Category: News

Chris’ Invincible Super-Blog continues to be one of my favorite comic blogs on the InterWebs, as it never fails to crack me up while also turning me on to some comics that might not have otherwise been on my radar. Yesterday’s celebration of his one-year anniversary with the new ISB site was no exception.

In order to commemorate a full year with the "new" ISB, Chris revisits his assessment of "The Single Greatest Comic Book Of All Time" — which happens to be November 1988’s Batman #425, featuring a Jim Starlin story and Mark Bright pencils.

According to Chris, a single page featuring Batman’s creative use of a car battery changed the course of his entire life:

That’s it. That’s the moment. That’s where the ISB was born, although it wouldn’t actually show up for another seventeen years. You can draw a line straight to the comics I read today and everything makes sense: The way Batman casually looks around for something to use, the delight he takes in “getting improvisational,” the thug’s reaction and the grin Batman’s got in the shadow, the way the guy just crumples. You don’t hear a whole lot about Mark Bright, but man. That is a beautiful page.

Much like Chris Ullrich‘s post a while back, directing you to a list of comics that "hooked" popular creators, it’s always interesting (to me, at least) to find out what issues were the "first" for various readers.

Mine? Marvel Team-Up #129, featuring Spider-Man and Vision vs. The Mad Thinker’s Robots. They smash evil versions of Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and, I believe, Abraham Lincoln. Vision questions his own humanity – or lack thereof – and there’s a big robot with a club for a fist. Ed Hannigan’s cover remains one of my favorites to this very day.

You may already know about this story – it surfaced in late April elsewhere. I found out about it thanks to This Is True, a weekly newsletter and website run by Randy Cassingham and one of my fave e-mails of the week each week.

Here’s the story, in case you missed it. An American entrepreneur has looked at the mess in Iraq and decided that what Baghdad needs is an entertainment park. Llewellyn Werner, chairman of C3, which The Times of London online says is “a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms” is putting 500 million dollars – a cool half billion – into the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience outside but near the American “Green Zone.” It will comprise fifty acres and, in addition to the former Baghdad Zoo, will include a skateboard park, rides, a concert theater, and a museum.

The Baghdad Zoo itself now has only 35 animals out of about 700 it had originally. The rest were lost to the war – starved to death, stolen, and killed so they could be eaten by Baghdad citizens who were afraid there was going to be no food.

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I visited my mom’s house for Mother’s Day, which always seems to include watching baseball, as Mom and I are both fans of the game. No, honest, this isn’t another column about sports! It’s about pink.

You see, every year on Mother’s Day, Major League Baseball provides its teams with pink bats, pink ribbons and so forth. It’s all Komen-driven, of course.  The Susan G. Komen Foundation has become the country’s largest breast cancer charity due largely to its habit of painting things pink.

And so we watched not only pink bats, but pink-ringed bases and pink home plates and pink wrist bands and pink caps in the crowd and Jose Reyes even had pink shoelaces for the occasion. It was, as always, very cool.  It would have been even nicer if the Mets announcers had actually noted the real reason for the pink; instead, the disappointingly misogynist Keith Hernandez said it was for Mother’s Day. ‘Cause, uh, Moms like pink, I guess, Keith? Seriously, do you know the difference between "for" Mother’s Day and "on" Mother’s Day at all?

I was surprised to find out that Komen isn’t the only charity focused on pink. Apparently a number of other less reputable places engage in "pink washing," where it’s not as clear where your breast cancer charity money’s actually going. In fact, Breast Cancer Action has a website called Think Before You Pink which reminds folks that "breast cancer is about women’s lives, not a marketing opportunity," and that there are a lot of places riding the bandwagon just to make a profit. (more…)