Some would say that this post is, what, two months overdue? And they'd be right, but I'd rather think of it as "Well, I'm doing two years at a time, so really, I'm 22 months early.

...Okay, the next one will be here before February, I promise.

The couple of years of Uncanny X-Men between #149 and #172 see the book go through some strange comic version of adolescence, or perhaps a mutant metamorphosis - If you compare the first of those issues with the last, it's as if more than just the artist had changed: After a year or so of space epics that took the series away from the glossy soap operatic formula it'd perfected during the Byrne/Austin era, the return to Earth brought changes in focus, storytelling and characterization, and made the book what it still is today, in many ways.

Claremont has often made reference to trying to adapt his writing to suit his artist, and the latter Cockrum era feels like the place where that's most obvious. After a period of trying to do more of the uber-superheroics and mindswap drama that had made the book so popular previously, it must've become clear that Cockrum wasn't enjoying himself - Look at the surprisingly bland pages he produced, and also the number of fill-ins - because, suddenly, the book became a space opera, with the Shi'Ar and the Brood pretty much dominating the book between #153 and #167, with only a four issue breather back on Earth in the middle (Two of which, maybe tellingly, are done by fill-in artists). Cockrum's art seems more alive in the space issues, with more exciting design work and more interesting layouts, but the book feels weirdly un-X-Men-like, nonetheless. Despite the family connections to the Starjammers and Claremont giving it his best Alien rip-off (Between this and the Kitty-In-The-Mansion-Oh-No-A-Monster's-After-Her issue a couple of years earlier, he obviously really liked Ridley Scott's movie. Which, considering Ripley is very much a Claremontian character, makes a lot of sense), the X-Men themselves feel superfluous in their own series for the majority of this time; with little work, the stories could've been reworked as Avengers or, more likely perhaps, Defenders issues (The Shi'Ar issues feel like muddier versions of The New Teen Titans stories about Starfire and her sister, it has to be said, but I'm not sure about the timing on who came first).

Cockrum's gone from the book - off to create The Futurians, according to the lettercol, but probably because he wasn't gelling with the series that he'd helped co-create a second time around - before the Brood storyline finishes, and replacement Paul Smith brought a much lighter, much more open style to proceedings; his early work seems years away from Cockrum's more classic, illustratorly, approach but also Byrne's. It's more graphic, and more empty (Look at his backgrounds, which're often missing or abstract shapes or iconography, which seems to fit particularly well with Tom Orzechowski's lettering - oddly enough, Orzechowski was absent from Cockrum's last couple of issues, with Joe Rosen filling in; the return to Orz's smaller, tighter, cleaner letters in addition to Smith's similarly-clean art in #165 really makes the book look different in its entirety). With Cockrum gone, the in-process Brood storyline wrapped quickly (and detours back into more familiar territory before it ends, with Professor Xavier's Brood implant acting more like a mind-control story than the alien abductor of the Cockrum issues) and we're slammed back into territory introduced in the Byrne issues: Not only teen angst ("Professor Xavier is a jerk!") but bondage imagery (The Morlocks with their collared-and-trussed Angel) and questions of identity (But, instead of "Does power corrupt Jean?" it's "Does leadership corrupt Storm?"). It's exciting, fast-moving stuff, and reads at times like Claremont's been dying to do this kind of stuff for a long time, with the speed and smoothness he brings to the material. It's also - and this is maybe my betraying when I started reading the series, the most "X-Men-y" the book has felt yet; a return to the values of the Byrne era, perhaps, but in a different way, and with a broader scope and, for better or worse, less focused intent (Only the Madelyne Prior subplot really meets any kind of quick resolution, although that'd end up undone before too long; Rogue joining the team, and Storm's uncertainty about who she is, open up threads that will continue for years to come). But even more refining of what'd become the cliched Claremont writing technique was right around the corner, just when it'd look like fresh starts were about to happen.

Labels: Claremont's X-Men, Graeme

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I fall behind in a lot of reading, and then I have more to read to catch up. Case in point: I picked up GREEN LANTERN CORPS #42, got about three pages into it, and realized that I had no idea what was going on apart from it tying in with Blackest Night and the plot being essentially "Bad Things Happen On Oa." So I stopped reading, went back and re-read GLC #39-41 first, then #42, straight-through and realized: Hey! This'll make a great trade. Here's the thing, though; I'm conflicted whether or not that makes it a good comic.

Don't get me wrong: Taken as a whole, the four issues so far of Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason's "Black Lanterns Bring The Pain And Shit" are one of my favorite things about Blackest Night. There's a lot going on, but enough different threads so that the repetition of "Oh, it's character X meeting someone who's dead from their past" isn't really pushed in your face (Kudos to Tomasi for using his stories in the Tales Of The Corps three-part mini from the start of the event to set a lot of this up, too; suddenly, what seemed like well-done but unnecessary tie-in has a point), and Gleason's art, always been one of the best things about the book, remains kinetic and frenetic enough to suggest the panic and confusion of everything going wrong at once. But almost none of the strengths of the story come through when reading it in singles. The juggling of plot threads, which works so well when reading it all at once, is frustrating, making the story seem more scattered and stuttering than you want it to be, and the forward motion of the plot seems almost impossibly slow. This isn't a complaint about decompression, to resurrect (Hey! Black Lantern Comic Terminology!) that old chestnut, because it's not that each issue feels stretched out or empty, just the opposite - They actually feel too full to be able to go anywhere.

(As an aside, for a second; #42's big ending worked better than I initially thought. When I first read it, I cynically thought, oh, they're just killing off a minor character because it's a crossover. But then I realized that it was a death that had more weight than that other Blackest Night deaths so far, which include arguably bigger names Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Tempest and maybe Firestorm... Kyle's death, despite coming midway through the story, feels like the story's first "real" one, which has to mean something. Well, until he comes back next month, I guess.)

I'm left conflicted. Are these decent comics or not? Well, kind of? If you sit down and read them in one go, then I'd call them Good, but otherwise, they're just Okay. Maybe I should switch to trades and save myself the dilemma.

Labels: Graeme

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CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN has the odd distinction of being one of the most dull event books in recent memory. I realized that when, less than a day after re-reading the most recent issue (#4, if you're curious), I couldn't remember what had actually happened in it, and felt compelled to re-read the entire thing from the beginning to see what I'd missed. What I'd missed, apparently, was the Summer Blockbusterization of something that didn't need that kind of treatment.

Let me preface this by saying: Brubaker's Cap run in general is, according to our regular SavCritic scale, Very Good bordering on Excellent, with the eighteen-part story that started with Steve Rogers' death being the kind of longform superhero story that people should reminisce about in years to come, when the kids are huddling over their tablet reading devices and complaining about stories that're longer than five pages. But Reborn isn't just separated from the regular run by its faux "event" status and separate series, but by a complete change in pace and storytelling style brought on by superstar artist Bryan Hitch (with inks and what looks, in many cases, more than just inks, from Butch Guice) that... well, feels like it doesn't really belong with what's come before.

Don't get me wrong; Bru keeps the characters' voices consistent, and the overall shape of the story fits with what we've come to expect, but the execution is just off. In interviews, Bru has talked, glowingly and lovingly, about Hitch's artwork for the series, and you can see his adoration for his collaborator in each issue, in the amount of space he gives Hitch/Guice, the number of double page spreads or splash pages for him to show off with. The only problem being that each one of those pages slows the story down even more, making each issue feel even lighter than it already did (A problem when so much of the series is essentially a Cap's Greatest Hits compilation of moments we've already seen).

That feeling of lightness isn't helped by the deja vu that the series has had throughout; we had action set-pieces in the first three issues that didn't feel as if they had any point or impact on the rest of the story at all: BuckyCap has been captured looking for the McGuffin that it turns out we don't need! Oh now he's escaped! Let's go rescue Sharon! Oh no she's not there! They feel soulless, pointless; there to give fans a momentary distraction from the talking heads - because, apparently, if you go to Hank Pym for scientific advice, he sits around for four issues and talks to you, bringing in Reed Richards to talk to you as well when needed - and scenes of Cap lost in time, and excuses for Hitch to draw something exciting and self-consciously awesome. But it doesn't feel right, somehow; like the numerous, superfluous guest stars (Really, the Thunderbolts? Even the Fraction-esque captions couldn't make that sequence seem less out-of-place), it all feels like not only a different series, but a different world from everything that's come before. It's as if the normally tight, thriller genre series that Captain America is has been adapted for the screen by Michael Bay, with all the razzle-dazzle and lack of logic that that implies: Heroes get their asses beat down, for example, for no reason other than to set up another action sequence later where they can escape and be bad-ass.

(It's unsurprising that another issue was added to the run when you realize how much plot the series would have to squeeze into its one remaining issue otherwise; especially when it's taken four issues for the following to take place: Sharon Carter goes to superhero scientists for help, and then gives herself up when Norman Osborn outs her as Cap's assassin. Meanwhile, Osborn also recruits the Red Skull and Doctor Doom to bring Cap's body back from being lost in time, while the superheroes run around ineffectually trying and failing to stop him. I'm sure that could've been done in at least one issue less than it took, and also that it would've been, if Brubaker was in the same frame of mind as he was when writing the regular Cap book.)

In the end, what makes the book feel like a failure for me isn't a sign that it's a bad book at all; it's my dislike/disappointment for the transformation it's made - seemingly intentionally - from one style of book to another, maybe even one audience to another. I preferred, by far, the more writer-led, more tight (and I'm fighting not to say "Smarter," because it's not that Reborn isn't smart, as such, but... but...!) Captain America to the crowd pleaser filled with an amazing number of images of Cap leaping across villains and a double page spread while inner-monologing about being confused and characters who add nothing to the story other than brand names.

For some reason, it feels wrong to say that, like I'm begrudging Bru and/or Cap his success and day in the sun, just like it feels wrong to say that the series for me is Eh. But it's true, nonetheless; maybe Morrissey was right. Maybe we really do hate it when our friends become successful.

Labels: Graeme, Morrissey Quotes

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It's been an insanely long time since I last posted, but let's just chalk that up to being very busy and move on quickly, shall we? Here're some things that I've been reading recently. Some you may even remember!

BATMAN/DOC SAVAGE SPECIAL #1: It's very nice to look at, but very slight. Basically, Doc Savage thinks Batman is up to no good, then then have a fight and he realizes his mistake. Phil Noto's art - always bordering on both the sterile and the overly-pretty - is the best thing about what, otherwise, is a standard Marvel Team-Up plot without much flair from Brian Azzarello's bland script. Eh, and not boding too well for the mini-series spin-off from this.

CINDERELLA: FROM FABLETOWN WITH LOVE #1: A light, but enjoyably so, opener for the latest Fables spin-off, with a quick script and Shawn McManus' art keeping itself under control enough (Am I the only person who finds his tendency to either give characters really long faces, or tiny little squished faces, offputting? I am, aren't I?) for it to feel... well, like an issue of Fables, and not the more smug and somehow less enjoyable Jack Of Fables. Firmly on the high side of Okay, but there's nothing wrong with that.

THE LONE RANGER & TONTO #3: I've gone on about my surprise love for Brett Matthews' revival of this series/character before, but the star of this special issue is easily Vatche Mavlian's art, which is scratchy and old-fashioned (and given lovely colors from Marcelo Pinto), and just pitch perfect for the story this issue. This really continues to be a series that's better than it should be. Very Good.

MODELS INC. #3: I'm continually surprised by the bad reviews I see for this series online. Sure, it's not going to change anyone's world, but I'm beginning to think that I'm somehow finding it funnier than everyone else, which makes me nervous. But even if we can't agree that this is a Good piece of throwaway camp fun, surely we can all agree that Colleen Coover's art in the back-up makes everyone wish she'd been able to draw the whole series?

RUNAWAYS #14: Yes, it's old now, but I just wanted to say "The End... For Now..."? Seriously, Marvel? That is the most unconvincing, quite-clearly-canceling-the-series-in-mid-storyline, bullshit that I have seen in a long time. Here's the clue: When your series ends (or goes on "hiatus" indefinitely, as the official line on this has it), then it probably shouldn't do so with the unexplained reappearance of a long-dead character and another one in critical condition in hospital, while the rest of your leads are going off to live with a brand new character whose motives are, at best, mysterious. Just sayin'. Offering the exact opposite of closure, the addition of "The End... For Now..." at the end of the issue really felt like a smack in the face for readers, an editorial note that translated as, "Hey, actually reading the story and wanting to know what happens next? That's for losers. It's over because we say it's over." It's a shame, because Kathryn Immonen and Sara Pichelli seemed to be going somewhere with this, but unsurprisingly didn't get there in the, what, four issues they were alloted? Crap, and not through any fault of the creators.

STUMPTOWN #1: Not just the best thing to come out last week, but also one of the best things that Greg Rucka has written in a long time. Yes, it's full of Rucka cliches (Lead character Dex, in particular, feels very familiar in that "Self-destructive, chainsmoking tough woman with personal problems who uses humor as a defense but is filled with self-loathing over something that we will inevitably find out three story arcs in" way), but there's a tension and style to the whole thing that just works, particularly given Matthew Southworth's really great, Michael Lark-esque artwork. The book just moves, and leaves you wishing that the next issue was out already, so you could keep getting sucked in. Very Good.

THE UNKNOWN: THE DEVIL MADE FLESH #2: Everything unravels much faster than anticipated, as Catherine proves that she's not as easy to fool as you may have thought, and I'm left wondering where this story is going next. Now that it seems that Doyle was definitely killed last issue, I find myself kind of loving the idea that he's definitely gone, and that Catherine is definitively the star of the show, even with her mysteriously-expanded lifespan (Even though she doesn't know it's been expanded). Good, and like the best mysteries, I'm dying to find out what the hell is actually going on.

WORLD'S FINEST #1: Completely superfluous to either the ongoing Superman or Batman storylines, but not that bad, either, I'm kind of at a loss as to how I feel about it, to be honest. Eh, I guess?

X-MEN FOREVER #10: Now hang on just a minute. What is going on with that last page? Is Claremont setting this up as a "No, really, this is just completely an alternate universe with an alternate history as well?" or a sign of some reality altering plot that will explain some of the other craziness from the series so far? I have no idea, but I'm still enjoying the surreal giddiness of this series... Although I'd prefer that Terry Austen could somehow unlearn a lot of his style, which manages to make every artist he works with into a mess of choppy, uneven lines and almost completely obliterates Paul Smith's smoothness here. Nonetheless, a guilty but high Okay.

Labels: Graeme

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I'm dragging Graeme's name in there because he's a draw, but really it's all my fault. We recorded all of Episode 5 way back in the early days of September. I mixed and uploaded the first installment, then we felt compelled to talk about the Disney/Marvel thing, I mixed and uploaded that, and then I just really behind the curve.

I won't bore you with details--and anyway, apologizing for not posting on your blog is so 2002, isn't it?--but for those of you who still enjoy this sort of thing, here's:

Wait, What? Episode 5.2: In which Graeme and I talk about Brian Wood and Dave Cockrum (among other things);

Wait, What? Episode 5.3: In which Graeme and I talk about 20th Century Boys and Dazzler: The Movie: The Graphic Novel, and announce a contest; and

Wait, What? The Britpop Edition: In which Graeme tries to educate me on Britpop and especially the career of Oasis, much to my bafflement and delight.

Believe it or not, thanks to covering manga, trade collections, and specific careers, these episodes, although a month in the can, don't seem especially dated. I was surprised, when I finally got the time to sit down and edit them, that they did not stink up the joint with their ancientness.

As for that contest, we should give you actual rules, but we're too disorganized to figure any out. Just listen to the podcast, and submit your entry in the comments section for this entry and after a week or so, Graeme will select the winner!

Thanks for your patience, and we hope you enjoy this abundance of comix conversation!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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Despite what it sounds like, it's a compliment when I call CONVERSATIONS WITH ADD a frustrating read. For those unfamiliar with it - which may be most reading this - it's a free e-book collection of interviews and Q&As with comic folk conducted by Alan David Doane over the last ten years for ComicBookGalaxy.com as well as his radio station, and it's full of names you'll recognize: Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Mark Millar, Joe Quesada, Mark Waid, Brett Warnock, Peter Bagge, Seth, and many many more.

What's frustrating about it is twofold, and both pretty much the nature of the beast - Some of the interviews are so old that I wish they'd had a little more background information attached to put them into the appropriate historical context (Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid both talk in depth about the short-lived Gorilla Comics, for example, and I'd have love to have seen some more editorial footnotes about what happened to it in practice, because as it is the uneducated reader will be left thinking "That sounds great! I wonder what happened to it?" Of course, you could make the argument that no uneducated reader would be downloading an e-book collection of interviews from a comic book website...), and some of the interviews - namely, the ones from his "Five Questions With..." series - are... well, too short.

The second complaint pretty much gets to the whole "it's a compliment" part; ADD is, especially in the longer interviews when he gets to go into greater depth with creators, a very effective and enjoyable interviewer, and the frustration of the short interviews is really "I wanted much more!" more than "Well, that was a waste of time." He knows when to let the subject go on at length, and also what questions to ask to prompt the conversation into interesting directions, and if some of those questions betray his own prejudices and feelings about the medium and industry, then so what? It makes for a more interesting interview, in almost all cases.

At times, this nearly-300 page collection feels like a contemporary sequel to the (great) Comics Journal Library: The Writers collection Tom Spurgeon edited a few years back, and makes you want more longform (and freeform) interviews from Doane. Someone should be paying him to do this on a regular basis, but until then, this freebie book exists to tide us over. Unless you have a complete aversion to PDFs, go and grab it.

