#So if you read graysons terminal it says they sold

[parviocula]

Hi, i am sorry, i need to know....

What was Graysons opinion on Hyena when he find out about her and how did he? Did Adam told him?

It's pretty normal for them to have trusted lackeys when they're off doing their own thing, specially if they have their own side business like Smasher did (tbh he's the reason we even got that fuckin spider bot lmao he sold it to dum dum)

So whenever Grayson did meet her it was pretty standard & he showed a lot of respect and would answer whatever questions she had! Grayson is also too busy to really interact with her and keeps up with emails and the local maelstrom so Hyena just leaves him alone the majority of the time when she is around (plus Hyena had her own work in place so they hardly saw each other)

As for how he met her? Smasher told him someone was gonna stop by and see him on the ship but he didn't say exactly who. Just to leave them alone & tell the others so Grayson does just that. Eventually Hyena comes in and he's just kinda like "goddam ANOTHER big mutherfucker???". They got along just fine tbh Grayson doesn't have any beef with her and neither does she because he does exactly as he is told!

When Smasher got promoted and left Grayson on his own Hyena pretty much forgot about him.

[ink-logging]

More Superhero Comics, Revealing My Reactionary and Facile Engagement with Art as Little More Than the  Accrual of Social Capital, Benefiting Nobody But Myself, 4/7/19

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 4: The Tempest #5 (of 6), Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill, Ben Dimagmaliw, Todd Klein: This is an often very funny issue, set up like a pasted-together UK edition of old US pre-Code horror and crime comics, which, in addition to being funny, plumps up the page count as the plot moves maybe two or three tics forward in advance of the very-last-issue-of-LoEG-ever. The conservative in me wonders why we’re being this digressive in the penultimate number of the entire saga, but then -- at least since “The Black Dossier” -- this project has been more about positioning various strands of fiction and their accrued cultural baggage against one another than telling a propulsive adventure story. Anyway: the realm of Faerie, having easily survived an attempted nuclear strike on the collective imagination by a military-corporate black ops fiction squad comprised entirely of various revamps of James Bond, has brought in every character from every game, comic, cartoon, TV show, movie and book reality with everything for a HUGE apocalypse! 

Scenes of bedlam involve: the life story of Victorian painter and murderer Richard Dadd; cameos by Stardust the Super Wizard and David Britton’s Lord Horror; the oeuvre of musician Warren Zevon, brought to terrifying life; a Corbenesque image of a nude muscleman’s massive dick flapping into battle in 3-D; Mick Anglo’s Captain Universe, presented by Moore in unmistakable evocation of his own Marvelman/Miracleman stories of decades ago; a ghost wearing the word CRIME on his head a la Charles Biro’s Mr. Crime, the greatest American comic book horror host; at least one figure from the annals of racist caricature firing powerful sound waves from his mouth; a monster named Demogorgon, the leviathan of Populism, which the heroes allegorically cross as a footbridge en route to a safehouse named the Character Ark; a page-long parody of Batman (via the forgotten UK superhero playboy character the Flash Avenger), describing his origin as motivated entirely by hatred of the poor; a text feature telling of UK comics artist Denis McLoughlin, who worked consistently since the end of WWII, never made enough money to retire, and spent decades as an elderly man drawing for survival on titles he hated, eventually taking his own life in his 80s; and the secret of what happened to all the British superhero characters after the midcentury, which is that they were all eaten by Capitalism, pretty much. I laughed a bunch, but if you think LoEG is tedious shit, this probably won’t turn you around.         

*

Savage Dragon #242, Erik Larsen, Ferran Delgado, Nikos Koutsis, Mike Toris: The latest installment of the longest-running Image comic written and drawn by one of the Image founders, now deeply dove into problematic network tv drama stuff. The Dragon’s relationship with his partner Maxine is still strained in the wake of her sexual assault, a video of which the Dragon viewed in the police archives; meanwhile, the mother of one of the Dragon’s young children has been telling them all the truth about their parentage, further disrupting the peace of the household. Also, a formerly aggressive sex robot has joined the gang, dressed as an anime maid. And, the Dragon reluctantly teams up with the mid-’00s-vintage sexy heroine character Ant (which Larsen purchased from creator Mario Gully a few years ago) to foil a scheme by elderly elites to project themselves into the bodies of mythic gods in order to provoke the Rapture. Most interesting to me, however, is a bonus segment in which Larsen presents newly-lettered pages of his preliminary solo work on “Spawn” #266 (Oct. 2016), which would later be filled out by contributions from Todd McFarlane, colorist FCO Plascenscia, and letterer Tom Orzechowski. 

