So there's two ways to look at FINAL CRISIS #1.

The first way is as the end of a "trilogy" of Crisii; the culmination of Dan Didio's editorial vision which, at this point, would make this issue #122.

(to whit: TITANS/YOUNG JUSTICE: GRADUATION DAY [3 issues], IDENTITY CRISIS [7], COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS [1], DAY OF VENGEANCE [6], VILLAINS UNITED [6], RANN/THANAGAR WAR [6], OMAC PROJECT [6] and the [4] part SUPERMAN/WONDER WOMAN crossover that spun from that, plus another special for each of those four series [4], THE RETURN OF DONNA TROY [4], INFINITE CRISIS [7], COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS [51], SALVATION RUN [7], DC UNIVERSE #0 [1], DEATH OF THE NEW GODS [8])

(That's me being nice and not counting AMAZONS ATTACK, or 52, or all of the individual crossover issues that happened in various comics, or event things like the JLA "Crisis in Confidence" storyline. You could certainly make the case that this is the 250+th issue if you're less charitable)

(And, of course, that's not counting the 30 issues of SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY, which really feel more like the lead-in to this than most of that other stuff...)

There's a lot of me that thinks that is a very very fair way indeed to look at it because that's exactly how they pitched it, and, to a large degree, the very title of "Final Crisis" puts that very weight upon it.

By that thinking, yes, I think this comic is largely a failure -- it is a slow build, it doesn't appear to have any direct focus, has seemingly important things happen in a small small, and lets seemingly unimportant things happen at a dawdling pace. It also appears to either directly contradict, or just ignore things that have happened in the last 2-6 months in the DCU universe -- the New Gods have already been dropping like flies, why is the GLC and JLA just noticing now as if it were the first time? Since SALVATION RUN is shipping late, a lot of these characters really should be running around, right? Where's the C-List Monitor Posse, starring Ray Palmer, who said they'd be the ones Monitoring the Monitors? And so on.

Plus, as Graeme notes, there ain't no explosions. And yeah, I think it a company universe-spanning crossover, especially one with a name like "Final Crisis" there shore should be some of dem purty spolsives, lordy yes!

I mean, honestly, after reading the issue, my first, gut-level reaction was "Well, where's the 'Crisis'?"

So, from the "Man, we've been reading the unending event from like 2003 now, where's my payoff?" POV, I can't give much more than an EH for this first issue.

But of course, the other way to look at it is without the weight of expectations, to completely let the last year of comics slip out of your brains, to not have the weight of a "Crisis" upon it, and just judge the book by itself.

And as that kind of reader, I'd call this a fairly GOOD book.

Because I think if it had come along with a different name, or not had a year-long lead-in (kinda sorta), or not been pushed as the conclusion of a trilogy, or even not come out in comparison with Marvel's string of similar events -- if people did not have the weight of expectations upon them, then I think the general internet reaction would have been very different.

Another book with a big Weight upon it was GIANT-SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN #1, the big wrap-up to the Whedon/Cassaday story. And it, too, suffers I think, because of it. After all of the long ass waiting for it, I think it fails to impress, but that is because of the long-ass wait. I suspect someone reading it in TP form for the first time is going to think that was a pretty solid story and a GOOD ending to the run; me, I've been living with that wait, so it too was kind of EH, for me.

What did YOU think?

-B

Labels: Brian

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Reading FINAL CRISIS #1 after having read some advance reviews of it (and listening to the opinions of friends who’d read advance copies both obtained legally and otherwise), I fully expected to be disappointed by it; I kept seeing that it sucked, was too confusing, that nothing happened, and so on and so on, and I was convinced that it’d be another product of the Morrison mind that knows what it wants too well, so much that it sometimes skips telling other people what’s going on. Instead, I came away from it thinking that it was a Good opener, and wondering if most people these days just want simpler, explosion-filled, stories.



First things first; Am I the only person who read it and thought that it felt as if Countdown To Final Crisis and all the related spin-offs had been reverse engineered from the initial script way back when? There are the Monitors, talking about the destruction of Earth-51, after all, and there’s Orion, dying… but none of it really hinges on the Countdown events, and in most cases, works better when you ignore them altogether (Especially the Monitor scenes, which suggest that the independence of the Monitors has been around for a lot longer than less than a year, considering they seem to have constructed a legal system of sorts. Also, Nix is being punished for… what, exactly? Being somehow responsible for the destruction of Earth-51, when he definitely wasn’t, from what we saw in Countdown). Despite some complaints, I found it less confusing to approach the majority of this issue as if I’d not read Countdown or Death of the New Gods, because you get all the main things you actually need to know in the (somewhat melodramatic; Jog’s right, this is definitely Morrison channeling his JLA run again for good and bad, all broad strokes and epic scale) dialogue.

Overall, I liked that it was scattered and frenetic, which I’ve seen complaints about – There’s still a sense that it isn’t entirely random, despite the different pieces (We see the first and last boys on Earth getting messed with by Metron in different ways, interestingly enough; is this a comment on some baseline humanity tinkering that the New God is up to, or a throwback to the shrinking of time at the edges from something like Zero Hour? More easter eggs for longtime fans that can be read without that knowledge by everyone else, just seeing a caveman and a boy in some post-disaster New York City), after all, and it opens up the story and introduces the themes while keeping things fairly grounded. What it lacked, however, was what Secret Invasion #1 provided in spades: Big explosions and immediate threat for our marquee heroes. I don’t care about that – I liked the slow burn threat and creepiness of anti-life children, crystal Metron and serial killing of superhumans well enough, thanks – but I can’t help but wonder if a lot of the complains about this first issue come from those who expected more of a direct competitor to Marvel’s louder opening issue. Never mind the quiet, depressing murder of J’Onn J’Onzz (which was somehow even worse for the almost off-handed manner in which it took place), I wonder whether some people would’ve been happier to see Snapper Carr betray the League to Libra and blow up the Hall of Justice again…

(The worst thing about the book is, for me, the art. Oh, don’t get me wrong; parts of it are glorious, but the scene with Vandal Savage talking to Libra seemed oddly rushed and/or inked by someone else entirely… It stood out, and not in the way it was probably intended to. Is this the dreaded deadline doom hitting in the very first issue… or something much more sinister?)

Labels: Graeme

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All Star Superman #11:



Yeah, Morrison's best this week.

I mean, Final Crisis #1 was OKAY and all; it basically read like the start of one of Morrison's old JLA storylines, only with the very slick stylings of J.G. Jones backing it up. More humor than expected, along with a couple character deaths that're abrupt enough that I'm not sure we're supposed to feel shocked. I smiled at Dark Side wiping his face, since I'm a Seven Soldiers nerd. But it also came off as firecracker-thin as JLA sometimes did, particularly while the stories were still in the setup stage.

And Batman #677 was as EH as Morrison's Batman tends to be in single-chapter form, packed with tense, prodding conversations ill-served by an art team that isn't stellar with emotional nuance. Decent twist on the nature of the Black Glove in there, one that fits Morrison's running themes really well, but the story didn't have much else to it beyond overlong musings on the nature of Batman, broken up by fragmented threats - it's all starting to feel like Born Again as smashed into Mask, that old Bryan Talbot story from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight where Bruce Wayne is laying in a hospital bed and the doctors are telling him he's only hallucinated his adventures as Batman to escape his horrible shit life. God, that one messed me up back in '92.

But All Star Superman? That one's got an ace up the sleeve it plays right on page one:



That's a great panel. Everything about it is awesome. The crazy dramatic hatched shadows, the zone of white light, the giant lever Lt. Handlebar has to pull to get old sparky roarin' while he makes dramatic note of the expiration of Lex Luthor's time among us... but it's the mustache that completes the scene. Let's be serious about that.

There's other reasons why this comic is GOOD. It's the penultimate issue of the series, so you'd probably expect it to be about the right time for a reprise of the Superman/Luthor relationship, as detailed back in issue #5 - you'd be right, and just about every Luthor page kills. I don't think it's spoiling much to reveal that Lex's execution goes terribly awry, but the action only serves to house some really fine supervillain character moments. I particularly liked his boast about curing cancer -- not only something he clearly has no plans to follow through on, but something Superman just did last issue -- and the continuing lies about the origin of (issue #3's) superpower serum.

Luthor, of course, is the ultimate skewed double of Superman in a series packed with them - if last issue showed Superman striving to bring out the finest in humankind, Luthor embodies his worst possible failure, a person made just about the Super-equal while retaining absolutely none of the kind qualities. The issue's portrayal also sports the most thorough mirroring the series has managed: a fortress packed with memorabilia and curious toys, a militia of robot helpers, and even his own goddamned evil sun, the help in "high places" first hinted at in issue #4.

Yet it's all an act -- Luthor stole his powers, and merely cut a deal with his sun -- and Morrison happily peppers his lines with childlike flourishes seemingly on loan from All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder ("You knuckle-dragging retards." "So how cool am I?"), but isn't any Frank Miller signal for fun. It's the essence of immaturity, of a Man unprepared to be Super.



On the other hand, not everything in this issue is about Lex Luthor, and not everything is as strong. Sure, I got a kick out of a 'red skies' gag showing up the same week as Morrison's own contribution to the Crisis series, and Frank Quitely is always great at tucking away special details that'll take more than one read to spot, like Bar-El from issue #9 terrorizing Phantom Zone criminals, or that photo of young Clark & friends slabbed so as to accomplish the plot of issue #6. While you're at it, compare Quitely's issue #1 Superman to the guy we're seeing here, and check out how his physical state has decayed.

