I got to read two weeks' worth of individual issues at once. Behind the times! Oh no! Under the cut: AMBUSH BUG, ROGUES' REVENGE, JONAH HEX, AVENGERS both MIGHTY and NEW, SECRET SIX and some spoilers.



AMBUSH BUG: YEAR NONE #2: The premise of this mini, as I understand it, is that each issue is Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming riffing on some project in recent DC history; the first one was a reasonably pointed take on Identity Crisis. This one seems to be about the run-up to Infinite Crisis, but there's not much to say about that--a death-of-Ted-Kord scene, a couple of near-miss OMAC gags--so Giffen and Fleming spend most of the issue riffing without a theme, and their jokes don't go anywhere. A low EH, but I'm looking forward to the 52 and Countdown issues...

FINAL CRISIS: ROGUES' REVENGE #2: I used to actively dislike a lot of Geoff Johns's comics--I thought they leaned hard on gross-out sadism and obscuro continuity to cover up for what they lacked in plot dynamics and character development. I'm not sure if my sensibilities have shifted or if he's just gotten significantly better over the last year or two, because I've been thoroughly digging most of what he's been writing lately. This issue is as gruesomely violent as any mainstream comic I've read lately, but it roars--I'd say it's just a well-constructed crime story that happens to have costumes and powers, but actually the costumes-and-powers stuff (as well as some backstory from his old Flash run that's spelled out briskly and fairly gracefully) is central to the way the story comes together. And I love the ragged, nasty grain of Scott Kolins' line here. VERY GOOD.

JONAH HEX #35: Gray & Palmiotti's ongoing series about sexual assault in the Old West gets a special issue drawn by J.H. Williams III, maybe my favorite artist currently working in mainstream comics, and he digs into the dust-and-sagebrush look with relish. But the gunfight half of this issue is the most generically written Western I've seen in a long time, and the premise of the rest--in which Hex gets some psychedelic roofies in his drink from a couple looking for him to knock the woman up because he's too ugly for her to fall in love with... well, it's pretty GOOD as long as you just look at the pictures, anyway.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #17/NEW AVENGERS #44: Has anyone put together a comprehensive Secret Invasion chronology? At this point, with the main action of the invasion treading water in the Savage Land and the two Bendis Avengers books flashing all over the timeline, I'm losing touch with how these stories fit into the overall scheme, and what they signify. In particular, I'd appreciate it if somebody could explain what's happening in this particular Mighty (aside from its cute cover nod to TALES TO ASTONISH #27): so the Skrull replacements for Hank Pym keep going off-message and being killed and replaced? But after Criti Noll/Pym gets killed, he's replaced by another Criti Noll? Or another Skrull pretending to be Criti Noll pretending to be Pym? What? And, in New, the Skrull "clonepod" Reed Richards only has access to the real one's mental abilities if he thinks he's the real one? Both OKAY, but I'm impatient for everything to click together.

SECRET SIX #1: It is a personal weakness of mine that I really prefer first issues to act like first issues. Having only read bits and pieces of Gail Simone's Secret Six projects in the past, I found myself navigating through this page-by-page just fine, but wondering what exactly the premise of the series is. The title includes a "six," there are four characters visible on the cover, on the inside there are five members on the team but the promise of a sixth (why would there have to be six?), and... what kind of team is it? They have missions? They're assassins and thugs? They're sort of in Batman's good graces? Why do they work together? As usual, Simone is more than solid with the character stuff (the best bit here is Deadshot blithely ignoring a stickup at the convenience store where he's buying ice cream until he finally gets fed up and demonstrates how one should hold up a convenience store), but this is very oddly paced--the opening scene setting up a creepy bad guy who talks like Herbie Popnecker seems like it'd be more appropriate for an issue that doesn't have a big "#1" on the cover, for instance. OKAY.

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I don't know which one of the thousands of exhibitors brought the ray that speeds up time, but they've got it cranked to eleven down here in San Diego: I had enough time to walk one-tenth of the giant exhibition floor last night, said hi to no more than three or four people (but they were awesome people, I assure you) before joining the nerd diaspora and staggering through the streets of San Diego in search of a place to rest my feet and a liquid that cost less than a dollar an ounce.

So I'm posting this early Thursday morning instead of Wednesday, and I apologize for that. Nonetheless, if you're immune to the effects of the Speed-Up-Ray and are at SDCC and have time to peruse our humble blog, here's the schedule for the Savageites at SDCC (basically, this is the stuff Douglas presented at the end of his post, plus the rare appearance of Graeme on a panel):

Thursday, July 24

1-2: Douglas Wolk moderates The Future of the Comics Pamphlet, Room 32AB (with Joe Keatinge, Carr D’Angelo, Eric Shanower, and other luminaries to be announced)

2-3: Graeme will be schooling you on the Science Fiction That Will Change Your Life, Room 2, along with Annalee Newitz, Austin Grossman, Charlie Jane Anders, and Patrick Lee. Expect Graeme to do most of the talking!

6-7: Douglas Wolk moderates The Comics Blogosphere, Room 32AB (with David Brothers, Jeff Lester, Laura Hudson and Tim Robins)

6-7: Jeff Lester will be thinking of something clever to say on the above-mentioned Comics Blogosphere, Room 32AB (with David Brothers, Laura Hudson and Tim Robins, moderate by the mighty DW)

Friday, July 25

11:30, Douglas’ll be giving a talk called “Against a Canon of Comics” as part of the Comic Arts Conference in Room 30AB, and probably signing Reading Comics somewhere after it.

5-6: Douglas Wolk moderates Teaching Comics—Room 4 (with Phil Jimenez, Matt Silady, James Sturm and Steve Lieber)

Saturday, July 26

11:30-12:30: Douglas Wolk moderates Image Comics/Tori Amos—Room 6B (with Tori herself and a cast of thousands)

2:00-3:00: Douglas Wolk moderates Lettering Roundtable—Room 8 (with Todd Klein, John Roshell, Tom Orzechowski and Jared K. Fletcher)

4:30-5:30: Douglas Wolk moderates The Story of an Image—Room 4 (with Kim Deitch, Jim Woodring, Jim Ottaviani and Kyle Baker)

Hmm, looking at the schedule, I think Douglas is one who owns the Speed-Up-Ray...

So there you have it, and I hope to see you at the Con. If you catch me wandering about blankly, feel free to come up and say hi--I'm hoping I can defeat the effects of Time Disappearitis by meeting more quality people!

Labels: Douglas, Graeme, Jeff, SDCC, speed-up ray

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Once again, the SavCrit hive-mind has failed to cohere. I tried to avoid spoilers this time, so no cut...

FINAL CRISIS #1: No, it's not a slam-bang opener like the first World War Hulk or Infinite Crisis or Secret Invasion; nobody punches anybody through a building. The tone is more of a slow slide into hell, the tipping point where the whole system becomes too badly screwed up to salvage. Morrison's described FINAL CRISIS as a take on the eschatology of this cultural moment, which seems about right. It's also true that the character who gets killed doesn't get a heroic exit, or much dramatic context for it: this is about a world where all it takes is some stupid with a flare gun to ruin everything. The story's full of stuff that rewards repeated looks and consideration, and it keeps circling back to the distinctions between gods and men, between enormous powers and the people they crush for sport or advantage. (The missing kids aren't just smart, they're poor, and I bet that's significant.) I pretty much loved all of it except for the tedious scene with the Monitors--which is, I think, the only part whose sense is directly contingent on Countdown. Jones and Sinclair's artwork is exquisite, too: body language, details of color (the rippling water reflecting the red sky!)... This isn't quite what I was expecting, but after a few readings, I'm finding it Very Good indeed. (I've annotated it at length over here.)

BATMAN #677: Wow. Drastically altering the premise of a series in the space of eight pages or so is a pretty impressive trick; when that series is Batman, it's really impressive, and I got a nice solid jolt from the plot twist this issue, even though it can't be entirely what it seems. Very Good, in a distinctly different way, although I agree with other people that Tony Daniel's artwork isn't quite working here--I don't know if the problem is his basic approach so much as that Morrison doesn't seem to be writing for him the way that he's writing for Jones and Quitely.

