2/27/13

BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN INCORPORATED #8 — Like most folks, I hated Damian’s guts the second I saw him there on the last page of Morrison’s first issue. Andy Kubert did a really fine job making you detest him right away with only that single shot, just his body language. This negative impression dramatically increased with successive issues. The first time he kind of made me chuckle was when he tried to kill Tim in the Batcave. And this is nothing against young Master Drake, it was just the sheer psychosis of the action, Damian’s commitment to his own greatness and simultaneous obliviousness to his current situation really appealed to me. Admit it. There’s something immediately likeable about the notion of Batman’s son trying to straight-up for real murder Robin the very first chance he catches the guy alone in the cave.

#666 will forever be close to my heart because it came out the day before we went to Comic-Con ’07 and I was an enormous fan of the way that rather than finish out the third part of an in-progress arc, Morrison flash-forwarded into a future in which Damian wore the cowl, had a cat named Alfred, and could barely stay ahead of Commissioner Barbara Gordon, who hated his guts for being responsible for the death of Batman, though there was immediately doubt about whether it was Bruce or Dick in the cowl that night. And I brought the issue along with me just so I could keep reading it over and over, even though of course I had stacks and stacks of business to get signed by professionals who had scheduled signings, but I was such a newb, I didn’t realize that just because Morrison didn’t have a specified session advertised on the website didn’t mean he wouldn’t be signing autographs at the DC booth just any old time, and so it turned out that #666 was the only issue of the massive amount of his catalogue that I had in my possession when I finally got to meet him and get charged up, and so then there was that.

And then I never wanted Bruce to come back. When Dick & Damian took over, it was the most dynamic thing to happen in years. The book was fun again, in a way that I didn’t realize that it still had the potential for or that I needed it to be. It was madcap. The Boy Wonder openly mocking his supposed mentor and counting down the days until he took up the mantle while barely sparing the time to condescend to “Pennyworth,” with us knowing that he’s going to be directly responsible for the death of (probably this) Batman and then name his only familiar after the butler, the first name that he will not at this time utter, just such a dense and terribly poignant journey all tucked up in there. It only lasted a little more than two years but it felt like an era. I was so sorry when it had to end. And Bruce Wayne is maybe my favorite character ever. To such an extent, though, see, that I almost didn’t even need him, he was so resonant that just his legacy was more than enough. Or the best possible thing, even.

Enter Peter Tomasi. He and cohorts Patrick Gleason and Mick Gray did the unthinkable and actually expanded upon Damian’s character in ways that not only complemented what had come before but enhanced it in heretofore unimagined directions. “Born To Kill,” the initial arc of the current volume, is a tour de force story of a father and son battling to overcome the programming and trauma wrought upon them by a cruel and capricious world while trying to accept and love and change one another for what each truly believes to be the best. And then that annual. One of the best done-in-ones I can remember hitting, every beat perfectly placed. And #17. Gah. Talking about this is too hard. Let’s just look at the issue.

The first page, airborne Damian POV on the way in to save the day, is a perfect thing. Four horizontal panels stacked on top of one another provide a cinematic widescreen sensation and perfectly even pacing with which to begin. That first bit of dialogue mirrors the utterance of his killer clone at the moment of death, the trademark “*TT*” followed up by the line that just cuts you up when you go back through knowing exactly what’s coming, “WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITHOUT ME, GRAYSON?” We’ll know soon enough. Also, you’ve right out of the gate got to be paying all kinds of attention, Burnham’s already packing it in there, on this last panel you can see the kid right behind Gordon at the top of the panel cocking back the bat, about to just open up the back of Nightwing’s head before we do the page turn and see that Damian’s knocked him head-over-heels airborne, suspended there right in between the line of sight between Dick and Damian. 