But I think all the referencing here exacts a bit of toll from the story. A good deal of space is taken up with Superman's clash with Solaris the Tyrant Sun, a character that typically works great until it actually has to show up on the page and do stuff, at which point there's rarely much to do with it. It is funny when Quitely draws its big blue eye squinting when Superman socks its belly(?), but the whole sequence does little more than reestablish the loyalty of Superman's pals -- including a dramatic sacrifice Morrison laboriously foreshadows -- while haphazardly reminding us of the Superman's New Powers plot thread that's been hanging since shortly after issue #1.

It's not unentertaining, but it registers as conspicuous consumption of space when set against more interesting content - never mind the hint of a convenient resolution to the series' main conflict having drifted in from outer space! Still more than enough to keep you perked up for the grand finale, though - and in August there won't even be a Crisis to upstage.

Labels: Jog

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Thank God for that holiday weekend, which allowed me to… what’s the word? Oh, yeah, breathe. Perhaps it’s the ancient curse of May that’s been making myself and everyone I know so busy over the last couple of weeks, or maybe it’s that downturn in the economy making everyone work harder so that they keep their jobs. All I know is, there’re reviews once you hit that “More” button.



AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #560: Marcos Martin may be the ideal Spider-Man artist around these days whose name isn’t John Romita, judging from his work on this and the last issue, but that doesn’t really help this book break out of its only-Okay rut. I feel guilty for not liking this as much as I could; Dan Slott’s script is fine and built off of some fun concepts (I like Peter Parker as paparazzi, and find his holier-than-thou friends kind of amusing, if confusing, in their response to his new job), but it still feels like a solid but unremarkable issue from the mid-70s, you know? Having a cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until after the skip week is a new, and somewhat unwelcome, twist; it just emphasizes how random the “three times a month” schedule actually is – Why not just do it weekly, if you’re going to all that effort anyway?

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #13: As Mark Waid’s run starts winding down, we get the first truly done-in-one issue without running subplots, and it’s… Okay. The problem isn’t the interplay between the heroes (which is well done, and I like seeing the less-dickish Batman), but the threat, which is – perhaps necessarily, considering the fact that it has to be introduced and resolved in one issue? – cardboard and unconvincing. I’d be happier if Waid just got to do 22 pages of Jay and Batman sitting around, having a chat, I think.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #38: After spending the weekend reading Essential Captain America volumes 3 and 4, I felt properly ready to read the return of (spoiler!) the crazy 1950s Cap. That said, reading those books also made it much clearer how well Ed Brubaker is updating the book and concept while remaining true to its history; you can see the Steve Englehart influence all through the current issue when you know where to look, and I mean that as a compliment. I’m still not sure entirely where he’s going with this storyline – partially because, the more we see of him, the more I like Bucky as Cap – but if he keeps up the Very Good quality, I’ll stick around to find out.

FANTASTIC FOUR #557: It’s like listening to someone trying to sing a song that they’ve never heard, but have read the Wikipedia entry of, isn’t it? You kind of know what Millar and Hitch are aiming for, but they’re just…not getting it right. I can’t even really put my finger on why, either… It just reads too… I don’t know, calculated? Cynical? There’s a lack of genuine joy in it, for some reason, and lack of momentum, as well. Awful, then.

THE FLASH #240: Meanwhile, this book seems to be getting back on track after a shaky last few issues. Freddie Williams’ art takes a turn for the Art Adams (It’s got to be the appearance of the giant ape that does it), and Tom Peyer seems to be getting more of a grip on the characters (and why they may have been out of character earlier on)… I’m not convinced about the new Darkseid appearing out of nowhere and snatching the Flashkids, but I guess we have to have our Final Crisis tie-in somewhere… Okay.

IRON MAN, DIRECTOR OF SHIELD #29: Stuart Moore takes over the book for a guest-stint and it’s weirdly familiar after reading Matt Fraction’s new Iron Man a couple of weeks ago – Again, we have a villain who’s as smart as Tony that he’s responsible in some way for creating. Nonetheless, it works; Moore’s take on Stark is less hero-worshipping than regular writers the Knaufs, and regular artist Roberto De La Torres’ art is, as ever, beautiful to look at. Dean White’s colors are worth pointing out, as well; he matches the line art’s look wonderfully (He also does a great job in Mighty Avengers this week). Another Good tie-in to the enjoyable movie? Who knew?

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #21: Ahhh, so that whole “Sightings” banner is going to be used on pointless filler issues that set up other storylines in uninspiring ways? Good to know. Don’t get me wrong, Carlos Pacheco’s art is nice to look at and Dwayne McDuffie’s dialogue is snappy enough, but still – Was there some point here beyond “Hey! These guys are going to be important in Final Crisis #1!” that I missed? A low Okay for the craft alone.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #15: The pluses: That last page teaser, returning from the first issue. The minuses: Are we still doing this long, seemingly aimless, Gog storyline? Eh, I guess, but I wish this had some sense of heading in any direction whatsoever.

THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #14: Secret Invasion is turning out to be a very strange thing, much more enjoyable in theory than in practice. Take the Avengers tie-ins, for example; the idea of using the books to fill in backstory not necessary but useful for the core title is a good one, but everything we’ve seen so far has had an air of indulgent uselessness – Does it really take an entire issue to have the Skrulls realize that the Sentry is mentally unstable and easy to trick? There feels like there’s much more interesting backstory out there to be mined (When exactly did the Invasion start, for example? Who were the first to be replaced? What has happened to those who have been replaced? Why did the Skrulls not act during Civil War or World War Hulk?), but that’s probably all going to be handled in the main book, leaving these issues to be filled with stories like this one, or the slow “Nick Fury gathers together another team of Teenage Superheroes” of the last issue of New Avengers, that are just… Eh.

(And because I wasn’t around to talk about it at the time, Secret Invasion #2? Was there some kind of “Well, things happened in the first issue, so I’ll make sure nothing happens in this second one so that I don’t exhaust the fans” thing happening there?)

STAR TREK: ASSIGNMENT EARTH #1: IDW, I don’t know if it’s you or John Byrne or whoever, but someone needs to take more care scanning that art in so that it’s not as pixilated and jaggy as it is here. Also, if someone could take some time and maybe get a colorist who’d be willing to add some kind of complexity to Byrne’s mostly-backgroundless art, then everything would be much better. Also also, if you could rewrite the book so that it wasn’t so generic and Awful, that’d be great as well. Kthanxbai.

Coming this week: Final Crisis! Marvel 1985! And the potential disappointment that is Joss Whedon’s last X-Men issue!

Labels: Graeme

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Here's a pretty brutal week for comics - we're receiving three comics that are triple digits in sales, and three trades with double digit orders -- and there's tons of other stuff, too!

PLEASE REMEMBER: because of the Memorial Day holiday, comics are 24 hours late this week, and are on sale on THURSDAY, May 29th! Don't go into your local comics shop on Wed looking for new books -- they'll laugh at you behind your back!

2000 AD #1585
2000 AD #1586
ACTION COMICS #865
ALL STAR SUPERMAN #11
ANGEL REVELATIONS #1 (OF 5)
ANGRY YOUTH COMIX #14
ARCHIE #585
ARMY OF DARKNESS XENA WHY NOT #3 (OF 4)
ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #6
BATMAN #677 RIP
BATMAN GOTHAM AFTER MIDNITE #1 (OF 12)
BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #161
BLUE BEETLE #27
CALIBER #2 (OF 5) (NOTE PRICE)
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #45
DAN DARE #6 (OF 7)
DAREDEVIL #107
DARKNESS VS EVA #3 (OF 4)
DRAFTED #7
EMILY THE STRANGE II BE ALL YOU CAN BE #3
FABLES #73
FINAL CRISIS #1 (OF 7)
FIREBREATHER SERIES #1
FUTURAMA COMICS #37
GIANT SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN #1
GREEN LANTERN #31
HELEN KILLER #2 (OF 4)
HERCULES #2 (OF 5) (NOTE PRICE)
HUNTRESS YEAR ONE #2 (OF 6)
IMMORTAL IRON FIST #15
INDIA AUTHENTIC #13 LAKSHMI
JENNA JAMESONS SHADOW HUNTER #3 HORN CVR (RES)
JSA CLASSIFIED #38
JUGHEAD #189
KING SIZE HULK #1
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #42
MARVEL 1985 #1 (OF 6)
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #36
MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #13
MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS #9
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED MOBY DICK #4 (OF 6)
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED PICTURE DORIAN GRAY #6 (OF 6)
MS MARVEL #27 SI
NEW AVENGERS #41 SI
NEW BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SEASON ZERO #8
NEW WARRIORS #12
NIGHTMARES AND FAIRY TALES #23
NORTHLANDERS #6
NUMBER OF THE BEAST #4 (OF 6)
POWER PACK DAY ONE #3 (OF 4)
RESURRECTION #5
ROGUE ANGEL TELLER OF TALES #4
SALEM #1 (OF 4) CVR A
SECRET HISTORY THE AUTHORITY HAWKSMOOR #3 (OF 6)
SHADOWPACT #25
SHE-HULK 2 #29
SNAKEWOMAN CURSE OF THE 68 #4 (OF 4)
SONIC X #33
SPEAK O/T DEVIL #6 (OF 6)
ST TNG INTELLIGENCE GATHERING #5 (OF 5)
STAR TREK YEAR FOUR ENTERPRISE EXPERIMENT #2
STAR WARS DARK TIMES #11 VECTOR PART 5
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF OLD REPUBLIC #29 EXALTED PART 1 (OF 2)
SUPERNATURAL RISING SON #2 (OF 6)
SWORD #8
TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #50
TEEN TITANS #59
TEEN TITANS GO #55
THOR #9
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #122
UNCANNY X-MEN #498 DWS
USAGI YOJIMBO #112
WOLVERINE FIRST CLASS #3
X-FORCE #4 DWS
X-MEN FIRST CLASS VOL 2 #12
X-MEN LEGACY #212 DWS
YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS #5 (OF 6)
ZOMBIE TALES #1 CVR A

