There’s something for everyone (comedy tonight!) on the superhero side of the July DC solicitations. Wondering when DC will get around to action figures of G’Nort or ‘80s-Headband Black Canary? Wonder no more! Itching to field-test your own pair of Bat-cuffs? They’re on the way, old chum! Been expecting Martian Manhunter and/or Ryan Choi to take a long walk off a short pier?

Well…

Let’s just get down to business, okay?

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Thank goodness for Nightwing, the superhero blogger’s friend. Sometimes I’m stuck for a topic and I’ll find myself returning to the Dick Grayson well. Sometimes a Nightwing-related topic even presents itself.

The latter is the case today, with the first issue of Titans (as distinguished from “The” Titans, the previous Old New Teen Titans revival from 1999) and the conclusion of “Wrath Child,” a Batman Confidential arc guest-starring a younger Nightwing. It’s dueling Nightwings — the now vs. the wow! Join me, won’t you?

SPOILERS FOLLOW, of course.

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“I’m for everyone.”

So says Superman in this week’s Action Comics #863, the conclusion of “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes.” The story involves a battle over Superman’s public image, and sets up a miniseries sure to be filled with alternate versions of characters (including one still in litigation) and metacommentary on the same. Thus, Action #863 was an issue which I found impossible to read without thinking of last week’s ruling. (more…)

Lately, talk in the blogosphere has turned to the emphasis of plot over aesthetics in superhero books. Although plot does get a lot of play, given the realities of corporate superhero serials’ production, that doesn’t mean it can’t be managed more productively.

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Well, it’s official: the path is now clear for me to stop collecting superhero comics. I’m sure that, after seeing the combined spectacle of the Super Young Team and Most Excellent Super-Bat, nothing else will quite measure up.

Oh, who am I kidding? I still want to see Grant Morrison and/or Mark Waid make good on their awesome plans for Super-Chief….

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Last week, you were probably ranting and/or raving about the photos of the Watchmen cast in costume. Well, I was too — and, lucky me, I’d just unpacked my copy of the Watchmen Portfolio and its six super-size reproductions of DC’s 1986 house ads. Unlike the relatively plain photos, these ads actually conveyed a lot of information about the characters and their world. A couple even kinda-sorta contained spoilers, if you knew where to look.

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Last week, Mike San Giacomo called for a resolution to the various Marvel Events which have each led into another these past few years. I’ve done much the same thing a few times now with regard to DC, and — call me naïve, call me crazy — I do kinda think that Final Crisis will live up to the first part of its name.

How, then, will DC maintain its superhero-fanbase’s regular Wednesday habit without a Crisis of some kind? While Trinity might keep customers coming into shops, it also means a step back in terms of DC’s ambitions.

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So, news from WonderCon is that there will be no Batwoman series, but Batwoman will be “integral” to DC in 2008.

Well, okay then. We’ll see how that pans out.

I do like the idea of Batwoman. Originally, Kathy Kane was a Batman fan who happened to be a rich circus star, and who therefore (according to 1950s superhero-comics logic) had the means and the ability to fight crime. Introduced in 1956 to help show that Batman = Not Gay, she soon acquired a sidekick, Bat-Girl, so that Robin’s hetero hormones could be stoked as well.

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Every month when I pore over the new DC solicitations, I feel obliged to look at them as some kind of cohesive whole, like a hint from one book will provide a clue into another. When there are big crossovers afoot, that urge is especially strong. Mostly, though, I’m able to remind myself that there’s not necessarily a master plan, and nobody’s writing these solicitations in a secret code that only the faithful understand.

That said, I wonder if there aren’t some clues to Final Crisis in this, the first month of solicitations for what may be the last Line-Wide Event for a while….

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Great thanks to Tim O’Shea for last week’s wonderful Archie Goodwin essay. I know that many of you will be let down by my return, because I can’t help but talk about something comparatively more trivial. Still, I’m writing this in a maze of giant cardboard boxes, I haven’t gotten the Vast Comics Library reorganized, and most of my collected editions are still packed away.

We’ll just have to make do with what’s at hand … which, let’s see, looks like the last two issues of Nightwing.

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Tom Bondurant and his wife are currently relocating to Memphis, so filling in for Tom this week is former Great Curve contributor, Tim O’Shea, who can regularly be found at his own blog, TalkingwithTim.com.

I fully admit that I am jumping the gun with this column topic, but when I have a high-traffic platform like this blog, I might as well make the most of it. Next month, March 1, will mark 10 years since Archie Goodwin died. I really hope no one reading this is asking: “Who is Archie Goodwin?”

DC’s Paul Levitz may have said it best in the official DC press release (thanks 1998 Michael Doran!) noting Goodwin’s passing:

“If the ultimate test of an editor is the quality of work produced under his auspices, Archie goes unchallenged as the ultimate editor. In almost four decades behind an editor’s desk, the best talent in comics consistently did their best work for him, and asked for the opportunity to do more. And yeoman talent often rose to heights they would not equal in their careers.”

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One way or another, Keith Giffen was going to influence this post.