ALL STAR SUPERMAN #11: And, weirdly, I thought this one was just Good, and that's following on the heels of last issue, which was my favorite superhero comic I've read all year. Solaris never really seems like much of a threat, or even like much of an entity, and the overarching plot of the series barely advances--Morrison spends too much of the issue going for cute lines and throwaway gags that don't add up to much. Hard to complain too much when Quitely's this on point, though, and I imagine it'll read differently after next issue, too.

ACTION COMICS #865: Blatantly a breather-between-arcs issue, but a pretty Good one, with the best work I've seen from Jesus Merino; I really like his fine-line/ink-wash technique on the flashback sequences. A neat little premise, too: the Toyman tells us his side of the story and explains his tragic history and his motivations--and he's so delusional that even the tragic history is almost completely lies. Also, that's a fine cover by Kevin Maguire, but it's too bad Maguire drew a totally different version of the character than Merino did.

NEW AVENGERS #41: I have no idea if it's the case or not, but I can imagine that the breakdown for Secret Invasion's story distribution between Bendis's three series allotted one significant event per issue, and this issue's was "Ka-Zar explains what happened in the Savage Land sequence early on in New Avengers, from his perspective." The problem is that that's only a few pages worth of exposition, and the rest of this issue seems like marking time: wasting lots of cycles deferring the cliffhanger until the end, and repeating stuff we've already seen in Secret Invasion #2. And as classically jungle-hero as Billy Tan's Ka-Zar and Shanna look, his Spider-Man seems really off. Eh.

DAREDEVIL #107: It's mighty Good to see the Brubaker/Rucka/Lark/Gaudiano Gotham Central team working together again, and they're clicking just like they always did: crime story/ensemble soap opera is a mode that fits them well. There's a lot of character business packed in here, though, including the idea Brubaker's been playing with that Matt is in really terrible psychological shape and not really in condition to deal with the A-plot. Still, the "save the bad guy from being executed for crimes he confessed to but didn't actually commit" gambit is maybe a little too familiar, especially after that last arc with Melvin in it. If I'm reading it correctly, the guy Matt's going to be defending in this story is in fact a disbarred lawyer--although that's only mentioned in a single panel, and you'd think it'd be a bigger plot point.

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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?

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Yeah, this one's spoilery. Not that everything hasn't been spoiled elsewhere, but I'm still putting this under the cut. Not a review, really, but annotations; if you want a rating, I thought it was Excellent as a teaser and value-for-money--I want to read what happens next--and n/a as a story.



Pg. 1: It's somehow fitting that, on the first page of a multi-title arc that will apparently draw on Jack Kirby's multi-title arc very heavily (and by the way, Jeff, that's a fantastic post right there), we get a tribute to one of his signature artistic techniques, the extreme long shot. This page seems to have been a last-second rewrite: in the version included in the New York Comic-Con program, the caption was "I am... everything." The present version's better by far. Note also that the captions start with a black background, and that the red creeps in from the right as the story progresses.

Also worth reading: George Pérez's comments on why this page and pg. 3 are "the simplest pages I've ever drawn."

Pg. 3: The first mention of red this issue--the infamous "red skies" of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which were sometimes about the only sign of tie-ins in other titles.

Pg. 5: It wouldn't be a Geoff Johns comic without dismemberment, but at least this character's meant to be one-handed--and "hands" are going to be a running theme in this comic, so take note. ("We could use a hand out here" appears on this page, too.) Tyr's name is the first direct reference to a god this issue, specifically Týr, the god of fistfights and single combat, a concept with which superhero comics of the era now ending are too familiar. This particular version of Tyr first appeared here, created by Cary Bates and the late Dave Cockrum.

Superman is wearing his Legion flight ring on his middle finger, oddly (it's on his ring finger here, as are the Legionnaires with visible rings on the next page. And can anyone identify the woman with Brainiac 5 and the White Witch?

Pg. 7: This appears to be the inked version of the preview image from a few months ago. I'm happy to see Night Girl (in the lower right-hand corner) again, although the peekaboo cut-outs on her costume's owl are sort of creepy. Also, note the building halfway down the right side: it's the 31st century HQ of the Daily Planet! And people say newspapers are doomed!

Pg. 8: A callback to the opening scene of The Killing Joke, of course, because Morrison can't stop slaying/honoring Highfather Moore. And here we go with red and black again... the version of the Joker follows on from this scarier version, rather than the one we've been seeing in Salvation Run.

Pg. 9: In The Killing Joke, the fake Joker of the opening scene seemed to be playing some solitaire variation of Klondike; here, the real one is just dealing cards. (In panel 4, he's doing a fancy shuffle--for a second I thought he was building a house of cards.) The Black Glove has been making mostly-offstage appearances in Batman, and this possibly extremely spoilery link goes to a very convincing theory by David at Funnybook Babylon on who the Opposite-of-White Glove is.

Pg. 10: Harlequin pattern on the card echoed not just by the floor but by the layout and color scheme of the page: nice! (And both the color-scheme trick and the splatter of blood on the card can't help but recall Watchmen...)

The "dead man's hand" is two aces, two eights and something else (here, cleverly, the wild card), supposedly the hand Wild Bill Hickcock was holding when it was shot. (The aces and eights are usually all black, but this fits the symbolic scheme of the scene and the issue better.) The term also recalls the Hand of Glory from The Invisibles; the hand missing a finger echoes the assailant from the most recent issue of Batman, and also suggests the name of Batman mastermind Bill Finger!

Pg. 12: I would like to congratulate myself on predicting the name of the Red Volcano almost two years ago. (Anyone want to predict who the water-elemental equivalent of R.V., the Red Tornado and the Red Inferno is going to be?)

Professor Ivo, of course, is the creator of Amazo. Doctor Poison first appeared here, although the one we're dealing with is most likely her grandchild, who first appeared here. I have no idea who that is in the Darfur scene; any thoughts?

Remember, kids, eating people is wrong!

Pg. 14: Anybody happen to know if the caption here references something Hal ever told Barry on-panel? In any case, Black Hand first appeared here, and continues the blackness/hands/Black Glove series. Hal, as the Spectre, burned Black Hand's right hand off here--it would appear that the right handprint is the one burned into the victim's chest, but he's able to reconstruct his hand by draining people's life force.

Is the "federal penitentiary" Salvation Run?

Pp. 15-16: The rainbow Lantern Corps were established in Green Lantern #25. In Roy G. Bivolo order, their motivating forces are rage, greed, fear (is that a Monitor?), will, hope, compassion, and love. And would that be a white lantern in the last panel? Or a black lantern? Apparently the ring in the Blackest Night previews is a Black Hand ring.

Pp. 17-18: Would someone who read Countdown maybe take a stab at what's going on here? Like, did Crispus shave?

Pg. 19: As far as I can tell, there's no DCU character named Carr D'Angelo, but there is a real-world person who produced The Hot Chick. Which was an awful movie, but I think the Spectre's response is a little extreme. Also: "I am somebody!" And I guess, from that ad, that it is "Revelations" with an S. Too bad.

Pg. 20: More of the 2-D/3-D play that Morrison's Seven Soldiers made so much of, especially Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle. The reddish and blackish planets in the first panel might be Apokolips and New Genesis, although it looks like there's more of a nature/tech dichotomy than a good/evil dichotomy going on there. And the falling character: would that be The Human Flame? Looks a little like The Ray, actually.

Pg. 21: "A runner poised on the line": yes, that runner. Doesn't this scene remind you of the Hood gathering all the bad guys in New Avengers a few months ago? Libra first appeared here, and at the end of that story, he became, in the words of some long-ago issue of E-Man, "several with the universe"--in other words, the position the narrator of this issue claims to be in at the beginning. It's not clear from that JLA issue what color Libra's eyes are--there's only one panel in which his eyes are visible, and they're colorless--but here they're definitely blue. As in the same color as the Flash's eyes in that Final Crisis poster. Anybody want to identify which copy of the Crime Bible this is?

Pg. 23: "Believe in him, that's all he asks!" Not only is this very much like the "he loves you" business going on in Secret Invasion, it explicitly echoes the "believe in her" refrain chanted by Lady Styx's followers. And Lady Styx, of course, makes the dead rise...

