Congrats Rosetta! Happy Veteran's Day! Comic Books and Their Movies/Shows. Character Changes.

Good day and congrats to the Rosetta Probe!

Sorry this is later in the week than I wanted.  I really want the format of a news entry on Monday with an opinion article on Wednesday and maybe Friday.  Oh well, I'll sort of mash them up unintelligibly here.

Firstly is the news segment.  The Superior Iron Man and the Spider-Verse event has launched from Marvel today, as well as the new Captain America series starring former sidekick (though he'd say partner) Sam Wilson as a Falcon/Cap hybrid.  Notable releases from Image include The Walking Dead #134, new series Drifter, and another TPB release of Invincible (vol. 20).  For DC, Dinah Lance finally takes up the (non-fishnetted) Black Canary guise in the Arrow show, and...well... Convergence.  Frickin' Convergence.

Let's start with DC.  The hard one.

The show Arrow has been fairly successful and was somewhat controversial in how it was clearly meant to be a show about Batman but someone scribbled out "Batman" on the top and renamed it "Green Arrow" about Dinah Lance, who in the show was Ollie's former love interest he cheated on with her sister (long story sort of), and how she wasn't the Black Canary but her sister (same one) was until the sister died.  The death led to the obvious in which Dinah will be stepping into her sister's non-fishnetted persona and continue on as a crime fighter.  So not news exactly, but it still seemed relevant enough.  Picture of her in the wrong costume below.

So let's get down to Convergence.  DC really loves it when people say they steal from Marvel (and vice-versa), but when Marvel has the same exact big event coming out of the pipeline you do, well... There you go.  Convergence is about Brainiac pulling the wool over a great and underappreciated character named Booster Gold in getting to something called the "Vanishing Point" where he basically has access to all realities and all time.  From here, Brainiac picks up all these quaint little cities/worlds/events/etc. and puts them under domes for his collection next to one another.  You might say, "Mak, isn't that the premise of Secret Wars?" And I'd say, "Only to this point."  The difference is, unless the Collector is the one placing all of Marvel's periods under one Battleplanet roof, then no. So what's the difference?  Well, it looks like instead of an all powerful time and space capable Beyonder placing specific points in history he probably enjoys onto a planet to encounter one another, Brainiac is reaching through time and space to specific points in history he enjoys and is putting them onto a planet to encounter one another.  Totes different, because the Beyonder is a snappy dresser.

You must be this fancy to be omnipotent for a while until you're not

 So the question is, "What is different?"  Well, the Beyonder at his core is someone who wants to see what people will do under conditions he sets and in locations he has selected and is in general curious.  Very different from Brainiac who wants to see what the people will do under certain conditions he sets and in certain locations he has selected and is in general a curious guy.  Hmmm....  Okay, well...  The Beyonder is a formerly all powerful sort of guy (who probably will have some influence in Secret Wars), and Brainiac is more or less a collector who has gained access to enlarge his collection.  There are subtle differences in the characters (assuming Marvel plays this straight and has the Beyonder come back and at near original power), and well... Yeah.  The events seem a lot of the same.  And this is very weird.  I'll explain in another post why I think this is weird.  But ONWARDS!

Image is releasing a new Walking Dead issue and that's important because people like the Walking Dead.  While they release comics every week all year long, WD only comes along once a month and blah blah blah.  I honestly have a real monotone reading of this in my head.  Image's other comic Drifter and this is the one I'm excited about. 

From Bleeding Cool: " Mankind’s colonization of the galaxy has left countless planets mined bare and lifeless in DRIFTER. A space transport crashes onto a backwater world whose unique properties set the stage for a story that combines the dark wonder of a strange and alien landscape with the struggles of an abandoned and lawless frontier town."

That's the basic premise of Drifter and judging by some of the art it will look great, and the premise has me interested enough to check it out.  Written by Ivan Brandon who is a complete unknown to me and art by Nic Klein who is also an unknown (but the image below is wonderful), I'm definitely seeing potential in this series and I'm glad Image has their hands on it because Marvel or DC would probably not even allow this series to see the light of day, and even if they did they'd axe it within a couple months when it doesn't reach Captain America numbers of sales.

