I’ve never really been a fan of Grant Morrison. Despite his status as an A-list creator, I can’t think of a single project of his outside of New X-Men that I’ve really enjoyed. Morrison’s Batman is particularly bad. Well, at least his first arc was, because that’s as long as I could stand to read it.

So naturally I had no plans to read Batman R.I.P. I know DC’s not going to kill off Batman, so right off the bat the story seems a little pointless. And with Final Crisis starting up right at the same time, I don’t need another major storyline to waste my money on. Plus, seeing as how the story is contained within Morrison’s Batman run, it’ll be easily avoidable.

Or so I thought.

Up until last week, I had no idea how major a crossover Batman R.I.P was going to be. Not only is it taking up six issues worth of Batman, but the crossover is spilling over into five issues of Detective Comics, four issues of Nightwing, and two issues of Robin. Those are three Batman family titles that I enjoy on a monthly basis. Now, thanks to Batman R.I.P., I probably won’t. (more…)

I wrote the following blog several months ago when thinking about the pairing of Final Crisis with Grant Morrison. I decided to shelve it, thinking I was maybe being too harsh.

After reading part 1 of Batman R.I.P. today and flipping through the Final Crisis Sketchbook, I decided to revive it. Both of these big events look like self-indulgent messes that are less about telling engaging stories than they are about a celebrity writer getting free reign to be as cute as he wants to be.

I’ll be very happy if I’m proven wrong, but the first part of Batman R.I.P. and several pages of Japanese superheroes and New Gods-related characters in the Final Crisis sketchbook did not make me excited about what’s to come.

I’m told Grant Morrison turned in the [Final Crisis] issue one script back in November. However, it was not exactly what has been previously discussed and didn’t bounce off from the end of “Countdown” as intended. It also goes off on what can only be described as Morrisonian tangents. You know, what readers call “the good bits.”

from DC’s Final Crisis #2 solicitation:

Meet Japan’s number one pop culture heroes, the Super Young Team and their languid leader, Most Excellent Superbat! Join legendary wrestler Sonny Sumo and super escape artist Mister Miracle as they team to face the offspring of the Anti-Life Equation! See Earth’s superheroes mourn one of their oldest allies! Witness costumed criminals sinking to new depths of cowardice and depravity as Libra takes things too far! Uncover the doomsday secrets of the poisoned city of Blüdhaven! Learn the shocking identity of the prime suspect in the murder of a god! And read on if you dare as Batman becomes the first of Earth’s champions to face the Fallen of Apokolips. All this and a spectacular return from the dead…

Let me go on record and say that, in spite of my moaning about the awfulness of Countdown, I would very much like Final Crisis to be a huge critical success. I don’t like hating comics. I don’t like wasting my money in $2.99 increments each week. I really want to like it.

But man, are the signs not pointing to something good. I was excited when I heard that Grant Morrison was doing the writing, because I considered him to be among the current comics writing geniuses.

As time has passed, I pondered that I also at one point considered Paul Dini to be a creative genius, and look how unpredictably awful Countdown has become. So I thought it worth considering what exactly Final Crisis is.
(more…)

What is the fascination with endings in comic books? It seems we just can’t get enough of them, and big comics companies just can’t stop giving them to us. Whether it’s the Ultimate X-Men or Y: The Last Man or the Final Crisis, it seems that endings are popping up around every corner, only, once we get there, it just shows a new path to a new ending, in a never-ending loop.

I don’t know how far back this trend goes, but let’s look at the most recent example of it. When 52 ended, the big tagline on the cover was, “It All Ends Here!” The very next week, the first issue of Countdown had the tagline reading, “So Begins the End!” One Year Later, the last issue of Countdown featured the tag, “The End!” Now, one week after that, DC Universe #0’s cover exclaims, “The Ending Begins Here!”

Aren’t you getting sick of it all? I know I am. I mean, it’s obvious that none of these were the real ending of anything, so why should we believe that Final Crisis will actually be the last Crisis that DC makes? Who’s to say that five years from now, there won’t be some new miniseries titled, “The Crisis of the Future” or something?

I guess I just don’t get the fascination. It’s like Margaret Atwood once wrote: “So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.”

Mr. Simon earned the “legend” title with his partner Jack Kirby by creating Captain America, the superhero who arrived in December 1940, just in time to play a patriotic foil to the Axis powers. The cover of the first issue even has the good captain socking Hitler in the jaw.

For Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, though, the biggest blow came when they were dismissed from the series, which had been selling a million copies a month, in a dispute over royalties. The team moved to Detective Comics (today DC Comics), but Captain America stayed with Timely, the forerunner of Marvel Comics.

Read the full article at nytimes.com.

While Doom DeLuise is MIA, Doominator and I recorded a podcast in his absence. Read along as two people with bad memories and limited grasp on recent events attempt to speculate on the Secret Invasion!

[SFX: Intro Music]

JIM DOOM: Hello and welcome to the latest Podcast of Doom. I’m Jim Doom, and filling in for Doom DeLuise this week is Doominator. Good afternoon, Doominator. What’s on your mind this week?

DOOMINATOR: This Secret Invasion business - how is it going to relate to the plot in X-Men from a few years ago, where Wolverine was a Skrull imposter?

JD: Man, I don’t know, but I think there’s a decent chance Wolverine is going to end up being a Skrull, or at least that there is a Wolverine Skrull running around.

I was thinking about how he “died” and was resurrected by The Hand, which has been run by Elektra, who is now revealed to be a Skrull.

Also, I’ve been re-reading New Avengers, and when they went to the Savage Land in pursuit of Sauron in the early issues, Wolverine was there and he came to them. Makes me wonder if he was a Skrull and became “Wolverine” in order to buy some time for the Skrulls there by distracting the New Avengers.

I mean just think about it, what’s the point of making Elektra a skrull? Isn’t Wolverine really the only character to have any kind of meaningful interaction with her over the past few years?

D: and Xavier leading a team of Skrulls around the time of the maximum security plotline.

JD: When was that?

D: Here, I printed this out for you. (Editor’s note: view the information Doominator printed out here)

JD: Hmm. Says here they had “innate powers.” That’s probably significant, because what’s being seen with these new Skrulls is that they have powers beyond just shapeshifting.

D: And outside of the traditional Super Skrull.

JD: You know what, Bendis wrote an interaction between Elektra and Daredevil toward the end of his run, if I remember right. And Matt kind of professed his love, or at least some regret that things weren’t like they used to be, and she had no reaction. He of course beat himself up over that, but that would make sense if she wasn’t actually Elektra.

D: Has she ever been? Maybe she wasn’t resurrected at all.

JD: Yeah, like maybe she was just killed by Bullseye - the end.

D: Which would suck for the three fans of her ongoing from 96.
(more…)

Some twenty months after “Brave New World,” the Trials of Shazam mini-series has finally concluded, leaving in its wake a new status quo for the Marvel Family, repleat with name changes, costume changes, and even a few changes in the core members. Oh, and the source of their powers has kind of changed too, I think. Depends on who you ask, I suppose.

Way back when this mini-series began, in September of 2006, I came right out and said that Trials of Shazam was, “my new favorite comic book.” Some claimed I was riding some sort of Hyperbole Train, whatever that means, but I stand by the claim. Throughout this series, the art has been nothing short of spectacular, and the characters and actions have been genuinely engaging. Sure, the delays friggin’ tanked a lot of the momentum; however, I’m certain that many will agree, for whatever reason, that it would probably read a lot better in one sitting.

With that aside, let’s forget about the merits of the story itself for a little bit and talk about what, exactly, it has established within the world of magic in the DCU. (more…)

Edited to correct a minor, insignificant error

Clearly, if I made the decision to purchase X-Force #1 I’m obviously a glutton for some kind of brain-dead punishment.

SPOILERS AHEAD, mateys.

So Cyclops set up X-Force back during Messiah Complex, because he rationalized to himself that as long as they’re wearing different uniforms and going by a different name, he can order X-Men to be cold-blooded killers but there’s no blood on the X-Men’s hands because these guys wear gray costumes and they’re called X-Force. DUH!

What’s even better though is that X-Force is a SECRET! Nobody can know what’s going on with ‘Clops’ Black Ops, not even Scott’s girlfriend, Emma Frost!

So how does Cyclops keep this information from Emma, who is clearly one of the most powerful telepaths on earth?

He doesn’t tell her!

Brilliant!

I can’t be the only one that noticed the Oceanic Airlines advertisements in this week’s Marvel comics. There was one ad on top of a cab in Daredevil, and there was another one behind Apocalypse in Ultimate X-Men. Those things looked so out of place that they were pretty much all I could focus on in those pages.

I don’t really undertsand why they’re there, though. Viewers of Lost certainly know the name Oceanic Airlines, but does anyone else? What’s the point in having this sort of viral marketing when the only people you’re marketing to are the people that are already part of your market?

