Comic Books

There are times when a bad property and a bad brand come together to create something truly putrid, the exact opposite of, say, the first set Marvel Masterpieces. The 1992 Youngblood trading cards from Comic Images are just such a vortex of suck, somehow managing to take a person that loves comics and cards and turn them into a devout hater of both. You can add this to the indictment list for that beleaguered whipping boy of all things wrong with the late-20th century comics, Rob Liefeld. Another triumph!   Comic Images issued a number of low-budget sets during the early 1990s trading card boom, licensing individual characters from Marvel and independents and in general leaving company-wide, multi-hero/villain/team sets for the bigger boys like Impel. Their selling point, if you could call it that, was that they had little to no original artwork amongst the cards, instead reproducing panels from comic books. Though lazy, this sounds like a halfway decent idea. The execution, however, left much to be desired. Panels that seemed lush and action-packed on a page with their pals became cramped and indecipherable when imprisoned in a single cardboard rectangle. Put it this way: One of the sets they produced (which will one day be featured here, I’m sure) was a 30th anniversary Spider-Man set, and amongst the artwork was some of the classic Steve Ditko material. It wound up looking odd and foreign when put on cardboard. Underwhelming in the extreme. Now just imagine what it does to Mr. Liefeld’s work. Or don’t just imagine it. Let me show you. YOU’RE WELCOME. Youngblood, you’ll of course recall, was a book about a highly paid team of celebrity superheroes, one of the first wave from the game-changing, then-new, creator-owned Image Comics. YB launched with great fanfare, and fizzled out faster than any of its contemporaries, both due to the poor quality of the storytelling and the congenital inability of anyone in that publishing confederation to meet a regular deadline. But the launch hype was enough to sustain interest in a trading card set, so that’s what we got. We’ve delayed long enough. Take your medicine, eyeballs. Here’s a “portrait,” if you will, of Shaft (Richard Roundtree – and Isaac Hayes, for that matter – should have pummeled Liefeld for this), the bow-wielding leader of the Youngblood team. Someone not acquainted with the team, the character, or comics in general might look at this and ask Is that a face? A baboon’s inflamed ass? Is that hair or flame? Are the eyes closed? Open? Welcome to the head-numbing world of Liefeld’s art: You want a giant, unnecessary gun, with phallic undercurrents that even us non-Freuds can decipher? There are plenty of those on display. Here’s one in the hands of the notorious killer of Al “Spawn” Simmons, Chapel: The card backs are a light blue with some text that tries in vain to drum up interest in the Youngblood universe. Here’s the back from card #1: MY GOSH WHERE DO I SIGN UP. There are, natch, chase cards. The de rigueur chase style for Comic Images was distracting, eye-straining refractor cards, which turned the pic on the front into a holographic shattered mirror. There are six in this set. They’re all unfathomably unattractive: Plus side: If you put these chase cards in your bicycle spokes, then VOILA, no need for reflectors. I’ve said before on this site that I have no great problem with Liefeld. He did what he did and people bought it — that’s called market economics. Also on the plus side for him, he’s always had some perspective about his style and its place in comic book history, not to mention a sense of humor about his limitations, both as artist and publisher. He seems like a nice enough guy — no personal knowledge of this, but from a distance at least. I saw something recently where he’s trying to get a Kickstarter camp

Matthew Price[img]2100042[/img] Brian Winkeler and Robert Wilson IV, creators of the comic “Knuckleheads,” will donate their proceeds from this week’s second digital issue to tornado relief following the recent tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. Winkeler is from Yukon; Wilson is formerly of Oklahoma City. (Colorist Jordan Boyd is also an Oklahoma native.) “Robert and I decided to donate all of our profits to tornado relief,” Winkeler said in an e-mail.Read more on NewsOK.com

After nearly a decade, Geoff Johns is stepping away from GREEN LANTERN, and here's a review of his freshly released final issue.

