Thursday, March 17, 2011

3/16/11

TINY TITANS #38—I keep meaning to bring this one up here, but I’m not reading it with the rest of these late at night and it keeps going by the wayside. This book is gold! Of course, it really really helps if you’ve got a young kid who loves superheroes and wants a dose of Robin and Superboy sans death by Joker crowbar or heat-vision rage. We’ve been picking these up since #35 was on the rack and snagging back issues on the off weeks.

Basically, this is a riff on the Titans by way of Schultz or Watterson, not unlike those loveable scamps the Lil’ Endless. The hilarity ensues when there are knowing winks to mainstream continuity for the parents. Coolest two moments that jump immediately to mind: in the Kalibak issue (oh, I forgot the funniest part of this, they’re all enrolled at Sidekick City Elementary, where Slade Wilson is the principal and Darkseid is the lunch lady. Yes.), a boom tube opens up to transport Lil’ Barda back from Apokolips and the sound effects are CRACKLE CRACKLE SPARKLE KIRBY. That was the first issue we ever read #32 and, brother, I was sold. Second best bit is guest-written by Geoff Johns and features the return of Superboy in #25, I guess around the time he returned to the main DCU as well. He flies up and they’re like, “Connor, where you been?” and he just says, “Oh . . . I was away for a while. But now I’m back!” And that’s it! The wife, not a habitual follower of Grand Corporate Narratives or Big Events just cannot understand that the reason this is still so funny after two hundred times is that the real reason he went away is this insane thread of Didio wanting to off Dick Grayson in INFINITE CRISIS but having Johns swerve at the last minute when the threatened fan boycott became too fearsome a thing to ignore and so poor Connor had to die this gruesome death in a mini-series known for over the top takedowns, yes, still looking at you, Pantha’s arm (or was it Wildebeest’s head? Or both?), and then the left field convoluted way that Johns brought him back in the FC: LEGION mini that I still never really wrapped my brain around, I mean, he was dead and then he wasn’t, it didn’t matter if he laid there for a millennium, I think? but in the end I just shrugged it off and said welcome back, plus all this not even counting the years of mourning and Tim kissing Cassie, just the whole deal compressed into “I was away for a while. But now I’m back!” such an elegant summation. Pull up a chair at the breakfast table, kid, there is a bowl of Aqua-Ohs with your name on it.

Wow, haven’t even talked about this issue. There’s an Aquacow in it. That’s all you need to know. It is a precious thing, and you need it in your life.

FEAR ITSELF: THE BOOK OF THE SKULL—Well, any diehard who’s been hanging with Brubaker since he first took out the Red Skull in one of the better debut issues of the last decade and who was planning on giving this Big Event a miss would probably do well to at least gamble four bones on this badboy, as it turns out to pretty much be #67 of Bru’s run, the bulk of which is a flashback to some rocking Dubba Dubba Two Invaders action that apparently sets the stage for this year’s line-wide crossover. And, you know, it’s a romp. Scot Eaton turns in dynamic work that’s cranked up from what I remember of him, those American heroes are thick. I enjoyed this and found the reveal to be eyebrow-raising enough to crank up my expectations for Fraction/Immonen/Martin’s upcoming core title that much more.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #502—This creative team juggernaut just rolls right on. Pepper does the heavier lifting on the action front while Tony and Otto talk it out for the most part, though the latter is probably more compelling, just because the characterization through dialogue is so spot-on. Fraction’s really locking into the rhythms now, every beat falling just where it ought to. I bitch about $4 cover prices a lot, but when it’s this consistently good, I’ll keep showing up every month.

GENERATION HOPE #5—Team Phonogram! With Matt Wilson’s gorgeous hues even along for the ride. Would that he and McKelvie could always be aboard. The only drawback of this issue was that it really just hammered home how much I miss these guys’ initial collaboration. This was, I guess, Gillen’s first baseball issue. Not that they actually played their equivalent, a first-person shooter or something, but this was the sit-around-and-rock-some-pinball-characterization issue, mainly Hope bouncing off the elder crew in interesting ways that can’t usually happen when they’re fighting the mutant menace of the month. This book remains a strong entry in the merry Marvel tradition of new mutant titles.

