Also on page 122, the El Diablo trade is solicited. I have never heard of this. NEVER! What the heck is it? When did it come out?

It’s a western about the legend of El Diablo who haunts the Western Plains and kills people.
There was a Sherriff with a secret and some bad guys.

Brian Azzarello wrote and Daniel Zejill drew (the guy on Desolation Jones who totally rules with everything he does – check out Congo Bill in a dollar bin near you)…

I brought two issues and wasn’t blown away, but I’ll get the trade for the art if nothing else.

It came out in the time between the end of Preacher and the start of Y: The Last Man – American Century, 100 Bullets, Outlaw Nation, Codename: Knockout and some book by Kelly Jones were Vertigo’s output, and Vertigo was desperate for some sort of hit (and occasionally a little too cancel happy – Outlaw Nation ruled!)

Not only is Arena going to sell really well, the book is really good. Wait and see.

Surely, we will. We don’t really have a choice otherwise. But I do feel obligated to point out that most people like the stuff they work on.

Greg: Yeah, like maybe upcoming covers or stuff? Maybe it’s just because I’m a short-attention-span youth, but when it’s all just text, my eyes kind of gloss over it.

I believe that’s how it more or less went down. Rude has said that when DH decided to stop publishing new Nexus material back in the late 90′s (due to low sales, which is a sad indictment of the comic buying public when a book as good as Nexus has to be effectively cancelled…), they gave the rights back to Baron and Rude pretty much for free. The two had a falling out and sat on the rights up until last year when they apparently made peace with each other and started working on the new project.

I’m glad to see DH continuing with the Archive editions though. Those things are beautiful.

“Heroes Return”. The FF return, and the Thing no longer has a bucket on his head to cover the scar Wolverine gave him, Johnny’s forgotten all about Lyja/Alicia, and Franklin’s back to being a kid instead of his own future self kidnapped by his grandfather and returned as a grown-up. The Avengers return, and Iron Man is no longer a teenager, Thor has his powers back (and a regular creative team), the Wasp no longer looks like a freaky mutant insect chick, and everyone’s forgotten all about ‘The Crossing’. The entire concept of ‘Thunderbolts’ came out of it, and to top it all off, ‘Heroes Reborn’ pretty much ended Rob Liefeld’s career, and who can feel bad about that?

Really, the only thing they could have done to make the event more perfect would have been to toss both Peter Parker and Ben Reilly into the HR universe, and have only one of them come back out.

In short, ‘Onslaught’ was like chemotherapy. Terrible, but necessary.

I think I just wanted them to be more like What If? And now What If? is more like Elseworlds.

As for Onslaught: Look, I was 17. I ate that friggin’ thing up. I’ve always liked the idea of a flawed or even evil Xavier, I liked the mysterious buildup over a year beforehand (my first event like this), I liked the use of the Sentinels to amplify psionic power, I liked that it was suggested that this was the destruction of Manhattan spoken about in 2099 and that it closed out the Bishop mystery stuff. Things I still think are awesome: The Green Goblin series ended wonderfully, with the good GG consciously blowing up his glider and ending his superhero career to take out only one Sentinel. Onslaught knocked Juggernaut across the country and trapped him in the very source of Juggernaut’s power. Nate Grey and Franklin Richards, two of the young mutants spoken of in hushed voices due to insane power levels, just kind of huddling together for support. Onslaught punched the Hulk so hard that he knocked Banner out of him. Banner wakes up and sacrifices himself like all the other heroes. I even liked the character Joseph, which provided the opportunity to examine is Magneto, given the choice now, would do the same things he had done before. Cable and Apocalypse, the monster he was sent back in time to stop, have to work together to take on a greater evil.

Plus, there’s that evil Xavier, which always wins me over — every great man has a dark side, you know. And I liked that he lost his powers because even today, Xavier or Magneto losing their powers feels like a good-sized shift in status quo; I’m a little sad Brubaker gave Xavier his powers back again recently.

Afterward, the dying Hulk takes over a Florida island. Franklin Richards loses his whole family and carries a universe in a blue ball while hanging out with Generation X. Those are good stories.

Yes, it appears I am actually defending Onslaught. No, I don’t care what that makes me sound like. I was glued to the main storyline and a few of the supporting crossover issues.

What can I say? I was 17.

And like others have already said, Dark Horse is continuing with the Archives because those high-production value things are easier for a larger publisher to invest in and because they’re just doing a nice job with them.

Re: Spider-Man, I’d have to disagree that Salvador Larocca is slow–he’s actually frightfully fast, it’s just many other artists who use the kind of style he’s working in now are slow. But hey, even that doesn’t matter, since John Romita Jr. is joining the title, and he could probably do two issues a month by himself.

The problem I had with Elseworlds is that most of them sucked eggs…Basically, I think just taking DC characters and putting them in new settings is a fundamentally stupid idea…

I’m not a big DC guy, but most of the Elseworlds I’ve read I actually enjoyed. Superman: Red Son and Superman: Secret Identity are two of my all-time favorite stories in the super-hero genre, and I usually find regular, DCU Superman stories to be kind of boring. Same with Batman – I don’t follow any of his mainstream books, but I do like some of the Elseworlds stories around the character.

Being more of a Marvel fan, I’ve always wanted them to do something more in the vein of Elseworlds – self-contained, alternate universe stories.

Of course, “self-contained” is a big part of the appeal. I can read an Elseworlds story, and get a complete story in one TPB – I don’t have to buy 23 different books to chase the storyline all through the DCU.

By the way, none of this is meant to endorse Countdown Arena: that sounds really, really uninteresting to me. I think I’ll sit that one out.

The Freebooters book is pretty much the same as the Young Gods book, in that it presents the nine published chapters, plus the unpublished chapters 10 and 11, a collection of abandoned subplots and stops ‘n starts, a short side-story intended for Storyteller #13, an early (b&w) Freebooters story created in 1995, and more of The Party, which was a sort of metafictional farewell deal that was supposed to run in Storyteller #10-#12 (part one was in New Gods, and part three will be in The Paradoxman, whenever it’s out).

There’s also text pieces, including a bit where BWS addresses some of the Valiant connection… he’d first come up with the premise of The Freebooters in the ’80s, and wound up using some of that material in Archer & Armstrong, so actually the influence went the other way around…

The third Valiant time traveller is Ivar The Timewalker.

Hopefully this’ll be better since he can tell the story he wants to tell without the baggage of an established franchise he seemingly had very little interest in to begin with. (I believe he was quoted as saying something like he didn’t actually like any of the stories the character appeared in or anything about the character’s portrayal in the series itself, which raises the question of why you’re even writing it.)

Here’s his website: http://www.barrywindsor-smith.com/storyteller/stt.html

Is it a complete story, or is it like the Young Gods book?

I cannot express how much I would love a Paradoxman book. That was easily my favourite strip in Storyteller.

And Jog, that’s a damn fine blog you have there. Digging your stuuf at Savagecritics, too.