Esther Inglis-Arkell read what looks like this past Wednesday’s Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant #1, and she did not enjoy the section by Jen Van Meter and Justiniano (pretty nice looking art, though!).

During that scene, Cyclone and Power Girl talk about how cool Power Girl’s costume is, and how, in fact, it is not at all sexist or unusual in anyway that there’s a big cleavage window in it…in fact, that’s the best part because of the way it unsettles criminals and blah blah blah. Inglis-Arkell then rattles off all the other explanations for Power Girl’s sexy costumes, and the sexy costumes of her female crime-fighting peers she’s read. None of which seem to include “Just because the person who designed it thought it was sexy, okay?”

Seriously, go read Inglis-Arkell’s post. Then come back and we’ll talk more, okay?

I can’t disagree with anything she said in her post; she’s dead-on right. If I had anything to add, it would be that the writer’s doing the justification of the costumes almost never have any real control over those costumes, and probably think they’re doing something valuable by finding a reason for explaining a costuming choice that sounds better than “Some guy 20-65 years ago though this was totally hot, and wondered if his editors would let him get away with it.” (That doesn’t make it any less irritating though, especially for a character like Power Girl, who is given explanation after explanation for her cleavage window. The first one of these speeches you read is never as annoying as the second, third or fifth).

Oh, and I should note it annoys me whenever a writer tries too hard to explain a goofy or silly element of a superhero comic, costuming or otherwise, in a way that writer thinks sounds more “realistic.”

For example, in this week’s Flash: Rebirth, Geoff Johns has a character mention that Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick where’s his totally boss soup-bowl hat because it reminds him of the helmet his father wore during World War I.

No, he wears it because he always wore it, and he started wearing it because it looked cool. (Oh, and the Roman god Mercury probably had something to do with that). Whether or not you think Power Girl’s costume looks cool or is sexy, the person who designed it certainly did, and the editors and artists responsible for dressing her since agreed and kept it. Some things about super-comics don’t need to be explained, and when a writer tries to explain them, they only draw attetnion to them and draw attention to the fact that the writer is struggling with their work.

Nothing knocks one out of a super-comic faster than the writer acknowleding that they’re not really fond of or don’t really get super-comics.

In 2004’s Green Lantern: Rebirth, Geoff Johns had some pretty difficult challenges to wrestle with. Not only did he need to bring the late and outdated Hal Jordan character back to life—no easy feat given the nature of his death and afterlife at the time—and convince readers there was any point to doing so at all, he also had to come up with a solution to the contentious Green Lantern fan issue of which of the many characters to have the name should be the Green Lantern, and what to do with the rest of ‘em.

I thought Johns’ “Everyone wins!” solution was rather elegant. He simply made all the possible contenders Green Lanterns, and DC found books for all of them to appear in, even if the main Green Lantern monthly could only star one of ‘em. It was a solution facilitated by the fact that the Green Lantern concept has so long included an army of Green Lantern characters all over outer space—if there were going to be at least 3600 Green Lanterns, surely there was room for four or five Earth men among them, right?

Johns’ current Rebirth series, in which he’s again working with artist Ethan Van Sciver, faces similar problems, although they’re magnified.

Once again Johns has to convince readers that a late and outdated character needs to be brought back to life, but Barry Allen had been dead far, far longer than Jordan, and his replacement Wally West “took” better than Jordan’s replacement Kyle Rayner.

And once again, he has to figure out what to do with the other possible contenders for the name, if Barry Allen were to come back. Unlike Green Lantern, The Flash doesn’t have a built-in army/team component to the concept though, so pluralizing The Flash won’t come quite as naturally, if that is what Johns is intending.

The Flash: Rebirth is only five-sixths over at this point, but it seems as if the final status of all the Flashes was revealed in this week’s issue (additionally, several big DC storylines, most notably Blackest Night, are set after the conclusion of Flash: Rebirth, and have thus offered pretty strong hints). Also, we got a look at what they may be wearing from now on.

