11/19/14

BEST OF YEAR: THE MULTIVERSITY: PAX AMERICANA — That last issue of ASTONISHING X-MEN that turned out to be giant-sized. PLANETARY #27. There have been a few comic books that I’ve waited for so long that months turned into years, but I don’t think I’ve ever been waiting on a single defined issue for as long as four years. Certainly nothing that John Cassaday wasn’t drawing! But here we have it. First announced in 2010, with pages previewed more than two years ago at MorrisonCon, this installment of THE MULTIVERSITY above all others has been the object of intense speculation and expectation for quite some time due to its astronomically enticing set-up: Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, the team responsible for FLEX MENTALLO, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, and WE3, among others, reunite to present their own version of that still-mostly-sacred milestone of graphic literature, WATCHMEN. Morrison ratcheted fanboy expectations up to a fever pitch back in 2012 by going into detail about his conceptual thinking for this issue. One representation of the harmonic alignment of the different Earths across the vibrational multiversal plane is that this issue does away with Dave Gibbons’s ubiquitous and famous nine-panel grid in favor of eight panels to represent the octave-to-octave musical notes of the Western major scale. Morrison actually went ahead and then showed us the uncolored unlettered opening pages and I now remember being a little disappointed that he just went ahead and blurted out, “The book begins with a backwards tracking shot of the President’s exploded skull as the Comedian’s just assassinated him from space!” But, if you’re going to get spoiled, you want Morrison to do it for you like that, only the deal was, sooooooooo much other shit happened in between that and the time that my poor body finally gave out on that long ago Saturday night that I had absolutely no retention of being spoiled until turning the page here and realizing that it was running backwards and then it all came crashing back in for me and it was really quite the charming effect. But, let me back up for a moment.

Just like the source material, the cover is actually the first panel of the issue. Or last, really. There’s already more shit happening in the first couple of shots than you almost know what to deal with. The cover appears to be the right half of a peace sign emblazoned on a flag that is on fire. The section that we can see is not unreminiscent of the DC peel logo in the upper-lefthand corner of this cover. The reader pulls back the cover to reveal a series of zoom-out shots whose angles are drawn (or shot, is the feeling) in an identical manner to those that we know so well from Gibbons’s groundbreaking work nearly thirty years ago. At first glance, the page hits the reader with two details: Gibbons’s nine-panel grid is indeed gone and we’re dealing with four skinny vertical panels on top of another four, giving us eight as advertised but also, that first shot back from the cover, the actual first panel of the interior comic, has the peace sign now folded and flapping in such a way that it also looks like an eight. Or, more specifically, a möbius strip. It’s such a striking visual aesthetic, Quitely’s hyper-rendered linework brought to glorious life by Nathan Fairbairn’s colors, that at first glance, the reader isn’t even aware that time is running in reverse. It’s only really explicit in the jump between the seventh to the eighth and final panel from the dripping blood’s spatial relationship to the Presidential seal, and remember, I already knew this because Morrison told me and a room full of one thousand people himself, but I was already so overwhelmed by what was happening that it wasn’t until that first page-turn that I realized that time was running backwards. Oh, and in the fifth panel, the dead guy who must be the President has a ring with an eight or an infinity sign or a möbius strip on it. But then, we turn the page and any subtlety about the backwards-time thing is blasted away as we watch the president’s jaw completely reform after being blown to bits. The same 4 x 2 grid of skinny vertical panels recurs here, which is enough to set it up as the default before Quitely violates it on the following page by subbing out the bottom half of four panels with two horizontal ones instead, possibly alluding to the whole widescreen comics thing that Ellis/Hitch inaugurated with THE AUTHORITY at the turn of the century, but maybe that’s reading too much into it. The next page is the title page and returns time to its natural forward flow, referencing Steranko’s Fury with that swirly business and explicitly mentioning the backward and forward flow of time.

The next page is the first walk-and-talk, kind of a riff on the trope of Aaron Sorkin television except that instead of the camera following the speakers for an uninterrupted take, what is uninterrupted in this case is the long shot of the room with time flowing as the characters walk from one panel to the next across the same physical space. Which you pretty much have to see for it to make sense, but trust me, it does. Everything I’m writing makes perfect sense. This issue has in no way damaged me at all. This page is looooooaded with that kind of double- or triple-meaning dialogue that Moore codified to such a ridiculous extent in WATCHMEN and that everyone has been doing such a sad job of reaching for ever since. The first panel mentions the light in the interrogation room, nothing subtle about that. Then, we proceed to talk of Smith burying the American super-hero while they walk on top of the presidential seal. The next panel, they stop walking and Nightshade rattles off an emboldened “stop,” followed by her father inviting her to take “the elevated view” while they walk up a staircase (of eight steps, natch). Subsequent dialogue references turning a corner and opening a door before the next page turns out to be a redux of the classic Clark-interviewing-Luthor-on-the-winding-staircase page from ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #5, which is once again loaded with multiple in-dialogue allusions to what’s happening in-panel. Eden’s last line mentions a leap of faith.

So, of course cut to The Question leaping through the air and asking a bunch of questions to his former partner, The Blue Beetle. Question mentioning four prominent scientists in conjunction with their four unsolved murders once again adds up to you-know-what. His mention of these guys and the disappearance of Captain Adam/Atom in the same context of the Yellowjacket case makes it seem like the killer might have been President Harley. And Nora O’Keefe maybe got too close and figured this out, so she had to go, as well? That is actually a great fit because it provides Peacemaker all the motivation he needs for then taking Harley out. But, more on that later. As Question hits the subway after escaping Beetle, he walks past ads for his secret identity’s news show, but there’s also one for Nightshade’s album futureBOMB, the cover of which directly references FLEX MENTALLO. It is also worth noting that The Question first mentions Algorithm 8 on Page Eight, which I have a pretty hard time believing is unintentional.

Oi. And then comes that insane double-page 32-panel spread that starts out doing that same Sorkin trick as before, breaking up the same physical space into 32 distinct bits of time but upping the ante quite severely by interweaving three separate timelines instead of just keeping it linear. We’ve got Nora O’Keefe right before getting murdered juxtaposed with The Question showing up later that night (in homage to Rorschach’s first scene at the Comedian’s place in #1 of WATCHMEN), referencing the date, November 17th, 2015 (with both 1 + 7 = 8, 2 + 0 + 1 + 5 = 8, natch) and also juxtaposed with Nora and her husband or boyfriend Peacemaker earlier that day. Dialogue from that earliest scene indicates that the President has claimed that “Algorithm 8” is projecting world peace. But later that night, Nora has cracked the algorithm and possibly knows that she is about to die. We see the murderer crouched behind the statue in Panel Six of the first page of the spread (or Panel Ten, if you’re counting across both pages horizontally), then he circles clockwise around the base of the Pax statue, as Question states. It’s a pretty incredible moment of the layout coming together in the bottom middle, there, Nora approaching from the left, the killer from the right, with the actual murder happening off-panel because that space is taken up by the follow-up scene with The Question. You could probably write a pretty mean five- or ten-page essay on just these two pages alone, but we had better press on. Special shout-out to Nathan Fairbairn, whose colors are crucial to making this spread as comprehensible as it is.

Oh good, now Captain Nathaniel Adam is reading ULTRA COMICS. Like my brain wasn’t already hurting. This charming fan-favorite from SUPERMAN BEYOND 3-D’s first line states that he has “caught sight of a massless time-symmetrical boson” on Pages 12 and 13. We just came from there, this is Page 14, but he’s probably referring not to that insane spread we just got done with but instead to the comic that he’s actually got in-hand. That ULTRA COMICS is going to be one hell of a thing to read, one of these days. This first page with the Dr. Manhattan analogue is as perfect an encapsulation that we get all issue long of what Morrison’s going for with the character’s usage of the second person in the last panel invoking Buddy’s famous “I can see you!” from way back in ANIMAL MAN #5. Also, a cool thing here with the layout, Quitely opens up with the first panel horizontal but only taking up a quarter of the page, meaning it stacks up on top of the other four half-panels that are then on top of the other four full-length panels. This seems to imply the way that the character exists in upper-dimensional space. Even on this page, he’s up above the normal eight panels that have been established as the norm. The good doctor takes his leave on the next page after the doomed scientists each push a button, executing “porti belli,” which translates to “beautiful places.” Quitely does a mathematical breakdown in the panel when Adam leaves, one in the middle, then two on each side, then continually having into increasingly smaller columns of four, eight, and sixteen. That winds up being thirty on either side of the main one. Which I don’t think means anything other than that Quitely’s a beast. This is immediately followed by the scientists’ murder by a “sergeant” that they seem to acknowledge as a superior and whose left arm is metal/bionic just like Nora O’Keefe’s killer.

The following page is a reprise of the Sally Jupiter/Laurel Juspeczyk scenes from the source material with Nightshade visiting her mother and sharing that her father, Dr. Eden, is working with Allen Adam on harnessing black hole energy to reduce America’s dependence on oil.

The spread on the next page is more confusing than even what we’ve gotten acclimated to by now. Across the top row, we’ve got four panels of Peacemaker and Nora in the very room that she will later be killed, discussing the ULTRA COMICS story that apparently Harley’s dad wrote entitled “Janus the Everyway Man,” which was the inspiration for her piece of art that will later be used to bludgeon her to death. Peacemaker clearly states that Harley has the algorithm but will not share it. All this while they let a pair of doves loose to fly off into the sky. This scene jumps to the bottom row of the page with the camera tracking the two doves. Peacemaker explicitly references all that is to come, he will “do what has to be done” after Harley wins the 2015 elections (why are there elections being held in 2015?) and then he and Nora will “go where they’ll never find us.” This is one shot when the doves are flying away, good to go. The next panel is a series of droplets of blood in a loose implication of a möbius strip. Then, there are just two feathers. Did Captain Atom pull the doves up into upper-dimensional space? Meanwhile, the sequence across the middle of this spread is laid out to echo the two-headed piece of art up above it with someone beating the hell out of Peacemaker post-assassination while the newly inaugurated President Dr. Eden asks him why he killed Harley. The person beating the hell out of Peacemaker’s face is the metal-armed killer. We’ve seen Eden’s hands and they are fleshy, so this just means that the killer works for Eden? Shit, I thought it was Harley.

Then, we’ve got Question reprising the famous Comedian-in-Moloch’s-room-from-Moloch’s-POV scene from #3 (I think #3). There’s another FLEX MENTALLO bomb allusion with the lighting of the fuse. Our hero goes on to reveal that he does not have a black-and-white worldview similar to one Walter Joseph Kovacs but is instead in favor of breaking things down into a, wait for it, eight-stage color-coded system. The high-level mob fixer playing the part of Moloch is apparently a “dirty cop in the pay of a corrupt vice president,” (who I think is supposed to be Eden, here). And this guy claims to have been taking orders from “the Sarge,” who I believe that we can correctly identify as Nora’s killer, whoever he really is.

Oh God, we’ve only made it as far as the staples.

Next up is the redux of Ozymandias’s failed 1966 Crimebusters meeting. The guy doing the talking, significantly, is one Sergeant Lane and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I JUST FOR THE FIRST TIME AFTER TEN READ-THROUGHS NOTICED THAT HE’S HOLDING UP THE EARTH-2 GRAPHIC NOVEL AND ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #10. Um. I can’t really deal with that right now.

