THINGS COMICKAL AND RANDOM

Virgin Comics Shut Down - 8/26/2008 6:55:00 AM - Publishers Weekly:Virgin Comics, the high-profile 2006 international joint venture between Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and the India-based comics publisher Gotham Entertainment, has been shut down. The company’s New York office and publishing unit has been closed and the eight people that staff it have been laid off.

Although calls to Virgin Comics CEO and cofounder Sharad Devarajan (who is also president of Gotham Entertainment) have not been returned, sources confirm that the venture has been closed and that a statement will likely be issued soon. The closing appears to effect only Virgin Comics’ U.S. publishing operations in New York City and does not effect the operations of Gotham Entertainment, the Bangalore, India-based partner in the venture that produces comics targeted at the South Asian consumer market.

The company produced about 17 different comics series in addition to publishing about 18 trade paperback collections and 3 hardcover titles. It is unclear what will happen to the rights to these properties....

...So I ... and that ... I mean ... what the hell was that hot mess, anyway? It was billed as a big status quo explanation that would be a perfect jumping-on spot for new readers, but it explained so little that unless you read one hell of a lot in the DC universe, you had no idea what was going on.

It was meant at least in part also to be marketing and a teaser for the upcoming Final Crisis and its many many many many many many many many tie-in stories, and it managed to persuade me to read ... nothing I wasn't already reading. I mean, I'll probably do Batman RIP, because I read Batman peripatetically and Detective consistently, and despite the fact that "The Resurrection of Ra's Al-Ghul" crossover, after a great first issue or two, sucked like a sucking thing of suckitude making a giant sucking sound of suckiness. (In other words, it was very very bad.) I'll read "Whom gods forsake", because I read Wonder Woman, and because I've been waiting for the choice she had to make to rescue her mother to have consequences -- although a raft of Spartans about to attack the world because she's a woman who couldn't save it in fact has absolutely nothing to do with that choice. (Don't ask me why they're Spartans, either.) I was already planning to read "Final Crisis: Revelations", because it's Rucka writing Renee Montoya, and it's going to be a teamup with Crispus Allen/the Spectre, and there's no way on EARTH I'd want to miss that. I could give a rat's ass about "Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds: Prime Evil" in which various and sundry Legions try to beat down Superboy ... er, pardon, SuperMAN Prime. (How many colons does a title need, anyway?) I could give a rat's ass about "Green Lantern: Blackest Night Prelude: The Dead Shall Rise". Which is apparently a prequel to their major DEAR GOD YES THIS IS THE END OF ALL CRISES TO BEAT ALL CRISES crossover for next year, anyway. And I could care less about "Final Crisis" itself.

The other thing that baffles me is why DC spent so much time planting information in the media about the Big Event That Happens in the story ... especially since it kind of doesn't really happen. I will note, however, that I was vastly amused that the multiverse literally precipitates fallen heroes when it needs them, just assembling them and raining them out of the sky when it wants them, like sentient magma, judging from what we do see. Granted, it makes a sort of sense, given how he died, but still, it was terribly funny to see them actually do something that silly. That said, the ending graphic is, just barely, subtle enough that if DC hadn't been clanging that anvil, dropping said anvil on the heads of anyone who'd stand still long enough, and then shouting from the rooftops after that, a lot of people would have missed it entirely. Or assumed that the multiverse was precipitating a stripper, which would have been kind of perfect, really.

Anyway, a story that managed to actually not be worth the 50 cents they charged for it. Who knew?

First, the title is NOT a typo.

Second, this story may be the most bizarrely awesome thing I've seen in a while.

In real life, Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and an incredibly accomplished woman. She met all sorts of luminaries of her day, including Frederick Douglass and Alexander Graham Bell.

In this story, her early life is the same, including meeting Anne Sullivan, who helps her retire her "Phantom", the personality she thought herself to be when she was locked into her dark and silent world. Anne and Helen are walking home from a college lecture when they're set upon by thugs. Cornered, and unsure where Anne is or if she might be hurt, Helen reaches up to touch a switch on her large, clunky dark glasses ... and suddenly she can see and hear. Moreover, it turns out that being able to see and hear allows her to tap into something that fills her with a wondrous rage and an awesome physical power. It turns out that Alexander Graham Bell has fashioned something in those glasses that uses a carrier wave into her brain that allows Helen to see and hear and to tap into that rage and power as an unintended side effect. It also turns out that she's being recruited by the secret service to ... well, that would be telling. Seriously, this is the sort of setup that's so audacious that it's clearly headed for either incredible success or awesome failure. Rice's black and white artwork is very very good, conveying character and expression very well. Kreisberg's and Rice's story ... works, so far, is all I can say. It's very good and very strange. Highly recommended.