Super powers and power aren’t the same thing, and where the pilot script for a TV version of Absolution grabbed me was where the two bang up against one another. I do see a lot of TV pilot screenplays. Most I just read as “deep research.” Some I address explicitly in various stories for the site, perhaps where you might not expect it. This one, though, I’m going to write about, all by itself. Because right there on the title page it says “Based on the Graphic Novel by Avatar Press” and, frankly, I thought somebody might have told me about this by now. But no. It was a real surprise. I never read Christos Gage’s original comics, so I came into this teleplay – written by Gage and his wife, Ruth Fletcher Gage – absolutely ice cold. I didn’t even know what genre the show has been designed to fit in. I expected it wasn’t going to be a rival for The Mindy Project or New Girl, not with this title, but really, that was all I had to work with in the beginning. The first scenes, the teaser designed to play before the opening credits and first batch of commercials, read mostly like a police actioner. Mostly. We open with a sorta-kinda SWAT team raid on an apartment building. They’re here to intervene in a hostage situation. A desperate man with a semi-automatic rifle is posing a threat to his ex-wife and kids. And then we meet John Dusk, the commander of the squad sent in to resolve this stand off. And then we find out that John Dusk has Powers. That’s my capital P in Powers. I’m talking about the kind of powers that used to always come with capes, cute names and aliases. John Dusk, specifically, has an aura, a kind of energy shield that he can use to deflect bullets, pin people to the wall, throw them into the sky, even punch or spear them. To my relatively unschooled mind it has some similarities to what a Green Lantern can do, but it’s played more realistically. Dusk has been employed to use his Power for the police. In the world portrayed in Absolution, anybody with a superpower has been sanctioned for service within the forces of law and order. This should not only keep them in line, it will also tap into their Powers for “the greater good.” But the story soon shows us that, for all the capital P at his disposal, Dusk might be rather lacking in power with a lower case p. As I understand it, there aren’t a lot of superpowered people in this world, so they keep getting rotated back into service. They’re going to see a lot more awful things than even the average special unit cop. Perhaps too much… and they aren’t being given a lot of choice about it. This reminded me of Stop Loss, and soldiers sent on tour of duty after tour of duty, and there really does seem to be a real risk of PTSD for these guys. At the same time, Dusk is also starting to perceive the police force as impotent. He’s skewing towards a rather more hardline view on crime and justice. More absolute, I might say. And the law won’t permit John Dusk to exact justice as he sees fit. His version of that “greater good” idea is somewhat out of step with the law. So what happens when a man with Powers finds out he hasn’t got enough power? It’s an interesting proposition and – no spoilers, I promise – has been very explosively dramatised. In truth, you could take the Powers out and this could be about a man with an arsenal of deadly weapons deciding to take back power – in some respects, it’s as though Dusk is meeting his unfortunate shadow in the hostage scenario that opens up the pilot. We’ve recently seen FX try and fail to get a pilot of Powers – no relation – onto our screens and this Autumn, Marvel are going to let loose with Agents of SHIELD. It seems like the deck is being stacked for something like Absolution, a next step deeper into the possibilities of superpowered TV. It’s not middle of the road stuff, but I know there’s a crowd out there that would eat this up. A show like this is going to be the next Walking Dead. I

T-shirt from Antarctic Press

Less than 24 hours after its launch, a Kickstarter campaign by Jeremy Kirby to fund a coffee table book devoted to his legendary grandfather Jack Kirby has already exceeded its $7,500 goal. Titled The Life and Times of Jack Kirby, the hardcover will feature hundreds of personal photographs and artwork, and a never-before-seen play written by Jack Kirby called Frog Prince. “Years ago (1997 to be exact) I wrote a screenplay and shared it with my grandmother,” Jeremy writes. “She did what every grandmother would do after reading her grandson’s story and told me how wonderful it was. But then she stopped for a moment as if pausing to think. She had me wait where I was and I saw her go into her closet. She reached into a box that was on a shelf and pulled out a dusty old folder. She handed it to me and said ‘your grandfather would have wanted you to have this.’ It was a play that he had written.  I have since showed the play to friends of the family and not one had ever heard of its existence.” The higher-priced pledge incentives offering signed Fourth World comics and original Kirby art are, not surprisingly, already gone. However, there are still other goodies to be had. The campaign ends June 20.

