Quit Harshin' on the Comic Relief (and More!)

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Just a quick one today, partially because I was slack on the reviews this week and so am appending them to this post and partially because I think that I'm going to save some of the things that I was thinking about this week for a future theme week (that's right, we got plenty of those suckers in the works. Just wait and see).

What I was thinking about was the poor neglected state of the comic relief character in comics. Derided (Bouncing Boy), abused (Blue Beetle), written out of continuity (Bat-Mite) or given a dose of grim 'n gritty (poor ol' Speedball), the comic relief character is not doing so well in current comics. This is a shame, I say, because done right a comic relief character can serve to take the starch out of even the most determinedly serious crusader for justice, something that some heroes (*cough*batman*cough*) sorely need from time to time.

And so I give you one of the very best comic relief characters ever, Mr. Johnny Thunder, a guy who has had virtually all of the above happen to him (I don't know about you but I reckon that Alzheimer's iss about as grim and  gritty as it gets). Back in the day, though, he was a force to be reckoned with, a bowtie-wearing sap who was too stupid to remember that he was virtually omnipotent with the help of his mystic pink thunderbolt. A guy whose idea of a good disguise a cap and gown, red hair and a black moustache, because the point of a disguise is for them not to recognize you, right? Johnny Thunder filled the role of the stupid but well-meaning doofus better than virtually anyone since, and for that I salute him.

But if you need any more proof that Johnny Thunder was comic gold, just check out his finest moment, from All-Star ComicsI No. 23, the first appearance of the Psycho-Pirate:

Eeee! Keep on buffoonin', Johnny Thunder.

And now:

John Buys Comics and Sends Geoff Johns Some Mixed Messages

Atomic Robo: Shadow From Beyond Time No. 3 (of 5)

Man, every time this comic comes out I’m just going to gush all over the place. I know that I have a lot of love for a lot of comics but I think that if I were able to compel everyone who reads this to pick up just one book then it would be this one. And this issue is self-contained enough to read by itself! Buy it… buuuuuuuy iiiiiiit…

And just in case my amazing powers of suggestion/persuasion aren’t enough, I’ll get you up to speed: Atomic Robo, brainchild of Dr. Nikola Tesla, is scrapping with a Lovecraftian horror that transcends time. So Lovecraftian, in fact, that it spent the first two issues possessing the head of HP Lovecraft himself, which is something that I have yet to see Cthulhu do. Having defeated the creature in 1926, Robo and some of his Fightin’ Scientists now have to fight a smarter iteration of the thing in 1957. Trust me, it’s delicious: terrific dialogue, crazy monsters, beautiful art, cheap 1950s gas… The Clevinger/Wegener/Pattison/Powell team are a comics-making juggernaut.

Buuuuy iiiiiit…

Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps No. 2 (of 3)

This is the comic that I specifically requested from DC and then completely missed when the first issue came out last week. I’m so good at this. Well, since I won’t be seeing issue numba 1 for a week or so yet I’ll just ignore its existence long enough to talk about this’un.

Yep, it’s a good time, just as I’d figured. It’s always fun to check out the backgrounds of some of the crazy aliens that are always flying around in the background of any scene of Lantern-on-Lantern violence. This issue we’ve got Red Lantern Bleez, the skeleton-wings lady (question: Red Lanterns are basically mindless rage-bags, so who creates those nifty custom costumes?), Orange Lantern Blume, the keen giant head that Larfleeze is all the time siccing on folks and… Carol Ferris.

Booooooooooooooooo…

Bad Geoff Johns! Carol Ferris has been a Star Sapphire for about 700 years already and this story contains nothing new or the least bit fun. I’m interested in this comic for crazy tales of crazy aliens, like I said above, not a pre-established character talking to a ring for eight pages. Seriously, this could have been edited down to about two pages (or possibly three panels: “Carol Ferris, joint the Star Sapphires!” “No!” “But if you don’t, Hal Jordan gonna die!” “Okay then!”) and stuck in any issue of Green Lantern or Green Lantern Corps from the last year. Or serialized over eight issues - it’s not like Carol is doing anything else in the DCU. Stop advancing your plot in my stand-alone! Whine! Complain!

Other than that, good comic.

Gotham City Sirens No. 2

SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT: Well, there’s more T&A in this issue, fer sure, if I’m counting that against it. Which I think I am, because my cynical side claims that the T and the A are two of the major reasons that this comic is being produced. But there’s a lot of Harley Quinn, and I even liked her in Countdown. Does that balance? Even if it’s mostly her T and her A? Guh.