Books / Mags /Stuff
BIONICLE GN VOL 01
BLACK ADAM THE DARK AGE TP
COMIC BOOK COVER PORTFOLIO #1 WOMEN OF THE DCU
COMICS JOURNAL #290
COMPLEAT NEXT MEN TP VOL 01
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS TP VOL 01
ESSENTIAL RAMPAGING HULK TP VOL 01
HEARTBURST & OTHER PLEASURES TP
HELLBOY TP VOL 08 DARKNESS CALLS
HEROES SC
IMMORTAL IRON FIST PREM HC VOL 02 CITIES OF HEAVEN
JACK KIRBYS OMAC ONE MAN ARMY CORPS HC
JUDENHASS GN
JUSTICE TP VOL 01
JUXTAPOZ VOL 15 #6 JUNE 2008
NEARLY COMPLETE ESSENTIAL HEMBECK ARCHIVES OMNIBUS
NO PASARAN GN VOL 03
PREVIEWS VOL XVIII #6
PRISM COMICS LGBT GUIDE TO COMICS MAG 2008
RETURN TO WONDERLAND HC
ROBOT GN VOL 05
ROSWELL TEXAS GN VOL 01
SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN TP VOL 03
SKYSCRAPERS O/T MIDWEST HC
STARMAN OMNIBUS HC VOL 01
STUDIO SPACE SC
SUPERMAN WORLD OF KRYPTON TP
TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD ARCHIVES TP VOL 01
WIZARD MAGAZINE #201 SUMMER PREVIEW CVR
WOLVERINE ORIGINS TP VOL 04 OUR WAR

What looks good to YOU?


-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

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Labels: Jog

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From time to time, it's been suggested in our comments that we post follow-up reviews of story arcs after reviewing them in issue-by-issue fashion for so long, as a way to see whether or not the whole thing came out in the wash. The Inventory doesn't quite do that but it's close: I'm so far behind on my non-manga reading that I thought I might review a batch of purchased issues of a single title at one go and see how they shape up.

First up, The Immortal Iron Fist #10-#14, plus The Immortal Iron Fist annual.

As you may remember, I've been a fan of Iron Fist from way, way back (like back when Claremont and Byrne first worked on the character) so I was delighted when writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, and artist David Aja tackled the character by crafting a story arc that re-examined the character's origin and took it as the jumping off point for an epic story that spun backwards in time even as it moved forward.

Part of what thrilled me about that it was unabashedly such a classic piece of Marvel storytelling: when I was growing up, Marvel characters were always having their origins re-examined, the gaps of believability being grouted over with more backstory and, whenever possible, more continuity. (The examples that stand out the most for me are both from Steve Englehart: his sprawling storyline in Avengers that revealed the true history of the Vision; and that great Captain America story that puts the Captain America of Marvel's '50s comics in continuity.) That stuff will probably always resonate with me, but never more so than when I was at the age where I was starting to figure out the underlying cause and effect in the world around me. There comes some point when it really sinks in that everything existed before you came into the world, and that everything has a history, and the effect is a little bit like those Marvel epics: even as you're moving forwards, this epic backstory of the world is spinning out before you simultaneously.

The first six issues of The Immortal Iron Fist have Danny Rand, the current Iron Fist, meet Orson Randall, the previous Iron Fist, and discover the true nature of his origin. At the end of it, he's whisked away to the magical city of K'un L'un where he was raised, so he may fight in the Tournament of Heavenly Cities. Issues #7-14 show that tournament, re-introduce us to K'un L'un and the political struggle behind its facade, introduce the other Heavenly Cities which are tied to K'un L'un, as well as the champions of those cities, fill in the backstory with Danny's dad and Davos, the villain of the first arc, and, in the end, set the warriors of the tournament and the warriors of K'un L'un against the forces of Hydra.

It's all audacious as hell, jammed to the gills with characters and action, cool fights and finishing moves. Even with the wit and insouciance of Fraction's dialogue, these issues of Immortal Iron Fist feel like Scott Pilgrim's deadpan cousin: Hong Kong movies from the '80s and '90s, video games, and Marvel comics all hold equal sway over the proceedings. At its best, the book becomes almost operatic while still being cobbled of out of little more than thirty years of beloved pop culture detritus.

Yet, weirdly, by the time I'd plowed through issues #10-14 (and the Annual, must not forget the Annual), I found myself simultaneously satiated and hungry, pleased and grouchy, content and unsettled. While comics have many, many advantages over movies and videogames, several of the biggest differences can work to their disadvantage: neither movies nor video games are assembled in a linear fashion, and the work on the slam-bang finale can be the first task undertaken. Also, comics both benefit and suffer from being the product of a much smaller team of creative personnel--when a member of the team takes a powder or loses interest, the change in the product is noticeable.

All of which is a fancy-dan way of saying that in issue #10, artist David Aja contributes fifteen pages, and Kano contributes five. By issue #13, Aja contributes three pages, Kano contributes six, and Tonci Zonjic the other eleven. And in the big finale, Kano does five pages, Clay Mann does five, Tonci Zonjic does the remaining twenty, and Aja is nowhere to be seen. (Unless he did the cover--why the hell aren't they crediting the cover artist on these books?)

Now, Zonjic has a clear, clean style--and Matt Hollingsworth's colors (which are so superlative throughout the entire series he deserves to be counted as one of the key creative personnel) help provide a visual unity with the preceding issues--but Aja's work gains its power from fluidly moving from elegantly simple linework to byzantine detail, and often in the same panel, in a way that underlined the ambitions of the book: Immortal Iron Fist similarly swings from the simplicity of a big, gaudy kung-fu fight book to a richly backstoried epic in almost as short a span. And so the big final issue, with all of the legendary warriors fighting side-by-side in Zonjic's clear, clean style, has a flattened feeling to it, just because a dimension has visually dropped out.

Additionally, the "Seven Capital Cities of Heaven" arc manages to more or less forget about the main character entirely, which is something Marvel's '70s epics never did. While some of this is because Brubaker and Fraction are too dutiful to succumb to mere hackwork--after setting up the reader's expectation that Iron Fist will fight against six other awesome kung-fu adversaries in the Tournament of Heavenly Cities, they have Danny lose his first match and remove him from the action--I can't help but feel, despite the writers' insistence in interviews, Brubaker and Fraction don't have much interest in Danny Rand.

Indeed, the real center of the piece turns out to be Davos, who starts off as a villain in search of vengeance, and ends up conflicted, torn between his self-righteous anger and the opportunity to truly act righteously. Issue #14 of Immortal Iron Fist really turns on that choice, and it's the resolution of his story that gives the arc tremendous power. It's kind of like if Lucas had done Star Wars right, and we really had started the story thinking it was about Luke Skywalker and finished it realizing it was actually all about Darth Vader.

And yet: couldn't the arc have also been about Danny Rand? As much as I appreciate that Brubaker and Fraction make Danny a genuine hero, noble and self-sacrificing and kind, I'm sort of frustrated they are either unable or unwilling to figure out what to do with the character apart from discover his origin. As Claremont and Byrne did before them, they surround the character with the flashiest supporting cast around. By the end of the arc, it's not enough that Danny already has an ex-girlfriend who's a detective with a bionic arm, a best friend who is a steel-skinned superhero, and a good friend who's partners with the bionic-armed ex and has been trained as a sword-wielding samurai--he ends up accompanied to Earth by the five other champions from the Tournament of Heavenly Cities. Danny Rand, Brubaker and Fraction seem to be saying, is basically a kung-fu Richie Rich from a magical city: after you've spent a story or two on that gimmick, you've got to bring in Robota and Dollar and Jackie Jokers, all of whom also come from magical cities, but who have an endless number of cool finishing moves that are fun to think up and splash across action panels. You have to keep attaching cool geegaws to hide that the center is dramatically inert. And that may be the case, but I didn't get the sense the creators were trying very hard to see if that was actually true or not. (That the creative team is pulling up stakes so soon after the conclusion of this story lends some weight to that suspicion.)

And so, if I had read and reviewed each of these issues on their own, they would've ranked along the spectrum of the Very Good rating (apart from the Annual, which I thought was shockingly close to Awful--all geegaws and nearly no point) but, read as whole, I would rank the storyline as highly Good, maybe a little more than that. Issues #10-14 of The Immortal Iron Fist are ambitious, clever, and the high points are, really, everything I want in a superhero comic. But the formidable skills of the creators may not be enough to conquer the realities of the marketplace, where a fastidious artist can become overwhelmed. Indeed, the skills of the creators may not be enough to outweigh their own creative passions, which may be drawn to places darker than a unambiguously good man may be able to take them. These issues of Immortal Iron Fist are certainly worth buying and worth reading. But they're also worth considering for their negative space, for the areas where they cannot, or will not, reach.

Labels: Iron Fist, Jeff, The Inventory

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I feel like I've just been punched in the chest.

Rory Root, owner of Comic Relief in Berkeley, and a tremendously great friend of mine, just passed away following a brief coma after surgery for a ruptured hernia this weekend.

Rory and I had a lot of shared paths in comics retailing -- we both worked at the Best of Two Worlds chain in the Bay Area. He managed the Berkeley store, and I managed the SF one, before we each opened our own stores, he two years ahead of my own.

