12/5/12

ACTION COMICS #15—We’re heading into the homestretch of Morrison’s run and he’s pulling it all together, this is probably the best issue yet. Certainly the most mind-bending. Here, we have not only the secret origin of Mxyzyptlk and Clark’s landlady, Mrs. Nyxly, a princess from the 5th dimension, but also their nemesis, a fellow called Vyndktvx who is assaulting our hero concurrently across three timelines, the past, present, and future. The princess relates this origin after coaxing her tenant to at last take a drink, and Morrison’s language is a rhapsodic wonder, polydimensional and nearly unfathomable to three-dimensional folks like us, subbing “time” out of the familiar opening in favor of “Once upon an always, further than forever and closer than the back of your head . . .” or “TRICEVERYDAY30” instead of “EVERYDAY.” This is all quintessential Morrison, ideas crackling on every page, months’ worth of stories that just get tossed out and left to the reader’s imagination to actualize into narrative. The three Sublime Weapons left over from CHROMO-CONFLICT 2 are The Nothingcoat, The Imaginator, and the Million-Pointed Multispear. That’s from a single panel on Page Thirteen. Or, I mean, Superturtle. Five pages of a Morrison-scripted Superturtle adventure might chain-react into the end of this network of dimensions. The art is also the best we’ve seen from the regular tag-team of Brad Walker/Rags Morales, their styles blend very well and there’s no jarring shift between their pages. Sholly Fisch and Chris Sprouse also turn in a back-up that expands on Mrs. Nxyly’s story as a kind of fifth-dimensional fairy tale, fine work all around. I’m going to miss this crew on this book, it’s always been the very first new comic I read every month since #1 came out sixteen months ago, but am looking forward to all the madness on their way out the door.

DETECTIVE COMICS #15—Layman/Fabok wind up their initial three-issue arc with just as much thunder as they began. Everything about this is top-shelf, Layman nails the narrative voice in the captions, the plot roars right along with plenty of twists and turns that are all engaging but perfectly plausible, and Fabok’s intricate art presents a series of striking images that conjure symphonies of motion from the imagination in the gutters. Jeromy Cox’s rich tones also deserve mention. I was really thrilled when this team was announced and they have completely knocked it out of the park thus far. Hope they feel like hanging out for quite some time, these guys over here opposite the Snyder/Capullo/Glapion madness has got to be one of the all-time best double-bills on the Batman books.

ANIMAL MAN #15—In the opening scene, we have Frankenstein’s patchwork army coming to the rescue of Animal Man, Constantine, Beast Boy, Black Orchid, and Steel from an army led by Gorilla Grodd and including M’sieu Mallah and The Brain, all of this taking place one year in the future when almost everyone else is dead. So yes, madness abounds. Green & Silver do a fine job blending their pages in with the majority of the issue drawn by Pugh, it’s so much better when there’s not a jarring shift in art style. Lovern Kindzierski’s colors throughout go a long way toward easing up this transition. Narratively, it’s a cool touch for Lemire to send this contingent to Metropolis after the green folks over in SWAMP THING took off for Gotham at the end of their last issue, nice bit of symmetry, there. It . . . really doesn’t look good for Buddy’s family in the One Year Ago section. And I guess there had to be a twist there on the identity of the Metropolis prisoner, if they managed to rescue Superman, that would pretty much be game over. Of course, we don’t know the specific identity of this individual and it’s not apparent from the last page. Luthor would be an inspired decision.

SWAMP THING #15—And Rotworld just keeps happening! This is Marco Rudy’s swan song on the title. At first, it seemed like Rudy was simply filling in on the title, but it’s turned into more of a tag-team affair between him and Paquette with both men not only holding it down but pushing each other in a way that makes both of their work stronger, both incorporating these immersive vegetation-based layouts that wind and snake across the page in a way that’s reminiscent of J.H. Williams. This issue’s probably a little more horrific than ANIMAL MAN, owing mainly to the Abby scenes, which are downright creepy, but the reveal at the end of this one is much more insane than Lemire’s juke over in the Red. Very very interested to pick back up with this one next month. Best of luck to Rudy, who will surely be a force to watch wherever he winds up next.

