I’m already starting to get a bit behind on these gift recommendations, so let’s get back into ’em. Today, we’re going to talk about The Complete Major Bummer Super Slacktacular.

A little history: “Major Bummer” was a humor comic published by DC from 1997-1998. It was written by John Arcudi, with art by Doug Mahnke. It didn’t appear to be within DC’s normal continuity — no other superheroes appeared, and Lou was never mentioned in any other DC books. There was also no one named “Major Bummer” in the comic — the title was part pun and part a thematic mission statement — namely, “Superpowers suuuuck, now let’s have a larf at people being brutally injured.”

Our main character was Lou Martin, a skinny, unmotivated slacker with few interests outside of eating, sleeping, and playing video games. But after a couple of alien grad students accidentally implanted him with a hypertech superheart, Lou was transformed into a superstrong, musclebound, super-smart slacker with few interests outside of eating, sleeping, playing video games, and trying to avoid being horribly maimed by supervillains.

The comic’s supporting characters included a group of misfits who’d received their own superpowers: Gecko (a superhero fanboy who could stick to walls), Val (a gorgeous babe who could fly and had the hots for Lou), Lauren (an elderly, scatterbrained lady who could see the future), and Francis (a condescending artiste with a supersonic scream).

The main villains were a bunch of superpowered thugs: impossibly-skinny claw-slinger Carlos, super-hot density-controlling Nancy, chubby electro-punk Bridget, big-brained weirdo Reggie, and Nunzio. Really, Nunzio was the only one who actually counted — he was a gigantic, red-skinned, lizardy monster who was way, way tougher than Lou was.

Other villains included the alien grad students, Zinnac and Yoof, a transdimensional Nazi thunder lizard called Tyranosaurus Reich, a psychotic, buck-toothed hero-worshiping geek named Milton, a demon-possessed toddler, and Val’s horrible parents.

The violence in this book, mainly directed at Lou, was entirely gratuitous, over-the-top, and ridiculous. Lou gets repeatedly beaten to a bloody pulp by Nunzio and various other threats. He gets bitten, clawed, shot, dropped out of planes, and trampled by elephants. In one memorable panel in the final issue, he even gets used as a club to beat a future version of himself.

DC has never bothered to put this out in a collected trade paperback, which was just insane, because it was such a grand series. Eventually, Arcudi and Mahnke were able to take the entire series to Dark Horse Comics, and they published this single gigantic volume earlier this year. If you missed the original series, this will run you about $30, but it’s really the only way to see what all the awesomeness was all about.

The Complete Major Bummer Super Slacktacular by John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke. Go pick it up.

Daredevil #6

Daredevil just got beat like a drum and thrown into the ocean by a metahuman enforcer called Bruiser. DD is still able to get himself out of that situation, but he’s got to save his client, Austin and his boss, Mr. Randall, from a consortium of the Marvel Universe’s biggest criminal cartels, including A.I.M., Hydra, the Secret Empire, Agence Byzantine, and Black Spectre. Can Daredevil survive his rematch against Bruiser, get Austin and Mr. Randall to safety, and find a way to let the five biggest superterrorist organizations in the world let him walk out the door unharmed?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Another grand issue, with action and smarts, great writing and great art, all wrapped up in a nice little package. You’re reading this, aren’t you? You should be reading this.

Tiny Titans #46

Robin is going off on a secret mission with Batman, but he’s got a replacement on the way — not good news for Robin’s evil mirror-universe counterpart, Talon, who wants to be allowed to take over in Robin’s stead. Instead, the guy taking over for now is a guy called the Protector — a guy who showed up really briefly as a replacement Robin in a “Teen Titans” anti-drug commercial in 1983! And appropriately, in an issue dedicated to way-out continuity trivia, we get this character:

It’s the weird purple cloaked lady who’s been showing up in all the rebooted DC Comics! Or is it…?

The Protector seems popular with everyone, but Talon isn’t going to let that get in his way as he organizes the Batcave’s bats and penguins to serve him. Will he triumph over Robin’s replacement? And who the heck is that lady in purple?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Spectacularly funny and clever stuff. Not the best issue of this title ever, but it’s close to the top, and it’s a great example of what makes this series so much fun.

