Dear DC, Please Publish More Wonder Woman Comics Like This One

So the other day I was going through the July DC Comics solicitations for work, when I noticed that they're publishing an honest to goodness Wonder Woman comic for little girls that month: DC Comics Presents: Wonder Woman Adventures #1.

I couldn't help but comment on how this is pretty great...But it's also kind of strange.

This is a reprint containing four issues of the late '90s series Adventures in the DC Universe, which was an oddball little series. It launched in 1997 shortly after "Superman: The Animated Series" and its comic tie-in started expanding Bruce Timm's "Batman: The Animated Series" setup onscreen and off. But with no TV precedent set for a lot of the DC heroes, Adventures in the DC Universe ended up being a weird DCAU/DCU mash-up. When someone from the Batman or Superman shows appeared up in the series, they'd be consistent with their onscreen appearances. When anyone else showed up, they'd be consistent with whatever was going on in the DC Comics of the day.

This made for a few head-scratcher stories, such as issue #16 (which I have in my apartment somewhere) where Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and Green Arrow Connor Hawke starred in a kid-friendly spiritual sequel to Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' iconic "Speedy Does Heroin" story.

Luckily, Wonder Woman wasn't in one of her leather jacket phases then. So the comics being reprinted in July star pretty much the classic Wonder Woman – the character that also appears on any number of t-shirts, coffee mugs and Halloween costumes sold by Warner Bros. Consumer Products every year.

Now, when I first saw this book I had to put on my Graeme McMillan speculation hat and wonder exactly who greenlit this series and whether or not DC sees it as a way to test the waters on more WW material for girls. I really doubt that, because you figure they would have promoted this SOMEWHERE if its sales performance would at all impact future publishing launches. But wishful thinking has me hoping someone at DC is talking about doing this...because it would be SO radical if they actually did.

Pound for pound, "A Wonder Woman comic you can give to a little girl" is the #1 thing I hear from retailers/parents/comic readers-in-general when discussing obvious comic projects they'd like see. It is just such a basic "They should be doing this" observation. And I'm not one of those people who likes to go around the internet looking at daydream pitches for comics starring teen reporter Lois Lane or manga-esque Wonder Woman saying, "I'd buy that and it would do really well." Because I'm not sure I would, and I AM sure that those comics wouldn't sell huge numbers at launch. But you've got to think SOMEONE would buy a kid-friendly Wonder Woman comic at some point along the distribution/platform chain.

I mean, okay, posting the above picture of a totally adorable little girl in a Wonder Woman costume standing in front of a totally gross picture of Catwoman on all fours licking up milk is a cheap tug to the heartstrings on this issue. I know it is. And I don't want to make this a blog post decrying things like the New 52 Wonder Woman series or DC's Wonder Woman output in general. I've only read a few issues of the latest book, and I think that taking the gore of Greek myth and twisting it into the WW mythos with an eye towards horror is a perfectly valid direction for the character. It might be fun, I don't know!

But for real, that photo illustrates a valid point at the same time. Wonder Woman is used to sell products to little girls – often via their moms and grandmas who grew up on a kid-friendlier set of comic books and the TV show. And the comics that get put out are never consistent with that image. I don't make an absolute or moral judgement on that. I think there can be room for all sorts of Wonder Woman comics, and I'm happy to have DC continue to make them for fans of the "serious" superhero universe that comprises its main line. I just don't think that kind of product and a kids product are mutually exclusive concepts.

Speaking from personal experience, I know that my sister-in-law has literally dozens of Wonder Woman products around the house for herself and some for my niece LuLu as well. But not one of those products is a comic book. And LuLu LOVES comics! She goes to bed every night reading my brother's old Garfield collections, she devours Archie Digests, and this weekend she flipped when I brought here a stack of FCBD books including Peanuts, Tinkerbell, Yo Gabba Gabba! and The Simpsons. But until July comes, I'll have no Wonder Woman comics to give her, no matter how happy that would make her and her mom. The reason is simply because there's been almost no basic kid-friendly WW material created since the early 1980s.

In fact, the whole DC Comics Presents format was created to collect material that isn't substantial enough by volume to justify a full trade. And what that means is that DC doesn't actually have enough Wonder Woman material suitable for little girls that they can put out a trade collection. Actually, even the four issues in the upcoming reprint aren't ALL Wonder Woman stories. One is the series debut, which focused on the whole Justice League, and amongst the stories reprinted is a short Batman Vs. Poison Ivy piece. That makes for less than three single comic books starring Wonder Woman. Compare that to the fact that since DC started doing kid-friendly superhero books in the early '90s, they've published hundreds of Batman comics, hundreds of Teen Titans comics, over 100 Superman comics and over 100 Justice League comics.

While that's a little depressing in its own right, it also makes it harder for DC to place Wonder Woman as a character in the kid-friendly initiatives they've already got going. For example, recently the kids book publisher Capstone Press, whose Stone Arch imprint did a fine job teaming with Art Baltazar on a series of DC Pets chapter books, signed a deal to release library bound collections of DC kids comics for educational and mass market distribution. And as you can see from that link, all the 100+ issue franchises I mentioned above have entries in Capstone's launch scheme. Wonder Woman doesn't.

But all hope is not lost!! Like I said, I think DC publishing even this one mini collection is a very positive step and something we should give them a collective internet high five for. And even though there are scarcely any more Wonder Woman comics from recent years to represent (ignoring the question of new books for little girls), I think there are just enough issues around for them to do another collection like the one shipping in July. If you take the comics from the Justice League Unlimited series (which I remember Adam Beechen doing a fine job on back in the day) that focus on Wonder Woman in total, you'd have the promising-looking issue above as well as this one with Deadman, this one with the Royal Flush Gang and this one with DC's Western heroes. That's not quite as strong a start as Wonder Woman meeting Catwoman or Supergirl, but I think it's enough to make for a DC Comics Presents: Wonder Woman Adventures #2.

