The nominees for the 2008 Harvey Awards are:

BEST WRITER:
Ed Brubaker, Captain America, Marvel Comics (2007 winner, Daredevil)
Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
Grant Morrison, All Star Superman, DC Comics (2007 nominee, same)
William Van Horn, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Gemstone (2007 nominee, same)
Brian K. Vaughan, Y: The Last Man, Vertigo/DC Comics (2007 nominee, same)

BEST ARTIST
Gabriel Ba, Umbrella Academy, Dark Horse Comics
John Cassaday, Astonishing X-Men, Marvel Comics
Guy Davis, BPRD, Dark Horse Comics
Frank Quitely, All Star Superman, DC Comics (2007 winner, same)
William Van Horn, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Gemstone (2007 nominee, same)
— at this point, Cassaday’s nomination almost seems like a consolation nod, given Astonishing X-Men’s sparse and constantly delayed existence the past year.

BEST CONTINUING OR LIMITED SERIES
All Star Superman, DC Comics
Captain America, Marvel Comics
Damned, Oni Press
Daredevil, Marvel Comics (2007 winner)
Umbrella Academy, Dark Horse Comics
Uncle Scrooge, Gemstone Comics
— glad to see The Spirit off the list. The bloom has come off that rose. I’m not going to be at all surprised if All Star Superman gets some kind of farewell award, but I’d like to see Captain America win. At the very least, I don’t think Daredevil deserves the honor.

BEST NEW SERIES
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
The Order, Marvel Comics
Resurrection, Oni Press
Thor, Marvel Comics
Umbrella Academy, Dark Horse Comics
— I don’t read any of these, but even JMS and Thor fan Fin Fang Doom had to admit to himself that Thor sucked (I gave up after the first issue).
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As reported by Newsarama.com, Carlos Pacheco is joining J.G. Jones on Final Crisis art duties starting with issue #4. Newsarama quotes Dan DiDio as saying Pacheco is being added to keep the book on schedule.

This reminds me of a situation back in August 2006 when Marvel announced they would delay Civil War in order to keep Steve McNiven the book’s sole artist, opting for potentially lost sales and angered customers in exchange for a commitment to the art.

For a fun little trip down memory lane, I invite you to read the following:

• The Civil War Machine Derailed by Fin Fang Doom, disagreeing with Marvel’s decision, and
• Whose Side Are You On? by Jim Doom, agreeing with Marvel’s decision.

It was an exciting time here at Doomkopf. I dare say this decision won’t cause similar sparks to fly. But given Grant Morrison’s repeated reminders that he started writing the series two years ago, it’s a shame nobody handed the scripts to J.G. Jones any sooner than they did.

The pages of Booster Gold #10 included a look at an all-new Rip Hunter blackboard as first seen in 52. The good folks at Newsarama break down the clues:

Board: Gotham isn’t safe – MIDNIGHT HAS THE HEARTS!

Meaning: That’s pretty clearly a reference to the new Batman: Gotham After Midnight series. If you read this week’s DC Nation, the rest of that comes into focus.

Board: RED LANTERNS=BLOOD

Meaning: That’s pretty specific. Our guess? Someone’s going to die at Red Lantern hands very soon. Perhaps in the pages of Rage of the Red Lanterns?

Board: The Perfect Peter Platinum isn’t so perfect!!!

Meaning: Booster Gold #1,000,000 has Triple-P next month.
…

more at Newsarama.com

DC shipped the final issues of both Gotham Underground and Salvation Run last Wednesday. While I had actually been enjoying these series up until this point, both of these endings sucked. It certainly didn’t help that these issues shipped after Final Crisis #1, which they were supposedly leading up to. For that matter, it didn’t help that Final Crisis #1 sucked.

Salvation Run had been a pretty fun series where all the villains on Earth are shipped off to a another planet that’s supposed to be their prison. It was just a bunch of villains being villainous for most of the series. Personalities clashed, people were killed, and brains in jars were used to bludgeon their french gorilla would-be homosexual lovers to death. Y’know, good, clean fun.