Rory was a confidant, a friend, a mentor, and always always ALWAYS, whether I wanted it or not, a sounding board.




There's many a time when the phone would ring after midnight. Nope, not an emergency or anything, just Rory wanting to gab about something relating to comics or retailing. He'd call so often and so late at times that Tzipora half-suspected I was having an affair. "Nope, just Rory calling," I say, and she'd roll over to sleep contented at that.

If Rory had a fault, it was that he was a talkaholic. Man, could the man talk! This is coming from, you understand, a veteran talker myself -- but Rory had me beat six ways to Sunday. The man never met a tangent he didn't like, never had a topic he couldn't opine upon. But it was all good -- because his gabbiness was tempered by wisdom and knowledge. The man (usually!) knew exactly wherefore he was speaking of, and on the few occasions he didn't, he was possessed of enough awareness to ask the questions that would make him MORE knowledgeable.

Comic Relief, once upon a time, had a second store in San Francisco, about eight blocks away from mine. He hadn't opened it on purpose, in fact, he was there to help out a friend who had gotten locked into a bad lease due to the actions of another. At no point we were enemies, however -- he used to call me "Mr. Macy", and I'd call him "Mr. Gimble" like we were out of A MIRACLE ON THIRTY-FOURTH ST., sending customers freely back and forth between the stores, knowing that making sure people got the book they want was infinitely more important than any kind of rivalry. When CR went in, sales actually INCREASED because there were now two excellent comics shops within walking distance of one another.

There are other retailers in my City who could have learned the lessons of camaraderie that Rory and I taught each other over those two or so years. I know Rory thought so too -- he told me so many times.

Rory was a generous man -- generous with his time and his attention, perhaps maybe generous to a fault because I can think of many people over the decades who took advantage of his trust and generosity, but it never made him bitter.

But there are few retailers, publishers or creators who spent any amount of time with the man and didn't walk away learning a dozen things about how comics work the way they do, and what things that could be done to make things better. It is the loss of that generosity of his knowledge (and it was truly encyclopedic and broad) that is going to be the loss that the comics industry is going to face over the next years. If only we had a few dozen Rory Roots, we could have utterly transformed the entire industry.

I've said more than a few times that Comic Relief was the best comic book store that I've ever been in in my life, and through his many illnesses over the last few years, he thought long and hard about making sure the store will outlast him. He told me on many different occasions that the store will fall to long-time manager Todd Martinez, and I really think it could not be in better hands. Todd's a very good guy, and I'm sure that the store will continue to thrive under his hands.

I owe Rory a lot, personally, professionally. He was always there for me with encouraging words, solid advice, and a wicked bad case of loving puns; I hope I was even half the friend to him that he was to me.

People used to mistake us for each other all of the time. I mean, not really, but in the sense that "they're two overweight bearded long-hair retailers from the Bay Area, who are deeply passionate about comics; so I've got a 50/50 chance of guessing right since I can't see his nametag clearly"

Here's how I most know I'm going to miss the big guy: if it was anyone else I was writing this for, I'd be calling Rory right now and reading it to him over the phone, and asking "what am I leaving out?" and he'd give me six great ideas of things that I really should have said.

Well, I don't have him now, and I'm sure I'm leaving out six things I really should have said, but I know this much: I'm going to really really miss my friend Rory Root.

May he rest in peace.


-B

Labels: Brian, Rory Root

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Here are this week's funny books scheduled to arrive at Comix Experience this Wednesday:

1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS ADVENTURES OF SINBAD #1
2000 AD #1584
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #81 (A)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #560
AMERICAN DREAM #2 (OF 5)
ARCHIE DIGEST #244
AVENGERS CLASSIC #12
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #13
BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #7
BETTY & VERONICA SPECTACULAR #83
BIRDS OF PREY #118
BLACK PANTHER #36
BOMB QUEEN V #1 (OF 6)
BOY WHO MADE SILENCE #3
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #13
BROTHERS IN ARMS #1
CAPTAIN AMERICA #38
CASEY BLUE BEYOND TOMORROW #1 (OF 6)
CATWOMAN #79
CHECKMATE #26
COUNTDOWN TO MYSTERY #8 (OF 8)
DAMNED PRODIGAL SONS #2 (OF 3)
DARK IVORY #2 (OF 4)
DC SPECIAL CYBORG #1 (OF 5)
DC WILDSTORM DREAMWAR #2 (OF 6)
DEAD SHE SAID #1
DOKTOR SLEEPLESS MANUAL #1 WRAP CVR
END LEAGUE #3
FALL OF CTHULHU #12 CVR A
FANTASTIC FOUR #557
FLASH #240
GHOST RIDER #23
GODLAND #23
GRENDEL BEHOLD THE DEVIL #7 (OF 8)
GUTWRENCHER #3 (OF 3)
HAWAIIAN DICK #4
HELLBLAZER #244
INCREDIBLE HERCULES #117 SI
IRON MAN DIRECTOR OF SHIELD #29
JIM BUTCHERS DRESDEN FILES #2 (OF 4) WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #271
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #21
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #15
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #139
LOVELESS #24
MADAME MIRAGE #6
MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #24
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED ILIAD #6 (OF 8)
MIGHTY AVENGERS #14 SI
NEGATIVE BURN #19
PERHAPANAUTS #2
PIGEONS FROM HELL #2 (OF 4)
PROGRAMME #11 (OF 12)
ROBIN #174
SCALPED #17
SCOOBY DOO #132
SHOJO BEAT JUNE 08
SIMPSONS COMICS #142
SPAWN #178
SPIRIT #17
STAR TREK ASSIGNMENT EARTH #1
STAR WARS LEGACY #24
SUPER FRIENDS #3
SUPERMAN BATMAN #48
TANGENT SUPERMANS REIGN #3 (OF 12)
TANK GIRL VISIONS OF BOOGA #1
TERRY MOORES ECHO #3
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #54
ULTIMATE X-MEN #94
WAR IS HELL FIRST FLIGHT PHANTOM EAGLE MAX #3 (OF 5)
WOLVERINE ORIGINS #25
WORLD OF WARCRAFT #7
X-FACTOR #31 DWS
X-MEN DIVIDED WE STAND #2 (OF 2)
ZOMBIES HUNTERS #1

Books / Mags / Stuff
BATMAN VS TWO FACE TP
BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON SC
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG JUGGERNAUT SPECIAL (O/A) (C
COMIC BOOK AUTHORITY BLK T/S LG
COMIC BOOK AUTHORITY BLK T/S MED
COMIC BOOK AUTHORITY BLK T/S XL
COMICS BUYERS GUIDE #1643 JUL 2008
DRAFTED TP VOL 01
FINDING PEACE TP
FORTEAN TIMES #236
GOLDEN AGE SHEENA BEST OF QUEEN O/T JUNGLE TP VOL 01
GRENDEL DEVIL CHILD HC
GRENDEL HC DEVIL QUEST
GRIMM FAIRY TALES TP VOL 03
HANK KETCHAMS COMPLETE DENNIS THE MENACE 1951-1952 SC
HELLBOY COMPANION TP (RES)
HULK VISIONARIES JOHN BYRNE TP VOL 01
HULK WWH TP INCREDIBLE HERC
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM O/T CRYSTAL SKULL TP
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR TP VOL 08 DIGEST
MOSTLY TRUE THE STORY OF BOZO TEXINO
POWR MASTRS GN VOL 01 (OF 6) (O/A)
PRISONER OF THE STARS TP
REBEL VISIONS UNDERGROUND COMIX REVOLUTION SC (RES)
SHOWCASE PRESENTS GREEN LANTERN TP VOL 03
SUPERMAN ESCAPE FROM BIZARRO WORLD HC
TIM SALE BLACK & WHITE HC


What looks good to YOU?

-B Click Here to Read More...

OK, so it's actually #168, but it has a new home, over at Comic Book Resources, and I bet you that Jonah would like it if everyone would click through that link so he doesn't start thinking, "Oh my god, what have I done"

I also now have my own forum there (god, was that a foolish thing to ask for?), and I see the first message there says I'm a gay icon, and I should team up with Dazzler.

I think I'll answer that one when I've had a little sleep!

-B Click Here to Read More...

Look, a review (kind of!)!!

HUNTRESS YEAR ONE #1: I really don't get the thinking behind this "Year one" series, for the most part -- they seem to be focusing mostly on characters without their own books, and seemingly no particular thing coming up soon that they're an important enough part that you've got to retell their origin. (cf METAMORPHO YEAR ONE) Huntress is largely a third string character, made much more so by decoupling her from being Batman-and-Selina's child (the Earth-2 version). The Mafia-Princess-become-The-Punisher isn't the worst idea ever, but it strikes me as being one of those inherently limited ideas that isn't enough, in and of itself, to sustain a character.

Jeff Lester and I were discussing something similar a week or two back when he opined that he thought when they finally bring Captain America back from the dead that it might be cool if they more or less fully rebooted him to be Man From The Past in the Modern World he was circa AVENGERS #4.

I said, sure that's cool, and could be interesting... for maybe (MAYBE) a year, then anything interesting about it really dissipates in the same way that I was amused by the first "Oh, what is this strange and mystical thing you call a 'gas-o-leen pump'?" in Jodi Picault's WONDER WOMAN run, but by the third one I was gagging and "get over it already!"

That's the problem with High Concepts -- as a general rule they're designed for A story, possible two, maybe maybe you can push it to three, but then you need to reinvent things or else it stagnates. If a High Concept becomes what a book/character is ABOUT, then how and where can you care?

