THINGS COMICKAL AND RANDOM

Greg Rucka Finished At DC, Off Batwoman [Wondercon]
Apr 2nd 2010
By: David Brothers (comicsalliance.com)

During his spotlight panel at Wondercon, moderated by our own Laura Hudson, Greg Rucka dropped a bombshell. He has been out of exclusive with DC Comics for three years, despite spending those three years working exclusively with DC, and his time with them is over. He just turned in the last of his DC work for the foreseeable future, and his time with Kate Kane is done. He reiterated his love for the character, saying that walking away from her was an incredibly hard decision to make, but one that was necessary....


The Complete Greg Rucka Wondercon Panel Transcript [Wondercon]
Apr 5th 2010
By: Laura Hudson (comicsalliance.com)

[...]LH: I solicited questions from Twitter, and they overwhelmingly asked the same question: What's happening with "Batwoman"?

GR: I don't know. I finished my last of my DC work yesterday, and I'm not currently doing anything for DC right now. I love the character; I would love to continue working with the character, but at the same time I'm sort of needing to step back from my DC work in general. I suspect that we'll come back to her at some point. I don't know if that's going to be something that Jim and I do together. I am not sure what Jim's plans are. I want to keep working with him, and I believe that's mutual. There is more to tell. There's a whole five-part story broken down that is really the last of -- "Elegy" was supposed to be four issues; there were supposed to be three issues that were "Go," and then there was a five-part story that Jim and I had, but because of a variety of things in-house at DC, we were moved out of "Detecitve [Comics]" and we couldn't tell the story there. So there's a concluding story that's basically Alice's origin story. It's what happened to Elizabeth. I don't know if we'll ever get to do it. I have been around in this industry long enough to never say never....


Nothing More, Nothing Less (gregrucka.com)
April 3rd, 2010

[...] So, if you’re a fan of my work in the field of comics, you’ve most likely heard the news that I’m no longer doing work for DC. I’m told that speculation is flying fast and furious as to why this is, and apparently, even despite my on-the-record comments, it continues.

There is no drama here, folks. It is as it appears. I’m stepping away from DC to pursue different opportunities. Nothing more nefarious than that. Nothing less sinister. Time is a commodity that is as precious to me as it is rare, and there’s simply not enough of it....

...OK, look: I don't read the main Blackest Night title -- aside from one stray mention in "Red Robin", it hasn't quite made its presence felt in the Bat corner of the DCU in a way that makes it necessary to pay attention (though given that "Batman and Robin" is on hiatus to keep its story from getting ahead of Blackest Night and DC has announced a forthcoming miniseries called "The Return of Bruce Wayne", I assume that everyone's about to figure out that Bruce isn't dead). So to a certain extent, I expected "Blackest Night: Wonder Woman" to lose me here and there. The surprise about issue #1 was that it didn't; if you knew the general shape of the main series -- that Nekron is sort of raising and reanimating the dead of the DCU, killing really quite remarkable numbers of superheroes and then raising them as black lanters -- then you could follow BNWW #1 just fine. She fought undead Maxwell Lord to a standstill -- she thought -- and left him without weapons or fighters, but with him saying that she didn't know how bad things were about to get for her. So I expected issue 2 to somehow, kind of vaguely follow issue 1 in a comprehensible way, but since the main BN title had moved along, I wouldn't have been surprised to be a bit more lost. I did not, however, expect that hot mess.

Issue #2, I suspect, bears the same relationship to "Blackest Night" as the two Final Crisis issues of Batman had to that event series; something happens in the main series that doesn't make the slightest sense without those particular tie-in issues, but at the same time, you can more or less muddle through the main event without them. In this case, I'm guessing that Diana gets killed somehow in the main series, becomes a black lantern, but then miraculously becomes a star sapphire, without any explanation of how that happens. (From what I can tell, this happens in Blackest Night #6.) BNWW Issue 2 is that explanation. Unfortunately, the issue doesn't make any sense on its own. More impressively, it doesn't even make sense as a follow-up in its own miniseries; the action is so completely detached that it leaves you trying to figure out how it even could connect to what came before. (It doesn't. Don't even try.)