Labels: Graeme

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To interrupt Douglas' 24 Hour Reviewathon slightly, I thought I'd share short thoughts about what little I have read recently that wasn't the Absolute Promethea collection (No extras? I'm surprised) or the end of Paul Levitz's run on Legion of Super-Heroes (which noticably becomes the Keith Giffen show more and more the closer it gets to the end). Which is to say, not a lot. But still!

DETECTIVE COMICS #857: Another VERY GOOD issue, even with the last-minute revelations about Alice (which felt cheap and hopefully lead somewhere interesting, so as to remove the "What, I'm reading mid-90s X-Books all of a sudden?" taste from my mouth). JH Williams' art continues to just amaze, so much so that news that he'll be replaced by Jock for a fill-in to catch his breath seems like the end of the world. No offence, Jock, but right now, it feels like no-one else is in Williams' league.

GREEN LANTERN #46: I should probably feel as if this finally brings the two sides of Blackest Night together (All the different Lanterns/Zombies Attack The DCU), but this just seemed forced and uneven in a way that the other Geoff Johns-written parts of the crossover haven't - Maybe because it tried, and fails, to bring everything together convincingly? I'm still enjoying the crossover, in general; I just am starting to wish that it'd been left as just Zombies Attack The DCU and everything else could've happened at another time. A high OKAY, but I wanted more, dammit.

MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #55: Despite not growing up with a high school-age Peter Parker, there's something about the tone and speed of Paul Tobin's soft-relaunch of this series that makes it feel like the perfect Spider-Man comic to me. The Peter here is a nice guy, out of his depth more than a little, but yet the completely neurotic Spidey of Bendis' Ultimate book. VERY GOOD, even if I still want them to change that logo.

SPIDER-MAN: THE CLONE SAGA #1: I never read the original Clone Saga, and on the basis of the first issue of this rehash, I didn't miss anything; the script is rushed and unfocused, the art is... well, very Todd Nauck, which isn't really to my taste (Sorry, Young Justice fans), and the whole thing feels much more phoned-in than any "This is how we meant to do it the first time" should feel. EH at best, but that's probably me being charitable.

SUPERGIRL #45: I'm with Sean; the Superman family may - to those not reading the books on a regular basis - seem like a collection of fail right now, what with Superman not actually appearing in the book that bears his name and everything, but to those who are reading, the weekly cross-title story is the closest DC have gotten to the excitement of 52 since that book finished, a feeling diminished only slightly by knowing it's all going to end in a big crossover or event or whatever they're called next year. For now, though, GOOD.

THE UNKNOWN: THE DEVIL MADE FLESH #1: Entirely not what I expected after the first mini (Which had a disappointing final issue after three great issues of set-up, if you ask me), and all the better for it, Mark Waid's semi-supernatural mystery returns with a GOOD opener that suggests that nothing is as it seems. I have no idea where it'll go from here, which means I'll be back next month.

X-MEN FOREVER #8: Proving once and for all that all the X-Men are idiots (and that the X-Women know what's up), the Sentinels return and hide behind a pretty face, fooling the boys. After its (more exciting) frenetic opening, this series feels like it's settled into a slower groove as the bizarro twin of Grant Morrison's NewXMen run, complete with Sentinels and new discoveries about the nature of mutants and evolution, but with added costumes, guest-stars and Claremontisms. There are many, many worse things to be. Still GOOD, surprisingly.

Labels: Graeme

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The Phoenix Saga ruined the X-Men for a few years.

I know Jeff Lester disagrees with me on this, but he's wrong; as exciting and classic comics as it may be, the whole Dark Phoenix thing derailed UNCANNY X-MEN all the way through #175, and I'm blaming it all on Jim Shooter and John Byrne.

Okay, that's maybe not entirely fair - especially Byrne left the book within six months of the end of the storyline, and Shooter probably bears less responsibility than Claremont, who was, y'know, writing the book and all - but while everything from #125 through #137 has become Official Comic Landmark material because Claremont and Byrne are working in such sync and with such success that even introducing Dazzler can't slow them down, the following year is a pretty great example of watching a writer thrown entirely off his game.

That year between #125 and #137, though, is a great read; Claremont and Byrne are on fire, introducing the Hellfire Club, Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde as well as Dazzler, and keeping the main characters evolving (Colossus has to kill! Cyclops stands up to Professor Xavier because he knows the X-Men better!) even before the big cosmic showdown that sees a character turn, essentially, outright evil and then pay the price for it. The year seems like the fulfillment of basic Marvel ideals, mixing soap opera and superhero, showing the need for responsibility that comes with power and ending with a tragic self-sacrifice that "This Man, This Monster" would've been proud of. It's really good stuff, and a peak (the peak?) of the series as a whole, one of the few times that everything comes together with such intensity and sincerity that it actually works... and then everything falls apart.

It's actually understandable that it did, and surprising that it didn't happen more obviously or more horrifically; Claremont and Byrne were forced to redo #137 after it'd been completed, because the original plan of leaving Jean alive with depowered wasn't thought to be enough after she'd destroyed a planet as Phoenix (FWIW, I think it was a change for the better), but even if they hadn't been, where do you go after a story so cosmic and... well, big? It's no wonder that the majority of the next year (all the way up to the subplots starting in #147, even if the A-plots remained weak until #150) seemed so generic and pedestrian in comparison: After saving the universe from one of their own gone bad, visiting Alpha Flight in Canada to go after a Hulk villain (Even one with Wolverine history) or taking on Doctor Doom and Arcade just doesn't really seem as interesting.

(There's a two-issue exception, of course, the "Days Of Future Past"/" Mind Out Of Time" story in #141-142 that would, once Claremont had exorcized his Phoenix demons, come to define the X-Men franchise with its dystopian, never-smile-because-you're-hated-and-by-the-way-your-future-duplicate-is-more-depressed-than-you-about-it vision. In the context of what followed its initial publication, though, it just seemed like a two-part story without a lot of impact. It'd take a few years to get full-on-depressathon.)

(The ghost of Phoenix haunted the book in more ways than one; she makes a hallucination-appearance in #144, and then the cover of #147 shows an out-of-control Storm with the tagline "We did it before -- Dare we do it again?" It's hard to know whether Scott Summers or Chris Claremont was most affected by Jean Grey's death.)

The loss of Byrne hits the book hard, too; looking back, I still think he and Austen lacked a lot of the personality of Cockrum's earlier issues, but the Cockrum that returns to replace him is a different artist, one who's more conservative and lacking the verve and invention that Byrne papered over with glamor (He's not helped by Joe Rubenstein's inks, either; Rubenstein tends to flatten out a lot of the pencilers he works with, giving everything a kind of generic quality that makes him perfect for a multi-artist project like The Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe, but not something where you want someone to follow Byrne and Austen.

As the series approached #150, it seemed to have flamed out. With the big villain hinted at for the anniversary issue Magneto yet again, capping off a year of familiar (and non-traditionally-X-Men) villains, it'd wouldn't have been too surprising if fans following the series then were wondering if the series' best days were behind it. Oh, how right/wrong they were.

Labels: Claremont's X-Men, Graeme

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Like a time traveler arriving to warn us all from the long-forgotten bygone era of Sunday, Giant-Sized Wait, What? #1 is available for your listening pleasure. In it, Graeme and I talk, approximately a week late at the time, about the announced purchase of Marvel by Disney.

(Sure. See if we do that shit again. We emailed each other just yesterday about discussing the recent DC restructuring, but decided to do so would only invite further seismic activity along Ye Olde Direct Marketplace Fault Line.)

Seriously, though, you may find some enjoyment in this--it's like, um, steampunk comic market analysis! Or...something.

It's also long (hence the name, but also to distinguish it from the other episode of Wait, What? we recorded that's still being sonically sliced, diced and pureed for eventual consumption)--like 90+ minutes long, so it's good for commutes, and mindless wage-earning drone work, and digging a deep, deep grave in which you can finally dispose of that hateful corpse that's been silently nagging you for so long...

Some notes:

1) The Hibbs open letter to Disney we mention is here.

2) Laura Hudson's article is, uh, here? Or maybe, uh, here?

3)For me, anyway, the key to understanding why Disney was hot for Marvel, even with movie deals in place, is what Heidi mentions here in her first bullet/section point.

Hope you enjoy!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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Just in time for the long weekend, Graeme and I roll out the first installment of Wait, What? Episode 5.1. While we'll probably record something to thrash out the whole Disney/Marvel situation, Episode 5 of Wait, What? was recorded the day before, so you're free from idle speculation about the state of Howard The Duck's pants (for now).

Instead, Graeme and I talk about Blackest Night #2, what the hell is up with the Spectre, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1, Ultimate Avengers #1 (or whatever the hell it's called), that weirdo John Byrne Millennium crossover issue and much, much more.

Thanks for listening!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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More Claremont retrospective! This time, the first two years of the Byrne run, wherein everything comes together remarkably quickly, and I compare John Byrne to Joe Sinnott. Or something.

Ignoring the fill-in in UNCANNY X-MEN #106 (Although: Chris Claremont and Bill Mantlo together! There should've been much more of this), #107 starts off Claremont's third year on the title with an important milestone: The last issue before it truly becomes the X-Men we recognize. Oh, so many things are almost there, but it's as if Dave Cockrum was holding Claremont back from achieving full Claremont or something; as soon as John Byrne and Terry Austen appear in #108, everything clicks into place: The characters' speech patterns, the "giving your life force to save existence" soon-to-be-cliche makes its first appearance (including Storm saying "It is my life to give, my friend" by way of explanation), the overly elaborate soap opera - space pirate and furry Corsair is Cyclops' dad?!? - the book just suddenly becomes the X-Men through some unexplainable magic, much in the same way that Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four suddenly makes sense when Joe Sinnott starts inking Kirby in the late #40s. By the end of that third year, Claremont has already worked in his first psychic mind-rape.

(It's possible that one of the reasons that the early Claremont/Byrne issues seems like the book makes this leap into a more pure X-Men-ness is because that run has become the touchstone for most fans, and subsequent creators, as the "best" X-Men run ever, but it's more than that; Claremont's writing suddenly becomes much clearer and more focused when Byrne appears. I don't know if there was an obvious reason behind the scenes - The editor's still Archie Goodwin throughout, so it's not that...? - but the shift is noticable and somewhat odd, when reading the issues in quick succession.)

By the book's fourth year, it's made it to monthly status in time to really start working out the kinks; oddly enough, the fourth year feels very much like the first two, in that Claremont revisits old X-Men villains and stories (Magneto, Sauron, the Savage Land, Sunfire), but at the same time, you can tell that he's also more in control of the characters and the plot than he was previously - Magneto's appearance pays off months of foreshadowing by showing Cyclops' fears about the new team "not being ready" and getting their asses handed to them, for example, leading to the first period (of many, it becomes a favored Claremont trick when he wants to switch things up) where the world believes they're dead, which allows him to show Scott and Jean outside of their relationship for pretty much the first time in their history. Unlike before, where it felt as if Claremont was using old characters and ideas because he didn't know what else to do, this time it feels as if he's comfortable and knows what he's up to.

The confidence is matched by Byrne and Austen's incredibly slick visuals. I mean that as much as an insult as a compliment, I have to admit; as revered as the art in these issues is - and as good as it is, as well - it really is very much eye candy, and at times overly glossy and soulless. Byrne's women, in particular, are almost distractingly... I don't know what the word is... vapid? glamorous, in a bad way? generic? They lack personality, despite what Claremont puts in their mouths (Now, that doesn't sound right), and occasionally the art feels so... professional, and impersonal, and "perfect," that it pulls me out of the experience and leaves me cold. Am I alone in that?

The comfort and confidence - and newfound success and acclaim - were making Claremont and Byrne more bold, though; by the end of the fourth year of Claremont's run on the book, he'd put the team back together with one exception... and that's because he was already at work laying the groundwork for the Dark Phoenix storyline, which would change superhero comics - and Uncanny X-Men in particular - in ways that he couldn't even have imagined.

Labels: Claremont's X-Men, Graeme

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The first couple of years of Chris Claremont's UNCANNY X-MEN (#94-105 - the book was bi-monthly back then) are really weird to look back on, knowing what came later: Len Wein had introduced the All-New, All-Different team in Giant Size X-Men without Claremont's involvement, and so the first couple of years feels like the writer trying to work out what to do with the characters.

There's no real singular voice to the series, at this early point, probably because Claremont himself hadn't really worked out what we'd later come to recognize as his voice; instead, everything reads pretty much like the generic late '70s Marvel comic book that is was - Free of the expectations of what an X-Men comic should be, Claremont and Dave Cockrum pursue their own interests (space opera!), bring in characters from other books (And when you're bringing in supporting characters from The Hulk, you've got to know that you're desperate) and pick at tidbits from the original incarnation of the book, just to keep that sense of continuity going.

It's enjoyably free of the oppressive angst that the books went on to develop, the consistent sense of persecution and fear and loss that defined the franchise after the Phoenix arc, but it's also... pretty bland stuff, really. If the characters hadn't gone on to bigger and better things, there'd be nothing to really differentiate this from Marvel Team-Up or The Defenders or whatever. As it is, it's mostly worthwhile to see Claremont slowly realizing who each character was, in fits and starts (Storm's sudden claustrophobia which affects her when she's in a castle in #102, but not when she's in a sealed military base within a mountain in #95, because he hadn't thought of it, back then; or Wolverine's claws being revealed to be part of him in #98 and the way it seems to crystalize the character so that he finally feels like the Wolverine we know by #100), and also what kind of story worked for them.

There's a free-wheeling, unrestrained feeling to the series here that it lost somewhere in the mid #100s and never regained, sadly enough, but one of the side-effects of that is that there's also no real sense of weight or importance to anything, either; the closest you get is Jean Grey's transformation into Phoenix, but even that has a familiar, never-ending Mighty Marvel Soap Opera feel to it that doesn't turn into what we know it as now until much later. For now, though, these issues are Okay, but nothing more, unless you know what comes later.

Labels: Claremont's X-Men, Graeme

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I realized, while reading the most recent issue of THE UNWRITTEN, what it is I miss about Y: The Last Man: Endings. I'm not talking about Brian K. Vaughan's almost unparalleled skill at managing to close each issue with a cliffhanger that was guaranteed to bring you back next month - although, really, that was something to see, and be jealous of - but instead, the idea that each trade collection would have some kind of ending, even as it continued the over-arcing story.

(For those who get concerned, yes, this continues after the jump.)

I've been enjoying The Unwritten in my own quiet way these past few months. Yes, it's not as smart as it thinks it is or really wants to be, and yes, the Harry Potter analogs are a little too unsubtle perhaps, but it's a fun book and there's something interesting to me in the greater story that it admittedly seems a little too content to hint at instead of actually, you know, explore (If I was reviewing it properly, I'd probably go with Okay; it's not wowed me at any point, but it's an entertaining, if occasionally frustratingly slow, ride so far). But the latest issue, #4, ended on such a sour note for me that I found myself thinking the kind of meta- thoughts that never go anywhere good.

What bothered me so much was that the last page of the story identifies itself as "Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity - Conclusion" despite the fact that nothing in the story had actually come to any conclusion. It's not even as if the story had come to a clear act close or anything, either; there was nothing particularly final about the issue, or anything to differentiate it from any other issue (Other than a sudden lurch toward slasher movie-dom, but that's not necessarily a good thing)... It clearly just meant that this would be the end of the first trade paperback, an arbitrary breaking point without much meaning.

And, thinking about it, I realized that Unwritten wasn't the only series that suffered from this problem. As much as I like it - and I really do - Matt Sturges' House of Mystery doesn't do story-arcs as much as just continuing on with the same uber-plot surrounding each issue's one-off, and in that title, too, the titles of story-arcs denote future collections instead of any sense of beginning, middle, end. Air, too, tells one larger story without break, leading to an ending to the first collection that seems as much like they ran out of paper as a planned break point.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, or who to blame (If there's blame to be given); I like stories with long-term goals, after all, and there's something to be said for being able to tell one, massive, story over a number of years. But there's also something to be said for being more aware of, and writing towards, the formats your story is appearing in, and part of that (I feel) is making the collections of individual issues have more... consequence? point? shape? than these series currently have. Vertigo as a line has gained a lot from trade collections, and it's been commented more than once that the TP format is the stories' true home. If that's true, it'd be nice if the books themselves reflected that thinking, and treated their collections with more respect every now and again.

Labels: Graeme, rant

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Our final installment of the week's podcast is almost an hour long and has it all: Tyrese Gibson's Mayhem!, Captain America Reborn #2, Cracker, Godzilla, Aquaman...then just as it seems we're winding down, a dose of meta and Graeme breaking out the old-school knowledge and talking Chris Claremont's original run of X-Men.

Oh, and Julie & Julia, of course.

Oh, and if you get a chance, please take a moment to tell Graeme in the comments he's a dreamboat--it'll make my mancrush seems a little less unseemly...(or will it?)

Again, our thanks to everyone who's chimed in with comments and suggestions, and thanks to Trent Reznor, whose Creative Commons license allows us to use the most excellent Track 18 from his ambient album Ghosts I-IV as our intro and outro music. Thanks for listening!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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Yep, the very next installment, right here already. We talk about Blackest Night, Superboy Prime, Amazing Spider-Man, and I think I finally end up making a point somehow. Long-time listeners (since, say, Wednesday) will feel rewarded.

Also, extra-special this time around: annotations! You can find Laura Hudson's terrific interview with Johns about Blackest Night at Comics Alliance here, and my 2005 FBR riff on DC crossover events here on our site. (Some of it reads almost prescient, in an ultra-smartass kind of way).