SPACE FRONTIER, AHOY!!

 Finally is Marvel with Superior Iron Man, Spider-Verse, and good ol' Cap.  First up is Superior Iron Man which I hinted about in a previous post being Tony Stark with the dick knob turned up to 15.  Apparently from the events in Axis (which I skipped because of how I normally feel about Big Events), Tony Stark has been switched from his normally heroic (ha) persona to what he was pre-Iron Man: The incarnation of ego and evil with little regard to the people he may potentially harm.  That's right, an entrepreneur who's looking to make shareholders happy.  Daredevil is supposed to feature heavily in this and I should have a review on this soon-ish.

So is he superior because he's white?

 Next is Spider-Verse.  Written by Dan "Always a good time" Slott, this series is about a being named Morlun who is going about the entire multiverse destroying spider totem types, aka versions of Spider-Man, and it's up to every Spider-Man (or girl as famous now) to team up and prevent this disaster.  Notable because this series launched an entire cosplay fever and entire new ongoing comic series about non-616 Gwen Stacey: Spider Girl just by the cover alone.  And I can't blame them. That cover is gorgeous and the character design is just beautiful.

                              

The cover on the right is the only one anybody really cared about anyway.  Love that design.

Next is one of the controversial (only if you subscribe to the White Power movement) character shake ups: Captain America!  (Who am I kidding? The same movement is just as pissed off about Thor being a woman now even though she's technically white)

Due to the events of a battle with a cloned Red Skull, Steve lost the Super Soldier Serum which kept him eternally fit and youthful, which aged him to an extremely old man.  In his place he has selected his previous partner in crime-fighting, Sam Wilson the Falcon, to take his place.  Right away this is an interesting decision as Marvel has been under fire recently (as have all comic books) about inclusion and variety.  This is actually a pretty good move for Marvel because it's not just "See, we can have black heroes who aren't Luke Cage!" (Yeah, I know about Black Panther, I mean always in your face heroes.) This feeling is organic, and Sam's design alone makes him his own Cap even better than Bucky did when he took over the shield.  Sam has integrated much of his old Falcon suit into this new Cap suit and really melded both identities together to create something new, fresh, and very exciting to look at.  This is less "Black Captain America" (Yeeees, I -do- know about Isaiah Bradley.  I own Truth: Red, White, and Black and many comics concerning Josiah X, and his descendent Patriot was an extremely well conceived character) and more a great Captain America who happens to be black.  It's organic, it makes sense, it doesn't feel forced.  You don't read it and say, "Oh yeah, I forgot Marvel's PR needed a boost with all the crap going around all entertainment industries right now."  This also might set a precedent for the future of Marvel's movies with how after the Civil War-like movie of Cap 3 (which I said would never happen, so egg on my face), Chris Evans is probably done with Marvel (I think), and Sam (played by Anthony Mackie) might step into the shield wing first to continue on the tradition and keep the movies from getting too stagnant.  I cannot stress how good of a move this is.  Too bad Steve will be back in his red booties in the next few years.  Oh well.

Fear my Super Soldier/Captain America/Falcon fusion!

I wanted to write an opinion piece, and I will try to later this week.  Maybe it'll be about Big Events.  Maybe.  Or maybe just comic book fans in general.

Oh, I did want to put a quick bit about how Naruto is now complete.  I didn't realize in a previous post that it would be over the VERY NEXT DAY after I posted it.  I mentioned before how life is a little darker without a series like that going on.  It really brought it home today when I realized it wasn't coming out this week anymore.  You really sort of get hooked on a schedule of watching and waiting, and then finding out it's gone.  I mean, it's not like losing a pet, but it's definitely a little weighty.

Either way, thank you very much for taking the time to read this!

Is This The Best Time For A "Jumping On" Point In Mainstream Comics?

As the title asks, "Is this the best time for a jumping on point in mainstream comics?"  Clearly not verbatim.