Virgin has, it seems, signed up for this year's Free Comic Book Day. Due to the brouhaha with The Salon and apparently one or two other titles, the people in charge of FCBD have declared that all titles offered should be all-ages appropriate. Virgin has been, shall we say, notably lacking in all-ages titles until this year. "Tall Tales" would appear to be one of their two attempts -- Dan Dare being the other -- to do an actual all-ages title, and this is an attempt at an all-ages story doing what Virgin does, retelling and updating traditional Indian stories. That said ... I wouldn't recommend this for anyone under the age of 12 or so.

We start out inside the book of the Panchantra. Chapter 1, verse 18, apparently. An old man is arguing with two beautiful women, because he doesn't want to do what he's supposed to do. Eventually, they talk him into it, and he transforms into a tortoise while the women transform into swans. A magician leading a horde of orcs, or something like, comes over the hill, slaughter the geese and the tortoise, and eat them and drink their blood. This disrupts the narrative of the story, which is vitally important to the flow of things in the world.

Jump to modern day Mumbai. Vishnu, a teenager, is grousing to a friend over the phone because his grandfather died and all he got was a book, the Panchantra, a kid's book of tales. He opens the door to his home to discover a talking lion, ox, and monkey, trying to convince him to take up his grandfather's mantle as world-guardian. After a very bad start, they kind of convince him that they're real, that the stories are real (for certain values of "real"), and that they need to go to his grandfather's house to find the world-guardian's weapons. The orcs have followed. Mayhem in midtown Mumbai ensues, including orcs getting shot point-blank in the eyes and having throats slashed.

The artwork works for the sort of modern day fable that the story is aiming for, and the story itself is a fascinating blend of the traditional story and a modern tale, and gruesome fun. It's just not really an all-ages story. Recommended; just not for children.

Oddly enough, Tall Tales appears to be on a seriously compressed publication schedule. Either that, or Virgin's given Amazon a seriously mistaken publication date for the trade, which is also entirely possible.

I don't know ... I just don't know.

"Jackie Karma": a man comes to New York to find Bobby Horner, a drugged out, burned out drunk living in an alley. Bobby doesn't remember the man, although they've met, but the man tells him that he's about to start something, and he doesn't want any interference from "you kung fu motherfuckers." Howler gets a message to John Carmichael, attorney at law, about what's happened. Somewhere in there, some guy gets his head cut off. Not knowing about that, John tells his wife that he's got to settle up some business from the old days. He hauls out the old leather jacket, puts on the lion's head belt and the extreme bell bottoms, and then goes out on to the street, causing everyone in a five-mile radius to curse and pray because Jackie Karma's back in town!

"Cool": a much more involved story so far. Pete and Leon work for Smitty the bail bondsman, and they're out pursuing Sheldon Abramowitz, wanted for mail fraud. (Sheldon happens to be the size of a small house. Smitty neglected to tell them that.) After a bit more trouble than they were expecting, Sheldon is subdued. Meanwhile, elsewhere in LA, Mark Reed brings his girlfriend cum stripper, Cherry Baum, along with him to make a drop, unwise though that is. Turns out that the person he was making the exchange with had instructions to kill Mark, which he does. Cherry, not wanting to become deceased herself, hits the murderer with the car and drives away. Meanwhile, back at the bail bondsman's office, Pete and Leon get their next assignment ... to find Cherry Baum. Meanwhile, back at the murderer's employer -- said employer happening to be a porn mogul, former porn star, and little person -- Logan is confessing that he killed Mark but didn't know about the person in the car until too late.

The idea behind "76" is that it's telling the same sorts of exploitation/action stories that you saw in movies in 1976. And, on the one hand, the authors and illustrators successfully evoke those sorts of stories -- including, unfortunately, the utter lack of sense to some parts. (Seriously, once you discover that the people you were worried about are either druggies or out of the vigilante business, why would you bother them? Why would you deliberately get their attention?) Thing is, these stories strike me as the type of thing that you're probably going to really like if you were actually around in 1976 and old enough to see and understand them, or else it completely sails over your head if you weren't. The black and white artwork is clean, distinctive, easy to distinguish characters and more or less works for the story. I just can't quite figure out who the audience is. As far as I can tell, it's meant to be an ongoing, rather than a mini, so I hope they can figure that out.

