What If.. ESU housing made a different arrangement?

[thanekos]

Then it'd be this month's Iron Man: Demon in An Armor, which proposed a reality where Tony Stark and Victor von Doom shared a room.

( And got on in the way diametric opposites normally do.. )

Angel & The Ape v2 01

[terrykun]

Today I bring you one of DC's rarely considered gems from the early 90's.

A dramatic tale of romance! Science fiction! Crime-fighting!

One of them is a detective. The other one is a cartoonist. Together... THEY FIGHT CRIME!

Oh, did I mention that one of them is a gorilla? Cuz that's kind of important.

Yes, it's Angel & The Ape, by Phil Foglio. Originally a pure humor comic by E. Nelson Bridwell and Bob Oksner, the series was given a reboot by DC to bring it into their standard continuity, and our beloved creator of Girl Genius (then just a distant twinkle of gears and gals in his eye), was tapped for the job. (:

8 more pages (out of 24) below the cut. The cover totally lies about what this series is like.

( The only other talking ape as cool as Ken Hale. )

Lois Lane is a Mary Sue-writing self-insert fanfic plagiarist

[galateus]

( Move over, Cassie Claire... )

Two-Face Tuesday: a Bronze Age gem with Bats and Ollie in "Double Your Money... and Die!"

[thehefner]

One of my favorite Two-Face stories barely features the character at all. But much like Orson Welles's Harry Lime, whose five minutes of screen time dominated the whole of The Third Man, the threat of Harvey Dent looms throughout the Batman/Green Arrow team-up story from 1973's The Brave and the Bold #106.

Written by Bob Haney and drawn by the great Jim Aparo (who got top billing!), "Double Your Money... and Die!" was the second story to feature Harvey since Denny O'Neil dusted off the character after seventeen years in obscurity. It's pure Bronze Age Batman, too: a murder mystery filled with action and intrigue, building up to an epic ski chase in Switzerland. Plus it's fun, thanks the humor both intentional (Ollie's wisecracks) and unintentional (dated lingo, clothes, Batman uttering "Ye gods!", etc).

Told in one single issue, the story was so densely packed that DC actually sacrificed the letters column to let it run twenty-three and one-third pages instead of the standard twenty-two! Either they really wanted to do justice to Haney and Aparo's story, or they wanted avoid printing the letters for issue #103. Either way, Haney and Aparo make use of every single panel, and modern comic creators would do well to follow the economy of Bronze Age writers like Haney.

Also, Jim Aparo. It's Jim Aparo drawing Batman. On skis, no less!





( Death on skis (and I don't mean the Black Racer) behind the cut! )

If you'd like to read this story in whole (which I recommend, as there's much more I had to cut), it's collected in the black and white collection, Showcase Presents the Brave and the Bold: The Batman Team-Ups, volume two, appropriately enough!

I must have missed a memo

[stubbleupdate]

But Image are launching a series ( nearly 3 years in the making )