Then, Harley gives a press conference in 2008 announcing the formation of the Pax Americana, a super-team comprised of some martial-arts based character called Tiger, the second Nightshade, Blue Beetle (now in the Dan Garrett outfit, having been seen rocking the Ted Kord duds in that future confrontation with his partner), The Question, and Peacemaker, who is even drawn in that scene leaning against the desk just like good old Eddie Blake, God rest his soul. But at that press conference, Captain Atom makes some new towers to replace the ones that fell on 9/11. There’s some assassin who’s rushing up to take out Harley but Adam teleports him to jail without even appearing to notice that it’s happened. That seems significant, but I can’t tie it in to anything else at this time.

Cut to Adam sitting on a park bench with his old dog Butch and reeeeally out of it as Harley approaches. Adam calls him the president, but subsequent dialogue reveals that he is just a governor. There’s a crazy deal here where Adam uses his powers to instantaneously not as much dissect poor Butch as separate him into his component parts. This of course immediately recalls Dr. Manhattan doing the same thing with his father’s watch, but that explicit comparison implies an interesting commentary on Morrison’s mindset to the material vs. Moore’s in the original. Whereas Moore takes a more mechanical craft-based approach, Morrison is far more humanistic and willing to roll his sleeves up, diving into the blood and guts of superhero comics to see what makes them tick, just as surgical as Moore but far less detached. One comes away from Moore’s material uncertain how much affection he even has left for this genre that at least at one time inspired him so much, but Morrison will clearly still have that big red S blazing under his shirt until the day he dies. And beyond!

Harley’s subsequent conversation with Adam irrefutably sets him up as our Ozymandias analogue. He discovered Algorithm 8 at his father’s graveside when he was twenty-three. He can see the new Dark Ages in the not-too-distant future. He puts forth the notion that the president has to be sacrificed in order to secure world peace. This is a very interesting permutation of Veidt’s plan, all but explicitly stating that the president was in on the assassination and that Peacemaker was acting upon the Chief Executive’s orders. Harley believes that Adam can resurrect him the same way he does with Butch a couple of pages back. All of this is apparently contained within “Major Max Meets Janus The Everywhere Man,” which it seems like is that issue of Major Comics that has been wrecking everything for everyone here for this entire series and which, by the way, was written and drawn by Harley’s father Vince.

Then, there’s a scene of some terrorists trying to get into President Bush’s White House and getting subdued by Peacemaker and his drones, all of which is narrated to the terrorist leader by Governor Harley. The significance of providing this scene to the reader at this point might be to illustrate the dichotomy of Peacemaker “loving peace so much he’s vowed to fight for it to the death.” That’s the genesis of the plan, right there. Same ironic goal as Veidt, the whole deal, this is just Harley putting himself in the role of sacrificial victim instead of half of New York City. Which makes the whole deal much more heroic, I believe we can all agree. This is confirmed by the following scene, the issue’s final post-assassination interrogation scene in which Peacemaker says that he was trying to “suvva worll.” He gets loose after that and manages an finger-gun “BANG!” in Eden’s direction before none other than the metal-fisted man, probably Sergeant Lane, decks him. Cut to that previous conversation with Nora when Peacemaker says that Harley said that he should be the victim because the punishment should fit the crime.

Then, we just back up to the early days of the Beetle/Question partnership and the latter causing a smack dealer to overdose on his own product at some basketball court. There’s a funny line about Question having to write something “badass and ironic” on his question card, but this page doesn’t really seem to contribute any answers to the narrative that I can discern, and its placement here seems to function mainly as a directional cue for the reader to show that we are now travelling backwards in time again. The next scene is Harley visiting his father’s grave across four different seasons, culminating with the Algorithm 8 revelation, which cranks up the situation on that panel-doubling pretty seriously, doubling so many times that there is a row of 256 goddamn panels across the middle of the page. Which I think means that there are 509 panels on this page. Okay, my brain is about cooked, now. Not even going to try to interpret that. One more scene to go. Okay.

Young Harley walks into his dad’s office and goes through a scrapbook. It’s a bunch of Yellowjacket clippings. The radio drops a long JFK quote, which you’ve got to do at this point in your WATCHMEN-homage situation. Young Harley starts playing with his dad’s gun. Yellowjacket (Vince Harley) comes back in through the window. He forgot his key but startles his son, which results in young Harley putting one right between Dad’s eyes. This is, of course, the crime that necessitates the punishment all of those years later. Young Harley holds up his father’s domino mask and it forms a möbius strip, which will go on to inspire him to see or compose Algorithm 8, as well as performing a nifty little tuck-in back to the beginning/end of this story, a perfect marriage of form and content. Oh, and there are the doves.

Okay. So, what I think happened is that Harley does in fact pull his little Ozymandias riff and orders Peacemaker to take him out but that he possibly expects that Adam will resurrect him. Only Vice-President Eden is a really bad dude and has Sergeant Lane coerce the four scientists to remove Adam from the equation before killing them, thus preventing Harley’s resurrection and leaving Eden in control, which is in keeping with the rest of the issues of this series ending in a really terrible place for all concerned. The only thing that I’m not really sure about is the extent of this that is revealed by Algorithm 8, how much both Harley and Nora knew before dying. Learning the secret of Algorithm 8 is clearly what caused Nora to be killed. Did Eden order this so that Harley’s equation would die with her after Harley’s assassination? Did Eden know Algorithm 8? Shouldn’t Harley have been aware of Eden’s machinations through Algorithm 8? Did everything, in fact, go according to his plan?

Just zooming in on this issue with this level of clarity has about sucked me dry, but I want to close by stating that my expectations for this issue could not have been higher and that they were surpassed. This is Morrison and Quitely both firing at the top of their game with Nathan Fairbairn and letterer Rob Leigh doing more than their share of heavy lifting to make this thing so much more clearer than it otherwise might have been. But, oh, it makes my brain hurt and my heart sing. It doesn’t get better than this, folks.

BATMAN AND ROBIN #36 — The Bring-Back-Damian arc in The New 52’s strongest and most consistently magnificent title continues. Gleason’s cover was so great, I had to bail out on the LEGO variant. Seriously, give those kids their own show on Fox Mondays after you-know-what! Bruce continues to dispense all manner of badassery in this issue. Dude even turns off the voice telling him all the horrible things that are breaking down on Page Three, even. That’s going to come back and bite him later on. A weird moment for me when our hero happens upon that crazy battle-tank and drops the classic, “I’m Batman!” For the first time, instead of thinking of Keaton dropping that seriousness in 1989 or even the Christian Bale cover-version of 2005, I could only hear it in the voice of whomever says those words for those wonderful “How It Should Have Ended” shorts. Kind of messed with the story flow for me a bit. That’s a terrific long shot of the team running up to the chaos cannon. And a perfect last page. This thing is going to read aces in trade, but it’s pretty sweet, savoring that shadow for an entire month.

FUTURES END #29 — All right, well I guess this business was important enough that we quit jumping around and just stayed with one cast of characters for this week. Would that they didn’t give away the big ending on the cover. I mean, it’s right there, man! Ryan Sook is so good. Patch Zircher is once again on interiors and pretty much locking down artistic MVP on this book at this point, fella keeps showing up and just putting it down. It looks like all kinds of Arrow & Barda fun next week, so hoorah.

BATMAN ETERNAL #33 — The shit has now really and truly hit the fan as Batman and newly promoted field agent Penny-Two race to lock down the seventeen weapons caches before Hush (who even has a stupid name, I’m realizing all these years later; oh, how that Jim Lee art blinds you!) can blow them all up and rob more Gotham families of their loved ones. Jason Fabok stays onboard for another round of finished pencils before jumping ship for the big show, and he once again turns in nothing but dynamic A-list business. DC really has found a deep reservoir of talent in this guy who I don’t know anything about but it seems like he is very much a child of the Lee/McFarlane nineties who has also studied Capullo’s evolution along the way and matured into his own style that is reminiscent of these influences but still very much his own. Character-wise, I love how Julia talks Bruce into letting her come out and then only makes it to her fourth panel out in the city before starting to question him and rake him over the coals for the whole underground weapons cache boondoggle. Which is a hell of a band name if anybody needs one.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #36 — I bailed on this title when Jim Lee did, was not a fan of the character dynamics that Johns had crackling for that entire first year. But I do like that Jason Fabok boy and wanted to support his ascendance to the ultimate big-time, so gave this one a look. It’s solid. Luthor in the League is definitely an interesting dynamic (and plays much better than that nonsense Bendis was running a few years back with Norman Osborne in Nick Fury’s old gig). The premise for this arc is compelling. Fabok once again knocks every single page out of the park, and his Outbreak Batsuit is a rocking character design. I’ll be back to see how it all goes down next month.

WONDER WOMAN #36 — I always reread the issues before writing them up so that I can blend my full-on going-for-broke Lone-Star-attack Wednesday night first impressions with a more nuanced pass through with more of a focus on the actual craft of the thing. For this reread, I waited until I had what felt like a particularly heavy bowel movement on deck. Because as talented of an artist as David Finch is, to say nothing of his collaborators Richard Friend & Sonia Oback, this thing manages to take a dump all over Azzarello/Chiang’s run in a mere twenty pages. Hell, in the first five. We open with a narrative caption montage about water. It is essential to life, you know, but too much of it can also lead to death. With this stunning juxtaposition between grass growing in the fields and floods destroying a city out of the way, we stop off at the statue of Hippolyta where the line “evidence of our sorrow” is oh-so-achingly presented alongside the image of rain trickling down from stone-Hippolyta’s eyes. As if the statue were crying, you see. People have got to stop copying thirty-year-old Alan Moore tricks. And then there’s some guy standing on top of a dam who might have caused this flood? And there’s Swamp Thing. All of this grand discussion has been in service of what we’ve been waiting more than three years for, an entire page of Diana doing nothing but washing blood off of her naked body in the shower before we turn the page and there she is, a full body shot of The God of War emerging from that self-same shower wearing a towel. Looking hot, Mama! This is the Wonder Woman we deserve. Nuanced.

I have made no bones about the fact that Azzarello did a great job loading this book up with a compelling ensemble, almost to the detriment of the lead herself occasionally, but it was always a good ride and they were all (with the exception of Orion, who still mainly hung around here) unique to this book. Well, Pages Eight and Nine are a double-page splash of the Justice League. And Swamp Thing shows up a couple of pages later basically so Diana can have someone to lose her temper against and fight. Because all of those dead women and children made her emotional, see. Then Aquaman just straight walks out of the jungle to fly Diana back home. And that’s such a weird thing. The League was all together, Batman said, “Let’s move,” it cuts to Wonder Woman attacking Swamp Thing to burn pages, and then Arthur takes her home. Best part of the issue is that they spend the flight with her holding and then nuzzling a teddy bear while providing an info-dump of the status quo post-Azzarello/Chiang’s run for all the folks who had been skipping one of the best books of The New 52 but who are now totally in because of that smokin’ Finch cover. Art notwithstanding, this comic would be very average without any context. Following up on what’s come before, it is downright insulting.

FABLES #146—Things are moving right along as the entire gang pretty votes to kill Bigby with Miss Duglas as his only hope of mercy from the merciless hand of Willingham. It looks like next issue is going to be really good.

