A Better Green Lantern Than the One in the Movie
This song and music video are further proof that the Internet is the greatest invention in the history of everything. It gives voice to the geeks of the world. Let us revel in this wonderfully specific theme song about the Green Lantern. It makes me wonder if bands who record these types of songs can ever play them in live venues. Who else but geeks would understand them?
Believe me when I say this wins all the Internets.
Hot Girl/Girl Action
That’s right everybody, my blog is now going to bring you some hot girl/girl action straight from the comic book page! We’re talking the sexiest superheroines this side of Supergirl, ready to get into hot and heavy action in the name of saving the day. And by ‘action’, of course, I mean fight bad guys and literally save the day. And by ‘hot and heavy’ I mean it’s probably exhausting being a superheroine, and I’m sure they worked up a sweat.
Why? What did you think I was talking about?
The girls in question are Zatanna and Power Girl, two semi-popular superheroines whose final issues dropped last week. They’ve been cancelled. As I’ve mentioned a few times before on this blog, DC Comics is doing a line-wide revamp next month. That means all of the current comics are getting cancelled, including the solo adventures of Zatanna and Power Girl, two of my favorite DC comics. It’s a shame to see them go, so I figured I’d show them off in style by reviewing their final issues: Zatanna #16 and Power Girl #27.
Zatanna #16 and Power Girl #27
First, a word about these types of comics. I love these types of comics. Zatanna and Power Girl are clearly not A-List heroes, like Batman and Superman. Yet with the right writer and some good ideas, DC Comics took a chance and published these series anyway. Comics are filled with hundreds of obscure and seemingly unpopular characters, and every once and awhile, DC and Marvel will put out a series or mini-series starring these characters. Sometimes they’re bad and sometimes they’re great. But I love that comics will take the chance anyway.
It enforces my writing motto: “There’s no such thing as a bad character, only bad writers.”
And fortunately with the Zatanna and Power Girl series, we got good characters, good writers and great artists! Both of their final issues are standalone stories with fill-in writers, so I won’t need to catch you up on any ongoing storylines. They’re both pretty good stories, and are also pretty good examples of what each series was like. Though the Zatanna comic is leagues better than Power Girl.
So let’s start with Zatanna.
The Mistress of Magic!
If you can’t tell from her ‘costume’, Zatanna is a magician. Literally. Her day job is as a classic stage magician who tours and puts on shows all around the world. The catch is that she’s using real magic, and that’s why she’s a superhero. All she has to do to cast a spell is say it backwards, and she can do almost anything. Want to pull a rabbit out of her hat? All Zatanna has to say is, “Raeppa tibbar!” It’s a pretty neat sort of ability. Not many magicians in superhero comics.
Zatanna’s series was about her juggling her stage show and real life with her duties as a superheroine, often with her having to stop some magic-based super-villain. There were a few standalone issues, and some multi-parters. There was a hunky cop who sometimes flirted with her, and she had a stage hand/assistant who helped out from time to time. The main villain, Brother Midnight, was sufficiently spooky and had a storyline or two. Zatanna defeated him in the end. Several issues also featured her cousin Zachary, who was basically just a young, male copy of Zatanna. I never liked him, so ignore him.
The comic was written by Paul Dini, one of the creators of Batman: The Animated Series. Dini is a huge Zatanna fan, and I like to imagine that the series was DC’s gift to him. Like a pet project. Dini and his fill-ins wrote some awesome stories. There was the time she fought the villain who could rewind time, so in order to cast spells she had to speak in only palindromes. Or the time she was almost married to a studly Vegas casino owner so that he could sell her soul to a gambling demon. And my favorite story was probably the time she had to fight a cursed ventriloquist who had been turned into a psycho puppet.
Only to get turned into a puppet herself!
