August 2, 2009
Geoff Johns reassures fans of Wally West that “Wally’s not only going to be fine, he’s going to kick ass.”
The third installment of Views from the Speed Force is up. The spinoff from the Views from the Longbox podcast has been focusing on each issue of Flash: Rebirth, and this one tackles issue #3.
Fanboy Wife contemplates the Flash, alternate meanings of the name, the value of hard water and just what super-speed is good for.
Blog@Newsarama considers what might go into a second volume of Wednesday Comics.
Tomheroes has a collection of super-hero Hostess ads from the 1970s. I’ve mentioned these before, and profiled the lame villains who appeared in the Flash installments. This page doesn’t have the snarky commentary of Seanbaby’s Hostess Page, but some of the scans are somewhat higher quality.
The Weekly Crisis is giving away 4 trade paperbacks and hardcovers in a contest to celebrate two years online.
Over at K-Squared Ramblings I’ve written up the Flash Forward panel at Comic-Con. This show looks like it’s going to be awesome! Also: the Lost panel was full of win. I missed it, but my wife posted a detailed write-up.
July 15, 2009
6:18:35 PM: Batman’s story is getting more intriguing
6:19:21 PM: Kamandi makes me want to re-read Tellos.
6:20:35 PM: I love the giant splash page on Metamorpho! (And the joke about a subscription to Element Dog!)
6:23:15 PM: That’s an awful lot of typos in Teen Titans for a one page story.
6:25:43 PM: It must suck to have only one soldier to defend your capital city.
6:29:04 PM: When I think “Wonder Woman,” I always think of a talking, glowing fish for a sidekick. (Okay, maybe not.)
6:33:27 PM: Whoa, awkward moment for Barry, Iris and Barry!
6:34:26 PM: The different coloring techniques stand out more this week, too.
6:35:49 PM: I can see a paradox brewin’, though.
6:36:57 PM: Hah! “Stately Blood Manor.”
6:41:47 PM: The Demon and the Cat. Yes, Demon and the Cat. One is a burglar, the other’s a prat.
6:45:55 PM: Hey, kids! Learn Hawkman’s secret sign language! You too can join the Junior JSA!
July 10, 2009
It’s huge. The most impressive strips are the ones that actually make use of the larger canvas — Adam Strange, Hawkman, etc.
A lot of the creative teams don’t have a good sense of how to tell a story one page at a time. Not many of the strips work well stand-alone. The Cat and The Demon may have been the most successful one in that regard.
I liked the art style on Wonder Woman, but it made really poor use of the space. Panels were tiny, and worse, the words were tiny. It actually felt cramped on a giant newspaper-sized canvas. Almost like someone had taken 6-8 pages of a regular comic book and shrunk them down to digest size, then rearranged them to fit into the space of 4 regular comics pages.
The Flash strip was fantastic. I love what they’re doing with the parallel Flash/Iris West strips.
Having driven along the central California coast a number of times, I can conclusively say that the first panel of Green Lantern is dead on. It looks exactly like any number of stretches of Pacific Coast Highway.
I liked the moody intro to Hawkman, but the Teen Titans into didn’t do much for me.
Supergirl was good, and actually made me laugh out loud at 11:30 at night.
I wasn’t expecting so many of the strips to have such a retro feel. Green Lantern was outright set in the early 1960s, Metal Men was clearly the 1970s, Metamorpho and Flash had the feel of the early Silver Age. (Flash even brought back the logo from the 1940s. And the one from the 2000s. Using both next to each other looks a little awkward.) And everyone seems to be comparing Kamandi to Prince Valiant. I guess it makes sense, given that nostalgia is one of the driving principles behind the series. (That and DC’s quest to keep people coming into the comic shop every week.)
That may be in part why I didn’t like the Neil Gaiman-scripted Metamorpho as much as I’d expected.
I’m not sure how I’m going to store these.
July 7, 2009
At The Source, DC has posted the first page of the Flash strip from Wednesday Comics by Brenden Fletcher and Kerl Kerschl! The story stars Barry Allen, Iris West and Gorilla Grodd.
