Oh, and somehow this wasn't supposed to be umpteen million words of blabbity-blab. It just ended up that way.

BATMAN DARK DETECTIVE #2: I liked everything up until the patented "Scarecrow gives Batman a hallucinatory freak-out scene" and even that was crafted in such a way (once Bruce figures out the Scarecrow's responsible, he has to figure out if that means Scarecrow is actually in the batcave with him and Silver) as to add some secondary suspense. If I have anything close to a major complaint, it's that "Hush" has turned every Batman arc into The Love Boat. Look, it's The Joker and Two-Face! And Scarecrow and Penguin! And Tom Bosley and Bea Arthur! I can understand it with this team since they're doing the equivalent of a greatest hits tour, but it's really undercut by having it happen in every other Batman book, all the time, and for a few years now. OK.

BIRDS OF PREY #82: I didn't really see much point to the repetition of those captions about Ted Grant's boxing career other than the second time through I realized how well written they were. Things like that and some of the bits throughout (I liked the litte factoid about fighting on sand) and some super-nice art make me wanna give this a Good, but I really have to qualify it: there's still some kinks in the pacing (Barbara's scenes felt tacked on; a story about breaking up a drug ring is becoming a story about Diana and Ted's fight to not compromise their ethics--which is laudable (and arguably more dramatic)--but also points out what a poor match they were for the assignment in the first place) that keep me from being genuinely enthusiastic about it. A wishy-washy Good vote from me, I guess.

BLACK PANTHER #4: The best of the issues by far and Hudlin has a genuinely interesting idea here (the nationality of the invading villains reflect the countries that colonized and plundered Africa, giving the story an almost allegorical resonance and tension) but the execution is still lacking--like many other filmmakers who've come to comics, he seems reluctant to edit anything out or tighten anything up--and none of it is half as interesting or thought-provoking as his response on a letter page to an accusation of racial bias. Taken in tandem though, I'd give this a very high OK.

CABLE DEADPOOL #15: I felt a few self-conscious twinges when Rob L'Heureux mentioned this book specifically as an example of crap in our comments section because, against all odds, Fabian Nicieza has made this book I enjoy reading simply by showing a degree of intelligence and craft that I wouldn't expect from the material. It's a pretty trashy pleasure and I do my best to qualify it as such, but for what it sets out to do, it does it well. There. With that shiningly qualified defense of Cable Deadpool put forward, let me say this issue didn't work for me at all (cue the guy going "wah-wahhhh" on the trombone). Deadpool wasn't particularly funny, the fight scenes weren't particularly interesting, and oh sweet Jebus, that recent Age of Apocalypse thingy makes me never want to see that setting again. It's an Eh issue, but I'll still see where it's at next ish.

CHEMISTRY ONE-SHOT: Steve Peters has a fine drawing line, a weakness for magical thinking, and a tendency to overanalyze things to within an inch of their life. This one-shot, drawn at the rate of a panel a day, starts as a stream of consciousness adventure that becomes an allegorical analysis of a relationship's failings and it alternately charmed and alienated me. It's charming because the facile line art is strikingly detailed and clean, and Peters seems like a sweet guy capable of injecting humor and insight into his narrative. It's alienating because, like a religious zealot or a guy whacked out on drugs or someone with mild Asperger's, he takes something relatively obvious and, incapable of seeing it, keeps insisting it's something complex and oblique. Chemistry looks at a rebound relationship that didn't work out and examines every possible reason it didn't work out (bad karma, self-sabotage, premonitions of emotional dishonesty) except the most obvious one--the girl was looking for a light, fun fling and Steve couldn't bring the light and fun. Although it can take a certain amount of time for something like that to sink in (and such a problem is certainly a fertile ground for great art), Chemistry made me anxious and depressed, in the same way being trapped in a conversation with the zealot, the stoner or the Asperger's person can, as the obsessiveness of its approach goes on to yield no greater insight. Chemistry actually gets an OK from me because I kept reading it, and there were parts of it I found greatly enjoyable. If you like work that honestly communicates how someone else's mind works, you'll like Chemistry. If you like thinking about why a piece of art works and why it doesn't, you'll like Chemistry (particularly if you've read Geoffrey Brown's stuff which covers very similar ground in utterly dissimilar ways). But if you're the type of person who wants to help people fix their problems, or even see them solve their problems themselves, caveat emptor in a very big way.

