11/19/14

BEST OF YEAR: THE MULTIVERSITY: PAX AMERICANA — That last issue of ASTONISHING X-MEN that turned out to be giant-sized. PLANETARY #27. There have been a few comic books that I’ve waited for so long that months turned into years, but I don’t think I’ve ever been waiting on a single defined issue for as long as four years. Certainly nothing that John Cassaday wasn’t drawing! But here we have it. First announced in 2010, with pages previewed more than two years ago at MorrisonCon, this installment of THE MULTIVERSITY above all others has been the object of intense speculation and expectation for quite some time due to its astronomically enticing set-up: Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, the team responsible for FLEX MENTALLO, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, and WE3, among others, reunite to present their own version of that still-mostly-sacred milestone of graphic literature, WATCHMEN. Morrison ratcheted fanboy expectations up to a fever pitch back in 2012 by going into detail about his conceptual thinking for this issue. One representation of the harmonic alignment of the different Earths across the vibrational multiversal plane is that this issue does away with Dave Gibbons’s ubiquitous and famous nine-panel grid in favor of eight panels to represent the octave-to-octave musical notes of the Western major scale. Morrison actually went ahead and then showed us the uncolored unlettered opening pages and I now remember being a little disappointed that he just went ahead and blurted out, “The book begins with a backwards tracking shot of the President’s exploded skull as the Comedian’s just assassinated him from space!” But, if you’re going to get spoiled, you want Morrison to do it for you like that, only the deal was, sooooooooo much other shit happened in between that and the time that my poor body finally gave out on that long ago Saturday night that I had absolutely no retention of being spoiled until turning the page here and realizing that it was running backwards and then it all came crashing back in for me and it was really quite the charming effect. But, let me back up for a moment.

Just like the source material, the cover is actually the first panel of the issue. Or last, really. There’s already more shit happening in the first couple of shots than you almost know what to deal with. The cover appears to be the right half of a peace sign emblazoned on a flag that is on fire. The section that we can see is not unreminiscent of the DC peel logo in the upper-lefthand corner of this cover. The reader pulls back the cover to reveal a series of zoom-out shots whose angles are drawn (or shot, is the feeling) in an identical manner to those that we know so well from Gibbons’s groundbreaking work nearly thirty years ago. At first glance, the page hits the reader with two details: Gibbons’s nine-panel grid is indeed gone and we’re dealing with four skinny vertical panels on top of another four, giving us eight as advertised but also, that first shot back from the cover, the actual first panel of the interior comic, has the peace sign now folded and flapping in such a way that it also looks like an eight. Or, more specifically, a möbius strip. It’s such a striking visual aesthetic, Quitely’s hyper-rendered linework brought to glorious life by Nathan Fairbairn’s colors, that at first glance, the reader isn’t even aware that time is running in reverse. It’s only really explicit in the jump between the seventh to the eighth and final panel from the dripping blood’s spatial relationship to the Presidential seal, and remember, I already knew this because Morrison told me and a room full of one thousand people himself, but I was already so overwhelmed by what was happening that it wasn’t until that first page-turn that I realized that time was running backwards. Oh, and in the fifth panel, the dead guy who must be the President has a ring with an eight or an infinity sign or a möbius strip on it. But then, we turn the page and any subtlety about the backwards-time thing is blasted away as we watch the president’s jaw completely reform after being blown to bits. The same 4 x 2 grid of skinny vertical panels recurs here, which is enough to set it up as the default before Quitely violates it on the following page by subbing out the bottom half of four panels with two horizontal ones instead, possibly alluding to the whole widescreen comics thing that Ellis/Hitch inaugurated with THE AUTHORITY at the turn of the century, but maybe that’s reading too much into it. The next page is the title page and returns time to its natural forward flow, referencing Steranko’s Fury with that swirly business and explicitly mentioning the backward and forward flow of time.