Ep. 4.4 is right around the corner! (By which I mean, probably first thing Monday?) Until then, have a great weekend and enjoy the 'cast!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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I think our only regret about this installment of Wait, What is that we didn't get to answer everyone's questions--but we did our scattershot best.

If you ask me, this one's worth a listen just to hear us respond to the "Crying Superheroes--Threat or Menace?" question.

Hope you enjoy! 4.3 will go up tomorrow (barring catastrophe) and will talk about Blackest Night. Oh, yes.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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We spent a long time gabbing this week, meaning you get, um, 5 podcasts? (Maybe--I'm not done editing them yet, and I can't guarantee by the end we're not just giggling and making dolphin noises.) As you'll see (well, hear), it's as much your fault as ours (and by 'yours,' I mean those wonderful souls who contributed questions, suggestions and comments in a previous thread.)

But the first episode of the lot starts on a focused note: I respond to Graeme's lovely recent piece about Wednesday Comics, Graeme responds, I respond to his response, etc., etc., dolphin giggles, and...scene.

So hear us talking about Wednesday on a Wednesday, then come back on Thursday to hear us talk about...something else.

And, as always, thanks for listening!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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It's almost that time again; Jeff and I are about to do another Wait, What? podcast, and this time, we want to know what you want us to talk about. Bear in mind that there's every chance that we haven't read what you want us to talk about (*coughAsterios Polypcough*), but any and all requests/questions you want us to answer/whatever will be read and considered and/or nervously laughed about. Honest. You can leave suggestions in the comments here, or email us at waitwhatpodcast at gmail dot com. Do it before tomorrow at 4 PST and you too could stand a chance of having your internetscreenhandle mangled by myself or Mr. Lester on an audio podcast of your very own. Call now. Operators standing by.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, Wait What?

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We're five weeks in, and I think I'm finally beginning to get my head around WEDNESDAY COMICS. And, when I say "get my head around," I really mean "Write lots of random, scattered thoughts that may or may not constitute a review of what we've seen so far. And so, for those who are prepared to slog through them all: 25 (SEMI-)RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT WEDNESDAY COMICS.

1. It's definitely not what I expected. I remember, when I saw the first issue, being surprised at the paper quality, and that there were less strips like Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman, which seems determined to pack in as much information - and as many panels - on the oversized page as possible. Something like Sgt. Rock feels, in a way, as if it could easily be printed on a regular sized page without losing anything, and that always seems like a bit of a let down.

2. That said, Wonder Woman, more than any other strip, falls prey to the printing process, which makes the colors too muddy and dark, and the size of each panel and size of the lettering makes it harder to read than it should be. You really have to work your way through it, which is a shame; I love the tone, and Caldwell's art is beautiful.

3. Wonder Woman and, to a lesser extent, Supergirl both show ways in which DC don't take enough advantage of the versatility of their characters. Anyone who doesn't think that DC should get Caldwell or someone similarly inclined to work on a series (or, better yet, a series of OGNs, Minx-style) featuring the young Diana having magical adventures aimed at a non-superhero-reading audience needs their head checked. Similarly, Palmiotti and Conner's Supergirl - surely one of the best strips in the series - is cute, charming and just plain fun. I really like the Gates/Igle series right now, but why can't we have another series like this instead of the spiky, off-putting Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures In The Eight Grade?

4. The fact that Supergirl is one of my favorite strips in the series points out something that surprises me every week - that my preconceptions about who'd knock it out've the park (Using baseball metaphors without irony? Apparently, I've taken it to US citizenship more than I'd suspected) and who'd disappoint were completely wrong. Well, almost completely; Eddie Berganza's writing on Teen Titans is pretty much as okay as I expected it to be.

5. To wit, though: Kyle Baker's Hawkman? It makes me sad. I'm not talking about the overly-computer-generated art (which works in some places, but seems very... sterile and posed, in others), but the writing, which just reeks of disdain for the subject, or for the readers, or both. I don't know whether it's because I've come to expect more of a sense of personality (and of humor) from Baker's writing, but I can't help but read this and think that it's mean, somehow. Like he's writing down to the audience, in a sense of "You want this kind of thing, do you? Fine."

6. Along similar lines, Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred's Metamorpho is, at best, uneven. The attempts at knowing fun (The meta "Hey, Kids!" strip at the bottom of the the second and third episodes) came off as throwaway and tired, and because they appeared twice in a row - and on two consecutive splash page episodes, too - before disappearing for the next two (or forever?), seemed more like repetition than a recurring feature. Also, for Gaiman, even with all his faults, the writing seems amazingly slight... or is it just me?

7. I still love that there is a high-profile series from DC where the subjects include Metamorpho, the Metal Men and Sgt. Rock, however.

8. That said, all three fall into Wednesday Comics' biggest trap: They look nice, but have no substance. See also Teen Titans and, depressingly, The Demon and Catwoman (And I say that as a massive fan of Walt Simonson's writing).

9. Man, I feel like I'm really dumping on Teen Titans, for some reason. I don't mean to; I think there's just such a disconnect from the quality of the wonderful Sean Galloway art and Berganza's meandering, weightless writing; the images make me want to read it, and the words make me wonder who all these people are and why I should care.

10. My problem with The Demon and Catwoman, however, is that I feel like Simonson is squandering what is a great idea - Selina Kyle tries to steal from Jason Blood, with hilarious, horrific and magical results - with a rushed execution. I get that there's only 12 pages to tell the story in, but it consistently feels like we're missing chunks of story in order to hit necessary beats. What makes Simonson's writing work for me is the humanity of his characters as much as the scale of his imagination, but I feel as if we're not seeing that here. Plus, Brian Stelfreeze doesn't draw as cute a Selina as I'd want (Being of the Cameron Stewart/Darwyn Cooke school of Selina Kyle).

11. Talking of Cooke: If there's a Wednesday Comics 2, as many have been discussing recently, I'd love to see what he could do with the format, especially after his Solo issue.

12. Other artists I'd want to see tackle Wednesday Comics, if there're more? Frank Quitely, JH Williams III, Brendan McCarthy and Bruce Timm (on OMAC - You know you want to, Bruce). Writers would include Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Jeff Parker and Paul Tobin.

13. It surprises me that only two strips have gone for directly referencing classic Sunday comics, to be honest. I'm sad that no-one has tried to ape the puzzles and multiple strips variety format (beyond Karl Kerschl's two-stories-in-one Flash Comics page).

14. Flash Comics is one of the biggest winners of the series for me. Even without the formal experiments - The dot-color in the Iris West strip, the crossover of the two strips, the homage/parody of the writing styles - Kerschl's art would've made me a happy man, but there's something extra-engaging about the quiet ambition of the page.

15. However, I'm still quietly mad that Kerschl didn't take Carmine Infantino's very particular iconography from the silver age Flash comics and go mad with it, given the size of the page. If there's a second Wednesday Comics, give me and Rian Hughes the character and I'll show you what I mean.

16. I admire the hell out've Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook's Kamandi, but would be lying if I said I actually enjoyed it. I always wonder if I'm alone in that.

17. Batman is pretty much tone-perfect so far, which amazes me, given how little I actually enjoyed 100 Bullets by the same people. But Azzarello has a nice pulpy punch that works with the short episodes, and Risso can draw the shit out've it.

18. I loved the lettering mistake in #4's Batman episode, where it looks like Bruce is trying to seduce Luna in the name of crimefighting. People, she's inviting him to her hotel room. Not the other way around. I mean, Batman doesn't care about sex.

19. I'm running out of points, and I have so much more to say. So, quickly: Deadman is something that I remain convinced I should be enjoying more. I love Deadman as a character, I love Bullock's art and there's nothing incredibly wrong with the writing, but it's just... there. I can't quite shift the feeling that Bullock's art works better smaller, either.

20. John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo's Superman is, sadly, a story that creators always seem to fall into when doing high-profile Superman stories: the "Why he is so important and deep and wonderful and inspirational" one. By the time it's completed, I may feel more warmly towards it, but for now, it's as if every week is ticking off a cliche one-by-one: Here's the bit where we see that Batman is colder than he is! And here's where he loves his friends, but feels disconnected from them because he's an alien! And here're his folks, who love him unconditionally, like the simple farm folks they are! But, look - Here's Jor-El and Lara, and they loved him so much they sent him into space! and so on. Bermejo's art is luscious, but at least half the credit for that goes to Barbara Ciardo's colors, which really humanize and soften his occasionally sterile harshness.

21. Metal Men? Another one for the "Eh, it's okay, I guess" pile; Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Kevin Nowlan, unsurprisingly, make a wonderful - if dated - mix (Seriously, look at the civilians), and Dan Didio's writing is better than Eddie Berganza's. Is that damning with faint praise?

22. The writing, overall, is the anthology's failing; I'm tempted to generalize and say that so many shortform anthologies from Marvel and DC show how poorly that their creators can handle the short format, but that's more childhood scars from things like Action Comics Weekly and Marvel Comics Presents than any real critical judgment talking. The strips in Wednesday are, if nothing else, better serializations than those earlier attempts, but very few manage to offer the right amount of story each episode. The most successful, to my mind, as Kamandi, Strange Adventures, Supergirl and Batman.

23. Talking of Strange Adventures, am I the only one who's ended up wondering how Adam Strange went this long without being a Paul Pope character? The intoxicating mix of Heavy Metal, John Carter of Mars and, well, Pope himself that each episode brings is always one of the highlights of each issue. I'm a massive Pope fanboy, so that's not really surprising, but I kind of hope that he'll end this series by agreeing to take on a full Strange Adventures series.

24. Someone else that I hope I'll see more of from this: Joe Quinones, whose Green Lantern art makes me think of Pixar every single issue, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. But his retro GL, given suitable square charm to match his square jaw by Kurt Busiek's fun script, has stayed as a fun surprise each and every issue so far.

25. It's hard to decide if Wednesday Comics is a success or not; the format kind of overrules the content in a lot of ways, and I'm tempted to just say "Well, it's beautiful and it's ambitious" and announce Good and leave it at that. But it's uneven and it's frustrating when you come to read it, and I'm not sure whether a great concept and good intent wins in the rock-paper-disappointing comic game these days. It sounds like I'm damning it by saying that it's Okay, and maybe I am, but... I can't help but feel as if Okay is a pretty good grade to give an anthology of such disparate material. If nothing else, it's never boring, and that's got to count for something, right...?

Labels: Graeme

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This is the kind of thing that you're supposed to admit in a darkened room, sitting in a circle on uncomfortable seats with people who are in the same position as you, and who won't judge you for what you're about to say, but somehow I'm telling everyone in the internet and hoping for the best.

My name is Graeme and I love X-MEN FOREVER.

I know, I know; you think less of me now. I'm sorry. What can I say to explain...? Does it help that, when the project - which, for the faint of heart and fortunate of reading, sees Chris Claremont pick up from where he left the X-Men franchise originally, back with 1991's X-Men #1-3, pretending as if nothing had happened in between then and now, accompanied by Tom Grummett, who seems to have become Claremont's old-school partner in crime following their Exiles run together - was announced, I was just like all of you, snarking that it was unnecessary and a cheap cash-grab for the wallets and adoration of those fans who feel like the X-Men haven't been the same since they were kids? Probably not, because I still picked up the first issue, and then found myself picking up the second, then the third, and by the time the fourth came out last week, realizing that it'd become the first thing I'd read off the reading stack everytime it was released. But how did this happen? What has gone wrong with me?

It's not even as if I have genuine nostalgia for the era. I'd stopped reading X-men by 1991 (I dropped off around the time Jim Lee came onto Uncanny, confused and tired by what seemed like months if not years of directionless storytelling and characters coming and going with no rhyme nor reason; I think #250 was my last straw, when Polaris reappeared and suddenly had a sister and new powers, and with no explanation), so it's not like I'm all "This is my era!" And yet, there's something comfortingly familiar to see all the stereotyped Claremontisms in place in this series, all the characters "sounding like themselves" in the way that the 15 year old me remembers, and incidental characters spouting awkward expositionary dialogue to give Chris the feeling that he's staying in touch with the common man (All we need now are a couple of NPR shout-outs, and I'll be in retroheaven).

But it's not just nostalgia that makes me unable to stop reading the series, because there's something oddly... intense about the nostalgia. The plot is too fast, too frantic to truly feel like the occasionally-glacial Claremont of old, and it's too scattered to feel like anything other than the Image Comics that the X-artists who replaced Claremont went on to abandon the series to produce. It's as if Claremont half-remembers what he wanted to do with the series - certainly, parts of what have happened tie in with interviews he's given about where he would've taken Uncanny, given the chance; Wolverine's "death," for one - but not how he wanted to do it, and so he's working in some strange parody of how he remembers the comics of the era being while trying to stay true to himself. Everything keeps happening in these comics, to paraphrase the line on the back of that Scott Pilgrim book: In four issues alone, Wolverine has died, Jean has become Phoenix again, admitted that she loved Wolverine, Nick Fury has become official government liason to the X-Men, Sabretooth has been blinded by Storm, who turns out to be (a) evil, and (b) not actually Storm, because there's another Storm running around, who's a kid - and there's a shout-out to an Uncanny subplot of years past - Rogue's powers have potentially been altered or maybe not, and Shadowcat has one of Wolverine's claws in her arm thanks to a phasing incident gone wrong. Oh, and there's a secret society plotting against the X-Men, of course. All of that in four issues, people. That's some packed, and nonsensical, storytelling.

Add to this conflicted writing Tom Grummett offering up art that takes his own (somewhat dated, but that may just be me) style and adds some 1990s papercut-rendering, covers that don't match the interiors (As in, characters have entirely different costumes, which seems like an odd mistake to make considering Grummett is doing the covers as well; I'm guessing that the costumes on the covers are part of a redesign that we'll see at some point) and you have a book that's very much its own, completely addictive, thing. I almost want to describe it as car-crash reading, but that'd be unfair; it's not that any of it is bad, or even that you're expecting disaster at any given point... It's just that there's a continuing feeling of "It's got to go wrong at any moment. It just has to," that keeps you from looking away. But, God help me, I also genuinely enjoy it.

It's a series that I know, objectively, should be Eh at best, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I find it Good, and secretly think that anyone who read Uncanny X-Men back in the day should at least try it.

I'm sorry.

Labels: Graeme

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Con reports age faster than wizards in Conan stories after you remove their special amulets, so this did not have a terribly long editing period: it runs just under an hour because we didn't know where to split it and Skype's new settings mixed me a bit lower and Graeme a bit louder.

But! We talk about the differences between this year's SDCC and last year's, each recommend a book we picked up from SDCC, and you get a bit of the "Prince & The Pauper" thing going on since Graeme was covering the show for io9, and I was chasing work.

We've got plans to do a more solid reviewy podcast in the near future, and I want to actually write some reviews (if I can make the time in all my manuscript wrangling) so if you don't dig this, stick around! There's more coming down the pike.

We hope you enjoy.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, SDCC, Wait What?

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Yes, Friday has arrived and, with it, our final installment of our second podcast. In Wait, What 2.3, Graeme and I discuss PHONOGRAM, DETECTIVE COMICS #854, GREEK STREET #1 and (failed) TV shows KINGS and VIRTUALITY. We hope you enjoy.

Now if you excuse me, I have to go back to monitoring the comments and seeing how things are going with Mr. Hibbs and the signing countdown...

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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I'll try and get this posted quickly so I don't cockblock Hibbs' important upcoming post. A new episode of Wait, What is up for your listening pleasure, provide your definition of pleasure hews more closely to 'random bullshitting around the comics counter': Graeme and I talk about the proper name for Portland, Greg Rucka, quickly develop a hideous pitch for Angel & The Ape, and cover other geekly topics.

For those of you who prefer, y'know, actual reviews? You should wait for the next two installments, but if two grown men agog over the career of a Transformers comic book writer is your idea of a good time, this should do you just fine.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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JUSTICE LEAGUE: CRY FOR JUSTICE #1 really is very Jeph Loeb, isn't it?

I mean, I'm not just talking about the tendency to emphasize words in an unexpected and unrealistic manner - Although, come on; parts of the dialogue here read as if James Robinson has never heard any real human being have a conversation - but the whole thing reads like someone at DC has actually kidnapped the real James Robinson and replaced him with a James Robinson clone actually made up of defective Loeb DNA: Splashy art masking a story where little happens? Check. Completely unconvincing dialogue? Check. Attempt at thematic cleverness that, in execution, comes across as laughable (I refer, of course, to the fact that in this series subtitled "Cry for Justice," each of the members of the upcoming new Justice League team literally cry for justice at some point in the issue. Well, except for Green Arrow, but that's because he's still embarrassed at having to say things like "No, baby, I'm with you. You and me. Old times, new times, all the time" and "Remember back in the day... when I lost my millions and became liberal - -")? Check! There's even, in the Atom scene, a rip-off of the duelling-first-person-narration of Loeb's Superman/Batman.

And yet, the comic it reminds me most of isn't a Loeb one. I'm convinced that this is, instead, the DC version of Secret War. Remember Secret War? Not the 1980s one with the plural title, the early-2000s one by Brian Bendis and Gabrielle Dell'Otto that was, like this, painted and self-important, bringing together unlikely characters (including one that clearly doesn't belong there - Hi, Congorilla!) to launch a new version of the company's flagship superhero title. Whether that means that Cry For Justice will end up being as light, storywise, and ultimately inconsequential as that series did remains to be seen, but it's not a good thing to finish the first issue and think "Oh, great, next thing they're going to end up invading Latveria." Awful, in a way that makes me wonder if I've been wrong in liking Robinson's recent Superman issues.