As you can see by the layout, each page is basically the size of four standard comic book pages.
Wednesday Comics starts tomorrow and will run weekly for the next 12 weeks.
July 6, 2009
Some linkblogging for a Monday, first with a couple of general links:
Comics in Crisis is running a series on Cartoon Heroes. The first installment includes video clips from the Filmation cartoons from the 1960s (which I reviewed when it came out on DVD) and Super-Friends.
Toys R Us will have (among other items) an exclusive Flash action figure at Comic-Con International.
Wednesday Comics
The Weekly Crisis wants to know: Will you be buying Wednesday Comics?
Karl Kerschl is running a contest: He’s hidden an image of The Abominable Charles Christopher in a panel of the Flash story in Wednesday Comics (he’s not saying which week). When you spot it, email him a photo of yourself pointing to the yeti, and you’ll be entered in a drawing for an original sketch.
When Worlds Collide’s Timothy Callahan is wildly enthusiastic about the series, and compares it to Solo. He also notes that the reasons he liked Solo and is looking forward to Wednesday Comics — get a bunch of top-tier artists and writers and let them loose on DC’s characters — is exactly why Solo sold so poorly.
Speaking of Solo, I didn’t buy every issue, but I did pick up three or four. I bought the ones by artists I wanted to read. Darwyn Cooke, Sergio Aragonés, I forget who else.
June 20, 2009
A few interesting notes from this weekend’s conventions, HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina and WizardWorld Philadelphia.
Wednesday Comics
Newsarama’s writeup of DC Nation at HeroesCon has the most direct Flash news. Ian Sattler showed of a copy of Wednesday Comics and talked about the series:
Sattler said that the Flash story features Flash Comics on the top of the page and Iris West Comics on the bottom half, but halfway through the story, the two meet and join, as the Flash literally and figuratively “runs” into Iris’ story.
I love this idea. It’s the kind of thing that only really makes sense in a comic-book format, as well. If you did it as a movie, it would just be alternating scenes with each protagonist until they meet.
Kid Flash
Newsarama also says that when a fan asked Ethan Van Sciver why Superboy gets a new series but Kid Flash doesn’t, the artist responded, “We’re going to make you so happy in Rebirth.”
From the way it was presented, it sounds like a non-sequitur. Presumably he means that Bart Allen will have a bigger role in the second half of the miniseries. I don’t really expect to turn to the last page of issue #6 and see a Kid Flash series announced, though certainly stranger things have happened.
The other item of interest comes from Wizard World Philadelpha. CBR’s writeup of Philly’s DC Nation included a segment in which Dan Didio talked about Teen Titans.
DiDio said fans will start seeing a more stable team starting with issue #75, adding that a “couple of returning characters are going to be coming back in”
Now, I’m probably reading too much into this, but Superboy and Kid Flash both returned pretty recently. How many Teen Titans readers would like to see them back on the team?
Following Through
Update: CBR’s article on HeroesCon’s DC Nation has a few details missing from the Newsarama version.
First, Ethan Van Sciver talked more about Flash: Rebirth:
“It’s the best thing to be doing right now,” Van Sciver said. “Geoff Johns and I have a very large vision for these characters.” He said they’re planting “little tentpoles” and have big plans for Bart Allen.
This puts the other remark about Bart into context…though of course, what those plans might be remain in the “wait and see” corner.
A fan also asked EVS about the fate of Rival, and he simply said, “What happens in the Speed Force stays in the Speed Force.”
Another fan wanted Barry Allen to wear bow ties in Justice League of America, but new artist Mark Bagley declined, saying he (Bagley? Barry?) “doesn’t own a single tie.”
Seriously, what is it with the bow tie?
May 7, 2009
I’ve seen several people online talk about how they’re curious about Wednesday Comics, DC’s experiment to bring back the old full-page Sunday comics format…but that they’re going to wait for the “inevitable” collection.
The thing is, I’m not 100% certain there will be a collection. And if there is, it might not be what readers expect.
