You know what a crossover is, right? For comics fans, it’s when Superman and Spider-Man meet in a comic book. For non-comics fans, it’s when the cops from “Law and Order” meet up with the cops from “Law and Order: SVU” — when characters from one show (or comic or movie or book) meet characters from another show (or comic or movie or book), that’s a crossover.

“Freddy vs. Jason” = crossover. “Aliens vs. Predator” = crossover. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is one big crossover for animated cartoons. And Richard Belzer, the guy who plays John Munch on “Law and Order: SVU,” is the TV crossover king, since Munch has appeared in “Homicide: Life on the Street,” several different versions of “Law and Order,” “Arrested Development,” and “The X-Files.”

Anyway, comics have lots of crossovers, too. Batman meets Spider-Man, the X-Men meet the Teen Titans, Wonder Woman meets Witchblade, Archie meets the Punisher. They happen once, then never get mentioned again, because if Superman mentions that time he met the Fantastic Four and kicked Galactus on his tushie, Marvel will get mad and want to get paid for it. Nevertheless, there have been a Guatemalan metric ton of comics crossovers over the decades.

And from time to time, real people will show up in comics. Presidents will often make appearances in comics, as will some prominent scientists, sports stars, musicians, media personalities, and even particularly prominent comic book creators. But I’m aware of very few instances of a real-world celebrity making appearances in completely different comics just a month apart.

Sure, a president might show up in a Superman comic one month, then in an Avengers comic the next. But it doesn’t happen often.

And I certainly never expected it to happen with actor/writer Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

But here he is in John Kovalic’s “Dork Tower” #36:

 

And here he is in Aaron Robinson’s “PS238” #23:

 

“PS238” is set at an elementary school for superkids, so Wheaton has somehow managed to score himself some superpowers — in this case, telekinesis, which he claims to have used to make the spaceships fly around on “Star Trek.”

There’s also this angry confrontation with an evil genius wearing a pimp costume.

 

An evil genius in a pimp costume denouncing a telekinetic “Star Trek” actor? That’s what comics are all about, baby.

Gigantor, the Space-Age Robot! He’s at YOUR COMMAND!

Remember Gigantor? You know, the ’60s-era Japanese cartoon about a little boy and his pet giant robot who run around fighting evil? Very goofy stories, as I remember them, but very influential, in both Japan and America.

The city of Kobe, Japan loves Gigantor. They love him so much, they’re building a life-sized statue of him.

The 18 meter high, 70 ton Ironman-28 will carry the price tag of 135 million yen. The project is expected to be completed in the spring of 2008.

(…)

The statue will serve as a double memorial, marking both the birthplace of creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama, who passed away in 2004 in an apartment fire, as well as celebrate the revitilization of the area, which was devastated in the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

I’m sorry to say it, but Japan is completely kicking our butts on the building-giant-statues-of-robots front. Statues of guys on horseback just can’t match giant robots for coolness…

(Link via Kevin Church)

No one will ever be able to claim that Lubbock is a major comics/cartooning center. Sure, we’ve got a good comics shop, our local library stocks comics, and we’ve even got the Lubbock Sketch Club, which works to nurture local artists and cartoonists. But we certainly don’t have a reputation as a comics hub.

However, you’d be surprised how many connections to the comics and cartooning world that we do have here. Let’s take a quick look at our hometown heroes…

1. Dirk West: Probably the artist that Lubbockites are most familiar with, West was born in Littlefield but grew up in Lubbock. After graduating from Tech, he spent a few years working as Uncle Dirk, the host of a local children’s TV show, and opened up his own advertising agency.

In the early ’60s, West started contributing single-panel sports cartoons to the A-J that featured the mascots of the teams in the Southwest Conference standing around and talking about SWC football. He created Raider Red and Nebraska’s Herbie Husker, and his weekly cartoons were must-read events here in Lubbock. They got lots of attention throughout the SWC — usually because some team (Ahem: the Aggies) would get mad about how they were portrayed.

West served a term as Lubbock mayor in 1978 and died in 1996.

You can see a gallery of some of West’s cartoons right here, and I’m posting a couple of my personal favorites below.