Labels: Graeme

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Mr. McMillan also posted Wait, What 1.3 as an mp3 for those of you who requested it. So that's finally sorted out.

But do also check out our minicast--an episode I like to call "Graeme, Interrupted"--which, although cut short by Internet problems...



...has us both on one channel, improvements on the volume settings, and Graeme doing a really great squeaky voice there at the end.

And, of course, if you'd like to take a second and let us know what you think after you do, we'd appreciate it.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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Don't think we resolved the stereophonic boondoggle, but the third part of our initial podcast is now available for your auditory delectation.

I'd like to have a follow-up review of LOEG: Century #1 to embellish some of the points made herein, but considering I've spent almost two full hours trying to catch up on overdue emails, it may come later rather than sooner.

Regardless, thanks for listening and let us know what you think!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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It's been a busy weekend. Plus, we're trying to work on the audio quality a bit.

Plus, we did just enough trash-talking of Alan Moore, we're trying to figure out if we can post this without bursting into flames.

(Plus, Robert made us cry.)

But we're planning on having this posted--today, in fact--and I'll update accordingly when we do.

Thanks for your patience!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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Thanks for those of you who took the time to comment on our first installment. Although this installment will have a little more of that angel/devil-on-the-shoulder stereo mix, we have dutiful drones hard at work to clear that up for our third installment, which we'll be posting Monday.

But, today: Graeme and I talk about the recent works of a certain Grant Morrison as well as how other critics affect our reading. (In fact, Graeme's analysis helps tiny-brained me think about some of the work at hand as we speak! You can all but hear the rice-krispyish popping of my befuddled synapses...)

Hope you enjoy it, and thanks for listening!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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Okay, so I'm not particularly on top of the new-fangled technology, otherwise this would've gotten to you sooner and better, but Graeme and I spent a few hours last week talking about comics and put it into convenient podcast form for you. We hope you give it a listen and let us know what you think...

Some notes:

(1) the opening music is Track 18 from Nine Inch Nails' excellent ambient album Ghosts I-IV, because Trent Reznor, bless him, actually has a creative commons license for the work that allows us to use it.

(2) I think I sound like a bozo for the first two minutes or so. Just hold out until you hear Graeme get going--it's more than worth it.

(3) I'll be uploading Part 2 of the conversation tomorrow on Saturday and we should have Part 3 for you by Monday. Who says this isn't the Savage Critic age of Sonic Gratification?



And here is the rest of it.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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It's been a long time since I've done one of these, so be prepared for a capsules review of a lot of books, many of which you may have forgotten reading already.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #592 - 594: Part of me is tempted to point to this arc and say "Hey, haters, here's a story that couldn't be done with a married Peter, because there's no way that Mary Jane would be cool with him only being Spider-Man for days on end just to piss off Jonah," but that would be both pointless and raising old ghosts. As much as I love the idea behind this story, and as much as I love Mark Waid's take on the characters, this is just Okay; I could've done without the "You see? He's really mad at Norman" bit, and Mike McKone's art has never done it for me. But it was nice to see the Peter I know and love back when giving his blessing to Aunt May's latest fling.

(Appropos of nothing much, but does anyone still really hold a grudge about Brand New Day and the Spider-Man reboot? There's a post to be written about how weirdly the new status quo seems to aim for - and reach - a constant level of late-70s fill-in quality, sure, but by this point, surely most people have come 'round to the fact that the reboot has brought back necessary things like "a supporting cast" and "some semblance of fun" to the character, after years of JMS. Or are those merely my biases showing?)

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #23 - 25: I don't know if the spell got broken when the scheduling slipped for awhile or what, but I just don't find this book even half as compelling as it once seemed, and haven't done since the middle of the Fray arc. I'm sure that it's still heading towards something, but the spark seems to be gone, and the current run of done-in-ones (even though they're heading towards the common goal of flipping the dynamic so vampires are loved and slayers are feared, ooh, just like the X-Men) has left the book feeling more disjointed and cold than it should. I'm hoping that they get things back on track soon, but right now, this is a sad Eh.

DARK AVENGERS #1 - 4: Four issues in, and I'm throwing up my hands and wondering why this isn't working for me. It's not that it seems overly busy - although it does - or that I don't care about any of the characters - although I don't; it's that I can't help but feel that the creators don't really care about this book that much. There's something uneven and hollow about it, a feeling of it being entirely cynical and insincere that just keeps me from feeling involved with anything happening inside the covers at all. Awful, but perhaps it's just me.

FINAL CRISIS AFTERMATH: DANCE #1: Joe Casey is, I'm beginning to think, my anti-matter duplicate; more often than not, I can appreciate his books more than actually enjoy them. This is just like Godland and The Intimates in that respect; I know that it's smart and funny and contemporary (Even the use of Twitter, which I'm sure would piss me off in other books, feels like it works), but I can't feel that it's anything more than Okay, for some reason, and I really don't know why.

FINAL CRISIS AFTERMATH: RUN! #1: Beginning DC's new habit of naming books after songs produced by Danger Mouse - I'll be writing Blackest Night Aftermath: Sofa King at the end of the year, I'm happy to announce - this book is, sadly, completely Eh. I don't care about the Human Flame, and this is too busy trying to make a grumpy face to give me a reason to.

THE FLASH: REBIRTH #1 - 2: Wait, what? Barry is the who whatcha now? I can't quite work out if the reveal at the end of the second issue is genius or insane, but I am enjoying the whole "Barry Allen is back, and that's really not a good thing for anyone" thing this series has going on. It won't last, of course, but I'm thinking it's Good while it does.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #31 - 32: Sad but true: Dwayne McDuffie's trying to write a really good book, in between the crossovers and the editorially-mandated character shuffles and art that's almost never appropriate. The (temporary?) addition of Rags Morales in the latest issue coincides with the JLA becoming the Defenders of the DCU, and it... kind of works? A high Okay, but I just wish that Dwayne would get free rein and a good artist so we could see what he's really capable of.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #21-24: I've heard a rumor that this title was nearly renamed Dan Slott Wants You To Know His Avengers Are Awesome, a title that would be more honest, if not quite as catchy. The problem with this revamp for this book is that, while the concept is ideal - "It's the old-school Avengers book full of big ideas!" - the execution... isn't. There's lots of telling instead of showing, and none of the telling seems particularly convincing, especially the "Isn't Hank Pym clever? No, really, he's really smart" talk that began to feel really desperate somewhere around Slott's second issue. There's a lot of interesting ideas here, but none of them really come together, and the result is something that you end up thinking "Well, I can kind of see what he's trying to do here..." more than actually digging what you're reading. Eh, if you squint in the right way.

NEW AVENGERS #50-52: Whereas this is a really good Defenders book. Unlike Dark Avengers, Bendis' affection for the characters comes through here easily, and if his storylines feel choppy and forced, the dialogue and character interaction feels true (In particular, Luke telling Doctor Strange that he has friends made the sap in me go "Awwww" inside). With Dark Reign seeming very hit and miss, this is one of the bright spots in the middle of all the enforced gloom.

PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB #2: A nice idea, but the I'm not convinced by the way it all plays out, somehow. I can't really put my finger on why, though; maybe it suffers from the weight of expectations coming (so long) after the amazing first issue? It feels unfinished in the same way that the first series did, where the theory and thinking behind it is there, but there's not the emotional connection that you want. It's still Good, mind you, and Jamie McKelvie's art continues to improve; I selfishly want them to release a colored collection of the first series, now, I've become so convinced that his work needs color to truly sing.

WONDER WOMAN #29 - 31: Potentially the most puzzling superhero book around right now, Gail Simone's current epic storyline seems stunningly misjudged. I'm not sure whether it's the choice of villain, the lack of forward momentum in the plot or the overwhelming (and uncomfortable, unconvincing and self-conscious) grimness, but the whole "Rise Of The Olympian" arc has almost entirely killed my interest in the series. I don't just mean that I don't like it; I tend to forget whether I've read issues, and when I pick up new issues, I've entirely forgotten what happened last time (Not helped by the fact that it feels like we've had "Diana has to screw her courage to the sticking post and compromise her morals to try and defeat this mysterious, surprisingly dull villain" as a theme for the last few issues in a row). In a strange way, it kind of pisses me off; I liked Simone's run up until this storyline, and almost resent the current arc for making me feel bored and disinterested in the book. Awful, as much as I hate to say it. Come back, interesting, suspenseful and fun book. I miss you.

But what, as Mr. Hibbs says, did you think?

Labels: Graeme

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And this is where Brian and I go our different ways, because I thought that DETECTIVE COMICS #853 was really, really appallingly bad. As in, I read it and almost thought that I had accidentally been reading some misprinted copy and that somewhere out there, there was a "real" version of the issue that had, you know, a story and a point and anything other than an overwhelming smugness and sense of incredible deja vu.

At first, I put down my sense of disappointment to the fact that the issue was late and that that had, somehow, raised my expectations of it to an unrealistic level, but a second read made me realize that, no, it was just plain bad. I'm not sure where to start with where I thought it went wrong, but I can tell you that the part where we spend five pages of Bruce saying "Goodnight, [name of familiar Batman element" over and over again before the Batsignal turns awkwardly into a pair of hands delivering a baby who - gasp - just happens to be Bruce Wayne was the point where I felt as if Neil Gaiman wasn't just even phoning it in, but giving to his assistant to phone in over a bad cellphone connection. Everything about the writing in this issue seemed lazy, even the obvious desperation to "say something" about Batman as myth rather than just character; all of the characters showing up to say their bit about "their" Batman seemed strained and unsubtle, and almost everything Batman himself said felt as if he'd been replaced by Expositionman ("I'm having a near-death experience, aren't I, ghost of my mother? Do you get that, fanboys? And here's where I explain that I am more important as a myth and urban legend than anything else. Look. I'll do it in captions over splash pages so that you know it's important."). Gaiman may have a great fondness for Batman, but he doesn't seem to have any special insight into the character; everything that he tells us here we've read many, many times before, and in a way that feels less like something rushed out in an afternoon to meet a deadline.

And talking of deadlines... There's something weird about Andy Kubert's art here; there's a slickness and generic quality that it usually lacks, enough to make me wonder if other people helped out to make sure this book wasn't more than two months late. His Batman - the "real" Batman, I mean, not the various ones in flashback/anecdotes earlier in the issue - in particular feels like it's come from a different artist depending on what panels you're looking at in the issue, and I don't think that's because he's trying to ape different artists' styles during the same scene. It's just weirdly inconsistent.

In a weird way, I'm glad that Brian liked it so much, because that makes me feel less guilty about saying that - for me - it was surprisingly Awful. At least there's some audience out there who it worked for, and it's not like Bri doesn't have better taste than me in most things...

Labels: Graeme

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When DC announced that they were sending Superman off-planet for an entire year, and taking him out of both the Action and Superman titles in doing so, I have to admit, I was somewhat skeptical. If, by skeptical, we all agree I mean "derisively snarky." But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and apparently this pudding isn't as doughy as I expected.

Wait, was that me taking the metaphor too far?

I admit, I skipped out on the second half of "New Krypton" when the first half left me more than a little bored, and planned to do the same for the Superbooks' new 2009 status quo; if it wasn't for getting comp copies of SUPERMAN: WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON #1 and ACTION COMICS #875, I wouldn't have even given the storyline(s) a second thought... and maybe that would've been better for my budget, because I have to admit being more sucked in than I would want to be by what I saw. Don't get me wrong, I still think there's an element of wrong-headedness to what's going on - Why would you take the character Superman out of the comic Superman and then create a new comic for him to star in, for one thing - but it's done with such... I don't know, shamelessness? Panache? Smugness? that I can't help but want to find out what the endgame is.

You see, that's what really won me over. Not the fine art by Pete Woods (although, I admit, I liked the sketchier style he used on "Up, Up and Away") and Eddy Barrows, although both WONK and Action look wonderful and the best they have in awhile. No, it's the way that, reading both books pretty much back-to-back reminded me, more than anything of reading 52. The way that they both felt like chapters in a larger story, but one that's (a) actually going somewhere, and (b) going somewhere that isn't immediately obvious. That 52-esque feeling is helped, of course, by the shout-outs to continuity (The reveal of Nightwing's identity in particular works much better than I'd expected it to, and I loved that you find out who he is, but not necessarily why he is) and the strong scripting of Greg Rucka (on Action, and co-writing WONK). Even if you're not as easily pulled in to what's happening in the two series, you still have to marvel (ha?) at the way that both issues are written, balancing exposition and narrative in such a skillful way (Admittedly, WONK #1 is still a little too "And this is the set-up" heavy for my liking) that you can pretty much pick the books up cold (or, like me, having skipped the last few months of what came before) and still not be lost, but without feeling that anything has been sacrificed to help you get there.

Of course, everything could still go to shit in the next year or so, but then, that was always a possibility with 52, as well. For now, though, I'm as surprised by anyone that I'm onboard the Supertrain through 2009, but WONK #1 was a low Good and Action #875 was just plain Good. Who saw that coming, even with telescopic vision?

Labels: Graeme

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So, I'm kind of conflicted about FINAL CRISIS #7. As the last issue of a company-wide "event" - Hell, even as a narrative - it feels like a failure, with lots of important plot points either muddy or entirely screwed-up in one way or another. But on an emotional level, as a shameless love letter to superhero comics, it was wonderful; moving, bold and purposeful and entirely successful. Maybe I should call this post "Crisis On Infinite Viewpoints" and get it over with.

To admit my bias early; I love Grant Morrison's superhero work. It's almost always flawed in one way or another, and sometimes to the extent that it's a terrible mess, but it's almost never a boring mess, and every failure can generally be traced back to being too ambitious or taking on too much at once, which is always something to be admired. One of the usual flaws for his superhero stories is his climaxes, which tend to either be of the deus ex machina variety or the "Wait, what the fuck was that" variety; Final Crisis has both, somewhat fittingly, and it's a tribute to Morrison's talent as a stylist that it still managed to work, somehow, despite at times feeling like the work of an overeager seven-year-old ("And then Aquaman came back! And then the Hawks died! Maybe! It's entirely unclear!" Both of which deserved more than just the panel of attention that they got). But then, Final Crisis was always less of what you would expect - or, perhaps, deserve - from a superhero crossover, and closer to something like The Invisibles (or Seven Soldiers, more appropriately), anyway; something less a story than an experience that either works for you or doesn't, with no in-between (By the end of The Invisibles, I didn't care how the story ended as much as I wanted the characters to be okay, if that makes sense; I was so invested in the characters I'd spent years reading about that I would've been equally happy if the final issues had been Grant Morrison stepping into the story and saying "Okay, so they're all going to be all right in the end. I just wanted you to know that" as much as, you know, the actual end of the story he was writing). The idea that Morrison could've been able to bring the story to a successful conclusion purely in terms of plot with only 40 pages was already unlikely, and so it was almost refreshing to see the approach he took.

Was I the only person who was reminded of Secret Invasion's final issue, when reading this? Not only the switch from watching the events "live" to being told what happened by participants after the fact, but also the construction of the issue so that the threat is dealt with by midway through the issue, and everything else was "what happened afterwards" exposition. Those similarities made it easier to compare the two, and draw (jumping to) conclusions about the two companies; while Final Crisis' finale was romantic, upbeat and embracing of the ridiculousness of the superhero genre (I mean, Captain Carrot and his Zoo Crew being part of the heroes that save the universe? Really? And when I saw that, I was actually glad that JG Jones wasn't drawing the issue, because I dread to think how realistic he might have made them), Secret Invasion was all... I don't want to say pointless, but oppressive and never-ending, and without actually achieving anything, or making any greater point beyond "And here is more of the same, our poor heroes." As much as Final Crisis may have made no sense on a plot level, at the end of it, I know what it was about and what it was trying to say; I'm not sure I can say the same of Secret Invasion, beyond "Selling comics." And, yet, maybe that made it a better superhero event book?

In the end, I think Final Crisis was - for me, at least - a Very Good series overall, with a Good, if rushed and overeager, last issue. It makes superhero comics seem full of possibilities again, but considering what is likely to follow, it's probably best not to think about that too much.

Labels: Graeme

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THE WAR AT ELLSMERE is the kind of book that makes you wonder why its author - in this case, Faith Erin Hicks, who did Zombies Calling a couple of years ago for SLG, which was also a lot of fun - isn't much better known and feted as a "meteoric talent" or "one to watch" or something similar by a hundred bloggers. To spoil the review, let's start with me telling you that it's Very Good, and go from there.


It's a tough book to talk about, because what makes it work so well is the execution as much as anything else; to talk about the plot could make it sound a little too like a less magical, less sentimental Harry Potter (although, I admit, if there was a new "The [Blank] at Ellsmere" book every year, I'd be a happy man) or like too many other stories; a poor girl gets into an exclusive private school on a scholarship and discovers a world of snobbery, cliques and mystery. But Hicks isn't a lazy writer, and for every familiar plot device she uses, she gives it enough honesty and originality to win you over nonetheless (The dynamic between heroine Juniper and lead Mean Girl Emily is more complex than you might expect, and more interesting because of it, for example); for all their familiarity, the characters feel individual and not like stereotypes, and you believe in them.

(Also, the argument can be made that YA fiction - of which this is definitely an example, and in a weird way, the Minx book that never was, although that sounds like more of a backhanded compliment than was intended, especially considering the critical/commercial failure of much of that line. It has much more... energy, perhaps? Enthusiasm? than any of the Minx books, and feels much less studied and focused, in a good way; perhaps it's a good model for what Minx could have been - can get away with a more familiar, simpler story with more familiar, simpler characters. I'm not sure that I completely believe that, but something that I kept thinking throughout the entire book was that it was a perfect book for its target audience, and not in the negative sense.)

