There's a lively discussion going on in the comments to my last post here, but I wanted to carry one thing that's been brought up there over to a new post:

How many "Marvel completists" are there right now? According to the estimates over at The Beat, November's issue of "Marvel Adventures Super Heroes" sold 3,308 copies in the direct market (one of them was to me). The final issue of "Omega the Unknown" sold 7,591 copies in the direct market. "Dominic Fortune" #4, a mature-readers title, sold 5,657. "Amazing Spider-Man Family," which was actually in continuity (at least in part), hit bottom at 7,289 copies with #4. If you assumed that everyone who bought a copy of each of those bought it only because they buy every Marvel comic (or Marvel non-all-ages comic, or Marvel in-continuity comic)... well, you would be wrong, but you still wouldn't have accounted for the existence of a lot of completists.

So here's my question: Does anyone who reads this buy a copy of every Marvel comic for yourself? (Do you read all of them? What keeps you buying them all?) Is anyone who reads this a retailer with at least one customer who buys every Marvel comic? While we're at it, are there DC completists out there?

(And one additional question for the number-crunchers: anybody want to cite a number for the lowest-selling single issue of a non-reprint, in-continuity, 616-universe Marvel comic book?)

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I'm putting together a list of interesting-looking comics-related books that are coming out in 2010--what I've got so far is under the cut. Note that this is only book-format projects (so e.g. no "Joe the Barbarian," which reminds me: whatever happened to "Warcop" anyway?), and only things whose release dates have been announced either by the publishers or Amazon. Everything, as usual, is subject to change. I welcome additional suggestions for this list from anyone who doesn't work for the creators or publishers of the things you're suggesting.



January: Eddie Campbell: Alec: The Years Have Pants (Top Shelf)

Jan. 12: Dash Shaw: The Unclothed Man In the 35th Century A.D. (Fantagraphics)

Jan. 29: George Herriman: Krazy & Ignatz in "Tiger Tea" (IDW)

Feb. 2: Michael Dowers, ed.: Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s (Fantagraphics)

Feb. 9: Jock: Hellblazer: Pandemonium (Vertigo)

Feb. 28: Jason: Almost Silent (Fantagraphics)
George Herriman: Krazy & Ignatz 1916-1918: "Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut" (Fantagraphics)

Mar.: Lewis Trondheim: Little Nothings vol. 3: Uneasy Happiness (NBM)

Mar. 3: Ben Schwartz, ed.: The Best American Comics Criticism of the 21st Century (Fantagraphics)

Mar. 16: Kevin Huizenga: The Wild Kingdom (D&Q)

Mar. 29: Al Capp: Li'l Abner, Vol. 1: 1934-1936 (IDW)

Mar. 30: James Sturm: Market Day (D&Q)

Apr. 1: Frank Young/David Lasky: The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song (Abrams)
Jaime Hernandez: The Art of Jaime Hernandez (Abrams)

Apr. 6: Jacques Tardi: It Was the War of the Trenches (Fantagraphics)
Gilbert Hernandez: The High Soft Lisp (Fantagraphics)

Apr. 13: Peter Bagge: Other Lives (Vertigo)
Jillian Tamaki: Indoor Voice (D&Q)
Dash Shaw: BodyWorld (Pantheon)

Apr. 15: Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files vol. 15 (Rebellion)

Apr. 20: Jim Woodring: Weathercraft (Fantagraphics)

Apr. 27: Daniel Clowes: Wilson (D&Q)
John Stanley: Nancy vol. 2 (D&Q)

Apr. 28: Chris Onstad: Achewood vol. 3: A Home for Scared People (Dark Horse)

Apr. 29: Various: The Golden Treasury of Klassic Krazy Kool Kids Komics (IDW)

May 1: Dan Nadel, ed.: Art In Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980 (Abrams)

May 11: John Broome/Murphy Anderson: The Atomic Knights (DC)
Various: Wednesday Comics HC (DC)

May 25: Megan Kelso: Artichoke Tales (Fantagraphics)

Jun. 8: Frank King: Walt & Skeezix book 4, 1927-1928 (D&Q)
Showcase Presents Suicide Squad vol. 1 (DC)
Greg Rucka/J.H. Williams III: Batwoman: Elegy (DC)

Jun. 15: Judge Dredd: The Restricted Files vol. 2 (Rebellion)

Jun. 22: Meredith Gran: Octopus Pie: There Are No Stars in Brooklyn (Villard)
George Chieffet/Stephen DeStefano: Lucky in Love (Fantagraphics)

Jun. 29: The Creeper by Steve Ditko (DC)
Kathryn & Stuart Immonen: Moving Pictures (Top Shelf)
Ernie Bushmiller: Nancy's Aunt Fritzi Ritz (IDW)

Jul. 6: Paul Karasik/Mark Newgarden: How to Read Nancy (Fantagraphics)

July 13: Matt Kindt: Revolver (Vertigo)

July 20: Jason: Werewolves of Montpellier (Fantagraphics)

August: Jess Fink: Chester 5000-XYV and We Can Fix It (Top Shelf)

Aug. 15: Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files vol. 16 (Rebellion)

Aug. 18: Robert L. Bryant: The Thin Black Line: Perspectives on Vince Colletta, Comics' Most Controversial Inker (TwoMorrows)

Aug. 29: Cliff Sterrett: Polly and Her Pals: The Complete Sunday Comics 1925-1927 (IDW)

October: Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century vol. 2 (Top Shelf)

December: Pat Mills/Kevin O'Neill: The Marshal Law Omnibus (Top Shelf)
Alan Moore/Steve Parkhouse: The Collected Bojeffries Saga (Top Shelf)

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Two I didn't like so much, under the cut: "Logicomix" and "Dark Entries."



LOGICOMIX: AN EPIC SEARCH FOR TRUTH: This is a comics biography of Bertrand Russell (preview here) that's been getting a lot of exceptionally enthusiastic praise lately: Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times called it "probably the best and certainly the most extraordinary graphic novel I have ever come across," which makes me suspect that he has not come across very many of any kind. It's by a relatively large cast, which is fine: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou are credited with "concept & story," Doxiadis with the script, Alecos Papadatos with "character design & drawings," Annie Di Donna with color. All four of them actually appear in the story (Di Donna with an outrageous French accent: "It's life zat is building zat!"), as does Anne Bardy, credited with "visual research & lettering" in smaller type (alongside two inkers).

The biographical part, as it turns out, is framed by the lazy device of the book's creators themselves chatting about how exactly they're going to represent Russell and the mathematical and philosophical innovations in which he took part. When the ostensible subject of the book hits dry patches, they return (repeatedly) to quibble about what it all means, discuss how to illustrate the themes they conveniently spell out, wander around, and finally attend a performance of part of the "Oresteia," which appears in lieu of any kind of real dramatic resolution.

It's not as if they haven't sacrificed plenty to drama already: an end-note indicates that "our book is definitely not--nor does it want to be--a work of history," and that therefore most of its biographical details are telescoped, simplified or outright invented. There are ways to make that work in historical fiction, of course--ask any biopic--and it can be done well in comics (see, for instance, Chester Brown's Louis Riel). But what's actually present on the page here suggests that it is a relatively faithful work of history, if you don't know better. There's a sequence in which the young Russell goes to visit the elderly, deranged Georg Cantor ("Try and imagine a young painter being received by Michelangelo. A composer meeting Beethoven," declares Russell-the-narrator). He has a horrible experience, and goes on to have nightmares inspired by the meeting; the afterword notes that "it is safe to assume that Russell never met... Cantor in the flesh." In other words, that scene is only there to make a dry subject more exciting to look at.

Which raises the question that often comes to mind when I'm reading a "source-based" comic (as the panel at last weekend's SPX put it) that isn't creator-driven like Louis Riel or From Hell or Crumb's Genesis, for instance: Why is this comics? What is there to gain by explaining this with drawings? What can a handmade visual interpretation add to this? The art team is just fine--they've got a low-friction sort of post-Hergé kids'-comics style that only really gets in the way when they try to get fancy. But the only way to turn abstract mathematical concepts like the ones this book deals with into comics is to have a character explain them, and the only way to illustrate how revolutionary and surprising they are is to have characters recoil in shock at the explanation. In the framing sequences, the creators pat themselves on the back a bit for being clever enough to make a comic book about this stuff, and some reviews I've seen have echoed that congratulatory tone: Rob Sharp at the Independent claims that it "challenges the traditional character of the superhero or detective... It has been critically acclaimed as a welcome subversion of the graphic novel genre." If graphic novels were a genre, then it might be. But they're not. AWFUL.