Dungeons & Dragons #13

Adric Fell and his frequently-not-very-merry band of adventurers are stuck in the dwarven stronghold where Khal, the group’s paladin, hails from. He suspects something bad has happened to his girlfriend Danni, and they all soon find themselves trapped between the insectoid Kruthik monsters and Khal’s fellow dwarves, who have been ordered by Danni’s mother to kill them! They make a narrow and altogether amazing escape, but find themselves in another underground structure, one filled with hundreds of slaughtered Kruthiks, tiled in bone, dominated by an obviously evil temple, and infested by the deranged and monstrously creepy Foulspawn. Is there any way out of this for Fell’s Five?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Vastly fun. Great atmosphere, wonderful dialogue, great characterization, outstanding action. The group’s desperate flight from the Kruthiks is fantastic, and the slow, ominous buildup inside the foulspawn tunnels is amazingly well-done. John Rogers and Andrea De Vito are putting out the very best fantasy comic book you’re ever gonna read, right here.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Begun, the Alan Moore-Frank Miller Flamewar has.
• Female bloggers, I apologize on behalf of my gender. And I truly wish there was more that could be done about these douchebags.
• Man, Batman is creepy.

Man, I ain’t got time for the usual rigamarole, so let’s get right to it. It’s time for… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Today’s fight comes from September 1999’s JSA #2 by James Robinson, David Goyer, Stephen Sadowski, and Michael Bair. The Justice Society is taking on the Sons of Anubis, a bunch of zombified Egyptians working for Mordru. One of them is trying to drown Black Canary ’til Jay Garrick removes the water from the situation:

That’ll do it. See y’all back here on Monday!

Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #9

Steven Woods and his young traveling companion Allie have a new vehicle to travel around the country in — the abandoned and battle-scarred Mechagodzilla! Woods has gotten the manual controls switched on, and he’s able to beat up on Anguirus. Woods reveals that he’s got a mad-on to destroy Godzilla, because the King of Monsters killed his whole family. Eventually, President Ogden and what’s left of the American government are able to contact Mechagodzilla and order him back to Detroit, but it may already be too late for that.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This really does seem to be the most focused issue of this series so far. Most other issues have had multiple storylines running and multiple characters, sometimes very minor ones. But this one is focused entirely on Woods, Allie, and Mechagodzilla, and it makes it a vastly stronger story. I wasn’t really expecting a lot from this issue, but I was very pleased with how it turned out — kudos to writer Jason Ciaramella for that.

Secret Avengers #19

Steve Rogers, Sharon Carter, the Black Widow, and Moon Knight are in the Baltic nation of Symkaria, looking to take down a drug lord named Voydanoi, who is apparently using drugs to make his thugs as powerful as super-soldiers. But it soon becomes apparent that Voydanoi’s minions aren’t super-soldiers, and they didn’t get their abilities from drugs — they emit brightly-colored, swirling lights when they’re knocked unconscious. Will the team be able to make it past all the enhanced guards to the penthouse? Once they’re there, will they be able to handle Voydanoi himself?

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a good but not spectacular story. Good action all around, and it’s nice to see Moon Knight do something other than be the Crazy Guy.

Dark Horse Presents #6

This anthology series stuffs another metric ton of good stories in here. We’ve got Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse’s “Resident Alien,” Carla Speed McNeil’s “Finder: Third World,” Felipe Melo and Juan Cavia’s “Adventures of Dog Mendonca and Pizzaboy,” Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s “Beasts of Burden,” Fabio Moon’s “Change,” Neal Adams’ “Blood,” Steve Niles and Christopher Mittens’ “Criminal Macabre,” Haward Chaykin’s “Marked Man,” Robert Love and David Walker’s “Number 13,” and Andi Watson’s “Skeleton Key.”

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nothing particularly bad, and lots of stuff that’s really good. Personal favorites included “Marked Man” and “Finder: Third World,” which both seem to get more amazing with every new chapter, and “Beasts of Burden,” which is always grand, grand fun.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Ladies and gentlemen: Daria Morgendorfer enters the real world.
• A stunt film group recreates a Catwoman fight scene from “Arkham City.”
• I’ve got a few quibbles with this (Frank Miller’s definitely finished in Hollywood, and lots of beloved graphic novels started out as individual comics) but overall, it’s a good article on the awesomeness of the modern graphic novel.
• More cops need to act like this instead of cracking heads and spraying chemical weapons at Occupy camps.
• Okay, Disney Princess movies can be hard to suffer through — but yeah, I would watch the heck out of a Disney Princess movie like this.

