1/16/13

BATMAN #16 — More absolute magnificence from one of the best teams in monthly superhero comics. These guys just don’t know how to let up on the gas, I can’t imagine what’s in store for #18 and beyond. This issue treats us to the majority of Batman’s romp through Arkham and past a huge portion of his rogues’ gallery. Every aspect of this issue is as pitch-perfect as ever, the plot careens along barely leaving the reader time to fathom what’s happening before the Joker pulls the next trapdoor. The narrative voice is rock solid, with Richard Starkings on lettering subtly highlighting the difference Bruce’s lower-case journal-entry narration and Joker’s pronouncements in a madcap font. And Capullo/Glapion/Plascencia once again display why they are masters of their craft with pages that place storytelling above all else. It’s also an inspired bit of madness to get the follow-up to the main story’s cliffhanger on the following page, such a treat to have Jock on the backup. Far from outstaying its welcome, this event has roared right by, leaving the reader breathless for a conclusion that both seems about to appear far too early (how could we have already gone through the entire arc?) and looms much too distant four weeks into the future.

BATMAN AND ROBIN #16 — I wish they could have made it a bit less terribly obvious that Damian wasn’t fighting his real father. It would have made this issue much more of an emotional ride, but the fight sequences were choreographed with great precision. And of course it ended the only way that it could. Damian has come so far. Kind of sorry they decided to drop that image of him in his #666 costume for the first time chronologically in a damn ad, but am certainly chomping at the bit to get my hands on that annual, so I guess it’s doing its job. Nice tie-in on the last page to the simmering cliffhanger from Jock over on the main title. I’m getting quite worried that no one’s seen Alfred since the first part of this thing.

FRANKENSTEIN, AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E. #16 — What a perfect final issue. Matt Kindt has always done a fine job preserving the groundwork that Lemire (and, arguably, Morrison before him) laid down while adding in his own minute developments and tweaks, but he puts the gas all the way down on the floor for this last gasp, delivering both codification and celebration of everything this book has stood for, perfectly contained within a single twenty-page narrative entitled, what else, “The Monster Bomb.” You can almost encapsulate the entire run in that last panel on Page Four, Frank leaping into action with his sword drawn. The real heartbreaker in this story is Kindt’s insertion of a new character, a CIA guy whose entire five-year operation comes crashing down around his head and who would make a fantastic foil for Frank and addition to the Creature Commandos, if this issue was functioning solely as his first appearance and not the title’s swan song. The best part is that this entire adventure is just a tangent operation on the way to taking out an enormous sand snake heading for Saudi Arabia. Have we even ever heard of the Aurora Robo Kits before now? Velcoro’s “going viral” joke is just the worst. I think Frank was calling Nina the fruit of the forbidden tree, not the tree itself. An important distinction when quoting Milton. The great trick of this story is that suddenly, two-thirds of the way through, the entire thing trapdoors into The Death of Frankenstein. Why not? It’s the final issue of the book. And the complete lack of sentimentality with which this is executed is perfectly in keeping with the tone of all that’s come before. And you know, he just had The Last Talk with Nina, gave Father Time shit for The Last Time, all of that’s suddenly falling into place, not unlike the protagonist himself immediately thereafter, who just gets the single page of plummeting toward the missile before perishing in a massive suicide-vest explosion on Page Sixteen. And it’s all terribly tragic and heroic and such a shame and just how it should be until you turn the page and remember, of course, he’s been dead all this time and will live to fight another day, many more days, until the end of days. His last line to Nina could not be improved upon, perfectly in character and following the flow of the narrative while we are caught up in its momentum until that last page-turn when you realize that it’s the last time we’ll see these characters, at least in this incarnation. The fact that I’m getting so sentimental over the ending of a book about Frankenstein leading a team of black-ops monsters is a testament to the power of the creators. May they bring life to these characters once again in the days and years to come.

FASHION BEAST #5 — An interesting enough pair of encounters in the two scenes, but as soon as we are promised something more substantive, the page count slams the door. Serialization of the screenplay loses again! At least the colors were pretty. I bet that next issue is a serious bit of business.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #12 — And so this title comes to the end of its first year. I’ve found every aspect appealing. Of course the art has been dynamite, no matter who’s been throwing it down, but the real star of the show has been Brian Wood guiding a younger, less experienced barbarian through an affair with the first true love he’s ever known, doing fine work straddling the line between action, dialogue and narrative captions that are evocative of Howard’s original prose. It’s been popular to dump on this comic because Conan hasn’t been such a relentless hardass destroyer for one-hundred percent of the time, but I’ve enjoyed seeing some chinks in his armor and found them believable given the timeframe of the story. I have elected to discuss the arc of this series as a whole rather than focus on the specific issue at hand because what happens within is, while not surprising, still executed to such heartbreaking effect that I really don’t want to talk about it. They did a really good job, made me very sad.

