10/19/11

TINY TITANS #45—Batgirls! Just in time for Halloween. So apparent that Baltazar/Franco are of our generation, once again, as clearly they had no idea what the hell Pantha was supposed to be there as the 80s were blooming into the 90s and Batmania ruled the streets. This one seemed a little denser than usual, I kept thinking it was going to be over and it opened up into another scene. As always, highly recommended, particularly if you want to read your daughter a new comic book that includes Starfire.

FEAR ITSELF #7—Seems to me like a reading order should have been published. I wasn’t sure, so just led with this because I didn’t want IRON MAN or something to spoil it for me, but then IM was total anticlimax. But let’s talk about this beast. It was billed as 64 pages of thunder, but in a pretty garbage move, the back 27 of those turn out to be four “epilogues” that are nothing more than previews of the first issues of new series that quite loosely spin out of this latest event. Which was kind of fucked, I kept reading thinking, Wait, is THIS one gonna be, no no, that’s just Aaron Hulk, well cool, is THIS gonna be, then especially the last one, I mean it was totally Fraction, but got me again, just another preview to DEFENDERS, which I was already sold on from the announcement. So, I came out the end of this comic even a bit more jaded than if it had just ended with the last page of the story that it set out to tell. What did I think about the conclusion to FEAR ITSELF? I think the art was fandamntastic. I mean, gorgeous top to bottom, everything you could hope for from Laura Martin on an event book and Immonen/Von Grawbadger raised their game to another level. To think how I was championing these folks on that Little New Avengers Book That Could not two years ago. Looked great. Storywise, I respect how Fraction dug deep and tried to come up with a threat on a scale greater than Bendis and Millar events of the past decade, but I really believed that he was going to swerve at the end and give us something different than the death that’s been, not telegraphed, but explicitly prophesied since the beginning. I mean, at this point, how hard is that supposed to hit us? We know he’ll just be back when the sequel to his movie hits. And, what’s that? Phoenix is rising again, you say? Maybe I’m just at that inevitable point that Corporate Comics are starting to get to me. I’ll always have Hickman FF. Yes? Always? Twice a month? With a spinoff, couldja do?

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #509—So, yeah. I even checked all the FI first pages to see if there were instructions provided, but reading this right after the monster was all kinds of anticlimax, though I have to say that the premise of Tony rolling with Splitlip in the aftermath and teaching him about sobriety sounds like a pretty cool dynamic. Fraction just keeps recovering all over this place, man, I tell you what, Banner or Strange is going to be hitting the sauce pretty good by #12 of DEFENDERS, just see if it doesn’t happen.

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #629—And then this beautiful thing fell out of the pile. Portacio’s art worked much better for me on this one, though it was of course a taunt to get three last pages of Braithwaite/Arreola. Gillen’s work here is Strong. Really makes a glorious actual epilogue for the main title. Folks who did not check this out got short shrift. Interested to see where this title’s headed. If anywhere, it would be something just to drop the curtain, too. But if Gillen’s back for more tales of Kid Loki, sign me up. Much much better than it had any right to be.

AVENGERS #18—Bendis gets a lot of mileage out of a pretty simple idea. Excellent, believable everyman dialogue throughout. I do wish he had reached all the way back to the wreckage of the mansion, the very first arc of the Bendis Age, that would have closed up the circle just real nicely, there, but I guess he only had twenty pages to earn my four dollahs! Good-looking work from Acuña, he’s really come a long way. Just had no idea who was going to be on the last page, there, though. Really.

UNCANNY X-MEN #544—They really have a lot of nerve putting THE FINAL ISSUE all big on the cover there when a new #1 is hitting in like three weeks. At this point in my Merry Marvel Wednesday night experience, I was feeling quite cynical about the old cyclical. But Gillen had just crushed it a minute ago and I’ve made no secret of improbably coming around on Land’s work, so I opened my heart. And we get the original first page from Kirby for our THE FINAL ISSUE first page! That is about as promising of a start as we could have been granted, True Believers. And the updated dialogue/status updates are killing. A few great little character bits sprinkled throughout here, by which this sort of endeavor lives or dies. Mostly from Bobby. That snowball made me laugh out loud. I will say, though, real shame they couldn’t just like bring Jim Lee back for that one double-page spread. Or, really, Quesada, some big boy should have handled that. As for the final scene, I can’t really convey how it would have hit me, because the ad of Cyclops and Storm hit me for the third or fourth time of the evening and just made me curse the empty room, Damn, how about a moment of SILENCE, you know? Always peddling the next damn thing.

X-FACTOR #226—Best recap page yet. This book just keeps happening, how many years has it been, now? The very definition of solid work. Digging Kirk on pencils (though, it must be periodically restated, missing him on MI-13). PAD is a long-game beast.

BUTCHER BAKER CANDLESTICKMAKER #4—Goddamn. Ennis. That is fucking brutal and heartbreaking. I mean, man. The combination of this + the end of THE BOYS #59 hemorrhaged a Facebook post out of me at 1-something in the morning, just because I was bleeding, and I bummed out this sweet girl in California I knew in elementary school who had zero Ennis experience and next to no idea what I was talking about. Because it was so sad! Powerful storytelling.

FABLES #110—That is one off-putting motherfucking ad for THE BIG BANG THEORY. I mean, I studied it. I actively hate these people. The actors or the characters, I have no idea. Which is another way of saying, Oh shit, it’s FABLES again and I have no idea what to write about. It’s still wonderful. No sign of quality dipping. It’s kind of starting to freak me out, how long I’m going to be buying this thing. I mean, can Willingham drop a “And some of them lived happily ever after . . .” from his deathbed like five minutes before kicking off? Because that’s kind of how I’m seeing it at this point. Rest in peace, big fella. You earned it.

WONDER WOMAN #2—As turns out to be the trend tonight, all three of the #2s I picked up are improvements on the first issues. And there wasn’t much room for this one. Azzarello drops another razor-sharp script not quite as in love with wordplay as he usually does but just enough to remind us who’s delivering the goods. And Cliff Chiang/Matthew Wilson are blowing the art up. Great to see the man who rescued PHONOGRAM from black & white/David Kohl doing so well for himself. And what an ending. DUN DUN DUNNNNN!

JUSTICE LEAGUE #2—Johns hits his, sorry, stride quite a bit better with this one, bringing everyone into the fold a bit and firing off more zingers than groaners in the dialogue this time out (my favorite being Batman’s superpower: “I can keep us on point.” Damn right you can, young Master Wayne). So, we’re just really going to straight up fight Darkseid for the first arc? What the hell do you have on deck for Round Two? Jim Lee is scary scary good, in top form twenty years after blowing the industry away in the first place. That Wildstorm purchase, that might have turned out to be a pretty good get for ol’ Detective Comics Comics, there.

****BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN #2—And the hits keep on coming. Snyder/Capullo/Glapion show us that the first issue was no fluke but merely harbinger of the greatness to come. Again, everything about this is perfect. I haven’t really gone looking, but I can’t imagine someone claiming to be a Batman fan and not getting their socks knocked off over this. Snyder nails the voice, both of the all-important and post-Miller obligatory Bruce Wayne narrative captions, as well as dialogue between characters, Bruce/Dick and Batman/Gordon being the standout examples. And Capullo/Glapion can’t stop turning in beautiful pages, hyperdetailed cityscape shots, dynamic action scenes, excellent acting from the characters. This one really worked for me on every level. Again.