Watchmen

New Comics & Collected Editions Releases: DC Comics – June 5 2024

June 1, 2024 by krisis 1 Comment

It’s the 23rd new comic book day of the new year! This post covers DC Comics June 5 2024 releases, which actually hit comic stores on Tuesday June 4 2024. Missed last week’s releases? Check out last week’s post covering DC Comics May 29 2024 new releases.

(DC is still releasing their comics on Tuesday until the start of July, but I think most folks think of Wednesday as release day, so that’s how I’m labelling my posts until then.)

This week in DC Comics: DC debuts Compact Comics for Batman & Watchmen, Dawn of DC collections for Hal Jordan & Shazam, climaxes for Zdarsky Batman & GWW Ivy, a My Adventures with Superman cartoon comic and more!

This list includes every comic and digital comic out from DC this week, plus collected editions including omnibus, hardcover, paperback, and digest-sized formats. I recap and review every new single issue. Plus, for every new release, I’ll point you to the right guide within my Crushing Comics Guide to DC Comics to find out how to collect each character in full – and, if a guide is linked from this post, that means it is updated through the present day!

DC Comics June 5 2024 Collected Editions

Barda
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779511133 / digital)
A new out-of-continuity Big Barda graphic novel exploring her origins and relationship to Scott Free from author/illustrator. Ngozi Ukazu.

Batman: The Court of Owls Saga – DC Compact Comics Edition
(2024 smaller-than-digest-size paperback, ISBN 978-1779527271 / digital)
See Guide to Batman. DC’s new Compact Comics are upon us! These are chunky paperbacks that collect 10+ issues of massive hit runs for just $10 in a format that is slightly smaller than “digest” size. It’s a bane for old eyeballs like mine, but a perfect format for newer fans and manga readers! This book collects the first 11 issues of Scott Snyder’s New 52 Batman run, possibly the single best Batman book to hand to someone curious about the character’s in-continuity adventures.

Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back In Action
See Guide to Green Lantern – Hal Jordan. I disliked this opening Hal Jordan arc from Jeremy Adams, Xermánico, Romulo Fajardo Jr., & Dave Sharpe, but not for any deficiency in their craftsmanship. I didn’t like it because it gets Hal Jordan so right, and Hal is my least favorite main character in all of Big Two comics! In fact, you could almost say I loved to hate it, because the level of craft was pretty damned great on every issue.

Adams leans in to writing a Hal Jordan as a man without a ring and with no redeeming qualities other than his willpower. Quarantined to Earth and with no powers or influence left to his name, Hal leans heavily into his privilege to get exactly what he wants – from demanding a job flying test planes to forcing himself into moments alone with Carol Ferris.

Along the way, we really do see how Hal’s willpower makes him one of the most formidable Lanterns. There are moments of this where I feel like we’re on the knife’s edge between Hal Jordan being a “nice guy” who always gets what he wants versus him turning into a full on villain and sexual predator.

For me, that clearly echos his previous downfall as Parallax, which in a way brings this around from being hate-worth back to being intriguing. Is Adams playing these beats deliberately to try to show us how Hal’s willfulness brings him right to the edge of villainy? Or, is Adams writing Hal totally straight, thinking we would all root for him to get everything he wants?

Either way, I think if you are fascinated by Hal Jordan and want to see him tackling a new set of challenges, this book could work for you. And, beneath that, there is a tickle of mystery about why Hal is ringless on Earth and what the Green Lantern Corps are like under new management. Despite my hatred, I’m still reading every month! [Read more…] about New Comics & Collected Editions Releases: DC Comics – June 5 2024

DC Teams: Birds of Prey, Titans, & Suicide Squad Omnibus Mapping for the Tigereyes Most Wanted DC Omnibus 1st Annual Poll

May 15, 2024 by krisis Leave a Comment

It’s time for a team-up! All of the remaining team-ups, to be precise. I’ll be loosely mapping missing and most-wanted DC omnibus volumes every day until May 19th! Then, on the 19th, I’ll be joining with Near Mint Condition to launch the first annual Tigereyes Most Wanted DC Omnibus Annual Poll! This post covers every DC team we haven’t covered so far, including mapping for Birds of Prey, Legion of Super-Heroes, Outsiders, Titans, Suicide Squad omnibus volumes – and much, much more!

