First off, I’d recommend Jeff Smith’s Billy Batson: The Monster Society of Evil, followed by Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam! Sholly Fisch’s Scooby-Doo Team-Up and The Batman and Scooby-Doo Mysteries are also some of the best comics for young readers out there. Anything with “Adventures” in the title is a safe bet too, tying into the great Timm and Dini DC animated universe — can’t recommend Superman Adventures, Batman Adventures, Batman & Robin Adventures, Gotham Adventures, and Justice League Adventures highly enough.
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i thought it better to ask you specifically, what is the KORD Industries of video games?
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I don’t have any opinions about video games.
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hm, who is/was the Curt Calhoun of DC creative?
I don’t know who that is.
Are there any one volume, or perhaps mini-series collected as single volume anthologies (I don’t know industry terms, is that what a “trade” release is?) that stand on their own without requiring homework from the reader to enjoy that you would recommend?
I’m not sure if I have the time/space/attention/etc presently to start a series of anything, but I could gobble up a nice stand alone story.
Try Darwyn Cooke’s DC: THE NEW FRONTIER. Every page is like falling in love.
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Can you help me track the Waller we know now through time a little bit? To my brain, it feels like it goes kinda like this:
- Not much recollection of her until she becomes prominent in JLU. I wonder why the Diniverse crew chose her?
- Huge void left by Maxwell Lord’s death (both within Checkmate and also sort of in the meta narrative)
- Prominence of Nick Fury as a paranoid string puller in both Marvel media forms (comics and movies)
- The hyper awareness of the Suicide Squad in mainstream movie media leading to her increased prominence in the funnybooks
She seems to be following a Maxwell Lord-esque path too, to what I can only imagine is a similar end? I don’t know how she gets unwound at this point…
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That seems right. I just spoke to Mark Waid about this yesterday. He’s saying he’s aware of the flattening of her character which has occurred over time, and will be doing his best to present her with more complexity in this summer’s event.
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Nice little flex there, Mr. I-Speak-With-Mark-Waid-On-The-Reg.
… unfunny jokes aside, much regards to Mark Waid and his family. His work with Alex Ross made me a DC Comics fan for life, and his Birthright with Leinil Yu was robbed of its preeminence.
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I was always a Marvel boy. Entertained by DC to be sure, but my focus was elsewhere. I recently read a story with Deathstroke.
Has Deathstroke always been this? The guy in Teen Titans? In all of those movies? Whose image is emblazoned on kids’ t-shirts?
Look into this at your own peril, it isn’t good.
Beyond that, if you could give me book recommendations. The biggies are accounted for, and I think my most “niche” favorites are the Kelley Jones Dead Mans.
This was one of the five Jaffe recommended me (the entire Priest run, not just Defiance) way back in the thread and I remember really enjoying it. Could you say more about what you didn’t like? I felt like Defiance was where the run really hit a stride and started building on the character stuff very well.
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I may have grabbed the wrong cover as I read this online on my phone. 2 secs!
Nope, it is the right one.
The handling of Terra, and the age difference between Slade and she, which made me look further back into the character.
Sorry for all the edits! I just want to write all of my thoughts with care!
I have no grievance with those who enjoyed this book, or even for writers wandering into dark subject matter. I suppose I am baffled because for my whole life I assumed Deathstroke was only just a cool anti-hero with a sword.
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That’s fair. That relationship is incredibly unhealthy and (I believe) it’s all because Slade manipulated her when she was young. I can’t speak to the details of their characterizations because it’s not in my memory anymore, but I can definitely see how their might be missteps I wouldn’t notice that would turn somebody else off.
And yeah I wasn’t taking it personally; I was just curious.
I also had basically no history with Slade before this, so I don’t have that Teen Titans, children’s t-shirt context.
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I was a tween as the show was airing on Cartoon Network, but I remember action figures and other merchandise of him being around.
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Yes he has. Deathstroke’s always been a real piece of shit, from the original Wolfman/Perez run on. His image was sanitized a lot by his popularity in the kid-safe 2003 Teen Titans cartoon, due in no small part to Ron Perlman’s voice acting. Fans of the cartoon went on to imagine him as a rival to Batman, and he spent most of 2011-2015 as a Batman villain because of that. He’s back to his Titan-fighting ways now, though.
- The Question (1987)
- Jonah Hex (2006)
- Animal Man (2011)
- Suicide Squad (1987)
- Blue Beetle (2006)
- Batgirl (2000)
- Gotham Central
- 52
- Hawkman (2018)
- Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood
Yeah, this was the relationship between Slade and Terra going all the way back to the 1980s. What made this particular Deathstroke story so interesting is that, unlike the decades of stories which followed that tried to sweep this under the rug, or worse, make it seem like Terra’s fault, this book boldly places the blame on Slade himself, exposing his character despite a fandom-wide insistence that he’s some kind of badass when he’s really a pathetic manipulative loser.
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I remember being younger, more or less ignorant of DC outside of what was in TV and movies, and thinking under the mask Slade was “definitely Bruce Wayne, testing Robin”
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All of that history gives me the context I didn’t have for why those scenes happened in the way they did; to put the onus on Slade and not Terra.
Most of what I knew of these two was from the 2003 Titans show. I was 11.
What a complicated read. Issue #27 has been rolling around in my head for 2 days now.
That answers all of my questions perfectly, thanks! I’ll report back on the books I end up reading.
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Considering Slade never actually successfully kills anyone on the show, this is a smart theory up until the Terra story there.
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Yeah, what I love so much about the 2016 Deathstroke series is that it does not ever try to mitigate the fact that this character is the fucking worst. He is not an anti-hero. That’s a bold choice.
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