Then, of course, we have the matter of the hand clutching something that looks like Kirby-dot energy--the culmination of this issue's hand imagery. I've written about the giant-hand-in-space motif before, but the short version is that it seems to be the closest thing DC has to a creation-story icon; maybe it's present here to signify the beginning of the Fifth World, or the end of the Fourth, or maybe there's something else going on.

This, I believe, is the first time in many years--maybe even post-Crisis?--that the Secret Society of Super-Villains has been referred to by its full name, rather than simply as the "Secret Society." (Incidentally, the third page of 52 #1 referred to a rampage by the "Monster Society"; in the trade paperback, that's been corrected to "Secret Society.") It's weird to see them calling it that; as the final chapter title of "The Lightning Saga" put it, "the villain is the hero in his own story."

"And this is me": is Barry Libra? And doesn't one usually see the lightning before hearing the thunder?

Pg. 24: Lightning plus red sky plus enormously oversized moon equals Flash costume. I assume "Twisters" is where the Society's meeting; Morrison has mentioned that this is where Final Crisis proper begins, an instant after this scene. (Is the club's name a hint at something involving the Red Tornado?)

As for Barry Allen's return--well, I don't really understand why that's an alert-the-media! big deal, since it's got what Wikipedia's perfect phrase calls "primarily in-universe" significance. I'm not exactly excited at the prospect of having him back and starring in a monthly Flashcomic, just because I like stories that have ended to stay ended: it makes me more invested in the ones that haven't ended yet. But Johns had Barry popping in from the future in Flash #200 and telling Wally West that that was the first of three times they'd see each other; the second was in #224, and the third hasn't happened yet. (I don't think the cameo via the Speed Force in Infinite Crisis #4 counts. Barry's end-of-career timeline is mostly detailed here.) "The Lightning Saga" teased Barry's return very heavily; I'm sure there are going to be plenty of callbacks to that story in the months to come.

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It's almost a year after 52 ended--as of this Wednesday and DCU Zero, the next cycle of DCU stuff is about to begin, and I'm a lot more curious about that than I was about virtually anything in the Countdown era. (The line in this week's DC Nation column about how Countdown's goals "met with various levels of success" is a delicate way of putting it.) But before that starts, I thought I'd take one more look at the afterlife of the series I spent a year writing about.

52 opened up a bunch of possibilities, opportunities and resources for the DCU setting, and the last year has not been kind to many of them. Here's what's happened with each of 52's main characters and plot threads:

ADAM STRANGE, STARFIRE, ANIMAL MAN: The outer-space plot of 52 didn't quite build up the force it was supposed to--where it seems to have been going at first was that they not only had to make it home but save the world from Lady Styx when they got there, which didn't happen. And the point of throwing these three characters together was that they didn't really belong together, or have much in common except for being different kinds of exiles longing for return. (The one who got to go back was Animal Man, which functioned dramatically as the end of Buddy's story: he's integrated himself with his understanding of what's beyond the fourth wall.) So putting them back together for Countdown to Adventure was a horrible idea: they are not a team, and have no dramatic reason to continue to work together, and there was no new angle to make it worth bringing them back right now.

BATWOMAN: Wasn't she supposed to be the Sensational Character Find of 2006? There actually may have been some demand to do something more with her--like explaining what her deal is--but after a year and only one appearance (in Crime Bible) that bothered to actually do anything with her, I suspect the urgency is gone. As of New York Comic-Con, there don't seem to be any announced plans to do anything with her (although she did show up in that Adam Hughes promo piece recently). Then again, if that Rucka/Williams project with her ever happens, I'm there.

BLACK ADAM: Look, the whole point of the end of 52's Black Adam arc was that it was final--that his pride had destroyed him and that he'd spend his remaining days wandering like Cain, searching for his magic word. It also meant that when he inevitably reappeared, eight or fifteen years down the line, it would have this massive return-of-the-repressed impact. And then he showed up again... THREE WEEKS LATER. Thereby undercutting all the dramatic force of his story, and making it totally exhausting every time he's appeared since. Also, the resolution of the "lost magic word" thing in the Black Adam miniseries was as stupid as it could possibly have been.

BOOSTER GOLD: The first few issues took off from the tone of the Booster sequences in 52, it's a clever idea, and I've enjoyed most of it so far. There's no denying it's an exercise in mining the past, but it gets away with it because "mining the past" is its premise.

RALPH AND SUE DIBNY, DEAD DETECTIVES: On the other hand, Batman and the Outsiders? In 2008? It's like turning on the TV and all you get is The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas, except that all the characters are dead now and it's stories about their ghosts running moonshine and making business deals. Next up: the Arak, Son of Thunder revival, yes?

RENEE MONTOYA/THE QUESTION/THE CRIME CULT: I love the character, I'll read anything Rucka writes with her, and I really enjoyed the first couple of issues of 52 Aftermath: Crime Bible: The Five Books, Excuse Me, Lessons of Blood: What, Were We Supposed To Mention Our Character's Name Somewhere in the Title? It's probably as close as I'm going to get as that "superhero comic about introspection and self-discovery" I imagined a year ago. But if you're going to end a miniseries on a cliffhanger, maybe it's a good idea to indicate where that cliffhanger's going to be resolved. (Final Crisis: Revelation, right, but that wasn't clear at the time.) (More title confusion, actually: is it Revelation or Revelations? Can I vote for the proper, singular, John-the-Divine version, especially since Wildstorm already used the plural a couple of months back?)

STEEL: The most awkward thread of 52--his plot never went anywhere all that interesting, and the "metagene" business was so unclear that it all ended up shoved back into its box by the end of the series. Peter Milligan's Infinity Inc. is kind of a clever idea (superheroes as metaphors for various kinds of psychological disorders and mental illness), even if he tends to bang his thematic drumbeats a little too obviously, but trying to hang it onto the 52 peg has probably hurt more than helped.

OOLONG ISLAND/THE FOUR HORSEMEN: Well, I couldn't have imagined that there was any more story to be told on this front--but Giffen and Olliffe managed to evoke the tone of 52. The Four Horsemen miniseries was unnecessary and vestigial, but at least it wasn't parasitic.

THE MULTIVERSE STUFF: The idea that there are parallel realities that sometimes intersect is one of the coolest concepts in DC continuity; I was glad to see it return. It would have been nice to have it floating around as an occasional story resource, not to have the 52 worlds pinned down and summarily zipped through the way we've seen them in the past year.

There are also still a ton of dangling plot threads left over from 52. I maintain a dim flicker of hope that the Waverider/Time Commander/Clock Queen business will eventually be wrapped up in Booster Gold, and that the Intergang/Gotham City/Apokolips stuff will get at least a nod in the course of the impending Kirby-legacy barrage of Final Crisis, but I'm still wondering what the business with Adam Strange and Alan Scott's eyes was, for instance. Also, um, Super-Chief.

What I miss most about 52, though, is its tone--the sense that anything could happen from week to week, that all the plotlines were hurtling somewhere far from where they started, that cool new creations and resonant echoes of history could turn up on any page, that the DCU was becoming a deeper and richer and more interesting place every week. It made me want to know what happened next. 52 gave us Oolong Island, Batwoman, the Crime Bible, Everyman, Lady Styx, the Four Horsemen, Rip Hunter's chalkboard, the Great Ten, Supernova, the Cult of Connor, St. Camillus, Sobek, Osiris... and then, when it ended, its inventive energy mostly dissipated. I'm really hoping that the Final Crisis cycle, and Trinity running in parallel, will build for the future at least as much as they evoke the past.

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SUPER SPY and NEW AVENGERS #39. Below the cut lurk spoilers (well, a plot summary, really) for the latter. Hence, the cut. For those who care about such things.



Tom Spurgon wrote the other day in his you-must-go-read-it best-of-2007 roundup that " I have a selfish reason for wanting to bring more people to the conversation on [Matt Kindt's] Super Spy: I think the book is good, but I can't figure out how good, and I'd love to see a range of writers and thinkers muse on it in public to help me along. It's the most confusing book of 2007 to me, and for that one of the most compelling."