In which the second real story arc finally gets underway. Oddly, we get an (impressively brief but informative) recap from one of the villains, as though they expected a long publication gap that didn't happen. In any event, having told us what just happened, said villain and his gang are killed by person or persons unknown. Rahul, having recovered from his recent possession by a celestial enforcer, investigates, and finds signs that lead him to believe that Tara/Devi might have committed these murders. (Strangely, stray police have noproblems with finding darinde, supernatural creatures in the shape of men except for being very green, murdered on site. Anyway, Rahul questions Tara, who knows nothing about the murders. (Incidentally, Tara seems to have gotten back to living her non-goddess life. Not so incidentally, the writers appear to have clean forgot just exactly what that was, or how difficult it should be to just fit back in after being away for more than a month.) Tara also discovers that she may have a sister, who winds up staying with her while Tara tries to validate that claim. In the meantime, more murders make the local political situation go completely pear shaped, and Rahul's investigation to try to clear Tara winds up implicating her.

I have to admit, I wish I knew more about the source Devi legend. In Bombaby, the graphic novel version of the Devi tale done by Antony Mazzotta, her sister also winds up playing an important role, as a sort of tiger-avatar of the goddess. Anyway, this second arc looks like it's going to be less "world ending soon, pay attention" and more focused on how being Devi affects Tara's life, which looks to make an interesting change.

The Twelve features characters resurrected from Marvel's pre-Marvel days, back in the Atlas and Timely Production pre-war years. Issue 0 isn't necessarily required for the series, from the look of it. Although it's entertaining to see the differences between what people were willing to accept then and now from their stories. I mean, if you think that the whole Batman/Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent/Superman secret identity thing is a bit strained, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Take the Phantom Reporter, who appears to have two different secret identities. There's Dick Jones, Cub Reporter; strangely, despite the fact that he never seems to bring back the story, every story to which he's assigned somehow miraculously gets resolved. Secret Identity 2 is Mr. Van Ergen, a Park Avenue playboy whose father left him $50 million. The hero -- entirely without powers of any sort -- is the Phantom Reporter. All three of them wear blue business suits. Van Ergen and the Reporter both wear bright red capes. The Reporter adds a glowing red domino mask; I'm guessing that the glow manages to distract people from anything important. (The clothing problem, by the by, is only going to get worse in the new series, if the triple identity remains, since, due to two characters with similar designs, Weston changed the color of the Phantom Reporter's suit to a lovely shade of magenta. Magenta business suits, then and now, being so overwhelmingly common as to pass without notice, of course.

Anyway, aside from the character designs, there's not a lot to comment on, as aside from those designs, issue 0 only contains three of the old Daring and USA Comics reprints. Fun stories, though, even with massive gaping plotholes. It's interesting to note that people of 60 years ago were willing to tolerate far more in the way of violence than we are now. Every single one of the heroes in those old stories kills someone, sometimes several people, and they get away with it, and it's seen as a good thing. I suspect that one of the things the heroes will have to deal with is the fact that killing with such impunity is no longer accepted.

The revised character designs are ... intriguing, let's say. Have a look at Captain Wonder, for example. Bare legs will certainly be an interesting thing to carry forward. (And I wonder how long it will be before Weston gets massively tired of doing the hairs on the legs like that). But ... well, thing about bare legs is, they draw your gaze down. And Captain Wonder ... kind of ain't so wonderful in certain areas, if you see what I mean. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that the character ought to be Captain Steel'd, so to speak --- wait, yes, I am saying that. Poor man has a negadick right now. The thing about bare legs is that it draws your attention to how the anatomy fits together, and really, there ought to be a bit more there there. Of course, as soon as you do that, the fanboy masses scream. I have to admit, I don't entirely get that, but I think that's a rant for another time. I'm also curious about the Blue Blade, especially given Weston's character notes on that page. And I'm really curious as to what Marvel lets Straczynski get away with for these characters. They let him pull Squadron Supreme over to Marvel MAX, allowing for more in the way of violence and boobies. This appears to be on themain Marvel label, judging from the announcements and issue 0, so I'm guessing not so much with the boobies this time.

