September 17, 2008
To be honest, I’ve been dreading this arc. Between the title, “This Was Your Life, Wally West,” the promotional descriptions, and the timing, it clearly seems that DC is setting it up as a last Wally West story — whether it literally is, or whether it’s simply the last story in his solo book. The last time that happened, we got “Finish Line,” which was…underwhelming at best.
Fortunately, this issue proved to actually be good. Writer Alan Burnett has a good feel for the characters, and portrays Wally as a competent hero. He holds his own against Amanda Waller. The Justice League has no qualms about sending him on a case solo. When he encounters obstacles that prevent him from using his normal tactics, he immediately finds a way to work around it.
Importantly for continuing readers, the story doesn’t feel disconnected from the previous runs. Story elements continue seamlessly from “Fast Money,” following up on choices and actions both at the personal level and at the heroic. And while the tone is more serious — possibly the closest to Geoff Johns since he left the book — it’s not a major departure.
Similarly, while Paco Díaz’ art is more realistic than Freddie Williams II’s more cartoony style, it’s clear that he’s working from the same character designs, so the change in style doesn’t jar the way that, say, the change from Scott Kolins to Alberto Dose between “Blitz” and “Ignition” did. (Although that was a deliberate artistic choice, so perhaps it’s not the best example.) I particularly like the fact that the Flash’s costume has some texture to it: the belt, in some panels, actually looks like a belt and not just a different color in the fabric.
The family dynamic is well-balanced with the super-heroics. Readers who dislike seeing Iris and Jai will be happy to see a lot more solo action from the Flash. Those who do like them will be pleased to see that their new, not-about-to-die status is actually explored rather than simply taken for granted.
This is probably the best first issue from a creative team that The Flash has had in years. It’s certainly better than the first issues of “Finish Line” or “Lightning in a Bottle.” I still have reservations about where the story may be going, particularly since we’ve got a major change coming in a few months, but I suppose we’ll see.
Now, on to specifics. Thar be spoilers ahead…. (more…)
Some administrivia today.
1. As of Monday, it’s been three months since I launched this blog. I have no idea what the typical lifetime for a comics-related blog is, but I can say I’ve kept this up far more regularly than I expected, with 162 posts in 94 days — an average of 1.7 posts per day! — and readers have made nearly 350 comments!
It’s also taking a lot more time than I expected, which has kept me away from other projects. (In particular, I’d planned a major update for the Alternative Browser Alliance this summer, which has become more urgent with the announcement and first beta of Google’s Chrome web browser.) I may be scaling back a little on Speed Force soon, but I’ll still aim for several posts a week.
2. I finally got around to replacing the banner at the top of the page. I didn’t want to stick with the theme’s default, since “train station” doesn’t really say “speedster,” and I was never really satisfied with the fractal “lightning.” (Besides, the smallest I could get that image without making it look really nasty was a whopping 50 KB.)
Still, I’m a web developer, not a graphic designer or an artist. Give me the graphics and I’ll build the HTML and CSS to turn them into a web page, but original art? It would make XKCD look like George Pérez. So instead of trying to draw something, I looked for photos of actual lightning on Flickr. I adapted “Lightning Crashes” by ~Prescott under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. The banner can be re-used and/or modified under the same terms.
3. After a struggle for the #3 spot at Comic Blog Elite with Collected Editions, we’ve both been superseded by a number of high-profile blogs that have joined, including Once Upon a Geek, The Absorbascon and 4thLetter. Speed Force has been holding steady around #12 lately.
4. I’ve dropped the Recent Visitors/Viewers boxes from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. They add a lot to the download time, especially on certain browsers *cough* IE *cough* that wait until they’re loaded before displaying the main section of the page.
September 16, 2008
The Flash #244
Written by Alan Burnett; Art by Paco Diaz and Drew Geraci; Cover by Brian Stelfreeze
The epic “This Was Your Life, Wally West” kicks off in high gear as Flash faces a scary blast from the past in a new story written by Alan Burnett (Batman: The Animated Series, SUPERMAN/BATMAN). Plus, Keystone City is abuzz over the new threat in town, who just might be the finish line for the Flash!
