2/08/12

BEST OF WEEK: CONAN #1—Oh my Crom. I am wild about DEMO and have picked up just about everything that Wood and Cloonan have released separately. And Dave Stewart is easily one of the best guys working today. So my expectations for this were pretty stratospheric. But these people still managed to absolutely blow me out of the water. I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of how much I loved every page of this. The captions in Courier New, conjuring old Bob Howard’s Underwood typewriter, where it all began. The dashing breadth and adventurous scope of Cloonan’s vistas, the energy of her figures hurling themselves headlong into danger, the cocksure grin on our hero’s normally dour visage. How Stewart uses the sky to control the light and tones, as he should, there is no artificial lighting to be had, even though Bêlit manages to conjure up her own lusty sort of foggy purple iridescence, which is a perfect fit. But it took active effort after the fact to parse these elements, these creators all turn in top-flight work that fuses into a unified narrative experience that carries the reader away, immerses us back in a time before the rise of the sons of Aryas, when a Cimmerian with not that many years of battle behind him fought and stole and laughed and loved, slew and sailed and drank and sought. This is already one of the best comics on the rack. And they’re just getting started.

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #634—Once again, the recap page is worth the price of admission alone. There are some who might prefer their fantasy comics not to reference Tarantino and quote APOCALYPSE NOW back-to-back, but I am not that animal. And speaking of, the look in the hellhound’s eyes when it asks Hellstrom to be his master is perfection. Loki ripping up the narrative caption is also a fine thing. I was a fan of that page that recycled the art of Loki and Leah finding the source but adding Nightmare’s captions, it didn’t feel like a cheat, somehow. All of this just in time for Loki to recreate Mia Wallace’s fucking trippy moment in PULP FICTION, which of course gets telegraphed on the recap page. Elson’s art wasn’t quite as good this time out, but Gillen is in as fine a form as ever.

THE UNWRITTEN #34—All right, this is the first issue in which the double-down really seems to be doing a number on the art. It’s a lot closer to Perker’s work on AIR, which I was not crazy about, and not as good as Gross’s lines on the majority of this series. I’m sure that that will level out after this crazy double-arc, but the strain is starting to show. Just more than a lot going down on the story side of this thing, as ever. We’re not even to the end of the arc and get the answer that the council doesn’t really know anything and there must be much more going on than we’ve been led to believe thus far. Which makes sense, there’s no way something as winding and labyrinthine as this story about all stories could just coast into a tidy resolution. Great fun, looking forward to the next .5 in a couple of weeks.

FRANKENSTEIN, AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E. #6—Wow. In a month when some of the DC titles take a bit of a drop in quality, a natural result of settling into the no-late-shipping monthly deadline sprint rhythm, Lemire/Ponticelli/Villarrubia turn in arguably the strongest issue of this series thus far. I might have dragged the pacing out just a little bit and let that one humanid achieve sentience and run off with no follow-up until next month, spent the rest of the issue messing around in Vietnam with our cast going after Col. Quantum, but Frank sends him off to his reward in a brief but effective scene and we are on to the main show. O.M.A.C.’s boss has evolved the humanids in a nice bit of strategy to cripple S.H.A.D.E., our heroes are outnumbered, and the original Creature Commandoes are lurking on the last page! A wild pulp ride, twenty pages more than worth your three dollar bills.

GREEN LANTERN #6—Big shame to finally lose the Mahnke/Alamy streak. It’s been almost three years, maybe? Seems like there have only been maybe a couple fill-ins since Mahnke first showed up two and a half years ago to draw #43 of the previous volume on a prologue to Blackest Night. I’ve enjoyed Choi’s work in the past but it was really quite jarring in this context. I get that you can’t always find a perfect stylistic match for fill-ins, but if that’s going to be the case, the story should ideally somehow reflect that. Like, if this had been a flashback issue, then it wouldn’t have seemed so strange that Hal and Carol suddenly looked about ten years younger. The art switchup put the spotlight on the story and helped me see that I’m picking this up more out of habit than anything else after seven years, though honestly the Mahnke streak is a huge drawing point. Embattled times, Hal Jordan!

BATWOMAN #6—Man, I guess the dip was inevitable, but this was still a bit much. I haven’t checked out MADAME XANADU, so I don’t know if her covers are just like much better than her interiors, but this is not the caliber of work that I was expecting from Amy Reeder Hadley when she finally clocked in. And, I mean, it looks rushed. She’s had no small amount of lead time, hey. Anatomy should be a bit less wonkier than this. Respect for at least attempting a crazy Williams layout on pages 2 and 3 to preserve artistic continuity, but without his chops to back it up, even such a commendable effort falls a bit flat. And the story even seemed to be not quite as solid, jumping around in a way that seemed more scattershot than symphonic. I wish that they’d tag-teamed this book all artjam-style, the way they did in #0 with Williams handling the in-costume action and Hadley doing the Kate scenes, because that was a solid mesh, a very good fit. This came across as much more second-tier than it needs to if it’s going to sustain its audience for an entire arc with this set-up. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than a great deal of what’s on the rack, just not nearly as compelling as the first five issues have led me to expect from the series.

BATMAN & ROBIN #6—Tomasi/Gleason/Ward do a fantastic job upping the ante on this one. The cover alone is instantly classic, even though it pulls the classic doesn’t-happen-in-the-issue about-face. But there’s enough meat in here that I didn’t realize that until well after finishing the issue. Loved that splash of savage Bruce smashing through Morgan’s windshield. And Tomasi remembers right where to put Damian’s trademark *Tt*. This is a fine slice of serial entertainment, one that definitely has me on pins and needles for the next installment, which is no mean feat, six months in.