So here's what Archie Comics gets for being the most progressive and interesting comics company today: a threatened boycott.

You want to know the really funny thing about this? The issue that they're targeting -- the one in which Kevin marries Troy not once, but twice! (depending on how you view things) -- is over two months old. Life with Archie only comes out once every two months. Issue 16 has already been largely replaced on shelves by issue 17. (In which Veronica -- the version married to Archie -- pretty much loses her freakin' mind, and Mr. Lodge -- both of him -- turns out to be much more than you'd expect. Oh, and then there's the X-Files thing. And anyone who didn't know it finds out Jughead's real name. And both continuities come to a crossroads that DC only wishes it could have managed as well in "Flashpoint". But that's all rather beside the point.) What I'm wondering is how long it will take these yahoos to notice that Kevin Keller actually has his own title now. One in which being a gay high school student is considered (GASP!) .... normal. As though he's just another Riverdale high school student, in exactly the same way that Archie or Reggie or Veronica or Betty or Moose or Jughead is.There's nothing in particular to distinguish it from any other Archie Comics title ... which is more or less their point.

Toys-r-Us has, so far, been utterly silent on the subject. This may be their best tack. They're not really in a position to say, in quite as tactful yet blunt a way as JC Penney said regarding One Million Moms' wildly ineffective protest regarding Ellen Degeneres, "Bite me, bigots!" Granted, that's not really how JCPenney phrased it (NOTE: Link below has autoplaying Flash video):

So One Million Moms is now wagering that America believes less in Toys-R-Us and Archie Comics than they do in Ellen The Trustworthy. Symbol of Americana for, what, four generations of people now? Seriously, these people, do they know how to pick their targets or what?

I have to admit, I do love the response of Archie Comics' CEO to these people, as reported by Robot6 at comicbookresources.com:

No, it's not a tactful "Bite me", but it's still beautifully stated. Although ... "free of prejudice, hate and narrow-minded people" is, perhaps, pushing it a bit far. After all, in his first longer story arc, Kevin had to deal with someone explicitly using the fact that he's gay against him in the election for student president, trying to take advantage of people's prejudices, implying that Kevin being gay made him unsuited, somehow less of a man. (Said bigot was, quite firmly and repeatedly, put in his place.) So it's not as though he won't face obstacles ... but this is Archie Comics we're talking about, so he'll usually get through, somehow.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I think Life with Archie is one of the best, if possibly not the best, titles being published in comics today. They manage to combine the melodrama with a somewhat realistic depiction of the sorts of things that young people go through today -- the Great Recession, although not mentioned as such, has not left Riverdale untouched -- as well as the odd touch of science fiction and fantasy. (They probably won't pay attention, but come awards time next year, the Hugos and Nebulas really should consider Life with Archie in their comic book section -- although usually it's graphic novels and webcomics compilations. Nonetheless, the title wouldn't exist without the explicit science fiction concept at its core, which is beginning to pay off big time. But I digress. Again.) I suppose today's news is a sign that Life with Archie has arrived -- again -- in a really odd way. After all, if Archie Comics wasn't considered meaningful in some way, why would you bother protesting or boycotting? Toys R Us just happens to be the merchant in the middle this time.

Questions? Comments? Boycotts? Babblings?

So, in the wake of the SAG Awards, which, at least in acting categories, are a slightly better predictor than the Golden Globes and the raft of critics awards -- given that they're voted on by substantially, if not entirely, the same people who vote for the Academy Awards -- have my thoughts of who will win changed at all?

Well ... somewhat. After all, given the limited number of categories, one film did, after all, steamroll the others, and it was ... The Help? Really? You're not just pulling my leg here? ... Well, all-righty, then. So, recalibrating:

Best PIcture: Oriignally thought to be a dogfight between "The Artist" and "The Descendants", it's now looking like it may be a dogfight between "The Artist" and "The Help", since "The Descendants" got clean shut out -- though, granted, it only had two nominations in the SAG Awards, Best Actor and Best Film Ensemble. For the moment, I'm sticking with "The Artist" -- because it is, after all, ART with a capital ART, and the Academy loves ART -- but a win by "The Help" wouldn't surprise me now.

Best Director: No change. The director of "The Help" wasn't nominated, or else I might be changing my mind a bit.

Best Actor: No change; still picking Dujardin narrowly over Clooney.

Best Actress: Apparently, this is a three-woman race, given that Viola Davis took the SAG Award. I suspect what may be swaying voters, if they are being swayed, is purely the fact that more of them have actually seen Davis' performance; "Albert Nobbs" and "Iron Lady" never opened all that wide, and who knows how many members have made their way through the pile of screeners to see Close and Streep. So ... let's say Davis narrowly over Close, for the moment.

Supporting Actor: No change. Plummer narrowly over Von Sydow.

Supporting Actress: Apparently, this really is Octavia Spencer's year. Therefore, changed to predicting Spencer romping past Bejo and McTeer. (Also, purely a sidenote: Alec Baldwin is a dick. But then, we knew that, didn't we?)

So, we'll see how things work out in the acting categories next month, won't we?

The thing I like about this year's nomination is that every single major category contains at least one "WTF?" moment. For all the predictability of the Academy Awards, you don't get that quite this consistently in the nominations process.

Overall, the entire nominations slate has a certain WTF? feel. Seldom has comedy been so well or frequently represented in all the major categories. The Academy generally prefers its ART to be VERY SERIOUS, dont'cha know.

So, as a complete outsider who frankly doesn't care about film that much, but loves awards shows and award show politicking, let's take a whack at this predictions stuff for the major categories, just for the hell of it, shall we? Let's shall.

BEST PICTURE
"The Artist," Thomas Langmann, producer
"The Descendants," Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, producers
"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," Scott Rudin, producer
"The Help," Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, producers
"Hugo," Graham King and Martin Scorsese, producers
"Midnight in Paris," Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, producers
"Moneyball," Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, producers
"The Tree of Life," Nominees to be determined
"War Horse," Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, producers

Looks like a probable dogfight between "The Artist" and "The Descendants". To a certain extent, this sticks the Ars Gratia Artis vs Commercial Art question squarely in front of the Academy again. The past few years, art for art's sake has beaten art that also makes decent money, fairly handily. That would point to "The Artist" beating out "The Descendants". "The Help", despite support from nominations in the acting categories, is just controversial enough that I think the Academy would shy away from it. Also, it does not say ART with a capital ART in the same way as the other nominees. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", also a somewhat controversial film. (I've heard it called things along the lines of "Extremely shrill and incredibly manipulative".) "Midnight in Paris", while reportedly one of Allen's best films in years, doesn't seem to have a lot of support. "Hugo", while supported by a best director nomination for Scorsese, has no support in other major categories, which might make it a harder sell; also, the academy, for some odd reason, does not seem to consider general audience films to be True ART. "War Horse" also lacks much support from other major categories. The fact that "The Tree of Life" is having a dispute over who exactly the producers are at this stage of the game also doesn't bode well for its chances, along with the whole, "Wait, what the hell was THAT film?" quality. "Moneyball" ... I don't know. Seems highly unlikely that a baseball/math-nerd themed comedy would make it through.

BEST DIRECTOR
Michel Hazanavicius, "The Artist"
Alexander Payne, "The Descendants"
Martin Scorsese, "Hugo"
Woody Allen, "Midnight in Paris"
Terrence Malick, "The Tree of Life"

I really think this is a two-horse race again, "The Artist" vs "Hugo" (Ha. Thought I was going to say "The Descendants", didn't you?). I think Allen will get his award elsewhere this night, and I'm not sure that "The Descendants" is "directorly" enough, compared to Hugo and The Artist. By that I mean you can very clearly see the director's hand and vision in shaping the film, whereas with Payne, it's much less in-your-face. And the Academy loves in-your-face directorliness.

LEAD ACTOR
Demian Bichir, "A Better Life"
George Clooney, "The Descendants"
Jean Dujardin, "The Artist"
Gary Oldman, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy "
Brad Pitt, "Moneyball"

Pick an actor, any actor. Seriously, I have no clue here, other than Bichir has no chance whatsoever, and the mere fact that he got nominated is truly astonishing. Oscar normally prefers his leading men to have been around a while and to have had previous nominations; both of those factors would seem to make Clooney and Pitt the front runners. My gut says they're going to go with Dujardin, purely because making a silent film in 2011 and making the role work is unspeakably difficult. On the other hand, if Clooney doesn't get this -- and I kind of don't think he will -- I suspect he may get the screenplay Oscar instead, because Oscar loves excuses to split the difference, so to speak. Of the other two, I would think Oldman has the best chance, and it may be that the Academy goes for him, because he did a great job in a conventionally dramatic film. (Three of the five nominations in this category are for comedy. When was the last time that happened?) Still, in order of prediction, I would say: (1) Dujardin; (2) Clooney, very very very close behind; (3) Oldman; (4) Pitt; (5) Bichir.

LEAD ACTRESS
Glenn Close, "Albert Nobbs"
Viola Davis, "The Help"
Rooney Mara, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
Meryl Streep, "The Iron Lady"
Michelle Williams, "My Week With Marilyn"

The WTF? moment in this category is: Rooney Mara? Really? Well, that's a surprise. Still, in her case, the nomination is almost certainly the award, for a performance in which she disappeared into the role, but a film with no real support in any other category. Other than that, expect a knockdown drag-out fight between Streep and Close for the award. They also both disappeared into their characters -- in Close's case, that was kind of the entire point, actually. The advantage for Close would be that "Albert Nobbs" is a well regarded film as a whole; Streep's disadvantage is that she's considered the only good thing in "The Iron Lady".

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE:
Kenneth Branagh in "My Week with Marilyn"
Jonah Hill in "Moneyball"
Nick Nolte in "Warrior"
Christopher Plummer in "Beginners"
Max von Sydow in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

The WTF? moments in this one, apparently, are Jonah Hill, which I'll certainly buy, and Max von Sydow which ... confuses me. You have an Old Hollywood actor in a big film, reportedly acting his socks off. He's only been nominated twice, including this year, in a career that spans over 65 freakin' years, for heaven's sake. Why was anyone surprised by this nomination?

Unfortunately for Sydow, he's up against another Old Hollywood actor, Plummer, who also reportedly acts his socks off in a notable film. He's has had a career nearly as long as Von Sydow's, and has also only been nominated for the Oscar twice, including this year. (Actually wasn't nominated for"The Sound of Music". Surprises me a bit, that.)

This is the sort of situation that Old and New Hollywood normally both love: the semi-official "Oh my, we need to give this guy an Oscar before he up and dies on us" award. (Remember Jack Palance, anyone?) It's just their crappy luck that Plummer and Von Sydow are up against each other. Of the two, I'd give a slight edge to Plummer, just because his role, as someone coming out of the closet very late in life indeed, and "Beginners" itself have been better received overall than "Extremely Loud". The interesting thing will be if the two of them split the Old Hollywood vote and allow someone else to sneak in. Probably not Nolte, what with a fairly recent arrest history. And probably not Hill, who had better hope that nobody in the Academy saw or even knew about the vile excrescence that was the "Allan Gregory" television show. And Branagh was playing Olivier in his film, to boot. So I'd say that it's probably betwen Plummer and Von Sydow, with Branagh as a dark horse if they split the vote just right.

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE:
Berenice Bejo in "The Artist"
Jessica Chastain in "The Help"
Melissa McCarthy in "Bridesmaids"
Janet McTeer in "Albert Nobbs"
Octavia Spencer in "The Help"

Man, Melissa McCarthy is having herself a year, isn't she? Again, no clue. The Supporting Actress award winners tend to fall into one of a few categories: (1) They strapped this film to your back and you should have been nominated for Best Actress, but since you're in this category, you get this award [Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls]; (2) Good land, you've been around forever, so here, have an award [surprisingly infrequent in this category in recent years, oddly enough, for all that it happens a fair amount in supporting actor; the last one I can find is Peggy Ashcroft, A Passage to India]; (3) We should have given the Best Actress award to you for a different performance in a different year altogether, so here, have another award for a good performance as compensation [Whoopi Goldberg, Ghost for The Color Purple; Judi Dench, Shakespeare in Love for Mrs Brown]; (4) You deserve This Award This Year for This Performance [a really surprising number of winners, in fact]. This is not to say that category 4 doesn't also apply at least a little for any given winner; just that the other three categories seem to provide the dominant story for some winners.

