Eye on Comics

Today on The Source, DC’s super-hero line “news” blog, the above image was posted as part of a piece teasing the upcoming series of Bruce Wayne – The Road Home one-shots. Given the fact that Batman and the new Robin are in silhouette in the foreground, I assume this is an image from Bruce Wayne – The Road Home: Batman and Robin, by writer Fabian Nicieza and artist Cliff Richards.

The giant letters being consumed in the explosion bring a question to mind: fuck who?

Did the artist slip this in as an act of rebellion? Did the writer direct him to do so? Is there actually a reason for the giant expletive in the context of the plot? Did the artist just stub his toe as he was about to work on this page? And most importantly, is an editor in on the gag, or did it slip by in the proofing process? I’ll be honest… I’m curious enough to find out next week.

Oct. 13 update: Well, the comic in question has been released, and apparently, someone at DC finally noticed the exploding expletive…

Pictured above is the opening splash page from Bruce Wayne: The Road Home: Batman and Robin #1 (two colons in the title — added punctuation value), and as is evident, some curious Gotham City signage has been removed. And it’s not just been removed from this comic. The original DC Source blog post in which the “exploding FUCK” image first appeared (link in the first paragraph) has been edited, removing the original image.

Furthermore, the comic in question was originally scheduled for an Oct. 6 release, but that changed along the way to Oct. 13 (DC’s website has been edited as well to reflect the new delivery date of The Road Home: Batman and Robin).

I can’t help but wonder if the delay stemmed from (a) delayed printing or (b) a management-ordered pulping and reprinting? Actually, a more likely scenario is that Alex Segura — to whom the now-edited DC Source blog post is credited — accidentally used an earlier, unedited image or was provided with the wrong JPEG file.

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