DARK ENTRIES: Speaking of books discussed in the British newspaper pieces linked above: this is one of the first two books from the new Vertigo Crime imprint, a John Constantine story written by crime novelist Ian Rankin and drawn by Werther Dell'Edera. (Notable quote from the Independent piece: "Bizarrely, he never met the book's Italian artist, Werther Dell'Edera; in fact, as he was only liaising with him via DC, he was unaware that the book was eventually going to be published in black and white.") You would think that a book selected for to launch a new crime imprint would be, you know, a crime story, rather than a numbingly by-the-book supernatural/horror story in which a popular reality-TV show turns out to be run by demons DO YOU SEE and the inhabitants of the Big Brother-oid house are actually in "Gameshow Hell" DO YOU GET IT YET, HUH? You'd also think that it would be wiser to launch a new imprint with a book that Dell'Edera had time to make look as imposing and menacing as his work on Loveless, but whether it was or not (I have no idea), a lot of the book's second half appears to have been drawn in one hell of a hurry. AWFUL.

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It's 24 Hour Comics Day, and it's also Read Comics All Day Day, and I figured I might join the festivities myself. I'm not going to be reviewing comics here all day--I have some things I need to write for other places--but figured I could mention a few worth-seeking-out things I picked up at SPX, as well as some other stuff. Below the cut: three of my favorite things I've read lately, "Woman King," "Driven by Lemons" and "Ganges" #3.



WOMAN KING: This is a small, self-published book by Colleen Frakes that knocked me for a loop--an understated but sharp-fanged fable about a human girl who becomes king of the bears during a war between bears and humans. (There's a 30-page preview of it here.) The basic setup (cute little silent girl + bears) and four-panels-a-page pulse remind me a bit of Chris Baldwin's "Little Dee," but its tone is fascinating and really original: Frakes plays with the reader's sympathies constantly, and keeps feinting toward the way things can be expected to happen in fables, then pushing the story somewhere else. Here's a great panel lifted from Rob Clough's review of it:



Now, that's a total Calvin & Hobbes sort of image there, but what's happening in the scene is that some other bears have just killed a pretentious artist dude (who's sketching the big human-bear battle, noting that "I am not interested in drawing action as much as the quiet spaces in between"). Off-panel, of course. Quiet spaces! Frakes has done a lot of clever design work here, too--her bears are, like, eight lines and two dots, and their personality comes out in the subtleties of her brushstrokes. It's EXCELLENT, and it makes me really excited to see whatever she does next.

GANGES #3: One of the many, many things I like about Kevin Huizenga's work is that a lot of his comics are about things that are not likely candidates for visual representation, and he manages to make them fascinating to look at anyway. Most of this issue is about the process of perceiving one's own consciousness--the sort of hyperconsciousness of your own mind that happens when you're trying to get to sleep and can't--which is potentially the least interesting thing anybody could draw. And it looks fantastic: here's the second page, which is just about the least ambitious page in the issue and still gorgeous and full of smart ideas. (Jog has a couple of my favorite pages embedded in his SPX writeup.)



Huizenga's Glenn Ganges (image lifted from The Balloonist) is vividly aware of the workings of his mind--what's happening here is that he's thinking about having seen a newspaper earlier (a footnote hilariously reminds the reader that it happened back in issue #1, 3 1/2 years ago), and the image is rising through the flat, rippling substrate within his mind from which thoughts emerge. (It's a little bit like Larry Marder's map of the Beanworld.) The joke of this issue is that that sort of self-awareness is mighty frustrating when you're trying to get to sleep; the "big action scene" on the last page is a perfect punch line. EXCELLENT.

DRIVEN BY LEMONS: This one, though, was my favorite book I picked up at SPX--a reproduction of a medium-size Moleskine that Joshua Cotter filled start-to-finish with something that keeps shifting between not-quite-explicable narrative and not-quite-non-narrative abstraction. It surprised me to realize that there are only a few pages that would really fit in that Abstract Comics anthology Fantagraphics just published, and most of them actually serve the story in their context. Like this one:



It's scribbly in an appealingly fanatical, graphomaniacal way--look closely at that first page, and the way the blue part starts out as a mass of minuscule triangles. (In fact, there's a running theme in the book about blue triangles and red squares.) Even a sequence where Cotter fills the better part of six straight pages with black doodles looks like it's actually specific forms overlaid on one another until they fill almost all the space on the page; a lot of those forms look like parts of the bunny who's the book's main character. One of the longer sections--laid out in a helpful "table of contents" that kind of corresponds to the actual contents--is called "The Get Better Factory," and it centers on a bunny-in-the-hospital sequence that is close to the same "lying in bed, not going anywhere" problem that Huizenga plays with. Cotter draws it a very different way, though: a repeated, static, 16-times-a-page image of the hospital bed, with its details shifting along with the psychological state of its occupant (including incursions from the terrible pain that's always nearby in a "get better factory," impossible to escape), until mental noise overtakes and devours the entire scene. Anyway, it's an EXCELLENT book, and I feel like I'm just beginning to look at it--I want to come back to it and think about it more. I'd also kind of love to see some other cartoonists take on the fill-a-Moleskine-and-publish-it challenge. (Dirk Schweiger's Moresukine kind of counts, I suppose, but not as much as this.)

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DETECTIVE COMICS #857: The Batwoman serial is my favorite thing happening in superhero comics at the moment, and it keeps getting more luxuriously inventive with each installment. I actually went back and reread all four parts after reading this one, and there are a handful of earlier scenes that open up in the light of later ones. One of those later cues is Alice's final line of dialogue this issue--I believe it may be the only thing she's said in four issues that isn't a quotation from Lewis Carroll's Alice--which sure makes Kate's hallucination in #855 a lot more interesting. The Question backups still aren't clicking at all: I suspect an eight-page story needs to be much more densely packed to work as a serial. But the Batwoman stuff is so far ahead of the pack in terms of immersive storytelling, layout and composition, color-as-content, you name it--I really hope other mainstream comics creators take it as a call to step up their own game. EXCELLENT.

SPIDER-WOMAN #1: I know this series has been in the works forever, but it feels very strange to be picking up a high-profile Marvel title this month and have the plot revolve around ferreting out hidden Skrulls--that one got beaten into the dust a while back, and at a moment when the Marvel universe is almost all driving toward the end of the Norman Osborn plot, it feels positively retrograde. There's also a lot of telling-not-showing going on this issue, maybe because only three characters have significant speaking parts; there's some other wobbly writing, too, as when Abigail Brand gives Jessica Drew what she says isn't a "Skrull detector watch" but is functionally exactly that (it's drawn, in that panel only, as Jessica's iPhone, for some reason), or when Jessica's narrative voice reads exactly like Jessica Jones's used to in Alias. I admire the fact that Alex Maleev is crediting Jolynn Carpenter as his model for Jessica Drew, although I wish he'd just made up a way to draw her face without photo-ref instead; I always enjoy Maleev's chemistry with Bendis, and even though not a lot actually happens this issue, it works well as a mood piece. If this had come out the week after Secret Invasion ended, it'd probably seem better than just OKAY. But it didn't, and it doesn't.

WEDNESDAY COMICS #12: I loved this series in theory, and God knows it was pretty to look at. But this issue augmented the problem it's had all along--that writers who are used to the rhythm of 22-page stories can get whiplash when they try to write for a single big page--with the problem that Sunday-paper adventure serial strips aren't really designed to wrap up neatly. Only a few strips manage to avoid the "...yeah, okay, we're done now" effect, especially the two that were the most pleasant surprises of this series: Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman ends in a totally appropriate way, and the Kerschl/Fletcher Flash serial was so good and so clever that I really want to see what they do next. GOOD, and I'm looking forward to Wednesday II or whatever it ends up being called.

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FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF 3 WORLDS #5: I get the feeling that this OKAY conclusion changed direction somewhere between its conception and its execution--there are a bunch of subplots set up in the earlier installments that either go nowhere at all or get resolved very quickly and for no particular reason (hey, Sun Boy feels good again! There we go). Various new statuses quo are hammered into place (the White Witch has turned into Morpheus or something, the one remaining Triplicate Girl has turned into Madrox or something), Blok gets to say "But at what cost?" twice (there's also a "But for how long?"), Kid Flash and Superboy strike some heroic poses, and you'd think given half a year of lead time Geoff Johns and George Pérez would've bothered to make their ending dovetail with Final Crisis proper. I sometimes wish Pérez would let his interiors breathe as much as his covers, but complaining that there's no blank space in a team-up of three gigantic teams would be missing the point. We do, however, get an absolutely spot-on coda--the punch line to the years Johns has spent setting up Superboy-Prime as the ultimate bitter, entitled fanboy who wants everything to be like it was in the comics he grew up with. Having already punched the universe, Prime does get to break whatever walls he wants, including the fourth one.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #600: Dan Slott's lead story here actually reads a lot like some of Stan Lee's Marvel annuals from the '60s, for good and ill: it never stops moving, but a lot of that motion seems like wasted effort. There are a lot of Lee-like touches: gratuitous cameos by the Avengers and Fantastic Four and Daredevil, heaps of expository dialogue, Spider-Man running his mouth to add some text to sequences where John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson's artwork is already providing all the necessary information (that's also a credit to the sturdiness of Romita's storytelling), and a big wedding at the end. It doesn't have any particular resonance beyond "Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus have a big fight," but it's a perfectly GOOD piece of very light entertainment. As for the backups, Lee's own contribution is pretty negligible: at this point, honestly, he scores whatever points he's going to score just by showing up. The rest of the rotating Spider-Man writers toss in short pieces that are awfully filler-y. (Joe Kelly's portentously foreshadows the big "Gauntlet" storyline that's already been advertised; Mark Guggenheim's sort of duplicates and sort of contradicts a plot point in Slott's story.) But 100+ pages of new material for five dollars? I can get behind that.