Sure, in a world where Amazons Attack gets reprinted as a hardcover book and Terror Titans gets reprinted as a trade paperback, and most comics are written in 4-6–issue story arcs, it certainly seems like everything will get collected eventually. (Except that last arc of Flash after Geoff Johns left, but then I’m not sure anyone misses it.) But two things make me wonder about this one:
- It’s an experiment specifically designed to recapture a newspaper experience.
- The pages are huge.
The first item means that, for once, the priority isn’t on the eventual collection: it’s back on the periodical.
As for the second, let’s look at the page size in more detail.
According to solicitations, each page will be 14 inches by 20 inches. Basically, open up two comic books flat, then line them up one above the other, and you’ve got the page size. Or pick up a newspaper. (The Los Angeles Times is currently 23″ x 12″ per single page, so WC is a little shorter and a little wider than a newspaper.) If they want to keep the page size, that’s going to be a big book. Certainly hardcover, and more suited to a coffee table than a bookshelf. Like this massive 21″ x 16″ 7-pound Little Nemo in Slumberland tome. That’s larger than (and almost as heavy as) Comic Book Tattoo!
Now, consider that DC charges $50 for a ~200-page hardcover in its Archive series at normal comic book dimensions. A ~200-page hardcover with 4x the page area is likely to cost even more.
So the options I see are:
- Keep the page size and make it a gigantic expensive coffee table book.
- Shrink the page size, sacrificing one of the main points of the format.
- Make it half that size, and print each page sideways across a double-page spread — which means running a gutter right down the middle of each page.
If there is a collection, it’s likely to be either very big and very expensive, or a poorer reading experience than the original.
Of course, none of this matters if the experiment fails and the series doesn’t sell well in the first place.
Update June 21: The Beat has a photo of a mock-up from Wizard World Philadelphia, demonstrating the size. CBR reports that at HeroesCon’s DC Nation, DC said they planned “both downsized and full-size trades” for the series.
Update October 12: The hardcover will be an 11×17″ coffee table book at $49.99.
May 4, 2009
Artist Karl Kerschl has posted a preview of art from his and Brenden Fletcher’s Flash strip in Wednesday Comics. The 12-part weekly series launches in July.
April 20, 2009
DC’s solicitations for July comics are up at CBR and elsewhere. In July, the Flash will show up in not only Flash: Rebirth, but Wednesday Comics, Blackest Night, Titans, JSA, The Last Days of Animal Man and more. There’s also Showcase Presents: The Flash Vol. 3 coming in August.
The Flash: Rebirth #4
Written by Geoff Johns
Art and covers by Ethan Van Sciver
Barry Allen left a legacy that thrived after his death. Now his return threatens it all. What secrets does Barry hold inside him about the fate of the Flash Family? What destiny awaits Wally and his twins? What murderous force targets Bart Allen? And what does it truly mean to be a speedster?
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers. For every 25 copies of the Standard Edition (with a cover by Ethan Van Sciver), retailers may order one copy of the Variant Edition (with a cover by Ethan Van Sciver).
On sale July 22 • 4 of 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US
Read on for Wednesday Comics, Blackest Night, Titans, Justice Society of America and more after the cut. Read the rest of this entry »
April 17, 2009
Superpouvoir (it’s in French) has the full credits for DC’s upcoming weekly series, Wednesday Comics. This is the 12-week experiment to recapture the feel of the old-style Sunday comic section of the newspaper. Each issue will feature 16 comic strips, each strip a broadsheet-sized page. (Basically the size of a comic book unfolded and turned sideways.) To give you an idea of the format, you can look at the sample pages DC has posted at The Source.
The Flash feature will be co-written by Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher, with art by Kerschl. Karl Kerschl is no stranger to the scarlet speedster, having done art for Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #3 (featuring Bart Allen as the Flash — see image at left) and Teen Titans: Year One (featuring Wally West as Kid Flash). Kerschl’s art on both series was well-received. Personally, I thought Kerschl’s work was a perfect fit for Bart Allen, and I’m looking forward to seeing him draw the Flash again.
(via SpeedsterSite)