This isn’t the usual Holiday Gift Bag installment. See, I’ve been re-reading Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” lately, which is something I try to do every few years, and I was marveling at how relevant it still is today. We see 21st century Scrooges almost everywhere we look. A lot of the anti-poverty programs that Scrooge advocated for during the first chapter of the book seem similar to programs that more modern wealthy misers have also advocated. The idea of working low-level employees on holidays is coming back into style. The scene where Christmas Present reveals Ignorance and Want was positively revelatory to me this year. Reading the book has got me thinking about a lot of stuff lately.

So in this installment of the Holiday Gift Bag, I’m not suggesting you go buy something as a holiday gift. I’m suggesting you do something to make the world a slightly better place. I’m asking that you try to nurture your senses of compassion and empathy.

The past week saw news stories about Christmas shoppers spraying other people with pepper spray, getting into fights, trampling employees, ignoring dying customers in the rush for bargains they could’ve gotten any other day of the season. Our politicians and pundits advocate for policies that would throw the unemployed to the wolves, that would send poor children to work in place of janitors, that would have poor people paying more taxes than the “job creators” who never seem to create any jobs.

There are people out there who cheer the ideas that private insurance should be too expensive for anyone but the wealthy and that people who can’t afford insurance should die of preventable diseases. There are people out there who look at the 10% unemployment rate, with hundreds of applicants for lowly burger-flipping jobs, and huff that the unemployed are just too lazy to work. There are people out there who think unemployment and welfare pay so lavishly that people choose to stay on the dole.

Sometimes, it seems like we’re trying to un-create civilization — like we’ve decided, as a culture, that having a sane society is just no fun anymore, so we’re gonna see how things work as a hellhole fresh out of Ayn Rand’s or Jason Voorhees’ wet dreams.

Part of the problem is certainly ignorance — people just don’t know how things are outside of their bubble, and their assumptions are deeply uninformed. But another part of the problem is that there are an awful lot of sociopaths running the political world and the mass media, and they’ve spent the past few decades getting paid very well to make sociopathy look sexy and fun. They’ve done a very good job of promoting the idea that it’s patriotic to dehumanize 99% of their fellow people because they don’t have the right politics or the right culture or the right level of wealth or the right level of personal attractiveness.

In the past few years, we’ve even seen people in the media and in our Congress claim that empathy is a bad thing to possess. Sure, maybe it is for psychotics and serial killers, who need to have no sympathy for the random people they’re trying to kill. But for the rest of us, if someone said you didn’t have any empathy or compassion for others, you’d think it was a huge insult. And you’d be right.

So seriously, make an effort to remember that not everyone has your advantages, and just because someone doesn’t have those advantages, that doesn’t mean they’re a bad person, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy, it doesn’t mean they’re taking anything from you, it doesn’t mean they’re destroying America, and it doesn’t mean you should be happy when bad things happen to them.

This is the type of thing you usually hear a lot of around the holidays. And it’s a good message, it really is. Compassion during the holidays is one of the best things about the holidays — opening your heart to all your fellow creatures is what gives this time of year the power that it still holds over us. But I hate it when those compassionate urges disappear after December 25th. And I hate it when people use the holidays as a weapon to attack others — either using a holiday greeting that the TV blowhards don’t approve of, or letting consumerism take over our good sense, or proclaiming that people who celebrate other holidays at this time of year — or none at all — aren’t deserving of the goodwill we offer to our own tribe. I wish compassion and empathy were the standards year-round, not the exceptions.

It’s a rough economy, I know, and I don’t think everyone should go out and spend all their money on charities. Please feel free to give to a good charity, if you’re able. But these days, you gotta keep your head above water first.

But even if you can’t contribute money to others, if you can’t give to the local food pantries or coat drives or toy drives or whatever, if you don’t sling soup at the homeless shelter or take boxes of cookies to the nursing home or go caroling at the hospital, please don’t let yourself devolve into the kind of thuggery, resentment, and hatemongery we have to see on the cable news channels. The only people who benefit from that are the cable news channels themselves, not you, not your family, not your neighbors.

It’s a hard life for all of us, but it’s a lot harder for some folks than others. Please remember that we’re all in this together. I mean, we’re all comic book people ’round here, right? Let’s try to be the heroes and not the villains.

Compassion and empathy: They’re free, and they make us all feel better. Please go pick some up.

