Doomsday Clock Pages

The first six pages of Doomsday Clock have been released, along with an interview with writer Geoff Johns.

And it looks like Ozymandias is in trouble, wanted for the murder of millions of people in the New York massacre.

Gary Frank’s art looks gorgeous, similar enough to Gibbons that it retains the Watchmen feel but still his own.

The interview’s interesting, although one line from Johns leapt out at me:

Johns said that Doomsday Clock isn’t necessarily a political book, but it is a book “about extremes.” He thinks people are being forced to pick strong sides, but Rorschach being an “apolitical” figure, refuses to pick a side.

Rorschach “apolitical”? The people to whom he mails his journal, whom he describes as the “only people [I] can trust” is the New Frontiersman, a right wing rag that’s about as far from apolitical as you can get.

If Johns has mis-read Rorschach, that’s not a good start.

Cheating On My LCS

It’s all the fault of the Brave and The Bold, I tell you.

I’ve been getting my comics from my local shop for almost thirty years. Sure, I’ll buy trades from Amazon – and before that, play.com if anyone remembers them – in order to save myself a few pounds and get them delivered the next day, but for my weekly fix, for the regular series on my pull list, I head to my comic shop on a Friday or Saturday.

The owner’s been good to me over the years – he knows what I like and has suggested stuff every now and then that perhaps I wouldn’t have tried. Some of it I enjoyed, some I didn’t, but it’s nice to have that interaction.

With Dark Nights: Metal, I told the owner that I’d be getting the main series but not the one-shot tie ins; as you’ll see soon enough, I’m having to build a new bookcase to house my ever expanding collection of comics, and yet more physical copies just didn’t sit well with me.

A few days ago, I was browsing Comixology more out of curiosity than anything else. I’ve bought a handful of items from them – the digital Crisis on Infinite Earths and the War of The Gods collection – when I saw Brave and The Bold #28 to #30 on the site, the first appearance of the Justice League of America. While I have the issues in the Showcase Presents collections, and the Archive editions that came out years ago, the chances of me owning the actual issues are remote. However, for under a fiver, I could get the three of them digitally. A few clicks of a button later and there they sat, in my books in the Comixology cloud.

And then I started looking around at what else was out there.

And started to succumb.

I bought all twenty three issues of Fate, the ridiculous 90s series that came out of Zero Hour and transformed Dr Fate into a dagger wielding, pouch strap wearing magician. I have both Guy Gardner: Reborn and Guy Gardner: Warrior on my wish list, alongside Captain Atom and LEGION. I’ve even saved Anima for later – you know, because I’m currently annotating Bloodlines so it sort of counts as research.

And now I find myself looking at the Dark Night: Metal tie-ins.

Even though I told my comic shop I didn’t want them.

What to do . . . ?

Laws? More A Set Of Principles For Some

said Superman, as he flew unaided in the depths of space . . .

Dark Nights Metal Chant

Everyone enjoying the craziness that is Dark Nights Metal? Snyder did promise us a fun, over the top ride and he seems to be delivering with, among other things, issue #2’s reveal of Darkseid as a baby:

(And is Darkseid making the devil’s horns sign beloved of the late, great Ronnie James Dio or am I just seeing what I want to?)

It’s jumping around and barking mad – and I’m really enjoying it. I may get around to annotating it further down the line, although it’s a little too embedded in the Batman books for me to get every single reference, but I did want to do my public duty and offer up one thing.

On page 20, the Court of Owls and the Strigydae trap Batman in order to raise the big bad guy, Barbatos, complete with a summoning ritual:

The font that’s used has been in DC’s comics for several years – among other places, it’s turned up in Blue Beetle as the language of the scarab; it was used in Pandora: Trinity of Sin when Pandora (remember her?) cast a spell; and even as far back as Final Crisis: Requiem when it was used as the Martian language.

Here, though, it’s the same phrase repeated three times, then the first three words repeated twice: