Author Archives: Drew

Sep 25 2012

Wonder Woman 0

Alternating Currents: Wonder Woman 0, Drew and TaylorToday, Drew and (guest writer) Taylor Anderson are discussing Wonder Woman 0, originally released September 19th, 2012. Wonder Woman 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: There’s a lot we take for granted in art. We accept the two-dimensionality of the canvas or the artificiality of a omniscient narrator as givens. It often takes an artist commenting on the arbitrariness of those boundaries for us to notice them at all, but that in itself has become almost expected. In comics, those expectations manifest in creative layouts and narrative devices, but it’s rarer that a creative team might challenge the arbitrariness of their tone. In Wonder Woman 0, writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chaing set out to do just that, delivering a brilliant deconstruction of modern comics via an apparent deconstruction of the Silver Age. Continue reading →

Sep 24 2012

Red Hood and the Outlaws 0

Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Red Hood and the Outlaws 0, originally released September 19, 2012. Red Hood and the Outlaws 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: Back when we started reading this title, Patrick and I couldn’t believe how much we liked it. We were wary of this title, famous for it’s leering depiction of Starfire, but Scott Lobdell’s charming characters and Kenneth Rocafort’s distinctive art won us over. The title was a blast, and we couldn’t understand all the ire that was directed at Lobdell — he seemed like a great writer to us. Our love affair started to wane a bit as Rocafort left, and branching out into Lobdell’s other titles left us unimpressed, leading us to question Lobdell’s prowess as a writer (perhaps unfairly). Is Lobdell the clever writer we thought, or the hack so many were making him out to be? In Red Hood and the Outlaws 0, Lobdell seems to address that question head-on, counting on our writing him off as pedestrian in order to better shock us with a earth-shifting twist in the epilogue. Continue reading →

Sep 20 2012

Nightwing 0

Alternating Currents: Nightwing 0, Drew and ShelbyToday, Drew and Shelby are discussing Nightwing 0, originally released September 19, 2012. Nightwing 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: The past is complicated. Or rather, our relationship with the past is complicated. Time has a way of changing our opinions of events, placing even our emotional attachment to our own memories in flux. That shifting relationship to the past is made exponentially more complicated in the comics world, where the actual events of the past are open to revisions, reboots, and retellings every few years or so. While those changes are often jarring for the characters, they’re particularly difficult for the audience, who may be attached to previous iterations of the story (not to mention the fact that they may be particularly anal about continuity). Like I said; shit’s complicated. It’s impressive, then, that Nightwing 0 isn’t just a successful retelling of Dick’s origin, but a compelling essay on the value of such retellings. Continue reading →

Sep 19 2012

Suicide Squad 0

Alternating Currents: Suicide Squad 0, Drew and PatrickToday, Drew and Patrick are discussing Suicide Squad 0, originally released September 12, 2012. Suicide Squad 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: Patrick and I like to pitch terrible television shows to each other. Imagining episodes of “Jewish Sopranos” or “Time Cheers” is hilarious (though I maintain that “Time Cheers” would be a great sitcom), but the funniest thing to me about the game is that it’s actually how shows are often pitched to networks. Being able to convey the ideas as quickly and concisely as possible is necessary when you’re competing for attention, but it also addresses the realities of people watching random episodes — the easier the concept is to introduce, the easier you can get new viewers up to speed. Comics operate in largely the same way, relying on snappy synopses of the origin story to orient new readers. Returning to that origin can be tricky, running equal risks of overcomplicating the story with new twists or boringly rehashing the same information. Unfortunately, Suicide Squad 0 falls firmly in the latter category.

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Sep 18 2012

Batgirl 0

Alternating Currents: Batgirl 0, Drew and HesperToday, Drew and (special guest writer) Hesper Juhnke are discussing Batgirl 0, originally released September 12, 2012. Batgirl 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: Batgirl is pretty unique among the New 52. Where most titles opted to return to an earlier time the the characters’ history or just plow ahead like the reboot never happened, Batgirl 1 found Babs in a very different position than when we last saw her, throwing a big question mark over her past in the DCnU. It quickly became clear that at least some of what we know is true, but writer Gail Simone cleverly left just enough out to make her past a tantalizing mystery she could tease out as the series progressed. The thought of a zero issue was bittersweet, then, as my desire to know more about Barbara’s past came into direct conflict with my desire to see these answers slowly revealed in the series proper. Simone cleverly side-steps this issue by avoiding those question marks altogether, effectively broadening the mystery by introducing new unknowns.