As usual, I prefer the ‘unfinished’ version (top) to the official release product (bottom).

*

Superman Giant #9, Erika Rothberg, ed. 

&

Batman Giant #9, Robin Wildman, ed.

These are two of those 100-page DC superhero packages they sell for five bucks exclusively at Walmart (for now; later this year they’re gonna have them in comic book stores too), which marry one new 12-page story per issue with three full-length reprint comic books from elsewhere in the 21st century. I just wanted to know what was inside them. Here is what I found:

-The new Batman comic is written by Brian Michael Bendis as a very conspicuously all-ages prospect, where the story is about nothing more than what it’s about, and the title character is presented as a serious-minded but inquisitive and compassionate man of adventure. This issue -- just in time for the remix of “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus -- Batman and Green Lantern travel back to the Old West, trade in their superhero outfits for cowboy clothes, and meet up with Jonah Hex. Nick Derington draws the heroes smooth and squinting with Swanian sincerity, and Dave Stewart colors it all bright and sunny. This is not my thing at all, but it’s confident to the point of acting like almost a rebuke to the rest of the book, where literally everything else is chapter whatever of a nighttime doom ballad drawn by either Jim Lee or something trying very hard to look like him. 

-Like:

I can spot the differences, sure - if nothing else, reading superhero comics trains you to spot differences in otherwise similar things. But, there is absolutely an aesthetic at work. The top page is from an issue of “Nightwing” that tied into the 2012 “Night of the Owls” crossover in the Batman titles, produced by a seven-person drawing and coloring team fronted by pencillers Eddy Barrows & Andres Guinaldo. The writer, Kyle Higgins, has Dick Grayson fight his semi-immortal great-grandfather, who is an assassin for the Court of Owls: one of the more popular recent Batman organizations of villainy, presented here as a fascist group mediating society’s function through murder from the gray space between social classes. The Graysons, therefore, are the Gray Sons, but Nightwing resists the pull of destiny by winning a big fight, slinging the villain over his shoulder, and walking away toward a better future of just beating the shit out of bad people instead of killing them, I think. The Batgirl story -- from 2011, written by Gail Simone -- is comparatively orthodox, finding the character gripped with uncertainty about the superhero life and going about some downtime character-building activities, though most of it’s a big fight with a villain with a tragic past. The penciller, Ardian Syaf, kind of has trouble blocking the action so that characters’ movements are clear; I think Syaf is best known for having his contract with Marvel terminated in 2017 for slipping what were widely interpreted as anti-Christian and antisemitic references to Indonesian politics into an X-Men comic. 

-There is a whole lot of Jeph Loeb among the reprints. He is not a writer who has been in critical fashion for much the past two decades, but he has undoubtedly sold a lot of comics for DC, and they probably feel he can do it again. The Batman book is serializing (deep breath) “Hush”, a 2002-03 storyline notable for its extraordinarily easy-to-solve central mystery, and generally being a taped-together excuse for Jim Lee to draw as many popular Batman characters as possible across 12 issues; it sold like hot cakes. The highlight of chapter 9 is probably a bit where a three person fight ends in one panel, and then one of the characters leaves, and then a second character wakes up from unconsciousness and also leaves, and then the first character comes back and nurses the third (also unconscious) character back to health, and then Batman arrives, all in the transition between the aforementioned panel and the next, which takes place in the same room; such is the befuddling desire to race ahead to more spectacle. Jim Lee (with Scott Williams and Alex Sinclair) is indeed Jim Lee (et al.) throughout, though at one point the team drops a howler of a swordfighting panel where Batman’s blade appears to grows to JRPG length due to what I think is the colorist filling two whoosh lines with the same hue as the swords.      