ZERO #12 — This is an interesting short blast. I didn’t care too much about the opening scene, but the brief follow-up in the back end saved it for me. Once again, I’ve never heard of this Adam Gorham, but he comes out of nowhere to provide interiors that are a terrific fit to everything we’ve seen in this title before, stylistically speaking. I guess it’s too much to hope that #13 will just be what Zero is seeing in his file, there.

MORNING GLORIES #42 — This feels like a denser read than they have lately. Twenty-eight pages for $3.50, that is some quality! Sometimes, it’s hard finding something to talk about these singles that Meylikhov doesn’t already cover in the backmatter. It is a little funny, his last heading quoting one of the catchphrases of that latest BATTLESTAR GALACTICA just a few pages after Isabel just goes ahead and drops John Locke’s all-time classic “Everything happens for a reason” into her campaign speech. I guess Spencer had to mark the #42 somehow. This book has got me so twisted around that when Georgina first walked in, I thought that she was maybe Casey from the future and undercover? Those glasses really do make one hell of a disguise.

ASTRO CITY #17 — Well, shut my mouth! When we jump to Honor Guard having Red Cake Day there on the bottom of Page Three, I thought that Busiek finally caved and, mysterious first-person narrative captions notwithstanding, was going to give us just a straight JLA-type issue after all of these years. Silly me. Of course this story is still about some random dude, even if he’s an alien. The character design made it a little confusing for me, though, I spent the entire issue that Stormhawk, whose face we see in the first two pages, is also that The Assemblyman fellow who’s there with the rest of Honor Guard, like those Quiqui-A folks were making reparations by somehow dreaming him into a new identity or something? Maybe it was just me, but there was some disconnect in the issue when it just turned out that they were two guys who looked very much alike.

FANTASTIC FOUR #013 — That goddang Bentley-23 finally shows his true colors while several guest stars make an appearance. Robinson brings in Namor to hang out with Hammond and remind us that they are Invaders and then drops Fraction’s FF team into the mix again, if only for a couple of panels. And why not the Inhumans, as well? After so much strife, it’s good to get almost everyone back together. Though I have to say, the red uniforms didn’t last long enough! So much for “The Man’s” “illusion of change.” I like how Sue took the time to cut her hair short while they were changing back into blues for that last page. And really, if that was going to be the final beat for this issue, seems like maybe they shouldn’t have defused it prematurely and saved the reveal for next issue’s cover.

DAREDEVIL #010 — Another quality issue from one of the most consistent teams working today. This is really a pretty painless resolution to a situation that could have gone much worse. Waid does a commendable job of once again not stringing anything out but keeping the story beats drum-tight. Samnee/Wilson continue to turn in absolutely beautiful work. It will be a sad day when this team decides that they’re done with the character.

AVENGERS·X-MEN: AXIS #6 — It should have occurred to me before now, but Remender is swinging at Geoff-Johns levels of fanboyhood. It’s not just a gig to the guy, he knows these characters, as evidenced by having Kurt & Rogue come after Mystique and then the great inversion of Sabretooth hiding from them in the Morlock tunnels, of all places. The Dodsons’ drawing Magneto & the kids visiting Vic out in Latveria is very reminiscent of Cheung’s last romp with that gang back in THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE. And Inverted Thor vs. Truth-Telling Loki is a pretty great dynamic and could have lasted a few more pages to my liking. I’m digging this series as it rounds the bend into the third act. It knows what it is, isn’t trying too hard, and is telling an entertaining yarn. And seems like Cheung is going to be on hand pretty soon, so, good fun for all.

UNCANNY X-MEN #028 — Bendis really has no problem not stacking his singles full of ensemble juggling in favor of crafting basically one major scene and a brief minor one to vary the tone and flow. It was a nice touch having Hank pitch a fit say that Scott Summers was right but then pretty on-the-nose to then just a few pages later have Scott tell us that Charles Xavier was, in fact, not right. We get it, Bendis! Kris Anka shows up and provides another round of more-than-solid B-team interiors, but they really shouldn’t have Chris Bachalo’s name on the cover. That just sets a brother up to disappoint folks, no matter how talented he is.

AVENGERS #039 — Hickman is just light years ahead of everybody, man. I know that prior to THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS, he was serious about outlining everything out beforehand, and I can’t imagine what this must have looked like a couple of years back or how it’s mutated and metastasized since then. This issue is nothing but moving more pieces into place. We know about Old Man Steve’s S.H.I.E.L.D. crew and we know about the Illuminati folks and we know at least that there is a cabal, but that’s not enough, so now here we’ve got fucking Sunspot of all people having bought up Advanced Idea Mechanics and rallying his own contingent, poaching Natasha and Jessica from Steve, and even having Hank drop by Cyclops’s new digs at the old Weapon X complex to report on the doings of the Illuminati. Yeah, not much happens here except extraordinary people in equally extraordinary situations orbiting one another, strategizing for the imminent endgame. Oh, and now Shang-Chi is infinite, the Masters of Kung-Fu!

NEW AVENGERS #026 — Ditto. Another really heavy slab of sequentials. Those of us who read the other issue first had no doubt about the identity of those two armored folks in the opening scene, but it just heightened the suspense. It’s always wonderful to see Valeria Richards drop in for a few pages of Hickman scripting. Bentley-23 offering Doom franchise opportunities was a really nice touch. But then, that’s of course the only way it could have gone down with Tony or the ladies. This one is another really powerful single. Trade-readers in the future are really missing out on watching this elaborate labyrinthine masterpiece unfold across the months and years one slice at a time.

ANNIHILATOR #3 — Ray & Max really start sinking their teeth into it here as Morrison dials up the meta- just a bit, and we get more scenes of their interaction. It turns out Max isn’t an original creation at all but an old public domain character from weird stories penned between 1910 and 1970. This whole deal is work-for-hire! Irving does some wonderful work across a variety of styles while providing the various covers for those prose editions of the old adventures. There’s even a Simonson riff on some interior sequential panels for an Italian comic book. But now Makro is in the guise of Ray Spass! So, this whole deal is probably Ray going all Tyler Durden, we think? The bottom is starting to drop out in the last pages of this issue. It looks like next month will be even more unhinged than we’ve already seen.

11/12/14

BATMAN #36 — This is a pretty bulletproof scenario, Capullo drawing Batman VS the Justice League. Of course, Snyder’s got to build all kinds of prep-time type business in here, but it’s a little funny to think about Bruce and Ray Palmer just bopping around dead solar systems collecting dead red suns for that one rainy afternoon that Clark is going to misbehave and Bruce is going to have to punch him. That is solid writing, though, making the crucial distinction that Bruce planned to fight the Superman he knows, not the safeguard-free Joker-venom version. The best line of the issue is about who wins in a fight between Batman and Superman: “Neither of us.” Thank you, Scott Snyder.

BEST OF WEEK: BATGIRL #36 — I liked this one even better than last issue. Babs Tarr channels more of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s SCOTT PILGRIM vibe this time out, and this time she’s working over co-writer Cameron Stewart’s layouts, which makes the pages look even more dynamic and engaging than before. Is Jeremy DeGroot’s last name a L O S T reference? All instances of DeGroot and Hanso will I guess forever make me think about the Dharma Initiative. Also, a very strong single-page introduction for Nadimah. That’s where the Pilgrim influence really shows up, the cartoony manga-like exaggeration of the characters’ body language and facial expression. Love that on a mainstream non-alternate-world title. That costume suit-up at the bottom of Page Five is an elegant bit of cartooning, what would be Panel Seven splitting up into five quick-change panels with every single one of those sound effects absolutely essential to the flow. Beautiful work. And good on Barbara parkouring up the tree and brick wall. The tone of this is much wackier than what we usually get out of the Bat—universe. Some folks have remarked that they would be all right with it if it was an alternate continuity, but I don’t see why it’s got to be all heavy gloom and doom every minute that she’s not in the cave with the rest of the family. Solid work building the ensemble just a little bit and really just terrific sequentials throughout the issue. This and GOTHAM ACADEMY really are a breath of fresh air even while the big guy is strong work across the line that’s more tonally in line with what we expect from a Batman book.

BATMAN ETERNAL #32 — As many talented artist who have graced these pages here these last five or so months, and even as much of an admirer of Dustin Nguyen’s as I have been for years across the impressive range of his stylistic spectrum, nobody does it here for me on this series like Jason Fabok. I was really excited when they even announced his mighty DETECTIVE run with Layman, and he knocked that out of the park before jumping right over here with his hyper-rendered intricate linework that really gives these events a sense of import and gravitas. The emotional payoff of Alfred hugging his daughter alone is one of my favorite moments of the series, executed to perfection in just five panels with only a single three-word shot of dialogue necessary because of all the care that Fabok and colorist Brad Anderson are putting into every single shot. And then of course, ha ha, everything goes even wronger. If these boys keep escalating, there’s not going to be enough of old Gotham standing in March to be able to use it as a viable setting for skyscraper urban combat.

FUTURES END #28 — Everyone else hears Michael Giacchino music during all those island sequences, right? There’s certainly something wrong with me, I will be the first to admit. Maybe I’m the only one who still harbors a grudge against the douchebag director who used to go around calling himself McG, but that is an unacceptable sobriquet for Terry McGuinness, full stop. I do love that shot on the bottom of his first page of Bruce in silhouette roaring up from the fire to grab him, though. Probably the panel of the issue here this week. And then he goes ahead and utters some straight Frank Miller dialogue about the old L1 vertebra, hilarious. That’s how you show it’s Batman Five Years Later, people! Get him to talk like the ur-Marv. Also a funny revelation for Terry. No, dude, Bruce has just always been kind of a dick, or at least since he was eight, it wasn’t Brother Eye at all. And this thing with Madison, never has a plot-point pivoted so crucially on a study group. Everybody knows about that group!  

WYTCHES #2 — I love the book-within-a-book on the first page, reminds me of Carey pulling that trick over on THE UNWRITTEN (the kid’s name is Taylor, even!). The description of being a parent at the top of Page Seven is almost identical to one I have bounced back and forth with folks over the past half a dozen years. So much the truth. The plot thickens just a bit, and Snyder doesn’t feel like he’s got to dole out too much for the reader in terms of answers, escalating the situation with a whole family’s worth of cliffhangers. And Hollingsworth is producing some really interesting work with the splatter backgrounds all over every page, starting out with the opacity relatively lower at first and then dialing it up as the issue progresses, which of course primes the reader to expect particularly graphic presentations of extreme gore and violence. And no review of this would be complete without at least mentioning that Jock is a beast. Thank you, that is all.

THE FADE OUT #3 — Mmm, everything looks as gorgeous as usual, but I had trouble finding any reason to care about young Maya Silver this month. As talented as these creators are, it feels like they’re just lapsing into doing a SATELLITE SAM riff. Devin Faraci’s essay about Lana Turner and Sean Connery and most of all her fourteen-year-old daughter Cheryl versus Johnny Stompanato, on the other hand, is riveting.

MPH #4 — Duncan Fegredo is really something serious. He makes the sequential storytelling work but then can show up with pitch-perfect likenesses of Reagan and Gorbachev that are downright uncanny. What we have here is plenty of escalation by way of disintegration, and our boy Mad Mark Millar with only one issue left to sell the film rights to Fox or another friendly neighborhood studio. We wish him well, in this and all things.

