The Other Guy: Justice League / Lobo #23.2 Review

Editor’s Note: Mess with th’ Main Man any you buy yourself oceans of spoilers!

Well, that wasn’t as bad as the leaked design art made it look. Then again, it couldn’t possibly have been.

There was a lot of Internet nerd rage over Kenneth Rocafort’s new design of Lobo, and a lot of that rage included the terms, “Twilight,” “metrosexual,” and “Bieber only more effeminate and probably white due to liberal application of semen.” And I’m guessing that that was based on the fact that the dude is named “Lobo.” The world is full of wuss-looking swordsmen who fluidly chop apart all comers before moving on to woo the maidens fair. After all, Orlando Bloom doesn’t get more ‘tang than an astronaut because he is a credible-looking medieval warrior. If it takes you more than five seconds to realize that Genghis Khan could kill Orlando Bloom just by thinking about it really hard (if Khan wasn’t busy thinking about whether to make Bloom his woman), then you don’t need fantasy literature because you clearly are living in one.

The problem has been that name. If you’re gonna call that mincing pretty boy Lobo, you’re gonna piss off anyone who is a fan of The Main Man, even though writer Marguerite Bennett has tried to make it clear that this character is a completely different guy than the Lobo that we all know and love, and that that design was not a redesign of the traditional Lobo. But that is an easy thing to forget or to put aside when all you have is a drawing, labelled “Lobo”, of a dude who looks like he’s a sword away from being a regular at Tower of Power night at the Manhole Club.

Well, the story is now here, in Justice League #23.2, and having the whole package in front of you makes it clear that this dude is not Lobo. He’s got the same name, and he is gunning for Lobo, but it’s a different guy. And that went a long way toward taking some of the sting out of my initial reaction to that concept art.

What took a lot of the rest of that reaction out was the fact that Rocafort didn’t draw this issue. Which means that the “new” Lobo looks a lot less like a clown and leather fetishist’s fantasy about who’s on the other side of the glory hole.

And all things being equal, it’s actually not all that bad.

Accuracy By Volume: A New Star Wars Movie Every Year, or: 48 Hours In Space

We all know that Star Wars Episode VII (a film as yet to be subtitled, but allow me to pitch one of our old podcast titles: The Fist of Justice) will be coming out in 2015 – a summer that will be so geek supersaturated, between Star Wars, Batman Vs. Superman and Ant Man that I should be allowed to retroactively wedgie the jocks who knocked the The Dark Knight Returns trade paperback out of my hands back in high school.

We also all know that Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars property, not only intends to make more big trilogies, but that they intend to make Star Wars movies that do not fall within the scope of another epic trilogy. But exactly what kind of ancillary movies they intend to make hasn’t really been totally clear. Would they be cartoons for kids? Political dramas? Porn?

Well, according to Disney’s Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo, who spoke about Star Wars at an investor’s conference yesterday (Rumors that the second order of business was to ratify Disney’s new corporate mission statement of “Kneel before Zod!” remain unconfirmed), said that those non-trilogy flicks will be prequel stories. Which has historically been a good decision when it comes to Star Wars movies.

And unconfirmed rumor is, that the first prequel will be Han Solo’s origin story.

Oh, shit.

Anarchy In Lovecraft: Locke & Key: Alpha #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Cthulhu Fthagn! Ph’nglui spoilers Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Basically, I see your crazy and raise. It’s the only way to live.

– Tyler Locke

And with that line, if nothing else, Locke & Key: Alpha #1 has finally settled the question as to what I want engraved on my tombstone.

I opened with that line because I’m finding it hard to review the actual comic book. First of all, this thing is a monster – 32 pages, not counting the “special features” toward the end of the issue – with battles and conflicts happening in about four different places with interchanging teams of characters fighting different threats at varying times.

Second, it’s a hard single issue to summarize. We jump back and forth between the characters, each of which is in a different form of mortal danger at least once, and many of them don’t make it through the issue. The nature of the threats to the characters changes from demons to torture to taunting to thrown rocks, so there’s no simple throughline to follow to keep track of everything so it can be described concisely for people who might be looking for reviews to decide if they want to try the book or not.

Further, this just doesn’t scan like your average superhero comic book. Throughout the issue, we see villain Dodge using a variety of escalating levels of magic to try to enforce his will. But instead of your normal comic, where the heroes meet that power with more power, they generally resist by simple human means of courage and love and persistence, leading to almost the opposite of a standard comic book climax, where the action grows smaller and simpler and more intimate toward the conclusion.

And finally, this issue doesn’t end like your normal superhero comic. Because for all the violence and power displayed, this issue concludes with a simple grapple between the villain and an ancillary character. And unlike in your standard comic, writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez give us a conclusion that makes a hard distinction between the bad guys losing and the good guys actually winning.