COMEDIAN #4—J.G. Jones manages to just barely keep his head above water and get this one out if not right on time, at least the very same week as the first #5. Very much worth the wait, this one demands full engagement from the reader and will benefit from multiple readings, particularly if you can’t place all the song lyrics right off the bat. Azzarello writes a pitch-perfect Edward Blake, taking a couple of young Vietnamese kids under his wing, giving them beer, and calling them Hearts and Minds is bang dead-on. As is all the LSD homicide. As is, more than anything, the Kennedy man-love, such a great inversion on what we have known and always expected but that still feels so true. Looking for a pretty disturbing #6 whenever it makes it out on the rack.

MINUTEMEN #5—Okay, I’m pretty dense. It wasn’t until Sally’s list this issue that I realized that the main content of this series is just straight up UNDER THE HOOD. Which certainly makes all kinds of sense. This time out, Cooke delivers by far the best issue, after the framing sequence once again establishing what a Good Guy Hollis is in terms of his affection for and protection of young Laurel Jane, we get probably the best Minutemen adventure likely to see print. Our heroes manage to rally from their collective washed-up trajectory with a little help from Bluecoat & Scout, a pair of Japanese-American vigilantes who lead them against a plot to poison New York City with a sixteen-pound ball of enriched uranium filched from Los Alamos. Darwyn Cooke on art, remember. Nothing else to say.

FASHION BEAST #4—When there’s that first shot of Le Patron at his desk from the neck down, did anyone else automatically assume that he was really Alan Moore? And wasn’t all of his dialogue much better in that Northampton baritone than it might otherwise have been? The characters are heading on down the pathways of their arcs, our transgender slutty cloakroom attendant is already too big for her immaculately designed britches and the tomboy designer is emerging as the most sympathetic protagonist, all while Le Patron looks on from his dark room. But who is Beauty and who is the Beast?

HAWKEYE, BRO #5—This series continues its run out of the gate as one of the very best things that Marvel is publishing. Fraction’s script hums along as crackly as ever and Pulido/Hollingsworth frame everything beautifully, particularly the cityscapes. All the crashing-out-a-skyscraper-window-tied-to-a-chair-Madripoor-ninja-throwing-star dictator-assassinatin’-espionage you can stand.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #699—After last issue’s monumental reveal, Slott’s got quite a bit to live up to here in terms of filling in the missing pieces, making this work as a unit of entertainment unto itself while keeping the tension jacked up at that insane level throughout. (Spoilers for this last arc, including #698, follow. If you love comics and have Internet access and still haven’t either read the issue or read about the issue, I highly recommend you go track down a copy of #698 if you still can, because it is a piece of immaculate craftwork.) The answer turns out to be, of course, don’t cut to Otto in Peter’s body at all, the only scenes from that scenario we get this week are worst-case type business in Peter’s imagination. This is a perfect call, working the old off-screen Hitchcock angle, because no matter how horrible of a thing old Otto might be getting up to, we can always imagine something worse. Of course, nothing can approach the horror of the Aunt May revelation, of which we will speak no more, ever. Poor poor Peter Parker. The stakes are raised to an almost unbearable level as we head into the final issue of this volume. I most certainly will be there the day after Christmas with my seven dollars and ninety-nine cents to see how it all goes down and just what the hell “superior” means when all is said and done. Surely it can’t be what I’m thinking.

ALL-NEW X-MEN #3—With the frequency of this one’s publication, it makes sense for Bendis to devote entire issues to factions of the crowded ensemble rather than try to keep every issue perfectly balanced. Cyclops and his crew were entirely absent from #2, so here we bail out on everyone at Logan’s school and spend all twenty pages with this new Brotherhood. Shacking up at Weapon X is definitely an interesting call. As is having the White Queen quote one David Desmond Hume, I’m not sure anybody else should be using those words. Unless they’re Scottish, maybe. And funny that the eponymous kids from the past come face to face with Cyclops and Magneto at a party in Austin of all places. We know how to do it! Three issues in and this one continues to impress, Bendis takes a deft hand with the various characterization of a couple dozen characters with nary a false note, and the art team is consistently delivering some of the very best looking pages on the rack. Strong work, all around.

