Comic Book Resources

How did Johns go insane? Is this backlash from the most recent issue of Justice Society?
As for Strangers in Paradise, it's very good. I fell off around issue 50 or so but the wife loves it.

The first two BPRD collections (Hollow Earth & Souls of Venice) are collections of the random one-shots done at the time the movie came out. These are of variable quality. When Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis started doing their series-of-miniseries with volume 3 (Plague of Frogs), that's when the series started cooking. I look forward to BPRD more than Hellboy nowadays.

I think the Supreme collections are worth it. I had also heard the excessive praise for the run, so went in wary. You can clearly tell that some concepts were testing grounds for what would later be reused in Tom Strong, but overall I think Supreme was a denser, more enjoyable read. The pre-Sprouse art is iffy, including the Veitch "flashback" segments. There are bits that will fly over the head of someone who isn't familiar with Silver Age Superman tropes, but if you do get them...

Stars and STRIPE is a lot of fun, though, be warned, Johns is very, very green and it shows. His dialogue isn't that tight and the plot jumps around, but its still a fun read regardless. The first collection would be a nice intro, but Johns hits his stride in the later half of the series that also features some cool stuff with the original Seven Soldiers. I recommend it.

"On page 216 the final issue (#90) of Strangers in Paradise is solicited. I should really buy these trade paperbacks, shouldn’t I?"

No. It's meandering, pandering, blander-than-blandering stuff. Nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing special.

I can't recall reading much by Johns, so most of what I claim about him is from reading what other people say. He just seems a bit bloodthirsty, I guess is the word, and not just from JSA, but even back to his Marvel work.

I quite liked Stars and STRIPE, myself. Lighter and more new-reader friendly than you think of when you think of Geoff Johns, though unlike most of the crew here, I enjoyed a great deal of his first run on JSA. (Not so much the new incarnation, sadly.) More to the point, my 12-year-old girl students thought Stars and STRIPE was pretty awesome too. Really it should get the manga-digest treatment the Marvel Adventures books get.

As for The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, the risk of an exploding head is well worth it, it really is that awesome. Previews is probably offering the paperback version, though, and the chances are good that Amazon probably has some nice remaindered hardcovers left for the same price or lower. That's where mine came from.

Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. is cute, I think that's an accurate description. It isn't outstanding or groundbreaking; it's just all-ages, fun tales. As Iowa said, he's still a rookie. It's pretty interesting, I'm not sure if it's included in the first trade, to see Johns write Young Justice. His hate for Impulse shines through.

It may be worth nothing that no one dies in Stars, probably because Courntey's based off his deceased sister.

The thing that gets me about all the animus aimed at Justice Society #3 is that it's not like the violence was all that new to the title. In the JSA series that precedes this one, Courtney's family (including Pat) is slaughtered by Per Degaton's goons in bloody, on-camera fashion. No one dwelled much on the bloodshed at the time. Rick Tyler got eviscerated in another storyline, and again minimal comment. And I seem to recall Jakeem Thunder having his throat slit in yet another plot.

Now, though, I've had to listen to the blogosphere drone on and on about the buzzsaw of death. I'm not sure how issue #3 is all that different from the Vol. 1 stories I just mentioned. Dead children? Well, Degaton's goons get all Travis Bickle on Courtney's kid brothers and sister in the earlier sequence. It's guns instead of Nazi superspeed, but it's still bloody as all get-out.

So what's the difference now? I have my suspicions (namely, payback for the bloodshed in Infinite Crisis), but I'd like to hear just how the current storyline is really that much worse than those in the previous volume.

"So there’s another weekly event (pages 74-75). I’m just wondering: why don’t DC and Marvel ever learn anything? I imagine it might do okay, so they’ll do another one, and the law of diminishing returns will kick in. If you’re Dan DiDio, wouldn’t you think, “How about we do something completely different instead of trying to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle success we had with 52?” I guess that’s why I’m not a successful businessman!"

That's unnecessarily negative, isn't it? It actually makes a lot of business sense to keep your biggest seller going until it's no longer profitable.

And it's not like you can't do the same old thing AND try something different as well. The Minx line is certainly a huge gamble (and let's not forget, so was 52).

So is this the new Gilbert Hernandez original graphic novel?

Just a quick note about Gutsville. This is a joint project, drawn by Frazer Irving and written by Simon Spurrier. For the past two or three years, Si's been the busiest up and coming writer on 2000AD and he's collaborated with Irving to great effect on From Grace and The Simping Detective.

His stuff can be overwritten and definitely wont be to everyone's taste, but he's got talent and mad ideas dripping out of his ears like hot wax so I'd recommend giving it a go.

Mark - the two Hernandez books are Luba: Three Daughters and New Tales of Old Palomar.

Yeah, Apathy Boy, maybe it is unnecessarily negative. I'm certainly glad DC is trying the Minx line, and I honestly don't care if the new weekly event does well or not, but I basing it on their business practices over the past 20 years or so, where it seems like they learn nothing about beating something into the ground. We'll see.

Crap. I have both of those. (Well, I have the original issues that Three Daughters contained, but there's a few new short pieces written just for the trade.)

