#niko is the seal being pointed out he's pretty young here

[totalspiffage]

Me and the boys at 2am looking for BEANS

[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.         

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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).

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Superman Giant #9, Erika Rothberg, ed. 

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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                   

[buddyrabrahams]

10 NBA trade deadline candidates

On February 2nd, Punxsutawney Phil will emerge from his underground burrow on Groundhog Day to determine whether or not we will have six more weeks of winter. Several days later, on February 8th, NBA general managers will emerge from their underground bunkers on Trade Deadline Day to determine whether or not we have a nuclear winter. The Detroit Pistons’ jaw-dropping trade for Blake Griffin on Monday was one heck of a start and knocked many of us dead in the process. But the fact of the matter is that we in the basketball fandom still crave infinitely more chaos. So in the spirit of the season, here are ten major trade candidates that are still out there.

DeAndre Jordan, C, LA Clippers

Jordan being the only Clippers player left from the notorious Navy SEALS unit that descended upon Dallas in 2015 was a plot twist that I, for one, wasn’t expecting. Nevertheless, he may want to keep an extra suitcase handy as the Griffin trade signaled that, if not a full-scale rebuild, the team is remodeling this roster like an HGTV show. Jordan’s value speaks for itself – basket-to-basket activity with ironman-like consistency (this season’s brief five-game absence was the first time he missed action due to injury in his ten-year career). His expiring contract does give him a specific niche market, but for the lob of God, players of his caliber ain’t available for trade all that often.

George Hill, PG, Sacramento Kings

It took all of six months for the Hill-Kings marriage to go sour, and now we wait and see which team will win custody. A prolonged stay in Sacto is likely untenable – rookie De’Aaron Fox has already lapped Hill on the depth chart, and the Kings’ Western Conference-worst record is pretty much purgatory for a player who has made the postseason in eight of his nine NBA seasons so far. A classic veteran point guard of the 3-and-D mold, Hill would probably be an ideal depth piece for a host of playoff teams. As such, he may not be locked in the royal castle humming “Someday My Prince Will Come” to himself for long.

Rodney Hood, SG/SF, Utah Jazz

When Gordon Hayward left the Jazz over the summer, this was supposed to be Hood’s team. Too bad that he didn’t see Donovan Mitchell’s coup coming. The star rookie Mitchell’s emergence has been the best thing to happen to Utah since the glory days of Jimmer Fredette, but it hasn’t been as great for Hood. Sure, he kicks donkey when it comes to scoring the basketball. But the Jazz don’t need him to be their primary offensive threat anymore, and once you add in his ever-present injury risk on top of that, he becomes expendable. I yearn for a continued future of Hood pouring in threes from the wing with the artful precision of a Renaissance swordsman. But the smart money tells me that said future will not be taking place in the Beehive State any longer.

Lou Williams, PG/SG, LA Clippers

After balling out this season to the tune of a career-high 23.5 points per game and coming to the very edge of All-Star Manor, it may be another sour ending for Sweet Lou in LA. He will be turning 32 this year, and every indication the Clippers are now giving is that they want to get younger and more flexible. Williams is at the apex of his value and would help out a contender much more than he would his current team at this point. That being said, it says “Professional Bucket Getter” on his business card for a reason, so expect the sixth man great to keep reminding us of that no matter where he ends up.

Nikola Mirotic, PF, Chicago Bulls

Mirotic’s surface stats this season (16.8 points and 6.4 rebounds per game on 42.9 percent from three) might be enough to get you punch-drunk. But the skillset overlap he has with other players on the tanking Bulls is more than enough to justify a move. Both rookie Lauri Markkanen and fellow pugilist Bobby Portis can play the stretch-four-with-rebounding-upside role just as well as Mirotic can, making him a luxury piece. Fortunately for Chicago, Niko’s $12.5 million club option for 2018-19 opens up just enough daylight to stand out in a market already well-saturated with shooting. Hopefully that means a move out of the Windy City before I run out of fight-related puns.

Kemba Walker, PG, Charlotte Hornets

Whether or not you believe that Kardiac Kemba is a true blue-chipper, 22-23 points per game and excellent one-on-one defense for only $12 million a year is virtually unheard of in today’s NBA. He may never be the best player on a true playoff contender, but his prime years may still be ahead of him in a world where you need a dynamic point guard to be able to compete. The Hornets seem doomed to wither away in the lottery no matter what. But in making Walker available for trade — along with his speed-of-light stepbacks and his homicidal crossovers — they are implicitly acknowledging that he can still be saved. We are now accepting donations for #SaveKemba2018.

Nikola Vucevic, PF/C, Orlando Magic

Vucci Mane remains sidelined with a left hand fracture, but he will return to a Magic team with little need for his services anymore. Frank Vogel’s bunch now has the worst record in the NBA, and No. 6 overall pick Jonathan Isaac needs a yellow brick road to more consistent playing time (once he returns from his own ankle injury). On the right team, Vucevic can be a Kevin Love Lite — a big man who hits the three, doesn’t kill ball movement, and can flirt with 20 points and 10 rebounds on any given night. The extra season he has under contract after this one may just be gravy for potential suitors as well.

Kent Bazemore, SG/SF, Atlanta Hawks

Even the balls of tumbleweed have deserted Atlanta by now, and I suspect that Bazemore, arguably the most valuable trade chip that they have left, will soon be following suit. A lefty slasher with 15-5-5 upside from the wing will always be a coveted player type. There’s just little use for him on a team that will struggle to reach 30 wins this season. If he picks up his player option, Bazemore will also be owed roughly $18 million a year through 2020, which is none too friendly for a roster teardown to say the least. Still not convinced? Well here’s the biggest argument for the Hawks to cash out on Money Baze over these next few days – he plays the same position as Luka Doncic.

Hassan Whiteside, C, Miami Heat

A word of advice for any team seeking a dominating inside presence on this year’s trade market: always look on the Whiteside of life. The former All-Defensive Second Teamer may have worn out his welcome in Miami after three-plus years — getting ghosted in the fourth quarter is becoming a regular occurrence for Whiteside as the Heat often elect to go with the spacing and the playmaking of a James Johnson-Kelly Olynyk frontline instead. Rookie big man Bam Adebayo has proven to be a more flexible, nimble-footed option down low as well. As a result, Whiteside is down across the board in almost all statistical categories this season, and that creates a nice buy-low window for any interested parties (like this Western Conference team perhaps).

Emmanuel Mudiay, PG, Denver Nuggets

The backcourt in Denver has just turned on the “no vacancy” sign. Gary Harris leads the team in points per game, Jamal Murray is playing like a maniac, and Will “The People’s Champ” Barton has reached new heights as a distributor to go along with his scoring thumb. With Nikola Jokic sopping up the rest of the playmaking opportunities, Mudiay seems to be the one Nugget left standing as the music stops. Granted, he is still just 21 years old, and his flaws, while glaring, are not necessarily fatal. A change of scenery could be just what the doctor ordered for a young guard who can pass the ball and penetrate while also quietly creeping up to a rock-solid 38.7 percent from deep this season.

from Larry Brown Sports http://ift.tt/2rOSUpp