In general, none of the first three categories seem to apply this year. Bejo has a very slight eau de "why weren't you in best actress again?" about her performance, but not strong enough to be dispositive. Thus, it's likely to be a current performance award, rather than a career/past-performance award. I wouldn't count McCarthy as the front runner, despite the awesome past twelve months she's had -- "Bridesmaids" being a particularly raunchy comedy, I suspect the nomination itself is the award. The only person who's been nominated before is McTeer, and apart from that, the only reason that I might say McTeer has any advantage -- apart from the role she plays in "Albert Nobbs", which is certainly notable enough -- is that she's got the only conventionally dramatic nomination in the category; the others are for films that were billed primarily as comedies. On the other hand, again, Bejo is also doing exactly the same work that Dujardin was doing, making a silent black-and-white comedy actually work. Still, given past history, I'll take McTeer in a very tight race over Bejo. (Four of five nominees from comedies. Strange year, this.)

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
"A Cat in Paris" Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli
"Chico & Rita" Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal
"Kung Fu Panda 2" Jennifer Yuh Nelson
"Puss in Boots" Chris Miller
"Rango" Gore Verbinski

Frankly? Don't give a rat's ass about that category. The only reason I mention it at all is because the WTF? factor comes not because of what is there, but because of what isn't: the startling omission of "The Adventures of Tintin", the week after it won the Producers Guild award for Best Animated Feature. For it not to win the award would be one thing -- the Producers Guild and the Academy do disagree, from time to time -- but not even get nominated? That's very peculiar. Other than that ... eh. Give it to "Rango", why not sure fine OK.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
"The Descendants" Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash
"Hugo" Screenplay by John Logan
"The Ides of March" Screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon
"Moneyball" Screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin; Story by Stan Chervin
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" Screenplay by Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the only screenplays with a chance in this category are "The Descendants" and "The Ides of March". Entirely because of the Clooney factor. If he wins this one, he's not getting Best Actor. If he wins Best Actor, then The Descendants takes adapted screenplay, and it's probably going to be the sort of night where you just watch one film roll to the sea, so to speak. It's an Indicator, is what I'm saying.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
"The Artist" Written by Michel Hazanavicius
"Bridesmaids" Written by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
"Margin Call" Written by J.C. Chandor
"Midnight in Paris" Written by Woody Allen
"A Separation" Written by Asghar Farhadi

If the Academy can get past the cognitive dissonance produced by the concept of giving a screenplay award to a silent film, I think it's going to "The Artist". Otherwise, it'll be the Woody Allen Consolation Award. (The interesting bit, in a geopolitical sense, will be whether or not the people involved with "A Separation" can get a visa to attend the show. I'm sure the State Department is not well pleased that the Academy dared to nominate a film from Iran for not one but TWO awards, including also Foreign Language film.)

So, check back again on March 1, and we'll see how well this went. Probably terribly badly indeed, given past track record, but what the heck.

Given sales, I can't say that any of the cancellations surprises me. All but one of them would have been a hard sell, conceptuallly. I haven't heard much about Blackhawks, OMAC or Men of War -- I don't know anyone who read them, and I didn't care enough to look up the reviews. Everyone I know who tried it, and the few reviews I've read, say that "Hawk and Dove" was outright awful.

"Mister Terrific" was on my pull list, and I can say that ... it wasn't very good, frankly. I never had the sense that the creators (or DC, for that matter) had a good grip on who he was. There was this limp corporate conspiracy that not only didn't seem to be going anywhere, but which would have seemed impossible to carry out, and which Michael would have been an utter idiot not to have taken at least some steps to prevent ahead of time. And on a pure character note, there's the utterly baffling question of why a person whose life seems, in both directions, to be the epitome of unfairness would have the words "Play Fair" tattooed into his skin.

The one title where the cancellation saddens but doesn't entirely surprise me is "Static Shock." Sad, because it would have been nice if the title had been given a little more time to find its audience. Unsurprised because, if you didn't read the previous Static Shock title or watch the animated series, this title would have been utterly baffling. There were just enough connections to the old series to aggravate readers of the older series at the changes -- many of which, like the move to New York, seemed utterly pointless -- and to irritate new readers, because these connections were never fleshed out enough to make sense to them. It never explained, for example, who Hardware was or why Static would be involved with him. (For that matter, even if you did read the previous series, that relationship would be utterly baffling.) It never explained what had happened with Sharon or why there were now two of her and they couldn't tell which -- if either -- was the original, although it seemed to be meandering around to that issue. And we got Static's origin story in this past issue and ... he was going to take a gun to get some gangbangers off his back when he got caught up in the Big Bang. I may be misremembering, but that doesn't sound at all like the Virgil Hawkins from either the old comic or the TV show. Even so, the title seemed to finally be finding its feet, after floundering through a confusing setup. Unfortunately, the floundering seems to have driven away readers.

The sad thing is that all of this squandered the potential for that title. I mean, the audience was there. Granted, a bit older than DC would have preferred. The people who would have fond memories of the series would now be in their 20s; the people with fond memories of the original comics in their 30s. Nonetheless, there was some sort of audience there for the title. But they managed to give a version of the character and his world sharply at variance with what the people who remembered the original title and TV series would have been expecting, without a good explanation or reason. And the storytelling was both dense and disorganized enough that a new audience coming to the title just couldn't get enough from it to stick with it.

I'm especially sad because Marc Bernardin was coming on as the new writer, and I'd have loved to see more of his take on Static. As it is, we're going to get two issues, and then he's done.

There are those who will say that this is more proof that minority-led titles just can't' sustain themselves and ... I don't know. I don't know if these titles are the best to judge that by. Mister Terrific was simply not a very good title. Static Shock couldn't give its old audience what they expected and didn't grab a new audience. On the other hand, at least for the moment, "Blue Beetle" and "Voodoo" are hanging on -- albeit probably by the thinnest of threads, and because DC doesn't want to cancel five of its six titles with minority leads in one fell swoop, with the horrendous bad publicity that would follow. (EDIT: And it turns out to be six titles, because OMAC's lead was Kevin Kho, a Korean-American man, which I hadn't realized previously.) "Batwing" is actually not doing terribly ... until you consider that it's a Batman-related title, and DC seems to have very little tolerance for lower sales in that group, because expectations are higher. It is, by a fairly healthy margin, the lowest selling of the Bat-related titles, trailing "Birds of Prey" by 10,000 copies per month.

That said, Blue Beetle, according to the numbers reported by Comics Chronicle, is selling only 5,000 per month more than Static Shock, and Voodoo slightly less than Blue Beetle. Blue Beetle, frankly, is a pretty interesting title -- once you get past the fact that they made one of Jaime's friends, who had been a perfectly average teenager, a sort of gangbanger, for no apparent reason. I haven't read Voodoo -- it didn't interest me in the slightest in concept. (Frankly, of all the carryovers from the Wildstorm universe, the only one that's interested me at all is Stormwatch, which seems to be doing well enough for now to keep Midnighter and Apollo on our pages for another year or so. But I digress.) Assuming standard attrition, and that DC's tolerance for low sales seems to run around 15,000 issues per month for the DCnU titles, I wouldn't expect either Blue Beetle or Voodoo to last more than another year, if that. Batwing is a little harder to predict, because there is the big Night of Owls crossover coming up that may buoy its sales for a bit. And, I assume, a big Leviathan related crossover coming a few months after that, if it can hold on long enough. (Please. It's Morrison, it's Batman, it's the DCnU. The idea that there is NOT a big Leviathan-related crossover coming down the pike is utterly laughable. That it may not come around for another year, however, is not unrealistic, and I don't think Batwing will last another year if it takes that long.)

It will be interesting to see how much more time DC is willing to give those titles, and if they can manage to find an audience before the other shoe drops.

Questions? Comments? Sabots? Sneakers?

Memory is a really weird thing sometimes, especially for stuff that's of no lasting importance. I mean, I have buckets -- just tons and tons and tons -- of neurons dedicated to various pop culture things, like the above song. I hope I'm not unique in that. Oddly, turns out that memory about things of no lasting importance can sometimes be really off.

"Own the Night" is one of my favorite Chaka Khan songs. I couldn't tell you why ... no, actually, I could. It's because it's part of one of the few episodes of Miami Vice that I actually remember. In fact, I bought the Miami Vice soundtrack, back in the mists of prehistory, purely because of that song. (I was buying pretty much everything Chaka Khan recorded, back then. Still do, in fact. But I digress.) The cassette was lost to the normal stresses of play and the shift to CDs and then digital, and losing that one song was the only thing I really regretted about that. (But then, thanks to the digital era MP3, the song came back! Everything old IS new again!) However, assuming the interwebs are to be believed -- and they're always right, aren't they? -- I didn't remember that episode. Not correctly, anyway.

One of the things Miami Vice was known for was doing full length songs as plot-related music videos during an episode -- the song would be commentary on whatever was going on behind and through it. Sometimes with dialogue, sometimes without. I remembered "Own the Night" as taking part during the episode "Rites of Passage", during the scene where Diane, Valerie's younger sister, is seduced into the world of high(ish) end prostitution. Traynor is buying her all sorts of dresses and jewelry and getting her hooked on cocaine, the 80s high style drug. (Because coked out prostitutes were The In Thing in the 80s, and in 80s television.) And as the sparkly dresses and drugs fly willy-nilly about the screen, and Diane is reluctantly convinced to let Traynor pimp her out -- literally -- "Own the Night" plays over the scene.

Except that it didn't. Assuming that the miamivice.wikia.com wiki is accurate, "Own the Night" appears in a similarly themed scene in an entirely different episode, Buddies, and it's in the background, not a full music video treatment.

It's weirdly disquieting to discover that your memory has played you false about something that minor, you know? Makes you wonder what important bits and pieces might have gone missing, or have been misremembered.

I did, however, remember the more significant -- plotwise -- music video from "Rites of Passage" correctly. After a great deal of trouble (and the odd spot of what was, as a purely legal matter, felony kidnapping committed by the police), Diane is convinced to go back to New York with her sister. She flatly refuses to testify against Traynor, saying that she did what she did of her own free will. That's somewhat debatable -- the whole drugs thing, remember -- but because she feels that way, despite having been specifically warned not to contact him, she calls Traynor, tells him where she is, and that she's leaving for New York, never to be in Miami again. Which comes true, if not the way she planned. The scene starts bouncing back and forth between Diane in her rehab, Tubbs and Valerie in bed -- relieved that Diane is taken care of and away from Traynor, if nothing else -- and Traynor taking out a hit on Diane, because he doesn't believe that she won't testify against him and wants to be sure that she can't. To the dulcet strains of Foreigner's "I want to know what love is", Diane dies. And Crockett and Valerie get that awful call. (And that scene is actually available, so I have documented proof that I remembered that one correctly.)

And, just for the hell of it, have some more night-time themed Chaka Khan:

Also, even more for the hell of it but in keeping with the theme, one of my favorite Whitney Houston songs. (Yes, I know, dance dance dance.) Oddly enough, this song isn't heard in its entirety in "The Bodyguard"; it's interrupted by her character getting overwhelmed by some out of control fans after having had death threats made. ("The Bodyguard", musically speaking, is known not only for "I will always love you" -- I prefer Dolly's version myself; that song is meant to be a lament for a love that can't/didn't work, not a big sweeping declamation about a love that didn't/couldn't work -- but for having wangled an Oscar nomination for "I have Nothing", a song that gets all of five seconds of screen time in the background during the film. But I digress. I think.)

Questions? Comments? Ice-cream colored suits?

You know, it's not that I don't get it. It's very clear that the whole corporate "synergy" thing is going on. They figured that, as long as they were rebooting the universe anyway, they might as well bring characters in alignment with those that have been depicted in more popular media. Thus, Green Arrow's background and character design are shifted to match what he had in Smallville. Superman gets to be younger, for much the same reason. (Although also for others.) And Waller gets Bassettified.

It's quite clear that her new character design is taken from Angela Bassett, who portrayed her in the wildly successful Green Lantern film. (... wait, it wasn't wildly successful? But it's got a sequel green-lit already! They don't do that with flops, do they?) Of course, if they wanted to align comics and popular media, then Ryan Reynolds should never have been Green Lantern; after all, the most popular and well known depiction -- at least for those younger men that Warner was trying to go after with that film -- was John Stewart, from the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited television cartoons. Far more people saw those than read Green Lantern comics during the same time period. (A television show with an audience as small as that of the wildly well-selling Justice League #1 reboot comic book -- roughly 200,000, give or take -- would be cancelled after one airing, even on Cartoon Network, which has much smaller audiences than a broadcast network.) And I love Angela Bassett, who reportedly played the hell out of Waller in that film -- allowing that it seemed that she didn't have a lot to do. (I pretty much intensely dislike Hal Jordan, so you would in fact have to pay me to see Green Lantern in any form. In fact, one of the few redeeming lights of Justice League #1 is that Hal looks like an idiot pretty much all the way through ... although, honestly, that's fairly problematic for the storytelling. But I digress.)

