* Marvel has acquired the rights to Marvelman (aka Miracleman) from creator Mick Anglo. This British Captain Marvel (aka Shazam) knockoff became a pioneering revisionist-superhero series at the hands of Alan Moore, Mark Buckingham, Neil Gaiman et al, then got lost in legal limbo for decades now, preventing the well-regarded revisionist stuff from ever being reprinted. The individual issues walked away from the Wizard library years ago, so I’ve never been able to read this, and it was just on the list of five things I’d like to be reprinted I sent to the Comics Reporter for this week’s Five for Friday feature. This is a treat. Marvel EIC Joe Quesada talks to my Comic Book Resources overlord Jonah Weiland about the announcement on CBR’s motherfucking boat.
* Now here’s a heckuva con debut: Drawn & Quarterly is premiering Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions #12 at the show. Looks like it’s getting even darker.
* My favorite announcement in this Geoff Johns Spotlight panel report isn’t Blackest Night: Flash with Scott Kolins, but the fact that Krypto the Super-Dog will be fighting Dek-Starr the Red Landern Cat. RRRRREOW! Johns has a CBR Boat Show interview of his own.
* And speaking of Johns and Blackest Night (this isn’t strictly an SDCC link, but just good timing on Curt Purcell’s part), Curt Purcell of the Groovy Age of Horror continues his series of posts on the horror-tinged DC event. Here he is on Green Lantern Corps #38 and Green Lantern #43; here he is on Tales of the Corps #1 & 2; and here he is on Blackest Night #1 and Green Lantern #44. Curt is not a regular reader of DC comics, so I think his posts are instructive for several reasons.
First, he rightly points out that the quality of the art in this crossover, specifically that of Doug Mahnke and Ivan Reis, is quite strong (though Reis has looked better in the past, IMHO). To the credit of both DC and Marvel, the current cycle of event comics that kicked off with Infinite Crisis and continued with Civil War, World War Hulk, The Sinestro Corps War, Final Crisis, Secret Invasion, and Blackest Night have all featured talented stylists at the helm, although this leaves them frequently plagued by fill-ins, lateness, or both. (I actually think Blackest Night could end up going without either problem; we’ll see.)
Second, he articulates a problem with serialized superhero comics that not even Jim Shooter-style “new-reader friendliness” can overcome, namely that even if a superhero comic uses exposition to provide you with all the information you need to make sense it, it still “presuppose[s] a history of emotional attachment to these characters” to connect with it. And frankly there’s no more of a way around that than there would be to make latecomers to The Sopranos instantly connect with the plight of Christopher Moltisanti. It’s just the nature of long-form serialized storytelling. The key is to avoid plot points that are simply “Hey look, it’s That Guy!” in favor of “Hey, look what that guy is doing!”
Third, I think it’s interesting that he started his read of the event with an issue of Green Lantern Corps because it had the tagline “Prelude to Blackest Night” on the cover. The thing is, every issue of Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps has had that tagline on the cover for months–at least two full storyarcs, in Green Lantern‘s case. As a hardcore superhero comics reader, I knew that this was intended a) to goose sales, and b) to establish a tenuous connection to the upcoming event, and not c) to mean that this was actually a prelude to Blackest Night in the literal sense. But of course an outsider would have no way of knowing that. This was something that never would have occurred to me.
* Back to SDCC news proper, here’s something else that never would have occurred to me: the formation of an enormous line to get into the plain-vanilla X-Men comics panel. My first San Diego Comic-Con was 2001, and iirc you could pretty much waltz right into any of the “here’s what’s coming up in this particular superhero franchise” panel. As Tom Spurgeon notes:
I saw at least a half-dozen lines to a few random panels that ten years ago would have had a hard time putting together 40 people that were dauntingly long this time out. One story that three people told me was that one mainstream comic book writer had a signing so stuffed that security was involved in processing the line.
It seems that San Diego is a big con for everything, including comics.
* I don’t think any news or new ground is broken in Graeme McMillan’s interview with Marvel EIC Joe Quesada for io9, but it’s a pretty good encapsulation of how Quesada comes across in every interview I’ve done with him, and what he values/prioritizes about his job. I find it difficult not to respect him on those grounds. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* Golly, Rafael Grampa can draw.
* Tom Neely has a con-exclusive minicomic called Self-Indulgence at the show for which he will hand-draw each and every cover. Is “others-indulgent” a word? Because that’s what that is.
* Scott Pilgrim videogame coming!
* I was rather smitten with Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, so I’m looking forward to plowing through the second volume of the series, Dallas, in time to pick up the freshly-announced third volume, Hotel Oblivion.
* World War Z author Max Brooks is writing a G.I. Joe miniseries for IDW. That’s IDW’s second good get of the con. I’ll check it out.
* The most interesting thing about this O.G. music-blogger roundtable featuring guys like Matthew Perpetua, Sean Michaels, David Gutowski, and Andrew Noz is how few of them read other music blogs. I think if you conducted a similar discussion with comicsblogging godfathers like NeilAlien, Bill Sherman, Dirk Deppey et al, you’d get a very different result.
Sean, your BLACKEST NIGHT-related linkage is what ultimately built my curiosity up to critical mass, so I have you to thank for provoking me to expand my horizons here (btw–did you catch my reference to CRwM’s tongue-in-cheek claim that no horror blogger should be taken seriously who hadn’t seen the SAW franchise?–I think you had something to say about that at the time).
Your third point about the “Prelude” tagline is hilarious in retrospect, although to be fair to GLC #38, it actually concludes with the Black Lantern rings dispersing through the cosmos.
Your second point is one I’m actually wrestling with, and will say more about as soon as my thinking on the issue crystallizes further.
Finally, if you’re following BLACKEST NIGHT, I hope you’ll share your thoughts about it along the way. I can understand not wanting to get embroiled in the whole “Wednesday crowd” thing, but the horror angle seems to put this at a pretty significant intersection of your interests.
Anyway, thanks again for pushing me to try out something new!