More seriously, the character is just painful to watch. She's rampaging all over, having a long drawn-out fight against Nera, killing Cassie and Donna, killing Hippolyta. We see at the same time not only the black lantern thoughts in the foreground, but Diana's own thoughts in the background, appalled at all that her body is doing, which is actually a rather nifty gimmick, although she's not all that articulate, so it does get a bit repetitive. (I would note, as well, that this is the second time in as many Crises that Diana's body has apparently been taken over by the bad guys and used against everyone. Superman and Batman get to save the universe -- or at least be dead during a crisis -- but apparently Wonder Woman's role is to be the weak link in the DC Trinity, involuntarily (if briefly) helping the bad guys. They might want to work on that.) And what brings her out of the black lantern killing rage? Not the love of her sisters. Not her love for her mother. Remembering that she loves Bruce, the dead guy, as he takes her into a deep swoony kiss. (Despite being dead, or at least profoundly absent, yes. Really, just don't ask.) This allows Aphrodite to activate the love in her, or some such, and turn her into a star sapphire lantern. Never mind that, canonically, she's had a boyfriend recently, and it wasn't Bruce. Never mind that there has not recently been even the slightest hint that they might have felt that way about each other. Never mind that you'd think that she'd love her sisters and her mother enough to snap her out of that killing rage -- over in her own series, she has defied and killed gods to save her mother and the Amazons, but somehow, that's not enough. It's love of the dead guy that does it for her. Oh, and then it all turns out to be a dream. No, really, a dream.

I get that as a tie-in, BNWW has to service the main miniseries, I really do. But honestly, that would have been a rocky issue on its own merits even without the "no, really, just a dream and now you're all fixed!" resolution. I really can't tell you how glad I am right now that Gail Simone's run on WW is structured in a way that lets her serenely ignore the various crises; I can for now just pretend Blackest Night doesn't exist. (One wonders how long the DC brain trust can let one of their flagship titles keep ignoring the rest of their universe. Blackest Night has raised the sales of almost every series it's touched, however briefly; you'd think they'd take a look at WW, and think, "Hey ... maybe ...")

BAD; Not recommended

In which the character of Bat Boy from the now defunct Weekly World News supermarket tabloid gets a role in a series. The main character, however, is Ed Anger, "right minded columnist for the Weekly World News". And by "right minded", they mean really really really really really right-wing columnist. He's pretty much anti-everyone, but especially those "illegal damned aliens". By which he means not only the more usual type, but also the extraterrestrials among us. He tried to warn us about them, in his columns in the WWN and also through interviews and rants on the WWN television network, but people still insist on being friendly to the aliens and taking them at face value. The humor in the issue comes from watching Ed utterly fail to cope with the various changes in the world around him ... although one of the gray aliens starts feeling uneasy himself, trying to tell Ed that there's something about to happen. Ed, being Ed, doesn't really listen. At the very end, there are also mockups of WWN pages, which may or may not show future stories in the book.

Robinson's art and Smith's coloring are perfect for the story; just a touch exaggerated and cartoony, but very expressive. The story is a lot of fun to read.

Excellent; Highly recommended.

I think I am, in many ways, absolutely the wrong audience for this title. Part of the issue is that I studied Far Eastern history and politics -- seriously, got the degree and everything -- and there are times when it's just really difficult to put that aside and remember that the DCU has nothing to do with the real universe in that way.

I got somewhat thrown out of the story immediately by what the premise seemed to be. Chinese gods were coming to answer the prayers of the Han Chinese people who have been oppressed by the Communist government and are protesting. Said government is trying to use the Great Ten, its superhero squad, to put down the protest, which drives the gods to act. And where is this protest? Outside a temple in Lhasa, Tibet. Given history and current politics, you'd think that if any gods would be responding, it would be Tibetan gods. So there's that, which I really did have a problem with in the first couple of issues. Given developments in issue 3, it looks as though what's actually going on may not be quite what it appears to be. Intertwined with that is the utter inability of the Chinese government to deal with modern media -- despite a very firm clampdown on all outgoing television, radio, internet connections, the rest of the world finds out about China's difficulties in really just a few minutes. While it may have been true that the Chinese government was that incompetent at one time -- vide Tienanmin Square -- the rather tight control of information in and out of Beijing during the Olympics would seem to indicate that they've figured that sort of thing out. But, again, fiction.

