So I was all set to talk about Deadpool tonight but then I get home and jump on Twitter and discover that Gail Simone has been email-fired from Batgirl. Which pretty much sucks. I got the first New 52 Batgirl Hardcover that just came out and loved it. A lot, actually. Since I'm in Hinton right now my copy is 300 kms away, and kind of stuck in storage anyway since we are getting our basement finished at the moment. So I can't really flip through it again for purposes of review. But trust me, it's great.
Gail Simone will be fine, I'm sure. Thanks to Twitter and other online arenas, she has much more of a devoted following than many other creators. Arguably she may be the biggest name in comics. She's up there anyways. Frankly it's hard to see why DC would treat someone who is truly an ambassador for comics this way. DC loses. Gail loses. And we the readers lose. Again, Gail will land on her feet just fine, but poor old Batgirl is probably going to suffer.
I've never met Gail or even tweeted with her but I've definitely been Gail-adjacent. She was out to Happy Harbor, our local comic shop for FCBD a few years back, and she was on a panel at  SDCC when we went- about writing LGBT characters. And just the other day I swear to god she tumbld this photo of mine so if that doesn't make us bffs I dunno what would. Here is another photo I took of a cosplayer from Calgary bringingthe Barbara Gordon love, a fitting tribute:

Comics being the visual medium that it is, it's easy to be drawn in by a particularly striking image, such as the cover to Thunderbolts #1. I lobe the reds and the white background, and other than the Punisher, I am a fan of each of the characters. The actual comic didn't do much for me, but again, being the first issue, it was mostly just setup. General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross has in recent years found himself as the thing he hated most in all the world- a hulk. But red! Anyways he decides to gather a team of other red guys and gals to be the Thunderbolts. I guess we're lucky his name wasn't Stormin' Norman otherwise this comic might be called the Stormins.
Actually the Thunderbolts name has been used in various guises for a long time in the Marvel Universe, usually as a team of super-villains being rehabilitated by working as a team on the side of the good guys. This incarnation is actually a little different in the sense that all of these characters occupy the shadowy in-between state of being neither villain nor hero, exactly. Shades of grey, more. Or red, in this case. Red Hulk, or Rulk as his buddies call him, has actually lately been an Avenger so he's solidly good. Which is why he's leading the team I guess. Elektra is an assassin  but she's not a bad assassin. Venom, (Flash Thompson, not Eddie Brock) is actually an army operative and Deadpool and Punisher are basically psychos with guns but for the most part they prefer to shoot bad guys. So really, not super-villains. I might pick up issue #2 to see how they actually work together as a team. Deadpool is always good for a laugh, and the Punisher is famous for his sense of humor too. Oh sorry, that sentence should have "utter lack of a" in front of "sense of humor".
The parallel on the DC side would be Suicide Squad, the first trade paperback collection of which I read and enjoyed. Any team with Harley Quinn on it is one I want to be on, though the explosives implanted in your brain part would kind of suck.But how else do you insure that such a collection of super-criminals toes the line? Plus, they have a bipedal shark! So I might give DC the edge in a head-to-head tussle of the bad-guys-working-for-good-guys genre.

Pallas will regularly announce to complete strangers that she has changed her name to Wonder Woman. This makes me happy. I never read much Wonder Woman, though. Nothing against her- I always loved her. Loved. You know, I was the exact right age when the Wonder Woman tv show was on. In fact, I think I'll go watch the opening credits on YouTube right now. Excuse me...
Nah, the main reason I didn't read her was she was DC, and I was Marvel. Even more recently I've tried a few WW collections just because the great Gail Simone was getting rave reviews. But there was just too much backstory baggage, even for a guy like me who thrives on backstory. But I picked up the New 52 Wonder Woman hardcover collection at the library and I loved it. Now I wish I had bought it. If only there were some annual day devoted to giving loved ones gifts to brighten our dark Decembers.
Azzarello and Chiang present a Wonder Woman with close ties to both her fellow Amazons, especially her mother Hippolyta, and the various Greek gods that like to muck about in the affairs of women. The art is wonderful, with kind of a Samurai Jack vibe to it, nice and clean but with plenty of moody silhouettes:

There's a part I won't spoil where Queen Hippolyta meets Hera that I love love loved. Good writing.
My only caveat- the gore level, while perfectly acceptable to me, makes it a bit inappropriate for me to read it to Pallas. Which is fine, there are plenty of good Wonder Woman story books targeted to her age level. Those centaurs in the page above? They get created in a fantastically gruesome way. I can't wait until she's 9 or 10, though, I think she'll love it, as I do.
Here is a classic fight scene featuring Wonder Woman.

It's tooken a couple of years, but I've finally caught up on all the comics. Man, you will never believe what happened to Batman. And Captain America? He died. Twice. Or something like that. I'm not actually caught up on every single comic but I have a pretty good foundation of what's going on with most of the major heroes, or at least the ones I'm a fan of.
This is a pretty good time for comics fans, old and new. DC rebooted their entire line last year so new fans could jump on (rebooting is kind of a fact of life for characters whose history goes back 40, 50, even 70 years or so) and though I was never much of a DC kid growing up, I've been glad of the opportunity to get acquainted with a few new characters, sans tons of back issue baggage.
And even better, they didn't reboot Green Lantern. Because Geoff Johns has been writing the definitive GL saga for the last five years or so and it would be a shame to wipe all that away. His run has become one of my all-time favorite comics runs of all time. There's a part in the Sinestro Corps War that I love so much. Sinestro is all like "I'ma make you feel fear Hal Jordan!" And Hal responds by pointing out something kind of profound and even inspiring- Green Lanterns aren't fearless, they just overcome fear. Every. Single. Time. And then he punches Sinestro in the face.
Also there was Rage of the Red Lanterns and Blackest Night and Brightest Day and so on. For the New 52 initiative or whatever you want to call it, Johns did something kind of clever- Green Lantern now features the debut of the brand new Green Lantern of Earth, one Thaal Sinestro. So yeah, Green Lantern kicks ass. I like the Red Lanterns series, too.