In honor of the release of Eric Powell‘s newest comic book, Chimichanga, Employee Aaron had a chimichanga for lunch. No, he didn’t eat the comic, he had a chimichanga from the bar ‘n’ grill down the street, but if had eaten the comic, it would have looked like the above. LOOK AND LEARN, FRIENDS.

Anyway, it’s a fine comic, and you all should buy it. Not eat it. Well, okay, eat it if you want, just give me your money for it first.

In other news:

• Who likes the free comics? You like the free comics!

  First, it’s the long-awaited third installment of the world’s greatest comic about a Luchador gorillia scientist/surf-guitarist, El Gorgo! Available in multiple downloadable formats, and it’s all completely free! (And here are number one and number two, if you need to catch up!) It’s comics as God intended, so go read ’em already!

  Second…”What? ‘Second,’ you say? But Mike, surely El Gorgo #3 is more free comics than we sinful, miserable comic readers deserve! Can there possibly be more?” Why, yes…yes, indeed, my friends, there are more free comics to be had from your special internet friends Chris Sims and Matt Digges at Action Age Comics: it’s The Christmas Chronicles of Solomon Stone, available, like its spiritual brother El Gorgo, in many a download friendly format. And did I say it was all for…FREE? Because it surely is.

• My friends, prepare for genius: Bully the Little Stuffed Bull in “Bully of the Lantern Corps” – may be too cute for the cuteness-appreciation impaired. All the hoopla surrounding the Blackest Night event, all the effort we had to put into obtaining and distributing the plastic rings…it was all worth it for this.
• A big “huzzah” to our pal Gilbert Hernandez, upon his becoming a Rasmuson Fellow and scoring a $50,000 grant. Drinks are on you, buddy!
• E-mailed to me by everyone on planet Earth, which should probably tell me something: construct your own Sluggo papercraft toy. (Superdeformed Darth is kind of cool, too.)

from the Wolverine Comic Images card set (1988)

…from the Batman: The Animated Series episode “The Terrible Trio.” Enjoy!

I know, we’ve seen Batman using guns before…he packed some heat back in the Golden Age (an era later revisited in the recent Batman/Doc Savage special), and in Final Crisis (used as a last resort), and even in the Animated DC-verse (in the very first Batman Beyond, where Batman uses a gun to defend himself when his aged and battered body fails him). Oh, and then there’s the Tim Burton Batman, whose Batmobile has machine guns built into the front of the car. And I’m sure there are plenty of other instances I’m not remembering at the moment.

Still, given Batman’s usual attitude regarding gun use, Bruce casually using a firearm for sport, as seen in this cartoon, feels a bit…out of character. Okay, Bruce’s parents were offed by a mugger with a pistol, not a shotgun, and Bruce is shooting skeet, not hunting The Most Dangerous Game or anything. And it’s Bruce using a gun as part of his rich sporting playboy disguise, not Batman trying to mow down the Penguin. But still, yeah, Bruce Wayne with a gun. Just struck me as a bit weird.

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…Well, shit.

house ad from Werewolf by Night #2 (Nov. 1972)

from The Champions #7 (Aug. 1976) by Tony Isabella, George Tuska & Vince Colletta

EDIT: Mr. Isabella his own self has a few words to say about this panel.

I suppose I should write something about DC’s new graphic novel initiative, establishing fresh restarts for Superman and Batman presumably to attract new audiences. Or, more likely, to give the old audiences something to complain about since they’ll be the ones primarily buying these. Unless, of course, I’m surprised and these are packaged at an under-$10 price tag and are sold everywhere and thus actually have a chance at getting in the hands of new readers. And, as Chris Butcher says, they’d better look different from the dozens of Superman/Batman books already on the shelves or they’re just going to get lost in the shuffle. I mean, it is DC, which does act like a real publisher most of the time, so I imagine they already realize the problems they’re facing.

As a funnybook seller, I do have some demand for continuity-lite standalone stories featuring the Big Two Characters, particularly with origin stories, so it’s not like I don’t have a market for it at my shop. That’s usually restricted to times when a movie featuring those characters is on the horizon, however, so I guess I’ll be set if there’s another Superman or Batman movie anytime soon.

The other thing is that, at least for Superman, there seems to be a progressively-decreasing amount of time between reboots/fresh starts for characters which is likely indicative of a fundamental problem regarding marketing and consumer acceptance, or at least a sense of desperation at maintaining a decades-old trademark in its original medium in the face of much more lucrative successes in other media. It’s the ol’ “let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks” strategy, but it’s beginning to seem a little like the flailing arms and thrashing-about of a drowning man just before he sinks beneath the water.

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Well, that was a bit of a downer. The graphic novels do seem like they’d be okay, and I do hope they succeed in “sticking” and attracting new readers. I’ve noted before that most people are good with a Batman or Superman or Spider-Man movie about once every few years or so, and don’t need to pop into a comic shop to keep up with the half-dozen monthly comics for each of these characters. A twice-annual graphic novel series seems to be a happy medium between Wednesday “New Comics Day” visits and the (at best) every three years film installments, that allows a new casual fan to follow a character they have interest in without creating a stack of periodicals in the house.

Or, as pal Dorian noted to me as I was discussing this with him, maybe this is all just a test run on publishers switching over to an Original Graphic Novel standard from the increasingly economically-unwieldy periodical standard. That’s a bit of an eye-opener, there.

At the very least, like I said at the beginning, maybe they’ll sell well to people already coming into the shop. That I can realistically hope for, and if additional interest from new audiences actually materializes, all the better. But I’m not holding my breath.

EDIT: Pal Nat and Tom note the importance of the licensing angle, as well.

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Also, given who the writer of the Batman Superman [EDIT: Oops!] graphic novel is going to be, I’m going to be very disappointed if those GNs don’t have a hamfisted moral lesson at the end of each story like that same writer’s Brave and the Bold comics, because those are awesome.