Ralf's right about BPRD. Try volume 3, you can easily jump in on that point.

My reaction to that scene where Stargirl's family got slaughtered was, "Oh, it's a time travel story. It'll be undone." And I was right. I'm guessing the lack of outcry was due to others making the same assumption.

Personally, I think Strangers In Paradise is worth a look see. It's one of those comics I recommend to alot of non-comic readers and most of them come back to me and say they loved it.

It started to meander a little bit in the middle of the current series (approximately issues in the mid-30's to mid-50's range) and I dropped it. But I picked up some of the 'pocket' collections that collected huge chunks of issues and after reading volumes 1-5, I found myself with a whole new appreciation of the series. It may not come through clearly when reading SiP in (semi)monthly installments, but when you read it all at once, you really get a feel for the cohesiveness of Moore's story, and where he was going with it all along. The more recent issues have been some of the best of the series' whole run because he's finally tying up alot of plot threads and throwing in a few last second surprises too. SiP may not be everybody's cup of tea, as it doesn't feature any spandex-clad throwdowns, but it's been one of the best indies out there for years now. I'll miss it when it's gone, but it will also be nice to see an American comic series get some sort of closure...

Conor, I can see that point. At the same time, though, we've still had to sit through a bloody scene in which children are viciously slaughtered (and Stargirl ends up killing--or at least stabbing--a minion). The representation is on the page, even if it will later be retconned away.

Put another way, Johns has always had a taste for the bloody and visceral. (It doesn't hurt that the JSA pencillers from the start of the 1999 series to the present day tend toward realistic styles instead of cartoony ones.) Why is it that people are suddenly singling out the bloody-minded takedown of utterly obscure heroes or child extras for condemnation?

(I should note that I have no problem with negative responses to the issue. For example, Evan Waters has done an excellent job of expressing his distaste in measured fashion. I just wonder why Greg needs to drag down an otherwise nice post with unnecessary Johns bashing--the comment in the Stars and STRIPES paragraph was justifiable, but the reference in the Catwoman paragraph seemed bizarre, given that Pfeiffer is the author in question there, not Johns. I'll also admit that I'm partially responding here to a trend that I saw at work in the JSA post that vanished from the blog last week.)

Sheesh - I didn't know Johns-bashing was off-limits! Sorry it bothered you, Rob, but my point was that I hope, despite a "body count" in Catwoman, that Pfeifer doesn't succumb to the slaughter-fest that some other books have become. That would be a shame.

I think the blogosphere's issue is not that the new JSA is so much bloodier than the old volume. To be honest, at this point I don't think anyone cares about the old volume, which is usually described to me as "like Robinson's Starman but less good". It's more a sense of feeling very tired with tedious parade of shocking gore that's been endemic to much of DC's output for the last six months.

Bloggers have decided Geoff Johns as of late is responsible for it. While it may be unfair, he certainly has enough obvious influence over the DCU editorial style at the moment that it's not a ridiculous opinion. Perhaps one that irritates a longtime Johns fan, but this sort of broad criticism becomes more inevitable the more prominent a writer in virtually any medium becomes.

My problem with JSA is the sheer pointlessness of the violence. There're occasions where on-screen violence is a decent shortcut to getting a villain over as being Really Really Bad, but it's just unnecessary when you're dealing with Nazis and Vandal Savage. We know they're bad already; they don't need to, say, dismember a guy at his wedding or murder a picnic.

And also Johns' weird crush on Kingdom Come. That's been driving me nuts for a while now.

It should be noted, in fairness to Dan DiDio, that '52' made me realize that I enjoyed the simple concept of a weekly comic--that being able to go in and get the new installment each week, having that speed of progression, was fun in and of itself. So long as they don't do anything to actively alienate me, I'm on board for a weekly series as long as they want to do one.

And it's not just Geoff Johns. Every DC writer they're currently employing has a man-crush on 'Kingdom Come'. I think it's in the employment application.

Kingdom Come still sells like mad, so it's not like exactly a bad publishing decision to emulate it. Really, the problem is that everyone, even Waid, is emulating it fairly badly when they try to bring that influence into the monthly books. JSA captures little of Kingdom Come's legacy charm, and the gore is just inexplicable. Kingdom Come for the most part had the good sense to avoid gore in favor of relatively "clean" and stylized violence. There was little blood and the "shocking" imagery operated on an intellectual rather than visceral level.

I also enjoy 52 largely as a fun way to explore a superhero universe. You get to keep track of tons of characters without having to buy scads of different titles, which is convenient for someone like me who doesn't have time or interest in digging through Previews. Flaws are easily forgiven because there'll be a new one next week, and stunts like the ending of week 43-- which would've been extremely offputting in a monthly book-- instead actually make me curious about how the cliffhanger will be resolved. It is disposable and ephemeral without being uninteresting, which is the sort of superhero read I enjoy when I'm waiting between masterpieces.

It helps to know that 52 is also finite, and therefore, there is more likely to be some sort of resolution to the title's various plot threads. It's a good format, one that frankly makes a lot of DC's monthly superhero output obsolete, and I look forward to seeing Countdown (which will hopefully remain similarly self-contained and finite, as for me these are key points of appeal for the format).