8/28/13

BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN INCORPORATED SPECIAL #1 — Well, I was a skeptical little fellow over the proposition of shutting this book down with an anthology that did not involve direct creative input from Grant Morrison. It seemed like a pretty dicey situation. And certainly could have been potentially, but just about everybody involved knocks their individual contributions out of the park resulting in a special that is as much a testament to the consummate skill of the creators as the density of imaginative value deeply embedded within this international cast of Batmen that Morrison established and developed throughout his already legendary run.

Kudos go to Mike Marts and/or Assistant Editor Darren Shan, whoever did the sequencing, because these shorts all hit in the precise order that they should, playing off one another like a well-rehearsed orchestra. We begin as close to familiar territory as possible, with Chris Burnham, who of course not only absolutely crushed the art chores on the second volume and most of the first of this title but also holds the distinction of having the sole non-Morrison writing credit on an issue of BATMAN INCORPORATED. #11 just came out a couple months ago. Burnham returns to Jiro Osamu, the Batman of Japan, once again teaming up with his girlfriend Lolita Canary. This time, Burnham has time to draw the pages, as well, easing us into the non-Morrison waters as gently as possible. This short is strong enough all on its own for me to wish that Burnham/Fairbairn would just go ahead and give us a mini starring these characters. Doctor Inside-Out is a terrific new rogue who fits right in to Jiro’s limited but already super-insane rogues’ gallery. And it sounds like he survived his grisly fate on the last page, there, though it was a close call for us readers as well, amidst all of that painful pun-slinging. Next up is a story featuring Beryl Hutchinson, the former Squire and new Knight, in a one-page-per-day tale chronicling how she handles being without her mentor Cyril. Joe Keatinge does Paul Cornell proud here, completely nails the tone to the point that I was certain that the former was scripting. What with the pub and all. Tremendous last page that once again leaves the reader wishing that Beryl would get her own series. Or why can’t we just keep doing this? A quarterly anthology of eight-page done-in-ones? If any anthology is going to sell these days, it would be top creators doing riffs on Batman. Then series colorist Nathan Fairbairn shows up on scripting duties after managing to recruit John Paul Leon on interiors, always a good call. And Fairbairn holds it down all by himself on the writing end of the spectrum. The next story with Nightrunner, Dark Ranger, and El Gaucho by Mike Raicht and John Stanisci left me a little bit cold. I would say that it’s maybe because I never really cared about those characters so much, but it really should come down to the creators. I wouldn’t have thought Raven Red could anchor his own short, but here you go. The team-up wasn’t terrible but just not particularly devastating, given the quality of all that have come before. But at last we come to Bat-Cow. Possibly the ultimate embodiment of Morrison’s Everything Counts aesthetic, this character who first appeared in Baltazar/Franco’s unforgettable TINY TITANS #17 found himself pulled into main continuity with a secret origin to boot in the first issue of the final volume of this series. Which really did a number on me that night, I have to reiterate. I had heard that this was coming and was very curious to see how Dan Didio and Ethan Van Sciver were going to manage a story with a bovine as a protagonist, but they certainly pull it off with aplomb, with only a single line of dialogue paying off an unexpected gag and the finely rendered tight linework we have come to expect from Van Sciver.

This issue was an excellent example of the fertile imaginative landscape that Morrison left in his wake. I can’t imagine anyone’s going to have the stones to pick up on the threads he left hanging from #13 but this one really makes me hope that we haven’t seen the last of Jiro & Canary or the new Knight or Man-of-Bats & Red Raven or all the rest, even and especially the cow.

