3/06/13

BEST OF WEEK: NEMO: HEART OF ICE — (coming soon, just too much to write about here alone, never mind all these issues and my birthday/SXSW week, sorry for the cop-out, but here's a peek. It really is BEST OF WEEK, oh my!)

DETECTIVE COMICS #18 — Now, this one made me wish that Editorial was just keeping Morrison’s INCORPORATED run contained in a post New 52 pocket universe of some sort like I assumed was the case, because this issue’s motoring along kicking as much ass as it has since the first issue of the run and then all of a sudden we’ve got to crash to a halt and mourn the dead son, suddenly bringing everything into continuity and making us wonder, okay wait, so this is happening after BATMAN INCORPORATED #8, but the first thing Bruce does is go mess with all the Cobblepot/Emperor Penguin mess? But is Talia/Leviathan still running around? Or does all this take place after Morrison and Burnham are done? I’m usually great at distancing titles from one another, Wolverine can run around with however many crews he likes, but when we’re specifically referencing the Snyder/Capullo thing that just got done crossing over here and then it’s like everything had to pause for the last three months of Morrison/Burnham to happen and now we're back with the Layman/Fabok greatness, only then we finally get the proper Morrison/Burnham aftermath I hope pretty soon, I’m just not really seeing the synergistic gain in fusing all of those stories, it completely interrupted the flow and took me out of the greatness that these guys in this title have been delivering since Page One of #13. Also, while I’m bitching, how dare Mike Marts drop an OMG in a footnote to this august title? I cannot envision Mr. Schwartz accepting this in good conscience and must therefore also condemn such an act.

ANIMAL MAN #18 — This cover has a melodramatic promise to keep! Especially considering what’s gone before. But these guys deliver on all levels, providing almost tidy resolution to all of the madness that has befallen the Bakers thus far. Great to see the thing reversed with Maxine, but then of course, somebody’s got to pay the price. So terrible. And odd synchronistic parallel to what’s unfolding elsewhere in the DC Universe. I won’t go into further specifics, but suffice it to say that Lemire/Pugh/Kindzierski turn in probably the best issue of this volume yet, which is really saying something.

SWAMP THING #18 — And but that’s just the warmup for Snyder/Paquette’s swan song on this title. I barely know how to talk about it. What a stirring, emotional climax, as well earned as it was absolutely heartbreaking. This ranks amongst one of Snyder’s very best scripts. Paquette is a god. I honestly don’t think I can pick up the next issue because I just need this one to be The End so badly. Perfect.

GREEN ARROW #18 — All right, I’m starting to break up a bit, here. Leading off with an hour’s worth of new Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill business might not have been the call for sustained longevity. Andrea Sorrentino draws real good.

GREEN LANTERN #18 — Wait, didn’t #17 just come out? Was it late? Or is this early? Or they wanted to synch up the Green ______ books because that worked out so well for the Vertigo expatriates? At any rate, we finally tune in to what’s going on with Hal and his buddy SInestro in the death dimension chamber of shadows or wherever with Ardian Syaf and Mark Irwin providing suitably ominous visuals. Though that is some kind of weak cliffhanger, who in their right mind is supposed to feel the least bit of tension or high stakes about that? Unless it’s a joke? Cliffhanger? Do it, Hal! Jump!

RORSCHACH #4 — Rorschach gets the shit kicked out of him by disco. I guess that sounds about right. Lee Bermejo’s work is absolutely glorious in sequentials, we are lucky that he takes the time to produce pages instead of just getting rich off of covers and prints. Azzarello delivers a script that is completely tonally consistent with the in-between Rorschach of its time period, neither Kovacs pre-dead-dog nor the character we encounter on the first page of the original series. But there’s really not enough weight to this narrative, no apparent reason that this story needed to be told (not counting just getting to see Bermejo’s art). It took until the last issue of Cooke’s MINUTEMEN for that one to earn its keep, he and Conner’s SILK SPECTRE was of course perfection from the first page, and I have hopes for the final issues of OZYMANDIAS and COMEDIAN, but this one, while managing to in no way contradict a single shred of extant characterization of this beloved vigilante madman, also doesn’t reveal anything about him that we didn’t already know.

FASHION BEAST #7 — This one definitely left me a bit cold as a single issue. Too much of the camera work is stiff in a way that it either didn’t or I failed to notice earlier on, like Percio’s running out of gas. The static staging felt a bit stiff. Am still interested to see where it’s going to go but am now fairly certain that it would make a much better single-sitting read, as it was originally intended (single-sitting viewing, if you want to split hairs, but same difference).

GLORY #34 — Oh, okay, wow, I didn’t realize this was ending. I mean, I kind of had a feeling, the way it’s been going here, but it was really a shock when a couple of those beloved characters just totally ate it. Keatinge wrings as much emotion out of that camera collection as possible, nice work. The real star of the show here, though, of course, is Ross Campbell, who lays waste to page after page of magnificent battle wreckage. And I love how Keatinge brings back the ripping-off-arms motif again, it started off as almost like a parody of the hyper-violent ultra-gory Image 90s and how that kind of got homogenized into the mainstream a bit by way of the Geoff Johns DCU of the 00s, and that was enough of a joke for me, but its return here suddenly feels like the only way this could have gone. “You rip off my arm? I rip off YOUR arm!” This has been a hell of a run.

DAREDEVIL: END OF DAYS #6 — The tension is becoming unbearable. Urich’s exchange with his son is a strong bit of character work to kind of ground this whole thing before it surely spirals off completely out of control. Could the new DD be the redhead playing pool in the bar when Ben’s talking to the Bugle? It certainly doesn’t look like a woman in costume, but then they do make a deal out of backlighting him/her, and the redhead is certainly prominent in the layout, up in the top left corner, the first thing we see in that crowd scene and then also the last, reflected there in the far right of the last panel on the page. Or is it Natasha keeping tabs on him? Or Matt’s daughter with same? I thought the Owl had Matt’s entire head the first panel when he busted out that mask. Not what you want to keep in your desk drawer, Leland! And another cliffhanger that ratchets up the stakes a few more notches. These last two issues are going to be madness, I have no doubt.

AGE OF ULTRON: BOOK ONE — Am only just now much later seeing Hawkeye there on the cover and feel kind of foolish. So this is the batshit insanity that they dropped on us last Free Comic Book Day. This thing has been in the can for a while now! The full issue doesn’t give us any more exposition as to exactly what happened other than Ultron Won, and that’s maybe a good thing. The Hitch/Neary/Mounts artwork is exquisite, no one can give you grandiose metropolitan superheroic shenanigans like these guys. I’m so glad Millar isn’t scripting this. This is a pretty successful first issue that drops you right in the middle of the horror and doesn’t let up until the last page. Though I wish Bendis wouldn’t have hyped up the insanity of the ending so much. It was perfectly serviceable but kind of a quiet thing, a bit of a letdown if you’re looking for some mind-blowing last page. Maybe I just can’t stand the sight of Steve Rogers pouting in the corner. But at any rate, I already feel like for me this is going to mitigate my feeling that Bendis’s AVENGERS run didn’t go out with anything approaching a bang, just a straight lateral to Hickman, but the thunder is here in the near future and it should be a hell of a thing.

ALL-NEW X-MEN #008 — As beautifully as Marquez stages every page, in terms of solely narrative content, I am damn sure we did not need half of this book to be two Angels versus H.Y.D.R.A. agents at Avengers Tower. I guess you can counter that if one goes ahead and signs up to pay eight bucks for forty pages of a book per month, then they can do whatever they want and you just have to eat it, but with this fantastic ensemble of characters whose beats Bendis has thus far been nailing scene after scene, it was a damn shame to suddenly just be hanging out with a couple of Angels for over half the book. Especially if you’re going to go ahead and throw in the Avengers, too. That’s like thirty characters you’re neglecting in favor of our present-tense Warren flying around basically going “Woo-woo!” at his teenage self. Even if it’s all in service of setting up the last scene with Jean, that’s still just a woeful lack of balance. Of course, Kitty & Bobby providing dialogue for the Captain America/Beast exchange turns the entire thing around and still leaves the reader with his or her money’s worth, just that page alone. Hilarious.