There are supposed to be ten issues, and it's clear at this point that they're going to show the origin of each member of the Great Ten, wrapped around the greater storyline of the group trying to battle the gods -- or not, as the case may be. Some of the group derive their powers from the gods and are, understandably, having a few conceptual difficulties. The tone of each issue varies wildly according to the origin of the character. Accomplished Perfect Physician, who gets his power forced upon him as a sort of penance for having accidentally (sort of) killed the man to whom it was supposed to go, and given that he is a physician, has a miserable time justifying the violence the government asks of him. Celestial Archer received his power from the gods after hiding in just the right tree from people who wanted to kill him; he's actually met the gods and walked among them, and has massive difficulties now that he's asked to fight against them. Thundermind (Thundermind?), who is a living Buddha, gained his powers through reading a page that induces a perfect moment of enlightenment, and gets the most unspeakably goofy storyline; he's a teacher, madly in love with a coworker who can never know his true identity (so, very early Superman/Lois Lane, and the deliberate parallels to Superman are pretty much thrown at you nonstop), and for some reason, the entire country is worried about the immodesty of his costume, which pretty much fully covers him. His story doesn't really match the seriousness of everyone else's origin story, and is really jarring against the broader battle against the gods story. The ending is not only goofy, but lunatic and an irritating delaying tactic; Thundermind apparently knows what's going on, but before he can tell his colleagues -- and, perforce, the reader -- has to zip back to protect his secret identity (in a way which should actually cause more suspicion; he has absolutely no business being there at that point in time, given what's happened everywhere else)

Honestly, I can't recommend this series. There are some interesting ideas here and there inside it, but they're being carried out in some very irritating, lazy and truly silly ways.

OK; Not recommended.

Yi Soon Shin tells the historical tale of a long-ago war between Japan and Korea. According to the frontmatter in the book, the Korean army had thought, until that point, that their navy was mostly unnecessary, and there was a great deal of political infighting, trying to get the navy under the control of the army to disband it. General Yi Soon Shin fought against this. In 1592, Japan attacked Korea, hoping to take it and use it as a way to invade China. The other Korean generals burned their ships and retreated to try to defend on dry land, which was what the Japanese generals had thought would happen, and their infantry was far superior to the Korean. The Korean king fled, and his own people were so furious that they looted and burned his palace.

Issue 1 tells the story of how Yi Soon Shin, the disregarded general, figured out the tactics that made it possible for his vastly outnumbered force to fight the Japanese at sea. We start out in Japan in 1591, where their generals are planning their war of conquest. We then jump to invaded Korea in 1592, where the Japanese army are committing various atrocities on the town they've captured. They then discover that the remnants of the Korean navy have surrounded that harbor, but aren't afraid, because they have the Koreans so seriously outnumbered. The Japanese then discover that they are up against a superior tactician -- and, oddly, superior armament. It seems that the Japanese didn't arm their ships with cannon, and Yi Soon Shin did, so the tiny Korean navy shreds the much larger Japanese navy.

Yi then has to deal with the aftereffects of battle. He's got internal problems, because another admiral feels that he should have been in charge. He then takes his men onshore, to try to find the remnants of the Japanese force and deal with what's left of the village that the Japanese attacked. And then at the end, he discovers something truly horrific.

The storytelling in this opening issue works very well. Even though they don't go into a lot of background on him at this point, you get a feeling for who Yi was, that he was brilliant militarily, and a man who could get his men to follow him. That said, the one storytelling weakness I would identify is that there's too much in the written frontmatter; we should have seen at least some of those things that he went through to get where he was. Given that it seems to be a self-published comic, I'm guessing that cost issues were a factor in simply telling us all that; that said, it does make for a relentlessly exciting first issue. Timpano's artwork and De Los Santos' colors are bloody gorgeous, as well -- quite often, literally bloody gorgeous, as this is a war comic and, well, there's a lot of blood flowing here and there. The title sems to be on a three issues per year publication schedule, so it's not going to end until January 2011 or so, which is unfortunate only because I'd really like to see more and faster. (I'm kind of surprised that this is purely self-published and not coming out of a smaller press like Archaia; it seems like it would be right up their alley, somehow.)

