Jim Lee – Stepping Down From Justice League Already?

It’s not even a year yet, but Bleeding Cool is running an article that reports DC is “making a number of approaches to what could only be described as the A-List of modern comics to sign up for a twelve issue run on Justice League, to replace Jim Lee.” While Geoff Johns will remain on the book as the writer, apparently DC is looking to lock down art talent for the next few years – including as yet unnamed individuals who are currently working for Marvel. Oooo! The plot thickens!

Just who could or would step into Jim Lee’s shoes? Could it be frequent Johns’s collaborator, Ivan Reis? Would DC steal Marc Silvestri back from whatever projects he’s engaged in, assuming he’s done icing his shoulder after penciling those couple Incredible Hulk books last fall and that variant cover of The Walking Dead #100 for Robert Kirkman over at Image? Would DC lure Greg Land away from Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men to turn his pornbox light on for Wonder Woman?

New Dark Knight Rises Promo Unveiled During MTV Movie Awards

Something wonderful happened at the MTV Movie Awards last night – and it wasn’t just that Jennifer Anniston was named “Best Dirtbag“, an honor that’s been overdue to her for years now. No, no. A new promo trailer for The Dark Knight Rises aired. This time with some new footage of Christian Bale in a humorous exchange with Morgan Freeman, more Selina Kyle/Catwoman, and Bane vs. Batman throwdown goodness. Check out the awesomeness!

The Dark Knight Rises hits US theaters on July 20th, 2012.

Body Dysmorphia: The Incredible Hulk #8 Review

In most of the ways that matter, The Incredible Hulk #8 is not a bad comic book at all. It’s a decent opening to a story told from Hulk’s point of view, where Banner makes moves neither Hulk nor we are privy to, with a reasonably effective guest spot by The Punisher, an interesting, if short-lived new villain, and fun violence inflicted in new and exciting ways. There’s a lot here that works.

However, the stuff that does work is somewhat hamstrung by a couple of significant weaknesses, including a general plot that is taken from the annals of Breaking Bad, if Giancarlo Esposito’s mother was actually an Alsatian Wolf Hound, and, well, the artist. In short: Steve Dillon is an excellent artist. An excellent artist who should be tazed in the groin before he even thinks of drawing The Hulk ever again.

All New, All Incomprehensible: The Ravagers #1 Review

Last September, DC Comics rebooted their entire universe, with the stated purpose of making each and every one of their books accessible to readers who had never read any of their books before. It is now June, and DC Comics has released The Ravagers #1, and apparently their commitment to making books accessible to readers unfamiliar with existing continuity lasted almost exactly ten months.

The Ravagers is a superteam introduced in the latest few issues of Teen Titans, which I haven’t been following as closely as I perhaps should be because it started as a decompressed and slow paced riff on The X-Men and became, well, a decompressed and slow paced riff on The X-Men. Well, apparently somewhere around Teen Titans ninth issue, they introduced The Ravagers, victims of the fiendish plot of shadow organization N.O.W.H.E.R.E. to activate the metagenes of unsuspecting teenagers and to force innocent comics writers to type longassed acronyms.

Putting The Band Back Together: Powers #10 Review

Brian Michael Bendis’s and Michael Avon Oeming’s Powers has been a dicey read for me for a long time now. A comic that started as a unique take on the superhero book, where some regular cops worked regular cases that just happened to involve superhumans and included some of the coolest dialogue you could find in a comic book, it eventually… evolved. Or devolved. Into a book where the regular cops got powers and secret identities, and the compelling partners at the core of the book split up, all while Bendis and Oeming started putting out, say, an issue a year, whether we needed one or not.

If the original Powers arc, Who Killed Retro Girl?, was the comics equivalent of Twin Peaks season one, the more recent arcs have been more like Laverne & Shirley after they went to Hollywood… assuming Garry Marshal had had the brainwave to replace Shirley with The Great Gazoo. Which is somewhat of an unkind comparison, because I always kept Powers on my pull list, because even while the characters shuffled and I lost track of the plot between issues, it still offered some of the best dialogue in comics, and there was always something interesting going on, even if some issues felt less like seeing Muhammed Ali in his prime in 1979 than it did watching Muhammed Ali trying to eat prime rib in 2009.

You get all that? Good. Now forget it all. Because Powers #10 is flat-out the best issue of Powers since the early, early Image Comics days. It has it all: the crackling dialogue, Walker and Pilgrim back together doing interrogations in the box, and real, human stakes behind the superpowers. It is awesome, and one of the best single issues of not just Powers, but of any comic book I’ve read in weeks.