Do the Guaridans of the Globe get team uniforms?: I hope so, for President Barack Obama’s sake, as that is one ill-fitting suit he’s wearing there. That is supposed to be Barack Obama, right? I assume it is, since he mentions Amazing Spider-Man #583 and he clearly isn’t Spider-Man, as it’s not much of a likeness, is it? Oh well, I imagine the president must be a really hard person to draw, given how hard it is to find visual reference material of the shy, private, hard-to-photograph recluse. (And while I’m complaining about nothing, is it cool to call your super-team The Guardians of the Globe when there’s already a team called the Global Guardians? Isn’t that like calling your team the League of Justice or The Four Who are Fantastic?)
Thinking about the thought balloon: Joe McCulloch has a great think piece about thought bubbles in comics, brought on by a quote from Stephen King about being told not to use them in his script for American Vampire.
“Even if you can get past the fact that they lettered an entire graphic novel in Times New Roman… still managed to get everything wrong“: Chris Sims, the Internet’s #1 critic of bad comics involving the undead, reviews Twilight: The Graphic Novel, and finds it to be pretty terrible. The main problem? The lettering. I haven’t read it yet (I’m waiting for Twilight: The Graphic Novel—The Novelization), but Sims posts some pretty terrible-looking examples. If I had to guess, I would assume they tried to keep the bubble-shapes of manga, but those bubbles tend to be shaped the way they are because they once hosted dialogue written in a different language using a different alphabet and read in a different order. Anyway, I always enjoy seeing Sims exposed to things he doesn’t like.
You tell him, Geoff Boucher!: “Snoop Dogg wants to know why there are no black superheroes”
I would have guessed Tommy “Hitman” Monaghan: Mid-week MTV’s Splash Page imagined a “last man standing” battle royale between various Irish superheroes (and heroes of Irish descent), to determine the most powerful of the lot. I didn’t know Captain American was Irish. Plenty of Irish comics characters didn’t make that particular list, but this person drops quite a few names in a holiday piece fantasy-casting them. I’m fairly confident that Slaine could make Kyle Rayner eat his ring, lantern and the nearest couple dozen members of the Green Lantern Corps if they ever got in a fight.
I had Leslie Thompkins in the office pool: If you missed it on the main page, Vaneta Rogers interviewed writer David Hine about the identity of Black Mask II, which was revealed in Wednesday’s Batman #697. It’s a pretty big surprise, but I think it’s more of a, “Well, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me” sort of surprise, rather than an, “Of course! Why didn’t I see it before?!” sort of surprise. But I’m just glad it wasn’t Jason Todd, who in the past was revealed to be the mysterious new Red Hood, the second mysterious new Red Hood, the mysterious new muderous Nightwing and one of the several people playing Hush.