DAREDEVIL #73: Changes up what seemed like the rules of the arc and that's likely a good thing, but I'm going to miss the modular done-in-one approach. Made it very easy to review. Now, I have to give this a high OK because where it goes from here will tell whether this issue worked at all or not. Maleev's art is fucking rad, though: this issue's art really knocked me out.

DESOLATION JONES #1: Yeah, came out last week, but I just wanted to say that double-page spread where Jones gouges that guy's eye out should go in The Double-Page Spread Hall of Fame. I'm just in awe of it--it gave me that same giddy nauseous brain-slap I got when Sonny Chiba breaks that guy's skull in x-ray during The Streetfighter, and may well work as both brilliant impressionistic storytelling and wicked pop art meta-commentary. No matter how you slice it (and I think Jones is actually an evolution, not a retread, of the classic Ellis character), that spread alone is worth your dollars. Very Good.

EX MACHINA #11: You know when you're in a plane and it loses altitude and your ears pop? Kinda how I felt this issue as Vaughan really changes up his pacing, drops any B story (after ten issues of scrupulously working the A-B story format), and focuses all of his scenes on Tony's drive to close down New York's fortune tellers. On the one hand, the story shot ahead like a rocket and it felt like a shitload happened. On the other hand, none of it really connected with me emotionally which made it even harder for me to buy the premise. Throw in some outrageously bad body language in the opening scenes (it looks like the police commissioner is communicating to Tony strictly through the medium of interpretative dance) and you've got your first Eh issue of this book. Considering how little I liked the wrap-up of the last arc, I hope that's not an indicator of things to come. Fingers are officially crossed.

EXILES #64: Boy, I really miss Mike McKone's art on this book: that guy can really sell a scene, you know? The plot and the writing are fine--in fact, it's pretty good despite some quibblage--but the art has kept everything at the same pitch for the last three arcs: it's the Exiles versus unstoppable bad guy Hyperion, who seems just like unstoppable bad guy Armageddon, who seems just like unstoppable bad guy Sasquatch god. There's always a danger of things flattening out when the storytellers keep going over the top again and again, but I think the art has really abetted that here. I feel like I'm right at the moment I get with a decent pop song on a radio--where the repetition drives me from really liking it to never wanting to hear it again. Call that a very manic OK.

FRIDAY THE 13TH #1: I think this tongue-in-cheek one-shot really misunderstands the nature of the Friday the 13th films which mercilessly exploit teens' fascination and disgust with bodies and their functions--the body's desire to have sex; its ability to break, crack and spurt, all viewed and tested by a brutal, unthinking puritan (by which I mean not only Jason, but also the mindset of a pre-teen child which still lingers in the thinking of a teenger). So, cleaving a body in half with a machete so the insides can be examined like a medical dummy (as happens on page 2): On target. Jason hitting people so hard their heads come out their asses: Very deeply off-target (really, it sounds so much better than it is). Throw in two oblivious teens having sex in a way that parodies all those other oblivious teens having sex and you have a Friday the 13th one-shot perfect for people who really don't like Friday the 13th movies. I say Awful, but I could well be so high on my artsy-fartsy crackpot theories I'm completely off-base.

GOON #12: Mmmm. Goon. The last two issues have really used the coloring to take things to a whole 'nother level, haven't they? And that boxing match with the robot was just a thing of sheer and simple beauty. The story, by its nature, feels a bit redundant but all the little touches more than make up for it. Very Good.