I read it at last yesterday, after it had been on my shelf taunting me for months, and... well, I'm confused too. I think it's Very Good, but that's kind of a split decision between the elements that work beautifully and the ones that don't work at all. It's one of the most formally grand comics I've seen in a while: 37 interrelated stories about espionage in World War II, each one written and drawn with its own distinct formal guidelines (not necessarily a specific style, but particular drawing and writing techniques, POV, etc.). They form one kind of story in the order they're printed, but that's not chronological order; they can also be read in chronological order by the "dossier numbers" printed at the beginning of each one. They're mostly black-and-white with a single tone color (which changes from time to time), except when they erupt into full-spectrum color in a few passages, generally for pastiches of old comic strips. But the whole book is actually in full color: its pages' blank space is mostly the mottled color of yellowed WWII-era newsprint, with crumpled corners and other marks of age and abuse. There are stories within stories (with the inevitable reference to the 1,001 Nights); there are hidden messages everywhere--everyone seems to be a spy, sending secret information and desperate requests to other spies while trying to act natural--and anything that looks innocuous in one story is inevitably revealed in another to be the vehicle of a hidden message. (A facial mole is actually the mark of an espionage mole: it's a dot of microfilm!)

Cool, yes? Yes, and as somebody who is inordinately fond of complicated formal structures in art in general, I do like it an awful lot. But the places where it falls down are some of the more old-fashioned, prosaic virtues, like character and figure drawing. The story is populated by a whole lot of characters, all of them spies trying to advance their personal and political agendas at any cost--but I found when I'd finished it that I only remembered the name of one of them, Sharlink, "the Shark," a classic femme-fatale type. The espionage material is standard-issue coded-transmission stuff, and characters are broad central-casting types; people discover that their lovers are spies for the other side and betray each other in a strangely facile way; an exotic dancer's desperate, unusual movements are Morse code: "my cover is blown, they're waiting for me, must escape tonight." (And he telegraphs a lot of the "secrets," too: one character explains how he's going to hide a message in every fifth word of a comic strip, and not only do we see every fifth word of the strip circled, but we subsequently see someone picking out those words.) Kindt's artwork is really lovely as cartooning-based drawing (line, tone, composition, abstraction), but it's a little bit off in the context of a story: characters are awkwardly different-looking from panel to panel, facial expressions are vague approximations. I definitely want to read his future comics, but like I said, I'm confused about what I think of this too.

NEW AVENGERS #39: Now, this is a Very Good and very interesting espionage-fakeout narrative--nowhere near as formally impressive as SUPER SPY, but a terrific piece of Bendis serial writing. The plot (SPOILERS like I said) is that Echo and Wolverine have a strange and slightly flirtatious conversation, and Echo heads to Matt Murdock's law office, where she encounters Daredevil; when she asks him a question he should know the answer to and he tries to cover up for the fact that he doesn't know what she's talking about, she realizes something's wrong--and Daredevil reveals himself as a Skrull, who attacks her. But Wolverine's followed them, and fights the Skrull, who gets away. The injured Wolverine explains that "if I was a Skrull looking to sink their claws into our little team, you'd be the one I'd go after," and Echo realizes that "they were going to kill me and replace me." Back at their HQ, Maya seduces Hawkeye; when she wakes up, she looks through her fingers at him.

There are three ways to read this story. The first is to take it at face value. The second, which I suspect is the case, is that Echo has in fact been a Skrull for a good long while--that she's already been killed and replaced, long since, and that her fight with the Daredevil/Skrull this issue is a game to clear her in Wolverine's eyes, since Wolverine is convinced that she's the most likely target. (And then what's going on with her and Hawkeye? Well, he's a Skrull suspect as an unlikely returnee-from-the-dead, but it's still a little confusing.)

And the third is that not only is Echo a Skrull, but Wolverine knows it but doesn't want to let on that he knows. (That "does he know about our past?" routine at the beginning of the issue may be the same kind of leading question as Echo's "Why did you send Captain America to me?" I know Echo and Wolverine worked together in the past, but can anybody who knows her history better than I do tell me if they were ever romantically involved?) Which means--after all the times in this series when Echo has responded to what someone's saying even though her back is to them--that when Wolverine's lying behind her and says "(She can't hear me...)," he knows she can hear him, and is saying it for her to hear and be deceived...

Or, you know, maybe everything is what it seems to be. But how much fun would that be? I have no idea how this will read once we see the whole story (Mack, certainly, is drawing much more straightforwardly and less inventively and attractively than he has with his other Echo material), but for now I'm delighted.

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Two '70s throwbacks, of different kinds. Short version: the new Mighty Avengers is a very nice execution of a badly flawed premise, and The Last Defenders struggles with the idea behind what it's building on. More under the cut.





MIGHTY AVENGERS #10: I'm still really enjoying Brian Michael Bendis's attempts to give every issue of this series (and of New Avengers) its own plot and tone--it helps prevent the sense a lot of other series have that they're written for the trade and broken up wherever the plot allows--and I'm glad he's still doing the info-overload tricks (the thought balloons, the constant internal chatter from Tony's armor) that make this series read differently from its sibling. This issue: Iron Man and Dr. Doom, stranded in the '70s! (Well, in the comics of the '70s--when the issue plugged on pg. 2 came out, the band plugged on a T-shirt on the same page hadn't formed yet.)

But the first premise of this issue is that Iron Man is terrified of setting off some kind of "butterfly effect" in the past that changes the present. Fair enough--but they discuss their previous experience with time travel this issue, and Tony wasn't nearly as worried about changing history then. (I suppose there's a Marvel Universe precedent for being able to change history, which is why we have e.g. "Days of Future Past," but has there been a Marvel butterfly-effect story?) For that matter, if Tony had access to a time machine--and given the opening sequence of last month's Fantastic Four, we have to assume that his pal Reed Richards still has one--wouldn't the very first thing he would do be going back a few months to save Steve Rogers?

The second premise is that since Mastermind made everyone forget that Bob had ever existed, he can openly retrieve Reed's time machine without fear of changing history. This makes no sense at all--if Mastermind makes me forget where I left my keys, that doesn't mean they aren't where I left them.

That said, the execution moves so smoothly the plot problems almost don't get in the way. This is Mark Bagley in peak form--if Trinity looks this good, I'm going to be really happy. The production tricks are really clever, too: the little bottom-of-page ads for "on sale now!" comics, the "continued after next page" squibs, and the old-fashioned dot-screen coloring (anybody want to identify what the first comic to use that technique to indicate a sequence set in the past was? I'm curious) make the very contemporary verbal cat-and-mouse games between Iron Man and Dr. Doom seem weirdly anachronistic in a really appropriate way. (Doom's dialogue is just far enough off--"Okay. Yes" doesn't sound like him--that Tony's suspicions that he's a Skrull are reasonable.) Bendis can't quite channel '70s--the "It's bedlam on the street as New York's glitziest citizens run in mortal terror!" sequence is way cornier than Marvel comics of that era actually were--but as long as you don't stop to think about logic, the style and flow of the story are Very Good.

THE LAST DEFENDERS #1: I'm not quite sure what Joe Casey and Keith Giffen are getting at here. The joy of Steve Gerber-era Defenders, which is what this is pretty much a callback to, wasn't entirely that it was a team made up of second-stringers and characters who had absolutely nothing to do with each other except that they basically drank at the same bar; it was that Defenders was deliberately unimportant in the scheme of things, and Gerber could therefore do any bizarre thing he wanted with it. (A Trout In the Milk and friends wrote a series of very long posts on the dynamics of Gerber's Defenders--all the parts are linked here.)

