cover—and look at the date: March 1941, months before the U.S. even entered the war.

I don’t see Hollywood studios deciding to stop being coy and equivocal on matters of politics and identity issues any time soon, as making statements tend to alienate advertisers and audiences, but it might be nice to see the folks making movies about superheroes showing more courage now and then.

If superhero films, as a genre in general, do move away from allegory and metaphor, I imagine it will be to abandon even those and retreating into pure action movies with masks and tights, instead of getting more specific.

But that won’t stop critics and commentators from finding symbolism in popular entertainments. Superhero films aren’t the only movies so scrutinized, anything that achieves a certain level of popularity will be looked at closely to see how it might be connecting with the audience (There’s been just as much written about politics and worldviews espoused by The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Juno, each version of King Kong, The Matrix, the resurgent zombie genre, each and each and every movie about vampires as there has been about Spider-Man and Dark Knight). And it will be a phenomenon driven by writers’ desire to write about something popular and fun. If to do so means finding a new angle, or a hook to tie it into the front page news of the day, well, that’s usually accomplished easily enough.

Now if you haven’t already, go read Steyn’s piece. Agree or disagree, it offers an awful lot to think about.

When I was writing that post about the state of the Justice League last week, and thinking about what superheroes DC has running around at the moment that aren’t already on another super-team in a different book the company iss publishing, I realized that there seemed to be relatively few book starring single, solo super-heroes from DC at the moment. Or from their marvelous competition.

Well, perhaps few isn’t really the right word, but it sure seems like the ratio has changed over the years. Instead of a team book like Justice League or Avengers offering a unique chance to see many of the companies’ superheroes in a single book, the teams have been proliferating over the years (like rabbits, when it comes to Marvel’s merry mutants; rabbits, or maybe cockroaches). It’s almost as if the superheroes are all unionizing, the better to collectively bargain with their readers.

This makes perfect sense, of course. If something works once, it will probably work two, three or four times more, at least until it stops working. So naturally a successful book like Giffen and DeMatteis’  ‘80s Justice League relaunch lead to a Justice League Europe and Quarterly. Or if fans were excited about Grant Morrison’s “Big Seven” JLA relaunch in the late ‘90s, well then naturally they’d  dig  a similar approach to a JSA and Titans book.

Regardless, I got the impression that rather than team books being an exception to the rule, it seemed like they were becoming the rule, and solo books were now the exception.

Was that just my perception, or was that actually the case?

Well, this week the Publishers Weekly’s The Beat blog did their monthly analysis of the Big Two’s sales figures, so I thought I’d dust off the math skills I learned in grade school (and was told I’d use every day for the rest of my life—ha!) and see just what the landscape looked like in terms of solo books vs. team books.

So after the jump, numbers!

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It’s been confirmed by sources like The Hollywood Reporter and my pals at Fangoria that 1985′s Fright Night will be getting the remake treatment. Now, I don’t want to be one of those people that runs down a remake before it appears; in fact, I thought that the Battlestar revamp succeeded beyond my wildest imagination, and I enjoyed Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. That said, I think that THIS remake in particular is probably a bad idea.

Why?

Part of the charm of the original is that the plot partially turned on something that has all but disappeared: the local horror movie host. I was born in 1973, and had the good fortune of watching Sammy Terry out of Indianapolis for many years. My experience echoes the experiences of many of my (and at least one previous) generation: their Elvira, their Svengoolie, their Dr. Creep, and so on, were key figures in introducing them to the horror genre. While a few still operate, like Dr. Gangrene, their influence has waned. In fact, several of my college students had no idea that such a phenomenon existed until I brought it up in film class one day. (For more on this, if you’re curious, consult the sublime The Monster Show by David J. Skal, among others.)

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There has certainly been a lot of controversy surrounding Marvel Divas, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and drawn by Tonci Zonjic. It’s been tagged as Sex and the City meets superheroines, but a lot of people took issue with the sexualized cover, drawn by J. Scott Campbell.

Well, late last week Tom Brevoort over at his Blah Blah Blog showed an image of the series (presumably titled Marvel Vixens during that stage in the game), showcasing the designs for Firestar:

Now, this art isn’t credited, but based on what I’ve seen on Zonjic’s blog, I’m willing to wager that this is definitely Tonci’s work. But if you’re still curious about what the art might look like, well, this link is an exerpt from Tonci’s blog, called Orange — and unless my eyes are deceiving me, it’s looking like Photon is in full force.

