3/05/14

ACTION COMICS #29 — And so the first arc comes to a close. Tremendous work. I’m a huge fan of Pak’s Page One insane run-on-sentence-first-person summaries that function as a PREVIOUSLY…, I hope they stay around. Kuder continues to knock it out of the park, though I could tell that some pages were fill-ins, some fella named Jed Dougherty doing the best he could. Am still really digging Wil Quintana’s palette for this. I like how, not once but twice, when the big guy can’t handle it anymore, he just goes into straight Cavill-heat-vision-rage mode. Burn it all, Kal! And the poignant Baka-hugging end totally snuck up on me despite being very organically developed throughout the course of this arc. Tremendous work. Still so grateful that ACTION COMICS is this great again. Because it always should be.

DETECTIVE COMICS #29 — Aw man, I just assumed that Jason Fabok would drop back in for Layman’s finale, but I guess he’s already hustling on ETERNAL pages just as hard as he can. It’s a shame not to have him here, but Aaron Lopresti once again does his share of heavy lifting. This finale makes perfect sense, of course our hero was undercover all along and outsmarted Scarecrow by palming an antidote. Classic Bruce! A really nice touch on the last page, not only does the battle never end but it cycles right back to the first of the Layman/Fabok run. At eighteen issues, it might be odd to say that it wasn’t enough, but it certainly seemed like this train could have kept rolling for another couple of years at least. Quality work throughout. Looking forward to seeing what trouble Manapul/Buccellato will get into next month. We certainly know that it will look gorgeous and have the best Eisner title pages going today.

FOREVER EVIL #6 — Ah haha, Johns certainly gets points for the set-up and punchline of the first two captions. But then “You need to see what they’ve done to Nightwing” is just a bit too meta- for my tastes. And I don’t get why the sight of the Murder Machine is such an Oh-my-God moment. I mean, the name is much more ominous than the sight of it. It looks like a doodad. I was definitely expecting something one hundred times more gruesome on the page-turn. Not that I was hoping for it. And shouldn’t the Shazam of the alternate New 52-Earth not be like an evil dick? Isn’t that what Johns and Frank rebooted our latest iteration into? I don’t know, man. The art is terrific. I guess I just want everything to be as good as FINAL CRISIS and nothing else maybe ever will be.

TRILLIUM #7 — Already so near to the end! This is a mini that I have definitely enjoyed serialized and am glad I picked up in singles. Though I’m sure I’ll eventually snag the trade, as well. I was wondering what further flipping tricks Jeff Lemire had up his sleeve and he executes what’s probably the last one here as Nika goes double-splash-sideways to fall back to the future. It is a very cool contrast having Lemire color one of the time-zones with Jose Villarrubia providing counterpoint on the other, anchoring the more bleed-heavy washed-out thing that the writer/artist has going on with something a little less impressionistic. Quite a collaboration. And we get the Atabithian-glyph language translation, a very cool move. I still need to go back through and do some translating. A suitably ominous cliffhanger as we finally put an end to our time-hopping and deal with nothing less than the eradication of the human race setting the stage for the last love story ever told. If only Mama Lemire had taught her little boy how to dream big!

CATALYST COMIX #9 — And so we come to the end. Joe Casey & Friends bring all the stories in to a series of senses-shattering climaxes! “Agents of Change” goes out as nutjob as ever with my favorite bit maybe being the glorious absurdity of misattributing “I Am The Walrus” to T.S. Eliot. Though the opening caption giving way to a TED talk is pretty funny all by itself. The resolution here makes total sense. But is that a reference to the Ewan McGregor motorcycle doc there in the first caption on the last page? Of the three, I was least into “Agents of Change” and it was still pretty solid. And in the final installment of “The Ballad of Frank Wells,” Frank lays it down to the president and Ghost Abraham Lincoln in the Oval Office itself. I had no idea where this story was going to wind up after the cataclysmic madness of the first chapter, but it wound up being a unique and, dare I say, relatively realistic take on a Superman’s impact upon the global superpowers. The last panel is, of course, perfect. “Amazing Grace” ends with as much seething cosmic thunder as we’ve come to expect. I particularly enjoyed Paul Maybury’s choice to go with the eight tiny panels across the top third of Page Three, solid cartooning that really highlights Grace’s inner battle. The real business emerges from Casey’s Kirbyesque captioneering on Page Five, though: “IT TAKES GREAT STRENGHT TO FINALLY LET GO, TO CONFOUND YOUR ADVERSARY WITH A CHANGE IN TACTICS TO DRAW UPON THAT WHICH HAS ALWAYS BEEN WITHIN YOU, TO TAKE THE BELIEF OTHERS HAVE IN YOU AND TURN IT INTO PURE POWER AND DISCOVER THE ULTIMATE TRUTH ABOUT ONESELF!” A particularly interesting shift on the last word there, which should be “yourself” to maintain person, but it is the shift to “oneself” that shatters grammatical agreement. “DELIBERATE LINGUISTIC REACTUALIZATION!” I also like how Page Six has “sun god” as the sixth and seventh words on the page and then seven words from the end, Casey goes ahead and drops “metropolis.” That business is not an accident, people! Grace & her golden city 4evah!

This anthology was consistently an intelligent, thought-provoking look at what the superhero genre is capable of, jam-packed full of 28 pages of greatness every single month for the low low cover price of $2.99. Many thanks to Joe Casey, Dan McDaid, Paul Maybury, Ulises Farinas, Brad Simpson, Rus Wooton, and the editors at Dark Horse for making the impossible a two-dimensional certainty!