But this isn't the sort of thing that's going to lend confidence to the reboot. DC says it wants more women readers, but I can't imagine this will attract them. DC will undoubtedly say that Waller is a minor character in this universe, and that it's a blowup over someone who doesn't have that huge an impact overall, and that's true as far as it goes. But ... she's not a minor character in this title. She runs the department that oversees Suicide Squad, after all.

No doubt the reaction of the overall comics audience will be to just shrug it off and move on. After all, the people who aren't reading Suicide Squad have already had an eyeful of that title's attitude to redesigning its women, right there on the cover. (And I've heard a startling number of otherwise devoted fanboys say they were actually turned off by the Harley Quinn redesign.) So it's not as though this is any sort of huge surprise.

But still, DC, you really should have known better. And you should have done better.

Questions, Comments, etc.?

And, once again, please note: SPOILERS, SWEETIES!

Wonder Woman 614 (Written by J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI and PHIL HESTER/Art by DON KRAMER and WAYNE FAUCHER)

For what it's worth, I'm guessing that Straczynski contributed the outline of the first half of the story, since he provided the outline structure of most of Odyssey. The back half of the story, where all the interesting stuff happens -- or, technically, doesn't, but yet is still more interesting than the front half -- would be all Hester, since DC didn't decide on the nU until after Straczynski was off the title.

One of the things that the Odyssey arc has suffered from is excessive padding. Originally, Straczynski's outline had it ending around issue 610. When Hester was brought on board, DC asked him to extend the arc -- twice, I believe, although I'd have to check that and I'm not sure where I saw the information -- so that it would dovetail into the universe reboot. The padding shows in the previous issue and in this one. In normal comic book pacing, Diana's climactic battle with Nemesis would take only one issue; instead, it got notably stretched in issue 613, so that it could conclude in 614. And, as with several of the other universe-ending issues I've seen in this run (Detective, Power Girl and Zatanna being the most prominent exceptions), the actual story ends early in the issue, making way for a coda that could be entirely anticlimactic. And, in the case of Wonder Woman, it is anticlimactic ... but that's entirely by design. You see, of all of DC's major titles -- Batman and Detective, Action and Superman, Wonder Woman (and, if one must count them, Green Lantern and The Flash) -- Wonder Woman contains the only action in which Flashpoint actually happened.

To be sure, it's all behind the scenes. After all, it would not do to upstage the Big Event, now would it? When last we saw her, Diana was beginning to get the better of Nemesis; she'd managed to arrange it so that Nemesis seemingly killed her, but what that meant was that Nemesis was in contact with her, which enabled Diana to take back that part of her essence that Nemesis had stolen. (...Just run with it. It'll hurt less.) At the end of 613, therefore, Diana is back to herself, with all her memories intact, older, impressively unstabbed, and back in the star-spangled panties of Wonder!

In 614, the fight continues between Nemesis and Diana. Eventually, Diana kills Nemesis. (Something of a side note: why, one wonders, is it that Diana is the only one of DC's major heroes that's allowed to kill and still remain a hero? Granted, most of those she kills are mythological beings: Medusa, the devil, Nemesis, etc. But she did kill Max Lord, although that didn't stick, and he's still pissed off about it. And there's no doubt that, for example, if the Joker decided to try to operate in a city she was protecting -- superheroes are remarkably territorial, in some ways -- she would simply put him down like a rabid dog. But I digress.) However, it turns out that, as with Diana's plan from the previous issue, Nemesis' death was part of her plan all the time, as that would force Diana to take over the role of the Vengeance of the Gods. Diana being Diana, she declines forcefully. In the process, she destroys a magical artifact that explodes! ... and then, for no apparent reason, it explodes again! There are two consecutive frames of a bright green explosion, and then when the smoke clears, Diana stands on Themiscyra ... in the version of the new costume that DC had originally planned for her to use, as shown on the cover illustration for issue 614.

As is not shown on the cover, however, this Diana is clearly younger than the one that went into the explosion. Not the teenager that she was during Odyssey, but also not the more mature woman that she was at the beginning of the issue. She also very clearly remembers everything that happened during Odyssey, and more or less remembers her past. She goes to see her mother, discovering during the process that all the people who died during Odyssey, all of her Amazon sisters, are alive again. Hippolyta comments on her new costume, which produces some understandable confusion in Diana, who rather clearly doesn't remember why she's wearing or how she chose it or anything about it, and yet there it is. And then Diana flies off into her future. It would have been absolutely perfect, except for something entirely out of the creative team's control: DC's public waffling about Diana's costume. Wonder panties? Wonder jeggings? Stars upon h'ars? No stars upon h'ars? It reached the point where Jim Lee, DC co-publisher and artist, did a public drawing at Comic Con of Diana in the star spangled panties, holding the star spangled jeggings, with the caption "For the love of Hera, Dan, make up your mind!" And, as we now know, Dan DiDio did make up his mind, and decided on the star spangled panties look, which meant that the new costume design at the end of this issue was all for naught.

One of the things I really liked about this issue is something a bit small and idiosyncratic: Diana spends the entire last half of the issue being rapturously, transparently happy, if periodically confused about the whole thing. Understandable, of course; she remembers everyone she knows and every place that meant anything to her being dead or destroyed, and yet here it is again. But what I realized in reading that is that we almost never get to see Diana being simply happy for any length of time. Most of that is due to the nature of the stories and of superhero comics; happy heroes make for dull stories, it seems. It's used purely as a contrast, where the writer shows a moment of contentment, and then destroys that happiness somehow. (Witness Diana's prior relationship with Thomas Tresser.) I think she may get to be happy in this issue for longer than I've seen her in all the years I've been reading this title ... which is kind of sad, when you think about it. (And given that Azzarello, her next writer, has said that he's going to be focusing on horror-related themes for Wonder Woman, rather than on pure superheroics, I'm guessing that she doesn't have a lot of happiness in her future.)

The other nice thing about this title is that the coda, instead of being backwards-looking anticlimax, got to be forward looking anticlimax, so to speak. This title is more organically connected to what comes after it through its storyline than any of the other rebooting titles. They leave you looking forward to what happens next, rather than feeling wistful about what came before. That's a good way to go out.

Flashpoint: Project Superman #3 (Lowell Francis, Scott Snyder/Gene Ha; DC)

Flashpoint has two enduring problems as a project. One is intrinsic to the structure -- is, in fact, required -- and the other is just baffling. The intrinsic problem is that we know -- and have known for the entire run of the Flashpoint main series -- that the Flash fails. He fails to completely repair the changes. All he can do is a partial reset, resulting in him losing the love of his life AGAIN, if in a less theoretically permanent way that the last time. And, judging from the teaser quotes that DC is releasing from the upcoming 52 titles, it's beginning to look like Flash may actually know that he's failed, and remember enough to understand how he's failed. Flashpoint itself is a series about partial success -- after all, the Flashpoint universe itself gets reset as well -- but also about the shape of failure; we're reading to see how the Flash's failure produces what we know will be happening. So the predetermined end is one significant issue with Flashpoint.

The other has to do with what that predetermined end has done to the main title and auxiliary titles. Basically, it's meant that the only issue of Flashpoint worth reading is the last one, with the climactic battle/whatever happens between Flash and Reverse Flash. But it's also meant that it's been left to the auxiliary series to show us why we should care about all of this. Flashpoint itself has been bizarrely repetitive and sterile. The most interesting of the tie-ins have been Flashpoint: Knight of Vengeance, featuring Thomas Wayne as Batman and Martha Wayne as the Joker, and Flashpoint: Project Superman, in which Kal's rocket, instead of crashing more or less harmlessly in a field outside a small town in Kansas, came crashing down with a major meteor shower into the major city of Metropolis, causing mayhem, death and destruction everywhere. In "Project Superman", Kal himself, instead of being picked up and raised by a kindly couple, was picked up and raised -- well, imprisoned, mostly, by the US Military, specifically General Lane, Lois' father and the architect, in the current DCU, of the destruction of New Krypton and the death of hundreds of thousands of people. So clearly, this is not going to go well. And, as it happens, Lane somehow caught Doomsday, and used his DNA to create his first super soldier, Sinclair. Doomsday being ... well, Doomsday, this also Does Not Go Well, and Sinclair goes slowly mad, eventually resulting in Lane imprisoning him in the Phantom Zone. A decade or so later, Thomas Wayne Batman, the Flash, Cyborg and others break into the project Superman HQ, where a major battle has clearly taken place (in the last Booster Gold, we see that the damage was a result of Doomsday waking up, as well as Sinclair breaking free of the Zone), and freeing the imprisoned Kal ... who promptly flies way far away from his prison.

In this particular issue (thought I'd never get there, didn't you?), Kal realizes that he can't just leave things alone. That he has to try to help out in some way. He searches for Lois, with whom he became infatuated when they were both young children, and finds her in the remains of London/New Themiscyra, where the Amazons have discovered that she was an agent of the resistance and are trying to hunt her down. (Side note: Have I mentioned how very TIRED I am of the Amazons becoming the bad guys every time the DCU seems to need something major reset lately? ... Oh, I have? Well, carry on, then.) He saves her from the initial attack, and then basically slugs it out with the attacking Amazons. This being his first major battle of any sort, he lacks the experience to know how to go about it -- and, for one of the few times ever, we see Kal deliberately killing someone. Unfortunately, certain aspects of the battle do Not End Well, which is all I will say directly about that.

This issue evoked all the reasons that Flashpoint matters in the DCU, in a way that Flashpoint itself has not done to date. We know what Superman is supposed to be. We see him trying to become that person, in a terribly short time, despite having no training, no experience, no Jonathan or Martha Kent to teach him right and wrong and how not to scare or damage the fragile humans he'll be guarding. We know what his relationship with Lois is supposed to be. And this issue makes you want that all back, and the only way to get it, or something like it, is for Kal to figure out how to join the battle ... and yet, we already know that it won't quite work. The writing and art were perfect in this series, which managed to actually make you care about Flashpoint, which was no small feat.

Batman: Gates of Gotham #5 (SCOTT SNYDER and KYLE HIGGINS; Art and covers by TREVOR MCCARTHY)

The way this title ends makes me wonder if (1) it wasn't originally meant to be part of the main Batman title, and (2) if perhaps it was also meant to be Scott Snyder's initial Batman arc before the reboot was planned. I wonder because the ending makes absolutely no sense as part of a miniseries, but makes much more sense as something that was meant to be part of the main title, and to dovetail into Batman Inc. (about which more later).

The main action of the story goes more or less as you know it must. Dick figures out that, yes, there is a surviving Gates of Gotham, a descendant of the designers of the city, and he's completely off his rocker, because insanity runs in the family. (How you have technologically induced insanity -- one of the things that Dick notes very clearly is that the suit that allowed the Gates to wander around the bottom of Gotham Harbor has problems that produce prolonged oxygen deprivation and hence insanity [although I always thought that produced death, but whatever] -- that somehow runs in the family is something best ignored.) Cass comes up with an ingenious solution for dealing with the bombs at the base of the bridge and retaining wall that keeps the city from flooding, a solution that even gets her some respect from Damian. Tim is sidelined by a concussion for the length of this issue, and has only a brief conversation with Cass at the end.

That conversation, along with the one that Dick has with Bruce, is what makes me wonder if perhaps "Gates" wasn't originally meant as part of the main series. In her conversation with Tim, Cass clearly indicates that she wants to come back to Gotham. And in his conversation with Bruce, Dick says that getting through this crisis, and how he did it, shows him that he can really be Batman .... and Bruce starts making noises that indicate that, now that he's got Batman Inc. set up, he's going to settle back in Gotham, so there won't be any need for Dick to be Batman any more. Which, to put it mildly, makes less than no sense; the city has been doing just fine with two Batmen in residence. But, for Inc. related purposes, as well as joint marketing with "The Dark Knight Rises" coming out next year, DC needed to have only one guy under the cowl in Gotham, and that had to be Bruce.

(Purely a side note: would someone please explain to me why anybody lives in Gotham? As far as I can tell, in the DCU, most other major cities on the planet have one, maybe two superheroes. Gateway City and/or Washington DC have Wonder Woman. Opal City has Starman and Stargirl. Metropolis has Superman and Black Lightning. Central City and Coast City and Star City had a Lantern, a Flash or four (well, they're a family, so that happens), a Green Arrow, something like that. New York City had Power Girl (and, OK, sometimes the rest of the JSA, but usually just her). Gotham has, at last census: Green Lantern the first (Alan Scott), Batman the first and second, Robin 5, Red Robin (formerly Robin 3), Batgirl the third (formerly Spoiler and Robin 4), Oracle, the five Birds of Prey plus Creote and Savant, Manhunter, and I'm sure I'm forgetting someone. To be sure, only Black Canary has any sort of meta power, and hers is somewhat limited if she doesn't want to blast her teammates. But still. A city dangerous enough to need a minimum of THIRTEEN extralegal vigilantes? Why would anyone stay there if they could leave? And yet, Gotham has a fairly large and wealthy elite. But I digress.)