This story, though, is about Nighthawk, the Very Most Boring Superhero of All Time, assembling a new group of Defenders (under the auspices of the Initiative), which is sort of like assembling a new group of people to drink at a bar that closed 20 years ago. They don't have anything to do with each other (the other three are She-Hulk, Colossus and the Blazing Skull); they fight some people affiliated with the Sons of the Serpent, which I always get confused with Kobra for some inexplicable reason, plus one of the Brothers Grimm refers to Nighthawk as "bird-man" the way the Hulk used to. Then there's an apropos-of-nothing flashback to the Ancient One turning the Son of Satan away 40 years ago, some tonal fluctuations toward goofiness (a caption reading "The Sons of the Serpent are getting their mystic ceremony on," the group smashing through a window as one of them yells "Defenders defenestrate!"), and finally a page on which Head seems to have drifted over from The All-New Atom (oh, fine, it's a Rigellian recorder) and Yandroth explains to him that the Defenders are actually incredibly important if they've got a lineup that... is nothing like the one in this issue and a lot like the Dr. Strange/Namor/Hulk-era one. This could be the making of an interesting story about fruitless nostalgia, especially since the title of the miniseries (and the title page) imply that it's meant to be the end of the line for the Defenders concept. But it seems to be an exercise in fruitless nostalgia instead, and the totally generic artwork doesn't help. Eh, I'm afraid.

*****

As long as I'm here, I might as well plug two not-comics-related projects I'm working on: Mincing Up the Morning is a collection of videos of musicians whose birthday it is each day, and Circle the Globe is a linkblog--just a bunch of interesting quotes and pictures and videos I encounter. Because, you know, everybody needs more stuff on the Internet to look at.

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Pamphlets! Under the cut: LOGAN, NEW FRONTIER and YOUNG LIARS.



LOGAN #1: I realized after I'd bought this issue that it's cover-priced at $3.99, and for that money I expect more than 22 pages of story. And in fact I got more: it's 23 pages of story. (And a glossy cover; so what?) Eduardo Risso's in good form, but I expected much better from Brian K. Vaughan. The story is once again sending Wolverine to Japan (which was a really clever and refreshing idea when Claremont and Miller did it twenty-five years ago--yes, I am of the Paul O'Brien "oh Christ, not Japan again" school), and once again exploring a bit of his adventuring past so deeply forgotten it's never been referred to before. Although I suppose repeating oneself is the risk you run when you've got him appearing in at least half a dozen books a month. Also, Vaughan's cliffhangers tend to be much less cheap than this one. What's the exquisite, pastoral Japanese locale where Wolverine rescues and is bedded by a beautiful young woman in the waning days of World War II? Why, a little town he's never heard of called Hiroshima, of course! Knocked down to Awful for the price gouging.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL #1: Effectively a 48-page plug for the direct-to-video animated New Frontier movie, but hell, it's Darwyn Cooke--nine pages of the first story even have his signature at the bottom, distractingly enough. That story doesn't really add much to the original series--Superman and Batman have a misunderstanding and fight, and then Wonder Woman mediates a deal between them--but Cooke's artwork and design sense are the point here. The backup Robin/Kid Flash story is seriously incoherent (having Robin drag-race Wally Wood is a joke I wish someone would explain to me), and the Wonder Woman/Black Canary/Gloria Steinem teamup is just kind of a dopey joke. Good, on the strength of the lead feature's lovely Cooke art.

YOUNG LIARS #1: A new Vertigo ongoing by David Lapham, who spends the better part of his text piece wincing about the fact that he still hasn't finished Stray Bullets yet. So instead of Amy Racecar, we get a different all-id-no-superego antiheroine, Sadie Dawkins, who's come by her personality the Phineas Gage way--she's got a bullet in "the moral and emotional centers of [her] brain." I'm looking forward to hearing what Polite Dissent says about that one. This is apparently Lapham's take on youth culture, and specifically the New York music scene of the moment (the story happens literally yesterday, March 7, 2008), and he's really shaky on that stuff from the top of the very first page, where the credits appear on a cassette tape. Note: that date is 2008, not 1993. The supporting cast are broad but shallow caricatures--an anorexic ex-model called Annie X, an aging trust fund kid ("Daddy refused to pay the co-op. They're kicking me out tomorrow!"), etc. Lapham's stuffed this issue with temporal jumps and cutaways, and he seems to have some kind of master plan for the series. I could be convinced yet, but this is an Awful start.

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Lewis Trondheim's diary comics are so good I'm actually posting a puke joke here.




My first exposure to Lewis Trondheim was Mister O, which is one of the funniest things I've ever read--the first time I looked at it, there were at least two or three pages that made me laugh so hard I was lying on the floor gasping--and I've been skimming bits of his enormous catalogue ever since, trying to find something I like as much. (The sequel Mister I wasn't anywhere near as good, and I'm sort of mystified by A.L.I.E.E.E.N.) Most of his hundred-plus books aren't available in English; if you're reading this and you know which of his books are worth seeking out in French, feel free to recommend some stuff in the comments.

Little Nothings is 120 pages' worth of his diary comics, which he posts every few days at his blog, and they're some of the best diary comics I've seen. They don't have the same kind of broad humor as other books of his, but they're perceptive, totally charming, and exquisitely drawn--he draws himself as some kind of bird (and everyone else as animals too, which means that every drawing of a character is a little sight gag). His artwork here is deceptively simple--pen-and-ink line drawings, shaded with watercolors--but the coloring gives a great sense of lighting, and usually underscores the jokes, too. Look at the puke joke again: the splotches of yellow capture the effect of late-night streetlights, direct the eye toward Trondheim and his friends, and quietly recapitulate the gag while they're at it.

What I think I like best about it is Trondheim's attitude toward himself, which is always tricky to negotiate when you're drawing your own immediate experiences and then showing them to the world. He's amused by himself, but not particularly self-important; he's sometimes the butt of his jokes, but there's never really a sense of self-loathing. The root of his humor is his awareness of how his own mind works. It's funny when he sits on a train, watching people run for it, and then bursts into a sweat, wondering "And me? Am I on the train? Did I make it on time?" But it's even funnier when he realizes that he asks himself the same question every time.

A good-sized chunk of the book can be read here, in reverse order, which may make some of Trondheim's running gags confusing. If you can read French (or just like his drawings), his current blog entries are here, and use the weirdest and funniest system for dealing with old entries I've ever encountered. It's definitely low-key--if you want ambition from Trondheim, there's the Dungeon series, which I've yet to read most of--but it's Excellent.

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A handful of of pamphlets this week, two of which allude obliquely to Ant-Man. Two different Ant-Men, actually. After the jump: BATMAN #674, NEXUS #100 and WORLD WAR HULK: AFTERSMASH!: DAMAGE CONTROL #2.



BATMAN #674: Couldn't make head or tail of this the first time through; fortunately, Timothy Callahan has helpfully pointed out the connections between this story and "Robin Dies at Dawn" from Batman #156, which I found reprinted in Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, and which includes a reference to an Ant-Man. (Note that this issue is called "Batman Dies at Dawn.") It's still a little confused by Morrison's occasional habit of selecting random fragments of a complicated story and leaving out the ones that would explain what's going on, but at least now it feels like it's going somewhere. But I love Batman trying to push all the horrible stuff he's experiencing into his world-view of "clues" and "crime," and I also think it's interesting that both Morrison's Batman and All-Star Superman are almost totally dedicated to iterations of the "superhero versus alternate versions of himself" story. Pretty Good.

NEXUS #100: Steve Rude's art is as gorgeous as ever, and this issue totally has the look-and-feel of Nexus in the '80s, when I read and enjoyed it. So why, I wondered as I slogged through the lead story, am I not getting any pleasure out of this? Oh, right: the previous issue came out in July, and it's a tightly packed story where almost every panel relies heavily on knowledge of comics that came out 20 years ago. I mean, if you'd asked me in 1987, I'd probably have known what a "Gucci assassin" is, or what Tyrone's relationship to Nexus is, or who Kreed is and why it's impossible that he's back from the dead, but that was a while ago. The backup story with Sundra brushing off advances from sleazy Washington, DC politicians might be a lot more enjoyable if it weren't a very tired old twist-ending story with a science-fiction muumuu flung over it, and if the pretty painted Rude art weren't built around the two sleazy politicians being modeled on Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. (Hillary as a rapacious lesbian? Is there really any appropriate response to that but a blank, pitying stare?) Creepy: two different photos of Jack Kirby, apropos of not much, one accompanied by a semi-hagiographical essay about the history of the series that ends "Undoubtedly, The King of Comics is watching Steve Rude and his cohorts, approving of what they're all trying to create with their hearts and their hands... And he's smiling." Doubly creepy: the fact that Rude-as-publisher begins the letter column by running a letter from a friend of his about how clever and cool Rude-as-artist's artwork in the story we've just read is. And seriously, if you're going to be half a year late with your second issue, serialization is probably not an acceptable strategy. So yeah, it looks really nice, but that only nudges it up to an Eh. (And yes, I know I'm blaming this issue for something very similar to what I just praised Batman for, but the difference is that Batman is approaching its sources with the understanding that it's dealing with messy, primitive memories of long ago, and Nexus is trucking along as if all the stuff it's referring to just came out last month.)

