Batman and Robin #1

Grant Morrison is the writer. Frank Quitely does the art. The two guys behind “All-Star Superman.” Like you need any other excuses to buy this one, right?

Unlike “All-Star Supes,” this one is going to be in-continuity — so that means that, after the recent “Battle for the Cowl” series, Batman is Dick Grayson (former Robin, former Nightwing) and Robin is Damian Wayne (Batman’s son by Talia al Ghul). It’s a shaky partnership — Dick was raised by a superhero, Damian was raised by supervillains and assassins — and Damian thinks he’d be a better Batman than Dick is. Damian is also rude to Alfred and unstoppably arrogant. Damian is really a bit of a, um, word-they-don’t-want-me-to-use-here.

So Batman and Robin capture a frog-faced criminal called Mr. Toad, who is transporting a briefcase filled with an unlikely number of dominoes. Toad is apparently waiting for the arrival of someone named Pyg, who seems to have a talent for horrific medical disfigurement and mental enslavement.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A good first issue, and a nice introduction to the new Batus-quo. Good dialogue, excellent art. Loved Damian’s rotten attitude. Not much happening yet, though, and I want to see some of Morrison’s trademark mind-blowing pretty darn quick.

Justice Society of America #27

Obsidian is holding Flash, Green Lantern, Wildcat, and Liberty Belle in the JSA headquarters, because he senses danger to them. And Hourman has had a one-hour-into-the-future prophetic flashes that says they’re all going to be killed. Stargirl gets possessed by evil spirits that use her cosmic staff to force Obsidian out of the building. The spirits then coalesce into a WWII-era Japanese shapeshifter named Kung, who transports Flash, GL, Wildcat, Liberty Belle, and Hourman to Hiroshima 1945 so they can all be killed by the atomic bomb.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A bit of a weird story so far, but fill-in writer/artist Jerry Ordway seems to have a good grasp of the characters, and that goes a long way.

B.P.R.D.: The Black Goddess #5

It’s the conclusion of the “Black Goddess” storyarc, as Gilfryd, convinced that Liz Sherman is loyal to him and that the threat of the frogs is over, turns his magic against the agents from the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, including Abe Sapien, Kate Corrigan, and Johann Kraus. He (possibly) kills Johann, but Lobster Johnson is seemingly resurrected. But in the end, his excesses lead Liz (or whatever powers have taken possession of her) to turn against him. But without Gilfryd, is there any hope that humanity can survive?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A good ending. I hope Johann comes back, and I also hope Lobster gets to stick around. And you better jump on board for all the upcoming BPRD mini-series, too — Mike Mignola has already promised that things are going to get rougher for humanity as this series continues.

Crossed #5

A cool-down issue — we don’t even see the Crossed in this one. We just focus on the small group of survivors trying to make their way to safety in a world that’s been taken over by insane homicidal maniacs.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Walks in the woods, peaceful encounters with wild animals, quiet conversations with friends. A nice break from the horror — except it’s not a complete break. We still see, in flashbacks and in the present, the psychological effects that the survivors take on. Some commit suicide, some get ill and don’t want to continue. The only people who seem immune are Cindy, the super-competent leader of the survivors, and her son, Patrick. I suspect things are going to get a lot worse and more violent for everyone as this series goes through its last four issues…

As I believe I’ve said before, I think a zombie walk in Lubbock would be beyond awesome.

What’s a zombie walk? Basically, a bunch of people get together, dress up as zombies, and go for a shamble. You hit a few appropriate locations (shopping malls, cemeteries, pubs with excellent jukeboxes), maybe make a few new zombies on the way (always with “innocent bystanders” who know what’s coming and are wearing easily rippable clothing), and just enjoy getting your zombie apocalypse on.

Some cities turn their zombie walks into charity events — food drives and blood drives are especially popular — and some places just do ’em for fun. The largest one ever happened last Halloween in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where over 4,000 people showed up to stumble around and groan “Braaaiiinnssss…”

Why do I think a zombie walk in Lubbock would be great? Very simply, it would be cool, and it would be hilarious. And Lubbock needs more cool and hilarious things. Really, that’s the full extent of my reasoning here. Who needs complex and rational arguments on why to do fun things, right?

Of course, I could certainly foresee some problems with a zombie walk here. Some folks in Lubbock tend to be, well, gee, how can I say this diplomatically…?

You’d have to do a lot of legwork before the event making sure that business owners wouldn’t totally freak out about it. You’d have to talk to the police beforehand to make sure they didn’t decide to shoot everyone. You’d sure need to make sure all your zombies knew not to involve anyone who wasn’t already in on the joke.