So I’ve struggled to decide how to write about this issue. So we’ll go with this to start: if you have been following Locke & Key, this is a spectacular ending (yeah, there’s one more issue, but based on this one, it looks like it’s gonna be a simple denouement) that pays off on just about tease and promise that has been made to the reader leading up to this moment. And if you have not been reading Locke & Key? Well, start with the trades and give this one a wide berth until you’re up to speed.

Every New Beginning…

There is always a surprise when I walk into my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me why I am constantly surprised that it isn’t Naked Day.

Some weeks my stack of pulls is small, yet full of awesome stuff. Other weeks, they hand me a six-inch stack of books that are nothing but middle issues of decompressed stories that mean a week of marking time until something cool happens. And on an infinite timeline, they will hand me only a wordy mess with incomprehensible art, and on that day you will read a 1,500-word review of something called Order of Restraint and its backup feature Remain 300 Feet Away.

This week, the take is interesting, in that it is filled with bittersweet endings. Most importantly to me is the penultimate issue of Locke & Key, but there is also the final issue Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9, as well as Matt Fraction’s final issue of Fantastic Four. And, lest we forget, this is also DC’s Villain’s Month, which means that this is the month where we see Lobo lose his testicles.

But if there are new comics, that means it is Wednesday. And while I have prided myself, for the past few weeks, on getting an early review up on Wednesday, I find that there is so much going on in Locke & Key: Alpha #1 that there isn’t a hope in hell of my getting it finished before tomorrow (short answer: it is awesome). And the combination of those two facts means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And actually, there are a ton of good new books this week. As week two of Villain’s Month, we have books featuring General Zod, Reverse Flash, Riddler, and several others villains who will probably not be emasculated. There is also a new Captain America, a couple of new crossover chapters of Marvel’s Infinity event, a new Deadpool, and a bunch of other cool stuff! *

But you know the drill: before we can review them, we need time to read them. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

* Stuff including a new trade paperback collection of Jim Steranko’s entire run on Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Some of these stories I haven’t read since they were reprinted in the 70s, and I can’t wait to dive back into them. Yeah, it’s 35 clams, but these are legendary stories with groundbreaking art. Consider picking it up on your trip to your local comic store, and give ’em a big, “Happy Naked Day!” from me!  **

** Please don’t give them my real name.

The (Bittersweet) End Of X-Factor #262 – Review

(Ed. Note – This review will be rife with spoilers starting with the very next line. Really. There’s no going back now, ok? Still here? All right then. You were warned.)

X-Factor Investigations is closed.

The long running title from writer Peter David closed up shop with issue #262, the end of a six part series of stand alone stories wrapping up the storylines of each of the main players. The finale focuses on the fate of group leader, Jamie Madrox, and his sometime wife, Layla Miller, “the girl who knows stuff”. In the aftermath of the “Hell On Earth” story, they’ve taken refuge on Jamie’s childhood home, a now abandoned farm. Jamie has been transformed into a demon by another demon named Mephisto with seemingly no way to be changed back. Layla, a mutant who’s power is “knowing stuff”, has been blindsided by the discovery that she is pregnant. Truly, the end times are upon us.

So, is it happily ever after for our crew?

This Is It, The Apocalypse: Johns Leaving Aquaman, Manapul and Buccellato Leaving Flash

It has not been a good week for DC Comics, publicity wise. In the last week, the creators of Batwoman announced that they were leaving the title early, mostly due to editorial interference on a bunch of story points, including forbidding the planned plotline of Batwoman getting married to another woman. And while that particular story point was not, by the accounts of both the creators and DC Editorial, the primary cause for the split, but it’s what fired the imagination of half of the comics Internet (if by “imagination,” you mean “screeching hate frenzy”)… particularly once Dan DiDio, at this weekend’s Baltimore Comic Con, defended that particular decision by announcing that no DC superheroes are married. Even though a bunch of them, you know, are.

But Baltimore is over now, and the initial hubbub is starting to die down, so DC can get back to focusing on the comics, particularly the few that are left from the New 52 relaunch that still have consistent and successful creative teams. Like Geoff Johns on Aquaman. Right?

Single And Swinging (In The Wind): DC Editorial, Marriage And Batwoman

Jesus, of all the weeks to skip a comic convention…

Last week, J. H. Williams III announced that he and co-creator W. Haden Blackman were leaving Batwoman as of issue #26 due to last minute editorial interference. Part of that interference was that DC Editorial reportedly pulled the plug on Williams’s and Blackman’s long-standing plans to have Kate Kane marry Maggie Sawyer. And we didn’t report on it at the time because, well, I figured the implied homophobia angle that some outlets were latching onto was a non-starter – you can say what you want about DC Editorial (God knows that we do), but nobody’s dumb enough to make that issue the hill they want to die on in the age of the Internet. And both Williams and DC Comics have confirmed that Batwoman’s sexual orientation wasn’t an issue here.