WILL EISNER'S THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOL. 26: The final volume of DC's Spirit reprints collects most of the Eisner-drawn (or at least Eisner-overseen) Spirit material from after the end of the Spirit section in 1952. It includes a handful of stuff I'd never seen, particularly a short, silly piece drawn for the New York Herald-Tribune and a set of splendid portfolio plates from the early '70s, as well as some pieces from the same era where Eisner is trying way too hard to be underground-y. There's a lot of ephemera, too, like the incomplete Spirit stories that were in process when the weekly Spirit section was cancelled, and some cute but negligible crossovers with The Escapist and Cerebus. Most of what's here, in fact, is Spirit art (covers, pin-ups, incidental pieces) rather than Spirit stories--although the 50-page "last Spirit story" that Denis Kitchen rejected for publication isn't included, which is fine. (Another omission: there's a page of a Spirit story Eisner drew for the never-released Someday Funnies anthology that appears as part of Bob Levin's fascinating article in The Comics Journal #299.) All the covers from Kitchen Sink's Spirit magazines are here (including some fantastic wraparound paintings), mostly reproduced from the magazines themselves (with fold marks and a few visible staples), but the Warren magazine covers Eisner drew are excluded; we get the three Eisner pages of the 30-page Spirit Jam, but not the rest. It's a GOOD collection, but not quite satisfying as either a reading experience or a comprehensive wrap-up.

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BATMAN AND ROBIN #1: I love just looking at Frank Quitely's art for this comic. The little details are the most immediate pleasure: the evenly spaced blobby teeth in Toad's mouth, the cutaway diagram of Wayne Tower, and most of all the utterly indignant, entitled expressions on every single iteration of Damian's face. And the in-art sound effects are a particularly nice touch, a subtle riff on the '60s Batman TV show that Morrison and Quitely are rehabilitating here. Going back to re-read it, I'm noticing more of Quitely's layout tricks, especially the preponderance of extreme closeups and long-shots; almost every page is composed as a cascade of pagewide panels, with the prominent exception of a couple of sequences that are all about vertical motion. (There are also not one but two scenes in which characters are climbing vertical ladders while holding something away from the ladder in one hand.) I don't know about the weird pixelated colors Alex Sinclair is using for a lot of the backgrounds, although I like the dominant-color-in-each-panel scheme he uses for that Geoff Johns-style "preview of coming attractions" page--yes, okay, these are all going to be different storylines! A VERY GOOD start.

SEAGUY: SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE #3: Yes, I am a Morrison stan. But this is one of the most purely delightful comics I've read this year, from Chubby da Ché on the cover to the Silver Age-y expository dialogue ("If he's Doc Hero, let's see him prove it by picking up those ten-ton chains"). I think I laughed aloud at almost every page, sometimes at particular gags but more often from how dead-on the whole thing is and how neatly it milks whimsy out of bubbling existential discomfort. Cameron Stewart seems to have drawn this issue in bolder strokes than he has before (literally--I can't remember the last non-kids' comic with contour lines this thick), and it's appropriate for the fabulistic tone of the story. Also, the conclusion to the big revolutionary showdown, in which everything is Disneyfied right back to old-fashioned consensus reality, and our hero gets offered the chance to serve the game now that he's beaten it--"S.O.S. the status quo!"--is a nice corrective to the excesses of Morrison's familiar "why destroy your corporate masters when you can become them?" rhetoric. The X that Jog pointed out on the last page also stands for EXCELLENT.

CHEW #1: First issue of what is apparently an ongoing Image title by John Layman and Rob Guillory, and I can scarcely think of a concept that's seemed less likely to sustain an ongoing series since The Mundane Adventures of Dishman (where the narrowness of the joke was kind of the point). Our hero, Tony Chu, is a "cibopathic" detective--he can eat anything (except beets) and get psychic images of its entire history. (He's kind of a cross between Matter-Eater Lad and Josie Mac, if anyone remembers her.) On top of that, the series is set in a near-future scenario in which bird flu has caused the U.S. government to pass an amendment outlawing chicken, which is only available in "chicken speakeasies"... and so on. This is a premise for a one-off comedy sketch, not an open-ended epic. So there's an odd dissonance between the ways in which Layman and Guillory are taking it seriously (the book's tone and, in some ways, its color schemes have a lot in common with Fell, and there are some impressive bits of storytelling, like a two-page spread in which Chu is overwhelmed by hundreds of tiny panels' worth of psychic impressions of a spoonful of soup) and the ways in which they're playing it off as a goof ("nutty" dialogue, the super-broad caricatures of Guillory's character design). It's highly OKAY--at the moment, I find it promising much more for Layman and Guillory as creators to keep an eye on than for itself as a series, but I'm prepared for it to surprise me.

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THE MUPPET SHOW COMIC BOOK #1: I had some conflicting expectations for this one. I would not have expected a comic book based on a TV variety show inspired by stage vaudeville (and notable for excellent puppetry and famous guest stars) to be up to much good. On the other hand, Roger Langridge, who's writing and drawing it, has never to my knowledge made a comic book that's less than worthwhile--I even kind of liked GROSS POINT.

It turns out to be VERY GOOD, I'm happy to say, because it reads less like a solid cartoonist servicing somebody else's trademark than like somebody had the bright idea to let Langridge have some fun with the Muppet characters. It's a Roger Langridge comic through-and-through, even within the strictly formulaic confines of the Muppet Show format--a friend pointed out that almost all the Muppets are only seen from the waist up, puppet-style, although Robin the Frog's eyebrows levitate a couple of inches into the air, comics-style. A few sequences (especially the ones involving rhymes) are straight out of Fred the Clown territory. Which is to say dry, bubbly whimsy: there's something at least kind of amusing in nearly every panel.

It's pretty impressive as a juggling act, actually: there's more of a narrative through-line here than there usually was on the TV show, but Langridge manages to cram in a Muppet News Flash, "Pigs In Space," a climactic musical number, a Statler-and-Waldorf routine, and even some guest stars: an aged pair of "Zimmer Twins" (who seem to owe a little to Dave Sim's Mick 'n' Keef). He also nails the Muppet characters' speech patterns so well you can hear their voices--particularly in a Swedish Chef sequence that's arguably even funnier for having its dialogue written rather than spoken:



JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #31: This might be a first: in-story spoilers for a comic that hasn't even been solicited yet. This issue was sold as dealing with "the fallout from FINAL CRISIS," which it does, sort of. But it also follows up on some threads from JUSTICE LEAGUE: A CRY FOR JUSTICE. What's that, you ask? Well, it's the James Robinson-written Justice League series that was announced a year ago, and has now become a miniseries, "coming this July," according to a footnote. Whoops: now we know some of what happens in it.

We also now know what happened in the scenes of FINAL CRISIS where story logic (and visual logic) dictated that Hawkman and Hawkgirl died: they didn't, they just got roughed up a little. Apparently, this was a decision made after those scenes went to press. Dwayne McDuffie posted last month that "I wrote a scene set at their gravesite that I recently had to quickly rewrite into something not very good." He's right; it's not.

As for the rest of the issue, the premise is that the Justice League is failing to accomplish its objectives, which are... Right. So Hal has started another group, to do things more proactively, which is a problem, because the League can't have a situation like, say, Batman with the Outsiders, and... Anyway. Wally, the world's greatest multitasker... Never mind. So they have to disband, because... wait, that was the plot of the end of the previous JLA series... Oh the hell with it. This is not even a story: it's a set of mandated beats to which these characters can't even be tacked without stretching them until they rip. AWFUL.

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I picked up a bunch of old Amazing Heroes Preview Specials a few months back. They were published twice a year in the mid-to-late '80s--fat saddle-stitched things, with more or less extensive writeups of nearly every comic book series that was supposed to be published over the next few seasons. Jog's mention a little while ago of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's perpetually in-the-works City Lights reminded me of my perverse fascination with comics projects that are officially announced and maybe even produced but never actually published at all. (I also recently ran across a French site with fairly extensive lists of aborted Marvel and DC projects--mostly pitched or planned, rather than formally announced, although I would still love to read Peter Bagge's Incorrigible Hulk.)