Meanwhile, the Superman book is serializing a 2004 storyline from “Superman/Batman” -- the series where Loeb has Superman describe the action on the page with his own Superman-branded captions, and Batman does the same with Bat-captions, and Superman says tomayto and Batman says tomahto -- in which the late Michael Turner, one of the rock star 2nd generation Image artists, illustrates a new introduction for Supergirl. But this isn’t quite the same comic that was originally published... can YOU spot the difference?

Is this like how Walmart won’t sell CDs that have an explicit content sticker, but with teen superhero g-strings? It’s hard to explain to younger readers how the low-rise/thong panties combo forever sealed the horniness of a generation of het male superhero artists into the late 1990s, and maybe DC doesn’t want to face that. Or, they’re just leery of how Turner slipping some peekaboo glimpse of Supergirl’s underpants or bare thighs into virtually every panel in which she is depicted below the waist might affect the marketability of the comic in 2019 - although I guess it could have happened in an earlier reprint somewhere too.

-The new Superman comic is a series of 12 splash pages depicting a race between Superman and the Flash. There is very little sense of speed, because Andy Kubert (inked by Sandra Hope, colored by Brad Anderson) draws the characters as frozen in time in a way that prioritizes muscular tension in the manner of contemporary superhero cover art; at one point the two characters part the sea with the force of their bodies, and it looks to me like they’re gesticulating in front of a theatrical backdrop. And, anyway, the story pulls back almost every other page to depict Batman standing on a ledge, or Lex Luthor in a sinister chair -- or some birds flying next to a building, or the Earth as viewed from space with streaks on it -- as the race occurs deep in the background or off to one side. The point is not excitement, but reflection, as imposed upon us by the between 13 and 21 narrative captions and/or dialogue balloons pasted atop all but the first page. 

The writer is Tom King, whose “Mister Miracle” (with artist Mitch Gerads) gets a double-page advertisement later in the book, festooned with breathless blurbs from major media outlets. His narrator here is a little girl who is literally chained in captivity, clutching a Superman doll, and delivering her soliloquy in a manner of a superhero-themed TED talk with handclap repetitions on the nature of contradiction. Being faster than a speeding bullet is a CONTRADICTION. Being as strong as a locomotive is a CONTRADICTION. Leaping tall buildings in a single bound is a CONTRADICTION. Superman is about to lose the race, but then he wins, because to beat the Fastest Man Alive is... a contradiction. No wonder the GQ entertainment desk was blown away. DC comics do this kind of thing a lot, where they just have the writer tell you how great the characters are, and since you’re still reading superhero comics in the 21st century, you’re expected to pump your fists in recognition, because you and the writer and everyone at DC are just big ol’ fans... but I am not, because I am Jesus Christ, the only son of God. 

-Elsewhere in the Superman book is an issue of “Green Lantern” from 2006, drawn by Ethan Van Sciver (inked with Prentis Rollins, colored by Moose Baumann), who is known today mostly as a conservative ‘personality’ online. He also netted more than half a million dollars last July in a crowdfunding campaign to make a 48-page comic book which he has not yet finished; funny to see an American right-winger on the French schedule. Funnier still to see the kind of people (mostly guys of a certain age) who mill around such personalities croaking about how diversity is ruining comics, because ALMOST EVERY FUCKING STORY IN BOTH OF THESE 100-PAGE BOOKS IS DRAWN BY EITHER SOME DUDE FROM THE 1990s OR SOMEBODY WORKING EXPLICITLY IN THAT STYLE, but - I guess when you’ve been pampered for so long, every paper cut feels like a ripped limb. Speaking of dismemberment, the writer here is Geoff Johns, who is often pegged as a superhero traditionalist, though he also has a grasp of gory pomp which occasionally pushes the comics he writes into a Venn diagram set with loud youth manga... at least in terms of how the action plays out, all broad and pained. So, needless to say, he’s currently writing “Doomsday Clock”, which is DC’s present attempt to extend the publication life of the valuable “Watchmen” property, so that they needn’t return it to the original creators, per the original writer, Alan Moore.  

