Other Comics News Parade-O-Links 02282021

(Convergence: Superman #2. May 6, 2015. Cover by Lee Weeks.)

Here are some things I found interesting in the world of minicomics, comic books, graphic novels, small press, self publishing, zines, webcomics, cartoons, digital comics, other, etc. during the week ending 02282021.

• Hello sisters, brothers and others and welcome to another episode of your Other Comics News Parade-O-Links.  My name is Shano and I'll be your host.  I'm still getting back in the groove of "blogging".  I'm not 100% decided on when I should post these things.  Friday is probably the most logical day if I want people to actually read them but Sunday feels better.  I like the idea of you, dear reader, sitting in your favorite chair wearing your bath robe and slippers with your feet propped up on your dog "Honeycomb Salad" reading this on a Sunday morning.  I can see the waves of steam coming from your "#1 Step-Parent" coffee mug.  You still have bed head but it's working for you.  You look happy.  You look at peace.  You smell terrific.  Have you been working out? 
• We may as well get WandaVision out of the way since it's the only thing on Earth that matters. This week's episode was great but maybe a little too great?  I can't think of any other TV show that has presented an episode that so neatly gift wraps everything the audience has asked for  and hands it to them prior to the finale.  I still kind of wish the show had never broke kayfabe and was still recreating a different chapter of TV history each week.  I still hate every second  S.W.O.R.D. is on screen and I knew the boss, Whiteguy McSuburbs, was a no good dirty liar.  See, even the parts we don't like conform exactly to our expectations.  Maybe the other shoe drops next episode?  There are certainly a few more questions to answer and a few more twists left.  SPOILERS Did y'all notice which of the recurring cast were not wandering around Westview during the flashback where Wanda came to town?  

• Since comic books don't even exist and only super hero TV shows matter, let's talk about TV's other floaty character with glowing read eyes.  A new Superman TV show pilot, Superman & Lois,  premiered this week.  This is our fifth live action Superman TV show in the past eighty-three years.  I think that's more than C.S.I. (Unless you count Without a Trace and Cold Case.  Then Supes has some catching up to do.)  I don't watch much broadcast TV so normally I'd be checking this show out two or three years from now on streaming but I actually watched this thing in real time with the rest of the CW watching world.  I enjoyed it.  I like the tone of the show and I think Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch make a great Clark and Lois.  I think the kid playing Frodo has potential too. I really appreciate that Hoechlin and Tulloch are adults.  Ever since Superman Returns cast a nine year old as Lois Lane I've been warry of these things. I think the show kneecapped itself by [SPOILERS] starting with a funeral though.  The overall tone of the show is upbeat and hopeful but the funeral kind of forces the cast to mope around before we get a chance to see their default settings.  Lois really only gets one comical scene with a vending machine where she gets to act like Lois before putting on the funeral time sad face.  Maybe the cast will get a chance to outshine the script as this thing proceeds.  And that script?  Hoo boy.  Look.  This is a CW show so you just have to accept that it's going to be soap opera.  It's not for everyone.  If you're not into teen dance parties/bonfired/charity balls and each scene ending with a contemplative stare followed by a hard cut to commercial then stick with WandaVision. This show still exists in the shadow of the Snyderverse Superman.  There is a sepia tone filter over the whole thing and the Super spandex under armor still has that grim dark tone to it.  We're still missing the trunks so Superman looks like a dog standing on his hind legs. But, for a few minutes at the beginning of the show, we get a full color flashback scene with a real Superman costume.  A moving picture homage to the cover of Action Comics #1.  That was pretty great. 
• As I said earlier, comics don't even exist.  To prove this, CW/DC/Warner followed up the premier of Superman & Lois with a behind-the-scenes featurette where the producers of the show along with Geoff Johns and Jim Lee talk about how they are all geniuses who thought up every thing on the show all by themselves without the help of 83 years of comic book creators.  Over and over again they brag about how the concept of this show, Superman and Lois married with children, has never been done before.  Comics don't even exist and that's why the producers and Johns and Lee make the big bucks.  Except comic books do exist.  Superman and Lois Lane have been getting married for decades. In maybe the best Superman comics of all time, "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tommorrow?",  (Superman #423 and Action Comics #583) Alan Moore's Lois and Cark are married and have a son named Jonathan. (Clark is going by Jordan in that one so that's where Jordan comes from for those keeping score.)  Superman and Lois have been in-canon married since 1996.  And they've had an in-canon son since "Convergence: Superman" #2 from 2015 where Dan Jurgens made superpowered son Jonathan a part of the current ongoing DC Universe.  Oh, but Shano, the genius producers put a new twist on it!  In the new TV show they have two kids! Not so fast imaginary person that isn't really arguing with me, John Byrne gave Supes and Lois two kids in "Superman & Batman: Generattions" in 1999.  And my point isn't that TV shouldn't steal from comics.  No TV, please, please steal from comics.  Comics are better than you.  But don't put together a TV feature about your brilliant game changing new idea when you know damn well that comics has already done this and that you should be giving the comics creators the credit they deserve.  Especially you Geoff Johns and Jim Lee.  You have no excuse.  One of you jerks better buy Dan Jergens a new house. 
• In other moving pictures of Superman news, it appears that a Ta-Nehisi Coates written Superman movie is in the works and that it might be the black Superman a lot of us have been wanting to see at least since Grant Morrison's Multiversity.  I'm optimistic but I hope they don't rush it.  We've had four Superman movies since 2006 with the Zack Snyder Justice League about to drop in a few days.  I'm worried that there won't be much appetite for a new big screen Superman.  It's like the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies.  They weren't terrible, Everyone was just full up on Spider-Man in that moment. Maybe if we get through this plague and back to the communal non-butter-liquid-popcorn topping trough we'll be ready for a fresh Superman. 
• I hate to linger in the world of moving images when comics are always vastly superior but I do have to link to this Zack Snyder redemption piece if for no other reason than for you guys to see that Warner continues to be wrong in almost every situation.  The two hour blockbuster died when you fools gave one of those Tolkien movies the Oscar.  
• In our final, I promise, DC Comics related link of the week, they're playing thrash metal during musical chairs now so I can't even keep up well enough to know what any of this means. 