I had originally planned to look at Mr. Giffen’s recent thoughts on continuity in the context of two fan-shattering events: Sunday’s flashback episode of “The Simpsons,” and the Star Trek trailer implying that the Enterprise was (horror!) built on Earth. The more I got into those topics, though, the more I felt mired in a futile debate. It was looking like mutually assured destruction, and while it might have garnered a lot of comments, in the end I doubt it would have been that productive.

Thankfully, though, yesterday brought the official announcement of Mr. Giffen’s new Ambush Bug miniseries, reuniting him with scripter Robert Loren Fleming in order to lead the Bug through DC’s last few big events. I eagerly switched topics, from the traps of continuity to the giddy anarchy of parody. If I’m going to be unproductive, I might as well have fun.

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(By the way, I’m not really comparing Countdown to something designed deliberately to be the worst musical ever produced. I’m just running out of time to make cheap jokes at its expense.)

Not a lot of surprises in the April DC solicits. Finally, the new Titans series debuts. Finally, Countdown reaches its last issue, along with most of its tie-ins. Still, that’s not to say there’s nothing intriguing here. Let’s get started, shall we?

YOU CAN CHANGE THE NAME OF A ROSE, BUT YOU CAN’T DO NOTHIN’ ABOUT THE SMELL

With a DC/WildStorm miniseries joining the DC/Tangent miniseries, that’s two look-how-different crossover stories running contemporaneously. Obviously I’m a big fan of the Multiverse concept, but this bugs me for a couple of reasons. First, we’ve just spent a year dealing with eleventeen versions of Batman, and I could use a break. Second, these kinds of stories run the risk of diminishing the crossed-into universe.

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For a number of reasons, I really didn’t want to do a “Brand New Day” post.

First, this is nominally a DC-oriented column. Second, I haven’t read Amazing Spider-Man since 1989, and don’t plan to anytime soon. Third, the comics blogosphere seems to have burned out on “BND.” Fourth, I did kinda talk about it, albeit so subtly you might not have noticed, last week.

So this is not really an essay on “Brand New Day.” It gets back to DC eventually. You’ll see.

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Lately I’ve been struggling with the notion that I am too nostalgic. Of course, I remember when I was just nostalgic enough. Good times, good times….

Sorry. Moving on.

I did like the first issue of Amy Wolfram and Karl Kerschl’s Teen Titans Year One. It was mostly a Batman/Robin story which, intentionally or not, did a clever riff on both the G-ddamn Batman and the classic Titans-team origin.* Naturally, I appreciated the nods to Titans history (wow, the Flips!), but on a more basic level I just liked seeing the original Dynamic Duo in action — with a yellow-oval Batman, yay! I’m similarly looking forward to the other mentor/protege relationships. (more…)

[Alternate title: "Don't Wanna End Up A Cartoon In A Cartoon Graveyard.]

Ah, January! It’s dark and cold, and you really don’t want to go back to work/school/whatever, now do you? One of my law-school professors used to remind us that January could be gotten through with the help of one word: “April.”

So sit back, think of April, and sample my thoughts on some (but hardly all) of this year’s DC-superhero-related offerings. To steal a line from Tuesday Morning Quarterback, All Predictions Wrong Or Your Money Back.

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You-all are very lucky I couldn’t get a solicit-flavored “Visit From St. Nicholas” poem to work. I kept coming back to this closing couplet:

And I heard him exclaim, ere he took to the skies,

“Merry Christmas to all, until someone else dies!”

WAY too bitter. So, having dodged that particular bullet … uh, so to speak … let’s jump ahead to March, and then I’ll wrap up with some more appropriate seasonal observations.

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Last week I mentioned cooking up a sort of magnum-opus of DC and unleashing it upon the comics blogosphere.  This is not that post, although it’s getting closer.

I have the feeling, and maybe you do too, that between the Countdown Special and the hardcover collection, all of this OMAC/Brother Eye “reinvention” which started back in March ‘05 is finally building to the (re)introduction of a more traditional, Kirbyesque setup for those characters.

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I’m still on a Multiversal kick, but I’ll try to be entertaining regardless.

One of the things I liked best about the Silver Age Multiverse was the relationship between the Huntress of Earth-2 (daughter of the Earth-2 Batman and Catwoman) and her “Uncle Bruce” on Earth-1. It gave her a chance to catch at least a glimpse of what her father was like in his prime, before age and heartbreak took their toll. Similarly, it showed the Earth-1 Batman another possible legacy, perhaps one he hadn’t considered — and perhaps one which could someday allow him to retire in peace, knowing that his crusade would be in good hands.

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Early in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Harbinger asks the Monitor why they didn’t just recruit all the powerhouses — all the Supermen, Wonder Women, etc.  Back then I kinda wondered that myself. 

The Monitor responded with non-answers (“heroes and villains must work together,” “the menace we deal with is one of emotion”) — basically, nice ways of saying “quiet, you!” After all, it wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that, if the old DC Multiverse contained (theoretically) an infinite number of parallel Kryptons, and if, say, just a hundred of those Kryptons produced a Superman like the Earth-1 and Earth-2 editions we’d come to know, Crisis might have been merely a 48-page blip on DC’s 1985 radar. No need to fill 12 issues with Blue Beetles, Dawnstars, or Solovars.  It’s a little odd, then, to see the villain Monarch holding tryouts for an army of Multiversal Supermen, Wonder Women, etc., just as 15-year-old Tom would have done. 

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