Has not posting in a week-plus left me chops a little rusty? I think so. Last month, Graeme mentioned how daily reviewing turned his brain into a non-stop reviewer-and-rater of everything that happened to him. And while I also had that, I currently find myself swinging toward the other pole--where almost nothing kicks the reviewing portion of my brain into action. I watched four movies last Sunday, for example, ranging from Duck, You Sucker! to The Black Gestapo and the closest I got to critical analysis was "nice explosions" (for Duck, You Sucker!) and "that was probably the best climactic battle between good and evil to ever take place on somebody's patio" (for The Black Gestapo).

So if my reviews this week run to the "hey, these staples do an awesome job of holding the book together, don't they?" side of things, be patient.

52 WEEK #51: Why did it take the end of The Mystery In Space storyline to remind me how much I liked these characters? While I'm griping, trading in a sneering caterpillar that wears glasses and a radio for a gloating, gigantic butterfly beastie is a bit like exchanging a stringless cello for a permanently out-of-tune saxophone. Unless you end up with a supervillain with arms (for fist-shaking and building punching) and legs (for junk-kicking and face-stomping), your upgrade is just as unlikely to be ignored as before. OK, I guess.

Oh, and if they put out a special of all J.G. Jones' covers for 52 on nice paper and a maybe a few essays or something? I'd totally buy that.

ACTION COMICS #848: If this had been a story about Superman dealing with a superhero who doesn't share the Big S's attitudes about non-interference in developing nations, that'd be one thing (and a pretty good idea for a story, I think). But by making the superhero be both religious and faith-powered, the waters are muddied considerably and maybe unnecessarily; all those flashbacks of Clark Kent in church certainly helps with the page count, but the link seems to imply that only rationalist-based individuals should be trusted to decide the fates of others (tell it to the French Revolution, Mr. Nicieza). I'm Eh about it, and hopefully next issue will prove all my various knee-jerk reactions to be simply that.

AMAZONS ATTACK #1: Graeme and Hibbs both had problems with this book, but laid those problems at editorial and gave the creative team a pass. Although I've liked Pfeifer's work in the past, and think Pete Woods' art is damn fine, I'm not so generous. I thought all that stuff with Abraham Lincoln was obfuscatory bullshit that did nothing but killed time and cluttered the issue (at one point, Queen Hippolyta charges into the Lincoln Monument saying something like "Let us show them what we think of their 'Great Emancipator'" and I asked Hibbs, "So the Amazons are attacking because they're angry at African-Americans?" Similarly, on the first page where the dad tells his son about Lincoln, and his son goes "Cool, and then what happened to him?" which no kid ever says after lectures about famous people made into statues because the kid knows if Lincoln had gone on to invent Pac-Man and found Metallica, that would have benn mentioned.) I know Pfeifer is going for an "Independence Day" summer blockbuster feel to things (and he's fortunate to have an artist like Woods who can give the big splodey as well as smaller moments), but it's such a dumb choice it seems lazy.

On the one hand, Pfeifer and Woods deserve better. On the other, let's face it: slumming is slumming. Awful.

BLUE BEETLE #14: Steps a bit into too-cutesy territory maybe, and I'm not sure that I can buy a concept where everyone in the JLA believes Jaime but somehow it's still just him matching wits against aliens posing as friendly vistors. But it's also an issue that advances the plot, is a satisfying read on its own, and has some of the better-written characters you'll find in a superhero book today. Compared to its previous issues, I'd say lowish Good, but good nonetheless.

CONNOR HAWKE DRAGONS BLOOD #6: An enjoyable big finish which, unless I missed something, opens the door for Connor to manifest superpowers in the future. The six people who care about Connor Hawke (two of whom are Chuck Dixon) must be thrilled. I'm not quite one of those six, but I'm getting closer all the time, particularly when competently done OK miniseries like this come along and make an argument for it.

CROSSING MIDNIGHT #6: Fixes (at least for this issue) the one problem I had with the book up until now--the characters' relative helplessness in the face of so much mystical badassery. Considering the last three issues have been varying degrees of awesome, I can only hope that (a) the awesome continues; and (b) it picks up in sales enough to survive. If you ever wanted Miyazaki and Clive Barker to collaborate, you should check this book out. Very Good. Click Here to Read More...

...and here's the other part of what I did this afternoon...

Another big week, it seems like:


100 BULLETS #83
2000 AD #1531
2000 AD #1532
52 WEEK #52
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #57 (A)
ALIEN PIG FARM #1 (OF 4)
ALL NEW ATOM #11
ALL NEW OFF HB MARVEL UNIVERSE A TO Z UPDATE #2
AMERICAN VIRGIN #14
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #109
ARCHIE DIGEST #234
ASHLEY WOODS D AIRAIN AVENTURE #2
ASTONISHING X-MEN #21
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #2 CWI
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA CYLON APOCALYPSE #3
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #3
CHECKMATE #13
CHUCKY PHOTO CVR B #1 (OF 5)
CITY OF OTHERS #2 (OF 4)
DANGER GIRL BODY SHOTS #2 (OF 4)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER BORN #4 (OF 7)
DARK XENA #1
DARKNESS LEVEL 3 BRASE CVR A
DEADMAN #9
DETECTIVE COMICS #832
DOMINION #1
EXTERMINATORS #17
FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #20
GHOST RIDER TRAIL OF TEARS #4 (OF 6)
GIANT SIZED RED SONJA #1
GREEN LANTERN #19
GRIMM FAIRY TALES RETURN TO WONDERLAND #0
HAWKGIRL #63
HELLBOY DARKNESS CALLS #1 (OF 6)
HOUSEWIVES AT PLAY #17 (A)
INCREDIBLE HULK #106
IRON MAN #17 CWI
JONAH HEX #19
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #257
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #33
LONERS #2 (OF 6)
LOONEY TUNES #150
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #27
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED LAST OF THE MOHICANS #1 (OF 6)
MARVEL ZOMBIES ARMY OF DARKNESS #3 (OF 5)
MIDNIGHTER #7
MS MARVEL #15 CWI
NASCAR HEROES #1
OMEGA FLIGHT #2 CWI (OF 5)
PHANTOM #16
PUNISHER #47
RAISE THE DEAD #2
RUNAWAYS #26
SCALPED #5
SCARFACE SCARRED FOR LIFE #5
SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1
SHAZAM THE MONSTER SOCIETY OF EVIL #3 (OF 4)
SPAWN #167
SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE #18
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC #16
STRANGE GIRL #16
STRANGERS IN PARADISE #89
SUPERMAN #662
SUPERNATURAL ORIGINS #1
TEEN TITANS #46
THUNDERBOLTS PRESENTS ZEMO BORN BETTER #4 (OF 4)
TRANSFORMERS ESCALATION #6
TRIPPER MOVIE ADAPTATION ONE SHOT (RES)
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #41
WARD O/T STATE #1 (OF 3)
WARHAMMER 40K CVR A #3
WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY #6
WITCHBLADE SARA BEARER CVR A #105
WITCHBLADE TAKERU MANGA #3
WONDER MAN #5 (OF 5)
WORLD WAR HULK PROLOGUE WORLD BREAKER
X ISLE #5 (OF 5)

Books / Mags / Stuff
52 ACTION FIGURES MASTER CASE ASST (NET)
ALL NEW ATOM VOL 1 MY LIFE IN MINIATURE TP
CIVIL WAR CAPTAIN AMERICA TP
CIVIL WAR WOLVERINE TP
CIVIL WAR YOUNG AVENGERS & RUNAWAYS TP
CLARENCE PRINCIPLE GN
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #36 SUB MARINER
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #8 GREEN GOBLIN
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAGAZINE #34 RED SKULL
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAGAZINE #35 GAMBIT
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAGAZINE #37 LOKI
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAGAZINE #5 MAGNETO
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAGAZINE #6 BLADE
COMPLETE OMAHA THE CAT DANCER VOL 6 TP (A)
FANTASTIC FOUR VISIONARIES WALTER SIMONSON VOL 1 TP
FIRST IN SPACE GN
FLOOD 3RD EDITION TP
GUNSMITH CATS BURST VOL 1 TP
IN DUBLIN CITY GN
KORGI VOL 1 TP
LEES TOY REVIEW MAY 2007 #175
LOVE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE OMNIBUS VOL 2 TP
SHOWCASE PRESENTS WAR THAT TIME FORGOT VOL 1 TP
STAR TREK COMICS CLASSICS VOL 5 CONVERGENCE TP
STAR WARS LEGACY VOL 1 BROKEN TP
WALKING DEAD SORROWFUL LIFE VOL 6
WALKING DEAD VOL 2 HC
WIZARD EXTRA VOL 1 DIRECTORS COMMENTARIES SC



What looks good to YOU?

-B Click Here to Read More...

Had some knocking-the-wind-out news on Friday, but mostly I had forgotten it was order form/sub form weekend. I should have comics related content posts on MOnday and Tuesday...

Meanwhile, here's the Top 20 of what Comix Experience ordered for June shipping (no specific numbers this time)...

1. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #4
2. ALL STAR SUPERMAN #8
3. COUNTDOWN #47 (I fell for the returnability offer here)
COUNTDOWN #46
COUNTDOWN #45
COUNTDOWN #44
7. JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #10
DARK TOWN GUNSLINGER BORN #5
9. JUSTICE #12 (Both covers combined)
10. NEW AVENGERS #31 (taking Marvel on it's word...)
11. HELLBOY DARKNESS CALLS #3
FLASH FASTEST MAN ALIVE #13 (also returnability offer)
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #4
14. BATMAN #667
15. RUNAWAYS #27
MIGHTY AVENGERS #4
BOYS #7 (Shame that DC let a top 20 book go away)
18. X-MEN FINCH GATEFOLD VARIANT #200
X-MEN ENDANGERED SPECIES ONE-SHOT
WORLD WAR HULK #1



And here's the Top 20 by the I-think-more-important dollars


1. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #4
2. ALL STAR SUPERMAN #8
3. DARK TOWN GUNSLINGER BORN #5
4. JUSTICE #12 (Both covers combined)
5. SHAZAM MONSTER SOCIETY OF EVIL #4
6. COUNTDOWN #47
COUNTDOWN #46
COUNTDOWN #45
COUNTDOWN #44
10. EC ARCHIVES TALES FROM THE CRYPT VOL 2 HC
11. JACK KIRBYS FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS VOL 2 HC
12. ULTIMATES 2 VOL 2 GRAND THEFT AMERICA TP
13. JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #10
14. FRENCH KISS #20 (A)
15. NEW AVENGERS #31
16. WILL EISNERS SPIRIT ARCHIVES V22 HC
17. GRENDEL ART OF MATT WAGNERS GRENDEL HC
18. X-MEN FINCH GATEFOLD VARIANT #200
X-MEN ENDANGERED SPECIES ONE-SHOT
WORLD WAR HULK #1


Dunno if any of that's interesting to anyone...

-B

Labels: retailing

Click Here to Read More...

It almost feels like an insult to say that THE SALON should be compulsory reading for any course teaching the history of 20th century art; it suggests that the book is some kind of dry, informative, educational text, which couldn't be further from the truth; someone who has absolutely no knowledge or interest in art could read this book and come away as in love with it as I did, without feeling as if they were being lectured or preached to. But nonetheless, one of the wonderful - and wonderfully sly - things about this book is the way that, almost without you noticing, it tries to explain the thinking behind the cubist movement and introduce you to Gertrude Stein and many of the movers and shakers of her artistic salon in Paris at the opening of the last century. It may distract with the amazingly inventive larger plot, but throughout the whole thing, conversation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque illustrates the excitement and drive that led to (and immediately surrounded) early cubism in a way that makes the whole thing relatable and understandable better than any art history teacher ever could.

And I taught in an art school, once. I should know these things.

There is nothing wrong with The Salon. And I kind of mean that in the literal sense - This is one of those rare books that you read with joy and a sense of stunned awe at just how good it is. Nick Bertozzi's writing ambitiously mixes art theory with murder mystery with cultural history remixed with imaginative flights of fantasy (the effects of absinthe, for example, have to be seen to be believed) without putting a step wrong; the facts of the story may not be entirely historically accurate - I'm pretty sure that Gauguin's ultimate fate, for example, is not what actually happened - but it's true to who those involved were in terms of personality and outlook, and manages to relate those personalities truly to the reader while in the midst of a speedy and enjoyable pulp plot. Visually, Bertozzi doesn't disappoint either; with a cartoony line reminiscent of Paul Pope drawing New Yorker cartoons and a smart and effective use of color throughout the book, it's both beautiful and evocative, pushing the reader's take on the action gently but surely throughout the entire book. The design of the book, with chapters separated by small pencil drawings surrounded by white space, and frontispieces that work both as design elements and plot hints, is also something to be applauded - This is a book that as intelligent in its visual elements as in its written elements, and - unusually for books that you can say that about - in both of those cases, it happens to be extremely intelligent as opposed to "Rob Liefeld".

It's a book that surpasses the hype, and something that I read and immediately started raving about to anyone that would listen, probably much to their annoyance. Smart, enjoyable, funny and entirely Excellent. Click Here to Read More...

These are the following things that I think about when someone says the word "Klingon" to me:

* Funny foreheads.
* Michael Dorn manages to make a career out of frowning.
* Tribbles.
* All of those very dull episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine where they talked about Klingon culture and things were very dark and they talk about "honor" a lot.
* Please stop saying the word "Klingon".

This is something that I don't think about when someone says the word "Klingon" to me:

* The need for a five-issue miniseries about Klingons published by IDW, especially a miniseries that has a Klingon-language variant of the first issue.

Do you see how that works? My lack of massive Star Trek fanboyishness (I know enough to think that Deep Space Nine in the best of the series, but not enough to stay away from the Voyager reruns on Spike, which Kate is now addicted to) and my disinterest in the Klingons at the best of times leaves me pretty much outside of the target market for this series, and yet somehow it managed to disappoint me nonetheless. Part of the problem is, I think, the scattered nature of this first issue - We're given a fairly generic framing sequence where Klingons outside of any given timeframe talk about some mysterious decision that they need to make, complete with potted (and confusing) history of the entire Klingon race before we flash back to, oddly enough, a recap of the original series episode "Errand of Mercy" from the point of view of the Klingons. And throughout the whole thing, I was thinking, Who is this book actually for?

The history of the Klingon race sequence - less than a page in total - seems to be written for insiders with unexplained references to human genetic science that somehow split the Klingons into two species and a plot of genetic superiority, and the rest of the issue is a recap of a Star Trek episode that fans will be familiar with, without much spin or insight... Those scenes only really work for those who are familiar with the original series, because for those like me who had to google the details because we guessed that it was probably from the TV show, it's an obviously incomplete storytelling experience; you can tell that something's missing, and what's missing is something that probably comes from knowledge of the episode in question. Which is probably very nice for the already existant fanbase, but isn't it lazy to write so directly to the fanbase and exclusionary to everyone else?

(Artwise, the book is blocky, but in a good way - The figurework is good, but there's something offputtingly perfect about the images of spaceships that suggests use of 3D-modelling software, and breaks the feel of the story somehow...)

I don't know why I'm surprised that this is all about the fanbase; it does have a Klingon language variant, after all. Okay for what it is. Click Here to Read More...

Yeah, after the signing, I pretty much zoned out for a week solid. (Hopefully, you noticed.) After a whirlwind 72 hours consisting of the signing, APE, catching four movies with Robson, and getting my car broken into, my brain was little more than a piece of dry, unbuttered toast. So brain-dead was I that I couldn't even find the new comics I bought from CE for five or six days. (The new Golgo and Drifting Classroom are tucked away in my bag for store reading today.)

Anyway, I--oh, hey look! Comic book superstars!



This is the best picture I took of our four signers from Friday, in part because it was a hard angle to catch all of them in on one shot, and in part because I kept having to go breathe into a paper bag to keep from hyperventilating and that probably kept my camera hands shaky. All of the signers were incredibly generous and kind, and put up with my nattering and/or lousy directions which in the case of poor Gene Yang meant that he showed up 45 minutes late to his signing (and in case you're wondering Kevin Huizenga, from what I can tell, always has some variation of a "they never built a prison that could break me" look on his face).

The signers said they had a good time, we sold a ton of books that day, and I think it'd be safe to call the signing a success. And yet, I spent most of the day feeling like Artie ("Do me a favor. Just kick my ass, okay?") Fufkin in Spinal Tap because there weren't lines out the door and down the street and helicopters circling around trying to figure out why traffic on Divisadero stopped. Because that's what these four people deserve, if you ask me, and that we didn't get that makes me feel like I didn't do my job correctly and do me a favor, just kick my ass, okay? I'm not asking. I'm telling.

Anyway, I--hey, look! There they are again!



(I'm very happy that New Comix is shining above their heads; I just wish it was little bit more centered.)

Oh, and as a bonus, here's a picture of Graeme and Hibbs plotting to overthrow the world:



Anyway, those are the signing pix (I've actually got a pretty good crowd shot with Matt Silady talking to Ian Brill, and Kiel Phegley (who not only was a very nice and funny guy but also did a kick-ass job of covering APE for Wizard's website) chatting with Bill Roundy but couldn't quite figure out a way to work it into the post). My thanks to Kevin Huizenga, Hope Larson, Bryan Lee O'Malley and Gene Yang for their kindness, generosity and awesomeness. Having them at the store was a tremendous honor for me. Click Here to Read More...

The funniest thing* happened to me on the way to writing this post - I got called out by a publisher. Okay, not called out, exactly, but following my post about Savage Tales, the wonderful (and I'm not even being facetious) Joe Rybandt of Dynamite Entertainment and I ended up in an email exchange about just why I don't dig Red Sonja. Which resulted in his sending me some Dynamite books after I admitted that I don't really read them.

And here's the punchline: I still don't like Red Sonja. But Battlestar Galactica? Not so bad. And The Lone Ranger? Really rather good.

When it comes to RED SONJA #21, I suddenly become a boyfriend trying desperately to get out of a relationship; it's not you, Sonja. It's me. Try as hard as I might - and I actually really did try, this time, surprisingly enough - I just don't get Red Sonja at all. I have problems reading it, literally; it's not just that the story doesn't make sense to me (Why are they fighting? Why do they all have cat heads? What's happening?), but I felt as if the typeface used for the lettering was chosen specifically to be hard to read, and the art is colored for maximum murkiness in far too many places. I'm sure that this book has its fans and that those fans have particularly good reasons to enjoy it, but for me it's almost entirely a confused Eh and no more.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA #8, meanwhile, demonstrates why TV tie-ins are problematic for series with continuity as tight as this one. It's not that this book is bad, per se - the script has moments where it catches the tone of the television series, and even an act-break with a last line that could come directly from Ron Moore himself, and the art is still a little too colorful for its source but with the occasional good likeness, especially on Sharon and Adama - but the story just feels false because its scale is too large to have been ignored by everyone during the second and third seasons. Similarly, setting this mini in the middle of the second season robs what little dramatic tension it may have - We know that everyone survives and that nothing of import can really happen, because we've seen what happens for the next year and a half. It's a weird flaw for this Okay book, and one that is semi-addressed by the upcoming "Season Zero" series, set two years before the start of the television series.

(Yes, the reader will still know what ultimately happens to the characters, but starting at an earlier point adds a couple of interesting wrinkles - The fact that we know how the characters end up works in its favor because you have the whole "How did they get like that?" question, and also, a two-year cushion is enough time to make changes with the possibility of changing things back later...)

Season Zero gets a preview in Dynamite's Free Comic Book Day special issue, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SEASON ZERO #0/THE LONE RANGER #0. The Galactica strip is more effective than the current series, partially because it's in an unfamiliar familiar setting - we know the characters but not really, just yet - and partially because Brandon Jerwa's dialogue fits what you expect better than Greg Pak's (Not so sure about the artwork, though; too Top Cow for my liking...). It's a high Okay, but the issue is well worth picking up for the Very Good Lone Ranger short. It's not high art, but it is a well-done, fun sampler for the ongoing Ranger series - It has a damsel in distress, kids in danger, a bad guy with a glass jaw and a funny last line from Tonto, pretty much all that I'd want from a Lone Ranger comic book, and done with some very attractive art from Sergio Cariello. Convincing enough, in fact, for me to want to see what the regular book looks like. Somewhere, Joe Rybandt is claiming victory, as well he should.

Just don't try to convince me that I should try to read Red Sonja again.

* - It's not actually funny, I know. Click Here to Read More...

Tired. Just a quick in and out tonight.


JOHNNY HIRO #1: there's a real charm in this what-appears-to-be-a one off from Fred Chao via Adhouse books -- it has heart, and a decent amount of craft behind it. I had two real problems with it, however. 1) The Pidgin English that Hiro's girlfriend speaks ("Why you wear my HELLO BUNNY slipper?"). I don't know, maybe its cool for the Asian-named Chao to use it, but it still made me feel all PC and squirmy inside whenever she opened her mouth. Problem #2 is a bit more serious -- nothing Hiro does has any impact on the story, in fact, the entire conflict utterly resolves itself without any need for action from ANYone, rendering it a fairly frustrating read, in a narrative sense. To a large degree, the comic feels like it was actually built AROUND the news article referenced right at the end, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it makes the whole thing feel like an exercise, or, perhaps, a notion, rather than a STORY. Still, it IS fun and charming enough, and it's rare to see an Asian protagonist like this in an "alt comic" kind of style (semi-Paul Pope-y), so let's go with a (fairly low) OK.


CROSSING MIDNIGHT #6: Either last issue or the one before, this book found its style and legs, and this issue, in particular, really grabbed me. I think this may, in fact, be both the most original Vertigo comic being published right now, as well as being the best Vertigo title under-issue-#50 (which are often different things, right?). The problem is, and I think it’s serious, is it really is difficult to "log line" this title. "25 or less words on what the book is about". "The last living man on earth tries to find his girlfriend", "what if all of the characters from the fairy tales were real, and living in New York", "in the near future a journalist reports from War-torn NYC", "A preacher, his hitman girlfriend, and a drunken vampire look for God, to make Him pay", and so on. I've got nothing HERE, and partly because it doesn't even seem like all of the pieces are up on the board quite yet. It is really REALLY hard to sell something if you don't have that log-line. Here's hoping I figure an appealing one out soon, because, like I said, this has turned into the best Vertigo comic in about five years. GOOD.


JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #5: You know what might have been a very smart idea? Having the second part of the JLA/JSA crossover say ANYTHING about being the second part of the JLA/JSA crossover on the cover. Or, I'd even settle for the cover being thematically linked to last week's JLA cover. Rather than the (let's be honest) fairly boring black-background, "Alex draws YET ANOTHER identical cover" style that we've got here. I'm of the opinion that the LAST time he did this run of covers (on the previous JSA series -- there he drew the "old" JSAers, now he's drawing the "new" ones) that they really hurt sales because customers couldn't adequately differentiate between the covers, and weren't sure if they already had them or not. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd guess he drew that last batch and this batch at the same time, and DC is running them only because they paid for them back then, and needed to get the cost off their books.

But then, I'm a cynical fuck.

Still, the INSIDES of this comic were fairly wonderful. This new artist, Fernando Pasarin, is really very very good. I wish the coloring was a little richer to bring out his work, but I seriously dug the art, especially that double-page spread of the (mostly) "classic" LSH lineup. I really like how you sort of get an idea of each of their personalities from body language alone.

There were some very fun character beats here (I especially liked the Reddy/Cyclone scene), and though I really and truly don't understand that shrine to the LSH in the Fortress -- since the currently published LSH series clearly isn't involving Superb*y, nor are these guys those guys, I don't think I'd be at all unhappy if they put that back into continuity.... if it could be done without breaking a whole lot of other stories. "And then the first Crisis hit and I never saw them again" doesn't actually cut it, as there have been post-Crisis legion-in-the-21st-century stories (Putting aside Booster Gold's origin, there's the L.E.G.I.O.N. stuff, with Tinya-from-the-future, and there was something like a year where the LSH/Legionnaires era was trapped here [and were instrumental in some other crossover.... Final Night, maybe? Or am I misrecalling?]. And I think there's at least two or three more I am forgetting. Sure this could be a "Superb*y punches a wall" thing (which would, by the way, SUCK), but if you're going to keep retconning, then they need to make it clear what the frak is going on. What IS continuity, and what isn't. Because I don't like this ever-changing backstory thing where being a long-time reader actually works AGAINST you -- and wow, I shouldn't have put that much text inbetween the dashes ("--") should I? But though I don't understand that shrine, I really did get a lovely tickle in my belly from it. I loved *that* DC Universe.

