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Lucy Knisley's 'Relish' Is A Satisfying Comics Meal

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2013-04-23T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: First Second, Reviews, Opinion

The front cover of Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, the new memoir by Lucy Knisley of French Milk fame, bears a pretty killer blurb from Alison Bechdel, whose years of Dykes to Watch Out For and her breakout hit Fun Home have made her something akin to the grand dame of memoir comics: "Step aside, Joy of Cooking."

Bechdel's blurb may be more braggadocio than brass tacks. Irma S. Rombauer's iconic, seminal cookbook isn't going anywhere, and certainly not because Knisley's comic book is pushing it. That said, however, it's an interesting comparison, because joy is exactly what Relish is about: The joy of cooking, the joy of eating, the joy of spending time with the family and friends one shares those activities with and even the joy of memories, which are are often rooted in those activities, and can be so thoroughly summoned by the tastes and smells of food.And, for readers, there's another source of joy to relish in Relish-that of seeing great cartooning and comic-making applied to such an accessible topic with so much wit. A memoir written around the axis of food and told in in Knisley's warm, engaging style, Relish has a lot to offer different audiences. You may read it for the same reason I did -- you're a fan of Knisley's comics, or simply because it is comics -- but it's easy to see others reading this for the subject matter, and I'm having trouble recalling the last time I read a book so perfectly suited to prose reader outreach and book club reading (The recipes included even give book clubs something to make and nosh on during their discussion). Maybe Marjan Satrapi's Persepolis?

Relish begins with a two-page introduction in which Knisley discusses memory-a big part of memoir-making, comics or prose-and how hers works, noting the significance of food and eating.

From there, the book is broken into chapters in which she tells stories about her life, in roughly chronological order (allowing for moving forward and backward within each), and each chapter ends with a recipe (something that the medium of comics is remarkably well-suited to, mixing as it does the verbal and the visual), spread across two pages (or, in the case of the sushi, four pages).

So, for example, the first chapter is about her early childhood in New York City and her immediate family and the circle of their friends that formed the foundation she grew up on (Raised by foodies, it's something of a wonder that Knisley went into comics instead of turning her creativity and energy to a more edible medium). The second is about her moving to the countryside with her mother after here parents' divorce. The third her childhood relationship with junk food, and so on through adolescence, college and young adulthood (A now-arrived, formerly-up-and-coming comics talent, Knisley's in her late twenties).

Each of these features a recipe related to the story she just told, like a recipe for sangria following a chapter on her impossible quest to recreate the croissants she found in a bakery in Venice (no sense including the croissant recipe, since she never figured it out, after all), or a recipe for her mom's pesto after the chapter on her and her mother starting a new, rural life together after leaving the city.

Along the way, she covers what one imagines are many of the big milestones of one's life story, at least the childhood and coming of age portions of a life's story, like coming to terms with death, her evolving relationships with her parents, a pivotal moment in her journey towards becoming an artist and even her first period.

That last bit occurs in one of the several too-perfect-to-be-fictional stories within the book, in which the teenage Lucy and the younger-than-her-by-a-day son of her mom's best friend, both experience transitionary rituals into adulthood that they tried to keep from their mothers while mostly left to their own device in Mexico (While Lucy began menstruating, Drew discovered pornography in a marketplace where the seller didn't seem to mind that he was a minor).

The other anecdote I wouldn't believe were I reading it in fiction involved Lucy being attacked by geese as a child, which she uses to jokingly justify the eating of pate, which is maybe the cruelest of all animal products, surpassing even veal (As a mostly-vegan vegetarian who abstains from all dairy products not baked into a doughnut or other baked good, I must confess I didn't try out any of the recipes, and thus can't report to you how good they are; of the few I could actually eat with some minor adjustments, the sushi and the Shepard Fairey Pie were both too daunting; maybe later).

With actual cookbooks, one of the most important components is always the imagery: Who wants to try a recipe when they don't know what the dish looks like? In fact, the case can be made that the images are even more important than the words in a cookbook, as a batch of poorly-written, bad-tasting recipes can still end up being widely read and tried-out if the food is presented and photographed well enough.

Relish lacks photographs, obviously, but there's nothing to complain about in the imagery department. Knisley's style hits that sweet spot between cartoony and representational, so that everything looks fun and abstracted yet recognizable and utilitarian, and she modulates the degree of realism like a camera coming in and out of focus, to highlight the humor or drama of a situation, or to render something more recognizable when necessary.

It's fully, brightly colored, with what looks like watercolors, and highly verbal, Knisley's pages containing plenty of words (though not so many they overwhelm the pictures), and chart-like elements like little boxes and arrows identifying people and elements within the imagery. It's a great-looking comic, and a great memoir, and, I suppose, an okay cookbook.

It's not Joy of Cooking though. But that's okay: For all her talent in the kitchen and influence over the cooking habits of Americans, Rombauer wasn't, as far as I know, much of a cartoonist, and I'm sure Knisley could draw circles around her.

[Click Recipe To Enlarge]

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'Nemo: Heart of Ice' Is 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', Streamlined [Review]

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2013-03-01T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Top Shelf, Reviews, Opinion

There's a downside to being a fictional character in heroic literature, aside from being beholden to the whims of an author or the deadly danger a character is so often subjected to. The role requires a certain remove from the rest of humanity, and warm, reciprocal relationships with others. To successfully live such a life, a character needs a heart that is cold and hard, like...well, like... Oh, I had the perfect metaphor a second ago! Ah, well. I'm sure it will come to me eventually.

That's the premise of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's new standalone graphic novel Nemo: Heart of Ice, the latest adventure from the world of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is, of course, the world of Western literature, set-up as sort of a mega-mash-up shared universes akin to those of Marvel and DC Comics.Compared to the previous volumes of the series, particularly the most recently completed cycle of Century stories (which were also published by Top Shelf/Knockabout), this is a much more straightforward endeavor: It's shorter, it's more or less self-contained, it occurs (mostly) in linear, chronological fashion and its allusions, in-jokes and Easter Eggs number in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

In that respect, it's something of a welcome return to -- or, at least, return toward -- the form of the first two LOEG series, and a refreshing race through genre tropes and shared memories of adventure fiction, rather than a treatise on literary theory. It also gives O'Neill the opportunity to shine in a way that the writerly, perhaps overly writerly, last few go-rounds did not.

That is, while Moore is engaged in several points about the dwindling power and scope of the characters the sort of fiction he is mining was able to produce -- the story is that of the child of a Jules Verne creation versus a handful of infinitely more obscure, American creations -- while meditating on what it would mean to be a character aware to a certain extent that they are bound in a world of fiction, he also makes sure O'Neill has a ton of cool stuff to draw, with a much higher than usual cool stuff-to-page ratio.

It's 1925, and the Nemo in the title isn't the Captain of previous volumes, but his daughter Janni Dakkar, who has inherited his title, crew, ship and vocation. After robbing sled-enthusiast Charles Foster Kane and Queen Ayesha from Allan Quartermain creator H. Rider Haggard's She (which was, probably not coincidentally, adapted into a silent movie that very same year), Janni decides to take her crew exploring, following an Antarctic route that drove her father mad.

Kane, who didn't take kindly to being robbed, assembles his own League to sic on Janni and her crew, recruiting inventors/adventurers Tom Swift (here spelled "Swyfte"), Jack Wright and Frank Reade Jr. to hound her through her journey. Their travels take Janni and her allies through territory previously described in Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Jules Verne's Antarctic Mystery and H. P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, where they encounter a white giant, a gargantuan hole in the ground, an ice sphinx, a cleverly rendered moment of time displacement, weird giant penguins and Lovecraftian architecture, hieroglyphics and creatures.

O'Neill gets to come up with his own designs for each of these characters, places and creatures, as well as some Jazz Age science fiction technology (including Kane's crew's weapons and vehicles and a new version of The Nautilus), and other spectacular sites that are merely passed through. To the artist's credit, he visually marries all these designs -- based on such diverse source material -- perfectly, so that the dude from Citizen Kane, an anthropomorphic dog dressed like a noble from the court of Louis XVI and one of the most complicated and scary-looking renderings of a Shoggoth I've seen all fit together so neatly its tempting to forget their paths were never meant to cross.

Moore's League comics have always afforded O'Neill similar opportunities, of course, but the compressed length of this one and the simplified plot -- it is literally little more than a Point A to Point B chase -- focuses the reader's attention on the art part of the equation more strongly than usual.

It may lack the appellation in the title, but Nemo: Heart of Ice is just as extraordinary as the preceding volumes of Moore and O'Neill's series -- if not, in some ways, even more so.

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'The Art of Betty and Veronica' Takes a Historical View of Comics' Frenemy Fashionistas

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2013-01-17T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Reviews, Archie, Art, Opinion

It's an age old question...or, at least, a 70-year-old question: Betty or Veronica?

The two female points of the love triangle at the very center of publisher Archie Comics have always formed a sort of either/or dichotomy for those male readers envious of Archie Andrews' predicament, being seemingly forced to choose between two ideal girlfriends of opposite natures. When those male readers ask themselves, or one another, "Betty or Veronica?" they're asking about what type of girl they prefer: the debutante or the girl next door? The cunning, sophisticated, fickle, wealthy heiress for whom everything comes easy, or the big-hearted, book-smart, loyal, hard-working young woman? Sugar or spice? Good girl or bad girl? Or perhaps they're just asking, more simply -- blonde or brunette?

There's a somewhat startling 1978 Betty and Veronica story by Dan DeCarlo, the cartoonist who more than any other was responsible for defining the characters' appearances and personalities, which attempted to make the point that there really is no choice at all: Betty and Veronica aren't two different girls as much as they are two halves of the same girl. The story, entitled "Split Personality," is one of the seven tales editors Victor Gorelick and Craig Yoe chose for The Art of Betty and Veronica, a new hardcover book celebrating the high school dream girls and the men whose designs and lines made them, to some, the idyllic girlfriends decade after decade.

DeCarlo's point was a rare example of a creator taking a wide, psychological view of the relationship dynamics at Riverdale High (He'd take another stab at it in 1989's "Triangle," also included in this book). Directly (if clumsily) presented as narration in a typically silly five-page story, the idea is a valid one: Betty and Veronica are different aspects of the "All-American Girl," separated in a centrifuge into characteristics best suited for a cartoon comedy of exaggerated contrasts.

In truth, Archie never really has to choose between the two -- the pair are still fighting over him, and he never has to choose for longer than the length of a gag (or the occasional alternate-future storyline). And, of course, readers never have to choose either: Betty and Veronica are always together, whether they are at peace or at war. America's original frenemies share the same title of one of the comics they appear in after all (even if they occasionally squabble over who gets top billing).

Editors Gorelick (currently the editor-in-chief of Archie Comics) and Yoe (a comics historian who produces handsomely designed themed anthologies at an enviable rate) each provide introductions to the book, as do Archie's publisher and Co-CEO Jonathan Goldwater and celebrated cartoonist and animator Bruce Timm (Batman: The Animated Series) who, perhaps realizing a picture is worth a thousand words (and one of his typically worth 30,000 words), provides a pen and ink drawing of the pair in bikinis. After introductions of each of the leading ladies, the book is then divided into decade-specific looks at their evolution, including a prose page discussing each decade and how the work of Archie Comics reflected it, followed by examples of covers and at least one full Betty and Veronica story from the era.

At 9-by-12 inches, the book is bigger than the average comic book, and colossal compared to Archie digest size. Many of the covers and stories appear in color, as they would have when originally published in the comics, but many more still are presented in black and white, allowing for a better appreciation of the line-work-in many of them, as the original pencil guidelines are clearly visible. It's a rare and welcome look at the behind the scenes process of these seemingly ubiquitous comics' creations, as well as the opportunity to appreciate the artists first and the characters second.