Anyway, the Preview Specials include a bunch of them, as well as some other gems, like Kim Thompson's absolutely correct declaration that "I don't think any one of our 20,000 plus readers gives a flying damn who is doing Sectaurs, what's coming up in it--or anything else to do with it, for that matter," and Denny O'Neil noting that "if there is ever a backup character in Detective, it will be a new female Bat-character, but she won't even be created until maybe next winter"--this was 1986 or so. The preview for the last few issues of Watchmen begins with Alan Moore apologizing that it had shifted from monthly to every five weeks (!), and ends "Current plans call for the entire Watchmen saga to be reprinted in both hardcover and softcover book formats for release through bookstores once the story is completed, and Moore is optimistic about the eventuality of a Watchmen film."

A few highlights from the Imaginary Library, under the cut:


"Alan Moore's Comic," a.k.a. Dodgem Logic, a Fantagraphics-published series with rotating artists; the first issue was going to be a comedy set at a comics convention, and the second a biography of Aubrey Beardsley.

A Thriller Summer Special, to be written by Robert Loren Fleming and drawn by Keith Giffen, along with a Superman/Thriller issue of DC Comics Presents. (Thriller, initially written by Fleming and drawn by Trevor Von Eeden, was a very unusual, very promising series that flew totally off the rails partway through its first year--it seemed particularly creator-driven for its time, which was why it seemed doubly weird that first Von Eeden and then Fleming were replaced by creators who seemed to not get it at all. But these were announced after the original series was gone.)

Speaking of Giffen: Keith Giffen's Tattered Banners, a monthly series from Lodestone that was supposed to be whatever Giffen felt like doing that month (it appears to be completely different from the Alan Grant/Giffen miniseries of the same title from 1999).

Brainstorm, an Eclipse flood-benefit anthology series, assembled by Mark Evanier, in which every story was supposed to be "a possible springboard for a series"; there was work completed for it by John Bolton, Sergio Aragones, Alex Toth, Howard Chaykin, Chris Claremont, Mike Mignola, P. Craig Russell, etc.

A second issue of Cerebus Jam, featuring stories by Dave Sim in collaboration with Colleen Doran ("The Applicant," which finally appeared in Cerebus #91), Dick Giordano, Mike Grell and Barry Windsor-Smith (those never came out, as far as I know). By Amazing Heroes Preview Special #4, Sim's comment on the nonappearance of the second issue was "I don't push creative people for the sake of reviewers."

Cheap Shoddy Robot Toys, initially announced as a one-shot written by (my old boss) Beppe Sabatini and drawn by Fred Hembeck, to be published by Eclipse. That was later revised to "illustrator undecided," and Sabatini mentioning that "we do have future issues planned. Issue #2 will cross over with Joe Kubert's Redeemer series, while issue #3 will guest star Ms. Mystic in a story that ties in to her sixth issue..."

A four-issue miniseries by John Byrne, adapting Edmond Hamilton's City at World's End.

A two-part Frank Miller/Walt Simonson Daredevil story.

William Messner-Loebs' "Journey: Wardrums," of which two issues came out, was to be followed by a miniseries called "Western Follies." (Speaking of which: I really need to reread Journey now that it's in those two fat IDW books. I saw a review of it recently by somebody who didn't seem to realize that Jemmy Acorn was a goof on Johnny Appleseed. Do kids today still learn about Johnny Appleseed? I AM OLD.)

A six-issue series of The Liberators by Grant Morrison and John Ridgway, to be published by Quality for 75 cents an issue (a few episodes of this saw print in Warrior #26 and Comics International #76).

A Mr. Monster/Swamp Thing one-shot by Alan Moore, Michael T. Gilbert, Steve Bissette and John Totleben. (A preview image was the cover of Amazing Heroes #77.)

If anybody happens to know what happened to any of these, I'd love to hear it.

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Goddamn: this site just got even more fun to write for. Welcome, Wave Three!

I'd be very surprised if the title of "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?"--the story that begins in BATMAN #686--had been created any way other than editorial fiat, as a companion to "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" (Whoever came up with this one apparently failed to notice that there was a joke in Alan Moore's title.) So I agree with Brian and David: points to Neil Gaiman for coming up with a different way to spin it. (More beneath the cut.)



As David pointed out, Gaiman's got a habit, these days, of making sure that we know he's Telling Stories, For He Is a Teller of Tales. A lot of Morrison's parts of Final Crisis were about stories-as-told too, but its narrators provided the surface of the story, or emerged from and sank into its surface (like the false and true Alfreds in 682/683). Here, there's a distinct frame for a pair of embedded stories, and I assume the second half is going to have a couple more. "WHttCC" seems to be about the ways in which the seventy-year Batman narrative might have been unsustainable but wasn't--as a tragic romance (Gaiman kind of gives the game away by citing "The Death of Robin Hood" by name), or a horrible lie (although "the Joker was really Alfred" is a less scary/nagging version of the "the Black Glove is really the guy with the white gloves" payoff that Morrison feinted toward throughout his run).

Still, that's a fun idea for a piece of meta-ish fiction, and it sits fairly gracefully on the page thanks to the updated '40s vibe of Andy Kubert's artwork. (Gaiman barely suggests the period he's dealing with in the dialogue--really just Catwoman's line about "listen[ing] to George and Gracie on the radio.") I like the little circular panel Kubert threw in on one page--you don't see those much in post-1955 comics; I like his designs for everybody's cars, too, especially Two-Face's, and the way he riffs on early Batman artists' designs. Interestingly, Kubert's sketches and pencilled page, seen at the back, are prettier and more interesting than the inked artwork--that Jack Burnley-style sketch of the Penguin has so much life and playfulness in it.

It's an OKAY comic--probably better than that on its own--but something is disconcerting about the way it works within the seventy-year narrative it's addressing. Mostly, it makes me think about how DC's squandered a resource nobody even thought it had until it was gone: the capacity for any kind of actual dramatic closure.

It was once the case that one version of a character could pass on his trademark to another, or even die, and it could be more or less expected to stick. (Was anyone in the '60s demanding that THE FLASH should be turned over full-time to Jay Garrick, the "real" Flash?) But now the DCU has an official mandate that Green Lantern is really Hal, that the Flash is really Barry, that the Legion is really the Levitz-era Legion. No threat of change can be effective any more; the gravitational force of How It Was in '83 is impossible to escape, and growing stronger all the time. Any change, any breakup, any death, any exploded planet will revert to its early-'80s form sooner rather than later. Superman says "pray for a resurrection"; we know one's coming--the only question is when. It seems like some kind of backfiring corporate-psyche-repression that DC's most interesting villain of the moment is literally a furious, bitter fanboy who wants everything to go back to the way it was when he was reading DC superhero comics in the mid-'80s.

This time, there was briefly the pretense--the scantiest veil imaginable--that Batman was ending. (The return of the Batman family of titles was officially announced before this issue even appeared, but it was never even faintly in doubt.) Morrison's "Butler" two-parter was one kind of "final Batman story," and Gaiman's is another. (The O'Neil and Dini stories between them: less so.) THE SANDMAN had a fine string of closing fanfares; why not BATMAN, too?

Because it's not ending--even in the way that the pre-Byrne Superman ended. This story acts like a conclusion, and in fact it'd be a lot more effective if it were the final Batman story: a last curtain call, with all the old favorites coming out for a bow to the audience before it's time to go home. This is a curtain call with all the old favorites coming out for a bow to the audience before they leap back into position for the next scene of the play that never ends.

Where Batman ends--the only way Batman ends--is where you stop reading Batman, which is how Batman has actually had hundreds of thousands of endings: dissatisfaction or boredom, walking out of the theater (past a dark alley?), cutting losses and wondering if it would've gotten better again. That's not what I'm doing yet; I'm already psyched for Morrison's return in June, and the Quitely rumors make me more enthusiastic, and those Rucka/Williams DETECTIVE pages look fantastic. But I also long, a little bit, for the kind of genuine conclusion Gaiman is pantomiming here but is forbidden to give us for real.

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I've put together a list of some interesting-looking comics-related books that are scheduled to come out this year, and figured other people might find it useful too. DISCLAIMER: This list is mostly ganked from Amazon listings, which is why it's heavy on a few publishers--notably Fantagraphics, DC and Top Shelf, which list things way, way in advance. It is not anywhere close to comprehensive. It is not anywhere close to reliable. The entire publishing industry could crumble in the next week, in which case none of this stuff might come out at all.

