Category Archives: DC
My Top 6 Greatest Comic Books of All Time
I love comic books because, deep down, I wish I was a hero with incredible powers. I wish I could fly around the world. I wish I was more powerful than a speeding locomotive. I wish I could turn invisible and mess with people on the street. I love reading comic books because they are a uniquely perfect way to tell a story, combining prose and pictures into one fun-to-read package. And comics have a creative freedom unmatched by almost any other medium. Movies and TV shows are hampered by budgets, technology, running time and so much more. With comics, the heroes can travel all around the world or into space without awkward green screens of fake-looking CGI. The visual imagination of comics is hampered only by the strain on an artist’s wrist. Comics can do anything, go anywhere and be anyone.
Though they’re mostly about men dressing up in animal costumes
I’ve had a draft of this List of Six waiting in my queue for more than a year now. I’ve been picking at it, rearranging it, deciding what should go where, but I’m dying to share this list with you. I’m always talking about comics, so what are the best comic book stories/series I have ever read? Keep in mind: this is my personal list. This isn’t just the best comic books of all time. This list isn’t going to have Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns on it. I’ve read those comics, and I like those comics, but they aren’t among the best comics I have ever read. No sir. And that probably has a lot to do with my comic book upbringing.
When I was a kid, I read everything from my dad’s comic collection that he left lying around, which were mostly a small smattering of Marvel superhero comics from the 60s. I didn’t get into comics on my own until the mid-90s, when my brother and I started with Spider-Man in the middle of the Clone Saga…which explains why he and I both love the Clone Saga…and my undying love of Phil Urich. We eventually moved on to the X-Men, but it wasn’t until Batman: Hush and Infinite Crisis that I finally started reading DC Comics on a regular basis. Because of this timeline, I wasn’t around in the 80s for Watchmen to blow my mind. I wasn’t around in the 60s for Spider-Man and Superman to define my world. In fact, almost everything on this list comes from the past 20 years or so, when I really got into comics.
Here are my personal Top 6 Greatest Comic Books of All Time. I would recommend any of these to anyone, comic fans or not.
Flash TV Show? Say Whaaat?
I don’t normally write about this kind of news, since it’s pretty much just rumors and guess work at this point, but this has been an incredibly slow week for comic book and geek news! It also happens to be my first vacation of the year from my day job, so I’m just sitting around playing Skyrim anyway. So I figured you peeps might like to chew on the news that the Flash might get his own TV show!
No speed puns felt appropriate
According to Deadline, the production team behind the successful Arrow show are going to start working on a live action Flash TV show – not unlike the live action Flash TV show that aired back in the 90s, and featured Mark Hamill as the Trickster. Never heard of that show before? It was a treat!
According to the report, the Flash will guest star in a Season Two episode of Arrow, then spin-off into his own pilot. Not quite sure how they expect to explain super-powers in the Arrow universe, but I’m sure they’ll come up with something.
I would be totally down for a live action Flash TV show, especially one set in the Arrow universe. I like Arrow as much as the next guy, so expanding it to a whole live action DC Universe sounds fantastic. There’s also a Flash movie planned for 2016 or something, right? I hope they don’t butt heads. I know DC and Warner Bros. have always had trouble when it comes to giving their superheroes conflicting TV shows, movies or cartoons. It never makes much sense to me, but I am completely in favor of seeing them expand from Arrow‘s success.
Maybe now someone will buy my pilot script for ‘Boy Wonder’.
Hench-Sized Comic Book Reviews – 7/27/13
We check back in with a few different comics this week that I’ve skipped over in the past, namely Uncanny Avengers and Wolverine and the X-Men. The latter impressed me, if only for its superb use of Toad, while the former was kind of disappointing. The Marvel Universe is an odd place these days, and I just don’t think Uncanny Avengers really has a place in it. Maybe a few years ago it would have been something special, but these days, it’s lost in the shuffle.
