Jim Lee Is No Curt Swan

From The Answer Man column in New Adventures Of Superboy #6 (1980):

And then there's Jim Lee. "Only" a page a day would be a quantum improvement in pace for a man who's finished 2 issues of Superman Unchained in 7 months. But I guess he knows the publisher or something, because apparently deadlines are optional for him...

I'm just sayin.'

Bold Fashion Choices--What If The X-Men Had Even Crappier Uniforms?

Some What If's have the most terrifying consequences. For example...

Well, yes, bad things do happen. The Fantastic Four, Hulk and Daredevil are depowered, Thor never returns from Asgard, Iron Man goes alcoholic way earlier and dies, blah blah blah.

But the real tragic consequences of this tiny change in the timeline is that the X-Men end up in the worst damned costumes you've ever seen.

I know--given that the X-Men started with the worst costumes ever designed by Jack Kirby, and given that they've spent the subsequent decades going through bad costume set after bad costume set, you're probably saying, "Gee, snell, How bad could they possibly be?

Pretty bad.

In this reality, Xavier spent years digging himself up from the bowels of the Earth, so Magneto gathered most of the mutants together for self-protection. And either because of Magneto's terrible costume sense, or the lack of Xavier's design aesthetic, get stuff like Angel and Beast dressed thusly:

Or Colossus dressing like it's RenFair day...

And yes, that's a little soul patch he's wearing there:

The Scarlet Witch stays precisely the same, in her original bathing suit/evening gown hybrid and Quicksilver mostly does, except for these 1950s sci-fi style shoulder fins:

Jean Grey? Hey, it's still RenFair season!

Ah, but Cyclops...let's start from the rear, shall we?

The front is not any better (the color register was off on this page...the costume is the same blue as above)...

Nothing says Scott Summers like "lightning bolt pointing to my crotch!"

And then there's the helmet...

That helmet...

Now, the art in this issue was by Vince Mielcarek. So maybe he designed these costumes. Or perhaps author Kurt Busiek gets the blame.

Then again...

...the cover is by Jim Lee, and we all know what happens when we put him in charge of redesigning costumes for alternate universes...

What If? #13 is from 1990, as if we couldn't tell.

What If The Mole Man Had Been Created Just A Few Years Earlier?

We all know our old buddy/1st villain of the Marvel Age, the Mole Man, right?

Well, let's all be grateful that he was created when he was. His status as a societal reject who made good in an underworld kingdom, the sympathetic villain, was a fluke of history, a time when Stan and Jack decided to humanize their characters--including the villains.

Ah, but what would have happened if the Mole Man had debuted just a few short years earlier? Let's watch...

It's one of those doomed archeological expeditions in Peru, and Larry is making time with Pete's woman:

Well, we know this isn't going to end well, don't we?

And when Pete boasts of the murder to Anita...

Man, Anita is a [REDACTED] [REDACTED], isn't she?

Ah, but this is a 1950s horror comic, so Larry is still alive!!

And...

Because SCIENCE!!

Years later, he does find his way out of the caves...but...

Dude, just go conquer a race of subhumanoids and try to take over the world. It's much more satisfying than--

No, Mole Man--NOOOOOOO!!!

Well, thanks to the great coincidence machine in the sky, Pete and Anita are back in Peru for an archeological lecture tour, so...

Anita--you kinda deserved that. And Pete?

Ewwww!!!

Well, now at least Larry will be caught, right?

Ha ha ha---this is pre-Code, baby--the bad guy gets away!!!

So we can see that, thankfully, our Mole Man was created at the perfect sweet spot in comics history. A few years earlier, and he's a neck chewing homicidal maniac.

And if he had been created a few years later??

Than Jim Lee would have designed him...brrr, now that's REALLY horrifying!!

From The Unseen #12 (1953), 90s version from Fantastic Four #1 & #2 (1997)

Manic Monday--Then How Could He Ride The Board?

In the blessed 1990s...

...even the Silver Surfer was losing his feet...

Pin-up by Jim Lee, from Silver Surfer Annual #5 (1992)

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

Look, everybody else and their grandmother has already reviewed Justice League #1. So this isn't a review of the issue, it's not a post about what I think of the story.

[OK, if you must know, it was pretty standard Johns-Lee: too many splashes; too few panels on most pages; loaded with more testosterone then an entire NFL team and a complete lack of any female presence; what plot there was could have taken place in the first 4 pages of a 1970s issue of Marvel Two-In-One, when the heroes would realize that they were both heroes and would spend the next 18 pages actually accomplishing something.]