Excellent; Highly recommended.

In which we see how Kate started her work as Batwoman, and how she sees it not as the sort of crusade that most of the Bats seem to, but as an extension of the same ethic that took her to the military. Her father discovers, rather easily, what she's doing, and is not at all amused, but when Kate makes him understand why she's doing it, he helps her with his connections, money and vision to make it happen. The three scenes with her father are, in fact, the heart of the story -- the first where she convinces him that she can do what she's trying to do, and he decides to help, the second where it all comes together and she gets her uniform ("Pop ... are those heels?"), and then the last scene, where we find out exactly what her father did when she was kidnapped, where they break each others' hearts. (In fact, as far as the colonel goes, his reasons for what he did provide the one somewhat false note in the entire story so far; his reasons for doing what he does simply don't match the character as we've seen him to date. He took away hope, however futile, for a false certainty. It will, of course, turn out that his daughter has, quite accidentally, given him exactly the same false certainty -- and we get confirmation of that on the last page.) Williams' art is, as usual, stunning; the first two thirds of the story look as though they're drawn by a completely different person, and the last third in that striking style he's used for the modern part of the story.

Rucka and Cully Hammer's "Pipeline" Question backup story hits a very interesting point, as Renee and Helena appear to have made a rather dramatic mistake in their attacks on the cartel that's been trafficking in people and drugs. (It does bring up the question of exactly how secret identities work, if it's that easy for something as low-rent as a regular criminal cartel to figure out who the Question is and where she lives -- getting Helena at the same time was simply the lagniappe.)

Excellent; Highly recommended

(NB: As has been seen elsewhere, this is the last of the Rucka/Williams "Batwoman" stories in Detective. Rucka and Jock will be writing and illustrating Batwoman in Detective 861-863, and that story will appear to be unconnected to what's come before. In the new Batwoman title to start in 2010, after a new issue 1, they'll pick up with the final five issues of the "Elegy" arc, which was planned to break around "Go" originally. The Question co-feature will continue, and was in fact scheduled to become the primary story for a few issues after "Elegy"; whether that will happen earlier is unclear. It's also unclear whether Batwoman will be an ongoing title, or whether that will be only a 6-issue miniseries.)

In which the threads started in "Bad Blood", "Rise of the Olympian", "Genocide" (somewhat) and "Warkiller", as well as the odd issues between those major arcs, are finally pulled together and concluded. Given that all of this has taken well over a year -- in fact, nearly two -- it would have to be one hell of a kickass issue to feel at all satisfying. And you know what? It kind of ... is. We finally understand, for example, what the hell happened to the Greek gods after the end of Amazons Attack and Countdown, when they seemed to have been rescued, but then disappeared for the entirety of Final Crisis; we find out where they were and why they weren't around to keep Olympus from being desecrated by the New Gods. We see gods abused, gods who were killed and resurrected, gods who weren't really dead. We find out what's behind all the strange pregnancies of the Amazons. We find out the truth of Diana's engendering. We get to see Diana, Hippolyta and even Achilles kick quite a lot of ass. Lessons are learned by the most unexpected people. Donna gets her sanity back. A lot happens, and it pretty much all works. Everything isn't completely wrapped up, of course, but that's to be expected. It really is a very satisfying ending for such a very long story arc.

Something of a side note: I would really love to know how Simone managed to get DC to allow her to run for such a long time without paying even the teensiest amount of attention to the ongoing crises of various sorts in what is supposed to be one of their major titles. None of this arc would have happened without Countdown, of course, but there have been two major events in the DCU since then, and this title hasn't taken any notice of either of them.

A side note to the side note: I wonder if we're going to find out what happens to the resurrected Olympians. As things are left, there doesn't seem to be a plan to send them back to Hades. And given what Simone has said about him, I'd love to see a miniseries with Achilles, just to see what he would do in today's world.

