Strained

When Max Lord uses his psychic powers, he gets a nose bleed. When he changed the memories of the whole world in Generation Lost, he bled from every orifice. In last week’s Brightest Day, Mera used her water powers to the extreme and promptly bled out her nose and ears while doing so. This led us to discuss why a bleeding nose or ear has become pop culture’s indication of a character’s extreme strain.

One of the things Kris started to wonder with the books that had been recently cancelled is how so many of them will be brought back as a new volume very soon. Newsarama started thinking about the same thing when discussing the most frequently relaunched comics. Doom Patrol, one of the books that was cancelled, has had five different volumes. If you include some of the mini series that have contained the Freedom Fighters, they’ve had four different books. The Outsiders have had six different books or seven if you consider the change from Batman and the Outsiders to Outsiders after Bruce died is a volume change (we don’t). The series previous to the current run of Outsiders ended with Batman dissolving the team that Nightwing was originally running. The next month saw the birth of Batman and the Outsiders, a brand new volume with a brand new numbering, where Batman assembled a new team from the old members he thought were “worthy” of being on his team. Kris and I are starting to wonder if DC is going to do something similar. Maybe not start a new book immediately after the old book ends, but we definitely think that there will be a lot of new books created after Flashpoint. Unfortunately, we also think that there will be more books cancelled before that happens.

I think I linked to Dennis Culver’s sketch blog in a previous post. He was sketching out his desires for Batman Inc by having existing DCU characters who aren’t being used at the moment (like Wally West) and making them part of Batman Inc. Well, he’s finished sketching these characters along with some redesigns of other Batman heroes and released them as one giant sketch poster. It’s extremely awesome and I definitely recommend you check it out. While you’re at it, just go ahead and check out the rest of his sketch journal, where you’ll find other awesome artwork like last year’s study of Batman villains.