DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)
[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]
"''Smoking while pregnant may seriously harm your baby's health'' I make a point of only buying packets with this warning... I figure the odds are it won't affect me. Though with my lifestyle, I can't rule it out." John Constantine, Hellblazer: City Of Demons #1.
Eventually, I will catch up... but not right now. Here's the column for comics released on 10/13 (mostly), so let's get on with it. Last column's DT!, or at least the gist of it, was cracked by Donald313... the problem is that the timeline in that Fantastic Four scene didn't fit. The problem is with the sliding timescale. The Fantastic Four got their powers at most 15 years ago; so if you make this 20 years ago, having Sue be 19 then and 39 now (a big stretch, because she shouldn't be 39, in Marvel's terms), sound files being something so outlandish would be stupid. There were other sound file formats in 1990; not mp3s exactly yet, at least not yet public; but the tech has existed for a long time... plus, they're wearing bell bottoms... both of them... I mean, you could have just worded the scene differently to achieve the same result, without fucking up continuity, know what I mean?
Now, The Dissector's Picks Of The Week are the following: Best Book Of The Week was Iron Man Legacy #7; good script by Fred Van Lente, nice art by Steve Kurth. I enjoy seeing The Pride in action, and Iron Man building himself up from his own broken pieces. Worst Book Of The Week? Well, Bruce Wayne: The Road Home - Outsiders... geez, this series of one-shots is a failure. Bruce Wayne wearing power armor? The armor doesn't even have consistent powers or limits across the different one-shots; and how could anyone who knows Bruce be unable to notice it's him in that "Insider" suit? FOR GOD'S SAKE, HE'S GOT BAT-BLADES IN HIS GLOVES, A YELLOW UTILITY BELT, AND EVEN SORT-OF-BATARANGS!!! Worst of all, having read all the books now; only Katana, Oracle, and R'as notice on their own? Yes, the others suspect something, but Dick would notice faster than any of the others... The Outsiders book in particular has very bad art, and the writing, like in the rest of this series, leaves a lot to be desired.
The Rundown: The Amazing Spider-Man Presents: Black Cat (writer and editors retracted themselves from this, but in previous issues they'd referred as Felicia Hardy's dad as "The Cat", when he never used that or any codename... except, and they didn't mention this, in the Spider-Man animated series of the 90s...), Angel Vs. Frankenstein II ("incnetive" cover?), B.P.R.D.: Hell On Earth New World (why announce a new numbering if you keep the old?), Booster Gold V2 (Zamarons are not yellow-skinned humans... not even before revealing their true shape), Bruce Wayne: The Road Home - Catwoman (Selina's eyes are colored incorrectly), Bruce Wayne: The Road Home - Outsiders (all signs and writing in Markovia is in English), Bruce Wayne: The Road Home - Batman And Robin ("niow" instead of "now"), Bruce Wayne: The Road Home - Batgirl (Damian is not a public member of the Wayne family, he shouldn't be making public appearances with them), Captain America: Forever Allies (inconsistent lettering in the "next month" page), Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors (wrong badges and rings), Incredible Hulks (Beast looks wrong), Iron Man: Titanium! (accented letters), JSA 80-Page Giant 2010 (several costume and hair and eye coloring errors), Shadowland (someone should teach artists how sai are gripped), Spike: The Devil You Know (San "Fransisco"?), Strange Tales II (Wolverine's eyes should be blue, not brown), Superman V1 (Perry's eyes are colored wrong), Titans V2 (I understand giving Ray Palmer blue eyes, even though they should be brown... but blond hair? Also, Arsenal's eyes are wrong, and Batman's belt and gloves), Untold Tales Of Blackest Night (Hal's badge, and... since when is Donna Troy Cassie Sandsmark's mentor?), Warlord Of Mars (the writer can't keep the names of the Martian characters right), X-Men V3 (sai grip, dammit, sai grip).
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"SHOW ME THE SHAPE OF YOUR... TRACER."
TITLE: Bruce Wayne: The Road Home - Red Robin (DC).
ISSUE: One-shot.
CULPRIT: Fabian Nicieza (writer) and/or Ramon Bachs (penciller).
DISSECTION: Not a bad issue; but nothing to write home about. My problem? The tracer Dick planted on Vicki Vale's bag was NOT shaped like a bat, yet now, for this series of one-shots, it is.
DISSECT-O-METER: 9 Bazzars.
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"NEW DISSECTION FOREVER."
TITLE: New Mutants Forever (Marvel).
ISSUE: 03 of 05.
CULPRIT: Al Rio (penciller).
DISSECTION: So, what gives?
DISSECT-O-METER: 9 Bazzars.
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"... THE SIZE OF MANHATTAN."
TITLE: New Mutants Forever (Marvel).
ISSUE: 03 of 05.
CULPRIT: Chris Claremont (writer).
DISSECTION: From the same man that gave us a Starjammer starship the size of Manhattan, and a coal-powered diesel train engine... now Warlock's made of "the primal substance of a star" and able to survive "temperatures hoter than the surface of the sun"??!?!?! Since when??!?!?!
