3/27/13

SUPERMAN FAMILY ADVENTURES #11 — Ten months later, this book finally shows up in my Pull, so it was a real treat to read it with the little girl on Wednesday night rather than have to track it down later on in the week. This one is packed much tighter than the pace of what we’ve come to expect from this title. Baltazar & Franco clearly got the word that #12 is going to be it and absolutely hit the gas, probably even last issue, now that I think about it. There’s so much going on in the first two pages with Doomsday attached to this month’s Meanwhile . . . meteor and then the Kents’ field trip to Metropolis that we actually forgot that we’re still hanging from the first ever cliffhanger last month in the middle of some pretty insane developments. Superman and Zod versus Brainiac in a Kandor that has just been regrown to full-size right in the middle of the Fortress of Solitude, followed by a Ma Kent/Lois Lane conversation that might be the best exchange I read all week long, followed by a new twist that is simply unheard of in 75 years of mythos and makes the fact that this is the penultimate issue all the more heartbreaking. Or at least that’s what I was thinking until the last page, so wonderful and bittersweet to make it back to good old Sidekick Elementary. Not ready for this to be over. Really ever, but certainly not so soon.

BATMAN INCORPORATED #9 — And switching gears about as drastically as is possible. After all the other requiems, I was pretty sure that this was going to be the roughest one to get through and of course the first page is a pretty rough start. Dick’s reaction in flashback plunges us down to new depths of mourning even a month later, the involuntary string of negations before hunkering down next to that lifeless little body. Him just lying there really is the worst part. And so but of course we’ve got the Prime Minister bringing up Lazarus Pits four pages later. The Damian clone molting into yet another Batman is really bringing the dominant theme of Morrison’s run into devastating relief as we round the bend into the home stretch, here. Further emphasized by the head-shots of El Gaucho, Man-of-Bats & Little Raven, and the Japanese and French guys (I forget at the moment if they have their own identities besides just being the Batmen of their respective countries). And Talia quoting “Hotel California” to Jason Todd makes you feel like you’ve about seen everything. Those last three pages are note-perfect, do everything they need to do to bring us out of the period of mourning and right on into vengeance. The kid’s not dead until the computer in the Bat-Cave says so. One last moment of tenderness with Bat-Cow. I still cannot fucking believe the emotional depth and overwhelming grief that Morrison has been able to wring from one of the most humorous aspects of Baltazar/Franco’s TINY TITANS. And finally, the scream of rage that sends the bats flying. Now begins the endgame. These first two titles, LOCKE & KEY, the DC NATION animation block as we have known it, everything I love is ending.

YOUNG AVENGERS #3 — And I guess I was feeling down enough from all of that that I broke my usual company-bordered reading sequence and just barreled right in to this one because I needed a dose of the wide-eyed teen hyperadventure madness. But is there any Kate Bishop/Noh-Varr goodness to be had? Once again, no! Gillen!!! Texting does not count. We do get to log in some quality pages with Miss America, who it looks like is some sort of Superman analogue from a parallel dimension with two moms? Have I got all that right? Of course, Gillen continuing to write Loki turns out to be the major non-PHONOGRAM-reunion selling point of this book, as every utterance is pure gold. And he even manages to out-pop-culture the great BKV with the Tyrion line, pure brilliance. There’s no way I’d ever trade-wait this, but I’m already almost sure that it will make a better breathless read in full volumes, exactly the way you want to listen to a quality album all the way through, not one shiny three-minute single at a time every four weeks. And that way, you won’t have to wait at least three months for something to (hopefully) top the glory of the opening scene.

