Happy Halloween!

Watchmen Reworked

Recently discovered this tumblr: Watchmen GN Manips where the author fools around with one of the best comics ever like so:

Just genius!

Nemo: The Roses Of Berlin

“Sixteen years ago, notorious science-brigand Janni Nemo journeyed into the frozen reaches of Antarctica to resolve her father’s weighty legacy in a storm of madness and loss, barely escaping with her Nautilus and her life. Now it is 1941, and with her daughter strategically married into the family of aerial warlord Jean Robur, Janni’s raiders have only limited contact with the military might of the clownish German-Tomanian dictator Adenoid Hynkel. But when the pirate queen learns that her loved ones are held hostage in the nightmarish Berlin, she has no choice save to intervene directly, traveling with her aging lover Broad Arrow Jack into the belly of the beastly metropolis. Within that alienated city await monsters, criminals, and legends, including the remaining vestiges of Germany’s notorious ‘Twilight Heroes’, a dark Teutonic counterpart to Mina Murray’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And waiting at the far end of this gauntlet of alarming adversaries there is something much, much worse.”

Well this is definitely going to join my collection.

Monday Memories #43 - Bloody Mary: Lady Liberty #4

Each Monday this year I'll be taking a look back at a random comic, prestige format issue, graphic novel or collection of reprints from amongst my 3,000 or so comics that date from 1962 to 2003 - I figured anything in the last ten years would be too recent to hark back to.

The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!

Who'd Like A Cocktail? #247

Can I get an "Amen" on that, people?

Superman Vs Batman Gossip

No real news - heck, there's not even the confirmation of a title of the forthcoming film - but over at CBR there's a couple of quotes from Warner Bros. executive Greg Silverman concerning various rumours, specifically those saying that Wonder Woman would turn up in the new film:

“We have been doing a lot of thinking for years about how to best use all those characters and we love them. Wonder Woman is an amazing character. I think it’s a great opportunity both for box office success, but also to have an amazingly powerful female superhero.”

It's a shame that "thinking for years" is pretty much all they've been doing, to be honest, while Marvel gleefully romps away with the superhero film market neatly sewn up. That said, and if they're quick, Warner Bros (and DC by extension) could still pip Marvel to the post in being the first to bring a successful film with a central female superhero to the market.*

Wonder Woman is perfect from the point of name and image recognition and - as the fan made trailer showed a couple of weeks ago - if she's treated with respect, imagination and like the mythical goddess-like character she can be, there's no end to the stories that could be told.

It's a shame any potential Wonder Woman movie could be launched from whatever Superman Vs Batman ends up being called rather than as a standalone, but it's better than nothing.

*  And no, dear god, no, I am not counting Catwoman. I said successful, okay?

Monday Memories #42 - Star Wars: A Long Time Ago #1

Each Monday this year I'll be taking a look back at a random comic, prestige format issue, graphic novel or collection of reprints from amongst my 3,000 or so comics that date from 1962 to 2003 - I figured anything in the last ten years would be too recent to hark back to.

The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!

No Cocktail Today

This week has been stupidly busy in work and at the weekend so I didn't get chance to buy my week's comics, hence no Cocktail today.

So have a picture of a female Blue Beetle for the hell of it:

Superman 75th Anniversary Animated Short

I've never been the biggest Superman fan in the world but this:

this is just great.

DC's January Solicitations

All-Star Western #27

Hex’s journey through the modern age continues! Guess whose attention Hex attracts as he makes his way to Metropolis!

Hex facing off against Superman - can't wait!

New York Comic Con Cosplay

With nothing else to blog about at the moment, I'm reduced to trawling through the cosplay photos from the recent New York Comic Con, picking out a handful that made me chuckle.

Kudos to this guy - those octopus arms look really well put together. Wonder if they moved?

Monday Memories #41 - Body Doubles #3

Each Monday this year I'll be taking a look back at a random comic, prestige format issue, graphic novel or collection of reprints from amongst my 3,000 or so comics that date from 1962 to 2003 - I figured anything in the last ten years would be too recent to hark back to.

The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!

Who'd Like A Cocktail? #246

Isn't it annoying when they do that?

Get Your Steampunk Fix Here!

