Congratulations, Stan!

On Monday, Stan Lee went to the White House, where he was awarded a National Medal of Arts. His reaction in an interview on Sunday was, "I wonder what took so long."* So do the rest of us, Stan! It's well deserved.

*In fairness, he followed that with "Say, 'He said it with a laugh' or I'll shoot you." God knows, we don't want to be on Stan's bad side.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Nobody does yet, because the movie's not due for another three-and-a-half months. But Mike Chary claims that he's going to. He's not expecting that much out of it, though.

Change in the Hall of Justice

Tatsuya Ishida's Sinfest is a scrupulously-updated webcomic of moderate amusment. Within recent memory, however, he's expanded the Sunday strips and added color; and within even more recent memory, he's really started to use the expanded canvas for some terrific, imaginative work with inspired visuals and something to say. I highly recommend:

• Imperil the World 7: The series regular pig has taken on the persona of "Sarah Piglin", and conflict arises.
• Barack Star: Sarah Piglin encounters the charisma of Barack Star.
• The Rich Will Go On: Parody of Titanic, with a note of banking crisis.
• Samakin Skywalker: US metaphors viewed through Revenge of the Sith. My favorite.
• Damn It Feels Good to Be a Banksta: Familiar cartoon icons of tycoonery sing about the banking crisis.
• Banktron: The bailout explained via Transformers.
• 1984: The fast food corporations control us--but an advertising touchpoint saves us all.
• Cartoon Mafia: Familiar cartoon icons defend themselves against Sinfest's success.
• Genocide: Ishida's regular use of Sam and Liberty seems to especially inspire his work.
• Hall of Justice: After passing through a gallery of black superheroes, Barack Obama reveals his secret identity.

Don't neglect the dailies in between these Sunday strips, either; while the scope is necessarily less ambitious, Ishida is nonetheless using his canvas ambitiously (e.g., the Gitmo era of McDonald's commercials). The strips have been dominated with election, economy, and media subjects for a couple months now, but if you go back further in the archives, you've find the more typical slacking, sex, religion, and marijuana gags.

Just Curious

Did anybody bother to read DC Decisions? I wasn't interested in it enough to actually pay for it, so I committed the unpardonable sin of reading it quickly in the store. (And, quite frankly, I read it more and more quickly as the issues progressed.)

As I understand it (and remember, I wasn't doing much more than flipping through the pages at this point), Superman's real reason for not wanting superheroes to endorse candidates (aside from the obvious--how do we know that's really Green Arrow coming out for the not-quite-socialist party?--and the realistic--why should the publisher alienate roughly half the fanbase?) is that they have virtually limitless power that's unchecked by any human authority, so in appreciation of that fact, they should stay out of human politics. Has he been reading The Authority?

So anyway, did anybody pay enough attention to this series to have a reaction? (And while we're at it, why did they recall that first issue?)

A forum for discussion of the ages before the Bronze?

Probably because of the Silver Age Marvel Timeline on my personal web site, I recently received this e-mail request:

It occurred to me recently that there might be a forum for discussion of golden and silver age comics and super heroes. Would you happen to know of any and would recommend if you do?

The regular contributors to the Curmudgeons are mostly readers whose formative years of comics reading were in or after the Bronze Age (which, for these purposes, I'm defining as roughly 1975-1987), and as a result most of our discussions revolve around comics from the last thirty years. Does anyone have a good recommendation for my anonymous correspondent?

Prey of Bat-Related Stunts

Birds of Prey has been cancelled. Nuts.

I liked the series a lot, although it suffered, a lot, when Gail Simone left, and Black Canary left basically contemporaneously. Sean McKeever's complete mishandling of the characters nearly killed the series for me, and I can't really say enough bad things about his run. While Tony Bedard's work is, as always, journeyman-acceptable, it's not got quite the spark. Again, this is largely a problem with Black Canary's departure; as soon as she makes a guest appearance, the series' dynamic roars back to life.

According to the link, this is fallout from the Birds' tenuous link to the Batman family of books. Since my disinterest in the Batman RIP (which I don't even know what that means) and "under the cowl" shenanigans can be measured with off-the-shelf astronomical instruments from neighboring solar systems (i.e., my disinterest is large; I am committed to my disinterest to the point that I will be unhappy if you try to explain the Bat folderol to me), my displeasure that this malarkey is taking a book I do like with it is, if not epochal, certainly not quotidian.

Gaga for GG

One final brief note on the day: I really like the art job that GG Studio (Vincenzo Cucca, pencils; Vincenzo Acunzo, inks; Barbara Ciardo, colors; Giuliano Monni, gets his name in the credits for some reason) is doing on She-Hulk these days.

It's clean and expressive, with elegant color work, with art design clearly reminiscent of high-end American animation prior to the anime invasion. It doesn't look anything like the post-Kirby standards for superhero comics (Buscema/Romita, Adams/Giordano/Perez, Lee/Silvestri/Image, etc.), and it works great.

Big Nate's Big Game

While I am a huge fan of the melancholy of failure and defeat that exemplifies Peanuts, over in Big Nate, whose protagonist usually fills the role of "overreacher put in his place", creator Lincoln Peirce has just had Nate win the big game, and, y'know, occasional moments of triumph against all expectations feel really good.