Fer example, I don't think Superman is ABOUT "rocketed to earth as a baby, he fights for ...the American Way". Sure you can do a couple of stories that are exactly about being an immigrant and an outsider, but I doubt that your personal Top 10 Superman stories ever actually feature that as a significant theme

(*waits for Kurt Busiek to post and tell me how wrong I am about that one*)

So, that's why "Mafia-Princess-becomes-The-Punisher" is clever enough, but it basically has no where to go from there -- either she loses against the mob (which no one wants to read), or she beats them (which ends the arc/conflict), or she joins them (which can't happen any longer in current continuity -- she was a member of the JLA after all!)

In fact, what it has left us with is a character who basically is just "anger management issues", which, again, is okay-ish, but also one that you can't go very far with. I'm speaking as a recovering Angry Young Man here -- it's only charming up to a point.

Here's the thing about this book: they can't possibly expect it to sell more than, say, 30k copies, and I think I'm being wildly optimistic there and wouldn't at all be surprised if it was 20k or under (like in CATWOMAN range). By the time it gets to issue #6, I'm guessing it will be 16k range or less, down to those kind of numbers that pretty much just represents the DCU fans with OCD who buy every DCU book because they HAVE to -- does anyone really even think there are even 5k *Huntress* fans? (I don't)

There's no bursting market clamor for Huntress as a character, that I can see -- and if there was, it almost certainly wouldn't be for a retelling of her origin, over some form of new work. The writer, Ivory Madison, seems to be an established writer, but not one that has a big bold body of work behind her that could draw in vast new audiences, that I can really see from her website there (though, to be fair, it's not like I'm the go-to guy for literary matters), so I'm really trying to figure out what the thinking involved here in green-lighting this series was.

Who knows, maybe its a little suck up to Paul Levitz.

As a comic book retailer, I am perpetually very nervous about overproduction, and this seems like such a misformed idea to me, one that really only exists to suck up another 1/20th of a point of market share, another 6 inches of rack space.

Be that as all of it may, the only question that matters at the end of the day is "Is it any good", and really, this was OKAY. The writing is good enough, the art is competent, and I liked the color palette used, but I think that if you're going to devote six issues to The Huntress, heck even more so, six issues to retell the origin of The Huntress, it really needs to be a whole heaping lot of better than just "OKAY".

As always, what d0 YOU think?

-B

Labels: Brian

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Sky Doll #1 (of 3)



This is the first product of Marvel's new comics venture with French publisher Soleil Productions. It's a quasi-miniseries of sorta new work that will kind of run for three issues, more-or-less unedited in a relatively nice format. Essentially.

Soleil has been around since the '80s, in case you're not familiar, and currently publishes a fairly international line of books, mixing European originals with French translations of English, Japanese and Korean-language works. They specialize in action/sci-fi/fantasy series -- although their partnership with book publisher Gallimard in reviving Futuropolis, a defunct, influential purveyor of avant-garde comics, has had them deemed bandits of cultural capital by sectors of the French small press -- and they've been enthusiastic in seeking artistic contributions from talent around the world. They seem as natural a fit as any French comics outfit would be with Marvel, in that their typical works might carry some crossover appeal to Marvel's core readership base.

However, French comics are not US comics, and questions always arise from several directions.

This first issue of Sky Doll -- the creation of Italian artists Barbara Canepa & Alessandro Barbucci (both are credited with writing and art) -- corresponds to the debut French album of the series, released in 2001. Each forthcoming Marvel issue will present one European album, as I believe it'll go for the whole of the partnership.

There's also an "of 3" in the issue count, but that's a little misleading; Sky Doll is, in fact, an ongoing series, with Tome 3 merely being as far as the creators have gotten with the main story (there's been a collection of shorts too). Issue #3 is therefore as much as Marvel can release. So, don't expect an ending or anything come July, because it hasn't been produced yet; Marvel even tacitly admits to the situation in the back of this issue, when it is mentioned in Canepa's biographical blurb that she's currently working on a part four, although I don't think this information has been made quite clear in the advertising.

And what about Marvel's presentation? What about the content, in which different cultural values regarding, say, depictions of the human body and its activities might be implicated? Well, I don't have access to the French original to do a panel-by-panel comparison, but it doesn't look like anything's been touched. So long as you define 'content' as 'inside.'



That's the French cover from which Marvel's cover is based, and I suspect just about every one of you has already figured out what's missing from Marvel's version: the French text. And the half-a-nipple.

Hey, I'm sure it saved a lot of retailers the need to somehow obscure the cover (mine plopped every copy in a bag anyway to prevent underage flipping), but you might recall that Marvel actually released an unedited version of the cover when the book's solicitation first arrived, which I guess got everyone's hopes up that the publisher would be adopting a more front-to-back liberal attitude concerning the material, which could have maybe prompted some interesting reactions, given Marvel's place in the Direct Market. It's not exactly a shocking cover, after all, but I think most readers have enough of an impression of what's 'acceptable' for Marvel that they can tell when the self-drawn line is being crossed.

Oh well - Marvel does include the unedited version inside the book as an illustration, and assures no interior edits via a big black & red MATURE CONTENT box, plastered over the lower half of the critter at the bottom left of the cover, which rather gives the impression that the lil' guy's penis is hanging out or something.

But hey, the cover could look a lot different.



This is what Sky Doll looked like on the stands when it was first released in English, less than two years ago. You might have heard from, oh, Marvel's solicitation that the series is "now finally presented in English," which seems to suggest that there wasn't a prior English translation... but there was, in the Heavy Metal Summer 2006 special, which went so far as to collect all three extant parts of the series into a single $6.95 magazine. Again, Marvel basically concedes the fact inside this issue itself (once more via Canepa's revealing biography!), which makes me wonder what they were getting at with 'finally presented in English' - they couldn't have just not known until the last minute (although if anyone said that or some other simple thing was the case on a message board or something, do bring it up).

An answer, or at least an underlying intent, might be found in the differing focuses of Marvel and Heavy Metal. The latter is no tiny presence in comics at large - it did have a total paid distribution of 58,108 copies per issue on average last year. But that's mostly to various magazine racks; it surely doesn't have Marvel's penetration into the Direct Market, and when you think of Marvel addressing its solicitation copy and its hype-in-general to Direct Market denizens, it makes sense that much of that audience would 'finally' be getting the stuff in English, if only for the places Marvel can get with the pamphlet format.



But shit, that's another thing. There's no undoing the fact that Heavy Metal has released the whole business in one hit for seven bucks, while Marvel's per-issue price is $5.99. And it's a decent enough pamphlet, with a press release-type intro to Soleil on the inside-front cover, what appears to be the original title and credits page art, the 44-page story without ads, a two-page interview with the creators, 16 pages of previews of forthcoming releases, those biographies on the inside-back cover, and, perhaps most importantly, a new English adaptation by C.B. Cebulski from Stephanie Logan's translation - Heavy Metal, as you've probably heard, is not famous for crackling English.

On the other hand, the art is squished a bit to accommodate the pamphlet format - it doesn't kill the reading experience, but Heavy Metal's magazine-sized images go down better for a work designed to be read big. And there's little denying that the magazine's got the more cost-effective system - even if they'd gone 'typical' with Sky Doll and spread the stuff out over various regular issues, you'd still have gotten the contents of this Marvel issue for $5.99, in a larger format, with an added stack of shorter comics and a good selection of anime porn ads.

Granted, you'd also be at the whims of Heavy Metal's iffy series scheduling, and then there's the translations (which, truth be told, were only stiff in Sky Doll's case)... I think Marvel's paper quality is slicker? There's always another question. But what's for sure is that there's multiple options, and the Marvel option isn't necessarily the best one, although it is the one they know how to work the best, given their base. I wonder if a less burdened series might have served as a better debut piece for the line? Ha, I wonder if these burdens even seem heavy when compared with the wider issue of comics pamphlet pricing in general today? Oh, French comic albums: also expensive.

So, um... how's the story?



It's OKAY. What struck me about Sky Doll the first time I read it was how it seemed to belong to its initial English-language venue: this is very nearly a quintessential 'Heavy Metal' type of comic, melding colorful/omnious sci-fi cityscapes, elusive spiritual ideas, sassy women in striking (or absent) attire, some blood & gore (not too much here), hallucinogenic visual passages, high technology, odd creatures and broad-as-a-Vatican-fresco satire.

Canepa & Barbucci add a little extra zest with an art style both informed by their work with Disney and eager to incorporate anime design tropes, several of which grew from the soil of vintage Disney animation anyway. I wouldn't call it manga -- the Japanese influence seems firmly planted in-panel, allowing for little of the extra-panel narrative thrust of comperable Japanese comics -- but it allows for some cute, semi-furry character designs with funny expression/body language work. Gobs of gloss in this thing.

The plot concerns the affairs of Noa, a very humanoid wind-up 'sky' doll -- pretty angels with which mortals can sin without fear of repercussion -- with the odd-for-her-type ability to retain her memories, and a longing to escape her dead-end life in Heaven, a 'sexy' spaceship wash station. She also hears voices and hides secrets that even she doesn't understand. Of course.

Hope arrives when she stows away with Roy & Jahu, a pair of novice emissaries for Papess Lodovica, the scheming, oft-topless god-queen of the ruling faith, kind of a Roman Catholicism as fatalistic capitalist carnival, with crowds screaming for holy blood and begging to be incinerated by divine laser beams while secret cardinals rule the media. Back in the day, there was a co-Papess, Agape, who balanced the spirit with Lodovica's carnality - she's gone, but her own followers still seethe with anger, ready to do some violence to clean out the decadence. Sensing any very basic parallels with These Times Today?



