Twilight of the Content Gods (or: "Blöggerdämmerung")
TOP FIVE SEXIEST TOP TEN BEST-SELLING SIGNS YOU HAVE TURNED A BELOVED WEBSITE INTO A HOLLOW SHELL OF ITS FORMER SELF FOR PENNIES IF YOU'VE SEEN AHSOKA
By now, we've all heard of the events taking place over at CBR, and they've been discussed at length by better journalists than myself. Still, as someone whose only marketable skill is "writing about picture books for children and dum-dums", the miserable death of beloved institutions of what must still be called "the comics press" has given me the mother of all pauses. Are we all condemned to drown in the SEO-optimized AI-powered content slurry? Does anyone still care about thoughtful discussion of the arts, wherever they are and whoever they are for? Who will stand and take up the fight against mediocrity whenever it presents itself? Can it even be won? Well, either way, it's time for me to do something.
When I set out on this adventure we call a newsletter, so many years ago, I told you that I was the only comic book critic ready, willing, and able to die for comics. That puts me in the very unique position of possibly being the last one standing when all of this is said and done. And that makes me incredibly powerful. So, here is my offer: I will sell out for ten million dollars American. You give me ten million dollars now, and I keep being aggressively okay at this, until there's no one left doing it, at which point, I'm so valuable that whatever you do with my name will be ludicrously profitable. It's a fool-proof plan, and you can get in on the ground floor of it. As comics media dies its unsightly death, prices are only going to go up, until the point when the question is going to be "Would you rather pay ME, or Rich Johnston?" I know how I'd answer, and I know I'd spare myself the headache by paying ten million now, rather than one hundred later.
Ball's in your court. Do the right thing. Meanwhile, let's get some work done.
The Immortal Thor #1 is not as good as The Immortal Hulk #1. That isn't saying much, obviously. That isn't even saying that it is a bad comic. It is, in fact, an excellent comic. Taking its title as a promise, Martin Coccolo and Matthew Wilson deliver page after page of the iconic Thor, that eternal image born of Jack Kirby. Bright, powerful, and ever so impossible, capturing in his wake the wonder and the magic of a world living next to the divine, but adding enough nuance and expressiveness in there to carry the book's deeper and grander ambitions.
And, obviously, this is a book with ambition for days, and Al Ewing writes it as good as anything he's ever written. Who could even be surprised? He has shown himself to be one of the most assiduous students of the King currently working in comics, and, on the flip side, his writing of Loki is so definitive that it makes most attempts at denying it or contradicting it in any way (Hello Jason!) feel lesser. His mastery of text is a delight; his mastery of subtext, of implications and commentaries, his hints and callbacks to his greater theories of the Marvel Universe and the mythologies within (see also: Loki: Agent of Asgard; Defenders Beyond) are the building blocks to what will be one of the most impressive legacies of a modern Marvel writer. This is a comic overflowing with Big Ideas, and yet it never feels like it's trying to do too much at once. It is, in many ways, what all Big Two comics should be striving for.
But it's not as good as Hulk, and I think I can tell you exactly why that is: it's a simple matter of structure. Immortal Hulk #1 had one complete Hulk story, with a beginning, middle, and end, which gestured at some of the run's bigger ideas, but kept the focus on demonstrating its thesis statement on the character through seeing its action through. Meanwhile, Thor has setups; bits and pieces of adventure that, while being very demonstrative, don't add up to one complete tale.
It has a cliffhanger, but it doesn't have an ending. It leaves you wanting more, rather than make you ask what's next. It's a choice, and you could justify it thematically with a long explanation based on the Marvel Universe Thor's very existence being a loophole preventing Those Who Sit Above In Shadow from feeding on the endless cycle of Ragnaröks. Is that too much leeway to give, even to a writer as talented as Al Ewing? I think so; and again, to be clear: none of this makes The Immortal Thor anything other than one of my favorite comics of the year so far
The era of Tom King comics we had been in for the last year or so was excellent for me as a reader, and an absolute pain to do anything with as a critic. As it turns out, there isn't much of value I can add to what has been a very productive cycle of straightforward pulp executed at the highest possible levels of the craft. I can't really make a book like Danger Street more interesting than it already is; saying that it is a comic about trying to solve the mystery of itself --that is to say, how to pull a single narrative out of the disparate parts of 1st Issue Special-- is all well and good, but it's nothing you couldn't get from reading the book itself.
That time, however, has come and passed. Tom King hath returned, for a nominally ongoing time, to Gotham City, the scene of his longest and most notorious crime, and alongside Rafael De Latorre and Marcelo Maiolo, working in that ever-so-classic noir kind of way, they've made a fantastically interesting little comic that they just had to call The Penguin #1. And to begin, they give you a nicely packed bit of genius-level stone cold raw insight. It goes like this: the core thrill of the Penguin, as a literary figure set against Batman, is that this is a guy who has no business being as successful as he is.
In order to get that idea across, King's script does the very clever thing of only having narration that gives you what other people are thinking of our boy Oswald. That bit of distancing works to keep a bit of unknowable darkness at the heart of the book, keeping an air of unpredictable menace around the proceedings. And even more important, it forces you to pay attention at the little things, the hidden foibles that get revealed along the way. It's a great way to build a character study, and it's proof positive that yes, the puzzlebox structure can work in comics. It's just a matter of asking the right questions. In short, and a few weeks ahead of Wonder Woman's relaunch: we are so fucking back.
Boy are we ever! I think the comics might be fucking back, gang! I think the fire in my heart of hearts was lit once more! I think love is real! If you think love is real, as in, you'd love to see things I do elsewhere, find me on Bluesky, where I just post with reckless abandon, find me on Cohost, which I'm finding more and more to be a suitable place for research-related musings, and find me on Tumblr, where I just post cool pictures I found. If you think love is real, but in a more general sense, you're probably right, and what you should do with that knowledge is pay it forward, and pledge to HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!