9/19/12

BEST OF WEEK: BATWOMAN #0—While #12 was a welcome return to form, this zero-issue interlude is a devastating suckerpunch that is suddenly the best we’ve seen so far from this series. It practically follows the form of an illustrated children’s book. There’s almost no spoken dialogue, the entire issue is Kate leaving a message for her dad in case she doesn’t come back from her big case with Wonder Woman, which we learn she used to do every time before a mission but has discontinued the practice since the end of her first arc when she learned that her father had been keeping the truth about her twin sister from her. Kate’s monologue, which is full of flashback montage recap, is amplified to tremendous effect by JH Williams III’s illustrations. The guy’s been absolutely murdering it from the get-go, perfectly complemented by Dave Stewart’s colors, and this issue is not only no exception but stands as some of his best work yet. I love how he’s got the one style for the past, Kate as a girl, losing her mom and sister, all the way through West Point and discovering Sophie and then we get that gorgeous iconic painted shot of Batman that’s unlike anything we’ve seen in the book so far, which highlights the amount of impact the experience has upon the character. But what makes this Best of Week for me is the way it opens there at the end of DETECTIVE #857 before Kate takes her dad and us through her entire extended origin, bringing us all the way back to that moment that now has all kinds of new depth in the context of this issue-long montage through her life. Really fine work. When Williams is on interiors, there are very few books on the rack that can hold up to this kind of thunder.

WONDER WOMAN #0—Wow. This issue is improbably presented in the Merry Marvel style, Azzarello dropping a pitch-perfect “The Man” impression while Chiang tweaks his style to be a bit more Silver Age. And beautiful colors by my PHONOGRAM boy, Matt Wilson. But the decision to frame this issue in this retro style is quite brilliant, serving to convey the impression that we’ve stumbled upon some long-lost Golden Age back-issue that will finally give us insight into Diana by showing us an adventure from her youth, not in flashback but as it happened, complete with narrative trappings from a bygone era. Lots of exclamatory occasionally alliterative narrative captions! The first page alone does most of the heavy lifting, letting us know “this magnificent missive that originally appeared in “ALL-GIRL ADVENTURE TALES FOR MEN #41.” As if this wasn’t old-school Marvel enough, we’re also treated to a gang of thought-bubbles featuring our heroine questioning herself and her actions, right up until the last panel. This title is always gorgeous (at least whenever Chiang turns up), but this is the first issue that’s done-in-one, a very satisfying slab of serial entertainment that fleshes out what we know about Diana while entertaining us in its own right. Really close call on Best of Week. Highly recommended.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #0—If you were holding your breath for the secret origin of what Superman, Batman, and all the gang were doing before they got retconned into assembling to battle Darkseid and the Parademon menace, go ahead and exhale. The Shazam backup feature with Gary Frank’s fine rendering takes over and finally gets a chance to get moving along with Billy catching his level-up from the wizard before coming back to Earth to bitchslapping the hell out of some mugger and then cadging a cool twenty-dollar bill from his near-victim. I get what Johns is going for here, the idea that kids today are bastards and that the first thing an orphan would do upon getting all these powers would be to drop some kind of pre-Death of Uncle Ben selfish personal betterment-type behavior. And if he can finally bring it around to that character’s redemption, streetwise Billy learning what it means to be a hero and what not, I guess it’ll be close to the fella we know, but I just miss the Big Red Cheese trying to get the JLI do sing-alongs while J’onn had his hand caught in the Oreo cookie jar.

And the back-up, I love me some van Sciver interiors but this whole Pandora/Trinity War thing, so far there’s absolutely no narrative hook hung on it, no reason for me to care at all about what’s coming. I want to be excited, but the engine’s not firing quite yet.

THE UNWRITTEN #41—This one’s pretty much The Ballad of Richie the Vampire. The revelation as to what’s really going on in this series with regard to how Tom’s perception shapes the situation leads to a very interesting new set-up that will surely see us through these last few months’ worth of stories. You’ve got to respect the dissolves-into-bats exit.

FABLES #121—Twisted and evil, this. Man, what a dark way for things to resolve on the old Island of Toys, there. At eight parts, this arc went on maybe a couple of months too long but now that we’re through it, it seems like it was entertaining enough. Probably another example of this reading better in trade. But I can’t bail out on monthlies now! Bring on the new story.

THE AVENGERS #30—It is great fun still to have Simonson onboard, even when he gets saddled with seven panels of walk-and-talk across the bottom of the page. But where Bendis has always nailed the tone of give-and-take between Luke Cage & Jessica Jones, he’s not doing it for me with the chemistry between Clint & Jessica. Hawkeye’s fine but Jessica comes across as shrill and bitchy. Spider-Woman shouldn’t convince the reader that she’s absolutely PMSing every single month, you know? I get that that’s part of the arc of this story, but that was a lot of exclamation points to hurl at ol’ Hawkeye in twenty pages. Sorry to say I dug this one about as little as possible with Simonson on art the only thing making it in any way worth a look. Total AVX filler. Let’s get this End Times business going.

DAREDEVIL #18—This continues to be nothing but gorgeous brilliance. Just the panel of nothing but DD swinging through the city on the bottom of Page 11, alone. It’s insane this book’s already moved through Martin and the Riveras and it still looks this good. Samnee/Rodriguez are a force. Waid doesn’t push the overall arc forward too far and it isn’t a done-in-one but we get a little scene with Matt and Kristen that’s cut too short before he possibly hallucinates Milla back in his apartment and then swaps cases with Foggy, off to a gangster’s building to solve a murder mystery. Really, it doesn’t sound that incredible in the recap, but the outstanding level of craft painstakingly put into each page is what sets this book above almost everything else that the House of Ideas is putting out at the moment. The smartest thing they’re doing this year is not giving it the Now! treatment. Looking forward to years more with Waid, Wacker, and hopefully Samnee/Rodriguez. This is a hell of a good time.

9/12/12

BATMAN #0—The usual suspects return for this pre-Year One tale and it’s of course beautifully drawn and the characterization is bull’s-eye pitch-perfect, as ever. The back-up is even stronger than usual, a real engaging seven pages dropping in on all three Robins-to-be and young Miss Barbara Gordon immediately before her dad turns on the signal for the first time. Tynion does a fine job juggling all four characters and giving them scenes that feel fully formed in a way that actually almost shows up the headlining crew. Not a knock, but that back-up is a complete story that cuts back and forth between four characters and gives us a beginning, middle, and end. The main feature has shades of Nolan throughout, opens up with a Red Hood Gang robbery, which of course, since everyone in the world knows who’s coming back next issue, we’re all primed for Snyder to drop some kind of deft retcon tweak that will pay off to tremendous effect next month. This doesn’t happen, at least in this issue, as far as I can tell, but then we get Bruce and Alfred eschewing the manor and holed up in the tower, more Nolan, before the only real meat of the story, the tension of Bruce and Gordon up on the roof with a ticking batarang, timed to return in under four minutes and blow Bruce’s cover before he ever even puts on the cowl. Gordon certainly already does seem suspicious, his taciticity an interesting potential retcon, given that Snyder all but had Gordon calling Dick Grayson by his first name while wearing the cowl over back in THE BLACK MIRROR and here it feels like he’s establishing that Gordon always knew, almost even before Bruce did. But then that’s it. A cliffhanger, the Red Hood’s coming for Bruce and we’re To Be Continued . . . next year. That makes the whole thing seem a bit slight. It’s all very well done, but at only two pages less than the standard length, this feels like much much less of an experience than, say #1, which was a revelation. The problem is these boys have set the bar very high for themselves. Bring on the Clown Prince of Death.

BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN AND ROBIN #0—Oh man, nothing else even comes close this week. As consistently talented as the boys over on the other book are, Tomasi/Gleason/Gray drop in with this portrait of the martial artist as a young man, and manage to completely annihilate every other book this week. In a scant twenty pages, we rush through a Damian Wayne birthday montage, opening with skydiving Man-Bat destruction before flashing back to his baptism in nursemaid blood a few minutes after being born, then jumping to maybe his fourth birthday, when he learns that he’s got to defeat his mother in single combat before she’ll tell him who his father is. This is a serious and wonderful bit of almost retcon characterization to just slip in here at this point and Tomasi artfully weaves new moments through the years in with references to Morrison’s run, which of course I’m like target-demographic-zero for that, Talia’s got old Otto Netz on the line, threatening an off-with-his-head if he doesn’t get the meta-bomb together before we race through a bunch of birthdays that inevitably end in defeat for our boy assassin protagonist until we finally, perfectly, end up with Damian holding the sword up to his dad’s throat at the London pop-art exhibit that we first saw on the last page of Morrison’s second issue waaaaaaaay back in BATMAN #656. But I love how this deepens what we know about Damian, from pretty much as early as he could remember, he’s been goaded to excel at combat on all levels, driven by his mother dangling the ultimate carrot in front of him, the answer to the question Who is my father? It goes a long way toward explaining why he was such a terrible insufferable asshole when he first showed up and broadens the breadth of his journey from then until now. They squeeze so many iconic moments into this one, that opening double-page spread, the aforementioned baptism by nursemaid-blood, Damian in the cowl at the age of four, really every bit of aerial Man-Bat combat, that panel of the boy and his mother screaming at each other before engaging in the last year of birthday combat, all the way through to that last page that, by God, might even trump what Kubert managed way back when. Before this issue, Damian Wayne was already one of the most nuanced and compelling individuals in not only mainstream comics but just period, and this issue only serves to enhance his depth of his character. Exemplary work, all around.

FRANKENSTEIN, AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E #0—This wasn’t as terribly compelling as Kindt’s first three issues but still doesn’t disappoint, nothing more or less than the not-so-secret origin of Frankenstein, how he met his maker and what not. This issue suffers, I guess, from the character not being an original creation. As beautiful and spot-on as the art provided by Ponticelli/Faucher/Villarrubia is, one still can’t escape the sensation that we’ve seen all of this before.

COMEDIAN #3—We slow down quite a bit here, not quite as crushing as the previous two installments. The entire issue is Eddie in Hawaii on the phone to Bobby delivering exposition as to his role in the Watts riots. The chief of police called all the black folks monkeys, so the Comedian threw some shit in his face. Also, there was clever call-and-response wordplay throughout, as is Azzarello’s wont. A bit underwhelming, this, though of course Jones’s pictures are pretty.

CHEW #28—These prologues just get more and more batshit, don’t they? I love that Poyo’s just a regular member of the supporting cast now, that’s certainly the right call. It’s hard not to dig on a doped-up Tony Chu anthropomorphizing the cast (I assumed the NEXT ISSUE: page on the back of SPECIAL AGENT POYO was a joke). I’m still adjusting to reading this in singles every six to eight weeks apart versus gorging on trades, but it’s always great fun, just a little bit less at a time than I prefer. Exploding cattle. Naturally.

THE ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM #2—More five-star greatness from Waid/Samnee. This is just good fun. We have delightful escalation in the form of aerial on-plane combat with unattached rocketpack, as well as the image of all the creatures from Monster Island potentially running amok through New York with rockets. Chris Samnee and Jordan Bellaire’s pages are glorious and Waid’s script remains drum-tight, as ever. This couldn’t be better. If you ever thrilled to the airborne derring-do of Cliff Secord, then this is the book for you.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #8—Mmm, I think I liked it better swashbuckling on the high seas or ransacking port cities before leaping off the pier just barely in the nick of time before being cut down by the city watch. This trudging across Cimmeria is kind of a drag. As is more overwrought angst over Conan & Belit’s relationship. It was working for me in the last arc, but now we’ve been there and done that. Also, while I usually dig Vasilis Lolos and I like how they kept in the family and yes he can draw wolves so well, his draftsmanship simply is not up to the ridiculously high bar established for this title by Cloonan and Harren. This certainly isn’t a bad comic book, but it’s a bit of a dip on what we’ve seen thus far.

THE MASSIVE #4—Been listening to a gang of Baader Meinhoff to get ready for MorrisonCon, so it was a bit odd for me to roll up on Mogadishu, here. This one’s a bit more of a slow burn than the first three. Still some interesting character work. Donaldson is, I guess, out and Garry Brown is in, possibly a slight improvement, the facial expressions aren’t as tightly rendered and nuanced but the body language is a bit less stiff and more natural. And the wide shots are still incredible, that bird’s-eye view of Somalia is ridiculous. This book remains an interesting slow build, but it’s starting to feel like it needs to move a bit faster. I need to be quite a bit more invested than I am right now by the time we make it to #10, say. Maybe Anatartica has all the answers.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #6—We completely bail out on the ridiculous ensemble, hanging on to only Wernher for half of the issue as a supporting tyrant keeping poor Helmut Göttrup under his thumb before the guy escapes into the clutches of the Russians. But that’s only the beginning. We’re seriously adding Gagarin and fucking Laika to the cast? You read over the nine character descriptions on what used to be the only THE CAST page and tell me that’s not frothing-at-the-mouth eye-popping lunatic enough for you. This book is wonderful. Delicious madness. I’m horrified to report that I suspect they’re still really only getting started, the maniac machine hasn’t even started spinning up all the way, as of yet.