Okay, this is where I sing for my supper. Avatar Press, the owners of Bleeding Cool, are flying me, Kieron Gillen and Si Spurrier out to Arizona for the Phoenix Comic Con. If you see me, please say hi, and if you want to drop off a message, samples, anything you want me to take a look at (please no faeces in a box, send those to Si Spurrier) then your best bet is to drop it off at the Avatar booth or the Hyatt Regency on 122 North 2nd Street… or hang about outside my hotel room at 2am in the morning. I’m easy. I’ll be presenting the Bleeding Cool Fan Awards, with a host of presenters and a free Adventure Time exclusive variant for attendees courtesy of Boom! Studios. And we promise, no one will swear in front of seven year old girls this year. It will however be incredibly embarrasing. It always is. Avatar themselves will have a large booth at the show, and will need to it contain all these exclusive variants. And yes, Kieron Gillen will be on hand to sign all the Uber editions      . At the booth, at the bar, in the bathroom, in his hotel room, while snorting cocaine off a stripper’s tits, he really is an accessible fellow. Warned, there may be a spoiler on one of the Uber issues for the first British superhero… with a familiar name, too. Uber #1 Insignia set  - Ultra-limited to 200 sets. Uber #0 Enhanced Phoenix Blitzkrieg – limited to 750 copies Uber #0 Enhanced Battleships –  limited to 2000 copies. Uber #1 Art Nouveau –  Limited to 1500 copies Uber #1 First Appearance HMH Colossus –  Limited to 1500 copies Crossed #25 Bikini – Limited to 850 copies. Crossed #29 Miss Crossed Set – A four part (A, B, C, D) special sequence showing it all go wrong at a beauty pageant!  Limited to just 400 sets. Uber #1 Phoenix VIP – Limited to 350 copies. Crossed #25 Phoenix VIP  - Limited to 350 copies. Those 2 VIP covers comes free with the Avatar VIP set… Here Comes Phoenix Comic Con, Uber And Crossed Exclusives And The First Appearance Of The First British Superhero

The GoodOften when there is a movement or cause of some kind we will see comic creators, writers and artists join together on a single project to create something whose proceeds go to that particular cause. This is exactly the case with OCCUPY COMICS, a new anthology which features works from Alan Moore, David Lloyd, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Ben Templesmith and many more. The proceeds for this project will be donated to the Occupy movement and its "related initiatives. The first issue of this new series nine short series which are separated by illustrations from artist like Molly Crabapple and David Lloyd. The theme throughout is generally the same: exploitation of the working masses and rebellion of the people against private and state institutions. The stories within the anthology are different lengths: some consist of four pages of story, others are a single page featuring stories that are more concise and to the point. Different artists and a wide range of creative teams make this an interesting comic to pick up, to be sure, but is it any good?The idea behind this anthology is great, and many of the biggest names in comics contributed to the creation of this issue. The artists that lent their talents to this issue did a fantastic job, and that really stood out to me as being one of the big highlights of this book. The two-page spread by David Lloyd, for example, is fantastic: his image of V teasing the iconic bronze bull that lives on Wall Street in New York City is fantastic and speaks more than some of the actually stories in this issue.I found that the sections that were the shortest were also the most meaningful. The illustrations by artists like Crabapple, Lloyd and Spiegleman stood out. The short, one page comic by cartoonist Matt Bors was also fantastic because it was straightforward and humorous: it was a great way to express and comment on the Occupy movement in general without seeming contrived or pretentious. Finally, if you are a big Alan Moore fan and you would love to read one of his stories, you won't find that here, unfortunately. What you will find, however, is a fantastic piece by Moore which is both humorous and informative.The BadSome of the stories are great, well written and interesting, but the problem is that they all generally act as overviews of the movement and very few of them actually allow readers to establish a personal connection with their characters. It all seems very much as though it grazes the surface of these issues and fails to really delve into them respectively.Sections of the comic, like "Casino Nation," for example, seem rather pointless. There is no story in this section, just information. And while it is informative to an extent, it is also information written by two individuals who don't provide a works cited page explaining where they obtained all of their information. Based on the text below the header there should be a bibliography on OccupyComics.com but it seems to be either missing from the site or very difficult to find. However, that's sort of besides the point. The sources should have been printed within the book.The VerdictAll in all, if you feel that the proceeds of this anthology go toward a good cause then you will easily be able to justify spending the money on this comic. The book consists of 48 pages and features some of the industry's biggest names, but that doesn't mean it's all that good. There are some parts of this comic that are great: the editorial by Alan Moore and the comic by Matt Bors being two great examples. Yet as a whole there are some definite moments that are not as enjoyable, some of which I mentioned above.

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