Batman, Incorporated #8 (Morrison/Clark/Beatty)

From what I've seen, this issue has impressively divided people. Either you love it or you hate it. Sadly, I'm in the latter camp.

Basically, what happens is that Bruce is conducting a virtual meeting with people that he wants to invest in his Internet 3.0, using a demo version of Internet 3.0 itself to hold the meeting with the investors in different cities. Only it turns out that one of the investors is a double agent for Leviathan, and has compromised the meeting, somehow trapping the investors in the meeting against their will ... or maybe just telling them that they're trapped. Since we get absolutely no sense of the equipment being used, how they're connecting, or any specificity to the threat, who knows? In any event, just when the virus/malware seems to be taking over Internet 3.0, enter Oracle to save the day! (Yes, yes, the Oracle that's supposed to be long dead by now. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and comic book continuity, don'tcha know.) And, well, her internet avatar is kind of cool ... if insufficiently detailed. In fact, the art for the entire issue suffers from a simultaneous detail overload in the background, while not having enough detail for the foreground characters themselves.

It's fairly clear that very few concessions were made to the universe reboot in this title. It's clearest of all in the repeated references to Batgirl, Stephanie Brown in this case. Oracle mentions (inside the video game, where the other people can hear, which WTF?) that she's been getting messages from Batgirl in the British boarding school where she was placed. Bruce mentions that she's been doing some good investigation and finding a lot of information over there. And at the end, there's another one of those big pulpy between-frame things, saying that Batman and Batgirl will be back next time, investigating the School For Terror! ... only, if you read Batgirl, you know that investigation never happened. It got cut short by the universe reboot; Stephanie got over to London, had an awesome one-and-done teamup with Squire, but then had to come back to Gotham, because her title was ending and they needed to wrap up her investigation into the speedsters and her father's new criminal activities. And they were very clear that she hadn't been able to do anything with the boarding school; she didn't have time. Unfortunately, Morrison's story clearly needed the information that Stephanie was supposed to provide, so he just needed to proceed as though she'd done what she was sent there to do. Which would be fine if they'd been able to convey, at any point in either title, what the hell she was sent there to do. Instead, we get drive-by infodumps that seem both irrelevant and impossible.

The most unforgivable part of the text, however, is that we're simply told at the end who is apparently behind Leviathan, the conspiracy that Bruce has spent the past eight issues setting up Batman Inc. to take down. We've been given no real lead-in for this, haven't seen him investigating anything that would lead to this conclusion. It's just dropped down on us as though it should be perfectly obvious. On the one hand, I suspect that this sudden reveal was one of the results of the reboot -- we needed to know what Bruce thinks is going on before the next story arc starts, and there wasn't enough time to develop the story the way it should have been before the reboot. On the other hand ... really, Morrison? REALLY? THAT'S the villain? I'm really hoping that Bruce is wrong, and that he's been deceived about who it is, but given that Morrison has said that he views his Batman run as one big interconnected story ... I'm rather afraid he's serious. Which is truly unfortunate.

Gotham City Sirens 26 (Galloway/Guinaldo/Ruggiero/Fernandez)

At first glance, this seems to be the most profoundly unnecessary of the conclusions of the Bat titles. And yet, turned out that in some ways, it was the most impressive.

I will admit, I only started reading this series by accident. I meant to get only the issue that was part of the "Judgement on Gotham" crossover that ended Azrael, but instead, I got the issue before that, in which Harley decided to go to Arkham to free Mistah J, against the firmly expressed desires of Selina and Ivy. And it was interesting enough that I just kept reading. One of the most fascinating things to see is that, if she weren't hamstrung by her extreme devotion to the Joker, Harley would be a very effective criminal/vigilante/whatever she is. She plotted the attack on Arkham, successfully carried it out by herself, successfully freed the Joker, and they'd have gotten clean away if he hadn't felt that wreaking havoc on the way was more important and she hadn't been so devoted to him that she hung around just because. In any event, at the end of the last issue, it seemed that everything was over. Harley had been caught and was going to stay in Arkham, and Selina had drugged Ivy to make sure she was caught and stayed in Arkham, as repayment for Ivy trying to torture Batman's secret identity out of her.

And yet, at the beginning of this issue, there they are, all fighting it out on the streets of Gotham. How did the Harley and the Ivy get out of Arkham? (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Who knows? Who cares? Arkham has such a revolving door it doesn't really matter how anyone gets out; that has to be the most insecure maximum security facility ever created. (Not helped, of course, by having been designed and rebuilt by the insane Jeremiah Arkham as Black Mask, so no doubt there are secret exits everywhere.) But turns out it's the confrontation they had to have.

Harley and Ivy are furious at what they see as Selina's betrayal. In turn, Selina tells them some home truths about how the team got together and why Batman allowed them to operate -- Selina was used to control them, and the three of them in turn helped contain the minor criminals so that Batman could concentrate on the major ones. Harley actually takes this surprisingly well, all things considered. Ivy ... does not. How badly does she take it? Put it this way: at one point, as things are getting started, Bruce arrives on the scene and tells Gordon that unless they start destroying Gotham, the police need to stay out of this mess.

And then... Ivy Destroys Gotham.

Understand, I'm not just talking about breaking up a few streets or throwing around a few cars. I mean, she does that, yes, but she does so much more. She uses her plants to bring down skyscraper after skyscraper. She breaks buildings. Fire, fire everywhere. In short, Ivy Destroys Gotham. The downtown parts, anyway. All these times Ivy's fought Batman, she's been holding back, and now she lets loose. It's a good thing for Gotham that the universe is getting rebooted, because there's just not much of midtown left by the end of this issue.

The other reason that it's a good thing that Gotham is getting rebooted is the confrontation at the end. It would be terribly difficult to sustain a Bruce/Selina relationship after the way they square off at each other at the end. There are some things that can't be forgiven, and helping the person who destroyed Gotham to get away would likely be one of those things. As would the rather heroic amount of manipulation that Bruce exercised over the Sirens. (One of the questions that's asked but never really answered is, does it count as manipulation if you know they're doing it, but allow it anyway, because you don't disagree with the goals?)

This does make me slightly -- and I do mean slightly -- more curious about the revived Catwoman title. And it helps me to see how it might be possible to choose Harley as a leader of the Suicide Squad. (Still doesn't make me want to read that title or see her in that outfit, though.)

Batman: The Dark Knight #5 of 5 (David Finch/Jason Fobok): In wihich Bruce succeeds by failing ... somehow. Dawn Golden dies, but somehow Etrigan gets his power back and ... I don't know. Honestly, I really have no idea what happened there. The art is wonderfully horrific and evocative, but the writing is just a rushed mess. (Although I do love the idea of Etrigan and Bruce as the "Demonic Duo.") And there's a coda at the end that pulls back in one of the earlier plot threads in a way that indicates that this title will ALSO be ignoring the fact that it's supposed to be rebooting after this.

Action Comics #904 (Cornell/Rocafort): As mentioned, I didn't read the entirety of this issue. After all, the only things I could care less about than Doomsday would be the New Gods and Darkseid, so I really don't care how Supes went about defeating Doomsy (as Booster Gold calls him). But I did read the last few pages, just to see how they'd send Supes out. Would they give him an ironically inspirational end like Kara? Just finish out the story like Detective? Something kind of unnecessary yet sort of awesome like Gotham City Sirens? And the answer was ... none of the above, actually. The last few pages of the issue featured Clark and Lois in a restaurant, having a startlingly public conversation about his secret identity and how it sometimes constrains him. And Lois reminds him that, more or less, he's really Clark, and that's the aspect of Superman that people relate to and blah blah blah. Basically, they remind us why Clark and Lois fit together as a couple, just in time to rip them apart next month. How nice of them! (Seriously, what does DC have against stable relationships? Every single formerly stable relationship from the DCU is gone in the DCnU.) It's a sad way for DC's other flaghship title to go out. At least 'Tec concluded on an awesome note for the Gordons. This doesn't conclude on an awesome note for anyone, from the looks of things.

Next time, the end of the old and the start of the new. And maybe one or two things that AREN'T DC.

DC Universe: The Source: Blog Archive -- Geoff Johns and Jim Lee announce identity of JUSTICE LEAGUE’s first villain

You can click over and see who it is yourself, if you don't mind the spoiler.

For myself, they could scarcely have picked a villain more designed to make me drop the title after the first issue or two. It's much too soon after that character's most recent appearance, even allowing that wasn't in JLA. And that character's defeat was rather ... emphatic.

Mind, it's going to be an interesting exercise in continuity rejiggering. If DC is insisting that everything that we know happened -- albeit sometimes a bit differently than we remembered -- but Batman and the current generation of heroes have been active for only about five years AND Justice League #1 takes place five years in the past ... how exactly can all that possibly work? What will they do? Have Supes and Bats and Wonder Woman thinking, "Wait ... I remember that we did this before. And yet we couldn't have. Someone has messed with my mind!" Seriously, it's going to be interesting to see what they do on that level. (My money is on "serenely ignoring the fact that they said that everything we remember happened, because if they don't ignore that, their heads will explode as they try to wrestle with revised continuity.")

And in conclusion (watch only the first two minutes if you're not interested in Secret Six):

Question? Comments? Cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos, etc.?

And please note, as before: SPOILERS, SWEETIES!

Batman 713 (Nicieza/Scott/Sampere/Bressan/Wong/Perotta/Ramos)

In which DC continues to hand off finale issues of major titles to thoroughly unexpected people, and all -- and I do mean ALL -- of Damian's character development occurs.This is, from what I can see elsewhere, the sort of issue that you're either going to love or hate.

So, as I mentioned in the previous entry, Nicieza has had what could charitably be called a wildly uneven run with Red Robin, and ended it with a frustratingly good issue which is clearly not going to get followed up on in any substantive way, at least not any time soon. He continues this by closing out Batman with an interestingly structured issue that reviews the histories and relationships of Batmen and Robins through the years. A history, one might add, that excludes Stephanie Brown as Robin entirely, though we do get a single headshot of her as Batgirl. Ah, DC editorial, you're so goddamn consistent.

On the one hand, I liked the issue; it's interesting to see the relationships of Batmen and Robins through the lens of that particular narrator. On the other hand, that this particular narrator would be telling this particular story in this particular way to those particular people is entirely unbelievable. It just wouldn't happen. And we're simply told what Damian has learned about being Robin; it's not character development we've really ever seen anywhere, except, to some extent, in his relations with Stephanie. (Which makes her prospective erasure from the DCnU even more grating.)

Another peculiar thing is that according to DC previously, all of the events of the previous 713 issues have actually happened, if over an intensely more compressed period. (Apparently Bruce has managed something like five Robins in five years, because being Robin is now a "very intense internship" ... which, actually, can't be argued. All of the Robins but the current one have gone on to independent careers -- allowing, of course, that DC declines to state whether Stephanie even exists in the nU.) They said, earlier, that the ending issues of Batman and Robin, Detective and Batman would set up the reasons why Dick goes back to being Nightwing. But nothing was set up in this issue. Nothing was set up in the other titles, either. It looks like something that's just going to happen as a result of the reset, and then maybe -- MAYBE -- get explained then, or even later.

Weirdly, I do like the issue. But it can't be argued that, in some ways, it's deeply unsatisfying. And I can't figure out what function it's supposed to serve. If you've read Batman and the various Bat titles, you know all this stuff. (Except the bit about what Damian's learned, of course.) If you haven't, and someone gave this to you, it would be a good introduction to the characters, up to a point ... except that everything's changing next month, and none of this will quite apply. So ... what, then?

Zatanna 16 (Beechen/Ibanez)

In which Zatanna's title takes its final bow, in preparation for her to shift to Justice League Dark in the nU.

Basically, this issue is all about Zatanna's quest for sleep before her next show in Washington, and all the things that interrupt it. She starts out traveling by plane from Frankfort to Gotham to DC (which would be some epic traveling for one day), and isn't able to get to sleep until the plane's most of the way back to Gotham. Then the plane's engine sucks in a bird and dies. (Both engine and bird.) She wakes up, fixes the engine with a spell, then tries to sleep again, but then they're on approach to Gotham. It takes an extremely long time to get through customs, and when she gets home, she just wants to sleep.She's then interrupted by an unexpected and quite unwelcome guest, who steals something from her and whom she's then forced to pursue. The chase itself is very funny, and the punishment she metes out when she finally catches him -- hey, it's the last issue, it's not spoiling much to say she catches him -- is ... parhaps appropriate. What she does to her poor alarm clock on the last page, however, is entirely unwarranted.

