HALLOWEEN!

BEST OF WEEK: 

GHOSTS #1—A superb and stunning anthology. It looks like several of the Vertigo regulars edited it, Shelly Bond and Will Dennis and such, but the overall high quality had me looking for Mark Chiarello’s name. This is top-shelf across the board, stories by folks I’ve never heard of or had little contact with are every bit as impressive as the ones by A-listers like Hernandez, Pope, or Lemire. Al Ewing (late of THE ZAUCER OF ZILK) and Rufus Dayglo deliver an excellent little 2000 ADesque yarn with the six-page “The Night After I Took The Data Entry Job I Was Visited By My Own Ghost,” though they owe us a comma after Job. Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham do little more than whet our appetites with eight pages of Dead Boy Detectives that turns out to only be the first part of a longer story (though it is a heartening thing to read the words “To Be Continued in the next Vertigo Anthology… at the conclusion of anything ever). Cecil Castellucci and Amy Reeder turn in an aching slice of beauty that starts out as a marital montage and becomes something more ambiguous and surreal. That one really snuck up on me, easily my favorite of the ones I wasn’t anticipating based on creator credits. Then, oh, we get the last eight pages Joe Kubert ever wrote and drew. Just unadulterated rough pencils with no modification whatsoever except for lettering. No inks, no color, Mr. Kubert shows once again and for all time why he is one of the greatest storytellers the medium has ever seen. Kleid/McCrea show up with something macabre, Mary Choi and Phil Jiminez provide gorgeous pages with which I failed to connect on a character level, and then Lapham/Pope/Kindzierski drop the absolute science fiction business, eight glorious pages, probably my favorite story in the whole book. I’m sure BATTLING BOY is one day going to make it all worthwhile, but I don’t get enough pages of Pope interiors per year to suit me, just glorious work. Then, the great Beto Hernandez drops in with what appears to be almost a riff on The Dead Boy Detectives, which was entertaining enough, but I could never quite lock into the story because I couldn’t stop thinking about just how much I love Beto and PALOMAR. Finally, Johns/Lemire/Villarrubia provide the final story starring a pair of brothers, one of whom is deceased, called GHOST-FOR-HIRE. This is a bunch of good fun and I’d like to see future installments of this story in these anthologies if these gentlemen’s prolific careers will let them have enough time to crank out a few pages every now and again. Any time the art team for SWEET TOOTH gets together, it doesn’t really matter who’s writing, the pages are going to be worth your time. I know anthologies traditionally never sell well but am certainly glad that DC put this one out anyway, just a hell of a collection of talented individuals. Here’s to GHOSTS #2, available next Halloween.

AMERICAN VAMPIRE #30—A solid bit of retconning on Pearl’s dear best friend casts Sweet’s motivations during this arc in a much more believable light. Albuquerque/McCaig continue to do no wrong, every bit as terrifying as any of their characters.

ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM #3—Dinosaurs. Naturally! This book continues to be terrific fun. I cannot imagine a single fan of this character coming away from these pages dissatisfied. Waid/Samnee/Bellaire/Lee are a unified force channeling an ideal incarnation of Dave Stevens’ vision. The artists really blow it wide open with that last splash, everything’s much tighter and more finely rendered than it has been up until now, suddenly into almost a Darrow or Quitely level of detail. This one’s worth every penny and with no in-story ads, there’s really no reason to trade-wait.

HAPPY #2—One grim Christmas story. The title character in no way mitigates and frankly serves to by comparison intensify the hyperbrutality to be found on these pages. You have got to love Nick using the invisible blue winged horse to cheat at poker. I’m frankly dreading whatever it is that’s going to motivate our protagonist to do the right thing here in the next little bit. It’s going to be on the far side of gruesome.

THE MIGHTY THOR #22—Well, last week the store was sold out of the final Brubaker CAP and Fraction IRON MAN issues, which is a shame because I followed those for years and years before the double-ship $4 situation made me bail, but I was also on board with this run even though it hasn’t lasted nearly as long. I thought it would be fun to just stumble back in at the last minute without most context and really no idea what’s been happening and just see how Fraction blows it up on his way out. Especially with Kitson on interiors. What follows are occasional potentially clueless page-by-page reactions. There Will Be Question Marks:

RECAP PAGE: Okay, Odin’s back. No surprise, there. No mention of the three wives having been in charge. Missed a comma between “Exile” and “Thor,” I wonder if that kind of thing is on the Assistant Editor?

1-“Doom Ring,” that sounds wonderful. I wonder what Victor Von Doom would do with one of those green rings.

2-Poor Balder can really just never catch a break, such a miserable fellow pretty much since Uncle Walt left.

3-Okay, who the hell are these kids at the bottom? Backwards baseball cap, I bet that dude’s from Oklahoma. What has always been the deal with Asgard and the OK? I never got it.

5 & 6-Odin is not behaving in a very magnanimous fashion.

7-Oh no, a trial. This is turning into the SEINFELD finale . . .

11& 12-Though that is a much cooler montage than what Jerry and his friends did or did not get up to.

15-All right, then, Kirby Krackle. We’re legit. This issue is okay.

20-Wait, Sif’s pregnant? With Thor’s kid? How is this THE END? That is a pretty cheeky way to bail out.

FATALE #9—More of the same from one of the most synergistic teams in comics. You kind of want Brubaker/Phillips/Stewart to drop like six pages of a story about something that absolutely should not work, a dyslexic bunny rabbit perhaps, and see what magic they’re able to conjure. Because they seem incapable of doing wrong.

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK ANNUAL #1—Naturally, we need Frankenstein to see the thing through. Lemire, you are a darling man. And why not throw Amethyst into the mix? The art team continues to deliver beautiful work, particularly Arreola’s palette. But damn, Constantine completely sold me on that one horrible thing he did. Bastard! For all the talk of watering him down and migrating from VertigoàDC, etc, etc, that one-two shot a few pages later of him replying to Zatanna, “For you? Please,” followed by the look they exchange, that’s vintage perfect John Constantine. Very shiny and colorful and as far away from Karen Berger as he’s ever been, but Constantine all the same. And something of a random ending, regular readers who skipped this annual are going to be a bit befuddled next month.

SWAMP THING ANNUAL #1—Cloonan! What a treat, I had no idea she was dropping in over here. Nice to see her getting work at DC. Though all I want from her is Killjoy destruction. The double-page spread across Pages 2 and 3 immediately establishes her comfort level with the sort of panel layout/branch-border thing that Paquette and Rudy have been rocking through the first year of this title. Young Alec Holland’s first line being “In the flesh” is so on-the-nose, I’m pretty sure we don’t need that final word emboldened. But got to let that slide, this flashback does more to cement the relationship between Abby and Alec and make me more care about them more than the entire run since last September. Onward to the 14s, with more momentum than ever.

FASHION BEAST #2 & 3—This is still interesting but probably suffers from serialization, as we’re by now trained to expect these perfect little diamonds when Moore composes an issue while this is a screenplay that is very capably adapted into ten issues, but they don’t resonate with the same power and depth as Moore’s classics. As of yet. It’s an interesting enough riff on transvestite Beauty & the Beast. Kind of a weird convergence to see artist Fecundo Percio making choices to frame shots like a tracking camera, can’t decide if he’s referencing Gibbons’s seminal work on WATCHMEN or the fact that this was supposed to be a movie. I keep waiting for Sid & Johnny to show up. Barring, Sidney!