For Immediate Release: JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT Announces Groundbreaking U-PAY-THEM Program
JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT, the groundbreaking publisher of award-ignoring creator-owned comics like GHOUL FUCKER 5000, ADAM FRANKENSTEIN AND HIS WANDERING FINGERS, and YGGDRASIL JOHNSON: VIKING ATTORNEY, is ready to bounce back better than ever following a difficult 2020, with a game-changing new initiative that will allow for the release of new issues of fan-favorite titles, and overdue payments to the many creators of JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT's many beloved comics.
In a conference call with the press, JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT Founder, CEO and Publisher Jeff Crap introduced the revolutionary U-PAY-THEM Program, which allows readers of JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT and JETPACK LIZARD OOH SPICY comics to send him a one-time check for $120,000, which will be used to pay JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT staff so they can release the next issue of their favorite comic, and to pay some of the thousands of dollars JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT owes to its creators.
"2020 has been a difficult year", Jeff Crap said in his opening remarks, "and circumstances like the global pandemic and the sudden disappearance of all JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT staff have forced us to postpone all releases until we got a check for $120,000. For the good of our hard-working creators, and to ensure the continued success of books like CHERRY THE TELEPATHIC STRIPPER we had to cut all communications with our creators, so they wouldn't know to look for their comics in Basilio's hidden cavern, deep in Basilio's domain beneath the old apple orchard. We hope to resume operations as fast as possible, and JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT fans can help, with a single one-time check for $120,000 dollars, addressed to me, Jeff Crap."
Addressing creator concerns, Jeff Crap added: "I know some creators found the terms of our contracts disadvantageous in many ways, from the fact that we only pay creators when the books are released to our extremely low rates, and, worst of all, the incredible legal hurdles we put in to force people to remain in these substandard contracts. However, all JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT creators are entitled to ONE audience with Basilio, so long as they bring a rotisserie chicken and a lock of hair from the first person they ever loved to his sacred plinth near the old apple orchard."
The U-PAY-THEM Program will launch this September worldwide, and it will be available for all titles of the JETPACK LIZARD ENTERTAINMENT and JETPACK LIZARD OOH SPICY catalog, which along with aforementioned titles include:
PRINCESS SWORD AND THE FROZEN MISTS OF THUNDERBURG
JETPACK LIZARD MEETS PLOK
INVISBLE DOG
THE FISTER
EMMY KRAMPUS: THE SEXY DAUGHTER OF KRAMPUS
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON'S AMERIDROIDS
JEFFY THE HORNY SHARK
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: IF YOU WANTED ME TO TREAT YOU WITH DIGNITY YOU WOULDN'T PUBLISH A COMIC CALLED "ZOMBIE TRAMP"
It would be completely pointless to speculate as to the exact nature of what happened during the production of The Bat and the Cat #7. There is a story there, one which ends with Liam Sharp taking over for Clay Mann and Tomeu Morey, but if it is ever to be told, it will be told ten to twenty years from now, at the first completely safe comic book convention after the breakout of the COVID epidemic. I assume it's not going to be a great story, but it will be better than any guess made from the peanut gallery, and we will leave it there. The plan was for Tom King to close out his Batman saga with a 12-issue coda in the form of a big Dark Knight Returns-style grand statement comic, all illustrated by Clay Mann, and then it wasn't, and here we are.
Besides, there are things far more interesting than any gossip that are worth considering when looking at this week's release. The biggest one of course being the matter of what changed and what hasn't in the transition from one artist to another. Luckily for me, it's one that makes itself very obvious on the very first page of the comic. In the first six issues, Clay Mann, in his always impeccable figure work, used bodies to break the delineations between the series' three time periods, breaching panel borders like memories breach into one another, especially when love, loss and pain get involved. In issue number seven, Liam Sharp mostly works from a strict four panels and three strips grid, shown at the very beginning in the form of a window, and while timelines do cross on the page every once in a while, the panels themselves remain neat and tidy, marking a shift in tone, as the characters' untenable positions are being forced to contend with the shapes of a Batman story.
The sharpest of all readers will have noticed here that this is one of the themes Tom King has been working on all throughout the 85 issues of Batman that precede this, and indeed that, in a larger sense, this is a theme present throughout his entire work, and its many stories of people clashing with stories in one way or another. The Bat and the Cat has always been a very referential work, and, in this issue specifically, King returns to the metaphor of the comic book grid as prison bars that he and Barnaby Bagenda first laid out in the final issue of The Omega Men. It gets complicated, because, once again, this is a Catwoman story, but at the heart of the issue is the question of escaping from our patterns, from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how such an escape might be achieved.
What this goes to show, really, is that Liam Sharp is an exceptional artist, whose capacity to match his skillset to the mindset of whoever he's collaborating with finds new territories to explore in King's self-referential hyper-textuality and formalist exploration. The dialogue quotes King's own work with Tim Seeley on Grayson, while the art puts the "very hot bodies in extreme states" work that Clay Mann usually pulls alongside gorier fare, reminiscent in parts of Chris Burnham's work on Batman Incorporated (it is in fact gory enough that it even evokes Burnham's later Morrison collab Nameless). His use of color tones remind me of the way Jordie Bellaire colors Mikel Janin, whether in Grayson or in Batman itself. There's a big nod to an iconic Adam Hughes Catwoman cover in there, and you can probably see some Neal Adams in the way expressions are drawn during the more melodramatic parts.
No matter what happened, then, The Bat and the Cat is a comic that is still as ambitious as it has ever been. The change in artists has only served to make what was already there show up in a bigger, louder, and therefore probably easier to see, way. I can see people liking this issue more than any issue previous. But it's been all good all the time, it's beautiful and it's genuine and I know it's going to wreck my heart. Then again, that's most comics to me!
Before I ride off into the sunset for the week, there's two pieces of information that I feel I have to tell you, so here goes: First, you have to read the Suicide Squad 2021 Annual before you read Suicide Squad #7, that's just the order of the story. Second, you should be reading Suicide Squad, because like almost every single Suicide Squad book DC has published it's quietly and unassumingly great. Since you're cool, you're already reading The Swamp Thing anyway, that has the other side of that in a really cool way! Plus it's got weird intrigue and weirder guest stars. It's a great weird comic about dirtbags doing fucked up shit. It's Suicide Squad! It's a little more serious than the film but that's good! That film could have been a little more serious! Anyway I got the word out, that's it, that's all I had.
And that's why I'm calling it! Great newsletter everyone, we might have learned something along the way too! I'm off to do cool stuff, see you here next time? In the mean time subscribe, tell your friends to subscribe, and get the word out? Have fun, grab a cold one of drink, enjoy the uncharacteristically warm weather, and at the end of the day, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!