UNCANNY AVENGERS #5 — I was concerned about who would pick up the banner when Cassaday made the inevitable bail after the opening arc (very much hoping it’s a revolving door and we’ll see him back for 9-12 or some such), but of course we’re in very good hands with Olivier Coipel. We open with a fairly monumental prehistoric scene that sets the stage for an arc that inconceivably manages to ratchet up the stakes from the ridiculousness of the first four issues, but that’s it for this issue, as the rest of the pages are devoted to bouncing these characters off one another and throwing in Wasp, Wonder Man, and Sunfire for good measure, solid additions, all. Coipel always delivers strong costuming but the way he’s got Rogue in casuals really jumped out at me, shot me right back to late-eighties greatness when I first came on board, a sweet little dash of nostalgia. Of course, the only element of this issue that anyone wants to talk about (and talk about and talk about) is The Speech, Alex Summers declaring the term “mutant” a pejorative and then straight up calling it “the m-word.” Upon first reading, I certainly didn’t find it insulting or controversial at all. It’s always bothered me, the language of Xavier’s dream of a world in which “human and mutant” can live as equals, right there in the mission statement separating mutants from their humanity by implication. And Remender nails it in that first panel at the top of the page, tags “dream” so we can see what he’s doing and then changes “human and mutant” to “all people” before having Alex ask to be defined by his actions, not his genetic code. So, it completely works for me on that level. On the other hand, the casual “Call me Alex” bit at the end is a smarmy dismissal that substantially reduces the impact of the preceding sentiment. And I do understand the argument of how substituting the politically correct term for another minority in for “mutant” makes the whole thing much more inflammatory than it hit me on first reading. It’s a complicated thing to unpack. What I haven’t heard anyone talk about, though, is the reality that this is a speech delivered by a character and not a writer, the villagers are so ready to lynch Remender that there’s no consideration whatsoever that Havok is not his mouthpiece but instead a character with his own opinions and faults, some of which will hopefully get him into trouble and increase the conflict in his life, at least we’d better hope so because that’s what makes for compelling fiction. The writer isn’t advocating minority assimilation, his character is. All the writer is doing is try to make his characters say and do compelling things and, in doing so, engage his audience. At which he has wildly succeeded.

AGE OF ULTRON #3 — A little shocking to have the first scene of this book be people actually doing something but so of course we get the six-page flashback to bring us back to what we already know. Which sounds more disparaging than I mean it to, Bendis can make this group of people talking at each other in an underground bunker pretty compelling. The sole miss on all of those voices for me was Storm, even after all these years surrounded by Americans, I’m not buying her using contractions. Clint, though, Bendis nails it. Big reveal at the end, I certainly did not see that coming. The art remains stunning. How many combined man-hours did these guys spend on just the wreckage of buildings?

FANTASTIC FOUR #5AU — On the one hand, this is a pretty good-looking comic on its own terms, never mind that it’s a company-mandated fill-in to the Big Event of the year, etc, etc. I’m real glad to see André Araújo return to these pages, his work on the penultimate issue of the old FF with Hickman was stand-out greatness and of course Jose Villarrubia is one of the very best in the business, so right there, you know you’re in for a visual treat. And Fraction certainly doesn’t coast or phone-in the script, choosing to drop a single-page bombshell about Ben Grimm and Victor Von Doom that is all the more stunning for its inclusion in an issue that presumably some percentage of the core readership will not be picking up. So, there’s that. But then on the other hand, on a purely narrative level, there’s all the messiness of what this does to the carefully interwoven plot that’s been playing out in the first five issues of these two series, hinging upon the main team leaving Earthspace/time and then failing to return at the proper chronal coordinates. The fact that T’Challa has a way to communicate with them pretty much pops the bubble thus far separating the two books if you think about it for even a second. There’s a way to get in touch with them across time and space? But Reed left it with The Black Panther? Not Scott, the guy who is actually designated leader of the replacement squad? And even accepting that Reed’s just being a dick and not wanting to give Scott a help hotline, wouldn’t T’Challa get on the old horn and see what was up when the team didn’t come back on schedule? Maybe not right away, but certainly before another four issues went by? So, we’ll see. This obviously isn’t the last one of these and maybe all will be explained, but going by just this issue alone, that ability to communicate with the team creates more continuity headaches than sequential delight. Just barely.

FF #5 — As if it’s not crowded enough, we get not one but two new kids here in the mix with cousins Ahura and Luna. You’ve got to love Ahura’s Lil’ Black Bolt ensemble. Shout-out to the Allreds for that stunning metropolitan splash of the maybe-Old-Human-Torch losing his shit. And that Bugle headline is totally a shot at DC, I’m thinking, funny stuff. This one’s not so full of great character beats as inching things along but I’m still interested to see where everything’s heading.

