Did you miss us? FanBoyWonder is (sort of) back

Well here we are again, pale, exhausted and cranky after a long week and an even longer month putting in the over-time at the day job forcing us (for the most part) to curtail our regular comicly speaking but for the occasional from the hip comment so we could complete a mega-writing project at work.

As we’ve mentioned, FanBoyWonder writes for a business-to-business magazine covering real estate finance so if you have read any of business headlines over the past three weeks or just type in “mortgage” in Google News, you’ll see why we’ve been so busy.

But here we are and we’ve missed you. We’re going to stick with our announced plan of not resuming our weekly comic book reviews until sometime after Labor Day but we wanted to post a few drive-by random thoughts.

First and foremost, if you haven’t heard about it yet, please check out Occasional Superheroine’s blog and her quite long but devastating Countdown To Change—where she gives a point-by-point accounting of all that is wrong with DC Comics under Dan Didio.

http://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/2007/08/countdown-to-change-after-reading.html

And then for balance/equal time, check out Kalinara’s “A Response to A Countdown To Change” at her blog Pretty, Fizzy Paradise
http://kalinara.blogspot.com/2007/08/response-to-countdown-to-change.html

For our part, FanBoyWonder has been chewing on this subject ourselves for a while now, so we’ll be weighing in with our two cents (day late and a dollar short perhaps) when we get a little bit of sleep.

And talk about timing…as we were writing this our best pal Kemosabe e-mailed us Keith Giffen’s “As if I care” column from Wizard which touches on his take on the whole DC/Marvel Big Event syndrome foolishness.
www.wizarduniverse.com/magazine/wizard/005639514.cfm

Meanwhile, here is our quickie from the hip take on a couple of the books we picked up during our work-mandated bloging hiatus.

The All New Booster Gold #1

The Upshot from DC Comics: Exploding from the pages of 52 and exploring the timeline of the DC Universe comes a new monthly book featuring the greatest super-hero history will never know: Booster Gold!

Following the universe altering conclusion of 52, Booster Gold wants what's due to him — a spot on the Justice League of America! But the time stream's in trouble and Booster Gold is in the center of it! Now he must make a choice: reclaim his former glory or do the right thing, forgoing the credit. ALL-NEW Booster Gold will take you through time and space, to the greatest moments of the DCU that have happened and will happen."52 Pick-Up" begins in this extra-sized issue #1!

Someone is exploiting the ravaged time stream, hoping to eliminate the world's greatest heroes — and only Booster Gold can stop them. But, really — Booster Gold? Why him? What does Rip Hunter truly want? And what shocking figure is behind it all? And coming up in the months ahead in DC's time spanning monthly: the world's greatest Green Lantern — Sinestro, Jonah Hex, Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon, Flash and Kid Flash, and plenty more of DC's super stars from throughout its past and future!

Well the Gettysburg Address-long synopsis from DC shows that they are really trying to put the hard sell on this book.

FBW remembers collecting the first Booster Gold title back in the 1980s. Booster was the first brand-new, originally minted hero following the CRISIS on Infinite Earths and we liked his back story as much as we hated his personality.

Dan Jergens created the perfect anti-hero—a guy from the future, the 25th Century, who is a washout and loser who uses future tech (including a 30th Century Legion of Super Heroes flight ring) to give him “super powers” then travel back to our time to become a hero/celebrity.

Looking back, Booster Gold the first run was ahead of his time (no pun intended) given the non-celebrity obsessed (think Paris Hilton and Reality TV in general) culture.

Canceled after 25 issues, Booster made his way to the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis Justice League where he promptly became a punchline.

We always felt that Booster Gold creator Dan Jurgens was never able to realize his character’s full potential so we’re glad that both he and Booster have been given a second chance to shine with the help of writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz.

The difference this time around is that Booster has a purpose—to protect the newly re-created multiverse out of the events of 52—and let the world think he’s still a buffoon. No good deed goes unpunished. Ok we’re on board. It’s worth checking out.