Despite not being written by Dini, the issue catches most of what works about this title. The superheroics are taken reasonably seriously, but there's still some humor, as well. I hope that this title continues in the DCnU, but somehow, I can't see DC giving a second tier character two titles. One can but hope.

Power Girl 27 (Sturges/Prasetya)

In which Kara is given 60 seconds to accomplish three tasks: save a friend being held by bad guys, save a girl fishing about to be threatened by bad guys, or save the Leaning Tower of Pisa and a bunch of tourists from another set of bad guys. Kara being Kara, it's probably not spoiling anything to say that, despite only being given time to do one of the above, she somehow manages all three, and to figure out how to trace it back to the chief bad guy responsible, besides.The story isn't so much about what she does as how she does it. And, clearly, she does it with style. And, as the store clerk told me, the last line is frustratingly perfect, given that DC continues to decline to state whether or not Kara exists in the nU.

And now, a brief encomium:

Of all the titles that are ending (or, you know, "ending") in the DCU, there are three that I'm really going to miss ... and they're probably not anything you'd be expecting. The three titles that I'm going to miss the most are: Batgirl, Power Girl, and Zatanna. None of them front-line heros, true. But still, the titles that I'll miss the most and hope to see again.

But, I hear many (many MANY) people I know ramping up to say, "Batgirl" isn't canceled! Haven't you heard all the kerflaffle about Barbara Gordon taking up the cowl again? And how dare you miss this title! The One True Batgirl (after Babs, of course) will always be Cassandra Cain! Stephanie Brown is but literally a pale imitation! To which I can say: (1) Yes, of course I've heard that Barbara's taking back the cowl, and I look forward to reading that version; (2) I never read Cassandra as Batgirl, so I can't miss what I didn't know, and besides, (3) even if Cassandra was the Bagirliest Batgirl who ever Batted, from what I've seen of the character elsewhere, her title could never EVER have worked the way this Batgirl title did.

The thing that these three titles had in common, and the reason why I'll miss them? Their characters enjoyed their lives. They took the superheroing seriously, of course -- lives depended on that -- but they enjoyed the superheroing as well. (Stephanie's joy at the variety of batarangs that Barbara had made for her was really wonderful to read.) The writers of these titles made sure to show other aspects of their lives besides the heroing, and to make it clear that, frustrating as trying to balance them could be, they enjoyed those aspects of their lives as well. Zatanna liked being a stage magician as well as a wielder of real magics. Kara enjoyed being Karen Starr and what she could do as that character as well as being Power Girl. Stephanie enjoyed being Stephanie Brown, college student, as well as being Batgirl, thwacker and gooperanger of ne'er do wells (including, as mentioned in the previous review, her own father).

In most titles, you really rarely see superheroes enjoying their lives. Superman, for example, would be best defined by his sense of responsibility for ... well, everyone, really. Oh, yes, he loves Lois ... but, well, he's losing her, isn't he? So now we get a few years of him pining and moping until she deigns to notice him, or he goes on to someone else. So nice to see, really. And it could reasonably be said that NOBODY in the Bat corner of the DCU has ever enjoyed their lives, except for Dick on occasion -- and, as Damian once said, since he became Batman, Dick's been "disturbingly jolly". (It will, I must admit, be interesting to see how the partnership of Bruce and Damian -- a.k.a Grim and Grimmer -- works out. The idea behind Robin, at least to some degree, is that he provides balance to Bruce's unrelenting seriousness. How does that relationship work when Robin can't do that? But I digress.) The Lanterns have been at unrelenting war with themselves, with the Black Lanterns, with themselves again, for several years now. Nobody over there is having a good time with anything, ever. And Wonder Woman's spent the past year and change trying to figure out just who she is/was. Fun and enjoyment are exceedingly rare qualities in the DCU, and I wonder if maybe it was almost all concentrated in those three titles.

To be sure, all three titles had their grimly serious moments. Kara spent the last year slammed into a Brightest Day crossover without portfolio, and dealing with the effects of that in the issues that weren't explicit crossovers. And her fun and easy semi-sidekick relationship with Atlee entirely disappeared, along with Atlee herself; I guess maybe Terra was doing something Brightest Day-related over in the Teen Titans/Titans titles. On the other hand, she did get herself an interesting technogeek with Nicco, so that helped. Zatanna had to deal with Brother Night to start her title, and then an interesting Brother Night sequence was being set up near the end, but got aborted by the relaunch -- another one of those things that made me wonder how much notice some of the creators got of what was happening. And in the issues leading up to the finale, Batgirl had to work with a deadly criminal conspiracy headed up by her father. Seriousness a-plenty ... but still, here and there, a sense of levity and fun that I'm going to miss.

As mentioned before, it's not clear whether or how two of these characters are continuing in the DCnU. DC has flatly refused to say anything at all about Kara or Stephanie. (Gail Simone has mentioned wanting to do something with Stephanie and Cass if DC doesn't have other plans. I do hope they let her do that.) Zatanna is going to be a featured player in the new Justice League Dark, as noted above. That said, given that "Dark" is in the title, I'm not expecting much in the way of levity or lightness. And on top of that, Zatanna is the victim of one of the three or four most misbegotten concept redesigns in the entire nU. She's going from this

In any event: it looks like, for a while, they're going to be taking all of the fun out of the DCnU. I hope, maybe in the second or third wave of titles, they let some of it seep back in.

Questions? Comments? A stray set of fishnets, perhaps?

This past week, DC began the roll-up of not one, but two comic book universes. Taking out the DCU in favor of DCnU gets all the attention, of course, but less noted is that they're also doing in the end of First Wave, their attempt at an alternate-earth pulp universe. It never got anything remotely resembling a reasonable promotional push, plus, let's face it, a universe with Batman Month One, the Spirit and Doc Savage, as well as unrecognizable versions of Black Canary and other heroes, was always going to be a hard sell. And, well, it didn't. Sell, that is. Pity; Doc Savage was fun and pulpy, as required, and the Spirit had several good issues. (First Wave itself, however -- that universe's version of Justice League -- had problems. Frequently.) Any road, let's look at the big guns first. (NOTE: Superman shut down this week, but since I don't read it any more and "Grounded" was an absolutely deadly storyline to go out with -- a truly ludicrous concept that should have been shot down before it got started -- I pretty much don't care.)

Oh, and I should say right now: SPOILERS, SWEETIES! I'll try not to give away anything too important, but I make no promises. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to spoil most of the final issues relentlessly, in order to talk about them at all. So I say again, FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, HERE BE SPOILERS!

Got that? Good.

Detective Comics 881 (Scott Snyder/Jock/Francesco Francavilla)

'Tec goes out in style, with a great finish to the story in which Jim Gordon is forced to face the fact that his son is both insane and evil, and that Barbara was right not to trust him all along. The really remarkable thing about this entire story arc is the extent to which Batman was sidelined in the very last arc of his very first title, with center stage being yielded to the Gordons. And, despite the fact that I've been reading primarily things Bat in the DCU these past few years, this story arc managed to tell me some things that I hadn't known. I didn't know that Jim Gordon's first wife was still alive, for example, or that Barbara had been named for her, or what had become of James, who disappeared so long ago that I'd almost forgotten he even existed.

In this final issue, Gordon has been confronted with incontrovertible evidence of his son's trying to poison infant formula to help create more sociopaths like himself. Barbara, while appalled, isn't at all surprised, because she never trusted James. Before Gordon can get to her, James kidnaps her, and does something to her that means that while she can free herself, doing so will mean her death fairly quickly thereafter. (Somewhat incidentally, we also discover that James figured out Dick's identity as Batman and Barbara's as Oracle. There is apparently nobody in Gotham that hasn't figured out that Dick is now Batman. Something to do with his disturbing jollity, no doubth. But I digress.)

Batman -- the Dick Grayson edition -- helps Jim figure out where

The amazing thing about this issue, on a technical level, is that the core of it is a monologue: James talking at Barbara. And somehow, Snyder, Jock, and Francavilla manage to keep that utterly riveting. To be sure, Batman does show up in time to rescue Barbara -- but not until she's done most of the rescuing herself. (And, frankly, in the process she does something to James that he could only survive in a comic book; in the real world, he'd be dead. Of course, so would she.) And then ... And then, Jim Gordon takes James out in a way that is absolutely saturated with irony ... though, of course, he can't know that, at that point.

It was truly a magnificent story arc, and it makes me look forward to seeing what Snyder and friends (different friends, I believe) will do with Batman volume 2.

Red Robin 26 (Nicieza/To/McCarthy)

This has been, overall, one of the more frustrating Bat titles from day one. Despite having basically one author for the entirety of its existence, the quality of Red Robin has been wildly uneven. It's varied between things that Nicieza really really shouldn't have done -- the last arc with the near-rape of Tim comes to mind, as does almost everything that involved Tam Fox -- with things that worked surprisingly well, even when they shouldn't have (Tim more or less punking Ra's al-Ghul, Tim getting rescued from the aforementioned near-rape by Cass, Prudence). This final issue, a done in one, manages to hit both sides. In this issue, Tim decides to go after Captain Boomerang, murderer of his father and resurrected by the White Lantern in "Brightest Day". And it's very clear, throughout the issue, that Tim has not decided whether or not to kill Boomerang -- or rather, whether to let Boomerang get killed because of the elaborate plot he's set up. And he's so good at predicting how people will act and react that he knows, absolutely knows, what Boomerang will do, what Victor Frieze will do when Boomerang pulls him into the plot, and how things will turn out if he does absolutely nothing but let it play out.

The downside of this issue is that Boomerang has been alive -- or re-alive, so to speak -- for pretty much the entire run of Red Robin. After all, the series is only a shade over two years old, and Blackest Night/Brightest Day were over a year ago. And Tim's shown absolutely no sign of knowing or caring about Boomerang; in fact, Red Robin contains the only line in any of the Bat titles (excepting Birds of Prey, which was a direct Brightest Day tie-in) acknowledging that either Blackest Night or Brightest Day even happened, and it was about the trauma of fighting his zombiefied parents, not any acknowledgement of Boomerang (who, to be fair, wasn't alive again yet). Thing is, this is not badly written; in fact, it's very well written. It's just so out of nowhere that it jars, badly. It's not that it feels false -- every frame of this feels like something Tim might do -- it's just unconnected to anything that's come before it in this series.

The upside ... the terribly, terribly frustrating upside of this issue are the last three pages, where Tim is confronted by Batmen Dick and Bruce (with a silent two-frame cameo from Damian). They have very different reactions to what Tim did and didn't do. And Tim's reaction to that points toward a really fascinating direction that Red Robin could have gone, one that could have brought him into direct conflict with various Batmen, and which could have defined the future of Gotham in some interesting ways.

And all of that is getting wiped away by the reboot. It's fairly clear, given that he's coming back first in Teen Titans, that Tim is being reset to be a bit younger. We'll have to wait and see if they've decided to leave him living out of the mansion and over a renovated Crime Alley, or if he's back under Bruce's thumb.

So, overall: Interesting, fascinating, frustrating and confusing. Which is the sort of reaction that kept me reading the title, really.

Batgirl 24 (Bryan Q. Miller/Pere Perez)

This issue does something really remarkable: the actual plot, the storyline that we've been following for the past several issues ... is entirely resolved in the first seven pages. Apparently, this was all the Cluemaster's way of both escaping Blackgate and getting Stephanie to come for a visit, because of course he figured out who Batgirl was early in her tenure. (Really, so many peole have figured out the various Bats' secret identities, you wonder why they even bother.) He attacks her with the Black Mercy rose, but she manages to foil his escape before she goes under. Once she brings herself out of the pollen's influence, there follow two pages of a really wonderful scene with Stephanie and her mother. And finally, the issue closes with Barbara noting that Stephanie brought herself out of the pollen haze herself, before the cure could take effect, and wondering what it was that Stephanie saw. And Stephanie reminisces silently, and we see what she saw.

There follows single page splash page after splash page of what Stephanie saw. Fighting criminals with Oracle and Wendy/Proxy in the background. A strange, fable-like land with Stephanie, Miss Martian, Supergirl, Stargirl and Bulleteer fighting off ... dwarves? Stephanie as a blue lantern, Damian as a red lantern (my, that's ... apt), and Barbara as a green lantern, fighting off black lanterns. A vision of herself in 1944 with Cass and Barbara as Batgirls triumphant along with the Blackhawks ... and so on and so on. "You know ... stuff", as Stephanie puts it. It's really, really lovely and wonderful. And, as Stephanie says, swinging off into the dawn, "It's only the end if you want it to be."

