Jumping into Comics

Thursday, January 31, 2008

DC Comics is bringing back the fun at last...

... in it's six-issue Ambush Bug mini-series, which comes out in July. In a recent Newsarama interview, Keith Giffen, who's plotting and pencilling this mini-series, makes an interesting comment about how this project came to be:

And out of the blue -- and I really mean out of the blue; I was not expecting
this -- Dan DiDio and Jann Jones called me up and said, "You want to do Ambush
Bug? Six issues?" And I was like, "You're really asking?" [laughs] And they
said, "Yeah!"Apparently, they kind of agree with me. NRAMA: Agree with you?KG:
Yeah. They brought it up that comics are taking themselves way too
seriously
, and it's time to thrash them around a bit and remind people why
comic books are supposed to be fun.


I don't disagree with Dan and Jan's comments, but I kind of wish Dan had realized that before killing off a bunch of Justice League International characters and making Maxwell Lord "evil all along." Justice League International, by the way, was the era of the Justice League (DC Comics' premiere super-team) in which humor played a large part. Maxwell Lord was the financial backer of the team during this period and was initially portrayed as borderline sinister, but turned out to be under the control of a villainous computer program. After breaking free, Max was generally portrayed as an amoral businessman, but not evil: in fact, his morality seemed to grow throughout the series, as seen through the various thought-balloons revealing what he was thinking. Which DC then decided to ignore, despite these being his INNER THOUGHTS.

*sigh* but I digress. I'm just glad DC's ready to laugh at itself again.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Newsarama's interview with Duncan Roleau about his Metal Man series includes a bunch of covers from earlier Metal Men series, and I have to say, they sound like something Grant Morrison would come up with (and that's a good thing). Check it:

http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/MetalMen/Metal_Men-007.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/MetalMen/MetalMen20.jpg (I LOVE this one)
http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/MetalMen/Metal_Men-026.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/MetalMen/DCShowcase040.jpg