And hey, two issues of DC Comics Presents: Wonder Woman Adventures is practically the same thing as two Capstone Wonder Woman library collections. See what I just did there? Sure, it wouldn't mean that hundreds of thousands of little girls would suddenly know the joy of having their own awesome superhero comics to go with their Halloween costume, but it would at least ensure the character had the same chance of finding some readers in a market where the big boys of the DCU already have a head start.

After that, who knows? I know that the DC kids comics are at least 80% based on current animated series, so asking for an ongoing Wonder Woman comic out of the blue is a stretch. But if the publisher wants a shot at reaching the same little girls whose nerdy parents make them clothes out of this kind of fabric, they've got to have more material suitable for that age group to play with. It has to start somewhere. Maybe it'll start in July.

Farewell to the(se) Teen Titans pt. 1

With the DC Universe we’ve known and loved for the past 25/5/2 years (depending on when you consider the current start point; I left out Zero Hour as an option, though I probably shouldn’t have) coming to an end before beginning anew this week, I wanted to do some sort of big post celebrating, highlighting or analyzing said world of comics. A daunting task to be sure, but despite the fact I work “across the street,” we’re talking about stories, characters, creators, etc. that played a major part in my comic book life and that have meant a lot to me.

I’m probably repeating myself here, but while I was a Marvel kid and am employed by Marvel now, DC was a major part of what got me back into comics in college following a multi-year lapse and ultimately led me down the path that made me a—snicker—industry professional. While discovering Sarge’s Comics and wanting to check up on what I’d missed with the X-Men was the lure that caught my attention, a sprawling universe containing so many tales and so much continuity I’d never explored in much depth was the bait that reeled me in.

Crisis on Infinite Earths was my starting point, rather than an end goal, so I could work my way back and figure out who all these people saving the multiverse were and where they’d gotten to since 1986. Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s New Teen Titans was a natural next step as they were the Crisis creators and the complete run was there in the back issue bins for me to find. At the same time, I caught up on what I’d missed in the late 90’s with stuff like Kingdom Come and Grant Morrison’s JLA while also familiarizing myself with then-current DC fare, most prominently the work of Geoff Johns on Flash and JSA.

Wow, this could easily just turn into yet another “Ben’s comics autobiography” post if I let it. But I won’t. Well, I’ll try.

Anyway, while Marvel has provided the bookends of my fandom to date, DC played a major role filling the gaps. I was known as “the DC guy” for most of my tenure at Wizard including a year or so run as their official contact and am a dude who still picks up quite a few of their books with my own hard-earned money and reads most of the others from the comps around the Marvel offices to this day.

But what to write about in this epic farewell to the current DCU? Something about the Justice League since their newest incarnation debuts this week? A treatise on Crisis On Infinite Earths, since it’s kinda my DC bible? An underrated stories list? A lazy top five?

All considered, all rejected.

I was reading Teen Titans #100 over the weekend and realized I vividly recall the first issue of the series and most of the 98 in between. I can’t really think of any other current book I can say that about, at least not one that’s lasted that long. So I figured remembering this last volume of Teen Titans, which in many ways was my DC touchstone from college to Wizard and even to Marvel, was the way to go.

First things first: When a new Teen Titans ongoing series was announced back in 2003, I was not happy about it. Seriously. I even wrote an article about why I didn’t like the idea for my old web site, 411mania.

Seems strange, doesn’t it? I’ve already covered that I was a fan of the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans as well as Geoff Johns, who would be writing the new series. I was also big into the Exiles art of Mike McKone, who would be drawing the book, and one of my favorite characters, Superboy, would be a charter member. So why the glass half empty outlook? It had to do mostly with Young Justice.

Since my “return” to comics, Young Justice by Peter David and Todd Nauck had become one of the consistent favorites to top my reading list. It was funny, it was a clever, and it was different; a monthly super hero comic with plenty of action, jokes and shiny art, but also a knack for incorporating heavier themes involving real teenage problems and building relationships that felt genuine. I loved Young Justice and miss it to this day. Unfortunately, while it had a passionate following, we weren’t enormous, and unfortunately it was just a matter of time before the book got cancelled. I should have been overjoyed that even if one of my most beloved comics was going away, at least most of its cast was sticking together in a new title by my favorite writer, but for whatever reason I took a more “You killed Young Justice!” approach to Teen Titans’ initial publicity.

Fortunately, my stance didn’t hold for long. Yeah, initially I was a bit of a fanboy, grumbling to myself about Impulse now wanting to be called Kid Flash or Superboy acting less like the eternally immature Peter Pan I grew up with, but Geoff did strong work and they did it from the start, so it was hard to not get caught up. As time passed, I bought more and more into the notion that these characters were actually growing up, just as I had; Young Justice was the carefree middle school years of those characters—and me—that still existed in memories and always would, but Teen Titans was the terrifying and exhilarating step that came next.

It also helped that Mike McKone’s art was really good. In a lot of ways he was the modern day George Perez to a new generation of Titans as far as enthusiasm for detail and skill in conveying youth, but he also set himself apart with a smooth style incorporating an eye for the future that set him apart from his decades-earlier predecessor’s classic and studied approach.