AVENGERS #007 — The return of 616 nomenclature! Thank you, Hickman, I’ve never understand current Marvel editorial’s disdain for it. Let me just get the obligatory If-Dustin-Weaver-had-time-to-draw-this-then-where-the-hell-are-the-last-two-issues-of-S.H.I.E.L.D.?!? question out of the way and move on. So, I was thinking the White Event was the initial inciting incident that set off the chain reaction over in NEW AVENGERS, but they happen all the time across the multiverse? Maybe it’s still the original one from the New Universe, though it is doubtful that Kenneth Connell or our beloved D.P.7 will make an appearance. Hickman is cribbing a bit from Ellis’s aborted relaunch of a few years ago, setting up those certain characters as archetypal roles that must be filled, universal ushers. And maintaining the Psi-ForceàCipher switch. I’m never going to read a comic book about Psi-Hawk again, am I? This one reads a little skinny with those single-page red herrings that I guess are intended to only highlight that the actual new Star Brand guy is kind of an asshole. Because all those other people got toasted? We’ll see. I dug this, but it really just made me want to read the next one right away. Which I guess is the point. And the wait will not be long. NOW!

2/27/13

BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN INCORPORATED #8 — Like most folks, I hated Damian’s guts the second I saw him there on the last page of Morrison’s first issue. Andy Kubert did a really fine job making you detest him right away with only that single shot, just his body language. This negative impression dramatically increased with successive issues. The first time he kind of made me chuckle was when he tried to kill Tim in the Batcave. And this is nothing against young Master Drake, it was just the sheer psychosis of the action, Damian’s commitment to his own greatness and simultaneous obliviousness to his current situation really appealed to me. Admit it. There’s something immediately likeable about the notion of Batman’s son trying to straight-up for real murder Robin the very first chance he catches the guy alone in the cave.

#666 will forever be close to my heart because it came out the day before we went to Comic-Con ’07 and I was an enormous fan of the way that rather than finish out the third part of an in-progress arc, Morrison flash-forwarded into a future in which Damian wore the cowl, had a cat named Alfred, and could barely stay ahead of Commissioner Barbara Gordon, who hated his guts for being responsible for the death of Batman, though there was immediately doubt about whether it was Bruce or Dick in the cowl that night. And I brought the issue along with me just so I could keep reading it over and over, even though of course I had stacks and stacks of business to get signed by professionals who had scheduled signings, but I was such a newb, I didn’t realize that just because Morrison didn’t have a specified session advertised on the website didn’t mean he wouldn’t be signing autographs at the DC booth just any old time, and so it turned out that #666 was the only issue of the massive amount of his catalogue that I had in my possession when I finally got to meet him and get charged up, and so then there was that.

And then I never wanted Bruce to come back. When Dick & Damian took over, it was the most dynamic thing to happen in years. The book was fun again, in a way that I didn’t realize that it still had the potential for or that I needed it to be. It was madcap. The Boy Wonder openly mocking his supposed mentor and counting down the days until he took up the mantle while barely sparing the time to condescend to “Pennyworth,” with us knowing that he’s going to be directly responsible for the death of (probably this) Batman and then name his only familiar after the butler, the first name that he will not at this time utter, just such a dense and terribly poignant journey all tucked up in there. It only lasted a little more than two years but it felt like an era. I was so sorry when it had to end. And Bruce Wayne is maybe my favorite character ever. To such an extent, though, see, that I almost didn’t even need him, he was so resonant that just his legacy was more than enough. Or the best possible thing, even.

Enter Peter Tomasi. He and cohorts Patrick Gleason and Mick Gray did the unthinkable and actually expanded upon Damian’s character in ways that not only complemented what had come before but enhanced it in heretofore unimagined directions. “Born To Kill,” the initial arc of the current volume, is a tour de force story of a father and son battling to overcome the programming and trauma wrought upon them by a cruel and capricious world while trying to accept and love and change one another for what each truly believes to be the best. And then that annual. One of the best done-in-ones I can remember hitting, every beat perfectly placed. And #17. Gah. Talking about this is too hard. Let’s just look at the issue.

The first page, airborne Damian POV on the way in to save the day, is a perfect thing. Four horizontal panels stacked on top of one another provide a cinematic widescreen sensation and perfectly even pacing with which to begin. That first bit of dialogue mirrors the utterance of his killer clone at the moment of death, the trademark “*TT*” followed up by the line that just cuts you up when you go back through knowing exactly what’s coming, “WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITHOUT ME, GRAYSON?” We’ll know soon enough. Also, you’ve right out of the gate got to be paying all kinds of attention, Burnham’s already packing it in there, on this last panel you can see the kid right behind Gordon at the top of the panel cocking back the bat, about to just open up the back of Nightwing’s head before we do the page turn and see that Damian’s knocked him head-over-heels airborne, suspended there right in between the line of sight between Dick and Damian. 

And then you could spend an hour just breaking down Burnham’s choices for panel layout and composition on Page Five. The askew interlocking situation he’s got going there combined with the varied camera angles and consistently depicting the edges of Batman’s body straining off-panel, all of that combines to do a fantastic subliminal job recreating the claustrophobic deathtrap of the world’s greatest detective locked in a safe at the bottom of a swimming pool, all of this escalating tension only partially released by that single bubble floating up the final seventh vertical panel, but of course it really just makes everything much tenser because it highlights what we already know: time’s expiring, Talia’s already stated that she’s got this all calculated to the last micro-second so that once he does in fact break out of there (which we all know he must and will), it will be Too Late.

Jason Masters does a fine job with the thankless task of trying to fill in on the Red Robin scene on this of all issues. It’s not Burnham, but it’s close, barely jarring, really, those askew layouts were clearly made with an eye on keeping the entire issue integrated. Much appreciated. And then, of course, we could watch Damian beat the shit out of a mob of hypnotized hammer-wielding children for two issues straight.

Page Twelve. This is where the tide rises, the orchestra swells. Dick & Damian’s final conversation. Everything you need is right here. Dick Grayson saying “ROBIN THE BOY WONDER, DAMIAN,” to his mentor and surrogate father’s son is a profound thing because there have never and (it’s going to take a serious serious run of writing in the years to come to overturn the) will never be two people who better understand what it means to be The Boy Wonder. To swing through that city with that man and support him and complement him in all the hundreds of ways that you must if you are to both survive the night. After all of the all of the shit that Damian shoveled on Dick while he was wearing that cowl, taking the time here to have him say that he was his favorite partner and that they were really the best, no matter what anyone thinks, man, at that point I had tears in my eyes, the little bastard was exactly right, I had been thinking the same thing all along. And then the perfectly in-character cavalier way that Dick defuses the emotional weight of the scene with bravado, only five words. With the weight of what is to come looming but yet a few, too few, pages off, those last two panels on the twelfth page hit me as hard as any piece of storytelling I can bring to mind, the payoff and sendoff to years of shifting identities and assumed legacies and heroism and earned respect and brotherhood, most of all. Those boys were brothers in every way that matters.

I’m not doing well here, this is still damaging me so badly even a full week later. But there are two more pages of the good fun, a sweet little callback to the sound-effects laced halcyon days of Adam West and Burt Ward, and really, that’s what I was trying to say before about when these guys were Batman & Robin. It wasn’t campy like that, but it had the same sense of zany Day-Glo fun. All of which comes to an end when the Damian clone makes his entrance. The momentum comes crashing to a halt in every sense right there on the top of Page Fifteen when the duo recreates their signature double-punch, which previously has always served as the resolution to an arc but here indicates the turning of the tables. There is no happy ending to be found here.

Damian never breaks character. As far as he’s come, he’s still the pampered little aristocrat calling out for his mother to put an end to this and fully expecting her to do so. And invoking his father as a battle cry.

Okay. I’m done. I’m sorry. Can’t do the last pages, any more pages, under this level of magnification. The twenty-panel page is brilliant, a tragic callback to the tiny-panel fight scene pages that Quitely and later Stewart employed to such devastating effect back on the original volume of BATMAN AND ROBIN. Burnham is really pushing himself, the material is inspiring him to new heights of greatness. That final double-page splash, the glass breaking as the panels, all very smart stuff. On the last page, Burnham pulls off the obligatory reference to the classic Aparo Batman-holding-Robin's-lifeless-body shot before ending things as low as they can go. We've come to expect the final panel of this series to actually provide a scene from the following issue, but this one is tiny tiny Burnham sequence of nothing but Batman's grief-stricken face fading to black. Next issue, our hero succumbs to darkness.

From the standpoint of page flow, it’s wonderful that that CONSTANTINE preview at the back means we get this issue almost entirely ad-free. However. It would have been really swell if the one ad that does appear did so on the opposite page rather than breaking up the story at the last possible opportunity. When the decision is to roll without advertising for 21 straight pages, it’s kind of a dick move to suddenly throw up an ad featuring Jim Lee Superman right there the page after you stab Robin to death. Even nastier, for just a split-second, I believed everything could still be all right. If anybody is ever going to fly in out of nowhere and impossibly save the day, Jim Lee Superman is your guy. Of course, this kind of thing happens with some amount of regularity, he’s actually the third Robin to go, but this feels different. I’ve never been this invested. I think I might at last know what it felt like to read AMAZING SPIDER-MAN in 1973 or X-MEN in 1980, how the sudden death of a fictional character can just gut you in ways that shouldn’t be possible.