I know there was a lot of concern about cheesecake, about exploitation, about women being seen as romantic objects rather than heroines in their own right — but at the same time, Aguirre-Sacasa actually came to Marvel early in his career looking to write strong female characters, and this work by Zonjic seems to be sensible and semi-realistic, in a vein not terribly unlike Amanda Conner. Are readers simply judging a book by its cover — and if so, is it warranted? What say you, Rama readers?

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!

Yipee! “So Super Duper” got a very fun, witty, positive review (yeah, you read that right, POSITIVE review, haha). Totes check it out here: http://dangermart.blogspot.com/2009/05/so-super-duper-7-review.html

Lauren Montgomery, director of Green Lantern: First Flight spoke with Warner Home Video about her upcoming animated project with Hal Jordan. The film is due July 28, 2009.

QUESTION: Will Green Lantern: First Flight be in the well-known design of Bruce Timm, or be more of the Lauren Montgomery vision from Wonder Woman?

LAUREN MONTGOMERY We’re actually having a lot of fun trying different artistic styles on different movies – Bruce felt his style has been done enough, and I just had my turn – plus I knew there were many other character designers who are infinitely better at designing aliens that I am. We were lucky to get Jose Lopez to create the characters for Green Lantern. I think he even took a pay cut from his last job to do Green Lantern, but this project really allows him to let his animation go wild. You’ve never seen anything like some of his designs for this film. His take on the familiar characters is fairly true to form, but he’s designed – literally – an entire universe of completely new characters in the different Green Lanterns, aliens and background characters. There are a lot of awesome, fantastical creatures.  Like me, Jose is trained in animation instead of comics, so his style really lends itself to being animated – and everything he’s done has looked spectacular. I think it’s really looking different from anything we’ve ever done.

QUESTION: Did Jose ever over-step any boundaries and need to be reined in?

LAUREN MONTGOMERY Actually, his first designs were a little too stylized. For the main characters, the designs were a little too streamlined – we had to make Sinestro more like the comics. But once he got that figured out, he really went crazy. It was exciting to see him come in with these characters. Even his Weaponer designer is far different than what we’ve seen before, but DC was okay with it. So we just let him run wild.

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OK, so I already hit up the comic shop for this week. (Purchases: Hellblazer trade, Young Liars and Unknown Soldier #1, which I should’ve read months ago. Unforgivable. Also, if you didn’t buy The Unwritten and the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we aren’t friends anymore.)

But. In the wake of a thoroughly mediocre Wolverine movie that I enjoyed far more than I should’ve, I find myself with a strange desire to read Wolverine comics. I’m a Jason Aaron fangirl, so I’ve been tempted before this to check out his take on the character, but I have this problem where I want to go back to the beginning with everything–it keeps me out of the superhero section quite often. I want to know EVERYTHING, which is impossible with these characters with this epic history.

So, I figured I’d ask you. Recommend me a trade that I can pick up and devour in one sitting. The more foulmouthed and gory, the better.

(No, the picture wasn’t entirely necessary. But I like it.)

The library is a great place for readers to discover comics, and it’s a great place for comics readers to check out things that they want to try without spending their hard-earned cash. I’m looking at comics that I find in the New York Public Library system.

Jeff Smith’s Bone is one of the greatest comics of all time, so his new series Rasl obviously merits considerable interest. A far cry from the all-ages fantasy of Bone, Rasl’s protagonist is a slightly amoral, dimension-hopping art thief, a ladies’ man out for a buck wherever he can make it. The Drift collects the first three issues of Rasl, and it’s very hard to make any firm judgments from what’s between these two covers.

Plenty happens – Smith jams a lot into these three issues – but because he’s creating all new characters, establishing the rules of the Drift between universes, introducing alternate-universe versions of characters and generating the back story that drives Rasl, it doesn’t quite coalesce into a definitive image of where the series is heading. Because so much of what occurs is laying the groundwork for the character and what follows, you’re left feeling that The Drift is little more than stage setting - effective stage setting, but groundwork nonetheless.

Smith’s cartooning remains very strong. He knows how to use angles to maximize the drama of panel, without drawing attention to the layouts. The pace is casual, with plenty of panels on each page to convey information while still allowing room for moments of silent introspection or breathless action.

Based on Smith’s track record, most readers are likely to give him plenty of time to build his new world, and I hope that readers new to his comics don’t get impatient with The Drift’s casual setting up of future events. Rasl shows promise, though it’s too early and there’s too much territory yet to cover to make any universal proclamations. If you find it at your local library, check it out and look forward to future installments, because Jeff Smith’s proven himself a cartoonist to watch.