Art Attack: June 2012's Coolest Covers

-Remember how we all spent years thinking Black Manta looked kind of ridiculous? Like how we all thought Aquaman was lame? The reward for our callous behavior is that Geoff Johns goes out of his way to write Aquaman bad ass and now Ivan Reis puts equal effort into making Manta look kick ass. Snark triumphs again!

-Loosely continuing the "back in the day" theme I've got going here, back in the day when the Phoenix Force was first introduced, guys like Dave Cockrum and John Byrne made it look cool enough, but they only had so many tools at their disposal. Today, with state of the art rendering and coloring techniques, the folks drawing and coloring variations of the Phoenix across AvX get to go all out and ramp this cosmic bad boy up to 11. Alan Davis uses great perspective and shading on Secret Avengers while Jim Cheung just brings the intensity on Avengers Vs. X-Men. Man, I never knew I needed a Phoenix bursting out of Captain America's chest until I saw it, but yeah, needed it.

-I like a lot about that Batman, Inc. cover by Chris Burnham, can't narrow it down. Is that Halo and Looker?

-Words on a cover can easily make things too busy, but Phil Noto really nailed their use on his Buffy cover this month. The placement and the juxtaposition against the image draws me in rather than scaring me away; skills.

-Good month for Buffy covers. That Drusilla one by Georges Jeanty is striking. Great use of white space and moving the action to the bottom of the page.

-Great layers to DC Universe Presents by Ryan Sook. Each bleeds into the next.

-Deadpool #56 by Dave Johnson is my current computer desktop background at work.

-Terry Dodson draws a fantastic Black Cat. I mean, he draws many characters well, but something about this one in particular really brings out his A-game. It's that mischievous smile and the glimmer in her eyes. Glad to see him taking her on again.

-Adam Hughes can draw dudes too.

-That's one crazy wolf by Simon Bisley on the Hellblazer cover.

-Dale Eaglesham doing something very different on Hulk, very outside the box. Cool to see since he's dynamite as a classic super hero artist, but he's a clever designer as well.

-I don't talk enough about Stephanie Hans' Journey Into Mystery covers (tremendous book, by the by). The more characters she puts on, the better. Beautiful colors.

-Jerome Opena and Dean White on Uncanny X-Force are simply a dream team. Rad to see them getting cover duty.

-Chris Samnee, what are you doing on these Wolverine covers? I love it.

ACTION COMICS #10 by Rags Morales

ALABASTER #3 by Greg Ruth

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #687 by Stefano Caselli

AQUAMAN #10 by Ivan Reis

AVENGERS VS. X-MEN #5 by Jim Cheung

BATMAN, INC. #2 by Chris Burnham

BATWOMAN #10 by J.H. Williams III

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER SEASON 9 #10 by Phil Noto

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER SEASON 9 #10 variant by Georges Jeanty

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: DRUSILLA #1 by Georges Jeanty

DAREDEVIL #14 by Paolo Rivera

DC UNIVERSE PRESENTS #10 by Ryan Sook

DEADPOOL #56 by Dave Johnson

DEFENDERS #7 by Terry Dodson

DIAL H #2 by Brian Bolland

DOROTHY & THE WIZARD IN OZ #8 by Skottie Young

FAIREST #4 by Adam Hughes

FURY MAX #3 by Dave Johnson

HELLBLAZER #292 by Simon Bisley

HULK #53 by Dale Eaglesham

I, VAMPIRE #10 by Clayton Crain

INCREDIBLE HULK #9 by Michael Komarck

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #639 by Stephanie Hans

MORNING GLORIES #21 by Rodin Esquejo

NEW DEADWARDIANS #4 by Ian Culbard

THE PUNISHER #12 by Marco Checchetto

SAGA #4 by Fiona Staples

SCARLET SPIDER #6 by Ryan Stegman

SECRET AVENGERS #28 by Alan Davis

THE SHADE #9 by Tony Harris

SMALLVILLE SEASON 11 #2 by Cat Staggs

STAR WARS: DARTH VADER & THE GHOST PRISON by Dave Wilkins

ULTIMATE COMICS ULTIMATES #12 by Kaare Andrews

UNCANNY X-FORCE #26 by Jerome Opena

UNTOLD TALES OF THE PUNISHER MAX #1 by Roland Boschi

WINTER SOLDIER #6 by Steve Epting

WOLVERINE #308 by Chris Samnee

Wizard Features That Never Were: James Marsters Up Close

First, a tangent: I have never been fond of doing phone interviews.