Basically Zatanna got up to all manner of magical mischief, and the final issue is no different. We start on a cross-Atlantic plane ride, with Zatanna taking a red-eye home after a few shows in Europe. Writer Adam Beechen is telling the story with a third-person narrative (different for the series), and it has a fun, playful style to it. The plane almost crashes, but Zatanna raises her sleeping eye-mask, casts a ‘repair’ spell and fixes the plane. All is well and she can keep trying to sleep, though she can’t seem to drift off. When she lands, she’s stuck in customs for a bit and finally makes it home. She crashes into her bed, still super tired, but it seems Zatanna doesn’t get to sleep this night.
The humor in this story, and the series, is delightful
Let me take a moment to say that the art in this issue, by Victor Ibanez, is amazing! It’s a realistic take on the traditional superhero style, and I love it. Zee looks and moves like a real person, not just a flighty superhero. Her facial expressions are a delight as she’s forced out of bed to deal with the books antagonist: the witch boy Uriah. He’s basically just a troublesome little scamp who knows how to use magic. He’s woken Zatanna up in the middle of the night because he wants to be her apprentice. Zatanna is very tired, so she politely tells him to get lost. Uriah doesn’t listen and decides to run wild in her house.
Precocious as he is, Uriah finds Zatanna’s massive library. It’s filled to the brim with magical tomes and books, and Uriah grabs The Book of Maps. The book is what he came for, and it’s supposed to know all the passages and short cuts between dimensions. Uriah’s plan is to use the book to become the most powerful being ever, then perhaps he’ll take over the world. Zatanna can’t allow that, so she chases Uriah from dimension to dimension.
...to dimension to dimension to dimension...
In order to catch Uriah, Zatanna casts a teleportation spell that takes them both to The Dimension of Gargantuans! This next page was wonderfully breathtaking. There are ads in comics, and pages that need to be turned. So a lot of great writers will use those to create a slight cliffhanger and a nice shock page. You see Zatanna chasing Uriah through the portals on one page, read her casting the teleportation spell at the bottom of the page, and then you turn the page to find this:
Booyah!
That’s just awesome and gloriously magical. This is the sort of fun that the Zatanna book brought to the table time and again. When magic combines with awesome, creative writing, you get some really fun adventures. That’s why I enjoyed Zatanna so much. The book never had a consistent artist, but it always had great art issue after issue. And even when Dini wasn’t writing, the fill-ins did a great job.
So Zatanna catches Uriah and takes him back to his witch town. She puts The Book of Maps back into her library and finally gets a moment to sleep. There’s a running gag about her trying to enjoy a dream with studly men and cocoa butter, and the final page shows Zatanna in a sexy bikini standing on a beach, with studly men waving from the ocean. Looks like it’s going to be a fun dream and she’ll be able to get some rest.
This was a fantastic issue and a great send-off to the Zatanna series. It’s fun, zany and funny, with great facial expressions and comedic panel-work. Uriah is hardly a classic villain, but he serves his purpose of being bratty and annoying – two things Zatanna does not want to deal with while she’s so tired. And that added level of being exhausted greatly humanizes Zatanna. She’s tuckered out and just wants to sleep, but instead she has to deal with this annoying thing. We’ve all been there. Humanizing superheroes is the way to make them really stand out as interesting subjects. This issue does a great job of that. I’m sorry to see Zatanna go.
Up next is Power Girl #27, a less interesting comic but still a nice, solid farewell.
We all know where your eyes are focused
Power Girl has a complicated background, but I’ll try to explain it in simple terms. Everybody knows Superman, right? And everybody knows or can understand the concept of Supergirl? Well Power Girl is an alternate reality version of Supergirl, who is now living in the normal DC reality. But none of that matters to this series. All you really need to know is that she’s a youngish woman with all the powers of Superman, who’s trying to make it on her own in New York City. She’s the head of her own tech company, but faces all manner of business and financial problems throughout the series. The book is high on humor and charm, with more than a few bad guy fights to enjoy. It’s not as whimsical as the Zatanna series, but it was fun.