It's a good question.  The answer is no.  That would've been the early 2000's when the Big Two (Marvel and DC) decided to pull the nearly dead body of good comics out of the financial gutter and breathe life back into quality and sales.  So unless you have a time machine you will have to settle for this point in your life.

But this is a good time to jump into the big two superhero factory comic companies, and that's because of the hair width, finely tuned, sweet spot planet aligned placement the two companies are in right now.  Let's start with Marvel.

With Marvel, as I've talked about two posts back, we see they're gearing up for some huge multiversal event which promises to bring out many of the most well known Big Events and somehow have that lead up into what seems to be (from the art provided by Alex Ross) multiversal fight between the current timeline and possibly their past counterparts and even other universal counterparts.  And while I'm not sure, I am sure about one thing: Continuity of only the most important parts will come to light.  With all of these Big Events possibly being revisited, which really only reinforce how I feel about modern Big Events and how they mean nothing, new readers will be treated to a rare conglomeration of points in important moments of a character's life.  See the photo below for reference:

See the two Iron Men there?  One all white, and one all retro?  One of them isn't Tony Stark.  Well, at least in the original Secret Wars.  This would be a very interesting conflict as Jim Rhodes is actually acting as Iron Man as his Tony is lost in the pit of alcoholism and had recently relinquished his role and responsibility as Iron Man to Rhodes.  Rhodes would see Stark is back in a fantastically futuristic armor and only 40 times the dick he was when Rhodes knew him.  Cap is fighting his protege who has taken his place.  Heck, Iron Man 2020 and Miles Morales the Ultimate Spider-Man are even in there.  Thor fighting new female Thor, etc.  With all these characters converging on one point, and all these Big Events being teased up to it in a single year, Marvel will have to be working in overdrive to get important character points (especially points in time) about the differences between characters.  If a new reader ever needed a synopsis and comparison about a character's past, this would be it.  And like I said, it seems Marvel is looking toward some sort of reboot and so maybe this would be good to get a taste of what might be coming.  I'm pretty sure I see Earth X in there as well, MC2, and definitely Marvel 2099.

For DC.  If Marvel ever had a reason to not reboot their universe, DC is that reason.  While the House of Ideas isn't exactly ashamed to copy what DC does, it at least tries to not make it so obvious (though both do steal and both fail at subtlety).  DC has this history about rebooting their universe both hard and soft.  They've done it quite a few times actually. And while each time is met with groans, it seems everybody forgets and adapts to the new universe with positive reactions.  Such is also the case with their Post-Flashpoint New 52 universe.  Not to be confused with their New 52 post Infinite Crisis where Superboy Prime retcon punched the universe until it changed history in the fallout.  This New 52 is much more severe in that it completely reset the entire universe and merged DC's other imprints (which were their own dimensions) into the fold.  Superman got a new start and was no longer married, the Justice Society was now Earth 2 specific, etc.  DC just basically pressed the reset button on their universe so they can tell similar stories, but in new and potentially exciting ways.  While you may think, "Well Mak, shouldn't the jumping on point have been three years ago when they actually pulled this stunt?" I'd say the answer is, "No."  Why?  Simple.  DC has had three years to put this new universe together, which means that you get to jump in AFTER the confusion of the reset.  You don't have to wonder why Tim Drake wasn't the Robin, but is Red Robin, or why certain characters behave as they do now.  You can read a few issues knowing they're still fairly recent, and if you like them you don't have a gigantic several hundred issue backlog to look up.  You can just go and pick from the previous few dozen issues which exist in their print line.  Granted the New 52 isn't a completely hard reboot, but is just mostly a hard reboot.  Just shy of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which means that some of the stories prior to Flashpoint are still relevant and you can search those out as you desire.  So long as they have nothing to do with Power Girl or any of the JSA.  So with only a few back issues and most of the wrinkles iron out of the Post-Flashpoint universe, you can jump in and have yourself a good ol' time in the Big Two publishers.  I'd talk about Image, Avatar Press, and all the rest, but I'm sure if you're new to reading you've probably watched DC and Marvel movies and want to start there.