While there is an awful lot of great artwork between these covers, mostly of the "good girl" variety practiced for decades by artists like DeCarlo, Timm, Dave Stevens, Amanda Conner, Terry Dodson and more, where the book is of greatest value may be in its restoration of the importance of the artists in the story of Archie Comics. The publisher has a bad reputation in some circles for its treatment of some of its artists over the years, particularly when it comes to giving credit where credit is due. That is not the case here. Gorelick's introduction may be brief, but it is full of remembrances of the men he worked with. There's a page of photos of the artists whose work is seen here, and the changes of various artists over the years is given more space than the introduction of new characters to the Archie story.

DeCarlo is obviously quite well represented, as is Dan Parent, the current high profile Archie cartoonist. There's even a drawing of Archie, Betty and Veronica by Norm Breyfogle, who has been doing a lot of work with the publisher recently, and whose work there never ceases to freak me out after all the years I spent poring over his Batman comics (I see the image below and all I can think of is the teens getting off the train in 1990s Gotham City, about to get mugged unless Batman can get there in time).

Irv Novick's 1940s work is perhaps one of the bigger surprises in The Art of Betty and Veronica, given how realistic he drew the girls. Indeed, "realistic" and "Archie" aren't exactly words one is used to hearing in the same sentence.

By the 1950s, Harry Lucey and Bob Montana had given the gals their big eyes (and big breasts, it has to be said, although they would shrink in the coming decade) and cute, up-turned noses. These designs were clearly the starting point for DeCarlo's refining over the next few decades. One of his earlier covers included here looks quite close to Lucey and Montana's work, but in the later pages you can see the figures getting slimmer, the heads less rounded.

It can be somewhat shocking to see just how sexy the art is in many of these comics. The 1950s through the 1970s were quite overtly so and, if anything, Archie Comics seem to have gotten tamer and tamer in the last few decades. Bathing suits might have gotten smaller in the recent past, but there seems to have been a conscious effort to pose the girls less alluringly, whatever it is they happen to be wearing. It can be strange to look back on these old comics and see so much skin -- or such gratuitous fan service as it would be called in modern manga circles. For example, there's a pin-up drawn by Bill Vigoda for a 1947 comic, ostensibly featuring Betty demonstrating various tennis strokes.

It doubles, of course, as an excuse to ogle a pretty, scantily-clad young woman.

It's worth noting that ogling is about the extent of the sexual interaction Archie has with Betty and Veronica -- that, and some cartoon kissing of the lipstick imprint variety -- and it's generally used as one more type of joke, one that gives the cartoonists a hook on which to hang a gag while also allowing them to draw sexy young women for certain readers to stare at.

As unexpectedly sexual as so much of this art is -- there are whole DeCarlo stories set at the beach in which every panel is literally crowded with bikin-clad female figures -- the tone is remarkably innocent. As befits the purely visual medium of comics in which characters are simply two-dimensional figures drawn on paper, it's all looking and no touching for Archie, Reggie and the gang.

That dynamic is perhaps another reason why Archie can never really choose Betty or Veronica. As a comics character he can't escape the strictures of his medium, which demands a certain amount of stasis from story to story, from comic to comic and, at this point, from decade to decade. As enviable as the fork in the road of Archie's romantic life might have seemed to so many young readers over the years, we're not doomed to the same frustration he faces as a comics character. Here in the real world, we can make our own choices, we can stick to them or change or minds, we can reap the benefits (and/or suffer the consequences). We can move on.

So, Betty or Veronica? Both, obviously. DeCarlo's or Parent's? Montana's or Lucey's? Novick's or Breyfogle's? All of the above, obviously. The Art of Betty and Veronica gives them to us, and in a deluxe package full of historical context and reverence for influential talents.

The Art of Betty and Veronica is on sale now in finer comics shops and bookstores.

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Surrender Yourself To The Siren Song Of Mark Siegel's 'Sailor Twain' [Review]

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-11-07T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Reviews, Opinion

In the late 19th century, about the time during which Mark Siegel's new graphic novel Sailor Twain, or, The Mermaid of The Hudson is set, American critics and thinkers started talking about "the Great American Novel," in response to England's dominance of English-language literature.

The Great American Novel, it was believed, would be one that captured and contained the spirit of the country in terms of its craft, its theme and its subject matter. Over the decades, plenty of novels have been identified as Great American Novels (and candidates for the Great American Novel), books that have become part of our literary canon, including Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whose author shares a surname with the title character of Siegel's book.

Could the Great American Novel actually be a Great American Graphic Novel...? The argument could be made for Siegel's Sailor Twain.In size and scope and narrative structure, it's truly a novel, albeit in comics rather than prose. It is comics, a truly American story-telling form that in the 21st century is almost as mainstreamed as prose fiction. Its themes and subject matter are various, and will take a bit more explanation, but include cultural clashes and synthesis of other, foreign cultures into something new, the tensions between sexual temptation and creative pursuits on the one hand and societal constructs and duty on the other and the struggle for equality between the genders.

And the setting and surface details are about as American as can be.

In 1887, the steamboat Lorelei travels up and down the Hudson River, under the command of its dutiful, punctual, professional Captain Twain ("That's not his real-" he begins to explain, when a passenger asks him if he's related to the writer, although a couple of mysterious stowaways on the ship taunt him by leaving out copies of Huckleberry Finn). This Twain would also prefer to be a writer than work aboard a riverboat, although his medium is poetry, and he had to put it on the back-burner while he worked the river, earning money to support his wife, afflicted with a malady that keeps her in a wheel chair.

Also aboard the ship is its owner Lafayette, who recently lost his brother and more recently still began to act rather mysteriously, pursuing a half-dozen love interests with a feverish intensity, dropping letters in bottles into the river when he thinks no one is watching and exchanging letters on the subject of mermaids with a C. G. Beaverton, a reclusive American writer no one has ever seen in person.

When Twain finds a badly wounded mermaid in the river, and secrets it in his cabin in order to nurse it back to health-and, in exchange, she magically inspires his poetry-he gradually begins to unravel the mystery of what became of Lafayette's brother, why Lafayette has been behaving the way he has and what the two men share in common.

Siegel's black-and-white artwork is rendered not with the traditional pencil and ink of most comics and graphic novels, but in charcoal, making for thick lines and a cloudy, gauzy look perfect for a dark and mysterious river, the coal-smudged crew of a 19th century steamship, and the murky, stormy goings-on of the Lorelei and the lives of the men upon it. Additionally, the medium allows for whites to appear particularly luminescent, by virtue of the rich and layered darkness of the blacks (The pale skin of Lafayatte's seventh lover, for example, appears to glow in a darkened cabin).

His character designs tend toward the cartoonish, with his Twain having huge, saucer-like eyes and a triangle nose that give his face a Muppet-like appearance and his Lafayatee a big, long, Cyrano de Bergerac-like nose. Sometimes exaggerated shapes aside, these characters' bodies and clothing are rendered realistically, as is the meticulously created steamship and the detail-heavy (and apparently quite thoroughly researched) settings.

The mermaid has a story, of course, a story presented as a story within the story, and it has the feel of a genuine mythology, although this being the still-young, barely-a-century-old United States of America, it is of course an invented mythology. But so thoroughly has Siegel created and recreated his cast and their era, that it feels and reads as real as anything else in the book.

Invented mythology, the filling-in of cultural needs with a new rituals and beliefs based on old ones bur tailor-made to suit the new and young country specifically, is but one more particularly American trait of Siegel's incredible book.

I suppose ultimately it will be up to future critics, literary scholars and canon-keepers to decide if graphic novels are up for consideration when it comes to the title of The Great American Novel. For now, I feel it's safe to, at the very least, declare Siegel's graphic novel both American and Great with a capital "G."

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President Obama As You've Never Seen Him In Steven Weissman's Bizarre 'Barack Hussein Obama' [Interview]

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-11-02T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Fantagraphics, Indie, Interviews, Art Comix

Steven Weissman is best known for comics about weird little kids like his late-'90s Little Rascals-by-way-of-Universal-monsters comic Yikes, and collections of strips featuring the cute, chubby children composed of thin, sharp, harsh-looking lines. These include the Fantagraphics-published Mean and Don't Call Me Stupid.

In 2009, Weissman started serializing a new weekly comic on Fantragraphics' website. The first installment features President Obama looking like an elongated, stretched-out version of the typical Weissman kid character, walking onto a stage and announcing, "Charlie Brown is a Jew...I read it somewhere," to a confused and angry crowd. The audience grows more perplexed when the President "meows" off-stage just before explaining that he's trying to trick his dog.

Such was the inauspicious beginnings of Weissman's Barack Hussein Obama, which Fantgraphics has collected and released as a handsome hardcover graphic novel just in time for the climax of the title character's bid for re-election for president of the United States. We spoke with Weissman about the singularly weird work.

Barack Hussein Obama changes quickly and drastically as the stripes progress, but it never really gets any less weird or less surreal. After a long series of standalone four-panel gags, a modestly epic narrative begins to emerge, one in which the President has his identity stolen, is gifted with a parakeet (which he kills), becomes a parakeet himself, dies, and is reborn from within a parakeet egg and...

Look, I said it was weird, didn't I?

Transformation is one constant of the book, and the characters gradually evolve as Weissman's depictions of them become more solid. Some of the changes are dictated by events, like Vice President Joe Biden losing his hands or having his head crushed, or Obama seemingly becoming a tree (you'll just have to read to find out why). Other changes seem to simply be creative choices the artist is making, like Secretary of State Hilary Clinton becoming a big, jagged-toothed, bug-eyed monster with red and blue veins visible beneath her black-and-white skin.

The types of jokes and the style of humor is as varied as the depictions of the characters, with some gags coming form the disconnect of Obama and Biden being the most powerful men in the world yet acting like ordinary people (they see bad movies in cinemas and go to normal restaurants). Some jokes have a sitcom-like quality, with Obama trading quips with family members -- for example, he shoos daughters Sasha and Malia out of a meeting by saying, "If I wanna know what's going on with the Jonas Bros, I'll give you guys a call," or when First Lady Michelle Obama believes her husband's being condescending and asks him to explain himself and he replies, "I'm being the President."

Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, the ghost of President James A. Garfield and other characters make appearances of various degrees of length and importance, but Barack Hussein Obama is at its very best when Weissman's focus is on Obama and his immediate circles. Or rather, when Weissman's puts the focus on the popular perception of Obama, either pro or con. Earlier strips especially play with the President's super-cool-guy image, like when he tries communicating with people solely with the gesture of peeping over his sunglasses. There are some pretty ballsy strips featuring a giant supernatural creature that Obama refers to as "Lord," apparently riffing on some of his opponent's particularly paranoid conspiracy theories that cast the President as some sort of Manchurian Candidate.

"The path has cleared, oh Lord, reconstruction of the temple will begin at Ground Zero," the kneeling President says. The skull-faced creature scolds him, "Stop calling it 'Ground Zero.' I told you I hate that," adding, "How are we supposed to fulfill prophecy if we lose all these senate seats?" Sasha and Malia face the beast later when the creature sighs, "This is why Al-Qaeda recruits boys." They retort, "Al-Gayda" with a high-five.

The Barack Hussein Obama that ultimately emerges from the book is a pretty regular guy trapped in a comic strip, struggling to be all things to all people. Not just a good friend, a good husband and good president, but also the Messiah/Joe Cool/unicorn his most ardent supporters wanted him to be, and the ineffectual and exotic America-destroying outsider his most zealous enemies want you to fear he is.