The next page is the first walk-and-talk, kind of a riff on the trope of Aaron Sorkin television except that instead of the camera following the speakers for an uninterrupted take, what is uninterrupted in this case is the long shot of the room with time flowing as the characters walk from one panel to the next across the same physical space. Which you pretty much have to see for it to make sense, but trust me, it does. Everything I’m writing makes perfect sense. This issue has in no way damaged me at all. This page is looooooaded with that kind of double- or triple-meaning dialogue that Moore codified to such a ridiculous extent in WATCHMEN and that everyone has been doing such a sad job of reaching for ever since. The first panel mentions the light in the interrogation room, nothing subtle about that. Then, we proceed to talk of Smith burying the American super-hero while they walk on top of the presidential seal. The next panel, they stop walking and Nightshade rattles off an emboldened “stop,” followed by her father inviting her to take “the elevated view” while they walk up a staircase (of eight steps, natch). Subsequent dialogue references turning a corner and opening a door before the next page turns out to be a redux of the classic Clark-interviewing-Luthor-on-the-winding-staircase page from ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #5, which is once again loaded with multiple in-dialogue allusions to what’s happening in-panel. Eden’s last line mentions a leap of faith.

So, of course cut to The Question leaping through the air and asking a bunch of questions to his former partner, The Blue Beetle. Question mentioning four prominent scientists in conjunction with their four unsolved murders once again adds up to you-know-what. His mention of these guys and the disappearance of Captain Adam/Atom in the same context of the Yellowjacket case makes it seem like the killer might have been President Harley. And Nora O’Keefe maybe got too close and figured this out, so she had to go, as well? That is actually a great fit because it provides Peacemaker all the motivation he needs for then taking Harley out. But, more on that later. As Question hits the subway after escaping Beetle, he walks past ads for his secret identity’s news show, but there’s also one for Nightshade’s album futureBOMB, the cover of which directly references FLEX MENTALLO. It is also worth noting that The Question first mentions Algorithm 8 on Page Eight, which I have a pretty hard time believing is unintentional.

Oi. And then comes that insane double-page 32-panel spread that starts out doing that same Sorkin trick as before, breaking up the same physical space into 32 distinct bits of time but upping the ante quite severely by interweaving three separate timelines instead of just keeping it linear. We’ve got Nora O’Keefe right before getting murdered juxtaposed with The Question showing up later that night (in homage to Rorschach’s first scene at the Comedian’s place in #1 of WATCHMEN), referencing the date, November 17th, 2015 (with both 1 + 7 = 8, 2 + 0 + 1 + 5 = 8, natch) and also juxtaposed with Nora and her husband or boyfriend Peacemaker earlier that day. Dialogue from that earliest scene indicates that the President has claimed that “Algorithm 8” is projecting world peace. But later that night, Nora has cracked the algorithm and possibly knows that she is about to die. We see the murderer crouched behind the statue in Panel Six of the first page of the spread (or Panel Ten, if you’re counting across both pages horizontally), then he circles clockwise around the base of the Pax statue, as Question states. It’s a pretty incredible moment of the layout coming together in the bottom middle, there, Nora approaching from the left, the killer from the right, with the actual murder happening off-panel because that space is taken up by the follow-up scene with The Question. You could probably write a pretty mean five- or ten-page essay on just these two pages alone, but we had better press on. Special shout-out to Nathan Fairbairn, whose colors are crucial to making this spread as comprehensible as it is.

Oh good, now Captain Nathaniel Adam is reading ULTRA COMICS. Like my brain wasn’t already hurting. This charming fan-favorite from SUPERMAN BEYOND 3-D’s first line states that he has “caught sight of a massless time-symmetrical boson” on Pages 12 and 13. We just came from there, this is Page 14, but he’s probably referring not to that insane spread we just got done with but instead to the comic that he’s actually got in-hand. That ULTRA COMICS is going to be one hell of a thing to read, one of these days. This first page with the Dr. Manhattan analogue is as perfect an encapsulation that we get all issue long of what Morrison’s going for with the character’s usage of the second person in the last panel invoking Buddy’s famous “I can see you!” from way back in ANIMAL MAN #5. Also, a cool thing here with the layout, Quitely opens up with the first panel horizontal but only taking up a quarter of the page, meaning it stacks up on top of the other four half-panels that are then on top of the other four full-length panels. This seems to imply the way that the character exists in upper-dimensional space. Even on this page, he’s up above the normal eight panels that have been established as the norm. The good doctor takes his leave on the next page after the doomed scientists each push a button, executing “porti belli,” which translates to “beautiful places.” Quitely does a mathematical breakdown in the panel when Adam leaves, one in the middle, then two on each side, then continually having into increasingly smaller columns of four, eight, and sixteen. That winds up being thirty on either side of the main one. Which I don’t think means anything other than that Quitely’s a beast. This is immediately followed by the scientists’ murder by a “sergeant” that they seem to acknowledge as a superior and whose left arm is metal/bionic just like Nora O’Keefe’s killer.