DAREDEVIL: END OF DAYS #3—The cover is beyond glorious. Bendis has already come to terms with the grisly sight before them, but poor Mack looks like he’s time-traveled back to 1981 and is getting his heart broken by Frank Miller and Bullseye burying Elektra’s sai in her gut all over again. We’re settling into a bit more of a pace on the interiors here, Urich is making the rounds, visiting most of Matt’s former flames in this one. Good thing Echo didn’t have any little Matts of her own running around, Mary’s twins showing up after Elektra’s boy made it look like we’re gearing up for a Sons of Murdock-type situation. Maybe we still are. That opening double-page Sienkiewicz is absolute majesty, particularly if you’ve been carrying his groundbreaking work on ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN and LOVE & WAR around in your heart for all these years. It’s also such a gift to get those painted pages of Echo, amazing work from David Mack. Always a pleasure to get any interior pages by him. The only problem about reading this in singles is that the wait between issues is rough. The entire creative team is murdering it with every installment, from the brutal Bendis/Mack scripting to Janson/Sienkiewicz/Hollingsworth tag-teaming sequentials to either Sienkiewicz or Mack painted pages dropping in whenever they like. This series is an embarrassment of riches for fans of Daredevil.

BEST OF WEEK: AVENGERS #1—I have been rapt and waiting with bated breath ever since it was announced that Hickman was taking over this franchise. As much love as his FANTASTIC FOUR run received, it was still criminally underrated, one of the greatest monthly/bi-weekly runs it has ever been my pleasure to experience in thirty years of collecting comics. So, of course, coming from this direction at least, this next thing is burdened with all kinds of expectation before I ever lay eyes upon the first page. The only thing we knew ahead of time is that it’s about the Avengers “going bigger.” Well, that first page doesn’t disappoint in the slightest, a PREVIOUSLY IN AVENGERS tag up top that both acknowledges the slot this run will take in nearly fifty years of corporate continuity while simultaneously kind of winking across the aisle at the various continuity-heavy serial dramas that have popped up in the last decade-plus. If you heard those first words in Jeffrey Lieber’s voice when you read them, then you know what I’m talking about. But what follows is one page of The Big Bang, the debut of Hickman’s info-graphic sickness take on the roster on the next page, six panels across two pages of completely apocalyptic flashes of all the horrible shit that is going to happen, and then zeroing in on Tony Stark designing the graphic and approaching Steve Rogers with the idea that the Avengers have to get bigger. Nothing but throw-down-the-gauntlet thunder right out of the gate. Oh, wait, because we’ve got to talk about the art. Jerome Opeña has been in rotation on Remender’s UNCANNY X-FORCE since it started and just laying waste to all he surveys every chance he got, but here he really takes his game up to the next level, more than ably abetted by Dean White on colors. At first blush, I guess it’s easiest to describe the art as European widescreen. Very much incorporating the lessons learned from Hitch AUTHORITY but with all these non-traditional exotic tones seething in there and all kinds of tricked out design work. It doesn’t look American. And I mean that as a compliment. That first shot of the core sextet in the quinjet pretty much sums it up. 

This is the opposite of what you expect from the #1 mainstream Marvel 616 title in the wake of all that success that old Brother Whedon and the gang had this summer. Though it does open with the core six from the film, a very clever little hook that shows whatever first-time readers might have stumbled this way exactly the scope upon which Hickman and crew are operating. Biiiiiiillions of big-budget movie dollars worth of comic book glory right there on the page. There are origin bombs. And I love how Opeña/White pretty much toss out every steroid-enhanced over-muscled design perpetrated upon the Hulk these past fifty years and just send a Kirby brute running right at the reader across the plains of Mars. What is not to love? This book and its complementary title are going to be a big deal every time they come out, a perpetually rolling thrice-monthly event unto themselves. It’s not too late to let the rush carry you away.