This post explains potential DC Teams omnibus mapping for votes on the Tigereyes Most Wanted DC Omnibus 1st Annual Secret Ballot. I’m posting all of these maps before the poll begins to give people the time to consider their favorites, correct our mapping mistakes, and catch books I might have missed.

Here’s the full list of the teams and groups this post covers: Birds of Prey (including Black Canary!), Challengers of the Unknown, Checkmate, Dial H for Hero, Doom Patrol Legion of Super-Heroes, Metal Men, New Gods, Outsiders, Power Company, Sovereign Seven, Stormwatch, Suicide Squad, The Terrifics, Titans & Young Justice, Trinity of Sin, and even Watchmen!

If you don’t know DC well enough to know what to vote for, stick around for my explanations! Learn why the team behind the poll decided on these books and titles – including giving us feedback if we missed the mark.

If voting is now open, you can use this as your crib sheet! Or… just find some great comics to read!

Remember: These mappings are just my suggestion of how DC could assemble these books. They are meant to help you decide on your votes and build your personal reading list, but your vote on the poll is NOT an endorsement of my specific map. It’s a vote in favor of DC creating a book with that title or covering that period.

High-effort, heavily-researched, over-the-top comics posts like this one are made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis. For less than the cost of a single comic issue a month you can fuel my in-depth comics coverage, plus gain access to dozens of exclusive collecting guides & reading orders – including all of the Crushing Comics Guide to DC Comics.

Review: Doomsday Clock #1 vs. Watchmen #1

November 24, 2017 by krisis

It is 2017, and every classic work of art or commerce is just another chance to launch a new franchise. Everything old is flogged again.

The Handmaid’s Tale is now an Emmy-winning television show that has extended its universe both before and after the story in the classic novel. The long-running Archie comics have been turned into a nonsensical thirst-trap of a TV show about sex and murder where it is every season of the year on every day to allow for a full range of fashionable costuming.

Classic franchises are groaning under the weight of being re-franchised. It’s franchising squared. Disney is determined to pump out Star Wars movies almost as frequently as they used to release Star Wars novels back in the day and Warner Brothers has rushed a Justice League into the theatres before we’ve had a chance to care about most of the individual heroes who would form it.

There’s even news that Amazon is planning to make an ongoing series out of Lord of the Rings, ignoring the extended fart sound that was made by the bloated Hobbit trilogy and the fact that they could simply serialize the original film series across two entire seasons if it was carved into TV sized chunks.

I’m trembling in anticipation for the “long awaited” adaptations of some of my favorite TV commercials and magazine ads.

(That is only halfway a joke.)

And here we are, revisiting Watchmen, one of the comic medium’s true masterpieces, because we cannot leave well enough alone.

Yes, we already had a Watchmen movie and a Before Watchmen, but they were each one-time events. This is more than an event. It’s also a mash-up with DC’s ongoing universe that we never asked for but cannot help but watch like rubberneckers delighting in a gruesome accident. (Which says nothing for the ethical concerns, addressed at length at ComicsBulletin.)

If anything can be forgiven of being a retread of past ground, shouldn’t Watchmen? After all, it was Alan Moore’s original idea to take a dead comics universe and put its characters through a meat grinder of a final story. He might have wound up using his own original characters in the end, but he’s just as culpable of re-franchising as any of these modern examples. Moore’s career is full of these examples – MiracleMan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and even Peter Pan. He loves digging up comics corpses to reanimate as much as films studios do!

And therein lies the truth of the matter. Moore always got a pass because his work was derivative but delightful. All of these franchise sins can be forgiven if the new extension of the franchise is good. The Handmaid’s Tale won that Emmy, after all, and everyone loves an Archie with abs.