The following page is a reprise of the Sally Jupiter/Laurel Juspeczyk scenes from the source material with Nightshade visiting her mother and sharing that her father, Dr. Eden, is working with Allen Adam on harnessing black hole energy to reduce America’s dependence on oil.

The spread on the next page is more confusing than even what we’ve gotten acclimated to by now. Across the top row, we’ve got four panels of Peacemaker and Nora in the very room that she will later be killed, discussing the ULTRA COMICS story that apparently Harley’s dad wrote entitled “Janus the Everyway Man,” which was the inspiration for her piece of art that will later be used to bludgeon her to death. Peacemaker clearly states that Harley has the algorithm but will not share it. All this while they let a pair of doves loose to fly off into the sky. This scene jumps to the bottom row of the page with the camera tracking the two doves. Peacemaker explicitly references all that is to come, he will “do what has to be done” after Harley wins the 2015 elections (why are there elections being held in 2015?) and then he and Nora will “go where they’ll never find us.” This is one shot when the doves are flying away, good to go. The next panel is a series of droplets of blood in a loose implication of a möbius strip. Then, there are just two feathers. Did Captain Atom pull the doves up into upper-dimensional space? Meanwhile, the sequence across the middle of this spread is laid out to echo the two-headed piece of art up above it with someone beating the hell out of Peacemaker post-assassination while the newly inaugurated President Dr. Eden asks him why he killed Harley. The person beating the hell out of Peacemaker’s face is the metal-armed killer. We’ve seen Eden’s hands and they are fleshy, so this just means that the killer works for Eden? Shit, I thought it was Harley.

Then, we’ve got Question reprising the famous Comedian-in-Moloch’s-room-from-Moloch’s-POV scene from #3 (I think #3). There’s another FLEX MENTALLO bomb allusion with the lighting of the fuse. Our hero goes on to reveal that he does not have a black-and-white worldview similar to one Walter Joseph Kovacs but is instead in favor of breaking things down into a, wait for it, eight-stage color-coded system. The high-level mob fixer playing the part of Moloch is apparently a “dirty cop in the pay of a corrupt vice president,” (who I think is supposed to be Eden, here). And this guy claims to have been taking orders from “the Sarge,” who I believe that we can correctly identify as Nora’s killer, whoever he really is.

Oh God, we’ve only made it as far as the staples.

Next up is the redux of Ozymandias’s failed 1966 Crimebusters meeting. The guy doing the talking, significantly, is one Sergeant Lane and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I JUST FOR THE FIRST TIME AFTER TEN READ-THROUGHS NOTICED THAT HE’S HOLDING UP THE EARTH-2 GRAPHIC NOVEL AND ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #10. Um. I can’t really deal with that right now.

Then, Harley gives a press conference in 2008 announcing the formation of the Pax Americana, a super-team comprised of some martial-arts based character called Tiger, the second Nightshade, Blue Beetle (now in the Dan Garrett outfit, having been seen rocking the Ted Kord duds in that future confrontation with his partner), The Question, and Peacemaker, who is even drawn in that scene leaning against the desk just like good old Eddie Blake, God rest his soul. But at that press conference, Captain Atom makes some new towers to replace the ones that fell on 9/11. There’s some assassin who’s rushing up to take out Harley but Adam teleports him to jail without even appearing to notice that it’s happened. That seems significant, but I can’t tie it in to anything else at this time.