All of this is helped considerably by Hicks' art, which has progressed from Zombies Calling towards something simpler, more graphic and immediate - Yeah, I know there've been comparisons to Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim art, but there are as many differences as similarities, to be honest. It's like a scruffier take on something like Craig McCracken's stuff, but with the occasional surprising note of something unexpected (No-one else will see this, but I swear there's some Dave McKean in there. Some Hope Larson and Craig Thompson, too), but all without seeming too derivative and managing to feel all of its own style, at the same time. If nothing else, take a look at the book for the art alone - especially Cassie talking about trees on pages 63 and 64. It's a wonderful-looking book.

I'm almost suspicious of liking something as much as I did this book; I second-guess myself and wonder if I'm missing some flaw that everyone else will see straight away, or whether I've been lured in by great art and enjoyable story and there's some larger ART point that I've forgotten (That last one I tend to get over pretty quickly), but fuck it: This book isn't perfect (the ending is a little too "THERE MUST BE A SEQUEL") or for everyone; people who want to see Bullseye dress up as Hawkeye and shoot arrows through people might not appreciate it, but who cares? It looks great and warms the heart, while making you smile and worry that everything'll turn out okay. Like I said at the start; it really is very good.

Labels: Graeme

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1. The title - SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD BATMAN TEAM-UPS VOLUME 3 - feels as if DC was trying to win some kind of award for longwindedness; would it have killed them to just call it SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD VOLUME 3 instead? I know, they're probably trying to plan ahead for when they do Showcases of the non-Haney/Aparo issues, but still.

2. If, like me, you've been following the series eagerly up until this point, Bob Haney's weird and poetic way with words has not only become normal by now, but also comforting in a way. "The Brave and Bold Beat continues! Miss it never!" Miss it never? It's like Bizarro Stan Lee, but it works.

3. Also wonderful: The operatic, emotional Batman that Haney writes. Never mind the dour, grim Dark Knight people are familiar with, this is a Batman so filled with life that he'll literally shake a fist in the air and swear an oath if needs be... but also one so secure in his manliness that he's got no problem calling Aquaman beautiful at the end of one story.


4. To be fair to Bats, Aquaman is pretty beautiful in that particular story, thanks to Jim Aparo's lovely, lovely art. Aparo's work in this collection is variable; you can see when he's rushed and hacking it out, at times, but there are also some pages that just make you wonder why he's never really gotten his due as an artist. As someone who first came across his work in Batman and the Outsiders, but soon came to consider his Batman as "the" Batman of my childhood, it's somewhat gratifying to see that the preteen me wasn't entirely lacking in taste.

5. Something that's very apparent in black and white: What a magpie Aparo could be, stylistically. There are some very Neal Adams-ish panels in this book, and during the Sgt. Rock issues, some great Joe Kubert-style touches in the inking.

6. The Batman scene in last week's Final Crisis that everyone's not been talking about? Add in some ridiculous narration and that could've easily been the opening to one of the stories in here; the follow-up, of course, would be precisely the same follow-up that Morrison is inevitably going to end up doing himself - Batman lost in either time (the Forever People solution) or the Life Trap (Morrison's Mister Miracle solution), and fighting his way out by being the Ultimate Man. Morrison's Batman was pretty much always Haney's, but a little bit older and grumpier, anyway.

(6.5. I pretty much think that FINAL CRISIS #6 was Good, all of the problems with it, aside; I liked the choppy sense of immediacy that Morrison brings to the writing, the genuine sense of emergency and everything happening at once making it feel like a Crisis, if not necessarily the "Final" one... Whether that's intentional or the result of rewrites, I'm not entirely sure, but it still worked for me; I also like that a lot of it happens off-panel, but not in such a way that you feel completely cheated, or at least, not yet. It's a shame that deadline issues and stupid production mistakes - Since when was Mister Miracle white? How is Hourman in two places at once at the end of this issue? - have killed a lot of this series' momentum, because it's really kind of awesome, in its own way. That said, I still think that it's definitely not the kind of thing that linewide event books are made of, and that it suffers from its more overt attempts to fit into that hole.)

7. Haney's choices for guest-stars is enjoyably B-list, for the most part (Wildcat, Mister Miracle and the Metal Men all appear in more than one story in this collection), and when big-name heroes appear, it's not as fun (Well, with the exception of the Green Lantern story).

8. That Green Lantern story, though... Man. It made me realize how much of this book - and the previous two collections -don't fit into what we now think of as the superhero formula. For one thing, they're mostly devoid of supervillains; lowlife hoods or criminal masterminds, sure, but guys in costumes with superpowers? Not so much. And, as over the top as the emotion may be, there's no angst or soap opera; it's literally "Here we are introducing the concept, here we are dealing with it, now we're done."

9. That economy - and, to be honest, also the way in which you get the idea that Haney might be ripping off whatever the movie or TV show he saw last night may have been (Seriously, how else do you get a story where Batman gets mentally tortured with the latest brainwashing techniques and almost breaks after following Green Lantern once he defects?) - really reminded me of early 2000AD, especially John Wagner and Alan Grant's stuff before they started taking themselves more seriously. On the one hand, they were hacking the stuff out, trying to write as many pages as possible as quickly as possible while still being entertaining, but "hack" is too much of pejorative to use, because the stories are still readable - enjoyable - and successful in what they set out to do decades later. Someone needs to tell me what this kind of thing is called when you're trying not to insult it (Pulpy? No, that's not it, either).

10. If these collections were weekly, they wouldn't come out quick enough for me. Fun, stupid, thrilling and never-really-giving-a-fuck, this book was Excellent.

Labels: Batman, Final Crisis, Graeme

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I have to admit, I'm not sure I get Dark Reign.

I mean, on the one hand, I get why Marvel are doing it; The Initiative branding gave the post-Civil War books a feeling of importance and consistency that they wouldn't really have had otherwise, so why not do the same thing for the post-Secret Invasion books?

(And to take a detour for a second, I may have missed the last couple of issues of Secret Invasion because of the move and the citizenship thing and everything else, but still: What happened? As much as the entire series was kind of playing for time and everything, what with nothing actually happening for most of it and all, the last couple of issues still managed to feel like an incredible anti-climax.)

But, plotwise, I don't see the point of Dark Reign; it feels like Marvel's creative hivemind has decided "Hey, that whole Police State thing that worked so well with the Initiative? The kids loved that. Why don't we just do that, but moreso?" and then tried to sell it by claiming that it's yet another All-New Status Quo and Everything We Know Is Wrong. Only problem being... it's pretty much the same Marvel Comics that we've been reading for the last two years or so, isn't it?



Don't get me wrong; I haven't missed the whole "Norman Osborn is now in charge of things! And he's evil! And nuts!" schtick - partially because it keeps being rammed down our throats - but... well, hasn't he been in charge of governmental superheroes since the start of the Ellis Thunderbolts? And, aside from the fact that we keep being told that he's, like, crazy and could destroy America just to make Spider-Man frown! and whatever, I don't get why a police state run by Norman is necessarily worse than a police state run by Tony Stark, no matter how sympathetic Matt Fraction tries to make him.

Okay, yes; obviously benevolent dictators are better than psychopathic dictators. I understand that. But in terms of plot mechanics, all this really means is that we have different characters playing the same roles: We have vigilantes who are really good guys but forced to operate outside the law (Still the New Avengers, but we now have Iron Man joining this side), we have good guys operating within the system despite the unjustness of the system (Still the Mighty Avengers and, presumably, the Initiative), and we have bad guys given freer-rein-than-they-should-be by the system (I look forward to the "Dark Avengers Are The New Thunderbolts" t-shirts). There may be an added threat of Osborn losing his shit and going nuclear on Howard The Duck or whoever, but that won't happen until Marvel's ready to finish off this status quo in favor of whatever comes next.

(Hibbs, in his infinite wisdom, pointed out to me that Dark Reign is clearly act III of an overarching "This Is Why The Superhero Registration Act Is Ultimately Wrong" plot that started with Civil War. So, does this mean that the next New Status Quo is really just the old status quo? I hope so, but can't really see what else they could workably do otherwise. I shudder to imagine, however.)

The problem is, I guess, that I've seen this before, and it didn't end well last time. I mean, if Marvel were really being honest about their "DC's Greatest Hits" medley (Civil War was Legends, Secret Invasion a mash-up of Millennum and Invasion!), Norman would have to shave his head and get a promotion, but fudging the details doesn't stop this from feeling like a rehash of the whole President Lex Luthor storyline that went... well, nowhere, really, from DC at the start of this decade. Should we start preparing for the end of the story being done in a new "Captain America/Iron Man" series by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness already?

(Even the name is derivative; remember Black Reign, the JSA/Hawkman crossover from a few years ago?)

All of which is just a preamble to:

SECRET INVASION: DARK REIGN #1: Yes, yes, I'm late to the party, but come on - You can't look at that cover and not wonder whether Alex Maleev had ever seen Norman Osborn before in any other comic ever, or just got a quick description of him from Tom Brevoort before the cover was due: "He's, like, a slimy businessman. I don't know. But could you make Doctor Doom look like he's shaking his fist at the reader and saying 'Get off my lawn?'"

The weird, unnecessary, feeling of the issue isn't helped by the fact that Maleev draws almost every single character differently inside the book - Maybe it was Skrull Alex that drew the cover - and Bendis fails entirely to either sell the concept behind it or convince the reader that he's just spinning his wheels for 30-odd pages in order to give his new branding an appropriately expensive launch. Entirely Awful, although drunken, lecherous balding Namor was an unexpected (and maybe unintentional) joy.

DARK REIGN: NEW NATION #1: Well, this is more like it. Admittedly, it'd be even more like it if it'd been free, or $1 or something other than $3.99 for what is essentially five trailers for new series launching around the brand, but I'll take what I can get, and at least two of the teasers (Secret Warriors, surprisingly, and Agents of Atlas, unsurprisingly; I love Jeff Parker's stuff) made me want to pick up the first issue of their respective series, at least. The others... I had no interest in War Machine before, and the Vertigo-lite preview possibly made me actively dislike the idea of the book. The Skrull Kill Krew strip seemed... okay? I guess? I kind of forgot about it before I'd finished reading it, to be honest. And the New Avengers: The Reunion short was just depressing; it wasn't that it was bad, because it wasn't, more that... I don't know, I guess I'd hoped that we weren't going to go from "You're alive! You're alive!" to "I am running away from you and keeping secrets" cliche quite so quickly, I guess. I'd wanted to like it much more than I did, to be honest, because I like Jim McCann, but... Yeah. Not for me. Overall, though, this book did its job pretty well, so I guess it's an Okay, in a way...?

SECRET INVASION: REQUIEM #1, THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #20 and AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE #20: Here's how you know that you failed with your big emotional climax of your big crossover event - When you have to spend three separate books afterwards telling people that it was a big deal, and it still feels like you're trying to explain why Xanadu was a fitting end to Gene Kelly's career. There wasn't any real reason for Janet Van Dyne to die, other than the misguided idea that doing so would give Secret Invasion some weight (Misguided because, well, in order for that to have been the case, someone would have to have done something - anything! - interesting with Janet Van Dyne at any point in recent memory, so that we'd care that she wasn't around anymore. And, no, having her say things like "Hey, Tony, how much damage can some aliens to do to New York in a day... Oh my God" doesn't count), and by the end of reading these three special memorial issues, I started to become convinced that the only people who actually care about, or believe in, her death are Dan Slott and Brian Bendis. Also, Hank Pym? Not any more interesting with the addition of self-righteous anger, guilt and a lot of "How could you let this happen while I was kidnapped by aliens," sadly. Crap, Awful and Awful, in that case.

NEW AVENGERS #48: Is it just me, or did this feel like a rehash of everything we'd seen in this title before? Here's the team getting together - again! And they're underground! Again! But there's a traitor having to betray the team - again! And that last part just didn't ring true at all; I believe that Luke loves his kid more than life itself, but it felt too soon for him to go to Osborn - half an issue wasn't long enough for we as readers to feel like every other avenue has been exhausted, and I can't believe that going to Osborn was anything other than a last resort for him. Overall, the entire issue felt half-assed and rushed, as if Bendis was going through the motions in order to get the characters where he wants them to be for the stories he really wants to tell. Awful, sadly.

In a weird way, I can't help but feel as if Dark Reign is really, really shittily timed. Dark Avengers, the core book for the branding, gets released the day after Obama gets sworn in as President of the United States, and it's that cognitive dissonance that sticks in my mind. Marvel, for all their faults, are normally more in tune with the cultural zeitgeist than Dark Reign; it feels oddly... wrong, and somewhat DC-ish, to see them plunge into a depressing world of misuse of power at a time when we're about to bring in a President who made the country believe in Hope and Change again. Maybe they know something we don't... or maybe this is a sign that they've lost their touch.

Labels: Graeme

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I know, I know. I've been gone for far too long again. What can I say? I've been busy. But just as my last appearance here was to tell you 50 things I love about comics, I'm giving you another list this time: 25 Entirely Random Thoughts About Comics From My Past Week. Feel free to rip apart any of these in the comments; that's what they're there for.



1. The Minx closure is just depressing, for reasons that Chris Butcher puts his finger on, in part, here. I'm nowhere near the target market for this line, but I enjoyed almost all of the books to varying degrees (including Clubbing, which seems to get beaten up in almost all write-ups for some reason. Yes, the art was on the sterile side, but I loved the writing. Also, despite what Johanna thinks, the line did have at least one person who loved it: my wife, who eagerly devoured each new release), and think that it was a wonderful balance to the genre-heavy rest of DC's output (Also, format-wise, I loved the $10 for a small OGN price point). I hope that everything that was already in the works for the line ends up at a new home somewhere.

2. Again to agree with Chris Butcher, the early closure of Minx has got to make Vertigo Crime editor Will Dennis very nervous about how his imprint is going to perform. That can't be fun, knowing that your line may have less than two years to prove itself.

3. While I'm talking about Minx: The second Plain JANES book, JANES IN LOVE, was much better than the first, even though I'm not sure I could coherently explain why. The writing was tighter and had a much stronger narrative arc, the art was - I don't know... weirder? More individual? More Jim Rugg-y? It felt more honest, less attempting to be generic, if that makes sense - and the book as a whole had a much greater sense of purpose than the first. Me, I thought it was Very Good.

4. On the other hand, THE NEW YORK FOUR disappointed the Local fan in me. That's not Ryan Kelly's fault (if anything, his art in this was stronger than in his Local issues), but Brian Wood's, and for the same reason that The Plain JANES disappointed: the book just stopped, as opposed to finishing. Obviously, a sequel was planned - and is being worked on as I type, I believe - but it doesn't stop this otherwise enjoyable (The guidebook commentary in particular is a nice touch, and Wood manages to bring some humanity to what could've otherwise just been a bunch of stereotypes) book from slamming on the brakes so suddenly at the end that you probably hit your head off the metaphorical dashboard. A high Okay, sadly.

5. My favorite new series to have appeared recently are both Vertigo books - House of Mystery and Air. Does this mean that we're headed back to a period where Vertigo is putting out a lot of good, surprising work again, or just that I'm getting old?

6. AIR's second issue is better than its first, by far (A high Good compared to an Okay, if you're going by that scale); I got sent previews of the first five issues from DC just after the first issue came out, and the fourth issue in particular just made me a massive fan of the series - which made me somewhat sad, because how many people will stick around to the fourth issue in this kind of market? Nonetheless, if you've bought the first two issues and feel like you're still on the fence, stick around until the fourth before you make a decision.

7. No, I can't tell you what it was about the fourth issue that I liked so much without ruining the surprise. Sorry.

8. The comic I'm most looking forward to read that's currently in my (growing) to-do pile? Andy Ristaino's massive The Babysitter, which just blew my mind leafing through the oversized, densely-packed, pages.

9. Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's FANTASTIC FOUR #560 just continues their lackluster attempt at being imaginative without, you know, actually coming up with anything new. When The World's Greatest Comic Magazine reads as if it's stolen its plot from Heroes, which in itself stole its plot from "Days of Future Past," then that's not a good thing. It's such a... dull book, now. Not just in the sense of being boring (although it is; it's slow and unsurprising and unamusing, all of which the ideal Fantastic Four comic should never be), but also in terms of the visuals, with Hitch's overly-rendered, awkward figures buried under coloring that seems like sludge. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in Marvel's offices to see discussions about this run - it's not in the top 20 best selling books, generating next to no buzz, and has roughly the same readership as Dwayne McDuffie's run. Is it a failure, considering what was expected? Oh, and Awful.

10. I've been reading a lot of Essentials lately, so part of my mind is convinced that it's not really the FF unless Joe Sinnott is inking, admittedly.

11. Also from reading so many Essentials: Ed Brubaker's CAPTAIN AMERICA #42 is both Good and completely influenced by Steve Englehart's run on the book from the mid-70s - He even brought back crazy 1950s Cap! It's not just the cast (The Falcon, Sharon Carter, Red Skull and Arnim Zola? Come on); there's something about Bucky's character and the constant questioning himself about whether he's worthy enough of Steve Rogers' legacy that's 100% Englehart-esque. All of which is a good thing, in case you were wondering.

12. In fact, between Brand New Day, Brubaker's Captain America and Dan Slott's plans for Mighty Avengers , Marvel's really going for a return for the 1970s these days. You could even argue that things like Secret Invasion and even Civil War are just longer, slower, versions of the kind of quasi-political things that Englehart and co. were trying to do back then, only taken much more seriously and to greater extremes. This can only mean one thing: Dark Reign is what happens when America is taken over the elf with a gun.