Running Right Back Again

So I read Runaways volumes 2 and 3, and while they were reasonably entertaining, I do have some reservations:

• That was their plan? It seemed like the Pride sub-group A's plan, and the Pride sub-group B's plan, and the mole's plan, and the kids' plan, all basically boiled down to "Hope the plan works". I am more or less compelled to draw a parallel to the neocon invasion of Iraq. I mean, really. About the only thing anybody did to make events break in the direction their plan needed events to break (i.e., strategy) was the mole's disabling of that one character, and even then, it didn't actually work, nor did it actually seem all that connected with the strategic goals. Tactics, OK; there were some tactics, I suppose, once the actual puncheminnaface was underway. But I was led to expect strategy.
• That was who the mole turned out to be? Ooo-kay. Sure, whatever, I guess. I mean, I guess there's not any specific evidence against it I can point to, but it sure feels violative of POV. There's not any evidence for it, either. Or for or against anybody else, really. I guess what I'm saying is that I hope it wasn't supposed to be a whodunnit, where the careful reader can be on board with the big revelation and agree that it all makes sense.
• They were supposed to be on the run for months? Within the context of the story, I don't think you could justify even weeks, and certainly not months.
• Like, two fights are enough to make the kids think they've tactically improved enough to take on their parents?
• Why did Captain America show up?
• Was the last issue supposed to make any sense at all? It's like this weird hybrid of a real-world treatment of the kids crossed with a kid gang story, and as a result, it doesn't work on either level.

Anyway, pretty entertaining, I guess, but I now don't believe it's sustainable. Excellent art, though.

Thought for the Day

It took me twenty years to notice it, but yesterday I realized that Marvel was once simultaneously publishing Star Brand comics and Star brand comics.

I Will Have Gone Pogo

Amazon is currently listing the Complete Pogo v1 for Oct 19...2009. That'll make two and a half years from first announcement of the project, and at least two release reschedulings.

I am impressed. Not in the good way.

Running Away...With My Heart

I'm no fan of Brian K. Vaughn. I though Y was to Garth Ennis's Preacher what a white suburban kid's version of punk would be; Ex Machina was too dumb to live; and Ultimate X-Men betrayed crucial problems with craft.

So I have no idea why I picked up volume 1 of Runaways while in Austin over the hurricane.

It's good. No, really. The art is charming and mostly effective (although there are enough parents that I had trouble keeping track of which parents matched to which kid, especially out of plainclothes). The kids are none of them whiny unlikable brats. Oh, they're not all admirable or thoughtfully mature, but none of them engender visceral dislike.

Vaughn's conquered most of his expositional demons. I was amazed, for example, that each of the five houses visited after the opening scene in order to introduce the other five sets of parents and kids were labeled with actual names; it's only mildly disappointing to go back to that first scene and the first family to note that, no, he didn't identify them.

The story itself is quite fun. Six kids, the offspring of six sets of parents, discover that their parents are, in fact, nefarious supervillains engaged in evil schemes, and they rebel. Volume 1 only sets things in motion, with the kids together and on the run, and just beginning to grasp their potential, as well as the threat arrayed against them.

It's been long enough since the Champions and the West Coast Avengers that I suppose I can accept a supervillainous cabal that no one's ever heard of appearing and taking over the city. Still, it verges on the sort of thing I've become reluctant to accept, the notion that there's been this big conspiracy all along and we've just now hearing of it, even though it would have been likely for the conspiracy to have appeared previously in universal continuity if it was so powerful and pervasive.

Anyway, there you go. I don't hate a BKV book. I'll be looking for volume 2.

Nananananananana Nananananananana

Working the obit beat, Mike Chary told me that Neal Hefti has died. He was a composer and arranger for Woody Herman, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and countless others, but we probably know him best for this:

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, that also represents Hefti's only Grammy Award.

Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Decide for yourself. Here are some covers by The Who, The Jam, and The Marketts, who took it to #17 on the charts in 1966.

Goin' Ape

DC has released a trade paperback collecting 8 or 10 stories featuring apes (and various other non-human primates). As you might expect, most of the stories are from the sixties (when DC's ape obsession was in its heyday), but there are stories from as long ago as 1959 and as recent as 1999.

Art Adams's cover will give the trivia mavens among you a good idea as to the contents of the trade, since he was careful to depict the actual heroes and apes from the featured stories.

It's a fun trade. Hats off to DC for putting together a collection like this.

Rembrandt

There is no comics content in this post. It is about my pet rabbit, who died this morning. He was 9 years old.

Curmudgeons Con: Fair Warning

We're not always good about giving proper announcements for Curmudgeon Con activities, so here's five days' notice for our big run-up to the election con. Join us on Saturday the 18th (even if Alex Ross and Tom Spurgeon won't). See who wins out in the taste test between Obama and McCain Hot Sauce. Can pastrami and turkey pastrami share the same stage without coming to blows? And finally, once and for all, the final throwdown between Secret Invasion and Final Crisis. Or maybe we won't talk about politics at all.

It all happens at Manny's in Chicago's South Loop at 1:00. Curmudgeons readers, comics fans, lapsed comic fans, and hungry people of any stripe--if you're in the Greater Chicagoland area, you're cordially invited to come.