Cut to Adam sitting on a park bench with his old dog Butch and reeeeally out of it as Harley approaches. Adam calls him the president, but subsequent dialogue reveals that he is just a governor. There’s a crazy deal here where Adam uses his powers to instantaneously not as much dissect poor Butch as separate him into his component parts. This of course immediately recalls Dr. Manhattan doing the same thing with his father’s watch, but that explicit comparison implies an interesting commentary on Morrison’s mindset to the material vs. Moore’s in the original. Whereas Moore takes a more mechanical craft-based approach, Morrison is far more humanistic and willing to roll his sleeves up, diving into the blood and guts of superhero comics to see what makes them tick, just as surgical as Moore but far less detached. One comes away from Moore’s material uncertain how much affection he even has left for this genre that at least at one time inspired him so much, but Morrison will clearly still have that big red S blazing under his shirt until the day he dies. And beyond!

Harley’s subsequent conversation with Adam irrefutably sets him up as our Ozymandias analogue. He discovered Algorithm 8 at his father’s graveside when he was twenty-three. He can see the new Dark Ages in the not-too-distant future. He puts forth the notion that the president has to be sacrificed in order to secure world peace. This is a very interesting permutation of Veidt’s plan, all but explicitly stating that the president was in on the assassination and that Peacemaker was acting upon the Chief Executive’s orders. Harley believes that Adam can resurrect him the same way he does with Butch a couple of pages back. All of this is apparently contained within “Major Max Meets Janus The Everywhere Man,” which it seems like is that issue of Major Comics that has been wrecking everything for everyone here for this entire series and which, by the way, was written and drawn by Harley’s father Vince.

Then, there’s a scene of some terrorists trying to get into President Bush’s White House and getting subdued by Peacemaker and his drones, all of which is narrated to the terrorist leader by Governor Harley. The significance of providing this scene to the reader at this point might be to illustrate the dichotomy of Peacemaker “loving peace so much he’s vowed to fight for it to the death.” That’s the genesis of the plan, right there. Same ironic goal as Veidt, the whole deal, this is just Harley putting himself in the role of sacrificial victim instead of half of New York City. Which makes the whole deal much more heroic, I believe we can all agree. This is confirmed by the following scene, the issue’s final post-assassination interrogation scene in which Peacemaker says that he was trying to “suvva worll.” He gets loose after that and manages an finger-gun “BANG!” in Eden’s direction before none other than the metal-fisted man, probably Sergeant Lane, decks him. Cut to that previous conversation with Nora when Peacemaker says that Harley said that he should be the victim because the punishment should fit the crime.

Then, we just back up to the early days of the Beetle/Question partnership and the latter causing a smack dealer to overdose on his own product at some basketball court. There’s a funny line about Question having to write something “badass and ironic” on his question card, but this page doesn’t really seem to contribute any answers to the narrative that I can discern, and its placement here seems to function mainly as a directional cue for the reader to show that we are now travelling backwards in time again. The next scene is Harley visiting his father’s grave across four different seasons, culminating with the Algorithm 8 revelation, which cranks up the situation on that panel-doubling pretty seriously, doubling so many times that there is a row of 256 goddamn panels across the middle of the page. Which I think means that there are 509 panels on this page. Okay, my brain is about cooked, now. Not even going to try to interpret that. One more scene to go. Okay.

Young Harley walks into his dad’s office and goes through a scrapbook. It’s a bunch of Yellowjacket clippings. The radio drops a long JFK quote, which you’ve got to do at this point in your WATCHMEN-homage situation. Young Harley starts playing with his dad’s gun. Yellowjacket (Vince Harley) comes back in through the window. He forgot his key but startles his son, which results in young Harley putting one right between Dad’s eyes. This is, of course, the crime that necessitates the punishment all of those years later. Young Harley holds up his father’s domino mask and it forms a möbius strip, which will go on to inspire him to see or compose Algorithm 8, as well as performing a nifty little tuck-in back to the beginning/end of this story, a perfect marriage of form and content. Oh, and there are the doves.

Okay. So, what I think happened is that Harley does in fact pull his little Ozymandias riff and orders Peacemaker to take him out but that he possibly expects that Adam will resurrect him. Only Vice-President Eden is a really bad dude and has Sergeant Lane coerce the four scientists to remove Adam from the equation before killing them, thus preventing Harley’s resurrection and leaving Eden in control, which is in keeping with the rest of the issues of this series ending in a really terrible place for all concerned. The only thing that I’m not really sure about is the extent of this that is revealed by Algorithm 8, how much both Harley and Nora knew before dying. Learning the secret of Algorithm 8 is clearly what caused Nora to be killed. Did Eden order this so that Harley’s equation would die with her after Harley’s assassination? Did Eden know Algorithm 8? Shouldn’t Harley have been aware of Eden’s machinations through Algorithm 8? Did everything, in fact, go according to his plan?