SILVER SURFER #007 — That Dawn Greenwood is just so cool, man. “Nah, let’s go a little farther.” And what a nice time for a montage. So, this is more like issue #027 if we count all the adventures that have apparently happened in between issues. Dawn’s rapport with Twomie continues to be an inspired bit of character dynamics. This is just a fun book. The fruit pies at the atomic shotgun wedding or the maze on the following page are proof enough of that. And but now Norrin & Dawn are dating! So cute!

BUCKY BARNES: THE WINTER SOLDIER #002 — Good night, I cannot believe the amount of quality that Marco Rudy lavishes on every page. This is some stunning work, to be sure. I wasn’t really a fan of the meter and rhymed verse that Kot selected for Loki’s dialogue, it distanced me from Rudy’s lavish visuals rather than anchoring me within them. This is more than worth the $3.99 price-point for the art alone, but the plot this time out was a little bit skinnier than last month. Here’s to something meatier next time.

AVENGERS·X-MEN: AXIS #5 — Okay, I’m a little bit dense. I do go to some length to avoid copy of what a premise is for something that I’m already going to be consuming anyway, but I love that the main Axis flip deal happened at the end of #3 and then I was just totally confused last issue. Why were the Avengers being such dicks? Okay, now I get it. And it is a very cool elevator pitch. Awakened, indeed. Good on Remender. I do think it’s kind of a fucked up and fundamentally flawed move making Magneto be good now that he’s inverted. I would like it much better if he was a total megalomaniac and everybody was like, “Oh nooooooo, he really has been a hero all this time, just so like misunderstood.” Morrison making Thomas Wayne the only stand-up guy on Earth-2 back in that graphic novel with Quitely is still my favorite time somebody used that trick, keeping it just barely implicit that Bruce’s dad was just a piece of shit back over in Earth-1. But back over on good old 616, I also didn’t realize that the Apocalypse last issue was Genesis all grown up. I probably need to finish up on Aaron’s WOLVERINE & THE X-MEN run, admittedly. Okay. This was a pretty fun issue of superheroes beating up on each other. Even though I swear I’ve seen that a time or two before now.

11/05/14

BEST OF WEEK: SUPERMAN UNCHAINED #9 — Snyder/Lee/Williams/Sinclair finally bring this bad boy in. It does what it’s supposed to, veering a little on the side of overly talky with Luthor monologing (sp?) most of the first half of the issue. But this is of course offset by all the heavy lifting that that art team does. It pretty much doesn’t get more A-list than these guys, and there are plenty of iconic shots sprinkled throughout the issue. My favorite page is before the big guy flies off for the final battle and he says goodbye to Lois, and I swear to God, Lee does this Gabriel Rodriguez homage, this same little trick that was in LOCKE & KEY: OMEGA #’s 1 and I want to say 3, where the last shot of the page is nothing but two hands, formerly clasped but now parting. Another standout is when Luthor finally shuts up just as the art team gives us their rendition of Warren Ellis’s favorite script prompt to Bryan Hitch: “The ships engage.” And there’s even a nod to that iconic shot of Superman getting struck by lightning in the last issue of Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT FALLS. Snyder does a pretty good job sticking the landing on Luthor’s rant about Superman. It’s no ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, but I guess nothing else will be ever. The deal with Wraith swooping in and sacrificing himself was not set up at all in any way? Has there just been too long in between issues? I need to go back and check, but it seems like that came out of nowhere. And the Nguyen flashbacks came off as complete filler, as well drawn as they were. All in all, though, this was a pretty great ride. Not Snyder’s best effort but reasonably coherent, and of course Lee and the crew just drew the hell out of it.

ACTION COMICS #36 — Well, it looks like Smallville has a bit of a Halloween hangover. And I’ve missed some chapters? Did I skip last month because it was a fill-in? Or has a bunch of stuff happened elsewhere? Lana’s in bed with John? And Clark has a beard in the present, too? It really really is flattering that the architects behind “The New 52” are going to such lengths to make the big guy closer to my physical likeness, but it’s kind of taking me out of the story a little bit! I can’t fly, and Lana Lang is not my best friend, you know? Love getting Kuder back on the entire issue’s worth of interiors, in all seriousness.

GRAYSON #4 — This one is a little bit more of a romp than we’re used to, but after the heavy business that has frontloaded this series, it was honestly nice to just frolic around with our boy getting chased by some young killers-in-training at glorious old St. Hadrian’s. This book continues to do a nice job balancing out the character work with compact blasts of espionage and the requisite scrambled signal to Mister Malone hanging out in his cave fourteen miles out of Gotham, there. And the Mikel Janin pages are nothing less than exquisite. I love that Quitelyesque splash of how the mission got accomplished before Dick could even finish his sentence.

GOTHAM ACADEMY #2 — This one is a little bit more angsty in tone than I would prefer, but I guess that’s kind of what you get with the demographic of this ensemble. It does an interesting thing for a second issue, substantially raising the mystery quotient on Olive, particularly with regard to how she spent her summer and whatever the deal with her mom is. At first, it felt like an odd bit of pacing, but I’ve decided that I like it. It would have come on a little bit strong and maybe been doing to much heavy lifting last issue to introduce us to all these new characters and also throwing that in our face first thing. It was good to just meet everyone and now dig in a bit deeper. Kerschl’s art is again stunning, and the three colorists do a pretty good job of blending their styles so that the reader doesn’t get thrown when there’s a switch. All in all, a slight dip from the excellent first issue, but still really good material to be found here.

BATMAN ETERNAL #31 — When I saw this cover, my brain wouldn’t let me understand that it was Alfred standing on the left. This is a hilarious team-up. Julia Pennyworth on the threshold of not being able to hang on tech support is a pretty solid running C-plot. I am a fan of Fernando Pasarin on these interiors, this guy really showed up. Terrific splash page with Mr. Freeze, but the three-panel run a few pages later with Thunderclap Auriga is a very nice piece of work. Just a killer ending, though. It couldn’t have happened any other way. Very good, sir, indeed.

FUTURES END #27 — Once again, lots of plots clipping forward here. We are standing on the verge of getting it on, as the song goes. I’m still digging on Barda teaming up with the Green Arrow crew (can’t believe that show has made the first word in the dude’s name sound weird to me). Scott comes face to I guess eye with Brother Eye, but of course the big deal is Terry and Bruce are finally on-panel together, which should make for the series bat-slugfest next issue. Aaron Lopresti’s sequentials are looking a bit more rushed than they did when he first showed up, but this is a weekly! These Ryan Sook covers, though, man. Wow.

CHEW #44 — The Mighty Layman is still having fun toying with our hearts, delivering the near-mortal wound that was already given away on the final page of last issue but then only offering a scant four panels of development past that point. There’s a bit more no-holds-barred action in this one with Guillory delivering quite the kinetic fight sequence. The Babycakes fakeout on Poyo is only surpassed by the inevitable double-page splash showing where our boy really was. You get the sense that when this book is done, Layman’s still going to have a list of thirty-five more batshit ideas that are just as much fun as this one.

VELVET #8 — This is another meat-and-potatoes issue with Velvet executing her plan to storm HQ and running afoul of Roberts, who it looks like is getting set up as nemesis/antagonist. This entire issue is basically just a single action scene followed by a cliffhanger, but it does its job well and is very satisfying. It’s cool to see Brubaker not just drowning in noir (not that I ever have any problem with that), but the real draw here has got to be Epting/Breitweiser crushing it on art. Sorry that this one beat ZERO to the rack, as those make a charming double-feature, but so it goes.

PUNKS: THE COMIC #2 — Wow, the Skywalker/Adama/Fellowship of the Ring shout-out before the end of the first page. That is some hustle. That Page Three sequence of SuperDog flying in from the sky is maybe my favorite thing I’ve seen from this series. Until that panel of them all hugging him and telling him they love him. I hope to see more of SuperDog in the future. The Halloween masks are also a very nice touch. Reading this comic is like taking drugs, only it never lets you come down.

GOD HATES ASTRONAUTS #03 — A relatively rational opening four pages this month. Or I’m just getting more acclimated to the madness? Sir Hippothesis brings those murderous scamps Seal Armstrong and Buzz Owldrin to Planet Crabulon, where they apologize to King Tiger Eating A Cheeseburger for killing all of those crab people. King Tiger Eating A Cheeseburger accepts their apology by killing them both with an enormous battle-axe. But then cut to Doctor Rhinoceros (not real name) waking up, only it wasn’t all a dream, and then he runs into a messy room where someone called Dave is crashed out in bondage gear. Dave has a muscular green arm attached to his chest that might as well be the Hulk’s right arm. That’s the first four pages. I can’t believe that they seemed kind of average to me, in terms of weirdness, but there you go. Ryan Browne ruins everything.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #009 — Well, I was enough of a fool for Spider-Gwen that I had to pick this one up. And it is pretty great work. Every time I check in with Slott’s run, he is making it happen on every level, truly a worthy custodian of this flagship character. That was a perfect opening scene, timeless and iconic and all, a perfect set-up for the lunar twist and surprise death. Coipel predictably knocks the interiors out of the park in his own inimitable A-list fashion. It is funny that with Hickman dragging all the Avengers through the multiverse and then of course with Morrison doing what he’s doing across the street that we’ve got enough multiverse for a Spidey-based spin on things. But, of course. I’m not sure how frequently this is coming out, but if I’ve got room, this is definitely worth staying with.

AVENGERS·X-MEN: AXIS #4 — Remender really hit a masterstroke giving Charles Xavier’s brain to the Red Skull. I defy anybody to engineer a superior way to slam together the X-Men and Avengers franchises in a manner that has more tension hard-wired into the premise. As soon as you beat the bad guy, all of the good guys can fight over who gets to keep him. But, damn! Did Captain Falcon just deck young Sam Jackson Fury? But man, why this compulsive return to our friendly neighborhood Carnage? I’m just not finding it compelling as of yet. I hope Remender proves me wrong. And then Tony sees U2’s free new album and raises the stakes pretty considerably! I guess that’s some kind of bad deal that he’s just swigging champagne there at home plate of Giants Stadium? But then Apocalypse onstage with the X-Men? Have I missed a crucial tie-in issue? And but then that goes double for all that business with the Avengers. And Kluh, the backwards Hulk’s Hulk. All of this characterization just took a bunch of LSD, man. Like, it’s kind of fun, you can’t say that nothing’s really at all happening early on, which has been the deal for the last couple of these, but there appears to be no in-book justification. Red Onslaught Xavier’s just making everyone do craaaaaaazy things to advance the plot? Strange times but good fun from your mainly mindless mighty Marvel superhero slugfest big event!

10/29/14

BEST OF WEEK: LITTLE NEMO: RETURN TO SLUMBERLAND #2 — If anything, these guys somehow manage to up their game from the ridiculous level of greatness that they hit in the first issue. Our new Nemo becomes a bit more engaged with his situation, Bon-Bon returns, and Flip Flap finally makes an appearance. Gabriel Rodriguez continues to manage the herculean task of assimilating Winsor McCay’s kaleidoscopic style while still managing to make the pages his own, all beautifully colored by Nelson Daniel and masterfully paced by Eric Shanower. This really is the most magical endeavor. At MorrisonCon a couple of years ago, there was a panel (a very painful Sunday morning panel) wherein the mourners assembled took a character from the public domain and attempted to frame what a reboot would look like. That character was Little Nemo, and as talented and insightful as everyone there was, nothing uttered that morning came close to matching this take in terms of sheer brilliance of both premise and execution. Everyone is firing at the top of their game, yes, but Rodriguez appears to actively be attempting to surpass his work on LOCKE & KEY, which is about the highest that anybody can shoot for. My favorite thing about this is that it’s utterly engrossing for me on every level, but then I can share it with my daughter and she loves it just as much. This is why we have Wednesday nights. Just wonderful.

