This post is comprised of miscellaneous topics, separated by horizontal lines.
Conversation at the store:
Employee Aaron: “I wonder what George Takei’s power is on Heroes?”
Me: “The power of being incredibly cool.”
Employee Aaron: “…I’ll accept that.”
…And then Employee Jeff asked about the sequence in the most recent episode, where he wondered if Hiro’s father (Takei) really taught Hiro expert swordsmanship in so short a period of time. That resulted in this shameful display:
Me (in my best Comic Book Guy voice): “Well, if you were to refer to your copy of All New Collectors’ Edition #C56, better known as ‘Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali,’ you will see that during the course of the story, Ali trained Superman in the sweet science while in another dimension…a dimension where time passes at a far different rate to our own dimension. Only minutes would pass by in the ‘real world’ while hours, or even days, could go by in this other dimension.
“Perhaps, with his time-altering powers, possibly even unwittingly, Hiro altered the passage of time for his father and himself, allowing them hours or days of training while only a short period of time passed outside of Hiro’s influence.”
Employee Jeff: “…”
Employee Aaron: “…I need to go sit down now.”
The whole Mary Jane “sexy” statue brouhaha reminded me of this oddity from a while back: the Marvel Milestone Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy statues:
The sculpts are absolutely identical, save for the heads. This should tell us something, I’d imagine.
And then there was this Mary Jane statue, which I mentioned in a previous End of Civilization installment:
And, as pal Dorian had noted, the “sexy” MJ statue is still better than this damned thing:
Why? Why would you want that?
Speaking of offending people, I wanted you to know that I had this title banner all ready to go when All Star Batman & Robin #5 was finally unleashed on the marketplace:
I was going to replace my regular title banner just for the day, without comment, just to…well, be annoying, I guess. But right now, with all the hoo-har over the sexual nature of the aforementioned Mary Jane statue, I thought maybe now may not be the best time to splash Wonder Woman’s rear end across the top of my page. I mean, sure, all you folks reading this site would get that I’m just messin’ around, but I suppose I don’t need the additional grief it could bring at the moment.
I wasn’t even going to bring it up, except for one thing. Would you like to know when I made that banner?
According to the file creation date of my original image, I made it on April 26th.
Of 2006.
It’s been about a year since the last issue of All Star Batman. It’s been several months since the last issue of Ultimates 2 (also out this week). And, as I’ve noted before, it’s been a year (and counting) since the last issue of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk.
Quite frankly, this is embarrassing. Appalling and embarrassing. There’s no excuse for alleged periodicals to be this late. I’m willing to cut folks a little slack, but once we’re measuring lateness in years, it becomes obvious that something’s broken at Marvel and DC.
Come to think of it, when was the last time a Frank Miller project was released on a timely basis? Daredevil? I remember the delays on Ronin. Dark Knight Returns #4 was so late DC actually released a promo item for stores to post, announcing its arrival:
And I’m sure most of you remember the delays on the Dark Knight sequel. Did the various Sin City series maintain a schedule? I’ll have to check.
Do any of Marvel and DC’s lateness problems have any repercussions? I mean, aside from readers giving up on the books and the occasional, sheepish “yeah, I know we’re late, we’re working on it!” interview in Wizard? Or have the companies 1) realized that readers are accustomed to late books now being the norm, and 2) grown attached to the slight sales bump provided by the low-rent star-f’ing of having minor league “celebrities” write their books regardless of their consistent lateness issues, and therefore just don’t care?
Wow, that got bitter, fast. I really just wanted to say, hey, finally a new issue of All Star Batman, it’s a hoot! But I’m too pissed off right now to be particularly enthusiastic about it.
But here are some questions I’d like to see answered by the powers that be:
1. Why are these books so late?
2. What is being done to correct this problem?
3. What is being done to prevent this problem from recurring?
4. What are you doing to repair the erosion of consumer (and retailer) confidence in your products?
Let us lighten the mood with a little joy:
I hadn’t known that there was a flash animation of the Alan Moore-vocalized “March of the Sinister Ducks” song:
…but now I do.
And since some of you were wondering how this turned out:
And you can blame Kevin for this.
