The Unholy Dragon

Hated Kirby as a kid, love him now. Never really got big on Chaykin and a lot of the Peter Bagge crop of indie dudes never really did anything for me either.

Related question: Is Disney getting Fox's shares in Boom! or are they staying with Sports Fox?

Classic recipe.

So uhhhhhh Bleeding Cool is saying the other big Heroes in Crisis #1 death is... I...wait...what?

Wolverine showed up in the Infinity Wars prologue with all his faculties intact. That was where they resolved him having a stone in the Legacy issue where he returned by...fighting Loki and giving it to Black Widow.

Can't wait to see how that gets squared with his Infinity Wars prologue stuff.

Honestly a big part of my problem is just that it's a moment of brutal realism that breaks the internal logic of books. Specifically that Batman wears an armoured cowl and sends his kids out in domino masks.

Yeah. Apparently it's a ride all around but the bulk of discussion I've found is Bat-dick centric.

The amount of hype in some spots over Batman's dick showing up in Damned today is unreal. I wish Wizard magazine still existed so it could show up in "Hot comics" with "1st Bat Penis" next to it. God bless the Black Label.

Someone on Twitter said that the Phoenix set photos look like promo pics for the inevitable Hot Toys Phoenix Joker figure and I can't unsee it.

Eh, they're restructuring the X-Line, FF proper are back, Sentry was a weird choice for a book anyway, and I'd wager DD gets a breather from Soule's run then a new #1 when the show drops, possibly under the revived Marvel Knights.

They need to trim lines badly. I know some sell but their propensity to turn a single success into a four to six book line has really started to turn readers off of them. Make one book and make it good. MAYBE do one spinoff at a time. Not everything is the Transformers universe in terms of comics audience. Also the fact they pretty much only seem to do licensed work now which has lower margins generally can't be helping.

My understanding is that Moon Girl was golden as soon as the first trade hit the Scholastic market and prior to that it was doing the Ms. Marvel thing of digital pulling higher than normal relative to print. It's less that it was given a ton of rope and more that it was succeeding in markets we lack line of sight for almost immediately.

I feel like Sandman would have died before Death was introduced if it launched in today's market conditions. No name writer/artist with a new character? Yeah, no. Which really does make you wonder how many potential Gaimans are slipping through the cracks because they aren't getting those kinds of real, sustained chances. I've been saying this for a while but I really do think the Big Two need lines where they expect to take an upfront loss and hope to recoup it. Publish weird or new books and give them minimum 18 issues to find their feet (basically up to the second trade's sales numbers coming in). Because while it's cool seeing Iceman and Wasp pop back, they could have had more material when the material was hot if they gave it a longer chance.

Cody's list is all stuff that's impressive if you haven't read much. It's a lot of beginner's comics so I'd wager he's more of a casual reader. Bleeding Cool saying the big Heroes in Crisis death (or one of them) is

Long tail. It perked up digitally and then they did a directorship cut reissue which sold better than you'd expect that sort of thing to before then doing well in trade. Sort of what happened with Iceman too. Series cancelled for low sales then did great trade sales so they relaunched it. The current system is killing a lot of books before really determining what their long term or alternate market sales might look like.

Apparently for editorial reasons with four issues in the can and everyone being paid for it in full (page rates anyway). Cain did not seem pleased though and was doubly miffed that Marvel told her to downplay it on social media so we'll see how that goes.

Steve Orlando's take, from the Hollywood Reporter on the launch. I think this is a really bad take but his comics tend to be good so I'll see how it goes.

I was more excited for it before reading press that said J'onn is too good and it makes him boring so they're going to give him personal tragedy and regrets so he can be brooding. Like it's Orlando so it'll be good but man I fucking hate that take.

So I got Absolute Killing Joke and it is VERY nice. As expected the art shines at the Absolute scale. Uses different paper stock for the Higgins coloured version to preserve those colours and includes a really interesting retrospective by Higgins on it plus some odd bits of process art. He posits that his colouring is the Joker's lens while Bolland's later recolouring is Batman's which is a neat concept. It also includes Moore's full script and in case you needed a reminder he's always been a dangerous madman, it's 134 PAGES! For a 46 page special! Ridiculous. The two short stories by Bolland and the art gallery round it out nicely. Maybe the funniest detail is that they do the big three credits fadeout style with an image next to a bio and Alan Moore's is the Joker standing in the rain looking miserable which feels like a petty joke if ever there was one. Anyway, if you're a fan of the book and don't have a previous ritzy edition, it's worth the $50 in a Special Edition sort of way.

Spoiler tags if you're going to lay out a whole issue's plot like that, damn.

Impulse Omnibus cancelled. Apparently the colour files were messed up and it was going to look terrible at Omnibus scale so instead they're going to be reprinting the material at standard size in two trades, which suits me better anyway (and can roll on to the non-Waid/Ramos run if it sells well)

Amazingly managing to drop two from the bottom while not making the bottom. Damn those puppets.

I mean that's basically Johns' ethos post Wally Flash run in a nutshell. "Sure other periods were cool, but the Silver Age must be best at everything!"

Yeah, I don't find most of Final Crisis that hard to follow either. Some of it is easier to place in the DCU with ancillary stuff. The New Gods died, had a war in the afterlife that Darkseid won causing the evil gods to reincarnate on Earth back in Seven Soldiers and slowly build their power base while their living past selves were more in focus. The problem is that they're still dead, just possessing humans, so Darkseid tries to use the Anti-Life Equation, finally found during his time on Earth, to enslave reality and bend it to his will so he can survive. Problem being that his continued existence is destabilizing the multiverse which allows ancient vampire god monitor Mandrakk to escape his eternal prison. I can explain the Monitor stuff too later if needed but that's the Darkseid portion basically.