JANUARY:

Lewis Trondheim: Little Nothings: The Prisoner Syndrome (NBM)
William Messner-Loebs: Journey vol. 2 (IDM)

FEBRUARY:

Boulet/Joann Sfar/Lewis Trondheim: Dungeon Zenith vol. 3: Back in Style (NBM)
Greg Sadowski/Jonathan Lethem: Supermen! (Fantagraphics)
VA: Korea As Viewed By 17 Creators (Ponent Mon)
Gilbert Hernandez: Luba (Fantagraphics)
Miss Lasko-Gross: A Mess of Everything (Fantagraphics)
Koren Shadmi: In the Flesh (Villard)
Grant Morrison/Tony Daniel: Batman R.I.P. (DC)
Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely: All Star Superman vol. 2 (DC)
Larry Marder: Beanworld vol. 1: Wahoolazuma! (Dark Horse)
John Wagner et al.: Judge Dredd: Complete Case Files vol. 12 (Rebellion)
Bryan Lee O'Malley: Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe (Oni)
Nicholas Gurewitch: The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack (Dark Horse)
Harvey Kurtzman et al.: Humbug (Fantagraphics)
Pascal Blanchet: Baloney (Drawn & Quarterly)

MARCH:

Ronnie Del Carmen: And There You Are (AdHouse)
Gabrielle Bell: Cecil and Jordan in New York (Drawn & Quarterly)
Lynda Barry: Nearsighted Monkey (Drawn & Quarterly)
John Stanley: Melvin Monster vol. 1 (Drawn & Quarterly)
G. Willow Wilson/M.K. Perker: Air vol. 1 (Vertigo)
Showcase Presents: Ambush Bug (DC)
Larry Gonick: Cartoon History of the Modern World Pt. 2: From the Bastille to Baghdad (Collins)

APRIL:

Captain Britain by Alan Moore & Alan Davis Omnibus HC (Marvel)
Jim McCarthy/Steve Parkhouse: Sex Pistols: The Graphic Novel (Omnibus Press)
Gilbert Hernandez: The Troublemakers (Fantagraphics)
Yoshihiro Tatsumi: A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly)
Jeffrey Brown: Funny Misshapen Body: A Memoir (Touchstone)
Ariel Schrag: Likewise (Touchstone)
Paul Hornschemeier: Life with Mr. Dangerous (Villard)
Showcase Presents Doom Patrol vol. 1 (DC)
Tony Millionaire: Billy Hazelnuts & the Crazy Bird (Fantagraphics)
Tom Spurgeon/Jacob Covey: Comics As Art: We Told You So (Fantagraphics)
Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910 (Top Shelf)
Gene Luen Yang/Derek Kirk Kim: The Eternal Smile: Three Stories (:01)
C. Tyler: You'll Never Know, Book 1: "A Good and Decent Man" (Fantagraphics)

MAY:

Len Wein/Berni Wrightson: Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis HC (DC)
The Best of Simon & Kirby (Titan)
Brendan Burford: Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays (Villard)
Doug Wright: The Collected Doug Wright Vol. 1 (Drawn & Quarterly)
Seth: George Sprott 1894-1975 (Drawn & Quarterly)
Kevin Cannon: Far Arden (Top Shelf)
Andre Molotiu, ed.: Abstract Comics: The Anthology (Fantagraphics)
Jaime Hernandez: Locas II: Maggie, Hopey, & Ray (Fantagraphics)
Jason: Low Moon (Fantagraphics)
Fletcher Hanks/Paul Karasik: You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! (Fantagraphics)
Ben Schwartz, ed.: Best American Comics Criticism (Fantagraphics)
George Herriman: Herriman's Humans (Stumble Inn/Us Husbands) (Fantagraphics)

JUNE:

David Mazzucchelli: Asterios Polyp (Pantheon)
John Stanley: Nancy vol. 1 (Drawn & Quarterly)
Tove Jansson: Moomin vol. 4 (Drawn & Quarterly)
Ben Jones/Frank Santoro/T. Hodler: Cold Heat (PictureBox)
Kurt Busiek/Mark Bagley: Trinity vol. 1 (DC)
Grant Morrison et al.: Final Crisis (DC)
Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon: Preacher vol. 1 HC (DC)
Showcase Presents: The Creeper (DC)
VA: Final Crisis Companion TPB (DC)
Marguerite Abouet/Clement Oubrerie: Aya vol. 3: The Secrets Come Out (D&Q)
Peter Bagge: Everyone Is Stupid Except for Me (Fantagraphics)

JULY:

James Jean: Process Recess 3 (AdHouse)
Eddie Campbell: Alec: The Years Have Pants (Top Shelf)
Neil Gaiman/Andy Kubert: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (DC)
Alan Moore/Curt Swan: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Deluxe Edition (DC)
Warren Ellis et al.: Planetary vol. 4 (WildStorm/DC)
Showcase Presents: Bat Lash (DC)
Jeff Lemire: The Nobody (Vertigo)
Sandman by Kirby & Simon HC (DC)
Charles Burns: Skin Deep (Fantagraphics)
Michael Kupperman: Tales Designed to Thrizzle (Fantagraphics)
Zak Sally: Like a Dog (Fantagraphics)

AUGUST:

Pat Mills/Kevin O'Neill: Marshal Law Omnibus (Top Shelf)
Matt Kindt: Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers (Top Shelf)
Alan Moore/David Lloyd: Absolute V for Vendetta (DC)
Showcase Presents Eclipso (DC)
Los Bros Hernandez: Love & Rockets: New Stories #2 (Fantagraphics)
Willy Linthout: Years of the Elephant (Ponent Mon)

SEPTEMBER:

Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #2 (Top Shelf)
Kathryn & Stuart Immonen: Moving Pictures (Top Shelf)
Joshua Cotter: Driven By Lemons (AdHouse)

OCTOBER:

Jooste Swarte: Modern Swarte (Fantagraphics)
Gary Panter: Dal Tokyo (Fantagraphics)
Mats Jonsson: Hey Princess (Top Shelf)
Simon Gärdenfors: The 120 Days of Simon (Top Shelf)

NOVEMBER:

Walt Kelly: Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Strips, vol. 1 (Fantagraphics)

DECEMBER:

The Don Rosa Library Vol. 1: 1987-1988 (Gemstone)
VA: AX Vol. 1 (Top Shelf)

SOMETIME IN 2009, MAYBE:

R. Crumb: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis (Norton)
Paul Pope: Battling Boy (:01)
Paul Pope: Total THB (:01)
Lawrence Klavan & Susan Kim: Germantown (:01)
Lawrence Klavan & Susan Kim: The Fielding Course (:01)
Farel Dalrymple: The Wrenchies (:01)
Paul Guinan & Anina Bennett: Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel (Abrams Image)
Glenn Eichler/Nick Bertozzi: Stuffed (:01)
Will Eisner: The Spirit Archives vol. 26 (DC)

Corrections are welcome in the comments; so is accurate information on other books you, as readers, are looking forward to.

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JUDGE DREDD: ORIGINS: I picked up this 2007 paperback from a half-off bin a little while back, noting that the front cover misspells artist Carlos Ezquerra's name. One of my minor New Year's resolutions is to read more of John Wagner's future-cop Judge Dredd stories; I've actually been batting around the idea of working my way through the twelve "Complete Case Files" volumes that are sitting on my shelf and reviewing them all here. (If Laura and Leigh can do it with Cerebus, I can do it with Dredd, right?) I like the fact that Dredd is an American character whose stories are almost always by British writers, for a British audience--he's a European nightmare of what an American hero would be like.

It's great to see Dredd's co-creator Ezquerra drawing most of this volume; I can't think of any other superhero series where an artist's new work is still so potent and so contemporary-looking 30 years after he started drawing the strip. (I bet it'll continue to age much better than the uncredited, airbrush-happy coloring, too.) His style is enormously different from the kind of Brian Bolland/Cliff Robinson continuum that's more closely associated with Dredd (at least in the States), and I can see why the publishers went with a Bolland cover for this volume, but I love Ezquerra's nasty, grimy felt-tip-marker-ish dots and blobs, and the enormous chins he draws on half his characters. (There's even a gag in here about how "chins have kinda grown since the big rad hit.")

This volume is where Wagner lays out the chronology that was the mostly-unstated foundation for the previous 1500 or so Dredd stories: how America turned into a fascist police state, how its big cities grew into Mega-Cities, and what's up with Dredd's genetic heritage. It's pretty GOOD, not as much for its broader strokes of violence and comedy (as far as Wagner's concerned, yokels are always funny) as for its hot jets of political bile and the way the backstory--which mostly gets revealed in long, moderately unwieldy flashbacks--evokes a whole culture's slide into catastrophe. (Wagner's obviously writing for the trade: this was serialized over 27 issues of 2000 A.D., and I couldn't even tell where most of the installment breaks were.)

But a couple of times, Wagner does my favorite trick of his: the sudden jolt when you realize that as a reader you're rooting for the wrong side. There's a little moment like that when you see Dredd softening to the idea of mutant rights, not because he's seen the light but because he now knows that some mutants are his blood relatives; there's a bigger one when we see the villain of the piece, President Robert L. Booth--who's got GWB's smirk and Reagan's knack for sanctimonious cornpone speechifying, not to mention a resonant last name--ranting about how Dredd and company "called democracy a failed experiment! These, the judges who ripped up the Constitution!" Of course, he's absolutely right.