 

2. Alex Ross: One of the best known comics pros anywhere, Ross was born in Portland, Oregon, but spent much of his childhood here in Lubbock. His specialty is not traditional comics art, but painting — specifically beautiful, photorealistic painting of superheroes. His characters don’t look like steroid freaks wearing painted-on costumes — Ross knows how to draw realistic muscles (and realistic fat!), as well as clothing that actually wrinkles like clothing. He knows how to use light and shadow, how to make super-people look like people — and his artwork is still incredibly exciting and cinematic.

Some of his best known works include “Marvels” and “Earth X” for Marvel, “Kingdom Come” and “Uncle Sam” for DC, and covers for “Astro City,” “Justice Society,” and more.

I’m plugging in a few examples below.

 

Above: Giant-Man from “Marvels”

 

3. Jack Tippit: A gag cartoonist, Tippit attended Texas Tech but tranferred to Syracuse. He was a pilot in both World War II and the Korean War. His best-known work was a gag strip called “Amy,” who was basically a female Dennis the Menace. He also drew a strip called “Dr. Bill” and published cartoons in the New Yorker, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines. For a while, he drew the “Henry” comic strip.

Here are a couple of his cartoons.

 

 

4. Scott Williams: I know almost nothing about him, to be honest. Yes, my Google-Fu is weak. But Robert Mora, who runs Star Books and Comics here in town, says that he’s a Lubbockite.

Williams is an inker — in fact, he inks almost all of Jim Lee’s work. If you don’t know Jim Lee, he’s one of the big artists, pencilling everything from the X-Men to Superman and Batman, and he was one of the founders of Image Comics in the 1990s.

“Aww, who cares? Williams just traces Lee’s stuff!” Ohh, that’s what you think, kid. You can’t be an inker without displaying a heck of a lot of artistic skill. Don’t believe me? Okay, here’s a sample of some of Lee’s uninked pencils:

 

And here’s the same piece after Williams inked it:

 

(Both of the pictures above come from Inkers.org, a blog produced by professional comics inkers. Check them out if you’d like more info on inking as a career.)

Pencillers are always very picky about their inkers — a good inker can make good artwork even better, and a bad one can doom the best pencils in the world. There’s a reason why Lee has stuck with Williams for all these years.

5. The Blob: No, not the evil glob of protoplasm from the 1958 horror flick — this is Fred J. Dukes, a mutant supervillain who was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1964 for “X-Men #3.” He’s not a particularly handsome super-guy.

 

His primary powers involve superstrength, toughness, and gravity control — basically, he can increase the pull of gravity on himself to make it almost impossible to move him.

Yeah, the Blob’s mutant powers involve him being really fat. Nobody ever said Marvel Comics was a very politically correct place back in the ’60s.

So what’s he doing on this list? Well, according to his official Marvel Comics biography, Fred was actually born here in Lubbock.

Gee, since he’s a native son, maybe we should name the Walk of Fame after him?

So how ’bout it, folks? Do you know of any other comics professionals who are from the Lubbock area? How about comics characters? Drop me a line and let me know, and I’ll add ’em to the list…

 

Just like high school, except in space and the leather-clad blondes aren’t beating me up and stealing my lunch money.

Let’s take a quick look at another new comic, this time the fourth issue of “The Brave and the Bold,” DC’s new revival of their classic team-up comic. So far, in a cosmic quest for a pair of artifacts, one mystical, one super-scientific, we’ve seen team-ups of Batman and Green Lantern, Green Lantern and Supergirl, and Batman and Blue Beetle. At the end of the last issue, a terrible accident had occurred while Bats and Beetle were fighting the futuristic Fatal Five, leading to Batman sharing a body with the evil cyborg Tharok — in other words, Batman is currently half-Batman and half insanely murderous robot!

In this issue, we start out with our focus on Batman and Blue Beetle. Bats is having trouble controlling the robotic half of his body and Beetle can’t figure out how to split Batman and Tharok back apart. The rest of the Fatal Five attack, and Batman seemingly sacrifices himself to remove the Fatal Five from the equation.

After that, we switch to this issue’s main team-up — Supergirl and psycho space-biker Lobo. Supergirl’s lost in space, and Lobo’s been hired to get her to the distant planet Rann, where Green Lantern has been teleported. Supergirl and Lobo are teleported from a scummy interstellar bar to, of all places, the Garden of Destiny — as in Destiny, the elder brother of Dream from Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics. Destiny, normally one of the most powerful beings in the universe, is a bit scatter-brained because he’s lost the Book of Destiny, which lists every moment of history, from the beginning of time to the end of everything. Supergirl decides to find the Book, and Destiny returns them to normal space, where Lobo takes her to Rann (and Supergirl welshes on paying him!).

