FNF Presents: “The Black Friday Brawl!” - The REAL Batman/Joker Deal!

Welcome to this special Friday Night Fights Prize Fight entitled "The Black Friday Brawl!". Our host Spacebooger has given us one special rule for tonight's post-Thanksgiving punchout: It must be a fight scene featuring a fight where the color black is present and noticeable almost to the point of being overbearing.

So I thought: What better choice for a comic having near-overbearing black colors than one named Batman: Black And White?

Tonight's ebony-heavy embroglio comes to us from Batman: Black And White#2. Remember that Batman fanfiction story from a few weeks back called "Batman: The Deal" that revealed that the real secret behind Batman and the Joker's relationship was that....you may want to sit down, because this is a really radical concept....they.....wait for it.....needed each other? Oh, and it ended with a Bill Hicks monologue to show us how edgy it was. (No, not the extremely NSFW one about Rush Limbaugh, thankfully.)Well, tonight's story, courtesy of writer Neil Gaiman and artist Simon Bisley, sheds a light on the real deal with the nature of the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince Of Crime's bond to each other:

Co-workers slaving away for a certain major multimedia conglomerate.

Nice touch, Mr. Gaiman!

So off to the Green Room goes our Dark Knight, where he waits with a certain green-haired (you'll have to just take my word for it here) gentleman.

Ok, now time to see how that rehearsed scene plays out.


Annnd..... ACTION!

Ok, if everything above didn't drive the black in this fight to almost overbearing levels....

....get a load of who's directing it.

And did you really think tonight's fight music for the "Black Friday Brawl" would be from someone OTHER than Steely Dan? Au contraire!

For more obnoxiously onyx altercations, click here. And don't forget to vote!

Friday Morning Fights: Wright - Round 12: Get Carter (And Her Hair)!

Tonight's This morning's final round of Friday Night Morning Fights: Wright features a lot of abuse, both physical abuse and mousse abuse. It comes to us from Captain America#450, written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Ron Garney and Scott Koblish. Things begin as a certain former Steve Rogers love interest who had until a few issues earlier been presumed dead (and will be played by Emily VanCamp in the upcoming Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie) is sitting in Steve's apartment pondering their future when she gets a few visitors...

....which leads to a more pressing mystery:

What in God's green Earth is up with Sharon Carter's HAIR???

Seriously, I know it was the 90's, Ron Garney, but Sharon's hair here looks like a living entity in and of itself. Was she trying to give Medusa competition? Or did she just have the worst bed-head ever?

Watch as Sharon splits her attention...

The men manage to restrain Sharon and her....seemingly living coiffure by sheer force of numbers.

But they learn to their regret that....

...you can't keep a good mane down.


Tonight's fight music is this styling song by the Bellamy Brothers.

For more HAIRy situations, click here. And don't forget to vote!

Friday Night Fights: Wright - Round 11: Getting Biblical!

I usually try not to mix comic book fisticuffs with religion (although I've made the occasional exception), but for tonight's round of Friday Night Fights: Wright I'm combining the two again.

Tonight's scriptural smackdown comes from She Died In Terrebonne, a weekly murder-mystery webcomic written by Kevin Church and illustrated by T.J. Kirsch. Synopsis: Private eye Sam Kimimura has been hired by the Tanaglia family to locate their daughter Daphne. He track's Daphne's last known whereabouts to Terrebonne, Oregon, where he meets up with Old Tom, who's a tad......religious.

But Sam has some Christian comebacks of his own.

This has been the Gospel according to Spacebooger.

Tonight's fight music is also of a....biblical nature.

The Hook Brings You Back...

Yesterday I found out Nick Cardy passed away at the age of 93. There have been several deaths of older comics pros in the last few years, but I have to tell you, this one hit especially hard.


Cardy was a very talented artist, both on interiors and covers. He was also the reason this blog even exists. For he was the artist who hooked me on DC Comics, and thus onto comics in general.


Sure, there were other Late Silver/Early Bronze Age (approx. 1968-1975) DC favorites like Neal Adams, Gil Kane, Dick Giordano, or the Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson team, some of whose styles I may have even liked better than Cardy. But in terms of addicting me to DC comics during that period, nobody, even Adams, did it better than Nick. And you can bet I was far from alone in that opinion, especially among old DC fans who are in their late 30's or older. If you couldn't resist checking out a DC comic in the early 70's, odds are it was because it had a cover drawn by him.


Cardy's covers were irresistible, often depicting their protagonists in unique, seeming Kobayashi Maru situations, all beautifully staged. They made you wonder "How are they going to get out of this one?" while making you care enough to take a look inside and find out.


You see, my earliest experience with reading DC Comics came from visits to my aunts' and uncles' houses. I was too young to actually buy any comics myself, and my family was struggling to make ends meet at times. So when we visited our relatives, I often made a beeline straight for their comics stash and lost myself in it. Unfortunately, some of those aforementioned aunts and uncles are no longer alive, so remembering reading those comics has the added bonus reminding me of happier times with them.


Here are some of the covers (and, in some cases, accompanying interiors), with which Nick Cardy owned me, body and soul, as a young boy. My one rule: I'm keeping things honest by limiting the comics shown to my actual childhood expriences, way before Google or the Grand Comics Database or whatever could fill in the blanks. With some of these I've only seen the covers, either through in-house ads or through seeing the covers at my local grocery store or drugstore. But I'm including them anyway because they made me crave the interior stories, too, even if I never got to satisfy those cravings.


Let's start with my first Cardy memory: His Aquaman work.

(Confession: My Cardy-era Aquaman solo series exposure was more limited when I was a kid. Brian Snell has some more tasty Cardy Aquaman covers I found out about in my adulthood, which you can see if you click here.)


But where Cardy really addicted me was on Teen Titans, where he illustrated both the covers and most of the interiors. He really started hitting his stride around this issue.

And it only got better.

Cardy's art was versatile enough to also thrive in a wide variety of other non-superhero genres (yes, DC and Marvel actually had other genres back in the day, believe it or not), including romance....

....western....

....and horror comics.

And then there's Cardy's work on my favorite hero, Superman.


True, Cardy never drew any Superman solo stories that I can think of. In fact, the only interior art I can recall Cardy doing of the Man Of Steel may have been his cameo in this Titans issue.

But his Superman covers, on the other hand?


Legendary!


Here's the first comic book that I bought with my own money. With a Cardy cover. Of course.

Here are some more seductive Cardy Superman covers.

But the Man Of Steel's solo adventures weren't the only Superman-related comics where Cardy's covers shined. There were also his team adventures, both as an adult.....

....and as a teenager.

There were also the Cardy covers with Superman's best friends....

...and even his own son.

Thank you for hooking me all those years ago, Mr. Cardy! You WILL be missed.