6/12/13

BEST OF WEEK: SUPERMAN UNCHAINED #1 — Now, this is certainly the way to capitalize on MAN OF STEEL release week. Pair one of your top writers with arguably the best and certainly most famous penciler in the industry and launch what else but another new #1. We open with a nice inversion on the old “It’s a bird . . .” bit, one lent a substantial amount of weight by framing it in Nagasaki four months to the day before the bomb dropped (I really really hope that’s not a typo and it’s supposed to be April not August, upon first and subsequent readings, it seems to make much more sense for this to be the day of the bombing, not four months before. Particularly in light of that epilogue. We will see). Snyder seeds all these terrific little one-panel juxtaposition gags throughout, like Superman telling the astronauts that they’re not going to burn up while irradiating the entire panel in the red of his heat-vision. Unfortunately, even in the DC Universe, you can’t say the word “gamma” without charging the reader’s expectation for the Hulk to show up on the next page. Which would have been quite a twist! I also quite liked Clark’s line to Jimmy about Bruce Wayne padding his shirts, hilarious little snipe, there. Also, much gratitude to Snyder for spelling “lede” the right way, seems like nobody in comics does that. I haven’t even mentioned the art. Of course it’s dynamite. Jim Lee, Scott Williams, and Alex Sinclair have been knocking it out of the park for quite some time now and this issue right here is no exception. More importantly, Morrison’s ACTION run notwithstanding, this feels like the first issue of a Superman title that really matters, in a way that the various teams on the regular New 52 titles haven’t been able to manage. It actually makes me wonder, he’s still missing the red underpants, but there’s not a New 52 logo on the cover. Is this thing existing in its own continuity vacuum a la ALL-STAR SUPERMAN? That wouldn’t be a bad thing. Either way, just really glad to be buying a Superman book in singles that I care about and can look forward to.

Oh, but wait! I almost forgot to report how mind-blowing pages 5 and 6 were. I had no idea going in, maybe everybody knew but me, but not only is there not a single ad to be found in this entire issue but pages 5 and 6 are both fold-out quadra-splash pages, four in one, these gigantic monster shots of glory from Lee and friends that are frankly staggering if you’re just going along thinking you’re reading an ordinary comic and then you get hit with that. I was so confused at first to encounter a stack of folded glued-together pages, it made no sense, but this soon gave way to slack-jawed elation at the sight of such artistic thunder. It was a great idea but even much better execution, those guys really knocked it out of the park on the fold-out splash pages. All the reason in the world you need to stay away from digital and keep buying paper! And a steal at $4.99, again, no ads at all, 22 pages of uninterrupted Lee/Williams/Sinclair art, but two of those pages are four times the regular size. Stunning business!

BATMAN #21 — Scott Snyder’s week of domination continues! Now, I have to say, I was a bit skeptical about this storyline when it was announced. Even though Snyder/Capullo/Glapion(now Miki)/Plascensia have reliably turned in the very best monthly of the New 52 since September 2011, hearing that they were going to return to the well and give us another origin story was not music to my ears. Especially the way that the title evokes the Miller/Mazzucchelli classic. Better to leave such revered stories alone and blaze one’s own trail, I thought. Or, the last time Johns tried something like this over in Jordan’s book, it ate up half of a year and yielded only a small bit of goodness in the way of retconning an origin that, as far as I was and am concerned, should go no further than EMERALD DAWN, now and forever. So, it was with some amount of trepidation that I cracked the first page of this new arc and of course was greeted with nothing less than beautiful pages showing us as much about what was going on with Gotham at large six years ago as How Bruce Learned To Be Batman for the tenth time. Capullo and company really do a fine job setting the scene and breathing life into the no-dialogue shots of the city, fleshing it out as its own character. We open in medias res, Bruce has been hassling the Red Hood Gang, who think they’ve got him on the ropes but of course he’s got an unorthodox escape by way of grappling gun up his sleeve. There are no obvious tells as to whether or not this iteration of the Red Hood is going to be the pre-Joker, though I don’t see why Snyder would write that out. The most spot-on business is the conversation between Alfred and Master Bruce, which manages to be totally believable and make me feel like we’ve heard this kind of thing a hundred times before, though it’s not an exchange that I can actually ever remember encountering. And then there’s the 3-D modeling thing that Thomas Wayne and Lucius Fox have cribbed from Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT sans the accompanying moral objections that I guess is about to be some kind of retcon big deal when young Bruce stumbles upon the Bat-Cave this time. This issue is kind of a slow burn, not as insane out of the box as I expected, but of course we’re in good hands with the creative team and the best is surely yet to come.