Ok, scratch that; I actually generally enjoy doing phone interviews once they get underway, but I get incredibly nervous for them. The primary reason for this is that I have (actual clinical diagnosed) anxiety disorder. I got diagnosed my freshman year of college after 18 or so years of not getting why I paced nervously before wrestling matches or freaked out on long car rides. I manage pretty well these days and most people I haven't told about my condition never suspect I have it (well there goes that). However, if you watch me carefully (and I don't encourage you to do so...weirdo...) or know me well, you can still catch little things.

My particular disorder is tied to my stomach and my digestive system. Put simply, my stomach gets upset a lot, and whenever I'm put in a position where I feel as though I may not have ready access to a bathroom, I start feeling like I have to go. Hence the fear of being cooped up in the car, the reason I need to sit near a bathroom on the train even when I don't need to go, and why I rarely enter an elevator on a full stomach.

Getting back to the point, it can also make phone interviews very nerve-wracking. The reason being, if I'm in the middle of an important call, I don't want to have to excuse myself to use the bathroom. If I'm speaking with a comic creator I barely know, I really don't want to. And if I'm speaking with a celebrity who only has a 15-minute window to talk, I really really don't want to.

However, despite all this, I have done--and enjoyed--many many interviews with comic types, actors and actresses, professional wrestlers, and other cool people. Some day I'll do a more navel-gazing entry about said cool people, but the inspirational message here is that hurdles can be overcome. Hey, I may not be working the red carpet at the Oscars or winning Nobel prizes, but I do pretty well for myself, and I do it despite sweating every time I need to take a taxi.

If you survived that pre-amble, let's get to the point.

One phone interview I did lobby hard for while at Wizard was an opportunity to speak with James Marsters back in 2005. I've been a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan for years and without a doubt Marsters' Spike was a huge reason why. His ability to play a total badass yet turn on a dime to do self-deprecating humor or an impassioned love story was uncanny. I've seen very few actors truly mine all they can out of a character the weigh James Marsters did with Spike.

Anyhow, James was getting set to join the cast of Smallville as Brainiac, and being one of the few staffers who actually watched the show on a regular basis (Kiel was/is another), I had become more or less the default correspondent for when we did articles relating to it or conducted interviews with the folks involved (and say what you will about the show, which can often be pretty ridiculous, but it's good fun and the people involved worked their asses off and are good folks; during a legitimate nightmare phone interview where I was incredibly sick and even more paranoid than usual, Tom Welling was absurdly nice to me and pretty darn understanding considering I introduced myself with "If my voice trails off, it's because I had to puke").

As is generally the case with celeb interviews, James called me at a predetermined time as opposed to me calling him (another thing I hate about phoners: lack of control) and we got to chat for a good half hour, longer I believe than we were supposed to (it's always a good sign when you're interviewing an actor and their agent must intervene to remind them they have places to be). We ran through all my bullet point questions and he gave some good answers on what was coming up on the show, the standard Buffy stuff ("Five more years and I'm too old to play Spike, so if we're gonna do something with him, it better be before then"), etc. It was a nice moment of self-satisfaction for me when I got him to chuckle with "What surprises people most about you when they meet you: that you're not blond, not British, or not 25?"

(I believe the answer was "I haven't been 25 for a looooong time, dude," said in his full-on California surfer dude voice, then followed by "...but I always seemed to fool them" in the Spike accent, which I tried not to squeal like a 16-year old girl over).

He also talked about some stage work he was doing and I think even that he was gonna be in the last Star Wars movie but wasn't for some reason. I do remember my one embarassing moment (there's always at least one) was that I was telling him what a huge fan I was (first rule of interviewing celebrities: if you're a fan, you tell them after you're done with the bulk of the interview, that way they take you seriously on the front end and leave with a good impression) and mentioned that I even watched an episode of The Mountain he had appeared on and ended up getting kinda hooked on the show (I was living in a motel room with no friends at the time, having started working at Wizard only a few weeks earlier). At first, it seemed like he couldn't remember the gig I was referring to, so I tried to play it off as, "Oh yeah, it was a terrible show, you wouldn't remember," but then he did remember, and being a pro, seemed a bit offended that I was ridiculing a show where he now recalled he knew the people who worked on it. He also mentioned he had gotten to work with a "great young actor," and a bit humiliated at this point, I rolled my eyes on the other end of the line; that "great young actor" turned out to be Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley, whom I would definitely call myself a fan of these days.

Fortunately, the call didn't quite end on that note, and he was super cool and very grateful thanking me for taking the time and me promising to send him the interview once it saw print.

Which it never did.