I should probably go read Alan Moore's first volume of SUPREME again to help me reconcile it, huh?

Anyway, although it makes my head hurt, I have to say I liked this issue a great deal. And I'll give it a probationary GOOD.




Fuck, 10:30 already. That's it from me. More tomorrow night.

What did YOU think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

FALLEN SON: THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA #2: So, the other day Hibbs and I were talking about the fact that it already feels like the death of Captain America is yesterday's news. It's not just that the news cycle has, unsurprisingly, moved on from something that happened, what, a month ago now? But there's also a sense that, as a fan, I'm feeling kind of washed out with the whole storyline already. Which, considering that Captain America #26 - you know, the issue immediately following Cap's death with his autopsy and everything - doesn't ship for another month or so, really can't be considered a good sign.

It's not Brubaker's fault, of course; Ed wrote the issues without knowing that there was going to be such a reaction to the storyline, but also - and more importantly for the purposes of what I'm about to talk about - without knowing that there was going to be a five-part miniseries about the Marvel Universe reacting to the news slotted in between the issues, and that that miniseries would see its frequency shift from weekly to, apparently, every third week for some strange reason (Was it meant to become bi-weekly and then it missed a week or something...?), further pushing his intended-to-be-immediate-follow-up back and back again. But it just feels like a really bad decision on Marvel's part to have delayed Cap #26 this long. Captain America #25 came out seven weeks ago, already; never mind that readers are going to be bored shitless hearing about how dead Captain America is by the time that the following issue finally comes out, any and all new readers who may have been tempted to pick up the next issue and find out what happens in part two of the story - That is, if they haven't thought that part 2 was maybe in Civil War: The Confession, or perhaps Fallen Son #1 - will probably have either forgotten about it considering that they were tempted three months earlier or have given up waiting for the damn thing to actually appear.

It's sad, but not surprising that the desire to milk the event for all its worth is probably going to end up hitting the original book hardest in the long run. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Cap #26 will have a higher readership than, say, Cap #24. But it'll definitely have a much lower one than it would've had it have appeared four weeks after Cap #25 and without six different tie-in books in between.

All of which is a long lead in to saying, Fallen Son #2? It's Okay. Jeph Loeb is much more comfortable with the set-up here, which mirrors both his parallel storytelling style of Superman/Batman and the classic Marvel set-up of superheroes dealing with big issues by doing mundane things. His dialogue still has the odd tics of the first issue, but filtered through a fairly passable Bendis impression, which was a welcome surprise. Ed McGuinness's art, meanwhile, continues to be an inflatable acquired taste, but it's one that I acquired years ago, and it's nice to see him cutting loose on superhero-on-big-monster action. It's nowhere near as bad as the first issue, perhaps because it's so much more of an old-school superhero book, and "anger" is a much easier concept to process in superhero terms than "denial" - but there's absolutely nothing about this book that says "You know what you need? Another three issues of this before the larger story can move forward." Click Here to Read More...

52 Week 51: Ah, the end is nigh. Quite a number of "happy endings" in this installment -- Buddy and Adam and whatnot -- and the solid point to the grand finale, in the form of the New Mister Mind. Frankly, I always liked the big glasses and the radio around his neck myself. Maybe I'm crazy, but the last few issues have been fairly satisfying, and I'm thinking we'll get a "good enough" resolution in... six days, sheesh. A lot of it is going to depend on just how the resolve the central "52" mystery (exactly 52 parallel worlds seems to a) miss the point of parallel worlds (that wouldn't even be three seasons of SLIDERS, would it?), and B) be a little too coincidental), but it seems that the latest issue of SUPERGIRL & LSH pretty much gives that away, anyway. All in all? GOOD.


AMAZONS ATTACK #1: If a) I had the slightest idea what was happening in the setup (Apparently one NEEDS to read WONDER WOMAN #8 first... which isn't flagged either on the cover of WW or inside of AA itself), b) this (and WW3) didn't, by and large, feel like an attempt to preemptively kick the legs out from WORLD WAR HULK; c) felt this "mattered" at all -- since virtually no other book is tying into it, it can be "safely ignored"; d) felt like it had any narrative weight upon the DCU itself (the carnage we've seen in just the first issue would certainly make CIVIL WAR look like a liberal's wet dream when it came to Government reaction... esp. coupled with Black Adam and the IC Superboy actions recently from the DCU-bystander POV), then I probably would have really liked this.

It's reasonably well written (barring the smidge of introduction to edumicate people not reading WW what the hell is going on, and how Polly is back from the dead, anyway [from the "Our Worlds At War" crossover a few years back]), and, really, really nicely drawn (there's a real sense of scope on that first double-sized spread, ain't there?), but what kills it for me is my personal sense that DC editorial hasn't got the first fucking idea what to do with Wonder Woman, and appears to be casting blindly around for some sort of a direction that might resonate. Given how recently they just had gotten rid of the Amazons (A year ago this week in INFINITE CRISIS #7? Or do I misremember?), this seems like a pretty quick and absurd return for them. Everywhere I look, it sure feels like the DCU architects are saying "We have a plan!", then 3 months later its "Uh, that plan didn't work... we have a NEW plan!"

Basically, the fault of AMAZONS ATTACK #1 isn't anything in the execution of the book (except for the lack of explanation about some of the key plot points), but in the greater, ongoing problems of DC editorial and the direction and point of the DCU. That yields an EH.


FALLEN SON: AVENGERS: I didn't have a lot of faith in this, I have to say, going in, but as chapter 2 of a 5 issue mini (as opposed to the second stand alone issue, as the naming schema would seem to indicate), this moved along much better than I would have expected. The "Mighty" half was a little weaker on the theme, but Spidey and Logan's interactions were really Classic Marvel, and I liked it tons more than I would have thought. A strong OK


More tomorrow, what did YOU think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

Here's the first thing that's wrong with AMAZONS ATTACK! #1: That it doesn't begin with a caption that tells you very clearly that you really should read Wonder Woman #8 before you read the rest of the issue. Even though I've been keeping up with the relaunched version of the alphabetically-chested Amazon's book, I started Amazons Attack! wondering just what the hell was going on, a feeling I could've at least partially avoided had I known to read the latest issue of Wonder Woman first, where one of the major "Wait, what?" moments was explained away.

Here's the second thing that's wrong with Amazons Attack! #1: That it needed a caption explaining that you should read something else to understand the issue. As much as I liked to completely rant about Civil War, it did something right as far as this whole "event miniseries" thing goes that DC's books don't - It started with a relatively clean slate for new readers. Sure, there was a lot of backstory that fans knew that enhanced the whole thing, but a new reader could pick up the first issue of Civil War and at least be able to follow what was going on and why. Compare that to Infinite Crisis, which started with the conclusion of at least four different miniseries, not to mention the various tie-ins from ongoing books... or worse yet, compare that to this book, which seems to launch entirely not only from ongoing events in Wonder Woman's current title (including two things that directly tie into events in WW #8 and only really make sense if you read that book - even though they don't actually make that clear anywhere in AA! #1), but also from a forgotten plotline that was last mentioned in Greg Rucka's WW run, what, two or three years ago? In what world does that make sense, launching a new "event" book - this ties in with Countdown as well, down the line, apparently - that is based in a plot that even Wonder Woman fans don't remember, and not explaining it for anyone who isn't familiar with that plot?

(For those who've read the book and still don't know what I'm talking about, it's Circe's daughter, who's currently being raised by humans - I think? - as per Rucka's run. If I understood the dialogue in this issue correctly, that seems to be behind Circe's plan to ignite war between the Amazons and humanity.)

This is exactly my big problem with DC's current superhero direction - Not just that it's aimed at pleasing the fans, but that it seems to be purely aimed at pleasing the fans. Stories shouldn't be centered around past continuity that doesn't get explained or introduced, and if your new series ties in with something else that's currently out there then, firstly, what kind of launch is that, and secondly, you should make that clear to your readers instead of just assuming that they're buying everything already.

Despite the clear feeling that this is a book created by editorial edict and without any clear creative direction, writer Will Pfeifer does a pretty good job with what he has to work with - the idea that the Amazons attack Washington and symbolically chop the head off the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial works in both a visual and comedically over-the-top blockbuster manner, and his writing has a nice rhythm to it. Pete Woods, meanwhile, provides art that yet again makes you wonder why he's not a superstar who misses his deadlines and yet wins awards every time he turns around. It's a testament to their talents that what should be a complete disaster turns out to be a pretty readable, Okay book. It's no World War III, at least, and shouldn't that be the main thing? Click Here to Read More...

Ow, back after 11 hours at the store – this week’s shipment kicked my ass. Man, do I hate it when FCBD books ship the same week as a big week of comics (and frickin’ PREVIEWS and WIZARD – those boys add some WEIGHT)

And, OF COURSE, this was the day Rob needed to check out at 5pm so he could make it to some concert somewhere up north (I think…?)

Anyway, quick hit on last week before I go for the newest books….


WORLD WAR III: Except for the whole “You shouldn’t buy it!” thing, I’m in total agreement with Graeme on this – I figure you’re a big enough boy to decide on your own how much of a DC Universe fan/completeist to decide for yourself if it is worth your $10 or not. Me, I’m a big DC fan, and I thought this was a trainwreck of a comic.

Functional problem #1 is that it doesn’t seem to me that the two writers read each other’s scripts at all – the first two parts have the Martian Manhunter (the POV character) somehow having his telepathy wired into all of humanity at once, crippling him. This is flatly ignored in the second two issues. That kind of sloppy co-ordination makes an bad comic even worse – if THEY don’t give a damn, why should WE?

From my side of the page, it appears the writers were given a laundry list of plot points to address (and is it just me, or is it sloppy and stupid that ALL of the “One Year Later” changes seem to be occurring in a single week?) – that may be OK in a “crossing the Ts” kind of way, but it makes for shitty fiction, and is completely unengaging.

Then there’s the changes themselves – many/most of them don’t really make a whole lot of sense. What was that that happened to Supergirl… and why? Showing Jason Todd in a Nightwing costume without any explanation whatsoever (or even clarity that it wasn’t Dick) was awkward; Adam gets his “bad ass” credentials shown by killing “Terra” (wait, what? Who the hell was that?, but doing nothing at all against similarly un-super characters like, say, Wildcat or Green Arrow (honestly, what is Green Arrow going to do against Black Adam?), while at the same time showing the Marvel family to be completely ineffectual, it just goes on and on.

Then there’s stuff like the Aquaman sequence – apparently he summons… well, I have no idea who those giant guys were, certainly no one we’ve ever seen before – but how? He has no magical affinity that we’ve ever been shown before. Further, what exactly is he bargaining for? We’re shown the people in “Sub Diego” drowning – but it strikes me that there’s not a human alive who is going to take more than, say, five minutes to drown. Clearly that’s not possibly enough time for Arthur to summon some gods (?), make a deal, and complete a ritual. Why are the people drowning, anyway? It doesn’t seem to be connected to anything that Adam has done, or even the idea of WW3. But, OK, fine, he manages to raise Sub Diego – but why does THIS WEEK’s issue of Aquaman reference the cast having to swim back to Sub Diego, then?

This kind of top-down plothammering is absolute CRAP, and it cements in my mind that the DCU isn’t a place for me any longer.

And that’s a god-damn shame.


BRAVE & BOLD #3: Meanwhile, this is exactly the kind of book that makes me think I’ll be reading DC comics until I’m well into my dotage – fun, funny, action-packed, moral, trenchant. If the overall DC line had HALF of the charm and verve of this title, DC would be ahead of Marvel by twenty points or more. EXCELLENT.

OK, so that’s the PICKS, both WEEK and WEAK, how about for the BOOKS?

I’ll give you two things you really should pick up, as they’re solid comics: v2 of Ed Brubaker’s DAREDEVIL: DEVIL INSIDE AND OUT, where he amazingly gets Matt out of where Bendis left him in a way that doesn’t strain credibility as much as you thought it might. I also really like the second volume of Matt Wagner’s recent Batman work – BATMAN & THE MAD MONK. Boy knows how to draw, and how to pace a story.

Right, back tomorrow with the first look at this week’s stuff, and, probably, the second of at least six daily blog entries for this week…


What did YOU think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

There's something really kind of sad about GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, the new Vertigo graphic novel by Mike Carey and John Bolton. Not necessarily in the content of the book itself, although it's hardly the greatest thing that you'll read this year - or even this week, arguably - but just the fact that it's being published at all in 2007. For anyone who's read almost any Vertigo in the past - especially any high-profile Vertigo - then this book seems like nothing so much as the comic book equivalent of a Vertigo tribute cover band. The plot is just a mash-up of old Vertigo series (Look, the main character is a mix of Fairy and human, just like Tim Hunter from Books of Magic! But she's a rebel who doesn't conform, and has a well-meaning teacher try and reach out to her just like Dane from the Invisibles! And there're Titania and Puck, just like in Sandman!) with Carey bringing nothing new to the mix whatsoever. The plot moves along in exactly the direction you assume that it will, with dialogue that rings hollow and as if the characters exist in service to the plot instead of having a life of their own. The art, meanwhile, is a lifeless glossy mix of photoreference and Bolton's obvious-and-slightly-creepy love for his main model's body (which, considering she's meant to be a teenager, is really kind of disconcerting). This is a book that would've seemed cliched had Vertigo published it ten years ago, so I'm not entirely sure why it seemed like a good idea now.

Actually, forget I said that; this is clearly a grab for the fantasy dollar (and, in particular, the Sandman dollar; the press release that accompanied this - because, yes, I got this as a preview copy from DC themselves - begins with a pullquote by Neil Gaiman, and the back-cover copy states that the book "echoes the epic scope of The Books of Magic and The Sandman." Mind you, the back-cover also claims that Bolton's art "perfectly captures ...the lurid underbelly of modern London," even though there's nothing particularly lurid about the art, and especially nothing that suggests any specific place never mind London, so perhaps YMMV, as they say), but it's such a non-inventive one, literally retreading old ground and trying to recreate old glories, that it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Never mind that Vertigo has, for better or worse, kind of moved past its Sandman-corpse-fucking days (with the obvious exception of Fables, although Fables is, unlike this book, good. Mind you, wasn't the Fables anthology the last hardcover OGN that Vertigo pushed out...?) and yet this book reaffirms all the stereotypes and cliches about the imprint - What made Sandman so good when it started was that there wasn't really anything else like it available. It had a sense of identity and uniqueness - a reason to exist - that this entirely lacks. As melodramatic as it sounds, a book like this doesn't just rip-off Sandman, it's almost disrespectful to the series in doing so.

(Yes, I know; disrespectful to a comic book. What can I say? It annoyed me.)

And that's before you've even got me started on the Sex Pistols riff in the title (Justified by the dialogue in the book from our heroic rebel: "God save the Queen. And her fascist regime. I mean, this was my Dad's music, this wasn't cool. It was beyond cool. And it was all mixed up in my head with memories of him. A thousand, thousand lullabies."), even though the ultimate message of this book - Just say no, and love your parents - is the safe alternative that punk was pushing against, or the fact that, weirdly, the cover art is just two panels from inside the book with some nice design to try and disguise the fact; was the book late for deadline, or did John Bolton decide that he couldn't be bothered doing any more paintings for the project...?

It's a Crap book, and not worth the $19.99 that they're asking for it. If you have that money in your pocket and you haven't read Sandman, The Invisibles or any earlier Vertigo, you should pick up one of those books instead. Click Here to Read More...

Reviews soon, I swear....


30 DAYS OF NIGHT SPREADING THE DISEASE #5 (OF 5)
52 WEEK #51
ACTION COMICS #848
AMAZONS ATTACK #1 (OF 6)
ASTRO CITY THE DARK AGE BOOK TWO #3
BART SIMPSON COMICS #35
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #5
BETTY & VERONICA #226
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #174
BLOWJOB #21 (A)
BLUE BEETLE #14
BOOKS WITH PICTURES #3
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #32
CASTLE WAITING VOL II #6
CATWOMAN #66
CONNOR HAWKE DRAGONS BLOOD #6 (OF 6)
CROSSING MIDNIGHT #6
DAREDEVIL #96
DEVI #10
DORK TOWER #36
EXILES #93
EXTERMINATORS #16
FALLEN SON DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA AVENGERS
FANTASTIC FOUR #545 CWI
FIRESTORM THE NUCLEAR MAN #35
HEROES FOR HIRE #9
HUNTERS MOON CVR B #1 (OF 5)
JOHNNY HIRO #1
JSA CLASSIFIED #25
JUGHEADS DOUBLE DIGEST #130
JUSTICE #11 (OF 12)
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #5
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #126
NEW AVENGERS ILLUMINATI SECRET HISTORY (PP #758)
NEW EXCALIBUR #19
NIGHTMARES AND FAIRY TALES #19
NINJA SCROLL #8
OUTSIDERS ANNUAL #1
PLANETARY BRIGADE ORIGINS #3 (OF 3)
POWERS #24
PS238 #22
PUNISHER PRESENTS BARRACUDA MAX #3 (OF 5)
RED MENACE #6 (OF 6)
REX MUNDI DH ED #5
RIDE SAVANNAH (ONE SHOT)
SADHU #7 (RES)
SE7EN LUST #4 (OF 7)
SILENT WAR #4 (OF 6)
SNAKEWOMAN #10
SPIDER-MAN POSTER BOOK
STAR TREK KLINGONS BLOOD TELL #1 KLINGON LANGUAGE VAR ED
STAR TREK KLINGONS BLOOD WILL TELL #1
STAR TREK NEXT GENERATION THE SPACE BETWEEN #4 (OF 6)
SUPER F$$$$$S #4
SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #29
TAG CURSED #3 (OF 5)
TEEN TITANS GO #42
TRANSFORMERS SPOTLIGHT KUP
TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD IMAGE ED #5
UNCLE SCROOGE #365
UNIQUE #2 (OF 3)
USAGI YOJIMBO #102
WALK-IN #5
WALKING DEAD #37
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #680
WAR OF THE UNDEAD #3 (OF 3)
WETWORKS #8
WISDOM #5 (OF 6)
WOLVERINE #53
WONDER WOMAN #8
WORMWOOD GENTLEMAN CORPSE #7
X-MEN FIRST CLASS #8 (OF 8)

Books / Mags / Stuff
ANCIENT BOOK OF MYTH AND WAR HC
BATMAN BLACK AND WHITE STATUE BY MATT WAGNER
CABLE DEADPOOL VOL 6 PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS TP
CIVIL WAR FANTASTIC FOUR TP
CIVIL WAR X-MEN TP
COMICS JOURNAL #282
DRAWING THE LINE VOL 2 GN
EC ARCHIVES WEIRD SCIENCE VOL 2 HC
GEEK MONTHLY #4
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN HC
HAWKGIRL THE MAW TP
KING OF KINGS VOL 1 PKT ED
LITTLE LULU VOL 15 THE EXPLORERS TP
MICROGRAPHICA GN
NICK CARDY COMIC STRIPS TP
OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PG VOL 37 NEW AVENGERS SC
PAINKILLER JANE VOL 1 REG CVR TP
PATH OF THE ASSASSIN VOL 6 TP
PREVIEWS VOL XVII #5
RUNAWAYS VOL 7 LIVE FAST DIGEST TP
SHENANIGANS GN
SPIDER-MAN BLACK CAT EVIL THAT MEN DO TP
SPIDER-MAN VISIONARIES ROGER STERN VOL 1 TP
SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES VOL 4
THUNDERBOLT JAXON TP
TRUTH JUSTIN & AMERICAN WAY TP
TRUTH SERUM THE LONELY PARADE TP
VADEBONCOEUR COLLECTION OF IMAGES #8
WILL EISNERS SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOL 21 HC
WIZARD MAGAZINE DC TOP SECRET PROJECT CVR #188

Free Comic Book Day Stuff
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN SWING SHIFT 2007 FCBD ED
AMELIA RULES HANGIN OUT 2007 FCBD ED
ARCHIE COMICS LITTLE ARCHIE 2007 FCBD ED
ARCHIE COMICS SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2007 FCBD ED
ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #1 2007 FCBD ED
BONGOS FREE FOR ALL 2007 FCBD ED
COMICS 101 HOW TO & HISTORY LESSONS FROM PROS 2007 FCBD ED (
COMICS FESTIVAL 2007 FCBD ED
FAMILY GUY HACK SLASH FLIP BOOK 2007 FCBD ED
FCBD SCI-FI WHO WANTS TO BE SUPERHERO BOOK (BUNDLE OF 50) (N
GUMBY 2007 FCBD ED
HUNTERS MOON SALVADOR FLIP BOOK FCBD ED
IMPACT UNIVERSITY VOL 3 2007 FCBD ED
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #0 2007 FCBD ED
LAST BLOOD #1 2007 FCBD ED
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY 2007 FCBD ED (NET
LIBERTY COMICS #0 2007 FCBD ED #2
LONE RANGER NEW BATTLESTAR GALACTICA FLIP BOOK 2007 FCBD ED
LOVE AND CAPES #4 2007 FCBD ED
LYNDA BARRY SAMPLER 2007 FCBD ED
MARVEL ADVENTURES THREE IN ONE 2007 FCBD ED
NEXUS SPECIAL 2007 FCBD ED
OWLY & KORGI 2007 FCBD ED
STAR WARS CONAN FLIP BOOK FCBD EDITION
TOKYOPOP CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON 2007 FCBD ED GN
TRAIN WAS BANG ON TIME 2007 FCBD ED
TRANSFORMERS THE MOVIE PREQUEL #1 2007 FCBD ED
UMBRELLA ACADEMY ZERO KILLER PANTHEON CITY 2007 FCBD ED (NET
UNSEEN PEANUTS 2007 FCBD ED #1
VIRGIN COMICS RAMAYAN 3392 AD 2007 FCBD ED
WAHOO MORRIS 2007 FCBD ED #1
WALT DISNEYS MICKEY MOUSE 2007 FCBD ED
WHITEOUT #1 2007 FCBD ED
WIZARD HOW TO DRAW SAMPLER 2007 FCBD ED
WOTC BAG O STAR WARS CMG FIGURES 2007 FCBD


What looks good to you?

-B Click Here to Read More...

I know, I know; it's APE this weekend, so I should be all about the indie comics this time out. But there are so many DC comics for me to write about this week, even though I have no idea why I ended up with quite so many... If it helps, expect me to write something about Nick Bertozzi's The Salon, as well as the new Eddie Campbell and Jeffrey Brown books, in the next couple of weeks. The Bertozzi book alone is very, very good and should be read by many. For now, though, step into the world where Dan Didio rules supreme.

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #3: With every issue of this series, I'm becoming more and more convinced that Mark Waid is writing this after looking through some Phantom Zone viewer into my brain. Not only is this an outright fun superhero book - a romp, even - but it's something that grows in scope each month. As the plot gets more and more grandiose and out there, this issue also sees some of the more human moments of the series so far (and from Batman, no less, trying to help Spider-Ma - no, wait, I mean, Blue Beetle - be a better superhero). It's an interesting growth for the book, and a welcome one; if part of this series is to act as an introduction to new characters and a selling point for you to check out their books, then you need those character moments in order to properly do that, and the interplay between Batman and Jaime makes me want to check out what the real Beetle book is like each month. It's also welcome because, as over-the-top as the plot is becoming, it's those character moments that make this issue enjoyable and memorable.

That said, Batidus? Worth a Very Good grade all by itself.

THE SPIRIT #5: And talking of ridiculous plots, this issue of Darwyn Cooke's (so-much-more-than-a-) revival of Will Eisner's crimefighter deals with a brand new snack for kids: pork, beans and sugar. And, unless I completely misread the book, the beans are pig testicles. As if that wasn't enough, there's also the hint of bird bestiality mixed in with this tale of intellectual property appropriation, and yet somehow... it all works. More to the point, it works on multiple levels, so that both kids and adults will get different (and equally wonderful) things out've the story, whether it be a straight-forward adventure or a satire on easily-conned, image-conscious consumer culture. As if he hadn't already shown that he was pretty much the master of monthly adventure comics, this issue Cooke gets to add "pitch-perfect American bastardization of 'manga' style" to his quiver of genres, too... Very Good, and like every issue of the series so far, pretty highly recommended.