So which of you go-getters wants to organize this thing?

(In related news: ya seen the new game trailer for the “Left for Dead” sequel?)

Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #36

Tigra has accidentally released a genie, and while he’s willing to grant her some wishes, what he really wants to do is kill the Hulk. Apparently, in the future, the Hulk goes back in time to 500 years ago and gets the genie imprisoned in a necklace — so the genie’s mad at the Hulkster for something he hasn’t even done yet. Tigra could just use her wishes to wish the genie away, but she knows that magical wishes tend to get twisted into something really awful. But the problem with fighting a genie is that he can do anything, and the Avengers, for all their power, can’t do that. Is there any way for the team to survive?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Yet another extremely fun issue, with Tigra accidentally making wishes, Wolverine scarfing down sausages, and Spider-Man making lots of great wisecracks. The solution to the problem ends up being perfect and fairly funny all on its own.

Wonder Woman #32

Most of this issue is a slugfest between Wonder Woman and Genocide, revealed as the future corpse of Wondy empowered with her own Lasso of Truth. Genocide makes her plans to kill pretty much everyone and forces Diana to tell Tom Tessier that she never really loved him. And beyond that — really, just a whole heck of a lot of people smashing each other in the face.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I don’t mind an all-smashing issue, but it’s gotta be really spectacular smashing, and this just ain’t it. And even worse, this storyarc still isn’t over! Haven’t we all had enough of storyarcs that take most of a year to complete?!

Green Lantern #41

Larfleeze, a.k.a. Agent Orange, is the sole possessor of the Orange Lantern. He’s the greediest being in the universe, and he’s taken Hal Jordan prisoner. Why? Hal has a green ring and a blue ring — and Larfleeze desperately wants the blue one. Hal gets him to reveal how he came to have the Orange Lantern — he was once a thief who stole an important item from the Guardians and fled to the planet Okaara. There, he and his fellow crooks found a glowing orange lantern and struggled greedily to possess it. The Guardians and the Manhunter robots tried to stop them, but the orange light was too powerful. In order to get their important box back, the Guardians bargained to let the last surviving thief keep the orange lantern and to never interfere with him, as long as he stayed in the Vega System. Larfleeze ended up having the Orange Lantern all to himself, and now he wants his very own Blue Lantern ring. And he’ll stop at nothing to get it, even if Hal can’t get the ring off his finger…

Verdict: Ehh, kind of a wash. Agent Orange’s story is really less than compelling, and the Guardians’ and the Green Lantern Corps’ battle against Larfleeze’s orange light constructs is fairly pedestrian. But the cliffhanger is pretty good. How the heck is Jordan gonna get out of this one…?

Green Arrow and Black Canary: A League of their Own

A compilation of a lengthy storyline from the “GA/BC” series — this one focuses on the quest to find who shot and then kidnapped Green Arrow’s son, Connor Hawke. With Batman and Plastic Man tagging along to help out, Ollie and Dinah eventually trace the hit to Ra’s al Ghul’s League of Assassins — but Ra’s is dead, so who was masquerading as him? Turns out it was Shado, a Yakuza assassin who is the mother of another of Ollie’s kids — she raped him while he was unconscious. Her son is dying of cancer, and Dr. Sivana offered to cure him, as long as she killed Green Arrow. When the hit went wrong and Connor was injured, Sivana had him and Shado’s son kidnapped and genetically treated with some of Plastic Man’s skin cells. So Connor ends up cured, but he’s completely lost his memory and his ability to shoot a bow. On top of all this, we get Mia Dearden, the new Speedy, out on a date. Will her new beau be able to accept her HIV-positive status?

Verdict: I think I’ll give this a thumbs up, because I was quite entertained by the story. The big problem is that writer Judd Winick put this together from the fragments of two of his signature “Let’s kill a random superhero” storylines — first, he “killed” Green Arrow himself, then after handwaving that one away, he “killed” Connor. One gets the feeling that, even for DC’s notoriously kill-happy editors, they thought Winick needed to be reigned in, so we get this long storyarc trying to get the Green Arrow status quo back to normal. I will say that Winick’s strongest abilities lie in characterization and dialogue, so I very much enjoyed Mia’s date and Connor’s post-coma amnesia, which both felt genuine and charming. And Mike Norton’s art is just grand throughout — nothing real flashy, but solid, beautifully created artwork.