Batman and Robin 26 (David Hine/Greg Tocchini/Andrei Bressan)

Yeah, so ... that was odd.

To the extent that there is one, the story is that Batman and Robin have gone to Paris to help Nightrunner, Batman Inc. Paris affiliate, recapture some very dangerous criminals that have escaped from Le Jardin Noir, the French version of Arkham. Mostly, it's an excuse for Tocchini and Bressan, with able assistance from Artur Fujita on colors, to flex their artistic muscles. And flex them they do! I don't think I've ever seen art this trippy or this consciously referencing other art works in a Batman title before. In any event, the art is spectacular, the story -- to the extent there is one -- seems like it would be more at home in Batman Incorporated, except that Morrison would never write something like this. It's fascinating to look at; I'm not sure how good it is overall.

Birds of Prey (Marc Andreyko, Billy Tucci/Melo/Mayer/Ferreira)

This is one of those title closers that really does make me wonder how much advance notice creators had of the universe reboot. Understand: this two issue arc was really very good, and highlighted how seriously out-of-place Xinda sometimes is, as a person who is young when she really shouldn't be. It's a fun, rip-snorting action adventure issue -- with Nazis and Boys from Brazil, even. It's just a very weird way to close out the title, with two of the characters that have been major players through the new volume missing (Hawk and Dove), as well as being written by someone other than Gail Simone.

Booster Gold 47 (Jurgens/Leonardi/Ho/Rapmund)

Yeah, so ... remember me mentioning that there were a few low notes in this final aria? This would be one of them, right here. If I were a regular reader of Booster Gold -- which, thankfully, I wasn't -- this would be an intensely frustrating issue, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I picked this issue up because it had been billed as a lead-in to Flashpoint 5, with Booster Gold maybe joining the fight with Flash. (Note the use of the word "maybe".) It was actually shockingly accessible, for the final issue of a title I wasn't reading. I think it was constructed with readers like me in mind, because most things were explained very well -- to the point of the front end of the issue being a bit exposition heavy. But, with the sole exception of wondering who Alexandra Gianopoulos was and what she had to do with anything, I wasn't confused by anything happening in that issue at all ... which is sort of sad, actually. It wasn't a done-in-one, it was the end of a parallel story to Flashpoint, and it should have been completely baffling. But it wasn't. And it went out with a whimper, not a bang. It basically said, yep, whole thing, completely pointless. Not worth saying more than that about it, really: bad concept, badly executed, and the character, much as I dislike him, deserved a better ending to his series than that.

THUNDER Agents 10 (Spencer/McDaid/Grell/Dragotta): Volume 1 ends with Colleen dealing with her mother, the Black Widow, more or less as you knew she would and hoped she wouldn't. On the upside, she doesn't quite do it herself; on the downside, she makes sure it gets done, so ... It's a very strong issue, if thoroughly appalling. And near the end, we find out that Colleen has one more secret, although we don't find out what it is. I suspect that secret is what volume 2 of THUNDER Agents, allegedly starting in November, will be built around. (It's never been at all clear that THUNDER Agents takes place in the DCU, but it's getting a restart nonetheless.)

Will Eisner's The Spirit 17, "Black and White Big Finish Issue" (Chaykin/Pfeifer/Levitz/Bolland/Russell/Garcia-Lopez): In which the second First Wave title rolls up its carpet and goes home. And, as advertised, all of the stories have black-and-white art. The Chaykin/Bolland story, which I am about to THOROUGHLY spoil, deals with cheating politicians, a gaggle of trophy mistresses (really, that's the only way to describe them) and killer bodybuilder lesbians, so ... yeah, that's all I got to say about that one. Oh, except that when he catches the murderer, The Spirit says he'll "drag your tight little ass home to justice." (Emphasis theirs, thank you VERY much.) So ... yeah, very much in character! The Levita/Garcia Lopez story, which really is much more in character, deals with the Spirit helping a newspaper stand vendor who's being harrassed by shakedown artists with an interesting scheme for making money. The Pfeiffer/Russell story involves the Spirit destroying pretty much every well known work of Western art -- most of which couldn't have been put into the same museum at the same time -- in his pursuit of a criminal, with, of course, a catch at the end. The Chaykin story is grating (to put it mildly), but given the others, not a bad way to go out.

Doc Savage 17 (Jones/Winslade): Oddly enough, despite the fact that DC has now concluded every other title in the First Wave universe and the main DCU concludes on August 24 -- marked with the final issues of volume 1 of Action, and volume whatever of Justice League and Wonder Woman, among others -- Doc Savage either doesn't end any time soon, or won't have a real final issue at all. Issue 17 -- which is action-packed pulpy adventure filled with Mongol warriors, a group of living Neanderthals, attempts at reviving Genghis Khan (Temujin), and renegade former Soviets, of all possible things, and an unspeakable amount of somehow coherent fun -- ends with a "To be concluded" notice, but issue 18 isn't scheduled for anytime before early November, at the moment. Heaven only knows when we'll see it; they may be going the Republic serial route and just leaving us hung up on the cliff, so to speak. Which ... honestly, not a terrible way to go out, if profoundly irritating. The issue itself is exactly what a Doc Savage issue should be: stuffed with action from cover to cover.

Questions? Comments? Cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos, information about Doc Savage?

The second item is included purely because the headline is perfect; whoda thunk NPR had it in 'em? Apart from that, let me just say that I love the way ABC structures their announcement that they're axing the two oldest remaining soaps on TV. The thing that's actually important to viewers is stuck in the headline -- which is good, no argument there -- and then basically not mentioned again for the next five paragraphs. Granted, once they get back around to it, they do a good job of talking about the history of the shows and the accomplishments of their people. But still.

Have to admit, the cancellation of All My Children (AMC) makes me sort of sad, even though I haven't watched AMC regularly in eons. I can remember, way way way way back in the mists of prehistory, when I was a young'un, watching the early episodes of All My Children while my great grandmother did ... whatever she was doing. (Hey, I was, like four or five. I had no clue. Ironing, mostly, I think, since that was something she could do and watch television at the same time. And this was something that we were Absolutely Not To Tell My Mother About, since she would hardly approve of me watching grownups behave in such scandalous ways! (As long as it wasn't scary or bloody -- something I had real problems handling until I was much older -- my mother wouldn't actually have cared, since I wouldn't really have understood what was going on.) I remember teenaged Erica Kane going after Philip the policeman, who was really in love with Tara, who was in love with Philip but also sort of really kind of in love with someone else ... And then Erica somehow managed to inveigle Philip into bed with her and deliberately got pregnant. But then the baby died in utero, and she had to carry it to term knowing that it was dead, but not telling Philip because as soon as she did, he'd leave her for Tara -- which he did. And I can sort of vaguely remember that showing a young woman who had UnMarried SEX! was a big deal at the time, because it was something that was Simply Not Done in soaps at the time, so clearly she had to be punished with a really gruesome type of miscarriage. (Soaps are very very moral in some very very odd ways.)

Many years later, Donna Pescow played one of the first lesbian characters on daytime on AMC -- and that really was scandalous at the time. The show also had the first same sex kiss on daytime, between Erica's aforementioned daughter Bianca and another woman, although that wouldn't come for another 20 years after Pescow's doctor had come and gone. AMC then developed a really spectacular case of cold feet, and pulled way back on showing any sort of physical affection between Bianca and Lena; Bianca was later raped by another character and bore his child and ... well. AMC was, in some ways, very ground-breaking for its time; in some ways, it was clearly very much of its time, regardless of when that time was.

Kept coming back every now and again for the odd story line here and there. Something would tweak my interest, and I'd wonder how they were going to handle something, or how they could possibly pull it off. The one I remember most is Ericafest, which was well over 10 years ago now. A run of episodes where Erica was ... in a coma, I think, and the ghost of Mike Roy -- whom Susan Lucci has repeatedly said that she believes was the true love of Erica's life, and who was killed off before they could really have much of a relationship -- took her on a "This was your life/Ghost of Christmas past" style tour of her life. Went on for weeks. As I recall, there were even occasional musical numbers. The whole thing was AMC's unspeakably blatant attempt to try to get Susan Lucci that then-elusive Emmy after what was then about 10-15 years in a row of nominations without wins. Didn't work. What finally did work was a run of episodes where Erica had to deal with her daughter Bianca, who was then anorectic. An unusually grounded issue for Erica to deal with. Apparently, Emmy juries prefer their characters to be dealing with more real-world issues. Whoda thunk it?

By contrast, I don't remember much about the early years of One Life To Live (OLTL). I do remember, vaguely, the Judith Light years, in which she played Karen, a suburban housewife (I think) cum prostitute (that part I'm certain about). She had a sister Jenny and ... I don't know; as I say, the early years of One Life To Live just never made much of an impression on me. Except for Dorian Lord (followed by several other names) and Viki Lord (followed by several other names) Buchanan and their eternal rivalry. Dorian was always so unrepentantly evil in the early days of the series -- not least in somehow getting Victor Lord, Viki's father, to marry her. (I always wondered how Dorian managed to find time to get a medical degree in between evil schemes -- I mean, clearly, she'd been evil all her life.) And Viki had a really spectacular case of what was then called multiple personality disorder; I used to think that every time they couldn't figure out a storyline for her, they'd somehow traumatize her and have another personality emerge. I know that there were at least three, although the only ones I really remember are Viki, the dominant personality, and Niki, who was this sort of hard working class woman that Viki couldn't possibly have known how to be, except through the magic of soaps.

I did watch OLTL for a few months a couple years ago. One Life to Live introduced a storyline with two gay men, one of whom was very reluctantly coming out of the closet (Oliver Fish), and the other who had been in love with him in their long ago college days but was now in another relationship(Kyle and the man he planned to marry, Nick). Of course, this being a soap, Kyle and Fish were each other's One True Love so ... good bye, Nick. (Eventually.) And then once Kyle and Fish got together, they even got to, like, kiss and have sex and do everything the straight couples do! And we saw just as much of that as we saw of the straight couples doing the same thing! Those were actually some surprisingly well written and handled stories. The stuff around them ... not so much, actually. And then the ratings tanked, so they blamed the gay couple and shipped them off to Llanview purgatory, wherever that may be. And the ratings continued to tank, imagine that. At roughly the same time, the show's writers had brought someone back from the dead -- again, Mitch Laurence has been dead three or four times now, I think -- and had him cause havoc, and it was pretty clear that the audience was just OVER him. But it was easier to blame Kyle and Fish than the truly terrible Mitch storyline and the fairly uninteresting storylines spinning out of all that, so off they went.

I wonder how long it will be before the networks kill off the other four soaps still on the air. From having something like 20 different soaps on television at their prime, it's now down to Young and the Restless, Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives and the clearly doomed General Hospital. (It may be the second highest rated soap on the air now -- which, given the anemic ratings of the genre as a whole, isn't saying much -- but they've pulled everything off the air that provided its lead-ins. Soaps have dense, dense backstory; it's not terribly likely that people are going to start jumping on now. GH has nowhere to go but down.) Amazing to think this was once the dominant daytime genre, and now it's down to just those.

Questions? Comments? Cigars, cigarettes, Cigarillos, a box of laundry detergent?

For example: there is no way on this earth that Teresa Colvin (Jennifer Beals) would get the job of police superintendent of Chicago. She's far too young and probably far too female ... except that they explain that as her being initially a token, and winding up being the last candidate left standing after the preferred candidate died of a heart attack. She impressed the board and city council with her passion, and so they gave her the job. (Still wouldn't happen, but a good way to explain how it did.)

The victim that kicks off the major investigation in the first episode I have a real problem with. She goes to her alderman with a question about some corruption in bids for city business that she's uncovered in her company, because she doesn't know who in the police she can trust with that sort of thing. But ... here's the thing: the primary victim is a long-time Chicago resident (and she grew up here, her mother grew up here, etc.) and she would know that you never ever ever go to your alderman with something like that. Chances are pretty good that if you've got an alderman with any juice -- and her alderman is the longest serving and most powerful man in the city, and, as it turns out, the guy they're after -- that alderman is either involved, or knows about what's going on and has chosen to do nothing about it. If you've got information about that sort of corruption, and would like to survive exposing it, you go to the FBI. (Note that most Chicago alderman have access to other tools with which to destroy a person's life; they really wouldn't likely turn to murder as a first option.)

