Time to get the reviews for the rest of my comics out of the way today.

The Brave and the Bold #5

Well, last issue ended with Batman merged with the evil cyborg Tharok and transported to the distant future. This issue starts out with the 31st century’s Legion of Super-Heroes using their amazing super-science to split the two characters apart. Unfortunately, despite the many technological advances of the future, they’ve never managed time travel (or at least this version of the future hasn’t — lots of previous versions of the Legion had time travel), so Batman may be permanently stuck in the future. Even worse, his presence is causing the manifestation of dangerous time rifts that could wreck the entire fabric of time. Everyone figures that, since the Haruspex super-weapon managed to send Batman forward in time, maybe it could also send him back. Unfortunately, no one can get it to work anymore.

Frustrated by his situation and by the arrogant Brainiac 5’s constant put-downs of his relatively primitive intellect, Batman seemingly goes nuts, steals a Legion Flight Ring, and leads the Legionnaires on a wild chase. In the process, he ties Triplicate Girl into a Siamese Human Knot (just like in the old ’60s “Batman” show!) and has a grand mid-air martial arts battle with Karate Kid.

Back in the present-day, Supergirl, Green Lantern, and Adam Strange are on the distant planet Rann trying to locate the Book of Destiny before the evil Luck Lords get their hands on it.

Verdict: Thumbs up. So many cool things, all in one book. Action, humor, wonderful dialogue, great plot twists, and George Perez’s outstanding art — all of it in one little comic book. Go git it.

All-Flash #1

This is a one-shot issue to link the old “Flash” series with the new one. In it, the resurrected Wally West goes after Bart Allen’s killer (and clone!) Inertia. He picks an ironic end for him that is indeed uncommonly cruel for what we know about Wally (just as Bart’s death was uncommonly cruel for what we knew of the previously non-murderous Rogues), but it is something that Inertia will be able to escape from pretty easily so he can come back over and over as a villain.

This issue has several different artists, but at the end we get a glimpse of Daniel Acuna’s art for the new “Flash” series — and I’m not really very encouraged by it. You see, Acuna is a painter — an excellent one, in fact — and his artwork, like the recent “Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters,” is dark, dark, dark — lots of very dark colors, accentuated by brilliant flashes of light. It’s beautiful, but it makes his artwork hard to look at — you can’t see it clearly in anything less than direct light — anything less is like looking at dim silhouettes. And his best work is fairly grounded in the realism of the human form — but here, he goes for some grotesque cartooning — Flash’s son is a kid, and elsewhere in this issue, he’s depicted as a normal-looking kid. But in Acuna’s artwork, he has powers, and his arms and upper body are muscled like a professional bodybuilder. He looks utterly freakish — he’d look freakish drawn by anyone, but Acuna’s realistic style makes it more pronounced and ugly. Acuna’s artwork for “The Flash” makes me a lot less enthusiastic about the upcoming series — I’m a big believer in the idea that the writer doe the most work toward creating a good comic book, but there’s no doubt that poor — or in this case, just bizarre — artwork can kill a lot of the pleasure of reading a well-written comic.

Verdict: Thumbs up, but just barely. There are large chunks of this story that I like a lot, but the Acuna artwork just makes me so nervous…

Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen #1

Yes, this is the same Stephen Colbert who anchors Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.” The comic isn’t written by Colbert, but he is credited with “Galactic Overlording.”

Tek Jansen is a Colbert-created space hero who looks just like Colbert and talks just like his comedy persona — egotistical, conservative, casually xenophobic, but very, very, very heroic and always right about everything. He gets sent on intergalactic missions, engages in wild derring-do, takes the law into his own hands, and makes fun of both the radioactive robot monkey he works with and Overseeress Braina, a floating disembodied brain wearing a pretty bow.

He sleeps with a gross skeleton alien, brutally assaults numerous monstrous alien menaces (and innocent alien passersby), fights evil in the nude, and destroys planets for no good reason. There are lots of funny sciencefictionisms, as well as wonderful dialogue, especially from the evil Meangarr, a caged inkblot who constantly issues over-the-top threats like “I’ll tear your head off and make it my wife.” (Note: Please try to use this phrase in conversation today.)

Verdict: Thumbs up. Clearly, we need more comics inspired by Stephen Colbert monologues.

 

Speed kills.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t like the most recent comic series starring the Flash. From the beginning, I thought it was a series that was very poorly thought out, with a popular character unceremoniously booted into comic limbo and replaced by an almost entirely new and untested character.

Let’s take a look at where things went wrong, and how they may yet be salvaged.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the character’s long history, there have been a variety of Flashes through the decades. In the 40s, there was a Flash named Jay Garrick who ran around with a metal helmet on his head. The Flash most people are familiar with was Barry Allen, a police scientist who made his debut in the ’50s. He wore a distinctive red uniform that every subsequent Flash has worn. During the “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” Barry Allen died saving the universe, and his sidekick, Wally West, who previously went by the name of Kid Flash, took over as the newest Flash. Wally was considered the fastest and most powerful of all the Flashes — since he was able to tap into the interdimensional “Speed Force” that powered all superspeed characters, there were no real limits on how fast he could run.