And then you could spend an hour just breaking down Burnham’s choices for panel layout and composition on Page Five. The askew interlocking situation he’s got going there combined with the varied camera angles and consistently depicting the edges of Batman’s body straining off-panel, all of that combines to do a fantastic subliminal job recreating the claustrophobic deathtrap of the world’s greatest detective locked in a safe at the bottom of a swimming pool, all of this escalating tension only partially released by that single bubble floating up the final seventh vertical panel, but of course it really just makes everything much tenser because it highlights what we already know: time’s expiring, Talia’s already stated that she’s got this all calculated to the last micro-second so that once he does in fact break out of there (which we all know he must and will), it will be Too Late.

Jason Masters does a fine job with the thankless task of trying to fill in on the Red Robin scene on this of all issues. It’s not Burnham, but it’s close, barely jarring, really, those askew layouts were clearly made with an eye on keeping the entire issue integrated. Much appreciated. And then, of course, we could watch Damian beat the shit out of a mob of hypnotized hammer-wielding children for two issues straight.

Page Twelve. This is where the tide rises, the orchestra swells. Dick & Damian’s final conversation. Everything you need is right here. Dick Grayson saying “ROBIN THE BOY WONDER, DAMIAN,” to his mentor and surrogate father’s son is a profound thing because there have never and (it’s going to take a serious serious run of writing in the years to come to overturn the) will never be two people who better understand what it means to be The Boy Wonder. To swing through that city with that man and support him and complement him in all the hundreds of ways that you must if you are to both survive the night. After all of the all of the shit that Damian shoveled on Dick while he was wearing that cowl, taking the time here to have him say that he was his favorite partner and that they were really the best, no matter what anyone thinks, man, at that point I had tears in my eyes, the little bastard was exactly right, I had been thinking the same thing all along. And then the perfectly in-character cavalier way that Dick defuses the emotional weight of the scene with bravado, only five words. With the weight of what is to come looming but yet a few, too few, pages off, those last two panels on the twelfth page hit me as hard as any piece of storytelling I can bring to mind, the payoff and sendoff to years of shifting identities and assumed legacies and heroism and earned respect and brotherhood, most of all. Those boys were brothers in every way that matters.

I’m not doing well here, this is still damaging me so badly even a full week later. But there are two more pages of the good fun, a sweet little callback to the sound-effects laced halcyon days of Adam West and Burt Ward, and really, that’s what I was trying to say before about when these guys were Batman & Robin. It wasn’t campy like that, but it had the same sense of zany Day-Glo fun. All of which comes to an end when the Damian clone makes his entrance. The momentum comes crashing to a halt in every sense right there on the top of Page Fifteen when the duo recreates their signature double-punch, which previously has always served as the resolution to an arc but here indicates the turning of the tables. There is no happy ending to be found here.

Damian never breaks character. As far as he’s come, he’s still the pampered little aristocrat calling out for his mother to put an end to this and fully expecting her to do so. And invoking his father as a battle cry.

Okay. I’m done. I’m sorry. Can’t do the last pages, any more pages, under this level of magnification. The twenty-panel page is brilliant, a tragic callback to the tiny-panel fight scene pages that Quitely and later Stewart employed to such devastating effect back on the original volume of BATMAN AND ROBIN. Burnham is really pushing himself, the material is inspiring him to new heights of greatness. That final double-page splash, the glass breaking as the panels, all very smart stuff. On the last page, Burnham pulls off the obligatory reference to the classic Aparo Batman-holding-Robin's-lifeless-body shot before ending things as low as they can go. We've come to expect the final panel of this series to actually provide a scene from the following issue, but this one is tiny tiny Burnham sequence of nothing but Batman's grief-stricken face fading to black. Next issue, our hero succumbs to darkness.

