Speed Force

From this week’s DC Universe Halloween Special 2010: Teen Titans Miss Martian and Blue Beetle encounter Klarion the Witch Boy and his familiar, Teekl, who have focused a bit too much on the “Trick” side of “Trick or Treat.” Written by Bryan Q. Miller, art by Trevor McCarthy.

Flash fans take note: The issue also has a Flash and Frankenstein story by Alex Segura and Kenneth Loh.

Today, a group of comics bloggers have gotten together to recommend lesser-known gems of the comics world. Comics are more than Brightest Day and Heroic Age, and you just might want to…read this too!

Astro City. Written by Kurt Busiek; art by Brent Anderson; covers by Alex Ross. Published by WildStorm Comics.

A big part of the appeal for many comics fans is the shared universe. Spider-Man, Daredevil and the Fantastic Four all share the same New York. Flash and Green Lantern can fight each other’s villains. There’s a sense that, beyond what you’ve read, there’s more…a bigger world, one where things matter beyond a single story.

Astro City takes that feeling and creates a whole shared super-hero universe in a single book. Instead of following one character or team, the anthology focuses on a different hero, villain, or civilian in each story. The stories are usually about the human element, focusing more on character than on super-villain beat-downs.

Many (but not all) of the heroes are based on classic characters or familiar archetypes. Samaritan is Superman down to the blue hair. The First Family is very much like the Fantastic Four. Others are original, or far enough removed from their sources that I can’t place them.

The first volume, Life in the Big City, features:

• A day in the life of Samaritan, who is so busy rescuing people that he can’t slow down to enjoy flying.
• A newspaper editor tells about his first published story as a cub reporter, when he witnessed a team of heroes turning back an interdimensional invasion in the caverns beneath the city.
• A small-time crook accidentally discovers the hero Jack-in-the-Box’s identity, and tries to figure out what he can do with the knowledge.
• A woman who grew up in a neighborhood fraught with supernatural dangers finds herself confronted with the very different, scientific dangers that threaten downtown.
• A neighborhood recluse turns out to be an alien spy, scouting out Earth as a potential invasion target. His decision rests on the discovery that one of his neighbors is secretly a super-hero.
• Heroes Samaritan and Winged Victory try to go on a date, but their professional lives keep getting in the way.

You don’t have to start there, though. With very few exceptions, Astro City stories can be read in any order. Most of the stories only take one or two issues, and are collected in Life in the Big City, Family Album, and Local Heroes. There have been a few longer ones: Confession and The Tarnished Angel each take up an entire volume, and the longest story, The Dark Age, will be collected in two volumes.

Some of my favorites include:

• Confession re-imagines Batman and Robin with a supernatural twist.
• In Family Album, Jack-in-the-Box meets his future son…or rather, three different possible versions of his future son, all traumatized by his death. The encounters force him to rethink the life he leads as he and his wife try to start a family.
• Also in Family Album, A man is troubled by vivid dreams of a woman he’s never met, and eventually learns that she was his wife before the reality-altering Crisis event erased her from existence. This 16-page story from 1998 is still my favorite take on the genre created by Crisis on Infinite Earths.
• In Local Heroes, a lawyer gets in over his head when he successfully uses the doppelganger defense.
• In the upcoming Shining Stars collection, sworn enemies Samaritan and Infidel meet once a year for a cordial dinner, while a living “Beautie” doll with super-powers seeks out her origins.

Astro City took a long break earlier this decade, and has been on a series-of-miniseries schedule for the last few years. With The Dark Age finished just a few months ago, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson have been planning to relaunch the series as an ongoing monthly again, but the recently-announced shuttering of WildStorm may throw a bit of a wrench into those plans (or it may just launch with a DC logo on it instead).

Oh, one more thing: Flash fans might be interested in the Astro City: Silver Agent two-parter that wrapped this month (and will be included in Shining Stars). He’s not a speedster, but you’ll see what I mean. More about this in an upcoming post…

But That’s Not All!

Interested in reading more? Good! I’ve also reviewed The Unwritten at K-Squared Ramblings, and there are a lot of other bloggers participating in today’s event. Check out the lesser-known titles reviewed in these other blogs and read these, too!