BEST OF WEEK: EAST OF WEST #1 — Good Lord. These guys show up dropping absolute justice right out of the gate. Hickman has hand-picked a gang of previous collaborators to help bring this masterpiece to life, Nick Dragotta from near the end of his FF run on art, Frank Martin, who I think is coloring his AVENGERS when Dean White isn’t, and then Rus Wooton, the letterer for THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS. What these guys have produced . . . it’s still hard to even talk about it without just gushing. Simply put, it’s a science fiction western apocalypse. Which sounds like a generic and fairly broadly applicable term, but it has never been more apt than in this case. We open with a scene of rebirth in a primal setting. The colors are bold and striking, conjuring almost a Martian landscape (or, really, Benedict Dimagmaliw’s color work on that first issue of THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN’s second volume, “Phases of Deimos,” is that even a real name? I always felt like Moore and O’Neill were messing with us about that guy, as many shenanigans as they get up to in that book, but I digress), but something’s wrong, there are only three where there should be four. They roll some bones and discover that their missing member has in some way absconded and must now be killed. Cut to the three-page white/almost-white Hickman opening credits that I want to say first showed up in THE RED WING (unless he was doing it as far back as THE NIGHTLY NEWS? That seems possible), but I love how whether it’s this new batch of madness or THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS or blitzkrieg almost-weekly corporate insanity over on THE AVENGERS, he’s got that graphic branding going on, intelligent business. Then, we get three exposition infodump pages that tell of an alternate history involving a soldier-turned-preacher, a chief of chiefs and the prophecy that they channeled after someone set off a nuke in 1908, resulting in America splitting into seven great nations. It’s unclear what exactly was the tipping point into this new history, though the new borders have got Texas laying claim to every single state it borders, so seems like Hickman got it right. THEN, we cut to “Now” and meet a pale pale gunslinger and his two confederates, all of whom are channeling a none-too-subtle demonic vibe. My initial thought was to assume that these are the little kids grown up, the genders matching up and all. After moseying on into a saloon and insulting all the Union boys and the massacre that ensues, come to find out that they’re really here for the bartender, who used to be a hunter and did some grave injustice to the gunslinger back when. Who, I hate to just straight up compare this to another character/book, but the guy has a strong physical resemblance to Skinner Sweet of Snyder/Albuquerque’s AMERICAN VAMPIRE, and while I dig that book, I have never thought that they have done a very good job establishing that character as the Ultimate Badass that it seems like they’re trying to. He’s always there in the cliffhangers, licking the candy cane and grinning and looking all eeeeeevil, but it never feels like we should fear him. Not so, here. From the first panel, through every single line of dialogue, every bit of body language and facial expression, this guy exudes menace and is at once scary in a way that very few characters manage in any medium. Very economical and effective work from all parties. The bartender gives the gunslinger a name and he leaves his two compatriots, then we get a time-stamp stating that this is in fact 2064: APOCALYPSE YEAR ONE and we’re back with the three kids from the start, quickly to learn that they are new incarnations of three-quarters of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, then we cut back to The White Tower, which is now where the President lives, all of this has been taking place in the same time, the trio in the bar weren’t these kids grown up at all, the gunslinger is instead their missing compatriot with a couple of confederates, which makes him Death, and then he takes the leader of probably the first nation, The Union. A single-panel flashback image from Death’s point-of-view makes it apparent that this president and the bartender and I guess the leaders of the other nations somehow got the better of Death in the Badlands and took something of great import from him. So, it looks like he’s trying to get it back and stay ahead of his brothers and sisters, who regenerated when he did not. There are still many questions, but I think that’s the most that I can work out just by myself with the text. This is a terribly strong piece of storytelling. As wide-ranging and insane as THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS and the glorious AVENGERS runs already are—and I’ve made no secret of my affection for both—the scope on this monstrosity is off the charts and I can’t imagine what an #5 of this is going to encompass. Just the first issue has about got me at comprehension threshold.

