(Note: This post originally appeared on my old blog back in November 2006; I’ve edited and updated it accordingly. I wrote three more installments, and I’ll be reposting new versions of those over the next three days. Enjoy!)

It’s time to rant about something else near and dear to my heart: comic books. Or, more accurately, how a majority of them suck ass nowadays. There’s a few gems here and there, of course, but most of the comic books on the shelf are a waste of your time and money.

I’ve been reading comic books for well over two decades. I grew up during a time when some of the greatest comic book tales ever written (like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns) were released, and later in life, I studied the medium extensively throughout college, speaking with industry professionals, artists, and writers. (I even wrote my senior thesis on Captain America’s place within World War II propaganda.) As such, I can honestly consider myself somewhat of an expert when it comes to comics, and can very easily recognize the industry’s ups and downs.

Right now, we’re stuck in one of those “downs.” Rather than nitpick every book that’s out there (which would take weeks, and none of us have that kind of time), we’ll focus on the two largest publishers as a whole (Marvel Comics and DC Comics), and the giant company-wide events that have given rise to this latest pile of slop.

We’ll start with DC, as they’re home to my favorite comic book character, Green Lantern. DC’s universe is still reeling from the events of the last big crossover, Infinite Crisis, while gearing up for the next big thing, Final Crisis. When that whole mess started up a few years ago, I predicted that the whole thing would be terrible, and I was proven correct. Instead of hiring clever writers to fix the marginal holes in continuity that spring up on comic books over time, DC gave us the biggest cop-out in history: teen angst. The original Superboy, acting like a whiny bitch, pounded on the walls of his interdimensional home (which he’s been stuck in since the Crisis on Infinite Earths saga back in the 1980s). As a result, “ripples” were sent throughout reality, altering all manner of histories. This retcon changed many things throughout the DC universe, including the return of Jason Todd from the dead (ugh), severe alterations to the nature of the Green Lantern Corps’ powers (first mentioned in the atrocious miniseries Green Lantern: Rebirth), and fixing the horrible Metal Men miniseries from the early 1990s. Granted, that last was a welcome change, but the overall messes don’t make it worth it. Infinite Crisis was a colossal shitbomb, and DC should be ashamed of itself for taking such a crappy way out. Even Zero Hour was better than this.

When Infinite Crisis concluded, DC shifted its universe’s timeline ahead by one year, under the oh-so-originally named One Year Later banner. Here, all of the books pick up one year after the events of the crisis, and we see what our favorite heroes and villains are all up to. Why was this done? Because at the same time, DC began a grand publishing experiment known as 52. This is a weekly series (about halfway done as of press time) that attempts to fill in the gaps between the very end of Infinite Crisis and the beginning of One Year Later, with multiple creators working on the various storyarcs within to keep up the weekly publishing schedule. While certainly ambitious in nature, I had my reservations. One, I believed that the one year gap would be explained in the core books themselves, and 52 wouldn’t really be necessary, and two, I had a feeling that 52 would just get boring after a few months. Sadly, both have turned out correct. Reading a few of DC’s core titles will easily fill you in on most of the important events that have taken place over the past year, and as for 52 itself…do we really need to read more about Khandaq? Why the hell do we need a Batwoman? And great, the Metal Men work again…but they got whacked early on in the current Justice League series, and then retconned again in another miniseries, so why waste our time? And a group of mad scientists on a tropical island, building all manner of evil machines? What the hell is this, the dregs of the Silver Age?! Lastly…many “jaw-dropping” moments within 52 have gone unexplained. One such example is that when Adam Strange’s zeta beam misfired, many heroes were horribly disfigured by the energy discharge. Firestorm and Cyborg seemed to be hit the hardest, as their bodies were literally fused together in a horrifying melted mess! But, a few months later in 52…Firestorm’s walking around just fine, with no explanation of how he was separated from Cyborg! C’mon, DC…you’ve got great writers on your payroll. (Well, except for Geoff Johns. He needs a sharp kick to the crotch after Green Lantern: Rebirth and the subsequent GL series.) If they’re pulling this junk, they’re playing games with you, and insulting the readers. Find someone else who can get the job done.

As you can see, 52 was a bit of a train wreck. Following it was Countdown, another weekly book that leads into Final Crisis, and that’s being followed by another weekly book Trinity. DC loves to part fans with their money, but some of them may be starting to catch on, as Countdown and Trinity‘s sales aren’t so hot.