It's such a complex comic book that a DVD-style commentary track from the cartoonist wouldn't be unwarranted, but in lieu of sitting on that or sitting on Weissman's lap while he reads Barack Hussein Obama panel by panel, we'll have to settle for the next best thing: asking him a couple of questions about it.

ComicsAlliance: Barack Hussein Obama seems like a pretty dramatic departure from your past work, or at least the work with which many readers are probably most familiar. Can you tell us a little bit about how you first started on the strip and why decided on the President as your subject matter?

Steven Weissman: I was pretty disappointed in myself when I started drawing these in late 2009. My technical approach to making comics wasn't working well and I'd kind of beat my existing characters into the ground. My son -- who was eight at the time -- made the observation one night that "Charlie Brown is a Jew." I thought it was really funny, and thought it would be even funnier if Barack Hussein Obama said it.

CA: I was also curious about the title, your choice to use Obama's middle name in it. Generally he's only referred to by his full name by opponents who want to emphasize his "foreign-ness" and think it's emblematic of him as the enemy of America they perceive him to be. Yet your comic, despite being full of politicians, isn't an overtly political one.

SW: I was interested by how Obama's critics used his name in that way. His supporters' sensitivity to "Hussein" is funny, too. I knew right away anyone hearing the title of the strip would get the wrong idea, which is just the kind of stupid logic that keeps me in my place.

CA: When a political figure first appears on the national stage, there's a period wherein the nation's cartoonists get to know him or her by drawing the person over and over until they arrive at "their" version. Could you tell us a little about how you arrived at your visual depiction of Obama? How long did it take before you arrived at what your Obama would look like?

SW: The first strip was drawn right away. There are a couple of practice drawings on the page preceding it (these are mostly drawn in sketchbooks), but he gets knocked into shape pretty quickly.

CA: How did you settle on a cast that you wanted to include?

SW: Biden worked immediately, though it took him a while to really suffer the way I wanted. I still don't think I've got the hang of Michelle Obama, but Sasha and Malia strips are really fun to draw. Secretary Clinton took the longest. She started out as Lucy Van Pelt, but really takes off with her physical transformation later in the book.

CA: Read in its final book form, Barack Hussein Obama seems to have shifted from a gag-per-strip format into something longer and much, much more elaborate, becoming a sort of continuity comic. Was that something that just happened, or did you plan out the whole thing at the beginning, expecting to shift gears into a longer narrative as time went on?

SW: It just happens that way. I would love to tell 100 unrelated jokes, but I can't help being interested in who they are and whatever happens next.

CA: What I found remarkable about the jokes in here are that very few are really political jokes of the sort that one might find in political cartoons or late night talk shows. That is, there aren't really any "easy" or obvious jokes. Was it difficult for you to sort of screen out the popular assessments of the figures you wrote, and the jokes our pop culture tells about them, in order to do your own thing?

SW: No, I don't like that stuff anyway.

CA: It's also worth noting that you tend to avoid extremely topical references, something that only becomes apparent when you do actually include topical references -- the "Ground Zero Mosque," for example, or the situation in Libya -- did you want to distance the strip from the news of the week while you were producing it, or did another of its production goose it in that direction?

SW: My earlier strip work was concerned with being kind of timeless and universal, but with Barack Hussein Obama I've consciously made an effort to be topical and specific. I wanted to use these people in this place at this time. You're right that it often departs from reality, but I was always trying to figure out a way back.

CA: Did your assessment or understanding of the work of political cartoonists change at all during the course of working on the strip?

SW: No, I'm consistently disinterested.

CA: Did you find your understanding or perception of Obama changing at all while you worked on the strip?

SW: Maybe just a little.

CA: How important was color to your strip, and how did you make the coloring choices you did? Because it's so sparse, when colors or new colors appear, it often seems significant.

SW: I think the more confident I became with the strip, the more I was OK with using whatever tools were around. Plenty of Stabilo point 88 pens, pencils, different screentones, the Pearlescent green and so on. Any kind of confidence is pretty significant to me.

CA: Can I ask to what degree the final story is inspired by Barack Obama as a real human being? That is, a lot of the events in the book could probably have technically existed with a different president in the Obama role. Were there unique elements about Obama as a human being or the Obama mystique or a popular perception of Obama that inspired the story? If things went differently in 2008, could you have seen yourself doing John Sidney McCain III?

SW: Barack Hussein Obama inspired such hope, fear, anger, disappointment, etc. that I really do think he's a special case. So many people had -- and still have -- their own ideas about who he is. I know this book isn't really "about" Obama, but I can't imagine it being about anyone else.

Barack Hussein Obama is on sale now from Fantagraphics.

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New Superman Exhibit Celebrates The Man Of Steel's Cleveland Roots

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-10-22T13:30:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, News, Culture

Krypton, Smallville, Metropolis and Cleveland are all famous homes to Superman. The only one of those four locales you can can actually visit (by virtue of it being a real place and all) is Cleveland, Ohio, and, ironically, it's the city that's the least popularly associated with the Man of Steel. Fortunately for Cleveland natives, a new permanent exhibit was unveiled and dedicated at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport earlier this month that ought to go a ways toward helping to put the city on the radar of Superfans around the world.The center piece of the $45,000 exhibit, funded and created by The Siegel & Shuster Society, is a slightly-larger-than-life statue of Superman with his hands on his hips, striking his famous George Reeves-inspired pose. He's in his familiar red-and-blue togs, a far cry from the armored, shorts-less New 52 Superman designed by Jim Lee, as well as from the Superman artist Joe Shuster first drew and which the world first met in 1938's Action Comics #1. If I had to pick a Superman artist whose depiction this Superman most closely resembles, I'd go with that of Dan Jurgens in the 1990s, though it's a strong synthesis of the various film, comics and cartoon Supermen over the decades, one that manages to look just right.

The airport Superman stands atop a huge S-shield logo, and behind his head the wall reads, "Welcome to Cleveland-Where the legend began." Big, red and black letters in the familiar Superman type scream the hero's name, with a banner reading "The World's Greatest Super Hero" below it.

Just below that? "Did you know Superman was created in Cleveland?" and "See these super sights in his hometown." Behind the statue is a silhouetted skyline of the city, and all along the wall are comic book dialogue balloon-like images announcing points of interest in the lives of Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Superman, along with their addresses should new arrivals in town want to take a little Superman history tour.

These sites include the Bell/AT&T Huron Road Building, an "art deco building long thought to be the model for the The Daily Planet; The Cleveland Public Library, to which the pair of teenagers used travel almost every day by street car; and several locations in the Glenville area, where they grew up, attended high school, created Superman and met Joanne Carter, the teenage model hired to pose for Lois Lane and who eventually married Siegel.

On the right border of the exhibit is a mock phone booth in which can be seen an image of Clark Kent pulling open his jacket and shirt to reveal his Superman costume. The left side features a television set constantly playing a never-ending loop of a short documentary produced, co-written and narrated by Mike Olszewski, the president of the Siegel & Shuster Society.

The film was played during the penultimate part of last Thursday night's ceremony for the hundreds of fans, media and curious passersby who assembled in front of the podium and wall of high, black-curtained screens obscuring the statue and display. T-shirts bearing Superman's S-shield logo just barely outnumbered blue t-shirts bearing the Society's logo, and one fan arrived with a Green Lantern t-shirt under his blazer (perhaps he was there awaiting a connecting flight to Coast City).

The short, upbeat film tells the most basic elements of the real story behind Superman, focusing on Siegel and Shuster's original acts of creation and the meteoric rise in their characters' popularity, including an appearance at the 1939 World's Fair, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the newspaper strip, the popular radio show and the debut of the Max Fleischer Studios' Superman cartoons -- an occasion Siegel and Shuster marked in Cleveland by setting up a mini-studio in the lobby of a local playhouse to demonstrate before an audience of children how Superman comics were made.

Olszewski's film was filled with photos of Siegel and Shuster and early Shuster artwork, as well as some stock footage and clips from various Superman movies, TV shows and cartoons. It was 100% completely controversy-free, with the ownership of Superman and the on-and-off legal disputes between the creators (and now their heirs) and the publisher who controls Superman not even mentioned. No one mentioned National Comics publishers Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz or the $130 page rate the young comics-creators got for Superman. National, DC Comics and Warner Bros. weren't ever mentioned in a negative light, if they were mentioned at all. DC only came up in the course of anecdotes during the various speeches. For example, in recounting how the Society came about, Olszewski explained how a faction of the group went to New York to meet with DC representatives to get their blessing before officially forming; they got it with the two conditions that the group be a non-profit, and that it not use the word "Superman" in its name).

The event kicked off with the Glenville High School Marching Band's rendition of John Williams' Superman theme from the 1978 film (which members of the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra would reprise as the curtains came down and the exhibit was finally revealed). Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson, City Councilman Jeff Johnson (who now represents the Glenville area) and airport officials all gave short speeches, as did Olszewski, Siegel's cousin and Society founder Irv Fine, and finally Laura Siegel Larson, the daughter of Jerry and Joanne Siegel, who now resides in California (Siegel Larson would make more news in comics circles a few days later, as comics news sites picked up on her open letter responding to the latest development in the long and ongoing legal battle between Warner Bros. and the Shuster and Siegel families).

"My dad, my mother and Joe would have been delighted, honored and humbled," Siegel Larson said during her speech, at another point noting they would have been "over the moon." As soon as her speech was finished, she was walked over to the display for its unveiling, and was among the first of scores of people to have their photos taken in front of the staring, primary-colored super-hero statue in the course of the next half hour or so.

People posing for photos with Superman should prove a pretty permanent phenomenon at the Cleveland airport.

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The Many Loves of Wonder Woman: A Brief History Of The Amazing Amazon's Love Life

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-08-28T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, News

Wonder Woman and Superman have long seemed like they'd make a nice match -- they both have blue eyes and blue-black hair, they're both superheroes with similar powers, they wear matching costumes. But maybe they look a little too much alike to work? In any case, since one or both of them are usually romantically entangled elsewhere, any dalliances between Superman and Wonder Woman have been very brief and occurred in their pasts or in alternate timelines where Lois Lane is dead. These include Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder (with Jim Lee), and Mark Waid and Alex Ross' influential Kingdom Come, in which the pair actually have a child together.

In official DC canon, however, Superman and Wonder Woman have always remained just really good friends -- that is, until this October's Justice League #12, in which Geoff Johns and Jim Lee will see the two heroes begin what's promised to be a substantive relationship.

Following our exploration of some of Superman's former flames, it's time to check out the Amazing Amazon's past dance cards. Sadly, Mr. Monster, seen about to walk down the aisle with Diana in the artwork to the right, doesn't make the list (but I bet you wish he did just so you would know what the heck is happening in that comic -- that's how effective Silver Age DC covers were! Decades later, and the intriguing imagery still piques one's interest).

Steve Trevor

Lois Lane to Wonder Woman's Superman, Steve Trevor is the reigning champion of Wonder Woman love interests and, even though the two haven't been an item in the comics for decades now, he's probably still the first guy a lot of people think of when they hear the words "Wonder Woman's boyfriend."

Trevor first appeared in the very same story Wonder Woman did, 1941's All-Star Comics #8, and he played an integral role in her origin and supporting cast. Trevor was a U.S. army intelligence officer whose plane crash-landed on the Amazons' Paradise Island. There, young Princess Diana helped nurse him back to health and gradually fell for him. At the advice of her patron goddesses, the Amazon Queen Hippolyta decided one of her people had to take Trevor back to Man's World and assist him and his country in their battle against the Axis forces in World War II. Naturally, Diana won the contest and adopted the star-spangled costume of Wonder Woman (a version of this story, updated so as not to be a period piece, was the basis of DC's 2009 direct-to-DVD Wonder Woman animated movie).