-To hear Alan Moore say it, the America’s Best Comics line was done on a work-for-hire basis as a means of ensuring prompt payment of the various creators from Jim Lee’s WildStorm, the original publisher. WildStorm was then acquired by DC (Jim Lee is now their co-publisher and chief creative officer), and Moore -- who has been (fairly) criticized in the past for taking ethical stances that cause financial harm to his artistic collaborators, who are in a less economically flexible position than writers in the comic book field -- allowed the line to continue under DC’s ownership, as to cancel everything would disadvantage everyone working on the titles. One of those titles, “Tom Strong”, was written by Moore and pencilled by Chris Sprouse for a while, and then there was a long line of guest creators, and then Moore and Sprouse came back when the ABC line wrapped, so that the concept could reach its logical termination point in an apocalyptic manner... Moore does love an apocalypse. The final story in the Superman book is a very recent, late 2018 issue of “The Terrifics”, in which we find an attempt to revive the DC-owned Tom Strong characters as players in broader DC stories. Jeff Lemire & José Luís are the primary creators. Jack Cole’s Plastic Man is there, as well as the John Ostrander/Tom Mandrake version of Mister Terrific. It’s a lot of offbeat characters; we even see Moore’s own parody of Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, because, I mean, Alan Moore does a lot of riffs on preexisting characters too, right? It’s a big blob of cartoon whimsy, filled with available characters running around. If they’re available, you might as well roll ‘em out, off the new releases rack and into a supermarket reprint package stacked in a box next to squeeze toys and discount Pokémon merchandise, which I bought, because it was really cheap.

-Jog                   

[thecomicsnexus]

TOP 10 COMIC-BOOKS 2018

This is a countdown to the best 10 overall comics that I reviewed this year. As these rely on my reviews, this list only reflects my personal opinions and shouldn’t be considered as hard truth.

NUMBER THREE DAREDEVIL #230. BY FRANK MILLER AND DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI

Frank Miller is known for his urban westerns. And in any good western, a hero is forged by the environment. The Kingpin has gone too far and is terrorizing everyone close to Matt Murdock, and it is the right moment for Matt to come back from the dead.

As I mentioned before, my favorite sequence in this comic is the moment Ben hears someone being killed on the other side of the phone, and everything around him is normal. The art was magnificent capturing that moment.

NUMBER TWO NEW TEEN TITANS #1. BY MARV WOLFMAN AND GEORGE PEREZ

It is hard to tell when the modern age starts. Crisis on Infinite Earths, Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns seem to be a good frontier in the DC Universe, but I have to give enough credit to New Teen Titans. For the first time in a long time, writers and artists were taking their job seriously in telling a good story while at the same time, creating a format that could be new-reader-friendly. Back then comics were still being sold in newsstands, so publishers couldn’t really afford telling just two stories a year.

To me, Marv Wolfman and George Perez are the architects of the new DC in many ways, even if they weren’t they surely inspired future runs of other comic-book titles. And they are also behind Crisis on Infinite Earths (a story that was hinted first in this title). So to me, New Teen Titans belongs to the modern age. And it feels so different from other DC titles of the time, including Batman. Robin is still trying to be his own persona, and here we can see he is a leader (although he is still being kept in the shadows by Raven). There are so many plots and hints of the future here, that there is no mystery this is one of the most expensive issues of the eighties.

We also see a sexy Dick Grayson. We could say his sex-symbol career started with this run. Another great thing about this run, it is so hard to establish new characters in comics these days, that creating Starfire, Cyborg, Raven, Ravager and Terminator all at once is an incredible feat.

Another thing current comic-book writers should study, is the format of this comic book. It tells a complete origin story while creating several plots, none of them affecting the story being told. And by the end of the issue, you read a full story. In this way, new readers coming in on issue 2, can still enjoy the comic book. Each comic book can be anyone’s first comic-book, and this is one of the finest examples of that.

The other good reason to love this run is the art. George Perez is a gift to comic-book readers. The level of detail and emotions in these pages is awesome (he would later redefine Wonder Woman in a similar way).