GREEN LANTERN SECRET FILES 2005: That lead story was a little too crafted (the third time someone said "You've never flown with me," I double-checked the credits to see if it'd been based on a Harry Chapin song or something) but undeniably gorgeous-looking, and I thought Cooke switching his typical Toth-based style to a Kane-influenced style in that middle section was clever and audacious. The second story read like a pile of script outtakes from Rebirth and seemed like the sort of thing you'd show people coming on to acid to guarantee that they'd have a really shitty trip. Considering I hardly like Secret Files issues (and I guess really hate people coming on to acid), that all adds up to Good, believe it or not.

HAWKMAN #40: My hope is there's some very clever bait-and-switch going on with the funeral thing, but either way, I just didn't like this issue very much. It's just--I dunno. It reads like a deliberate mimicing of Geoff Johns' patented Classic Character Dogpile, but it lacks Johns' ability to indicate what makes each character in the dogpile unique. The art's darn pretty, but barely rates an Eh.

HERCULES #2: Okay, so much for all the good will I granted Frank Tieri last issue. He's got a good idea he has no interest in actually executing: He's only got three issues left and Hercules hasn't started any of his twelve labors yet! Are we going to get five pages per labor? Perhaps part of the problem is that Tieri is writing this as a comedy, and he and I have two very different ideas about how comedy should work--I think it should be funny, and he doesn't. Awful.

JANES WORLD #19: Pleasant enough soap opera, and the humor runs the gamut from witty to overdone (I really liked the sports bra joke before it was run straight into the ground). But it feels like Braddock is still learning her craft--very solid cartooning chops, but the writing frequently clunks, and an inability to speed up the storytelling leads to a really high pagecount. Said count may explain the $5.95 price tag but that just seems way too high a price for a book this emotionally slight (at least in a comic book store; it may sell just fine on the racks of a GLBT bookstore). Pricing and other problems drops it to Eh for me, but this was actually a very pleasant little read.

LIVEWIRES #4: This book is drenched in clever touches but I think it's not enough for me: a scene like the discussion of the emotion hack should feel like a clever bit of tantalization, but I read it annoyed that it didn't actually reveal anything. I really like Adam Warren's work a lot but somehow this all went wrong somewhere (I guess that really wheel-spinning second issue) and I'm just not with the program. Eh.

MARVEL KNIGHTS SPIDER-MAN #14: Starts with a really lousy scene--Spidey flips out because Wolverine cuts him, to the point he actually passes out from blood loss, but at no point do the artist or the colorist feel any urge to put, oh, you know, blood, anywhere in the scene--and pretty much goes downhill from there. Initial amusement over the Clark Kent analogue shoving Peter Parker into a supply closet turned to utter incredulity as the analogue apparently convinces Peter to pray(!) so he can conveniently heal him with his Sentryvision or something. My hope is Hibbs gets some really pointy sticks installed in the store so I can just stab myself in the head with them instead of reading the next issue. It would be much less painful. Awful.

PLASTIC MAN #16: Spins its wheels and vamps, even by the standard set by previous issues: I get the sense Baker has fun thinking of some of this stuff, and takes almost no pleasure drawing it--the tip-off being how the quality of art shifts so dramatically upward whenever he's drawing a female character. As a kid's book, Good, as my book that I'm paying $2.99 for: Eh.

ROBIN #138: Some really interesting art here with fight scenes where the panel borders disappear entirely (a pretty neat trick). But I just couldn't get through the book to save my life. Look, I don't have the faintest god-damn opinion on how a Robin book should read or look, but every page of this oozed wrongness. Either I'm a cranky opinionated bastard (guilty) or this book has seriously got to get its shit together. Or both. Awful.

SEVEN SOLDIERS GUARDIAN #2: If you liked last issue mainly because of the pirate stuff, you'll like this issue even more. If you liked last issue because of the superhero stuff, you'll like this issue at least a little less (Guardian maybe does more than jumps from one subway car to the next, but I don't remember it). The pirate subway stuff is so much fun (and is that an oblique connection to Klarion The Witch Boy on one page?), I gotta go with Very Good.

