Art Show: The Fantastic Night of Terror that Menaced the Fate of the World!

Onward through the Mangroves



By Chris Turnham.

The Abominable Charles Christopher



By Katie Cook.

Monsters and Heroes



By Larry Ivie. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

After the break: a giant insect, Avengers, Batgirl, Black Widow, Wonder Woman, and some space girls.

Comics News: Infamous Fiends and Timeless Terrors

Polly and the Pirates, Volume 2



I was disappointed when I first learned that Ted Naifeh wouldn't be illustrating the second volume of Polly and the Pirates (due early next year) himself, but I can't stay that way when Robbi Rodriguez' stuff looks so nice. Comic Book Resources has the preview.

Aqua Angst



The Aquaman Shrine has a helpful, aqua-centric review of Brightest Day #0 and... well, it's not so bright.

...this is the perfect moment to scrape off all the sturm und drang that's been dogging Aquaman like so many barnacles over the decades(!), and return the character to the courageous, confident, and almost happy-go-lucky adventurer and protector of the seas that he used to be. I'd hate to see Aquaman be put through all this, brought back to life, only to go right back to being Mr. Mopey again.

Like the Shrine, I understand the need to deal with the Darkness That's Come Before. There are people who've been following the story for a while and want to witness the barnacle-scraping for themselves. Me, I'll be looking forward to when it's all cleaned off.

Colonials, spies (one of them a gorilla), Alpha Flight in Hell, a skull-faced dude, Mulder and Scully go to Barrow, and a man punching skeletons after the break.

And Now the News: Welcome to Death Island

Oops. Sorry about that. I poked back in on Friday only to disappear for another three days. Parties and other busyness caught up with me. Here are some odds and ends to help get back in the groove.

Valley of the Dinosaurs



I wish this was real news about some rebirth of Valley of the Dinosaurs. Instead, it's just me getting my memory jogged that it ever existed. I'd forgotten all about this show until Comics Comics posted about the comics version of it. Their commentary is far more thoughtful than "Hey! Dinosaurs!" but I'm just glad it helped me remember to look for some of these comics next time I'm at the store. Or, better yet, DVD episodes.

Charles Christopher tells it like it is



Skottie Young did a guest strip for The Abominable Charles Christopher recently and it was awesome. Of course, the strip is always awesome, but this one was especially good because I got to laugh at rich people.

Alpha Flight Collector



I luh-hu-huuuuuv Alpha Flight. Maybe that's not a secret. In fact, I love them so much that in my more-obsessive youth I toyed with the idea of starting some sort of site or blog to catalog and discuss all their appearances. Fortunately, I don't have to do that anymore because it's been done for me. The Alpha Flight Collector is a brilliant resource and I'm thankful it exists.

I also dig the Collector's justification about not including Wolverine appearances in his project. He has a fine rationale, but as far as I'm concerned all he had to say was the part about, "Wolverine, what can I say, I love ya. Uh, if you love him too, email me a list of every single one of his appearances in html format."

Cold City

I wish I could find some art for Anthony Johnston's (Wasteland) new spy series about Cold War-era Berlin, but I can't. Hopefully, the story description will be as exciting to you as it was to me.

November 1989. Communism is collapsing, and soon the Berlin Wall will be torn down by both the East and West.

But before that happens there is one last situation for MI6, Britain’s intelligence services, to resolve. Two weeks ago, an undercover MI6 officer was killed in Berlin. He was carrying information from a source in the East — a list that allegedly contains the name of every espionage agent working in Berlin, on all sides.

No list was found on his body.

MI6 sent in Lorraine Broughton, an experienced spy with no pre-existing ties to Berlin, to root out the list. But she walked into a powderkeg of social unrest, counter-espionage, defections gone bad and secret assassinations. Then, on the night the Wall came down, her superior — MI6’s chief officer in Berlin — was shot and killed in the street.

Now Lorraine has returned to tell her story. And nothing is quite what it seems.

