A Return to Glory for the First Time

Glory was ‘created’ by Rob Liefeld in the early 1990s. I say ‘created’ because apparently Rob Liefeld’s idea of creating something is just to take an already existing character and change the color schemes a bit. Glory was clearly Wonder Woman, just like Supreme was clearly Superman. She was an Amazon warrior who went to go live with mankind. There were some differences: She was half demon and she possessed a woman in order to learn what it meant to be human (probably not doing that). There had to be something different. I’m surprised DC Comics didn’t sue Liefeld off the face of the Earth. They’ve always been so historically good at utterly destroying anything that remotely looks like their characters. Maybe it was ok in the 90s.

It was clear that Liefeld’s Extreme/Awesome Universe was not very well thought out. It took Alan Moore to make Supreme into a clever pastiche of Superman, instead of just a xerox copy of him. He won an Eisner for it! The Fighting American was an old Jack Kirby/Joe Simon character who was brought in to replace Liefeld’s already shut down Captain America stand in, Agent America. A stand in for a stand in. You get the idea. Glory was no different and no better. For a time these comics were popular, but eventually Liefeld ran out of money and everything tanked. Fast forward to 2011 and Image has decided to relaunch some of the Awesome Universe comic book properties without Rob Liefeld. One of them is Glory.

Whatever Happened to the Comic Book Creator?

This title, that you didn’t buy, is cancelled with issue #8

Creator owned comics are dead. Literally. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe no one wants to buy anything new anymore and with that reality the industry dies a little more. New characters have always had a hard time finding an audience. Everyone wants a new #1, but no one wants to buy a comic about someone they don’t already know. On top of that, the recent trends within mainstream comics has moved towards stifling creative endeavors in favor of proven successes. All this is leading comic book creators to shy away from creating new concepts for mainstream comics, but their independent creative owned books never find the sales for success. In essence we’re being robbed of so much potential.

The sudden cancellation of a comic book NAMED Creator-Owned Heroes tells a lot about what comic book fans are looking for. A book starring characters created by the likes of Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Steve Niles, Phil Noto, Darwyn Cooke and others is a big deal, and yet people weren’t buying it. Sales were in the 5,000 range and they were asking for only a little bit more than that. Palmiotti and Gray have a loyal following from writing Jonah Hex and now All-Star Western, Steve Niles created 30 Days of Night and so many other things, Phil Noto is a popular cover artist at Marvel and DC, and Darwyn Cooke is the type of creator that you follow religiously. It was thought that all these creators’ fans would come together in order to support the book. Apparently not. Creator-owned concepts don’t always make it at Image Comics, but what about Marvel or DC, the companies that everyone wants to read and make the most money.

Confusing Realism With Pessimism

There is a growing trend, it seems, towards making comics “realistic.” The realism that they adhere to, though, is anything but. Comics where people die in depressing ways, where the hero doesn’t always win, where the villain is some kind of unspeakable rapist serial killer pedophile, that’s not realism. That’s pessimism.

Pessimism is an adolescent train of thought. There’s a time in your life where you grow disillusioned with the world and see everything as rotten, but that’s simply an illusion of the real world. When you’re a child, the world is wonderful, new, and awe-inspiring, but as a teenager you’re exposed to all these new facets of the world you previously had no interest in. Politics, heartbreak, genocide, these are suddenly new things in your life that before you were ignorant of. This exposure is scary, and you react in the only way you can, with pessimism. Surely, this world I previously thought to be so great and wonderful is actually a rotting carcass, you think. But like I said, it’s an illusion.

No one will be happy again

The Walking Dead is one of the most popular comic books being published right now, and with a hit TV series that continually shatters ratings, it’s certainly not going away any time soon. It’s appeal is certainly the “realistic” approach it takes towards the zombie genre, where every day is a struggle for survival, no one is safe, and the real enemies aren’t the zombies but the humans. But, this is confusing realism with pessimism. Reality isn’t a bleak, meaningless existence. Reality isn’t a world where humans revert to their base instincts of sex and violence when society collapses. That’s foolishness. The Walking Dead is a series where there’s no light at the end of a tunnel, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no hope amongst all the despair. Nowhere is safe, and no one is to be trusted. People who fall into those traps end up raped, tortured, or worse. The philosophy behind the series is “no one is safe”. That’s not real world, despite the best efforts to convince us otherwise. It’s fantasy, pure and simple.

Review – Chew: The Omnivore Edition Vol. 1

The FDA is on the case

4 out of 5 stars
Chew #1-10
Image Comics
Story – John Layman
Art – Rob Guillory

Chew is a book that can sell copies on it’s concept alone. That’s what drew me into this comic in the first place, because it seemed like a perfect example of an ‘only-in-comics’ storyline. Chew is about Tony Chu, a man with a special gift. He is a cibopath, meaning he can eat food and instantely get a telepathic image of where that food had been and how it was prepared. When you thrust that concept into a police procedural, a gift like that can only end up serving one purpose. If you still don’t get it, it means he eats dead bodies.