The Treadmill Days of Christmas, day 2

Day Two: Spider-Man

I think H is right: There aren't a lot of really distinctive, iconic Spider-Man covers. Which is surprising: Given how flippin' many Spider-man covers there are, you'd think the odds would be on their side.

The first fifty issues have far more than their share of gotcha covers, even though some of them are cut-and-pasted from Ditko's interior pages. On this cover to Amazing Spider-Man #22, Ditko attempts Batman's menacing shadow, which shouldn't work and probably wouldn't have worked if not for the Spider-signal belt buckle. (does he still have that?) It turns an off-center pose where the hero of the book isn't even present into a striking, moody piece. There have been dozens of attempts to use the signal motif since, none as effectively as this.

Oh, and the interiors aren't bad either.

The requirement to select covers from distinctly different eras of the book forced me to choose only one Ditko cover -- and also eliminated the best of John Romita Sr's covers as well. I probably could have considered the Andru run a different era, but despite countless classic images for Wonder Woman, I have to say I never liked his Spider-Man.

And Todd McFarlane's work always looked too busy to me. Lookit me, I drew all these extraneous web lines, aren't you impressed by all the work I did here?

As long as I'm flashing forward, I'll go all the way to Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #4, the end of "The Other" arc. Not having approved of the trials and reboot inflicted on the character throughout "Sins Past", "Civil War", "Back in Black" and "One More Day", I consider this gorgeous Weiringo portrait the end of Spider-Man's run. I prefer to remember Pete and MJ looking forward to the days they should have had, and it doesn't get any better than this.

The Treadmill Days of Christmas

Over at the Comic Treadmill, Mag and H are celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas by each selecting their two favorite covers featuring a particular character. The series is such fun reading that I decided to play along over here. Well, that and not having anything else to talk about.

Day One: The Atom

I've never been a big fan of the Atom (get it? get it?), but he is a big (I kill me) part of the cover for one of my favorite silver-age Justice League of America stories, from #18. Our mite-sized heroes are attempting to get the Atom's attention before they shrink completely out of existence. This cover is by the masterful Murphy Anderson.

Of course, they do manage to do this, and he follows them under his own power to a microscopic world whose Protectors emit a radiation that is slowly killing their planet. But these android Protectors were created too well, and cannot surrender to their makers. They have summoned the Justice League so that they might defeat them and end the threat they pose.

Boy, that'd be a year's worth of story arc now. You young whippersnappers don't realize how good we had it way back then.

By the 80s, the Atom had been canceled a couple of times, and generally written off as an unworkable concept. Jan Strnad and Gil Kane got Jean (the bitch) engaged to another man, dumped Ray in an Amazonian forest, broke his size-controls, stuck him at six inches high, and let him stumble onto a lost six-inch-high civilization.

Sort of like if the Atom had been created by Edgar Rice Burroughs -- and I mean that as a compliment.

I never did get the logic of having him wear a loincloth over his tights, though.

Shirtless Saturday - Kendra Saunders and...

In this fantasy scene she's making the Bird with Two Backs with Carter Hall, looking surprisingly young for his age--but when she says his name out loud, we discover she's really in bed with Roy Harper (aka Red Arrow, previously Arsenal and Speedy).

So that even happens to superheroes.

[From JLA #27.]

Andy, Kate, Chuck and Zeke?

According to /film, M. Night Shyamalan has cast two of the four lead roles in his upcoming film The Last Airbender (previously titled "Avatar", changed to avoid confusion with James Cameron's upcoming film "Avatar" which has nothing to do with the popular animated series on Nickelodeon), and has chosen the actors he wants for the other two. (Release date July 2nd 2010.) Pictured: Nicola Peltz (Katara). Hey, this is my blog. You'd rather look at the kids in talks to play Sokka or the dark and brooding Zuko, go right ahead.

A whiter group of young, attractive people you will never see.

Not that this is necessarily wrong, but... I mean, even though the show is American-produced, it has a distinctly Asian flavor. And I understood the Four Kingdoms to be rough analogs of Chinese, Japanese, Manchurian and Inuit culture. The animated show is hip-deep in Asian voice talent.

