The Dissector

The Dissector #144.

DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)

[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]

"(...) your total and utter stupidity!! (...) When I asked you to sign our release form, you put down "Pisces"! You once told us to meet you at the corner of "Walk" and "Don't Walk"! I caught you studying for your blood test! Calling you stupid would be an insult to stupidity! You're a completely dim ignorant vacuous imbecilic idiot braindead cretinous moron!!" Outlaw scientist about Rhino's intelligence, or lack thereof, seconds before being impaled on the newly minted villain's larger horn.

Welcome to the column for comics released on 12/09, which I'm writing while listening to Richard Cheese's "Silent Nightclub" (a Christmas album). Gotta love Richard Cheese... First of all, and on a comics related not, let me apologize to David Gallaher, writer of Hulk: Winter Guard, who dropped by the comment section of my last column, and disputed my claim that there was some fake Russian in his book. My apologies, I took note of the word "ponchiki" because I didn't know it, and then, when writing the column, without the comic book in front of me, just my notes, I didn't notice that I had typed "pochiki". I couldn't find that word anywhere, even with alternate spellings (but alas, never the right one), so I marked it as a made up word. Honestly, when I was writing it, I thought "the rest of the Russian looks flawless, I should go back and check if I took note of the word correctly"... but I didn't. The average for last column stays the same, though, the math added up to the same 6.3 figure.

JohnnyDoe correctly cracked the DT!; there were too many Earths in the Bleed when Swift was in it. It's doubtful the Megaverse, with more than the 52 Earths of the current DC Multiverse would be seen from there. Good job JD, you just made Lieutenant Commander in the Honorary Dissector's Scout Corps!

The Dissector's Picks Of The Week! Best Book Of The Week was R.E.B.E.L.S. #11, just a good read, and good art. Worst Book Of The Week was, unfortunately, Lobo: Highway To Hell #2; it's like writer Scott Ian didn't know how to end what he'd started pretty well.

Now, The Rundown: Action Comics (Hal Jordan's badge, Congorilla's size), Citizen Rex (accented letters, calling the main character by the wrong name), Dark X-Men (Norman's eyes), Incredible Hulk (Reed Richard and Bruce Banner with wrong eye colors), Lobo: Highway To Hell (why call Lobo a "blue moron", if his skin is white?), Nation X (Logan and Namor get their eyes colored incorrectly in the cover, and Anole's larger arm is wrong in a story), The New Avengers (Jessica Jones should have brown eyes, not green ones), R.E.B.E.L.S. (Lyrl Dox's eyes are colored incorrectly, an alien spaceship has a sign in English, Sinestro looks nothing like he does in the Green Lantern books and he even changes appearances within this book), S.W.O.R.D. (Beast again, and Hepzibah looks wrong), Star Trek: Alien Spotlight: Cardassians ("Carassia"?), War Machine V2 (an American flag again in the ICC, Norman's eyes, and what's a "technomath"?), Wolverine: Under The Boardwalk (Logan's eyes are wrong, wrong costumes on the X-Men, and Logan didn't have adamantium forty years ago), X-Men Forever V2 (accented letters, wrong colors), X Necrosha: The Gathering (Selene's eyes are wrong). Dissections!!!
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"BLUE BEATLE."

TITLE: Booster Gold V2 (DC).

ISSUE: 27.

CULPRIT: Hi-Fi (colorist).

DISSECTION: Ensign Piggylicious noticed that Blue Beetle's armor's hands change color midway through the issue. Good catch, Ensign!

DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars. Also, Barry Allen has inexplicable red eyes, Rip Hunter's eyes and hair are, as usually, colored incorrectly, and Supernova's costume is colored wrong too. Not Hi-Fi's day.
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"MINISTERIAL MINISTRATIONS."

TITLE: Daytripper (DC/Vertigo).

ISSUE: 01 of 10.

CULPRIT: Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá (writers).

DISSECTION: Twin Brazilian brothers Moon and Bá claim they have "secret real names so we don't get attacked by the mob of fans (mostly women), but Brazilian's are known for using nicknames a lot... Pelé is not reaaaaaally (read in a "Dr. Perry Cox" style) called "Pelé", you know? Anyway, you might know them as artists from separate books (Casanova in Moon's case, and Umbrella Academy in Bá's, to name two examples), but now they're writing and drawing their own limited series, Daytripper, in what might be the first US published comic (from DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, or any other publisher) written and drawn by South Americans. Yes, there are a lot of artists from Argentina, Brazil (a LOT), some from Uruguay (Eduardo Barreto, Richard Bennett, and newer artists like Ignacio Calero, Eduardo's son Diego Barreto, and Diego's sister Andrea, who is a colorist, and, more recently, Diego Jourdan), and several Spaniards; but that's all in the art department.

