11/23/11

FANTASTIC FOUR #600—BEST OF WEEK by a light year. It isn’t even fair. What a monster. Everything has been building to this, and Hickman and company start ripping it up right out of the gate. Namor hits on Sue at the bottom of Page Five, even. So much going on! Hickman’s done a masterful job choreographing all of these elements into this crescendo. The Kree armada cues up extinction to get at the Inhumans/Black Bolt’s other wives, causing Annihilus to accelerate his plans and invade the Baxter Building, which triggers the kids jumping the top three floors to the moon, all of which amounting to payoff on months of set-up to bring Peter Parker racing right into the crosshairs of a perfect returning line from Johnny “you never saw my body” Storm. And the value of this book is incredible. Particularly going by current Marvel standards. I mean, this 96-page behemoth should retail for $19.99 at the typical page rate. The opening Epting chapter is 28 pages long with only a lone ad and is, all by itself, better than anything else this week. The Johnny catch-up is a beastly 48 pages, again with only a single double-page ad that completely flattened me on the first readthrough, because I hit the text on the first page without scoping out the second and thought that Hickman had written some Completely Fucking Insane Thing about some kind of superhero reality show with a protagonist named Kirby, and there was another bit about tree removal and it was just completely destroying me until I realized that it was a perfectly-placed ad for the video game character and had nothing to do with getting all meta-crazy on the King.

But back to the narrative, there’s a concern about Johnny and those worms. So, he DID die, he’s just been resurrected several times. Of course. Not cheating at all. This leads into a pretty great Negative Zone riff on The Great Escape by way of Gladiator and paves the way for a pretty ridiculous status quo for Johnny, going forward. Then Ming Doyle draws a real pretty seven-page piece with Black Bolt and Medusa getting their shit together after and amidst all of this five brides nonsense. This gives way to six pages of Yu laying some further foundation for whatever they’ve been building up with Galactus for a while now. Old Hickman is a fan of the heat death, and no two ways about it. The huge surprise of this issue is Farel Dalrymple and Jose Villarrubia dropping the serious indie business on the final seven-page story starring Franklin and Leech. The art really emphasizes the wonderment of the young protagonists, the way they see the already-fantastic 616. Sign me up for the adventures of Hyperstorm & Kid Incredible just any old Wednesday, now. But who’s the white-out man? Morrison’s got me conditioned to expect Hickman at that point, but could it be future Franklin? Or Nathaniel? It looks like that one will play itself out, eventually. So much gets both resolved and set up in this gargantuan tome. 2012 is going to be a really, really good time to be a Fantastic Four fan. And I could go on and on, get all symphonic about it, but last week’s holiday means I’m writing this on the next Wednesday night and FF #12 is waiting . . .

SECRET AVENGERS #19—This one lives up to the high, high marks set by Aja’s outing last month. Lark/Gaudiano/Villarrubia are hosses. And Ellis is still such a razor-sharp bastard. Such a treat, having him do these. Every single beat is perfectly choreographed, every line stretched for maximum impact at minimum verbosity. This has got to be the leanest, most satisfying twenty-page comic on the rack. Ellis is throwing down a master class in done-in-ones, very much worth the cover price every single time.

WOLVERINE & THE X-MEN #2—

THE MIGHTY THOR #8—Mmmm, I hate to say it, but I’m suddenly considering dropping the Fraction run. And it’s been pretty great, so far. But this is a poor follow to FEAR ITSELF, not a very interesting new status quo, and who told Laura Martin she could have some time off? Insane difference between this and what we were getting with Coipel. I want to say Hollingsworth was coloring Ferry last before they all jumped over here to make way for Gillen’s journey? D’Armata, not doing it for me. This is a bad situation, folks, I don’t want to bail out on Fraction Thor, but at $4 a pop/forevah&evah, they’ve got one more shot to change my mind.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #510—This, on the other hand, managed to keep me pretty engaged through the FI dismount. I am a little tired of Fraction keeping the alcoholism so much at the forefront, but I guess when you have a recovering (-ed, you say?) addict writing a multi-year IRON MAN run, that’s pretty much going to go with the territory. #500 was stellar, but I hope we’re not going to burn pages in recovery every other month. Maybe at some point we’ll learn the difference between not drinking and staying sober. I never seem to be able to hit either one of those on Wednesday nights.

KICK-ASS 2 #5—Yeah, I’m pretty much otherwise done with Millar, but he’s still turning in really entertaining work here, running the initial premise down to the inevitable glorious, bloody and completely over-the-top conclusion. I’m not sure there’s enough room for Vaughan and company to do a sequel that’s as much better than this as their first movie was than the original mini-series, but if they just manage to pull off a movie that’s at least as good as this, it will be quite the damn ride.

THE UNWRITTEN #31.5—I wouldn’t mind this going apparently biweekly at all if I hadn’t just seen 28-30 in the quarter-bin at Half Price this morning. That smarts! This thing, though, a serious jam. If you’ve got to bench Gross, then Kaluta, Rick Geary, and Talbot are a mighty fine pickup. Serious material here, Carey’s delivering the deep goods, all of a sudden, very much coming across as dropping origins, then about-facing on the last page and promising maybe we’ll get into that next month. This reminds me that this series used to drop the serious non-Tommy issues in between arcs, which I guess we’re suddenly going to get concurrent with the proper book. Judging from this first month out, it should be quite a ride.

FLASH #3—This one continues to be one of the stars of the reboot, nothing more or less than two very talented creators telling a great story with a great character. Manapul continues to nudge the form every chance he gets, always delivering the kind of kinetic shots that this book lives or dies by. Great work. Bummer ending, though. They shot him in the head! How’s he gonna get out of that one, Manuel?

SUPERMAN #3—Mm, I’ve got to call bullshit on this one. The first five pages just straight recap the first three issues of ACTION and the first two issues of this. Well, there’s one page in there that’s the bridge between the two, but it’s not exactly riveting to have Titano’s post-reboot existence confirmed. A Max Fleischer name-drop does not an entire page justify. A full 25% of the book is recap, thinly veiled as some schmuck’s not-that-fair-or-balanced take on Superman, by way of J. Jonah Jameson. And poor Nicola Scott must have picked this one up at the last minute, a few of these pages are not representative of her ability. The 80s writing style was a curiosity for me the first couple of go-rounds, now I’m not sure I’m even going to hang out for this arc.

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #3—This one’s coalescing for me. Which might just mean Constantine was in it for more than two pages, this time. The art is still gorgeous. I really need to make that old SHADE run happen for myself, pretty sure I’d be much more into this if I was down with the old Racman. It was on the bubble, but I can definitely hang on through the opening arc, at least.

ALL-STAR WESTERN #3—Huh. And now this one suddenly seems to have worn out its welcome, lost its charm. Don’t know if Moritat was just a little bit more rushed or I’ve got my fill of Hex for the season or just wasn’t drunk enough or what, but this issue fell a bit short, wasn’t nearly as magnificent as the first two. Too, I could give a shit about El Diablo, Bernet art or not, so maybe that was a problem. This definitely doesn’t seem like a title that DC should be pressing the pricepoint on. Hope we get the mojo back next month, podnuh.