Fortunately, Marvel is also publishing the excellent Superior Spider-Man comic, and I’ve finally given in to fan demand and read Avenging Spider-Man, now renamed Superior Spider-Man Team-Up. I liked it a lot, but this week it pals in comparison to the outright awesomeness of the Comic Book of the Week, Superior Spider-Man #14! Otto Octavius finally embraces his new Spider-Man persona, and it is glorious to behold!
How have we gone this long without Spider-Man henchmen?
Comic Reviews: Justice League Dark #22, Larfleeze #2, Superior Spider-Man #14, Superior Spider-Man Team-Up #1, Uncanny Avengers #10 and Wolverine and the X-Men #33.
Review: Teen Titans #22
I think Teen Titans #22 is where the series finally loses its mind. It’s jumped the shark. There is only the insane ramblings of a madman who has too much else to worry about, and can no longer be bothered to tell an even partially coherent story. Scott Lobdell is off writing both Superman comics. He’s got a lot on his plate. So clearly when it came time to write Teen Titans #22, he simply went off the deep end. Everything he may have learned in story-telling school has gone right out the window.
Teen Titans #22
Unprecedented recap page. The Deus ex Machina Squad. Trigon quitting. Evil Red Robin defeated off-panel. It’s all just so…so…lame.
Comic Rating: 2/10 – Very Bad.
On the one hand, the comic is comprehensible. I know what’s happening, I can understand what’s intended. But on the other hand, every other aspect of this comic is a wreck. It’s given up all pretense of being about the characters, and is instead just a rambling befuddlement of stuff that’s happening to a random, somewhat familiar group of superheroes. There’s no cohesion anymore. Issues don’t flow together. Characters are nothing more than colorful bodies who spout painful dialogue, and do what is required of them by the writer. Plot threads are dropped or dismissed seemingly at random, with only a little hand-waving to explain them away. While other plot threads just pop up out of nowhere and make no sense in the larger series.
Nothing matters anymore. Nothing. No friendships, no relationships, no idea of teamwork or why they’re even doing this. The Teen Titans are a train wreck. And the worst part is that they will now always be a train wreck.
Remember, there are no previous versions of the Titans. There is no long legacy of Teen Titans to fall back on anymore, not in the New 52 universe. It’s just Red Robin and this band of idiot misfits grouped together for the sake of hanging a series on. And it’s garbage, pure garbage. I’m pretty sure this book is surviving on name recognition alone at this point. But if it keeps going like this, Teen Titans isn’t going to have a name to bank on anymore.
6 Things I Want From the Batman/Superman Movie
Holy cow, Comic-Con International was FULL of movie news this past weekend! Age of Ultron, Guardians of the Galaxy, Days of Future Past, Godzilla, Hunger Games; it was a madhouse of movie news, spoilers and trailers! We haven’t seen a lot of those trailers yet, but the descriptions online have been stunning. Us movie geeks are in for a good couple of years. But I think the biggest, coolest surprise announcement was that the sequel to Man of Steel is going to be a team-up between Superman and Batman!
And even though I didn’t like Man of Steel, I’m nothing if not a sucker, and I can appreciate the wonderful excitement of a Batman/Superman team-up movie just as much as the next guy! I’m not made of stone, people!
2015 is gonna be a wild year
Meanwhile, the Justice League movie has been pushed back to 2017, if it even happens. Frequent readers of my site might remember that I had absolutely no confidence in DC and Warner Bros. to make a Justice League movie by 2015. But that didn’t stop me from making a list similar to this one, and a Batman/Superman team-up was my #4 choice for what I’d want to see in a Justice League movie. So seeing DC simply do this film first is a very cool turn of events. It fills me with…something close to hope. But DC has messed up their superhero movies before. I didn’t like Superman Returns, I didn’t like Man of Steel and I didn’t like Green Lantern. So if DC wants to finally make me happy (and I’m sure they do), here are my six suggestions for the Batman/Supermean movie.