AVENGERS VS X-MEN #11—Shenanigans! Young Master Summers goes too far. SPOILERS. SPOILERS! Bendis/Coipel/Morales/Martin all show up here with A-game material that is light years better than HOUSE OF M and consists of pretty much everybody dogpiling on Cyclops. In the space of a scant nine pages, Scotty burns Magneto to a crisp, performs whatever power-suck ritual is necessary to soak up Emma’s half of the Phoenix, stone-cold murders Professor X so hard the dude doesn’t even have any pupils at all to speak of, I mean there might as well be X’s in his eyes, and then like disintegrates Wolverine. While I’m sure probably only one of those will actually take, it’s Great Big Event Fun to see the madness unfold. Now! If they don’t kill Cyclops next month and really try to rehabilitate him, it’s definitely the uphill battle of the 21st century.  Unfortunately, at $4 a pop twice a month, I’m probably not going to be along for the ride. Unless he shows up over in Hickman’s AVENGERS, I suppose.

THE NEW AVENGERS #30—This was some pretty meh filler, particularly compared to last month. Some Bible-quoting Purifiers try to hijack Emma from Luke Cage, DD, Mockingbird, and bashful Benjamin J. Grimm. Then, Luke Cage decides to quit on the last three pages, bringing this long-simmering plot to as tame and quiet a resolution as possible amidst all the wonderful Deodato explodo. Bendis clocking out, suckahs, End Times a’coming!

FANTASTIC FOUR #610—Wow. So, instead of putting the toys back in the box, now all of a sudden Hickman is busting loose. A.I.M. buys an island? Achieves sovereign-nation status and selects Reed as their ambassador? This kind of set-up worked out pretty well over with Sue and Atlantis a couple years back, remember. Young Ryan Stegman continues to blow the doors off here in the home-stretch, is rocking kind of a Jim Lee style with the cartoonistic stylization cranked up just a little bit in the direction of Ed McGuiness. Really solid and confident work out of the gate for a guy I hadn’t heard of two months ago. And of course the Wizard’s got to start in with Bentley, that isn’t a shotgun that Hickman’s going to be leaving up on the wall. This is nothing less than more of the greatness we’ve come to expect. Can’t believe we only get three more. Stiff upper lip.

9/5/12

ACTION COMICS #0—What begins as an entertaining enough early-days-in-Metropolis yarn takes a sharp turn when we are given the title, “The Boy Who Stole Superman’s Cape.” Morrison digs deep, strips through all the continuity and obsessive fanboy concern over what’s been retconned and what “counts” and just tells an iconic story that renders all of these things moot, what would happen if an abused boy got his hands on Superman’s cape and believed that he could do anything? Even the hardest thing in the world, standing up to his abusive father. We also get two pages of White, Lane, and Olsen that are MUCH better than any exchange featuring them since the reboot. I loved the negative space comment and what the S really stands for. But of course the centerpiece of the issue does a perfect job locking back up with the 1938 pulpier roots of the character who, before he could fly into deep space, was merely more powerful than a steaming locomotive. Ben Oliver’s painted work is a good fit for this flashback. Great ride.

ANIMAL MAN #0 & SWAMP THING #0—There’s not much reason not to continue reviewing these two together, even though Lemire and Snyder stay in their own sandboxes for just this month before all the Rotworld erupts. Even though a great deal got streamlined by the reboot last year, these boys are not afraid to drop in some legacy characters out of the sky. Or to have Arcane take them out. Both of these are basically Arcane amok across the decades, murdering avatars of the green and red right and left. The regular team stays on with Animal Man and holds the fort just fine while Kano pinch-hits for the Paquette/Rudy tag team and manages to maintain the artistic quality at the high level to which these gentlemen have caused us to grow accustomed. These issues were all well and good and grisly and horrible, but I’m ready to jump back to the main narrative. Bring on the Rotworld.

BEST OF WEEK: SILK SPECTRE #3—This continues to blow every other one of these minis out of the water with Amanda Conner turning in career-best work augmented by Paul Mounts’s achingly beautiful colors. This is certainly one of the best-looking books on the stands, no problem, but what makes it stand head and shoulders above the rest is how engaging the narrative is, the extent to which it manages to draw the reader in and make us totally invested in what amounts to a Year One arc for good ol’ Laurel Jane Juspeczyk a full nineteen years before we meet her as the chain-smoking jaded concubine of the walking blue penis atomic bomb. One great touch here is how the layout warps to accommodate the acid tip, the familiar nine-panel grid twisting and spiraling into the center of the page to reflect all the lysergic crazy. We close with another beat so perfect, it’s like they channeled it, the root of Laurie’s first heartbreak as a result of her parents’ behind-the-scenes machinations along with a pre-WATCHMEN Easter Egg that might have some folks groaning, though I thought it was absolutely perfect in a way that no one else has as yet been able to manage, finally accomplishing the opposite effect we got from looking at the snapshot Minutemen team photo in the first issue of the original series, a kind of reverse nostalgia here where we see something unfolding in the present tense in 1966 but already know how it’s going to turn out, I mean, it’s the most iconic image of the series. And this is its secret origin and it’s perfect.

THE BOYS #70—Nothing but all kinds of escalation here, which, I guess there’s certainly no place left to take it. This is so so good, pitch-perfect and completely true to the characters that Ennis has spent almost six years dialing us right into. No cackling maniacal world-dominating madmen here. I really can’t imagine how the good guys are going to win this one. Not that they will. This is Ennis. This is one of the most compelling portrayals of an antagonist I’ve ever seen, right up there with the greats, Kirby’s Dr. Doom and Darkseid, Claremont’s Magneto. Two more to go.

HAWKEYE #2—Wow, this issue was better than the first, which I was wild for. I hope old “Crystal Clear” Wacker has just a hell of a fill-in artistic team lined up or has convinced Marvel to improbably suspend monthly publication and just hang out until Aja/Hollingsworth can produce pages at their own pace because, lawdy, are they worth it. The first page alone here is a callback/homage to Steranko in all the right ways and then we’re suddenly thrown into the new dynamic of Kate Bishop as sidekick, a pair of Hawkeyes. And then there’s the perfect time-dilation trick on Page Three, where the act of Clint taking aim stretches Kate’s words out into fourteen panels and her mouth is even making the perfect angle, letter by letter. And wow, a newspaper article with actual text instead of the old standby “kdsjf asdkjf;dj mnddf.” The French/Italian dialogue caption for Ringmaster is a thing of joy. And then the caper ensues and erupts. This is hi-toned streamlined comic book goodness, right here, nothing less than a rollicking good ride starring the best archers in the good old 616, who just happen to have explosive chemistry, I mean, every single exchange between them is pure gold, there are somehow five or six of those sandwiched into the twenty pages alongside all of the jumping and shooting and diving and punching and blinding-bad-guys-for-the-rest-of-their-lives-with-trickshot-arrows. Grim, yes, but also terrific terrific fun. After only two issues, this one’s already on the short list of Marvel books that I can’t live without, with only Waid DD and Hickman FF for company. Gives me hope for Fraction hopping onboard FF, though of course, what a nightmare act to have to follow. If Amanda Conner wasn’t just slaying it, this would be Best of Week and will surely take it for #3. As long as Aja can hold on, fingers crossed.