SIMPSONS COMICS #106: What should have been a solid gold idea--crossing The Simpsons with those old musical parodies you used to see in Mad Magazine--falls astonishingly flat, mainly because the songs are set to tunes like "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover." I'm not sure if the editors insisted that the songs be stuff little kids would recognize or what, but it and the weird "we can't be authentic anymore because we're putting it all out on stage" angle just did not work for me at all. Disappointingly Eh.

SPIDER-MAN HUMAN TORCH #4: Well-crafted and if the intention was to create an issue as visually boring as the books from the era in which it was set, mission accomplished. OK, but nothing to write home about.

STRANGE EGGS #1: Starts off with a lot of charm and snap, then suffers a real case of the Shared Universe Anthology Blues--a significant chunk of the cartoonists seem to not care about (or completely loathe) the given constraints and just do what they want. Kind of a shame the whole project ended up as corporate roadkill, but pretty understandable. Eh.

SUPERMAN #217: The first half made no sense but I kind of liked it anyway (Lois had been wiped into the negative zone for the better part of a year, then when she returns, Superman disappears for seven weeks? Ms. Lane, you should file for divorce now: your husband HATES you.) I really hated the second half and realized the first half only existed to give the second half some impact, so I now hate the first half, too. A low Eh, because it's still an improvement over "For Tomorrow."

TEEN TITANS #24: Effective but I'm pretty shocked Winick let Johns use that last page reveal--it really, really belongs in The Outsiders. I also worry that Judd and Geoff will reinforce each other's worst impulses on this upcoming crossover, but I hope I'm wrong. Good.

UNCANNY X-MEN #459: Jesus. Here's a storyline with a intelligent superpowered dinosaurs, the Savage Land, a third faction of supervillains, and it still wraps up in the dullest way possible. And what kind of dinosaur decides to wipe out the rest of the Earth with a new ice age when some judicious overheating would render the rest of the world ready for its culture's repopulation? I'm almost glad Alan Davis is leaving the book: this way I won't feel his skills are being squandered when Nightcrawler and X-23 face off against the Sh'iar Empire in a brutal Pictionary showdown. Sumptious looking but Awful.

WOLVERINE #28: I have no idea what Mark Millar was trying to accomplish with this issue. In fact, I don't think he had any idea either. Is he trying to show he's not homophobic by having Evil Northstar and his team of zombie ninjas run around killing rednecks and gaybashers? What kind of evil master plan does Hydra have going when there's an explanation like: "Well, SHIELD's in ruins and the superheroes are in a panic, so we thought we'd have some fun killing off rednecks?" My mind is still reeling from it. Throw in a really dumb Sentinel sequence (presumably after Romita refused to accept any more pages from Millar that read like: "Pgs. 14-21: Wolverine kills everyone in sight. Really let yourself go on this one, J!") and you've got full-on Eh or lower.

YOUNG AVENGERS #4: As (almost) always, the time travel stuff makes not a lick of sense (and frankly, wouldn't it be cooler if Kang had set the whole thing in motion because he wants his younger self to be an Avenger and thus give his older self insider knowledge that could help beat the team?) But I liked all the other stuff a lot. There's a good balance of revealing bits and pieces about the various members and continuing to add characters to the team. So even without the sense-licking, I'm calling this Good.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Pretty easy. Either Goon #12 or Guardian #2. I'll go with Guardian #2, just because.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Hercules #2 because I was dumb enough to give Frank Tieri the benefit of the doubt last issue. That'll learn me.

TRADE OF THE WEEK: God damn Marvel's greedy eyes: you cannot tell me there was any reason Giant-Size Marvel needed to be twenty-four fucking ninety-nine. This could have been a great breezy read filled with lots of fun stories, a real snapshot of the age. Instead, it's an overpriced vial of Marvel Zombie crack cocaine, and I barely escaped buying it and letting myself be robbed. (Secondary eye-damning goes to DC for making the cover of their Teen Titans trade look like the animated series in the hopes some kids will actually pick it up and be scarred by the Beast Boy vivisection story.) The trade I went home with is Vol. 3 of Walking Dead, so I guess that's my pick.