AMERICAN VAMPIRE: THE LONG ROAD TO HELL #1 — Give it a rest, Snyder! At least he had to turn the script for this over-sized 54-page one-shot over to regular series artist Rafael Albuquerque, who does a wonderful job slinging words as effectively as he does lines. Though I’d love to know what Rafael Grampá has to do with this. That first splash of the greaser slayer guy looked like it might be by him. But what we have here is quite possibly the best issue of this series yet, I believe that I got more dialed in to poor doomed Billy & Jolene than any of other our protagonists thus far and then there’s a pretty compelling mystery in maybe-not-really-that young Jasper Miller that is only hinted at here and will presumably be explored more in the main title when it returns. The break in publication obviously does not reflect these guys taking any time off at all, they’re working harder than ever and it shows. We do get a single mis-apostrophed “y’all,” though, that is one word them folks at Vertigo jest do knot no how to spell.

LIL’ GOTHAM #3 — The Caped Crusader takes a backseat to Joker’s disastrous romp through Valentine’s Day and then the adventures of Damian and Katana in Chinatown. The cuteness of the art aside, these characters are written with a strong voice that manages to be humorous without diminishing their intelligence, a common failing of all-ages books. That one page of the Justice League working on the satellite that came out of nowhere, in particular, man, just terrific stuff. Glad there’s a place for this on the rack.

STAR WARS #6 — This one is another solid entry, though it suffers a bit from spending such a large percentage of its pages trying to wrap us up in concern for Princess Leia, who is of course going to survive not only this series but Episodes V and VI. And VII as well, for that matter. We live in hope. It’s a tricky thing, though, of course Wood has to place her in those circumstances, try to make us care about the outcome but it’s almost impossible to pull off, given that we all know what we know. Targeting her jettisoned fuel canisters to nuke the Star Destroyer was pretty damn cool, though, I certainly did not see that one coming.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #12 — It’s the secret origin of Enrico Fermi that no one could have predicted. Is Feynman the only member of the team who’s actually our universe’s native human Feynman? I’m terrified what plans Hickman has for him. But that’s for another time. Having Fermi be the saboteur for Daghlian’s accident is a clever bit of business. And but then there’s a nifty little trick here where I think they recycle a full seven pages of art from a few issues back but with new dialogue of the Fermi drone secretly reporting to and receiving instructions from its superior that frames the climax of #8 or #9 in a new light with regard to Fermi, it’s really quite clever. And then there’s the final page, just in case anybody happened to have any lingering doubt this month whether or not everyone involved in the production of this book is a fundamentally disturbed individual. Einstein with a Chainsaw. Tell you me that you would not plunk down eleven dollars for that bit of excitement at your local cinematic multiplex!

THE TRUE LIVES OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS #1 — Four years in the making and apparently featuring a plot entirely different from initial conception, the first issue of this four-issue mini-series manages to live up to the months and months of anticipation. It doesn’t hurt that artist Becky Cloonan has done nothing but improve her considerable artistic chops, so, as good as this would have been a few years back, we’re cooking with fire, here. This story picks up twelve years after the disastrous events depicted in the two videos starring the titular characters. I’m a little bit confused because our protagonist is supposed to be the girl who was riding with them, but that girl was African-American with curly hair and this character is clearly Anglo and a brunette. Does that mean that she’s not really the same character but just claiming to be? It’s a weird inconsistency, it isn’t like there’s just tons and tons of pre-existing continuity to synch up with. The bulk of the issue portrays the girl’s interaction with a band of Killjoys-inspired hellraisers calling themselves the Ultra-Vs who appear to meet as ignominious an end as their inspiration. We also get three pages of a porno droid named Blue doing her job and turning her wages right around to purchase a drug called Plus from a vending machine. The scenes with her are pretty underwritten, writers Gerard Way and Shaun Simon didn’t really do anything to make me care about her one way or another. And we know that Way knows how, by the fifth page of #1 of THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY, I was ready to open up a vein for those kids. But just like on the album, Dr. Death-Defying pretty much steals the show. All of his dialogue sings and you can really hear the voice delivering those rhyming lines. This is a good beginning and I’m excited to see where we go from here.