“I want to see dating and drinking and shopping punctuated by the occasional ass-kicking. I want Iron Man and Captain America to finally kiss”: The Internet, or at least the portion of it that generally discuss comic books, is abuzz with yesterday’s announcement of Marvel’s 2010 miniseries Girl Comics. Of all the reactions I’ve read, cynical and enthusiastic, I think I liked Rachel Goguen’s of Living Between Wednesdays the best. Her paragraph beginning with “This is what I am truly hoping for” is fantastic…even though I’m pretty sure her specific hopes are all going to be in vain.
It’s not too early to get excited about the next Batman and Robin arc yet, is it?: I hope not, because upcoming artist Cameron Stewart posted some pages, and they look gorgeous (Confidential to Batman editor Mike Marts: You should totally have Morrison and Stewart do a Knight and Squire miniseries). The covers for Batman and Robin look like they will remain awesome in the near future, too.
Is Red Tornado the Dane Cook of the Justice League?: Andrew Weiss has been doing a fun feature he calls “Nobody’s Favorites” on his blog Armagideon Time, focusing, as the name suggests, on characters that nobody likes (Orpheus, Triumph, Doctor Druid, etc). With this post, he offers an interesting twist—characters who should be nobody’s favorites, except for reasons Weiss can’t quite fathom are actually pretty popular with some people. I should note that I genuinely love one of the characters on Weiss’ list, and I genuinely love to hate another of them.
Having trouble getting into the Christmas spirit?: Perhaps these Christmas comics can help. Diversions of the Groovy Kind has posted a Steve Gerber-scripted, 1972 short entitled “What If…Famous People Were Santa Claus?” and Ten Cent Dreams has Simon/Kirby classic “The Sandman in Santa Fronts For the Mob.” Or do you have the opposite problem? Are you too into the Christmas spirit, and need some help getting out? Then perhaps these NSFW Johnny Ryan holiday strips from Vice can help (Is it redundant to say “NSFW” and “Johnny Ryan”…?). Click carefully now, because once you see a Johnny Ryan strip, you can’t unsee it…
“Hergé was himself a mentally complex, flawed genius, and occasionally his creations have been analyzed in Freudian terms…”: Benjamin Ivry reviews a pair of books about Hergé and his signature creation for the San Francisco Chronicle.
“What Hollywood does is it cuts off the conclusion…So you get this rising action to a climax, you stop, and then you’re set up for the sequel”: NPR‘s Bob Mondello talks a bit about how sequels and the perception of films as franchises are changing the ways films get made and watched. Spider-Man 3 got me really thinking about the connection between comic book films and comic books, and how certain franchises are beginning to reflect the serial nature of the comics they’re based on (Spider-Man, for example, has had three films with the same talent and director, making it a bit like a run by a single creative team on a Spider-Man comic). Mondello doesn’t really get into all that, but it’s something I find a kinda fascinating.
“Mark Millar’s graphic novels really are graphic but the Coatbridge boy behind Wanted and new teen film Kick-Ass is suprisingly mild-mannered”: Are they calling Mark Millar a sissy? It sounds to me like they’re calling Millar a sissy.
