INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #503—The lead story is all well and good, sets up FEAR ITSELF like you’d expect, but I really really dug on that “How I Met Your Mother” with Chaykin. I bet Fraction was just freaking out, I know AMERICAN FLAGG is a really big and formative deal for him. This one’s very much worth your $4, thanks, all.
GENERATION HOPE #6—These guys seem to be doing an even better job finding their footing as we open the second arc. I’ve very much enjoyed the series thus far, but it’s apparent that Gillen is even more laser-sight locked in than ever, knows exactly where he wants to take these kids and has the right people to help get them there. With Gillen having created all of these characters but Hope from scratch and also just getting cranked up over on UNCANNY, we’ve suddenly got the potential to relive the mid-80s Claremont UNCANNY/NEW MUTANTS heyday all over again. You just need $7 a month to enjoy the ride now, as opposed to a buck twenty.
X-FACTOR #218—Gorgeous! I’ve gone on before about Emanuela Lupachinno’s work here, but this issue takes it to a new level. PAD is still the master of the long game. This has been and remains just a hell of a run on characters that nobody gave a damn about until the right people gave them life.
LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #12—The art looks pretty good. The story moves pretty well. I might still be experiencing Legion fatigue. Story still developing.
GREEN LANTERN #65—Guy and Hal rock the buddy cop vibe better than most. This was a pretty satisfying issue all on its own, no mean feat, considering I skipped the parts 2 and 3 that have happened since #64. I’m really grooving on the artistic space that Mahnke is occupying, even five different inkers couldn’t muddle up the greatness, though I’m driving myself crazy playing guess-the-inker with those shots of them in the cockpit (and, since I brought it up without meaning to, there was just no need for the homoeroticism. Bad call, there). But yeah, we get dropped off in an interesting place, making parts 5 and 6 pretty difficult to ignore. Of course, NOW I’m thinking about picking up GL CORPS after finally appreciating Gleason’s work and he’s already shipped off to Gotham.
FABLES #104—This arc continues to delight as the F-Men get thrown into hypothetical combat and Buckingham/Leialoha drop the serious Kirby thunder like it’s no big deal. And it looks like things with that big bad wolf and his dad have approached critical mass, next issue is going to be just a hell of a thing.
TINY TITANS #39—What else can you say about an issue whose central plot point is that Supergirl cons Alfred into throwing all of the red capes in the Wayne Manor laundry with all the Bat-family's costumes and everything comes out pink, so everybody's just dealing with that for the rest of the issue, plus they just slap SMALLVILLE across the face with that Pink Blur barb? Do I have anything to add? I do not, except that I hope this series never, ever gets cancelled. Or progresses, even. Maintains a rhythm more in the neighborhood of THE SIMPSONS. I mean, obviously, Balthazar & Franco are building, but I'm trying to say, I hope in 18 years, this book is still coming out monthly and all these kids are still enrolled at Sidekick Elementary and Slade is still the principal and Darkseid is still the lunch lady. There's no way that situation in which comedy is certain to ensue ever, ever gets more perfect. I feel so fortunate that this, of all possibilities, is what I am required to read to my little girl, every day and all the time.
EDITED ONE WEEK AND ABOUT A DOZEN READS LATER TO ADD: I would love to know how many kids read this and then actually, when the coast was clear, dumped a vest, some short shorts, and a bunch of red and green and yellow food coloring in the washing machine to make a Robin costume. I mean, even if it's like 1% of the readers, that's still 40-something kids.
SUPER DINOSAUR #1—This is pretty much a pitch-perfect first issue. Same especially goes for the first page. That is how you do it. I suspect that Mister Bob Kirkman has been around the block a time or two with this sequential narrative game, here. Since Derek Dynamo’s such a genius, I could maybe do with him not misusing “awesome” the way that every other English speaker seems to be doing of late (same goes for “literally” and “epic”), but he’s still a kid, so it’s a defendable decision. Jason Howard’s come a long way since that first issue of ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN and knocks these pages out. Most importantly, I believe that these guys have executed their goal, to create an exciting title full of wow and wonder that anyone of any age can get in on the ground floor with, that tickles all of those Silver Age synapses that Lee, Kirby & friends did such a wonderful job activating fifty years ago. WAIT. If FANTASTIC FOUR #1 was cover-dated June 1961, doesn’t that mean it came out right around now fifty years ago? Shouldn’t, shouldn’t something be done about that?
****
BEST OF WEEK: Well, I fear that I might have walked away from this week’s winner by not picking up the reboot of the DARK HORSE PRESENTS anthology, but I have never read CONCRETE, probably to my detriment, but that simply wasn’t a draw for me, not to mention I could not give less than a shit about 300 2: 301, and at that point, even with Adams and Corben, the $8 cover price was just a little too steep when I know that book’s going to be waiting for me at Half Price Books in just a very few weeks (that place is a treasure horde, today I found PLANETARY #1 and all three REDs in the quarter bin, absurd). Of what I read . . . I don’t know, it might be too close to call. AVENGERS and FABLES and SUPER DINOSAUR were all pretty much the same redline level of wonderful. Or really, TINY TITANS, even. Give it to Kirkman/Howard, just for pretending to be rooks.
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