Doll

Near the end of “Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill,” one of the characters states, “Six months from now, who’s even going to remember Dollar Bill?” It’s hard to keep from feeling like Len Wein and Steve Rude’s comic is commenting on itself, and on its rather futile nature of even existing. When “Before Watchmen” was first introduced, there were a lot of jokes made about to what extremes the series would go center around different characters. But in the flurry of proposals for secondary and tertiary characters, the idea of a comic about Dollar Bill was brought up. Because of all the Minutemen, the character that existed the most in the background was Dollar Bill. Dollar Bill is a character who not only has no dialogue in the original “Watchmen,” he actually only appears in 3 panels. This is, to put it mildly, a character that virtually no one was clamoring to read more about. And now he has his own comic. So why, then, read the “Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill” one-shot? That answer is at le

Phantom Lady and Doll Man are two superheroes that hardly have a big reputation as popular characters. Instead they’re more ones that could best be described as cult-favorites; slightly obscure characters that every now and then get trotted out for a revamp. And while this recycling/returning of this level of character can succeed (the Jack C. Harris/Joe Quesada and Christopher J. Priest/Howard Porter incarnation of the Ray leaps to mind), it’s a difficult process at best. So with the debut of “Phantom Lady and Doll Man” #1, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Cat Staggs and Tom Derenick needed to hit the ground running and grab the reader’s attention quickly. While at first they seemed to do just that, this is a book that loses steam quickly. After a one-page flashback to Phantom Lady as a little girl (in which she witnesses the murders of her parents), Palmiotti, Gray, Staggs and Denerick craft a lively five-page sequence in the present day DC Universe where Phantom Lady takes down a gro

“Dollhouse” might be best remembered (if at all…) as the unfortunate post-script to Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku’s respective TV careers, but to those of us who stuck with it, it did eventually turn into an interesting and thought-provoking series shortly before it was cancelled. The question, of course, is whether a show that was conceived as a vehicle to showcase Eliza Dushku’s acting talent could be translated to the medium of comics without losing what made it interesting in the first place. Writers Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen have opted to set the comic at a point between the season’s chronological ending and its “epitaph” episodes, which were set in a post-apocalyptic future where Dollhouse technology has run amok. At this point, the survivors (including Mag, Felicia Day’s character who stars in both Epitaphs episodes) are on the run, hoping to save other “actuals” like themselves. Admittedly, this setting was the more interesting of the two explored in the show, but it’