Did Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis actually write dialogue for Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, or did they just transcribe their own conversations? You might wonder that yourself after reading their interview at Newsarama.

You’ll also find out about their upcoming Hero Squared X-Tra Sized Special #1 from Atomeka. All in all, the piece is as delightful to read as their comics.

(Links fixed. Thanks, N!)

Remember Tim O’Neil’s hilarious rewrite of Identity Crisis #3 (click here and scroll down to find it)? He’s at it again with Avengers #500, over at PopCultureShock. I keep getting a “file not found” page when I click on the image, but I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Speaking of Identity Crisis, Dr. Scott politely asks issue #2 to turn its head and cough. Here’s his medical review.

Speaking of Avengers #500, The Fourth Rail’s Don MacPherson makes the following observation:

“I also find it unsettling that none of the female members are left for the emotionally charged meeting of minds that serves as this issue’s focal point.”

I’m guessing he should probably gird himself for message board threads dismissing him as an overly sensitive, politically correct minion of “the Women in Refrigerators crowd.” It’s still unclear whether his score of 5 (out of 10) is enough to warrant a diagnosis of insanity, but I’m trusting Fanboy Rampage to keep tabs on that.

Johanna Draper Carlson takes a look at Marvel’s spate of first issues for the week. There are five: two Daredevil spin-offs, two new ongoing series for X-characters, and a Hulk-Thing mini-series by the writer everyone got sick of on Incredible Hulk. None of these things scream “because YOU demanded it!” to me.

Wait a minute… five first issues? On one day? I think Marvel is looking to nature for its marketing techniques. This reminds me of those giant sea turtles who lay a bunch of eggs on a beach, leave them to develop on their own, and vaguely hope some of the hatchlings make it into the ocean before being eaten by gulls or dying of exposure.

This just in: James Schee, while a thoughtful fellow with great taste in manga, is evil. What else could explain his sadistic gloating, while others remain frogless? (Just kidding, James. Kind of.)

Last but hardly least, and triggered by no current event in particular, I can’t remember if I’ve ever mentioned how much I enjoy reading Greg McElhatton’s reviews at iComics.com. If I haven’t, consider it mentioned.

P.S. (Does Blogger’s spell checker have a smaller vocabulary than that ape in Congo, or what?)

I’m still not really capable of any kind of qualitative analysis of AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED. Too much nostalgia, and all that. But one bit of dialogue in #501 did jump out at me.

In a sequence that reads eerily like a Usenet thread, the team is speculating about the day’s excessively unpleasant events. Hawkeye offers the following:

“This ain’t going to be the most popular thing I ever say, but, yeah, we had it coming. We’re all about the short-term. We’re all about whatever is in front of us that second. And then we’re on to the next thing.”

Well, that’s certainly true about the Avengers. But it’s not exclusively true about the Avengers. It’s a genre convention, like secret identities and kid sidekicks and dead girlfriends. (And the conversation is derailed by two other genre conventions: “squabbling heroes” and “powerful beings with feet of clay.”)

Given the body of Brian Michael Bendis’s work in the super-hero genre, it’s not a leap (for me) to interpret Hawkeye’s remarks as follows: “We’re genre characters playing by genre rules, and it was bound to bite us at some point.” I’m not really sure how sound it is to punish a specific group of characters for so widespread a trend, if that’s actually what’s happening.

Of course, I can’t think of many titles that have embraced that particular genre point as enthusiastically as the Avengers. The bulk of their time has traditionally been spent defending themselves from antagonists who act as they do because they simply don’t like the Avengers, individually or as a group.

Whether it’s for reasons of revenge, the challenge of it, the perception of the group as an obstacle, or whatever, the Avengers spend a whole lot of time reacting to threats to their own safety. I mean, sure, Ultron may want to extinguish the human race, but mixed up in the matrix is always his origin as an Avenger’s creation. Kang keeps threatening the Earth because the Avengers keep foiling him; he’d have moved on ages ago if his ego wasn’t so fragile. Grim Reaper? Masters of Evil? Red Skull? The Kree? The Gatherers? Loki? The grudge list goes on and on.

Approaching a story like this, where you specifically challenge a long-standing genre convention or take it to its logical conclusion, depends a lot for its effectiveness on what you do after it’s done. And maybe Bendis has an entirely new paradigm for the team in mind that stretches beyond “people who hate the Avengers attack them.”

Bear in mind, though, that Kurt Busiek tried much the same thing towards the end of his run on the book. It was triggered, in fact, by a similar snit from Captain America, and it seemed like the team was going to take reasonable steps to be more thorough, prevent disaster if possible, and capture at-large villains before they – I don’t know – erected a deadly force field around Manhattan, or something. (They even installed a big globe with super-villain Colorforms on it!)

So what happened? Well, Kang launched a massive attack, desperate to finally defeat the Avengers. Busiek left the book after that arc, and subsequent writers didn’t really follow up on the status quo he had created.

I can’t pretend I really enjoy what’s going on in the book now, and I’m not particularly enthusiastic about what’s coming. But, if Bendis really does have a functional, long-term response to Hawkeye’s argument, then it could be interesting.

Maybe it’s just me. It often is.

But, while reading Justice League Unlimited #1, I kept having the same thought:

“With the tiniest changes in script and pencils, this could be an issue-long ad for Hostess Fruit Pies.”

Just me, then? Okay.

No amphibians
Arrived at the comic shop
Cue mournful croaking

Okay, so I’m guessing Tokyopop just announces their monthly releases in the first week, so when I see a title on the New Comic Book Releases List, it means “sometime in September.”

As if that didn’t leave me sufficiently gloomy, John Jakala announces the end of his blog. Don’t be a stranger, John. I’ve really enjoyed reading what you’ve had to say.

