Flex Mentallo to be Republished in Fall 2011

DC has just announced that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo will finally be collected and published as a deluxe hardcover in the fall:

If youre a fan of Grant Morrison (and who isnt?), youll be stoked to know that FLEX MENTALLO will be published in book form this year. This marks the first time the four-issue mini-series written by Morrison and illustrated by artist Frank Quitely is being collected. FLEX MENTALLO sprang out of Grants mind bending and infamous run on DOOM PATROL.

Pick up this beautiful Deluxe Edition hardcover with bonus material this Fall.

The story was one of the first collaborations between Morrison and Quitely but has never been republished due to a lawsuit by Charles Atlas Ltd. Flex Mentallo’s origin story is a parody of Atlas’s famous “The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac” ad that ran in comics in the 60s and 70s, and the character bears an undeniable resemblance to Atlas (c.f. the photo of Atlas in this article and the pinup of Flex Mentallo in this one). The case was dismissed but DC decided not to reprint the series, until today. (More info on the case, including Jim Shooter’s afadavit, here, and on its decision not to reprint it here.)

Flex Mentallo is important not just because it’s an early collaboration between Morrison and Quitely, who’d go on to reinvent the X-Men, Superman, and Batman, but because it is an amazing commentary on comics themselves and states many of the themes of fiction vs. reality that Morrison has continued to play with subsequently. It takes a tour of comics from their fun origins through the zany silver age to the dark 80s and toward Morrison’s idea of the future of comics, which he’s attempted to realize in his Batman work and others. Many have called it one of the greatest short comics series ever published, up there with Watchmen. Greg Burgas takes a stab at explaining why here.

The real question, since I own the original copies (and even had them bound into a hardcover), is whether I’ll need to buy the series again in this deluxe format with bonus material. (Answer: yes.)

The Road Home

I’m not reading any of DC’s “Bruce Wayne: The Road Home” books. Here’s Brian Hibbs writing about how poorly-produced the specials were:

[I]nstead of being “one shots,” as their solicitation text describes, the final product turns out to effectively be an eight-issue miniseries, with each one-shot being released with “to be continued in…” the next “one shot.” Naturally, someone messes up the production and at least one of the books “points” to the wrong “next” title. And let’s not forget to mention that the eight covers link up to form a single image – but that that image is neither the order of release, nor of reading order.

DC iPad App

Following up from last week, DC Comics has now released its own iPhone/iPad app, also powered by comiXology (iTunes Link). Newsarama has the full list of its launch titles.

Recommendations:

• All-Star Superman
• Green Lantern
• Batman starting with 655
• Action Comics starting with 844
• Tiny Titans, especially for kids
• Sandman
• Planetary

Vathlo Prime

Sort of an amusing confluence of events:

1. DC decides to do a political story called DCU: Decisions around election season featuring its characters choosing sides in the race. Except they use fictional candidates, and the story is poorly drawn and written. No one cares.
2. Marvel decides to do a Spider-Man issue that features Barack Obama in a 5-page back-up story of serviceable writing and art quality. It’s a huge, sellout success. (Despite that they botched the covers, releasing the Obama cover as a rare variant, which most customers don’t understand. Still, big success. The second and third printings feature Obama on all the covers. Last night when I was in my comic book store someone came in and bought three copies. The clerk then failed to bother to upsell him on anything, thereby squandering a great chance to sell him something else for himself or his kids that might turn them into regular customers.)
3. At the same time, Marvel bets on the wrong horse in the actual election, having Norman Orsborn, a big-time villain, take over the operations of SHIELD and generally staying with the tone of the Bush administration where we can’t trust our government. No hope to be found.
4. DC releases a book that was supposed to come out in December, but due to artistic delays only just came out this week, eight days after President Obama’s innauguration. It features an alternate- Earth black president who’s also Superman¹.

How did both companies manage to both hit and miss here?

1. DC actually once published a story about Vathlo Island, a nation on Krypton that featured dark-skinned Kryptonians. Morrison here is taking this fairly embarrassing part of DC’s history and turning it around, imagining a world where a Vathlo citizen sent his only son to Earth instead of Jor-El².
2. Jor-El lived in the city “Kryptonopolis”.

