7/25/12

COMEDIAN #2—I was already completely on-board with this one even before the decision to open the second installment with Eddie & Bobby ringside for Clay’s inaugural triumphant dance. Brilliant. The rest of the comic doesn’t quite crush me as much, more boilerplate crazy-Eddie-corrupting-it-up-around-Vietnam sort of fare, but I think Azzarello has yet to reveal the full scope of what he’s got planned for us. J.G. Jones continues to absolutely tear it up, I sure hope he’s already working on #5 or 6.

NATIONAL COMICS: ETERNITY #1—All kinds of value here, $3.99 for 32 pages with only five ads breaking up the flow of the first third, a pilot done-in-one injecting Kid Eternity into New 52 continuity. I would have picked this one up for Lemire alone, but having Hamner along for the ride certainly sweetens the pot, the man is a consummate professional. This issue works well as a standalone, like a sort of horror anthology, but I’m not sure how intrigued it makes me in terms of picking up a hypothetical monthly series. Though I’m sure I’d have to give these guys at least the first arc for a trial run.

SPACEMAN #8—This penultimate issue is exactly what it needs to be, cranks everything way up and leaves us hanging for the final installment. The expression on Orson’s bruddah’s face at the bottom of Page Three is classic, that’s a perfect little exchange, there. Looking forward to jamming this whole thing in one go here in the next little bit.

AMERICAN VAMPIRE #29—This is shaping up to be maybe the best arc yet, an excellent dynamic with Pearl and Skinner partnered up tracking down the names on the blacklist. Albuquerque’s art is a bit looser but no energy is sacrificed.

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #11—I missed #10, but went ahead and picked these two up when I saw this on the rack today. The art is breathtaking, Janin and Arreola have some serious synergy firing. Though Constantine has got to have some kind of glamour going on with his appearance, seems he should look like he’s got about fifteen years and half a million more miles on him than he does here. And of course, Tim Hunter, everyone roughly a decade on either side of me or Lemire’s age saw that one coming. I’m sure there’re all kinds of crazy items in that Black Room that I have no idea about. Is that a giant Diocletian coin to offset Bruce Wayne’s penny?

FLASH #11—This title’s first fill-in on art doesn’t break momentum as much as you’d expect, the title page as wonderful as ever. I’m still having trouble investing in the narrative, though, the luster’s fading for me on this one. Will definitely hang out through the zero-issue and probably give #13 a shot, but it’s time to crank this one up a bit more than it’s going right now in singles. I still don't understand why everyone is so fascinated by Flash's Rogues.

PROPHET #27—This has got to be hands-down the best new series of the year, if only because of how immersive and entertaining it is on a monthly basis while managing to almost entirely eschew a linear narrative but instead just fire perfect little storytelling bulls-eyes all over the universe. You can get the sense that all of this might connect up at some point or not, and it would be all right if it didn’t, it’s an entertaining enough ride the first time through, doesn’t all have to turn out to all be any closer together on this massive tapestry than it already seems to be. I laughed pretty hard at the shots of all the creators in that helmet from the cover, but then the sight of Diehard at the bottom of the first page was so much better. Really, relative to the rest of the series, this one’s probably one of my least favorites, but that’s not a dig, it’s just that these guys have already set the bar so high. It’s still better than just about everything else on the rack today. The phrase “created by Rob Liefeld” gets stranger and less applicable as the months go streaming by.

BEST OF WEEK: THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #5—Quite possibly the best issue of the series so far, we get a first contact and follow-up encounter that could only happen in this series. All kinds of depraved madman shit going on up in here. There’s a darkness to this book that’s more like dark matter, just a hyperdense crushing-in-from-all-sides Science Will Kill Us sort of thing. Though we open with a boyhood flashback and of course his epigraphs are all over the place, there’s been relatively very little of Feynman actually doing anything on-panel. With the exception of talking Einstein into helping them build the atom bomb, I guess I should say. But it’s an interesting long game that Hickman’s playing here, we’re conditioned to latch on to a protagonist, root for some kind of hero or at least anti-hero, but you know, this has basically been Oppenheimer’s show up until now and he’s, well, a monster. Really wondering what the landscape of this book is going to look like by #10. Pitarra/Bellaire continue to absolutely annihilate it on the sequential panelwork, I’m real proud to see such hyper-detailed sort of European Quitely/Darrow/Adams linework flourishing just down 290 in the great megalopolis of Houston, TX. This book and PROPHET on the same night are very nearly almost too much bleeding-edge science pulp to bear. Advantage goes to this one by a picometer.

THE AVENGERS #28—So powerful is the inner narrative voice of General “Thunderbolt” Ross in his incarnation as the Red Hulk that Bendis just provides us straight first-person prose in captions off to the side and gives all that lovely Simonson art room to breathe, in the full breadth of all of its Kirby dynamism, power, and fury. Which is pretty cool, but I have no idea what they’re saying around the breakfast table there on that second spread. And that’s why I buy my Bendis Avengers, you know, to hear who says what around the breakfast table. This is another filler, but it’s kind of fun to see a character I haven’t had that much exposure to try to punch so far above even his formidable weight class.

FF #20—Hickman is just now on-panel visibly beginning to roar up and round the bend, bringing the First Family and the massive ensemble he’s constructed at long last home, or at least and of course on to the next thing, as ever. Nice to see so much Kirby Krackle there when the Hooud booted Annihilus back into the Negative Zone. Reed lecturing was perfect, down to the students’ optimum lounging learning conditions. The two short scenes of the Richards kids’ interaction with their future selves are a perfect example of what puts this book (these books) on top, month after month. I’m 99% sure we’ve never even heard of Sara Jessen before and Hickman crushes it in a mere two panels, all the aching nostalgia for a childhood long since past.