Waking up is hard to do
Especially in the beginning for the first 12 issues, when it was written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and was drawn by Amanda Conner. I assume they had the initial pitch for the series, and those first 12 issues are phenomenal. They tell the story of Power Girl as a real person, struggling with her day-to-day life while also trying to be Power Girl. She faces off against some tough bad guys, including 3 diva-like alien women who just want to party on Earth, and an overly macho, Zap Brannigan-esque, hairy-chested space stud who wants to mate with her. The stories were funny and friendly, and the art was amazing. Conner drew those picture I posted above, and she draws absolutely gorgeous facial expressions and body language. Power Girl also has the most adorable cat in all of comics.
I prefer the name 'Mr. Cat'
The stories were largely inconsequential. If you’re a Power Girl fan, the comic was probably a godsend. Straight forward, fun adventures starring your favorite superheroine. But the action was never great. The Power Girl comic succeeded because of the humanity in the main character. The writers, even those that filled in after Palmiotti and Gray left, wrote plenty of scenes of Power Girl at home. She played with her cat, worried about her social life and struggled to keep her company from falling apart. At times the idea that she ran her own massive tech company seemed to stretch credibility, but it never got too out of hand. Other superheroes have been CEOs before.
The final issue is a story about a super-villain giving Power Girl one minute to save 3 different people on 3 different sides of the world. Theoretically she only has time to save one, and the villain wants to find out and take note of which choice she makes. Will she save the old people at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, will she save the random fishing girl in east Asian or will she save her superheroine friend Cyclone? All three are being attacked by super-villains, so who will Power Girl save in the minute time limit?
All of them, of course.
Take that, ancient monument!
First Power Girl drops a giant boulder into the ocean, creating a tidal wave that will come into play later. She has the strength and speed of Superman, so she’s able to fly all the way to Brazil to save Cyclone first. She beats up the super-villains who are holding her prisoner and gives Cyclone a message to meet her in east Asia in 25 seconds. Power Girl then flies to Italy and beats up the villain who is trying to knock over the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Power Girl puts the tower back up (though not all the way straight) and flies off to east Asia to save the fishing girl.
Along the way she stops to save a cat in a tree. Kind of a dumb thing to waste precious seconds on, but it’s sort of a call back to the adorable cat from the Amanda Conner issues!
The tidal wave she created at the start comes and hits the super-villain, stopping him from killing the fishing girl. Then Power Girl shows up to knock out the villain. Then Cyclone shows up, and together they use their powers to stop the tidal wave.
Blow Power Girl, blow!
In the end, Power Girl is able to triangulate the location of the lead villain who put her up to these 3 tasks in the first place. It’s revealed to be the Calculator, an intelligent, computer-based, thinking super villain. She flies to his base but finds out that Calculator isn’t even there, he’s just talking via monitor to his goons. Calculator sort of explains that he was making notes of who Power Girl saved and in which order, to better predict superheroes’ actions. It’s not very clear, at least not to me. And the book ends with Power Girl getting ready to interrogate the goons to figure out more of the Calculator’s plans.
And that’s where it ends.
Kind of odd really. One is led to believe that it’s leading into a new storyline. But again, this was the last issue. It’s written by a guy named Matthew Sturges, who I am not familiar with. And it’s drawn by Hendry Prasetya. Neither one is part of the regular creative team for Power Girl, they’re both fill-ins. They both do an acceptable job. No one’s art will be as good as Amanda Conner, so there’s no point in trying. Sturges tells a good story, even if it doesn’t work very well as a send-off. It’s just a neat little adventure. Sturges even mixes in some of the humor of the series, but that too is a sub-par effort compared to previous issues. So for its final issue, Power Girl takes a step down in quality, but it’s not so bad.
In the end, these two issues were nice endings to each series. Zatanna was fantastic, and Power Girl was OK. I’ll be sorry to see the two titles go because they were some of the few that I and friend-of-the-site Alyssa both read. She even introduced me to Power Girl. Hopefully we’ll find some new ones to read together after the revamp.
