And a thousand fanboys and fangirls cry, "Yes!"

Hints dropped left and right by Gail Simone and DC editorial were confirmed yesterday: Gail Simone (Birds of Prey, Secret Six, The All-New Atom) will be the regular, ongoing writer of Wonder Woman starting right after the "Amazons Attack" event, with issue #13.

The title has been floundering lately, with a high-profile, chronically late writer (something about that TV show he's also writing for, Grey's Anatomy) and a coming new high-profile writer who, it was announced going in, will only be staying for six issues.

The thing about having a character do something really dramatic (like, say, killing a long-time supporting character, as Wonder Woman did to Maxwell Lord) is that the editors have to have some kind of plan for where the character goes next. I don't think they had one.

So, if Simone is writing it, who's drawing it? She's said "a dream art team," and she's said "if the readers all made a list of who the best possible Wonder Woman art team would be, I bet this would be the number one choice. It’s that good."

I'm thinking one of two things must have happened: Either Didio looked around and thought, "Why am I asking Adam Hughes to draw an All Star Wonder Woman title when the real Wonder Woman title is in so much trouble"; or else he remembered that it wasn't the artists who made the first five issues of the restart late, and realized that he can't do any better than Terry and Rachel Dodson. I'll take either option, but I'm hoping for the Dodsons.

Are there any civilians left?

Aw, heck, the Fortress Keeper said it already.

Heroic Dynasties and Legacies

Given: The DCU is too white-male-centric.
Given: There are only so many good names/costumes/raisons d'etre.
Obvious Solution: Any property from second-tier on down is subject to being killed off and rebooted as a non-white/woman/both.

Okay, I get that. I like that blacks and women can be superheroes without being "Black This-or-That" or "She-Something".

Corollary Solution: Any property -- any property -- is subject to acquiring a partner/kid sidekick.

I even get that. I have to admit I wondered what kind of powder is in the sugar bowls in the DC breakroom when I saw Miss Martian, but dang it, she grows on me. (If only her breasts didn't grow and shrink from page to page, but then she IS a shape-changer.)

Here's what I don't get.

Did nobody at DC actually read Kingdom Come before they decided to make it happen? It was a dystopia. It was a nightmare. I always interpreted it as a commentary on Marvel Earth as well, since Stan Lee really wrote (heh) the book on leaving the villains out of the story completely and having alleged heroes whomp on each other for whole issues at a time. (Maybe Civil War was inevitable, at that.)

Specifically, it was hell on earth for non-metas, who appear to be drifting out of comics, even as supporting characters.

Things that made Scipio happy

Over on The Absorbascon, Scipio has been keeping a running list of "Things that made me happy" in the week's comics. Taken as a group, they are proof that the rumors are true, and the DC comics universe is getting brighter. Even Bruce Wayne, the poster child for abandonment issues, is learning (in Superman/Batman #33) that it's OK not to be an a**hole all the time.

What, again?

What kind of situation leads a comic-book retailer to say this to the press?

Don't bug me about this. I'm ready to kill in a heartbeat because of this stuff. Seriously. Just a comic.

When you buy comics, do you want to know what happens before you get a chance to read it? Some people say no to spoilers, some say yes. Both of the Big Two comics publishers have had major events spoiled when plot twists leaked, so their inclination is to keep the stories secret until the books actually arrive at the stores. Occasionally, they're actually able to do this. They're getting better at it.

On the other hand, the comics shop buyers have to decide how many of each issue to buy weeks in advance. They track sales (both in their specific stores and nationwide) very carefully, and decide on quantities anew for each issue of each title. In order to do that, they want to know as much as they can about upcoming issues: Who the creative team is, what characters are featured, broad-brush plot information, specific key events that might bring in significant numbers of new readers causing an uptick in sales.

So the decision is made two or three hundred times a month: How much information do you release, and to whom?

If Marvel had told retailers weeks ago (when orders had to be placed) that Captain America would die in this issue, someone, somewhere, might have leaked the information before the book shipped. They did everything short of that: They hinted that Cap might die at some point in the course of their current crossover event, Civil War. They urged retailers to increase their quantities on Captain America #25, without saying why. Yeah, right. If retailers bought big just because Marvel told them to buy big, they'd be stuck with 200,000 copies of Squirrel Girl Swimsuit Issue.