Anyway, here I am getting caught up on ideological issues when I should just settle this on the concrete evidence of the paper artifact in my hands. Well, how is it, Johnathan? Enh. It looks nice but the plot is pretty unenthralling, to say the least. I liked Catwoman’s lie about Batman’s identity and I like the Grey Hoodie Gang as minor antagonists but the main bad guy is Hush (minus 50 points) who is masquerading as Bruce Wayne (minus 7 million points for needlessly complicating things in the Bat-family books just as they seem to be running smoothly) and if there’s any one villain that should have been killed off by now, it’s Hush. Black Lanterns? Anybody?

Hey, maybe it’ll get good someday but I’m not willing to stick things out. So yeah, I’m saving four bucks next month.

JUDGEMENT PASSED.

Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds No 5 (of 5! Woo!)

Heee! Final Crisis is complete! In the most awesome way possible!

Man, forget drawing every Legionnaire over the course of the series, I think that Perez might’ve done it in this issue alone. This is definitely a fantastic effort by everyone involved, and Johns has managed to clear up all of the lingering loose ends regarding the Time Trapper, Superboy Prime, Superboy Regular, the Legion and its place in the various multiverses…

And speaking of the multiverse, the implication of all of the alternate Legions showing up is that they all exist out there somewhere - even the 5 Years Later Legion, which some were speculating that the Action Comics Adult Legion had retconned out of existence. Hooray for inclusiveness!

And hooray for three Brainiacs 5! Hooray for the ultimate fate of Superboy Prime! Hooray for stopping while I haven’t really spoiled anything!

Hooray!

We Kill Monsters No. 1 (of 6)

There are a lot of small comics companies doing a lot of nice work lately, for which I am highly thankful. Of all of these, Red 5 Comics might just be starting to pull ahead of the pack in my eyes. To begin with, they have Atomic Robo, which you may recall me gushing at length about earlier. And now here comes We Kill Monsters.

I can't say what it is about a comic where two auto mechanic brothers discover the existence of a race of blue-blooded, three-eyed monsters and start fighting them with pickup trucks and shovels and the mutated arm that one of them has acquired. Oh wait - I did say it. Blue-collar monster fighting by a couple of well-written characters, yeah. Plus the art and the colours are loverly.

Oh, and there's a romantic subplot shaping up, if you're into sappiness. Not that I am. At all. (sighhhh... they look like they'll make such a nice couple...)

The Life and Times of Savior 28 No. 4 - Still liking this, but remind me never to read it last. This is a damn depressing comic at times.

Green Lantern No. 44 - Zombie Martian Manhunter Vs. Green Lantern and the Flash! Highly enjoyable! Terrific ending! Scar vomits more than ever! That last one was not a point in the comics favour!

Dethklok Versus the Goon - Well, I love Metalocalypse and I love The Goon, so how could this go wrong? Well, it didn’t, but it didn’t go completely right either. Everyone was acting on character and there were some good lines and the expected massive bloodshed. It just didn’t… mesh. I think it’s the fact that Dethklok was wandering around in the Goon’s world without adopting his art style, which is just rude, not like that nice Hellboy character who visited a few years back. So: good enough but not as good as I’d hoped.

Invincible No. 64 - Kirkman you crazy bastard. Good show.

Batman: Streets of Gotham - I'm playing catchup on a lot of fronts, it seems. Just read the first two issues and they weren't bad, thhough I'm sad to see that this is where that Hush malarky started up. In any case: it's a good look at Gotham as a whole, with alla its crazy vigilantes and villains and crazies. And the Manhunter backup is really super fun. Hooray for the return of Jane Doe!

Action Comics No. 879 - Good stuff, same as always. I just want to note that the Captain Atom backup is great! It makes no sense but I know that it will eventually! I love that sort of thing!

Wednesday Comics No. 3 - Upside-down Batman! Dr. Canus! Pa Kent's facial expression! Java's inquiry! Strange Adventure! Future Flash! Two separate alien insect monsters! And all the rest! Definitely enough delight for my dime.

Superman/Batman No. 62 - A couple weeks late on this one but I'd just like to pipe up and call it a fun little story.

Good night everybody!

It's Our Third Anniversary!

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It's Living Between Wednesdays' Third Anniversary!!! To celebrate we are looking back at our favourite LBW posts of all time.