Notes: Chances are pretty good this will, in fact, be the final story arc in this series.
Team books and events after the cut. (more…)
ICv2 has posted August sales estimates, and the overall market is down for the seventh month in a row. Worse, Flash #243 dropped below 30,000 units for the first time in 5½ years, selling just 29,647 copies. That was Flash #196 (March 2003), half-way through Geoff Johns’ storied run on the book, just before the Blitz storyline and the slow rise from 30K to 50K by the end of Rogue War.
02/2008: Flash #237 — 37,719 (- 9.0%)
03/2008: Flash #238 — 35,606 (- 5.6%)
04/2008: Flash #239 — 33,741 (- 5.2%)
05/2008: Flash #240 — 31,944 (- 5.3%)
06/2008: Flash #241 — 30,810 (- 3.6%)
07/2008: Flash #242 — 30,325 (- 1.5%)
08/2008: Flash #242 — 29,647 (- 2.2%)
(Link via The Beat.)
Last month, it looked like sales were leveling out near 30,000 — right where most of Geoff Johns’ original run hovered. But they dropped more between July and August than they did between June and July. No doubt the announcement that Flash would be rebooted didn’t help, as readers decided to wait until the relaunch instead of reading a “lame duck” title.
Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge #2 fared better, but still dropped 12.9% from its first issue.
07/2008: Rogues Revenge #1 — 62,482
08/2008: Rogues Revenge #2 — 54,404 (- 12.9%)
The Beat’s analysis of July’s sales was underwhelmed with Rogues’ Revenge’s performance, opining:
The notion that not even Geoff Johns’ commercial Midas touch can reignite interest in The Flash, for that matter, suggests that what the franchise needs right now, above all, is some rest.
Only time will tell, but I expect that the next few months of Flash sales are going to be dismal, even if the quality of the Alan Burnett/Paco Diaz/Carlo Barberi arc turns out to be stellar.
September 15, 2008
Contrary to previous reports, it turns out that “The Black Flash” isn’t getting the collected edition treatment just yet. Now that DC’s December solicitations are out, they’ve officially solicited the January 21 release of The Flash: Emergency Stop. It’s confirmed at a $12.95 trade paperback covering Flash vol.2 #130-135 — only half of the Grant Morrison/Mark Millar run.
So what does that include?
- “Emergency Stop” — Flash vs. the Suit, with a time travel mystery.
- A one-shot fighting the Mirror Master.
- A one-shot focusing on Jay Garrick.
- The third part of the “Three of a Kind” crossover with Green Arrow and Green Lantern.
See also my overview of the whole run.
The surprise here isn’t that it’s only half the run. 6 issues is typical for a collection these days, and since the whole run is 12 issues, that makes it easy to cover the whole thing in two books.
The surprise is that with “Three of a Kind,” they included 1/3 of a 3-part story. At least it should flow reasonably well, since it was told with its own framing sequence, but it’s still an odd choice.
Geoff Johns is seriously busy. The writer on Justice Society of America, Action Comics, Green Lantern, two Final Crisis tie-in miniseries, Flash: Rebirth, and a Smallville episode has been announced as the writer for the back story for the upcoming MMO game, DC Universe Online, joining art director Jim Lee. Newsarama and Comic Book Resources both have more:
September 14, 2008
The preview of DC’s December 2008 solicitations is are up at Newsarama and CBR. Here are the Flash-related books listed so far.
Update: Full solicitations are up. Read on!
The Flash #247
Written by Alan Burnett
Art by Carlo Barberi & Drew Geraci
Cover by Brian Stelfreeze
“This Was Your Life, Wally West” concludes! As Flash stands alone without his powers or family to support him, only one question remains - is this end of the Fastest Man Alive?
On sale December 24 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US
Notes: Surpisingly enough, the solicitation doesn’t actually say that it’s the last issue.
Team books and events appear after the cut. (more…)
September 11, 2008
I’m beginning to think that Final Crisis should have been an original graphic novel, not a miniseries.