And finally, we catch back up with Batman, still merged with Tharok, transported to the far future, where he’ll team up, next issue, with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

I’m a big fan of this book. George Perez’s artwork is as awesome as ever, and Mark Waid really has a knack for depicting multiple different characters and giving them enough personality to make them all distinctive from each other. The story is entirely rollicking, even in the places where it doesn’t make a lick of sense, and the idea that anything can happen at any time (who ever expected a character from the “Sandman” comics to make a guest appearance?!?) means you anticipate the next new surprise all the way through.

Verdict: Big thumbs up. Go git it.

 

Speed kills.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t like the most recent comic series starring the Flash. From the beginning, I thought it was a series that was very poorly thought out, with a popular character unceremoniously booted into comic limbo and replaced by an almost entirely new and untested character.

Let’s take a look at where things went wrong, and how they may yet be salvaged.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the character’s long history, there have been a variety of Flashes through the decades. In the 40s, there was a Flash named Jay Garrick who ran around with a metal helmet on his head. The Flash most people are familiar with was Barry Allen, a police scientist who made his debut in the ’50s. He wore a distinctive red uniform that every subsequent Flash has worn. During the “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” Barry Allen died saving the universe, and his sidekick, Wally West, who previously went by the name of Kid Flash, took over as the newest Flash. Wally was considered the fastest and most powerful of all the Flashes — since he was able to tap into the interdimensional “Speed Force” that powered all superspeed characters, there were no real limits on how fast he could run.

Bart Allen made his first appearance as Impulse in 1994. He was the grandson of Barry Allen, born in the future with an accelerated metabolism. Many of his best adventures were comedic, playing up both his superspeed and his irritating hyperactivity. In 2003, Bart took on the mantle of Kid Flash, in one of the more enjoyable storyarcs of the revived “Teen Titans” series. (It was revealed that he had a photographic memory, and deciding he wanted to be a more efficient superhero, he read every single book in the San Francisco public library in a matter of minutes.)

Built up alongside the various Flashes were the members of his Rogues Gallery, better known as just the Rogues. Most had no powers of their own but used various super-scientific weapons to commit crimes. They included Captain Cold, the Mirror Master, Heat Wave, Captain Boomerang, Weather Wizard, and many more. Captain Cold was generally acknowledged as the leader, and he insisted that they follow a strict code of honor — they avoided drugs and preferred not to kill anyone, unless they couldn’t avoid it. I remember them saying more than once that they liked being simple bank robbers, and didn’t want to be the world-conquering egotists who faced most other superheroes.

And then, during the “Infinite Crisis,” Wally got sucked into the Speed Force, along with his wife and infant children — readers were told that he’d never come back. There was no grand farewell for the character, he made no great heroic last stand, and no one seemed to mourn his passing. Remember, Wally had been a major player in the DC Universe ever since his debut as Kid Flash back in late 1959. I, for one, felt that DC tossing him aside so quickly and with so little care was disrespectful, both to the character and to his fans.

At the same time, Bart was pulled into the Speed Force and artificially aged four years, going from being a teenager to being an adult. He was basically an entirely new character, as many of the appealingly humorous aspects of his personality had been transformed replaced with angsty whining. It’s no great surprise that his new comic wasn’t that popular.

DC, however, went into panic mode recently — they resurrected Wally and his family in the latest issue of “Justice League of America” (a comic so bad that I decided not to make myself review it, with cover artwork so outrageously inept, I feared I’d run afoul of the A-J’s filtering software just describing it) and had the newly drug-abusing, kill-crazy Rogues beat Bart to death. DC has been claiming that they’ve planned this all along, but frankly, no one believes them. Bart’s ending is just too abrupt and absurdly violent — DC seems to think that the fans didn’t like Bart when what they didn’t like was watching DC produce badly written and poorly planned comics. No one would’ve complained if Bart had been kept alive — heck, I suspect most Flash fans will be angrier about Bart’s death than they were about his short-lived Flash career.