And Now the News: A Tough Nut to Crack

I'm waaaay behind (like months behind) on news, so I'll need some time to catch up. Here's a little bit to get started with...

Captain Daring



Pappy's got a Golden Age pirate comic. Funny; it's nothing like Tales of the Black Freighter.

10 Pirate Comics



I always love Bully's Ten of a Kind features, but I especially loved the Talk Like a Pirate Day one.

The Airfighters



From the press release I got:

Look! Up in the sky! It’s not a bird, it’s a plane! And what a plane it is! Airboy’s “Birdie” returns this January and he’s not flying solo.

Writing legend Chuck Dixon once again mans the stick for the adventures of Airboy in Moonstone’s all new Air Fighters #1.

Flying in Airboy’s squadron you’ll see Sky Wolf, Black Angel, Flying Dutchman, Bald Eagle, Flying Fool, Iron Ace and Captain Midnight as they take on the original Axis of Evil in the air, on the ground and anywhere else their fight for freedom takes them.

With stories navigated by Tom DeFalco, Martin Powell, Jeff Limke, Len Kody, Mike Bullock and Joe Gentile, the Air Fighters will once again earn their wings by making the skies safe for liberty!

I've read some of those old Golden Age Air Fighters comics and they're completely nuts with their pilots in wolf-skins and medieval armor. They're also completely racist, but I have no doubt that'll be corrected in the Moonstone version. Looking forward to seeing these characters work together in the same squadron.

Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time



Got another email - this one from Red 5 - about the release of the third Atomic Robo collection.

This December, the third volume of Atomic Robo debuts with the trade paperback Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time. It collects the acclaimed five-issue mini-series, with bonus stories and art… and the web-short “Atomic Robo vs The Yonkers Devil” in print for the first time.

Atomic Robo TPB Volume 3 (Diamond Order Code: OCT091062)
It is 1926 when H.P. LOVECRAFT comes calling to warn ATOMIC ROBO of imminent doom. But the SHADOW FROM BEYOND TIME escapes into the future, intersecting with our world through the 20th century. The future and history of the universe hangs in the balance as ATOMIC ROBO teams up with, uh, ATOMIC ROBO in a last ditch effort to protect reality itself.
152 pages, $18.95, 2009-12-09

Why we won't see an Alpha Flight comic again soon



Tom Brevoort explains why Marvel can't figure out how to make a successful Alpha Flight comic:

Alpha Flight is a tough nut to crack, and in all honesty we haven't quite cracked it yet. So at the moment, there isn't any active Alpha Flight series in development. The problem with Alpha Flight is that the two things that really drove interest in them in their earliest years were the fact that they were these exciting, mysterious new characters who mixed it up with the X-Men (and in some ways resembled them as regards the tenor of their team), and the fact that their series was being written and drawn by John Byrne at the height of his powers and popularity. But when you drill down, the core concept of the series is based on geography, which is very limiting -- they're like the Avengers, but in Canada.

That's disappointing mostly because - except for the part about John Byrne's being a huge part of the team's popularity - I absolutely disagree with him. The secret of their early success wasn't their mystery. The mystery was dispelled almost immediately in Byrne's initial stories and I'd argue that those stories are the reason fans have such powerful fondness for the team.

What no writer has been able to recapture (as much as I liked Steven Seagle's X-Files-like conspiracy angle in Volume 2) is that focus on those original characters. Every single time the concept has been re-launched, it's been with one or two originals and an otherwise all-new cast. Until Marvel tries a series with the original team and that fails, I don't think they can argue that the concept itself is the problem.

Ghost Rider vs. the Orb



Know what's cooler than the Orb in a Ghost Rider comic? Absolutely nothing.

Karl Kerschl's Awesome Announcement



Accompanying the above picture, Karl Kerschl said, "I’m thinking of doing a book of animal paintings like this. Possibly a children’s book.

"Possibly an Abominable Charles Christopher children’s book…"

Oh, yesyesyesyesyesyesyes!