Why not revive the Watchmen? Everybody’s doing it and they’ve been doing it forever – since long before Moore did it back in 1986.

Doomsday Clock #1 & Watchmen #1

Doomsday Clock #1 written by Geoff Johns, drawn by Gary Frank, and colored by Brad Andersen. Watchmen #1 written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, and colored by John Higgins.

Doomsday Clock is not meant to be a slavish, panel-by-panel homage to Watchmen, but the parallels are clear.

Both issues open with similar narration. Both are largely contained in a 3×3 nine-panel grid structure, and this first issue of Doomsday Clock employs a similar rhythm of breaking the grid to Watchmen #1. Both issues end with a sudden scene change punctuated by a historic quote that is followed by illuminating back matter.

There is an additional storytelling parallel that Doomsday Clock #1 ought to have picked up from Watchmen #1. Watchmen included several scene transitions throughout the issue, though each one turned out to be an extension of Rorschach’s journey through the narrative.

The first scene change in Watchmen is the most significant. On page nine, we cut from Rorschach looking at the Comedian’s photo of the old Watchmen to that same photo hanging above Hollis Mason as he enjoys a beer with Dan Dreiberg. Their conversation reveals they are the two Nite Owls, old and new.

The scene could have existed elsewhere, but the transition immediately lends it additional context: some of the Watchmen are still alive, and some of their mantles were handed down to others.

A page later, we realize this story is still the story of Rorschach, who shows up unexpectedly in Dreiberg’s house as he returns. The implication is that Rorschach, too, was a Watchman – which also tells us that the membership has changed over time, pre-explaining the upcoming scenes with Ozymandias, Dr. Manhattan, and Silk Spectre.

For all his withering critique of society in his journal, Rorschach was once involved in protecting it. We immediately realize that, in a way, his pessimism is him bemoaning his own failures. [Read more…] about Review: Doomsday Clock #1 vs. Watchmen #1

New Comic Guide: The Definitive Guide to Watchmen

November 23, 2017 by krisis

Yesterday, DC resurrected The Watchmen’s universe in the first issue of Doomsday Clock, a year-long event that gives us our first glimpse of what happened after the end of Watchmen 20 years ago.

To commemorate the occasion, starting today my new Watchmen guide is available to the general public! This new guide was made possible through the support of the Patreon community, who pay for Crushing Krisis’s regular monthly expenses.

My goal with this guide was to create something distinctly different from other Watchmen references on the web. I didn’t just want a bibliography or an encyclopedia article, but something in the middle that tracks every reprint of the original series and still offers some interesting insights.

How many of Watchmen’s 10 collected formats do you own? How many of the three cuts of the film have you watched? Have you read any of the Before Watchmen series? Do you know the Charlton Comics character equivalents for all of the characters, including which of them made it into the DC Universe proper after Crisis?

The guide answers all of those questions, and will be the home to Doomsday Clock information as the series progresses across the next twelve months.

New For Patrons: Watchmen – The Definitive Collecting Guide

November 3, 2017 by krisis

Today I launched a somewhat unusual guide directly to Patrons of Crushing Krisis – Watchmen: The Definitive Collecting Guide.

“But, Peter,” you might say, “Watchmen is only 12 issues long. How does that warrant an entire guide?

I’m so glad you asked. This guide does more than break out the many ways the original Watchmen series is collected. It also has information about the genesis of the Watchmen characters. It explains the differences between the three different cuts of the film, including one that incorporates the Tales of the Black Freighter material. It covers DC’s 2012 return to the Watchemen with Before Watchmen.

Much like my Complete Guide to Batman by Grant Morrison, this page is something I’ve always sought on the internet but never quite found. I look forward to adding more to it as the upcoming Doomsday Clock event as it unfurls.

This guide will become available to the general public in a few weeks to coincide with the release of the first issue of Doomsday Clock. Want it before then? Patrons get early access to every guide, including extended access to special Patrons’ Choice guides like Scarlet Witch.