WORLD WAR HULK: AFTERSMASH!: DAMAGE CONTROL #2: As the next-issue blurb suggests, very little happens this time: the cliffhanger from last issue is resolved through a few minutes' worth of conversation, there's some more discussion, and another cliffhanger turns up in the final two panels. But this is a little gem of a story about what happens after the big fight scenes in the post-Civil War landscape, with hugely fun character interaction, one funny line after another ("I don't want any of you having unnecessary origins"), and lots of nice little bits of visual business (I especially like John Porter's Spider-Man key ring). I was happy to see a reference to the "Slaying Mantis" routine from Irredeemable Ant-Man, too. My reservations about Salva Espin's artwork in the context of this particular story still hold--the more he draws these characters as broad caricatures, the more he threatens to oversell the jokes. Still, it's Very Good, and I kept thinking I'd so much rather see Damage Control complements to big Marvel events than Frontlines...

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Go read: Tom Spurgeon's interview with Douglas Wolk.

Go look: the new Indiana Jones Trailer! Looks better than I would have hoped!

(lets try the embed thing, to see if it works)



-B

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Well, okay, then--the consensus seems to be that reviews of older stuff are perfectly OK here. So... here's some quick notes on this week's books! (Actual graphic novel reviews will be coming soon...)

NEW AVENGERS #38 re-teams Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos, so it's effectively a new issue of Alias, which is just fine with me. This is an all-conversation issue about Jessica Jones and Luke Cage falling out when they land on opposite sides of the registration divide, and... yeah, I admit it: Civil War was a much better idea than I'd have guessed for opening up story possibilities in ongoing series. This is the kind of conversation-based, stage-play-ish story Bendis hasn't done in a while, but the other reasons it works better than most of Bendis's recent Avengers books mostly come down to how good Gaydos is at facial expressions and character-acting: Luke, more exhausted than angry, pointing his fingers and crossing his arms a little less intently than usual; Danny lifting his hands up around his head when he talks about the Leader; Spider-Man hanging upside-down from the ceiling like it's the most comfortable place for him. (And the next issue is "The Truth About Echo," which I'm hoping will explain how a deaf lip-reader can hear somebody with a full-face mask who's facing away from her. Skrullity-skrullity-skrull.) Very Good, although does it bother anybody else that even Luke and Jessica almost never refer to their child as Danielle, but "the baby" or "our baby"?

The first few pages of BOOSTER GOLD #0 are cleverly executed--a callback to a 14-year-old miniseries could fall flat, but actually pretending it's an official tie-in to Zero Hour is pretty funny. (Extra points for the silver fifth color on the cover.) But that's mostly undermined by the extended "flashback" to the 25th century. I know it's hard to imagine what the future's going to look like--40-year-old Legion stories look like 35-year-old photographs of Tokyo--but the idea that Gotham University would be playing a football game against Ohio State in 2462 is like imagining 20th-century versions of 15th-century academies playing highly publicized games of closh. You'd think that Johns and Katz and Jurgens would try to get around that, but instead we get pages on end of locker rooms, sportscasters, Booster's sister in high-heeled boots... it doesn't look like the 25th century, it looks like the '80s with some extra fashion disasters. Eh.

FANTASTIC FOUR #554 seems to be more about demonstrating how impressive and audacious Mark Millar's approach to the series is than actually doing anything impressive or audacious--the magazine-style front cover, for instance, was clever on Trouble, but it doesn't work here. This reads a little like the proposed-but-unmade Fantastic Four movie idea that was floating around a few years ago, which was supposed to be about them as the objects of a cult of celebrity, except that they're all acting like parodies of celebrities, as if Millar's trying to to show how impressively X-Treme everyone is. (As for the music industry making Johnny a millionaire, has Millar been paying attention to newspapers in the last few years?) The "Old West" sequence at the beginning is blatantly tacked onto a story that doesn't seem to have anything to do with it but doesn't have any other action scenes. For that matter, if the Richards family had access to a functioning time machine, the miserable first day of Disneyland might not be the most fun destination. Hitch is using a lot of photo-reference here, it looks like, especially for faces, but that means a lot of the characters don't look quite consistent from panel to panel. (And is the Marvel Boy in the Fantasti-Car meant as some sort of tweak at the Morrison/Jones version?) The best bit of the issue is Hitch's double-page spread of Nu-World at the end--and even that doesn't tell us anything about it, just that it looks like a cross between Pac-Man and the Death Star. (That "nu"-as-in-nu-metal, as opposed to "new," is a good symbol of what's not quite right about this issue: it needs to announce that it's cool, which means it's sort of not.) It's Okay, but I suspect half the fun of this run is going to be finding things to get irritated about, so I'm on the fence about continuing to read it.

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Just time for a couple of quick reviews, but I wanted to note that WWH AFTERSMASH: DAMAGE CONTROL #1 is awfully Good--the most welcome mainstream-comics surprise of the week. I managed to miss Dwayne McDuffie's first three Damage Control miniseries, circa 1990, but now I'm tempted to go dig them all up. The premise is cute (Damage Control is the company whose job is to clean up and repair stuff after superhero fights), and McDuffie uses it as a vehicle to play with the current state of the Marvel universe (the upshot of Civil War, as far as civilians are concerned, is basically just additional bureaucratic hassle) and riff a little on real-world politics. I cracked up at the editor's-note gag and the bit about being "liable under S.H.R.A." Plus: Black Goliath!

I'm not totally sold on Salva Espin's artwork (with Guru eFX coloring)--it's an uncomfortable mixture of rubbery cartooniness and the Epting/McNiven hyper-modeled Marvel house style of the moment, and when some of Ernie Colón's old characters (like Gene Strausser) show up, there's a real disjunction. But this is essentially a talking-heads setup issue until the last couple of pages, and he manages to keep it moving anyway. Title of story: "Whatever Happened to All the Fun in the World?" Ad tagline in same issue: "Cyclops' covert wetworks team doesn't protect the dream, they erase the threats... Bloody variant by Clayton Crain."

Ed Piskor was kind enough to send me a copy of his self-published book WIZZYWIG, VOL. 1: PHREAK, a fictional biography of a computer hacker-in-the-making growing up in the '70s (there are apparently three more volumes to come). The book's protagonist, Kevin Phenicle, is essentially synthesized from the histories of two famous hacker-type Kevins, Mitnick and Poulsen, as well as bits of other well-known hackers' life stories. This volume is slowly paced, and the scenes of Kevin's early social alienation drag on a bit (guess what? he was beaten up by other kids at school! and he was scared of girls!), but the stuff about his fascination with figuring out and exploiting systems is mighty interesting. Mitnick has written about how "social engineering" is at least as important as technical knowledge for hackers, and Piskor works with that idea here; the best scenes are the ones where Kevin is gradually learning how to get other people to trust him. Piskor's artwork reminds me a bit of Chester Brown's Louis Riel--the steady clip-clop of square panels, the compositions built around a couple of small caricatures, the empty circles for eyes--and his fine-lined feathering is worth lingering over. It's Good, if kind of pricey; Piskor has posted the entire first half of the book at his site, and if you're into hacker culture, it's absolutely worth a look. Also, it's the first time I've seen a TRS-80 in a comic book since this one.

And a question: For various reasons, I often don't get to read trade paperback and hardcover collections until they've been out for at least a few months. Quick and non-binding straw poll--are reviews of several-months-old books interesting to you at all, or do you prefer to read about stuff with at least a little of last Wednesday's warmth still radiating from it?