WONDER WOMAN #35 — This one is slam-bang and done. I would have gladly paid an extra dollar or two to get this story presented with all the ads at least in the back, but it’s kind of fitting that this run ends as it began, on the front lines of the mainstream, ARROW ads breaking up the flow, as ever. Azzarello/Chaing/Wilson’s final chapter does more of what they’ve been doing. And why not? It’s certainly been working out for them. There’s lots of pontificating wrapped up in clever wordplay and fighting and scrambling around to get a hold of Zeke. There’s a great moment when Diana takes off her wristbands and proclaims her various titles if only to point out how little they matter. She’s still going to kick dude’s ass. Azzarello weaves the golden lasso and submission into the resolution in an elegant manner. And then there’s a last-minute reveal that I didn’t see coming and hadn’t feel like we particularly needed, but as soon as it hit turned out to be a great latest reason to slap my forehead. My only quasi-gripe with this finale is that Orion never came back. I would have liked to see him take a final bow under this regime. However, everything pretty much turned into a sitcom whenever he was on-panel, so keeping him on the bench does make sense. It certainly would have broken up the breakneck flow we have going here. This team did more heavy lifting than arguably anyone in The New 52 reboot. Snyder/Capullo have been great, but that whole deal has been very much an extension of what Snyder was doing previously. No other creative team had such success taking an established mythology back to basically a reset point and then building it up into something resembling but unlike what had come before. I’ve never read the Perez issues from the eighties, but this is the best run on the character that I’ve ever experienced, and it has consistently been a terrific ride, month after month. Going to miss these creators but am grateful to them for showing us how it’s done.

FUTURES END #26 — Bruce meeting Michael is pretty grim, given what we know. I guess his important business was really giving the Jason & Robbie that gruff Bat-pep-talk? If all of this Madison Payne nonsense has been a lead-up to her getting fridged, I’m going to be unimpressed, but I guess they also set up her being the glue that brings Firestorm back together for good. It would be nice if she could just save herself. I was kind of sad for poor Fifty-Sue getting betrayed, there. Slade is just the worst in any continuity!

BATMAN ETERNAL #30 — Well. Kind of only one thing happens this issue, but it’s a pretty big deal. That is some pretty grim business with old Batwing, there. And I have got to say, I still really can’t get past how stupid I find the whole Joker’s Daughter business, and any time she shows up, it completely takes me out of the story. This series has been pretty solid based on protagonist interaction, but would do much better with antagonists that were worth a damn.

SAVAGE DRAGON #199 — Magnificent. A tour de force. Larsen blasts out ten double-page spreads and makes it look effortless. Not just the sequential content but the narrative flow. I mean, this must have been a bitch to compose this up out of nothing, but the impressive thing is that you can never see the strings, the eye glides effortlessly across the page. These pages were really over much too soon for my taste.

CAPTAIN VICTORY AND THE GALACTIC RANGERS #3 — I wasn’t able to lock into this one as well as the first two. I dug all the art. Fox continues to bring the crazy, and both Mahfood and Dalrymple show up with strong work. I just don’t care as much about this series as I feel like I should? I don’t know. They keep putting Kirby’s name in the credits, how can I not support these guys? Solid but not as batshit as I want it to be.

BLACK SCIENCE #10 — Ten issues in, and these guys are only picking up steam. It’s a good call to move Pia more toward center stage. That is one angry young woman! Though I have to say, I was surprised to see her mention dropping out of college. Scalera doesn’t draw her looking older than a girl in her early teens. I’ve been thinking this whole time that she was thirteen, fifteen tops. Maybe she gets that youthful appearance from her mother. She does make a solid new protagonist for this series if Remender doesn’t take her out. I am a fan of the multiple iterations of characters that keep creeping in. You can see the level of complexity gradually increasing as the series progresses. It seems like there will be pretty insane things happening by #25! Respect to the art once again, Scalera/White create such an immersive and beautiful world, month after month.

LOW #4 — This double-shot of hard-science Remender is a heady concoction! After the first three issues pretty much serving as the pilot episode, we get our next installment here, which takes place in the pirate city of Poluma. The mom behaves just the way you expect her to, but it’s nice to see Marik begin to act like an actual human being. Though that’s a harsh deal with his sister, there, not cool! I feel like this book would benefit from doing a one-paragraph recap on the inside front cover, not so much because the reader needs it as I suspect that it would be great fun to both read and write. Tocchini continues to turn in more absolutely gorgeous work. You have to respect Remender, locking down these guys on both of these books with this sweeping European style of art while simultaneously taking his turn running the Big Event over at The House of Ideas. Hickman and he are both doing a pretty incredible job of balancing out creator-owned and work-for-hire and making both seem like labors of love, never phoning it in.

SOUTHERN BASTARDS #5 — The Jasons pull off a nifty little trick here, shifting focus to our antagonist Coach Euless Boss and actually succeeding in making him just the least bit relatable. Flashing back to when he was a scrub at the bottom of the lineup causes the reader to feel a grudging respect for him, despite the shocking events of last issue. Not sure what to make of the fact that Coach Boss’s address is 616, what with Aaron being such an architect of the old Marvel Universe this last little bit, here.

SAGA #24 — After scaling it back for a few months, this title’s preciousness has returned. I don’t know if it’s a function of the massive amount of adulation it gets or what, but I feel like the tone and peccadilloes that I found somewhat annoying back when we were in single digits are really dialed all the way up by now, and I’m just shaking my head most of the way through this. The completely naturalistic twenty-first-century tone of every single character’s dialogue, how often everybody says, “Fuck!” just because they can. I am completely missing what is so cool about Lying Cat and why an utterance of “Lying,” ever ever merits its own splash panel. That page really kind of sums it all up for me. As soon as I turned to it, I was simultaneously hit by how flat it fell for me and the certainty that true fans around the world were throwing up their arms in victory. I don’t know. I’ll still keep picking this up just to be aware of what’s happening and in case it becomes less adoring of its own internal greatness. Staples is still producing some good-looking pages. I liked the gag at the end where Prince Robot’s screen is all red-skies crisis.

FANTASTIC FOUR #011 — The boys keep moving things along and bringing them to a head. Kirk/Kesel/Aburtov continue to produce beautiful pages. I liked Spidey’s dialogue to Johnny. It rings true that for all the shit they sling each other’s way, Parker is there for the Torch in a heartbeat when things start crashing down. And, hey, it’s just cool to have Wyatt Wingfoot in play across more than a single issue. My favorite dynamic in this entire mythology, by far, has to be Valeria & Doom. I would just devour an entire series focusing on only their relationship down through the years, across time and space. I was more than a little disappointed by the reveal that she’s not having as much of an effect on him as seemed apparent, but that is certainly in-character.

ALL-NEW X-MEN #30 — It felt like more happened in this one then in the past few issues. I was already loving the opening scene with Bobby before that Page Six splash page with the hilarious quip, a really nice piece of comic-booking, there. I guess you can always win me over by doing a homage, that is probably the easiest way in. Bendis has queued up some entertaining chemistry in his matchups for everybody. I’m particularly interested in seeing where it goes with Hank and Doom, though of course Miles and Jean are total sweethearts. More terrific work from Asrar/Gracia.

10/22/14

BEST OF WEEK: THE MULTIVERSITY:theJUST #1 — The superheroes of Earth-16 won. In an inversion of the FINAL CRISIS premise, Morrison posits the aftermath of a world in which good triumphed over evil and there are no more supervillains to fight. This creates a problem for the next generation, who are left to basically wallow somewhere in the spectrum between existential ennui and the same kind of vapid celebrity adulation that is so common in our own world. Morrison does a good job here making the characters relatable but also kind of pieces of shit at the same time, as they would have to be, born as they are into this powered privileged life but never having been tempered by the conflict and strife that shaped their parents. Right off the bat, there is a pretty definitive statement that, though the premise in some ways suggests that this could be the aftermath of ALL-STAR SUPERMAN (this world’s Luthor succeeded in killing Superman), this story is the polar opposite of that one. Arguably the defining moment of that all-time classic occurs in #10 during the non-linearly-presented last day of Superman when he takes time out from performing many many other tasks to talk the goth girl Regan out of committing suicide by jumping off a ledge. Man, that moment is still so moving, just even mentioning it now is getting me choked up. But! This is straight up not the deal here as Metamorpho’s daughter commits suicide by the very same method on Page 2 with the difference highlighted by the fact that she is not technically alone at all but in the middle of a telepathic link with Shilo Norman’s daughter. But, she still feels really alone, get it? To top things off, when son of Superman, Chris Kent shows up, he can’t even be bothered to call her by anything other than Megamorpho. She’s not a person to him at all, only a teammeate. ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #10, this ain’t.

We move on to my favorite dynamic of the story, a fully-grown Damian Wayne hanging out with Alexis Luthor, the bald and brilliant daughter of the world’s greatest criminal mastermind. Lexi is smart enough to know how cool comics are, but as regular readers know, that is the kiss of death in this series because, yeah, she’s got herself a copy of the haunted ULTRA COMICS and is actually reading through the thing for the duration of this scene. There’s all kinds of meta-dialogue zinging back and forth this entire time. Damian’s watching the Superman robots repel an invasion and Lexi calls it “boring,” which is a straight reference to Wayne Boring, noted Silver Age Superman artist who illustrated more than one tale of Superman robots back when. Damian expresses disdain toward folks who don’t like calling comic books comic books in one beat and then with “I bet the artists don’t get a single dime,” references both the prevailing corporate culture down through the years of not rewarding creative talent as well as the original cover price for superhero funny books. We’ve already seen Ultra’s costume before, but this was the first time I realized that he seems to be functioning on multiple levels: as a Miracleman analogue that appears to be in Carol Danvers’s costume but also (if the cover copy is anything to go by) as a potential fiction suit for our own charming selves (see: INVISIBLES if you’re ginchy on the term “fiction suit”). Maybe folks who follow solicitations already know this, but it now seems clear that ULTRA will have to be the last one-shot before we head back into the climactic final issue. But back to Gotham, I love love love Damian hustling Lexi into his closet behind the lead-lined coat so that his best friend doesn’t bust him hanging out with the daughter of the guy who killed Chris’s dad. Oh but wait, then the two-panel bit about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is one of my favorite conversations that’s ever happened. Morrison NAILS what that Superman/Sandman story would be in three word balloons. And it is hilarious. I, of course, love getting to read more Morrison-scripted adult Damian (we all knew there was a *tt* coming). It is interesting that this is basically the opposite of the #666 future situation, a paradise instead of a hell, and naturally Damian is miserable. I kept waiting for Alfred the cat to show up, but maybe Lexi’s allergic? But it’s so perfect for them to be together, an example of Damian following his father’s taste in romancing the villain like with Selina and his own mother, even, but then the weird deal is, that starts heading into Oedipal territory really quickly. OH, Damian. You never had a chance. Was Alexis trying to get him to read the comic in order to deliberately infect him?