BIRDS OF PREY #105: As Gail Simone nears the (surprise) end of her run, the book continues to get back into the rhythm that it lost around the same time that it lost Simone's original heart of the series, Black Canary. Maybe it's because of the use of Simone's other superteam (the Secret Six, who are arguably more enjoyable here than the Birds themselves), but there's a welcome swagger to this book that hasn't been here for awhile. What's interesting for me is that it's that swagger that makes the book for me, even though I have to admit that I'm not that involved with (or really that sure that I'm entirely following) the plot; the second book this week that had that effect on me. Maybe I'm an easy sell when it comes to witty repartee? Good, nonetheless, and I'm very much looking forward to Simone taking over Wonder Woman later this year.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #8: There are all manner of reasons why this should be a carcrash of an issue - It's a DC continuity nerd's dream to the point of ludicrousness, including using versions of current characters that haven't seen print for almost 20 years and continuing Brad Meltzer's fanboy-gone-mad-with-power style of writing the main characters. The art by "rising star" Shane Davis is fairly generic, papercut-face-filled, and in all ways that count, a return to Image Comics from the 1990s. The plot is, yet again, a slow build, and the dialogue is self-conscious and awkward. Yet, for some reason, it's Okay, perhaps entirely due to my inner DC-fanboy being sucked into the idea of a return for the Levitz-era Legion of Super-Heroes that gets offered up fairly strongly here. I'm so pathetic.

PICK OF THE WEEK is probably The Spirit, because Cooke manages to provide something that works really well for brand new readers who have no idea about continuity, no matter what their age may be. That kind of thing takes skill... PICK OF THE WEAK is, very obviously, World War III. Doing that kind of thing takes some kind of skill as well, but it's not a skill that we talk about in polite circles.

What has everyone else been up to this weekend, anyway? Click Here to Read More...

So, APE weekend and even though I was too nervous to talk to anyone at the signing yesterday - I'm only exaggerating slightly, sadly - a fine time was still had by all. If I had to nominate a king and queen of the whole thing, it'd be Bryan Lee O'Malley and Hope Larson, who put up with my shyness and appreciated Kate's food tips never mind their obvious talent and attractiveness (That said, Kate's food tips are generally always worth listening to). They also let me buy a page of Scott Pilgrim art that is on its way to being displayed in the bathroom, if only because I've been told by my lovely wife that every bathroom needs something wonderful to look at. Buying art is actually a running theme for me at APE - Kate and I always end up with art (normally from Nucleus, who rep artists that Kate adores; every year she buys prints from them to frame and hang in the house) instead of books, even though we both wander around and see many things that look pretty great. That said, this year it's worth heading to the convention (if you haven't already) for the guests alone; even if Bryan and Hope aren't your thing, there's also Gene Yang, Derek Kirk Kim, Kevin Huizenga (someone else I was entirely too scared to talk to on Friday. Me = Dick, in case you didn't know), Debbie Huey, and - if he's there tomorrow at the AiT booth like he was today - Matt Silady, who did The Homeless Channel that I raved about here. Go and ask him to tell you about his book.

And then you should all buy lots of art, just like Kate and m'self.

Reviews tomorrow, honestly. Click Here to Read More...

I actually thought about changing the name of the blog to Graeme McMillan's Savage Critic for the week, since he's been carrying all of our asses this week...

Anyway, about 60% of my ComicsPRO emails and calls have been made, I completed ONOMATOPOEIA this morning (gonna be amusing to photocopy it "while" we have a major signing going on), and the new TILTING AT WINDMILLS is up at Newsarama, wherein I talking about the ComicsPRO meeting.

Reviewish stuff...soon. BUt probably not before Sunday, honestly.

Also, one thing I didn't get into my column (it didn't seem to fit the tone), but I pasted it off into Notepad so I wouldn't lose it:



Let’s end this with the third weirdest thing about the trip: The Orleans hotel has a check cashing service these days. If you haven’t been to one of these old-school Vegas hotels, you need to understand that the hotel lobby is the casino. In order to get anywhere in the hotel, you have to pass through the casino. So, five to ten times a day I’m walking through the casino, and past the check cashing line, and during normal 9-5 business hours that line is the longest line in the whole joint – usually 40+ people deep.

Like any check cashing service, it’s pretty clear that the people using it are generally poor – that’s why most of them are using such a service in the first place. (and let me say that using these services is a really bad financial deal, and should really be avoided in anything except the most desperate of times) It’s really pretty evil to set up a checking cashing deal in the middle of a casino – way to stack the house against the poor twice over – but what astounded me even more was that the casino had waitresses serving booze to the people in line.

Only in Vegas, I guess.



-B Click Here to Read More...

I keep trying to avoid that situation (which I know is nonetheless inevitable) where I'll post pictures of the event next week and someone will say, "Hey, I didn't know that was happening! Why didn't you post a reminder or something? I even looked at your blog that Friday because I was in town for APE and I didn't see anything!"

If you're in town around 5, stop by. It's going to be a tremendous gathering of talent under one roof, and a great way to kick off your APE weekend.

Labels: Jeff, signing

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Is it just me, or has this week been really, exceptionally, surreally long? Perhaps it's because last weekend was so pleasant that I wasn't prepared for the shock of the work week, perhaps it because I've been looking forward to APE and tonight's signing all week, perhaps it's because someone has been messing with all of our clocks and this week really has been 12 days long, but good lord, this has been a ridiculous week. Any time you wake up on a Wednesday and wish that it's a Friday, you know that you're going to be a zombie by the time that the real Friday comes around.

And I'm not talking cute Minimates version of Marvel Zombies zombie, either.

(Actually, that reminds me - When the next Previews comes out, please leaf through to find the new McFarlane "Lost" toys. There are four characters in this new release: Sawyer, fully-clothed in action pose. Jin, fully-clothed in action pose. Mr. Eko, fully-clothed in action pose. And Sun, outstretched in a bikini. I'd complain about sexism, but that seems kind of pointless when you remember that McFarlane Toys were also responsible for turning the Wizard of Oz into a BDSM fantasy where Dorothy was tied up, blindfolded and slave to munchkins (Arguably not safe for work, depending on your work's stance on topless bondage action figures). Nonetheless, I'd love to know what the actress who plays Sun on the show thinks about her figure.)

NIGHTWING ANNUAL #2: Say what you like about Dick Grayson, but he's not the smoothest lover in the fictional world - Midway through this relationship retrospective, we see that Dick goes to Barbara Gordon as soon as he finds out that she's been shot and crippled by the Joker, has sex with her, and then tells her that he's getting married to someone else. Exactly how that goes towards this annual's unstated-but-clear goal of appeasing the fans who were appalled that One Year Later not only split this couple up but also didn't refer back to their cliffhanger engagement by proving that the two characters are, like, rilly rilly in love with each other and totally meant to be 2gether 4evah, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm also fairly confident that the sex scene from that sequence is more than enough misdirection for them to keep them away from the clear suggestion that Dick Grayson is, well, a dick.

That's what stayed with me most from this special. Not that Dick is a dick, but that it's one of the clearest pieces of fan service that DC has offered in awhile, and considering that you could argue that a lot of DC's post-Infinite Crisis moves have been fan service of one type or another (even if those fans have been the creators, in many cases), that's saying something. It's an interesting thing to watch - resetting the romance between Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon involves a couple of near retcons that actually make a lot more sense than what we've previously been seen (Putting at least a month between the big last battle and Batman leaving Gotham to go around the world to find himself makes a lot of plot sense, but arguably messes up 52's timeline, for example, and for the ending to make sense it helps to ignore Bruce Jones making Dick Casanova during his run - but then, ignoring Bruce Jones' writing generally makes sense anyway) - if uncomfortable at times because, really, who wanted to see Robin hide his hard-on from Batman under his cape?

(As soon as I wrote that, I realized that there is probably a large contingent of Robin fandom who wants to see that very thing. There we go with that fanservice thing again...)

Thing is, it's not that bad a book; Marc Andreyko's script manages to negotiate a minefield of continuity and editorial decisions and still come out not only as readable, but almost convincing; they're a dysfunctional couple, sure, but they're a believable dysfunctional couple no matter how many bad decisions that they're forced (by the creators) to make. 52's most consistent art team of Joe Bennett and Jack Jadson do what they did on the weekly book, and provide solid if dull support with the occasional striking image - they do a very good Batman on the opening spread - and the overall impression of the book is something that's weirdly Good despite the entirely cynical circumstances surrounding its creation.

And, yes, I'm a sap for wanting to see these two crazy kids make it work. But that's hardly a surprise. Click Here to Read More...

This week has flown by scarily fast. Almost a week since I last posted? The signing's tomorrow? APE is this weekend? I'm like the low-budget version of Rip Van Winkle (and what an underwhelming twist on that classic story I would be: "Last thing I remember is falling asleep after bowling with dwarfs. And when I wake up...it's one week later!")

(By the way? If you go to the wikipedia entry for Rip Van Winkle--perhaps because you're unsure if it was dwarfs or ghosts or giants or what Mr. Van Winkle was bowling with--you'll see there's a spoiler warning before the plot sypnosis. Ditto for "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." I'm agog at the concept, and will now spend the next thirty-six hours imagining what kind of angry email someone who's had the story of Goldilock and The Three Bears spoiled for them might write.)

Since chances are good it might be another few days before I turn up to post again, lemme cover some stuff I've been reading recently.

DEATH NOTE VOL. 11: Looks to be heading for a big wrap-up, but, to be honest, I'm so taken by Takeshi Obata's art, I could probably read another ten volumes of this. There's a sequence where Near breaks out a suitcase full of Kubrick figures which he labels and shoots with a popgun that had me appallingly rapt--appalling because I was just as engrossed by a similar scene several volumes ago where Near uses an evilly-grinning finger puppet just a volume or two ago. (Fans of that finger puppet will be heartened to know he makes a reappearance here in Chapter 96.) Also, even though it's been used 9 million times, close-ups of Near's owl-like eyes followed by close-ups of Light's evil cat-eyes also fill me with a shocking amount of joy, no matter how often I see them.

There's other strange delights here, stuff that works more or less because it shouldn't work. For example, by this volume, the internal monologues of the characters trying to second-guess each other have grown so numerous they literally obscure the characters' faces. It seems like the sort of imbalance in the verbal-visual blend that would have R.C. Harvey's panties (girly-cartoon festooned panties, it should be noted) in a bunch, but it works here as a symbol of how the characters' obsessions are obliterating any other trace of them. Similarly, the scenes where two characters who are being bugged are communicating by writing on a piece of paper while carrying on a conversation for the benefit of their listeners is the sort of thing I can't imagine being done half as well in any other medium. Not only is it not boring, it's genuinely riveting and a testament to the velocity of Death Note's story: you can't help but be sucked in.

Anyway, a lot depends on how it wraps up, I would think, but if you're a big fan of the series, I'm thinking you'll also find this Very Good stuff.

KING CITY VOL. 1: I dug Graeme's review of this but even though he gave this book a Very Good rating, I wasn't particularly compelled to pick it up. Nonetheless,he lent it to me when I lent him Empowered so I figured it'd be worth a read, and holy shit, did I love it. King City is such a balls-out, energetic comic book achievement that I started making a list of all the people I wanted to get copies to even before I finished it. Only the fact that this is Graeme's copy prevented me from trying to loan it out a half-dozen times this week.

The near-futuristic setting and the wandering approach to a genre story makes it feel a lot like early Paul Pope to me, but Graham is goofier, less eager to impress, than early Pope and a lot of the scenes have a winningly comedic tone to them (I think one of my favorites is when the protagonist Joe tries to draw the mystery woman who has led him and his buddy into events way behond their understanding, and all he can really recall is her butt). Nearly all of the panels of the book burst with strange new products, bad puns, graffitti, cartoony vigor. In some ways, it may be the most impressive non-debut (Graham's got four other books under his belt) since Scott Pilgrim, and I highly recommend you start beating the bushes off your favorite Tokyopop dealer to find a copy. Very Good stuff that I really, really enjoyed. It charmed the hell out of me.

Okay, the wife is making hand gestures indicating we have to go to dinner now, so more later, hopefully tomorrow before I head to the store.

Labels: Jeff

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Hey, look, the Eisner Nominations are out. And two names in particular stand out for me:

Best Graphic Album—New
American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang (First Second)

Special Recognition
Hope Larson, Gray Horses (Oni)

Wow, wouldn't it be great if the two of them appeared together at a signing along with Kevin Huizenga and Bryan Lee O'Malley? Like, tomorrow, between 5 and 7?

I just wanted to get that in before Jeff did. Click Here to Read More...

Is it so wrong of me that I'm cursing the fact that I have to, you know, work today, when I'd much rather be sitting in front of C-SPAN watching the Alberto Gonzales testimony? In between all the things I'm supposed to be doing this morning, I'm already checking all my usual news and politics sites to see what he's said and whether he's been nailed yet. Even if there's nothing wrong with (a) wanting to skip work to (b) stay up to date with current affairs, I'm sure that there is definitely something wrong with (c) enjoying Gonzales squirm when presented with his own words and asked to explain them without coming right out and saying "Well, obviously, I was lying."

But on less political matters:

There's this moment in MIGHTY AVENGERS #2 where it looks like Brian Michael Bendis is doing a very funny metatextual joke at the expense of Frank Cho. Janet Van Dyne, the "winsome" Wasp - and why does no-one else call her that anymore? When did describing people as "winsome" go out of style? - looks at the brand new all-woman mostly-naked Ultron and says "Does anyone think that looks exactly like me with worse hair?" I read that and thought, hey, Bendis is making a funny about the fact that Frank Cho can only draw one woman and just changes their hairstyle. Good for him! And then it turns out to be a plot point by the end of the issue, and I was depressed.

That said, this was a pretty Good issue. A low good, sure, but stronger than the last issue... Bendis is already visibly processing what worked and didn't from his first issue, the most obvious indicator being his dramatic dialing back the use of thought balloons (Not getting rid of them altogether, sadly - Don't get me wrong, I like thought balloons just fine; I just don't like Bendis's take on the idea, which is too cute by half). He's still overusing flashbacks, however. If he was writing this review, this would the point where I'd say something about his use of flashbacks -

EIGHT HOURS AGO:
Hmm, this episode of Lost is interesting. Brian K. Vaughan's first one, huh? Maybe I should finish off that Mighty Avengers review. Frank Cho's art is technically very good, but oddly lifeless, though - The coloring really gives it some weight and saves it -

- and then we'd come back to me writing this review right now.

(Also, if he was writing this review, it would probably be more positive, and I would say more things in parenthetical asides. Like this one. And then, caught in the moment of demonstrating, I'd probably say something like "Oy".)

Both Mighty and New Avengers have become overly reliant on the cross-time-cutting (New much more than Mighty; wasn't almost all of the most recent issue a flashback?), and I don't really see why, or what it adds to the readers' enjoyment of the story. You could argue the opposite, in fact; in New, it actively undercuts the tension for the reader - you already know that the characters have survived their encounter with the other Avengers because you've seen them fine and healthy a day later already. It pretty much reads to me as if he's trying to keep himself interested more through structural trickery than through the stories he's writing, somewhat offputtingly, but I'm holding out hope that we'll either see him pulling back on the gimmick and/or explaining his use of it before too long.

Nevertheless, this was a fun enough book. Like this week's Justice League, you can see Bendis trying to write the stories that he read as a kid, but his own style tweaks that formula whether intentionally or otherwise. Not that that stops it being interesting or enjoyable; if anything, it may make it more enjoyable than your average monster/robot/superhero slugfest. It's not a book to change your life or even your reading habits, but I think that Bendis has passed the point of wanting to make those anymore; books like this make me think that he's instead at the point of comfortably trying to give them what they want, as long as he can make it work for him, as well. And, if nothing else, it is entirely devoid of someone telling you how Civil War changed everything, meaning that it's automatically better than almost every other mainstream Marvel title right now. Click Here to Read More...

I'm sure that everyone else in the world remembers the sense of unease when DC talked about WORLD WAR III for the first time. There was, if you will, a disturbance in the DC Nerd Force when this four-part-series-all-released-in-one-day was announced - a deep intake of breath at the idea that maybe 52 wasn't going to get it all done after all, and that they needed four extra comics to tell the story and explain everything that had happened in the missing year. In an effort to try and calm the fanbase, Dan Didio explained that you didn't have to read any of World War III's four issues (and, really, where's the thematic consistency in that? Three issues for World War Three, people. Come on, that's easy) in order to understand what happened in 52 that week. Having now read all of World War III and 52 Week 50, I have to agree. In fact, I'll go further: 52 Week 50 is much, much better if you don't read World War III.

In fact, I'll go further than that: Don't waste your time or your money on World War III.

Now, I'm not the most market savvy of internet comic geeks, but I can't help but feel that both Countdown and especially World War III show just how badly that DC have misunderstood the success of 52 - I don't really think that the book sold just because it was weekly, or because it was continuity porn (which seem to be the main selling points of Countdown and WWIII, respectively), but because of the creators involved in 52 (namely, DC's four biggest writers) and the novelty of what was originally sold to us as a self-contained 52-part "novel" that would explore the DC Universe in more detail than we've seen before, setting up the new rules of the world post-massive status quo-changing crossover event. That's pretty much still the case for me, and probably most of the audience who has stuck with 52 this far; to be honest, with two weeks of 52 left, my main concern has nothing to do with finding out how Firestorm got to be merged with Firehawk or why Manhunter became a defense attorney, but instead that none of the core storylines are going to reach any kind of adequate conclusion. Which isn't to say that I don't doubt that there is a section of DC's core fanbase out there wondering about all of those dangling plots from the One Year Later jump, just that it wasn't 52's main draw. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I kind of wanted the unanswered questions from each leap forward to be handled in the series that they were initially raised, anyway; that way, the creators who came up with the questions could answer them, and the readers wouldn't find themselves forced to buy another series for a chunk of the story. But that's why I don't run multi-million dollar franchise-enabling publishing companies.

Here's the thing - 52 #50? It's Okay, at best; it stays with the series' inability so far to close any of their plotlines, as well as their tendency to devote entire issues to a plot as they attempt to pull it to a close (See the Steel/Luthor battle in week 40 or the Ralph Dibny finish in week 42, for proof of both; if you look at week 50 in the context of the series and ignore the "event" that was added on after the fact, this isn't any more of an important issue or storyline than those, although it does have a much more satisfying conclusion than either - The final solution for Black Adam has an oddly optimistic and inventive bent that suggests Morrison or Waid's input). But part of the reason that it works as well as it does is because it holds together as a complete chapter in and of itself, if that makes sense - There's an internal consistency that keeps the whole thing moving along. As soon as you start introducing "important things you may not have known" about scenes from the issue, as WWIII does, then you start to undermine the core book. Especially when the new scenes that you're adding are, to put it mildly, horrible.

World War III as a series takes the art aesthetic of 52 as a series - which is, essentially, "It's not great but it's on time; it'll get the job done" - and applies it to the writing as well. It's a series that, despite two writers (whose writing is entirely interchangable; I couldn't tell you which writer worked on which book without looking at the credits) and four artists, struggles to even stay readable most of the time. Everything about the series misfires: The staging is pedestrian and haphazard (There isn't any real narrative flow to each issue, never mind the series itself; it reads entirely disjointedly, as if scenes have been placed randomly into pages), the dialogue is - at best - wooden and the narration (by the Martian Manhunter, who gets to bookend the action of the series thanks to retconning 52 #45 and being "behind the scenes" in 52 #50) even worse:

"Theft. Lies. Deceit. All in the name of justice. The two sides of human nature, once more represented. Smaller acts of malice performed in the service of the greater good. It is not the Martian way. It is not my way. Or... is it?"

The story in the four WWIII issues undermining 52 in terms of plot makes a certain sense, if you think about it - The addition of a spin-off book that (despite the intentions of 52's creators) essentially being sold as "If you want more of 52, you can get it here!" undermines the initial complete-in-and-of-itself nature of 52's time capsule concept as a series and also undermines whatever goodwill and consistency that the series has built up for more or less the last year by adding an additional 4 books of unknown quantity (due to the unknown - ie, no involvement from Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns or Mark Waid - creative team) to the fan's shopping list at essentially the last minute.

The worst sin of the series, however, has nothing to do with the workmanlike execution and everything to do with the core idea behind the series itself, because we don't get any of the major One Year Later changes actually explained to us. The entire point of the series - something that Dan Didio even repeats in his DC Nation column in the back of each issue this week - and it completely and utterly fails at it. Sure, we get to see some of the changes happen, but they don't get explained. Martian Manhunter has a new look because he mindmelded with Black Adam and then blacked out! Okay, but why? There's Jason Todd dressed up as Nightwing! Yeah, but why? Supergirl ended up in the Legion of Super-Heroes' future then comes back and gets split in two... but how? And what does that actually mean, anyway? Aquaman turns into a sea monster after raising Sub Diego... but why? And so on, and so on. That the changes happened isn't news - We've known about them for a year now - so just showing us them doesn't do any good. This was supposed to be the book that explained everything that we've seen, but it couldn't even do that right.

To add insult to injury, the series finishes with a cutaway to the Monitors, those harbingers of crossovers yet-to-come:

"Some have lived. Some have died. Others have... changed."

"They must evolve or they will not be prepared. Their darkest hour has not yet arrived."

So, yeah. Your $10 on getting "the full story" of what happened to the DC Universe during 52 week 50 ends with a badly-written advertisement to keep buying more DC books. It's kind of fitting, I guess, because if you made your future purchasing decisions based purely upon World War III, it's very possible that you'd never buy another DC comic ever again.

(All of the above said, the worst part of the series is arguably the most laughable - Don't buy the book, but look at the first page of #4: It's a fifteen panel grid of close-ups of the various superheroes while they wait for the final battle, and you see the icons of Green Lantern or Wildcat grimacing, or Hawkgirl holding a mace and... What's that in panel 6? Oh, that's right - It's a close-up on Power Girl's breasts, with her top torn open to reveal more of her blood-spattered cleavage.

Whoever made the decision to let that stay in the book? Classy. Really, really classy.)

Without a doubt, an incredible misfire from DC. Really, really Awful. Click Here to Read More...

I'm sure that you've heard of the concept of saving the best till last, right? Well, this isn't like that at all. This is more "Saving the completely bland until last," for the most part, as I present the books I read over the last seven days that I had no strong feelings for one way or another in one big dollop just to get it over with.

LONERS #1 (OF 6): I'm undecided on this Runaways spin-off. On the one hand, it's definitely competently done; CB Cebulski's script has some nice moments and Karl Moline's art is solid enough... But on the other hand, there's nothing new in here. It reads like the characters' appearance in Runaways mixed with the middle storyline from Young Avengers, and as good as that sounds in theory, it's been done before, you know? It's Okay, but I kind of wanted to be wowed, or at least surprised, more.

MARVEL ILLUSTRATED THE JUNGLE BOOK: There's something weirdly depressing about this book. It's not really the stories themselves, which are fine enough but feature a mismatched art team where P. Craig Russell's delicate inkwork overwhelms the usual grumpy power of Gil Kane's pencils (although these stories do come from the late 70s, early 80s, when Kane had a tendency to push work through that wasn't up to his standards, if y'ask me - There are places here where the sum is equal to its parts, but not too many), and scripting that's as much expositionary Cliff Notes versions of the stories as I (perhaps mistakenly; it's been a long time, and I wasn't a fan to begin with) remember them. But the "backmatter," as it's now called - Ralph Macchio's bombastic advertisement for the later books in this line, and the previews for said books, with their tone of "Sure, they may be classic stories... But done by new artists who RAWK like only Marvel can!" - seemed kind of out of place with what had come before, as if you were having a nice leisurely conversation with a well-meaning older relative telling you stories you've already heard ten times before and then he's pushed off his chair by your unsettling brother-in-law who wants to tell you about this great new band he's just found out about called Limp Bizkit. Eh, and better enjoyed if you stop reading as soon as the last story finishes.

