ANNOUNCEMENT!

I am please to announce that I will be providing some reviews, articles and hopefully the DC FOCUS column for Sequart.com! This is a website devoted to the study of sequential art and I am please to be able to contribute.

My first review is already on the site. It's on COUNTDOWN #1 and I encourage everyone to go read it. Check it out here.

I hope to have more stuff appearing there soon. They actually had a table at the last NYCC and were selling proofs of a soon to be released volume of essays about... THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES! Sorry I missed that one. Hopefully the final, edited version will be published soon.

So go and check out the site and leave me some comments! Who knows? If enough of you do that, they might even invite me to their booth at NEXT year's NYCC! LOL

Thank Darkeid THAT'S over!

Yesterday saw the release of COUNTDOWN #1 which, thankfully, ends that painfully pointless series. I'll be having more to say about that in another post (along with some news about that post) hopefully soon. Suffice it to say that this was an incredibly disappointing series that kept the characters (and the readers) jumping from place to place with no real interest. I wonder how much of it was plotted out beforehand and how much was simply made up as the writers went along. Anyway, it's over and hopefully now all we DC fans can breathe a collective sigh of relief and starting putting back our comic reading lives.

Next week brings DC UNIVERSE #0 which is supposed to lead right into Grant Morrison's magnum opus, FINAL CRISIS. You did know Grant Morrison is writing that, yes? I mean, how could you possibly NOT know he was writing it? Basically every single freaking comic blog and website has been falling all over themselves to tell you about Grant Morrison and FINAL CRISIS and BATMAN R.I.P. So I guess that DC isn't planning on publishing anything else while those titles are on... Now, I love Grant Morrison. I think that he is one of the most imaginative and creative writers in comics today but I am so sick of this PR spin-doctoring that is going on that I'm getting afraid that this series might even be worse than COUNTDOWN (as if that is possible). Not to mention the growing rumors that there is already some problem with the scheduling and grumbles in-house. I long for the days when comic companies just shut the hell up and put out comics. The editors, creators, writers and artists spend so much damn time at conventions and panels and on-line that I wonder when they get any work done? They probably have to schedule their lives around the conventions instead of the other way around. Could this be why DiDio keeps making so many lousy editorial decisions? He's suffering from too much jet lag?

I'm old school. I admit that and you know it by now. My comic book heroes were Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, STERANKO, Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson. If I went to a convention, that's who I went to see. Not some pencil neck editor-in-chief who thinks he's somekind of a comic/rock star. My heroes were the CREATORS. The people who actually WROTE and DREW the comics. They didn't spend all their time going to conventions and giving interviews about how great the comics they have coming out next month (why is it always next month? why not this month? it's like 'new and improved' in marketing which makes you think of your old stuff as 'old and crappy') are going to be. They were making those kick-ass comics!

The best thing I can think of to say to today's comic editors and 'talent' is this: Shut the hell up and show me how great your comic is instead of selling it first.