13. That said, four ongoing mainstream continuity Avengers books is insanity. Especially when you know that they'll all end up coming out on the same week. Which'll also be the same week that Invincible Iron Man and Captain America come out.

14. Completely random observation: Marvel events are all about bringing the books together and setting a coherent tone and overall plot for the universe going forward, but DC events are all about trying to launch different plots and tones - Look at One Year Later or all the different titles that have the Final Crisis branding.

15. DC's variety is never played up as the strength that it should be. The Batbooks aren't like the Superman books aren't like Wonder Woman, Flash (which is, admittedly, a bit schizophrenic in and of itself right now) and Green Lantern, etc. etc. - Why isn't this seen as a good thing by fandom at large? When a Marvel book comes through that is genuinely different and not smothered by the frowny self-importance of the Marvel Universe Status Quo Du Jour (like Hellcat or The Immortal Iron Fist, say), it seems much more of a surprise and like it's somehow slipped through the cracks... why can't DC play their books up as a whole line full of such happy surprises?

16. I just realized: Kathryn Immonen should write Fantastic Four.

17. TRINITY (#17 of which came out this week) reads really well in chunks - It's the DC event book for people who think that Final Crisis makes them think too much - but really poorly in single-issues (The most recent issue, when taken on it's own, for example, is just an Eh). When fight scenes last more than an issue, even with the shortened page-lengths of the split book format, then you should know that something's wrong. Also, is it just me, or does it feel as if the Busiek/Bagley strip is taking up less and less of the book as the series progresses? I don't think that it actually is, but it always seems to give the impression of being over too quickly.

18. If I were in charge of collections at DC, I'd put Trinity into a series of quick and cheap trades immediately, so people can realize that it really does read much more smoothly when you read a month or so at once.

19. Also, Mike Carlin? Page 7 of #17 isn't a third of the way through a 52 issue series. That'd be page 7 of #18. 17 x 3 = 51, remember?

20. My not-so-secret anymore shame: Brand New Day Spider-Man has grown on me. I'm sorry, but I'm a sucker for Spider-Man Done Right, and if you can get over the whole "they invalidated Peter's marriage and continuity oh no," this comes pretty close to it being done right in my eyes (It's not perfect, mind you, but it's enjoyable). New Ways To Die is almost undoing that, however, so there's still hope for my cynical side to win out.

21. Talking of New Ways To Die: A six-part story told in a comic that comes out three times a month and we really have to wait four weeks for the last part? How did anyone let that happen?

22. Why the hell is the internet suddenly bothered about whether or not Peter Parker slept with Betty Brant thirty years ago?

23. You know, it's kind of hard to argue with this year's Harvey Award winners. Congratulations, Doug! (And also Bryan, Brian, Darwyn and everyone involved in All-Star Superman.)

24. I want an Absolute All Star Superman collection already.

25. I have felt so guilty about not writing for Savage Critics for so long that I have just spilled my mind onto the keyboard and forced all of you who've made it to the end to read the above. I'll try and post more regularly and more coherently in future. Honest.

Labels: Graeme

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Because Jeff asked and David Brothers threatened, here are 50 things that I love about comics, including at least one comic that I really, really would love to write, in case anyone at DC Comics is reading and desperate (Actually, I think that the next weekly book DC does should be an anthology of work by internet critics, forced to do at least one strip each so that all the professionals get to point and laugh at us for a change. It'd sell like crap, but imagine the schaudenfruede!). Anyway - More reviews later this week, I promise. For now, click that "Click to read more" and... well, read more.

(Also, if "anonymous" called Jeff a fanboy, he/she'll love me.)



50 Things I Love About Comics, because two people demanded it.

5 Creators That I Will Buy Anything From, Sight Unseen
1. Kevin Huizenga
2. Bryan Lee O'Malley
3. Darwyn Cooke
4. Grant Morrison
5. Brandon Graham

5 Creators That I Would Probably Buy Anything From, But Would At Least Look At First
1. Jack Kirby (I know, heresy! But it's got to be late-period, and I admit it; Devil Dinosaur let me down hard.)
2. Paul Pope
3. Nick Abadzis
4. Eddie Campbell
5. Matt Fraction

5 Artists Who Continually Blow My Puny Little Mind
1. James Jean
2. Gabriel Ba
3. Jack Kirby
4. Kent Williams
5. Dave McKean

5 Pretty Much Perfect Comics, If You Ask Me
1. Seven Soldiers #1
2. Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness
3. Graffiti Kitchen
4. Or Else #2
5. Mister Miracle #3

5 Comics That Changed My Life, And Why
1. Uncanny X-Men #185 - The first one I read and thought, I'm going to collect these.
2. Animal Man #1 - When I realized that the Grant Morrison from 2000AD and this Grant Morrison were the same person, and then realized that Scottish people could write American comics, which oddly enough made them more real.
3. Cages #4: For the craft, and the realization that Alan Bennett didn't have a lock on monologues like that.
4. Graffiti Kitchen: My first auto-bio comic, I think? And the first one that, as the song goes, said something to me about my life.
5. The Invisibles: As a series, it weirdly mirrored my life for the five or so years it ran, and changed my idea of what normal was. Possibly for the better; I'm not quite sure about that yet.

5 Comics I Collected The Entire Run Of
1. Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol
2. Steve Englehart's The Green Lantern Corps
3. Green Lantern: Mosaic
4. Tom Peyer's Hourman
5. Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars, the British version that also included Secret Wars II and all of its crossovers.

5 Characters That I Wish I Could Speak Like
1. Dr. Doom
2. Luke Cage
3. The Watcher
4. Namor, the Sub-Mariner
5. The Thing

5 Minor Characters I Love So Much That I WIsh I Could Write Them (and, just because, what I would do with them)
1. The Manhattan Guardian (Create a franchise of Guardian newspapers all across the DCU America, so that there'd be a Metropolis Guardian, a Gotham Guardian, a Los Angeles Guardian, etc. Hilarity ensues.)
2. OMAC (Turn him into DC's version of Iron Man during "Armor Wars", working for SHADE from Frankenstein.)
3. Dazzler (Make it into the romance book it so clearly wanted to be when it started, and bring back lots of minor supporting characters from other books for her to date.)
4. Rick Jones (When Epic was around and Marvel had no standards, I almost pitched an Ultimate Rick Jones book where he was this retro beatnik loser who idolized Kerouac teamed up with Ultimate Doc Samson, who was a former pro-wrestler turned radio talk show shrink. Together, they fought monsters.) See also: Snapper Carr.
5. Ralph Dibny (Is he really minor? I'm not sure. But I love love LOVE the idea of Ralph and Sue as the Thin Man meets Topper: Deadman and Wife, anyone?)

5 Items That Only Exist In Comics That I Wish I Owned In Real Life
1. The Time Bubble
2. The Cosmic Treadmill
3. Clothes made of unstable molecules
4. A Green Lantern ring
5. Weather Wizard's climate-controlling wand

5 Random Other Things That I Love About Comics
1. John Workman's sound effects in Walt Simonson's Thor
2. Death Note, in general
3. Being able to read all the old comics that didn't work in Essentials or Showcase format, like those Teen Titans and Defenders runs...
4. Newsarama and Comic Book Resources. Completely seriously, no matter what you may think.
5. 52's Oolong Island of Mad Scientists, which may have been the greatest one idea out of a series of wonderfully dumb and dumbly wonderful ideas.

Labels: 50 things, Graeme

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Here's the thing. When I got to the last page of Secret Invasion #4, and I saw Thor arrive and the glimpse of Captain America, I thought, okay, so #5 is going to see them getting involved and maybe something will finally happen in the series. Well, SECRET INVASION #5 made half of that come true, I guess. Just the less expected half.



The complete lack of Cap and Thor in this issue just made me concentrate on the incredibly weird pacing of this series so far: What was the point of teasing their appearance so blatantly when you're not going to show them at all in the following issue? Probably the same point as having nothing whatsoever happening for three successive issues, and then blowing your plot development wad on three climaxes this time around. And, while I'm asking questions, what point did the whole Savage Land plot serve whatsoever, apart from taking the Avengers out of New York? If all of the heroes who came off the Skrull ship were Skrulls - and if Reed Richards can just expose them all by building his Skrull Detector off-panel in a moment of prime McGuffin-ing ("They're undetectable! No, wait, I need someone to detect them now. Okay, Reed can build a detector, but I won't tell anyone what his discovery that changed everything actually was.") - then... okay, I guess? But what purpose did it serve, especially when the fake heroes didn't actually do anything apart from run around the jungle and get killed?

That's the problem with Secret Invasion, ultimately; it doesn't stand up to any real questioning. It's just a series of moments that probably looked cool in Bendis' head when he thought of them strung together in some semblance of plot without much thought to the mechanics of how they'd actually work (Of all the Skrulls on the Helicarrier, not one of them noticed that there was another Maria Hill hiding out watching the showdown? Really?). As a big summer blockbuster about explosions and people saying "Oh my God" to tell the audience that this is meant to be important, it works well, but as a story? It's just turning out to be kind of Crap.

Labels: Graeme

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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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So, I had a dream the other night where I met Brian Michael Bendis. It was one of those traditional disorientating dreams you know something is wrong, but can't quite put your finger on it... In this case, I was at some sub-San Diego con thing, and someone had introduced me to Bendis, and I was trying to think of something nice to say to him. The best my dream-self could come up with was "Secret Invasion doesn't suck so much if you read all three issues at the same time..."

Yeah, I know; smooth. I don't think he noticed, though, because he seemed happy enough as he showed me how to operate his new home theater set-up with his supercharged remote control.

But that's enough about me. FINAL CRISIS #2, anyone?



Here's the thing: The second issue of DC's Big Summer Event book is Very Good, taken on its own terms. If you ignore Countdown to Final Crisis and all of the lead-ins and other books (except maybe Grant's own Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle series) and forget that it's supposed to be this big "event" book, it works really well - It's definitely still in "slow build" mode, but it works nonetheless; seeing Dan Turpin slowly realize that something is wrong with him (and getting odd hints that what's wrong is that he's slowly turning into Darkseid, oddly enough - but then, we know from the first issue that bodies wear out quickly for the New Gods), watching the DC Universe get more corrupted... It feels creepier and more effective because it is happening relatively slowly, as opposed to the big "And then the Skrulls invaded New York! So much for that 'secret' invasion!" take of Marvel's summer smash. Not that nothing's happening here, of course; if anything, Morrison's guilty of too much happening, too much taking place between the pages or without proper explanation just yet (I would've liked to have seen more of what happened to John Stewart, for example - Why wasn't he killed? Surely leaving him alive means that his attacker will be identified?).

That compression, the choppy style of storytelling that needs the reader to both be patient and also to pay attention, also feels like the downfall of the book, in a strange way. Like I said, taken as a book in and of itself, it's great. But as "The Summer Event" for DC Comics, it doesn't deliver, yet; it's too slow, too fragmented, maybe too smart to do what we've come to expect from these big summer flagpole series. It's not just that it doesn't do explosions, like I said when talking about #1, it doesn't really do anything that we think a book like this should do. Even the by-now-traditional death of a superhero is treated in a more quiet, subdued and serious way than usual - No tearful declarations of revenge or a stranger picking up the mantle here, just three panels of a funeral and then a sober investigation. Don't get me wrong; it's a better read because of that, I think... It's just that it's something that feels more like something that a smaller audience would appreciate, rather than the simplicity and lowest-common-denominator appeal of a Secret Invasion or Crisis On Infinite Earths. In a way, it's brave of DC to have give such promotion and status to what is, essentially, Grant Morrison's sequel to Seven Soldiers (which the opening of this issue, with the introduction of a whole new subculture of superheroes, really felt like), but in another way, it's almost setting themselves up for disappointment.

Labels: Graeme

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



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

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

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

Labels: Graeme

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Graeme

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



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

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

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

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The strangest thing about SECRET INVASION #1 actually had very little to do with the book itself. I mean, sure, it’s Okay, it does the job relatively well and Mark Morales’ inks bring a nice shine to Lenil Yu’s pencils that I haven’t seen before, but reading it after having read all the spoilers about it online, I was kind of surprised that not one plot point had escaped being revealed ahead of time.




The feeling of déjà vu wasn’t helped by Marvel having previewed half the book online ahead of its release, either, but I’m not really complaining about that (DC did it first for Countdown’s first few issues, didn’t they? It’s obviously the way to get people talking about your book); at least that déjà vu was earned by actually having read the thing before. But reading the rest of the issue, with all of the intended-to-be-surprise events, after having had every single one of them spoiled ahead of time was a weird experience. It kind of took you out of the story and made you focus on the execution, instead, and… well, that’s not the best thing to think about on a book like this.

Don’t get me wrong. Like I said earlier, the book looks great – the cleaner Yu art, along with Laura Martin’s colors, works a treat, Morales’ inks filling in for some of Yu’s traditional shortcuts and making it look more… well, more mainstream, really, the kind of muscley, glossy thing that you’d expect to see in a Marvel crossover book. But the writing works on the momentum of plot more than anything else, and when you remove the intended “oh shit” moments, all you’re left with are choppy scenes of characters given no real introduction doing things that are given no real context within the book itself other than “aliens are attacking” (Mind you, how much more context do you need?). As the first issue of a series that’s intended to draw in readers who haven’t been reading Marvel books for years up to this point, it’s terrible.

That said, as the first issue of a series building on the recent Marvel Universe exploits? It does the job you expect it to. So, overall? It’s Okay. I’ll just make a point of avoiding spoilers for the next few issues, I think.

Other comics! Quickly!

ACTION COMICS #863: By this point, Geoff Johns has worked out how to play almost entirely to the existing fanbase while making everything so basic that anyone can understand what’s happening – “Superman is in the future with his childhood pals fighting for tolerance? Sure, that makes sense.” As a complete Legion fanboy, I loved this storyline as much for the optimism of the heroes as they dealt with the dystopic future as for the nostalgia of the whole enterprise, and the “Legion of 3 Worlds” tease at the end make me stupidly excited. Good stuff.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #555: Hey, Steve Wacker? Here’s how you solve the continuity problem you ask about in the letter column: Ignore the complaints. Zeb Wells writes a fun script that, unlike all the other Brand New Day writers so far isn’t too retro, and Chris Bachalo’s art is clear and chunky and fun. Pretty Good, surprisingly.

CASANOVA #13: Post everything exploding, Fraction takes a step back for an issue of exposition, surprising reveals (Me, I’m sad that he isn’t dead, myself), and flashbacks showing that Casanova Quinn was kind of an awesome influence on those around him for a self-professed asshole. As we hurtle towards the end of the second album, it’s the small things in this issue that shows once again why this book is Very Good on a continual basis.

(And, on a side note, Fraction, Brubaker and Aja leaving Iron Fist? Very sad news indeed.)

KICK ASS #2: Mark Millar knows what he likes, and part of that really is some strange lowest common denominator stuff. It’s as if Millar really dislikes his audience but on some level recognizes that he is that audience, the way that he writes down to them but with such love. This book is entirely Eh to me; it feels as if it’s being written for an audience entirely alien to what I’m used to. Nice art, though.

YOUNG X-MEN #1: Talking of being written for an audience entirely alien to me, I can’t help but wonder what the thinking is behind this latest version of the New Mutants/Generation X/New X-Men idea: “They’re young heroes in a dangerous world! So they have to become soldiers… who kill!” What, really? There’s something so depressing and hopeless about that idea – and about the fact that the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants are the original New Mutant team – that I can’t help but hope that there’s going to be some “surprise” reveal some time soon that shows that everything isn’t as oppressive as it seems. As it is, this first issue was Okay; written fairly generically, but with some nice art.

This week: Surprisingly, no Secret Invasion books. You do all that hype and then let momentum drop the very next week, Marvel? What’s that all about?

Labels: Graeme

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April at last. After the endless slog that was March, it’s time for a new month of optimism, happiness and… Wait, what’s that you’re saying about Jim Mooney...? Oh, crap. Comic reviews and only one April Fools reference under the jump.



ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #10: As if he’s been holding back for the last few issues, Grant Morrison gives us the perfect Superman here, one who’s so in love with humanity that he spends his dying days making sure that we’ll all be okay without him. I can’t help but compare this to “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?” and this, I have to admit, seems better to me in almost every way - This is the “End of Superman” that I want to read, one that’s… well… more kind, really. And now all the Alan Moore lovers will come to my house and beat me up. Sorry, but this was really Excellent.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #5: Yeah, yeah, I get it: It’s the secret origin of Kamandi. And yet, done in such a way that it’s really, really dull. What was the point of destroying another Earth with a plot that doesn’t seem to connect to anything? Will Final Crisis answer this question? Am I a patsy for even caring at this point? Crap.

GANGES #2: This, despite appearing in the same week as both All-Star Superman and the fourth Jack Kirby Fourth World Omnibus, is easily the comic of the week. Despite my normally going on and on about his writing – and I’d happily do so again, based upon the evidence here; a wonderfully wistful, melancholic short story that feels true and familiar in the best ways – it’s the impact of the opening pages, a silent sequence all about design that introduces iconography to follow in the rest of the book, that sticks with me days after reading. Kevin Huizenga remains a creator unlike most, with an eye for the little things that don’t have any names, but are important nonetheless. Really, incredibly Excellent.