Johns also brought his talent for reinvigorating classic villains as well as creating new takes on familiar bad guys honed on Flash over to Titans. Deathstroke shook off his murky anti-hero period and got back to being a thinking man’s bad ass with a warped—but potent—code of honor. The Wilson children, Jericho and Ravager, both got fleshed out and twisted (in my exit interview with Geoff for Wizard when he left the book, I noted how his run was in many ways as much the story of the Wilson family as of the Titans, a fact he registered with a “Huh”). The new Brother Blood was even creepier than the old one (and still gives my wife the willies if I mention him). The fallout of Doctor Light going from joke to psycho with an earned chip on his shoulder was also well-played.

There was also a clear rising action to those early arcs of Teen Titans especially. “A Kid’s Game” was a strong opening that forged the team immediately against an A-level threat in Deathstroke and gave a nod to the title’s past, but it was still our heroes versus a relatively conventional bad guy, which gave room to grow. After two fun one-offs with a JLA versus story and ode to the classic “Day in the Life” issue of NTT, “Raven Rising” upped the stakes with a more serious threat in the new Brother Blood and reached deeper into the past by incorporating Trigon while also building further for the future with Ravager’s ongoing involvement. “Beast Boys and Girls” was another diversion arc with a focus on Beast Boy—which made sense given that Johns had written a solo series for him way back when—another new villain in The Zookeeper and a neat throwback with former Titans—and Superboy—artist as well as a personal favorite, Tom Grummett, on hand to illustrate.

By this time, I had become friends with Geoff and met him at my first San Diego Comic-Con as he was helping me try to break in. My buddy Tim and I went out for a midday drink with him and he showed us on his laptop what was coming up in Titans, so I got my first taste both of being an “insider” and not being able to share awesome secrets.

“Titans Tomorrow” was awesome. In reality, it was “only” a three-part story contained to a single title, but it felt so much bigger in scale. I’ve always loved peeking at future versions of elements I know as much as the next guy, but here Johns devoted as much time to genuine character building in the way of values and destiny as he did to fan service stuff like revisiting the Bart Allen-Rose Wilson romance or incorporating Cyborg’s animated series look—although I suppose that latter credit should be given more to McKone, who outdid himself in redesigning the future Titans and their world.

It would be the next arc, “Lights Out,” where Mike would really get the chance to shine—which was fitting as it would be his swan song before heading back to Marvel to draw Fantastic Four. The story spun out of Identity Crisis, bringing Doctor Light out of that event and back into the Titans orbit, and also brought the new Speedy into the team as well as introducing a new Hawk and Dove. The true draw, however, was McKone getting to draw pretty much every Titan ever when they get called in as backup, an old Perez staple that he had earned and that he attacked with an explosive excitement, truly his finest hour on a tour of duty filled with many high marks.

Teen Titans would be a good and even great book other times past issue #23, but there was certainly a magic and energy in those initial Johns/McKone issues that, as with any truly special creative team, would be impossible to duplicate.

And that seems a good place to stop for today, as 100 issues certainly warrants more than one post (particularly when I—predictably—rambled about myself for the first five paragraphs).

12 Titles DC Forgot to Reboot

If you've read Kiel's weekly Talk to the Hat chat with Tom Brevoort--and if you haven't, what's your problem?--you know by now that some folks at the Marvel offices held a "Guess the 52 DC Reboot Titles" pool and yours truly came out on top--despite the fact that I somehow left Green Lantern off my list.

How did I do it? A combination of knowledge, research, luck and maybe some bribes to make sure no new Lobo book would allow C.B. Cebulski to steal my win.

I also didn't put down any of these titles...

ATARI FORCEBLOOD PACKDOOM FORCEFIREBRANDTHE KINDRED IILAB RATSMASTERS OF THE UNIVERSESONIC DISRUPTORSSTRANGE SPORTS STORIESSUPERBOY AND THE RAVERSTAKIONWELCOME, BACK KOTTER

For the record? I would have most likely bought every one of those books (Superboy & the Ravers twice).

Good luck to all my friends over at DC--especially the ones whose pictures are up in the corner there--on this big new initiative. I'll be reading!

An Open Letter To Geoff Johns & Jim Lee

Dear Misters Johns and Lee,

How's it going? It's been a while since I spoke with you on the phone at a prearranged time. Did you do BBQ on Memorial Day?

Anyway, I'm writing about your new Justice League comic, which was announced today as part of a big honkin DC Comics relaunch of your entire line. What rad news! I'm sure with your past work, you guys will have some cool shit on tap for the League. However, I've got to admit I was a little bummed when I heard the lineup would consist of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern and Aquaman. No Martian Manhunter? J'onn J'onzz denied?

Then I thought about it for a minute, and it occurred to me: is this about his collar?

I know the team is dressing for success with a unified look to their outfits – it's a nice touch! But seriously, they shouldn't be afraid if the Manhunter from Mars wants to pop his up every once in a while. Motherfucker has been popping his collar for years, see?





If this still doesn't convince you, may I suggest the following candidates for League expansion:









I very much look forward to your new comic in September.

Sincerely,

- Kiel Phegley

5 Random Wonder Woman Pictures

So hey, everyone and their sister-in-law (or at least MY sister-in-law, who's a Wonder Woman nut) already heard about Wonder Woman getting a new costume and origin. For the basic facts of the change, you can check out my interview with writer J. Michael Straczynski, and for a great reaction round up check out Robot 6.

I actually didn't think I had much to say about Jim Lee's design or the story surrounding it beyond "it looks all right I guess for something that won't probably last more than two years" and "JMS defines hit or miss for me, so we'll see," but after seeing all the blog reactions and people Tweet-a-booking about it and whatnot, I figured I'd share some random Wonder Woman pics that have crept across my browser.

1. OK, despite what I said about not having any real problems with the new design, it really doesn't hold a candle to the Jamie McKelvie one Shaun Manning reminded me existed this morning:


Seriously, I would buy him drawing that character in that book in a heartbeat. I've never understood why more comic artists don't tap actual fashion sense when designing characters and costume choices. Remember back in the day when Ian Churchill did Cable and everything Nate wore was straight out of classy British fashion mags? That was rad.

2. Heidi MacDonald's post of Wonder Woman covers throughout the years covered a lot of ground including the recent run of cheesecake-tastic images by Adam Hughes, but how she could have missed Hughes' WW masterpiece is beyond me:


I was actually an intern at DC when this cover came in, and if I recall correctly, Hughes created the piece by drawing the old school H.G. Peter homage and then stuffing that art under his recliner cushion to be sat on for a few weeks until it was worn enough to look time-damaged and then he slotted the modern Diana in.

3. I haven't read Wonder Woman #600, the issue where the new costume debuts, just yet so maybe I'm off base here, but when I saw this preview page on DC's The Source blog featuring WW and a roundup of DC superheroines...


...I thought to myself, "Damn, is that really what a lineup of the company's best and brightest female superheroes looks like?" And then I realized that no, it isn't. I'm not sure why Gail Simone didn't include, say, Catwoman, Black Canary, Huntress, Power Girl, Fire, Ice, etc. in the story. There might be an actual reason for it once I read the whole damn thing. But as it is, a bunch of the Teen Titans and Birds of Prey supporting characters really isn't packing quite the Oompf it should for me, you know?

4. Is there ever a reason NOT to link to Kate Beaton's Wonder Woman?


I think not. Also: you should really read the full strip.

5. Finally, after reading this post, MY best guess as to why DC has changed the costume is to cast Helen Mirren in a Wonder Woman movie:


Think about it: she's been around since the 1940s, and she's got great cans.

Our Comics Decade: 2005

Rickey
I don't think I stopped smiling ONCE in 2005.

I graduated college that May because I double-majored, so I needed a few extra courses than the ordinary 4-year education. I moved to New York before the ceremony, though, after taking a second job offer from Wizard and stayed for the summer on a futon in the house of some of the best friends I've ever had. "The Summer of Fun 2005" yielded dozens of BBQs, Halo tournaments, genre TV watching marathons, binge drinking adventures, and so much more that looking back, I feel like I was living in an Apatow comedy about working at a comic book magazine. I had a job in comics, I was on a career path for the first time ever, I had amazing friends, and I was enjoying my life so wholly that I hope hope HOPE that all of humanity has felt - even for a few seconds in their lives - a FRACTION of what it was like that orgasmically fervent year for me. You know that part in high school movies where it's Fourth of July and fireworks are exploding and someone looks over at someone else while, like, Duncan Sheik or whatever plays in the background and says, "This is the best it's gonna be for us"? That was 2005 for me.

And the comics! HOOO BOY, the COMICS! At work, I was devouring EVERYTHING. The fabled Wizard library, with its dense paper-pulpy aroma practically dying my hair four colors, was filled with everything you could want and that's where I tried out everything from Miracleman to Clive Barker's Night of the Living dead comics to early Top Shelf anthologies to Preacher. Shit was tight! And the new comics that year - JESUS! DC played me like a Namco handheld game by dropping dozens and dozens of books in my lap that I just could not stop hoovering up. In 2005 alone, the world was served Green Lantern: Rebirth, Geoff Johns on Teen Titans and Flash and JSA, the Bizarro World hardcover, Will Pfeifer’s criminally underrated HERO, Grant Morrison's PHENOMENAL Seven Soldiers epic, John Arcudi and Patrick Gleason on Aquaman, the juicy launches of JLA Classified (Morrison and Ed McGuinness!) and JSA Classified (Johns and Amanda Conner!), the Kinetic trade paperback (the only full book I actually buy copies of to give as gifts whenever I can), Scott Beatty's fun-to-champion Son of Vulcan, Eaglesham's Villains United, the start of fucking Infinite Crisis, ever-lovin' SOLO, and sooo soo much more!

So, there's the thing - I can't choose just one book. So I'm picking DC Comics as a whole as the book that meant the most to me in 2005. I think it was because I was the most happy I've ever been in my life that year that I allowed myself to be so positively receptive to an outstandingly creative year from DC and ended up falling back in love with comics and what they meant to me. I was already smiling - but DC kept me right on grinning and fueled up a nostalgia I don't think I'll ever run empty on.

Kiel
When I went back to my mom's place this past week for the holiday break, I looked EVERYWHERE for the comic I wanted to write about for this year. You know what? Bupkis. Now, this probably has a lot to do with the fact that I own way too many fucking comic books, but it may also have to do with the fact that Robert Ullman's "Old Timey Hockey Tales" is a very small comic book – some would say a "mini comic."

During the spring of 2005, I made what was either the very stupid or very smart move of packing my 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier with a bunch of crap and driving to Long Island to stay indefinitely with my aunt and uncle in hopes of landing a job in publishing. What that ultimately meant was several months of applying to any and every job open at any book publisher in Manhattan (and some pretty suspect teaching gigs) while spending my nights eating cheap pizza and watching a shit load of "West Wing" reruns. However, during those dark days I had a few bright spots which included my first forays into what I can today loosely call a career.

Stop one on the comics job express was my first trip to the MoCCA Festival in the city. Thanks to the referral of one of my former teachers in a summer science fiction story workshop, one of my first outreach ventures in the city was to meet with Tor editor David Hartwell. This wasn't an interview or anything, just a "Hey, David...won't you take this poor jobless kid to lunch?" David was supremely cool though and gave me a lot of good advice in general, but the more important discovery I made that day was randomly bumping into Tor assistant (and my former DC co-intern) Liz Gorinsky. Aside from helping put together some rad sci fi novels, Liz runs the volunteer program for New York's preeminent alternative comics festival and invited me to join in for that summer's festivities.