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Sep 17 2012

Superboy 0

Alternating Currents: Superboy 0, Drew and NickToday, Drew and (special guest writer) Nick Idell are discussing Superboy 0, originally released September 12, 2012. Superboy 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: I’ve never been a big fan of origin stories. They tend to be overly plotty, displacing more telling character moments in favor of unwieldy exposition. In short, I see them as a necessary evil we often need to get out of the way before the real story can begin. It’s unfortunate, then, that I live in an age where superhero origin stories are so ubiquitous, every third Spider-Man movie needs to revisit that well. We’ve fetishized origins, pushing them to ever-increasing complexity, straining the very limits of pre-title copy that attempts to explain it all. “The Supergirl and Robin of Earth-2 are trapped on Earth-1” sounds relatively snappy, but likely requires an explanation of what the fuck Earth-2 is, and how exactly they get trapped in the first place. These baroque origins relay details, which requires more space to properly explore, resulting even more bloated exposition. “Scientists clone Superman” is such a clean, self-contained idea, but Superboy 0 finds writer Tom DeFalco ladling on the details, buddying the message into an inexplicable hash.

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Sep 13 2012

Batman 0

Alternating Currents: Batman 0, Drew and ShelbyToday, Drew and Shelby are discussing Batman 0, originally released September 12, 2012. Batman 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: If I may, I’d like to offer a bit of my own zero issue: One year ago, I had never purchased a monthly comic. Comics culture struck me as insular and impenetrable, and I saw fans as hyper-vigilant of petty continuity issues. Today, I’m a regular Wednesday warrior, and — more surprisingly — have become a nascent continuity-phile. That tendency has reared its head most fiercely in our coverage of the Before Watchmen prequel series, where I’ve argued that strict observance of continuity is an important means to observe the source material. It’s an opinion that has lead to a few clashes with Shelby, who would much rather enjoy a comic than obsess over details — an opinion I can totally respect, and am striving towards. What better test, then, when another creative team I respect immensely revisits beloved, seminal works?

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Sep 11 2012

Phantom Stranger 0

Alternating Currents: Phantom Stranger 0, Drew and PeterToday, Drew and Peter are discussing Phantom Stranger 0, originally released September 5, 2012. Phantom Stranger 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: I don’t remember when it is that I first stumbled across William Safire’s cheekily ironic Rules for Writers, but the last rule, “Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives,” has managed to nestle itself in my editing subconscious. I make a point of eliminating any cliche I see on the site (the odd exception aside), which has effectively lowered my tolerance for reading them. It rarely becomes a problem — this is one of the most well-known axioms in writing, after all — but every so often, I’ll come across a piece that indulges in cliches to excess, it’s beyond distracting. The Phantom Stranger 0 is one such example, offering sequences that are so dense with cliches, it’s hard to remember that this story was published in 2012.

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Sep 10 2012

Detective Comics 0

Alternating Currents: Detective Comics 0, Drew and ScottToday, Drew and (special guest writer) Scott Baumgartner are discussing Detective Comics 0, originally released September 5, 2012. Detective Comics 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: I have kind of a strange relationship to Detective Comics. As the original home of Batman, and the namesake of DC Comics, I have nothing but respect for the history of the title — I want to like it. Unfortunately, since the relaunch, the title has been marred by embarrassingly clunky writing, leading it to be the perennial “Retcon Punching Bag” until we unceremoniously dropped it after issue 9. Most of that blame falls on the shoulders of writer/artist Tony Daniel, whose overly grim tone and unnecessarily convoluted plotting made the title a real slog. Well then, the fact that Daniel is off of writing duties as of this issue should be a good thing, right? Continue reading →

Sep 6 2012

Swamp Thing 0

Alternating Currents: Swamp Thing 0, Drew and PeterToday, Drew and Peter are discussing Swamp Thing 0, originally released September 5, 2012. Swamp Thing 0 is part of the line-wide Zero Month.

Drew: One of the most interesting things to me about this zero month experiment is the diversity of types of stories we might get to see. Some titles have large, overshadowing histories that have only been teased. Others have managed to make revealing the origin of their hero a key element in the narrative at large. But what do you do if your title has followed the hero since before he was a hero? Scott Snyder has made clear through his previous work on Swamp Thing that he’s not afraid of telling an Alec Holland story (as opposed to a Swamp Thing story), but is that really necessary at this point in the narrative? Snyder manages to answer both questions in surprising ways, turning the focus to Anton Arcane’s history, and how it shockingly ties into Alec’s own past. Continue reading →