FASHION BEAST #1—Just when you thought Alan Moore was done with singles, we get an announcement for 48 pages of new LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN goodness next February and this story finally sees the light of day. Originally commissioned by Sex Pistols founder Malcolm McLaren in the 80s, Moore’s screenplay for an update of Beauty & the Beast finds new life in this ten-issue series from Avatar, adapted by Antony Johnston and illustrated by Fecundo Percio. With Moore’s edits and input, apparently. It’s an intriguing affair, doesn’t just grab you and make you ravenous for more, but it certainly does have its own rhythm. We spend a full seven no-dialogue pages meeting our cast in a series of jump-cuts as they get dressed to leave the building where they all pay rent and attend The Catwalk, which is some kind of swanky nighttime debauching situation. Our hero(ine) is apparently a transvestite possibly called Doll who is the individual responsible for coat-checking, occasionally stealing away to vogue for the masses. I’m not just wild about it after this first issue but will definitely hang out and see what develops, who these other people even are. It’s not like there’s just a gang of Alan Moore singles cluttering up the rack.

8/29/12

So much for a light fifth week!

BEST OF WEEK: LOCKE & KEY: GRINDHOUSE—What a nasty bit of business this was. I had heard that a one-shot was coming down the pike but had no idea that it was today, so finding it on the top of the ol’ weekly pull was about the best news possible in that particular circumstance. The choice of dropping the old EC Comics font for the lettering is pitch-perfect. This was basically Hill/Rodriguez roaring their Buick 8 into Brubaker/Phillips country at 80 mph and claiming all the land that they could survey for themselves. Everything played out exactly the way it should have and I really kicked myself a couple of times for not seeing the twists and turns coming, really quite obvious in hindsight, but I was so bewitched by the narrative. And the backmatter pages are priceless, Rodriguez is apparently an architectural madman. I love how Hill had no idea that Tyler and Kinsey’s bedrooms were on the fourth floor. Also a fan of Kinsey’s Komix Korner, that three-panel one at the bottom was a scream. This issue is nothing less than the creators of the best comic series on the rack kicking off their shoes and doing whatever the hell they want, just because they can, delighting us with how great it is but also causing no small amount of infuriation because every minute spent working on this wonder could have been in service of bringing the first issue of OMEGA closer, ever closer . . .

MINUTEMEN #3—Okay, I think I get it, the point of this series is to track the journey of the group from idealistic greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts unit to the collection of alcoholic opportunistic fame-hungry Sodomite-and-otherwise-evil-bastard types that were such a cornerstone of the whole horrific grim’n’gritty movement following the original series. The framing sequences are all right, but I don’t really see much point. I mean, we know he publishes. I did dig the juxtaposition between the circles of Golden Age propaganda opposite the seedier more unfortunate reality. Though it was maybe more effective when Parker and friends pulled the trick first in that THE AGE OF THE SENTRY mini a few years back. I did like the Comedian’s exit from the group, not something I ever even imagined in all these years, but Cooke’s version feels completely authentic. As do Hollis’s feelings for Ursula, it never would have occurred to me and they aren’t really implied by the source material, but they ring true. At the halfway point, I don’t feel like this series has quite justified its existence narratively, though of course Darwyn Cooke simply storyboarding scenes implied by one of the greatest graphic novels of all time is pretty okay.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #12—I definitely should have realized what an easy walk-back was possible to execute from that last cliffhanger, but Johns goes a little overboard with that caption “...believed to be where the dead…” I mean, he might as well have said, “according to the last page of last issue, but hang on, dear readers…” When I saw the names on the cover, my first reaction was being bummed that Lee needed help from both Reis and Finch to get it done here for the last issue of the year. Of course, it turns out those guys just jumped in at the end and Lee knocked out the pencils to the entire main story with the help of nine inkers and five colorists (!). That’s insane. You could definitely tell which pages were Williams/Sinclair, but otherwise, I suppose the mob did a pretty fair job locking in to a mostly unified style. It didn’t take me out of the story, anyway. What really cut into my enjoyment reading this comic book was that two of the three things that had the potential to freak me out were spoiled the previous week. And I get it. If you’ve got Superman kissing Wonder Woman, that’s going to spike sales and you’ve got to promote it. But should you do so at the cost of wrecking the experience for the 150,000 people who have already been showing up every Wednesday for the past year? Sales are tabulated in monthly values, not daily. You don’t get extra points for selling out on Wednesday. What if they let the regular readers have first crack at the story, maybe even don’t put the Big Iconic Moment on the cover and keep it a complete surprise, and then let the story build from there? Drop the USA Today or Newsweek stories on Thursday and Friday to get people in the stores that weekend. It seems like that way, everybody would benefit to no one’s detriment. As is, reading those two pages of Superman and Wonder Woman talking, all I could think about was how contrived and hackneyed the writing was to get the two icons in position for the next page that I had already seen posted all over the Internet dozens of times. And that might be a disservice to the writing. Possibly, it would have swept me away if I didn’t already know for certain where it was leading. The other thing was the ad for the new series. Not a huge deal, not like you can even call it a spoiler, but the one remaining surprise about the issue was the reappearance of those COMING THIS YEAR IN JUSTICE LEAGUE vertical panels that Johns used to do every twelve months in JSA and BOOSTER GOLD and that I always loved, so they were a great ride and caused all this momentum that would have led to a real cool way to announce the new title. I guess they needed something to say at FanExpo. Too, was the coloring screwed up on anybody else’s issue, the Big Iconic Kiss page and then the page facing opposite? Like, there’s this splotchiness in the shaded part of their faces. And I was thinking that it might be intentional, but the same thing is on Amanda Waller’s skinny face on the next page, which makes me think someone forgot to hide a layer in Photoshop or something.

FLASH ANNUAL #1—All right, I’ve been wondering how Manapul/Buccellato were going to be able to crank out so many extra pages for this thing while holding down their duties on the monthly title minus one fill-in and the answer turns out to be have Manapul do all the layouts and then kick it out to a different crew for every chapter. Which works pretty well, supplying a cohesion and consistency both in the book and to the main title while letting each chapter retain their own distinct artistic flavor. Glider gets a bit more weight once we know her secret origin. I’ve never seen Marcio Takara’s work, but enjoyed Chapter 4, kind of a Samnee thing going on striking a real fine balance between cartooning and photo-realism. And then a bunch of hand-grenade-shaped pods crash down from the sky full of Gorilla Grodd’s minions. Readers of the regular series who gave this a pass are going to be scratching their heads next month, I tell you what.

AMERICAN VAMPIRE #30—Man, and then again, this one feels like one of the better issues of this series. That’s been happening a lot lately. Snyder/Albuquerque remain at the top of their game. Nice of them to blow up that car with a hand-grenade to help celebrate the recent release of THE INVISIBLES OMNIBUS.  And I really dug Skinner’s “Wrong genre, asshole,” line. And, of course, really serious business there at the end, cutting back and forth between those two scenes with the phonograph lyrics getting all kinds of weight from the adultery. That’s actually the kind of synergistic alchemy they haven’t been able to quite hit over there on BEFORE WATCHMEN, as of yet.