In Man's World, Wonder Woman adopted the civilian identity of a nurse named Diana Prince and got a job working as Trevor's secretary, allowing her to be close to him and on top of any intelligence concerning Nazis or other enemies of America that needed to get smashed. In a gender-reversed version of the Clark Kent/Lois Lane/Superman love triangle, Trevor pined for Wonder Woman while ignoring the affections of Diana, apparently oblivious to the fact that Diana looked just like Wonder Woman wearing glasses.

Trevor remained part of the Wonder Woman comic book long after its William Moulton Marston/H.G. Peter heyday, although he occasionally died and came back to life. Notably, the character was often portrayed as feeling emasculated by Diana's power and status. The couple finally married in the very last issue of the first volume of the Wonder Woman title.

During the 1985-1986 Crisis On Infinite Earths, DC's first big continuity reboot, the married Diana and Steve of Earth-2 move to Mount Olympus. When the next volume of Wonder Woman would start, Trevor was sidelined as Diana's love interest. He still appeared in the series, but as an older man, one who would ultimately marry the post-Crisis version of Wondy's Golden Age sidekick, Etta Candy.

After 2011's New 52 reboot, which cleaned continuity house just as COIE did, Steve Trevor became Wonder Woman's U.N. liaison in the pages of the new Justice League comic. Writer Geoff Johns and artist Jim Lee have had Trevor flirting with Wonder Woman, but the two characters have apparently yet to engage in any sort of romantic relationship. Trevor hasn't yet appeared, or even been mentioned, in the new Wonder Woman series by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, wherein Wondy's been too busy to think about boys (although she did almost marry Hell, the modern incarnation of Hades/Pluto -- long story).

Trevor's high profile is thanks mostly to the characters role in the 1975-1979 live-action television series starring Lynda Carter, and he's appeared alongside Wonder Woman in most of her incarnations in other media as well. An episode of Batman: The Brave and The Bold is beloved by fans for its humorous depiction of Trevor as cheerfully waiting around in a death trap with Batman until Wonder Woman swooped in to save the day.

"What does she see in that man?" Batman asks himself after the couple is out of earshot, echoing the feelings of many a Wonder Woman fan (more on that later).

Aquaman

They're both royalty from fictional fantasy kingdoms in the DC Universe, they're both superheroes, they're both lifelong Justice Leaguers. She has a thing for blondes. It seems like a pretty good match, right? The one major obstacle to Aquaman and Wonder Woman ever hooking up was, of course, the fact that Aquaman was married to Mera. But when the submarine sweethearts were estranged during the 1990s, and they were both single, well, why not?

In 1995's Aquaman Annual #1, writer Peter David told a story of the first meeting between a pre-Aquaman Orin and a pre-Wonder Woman Diana, in which the sea god Triton attempted to take the young princess before Orin intervened. The pair kissed before parting for years. In Grant Morrison and Howard Porter's 1997-launched JLA, Wonder Woman is the one who re-recruited the then-extremely anti-social Aquaman to join the new "Big Seven" iteration of the team. In a short story in 1998's Justice League 80-Page Giant #1 written by Chistopher Priest, Aquaman accidentally became entangled in Wondy's magic lasso and ended up inadvertently confessing that he found her attractive, and that she was the main reason he remained on the Justice League (Geoff Johns and Jim Lee repeated this scene in their modern Justice League, only with Green Lantern Hal Jordan in the lasso).

Perhaps the closest they ever came to consummation, however, was during Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch's 2000 JLA story arc "Queen of Fables," in which the titular villain put Wonder Woman in a cursed, Snow White-like sleep, and a kiss from the former prince of Atlantis awakened her.

Trevor Barnes

Writer/artist Phil Jimenez introduced Wonder Woman's first major love interest in years in 2001's Wonder Woman #170. Trevor Barnes kept Wondy's original flame's surname, but little else: Whereas Steve Trevor was a blonde, blue-eyed, caucasian fighting man for the U.S. military, Trevor Barnes was black, with long braided hair and a goatee, and he worked for the United Nations. The change in professions made Barnes a much more suitable partner for the modern Wonder Woman, as she moved further and further away from her World War II propaganda roots and became more of a champion for the world than for the United States specifically.

While the pair quickly became friends and shared a few adventures -- including a trip to Skartaris -- Barnes didn't last much longer than Jimenez's run on the title. Writer Walt Simonson killed Barnes off in Wonder Woman #194, the conclusion of a six-part fill-in arc between the end of Jimenez's run and the start of writer Greg Rucka's. The event may have made the case for some readers that Wonder Woman's love interests should be super-powered if they want to survive her lifestyle for long, but it's likely that most DC fans would disagree with that, as I'll explain presently:

Batman

Probably the last superhero one might expect to be a good match for Wonder Woman is the dark, grim and decidedly unlucky-in-love Batman, which is probably precisely why Joe Kelly decided to explore such a relationship during his 2003-2004 run on JLA. During the storyline "The Obsidian Age," in which the Justice League journeyed into the ancient past in order to save a time-lost Aquaman, Batman and Wonder Woman prepared to fight their enemies to the death and, before doing so, they surprised one another (and a lot of readers) by sharing a kiss. Once all the resurrection, time-travel, villain-fighting and day-saving was out the way, the two put off having to talk about their kiss for awhile, with Batman being the more reluctant of the two, even standing Wonder Woman up on at least one occasion.

Ultimately, Wonder Woman used Martian Manhunter's Martian Transconsciousness Articulator, a doohickey that plays out various possible futures in dream-like fashion for the user, in order to determine that maybe she and Batman were better off just being friends and teammates.

The Batman/Wonder Woman romance is a favorite of longtime fans, largely because of its role in the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited animated series that broadcast between 2001 and 2006. The relationship developed remarkably organically for a superhero action series, with both parties falling for each other's obviously admirable qualities in a way that seemed to humanize them both. Memorably (but weirdly), the sorceress Circe transformed Diana into a pig. In order to save Wonder Woman, Batman was forced to testify to his love for the Amazon princess in the form of song.

Nemesis

Perhaps the most lasting contribution to the 2006-2011 Wonder Woman series that the much-heralded (but ultimately short-lived) writer Allan Heinberg made was giving Wonder Woman a new romantic interest in Tom Tresser, AKA Nemesis. Originally created by Cary Burkett as a spy and master of disguise in a short story in a 1980 issue of The Brave and the Bold, Nemesis was best known for his role in the popular 1980s action/espionage series Suicide Squad. When DC relaunched Wonder Woman in 2006 after a universe rejiggering Infinite Crisis, Nemesis now worked for The Department of Metahuman Affairs alongside agent Diana Prince, Wonder Woman's new secret identity. The set-up thus reflected her original relationship with Steve Trevor.

Heinberg and his successors on the title -- mainly Gail Simone, who ended up writing the bulk of the 58-issue series -- kept Nemesis around. He was generally played a good-intentioned but goofy and sexually aggressive foil for Wonder Woman, and her courtship of him via traditional Amazonian rituals was mostly played for laughs. Their relationship ultimately ended when Tresser realized Wonder Woman didn't really love him.

Superman

As previously mentioned, romances between Diana of Themyscira and Kal-El of Krypton have until recently been non-canonical, but they have happened. In 1998's Superman: Distant Fires, Howard Chaykin, Gil Kane and Kevin Nowlan depicted a post-apocalyptic Earth where Superman and Wonder Woman were among the only survivors, and where they had a son who, like Kal-El, was eventually rocketed to another planet to save him from his homeworld's destruction. In Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, which also takes place in the future, Clark and Diana had a superpowered daughter called Lara, after Superman's Kryptonian mother, whom they protected from the government. In typical Miller style, the relationship was memorably... intense:

Click images to enlarge

Perhaps most famously, the Kingdom Come graphic novel by Mark Waid and Alex Ross introduced a reality where Wonder Woman and Superman coupled after Lois Lane was killed by the Joker, and where Kal-El and Diana eventually started a family (seen below with Uncle Batman):

Indeed, there have been quite a few occurrences of this match, but October's Justice League #12 by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee will be the first time the love between Superman and Wonder Woman will be presented as canon. In honor of the event, DC partnered with popular online dating site Match.com to create profiles for both superheroes. Here's Wonder Woman's, along with an analysis by Dr. Helen Fisher, Chief Scientific Officer for Match:

Click to enlarge

Superman and Wonder Woman are a classic match, as a very high testosterone male and a very high estrogen female. They also have many cultural and biological traits that will fuel their romance. People also tend to fall in love with those of the same background. Although Superman comes from a different planet, while Wonder Woman harks from an isolated island, both are aliens to our modern world. More important, Superman and Wonder Woman share the same values and goals: They are both dedicated to truth and justice and both fight evil to save the good -- traits shared by both the high testosterone and high estrogen type. Lastly, both value independence.

Compelling testimony from Dr. Fisher, to be sure, but we'd be remiss if we didn't give equal time to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, who memorably commented upon the idea in the classic 1985 story "For The Man Who Has Everything":

Click here for our brief history of the many loves of Superman.

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The Many Loves Of Superman: A Brief History Of The Man Of Steel's Love Life

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

Filed under: DC

Last week DC Comics announced that Superman and Wonder Woman would lock lips in the upcoming Justice League #12, and unlike their previous lip-locks (like the one above, from John Byrne and George Perez's Action Comics #600 in 1988), this one would lead to an actual relationship, making them the DC Universe's premiere super-power couple.

Wonder Woman and Superman have long seemed like they'd make a nice match -- they both have blue eyes and blue-black hair, they're both superheroes with similar powers, they wear matching costumes. But maybe they look a little too much alike to work? In any case, since one or both of them are usually romantically entangled elsewhere, any dalliances between Superman and Wonder Woman have been very brief and occurred in their pasts or in alternate timelines where Lois Lane is dead. These include Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder (with Jim Lee), and Mark Waid and Alex Ross' influential Kingdom Come, in which the pair actually have a child together.

In official DC canon, however, Superman and Wonder Woman have always remained just really good friends, even when put in the most dire and tempting circumstances, as in Joe Kelly and German Garcia & Joe Rubenstein's Action Comics #761, in which the superheroes were transported to another dimension and forced to fight demons for literally a thousand years. In all that time, Superman's love for his wife Lois Lane never wavered.

While Lois has always been the most famous of the Man of Steel's romances, she's hardly the only love interest he's ever had. Join us now as we take a look back at a few of Superman's prominent girlfriends.

Lois Lane

It's just about impossible to argue against Lois Lane as Superman's ideal girlfriend. She's the only character to star in a comic book with the words "Superman's Girlfriend" right there in the title, after all, let alone one that ran for 14 years. It's similarly difficult to overestimate the character's importance in the Superman story and basic, core appeal.

Lois Lane has been around since Superman's first appearance in 1938's Action Comics #1, and she's been in every single adaptation of the Superman story in other media: radio, newspaper comic strips, novels, animated cartoons, film, and television. The relationship Lois shares with Superman is complex; she spurns milquetoast Clark Kent in favor of alpha-jock Superman, who in turn spurns her. Consequently, Lois would think of insane plots to either reveal Superman's secret identity or trick him into marrying her while jealously fending off any romantic rivals. Superman generally kept Lois at arm's length, unless of course she suddenly took an interest in another guy or her ardor seemed to wane.