I really loved that kid. It has been a source of great delight to follow his path these past seven years. He rose up from darkness and trained and fought as hard as he could to overcome a dire set of circumstances and chose to do right, to help people and make the world a better place. Because it was the right thing to do, but mainly, I think, because it’s exactly what his father did, and he loved his father more than anything in the world. It's surprising and staggering to what an extent his death has wrecked me, how much I’m going to miss him. And I can’t begin to fathom what this is going to do to his father is maybe the worst part of all.

Damian Wayne. May he rest in peace.

*  *  *  *

FLASH #17 — The great big Gorilla Warfare finale! This one had to operate at a breakneck velocity simply to avoid a drop in the momentum that’s been steadily escalating since this arc began, and, surprising no one, Manapul & Buccellato deliver once again. This might be the best art of this series so far, and that’s really saying something. The two-page spread of Iris about to get trampled by the wooly mammoth then getting rescued is one of my favorite Flash bits ever, the continuity doesn’t matter, it’s just pure undiluted super-speed perfection. And of course, with all being well, Barry is left to wonder if he’s even charting the right course for himself while we readers are privy to the imminent arrival of his ultimate nemesis, a character they were smart to keep on the bench until now, as his arrival is sure to raise the stakes of this title to a heretofore unimagined extent. A year and a half in, this remains one of the most consistently rewarding titles of the New 52. Here’s to these guys hitting #50 just in time to ring in old 2016!

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #17 — Beyond wonderful to have Frank quote Morrison’s “Nothing is impossible!” This one’s definitely hurtling along to the climax of everything that Lemire’s been building up to since hopping on board. Jeromy Cox’s colors are a beautiful fit for Mikel Janin’s lines. Though I’m still not over how clean everything looks, how un-Vertigo and anti-Sienkiewicz it all is. I guess that’s the point. I’m still hanging out here, but if Lemire bails, I probably will as well.

THE UNWRITTEN #46 — Carey/Gross manage to keep the tale captivating without our protagonist yet again. Savoy and Didge have got what it takes to carry any sort of undead buddy-cop scenario that might present itself and Madame Rausch gets a level-up that will surely factor in to the landscape in the months to come. Now, we can has a superior tangential done-in-one next month, please?

THE MASSIVE #9 — The last issue of this arc ends quite a bit less explosively than it potentially might have. At least on-panel, Wood reserves the real fireworks for the closing captions in the final panel. Which some folks might call Foul on, but I’m okay with. Garry Brown and Dave Stewart continue to provide quality art for Wood’s tale of what happens when the world ends.

PROPHET #34 — Simon Roy slides back into rotation on co-plotting and art as a gang of Johns makes it to a domus, a central Prophet hub that’s channeling kind of a Hrothgar’s-mead-hall vibe, and there is a council of war and also the best naked-dude knife-fighting scene since Viggo in EASTERN PROMISES, no problem. This one moves the madness along just as well as we’ve come to expect and thank you, but the real surprise of this issue is the back-up story by Matt Sheean & Malachi Ward, whose work is so swell, they get to have the cover. In just five pages, these guys do fine work dialing us into the mindset of a doomed architect who’s been chosen to be the sacrifice to keep his city’s ecosystem going in some unexplained arrangement with a creature that lives to the east. This is a really sparse little feature, very much a horror sci-fi anthology feel, CREEPY meets 2000 A.D. I actually am unable upon further readings to identify exactly what facet of it works so well for me, they just hit the right narrative alchemy and I’m onboard to see what happens to this guy next, now that his journey is surely only beginning.

UNCANNY AVENGERS #004 — This one right here is more than worth the wait as Cassaday/Martin hand in pages that deliver plenty of crackling climactic action and big moments but never at the cost of telling the story as cleanly as possible. Remender has really elevated his already high-level game here, weaving a tale that seems to flow naturally from character motivations and the continuities of Marvel’s two biggest franchises, making this seem more like an inevitable culmination of events up until now rather than a callous attempt to bleed fanboys dry by way of simple franchise addition/collision. No mean feat. The double-shot of Havok and Wanda vs Thor followed by the text detailing what Wanda puts herself through in order to take Thor out of action is, in particular, a strong exchange. And of course those last two pages are complete and glorious batshit insanity. Can’t wait to find out if this is just the new status quo for this series or only a glimpse into the future or what. Pretty sure Cassaday will bail out after this arc, but hope he comes back for the third or fourth. A hell of a good time to be had, here.

UNCANNY X-MEN #002 — Bendis makes with more of the talky-talk and Bachalo throws down serious sequential justice page after page. Not a lot happens in this issue outside of Scott and Emma defining for them and for us where they stand and then we get some character development for these new mutants and some demon witch snark from Illyana, but Bendis has such a fine ear for dialogue and Bachalo’s pages are so gorgeous, I really didn’t mind.

FF #004 — This is almost a filler issue, in that there’s not a terrible amount of advancement in the overall narrative and you get the sense that the creators are just having fun goofing off a bit. That said, I’ll pay to watch this team finger-paint riveting mud canvasses on cave walls if that’s where their artistic impulses take them. A tiny bit of the issue is dedicated to making us question the validity of future doomsaying Uncle Johnny (which is in turn undermined with the final page revelation) before we get to the meat of the issue, Bentley-23 and the Moloids trying to sabotage a date between She-Hulk and that mainstay of the Byrne years, good old Wyatt Wingfoot. It’s not much of a plot twist to have the kids actually enhance the date rather than wreck it, but like I said, the sense of fun conveyed through the situational dialogue but most particularly the art is more than enough to carry the issue through any bits that would seem too zany or ludicrous in the hands of lesser men and women. Good clean fun here, certainly more than you’d expect in a book in which seventy-five percent of the Fantastic Four have allegedly been killed by a triumvirate of Dr. Doom, Kang, and Annihilus from an alternate timeline.

HAWKEYE #008, I KILL YOU, BRO — This book can be barreling along better than you think it’s ever been even yet and so far, despite the blistering and totally deserved levels of love and hype heaped upon it, but then Kate Bishop drops in with only three panels of glory and lays waste to all that has come before or will follow. Annie Wu’s covers are a treasure and actually manage to factor into the plot in a clever way. Glad to see this book’s principal femme fatale return, Clint is never more entertaining than when he’s fumbling over his business with that Penny. Aja & Hollingsworth, though, my God, still.

YOUNG AVENGERS #002 — Even with half of the team not along for the ride, there is still plenty to enjoy about this issue. Of course the super-clean McKelvie/Norton linework or Matthew Wilson’s perfectly chosen palette or the way Kid Loki can bop in and out of pocket dimension panels like it’s no problem in between ordering diner grub, but I’m not sure this one ever gets better than the credits page explicitly stating where we all first read the word “Manichean,” and there’s nothing wrong with that. The only way this one might have been better is if we cut away for like two pages to Kate & Noh-varr plunging through orbit post-postcoitus-SkrullAttack. Dialing into that fun couple not only would have scrambled up the flow and made these twenty pages feel a bit denser but not doing so heightens the cruelty of not returning to them after last issue’s first five pages by continuing the blackout for another full issue. Gillen knows what he’s doing, the sadist.

2/20/13

ACTION COMICS #17 — The climax that could not be contained! This was supposed to be the last issue of the Morrison/Morales/Walker run, but all the madness spilled over into #18 (which, incidentally, that’s got to be daunting for Diggle/Daniel on the follow-up run, bad enough they’ve got to follow Morrison but even worse when his finale surges up and claims their inaugural issue). And the pace is relentless, I’ve got four jump-cuts between scenes in the opening Death of the Kents montage alone, which roars right by in the first three pages. The art team does well hammering home the brutality of that Super-Doomsday on Page Seven, cranks it up to almost a Kirby level of brute strength and physicality. Loved the one-two set-up of the Legion kids being the angels that Jonathan saw take Martha away, that was beautiful. Vyndktvx’s line on the last panel of Page Ten elevates the situation into a glorious new height of madness density, implying an upper-dimensional logic that we can just barely grasp well enough to fathom how incapable we are of understanding it. Just like hypercubes. And then the callback to #0. Having the bad guy stage a simultaneous attack across all of space and time is a fine way to optimize the situation that a single team has been telling this character’s story since the reboot and has seeded elements since the beginning that are only now beginning to pay off. And yes, a teleport rifle, of course. That last page is the only thing that could have happened, the best escalation possible. This run hasn’t been the diamond-cut gemstone perfection of what we got in ALL-STAR, but it has had enough flashes of brilliance to remain compelling throughout and I’m certainly going to miss it when these boys are done telling their tale of how an upstart anti-corporate socialist grew up to be the Man of Steel we know today. Or at least until the next reboot.

