“The graphic novel particularly fits Snyder’s talents and career interests, since she is interested in both writing and drawing”: Here’s a nice little profile on Montana State University studio arts major Jasmine Snyder, “who used comic book illustrations to explain her research that explored and explained the commercialism of the underground culture,” complete with images of Snyder’s very nice art. I’m going to have to dock the article’s writer Carol Schmidt a point for misspelling Spider-Man though; it’s two words, hyphenated and with a capital “M.” Jeez, what do they teach these kids at school these days?
Since it’s been days since I’ve posted anything about Guibert’s The Photographer…: Here’s the LA Times review of his book.
Aqua-Borg? Terranado?!: Last week, on Living Between Wednesdays, Dave Howlett discussed Superman/Batman, and came to an unusual conclusion:
The book features a supremely annoying house style of writing where the two leads narrate in hilariously homoerotic tandem, constantly commenting on what the other must be thinking right now. In defiance of all odds, it somehow became even stupider when Jeph Loeb wrapped up his 25-issue arc.
However, I submit to you that, despite all these flaws, Superman/Batman is the most consistently accessible and yes, entertaining, mainstream book featuring these two leads a lot of the time.
I quit buying it around the time of the weird Metal Man “story,” and even quit looking for library trades of it after that one with the New Gods in which Batman was “aroused beyond all reason,” but Howlett does make a pretty compelling argument that sometimes the book reaches a critical mass of stupidity that makes it awesome.
Also of note at LBW this week was a Johnathan’s post about punctuation, which I enjoyed in no small part because he used three of my favorite comics characters to illustrate examples of less-standard punctuation.
So, how about this Dwayne McDuffie thing, huh?: I assume you’ve all heard the news about McDuffie leaving JLoA by now, right?
It’s been something of a hot topic, and talked about hither and yon. I first heard about it at 4thletter.net, which concludes a post about it in…an interesting way (And by interesting, I mean hypnotic. I can’t stop staring at that thing). Chistopher Butcher mentioned it while liveblogging the May Previews, which I’ll quote because it gives me an excuse to link to Butcher’s always entertaining (and educational!) liveblogging of Previews:
I mean, whatever, people don’t like their jobs, but you can only complain about how fucking broken the book is and how your hands are tied, in public, for so long, before Dan DiDio reads his e-mail. You know what I’m saying? That dude seems like a biiiiiiiiiiiit of a control freak, I can’t imagine he’s reading McDuffie complaining about a scene needing to be re-written at the last minute and the scene being clumsy because of it, and DiDio steps back and goes “Yeah, shit, good point man. We really gotta get our act together here at DC!”
Dan DiDio doesn’t seem like that kind of guy is all I’m saying.
To The Extreme.
The thing that confuses me about the situation is that I don’t see how removing McDuffie from the title helps anyone, especially DC. I mean, yes, the title was horrible, just completely unreadable. But then, it was before McDuffie got there too, and it was pretty clear to anyone trying to slog through it that the person credited as the writer only had so much control over the proceedings. From the issues I read, it seemed like McDuffie spent about 75% of each issue in his run trying to finish what his predecessor half-wrote before leaving, and/or setting up and tying into other books, and he was working without a regular artist. I mean, there were multiple issues where the artists would draw entirely different characters than the ones the writer was writing into the scene (actually, that started before McDuffie did, with the Aquaman mistake in Brad Meltzer’s last issue). I’m pretty sure that Alan Moore could have been writing JLoA and getting story tips and advice from the ghosts of Shakespeare and Mark Twain, and the book would have still been pretty terrible.
But the thing is, whatever damage McDuffie might have done by publicly admitting that writing the book wasn’t super-fun, or that he and the book were at the mercy of the events of other books, it’s already been done. Removing him now just makes DC seem petty about it, and besides, who’s going to replace McDuffie and do any better?
The sales have been sliding since Meltzer left the title, but whether that’s McDuffie’s fault, or the fault of all the terrible artwork, or the fault of the book’s many tie-in plots making it seem irrelevant, or just standard attrition, it’s hard to say. It doesn’t seem like DC booted McDuffie to replace him with a more talented or more popular superstar writer who’s going to rocket JLoA back up the charts.
It looks like Len Wein will be writing the book for at least the next few issues, and while Wein is a talented writer with plenty of experience and goodwill from plenty of older readers, his addition isn’t likely to burn up the sales charts. In fact, it’s likely to do the exact opposite.
It’s like you’re eating at a restaurant, and the food is so bad you complain about it, and the chef invites you back to the kitchen and shows you it’s a filthy mess; how’s he supposed to cook great food under these conditions? And then the owner fires that chef and tells you, “Hey, don’t worry; we’ve got a new chef now!”
If JLoA under McDuffie read like a fill-in run, a placeholder while the “important” DCU stories were going on in Final Crisis, the upcoming Blackest Night business, and whatever Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison were writing, now it’s just going to read like a fill-in for a fill-in. How does that benefit anyone?