Morning Glories #14

A story told concurrently with last issue, this time we focus on Zoe, Hunter, and Jun. After Hunter furiously tells off Zoe for being a shallow skank, Zoe decides to get her petty revenge by forcing him to pal around with her — because if she won’t, she’ll get her many male admirers to kick his butt. With the just-announced Woodrun, Zoe has decided she wants to win it, with the unwilling help of Hunter and Jun. But once the race actually begins, very, very strange things happen, and neither the students nor the teachers are prepared for what happens.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This felt like a very deeply unusual story. Lots of weird, moody teen angst, as you’d expect from this series, and lots of weird time travel stuff and just general weirdness — again, as you’d expect from this series, but they combine into something stranger than normal.

Blue Beetle #3

Jaime Reyes spends the whole issue trying to get his alien costume to let go of him so he can look human. La Dama slashes an injured minion’s throat so she can do some kind of blood magic. The Reach try to get a lock on where the Blue Beetle armor is. The Brotherhood of Evil get called on the carpet by a possibly new villain called Silverback. And I fail to be entertained by any of this.

Verdict: Thumbs down. This wholly unnecessary reboot of a character who wasn’t that old is just not hitting the cylinders like it should. I don’t understand why it’s important for us to understand what the armor is saying now. I don’t know why La Dama had to turn into a black magician instead of a somewhat sympathetic crimelord. I don’t know why there’s so little interaction between Jaime’s wonderful supporting cast. I want to see some improvement here fast.

Well, well, well, looks like it’s time again for the biggest shopping day of the year! Time to go fight your way through wall-to-wall crowds at the mall, while stores offer insulting “doorbuster” sales that require you to get up at dark-thirty so they can squeeze another few pennies out of you. And don’t you just love shopping mall parking on the day after Thanksgiving? You know why they call it “Black Friday,” right? Because it’s EEEEVIL.

But I’m here to offer you an alternative: comics! There are lots of comics and comic-related gifts you can find for the comics fan in your life, or for the person who you want to turn on to comics. So we’re going to spend a few weeks looking through our Holiday Gift Bag to find some good presents that won’t require anything more stressful than a trip to your friendly neighborhood comics shop.

Today, let’s start things off with Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá.

If you’ve read this site for a while, you know that this was my very favorite comic series from last year. It wasn’t available in trade paperback last Christmas, but it is now. And here’s why you should consider gifting it to someone else.

This isn’t a traditional comic story. There are no superheroes or villains, no great battle between good and evil, and the only fights are short, brutal, and generally deadly, just like real life. It’s not really a story about mundane life either — though the main character and everyone he knows are perfectly normal people, there are a few traces of magical realism. It’s definitely not a linear story. We follow our hero from the age of 32 to 21 to 28 to 41 to 11 and older and younger and older. But every chapter ends the same way.

Our hero is a Brazilian named Brás de Oliva Domingos. He’s the son of a famous writer, and he has dreams of becoming a writer himself. For now, he’s employed at a newspaper writing obituaries while working on his own novel. He’s got coworkers, a best friend, a prickly relationship with his father, and everything’s going about the way things do. And at the end, Brás dies.

No, not at the end of the entire story. Brás dies at the end of the first chapter.

And then at the end of the second chapter. And the third.

Brás doesn’t have superpowers. He just seems to die on days that are significant and important to him. The day of his first kiss, the day he meets his wife for the first time, the day his son is born, the day he spends writing obits for dozens of people dead in a plane crash.

You can call it miracles, alternate universes, metaphors, whatever you want. Because the deaths aren’t ultimately any more important than anyone else’s death. We all have death to look forward to, or to dread — we all get to die, from the top 1% to the schmuck at the bottom of the 99% rung.

What’s important is how we get there, right?

And how Brás gets there is what keeps you turning the pages of this story. His life, his family, his friends, his lovers, his trials and triumphs, from the entire stretch of his history, from childhood to old age. I wasn’t able to get enough of this, and I think you’d love it, too.

In a way, I’m still a little surprised it didn’t get more acclaim. It’s pretty much the best comic work that Moon and Bá have done — and both of them have done lots of brilliant work prior to this. The series won an Eisner Award, a Harvey, and an Eagle, and I’ve never heard anyone say a cross word about it. DC never published this as a hardcover, just a regular paperback — and this was definitely good enough for a hardcover. Still, DC’s loss is your gain — you can buy it for less than $20.

Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. Go pick it up.