This status quo worked for a good four or five decades, but eventually the two developed a more realistic and mature relationship during writer/artist John Byrne's revamp of the Superman continuity for the emerging post-Crisis On Infinite Earths version of the DC Universe in the late 1980s. The new Lois Lane wasn't quite so hard on her Daily Planet co-worker Clark Kent, and Superman revealed his secret identity to her. After a few years as a couple, they finally married in 1996's Superman: The Wedding Album, and had one of the more healthy and stable super-relationships for the next 15 years. DC's "New 52" reboot undid their marriage, courtship and even the fact that Lois knew that Superman and Clark Kent were one and the same, freeing the Man of Steel up for a relationship with Wonder Woman that does not necessitate leaving Lois -- if they were never together, there can be no break-up.

Lana Lang

If Lois Lane was Superman's greatest love, Lana Lang was his first -- at least insofar as the mythology goes. She debuted in 1950's Superboy #10, back when "Superboy" was "the adventures of Superman when he was a boy," rather than a different character entirely (if you don't know what I'm talking about... it's a long story). Back in Smallville, Kansas, Lana was essentially a red-haired, teenage version of Lois Lane, but over the years revisions were made to the character and her precise level of romantic involvement with Clark. Sometimes she was just a platonic pal, sometimes she loved him but her feelings weren't reciprocated, and sometimes they were high school sweethearts.

The adult Lana spent a lot of time in Metropolis, vying for Superman's affections in a conflict with Lois. In the post-Crisis DCU of the 1980s, Lana had an unrequited love for Clark, and eventually started stalking him when he became Superman. Things ended more or less happily for Lana when she married Clark's best friend from childhood, Pete Ross, and they had a baby together, whom she named Clark. Which, come to think of it, was probably pretty weird for Pete.

While Lois is usually the love interest in any other media adaptations, Lana got her turn in 1983's Superman III, in which she was played by Annette O'Toole, and in the 2001-2011 TV series Smallville, in which she was played by Kristin Kreuk (although the ostensible prequel series ended up running so long that a Lois Lane eventually joined the cast as well).

Lori Lemaris

And then there was that time Superman dated a mermaid.

In 1959's Superman #129, Bill Finger and Wayne Boring revealed "The Girl in Superman's Past." It turned out that when Superman's alter ego Clark Kent was attending Metropolis University, he fell in love with a mysterious girl in a wheelchair who had a strict 8 pm curfew every night. Despite some of his questions about her unusual behavior, young Clark proposed to the co-ed, who turned him down, saying she had to return to her homeland. Which turned out to be Atlantis. Yes, Lori was all fish from the waist down, a fact she disguised by getting around on land in a wheelchair and covering her fish parts with a blanket.

Lori survived the Silver Age continuity purge of Crisis, although the post-Crisis version grew human legs when on dry land, and would resume her mermaid form only when wet. She's appeared only rarely since.

Maxima

Roger Stern and George Pérez introduced Superman to Maxima in 1989's Action Comics #645. A super-powered despot from the alien world of Almerac, she came to Earth seeking Superman as her perfect mate. Unlike Earth women, she argued, Maxima could produce children with the Kryptonian Superman. TMI?

Superman didn't bite, perhaps because he was already in love with Lois, perhaps because he didn't like the idea of being a super-stallion for some supervillain, or perhaps he just didn't like girls who didn't have the initials "L.L."

While Maxima and Supes never hooked up, exposure to the noble hero helped soften her, and she later became a superhero in her own right, serving on a couple different incarnations of the Justice League before ultimately dying in a big crossover event story.

Wonder Woman

As previously mentioned, romances between Kal-El of Krypton and Diana of Themyscira have until recently been non-canonical, but they have happened. In 1998's Superman: Distant Fires, Howard Chaykin, Gil Kane and Kevin Nowlan depicted a post-apocalyptic Earth where Superman and Wonder Woman were among the only survivors, and where they had a son who, like Kal-El, was eventually rocketed to another planet to save him from his homeworld's destruction. In Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, which also takes place in the future, Clark and Diana had a superpowered daughter called Lara, after Superman's Kryptonian mother, whom they protected from the government. In typical Miller style, the relationship was memorably... intense:

Click images to enlarge

Perhaps most famously, the Kingdom Come graphic novel by Mark Waid and Alex Ross introduced a reality where Superman and Wonder Woman coupled after Lois was killed by the Joker, and where Kal-El and Diana eventually started a family (seen below with Uncle Batman):

Indeed, there have been quite a few occurrences of this match, but October's Justice League #12 by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee will be the first time the love between Superman and Wonder Woman will be presented as canon. In honor of the event, DC partnered with popular online dating site Match.com to create profiles for both superheroes. Here's Superman's, along with an analysis by Dr. Helen Fisher, Chief Scientific Officer for Match:

Click to enlarge

Superman and Wonder Woman are a classic match, as a very high testosterone male and a very high estrogen female. They also have many cultural and biological traits that will fuel their romance. People also tend to fall in love with those of the same background. Although Superman comes from a different planet, while Wonder Woman harks from an isolated island, both are aliens to our modern world. More important, Superman and Wonder Woman share the same values and goals: They are both dedicated to truth and justice and both fight evil to save the good -- traits shared by both the high testosterone and high estrogen type. Lastly, both value independence.

Come back tomorrow for a brief history of the many loves of Wonder Woman!

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Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor Build an Ideal Batman Story in 'Death By Design'

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-08-02T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, Reviews, Opinion

This summer audiences are seeing two very different takes on the Batman character and his story that rather radically depart from the one that appears in DC Comics' regular publishing line. The company released Batman: Earth One, an original graphic novel by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, which tells an alternate origin story more grounded in reality and intended to appeal to a more casual bookstore audience, as opposed to weekly comic shop customers. And Warner Bros. released The Dark Knight Rises, which wraps up director Christopher Nolan's incredibly popular film trilogy about a masked vigilante in a world free of superheroes and their narrative conventions.

A third alternate and similarly accessible take on the character was recently released, however, that hasn't received anywhere near as much attention as the other two -- but it deserves to. Chip Kidd and Dave Talyor's graphic novel Batman: Death By Design, which sets the Dark Knight in a world reminiscent of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and where aesthetics and adventure combine in uncommonly explicit fashion.

Kidd is an accomplished book designer who's probably best known to comics readers for his work for DC Comics, including the often imitated logos for All-Star Superman and All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, and art books Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limit (with Art Spiegelman) and Mythology (with Alex Ross), as well as some mildly controversial projects like Bat-Manga and Shazam!: The Golden Age of the World's Mightiest Mortal.

Kidd's also a writer, having produced a pair of novels -- The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners -- in addition to his non-fiction writing, and those are two skill sets that synthesize quite perfectly in his Death by Design.

His partner on this particular work, Kidd's first full-length graphic novel, is artist Dave Taylor, who previously drew Batman in the 1990s, mainly in the monthly series Shadow of The Bat. The method and style Taylor adapts here, however, make the visuals appear to be the work of an entirely different artist.

Their Batman, like the character in Earth One and Nolan's movies, is his own Batman, with his own look and his own world. His costume is heavily informed by the one his first artists drew in the Batman's first appearances, right down to the cut of his trunks, the shape of his ears and edges of his cowl; they even include a panel where his cape flares up to simulate the erect bat-wings of the very first Batman comics images of the 1930s.

As is appropriate given the title, this is a Batman narrative almost completely defined by its design and aesthetic sensibilities, to the degree that I'm having trouble thinking of a Batman anything as thoroughly and completely visually detailed as this since the Tim Burton Batman films. Perhaps Batman: The Animated series, with which the book shares an ambiguity regarding its setting in history. As in the animated series, everything looks as if it's taking place in comics' pre-war Golden Age, but modern technologies like computers and futuristic concepts like a hologram projector and a hand-held personal force field generator exist -- they just look like they were designed by Madison Avenue ad men circa 1942.

Familiar faces appear in Death by Design, including Alfred and The Joker, plus a single panel of The Penguin and references to Harvey Dent and Commissioner Gordon. The Joker is a rather unique take, with blackish gums, black-red lips, luminescent pale blue hair, and purple neckwear, but otherwise completely drained of color like so much of the book. The other characters look more or less standard, although every character, new and old, is dressed in 1940s Hollywood costumes.

The story is a fairly standard murder mystery type, of the sort that might have been eight-pages in a Golden Age comic but fleshed-out characters and filigreed fantasy-history make Death by Design novelistic in length.The crumbling Wayne Central Station, commissioned by the late Thomas Wayne, Batman's father, is about to be demolished in order to make way for a new Wayne Central Station. The new building is to feature an ultra-modernist architectural design. Architecture expert Cyndia Syl, who wrote her thesis on the original Wayne Central, wants to save the building because she believes it's an architectural treasure, one created by an eccentric Gotham architect who has since gone into hiding.

Meanwhile, someone seems to be trying to kill Bruce Wayne and a union boss responsible for the shoddiness of the original station. A mysterious, banshee-like figure who looks like a Republic serial mystery man and calling himself "Exacto" appears to warn of impending doom. An architecture critic investigates the strange goings-on. And The Joker is on the loose, doing Joker things.

Kidd's plot is straightforward but engaging in its old-fashionedness, as he puts Bruce Wayne/Batman in the interesting position of being the bad guy and the good guy simultaneously, depending on the point-of-view of the character he's dealing with. While there are attempts at murder, there's not a whole lot of black-and-white good and evil in Death by Design (with the exception of The Joker); the characters basically see things in different ways, and Batman's journey isn't merely beating up the bad guys, but coming around to seeing things one way after having started out seeing them a different way.

What really elevates the book beyond a pretty good, much-better-than-average Batman story, however, is Taylor's artwork, and the degree to which he and Kidd have built the book's world as a cohesive whole that all fits together and works the way a world actually might, all while looking like its own place and distinctly different from our own. Taylor said the entire book was done in pencils; "penciled" with blue pencil and "inked" with graphite, and with no lines erased. Shading and bits of coloring were later done with computer. As such, the grit of the pencil lines and the grade of the paper form the raw materials of everything you see, from the detailed architectural drawings of buildings and the fabric of Batman's tunic.

Death by Design is not quite black and white, although it looks awfully close, with most scenes having only highlights of a third color. A daytime business meeting, for example, will be set in black and white save for some golden sunlight shining through a window and reflecting off select objects in the room; or the aforementioned Joker's splashes of color, singling him out from a crowd. The subtle, restrained coloring allows the pencil lines to remain visible and to define the artwork. Unlike most comics art produced with computer-coloring over pencils, the colors here never absorb the line artwork itself.

Additionally, there are so many more darks in the scenes in which Batman appears, with his black cape and cowl, that there's a sharp, visual division between Batman scenes and Bruce Wayne scenes, and between nighttime action scenes and daytime plot-advancement scenes.

Compared to other new Batman stories available this summer, Death By Design certainly seems to be the least flashy and the least ambitious in terms of reinventing the wheel that is Batman, but it also seems to be the most potent in terms of getting at the most basic appeal of the character and exploring it: the striking bat-costume wrapped on a man running and jumping through a classic urban setting. And, unlike the films and video games that now make so much money as to make the comics themselves seem incidental (if not downright irrelevant), the book does so with the character as he was originally conceived -- as a drawing on a piece of paper

Batman: Death by Design is on sale now in finer comics shops and bookstores.

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Will Captain America Team With The Falcon In 'Winter Soldier' Movie Sequel?