Very Good; Strongly recommended.

...Good lord, this thing is gorgeous!

OK, OK, story first: We finally get the Batwoman series that we've long been promised, as she takes over 'Tec in the absence of Bruce Wayne. And right away, we see her in action in a way that shows us both the similarities and differences between Kathy Kane's Batwoman and the other members of the Bat family. She brings Rush to ground in an alley somewhere, and demands that he tell her what's going on with the religion of crime. He refuses, because he knows they'll kill him. At this point, most likely, Bruce (and possibly Dick) would have threatened him with even greater bodily harm if he didn't tell; Batwoman instead promises him that she'll protect him, and for some reason, he believes that she can. It's oddly comforting and seductive at the same time. There's also an interesting encounter with Batman -- version deliberately unspecified -- in which he grumps about her hair length and then takes off.

Next morning, Kathy goes to breakfast with putative girlfriend Anna, who promptly dumps her because she's consistently unavailable at night; the last straw was that Anna couldn't reach her last night, and Kathy looks like she hasn't slept -- as indeed she hasn't -- from which Anna draws entirely the wrong conclusion. Kathy then goes back to her place, where her father the Colonel is serving as her version of Alfred. We get a bare hint of what happened to her back when the Religion of Crime originally kidnapped her and tried to sacrifice her -- a shadow of an origin story, as it were. Kathy pulls together the clues to discover where the heads of the Religion's covens are meeting their new head. Said person, it turns out, is the loopiest criminal in town since perhaps the Joker, which is saying something. She presents herself as Alice, of Wonderland and Looking Glass fame, and every line out of her mouth is a somehow nonetheless entirely appropriate line from one of Carroll's books -- though not always one of Alice's lines, I think. 'Tec 854 ends with Batwoman meeting Alice, and 855 is a hard leadout from that, essentially an issue long fight sequence of sorts. During the fight, Kathy discovers the hard way that Alice hides razor blades in her mouth when she's cut with one that proves to be poisoned with some sort of hallucinogen. She goes staggering off into the nearby woods; meanwhile, back at BatLoft Central, the Colonel sees on his computer that follows her that his daughter's vital signs have suddenly taken a turn for the worse, so he grabs a few semiautomatic weapons and heads out after her. Somehow, he gets where she is more or less in time -- there's absolutely no sense of how long things are taking, since Kathy is hallucinating and herself has no sense of time. She's also remembering some of what happened during her earlier kidnapping. The Colonel arrives and starts shooting -- somehow managing not to kill anyone, possibly deliberately -- but it looks like Alice and her minions are about to get the upper hand when something unexpected happens at the story's end. Honestly, the story is a bit of a sine wave at this point; an outstanding first issue followed by an OK second issue that seems to be concerned with a lot of backstory and getting a few things in place.

The artwork on this story is, from beginning to end, truly spectacular. Williams does some really interesting things with frame composition and line length to visually separate Batwoman from Kathy Kane. Batwoman's part of the story only rarely has square frames of story, and even when she does, the borders and gutters are all black to the edges of the page. Much more frequently, her part of the story has a very different framing and flow, with a surprising number of two page spreads with unusual shapes and layout. Because the rest of her art is so dark -- night time, black costumes, dark places, etc. -- the line weight on her part of the drawing is much lighter weight. Dave Stewart is doing some incredible things with color throughout both sections, the more faded colors of the background with Batwoman -- making her reds and blacks pop out of the page -- and the vivid colors throughout for Kathy Kane's section.



By contrast, the Kathy Kane sections are lighter, airier -- despite a much heavier and distinct line weight -- and have a more traditionally structured page visually.



Unfortunately, after six issues (I think), we get a planned break in both art and story, shifting to a different artist for a couple of issues before Williams comes back to finish the "Elegy" story arc, and then a shift again to another artist.