Kind of recommended, for the fun if exceeding violent old stories, but not actually required.

An Open Plea to Comics Writers: Could we please please PLEASE confine the zombie thing to Marvel Zombies and Walking Dead? PLEASE?

...Well, thank goodness that's over.

Look, it's not that it was badly written. And I understand that it was a means to an end; the slayers organization would need some way to go after rogue slayers. AFter all, not every single one of the thousands of girls who received superpowers on that day is going to be filled with the desire to save the world. It makes sense that Giles wants to protect Buffy from knowing what needs to be done or that he's doing it or from having to handle it herself, because he knows she really couldn't; it's consistent with what happened in "The Gift", when he killed Ben and never told Buffy what happened. Now that Buffy is really and truly the leader of thousands, she can't be seen to be sanctioning the murders of some of them. It even makes sense that Faith and Giles would be the ones to do what needs to be done; they're the two characters most likely to be able to live with it. However, to get there, Vaughan essentially ignored everything that happened with Faith in Angel and in the last season of Buffy. She grew up and changed in ways that just aren't reflected in "No future for you". (We will serenely ignore the sheer lunacy of Faith being trained to act as an English aristocrat, because the very concept is so absurd that you have to simply accept it as the story's "god point" to read the thing.)

If this were Faith right after the bodyswap episodes (which I can't remember the titles of), then yes, it works really well. That Faith was still bone-deep furious with and jealous of Buffy. If that's supposed to be Faith after she helped Buffy and the slayerettes save the world, then it simply doesn't work at all.

As Guggenheim says in the letters column, the base concept behind the story is "What happens next?" What happens after all the aliens have been killed in "Independence Day", for example? All the capitals and major cities of the world have been substantially destroyed; millions upon millions have been killed. In Guggenheim's case, he says he was inspired by "V: The Final Battle", which is essentially the same situation, except that in the V miniserieses, considerably more was left intact. In this case, it looks as though while V may have been a source of inspiration, Independence Day was a more direct antecedent. The aliens and the humans have been fighting across the surface of the world for over a decade, driving humans to live in underground bunkers the past few years. Oddly, later in the story, we discover that the aliens were here for considerably longer before fighting broke out, making one wonder why this all happened. (You also wnder how people have survived; it's clear that there can't have been any agriculture or manufacturing or transport during the worst of the wars, and this would have been the case world wide. So how did they manage to live?)

People are, depressingly, pretty much what you think they'd be after spending years underground. A gunfight nearly breaks out among some of the first to emerge. Sara, a youngish woman, gets disgusted by them all and sets out to walk to Washington DC, to see if anything is left. The government, it turns out, has been moved to, apparently, Berlin, New Hampshire, but Sara doesnt know that. On the way, she decides first to visit her son, and she happens to run into Ben, another refugee, and they decide to travel together.

I am, I must admit, very curious to see where this story goes. To see just how far "what happens next" can go. Dumeer's black and white art works really well most of the time, although there are places where he uses shadows in a way that make people faces look very eerie, in a way that the story doesn't quite seem to support. Are we meant to think of these people as creepy in that way? I guess we'll find out.

I do wonder how long this series is meant to run. Guggenheim's comments sound as though he's got a specific endpoint planned, and I suspect this may be more enjoyable as a whole than as a serial. Any road, recommended.

Retelling the story of the Odyssey, updated to the modern day. In this story a soldier identified only as "The Captain" is in Syria, fighting what appears to be an ever expanding, never-ending war of the US versus the Middle East, when suddenly the entire world goes to hell in a handbasket. And through all of this, the Captain needs to get his men back home, through intractably hostile territory. Meanwhile, back at home, his wife Penelope tries to keep things going, standing between neighbors hostile to each other, but not to her. However far in the future this is, it appears that the water situation in this country has gotten peculiarly bad, perhaps due to some war-related cause we haven't yet seen or due to global warming; peculiar because absent major weather changes, the Catskills in New York shouldn't be experiencing the sorts of water shortages that would bring people to blows. (Then again, neither should Georgia in the here and now, and we all know how that's going, so maybe not so far fetched after all.)

Honestly, nothing about this story really grabbed me all that much. Part of it is just typical first-chapter expositionitis; we need to get at least a general idea of who people are and what's going on, and there's not a lot you can do to avoid exposition dumps for that. Part of it is that the art is so stylized that it doesn't quite feel like a good match to the story to me -- although, that said, I think the artist may be trying to faintly echo ancient Greek art, which makes sense.