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-07-18T10:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Marvel, Movies

Marvel Studios announced the full title of the next Captain America movie at San Diego Comic-Con International this weekend -- Captain America: The Winter Soldier -- but didn't go into any other details, like, for example, if Cap would be joined by any of his long-time allies from the comics. Now, E! News is reporting that actor Anthony Mackie is apparently in talks to play The Falcon in the upcoming film.Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, was created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan, and made his debut in 1969's Captain America #117, becoming Marvel's first African-American superhero (He's pre-dated by the Black Panther, but T'Challa is, of course, African rather than African-American). His costume and powers have varied over the years, and when he debuted he was wearing an unfortunate green outfit open to the navel, but he usually wears a red and white costume, flies with the aid of artificial wings and has a mental link to his pet falcon, Redwing.

He shared Captain America's book, which was retitled Captain America and The Falcon, through the bulk of the '70s.

How exactly the character might fit into the next film is, at this point, anyone's guess. The sub-title comes from the Ed Brubaker written story of the mid-aughts, in which Cap (and readers) learned that his sidekick Bucky Barnes had survived his supposed death near the end of World War II, and was living as a brainwashed, robot-armed assassin serving the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. "Winter Soldier" was his code name. Given that movie Bucky seemingly fell to his death in last year's Captain America: The First Avenger, the sequel could easily extrapolate its plot from Brubaker's run on the comic book.

But if Falcon appears, he would have to be introduced, as movie Cap has only been un-frozen for the length of the plot of The Avengers... and the last few minutes of his first movie. It may be worth noting that in Marvel's Ultimate Universe, which so heavily inspired Captain America and The Avengers, The Falcon was first introduced as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Mackie was most recently seen playing sidekick to action movie star Abraham Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but he's probably best known for his role in The Hurt Locker. He's also appeared in Real Steel, The Adjustment Bureau, We Are Marshall and Notorious, in which he played Tupac.

If E!'s source is solid, and The Falcon does appear in The Winter Soldier, that might mean the character will be eligible to join up in an Avengers movie sequel. After all, Black Widow and Hawkeye were both introduced into Marvel's movie-verse with supporting roles in other Avengers' movies.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is currently planned for a 2014 release.

[Via E!]

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ComicsAlliance Week-in-Review: July 9-15, 2012

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-07-15T23:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Humor, News, Opinion, Culture, Cosplay

Depending on how you want to look at it, there was either one big story this week (San Diego Comic-Con International), or a million smaller stories this week (all the stuff everyone even tangentially related to comics is announcing this weekend). We've got plenty of CA staff reporting from the floor, and, after the jump, we can look back at most of what they're reporting...and CA's other coverage for the week.

Publishing:

-Mike Mignola will be writing and drawing the Hellboy miniseries Hellboy In Hell, which begins shipping in December.

-Dynamite has announced a Masks series by Chris Roberson and Alex Ross that will see their various pulp and pulp-inspired heroes like The Shadow, The Spider and Green Hornet crossover. It will mark the first full-painted interior work from Ross in about three years.

-IDW has announced a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic, by Katie Cook and Andy Price.

-Brian Wood and Carlos D'Anda will be producing a new Star Wars comic for Dark Horse, set immediately after the events of the original 1977 film. So it's basically going to be exactly like the original Marvel Star Wars comic, only completely different.

-DC's "The Dark and The Edge" panel.

-IDW plans to publish Artist's Editions of Gil Kane's Spider-Man and Mark Schultz's Xenozoic Tales.

-DC's SDCC Batman panel.

-J. Michael Straczynski will be publishing comics through Image, as part of his new "Studio JMS" trans-media effort.

-Legendary Comics announced a few projects.

-DC's SDCC Vertigo panel (There's new Gaiman-written Sandman material on the horizon!).

-DC's SDCC "DC Now" panel.

-Marvel's SDCC "Next Big Thing" panel.

-DC's SDCC Superman panel.

-Marvel's SDCC Avengers Vs. X-Men panel.

-Image announced a mess of new books from the sweet spot in the Venn diagram of the intersection of "Industry Veterans" and "Top Talent."

-Archie Comics will publish a crossover between their Mega Man and Sonic The Hedgehog comics.

-DC is publishing a Django Unchained comic book, adapted from Quentin Tarantino's first (longer) draft for his next movie, and drawn by an artist yet to be announced.

-Marvel's SDCC Cup O' Joe panel.

-DC's SDCC Justice League and Green Lantern panel.

Awards:

-The latest-and last-recipients of the Xeric Foundation awards have been announced.

-This year's Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.

Previews:

-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Color Classics #3.

-Freelancers.

-Avenging Spider-Man #9.

Film:

-Chris Sims and David Uzumeri have finished watching Superman Returns.

-Here's a 13-minute behind-the-scenes featurette on Dark Knight Rises.

-Will Yun Lee has been cast in the next Wolverine movie, The Wolverine, perhaps as the Silver Samurai.

-Take a look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One DVD collection, which includes The Avengers, all of the films feeding into The Avengers and bonus stuff in a collectible case.

-Christopher Nolan is not-repeat not-doing a Justice League film, or any other Batman films, after The Dark Knight Rises.

-SDCC attendees got to see all of the Batmobiles, from the one Adam West's Batman rode in to the ones Christian Bale rides. This is the first time all of the Batmobiles have been in the same place at the same time...with the exception of every night in the Batcave, of course.

-Marvel Studios made a mess of minor announcements regarding their upcoming film slate, revealing the sub-titles of their next to Avengers-verse movies and the villain of Iron Man 3 (It's who you thought it was).

-Here's the new Man of Steel poster, featuring an extreme close-up of Superman's costume (sorry; it's only from his chest up).

TV:

-Andy Yen reviews the CW's live-action Green Arrow show, Arrow. He thought it was fun.

Video games:

-Andy Yen reviews The Walking Dead Episode 2: Starved For Help.

-Rocksteady's follow-up to Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City won't be Batman: Arkham Nation or Arkham World, but will reportedly be set in "The Silver Age," feature the Justice League and revolve around Batman's first meeting with The Joker.

-Here's a minute and a half trailer of DC superheroes brutalizing one another in the upcoming Injustice: Gods Among Us.

-Here's a trailer for the previously announced Adventure Time: Hey Ice King, Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!

-Deadpool announced a Deadpool videogame.

Cosplay:

-This week's Best Cosplay Ever (This Week).

-Here's Becky Cloonan, our own Bethany Fong and Ali Kay modelling a Ming Doyle-designed handbag.

-Thursday's best SDCC cosplay.

-Friday and Saturday's best SDCC cosplay.

Toys:

-Square Enix is making Batman and Catwoman action figures based on the Batman: Arkham City video game versions of the characters.

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Christopher Nolan Preemptively Turns Down Justice League Membership

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-07-12T15:30:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, Movies, News

It's no secret that that Warner Bros., like any movie studio, wouldn't mind having something like Marvel's Avengers in its portfolio: A whole family of blockbusters starring individual superheroes that can carry their own sequels, help sell the audience on related movies and unite for a massive team-up of a movie every few years that obliterates box-office records. But if Warner Bros. is ever going to follow Marvel's Avengers example with the Justice League -- heck, if they even ever get a Justice League movie off the ground -- they're going to have to do it without the help of their go-to superhero guy, Christopher Nolan. During press for The Dark Knight Rises, the director said he was done with comic book superheroes, bat-caped and otherwise."I've got no plans to do anything more, and certainly, no involvement with any Justice League project," Nolan told the Associated Press.

Dark Knight Rises will mark the end of the filmmaker's involvement with Batman, including the inevitable franchise reboot that ought to be announced shortly after the box office receipts for the new film get counted, or a Justice League flick prominently featuring The Dark Knight.

Said Nolan:

We're finished with all we're doing with Batman. This is the end of our take on the character.

...

Batman will outlive us all, and our interpretation was ours. Obviously, we consider it definitive and kind of finished. The great thing about Batman is he lives on for future generations to reinterpret and, obviously, Warners will have to decide in the future what they're going to do with him.

It's not too terribly surprising to hear, given how much time and energy Nolan has already given to translating the character to the big screen between 2005's Batman Begins and this summer's promotional efforts for Rises (assuming he started working on the first film at least a year prior to its release, that's almost a decade of the man's life), and seeing how hard his Batman films leaned away from the science fiction and fantasy elements of the DC comics that comprise Bats' home turf, choosing instead for a more realistic take on the character (Ninjas, Batpods, flying Batmobiles and Liam Neeson's facial hair aside).

Fans of Nolan no doubt had their hopes stirred when they learned Warner Bros. very next film starring a DC superhero (and Justice League member!) would be 2013's Man of Steel, which bears a Christopher Nolan producing credit (and, currently, a story credit).

Factor in last year's Green Lantern film-which was not produced by Nolan and, perhaps not coincidentally, disappointed at the box office and the comic shop-and three-sevenths of the founding members of the Justice League would have already made their film appearances, making and Avengers-style team-up movie possible, if unlikely.

It's probably for the best. I for one wouldn't want to hear Christian Bale sharing trading quips with Ryan Reynolds in his hoarse, smoker's cough whisper-roar of a Batman voice.

The Dark Knight Rises opens July 20.

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DC Announces New Gigs For Ann Nocenti And Tony S. Daniel

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-07-09T10:30:00+00:00

Filed under: DC

DC Comics made a couple of unexpected announcements Friday afternoon, revealing high-profile new assignments for veteran writer Ann Nocenti, one of only two women writers working on the publisher's DCU line of comics at the moment, and artist-turned-writer/artist Tony S. Daniel.

Nocenti will be taking over the writing chores on Catwoman starting with September's #0 issue, the one with the much remarked upon cover by Guillem March. That issue was originally announced last month with current Catwoman writer Judd Winick (who is moving on to another DC title and an all-ages book of his own creation) attached.A long-time comics writer and editor, Nocenti is probably best remembered for her four-year run on Daredevil from 1987-1991. She started her career at Marvel as an assistant editor, and she did much of her earliest comics writing there.

For DC, she wrote a Kid Eternity monthly for the Vertigo imprint and, most recently, she inherited the just-relaunched "New 52" version of Green Arrow from J.T. Krul (and fill-in writers Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens) with its seventh issue.

Nocenti previously wrote Catwoman in the 2004, two-issue miniseries Batman/Catwoman: Trail of the Gun, drawn by Ethan Van Sciver.

Meanwhile, those wondering what would become of Daniel after learning that the new team of John Layman and Jason Fabok would be taking over Detective Comics from the writer/artist need wonder no longer. Daniel's next gig at DC will be a two-issue fill-in stint for Jim Lee on Justice League, drawing a script by the book's regular writer Geoff Johns.

When you're writing and drawing one of the two main Batman books, the one that the publisher named itself after, the summer there's a Batman movie in theaters, there isn't a whole heck of a lot higher one can go at DC, but the Justice League gig certainly qualifies-it remains DC's top-selling book.

Daniel will be drawing October and November's Justice League #13 and #14, which will comprise a two-issue arc introducing Wonder Woman villain The Cheetah into the New 52U. Daniel will join Gene Ha, Carlos D'Anda, Ivan Reis and Joe Prado on the list of artists who have been called in to fill-in for Lee during the book's first fourteen issues, which will make it just over a third of Lee's run on the book that has been penciled by someone other than Lee.

[Via The Source]

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ComicsAlliance Week-in-Review: July 1-7, 2012

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

Filed under: News, Opinion, Culture, Cosplay

This week Marvel announced a large, concentrated relaunch and re-branding effort of sorts they're calling "Marvel NOW!", which will launch news series, relaunch older series with new #1s, shake up creative teams and redesigns many costumes over the course of the next few months. Andy Khouri spoke to Marvel execs Joe Quesada, Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort about their plans here.

As for ComicsAlliance THEN!, join us after the jump for a rundown of much of our coverage during the last week.