NUMBER ONE ATLANTIS CHRONICLES. BY PETER DAVID AND ESTEBAN MAROTO

I was amazed by this story. It is not only a myth in the making, but it pretty much rebuilds history, interjecting with religions, myths, and legends. It is hard to know the timespan of this story, even in the “fake articles”, historians are not sure. However, on the revised timeline of the DC Universe published after Zero Hour, the rise of Atlantis happened around 100 thousand years ago, with the city sinking around 50 thousand years ago (this is where they dated the deluge).

While Aquaman is not present until the very end of the story (linking to “time and tide”), the themes from most of Aquaman series is there, it is a political thriller, but in this case, there is so much myth and legend, it is an entire different beast. And just like the articles suggest, this story tries to make sense of many different religions. Of course, in the DC universe, some of those religions are based on real beings, but I appreciate the intention.

All of this is also crucial to understand Peter David’s run. Although there are no alien invaders here just yet, it is hinted in the articles. There is one episode that feels different to the rest, and is the one involving the conquest of the surface. In this case I think the change in the narration is justified as there is too much to cover and the narrator is not really present.

Esteban Maroto did the unthinkable. Took a story full of characters and made them unique. The european style also made this story even more legendary. It does feel like I am reading a bible.

Now, would I recommend this book to everyone? I think I would, buy I understand it is not an easy read (just like Watchmen is not a simple read). But I think it is worth checking out, especially if you like shows like Game of Thrones and epic movies.

[thecomicsnexus]

The New Teen Titans

New Teen Titans #1. November, 1980. By Marv Wolfman, George Perez and Romeo Thangal.

A Gordanian slave envoy carries the Tamaranian princess Koriand'r to be sold to an unknown buyer. Koriand'r however, breaks free of her bonds and steals a shuttle pod. She escapes to Earth and lands in New York's East side where she is found by Grant Wilson. Meanwhile, the Empath known as Raven begins gathering heroes to form a new group of Teen Titans. She gathers Robin, Changeling, Wonder Girl, Cyborg and Kid Flash in an effort to rescue the team's final member Starfire (Koriand'r) from alien capture. The Gordanians arrive on Earth and begin attacking the United Nations building. The Teen Titans fight them off forcing them to retreat through a space rift. The Titans follow them onto the ship where Cyborg rewires the engine systems causing it to explode. They find Starfire and invite her onto the team, much to the chagrin of Grant Wilson.

From DC Wikia

It is hard to tell when the modern age starts. Crisis on Infinite Earths, Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns seem to be a good frontier in the DC Universe, but I have to give enough credit to New Teen Titans. For the first time in a long time, writers and artists were taking their job seriously in telling a good story while at the same time, creating a format that could be new-reader-friendly. Back then comics were still being sold in newsstands, so publishers couldn’t really afford telling just two stories a year.

To me, Marv Wolfman and George Perez are the architects of the new DC in many ways, even if they weren’t they surely inspired future runs of other comic-book titles. And they are also behind Crisis on Infinite Earths (a story that was hinted first in this title). So to me, New Teen Titans belongs to the modern age.

And it feels so different from other DC titles of the time, including Batman. Robin is still trying to be his own persona, and here we can see he is a leader (although he is still being kept in the shadows by Raven). There are so many plots and hints of the future here, that there is no mystery this is one of the most expensive issues of the eighties.

We also see a sexy Dick Grayson. We could say his sex-symbol career started with this run. Another great thing about this run, it is so hard to establish new characters in comics these days, that creating Starfire, Cyborg, Raven, Ravager and Terminator all at once is an incredible feat.

Another thing current comic-book writers should study, is the format of this comic book. It tells a complete origin story while creating several plots, none of them affecting the story being told. And by the end of the issue, you read a full story. In this way, new readers coming in on issue 2, can still enjoy the comic book. Each comic book can be anyone’s first comic-book, and this is one of the finest examples of that.

The other good reason to love this run is the art. George Perez is a gift to comic-book readers. The level of detail and emotions in these pages is awesome (he would later redefine Wonder Woman in a similar way).

I give this issue a score of 9.94.