9/12/12

BATMAN #0—The usual suspects return for this pre-Year One tale and it’s of course beautifully drawn and the characterization is bull’s-eye pitch-perfect, as ever. The back-up is even stronger than usual, a real engaging seven pages dropping in on all three Robins-to-be and young Miss Barbara Gordon immediately before her dad turns on the signal for the first time. Tynion does a fine job juggling all four characters and giving them scenes that feel fully formed in a way that actually almost shows up the headlining crew. Not a knock, but that back-up is a complete story that cuts back and forth between four characters and gives us a beginning, middle, and end. The main feature has shades of Nolan throughout, opens up with a Red Hood Gang robbery, which of course, since everyone in the world knows who’s coming back next issue, we’re all primed for Snyder to drop some kind of deft retcon tweak that will pay off to tremendous effect next month. This doesn’t happen, at least in this issue, as far as I can tell, but then we get Bruce and Alfred eschewing the manor and holed up in the tower, more Nolan, before the only real meat of the story, the tension of Bruce and Gordon up on the roof with a ticking batarang, timed to return in under four minutes and blow Bruce’s cover before he ever even puts on the cowl. Gordon certainly already does seem suspicious, his taciticity an interesting potential retcon, given that Snyder all but had Gordon calling Dick Grayson by his first name while wearing the cowl over back in THE BLACK MIRROR and here it feels like he’s establishing that Gordon always knew, almost even before Bruce did. But then that’s it. A cliffhanger, the Red Hood’s coming for Bruce and we’re To Be Continued . . . next year. That makes the whole thing seem a bit slight. It’s all very well done, but at only two pages less than the standard length, this feels like much much less of an experience than, say #1, which was a revelation. The problem is these boys have set the bar very high for themselves. Bring on the Clown Prince of Death.

BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN AND ROBIN #0—Oh man, nothing else even comes close this week. As consistently talented as the boys over on the other book are, Tomasi/Gleason/Gray drop in with this portrait of the martial artist as a young man, and manage to completely annihilate every other book this week. In a scant twenty pages, we rush through a Damian Wayne birthday montage, opening with skydiving Man-Bat destruction before flashing back to his baptism in nursemaid blood a few minutes after being born, then jumping to maybe his fourth birthday, when he learns that he’s got to defeat his mother in single combat before she’ll tell him who his father is. This is a serious and wonderful bit of almost retcon characterization to just slip in here at this point and Tomasi artfully weaves new moments through the years in with references to Morrison’s run, which of course I’m like target-demographic-zero for that, Talia’s got old Otto Netz on the line, threatening an off-with-his-head if he doesn’t get the meta-bomb together before we race through a bunch of birthdays that inevitably end in defeat for our boy assassin protagonist until we finally, perfectly, end up with Damian holding the sword up to his dad’s throat at the London pop-art exhibit that we first saw on the last page of Morrison’s second issue waaaaaaaay back in BATMAN #656. But I love how this deepens what we know about Damian, from pretty much as early as he could remember, he’s been goaded to excel at combat on all levels, driven by his mother dangling the ultimate carrot in front of him, the answer to the question Who is my father? It goes a long way toward explaining why he was such a terrible insufferable asshole when he first showed up and broadens the breadth of his journey from then until now. They squeeze so many iconic moments into this one, that opening double-page spread, the aforementioned baptism by nursemaid-blood, Damian in the cowl at the age of four, really every bit of aerial Man-Bat combat, that panel of the boy and his mother screaming at each other before engaging in the last year of birthday combat, all the way through to that last page that, by God, might even trump what Kubert managed way back when. Before this issue, Damian Wayne was already one of the most nuanced and compelling individuals in not only mainstream comics but just period, and this issue only serves to enhance his depth of his character. Exemplary work, all around.

FRANKENSTEIN, AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E #0—This wasn’t as terribly compelling as Kindt’s first three issues but still doesn’t disappoint, nothing more or less than the not-so-secret origin of Frankenstein, how he met his maker and what not. This issue suffers, I guess, from the character not being an original creation. As beautiful and spot-on as the art provided by Ponticelli/Faucher/Villarrubia is, one still can’t escape the sensation that we’ve seen all of this before.

COMEDIAN #3—We slow down quite a bit here, not quite as crushing as the previous two installments. The entire issue is Eddie in Hawaii on the phone to Bobby delivering exposition as to his role in the Watts riots. The chief of police called all the black folks monkeys, so the Comedian threw some shit in his face. Also, there was clever call-and-response wordplay throughout, as is Azzarello’s wont. A bit underwhelming, this, though of course Jones’s pictures are pretty.