Comic Review: ‘X-Men: Schism’ #3
In my effort to do more comic book reviews, I’m going to throw down with another of the big Event Comics coming out of Marvel this summer: X-Men: Schism. This will be my first time visiting X-Men Schism, and sadly I’ve found it to be lacking.
It’s a fun X-Men comic, but it’s utterly failing at its two main points: splitting up Cyclops and Wolverine and introducing some new villains.
X-Men: Schism is essentially the prologue to the next big X-franchise reboot this fall. For years now, the X-Men have been hanging out and doing their thing on the West Coast. They abandoned the classic X-Mansion in Westchester and moved out to their own private island off the coast of San Francisco, then named it Utopia. The X-Men claim they’re their own sovereign nation; whatever. The point is, all the mutants are now living on Utopia with Cyclops leading the X-Men. They’ve been nice and comfortable for years, fighting baddies and doing superhero stuff.
So now it’s time to break them up, it seems.
Zappy, zappy! Slashy, slashy!
The main thrust of this story is supposed to be that some dangerous something or other has come along that’s going to drive a wedge between Cyclops and Wolverine. They’ve never really gotten along, but for decades now they’ve been respectable pals. They trust each other, fight alongside each other and can count on each other. Well the new X-franchise reboot is going to involve a split where each one takes one half of the team and forms their own X-Men. So how do we get to that position?
By issue #3 of the 5-part Schism, I’m not really sure. Absolutely nothing that’s happened so far has convinced me at all that we’re heading to a monumental split of the X-Men, or even a minor split between Cyclops and Wolverine. Writher Jason Aaron is basically feeding us a few minor squabbles so far that I guess are going to lead to the bigger split between the two. But there’s just so much history and friendship between Cyclops and Wolverine that even they seem to acknowledge that getting at each other’s throats is silly.
And this is only issue #3
The story itself is actually fairly cool, and would make a good X-Men story. With mutants gathering power on Utopia, Cyclops and Wolverine attended a world conference about peace and security in issue #1. Cyclops gave a good speech and argued a bit with some jerkly diplomats. Then an evil mutant punk crashed the party and used his telepathy to start making all the diplomats admit their darkest secrets in front of the TV cameras. It’s a minor terroristic prank from a third-rate character – but it pisses everybody off. All around the world these diplomats are calling on their countries to bring their old Sentinel robots out of storage to once again defend themselves against mutants.
That’s a good idea, and I’m enjoying that part of the story. Under Cyclops’ leadership, the X-Men step up and start taking down these idiots and their mutant-killing machines.
Then the evil mutant punk asks for asylum on Utopia, and Cyclops gives it to him FOR SOME REASON! Cyclops’ decision to protect the jerk-whistle who started this mess makes very little sense. Sure there’s the sense of protecting a fellow mutant, but since when has that been an option? Whenever the X-Men beat up evil mutants in the past, they didn’t take those guys under their wings to protect them. It’s a decision that seems forced just to cause a riff with Wolverine, since Wolvie wants to turn the punk over to the proper authorities.
I’m really getting the sense that Cyclops is supposed to be in the wrong here. Because the next little squabble comes in issue #3. One of the young student characters, Idie, is out in the city with some other X-Men when the bad guys attack (more on them later). Idie is a scared teenage girl, and she’s hiding. When she’s the last X-Man standing, she’s able to get on the radio to the others. Wolverine tells her to stay hidden and not do anything. Cyclops tells her to do what she must to save everybody in the building.
So Idie saves people!
When Cyclops and Wolverine finally make it to the scene, Wolverine is pissed that Cyclops had the girl attack and kill the bad guys. Cyclops’ exact orders were ‘You do what you feel you have to’. He didn’t order Idie to kill anybody. She decided to be a hero, be an X-Man and stepped up and saved the day. Everybody made it out of the building before the ‘bomb’ went off, thanks to Idie! But Wolverine is pissed that Cyclops would put her in that situation.