There's also a huge payoff at the end, when Dredd's ultimate authority figure, from whom he's been longing for approval the entire book (as much as he can allow himself to desire anything, which isn't much), tells him that the system to which he's devoted his life is completely fucked:



--Which, of course, Dredd can barely even process, and can't admit he heard. And which makes me want to read Wagner's other recent Dredd material even more. Any suggestions about other Dredd volumes from the last ten years or so I should pick up?

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THOR GOD-SIZE SPECIAL #1 is a very pretty-looking comic, and I don't mind paying the $4 Marvel toll, even for a series I don't normally read, to get a 38-page Matt Fraction story plus a Walt Simonson reprint. (A 22-page story, on the other hand... well, I suspect I won't be buying certain titles much longer.) It's a Fraction riff on a particularly charged scene from 1985's THOR #362, which is the backup reprint, and it's got fancy high-gloss artwork from Dan Brereton, Doug Braithwaite and the previously-unknown-to-me Miguelángel Sepulveda, as well as Mike and Laura Allred doing their Allred thing. But only the Allreds' section looks anywhere near as interesting as the splintery power and scenery-chewing grandeur of the 23-year-old Simonson artwork; the other three artists are pretty much channeling a "painterly" look that I associate with the sub-Frazetta cover artwork of third-rate fantasy paperbacks from the '70s. And after I re-read the Simonson story, it started to bug me even more that Fraction's story was getting basically all its juice from nostalgia for a sequence that Simonson did perfectly well in six pages. EH, overall.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #20: Bendis's one-incident-per-issue schema for the Avengers tie-ins to Secret Invasion had its moments, but it ended up leaving a lot to be desired. This issue could have fleshed out the ending of SI, or set up something with Nick Fury's team of larvae that didn't end up doing much in SI proper, or given some kind of dramatic closure to the "government-affiliated Avengers team" concept that this series barely even touched under Bendis despite that being its ostensible premise, or clarified the multiple-stranded flashback structure of Bendis's SI material (within the story, rather than in Tom Brevoort's blog), or... anything. Instead, what happens? Hank berates Tony at Janet's funeral. That's it--and the five straight pages of clip-reel "remember our last few Big Event Comics?" in the middle are particularly maddening. AWFUL.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #8: This, on the other hand is GOOD Fraction and a good setup for Dark Reign, even though my suspension cable snapped instantly at Dark Reign's premise. The obligatory action scene isn't much to speak of (Tony lifts a heavy thing! It doesn't go well!), but Fraction packs a lot of other lively stuff in there--a nice character sketch of Maria Hill, a heavily freighted moment between Tony and Pepper, Tony and Maria snark-flirting, Tony and Norman Osborn playing Number Six and New Number Two, and the setup of a credible conflict to drive the new storyline, accompanied by the eating of Chinese takeout. It snaps right along. I'm still not totally sold on Salvador Larroca's artwork--a little photo-ref, a little CGI-type near-reality, a little more photo-ref--but I'm getting used to it as the look of this series.

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Yes, I've been gone for a bit--working on some stuff that's top secret, yet boring!

FIGHT OR RUN: SHADOW OF THE CHOPPER: This might be my favorite comics pamphlet of the year so far; it's on this week's Diamond list, and if your local store doesn't carry it it's available from Buenaventura Press. It's a trifle of a thing, but so perfectly executed that I keep coming back to it with renewed pleasure. A bunch of "Fight or Run" shorts have appeared in Kevin Huizenga's other comics over the last few years, although I don't think this duplicates any of those. The premise couldn't be simpler (Huizenga describes it as "an open source comics game"): two characters (from a stable of several dozen, each with its own set of loosely defined abilities) appear on panel, and either they fight, in which case one of them wins, or one runs from the other, in which case the winner is the one who either escapes or captures the other. The battles sometimes proceed by videogame logic and sometimes go someplace totally unexpected--a page involving a hypercompetent character called McSkulls winning eight contests in a row through sheer girliness cracks me up every time I look at it. Actually, almost everything about this project cracks me up: the characters' names and designs (Pronouncement is an eye-in-the-pyramid with wings, Birther has a little Anders Nilsen scribble for a head), the terrain of horizontal dashes that functions just as well as any oh-what-the-hell videogame background, the "Rabbit Vs. Duck" fights that turn into abstract reinterpretations of the entire concept. EXCELLENT, and really not like anything else.

The last time I praised one of Huizenga's comics here, it appeared next to a joke about a (nonexistent) new Steve Ditko comic. This time, there actually is a new Steve Ditko comic: DITKO, ETC..., published by the artist and Robin Snyder. As Ditko gets older, there's something about his style that gets purer. He's not even pretending to carry stories any more--everything has been reduced to images of purity half-corrupted and sequences of thugs and snickering namby-pambies getting their comeuppance. About half of the issue is single-page pieces with titles like "Who Is Safe in a World of Non-Anti-A?"; there's also a sequence devoted to a new entity-with-a-costume called H the Hero, whose distinguishing characteristic seems to be that he's... a hero. After a few full-page pinups of H stomping out a formless mass of Ditko squiggles that's labeled "Anti-A Violence Crime Force Hatred Corruption" (and so on), we finally get a couple of pages of continuity, or something like it--really just H beating up some thugs while leaping around Spider-Man-style, as if to reassure us that Ditko can still play something like the old tune. Rather EH, on the whole, but jeez, it's new Ditko; I can imagine the gradual simplification of his artwork continuing for another few decades until everything he draws is just a straight line on the left side of the page and a squiggly line on the right, and it will be a perfect squiggly line.

And speaking of Spider-Man, I picked up last Wednesday's AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #578 on the strength of Mark Waid's byline, and I'm glad I did: it's the first issue of the post-Brand New Day incarnation I've sampled that's made me want to see what happens next. This issue is one long, nearly continuous scene, which works for an episode of a weekly serial in a way that it might not for a monthly serial. There's not much in the way of plot here, but what there is is paced awfully effectively: a panel that reads at first as the climax of a joke turns out to be the moment where the story pivots from light farce to disaster-horror, and the cliffhanger ending is topped with a very clever second, character-based bit of suspense. Really nice artwork from Marcos Martin, too--it's got a buoyancy and flair that's always welcome in Spider-Man stories, and he conveys so much of the story visually that Waid gets to make most of his dialogue bouncy rather than expository. (Which also means it sometimes seems unnecessary, but even so there's something pleasantly Stan Lee-like about that effect.) Plus: the reliably entertaining image of Spider-Man about to be crushed under a big heavy thing. GOOD enough that I'm coming back for more.

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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.

Labels: Douglas

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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.

Labels: Douglas

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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 printed-out screenshot of an IM conversation between Montoya and Tot Rodor
*A telegram from Rodor to Montoya


I don't have time to scan the whole notebook, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if bits of it turned up elsewhere too, or even if there were a couple of additional copies of the entire thing--it's one of those little Moleskines that come in multi-packs, and Montoya's old mentor was rather fond of a book in which a character makes a duplicate copy of his entire journal to make sure its content survives.

Labels: Douglas, viral marketing schemes in which I'm only too happy to participate because they're really clever and come from the creator himself

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Graeme, if it's any consolation, I started writing about The Brave and the Bold #8 two days ago, and am only getting around to finishing this now. But that's partly because of a Very Cool Thing that will be showing up tomorrow.

One thing I always enjoy about this series is how densely packed it is, and this issue in particular is incredibly tightly structured. In 22 pages, we get an old-school Silver Age splash page (an action shot that lays out the basic concerns of the story and happens somewhere in the middle of the plot--and, in fact, it's one of the sturdiest Silver Age concepts, the heroes fighting because of a misunderstanding before they team up!), a two-page frame for this issue's story that contexualizes it in the ongoing "Book of Destiny" storyline, and then the main story itself, which involves plenty of character comedy and is effectively resolved within the issue. Mark Waid even gets across the premises of the new Flash series, the Doom Patrol and, more or less, the Challengers of the Unknown--"we're livin' on borrowed time and all." All the story's Young Frankenstein-isms are there to underscore the same principle that Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack played with in their respective versions of Doom Patrol: the Doom Patrol are all "superheroes" because they've got something drastically wrong with their bodies, and arguably Jai and Iris fit into that category too. (As Brian noted, Rita as Stepford Superheroine is a very funny idea.)

