GottaGetAGrip

I suppose making it free was the only way Marvel could ever get me to read AvX...

Dark Horse's offerings - mostly single issues, but there is an entire BPRD trade: https://digital.darkhorse.com/pages/246/free-dark-horse-comics

2000 AD is giving away a Judge Dredd collection - credited writers are Alan Grant and John Wagner: https://shop.2000ad.com/catalogue/GRN281

Looks like the ComicsHub idea is a no-go: https://www.newsarama.com/49692-comichub-temporary-distribution-system-isn-t-going-forward.html

I wonder if issues for that one 90s Batman crossover Contagion about a killer virus hitting Gotham City have also gone up in value as of late.

I suppose at least a few households will be looking like the Torrances when all this is over.

Maybe Trump will begin chasing people through the White House, knocking down doors while screaming "Here's Donnie!"

2020 Visions, courtesy of a new trade edition. As far as I'm aware, it's the first color reprinting of 2020 Visions - the original covers were not included and it is printed in smaller dimensions than the average trade paperback however.

In most respects, Delano's speculative 2020 is even worse than what we've actually gotten, but the detail about the new plague in the first story sure hits a lot differently as of late.

It also comes with a new intro by Delano, where he describes his plotting on Hellblazer and Animal Man along the lines of making it up as he went in contrast to a more structured approach to 2020 Visions. That does explain the latter half of his Animal Man run, in all honesty.

I'm not sure if DC would be willing to allow their writers to write about Coronavirus while it's an ongoing issue in the real world, even with the new Hellblazer being apart of the mature-rated Black Label now. Higher-ups might find it too topical a topic to touch, similar to school shootings in regards to the Shoot issue.

Trump claims that he's tested negative for the Coronavirus.

O/U on this being another blatant lie?

Constantine will be playing a role in Tom Taylor's DCEASED sequel. DCEASED is DC's belated version of Marvel Zombies alternate universe zombie apocalypse story.

Taylor has previously written John in the Injustice comic, which was a surprisingly solid take on John considering it was for a video game tie-in. (or perhaps it just seemed better considering New 52 John Constanteen was  the only other alternative at the time)

I don't plan on picking up the books, but this is a nice variant cover styled after an iconic movie poster that features John:

https://warrenellis.ltd/work/work-faq-march-2020/

Warren posted a blog with some updates on his comics work:

-Injection remains on indefinite hiatus due to Declan Shalvey's workload.
-Trees has ended
-The Batman's Grave is just taking a skip month and will presumably finish on schedule. Great for the people who are reading and enjoying it, I suppose!
-Wildcats is now officially cancelled due to artist troubles. Nothing on the general future of his Wildstorm reboot, but I presume it is bleak..

Seems like a real "coincidence" that two of the Democratic candidates who would probably split up the Centrist vote with Biden during the primaries dropped out and endorsed him like a day or two before the big round of state primaries.

Well, I guess this means that the Democratic Establishment is going all-in on a Biden nomination, so I suppose we might as well start preparing for four more years of Trump like Christian has speculated or in the best case - as Biden seems to be suffering an onset of senility at times these days - hope that Biden doesn't forget which button sends the nukes and which buttons sends for the nurse if he gets elected.

I've seen the moderates on Twitter claiming that Biden is the only candidate capable of unifying the Democratic Party to beat Trump... which makes me wonder which Joe Biden they've been looking at. I suppose Biden could run with the "Better me than Trump!" angle, but that clearly worked out so well for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

I suppose the writers were taking inspiration from Geoff John's direction in the later half of his New 52 run where he had Luthor reform (I guess) and join the Justice League. Or maybe it's one of those cases where the situation is so desperate the heroes need a human shield to "accidentally" push in front of a laser blast must temporarily forego current enmities.

Here's the trailer:

I suppose that between stuff like this and his stay in the CW shows, it was a Monkey Paw that granted the wish for Matt Ryan to reprise his role as Constantine.

If that really is Old Man John turning heel and getting cozy with Right Wingers, maybe Spurrier was inspired by the kind of aged punk rockers who pivoted from singing about anarchy and rebellion against the system to singing praises of Brexit and Trump?

Though it is also possible that this is part of a scheme he's playing to get Young John where he needs to be - in the time that's passed between #300 and now, perhaps Old Man John has become willing to make the kind of decisions that not even Classic Vertigo John at his most cynical and self-serving was capable of.

Spurrier has confirmed on his Twitter that he plans for all his stories to be three issues at most and his run to be a series of these short stories that cohere into a larger macro plot. So at the very least, if he happens to write a bad story, at least it won't go on forever like some Constantine tales of years past...

https://comicbook.com/dc/2020/02/21/exclusive-justice-league-dark-apokolips-war-cast-revealed/

The animated movie is getting a sequel this year - though by all accounts, it seems to be a regular Justice League movie that has Constantine and the other faces from the magic crowd tossed in. So who knows why it's explicitly labeled Justice League Dark. Maybe cause they're fighting Darkseid?

These kinds of images still hurt to look at, to be honest.