• Adam Strange at It’s A Dan’s World
• American Vampire at Doom Patrol
• Booster Gold and Zatanna at Red Tornado’s Path
• Essential Man-Thing at Firestorm Fan
• Forgetless at Girls Gone Geek
• Franklin Richards digests at Once Upon a Geek
• Glamourpuss at Being Carter Hall
• Peter David’s Hulk at Fortress of Baileytude
• Jonah Hex at Boosterrific
• Scott Pilgrim at Toyriffic
• Son of Tomahawk and Thor the Mighty Avenger at Aquaman Shrine
• Spelljammer at HeroPress
• Spire Christian Comics: In His Steps at Mail It To Team-Up
• Strange Science Fantasy at Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
• R.E.B.E.L.S. at Indigo Tribe
• The Unwritten at K-Squared Ramblings
• Welcome to Tranquility at Girls Gone Geek

Some items I’ve written about elsewhere that might be of interest to this site’s readers.

First up: I’ve finally found the time to finish my San Diego Comic Con write-ups! Here’s Saturday and Sunday at Comic-Con International!

Review: I liked Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It was a fun movie/comic/video game mash-up, and it’s a shame that so few people have gone to see it.

Speaking of reviews and things that are insanely late: I found some interesting reviews on Amazon this week while looking for long-delayed fantasy books, including Tokoypop’s Labyrinth and Dark Crystal series. I found it most amusing that George R.R. Martin’s fans are already reviewing A Dance With Dragons…even though the book isn’t finished yet. More precisely: they’re reviewing the wait for the book!

Today, DC released some major Wonder Woman news: a new costume designed by Jim Lee and a new direction for the series as J. Michael Straczynski takes over.

To sum up: Persons unknown have altered Wonder Woman’s history so that Paradise Island was wiped out 20 years ago. Diana has no memory of the original timeline, doesn’t have her full powers yet, and needs to survive, help other refugee Amazons, find out who destroyed Paradise Island and find out whether the timeline can be restored.

All-New, All-Different!

I’m always apprehensive when a new writer picks up an established character and the first thing he does is to remove some key element of the character. Like the Flash’s speed (Geoff Johns’ first Flash story, “Wonderland”). Or Superman’s flight (JMS’ first Superman arc, “Grounded”). I understand it might help the writer get inside the character’s head: what is he or she like without the powers? But it always feels like shoehorning some other idea onto the character. Why did you want to write the Flash if you didn’t want to write about a guy who runs fast?

That said, for all that DC is pushing this as a “new direction,” to me this description reads more like a major story arc. I mean, there’s an end point right there in the description: find out who did it and see if it’s possible to change things back. Given the timing of the comics themselves and the time-travel elements to the story, I suspect this is going to be linked to Flashpoint. [Update: Comics Alliance asked JMS about this and he said it's not related.]

Retcon Fever

It’s worth comparing to Flash: Rebirth, actually. In both cases, someone within the fictional universe has gone back in time and altered the main character’s history. With Diana, we know before the first issue is out. With Barry Allen, only long-term readers knew anything had been changed to begin with. It wasn’t clear that there was an in-story explanation for it until the miniseries was almost over. Even then, the prospect of undoing the changes was only floated long enough to be dismissed as impossible.

Most importantly: changing Diana’s history drastically alters who she is today. That’s a story. Once you get past the doom-and-gloom Barry of Flash: Rebirth #1-3, the changes to his history don’t seem to have made much difference in the present.

More linkblogging! Here are some (mostly) non-Flash-related posts on general comics, fandom, and online community issues.

Orbital Vector analyzes an aspect of super-speed that’s usually glossed over: Just How Old is the Flash, subjectively? (via dhusk’s comment on the Flashes’ experience post)

Techland has eight questions for comics creators to consider before putting a book on the market. (via @SpeedsterSite)

Multiversity Comics looks at some of the pros and cons of waiting for the trade.

Comic Vine has 5 Things to be Aware of When Buying Back Issues.

What do websites with open comments do when they realize that people are jerks? Reining in Nasty Comments. (via @ThisIsTrue) I’m reminded of Penny Arcade’s expression of the Greater Internet ****wad Theory (NSFW language): Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total ****wad.

Poll: You find a typo in one of your old blog/LiveJournal/etc. posts. Do you fix it?