SPACEMAN #9—This was a hell of a series that never shied away from challenging its reader. And pretty much all of that comes from narrative decisions made by Azzarello. All the dialogue is rendered in this slangy future patois that the writer invented solely for this story, which sounds like a dicey proposition, but Azzarello crafts his syllables with such a deft hand that, not only did I never get lost or confused about what they were saying for the entire course of the series, but I actually managed to internalize this brand-new dialect and in some cases even anticipate what they were going to say. Say? On top of that, though, the timeshifts between the present-day action and whatever went down with Orson, Carter, and the rest of the Spacemen on Mars are presented in a way that seems constructed to deliberately disorient any reader who doesn’t stay right on top of things. And the art. I mean, Risso/Mulvhill/Robins are pretty much universally acknowledged as one of the best teams in the industry. Hell, they’ve got over a dozen years of experience working together under their belts! And it shows, expressive faces delivering the unique dialogue, body language as dynamic as it is unique, gorgeous tones depicting everything from dock explosions to lush panoramic Martian sunsets, and a lettering style that is completely invisible, Robins gets out of the way entirely, I didn’t think about him while reading a single word of this series. Which means he was doing his job. I haven’t even touched upon the actual narrative content of this final issue, and I don’t think I will, but I will say that I didn’t expect it to be half as heartbreaking as it turned out to be. If you loved 100 BULLETS or are a fan of very intelligent literary science fiction that makes you work for it and rewards the effort, definitely pick this one up when the trade comes out. Top shelf work, all around.

PROPHET #28—God, I love this series. We check back in with Old Man Prophet and his tree sidekick Hiyonhoiagn in their starship moving at the bleed of light. An act of wordplay that I’m wild for. Maybe I’m just the last person in the world to realize this, but does this mean that every artist on this book is assigned to a particular Prophet. I’m think that Milonogiannis drew these guys last time? But I can’t be sure, every one of these issues about completely scrambles my brain by the time it’s done. The crowning achievement of this issue by far is the resuscitation (on both levels of an on-panel influence on the plot and just the character in general) of Diehard, who first exploded into the lives of millions of readers (or hundreds of thousands of readers who bought multiple copies) twenty years ago as probably the most cliché and derivative member of a team comprised entirely of clichéd analogues. Of course, in the hands of this brain trust, he’s wildly compelling to an almost laughable extent. “Diehard’s headless body leads them on,” is, no problem, my favorite sentence of the week. If tragedy struck and for some reason I had to jettison 90% of my pull list, this one would still get picked up every month. I just hope we make it back to this crew sooner than three months from now. I actually really care about what’s going on with Diehard. Inconceivable! This one missed Best of Week by the narrowest of margins, to the point that the whole hierarchy of the thing almost seems pointless.

MORNING GLORIES #21—And brand-new psychopath du jour Irina is on the cover about to pull the pin out of yet another grenade. Almost too much to take! Spencer/Eisma and friends continue to put Marvel to shame, delivering massive value on another issue, this one’s 36 pages, no ads, still for $2.99. You can’t afford NOT to be reading this one! The Lindelof story structure adoration continues as we get resolution to a dangling cliffhanger opposite flashbacks that you can’t really call “The Other 48 Days,” but close enough. This new gang of kids who’ve been here all along jump right in and provide plenty of spark to a book that’s going to have quite a ridiculous ensemble if everyone can ever get in the same place at the same time any time before #50. And when the hell are we going to dial back in with Casey?!? She’s just been hanging out at the Academy for years incognito or in disguise? I think? One of the most consistently rewarding serial experiences in comics today, this.

FF #21—So sad, you can definitely see Hickman putting all the madnesses back in the toybox one by one, here. Unless things just go batshit bananas on his way out the door, which would of course be wonderful, this issue seems to completely retire the Inhumans/Kree cosmic conflict, a really sparse affair, but beautifully rendered. I hope Nick Dragotta stays through #23, his crisp economical lines are just enough to fully depict the body language and facial expressions without over-rendering, and Cris Peters fleshes the images out with soothing hues that are always well-chosen. The counterpoint between Reed and Sue on the station and Ronan and Crystal was well done, and of course, Spidey getting called out by the Centaurian was the perfect comic relief to dispel the crippling tension permeating this issue, if only for a page. Let’s shut it down here, I’ve still got four more of these to get through and it’s going to get better, not worse, my dears. As Jerry Horne once sagely noted, “Man . . . now I’m depressed.”

8/22/12

BEST OF WEEK: BATMAN INCORPORATED #3—There is so much to love about this issue. The opening three-page montage illustrating to how great of an extent Leviathan’s insidious tentacles have already wrapped around the various systems that so critical to Gotham’s (or any city’s) future: educational, law enforcement, judicial, social services. Six pages of Bruce resurrecting his Matches Malone undercover disguise with near-constant side-splitting dialogue. Dick Grayson’s review of himself as Batman. The digital diagram of Leviathan’s web, a beautiful illustration of 34 images that recapitulates Morrison’s entire six-year run on this character, across all the various titles and iterations, complete with dialogue that already suggests a meta- quality that will surely only intensify in seven issues’ time, once we know how it all ends. That panel of Dick consoling a grounded Damian. The underworld bar from the Matches scene turning out to be called Three-Eyed Jacks, certainly a TWIN PEAKS homage. The bad guys getting the drop on “Matches,” followed by Damian getting the same on “Pennyworth,” just in time to invent a new identity and let Burnham channel some of that old Quitely/Stewart BATMAN & ROBIN no-dialogue fight-scene choreography brilliance. Everybody here is operating at the top of their game, creators and characters alike. I’m going to be so sad to see this run come to an end, but it has been a majestic demonstration of just how elastic the legend and mythos are, and it is a hell of a good time seeing it ramp up for this last roaring home-stretch.

ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM #1—Man, I had no idea this was even coming out, what a terrific surprise to find in the old weekly pull. I’ve made no secret of absolutely loving Waid/Samnee’s recent work over on DAREDEVIL and this character is perfectly suited to their aesthetic, it’s a great thrill to watch them tear up this pulp goodness. The opening six-page scene is thrilling, they could not have showed up with a tighter or more instantly engaging opening. Jordie Bellaire shows up on colors as strong as Dave Stewart would have, which is about as high a compliment as I can pay. Cliff’s “Huh” on Page 19 is perfect. This is a real smart package, I’m happy to pay $4 a pop when they put all the ads at the back. Get in there, IDW. The first anthology they did a while back was full of jaw-dropping A-list goodness, but that last one wasn’t quite up to the same standard. Great to see the property return to form. And Samnee’s pin-up or cover on the Next Month page is almost the best part of the whole package. Stevens lives on!