Remember Warren Ellis' webcomic Freakangels? It's now getting an animated adaptation from the anime streaming service Crunchyroll:

https://warrenellis.ltd/work/freakangels-adapted-for-animation-at-crunchyroll

The webpage for the original comic now sadly seems to be defunct.

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The new Bond theme song and also the final theme of the Craig era:

(Not a listener of Billie Eillish so no clue if this is her regular style or something just for a Bond theme)

With the news coming out in regards to Iowa's bungled caucus, it's hard to tell if the Democratic Party is just that bad at their jobs or are that unsubtle in trying to rig the primaries for their candidate of choice?

Either way, it doesn't lend one much hope in their capability to prevent another four years of Trumpster.

This arc was very much a safe, "back to basics" kind of story but unlike Tynion/Doyle or Oliver's ill-fated attempts to restore John to a Classic Hellblazer kind of feeling after he went full superhero in the New 52, Spurrier's actually been managing to pull it off.

Spurrier's John feels like he could've stepped off the pages of the original Hellblazer, and Spurrier writes a world for him to inhabit more like our own and less like the world of cape-filled skies John had gotten trapped in for the past decade (even with the questionable plot of Old Man John lurking in the shadows and masterminding things)

Hopefully Spurrier makes the run truly his own in his future issues, but for now, it's the most optimistic a new Hellblazer launch has made me thus far.

Though I said similar things about the last two and look how they turned out... but to Spurrier's credit, he's managed to sustain his promise for an entire arc where Oliver's promise began steadily plummeting before his first arc had wrapped.

(Benefits of keeping things contained to three issues instead of trying to stretch it out to six issues, I suppose.)

(I have not reread the Tynion/Doyle Blazer so I don't remember if it was before or after their first arc had wrapped that things all went to hell...)

It's that time of the year again: another rumor about Justice League Dark films and other projects in development that will probably ultimately go nowhere!

This time it's JJ Abrams' production company Bad Robot at the helm.

Oh boy, one step closer to seeing the iconic Justice League Dark characters like Nick Necro and Waiting For Mindwarp on the big screen!

(Though Bad Robot did produce the solid war horror film Overlord, so they might actually be capable of at least a few decent takes on DC Horror and Magic...)

Sure feels like we're about to watch a shittier remake of the Bush years unfold...

The last Jonah Hex series DC did (titled All-Star Western) by Palmiotti and Gray did ditch the whole conventional western angle to place Hex in more outlandish situations, though these situations were probably way more connected to the wider DCU (i.e. Hex working in 19th century Gotham or time-traveling to meet random DC faces including the New 52 Constantine) than something Ennis probably would write if DC ever let him do a Hex book.

(and it honestly was much weaker than their conventional westerns Jonah Hex book that preceded it)

Given Ennis is a fan of Cormac McCarthy, I'd half expect him to work in an unofficial adaptation of Blood Meridian into his hypothetical Hex book.

(DC honestly ought to offer Ennis the chance to do a serious western or war book one of these days though, instead of yet another comedic mini-series that comes off half of or all the time like something he wrote to amuse himself while drunk)

Add Jim Starlin to the list of enemies that Trump's made in recent happenings...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/thanos-creator-feels-violated-trump-campaigns-avengers-ad-1261553

I read Brian K. Vaughan's Swamp Thing run after picking up the digital trades on sale a couple weeks back... and it was... competently average. I enjoyed Tefe's anti-hero characterization (which is honestly what kept me going with the book). The two issues where she encounters her fathers were highlights, but I found the bulk of the supporting cast Vaughan built around Tefe forgettable caricatures and a good deal of what happened in his twenty or so issues just blurs together.

I was annoyed by his penultimate storyline where he sets up some future plot threads that he immediately waves off with a line of dialogue in the next issue cause the book got cancelled, I imagine I'd be a wee bit more incensed if I'd been buying his run when it was coming out.

If nothing else, I wouldn't mind seeing some writer (well, maybe not all writers) take a crack at bringing Tefe back. There's much potential with her character that I feel Vaughan only brushed the surface of.

Having finally read #1, it does feel like a very safe return to classic Hellblazer form, but after all the mishaps of his three post-Vertigo books (four if you count the New 52 JLD as a Constantine & "Friends" title), a little back to basics might be just what John needs. Spurrier in his two issues has done a great job capturing John's bastard-with-a-conscience attitude without straying too far to either end of the spectrum - John's no hero but he's also not a total ass as some other writers have tended to do him. And Campbell might be the most Hellblazer-esque artist that's drawn Constantine since Manco was on the original Vertigo run. I'm not too invested in the arc's narrative of magic drug dealers vs angels too deeply since it is a tried and true Hellblazer plot, but I definitely do want to see where Spurrier takes John in the foreseeable future.

(in the case that Spurrier makes Nat this run's Hellblazer Girl, would she be Constantine's first Scottish lover?)

With John, you can at least hypothesize that Nergal's demon blood, along with that time he did the succubus salsa with Ellie, slowed his physical aging down.

Though it's not out of question for Gemma have gotten up to some similar hijinks sometime in between her appearance in the Jenkins run and her return in Carey's.