Tired of waiting for the Joe Benitez to write and draw the hugely delayed next issue of Lady Mechanika?

Now worries - he's illustrated the cover of this instead:

That's the cover of Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure by Bill Willingham, featuring steampunk versions of "The Phantom, Green Hornet, Vampirella, Red Sonja, the Bionic Man and more" in a seven issue miniseries as detailed here.

As Willingham says in the interview:

"This is a story designed for me to have fun and I hope that will translate to the readership. A fun adventure doesn't mean it won't be important in the sense of "Will you care about these characters?" or "Will you care about the outcome of the story?" I hope that that's true, but more in the sense of going on a nice, wild ride. Hopefully you're too busy hanging on and screaming to worry about the structure of the story."

Fun comic books - that's what the industry needs more of. And yes, I'm looking at you, DC.

I will be buying this. Oh yes

The Invention Of Time Travel

Here's something I didn't know - time travel was invented in Cambridge, here in the dear old UK:

How cool is that? Britain gets to claim the first time travellers.

And when did it happen?

You'd have thought the BBC at least would have covered it, but no, they're off talking about Kosovo.

Priorities, people!

In case you're wondering, this sterling piece of science reporting comes from Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files #21 which turned up in the post yesterday. And yes, I have nothing else to blog about right now.

Manners, Please

I don't get a massive number of comments on my posts - there's a handful of you who post semi-regularly and that's appreciated - so I've never felt the need to enforce a commenting policy. Comments on older posts have to be agreed by myself before they show up and I put that in place after a spate of spam-bot comments that seemed to target the old stuff.

If you like what I write then I'm happy to hear that; if you disagree with what I write, I'm equally happy to take some criticism as long as it's reasonable and constructive. As this blog's primarily DC based, there have been some readers who've offered their opinions of what has and hasn't worked since the reboot and I'm fine with that - some of it I agree with, some I don't. I hope they don't mind me name dropping them but neither Shlomo Ben Hungstien nor Dale Bagwell appear to be massive fans of the New 52 but at least they put sensible arguments across and I have no problem with that.

I'm not in the business of preventing people expressing their opinion as long as it's done with a certain degree of maturity and thought. By all means get angry about a person's work but don't get personal about the person - I've mentioned before how Ann Nocenti's writing on Green Arrow was so poor it led me to drop the title, but I never said anything about her as a person.

All of the above was prompted by a recent anonymous comment that someone left on an old post which read:

"DC comics began to suck in the nineties and becane [sic] worse until they became the joke they are today with the new 52 reboot DC Comics suck suck suck suck"

That's the sort of thing that I don't like. It's childish, basically. It's just someone standing in a school playground telling another kid their toys are rubbish or they smell or something.

There are things about the reboot I'm not a fan of and yes, part of me wishes we still had Ted Kord's Blue Beetle, Wally West's Flash and Donna Troy's . . . er . . . Donna Troy still running around. However, I'm glad we had Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, Demon Knights and even the much maligned Voodoo. Not all of it worked for me and I find myself caring less and less about new titles coming from DC - Forever Evil's not doing anything new and the recently announced Forever Evil: Blight crossover just leaves me cold - but I'm not going to stand there and shout "You suck!"

What I will do is not buy the books and move on to something else.

Comments on my posts are more than welcome - seriously, I love interacting with my readers. But if someone posts examples of the above . . . well, from now on . . .

Monday Memories #40 - JLA Incarnations #2

Each Monday this year I'll be taking a look back at a random comic, prestige format issue, graphic novel or collection of reprints from amongst my 3,000 or so comics that date from 1962 to 2003 - I figured anything in the last ten years would be too recent to hark back to.

The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!

Who'd Like A Cocktail? #245

And, as we all know, size matters

Wonder Woman Fan Trailer

The internet and its uncle have been showing this and rightly so - it is a damn fine example of how a Wonder Woman movie could so easily work if Warner Bros put their mind to it.

Perusing Previews - October 2013

I'm sure the Create Your Own figures will be great fun for kids of all ages, but I have to wonder why you can get a Superhuman Male but not a Superhuman Female? Isn't that just reinforcing the idea that all female superheroes have to have the same body shape?

Dear JJ Abrams

This is just perfect - clear, succinct and beautifully animated.