Small week, this fifth Wednesday, but certainly not lacking for quality. I deeply loved everything I bought and managed to get out of the store for under $20. Win and win! Let’s get into it.
AVENGERS: PRIME #3 – This, right here on its own in five little issues, is more of an event and more impressive than SIEGE, or really anything like that that I’ve seen from Bendis. Davis & Farmer cannot be contained. I mean, from that first two-page splash, they own you, body and soul. We’ve got Thor getting smote, naked Tony Stark on horseback fleeing a dragon before yukking it up with Steve, all flirty in a way that somehow manages not to be homoerotic, and then our boys in hell? Killer plot, but Bendis’s dialogue remains the star of the show, just sings here sweeter than ever. Dude is really at the top of his game right now, and I’m not even reading whatever they’re calling ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN anymore. And I can’t go on enough about how great the art is. This could totally be a filler mini-series, but like I said, it’s getting it done for me better than every event we’ve seen from Marvel in the past decade. Great great work and, yeah, totally worth the $4.
CAPTAIN AMERICA #610 – Brubaker, Guice and company knock this one out of the park. I loved those first 25 issues so much, the best Cap run that I’ve ever run across, but hell if I don’t like this stuff with Bucky even better. Really glad that he got to keep the shield even after big man came back. Wonder if Brubaker’s got an exit strategy lined up, or is just plotting ahead for the next couple of years with no end in sight. Man, I do not envy the guy who has to follow this act.
ACTION COMICS #893 – Yeah, this really is too good. Cornell just nailed it, setting up android Lois as Lex’s foil, because we totally need that interplay, but it would ring just the least bit false if the real woman was actually globetrotting with her husband’s nemesis. Which actually freaked me out pretty good this time, the globetrotting. I jammed the first volume of BATMAN: BLACK & WHITE a couple of weeks ago (which I can’t recommend highly enough, amazing stories in there, top-drawer talent), but all those succinct 8-pgrs set my brain firing and I had to exorcise an idea about the weekly Monday morning pool game that Bruce and Clark always play at sunrise before clocking in as their secret identities for the start of the week, just a couple of bros blowing off steam, but on the last page, Bruce asks about Lois and Clark mentions that she’s off in Uganda working on a piece, and lo and behold, two nights after I first typed the words, we’ve got Lex and android Lois on safari in Uganda, which freaked me out pretty good. But enough about unsolicited spec fanfic, this is another solid slab of Luthor goodness. Sean Chen does excellent fill-in work. Don’t know why he’s not working more, he killed that FF: DARK REIGN series to start out Hickman’s run early last year and this is the first I’ve seen of him since. Really excellent job. Incredibly annoyed with DC for announcing it and myself for reading it, because if I’d hit that last page not knowing what was already coming for this title, think I would have just started running around the room screaming. So great to see her again, after all these years. She really is just the best friend you wish you could hang out with forever and always. Which, I guess eventually you can.
CASANOVA #3 – This pair of issues didn’t just bowl me over when they first came out, but they still make a cracking good read, especially served up side by side and in gorgeous living color. My favorite panel is probably the one when Cass goes native. Kal’laa yourself, guy! After getting flattened last month by the Chabon/Fraction backmatter, I couldn’t wait to see what my man had in the hopper this month and was pretty stunned to find an interview with Mike Doughty, late of Soul Coughing, about addiction and recovery. Fraction is an alcoholic and an addict?!? CASANOVA was conceived of and written under a state of total sobriety? It cannot be? Pretty shocking, I completely had him pegged as a put-the-kids-to-bed-then-light-up-and-jam-out-some-madness type of fella. Guess I got the personality type right, but he’s moved on. Well, good for him. Pretty compelling reading, the best on this topic I’ve seen, this side of INFINITE JEST, which reigns supreme, once and forever.
BEST OF WEEK: ATLAS #5 – I think I’d feel this way even if it wasn’t the last issue. But we’ll never know! Parker/Hardman et al have had a fantastic run on this series across almost thirty different issues worth of mini-series and truncated ongoings, but this has been my favorite arc of the entire batch. For all the mind-blowing Big Plot exploding across the pages, Parker never loses sight of the little beats that define character and are the glue that holds a team book like this together. This really is a cast of nobodies, C- and D-listers, and he does a fine job of making us care about them, as individuals and as a family. I adored the text pages. That first double-shot, especially, made total sense in the context of what was going on, and dude’s nailing the voices of his characters when he can just drop an entire scene on you without dialogue tags and you know exactly who’s talking from the cadence of their speech. Also, the text is a nice nod to this title’s pulp roots.
But, oh, those last three pages! Over the moon insanity. “May there be many before you ride with us on the steppes,” ayeGod, that line in context just completely blows the doors off of this series and makes Woo one of the most compelling characters in the entire Marvel Universe, at least from where I’m sitting. Amazing last page, perfect last panel. If we never get another page of this book, they could not have gone out on a higher note. If it ever comes back, Jeff Parker sure as hell better be the only person who writes it. But now the entire team’s off to HULK? I . . . I don’t care about HULK, I don’t want to read HULK! I must. Did it come out this week? I might have to trudge back and take a look. Plus, I hear that BRAVE & THE BOLD is amazing. Maybe not such a small week after all. But first, let us raise a glass and bow our heads and say a little prayer of thanks to Marvel Comics, Jeff Parker, Gabriel Hardman, Elizabeth Breitweiser, Ramon Rosanas, and everyone else involved in making this dream a reality. A wonderful, wonderful series that will be missed every single month.
ATLAS. It was about Jimmy Woo.
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