FLASH #12—The action cranks way up as Glider makes her full-issue debut and accelerates this title back up to top form. It took her showing up to make me realize, but what this book’s been needing is something new on the antagonist front, and she certainly makes a strong initial showing. Manapul/Buccellato’s art is as kinetic and gorgeous as ever and I’m certainly intrigued to see how they’ll wrap this first year up next week, though I hope the folks they’ve brought in to help are capable of keeping the bar this high. The Trickster paraphrased “A Song of Ice and Fire” with the line about a Snart always paying his debts, right? That was weird.

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #12—Man, the art on this is really beautiful. Janin’s a beast, but Ulises Arreola’s color work really makes the entire thing pop, every page sings. Even if I still can’t get over how young Constantine looks. I loved the Ellis AUTHORITY caption on the House of Mystery “currently traveling through Limbo at extradimensional speeds.” That business came out of nowhere, a nice little throwback. Though, why not just make it The Bleed, at this point? The whole idea is that these people are in the DC Universe proper with the Stormwatch gang, right? Not just tucked in their own pocket universe. And kudos again to Janin for those layouts on the Slaughter Swamp scene, that business is straight JH Williams. It’s interesting to see this kind of thing flowing into a title like this or over on SWAMP THING, a cool little microcosm of a house style. Really glad Lemire jumped in on this one here, good Vertigo fun in all but name. Though the title, man. Just because everyone bought Bendis’s DARK AVENGERS doesn’t mean that’s the way to go here.

FABLES #120—And speaking of dark. I’m usually too jaded by now to get too upset when a character dies on Wednesday night, I mean, Brubaker figured out a way to bring back Bucky (spoilers!), twice, even, but I seriously hope that this one won’t stick. Bleakest. Island of Toys arc. Ever. I could still care less about the backup, though McManus’s art is purty. Can’t believe I’ve been picking this one up for ten years running.

THE UNWRITTEN #40—And there’s our protagonist! This title’s worth picking up if only to have Carey wax eloquent and slam home for you every four weeks how important stories are to us a culture and individuals, the importance of narrative ideaspace on the collective unconsciousness, yadda yadda yadda, Gaiman Gaiman Gaiman. I say with love.  I can’t find it now, but seems like someone made some simile involving putting the pin back in the hand grenade, which was a bit disturbing the week they start running ads for THE INVISIBLES OMNIBUS. What a beast of a tome that thing will be.

FANTASTIC FOUR #609—This is great fun. Probably the worst thing you can say about it is that it’s very likely one of those ideas at the bottom of the monster list of batshit crazy story ideas that Hickman made four years ago when he got this title. It provides resolution to a dangling plot-point from the Millar/Hitch run that I don’t think anybody remembered or cared about after the seventy-something issues of madness that have been thrown at us since. It doesn’t, at first glance, appear to drive the mega-narrative forward one little bit. It’s a fill-in issue. Arriving in a run with only six issues left to go. Drawn by an artist I’ve never heard of. All of that said, it’s glorious. The FF pretty much don’t do anything, we don’t even see the kids, there are like two dozen characters that Hickman has folded into this run who do not make an appearance, all that happens is that our title characters pretty much stand around while the Defenders of the future sub-contract with the Moloids to engineer the corpse of Galactus from the future into a galaxy-spanning god ship so that they can pilot him/it at 98% lightspeed on a 500 light-year round-trip and have all kinds of crazy adventures, but then because of all of that time dilation, arrive back at an Earth that’s one thousand years in the future. And Reed really believes that they can make it, even though there’s significant statistical probability that they won’t. That’s it, nothing happens, just universe-sized ideas blooming up out of every page turn. And Ryan Stegman’s art is magnificent, fully appropriate to the scale this issue is operating on. Stunning work. 

8/15/12

RORSCHACH #1—Of course, there’s all kinds of concern with giving this guy his own series. Not whether or not he can anchor it, but whether the poor bastards they’ve talked into producing it can come anywhere within hot-grease-throwing distance of a narrative worthy of the character who stood at the heart of, and indeed, served as the initial forward momentum for what many folks believe is the greatest comic book series of all time. I went in with optimism, Azzarello and Bermejo have a solid track record in previous collaboration. The cover is immaculate, one of those few things you can hold up to the no-look naysayers and say, “See, this is why BEFORE WATCHMEN.” But how are the interiors? Well, the art certainly holds up. Lee Bermejo is one of the master craftsman in the industry, I can’t believe that he’s produced as many pages of sequentials as he has in such a gorgeous, fully-rendered painted style. The zoom-out for the first two pages is perfect and then that opening shot of Rorschach-cloud New York is perfect. As is the dialogue on that third page. Of course, we’ve got to start with an entry in the good old diary, but Azzarello provides plenty of nuance here. It’s 1977, so the first word is “I,” our protagonist has not yet become the man whose narrative voice we know so well eight years hence. The second sentence, he drops the subject just like we’re used to, opens with the verb, but then still uses the first-person pronoun in the predicate. Smart smart writing. Walter Joseph proceeds to relate yet another old story about how his whore mother was basically just the worst in the world. And it’s tonally perfect. Especially the punchline after the page turn. This feels like Kovacs. The rest of the issue is basically all set-up. Our boy beats the hell out of some goons for information. Azzarello gets to have fun bouncing a sound effect off of dialogue with a gleeful abandon that would never work in any other context. We meet Bourquin and Fine, just barely less jaded and grizzled than they are in that last month of their lives, as they stumble across the body from the opening scene, natch. Rorschach gets ambushed and all beat to hell. Then he rolls into Gunga Diner and gives some tough talk to hold us over until next issue. The verdict on this one is that it has potential. If the rest of the issue had been as symphonic as that third page, then I’d be frothing at the mouth like I was for SILK SPECTRE. But Azzarello, ever the master of pace, makes the decision to dial it way down this opening issue. Not necessarily a bad thing, just a choice that makes it hard to judge this one too strongly one way or another. As a single, it did not destroy me. But this is a slow burn, I’ve got faith.

BEST OF WEEK: WONDER WOMAN #12—What a year-end payoff! Great Zeus, these gentlemen dropped the justice. This issue has all of the high-level trademarks we’ve come to expect: Azzarello’s whip-smart dialogue that almost seems too clever for its own good until you begin to suspect that its also operating on a third level that whose meaning is only clear to the author, dynamic shots from Chiang, and a vivid palette from Wilson (whose name really deserves to be on the cover). Only, this particular installment happens to serve as the climax for the entire story we’ve been rocking up until now with a couple of serious last-minute plot twists. That last page had me gasping and choking at the same time, just terribly messed up about the poetry of the whole thing, such a great idea that seems obvious in hindsight but that I seriously doubt anyone sitting around trying to guess the ending of this long arc could have possibly seen coming. There’s even a strong hint in-issue, when Diana throws off her bracelets, the Kirby Krackle is suddenly unleashed! We’ve still got one more week left, but with the first-year final pages of BATMAN, ACTION, ANIMAL MAN, and SWAMP THING on the stands, I think I’ve got to give it to this one above all others for providing a very satisfying resolution for what has come before while dropping the heartstopping out of nowhere madness last page that earns another year’s worth of patronage all by itself. A terrific idea and perfectly executed way to organically introduce one of my favorite corners of the DC Universe into this post-reboot landscape. I’ve got a million questions and can’t wait to find out what happens next. Which means you’re doing serial fiction right. Full marks.