NEW AVENGERS #29: Wait, so this issue reveals that Brother Voodoo is involved with the whole New/Mighty Avengers showdown, and apparently New Avengers #31 will have the most shocking last page of any Marvel comic this year, and Marvel is milking their Marvel Zombies franchise as much as possible... Oh my God we're going to have Zombie Captain America as reanimated by the ancient terrifying power of Voodoo within three months. Holy crap. This issue was pretty much filler; nothing about the main plot was moved forward, and instead we had some posturing and the occasional good line. Pretty much the definition of Eh, which is a shame after the last couple of strong issues.

NEWUNIVERSAL #5: So, I was reading on The Engine the other day that Warren Ellis is avoiding "Heroes" because he knew, upon seeing the first episode, that it would be following a similar route. It's a shame, in a way. I mean, he's right, but Heroes does one thing very right that this series get very wrong - the pacing. We're five issues into this series, and instead of offering any kind of resolution to the origin stories of the characters - or, really, any kind of growth for the characters we've met so far - we get an introduction to another new character. So, it's not Heroes: The Comic Book. It's the comic book version of Lost, but without the spooky music. A pretty low Eh.

NOVA #1: I know that I should like this. Nova is pretty much "What if Spider-Man was Green Lantern?," so I'm sure that I should dig this even if the Green Lantern he's modelled after is now Kyle Rayner instead of Hal Jordan. But there was nothing worth reading here - No originality, no humor, no spin on what we've seen before. There's still a mix of concepts here, but now it's "It's Nova -- but just as grim as Civil War!" and, to be honest, if you're going to have a "He's a cop in space" story, even a "He's the last cop in space" story, then I want it to be fun, Goddammit. Eh.

PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #6: So, we get Punisher putting on the Captain America mask as teased, but it has nothing to do with him actually claiming the Captain America identity... Instead, it's all to do with him trying to stop others from ruining the legacy. That swerve is the nicest part of this issue; as good as Fraction's take on the character is - and it's much better than I'd expected, as I continually tell you - this issue is just a bit thin for my taste. That said, I know that there's going to be more explanation and chances for more than just Ariel Olivetti cutting loose in the next issue... You can tell that this is definitely Act 1 in a three-act-structure. Okay.

WONDER WOMAN #7: Welcome to the latest episode of "Where was the editor?", our continuing series where I present comics that you read and wonder exactly where that strong guiding hand was that could've prevented what you just read. It's not that this book was bad, mind you - It was Okay although, considering the reaction of many people on this internet, I may be the only person who thinks that - just very, very muddled. There's a stronger story here, under the confusing scenes and gimmicks of Circe jumping in and out of mirrors or a trannysupervillain bar (Not as exciting as it sounds), and it's frustrating to read this version of the story instead of the one where you're sure it could've been, you know, actually good. I don't think that it's that Jodi Picoult is new to comics that's to blame, as much as it is that she's dealing with too much at one time to make sense of any of it - I would've preferred this to have been its own thing, as opposed to the obvious "set up the new status quo post-Heinberg and also that whole Amazons Attack! mini-series and tie in with Countdown while you're at it" clusterfuck that it's turning into; Maybe she should've been given All-Star Wonder Woman instead of the cursed main-continuity version? In any case, now that Gail Simone has been announced as the new writer come the end of the summer, I have to join the growing number of people who're ready for this title to be relaunched again just to get rid of the taint of this screwy latest run of the book.

Now that I've finished the week, PICK OF THE WEEK is All-Star Superman #7, which shares TRADE OF THE WEEK (as All-Star Superman Volume 1 HC) with The Professor's Daughter, which came out last Wednesday after all. PICK OF THE WEAK, meanwhile, is probably Iron Man, and that's just because I'm not on the same bus as everyone else at Marvel, it seems... Coming up this week: APE! Signings! Onomatoepia! Which may mean less reviews than normal, so forewarned is forearmed, or something... Click Here to Read More...

Back from Vegas, but drastically underestimated how much New and Important work I'd come back with, so I'm still on Radio Silence for a little while (probably, realistically, until the weekend).

This was not helped by Bennett being called into Jury Duty today (WHY did it have to be TODAY, of all days... if they'd have waited until Wednesday.....)

Anyway, here's what's a'comin':


52 WEEK #50
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #56 (A)
ANITA BLAKE VH GUILTY PLEASURES #6 (OF 12)
AQUAMAN SWORD OF ATLANTIS #51
ARMY @ LOVE #2
AVENGERS EARTHS MIGHTIEST HEROES II #8 (OF 8)
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA #8
BETTY #164
BIRDS OF PREY #105
BIZARRE NEW WORLD #1 (OF 3)
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #3
CABLE DEADPOOL #39
CONAN #39
DMZ #18
DRAIN #3
EX MACHINA #27
FALLEN ANGEL IDW #15
FLASH THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE #11
GHOST IN THE SHELL 1.5 HUMAN ERROR PROCESSOR #7 (OF 8)
GIRLS #24
HELLBLAZER #231
HERO BY NIGHT #2 (OF 4)
INVINCIBLE #40
JUGHEAD AND FRIENDS DIGEST #19
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #8
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY #1
LOVE & ROCKETS VOL 2 #19
MANHUNTER #30
MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #12
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT SPIDER-MAN
MIGHTY AVENGERS #2 CWI
MOON KNIGHT #9 CW
NEGATIVE BURN #10
NIGHTWING ANNUAL #2
ORSON SCOTT CARDS WYRMS #3 (OF 6)
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #111
RAMAYAN 3392 AD #8
RED SONJA #21
ROADKILL ZOO #3 (OF 6)
ROBIN #161
RUNAWAY COMICS #3
SCOOBY DOO #119
SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN #37
SHADOWPACT #12
SIMPSONS COMICS #129
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #174
SPIRIT #5
SQUADRON SUPREME HYPERION VS NIGHTHAWK #4 (OF 4)
SUPERMAN BATMAN #34
TESTAMENT #17
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #108
ULTIMATE X-MEN #81
VAMPIRELLA QUARTERLY SPR 07 JUSKO REG
WORLD WAR III PART FOUR UNITED WE STAND
WORLD WAR III PART ONE A CALL TO ARMS
WORLD WAR III PART THREE HELL IS FOR HEROES
WORLD WAR III PART TWO THE VALIANT
X-23 TARGET X #5 OF(6)
X-FACTOR #18
X-MEN #198

Book / Mag / Stuff
ALEX TOTH EDGE OF GENIUS VOL 1 TP
BATMAN AND THE MAD MONK TP
BLUE EYES VOL 3 TP (A)
CIVIL WAR AMAZING SPIDER-MAN TP
CIVIL WAR FRONT LINE BOOK 1 TP
CIVIL WAR THUNDERBOLTS TP
COMICS BUYERS GUIDE JULY 2007 #1630
COMICS INTERNATIONAL #201 (RES)
DAREDEVIL DEVIL INSIDE & OUT VOL 2 TP
DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 5 TP
FIRST APPEARANCE SER 4 INNER CASE ASST
FORGOTTEN REALMS DARK ELF TRILOGY VOL 4 CRYSTAL SHARD TP
GOLGO 13 VOL 8 GN
H EOFIGENDLIC LODRUNG GN
HELLBLAZER REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL TP
LAST SANE COWBOY & OTHER STORIES GN
MISS DD VOL 4 GN (A)
NIGHTMARES & FAIRYTALES VOL 3 1140 RUE ROYALE
PET HUMILIATION DIARY GN (A)
PREY ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES TP
PUNISHER MAX VOL 7 MAN OF STONE TP
ROCKETO VOL 2 TP JOURNEY TO THE HIDDEN SEA
ROUGH STUFF #4
SHOWCASE PRESENTS SUPERMAN VOL 3 TP
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #153
WONDER WOMAN THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD TP
YOUNG AVENGERS VOL 2 FAMILY MATTERS TP



What, as they say, looks good to YOU?


-B Click Here to Read More...

So last night, I had a dream that proved that my subconscious was frantically grabbing what little pieces of pop culture that I'd exposed myself to over the last couple of days - My life was being narrated by This American Life's Ira Glass, and illustrated by Joe Kubert. Needless to say, everything was much funnier than it is in real life, and looked beautiful.

Kubert's art was pretty much the main reason that I picked up SHOWCASE PRESENTS HAWKMAN VOLUME 1, the phone-book-sized collection of the first Silver Age stories about the man with the feather fetish. I've never been a major fan of the character or the concept, but the idea of getting lots of prime Kubert art in black and white for relatively cheap was a very easy way to get me to part with my money. Having read the book, it's easily the best thing about it - As much as many artists of the Silver Age had an ability and strength (to say nothing of work ethic) that many of today's Young Guns and Ten Terrific could learn from, Kubert is one of only a handful who matches that to a style that's breathtaking even today. Even though he only handles a few stories at the start of the book (The series obviously had a rocky start, running three issues in Brave and Bold before disappearing for awhile, before another three issue run, then another disappearance, then a run in Mystery In Space before finally graduating to its own title; Kubert was only on the strip for the Brave and Bold issues), it's Kubert who you'll remember when you're finished with the 500+ pages: His lush brushwork, his mastery of the balance of black and white on the page, the care and attention he takes on things that other artists would've just hacked out without a second thought... It's impossible to read this book and not be convinced each and every page that he worked on, that he's one of the greatest comic book artists of all time. Completely amazing, beautiful work that makes the normally-competent Murphy Anderson (who handles the remainder of the series in this book) look stiff and lifeless by comparison.

What you may be missing in the afterglow of that love, though, is the lowkey charm of Gardner Fox's stories. Yeah, it's definitely one of the lesser of DC's Silver Age books but, just like his Justice League stories, you can't help but be swept along with the old-fashioned "adventure with a lesson built in" nature of the whole thing - Look at Hawkman use that old-fashioned weapon from his museum and learn the name of said weapon and as much of its history as can fit in a caption! The science-fiction aspects are enjoyably campy in retrospect (We don't celebrate "Independence Day," but "Impossible Day"! We Thanagarians don't use wedding rings - We use wedding earrings! But only for women! We have our own words for "hour" and "week," but like using "day," if that's okay with you!), which kind of sums up a lot of what makes the stories as enjoyable as they are - it's not that they're good, per se, but they're funny and charming for maybe the wrong reasons. It doesn't stop them being entirely readable, of course, even when Murphy Anderson is drawing. For the first third of the book, though, you'll barely notice that there are any words; your eyes will be fixed on the shot of the talking bird in the beautiful pen-and-ink tree. Or the staircase rendered in loose, thin brushstrokes. Or the profile shot of Carter with his helmet, where the shadow falls perfectly to draw your eye across the panel. Or... Well, you get what I'm saying. It's enjoyably Okay overall, but worth it for the opening stories alone. Click Here to Read More...

...even after I said I wouldn't. What follows are the notes I tapped out while working, unedited except for spelling and clarification, of my first six hours at the shop. Might be interesting for some of you who wonder what our store's like and who shops there, even though this is 100% pure anecdote and things may well be utterly different the other six days of the week. Wherever possible, I've tried to keep everyone anonymous so that subscribers, regular shoppers and lonely guys buying porn can retain their privacy.


11:24 a.m.: Okay. Store is open, music is playing (Elastica's first album, which is directly attributable to reading Mr. Gillen's endpapers in Phonogram), two people are in the store currently. Arune called hoping to get in touch with Graeme, and UPS just dropped off Diamond's blackline, which means work on a new newsletter has to start soon.

First purchase of the day? Somebody buying a copy of Small Favors, Ho Che Anderson's Eros comic (Temple Duncan or something like that), and the third issue of Conan and the Midnight God. It'd be easier to make fun of such a purchase if I didn't actually like Small Favors and up until recently read Conan.

Second purchase of the day? A copy of Civil War: The Initiative and Wolverine, from a guy who was looking for the latest issue of the Transformers movie comic. Nice guy, too. Seemed very happy that we had still had the first printing of The Initiative.

I've read the latest 52, and All-Star Superman #7. I think I've missed the last page importance of All-Star Superman, though. So the Sbarro pizza chain is a weird genetic offshoot of Bizarro? I guess it kinda makes sense....

11:35: Wow. That Elastica album is SHORT. There's a guy looking through the DC Showcase volumes, with the tag from his shirt sticking out about three inches. It looks like a black polyester transmitter jutting out of his neck. Two guys walking around the store, talking to each other in, I dunno, Italian or Portuguese, have just been joined by three other friends. As one, the group of five loudly descend on the porn rack. It's going to be one of those days, it looks like.

11:40 a.m. : Caller asking when X-23 is coming out. After that, there's a pause and then he asks what every retailer loves to hear: "Hey, what about the next issue of that Ultimate Hulk Vs. Wolverine? Is that ever gonna come out?"

11:45 a.m.: The five guys leave with compliments for the store in their halting English. Turns out they're Brazilian musicians traveling and one guy really wants this Giger hardcover that we have, but is worried it weighs too much to travel with. Says they'll try to come back.

11:50 a.m.: Two more Brazilian guys, unrelated to the first group, remarkably enough. One wants to see the Walking Dead books. The other is looking for Dabel Brothers books because his friend did the art on one of the issues.

Another call (busy phone morning) from a guy wanting old Milestone issues. We've got four issues of Static Shock in our starter sets for cheap, recommend he come down and browse our other sets--the Milestone stuff seems to appear and disappear from that section reuglarly.

11:58 a.m.: The first Brazilian (the Walking Dead guy) asks about Bone, and wow do I wish I had one of those big Bone-In-One volumes to show him. Instead, Point him to the color version adn also show him the first two issues of the Shazam mini, which amuses and delights him.

12:05 p.m.: The two Brazilians leave, one buying that Dabel Brothers book and the 300: The Art Of book which he tells me is actually really hard to find. His friend gets that second volume of Walking Dead and also Tiny Tyrant. The first guy asks me when the next volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is due out. I swear to god, one day the riddle of the sphinx is going to be posed to me, and it's going to be "Hey, did the second issue of Daredevil: Target ever come out?"

12:10: One dude with a khaki cap browsed for a few minutes, left, now a bespectacled guy with an Ideo messenger bag is browsing the Vertigo comics section. At this rate, between the whole customers and describing-the-customers thing, I'll never get a chance to read any comics, will I?

12: 15: Did I mention I'm listening to The Good, The Bad & The Queen now?

12:18: Perusing the blackline and, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to post anything I'm seeing. I will say that I yelped aloud at a certain Omnibus announcement.

12:24 p. m.: Joe Ideo is gone, having purchased several back issues of NewUniversal, the latest Fell, Buffy #2, All-Star Superman #7, and the latest issue of Optic Nerve. I hesitate to call him a prototypical CE customer but he skews pretty close, dontcha think?

12:38 p.m.: First sub of the day just left with a handful of great stuff. Second sub showed up 45 seconds after and is still browsing the store. Mentions that the Wilco song playing sounds like it's going to break into the Batman theme at any second. Funny and also, if I listen carefully, kinda true.

12:43 p.m.: There's also a manga announcement in the new Blackline I'm pretty damn happy about. And a cool webcomic collection from Dark Horse, too?

12:45 p.m.: Danny (the second subber) is gone so store's empty now. Wonder how long that'll last.

12:46 p.m.: Answer: approximately 90 seconds.

12:48 p.m. : And now the store's empty again. So it goes.

1:18 p.m.: First woman to set foot in the store today. Shows up with her boyfriend. They are both dressed entirely in black. Right behind her a trio of kids, all boys between the ages of what looks like 13 and 16, the oldest of which buys a Batman shirt.

1:23 p.m .: Wilco's done. Just put on Compounds + Elements: An Introduction to All Saints Records. I've read (in reverse order) Fell, Blade, New Avengers, Uncanny X-Men. I could use some lunch--less for the food and more for the desire to get my ass out of the store for a few minutes. (This is why people who work retail, smoke.)

1:32 p.m.: The couple leaves, having bought two issues of Fell, two issues of Wormwood, and two issues of 30 Days of Night. Ben Templesmith fans would be what I'm thinking.

Forty seconds after them, a long haired kid with green streaks buys Iron Man #15, Nightwing #131 and that latest issue of the Scarface mini. Huh.

1:36 p.m.: The fourth sub's out the door and, yeah, forgot to mention subscriber number three, sorry. After buying a handful of Vertigo titles and the latest Optic Nerve. See? Optic Nerve. Big, big seller for us. Asks if the second Rocketo trade has come out yet. (Uh, no?)

1:45 p.m.: Current store count: subber number five, a pair of women, and a tall guy with a camo ruck, a Cure haircut, a flannel shirt and an angular sunburned face. Oh, and a trucker cap. The tall guy has enough interesting quirks to his appearance for five people.

1:47 p.m.: Trucker cap leaves empty-handed, but very pleasant. One of the women asks about back issues of Anders Nilssen's Big Questions, and I can't help her--we've just got two of his trades. I give her an APE bookmark and suggest she look there, but she says she's from out of town. She gives the bookmark to her friend, who says she'll go and look for the books if her friend makes a list of what to look for. Awww. That's a friend for you. On the way out the door, the woman who says she'll go to APE says to her friend, "Yeah, [guy's name] is having Art Spiegelman do all this stuff?" Which suggest she's probably better-connected to finding those issues of Big Questions then she either realizes or lets on.

1:51 p.m.: Mail call! And nothing for me. Although the excitement of opening and setting out the free screening tickets for Severance is mine and mine alone.

1:57 pm.: GRAEME!! stops by for a few as he's getting ready to head out of town for the weekend with Kate. I finally loan him my copy of Empowered. He essentially has stopped by to tell me that he's very excited about next week's signing, which is great becuase I am too, but he's excited in that "not puking blood" overreacting kind of way and I am. (He also already knew about the Omnibus, damn it.)

3:03 p.m.: And suddenly it's over an hour later. Graeme leaves, along with sub no. 5. A few weeks ago, I'd talked briefly over the phone to an ex-retailer in the U.K. who was coming over here to shop for silver age books. At the time, I turned him on to Al's and a few other places, but he and his friend stop by today anyway, just to make sure we don't have anything.

We don't, but nevertheless he buys a Batman year one t-shirt (second one of the day, weirdly enough) and shoots the breeze while waiting for his cab to show up and shuttle him out to the avenues.

While he's here, more people show up including a semi-regular who picked up the first two issues of Joss's Buffy last week and so I recommended Runaways #1 to her--she also buys Y: The Last Man from us so I figured it'd be a pretty good fit--and so she's back to start in on our Runaways back issues. Then there's the couple from San Jose--she ends up buying Optic Nerve and Love & Rockets, he buys fifty gajillion back issues, including a huge chunk of Daredevil back issues by Bendis and Maleev. She makes a joke about staying in bed all weekend together and reading comics. Awwww.

Another subscriber, in and out in under ten minutes. A very quiet older gentleman steps up to the register with a great handful of books--both Don Rosa Scrooge books, volumes 1 and 2 of the Superman Chronicles, It Rhymes with Lust and the girly art cartoons of an artist I always think is Dan DeCarlo but isn't (or maybe it is). [Ed.: I'm 90% sure it's The Glamor Girls of Don Flowers.]

I really should get lunch soon.

3:15 p.m.: A teen girl suddenly appears in the doorway with wide eyes. "Do you have Naruto?" Her family trails in a few seconds later; they're traveling from Omaha to (I think?) Washington. The mom tells me, "My daughter looked you up on Google when she found out we were coming here, so... it works!" The daughter buys two volumes of Naruto while the family walks around the store, caught somewhere between awe and amusement that such a thing exists. Or maybe they're just burnt out by their time on the road. The mom and (I assume) the dad look through a few volumes of Tintin, having heard from someone else that they're reallly good, but they don't buy anything and then they're gone.

3:30 p.m.: A tall guy in running shorts with a black IPod strapped to his arm, comes in and asks if the latest issue of Buffy is out and seems really excited about it. "Really? Issue #2? It's out? When?" He's just started jogging but assures me he'll be back.

So, yeah, I'm starting to see what Hibbs is talking about when he says that this Whedon Buffy stuff could have legs for us.

3:40 p.m.: My friend Theresa calls on my cell to tell me her sister Jean just had a baby. Of course, this being the real world, the store phone rings at the same time and it's the guy from the Bay Guardian calling to remind us about the deadline for the ad we're placing promoting the signing. I'm really glad he called because Edi sent the ad to him yesterday. After a few seconds of him checking his inbox, then looking at the attachment to see if it's formatted correctly, we're good to go but it ends up cutting my time with Theresa short.

3:50 p.m.: The jogger is back, true to his word. Asks about Runaways, but doesn't pick it up. One of the two subbers who buys 2000 A.D. drops by for his weekly fix and, to my delight, picks up The Professor's Daughter just "because it looks good. "

Oh, and after forty-five minutes of browsing, the eccentric lurker of the day (dressed in all black, bearing luggage, wearing galoshes) leaves. He asks several questions ranging from the very knowledgeable ("Do you have any works by Tardi?") to the, uh, less than knowledgeable ("Image? That's Marvel, right?" which sounds kinda crazy but since he follows this up with asking if Vertigo is DC, it actually makes a weird kinda sense.)

Now, if this other subber buys his books and heads out before someone else comes in, I can grab "lunch." I probably shoulda booted him or galoshes guy for a few minutes but I actually brought food with me today so I'm not dying or anything.

3:57 p.m.: Subber leaves and of course a guy comes in at the same time. I'll give him two minutes and hit lunch.

Also, forty-five seconds after the last subber leaves, I realize I went to college with the guy. Forty-five seconds after that, I realize he's left behind one of the books he bought. Shit.

I call the number we have on file for him in the hopes that it'll be his cell phone but it's an old answering machine where "The Girl From Ipanema" is playing on the background through a rainstorm as funnelled through a paper towel roll. (Good ol' answering machines.) I leave a message, write out a note explaining what's happened, and put the book back in his slot.

During all this drama, three more people have come in: a dude who does a lap around the store and heads out, and a couple browsing the crime section. Another subber comes in, fills out the form, shoots the shit. Topics range from The Boys to The Secret Six (he didn't know about the crossover with Birds of Prey so I hunt that up) to Y: The Last Man. Then he goes and checks the racks. When he asks what I'm reading and what's good, I go and hunt up a copy of The Professor's Daughter which he looks through and nods.

4:22 p.m.: The Brazilian musician who wanted the Geiger book is back to browse. Someone else comes in with a bottle of orange sports drink, gets a call on his cell phone and leaves. It's just five people quietly browsing comics, the radio playing old UB40 and my stomach, gurgling merrily. I can handle missing lunch, but I can't handle old UB40. I get up and put on the soundtrack to One From the Heart.

4:33 p.m.: Maybe it's the hunger talking, but this Dr. 13 story by Azzarello and Chiang in the latest Tales of the Unexpected is kinda brilliant and really, really amusingly savage about the current state of DC affairs. And just unbelievably gorgeous art by Cliff Chiang. I pray to god this sucker gets collected in a trade because I haven't been buying the issues.

4:40 p.m.: A German (or maybe Austrian?) guy comes in asking what's "good." His benchmark, when asked? "Oh, I liked Spawn five or six years ago." I point him to Walking Dead and cross my fingers.

4:43 p.m.: So the guy I pointed to Walking Dead after he said he likes Spawn? Comes to the front with....Kafka, that biography with art by Crumb. Go figure. The guy tells me a little bit about the Yerba Buena Crumb show which I've entirely forgotten about until he mentions it. Not a big show, according to the guy. "Just one room, and not even any Fritz The Cat." Hmmm.

5:00 p.m.: And suddenly everyone leaves at once: the two subbers, the couple who was browsing the crime section (French), a bunch of other guys. Somebody shows up to pass out cards for APE related showings and it turns out it's Dave Crosland! Holy crap!


And that's where I had to stop because (a) Rob Bennett showed up to see how I was doing and brought Guinness; (b) I had to go get something to eat, finally; and (c) it got even busier from there on out. Although the quality of my anecdotes would have improved because Ian Brill, James Masente, Dave Robson (also bringing beer, bless him) and Peter Wong all showed up and spent time hanging out and shooting the shit, I just didn't have time to even take notes. And Lord knows how I'm gonna write reviews this week since I read so little and during so much business...

But, anyway, there's your peek behind the curtain. Surprising, or no?

Labels: Jeff, liveblogging

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Forgot I'm at the store on my own today, so the liveblogging? Ain't happening.