Then a bunch of parademons attacked the villains in the final issue, and suddenly the villains were the good guys. And they were fighting parademons. Ugh.

Did this series really need to crossover with Countdown, or Death of the New Gods, or whatever this was supposed to be related to? The writer didn’t even bother explaining why the parademons were there. Amanda Waller is responsible for sending the villains to the prison planet. Something tells me she didn’t call up Desaad and ask him to send some Apokoliptian minions to attack them after a few months.

And the worst part? Most of the villains manage to escape the prison planet through a portal Lex Luthor managed to construct, but their prisoner gets left behind with no way of returning to Earth. Who is their prisoner, you might be asking?

Martian Manhunter.

But wait, wasn’t he very much on Earth in Final Crisis #1? Salvation Run #7 shipped two weeks after Final Crisis #1, yet the stories blantantly contradict each other. That is just laziness, pure and simple.

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Which is a cooler response to the phrase, “Go with God,” or, “God be with you, Frank?” Is it a) “God’s gonna sit this one out,” or b) “Sometimes, I’d like to get my hands on God?”

If you answered B, I guess you should watch this trailer. I answered A, because I loved Tom Jane’s Punisher (I know, I know).

This is the new teaser for Punisher: War Zone, and I’m far from impressed. The dinner party scene is reminiscent of Batman: Year One, the dangling from the ceiling scene is reminiscent of Boondock Saints (which, in case you didn’t realize, is a terrible, terrible movie), and the whole thing just seems kind of, I don’t know, off.

Anyway, here’s the teaser. Enjoy?

This week’s dip into the Secret Invasion involved several short stories that fill in a few gaps and create several more.

Part 1: Captain Marvel
Chapter 1 explains the actions leading up to Captain Marvel’s decision to attack Thunderbolts mountain in Secret Invasion #1. The rationale is a bit convoluted, so it makes me wonder if someone called an audible late in the game when they figured out something didn’t make sense.

Captain Marvel finds out that the data he swiped from the Skrulls makes mention of an invasion but gives no insight on how it’s going to happen. As a result, he decides to give himself up to the Skrulls, pretending to be loyal to the cause. They know that his secret identity programming went wrong, and that he’s a Skrull with Kree Mar-Vell’s personality intact. But now he tells them he wants to be part of their invasion, and his reason? He wants to help save Earth as a willing participant of the Skrulls’ destructive forces.

See, he’s figured out that evil has infected good on Earth, and he’s going to use his destructive powers in judgment of that evil. And this is why we see him laying waste to Thunderbolts mountain in Secret Invasion #1 — the Thunderbolts are just a bunch of villains, working for the government with little to no restrictions. They’re only “good guys” because they’re branded as such. So as a Skrull double agent, he gets to participate in the Invasion and take out Earth’s own infiltrators.

Past Implications:
I didn’t really get why Mar-Vell attacked Thunderbolts mountain at first. My initial read on it was that maybe his Skrull programming was powerful enough to send him on some involuntary destructive mission, but his underlying Kree personality was what made him hesitate to kill. Now we know he was fully aware of what he was doing when he launched his attack.
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In the lead: A gradually expanding solar system appears in Metropolis, but Superman grabs the sun and flings it into outer space, dragging the planets with it. Gotham City is transformed into…something different, and Batman turns it back by refusing to believe it’s real. Wonder Woman gets attacked by three giant robots and beats them up. The Trinity decide to meet in the Batcave following their encounters, but they’re interrupted by a Justice League alert transmission from Green Lantern…

In the back-up: John Stewart’s ring picks up a spacecraft entering Earth’s atmosphere, and GL goes to investigate. He finds Konvikt and Graak, introduced in the flash-forward in last issue’s back-up, and Stewart gets his ass kicked, prompting the JLA distress call the Trinity picked up in the lead.

