Funnybook Babylon

And we’re back, with looks at S.H.I.E.L.D., the new Power Man mini, and Thunderbolts. Plus: Brief Recommendations, Miscellany and Links of the Week! Spoilers abound!

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This week, we look two semi-autobiographical Young Man Coming of Age stories that came to their conclusion in July!

Wolverine Origins #50 by Daniel Way & Will Conrad (Marvel Comics)
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni Press)

We’ve talked about Scott Pilgrim before, particularly in FBBP #96. Be forewarned, we follow up on some of the discussions from that podcast, not to mention spoiling the crap out of the entire series.

There’s been less FBB talk about Daken (aka Daniel Kenneth Way), but Jamaal has been reading the book all along, and shares his thoughts on the evolution of both Da*Ken*s. We know Daken’s taken on The World, but does he Get it Together? Is this either young man’s actual Finest Hour? Find out this week!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:25 — 38.0MB)

By now I assume most of our readers have heard about the upcoming changes on Amazing Spider-Man: “Brand New Day” will be replaced with “Big Time“, in a clear power-shift from Sting to Peter Gabriel on Steve Wacker’s iPod.

“Big Time” sees Dan Slott take over as sole Amazing writer, and the book’s frequency will drop from thrice-monthly to twice-monthly. Some have seen this as a repudiation of the whole “Brand New Day” paradigm, whether that means “a thrice monthly book doesn’t work” or “the creative teams have disappointed” or, most colorfully, “JOE QUESADA IS A BIG DUMMY AND PETER WOULD NEVER MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL AND I AM VERY ANGRY ABOUT EITHER THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MARRIAGE OR POSSIBLY ALSO SPIDER-GIRL BUT MAINLY I JUST HATE MARVEL”.

I can’t speak to the last group, but personally I think BND has resulted in some very enjoyable characters, and several of the main BND players (Slott, Marcos Martin, Zeb Wells) are sticking around, so I can’t imagine this change was spurred by a perceived failure of the creative teams. Many people have pointed to the sales numbers on Amazing this year as proof of that, as sales are down considerably from the lofty heights of a few years ago. Brand New Day, they have argued, has seen Amazing drop from selling over 100,000 copies a month to under 60,000.

While that isolated data point is true, it doesn’t give you the whole picture. Sales have dropped considerably from the point they were at immediately before BND, but there are many factors:
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From Superboy #26

And they say Geoff Johns doesn’t do long-range planning.

While working on another sales analysis post, I started writing a brief aside about Marvel’s Heroic Age Pedestal Variant Covers. You’ve probably seen them, they all follow the same template:

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Brief Bloom.

Batman and Robin continues, beginning the “Batman and Robin Must Die!” arc, which Morrison has stated is “R.I.P. as farce.” Each issue is named after a classic gothic painting; this one is “The Garden of Death” by Hugo Simberg, pictured above. Many shots and events in this book are deliberate evocations of events in “R.I.P.”, so I recommend a rereading before engaging in any close analysis of this story.

And, as usual, the links to my other annotations:

Stuff here (original Batman run, current Batman and Robin)

Stuff at Comics Alliance (Return of Bruce Wayne #1, #2, #3; Batman #700)
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So, another San Diego Comic Con’s come and gone, filled with tantalizing news and previews of the comic books, films, television shows and videogames that we will all discuss during the coming year. I’m here to provide you with a guide to some of the more interesting announcements and previews buried in the four day flood of information.

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As you may have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about Vertigo lately. So has Rich Johnston! In addition to the persistent hand-wringing about cancellations, there has been additional hand-wringing about how DC proper is going to “take back” all of the characters that originated in the DC Universe. According to Johnston, he told us all this would be happening, and posted of Karen Berger’s “confirmation” of the fact at Friday’s Vertigo panel.