I don't know if I'm curious enough to see what happens in issue 2, despite the fact that a lot more ought to be happening -- and it's not as though a lot didn't happen in issue 1, expositionitis or not. Just not my taste, I suspect.

In which the interminable zombie plot finally comes to an end. And, to be fair, a very satisfying grand-guignol sort of end. And hey! there's a gay couple! This being a superhero story, they end about as well as you'd expect, especially given that they're one-shot supporting characters.

The story is a hard leadout from issue 10, starting with Ebony bandaging Denny's injuries from the beating he took at Montez' hands last issue. The story takes place on the night of November 2, el Dia de los Muertos, very appropriate to undead like Montez and Denny Colt, as Denny himself notes. Ellen goes to see a former fiancee, name of Argonaut Bones (...and, you know, after Ginger Coffee, the names in this series shouldn't get to me, but still, how can you not roll your eyes a little at that?). She's gone to see him because he's the most knowledgeable person she knows on the topic of folklore and zombies. He doesn't entirely believe her, but decides to go with her, and, of course, is rapidly made to believe by the zombie infestation spreading across the middle of Central City. It turns out that Argo and Ellen wind up being key elements of the story. (The nice thing about Ellen, overall, is that she's not merely a damsel to be distressed and rescued; in fact, she's been unusually UN-distressed, for a superhero's girlfriend, through the course of this series. She doesn't actually appear a lot, but when she dies, she's usually fairly important in the story.) This issue does form a reasonably satisfying ending to the Montez arc -- though perhaps it might leave Denny with a few psychological issues relating to his ongoing semi-zombiehood.

I am beginning to wonder if maybe I've just read the wrong stories in forming my opinion of what Eisner's Spirit actually was. This is the second time in four issues where you could reasonably approach Cooke's version by talking about the sheer overwhelming body count -- not just of the zombies, but of all the people they kill. Central City's police department, especially, has had the crap hammered out of it in those two issues; you wonder if anyone but Chief Dolan is even still alive. That, combined with the casual approach taken in the original issues of The Twelve (see above) to heroes killing off the bad guys makes me wonder if maybe there are a lot of issues that Eisner wrote where Denny does in the criminals then goes out singing a jaunty version of "Je ne regrette rien". And also makes me wonder if Frank Miller's approach to the film maybe isn't as wrongheaded as it sounds. Then I think, "Six villains! One movie!" and I get over that, at least. But I digress.

Man, Ennis can be fun to read in a good old-fashioned comics way, when he decides to indulge himself.

"Dan Dare" resurrects an old British title, much as Ennis did last year with Battler Britton for DC/Wildstorm. Dan Dare himself was an international space pilot, back in the day. He fought the good fight, then retired (to a most surprising place) when Britain changed into something that he could no longer fight for. In the meantime, the rest of the world went to hell, with nuclear war bustin' out all over, and Britain surviving only because they had an effective SDI. The US is essentially a land of blasted craters where cities ought to be, as are Canada and Mexico. In any event, it turns out that the beings that Britain thought they'd defeated back in Dan Dare's day are still very much alive, and have retrenched to become more effective enemies. The British go to Dan Dare to recruit him to rejoin the fight, and of course he eventually agrees, because we wouldn't have any story if he didn't. Erskine's art is just perfect, matching that sort of old-time storytelling while being perfectly clean and modern. Looks like the story is going to be good old fashioned space-fighting fun. (So to speak.) Highly recommended.

Cage Eyes Chopra-Scripted Superhero - Deepak Chopra will script - Zap2it: Virgin Comics is looking to adapted "The Sadhu" into a feature vehicle for noted comic enthusiast Nicolas Cage. "The Sadhu" was created by Gotham Chopra, chief creative officer of the Richard Branson-financed Virgin Comics and, according to Variety, Gotham's daddy Deepak will script the project. Cage could play James Jenson, a soldier who time-travels back to colonial India and becomes a spiritual warrior.

Cage is all wrapped up in Virgin Comics' business. Early this year the company made a deal to publish "Enigma," a comic developed by Cage and the actor's 15-year-old son Weston. The thriller, which will be published as a five-part miniseries starting in March, could also be a potential film vehicle for the "Leaving Las Vegas" star. Steven Johnson's "Ghost Rider," another comic-based Cage offering, will premiere early next year.