To absolutely no one’s surprise, DC is cashing in big on the success of the new movie Joker with an unconscionably over-saturated slew of Joker-centric comics — as well as plenty of Bat-crap that doesn’t feature the so-called “Clown Prince Of Crime” — so let’s take a look at the attendees at this week’s cash-grab party, as well as one more item of interest —

Okay, so I was lying when I said Joker/Harley : Criminal Sanity #1, the newest offering in the veritable onslaught of books coming out by way of DC’s “Black Label” imprint, was an “item of interest.” In point of fact, popular YA author Kami Garcia’s script, which re-imagines Harley as a criminal profiler and Joker as a standard-issue serial killer, is so clumsily written and embarrassingly verbose as to be well-nigh unreadable, while “flashback” sequence illustrator Mike Mayhew’s art is so heavily photo-referenced as to…

If there’s one cartoonist that learned scholars of the comics medium — and even the occasional opinionated asshole such as yours truly — wishes we could see more work from, it’s James Romberger. His understanding of the unique potential and possibilities inherent to sequential storytelling is on par with the likes of Mazzuchelli or Krigstein, yet when pressed, most of my fellow critics will cop to being familiar with his stunning graphic adaptation of David Wojnarowicz’s Seven Miles A Second, and that’s about it.

Which isn’t a bad thing to be known for by any means — quite the reverse — but for whatever reason, subsequent and occasional works such as Post York and Aaron And Ahmed didn’t rock the comics community to its collective core in the same fashion. Which is a damn shame, because they’re both outstanding books that deserve to be just as widely known, studied…