Morrison's DC

I have to hand it to DC Comics for having the guts to publish the comics they’ve been putting out lately. In a summer where parent company Warner Bros. released a widely successful Batman movie, one would have expected them to try to parlay that success by publishing some watered down, accessible Batman comics. Instead they give Grant Morrison the keys to the kingdom and let him put out stuff that’s as crazy as you could possibly expect. Why not? As he says, “the success of any superhero movie doesn’t affect the sales of the monthly comic one bit. We always sell more trades of stuff like The Killing Joke or Arkham Asylum but numbers on the monthly issues don’t really change when a film comes out.” So they let him run wild with the monthly, because few people who didn’t read comics before The Dark Knight came out are going to start, and this is what DC publishes:

• Superman Beyond, a 3-D comic in which Superman and Nazi Superman from Earth-10 travel to comic book limbo (where forgotten characters go) in a multi-dimensional yellow submarine. In 3-D!
• Batman R.I.P., in which Bruce Wayne suffers a psychotic break, villains inject him with heroin, and he wanders the streets of Gotham hallucinating and then drops into a back-up persona that Bruce Wayne saw fit to invent just in case he was ever driven insane by a villain.
• Final Crisis, where no one really knows what’s going on yet, but features a Japanese superhero named “Most Excellent Superbat” and a fight between Wonder Woman and an evil dominatrix Mary Marvel with pink hair.

In other words, crazy crazy stuff. Either you love it and you’re willing to pour into these fairly difficult books, or you think it’s stupid because you just like the ones where Radioactive Man punches things.

Paul Levitz: DC Comics and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative

Paul Levitz: DC Comics and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative

I Beg You To Be A Little More Observant - The Comics Reporter

I Beg You To Be A Little More Observant - The Comics Reporter

Great, great piece about how DC Comics treated Superman’s creators early on. Read the linked articles at the top if you don’t know the background. Amazing how the mistreatment of these artists led to a resentment that’s still being played out in court 80 years later.

Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics

Mike’s Amazing World of DC Comics

Huge index.

Green Lantern Sinestro Corps Checklist

Over the past few nights I’ve reread the big Green Lantern event from last year, The Sinestro Corps War. I really liked the story, finding it to be the perfect sort of fun, widescreen superhero action you want in comics. The story was designed to be very easy to read, with minimal tie-in issues. Despite what by my count adds up to 23 books, that’s actually very low for many summer “events”, like Marvel’s Civil War. In fact, while the main two books telling the story were Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps, the subplots are split up properly such that you can easily start with the initial special and then read only one or the other title and still get a coherent read out of it. Of course, with any crossover, if you want to get the whole picture, it can get hard to know which books to read in what order.

The story is very much foreshadowed in both titles from the very start, beginning with Green Lantern: Rebirth and popping up here and there in both Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps. You’ll see Batman get offered a yellow ring, you’ll see the Zamorans’s purple rings, you’ll meet Ranx the sentient city, and a new direction for Black Hand, but none of it is required reading. Below are the books that bear the official “Sinestro Corps” logos, plus a story from twenty years before the crossover started that’s absolutely essential to it. I’m actually very surprised the didn’t reprint it in one of the issues.

1. Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 2: Tygers, a 1986 story by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil, upon which Geoff Johns draws heavily. It’s been collected in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, and can be read online here.
2. Green Lantern 18: Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Despotellis
3. Green Lantern 19:Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Karu-Sil
4. Green Lantern 20: Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Bedovian
5. Sinestro Corps Special 1: Sinestro Corps War, part one
6. Green Lantern 21: Sinestro Corps War, part two
7. Green Lantern Corps 14: Sinestro Corps War, part three
8. Green Lantern 22: Sinestro Corps War, part four
9. Green Lantern Corps 15: Sinestro Corps War, part five
10. Green Lantern 23: Sinestro Corps War, part six
11. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Parallax 1
12. Green Lantern Corps 16: Sinestro Corps War, part seven
13. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Cyborg Superman 1: includes Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Kryb
14. Green Lantern 24: Sinestro Corps War, part eight
15. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Superman Prime 1
16. Blue Beetle 20
17. Green Lantern Corps 17: Sinestro Corps War, part nine
18. Green Lantern Corps 18: Sinestro Corps War, part ten
19. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Ion 1
20. Green Lantern 25: Sinestro Corps War, Finale
21. Green Lantern 19: Sinestro Corps War Epilogue
22. Green Lantern/Sinestro Corps Secret Files 1: includes Tales of the Green Lantern Corps story about Morro

I don’t necessarily recommend reading everything up there. You’ll probably enjoy the story much more just reading the main books (bolded above). The Blue Beetle tie-in is entirely inconsequential to the main conflict, but presents another angle to the big fight on Earth and fits in nicely with that book’s characters. The four Tales of the Sinestro Corps books fill in the characters some, but weigh down the narrative flow more than they help I think. The Epilogue isn’t too important, and the Secret Files book is a cool thing that I would have loved as a kid (and still do!), but doesn’t add to the story much. Finally, the events of Green Lantern 26-28 spin directly out of the War story, as do Corps 20 and 21, but I haven’t listed them above.