AND...we are also having a contest! All you have to do to enter is leave a comment at the end of this post with a link to your favourite comic blog post(s). It can be your own blog, it can be someone else's blog! We are celebrating the comic blog community here! The winner will get a SIGNED copy of Dawyn Cooke's new book, Parker: The Hunter, and a SIGNED copy of Faith Erin Hicks' awesome book, The War At Ellsmere! Probably some other goodies too!

Big thanks to everyone for reading this blog, and leaving comments, and thanks to all the comic creators who have allowed us to interview them. Extra big thanks to Paul Pettipas for building and maintaining this site for us for zero dollars, and to Matt for designing the logo. And a special shout-out to the guys at The Dollar Bin for being so supportive, the Newsarama bloggers for linking to us pretty regularly, Chris Sims' at the Invincible Super Blog for sending a lot of traffic our way, and especially Calum Johnston at Strange Adventures comic shop for being awesome all the time.

So here we go with our favourite posts. I have "remastered" some of the older ones to include alt-text on the images! Enjoy!

FROM RACHELLE:

HOT Action Comics

This stands as the most viewed post in LBW history. It got linked on a lot of sites, including a lot of sex and erotica sites, and still gets lots of hits every week (mostly on the old site). It also gets a lot of traffic from people searching for "superman porn."

Can We Talk About Something Else?

This was one of the first big deal posts that I did, in that it got linked from a lot of places and it brought a lot of traffic to my site. For that reason, I will always be fond of it.

Rating The Super Hunks: Daredevil and Rating The Super Hunks: Namor

The Rating The Super Hunks feature is one of my favourite things to write, but these posts also take me a really long time (mostly because of all the image hunting). These two are my favourites. And the Daredevil one took me hours and hours and hours because I was obsessed with having a perfect cross-section of images from different eras.

The Prop Comedy Stylings of Superman

World's Grossest Detective

Superman Plays British

The DC Showcase Presents books are obviously very inspiring to the humour-based comic book blogger. Of all the posts I did that used panels from the Showcase books, these are probably my favourites.

Superman and Batman Quit Earth, Not Each Other

Gigantic Fun With the Super Sons!

I really can't say enough about how awesome Bob Haney is or how thankful I am that he wrote comics and that I can blog about them. Bob Haney makes my job easy. I've done a lot of posts about Bob Haney comics, but these two are my favourites.

Superman Gives Batman His Heart

The Bride of Batman

World's Finest #71: Teaming Up to Confuse Lois

I would be pretty content just writing a blog about Superman/Batman team-ups. I have done a ton of posts about the World's Finest duo, so it took awhile to find my favourites, but I would say these three stand out.

Who Needs an MBA?

This post did not seem to get a lot of attention or views, but I really like it. I wrote it from the computer lab at school.

Captain America #33 in 30 Seconds

This was an entry I did for Chris Sims' annual contest in 2008. I am especially proud of it because it earned comments from both Steve Epting AND Ed Brubaker!

The Supergirl From Krypton Meets Her Asshole Cousin

I am surprised that it took me so long to do a post about this comic because it is one of my favourite all-time stories (to make fun of).  

Thunder=Stolen

I want to acknowledge this one because Dave did such an awesome job on the fake Marvel variant covers. Unfortunately, we ended up posting this the same week that Chris Sims posted his own version of Marvel Hobos. Because he spies on me.

I also want to acknowledge my favourite Johnathan posts (which is really hard because they are all so good. I think these three certainly merit special mention:

The Hair Continuum

Thinking Hypothetically: The JSA (Part 1)

Thinking Hypothetically: The JSA (Part 2)

And Tiina's recent post on Heart Throbs #119 was definitely great:

Fun With Romance Comics: Two Awful Girls for Every Dumbass Boy!

FROM DAVE (VIA RACHELLE):

YOU THINK YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?!

Dave told me that this is his favourite LBW post because it's about the greatest thing that ever happened to him (he may not have said exactly that). I still love this commercial, though, and a brush with a local celebrity is always exciting.

FROM TIINA:

Happy three year anniversary, Living Between Wednesdays! Our blog is a toddler! Although in blog years, it's probably in its early 30s, makes a comfortable salary at its graphic design job, just bought a house, but still parties pretty hard on the weekends.

Since the early days of LBW, I've always loved Rachelle's Archie posts. Archie Sunday: Rockin' With Dilton has everything you'd expect in an Archie comic: the Riverdale kids being sociopaths, tired cliches and totally unbelievable plot lines, and Dilton being rad.