So after the jump, a badly-scanned image of a two-page Van Sciver-drawn spread, and some thoughts about the characters on it…and the clothes they’re wearing. (And, um, “spoilers,” obviously).

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“Kenneth Branagh? A comic-book superhero movie? Are things really that tough? And not even an A-list Marvel hero—but Thor?”: Paid professional, film critic, author and apparent grown-up man Marshall Fine is shocked, shocked, shocked that talented directors and actors might make Hollywood superhero movies or voice cartoon animals. Marshall Fine hasn’t seen a single movie in the last ten years.

“It‘s a physics question…If she‘s falling, say, 100 metres, how fast is she going?”: Here’s a nice Chronicle Journal feature profiling comics fan and physics teacher James Kakalio, author of The Physics of Superheroes. The “she” doing the falling is, of course, Gwen Stacy, just a few seconds before physics murders her.

“I generally think in pretty visual terms when I’m writing…And so, this felt kind of natural in that way, and, of course, easier for me because I can, instead of really struggling over those descriptions, I can just say, here, you do this, you know?”: That’s prose writer-turned-graphic novel writer Kevin Baker on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, talking about Luna Park, his collaboration with artist Danijel Zezelj (and talking specifically about one of the benefits of the medium for someone used to doing all the describing himself). You can listen to it here (or just look at the pretty pictures) or read a transcript here.

Dammit. I shouldn’t have waited so long to write about Spandex: Martin Eden sent me a copy of his book about an all-gay superhero team to review, and I put it on my “to-review” stack and just haven’t gotten there yet. Now I’m missing the press roll-out! The Sun had a short piece on Spandex here, Digital Spy has another short piece here, and I suppose I should also mention that Rich Johnston has a piece over on his website, because if I don’t he’ll just show up in the comments section and let us all know anyway. You can learn more about the book here. (My three-word review of Spandex? Pretty good stuff.)

The biggest news a Moomin/Bjork fan could ever hope to hear: “Bjork Writes New Song for Freaky Finnish Childrens Movie” (Via The Beat)

I haven’t read Superman/Batman in a while, but then, they haven’t eschewed the World’s Finest team and instead used Bizarro and Man-Bat instead yet. They’ll give it a try in tomorrow’s Superman/Batman #66, in which the two characters will contend with Black Lantern Solomon Grundy. It’s going to be written and drawn by Scott Kolins, who recently completed a little-read Solomon Grundy miniseries. I hope it’s good. What else is there to hope for this week? Let’s find out below, after the jump!

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Princess Diana comic book under attack in Britain: The Los Angeles Times’ Geoff Boucher defends Bluewater Productions’ Female Force: Princess Diana comic from its critic Diana Funnell of the Diana Circle UK. Now I really, really wish Marvel would have let Peter Milligan write that X-Statix story where Princess Diana comes back from the dead as a mutant and joins the team, if only to have been able to see the reaction.

“He said that the audience to him tended to look like a ‘blur of pink unicorns’ to him”: I know what causes people to see pink elephants, but what causes them to see pink unicorns? You’ll have to ask Tony Lee, but from the lead of this short feature on his visit to Calcutta, it sounds like it might have had something to do with the length of the flight.

Wow, remember when Batgirl comics used to be awesome?: The gang at 4th Letter does.

Okay, I guess I’m not sick of Obama comics after all: Check out Steven Weissman’s strip. And then explain it to me. Wait, don’t explain it—I think I like it just the way it is.

It was Joe McCulloch who really sold me on the idea of DC’s First Wave series. In his regular preview of the week’s releases, he wrote of Batman/Doc Savage Special #1:

[W]riter/mastermind Brian Azzarello seems to have a pretty great concept brewing: a matured, shared universe of pulp magazine fixtures, upset by the arrival of the gun-toting early Batman cast as the young hotshot in town, thus neatly linking the early notion of the superhero to the costumed magazine characters that certainly provided some of the concept’s lineage.