Recolored The Killing Joke

DC has released a new hardcover of Alan Moore’s famous Batman story The Killing Joke (only $10 on Amazon). If features new colors by original artist Brian Bolland. You can see side-by-side comparisons here. It looks very nice, and interestingly mostly that’s toning down the colors on most panels. I already own the story as part of an Alan Moore collection DC did, but it’s a good book and this edition looks great.

More on Batman 156

More about that Batman issue that Grant Morrison’s in love with. A quick check of eBay shows a few issues of Batman 156 that people are trying to make money on.

Batman 156

The current arc in Batman plays on an old, crazy story where Batman participated in an isolation experiment and hallucinated Robin’s death for a few days. Here are some scans of it.

Talking Batman with Grant Morrison

Grant Morrison talks about his ideas for his ongoing Batman run. I love his idea that all of the different types of stories from the origin to the campy 50s to the grim and gritty 80s all happened and all represent his psychological makeup.

New Weekly DC Series: Trinity

DC Comics has announced that their next weekly series, following Countdown to Final Crisis, will be called Trinity. As widely rumored the main story will be written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley, with backups by various teams. This is, I think, a great idea. It gives comic stores something to recommend to new or casual readers that comes out every week, should hopefully be easy to follow, and features its most recognizable characters—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

DC Responds to Piracy Concerns

Over two years ago Glenn Hauman met with DC and Warner Bros. where he told them that the torrent community had already bootlegged 75% of DC’s entire comic library and presented a plan to start putting stuff online to curb the trend iTunes style. This week DC finally started doing something about it, by suing torrent sites, but has made no movement in putting its products online itself. You would think that they could learn from the music industry, especially being that Time Warner owns a record label.

Alan Moore's Green Lantern Tales

In 1985-1987, Alan Moore wrote three short Green Lantern stories for DC. All three were about various Green Lanterns who were not the major characters starring in the books at the time, allowing Moore to come up with whatever crazy sci-fi stories he wanted. Recently Geoff Johns and Dave Gibbons have latched onto Moore’s stuff, making them very important works to the current Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps titles. Johns’s backup story about Sinestro Corpsman Despotellis is a straight riff on the Mogo story, the villains from Tygers have all been introduced, Mogo has been given a recurring role in Green Lantern Corps, and the prophecy told to Abin Sur is starting to occur.

The three stories have recently been collected (along with For the Man Who Has Everything and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, considered to be some of the best Superman stories ever told, and seminal Joker story The Killing Joke) in the DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore trade paperback. 4ColorHeroes also has the original issues for sale at reasonable prices.

Scans Daily has copies of all three stories if you want to read them: Tygers, from Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 2 is here, and Mogo Doesn’t Socialize and In Blackest Night are here, from Green Lantern 188 and Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 3, respectively. I’m probably going to pick up the trade paperback at some point, but the scans serve as a nice preview of Moore’s mainstream stuff.

While I was poking around Scans Daily, I also found this post showing how a one panel throwaway scene in Green Lantern 22 references a story from eleven years ago. None of this is stuff you had to know to follow the plot, but I love that the creators are going back through the older books and picking out these little gems.

Arrowette's Diary

If you’ve been keeping up with DC Comics lately, you’ll probably find Arrowette’s Diary hilarious. Recent delightfully crass (but SWF) entries include DC Artists, it’s OK; you have my permission. You can draw Mary Marvel’s vagina and The Dan Didio Advisory & Warning System.

Plans, Fans, and Tygers

Plans, Fans, and Tygers

How DC should and shouldn't do its crossovers.

Differences in the Infinite Crisis hardcover and the original issues

Differences in the Infinite Crisis hardcover and the original issues

Another older link. DC rushed the monthly issues and the final hardcover contains new pages, fixes editing and coloring mistakes, and changes some dialogue.

Counting Down: Dan Didio and Mike Marts on DC's New Weekly Series

Counting Down: Dan Didio and Mike Marts on DC’s New Weekly Series