Missing Page in 52 Week 18

I’ve been re-reading 52 over the past few weeks. Highlight so far:

My wife, who’s that chimp in the detective hat on the cover?

Me: Oh, that’s Detective Chimp.

God bless them for bringing back that ridiculous character in Day of Vengeance.

Anyway, there’s a page missing from Week 18, which came out in a recent interview with Greg Rucka (via LitG). Page five was yanked because it was too sexually explicit. In the story, Renee Montoya has had a bit of a relapse. As the series started she had left the Gotham City police force following the murder of her partner, and was spending most of her time drunk and reeling from her decision not to shoot the murderer. Last issue she had to shoot a suicide bomber, so she’s dealing with the conflicted feelings of guilt for killing a would-be mass murderer. So she’s gotten very, very drunk and picked up some girl in Kahndaq. (Despite not speaking the language. I guess they have easy-to-find lesbian bars?) Here is the inked page that was removed:

Click to embiggen. Slightly NSFW.

You can read the script for that page in this document, which I’ll excerpt here:

One: Caption (Vic): …and she’s defaulted to her standard coping mechanisms as a result.

Zalika: [Arabic]

Montoya (drunk): Okay, I’m drunk and all but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t English…

Two: Caption (Montoya): Irony is the universe’s way of saying you’re its bitch.

Zalika: [Arabic]

Montoya (drunk): Got no idea what y’just said, baby, but I love the way you say it.

Three: Caption (Montoya): I mean, what else can it be?

Zalika: [Arabic]

Caption (Montoya): Why else do the wrong people always end up dead?

Four: Caption (Montoya): I can kill a fourteen-year-old girl…

Zalika: [Arabic]

Caption (Montoya): …I can’t kill the bastard who murdered Crispus—

After this, sunlight bursts in, due to the fact that Black Adam has just crashed through the wall on the next page, which was published.

None of this is that crucial to the story. It flows fine with the page omitted, but that’s what was supposed to be there.

Two great resources, incidentally, if you’re reading 52, are JG Jones 52 Cover Blog, in which the cover artist shares his sketches and process for every cover, and Douglas Wolk’s 52 Pickup. It was written as the series was released, so some of it is guesswork, but there are lots of good references and annotations.

The 52 Exit Interviews: Grant Morrison

The 52 Exit Interviews: Grant Morrison

Nice Review of 52 by Marvel Writer Matt Fraction

Nice review of 52 by Marvel writer Matt Fraction

52 Covers Blog

I linked to this in October, and wrote about the covers in June, but I’m going to make a plug for a weekly weblog called J.G. Jones 52 Covers Blog. It’s hosted on Wizard Magazine’s website and doesn’t feature and RSS feed, but it’s worth manually loading up once a week. For the past year, DC Comics has been publishing a weekly comic called 52. J.G. Jones has drawn all of the covers for the series, and they’re spectacular. Each week he writes up a post about the week’s cover, how it ties into the main story, and shows off some of his early sketches. The series itself is interesting in that all the major characters come from DC’s c-list. It’s been a fun read, though as with 24 the real-time gimmick gets in the way (though at other times it pays off, like the New Year’s Eve cliffhanger), but reading about the amount of thought and talent that went into the covers is quite something even if you haven’t been reading the comic. Also it has one of the best mastheads around, with the giant “52” numbers integrated into the art.

J.G. Jones on 52 Week 25's cover

J.G. Jones on 52 Week 25’s cover

Great cover this week. He did a great job of making them look like store bought costumes.

52 Covers

I’ve really started to get into DC’s 52. Actually, I’m very relieved that the concept is working as well as it is. Putting out a book every single week can’t be easy, and getting all the different artists’ work to fit together and still make the story work is impressive. Also, you have to admire DC’s guts on this one, putting out a weekly book whose very premise is that it doesn’t feature their three most famous characters.

I’m not one, you might say, who judges books by their covers. Flashy covers are there to get kids to read books and draw in the occasional news stand buyer, but I already know what I’m going to pick up before setting foot in the store, so the covers just aren’t all that important to me. However, I want to point out how absolutely outstanding the covers for 52 look. For me, it’s the masthead that really puts it over the top. That big, recessed “52” just pulls the books together so well. It looks so iconic.

Comicon’s The Pulse has two nice interviews with cover artist J. G. Jones, and Wizard runs a weekly feature that’s worth checking out:

1. JG Jones Creative Technique for _52 Covers_
2. JG Jones Covering DC’s Weekly _52_
3. J. G. Jones’s 52 Blog

From the 2nd one:

THE PULSE: How did you decide how to lend your own unique art style on these heroes and hat to tweak or what to leave as people might be more familiar with?

JONES: Well, my style sort of is what it is. I am definitely taking a lot of different approaches on the 52 covers to keep things from getting dull. I mean, there’s 52 of them, right? I’ll do one cover that’s sort of based on the style of WPA posters from the ’30s, are another one based on looking at film noir posters from the late ’40s. Sometimes I’ll go with a straight forward action scene from the issue. Other times I’ll take a collage approach with a lot of overlapping art elements. It just depends on how well I feel it will serve the storyline.

I figure that the way I draw, my style or whatever will be the unifying element over all 52 covers.

Looking at each book, this is what I love. The Lex cover for issue three looks like it might be a magazine é or something. It’s totally different than the other issues, but it works with them all.

Update: Here’s a cover gallery for all 52 issues.