Some of the most gorgeous fan art I’ve ever seen: Spider-Nam.

(Looks like it could be really interesting, too.)

Over at the Standard I’ve got a long piece about the Great Comic Book  Bubble of 1993. Surely you’ve been dying to read about this epiphenomenon for years.

(The art is from my collection; it’s kind of fun.)

In case it wasn’t clear with that Superman-renounces-citizenship stunt, DC Comics is completely out of control. They’re now going to reset 50 of their titles to issue #1 in September, redesigning character costumes, attitudes, etc.

It’s not like they didn’t just reset Flash and Wonder Woman and Justice League of America in the last few years. It’s not like they didn’t just “kill” Batman. And run a weekly pub-sched maxi series (52)all leading up to an absolutely final, last-ditch “universe defining” miniseries (Final Infinity Identity Super-Duper Crisis).

DC has lost now lost both the ability and the desire to tell stories. At this point, I suspect that the only thing which would cause Warners to rethink this pathetic division is a $50M opening weekend for Green Lantern.

(For what it’s worth, my guess is that GL will actually do great business, but I’m rooting against it on the hope that catastrophe might mean decapitation of the current DC regime.)

How bad is it? My non-nerd lawyer friend K.T. emails in that this is obviously “the New Coke of comics.” The letter from DC to retailers is even more pathetic:

In addition, the new #1s will introduce readers to a more modern, diverse DC Universe, with some character variations in appearance, origin and age. All stories will be grounded in each character’s legend – but will relate to real world situations, interactions, tragedy and triumph.

This epic event will kick off on Wednesday, August 31st with the debut of a brand new JUSTICE LEAGUE #1, which pairs Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, together for the first time. (Yes, this is the same week as FLASHPOINT #5.)

We think our current fans will be excited by this evolution, and that it will make jumping into the story extremely accessible to first-time readers – giving them a chance to discover DC’s characters and stories.

We are positioning ourselves to tell the most innovative stories with our characters to allow fans to see them from a new angle. We have taken great care in maintaining continuity where most important, but fans will see a new approach to our storytelling.

Some of the characters will have new origins, while others will undergo minor changes. Our characters are always being updated; however, this is the first time all of our characters will be presented in a new way all at once.

You can practically hear the editorial meeting as it must have taken place:

GJ: Jeez, people really loved those Ultimate books. The characters were so edgy.

DD: Yeah, they were super edgy. I think Quicksilver and Wanda were doing it. I mean, like doing it.

BH: But they were still brother and sister?

DD: Yeah! See? That’s edge. Kids love edge. You’ve gotta have edge if you’re going to sell comics. The only problem we had with sales of 52 and Trinity was that they just didn’t have enough edge.

GJ: So what if we did our own Ultimate universe? We could, I don’t know, revamp the costumes. I’ll get Lee to draw the women even sexier. Wait until you see what he does with Power Girl once we take the restricter plate off of him.

DD: Gotta go edgier than that.

GJ: Okay. How about we make Superman gay?

DD: Edgier.

GJ: And black.

DD: Now you’re getting close.

GJ: Well . . . we could put the Justice League back in Detroit and get some more Hispanic and gypsy characters.

DD: That’s fine, but what I’m thinking is this–and idea so big and sharp, it just cuts glass: We make the entire DCU into an Ultimate universe.

BH: Wait . . .

DD: The whole thing. Start every issue at #1; re-imagine all the characters. Scrap all the old, boring stuff. New continuities. New mythos. New origins. New everything! And best of all, new costumes. Because that’s why people buy comic books–for the costumes. We’ll out-Ultimate the Ultimates.

GJ: Suck-it, Stan.

DD: I know, right? Now maybe we could get some holograms on the covers of the new #1s . . .

I’ve got a short item up at the Standard on Superman renouncing his citizenship. It’s another brilliant move from the crack team running DC.

In related news, I found a high-grade copy of Silver Surfer #4 last night . . .

Update: Here’s is a perfect example of a very particular kind of journalism. Over at Reuters, Alex Dobuzinski has a piece about the reaction to the news of Superman’s impending citizenship renouncement. He writes:

In the comic, Superman never actually renounces his citizenship, he only talks about his plans to do that.

But conservative commentators reacted with disgust to the new storyline, given that the fictional superhero has long proclaimed he stood for “Truth, Justice and the American way.”

In a blog post at The Weekly Standard, senior writer Jonathan Last questioned Superman’s beliefs, now that he seems to have rejected the United States.

“Does he believe in British interventionism or Swiss neutrality?” Last wrote. “You see where I’m going with this: If Superman doesn’t believe in America, then he doesn’t believe in anything.”

Maybe “conservative commentators” have reacted with disgust. And I’m certainly bent out of shape about it. But the point of my complaint–and I don’t think it was buried too deeply–wasn’t “hey, here’s another bit of PC nonsense.” It was: “Hey, Superman needs this anchor to give his character dramatic weight and meaning and what DC has done strips him of that.”

I realize this is a (slightly) nuanced argument but isn’t it pretty obvious that it’s a literary, not a political one?

Galley Friend Mike Russell has put together what looks like another fabulous fancomic: Jaxxon’s 11. You’ll have to be pretty steeped in the Marvel-Star Wars lore to piece it all together–remember this stuff?–but even so.