So I got to thinking, maybe this isn’t something planned with the guys at Lost at all. Maybe this is Marvel’s new attempt to be hip and cool by associating themselves with the hip and cool TV show of the moment. They have “Colbert ‘08″ signs in the background sometimes, too.

Regardless of whether or not this is a cross-promotion or a cheap pop culture reference, it’s annoying. The Oceanic Airlines images stick out like a sore thumb, because they’re computer-generated images layed over hand-drawn artwork. That crisp, clean logo just doesn’t look right on top of a expertly-rendered taxi. Now that I’m looking at the final page of Ultimate X-Men again, it turns out there’s not one, not two, but three Lost references in that one splash page.

If an artist decided to drawn in a reference to one of their favorite TV shows (or whatever) every so often, I’d have no problem with it. Sometimes those sort of Easter eggs can be kind of fun. But when it’s obviously forced in there by editorial, and it happens more than once a week (and especially if it’s more than once a page), that’s just stupid.

There’s a misguided notion in Hollywood among some circles that bigger is better. The more supervillains you can pack into a big budget summer superhero blockbuster, the more excitement will be generated. If Batman has to overcome not one, not two, but three villains in his new installment of his megapopular franchise, he’ll look like an even bigger hero than in the last movie, when he had his hands full with just one! Right?

No, I’m sorry, that’s wrong. Any time you put more than one main villain in a superhero movie, you’ve given yourself the proverbial kiss of death.

With reboots of failed franchises all the rage these days in Hollywood - - reboots toward simpler times, with less villains, focused more on what makes the heroes tick - - it’d be easy to think that maybe the trend has stopped. After all, in Batman Begins, the main villain was Ra’s al Ghul, and the Scarecrow merely served as his henchman. Falcone was a dying remnant of the old Gotham that Batman cleaned up, once and for all. One main villain, tons of focus on the hero. Great movie.

With Superman Returns, you had Lex Luthor, and only Lex Luthor, to fight the Man of Steel, rather than the last time we saw him on film, when he faced off against Luthor and some stupid clone of himself. These newer movies were each a return to form (Superman Returns still sucked, though), pared down to what made the characters iconic in the first place. (more…)

Last year was a pretty rough year for comic book superhero movies. Things varied from the laughably pathetic without the laughs Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to the perhaps worst comic book movie of all time, Ghost Rider. And let’s not forget the franchise killing Spider-Man 3. All in all, I can’t say there was a single superhero movie released in the past year that I walked away from having fully enjoyed.

I had high expectations around this time last year for 300, but those expectations turned out to be a bit too high, and I was mostly disappointed with the final product. Still, though, I must give credit where it’s due, and 300 cut probably the greatest trailer of all time. Way better than the actual movie.

Oh, and don’t get me started on how much I hated Transformers. I’m no Transformers purist, far from it, but that movie hurt my head to watch, it was so full-on stupid. Hey, look, Shia Lepoof is exchanging witty banter with the guy from the Coens Brothers movies. Great, where’re the robots?

Luckily, this coming year, we have what promises to be a couple really great looking movies, along with a couple of hopeful franchise reboots. Time will tell who the winners and the losers will be, but let’s take a look at what’s on the docket for 2008. It surely has to be a little bit better than what we got this year. And, if not, I promise I won’t write a blog where I fake interview Jack Kirby about how god-awful Hellboy 2 turns out to be. Old comics creators say the darndest things!

Remember when I said that we had a couple really great looking superhero movies coming out this year? If not, you should really lay off the sauce. I seriously just said it in the last paragraph. One of those really great looking movies, though, is Iron Man, which will come to theatres on May 2nd.

It looks like they’re showing the source material a great deal of respect when it comes to this movie, which is something that was sorely lacking in a lot of Marvel’s recent “franchise” movies. The fact that the leaked footage from ComicCon or the first theatrical trailer made use of the Black Sabbath was also a nice little touch that shows that the guys in charge of making this have a definite grasp of what makes superheroes cool.

It’s a dude in a giant suit made of armor, flame-throwing bad guys, and in the background, there’s a kick-ass heavy metal song reinforcing the idea that this rocks out. It just frickin’ fits, and I have super high hopes for this movie.

Plus, the casting of Robert Downey Jr. is the most brilliant casting for a comic book movie I’ve seen yet. Unless they cast Stephen Hawking as Captain America, I can’t see that changing. (more…)