Of Popped Collars and Pinstripes

THE HIJINKS ENSUE STORE IS A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN BUY STUFF!!!

Funny T-Shirts, Geeky shirts, Doctor who parody shirts, Team Edward James Olmos shirt, Groverfield Shirt, Sci-Five Star Trek Parody T-Shirt in The HijiNKS ENSUE Store

I’m not that into DC comics proper these days. Their movies, cartoons, etc certainly have my attention, but floppy, paper comic-wise I’m pretty out of the loop. From an outsider perspective the whole reboot/relaunch seems like a drastic grab for attention and money, which I in-no-way fault DC for. They need both desperately, and they certainly should do what they need to in order to hold on to their audience in a dying industry for a few more years while they figure out the next steps (though I doubt they are anywhere near close to figuring such steps out).

On the other hand, it seems like a much-needed course correction for an insanely complicated and convoluted continuity that has been running out of control for over 40 years. Perhaps a 9 year old kid that starts reading DC comics today will find this new unified universe MUCH easier to grok than I did coming into it in the early 90’s. I wish DC all the best, and I hope this stunt brings more mainstream media attention to comics in general, but I suspect they are only delaying the inevitable. What are comic books, if not little monthly newspapers about aliens and robots (and sometimes alien robots… I’m looking at YOU BRAINIAC, you big jerk.)

Sidenote: From an artist’s perspective, the new costumes take WAY LONGER to draw.

COMMENTERS: Did you pick up any of the new 52 #1 titles? What do you think? Those that didn’t, what do you think of the DC relaunch in general (Zod)?

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , .

32 Comments

    • We need to do a contest for their superhero names, even though we know they're the "FCB Trio", and then get a t-shirt made of all three in heroic poses…I'm just sayin'.

  4. Okay, this is as good a place to ask as any: How did the lavender/puce/mauve/periwinkle/whatever striped short-sleeved sweater become comic Joel's default look? Do you have that shirt IRL? And if so, are there photos of you wearing it?

    I'm mostly wondering because otherwise Josh's Wonder Bear costume keeps creeping in from the corners of my mind.

    • Joel used to wear a blue button up long sleeve shirt that very closely matched the one I least hated wearing to work. I wore it with a mauve undershirt most of the time. After I was doing the comic fulltime, I sort of symbolically changed Joel's shirt to match my newfound professional unemployment. I made it match my favorite longsleeve pullover which was also blue, but had two white stripes. I kept the mauve to match the previous color sceme. Eventually I change it to the short sleeved shirt, because I live in TX and you never really get to wear long sleeves in TX. This is ZERO relevance to the actual comic. Mostly just insite into what I was thinking when I made somewhat arbitrary changes.

  5. Did you really mean "coarse" correction as in rough, not refined? Am thinking it should have been "course" correction as in path, direction. But yeah, the first one probably works in this case.

  6. That…. that was so wrong, but yet so freaking hilarious. Where I just briefly take potshots and digs at the DC Reboot, you go full on, and I'm talking the full meat and two vegetables sort of way. Magnificent.

    • What? For your ass to appear? Pretty sure you've been fully nude in the comic at least once. Not to mention a 4 way time traveling orgy with yourself.

  8. Thank you ever so much for tastefully censoring Josh's "baconator" for us.

    No offense to Josh IRL, but there's no way it'd live up to what the fans have been imagining since the first comic.

        • And why am I suddenly expecting to see that in one of those sketch compilations that shows up every time the gang goes to a con?

          Possibly with a note that the fan who requested this sketch turned to stone upon gazing on the completed sketch…

          • Sounds like the composite sketch that was "commissioned" on The Nerdist podcast, and cost Damon Lindelhoff several grand to buy all of….believe it involved a sasquatch and a writer touching each other's Baconators.

  9. I think digital day and date is a smart move from DC. I don't think the first reboot issue of Justice League is as newbie friendly as it should have been but at the same time it has enough of a hook that it'll bring some people back who aren't loyal comic readers. It'll be much easier to gauge how new reader friendly overall the reboot is next week once there is more than one issue to read.

    Also this comic is hilarious. Nice work Joel.

  10. Didn't pick any DC-new-version comics, don't plan to do so for a while. Not because I'm a hater or something. I'm only living on the other side of an ocean and seriously, the expedition prices for my country would kill me.

    And I want this beer costume ! And no, I'm not completely traumatized by Josh's … Nope. Not at all. Still have some Chimay Bleue to cleanse my mind, anyway.

  11. I'll admit that as a kid, I was intimidated by getting into a series numbered into the hundreds because I thought I'd be totally lost. Like picking up a book and only reading from the middle. Might not be a problem for today's kids, what with the internet and all.

    Also, I find it ironic that we're discussing reader friendliness in a comic featuring Josh's Wonder Wang.

  12. Just wanted to add that I was listening to a pretty prominent DC writer talk about the current state of the company at an airport on the way home from a con and, man, are they mostly fucked. There's so much polotics and petty bullshit going on at the highest levels of DC, I dont see how they ever get anything done. There's a whole slew of top notch creators that refuse to work with DC because of certain individuals within the company. It's pretty sad.

  15. Speaking as someone who just started reading comics in February or so, I thought Justice League #1 was pretty well-suited to new readers. It wasn't as simple as "This is Green Latern. This is what he can do. This is how he can do it." I thought it was a nice introduction to the characters without making the comic pure exposition.

  16. Meh, I'm boycotting until I see what they're doing with my favorite DC characters, Power Girl and The Question. Then I may boycott some more.

    Things that are hilarious about this though
    a. Can't help but think back to the old Who's Who comics that they would put out once a year in the 80s explaining the characters
    b. This came out so quickly after DCUO got released I'm wondering what the effect on them will be
    c. The production shots I've seen of the new Superman movie show him wearing the new costume, which is going to confuse 89.7% of movie goers.
    d. Let's reboot! Because rebooting worked so well for, let's say, Spiderman in the-storyline-which-must-not-be-named.
    e. If they're going to reboot, they should go all in and do something along the lines of Tangent, this just seems tepid.

Leave a Reply