It's fruitless to go much deeper, since this issue is almost entirely setup. Mild, kindly Roy and zealous Jahu are presented as opposing types of religious faith, the notion of female sexuality as a commodity is circled, if not really explored, and schemes are set in motion. It's all pretty enough, and sometimes pretty funny, but its energy is never more than an engine's shaking as it struggles to start.

In case you're interested, it doesn't really turn over until issue #3, when the various combating forces come into clearer view, and the series stops to wait for #4 - until then, it's little parodies of fringe religions and That Damned Media. Who knows what the readers will say when that 'ending' is reached? It's a difficulty in bringing these works over to this language, in this format, and only one difficulty of many. I think Sky Doll's a nice enough series, but there's necessarily more going on to ponder than the cunning of half-naked catgirls, as nice a query as it is.

Labels: Jog

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Actually, an announcement first: Because I have discovered the secret extra six hours in every day, I've revised and expanded my annotations for DC Universe 0, and posted them at Final Crisis Annotations, where I'll be making notes on FC-related stuff as it appears. So now the complaints, both about comics I more or less enjoyed, under the cut: THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1 and SECRET INVASION #2.



THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1: I liked pretty much the same things everyone else liked about this issue--the clever ways it jumps off from the Iron Man movie (the dial-style chest implants, Pepper's Girl Friday relationship with Tony), the return to Iron Man's roots as a guilty arms merchant, the computer-modeled artwork and coloring (this is one series where there's almost no such thing as excessive digital effects).

The part that irritates me is something that's not unique to this issue at all, and something I've complained about before: the totally cavalier way "terrorists" have become all-purpose bad guys, unconnected to any kind of politics. Terrorism is a means, not a goal. "Terrorists" are not the same thing as "people who go around killing everyone in sight indiscriminately because they just want to fuck shit up a little": they are people who attempt to further a specific political or ideological agenda by creating the fear of violence against civilians. Any terrorist action has an immediate and obvious political subtext, by definition; it's meant to change civilians' behavior patterns. But we don't get any politics here. There is no agenda; there is no ideology. All we get to find out about the guys who blow themselves up in the street at the beginning of this story is that they've blown themselves up.

And that makes no sense . Tanzania doesn't have much in the way of stuff that people blow themselves up over; in fact, the last significant terrorist action there, as far as I can tell, was ten years ago, when the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam was bombed. But to move the plot along, Matt Fraction gives us a a ripped-from-today's-headlines bit about the "three traditional terror outfits" near Tabora: "the Revolutionary Army, the Fist of the People, and the Tiger's Tooth." "Revolutionary army" is a fairly common phrase, but I can find no evidence of the other two anywhere near Tanzania. Whoops, guess it's not actually ripped from the headlines.

So what other terrorists might have been close enough? An "A.I.M. splinter group" called "Advanced Genocide Mechanics" in the Congo turns out to be responsible. (The Congo proper is rather a long ways away from Tanzania; maybe Dugan meant the D.R.C.) This is where the goofy but disbelief-suspendable idea of A.I.M. as a consortium of morally lax scientists falls off a cliff: nobody is just sort of generally in favor of genocide in the abstract--practitioners of genocide have a specific group of people they believe it's justifiable to kill, rather than a hankering to put together an institute to develop new genocidal mechanisms.

There's also the question of why Stane and A.G.M. would need to surgically modify people into human bombs if they're just going to blow them up; the old-fashioned strapping-on-a-bomb technique seems much more cost-effective. Surgical modifications are how the Iron Man armor works, of course, but the chief purpose of his armor, as with any armor, is to provide defense--to protect the user from harm, right?

Anyway. This issue's a Good start, and I'm sticking around, but I sure hope Fraction starts dealing with the messy realities of politics if he's taking this tack on the character.

SECRET INVASION #2: Tom Spurgeon has some interesting comments on the subject of comics costing too much; I'll simply note my annoyance at Marvel jacking up the price of a 22-page story by a third and offering up no enhancement in exchange other than a cover printed on slightly heavier stock. This also seemed like a weirdly lightweight installment of a story as potentially plot-driven as this is: four double-page spreads is definitely too many in this context, especially since most of the plot threads introduced last issue are ignored this time. (I probably would have minded a bit less if this were an issue of Mighty Avengers.) And I wonder if a monthly release schedule was really the right idea for an eight-issue story that seems to be taking place in a very short span of time and requires most other Marvel-universe titles to tie in with it. Okay, and the possibility that some of the SW6 Avengers are real is indeed pretty juicy, but I'm starting to lose patience.


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Our remodel on our bathroom at home is nearly done, and we've moved back in this weekend, so I've got one major weight off my back (paying for it, however, will be another, different kind of joy)

Once I get the new TILTING written (now with more surprises than ever!) (and, no one noticed that I skipped last month altogether?), then do this month's Diamond data import I should be back to a "normal" posting schedule...

100 BULLETS #91
2000 AD #1583
ALL NEW IRON MANUAL
AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #20
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #559
ANITA BLAKE VH GUILTY PLEASURES #11 (OF 12)
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #119
ARMY OF DARKNESS #9 LONG ROAD HOME
BAT LASH #6 (OF 6)
BATMAN #676 RIP
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #17
BATMAN STRIKES #45
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #184
BOOSTER GOLD #9
BPRD 1946 #5 (OF 5)
CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND MI 13 #1 SI
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #25
CASANOVA #14
CLANDESTINE #4 (OF 5)
CTHULHU TALES #2 CVR B
DEAD OF NIGHT FEATURING MAN THING #4 (OF 4)
DEAN KOONTZS FRANKENSTEIN VOL 01 #1 (OF 5) PRODIGAL SON
DEATH GRUB (ONE SHOT)
DMZ #31
DOCTOR WHO CLASSICS #6
EVERYBODYS DEAD #3
FINAL CRISIS SKETCHBOOK
FX #3 (OF 6)
GEN 13 #20
GENEXT #1 (OF 5)
GHOST WHISPERER #3
GIANT SIZE INCREDIBLE HULK #1
GOON #24
GOTHAM UNDERGROUND #8 (OF 9)
GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #8
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #24
GUARDIANS OF GALAXY #1
HUNTRESS YEAR ONE #1 (OF 6)
IRON MAN LEGACY OF DOOM #2 (OF 4)
JUGHEADS DOUBLE DIGEST #140
LAST DEFENDERS #3 (OF 6)
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY #14
LOCKE & KEY #4
LOST BOYS REIGN OF FROGS #1 (OF 4)
MAD MAGAZINE #490
MARVEL ADVENTURES HULK #11
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT HULK MOVIE
NEW EXILES #6
NEWUNIVERSAL SHOCKFRONT #1 (OF 6)
NUMBER OF THE BEAST #3 (OF 6)
PHANTOM #23
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #3 (OF 7)
PUNISHER #57
RED SONJA #33
SECRET INVASION FANTASTIC FOUR #1 (OF 3) SI
SERENITY BETTER DAYS #3 (OF 3)
SIMON DARK #8
SOLEIL SKY DOLL #1 (OF 3)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #188
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF OLD REPUBLIC #28 VECTOR PART 4
STRANDED #4 (RES)
SUPERMAN #676
THUNDERBOLTS #120
TINY TITANS #4
TITANS #2
TRANSHUMAN #2 (OF 4)
TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD IMAGE ED #11
TWELVE #5 (OF 12)
UN-MEN #10
WALKING DEAD #49
WARHAMMER CONDEMNED BY FIRE #1 (OF 5) CVR A
WOLVERINE #65 DWS
WOLVERINE AMAZING IMMORTAL MAN BLOODY TALES
WONDER WOMAN #20
X-MEN LEGACY #211 DWS
X-MEN ORIGIN COLOSSUS
YOUNG LIARS #3
ZORRO #3

Books / Mags / Stuff
2 GUNS TP
52 AFTERMATH THE FOUR HORSEMEN TP
BATMAN THE JOKERS LAST LAUGH TP
BATMAN THE RESURRECTION OF RAS AL GHUL HC
BIG BRILLIANT BOOK OF BART SIMPSON TP
BOOSTER GOLD HC VOL 01 52 PICK UP
BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 02 NO FUTURE FOR YOU
CHECKMATE TP VOL 03 THE FALL OF THE WALL
COMIC ARF SC
EROTIC COMICS GRAPHIC HIST TIJUANA BIBLES TO ZAP COMIX HC (
EXPLAINERS HC (RES)
GEEK MONTHLY VOL 2 #5
GREEN LANTERN NO FEAR TP
HEAVY METAL JULY 2008 #117
HULK WWH TP X-MEN
IRON MAN AND POWER PACK TP ARMORED DIGEST
JAMES BOND TP ON HER MAJESTYS SECRET SERVICE NEW PTG (C: 0-1
LAST BLOOD TP VOL 01
NEW X-MEN BY MORRISON ULTIMATE COLL TP BOOK 01
PAPYRUS GN VOL 02 IMHOTEPS TRANSFORMATION
REX GN
RIME ANCIENT MARINER HC
SGT FROG GN VOL 15 (OF 15)
SPAWN COLLECTION VOL 5 TP
STAR TREK ALIEN SPOTLIGHT TP
TOYFARE #131 HULK MOVIE CVR
ULTIMATE HULK VS IRON MAN PREM HC ULTIMATE HUMAN
VERTIGO FIRST CUT TP
WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY TP VOL 02

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

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Aaah, lazy Saturday, reading my Secret Invasion…

Before Having Read the Comic:

I really enjoyed reactions to issue #1 around the internet. My favorite criticism is from a Mr. Stahl at Newsarama which pointed out that Skrulls revert back into Skrulls when they die:

“Detecting impersonators is trivial: Take a live tissue sample from a suspect, and see if it reverts, immediately upon being removed from the body or after the cells in the sample die. There’s no plausible way for a Skrull to retain control over the sample, especially after cell death.”