If you've been to MoCCA, you know how exciting the show can be for a comics reader of any stripe, and working on the show at even the most basic level is an energizing and enjoyable thing. Even mundane shit like setting up tables and selling tickets is fun at a good MoCCA, and the other folks that take part in the museum and the show are amongst the smartest and nicest I've met in the industry. But most important of all, I bought a ton of comics from some of my first Jeffrey Brown minis to a ton of printmaking-influenced comics from the PARTYKA crew and Ullman's short mini featuring true tales from the Golden Age of the NHL. High fives all around.

Shortly thereafter, I started pitching Alan David Doane on doing some writing for his recently relaunched Comic Book Galaxy site. I have no idea why I did this. I wasn't a journalism major in school (something several of my readers at Wizard and CBR have surmised over the years ;)) and at that time had no real interest in becoming a journalist or reviewer. Mostly I think I was looking for something to do with my time while I waited for more rejection e-mails to come in from publishers, and I'd seen a post somewhere at ADD was looking for people to contribute to the site.

All of this collided when "Old Timey Hockey Tales" became my first semi-amatuer published work in comics journalism. You can read it here. As you can see, the review wasn't particularly insightful or even well-written, but looking back I'm pretty sure I stand by what I said about the book (like I said, I couldn't find it to re-read for this post). That piece led to a handful of reviews and one live con report from the Detroit area alt comics fest Snap! (you can read most of my work for CBG here) as well as one disastrous pitch of a critique of event comics (the less said about that, the better).

Within a few weeks, I had to drop the CGB gig because I'd been brought on at Wizard after another "Why the hell not" round of e-mailing my resume around to try and make any kind of money. In the end, everything worked out surprisingly well considering my total lack of experience in journalism. I'm still not 100% sure how or why that is. What I do know is that I still feel extremely grateful that comics as a whole seemed to reach out to me right when I needed it. There were plenty of times during that year when I was sure I was going to return home to Michigan an abject failure, but thanks to folks like Liz, ADD and Joe Yanarella at Wizard, I ended up getting a chance to prove myself as a professional.

So I guess what I'm saying is "Thanks."

Ben
As I sit down to write this post, I’m somewhat surprised and interested to find that Neil Gaiman’s Sandman intimidates me as much in 2009 as it did in 2005 and every year prior, albeit in a somewhat different way.

In the last few posts in this series and generally when talking about my earliest comic book reading days, I think I’ve always made it pretty clear I was quite the meat and potatoes super hero guy. I’m not too ashamed to admit that before I had a peer group who exposed me to true indy comics and alternative non-capes and tights fare, I unironically thought Vertigo pretty much was indy comics and was pretty skeeved by it. Like I said during my 2003 entry, the idea of branching out beyond Marvel and DC scared me in that I figured that pretty much anything that wasn’t X-Men or Justice League was too heady for me and I’d feel dumb when I didn’t connect to the material.

Being full-time at Wizard, I began to be exposed to and expose myself to a gradually wider variety of comics via the access the company library gave me. I started small just checking out other super hero imprints I’d never explored like Valiant and WildStorm, but I did gradually begin to check out a variety of outside-the-box for me genre stuff such as 100 Bullets and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, discovering along the way both that I could appreciate comics that didn’t involve guys and gals in their underwear and also that doing so seemed to make me a better fan and professional in that I really started to get the full impact and capability of this medium I was dedicating my life to.

And yet still, of in the distance, Sandman loomed ominously.

Excepting perhaps Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, no comic book body of work had been hyped more for me than Sandman. The fact that I really didn’t care for DKR and enjoyed Watchmen, but really no more than something like Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s Avengers, made me leery of reading anything my more learned contemporaries regarded as the seminal stories of our time; I didn’t want to always be the one guy who didn’t get it.

Sandman grew in my head to some crazy threshold that should I cross it I would be passing into a comic world I could get lost in like Alice down the rabbit hole.

But I’m sure by this point you have figured out that I did in fact read Sandman in 2005, so I’ll cut the posturing and get down to it.

Long story short: I enjoyed Sandman. I got absorbed in it pretty quickly and didn’t slow down much plowing through the entire 75+ issue series in a couple months. There were some valleys (early on I wasn’t enthralled with The Doll’s House and some of the short stories collected in Fables and Reflections I found more hit than miss), however, particularly as I think back on it, there were far more peaks.

From the obvious department, yeah, I thought the Doctor Destiny story was one of the scariest fucking comics I’ve ever read, and pretty much every time Death shows up it’s sublime. I also really enjoyed A Game of You and Brief Lives, particularly the latter as I was fascinated by the expanded dynamic of the Endless and their resemblance at times to something like the Greek/Roman pantheon. Honestly though, I think my favorite Sandman story arc—and the only one I actually own—is one that Morpheus barely even has a presence in, that being Worlds’ End, Gaiman’s Canterbury Tales tribute (yes, I read Chaucer in college) in which he really gets to show off his story-telling and genre-shifting skills.

To go on a quick tangent, I actually ended up getting perhaps more into Lucifer, the psuedo-follow-up series to Sandman written by Mike Carey, featuring the retired Lord of Hell whom Gaiman introduced and used sparingly. That series took some of that old school mythological magic I was just talking about in reference to The Endless and really steps it up; Lucifer is quite underrated and I’d love to see Mike Carey write Son of Satan just because.