BATWOMAN #17 — Wowdamn. This issue is nothing less than the climax of everything that’s been going on since #1 and just when it can’t get any crazier, there’s the epilogue that hearkens all the way back to Kate’s first-ever arc that Williams crushed with Rucka a very few years ago back when DETECTIVE COMICS had three digits. Williams/Stewart pull no punches, every double-page layout is, as ever, a masterpiece of composition and dynamics, but owing to the climactic situation we have going here, this issue has a few more big moments packed in than we’re used to getting in a typical twenty-page hit. Just that opening shot of the tear in the fabric of reality alone, man. Dave Stewart is a beast. And Williams continues to choreograph the most exhilarating fight scenes coupled with the most jaw-dropping draftsmanship on the rack today. Beautiful beautiful work. I’m just afraid that he’s about to bail out on interiors, he said it was happening sometime relatively soon back in September and this would certainly be a high point from which to make his exit. That last moment between Kate and Mags is one for the ages.

WONDER WOMAN #17 — The neo-Greek family dynamic squabbling continues and we get quotes from GHOSTBUSTERS and EPISODE IV on successive pages. Tony Akins/Dan Green (with a little help from Amilcar Pinna) turn in their best looking issue yet, abetted by Matthew Wilson in the thankless task of alternating issues with Cliff Chiang. This was a more satisfying single than usual, fine work because Orion barely did anything, but as ever, I wanted the next issue as soon as I made it to the last page. Mission accomplished, purveyors of serial entertainment.

GREEN LANTERN #17 — Oh my goodness. Eagle-eyed readers will note that I bailed out on Johns’s run almost a year ago when he brought Black Hand back and put Carol back in the Star Sapphire suit and I realized I didn’t care about those things the first time they happened so why would I want to sit through them again? Cut to now, Johns is finally leaving after all of these years, and I just couldn’t stay on the sidelines to see how he was going to bring it all down. At first, I was just going to drop back in and make sense of what was going on as best I could, but when this Wednesday rolled around, I simply couldn’t do it, so God help me, I jammed every single page I had missed #s 8-12, the annual, and then #13-16. A lot of gorgeous Mahnke/Alamy pages with a special guest annual hit from the Right & Left Side of the comic book industry, Misters Ethan Van Sciver & Pete Woods. The big memorable moments, though, were remarkably thin for a year’s worth of stories. Everything kept chugging along and there were certainly cliffhangers, but nothing that particularly messed me up. Johns does immediately crank things up with this arc, though, taking us back to all those ur-shenanigans Krona was getting up to ten billion years ago on Oa. And in a very cool move, editorial recruited Phil Jimenez to pencil this prologue over Mahnke’s layouts to give the pages that magic Perez feeling. It’s kind of stunning that Johns keeps Sinestro and his beloved Hal benched for all but the final page of this issue and that Jordan doesn’t even get a line of dialogue, but everything moved along well enough and I remain curious to see how things are going to finish up.

VIBE #1 — This one got by me on Wednesday but when I realized I’d missed it, I had to head back in to check out what old Pete Woods and his writers had in store for a fellow who, let’s just say, does not top the majority of lists of great Justice League characters from the eighties. As further illustrated by a couple of recent DC Nation shorts, yeesh, I headed into this first issue a devout skeptic. But the crew won me over almost immediately. The art is top-notch and the story is engaging, dialing the reader right into the situation and banishing all thoughts of breakin’, radical though it may be. Linking his not-so-secret origin to Darkseid’s first incursion into Earthspace does a nice job taking advantage of the rebooted New 52 continuity and gives this character a weight and importance that was sorely lacking in the previous iteration.

FABLES #126 — It really is great to have this one back burning at full steam. I remain an enormous fan of the conceit of having Future Ambrose provide narration. Is that Blue Fairy sporting a pretty serious Mary Poppins vibe, a well? The encounter between Reynard and Gepetto is worth the cover price alone. And I have to say, as grim as Karen Berger “resigning” seemed for the fate of Vertigo 2013, that double-page spread has them sitting pretty at least in the short-term: new series from the rotting dynamic duo of Lemire/Snyder, FABLES and THE UNWRITTEN crossing over, the quite-possibly-in-no-way-awaited return of TIMEWARP, and Gaiman and Williams falling back into SANDMAN, pretty strong titles, all around.

HAPPY #4 — And this bloody fucking mess comes to the only possible conclusion. Well done, all around, these pages are as meticulously rendered as anything we’ve thus far seen from the hyper-detailed Darick Robertson and Morrison’s script managed to actually get me a little bit choked up at the end there, despite its quasi-Ennis bluster. Those twisted fucksacks always have a bit of beating heart buried deep down inside.

SAGA #10 — Oh, BKV just cannot resist those clever little meta first-page openings. Don’t worry, dude. Everyone thinks your new book is the greatest thing since the first STAR WARS, we’re all going to keep reading. This issue is another little slice of wonderful with all kinds of collateral damage, great and small, that will no doubt engender howls of remorse from the far reaches of galaxy. Vaughan does not care! And possibly just sat through this last season of DOWNTON ABBEY, is suddenly angling for a shot at the Robert Kirkman/George R.R. Martin title, creators who will straight up kill characters just because they’re your favorites. How many more issues before either Marko or Alana eat it? If they both make it to the last page of #25, it will be a stunning thing.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #13 — I tell you what, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even flinch, I grin when I see a name that I don’t recognize on the cover of this series. As a long-time fan of Wood and Cloonan’s collaborative efforts, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the first issue of this series and was quite disappointed to see the talented Miss Cloonan bail out after only three issues (though #7 was a welcome but fleeting return, I cannot cannot cannot wait for her FABULOUS KILLJOYS pages, at long last, make some noise). Then came James Harren, Vasilis Lolos, and Declan Shalvey, all of whom completely won me over. I’m always sorry to see each of them leave in turn but am a fan of the next person in the chute! This Mirko Colak fellow has a style that’s much more photo-realistic than the more stylized business we’ve been seeing lately. It’s interesting to contrast Dave Stewart’s choices with what he’s been using thus far, as he goes with a much lusher palette here. I know purists who keep complaining that Wood’s version here is not “their” Conan, or Howard’s for that matter, there’s not enough emphasis on plot-based momentum or fantastic sorcery and far too much character work. And maybe they’re right. But I haven’t read a dozen REH Conan novels, I say not as a point of pride, but simply to point that taken on their own merit, without a preconception or a sense of being terribly beheld to an existing canon, I’m really enjoying these stories of a young man coming into his own, in the days before he was feared throughout the land and known only by his first name and title.

DAREDEVIL #023 — All right, I was definitely spending those first three pages wondering why the hell we were back at the secret origin, as good as the Samnee POV looked, but there turned out to be a payoff. I’m with Matt, the Chrysler Building is just the best.  It’s Waid, though, buddy! Mark Waid is drawing the noose around your neck. But, oh man. Perfectly crafted terrible situation at the end, there. Gut-punch. I’m really loving Waid’s lighter more upbeat antidote to the depressing twenty-five-year run, yeah.

AVENGERS #6 — This is pretty damn incredible business right here, but it is only devastating for readers of a certain age. In 1986, I was just getting my bearings in the Marvel Universe, nine years old and hadn’t yet dared to plunge into the convoluted soap-operatic madness of Claremont’s UNCANNY X-MEN or all of that trouble that Peter Parker was having figuring out whoever was really behind that Hobgoblin mask. All of the main titles were in their mid to late 200s, a few verging on that #300 milestone. It was the 25th anniversary of the first issue of Lee/Kirby’s FANTASTIC FOUR, the beginning of the Marvel universe, and editor-in-chief Jim Shooter decided to celebrate by publishing a New Universe, a series of eight loosely interconnected titles telling the story of “the world outside your window.” The conceit was that there was a single inciting incident, a White Event, this flash in the sky that took place on July 22, 1986. Before that moment, this world was identical to ours, Reagan was president, Transformers and G.I. Joe were all the rage in the toy and animated series departments, Oliver North was getting ready to jump under the bus over the whole Iran/Contra scandal, etc. But the central appeal to a young reader like myself, who hadn’t been around in the sixties when all these other titles got cracking, was that here was a chance to jump on board with a whole new run of #1s that were for me. And I loved them. PSI-FORCE was my favorite, but I was also a huge fan of Gruenwald/Ryan’s D.P.7, Shooter/JRJr over on STAR BRAND, a new spin on Iron Man called SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS, and NIGHTMASK. The line eventually compressed and then finally folded, but it those titles have always had a place in my heart. Making it to the final page of this issue and finding nothing less than a straight homage to an ad that I first laid eyes upon 27 years ago was an incredible moment. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

BEST OF WEEK: LOCKE & KEY – OMEGA #3 — And things go from worse to pretty much catastrophic right there in that first scene. After teasing us for these first two issues (or, one could argue, the entirety of Volume 5), Dark Bode finally makes his move and has Nina, Duncan, and Tyler completely out of commission by issue’s end. Of course, this series being what it is, this is interspersed with several moments of stroooong character work, made all the more poignant given the fact that at this point, every single conversation and interaction could be the last words these people will ever say to one another. I definitely had that feeling with Tyler and Uncle Dunk, but it’s all but a certainty from the way Rodriguez zooms in on that last shot of Tyler and Jordan’s hands unclasping as they part. Terrible terrible heartbreaking business. And, of course, the CARRIE moment. Joe Hill, bless his master craftsman heart, has everything perfectly poised on the precipice of absolute calamity, several principals taken out and all the kids heading down to be slaughtered at the cave rave as the Omega key is finally at long last turned. I can’t bear to wait another one or two months for #4 but I never want this to end. Incomparable work.