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I'm probably a pretty decent test case for AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #546, since I haven't read a non-Ultimate series about Spider-Man regularly in many years, am fond of high-speed serialization in theory, enjoy Steve McNiven's artwork (particularly for action scenes), and don't have strong feelings about this particular continuity revision beyond my general distaste for it-was-all-a-dream soft reboots. (I should also note that the initial rumor I'd heard about the upshot of One More Day--about a year ago--was that it was going to reboot the entire 616 universe, the way Marv Wolfman intended to have Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot the DCU.) Jumping-on points? I'm all for 'em.

So I've jumped on, and... it's Okay, but I don't think this is the train for me. The tone of Dan Slott's story is very much in the vein of what Spider-Man comics were like 30 years ago or so: there's a new villain with a cute gimmick, a couple of new supporting-cast members, J. Jonah Jameson is a one-dimensional jerk instead of the hardass newsman Brian Michael Bendis has turned him into over the last few years, Peter Parker can't catch a break, the storytelling is very straightforward despite the cute little temporal loop built into it, etc. In fact, the "this and that" page with the flashback to what Peter's been up to looks like a homage to the Ross Andru era of Amazing Spider-Man. (Note that we're seeing Hammerhead and the Rhino rather than, say, Venom.) And there are a couple of straight-up callbacks to Amazing Fantasy #15--Aunt May and her wheatcakes, the "I could have stopped the robber but I didn't" routine, etc. It's perfectly solidly executed, and Slott and McNiven are gratifyingly painstaking about the details: Jonah's mad-dog face, the cooing pigeon on the phone, even the filler text in the newspaper ads and the chairs (!) in the scene where Peter's interviewing for jobs. (I notice that the Ph.D. who interviews him is Stephen Wacker.) Everything that needs to be explained for someone who hasn't read Spider-Man comics in a while is there. And that first page of next week's issue that Wacker showed in his Newsarama interview yesterday is a fine little joke.

But there's a nasty irony to the scene where Peter wakes up in his aunt's house: he's too old for things to be exactly the same way they were long ago--he's still got his science-fair trophies in his bedroom, with the periodic table hanging over the bed--and it feels almost infantilizing, the same way this new direction for Amazing does. This issue is so thoroughly concerned with setting up the new ground rules for the series that it never quite gets to the exciting part: McNiven keeps drawing things from dramatically tilted angles to suggest a sense of chaos and drama (the entire final scene at the Bugle seems to represent the perspective of somebody overcompensating for a crick in their neck), but this is really mostly a talking-heads story, and not even very suspenseful.

Most frustratingly, there's nothing particularly fresh going on here--nothing that opens up the Spider-Man concept to the 21st century, or finds new depths in the 45 years of stories that precede it. There doesn't seem to be any subtext at all in this issue (what is it about? it's about Spider-Man, duh!), and there's barely any open space, either visually (the cover is almost the only image this issue that suggests Spider-Man's sense of free motion through the city) or in the story; I can't imagine the plot going anywhere unexpected or novel. I feel like this is an upgraded version of a story that was accidentally left out of Essential Spider-Man Vol. 7--sharper dialogue, prettier modeling for the artwork, but very much the opposite of brand new.

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I got my first look at the weekly British anthology series 2000 A.D. sometime around 1980 or 1981, when Mile High Comics had a "five bucks for ten randomly selected British weeklies" special--the issues I got included a couple of the Judge Dredd stories that Brian Bolland drew, and I was pretty impressed, especially by how tightly constructed the stories were. With only five or six pages to an episode and at least five stories in each issue, there was a lot happening in very little space.

In 1982, I got to visit England, went to Forbidden Planet in London, and bought a pile of 15 or 20 recent issues (excuse me "progs"), in the 250-275 range. This time I was riveted: the enormous, roaring Apocalypse War storyline was going on in "Judge Dredd," and there was also Alan Grant and Ian Gibson's "Robo-Hunter," Massimo Belardinelli's totally silly artwork for "Ace Trucking Co.," Dave Gibbons occasionally popping in to draw "Rogue Trooper"... I read them over and over, and after that, I made a special effort to find stores in the U.S. that carried the series.

It may be hard to imagine how exciting 2000 A.D. was in the early '80s if you've only read individual series in collections, but it was usually at least 3/5 awesome. And it kept getting better and better over the next few years, especially after Alan Moore started writing a bunch of serials--"The Ballad of Halo Jones," "Skizz," "D.R. and Quinch." Series I hadn't liked much at first, like "Nemesis the Warlock" and "Strontium Dog," started to grow on me. Even the lamer stuff had its charms--"Harry Twenty on the High Rock" was a by-the-numbers defiant-prisoner story that just happened to be set in outer space, but it had some nice art from Alan Davis. ("Sláine" never did much for me--somebody got sword-and-sorcery in my SF comic!--but I grudgingly accepted it.) And "Judge Dredd," usually written collaboratively by John Wagner and Alan Grant in those days, was always a treat. The setting was much sharper satire of American culture than I noticed at the time, and their Dredd was a fascinating character: a despicable hero, unutterably brave and devoted to his city but also an inhuman fascist.

In retrospect, 2000 A.D. had probably peaked by around 1987 or so, but it didn't decline quickly--there was Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's "Zenith," some really nice Simon Bisley art on the still-not-my-thing "Sláine," amusing weirdness like Peter Milligan and Jamie Hewlett's "Hewligan's Haircut," Garth Ennis and Mark Millar cutting their teeth. And Dredd, semper Dredd. By '92, there were signs of decline, like a Moore-less sequel to "Skizz" and updated callbacks to not-exactly-thrilling early series like "Flesh"; by the mid-'90s, I realized that it had been a good long while since there'd been a new series I'd really liked, but Dredd--once again written by John Wagner--and the occasional Morrison/Millar serials were good enough to keep me seeking out the series as it showed up in the U.S. (usually in clumps of four or five weekly issues at a time).

I finally stopped buying it a few years later--Dredd usually still delivered the goods, but the now-full-color-and-glossy 2000 A.D. Weekly had gotten awfully expensive in the U.S., and the "Nikolai Dante" and "Sinister Dexter" serials kept going and going and going and never caught my interest. But I still check in every year or so, when they published a special issue. And when the Complete Judge Dredd books started appearing, I snapped them up--the first few years' worth are pretty dodgy, but after that, they really hold up.

This brings us to Prog 2008, published last week--not the 2008th issue (this week's issue will be Prog 1567), but the end-of-2007 special. It's 100 pages long, with a bunch of features, but what's particularly interesting about it is that it's the first issue that Clickwheel is offering for sale as a downloadable PDF; each issue will be available for download a week after it comes out. Which is to say: it's in a time-frame and a format more sensible than any of the major American comics companies have yet offered.

The lead story is a Dredd Christmas special, written by Wagner (who's been writing the series on and off for the last few years), and it's built around a character moment that doesn't quite scan to me, since I haven't been following Dredd lately--but at least it makes me want to find out why it's so important "to put the mutant question to another vote." Beyond that, there's the first episode of something called "Shakara the Defiant," which has rich, intriguing art by Henry Flint (entirely brown, black and white, except for a few flashes of bright color), and a totally incoherent story; the first episode of "Kingdom: The Promised Land," which I should've given up on as soon as I saw that the post-apocalyptic barbarian hero who looks like Cable is called "Gene the Hackman"; a pretty but dull Nikolai Dante quickie; a beautifully rendered (by D'Israeli) black-and-white piece called "Stickleback: England's Glory" whose plot I might have found comprehensible if I'd read earlier installments; a Sinister Dexter one-off, arguably a little too conventionally nicely drawn for its jokey tone, that's effectively about what a one-note gun-for-hire cliché that whole series is; and an episode of another series that's apparently been running for a bit, "Caballistics, Inc.," that has the look of old-school 2KAD high-contrast black-and-white, but takes ten pages to accomplish what would once have been done in four. Finally, there's a Strontium Dog story, by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra (with wretched computer coloring); it's fine, and I always like seing Ezquerra's work--he's been drawing for 2000 A.D. since the beginning--but Strontium Dog never had a sense of forward motion like Judge Dredd, and it's an exercise in nostalgia at this point.