Wow. I'm just full of broken promises this week, aren't I? And while the tank's still on empty as far as comic books go, here's a film or two I've seen in the last week, and maybe I can still wrangle an uncomfortable comic book comparison or two:

THE LOOKOUT: I think my wife may have developed a "thing" for Joseph Gordon-Levitt after watching Brick, because this film suddenly jumped to the top of our to-see list once it came out. It's a very solid film written and directed by Scott Frank (for whom the warm spot in my heart for adapting Out of Sight is mitigated by the very cool spot in my heart for writing Dead Again), caught somewhere between a crime film and a character study. Gordon-Levitt plays a brain-damaged guy working as the janitor and night man at a small time bank who's embroiled in to a plot to rob the bank. As I say, it's a very solid film with a near-great performance by Gordon-Levitt who nicely underplays the part, and a script that's an astonishing piece of craft. Despite all that, it's no more than highly OK--Edi and I talked about the film a day or so later and realized neither of us had thought about it for more than a second after seeing it--maybe because Scott as first-time director plays his visuals a little too safe, or maybe because, as sometimes happens in tightly crafted crime pieces, people act only as little cogs that move the plot forward. Worth a rental, though.

SHOOTER: Yeah, I never heard back when I asked if anyone saw this and now I know why: after you walk out of this movie, you'll go to great lengths to pretend you never saw it. This "adaptation" of Stephen Hunter's deeply engrossing Point of Impact cuts everything out of Hunter's book the filmmakers thought the audience would find dated, corny, overly complex, or satisfying and puts in a whole bunch corny, overly simplistic, dull talky stuff that will age badly.

Here's a good example: in the book, after Swagger is double-crossed and shot, he manages to make it far downstream, makes his way into some scrublands, and finds and kills a boar, whose protein rich liver he is able to eat raw, giving him the strength to go on even though he's steadly bleeding out. It's a cool scene, filled with fun facts about eating why the liver is one of the few organs you actually can eat raw, but okay, I can see how it might look a little ridiculous to your average filmgoer and the filmmakers needed something different. Okay. So in the film, Swagger manages to make it far downstream, steal a truck, make his way into a small little town, finds some tin foil in a dumpster, shorts the lights in the country store so he can't be seen by the clerk, buys some sugar, salt, water, and a turkey thermometer, goes on to create a rejuvenating concoction, and injects this concoction by shooting himself up with the turkey thermometer in a gas station. Yeah---that looked a lot less ridiculous, guys. Nice job.

In fact, there's a distressing amount of emergency shopping in Shooter--so much so, you wonder if they should've called it Shopper, instead. Once Swagger makes it to the home of his dead buddy's ex-fiancee and convinces her to help him, he gives her a massive shopping list of stuff she'll need to conduct surgery and remove the bullet. (Of course, this involves eighteen cans of whipped cream, so that Swagger can use the nitrous as anesthetic--and no, I'm not kidding.) Later, when Swagger and the FBI agent who's decided to help him have to prepare for an assault on the trap that's been set for them, they go to a big-ass department store and race up and down the aisles with their shopping carts, pulling in huge swathes of shirts and nails and other goods they'll MacGyver into C4 and napalm and booby traps. The message is clear--when your precious government is riddled with corrupt black-op agencies working for the highest bidder, the only way you can fight them is by shopping. It's a strange updating of Hunter's Second Amendment oriented thriller--one wonders if the Swagger of the movie drives a pick-up with a "You can take my charge card when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers" bumper sticker.

Oh, and the action scenes are dull and there aren't enough of 'em. Truly Awful.

GRINDHOUSE: I'm supposed to see this tomorrow but I couldn't hold out any longer and caught a matinee yesterday. I could bore you with a million different thoughts about the thing but I'll stick to one central point: Rodriguez and Tarantino may now own the grindhouse, but apparently John Carpenter built it. Rodriguez's Planet Terror is riddled with classic Carpenter flourishes, from the self-composed keyboard hums, to the disastrous fate that befalls a child, to the mixture of jokey, aw-shucks humor mixed with outrageously disgusting effects. (Admittedly, Rodriguez pulls from a bunch of different other sources as well, but the Carpenter stuff is the stuff that really sticks.) Similarly, Tarantino's Death Proof tries to throw a lot of different stuff into the mix, but the long, near-interminable conversations between the first four girls mirrors the far crisper, naturalistic conversations among the four girls in Halloween. Throw in Eli Roth's trailer, and Grindhouse is a veritable John Carpenter tribute joint.

Which is all fine and good. I quite enjoyed Grindhouse, but every failing that Grindhouse has (including, arguably, its financial one) comes from emulating just about everything Carpenter did while ignoring how Carpenter had to do it. I don't know if you've ever listened to one of the Kurt Russell-less John Carpenter commentaries, but Carpenter gives (in a bored, laconic tone) some advice that really reinforces how much money mattered in his early films: in one commentary, he talks about running the title credits on a black background because it's that much more time you can fill up without having to shoot any film. Carpenter had to come up with ways to get his films to run ninety minutes because he only had the budget to shoot eighty-some-odd minutes of film. By contrast, Rodriguez and Tarantino have trouble keeping their movies to length, because anything they can think of--endless credit sequence of naked women feet, genital-leaking rape scenes, that chick from the Black-Eyed Peas bending over a car engine--they can get.

That said? Quite enjoyable, highly Good, and unlike The Lookout, there's stuff I'm still pondering a day later. As I said, I'll spare you the rest of it, but you could fill a book with the comparison and contrast and strange subtextual rumblings running through Grindhouse, and hopefully someday someone will.

Labels: Jeff

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So, I read Tom Spurgeon describe All-Star Superman as "one of the best superhero comics of the last 30 years" this week and thought, wow, that's pretty high praise. And then I read ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #7, and re-read the first six issues (released in collected form this week as ALL-STAR SUPERMAN VOLUME 1 HC) and thought, you know, maybe he's not giving them enough credit.

As much fun as the series is in single issue sittings, there's a lot to be gained from reading the first half of the series in one go. You catch the running themes (multiple identities, mortality, the multiplicity of the Superman character type) much more clearly when you can sit there and connect the dots. Although the series is constructed so that even though every issue is a story in and of itself, each issue is structured to play off what has come before and set up what comes after - the fifth issue, for example, ends with Lex Luthor embracing death because he's murdered Superman before the sixth shows the first time that Superman had to deal with mortality experienced from three different periods of Clark Kent's life (with the third perspective an Easter Egg for longtime Grant Morrison fans, who've read DC One Million and know that Superman Prime is our Superman in the far, far future); even the cliffhanger ending of issue 7, the first real two-parter of the series (Even though #2 and 3 were kind of a two-parter), manages to provide a conclusion for the main plotline with the defeat of the Bizarro World before branching out into the two-page set-up for the next issue. It's not that the series is being written for the trade, as the kids say, but just another illustration of how much thought and care has been put into its creation.

This is, without a doubt, a labor of love for Grant Morrison. You can see that, more than anything, he believes in Superman; this is a book, first and foremost, about Superman as a force for good and not something that worries about deconstructing the character or making him relevant for modern times. That's not to say that it's dated or retro, however... As much as the book's focus on Superman as not only perfect but almost unrelatably so may bring to mind the Silver Age take on the character, this is timeless instead of old-fashioned. Morrison's talked in the past about approaching super-heroes on a mythic level, but this is the first time for me where he's actually achieved that, perhaps because of the lack of the self-consciousness that shines through on the rest of his mainstream superhero work (Compare an issue of this with his Batman, for example, or his Wildcats - in those books, he's almost trying too hard to live up to his reputation, where here everything just works. There's a calmness and focus, instead of "Grant Morrison, he's so crazy"). Which isn't to say that there isn't imagination on show here, but it's imagination used in service of the story - and imagination where the ideas come slower but are more followed through, as opposed to his other work - which makes all the difference.

A lot of the calm that the book exudes - fittingly, considering the unflappable, serene nature of its star - comes from the art, which shows off Frank Quitely's very personal sense of design, pacing and space better than anything else he's done; We3 may have been more formally inventive, but All-Star Superman gives him the ability to compose a page and control your eye without the need for hyperactive bullet-dodging cyber-rabbits. It's widescreen art, but not in the traditional comic sense of the term - the panels stretch across the page to show surroundings, movement and the characters in a beautifully cinematic way, gracefully and allowing the reader to feel that everything is real, or at least, exists outside of the confines of that particular panel. There's a sense of life in the work, if that makes sense. "Digital inker" and colorist Jamie Grant's work helps dramatically in that, it has to be said - especially in the sixth issue - subtly reinforcing Quitely's linework while giving it more depth and weight, and completely earning his name being on the cover.

So, I'm reading these seven comics last night, and realizing that there's not a wrong step in any of them. The tone is perfect for Superman stories, the plots the right mix of adventure and overwrought emotion, the execution an ideal balance of humor and grace. It's so stunning a series that delays between issues don't seem to matter, because you know that the wait will be worth it, and when taken along with Jeff Smith's Shazam series, a successful one-two punch for DC of superhero comics that make you feel like you did when reading comics as a kid, even though you're an adult. Excellent, and then some.

No reviews for me tomorrow (or Sunday, for that matter) - It's Kate's and my wedding anniversary today, and we're celebrating five years of Kate not coming to her senses and dumping my comic-readin' ass by heading out of town for the weekend. Expect to see me recharged and full of snark in a couple of days, though. Click Here to Read More...

It's almost ready. Are you?

Sorry for being so tardy with the posting lately. I sat down this morning to write a few reviews and found myself stuck: I spent over an hour typing sentences and deleting 'em, typing and deleting in turn. Anyway, I have tentative plans to try liveblogging from the store tomorrow so hopefully that'll work out a bit better. Lord knows there's enough coming out....

Labels: Jeff, signing

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Firstly, Kurt Vonnegut, RIP. I was a massive fan of the man; my favorite book of his was Timequake, which just struck me as exactly the book that he'd wanted to write all along, all anecdotes and ponderings under the attempt of science-fiction, mixing Slaughterhouse Five with Palm Sunday. I went through a period, when I was still in art school and my mind was still trying to suck everything in to figure out who and how to be, when I read his stuff voraciously, book after book after book, entirely out of order. I remember clearly getting to Breakfast of Champions and being surprised and depressed by the misanthropy of the book, of the way Vonnegut seemed to feel when writing it; I kept reading even though it felt as if he wanted to kill himself and punish all of his characters for being in his head, and can remember clearly feeling relieved when he saw the light of... what, I'm still not sure. Optimism? Humanism? Not-killing-yourselfism? in the middle of the book. It's one of those things that you're sure that Clarence the Angel would point to, if he found you trying to throw yourself off a bridge on Christmas Eve, even if he couldn't tell you why it was so important, either. I saw Vonnegut on the Daily Show, last year, and was struck by how frail he looked. Sure, he was 84 at the time, and I hope I'm still around and healthy enough to make talk show appearances at that age (Not that I'd want to make talk show appearances, but you know what I mean), but... man. I wanted him to be as vibrant and healthy as his writing, you know? Sly and funny and so, so human.

Ah, well. So it goes, as he said. Onto happier things:

SPIDER-MAN AND THE FANTASTIC FOUR #1: Jeff Parker proves, once again, that he's the go-to man at Marvel for stories that don't suck or ask you to buy into totalitarian police states where superheroes can literally get away with murder, with this new, entirely unnecessary-yet-fun miniseries that just coincidentally stars the House of Ideas' two summer movie franchises of the year - What's surprising about that isn't so much that it's a movie tie-in, but that it's a movie tie-in that's not going to be released in trade in time for said movies; either Marvel have screwed up their schedules, or they're beginning to look at the direct market and single issues as a viable source of money in light of Civil War sales... Or maybe both. Who knows?

Anyway, this is pretty much what you'd expect from a non-continuity story by Parker and Mike Weiringo; it's light and throwaway purposefully, focusing less on the angst and more on the derring-do and imaginative adventure of the whole thing. You can tell that Parker's worked on the all-ages Adventures books, because this has a similar feel, and there are a number of scenes that set up the characters and their relationships pretty clearly for new readers (Ben plays a trick on Johnny to show off their rivalry, Spider-Man is insulted by people who later praise the FF to show their particular public standings, and so on) without being too obvious about it. There's something wonderfully old-fashioned about it, in the best way - It's written as if it's someone's first comic, but in such a way as to not alienate old readers who'll instead appreciate the character bits.

Likewise, Weiringo's art is a joy; clear and easy to follow, attractively cartoony while being dynamic enough for readers who've been at this for awhile. He's one of Marvel's secret weapons even if they haven't really realized that for awhile, and a pitch-perfect match for Parker's writing. Both of them seem uninterested in post-modern takes on superhero icons, preferring instead to offer up stories that aren't tied to any particular movement or zeitgeist and have no agenda other than to entertain. Depressingly enough, that probably guarantees that this will be seen as old-fashioned and unnecessary by the majority of fandom, but feh. Their loss; this is Good and in many ways closer to the movie versions of the characters than the regular books. Here's hoping the potential new audience finds this and gobbles it up, instead of Civil War Chronicles or whatever. Click Here to Read More...

Perhaps fittingly, considering what's currently going on in the Marvel Universe, IRON MAN #16 is a rather uncomfortable comic. It's not uncomfortable for the good reasons - It prods places in the reader's mind that they wouldn't want to consider at the best of times, for example, or it offers up some inconvenient truth (Al Gore as Tony Stark; what a concept) - but because it just doesn't hang together well at all. For one thing, Iron Man as a character (That is, Tony Stark when he's wearing his technological supersuit) doesn't really appear in the book, other than in flashback in one scene. The rest of the book revolves around Tony Stark as Director of SHIELD, bring so driven to take down terrorists that he doesn't give a damn about military protocol. Which is a potentially interesting take, but one that doesn't really sit well with his portrayal in other books, where his following the letter of the law over what his instincts may say causes him to, say, set a trap involving a pretend corpse of Captain America (Oh, and also: The book isn't called "Tony Stark: Goateed Defender of America"). Sure, Stark comes across as a dick in this book as much as he does in other books, but it's a different kind of dick, and that sort of thing should be important, somehow.

(There's a moment of supreme dickishness towards the end of the issue, where Dum-Dum Dugan is giving Stark a lesson in how to be a good military leader. Dugan says, "As our commanding officer, you will make life-or-death decisions. When you do, you must ask yourself one very important question: Did your decisions today make for a better world tomorrow?" The dickish moment comes when Stark replies, with a smirk, "Yes." It was a rhetorical question, Tony! And even if it wasn't, that smarmy certainty isn't going to win you any points.)

The end of the issue, where Stark speaks at the funeral of fallen SHIELD agents, is one of the few places where the characterisation of Stark seems consistent with the way he appears elsewhere, and it's arguably accidental; speaking in tribute to the fallen soldiers, Stark says "I have had the distinct honor of fighting alongside hundreds of super-heroes in my life... but very few heroes." And it's such an odd line that what I took away was that Stark doesn't consider super-heroes actual heroes. Which, you know, ties in with his Civil War persona of "superheroes are idiots who need to be registered and trained" and all, but at the same time makes you stop and think, Wait, why aren't super-heroes heroes? Is their desire to do the right thing despite their personal cost somehow invalidated by them wearing costumes or something? ("I'm sorry, Spider-Man. Yes, you saved that nun and her band of orphans from certain death in that burning building, but I happen to have the exact mathematical formula for heroism here and, ohhhh, you were just slightly off. Better luck next time.") That said, I'm convinced that such thinking isn't what the writers intended, and instead they were just reaching for just another "You know who the real heroes are, America? Our brave boys and girls in uniform" moment, a la Civil War #7.

But here's the thing: The events of Civil War, for better or worse, have ultimately pushed this character into the position of being not just a super-villain, but a pretty successful super-villain - He has created clones who kill people, manipulated governments, tried to ignite international war, and not only gotten away with it, but been rewarded for it. Books like New Avengers play the character as a villain fairly openly, and it's in that light that you can get away with him devaluing the sacrifice of others while telling people with certainty that he has made a better world. But as a hero himself or even just as a sympathetic character, that arrogance and lack of self-doubt doesn't make for interesting reading. Yes, he will inevitably be heading for a fall and will regain some humility prior to his movie launching, but without any attempt at moral uncertainty at this point, I find myself unable to care. In his own series, not only does Iron Man know that what he's doing is right, but two issues into the new status quo, the creators appear to agree with him; there's no ambiguity here, and that makes for dull reading. Eh. Click Here to Read More...

Off to Vegas, be back on... well from your POV, probably Sunday. (Maybe MOnday, when I think of it)

Sorry I've been slack the last few days -- lots on my mind!

One other thing I forgot to mention: in addition to the shipping-from-Diamond list I posted, we ALSO got these items in this week, via Baker & Taylor:

ALIAS THE CAT HC (Kim Deitch)
BLINDSPOT GN (Kevin Pyle -- I really really liked this one, though it's a smidge expensive for how long it takes to read)
FLIGHT v1 & v2 -- the new "Ballentine" editions
PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER
TINY TYRANT -- both from FirstSecond, and, I think, the strongest two books in this "wave" of releases.

As far as I know, we're the only store in SF to have these books currently, as DIamond hasn't distributed them yet. That's one reason I bought them via B&T.

In addition to that, they're CHEAPER from B&T -- Diamond offered them all at a "H" discount (max 40%), while B&T had them for about 46%, once you calculate the free shipping, the extra pre-order discount, and the additional "pay on time" discount.

Plus, they're returnable. (not that I order anything to return - but its nice to know that option is potentially available)

So, the BOOKSTORE distributor beats the COMICS-SPECIFIC distributor on a) time, b) discount, and c) returnability.

There's something very very wrong with this picture. (which, amazingly, will get worse once they're no longer "new" -- Diamond's discount will drop to a pathetic 37% on these as reorders, while I can not possibly order them for B&T for less than 43%)

Can you guess one of my prime topics for the ComicsPRO meeting?

Anyway, see you in a while!

-B Click Here to Read More...

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA CVR A #7: I'm reviewing this issue because I found it a much better read than Cover B. No, no, just kidding. Although it's yet another issue of nearly no action (I'm fully expecting Meltzer to wrap up his run with the conclusion of the god-damned election of the JLA head, or maybe a dramatic motion by the Sargeant-At-Arms to table the reading of the minutes of the last meeting until after everyone's finished eating cookies), I'm a sucker for the uber-reverential tack Meltzer is taking--if Red Arrow didn't get me, the good ol' Hall of Justice would've. One could argue (probably quite successfully, I should add) that this is all just nostalgia and easy symmetry cranked up to 11, cheap fanboy pandering at its hucksterish. And yet I'm digging it, I admit it. Highly Good, and I might even go higher if I wasn't paying fifty-one extra cents every issue.

MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #1: I'm with Hibbs and MacMillan, although I was always kinda lukewarm on Madman for a reason I couldn't quite put my finger on until now. Flipping through the rehash, I realized that Allred was pretty self-indulgent with Madman, crossing the character over with every other god-damned comic hero ever created and not hesitating to use him to promote any other project, comic series, album, movie, or underwear line Allred was undertaking at any given time. So I think it'd be awesome if Madman ends up one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because, say, Allred's starting up a crazed religious cult (of which he would of course be the charismatic, cartooning, sludgey-guitar-playing head) and he wants to get his message of the End Times (and the purple tracksuited, free-loving individuals only he can save) out to the comic book reading population.

Obviously, I'm not emotionally involved with the character enough to go more than Eh either way, but I obviously (still!) resent having to sit through Astroesque enough that I probably would've stuck to that rating if this had actually been good.

MARVEL ZOMBIES ARMY OF DARKNESS #2: Like Hibbs, I thought the Blob gag and the last page were great. Unlike Hibbs, I probably will pretend that cliffhanger is true and that's the end of the mini. Two Good pages and a whole bunch of stuff I don't care about (actually, now that I think about it, the fact that Dazzler is apparently Ash's idea of a perfect woman is pretty funny too) puts it on either high Eh or low OK.

MIDNIGHTER #6: I picked this up because of Jog's mention of it (although re-reading the post now, I realize I missed his dismissal of the story as "actually really overwrought and kind of awful") and quite liked it. I have no idea where it fits into continuity (I kinda stopped paying attention to the book once Midnighter crushed Hitler's ball--has anyone in modern comix written as much about Hitler's testicle as Garth Ennis?) and kinda don't care. Did I want to read Shogun Assassin with 80% more gay? Turns out I did. Call me crazy, but Good. Here's hoping next issue is The Duelists...with 40% more gay!

OMEGA FLIGHT #1: Oh, man. I remember after Bendis wiped out Alpha Flight in New Avengers, he or Quesada or somebody was all, "Don't worry. We love Alpha Flight and this is just our first step to bringing 'em back in a way Alpha Flight fans are gonna love." So, yeah, you get to the last page of this book where apparently Sasquatch is beat to death by the Wrecking Crew and I gotta tell ya, I could just feel the love coming off the pages. Awful stuff, even with art by Scott Kolins (I know some of you will be inclined to replace "even" with "especially."

Labels: Jeff

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Here's the odd thing; I didn't really like SAVAGE TALES #1 that much, but I'm not sure I could tell you why.

I mean, sure, I could say that three of the four stories in this relaunch of the fantasy anthology are unsatisfying first chapters, not able to find enough of a middle ground between character work and action to provide me with any reason to come back (The one exception to this is Ron Marz and Adriano Batista's opening Red Sonja story, which manages to use what reads as a pretty throwaway scene as a sneaky way to introduce Sonja to any new readers, showing us not only the character herself but also her reputation and the world in which she lives - It's actually a surprisingly successful way around what would otherwise have had to be an exposition dump either in dialogue or narration, and just one of the reasons why this is easily the best story of the issue; I'll get to some of the others later), but I'm unsure whether that opinion is really a failure of the creators or partially a result of my expectations of the title based on its format.

Anthologies like this, you see - Adventure-based anthologies, I guess you could call them - are all, in mind, up against 2000AD as some kind of ideal of what they should be. And not any particular issue of 2000AD, but a dream issue; something that probably never existed, but merges the best of their strips together into some kind of superprog. This is partially because I grew up, like most comic readers from the UK, reading 2000AD every week even when most of the stories were crap even to an undiscerning fourteen-year-old, but also partially because 2000AD did a lot of things right (to me, at least) when it came to working in this format. One of those things in particular was that the writers knew how to write serials in 5-page episodes - they kept things moving, even if it was only the illusion of the advancement of plot, and when they couldn't do that, they'd overwhelm you with dialogue that was funny, or stylish, or incomprehensible or whatever, but which gave each series its own personality. Because of that, there would be episodes where nothing would happen, or everything would happen even if it made no sense (Both of these, admittedly, happened more often as 2000AD got older and its readers started growing up; the writers that started it, Alan Grant, Pat Mills, John Wagner and the like, were old pros at making sure that each five page episode had at least one action sequence, even if it was just a very dramatic argument between characters. I'm thinking now of writers like John Smith or even some of Grant Morrison's stuff like Really and Truly), and you wouldn't care, because the personality of the story was so strong that that was what you were really reading for, coming back for every issue.

And that, maybe, is what is missing in the strips in Savage Tales: Personality. Each strip, including the Marz Red Sonja one, is pretty homogenous. There's a sameness of tone to them, a manneredness to the writing that restrains the dialogue and the imagination just as it keeps the visuals to a pretty generic superhero book level (with the notable exception of Pablo Marcos's work on one strip, which is completely elevated - I'm tempted to say "saved" - by the coloring that gives it a painted finish), and that might be the one thing that disappointed me more than anything else. I mean, yes, Leah Moore and John Reppion's story is all set-up and no actual story (Showing two panels of a mystery man in a hood with glowing eyes doesn't count), and Luke Lieberman and Mike Oeming focus on action at the expense of coherent storytelling and, you know, telling the reader the name of their main character (No-one is really given any introduction, and as a result, it's hard to care about the story because we have no idea of the context), but there's no variation in tone between them, nothing to make them stand out against everything else in the book. The same goes for Mike Raicht's Lovecraftian story at the back of the book - Yes, there's more of a horror element, but it's treated in exactly the same way as the other stories: Po-faced, earnest and without any sense of humor; Marz's story opens with comedy, which is another of its saving graces. As, for that matter, is that it's the only story that attempts a cliffhanger to draw the reader back for issue 2 - The hero is in direct, if somewhat vague, peril as opposed to the other three stories, all of which close on "slight sense of unease with foreboding last line."