I realize this isn’t blockbuster news on par with movies coming out or someone getting stabbed, but it’s been over twenty-four hours and I haven’t seen this reported anywhere else. Granted, none of the big sites have posted write-ups for this panel, which aside from Johnston’s bombshell didn’t contain any real news. But I’ve listened to audio of this panel (available at DCComics.com) and can’t find any mention of this. The audio file is only fifty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds, and trails off as Berger languidly polls the audience on their interest in different books being reprinted in the Absolute format, so it’s possible the panel ran one hour on the button and those final two minutes and twenty-seven seconds contained Berger’s confirmation. I realize it’s also equally possible that she confirmed it in a venue other than the official mic’d up portion of the panel.

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Vertigo has recently announced the end of three titles: Air, Unknown Soldier, and most recently Greek Street. While comic fans have become inured to superhero cancellations — Agents of Atlas just got canned for what I believe is the nineteenth time in five years — many people feel special pain for the premature end of more personal creator-owned books like those at Vertigo. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise: the majority of Vertigo titles end within about two years, well before their creators’ projected endpoints:

I don’t wish to suggest people cannot lament their favorite underdogs: at least some of us at FBB are outspoken fans of Air and Young Liars, and while none of us cared much for Greek Street, I don’t wish to make light of its fans. But people — and I am focusing on the most prominent mourner, Rich Johnston — need to be realistic about their love of spectacularly unsuccessful projects.
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Welcome back to Avenging the Week. This is a short one, in which we briefly discuss Daytripper and take a look at tomorrow’s comics today. As always, spoilers below!
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This week, the gang reads <i>Invincible Iron Man Annual</i> #1  by Matt Fraction and Carmine DiGiandomenic! It features Fraction’s “autobio comix” take on stalwart Iron Man villain The Mandarin, borrowing from both Kim Jong-Il’s kidnapping of Shin Sang-ok and, more cryptically, Fraction’s MK12 work alongside Kanye West on Common’s “Go” video.

IIM Annual #1 was also Marvel’s first day-and-date digital release, so we take a look at that, which devolves into an argument about marginal value and price points. Maybe we were all coming off World Cup Fever, but it gets feisty.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:27 — 28.5MB)

Amazingly enough, I don’t think this sequence even cracked the Top Three for things that bothered me about this issue!

My complaint about DC’s handling of interlocking covers a couple weeks ago got me thinking more about recent comic covers. Big Two superhero comics have long been a place for boilerplate standard cover layouts: title along the top, number and company logo in the top left cover, more recently creator credits running below the logo/number. In principle I applaud any attempt to expand the range of the covers, though more often than not that just seems to involve running some sort of design element across the top or side of the book, something that goes back to DC’s “Go Go Checks” or the little translucent bar along the spine of practically every Vertigo book in the 1990s. Whoever designed the covers for Ink and the Rise & Fall crossover went in for some blocking, and messed up the interlocking covers in the process.

To be sure there have been good recent examples of blocky cover design elements that instantly define a line of books:

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After a short sabbatical, I’m back with a brief look at the first issue of Thanos Imperative, the second issue of SHIELD, and the seventh issue of Daytripper. And links. Can’t forget the links.

Spoiler Alert: I will be revealing plot details of all three books (particularly Daytripper).

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Sometimes the Internet sends you down a rabbit hole. This past weekend, after the latest round of Ridiculous DC Convention Panel Statements (from RDCPS stalwarts Ian Sattler and Bill Willingham) I began to wonder: what exactly does Ian Sattler do as DC’s “Senior Story Editor”, besides make bizarre statements on panels? I never found a job description or even what he did before he became Senior Story Editor — though it seems like he wrote for Comics Alliance under the name Ian DeLaurentis a few years back — but I did stumble upon a post Sattler made on the DCU Source Blog a year or so back.

It concerned Brian Stelfreeze’s covers for Final Crisis Aftermath: Ink. They were designed to form an interlocking portrait of the Tattooed Man, and frankly the design is pretty awesome:

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