GREEN LANTERN #29: From the sublime to the… Well, not ridiculous, but, man, do we really need another chance to read Hal Jordan’s origin? It feels like this is one of the more traveled parts of Green Lantern history, and even though it’s being done well – Taken on its own merits, this is easily a Good book – it still feels tired and unnecessary. That said, I prefer “Secret Origin” than “Year One” as a brand name for this kind of thing, just because, so there’s that.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #11: Finally, this series meets its potential, with a well thought-out issue that mixes old school action and characterization with a plot that makes sense and doesn’t rush between nonsensical events as if there is a race to put everything in place before the next big crossover. Oh, wait. “April Fool.” This is not just the lesser of the two Avengers books, but just a mess of a book on any level – I just don’t get what this story was all about, because it kept switching plots without any rhyme or reason like a hyperactive child: “Okay, so the ‘vengers are fightin’ lots of Venoms! No! Wait! They’re fightin’ Doctor Doom! No! They’re going back in time! No never mind, it’s Doctor Doom again!” Here’s hoping that Secret Invasion brings this book somewhere back to coherence. Crap.

NEW AVENGERS #39: Meanwhile, over with the other Avengers, there’s an issue of filler that only would be interesting if Doug’s theory about it turned out to be true. Part of it is that Echo hasn’t really been shown to be an interesting character in this series yet, so having Wolverine and Hawkeye both flirt with her seems Mary Sue-ish, but the other part is… the Skrull thing just wasn’t that interesting here. Worth looking at for all the art “homages,” though. Eh.

POWER PACK: DAY ONE #1: See, Geoff Johns, this is the way you do origin retells. As much as I loved the Louise Simonson/June Brigman originals, this new version has a much friendlier, faster tone and makes me want to see an ongoing book from the creative team. A Good start, even if Jack is now a Skrull imposter.

This week: Is there any doubt that it’s all about the Skrulls? Secret Invasion starts, and we all get to see just how much of it has already been spoiled online. Personally, I’m holding out for those Luke Cage rumors to be 100% true...

Labels: Graeme

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Between sickness, work craziness and deadlines for everything under the sun, it’s surprising that I’ve had any time to read comic books. Add in the fact that Brian Hibbs got me addicted to Death Note, and it’s even more surprising that I have anything to write about under the jump apart from “Light Yagami is messed up, dude.” And yet, commentary about superhero books await you if you click that “Click here to read more”...



AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #554: Now that we’re three quarters of the way through Brand New Day – it stops having that branding after all the writers have been introduced, right? – it’s worth noting that we seem to have established this quality level that could best be described as Okay And On Time. None of the BND issues have been stunning when taken on their individual merits, but there really is something comforting about the almost-weekly nature of the book and the fact that it’s not that bad, really. Bob Gale somewhat overdoes the knowingly-retro flavor in this issue (Overall, Marc Guggenheim’s been the most satisfying of the writers so far, but I’m hoping for more from Dan Slott’s second go-around, when he doesn’t have to introduce a status quo), and Phil Jiminez’s art just doesn’t really seem Spider-Man-ish enough for me, but at the same time, it swings by in a completely inoffensive manner, so it seems good enough, if that makes sense…?

CAPTAIN AMERICA #36: Call me irresponsible, but I’m really hoping that the reveal at the end of the issue lays groundwork for a return of Steve Rogers. Captain BuckyCyborg is a much more interesting character, and it’s a lot more fun seeing him try (and fail) to live up to the legacy of an icon than seeing the icon in action. Which is, in a way, my way of saying that this was a Good issue, and yet more proof that Ed Brubaker doesn’t need his characters alive to write compelling stories about them.

DEATH OF THE NEW GODS#7: There may be something wonderfully old school about the melodramatic “You didn’t expect this!” nature of this issue’s cliffhanger, but seriously, what actually happened at the end there? Starlin’s writing has a great old school crassness about it that really fits on this project, but his art just feels out of place – It doesn’t have either a modern look or the sheer graphic power of Kirby’s work – making this book even more of an oddity than it would be otherwise. It’s like a strange guilty pleasure, but the guilt comes from not really knowing why I’m enjoying it.

FLASH #238: Well, that’ll teach me to have high expectations for a book. As a big fan of Tom Peyer’s Hourman as well as his blogging, I was pretty excited about the idea of him stepping up to take over the Flash following Mark Waid’s too-soon departure. Finally, I thought, a writer who will be able to bring back the Silver Age weirdness of the book and also bring some humor with bite… and, to be fair, he’s done both of those things, but at the price of characters seeming out of character in service of plot, and jarringly so. Wally’s non-sequitur about feeling stressed because of lack of money to a reporter at a disaster site may have gotten the story moving, but was enough to stop the reader in their tracks in terms of “Doesn’t he, you know, know better?” Maybe there’ll be something later in the story to explain suddenly-grumpy Wally, but right now, this was a fun-but-flawed Okay first issue to Tom’s run.

FX #1: Hey, suddenly it’s 1986 again! Considering the incredibly generic script, the lazy John Byrne artwork (and, really, it’s very very lazy) and the pricetag, there’s really only one thing to recommend this Crap: John Workman’s lettering. Now there’s a creator who never lets you down.

TANGENT: SUPERMAN'S REIGN #1: Is it wrong of me to have really, really enjoyed this, especially Ron Marz’s back-up about the history of the Tangent world? There’s nothing particularly new about it, after all, and it’s not like DC isn’t already full of alternate Earths, but stil... Something (Perhaps Matthew Clark’s artwork, even though the series was trailed with Jamal Igle attached?) clicked for me, and I ended up wanting to read more to the point of almost buying the Tangent Comics trades. Luckily, I stopped myself before going too far, but still; who could’ve expected this to be so enjoyably Good?

This week? Man, if you’re not picking up the Fourth World Omnibus with remixed Hunger Dogs, then you hate life. It's that simple.

Labels: Graeme

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There’s something to the way that your workplace reacts to someone having a heart attack in the middle of it, I think; whereas other, “lesser,” places than my dayjob would shrug off the sight of four medics asking questions of, and sticking all manner of IVs in, a near-comatose woman in the middle of the office, right now it’s like someone’s dropped a special Unnerving Bomb. Everyone here is freaked out and wondering when it’s going to be their turn.

Well, except for everyone who’s already been through that kind of thing. Not the most healthy of places, my work.

Anyway, comics?



CABLE #1: Yet another attempt by Marvel to redo Lone Wolf and Cub (Really, Nomad wasn’t enough?), this time with added cybernetics and the smallest baby in the history of the world. It’s almost as if Ariel Olivetti has never actually seen a real baby, but instead is working off some photos and a vague idea that “babies are small”. Storywise, this is pretty generic “I am in the future, it is bleak. I am a man. I have a mission.” stuff, but I’m sure that someone, somewhere, probably has never read this kind of thing before. Pretty Eh.

ECHO #1: I never read any of the Valiant comics, back in the ‘90s – There was something about them that felt as if they were the generic fill-ins for 1980s Marvel books, but that they were like that every single month – but the feeling I got from this new Terry Moore book was that it’s a Valiant revival in spirit if not name. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong about it (Well, aside from the pacing, perhaps, but I’m willing to let that slide), but more than there was absolutely nothing compelling or even that interesting about it. Sure, it’s not just another Strangers In Paradise, and therefore good for Moore, but on the other hand, Eh. Who cares about something like this?

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL: Now this, on the other hand… Mmmm. Visual candy from start to finish, especially the design work on the back-up “And this is how we made the movie” pages. Which is good because, storywise, this was amazingly slight. It’s understandable, really; Cooke probably said all that he wanted to say in the original series, and so there probably wasn’t much more to add beyond the mix of injokes and references that pepper the plots of the three short stories herein, but at the same time, I’d kind of been hoping for something that had a little bit more meat to it in terms of writing (My favorite of the stories, in terms of writing, was the Wonder Woman/Black Canary short, which may be because it was the most intentionally comedic and throwaway). That said, even with the lightness of the stories, it was still Very Good indeed.

LOGAN #1: Brian K. Vaughan! Eduardo Risso! And it’s still just a Wolverine comic! I don’t know why I was expecting more, really; the clichés of Wolverine tends to overwhelm so many writers, so I don’t know why I thought Vaughan would get ‘round them… He didn’t, though, and so we’re left with a moderately interesting flashback story with pretty art. It’s Okay, and if you were in the mood for a Wolverine story, you’d probably enjoy the hell out’ve it. Me? I was expecting more, which was my problem.

STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER: THE LONG ROAD HOME #1: I don’t know if it’s the overly lush art (Jae Lee’s pencils, reprinted at the back of the book, are lovely. But adding Richard Isanove’s colors over them is like Phil Spector adding his special production talents to “Across The Universe”) or the nadsat dialogue, but I just can’t read these comics. I try, but my eyes glaze over and my brain shuts off. I can’t explain it, and I almost feel guilty for having no opinion about the what may be the biggest book of the year, but still…

YOUNG LIARS #1: This, on the other hand, is kind of awesome. Fast-paced and ridiculous, it feels unlike anything else Vertigo is publishing right now just because it feels like the Stooges to the Radiohead of the rest of the line (Well, aside from the Fables books; I haven’t quite worked out which band they are, yet). It’s almost a victim of its own stylings; if it doesn’t burn out and get cancelled within a year, I’ll almost be disappointed, but at the same time, it’s a Very Good first issue.

Next week: Very little of interest whatsoever, thankfully iving me the chance to purchase and finish off the rest of Death Note, my newest addiction... But what did the rest of you think?

Labels: Graeme

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Was it just me, or was February a strange and full month that just overwhelmed everyone else with stuff? I'm used to January seeming like a hangover from the previous year, but there was something about February this time that seemed to take me by surprise. Those damn leap years, man. They take it out of you.

Reviews of last week's books under the jump, for those who want comics.



BATMAN #674: This is a strange book; you get the idea that Grant Morrison knows roughly where we wants to go with the character, but just can’t quite get there for whatever reason. Ideas that should be big and bright and interesting – the trainee Batmans gone rogue, Bat-Mite showing up – fall flat, as if they’ve been rushed out without being thought through, and without art that boosts their potential by dazzling us into submission. It feels oddly like Morrison’s X-Men run, which had moments of wow and genius but felt more and more bogged down in mental sludge as it went on. Okay, I guess.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #35: Over here, however, Ed Brubaker has used the new Captain America to regain focus on another book that seemed to be getting trapped in itself a little bit too much. I didn’t find the Winter Soldier to be that interesting a character, but there’s something about Bucky’s aspiration to be Steve Rogers – and the fact that he’s kind of digging trying, despite the legacy – that I really enjoy. Weird to see Butch Guice doing such a great Steve Epting impersonation, but you can’t fault a book that has such a stylish rotating art team where you can’t see the joins. Very Good.

CRIMINAL #1: Talking of Brubaker, the return of his noir collaboration with Sean Philips is, very simply, Excellent; the writing doesn’t miss a beat or waste a word, and Philips’ artwork manages to be realistic and appropriately melodramatic all at once. The done-in-one format works surprisingly well, given the previous stories’ sprawl, and while the last story lost me slightly with what felt like overdone cruelty, this short piece gripped me all the way through. Really, really good, and easily PICK OF THE WEEK, as we used to say.

DOCTOR WHO #1: Eh, I suppose? It’s a strange book, which comes close to feeling right in a few places, but then veers off to a more cartoony place (in writing as well as art) that is off for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t really enjoy it that much, either. I’d say that it wasn’t what I expected, but I’m not sure that I could tell you what I expected if you asked.

RASL #1: Getting back to what I said about consistency yesterday – This is pretty much not the subject matter nor the writing that you’d expect from the guy who gave you Bone and last year’s Shazam book, and it’s much the better for it (The art, though, is very Jeff Smith; that’s not a bad thing, mind you). Like some kind of karmic doppelganger to Casanova, the main character here is a dimension-hopping thief lost in an alternate dimension that it’s quite like our own, but the execution is different enough to make it its own book. What’s going to kill it, ultimately, is the schedule; this is a Very Good first issue, but I probably won’t remember enough about it when the second issue comes out in three months.

X-MEN: LEGACY #208: Surprisingly strong, even if I find myself far more interested in the flashback/X-Men Saga scenes than the current-day plot about Xavier’s stolen body or Magneto returning, again. Mike Carey definitely has both a love of, and a feel for, Xavier and the old characters, and John Romita Jr.’s art is beautiful work – with equally beautiful coloring – but I wonder just where this is going, if anywhere. For now, a highly Good first issue of the new run; here’s hoping it keeps it up as we go through the history of the team.

But what did the rest of you think?

Labels: Graeme

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There is, I guess, something to be said for consistency of vision. For example, that’s probably the best thing about KICK-ASS #1, which otherwise could be easily described as “everything you’ve already read by Mark Millar in one comic”. Never mind his by-now-traditional unrealistic dialogue that mistakes unpleasantness and swearing for realism; there’s actual thematic threads in here from his other books, not least of which is Millar’s favorite “watching lead character transcend reality, which is mundane and soul-destroying,” this time managed through the power of self-belief and beating up black guys (Am I the only person who got nervous that the first thing the character did as a superhero was go out, find three black kids and call them “homos”? I can’t tell if I was meant to take that as an example that the main character is a nervous white kid with issues or that the writer was one, to be honest).



It’s definitely the ultimate Mark Millar comic, in the same way that The Invisibles remains the ultimate Grant Morrison comic – Something that sums up, demonstrates and exaggerates all of his writerly fetishes and ticks, but without the self-awareness (or, perhaps, the demonstrated self-awareness) that Morrison brought to his series. It’s almost as if Millar sat down and tried to write some genetically-engineered mutant version of everything he’s done before: Want to see Chosen’s unassuming teen protagonist discover the great things that he’s unwittingly destined for, but for those great things to be laced with Wanted’s self-conscious depressive “grim and gritty realism”? Want to see the random pop-cultural references that made The Ultimates so up-to-the-six-months-ago (Seriously, what was with that “I say that as Buffy fan numero uno” scene? What kid anywhere would call themselves anything “numero uno”?)? Want to see the weird, naïve belief in the power of superheroes from Superman Adventures? It’s all in here! And it all plays together relatively well, but none of it is interesting – It’s all just dully nasty, like Michael Jackson had decided to remake “Fight Club,” but make it about super-heroes; we’ve seen it before and there’s no new here to make us care this time around.

(The art by John Romita Jr. is nice enough, but it’s almost too comic-booky for the story that they seem to want to tell – I can’t really buy into the idea that the beating is anything other than familiar cartoon violence, because it just looks like Peter Parker being beaten up really badly by one of his villains. Again, I don’t know if that’s intentional, or whether that confusion is acting against the idea of the book.)

Overall, though, how you feel about Millar will dictate how you feel about the book. If you love everything he’s done, then chances are you’ll love it. Otherwise, it’s just Eh.

Labels: Graeme

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Well, my lesson from Wondercon was “Never believe anything Bill Willingham says.” What was yours?

Also, it's time to test some exciting new potential technology. If all goes well, you'll have to click through to read my reviews for this week. If it doesn't, then I'll have to fix that later somehow... (If it does work, it's all Kate's doing, by the way).



AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #551: This really has settled into a strange middle ground, in terms of quality; it’s always just Okay, but in a weirdly comforting way, as if it wouldn’t make sense for it to be any better than that and on a mostly-weekly basis. Marc Guggenheim seems more self-conscious about the retro tone of the book (Those narrative introductions to each of his issues are just the wrong side of annoyingly smug parody), but he really does his best to make it work. Sal Larocca’s art has almost been good as well, but really, I’m just waiting to see the Marcos Martin issues that’ve just been solicited at this point…

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #10: Here’s hoping that the rumors of the removal of Mark Waid from this series are wrong, or at least miss out some kind of “and then he gets given a book called Mark Waid’s Awesome Superhero Book Where He Can Do Whatever He Wants” qualifier. Yet again, this is a wonderfully solid, simple reminder of not only why these characters are awesome (Superman traveling through time as if it isn’t such a big deal? That’s the kind of Superman I want to read more of), but how well done short stories can be – the disguised anthology format that the last couple of issues have taken on have been Very Good, and I could happily read this kind of thing for a long time, thank you very much.

HULK #2: I wanted to dislike this much more than I did, I have to admit. Especially when it came to that “Oh, the humanity!” page (which, by the way, what the fuck?). But… I don’t know. Maybe it was a moment of weakness, maybe it was the “Hey, Rick Jones isn’t the Hulk after all… he’s the new Abomination! Called A-Bomb!” reveal, maybe it was Ed McGuinness doing big and bold art again… I just bought into the sheer dumb action of this much more than I had the first issue. It’ll never be the kind of comic that will make you think, but it’s a Hulk comic – maybe smashing and beating up on Iron Man is all you need from that, really. A guilty, but genuine, Good.

THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST: ORSON RANDALL AND THE GREEN MIST OF DEATH: Whereas this was… Okay, and disappointingly so, at that. Perhaps my brain got mixed up and my usual Matt Fraction love got transferred to Jeph Loeb this week, because this seemed like a hastily put-together, familiar story that didn’t have the usual spark that the book has had in the past. The art was uneven, as well; Dragotta/Allred and Russ Heath provided something with personality, while Lewis LaRosa and Mitch Breitweiser’s work was sluggish and generic in comparison. Every now and again, I feel like I screwed up in reading a book because I disliked it, and this is one of those books – Was it really as disappointing as I felt, or should I take another look at it?

JENNA JAMESON'S SHADOW HUNTER #1: This book, meanwhile, was just plain Crap. It’s actually not as crap as it could’ve been, because of the serviceable art and nice coloring, but the plot is generic and the scripting horrific. The worst part about the whole thing, though, is that it’s just bad; I’d wanted something so bad that I could laugh at it, or rant about it, or have some reaction beyond “Well, that sucked.” What has the world come to if I can’t even say that about a Jenna Jameson comic?