So, it’s a little weird that Ray Palmer is in this, just because he’s the only non-legacy hero. Can’t figure out what that means. When Kyle Rayner gets a look at Offspring’s copy of ULTRA COMICS, we get our first glimpse of two unlettered pages that have to be near the end of the issue, and they look pretty grim for our hero/us. It will be interesting to see if there actually is dialogue when we finally get our hands on the cursed comic book. This is the first time that I’m actually experiencing a sense of dread at the thought of reading this thing myself. I dig Kyle’s, “Dude! You’re into comics,” statement to Ernie, who it seems like is talking about analogues for the Marvel and Ultimate universes (and is possibly referencing all the shit that went down at the end of THE MULTIVERSITY #1? This shit is starting to make my head hurt).

Planet Krypton from KINGDOM COME showing back up really brings home the extent to which this entire set-up is just taking a bath in the mid-nineties. All of these versions of heroes with the exception of Chris & Damian are all who was running around back then (Artemis, for one).

This Chris Kent Superman is just terrible, though! There’s of course the initial failure to save Saffi, then him treating her suicide like a “super-mystery,” but Morrison keeps giving him these horrible moments, making fun of Batman behind his back and then just literally reading the chemical composition of the haunted comic, but then it looks like he even gets Ernie’s name wrong, calling him “Eddie” when they’re looking at the guy’s comics.

Damian and Chris try to rally their pitiful partnership at the end, tracking down leads. I just realized that I was so caught up in Megamorpho’s death being an anti-Regan thing that I missed that a hero(ine) landing on the sidewalk as an inciting incident is something that has been done before in a high-profile book.

Sister Miracle tweeting about how cool it would be to meet herself before looking out to see the devastation on the last page is a perfect last thematic beat embodying the rampant narcissism and navel-gazing that characterizes this entire issue. By now, we’re trained to know that some kind of really heavy shit is going to come raining down on the final page, and it apparently looks like Alexis has, in fact, been poison from the start. I love how Jakeem Thunder just suddenly shows up at the end, only ever having been mentioned on the cover. Which, I should have mentioned Ben Oliver before now. Assisted by Dan Brown on some coloring, the pair provide excellent visuals throughout, leaning on a likeness-heavy style that's a perfect fit for the content of this issue. Alexis is clearly Angelina, and Arrowette's shaved sides seem to be inspired by Miley's, but I'm having trouble placing who Chris and Sasha are supposed to be. That's usually a dicey Greg Land sort of move, but it works really well in this context. 

I have to say, though, that big ending was mostly hijacked for me by the opposite page because I had no idea when PAX AMERICANA was coming out. Morrison/Quitely are my very very favorite team working today and really just about of all time. I could not be more excited for their harmonic eight-panel-grid take on the Charlton/WATCHMEN universe. Soon. Soon.

BATMAN ETERNAL #29 — I am digging Julia/Penny-Two’s gradual assimilation into the family as an operator. Really don’t care about Blackfire or Joker’s Daughter, though. Or Hush, for that matter. Which, all those pages start to add up. This series is just all over the place. Everything blows up real good at the end, so hopefully I’ll be more into the players left standing next week.

FUTURES END #25 — Well! So honored to appear on the cover. It turns out that the old MIA Man of Steel decided to do a little bit of dressing up like me just to mix things up a bit. Good fun! The Stormwatch crew, who continue to be my favorite plot, get a great cliffhanger this week out. Slade dropping the uppercut on Cole while asking, “How bad does it have to get before the situation trumps the obsession?!” is my favorite incongruous panel of the week. And Brainiac, how many more times are we going to get another permutation of the old all-Braniacs-up-until-now-have-been-Doombots bit? I feel like Johns did it first a few years back but that it’s shown up more than once since then. Constantine certainly hasn’t felt the same since crossing over from Vertigo, but him dropping a “Sunshine Superman” is a nice touch. But man, I do not give one shit about that Firestorm plot. At this point, I’m only still halfway onboard this series. But if they keep putting me on the cover, I promise to keep picking it up.

INFINITY MAN AND THE FOREVER PEOPLE #4 — Now, that is one good-looking Howard Porter cover. That guy has really transformed his style since the Morrison JLA run. Didio once more demonstrates his love for Bat-Cow, bringing the bovine detective in for an opening scene that actually leaves you wanting more. Giffen is back with all the Kirby seething up out of every page. I haven’t been following the Green Lantern books since Johns took off so was a bit surprised to learn about what’s going on with all of this business between them and New Genesis. And is that Red Lantern a bearded Guy Gardner? Funny doin’s abound! If Giffen sees fit to maintain the old 3x2 panel grid while channeling the King’s krackle, I’m here every month with a smile on my face.

THE UNWRITTEN: APOCALYPSE #10 — We’re not quite roaring into the climactic finale just yet, but Carey/Gross move most of the pieces into place in this substantive issue. There’s an inevitability about the proceedings as Gross sheds most of the impressive stylistic tricks he’s been employing in the past few months, content trumping form at the same time that Carey scripts the line, “Form defines function” for Tom. Those two things keep rattling around my head, and I don’t think I’ve quite worked them out yet. But, just when it can’t get anymore compelling with our two factions remotely facing off against one another, it’s time to head where else but into one of the later Tommy Taylor novels. Terrific penultimate cliffhanger. Feeling really confident that these boys are going to nail the ending, always the trickiest part of telling any great story.

STARLIGHT #6 — A very strong finish to a series that debuted with a perfect first issue. $5 for 36 pages of straight-ahead no-ad science-pulp greatness as Duke McQueen barrels toward THE END as fast as his classic Ford Mustang can carry him. There’s no ebb and flow here, not a single page where we’re concerned that things are not going to turn out well for our hero. All of that has already come and gone, but this lack of tension is not a bad thing. There’s a simple, direct joy to be found in watching Duke save Tantalus without a shred of doubt or angst, just taking care of business like he did back when. The final battle deservedly takes up most of the page count, but it isn’t until Duke and Krish make it back to Earth that Millar drops a pretty effective little bomb resolving the principal conflict from #1 and getting me more than a little choked up in the process. Parlov’s work, once again, is the star of the show. He communicates the various climactic action scenes with a direct immediacy that channels Kirby dynamism, but then it’s the character work, the burly hero embracing his much-smaller sidekick at the very end of the story, that brings home that emotional beat and really pays off the entire series. This was a delight from start to finish, and I recommend it unreservedly to one and all, even if you think you’re done with Millar. Beautiful work. It would have claimed Best of Week, no problem, if not for multiversal Morrison machinations.

ZERO #11 — More of the quality that we’ve come to expect from this title. Ricardo Lopez rotates in on art, lending a kinetic energetic style that makes the “scrawls of velocity” accompanying Edward’s drive home from getting supplies arguably the most dynamic movement of the entire issue. There’s not a lot of text in this one, but the art rewards contemplation. The Day Five action scene is very exciting.

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #5 — There’s a nifty little twist here right at the end, but my suspicion that the general vacuity of every character in this series is borne out when a major character is killed and I don’t care one tiny little bit. The art remains tremendous, but these guys are all ciphers.

AVENGERS·X-MEN: AXIS #3—All right, the opening Deadpool captions are funny enough, but I am not a fan of the voice Remender gives Carnage and Loki. Really, not a fan of Carnage in general so maybe that’s a lost cause, but I didn’t realize to what extent Gillen’s take on the character has laid claim to the way I see him now. And actually, by the middle of the issue, even Deadpool covering The Monkees is a bit grating. It feels like a misfire to have the majority of this issue filled up with villains quipping clever. And then I totally don’t get what happened with Doom and everybody disappearing over that time-lapse. Very unclear cartooning from Yu, who delivers an otherwise good-looking issue. The script, at least, gets back on track in the final six-page scene when the heroes all wake up and start bickering about jurisdiction. And you know, Xavier’s mind potentially being salvaged from the Red Skull’s body, that’s a tricky one. Remender drops a fairly major plot beat here with Havok’s resignation. Other than that, three issues in, not a whole lot has happened thus far. We’ll see if they can get something cooking in a couple of weeks.

AVENGERS #037 — Well, Hickman likes his reversals, doesn’t he? Now that we’ve got up with Reed’s gang over in the other book, we get the regular artist of that title over here to check in with Steve’s crew, hot off of ORIGINAL SIN. And Deodato continues to knock it out of the park. This is yet another one of those issues that when you break down the plot into a synopsis, not really that much happens in terms of long-term development, but it always feels like just enough, and each single is a satisfying read unto itself. Hickman has struck upon the magic in the DNA of CIVIL WAR that Millar was so unable to mine. When you set hero against hero, you don’t need armies of villains. You’ve got enough character collision happening right there. More than enough! He has spent close to two years setting this up, stacking the ranks with dozens of heroes, and it is a delight to watch them play off one another now that the fuse has finally gone off.

10/15/14

BATMAN AND ROBIN #35 — Bruce’s Orphean quest into Apokolips continues. Gleason/Gray/Kalisz drop the serious ruckus on the five-page opening scene that sees him raining down justice on a gang of parademons. But, as great as that is, it’s even more fun to watch the gang of sidekicks sneak back into the Bat-Cave and band together to trick Cyborg into Boom-Tubing them to their mentor’s aid. I dig Jason’s “Ping Pang Poom” comment, but Kate’s subsequent “Who’s the idiot?” quip is even better. A pretty economical two-page scene with her, nothing but housekeeping, really, but a logical step before so many members of the family go off-world. But that is some cold-blooded shit, their dialogue while poor Vic is voluntarily strapping himself in to help out. And but how great is Alfred’s retrofit of Damian’s suits for the trio? This is another perfect slice of sequential narrative, completely satisfying on its own merits in episodic form even while pushing the main story along and leaving the reader ravenous for the next installment. Keep them coming, gentlemen!

BATMAN ETERNAL #28 — I do not like Jason calling him “Bats.” I wonder if the Moffat Building is a DOCTOR WHO shoutout. Have I said that before? And maybe it’s got something to do with this week’s THE WALKING DEAD Season Five premiere, but I’ve got to say, as soon as dude cocked back that baseball bat, I was totally flinching, Selina-as-The-Don-in-#35 ads notwithstanding. Meghan Hetrick and Romulo Fajardo, Jr.’s art really stands out in that scene in the Moffat Building, particularly in the close-ups of Selina. I love the tones on her face. But isn’t this the second or third time she’s brought up pole-dancing classes in this book? Let’s move on, already. But, man. As soon as Jade’s uncle pulled the trigger, you knew what was going to happen. So awful. Killer last panel (see above). For once, the ad placement opposite the last page is perfect. Another great issue of this weekly, going strong now for over half a year already.

FUTURES END #24 — This one was all right. A little bit coasting. Funny to have Angie all over Katar. Nice to see Scott and Barda back together even while expositing a bunch of carnage that we missed. The big hitch with this series is that I don’t give one great goddamn at any point when Superman shows up. Which means something has gone quite horribly wrong. Who can save us now?

FABLES #145 — Still loving the cover-as-first-page gag. That is certainly a strong three-page opening with Snow & Cinderella. Clever of Willingham to tack it on to the front of the issue “out of turn” and then just kick it into the main narrative. I assumed that we’d just get two pages of Roberson at the back. But the real trick is, setting that opening scene a week in the future and then winding the clock back for the Rose/Bellflower vs Bigby fight sets us up to know that the ladies are safe but that, hey, maybe Bigby’s about to get taken out of play with five issues still left to go. It’s a canny bit of narrative stagecraft. Willingham is so good. As are all of his cohorts, still, after all of these years.