Publishing:

-Bryan Lee O'Malley's San Diego Comic-Con goodies will be especially good: A special "Evil Edition" of the first volume of the new full-color hardcover version of his beloved Scott Pilgrim series (featuring First Evil Ex-Boyfriend Matthew Patel on the cover), and a limited number of prints featuring the cast of his highly-anticipated next project, Seconds.

-Remember that part at the very end of The Avengers, where that alien guy was like, "To fight the Avengers is to court death," and then a guy with a wrinkly chin smiled and your friend who is way more into Marvel comics than you are totally freaked out? Have you wondered who that guy is, and what his whole deal is? Marvel is panning a miniseries entitled Thanos: Son of Titan just for you.

-ComicsAlliance favorites Art Baltazar and Franco (Tiny Titans, Superman Family Adventures) are launching their own independently-published anthology book, featuring original characters: Aw Yeah Comics.

-Chew writer John Layman and artist Jason Fabok will be taking the reigns of DC's Detective Comics from writer/artist Tony Daniel.

-DC Comics announced a six-issue Joe Kubert Presents miniseries and the debut of the New 52boot versions of Black Lightning and Blue Devil...unsurprisingly, some of the creators of Black Lightning and Blue Devil are less than thrilled.

Reviews:

-Matt D. Wilson on Wizzywig.

-John Parker on more of the first year of Spawn.

-Andrew Wheeler on Avengers Vs. X-Men #7.

-David Brothers on the work of Joe Casey.

Previews:

-The Cape: 1969 #1.

-Boom! Studios' SDCC exclusive variant covers.

-Rocketeer Adventures #4.

Interviews:

-Matt D. Wilson talks to Mike Norton about his Battlepug.

- Andy Khouri talks to Marvel executives Joe Quesada, Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort about Marvel NOW!

- Chris Sims and Matt D. Wilson talk to Chris Roberson and Allison Baker about Monkeybrain Comics.

Art:

-Best Art Ever-This Fourth of July!

-This week's Best Art Ever (This Week).

-Artist Chris Sheridan brings a lot of his own personality (and particular design style) to familiar characters like Elvis and the Star Wars gang.

Toys:

-There will be a ThunderCats box set of Minimates available at SDCC. And it will include Snarf, for some reason.

-Caleb Goellner unboxes Hasbro's SDCC exclusive SHIELD Helicarrier toy...and photographs the hell out of it (Pug included to show scale). Caleb and his toy reviewing assistant gave Hasbro's Amazing Spider-Man line the same treatment.

-DC will have an exclusive two-pack set of action figures featuring Green Lanterns Kyle Rayner and Kilowog at SDCC.

-Here are a million images of Hot Toys' Dark Knight Rises line. Like the Hot Toys Avengers toys, they seriously creep me out.

Video games:

-If you've ever wondered exactly how old a man I am, this may provide a decent clue: I didn't understand any of the sentences in this article, but I'll go ahead and cut-and-paste the first one here: "Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 players looking to get their hands on the latest ports of '90s fighting game mainstays Marvel Super Heroes and Marvel Vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes will be able to grab both simultaneously in September with the release of Marvel vs. Capcom Origins on XBLA and PSN for 1200 MS Points/$15, respectively." We are living in the future! And it frightens and confuses me!

-Hit-Monkey, the Marvel character who is a hitman who is also a monkey, is apparently getting his own video game next year.

Film:

-It had to happen! Chris Sims and David Uzumeri have made it all the way to Superman Returns, those poor bastards.

-Just think-in a few more weeks, posts like this featuring dribs and drabs of info and images from The Dark Knight Returns will be a thing of the past!

-Marvel will screen a short film entitled Item 47 set in the world of The Avengers at Comic-Con.

-Sims on The Amazing Spider-Man, a film that really seems to be fishing for compliments with a title like that, if you ask me.

-You've seen the movie, now see the concept art! You can check out some select pieces of Amazing Spider-Man designer George Hull's work for the film here.

Cosplay:

-Holy @#$% look at that @#$%ing mermaid! Er, I mean, here's this week's Best Cosply Ever (This Week).

-Here's a special Fourth of July edition of Best Cosplay Ever (This Week), featuring the most patriotic heroes.

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Joe Kubert Presents Hawkman & Hawkgirl, DC Reintroduces Blue Devil & Black Lightning

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-07-05T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, News

Yesterday may have been Independence Day here in the United States, but public relations never takes a holiday! DC Comics made two notable announcements via their Source blog yesterday, one of which is sure to excite fans of one of their oldest and greatest creators, and another which may excite fans of two particular characters: Artist Joe Kubert will be getting his own miniseries to showcase his work, and Black Lightning and Blue Devil will be making their "New 52" debuts in an upcoming DC Comics Presents story arc.

On October 31, DC will ship the first issue of the six-issue anthology project Joe Kubert Presents, each issue of which will feature a Kubert story as well as work from Brian Buniak and Sam Glanzman. That first issue will feature a Hawkman (and, based on the cover image, Hawkgirl) story written and illustrated by Kubert, as well as an Angel and The Ape story by Buniak and an autobiographical story set on the U.S.S. Stevens by Glanzman.

Kubert said his stories in future issues would star Sgt. Rock, another one of the characters Kubert is most closely associated with; The Redeemer, a character Kubert created to star in a 12-issue, 1983 maxiseries that never actually saw print; and "Spit" and "The Biker," two characters whose names are completely unfamiliar to me... and minutes and minutes of Internet research hasn't made them any more familiar to me.

Kubert has of course enjoyed one of the longest and most fruitful careers in American comics publishing, and is one of the few creators who was working in the industry's Golden Age that is still working today --vand, it should be noted, still producing great work. In the past decade alone, DC has published his Yossel, Dong Xaoi, Jew Gangster, Tor: A Prehistoric Odyssey and Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place. He also occasionally contributes to the publisher's superhero-oriented efforts, liked drawing the Sgt. Rock feature in 2009's Wednesday Comics and more recently inking his son Andy's pencil art in one of the controversial Before Watchmen prequel miniseries.

His less-famous collaborators have both worked with Kubert in the past. Buniak is currently an instructor at The Kubert School and has drawn for Dark Horse, Charlton and Archie; his past DC work includes contributions to the now defunct Paradox Press imprint's Big Book Of... series. Glanzman, for his part, has worked in comics about as long as Kubert has, for publishers including Charlton, Dell, and Marvel. At DC, Glanzman worked under then-editor Kubert for on various war and horror anthologies.

Meanwhile, in the DC Universe, Black Lightning and Blue Devil will make their post-reboot debuts in a five-issue "buddy concept" arc beginning in October 17's DC Universe Presents #13.
The story arc will be written by Marc Andreyko, perhaps best known for his work on the critically-acclaimed and fan-favorite (but not market-supported) series Manhunter, and artist Robson Rocha, who has a handful of pencil credits to his name at DC, including work on Demon Knights.

Black Lightning was created in 1977 by Tony Isabella and Trevor Von Eeden, and was DC's first major black superhero. An athlete who wore a mask, an afro wig and a special electricity generating apparatus, Jefferson Pierce fought crime by hurling bolts of lightning at his foes. He managed to carry to short-lived volumes of a solo title (eleven issues in '77; 13 issues in 1995), but has had great success as a supporting character in team books, usually the various incarnations of The Outsiders, although he did have a short stint on the post-Infinite Crisis, pre-New 52 Justice League.

Blue Devil was created in 1984 by Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn and Paris Cullins to star in his own series. He was Hollywood special effects wizard and stuntman Daniel Cassidy, who created a costume to play the character in a movie, but, after a run-in with a real demon, he found that he was stuck in the costume for good. The Blue Devil series lasted 39 issues, after which the character became a sort of free-floating supporting character, usually popping up in stories that accentuated his supernatural aspects. He was most recently seen starring among the magic-based heroes in DC's Shadowpact series.

DC released redesigns of the characters by Teen Titans artist Brett Booth. The full-color Blue Devil sketch reveals a character that seems decidedly supernatural, based on his goat-like legs and clawed feet. He's also clothed head-to-toe in leather, with plenty of chains, armor and, naturally, a high collar.

The Black Lightning sketch is in black and white, but his costume redesign seems a lot less drastic and rooted in the aesthetics of early '90s Image Comics; he too sports a high collar and a more "realistic" ribbing and details on his feet and elbows. He also seems to have a few bolts of black-colored lighting emanating from him, which would be a neat solution to the problem of his name, which harkens back to an era when too many black superheroes had the word "Black" in their name, suggesting white heroes were the default (as they were, in the 1970s, I suppose). If he shoots black-colored lightning, then his code name can be de-coupled from race entirely. Why is he called Black Lightning now? It's not because he's a black guy with lightning powers, but because he shoots black lightning-same reason Green Arrow calls himself Green Arrow.

We won't know until someone colors those first Black Lightning comics, of course, but, if he does shoot black lightning now, then I guess that makes him the one DC character who definitely benefits from a reboot setting his origins in the modern times, rather than on the sliding timeline DC used up until last fall.

[Via The Source]

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ComicsAlliance Week-in-Review: June 24-30, 2012

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Previews, News, Opinion, Culture

As Pride Month draws to a close, ComicsAlliance is proud to share the results of a massive survey of comics and comics characters important to LGBT readers, as chosen by an expert panel of comics folks. You can read the list of 50 characters and comics here.

And you can read a list of many of the other things we covered in the past week by clicking on the little blue "Keep Reading" box below.

Publishing:

-George Pérez talks about the behind-the-scenes creative chaos he experienced while working on Superman, the title book of DC's flagship character during their recent relaunch/reboot/re-branding effort.

-BOOM! Studios, the publisher responsible for the comic book series based on the cartoon series Adventure Time, may be preparing to launch a comic book series on Bravest Warriors, a new cartoon series from the creator of Adventure Time.

-DC Comics is now embracing comics creators in an effort to sell their books...wait, did I say "creators"...? I mean makers.

-After a week of teases, Marvel has announced a new volume of Punisher War Journal.

Previews:

-Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 05.

-B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Exorcism #1.

-Amazing Spider-Man #692.

-Captain America & Iron Man #634...following an interview with the creative team.

-New Crusaders #3.

Reviews:

-Andrew Wheeler on Avengers Vs. X-Men #6.

-John Parker on more of the first year of Spawn.

-David Brothers on Garth Ennis' work.

-Sims on his HeroesCon haul.

-Lauren Davis on Sin Titulo.

-Caleb Mozzocco (hey, that's me!) on NonNonBa.

Art:

-Time Wesoly has created a wholly different "Lego Batman" using his own Quibicle Constructor software.

-I didn't even know how badly I wanted to hear the words "Sailor Captain America" and "Sailor Thor" until I saw Ann Marcellino's beautiful Avengers/Sailor Moon mash-ups.

-Sims shares his Jack Kirby character-themed sketchbook, showing off drawings of Kirby characters by artists like Colleen Coover, Chuck BB, Steve Epting, Sanford Greene and many others.

-This month's Best Comic Book Covers Ever (This Month).

-This week's Best Art Ever (This Week).

Film:

-If you need proof that literally every single Marvel character is being considered for possible film adaptation development, try this on for size: Deadline reports The Human Fly is being developed. Sweet. Now bring on Woodgod, Hollywood!

-Tea leaves are being read, and the tea leaf readers seem to agree that Marvel is definitely prepping a Guardians of the Galaxy movie...dashing my hopes that Black Widow would spin-off into a Champions movie and The Hulk into a Defenders franchise for the next big Marvel super-team tent-pole movie series.

-Edgar Wright has reportedly wrapped filming his Ant-Man movie...test reel.

Video games:

-Here's a trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man.

