"The Animaniacs" Was Not A Factual Report
You Know What's In That Water Tower? Water.
I write to you this week from sunny Burbank, California, where I am currently trapped in a giant secret vault miles beneath the Warner lot.
Long story short: I was pounding the pavement, looking for the hot scoop on the never-to-be-released Batgirl film, like every other two-bit "entertainment" "journalist" out there. Turns out I had an AMAZING lead on an assembly cut of Batgirl without the VFX and all that ballyhoo that turned out to be entirely correct. But here's where things get Harlan Ellison: there's absolutely no way to watch the dang thing from inside the Warner Bros vault, and by the time I found a Seth McFarlane Flintstones reboot backpack big enough to carry the reels out of there, the vault door had closed and I was trapped with everything else the suits don't want you to see. Fun fact: did you know that there was a fifth impractical joker? His name is Dino, and he did not test well with audiences. And while we could not watch any of the myriad lost movies that people would kill to see (I'm not saying a working version of David Ayer's cut of 2016's Suicide Squad is in there, but I want to make it clear that I am not not saying it), Dino did point me to a very large selection of unpublished DC comics, which range from neat little curios (the Vertigo edition of SFSX) to enlightening little artefacts (like those two issues of Sejic and Williamson's Justice League Odyssey that they scrapped for seemingly no reason). Point is: don't worry about me, as you can clearly see there is Wi-Fi down there, so once I'm through writing this I'm getting some Doordash, they'll open the vault door and I'll be on my way home.
Anyway, you probably want my take on the whole Batgirl thing, right? The big boy reporters have made it sound simple enough: AT&T have offloaded billions of dollars of debt onto Warner Bros Discovery, and the new leadership is using whatever means necessary, including the tax breaks they'd get from not releasing Batgirl, to get that debt under control. It's simple, it's stupid, it doesn't embarrass itself with the fact that Warner Bros is, in all likelihood, still massively profitable, and, at the end of the day, it becomes an existential threat to every single thing you love. I don't know what it means for DC Comics, who seem to be running a pretty good business at the moment; do they get even more rationalized? Are they cutting down on the number of non-Batman books? I don't know. Guess it depends on how hard Dwayne Johnson can impose the idea that everyone cares about Black Adam, who is exactly the third best villain in Shazam's rogue gallery. It's a weird situation. But like Dino says: they cloned us from a Nathan's Famous hot dog and we live in constant pain.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: SOME DAY I WILL BE A TAX WRITEOFF TOO
Obviously X-Men Red #5 is good. At the risk of repeating myself, it has been set up for massive success by Judgement Day #1, which flipped the usual paradigm of setting up an event tie-in comic by showing you a consequence rather than a cause (for more on this absolutely genius move and what it does for the forward momentum of the event, see our award-ignored previous missive, chums!). It goes like this: Arakko (née Mars) has been catastrofuckally omnicided by Thanos' turbo-hardcore pep-pep. This begs two questions. First: "What the hell actually happened, comma, I thought everyone on Arakko was a supreme violence freak forged by millennia of combat against an infinite demon horde, plus some commercially viable X-Men were there, so what gives?". Second: "With everyone on Arakko either dead, dying, or, worst of all, double-mega-dead-no-take-backsies, what happens next?".
Answer one involves some of the most wickedly creative acts of destruction Al Ewing can devise, and Stefano Caselli can draw. It is big-time big-scope superhero mayhem, and yes it is the kind of apocalypse where someone puts their whole-ass arm through the chest cavity of someone else to rip out their heart, so you know: it's the good shit. Answer two, well, that's spoilers, but since it's Saturday, I'll just say this: would that there was someone that had gone through their fair share of genocides and survived, you know, wink. More interesting to me than its exceptional ambition in terms of the events depicted, is the fact that it is also an exceptionally ambitious comic on a formal level. It frames itself as a timeline of events, going over everything that is taking place minute by minute, and war crime by war crime. The style is laconic, to the point of being clinical, but on occasion allows itself a touch of lyricism that works really well at setting the feeling of the piece. And all of that makes it a sterling example of everything that is great and good about the humble event tie-in. It is, despite being the fifth issue of X-Men Red, despite being the fourth or fifth issue of Judgement Day, a one of a kind comic.