With all of the recent departures from the blogosphere, maybe we should set up some kind of scorecard, like Marvel.

So I was looking through this week’s releases, thinking it all looked kind of dreary. And then I made my way down to the Tokyopop listings.

Sgt. Frog Vol 4.

Gero! Gero! Gero!

Avengers 501 comes out, too. And guess what? If you don’t like it, you’re out of your mind! (Links contain SPOILERS.)

These gentlemen make me feel unworthy of the title of curmudgeon. They also make me seethe with jealousy when they effortlessly toss off brilliance like this:

“Be sure to come back for the conclusion of this heart-rending trilogy in 2015, when Kyle Rayner finds his grandmother in the dishwasher.”

Speaking of brilliance, Ed Cunard of Comic World News now has a blog. Yay!

I love stories with a strong sense of place, whether it’s the meticulously researched archeological digs of Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody mysteries or the wonderfully illogical fantasy landscapes of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Fallen Angel fits neatly into this place-as-character tradition.

The series is set in Bete Noire, a murky burg that’s home to more than its share of unpleasantness. It’s a city that seems to exist outside of conventional morality. It attracts unsavory elements, whether criminal or supernatural, but it doesn’t necessarily accommodate them.

That’s because Bete Noire has also managed to attract Lee, the Fallen Angel of the title. She’s a disruptive presence in the city’s everyday business of organized crime, blood feuds, and malignant appetites. And it isn’t even that she’s a moral crusader, a Batman to Bete Noire’s Gotham. Her motives are much more ambiguous, and her methods can be downright frightening.

On paper, her methodology is simple. People in need of assistance come to her, and she helps them out of their difficulties. In practice, it’s much messier. Lee’s solutions are very rarely in line with her charges’ desires. While she seems egalitarian in whom she’ll help – runaways, hapless tourists, nuns, and bitter rivals – there’s a streak of sadism and self-interest to Lee that generates suspense. Will the people Lee helps wish she hadn’t? And what does Lee get out of it?

That isn’t to say the Fallen Angel isn’t sympathetic. While her past is still fairly obscure at this point, it’s evident there’s a lot of pain in it. And writer Peter David gives her a blunt, mordant sense of humor. Like the protagonist of a hard-boiled mystery, she’s got her own atonement to consider, even as she inserts herself into the lives of others.

In fact, David manages to give layers to his large cast of lowlifes. Whether its hapless drug lord Asia Minor or Lee’s steely, sly nemesis, Mariah, there’s an offbeat humanity to the residents of Bete Noire. They may be criminals, but there’s an unmistakable sense that they’re holding their own in a situation that’s spun out of their control.

Most of the prominent citizens of Bete Noire are on display in Fallen Angel 14. It’s a busy night at Furor’s, the neutral-zone bar Lee uses as a headquarters. Without being overly expository, David crafts neat little vignettes that serve as entertaining character introductions for new readers while enhancing dynamics and furthering subplots for current fans.

Peter David has crafted a unique fictional world with Fallen Angel, and he’s populated it with well-crafted characters. Interpersonal dynamics are balanced with suspense and a healthy dose of horror. It’s really one of the freshest, most rewarding titles out there, and you should give it a try. (And now you have a chance to try it for free! Just enter Johanna’s contest here.)

Have you been tempted to try the critically acclaimed but underselling Fallen Angel? Now’s your chance, thanks to Johanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading and Cognitive Dissonance.

Johanna’s holding a contest for the curious, with details here. Entry is easy, and prizes include copies of the first trade paperback and individual issues of the series.

Go! Enter! Enjoy!

Whoops! Forgot a couple of runs in the team-book entry:

Avengers 343-375: This really shouldn’t have worked for me at all. Bob Harras writing? My least favorite B-list Avengers in the spotlight? (Black Knight and Hercules, neither of whom behaved anything like they had previously, which might have been the trick that made them work.) Crystal and Sersi? But the Gatherers plot was genuinely creepy and suspenseful, and I loved that a fairly simple love triangle practically turned into a dodecahedron. The Steve Epting art was a treat, too.

X-Factor (the Peter David years): I can’t credit Giffen’s Justice League with bringing comedy to a stuffy franchise without noting David’s accomplishments with X-Factor. At the time, there wasn’t a more humorless super-hero franchise to be found than the mutant scene. David brought in a new cast (consisting of some of my favorite B-mutants, Havok, Polaris, Madrox, and Quicksilver) and radically revised the tone, poking gentle holes in the pervasive angst of the X-universe. The humor didn’t keep the stories from functioning prefectly well as super-heroic fiction, either.

Okay, maybe it was cruel to hope Paul O’Brien would subject himself to Chuck Austen’s Worldwatch. He didn’t, but he’s made up for it with a really terrific review of We3. (Other entertaining analyses can be found at the blogs of David Allison, David Fiore, and Marc Singer, and at Comic Book Galaxy, and Silver Bullet Comics.)

At the Ninth Art, Greg McElhatton looks at November Previews through a haze of over-the-counter medications. Some might argue that’s the safest way. I’m going to have to give Kindaichi Case Files a try. And, look! A She-Hulk collection is on the way!

Scott at Polite Dissent brings us up to date on Latveria’s performance at the Olympics. For those of you who are interested in the real thing, check in with Tom the Dog. (Tom, like Peter David, admires the athleticism of beach volleyball.)

Speaking of Peter David, there’s a preview of Madrox up at Mile High Comics. (I still wonder how posting the complete content of a comic on-line influences sales, but I’m glad to see the book get a push.)

In Lying in the Gutters at Comic Book Resources, Rich Johnston shares a rumor about a possible Identity Crisis plot twist so operatically stupid that I’m tempted to find religion just so I can begin praying it comes to pass. (Found via Fanboy Rampage!)