From the standpoint of page flow, it’s wonderful that that CONSTANTINE preview at the back means we get this issue almost entirely ad-free. However. It would have been really swell if the one ad that does appear did so on the opposite page rather than breaking up the story at the last possible opportunity. When the decision is to roll without advertising for 21 straight pages, it’s kind of a dick move to suddenly throw up an ad featuring Jim Lee Superman right there the page after you stab Robin to death. Even nastier, for just a split-second, I believed everything could still be all right. If anybody is ever going to fly in out of nowhere and impossibly save the day, Jim Lee Superman is your guy. Of course, this kind of thing happens with some amount of regularity, he’s actually the third Robin to go, but this feels different. I’ve never been this invested. I think I might at last know what it felt like to read AMAZING SPIDER-MAN in 1973 or X-MEN in 1980, how the sudden death of a fictional character can just gut you in ways that shouldn’t be possible.

I really loved that kid. It has been a source of great delight to follow his path these past seven years. He rose up from darkness and trained and fought as hard as he could to overcome a dire set of circumstances and chose to do right, to help people and make the world a better place. Because it was the right thing to do, but mainly, I think, because it’s exactly what his father did, and he loved his father more than anything in the world. It's surprising and staggering to what an extent his death has wrecked me, how much I’m going to miss him. And I can’t begin to fathom what this is going to do to his father is maybe the worst part of all.

Damian Wayne. May he rest in peace.

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FLASH #17 — The great big Gorilla Warfare finale! This one had to operate at a breakneck velocity simply to avoid a drop in the momentum that’s been steadily escalating since this arc began, and, surprising no one, Manapul & Buccellato deliver once again. This might be the best art of this series so far, and that’s really saying something. The two-page spread of Iris about to get trampled by the wooly mammoth then getting rescued is one of my favorite Flash bits ever, the continuity doesn’t matter, it’s just pure undiluted super-speed perfection. And of course, with all being well, Barry is left to wonder if he’s even charting the right course for himself while we readers are privy to the imminent arrival of his ultimate nemesis, a character they were smart to keep on the bench until now, as his arrival is sure to raise the stakes of this title to a heretofore unimagined extent. A year and a half in, this remains one of the most consistently rewarding titles of the New 52. Here’s to these guys hitting #50 just in time to ring in old 2016!

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #17 — Beyond wonderful to have Frank quote Morrison’s “Nothing is impossible!” This one’s definitely hurtling along to the climax of everything that Lemire’s been building up to since hopping on board. Jeromy Cox’s colors are a beautiful fit for Mikel Janin’s lines. Though I’m still not over how clean everything looks, how un-Vertigo and anti-Sienkiewicz it all is. I guess that’s the point. I’m still hanging out here, but if Lemire bails, I probably will as well.

THE UNWRITTEN #46 — Carey/Gross manage to keep the tale captivating without our protagonist yet again. Savoy and Didge have got what it takes to carry any sort of undead buddy-cop scenario that might present itself and Madame Rausch gets a level-up that will surely factor in to the landscape in the months to come. Now, we can has a superior tangential done-in-one next month, please?

THE MASSIVE #9 — The last issue of this arc ends quite a bit less explosively than it potentially might have. At least on-panel, Wood reserves the real fireworks for the closing captions in the final panel. Which some folks might call Foul on, but I’m okay with. Garry Brown and Dave Stewart continue to provide quality art for Wood’s tale of what happens when the world ends.

PROPHET #34 — Simon Roy slides back into rotation on co-plotting and art as a gang of Johns makes it to a domus, a central Prophet hub that’s channeling kind of a Hrothgar’s-mead-hall vibe, and there is a council of war and also the best naked-dude knife-fighting scene since Viggo in EASTERN PROMISES, no problem. This one moves the madness along just as well as we’ve come to expect and thank you, but the real surprise of this issue is the back-up story by Matt Sheean & Malachi Ward, whose work is so swell, they get to have the cover. In just five pages, these guys do fine work dialing us into the mindset of a doomed architect who’s been chosen to be the sacrifice to keep his city’s ecosystem going in some unexplained arrangement with a creature that lives to the east. This is a really sparse little feature, very much a horror sci-fi anthology feel, CREEPY meets 2000 A.D. I actually am unable upon further readings to identify exactly what facet of it works so well for me, they just hit the right narrative alchemy and I’m onboard to see what happens to this guy next, now that his journey is surely only beginning.