Also, it's easy to take George Pérez for granted because he hit his groove 25 years ago and has stayed there, but he really is incredibly good at this stuff--he draws, like, 38 panels on every page while keeping the action totally clear. Check out this sequence from early in the story:



That's six panels, 2/3 of a nine-panel page, and Pérez manages to establish the nature of Jai and Iris's respective powers, throw in some POV shots to get into the kids' heads (showing only the lower part of Wally and Linda's bodies, and later Wally's shoe, gives us a sense of Iris's point of view without directly representing what she's looking at, which would be less interesting; the next-to-last panel is in fact what Jai's looking at, which reinforces how put-upon he's feeling there), and pull off some physical comedy (the peculiar initial images of Iris and Jai fall into place with the establishing shot of the kitchen). Maybe all this was in Waid's script, maybe it was Pérez's idea, but it works. I'll overlook the fact that the page's first panel establishes Wally and Linda's discussion as happening on the ground floor, but that there's a sunlit kitchen a floor below them: it is a nicely drawn kitchen.

So what's missing? The depth of Waid's best writing: this is a romp in the fields of the DCU, but its meaning is almost entirely bounded by the DCU's borders. Wally's decision at the end of the story is supposed to have terrible emotional weight (hence the title's allusion to a William Styron novel); in practice, it has no consequences at all outside his head, and I'd be surprised if we ever saw it mentioned again.

That's actually a symptom of the broader difficulty that The Brave and the Bold is up against, just like its original incarnation; it seems like it has to put all its characters back exactly where they were, unchanged, even when (like the Flash cast) they're characters Waid's more or less in charge of. There has to be some kind of middle ground between total-status-quo stories and possession by the Countdown duppy, and I hope this series finds it. But the movement toward putting everything back the way it used to be in superhero comics is hard to get away from. The Doom Patrol has nominally had all its past continuity re-integrated, post-Byrne, but the upshot of all the transformations the team has gone through--Haney/Drake to Kupperberg to Morrison to Pollack (and I really need to go back and re-read the Pollack run one of these days, since even more than the other writers' versions its premise was that drastic transformation is necessary) to Arcudi to Byrne to the Geoff Johns/Tony Daniel sleight-of-hand in Teen Titans last year--is that they're now stuck almost precisely where they were in 1963.

If you don't mind my talking about what's happening inside the story for a minute, it's amusing to see all these characters scratching their heads about what exactly "Megistus" could mean--that word (or fragment) plus "ancient texts" plus an Element Man plus those other elemental characters, the Metal Men, who seem to be showing up next issue (along with the old-times'-sake Atom and Hawkman team), pretty obviously yields Hermes Trismegistus, the godfather of alchemy. H.T. was mixed up with Felix Faust here and here, so this may be Waid trying to straighten out the mess of how Felix Faust could be trapped in the tower in 52 and then show up again in Brad Meltzer's JLA. Or it might be something else; I wouldn't be surprised to see Dr. Alchemy and/or Mr. Element showing up here. (Oh, how I love that cover. I never fully appreciated Don Heck as a kid. Actually, I never fully appreciated him until Colleen Coover pointed me at his "head-shot" covers for this series.)

So: A Very Good issue of a series that I still keep wishing for more from.

Labels: Douglas

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(The nerd conundrum for the new millennium: who's stronger, Annalee or Graeme?)

Sorry these took so long to post; Douglas's signing is at the start of my workweek and was followed immediately by my garage sale (which turned out great, by the way), and after the last nine weeks or so of six day workweeks when I finally got time off, I totally slacked.

Of course, I've got no right to bitch after meeting Douglas Wolk--not only had the guy only been home 22 hours in the last month (the way he put it was, "22 hours total," which leads me to infer they were non-contiguous hours), but he still had something like 11,000 words to write before(?) he left for Burning Man (which he may be doing today, I can't remember) for his six or so regular columns.

Yeah, he's kind of a dynamo, Douglas, and yet still manages to be an incredibly sweet guy, very low-key, filled with great stories, be they about how he got his new column at The Nation, or one of the bands on his record label. (Yes, Douglas Wolk is that kind of terrifying ultra-achiever: the hyphenate.) Not that I'm an expert on either man, but he really reminds me of Scott McCloud when I first met McCloud at San Diego back in 1990--very, very smart, very kind, self-assured but not content to just rest on accrued laurels. (I hope that doesn't sound like a diss against current day Scott McCloud, by the way, because it's not: it's just that when I met McCloud in 1990 and complimented him on the great work he was doing on Zot!, he thanked me and told me he was leaving the book to do a mammoth how-to on comics, a fact at which I could only stand there and gape. "Well, you've earned my trust as a creator, so if that's what you want to do I'll be there..." I not-very-encouragingly said.)

Anyway, here's just a few photos of the signing, and if you get a chance to turn up for one of Douglas's signings in the future, you should do so because he's great.


(the man himself, Douglas Wolk)




(I don't remember what Douglas was saying here, but it obviously entrancing)



(Douglas Wolk, Peter Wong, Ian Brill, Annalee Newitz, Graeme McMillan... it's like the entire Internet showed up for this photo!)




(Hibbs achieves enlightenment, courtesy of Douglas Wolk)

Labels: Brian, Douglas, Graeme, Jeff, photos, signing

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As Brian noted, it turns out the problem wasn't "event fatigue"; it's just fatigue with dull events. I hadn't been following the Hulk for, I'm guessing, 15 years or more, and I'm now thoroughly drawn in by World War Hulk. The funny thing is that it's exactly the kind of story I thought I was sick of--long-underwear types beating each other up for five issues straight, plus lots of tie-ins, while they speechify about how the enemy has never been so powerful and this calls for the greatest struggle ever and so on. But so far it's actually fun and exciting and Very Good, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens next. Here's why I'm enjoying it so much:

*There's real dramatic force to WWH as an event, because both the fight and the story in general proceed entirely from the characters' personalities as they've been established. The plot has nudged them into place, of course, but everything they do feels inevitable--not, as in Civil War and Identity Crisis and so on, as if they're being frogmarched in some unwarranted direction. (The two-panel Reed-and-Sue scene this issue is a "yes, that's exactly what they'd do" moment, as opposed to their Civil War headslappers.) We've been bracing for this since Namor's line in Bendis's Illuminati special about how "he's going to come back and he's going to kill you all."

*The "crossover" elements have mostly been pretty well handled--there's a very specific sequence of events that everybody's been working with, and the multiple-angle approach of the various series tying in with it reinforces the sense that something massive is happening. Some of the crossovers are still pretty lousy, mind you, but at least they mostly seem to address legitimate story points, and I've liked a couple of them a lot, especially Ant-Man. And the way Greg Pak is handling WWH and the regular Incredible Hulk series at the same time is very sharp: Incredible concentrates on the supporting cast, WWH concentrates on the Big Fight, and in each of them the other story is mostly going on in the background.

*John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson are exactly the right people to be drawing the main WWH series, because they're really good at making stuff look BIG and DRAMATIC. Even the digital-blur effects in the Hulk/Thing fight make the scene more brutal and kinetic instead of cornier.

*Amadeus Cho. What a great character--even captions have more fun when he's around. ("Jen's total fave"!) Not that he's really in this issue...

*As tired as I'm getting of the Sentry as the character whose powers are just about literally providing deus ex machina endings, I kind of love the idea of him helplessly sitting out the fight.

*This could very easily have been a gorefest, with rolling heads and blood in the streets; even though the initial premise of the Hulk being shot into space is based on the idea that his rampages kill lots of people, Pak and company are avoiding the cheap manipulation of on-panel ichor-spraying. (I'm kind of amused that all the characters keep using "smash" to describe what the Hulk's doing.)

*Even though it's obviously not going to be, it feels like a final Hulk story in some ways, with the whole supporting cast of the series returning for dramatic closure. Actually, I have no idea how there can be another Hulk story after this one, although Pak clearly knows where he's going--Dr. Strange's comment about redeeming the Hulk at the beginning of this issue points toward a potentially interesting angle.

The really smart thing about World War Hulk is that Pak has appealed to the standard line on what the Hulk is about--rage being something that makes you stupid and violent--and then flipped it over. The Hulk's rage, this time, is righteous--which it's taken two years' worth of stories to set up, but now it's very clear. The stupid, violent guy indisputably has a just cause for war, and it comes from the military-industrial complex, in the person of Iron Man et al., having done horrible and treacherous things, once again claiming--reasonably--to have been acting in the interest of public safety. The premise is not just "oh, crap, the monster is coming back from outer space to smash us all," it's "the monster is coming back from outer space to smash us all, and oh, crap, he's kind of justified, isn't he? But wait: we have a right to act in our own imminent defense, don't we?"

So, as much as this is a story about a massive fight scene, it's also a story about a drive for revenge that's being characterized as monstrous; about the economic engines of war and industry, and the governmental apparatus that supports them in the name of public security, and the resentment they've built up coming back to explode in their face; about more or less legitimate ideologies that are more or less legitimately at odds clashing, violently, and bringing destruction to everything around them; about karmic payback. In other words, it's a political story, about the present moment, maybe even more than Civil War was. But this one's aiming for thrills rather than "importance," and it's much better entertainment.