Getting back to Sandman, one last thing I will say is that I wasn’t always bowled over by the art, but as TJ and I have talked about in private, the art never really seemed to be the (pardon the pun) draw for the old school Vertigo titles that came before you had guys like Eduardo Risso on 100 Bullets or Mark Buckingham on Fables. With Sandman, the art is always competent and conveys exactly what Gaiman needs to say, and occasionally you get a standout performance from a Sam Kieth or Jill Thompson or Charles Vess, but for the most part you just get dependable pictures that get their point across.

So the reason I’m still a bit intimidated to write about Sandman four years later is that those three paragraphs you just read, well, that’s pretty much all I’ve got. I don’t really have any particularly deep musings on Sandman besides saying I liked it and being able to point out my favorite stories (and that it led me to Lucifer—the comic, not the embodiment of evil). I guess that shouldn’t be a really big deal, but there’s still that nervous fanboy in me who feels like I need to have more to say about comics as important as this.

But I don’t.

Ok, I will say this: I really really did get invested in Morpheus and the characters around him to the point where even though I knew the end of the series going in, I was still kinda on the edge of my seat as the issues wound down. Gaiman sure as hell knows how to tease out a character arc over the years like few others.

Honestly, Sandman probably wasn’t even my favorite comic that I read in 2005; I really did dig it and don’t want to undersell it, but I really dug Young Avengers and Green Lantern: Rebirth too. I do think Sandman was the most significant thing I read in 2005 though for a lot of the reasons I discussed above, mostly that I did conquer my great white whale and proved to myself I could do it. Despite still having that nagging feeling that I should have headier thoughts on the work, I recognized then after I finished and still do now that sometimes just enjoying a comic is enough.

Our Comics Decade: 2002

Rickey
If a magic fire demon swept through my apartment and destroyed everything I owned but only one item survived the shitty enchanted luck I just had, I'd want it to be my copy of Jeffrey Brown's Clumsy.

(Or my girlfriend or my cat.)

Strolling through the indie section of a comic shop near the University of Texas campus in 2002, Clumsy's plain tan cover with slender text caught my eye, and that sleek-ass price tag of 10 bucks meant my broke college student ass could afford to give it a try. In order to buy comics (and beer) in 2002, I gave plasma twice a week and still have the track marks for that high volume of generosity I gushed. Meanwhile, there's never really been a time in my life where I gave up reading comics or felt like I outgrew them or traded them for girls or anything like that - I bought them pretty consistently since I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade. But starting in 2002, I was getting pretty bored with the high-adventure, fantastical elements of superhero comics. So, armed with $20-$40 bucks each Wednesday, I was ready to try new shit at the comic shop and slice-of-life books were the freedom my Thelma and Louise comic passion was looking to drive off a cliff for.

Clumsy is BASICALLY an auto-biographical story about a long-distance relationship and the semi-neurotic dude (Jeffrey Brown) who deals with it all. But you've got to understand, I never read anything like this before! By the second page, Jeffrey's naked and making out with his girlfriend! But not all smooth-looking like Cyclops in a pair of trunks by the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters poolside as drawn by Jim Lee. No, no, Jeffrey draws himself slightly chubby, covered in hair and, most often, in a bedroom or living room cluttered with shit. It was like reading a diary! I know now that the auto-bio landscape has hundreds of similar practitioners and that ground-breakers like Robert Crumb helped pave the way for artistic self-expression in comics by exposing their subconscious by allowing all the grit in their lives to show up in their work and all, but Jeffrey Brown's everyman was more like me and has remained more like me than any other auto-bio protagonist I've found since. I'm a confused dude. I had a girlfriend living in another town. I like sex. I'm a goofball and introspective and worried and joyous. Fuck Darkhawk (not really), I had a new buddy.

That's all not to mention the simplicity of Jeffrey's art. Stark straight lines and ZERO shading mean the story is RIGHT THERE on the page, but that means the emotion has to spurt out from the most surprising places - silent panels, claustrophobic close-ups, natural pacing and more. Seeing Jeffrey employ all this to such effect with such SIMPLE-looking techniques made me A) think I could this myself (I CAN'T) and B) notice how LITTLE those kinds of techniques were being used in the mainstream comics I'd been reading.

Maybe it's nostalgia for Jeffrey and maybe it's a straight-up addiction to his comics, but he's probably the only creator whose work I've bought ALL OF since I first discovered him. Whether it's a book about hilarious robots, a book of one-page gags, a book about cats getting out of bags, a book about a superhero with a big head or a Simpsons homage, I grab anything new by him that I can get my hands on because that honesty and deceiving simplicity I found in Clumsy is still in everything that talented bastard does. COMICS ARE RAD!

Kiel
Over the summer of 2002, I was an editorial intern at DC Comics. The story of how I got the job is far too long and complicated to repeat here (especially considering how boring it would be for y'all to read), but suffice to say, once I landed the gig I was pretty fucking pumped up about it. In terms of ever having any brand of fanboy loyalty, I'd always been more of a "DC kid" dating back to my earliest interactions with comics from around age 6 or 7, and seeing the internship effectively saved me from another summer spent painting houses for extra money, I was already heaping a heavy amount of praise and expectations on the gig before even flying to New York for ten weeks of imposing on my aunt and uncle on Long Island and doing a three-day-a-week commute to 1700 Broadway.

Before I left, I remember my mother (who despite being outwardly supportive always viewed this whole comics thing as a potentially ruinous career path) trying to help keep my sites realistic. "You know, Kiel," she said. "You might go to New York for the summer and realize that this whole comic book thing isn't really cut out for you."

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah. Not so much.