Let’s move on to Marvel. While DC attempts to clean up their continuity roughly every ten years, Marvel’s method is simply “let’s just throw shit in randomly and see if it works.” Case in point: Iron Man. After the “Avengers Disassembled” arc a few years back, many of the core Avengers members’ books were restarted. Iron Man was one of them, and all of a sudden, Tony Stark received his life-changing heart injury during the first Gulf War, not the Vietnam War (as was previously canon). Now, I can understand the need to keep characters young and whatnot (Tony Stark would be in his late 70s if the Vietnam origin was kept!), but just dumping the new origin onto readers brings in a host of problems. The biggest of these was that there have been a lot of Iron Man stories dealing with what happened to Stark in Vietnam, and the other characters that were either there or otherwise strongly connected to the events. With this latest retcon, all of those stories were in continuity limbo, and that’s poor writing, any way you look at it. And once the recent All-New Iron Manual came out…Marvel retconned it back to Vietnam, but just not in wartime! You can see how confusing this would be to new readers.

Then we’ve got Civil War, Marvel’s last big company-wide crossover. The gist of it was this: the US government passed a bill requiring all superhumans, mutants, and the like to register in a national database, much like the Selective Service System. Naturally, some characters are in favor, while others are against, and the whole thing spirals out of control. Now, we’ve got plenty of big-name characters on one side, just as many on the other, and a few stuck in between. While it seems like a great story on the surface, it’s not going to end well. Marvel’s made it incredibly clear that old friends who have found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict now hate each other, and this is unlikely to be reconciled by the end of the crossover. So, what’s Marvel to do? Well, history tells us that whenever Marvel does a colossal experiment like this…they retcon it rather quickly. Proof? The Onslaught storyarc. “Teen Iron Man.” Heroes Reborn. The Spider-Man “Clone Saga.” The “deaths” of Apocalypse, Hawkeye, and Colossus. All of those were “world-shattering” events, and every single one was retconned within a few years. I don’t care what “amazing” stuff happens during Civil War; watch, it’ll all get retconned or otherwise “fixed” so that things go back to normal. It’s par for the course for Marvel, so don’t even bother getting excited. In fact, not only did the “bad guys” (the government) win the war and force everyone to register, now we’re well on our way to Secret Invasion, the newest crossover. This ones about Skrulls infiltrating Earth…again. Expect this crapfest to reveal that plenty of the major players in Civil War were actually Skrulls in disguise. In fact, it’s already been shown that many top Marvel characters from the 1970s have actually been Skrulls for decades! Ugh.

Alright, enough about crappy storylines. There’s another cancer growing within the comics industry, and this one is due to the treatment of writers and artists. No, not poor treatment; in fact, it’s the opposite. With the booming popularity of comic book-based movies and video games, more people are checking out comics books. To continue this influx of new readership, comic publishers have been giving writers and artists a lot of leeway, and have also been bringing in creators from other media, such as television. Examples include Bablyon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski (who penned two excellent creator-owned series, Rising Stars and Midnight Nation, before being hired by Marvel to write Spider-Man and the new Squadron Supreme) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon (who wrote some Buffy-related comics before moving to a writing gig on Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men). Now, I’m not saying this is a bad idea; there’s nothing wrong with allowing writers from outside the comics field to try their hand at our four-color funnybooks. It becomes a problem when these creators are treated like “rock stars,” as it were, and they’re lauded even when they churn out crappy work.

Examples of this are Straczynski’s “The Other” storyline that ran through the Spider-Man titles, and Whedon’s first few Astonishing X-Men arcs. JMS’ first few Spidey stories were damn good…and then, “The Other” came along. If you want full details of this travesty of writing, I ask that you read Protoclown’s excellent editorial, “Spider-Man: The Other: Suck or Blow” (the rest of his Tales from the Longbox columns are good readin’, as well, and right on the mark!). Suffice it to say, JMS fans wondered just what the hell happened. We were all pleased by his previous Spidey work, and then this just came out of nowhere and kicked us in the mouth. Inexcusable. And don’t even get me started on “One More Day,” which has officially replaced “Teen Iron Man” as the worst comic book story ever written.

As far as my favorite whipping boy Joss Whedon is concerned, let me proclaim this again for those of you who are unaware of my take on his writing: Joss Whedon is probably the single most overrated writer on the face of the planet. Yes, I said it. Now, I’ve met the man personally (about four years ago); he’s a nice guy, and a pleasure to talk with. I just don’t enjoy his stories, because I can see just how derivative and rehashed they are. (It’s not difficult, if you’ve got an open mind.) I was forced to watch Buffy way back in college by a girl I was seeing, and the dialogue and story flow in that series was painful to the brain, not to mention having some of the weakest “vampires” ever seen in fiction. His science fiction series Firefly fared better, but not by much: it’s an almost literal reimagining of classic Star Trek and Deep Space Nine (including old Trek‘s bad acting!).