Frankly, Idie is annoying the ever-loving Hell out of me. I know very little about the character. She’s brand new and is featured in a book I don’t read. What little I do know is that she’s from some African village (I think) and was mistreated because she’s a mutant. But so far in Schism, she’s written like a 4-year-old who hates herself. So seeing her do something heroic is only a good thing. As if the teenage X-Men have never gotten their hands dirty. Hell, why’d she even have to kill those guys? Haven’t the X-Men been training her how to use her powers?
Between the evil mutant punk and Idie, the writer seems to be forcing little squabbles down our throats as to why Cyclops and Wolverine will come to blows in the last two issues of this mini-series. But I’m just not buying it. Nothing has happened so far, and there’s no indication that anything will happen, that’s monumental enough to split these two friends and then split the entire X-Men into picking one side of the other.
Especially not the villains.
The Sentinels are not the villains of Schism. Instead, the writer introduces us to Kade Kilgore, a psychotic pre-teen kid who’s taken over the Hellfire Club and is attacking the X-Men for reasons that are not yet clear. I could not be more disappointed in this one-note, implausible, ridiculously over-the-top villain. It’s like the writer said, “Okay, so get this, the bad guys is going to be…a psycho kid!” and then stopped right there.
We meet Kilgore in issue #1 when he kills his father.
And they're in a flying car for some reason...
And since that one moment, we have learned nothing new about this kid or his motivations. Why does he want to kill his father and take over his company? Why is anybody letting him do it? Why does he want to go after the X-Men? No freakin’ clue!
What’s worse is that in issue #2, he’s joined by three other psycho kids who’ve also apparently killed their parents to take over their respective companies. Nobody in the business world is stopping them. Nobody seems to question that they’re now taking orders from clearly homicidal children. It just is. And that’s hair-pullingly idiotic.
First of all, they’re not even written like kids. They’re more like short adults. All four of them (with the exception of the girl who’s playing the ‘loopey’ psychotic maniac) speak and think with complete maturity and intelligence. That completely undoes the reason for them to be kids. Now they’re only kids because it’s crazier, or something to that effect. Like, wouldn’t it be crazy if they were all psycho kids? Yes, it would be crazy, but it wouldn’t make any sense.
Second of all, these kids are super-powerful. Not personally, mind you, but they seem to be unstoppable in a ridiculous way. For some reason, they’ve taken over the Hellfire Club. The idea of a purely human Hellfire Club, one that has turned away from its former mutant masters, is a good idea. But who the hell on the Hellfire Club thinks it’s a good idea to start taking orders from these insane children? Whatever, so the Hellfire Club gives the kids a couple of goon squads and they attack the opening of the new Mutant History Museum in San Francisco.
This is the building where Idie was earlier. She’s joined by her classmates, and then the X-Men Emma Frost, Colossus, Iceman, Magneto and Namor. This is a pretty big team of heavy-hitters for the X-Men. Yet when the kids attack, they and their random Hellfire goons are able to take each of the X-Men out in essentially one hit! That’s all it takes. Hell, both Magneto and Namor each have an exact same moment where they take all the time in the world to introduce themselves, give the evil children a moment to explain the fancy gun they have and then the kids use the gun to take out Magneto and Namor. And these guns are ridiculous. The gun to take down Namor shoots out heat pads on the ground, dehydrating the undersea king. The gun that takes down Magneto shoots miniaturized neutron stars, or super magnets. WHAT!? These kids have a gun that shoots miniaturized FREAKIN’ stars?
Again, ridiculous! These kids and their weaponry are just too over the top to take seriously.
Now let me stop here for a moment and say ‘yes, this is comics’. These sorts of weapons and villains are awesome in their ridiculous nature. In the world of comic books, of course such a gun is awesome and children as bad guys are cool. But they don’t fit in this mini-series.