That does sound like a pretty great idea for a series, huh? Something in the tradition of past DC epics hinging on the change of publishing eras. Think The Golden Age, The New Frontier or Kingdom Come, applied to the dawning of superhero comics as the adventure pulps began to fade. And if someone could do a kick-ass version of such a series, it would almost have to be Brian Azzarello, who has more great crime comics on his resume than just about anyone, and showed a great aptitude for metafictional fun in his Dr. 13 story.

Unfortunately, McCulloch wasn’t speaking for Azzarello or DC Comics, and this first book of the First Wave series/event isn’t anywhere near as clever. Instead it’s a 38-page, $4.99 comic book in which the two leads have a misunderstanding, get in a fight, realize their conflict is premised on a mistake, and decide to team up (Or as Graeme McMillian succintly put it in his Savage Critics review,  it’s “a standard Marvel Team-Up plot without much flair”). It even lacks what little punch that old superhero team-up formula has left, as it’s stretched out past the 22-page mark, but never actually gets around to the teaming-up. That’s something that will presumably happen at a later date, most likely sometime next spring, based on the back matter.

That back matter consists of eight pages of sketch art and character designs by Rags Morales, with a few paragraphs about a variety of characters playing a part in the First Wave to come by Azzarello. The characters are a pretty eclectic mix, so eclectic that it’s hard to find a pattern. There are a few standard DCU characters—new versions of Batman, Black Canary and the Blackhawks. There’s Will Eisner’s Spirit character, who also seems to be a distinctly new take (His Ebony White, for example, is a “brash girl.” Not even Frank Miller thought of doing that!). There’s Justice Inc, an old pulp franchise which became a DC comic briefly in the ’70s. Also from the pulps is Doc Savage, who also did time as a DC Comics-published character. And then there’s Rima, the mysterious jungle girl character from William  Henry Hudson’s 1904 romance Green Mansions, who also did time in the ’70s as a DC character, albeit in a jungle adventure mode.

Is there a logic to the character’s chosen? It’s difficult to say. It seems like they are among the less fantastic characters DC own or has the right to publish comics featuring—none are as hard to imagine existing in the real world as, say, Superman or Space Ghost—but there’s still a sense of the random about them, like they were chosen out of a hat and handed as an assignement to Azzarello, along with the instructions to “Try and make something out of all these guys, huh? We’ll let you know if we can get The Shadow or decide to throw in The Sandman or Crimson Avenger.”

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“Anyone with half a brain who had a love for Diana will hate it”: That’s Margaret Funnell, co-founder of the Diana Circle UK, lashing out against Bluewater Productions’ Female Force biographical comic book about Princess Diana. From the looks of the samples shown, and the looks of the other Female Force bio-comics, Funnell seems right on, although I don’t know whether or not loving Diana will necessarily have much to do with hating the comic. Funnell seems far more upset about the existance of the book than the quality of it, however, as she also says “Comic means something to laugh at. I don’t find it at all comical and I wish they hadn’t done it.” I thought everyone in the country that gave us 2000 AD and so many of our best comics writers of the last 20 years was pretty enlightened about comics. Bluewater publisher Darren Davis talks with Coventry Telegraph blogger David Bentley about the criticism, and defends the books portrayal of Diana and her life. Check it out here.

And on the subject of Bluewater’s Female Force bio-sploitation books…: Chris Sims reviews the latest, Female Force: Stephenie Meyer, and he does not much care for it. From the quality of the art he scanned and posted, it’s easy to see why—it’s pretty horrible stuff. It is intriguing that the creators decided to have the bio narrated by a Dracula to either fill space or make it more exciting than the bio on the jacket of Meyer’s own books. See, Margaret Funnell, the Princess Diana book could have been much more tasteless…it could have had an undead horror host narrator in it.