SAGA #9 — I don’t know if Vaughan’s just striking a tone with which I’m more and more attuned or if maybe I’m just not as into the protagonist family, but I thought this issue was just about perfect. The dynamic between The Will and Gwendolyn and Lying Cat is immediate greatness. I could really hang with just a series about them, which is of course the mark of a great ensemble drama, once you start having all these wonderful mini-narratives tucked inside. Which of course, we have in spades with Slave Girl’s ability to home in on the main characters. Am a big fan of The Will quoting Kirby while getting strangled by that last member of Sextillion Loss Prevention. Really could have done without Gwendolyn invoking Marko to no one in particular not once, but twice. Maybe more acceptable if we don’t definitively know that she’s his ex-fiancé but since we do, it’s just tiresome. But I’m quibbling about the only flaws detectable in an ocean of wonderful. Fiona Staples blows it up as usual. I still don’t get the uniform adoration this title’s been getting, but it is a consistently enjoyable read and I’m looking forward to the next issue more than ever.

ALL-NEW X-MEN #6 — I greeted this issue’s arrival with some amount of trepidation, thrilled for Austin local David Marquez to receive the level-up from drawing Bendis’s ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN to this one, which, I’m not 100% but seems like the first issues were not only the top of the chart for Marvel but they outsold everything else, as well. And Marquez has a hell of an act to follow. As I’ve made no bones about below, the first arc of this title is one of the best stories set upon Graymalkin Lane in years, and the pages turned in by Immonen/von Grawbadger/Gracia are some of the most beautiful on the rack. But any concern I had felt was completely misplaced, our boy shows up and knocks it out of the park right away. Bendis is nice enough to provide him with a nightmare sequence to open things up, so that by the end of the second page, we’ve seen Cyclops & Magneto and feral Wolverine has stabbed teen Jean Grey through the neck. And it looks gorgeous! The following interaction between Jean and Kitty and Ororo is probably my favorite in this series, which has put character moments first from the get-go. The deal with teen Scott stealing Logan’s chopper is a nice inversion from the first Singer flick. Is that a LOCKE & KEY Easter egg when Scott first heads into town? Page Eleven, Panel Two, that looks more than a little bit like Scot Kavanaugh and Kinsey Locke in the parking lot, there. And, again, tremendous work from Gracia, locking down serious continuity between Marquez inking his own work and the fellas who started us off on those first five issues. Highly recommended. Such a tremendous feeling to be loving a regular X-Men title this much again. I didn’t realize how badly I still needed these stories to be great.

DAREDEVIL #22 — Waid handles the Superior Spidey cross-over with his usual deft hand at characterization, both men act and react to one another exactly the way we would expect them to. The bit about the folding bills is another great bit of real-world minutiae Waid drops in that succeeds in making the reader understand just how many everyday facets of real life we take for granted that are completely different for not just Matt, but everyone else who shares his handicap. Um. The art is really good, too. Again. I’m kind of running out of nice things to say about this book. It lives up to the hype?

BEST OF WEEK: THE NEW AVENGERS #2 — Okay, so this is my new favorite series. It’s not that much of a shock, given the talent involved, I mean, you expect these guys to completely blow the doors off when they get together, but I guess it’s just the venue? I just wasn’t expecting what has been the ancillary spinoff title, the B-team to the A-listers over in the main title, to come with this much nuclear firepower. These guys are operating at a level so far above everything else that’s happening in a monthly title, it would almost be ridiculous, but it’s being played with such a straight face that the gravity of the situation is almost unbearable. Only two issues in, this feels so much more important than just about everything that’s gone before in the 616, Galactus be damned. In this hyper-jaded age of big events neverendingly tumbleweeding into one another, summer after summer, year after year, with a spiffy new cross-company branding moniker bridging the gap in between, pulling this off should be impossible. And yet.

It takes a full two issues to even set up the drastic scope of the situation. Which I won’t belabor here. Really, everyone should just read these. The first issue is an immaculately rendered episode in Wakanda that is perfectly compelling on its own until it, without indication or advance notice of any kind, suddenly tumbles into the greatest threat that our heroes have ever faced, one that will force Earth’s mightiest heroes to make an impossible decision in secret that will forever damn them in their own eyes, if they are even successful and manage to save the world. Is genocide on a planetary scale ever an acceptable alternative? What if five guys say it is and Steve Rogers won’t bend? That kind of thinking, these seven guys working in concert holding five Infinity Gems with Xavier’s still hidden, the secret having died with him . . . my mind is reeling and we’ve barely gotten started. Highly highly recommended to one and all.