Wondercon Makes Us Sad: Greg Rucka Leaving, All-Star Batman and Robin Not Over
This weekend is Wondercon and of course announcements are rolling out to let us know what to expect from the world of comics, movies, and science fiction. The two that have caught our eye are not exactly what we would call reassuring.
DC Comics has announced that Frank Miller and Jim Lee are still dedicated to the long running “deadline challenged” series of All-Star Batman and Robin, and will be starting up a new series Dark Knight: Boy Wonder, to begin running in February 2011. They promise that these issues will ship on time. Without, you know, switching to a bi-monthly schedule halfway through. And then a five month delay on the last issue which ultimately has to be recalled.
I… I can’t even muster the strength for a ಠ_ಠ . If there was an emoticon for taking your glasses off and rubbing your face, that might be appropriate.
I thought we were done with All-Star Batman and Robin, the series that gave us “I’m the goddamn Batman” and was laced with so much profanity (revealed by a hilarious printing mistake) that the c-word was used four times in two pages, but apparently… we’re not. Dark Knight: Boy Wonder will continue the story started in All-Star, and make it clear that they both take place in the same universe as Miller’s 1986 The Dark Knight Returns. So we can look forward to more offensively gay Joker and the hyper-sexualization and/or use of brutal violence towards every female character.
But enough about Frank Miller.
Greg Rucka also took a moment at Wondercon to announce that he will be leaving DC now that his award winning run on Detective Comics has been truncated.
From Comics Alliance:
He just turned in the last of his DC work for the foreseeable future, and his time with [Batwoman] is done. He reiterated his love for the character, saying that walking away from her was an incredibly hard decision to make, but one that was necessary…
Originally, “Elegy” was supposed to be 4 issues, “Go” 3 issues, and then a 5 part story with JH Williams III, his collaborator on “Detective Comics.”Due to a variety of things in-house at DC, they were moved off of “Detective Comics” and couldn’t tell the story there.
Rucka plans to focus on his ongoing series Queen & Country and other personal projects, saying that he “needs to [tell] the stories he wants to tell again.”
As the guy who has written some of the best Batman comics that have been published since I started regularly reading them, including work on Gotham Central, Detective Comics, Death and the Maidens, 52, and the story arc that got me to start reading monthly comics, Bruce Wayne: Murderer? and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive; I wish him well.
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