“If I’m to read that right, she’s a MacGuffin in a loincloth. Is this really the kind of nostalgia DC should be reaching for”: Racialicious has some concerns about how DC’s upcoming 2010 First Wave series will treat Rima the Jungle Girl, based on the little character sketch/proposal that writer Brian Azzarello had in the back of this week’s Batman/Doc Savage one-shot. Having just read Green Mansions for the first time this summer, it doesn’t sound a whole hell of a lot like the character in the book. Green Mansions isn’t exactly a terribly enlightened book when it comes to race in the first place, though. (Note: I do hope we get a Rima trade collection out of this First Wave business, though. Those Joe Kubert covers sure look great).

Next for Nancy: Drawn and Quarterly has a neat little preview of the next volume of Nancy from their John Stanley Library series.

“Will Kick-Ass be a 21st Century superhero?”: So asks The Guardian’s film blog. I’m going to say yes, unless they push the release date back about 91 years.

An important reminder from Don MacPherson: DC and Marvel aren’t the only superhero publishers with super-icky comics.

The other fantastic four: Check out PopMatters on Beatles comic books. Here’s my favorite Beatles appearance in a comic book recently, as the mentors attending Blue Beetle’s parent/teacher conference in Tiny Titans:

Is it that time of the month again already? Last week, Paul O’Brien and Marc-Oliver Frisch posted their monthly analysis of Marvel Comics and DC Comics sales figures, assembled from ICv2.com’s numbers, at Publisher Weekly’s The Beat.

And then I read the results. And had some thoughts while reading those results. And I wrote them down. And now I’m going to post them on the Internet. And then you can read them and we can all talk about these figures, and what they mean.

But not here, in public like this. Let’s meet after the jump and do it there, okay?

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League of Extraordinarily Unprofessional Librarians: Amy Wilson of the Lexington Herald-Leader provides more context into the story of a pair of public library employees losing their jobs for refusing to check out The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: The Black Dossier to a patron as per their employer’s policy. I feel even less sympathy for Sharon Cook then I did before, given that it seems not to have been a case of misunderstanding or disagreeing with the policy. Apparently she thought the book unsuitable for patrons, and thus checked it out herself and kept it checked out indefinitely in the hopes of preventing anyone else from ever reading it. Whatever you do, don’t read the comments section attached to the Herald-Leader story; it will only cost you brain cells. If you must read a comments section on the issue, check out the lively one attached to The Beat’s link to the article.

“Solve the case of the missing couch first. Nobody likes it when detectives case-hop mid issue”: Tucker Stone notes a weird art mistake in the otherwise pretty good Stumptown #1. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t even notice the disappearing furniture when I read the issue. I’d make a terrible detective.

That sounds reasonable: Peter Bagge’s latest strip for Reason is entitled “Will Everyone Please Stop Freaking Out Over Ayn Rand?!?” It’ s a timely piece, given the American Right’s recent re-embrace of Rand, and a few recent new books about her. (Via Flog!)

“One in 10 Adult Book Buyers Read Comic Books, Simba Study Reveals”: But does that mean that comic books are really popular, or that books are pretty unpopular?

I thought print was dead, why do I keep finding newspaper stories on the Internet?: I got to the third paragraph of this story— “Libraries promote love of reading with graphic novels” from New Jersey’s The Daily Journal—before I was consumed with rage. Here’s the paragraph:

Graphic novels and similar genres like manga, a popular Japanese style of graphic novel that often involves science fiction or fantasy themes, and animé, also heavily Japanese, share a method. They tell stories within the context of cartoon drawings.

I couldn’t bring myself to finish the story.

Tomorrow is the day we’ve all been waiting for ever since Marvel announced that their Punisher series published through their Max imprint would be retitled PunisherMax, all one word. Will they really go through with it? Will it look less stupid running along the top of the actual cover of an actual comic book than it does in writing in, say, a shipping list or solicitation or a blog post? We’ll know soon enough.

Me, I can’t think of anything but the above scene every time I hear “PunisherMax.” Anyway, the latest iteration of the series will be by Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon, so it’s probably not going to be anywhere near as bad a comic as its title might indicate.