So there you have it. Don't leave me hanging: what'd you think?

Labels: Jeff

So. Now that you know where my brain is at, here's some comic book reviews:

AMAZING FANTASY #8: Picked this up because I kinda liked last issue and, surprise, I kinda liked this issue. A lot of the little traps that Arana fell into are neatly avoided here: rather than just being the dutiful agent with the all-knowing back-up team, Scorpion has her own agenda and knowledge base that she’s willing to work with. Yeah, there were the occasional head-scratchers here and there, but very highly OK.

BATMAN DARK DETECTIVE #1: My expectations were not high, so it’s not surprising this managed to more or less clear them. Marshall Rogers is one strange artist—great design sense, nice attention to detail, passable body language, and then suddenly there’ll be a panel or two where everything is utterly lifeless—it’s like an illustration of two mannequins facing each other. Very odd. As for Englehart, I was (and am) a huge fan of his '70s Marvel work but remember work in the '80s and '90s that! became! a! little! heavy! on!--well, you get the idea. Fortunately, people here do more than exclaim, and I like his take on The Joker. Is the whole thing still a bit anachronistic and limp? Yes, and yet I would again throw this on the high side of OK because I enjoyed reading it.

BLOOD OF THE DEMON #3: Oy, this issue. I don't even know where to begin. The capper for me, however, was Batman refusing to get the League involved because Gotham is his city (lame, but in character, I'd say), Zatanna deciding he's mismatched and contacting the League anyway (okay, gotcha), and then a page showing Zatanna seeing that all the members of the League are fighting menaces of their own. Great. Does Zatanna then go on to help anyone? Take the three minutes to help each hero, get the JLA together, and then transport them to help Batman? No, Zatanna apparently decides to go back to bed, or check her email, or something. So why was it brought up? Because Byrne only wanted the scene to appease crotchety guys who go apeshit when it's not explained why Batman doesn't call the League—people, in short, like John Byrne. In the store, Hibbs seemed to think it was OK, I definitely thought it was Awful.

CONCRETE HUMAN DILEMMA #5: Plot-hammered, badly paced, and Chadwick runs a letter in the back that really seems to take the piss out of the sterilization arguments used in the series: in short, not really what I would call a return to form. Weirdly, I find I still have some emotional connection to the characters (I was a very casual Concrete reader at best, way back when) so I sorta hope Chadwick tries again soon—maybe more time at the drawing board will shake off a lot of those faults. 'Til then—Very low Eh.

DETECTIVE COMICS #806: Obviously, I missed an issue. Or two. And yet, I can't guarantee that this would have made any sense at all even if I had read them. I thought this arc was going to be Batman meets Bonfire of the Vanities; it seems, instead, a bit more like Batman meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers via some of the more boring stretches of The Godfather. Or something. Take the word Eh, reverse it, and you've got the first two letters of "Help!"

EMBROIDERIES OGN: After two exceptionally strong volumes of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi follows up with an exceptionally well-written, crudely drawn quasi-sequel, as a group of Iranian women trade stories of love and sex. The book's gotten some guff because of the art, and rightly so: the visual-verbal blend is outrageously out of whack; anatomy's off kilter; page layouts are cramped; the women hold their heads up at weird angles and seem to talk out of their throats—everything about it suggests either a book that was rushed to market or an artist whose range of talent is dramatically limited. But, honestly? I don't read Jules Feiffer's work for the art either: I read it for the keen sense of character, irony and insight into the condition of a gender and a culture. (For ten points of extra credit, compare and contrast Feiffer's neurotically anxious and arrogant men with Satrapi's scathingly candid and jocular women. Pick up your papers and begin.) Admittedly, my employee discount might have taken the sting out of this, but if money matters to you, wait for the softcover and/or check it out of a library. You should like it fine. Good.

ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS VOL. 1 TPB: Thanks to this, along with the reprint of Tuk The Cave Boy that also came out this week, I am absolutely convinced the Marvel Reprint Department runs on a series of dares and wagers. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the third consecutive Essential to include The Incredible Hulk #126, a hat trick I can see no other explanation for save mischievousness. While this material really shows how far the mainstream's come in more than thirty years (Hibbs was reading some of this stuff aloud in the store on Friday, to hilarious effect), it also shows us how much ground comics book stories themselves used to be able to cover—a Lovecraft derived Dr. Strange story becomes a series of interlocking one-shots spread across three different titles to create a brisk little mini-epic while still juggling a subplot or two from each book. I'm also a sucker for how Marvel books were much more eager to throw their influences into the mix (superheroes fighting Lovecraftian Undying Ones? It'd be awesome if only the artists' interpretation of the latter didn't resemble deformed cat people…) While you have to have a strong constitution (or stronger predisposition) to handle so many pages written in faux Stanglish, I'm enjoying this alot. Good, but surely not for everyone.

FELT TRUE TALES OF UNDERGROUND HIP HOP ONE SHOT: I made it about a third of the way through. Although I love Mahfood's work, a lack of familiarity with the main characters really hindered this for me—considering that they are "two of the hottest rappers in the underground hip hop scene today," I don't feel like I can merely chalk this up to me being a fogey ("two of the hottest rappers in the underground hip hop scene today" is kinda like saying "well, they're big in Japan…") There are some transcendent points in the book (like all of Mahfood's loving portraits of women for the section "Dirty Girls") but mainly, this seems like the ultimate CD pack-in transmuted into unsuccessful rack fodder. Damn shame, too. Eh.

GLA #2: Humor is not easy: some of the riffs in this I thought were very clever (comparing the superhero loner speech to the "it's not you, it's me" speech, the Magnolia soundtrack gag) and some I thought were very, very lame (that two or three page rejection grid might have worked without the ads breaking it up—maybe—but it sure felt like super-dull filler to me). I actually thought this was more miss than hit, myself, but part of why humor isn't easy is because it's so subjective. A high Eh.

LEX LUTHOR MAN OF STEEL #3: What's really maddening about this is that the scenes between Lex and Bruce were so good. In fact, those may have been some of the best "Bruce Wayne, Playboy" scenes I think I've ever read—Azzarello and Bermejo totally sold me on them. But the rest of the issue, putting aside continuity concerns, was both baffling and/or plain ol' Out Of Character. Batman gets kryptonite so Superman beats the crap out of him and takes it? Winner of this week's "Uhhhh…what?" award. If it hadn't been for those scenes between Bruce and Lex, I'd insist that the DCU file a restraining order on Brian Azzarello. But with those scenes: a very frustrated Eh. (The Shrew has an interesting take on the whole thing, by the way, which may just show me up as a DC dilettante, a title I'd be glad to wear if it meant this stuff could make any sense.)

MATADOR #1: A lot of ground covered in the first issue, which is all to the good, and the art team is having fun playing with the reader's expectations. Can't put my finger on my misgivings—things happen so quickly they're a little flat, maybe, but that's counterbalanced by not being really sure where it's going to go from here—so let's go with a cautious Good.

SEA OF RED #2: Not exactly subtle, is it? What started as kinda clever quickly became kinda obnoxiously dumb. All the smirky in-jokey elements work against, not with, the seriousness of the lead character, and yet nothing ever gets entertainingly insane, the way it might in, say, Eric Powell's hands. I'm at Eh, and ready for things to not get any better, but we'll see.

SEVEN SOLDIERS SHINING KNIGHT #2: First issue didn't work for me, and this didn't either—I still have no sense of who the title character is (even with a character named Guilt working him over), the horse didn't get to talk enough, and the rest of it seemed a mess. Sure, the art was pretty but give the knight a rack and this could have been a Top Cow comic. I'm calling it Awful until I get convinced otherwise.