Bart Allen made his first appearance as Impulse in 1994. He was the grandson of Barry Allen, born in the future with an accelerated metabolism. Many of his best adventures were comedic, playing up both his superspeed and his irritating hyperactivity. In 2003, Bart took on the mantle of Kid Flash, in one of the more enjoyable storyarcs of the revived “Teen Titans” series. (It was revealed that he had a photographic memory, and deciding he wanted to be a more efficient superhero, he read every single book in the San Francisco public library in a matter of minutes.)

Built up alongside the various Flashes were the members of his Rogues Gallery, better known as just the Rogues. Most had no powers of their own but used various super-scientific weapons to commit crimes. They included Captain Cold, the Mirror Master, Heat Wave, Captain Boomerang, Weather Wizard, and many more. Captain Cold was generally acknowledged as the leader, and he insisted that they follow a strict code of honor — they avoided drugs and preferred not to kill anyone, unless they couldn’t avoid it. I remember them saying more than once that they liked being simple bank robbers, and didn’t want to be the world-conquering egotists who faced most other superheroes.

And then, during the “Infinite Crisis,” Wally got sucked into the Speed Force, along with his wife and infant children — readers were told that he’d never come back. There was no grand farewell for the character, he made no great heroic last stand, and no one seemed to mourn his passing. Remember, Wally had been a major player in the DC Universe ever since his debut as Kid Flash back in late 1959. I, for one, felt that DC tossing him aside so quickly and with so little care was disrespectful, both to the character and to his fans.

At the same time, Bart was pulled into the Speed Force and artificially aged four years, going from being a teenager to being an adult. He was basically an entirely new character, as many of the appealingly humorous aspects of his personality had been transformed replaced with angsty whining. It’s no great surprise that his new comic wasn’t that popular.

DC, however, went into panic mode recently — they resurrected Wally and his family in the latest issue of “Justice League of America” (a comic so bad that I decided not to make myself review it, with cover artwork so outrageously inept, I feared I’d run afoul of the A-J’s filtering software just describing it) and had the newly drug-abusing, kill-crazy Rogues beat Bart to death. DC has been claiming that they’ve planned this all along, but frankly, no one believes them. Bart’s ending is just too abrupt and absurdly violent — DC seems to think that the fans didn’t like Bart when what they didn’t like was watching DC produce badly written and poorly planned comics. No one would’ve complained if Bart had been kept alive — heck, I suspect most Flash fans will be angrier about Bart’s death than they were about his short-lived Flash career.

This seems to be common practice for comic companies. Got a series or character you expected to be insanely popular that is instead unpopular? Don’t tell readers it’s your fault — use the character as a scapegoat and kill him off! We saw Marvel do the same thing to Ben Reilly at the end of the much-despised Spider-Man “Clone Saga” of the mid-’90s. They blamed the character for their misfortunes instead of who was truly at fault — the editors, the writers, the company bigwigs who pushed the story forward.

Right now, everyone is very hopeful that putting Mark Waid back on as the Flash’s writer will return the series to greatness. Waid is the writer who’s most well-known for writing Wally’s best adventures, and he is the writer who I’d most like to see writing about the newly-resurrected Wally.

But I’m also expecting Waid to do something that DC isn’t expecting. I think that Waid is smart enough to see through DC’s likely bulldada about Bart being a “bad character.” I’m hoping that Waid will also find a way to resurrect Bart, either as an adult, or as a teen. After all, Waid created Bart and wrote his adventures for several years — I suspect he has a vested interest in seeing the character continue. Expect Bart to make his return sometime in the next year or two — and most importantly, expect his return to be a good story. Mercy knows, someone needs to remind DC how to do that.

 

It’s very dark in there.

It’s the 13th and final issue of “The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive.”

If you’ve been paying any attention to the comics rumor mill, you know what happens in this one.

If you haven’t, you’re about to find out. Shut yer eyes quick, chickadee, spoilers in the next paragraph!

Bart Allen dies.

In fact, he gets his speed taken away, he pulls off a pretty good fight against the Rogues, and then they beat him to death.

Yes, they actually killed a Flash without letting him run.

In other words, DC decided they didn’t like the character, so they simultaneously killed and dissed him. Because all Flashes are supposed to die running. It’s in the contracts. If you’re a Flash, you die while running faster than you’ve ever run in your life, skirting just this side of hypercosmic speeds, your atoms actually burning down and exploding as friction, kinetic energy, and Einstein’s frustrated ghost strip away your individual protons and hyper-accelerated skin cells.