What else is coming out this week? And will there be spaces between the words that make up their titles? Find out, after the jump!

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“I like to tell the history of Judaism through comics…When I was growing up, I never thought comics were connected to religion and culture”: That’s comics creator J.T. Waldman talking Judaism and comics in this profile in the religion section of the Pennsylvania Patriot News. The focus of the story is Waldman’s presentation on the subject with the clever title of “People of The Comic Book.” I wasn’t overly surprised to see the article spell Spider-Man’s name wrong (as “Spiderman”…come on, let’s get this in the AP Style Guide, already!). I was sort of intrigued when the article mentioned that “Waldman called Spiderman ‘a veiled story of Moses’” (they did mean Superman, with the infant in the rocket ship an analogy to the baby in the basket, right? Or are there parallels to Exodus I never noticed in the Spidey story? Is the radioactive spider analogous to the burning bush, and Uncle Ben is God and the Green Goblin Pharaoh…?). And I was pretty appalled when I saw that they got Waldman’s name wrong, calling him J.P. Waldman. It’s obviously too late to fix the print edition, but I don’t see any reason why the online version of an article has to have a pretty basic, embarrassing mistake like that up a few days after publication.

“I guess it’s truly time for me to forgive South Carolinians for firing on Fort Sumter. I hope, in 100 years or so, South Carolinians will forgive me for my own cheap shot”: Political cartoonist David Horsey talks at some length about the reaction to his cartoon mocking South Carolina.

“Early Buzz: Is Kick-Ass The Best Superhero Movie Ever Made?”: Yes, I’d definitely say that buzz qualifies as “early,” since the first trailer isn’t even due out until mid-month. I’m intensely curious about how they managed to make a whole Kick-Ass movie in the time it’s taken Marvel to publish just seven issues of the series. It’s not like artist John Romita Jr. is known for deadline blowing or drawing slow or anything, and yet Kick-Ass has been coming at about as regularly as Mark Millar’s Ultimates used to.

“Dropping a supernatural enemy into an environment that’s already so alien and strange is overkill, like setting a vampire movie on the moon”: Here’s the New York Times on Matt Phelan’s excellent The Storm in the Barn, which is covered as part of a round-up of various children’s books dealing with the Dust Bowl. Writer Jessica Bruder isn’t overly impressed, but then Bruder doesn’t think a vampire movie on the moon would be totally awesome, so I’m not sure whether I’d trust her opinion on anything else.

“Strip away the Hollywood glamour and shows like Comic Book I-Con are what the hobby are all about: Passionate fans and creators talking about the comics they love”: Joe Lawler of the Des Moines Register has a nice little write-up on Comic Book I-Con, which goes down today in Altoona, Iowa.

“What’s the most stupidly ambitious aspect of “XKCD Vol. 0,” the book based on the wildly popular yet still very underground webcomic”…?: Here’s an LA Times blog post profiling the plans for Randall Munroe’s XKCD hardcopy collection.

“These cartoons radicalized me, an impressionable young person, against the idea of conflict and the then-current Vietnam War”: That’s Craig Yoe in a feature story in The Oregonian, talking about the work collected in his new The Great Anti-War Cartoons from Fantagraphics. There are some real jaw-droppers used to illustrate the piece, so be sure to check it out. (A slideshow can also be seen here).

“Batman at 70″: Here’s a neat Toledo Free Press feature on Batman turning 70, and the way the city’s downtown library is marking the occasion.

Seattle vs. South Carolina cartoon battle: Seattle Post-Intelligencerpolitical cartoonist Dave Horsey drew a cartoon that was less-than-flattering in its depiction of South Carolina, and Palmetto Scoop cartoonist Mike Beckom responded with a cartoon making fun of Yankee unions. Alan Gardner will tell you all about it at The Daily Cartoonist.

