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.

The movie that ain't

"Hopes may fade, Wonders never cease."

You'd pay ten bucks to see this movie, wouldn't you?

Sadly, this is a fan-created poster. But it is spectacular, isn't it?

[Followed the image back to Michael May's Adventureblog, and the artist to his deviantART page, Josh MC.]

Hey, kids! F*#king Comics!

I was going to say something about this week's All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, but Greg Hatcher has already said it much better over at Comics Should Be Good.

(I love the earrings, Babs.)

I'm thinking DC could probably create a couple of imprints to help the readers understand what kind of comic we're getting. DC Quality for the mainstream DC universe; DC Sensation for the good-girl art line (you know, whatever Adam Hughes, Ed Benes or Terry Dodson are drawing this month); and DC Cavalcade for, you know, stuff like this. Although, how can there ever be anything else like this? (Under this nomenclature, the Johnny DC titles would be DC Adventure, a classic title it continually pains me to see go unused.)