Flashes never die on their backs getting their guts stomped out by supervillains.

The problem is that DC thought they’d shake things up, age Bart Allen to adulthood, change his personality, and rake in big bucks with their new and angsty Flash. Lo and behold, readers didn’t like the new Flash. Readers didn’t buy the book. Readers said the book sucked.

DC decided they had to ditch the book and, assuming the readers hated Bart Allen, killed him off as dismissively as they could. “Yay for us, readers!” DC yells. “We killed the character you hated, Bart Allen! Love us again!”

“You idiots,” snarl the readers. “We liked Bart. We hated your stupid comic book.”

“Don’t worry, readers,” says new Flash scribe Mark Waid. “I’ll fix this for ya.”

How? That’s a post for another day. (In other words, tomorrow morning.)

Read this blog… or we shoot the Flash!

Hi there. My name’s Scott Slemmons. I’m the guy who does the online updating for FrenshipToday.com, plus I’m a general low-level flunky for LubbockOnline. Really, seriously low-level. Technically, the company cat can fire me.

So anyway, I decided I wanted to do a comics blog. ‘Cause, ya know, I read a lot of comics, and I like getting to write about why they work, and why they don’t work, and assorted and sundry other geeky stuff.

So I give a heads-up to Scott Phillips, LubbockOnline’s weblog guru and the guy who stole my first name. “Hey, Phillips,” says I. “I’d like to do a comic book weblog. When do I start?”

“Oh, hey, look at that,” Scott replies, suddenly looking over at the big TV mounted on the wall of the newsroom. “Anna Nicole Smith died.” The TV is currently switched off.

“Don’t change the subject,” I say. “I think it’d be pretty cool. Comics are pretty big business, and an important American cultural touchstone. They inspire movies, TV shows, novels. Sure, there’s a lot of dreck out there, but there are a lot of really wonderful comics, too. I could do reviews, analysis, historical stuff. I could also just geek out over cool comics and make fun of the dreck. I think it’d work.”

“Whoa, it’s lunchtime already?” says Scott, turning and sprinting for the door. “Better get going.” Of course, it’s just 9:15 a.m.

Well, okay, fine. Phillips is taking an early, early lunch break. “Hey, Judy! Scott Phillips said I could have a comic book weblog! Ain’t that great! No, no need to mention it to him. Could you make one of those awesome top-of-the-page headers for it? Muchos gracias!”

So, by hook and/or crook, I’ve got my comic book blog. But first, let’s make a few things clear, so we don’t misunderstand each other.

(A) I think of the modern-day comic book as a mostly adult medium. Some of the books I read include characters who cuss a lot, or indulge in really graphic violence, or run around without pants. If I recommend a comic book, that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for your kid. I believe that parents should review comics before they buy them for their kids to make sure there’s nothing there they won’t like.

(B) And because I think of comics as something adults can enjoy reading, I plan on talking about them as an adult. No, that doesn’t mean I plan on throwing F-bombs around or posting gory or pornographic pictures. But from time to time, we’ll be talking about politics in comics, religion in comics, race in comics, controversial comics, you name it. Honestly, at some point, we’ll discuss sex in comics — no, not porn, but the issues of sex, sexuality, body images, misogyny and more are currently very big in the comics industry, and there’s not much of a way to avoid ’em. There is more to comics than just escapist entertainment.

(C) But hey, escapist entertainment ain’t bad either, so we’ll try to have fun, too.

(D) Comics fans, I plan on talking about some stuff that you already know about. Yes, we all know that Alan Moore is awesome, that Grant Morrison’s JLA was the best ever, that MODOK fills our hearts with joy, that Rob Liefeld fills our hearts with rage. But there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll have an unusual number of readers who aren’t (or at least, aren’t yet) comics fans. So you comics readers will need to be patient while I explain some of the awesome stuff to the newbies.

(E) And non-comics fans, I’ll try to make sure everything makes some sort of sense. But sometimes, I’m just gonna post pictures of MODOK over and over and over, and if you complain, I’ll shoot you with my atomic zamboni pistol, see if I don’t.

(F) You probably won’t see me reviewing a lot of comic book movies or TV shows. The last comic book movies I saw and enjoyed were “V for Vendetta” and “Hellboy,” and I don’t watch “Heroes” or “Smallville” at all. I’ve had my heart broken by too many badly adapted comic book movies, and I now tend to avoid them altogether. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

(G) I prefer DC Comics to Marvel. I’ve picked up a few long runs of Marvel’s books from time to time, but I just tend to gravitate toward DC’s stuff. I don’t think there’s any deep reason why — from childhood, I’ve always been a DC reader more than a Marvel reader.

(H) I reserve the right to blog about non-comics subjects from time to time. I like comics, but I like other stuff, too.

There we go — introductions are out of the way. Better get this posted before Phillips gets back from lunch…