SUPREME: BLUE ROSE #4 — The plot thickens pretty substantially here as we follow Doc Rocket away from Diana Dane and head over to the Hotel Krohme, which used to be the headquarters for a superhero team but is now apparently a bar where you can get a glass of quality rye whiskey. There, he meets Zayla Zarn, who relates that the generation of a Supreme is basically an inevitable occurrence that takes place whenever the world needs an “extremely energetic actor in human affairs.” However, all of this destabilizes the continuum and necessitates a continuity revision. But the last time that happened, something really screwed up, and it looks like the next eight hundred years are going to be a massive Dark Age. Unless something happens, presumably. Old Zayla did not seem terribly optimistic on that point. But, there must be hope! Professor Night is as wonderful as usual, but then we get a flash-forward to c. 2100 featuring “late human render ghosts” that is some pretty out shit, as far as these things go. Warren Ellis has considerable stones putting this out there. It is diamond-hard sci-fi, very much deserving of its Lynch-inspired title. There’s a narrative in here somewhere, but every time you think you’ve got your mind wrapped around it, it slithers away through some inverted hyper-dimensional triangular apparent non-sequitur that might mean everything in hindsight. Tula Lotay’s work is beautiful again. I never would have thought that anyone would be able to step to Moore’s classic run from fifteen years ago, but this is doing the job just fine.

TREES #6 — This book remains a very interesting study in restraint or really almost premise avoidance. It’s kind of a wacky trick. Here, we have this really solid set-up of these trees, giant towering alien ships that landed ten years ago in several major cities and that have just hung out there doing God knows what for all this time and don’t seem to consider human life worthy of the least bit of consideration. With that established, Ellis swerves all the way in the opposite direction from mythology or world-building and instead zooms all the way in on his cast for some in-depth character interaction. The majority of this issue is devoted to Chenglei dealing with the emotional aftermath of last night’s orgy with Zhen and friends. This is a complicated situation requiring several pages of hashing it out with his transgender uncle because Zhen is also transgender and Chenglei has been thinking that he was bi-sexual but now having completely fallen for a beautiful “girl with a cock” is kind of messing him up. Ellis never loses sight of the emotional core and writes honest relatable dialogue that manages to play as fairly universal even to straight folks who are comfortable with their initial gender and have not yet had the chance to participate in an orgy (never say never, young one!). Ellis’s beats do a bit more work here than usual, but Jason Howard still shoulders the bulk of the heavy lifting, really magnificent work on every page. Seems like there are only one or two more of these before they go on break, but I’ve enjoyed the relatively quiet introspective ride thus far.

DAREDEVIL #009 — Man, just in time for Halloween. These purple kids are horrifying. I dig the interaction first thing between Foggy, Kirsten, and Matt, the way that Waid bounces their dialogue off one another feels completely unforced and natural. Nice gag with Kirsten compressing “terse.” But all of that gives way to the main event, Matt vs. Killgrave’s offspring, which Waid choreographs to perfection. It’s like the guy’s been writing comics for nearly thirty years or something. And of course Samnee continues to rain down the destruction, more than ably abetted by Matthew Wilson. This one is still as great as they say, kids.

FANTASTIC FOUR #11 — Things continue to deteriorate for our intrepid quartet as Reed gets a pep talk from Wanda, Jen & Wyatt meet to discuss how bad everything is looking, Ben takes a shower in prison, Sue makes it back to Reed, and then someone who surely isn’t Barney Barton tries to fill Wyatt full of arrows but is stopped by a friendly neighborhood cameo. Robinson keeps everyone in character and Kirk/Kesel/Aburtov are turning in some A-list art. These guys aren’t garnering enough praise for the quality of their work.

UNCANNY X-MEN #027 — It is a such a joy to get Bachalo back on interiors, this book never really feels right without him. He takes a break from coloring his own lines this time (which maybe should be the deal for always if that will necessitate less fill-ins?) with Jose Villarrubia and Rain Beredo stepping in to provide work that manages to pop and maintain an even subtlety throughout. Old Matthew Malloy proves as formidable as Bendis has been Bendis-speaking us that he is as he manages to add a notch to the count of helicarriers that this book has swatted down from the sky like nothing more than a pesky housefly. The turn at the end isn’t quite a plot twist, but it’s exactly the way Scott would play it. It will be interesting to see where things go from here. Doesn’t Bendis know you’re not supposed to introduce formidable new mutants until the timeless evil of Fox Studios can be quashed? Shouldn’t the editors have nipped this whole thing in the bud before Bachalo ever got eyes on the script?

AVENGERS·X-MEN: AXIS #2—More good fun to be had here as Tony’s Sentinels kick the teams’ collective ass all up and down. I like the voice that Remender gives him in the first-person narrative captions, but the deal about Tony’s mental journal detailing everybody’s weaknesses is a biiiiiiit “Tower of Babel” for my taste. Did anyone think Young Nova was going to get his ruin smote upon the mountainside? The falling-for-Rogue thing seemed like a kiss of death, but I guess they’re not going to sacrifice him quite yet. If only readers had cottoned to Jeph Loeb’s random reboot of the character! Come to think of it, Remender has no problem doing a pretty straight cover version of AMAZING #33 with Tony on Page 12, there. That dude has a thing for reprising his favorite iconic mighty Marvel moments! Great deal with Magneto bailing. I still don’t care about Alex and Jan. At all. Pretty much anytime someone calls Nightcrawler “fuzzy elf,” that’s all it takes to get me all misty and nostalgic, apparently. And maybe it’s just coming off tonight’s previous issue, but that last shot of Magneto’s Eleven (apparently recruited in MAGNETO #11, natch!) reeeeeeally looks like Bachalo drew it. Kubert & Martin certainly tore it up, throughout, it must be said. Sorry to lose them next week, but of course Yu and friends will certainly crush it.

NEW AVENGERS #025 — I am wild for the premise of this crew as just the straight-up bad guys of the Marvel universe with Tony still completely M.I.A.. I mean, the old deal about how the most timeless villain is a hero in his own eyes? How are you going to get more compelling than Reed Richards leading a team of the smartest people in the world to save it from itself? I’m definitely onboard with all of these shenanigans. It’s testament to how interesting the dynamic is, not much happens besides the guys getting set up in an old pre-Fury S.H.I.E.L.D. hideout (paaaaaaaging Dustin Weaver) and then just hanging out there on the other end of the line while Cho gets captured back in AVENGERS #035. That’s pretty much the whole deal, and it’s riveting. Kev Walker’s style is a bit looser than the insane realism we’ve come to expect on this book from Deodato and Schiti, but it’s also quite reminiscent of JRJr., so who’s going to question that DNA here in the glorious old 616? That’s some cold shit, though, Sue interrogating Amadeus. You kind of get the feeling that she knew they were being monitored and was just letting Reed have it via remote. Cold, Sue.

BEST OF WEEK: ANNIHILATOR #2 — Very nice balanced symmetry from Irving in these first few pages of Spass & Nomax, here. Morrison has really hit upon something here with the notion of the biography of a character beamed into the writer’s head as a data bullet brain tumor with the only hope for survival being that the writer has to tell the guy’s story. I love how Irving cranks up the art and washes out all the colors during the story-within-a-story screenplay scenes. Morrison plays up the interplay between writer and protagonist to comedic effect. It is good fun to hear Max going on about Act Three or demanding to know “what happened next.” Just realizing a funny trick here, Ray not only introduces Jet Makro the Arch-Annihilator in his script because it’s the end of Act One, but by issue’s end, that very individual makes planetfall, crashing into the Hollywood sign (and seriously, the colors that Irving drops on that last page alone are jaw-dropping). But on the previous page, Max tells Ray that he is “absolutely the bad guy.” All of this at the end of the second issue, which is about where the proper first act of this series is apparently landing. Morrison has been all about the meta- for twenty-five years, but it’s exciting to observe him kicking it back and forth on so many simultaneous levels. I saved this for the end in the headlining slot but probably should have paired it with SUPREME: BLUE ROSE in hindsight. Serious business, all around.

10/08/14

BEST OF WEEK: BATTLING BOY: THE RISE OF AURORA WEST — This is a tough gig on art. Paul Pope’s BATTLING BOY was the best book released last year, adored in equal measure by critics and fans alike. It actually managed to surpass the monstrous amounts of hype that accrued around an A-list industry superstar taking more years than initially projected to produce a new original work of more than two hundred pages. Shortly after its release, this prequel starring the female co-protagonist was announced. I was thrilled until hearing that Pope was only co-writing. There was no way this project would be able to hit the heights of solo Pope, not with any other cooks in the kitchen. Enter David Rubín. I don’t know where Pope found him, but this guy does an uncanny cover version of Pope’s very distinctive style that completely sells the most jaded critic. The layouts are inventive and dynamic, and the body language is completely rocking the Kirby dynamism (particularly, crucially, in the action sequences). Rubín manages to straddle that same line that Pope does between over-exaggerated cartoony stylization that’s totally madcap and fun with this really creepy ominous foreboding inherent in the scratchy linework. Rubín does a fantastic job depicting Aurora at several different points in time, aging her in immediately recognizable and very convincing ways so that the reader can identify how old she is at a glance. Then, he’s got an entirely different skill set going on with Haggard and Gately, both of whom are these imposing physical presences whose massive statue and gruff exteriors belie their obvious affection for their young charge. I could go on and on about Rubín, how well his black-and-white work holds up next to Pope’s full-color situation last year. But this would all be nothing more than a bunch of brilliant technical craft without Pope and J.T. Petty’s script, which imbues the story with its heart and soul. There is, of course, a major theme of barely buried melancholy running through this entire thing as we examine what a massive hole the death of Rosetta West has left in the lives of her husband and daughter, which is unfortunate enough just on a surface level, but infinitely worse when you’ve already hit the original and know how that opening scene plays out, what’s just around the corner for these characters. On top of everything else, this functions as a coming-of-age story for Aurora as she figures out that her imaginary friend might not have been so imaginary after all. This goes a very long way toward fleshing out not just the title character but one of Sadisto’s previously generic henchmen as well and retroactively imbues BATTLING BOY with even more depth and pathos then a first reading could possibly provide. The writers never lose sight of keeping the family dynamic front and center, which goes a long way toward fleshing out these characters and making them fully realized. Which, of course, makes the wait until the next full-on Pope installment of BATTLING BOY all the more grueling.

G.I. JOE VS TRANSFORMERS #3 — Scioli continues to produce cracked-out mashed-up cracklin’ entertainment that is both celebration and codification of the medium’s vast potential. No matter how high the stakes escalate in this conflict between the various armies of two worlds, Scioli’s sense of thrill and exhilaration is always front and center, which makes this a consistently fun read page after page, no matter who’s getting blown up or killed for a fake funeral or what have you. This guy packs as much into a double-page splash as other artists do into entire issues. Scioli also continues to elevate the source material by providing richer backstories and character motivation than even Hama did during his immortal (and still ongoing!) run. I would devour an entire book about Destro and Megatron just hanging out, verbally sparring over tactics and the craft of war. I also love the fact that even though we weren’t on Earth at all for #2, Scioli goes ahead and says that an issue’s worth of business actually went down, but we just missed it and so have to catch up. Once again, one of the best books of the month.