Technologizer tracks down the origin of the term Fanboy (via The Beat)

High Five Comics considers The Problem with Madame Lady Girl-Woman.

In the 1940s, Crash Comics introduced a super-hero named Blue Streak. He was a “skilled fighter.” With that name, how did they not make him a speedster?

There have been a lot of articles on the battle for the future of Comic-Con International, but one question jumped out at me in this one at Deadline Hollywood: Jeff Katz asks, “Are you a fan show with trade elements, or are you a trade show that lets in fans…or is there a happy medium?”

A few brief news items:

Top Cow’s delayed Velocity #1 is shipping June 16. I’ve been looking forward to this since reading the Pilot Season book, though of course this is an entirely new creative team. On the plus side, it’s a miniseries, so there’s not a huge commitment to picking it up.

Cartoon Network will be producing a Green Lantern animated series. Green Lantern: First Flight was pretty good, but of course there’s no guarantee that any of the same people will be working on this.

DC will be teaming up with TASCHEN Books to produce 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking. Basically it’s a history of DC Comics. How soon can I pre-order this?

Hypergeek notes that the UK graphic novel Whatever Happened to the World’s Fastest Man? has been nominated for the 2009 Eagle Awards. From his review, it looks like it’s not about a speester so much as it’s about a man who can stop time, and reluctantly becomes a hero. I’m going to have to look for this one as well. [Edit: I should note that I stopped reading the review once I decided the book looked interesting, just in case there were spoilers.]

Remember the Battlestar Galactica cake? For last night’s LOST finale, my wife made an authentic DHARMA Initiative chocolate cake, and pizzas with the Swan and Orchid logos.

The cake is chocolate, with homemade buttercream icing (vanilla for the background, chocolate for the design). The pizzas have an outer ring of sausage, with bell pepper strips for the I Ching. The Swan logo is cut from a bell pepper. The Orchid is cut from a tomato, and placed on the pizza after baking.

For more views, including in-progress pictures, close-ups, and making-of commentary, check out the LOST finale food photos on Flickr.

This Is True is a weekly newsletter rounding up weird news from around the world, summarized with witty comments by Randy Cassingham. It’s usually funny, sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating — but it always makes you think.

I’ve been a subscriber for years, and highly recommend it. One of the things I like about it is that he makes more effort to verify the stories than the typical “odd news” wire service that simply repeats something printed in a distant newspaper without realizing that it’s the local equivalent of the National Enquirer or Weekly World News.

Anyway, I could keep talking it up, or I could show you an example story using the True-a-Day service:

Cassingham also links to interesting news items on Twitter and on Facebook, though not the same articles as in the newsletter.

It’s a safe bet that your web browser uses at least one plugin, and probably several. Maybe it’s just Flash (the other one!) for viewing animations and video (think YouTube and Hulu). Maybe it’s Silverlight for watching Netflix, or Shockwave for playing games. You’ve probably got Java installed.

Just like your web browser, these plugins must be kept up to date or you’ll run into problems: missing features, instability, or (worst case) security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, most plugins don’t update themselves.

Several months ago, Mozilla introduced a service called Plugin Check that will identify the plugins you have installed and tell you whether they need to be updated — and how to do it. At first it only worked on Firefox, but now it’s been expanded to all major browsers: Chrome, Safari, Opera, and even Internet Explorer.

It’s worth taking a few moments to check. Think of it as a pit stop for your computer’s web browser.

(Reposted from K-Squared Ramblings)

Here are a few recent comics-related items from my other blog, K-Squared Ramblings, that might be of interest to readers of Speed Force.

First up, I’ve written up a piece on today’s Comic-Con hotel deposit deadline and how it should be a second chance for hotel rooms. The short version: Today’s the last day to cancel without a penalty, so you can bet that rooms will be freeing up. We’ll see how Travel Planners handles the waiting list.

Last November, I wrote up a piece here on mini-series I was reading that had stalled with just one issue left. One of those miniseries, the adaptation of Robert Jordan’s New Spring (a prologue to The Wheel of Time), finished this week. Five years is a bit long for an eight-issue miniseries, but it’s done!

I spotted a movie marquee that had (as most of them seem to) censored the title Kick-Ass, but the placement created another movie title entirely:

This could actually make an interesting movie! Okay, it would be about as long as Bambi Meets Godzilla, but still…