So, yeah. It's not that the stories are bad, as much as bland. But when you have such little space to work in or offer the reader some reason to come back next month, then maybe that blandness is the worst thing that this title could have to offer. Technically, it's Okay, I'm sure; if I had more affinity to the subject matter, maybe I would like it more, but to me...? Eh. Click Here to Read More...

So, yeah, I took the Holiday Weekend "off" (not really, but off from writing at least), and I'll have something for you tomorrow, but on Wednesday I'm off to Vegas for the first ComicsPRO meeting, so this is pretty much just Jeff and Graeme's Show this week.

LOTS of stuff coming this week:


2000 AD #1529
2000 AD #1530
52 WEEK #49
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #55 (A)
AFTER THE CAPE #2 (OF 3)
ALL STAR SUPERMAN #7
AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #7
AMELIA RULES #17
ARCHIE #574
ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #178
BATMAN STRIKES #32
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA CYLON APOCALYPSE #2
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ZAREK #4
BIG BANG COMICS PRESENTS TEENREX #5
BLADE #8
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL #124
BOMB QUEEN III #2 (OF 4)
BPRD GARDEN OF SOULS #2 (OF 5)
BREATHE CVR A #1 (OF 4)
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #12
CLIVE BARKERS GREAT & SECRET SHOW #11 (OF 12)
CONAN & THE MIDNIGHT GOD #3 (OF 5)
DESPERADOES BUFFALO DREAMS #3 (OF 4)
EMO BOY #11
FABLES #60
FELL #8 (RES)
FIENDISH FABLES ONE SHOT #1 (RES)
FRANK FRAZETTAS DEATH DEALER #1
GEN 13 #7
GHOST RIDER #10
GREEN ARROW #73
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #11
GRIFTER MIDNIGHTER #2 (OF 6)
HIGHLANDER #6
IRON MAN #16
JLA CLASSIFIED #37
LEGION OF MONSTERS MAN-THING #1
LONERS #1 (OF 6)
LOVELESS #17
MAD MAGAZINE #477
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #23
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED JUNGLE BOOK
MR STUFFINS #1 (OF 3)
NEW AVENGERS #29 CWI
NEW X-MEN #37
NEWUNIVERSAL #5
NIGHTLY NEWS #5 (OF 6)
NOVA #1
PIRATES VS NINJAS #4 (OF 4)
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #6
SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE SLEEP OF REASON #5 (OF 5)
SHE-HULK 2 #17
SPIDER-MAN BACK IN BLACK HANDBOOK
SPIDER-MAN FAMILY 2ND PTG KIRK VAR #1 (PP #758)
SPIDER-MAN FANTASTIC FOUR #1 (OF 4)
SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE #17
SPIDER-MAN MAGAZINE
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC #15
STORMWATCH PHD #6
TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED #7 (OF 8)
TEEN TITANS #45
THUNDERBOLTS #113 CWI
TMNT MOVIE ADAPTATION #1
TMNT MOVIE PREQUEL 3 DONATELLO
TRIALS OF SHAZAM #6 (OF 12)
TWO GUNS #1 (OF 4)
UNCANNY X-MEN #485
WASTELAND #8 (NOTE PRICE)
WHITE TIGER #5 (OF 6)
WOLFSKIN #3 (OF 3)
WOLVERINE ORIGINS #13
WONDER WOMAN #7
XOMBIE SEELEY CVR A #1 (OF 6)

Books / Mags / Stuff
ALL STAR SUPERMAN VOL 1 HC
APEX TREASURY BEST OF BIJOU FUNNIES TP (O/A) (A)
ASLEEP IN A FOREIGN PLACE ART BOOK
BATTLE POPE VOL 3 TP PILLOW TALK
CIVIL WAR TP
CLASSIC DAN DARE THE MAN FROM NOWHERE HC
COMPLETE PEANUTS VOL 7 1963-1964 HC
CONLUVIO TP
CRISIS AFTERMATH THE SPECTRE TP
DARK GOODBYE VOL 1 GN (OF 3)
DEATH NOTE VOL 11 TP
DOOMED PRESENTS ASHLEY WOOD TP
DRAGON HEAD VOL 6 GN (OF 10)
EDU MANGA MOTHER TERESA GN
FERRO CITY VOL 1 TP
FLOWER & FADE GN
FRUITS BASKET VOL 16 GN (OF 20)
HACK SLASH VOL 1 FIRST CUT TP NEW PTG
HACK SLASH VOL 2 DEATH BY SEQUEL TP
HARRY THE RAT WITH WOMEN NOVEL
HEROES FOR HIRE VOL 1 CIVIL WAR TP
INU YASHA VOL 29 TP
KAFKA GN
MARVEL ADVENTURES FF VOL 5 ALL 4 ONE 4 FOR ALL DIGEST TP
MOME VOL 7 GN
NIKOLAI DANTE TSAR WARS VOL 2 TP
SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE VOL 5 DR DEATH TP
SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN FERAL TP
SPIDER-MAN REIGN PREMIERE HC
STAR TREK COMICS CLASSICS VOL 5 CONVERGENCE TP
STREET MAGIK GN
TOYFARE SPIDER-MAN 3 MOVIE CVR #118
WASTELAND BOOK 1 CITIES IN DUST TP
WIZARD MAG 2007 MEGA MOVIE COLL ED SPIDEY 3 CVR (187B)



What looks good to you?

-B Click Here to Read More...

I'm finally watching season three of Battlestar Galactica, on maybe episode eight or something, and....wow. I'll be curious to see what they do with the next ten or twelve episodes but, occasional clunker or two notwithstanding, it's one hell of a season so far.

In other late adapter news, I just read my first volume of Naruto last week.

And next week, the missus and I are getting one of them new-fangled rotary-dial telephones! No more party lines for us!

Oh, and what a drag Johnny Hart died just a day short of Easter Sunday, huh? I think the timing of that would've made him grin a litttle. I'll spare you the standard story, but suffice it to say my brothers and I had about 15 to 20 B.C. paperbacks growing up and read 'em until the spines dissolved.

And, anyway:

DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER BORN #3: I don't know; I'm getting a little more underwhelmed with each issue. I mean, it looks lovely, but it reads like Cormac McCarthy doing a rewrite of The Sword and The Sorceror. And while that was initially okay, it's getting a little dullish--the big action in this issue is a dude batting a decapitated head twenty feet, and someone getting their finger knocked off with a slingshot. At this rate, we're gonna have people blinding each other with straw wrappers and/or falling after running with scissors by issue #5. Lovely but really when you factor in the price and the back-patting extra features? Eh.

DETECTIVE COMICS #831: I run hot and cold on the art team of Kramer & Faucher--if nothing else, whenever the Ventriloquist pops up I can't help but notice how much everyone looks like a mannequin--but some fault also lies with Dini who, as Hibbs pointed out in the store on Friday, still writes his action scenes for animation. I'm also not down with Harley being rehabilitated (if nothing else, I think it's the third rogue to do so in Dini's run, which suggests either a very slowly developed story arc or a distracted writer) but, on the other hand, it's a pretty competent done-in-one and us Batman fans gotta take our thrills where we can get 'em these days. So, OK.

FALLEN SON DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA WOLVERINE: Nice art, but I got to the point where Wolverine recruits Daredevil for DD's heightened senses and I never quite recovered. (Isn't that like Iron Man recruiting War Machine because he needs someone with armor and high-tech weaponry?) I'll probably keep checking these out, if only to see if Loeb falls back on his crutch of excerpting lengthy historical speeches for cheap and easy resonance. Please don't mistake that for a recommendation: pretty pictures pull this up to Eh.

IMMORTAL IRON FIST #4: Ups the awesome by about 200% and probably just in time--dashed-off steampunk hyperbole meets wacky kung-fu hijinks and old-school convoluted Marvel continuity to give you that classic '70s comic book feeling of a book that can access every genre conceivable and still have guys in funny suits punching people in the face. Also reminded me a bit of reading Ellis's superhero work but without the nagging feeling the author was vomiting in a wastebasket every four pages. Very Good stuff, in short. I liked it quite a bit.

IRON MAN HYPERVELOCITY #4: In a way, this is almost like Adam Warren's rewrite of Livewires, as you get a lot of the same ideas and motifs--a fixation on "mecha" culture, artificial personality and cat-and-mouse games with high-tech covert intelligence agencies--but all of the dullness carved away: Warren not only throws his protagonist from the frying pan into the fire at the end of every issue (as he notes on the last page here) but at least once more per issue, as well. It's currently running the risk of being too one-note at this point, but I'm inclined to believe he'll change things up for the final act. Highly Good stuff, and it'll either make an awesome trade or an exhausting one. I'll be curious to see where it goes.

JONAH HEX #18: If the nation's Grindhouse fever keeps up for more than a week or two--or happened at all, if the movie's earnings are any indication--maybe DC could figure out how to advertise this book in a way that makes explicit the links between this and those scuzzy theaters with their cheap and nasty double features. Like many of those lovely films, this issue was a nasty piece of work with little more in mind than putting its arm around you, offering to school you in mankind's most detestable behavior, and then punching you in the stomach when you drop your guard and lean in closer to listen. Pretty OK, although just about every issue I put down feels about two to five pages too short.

Labels: Jeff

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I really need to look at calendars more often. It's Easter already? Where's my egg?

52 WEEK FORTY-EIGHT: If Richard Corben and Phil Jiminez had a baby, it would be Darick Robertson's art in this issue, which manages to jump back and forth over the line that separates looking rushed and particularly stylized. We're in the rather rushed end-run of the series, now, and it's coming more into focus that things aren't going to really come to a complete conclusion in the next four issues -Intergang may be trying to turn Gotham City into Apokolips (It's the fire pits that gave it away, even though commentators over at Doug Wolk's blog think that they're actually Lazarus Pits), but I can't see any way for that plot to even be properly introduced never mind completed, considering the other plots that still have to be dealt with. Unlike Hibbs, I'm not so happy about the idea of Batwoman dying this issue, if only it feels like the character never really transcended the hype surrounding her sexuality and debut in the New York Times. I mean, sure, it explains why we've not seen the character outside of this series, but still, it's a waste of whatever potential was in there in the first place. Okay, but at this point, I don't want to see characters dying and issues spent entirely on one plotline anymore.

DANGER GIRL: BODYSHOTS #1: It's Alias meets Charlie's Angels, and curiously enjoyable in a trashy kind of way. I've avoided Danger Girl until this series, mostly because I didn't really see the point, but... Eh. It's fun, if you set your sights low enough, and always interesting to see a creator-owned book continue without any input from said creator.

THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST #4: By this point, the co-writing team of Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction has shifted more towards a Fraction-esque direction - When airships crash into mythical cities and men in top hats emerge with guns, you start to wonder whether Matt's taking more of a lead in plotting, or whether Ed has started to be infected by his writing partner. Balancing expositionary introduction of the Iron Fist history with kung-fu and shootin' action and corporate takeovers, this continues to be much more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Good, even as I'm not the biggest fan of the Steel Serpent.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #7: I'm such a sap. I really shouldn't enjoy this; the individual scenes don't work, I don't buy half of the character development, but... I kind of dig the new Hall of Justice/Watchtower headquarters. I'm happy that Dinah gets to be the chair of the team in this new setup. And even as the "fate decided the team" theme voiced by the characters mirrors the first three issues of Bendis' New Avengers too much for my liking, I have to admit that this seemed surprisingly Good to me. I'm sure that everyone else may find it somewhat less impressive, but, feh. This completely sucked up to my DC fanboyishness, and won me over.

OMEGA FLIGHT #1: Again with the slow build! Only two of the characters on the cover appear inside this way-too-self-conscious first issue of a series that shows surprisingly clearly that whoever decided that this shouldn't be an ongoing book after all made the right decision. Bri had it right, pointing out that this book is far too American-centric for a Canadian team. When the whole concept seems to be "American supervillains are invading Canada, so American superheroes have to save the Canadians," there's something weirdly patronizing going on. But why am I surprised? Crap.

SUPERMAN #661: As much as I enjoy Kurt Busiek's one-shots, I have to admit, I'm pretty much done with fill-ins by now. It's not that I'm desperate to get back to the ongoing Camelot Falls arc (Although I am, and it's interesting that the four months of filler on Action Comics is getting such bad press, but the four months of fill-in skip by without commentary on this title; Maybe because regular writer Busiek has been on the book all along?), but there's something almost weightless, in a way, about this issue; a feeling that no-one, not even the creators, really cared about it that much. It's enjoyable enough, but there's something very Eh about the whole thing.

Coming up either tomorrow or Tuesday, we'll see if I can get my thoughts about the Savage Tales relaunch to amount to more than just "It's not Ron Mars, whoever spellchecks the Dynamite books..." Click Here to Read More...

Writing comic book reviews on Easter Sunday morning? I cannot tell if I am to be admired or pitied on this, one of our more deeply confusing holidays [cue the whole Jesus/Easter Bunny/salvation/colored egg thing, done to death by thousands of stand-ups, here). Hats off to Dave Robson, who told me he was going to spend Easter morning watching Grindhouse. I can only hope this will become a trend that will transform the face of the holiday, and 100 years from now parents will have to explain how looking for Easter eggs and watching "Hobo With A Shotgun" ties in to the story of Jesus....

52 WEEK #48: Montoya becomes The Question and it's highly OK but I was really underwhelmed. I find that especially troubling because I'd argue that Montoya's story arc has been the most solid one in 52, overall: the character beats are there; the motivation is there; verbal and visual metaphorical use of the Question motif, etc. In talking about it with Hibbs, he suggested that maybe because it was a foregone conclusion it didn't have the "oomph" it might have, and there's something to that.

But I still blame the '80s. Yes, that's right. I blame an entire decade for my general listlessness to the Montoya/Question storyline, because if there's one thing that decade taught me to be wary of, it's a woman in a fedora.

As you young whippersnappers probably know from history class, MTV started back in the '80s and in those early, pre-Real World days they actually showed music videos. Music videos in those days were infamous for showing you unreal things filmed cheaply out in the real world, and leaving it to you to sort out what was real and what wasn't. I think it took me over ten years to realize that if you drop a rose on a checkered ceramic floor, it doesn't shatter like glass. Also, if you are in the water with a woman--say, at the beach or a tropical lagoon--and the two of you come out of the water at the same time, you have other options than gripping each other at the arms and screaming. Even if you are in slow motion. Also, no matter how much you clean it first, a sexy woman is not going to dance all over your car. It's just not going to happen.

So whenever I see a woman in a fedora, I find myself getting anxious. It's true. Up until she became the Question, every scene in which Montoya tugged on her hat led me to believe she would next be in a shoving-dancing match with her pimp, rubbing herself all over her hair-metal boyfriend's car, or dancing with a suspendered cartoon cat. I think this may have hampered my enjoyment of 52 #48 which was, as I said, probably a pretty OK issue, overall.

ALL NEW ATOM #10: I wonder if something got changed in the drafting process--you know, another pass to tighten up the plotting that changed the character's relationships, maybe--because I really, really can't buy that (a) Ryan is still going to be friends with the woman who married the dude who savagely beat him before her eyes and would have murdered him if fate hadn't intervened; or (b) that woman would have married the dude who savagely beat her friend almost to death before her eyes. And maybe it'll pick up next issue, but I also wish it was a little less Sometimes They Come Back and a little more Chinese Ghost Story (parts 1 or 2). Still some stuff to like, but lower end of Eh for me.

AVENGERS INITIATIVE #1: I wasn't fond of the death scene, partly because it seemed pretty telegraphed, but more than that I found the book kinda muddle-headed. Here, the Initiative is being an extension of the military whereas the other Civil War comparisons I've seen liken it to police firefighting service--which I think really affects the tenor of the thing. If registering your superpowers is like registering a handgun, and you have to pass some sort of very basic training in order to be licensed, that's one thing. But if it means you're shipped off to a base where people holler at you and you crawl in the mud and get accidentally killed, then that's essentially a draft and I think there would be a very different national reaction to it. (I know there are lots of factors in play, but I think a huge difference between the current war and the Vietnam War is that there is no draft hanging over the head of today's college kids and, as a result, a lot less protesting.) Considering half of the book's hook is the Initiative, it'd be great if, now that Civil War is over and there's not as much tightly-knit deadline sensitive cross-continuity going on, Marvel might take the time to really iron out all their ideas on it. (And considering the other half of the hook was the Avengers in the title, it'd be great if we got to see more than Yellowjacket.) Slott does a an okay job with what he's got, but instead of war movie cliches with a superhero gloss, we got some deeply wonky military nut who could use the previous history of our armed forces as a basis for the behind-the-scenes drama of military men who need to figure out standardized training for people with non-standardized powers. To paraphrase the great bluesmen, "Well, the men don't know, but the Tom Clancy fans understand."

Anyway, for those who prefer their reviews without so much Monday (or, in this case, Sunday) morning quarterbacking: deeply Eh.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #2: I agree with the G; this was much stronger than the first issue (which I liked just fine) and so like this even more. Another thing that I think Graeme nailed in his review is his reference to Joss's "swagger." A couple of people on our comments and elsewhere have protested that they don't understand Whedon's popularity, and I'd say it's precisely this swagger that makes Whedon stand out. It's not that he's especially great at any one thing (although his sitcom training tends to give his dialogue both a lot of zest and a tendency to sound all the same, sometimes) but more that he's good enough at a lot of things to know how the rules of how they work and how to break those rules when it suits him. (For example, he's done that sudden change-up to a dream or fantasy sequence several times before but he nailed me with it here because of how he plays with the page pacing.) The high level of craft plus that extra bit of zing is what can make him a very entertaining writer and, when he's on, you get Very Good work like you do here.

More tomorrow, most likely. Happy Easter!

Labels: Jeff

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Less than two weeks until the signing? Holy Cow, that's just crazy.

Oh, and since I posted this on a Saturday, you can probably count on it showing up in the middle of this upcoming week (and probably next week as well, come to think of it.)

Hope any of you inclined to show up will do so. It oughta be awesome.

Labels: Jeff

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Continuing the trend from Brian's last post: Something else that Annalee liked? Grindhouse, which she and the lovely Charlie Anders invited Kate, myself and a theater row of others to watch at the Bridge last night. Perhaps because I am young, innocent and Scottish, I'm not so familiar with the whole grindhouse thing - I've seen some of the movies and trailers themselves, but outside of the context of grindhouse culture, so the whole package that surrounded the movie last night (Including about half an hour of trailers for genuine grindhouse movies) was both surprising and very, very enjoyable. The actual movie was both only moreso, especially the Rodriguez half, which just piles more and more over-the-topness throughout itself to give you the feeling that This may be the greatest achievement in cinema history more than once. Tarantino's half starts slowly, but just when you're getting worried that you're going to be bored by the whole thing, kicks in the awesome to such an extent that you'll be cheering along with the best of them. Kate's and my love of Rose McGowan aside - and that's a pretty big thing to put aside, let me tell you - the best thing in the movie for me may be the trailers between the two movies: "Don't!" being something that makes me laugh much more than it should even a day later. Consider the movie Very Good... But anyway! Because I said I would yesterday!

MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #1: Wow, what a spectacular misfire. Whenever I think of Madman, I tend to think of absurd, colorful, retro fun that occasionally strays into the existential, sure, but fun nonetheless. Maybe I've only got this impression because I've not read enough Madman in the past, and the series itself has actually always been a downer with a surface glee, because if there's one thing that this opening issue of the new ongoing series isn't, it's fun in the slightest.

The plot of the issue, such as it is, is the following: Frank Einstein, the eponymous Madman, finds that everyone in the world is dead. After reliving his past in the exposition-heavy bulk of the issue, he's told that that past wasn't real, and he's not a superhero at all, he's actually the personification of one of the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse; he's actually Death. The end. I've got quite a few problems with this, the first one being - You spend an entire issue on exposition summing up the character's history, only to spend the last three pages saying that none of it is true? Then haven't you just wasted everyone's time and money...? That really seems like the case here, especially considering that the exposition isn't particularly inventively done; it reads more or less like a Marvel Saga issue, but less so, not focusing on recurring themes or the big events but apparently just recapping almost every issue (with the exception of the cross-company crossovers, although Superman, Nexus and the Savage Dragon all appear in there). Why spend so many pages building up a history that doesn't matter for, I assume, new readers like me, only to pull it away at the last moment? The shock "That's not who you are" reveal doesn't work, because we've only really been told who Frank thought he was, instead of shown, and the shift in tone (Frank isn't a fun superhero, he's Death!) doesn't even seem particularly jarring, because the book started with the horror theme of Frank finding rotting corpses everywhere. It just seems... dull, kind of.

I almost wish that I had been reading the series long-term, just because I wonder what the reaction of longer-term readers would be to the ending of the issue. Would it seem more dramatic? Or would they, as Brian seems to be, have been turned off by the essentially-issue-length recap of things that they already knew up to that point?

(Also, for that matter, if we're to believe that the end of this issue isn't a giant swerve, hasn't Mike Allred just killed demand for his expensive Madman Gargantua collection by saying that none of it happened in continuity? Or don't people care about things like that?)

It's a strange move, I think, spending your first issue more or less spinning your wheels before trying an "everything you know is wrong!" ending - You haven't earned the gravity that that ending should have because, hey, it's a first issue (Yes, the book has been around in many other incarnations by this point, but you don't fill an issue with recap unless you think that you're reaching new readers who haven't read that stuff before, so obviously on some level Allred is treating this as a first issue - "First smashing issue! Jump on for the ride of this life!" as the cover blurb screams), and so it feels like a cheat and kind of like shock for the sake of shock, which tends to kill goodwill from the reader. There's something oddly reminiscent of early '90s Image in it, the way that Liefeld and Lee and all the rest tried to pull X-Men style reveals on characters that they'd introduced at most two issues earlier, so maybe the whole thing is some meta joke now that this book is being published by Image, but... I don't know.

Don't get me wrong, the new direction, if it takes (and I kind of hope that it does; not that I like the new direction, because either Frank goes along with it and becomes Death which is, you know, not what I want from this book at all, or he doesn't, and becomes the cliched "monster who denies his destiny and tries to do good" that Hellboy has had covered for the last decade and a bit, so... But at this point, I feel like Allred can't just reveal that this is an entire fake-out because if it is, then he really has just wasted that first issue entirely) may end up being the best thing since sliced bread, and the book is still pretty damn pretty to look at. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a very disappointing first issue, not only because of the lack of fun, but also because of the worthlessness of pulling the rug out from people who weren't standing on it in the first place. Crap. Click Here to Read More...

Wow, how cool would it have been if "Spock's Brain" was about zombies, huh?

That's my mini-theme this entry, with two zombie reviews:

MARVEL ZOMBIES / ARMY OF DARKNESS #2: I actually can't tell you how much I'd like it if that cliffhanger were true, and that was the last we saw of Ash -- what a perfect, absurd ending that would have been.

In fact, I'll even say that that last page may be my favorite last page of a comic book so far in 2007.

I also really really laughed hard and out loud at the Blob sequence, even though it was background and only a page long.

So, yeah (and I honestly don't beleive I am typing this): GOOD.




RAISE THE DEAD: Also under the auspices of Dynamite, this is a lot more pedestrian. I feel like I've read "trapped in a truck stop diner" ten thousand times before, even though I have probably not.

The characters are reasonably well voiced, the suspense level is adequate, and despite the slightly awkward, "our gun is from children" bits, this is generally compelling drama. But there's nothing, in this first issue at least, that really STANDS OUT -- nothing to differentiate this from, say, WALKING DEAD (sorry, sorry! Too obvious a compariosn, I know, but there it is). Or 20 or 30 different movies or TV episodes or something that I've watched over the years. In a genre as well-mined as "zombie survival", you need to have something DIFFERENT to get to a worn out soul like mine. And while this was competant, maybe even very much so, I didn't get much of a tingle from this first issue.

I'll check back with it, because, y'know, I own a comic book shop and I can read comics for free, but not because of "Wow! That was fresh/new/exciting!". Which is pretty much the cardinal sin for a new (ongoing? I think?) title.

A strong OK, but only OK.




What did you think?


-B


PS: Analee liked OPTIC NERVE #11 Click Here to Read More...

So, for once I actually get time to sit down and write reviews ahead of time, and then Brian manages to beat me to every single one. I was going to post about Madman today, but considering Hibbs' review is below, I'll do that one tomorrow, and today go for...

AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE #1: Color me surprised that Hibbs disliked this more than I did, and also that he didn't mention the really, really bum note that opened the book - It starts in Iraq, where one of the new characters is introduced fighting terrorist insurgents... who are from the Marvel Universe terrorist organization, Hydra. Now, as much as I liked Hydra and know that they've never really been portrayed as a joke within Marvel's books, and as much as I know that Marvel really really wants to be socially relevant and set in "the real world," there's something really odd and kind of cheap about seeing carbombers in Iraq yelling "Hail Hydra! Cut off a limb, two more will take its place!" as they try to drive into American soldiers. Is it weird that that disturbed me so much? It's literally one panel, but there was something about it...

Anyway, kind of like Hibbs, the first thing I thought about this book was that it was trying too hard to be serious and dark - I kind of feel for Dan Slott, whose previous recent series for Marvel have been lighter, more an old-school mix of action and comedy, and relative failures in the marketplace. Then he does this book, which is almost comedically bleak (The good guy with the heart of gold gets killed accidentally saving someone's life! Life is pain), and Marvel upgrades it from a miniseries to an ongoing before the first issue is even released; there's a lesson there, and it's not necessarily a good one. The thing is, I don't see what here could support an ongoing book; the characters certainly can't, as introduced here (Brian's right, there aren't many sympathetic ones), and the concept is essentially "Superheroes get trained to be superheroes," which we've seen waaaay too many times before, without too much of a twist. Or too much of an open twist, anyway.

The reason I mention an open twist is that there's a weird subtext in the structure and dialogue of the book. We're introduced to the main characters of the issue, but in the process, one of the characters screws up and is sent home, and the issue finishes with them walking off into the sunset... like some kind of reality show. And at first, that seems like a stretch, but here's the dialogue from the scene where she's told that she's leaving:

"I'm sorry, Armory, you've been washed out of the Initiative. We'll be confiscating your weapon. You're grounded."

Referring to the title of the book in the dialogue? "You've been washed out of the Initiative"? "You're grounded"? Am I the only person who can see this as the follow-up to "In fashion, some days you're in, some days you're out... I'm sorry [name of contestant], you're out" or "You're no longer in the running to become America's Next Top Model"? The introduction that the new characters get to their new situation is also kind of Tyra-esque:

"Here at Camp Hammond, you will be put through Avengers basic training. This includes combat, first aid, and superhuman ethics. Once you pass, your registration card will be upgraded to a full hero's license. And if you're among the best and brightest... You'll be offered a spot on of our fifty nationwide teams. Do that, and you've made it to 'The Show'."

Yes, he really offers them a chance to make it to "The Show" (whatever that is supposed to be - Has anyone ever referred to being a superhero as "The Show" before?). Maybe it's just me, but there's a definite reality show feeling to this book; I'm just not sure if it's intentional or not. Nonetheless, that also drives the feeling that this isn't a book that should be ongoing - There is, surely, a finite end to this story (When America's Next Top Avenger is crowned), and the idea of the series just shifting towards another cast at that point isn't an exciting one; similarly, the idea that none of these characters will ever become competent enough to graduate the Initiative or the series strains the credibility of the whole enterprise. I know this book has the Avengers name on it (even though, really, it doesn't need it - The characters are getting "Avengers basic training," whatever that is, but that's about the only link to the team in the entire first issue), and that means that Marvel will want to capitalize on their franchise for as long as possible, but this is really a book too far. Crap. Click Here to Read More...

MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS! #1: I have to admit I was deeply disapointed in this. Admittedly, MADMAN has been off the market since... 2000 or so? And so I guess I understand the intellectual decision to make this an All-Recap issue, but the problem with a plot-driven recap is that it doesn't give an idea, really at all, of how FUN Madman could be.

And, despite Allred clearly being driven to get to his uber-plot of "The Four" and all of that, that was probably the bits of the previous run(s) that I liked the least.

I had really thought, especially with a title like "Madman Atomic Comics!" (with the exclamation point and all), that this was going to focus on the Ginchy Fun bits -- sort of like that Paul Rivoche pin-up towards the back; but, instead (especailly with that ending), it was actually kind of dour.

Because its all (or, at least, primarily) flashback, I suspect many long-time Mad-Heads are going to be like me (disapointed), and new-to-the-character readers won't exactly understand what the appeal was.

And appeal there very much WAS I really really want to sing you the praises of MADMAN... maybe next issue?


What did you think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

EMPOWERED TPB: The first twenty pages of this made me think of that old Matt Groening joke about how paradoxically the French are funny, sex is funny, and comedies are funny, and yet there are no funny French sex comedies. Initially, Adam Warren's sexy superhero manga Empowered is not sexy, uses all the superhero trappings for comedy-based blackout sketches, and Warren, while certainly influenced by manga, is not a manga artist. Really, the first twenty pages or so read like a PG-13 version of Little Annie Fanny where superheroine-in-training Empowered finds herself in one embarrassing (but relatively mild) bondage "story" after another, comically whimpering about how pathetic she is. If this had been a comic book one shot, or the next 220 pages read like the first, I would be telling you to save your money, express general frustration and be done with it.

But, in fact, I pretty much exhort you to get out to the store and find a copy of this because Empowered is probably the most enjoyable book I've read in a month or so. Through an act of creative alchemy, Warren takes those first few three page "stories" (created by Warren on commission for someone who collected superheroine-in-bondage art even though Warren himself seems creeped out by such a specialized kink) and sees a deeper potential for the character. What he goes on to do simultaneously is and isn't revelatory--he develops character and mileu by building on continuity. It's not revelatory because that's what superhero comics these days do. What's revelatory is how well Warren does it, and the tricks he uses to accomplish it.

Once Empowered meets a doting hired thug who genuinely admires her, the book's story begins to shift and Warren places the bondage into a context that he feels more comfortable with: "You're, like, a hundred times braver than any of your bigshot, overrated Superhomeys teammates," Thug tells her. "How tough can it be to act all brave and courageous when you're pretty much invulnerable, like most of the Superhomeys? [...] You keep on plugging away. You keep on putting yourself in harm's way. That's brave. Or crazy. Or both." While on the surface this reads like exactly the sort of thing, say, Jim Balent would write while putting his nekked witch Tarot in explicitly titillating positions, it's far more convincing after seventy-plus pages in which we've seen nothing more explicit than a buttcheek or some side-boob. It's easy to read Empowered and feel like Warren is walking the walk while talking the talk--emotional vulnerability is sexy to him, and it's the emotional relationships in the book that go on to resonate. With that in place, Warren goes on to develop the book's mileu with his typically irreverent eye for detail (for example, he gives the Superhomeys one of the more absurd and yet rational origin stories I think I've ever read. And I won't give away any details about Empowered's "roommate" but I thought that too was tremendously amusing and satisfying).

Although I'm not gonna bore you with it, I should at least point out how Warren uses variable length stories to accomplish such a satisfying read. Starting from those brief three to five page "stories" (little more than blackout sketches), Warren builds a dizzying number of tales into the book, some as short as two pages, some as long as eighteen pages. Because Warren's pacing and command of storytelling is so spot-on, each piece pretty much works on its own, but each of these pieces also help contribute to the larger whole of the book. Really, they should probably just be thought of as scenes but that's not quite the case--they're like turbocharged scenes, or as if you got to read the first twelve issues of a superhero book with all the inessential stuff cut out. By the time I put down the book, the characters felt like ones I'd been following forever, and I can't wait for the next volume.

From ambivalently developed, compromised fan commission to extraordinarily satisfying character comedy--Empowered is a triumph of a creator's skill, craft and intuition, a Very Good work and I urge all of you to hunt up a copy. As I said, it's one of the most enjoyable books I've read this month and I can't wait to see more.

Labels: Jeff

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This didn't start out as a themed post, but it just kind of turned out that way. See if you can see the subtle connective thread...

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #2: Maybe I'm just getting into the Whedon swing of things, but this seemed much better than the first issue to me - There seemed to be more to it, in some way; the plot moved forward, there was the reintroduction of more characters from the TV show (although Andrew looked nothing like he did on the show, and was only recognizable through his geekdom and Star Wars references) but also character work that works within the context of the comic series itself. Also, there are zombies and fairy tales, which is always nice. More to the point, there is also some of Whedon's swagger back in play, from the switching of scenes at the start of the issue, to the dream sequence, to Amy's fake-out surrender; it feels like a stronger episode of the show, especially as compared with last issue. Very Good, thankfully, although maybe that's due to my recent reading of...

FRAY: Proof that this here site has been good for me, at least, comes with the fact that I read this purely because of people telling that I should, back when I reviewed the first issue of the new Buffy series and was somewhat underwhelmed. This book - midway between Buffy and Firefly (including the futuristic slang that really annoyed me in Firefly; Alan Moore, I blame you, purely because of your use of it in Halo Jones, all those years ago) - was precisely what I was looking for in that first Buffy issue: Fast, funny, and not reliant on you knowing continuities of anything before you started reading. The final showdown with Urkonn, in particular, resonated with the anything-can-happen feeling of Buffy at its best, along with the comedy of the finale of that scene. More than anything, it felt like the pilot for a series - I finished it and wanted to read more, almost immediately, but that's only a good thing. Perhaps when Whedon is less busy he'll get around to writing some more but, for now, this was solidly Very Good.

As if this wasn't Joss Whedon-y enough, his first issue of RUNAWAYS (#25) is also out this week, and it's... Well, it's Good, but pretty much a disappointment after Brian K. Vaughan's three-or-so years on the book. The pacing seems off, as does the dialogue, but more importantly, the bringing the book into the mainstream Marvel Universe doesn't work. On the previous two occasions that the characters were in New York, there was a feeling that it was something unusual and special, but this time, the Kingpin and Punisher appear and it's just underwhelming for some reason. The feeling may be gone, I guess, but that's not to say that I won't end up liking the new feeling.

Oddly enough, the most Buffy-esque book of the week for me might actually have SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #28. The first year of this book, and the last four or five months or so, have had a wonderfully episodic-television sense of pacing where each issue is complete in and of itself while still advancing the overall plot, with a blurb at the opening of each issue setting the scene for that continuing story as much as would be needed by any new readers. With the creative team heading towards the end of their run on the book, it's nice to see the clarity of focus that Mark Waid brought to his early issues come back, as well as the feeling that the book is about more than just superheroes in space - Both the first year arc, and this second major arc (although it went through a prolonged birth, thanks to fill-ins and what seemed to be Waid being exhausted by 52) have had an epic feel to them that's missing in most superhero books these days. Very Good again, thankfully.

What did the rest of you think about these books? You've probably picked up at least two of them... Click Here to Read More...

A couple from this week, then:

52 WEEK 48: The inevitable comes true, though the cover obviously telegraphs it. Ultimately, I tend to think this is a mistake -- there's few enough strong supporting characters in the world that MOntoya becoming a mask isn't the choice I would have made; but it does work well within the context of both the story, and her own personal arc. I was a little annoyed that "Gotham burns" (Again?!? How can ANYONE in that town afford property insurance?), and there's also something a little strange about Robertson's art, with it's big open page gutters -- at first I thought "is he drawing on the wrong sized paper or something?", but no, many of the pages have a full bleed out to the side. It's a weird stylistic choice, and one that distracted me a lot in the first half of the issue. I also think it would be cool if Kate actually dies, since that would be absolutely unexpected, though she's in the COUNTDOWN ad so probably not, huh? Anyway, quibble quibble quibble, but I still thought this was VERY GOOD.



BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER SEASON EIGHT #2: Yeah, that rocked. Really rocked. And was properly dense, too -- unlike last issue, this felt nearly like a complete TV episode in itself. There's an awkward transitional bit at the end there where it cuts away from Amy and Xander for a minute, but when it cuts back it's away from Xander's beat. But other than that? Letter perfect. My only question: I'm not sure I understood the Giles scene in the beginning? Where is he in relationship to Buffy? Not in the same place? But he's training a larger number of the slayer-ettes then Buffy seems to have around her? Muh? Anyway, an easy EXCELLENT.

I am STUNNED how well the book is selling, also -- our As-Big-As-CIVIL-WAR initial order lasted us 12 days (CW was about 6 weeks or so), we got in the Largest-Single-Reorder-of-a-Comic-That-We've-Ever-Placed for the second printing, and we're halfway through THAT pile already. #1 is easily my best selling 32-page comic in the last 10 years or so -- we're not quite back up to where we were in the SANDMAN days, but if we keep selling 3 or 4 copies a day, like we have been lately, we're going to get damn close...



AVENGERS THE INITIATIVE #1: It is competently done, but there's not really any sympathetic characters here (except for maybe Cloud 9, but I think that's more from pity than actual interest), which is a pretty big problem, I think, for an ongoing monthly. Even the situation isn't sympathetic -- people being taken against their will to a training camp, and, when something bad happens, its covered up. This is supposed to be America? I was also kinda shocked there's a scene of "here is your mask, you will NOT use powers without wearing it" for two reasons: a) that seems pretty counter-intuitive to the High Concept of having an accountable nationwide super-hero task force -- I'd think things would be largely the opposite, that all recruits would be issued a visible ID card with a "badge number" they'd hvae to display openly at all times. If I were an American citizen in the Marvel Universe, I sure wouldn't be up for my government handing out MASKS; b) it is immediately undercut a few pages later in the "training room" where not ONE of the seven characters involved wears a mask. I was also deeply bothered by the "we're confiscating your weapon" scene. Take the same scene, and instead of Never-Heard-Of-Her-Girl, cast, say, Iron Man in that spot. Still feel comfortable with it? "We'll just be taking this incredibly powerful tech from you. We're the government, you can trust us." I usually enjoy Slott's work, but this is really a badly thought-out opening sequence to an ongoing *Avengers* comic. As a mini, this might have been the right way to go (and, it got "upgraded" to ongoing when Marvel got the numbers in), but as a "Hey! Buy me for the next five years!" I'd take a serious pass. AWFUL.


OMEGA FLIGHT #1: Wow. I can't even BEGIN to imagine a world where a sovereign government (not on the brink of collapse, or coup, or otherwise facing direct and imminent extinction) would just blithely hand over the reigns of its single most important military asset to a foreign government. I mean, isn't this pretty insulting to Canadians? Especially having a jingoistic nutjob like the USAgent being the first recruit? And the very idea of Mr. I-nuked-Canada-once being draped in the Canadian flag and forced on the team seems, I don't know, beyond insulting? Walter's portrayed as a completely ineffectual, out of touch loser, and there's not even the courtesy of an explanation of how he survived his previous dashed-off death. But, really, the problem is: this portrays Canada as America's 51st state, with all of the due accord being #51 comes with! I am super-curious to hear what a Canadian thinks about all of this, because I'm kind of reading this with my jaw dropping that anyone at Marvel thought this scenario was a good idea. Maybe the best way to read both this, and AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE, are as horror stories. AWFUL

What did you think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

Right, let's "wrap up" last week -- PICK OF THE WEEK: I'm going to tie between two books I didn't actually write about (I didn't write about many comics this week, did I?): BLUE BEETLE #13, and USAGI YOJIMBO #101.

USAGI is USAGI -- every issue is terrific fun stuff full of intrigue and action and humor and chills. It is very nearly a textbook example of "how to do good continuing comics", and this issue is no exception. (issue #100 was an exception, but that's because it was about the comic rather than being a comic itself). I remember having a conversation with someone or another maybe 15-20 years ago about the "celebrity" of the comics artist, and how much money the "top" artists were making in Japan, and how wouldn't it be nice if some day American creators might do as well as Rumiko Takahashi was doing then? (this was before Image, obviously) Today we have a couple of folks that are beginning to enter those kind of rarified heights -- Frank Miller, I would assume; possibly Alan Moore, or some of his collaborators. I know at least one artist who never has to hustle any longer because of their SANDMAN royalties.

If there was any justice in the world, Stan Sakai would be in that bracket. Why do we live in a world where USAGI doesn't sell 50k an issue?

BLUE BEETLE is aother solidly fun book, in "learning the ropes of the supergame" as its core. Obviously things jostle around month-by-month, but this is almost certainly DC's best monthly solo-character super-hero comic -- it has heart, it's filled with fun action, and it is very focused on building its own ambitious mythology within the larger DCU. Everything you want in a super-hero comic, ultimately.

So hurray for both of them!


PCIK OF THE WEAK: Yeah, got to be WONDER WOMAN #6. Picoult, I'm sure, will "get" the verbal/visual blend before too long, but she ain't got it yet. I intensely dislike the current editorial direction of the book, and I can't believe that we've got Circe as the heavy given the first arc of the book. Foo!


BOOK / TP OF THE WEEK: BATMAN: SNOW is absolutely loverly work from Seth Fisher; GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH was a solid way to get Hal back into the DCU; and boy, it's nice to have GRENDEL: DEVIL BY THE DEED back in print (kinda weird that its the B&W version, wasn't expecting THAT), but the best book of the week is pretty obviously Bryan Talbot's ALICE IN SUNDERLAND. Go buy it.

And, believe it or not, I have a BOOK / TP OF THE WEAK, our first ever: DEAD HIGH YEARBOOK, horror GN aimed at kids (? Really? That's rougher than *I*'d let less-than-15 touch, but the ads for this GN, in this week's DC's [!] seem to suggest they think its for younger than that). I suppose if you've never read a horror comic before this could be fun, but they read about as well as, say, a Gold Key TWILIGHT ZONE story. And the framing sequence was just interminable. It does have GREAT production values -- look at that puffy cover, the bloody smudges on the edges of the page, and so on -- but the content was really dreadfully weak.

Semi-parenthetically to that, I read through CENTURY GUILD CHAMBER OF MYSTERY v1 with a number of pre-Code horror stories. And they are weird and lurid, but they're not really any good at all. What I found the most interesting though was the note in the indicia that said (from memory) "The contents of this book have been significantly modified, so as to constitute a new copyright", which struck me as down right odd and peculiar.

Not owning any of the originals in question, I couldn't tell you want they changed -- the lettering and art certainly looks period. I suppose it could be recolored, even. But could that possibly be enough to assert copyright on something you didn't create in the first place?

Anyway, more tonight.


-B Click Here to Read More...

I am, in far too many ways, a Jeph Loeb apologist. This isn't because I think that Loeb is some kind of underrated genius or anything - He isn't, although I maintain that his first six issues of Superman/Batman are a lost pop art gem - but just because I think that he gets waaay too much shit online. To read most of the things that have been written about him, you'd think that he was singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of the superhero comic through his work on things like Batman or Supergirl. It's pretty unfair, I think - There are some things that he's very good at; when it comes to big dumb old-school superhero epics that hit every fanboy erogenous zone without caring about such things as "logic", for example, he's pretty much in a league of his own (and I mean that as a compliment, believe it or not). It's just that there are some things that he's not so good at. Subtlety, for one.

Sadly, FALLEN SON: THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA #1 is the work of the Jeph Loeb who wants to be subtle and sensitive instead of the one who wants to knock your socks off. And it pretty much sucks.

You can tell that it's going to suck from the start of the book, which opens with the somber cover of Civil War: The Confession (Cap's blood-splattered shield!) above the title of the comic, followed by the somber cover of Captain America #25 (Cap's glove, with a handcuff around his wrist, against a blood-splattered newspaper!), proving that Marvel definitely tries to get the most value from their artists, didn't have any other use for those two pages, and want you desperately to feel how serious this comic is going to be. Sadly, that's then followed up with the first page of the story, which ends with dialogue so bad that you start to wonder if the two covers were there to postpone the story until the last possible minute:

"Nobody would want to see what I saw. Don't you get it? It was - - The death of Captain America."

The first thing on the next page? The words "The Death of Captain America" is red, white and blue. By page five of the comic, the phrase "The Death of Captain America" has appeared three times; it's as if someone got worried that you'd forget what comic you were reading, and took appropriate action. Sadly, this is the most interesting thing about the entire book - Everything from that point onwards is a downward spiral of pointlessness. The plot revolves around Wolverine not believing that Captain America is dead (Didn't he see the two reprint covers or the three mentions of the title of the comic?), and breaking into SHIELD headquarters to find out the truth along with Daredevil. Why does he need Daredevil, you may ask? Well, because Daredevil's heightened senses will help him question the man they think shot Cap. Sure, Wolverine himself has heightened senses that could probably do the same thing (Am I completely misremembering scenes where he could literally smell if someone was lying? I almost hope that I am), but then Lenil Yu wouldn't have the chance to draw a "cool" double page spread of Daredevil and Wolverine jumping over each other. By the end of the book, Wolverine finds a corpse (although we don't see the corpse's head except in silhouette, interestingly enough) and seems to be convinced, as he explains to Iron Man in a fine example of Loeb's increasingly odd dialogue:

"I don't see his shield. How you going to play this, Stark? That Steve Rogers is dead, but Captain America will live on? That's what you'd like, right? You people..."

Yes, it really does mix bold and italics like that, with the strange emphases; it's like that all through the book, for no immediately obvious reason, as in the following:

"You want me to go back and tell them. Anybody who had hope. Who are in denial. Luke Cage. Spidey. The other Avengers. That I've got proof."

As you can tell, by the end of the book, Wolverine is convinced that Cap is, indeed, dead - Good thing too, considering there's another four issues of this series left - but that still doesn't really give you enough story for 32 pages. It's literally "Wolverine doesn't believe he's dead. Then he sees the body, and he's convinced. The end." Everything else is what we've seen far too much of from Marvel since the start of Civil War: Characters telling each other how important the stories are. That's what the whole issue is about - The idea that Captain America is "really" dead, and that this is serious and for keeps this time (as emphasized at the open of the issue, when the formerly-dead Bucky and Wolverine discuss the fact that people don't tend to stay dead in the Marvel Universe). The only problem is, it's not for keeps; we all know that, and spending 32 pages to try and tell me any differently isn't going to convince me or seem like anything other than a waste of time, an insult to my intelligence, and an attempt to try and milk this storyline for all its worth. Awful, despite the pretty art by Yu. Click Here to Read More...

Yes yes, I'm a whiner.

Books were late AGAIN this week (about 3:45, so when Graeme came in at 4:30, I was still counting stuff in!)

Then I waited MORE THAN AN HOUR for the 24 (5 busses went North, none came back SOuth) -- you know how you wait for a bus for so long you realize you CAN'T start walking because as soon as you do, the bus will come roaring around the corner/over the hill/whatever? Yeah that one.

Anyway, I have nothing by runny brains right now, so... I'll be back tomorrow to do the last week wrapup, and the start of the next cycle....


-B Click Here to Read More...

Mentioned work was a big nightmarish, yeah?

SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN #36: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's first few issues really underwhelmed me, but I thought I'd pick this up to see how it's been since. I think the hook for this--a mysterious scientist is picking up orphaned youth and giving them spider powers to see just how anomalous Peter Parker is--was both kinda interesting and charmingly goofy (and the ultimate identity of the mysterious scientist successfully upped the interest and the goofiness). Despite the book's title, it's not really sensational, but it was surprisingly solid, highly OK, and I'll make it a point to check out next issue.

SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #4: Felt kinda dashed-off to me--particularly in Sale's art, which is frequently blocky (but rarely this clumsy), but also in Cooke's script, which just hasn't wowed me here. It's on time (I... think?) and not a fill-in, however, which is more than you can say for the other Super-books. Deeply Eh, if you ask me.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #40: God, it's kind of embarrassing to admit that I was enjoying this book more when Mark Millar was breaking out his usual big moment, comic-book-equivalent-of-power-chords shtick than when Mike Carey whips up intelligent, yet turgid, reinventions of minor FF villains but, to be honest, yeah, I think I did. I don't know if there's some verbal/visual blend that's off, or a mismatch in the creative team, or what, but the first five pages of every issue since Carey has taken over feel like a chore to read. Or maybe it's that the most dynamic interpretation of Diablo is still, let's face it, Diablo. Whatever it is, I found this sadly Eh.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #107: A really enjoyable little issue, as Bendis manages to skip all the expected high school drama from the Kitty-Peter showdown but still manages to make it dramatically interesting, and gives us a nifty, potentially complex set-up for a Kingpin story. Another really Good issue and seems like it's back on the rails for good (by which I mean, until the next time Bendis takes on too many assignments or something).

More tomorrow, and hopefully work won't feel like an elephnat standing squarely on my forehead by then.