Marvel didn't reveal that they would be sending a press release to the New York Daily News telling them that Captain America would be killed in #25. They didn't reveal (because they couldn't know) that everybody from CNN to Stephen Colbert would run with the story. And they didn't reveal that they were dramatically overprinting #25 in order to have sufficient quantities to cover reorders -- reorders that the retailers weren't told they'd be able to place.

So when all this hit on New Comics Day (known to the rest of the world as Wednesday, March 7), every specialty comic shop in the country was deluged with walk-in customers ("I didn't even know they were still publishing comic books") who wanted to buy the first comic book they'd bought in years ("Four dollars? When did they stop being ten cents?") because they'd heard about it on CNN ("It's going to be collectible, right? I mean, characters don't die everyd-- Hey, look, Superman comics. I thought he died years ago"), only to be told that unless you were a regular customer with a subscription list, there wasn't one to be had.

Of course, with the current size of the comic book market, a "deluge" of non-regular walk-in customers can be defined as "more than fifteen", which is pretty sad in itself.

Another retailer said this:

I ordered about 10%-15% above my usual number for Captain America, just based on the fact it was an anniversary issue.

Anniversary? It's #25. It's now a landmark worth celebrating when a title lasts two years. Talk about short attention spans.

Civil War: The Cash Cow

From the Fortress of Soliloquy:

This isn't a plot, it's a series of events, and the only story to speak of is simply there to get from one event to another. There is no flow, no natural progression; nothing seems to follow. Actions and reactions are disconnected from the stories, then justified after the fact.

It's a very long post.

Living in a Platinum world

You know, I thought I was really reaching when I suggested a Jimmy Olsen backup story in a new, reformulated All Star.

Wizard Entertainment | [UPDATED] COUNTDOWN
PAUL DINI: I’d say our everyman character in the story is Jimmy Olsen, who to a great degree fits that bill within the DC Universe anyway. He has links to the Justice League, the Legion of Super-Heroes and the New Gods. And he is in the unique role of being not only a traveler through the mainstream DC Universe, but also becomes increasingly aware that he might have a bigger part to play in all this than he’s ever suspected. His quest to find out his role is one of the major driving points of Countdown.

Jimmy is going to be Countdown's Ralph Dibny. It's going to be really confusing if both stretching redheads in the DCU grow beards. Is Jimmy even old enough to grow a beard? Or is that part of his Quest?

Wait. "He has links to...the Legion of Super-Heroes..."? He does? Even now, after multiple reboots? Can Arm Fall Off Boy be far behind?

Or maybe Jimmy loses an arm in a silly-putty-related accident, and Professor Potter searches for a way to enable Jimmy to grow the arm back, like a lizard, but instead reawakens the latent Giant Turtle Boy!

Rethinking All-Star

Here's an idea.

Cancel All-Star Superman and All-Star BatmanAndRobinTheBoyWonder.

Restart as All-Star. Same format as Tales of the Unexpected, call it 36 story pages for $4.00. (Let's dispose of that $3.95 crap, can we?) Make it bi-monthly.

12 pages of Morrison/Quitely Superman, 12 pages of Miller/Lee Batman. You think maybe each team could actually manage six pages per month?

The other 12 pages to contain stand-alone stories, rotating creators and characters: Could be anything. Jim Gordon by Darwyn Cooke. Jimmy Olsen by Barry Kitson. Booster Gold by Kevin Maguire. Plastic Man by Kyle Baker. OMAC by Rich Corben. Hawkman by Joe Kubert. Go wild. Whenever one of your regular Big Guns misses an issue, toss in another standalone. Readers will be hoping they miss.

If it works -- and how can it not? -- don't make it monthly. Fill the odd months with a second bi-monthly "All-Star" title, Sensation, featuring Adam Hughes' Wonder Woman and Johns/Jones Batgirl. Plus Black Canary by Howard Chaykin. Power Girl by Amanda Conner. The new Red Bee by Ed Benes. Manhunter. Cyclone and the Red Tornado. The Bulleteer.

It's a license to print money.

“Ever had the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

That's how the Fortress Keeper at Fortress of Fortitude opens this week's comics overview. Good question. Let me think.

Many years ago, back when I first started reading comics, they contained up to three separate stories each. With rare exceptions, it didn't matter in what order you read them: Each stood alone, and told you the essentials you needed to know about each character involved (even the regular characters like Superman, whom one would think the average comic reader knew about).