This is a serious, down-to-Earth, grounded tale of how Cyclops and Wolverine come to blows and how it splits the X-Men. Everything so far has been very realistic in nature. They went to a peace summit, they’re attending a museum opening. They’re questioning matters of politics. And then in come these ridiculous, over-the-top villains that just clash with the nature of the story. The children villains are so one-dimensional as to be groan-inducingly boring. We don’t even know why they’re doing all of this or why they’re specifically going after the X-Men. And they seem to be able to pull whatever sort of magic weaponry they want out of their asses with the specific purpose of defeating the X-Men in ‘one punch’.
And I haven’t even mentioned the space slugs.
X-Men: Schism has been disappointing so far because it’s failing at its two main points: splitting up Cyclops and Wolverine and introducing the new villains. Nothing these evil, one-dimensional brats have done so far would convince me that the X-Men are going to split up and go their separate ways.
But other than that, the mini-series has been good. Jason Aaron writes a strong team with great personality. The idea that the X-Men have to clean up when all the world starts digging out their old Sentinels is a cool one. And I like the idea of the X-Men doing something global like attending a peace summit.
And the art has been fantastic. There’s been a different artist for each issue so far, and they’ve all been brilliant.
Except in issue #2 when Cyclops looked anorexic…
Amateur ‘Behind-the-Scenes’ Shots are Sullying Comic Movies
Next year’s two biggest comic book movies, The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, are both filming on location in Cleveland and Chicago respectively this Summer. And in this day and age of camera phones and video cameras and spy satellites, the people who live nearby have been filming the movie-making and posting it online. Not that they’re allowed on the actual sets, but they can stand nearby and close enough to get some pretty clear photos and videos.
I am not a fan of this practice.
I am definitely looking forward to both movies, and both are probably going to be awesome. But call me old-fashioned, I have no problem waiting for an official trailer or film photos that the studios actually want to release. Trailers are one of the funnest parts of a movie, and real publicity photos can capture the mood and style that the filmmaker wants. It spoils the mood and the atmosphere to see a picture of Bane in full costume from the next Batman flick just standing around drinking coffee in a gaggle of extras. And it spoils the surprise to know that, right now, Captain America and Thor are being filmed fighting aliens on a city street.
Though I will admit this is an awesome picture
Marvel Studios haven’t told us yet who the bad guys will be in The Avengers movie. I have my guesses, but I would rather it not be spoiled by some idiot fan and his iPhone. Obviously I don’t have to look at these things if I don’t want to, but they’re everywhere. One of my favorite geeky sites is all about comic book movies, and they post this stuff multiple times a day. There’s even been national news coverage of some of this filming. I know that the front page of Yahoo.com at one point showed the pictures of Bane in costume. These are going to be very popular movies, and everybody’s ready and eager to give fans a peak because that drives up viewership.
Well not me.
Go somewhere else for your spoilerific film shots. I’m more than happy to wait for the movies to actually come out before I see them.
I’m Going to Comic-Con!!
New York City, here I come! I hope. I still need to buy the 3-day tickets and there’s a chance that something could go wrong. But as it stands right now, my boss has approved my diabolical scheme to use a personal day to super-extend my vacation. The personal day will link with a day off, so I’ll have all three days off for the New York City Comic Book Convention!
The convention will be Oct. 14, 15 and 16.
I went last year and it was fun, but I realized afterwards that I didn’t do everything I probably should have done. I didn’t attend any panels, and mostly just wandered around people-watching. There’s so much more to do! This year will be better. The plan is to go with my brother, since he’s never been to a Comic-Con before and now he lives in Connecticut, near New York City. So I’ll drive down, visit with him and together we’ll hop over to the city and the convention. A few of my other convention-going friends may even join us!
Suffice to say, it’ll be a pretty cool October. Look for more pictures and stories from the Con in October!
I probably won’t go in costume…unless my brother and I can come up with something easy and inexpensive to make..