Detective also has a backup 8-pager, featuring the new(ish) Question, Renee Montoya, Kathy Kane's former lover. Montoya investigates the disappearance of an illegal immigrant whose brother paid for her to come north to the US. She vanished before he ever saw her. When Victor asked the person he paid to bring her where she was, he got a serious beatdown for his trouble, along with a warning not to ask again, at which point he went to the Question's website and asked for help. Renee begins to look into things, and of course not only do things look bad right off the bat, but the investigation hits a few hitches almost immediately. Since this is a shorter chunk of story, it's actually faster paced, hitting plot points a bit faster. Honestly, it feels like a comics version of a Republic serial, except that it's monthly and not weekly. Even with a less satisfying amount of story, it's still gripping and involving, and Cully Hammer is doing some really good artwork on this. (Something of a side note, but I'd really love to know how Renee got out of being the head of the Religion of Crime. At the end of "The Crime Bible", she's just managed, despite her best efforts, to land the title, so she's the head of a group that doesn't take no for an answer. And yet, as we see in the main story, that mantle's been somehow passed to Alice, leaving Renee improbably still alive and kicking.)

Highly recommended.

In which we finally finally get past "Rise of the Olympian" ... sort of. And past Genocide ... mostly.

Diana starts out this issue in the arctic, communing with a mama polar bear and her cub on what she's been through -- the fight with Genocide that she thinks is done (if only she knew), having to renounce her people, her family, her home. She is, for Diana, a bit down in the dumps, understandably. (More about that later, I think.) She goes back home, only to be alerted by the gorilla tribe in her apartment (that will never fail to be entertainingly weird, somehow) that Nemesis is trying to get in touch with her -- yet more unfinished business, she thinks. And it is, except that it's Genocide; apparently she's still alive, sort of. It's somehow involved with underground metahuman extremely extreme fighting, about which Diana knows nothing, so she asks Black Canary to help. And they then go jaunting off in relative disguise -- using, as Dinah puts it, the "second most famous bosoms in the world after Power Girl" (and that Diana doesn't know this, despite having been enbustiered in man's world for nearly 20 years in the current revision, is just mindboggling) as auxiliary weapons. They get to the site, and their disguise gets them into the fights, which they win more or less handily, after faking some difficulties. And then, at the end, someone who wants revenge against Diana, for something she did not in fact do, appears. Meanwhile, back on Themiscyra, the Olympians' attempt to take over from the Amazons is not going terribly well, so clearly neither the Olympian story nor the Genocide story is going to be done any time soon.

The story, compared to the past few months, is comparatively light and functional. It sets a few things in play and reminds us that a few other things need to be dealt with, while still giving us a break from the fairly dark storyline of recent issues. And the relief is much appreciated. (Something of a side note, but I wonder what the current story behind Diana's costume is? During the "bosoms" segment, Dinah teases Diana about her patriotic star spangled briefs, and Diana says that's a misinterpretation, that people just assume that it was meant to do with the US flag. However, in the original concept of the character, it was meant to do with the US flag; her costume was meant to echo American symbols, because she was being sent here as ambassador. Given that she no longer has an eagle clutching the second most famous bosoms, things have clearly changed.)

Now ... let me just say that I'm not a continuity wonk. Not really. But that said ... I do keep wondering when, if ever, this title will acknowledge that Final Crisis even happened. After all, Wonder Woman was the first of the heroes to fall, after Mary Marvel; her mind was taken over by Darkseid and/or his minions, and her body was used against people to enforce his orders. I'm not saying that there should be a full issue of Diana weeping and wailing and railing against her fate, but it does seem like there should be something. A memory of something she did that she regrets. People she's trying to help pulling away or hiding because they remember what she did -- maybe she even did something directly to them. Other superheroes looking at her warily. Something.

As far as I can tell, the group of titles that really acknowledges that Final Crisis even happened are the Bat titles and, to some extent, JSA and JLA. Given that Bruce Wayne got removed from the field and the Marvel family were still suffering some of the aftereffects, they have no choice in the matter. And of course, there's the Final Crisis Aftermath set -- though, one might also note, the Escape title makes no sense so far as a Final Crisis related title, since almost nobody in it played any sort of major role. And, of course, in theory, that title should feed back into Wonder Woman at some point, unless maybe Escape is supposed to take place after they break up.