So is a lot of the non-story material this issue. A few pages are devoted to "Great Moments in Thrill-Power," new illustrations of memorable bits from the past: the apparent suicide of Dredd from #262, the Angel Gang from #158, a nice Bryan Talbot drawing for the Nemesis serial "The Gothic Empire" from #387-406. There's a feature where fans are asked for their favorite 2000 A.D. covers. They name progs 5, 85, 112, 216, 230, 406, 469, 473, 620, 669, 686 and 883--most of them in that 1981-1990 sweet spot, none after 1994. (Also worth noting, on 2000 A.D.'s own site: the list of readers' twenty highest-ranked stories from the history of the series. Aside from three Wagner-written Judge Dredd serials, they're all pre-1993.) In some sense, it's kind of nice to know that other people agree with my sense of 2000 A.D.'s golden age, but it's depressing to think that the last 15 years' worth have produced so little of note.

The art in Prog 2008 is better than it's been the last few times I've picked up an issue--in particular, I'm going to be looking for more of Henry Flint's work (his Omega Men series wasn't nearly this cool-looking)--and reading the Dredd story made me want to catch up on the last few years' worth of Wagner's stories, at least. But I can't give this more than an Eh, because there's nothing else I want to keep reading--the delicious hypercompression and barbed comedy I associate with vintage 2000 A.D. isn't there any more. Tweaking them for their title isn't a new joke, but the fact that they're stuck with it suggests what's gone wrong: their aesthetic once implied the looming future, and now it's stuck in a past that's still sort of close but getting farther away, week by week.

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I haven't really done mini-reviews here before, but this is the Season of Experimentation, right?

Crime Bible: Five Lessons of Blood #2: Obviously I'd be biased toward this comic, but it really is Very Good: a crisp, done-in-one espionage/romance/psychological thriller-type story about Renee Montoya/the Question infiltrating a crime-cult-operated brothel for wealthy Beltway types in Chevy Chase, MD. Very densely plotted, too--it takes place over the course of two months, and a whole lot happens, most of it nudging forward the overall themes of the series. It's also worth noting that the tone of this issue would've been very different with a male protagonist and everything else the same. (And that Montoya's background gives her a stronger connection between sex and guilt than other people have.) As I mentioned when I reviewed the first issue, The Question is a vehicle for stories about the character's self-exploration, and I kind of love the idea that the crime cult is forcing her to commit what she knows are sins (in the name of doing good) so that she can better understand herself.

One little production note, though: if word balloons are supposed to include unintelligible text (to indicate a not-quite-overheard conversation), it's probably wisest for that text not to be the Photoshop-blurred word "unintelligible," especially if it's still pretty much intelligible.

Love and Capes #6: This is apparently the final issue for now of this fun little series, produced singlehandedly by Thom Zahler, although the text piece at the end promises more to come eventually. The blurb on the cover calls it "The Heroically Super Situation Comedy Comic Book!," which makes it sound slightly more formulaic than it is; it's essentially a romantic comedy about a celebrity dating a non-celebrity, with a superhero angle to make it a little more lively. (The action stuff, including an alien invasion this issue, all happens off-panel; the plot this time concerns the Superman-analogue the Crusader's girlfriend hosting a signing by the Wonder Woman-analogue Amazonia at her bookstore, and gnashing her teeth over the fact that Amazonia's book is partly a kiss-and-tell about the days when she used to date the Crusader.)

Zahler's got a really nice sense of narrative flow and design--I'm particularly fond of his "translucent" speech balloons--and if we have to have computer color modeling in comics, I'm happy to see some of it look like this, with a lot of tones and textures that look more like cel animation than old comic books. It's Good stuff, but I also wouldn't mind a bit if Zahler let these characters' stories end here; most of them don't have a lot of life beyond being breezily written stand-ins for familiar icons, and I'd like to see what he could do outside this set of formal constraints.

Batman #671: I missed the first three parts of "The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul," and found myself a little lost at the beginning of this issue, but also drawn in, mostly by Tony Daniel and Jonathan Glapion's artwork--they're copping the Neal Adams/Dick Giordano style in a few sequences (cf. the image of the Sensei on the first page, below--that "chunky" line is a total Crusty Bunker effect!), and it looks great.



What we actually get plot-wise, though, is a lot of shouting and fighting. It's Okay, and Batman gets to be a total badass in the climactic fight scene, but compare this to, say, All-Star Superman and it's evident that Morrison's writing a tone--Batman the Badass Hairy-Chested Love God--rather than a story. And I'm wondering where the impetus and plot for "RRaG" (not to be confused with "RRAGG" [at 5:03]) came from: was it at all Morrison's and/or the other Bat-writers' idea, or was it dictated from above?

I'm also wondering if Morrison actually knows what happened in the sequence in 52 #30 he keeps suggesting he's going to expand on. The solicitation for this issue promised that "the secrets of Nanda Parbat are revealed," and the solicitation for #673 also says it "revisits Batman's life-changing Thogal ritual in the caves of Nanda Parbat." Of course, the solicitation for #665 claimed "we learn what really happened to Batman inside the cave in Nanda Parbat when he underwent a seven-day Buddhist isolation ritual to purge his negative karma," and unless I skipped over a few pages, we didn't. The retreat involved in the practice of thogal, by the way, seems rather arduous, especially since it's seven weeks rather than seven days--scroll down to "The Bardo Retreat," near the end--but "attaining the rainbow body" is a bit like becoming a New God, don't you think?

Marvel Atlas #1: And here I was, thinking this was going to be some kind of sequel to Agents of ATLAS. It's actually an Official Handbook sort of thing, with straightforward text infodumps about every real and fictional country in the 616 Universe's Europe and Asia. Perhaps there will eventually be an ATLAS Atlas. (Not to be confused with "Hatless Atlas".) Not nearly as entertaining as it ought to be, despite sentences like "Italy is home to the Mafia and the Maggia" (and a we-wish-we-could-spell-this-out bit of the Ireland entry: "in ancient times Scathach approached a recently orphaned girl, who vowed to the goddess she would only ever love a man who could defeat her in battle"). Where there isn't a lot of Marvel Universe detail, space is filled in with generic world-atlas pieces of information; where there is, piles of stories get referred to glancingly, in a phrase or two. Title and issue-number references (for things other than fictional countries' first appearances) would've made it a bit more useful; as it is, it's not terribly readable, and not much of a reference tool, either. Eh, on the whole, and it's strange that the second issue won't be out until March.

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I carry a little Moleskine notebook with me everywhere. The obi they come with advertises that they're the notebook used by Bruce Chatwin, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, although that isn't strictly true. To that list, we can now add Renée Montoya.

Despite Countdown, I do like it when artifacts that ought to belong to one world end up in another. Yesterday, Greg Rucka dropped off a document that had come into his possession while he was working on the Crime Bible miniseries (of which the second issue comes out Thursday): Montoya's Moleskine, a bulging notebook that reminded me a bit of several Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links volumes. The pocket-sized notebook, besides copious handwritten notes on Montoya's investigation of the Dark Faith, includes a bunch of inserts:

*A 1938 translation of a bit of the Crime Bible, with Montoya's handwritten note about a numerical cipher or code. (Which, I'm guessing, has something to do with the numbers in the border of the first page of Crime Bible #1! I haven't had time to figure out how the cipher works, but I'm guessing that's what the Internet is for.)

*A photo of the cult's Barcelona convent
*A security photograph of the Question
*A gig poster for a Dark Cult-connected band called Darkseid's Bitch, who it turns out also have their own MySpace page

*A handwritten lyric sheet for "Ashes All Fall Down" by the band's singer/guitarist Serration, with annotations by Montoya, on a piece of letterhead from the Hotel Monarch in Star City
*A ticket for their show at the Dirrrty Club
*A set list for that show, with more Montoya annotations
*The Coast City coroner's report on Serration's death, and his toe-tag from the morgue, along with several bullet casings and a couple of pills
*Montoya's boarding pass for her flight to Barcelona (on Ferris Global Airways!)

*A clipping from the international edition of the Gotham Gazette, also annotated by Montoya

*A