2/13/13

BATMAN #17 — And so at last we come to this. It’s only been four months, but each successive chapter of this main run of “Death Of The Family” has done such an effective job of ratcheting up the tension and elevating the stakes that after the first four parts of just the Snyder/Capullo main run, so much as opening up to this final first page was an almost unbearable proposition. I straight up paced back and forth through my living room for an extra ten minutes, had to knock down an extra Lone Star for the courage to finally proceed. Of course, everyone thought it was going to be Alfred’s head on the platter and so that meant that it couldn’t be, but then I tried to imagine what was the absolute worst thing that could happen, how could the Joker gut Batman most effectively, and the simple answer was to kill his son. I mean, there’s nothing worse. And that also would have done a real number on the fans, even in this jaded era of event deaths and next-month resurrections. And sure, there could have been a Lazarus Pit for Damian. His mother has a key to one or two of them. But it wouldn’t diminish the impact of the loss of life, his father holding the weight of that little lifeless body in his arms. I really did not want to read this comic book. But then it was midnight and what finer time to begin? A solid set-up with the splash on Pages Two and Three. No one’s dead yet, but no sign of Alfred. Okay, wait, Alfred’s alive but all Jokerized, which still elicits a “Thank God” from his surrogate son. And but then at last the reveal of what’s under the covered dish. Followed by a perfect layout from Capullo, that composite heart panel, almost like the sidekicks comprise the various chambers of Bruce’s heart, say, but then with the Joker underneath professing his own horrifying brand of undying love. “Beneath my grin, though, is just more grin!” is an incredible line. And I dig how Batman finally replies with nothing but a declaration of absolute hate. That’s perfect. Twists within twists: their faces weren’t really cut off and they’re all okay, and Batman should leave them to hunt down Joker for good, only then the bomb goes off and they all get gassed and start trying to kill one another. And we’re going great until we get to the last last climactic exchange between the two over the edge of the cliff in the underground cave. Batman makes the decision not to kill Joker because of course he mustn’t, but now he’s suddenly figured out who Joker is? And is about to whisper his true identity when Joker hits the boobytrap on the cowl and gets shocked and squirms out of his opponent’s grasp to fall to yet another indeterminate fate. Total lack of resolution. I mean, I see how that’s the way it had to go, something like that. This can’t be the last page of Miller’s HUNT THE DARK KNIGHT, the third installment of that landmark story, that kind of thing isn’t going to fly here in the monthly “main” continuity. It just felt like this was entire thing was all set-up, very intelligent and perfectly conceived set-up that failed to deliver on anything lasting. Not that I wanted Alfred or Damian’s head on the platter. But that bit about the Joker’s identity at the very end is a microcosm of what left me kind of squinting askew at the final few pages of this. The whole thing left me feeling quite empty. Maybe that just means it worked. I do quite like how the title of the arc came true, the only actual casualty of this whole mess, at least for the next little bit here, appears to be the tightly knit set of foster relationships that Bruce has cultivated with his various sidekicks over the years. Which was all part of the master plan, naturally. Curse you, Joker!

BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN AND ROBIN #17 — And then but here comes this slice of perfection barreling up out of nowhere. Tomasi/Gleason/Gray have been killing it since Day One (and I think Kalisz has been onboard that long?), but it is a true testament to the full extent of their powers that they can roll up right behind the conclusion to such an overall well executed event and knock it out of the park with a damn dream issue. I mean, this kind of thing is usually a throwaway, heavy on the shock and spectacle because nothing needs to count, there doesn’t have to be logic, but it’s hard to make any of it stick or feel like it in any way matters. This series of dream sequences, however, manage to provide characterization while dropping us down the rabbit hole of the Wayne family psyches. Damian works through some not surprisingly dark imagery of everybody else drowned in a submarine holding tank before chasing a robin into his father’s pivotal bell-ringing encounter with the bat in the parlor. Alfred, no surprise, conjures up Thomas and Martha in order to see them one more time before knocking out some traditional wish fulfillment by unloading both barrels of a shotgun all over Joker’s face. But then Bruce, man, I can’t quite unpack that entire mess, his parents fall out of his boat and then various rogues threaten to capsize it but instead the whole mess tumbles into the belly of a Jokerwhale? And then Damian pulls him up out of the water, saves him in a way that he couldn’t save his own parents. Dreams are weird. But just a beautiful last scene there, the one-two of Bruce checking on Damian, tucking him in and patting on him, the boy smiling and then dreaming of watching the sunrise with his father. Stirring material. Really strong work from all parties.

COMEDIAN #5 — Fast Eddie’s Vietnamese hijinx continue and they are about as unfunny as we’ve all come to expect. With a dash of baby-eating allusion to bring the point home. J.G. Jones and Alex Sinclair continue to provide lush photo-realistic art as perfectly suited to the tone of the character as Azzarello’s brutal and unflinching script. The bit about 500 being an unacceptable threshold for the American public accepting casualties rings particularly true. And Bobby. It would actually be kind of a brilliant twist if, after all this time, Eddie turns out to be the clandestine assassin for the other Kennedy brother. In the next six to eight weeks, we’ll know.

FATALE #12 — And that’s two issues of this one in a row. Like THE UNWRITTEN, I’m finding that I dig this series more when it breaks from the main narrative and just runs wild down a tangent track. In both cases, the regular stuff is of course terribly compelling, but these offshoots have an energy, a momentum to them that is contagious. The creators infect you with their excitement for their sudden whiplash-inducing left turn. Here, we finally meet another Femme Fatale who is tied up in the origin of all these shenanigans thus far. But, even better, Brubaker and Phillips welcome Bettie Breitweiser to the book as regular colorist. Losing Dave Stewart would be a catastrophic blow to pretty much any creator-owned title such as this, but of course this dynamic duo gets right back on their feet with one of the best and most underrated colorists in the business. Beautiful work, all.

STAR WARS #2 — The team nails another opening scene, we get a shot of Han/Chewie interaction before Boba Fett shows up and then there’s just enough time to plot a course through hyperspace and jump to lightspeed before the Star Destroyer shows up to corral the Falcon. I’m pretty sure I did exactly this with action figures in 1982. Leia watching the Alderaan tourism video is a nice touch, as is the conversation between the simulation tech and Wedge about what a cocky pilot Luke is. He was much whinier just a little while ago, fellas, old Biggs Darklighter could tell you a thing or two. Wood succeeds in making this new Colonel Bircher fellow interesting and engaging in his first three pages. That’s not all the groundwork that needs to be laid, we meet six new characters in a single page. It’s interesting, as much as you’d think the personal details would help lock down all these new folks in your mind, the two descriptions that stick out most aren’t anecdotal but planetary: “Tess Alder, from Corellia,” and “Gram Cortess, from Alderaan.” What is that last shot of Prithi supposed to mean, though? She’s got something going for or against Leia or Luke? She’s the spy? And but of course killer and gorgeous last page. Not even that much really went down this issue, but I already can’t wait for next month.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #9 — Well, it seemed to me that last issue was the big finish of this title’s first major arc, and the majority of the climax certainly went down, but this epilogue delivers more than enough thunder all on its own. With a little help from FDR: A.I., our heroes track down and eliminate the scattered members of the cabal who have until now held the world under their thumb. Strange bit of synchronicity, the A.I. referring to Truman as the cabal’s “big stick,” the same name that Azzarello has Edward Blake originally choosing for his masked identity on up the page a bit. This particular big stick meets his grisly fate at the hands of Oppenheimer, all the more horrifying from taking place off-panel. And great fake-out with Kennedy’s speech in Texas there, of course all anybody’s expecting is them sending him off to his assassination, but it turns out to be the inspirational “We choose to go to the moon,” number from September ’62 at Rice, ghost-written by Feynman, apparently. So but, wow. All this has basically amounted to the pilot. The stage is set. Our amoral monstrous protagonists have installed themselves as the secret rulers behind the powers that be on both sides of The Iron Curtain. What Happens Next? has never been a more compelling question, as far as this series is concerned.