My take: I’ve got to say, the back-up in this issue was a lot better than the last one. The dialogue was still pretty bad (especially the annoying psychic sidekick that sits on Konvikt’s shoulder), but this story looked a hell of a lot better. That surprised me, because Tom Derenick did a remarkably terrible job on the last quarter of Countdown. His work here was completely unremarkable, but that’s a step up.

I liked how the back-up tied into the lead this issue, but it really seems like the back-up either didn’t need to be told at all or could have been told as part of the lead. I really didn’t need 10 pages of a Konvikt/GL fight. I guess it makes sense that this would be a back-up since it didn’t directly involve the Trinity, but then again what amounts to 2 of the 12 pages in the lead didn’t feature the title characters.

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I don’t remember.

This week, DC put the latest ad for Final Crisis in all of its funny books, asking the question of where we all were when the Martian Manhunter died. It’s supposed to evoke this weight or gravity to the situation that just simply wasn’t there, not since the villains, “changed the rules,” as Final Crisis writer Grant Morrison defends it.

I remember where I was when Superboy died. I was sitting on an old blue couch that my parents gave me when I moved out, at my old rat-hole apartment in the ghetto (not to be confused with my current rat-hole apartment in a different ghetto).

I remember where I was when Batman got his back broken. I was at my parent’s house, sitting on the back porch late at night one summer way back when.

I remember where I was when Superman bought it back in ‘93. I was lying on my stomach in my parents’ basement in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

I very vividly remember where I was when Blue Beetle Ted Kord got shot through the head by Max Lord.

But a couple weeks pass, and I can’t remember where I was when I read Final Crisis #1? Yes. You know why? Because Martian Manhunter’s death was completely unremarkable. All this ad reinforces is that the brass at DC have no concept of what’s dramatically important or impactful anymore. When you pose a question like that, you better be fairly confident that the answer will be something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ll never forget where I was, because that scene shattered my entire universe.”

You certainly don’t want the response to be a pause followed by a head scratch or a shrug of the shoulders.

By Adam Slutsky and Joseph Phillip Illidge (W)
and Shawn Martinbrough (A)
Published by BDG Entertainment, 2008; 96 pages; $19.95

There’s an issue of the Grant Morrison / J.G. Jones “Marvel Boy” miniseries in which Marvel Boy battles with Hexus, a living corporation. It establishes Brand Hex — a company that dabbles in a little bit of everything, and everyone knows they want something to do with it, but no one knows anything about it. The issue opens with a computer programmer and a musician both waiting in line to interview; each is surprised that the other would be interviewing at the same place, yet neither can really elaborate why, since neither really knows what Brand Hex is.

So when I received an email from Bodog’s marketing people asking if Doomkopf would be willing to review their new graphic novel, “Ayre Force,” I felt a little bit like a cog in the mysterious Brand Hex factory. All I knew about Bodog was that it was an offshore company … that had mixed martial arts fighting … and a record label … and poker. The marketing rep even asked that I include a link to Bodog’s poker site in the review, with any anchor text I’d like (I’m happy to oblige). I felt like I was almost helpless to avoid getting sucked into this huge marketing machine.

The comic book, in addition to being a tangible book that you can purchase and read, is itself an extension of the Bodog marketing effort, as it features real-life personalities in the Bodog empire as its protagonists — Bodog founder Calvin Ayre and his assistant Fawn LaBrie; Bodog recording artists Bif Naked, Jason Darr and Nazanin; Bodog poker players David Williams and Josh Arieh and blackjack dealer Evelyn Ng; and mixed martial artists Jorge Masvidal and Tara Larosa.

The basic idea reminds me of a project one of my friends and I worked on when we were in middle school. During the first Gulf War, we passed the time in study hall writing fictional adventures of middle school students fighting off an Iraq invasion. Iraq Attack 1, Iraq Attack 2 and the epic Iraq Attack 3 put us and our friends in the middle of the struggle of good against evil. It was fun, but it was also a little bit embarrassing.
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This clip’s got me all jazzed up for what has been, up until this point, a movie that really hasn’t interested me all that much. CGI still looks fake, but who cares?