My favourite thing I've posted since I joined the LBW team is the post about the New Kids on the Block and Richie Rich team-up. Because it's as awesome as it is nonsensical.

FROM JOHNATHAN:

Sheesh, three years? I've been flailing around on the Internet for that long? Makes a guy feel... venerable. And speaking of flailing, here are some posts that I especially liked that I found while haphazardly trawling through the archives:

Review of Future Current Events - Mostly I like how the graphic on this one turned out - narcissism! Geoff Johns' Legion of Super-Rejects under a microscope!

The Forbidden Loves of Superman - It's only shame that keeps him in check, so heap it on.

Review of Something Very Perplexing - Old ads make for many questions.

A Look at the Nineteen-Nineties - See how Captain Atom chairs a budget meeting! All the thrills of the 90s, today!

Review of Burial Customs - What do you do with a dead Legionnaire? Shoot them into space, of course.

Review of the Legion of Super Heroes - Epically long, so I have to make sure that it gets read.

Future Zoo: Review of the Parakat - Superboy used to run into a lot of variations on the tiger, for some reason. Here's one from the super-fun first appearance of Star Boy.

Review of Juvenile Humour - I can't always be highb

Review of Some Robots - Part three in a series that asks, "how much can Johnathan talk about robots that appear in a single panel each?"

Make Dragons History (Ed. - Hey, that's one of my posts! Thanks Johnathan!) No problem! I liked it!

Review of the (Best Ever)s - They really were.

Super Human Detritus of the Thirtieth Century: Alaktor and his Marvel Belt - I like Alaktor because he's not even very good at being a villain.

Most of these, you'll notice, are mine, from back in the "Paul and John Review" days of yore. This is mostly because I am disorganized and had to go with what I remembered. Rachelle has some damn fine posts out there that I just didn't get to go through in time to single out, while Tiina and Dave have been delivering solid stuff from day one. I think that Dave has basically managed to sell me something with every other post, in fact. Go team!

And of course our greatest adventure was when we unmasked the Phantom that was haunting Old Man Johnston's Comic Shoppe.

Always Bet On Black.

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So, I think it’s fair to say that I liked Blackest Night #1 a lot better than my blogmates here at LBW (with the exception of Tiina who, to my knowledge, hasn’t read it yet). However, I should qualify this by saying that I am also a huge horror movie fan who occasionally likes it when two of my favourite genres—superhero stuff and scary stuff-- cross paths. In any event, Blackest Night is not a book for the squeamish. For a superhero comic, it almost certainly goes too far in terms of guts and gore (one of my biggest beefs with Geoff Johns’ scripting, but more on that in a bit). Still, as a crazy cosmic horror story, as well as the culmination of a few years of build-up in the pages of Green Lantern, I was very much into this creepy, ominous first chapter that takes the revolving-door aspect of death in superhero crossover events to a horrifying extreme.

Geoff Johns’ writing has made Green Lantern my favourite monthly series of the past few years (eclipsed all-too-briefly by Johns’ stellar run on Action Comics), and, in re-reading the entire series over the past few weeks, I realized that this might now be the longest I’ve regularly bought a title since Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, which shows just how short an attention span I have for ongoing monthly books. I started buying the series, starring a character I really had no great emotional investment in other than “hey, I had the Super Powers toy of this guy”, for the artwork of Carlos Pacheco. However, by the time Pacheco left the series, I was caught up in the thrill of a good monthly superhero book, one with a cool lead, an interesting supporting cast made up of old favourites and new characters, exciting story arcs that built nicely on their predecessors, and slow-boil subplots that were expertly teased out months ahead of coming to fruition. The addition of Ivan Reis as the new regular artist with issue nine sealed the deal.

Now, the regular monthly team of Johns and Reis have moved over to the eight-issue Blackest Night miniseries, which has gone from being a Green Lantern/Green Lantern Corps crossover to a DCU “event”, with several tie-ins, spinoffs, and the like. Blame the surprise success of the Sinestro Corps War crossover, which I think caught everyone at DC off guard. Blackest Night was first teased at the end of that crossover, and the past two years of the monthly GL titles have been laying the foundation for it with a brewing conflict between the different Lantern Corps (Yellow, Red, Orange, etc.) and the behind-the-scenes machinations of Scar, a traitorous, disfigured Guardian of the Universe. As such, I’m not sure how accessible Blackest Night will be for non-readers of GL, although the first issue does a good job on the recap. The zero issue made available for this year’s Free Comic Day didn’t hurt either. Anyway, by the issue’s end, a swarm of Black Lantern rings have made their way across the galaxy and are finding their way onto the hands of beloved dead heroes, transforming them into hideously undead Black Lantern Corps members eager to add the still-living heroes of the DCU to their ranks. 