The show does have a few stylistic quirks. I could live without the flashbacks or the voiceovers. That said, they're actually pretty useful, for a wonder. It's used only as a quick thumbnail way of giving character information and background. They intrude but they're so brief that they mostly limit the annoyance. The story has a nicely intricate setup, watching Colvin and her former partner Wysocki playing an elaborate game of cat and mouse with Alderman Gibbons (Delroy Lindo), at the same time that she's working with the rank and file to try to prevent a major gang war, while at the same time pissing off that very rank and file by reassigning and rooting out corrupt cops and also pulling together a task force she can trust from that same rank and file to go after all of that corruption. So, you know, she's kind of busy. I also have a hard time believing in ... not so much Colvin's idealism -- I think you have to be somewhat idealistic to be a cop in the first place, or at the least a very firm believer in order -- but that as quite the high flier, she wouldn't have better learned how to disguise what she's doing, and how to better approach it. She's picked a very blunt-force approach to the task, and it's already turning out to be an expensive way to operate.

As a show with a very explicit anti-corruption focus, it's going to be interesting to see if it keeps from getting preachy. Then again, it's Shaun Ryan of "The Shield" fame, a show about corruption that managed not to be at all preachy. (To put it mildly.)

It's going to be an interesting ride, I hope.

Questions? Comments? Cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos?

NOTE: FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, HERE BE SPOILERS. I don't think you can reasonably spoil a film that's been out for four months, and out on DVD for one, but consider yourself warned. Any road, there's nothing too major revealed.

The fascinating thing about both comic and film is that they both suffer from a problem with their premises. The comic book starts out with the incoming CIA director being told about all the things that Frank has done in his past at the behest of his government, and deciding that he needs to be taken out. The problem with that premise is: it wouldn't happen. If the missions were successful, the new director wouldn't be told about them because he would need to maintain plausible deniability -- and in any event, since they didn't happen on his watch, he wouldn't be held responsible for them. If they were unsuccessful, he wouldn't need to be told about them, because everyone on the planet would know. (Let's face it: really unsuccessful CIA black ops tend to go so pear shaped that everyone in the world finds out about them sooner or later.) And the last thing that the first thing a new CIA director needs to do is to order the murder of a US citizen, on American soil, where -- with the obvious exception of its own buildings -- the CIA is mostly forbidden to operate. (And at the time RED was written, the CIA was totally forbidden to run operations in the US.)

The film takes its own sweet time in telling you what's going on. It's structured as a comedy/mystery/thriller, whereas the comic is a straight ahead weird revenge/thriller -- assuming that "thriller" in both cases means "lots of people get killed and lots of stuff gets shot up". Eventually, it does get around to telling you that this is all about a clean-up operation Frank was involved with early in his career. The problem is, the people being killed know what was done, but not by whom. A reporter was investigating, but the people she was questioning didn't have all the answers, and in any event, her murder is the one that enables Frank to begin to make sense of things. The people directing the killing are the only ones who can make the connections. If they don't run around cleaning up the mess ... there's no mess to clean up. Or less mess, anyway.

And yet, the premise of the film, ultimately, makes slightly more sense than the comic. Slightly. Probably because, given the ranks of the people involved and what they actually did, trying to cover it up by making sure that all players were dead and couldn't blackmail or expose you is understandable, if reprehensible. And having had, in real life, an amoral vice president decide that exposing intelligence assets would save his ass -- and hey, he was right about that -- it's not so hard to believe that the high level players in the film would behave as they do. Mind, a real-life cover-up would probably not involve quite so much massive and highly visible destruction of property or quite so many very noticeable murders. (It is utterly fascinating that most of the destruction and most of the murders are completely public and surprisingly little noticed by anyone around.)

Another interesting point of comparison: The comic is rather more pointed about the extremes to which Frank has gone in his job and doesn't make much effort to make you like him; it's also much more pointed about what the job cost him and what retirement meant to him. The comic humanizes Frank without making him likeable; the movie lets you like him, but has to take a much different path to making him human, especially given that they're forcing him to kill rather startling numbers of people to protect himself. Thus, the romance, which is very oddly played.

Other than that, I really don't have much to say about the film. It's oddly delightful, in a "let's turn off the brains and watch the old pros operate" sort of way. The one major knock against it that I have is that most of the team doesn't show up for far too long -- Helen Mirren especially. This movie needed an elegant hitwoman much earlier. (Victoria's ability to produce major automatic weaponry from absolutely nowhere is just awesome.) The romance, as mentioned, felt a bit odd and out of place. And it has absolutely no sense of pace -- a movie like this needs to run fast and not stop to give you time to breathe, and it slows down quite a few times, here and there. That said, it does -- quite successfully -- make you like some people who, if you think about it at all, we should absolutely hate. After all, as Victoria says, "[They] kill people, darling." For their governments, yes, but for a living. Their actual job is killing people for variously political reasons. And they're not nice about it.

(...OK, the entirety of the bit in the CIA building in the film is utterly ridiculous, even for a popcorn movie. The idea that you could break in the way they do, with the people watching the way they do, is just bizarre. Oh, and in one of the most highly defended buildings in the country, nobody notices the mayhem. Though, that said, there's also an interesting CIA building showdown in the comic. Ends differently, though.)

I will admit to being incredibly curious as to what happens with Karl Urban's character after the end. How in the name of sanity would he explain all that, especially given the number and identities of the corpses? But hey, apparently Red did so well financially that Summit is about to greenlight a sequel, so maybe I'll even find out. (I really can't imagine what the story would actually be about -- the difficulties in running domestic intelligence black ops after the events of Red, which would have produced the security state to beat all security states, maybe?)

Questions? Comments? Stylishly presented automatic weaponry?

Reign of Doomsday: Steel #1 (one-shot; Steve Lyons/Ed Benes/Blond; DC)

Warning: this issue is about to be RELENTLESSLY SPOILED WITH SPOILEROUS SPOILERS EVERYWHERE. Not that there's that much to reveal, because there's just not much story.

As the first issue of the lead-ins to the big summer event in which Doomsday kills everyone -- again -- this issue is problematic. We have no idea whatsoever what Doomsday is even doing there; he just suddenly appears to wreak havoc, as supervillains do. The last we knew of him, he was stranded on the moon; I suppose the destruction of New Krypton must have released him somehow.

Any road, this is basically just an issue long fight sequence, at the end of which, it appears that John Henry Irons has been killed by Doomsday. The last panel echoes the cover of the Death of Superman issue from 20-odd years ago, scraps of Irons' cape blowing on the handle of his hammer. However, given that Doomsday carries Irons off when he flies away, one can but assume that Irons is still alive and ... well, OK, not alive and kicking, exactly, but not dead.

According to Lyons, the story we get in Steel was not in fact the story he was initially hired to write, or the story that he in fact initially wrote. I can only imagine what it would be like to have completed a script, handed it in, and then suddenly get told, "No, we're not going this way. Instead, you're going to write the first issue of our big summer event! And instead of Metallo, we want Doomsday! So can you fix it up a little?" Supposedly, the aim of this issue was to remind people of the essential qualities of Steel; I guess it mostly did that, but it didn't actually tell you anything.

OK; No recommendation, but hopefully it will actually turn out to mean something to the event.

Starman/Congorilla #1 (one-shot; James Robinson/Brett Booth/Norm Rapmund; DC)

An issue that exists purely to explain why Starman and Congorilla aren't helping out the rest of the JLA during their encounter with the Crime Syndicate. That said ... it's kind of fun, and manages to do something surprising.

We start with Congorilla finding Mikaal after he's gone on a drinking and sex bender. The story is quite direct about what he's been doing and whom he's been doing it with. (Unfortunately, since I didn't read Cry for Justice or JLA, it was the first I'd heard that Tony, Mikaal's partner at the end of the Starman series, had been killed.) Congorilla is understandably concerned about Mikaal and what he's doing to himself -- given that Mikaal's apparently been doing this for a couple years now, concern is quite understandable -- but they've got bigger fish to fry; Washington, DC, has been cut off from the rest of the world, trapping everyone, including the JLA, inside some sort of energy dome. The only way they can break the dome is to find Malavar, a gorilla scientist from Gorilla City who was doing work in transdimensionality. However, Malavar is off trying to help someone who was held captive with him by Prometheus, so they need to track him down. To track him down, they wind up involving Rex the Wonder Dog (no, really), as well as Animal Man (to talk to Rex the Wonder Dog, who no longer has the power of speech).

The story winds up involving a Lazarus Pool in a thoroughly unexpected place, and a truly profoundly unexpected resurrection. All I will say about that is that it will make some fanboys happy. (And the vast majority of them will be truly upset, which in this case will be a good thing.) I must admit, I do hope they don't go in the direction implied by the ending. (I'm vaguely tempted to read JLA to find out, but I shall resist manfully.)

I liked the story itself. However, and I know this is purely a matter of taste, I really am not fond of Booth's art style. The human characters are far too thin and angular for my taste. It's not badly done -- in fact, I think the art is actually very well executed. It's just not for me.

Good; Recommended

Azrael #16 (David Hine/Cliff Richards/Tomeu Morey; DC)

And on the third day, he rose.

Seriously, that's ... pretty much what this issue is. Michael's Suit of Sorrows had been drenched in Lazarus Pool chemicals, and they had been slowly infused into his body. It operated more slowly but just as surely as an actual Lazarus Pool. (Incidentally, the quite strong implication from previous issues is that the Shroud of Turin had also been soaked in Lazarus Pool chemicals, accounting in part for the resurrection of Jesus. I do love the way this story just goes headlong for the heresy without flinching.)

We get a few pages of Michael in purgatory as he walks toward the gate he needs to reach to take his suit back and wind up back in his body. He has to make his way across this space followed by all the people that Azrael -- all of the Azraels -- have killed. Those people don't really do anything; they're just ... there. Oh, and the still very flayed Father Grieve, of course. (Why the poor man would be condemned to purgatory without his skin, I have no idea.) We also get the background of what really happened to lead to Michael's "death". (Of course, once we see it, there's the utterly baffling question of why Batman and the Gotham police seemed to think, for even a brief moment, that Michael crucified himself. The forensics would have been very different. But I digress.)

In the meantime, Bruce and Dick are watching Ra's al-Ghul's place, where Michael's body rests. Knowing that Bruce is there, Ra's invites him in to see Michael's resurrection. Turns out that Bruce is a messenger designated by prophecy. (What prophecy, you might be asking. Hadn't the Book of Thomas, which guided the Order, ended with the flaying of Father Grieve, leaving the order without further guidance? Why, yes. Yes, it had.)

Once Michael rises again, it turns out that the Suit of Sorrows no longer speaks to him; the voices that drove him insane are now silenced. It now belongs to him alone. Which also means that he's the descendant of Jesus for whom the suit was meant. (But do not think for a moment that Michael is now sane, oh no no no no NO.) Bruce, for no reason that makes even a tiny bit of sense, tries to get Azrael to sign on for Batman Incoporated, and Michael refuses. Then there is ... an Event, let's say, that allows Bruce to see the message that he's meant to give to Michael.

Reportedly, there are only two more issues left after this. Issue 18 carried a "final issue" notice in Previews. What they've got left to do, I'm sure I don't know. He's back, he's bad, he's only slightly less insane, and he's a direct descendant of the only begotten son of God. What's left to do?

No recommendation, but man, it's fun to watch Hine and the artists working with him just head for the crazy with such dedication and commitment.

Purely a side note: the sneak preview DC's putting in everything for the comic they're making of DC Universe Online Legends makes it look like The Stupidest Thing EVER. I mean, in the first few pages, we have Lex apparently killing Superman, then being stunned and surprised and even hurt because Brainiac, who made that possible, has betrayed him. I ask you, does that sound like any recent version of Lex Luthor that you've ever heard of? The Luthor currently toplining Action Comics is neither stupid enough to ally with Brainiac for anything important, nor would he be surprised at being betrayed. It really looks awful.

Questions? Comments? Cigars, cigarettes, Cigarillos?

Red Robin 17 (Fabian Nicieza/Marcus To/Ray McCarthy; DC): Well, DC can't have meant this to be the first title out of the gate to bear the Batman Inc. logo, but it doesn't hugely matter. Tim winds up in Hong Kong, locating Cassandra Cain. Oddly, while she keeps the suit that Tim gives her, she refuses to take up the title of Batgirl again, since Stephanie is both doing relatively well with it and seems to need it more than she does right now. (From interviews I've read, Cassandra Cain may be playing a larger role in the Bat Inc universe sometime soon. But I digress.) Back in Gotham, Tim purchases the buildings around Crime Alley, planning to live and work there. (Why this doesn't send Bruce into fits, I'm sure I don't know.) Tim also begins re-acquainting himself with old friends, like Ives. He also recruits his own technogeek support -- Lonnie, the kid who'd been held prisoner by Armstrong, and whose body no longer functions on its own. His brain, however, is top notch. (Now I really really REALLY want a "Network" one-shot, wherein the Bat sections technogeeks save the world. It would be awesome. Especially since it would need to be something where the heroes they work for had been disabled or were off elsewhere -- and something that could distract/disable Power Girl, Batman, Batgirl and the Birds, the Web and the others would be quite the event. But I digress.) Tim also continues the family tradition of getting involved with possibly criminally-inclined cat-themed women; he is, perhaps, the first to commit actual illegal acts to do so, breaking Lynx out of police custody. She thanks him in a very special way ... which Bruce has some eloquent commentary about. And the ending is... oddly delightful, in fact.
Very good; Recommended.