At the time, a title was in trouble if it sold less than a hundred thousand copies per issue. And since each comic contained a fine-print Statement of Ownership from its publisher once each year, we could tell how well it was selling.

Soon readers became sufficiently sophisticated to understand the concept of an "inventory story". It became necessary to explain this when storylines began to sprawl across months or years of a title's life. Occasionally a story would appear that ignored the ongoing threads, often by a different artist's hand. Marvel, as usual, made a joke of this and let the readers in on it, via references to the "Dreaded Deadline Doom."

The underlying assumption that made the joke work was that the Schedule Is The Schedule, and on the third Tuesday of the month, by God and Mort Weisinger there was going to be a new issue of Action Comics on the stands. That comic not being there simply wasn't an option. Those hundred-thousand readers would buy something else, perhaps some other publisher's product, and that was unacceptable.

Flash forward to the 21st century. Thirty thousand circulation is a top-of-the-line title. All-Star Batman's publication frequency has become a joke, as Superman-Batman's and Supergirl's were before it. Marvel has delayed the publication of its entire line, including an anniversary issue of its first flagship title, Fantastic Four, because Civil War is running late.

But inventory stories cannot be used because all stories (with rare exceptions) are now serialized. Instead we have situations like Action Comics and Wonder Woman (and Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk), where hopelessly-late story arcs are simply abandoned. Maybe we'll get back to them: Maybe we won't.

Complete story in 1967: four to six cents. Sometimes twelve.
Complete story in 2007: eighteen dollars. If they finish it.

Stories that begin and end. That's what I miss.

The Shape of Things to Come

Over on Fark, they have a recurring comment whenever two similar things happen, referring to the old wives' tale about bad things coming in threes, that "the trifecta is now in play". Sometimes you don't realize a trifecta is in play until it's over, at which time it becomes obvious.

Today's trifecta: Marvel Comics has no idea why anyone reads Spider-Man.

First incident: Trouble, a five-part 2003 miniseries that may or may not be in continuity. It was probably intended as the first of a new line of comics aimed at girls. It didn't look like anything else on the stands: It even had variant photographic covers intended to resemble paperback teen romances, but they looked more like Lolita to me. Had the series been better received, the Spider-Man connection probably would have been better publicized: One can read the comic and enjoy it (if one does enjoy it, which apparently few readers did) while knowing nothing of it. As it is, it's one of those Mopee moments that the publisher probably wishes we'd forget about.

In Trouble, it's established that Aunt May actually is Peter Parker's biological mother. See the blonde on the cover? That's her, the tramp getting ready to sleep with her best friend's boyfriend, Richard Parker.

Yes, this mini contains the never-before-revealed conception of Peter Parker.

Second incident: Amazing Spider-Man #509-514, the notorious "Sins Past" storyline of 2005. Peter, and Spider-Man, are separately being stalked by a couple who, it is revealed, are the adult children of Gwen Stacy. Writer J Michael Straczynski originally intended that Peter Parker would be their father, but Marvel editorial thought that having adult children would make Peter "too old" for his readers, so a workaround was substituted: The children are still Gwen's, but their father is Norman (the Green Goblin) Osborn.

I would have thought that the creep factor involved here (Norman is the father of one of Peter's and Gwen's friends', and Gwen was still a teenager at the time) would be far worse than Pete being a couple of years older than we thought he was, but go figure.

In flashback, this encounter is shown on-panel. I've spared you that.

Third Incident: Spider-Man: Reign, a current miniseries set in Peter Parker's old age, intended to be an "homage" to The Dark Knight Returns. Everyone Peter knows and loves is dead. In the course of a battle with the reanimated corpse of Mary Jane Watson Parker...

Even in comic books, some premises are so bizarre that they don't fully register the first time, so allow me to repeat:

In the course of a battle with the reanimated corpse of Mary Jane Watson Parker, Peter exposits:

Oh God, I'm sorry! The doctors didn't understand how it happened! How you had been poisoned by radioactivity! How your body slowly became riddled with cancer! I did. I was... I am filled with radioactive blood. And not just blood. Every fluid. Touching me... loving me... Loving me killed you!

Like a spider, crawling up inside your body and laying a thousand eggs of cancer... I killed you.

Spider-Man, in other words, has radioactive sperm.

Anyone want to bet they're going to time the release of the trade paperback collection of this mini to coincide with the release of a certain blockbuster motion picture?