-Here's a trailer for The Walking Dead Episode 2: Starved for Help.

Toys:

-Hot Toys has a new version of their Dark Knight Joker figure.

-Medicom has created Batman and Joker figures based on their designs and renderings in the Jim Lee-drawn 2002 Batman story-arc "Hush."

-Like every other toy line of their era, Jem and The Holograms dolls are making a comeback.

-Hot Toys is doing one of their insanely detailed 1/6th scale action figures for The Amazing Spider-Man.

-Check out Mezco's summer exclusives.

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'NonNonBa' by Shigeru Mizuki Mixes Memoir and Fantasy into a Manga Classic [Review]

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-06-29T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Manga, Reviews, Drawn and Quarterly, Opinion

If Shigeru Mizuki's NonNonBa were just the childhood memoir of an extremely talented and influential first-generation manga artist, it would be something well worth reading. If it were just a family drama set in the transitional, pre-war years of Japan, when the old, traditional ways were being replaced by the new ways of a more modern, industrialized world, it would be well worth reading. And if it were just a cataloging and collection of various species and characters of yokai (or Japanese spirit monsters), it would be well worth reading.

It's the fact that it is all three at once that makes NonNonBa a must-read, a classic work that is important as it is charming.The book is newly available in English thanks to Drawn and Quarterly, who previously published Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, and it is named for the character around whom so much of the our young protagonist Gege's life seems to revolve.

"NonNonBa" is a contraction and corruption of NonNon Obaasan, the latter Japanese for grandmother and the former the title given to people who served Buddha. Her profession, mentioned in passing, is that of a "prayer hand," someone who made their living praying for those who were ill to get better, although she also worked as a housekeeper for Gege's family and others in their neighborhood.

Her role in his life, however, was as his unofficial guide to the spirit world, which, in the rural Sakaiminato of the 1930s as seen through a child's eyes, overlapped and permeated the real world in the same way that the fairy world intersected and often pierced the folk experience of the British isles in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. No one young Gege knew had ever been on an elevator, or eaten a doughnut -- not until he and his brothers take a 12-mile journey to taste their first one, anyway -- and word of a train that ran under the ground in Tokyo was dismissed as simply too fantastic to believe.

In such a setting, under such circumstances, are ghosts and demons really such bizarre things for a child to believe in?

The devoutly religious and highly superstitious NonNonBa, born in the previous century, knows all of the yokai, and all about them -- their names, their habits, how not to anger them, what to do if you do anger them -- and she shares her knowledge with Gege. And even before growing up to be a professional and famous manga artist, Gege shared that knowledge with others, in little stories he writes and draws and passes around to his friends and family to read.

The book, a 400+ page doorstop, is broken into chapters, many of which are devoted to particular episodes involving various yokai: Zauki-Hakari, Otoroshi, Mr. Sticky, The Wart Yokai, Akaname the Dirt-Licker, Nekomata, The Hungry Ghosts, Slippery Lads, the Suiko/Water Tiger and The Waargh (a ghost so named for its cry of "Waargh!")

Mizuki rather ingeniously grants his yokai characters an ambiguous, equivocal degree of reality within the story. Are they real, or do they just exist in the imaginations of NonNonBa, Gege and other characters? Mizuki shows the reader the yokai, whereas the characters almost never see them with their own eyes -- with one, climactic exception which nevertheless is somewhat uncertain in nature -- but rather feel them and their effects.

For example, when NonNonBa and Gege cross paths with Mr. Sticky, an invisible yokai who follows travelers at night, the sound of his footsteps echoing behind them, Mizuki designs the creature for us to see, but the characters never have that opportunity. Others appear to Gege in his dreams or his sometimes fevered imagination, or appear in stories being recounted to him.

While the stories featuring the yokai are often somewhat standalone and episodic, NonNonBa is a graphic novel in the truest sense of the word (even though its 1977 creation predates the popular usage of that term by years), as young Gege comes of age and we see the various struggles of his family, and a few even more unfortunate girls who enter and leave our hero's life suddenly.

It seems somewhat redundant to note that Mizuki's art features cartoony characters in a highly realistically rendered environment, as it is manga, after all, and that's one of the signifiers that differentiates Japanese comics from those of other countries, but the distance of the gulf between the cartoonishness of the characters and the realism of the environment.

Mizuki's humans are as cartoonish as the characters in your average American newspaper gag strip (some barely even look human), and their emotions are similarly outsized, as they go cross-eyed with fear, exhale little clouds through their nostrils and sweat like sprinkler heads. The yokai themselves are richly varied in design, with some as simple as a little black cloud with staring white eyes and others looking as if they were pulled straight from classical Japanese art.

In that respect, the way they are drawn reflects their nature within the narrative.

Given his subject matter and skill at relating it, it's little wonder that Mizuki is regarded as a cultural treasure in Japan, having won just about every award a manga-ka or Japanese citizen can win and having been named to the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology. His hometown of Sakaiminato has a street decorated with over 100 bronze statues of his yokai characters and a museum. And while awards and statues are nice, there's no better monument to Mizuki than the comics he made. Comics like this one.

NonNonBa is on sale now in finer comics shops, book stores and directly from Drawn and Quarterly.

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Hark! A Pair Of Kate Beaton Calendars To Debut At Comic-Con

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-06-27T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Conventions, Art, Culture

Counting the days the days until this year's San Diego Comic-Con International? Well next year you can count the days to 2013's show on a Kate Beaton calendar, which you'll be able to score at this year's convention.

Over the weekend Drawn & Quarterly, the publisher responsible for 2011's Hark! A Vagrant hardcover collecting Beaton online works in addition to original material, announced that they will be releasing 2013 Hark! A Vagrant calendars by the artist. It's sweet timing for fans too, considering the artist will be at the show as well.

Pricing info and precise calendar specifications haven't yet been revealed, but for the cartoonist's growing fan base, of course, "new Kate Beaton" is pretty much all anyone needs to know.

There's slightly more detail on Beaton's Tumblr blog, which notes there will be two calendars: A literature-themed calendar and another with "a more general" theme. You can check out both calendar preview images below:

[Via Drawn & Quarterly, Kate Beaton]

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ComicsAlliance Week-in-Review: June 18-23, 2012

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-06-24T17:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Humor, News, Opinion, Culture

Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat shared the harrowing tale of his attack by pro-government forces, who broke both of his hands in an attempt to stop him from criticizing those in power through his work, in this heart-breaking but ultimately inspiring video.

The other sad news story we shared this week didn't have a happy ending: Comics writer Robert L. Washington III passed away a few weeks ago, and now the Hero Initiative is seeking donations to help cover the costs of his funeral.

Join us after the jump for much lighter, less tragic news from the week as covered by ComicsAlliance.

Publishing:

-Terrible news for Daredevil readers: Daredevil artist Paolo Rivera is following fellow Daredevil artist Marcos Martin, and leaving the book to concentrate on his own comics. Rivera will be ending his decade-long exclusive arrangement with Marvel, but will continue to work for the publisher in a non-exclusive capacity

-What's next for Chris Roberson? MonkeyBrain Comics.

-Udon is releasing a Marvel Vs. Capcom: Official Complete Works art book, chronicling the work from the many collaborations between the two companies an featuring art work from Joe Madureira, Adi Granov, Takeshi Miyazawa, ComicsAlliance favorite Adam Warren and many others.

-George Takei will become the latest real-life celebrity to be imported into the Archie-verse, in the pages of November's Kevin Keller #6.

Previews:

-Adventure Time #5's back-up by Paul Pope.

-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Micro-Series #5: Splinter by Erik Burnham with art by Charles Paul Wilson III. And check out that David Petersen cover...when is Petersen going to do his own TMNT project?

-Higher Earth #2 by Sam Humphries and Francesco Biagini.

-Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a graphic novel based on the storyboards of the movie based on the novel.

-The Art of Howard Chaykin.

-Harbinger #2...and a brief interview with writer Joshua Dysart.

-Sakuran by Moyoco Anno.

-Prophet #26 by Brandon Graham.

Reviews:

-John Parker on the first year of Spawn, part two.

-David Brothers on The Dodsons.

-Chris Sims on Life With Archie #196.

Film:

-Sims and David Uzumeri finish watching Steel.

-Here's the first trailer for the new Judge Dredd movie, which is apparently just called Dredd. Looks Rob Schneider-free, so it's already better than the original!

-Dark Knight Rises hype, parts one and two.

-Is director Barry Sonnenfeld considering making a Metal Men movie? Will the freaking Metal Men get a movie before Wonder Woman does?

TV:

-Say, this new computer-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon on Nickelodeon looks like it's gonna be pretty all right...I dig the ninja running and the visible sound effects...

Video games:

-Here's a hands-on preview of The Amazing Spider-Man.

-Here's the final trailer for Lego Batman 2. I still maintain that it's a better trailer than any for The Dark Knight Rises, by a factor of one million.

-Here's a little featurette demonstrating Stan Lee's appearance as playable character in The Amazing Spider-Man.

-Here's a preview of Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition for the Wii U.

-Facebook game/The Dark Knight Rises promotional tool The Fire Rises lets players participate in a strategy game set in Gotham City...only as one of the bad guys, rather than Batman.

-Sims reviews Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes.

-Here's a featurette focusing on Bruce Campbell's voice work in the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man videogame.

Toys:

-Toys 'R' Us is letting fans and collectors vote to decide who becomes a Minimate in an Avengers Vs. X-Men box set. I vote Jason Aaron.

-SDCC exclusive announcements: and a Alpha Flight Minimates box set.

ART:

-Sharon Moody paints comic books...in her own unique way.

-Igor Scalisi Palminteri transforms saints into superheroes with well-chosen paint jobs.

-This week's Best Art Ever (This Week) (Wow, that's some Tank Girl from Joelle Jones...)

-Everyone's parodying Guillem March's cover for Catwoman #0, even Guillem March! Check March's sketch of the same subject, drawn in the style of R. Crumb

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Italian Artist Igor Scalisi Palminteri Imagines Saints As Superheroes [Art]

J. Caleb Mozzocco — 2012-06-21T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Art, Culture

Ordinary men and women blessed with extraordinary abilities who fight for what they believe in no matter the consequences aren't exclusive to superhero comics. Catholic saints also possessed such powers as levitation, flight, extra-sensory perception and the ability to communicate with animals and used these skills to help those around them. Igor Scalisi Palminteri makes this connection explicit in his (potentially offensive) sculptures for his show entitled Hagiographies, by slapping some familiar coats of paint on saint statues.

The Italian artist created his pieces by applying acrylic paint to sculptures of saints purchased at street fairs in Palermo, transforming the champions of Catholicism into the champions of modern comic books, movies and cartoons.

This may be Scalisi Palminteri's most controversial piece: The Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of God, as Catwoman:

And here's her son Jesus, cosplaying as Captain America:

"Do you think this 'A' stands for Nazareth?" Well, it doesn't. Nazareth begins with an 'N'. It stands for "America," which begins with an "A."

Here we see Saint Anthony dressed as a Franciscan Batman, and holding the Christ Child, who is swaddled in Robin's costume:

Saint Anthony is traditionally depicted not only holding the Christ Child, but also holding an open book. Perhaps, in this case, The Black Casebook.

It's been a while since I attended Catholic school, but I'm pretty sure this is Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, now dressed like Superman and... Super-Baby?

I think I prefer this to the "New 52" Superman costume redesign.

This version of Reed Richards is a heavily modified version of an unknown saint statue, as is this statue of St. Pio of Pietrelcina made to resemble Spider-Man.

And here's a Incredibles inspired new look for the Holy Family:

You can see a few more of Palminteri's super-saints here.

[Via Slog]

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