I understand there are many reasons to do a big event as a miniseries. People are more willing to spend $3.50 a month for 7 months than to drop $20-25 all at once. And they’re more willing to pick up a first issue to try it, knowing that if they don’t like it, they don’t have to pay for the rest of the series (while with a book it’s all or nothing). It’s easier to schedule tie-ins. Plus it keeps the hype engine going for longer.
But those are all business reasons. Let’s look at artistic reasons. Specifically this one: it’s clear that Final Crisis will read better all at once than in serialized chapters.
After the contention that the series requires the reader to be a walking encyclopedia of arcane DC knowledge (a claim with which I disagree), the biggest complaint about Final Crisis is that it isn’t clear what’s going on. There’s a sense that you need to have read interviews and annotations just to follow it.
It seems like readers want an inverted pyramid structure to their comics. Establish all the players up front, then jump into the conflict. Which is certainly a valid way to tell a story, except that:
- It’s not the only way to tell a story.
- It’s not even what comics readers really want.
Movies and novels frequently tell stories where they give you only pieces of information, bit by bit, and slowly assemble them into a whole so that by the time you get to the end, or three-quarters through, or half-way through, you know what’s going on. Before the sequels soured people’s memories of the first film, The Matrix was massively popular — but it takes a long time before Neo — and the audience — find out what’s really happening.
And really, people don’t want everything spelled out ahead of time. They want to be surprised. They want the rush of a cliffhanger ending. And when you spend an entire issue establishing the situation and players, like in Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds, they complain that it’s all setup, and it’s like “reading a Wikipedia article.”
The problem is trying to mix the story structure Grant Morrison is using for Final Crisis with the serialized format.
A movie can spread out the exposition because it’s a whole work intended to be watched all at once. A novel can get away with it because it’s perceived as a whole work, not as series of connected stories. You can pause reading a novel and know that you can read the next part, which might explain more, anytime you want. When you have to wait a week for the next episode of a TV show, or a month (or two, or more) for the next chapter of a serialized comic, waiting for things to make sense can be a much more frustrating experience.
So doing it as a graphic novel would solve that problem. Have the whole thing come out in one volume. People can sit down, read it at their own pace, and follow the pieces as they come together. They can see how the story works as presented on the page, and then if they want to look deeper into symbolism, see how it connects to 70 years’ worth of shared universe stories, or do a literary analysis, then they can look up the annotations.
September 10, 2008
The Hero Initiative has released a variant edition of Marvel Apes #1, penciled by the late Mike Wieringo and inked by Karl Kesel.
Daregorilla, the Ape Without Fear, penciled before Mike’s passing.
Marvel Apes writer and cover inker Karl Kesel said:
It was a blast working on Marvel Apes — one of the most far-out, fun assignments I’ve ever had! And inking Mike Wieringo’s “Daregorilla” variant cover only made it better. This drawing is one of the initial inspirations for the entire mini-series — chances are the comic would have never happened without it — so this cover brings everything full circle. And it’s only fitting that it helps The Hero Initiative, because Mike was a big believer in giving back to the comics community, and that’s exactly what The Hero Initiative is all about.
The book is limited to only 3000 copies worldwide and is available now at Atomic Comics. Retail price is $8, and the book will also be available at the Hero Initiative booth at the Baltimore Comic-Con (Sep. 27–28), Mid-Ohio Con (Oct. 4–5), Adventure Con (Oct. 25–26) and Wizard World Texas (Nov. 7–9).
The Hero Initiative is dedicated to helping comic book creators in need. Hero creates a financial safety net for yesterdays’ creators who may need emergency medical aid, financial support for essentials of life, and an avenue back into paying work.
(Adapted from the Hero Initiative’s press release.)
(Edit: Fixed the typo in the title. *sigh*)
It’s a light week for Flash-related books, with only Super Friends #7 and Trinity #15.
Trinity continues the battle between the Justice League and the Crime Syndicate. Super Friends has the always-smiling toy versions of the Leaguers going up against Amos Fortune in, if the cover is anything to judge by, a skateboarding contest.