ALSO: While I'm thinking of it, two of your Savage Critics will be appearing at Comic-Con International! I'm moderating three panels:

"Drawing Style and Storytelling": 12:30-2 PM on Thursday (with Darwyn Cooke, Carla Speed McNeil, Colleen Coover, Cameron Stewart, and possibly a special guest; unfortunately, Brian Wood probably won't be able to make it)

"Meet the Press: Writing About Comics": 10:30-11:30 AM on Saturday (with Graeme as well as Heidi MacDonald, Nisha Gopalan, Tom Spurgeon and Tom McLean)

"Comics Are Not Literature": 11:30 AM-1 PM on Sunday (with Cecil Castellucci, Dan Nadel, Austin Grossman, Paul Tobin and Sara Ryan)

And I'll be signing Reading Comics on Thursday, 2:30-3:30 PM, and Saturday, 3-4 PM, at the Comic Relief booth, 1514-1523! Come say hi.

Labels: Douglas

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The MoCCA festival was a few weeks ago, but the thing I kept pointing people toward there is the same thing I've been showing off to friends back home: a self-published, 28-page minicomic by Laura Park called Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream. This is apparently her first print comic, although she posts a lot of her drawings and comics on Flickr. (I've been looking at her Flickr page every so often since I got the mini--there's a lot of stuff to go through there.)

Do Not Disturb is really just a collection of miscellany--a bunch of one- and two- and four-panel strips and sketches, with one story-like thing in the middle of it: six pages of a little fable called "How Does Your Garden Grow?," which cuts off in the middle with a "To Be Continued. (Sorry!)" There are some bits about Park herself, mostly about her relationship with her cat Lewis; there are a couple of illustrated recipes; there's a one-page jam with Julia Wertz; there's a great little drawing of herself as a child, captioned "I spent a lot of afternoons making eucalyptus bark masks."

I've kept coming back to Do Not Disturb, because Park's artwork is such a joy to look at. She's got a Steven Weissman-like gift for big-headed caricatures (especially for her self-portraits--squat and moody, with downcast eyes, all her features taken care of with a few brisk dashes), but she's also got a really striking way with rendering tones and shapes and backgrounds, and she adjusts her technique for almost every piece. Plus she's really funny when she wants to be. I've been grinning every time I look at her piece about "the terrifying spider that lives in my bathroom."

There's a certain kind of cartoonist archetype that Park sorta fits into: the kind with a fondness for old-time music (the title of Do Not Disturb comes from a Carter Family song, "The Winding Stream"), an extensive sketchbook, and a reflex of self-deprecation that sometimes crosses the line into cruelty. That last thing is the only part of Do Not Disturb that bugs me; it's a bad habit she shares with Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti, and in all three cases they're so talented that it becomes functionally the same thing as fishing for compliments. A line like "I'm wandering through the black hole of self-loathing, embracing my worthlessness and choking on the stagnant fumes of my profound inadequacy" is the sort of thing you can really only get away with once before it starts getting old.

"No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission (unless you want to review it, but that probably won't happen)," says the copyright page. So much for that--! This is very good stuff by an artist I'm looking forward to seeing more from in the future. Maybe she'll do longer pieces, maybe she won't; a couple of people I've shown it to have said they'd like to see her do some kind of extended narrative, and I would too, but I'd also be happy just to have more collections of tiny pieces like this one. I have no idea if she plans to sell copies of Do Not Disturb at any future cons, but the email address she lists on the inside front cover is pancakemahoney (at-sign) gmail.com.

Labels: Douglas

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As I was waiting in line to buy my comics this week at Midtown Comics in Manhattan, the power went out for a moment, and a bunch of other customers pointed out the huge plume of smoke rising up from the explosion at Grand Central, three blocks away; I figured that whatever happened over the next few hours, I'd probably want something to read, so I paid for my comics and then went down to join the crowds of businesspeople running away from the explosion site. (It was just a steam pipe that had blown up, but we didn't know that at the time.) Understandably, I didn't really feel like turning immediately to a comic book about Manhattan getting smashed, or about a couple of characters trapped in rubble.

So when I finally got to sit down and read, the first thing I pulled out was Giant-Size Marvel Adventures The Avengers #1, as the indicia has it, although the cover calls it Marvel Adventures Giant-Size Avengers--cue the "where are Giant-Man and Goliath?" jokes. It's actually a perfectly normal-size 22-page-story Marvel Adventures Avengers comic, padded out to $4 size with reprints of the first appearances of Namora and Venus, from Marvel Mystery Comics #82 and Venus #1. Those two stories were also just reprinted a couple of months ago in the Agents of ATLAS hardcover, in which their creators aren't credited either. For the record: the Grand Comics Database also isn't too clear on the creators' names, although the Namora story seems to have been drawn by Ken Bald and Syd Shores.

But the real raison d'être of this comic doesn't turn up until a few pages into it: a two-page spread dedicated to a bunch of the Spider-Man merch that ties in with the new movie--a card table, folding chairs, some throw pillows, a poncho, and two photos of what an explanatory caption notes is CHILDREN'S BEDDING. Another caption: "Available at fine stores everywhere. Product may differ by store." I should hope so!

This is followed, a few pages later, by an ad for Marvel Heroes bottled water, "The Coolest Water in the Universe!" This is as good a juncture as any to point out that bottled water is almost by definition uncool (seriously, go read that story). In another ad, Wolverine is wearing boxers with his own image on them, and saying "bub." Another ad is for the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer game based on the movie based on the comic book, which features "truly destructible environments." The movie FF's likenesses advertise milk, overleaf.

The only place where you can actually live the adventure, though, according to another ad, is Universal Orlando Resort, where the pictured Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man ride cost $100 million to build. Just to put that figure in perspective, let's say that after "One More Day," Amazing Spider-Man starts selling Civil War-ish numbers, 350,000 copies of each issue (and that its cover price is permanently three bucks). By my back-of-envelope calculation, it will still have to sell 95 consecutive issues at that level before their cumulative combined cover price is as much as it cost to build that one Spider-Man ride. Which it's reasonably safe to assume is making money anyway.

This is one weird, sort-of-guilty secret of superhero comics: they're really just caretakers for the licenses that go on CHILDREN'S BEDDING. The money isn't in Batman comic books, it's in Batman video games and throw pillows and coloring books. The comics' responsibility is to keep each franchise alive, in the "they still make those?" sense, and maybe if they're very lucky give it a little bit of cultural currency. As long as Iron Man and Wonder Woman don't do anything shocking enough to get their likenesses permanently removed from theme park rides, they're golden. The Big Two's market-supremacy skirmishes don't matter in the grand monetary scheme; I don't even know if superhero comic books' profitability matters. All that matters is that people keep wanting boxer shorts with Wolverine on them, which means that Wolverine has to keep being a thing of the present rather than of the past. This is not news, but it's irritating to have the comics themselves rub it in your face.

On the other hand, there's a curious kind of freedom that goes along with the way superhero comics are locked into a much bigger system of superhero commerce: as long as Marvel and DC don't rock their franchises' boat too much, they can do whatever they want with them. That's how projects like Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane and The Irredeemable Ant-Man and Paul Pope's Batman: Year 100 (and, thinking back a few decades, the Bill Sienkiewicz New Mutants period) happen. On the rare occasions when comics do give a superhero franchise more cultural (not just subcultural) currency, it comes from cutting loose within the limits of the franchise. Which is something I'd like to see a lot more of--Kirkman and Hester's Ant-Man hasn't caught on for a bunch of reasons (I'm convinced that one big one is the five-syllable word in its title), but it doesn't look or read like any other comic book right now, and that means it at least had a better shot at staying power than, oh, World War Hulk: X-Men.

GSMATA also includes a fun Avengers story by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk (involving the Agents of Atlas, Kang, time-travel, what would have happened if Captain America had been thawed out too soon, etc.). Kirk is credited as "penciler" only; there's no inker credited, but then again Marvel hasn't been crediting its inkers at all in solicitations for the past few months. I'm not gonna review the story as such, other than to say I enjoyed it, for the same reason I'm not giving it a rating (although I'll be giving other things ratings, never fear): partly because the commercial realities of superhero comics are clawing at me more than usual today, and also because I'm on a panel with Parker on August 1 (at Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon!), and if I started logrolling now I'd also have to point out that Jim Ottaviani and my pal Dylan Meconis's Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love is out this week from G.T. Labs, and will tear your heart out if you care about monkeys, parental love or both.

Finally, a bit more self-introduction and self-promotion, which you can skip if you don't like that stuff: Hi! I'm Douglas. I've got a new book out called Reading Comics, I do semi-regular graphic novel reviews at Salon, and I also write about comics for Publishers Weekly and its free email newsletter companion PW Comics Week, as well as a few other places. And I'm pretty sure I'm the last of the Legion of Savage Critics to post something; does that make me the Whilce Portacio of this crew?

Labels: Douglas

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