• I think I mentioned the new Stan Lee biography last week.  This week, Marvel great Roy Thomas provides a rebuttal.  I don't know Roy. Sure, old dudes' memories are suspect but the pages don't lie and a whole lot of the pages seem to have been written by a name that rhymes with Snack Derby. 
• Speaking of the guy that created everything of value in US history, there is a new podcast that digs into Jack "The King" Kirby. 
• Here's a neat article on another great American author, no, not Hemingway, it's our man J. M. DeMatteis and his great American masterpiece "Kraven's Last Hunt". 
• As soon as either this plague ends or the government gives me that money they owe me I"mma hit a comic store and dig through the long boxes for some weird junk like this. 
• Our man Benjamin Marra had an informative inside baseball chat with filmmaker Craig Zahler. 

THE BEST NEW COMIC I READ THIS WEEK

Once again I am apologizing to you for not having read any new comics this week.  I still have not made it to the comics shop.  I hope our good man Brian at Cavalier Comics hasn't thrown my pull list in the trash but there's still a plague going on, it's been raining and the goddamned government still hasn't given me that money they owe me. 

Nicholas Burman over at TCJ still reads the comics and writes about them though.  The most interesting comic I saw reviewed this week was probably the Savage Pencil collection he wrote about. 

As for me, I read a lot of Spider-Man comics this week. I'm getting caught up on the Nick Spender run.  I can't say that I care for it.  The jokes are pandering way to hard to an audience that isn't going to look away from Tik Tok long enough to read these comics and the art is nothing special.  They can't all be winners.  

I'm still on my orange, yellow, brown and green costume bullshit with my ongoing read throughs of Suicide Squad, Doom Patrol and the Vision and Scarlet Witch mini-series and related Avengers comics. One of the Vision and Scarlet Witch issues features guest star Power Man (Luke Cage to the youngs) celebrating what appears to have been the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Always classy Quicksilver celebrates MLK Jr. Day by calling black humans and black Inhumans "dusky skins" so, I'm gonna call this one a swing and miss. 

Look friends, I know a lot of you might be interested in the first two Vision and Scarlet Witch serieses because of WandaVision so let me warn you, they are not good.  I'm not saying don't read them,  They are interesting and there is a surprising amount of stuff in the WandaVision show from those comics, I'm just saying don't expect quality.  Personally, I tend to be anti-quality in most things. I'll take weird over quality 99 out of 100 times and these comics are weird AF.  The full Steven Englehart. Just don't go into these things thinking that you are going to come out the other end a better person. 

• Before we leave, it looks like our man Francis was too busy to make a video this week so instead we'll check in on his distant cousin (by marriage) Boogie and see what's up on the Yoo Tubs and the Tick Clocks. 

• Remember pals, life is hard.  Never stop running unless it's to pick up a friend.  Read comics and chew Glorp gum every day and you'll keep on livin' until you're dead. 

Your best pal ever,

Shannon Smith

p.s. I write comics.  Do you make comics?  Maybe you should hire me to write comics. 
p.p.s Say you want a leader but you can't seem to make up your mind. I think you'd better close it and let me guide you to my twitter feed.
p.p.p.s.  Yeah, I do Instagram too.  Maybe if 100,000 of you follow me there I'll be as famous as the average Cambodian teenager with a milk ring collection.