BATMAN/SUPERMAN #3 — Though Pak continues to mine entertainment through juxtaposing these characters at different points in their timelines, several choices cause this script to take a nosedive for me. The retcon about them meeting when they were boys was a little precious and overly pat for my taste. Lil’ Clark first giving Lil’ Bruce the idea that having people scared of you might just be a good thing there, pardner. Come on, now. And ahahah, now they’re all of a sudden listening to the NSA agents. Ripped from today’s headlines, more up-to-the-minute scripting than LAW & ORDER! And really, referencing the MAN OF STEEL “hope” line? And maybe the Darkseid reveal shouldn’t be on the cover if he’s only in this issue for a no-dialogue panel on the penultimate page. This is not a terrible comic by any stretch, Jae Lee continues to blow it up, but a serious bit of a dip for me in terms of scripting, this month out. Here’s hoping Pak pulls it back in next time.

FLASH #23 — [Obligatory “that was a badass double-page titles splash” comment]. “Big” and “scary” are not adjectives that come to mind when describing Patty’s father, there. But a solid reveal about Reverse-Flash, terribly obvious in hindsight, though I never saw it coming. Very much looking forward to his origin issue now, an excellent and timely optimization of these whole Villains’ Month shenanigans. This really is one of the best looking books on the rack, two years and going strong.

THE UNWRITTEN #52 — Mike Carey & Peter Gross, with a bit of help from Willingham/Buckingham, continue to throw down one of the best FABLES arcs in recent memory that just happens to guest-star Tommy Taylor and his two best friends. It’s even more maddening wondering how this fits in with FABLES continuity, with Bigby being not only reconstituted but apparently imprisoned for years. And I’m such a damn sucker, totally fell for the Blue thing for at least like a page before realizing, of course. This remains really strong work throughout.

MORNING GLORIES #30 — All right, and with a sigh of both respite and relief, we at last disengage from the multi-part season finale/premiere madness and just dial into a single –centric done-in-one that will potentially ease up and might not blow our minds. Which holds up pretty well until the last panel, of course. We almost need a black panel with only the logo to shut these issues down, you can just about hear the episode-ending drum beat that closes every installment of L O S T by now. Here, Spencer makes the intelligent choice to delve into the past of one of the least sympathetic characters that we’ve been introduced to of late, Irina. I’m not sure we get an Ana-Lucia-level of reversal right away, but then again, these guys only have 24 pages for the payoff instead of 42 minutes. We can definitely sympathize with why she’s such a militant little commando. But man, just when you can about wrap your mind around the whole deal, or trick yourself into feeling that way, along comes Miz Danielle Clarkson to up-end the entire applecart. Someone’s going to have to do a L O S T-style resequencing and just give us Casey’s linear experience when all of this is said and done because not quite a third of the way in and it is already bending my noggin into Morrisonian knots.

ITTY BITTY HELLBOY #1 — Well, this is as precious and hilarious as you might expect, there is a battle of appliance-box forts and generally sunshine-sweet times, stretching the limits and durability of the source material about as far as possible while still remaining fundamentally true to it. It’s stiiiiiiill Hellboy but about as far away from Mignola/Stewart as you can get. Hey, it’s terrific. My little girl is a fan. I’m just still crossing my fingers for the second year of SUPERMAN FAMILY ADVENTURES and they’re turning blue.

THE MASSIVE #15 — Okay, wait, now what? Everything was racing toward a thrilling climax and all, just like you want, Garry Brown & Jordie Bellaire knocking it out on art, there are twelve nuclear missiles up in orbit and then . . . Mary just drops some Stephen King shit out of nowhere? She’s got psychic powers or something? Did she and Mag study at Morning Glory Academy? Because that is the level of cryptic weird out-of nowhere bullshit that just got dropped on us, but this is not that book. I mean, I’ve got to be missing something. The only, and I mean only, reading that I can derive from this is that she closed her eyes and burned out some one-time psychic thing and made twelve nuclear missiles disappear from orbit without detonating. Only that is like the worst deus ex machina shit almost ever, I don’t feel like a single thing about any sort of powers has been set up whatsoever in over a years’ worth of this title’s run. Maybe I’m dense, but am completely reeling and stunned by this turn of events. The fuck, Wood.

