A funny, funny clown once asked about Batman: “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” Where do you think, Mistah J?!? Why not look on his Amazon.com Wish List?:
The Joker by Steve Miller (CD)
Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms by Michael Ray Taylor (book)
The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father by Maxine Harris (book)
The Arkham House Companion by Sheldon Jaffery (book)
Nightwing (VHS)
Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows
Catwomen of the Moon (VHS)
Mentoring: Confidence in Finding a Mentor and Becoming One by Bobb Biehl (book)
Report to the Commissioner by James Mills (book)
High-Performance Restoration: How to Rebuild and Modify Your Muscle Car by Jason Scott (book)
Zorro (VHS)
(Also available: Superman's Amazon.com Wishlist)
TEEN TITANS #29: This comic is not fun. Have you ever been to one of those parties when there are lotsa people you know, but they are all acting strange and not at all like themselves? Before, you knew them and liked them a lot, and they were fun to hang around with and easy to talk to, but as soon as they get into this popular fancy party they're all a sudden "too cool for school" and dressing diff'rent and talkin' all serious? And they don't seem at all like the people you knew and palled around with because they're full of woe-is-me angst and they're more concerned with their hip new friends or maybe their older friends who went away for a while but who are back now and soooo popular because they have an edgy dark streak even though they were kinda fun and goofy in the past? And none of them want to talk to or hang around you anymore and just pitch pennies and eat submarine sandwiches and talk about dumb stuff that makes you all laugh until soda comes out your nose?
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF THE ESCAPIST #8: This comic is fun. There's four stories (one of them is to be continued) and one kinda po-mo gag page in this issue of the Escapist, and even though it cost me a lot more dimes (90 of 'em!) than Teen Titans #29 did (25 dimes), it was pound-for-pound a more fun comic all around (Note: I did not weigh the actual comics). I really like the anthology aspect of Escapist, which pretty much guarantees you at least one really solid fun story in every issue, and the top-notch ones give you four or five. My favorite one this time is part one of a story called "The Escapists" in which a boy grows up so obsessed with the character and the comics that when he gets older, he buys the rights to the Escapist and plans to make his own comic. I like Philip Bond's art a lot (John has showed me some of his Vertigo work...well, at least the ones that I was allowed to look at) and there's a neat reprint of a Golden Age Escapist comic in the middle of the story. This one story defines everything I love about comics and what makes them fun: a sense of wonder over the comics and their characters (even the characters in the story have a sense of wonder for the Escapist!), great expressive art, and wow, I can't wait to read the next issue! All the other stories are pretty good too. I liked the one where grumpy Harvey Pekar (who I have seen with David Letterman and in that film last year) meets the Escapist on the bus, and then there's a Andi Watson World War II story that is kinda sad but very dramatic—it reminded me of Band of Brothers with artwork that is in the style of Joe Kubert (and when I say that, Andi, it's a big big compliment!). The last story was a more traditional, rip-roarin', pulpy-style tale of the Escapist at the Royal Festival of Magic, and there was a nice text piece on the Big Little Book it was based on. I'm oh-so glad very nice Mister Chabon is letting Dark Horse publish this anthology of old and new Escapist stories, 'coz I keep reading all about the old Escapist comics in the text pieces and yet I can never, never find any of them in the back issue bins at Jim Hanley's Universe! They must be so popular that I could not buy them even if I had a whole bag fulla dimes! Oh well, a fella can dream, can't he? Maybe I will write and draw my own Escapist comic, huh? I will call it...The Escapbull!
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #15: This comic is fun. Nobody expected a character almost universal'ly considered to be one of the lamest heroes in the DC Universe to make any sort of comeback, much less a starring role in a Justice League Unlimited story! That's one of the best things of all about JLU: any character, no matter how they were treated or written before, or even if they died, has Justice League potential! (Or, as Superman has been heard to say once or twice, "Each of you brings something to the table." I guess that means even a little stuffed bull has Justice League potential! Mind you, what I usually bring to the table is the silverware and the napkin rings...) Take away the kinda-clichéd "here's the moral of the story" ending and a writer who doesn't know the difference between "el" and "los" and at the heart of this book you have a story that defines the joy 'n' wonder of comics: every character is someone's favorite, and if you dismiss a character as lame, well, he or she just hasn't been written right—yet. I doubt they'd ever bring back Vibe in the real DC Universe, so all hail the Animated DC Universe! May your skies never turn red!
FLAMING CARROT COMICS #4: This comic is fun. Sentences can't express how cool it is that Flaming Carrot is back in a regular comic book series. So, I'll use a series of partial, disjointed, sentence fragments to explain what I loved about this issue, much in the vein of a hip beatnik hep cat or maybe even the Carrot himself, starting...now!
There's only one way this could be cooler and that's if it was big enough that I drive it around Brooklyn! (PS to Santa: I'm eight inches tall).
BART SIMPSON #26: This comic is fun...sorta. Frequent readers of Comics Oughta Be Fun ("COBF", pronounced "cobif") know that I generally have two grades for the comics I read: fun and not fun. Well, add to that a brand-new grade of fun...sorta. And it's 'propriate I'm using it on this week's Simpsons comic, because I'd actually been thinking of retiring the Simpsons/Bongo line from the fun/not fun rating system. Why? Because they're nearly always fun...but sometimes they're not perfect. I needed a middle grade for comics that are still plenty fun to read—don't get me wrong—but which aren't exceptionally amazing or fantastic. It's sorta like if Mister Ebert waggled his thumb in the middle instead of thumbs up and thumbs down all the time! Anyway, as usual, this week's Simpsons comic is fun...but it could have been better. The thing I like about Bart Simpson is there's usually a buncha stories; if one's not that great, there might be an even better one later on. I liked the first one best (Bart's treehouse is scheduled for demolition. I wish I had a treehouse!) and it has lots of funny sight gags (but where did Homer's bandages go between pages 7 and 8?). The Maggie dream story was kinda silly more often than it was fun or funny and the "Bart goes on a bath strike" story was something you'd see on any Disney Channel sitcom! It wasn't sharp enough for the Simpsons. That's why this issue gets a grade of fun...sorta.. It's better than a lot of comics, but it's not as good as it could be.
JSA CLASSIFIED #4: This comic is fun. I've never been a huge fan of Power Girl but this whole storyline has been a fun exploration of who she is and what her relationship to the DC Universe is. It has a twist at the end which was fun just for being different than what you usually get in a twist at the end. You know how so many stories are "what you know about Character X is WRONG!"? Well, this one is "what you know about Power Girl is RIGHT!" It restores the simplest, most common explanation for her origin back to comics, and I'm pretty sure I can guess that means (as the 'blogosphere' has been buzzing about for weeks) a return to the multiverse for DC Comics. I'm not certain how i feel about that. I like Earth-2 and multiple earths and crossover stories. But I'm not certain if returning to that will make the comics more accessible, or, most important to me, more fun. I guess we have to wait and see! (I'll have to wait longer than most of you, 'coz buying this title is the closest I'll get to reading Infinite Crisis!) I think the story loses a couple points for 1) having a kinda downbeat splash-page ending (I woulda wrote it different—a little more triumphant, but I'm just a li'l stuffed bull after all), and 2) there's a two-page epilogue that just kills the momentum of the story itself, makes it not complete, and isn't really anything but a teaser for Infinite Crisis. That's why even tho' this book was fun, I can't award it the Bully-approved seal of most fun comic of the week. Nobody gets that. Maybe next week I'll trot it out again.
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