BEST OF WEEK: STARLIGHT #1 — I thought I was just about done with Millar. I can’t believe how terrific this is. It’s a perfect first issue. Every element, the dialogue, the characterization, the pacing. And the art. It could not be a better fit. Millar obviously could have sweet-talked Hitch or Gibbons or maybe even pulled old Cassaday back out of sequential retirement again (I had to get his cover) if Millar wanted the sort of highly rendered photorealistic thing that is those gentlemen’s specialty. However, Goran Parlov’s style is ideal for this, cinematic and expressive while never over-rendered, always just the right amount of detail with a master’s eye for composition and layout. This is reflected in the two very disparate sections of the story, which almost look like they’re shot by two different directors, testament to Parlov’s consummate skill. And Ive Svorcina’s colors light up the page, conveying fantastic vistas on the alien world while highlighting the drab and dreary modern-day reality that Duke has chosen for himself. This book is drum-tight, everything is presented to the reader in shorthand. We get all that we need to know about the past adventures on the alien world in six-and-a-half pages. The two sons between them only rate three scenes in less than three pages and we don’t need to see them again; they’re pieces of shit, we’ve got it. The wife is only on-panel for a page and another panel, and that’s still enough to justify the gaping void that exists in our protagonist’s life for the duration of the present-day sequences. And then, of course, inevitably, the final call to adventure. I don’t know how Millar managed to imbue this with so much heart. On the surface, it really looks like nothing more than his latest cavalier attempt to sell his fourth or fifth mini-series to Hollywood for more Big Option $, and this one just happens to be “FLASH GORDON meets UNFORGIVEN,” but hey, that and Parlov were enough to get me to give it a shot and I am so glad that I did. This is so thrilling and pitch-perfect, I almost don’t want #2 to come out and ruin it. But then, this is only the beginning, and there is such a multitude of fantastic possibility just over the horizon.

JUPITER’S LEGACY #4 — I loooooooove Frank Quitely. Just look at that cover. He did that with a pencil. Once upon a time, there was a blank piece of paper and then he started drawing on it and now those people are there. It’s almost too much to believe. It turns out that the first three issues of this were really just set-up as we jump nine years forward and meet the character who it’s looking is our actual protagonist. Of course, the world is total horror in light of the events of last issue but it only takes half of this next single for our boys to whip up a sequence that will just about get John Williams’s Superman overture roaring through your head, which is about the highest compliment I can pay something like this. There’s a lot of heart in this, as well. Absolutely did not think Millar had it in him, guy really knocked it out of the park this week.

VELVET #4 — More espionage greatness from Brubaker/Epting/Breitweiser. We head on down to Monaco and the glamorous Carnival of Fools for gambling with masked royalty. Mrs. Breitweiser’s colors on the Page Eight spread are particularly glorious. It’s just occurring to me that this has got to be a finite thing, it’s not like Epting is just going to sign on for an open-ended couple-of-dozen-issues-at-least type of situation. That would be years and years of his life. This is maybe the first act break? If Codename: Mockingbird turns out to be a major character, perhaps. If he’s even still breathing.

SECRET #6 — These two titles together are a solid idea for an espionage double-feature in concept, but I’m afraid that this book suffers from the comparison with VELVET. At least from a characterization standpoint. Ryan Bodenheim obviously and absolutely just wrecks everything on that spread across Pages Four and Five, digging deep into that Darrow/Burnham vein of a bit of the ol’ hyper-rendered ultra-violence. God, though, man, the italics. If I’m just barely easing into it on EAST OF WEST, it’s making the dialogue in this book a self-parody. “I’m pretty sure work’s not done for the day.” “How’s this going?” “I gotta tell you.” These are not phrases that need to be emphasized and calling attention to them makes them silly in a way that they would not otherwise be. I want to like this quite a bit more than I actually do. Come on, Hickman!

UNCANNY X-MEN #018 — Marco Rudy shows up and once again destroys everything. Easily some of the most inventive page layouts being produced today, beautiful characters who can really act, occasional shifts into David-Mack-level KABUKI painted greatness, the man is on fire. There’s been so much going on, I didn’t even realize that we haven’t had time to properly deal with the integration of the original team into the ranks of Cyclops’s Weapon X crew. Which is of course some necessary interaction to depict. Rudy’s been posting this cover for weeks to encourage speculation about who’s holding the gun. I love that it’s metaphorical and what the answer actually turns out to be. I’m a little unclear on exactly what goes down at the end there, does Cyclops see an enemy and just open up wide? Or take a page out of the Cavill-Superman-heat-vision-rage playbook? Whatever the case, this is a fill-in issue of the highest caliber.

MOON KNIGHT #001 — What a furious monstrosity for Wacker to leave in the wake of his exodus from the East Coast. We welcome Uncle Warren from the zones of dystopic pulp fiction and neon futurist conferences back to the land of monthly sequentials. This sounded like it would be mental when I first read of it but it exceeded even my most fearful projections. Our man Detective Flint radiates a serious FELL vibration that is perfectly at home within these pages. Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire’s art is a good match, setting the atmosphere for this muted and bleak corner of the Marvel Universe, one we really haven’t had a chance to visit since those six issues of the Secret Avengers trying to poke their heads back in the door first opened by Ellis’s monstrous THUNDERBOLTS run. I suspect that we have only begun to descend into the vileness, filth, and horror.