MORNING GLORIES #25 — I was a little disappointed that this one wasn’t all sideways widescreen like those really radical issues of SPIDER-MAN and X-FORCE that McFarlane & Liefeld crossed over Back In The Day, I think almost immediately pre-exodus (that, now that I think about it for the first time in probably, yeah, twenty years, didn’t all the fun start when Juggernaut wrecked one of the Twin Towers?), but the cover tricked me, let’s not hold my preconceptions against the interior. I’ve been meaning to do a reread on this monster from #1 for a few months now and made a serious error not doing so before this issue, I highly recommend it to yield maximum enjoyment of the masterful way that Spencer ties all the knots and brings what up until now has seemed like possibly a whole lot of random firing up into the sky into a pupil-dilating cohesive whole incorporating multiple ensembles and timeframes. And the electromagnetic L O S T vibrations have never been felt stronger, you can straight up hear Giacchino’s drums from the catch-up montage at the end of “The Other 48 Days” (2.07, island faithful!) there on all those no-dialogue four-horizontal-panel pages that make up a significant portion of the first half of the issue. Kudos, as ever, to Brother Eisma for the way he stages all these scenes we’ve already seen. It used to always drive me crazy on That Island Show (and even more so on something like HEROES, when the device was employed to much more amateurish effect) when they trotted out this old trick, revisiting material that we’ve already seen once but now process with an increased understanding and, hopefully, appreciation. But, next to the aforementioned drums montage, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the trick done as well. The juxtaposition of images in the composition of opposite pages goes a long way to selling it, and Eisma lays everything out in a very aesthetically pleasing way. And there is certainly no shortage of major payoff big moments in the final few pages here, the thing is, we’ve already had so many people shot and stabbed and finger-skulled to death only to see either a time-displaced version of themselves or a doppelganger turn up to deliver yet more cryptic mission advice that by the end of it, all I could do was throw up my hands, “Yes! Of course!” with only a fraction of understanding of even the clues that have been revealed. This is a product of the non-linearity with which the story has been presented and the fact that I’ve only hit it once or twice a month in singles. It will be much less demanding and confusing in trade, of that I have doubt. Though this certainly isn’t meant to condemn the series for being demanding or confusing, I prefer to work for it. Just should have cranked it up harder to get ready for this. Going to have to hit the reread before next month. All respect to Nick Spencer, Joe Eisma, Alex Sollazzo, Johnny Lowe, and Rodin Esquejo on those gorgeous covers. Without fill-ins, these guys have turned in the first quarter of a quality sequential narrative that’s not afraid to make its reader work very hard to understand everything that’s happening, showing up month in and month out, many times with an added page count at no additional cost, and delivering this 48-page behemoth finale for a mere #3.99, or, what Marvel charges for 20 pages of anything they think they can get away with. I admire everything that these guys are doing, both narratively and business-wise. If more creators follow their lead, the future for this medium will be a very bright one, indeed.

THE MASSIVE #10 — Sorry to see the backmatter remain gone but it looks like we yielded about the same material in those three pages of infodump montage on South America. A treat to get Gary Erskine filling in here. I was a fan of that DAN DARE mini he did with Ennis a few years back. And of course the horror of THE FILTH. Also, cool to see Jordie Bellaire picking up where Dave Stewart left off, she’s really been tearing it up all over the place of late, a rising star. Which is more than we can say for Callum Israel and his crew, the way things have been going pretty much since the beginning of the series, man, looks like the very end is always just around the corner. The premise of this series does have us starting from a pretty grim place, I suppose. Consistently rewarding in singles, and I still don’t think we’ve seen more than the very tip of what Wood’s got in store for us. And a hell of a John Paul Leon cover.

FATALE #13 — Like the previous issue, this one skews a bit closer to straight EC Comics fare than the tone of Lovecraft noir perfected over the first two arcs of the series, as well as being another done-in-one and one of the better singles thus far. No mean feat for a synergistic duo so prolific and inventive that they can’t manage to commit to a single series! We meet another new femme fatale, this one an outlaw in the old West and as alluring as ever, though she’s pushing at least seventy. Even in a relatively sparse twenty-four pages, Brubaker gives us enough character beats to rope us in and make us care about these people, feeling a little tug on the last page when the expository montage blasts us through their story all the way to The End, leaving behind more questions than answers. Breitweiser continues to provide perfect complementary tones to Phillips’s immaculately crafted linework. This is A-list material all the way, a single you can’t afford not to be devouring the moment it’s on the rack.

THE UNWRITTEN #47 — The new Lord of the Dead is hilarious, the combination of the voice that Carey gives him with Gross’s cartoonish visage combines to craft a memorable character who steals at least the first half of this issue. The back half coasts along until the last page, which is as heavy a moment as we’ve seen in this series since at least Pullman went down. Next issue should be seismic. And I’m really looking forward to that FABLES crossover, what a wonderful world.