X-FACTOR #217—And PAD pulls in the ever-lovin’ mighty mayor of New York City as an engaging guest star/target, and heck if old JJJ isn’t as engaging and relatable as he’s ever been. PAD dials the rabid Spider-hate way back and does his best to make us care about one of our friendly neighborhood wallcrawler’s oldest antagonists. And man, I can’t speak highly enough of the art. Gorgeous work, all around. Then we get just a hell of a double cliffhanger, made much more ominous by the reveal of next issue’s cover. Still doing everything for you that 22 pages ought to be monthly at just $2.99, folks!

MORNING GLORIES #8—So yeah, this arc definitely looks like it’s going to straight up go the L O S T route and have flashbacks about one individual character per issue, revealing information pertaining to events as they unfold. And if you think I just have a disease, tell me that isn’t Hurley at the bottom of Page 12 firing Hunter from Mr. Cluck’s (of course, we all know that Hurley was never manager, he went straight from quitting as fry cook to winning the lottery to buying the entire franchise, but this is clearly an alternate reality, anyway). Anyway, yeah, this is yet another intriguing issue, inching things along while implying a grand plan for the overarching narrative. Will Nick Spencer’s exclusive with Marvel and subsequent corporate work dilute or supercharge the intensity of his work on this title? I’m hoping the latter.

THE UNWRITTEN #23—Well, of course, it shouldn’t be strange that all kinds of madness gets thrown down in #23 of this particular title. Eminently logical and sensible reveal as to what the whale really is, along with being maybe my favorite splash of the entire series thus far. And then we even get a nice little nod to the Savage/Falk THE PRINCESS BRIDE dynamic on that last page. We are all the consumers of story. And this is a really, really good one. Because, not only is it about all of them, but in the end, it’s about us, the ones who perform the alchemy that change the words or words and pictures on a page into so much more.

BRIGHTEST DAY#22—I, ah, thought this was running four more issues after this, so was kind of freaked out that so much was going down. But looks like #24 is it. I bet it’s a pretty big damn finish, this has been the best weekly since 52, with the art even a step up. Looking forward to seeing how it all comes down.

ADVENTURE COMICS #524—No huge bombshells in this issue, just solid characterization from Paul Levitz and top-drawer draftsmanship from Phil Jiminez. Enjoyable, if not particularly flattening. I think I sequenced it wrong.

****

CASANOVA: GULA #3—Took me exactly 1:08 to make it through, though it must be said that I had an omega humdinger of an idea about five pages in that must have taken me out of commission for at least ten or twenty minutes. It is unreal how good this book is! Zephyr’s massacre is even more gorgeous than I remembered, due in no small part to the added tones, I’m sure. It is a shame how it broke down, though, with the doubled-up issues. New readers didn’t have a month off in between #12 and #13 to chew over the absolute carnage that Cass’s sister wreaks. Which is a shame, what with all the reversal that goes down the next issue, now just a few pages later. That’s basically reaching as hard as I can to say anything less than superlative about the glorious eruption that is this book.

I’ve only read #14 the one time. It was one of the best single issue hits of my life, to the point that I have locked myself out of even opening the fucking thing back up, because to do it again, to really do it right, you would have to now be blasting the mix, one song per page, get that shit all synched up right, but to get the list, right, you’d have to open the book up and go through it page by page. But I don’t want to do that, see all those pages again, until everything is just perfect. So up until now, I’ve chicken-egged myself out of the experience altogether. And, and I think I remember the business, the heavy shit, the flip twist reveal that makes one reconsider the entire GULA run in a new light. But I really really want to just grab #14 out of my longbox and rip through it. But haven’t touched the initial run since we got going over here at Marvel, found all these pretty colors. I hope I can wait.

Want to rip my jaw off over the idea of new material, at this point. If I had to go down to one title a month, this would be it.

No comments:

Post a Comment