In a lot of ways, my internship was every bit as run-of-the-mill and tedious-sounding as these things are generally viewed – a lot of photocopying. A lot of filing. A lot of labeling envelopes. One editor who shall remain nameless was always asking me to clean his desk when he was out at lunch. But when you're photocopying original Wally Wood JSA stories for reference or sending out black and whites of new books to their creative teams, that kind of work comes off as way more fun than it should be. And beyond that stuff, there were a slew of honest to God fanboy freakout moments for me. From meeting all sorts of creators passing through (Klaus Janson is the fucking BOSS!) to pulling in Billy "The Rocketeer" Campbell off the street for an impromptu tour.

Most of all though, an internship at a comic company means learning a lot about "how the sausage is made" for superhero books. At any given time, there are a million people on the internet shitting on editors at the Big Two for committing some kind of invisible crime against good taste or the one true Green Lantern or some horse shit, but what I took away more than anything else was how the best editors have a very strong but generally unobtrusive hand in the books they put together. Reorganizing the Bat Office reference bible while Matt Idelson and Nachie Castro tracked down artists who could compliment the tone Darwyn Cooke set for Ed Brubaker's Catwoman run and sitting in Steve Wacker's office ballooning issues of Justice League Adventures while he gabbed on the phone with talent trying to find the best ways to up the fun factor of the books he worked on – these are the kinds of things I remember the most about that summer. The little things where comics veered off that supposed assembly line format of "Writer/Penciler/Inker/Colorist/Letterer" and into really unique and original story collaborations.

And probably the book where I got to interact the most with that often unseen process was Green Arrow: Secret Files & Origins #1. See, my direct internship supervisor was Ivan Cohen. Ivan probably isn't as well known to most comic fans as some of the other editors in the biz (he's since moved on to working in DC's Hollywood unit), but at the time he was the right hand man for then Executive Editor Mike Carlin. Ivan is without a doubt one of the smartest, savviest and hardest working guys in comics (and I'm not just saying that because I essentially owe my entire professional career to him).

Beyond helping oversee a lot of little tasks in terms of the running of all of DC's line, Ivan put together DC's then regular series of Secret Files one-shots along with whatever editor oversaw the particular hero in the spotlight that month. While I'm sure a lot of people see these books as fan service throwaways, a lot of those books had some stellar stories in them. The JLA and JSA editions both come to mind, as does the Catwoman edition with a two-pager Brubaker wrote to "explain" the appearance of Holly in the series where Eric Shanower did the best fucking Jaime Hernandez homage that's ever been committed to a page.

Now, for the Green Arrow comic, editorial was going in with absolutely no involvement from the ongoing series regular writer, Kevin Smith, as he was busy making a movie or something at the time. So the task fell to Ivan and Bob Schreck to make the book feel substantial and worthwhile for readers without the marquee writer who re-launched the series into prominence. It wasn't the easiest thing to do, but over the course of the ten weeks, I got to see the process of building a cool comic from nothing, soup to nuts.

The piece of the issue I personally had the biggest impact on (which is to say, barely any impact at all) was the creation of a diagnostic of Ollie's famed trick arrows. Ivan had me go through a bunch of older GA comics from some Jack Kirby stuff that had been recently reprinted to that killer Grant Morrison two-part with Connor Hawke in the Watchtower from JLA. I'll pat myself on the back a little for suggesting that we include the bleach bottle arrow from the beginning of Smith, Phil Hester and Ande Park's run. The final spread is posted at the bottom of this entry. The issue still holds a privileged place in my collection because of this silly little thing.

More interestingly, I got to see the real impact an artist can have on a superhero comic thanks to the work Ivan did with Rick Burchett on the final story in the issue. The story written by Scott McCullar dealt with the death of Ollie Queen's parents as he related their demise to his extended superhero family before offering them a hearty bowl of chili. In general, it was a decent little story by the standards of 8-page backup features, but Burchett tackled the script like a pro, pulling a lot more dramatic tension and characterization than you'd expect through his own well-honed storytelling instincts. Most of this stuff would probably be imperceptible to readers who hadn't read the whole script, but seeing how well Ivan and Rick meshed the ideas together to elevate the story into something worth the $3.99 price tag taught me a lot more about how comics are really made than the hundreds of cornball articles I'd read over the years in the fan press.

[SIDE NOTE: If you ever see a copy of Wonder Woman #200 as edited by Ivan and written by Greg Rucka on sale somewhere, pick that book up! Burchett does a killer HG Peter in a really smart little story that's not reprinted in trade!]

After that summer and that issue, I was able to go back to the rest of my college career dedicated to getting back to comics after I graduated (sorry, mom). And although I'm still pretty disappointed in myself that I never made it to working in the industry in an editorial capacity, I'm still grateful for the brief chance I had to contribute a little bit back to the medium that'd been omnipresent in my life for so long.

Ben
During the fall of 2002, I took advantage of Connecticut College’s study abroad program and hopped the pond over to Norwich, England, where I spent four months living and studying at the University of East Anglia.

All in all, the experience was one I got some value out of, but also not everything I had hoped for. From an educational standpoint, I was still pretty focused on journalism as my field of endeavor at that point, and anybody who has been exposed to European newspapers or magazines know that their standards and practices when it comes to reporting the news is nothing like those employed in the U.S., so I didn’t learn much that would be applicable to my professional life unless I chose to relocate to the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, culturally I got a lot out of the trip. Just living amongst people from another part of the world is really eye-opening, and only a year out from 9/11, being an American dropped in the midst of a nation who didn’t particularly care for people of my nationality was a bit awkward, but more often than not led to some pretty intense and valuable discourse for me (and to hammer home they "I'm American" point and tempt vandals, I posted the cover at the end of this paragraph on the door to my room). I also got to travel to places like Scotland, Spain, Amsterdam and Italy fairly cheaply, an opportunity that obviously is not readily available when you’re not living within a couple hours of those places; saw some great sights and also made some great memories that I can barely remember (this is well before I stopped drinking).