SHANNA THE SHE DEVIL #4: Cho deliberately chose to make this uninteresting by not being arsed to give anyone apart from the narrator any personality (and that's hardly more than him saying "Holy buckets!" over and fucking over again). And since one or more of these guys dies gorily every issue, it's becoming really, really tedious, too. Although there's nothing in the story that's remotely similar to The Phantom Menace, there's something eerily familiar in paying to watch someone with talent squander tons of pulpy potential. Awful.

SHARKNIFE VOL. 1 OGN: When cornered, I tend to slip in to a high concept babble. For example, I might describe Sharknife as "OMAC meets Iron Wok Jan by way of a Paul Pope influenced graffiti tagger,:" but that certainly wouldn't tell you whether it's good or not. And that's because, frankly, I just don't know. The parts of it I liked, I really liked a lot: its premise is deeply whimsical without, I think, being ironic; the simple giddiness of a fight where finishing moves are performed with hammerhead sharks is infectious; and Corey Lewis does a great job pulling new surprises out of his sleeve just when things might start to feel stale. I couldn't tell a fucking thing that was going on in the fight scenes and yet the sheer kineticism of the design conveyed all the tension and impact needed. But, in the end, it felt a bit like watching three episodes of a giddy Saturday morning cartoon in a row—or maybe like being trapped on a tilt-a-whirl operated by a grinning carnie who didn't much care if I was enjoying myself or not. Sharknife is a helluva ride, but even by the end of its first volume, it's too soon to tell if there's anything more resonant than watching an emerging talent take pleasure in the powers at his command. Good.

SUPERMAN #216: Clearly, this was supposed to come out before Day of Vengeance #1, and, clearly, it would have stunk, anyway. But it might have stunk a little less—the Jean Loring thing, in particular—if DC'd had their scheduling a little more together. And does the Spectre decide to destroy all magic because he gets in a pissing match with Shazam? He's the Spirit of Vengeance, not the Spirit of Pettiness… Throw in a ending where Superman is apparently a mindless husk on an iceberg (making him a fine reader surrogate), and you've got the makings of an Awful little issue.

SWAMP THING #15: I had no idea what was going on, or what the threat might be (giant amoebas that can use refrigerators?), but I liked the struggling guy with the stroke who shirked Linda Holland way back when—it seems like a good direction to go in, although the execution of the rest of this issue suggests an inability to get there (or anywhere) in any coherent fashion. Kinda Awful.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #18: Seemed like a pretty half-hearted attempt to capture the glories of widescreen action (it never got better than that beautiful double-page spread of the shuttle being chased across the desert by that big-ass thing) and/or wrap up the script in about ten minutes. I pretty much blame Kubert, who either thought it'd be funny to put Jawas into script (with gaffi sticks, to boot!) or was on too tight a deadline to design anything new. There were some great little sequences in this arc, but this wrap-up left a bit of a bad taste. Eh.

ULTRA VOL 1 SEVEN DAYS TPB: After enjoying the first two issues of the mini, I decided to wait for the trade and I'm glad I did. This was a strong fun read about three friends dealing with their careers and their love lives after their fortunes are read—that the three friends are superheroines is kind of an odd twist, but one that ends up working out in the long run. It's a quick, slick way to ruminate on class differences and the complexity added to romance as a result of female empowerment in our culture. It's not a particularly deep rumination, mind you, but it helps undercut the occasionally calculated feeling the project sometimes has (probably my own biases). If you're a fan of Bendis's lighter work, you should pick this up. Good.

VILLAINS UNITED #1: I never should have bought the transformation of Catman into a potentially interesting character, and yet I did, which is a testament to Simone's, Eaglesham's and Von Grawbadger's talents. If it wasn't for that, I don't think I could continue to suspend enough disbelief to keep the whole venture going. ("If we succeed, Cheshire, you will get Asia." Wha? All 1.3 billion people are just gonna go along with anything she says or something?) Interesting enough to make me come back for the second issue. OK.

Y THE LAST MAN #33: Too much plot-hammering going on here, I think, even for the old romantic triangle trope. Vaughan's pulled this sort of thing off before but I am currently mightily underwhelmed. Eh.