Pure nerd-bait below. You’ve been warned.

(Why? Let’s just say that DC Universe Online didn’t quite work out for me, and as a consequence, the Batman question has been like a splinter in my brain.)

Last week I noted a little essay debating whether or not it would be possible for someone to become a real-life Batman. The piece, written by Mark Hughes, concludes “probably no.” The reasons are as follows:

1) Timing: It would take at least 10 years of training in combat and criminology to achieve a minimal level of Bat-competency, meaning that you couldn’t start your career until 28, at the earliest. You’d then need to work as a cop for at least 3 years to understand cops and robbers, putting you at 31.

2) Resources: You’d need to amass a fortune and buy a hideout, such as an old missile silo.

3) Crime-stopping: You’d almost never be able to stop crime in progress, because that’s like finding needles in haystacks, particularly when you move by foot.

4) Bat-technology is no match for guns. You’d get cut down, even with body armor.

That’s all me paraphrasing. Here’s Hughes’s actual description of the logistical problems with being Batman:

By your second week, you are getting unhappy that 90% of the crimes you’ve even seen up-close are just pathetic junkies buying crack from another pathetic junkie selling drugs to support his/her own habit. And nothing makes you feel LESS like Batman than scaring sad homeless crackheads. You tried to chase down a kid who you saw punch a lady and take her purse, but you can’t really pursue that kind of thing by running on rooftops, you gotta do it the hard way by chasing him on foot down the sidewalk… in your full Batman costume, where everybody can see you. People are taking photos on cell-phones, and yep there’s a cop car at the intersection and he saw you, and now he has his lights on and it’s YOU he’s after. Great, you have to let the kid go so you can run down an alley and climb up a fire escape to the roof to get away.

Yet for all of this, I’m not quite sure I buy it. Let’s stipulate that no, you or I could never become Batman–but that’s because the hardest part of the equation is the resources. Someone born to money–and not Mark Zuckerberg money, but a fortune, say, in the $100 million range–would have a real chance at being Batman. Because the second part of the equation is that a potential Batman would have to be an emancipated minor from a very young age, with access to said fortune. (And would have to have born with a surfeit of natural intelligence and athleticism. But we’ll leave that for now.)

My alt take on how it could happen is actually pretty close to the Bruce Wayne founding mythos:

You’d need a young-ish boy with access to a lot of money, no real adults around to run his life, and a very early desire to take on the Batman project. This would allow him to begin training in both the martial arts and industrial chem to the exclusion of all unnecessary schooling (no wasted time on health class or JV soccer). Once our boy is grown, he’d need some particularly exotic DIY skills to he’d be able to build/repair his suit. And he’d need enough cash that he could buy certain kinds of information–he’d need a pretty vast network of CI snitches to avoid having to do so much grunt detective work.

So we’ve gotten out Batman to a certain level of plausible completeness. The next question is how he would actually find, and fight, crime. Hughes is correct that running from roof-top to roof-top chasing purse snatchers is a non-starter. A real-life Batman could never plausibly fight street crime. But he could fight organized crime. At low-level, you could see Batman dismantling open-air drug markets like we saw in The Wire: He comes at night, terrorizing a look-out or two one night, then a signaler the next, working his way up the chain.

At the higher-level, there’s no reason Batman couldn’t target specific criminal organizations, going after mafia guys where they live and work, quietly. No need for massive pitched battles and gunplay: No man is protected 24/7, a real-life Batman would do lots of non-cape surveillance, waiting to find when the button men or captains were vulnerable and then, again, working his way up the food chain until he got near the head of the organization.

So in answer to Hughes’s question then, should be a qualified “yes.” There is a small pool of people who could, under extreme circumstances become Batman. And while they couldn’t do the Justice League version of the character, they could become something reasonably true to the character’s mythology.

I mean, if you care about that sort of thing.

Dynamic Forces is one of my secret vices—not because I believe the collectibles they’re hawking are on the fast-track to high-value, but because some of the stuff they sell is really pretty cool. For example, last week they were offering 18 copies of Uncanny X-Force #1. Nothing special there, except that they were “blank” variant covers. And nothing special about that, either, except that Joe Rubinstein did an original X-Men character sketch on each of them.

Rubinstein is a stud Marvel guy. Among other work, he inked Frank Miller’s pencils for the Wolverine limited series, which is one of my favorite books from the ’80s. Having an original drawing from him on the cover of an X book? Awesome.

The only catch was, when you ordered one of these books, you had no idea what sketch you were going to get. Dynamic Forces just shipped the 18 of them out randomly. I was kind of hoping for a Nightcrawler or Colossus, but figured that with my luck I’d get Toad. Instead, this is what arrived in the mail over the weekend:

Nerdtastic.

Why not bid on the original art for the cover of Ewoks #4.

If only you had the full run from the series in NM. Then you’d really feel like a winner.

Whoa.

Galley Friend K.T. sends us Law and the Multiverse, a blog about the legal realities of the superhero world. Sample awesome:

* How supervillains can procure a secret lair.

* Does “killing” someone with a healing factor (ie Wolverine) constitute a crime?

* How might the ADA be applied to superpowers.

It’s all crazy, fantastically good. Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics levels of good.