Had an unusually rough night, what with a completely unexpected allergy attack and a bad dream about a bad, bad man with a chainsaw. So as long as I’m up early, I think I got time for one quick review, don’t I?

Booster Gold #20

Booster begs Rip Hunter to send him on a sightseeing tour of 1952, mainly because he’s a big fan of “Happy Days.” Unfortunately, he gets sent to Nevada, 1952, where there aren’t any sock hops, where’s there’s not even a real Las Vegas yet, where there’s not much but a secret rocket test site and a bunch of paranoid government agents who really, really don’t trust super-people. In fact, the federales include Jess Bright, Evan Hughs, and Karin Grace — Task Force X, better known as the original Suicide Squad. And their leader this time out is none other than Sgt. Frank Rock himself. And they want Booster to go undercover with them to infiltrate the rocket site to help them investigate a shady Russian scientist. The investigation soon turns out they intend to launch the rocket into space — and that makes it one of Booster’s prevent-someone-from-messing-with-history missions. In the end, Booster prevents the origin of, believe it or not, the Fantastic Four, and finally gets to go to a ’50s malt shop and make like the Fonz.

Verdict: I think I gotta give it the thumbs down. There are just too many weird errors for me to tolerate. Obviously, Sgt. Rock was never a member of the Suicide Squad, and I can’t think of any good reason to shoehorn him into the job instead of Rick Flagg, except that they just wanted to use Sgt. Rock. On top of that, one of the squad members was named Hugh Evans, not Evan Hughs. Yes, these are just silly continuity errors, but this entire series is about time-travel and comic-book continuity — in this kind of series, clumsy continuity errors matter. And finally — no, I just do not buy for one second that a guy born in the 25th century is going to be a fan of a ’70s nostalgia series about the 1950s. I mean, there’s silly, and then there’s much, much too silly to make proper sense…

Time for a new 12-round series of Friday Night Fights, and Spacebooger has a new theme and set of rules that I’m not real thrilled with — music lyrics. The rule is that I’m supposed to tie my panels of punishing pugilism to a song title or lyric. Well, great, but I’ve got a lousy memory for song titles and even worse for song lyrics. I really doubt I’d be able to consistently come up with songs that match the fights… so I’m gonna go ahead and plan on breaking the rules as often as I need to. Like, for example, today.

So here we’ve got a panel from January 2008’s The Goon #20 by Eric Powell, in which the Goon punches some oversized doofus across the chops:

So I wracked my brain trying to come up with a song to match up with that. I can’t find any lyrics for “Dude, I punched some guy who was taller than me” or “Lookit those teeth fly”. The closest I could come up with was that old kids’ song “Little Bunny Foo Foo,” but the bit where the Good Fairy saying “If you don’t behave, I’ll turn you into a GOON” isn’t even sung, it’s just spoken.

So instead of specific lyrics, let’s just hit the trailer for the upcoming “Dethklok vs. the Goon” one-shot. It’s about the Goon, and it certainly includes music by Dethklok, the most brutal death metal band ever. So I’m calling it a win. Huzzah!

QUICK UPDATE: Hey, I just realized that the music played at the end of the “Dethklok vs. the Goon” trailer is Dethklok’s “Face Fisted” — which actually appears to conform to Spacebooger’s rules. Nevertheless, I’m still declaring this to be a rule-breaker, just to emphasize that I’ll be breaking that rule pretty often, and that none of youse sorry mugs is tough enough to stop me.

Maxo at Great Caesar’s Post had a really interesting article yesterday about the perceived rivalries between comics fans and pen-and-paper RPG fans. I fluctuate between thinking Maxo’s right and thinking he’s wrong — while there does seem to be a general rivalry between the two groups, it’s also pretty clear that there’s a lot of bleedover from fans of comics to fans of RPGs.

It all got me thinking about superhero games, too. I’ve only been able to play in one superhero RPG — when I was in college, some friends cracked open a copy of the classic Marvel Super Heroes game, they helped me roll up a character, and we played through a short scenario. When you roll up a random character, you’ll get stuck with some pretty crazy stuff — mine had very high strength, a nearly nonexistent IQ, and an absolutely incredible sense of smell. So I called him Mr. Nosey. (What? It’s a perfectly good superhero name.) I teamed up with SonicAttack (Battle cry: “You can’t stop… SONICATTACK! DAMAGE!”), and we took on Sterno-Man (a former bum who got his fire powers from drinking Sterno) and a fairly ineffectual refugee from a blaxploitation flick called Captain Alphonso Power.

