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JH Williams

Crushing Comics S01E24 – Atari, Wonder Woman newspaper strips, Gaiman’s Death & Sandman Overture, & more!

November 24, 2017 by krisis

In this episode I pull an unusual hunk of books of the shelf – a set that pulls me far out of my Marvel Comics comfort zone! Watch as I reminisce about things old and new including my Atari 2600, Wonder Woman’s newsprint comics, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman prequel and afterword all rolled up into one, and more!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 24 features Wonder Woman: The Complete Newspaper Comics (Amazon), Death Deluxe Edition (Amazon / Absolute Edtion), The Sandman: Overture Deluxe Edition (Amazon), Daytripper Deluxe Edition (Amazon), and Mystery Society (Amazon).

 

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Collected Editions, Crushing Comics, DC Comics, JH Williams, Neil Gaiman, Sandman, William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman

Batwoman: The female, feminist, lesbian Caped Crusader you need to be reading

March 22, 2017 by krisis

Today I’m bringing you a guide to one of my favorite characters introduced in the past decade – Batwoman!

If you’ve never heard of Batwoman, don’t worry – I hadn’t either when I first picked up a comic she starred in back in 2011. I’m going to explain everything you need to know.

Batwoman: A Thoroughly Modern Bat-Hero

I was initially intrigued by Batwoman because of her bold visual design – the v-shaped slash of red hair centered about her black mask and chalk-white skin.

I had no idea she was much more interesting for two other reasons.

First, Batwoman is a rare female hero who shares a title with Batman as her male counterpart but has never been his “girl” (Supergirl, Spider-Girl), or a secondary “Ms” or “She” version (Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk).

Batwoman’s wealth and training rivals Bruce Wayne’s, as does a traumatic loss in her youth. That makes her a similarly aloof adult when she’s out of the mask, complete with a complex history of romantic entanglements.

The woman behind the mask, Kate Kane, is an out lesbian who was discharged from the Army in the Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell era. As you can imagine, that experience also informs her decision to become a costumed crime fighter.

Second, this  modern Batwoman was truly a brand new character when she debuted in 2006. There’s no lengthy history or different character versions to understand.

In fact, she has been used sparingly enough that you can easily buy all of her appearances and read them in just a week or two, and she has a brand new series that just started last week!  [Read more…] about Batwoman: The female, feminist, lesbian Caped Crusader you need to be reading

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Batwoman, Greg Rucka, Infinite Crisis, JH Williams, New Comic Guide

Definitive Batwoman Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Batwoman comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting DC. Last updated February 2017 with titles scheduled for release through October 2017.

There is not another character in comics today quite like Batwoman: A female legacy hero who has never been a “girl” or “ms” version and whose power, wealth, and training matches her “man” counterpart – and, who also happens to be an out lesbian with a complex romantic history.

The original Batwoman was introduced in the early Silver Age of DC, when every hero had a female counterpart, teen and kid version, and pet.

The Batwoman we’re reading today is not that Batwoman.

The current Batwoman, Kate Kane, put on her cowl in Batman’s absence during the aftermath of Infinite Crisis. Despite bearing the Bat codename and costume, for her first decade of publishing she was at best a distant cousin in the Bat family, disconnected from both their camaraderie and their drama (though she has forged a connection with Nightwing).

Kate Kane’s history is a twisted mirror of Bruce Wayne’s. Like Wayne, she is an estranged aristocrat who experienced childhood tragedy that fractured her family and relationships. While Wayne escaped Gotham for his lost years, Kane sought a path in the military before her career was prematurely ended.

Without her military career, she descends into a party-girl life of solipsism before a brief encounter with Batman shakes her out of it. Heroism fills a void for her, and she filled a void in Gotham in Batman’s absence.

In her earliest appearances Kane is shown as a long-haired, high-society bombshell, but as her story progresses she transformed into a pale-skinned, tattooed, punk-rock social pariah with a severe bob haircut. This standoffish, counter-culture version is the one that persisted.

While Batwoman was intriguing as a foil and love interest to Renee Montoya for her first two years of stories, she comes into her own in her starring run in Detective Comics penned by Greg Rucka with sumptuous art nouveau illustrations from J.H. Williams III. Williams would continue illustrating and writing the character into DC’s New 52 in 2011.

Batwoman disappeared for a while at the end of that period, only to pop back up as the co-lead of Detective Comics with equal standing to Batman in DC’s Rebirth in 2016 before returning to her own ongoing title in February of 2017.