Labels: Jeff

Click Here to Read More...

If ever there was a back-cover blurb to strike fear into the heart of the average reader, it's probably going to be one that starts "Guy Delisle is a wry 37-year-old French Canadian cartoonist..." Not, I should immediately add, that I have anything against Mr. Delisle himself, as you're just about to read. But there's just something so matter-of-fact and dry about that opening that your average - if you will - "punter" will read it and more than likely think "Wow, that sounds like something I'd avoid on NPR" and go on to the latest issue of Tarot or something to make fun of it. And that's a shame, because PYONGYANG: A JOURNEY IN NORTH KOREA is Excellent.

(A small aside, though, about that NPR line above. I was listening to This American Life the other week, and Ira Glass talked about hearing Summer Roberts from The OC describe his show as "that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are," and if I didn't already love This American Life, Glass's reaction would've sealed the deal for me: "I had this experience [after hearing that] where I was like, it was like having fictional characters from the Fox network saying... They said my name... And, like, did that just happen? It was totally just like, Is this on everybody's TiVo?" Arune, if you haven't heard this episode, you have to track it down - Glass then talks about his OC fandom (And I feel completely vindicated for loving the show, now; Ira Glass likes it, you snarky bastards) and admits that not only did he and his wife sing the theme song every week, but he also cried during the last episode. It's almost enough to make me sign up for Showtime to see the new TV version of TAL, I'm telling you.)

(Anyway, back to Pyongyang.)

It's not that there's anything wrong about that clinical back-cover blurb, as such - certainly, it's factually correct - it's just that there's so much more to the book than the just-the-facts presentation that the blurb provides. Yes, Delisle does "depict [the] sojourns into the heart of isolation" of working in North Korea as an animation producer while living in "'cold and soulless' hotel rooms where he suffers the usual maladies of the long-term boarder," but it's the way in which he does that that makes the book so special, so worth reading. Delisle's is both present and absent from the book, giving the book warmth and humor without overpowering the experience of the alien culture to the point where all you can perceive are his perceptions. He gives his opinion full rein on the people that he meets, and even on his work experience in North Korea, but allows the reader to make up their own minds when it comes to the oppressive regime of "the world's only Communist dynasty," as he calls it in a throwaway gag midway through the book. It's a skillful mix of reportage and memoir, each balanced perfectly against each other in a way that humanizes the reportage and legitimizes the memoir, if that makes sense - There are two pages towards the end of the book where another cartoonist takes over to tell one of their own experiences, because it adds to Delisle's own experience and also to his own fears and expectations of North Korea itself (perhaps going so far as to fulfill his fears). Going from those pages back to his own, the next line of dialogue is the perfect "It's always interesting to get another perspective on things!" which may be Delisle's guiding principle in the creation of this book.

The art also follows the same principle: Abstracted and cartoony enough so as to allow interpretation, but not so much as to genericize everything. For want of a better way of putting it, Delisle makes himself very French - a particularly European-looking cartoon for reasons I couldn't really explain coherently (It's something about the angles, and the nose in particular) - which helps him stand out against the more detailed Koreans he encounters. The greyscale wash adds weight (both visual and dramatic) to the simple linework, and the whole thing works in unison with the writing, invisible in the best way in service of the overall story.

It's a wonderful book, and highly recommended - I picked up my copy second-hand at Green Apple this weekend on one of my traditional "I have trade-in credit, so feel as if I can take a bit more of a chance on what I'm buying" visits, but as soon as I'd finished it, I immediately wanted to read Delisle's second travelogue, Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China even at full-price. And when you're as cheap as me, that means a lot. Click Here to Read More...

In a stunning return of a Savage Critic theme, I'm sick today. This isn't the usual kind of sickness that one or all three of us tends to befall, though; it's just food poisoning or something, although Kate keeps pointing out that she isn't sick, and she ate the same things as me yesterday. That said, she doesn't write for this blog, so perhaps her immune system is just inherently stronger than mine, who knows? And just as I'm about to post this, I see that Lester's said more or less the same things as me below. Dammit.

GUY RITCHIE'S GAMEKEEPER #1: Which, for those with long enough memories to remember Tekno Comics, is roughly equivalent to "Isaac Asimov's I-Bots," which is to say, Guy Ritchie was probably being harrassed continually by Richard Branson to come up with some kind of idea for a comic that would bear his name and came up with something that's less a plot or character concept as much as it is a rushed one-liner created out of desperation and the desire to be left alone.

(There's an interview with Ritchie at the back of the book that shows how little he gives a shit about the project in his use of exceptionally generic responses to each question - "By my creative nature, I am interested in the extreme, animated world... By its design, [comic storytelling is] animated, which to me implies that you can cut to the meat and potatoes and skip the first course." What does that even mean? And why does he keep calling comics animated? Does he even know that a comic isn't a cartoon? The answer to how he got involved with Virgin Comics is hilarious for all the wrong reasons: "Errhh, can't really remember... I think Gotham [Chopra, Virgin's CCO] gave us a call... I am drawn to the arena where film meets highly animated concepts. The call came at the right time.")

The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves the book with nothing worth reading at its center - There's nothing here that hasn't been done before, and although Andy Diggle does the best he can with such a cliched set-up - The gameskeeper on a Scottish estate is an honorable ex-soldier who has done terrible things! Because war is terrible! But now war has followed him to his new life! And now he has to get his hands dirty again! With lessons learned in war! Which is terrible! - it's nowhere near enough to keep your interest, except perhaps for trying to guess the next line of tough guy narration ("Only a fool would set up camp here. A fool... or a fugitive."). What's maybe more interesting is that everything that happens in this first issue would play much better as a movie, where the action sequences would have more noise and movement to excite, and the dialogue could be saved by performance, but more importantly, you'd get more than just the set-up for whatever comes next (I'm guessing violence and murky morality plays, but I may be wrong) in one sitting; if this issue wasn't a 32-page, $2.99 experience in and of itself but the opening twenty minutes of the next James Bond film or whatever, then I'd probably not have half the problems with it that I did.

It also wouldn't have Mukesh Singh's artwork, which is nice enough but completely wrong for the story; his colors in particular are waaay too bright for what's happening, even factoring in arty noir lighting and everything else - There is no reason for outside scenes to be bright blue when juxtaposed by internal scenes where everything is bright read; it overpowers the flow of the narrative, and just emphasizes how false the whole thing comes over as. The grass is bright green, the sky, bright blue, and it pulls you out of the story enough so that you see it as art that is accompanied by dialogue balloons, as opposed to a complete comic experience.* Overall, then, most definitely not the sum of its parts - Diggle has done better, Guy Ritchie used to be a semi-decent filmmaker once, and Singh would be better used elsewhere. Pretty much Eh, at best.

(* - Yes, I did have to stop myself from spelling comic "comix" just for the pun. Thank you for noticing.)

Tomorrow: A book I really liked, for once. Click Here to Read More...

Oh, man. The day job has been cuh-razy. Would you believe I've been meaning to post these for over seven hours?

But for those of us who aren't as number wonky as B:

CROSSING MIDNIGHT #5: As you may remember, last issue really hit its stride and this issue, while not quite as strong, continues the pace. After all, when you've got the origin of the word "yakuza," mysterious demonic pacts (both figurative and literal), a blind gang leader who has a hyperarticulate henchman explain everything as it unfolds, gorgeous art, and people being sliced to ribbons (oh, and I forgot to mention the line about having sex with strippers after violence to avoid infecting one's wife with negative chi), what more do you need?

No, really, what more do you need? If I had to guess, I'd say it needs a bit less helplessness on the part of its protagonists--like the children in fairy tales, their only power seems to be in bargaining with devils to overthrow each new threat. It's a disempowering read, precisely the opposite of your standard superhero wish-fullfillment. That's not bad, but it makes the book an even tougher sell--and tougher read--than it might be otherwise. Good stuff, but I hope it finds the right balance in its tone as time goes on...and that it has the time to do so.

DAREDEVIL #95: Lots of neat little bits--I liked that we got to see an argument between Foggy, Matt and Becky that actually got resolved, and was more than fodder for a subplot--but the bulk of the story concerns Melvin Potter, The Gladiator, who was probably the weakest of Miller's triumphs from his first run on Daredevil (Miller managed to give the character an extra dimension of pathos, thus bringing the Gladiator's sum dimensionality all the way up to...one). If you still find the old trope of prisoners teasing mentally deficient powerhouses believable or palatable, you'll find this a Very Good issue. I found it highly Good, myself, just built on a bit I don't have much patience for. We'll see if the creative team can woo me when part two of the story comes out.

DEVI #9: Haven't read this for at least nine issues--it went from looking like Witchblade to Witchblade Adventures at some point, which is more of a bummer than you might think. I'd be interesting in checking out the trade of this at some point--they try to make the characters at least a little bit emotionally complex--but this issue was more or less Eh.

DMZ #17: Sorta spaced out around Part 2 of this arc, came back for the end to see how things had progressed. It was interesting enough that I'll probably check out the trade and give you a review of the whole arc later. No Rating, but seemed promising.

ELEPHANTMEN #8: I thought it would be fair to Rich Starkings, after he was kind enough to post here twice, to check out this issue and review it but didn't get a chance. I'll try to get to it next week.

FANTASTIC FOUR #544: For an old school Marvel geek like me, this issue was probably worth it just for the "I mean, who hasn't met the Watcher by now? C'mon, raise your hand if you haven't met the Watcher!" bit. And I'm glad to see there's gonna be some follow-up to that Beyond mini. And the art was nice. So, you know, Good, although if you ask me, Dwayne McDuffie has a big ol' achilles heel and it's called Deathlok. I know he's necessary to get the ball rolling on the storyline but I wonder why, exactly, he had to come along other than, y'know, McDuffie's heel and all that...

GAMEKEEPER #1: So. A Chechen gamekeeper with a mysterious past is the only thing in the path of a mysterious strike team who are after the gamekeeper's employer, who has an even more mysterious past. As you can imagine, it's all so mysterious at this point as to be absolutely 100% generic. However, it is competently done, and I'm always a big fan of "dude with a mysterious past kicks ass of mysterious bad guys" so I'm willing to give it an OK and see what comes next. Weirdly, this and Hellblazer last week both feature characters who use so many anglicisms I'd swear Diggle wasn't from the U.K. Maybe he just overdoes it when trying to write slangy street-smart characters? Really weird.

GREEN LANTERN #18: Like G., I'm in the "art on this was lovely" camp--Acuna's work here makes me think of, I dunno, if Toth had worked in watercolors or something: the characters are all vital and expressive with dynamic brushwork, but there's also a lushness to it. Between it and the back-up story--which like a lot of the old Tales of the Green Lantern Corps stories was less a story and more a little slice of coolness--I'd say this was Good issue, even if the main story was both truncated and kinda cheesy. Click Here to Read More...

My last bit of work for the day (passing on reviews, as I think you can understand?), here is what is arriving to Comix Experience on Wednesday 4/4


52 WEEK #48
ALL NEW ATOM #10
AMERICAN VIRGIN #13
ANNIHILATION HERALDS OF GALACTUS SILVER SURFER FIRELORD
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #1 CWI
BOOKS WITH PICTURES #2
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #2
DANGER GIRL BODY SHOTS #1 (OF 4)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER BORN #3 (OF 7)
DETECTIVE COMICS #831
FALL OF CTHULHU MAVLIAN CVR A #1
FALLEN ANGEL IDW #14
FALLEN SON DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA WOLVERINE
FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #19
GHOST RIDER TRAIL OF TEARS #3 (OF 6)
HULK AND POWER PACK #2 (OF 4)
IMMORTAL IRON FIST #4
INCREDIBLE HULK #105
IRON MAN HYPERVELOCITY #4 (OF 6)
IRREDEEMABLE ANT-MAN #7
JACK OF FABLES #9
JONAH HEX #18
JUGHEAD #180
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA CVR A #7
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA CVR B #7
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #32
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #125
LOONEY TUNES #149
MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #1
MAINTENANCE #3
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #26
MARVEL ZOMBIES ARMY OF DARKNESS #2 (OF 5)
MIDNIGHTER #6
MS MARVEL #14 CWI
NEW EXCALIBUR #18
NIGHTWING #131
OMEGA FLIGHT #1 CWI (OF 5)
PAINKILLER JANE #0
PTOLUS CITY BY THE SPIRE #6 (OF 6)
PUNISHER #46
RAISE THE DEAD #1
RUNAWAYS #25
SAVAGE TALES #1
SCALPED #4
SECRET #3 (OF 4)
SONIC X #18
SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #2
STAR TREK NEXT GENERATION THE SPACE BETWEEN #3 (OF 6)
SUPERGIRL #16
SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #28
SUPERMAN #661
SUPERMAN BATMAN #33
TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #19
THUNDERBOLTS PRESENTS ZEMO BORN BETTER #3 (OF 4)
TMNT MOVIE PREQUEL 4 APRIL
TMNT MOVIE PREQUEL 5 LEONARDO
WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY #5

Books / Mags / Stuff
ABSOLUTE BATMAN THE LONG HALLOWEEN HC
ALPHA FLIGHT CLASSIC VOL 1 TP
ALTER EGO #67
AMERICAN SPLENDOR ANOTHER DAY TP
BATMAN DETECTIVE TP
BLEACH VOL 18 TP
BLUE BEETLE COMPANION SC
CONFESSIONS ROMANCES SECRETS & TEMPTATIONS SC
CROSS BRONX VOL 1 TP
DOMIN-8 ME GN (A)
ELKS RUN GN
ESSENTIAL SPIDER-MAN VOL 8 TP
G FAN #79
GREEN LANTERN PLASTIC BUST BANK (O/A)
HEAVY METAL MAY 2007
JONAH HEX VOL 2 GUNS OF VENGEANCE TP
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED BATMAN PLASTIC BUST BANK (O/A)
LEES TOY REVIEW APR 2007 #174
MURDER PRINCESS VOL 1 GN
OLD BOY VOL 5 TP
RED SONJA VOL 1 HC
SGT ROCK THE PROPHECY TP
SHAZAM VINTAGE MESH CAP
SHOWCASE PRESENTS LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES VOL 1 TP
SIX FROM SIRIUS VOL 1 MASS MKT CVR TP
SMOKE & MIRROR VOL 1 TP
SPAWN COLLECTION VOL 3 TP
SPIDER-GIRL VOL 8 DUTY CALLS DIGEST TP
TEENS AT PLAY SPOILED BRATS GN (A)
TEZUKAS BUDDHA VOL 6 ANANDA SC
TWO WHITE WIZARDS GN
UNUSUAL SUSPECTS ORIGINAL GN
WOLVERINE ORIGINS VOL 1 BORN IN BLOOD TP


What looks good to you?


-B Click Here to Read More...

I haven’t done a lot of charts here, mostly because the response is always so muted. I know only a small number of people have the Numbers Wonk gene, but if you’re one of those people, here’s a peek behind the curtain of Comix Experience, so you can see how things work. That’s because it’s paperwork day here at Casa Hibbs, and one of the things I’m working on is the April subscription orders.

Unlike a lot of stores, we ask subs to order month-by-month. You don’t say you want “Batman” – you say you want “Batman #665” followed by “Batman #666” and so on.

The following list is our top 40 sub orders for the month of April 2007. The deadline to turn this in was February 14th, so most of our customers made their decisions 6-8 weeks ago – this especially means on books that are on #2 or #3, sub counts tend to be lower as customers haven’t SEEN #1 with their own eyes yet. People tend to be willing to “take a flyer” on a new #1, much less so on the #2 and #3. Once you hit #4+, these numbers get increasingly accurate.

The first column is the numeric rank, the second column is the percentage of our total subscribers who ordered the book, and the third column is (obviously) the title. That is to say: our #1 preordered book for April (Astonishing #22) was preordered by 41% of our subscription customers.

Hopefully this will format OK as I transfer it from Excel to Word to Blogger. If not? Deal!

1 41% Astonishing X-Men #22
2 36% 52 Weeks 48-52
3 34% JLA #8
4 31% JSA #5
5 29% Batman #665
6 27% Justice #11
27% The Spirit #5
8 26% Daredevil #96
9 23% Brave & Bold #3
23% Fables #60
11 22% Hellboy: Darkness Calls #1
22% Buffy Season 8 #2
13 20% New Avengers #29
14 19% Detective #831
19% Shazam: Monster Society #3
19% Runaways #25
19% Ultimate Spidey #108
19% Uncanny X-Men #485
19% Thunderbolts #113
20 18% World War II #1-4
18% Midnighter #6
18% Iron Fist #5
18% Punisher Max #46
18% Ultimate Power #5
25 17% Teen Titans #46
17% Y, The Last Man #56
17% Ex Machina #27
17% Stephen King's Dark Tower #3
17% Ultimate FF #41
30 16% Green Lantern #19
16% Jack of Fables #10
16% The Boys #10
16% Mighty Avengers #2
16% X-Factor #18
35 15% BPRD Garden of Souls #2
15% Dr. Fate #1
15% Ultimate X-Men #81
38 14% Supergirl & LSH #15
14% Optic Nerve #11
14% Love & Rockets #19
14% Fantastic Four #545

Anything interesting pop out to you? (this isn’t a test or anything)

-B

Labels: retailing

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Here’s a list of the “top 40” comics “expected to arrive in April 2007”, and how I ordered them. These are my gut-reaction orders from about 8 weeks ago when I did my first pass through the catalog. These numbers may have switched around a bit at FOC time, but there’s usually not a TON of adjusting going on.

Like above, we’ve got three columns. Again, rank, followed by a let’s-use-Diamond’s-percentage-of-BATMAN-metric, followed by title.

(note: some of this WON'T ACTUALLY SHIP IN APRIL 2007!)


1 231% Buffy Season 8 #2
2 169% Astonishing X-Men #22
3 138% JLA #8
4 131% 52 Week #52
131% Stephen King's Dark Tower #3
6 123% 52 Week #50
123% 52 Week #51
123% Hellboy: Darkness Calls #1
9 115% 52 Week #48
115% 52 Week #49
115% JSA #5
12 108% Brave & Bold #3
108% Justice #11
14 100% Batman #665
100% Runaways #25
16 92% Mighty Avengers #2
92% Optic Nerve #11
92% World War II #1
92% World War II #2
92% World War II #3
92% World War II #4
22 86% Ultimate Power #5
23 77% Madman Atomic Comics #1
77% New Avengers #29
77% Shazam: Monster Society #3
77% The Boys #10
77% Wonder Woman #7
77% Wonder Woman #8
29 71% The Spirit #5
30 69% Daredevil #96
69% Uncanny X-Men #485
69% X-Men #198
33 66% Thunderbolts #113
34 62% Army @ Love #2
62% Avengers: The Initiative #1
62% BPRD Garden of Souls #2
62% Detective #831
62% Fables #60
62% Iron Fist #5
62% Love & Rockets #19
62% Marvel Zombies/Army of Darkness #2
62% newuniversal #4


As you can probably see, I’m a lot bolder than my preorders in some places – especially “civilian friendly” material and new books. And there’s some places I’m decidedly more timid.

-B

Labels: retailing

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Traditionally everyone stares the most at the quantity list. But, at a retailer, the DOLLAR list is probably more important. Same set up as above, but often different results.

(note: several of these have already been cancelled, or won't otherwise actually ship in 4/07!!)


1 231% Buffy Season 8 #2
2 216% Y, The Last Man v9 TP
3 175% Stephen King's Dark Tower #3
4 169% Astonishing X-Men #22
5 154% Shazam: Monster Society #3
6 138% JLA #8
7 126% Justice #11
8 123% Hellboy: Darkness Calls #1
9 122% Optic Nerve #11
10 115% JSA #5
11 109% 52 Week #52
12 108% Brave & Bold #3
13 103% 52 Week #50
103% 52 Week #51
15 103% Wonder Woman: Who is WW HC
16 100% Batman #665
100% Runaways #25
18 96% 52 Week #48
96% 52 Week #49
20 93% Love & Rockets #19
21 92% Wizard #187
22 92% Mighty Avengers #2
23 90% Mouse Guard v1 HC
24 86% Ultimate Power #5
25 82% 52 volume 1 TP
26 82% Art of Bone HC
27 77% World War II #1
77% World War II #2
77% World War II #3
77% World War II #4
77% Golden Age Dr. Fate Archives
32 77% Eternals by Gaiman HC
33 77% Alpha Flight Classic v1 TP
34 77% EC Archives: Shock SuspenStories v2 HC
77% The Plain Janes GN
36 77% Hellboy Companion TP
77% Madman Atomic Comics #1
77% New Avengers #29
77% The Boys #10
77% Wonder Woman #7
77% Wonder Woman #8

Any thoughts?

Here’s one from me. By SUBS, OPTIC NERVE #11 is a Top 40 hit. By quantity ordered, it is a Top 20 hit. By the amount of money I expect to make from it… it’s a Top 10 book.

-B

Labels: retailing

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DC's 52 may be a year without Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman, but by coincidence and the magic of fill-ins to try and get books back on schedule, this week couldn't make that claim. Admittedly, now that there are four Batman books and four Superman books (although those numbers both include the All-Star books), every month should, in theory, be able to have a week starring the Big Three...

ACTION COMICS #847: I think Hibbs and Lester have already covered most of my feelings about this fill-in - It's well-written, and more substantial than the filler than you may have expected considering its "between the panels of the ongoing story" origin, and provides a return to the classic "Superman is a hero throughout the universe" feel that really hasn't been around in the main books for years - but what really stood out in this high-Okay book for me was the art: Renato Guedes has provided some fill-in art through other DC books over the last year, but his effort here, where he also does the coloring, is really rather wonderful - I'm looking forward to the next three months-worth of Action fill-in now, just to see how lovely the art looks.

BATMAN #664: See, and this is what I expect from Grant Morrison's Batman, unlike the last issue text piece. Dense, sarcastic, throwing camp back into the bat-bowl with abandon ("He says you're cool, like James Bond." "Oh, I'm much cooler than he is," followed by a two page action scene that is very clearly a Bond rip-off), while the two sections of the issue seem to point towards the idea that there's more of a continuing story throughout Morrison's run than was apparent until now. Very Good, and wouldn't it be nice if this is Morrison getting back on track now that 52 is winding down...? Maybe we'll even see some of the missing Wildstorm books before too long.

WONDER WOMAN #6: This is a weird one; there's a lot wrong with this issue, as Hibbs has pointed out already - Since when was Diana so naive, and the Circe reveal at the end of the issue (complete with her amazing shrinking leg, a bum note in otherwise pretty strong art by Drew Johnson - I'd like to see him come back to this title on a regular basis if the Dodson's can't stick around) ruins the one thing left to spoil about the end of Allen Heinberg's unfinished arc - but nonetheless, I actually really enjoyed it. If you can completely ignore everything about continuity or common sense, as I was somehow able to do, then there's a kind of goofy charm to this. It may not actually be good, but somehow it manages to seem Good, if that makes sense.

What's interesting about these three books is the variety of tones between them - Batman and Wonder Woman are both kind of dumb and not-to-be-taken-too-seriously, I guess, but Batman in a more "arched eyebrow" way against Wonder Woman's innocence (both the character and book; it reads like a curiously sincere attempt at the character, even though it also reads out-of-character. Maybe it's that sincerity that I responded to?) - I've seen some complaints online about the lack of consistency in DC's superhero books recently, and Mark Millar's comments that he doesn't know what's going on in the DC Universe anymore, but I tend to see this thing as a strength: Why should a line of 30+ (and I'm being conservative, but I can't think offhand of how many superhero books DC publishes each month and can't be bothered to check) books have one feel, or one throughline of story? As much as I may be responding to some of the post-Civil War Marvel Universe (Hello, Fantastic Four), that's much more to do with the individual creators' efforts than any kind of linewide "new status quo" that's been forced upon everything. I don't know; is this my inherent DC-centricness coming to cloud my mind? Would everyone else want to see some kind of superconsistency in tone on all DC's books? Click Here to Read More...

Tzipora wonders why I go to bed at 1 am every night, and it's because it is midnight and I'm still typing.

BUT, now that it is Midnight, that means it is April 1, which means you're going to read a lot of stupid stuff on the 'net today that you shouldn't believe. This one is real, however.

Comix Experience is 18 years old today. Give her a round of applause!

(you have no idea how old this makes me feel, by the way)


-B

Labels: retailing

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