Just zooming in on this issue with this level of clarity has about sucked me dry, but I want to close by stating that my expectations for this issue could not have been higher and that they were surpassed. This is Morrison and Quitely both firing at the top of their game with Nathan Fairbairn and letterer Rob Leigh doing more than their share of heavy lifting to make this thing so much more clearer than it otherwise might have been. But, oh, it makes my brain hurt and my heart sing. It doesn’t get better than this, folks.

BATMAN AND ROBIN #36 — The Bring-Back-Damian arc in The New 52’s strongest and most consistently magnificent title continues. Gleason’s cover was so great, I had to bail out on the LEGO variant. Seriously, give those kids their own show on Fox Mondays after you-know-what! Bruce continues to dispense all manner of badassery in this issue. Dude even turns off the voice telling him all the horrible things that are breaking down on Page Three, even. That’s going to come back and bite him later on. A weird moment for me when our hero happens upon that crazy battle-tank and drops the classic, “I’m Batman!” For the first time, instead of thinking of Keaton dropping that seriousness in 1989 or even the Christian Bale cover-version of 2005, I could only hear it in the voice of whomever says those words for those wonderful “How It Should Have Ended” shorts. Kind of messed with the story flow for me a bit. That’s a terrific long shot of the team running up to the chaos cannon. And a perfect last page. This thing is going to read aces in trade, but it’s pretty sweet, savoring that shadow for an entire month.

FUTURES END #29 — All right, well I guess this business was important enough that we quit jumping around and just stayed with one cast of characters for this week. Would that they didn’t give away the big ending on the cover. I mean, it’s right there, man! Ryan Sook is so good. Patch Zircher is once again on interiors and pretty much locking down artistic MVP on this book at this point, fella keeps showing up and just putting it down. It looks like all kinds of Arrow & Barda fun next week, so hoorah.

BATMAN ETERNAL #33 — The shit has now really and truly hit the fan as Batman and newly promoted field agent Penny-Two race to lock down the seventeen weapons caches before Hush (who even has a stupid name, I’m realizing all these years later; oh, how that Jim Lee art blinds you!) can blow them all up and rob more Gotham families of their loved ones. Jason Fabok stays onboard for another round of finished pencils before jumping ship for the big show, and he once again turns in nothing but dynamic A-list business. DC really has found a deep reservoir of talent in this guy who I don’t know anything about but it seems like he is very much a child of the Lee/McFarlane nineties who has also studied Capullo’s evolution along the way and matured into his own style that is reminiscent of these influences but still very much his own. Character-wise, I love how Julia talks Bruce into letting her come out and then only makes it to her fourth panel out in the city before starting to question him and rake him over the coals for the whole underground weapons cache boondoggle. Which is a hell of a band name if anybody needs one.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #36 — I bailed on this title when Jim Lee did, was not a fan of the character dynamics that Johns had crackling for that entire first year. But I do like that Jason Fabok boy and wanted to support his ascendance to the ultimate big-time, so gave this one a look. It’s solid. Luthor in the League is definitely an interesting dynamic (and plays much better than that nonsense Bendis was running a few years back with Norman Osborne in Nick Fury’s old gig). The premise for this arc is compelling. Fabok once again knocks every single page out of the park, and his Outbreak Batsuit is a rocking character design. I’ll be back to see how it all goes down next month.