BATWOMAN #12—Cool transitioning on the pile this week, the double-shot of Azzarello giving way to his girl guest-starring here. And, you know, I really don’t pay that much attention to the covers until I’ve already read the issue + I had dropped this until JH came back on art, both of which combined for me to have no idea that Wonder Woman was even in this book until I got to the bottom of the first page, and let me tell you, it is good news to have already begun a story and realize that JH Williams III is about to drop a Batwoman/Wonder Woman team-up in your lap. And how he delivers! I wish that this could be the one New 52 book where they’re just like, Okay it isn’t monthly it comes out when it comes out and isn’t that what you people want? Because that’s the way it should be. It’s not fair to ANYone to have to draw fill-in arcs for this book. It’s impossible. I guess I’d like to see Jock or Francavilla try, but I’d rather just wait. Seven or eight issues a year would be fine. Williams, once again, like he has every single time since at least that “The Black Glove” arc with Morrison a few years back, plus I guess why not go ahead and count PROMETHEA, delivers a master class in sequential storytelling/page layout/panel composition/mixed-art style to reflect subject matter, I mean, the guy is a raging maniac. The opening ad-free 11-page scene is nothing less than a tour de force. I could probably do a thousand words about how each double-page spread is just the sickest thing ever, but then you turn the page and he bitchslaps you with an entirely different bag of tricks, this whole new level of innovation. I’d love it if the big bad monster at the very end of this long story turns out to be JH himself, frothing at the mouth, hunkered over his drawing board, warping Kate’s very reality into inconceivable panoramic vistas of ornate perfection that leaves even this hardened ex-Marine Batwoman a drooling vegetable because it’s all just so so pretty to look at.

FATALE #7—Here we are with Chapter 100 or however many of Brubaker/Phillips completely kicking ass, with series regular Dave Stewart along for the ride on pretty colors. This one is perfectly engaging and works well as a single installment, though I’ll be damned if I know how it’s going to lock in with the first chapter or the present-tense prologues we’ve been getting. There are comics professionals and then there are these guys, just a cut above almost everybody. The second installment of the Nevins essay is, like last month, perfectly informative but not quite as rhapsodic as we’ve grown accustomed to from the pen of the great annotator.

SAGA #6—Everyone’s falling all over themselves about how great this book is and I’m just not seeing it. It’s certainly not a bad read, but it’s nowhere near as flattening as it should be. If you pitched me “BKV’s new longform creator-owned space opera, in which science fiction and magic collide every bit as star-crossed as Romeo & Juliet + baby/attached ghost girl, and all of the galaxy is trying to catch them. Plus, he got Fiona Staples to do interiors,” then I’m all over that. That sounds wonderful, but the contemporary dialogue is just murdering it for me. Modern-day slang like “Because of course,” takes me right out of it. And that’s on the bottom of the second page. And Alanna says “literally” when she doesn’t have to, just like everybody else in the world at the moment. No sign of “epic fail,” as of yet. The art’s wonderful and expressive, as is Miz Staples’ hand-drawn lettering. I want to love this, am so in BKV’s corner, but not nearly as crushed as I feel like I should be by now. You can’t beat the value on that trade, though.

AVENGERS VS X-MEN #10—Ya-ha-hah, well the old girl is really ramping up now. There are enough slambang moments in this one to getcha all pumped up about WHO WINS/LOSES/LIVES/DIES?!?!? I’m not sure why Charley’s little speech on Page Five made Cap shed a patriotic tear, though. I mean, yeah, this whole thing sucks, but Big Daddy X is just now manning up, getting ready to go to work and tear down his old QB1, the Sentinel of Liberty/First Avenger getting all verklempt is like the last thing he needs to see right now. Was anybody hoping Magneto was going to somehow straight-up end dear Emma? I’ve certainly enjoyed her role this decade and can’t believe that editorial has let it last this long in this brave all-new all-different post-Morrison era, but that would have been the big damn fun. Which I’m given to understand is the point of this whole thing. Also, reclaiming market share from the New 52 and setting up increased revenue going forward, but come on, play with me here. The Chaos Fist knows what I’m talking about. She punched him to the Blue Area of the Moon! That’s where Jean died! Or at least the Phoenix simulacrum, but you know what I mean! UNCANNY #137 tore my heart out, son.

THE AVENGERS #29—Huh. This was just weird. Of course, it’s great fun to see Simonson draw yet another big throwdown of everyone’s favorite box-office icons, but Bendis usually regulates his tie-ins really well so that everything bounces off each other just so. It’s totally fine to have this take place before AvX #8 and come out now, but in weeklies, I always read the core title before tie-ins to make sure that the main cliffhangers don’t get spoiled and it’s incredibly anticlimactic to have Xavier swearing off the conflict and wiping everyone’s memories three issues in the past, when we’ve in the core series, we’ve just read him announce his intention to resolve the conflict once and for all. Narratively a misfire, but still, you know, Simonson.

DAREDEVIL #17—Like Snyder last week, Waid seizes the opportunity of a fill-in and crafts a pretty flattening done-in-one that does its dead-level best to surpass all that’s come before. The Allreds show up here and lay the business down. That super-clean retro hearkening-back-to-the-Silver-Age kind of style they’ve got going is a perfect fit for this book. Mrs. Laura, in particular, tears it up with her palette. The whole thing made me miss that batshit version of X-FORCE they did a few years back with Milligan. And what a beautiful yarn Waid crafted to anchor the flashback. Comics done right, people!