The only Latin American writer I can think of is Roberto Aguirre Sacasa, and in addition to not being South American (his parents are Nicaraguan), he was born in the US. Enrique Breccia is a writer as well as an artist, but he has only drawn stuff for DC, not written it... Fabian Nicieza was born in Argentina but lives in the US since he's three years old, and he's done stuff with Spanish artists, but none that I can think of with South American ones. So, it's kind of a big deal, even if there are other South American writers in the US comic scene, I am pretty certain there hasn't been any book both written and drawn, and more importantly, created, by a South American writer/artist team, so I applaud the irmãos BaMoon. And to any South American artists already in the industry... well, you know where to find me if you want a Uruguayan writer. *wink*

Now, this book was a good read, but it did have one tiny dissection. The main character and his friend refer to the "Ministry" of Culture, when they're actually talking about the "Minister" of Culture, the person, not the institution.

DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars, just like any other "foreign language" dissection.
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"SUPERENDAGERER."

TITLE: DC Holiday Special '09 (DC).

ISSUE: One-shot.

CULPRIT: Superman. Err, I mean Arie Kaplan (writer).

DISSECTION: Supes meets a kid with cystic fibrosis (go read that Wikipedia article, it's a serious genetic disease and most people don't know what it is), and takes him flying through the city on Christmas eve... in a robe, scarf, slippers and apparently no pants. Good job, Superman!!! Now, any healthy adult will most likely get a cold like that, and while I don't know much about cystic fibrosis, I know enough (and I read about it on the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's website) to know that people with the disease aren't more likely to get colds, but there's a great chance they'll get sicker than someone without CF. You see, cystic fibrosis, among other things, causes a person to have trouble breathing due to accumulation of mucus in the airways.

I knew a guy in high school who had what I now think was CF (or something very similar), and he was constantly having breathing problems, and had to get physical therapy to help with that. Unfortunately, he died when we were sixteen or so. While we never were actually friends, hope you're well where you are now, Frank.

DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars. There are a lot of other dissections in this book, mostly wrong eye colors, a costuming mistake here and there... and for some reason Adam Strange's hair gets colored brown...
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"MR. WEATHERBY."

TITLE: Doom Patrol V5 (DC).

ISSUE: 05.

CULPRIT: Keith Giffen (writer).

DISSECTION: Once again, Tempest did not have weather powers.

DISSECT-O-METER: 9 Bazzars.
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"!"

TITLE: Web Of Spider-Man V2 (Marvel).

ISSUE: 03.

CULPRIT: Fred Van Lente (writer).

DISSECTION: See the Quote Of The Week? Well, there are portions I actually changed to correct them. It actually said (and pay attention to the quotation marks inside the ones I put: "(...) When I asked you to sign our release form, you put down "Pisces!" You once told us to meet you at the corner of "Walk" and "Don't Walk!" (...)".

See the problem? While, depending if you're using American or British grammar rules, you can put commas or periods inside or outside the quotation marks, exclamation or question marks only go inside of said quotations if they only apply to the portion you're quoting. The was being emphatic about the stupidities Rhino did (writing "Pisces", thinking "Walk" and "Don't Walk" were street names), not saying that Rhino had written "Pisces!" or "Don't Walk!" with exclamation marks.

DISSECT-O-METER: 5 Bazzars. There is also an accented letter smaller than it should be, and a word balloon pointing to empty air, and no invisible man.
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"SECRET AMNESIA."

TITLE: What If: Secret Invasion (Marvel).

ISSUE: One-shot.

CULPRIT: Kevin Grevioux & Karl Bollers (writers).

DISSECTION: The Skrulls succeed in their invasion, and humans and Skrulls live in peace... mostly. Some humans, including aunt May, accept "conversion"; becoming Skrulls by combining their DNA with Skrull DNA. So, the heroes start adapting the X-Men's skrullified Legacy virus to purge the alien DNA from humanity. Peter Parker, the Black Panther, Night Trasher, Iron Man, and others work on it, trying to make it so it doesn't kill humans while cleansing the Skrull DNA from them. However, Peter Parker, yes, Spider-Man, helps Norman Osborn sneak in to impersonate Iron Man and help, because he's apparently an expert in "microbiology".

Since when? Microbiology has never been Norman's specialty, and in any case, why would Peter trust Norman? I call thee bullshyte.

DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Lots of other errors, of all kinds, in this book.
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"WORLD WAR DISSECTION."

TITLE: What If: World War Hulk (Marvel).

ISSUE: One-shot.

CULPRIT: Lucio Parrillo (colorist).

DISSECTION: You tell me:


DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars. It's pretty obvious; and there are also a couple of minor script dissections.
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This column has an average of 6.7 Bazzars on sixty-nine (hehe) dissections. Pretty standard. Now, Cover Of The Week, a pretty simple, yet good looking cover by Russell Chong for Star Wars: The Clone Wars #11:


Very Red Baron, and that's the whole point... but I liked it. Only two Moments Of The Week, first up, Booster Gold comes up with a great way of getting rid of Black Lanterns:


Jolly good job! And now, a funny X-Men moment:


It made me laugh. That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...

THE DISSECTOR!