6/04/14

TINY TITANS: RETURN TO THE TREEHOUSE #1 — In a world that sees Mitchell Hurwitz get all the gang back together eight years later for arguably the best season of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT or that just suddenly has Jack Bauer clock back in for a ninth day four years after we’ve last laid eyes on him, it should come as no surprise for Baltazar/Franco to resurrect the title that made them a household name (at least in this house). This is the first comic book that my little girl ever loved when she was just a two-year-old baby girl and so obviously, if you’re looking for like a really objective scathing critical analysis, I’m probably not going to be able to do it for you. But this is more of the good fun we’ve come to expect from the 53 issues of this title’s first volume or in the all-too-short single-year run of SUPERMAN FAMILY ADVENTURES. Terra’s still pegging Beast Boy with rocks every chance she gets, Raven’s got a new cute haircut, and Braniac 5 & Psimon turn up to steal the Treehouse. Throw in a couple of cameos by Swamp Thing and Metamorpho and a new Bat-Treehouse constructed by Alfred Pennyworth himself and we are right back in the middle of it. And there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

ACTION COMICS #32 — Scott Kolins shows up with solid fill-in work but before we even get started, can I just say how horrifying the COMEDY BANG! BANG! ad is with Scott and Reggie in the leotards? I can’t unsee it and want to so badly. And then it just kept happening like it always does, every DC book I’d open up and there it would be again, cutting open the wound before it had even fifteen minutes to heal up or scar over. But this Superman comic book here, the story clips along well enough. Our guy should not have inhaled all of those Doomsday spores because they’re turning him into the guy. Which, yeah. I perhaps should have checked out that initial issue but I don’t see how the knee-jerk reaction when your antagonist turns into a cloud of dust like that is to just do ALL THE LINES of that bad guy. That shit goes right into your bloodstream, Kal! It’s going to have an effect. This is maybe when that Smallville upbringing left you just a little bit on the sheltered side to be making all of these on-the-fly calls. Drugs are bad, Kal. Snorting the bad guy all the way up is so much worse. Will be glad to get Kuder back next month.

FUTURE’S END #5 — Ah, there they are again, Scott & Reggie! Make it stop. So, Mister “Watch Me Trend” Terrific is only a douchebag now in this future? Or is he also one in the current New 52? I haven’t read anything with him since JSA folded. Not a fan of this guy, though. But good news to have O.M.A.C. back. I love that all my favorite cancelled books’ protagonists can just come hang out in the middle of all this, the more the merrier. And Constantine! And crop symbols! Whyever not? It seems like they’re just picking random plot beats out of a hat with this thing, but they’re holding it together well enough so far. Jesus Merino turns in killer pages this issue, just like you’d expect him to.

BATMAN ETERNAL #9 — Of course, Batman can’t come to Tokyo without running into Jiro and Kanaria. Man, I love that bit of Morrison mythology, nice to see folks playing in the same sandbox. Great to get Guillem March here blowing it up once more. And an interesting wrinkle with Alfred there at the end. Two months in and this one’s still quality.

THE WAKE #9 — Well, it is certainly all going down now, isn’t it? Snyder/Murphy/Hollingsworth pull out all the stops here for the penultimate issue of one of the strongest mini-series of 2013 or 2014. It’s probably just because this book was next in my queue, but I when they made it to the tomb and Leeward put her hand on the moon and then said, “What the…,” I was really pulling for old Marc Spector to come roaring up out from behind that wall on the page-turn. And that is a hell of a double-page splash reveal to kick it into Chapter 3 of this issue, all of the aerial and naval action, pretty stunning business. I’m the leeeeast bit unclear what happened at the end there, Leeward said it was all bogus about the call and then told her dolphin-buddy, “Good boy,” a couple of mers grabbed her and pulled her down . . . and then she was suddenly in some sort of iridescent light universe with our old friend Lee Archer? I feel like I’m missing something. Maybe all will be made clear next month. Snyder’s done fine work keeping this series clipping along at a breakneck pace while finagling in economical little character moments but, man, you cannot overstate how incredible the art on this book is and what a massive role it has in selling the narrative. Every page really is a beauty. And what’s even going on with those white-hot greens there on the last page? Just glorious.

BEST OF WEEK: MOON KNIGHT #004 — Oh, for the taste of a sweet Odinburger melting in my mouth! And it is nice to have a bit of the old Ellis quasi-science, those bits that sound just technical enough to just maybe be true but are usually nothing more than Uncle Warren devouring all the latest abstracts on bleeding-edge tech and New Scientist headlines or whatever grinder-type futurist insanity all of that is racing toward and then spitting it back at us in a way that’s barely almost plausible. Uncle is fortunate to have found such worthy collaborators in Declan Shalvey & Jordie Bellaire, it’s all perfectly lovely sequential for the first little bit but then everything goes mental for the dream sequence. Really beautiful work throughout. I mean, really, just the choices Bellaire makes on those first two pages of Spector falling into the dreamworld are stunning. And then you turn the page and the bottom drops out. I have heard some people complaining about the decompressed pace of this series, how it takes less than five minutes to read an issue, everything’s done-in-one, there’s no palpable character development, etc, and I can see those points as being valid, but that’s obviously not what they’re going for here. The creators appear to be inviting us along for the ride, to hop directly into our protagonist’s mindset and have it be relayed to us through direct point-of-view rather than the first-person narrative captions that are more often found in this genre. The result is a title that’s as much an art artifact as a fragment of serial narrative fiction. A story where maybe it’s not so important that it has a profound and sweeping beginning, middle, and end but that is instead something you can just submerge yourself in and swim around for a little while to experience the way that this particular fellow filters the world. I am really sorry to learn that this team is jumping ship after #6 but it is a very cool bit of business that they’ve thrown together here while it lasts.

ORIGINAL SIN #3 — All right, business is now definitely steaming up just a bit. The Orb’s truth bomb is one of the better across-the-board high concepts to come out of one of these Big Events in years. Simple but with a terrific amount of elasticity for any creative team who’s in the mood to pick up and grab some serious mileage with it. Aaron doesn’t do much more than tease a few things here; I’m hoping we get more into depth with the ramifications actually in these pages. I’m thinking we’ve got the inciting incident for Waid’s upcoming THOR VS HULK mini, though. Deodato/Martin continue to absolutely burn it down on sequentials, A-game all the way. And, man! That twist at the end is certainly something that I did not see coming. It’s going to be pretty hard to put that particular genie back in the bottle! Unless they go the LMD route, which is such a trope by now, it would be a pretty cheap way to cheat out of an otherwise terrific cliffhanger.