This is not yet a bad omen; just a thing to make me go "Hmmm."

Batman and Wonder Pig

I used to think that toy companies went over the top when they created "special edition" toys for characters that only appeared once, or character variants that never appeared in the comics (I thought of that as an interesting cover story for "we got the costume wrong").

But this... this is adorable!

(Saw it at Great White Snark, available at Amazon.)

The Emperor Morrison

I'd like to have something meaningful to say about Batman #681, but then I'd also like to have something meaningful about which to say it.

And, as the cliche goes, I'd also like a pony.

Of course, I don't really want a pony. I never understood the attraction of ponies or horses. But I want lots of things that in a real, normal world I'm not going to get. Apparently, a comic book story that actually ends is now one of those things.

"Batman R.I.P." doesn't have a conclusion. Serialized life goes on.

I challenge anyone who liked this story to reread Batman #156, "Robin Dies at Dawn", and explain to me in what way this story improves upon it.

Everybody wants to have an artistically-worded review, but nobody wants to be the first to state the obvious fact. Okay. I'll throw myself on the grenade.

The emperor is naked.

This is a better Batman story:



LATER: Ah, I see. Didio says "Batman R.I.P." was always intended to conclude in Final Crisis #6. Well, that makes perfect sense.

The world-famous Elongated Man

The Comic Treadmill - Stretching Exercises
Normally a man with nerves of steel, Mag is totally grossed out by scenes wherein Elongated Man pops out his eyes.

As am I, my friend. As much as I love Ralph Dibny (I mean, isn't it obvious?), it's a long, long suspension of disbelief between the "super-India-rubber-man" he originally claimed to be and a guy who can stretch his hair and eyeballs.

In the Elongated Man solo series the criminals were, without exception, ridiculously stupid. The kind that in real life make for those great comic relief articles in the light-hearted look at the news sections of newspapers and Darwin Awards web sites. Good for a chuckle, but it doesn’t reflect well on the protagonist when all he faces are the low hanging fruit of the criminal world.

One must remember that the Elongated Man came to be in the year 1960, when there were less than a dozen super-heroes, and each of them tended to stay on his own "turf". It was a rare threat that drew Superman out of Metropolis or Batman out of Gotham City. You would sooner find either of them on some other planet than in Coast City or Midway City. Yet Ralph alone had no home base.

For this reason, he tended to run into criminals who had never encountered a super-hero before, and had certainly made no contingency plans in the event they did. They weren't stupid, at least not at first: In fact, I could make a case for their intelligence by pointing out that they were planning their activities for areas not served by resident super-heroes.

And it would have worked, too, if not for those nosy kids -- I mean, if not for that twitchy-nosed rubber man.

This also supported the plot device of Ralph being his own press agent, eager to spread the word throughout his travels that the World-Famous Elongated Man was in town.

Nonetheless, I shall be avidly following H's quest to tally every use of Elongated Man's namesake power. I'm all the more excited that next time, barring some minor miracle, he should reach the watershed event that gives this blog its name.

Jason who?

Hang on. This comic is twenty years old?

Holy stunt arc, Batman!

Kill them all and let Crom sort them out

From Michael Cho's Sketchbook.

Whose Spirit?

When my dearest friend and I saw The Dark Knight a few weeks ago, we also saw a trailer for the upcoming Spirit movie. We saw:

• Almost abstract visuals.
• Breathtaking women (OK, they got that right)
• Highly improbable women's names (absolutely true to the originals, yes, but my friend turned to me and said "They're all strippers, right?")
• One lone spot of color, a red tie

There's no doubt that this movie is going to be visually stunning. However, it appears that it will also be, as billed, Frank Miller's The Spirit.

Fortunately, thanks to DC Comics' Archives program, Will Eisner's The Spirit can always be appreciated in its pretty much original form. (The original newspaper supplements had larger pages, and the reproduction suffers in places, but it'll do.)

Graeme McMillan at io9 has a similar "unrant" entitled Why Frank Miller's Spirit Can Only Fail.