* I haven’t talked about this yet I don’t think, but over the past little while a lot of my friends at Wizard lost their jobs. This includes the whole staff of Anime Insider, and over at the Wiz proper it includes David Paggi and Rachel Molino, the two remaining altcomix-interested staffers. This is all a bummer for various obvious reasons. My pal Rob Bricken has a nice eulogy for AI. On a similar note, I liked Douglas Wolk’s post on Blender, which was canceled the same day as Anime Insider.
* Tim O’Neil concludes his review-of-Kingdom-Come-by-way-of-a-bunch-of-different-posts by explaining “momentism” as a school of superhero writing. This is pretty goddamn dead on. During my years at Wizard, the search for iconic/badass/jaw-dropping moments in superhero comics, splash pages or action beats or lines of dialogue that functioned not just in getting across something necessary to the story but also in encapsulating just what makes Superhero So-and-So so cool/tragic/scary/inspiring/whatever, was absolutely paramount for writers and readers alike.
* Here are some more Caprica clips, replacing the set that was apparently yanked earlier last week. I’m still not watching them.
* Tom Kaczynski discusses Watchmen the comic and Watchmen the movie in terms of cool and hot media.
* Jog reviews a trio of recent comics of note: Jim and Jam, Sleazy Slice, and Rumbling.
* Renee French: still creepy.
* Jim Rugg has a blog! And he drew Klaus Nomi!
* I’ll never not be a sucker for nice compact drawings of Batman and his rogues gallery like this one from Doc Shaner (via Johnny Bacardi). Heck, that’s why I got Lego Batman last week.
* Torture is useless at producing actionable intelligence. One has to wonder what, then, the point of torture is.
If I were Dave Paggi, I’d say that Batman art was giving me a boner. Since I’m me, I’ll just say I really dig it.
The one thing I really dig about Batman’s Rogue’s Gallery besides it’s awesomeness is how it’s been able to grow in measurable ways over the years. You’ve got the original set from Joker to Riddler from the Golden Age, Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze in the ’60s, Man Bat and Ra’s Al Ghul in the ’70s, Killer Croc and The Ventriloquist in the ’80s, Harley Quinn and Bane in the ’90s and whatever dudes from today who will end up having some staying power. And that doesn’t even get into some of the also rans who’ve stuck around here and there like The Black Spider or whoever. It’s an incredibly deep bench that I don’t think any other character can match.
He has the best rogues gallery by a country mile. During my stint as a comics reader in middle school/high school or whenever it was, the big Batman books I remember fondly from that time were rogues-centric–Arkham Asylum, Knightfall, even that opening arc of Shadow of the Bat.
I’ll be curious to see whether any of Morrison’s recent/upcoming additions stick or if they end up going the way of Fantomex and John Sublime. And I hope they just give up on trying to cram Hush down our throats.
You know who was hilarious to see show up in Lego Batman? Killer Moth! I guess they needed another flying character other than Man-Bat.
They shoulda used Firefly. Highly underrated in my opinion.
None of Morrison’s additions thus far strike me as lasting (Damian doesn’t really count), but I supposed he still has time. I feel like Dr. Hurt has the potential, but at the same time, he feels very much like a “one big story” guy, not unlike Mageddon. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The one and done villain has become something of a lost art.