Big Two Comics

By Todd Allen Back in August, DC released the "TALES OF BATMAN: GENE COLAN VOL. 1" hardcover book. This book reprints Batman #340, 343-345, 348-351 and Detective Comics #510, 512, 517, 528 and 529....

“Venom by Rick Remender Vol. 1” is not the flashiest title ever conceived for a book (pun intended). There’s a trend of breaking up titles runs by creator. Over at Marvel, you’ve got “Ultimate Comics Spider-Man by Brian Michael Bendis,” “Moon Knight by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev,” and so forth. Over at DC, You’ve got “Tales of the Batman” volumes for Gene Colan and Don Newton. I suppose it’s good for branding the work of a particular creator on a series, though it’s the rare title like Moon Knight that’s spreading the love between both writers and artists. We’ll see how long this naming trend sticks around and whether more heavily promoted storylines are collected under the creators’ names (as of this writing, it’s Spider-Man: Spider Island, not Dan Slott’s Spider-Man Vol. *.*”) Venom by Rick Remender has Remender on writing chores, with the art split between Tony Moore and Tom Fowler, and a variety of inkers on Moore. I pulled this volume out of the library on a lark and it turned out to be a much deeper read than I was expecting.

This afternoon, Bill Willingham tweeted some typically frank thoughts about working on superhero comics -- in recent years, he wrote JSA for DC, and before that Shadowpact, a group book featuring several of DC's more supernatural characters...and Detective Chimp. And as many have said before him, working with recent brands of editorial direction tended to mitigate against spontaneity:

I was only able to attend one DC new 52 panel, and it was the first one, the one that has gotten a particular soundbite spread all around the internet. DC has made all their panels available as podcasts, and I guess if you are a real Kremlinologist you'll want to comb over these tapes for clues and evidence. I do want to talk about the panel I attended, because there are some things that happened that I witnessed that I haven't seen reported, and some other private moments that I witnessed that I think add to the whole picture. So here's what I know:

This post has been edited to add actual content, now that the panel has finished!

Saturday brought a boatload of news from DC, which isn't surprising, given the number of comics panels they held.

Since Uncanny X-Men just got renumbered - oh, I'm sorry, "ended" and "restarted" - today's X-Men panel was pretty sure to bring interesting news. It's been pretty clear for the last few weeks that Marvel's big push this convention was probably going to be X-Men, which makes sense, since the line has been losing visibility for years, overtaken by the various Avengers. And now, with a successful new X-Men movie under their belt, the time must have looked right. So what's up?

The latest round of outrage over the matter of women in comics was sparked off when DC's relaunch had only three "distaff" members. In all the talk-talk there was some along the lines of Adam P Knave's Why Aren’t There More Women in Comics? which points out the lack of a welcome mat for female creators.

Knave takes pains to point out that he's talking "mainstream" comics, but this got me thinking about how obsessing about women at The Big Two is really like worrying about the number of saunas in the Kalahari.

On his Facebook page, JMS praises DC's plan to relaunch its superhero line and gives a hint of the backstory.

Flashpoint is going to end in new #1 issues across the board and new origin issues for everyone, that much is clear. Will it be the earth shattering annihilation of Crisis on Infinite Earths, or the long-forgotten supposed reboot of Zero Hour?

Is there anything new under the spinner rack? Only yesterday, Chris Irving quoted the late, great Dwayne McDuffie on the difficulty of launching anything new in comics:

“I look at the new Blue Beetle, which was really well done and really entertaining, even though it didn’t sell at all. The new things in the universe are pretty much impossible, and new things out of the universe are pretty unlikely, because people won’t try new things. I hope I’m wrong and there’s some wonderful new thing. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Static will break, but I don’t think people will try it, or that people at comics stores will even care. That book should have come out in 2002 when it was the #2 cartoon on television, and not 2010 when it was in reruns on Disney XD.”

A couple of interviews out now clarify controversial comics news stories of the past and more recent past; both are a reminder that what you read on CBR or Newsarama is rarely the whole truth -- and that's it's not always our business to know the whole truth.