Avengers Academy #22

Someone has tried to kill Jocasta — and maybe succeeded — it’s hard to tell with a robot. Hank Pym isn’t making any headway in his investigation, beyond discovering traces of unidentifiable electromagnetic energy, but he realizes he needs to call in an expert. And that means Magneto and the rest of the X-Men are coming for a visit. Wait, Magneto is in the X-Men now? Yes, at least for now. Pietro definitely isn’t happy about Magneto paying them a visit — he and his father don’t get along anymore.

While Magneto and Quicksilver argue about all their many, many issues, Finesse gets uncharacteristically emotional and attacks the Master of Magnetism, soon involving Avengers Academy, the X-Men, and the rest of the Avengers in a big bench-clearing brawl. Emma Frost eventually calms everyone down telepathically, but the relationship between Magneto and his son is still strained, the mutants leave feeling not very trusted, and all Magneto is able to discover from Jocasta’s body is a large buildup of tachyon particles around her body, suggesting that her attacker was a time traveler…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Another good issue — the mystery deepens almost without anyone noticing, thanks to the worlds of action, angst, intrigue, and chaos going on in the story. Great characterization of everyone — which is quite a feat, considering how many people there are in the cast of this issue…

Batman #3

The Dark Knight has figured out that the man in the owl costume who attacked him got into Wayne Tower through the underground rail lines that converge underneath the tower. He lays some smackdown on the gangs that control the traffic in the subways, but can’t find anyone who knows of the assassin. He doesn’t believe that the Court of Owls exists, other than as part of an old folk song, but everyone else seems to think they’re real, including Alfred and Lincoln March, the politician who was injured in the assassin’s attack. Lincoln tells Bruce Wayne that someone is watching him, someone who leaves owls in his home. Batman’s investigation soon leads to — of all things — the empty 13th floors of high-rise office buildings — and what he begins to find there is bizarre and more than a little scary.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A very creepy story. I mean, there’s excellent action and detective stuff and everything you want from a good Batman story. But then there’s the creepy stuff — politicians muttering away in hospitals about all-powerful conspiracies, shadowy hidden headquarters filled with weapons and old photos of rich people wearing bizarre owl masks, secret societies that stretch back hundreds of years, all unsuspected by anyone — and what really gets left behind is how eerie and creepy and frightening this all is.

Wonder Woman #3

The big secret is out — Diana wasn’t formed from clay by her mother and given life by the gods. She was created the old-fashioned way — by her mother, Hippolyta, and her father, Zeus. With many of the Amazons angry at her, with Hera lining the gods up against her, and with only a few allies remaining on Themyscira, what future does Wonder Woman have here?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Still not sure I like the new origin, but the art is beautiful, the dialogue and characterization are great, and I can’t see that much here I should feel unhappy about.

iZombie #19

In the aftermath of the zombie invasion, the National Guard is out, the Dead Presidents and the Fossor Corporation are hunting monsters, and everyone else is lying low. Gwen has Ellie seal her up inside a crypt to keep someone from shooting her in the head, despite the danger that she could go nuts whenever she needs to eat a brain. Spot has a date with Gwen’s hunky brother Gavin, and a new ghostly vigilante called the Phantasm is stalking the streets.

Verdict: Thumbs up. As always, Mike Allred’s art is fantastic, and Chris Roberson does a great job juggling the various professional and personal relationships — and the accompanying soap opera angst — going on here. Interesting to see that Spot is apparently bisexual — had no clue prior to this that he was anything other than an awkward straight geek, but maybe more was going on that I didn’t notice…

Today’s Cool Links:

• Yes, what the world really needs is a dark re-imagining of “The Munsters.” (shoots producers)
• Batman knows all about good customer service.

Well, according to my calendar, it’s Friday, so it’s the end of the work week, and that means we need to get the weekend started right with a nice fat dose of… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Today’s battle comes to us from one of my favorite comics ever: June 1980’s The New Teen Titans #20 by Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Romeo Tanghal, and Adrienne Roy, a story molded around the idea that Kid Flash is writing about the team’s latest adventures in a letter home to his parents. The villain in this issue is a guy called the Disruptor, who wears a high-tech super-suit that lets him… disrupt things. It’s sounds incredibly dorky, but he still manages to mop the floor with the Titans for a while, all narrated in overwrought style by the teenaged Wally West…

That’s what we got for this Friday. Next weekend is going to be post-holiday crazy, so I won’t be posting a fight next Friday, but we’ll have plenty of fighting to do the weekend after that…