Obviously, comparison to the Marvel Zombies franchise is inevitable. That series, though, began as a kinda-dumb joke born out of former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter’s nickname for devoted Marvel fans. The joke got old fairly quick, but the two most recent MZ series, by new creative team Fred Van Lente and Kev Walker, have rejuvenated the idea by crossing the book’s alternate universe into the regular Marvel U. In any event, the emphasis in MZ has been on gross-out humour, where Blackest Night is doing its best to be straight-up terrifying. There’s nothing remotely funny about the scene where the Black Lantern rings revive every fallen member of the Green Lantern Corps, or the scene where rotting, reanimated Ralph and Sue Dibny murder two of their old pals and transform them into Black Lanterns like themselves. Some might argue that there’s nothing remotely fun about it either, but I’m not sure that “fun” and “suspenseful” are always meant to be one and the same. I mentioned Johns’ penchant for crazy gore earlier, and how I think it’s a weakness of his—no monthly superhero book should be as disgusting as Green Lantern sometimes gets, especially issue four’s gut-crunching cliffhanger (you know, the one where the new incarnation of the Shark has a whole guy's mashed-up body crammed between his jaws). I’m not sure why he feels it’s called for, and a book like Blackest Night provides a perfect vehicle for his nastier impulses to run rampant. The only reason I can look past it is that he tends to balance out the nastier stuff with unwavering heroism from his leads. One of the things that made the conclusion to the Sinestro Corps War so satisfying was the fact that Hal Jordan made a point of arresting Sinestro, even though a new edict from the Guardians now authorized the use of lethal force. It’s this insistence on stalwart heroism in his lead characters that, I think, places Johns a cut above cynical gore-meisters like Mark Millar and Warren Ellis; where those scribes seem to revel in writing books where so-called “heroes” casually execute their opponents, Johns’ protagonists never even consider it an option.

Speaking of protagonists, another thing I’m enjoying about Blackest Night is the fact that, to my knowledge, this will be the first ever DCU crossover event to be headlined by the Hal Jordan and Barry Allen incarnations of Green Lantern and the Flash (both appeared in Final Crisis, but their roles were much smaller than they are here). This should, I think, make for an interesting dynamic, given that their deaths played such major parts in past DC crossovers. This choice of protagonists is no coincidence, since the larger idea behind Blackest Night seems to deal with the nature of death and resurrection in superhero crossovers. Barry Allen’s ultimate sacrifice in Crisis on Infinite Earths opened the floodgates for killing characters off as a selling point, and everything came full circle last year when he was resurrected in Final Crisis. Clearly, it’s not enough to kill characters off to sell comics anymore—now you’ve gotta shock everyone by bringing them back to life. And that’s where Blackest Night comes in, I suppose.

The artwork by Ivan Reis must be mentioned as well. It’s been very exciting to see his already-solid art on the monthly GL series evolving to this point. He’s like Bryan Hitch before he discovered photo reference, at ease drawing simple conversations or epic-level double page spreads. Check out the scene where Hal uses his ring to create constructs of every other hero who has died since Barry’s sacrifice. It’s a terrific group shot of dozens of fallen heroes, showcasing Reis’ ease at dealing with a large and varied cast (it’s also an eye-opener for Barry, and for the audience—it’s suddenly very clear what the real legacy of Barry Allen has been, at least in terms of what sells comic books). I hope DC hangs on to Reis for a while to come, since this book should rightfully make him a superstar.

The Sinestro Corps War set the bar pretty high for these kind of cosmic epics recently, and I hope Blackest Night can live up to it. Having its status elevated from a mere Green Lantern storyline to a full-fledged DCU event might hurt it, since the Powers That Be like to sow the seeds for the next crossover in the pages of the current one. Editorial interference aside, Johns has clearly had this one in the works for a while, and Reis has shown that he can crank out quality pages on a timely schedule. These guys are off to a good start, anyway, and I’m alternately looking forward to and dreading what issue two has in store.

Oh, and, like Rachelle and Johnathan, I also could have happily gone my whole life without this image:

“I’m your boyfriend now, Batsy!”