However, the major shadow cast on the semester as a whole (besides the pretty much round-the-clock grey skies and lack of sunlight that came pretty close to driving me batshit crazy) was that my girlfriend of three years and I, who were pretty much on the outs from the beginning of the year but were clinging to our relationship for whatever reason people do such things, decided that attending the same school abroad and living together would be the perfect remedy to our woes—big mistake. We spent the first two months at each other’s throats, broke up, and then I wandered around in a fugue state between depression and confusion for the rest of the time. We had made a lot of the same friends during our time in England, so all of a sudden they were forced to pick sides, only ratcheting up the awkwardness that much more. I’ll definitely always regret that I spent probably more time trying to patch up my fractured relationship and then mourning its loss than actually exploring the foreign land I was living in, but c’iest la vie.

On the bright side, I somehow made my school’s basketball team; I couldn’t shoot or even dribble, but basically if you were American, they thought you were Michael Jordan. I led the team in steals for the two games I played before quitting to devote more time to “studies” (drinking) because I had no problem walking up to guys on the opposing squad and just grabbing the ball from those pasty, tea-drinking blokes. If nothing else I can always say I played college basketball.

The other big plus I took away from my time at East Anglia was the town of Norwich itself. It was a really gorgeous little oasis located about an hour and a half northeast of London, surrounded by farms and whatnot but with a really cool hub of stores and attractions at its center. My friend Adam and I spent countless nights at the Canary Cue Club, a classic smoke-filled billiards establishment located within the winding halls of a sketchy factory that looked like every stereotypical seedy British club you’ve ever seen in the movies and served some of the greatest cheeseburgers I’ve ever eaten. There was also a legitimate old school castle you could tour and a great open air tent market with all sorts of bizarre knick knacks for sale, including some comics (I picked up both bookends of Eclipso: The Darkness Within there) and a red jumpsuit I ended up converting into a Super Mario costume for Halloween.

There was also a wonderful little comic shop, which gave me no shortage of relief upon my arrival in town after being scared I might miss months of my favorites titles and became the center of a weekly pilgrimage I’d make via bus into Norwich every Thursday (England’s free comic day). The trip was as much to get away from the aforementioned girlfriend and give myself at least a few blissful hours of me-time each week as anything else.

My ritual started with me heading straight to the shop, which wasn’t much different from any you’d find in the U.S. other than a uniquely British excitement the owners and patrons had for the then-upcoming Alan Davis Killraven limited series. I’d generally just snatch whatever new books I wanted for the week, but that place also helped me out a lot with filling the holes in the full run of New Teen Titans into New Titans that I was assembling (for some reason they had had a lot of the post-Zero Hour New Titans issues I couldn’t find in the U.S., so I guess England really appreciated that era).

Occasionally after I’d step outside and transfer the bagged and boarded books I’d accumulated from the store’s plastic bag into my backpack and dispose of the excess (I’ve never been a bags and boards guy, but they didn’t really give you an option there), I’d stop by the novelty store a few doors down where they had some cool toys and games and where I actually also snagged the Avengers: Nights of Wundagore pocket-size book.

My comics purchases squared away, I made a beeline to this hole-in-the-wall Thai place I had discovered one day where the super-nice British owner and his wife actually came to expect me each Thursday evening (I was the only person ever in there at that time) and had my Pad Thai and tea waiting for me so I could settle right in, share a few nice words with them, and then enjoy the books I had just bought over noodles I could not believe an Englishman had cooked.

Maybe the highlight of my weekly Norwich trip though was my last stop at the local public library. Located just above the tent market, this place was a gorgeous and modern architectural marvel of glass and steel that puts to shame any library I have seen before or since. They had an incredible selection of any book or research material you needed, as well as an awesome pizza place on the second floor that overlooked the entire town.

But most importantly, they had a huge comic book graphic novel section off in the far corner that blew my mind.

I had never seen comics in the library before outside of a few books on the craft of making them back in Newton, so this was a revelation for me. And the fact that the section was pretty well separated from the rest of the high traffic areas of the place made it nice and easy for me to settle in, grab a trade or two, and mow through them without ever leaving the building.

The Norwich library had a pretty eclectic selection of trades that I can’t fully recall, though there was of course a lot of manga and foreign stuff that at the time I had no interest in. I do remember there was a lot of DC and virtually no Marvel, which didn’t really bother me as I was heavy into my DC period. I got my hands on the Grant Morrison JLA issues I hadn’t read via their collection and also checked out stuff I never would have otherwise like Superman/Gen13 or Batman: Fortunate Son.

They also had a near full run of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but I wasn’t ready yet (more on this in a future post).

The primary poison of the Norwich library came down to two primary flavors though: Superman and/or Elseworlds. I most vividly remember reading a lot of late 80’s and 90’s Superman stuff like They Saved Luthor’s Brain and the Revenge Squad stories that, again, I would never have tracked down on my own, so it definitely filled in some major gaps for me. I pretty distinctly recall Son of Superman and how awesome I thought the costume designs were, as well as really enjoying John Byrne’s Superman/Batman: Generations and being super-psyched when the sequel turned up (they would rearrange the trades weekly, rotating stuff in and out, so there was no guarantee if you didn’t get to something one visit it would still be there the next).

When I returned to the States near the end of 2002, I was down one girlfriend but up a lot more knowledge of comics than when I had left (the perfect comic geek’s tradeoff). The combination of more free time/improved comics IQ would lead me to lobby for a comic book section on 411mania.com, the entertainment web site I was writing pro wrestling columns for, and a ways down the road, that would usher me into the comics industry for real.