Other than that, I’ve never actually been able to play in a superhero game, despite buying a metric ton of superhero RPG books. I could never get the hang of Champions, which is far and away the most popular superhero game. I always loved the insane detail in the character design process in Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS games, so I liked their GURPS Supers books, even if they were generally low-powered superheroes. I used to fill up stacks of legal pads with GURPS Supers characters, just to fill time after work. But as far as I can tell, I’ve always been the lone GURPShead in every town I’ve ever lived in.

I’ve recently started picking up the Mutants and Masterminds game from Green Ronin Publishing. Again, I haven’t played any games with it, but the books are jam-packed with good stuff, like a cross between the Justice League, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four. You get the feeling that they got their inspiration from Grant Morrison’s modern “JLA,” but they also love to throw in cool bits from the Silver Age, like secret cities on the moon, atomic dinosaurs, and evil gorilla geniuses. I think it may be the best superhero RPG system ever, but I don’t know if they’ll ever grab the golden ring away from the Champions RPG.

And I’ve also enjoyed reading the Truth & Justice RPG from Atomic Sock Monkey Games. It’s a much more rules-light system — you get to skip a lot of the time-consuming elements of character creation in favor of just writing down who you are and what you can do (with the gamemaster’s approval, of course). There’s a lot of emphasis on improvisation, both by players and gamemasters, and the rules contain several pages of some of the crazy/cool themes and elements of comics — I suspect that’s just to remind players of some of the wicked-kewl stuff you can do with a superhero game.

So howzabout you? Have you ever gotten to play any superhero RPGs? Which ones are your favorites?

So the word on the street is that Archie is getting married.

Archie Andrews is about to make an offer someone can’t refuse. In what Archie Comics is billing as the “Archie Story of the Century,” Hollywood producer and comics writer Michael Uslan (“The Dark Knight,” “The Spirit”) is set to take Riverdale’s resident redhead into the future where he pops the question more than 65 years in making: “Will you marry me?”

Well, he’s not actually getting married, of course, because he’s a cartoon character and is not able to actually get married or sign contracts or purchase stocks and bonds. But even in the world of Archie Comics, he’s not really getting married.

This is a story that starts about five years in the future. And it takes place just as Archie and the Gang graduate from college. So what we do here is take a leap into the future and the device that I use here is similar to what happened back in “Archie Digest” #236. There was a story where Archie meets Archie. Archie walks down memory lane and meets Archie from 1941. This time, he goes up the street rather than down the street and winds up walking smack into his own future.

And it is just, to me, a really, really cool setup where we get to explore what impact, making a decision about who you are going to marry has.

In other words, it’s a publicity stunt, just like Spider-Man getting un-married, just like the new Batman, just like the death of Superman, just like, frankly, “Final Crisis.” It’s there to grab a few extra readers for a month or two, and then it’ll never be mentioned in-continuity again.

I don’t mind a few publicity stunts now and then. I just wish the comics industry was better at designing and publishing them.

Besides, everyone knows Archie would marry Betty. Right?

Everyone knows that.

Tiny Titans #16

Sidekick Elementary’s PE coach is Lobo, which isn’t quite as cool as having Darkseid as a lunch lady, but it comes close. Anyway, Coach Lobo has decided that the best way to get all the students in shape is to have them race all the way around the world, which really isn’t going to be fair for most of the kids. We also get to meet the Tiny Titan version of Bombshell and Mas y Menos.

In addition to that, we also get this deliriously odd panel:

Mmmm, that’s great non sequitur!

Verdict: Thumbs up. As always, this is just a very, very fun comic. It’s marketed to kids, but I think it’s a good read no matter how old you are.

Marvel Mystery Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1

Another in Marvel’s special comics to commemorate their 70th birthday, this one puts most of its focus on Namor the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, and the great rivalry they had during the Golden Age. We also get guest starring roles from Toro, the Angel, and Electro — not the Spider-Man villain, but an old robot hero from the ’40s. They’re all fighting Nazi saboteurs (of course) and a bunch of robots that burn with green flames. Once that’s over, we get treated to some reprints of classic Golden Age stories, including one with the Human Torch and another starring a guy called the Ferret, a detective whose gimmick is a trained ferret. Yeah, no kidding — pet ownership used to be enough to get you a comic book series…

Verdict: Thumbs up. The reprints at the back are pretty silly, but the main story is solid work — good script, excellent art, and I love Namor’s near-constant state of offended rage. It’s really too bad that we don’t see that version of the Sub-Mariner very much anymore.