So absent that, this was, at the time, just another story about creators quitting a DC book over editorial interference at the last minute, and that is a story that we have told before, recently and repeatedly. So unless something or someone changes in the upper echelons of DC Editorial, it’s a story that we’ll probably hear again. So was it news? Undoubtedly. Was it news compelling enough to put down my bourbon? Not at the time, it wasn’t. It would’ve taken pictures of Dan DiDio donkey-punching k. d. lang to get my mitts off of that sweet, sweet dose of Vitamin J. D.

Anyway, that was Thursday. The Baltimore Comic Con started yesterday – a convention we considered attending, but then we watched The Wire on HBO GO – and DC Comics held a panel where DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio reaffirmed that the issue with Batwoman wasn’t the fact that she was going to enter into a gay marriage, but that she was going to enter into any marriage at all. DiDio, in fact, said that real heroes would never get married, as their first duty would always be the superhero stuff, so they don’t have time be married. And, to ward off some of the most obvious questions, DiDio went on to say that Aquaman and Mera – you know, the King and Queen of Atlantis – are not married.

Wait, what?

Red-Headed Stepchild: The Star Wars #1 Review

Reading Dark Horse Comics’ The Star Wars, the adaptation of George Lucas’s first draft of the Star Wars screenplay from back in 1974, is, if nothing else, a strange experience.

And it is strange on a couple of levels; first, there’s the simple cognitive dissonance that occurs seeing an old dude with a white beard named Luke Skywalker, a dude with a greasy Guy Gardner haircut named Darth Vader, and small two-man fighter ships called Star Destroyers. Second, it is strange because this comic is coming out about 18 years into the Internet age, and any movie fan worth a damn has already long ago downloaded one of the early drafts of the Star Wars script from Drew’s Script-O-Rama (at one time or another, the first four drafts were out there for the taking), and already knows at least some of what’s coming in this comic.

And third, having glanced at those early drafts, we know that what is coming really isn’t all that great, at least compared to the real Star Wars. After all, this is a story originally written by George Lucas, who based on the prequels, clearly caught lightning in a bottle with that final revision of the shooting draft for Star Wars, and if this was a just universe, he then would have immediately had the language center of his brain scraped away in a lobotomy-like procedure.

And you will see a lot of elements of the prequels in this comic book, with some of Lucas’s worst instincts in Star Wars storytelling on display… including a little blond moppet shouting, “Yippee!”

But on the positive side, unlike in the prequels, you will also see that little blond moppet die like a pig in a chute.

Zombiebusters: The Mocking Dead #1 Review

Mahatma Gandhi once said about fighting The Man: ” First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” And that’s a fine addage to remember when you’re being hosed down with pepper spray by some armored riot cop due to your belief that everyone should eat tofurkey or something, but it doesn’t really apply to big genre trends. In fact, the opposite is true: first some nifty geek thing takes the world by storm (hi, Twilight!). Then people start actively complaining that they’re sick of hearing about that trend. Then come the parodies, and finally the thing goes back underground, never to be mentioned again except on obscure fan and slashfic sites.

And I can hear what you’re saying: “Rob,” you’re saying, “How dare you sully the good name of Mahatma Gandhi by mentioning it on this Web site? You’re not fit to carry this great man’s diaper!” Well, I’ll concede that you have a point, or at least I will if it gets me out of carrying a giant diaper, but I do have a point. And that point is that zombies have been front and center of the geek consciousness arguably since Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later was released in 2002, penetrating into movies, comic books and television like few recent monsters that don’t sparkle. And for the past couple of years, more and more people have been grumbling that they’re sick of zombie stories – not me; I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of seeing people being eaten while society crumbles around them, but a lot of people.

And now come the parodies, specifically, this week’s The Mocking Dead, by writer of a bunch of the Marvel Zombies miniseries Fred Van Lente and artist Max Dunbar, which not only pokes fun at the public’s zombie apocalypse fascination, but at the people who are fascinated by zombies. And if this is, in fact, a sign that zombies are that far along on the Reverse-Gandhi Geek Continuum (Trademark me! I own that phrase, and al the subsidiary rights!), well, Robert Kirkman better open a savings account and hose off his diaper bucket.

Iron Man Spoof Reimagines Tony Stark As A Kid From Southie

Inspired by the casting of Ben Affleck as Batman in the upcoming Superman vs. Batman, Dave Ebert puts on his best Mark Wahlberg impression for this Iron Man spoof. Importantly, it asks the question we all wonder about: “Is it better to be feared or respected? Why can’t I be both? …Larry Bird is both. I’m fucking Iron Man.”

And, as someone who recently installed a widget on my phone specifically to give me updates on Sox games, I can’t fault him for his use of Jarvis at 1:29 in.

Via Topless Robot.