This seems to be common practice for comic companies. Got a series or character you expected to be insanely popular that is instead unpopular? Don’t tell readers it’s your fault — use the character as a scapegoat and kill him off! We saw Marvel do the same thing to Ben Reilly at the end of the much-despised Spider-Man “Clone Saga” of the mid-’90s. They blamed the character for their misfortunes instead of who was truly at fault — the editors, the writers, the company bigwigs who pushed the story forward.

Right now, everyone is very hopeful that putting Mark Waid back on as the Flash’s writer will return the series to greatness. Waid is the writer who’s most well-known for writing Wally’s best adventures, and he is the writer who I’d most like to see writing about the newly-resurrected Wally.

But I’m also expecting Waid to do something that DC isn’t expecting. I think that Waid is smart enough to see through DC’s likely bulldada about Bart being a “bad character.” I’m hoping that Waid will also find a way to resurrect Bart, either as an adult, or as a teen. After all, Waid created Bart and wrote his adventures for several years — I suspect he has a vested interest in seeing the character continue. Expect Bart to make his return sometime in the next year or two — and most importantly, expect his return to be a good story. Mercy knows, someone needs to remind DC how to do that.

 

It’s very dark in there.

It’s the 13th and final issue of “The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive.”

If you’ve been paying any attention to the comics rumor mill, you know what happens in this one.

If you haven’t, you’re about to find out. Shut yer eyes quick, chickadee, spoilers in the next paragraph!

Bart Allen dies.

In fact, he gets his speed taken away, he pulls off a pretty good fight against the Rogues, and then they beat him to death.

Yes, they actually killed a Flash without letting him run.

In other words, DC decided they didn’t like the character, so they simultaneously killed and dissed him. Because all Flashes are supposed to die running. It’s in the contracts. If you’re a Flash, you die while running faster than you’ve ever run in your life, skirting just this side of hypercosmic speeds, your atoms actually burning down and exploding as friction, kinetic energy, and Einstein’s frustrated ghost strip away your individual protons and hyper-accelerated skin cells.

Flashes never die on their backs getting their guts stomped out by supervillains.

The problem is that DC thought they’d shake things up, age Bart Allen to adulthood, change his personality, and rake in big bucks with their new and angsty Flash. Lo and behold, readers didn’t like the new Flash. Readers didn’t buy the book. Readers said the book sucked.

DC decided they had to ditch the book and, assuming the readers hated Bart Allen, killed him off as dismissively as they could. “Yay for us, readers!” DC yells. “We killed the character you hated, Bart Allen! Love us again!”

“You idiots,” snarl the readers. “We liked Bart. We hated your stupid comic book.”

“Don’t worry, readers,” says new Flash scribe Mark Waid. “I’ll fix this for ya.”

How? That’s a post for another day. (In other words, tomorrow morning.)

 

Falling apart at the seams?

Got a cluster of different links for ya this morning — not enough for a full post for each, but some fun stuff to click on…

* A list of the best scenes from superhero movies. I can’t agree with all of them — they’ve left out some of my own favorites — but I don’t see anything staggeringly wrong either.

* There have been a lot of action figures of Marvel Comics characters, but this is the first time that Marvel super-writer Stan Lee has gotten the toy treatment.

* Not exactly comics-related, but we were talking about Stephen King just a few days ago… Did you realize that the soon-to-be-released “1408” will be the 99th Stephen King adaptation to make it to film or TV? Michael Sadowski has his picks for the five best King adaptations ever.

Mmmmm, giant Kryptonite monkey…

One thing you should know about comics fans: We really love monkeys.

“What’s so strange about that?” I hear you ask. “All red-blooded Americans love monkeys!”

This is indeed true. But it still must be said: comic book fans really, really love monkeys.

A lot of this stems from comics’ “Silver Age” in the late-1950s to ’60s. DC Comics had an editor named Julius Schwartz, who had a method for spurring writers’ creativity in which he’d send them some utterly outrageous cover (Green Lantern giving away free power rings to passersby, the Justice League getting turned into trees, the Flash being transformed into a life-sized wooden puppet), then tell the writers to come up with a story based on that cover image. As it turned out, the covers that had DC characters interacting with a gorilla or monkey nearly always sold more copies than other comics, so you saw more and more DC comic books with monkey guest stars, monkey villains, like Gorilla Grodd, Monsieur Mallah, and Titano, or even monkey superheroes, like Detective Chimp or Beppo the Super-Monkey.

