...To Write me Down An Ass

There's a pretty good scene for Black Canary as team chairperson in JLA #27 this week (or is it last week already? I was kinda lost in 1978...).

Stars and Garters shows you the page, and I won't reprint it here, so I don't crib his act. But I do want to show you the page before, which COMPLETELY undermines the scene:

Really.

Black Canary is about to have a big leadership moment, we're supposed to take her seriously as JLA chairperson, and Ed Benes introduces the scene with a page specifically designed to make you ignore everything else, designed to draw your eye right to her buttcheeks.

The JLA is essentially a broken book, a damaged concept right now, and I'm not sure what it would take to fix it. But of all the things wrong with it, nothing is more dire than having an artist who directly undermines the story points the writer is trying to establish, who undercuts Dwayne McDuffie's attempts to build up Black Canary with his immaturity and his fetish for close-ups of female body parts at inappropriate times.

So maybe instead of worrying about the Big Three undermining her, Dinah should worry more about the idiot they have drawing her, which does far more damage.

(Although I praised McDuffie's scene above, I have a couple of quibbles about his script.. One, Dinah never lays out any specific grievances about the Big Three, except that they're meeting in private. And since she establishes that no one else knows about the private meetings, it's not clear how they're actually "undermining her authority." No example of orders countermanded, or secret plots, or anything. A good manager always has specific examples when laying down the law. Given that just a meeting is ticking her off, I shudder how Dinah is going to respond to Trinity.

Secondly, they get a distress call from Dr. Light (the good one) on a JLI communicator...and they take a Quinjet (or whatever they call it) to Metropolis? They have a freakin' teleporter. Zatanna could just magic them there. Superman or Flash could certainly get there more quickly. It's a distress call, she might be dead or dying...and they don't take the fastest way there. Good show, League.

So it's not just the art of JLA that's broken.)

About Anthologies...and Whither Weeklies?

Well, DC has apparently decided that a year-long weekly series is going to be a permanent fixture in their publishing plans. Trinity will follow in the footsteps of 52 and Countdown, featuring one long story about Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.

In a big break from tradition that might avoid some of the pitfalls of those other two series, there will be one creative team--Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley, doing the front 12 pages of EVERY issue. The the plans for the remaining ten pages sound a bit more nebulous, but will be by Busiek and Fabian Nicieza with art by various artists, and will sometimes be one-shot stuff and sometimes a continuing story.

Now, to me, it sounds like maybe, just maybe, they might be getting the formula right, by combining a weekly with an anthology. It sounds like it could avoid the pitfalls of the too many cooks approaches of 52 and Countdown, where both the quality and content veered wildly from week to week, depending on which team was up.

I've always thought there was room for more anthology titles on the market...but DC and Marvel usually mucked it up by making them monthly. Showcase '9x and the current Marvel Comics Presents show the perils of doing so...it's hard to keep momentum going for 6 pages at a time when you don't pick up the story again for 4-5 weeks. It's tough for the reader to remember, and it's tough on the creator to pace it so you have a natural story break/cliffhanger every six pages.

But by being weekly and having longer stories, I hope Trinity will be able to avoid that. The original run of Marvel Comic Presents was bi-weekly, and eventually settled on Wolverine as the permanent lead feature.

But I'm most reminded of 2 decades ago, when, for about a one year period, Action Comics became Action Comics Weekly--a weekly giant-size anthology title. Each week, 48 pages for $1.50, continuing stories and one-shots. And lots of stories and characters that weren't getting any attention elsewhere in the DC Universe: Mike Baron's wonderful Deadman stories, the Secret Six, the Phantom Stranger...

It wasn't perfect...the decision to relegate Superman to a 2 page "newspaper" style appearance every week was incredibly dumb. And of course, a fair amount of lame stories made it through.

But it did the anthology idea right: it allowed stories and characters that weren't going to be seen elsewhere, and it kept the fans coming to the feeder pellet button every week, when the last week's stories were still fresh in their minds.

So I hope Trinity works better as a weekly series than its predecessors (although I despair now of ever seeing Astro City again...). And I hope DC and Marvel move back to more frequent anthologies, using them as a guide to their wondrous universes. It's always seemed to me to be a great way to develop new talent and showcase your less well-known characters.

Oh, and Marvel? Get BETTER stories than the crap now appearing in Marvel Comics Presents. Yuck.