I’m not being mean—I think that’s a great reaction. It’s a completely valid, logical solution to the logistical problems that extraterrestrial Skrulls would face in mounting an invasion of the planet Earth from their outer space hives.

My only way of arguing it is a cop-out: I don’t care about logic—I just want to see 2008 Luke Cage fight 1978 Luke Cage, and logic be damned. Logic be damned! Which… that’s how we ended up in the Iraq War, if you think about it. Which I haven’t.

I really enjoyed the reactions, but... I think a lot of times people complain about big crossovers—and with good reason. Very good reason. But I think what gets lost in all of that is… you know, a lot of people like these things. They’re not all bad people. So: what are they getting out of them?

I’m reading my first China Mieville book right now, Perdido Street Station. Mieville is an avowed Marxist and international law specialist who writes these very odd novels about monsters. I guess he's the cutting-edge guy in fantasy right now-- I don't usually read those kinds of novels anymore so I wouldn't know. I saw a quote of his from an interview the other day:

Well I think part of the problem with the modern 'liberal' novel is that it often tends not to conceive of the totality of social life: instead it abstracts one element (stereotypically the middle-class family), and universalises it. By contrast, fantastic fiction that 'world-creates' creates a world - a totality. So whether or not it explicitly spells it out, there's a sense that an economic problem conceived of as background and the romantic plot foregrounded are part of the _same universe_.

Maybe there’s an analogy we can draw to the big crossover. A specific series can only cover so much geography—an issue of The Fantastic Four can talk about family, an issue of Captain America can talk about patriotism. But the daily lives of readers are rarely just one thing—life can often be a series of collisions between disparate elements, between balancing family and work, social responsibility and private needs, etc. People eat dinner with their families, then turn on TV and hear about crazy shit happening on the other side of the world. Everything collides together. Everything’s colliding faster and faster—try and follow the news anymore. One day, the Bush Administration’s corrupt, the next day they’re incompetent, the day after that, they’re back to corrupt—who can keep up? The same machine you’re reading this on, brings you pornography and music, you know? The pornography is sometimes about innocent schoolgirls who get caught cheating on their college geography exams, and have to pleasure their way out of trouble. Sometimes there are moustaches involved; sometimes there aren’t. Sometimes the performances stops in the middle for the two lovers to kick open a piñata, and inside of the piñata are sex toys, and then the porn stars resume their lovemaking on top of the lust-piñata. Sometimes a young pistelero arrives upon the scenes and says “Madre de Dios! You have destroyed my lust-piñata with your naughtiness. I shall teach you both a lesson.” And then he does, sexually, and it’s horrible, and you want to look away, and you want someday to forget what you see, forget what happens next. But it’s border justice, and you learn to live with that.

Usually there are tattoos.

I think a big crossover can speak to that sense that beyond our own limited human stories or what have you, we’re part of a larger social organism, in a way that I don’t know of or can think of any other mainstream comic that can. So: maybe that’s something…?

After Having Read Issue #2:

Not much "happens" this issue, so I don’t have much to say about any of it. This issue’s mostly just follow-through on the events of the first issue-- fight scene, cliffhanger, and done. I thought it was nicely balanced between the big fight scenes, and bringing key events down to a level of how specific characters react to the situation. I've read a number of crossovers which have failed dramatically at the latter.

Mostly, I suppose I liked this issue because there were three double-page splash pages of things going nuts. The hero of the issue to me is inker Mark Morales: having seen Leinil Yu without him, I have to say I’m happy he’s around. I liked each of the double-page splashes so I liked the issue. People who don't enjoy that sort of thing probably enjoyed the issue less, I'd guess.

Unfortunately, the issue hints that maybe the Sentry will figure prominently in this series. I don't think that's a very interesting character, so I'd rather he didn't.

The only part that jumps out at me as being especially interesting is the “cliffhanger” involving Captain America. Basically, a new Captain America pops out and the issue suggests New Cap is real and Old Cap was a Skrull for the last ___ years. I think that's something, but not because anyone is going to believe the cliffhanger for a second and believe that Old Cap could have been a Skrull. Readers have seen his dead body, seen his funeral, etc. Having him be a Skrull would be a horrible take-away on readers, and would badly derail the work done on the regular series. I think it'd very obviously be a huge, huge mistake.

But I still think it’s an interesting cliffhanger because it poses the question that… the Old Cap managed to rally half the characters behind him in Marvel’s Civil War; what kind of damage is the fake New Cap capable of? I think that’s a fun, solid question to end an issue on.

Labels: Abhay

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He may have the biggest movie opening that isn't a sequel this side of Tobey Maguire - and, no, I haven't seen it yet - but that doesn't guarantee that Iron Man's new books are going to be any good. With both the blatant movie tie-in (IRON MAN: VIVA LAS VEGAS #1) and more subtle tie-in (THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1) released this week, it's almost as if Marvel's trying to, you know, get fans of the movie to buy comics or something. It's a crazy world of multimedia marketing and no mistake these days.



Thing is, the one that's going to grab most of the movie-hungry eyes is easily the worst. That's not just complimenting Matt Fraction's new Tony Stark-centric book; VIVA LAS VEGAS, Jon Favreau's comic debut, is really pretty shitty. Never mind the lifeless, static art of Adi Granov - his men in armor can't be beat, but his real people are scarily devoid of any life - and go straight to the appalling script that jumps from scene to scene choppily, has generic dialogue and really, seriously, opens on a skit that suggests that French people are - are you ready for this - apologists for terrorists who hate Americans! I know! Hilarious! And timely!

On almost every level, this book feels like a misfire, the result of normally more sensible heads being turned by Favreau's Hollywood glamor (Tom Brevoort, how could you really let this go out with your name attached?). It's not even interestingly bad, it's just kind of dully embarrassing, and pretty much all out Crap.

Much, much better is INVINCIBLE IRON MAN. You still have art that's not really firing on all cylinders (although I think Sal Larocca's work looks better - and less photo referenced - than it did on newuniversal, for what it's worth), but Matt Fraction manages to do everything you want it to do - Introduce the threat in an interesting way and show that he understands the main character while he's at it, making his take one that you'd want to read more of. I don't know if it's my particular political stance, but I find this kind of flawed, redemptive Tony Stark much more interesting to read than the more obviously heroic version in his Director of SHIELD book (it also seems more in tune with the character's history, what with Armor Wars and, you know, his origin and all of that). Giving him something to legitimally feel guilty about - and the Son of Stane villain definitely seems to be able to do that - feels like it's the hook for the reader to actually care about the character and the story, instead of either/or for once. This book both feels lighter and more modern than the other regular book - faster, more ready to reinvent itself - and it's something that I hope will continue past this first arc, however long that may be; I'm surprised to want to read the second issue as much as I do, and would like to be able to say the same for the second year, if possible. Very Good.

Labels: Graeme

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Weekly comics, therefore spoilers, therefore under the cut. Specifically Action Comics and New Avengers. And glamourpuss, which is sort of impossible to spoil. Plus Whatever, which is not a weekly comic but a collection of weekly comic strips.



GLAMOURPUSS #1: I see that Dave Sim, God bless him, is now requiring anybody who wants to talk to him to indicate in writing that they don't believe he's a misogynist. Well, that'll cut down on the amount of time he'll have to spend doing interviews, I suppose.

I posted here about how excited I was that Dave would be doing a regular series again when he announced glamourpuss, and it's good to see him doing a kind of drawing he obviously enjoys. What I didn't quite realize was that the premise of this series would kneecap his work--it keeps him from acting on some of his greatest strengths as a cartoonist. One of the best things about Cerebus was his gift for constructing and developing characters. But as Sim himself notes in this issue:



Right: there will never be much of a character in glamourpuss, because it's impossible to develop a character when you may have access to six images of that character, ever. (Also, I still don't see why he uses "photorealism" as an adjective instead of "photorealist," but I'm sure he has his reasons.) Pretty much every image here is based on fashion-magazine photos; most of the rest are hand-copied from old comic strips. As Jog pointed out, the six pages of "The Self-Education of N'atashae" are as much of a story as we're likely going to get.

For that matter, Sim was a brilliant caricaturist in Cerebus--when he drew Margaret Thatcher or the Three Stooges, he gave us something that looked nothing like the real thing but felt exactly like the real thing. Tracing-and-inking photographs, which is the raison d'être of this series, doesn't leave much latitude for caricature. And it can only be out of petulance that one of the best letterers in the history of comics is using ComiCraft's Joe Kubert font.

What's fascinating about this comic, though, is seeing Sim--an artist with thirty years of experience--pushing himself, hard, into unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. It's an ongoing commentary on his own process, an ouroboros of art gazing at and correcting itself, a high-grade, polished-for-publication sketchbook documenting Sim working out some ideas about drawing that have obsessed him for years. (I can see hints of this as far back as his commentary in one of the Swords of Cerebus books about trying to imitate Hal Foster's ability "to make a thatched hut with rough-hewn wooden shutters look like a thatched hut with rough-hewn wooden shutters in four pen lines or less.") Not at all like what I was hoping for, but Good enough that I'm sticking around to see where he can possibly take this.

