Back in September, thanks to DC’s Zero month, I gave the Superman zero books a shot and like them a lot. Due to this I decided I was going to commit to reading the Suerpman: H’el on Earth storyline which will cross-over into Superman, Supergirl and Superboy. To give myself a better background on the New 52 Supergirl character, I picked up the Supergirl: The Last Daughter of Krypton trade. To my surprise, quite a fun read.

Its been a while since I’ve posted an update about the status of the site and the database.  So, I’m going to quickly run through some of the things we’ve been up to at OpenCBDB.  The tables for Titles, Volumes, Publishers, and Issues are setup and we’ve filled them with some data (the combined collections of myself and Doug Von Doom along with the issues we don’t have).  We have about 35, 000 issues in about 1,000 different titles (with 1100 volumes).  We’ve tried to put a few creators out there (about 3300) with their credits (applied to different roles on the 35K issues for about 68K credits).  We’ve only been able to put up about 3500 covers so far, but we’re adding more every day.

If you’re a registered user, you’ll be able to track your collections online.  Once logged in, on each issue, you’ll be able to add issues into your library.  When they’re in your library you can view a nice list of the issues you have, AND a checklist for the issues you’re missing.  This way you know what issues you need to track down.  And if adding issues into your Library one at a time is too slow, from your Library menu you’ll be able add your whole runs to your library at once!  Just pick the title, and start typing your issues in.

You’ll also notice that if you’re a registered user, you’ll be able to add and edit the information in the OpenCBDB.  You’ll be able to add new Titles, Volumes, Publishers, Issues, etc!

And we’ve got tons more ideas in the wings.

Cliff Chiang’s Amazonian Princess

Let me preface this with, “I am pretty ignorant of Wonder Woman’s character and continuity.” My whole understanding of the Wonder Woman character is deep rooted within DC’s Animated Series’ Justice League and Justice League Unlimited as well as the half dozen or so animated features like Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths and New Frontier. Wonder Woman to me is a strong-willed, bull-headed, prideful feminist warrior princess from the isle of the Amazons that doesn’t take any shit and can give Superman a run for his money. My understanding of Wonder Woman isn’t much more than a comic book stereotype. It’s rather kind of sad. Wonder Woman is the most recognized female comic book character in the world, a staple Justice Leaguer and a part of DC’s Trinity and yet I don’t really know anything about the character. While I have tried my hand at reading Wonder Woman a few times before, the title has never really held my interest. But when I heard that Brian Azzarello was taking on Wonder Woman for the New 52 re-launch I was intrigued. Brian has a penchant for outside the box storytelling. I knew that his type of approach on the character could make me care about a Wonder Woman title. I’m pleased to say, I couldn’t have been more right.

If I query my memory banks for my first impressions of Dark Horse Comics, I start to conjure up dimly lit images of the now extinct Friendly Frank’s Comics of Hobart, IN. Friendly Franks had these home-made comic shelves and the Dark Horse comics were at the back of the bottom shelf and took the most amount of effort to reach for.  For me Dark Horse was the forbidden fruit of comics. It seemed like every single one of those damn things had a ‘Mature Readers’ label on it. So imagine me, a husky kid, bending over and contorted my body to reach out for a ‘Mature Readers’ comic book at age 8. That image alone would have prevented my conscious from letting me buy Dark Horse Comics until I was about 27. Thankfully, my grandparents bailed me out of that embarrassment by picking me up my first Dark Horse comic, Batman vs Predator #3 (1991) at age 10.

Character Cross-overs are nothing new to Comics. So it’s no surprise that DC is about to release the proverbial cross-over hounds this Oct-Nov. The first positive statement I will make about this “Thank the Cosmic Gods… that this isn’t a Universe-Wide Storyline.” (I still have a Blackest Night hangover)  While Marvel is just now finishing up it’s year long Universe commitment to Avengers vs X-Men Mega Cross-over, DC is taking us into year two of the New 52 by bringing out the old baddies in a few mini-verse cross-overs.

DC’s The New 52 Zero Month

Roughly one year later, DC Comics is agressiviely building upon it’s successful universe re-launch with DC’s Zero Month, by giving us an entire month of origin stories. I started the month with just my share of the 8 titles in my pull-list. Left wanting more, I hit up Comixology and ended up picking up an additional 16 books I don’t normally read and was not disappointed by a single one of them. The best part… because all the zero issues were origin stories, I could pick up any zero issue and not worry about being lost. Each story was self contained and some even led me to buy recent copies of books I don’t normally read. Essentially the entire month of September was a jumping on point for every title in the DC universe.