2/20/13

ACTION COMICS #17 — The climax that could not be contained! This was supposed to be the last issue of the Morrison/Morales/Walker run, but all the madness spilled over into #18 (which, incidentally, that’s got to be daunting for Diggle/Daniel on the follow-up run, bad enough they’ve got to follow Morrison but even worse when his finale surges up and claims their inaugural issue). And the pace is relentless, I’ve got four jump-cuts between scenes in the opening Death of the Kents montage alone, which roars right by in the first three pages. The art team does well hammering home the brutality of that Super-Doomsday on Page Seven, cranks it up to almost a Kirby level of brute strength and physicality. Loved the one-two set-up of the Legion kids being the angels that Jonathan saw take Martha away, that was beautiful. Vyndktvx’s line on the last panel of Page Ten elevates the situation into a glorious new height of madness density, implying an upper-dimensional logic that we can just barely grasp well enough to fathom how incapable we are of understanding it. Just like hypercubes. And then the callback to #0. Having the bad guy stage a simultaneous attack across all of space and time is a fine way to optimize the situation that a single team has been telling this character’s story since the reboot and has seeded elements since the beginning that are only now beginning to pay off. And yes, a teleport rifle, of course. That last page is the only thing that could have happened, the best escalation possible. This run hasn’t been the diamond-cut gemstone perfection of what we got in ALL-STAR, but it has had enough flashes of brilliance to remain compelling throughout and I’m certainly going to miss it when these boys are done telling their tale of how an upstart anti-corporate socialist grew up to be the Man of Steel we know today. Or at least until the next reboot.

BATWOMAN #17 — Wowdamn. This issue is nothing less than the climax of everything that’s been going on since #1 and just when it can’t get any crazier, there’s the epilogue that hearkens all the way back to Kate’s first-ever arc that Williams crushed with Rucka a very few years ago back when DETECTIVE COMICS had three digits. Williams/Stewart pull no punches, every double-page layout is, as ever, a masterpiece of composition and dynamics, but owing to the climactic situation we have going here, this issue has a few more big moments packed in than we’re used to getting in a typical twenty-page hit. Just that opening shot of the tear in the fabric of reality alone, man. Dave Stewart is a beast. And Williams continues to choreograph the most exhilarating fight scenes coupled with the most jaw-dropping draftsmanship on the rack today. Beautiful beautiful work. I’m just afraid that he’s about to bail out on interiors, he said it was happening sometime relatively soon back in September and this would certainly be a high point from which to make his exit. That last moment between Kate and Mags is one for the ages.

WONDER WOMAN #17 — The neo-Greek family dynamic squabbling continues and we get quotes from GHOSTBUSTERS and EPISODE IV on successive pages. Tony Akins/Dan Green (with a little help from Amilcar Pinna) turn in their best looking issue yet, abetted by Matthew Wilson in the thankless task of alternating issues with Cliff Chiang. This was a more satisfying single than usual, fine work because Orion barely did anything, but as ever, I wanted the next issue as soon as I made it to the last page. Mission accomplished, purveyors of serial entertainment.

GREEN LANTERN #17 — Oh my goodness. Eagle-eyed readers will note that I bailed out on Johns’s run almost a year ago when he brought Black Hand back and put Carol back in the Star Sapphire suit and I realized I didn’t care about those things the first time they happened so why would I want to sit through them again? Cut to now, Johns is finally leaving after all of these years, and I just couldn’t stay on the sidelines to see how he was going to bring it all down. At first, I was just going to drop back in and make sense of what was going on as best I could, but when this Wednesday rolled around, I simply couldn’t do it, so God help me, I jammed every single page I had missed #s 8-12, the annual, and then #13-16. A lot of gorgeous Mahnke/Alamy pages with a special guest annual hit from the Right & Left Side of the comic book industry, Misters Ethan Van Sciver & Pete Woods. The big memorable moments, though, were remarkably thin for a year’s worth of stories. Everything kept chugging along and there were certainly cliffhangers, but nothing that particularly messed me up. Johns does immediately crank things up with this arc, though, taking us back to all those ur-shenanigans Krona was getting up to ten billion years ago on Oa. And in a very cool move, editorial recruited Phil Jimenez to pencil this prologue over Mahnke’s layouts to give the pages that magic Perez feeling. It’s kind of stunning that Johns keeps Sinestro and his beloved Hal benched for all but the final page of this issue and that Jordan doesn’t even get a line of dialogue, but everything moved along well enough and I remain curious to see how things are going to finish up.

VIBE #1 — This one got by me on Wednesday but when I realized I’d missed it, I had to head back in to check out what old Pete Woods and his writers had in store for a fellow who, let’s just say, does not top the majority of lists of great Justice League characters from the eighties. As further illustrated by a couple of recent DC Nation shorts, yeesh, I headed into this first issue a devout skeptic. But the crew won me over almost immediately. The art is top-notch and the story is engaging, dialing the reader right into the situation and banishing all thoughts of breakin’, radical though it may be. Linking his not-so-secret origin to Darkseid’s first incursion into Earthspace does a nice job taking advantage of the rebooted New 52 continuity and gives this character a weight and importance that was sorely lacking in the previous iteration.

FABLES #126 — It really is great to have this one back burning at full steam. I remain an enormous fan of the conceit of having Future Ambrose provide narration. Is that Blue Fairy sporting a pretty serious Mary Poppins vibe, a well? The encounter between Reynard and Gepetto is worth the cover price alone. And I have to say, as grim as Karen Berger “resigning” seemed for the fate of Vertigo 2013, that double-page spread has them sitting pretty at least in the short-term: new series from the rotting dynamic duo of Lemire/Snyder, FABLES and THE UNWRITTEN crossing over, the quite-possibly-in-no-way-awaited return of TIMEWARP, and Gaiman and Williams falling back into SANDMAN, pretty strong titles, all around.

HAPPY #4 — And this bloody fucking mess comes to the only possible conclusion. Well done, all around, these pages are as meticulously rendered as anything we’ve thus far seen from the hyper-detailed Darick Robertson and Morrison’s script managed to actually get me a little bit choked up at the end there, despite its quasi-Ennis bluster. Those twisted fucksacks always have a bit of beating heart buried deep down inside.

SAGA #10 — Oh, BKV just cannot resist those clever little meta first-page openings. Don’t worry, dude. Everyone thinks your new book is the greatest thing since the first STAR WARS, we’re all going to keep reading. This issue is another little slice of wonderful with all kinds of collateral damage, great and small, that will no doubt engender howls of remorse from the far reaches of galaxy. Vaughan does not care! And possibly just sat through this last season of DOWNTON ABBEY, is suddenly angling for a shot at the Robert Kirkman/George R.R. Martin title, creators who will straight up kill characters just because they’re your favorites. How many more issues before either Marko or Alana eat it? If they both make it to the last page of #25, it will be a stunning thing.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #13 — I tell you what, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even flinch, I grin when I see a name that I don’t recognize on the cover of this series. As a long-time fan of Wood and Cloonan’s collaborative efforts, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the first issue of this series and was quite disappointed to see the talented Miss Cloonan bail out after only three issues (though #7 was a welcome but fleeting return, I cannot cannot cannot wait for her FABULOUS KILLJOYS pages, at long last, make some noise). Then came James Harren, Vasilis Lolos, and Declan Shalvey, all of whom completely won me over. I’m always sorry to see each of them leave in turn but am a fan of the next person in the chute! This Mirko Colak fellow has a style that’s much more photo-realistic than the more stylized business we’ve been seeing lately. It’s interesting to contrast Dave Stewart’s choices with what he’s been using thus far, as he goes with a much lusher palette here. I know purists who keep complaining that Wood’s version here is not “their” Conan, or Howard’s for that matter, there’s not enough emphasis on plot-based momentum or fantastic sorcery and far too much character work. And maybe they’re right. But I haven’t read a dozen REH Conan novels, I say not as a point of pride, but simply to point that taken on their own merit, without a preconception or a sense of being terribly beheld to an existing canon, I’m really enjoying these stories of a young man coming into his own, in the days before he was feared throughout the land and known only by his first name and title.

DAREDEVIL #023 — All right, I was definitely spending those first three pages wondering why the hell we were back at the secret origin, as good as the Samnee POV looked, but there turned out to be a payoff. I’m with Matt, the Chrysler Building is just the best.  It’s Waid, though, buddy! Mark Waid is drawing the noose around your neck. But, oh man. Perfectly crafted terrible situation at the end, there. Gut-punch. I’m really loving Waid’s lighter more upbeat antidote to the depressing twenty-five-year run, yeah.

AVENGERS #6 — This is pretty damn incredible business right here, but it is only devastating for readers of a certain age. In 1986, I was just getting my bearings in the Marvel Universe, nine years old and hadn’t yet dared to plunge into the convoluted soap-operatic madness of Claremont’s UNCANNY X-MEN or all of that trouble that Peter Parker was having figuring out whoever was really behind that Hobgoblin mask. All of the main titles were in their mid to late 200s, a few verging on that #300 milestone. It was the 25th anniversary of the first issue of Lee/Kirby’s FANTASTIC FOUR, the beginning of the Marvel universe, and editor-in-chief Jim Shooter decided to celebrate by publishing a New Universe, a series of eight loosely interconnected titles telling the story of “the world outside your window.” The conceit was that there was a single inciting incident, a White Event, this flash in the sky that took place on July 22, 1986. Before that moment, this world was identical to ours, Reagan was president, Transformers and G.I. Joe were all the rage in the toy and animated series departments, Oliver North was getting ready to jump under the bus over the whole Iran/Contra scandal, etc. But the central appeal to a young reader like myself, who hadn’t been around in the sixties when all these other titles got cracking, was that here was a chance to jump on board with a whole new run of #1s that were for me. And I loved them. PSI-FORCE was my favorite, but I was also a huge fan of Gruenwald/Ryan’s D.P.7, Shooter/JRJr over on STAR BRAND, a new spin on Iron Man called SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS, and NIGHTMASK. The line eventually compressed and then finally folded, but it those titles have always had a place in my heart. Making it to the final page of this issue and finding nothing less than a straight homage to an ad that I first laid eyes upon 27 years ago was an incredible moment. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

BEST OF WEEK: LOCKE & KEY – OMEGA #3 — And things go from worse to pretty much catastrophic right there in that first scene. After teasing us for these first two issues (or, one could argue, the entirety of Volume 5), Dark Bode finally makes his move and has Nina, Duncan, and Tyler completely out of commission by issue’s end. Of course, this series being what it is, this is interspersed with several moments of stroooong character work, made all the more poignant given the fact that at this point, every single conversation and interaction could be the last words these people will ever say to one another. I definitely had that feeling with Tyler and Uncle Dunk, but it’s all but a certainty from the way Rodriguez zooms in on that last shot of Tyler and Jordan’s hands unclasping as they part. Terrible terrible heartbreaking business. And, of course, the CARRIE moment. Joe Hill, bless his master craftsman heart, has everything perfectly poised on the precipice of absolute calamity, several principals taken out and all the kids heading down to be slaughtered at the cave rave as the Omega key is finally at long last turned. I can’t bear to wait another one or two months for #4 but I never want this to end. Incomparable work.