Speaking of photorealist comics: Karl Stevens was kind enough to give me a copy of his new book WHATEVER (published by Alternative Comics, but not yet listed on their site) at Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend. (I don't know if it's in comics stores yet, but Amazon's got it.) Stevens won a Xeric grant for his book Guilty a few years ago; this is a collection of his weekly strip for the Boston Phoenix. His stuff is very clearly photo-based--specifically, it's based on photos of himself and his friends, which he renders in an intensively crosshatched style that's wonderfully sensitive to light and shade and contours. (I really like this maybe-not-suitable-for-work one.) His art is splendid and disciplined, but his writing is much messier: the strip is mostly, as might be expected, about post-collegiate types in the Boston area being unsure about what they're doing with their lives, and its tone keeps fluctuating. Sometimes it's little slice-of-life incidents, along the lines of Harvey Pekar's old one-pagers; there are occasional attempts at continuity and farce, like a sequence where "the two titans of Allston breakdancing" meet after seven years apart and prepare for a challenge.

One running gag that doesn't quite work involves an aggressive, freeloading Russian named Olaf, and the reason it doesn't work is that photorealism and comedy don't seem to mix--Stevens' thoughtfully observed artwork doesn't play along with the broad caricature of his writing. (There's a Christmas strip in the middle of the book where Stevens is sitting on Santa's lap, and Santa's telling him "you should practice drawing from your imagination more"; it's supposed to be a joke, but I really would like to see more of what Stevens imagines.) The most effective strips here are the ones where he isn't pushing toward a joke, but taking us into one of his characters' experience of their bodies and their world--like an All Over Coffee concerned more with people than with buildings. Very Good, in any case, and worth checking out.

ACTION COMICS #864: You know, I used to really dislike both Geoff Johns comics and Roy Thomas-style continuity fixes, but I'm starting to enjoy Johns' run on Action a lot. I didn't get the buzz from this issue I got from DCU Zero (and that... everyone else seems to have not gotten from DCU Zero), but it's certainly a more effective "bridge" issue out of Countdown and into Legion of Three Worlds. And it's very smartly constructed: a thread from Countdown (the deaths of two Legionnaires) turns up, but it's treated as a mystery rather than as something readers will already know about, and the core of the story is the contrast between Superman's easy acceptance of the friends of his youth and Batman's automatic suspicion of things that don't make linear sense. The little name-and-powers explanatory boxes are useful guides for non-Legion-savvy readers; even the first page includes some offhanded references to things that have happened in Action lately and some things we haven't yet heard about, so they all act as teasers to one extent or another.

This one also features three of the very few on-panel editor's notes referring to earlier issues I've seen lately: the reason Batman distrusts the Legion is that he's met three different versions of them, and the notes mercifully indicate where. Fair enough: that's a sizeable continuity issue, and Johns is actually turning it into the nut of what looks to be an interesting story. (Although, speaking of continuity fixes, there's a weird disconnect between this issue and "The Lightning Saga"--seeing as how Johns wrote both of them, there's at least some chance it's intentional. Here, Garth makes some cracks about Thom being in a "nuthouse," and has never heard of schizophrenia. In JSA #6, Dream Girl says "The medicine of this time period is unbelievably primitive. They still use pills to help schizophrenia.")

Like DCU0, it's got a mystery narrator revealed on the last page (a different one this time), but even if you don't know who he is already, the narration makes his significance and motivation fairly clear. I don't know how I feel about Johns using Thom Kallor's schizophrenia as an opportunity to make him something like Poet from Suspended, an oracle whose cryptic utterances serve the same function as Johns' end-of-first-issue teasers, but I have to admit it works dramatically. Quite Good.

NEW AVENGERS #40: It's very strange to see Bendis essentially marking time while we wait for Secret Invasion #2--unless I'm drastically misreading this issue, which I might be, it doesn't seem to be advancing the plot at all. Instead, it's a sort of mini-history of Skrull politics beginning shortly after Fantastic Four #2, and ending with the revelation that Spider-Woman was one of the first people to be replaced by a Skrull. Except that's not really much of a revelation at all--it's been fairly clear for the last few months' worth of comics--and everything else here could just as well have been taken care of with a few lines of dialogue. Nicely drawn, but Eh.

And one other note: the best moment of Free Comic Book Day for me was going to the Iron Man movie in the evening, and seeing the maybe nine-year-old girl in the seat in front of mine TOTALLY RIVETED by the FCBD Iron Man/Hulk/Spider-Man giveaway comic. As for the movie itself... I really enjoyed any time Gwyneth Paltrow was on screen (has anyone ever written Pepper this well in the comics?), the first fifteen minutes are some of the best-edited moviemaking I've seen in a while, I'm glad to see that Bendis's re-conception of Nick Fury has come true (and Bendis got to write it!), and the action scenes seemed to be play-by-play identical to every movie action scene in recent memory and bored the heck out of me. And all the previews for upcoming movies (and, in fact, the Middle Eastern scenes of Iron Man) were about eschatology and/or xenophobia. No more Wacky Terrorists or Everybody's Dead (Oh, No) scenarios, please?

Labels: Douglas

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Oh, there's the stupidly-large week of comics I was expecting.... EVERYONE should be able to find SOMEthing to buy this week...

24X2
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #80 (A)
ABE SAPIEN THE DROWNING #4 (OF 5)
ACTION COMICS ANNUAL #11
ALL NEW ATOM #23
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #558
AMERICAN DREAM #1 (OF 5)
AMERICAN SPLENDOR SEASON TWO #2 (OF 4)
ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #7
AVENGERS INVADERS #1 (OF 12)
BATMAN DEATH MASK #2 (OF 4)
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ORIGINS #5
BOYS #18
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #14
CABLE #3 DWS
CONAN #50
COUNTDOWN TO MYSTERY #7 (OF 8)
CROSSING MIDNIGHT #18
DARK TOWER LONG ROAD HOME #3 (OF 5)
DC SPECIAL RAVEN #3 (OF 5)
DC UNIVERSE SPECIAL JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA
DEAD SPACE #3 (OF 6)
DETECTIVE COMICS #844
DOCK WALLOPER #4 (OF 5) (RES)
DOCTOR WHO #4
DUMMYS GUIDE TO DANGER LOST AT SEA #2 (OF 4)
DYNAMO 5 ANNUAL #1
EXTERMINATORS #29
FOOLKILLER #5 (OF 5)
FORGOTTEN REALMS THE LEGACY #2 (OF 3) ATKINS CVR A
FOUNDATION #5 (OF 5)
FRANKLIN RICHARDS NOT SO SECRET INVASION
GEORGE R R MARTINS WILD CARDS #2 (OF 6) HARD CALL
HOUSE OF MYSTERY #1
INFINITY INC #9
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1
IRON MAN VIVA LAS VEGAS #1 (OF 4)
JACK STAFF #16
JONAH HEX #31
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #45
LOGAN #3 (OF 3)
LOONEY TUNES #162
LORDS OF AVALON SOD #4 (OF 6)
LUCHA LIBRE #4
MACK BOLAN THE EXECUTIONER DEVILS TOOLS #2 (OF 5)
MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #8
MAINTENANCE #10
MAN WITH NO NAME #1
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #39
METAL MEN #8 (OF 8)
MIDNIGHTER #19
MIGHTY AVENGERS #13 SI
MOON KNIGHT #18
MUMMY MOVIE PREQUEL RISE & FALL OF XANGOS AX #1
MY INNER BIMBO #4 (OF 5) (RES)
NEW DYNAMIX #3 (OF 5)
NIGHTWING #144
NOVA #13
OMEGA UNKNOWN #8 (OF 10)
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #121
PRETTY BABY MACHINE #1 (OF 3)
PS238 #31
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #19
RANN THANAGAR HOLY WAR #1 (OF 8)
RAY HARRYHAUSEN FLYING SAUCERS VS EARTH #1 (OF 4)
REX LIBRIS #11
ROGUE ANGEL TELLER OF TALES #3
SAVAGE TALES #7
SCUD THE DISPOSABLE ASSASSIN #24
SECRET INVASION #2 (OF 8) SI
STAR WARS LEGACY #23
SUPERGIRL #29
THUNDERBOLTS REASON IN MADNESS
TOR #1 (OF 6)
UNCLE SCROOGE #375
UN-MEN #9
VERONICA #188
VINYL UNDERGROUND #8
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #690
WAR THAT TIME FORGOT #1 (OF 12)
WASTELAND #17
X-FACTOR QUICK AND DEAD
YOUNG X-MEN #2 DWS

Books / Mags / Stuff
AFTER SCHOOL SEX SLAVE CLUB GN (A)
AMELIA RULES SC VOL 04 WHEN THE PAST IS A PRESENT
AMOR Y COHETES SC
AND THEN ONE DAY #5
BATMAN GRENDEL LTD ED HC
BEST OF DRAW MAGAZINE TP VOL 03
BLACK MAGIC 2ND ED TP
BOMB QUEEN TP VOL 04 SUICIDE BOMBER
BUCK GODOT PSMITH SC
CAPTAIN AMERICA PREM HC VOL 02 DEATH CAPT AMERICA
COLOR OF RAGE TP VOL 01
DEADWORLD TP BITS & PIECES
ESSENTIAL X-MEN TP VOL 01 NEW PTG
EXTERMINATORS TP VOL 04 CROSSFIRE AND COLLATERAL
GARY PANTER HC SLIP CASE
GIANT ROBOT #53
HULK TP WORLD WAR HULK
IRON MAN TP ENTER THE MANDARIN
IRON MAN WAR MACHINE TP
JLA PRESENTS AZTEK THE ULTIMATE MAN TP