Who was inking him on Hourman? I thought he was passible on Hawkman (when it crossed over with JSA, which is the only reason I read it). While several of the problems I have - everyone looks so damned SAD half the time, and there’s way too much similarity between unrelated characters for such detailed art - Dell’s lighter hand on the inks worked a lot better with his art than Bair’s heavy-duty shading.
He also took ‘Power Girl has big tatas’ to a whole new level. I was terribly amused by the insertion of the Village People as the bunch of guys who wanted to see PG’s tits, though.
(Hawkman’s art bugged me, but since I didn’t pay that much attention to the names on the covers, and Dell’s inks didn’t add to the problems like Bairs do, it took me most of the first issue of the crossover for me to look at the cover and realise WHY…)
I seem to recall Dave Meikis was the inker on Hourman.
The other think about Hourman was that it was not at all serious (although it certainly had an emotional impact). Rags was allowed to let loose on the art in wild fashion; maybe he’s better at that than trying to be serious.
You got that exactly backwards from the quote (by, IIRC, Julius Schwartz) that I’m familiar with: he (or someone of similar stature) said “Gotham is everything bad about Chicago and Metropolis is everything good about New York”
And the weirdly colored issues of Detective that Cliffy wrote about is the wonderful run that I was talking about. Rucka was handed a hopelessly fouled up Batman and rolled up his sleeve to try to fix him (with limited success).
I recall endless debate about this on the DC Message Boards, until someone got an official DC Universe role-playing game sourcebook that revealed Metropolis was in Delaware (!?!) and Gotham and Bludhaven (Nightwing’s city) were across a river from each other in New Jersey. Nobody could ever decide on the location of Starman’s Opal City due to James Robinson’s deliberately contradicting geography, but Robinson himself likened the Opal to “a funkier version of Baltimore.”
That’s 'cause of one (really stoopid) issue of World’s Finest in the 270s-290s that said they were across a river from each other and connected by a huge bridge. As far as I know, that’s the only time they’ve ever been so close to each other.
So, there’s backing for the Sourcebook–but most people put that story on “Earth-B”
Frank Miller said Metropolis is New York in daylight; Gotham is New York at night. (“Gotham” was a nickname of NYC before Kane and Finger came up with Batman. According to legend, they were trying to get names for their fictional city by looking through a New York phone book and lightning struck when they saw an ad for Gotham Jewelers.) As far as I’m concerned, they’re all three New York. It’s obvious that’s the case; no other real world city is anything like the (heh) metropolises that Bats and Supes call home.
Inspired by this discussion I’ve been re-reading Whiteout and Q&C this weekend. (This is the first time I’ve re-read most of the trades since they first came out, and goddam but they are good.) Anyway, it’s pretty obvious in the first Q&C book that Tara = Lily. I therefore did a little poking around on the Internet and while the official position of Rucka and Oni is that they’re two separate characters, it appears that this is so that the movie rights to the series can be sold separately. Otherwise, someone who owned Whiteout would presumably own the main character of Q&C, making Q&C rather impossible to film. But between you, me and the lampost, I now think they’re really the same person, and that’s backed up by things said when Q&C was launched, which apparently were more explicit about the connection that I remembered.
I picked up an issue of Wizard this week - it discusses, among other things, Countdown, and Infinite Crisis, and the various tie-in minis. Some nice tidbits there, but nothing exceptionally revelatory - save perhaps a notation about the OMAC Project that reveals why it was under a Waynetech entry in that database. It seems the Brother Eye satellite that Max refers to may have originally been a Batman-sponsored project.
The Spectre is noted to be without a human host during Day of Vengeance. Captain Marvel will appear in the pages of one of the Superman titles as a lead-in to that. Geoff Johns has a five-issue run of JLA coming up that leads directly into Infinite Crisis and deals with what Batman does in response to the knowledge of being mindwiped by his friends in the JLA. (I can’t imagine him getting too angry - none of the current JLA is directly responsible, and only Superman was even an active member at the time of the incident.)