WONDER WOMAN #36 — I always reread the issues before writing them up so that I can blend my full-on going-for-broke Lone-Star-attack Wednesday night first impressions with a more nuanced pass through with more of a focus on the actual craft of the thing. For this reread, I waited until I had what felt like a particularly heavy bowel movement on deck. Because as talented of an artist as David Finch is, to say nothing of his collaborators Richard Friend & Sonia Oback, this thing manages to take a dump all over Azzarello/Chiang’s run in a mere twenty pages. Hell, in the first five. We open with a narrative caption montage about water. It is essential to life, you know, but too much of it can also lead to death. With this stunning juxtaposition between grass growing in the fields and floods destroying a city out of the way, we stop off at the statue of Hippolyta where the line “evidence of our sorrow” is oh-so-achingly presented alongside the image of rain trickling down from stone-Hippolyta’s eyes. As if the statue were crying, you see. People have got to stop copying thirty-year-old Alan Moore tricks. And then there’s some guy standing on top of a dam who might have caused this flood? And there’s Swamp Thing. All of this grand discussion has been in service of what we’ve been waiting more than three years for, an entire page of Diana doing nothing but washing blood off of her naked body in the shower before we turn the page and there she is, a full body shot of The God of War emerging from that self-same shower wearing a towel. Looking hot, Mama! This is the Wonder Woman we deserve. Nuanced.

I have made no bones about the fact that Azzarello did a great job loading this book up with a compelling ensemble, almost to the detriment of the lead herself occasionally, but it was always a good ride and they were all (with the exception of Orion, who still mainly hung around here) unique to this book. Well, Pages Eight and Nine are a double-page splash of the Justice League. And Swamp Thing shows up a couple of pages later basically so Diana can have someone to lose her temper against and fight. Because all of those dead women and children made her emotional, see. Then Aquaman just straight walks out of the jungle to fly Diana back home. And that’s such a weird thing. The League was all together, Batman said, “Let’s move,” it cuts to Wonder Woman attacking Swamp Thing to burn pages, and then Arthur takes her home. Best part of the issue is that they spend the flight with her holding and then nuzzling a teddy bear while providing an info-dump of the status quo post-Azzarello/Chiang’s run for all the folks who had been skipping one of the best books of The New 52 but who are now totally in because of that smokin’ Finch cover. Art notwithstanding, this comic would be very average without any context. Following up on what’s come before, it is downright insulting.

FABLES #146—Things are moving right along as the entire gang pretty votes to kill Bigby with Miss Duglas as his only hope of mercy from the merciless hand of Willingham. It looks like next issue is going to be really good.

ZERO #12 — This is an interesting short blast. I didn’t care too much about the opening scene, but the brief follow-up in the back end saved it for me. Once again, I’ve never heard of this Adam Gorham, but he comes out of nowhere to provide interiors that are a terrific fit to everything we’ve seen in this title before, stylistically speaking. I guess it’s too much to hope that #13 will just be what Zero is seeing in his file, there.

MORNING GLORIES #42 — This feels like a denser read than they have lately. Twenty-eight pages for $3.50, that is some quality! Sometimes, it’s hard finding something to talk about these singles that Meylikhov doesn’t already cover in the backmatter. It is a little funny, his last heading quoting one of the catchphrases of that latest BATTLESTAR GALACTICA just a few pages after Isabel just goes ahead and drops John Locke’s all-time classic “Everything happens for a reason” into her campaign speech. I guess Spencer had to mark the #42 somehow. This book has got me so twisted around that when Georgina first walked in, I thought that she was maybe Casey from the future and undercover? Those glasses really do make one hell of a disguise.

ASTRO CITY #17 — Well, shut my mouth! When we jump to Honor Guard having Red Cake Day there on the bottom of Page Three, I thought that Busiek finally caved and, mysterious first-person narrative captions notwithstanding, was going to give us just a straight JLA-type issue after all of these years. Silly me. Of course this story is still about some random dude, even if he’s an alien. The character design made it a little confusing for me, though, I spent the entire issue that Stormhawk, whose face we see in the first two pages, is also that The Assemblyman fellow who’s there with the rest of Honor Guard, like those Quiqui-A folks were making reparations by somehow dreaming him into a new identity or something? Maybe it was just me, but there was some disconnect in the issue when it just turned out that they were two guys who looked very much alike.

FANTASTIC FOUR #013 — That goddang Bentley-23 finally shows his true colors while several guest stars make an appearance. Robinson brings in Namor to hang out with Hammond and remind us that they are Invaders and then drops Fraction’s FF team into the mix again, if only for a couple of panels. And why not the Inhumans, as well? After so much strife, it’s good to get almost everyone back together. Though I have to say, the red uniforms didn’t last long enough! So much for “The Man’s” “illusion of change.” I like how Sue took the time to cut her hair short while they were changing back into blues for that last page. And really, if that was going to be the final beat for this issue, seems like maybe they shouldn’t have defused it prematurely and saved the reveal for next issue’s cover.