All of this affected his Astonishing X-Men work. Make no mistake: people read this because of Whedon, not because it’s an X-book. I guarantee that if Whedon used a pseudonym, and no one knew who the writer actually was, the book wouldn’t be doing nearly as well; it’s possible it may have been canceled already. Whedon’s storyarcs are not only full of clichés, but they also rehash his own work, as well as X-Men tales of the past! Whedon claims that he based his Buffy and Angel characters off of the X-Men’s Kitty Pride and Colossus, respectively. How incredibly convenient for him to say that…after he’d accepted the Astonishing X-Men writing gig. As far as the storyarcs themselves…well, his “Gifted” arc (in which a cure for mutations was found) was lifted from an old X-Men animated series episode from the early 1990s, and his “Dangerous” story (where the Danger Room became sentient) fares even worse; that type of story had been done countless times before in Iron Man comics, as well as Uncanny X-Men! Whedon himself even admitted the poor quality of the “Dangerous” arc. Like I said, I don’t have anything against the guy personally, but his work is so highly overrated, it’s reached gross proportions.

This “rock star” problem has affected other writers, too, as well as artists. While it’s expected for some books to be a week or two late every now and then, the problem has grown to the point where a great many books are consistently late. And we’re talking months late, not just a week or two! This is far beyond unprofessional, and the publishers do absolutely nothing to fix it. As a result, the snake eats its own tale; creators aren’t penalized for turning in work late, so why should they bother buckling down and speeding up production? Look at the Cliffhanger! Comics debacle a while back, specifically Joe Madureira’s Battle Chasers. That book was constantly late, apparently because Joe Mad wanted to stay home and play Final Fantasy games. In a Wizard magazine interview back then, he even admitted to ignoring phone calls from his editors! Can someone explain to me why he wasn’t dragged into court, and sued to every penny he had for breach of contract?

The same could be said for the first six issues of the current Iron Man series. Writer Warren Ellis has produced stellar work in the past (read StormWatch and the original Authority), but his “Extremis” arc was the second worst Iron Man tale ever written (right behind the abominable “Teen Iron Man” story from the late 1990s). If that wasn’t bad enough, the book came out once every few months. In this case, artist Adi Granov was to blame, and he admitted as such, which deserved a bit of respect. But…why didn’t Marvel simply fire him, and have another artist finish the story in a timely manner? And if Granov was contracted for those six issues, with no way for Marvel to get out of said contract to hire a replacement…again, why wasn’t Granov sued for breach of contract?

We’ve seen the storyline problem, and the rock star problem. Finally, we’ve got the classic “quality vs. quantity” problem. No matter what you hear to the contrary, let’s make one thing very clear: like any other artistic medium, comic books’ sales have nothing to do with their quality. Period. You can argue otherwise all day, but you’d be a victim of coincidence at best, or flat-out wrong at worst. Even the most rabid comic book fans have books they love to read that just don’t sell well (and often get canceled). Astonishing X-Men sells like hotcakes, but I’ve shown how derivative and poor the stories are; meanwhile, great DC books like Manhunter and Firestorm didn’t get any respect, and it’s a miracle they lasted as long as they did! If you still don’t believe me, let me lay it to rest with this: if sales equaled quality, then Britney Spears would be one of the most skilled and talented musical composers of all time.

After all of the negativity, there really is a big light at the end of the tunnel. I mentioned “ups and downs” earlier; well, the comics industry’s quality always comes and goes in waves, without fail. The early 1980s were incredible (especially the X-Men tales), and the mid- to late 1980s were a messy overload of “grim ‘n’ gritty” clichés. The early 1990s gave us a fresh take on Spider-Man and X-Men, and the late 1990s vomited up the “Teen Iron Man” and “Electric Superman” stories. The turn of the millennium gave us some of the greatest JLA stories we’d seen in decades…and now, we’re in another slump.

So what does it all mean? Well, in about five to ten years or so, comics will hopefully be good again! This has taken place time after time. The big crossover messes I’ve mentioned above will be hopefully be things of the past (and very likely retconned!). Finally, as is the standard with the comics medium, all of our favorite books will have undergone some creator team changes; new writers and artists will tackle different characters.

As bad as the comics world is right now, all is not necessarily lost. If all else fails, seal yourself in a cryogenic capsule, and we’ll see you in 2011 when the PlayStation 4 comes out.

I love coffee. I love donuts. As such, Dunkin’ Donuts is an expected pit stop for me. I don’t go there often, as the food’s not exactly healthy, but it’s still a nice treat every now and then.

As much as I love their products, the sheer amount of franchises that keep popping up like mushrooms is getting annoying. You can barely turn a street corner without seeing a DD shop. There’s more than twelve of them in the town I work in alone! That’s fucking insane. In some cases, there’s shops directly across the street from one another! Compounding the overload is the fact that many DD franchises are placed within other stores, such as Stop & Shop, Home Depot, or Wal-Mart. Is it really necessary for you to guzzle a coffee and scarf down a French cruller while shopping for a ballpeen hammer?

