Sunday, January 9, 2011

1/05/11

What an excellent week of reading. I meant to comment in the past two weeks that basically every huge writer showed up (and while I’m always happy to see him, I don’t count Gaiman in a statement like that, because he’s put out, what, something less than a couple dozen singles in the past decade+. But everybody else was there). Did you notice? Week before Christmas, we got offerings from Hickman FF, two shots of Fraction, Brubaker, Millar (not like my favorite or anything, but his crossover success makes him a part of any conversation involving Big Name Writers at this point, I’d say), some new blood with Snyder, yet another hit of Morrison Batman, and even the Wizard of Northampton taking a rare bow on the rack. We were really only missing Bendis, Johns, and Ellis and look who showed up for the last week of the year. More Hickman, Millar, a double-shot of Brubaker, another one of Johns, Bendis, Ellis in his penultimate (announced) work-for-hire gig, Levitz, and that Paul Cornell, who’s been doing it for me lately.

ANYwho. That was a hell of a curtain call for 2010. When I picked up this week’s books, there wasn’t anything I was really just pumped to hit. Except maybe SUPERBOY. But, you know? The only one of those big boys who showed up was a single Bendis and Johns co-writing BRIGHTEST DAY. So, I settled in for a more mellow night of reading. Only ten Lone Stars tonight, Johnny! Was still pretty knocked out by what I got.


SUPERBOY #3—This is the best new monthly that I’ve hit lately. Lemire’s work here and on that ATOM back-up inspired me to check out his much-lauded ESSEX trilogy, just jammed it these past couple of nights and, friends, I am here to tell you, believe the hype. It is stunning. Like, I had to give the book a long and meaningful hug when I was done. And I wasn’t kidding, either, just grateful. Most highly recommended. As for this title, yeah, he’s making everything sing, I’m really much more invested in the adventures of Connor Kent in Smallville than I ever thought possible. Jamie Grant continues to make you weep with the glory of it all, a hell of a sunrise on page 2. Pier Gallo’s lines do suffer just a bit this month from slight fatigue, not that strange for the third issue of a monthly, you can hear the deadlines rushing up, but the figurework and facial expressions are still excellent. And he manages to work this weirdo in. A head injury does not seem to have threatened Jeff's quest. This SUPERBOY is a fractured narrative that delivers.

WEIRD WORLDS #1—I am a sucker for anthologies, and this one delivers better than most. Jerry Ordway shows up to deliver some of the best work of his that I’ve ever had the privilege of laying eyes upon, and on a fraggin’ Lobo story, no less. A Kevin Van Hook script. Maybe he helped out on those Escapist anthologies Dark Horse used to want $9 for? The other two stories are by writer/artists, neither of whose scripts I’ve run across, if these aren’t their writing debuts. Aaron Lopresti reveals a love of the Silver Age with his origin of Garbageman and Kevin Maguire proves as economical with his words as his lines, giving us just a hint of what kind of a character his alien Tanga might be. Two 9-pg stories and a 10er. A single ad for BATMAN & ROBIN somewhere in there. And that is all. I’ll keep paying $3.99 for this one, but aren’t they rolling it back across the board? A steal at $3, to be certain, but easily worth the extra buck!

BRIGHTEST DAY #17—The problem with having Ivan Reis as one of three or four revolving art teams on your book is you get to a double-page splash and it’s pretty much five-star hyper-detail brilliance and then you turn the page and get on back to perfectly serviceable and even excellent work that is still unfortunately not even close to what’s just overloaded your retinas. Is Qward now like the go-to spot in the DCU when there’s just nowhere else to send your characters? It seems like almost every time a particular narrative starts to run out of gas, it’s off to the anti-matter universe! Maybe not. I’m not caring too much about the Hawks, but the Deadman plot remains pretty interesting, good hook at the end, here. Definitely on board with nine more of these.

ADVENTURE COMICS #522—And back down to $2.99. Beautiful. This one goes right ahead and delivers for everyone who was pumped about the identity of the new Green Lantern of Sector 2814. And Jiminez is doing a Legion Academy book next month?!?!? I can’t believe they found a way to sell me a third Legion book, but them’s the magic words. Paul Levitz is maybe sending all these scripts over the bridge from Valhalla? He deserves it.

HOUSE OF MYSTERY #33—Holy shit, Sturges did it again. I need to go back and count, I feel like he’s almost batting .500 for the entire series on the story-within-a-story not only trumping whatever’s going on in the main frame, but being better than all the individual stories that have come before. And I always think he’s not going to be able to do better, but then the next month or two, he does it again. “Great Artists Steal,” though, man, is going to have to maintain the throne for more than a little while, now. It’s all still riveting with Fig and what’s left of her merry band, of course.

GENERATION HOPE #3—Well, last month didn’t blow me away, but they cranked it up enough this month to carry me right on along. Gillen’s doing a fine job of letting us get to know these kids without jamming characterization down our throats. Espin, like Gallo back on SUPERBOY, dips just a little bit this month, but I bet he’ll get the flow back. With Gillen phasing out Fraction over on UNCANNY, this is probably not one to pass up, if you’re a fence-straddler on the current crop of mutant madness.

X-FACTOR #213—All the Vegas stuff and Rictor/Rahne stuff basically gets put to bed, but oh noes! Pip the Troll is a snake in the grass, a spy in our midst. Who woulda thunk it? The best news is that the recap at least opens with a gag, so maybe PAD will bring back the hilarity we’ve come to expect, nay, demand from that august inaugural page.

****

BEST OF WEEK: AVENGERS: PRIME#5—I’ve been saying it all along, but I’ll scream it so all the nine worlds can hear me now that the story’s over. This was not only one of the better written and certainly most lavishly illustrated arcs since Bendis took over the franchise seven years ago, it’s a better event book than anything that he (or, yeah, Marvel period) has put out in recent memory. Alan Davis, Mark Farmer, and Javier Rodriguez absolutely take us to church, there appears to be no limit to the amount of stunning vistas and heartstopping slugfests they’re capable of conjuring before our very eyes. And Bendis just nails it. The thing about his other runs like this (HOUSE OF M, SECRET INVASION, to a lesser extent SECRET WAR) is that the concept is always sound and he always comes out of the gate blasting. But then at some point, the train runs off the track. Never more so than SECRET INVASION, that’s a textbook example of how you set up a first issue without any bullshit, just trapdoor, trapdoor, trapdoor, cliffhanger. Sputtering out into the death of a founding Avenger in #8, related in expository captions on top of the action taking place.

But not here, friends. Here, Bendis not only pulls off a perfect-10 landing but mends in truly elegant fashion the rifts first torn asunder five years ago by Joey Q and Mark Millar. Remember how that CAP/IRON MAN: CONFESSION one-shot almost singlehandedly redeemed the entire CIVIL WAR malarkey, tied it up in a little bow and made you see the whole thing in a new light and almost believe that it lived up to its promise? Well, this series does that with at least the past five years of Bendis AVENGERS. Not that it was ever terrible comics, I enjoyed the run as much or more than most and only bailed out on the last year of NA when they jacked up the price, but this series closes the circle, delineates an ending to that first cycle of Bendis AVENGERS stories and retroactively whets our collective appetite for the across-the-board goodness the franchise has been giving us for the past eight months now. Well played, all.

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