MORNING GLORIES #24 — And another Ike issue comes through with the big revelations naturally leading to more questions but providing more substantive answers than we’re used to getting. As ever, much appreciation to the creators for providing such a ridiculous amount of content at absolutely no additional cost. 44 pages, ad-free, for $2.99. That’s like nine dollars worth of business over at the Marvel! This story needed that much room to breathe, though. Of course, Spencer isn’t merely dicking around by naming his father/son combo here after the immediate ancestors of Jacob, but actually straight up invoking the Judeo-Christian mythology that winds up getting inverted in a scene that plays as surprising but is actually completely set up in hindsight. Eisma and Sollazzo continue to barrel along at an almost Kirby-level pace, regularly slamming out pages faster than pretty much anybody else you can name these days, always putting storytelling first but never sacrificing the quality of staging, composition, body language, facial expressions. These guys are operating at a high level of craft and making it look much easier than it is, all in the service of a hell of a ripping good story.

AMERICA’S GOT POWERS #5 — And speaking of value, here we have three dollars for 28 pages of Hitch/Neary/Mounts goodness. 29 pages, really, that last one double-page splashes into the inside back cover. That’s more than enough, right there. Dear old Wossy isn’t just dialing right in and breaking my heart with any of this characterization, but the story clips along at a brisk pace and he certainly never fails to keep you engaged and wondering where the plot is heading. It’s interesting, what an almost house style this art team is unto itself at this point, Mounts wasn’t on AUTHORITY, but of course it started there (or with STORMWATCH, but splitting hairs, there), then ULTIMATES, that FF run with Millar, and now over here before heading back to light up the good old 616 here in a just a bit with some Ultron fighting time. If you need an army of super-folk filling up the sky, no one can do it for you like these fellows.

FANTASTIC FOUR #004 — Fraction really lathers up the doey-eyed loving goodness as Reed delivers a second-person narrative aimed at his true love, recounting their first days of courtship. It’s an ideal time for it, make him as sympathetic as possible, because of course there’s no way he’s able to keep the real reason behind their space/time field trip a secret from his beloved for long, and oh but it also turns out he’s the one who traveled back in time to drop some ancient prophetic cave paintings for some alien civilization they just now met who, surprise, actually turns out to not be horrible and bloodthirsty. At least, so far. A sweet little shot of Valentine’s, this.

THE UNCANNY X-MEN #001 — You know how just the taste or smell of something you haven’t experienced in a long time can rocket you right back to the last time and place when and where you did? I think that Proust fella wrote a few words about such a phenomenon one time. I seldom experience such a sensation with new books on Wednesday nights, but man, that very first page, Maria Hill striding down the hall but like we’ve never seen her before, body language, the simple lines of her face, the characters’ stance in relation to one another, and those colors, oh it’s vintage Bachalo, I’m a teenager falling in love with Death learning the high cost of living and having the time of your life and then the yearn and burn of Paige & Starsmore for one another over in that first and forever greatest GENERATION X. It’s funny, I’ve seen new Bachalo pages as recently as this new Wolverine series with Aaron and then seems like at least something else since that killer “Assault on Weapon Plus” arc back a ways on Morrison’s NEW X-MEN but just something about the set-up this time out sent the floodgates of nostalgia crashing down and roaring open. So. That was nice. But how’s the rest of the book, the actual content? Well, with Bendis behind the helm, it is no great surprise that the entire thing takes place as a conversation between two principles and one of them is his beloved Agent Hill. But the main news, the real deal, is that almost half of this thing’s twenty pages are slightly askew double-page layouts of Bachalo drawing the Sentinels whupping up on Cyclops’s Uncanny Brotherhood and getting whupped upon in return. A pretty binary situation, that’s either going to turn you off and earn a Pass or you’re immediately going to have to see this robot-fightin’ time for yourself. On the reread, this one does come off a bit skinnier than the justice getting slung over in ALL-NEW, but the reveal on the last page does skew the status quo better than what we were supposed to be afraid it was, and hey, Bachalo Sentinels.

2/6/13

DETECTIVE COMICS #17 — These guys Layman, Fabok, and Cox are just going for it so hard with such consistency, it’s really starting to freak me out. I can tell that I’m going to run out of things to say about this run pretty soon now, because every single time out, I love every aspect of every page, there really appears to be no room for improvement, I will soon be reduced to simply listing what happened and pointing out the various aspects of how great it was. I guess start pining for a Mason Savoy crossover appearance, maybe. That’s it, this run won’t be perfect until that’s happened.

ANIMAL MAN #17 — It’s all been building to this, the final assault on Arcane from two fronts. Lemire & Snyder keep the action moving and Pugh and Green again both turn in fine work in styles that manage to be unique but not clash. I do appreciate the decision to delegate them specific groups to draw and not expect the reader to reconcile two different versions of the same character when there’s more than enough going on here with this ensemble to not need to pass various folks around. The choice of new Green Lantern is particularly inspired, I would definitely be very much all over any further adventures from that particular fellow. Perfect cliffhanger, everything’s humming along quite nicely here. Over to you, Holland.

SWAMP THING #17 — And but, hell. Where the fuck is Marco Rudy? Nothing against Andrew Belanger. Out of context. I’m not familiar with his work and he turns in perfectly serviceable pages, certainly better than anything I can produce. And he’s going for those organic Paquette panel-border layouts. But it’s impossible to read this as a monthly fan without taking the situation into context. We are at GoTime here. This is the finale of something that’s been organically building with nary a misstep across two titles for a year and a half. I get the whole thing about how you can’t always have Paquette every month, but here’s the deal: don’t send Rudy—who has been nothing but terminating his alternate slot in this title with extreme prejudice since the get-go—his marching orders before seeing this thing through to the end. I just presumed that #15 being his last issue meant that we were solid with Paquette for the duration. I don’t care if Rudy picked up a Spidey book for the other guys. Booting him out of spite only hurts the title and the fans who have supported it all this time. It would be one thing if they brought in someone else who just blew it up. Gene Ha did stellar work over in ACTION and even a lesser-known name with serious proven chops like Eddy Barrows would have been a great fit. As is, I never managed to fully engage with the story due to my frustration with Editorial over the art not quite living up to the insane bar that this title has consistently set for itself since September 2011. Looking to be crushed next month but am not pleased with this hiccup.

GREEN ARROW #17 — Okay, I’m admittedly a bit lost, as this is my first issue, I came onboard with the new creative team, but it appears as though Oliver has been completely rebooted and was another beautiful nameless no-dialogue extra on Seasons 3 and 4 of L O S T immediately before this series/issue began? The questions don’t matter, Lemire provides us the bare bones of a status quo before completely upending it and throwing in the nemesis yang to our hero’s yin. I’ve been a big fan of Andrea Sorrentino since X-FACTOR and these pages are taking it to a next level, reaching for that J.H. Williams greatness with the occasionally uncolored in-panel squares highlighting crucial limbs/weapons in the fight. Also, gorgeous colors. Are any other New 52 people coloring their own work? It doesn’t bode well for a lack of fill-ins, here’s hoping editors Cavalieri/Stewart check back in to the Rudy school of thought in that regard when the time comes, as opposed to what we just got a minute ago in SWAMP THING. This first issue didn’t just annihilate me, but the creators are top drawer and I look forward to seeing what else they’ve got in store.

MULTIPLE WARHEADS: ALPHABET TO INFINITY #4 —I can’t tell if the four-month Graham blister bender I’ve been on this last little bit jamming all of KING CITY and regular installments of PROPHET and then this entire thing too finally like gave me an overdose or if I’m just bummed that Sexica and Nikoli didn’t show up in this issue or what, but this one didn’t fill me up with the usual magic. That’s of course badly understating and kind of terribly taking for granted all the wonder and greatness  and undistilled fun that Brandon Graham still manages to impart upon every single page. The stretch from “Cannibal Run” to “Sphinx to High Heaven” containing the Disbelief Suspension Bridge is maybe my favorite sequence of pun insanity thus far. Until the Marx Men show up. To say nothing of all that absolutely rabid pear nonsense at the end. And I’m a huge fan of the Six Paths Out of Nowhere to Anywhere. I’ll probably sit on this for a few months and work up an appetite before downing all four in a single sitting and finding new things to love about this that escaped me on the first couple of passes through.