8/8/12

BATMAN #12—Now, that’s what I call a fill-in issue. Snyder digs deep, all the way back to the first issue, and sheds new light on the behind-the-scenes machinations of Harper Row, who up until now in the series has appeared to be a random drop-in no-name cameo but gets more characterization in this issue than your average character in an entire arc of AMERICAN VAMPIRE. Snyder welcomes Becky Cloonan to the festivities, which is a perfect fit, Ms. Cloonan’s lines are already just about as synonymous in my heart with this particular character the way that J.H. Williams managed to dial his own aesthetic into the adventures of that Kathy Kane from those first few pages. Harper Row is everything we need in a modern-day female protagonist: strong, gutsy, ready to charge into danger to help Batman without a thought for herself, and in no way defined by or as a love interest. I was definitely concerned what would happen when/if this title’s stellar regular team took a break, but I should have realized that Snyder had a strategy up his sleeve from the very beginning. Strong, strong work. Even the art jump to Andy Clark wasn’t terribly jarring, timed perfectly in-line with the more superheroic elements crashing into the panel. Though I have to say, I would have enjoyed Cloonan’s work on the whole issue, we know she’s more than capable of excelling at action. The other little skip-up I had with this issue was the whole “seven words” thing, once he set up that first decoy on the first page, I kept counting words in whatever sentences seemed like contenders, which, you know, took me out of the story a bit, but a minor grumble. My favorite part might be how explicitly this issue displays arguably the best thing about Snyder's run, probably my favorite anyway, not the pitch-perfect characterization or galloping action beats, but his dogged commitment to adding to the mythology of Gotham as a character, brick by brick, every issue, just this entire Grid/ghost-grid thing alone, I mean, this is the first time this has really been discussed, right? It makes perfect sense and tucks back in to all that's gone before with surgical precision but then absolutely embodies the themes and motifs, Batman appearing to go all Robin Hood with the power but then turning out to be the true architecture holding the entire skeleton together, it's so nice when the ideas behind the words explode in your head even harder than everything they've imagined on the page. Highest possible marks for this one, all around.

BATMAN AND ROBIN #12—This team continues to turn in nothing less than a top-drawer Batman book, month-in and month-out. That Tomasi/Gleason/Gray can even step to what Snyder’s got going on down the way on a monthly basis is a massive feat. The augmentation suit shot is, of course, the fanboy moment of the week. I loved how the whole Robins subplot came together too, so priceless for Dick to just hand the trophy over. “Dude. You’re already Robin, you know.” That was a really cool shot of the four of them looking up at their robot-suit Iron Batman daddy in the sky there, but did it look kind of stretched to anyone else, horizontally distorted like you don’t have the orientation settings right on your TV? Tim’s head, in particular. Nice to see Damian still owning the book, though, of course he’s got to talk shit to the dying bad guy as the light fades from his eyes. What a kid.

FRANKENSTEIN, AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E. #12—Yeah, maybe the best issue of the series yet, certainly my favorite since Lemire left. It would be great to see the monster throw off the shackles of agency control, just strangle that Father Time fellow in the little girl’s body and go all Nick Fury up on this shit. Kindt is really doing fine work, here. And the art never lets up, continues to blow the doors off every chance it gets. There have been no fill-ins, right? Ponticelli/Faucher/Villarrubia have grown accustomed to one another, are able to dart in and out of each other’s abilities, tightening and strengthening the pages into something greater than any single one of them would be able to produce. That splash of Frank engaging and infiltrating the threat near the end is my favorite, just good action pulp fun. Love that sky over the Leviathan graveyard. It’s a strong week for the DC #12s I picked up, all three going great guns blazing into their second years. Looking forward to seeing what they’ve got on tap for those zero-issues next month.

OZYMANDIAS #2—The title character’s not-that-secret-origin continues. We get an interesting October 11 time-stamp for the framing sequence, locking the narration down as taking place early in the original series. This one is the most middle of the road of the five series we’ve had a look at so far. It’s not offensive (or at least any more so than the entire endeavor) but not terribly compelling. The club manager slipping the payoff to the goon on the bottom of Page Seven while managing to work in both the name of the goon’s boss and the phrase “drug trade” is kind of hilarious and hopefully, surely, a throwback to that sort of hackneyed over-expository dialogue so prevalent in the Silver Age, during which this should be taking place. Right? The early- to mid-60s? Because this should be before the Crimebusters meeting in ’66. That one two-page spread of Adrian whupping ass all the way up to the rafters in silhouette is pretty gorgeous. It’s weird, though, I can’t disassociate Jae Lee’s faces with THE DARK TOWER, that following page looks taken straight out of WIZARD & GLASS to me. Digging on his layouts, those round panels breaking through page-length horizontal slits. The cover is hilarious, as there is nary a dominatrix to be found within these pages, though of course there are those pundits who will argue that willfully entering into any of these narratives at all constitutes an exercise in sadomasochism of the highest order. Maybe Eddie Blake will put on the outfit next month.

BEST OF WEEK: NEW AVENGERS #29—I really loved this issue. It reminds me of that CONFESSION special Bendis wrote that came out in the aftermath of CIVIL WAR that retroactively fixed up the majority of wreckage that Millar visited upon the Marvel Universe, just almost salvaged the entire event in 32 or so pages. Now, AvX isn’t anywhere near the mess that CW was, but Bendis is already going to work, employing his time-honored device of having characters sit around making with the back and forth to make much more sense of all the madness visited upon the Big Event-hungry superhero comic consumer. I mean, really, it shouldn’t work, all that happens in this issue is the heavies sit around and talk about what’s going on, a total respite from the battle, the opposite of that AvX: VERSUS series now that I think about it, but Bendis does such an ace job nailing the voices and tics of every one of these characters that verisimilitude is total, you really feel like you’re sitting in the room with these guys, and Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Stephen Strange, Charles Xavier, and Reed Richards are five fellas I would be thrilled to hang with just any old time. This is the gold standard of what a tie-in to a Big Event should be. Top-drawer work from Deodato, as well.

MOUSE GUARD: THE BLACK AXE #5—It’s been many a moon, but David Peterson’s singularly unique tale of medieval mice knights in the twelfth century returns with another installment in its third volume, this one a flashback relating how Celanawe’s fate first became intertwined with the Black Axe. It’s been long enough that I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to dial right back in to the story, but this was not the case. All told, pretty heartbreaking. These mice do not have an easy time of it! And we already know how it all ends for poor Celanawe. Rough going, all around. But a beautifully told story.

THE MASSIVE #3—An excellent third issue here putting a definitive punctuation mark on the opening arc, which will make for a very strong reading experience in one sitting, though I hope the trade gets all of the backmatter. Maybe not, that might be the point of it, to drive singles sales. At any rate, Wood is a gifted enough storyteller with hundreds of scripts under his belt at this point who knows exactly how to come barreling out of the gate. I’ve enjoyed Kristian Donaldson’s art, impressive scope ranging from human interactions to the massive disaster-strewn vistas he’s called upon to provide, sometimes three to a page. Sorry to see him go. But I’m sure that Wood has another monster ready to wreak havoc upon the crew of The Kapital and those of us playing along at home.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #7—And in a nice bit of symmetry, we close out this evening’s Wood doubleheader with one of his most prolific collaborators and the artist who started off our Wednesday night, the gifted Becky Cloonan. It’s a little bittersweet because she’s only back for this one issue, but we’ll take what we can get. This is your average fish-out-of-water story except the setting is Conan’s home village. Apparently, some chucklehead is going around claiming to be Conan and raising just all kinds of hell upon the countryside. Our lovers have to stop them. That’s . . . pretty much it. This one’s a bit skinny on content as far as singles go, not quite as much thunder per issue as we’ve come to expect, but it’s so good to see the gang back together, we’ll let it slide just this once. Or any old time. Now, go make DEMO 3, please.