UNCANNY AVENGERS #004 — This one right here is more than worth the wait as Cassaday/Martin hand in pages that deliver plenty of crackling climactic action and big moments but never at the cost of telling the story as cleanly as possible. Remender has really elevated his already high-level game here, weaving a tale that seems to flow naturally from character motivations and the continuities of Marvel’s two biggest franchises, making this seem more like an inevitable culmination of events up until now rather than a callous attempt to bleed fanboys dry by way of simple franchise addition/collision. No mean feat. The double-shot of Havok and Wanda vs Thor followed by the text detailing what Wanda puts herself through in order to take Thor out of action is, in particular, a strong exchange. And of course those last two pages are complete and glorious batshit insanity. Can’t wait to find out if this is just the new status quo for this series or only a glimpse into the future or what. Pretty sure Cassaday will bail out after this arc, but hope he comes back for the third or fourth. A hell of a good time to be had, here.

UNCANNY X-MEN #002 — Bendis makes with more of the talky-talk and Bachalo throws down serious sequential justice page after page. Not a lot happens in this issue outside of Scott and Emma defining for them and for us where they stand and then we get some character development for these new mutants and some demon witch snark from Illyana, but Bendis has such a fine ear for dialogue and Bachalo’s pages are so gorgeous, I really didn’t mind.

FF #004 — This is almost a filler issue, in that there’s not a terrible amount of advancement in the overall narrative and you get the sense that the creators are just having fun goofing off a bit. That said, I’ll pay to watch this team finger-paint riveting mud canvasses on cave walls if that’s where their artistic impulses take them. A tiny bit of the issue is dedicated to making us question the validity of future doomsaying Uncle Johnny (which is in turn undermined with the final page revelation) before we get to the meat of the issue, Bentley-23 and the Moloids trying to sabotage a date between She-Hulk and that mainstay of the Byrne years, good old Wyatt Wingfoot. It’s not much of a plot twist to have the kids actually enhance the date rather than wreck it, but like I said, the sense of fun conveyed through the situational dialogue but most particularly the art is more than enough to carry the issue through any bits that would seem too zany or ludicrous in the hands of lesser men and women. Good clean fun here, certainly more than you’d expect in a book in which seventy-five percent of the Fantastic Four have allegedly been killed by a triumvirate of Dr. Doom, Kang, and Annihilus from an alternate timeline.

HAWKEYE #008, I KILL YOU, BRO — This book can be barreling along better than you think it’s ever been even yet and so far, despite the blistering and totally deserved levels of love and hype heaped upon it, but then Kate Bishop drops in with only three panels of glory and lays waste to all that has come before or will follow. Annie Wu’s covers are a treasure and actually manage to factor into the plot in a clever way. Glad to see this book’s principal femme fatale return, Clint is never more entertaining than when he’s fumbling over his business with that Penny. Aja & Hollingsworth, though, my God, still.

YOUNG AVENGERS #002 — Even with half of the team not along for the ride, there is still plenty to enjoy about this issue. Of course the super-clean McKelvie/Norton linework or Matthew Wilson’s perfectly chosen palette or the way Kid Loki can bop in and out of pocket dimension panels like it’s no problem in between ordering diner grub, but I’m not sure this one ever gets better than the credits page explicitly stating where we all first read the word “Manichean,” and there’s nothing wrong with that. The only way this one might have been better is if we cut away for like two pages to Kate & Noh-varr plunging through orbit post-postcoitus-SkrullAttack. Dialing into that fun couple not only would have scrambled up the flow and made these twenty pages feel a bit denser but not doing so heightens the cruelty of not returning to them after last issue’s first five pages by continuing the blackout for another full issue. Gillen knows what he’s doing, the sadist.