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Be glad that you skipped Batman # 663. It was poorly written and the art was absolutely atrocious. As a big fan of Morrison, I was embarassed for him as I read it. It was hard-to-read bad. I've been pretty disappointed with Morrison's run on the title (he is trying to do his "revampt everything" schtick and it's just not working), but this was worse than I could have imagined, especially considering all of the hype behind it from both DC and Morrison himself. They should be ashamed.

I skipped Batman #663 when I flipped it open randomly and the first word I saw on the page was "Harley Quinn."

See for me that'd be a pull. And I'm long used to text/comic hybrids from the super keen and terribly underrated Thieves and Kings (www.iboxpublishing.org, last I checked).

Damn, that first part reminds me. Why isn't Karl Kesel writing a monthly book anyway?

It's certainly not going to put me off a book by itself, Matt, but combined with all the other stuff, I thought, "No thanks."

I didn't particularly enjoy Grant's first Batman story as it came out but, when I sat down and read it in one go it seemed pretty good.

Oh man, Ultimate X-Men: I bought it from issue 1 to the most recent annual. At times, it was mediocre (but "mediocre" to everyone else is "okay" to an X-Men fan). At times, it was lots of fun. Kirkman & Co. turned it to garbage. I haven't read the Cable arc, and I'm glad I didn't.

What is the "Karl well?"

Karl is an A.I.M. technician who's incompetent. There are at least three jokes about it, which is two too many.

I think the problem is this- we don't HEAR that there's a book out there delivering what we want until it's too late. I had no idea about how good NEXTWAVE was until I saw the MODOK Elvii. I didn't hear BLUE BEETLE was a fun book until about issue #11. These books are on the periphery of what DC and Marvel want to be publishing- they don't get the promotion that CIVIL WAR and JLA and JSA do. You hear that they exist, but the hype sort of disappears after launch, drowned out by the hype for the big events.

I don't know how DC and Marvel can improve promotion, but we need to hear more than "okay, this is shipping next week." They maybe need to emphasize tone so that we know what kind of book to expect- "the insanity continues in the next ALL-NEW ATOM!" or somesuch.

Or "worship Nextwave. It is your life, your soul your everything
WITH forbush man."

Re your dropping Batman: I've been thinking recently about my own behavior in dropping titles, and wondering if I'm more likely to drop a book when a highly regarded creator doesn't live up to his/her rep or his/her abilities as judged from other work than when a mediocre or unfamiliar creator produces mediocre work. (I had a book or books in mind, but can't think of them right now.) Does this resonate with anyone else?

Having now read Nextwave (because the first trade came out the same week as the last issue, in a Marvel marketing masterstroke).........

Hmm.

First, I think your reasoning is fallacious when you say, "Oh, this is what comics fans say they want, but they really want what they're getting." Comics fans say they want non-stop action, snarky humor, and goofy villains, but I've rarely heard them say they want Machine Man, Boom-Boom, and Photon together in one book, and I've certainly rarely seen them say, "Hey, I'd like a book that doesn't pay much, if any attention to the established personalities of these characters and writes them like generic Warren Ellis characters!" Warren Ellis picked very obscure characters who can't carry a book to carry his book, and lo and behold, they didn't sell. No mystery there.

And to be honest, after reading Nextwave, I'm not sure it deserved to survive. I mean it was entertaining, yes, in a junk food junkie sort of way, but there was this constant underpinning of contempt for its audience. It was tremendously lazy, as though Ellis was saying, "I'll just put in some fight scenes, some one-liners, a skeletal plot, and some jokes involving perverse sexual practices. That should be enough for you slope-browed wankers, right?" And yes, for the half-hour it took me to read it, it probably was, but I wasn't unaware that Ellis thought that was as much as he needed to do.

(And the best news all day was that they're coming out with Marvel Adventures: Iron Man...the Marvel Adventures line continues to be consistently better than its mainstream Marvel counterpart on a title-by-title, issue-by-issue basis. Which is, of course, not relevant to Nextwave at all, but you mentioned Marvel Adventures: Avengers in there too, so it gave me an excuse.)

Silence! Nextwave is love. Nextwave is godly. Nextwave is ALL.

And yeah, I stupidly picked up the damn issue of Casanova, thinking it was going to be the start of a new arc (who plots seven-issue arcs? WHO?), and missed out on the Godland issue, because I missed the cover price, and didn't notice that it was a recap issue.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures... I mean, me.

