New comics

Got to the comic shop yesterday to get a copy of Diamond Previews before they sold out.

For all that I keep worrying about my budget, I had just one comic from my pull list waiting.

Oh, well, I could have just taken that and been done, but I decided to look at the racks. I picked up the last copies of the last two issues of the Edmondson/Noto Black Widow, as if I actually have $8 to spare. That was dumb.

Anyway...

Al Rio and Fever Moon

Recently, I found a graphic album of something called Fever Moon at the public library. It had art by the late Al Rio, so I checked it out. When I finally, weeks later, sat down to read it, the author's foreword surprised me:

Karen Marie Moning:
When Del Rey told me I could pick my artist, it was a done deal. I would have written anything to get a chance to work with Al Rio, whose art I've long admired.
[snip]
Fever Moon ended up being more than I'd hoped for, but the path to completion was difficult, and not everyone survived. We lost Al Rio along the way....

So this was some of his last work, and he didn't even finish it. Wow.

This hit me.

I had long harbored an idle fantasy of writing Wonder Woman, and in that fantasy I wanted Al to draw it. I figured he'd pull me back. I'd write a script where Diana's in civvies, he'd put her in the costume, probably with the booty shorts that show the bottom of her buttocks. I'd want to be kind of off-kilter, he'd bring the book back to a classic superhero look. Stuff like that.

I think Al dying in 2012 was one of the things (alongside my own clear inability to actually write a decent Wonder Woman story, and DC basically telling entire fandoms of its characters to get lost with the New 52 revamp) that made me just give up on the idea and move on.

And here I was reading the book he was working on before he died--and which he never finished. So it was kind of like mourning.