SECRET #3 — Well, it’s been just a little while, hasn’t it? I managed to track down RED MASS FOR MARS in the interim and am more onboard with Ryan Bodenheim’s style than I was when these first two issues came out. All that italicized lettering in some of the dialogue was a bit much. I don’t like my emphases being that force-fed to me. Whoever lettered this was like 25-year-old Bruce Wayne in YEAR ONE underlining every damn fourth word. Other than that, some relatively interesting scenes of espionage and accounting in the le Carre sitting-around-and-talking-about-it vein. I should probably reread the first two issues.

FF #011 — It is always good news when the Impossible Man shows up. At least, I am a member of the camp who feels that way. Bringing in Adolf the Impossible Boy reading about all the cancer feels like it’s possibly over the line, which is probably just the right amount of escalation. And Maximus rocking the Unit 909 H.E.R.B.I.E. unit is a straight CASANOVA reference. How incredible if Ba dropped in for an issue of all that amidst this dimension-hopping madness? And but maybe I was too harsh on Sebela on the other title? Fraction is the only credit here and manages to drop two “literally”s within four panels of one another all by himself. It is certainly supposed to be bad news, those two guys getting together on the last page but it is far more horrifying to see Sebela’s name in the credits for the next issue of the other title. Was the name of Kesel invoked as mere smokescreen? The temerity!

UNCANNY X-MEN #011 — Frazer Irving continues to depict Merry Mutant Madness in tones formerly reserved for the bleakest most washed out corners of the stygian depths. The internal monologue/narration that Bendis composes for Cyclops gets a bit overly expositional for my taste in what seems like an effort to honor “The Man’s” aforementioned every-issue-is-someone’s-first maxim, but it’s stretching credulity a bit thin to posit that Scott is just doing straight roll-call narration in his head of his students while a Sentinel is tearing into his crew. “And here come’s David Bond/Hijack.” Next page, “And here’s Eva Bell.” You can have the first one for free, but just going down the list like that afterwards is lazy, I don’t care if you’re jamming out five scripts a month or what. I am looking forward to Bendis’s first act coming to a head with this BATTLE OF THE ATOM business, though, been a hell of a ride so far. And dearly wish Art Adams was on interiors, that cover is a real knockout.

YOUNG AVENGERS #009 — Wow, Gillen’s got Teddy quoting Ygritte now, that might out-pop-culture old BKV. McKelvie drops another slice of panel insanity with Mother warping in the panel-borders to trap all of the bad influences. And an epilogue-no-plot-twist-at-all, every happy ending that you could write yourself begins in Austin, Texas, thankyewverymuch.

UNCANNY AVENGERS #009 — Man, you knew Wanda was going to walk around and talk about it all with these fools for a whole chunk of the issue. And but haha, Remender, the Red Onslaught! He’ll use everything, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous the source material, Remender will super-collide the ideas of Morrison and Lobdell and make it all work. And of course Wanda’s ready to pitch in by the end of the issue, we expect nothing else at this point.

NEW AVENGERS #9 — I like how we’ve dropped the superfluous zeroes now that the NOW! cover dressing is gone. Just like over on the sister title, this all seems like pretty substantial goings-on and I am interested to see how well it will be covered/reiterated over in the main INFINITY title for those foolish enough to skip out on these other Hickman-written tie-ins. A hell of a PREVIOUSLY IN… page, no doubt. The action comes fast and furious here, hyper-compressed as those Black Order folks make planetfall and commence tearing it up in Atlantis, Wakanda, Logan’s school, and Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum while Reed and Tony get it together on one end and the Brothers Boltagon do so on the other. Mike Deodato & Frank Martin deliver A-grade art throughout with dramatic imagery that has the weight and narrative heft of an event on a scale of this magnitude. All told, I’m impressed with the quality and pacing of these first two tie-ins and eagerly anticipate the second month of this latest massive we-really-mean-it-this-time-and-it-might-even-be true heartstopping catastrophe for all of our heroes.