Red Hood Loves Arsenal #8

Me color good!

Rating: -1 Ranking. This comic book is dumb. It would please me greatly to come up with more intellectually viable criticism but why should I waste my fucking time on it when Lobdell obviously doesn't waste any time writing his scripts. Watch, I'll come up with one right now!

Red Hood and Arsenal get into a conflict with some mean people (artist, draw them however you like! Make the guys bad-ass and the women hot! Maybe their names will be Speed Clash, Flight Monster, Bag of Lust, and Circle Quirk)! The bad guys threaten Jaybird and the other one. Jaybird and the other one say some bad-ass stuff and act nonchalant and stuff. Roy thinks some thoughts that will have lots of jokes that I'll come up with after seeing the art. It'll totally be hilarious. Jay and the other one--fuck. What was his name? Oh, I'll ask the editor later if he's not busy groping the new intern--kill the bad guys. But then I'll probably make it so they didn't kill them because I guess they're not killers now and I'll write them as if they never were and they're totally empathic and crap. Jaybird will be all annoyed at the other one because the other one will be all, "I'm a slacker and shit! Total rockabilly genius too!" Oh crap! I forgot to remind the reader that he was a rockabilly genius in this new issue! It's a good thing Tess made up this new script for the next issue so I can point that out and everybody will be all, "Ha! Yeah! So Rockabilly! I guess!"

That would totally go to print, right? Pay me my money!

Batman Loves Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2

Michaelangelo leaps like Nightwing.

Rating: No change. This comic book has Batman so Batman fans will probably like it. This comic book has Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fans will probably like it. So far, it doesn't have a story that matters if you're not a fan of those things I mentioned. It would be more interesting if it guest starred Banksy.

Batman Loves Superman #28

I get why Batman is surrounded by bats but why is Superman covered in pigeons?

Rating: +3 Ranking. Holy shit! A comic book that's simply about Batman and Superman having and adventure and working together! A comic book about Batman and Superman that doesn't need dozens and dozens of Narration Boxes to explain the theme! A comic book about Batman and Superman that's actually about Batman and Superman! Bruce Wayne is in the costume! Superman has his spit curl! Alfred Pennyworth has two hands!

Okay, that's probably bugging a lot of people. But who the fuck cares? I'll take this over all of the Commissioner Gordon and Powerless Superman crap that's been going on across the last year. Although I'm actually enjoying the story over in Batman because much of it is focused on Bruce Wayne. But Commissioner Batman in previous issues of this title?! Pee-yuke!

Oh? And Lobo's appearance? That's how you fucking write a Lobo comic book! Although I was a bit confused because he was being raped or filling half the page in Narration Boxes or apologizing for not really apologizing.

Starfire #8

You know you would get more entertainment value out of Dick if you'd stop referring to him as Grayson, DC Comics.

Rating: No change. This comic book should have been twenty pages of sex. Instead, it is twenty pages of no sex. Not a drop! It has less sex than the first twenty-seven years of my life! You know how hard it is to write something with less sex than that?! I assure you, it's quite difficult. But this issue managed it.

I guess Dick is going around the DC Youniverse clearing up all of his past relationships so that he can start banging Helena without any complications. Unless he starts banging Midnighter. Either way's cool.

New Suicide Squad #16

Sixteen issues to get back to status quo.

Rating: -2 Ranking. Crappy dialogue adds that special hint of extra suck that this story probably didn't need. This story puts an end to the Vic Sage nonsense that never should have begun in the first place. I still have no idea why he was introduced. I don't know how he was supposed to make the book better. I don't know why, plotwise, he was even added to the team! But he's gone, Bonnie's gone, and Amanda is back running her regular team out of Belle Reve. This book doesn't have to be so complicated, guys. In fact the one thing this book is supposed to do, it hasn't done for sixteen issues. No villains have died. No villains have even come close to dying because whoever is editing this shit seems to think this book will only sell if it's packed with popular villains who have no chance of being killed. Sure, some Man-bats died but that's like killing Stormtroopers. And Bonnie died in this issue but she was just part of the Vic Sage story that needed to be swept under the burning rug inside the gasoline doused property.

Seriously. I don't know how DC can get such a simple concept like the Suicide Squad so fucking wrong. Did anybody currently at DC even read the Ostrander run?!

Gotham Academy #14

This year book was put together by amateurs.

Rating: No change. This issue is frivolous fun. It's one of those books where it's a bunch of stories collected together in one place instead of one big story. Most people have a word for that kind of thing. You could even find it in the dictionary if you had any idea where to start. Or you could just read the entire dictionary straight through until you found the word that described what I just described about stories in a collection. The word has something to do with getting crap for free and then maybe also a synonym for a stack and then the lower part of a person's leg!

I wonder if I should buy a dictionary? Do they come in calculator form?

Superman: American Alien #3

Come on! The bat symbol is such a nice touch!

Rating: +3 Ranking. I feel like I should be one of those pseudo-intellectual blogging windbags who describes as many things as they can as "meh" to prove they're too smart for everything so I could point out that Landis presents some fairly cliche ideas in hamfisted ways. But this comic book was fucking entertaining and any niggling critiques I might have would simply be sour grapes.

Sour grapes are good, right? Isn't that alcohol?

Um, uh, anyway, this story might not be in continuity but who the fuck cares? I cared more about Clark Kent and Barbara Minerva in this story than I've cared about either of them in nearly the entirety of The New 52. It doesn't hurt that Deathstork was made to look like a fool as well. It's sort of the role he should stick to instead of trying to carry his own comic book where he pretends to love his children but can't even remember his own son's name.

I wouldn't mind if DC Comics simply published well written stories and let the fans fight it out over continuity. Not like most fans aren't making up their own versions of everything anyway. Besides, what are comic books if not glorified fan-fiction?