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #18 — So, it all turned out fine. The art is beautiful, but I’m having trouble dialing in to these characters. I enjoy seeing them run around but can’t manage anything more than a surface engagement with the narrative. There’s nothing meaty enough to draw me in. Of course Constantine fires off a typical badass line of dialogue to close out the arc. I’m going to hang out for at least next issue and see if this one wants to get its teeth in me.

FLASH #18 — Francis Manapul, wherefore art thou? It’s never good news when this book’s co-writer/artist needs to take a month to get back on deadline but regular collaborator Brian Buccellato more than holds down the fort here with Marcio Takara on pencils and inks, even delivering a title page that can stand with what’s gone before, a horribly intimidating prospect while staring at a blank piece of paper, I should think. It is refreshing to have Barry in a relationship without secrets or hero vs boyfriend drama malarkey. This one’s solid enough throughout, but I feel a bit bait-and-switched having to pick up DIAL H to find out what’s going on with that cliffhanger. I do dig on the Ponticelli.

TIMEWARP #1 — What a gorgeous beast of an anthology. I love these things. At this point, Marvel seems to have the edge in delivering across-the-board high-quality runs by A-list talent on every single one of their main characters/franchises. However, even amidst creative team shifts and walk-outs on high-profile books over in the mainstream DC universe, we’ve still got Vertigo delivering wonderful gems like this, a standalone eighty-page anthology of nine stories by a myriad of creators, a few of whom are high-profile but with a majority who aren’t household names. Fame is no indicator of greatness, however, every single one of these delivers the goods, an inventive blend of science fiction and 2000 A.D.esque twist-ending stories that really made me think about the craft of writing short short stories, seems like you could put almost as much work into eight pages of perfection as three issues of an arc. We open with Damon Lindelof having roped his previous Batman collaborator Jeff Lemire into another eight-page slice of clever starring Rip Hunter in a riff on time travel and acceptance of the inevitability of mortality. Set on what appears to be an island in the South Pacific, naturally.  An enjoyable read though it doesn’t manage to tap in to the core of the character with as much surgical precision as their digital-first “The Butler Did It” from a few months back. Fine way to begin the anthology, though. Tom King & Tom Fowler’s (and there she is again, we get Jordie Bellaire for these next two) “It’s Full of Demons” has a very clever twist-ending that I absolutely did not seem coming. Actually, without ruining either this or the final story, it seems like this should have been sequenced first in order to thematically bookend the anthology. Gail Simone makes her Vertigo debut with “I Have What You Need,” with Gael Bertrand turning in some highly stylized cartoonish art that belies some pretty dark subject matter. Another serious twist. Si Spurrier & Michael Dowling deliver “The Grudge,” the tale of a fairly ultimate rivalry, while Toby Lit and some usual suspects from the Vertigo stable bring us the second part of the “The Dead Boy Detectives” story that I think started up in last October’s GHOSTS? This installment isn’t quite as engaging as the previous one. And speaking of GHOSTS, Milligan and M.K. Perker, late of CAIRO and AIR, have a story “She’s Not There” that would be just at home in that anthology as this one, dedicated to Joe Kubert, natch. Ray Fawkes & Andy McDonald’s “00:00:03:00” is a tender tale of time-dilated final protocols. Matt Kindt’s “Warning Danger” channels the bio-punk trappings of Brandon Graham and friends’ PROPHET reboot to reasonably successful effect. I’ve been digging on his stuff more and more, thought he subbed in for Lemire real well on FRANKENSTEIN there for as long as that lasted and REVOLVER was strong. Looking forward to the MIND MGMT trade whenever it finally shows up, already paid for it, even. Okay, but wait, the last thing by Dan Abnett & Inj Culbard is a very tight little shot starring agents of causality that’s not too far removed from the idea that served as the germ of my first novel. These guys just do it in eight pages instead of six hundred.

I really enjoyed this entire thing and hope that DC keeps publishing anthologies. It must be a dicey move financially but there’s a tremendous amount of value and quality to be had, just tons of high concept to be found packed into a single spine that costs as much as half as many pages from Marvel. Kudos and appreciation to the editors who greenlit the book and the creators who rose to the challenge.