5/08/15

BATMAN #20 — The art on this is pretty outrageous. Miki has settled right in with Capullo’s lines and I find more to love about Fco Planscencia every month. Just finally made it through the sixth ultimate collection of INVINCIBLE and didn’t realize that I’d seen his business on that title before, starting with the previous collection. What a hoss. Clayface’s whole strategy of catching Batman with Bruce as a lure was hilarious. The Batman Beyond armor was a nice touch, particularly Lucius’s line about it not being cost-effective for twenty more years. Snyder does tremendous work there at the end having Clayface invoke Damian and making Batman lose it, which, I mean, isn’t that a pretty dead giveaway to all on hand? Maybe it was just hearing the line “To the Batmobile, Father,” unexpectedly but I found something terribly resonant and sad about the final image of Alfred and Bruce with the visors on, re-experiencing Bruce’s footage of final missions with Damian, not solely for the in-text reasons that are certainly heartbreaking enough but those guys symbolizing us, the fans, the creators, the industry as a whole, all stuck dialed into the past, trying to recapture the elusive moments when these sequential worlds seemed to overtake the one into which we’d been born, living on nostalgia, trying to wring the memories out for all they’re worth, drain them dry.

BATMAN AND THE RED HOOD #20 — This issue is clearly delineated into two sections. The first third continues the Carrie Kelly subplot, giving her an exchange with Bruce at the manor that manages to pack in quite a few solid beats of characterization through dialogue. Then, because we’re doing rage this month, Bruce recruits erstwhile Robin/crowbar victim Jason Todd to help him take out some assassins in Ethiopia, which, of course is nothing more than a ploy to trigger Jason’s memories of how he got resurrected. It was Superboy-Prime, Bruce! You need to break the fourth wall and get Geoff Johns to set you up, he’s the one that’ll get this thing wrapped right up. God forbid. The last page is a bit of a non-sequitur. I mean, it’s Two-Face, right? I guess it’s the setup for next issue but the way it drops in out of nowhere left me a bit confused, particularly in light of the symphonic precision with which this crew has been crafting their tales of late.

BEST OF WEEK: PROPHET #35 — Brandon Graham and friends really crank this one up to the next level, pushing the reader to elevate his or her reading processing ability. I mean, I’ve been devouring this series in singles since Day One and still felt like I had to throw the blinders wide to fully understand and appreciate everything that was happening in an issue jumping back and forth between Old Man Prophet’s band of irregulars following a once dog “across a moon surface littered with starcraft and statues” and only to find his old starship to a casualty-heavy bloodbath between three different factions of Prophet armies. Simon Roy and Giannis Milonogiannis’s styles are excellent contrasts for one another between the two settings, gracefully woven together by Joseph Bergin III’s varied palette. This issue really sent me reeling in a way that the last few haven’t, I kind of got the feeling that everyone involved, both cast and creative, goT their hands on old copies of KING CITY and individually smoked every last page.

STAR WARS #5 — Leia pulls off a gutsy near-suicide run while both Han and Vader make alliances with new characters that will hopefully get them to where they want to be. Five issues in, this title shows no sign of letting up, the creators just keep digging in deeper and letting the plot continue to thicken. Carlos D’Anda and Gabe Eltaeb’s art might be a high water mark in the history of the franchise, highly detailed renderings of the ships and cities while not being so photorealistic that it distracts the reader by falling short of the various actor likenesses (unlike Jeanty over on BUFFY, for instance). Top shelf work, once again.

WOLVERINE #003 — This is more of the same, nothing less than a tightly written and plotted Wolverine story that is immaculately rendered and colored by Davis/Farmer/Hollingsworth. Wolverine drinks a beer and slices up some guys in quasi-Mandroid armor and young Nick Fury gets to quote John McClane, which, maybe that sounds like something you’ve seen before and/or don’t care to see again, but when the pages are of this high a quality, you can’t look away.

AVENGERS #011 — You’ve got to love going with the Viserys Targaryen reference in the title. One hopes things end up better for Shang-Chi than that fine individual. Also very cool to see Hickman using this title to further develop A.I.M. becoming a nation state, which he managed on the way out the door of the FF run. What a terrific three-page opening, laying out everything we need to know in a manner that is economical and in no way cramped. I enjoy Natasha’s direct approach. This issue is masterfully paced, every single cut between its four scenes executed at exactly the right beat. Mike Deodato delivers more of the top-drawer work we’ve come to expect from him over the years. Overall, this is nothing more or less than another entertaining slice of superhero espionage shenanigans, closer to the vibe of Ellis’s SECRET AVENGERS, say, than the all-hands-on-deck madness we’ve got in effect when all eighteen members of the team are on the issue’s roster.

UNCANNY AVENGERS #008 — All right, well I should have known but with this issue, it becomes glaringly obvious that I should have already caught up on the end of Remender’s X-FORCE run by now because they’re explicitly referencing business from that that came as a bit of a surprise to me. Daniel Acuña continues to turn in A-list material in his own watercolor style, far more dependent on the intricacies of shading than linework. Wolverine taking such a definitive no-killing stance with Rogue reads a little oddly in light of recent events in AGE OF ULTRON, but I suppose he is in vastly different circumstances. Remender continues to do a fine job cranking out stakes elevated enough to justify the wacky franchise amalgam that could have made this book a laughing stock rather than the blowout high-magnitude event catastrophe that it has so far turned out to be.