So, based on this noble, banana-eating heritage, comic book fans really love monkeys.

There are, however, limits.

DC decided to really push the envelope of monkey-love back in 1999. Back then, all of DC’s annuals would revolve around central themes — one year, it was pulp fiction, the next it was “DC One Million” with new versions of DC’s heroes in the far flung future. Well, in 1999, the theme was “JLApe” after the evil Gorilla Grodd succeeded in one of his oldest schemes: he turned the members of the Justice League into gorillas.

The Justice League of Apes?

Someone’s made monkeys of the JLA…

Green Lantern channels Charlton Heston

All in all, it doesn’t seem that bad, does it? Well, unfortunately, despite all the funky monkey art, the series as a whole just wasn’t very well written, but then again, lots of comics aren’t well written. The biggest problem is that, rather than being a single comic with a bunch of gorillas in it, it was seven or eight comics, in the space of a month, with a bunch of gorillas in ’em. That’s like chain-smoking Cuban cigars for a month, or guzzling bottles of fine champagne for a month — when you over-indulge in a luxury, it stops feeling luxurious.

So to summarize:

A few super-monkeys = good!

A whole bunch of super-monkeys over a dozen comics all in the same month = Let us not speak of this again.

This article is a few weeks old, but it certainly seems relevant for this blog: a little kid named Liam Hoekstra is a superhuman prodigy!

Liam Hoekstra was hanging upside down by his feet when he performed an inverted sit-up, his shirt falling away to expose rippled abdominal muscles.

It was a display of raw power one might expect to see from an Olympic gymnast.

Liam is 19 months old.

(…)

Liam can run like the wind, has the agility of a cat, lifts pieces of furniture that most children his age couldn’t push across a slick floor and eats like there is no tomorrow — without gaining weight.

“He’s hungry for a full meal about every hour because of his rapid metabolism,” Hoekstra said. “He’s already eating me out of house and home.”

The kid has a genetic condition called myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy, which means that he’s got abnormal growth of his skeletal muscles. He’s immensely strong for his age, quick as lightning, has a light-speed metabolism, and almost no body fat. The condition doesn’t affect his heart, and as far as anyone knows, it has no negative side effects. Scientists think it’s pretty rare, but it’s only been discovered in the last few years, so they don’t yet know exactly how many people have it. The biggest problem for Liam is that a kid his age needs some body fat to develop properly, and his metabolism is cranked so high, it’s hard for him to put on fat at all.

Even better? The kid has the potential to be a real superhero — no, not flying around and fighting supervillains, but studying him could lead scientists and doctors to important new treatments.

Liam’s condition is more than a medical rarity: It could help scientists unlock the secrets of muscle growth and muscle deterioration. Research on adults who share Liam’s condition could lead to new treatments for debilitating ailments, such as muscular dystrophy and osteoporosis.

If researchers can control how the body produces and uses myostatin, the protein could become a powerful weapon in the pharmaceutical arsenal. It also could become a hot commodity among athletes looking to gain an edge, perhaps illegally, on the competition, experts said.

Give him another couple of decades, and there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see playing pro football. Don’t bet against him…

UPDATE: I just found an interesting photo of Liam:

That is a 19-month-old toddler doing a chin-up.

I would not want to be anywhere near when he has a temper tantrum.

Okay, comics fans, this one’s all for you.

What was your first comic book?

I actually have a lot of trouble remembering my first one, but I think the very first one I got probably starred this guy.

That’s Super Goof, who made his first appearance back in the ’60s. Obviously, it was Disney’s Goofy. He had to eat Super Goobers to gain his amazing powers — superstrength, flight, bulletproof skin, etc. And apparently, the goobers also caused his costume appear. Either that, or it made his clothes disappear, since his costume was just some flannel long underwear.

But here’s the cool thing — as far as I can remember, the second comic book I ever owned was this one:

Yes, that’s the classic Detective Comics #408, from 1971, with the cover story of “The House that Haunted Batman” illustrated by Neal Adams. Brilliant stuff, with a villain (Hugo Strange, perhaps?) trying to drive Batman insane with a fake haunted house, including that lurid dissolving Robin bit.

Anyway, enough of my big firsts — what were your first comics?