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars. Poppycock, Chris, poppycock. Also, there are several small accented letters, and I will NOT go with your "Nova Roma is in the Andes" idiocy, Chris.
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"THE UNWRITTEN CREATED BY MIKE CARREY AND PETER GROSE."
TITLE: The Unwritten (DC/Vertigo).
ISSUE: 18.
CULPRIT: Mike Carey (writer).
DISSECTION: It's a story about writing and writers; and a journalist says "Hunter S. Thomson" instead of "Thompson"?
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
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"I'M A BEAST, I DON'T UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY."
TITLE: X-Campus (Marvel).
ISSUE: 04 of 04.
CULPRIT: Francesco Artibani (writer) or Luigi Mutti (translator).
DISSECTION: "Gigaterabytes of nanites"? What? You either have gigabytes, or terabytes... and nanites are physical nanobots; not information, data... which is what you measure in bytes.
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars each. Beast also refers to "the Sanskrit", and Logan's eyes are colored incorrectly.
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"MEDICAL SCIENCE, WHO CARES?"
TITLE: X-Campus (Marvel).
ISSUE: 04 of 04.
CULPRIT: Roberto Di Salvo (writer) or Luigi Mutti (translator).
DISSECTION: You can't have "anemic hemorrhage", you can have "hemorrhagic anemia". The term they used makes no medical sense.
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars.
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That's odd... despite several "10" ratings, the average was only 6.8 Bazzars in fifty dissections. Well, not important. Now, Cover Of The Week, from Tomb Of Terror, by Travel Foreman and Nathan Fairbairn:
Good job evoking the covers of those old horror books. Now, Moments Of The Week, first up Brainiac 5 does think of others:
Not too highly, but he does... Next, a robot with a sense of humor:
... and the correct laughter. Then, where is the Council Of The Spiders hiding?
My own backyard? Next, John Constantine, good neighbour:
He takes care of your mom! And Tony Stark...
pwnd! And who's Doctor Fate cribbin’ from?
Dr. Strange? Shame on you, Fate. And to finish this column, a peak at Kate Beaton's hilarious Spidery/Craven story for Strange Tales II:
I just love the faces she draws... That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...
THE DISSECTOR!
14 comments:
A stab at the DT - Cannonball should be generating a blast field if he's in the air?
Exactly. Good job.
Just a quick thought, in the column you wrote "...only Katana, Oracle, and R'as notice...". Did you mean "Ra's" instead of "R'as"?
You're right. :)
A couple things from recent books I've notice;
In Avengers Academy #5, Striker makes the "loser" symbol on his forehead with his left hand. However, isn't it usually made with the right hand so it looks like a capital L?
In Legacies #6, it says that Crisis on Infinite Earths took place in a single day. Personally, I think that with everything that happened, it took at least a week if not long. Second, there was a cameo of the pre-Crisis Supergirl, who didn't exist. Finally, it said that the line up of the Justice League of America that was based in Detroit was formed after the Crisis, not before it as it actually did.
In the free Spider-Man Saga book, there is a credit for an insert that wasn't there in the Sasha Kravinoff entry.
Sid, thanks for the heads up.
1) The Striker thing; I wouldn't consider it an error. I think someone can do it with their left hand, or maybe he's even left-handed.
2) DCU Legacies is a royal screw-up, continuity wise. The part the public saw of the Crisis might very well taken a day, or their perceptions might be warped.
3) As for Supergirl, she might have been the Earth-1 Supergirl before her death; or even another Supergirl from a parallel Earth... it was a crazy moment.
4) The Detroit League... well, you're right... I'll check the Legacy issue out and confirm there's no loophole.
5) I'll check the Spidey book.
Legacies is not a straight-out retelling. Its a minor ret-con tool. The general rule is "if the timing of what you read before and what you read in legacies differs, then legacies is the new canon"
Poppycock! Hogwash! Legacies DOES NOT JIVE AT ALL. The guy is a kid in WWII to be around the JSA in their start; then he's there when Superman appears, and he's in his 30s? How does that work?
Maybe he's a mutant LoL
Dude, no. He can't be a mutant. He might be a Highlander!
Sid, man, I havent' gotten ahold of that Spider-Man saga book. Can you tell me exactly what's wrong? There's an insert announced, and the insert isn't there? Elaborate, please... and tell me who the editors where on that book, please.
The credits say "Art by Barry Kitson with Phillipe Briones (inset)", but there is no inset picture in the entry. Jeff Christiansen is listed as "overseer" for the Handbook section where it's found, while Jeff Youngquist is the editor of the book as a whole.
Ah, an "inset", now it makes sense. :)
They're not saying the Detroit JLA formed after Crisis, they're just showing the book's main character ran into them after it, around the time of Legends (right before they split apart, IIRC). As for Supergirl, any appearance of her during the Crisis can be chalked up to alternate realities being superimposed on each other during that time. So I'm not going to take any of the DCU Legacies #6 dissections you pointed out (but you saw how I ran the Spider-Man one last column). Thanks!
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