I think we ended up pulling a few quotes and using them as a tiny sidebar in the Hollywood section, but the James Marsters Up Close kept sliding off the schedule, being among the lower priority features, from issue to issue to Mega Movie Special to issue until only like two things he said were still of any relevance.

So I ended up having a great chat with an actor I really dig who turned out to be as great a guy as I could have hoped for, and if I'm ever fortunate enough to speak with him again, I'll have to introduce myself as the douche who couldn't push his interview into an issue of Wizard.

I hate phone interviews.

Five Comics Worth Reading, 10/22/08 pt. 1

Gonna go for something different this week, as I was too wiped to do this over the weekend, so rather than skip a week or try and cram everything into a weekday night where I'm exhausted from dealing with Marvel.com shenanigans, I'm going to try doing one post a day on the five books that rocked my world last week. Who knows, this may end up becoming a more regular thing if it works. So let's do it to it. But first...

Stop! Read the disclaimer!

ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL #13

It's been great to see both "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel," for certain two of my favorite TV shows ever, picked up in comic book form under the direction of their creator, Joss Whedon, over the last couple years, but while the Buffy comic has become the big money hit, I've found myself anticipating IDW's Angel series a bit more. This isn't totally unprecedented as I was actually an "Angel" fan before I ever became a "Buffy" convert.

Having recently rewatched all of "Buffy" on DVD with my fiancee, Megan, I can say that as a full body of work, that show is certainly superior to "Angel" and has held up better. However, it was a case of timing for me back in the day, as I only sporadically watched "Buffy" until late in college when it was winding down but picked up on "Angel" at exactly the right time. "Angel" started right as I was getting ready to graduate high school, and as it was ostensibly about the journey people take after that period in their life, so I was hooked.

Also, I'm a dude, so the male fantasy show hooked me a little more quickly at age 18 than the female empowerment one. Go fig.

Anyhow, back to the funnybooks, Angel: After the Fall, like the Buffy comic, picked up after the show's series finale and, again like its counterpart, threw the status quo into a tailspin, plunking Angel and friends (and L.A.) down in Hell where humans were caught in the crossfire of a demonic turf war. Over the course of its first year, After the Fall has roped back in pretty much all of the familiar faces from "Angel," in some cases in extremely altered states (Gunn has fangs, Angel does not), and had them circling one another leading up to the climactic clash of the last couple issues.

Before I (finally) get to issue #13 proper, one final Buffy vs Angel comics comparison: the Buffy book is great on its own but can feel like kinda a separate beast from the TV show since their base of operations for the seven-year run of the show no longer exists, the cast is scattered, etc.; however, on "Angel," there was never quite that sense of comfort as the locales and cast changed much more often, so After the Fall really does feel like a logical extension of where we left off.

Ok, the issue itself. As mentioned, writer Brian Lynch (under direction from Whedon) has spent 12 issues manuevering his pieces into place, so my expectations going into this were emotional payoffs galore, and this one delivered by the boatload.

No character has changed from the show to the comic more thoroughly than Gunn, who went from being the human heart and soul of the team on TV to a vampire with delusions that he can succeed where Angel has failed on the printed page. He's a truly tragic and frightening "villain" as you desperately want him to come around and realize how crazy he's acting, but he just won't. His complete emotional breakdown upon realization of his fool's errand is crushing and makes his reunion at issue's end with former lover Fred/Illyria all the more tragic--and what happens next all the more shocking.

Connor is a character I always hated on the show because he was all about the whining and the inner darkness, but Lynch has found room to grow him and make him really likeable. His relationship with Angel, his father, has become the core of the book, and it has become something both touching and cool that doesn't detract from either being a badass hero. His speech about not giving up the fight in this issue as he attempts to bring his pop back from the brink of death is "Braveheart" dope and makes me wish the show had gone another year or two if only to see if the character could have gotten here in that medium.

The one problematic character in the book, as he was in the final season of "Angel," is Spike, simply because the guy can clearly carry his own show (or comic book), so making him a supporting player is tough. Nonetheless, Lynch writes him very well, as his dialogue makes him far and away the wittiest member of the cast. Being breathlessly offended at a Slayer thinking his jacket is pleather as three of them leap at him with murderous intentions is classic.

At the end of the day, Angel: After the Fall is exactly what an "Angel" fan would hope for: another season of the show with an unlimited budget and no casting conflicts. Shit is crazy, there are dragons in every issue, and tragedy, comedy and action collide on a monthly basis for a nice little soup. I would say it's a comic I can really sink my teeth into, but that would be cliched. So I won't.

But I could.

See you tomorrow (I hope)!