CHEW #28—These prologues just get more and more batshit, don’t they? I love that Poyo’s just a regular member of the supporting cast now, that’s certainly the right call. It’s hard not to dig on a doped-up Tony Chu anthropomorphizing the cast (I assumed the NEXT ISSUE: page on the back of SPECIAL AGENT POYO was a joke). I’m still adjusting to reading this in singles every six to eight weeks apart versus gorging on trades, but it’s always great fun, just a little bit less at a time than I prefer. Exploding cattle. Naturally.

THE ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM #2—More five-star greatness from Waid/Samnee. This is just good fun. We have delightful escalation in the form of aerial on-plane combat with unattached rocketpack, as well as the image of all the creatures from Monster Island potentially running amok through New York with rockets. Chris Samnee and Jordan Bellaire’s pages are glorious and Waid’s script remains drum-tight, as ever. This couldn’t be better. If you ever thrilled to the airborne derring-do of Cliff Secord, then this is the book for you.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #8—Mmm, I think I liked it better swashbuckling on the high seas or ransacking port cities before leaping off the pier just barely in the nick of time before being cut down by the city watch. This trudging across Cimmeria is kind of a drag. As is more overwrought angst over Conan & Belit’s relationship. It was working for me in the last arc, but now we’ve been there and done that. Also, while I usually dig Vasilis Lolos and I like how they kept in the family and yes he can draw wolves so well, his draftsmanship simply is not up to the ridiculously high bar established for this title by Cloonan and Harren. This certainly isn’t a bad comic book, but it’s a bit of a dip on what we’ve seen thus far.

THE MASSIVE #4—Been listening to a gang of Baader Meinhoff to get ready for MorrisonCon, so it was a bit odd for me to roll up on Mogadishu, here. This one’s a bit more of a slow burn than the first three. Still some interesting character work. Donaldson is, I guess, out and Garry Brown is in, possibly a slight improvement, the facial expressions aren’t as tightly rendered and nuanced but the body language is a bit less stiff and more natural. And the wide shots are still incredible, that bird’s-eye view of Somalia is ridiculous. This book remains an interesting slow build, but it’s starting to feel like it needs to move a bit faster. I need to be quite a bit more invested than I am right now by the time we make it to #10, say. Maybe Anatartica has all the answers.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #6—We completely bail out on the ridiculous ensemble, hanging on to only Wernher for half of the issue as a supporting tyrant keeping poor Helmut Göttrup under his thumb before the guy escapes into the clutches of the Russians. But that’s only the beginning. We’re seriously adding Gagarin and fucking Laika to the cast? You read over the nine character descriptions on what used to be the only THE CAST page and tell me that’s not frothing-at-the-mouth eye-popping lunatic enough for you. This book is wonderful. Delicious madness. I’m horrified to report that I suspect they’re still really only getting started, the maniac machine hasn’t even started spinning up all the way, as of yet.

AVENGERS VS X-MEN #11—Shenanigans! Young Master Summers goes too far. SPOILERS. SPOILERS! Bendis/Coipel/Morales/Martin all show up here with A-game material that is light years better than HOUSE OF M and consists of pretty much everybody dogpiling on Cyclops. In the space of a scant nine pages, Scotty burns Magneto to a crisp, performs whatever power-suck ritual is necessary to soak up Emma’s half of the Phoenix, stone-cold murders Professor X so hard the dude doesn’t even have any pupils at all to speak of, I mean there might as well be X’s in his eyes, and then like disintegrates Wolverine. While I’m sure probably only one of those will actually take, it’s Great Big Event Fun to see the madness unfold. Now! If they don’t kill Cyclops next month and really try to rehabilitate him, it’s definitely the uphill battle of the 21st century.  Unfortunately, at $4 a pop twice a month, I’m probably not going to be along for the ride. Unless he shows up over in Hickman’s AVENGERS, I suppose.

THE NEW AVENGERS #30—This was some pretty meh filler, particularly compared to last month. Some Bible-quoting Purifiers try to hijack Emma from Luke Cage, DD, Mockingbird, and bashful Benjamin J. Grimm. Then, Luke Cage decides to quit on the last three pages, bringing this long-simmering plot to as tame and quiet a resolution as possible amidst all the wonderful Deodato explodo. Bendis clocking out, suckahs, End Times a’coming!

FANTASTIC FOUR #610—Wow. So, instead of putting the toys back in the box, now all of a sudden Hickman is busting loose. A.I.M. buys an island? Achieves sovereign-nation status and selects Reed as their ambassador? This kind of set-up worked out pretty well over with Sue and Atlantis a couple years back, remember. Young Ryan Stegman continues to blow the doors off here in the home-stretch, is rocking kind of a Jim Lee style with the cartoonistic stylization cranked up just a little bit in the direction of Ed McGuiness. Really solid and confident work out of the gate for a guy I hadn’t heard of two months ago. And of course the Wizard’s got to start in with Bentley, that isn’t a shotgun that Hickman’s going to be leaving up on the wall. This is nothing less than more of the greatness we’ve come to expect. Can’t believe we only get three more. Stiff upper lip.