Black Adam: The Dark Age

The Upshot from DC Comics: With the power of the gods stripped from him, Teth-Adam is on a quest to find not only the magical word that will restore him as Black Adam, but also the one thing that always kept his heart from turning completely black with rage.

Black Adam is a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of Bialyan citizens and wide spread destruction across the globe. He is a man on the run from Earth's heroes, who want to see him brought to justice. Some want him tried before a world court, while others want retribution; to exact a pound of flesh for the lives he has snuffed out. And some simply want him dead as quickly and as quietly as possible.

Despite our love for all things Marvel Family (even “Black Marvel”) we hadn’t planned on picking up this book. We were burned out from how Black Adam jumped the shark during World War III/52 and we were confused by the early events of Countdown where Adam gave a powerless Mary Batson his Gods-given abilities.

Yet, our pal Dan at Brainstorm Comics hooked us up with a copy—with the variant Alex Ross cover thank goodness—and we liked it more the most part. Art by Doug Mahnke, Norm Rapmund and Christian Alamy was quite good and the story by Peter Tomasi wasn’t as awful as we thought it could have been.

The Flash #231

We won’t bother with the upshot from DC Comics because it says nothing but it’s the return of Wally West. He’s back with the entire family as is classic Flash writer Mark Waid.

Waid introduces a new element with Wally’s return as The Flash after the disastrous and fatal run of “Bart Allen” (we still don’t believe the guy who died was the real Bart) as Flash.

After having been away for a year following the events of Infinite Crisis, we find that his twins with wife Linda—Iris and Jai—advanced in age to 8 in the space of a single year thanks to that hyper-speed metabolism and they each have super speed powers.

We’re not 100 percent in love with Waid’s concept or at least how he got there but we do like the new twist of Flash and family. We missed you Wally. Welcome back.

Judd Winick’s Teen Titans East Takes Cyborg Hostage

Ok. It’s just a drive-by post this weekend as our mega-writing project for the dayjob has us running way past the red line with little time to read comics and even less time to ponder the power cosmic, to say nothing of sleeping, eating or time with Mrs. FBW.

Yet we saw the advance previews on Newsarama.com for DC Comics in November and we see that DC was actually serious when they announced a Teen Titans East Special earlier this summer.

Here’s the upshot from DC Comics via Newsarama.com: Titans Tower is back up and running on the East Coast as Judd Winick, Ian Churchill & Norm Rapmund assemble an explosive new team of Titans under the leadership of Cyborg! But their first mission may be their last as powerful forces gather to destroy all Titans past and future!

Judd Winick & Ian Churchill…together---Rao help us all!

Regular readers of FanBoyWonder know that we don’t hold Winick’s work in very high esteem (No Talent A** Clown). And Ian Churchill???????

Why does an otherwise promising comic book illustrator feel compelled to go OUT of his way to draw cheesecake into even the most benign scenes of a comic book story—there was so much T&A while he was drawing Supergirl that for the better part of a year we expected him to show up in Dateline NBC’s Predator kitchen.

With Winick, however, we rejoiced when we found that Winick’s Outsiders book had been canceled—especially not that long after we had publicly called for either Winick to be removed from the book and/or take Nightwing off the team (and out of Winick’s hands)—now it seems that both things have come to pass.

So now here we are dismayed that Winick has apparently commandeered Cyborg as the lynch pin of his otherwise unimpressive Titans East one-shot.

So Cyborg has gone from being on the short list of Brad Metzler’s Justice League of America to a life on the D-List???? Our old friend Victor Stone—one of the best characters to come out of a stellar group that was the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans—deserves so much better than this.

Let us point out the two operative words “one-shot.” If NO ONE picks up the Titans East one-shot, then hopefully this doomed-to-be-flawed idea will die stillborn and thus Free Cyborg from captivity.

Save Cyborg, ignore Teen Titans East!