5/7/14

FUTURE’S END #1—Now, that is a beautiful cover from Ryan Sook. A little bit about me and DC weeklies: I adored 52, haaaaaated COUNTDOWN and bailed out on it within a very few issues, and thought TRINITY was solid though average and mainly stayed with it to watch Bagley draw eleven pages a week (or whatever it turned out to be). I thought that #0 of this title for FCBD was all right but suffered from the future-what-if? book syndrome in which the minute a writer gets a story involving corporate characters that’s out of continuity, he or she winds up just like murdering everybody (seriously, check out Marvel’s second volume of WHAT IF? from the early nineties, it seems like every single one that I can recall picking up ended in Everybody Dies!)(Claremont got here first as well, it seems). So at any rate, I was interested to see how we’d do here, now that we’re under a weekly rhythm and presumably can’t burn every single character. Sure, we’re set five years in the future but presumably going to stay here so can’t just axe the cast all of the time. Oh ho, was that a premature sentiment. After an opening scene pretty firmly establishing Terry McGuiness as the series lead, we are treated to five pages of Ellis/Hitch’s Authority (now with Hawkman in the cast! Which I found unaccountably hilarious, just the mutation and subsumption of that originally subversive cast into the DC universe at large) cresting on the cusp of the most uninspired The Carrier captions of all time before coming face-to-face with an evil so great and powerful that it blows them all up. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, it is right there on the cover, after all. Oh well, let’s turn to Grifter, no wait, he’s just murdering a family of six who actually, oh good, are really aliens in disguise, and now here’s half of Firestorm cockblocking the other because, oh dear!, they’re late to a Green Arrow-sent distress call and are actually the cause of poor Ollie meeting his maker once again. Ronnie Raymond, you have failed this city!

Patrick Zircher does a great job with these pages. I would love to know the writers’ breakdown, who’s first-drafting which character. Maybe Azzarello on Terry, Lemire on the Authority, Jurgens on Grifter, and Giffen on Firestorm? This is pretty good fun, but we’re going to need the near-future heroes to stop dropping like flies to crank up the stakes every issue, here.

BATMAN ETERNAL #5—And the weekly fun continues! Alll of those writers welcome Andy Clarke, who keeps the bar high. We shift the focus off of Batman and Gordon this issue (the latter’s total absence from these pages particularly ominous, as that character’s final page seemed to imply the beginning of a long crusade against involuntary institutionalized sodomy) in favor of Tim Drake and the merry band of Harper Row, Vicki Vale, and their respective sidekicks. It’s a good call to shine the light on some of the other members of the ensemble while the other plots simmer. I am wondering about all of those near-future hijinx we were implicitly promised there in BATMAN #28 a couple of months back, though. Hopefully Stephanie Brown won’t get captured next week and then spend months being tied up before we make it back to that last page again.

DETECTIVE COMICS #31 — These guys settle into the narrative flow a little bit smoother in their second issue, and of course the pages look amazing. The ensemble writing is working for me much better than over in FLASH, these characters all already seem much more fully formed. I totally fell for the deal with Bruce in disguise as Ash, which I LOVE, am all about it when some character’s just going along and then takes off the mask and is Batman. Shouldn’t life always be that great? Those small panels on Page Twenty are a masterful little bit of staging, top quality work, there. It is a good time to be a fan of the Dark Knight Detective.

BATMAN/SUPERMAN #10—Because it never lets up! This is quite a week of Batman. I probably would have left this on the rack if it had been Pak/Lee or really most other people, but Lemire/Kerschl taking us on micro-mission to save the Dark Knight starring Superman and The Atom is not something that I’m going to be missing. Kerschl only winds up drawing half the book but Scott Hepburn holds up his end, and it’s a fun little done-in-one that Lemire also cannily uses to nudge forward all of his other books, even ones he’s left behind, as we get a framing sequence with Father Time of S.H.A.D.E. that’s bound to have some crazy kind of payoff some time, somewhere.

THE WAKE #8 — It’s all hitting the fan in the roar toward the big conclusion as Leeward falls in with a gang of pirates, we get our first glimpse of Lee Archer’s face in two hundred years, and the Alamo makes a rousing and memorable appearance, indeed. Snyder continues to steer the action/adventure component of this narrative into port with deft precision while Murphy/Hollingsworth’s pages burst forth from two-dimensional space crackling with dynamism.

FATALE #22 — Only two to go after this one? I didn’t realize we were that close to done! So, of course it’s time to check in and get the secret origin of The Bishop here at the last minute, and it’s full of as much grotesque and horrifying imagery as we have come to expect. Seriously, I wish I could unsee that dead baby tree. Just horrifying. Um. I’ll say no more.

SATELLITE SAM #8 — The fun continues as the stakes go up and Mike stumbles across footage that might maybe some day lead to his father’s killer. Chaykin keeps knocking it out of the park with top drawer draftsmanship. Of course, he had to bang out an actual Tijuana bible when it showed up in the script. “Oh say, baby, this is tops,” indeed! Still enjoying this but thinking it should be moving a little bit faster. After eight issues, not that much has really happened. Other than all the drinking and fucking, but hey.

ORIGINAL SIN #1 — It’s a shame that Marvel felt compelled to hype this series hook as pretty much the only promotional material, because the big fella going down would have been a kind of huge moment if we didn’t all know that it was coming months ahead of time. Aaron wastes no time getting his ducks in a line after it all goes down. Though my favorite part was the Cap, Logan, Natasha, and Fury eating steak and reminiscing about the glorious old days of grilling a slaughtered cow while under siege in 1944 Bastogne. Marvel should publish an anthology of top creators doing just that, having the characters just sit around bars talking at Harry’s or wherever. I’d buy the hell out of it, at least. At any rate, not a lot else happens this issue but the gathering of some factions. I’m not a fan of the smarmy little captions that pop up every time a character shows up who pretty much everybody who’d plunk down $5 for this thing has been reading for twenty-odd years now. Particularly the Punisher one. If we’re trying to be funny, it doesn’t play. Deodato/F. Martin throw down some serious sequentials here, the double-page spread of dead Uatu is suitably dramatic and we know they’ve got the chops to throw down on an event this potentially massive in scope. I’m not just really on the hook with this event based on this issue alone but trust Aaron with the slow burn.

MOON KNIGHT #003 — This was a pretty skinny one. Everybody shows up and keeps doing that crazy thing they do that makes this book so crazy, but there’s not enough material in here to justify the price tag. I’m sure this will make a hell of an interesting trade, but if you’re going to charge $3.99 for twenty pages, throwing down no more than maybe a total of five total pages of dialogue therein is going to make some folks feel like they’re not getting their money’s worth. It’s certainly a decision, the empty spaces, and works for me for a while, no one else is going to bring you the widescreen cinematic like Brother Uncle Warren, of course, but I could use a little bit more meat on these spectral bones, just a hint of an enticing ongoing mystery, something. This one feels pretty disposable and there’s again no escalation from the first issue. Pull the ripcord, Uncle! What does the horrifying ghost bird skeleton creature mean?