Except.
There is another comic doing much of what X-Men Red #5 is doing, and it has also been released this week. And I think it is a better comic. I am, as ever in this newsletter, talking about Tom King. I am, in fact, talking about Batman: Killing Time #6, which does sensibly the same thing. It is a blow-by-blow account of cruel and seemingly arbitrary superhero violence, framed by a cold and ever-present narration that occasionally veers into the whimsical lyricism, and it is about trying to make sense of it all. The most obvious reason why it is a better comic, to me, is that David Marquez draws it, and David Marquez is a powerhouse, especially when he's given the ability to stretch his wings with as varied a collection of characters, locations, and situations as he has been given for the whole of this six-issue miniseries. The second most obvious reason why it is a better comic, to me, is that its storytelling decisions feel more motivated, they play into the big reveal of the previous issue, and those decisions get to an interesting destination, extending outside of the comic's scope in a way that is entertaining to think about.
Ultimately, these are two great comics, however. The funny coincidence of their release will be remembered by no one but me. If there is a wider point to be made, it is one that I think is fairly old at this point: I love that these dumb superhero comics exist in conversation with one another, not just within the one publisher but within all of comics, and it will be sad to see it all go away once the suits realize that this is another area in which beauty can get crushed. Ah well! Moving on!
For the longest time, I had struggled to care about what Cafu, Christopher Cantwell, et alia have been doing over in Iron Man. The problem was twofold: first, I don't think that Tony Stark works in the grand cosmic context, and attempts at making it work have ended up as Brian Michael Bendis' run on Guardians of the Galaxy, which proves me right better than any lengthy written argument ever would. Second: I have very little patience for stories about men who are sad because they're too smart and too correct all the time, misunderstood by a world that is unprepared and ever ungrateful for their forward thinking brilliance, and realizing that actually it's never the single Great Man that changes things for the better in the world. (Sidebar: this is the same reason why I couldn't get into Halt and Catch Fire, which at the time was like the fourth best AMC period piece about a brilliant complicated man too smart and modern for his time. I hear it gets good! Sorry!)
Anyway: Tony Stark got addicted to morphine, became a cosmic god, relinquished his cosmic godhood, went to rehab, and here we are with Iron Man #22, joining a storyline already in progress that is as original flavor Iron Man as it gets, and as it turns out that's just about my favorite flavor. It is about stopping the proliferation of world-destroying superweapons in the way only a billionaire playboy with a high tech suit of armor can, fighting a cadre of kooky mercenaries in the employ of the most destructive organization on Earth: other billionaire capitalists. In this context, Cantwell's quirks, including but not limited to his overreliance on cramming as many references to Marvel Comics history in every single line, absolutely sing, feeling like a loving embrace of all the component parts of those long-forgotten comic classics. There is an immense wealth of stuff to play around with, seems to be the point, and as the current team gets ready to pack up their bags and leave, it works as a reminder for fans and comic industry peers alike. It is a nice fun book, and I'll miss it when it's gone, but it's not gone just yet.
And that does it! We've done another one of those! Congratulations to us! Questions or feedback? Get on the tweets! Anything else? Get on the tweets! If you haven't already, subscribe! You'll get more of it! If you have, tell your friends to subscribe! They'll get more of it! No Impractical Jokers were harmed during the making of this newsletter, unless studio security has fucked up real bad, could happen, I'll tell you when my Doordash shows up. Also they burned a lot of Dan Didio's stuff and that's why I couldn't tell you about the original plans for 5G. Okay now I'm done! See ya next time! HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!