Bad news about Midnight Sun. The remaining issues won't be coming out in single form. Just a graphic novel. It sucks.

http://www.benzilla.com/?p=616

Thanks, Chris. My review of the first issue said it was FAR better suited for a graphic novel form and would read better as a collection, so I wish they had just done this from the beginning.

I've been reading Ultimate X-Men from the start, and for years is was exactly what I wanted, and a great alternative to the disjointed mess that is the 616 X-books. But man, Kirkman's really been pushing his luck lately. I haven't dropped the book yet -- when I've been reading something for 80 issues I'll give it more leeway then I usually would. But he's on thin ice.

To be fair, though, #81's pretty good. I'm not buying that Xavier's actually dead and it's silly that Kirkman is trying to convince us he is, but it's a good catching up/funeral issue, with some great cameos and at least one generally unexpected appearance. There's also a very nice bait-and-switch with Ultimate Shadow King, but I won't give it away for anybody.

Batman #663 was kind of interesting. It wasn't great but there's a lot of cool stuff happening. I'd probably dig it more if it was a double sized comic story but it's an interesting take on the Joker.

Though it does seem like Morrison's Batman stuff is kind of an afterthought. It seems like Superman is getting more love and attention.

Put me down as someone who had happily anticipated and was badly let down by Batman #663. Morrison's trying to make his prose purple enough to substitute for the garish visuals, but the result for me was just some miserably overblown descriptive passages outlining a fairly typical "Joker kills people!" plot. There're a few interesting points here with regard to the psychological descriptions of Harley Quinn and the Joker.

The major difficulty here is that the plot is really coasting on some rather overelaborated symbolism: it's as if Arkham Asylum: A Serious House... had been published as a script book rather than a comic, or perhaps as a proposal.
And what makes it worse is the degree to which Morrison's chosen visual symbolism, which simply underlines the stretch his prose style has to try in order to try and work as a comic. The writing is so over the top in tone as a result that there's no sense of suspense or build; it's all climax, with the result that the actual climax isn't one.

Nor is the plot all that brilliant: for all the expectations heaped on Morrison in his stated desire to "make the Joker scary again," having him kill people isn't innovative, and it's hardly some sort of wild new take on a character who's spent far too many storylines simply killing people for his murders to have much impact on the reader.

It's the format that was the experiment here; and that format, detailed above, doesn't really work as a prose story or as a comic. I does, however, do a ggood job of demonstrating the vast gap between prose and comics as media, mainly by way of plummeting into that gap.

The "make the Joker scary again" idea is his having "no Self". It is a scary idea, and a nice, new contrast to Bats who is all "Self", all about HIS mission. It also provides a nice retro explanation for the various presentations of the character over the years ("the Satire Years, before Camp, and New Homicidal, and all the other Jokers he's been").

A good idea does not a good story make, however. I was going to refer to Morrison's work as "purple prose", but Omar beat me to it. Even as an attempt to emulate pulp, it comes off more as fan fic. Of a story Dini & Timm told better a decade ago, accompanied by screen shots of a bad video game.

I want to go back and read all of "Batman & Son" in one sitting before rendering a final decision on dropping it, but so far this run feels like Morrison at his most mediocre - cool concepts/ideas wrapped in a middling story featuring archetypes instead of characters.

So did you run around the house screaming with joy when one of your fave books quoted you on the back cover?

How many copies did you buy?

Anyone else think they should market Godland as 'From the guy who wrote X-men and Superman high on coke'?

I might have to get the 2nd trade of Godland. The first didn't excite me too much, except for the drug hungry floatiing head, but I re-read Automatic Kafka on the weekend, and it left me hungry for more Casey.

Nextwave is a fantastic read as an action book and kind of weak and self-indulgent on other levels. I'm still sorry to see it go, since, wow, it was like a never-ending guitar solo when it came to awesome fights.

As a humor comic? Ah, I gleefully recall being flamed as I pointed out entire stretches of gags and characterization points Ellis was really just lifting from popular sitcoms. There's even Family Guy manatee jokes in it, people!

I only bought one copy, FGJ. I didn't see the quote until I was at home. And I didn't run screaming around the house, as that would have upset the children. I did point it out to my wife, who smiled in that indulgent way that she has that lets me know she thinks she married an idiot. But I don't care!

Yeah, Spider-Girl fans and their "depression spyral". Tom Brevoort says something different in "Omega Flight Fans Must Be Stopped", paragraph #5.

http://www.marvel.com/blogs/tom%20brevoort

Well, one is now forced to either reconsider and learn something, or... one can simply find new ways to criticize other people in order to make us feel better while at the same time not changing a damn thing about the world. Being a cynic of human nature, I'm opting that the latter is more likely.