BATGIRL #35 — Hopes have been high ever since Babs Tarr’s fresh and fun redesign of Barbara’s costume hit the Internet a little while back. It actually got to the point that the hype kept building and building and people kept posting more and more fan art, and I started to wonder if the poor script could possibly meet the expectations that were building to such a massive level, week after week. However, Cameron Stewart & Brenden Fletcher overcome the odds and manage to deliver a first issue that sets a definitive tone from the first page that is a bit more light-hearted than what we have come to expect from the majority of The New 52. Opening with Barbara’s move places the focus squarely on her secret identity and provides a richness of characterization that has been lacking in the character since Simone’s exit. And the interpersonal reactions with her new roommates are entertaining unto themselves. The reader certainly isn’t sitting around waiting for the tights to come out, it’s fun enough to watch the characters all bounce off one another the morning after Barbara’s debaucherous moving-in party that is sadly only depicted in flashback (though it should be noted that the method of depiction via our heroine’s photographic memory is a very cool trick that is running neck-and-neck with Scioli above for this week’s best “only in comics!” moment). Stacking the supporting cast with Dinah Lance crashing on the couch is a great idea, particularly in light of the last-page twist. This one is a little bit less all-ages than I was expecting. It’s probably just barely over the line of not being appropriate for my five-year-old in the way that GOTHAM ACADEMY totally is, but the slightly racier tone is a good fit for the character and plays well here. Yet another impressive launch from DC’s line of Batman books, the only corner of Editorial that has been consistently knocking it out of the park for the past three years.

BATMAN #35 — At last! It’s almost been half of this volume’s lifespan, but we finally made it back to the present. So great to open with the simple “GOTHAM CITY, NOW” caption. Of course, ha ha, Snyder’s still got to mention Zero Year in the very first narrative caption. We get it, Snyder, it was a whole thing, man! Zero Year, it really happened! You’ve sold us on it. It’s cool to see young Lola there in the opening section and even better to at least get a page of that future from #28 that they keep teasing. Snyder naturally writes a terrific dynamic between Bruce, Alfred, and Julia. And the rest is Capullo/Miki/Plascencia slugfest thunder. The JLA attacks. This is one of those cases where there’s no way that what we got should have been the cover. I really wish they would have saved the one they used until next issue and let it actually be a surprise because as soon as Diana shows up, your first question shouldn’t be, “All right, cool, but where’s Clark?” It should be riveting enough that she’s there all by herself. A fun set-up here, though, going forward. Capullo’s had a couple of months to get ahead, so here’s hoping he’s strapped in for another blessed year of regular deadline delivery goodness.

BATMAN ETERNAL #27 — I don’t know these guys, Javier Garron on art with Romulo Fajardo, Jr. on colors, but they continue this book’s tradition of importing guys with a strong European aesthetic that really makes this book feel different from what we’ve been getting lately in all the regular books. When Ibanescu starts talking to the Zebra and actually addressing it as Zebra, though, that’s probably the high point of this issue for me. Cool to see Flamingo pop up, it’s always nice when someone runs with one of the million things Morrison’s tossed off. And we’ve definitely got a couple of crazy cliffhangers to follow up on. Next week!

FUTURES END #23 — Everything keeps clipping along here. I remain a fan of the Frankenstein/Amethyst crew’s extraplanetary explorations. That was a nice line Atom got about swords for those of us who collected comics in the eighties. Still really not caring about Voodoo’s squad, and the Tim/Madison plot is taking quite a dip now if we’re just going to turn it into a triangle with Ronnie, of all people. That ending, though. Yeah, man. It must be October. Completely horrifying.

ARROW: SEASON 2.5 #1 — All right, I’m confused. I picked this up because I was feeling giddy about the Season Three premiere today, but I thought this was supposed to be a bridge between the seasons? Why do we care about a Brother Blood cliffhanger at this point, is this supposed to be him coming back? I doubt it? The whole deal is ill-advised. I’m sticking with Amell.

WYTCHES #1 — “The Black Mirror” is one of my favorite Dick Grayson stories of all time, so of course I was onboard when Scott Snyder & Jock announced this new creator-owned, very wisely soliciting the talents of one of the best colorists in the business and previous Snyder collaborator on THE WAKE, Matt Hollingsworth, and Clem Robins of 100 BULLETS lettering fame to round out the creative ensemble. This was even better than I was expecting, though. You can tell that everyone involved really put their heart and soul into the work even while hustling it up to get in print during the month of October. We open with a horrifying scene of a mother about to get apparently eaten by a tree and failing to receive assistance from her young son in a manner that is most disturbing and that yields the probable catch-phrase of the comic, “Pledged is pledged.” Cut to the present and we’ve got a dad trying to buoy the spirits of his daughter while waiting for the bus to take her to her first day at a new school. There are a couple of major plot escalations that I won’t spoil, but the bulk of this issue is spent laying groundwork, establishing who these people are. Snyder does really efficient characterization via a long-distance phone call between the dad, who’s a graphic novelist, and his editor. This is important work because we only get a few pages to ground these characters in a relatable situation before the serious shit really starts coming down, so serious that we’re going to have to wait another month to catch the whole thing on-panel. Razor-sharp narrative craft throughout from Snyder, but Jock and Hollingsworth do plenty of heavy lifting here, building suspense by sending the camera over to the woods just when we’re getting comfortable with some heartwarming characterization. Really, the dominant element that I’m coming away with sitting here typing without my copy within arm’s reach is Hollingsworth’s reds. He always varies up his palette depending on the project, but here he keeps things not quite as muted as HAWKEYE but pretty restrained nonetheless, reining it in with some quiet daytime yellows giving way to ominous blues and greens before exploding into these vibrant reds. This is a very promising start, and I fully expect all parties to deliver on the promise of this initial installment.

PUNKS: THE COMIC #1 — Very cool to see this return after such a long hiatus. I was lucky enough to pick up the first issue from Kody Chamberlain at a con a few years back and was struck by its completely unique usage of paste art in the name of depicting general skullfuck insanity. Fialkov & Chamberlain have only gotten more demented in the past few years. This issue’s sequence with Dog and Larry, then King Dog versus the all-out gnome attack is wonderful and horrifying. I had to take a little walk when it was over just to pull myself together. There’s really nothing else like this on the rack. Or anywhere else. Recommended to fans of the fundamentally disturbing absurd.

SEX CRIMINALS #8 — This book might actually be even better when it for the most part dodges its original premise and just lets the characters hang out and tell us shit through that broken fourth wall. As invested as everyone is in Jon & Suze’s relationship, the opening scene of the latter scoping out Robert Rainbow during an OB/GYN visit manages to play not as some kind of betrayal but actually does some solid work fleshing out her character out and making her seem even more endearing. Who wouldn’t want a bit of an escape to normalcy after all that crazy shit that went down in the first arc? And RR turning out to be the absent Cat Man from Jon’s past is wonderful. Once again, as good as the actual funny book pages are, they’re trumped by the heartfelt outpourings from the readers, many of whom have apparently just lost their virginity and/or are receiving powerful resonances with Jon battling ADHD/OCD, if this month is a representative sample. The absolute best thing about this whole issue, though, is Zdarsky telling the readers to drop Gillen/McKelvie a line at the THE WICKED + THE DIVINE e-mail address to tell them what their book helps readers masturbate onto. Incredible.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #24 — Goodness day! Our Mister Hickman is a bit zanier than he has previously let on. I mean, sure, you put Oswald on the first page, but I didn’t think that that meant that we were just going to do the whole thing here and now. Pitarra continues to hone the precision of his linework and Bellaire’s tones are as beautifully complementary as ever. A perfect example of the insanity of this book is that we can cut straight from 11/22/63 to four pages of Von Braun and Gagarin lost in space searching for Laika and then getting abducted by a giant alien mothership. This book is nothing but good fun.

ASTRO CITY #16 — I had no complaints with the previous two-parter, but Busiek and company all dig a little bit deeper here and reinforce why this has been one of the very best books on the rack whenever it’s shown up over the past twenty years. This is a really sweet tale that began life as an eight-page back-up feature detailing Superman’s college years (of course it did!). The Silver Age love is right there in the DNA. The main feature is timeless and universal. I had a bit of a hiccup toward the end jumping back to the present and then had to go back and reread the opening sequence to really fully process how it all went down. The transitioning overall could have been smoother, we saw the stitches a little bit, but I very much didn’t care. This is a beautiful piece of work, and I’m grateful that we live in a world where this book not only appears so regularly that we’re already on #16, but it’s still building and gaining momentum from the very first page of this volume toward something that has only barely been hinted at while we’ve been getting entertained as hell along the way. And nowhere else has the terrific cover-as-first-page gimmick Vertigo’s been doing this month yielded such glorious fruit as Alex Ross just about getting tricked into producing a page of sequential action. Good on ya, Shelly Bond!

BLACK SCIENCE #9 — Man, that is a pretty bleak way to open the issue here with the Becca’s Dead Twin flashback. Unfortunate. Matteo Scalera & Dean White have arguably never looked better. These pages are glorious. The two-page spread of the cars racing through the marketplace is out of control. And that whole second-person captions deal in the back half of this issue certainly does end on a crazy twist. Man, nine issues in, and these fellas are just barely ramping up the crazy. Strong work!

AVENGERS—X-MEN: AXIS #1 — Remender does a terrific job setting up the ensemble’s chemistry from the very first page, providing a tight rapid-fire shot of banter as the team flies up to the scene of the latest dastardly doing. The tone is Whedon meets Bendis, which I suppose is the bull’s-eye you want to be aiming for with the Avengers these days. Grounding the characters’ interactions in the rhythms of Whedonspeak goes a long way toward making these pages feel like a widescreen adventure at the multiplex, which helps distinguish it from the seemingly never-ending onslaught (I’m sorry) of these things that bleed one into another. This is a good choice to set the scene, checking in with these guys before cutting back to the cliffhanger from UNCANNY AVENGERS #025. Things get pretty drastic pretty quickly as the Red Onslaught fellow brings Wanda in his thrall the damn first page after the titles, which is really not a good thing. All the really horrible shit always starts with Wanda, seems like. But there is a nice moment of Summers brothers reconciliation before more horrible things are about to erupt. Adam Kubert & Laura Martin show up with their usual high level of craft, imbuing every scene with enough grandeur to make this feel like maybe possibly this one will be a big deal. Remender’s got a pretty strong track record, so I’m certainly willing to extend him some credit, but I’ve got to say that just in terms of premise, it seems like maybe he’s digging a little bit too deep into the old nineties well. I mean, I was all for going back to the Age of Apocalypse back in UNCANNY X-FORCE, but this whole Red Onslaught thing might be a little much. What’s next, “X-Cutioner’s Song 2?”

AVENGERS #036 — Well, this is one cover that certainly came true, isn’t it? The cool thing about Hickman’s time-jump is that he can actually make Thor and all the crew probably dying on the other side of the multiverse seem pretty plausible to the less jaded readership just because it will take years and years of present-day Marvel stories starring that unworthy fellow to catch up to this point. Really cool to see former SECRET WARRIORS collaborator Stefano Caselli back in the saddle on this one. The guy’s another seriously underrated professional. In other news, Bobby has pretty much just turned into Tony Stark? It’s not only his title and role within the ensemble, he even seems scripted like Downey’s delivery all of a sudden. Once again, Hickman does solid work filling an issue in which basically one thing happens (they leave) with enough strong character-based interaction that it makes for a satisfying read in singles. Thanks, man.