DAREDEVIL #010 — Another quality issue from one of the most consistent teams working today. This is really a pretty painless resolution to a situation that could have gone much worse. Waid does a commendable job of once again not stringing anything out but keeping the story beats drum-tight. Samnee/Wilson continue to turn in absolutely beautiful work. It will be a sad day when this team decides that they’re done with the character.

AVENGERS·X-MEN: AXIS #6 — It should have occurred to me before now, but Remender is swinging at Geoff-Johns levels of fanboyhood. It’s not just a gig to the guy, he knows these characters, as evidenced by having Kurt & Rogue come after Mystique and then the great inversion of Sabretooth hiding from them in the Morlock tunnels, of all places. The Dodsons’ drawing Magneto & the kids visiting Vic out in Latveria is very reminiscent of Cheung’s last romp with that gang back in THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE. And Inverted Thor vs. Truth-Telling Loki is a pretty great dynamic and could have lasted a few more pages to my liking. I’m digging this series as it rounds the bend into the third act. It knows what it is, isn’t trying too hard, and is telling an entertaining yarn. And seems like Cheung is going to be on hand pretty soon, so, good fun for all.

UNCANNY X-MEN #028 — Bendis really has no problem not stacking his singles full of ensemble juggling in favor of crafting basically one major scene and a brief minor one to vary the tone and flow. It was a nice touch having Hank pitch a fit say that Scott Summers was right but then pretty on-the-nose to then just a few pages later have Scott tell us that Charles Xavier was, in fact, not right. We get it, Bendis! Kris Anka shows up and provides another round of more-than-solid B-team interiors, but they really shouldn’t have Chris Bachalo’s name on the cover. That just sets a brother up to disappoint folks, no matter how talented he is.

AVENGERS #039 — Hickman is just light years ahead of everybody, man. I know that prior to THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS, he was serious about outlining everything out beforehand, and I can’t imagine what this must have looked like a couple of years back or how it’s mutated and metastasized since then. This issue is nothing but moving more pieces into place. We know about Old Man Steve’s S.H.I.E.L.D. crew and we know about the Illuminati folks and we know at least that there is a cabal, but that’s not enough, so now here we’ve got fucking Sunspot of all people having bought up Advanced Idea Mechanics and rallying his own contingent, poaching Natasha and Jessica from Steve, and even having Hank drop by Cyclops’s new digs at the old Weapon X complex to report on the doings of the Illuminati. Yeah, not much happens here except extraordinary people in equally extraordinary situations orbiting one another, strategizing for the imminent endgame. Oh, and now Shang-Chi is infinite, the Masters of Kung-Fu!

NEW AVENGERS #026 — Ditto. Another really heavy slab of sequentials. Those of us who read the other issue first had no doubt about the identity of those two armored folks in the opening scene, but it just heightened the suspense. It’s always wonderful to see Valeria Richards drop in for a few pages of Hickman scripting. Bentley-23 offering Doom franchise opportunities was a really nice touch. But then, that’s of course the only way it could have gone down with Tony or the ladies. This one is another really powerful single. Trade-readers in the future are really missing out on watching this elaborate labyrinthine masterpiece unfold across the months and years one slice at a time.

ANNIHILATOR #3 — Ray & Max really start sinking their teeth into it here as Morrison dials up the meta- just a bit, and we get more scenes of their interaction. It turns out Max isn’t an original creation at all but an old public domain character from weird stories penned between 1910 and 1970. This whole deal is work-for-hire! Irving does some wonderful work across a variety of styles while providing the various covers for those prose editions of the old adventures. There’s even a Simonson riff on some interior sequential panels for an Italian comic book. But now Makro is in the guise of Ray Spass! So, this whole deal is probably Ray going all Tyler Durden, we think? The bottom is starting to drop out in the last pages of this issue. It looks like next month will be even more unhinged than we’ve already seen.