So that someone could spend a day of his life hastily assembling an Archie story filtered through Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics. That someone was Adam Prosser, and you can read his whole story in all its shouty, punch, funny hat-wearing glory here. (Thanks to Johanna Draper Carlson, from whom I totally, shamelessly stole this link).

Earlier this week MTV’s Splash Page brought “exclusive” news that novelist S.E. Hinton will be joining the throngs of popular prose writers moving into the hot new medium of comics. Hinton will be working with Bluewater Productions, the company that published some comics based on Ray Harryhausen creations and concepts, but is probably best known for those weird “Female Force” biography comics that seem to generate plenty of mainstream media coverage every time an issue is announced.

Splash Page and Bluewater’s home page both have some covers and details, so head on over there for to take a look (My immediate reaction, you ask? Yuck). It sounds like the relationship will begin with Bluewater adapting some of Hinton’s pre-existing works, before writing “an entirely new title created specifically for Bluewater” in 2010.

I understand why comics publishers are so eager to accept the contributions of proven prose authors, what with their name recognition and their large audience of non-comics readers who would theoretically at least follow them into comic shops, but part of me still thinks there should be some kind of hazing ritual involved. Like Salman Rushdie will be allowed to write an original graphic novel, but first he has to write and draw his own minicomic to be published at a photocopier in a Kinkos, or Stephen King can develop a Vertigo ongoing, but only after a couple issues of Brave and the Bold.

I think I know the perfect title for Hinton’s hazing.

Wanna be a successful cartoonist and/or comics/prose hybrid literary sensation?: Then you should probably enroll at the University of Maryland and get a job doing cartoons for the school’s paper The Diamondback. It worked for Frank Cho, Aaron McGruder and Jeff Kinney.

Apparently, the New York Times list-makers don’t even crack the covers of the books they put on their lists: I quit paying attention to the NYT’s goofy comics bestsellers lists as soon as I got over making fun of their dumb names and dumber press announcement, but manga expert Deb Aoki hasn’t, and she notes another reason to shake one’s head sadly at the lists. Illustrated prose book Death Note: L Change the World apparently ranked #4 on the manga bestseller list, despite not even being manga, or comics of any kind.

“I used to feel as powerful as a locomotive, but I’m running out of steam”: Augusta Chronicle columnist Glynn Moore reflects on his own mortality in relation to dressing up in Superman t-shirts and towel capes with his grandson in this only mildly depressing piece.

Great, now I’m hungry: On Drawn and Quarterly’s blog, the unlikely source of inspiration for Seth’s Nancy Vol. 1 collection cover design stands revealed.

“I cannot wait until Williams III leaves in a couple months time…I wonder how many people are going to admit that if it weren’t for Williams’ III art, this would be just one or two steps above Outsiders“: In his latest post, guy-I-link-to-alot Tim O’Neil reviews the latest issue of ‘TEC, along with several other recent releases, and discusses how muscular Reed RIchards should look.

Cyborg’s name never strikes me as all that boring and prosaic until I hear it next to the name of another cyborg comic character, like Deathlok, who has one of the most metal names in the Marvel character catalog. Deathlok returns this week in Deathlok #1, the first part of a new, seven-issue Max series written by Charlie Huston and penciled by Lan Medina. Cyborg, on the other hand, seems to have the week off, which is probably for the best–he won’t be getting shown up by Marvel’s more bad-ass cyborg.

Who else will be waiting to see you at the comics shop tomorrow? Join me after the jump to find out!

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How Seth writes: Geoff Pevere interviews the George Sprott author about his writing process for The Star.

Your anniversary-inspired Asterix overview of the day: Ben East writes about “good old Asterix and his fulsome friend Obelix” in this column for The National.

Basketball guy married to famous-for-being-famous lady didn’t work too hard on his Batman costume: I still like it better than the ones Christian Bale and the other movie Batmen have worn though

“Millar to direct superhero movie”: I hope it’s better received than Frank Miller’s was…

The single scariest image the comics blogosphere came up with this Haloween weekend: Mike Sterling had it.