FASHION BEAST #6 — Wow, there is a ridiculous amount going on in simply those first three pages alone: the silhouette-play crosses over from any pretense of subtlety to have the reader all but reading the dialogue of the Beast/Le Patron in the author’s rumbling baroque Northampton accent, also that bit about the bald ape inventing fashion, and then climaxing in the “for in the image, there . . . is . . . power!” line, which of course has all kinds of resonance in the comic book industry that it didn’t twenty years ago. I know this was written a few years before that, but, especially delivered by his proxy avatar, that line serves to comedically enhance the mythical magus legend that Moore has crafted around his public persona, further makes him seem like this wild sequential Nostradamus of the eighties, scribbling out phrases and throwaway plot ideas that predict or self-fulfill into relatively seismic events and changes in the industry landscape decades later. Glamour, indeed! The face reveal, it was a perfectly executed shot/counter-shot between the odd/even page-turn, but at first it seemed like we shouldn’t have gotten to see his face, not now, if ever. Really seemed like a mistake. But it did lend the following conversation a bit more depth than it would have otherwise had. Perfect last shot, there at the end.

DAREDEVIL: END OF DAYS #5 — Yet another seismic installment of one of the greatest Daredevil stories of all time. I’ve said it before, but I’m so so glad I didn’t wait for the trade on this, even bought #1 with the intention of doing so but just wanting to get the first chapter after all of these years, only then I couldn’t stop, but the tremendous benefit for everyone who’s picking this up serially is we have a real-time seven-month gap between that opening scene and finding out what the hell Mapone means in the final issue. The mystery has weeks and weeks and weeks to percolate and fester in our imaginations, accruing all kinds of weight and poignancy and expectation that is simply impossible to achieve for a reader who just sits down some time next year with a really gorgeous hardcover and jams the entire thing in a single sitting. So, all of that said, what’s my take on this particular issue, the first one of the back half of the series?

Well, I’m certainly a fan of opening with a Sienkiewicz-painted Punisher VS Daredevil splash that tosses out the old crackpot theory that they were really the same person. While we all know that can’t be the case, just the simple idea sent my brain racing to make connections, rewrite exchanges. “I am Matt’s great vengeance and furious anger.” The idea of Matt training his disciple is so spot-on from a character standpoint, I’m terribly embarrassed not to have immediately hit upon it as soon as I made it to that last page of the first issue. And but wow, it’s been cool enough revisiting all the C- and D-list members of the rogues gallery but one of, maybe THE, very first issue of DAREDEVIL that I bought new off the spinner rack was, I wanna say #267, well into the Nocenti/JRJr run with Bullet fighting Hornhead on the cover with his little daughter in the background, so it hit me a lot harder, much more personal emotional resonance, Bullet rushing in like that at the end, as opposed to someone like Gladiator or various other folks we’ve dropped in on so far. And of course the cliffhanger is heartstopping and as good as it could possibly be. Rescue from plummeting to death and potential answers are only four weeks away! I’m really just terribly grateful to all of these guys—Mack, Bendis, Janson, Sienkiewicz, Hollingsworth, Caramagna, even that old Wacker—for producing such a quality product and proving once again that no matter how many great stories have been told about a character (I mean, look at it, the original Miller run, Miller back with Mazzucchelli in one of the greatest Marvel stories of all time, Bendis/Maleev with a little help from Mack, Brubaker/Lark), it’s always possible to dig a little bit deeper and try to pull out maybe the best one yet. Inspiring work.

ALL-NEW X-MEN #7 — Kitty trains three-fifths of the founding crew and Mystique takes a walk with young Scott. Bendis continues to completely nail every character voice. Had talked myself into holding the line against picking up UNCANNY with Bachalo, in some small way rein in this bi-weekly Marvel Now! rampage, but the only one I’d be hurting is myself. Marquez and Gracia turn in pages that put storytelling first but still manage every single time to be a series of lush breathtaking snapshots that you can stare and stare at all on their own without wondering what happened before or after, whatever you’re seeing right there in that moment is more than enough. I am curious now for the first time what kind of a timeframe Bendis has for this thing, I mean, he can keep it going for a while, but seems like this is a finite situation. By definition, no? I’m going to throw a blind dart at the board and say the last issue is #35, due this Christmas.

AVENGERS #5 — Here this book is again! That’s three in three weeks, True Believers. We have here another –centric issue introducing us to a new member of the team and, correct me if I’m wrong, one of the two new characters that Hickman has created for this series. Izzy Dare is an impressive figure, managing to join the Imperial Guard on her own merit, though she’s certainly got the genes for it, since her grandfather’s name can’t be a coincidence. Isn’t he English, though? That screwed me up, when I got to the name at the end, realized I’d been maybe doing the accent throughout? Kubert’s work is commendable as ever but I do miss Dean White on colors. Wonder what team is next on deck. A couple more singles with Kubert/(Frank) Martin first? Is Frank Martin, in fact, married to Laura? If so, is it wrong that I like him better?

BEST OF WEEK: NEW AVENGERS #3 — Holy shit! Those first two issues, as tremendous as they were, definitely seemed to be little more than set-up for some very serious business to crash through into the good old 616, and here we have it. Four days later, indeed. The events that take place in this single issue deliver more drama, shock, and raw seething imagination crackle than anything that anyone writing for Marvel has ever ever managed to pack into any of these so-called Big Events that keep coming down the pike as reliably as spring blooming into summertime. That is not hyperbole. There are two massive plot points that take place in these twenty pages alone that would deliver upon any level of supermassive Internet hype, the kind of which is regularly heaped upon these crossovers. That’s the joy and wonder, I’m not picking this up curious to see what massive paradigm they’re going to shift askew for a little while or who’s going to get killed and then resurrected a few months later, I’m only expecting to be completely blown away by events on a scale that is immense enough to justify this gathering of heavyweights in the Marvel Universe. I really dug that initial ILLUMINATI mini-series that Bendis and Reed banged out a few years back that serves as the jumping-off point here, very intelligent retcons packed throughout, but ever since then, I haven’t felt like the concept was able to translate into present-day events with anything even approaching the amount of weight and gravitas that such an undertaking warrants. Those days are done. What’s happening in this title is, for my money, the biggest event that the House of Ideas has ever produced. I mean, a fifty-word sentence summarizing exactly what takes place in this issue is all that it would take to convince even the most jaded corporate comic boycotter, but I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. Same goes with attaching the best images to this post, even unlettered, just the Epting art alone would give too much away. Just buy the first three issues of this book.

 

This was the first time, I totally missed it last issue, but the connective tissue between this title and the other one is most likely “the event” that happened in a parallel universe and triggered this multiversal calamity in the first place. That’s got to be the White Event that Adam referenced in his encrypted dialogue up on Mars over in #3 of the other title. If the Psi-Hawk shows up, I am going to seriously lose my shit, it will not be a pretty thing. Though, hey, just realizing that getting JRJr to draw Kenneth Connell/Star Brand is more probability than possibility, if the New Universe is actually the place Hickman is looking to take this mad narrative. Wild wild times. The only slightly false note to be found here is that that last page is more than a bit reminiscent of a crucial plot point in a ten-year-old DC event, but I can almost No-Prize myself into reconciling that via the entire parallel worlds/realities conceit of this series and the fact that Captain America and Batman are Marvel/DC equivalencies, if not analogues, pretty much without debate*, so this is just the way all of that mindwipe malarkey played out in the 616. Without the ridiculous amount of color-coded first-person narrative captions that make you spend half the book trying to figure out who the hell is even telling you the story. I am out of my mind for this thing, can't wait to see where it's heading next.

* SEE: “Under the Red Hood” vs “The Winter Soldier”; “The Return of Bruce Wayne” vs “Captain America: Reborn”; the pair’s interaction in Busiek/Perez’s pitch-perfect JLA/AVENGERS

1/30/13

BATMAN INCORPORATED #7 — All right, I totally missed that ninja-ManBat swooping our guy up into the upper right corner of the first page the first two times I read this. Though I still love the layout. Beryl’s stuttering dialogue is really rough going, and I mean from an emotional standpoint not one of comprehension. And then Damian and Alfred. Man. It is a shame that the world is likely ever only going to get two or three dozen more panels of them exchanging Morrison-scripted dialogue. Every line is so perfect at this point. We’ve come so far. And oh but hell. That enforcer fellow reminiscent of a Middle Eastern Bane being a Damian clone is another lunatic twist of perfection that is of course painfully obvious in hindsight. I thought Tim was toast. But is Jason, really? Are we supposed to come away with that impression? It didn’t even occur to me the first pass through but then later on I saw something about a hero dying this issue. If so, almost a hilarious lack of fanfare worthy of this permutation. That Ellie-Bird lady who got away, let’s not forget her, she’ll surely have some pivotal role to play. The shot of Bat-Cow and Ace and Alfred the Cat huddled up in a nap is a glorious homage to Baltazar’s Super-Pets, hard to handle. Again, Damian and Alfred take it on that last scene, such incredible chemistry. And good hustle to Jason Masters for rising to the rough rough challenge of pinchhitting for Burnham on a scant three pages and doing a more than reasonable facsimile of his style. Don’t want this to end. But can’t wait.