[And, not to be too harsh on Johns' script, but it borrowed so heavily from other sources that it needed a few "story by" credits. This type of Batman/Green Lantern interaction, if it's what you like, was done far better in All-Star Batman & Robin--I know, I can't believe I just said that; the "we hate super beings" was done better in Legends, and yeah, that was a Darkseid story, too; and the ending was completely lifted from Cosmic Odyssey (arrogant GL locks up accompanying hero behind because he knows he can handle the problem by himself, surprise, he can't).]

[Plus, Johns doesn't seem to grasp the concept "note to self":

Note to self, Geoff: that's not how it works.]

No, what I'd like to talk about here is what JL #1 was supposed to accomplish (aside from "huge" sales that are probably actually less than what the combined sales of 13 regular books would have been that week, had DC not pulled a stunt...go figure).

After all the hype, all of the carelessly throwing around words like "historic" and "game-changing", there's almost no way the book couldn't have disappointed. Hell, JL #1 could have cured cancer, and it would have lived up to the massive propaganda blitz DC engaged in.

But is it what we were promised? Way back in May, DC VP Of Sales Bob Wayne said, in a letter to retailers, that "(a)ll stories will be grounded in each character's legend -- but will relate to real world situations, interactions, tragedy and triumph." [Emphasis added]

Was Justice League #1 anything like that? Did we see any real world situations or interactions? Was there anything in JL#1 that couldn't have been done without a line-wide reboot? Anything different in storytelling style, in story construction, in tone or content, that couldn't have been done in a "The Secret Origin Of The Justice League" 6-part mini-series, as Johns did with GL and Superman when he wished to adjust their continuity in the old DCU?

At this point, I would normally do a pullback here, and say that it wasn't fair to blame the creators of this particular comic, because the hype wasn't their fault, and they didn't choose to make their comic the debut of the nu52, etc.

But, in this case, the creators ARE just as responsible for the hype, and they DID decide that this book would be the first showing for the bright, happy shiny nu52. And either the co-publishers of DC were just over-hyping beyond belief, or (much more troubling) the co-publishers of DC had no idea that this masterwork they produced was not really in any way different than what DC has been doing for the past few years.

Of course that's no surprise. When the people in charge of the company come out and say "the comics we've been producing for the past few years have failed," without any questioning of who was responsible for that; and then, with essentially zero changes at the top, say "but now we're going to do it better" without any self-awareness at all, well, what do you expect? The self-aggrandizement of putting their own book first resulted in big sales, sure, but the complete disconnect between what they're saying and what they're actually publishing is not reassuring.

Still, it was better than Flashpoint #5, which Johns obviously deliberately wrote as badly as possible, in order to make JL #1 look good, right? I mean, he couldn't actually have thought that was a good conclusion, could he?

Meanwhile, enjoy the completely unrelated music video:

Oh. My. God.

From today's reveal of the New New New New New Teen Titans:

Tim Drake is forced to step out from behind his keyboard when an international organization seeks to capture or kill super-powered teenagers. As Red Robin, he must team up with the mysterious and belligerent powerhouse thief known as Wonder Girl and a hyperactive speedster calling himself Kid Flash in TEEN TITANS #1, by Scott Lobdell and artists Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund.

I have a few comments:

**AHHHHHHHHH MY EYES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sweet lordy but that's the most set hideous costume design EVER. Dear Jim Lee--please stop. The 1990s are over.

**To the weaselly claims of "not a reboot"--right. Either these are all new characters using the old names, or it's a reboot. "Tim Drake has to step out from behind a keyboard" sure sounds like he wasn't Red Robin before, and there's a conspicuous lack of the Robin symbol on his costume. And a Tim Drake who doesn't know Dominatrix Wonder Girl, W.I.L.D.Cats Kid Flash, or Emo Superboy, and wasn't Robin before...look, there's no way you can do that without a full reboot, or ridiculous selective amnesia.

Sure, it could all be explained with a few sentences; maybe they're all new, and they just used odd phrasing to describe Tim. Yup, sure.

**So, Warner...you spends millions and millions on your lawsuit to maintain ownership of Superboy...and this is what you do with him??

Seriously...at this point I'd rather have Superboy-Prime back.

**Just for the record, that had better not be Wally as Kid Flash...that is a warning, DC.

**This convinces me more than ever that DC is going to do a pretty thorough reboot on Superman himself, and I'd put money on the fact that Grant Morrison is finally going to get to adopt some version of his Superman 2000 proposal. The loss of the red trunks, separating Superman and Lois...these have long been proposals of Morrison, and he's supposedly writing Action. And what the heck...maybe DC can make the "new" Superman different enough to salvage something after 2013...