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[Read more…] about Definitive Batwoman Collecting Guide and Reading Order

An Epilogue to The New 52

September 10, 2013 by krisis

BATWOMAN_25Here lies the epilogue to my grand experiment of reading DC Comics’ 52 new titles when they launched two years ago this month – and a tiny lesson on customer lifetime value.

Last week the big story in comics was that multiple Eisner Award winner J.H. Williams was walking off DC’s critical hit Batwoman, along with his co-writer W. Haden Blackman. Williams is also the illustrator to DC’s upcoming hotter-the-the-sun Sandman Overture with literary rockstar Neil Gaiman.

Not coincidentally, Batwoman is one of just two DC ongoings I am still reading (the other is Animal Man).

Mmany outlets tried to make the big story of the walkout that DC Comics ordained that we would never get to see the titular character – a lesbian – marry her new fiancee Detective Maggie Sawyer on panel. Given DC’s dalliance earlier this year with anti-gay champion Orson Scott Card writing a Superman story, many (not just comics) news outlets slanted their stories that the Williams walk-out adds more fuel to a fire of DC’s low opinion of GBLT characters and fans.

That may have yielded some extra hits and comments, but that’s not the real story behind the sudden resignation. If you read into Williams & Blackman’s statement, you’ll see the real issue is that DC won’t commit to a story for long enough that they can build up to it – which is exactly why I went from reading 52 title two years ago to 1 as of next month:

Unfortunately, in recent months, DC has asked us to alter or completely discard many long-standing storylines in ways that we feel compromise the character and the series. We were told to ditch plans for Killer Croc’s origins; forced to drastically alter the original ending of our current arc, which would have defined Batwoman’s heroic future in bold new ways; and, most crushingly, prohibited from ever showing Kate and Maggie actually getting married. All of these editorial decisions came at the last minute, and always after a year or more of planning and plotting on our end.

jh_williams_01While the final straw was the fizzled marriage plot, it was the ongoing interference that broke the camel’s back. Hints of this were visible over three months ago, when Williams tweeted his disappointment in his longstanding Killer Croc plans getting co-opted for another writer to write a one-shot of the character for Villains’ Month.

DC relaunched their entire publishing line to try to establish new (or: bigger) buying habits with a wider group of readers, of whom I was one. I read all 52 books in September 2011, and at least 26 of them that October. I was really excited to see so many distinct stories and new characters, and I would have gladly kept up with many of them.

However, one-by-one, my favorites got picked off – Resurrection Man and Frankenstein to low sales, Stormwatch to a complete reboot, Birds of Prey and Demon Knights to creator changes, and Batwing to a new direction. It seemed like the only books I enjoyed were the offbeat ones no one loved, or the books DC was certain needed a big change.

Note the distinct lack of their core superhero IP on that list; I largely disliked the first story of this books, with a few exceptions (Flash, Batgirl, Green Lantern Corps). And, even if I adored them, it wouldn’t matter – hardly a single book has survived past twenty issues with a consistent writer/plotter aside from Scott Snyder directing Batman, Gail Simone on Batgirl, and Brian Azzarello on Wonder Woman. (Superteam Buccellato and Manpul just announced they are leaving Flash.)

The end result is that I went from reading 52 DC comics 24 months ago to just 1 as of next month. DC’s reboot won them my money and attention in the short term, but my lifetime value as a customer grew less and less as I dropped books, and now will continue to accumulate only a measly $2.99 per month. They lost me in the long-game of increasing revenue.

Meanwhile, in that same time period Marvel has grown my readership from just X-books to all but two books in their entire publishing line of main continuity stories. They have me reading characters I am an avowed non-fan of – like Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Daredevil, and Captain America – just on the strength of the creators and the bold stories being told. I’m happy to commit to that because even when creators change during a run the story direction tends to be largely preserved. My the slope of my cumulative lifetime value line keeps getting steeper and steeper. I’m about as valuable of a customer as they can have – traditionally known as a Marvel Zombie.

I’m just one customer, but I have to believe there’s a greater trend to be found in that example.

Is there a common moral to be found for DC comics between Williams walk-out and my trailing off? I’d say the stories are one and the same – DC doesn’t have faith in their creators to tell stories. That isn’t about characters getting married – Marvel only boasts one major marriage in their line. It’s about telling interesting stories that evolve but never distinctly end.

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Batwoman, Blackman, DC New 52, JH Williams

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