BEST SINGLE OF THE WEEK: BATMAN AND ROBIN ANNUAL #1 — Tomasi and the usual crew of Gleason/Gray always deliver entertaining slices of interaction between Damian Wayne and his father but in this annual, Tomasi brings in Adrian Syaf and Vincent Cifuentes to help produce an issue that is not only the best single of the week but one of the best done-in-ones I can recall reading for quite some time. The conceit is forehead-slappingly obvious in hindsight. Damian rigs a global scavenger hunt for his father, sending him gallivanting around the world to uncover fairly seismic bits of evidence pertaining to Bruce’s parents that he has remained ignorant of his entire life. While Bruce is out of town, though, Damian has the run of Gotham and doesn’t waste any time, setting an alarm for sunset and rampaging around the city all through the night, running afoul of criminal and cop alike. Thus, we have a compelling juxtaposition of the maniac assassin-trained sidekick running amok with as much pure unfettered joy as you might expect a ten-year-old to express in that situation opposite very well written and thought-out character moments from Bruce’s early childhood or the days of his parents’ marriage before he was born. And Alfred breaks out his Shakespeare costume and takes another ride on the boards of the Globe theater, most of which is left off the page but conjured in our imaginations to glorious effect. I really really love this story, find it thrilling but am also ridiculously proud of Tomasi for hitting a new high with such a tremendous character. Top drawer work, all around.

 

FLASH #16 — Damn, you wouldn’t think the art on this book could get any better and then here comes the first page. And the next two pages. And why stop there? It just keeps happening! Manapul & Buccellato continue their high-velocity rampage with no signs of slowing down. One of the best looking books on the rack but with enough narrative heft and character work to back up all that beauty.

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #16 — Janin’s lush work took a dip on this one, I can’t believe some of these pages weren’t a fill-in. The deadline crush! It does one’s heart good to have Frankenstein’s adventures continue within these pages. Constantine involuntary blurting the truth is a clever idea that it seems should be played to more humorous effect. Humourous? I do like the new secret origin of the Books of Magic, that works. And that is one gorgeous last page.  

OZYMANDIAS #5 — An elegant bit of retconning here, Wein corrects a major plot point that he found objectionable over twenty-five years ago. He found the similarity between Moore’s answer to why the Comedian was killed (because someone wants to perpetrate the greatest hoax in the extant history of civilization and use a giant fake alien squid to prevent Armageddon and unite humanity) and an old episode of THE OUTER LIMITS just a bit too close for comfort and insisted that Moore dig deeper and change it. Of course, Alan wasn’t having it and Wein wound up walking off the title as editor sometime around #10. All this time later, Wein winds up writing the autobiography of this title character and comes up with the reasonably organic solution of having him scour the annals of popular culture for inspiration and just straight up happening upon that very episode. This is the second BW retcon in as many weeks that I’m totally on-board with, which I certainly did not see coming this time last year. It also makes total sense that the majority if not all of the tech advances are brought about through Adrian surreptitiously co-opting Dr. Manhattan’s abilities. And the cover to this one is brilliant.

THE UNWRITTEN #45 — We take a break and check in with Savoy, who really isn’t that bad of a guy, still. Worth it for the page of misspelled zombie fiction by the twelve-year-old alone, good night, I lost about five minutes there, laughing my ass off on the couch.

MARA #2 — Mm, maybe Wood has just spoiled me with THE MASSIVE but I come away from this one with the same feeling that I did from the first one. The art’s very pretty and the story is somewhat intriguing, but this one isn’t delivering enough punch to justify picking it up in singles, particularly with this cliffhanger being such a miniscule escalation on we got last issue. I will gladly pay half-price for this trade the first time I see it on the shelves of Half Price Books.

GLORY #32 — Beautiful damn cover. And then that first panel is something special, as well, I’ve got to say. But then I was sorry to see that this was a jam issue, really dig Campbell on interiors. I should have had more faith, Owen Gieni’s style is a great fit for Riley, but then Emi Lenox dropping in on Henry is suddenly the greatest most wonderful thing ever, all through the lense of a vintage camera and looming death. Though I don’t recognize that Question ripoff there in the next scene. Nanaja + The Baby wants to be its own one-shot spinoff. Checking in with everyone for Last Moments scenes wound up being a cool way to pad an art-jam issue and hopefully give Campbell enough lead-time to bring this baby home. Awesome last page.

HAWKGUY #7—Fraction and Hollingsworth bring in Lieber for a Very Special Superstorm issue and of course it’s got as much heart and emotional weight as you expect from this crackerjack creative team. Clint continues to not be an Avenger and help one of his neighbors get his dad and all that’s left from his dead mother out of his house before ceding the back half of the issue to Katie-Kate, who has her own Jersey wedding adventure, that phrase pretty much saying it all. As much as I adore Aja on this series, we’re in a pretty good place when the fill-in guy is able to drop possibly the most iconic shot of Miss Bishop thus far, that last solo panel when she turns and hollers “Jersey rules!” And of course the last page is perfection. Clint and Kate are already close to my favorite relationship in comics at this point. Not counting Damian and his dad. And Damian and Alfred. Rubbing my hands together in gleeful anticipation of how this crew might fold Noh-Varr into the situation in light of that first scene from Team Phonogram’s YOUNG AVENGERS.

AVENGERS #4 — It’s always good fun to ignore the solicits and then find an A-lister like Adam Kubert on one of your favorite titles one fine Wednesday morning. With that opening arc behind us, Hickman zooms out to a relatively ancillary C-team, the back six of eighteen, you could say, as they deal with the arrival of a sixth origin bomb at the Savage Land. But the real meat of this issue is the secret origin of Hyperion, which, I can’t tell if we’re rebooting it here or just streamlining Gruenwald’s deal with the original SQUADRON SUPREME or cleaning up JMS’s MAX version, though I strongly doubt the latter to be the case. Regardless of whether this is an ultimatized continuity or a brand new one, the point is that our Superman analogue is not the most stable of fellows and a timebomb that will in all likelihood detonate at a most inopportune moment, I’m going to guess sometime around #11. Which will probably be out by like the end of March, the pace we’re running, here. This is the first issue of the run in either title that I felt could have used a little bit more meat on it to justify the price-point, but you know, Hickman and Kubert on AVENGERS, I guess they’re wearing me down on that $4/20pgs thing over time but that still makes plenty of sense.

BEST OF WEEK: THE ONE TRICK RIP-OFF & DEEP CUTS — It isn’t really fair to compare this to other books that came out this week. What we have here is nearly three hundred pages of early Paul Pope, beginning with a graphic novel that I believe was serialized in a dozen or so issues of DARK HORSE PRESENTS that Bob Schreck commissioned after reading something Pope self-published at Comic-Con ’93. Those were the days. The kicker is that these twenty-year-old pages have been newly colored by Jamie Grant, one of the very best colorists in the industry, which is the best news I ever could have received from the Table of Contents. I’ve only managed to track down a single later issue of THB, so that until now 100% and HEAVY LIQUID have been the earliest look I’ve had at Pope’s development. And you can see how this right here is the work of a young man, the momentum and narrative energy of the thing carry you right on through from the first page. But it’s wild how developed Pope’s idiosyncratic style already is at the age of twenty-three. Of course he kept evolving all though his twenties, and naturally continues to do so, but so much of what is unique to his work is already there, mostly or fully formed: the way he draws those brash confident faces or lips that can pucker into a seemingly endless succession of expressions, the obsession with international cuisine and Indian food in particular, the frenetic camera work that rockets you right through an action scene and then slows down and zooms out for wide-open panoramic landscapes . . . I’ve always really loved the guy’s work but don’t think I’ve been afraid of him until now.

 

And that’s not even discussing the 160 pages of shorts that comprise the back two-thirds of this thing. A couple are only single-pagers while others stretch out to almost forty pages long, but it’s fascinating to watch his development over the course of eight years from Columbus to Toronto to Tokyo manga immersion and winding up in New York City, the only logical conclusion for an artist whose vision is a unique synthesis of Kirby and Moebius and manga and a bunch of other guys I’ve never even heard of, blending American superhero kinetic dynamism with lush and delicate European hyper-detail with the smash-cut action energy of Japanese comics. This is an essential book for any fan of one of the most exciting American artists of his or any generation.