Ethan? #1 (Alessandro Apreda/Fabrizio Fiorentino/Giuseppe/BBox Boccia; GG Studio):

Another title from GG Studio Design out of Naples, Italy, apparently aimed at the American market. (Interestingly, the credits don't show a translator, so I'm guessing this is an English language original.)

Ethan Babylon wakes up after a sexual assignation, disoriented, confused, having had a beer or ten too many the night before. Not all that unusual, right? Except that it seems that he's in someone else's body. A serial killer's body, as it turns out, right before he gets captured by the Tokyo police. And Tokyo has become a bit more violent than it was in the past, to the point where they're actually willing to exercise the death penalty with a bit more regularity and emphasis. (Historical note: Japan actually does have the death penalty, and has used it. Japan is notorious for the capriciousness with which they actually execute people. Once you're sentenced, it could be weeks, months, years before the sentence is carried out; you have no idea when your last day will be. Not because of the appeals process, but because that's just the way they roll. But I digress.) Once the serial killer is executed, Ethan finds himself inside the body of one of the police observers of the execution, the previous occupant having been apparently evicted by the process.

It's essentially the same as the idea behind the comic Existence 2.0/3.0, with a bit less initial technological intervention. Whenever he dies, Ethan leaps into the body of someone nearby. Reincarnation gone horribly awry, in effect.

Fiorentino's art is very detailed and highly stylized and works well with the futuristic story. The story itself is intensely intriguing; I am curious to see exactly where this story is headed, what, if anything, will distinguish it. On the one hand, Ethan isn't a particularly appealing character, but the concept is interesting. What would you do if you discovered that upon your death, you would wind up in someone else's body, all of your memories intact and none of theirs, but you still had to live their lives? What if they were some sincerely unpleasant people? What would you do?

Good; Recommended for mautre audiences due to some adult (and profoundly icky) themes.

Batman: The Return one-shot (Grant Morrison/David Finch/Batt/Ryan Winn; DC): In which Bruce's Batman Inc. concept begins to take shape. He dons a new variant of his costume, and begins to order about the other members of his team in some incredibly high-handed ways. Seriously, the man wants Stephanie to go to a girls finishing school in England -- the very idea that she would form a Batman Inc outpost in England would be highly insulting to Knight and Squire (WHO ARE BRITISH, SO VERY BRITISH, OH MY GOODNESS YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW BRITISH THEY ARE... Er, sorry. Read Knight and Squire #2 recently. Not bad, but it has ... an attitude, let's say. But I digress.). He's giving Barbara early and enhanced access to Waynetech's "Internet 3.0", also allowing her to redesign her online avatar -- but he's given her a starting-point design that looks like a technological version of her old Batgirl costume, managing to be incredibly insulting to both Barbara and Stephanie in one fell swoop. Now that he can be more above-ground with it, he's having Lucius Fox design all sorts of insane things at Waynetech itself, explicitly for use by Batman Inc. people. Oh, and there's a new villain, Leviathan, that looks like a very bad guy indeed. And finally, the Catwoman plot, in which Bruce asks her how she'd like to steal something, winds up being a direct lead-in to Batman Inc. #1 -- but we'll get to that. All in all, an interesting place to start ... but it's going to be interesting to see how things go. It'll be a while before his plans for Stephanie take shape, at least; she's got to finish out the current arc in her title before she can go anywhere, and it looks like that might be a bit involved. Anyway, the art by Finch et al is perfectly serviceable with the story -- although, that said, Dick frequently winds up with a somewhat featureless face, and Alfred looks like he doesn't have any teeth.
Good; Recommended

Mindfield #4 (JT Krul/Alex Konat/Jon Bolerjack/John Starr; Aspen): In which the attack unleashed by the bad guys -- whoever they be -- against the minds of Jessica the programmer and Connor the remote viewing (sort of) government secret agent continue. It's essentially an issue long fight sequence, except with a most unusual fight. Instead of taking place out in the open, wrecking Denver International Airport where their bodies are, it takes place entirely in Jessica's mindscape.The Project Cobalt backup story this month is about Kassem, the Muslim member of the group. Normally, the Project Cobalt files show the events in the life of the main character that rendered them susceptible to recruitment; in this case, I think perhaps a few pages got left out, because Kassem's story just stops. There's no traumatic event, no recruitment, just Kassem standing in the middle of a campus, ogling the behinds of the female students.
Good; recommended if you've been following the series.

Batman, Inc #1, "Mr Unknown is Dead!" (Grant Morrison/Yannick Paquette/Michel Lacombe; DC): In which Bruce goes to Japan to recruit Mr Unknown for the first extension of his Batman Inc. concept, talking Selina along to steal a jewel that isn't a jewel and that he doesn't want in the hands of its inventor -- said inventor being off making the lives of Power Girl and Justice League International a misery at the bidding of Max Lord at the moment -- or of any government, either. (But he trusts himself, of course. Mighty high-handed, this Batman Inc. concept.) Sadly, Mr Unknown has been, shall we say, permanently recruited by other forces, as the issue title might state. We also discover that Catwoman has a few unexpected talents that even Bruce didn't know about. And a new -- I think -- villain makes his appearance. Interestingly, while the Super Young Team is mentioned, they don't make an appearance, and despite the yeoman-like service they rendered during the last crisis, at the moment, at least, they don't seem to be a part of Bruce's concept. Odd, that. (Then again, he was being imprisoned and then dead for a while during all of that, so he probably simply doesn't know what they did.) The art and colors work for the story, which, for a Bat story, has some unexpectedly bright spots, quite literally. (Like many an artist before him, Paquette is quite enamored of Selina's bosom.) All that said, the last page of the story is truly odd; it has text between the rows of frames, phrased in a way that sounds straight out of the 1960s Batman TV series. Wonder why?
Good; Recommended. An intriguing start to the concept.

Morning Glories #4 (Nick Spencer/Joe Eisma/Alex Sollazzo; Image): In which the students begin to scheme to get out of their captivity, despite being observed at all times and in (mostly) all places. And in which we discover that the same is true of the evil faculty, as well. Casey uses her persuasive powers on the rest of the glories to get them to fall in with her plan, which involves Sane (as opposed to Mad) Science. It's an interesting story but I am beginning to vaguely hope that this is a mini/maxi series and not an ongoing. Not because it's bad -- I think Spencer's writing is excellent, and Eisma's art is very good -- but because we've now had four issues of an odd combination of setup and thwarting, and it would be nice to know what's being setup and why the thwarting matters, you know? Just the odd answer to keep us engaged.
OK; recommended, with reservations.

Batman #704 (Tony Daniel; DC): In which Bruce officially, if somewhat theoretically, cedes Gotham to Dick "while he's gone". He also takes extreme exception to Catwoman's new sidekick Catgirl, and tells Dick to "deal with her". Dick tries, but as Selina points out to him, the hypocrisy of asking her to keep a 15-year-old girl out of sidekick danger while he's dragging an eleven-year-old boy into dangerous situations willy-nilly is rather extreme. In the meantime, an Asian businesswoman wants to purchase Crime Alley from Wayne Enterprises and is trying to negotiate that with Dick. Given that Tim just purchased the area for his work, this is probably not going to go well. Later on in the story, we also see that the new Waynetech equipment lends itself to some ... interesting applications.
Good; Recommended

The One #1 (Giuliano Monni/Davide Rigamonti/Pasquale Qualano; GG Studio):

The first of the GG Studio Design titles I've seen that actually lists English translators, so this title was clearly intended for elsewhere before being brought here. And that said ... I have no idea what this freakin' thing actually is. It's some sort of sword and sorcery story, but beyond that, I have no strong sense of what's going on.

Masdhin, a "junior berserker" (...what?), is searching for Faras, a woman who broke his heart when she chose to go off to become a warrior herself. A few years in the future, Faras has been captured by Targhan, who seems to be an evil sorceror. He and his minion threaten her with being kept alive for their "amusement" -- they cut her breast and forehead with a sword to demonstrate what said amusement will be like -- only to be interrupted by the arrival of Masdhin, who had to fight his way out of his mother's palace to do so. (She would seem to disapprove of Faras.) And there ends the relatively coherent part of the story.

There follows a lot of fighting in very dark scenes, and apparently both the evil sorceror and his minion wind up dead, Faras gets rescued, and the priestess who set all this in motion gets annoyed. Strangely enough, we do find out what The One is, although not what it does. The artwork is insanely detailed, very stylized and unfortunately, very dark during the action sequence. The story, sadly, didn't grab me. It's not that it's bad, necessarily, but there wasn't enough character development to make me care about what happens to them next, and the story got so muddled in the middle that it's hard to care about the actual plot. I do realize that this is a first issue, but there needs to be enough character and/or story content for me to want to pick up the next issue, and right now, I really don't. And for perhaps the first time ever, I shall actually remark on the lettering: for the art and the amount of dialogue it's got to support, it's WAY too small and difficult to read. Unfortunately, good lettering should be somewhat invisible; it should match the art, be appropriate to the story, but not generally call attention to itself. If it's too small to read comfortably, then that calls attention, and not in a good way.
OK; no recommendation.

Angel: Illyria: Haunted #1 (Scott Tipton and Mariah Huehner/Elena Casagrande/Walter Trono/Ilaria Traversi; IDW): In which Illyria begins to have increasing problems with her inner Fred, and seeks out ways to cope with it. She talks to Angel, but that winds up being sincerely unhelpful, and in any event, he's got issues of his own to deal with. She then seeks out Spike, which winds up being more useful. Oh, and along the way, any number of demons get squelched. An intriguing start to the miniseries; it's going to be interesting to see where they leave the character at the end, when the entirety of the franchise moves to Dark Horse.
OK; recommended if you're into Angel and Buffy and utterly impenetrable if you're not.

Azrael 14 (David Hine/Cliff Richards; DC)

In which Azrael returns to Gotham and his end game begins.

As usual, it's utterly impossible to discuss this story without thoroughly spoiling the end, so:

NOTE: HERE BE SPOILERS! SPOILER CITY! SPOILERRIFIC REVIEW HERE! WHOA NELLIE, WILL THIS STORY GET SPOILED FOR YOU!

In short, the flayed Father Grieve reiterates that the Suit of Sorrows was made for the descendants of Jesus, and Michael should tell Father Day this. Michael not only refuses -- apparently he hasn't wrapped his brain around the whole Gnostic Gospel/Dan Brown heresy yet -- but he kills Father Grieve to keep him from saying anything more. Bruce and Dick begin to worry about Michael's sanity, since he really doesn't believe in justice even as much as they do (which is saying something). Bruce thinks he should be brought into the Batman Inc. group to keep him controlled -- a thoroughly demented idea if ever there was one. Dick as Batman goes out to make Michael the proposition, more or less immediately after discovering that Michael has been using the suit's swords to cut a swath through Gotham's criminal element, and, as anybody reasonable would expect, this does Not Go Well; in fact, he tries to kill Dick, and only just manages to stop himself. Ra's al-Ghul also comes back into the story -- turns out he's the true employer of the guy who is allegedly Michael's liaison to the Order and maintainer of the armor -- and manages to imply to the White Ghost that Michael himself is the descendant of Jesus for whom the suit was intended.

And, as we knew he would since the first issue of the series, Michael dies, in a way befitting a descendant of Jesus. And manages to do it in an apparently completely impossible way, at that.

I have to admit, I'm kind of in awe at the way Hine and Azrael's other writers gripped a certain angle of heresy with both hands and leapt into the story, utterly without restraint. In all seriousness, if you're going to take this sort of tack, you have to commit to it and keep going, no matter what. I'm even more surprised that DC let Azrael's writers keep going this way. A lot of people could be pretty profoundly offended by the storyline, yet it's managed to keep itself out of people's view. (...Which probably wouldn't be DC's preference, come to think of it.) And I'm also impressed that Richards' art manages to keep up with the pure and utter insanity of the story, emphasizing and enhancing it as needed.

As usual, impossible to qualify or recommend, but utterly fascinating.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Brickbats?

]]> http://after-words.org/mr/weblog/2010/11/24/recently_read_indie_bat_editio.shtml http://after-words.org/mr/weblog/2010/11/24/recently_read_indie_bat_editio.shtml things comickal Wed, 24 Nov 2010 03:22:01 -0600