So who’s to blame for this nearly viral outbreak of confections and caffeine? I think I’ll place the blame squarely on Fat America. As a country, our waistlines are grossly expanding, and no one seems to give a shit. Sure, you’ll see so-called “health initiatives” on the news every so often, and reports about the alarming rates of childhood obesity, but do you honestly think anyone cares? DD as a business is out there to make money; I doubt they care that it’s based upon mounds of flab.

If you want to see some scary shit, go to a casino. I was at Mohegan Sun the other day, and there were patrons there so insanely fat that they had to use back scratchers to reach the buttons on the slot machines! Instead of wasting that money on gambling, your fat ass should be using that money to enroll in a goddamn fitness program.

Seriously, people worry about the economy bringing about America’s downfall, but I think we’re literally going to collapse under our own weight! I’m no Adonis myself, but at least I can keep my weight under 200 lbs. That’s positively anorexic by too many Americans’ standards.

As much as I enjoy democracy, the 2008 US presidential race disgusts me beyond compare. For as long as I can remember, we’ve always been stuck with a choice between the lesser of two evils: Republican or Democrat. I consider myself a political moderate, maybe veering slightly towards the left. (Mainly because the right wing in the US has gone completely insane.) Neither party gives a shit about the people; they just want votes. Senator John McCain has changed his stance so many times on the issues that I honestly don’t know what he supports any more. Even though Senator Barack Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton was constantly in full-on attack mode, since she’d been trailing Senator Barack Obama for months. The sheer level of personal attacks she’d been leveling are insulting to anyone with a brain cell.

Obama’s not perfect, but I’d vote for him, and I certainly don’t envy the mess that he (or whoever the winner is) will inherit. The problem is that I honestly think that many people will vote for McCain just because they’re either sick of the bickering between Obama and Clinton, or that hardline Clinton supporters will just refuse to support Obama. The last thing this country needs is another Republican president; aside from the failed policies of the last eight years, we’ve also got a Democrat-controlled Congress that’s too scared to stand up to the GOP. With McCain at the helm, things will not only continue on the same slapdash course, we’ll circle the drain even faster.

Just a quick note to let you all know that next week, I’ll be reposting my “Four-Color Nightmare” series, which originally appeared on my old blog. The series highlighted some of my gripes with the comic book industry and its fans. The posts have been edited and updated accordingly, and will appear daily Monday through Thursday. Enjoy!

In other site update news, I’ve added a social bookmarking feature to all of my posts. By clicking the little “Bookmark This” link in the lower left corner of each post, you can add the post to Facebook, del.icio.us, Furl, Digg, Yahoo, Google, Windows Live, and many more.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled rants.

On September 16th, fans of the Star Wars franchise will be treated to a rather ambitious video game: The Force Unleashed. Taking place somewhere in the nineteen years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, the game will focus on Starkiller, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, as he hunts down renegade Jedi and other threats to the Empire. The game promises to make excellent use of ragdoll physics, adaptive lighting, and all of those other next-gen selling points.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about how revered Jedi Master Shaak Ti looks like a whore in the game.

The last time I checked, most Jedi, male and female, wore simple brown robes. In fact, that’s exactly what Shaak Ti was wearing when she appeared in the prequel films, the Clone Wars cartoon, and so on. Now, I understand that being on the run from an evil empire out to murder you might preclude one from finding fresh clean robes whenever one wants, but does that automatically mean that Shaak Ti has to wear a tiny leather swimsuit? (Click the picture on the left to get a better view.)

I know exactly where this comes from: it’s classic comic book/video game female character design syndrome. An overwhelming majority of female characters in both of those media are specifically designed to be very sexy, sport massive boobs, and wear skimpy outfits. This makes perfect sense from a business standpoint, as both forms of entertainment are targeted at young men. I enjoy hot chicks just as much as the next guy, and I tend to laugh at the often over-the-top sexism. The reason I take issue with this in Force Unleashed, however, is that with a Star Wars product, you don’t need to use the “sex sells” tactic. It’s Star Wars, so it’s already going to sell!

Shaak Ti’s not alone in her wardrobe issues. Another character in Force Unleashed, a padawan named Maris Brood, doesn’t fare much better. She’s got skintight leggings on…and a few strips of what looks like electrical tape for a top. This trend continues in other Star Wars media, too; for example, in the excellent comic series Star Wars Legacy, one of the villains is a Sith Lord known as Darth Talon. She’s badass, she kills Jedi, she’s pure evil…and she runs around in a black bikini and go-go boots. C’mon, is that really necessary?

Like I said before, nothing makes me happier than a gorgeous woman. But when it gets so ridiculously silly and pandering that it detracts from the core product, then there’s a problem.