I had read all 44 pages of FVZA: Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency #1 (Radical Comics) before I began to understand why the comic book existed at all and why it felt like a very solid premise from which a story was being reverse engineered, rather than a story that needed to be told.

That realization didn’t come from the comic book itself sadly, but from an interview with writer David Hine, printed after this first third of the story ends—he was apparently brought in to turn the website fvza.org into a comic book. (This also explains the wonky credits. David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez are the only creators with their names on the cover; on the title page the former is credited as “writer” and the latter as “illustrator,” but there are also two people given a “conceived by” credit and two more people given a “painted by” credit).

The premise is an alternate history of the United States, in which both vampires and zombies are real, and have posed existential threats to the nation since at least the time of the Civil War. Eventually, a federal organization was formed to protect the country from these two supernatural menaces. At present, they’ve both been seemingly stamped out, and the agency is in decline, the way that perhaps the Department of Homeland Security would be if the threat of terrorism were somehow almost completely erased.

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“I adore what I do and don’t think of it as just a job. It is what I breathe, it is intrinsic to my being”: That’s Hana Hajjar, “Saudia Arabia’s lone female cartoonist,” talking about her profession in this nice feature on CNN.com. You can see a slideshow of Hajjar’s work there, and much more of it on her website.

“Crazy Dudes Wanted to Fly to Denmark to Murder Old Man Over Cartoon, of All Things”: Gawker had probably the best headline of all the coverage of the plot by two Chicago men to kill the Danish Muhammad cartoonist.

“Not your average wiggly things”: Check out this National Post feature on Drawn and Quarterly’s recent collection of R.O. Blechman’s work, Talking Lines. I plan on writing a full review at some point in the near future, but in the mean time I will say it’s an excellent book, and one I hope you’ll take the time to look at soon.

“Costume possibilities are endless with a simple cape”: Need a last-minute Halloween costume? This article from The Orlando Sentinel makes a good case for starting with a cape and making a simple superhero costume from there. If it was good enough for Superman…

“That’s… different”: Savage Critic Brian Hibbs did a good job of expressing why “Dark Reign” has been less than satisfying for me, in large part because it seems like a branding exercise rather than a story, a new status quo in which nothing ever actually happens—dark or light—as the whole Marvel line simply waits around for the next Secret Invasion-sized event. He did so while expressing some admiration for Dark Reign—The List: Punisher #1, in which something pretty big and pretty dark does happen. Also on Savage Critics, Sean T. Collins defends The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Let the record show: I loved that series (I could have done without all the newscaster segments, but otherwise, I thought it was pretty damn great).

Changes in store for The Comics Journal: The venerable comics magazine’s next issue, November’s #300, will be its last on the current schedule and in the current format. In the future, the hard copy of TCJ will come in “expanded semi-annual editions, each customized to fit its content.” Meanwhile, TCJ.com is going to massively beef up its content. You can read the company’s official press release on the changes here.

How often do Ivan Reis and Johnny Ryan draw the same exact thing in the same exact week?: This week’s Blecky Yuckerella strip on Fantagraphics’ Flog! Blog has Blecky doing to her pal Wedgie just what the Silver Age Atom did to the Golden Age Atom in the pages of Blackest Night #4. Weird.

Also, does it even mean anything if the artist in question has only drawn like five different stories in that career?: Heidi MacDonald finds the phrase “best work of his career” kind of annoying when its used to hype up an upcoming project.

Fantastic: Check out Johnathan of Living Between Wednesday’s Halloween costume. Here’s a hint—It’s Designed Only for Killing…

Fantagraphics recently announced that they’ve struck a deal for seven (7) new books with writer/editor Greg Sadowski, who was responsible for Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 and a couple of B. Krigstein-related works for the publisher.

The books will be published one a season, so seven of ‘em is really planning ahead, and should carry them through to fall of 2012 or so (I don’t even have my next seven blog posts planned yet).

Here’s what they have planned at the moment…

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