This comment thread, where gamera_spinning explains something of the Continuity Clusterfuck that DC Comics is undergoing right now makes me believe that the venerable comic company is trying very hard to break my mind. But I won’t give in, I won’t. I promise to stay abreast of all, I repeat, ALL braindead changes that occur in the DC Universe.

P.S Out of all the facts retold in the comment thread,the Mary Marvel storyline was the only one that escaped my general DC consciousness.

I read Adam Warren’s Empowered volumes 1 and 2 this Saturday. Must rank as one of the most seamless merging of the superhero genre and (what is commonly referred to as ) manga style of drawing. Adam Warren is one of the earliest creators of Original English-Language Manga ( OEM ), his work on The Dirty Pair hitting bookstores a long long time before manga attained the level of popularity we see today. Empowered is a kick-ass piece of work, combining absurdist humour with superhero cliches, taking the damsel-in-distress gag to ludicrous heights. The series is chockful of quirky characters – our disaster-prone heroine, her boyfriend, a thug named Thugboy – with a former career of filching equipment of super-villains by pretending to be a brainless minion, her best friend Ninjette, a heavy-drinking, ass-kicking ninja princess, The Caged Demonwolf, a Lovecraftian monster who has been trapped inside an energy-draining belt and now spends his free time watching TV from Empowered’s living room, the Super-homeys, the bunch of upright superheroes with whom Empowered hangs out and her arch-nemesis, Sistah Spooky, who resents blonde women. All in all, a romp of a series – I love the fact that Warren is not just having fun, but is also introducing subplots that make me await the next volumes impatiently. The artwork is all black-and-white, being shot entirely from Warren’s pencils ( though I detect a marker or two, in the blacks ).

And also reading the first two trades of Brubaker-Lark’s Daredevil run, The Devil, Inside and Out volumes 1 and 2. I cannot stop drooling over Lark’s artwork; just when I thought Maleev had brought in a new scratchy feel to Daredevil’s adventures, Lark takes that style, makes it his own and does wonders with it. Ed Brubaker – someone stop that guy! His writing is so perfect for the street-level grittiness that Daredevil needs. The added bonus is that he does not indulge in conversation-masturbation, the way Bendis did in his series, when all you had were talking heads that indulged in random, forced conversation just because the writer felt like it. The fag end of the Bendis-Maleev run, especially Decalogue and The Murdock Papersare tough to read just because they are so BORING. Here, though, the action and the quiet moments happen in perfectly-timed beats, and all I can say is, dang, I want to see where this series goes.

Also read this Dr Strange mini called The Oath, by Brian K Vaughan and Marcos Martin. I am not a big Dr Strange fan, and while the series goes very deep into the mythos of the good doctor, Vaughan’s writing made it fairly clear for me to figure out what was going on. I dig Martin’s art, from the Batgirl: Year One series, it’s very Mazzuchelli-influenced, or so it seems.

And THAT is the reason why there isn’t any new Lone Wolf and Cub post yet.