MIGHTY AVENGERS #9: Okay, I get that comics are a visual medium and all, but holy motherfreakin’ spit (as Luke Cage would probably say), this book was so lightweight as to almost be insubstantial. Page after page after page of silent double-page spreads of the Avengers fighting generic bad guys, followed by an almost-silent struggle between Iron Man and Doctor Doom that made both of them seem like the most boring comic characters ever created, add up to an issue that felt less like Brian Michael Bendis was thinking “I’m going to give Mark Bagley a chance to shine” – especially because, well, he doesn’t, here. He’s never been the kind of artist who excels in the busy punching that this issue demands from him, and his double-page spreads are just confusing to the eye, with no dynamism or excitement coming from them – but was, instead, rushing to get the issue finished superfast because of a bet or something. That feeling is added to by the plot, which is literally this: “The Avengers attack Dr. Doom’s castle. Iron Man wrestles Dr. Doom, and in the process, accidentally activates a time machine, throwing both of them back in time. The end.” With a lack of dialogue (or, for that matter, any kind of writerly polish) on top of that bare plot – seriously, this review may have more words in it than there are in the dialogue of the entire issue – the whole thing stands out as much more hacked-out than either of the creators involved normally produce. Really, terribly Awful.

THE SPIRIT #14: Aaaaaaand with the addition of a new creative team, the series suddenly reads like the Will Eisner grave-robbing that we were all worried about in the first place. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the book as such, but there’s no reason for it to exist – the story isn’t particularly entertaining, it’s not particularly stylish (in fact, coming after the Darwyn Cooke issues, it’s almost embarrassingly dull), and it feels as if the only reasons it exists are copyright-related. Eh.

Coming tomorrow: Doctor Who! Project Superpowers #1, which has the strangest corporate synergy that I’ve seen in quite some time! And some other books that I’ll probably not have time to read because I bought four Essentials phone books at the convention and currently think that it’s the early 1980s right now (“Dazzler? For $10! I’ll take it!” Oh dear...)

Labels: Graeme

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Hey, Wondercon this week! There’s a sign that there won’t be that much sleep happening anytime soon...

BOOSTER GOLD #0: Wow, this really does take me back; ignoring the guest-shot from Parallax and Extant (Just to remind you just how unusual supervillain names got in the early ‘90s. Was there ever one called Ennui, or was that a missed opportunity?), using the issue to give a recap of Booster’s secret origin before setting up the next storyline captured the tone of the Zero Hour “zero issues” far too well, right down to the fact that it left you feeling as if you should somehow find it a lot more interesting than it actually was. Despite the metatextual shenanigans, though, it’s still Good.

CAPTAIN MARVEL #3: Meanwhile, over at the House of Ideas, everybody’s Skrull-Fu Fightin’. Maybe I’m missing something, but following the reveal of the alien sleeper agent conspiracy, the individual reveals that we’ve seen have all been incredibly underwhelming. “You mean this formerly-dead character that no-one cared about is really an alien?!? Now no-one is safe!” Even the hint that Mar-Vell himself may be a little bit Skrully disappoints, and makes you feel as if this series is entirely pointless outside of leading in to the next big crossover. Did no-one learn from Millennium? Eh.

FANTASTIC FOUR #554: Depressingly, pretty much exactly what I’d expected from the pre-release hype, right down to the stylized dialogue that –like a lot of Mark Millar’s work – reads not like the characters themselves, but like Millar has been told what the characters are supposed to sound like by someone else. Yeah, Johnny’s a jerk and Ben is lovable and Reed is the Big Brain, but none of them seem like themselves; they’re all the Mark Millar Unpleasantverse versions of themselves, instead. Like Doug, I was bored by the lack of new ideas and simultaneous sense that the creators thought that these were new ideas, and scenes like the schoolteacher talking about wanting to fuck a super-hero were just embarrassingly bad attempts at making the book “relevant” from someone who has their finger on the pulse of pop culture from last year. I fully expect Mark Millar’s take on Britney’s Meltdown - but she’s a superhero! – before the end of 2008. Bryan Hitch’s artwork is pretty, but also flawed; his anatomy is getting odd in the rush of the work (What happened to Sue’s arms on the cover? They seem too short), and feels very static and lifeless in all the rendering and crosshatching. It’s depressing; I really wanted to like this, for some reason, but there’s just no sense of either wonder or family there for me. Eh.

FANTASTIC FOUR: THE LOST ADVENTURE: God, for an Interesting, But Essentially Distressing rating. On one level, this is a fascinating book because of all the process stuff included – Kirby’s unfinished pencils (with margin notes), the reprint of the previous attempt to complete the story from the ‘70s – but the finished story itself is (perhaps necessarily) like listening to “Free As A Bird” for the first time; there are glimpses of what made you dig them in the first place, but it’s kind of like unintentional self parody at the same time. Okay, I guess?

GREEN LANTERN CORPS #21: On the one hand, I’m sure there’s an interesting story to be done about the dehumanizing of the Alpha-Lanterns, but on the other, this really isn’t it. There just aren’t really any sympathetic (or even reader-friendly) characters here at all, and so the whole thing is just flat. Crap, worryingly, just when I was getting into the book.

NEW AVENGERS #38: I know that Brian liked this, but it just seemed to confirm every stereotype about Bendis’ writing being meandering and driven by dialogue schtick, especially the cut-aways to the New Avengers finding a new headquarters, which were very Venture Bros for some reason. Also, if Ms. Marvel lets the unregistered super-heroes escape one more time, they might as well give up on this whole “living underground” thing anyway. Eh.

NOVA ANNUAL #1: An annual that recaps the hero’s origin while advancing the plotline of the main series? I can’t believe that that feels so much like a throwback, but still, this was an Okay primer for those who aren’t following the regular book, albeit an amusing one to someone who just finished the Essential Nova collection recently.

WONDER WOMAN #17: Goddammit, I really wanted this to be less frustrating than it was, even though I know that I’m frustrated because I got so involved with the story. The Etta Candy resolution feels like I missed something – She’s Wonder Woman’s alibi? So it is the same Etta Candy as before, and not a post-Infinite Crisis reboot? – and The Circle plot doesn’t so much resolve as get derailed by the Nazi invasion, some fighting, and then get pushed out to some later date. There’s still a lot to like here (Unlike Diana, I think it is a Good), but it doesn’t really fulfill the promise of the previous three issues.

WOLVERINE #62: Reading this and X-FORCE #1 back to back is an unusual experience. Both have essentially the same set-up – Cyclops sends Wolverine (and others) out to kill a bad guy because he just don’t done take no shit no mo’ – that I have a hard time buying because, come on, it’s fucking Cyclops. I know that Messiah Complex was supposed to change everything, but still; it’s as if writers can only ever play him in two modes: Neurotic tight-ass or Bad-ass tight-ass, and we keep swinging between the two. Anyway, getting back to the two new books – which seem to share a set-up with Young X-Men, as trailed in the back of this week’s Marvel comics; apparently “variety” is the watchword of the post-Messiah Complex X-franchise. That and “death” – the difference between the two is that, well, Wolverine is actually pretty Good, whereas X-Force is a steaming pile of Crap. Your mileage may vary, of course, but Wolverine sees an attempt to build a story onto the “Wolverine goes out to kill someone!” set-up, complete with retconning motivation in there, putting in an unexpected reversal at the end of the issue, and generally staying within character for the book’s stars, all wrapped up in some nice Ron Garney artwork. By comparison, X-Force does away with character pretty much altogether (Wolverine’s hilarious “You don’t want to do this. Bein’ a killer is tough. Your friends will look at you funny. You ain’t gonna cross this line unchanged, bub. Okay, let’s go and slaughter lots of people” monologue aside), substituting it with X-trivia (Bastion?!?) and muddy, emotionless artwork to give it the feel of being the comic read by nerds who want to feel very, very serious about their hobby. It’s humorless and kill-friendly, and the fact that it has a “Bloody Variant” cover pretty much sums the whole thing up. If you want to see X-Men want to kill someone, read Wolverine. If you’re fifteen and like the idea of lots of people dying, read X-Force.

But what did you think?

Labels: Graeme

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This one is for Ian Brill, who complained to me last night that we here at Savage Critics weren't being timely enough any more. It's true; I didn't mean to disappear for a week, but I got both a cold and swamped down with everything else and left you all to wonder just how good the latest issue of "Brand New Day" was, and I apologize for that. On the plus side, it was a slow week...

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #549: Marc Guggenheim takes over the writing reins on the reboot Spidey and manages to make it even more of a trip in the Way Back Machine. Never mind the return of thought balloon exposition (which, possibly because of my age, worked better for me that caption narration last issue), look at the captions written in fluent 1970s Marvel: "So set your tongue on waggin'"? Really? Nonetheless, it's fun enough, with Sal Larocca's artwork less annoyingly photoreferenced than it was in, say, newuniversal. A high Okay, in other words.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #11: If only for the fake-out with the itchy neck, Good. Luckily, the rest of the book lives up to that scene, with Whedon and Jeanty managing to do a fine done-in-one that also introduces the new big bad of the season. Buffy as a character is much less annoying without the presence of Sarah Michelle Gellar, as it turns out.

CLANDESTINE #1: More old school from Alan Davis, this book fights it out for the title of "Most Chris Claremont Influenced title" with UNCANNY X-MEN #495. Whereas Davis does his best to create intrigue and tension with his cast of mostly cyphers, there's little here for anyone outside of his impressive art; the story is muddled by trying to cram in too much backstory and not enough plot, with dialogue that is Claremont-esque in the wrong way (too stylized, but without his rhythms). Depending on your feelings about Davis as an artist, you may or may not find it as Eh as I did. Uncanny X-Men, on the other hand, sees Ed Brubaker reaching out to a few Claremont/Byrne era ideas (The image inducer for Nightcrawler? The Savage Land?) but using them in such a way to remind you why the series used to be so awesome. Yeah, the speedy reveal that - hey! The X-Men haven't really broken up at all! They're just on vacation! - made me feel, again, like Messiah Complex's lasting effects were all on the marketing side of the franchise instead of story, but this was still a plain old-fashioned, fun, Good read.

METAL MEN #6: In the running for "densest read on the superhero racks" right now, this book feels completely impenetrable when not read alongside earlier issues for the most part... but when it is read with them, it's wonderful, a rare case of something exceeding the Morrison concepts it was built on. When it's a trade, people will love it; as a serial, it's confusing as all hell. Okay for now, then.

TEEN TITANS: YEAR ONE #2: Back when we did Pick of The Week here, this would easily claim the crown. It's not just Amy Wolfram's scripting, giving each of the characters their own personality in a couple of lines (I love the cowardly Aqualad, for some reason) and letting them react to each other and the situation organically, but Karl Kerschl's truly outstanding artwork, cartoony and kinetic, fits the writing and the characters to a T. Really feeling like an all ages book instead of something written for kids and/or fanboys, this is Very Good and something that more superhero comics should try and take a leaf out've.

Next week: Is it wrong of me to be really, really excited by the prospect of Booster Gold crossing over with Zero Hour? Or the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby "Lost" Fantastic Four? And if it is, do I want to be right?

Labels: Graeme

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My, this was a busy week in terms of releases, wasn’t it? And that’s not even including the Essentials books that I read this past week (Essential Defenders – The title may be untrue, but I kind of wish that kind of comic was still being done at the big two today), or the history of the WB and UPN that I just finished last night (“Homeboys in Outer Space”? Really, America?). I've also been "grooving" to the leaked new Gnarls Barkley song, which rocks my world several ways to Sunday, and happily finally getting into The Wire on DVD, just to make my media consumption as vast as possible. But I’m not here to talk about other forms of media. This here is comic city.

ACTION COMICS #861: While I’m not the biggest fan of the slightly goofy “Hey! You guys!” Brainiac 5 we get here, I’m still enjoying this entirely nostalgic trip down Legion Lane more than I should. That said, this feels like treading plot water more than the last few issues for some reason, so I’m hoping that next issue sees faster movement and maybe some things exploding or something. Good, though.

BATMAN #673: I’m genuinely depressed by how bored I’m getting with Morrison’s Batman these days. All the ingredients for something good are in this issue – A near death hallucination where Bruce Wayne deals with his guilt issues and also reveals what happened to him during 52? That should be much more interesting than the flatly-illustrated reference-filled Eh-fest that this was.

DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #5 (OF 8): Wait, so it’s the Source that’s been killing all the New Gods? And behind, apparently, every single DC crossover ever? Because it wants to recreate the entire universe because it’s flawed and, by the way, can talk and explains everything to Metron? (Oh, and by the way: spoiler warning)? I’m not sure I buy it, but at the same time, it definitely gives some kind of scope (and, if the Source succeeds, finality) to Final Crisis if it’s true… Oddly Good despite the nature of the reveal.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #8: Still feeling very much like the unsuccessful attempt to do for the Avengers what Grant Morrison’s JLA did years ago, this big scale adventure reads muddled in execution and uncertain in planning – the symbiote takeover of New York is so rushed that any potential sense of it being a big deal is lost; it just seems more like a nuisance than anything else, and who wants to read about that if it’s not fun? Eh.

NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #2: That said, even a nuisance is better than the feeling of complete unnecessary cashgrab that this book has. After defeating the Hood’s team in the main book, they escape and… get defeated again. Meanwhile, Dr. Strange turns out to be faking his magic and has to quit the team because… well, I’m not quite sure, but it’s probably meant to be shocking (Maybe he’s really a Skrull and this is foreshadowing). Why none of this could be done in the regular monthly – especially considering how meandering this storyarc was in there, and in need of the little meat that this annual provides – I have no idea, but this was rather Crap. Nice cover, though.

SPIDER MAN SWING SHIFT DIRECTORS CUT ONE SHOT: Almost worth it for the Tom Brevoort-written “manifesto” alone. In fact, those five pages are much more interesting than the main event, which is still a nice enough old-school Spidey story that you shouldn’t have to pay $4.99 for. The manifesto, though, illustrates the thinking behind the necessity for the revamp, and if you ignore your feelings on the whole “breaking Peter and Mary Jane up via the devil” thing, it’s hard to disagree with what is said in there… Okay if you’re a behind-the-scenes wonk like me, really.

SPIDER-MAN WITH GREAT POWER #1 (OF 5): This, on the other hand, is a nicely-illustrated but ultimately unfulfilling or affecting story about a timeframe that most people won’t care that much about. For Spider-obsessives, it’s probably absolutely awesome, but for me…? Eh.

SUBURBAN GLAMOUR #3: There seems enough story left over – especially because there’s not that much actual plot this time around – to make me wonder whether next issue’s end of this series will just set up future sequels (which I would welcome, actually)… Even when he’s not really moving events ahead, Jamie McKelvie’s writing shows nice, quiet, character work that’s matched by artwork that just looks so good in color. I have no idea if this is a “hit” or not, but nonetheless, it’s one of the best new books to have come along in a long time. Very Good.

But what, as the saying goes, did you think?

Labels: Graeme

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Okay, am I really the only person who was wondering just where the whole "Alpha Lanterns" thing in GREEN LANTERN #27 was going before it got to the end, and I got completely creeped out by seeing the characters, post-surgery with their faces flipped open to reveal weird robotic anti-Lanterns underneath? I mean, dude. THEIR FACES WERE FLIPPED OPEN. In a Green Lantern comic. What's the world coming to?

Before that point, the storyline seemed to be a strangely-paced version of the usual "our heroes try to catch their breath and reflect" stand-by storyline; there didn't seem to be much happening, and without knowing what the Alpha Lanterns were, the crumbly visuals from last issue didn't really offer much in the directions of interest. Even as we were getting into the what, midway through this issue, it was still pretty ho-hum. Only at the end of the issue, seeing the Green Lanterns having been turned into some weird monstrous cyborg things and realizing just how out there the Guardians are getting, and also far their "We're not afraid, we're just letting fear influence every action we take" stance is going to go, does the story get interesting... It's a shame, because while I can see that Geoff Johns has a plan, the loss of momentum from the Sinestro Corps War storyline to here is both immediately noticeable and worrying.Okay, and that's entirely down to the creepiness of the final page.

Labels: Graeme

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Speeding through the big time books of the week, partially because I'm pressed for time, and partially because I've already written about two of them over at io9 this week. Yes, that was a plug.

Y: THE LAST MAN #60: While it didn't bring me to tears like it did Diana, I have to admit to being happily surprised by this last issue. Not that I expected it to be bad in any kind of way, but I did expect some kind of last minute reversal or reveal that would cast everything that had come before in a new light, and that idea scared me; not only did I like everything that had come before, but the whole "last minute gotcha" thing would've felt cheap in this series. It wasn't something built on that sort of idea-led/plot-led structure; like all of Brian K. Vaughan's work, it's been the character work and small details that had made the series as good as it was. So, that the final issue turned out to be a series of small, quiet, vignettes with a framing sequence that resolves the entire series in an entirely unresolved, optimistic, manner, came as an unexpected treat. That those vignettes, along with the framing sequence, manage to somehow bring the series to a close that feels right and doesn't shortchange the entire story, makes this last issue a Very Good end to an Excellent series.

STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC #25: Maybe I'm the only person outside of Dark Horse who feels that a year-long storyline running through all of the Star Wars books is a big deal, but as someone who'd never before read a DH Star Wars comic, I have to admit: I was sucked in pretty quickly by this opening issue. As I said over at io9, it's not just that the issue hits a lot of Star Wars tropes, but that it also feels pretty much like "Jedis do Indiana Jones" at times. John Jackson Miller's writing manages to make this relatively unfamiliar setting (I know Jedis and lightsabers, but everything and everywhere else... Not so much) easy enough and recognizable enough to understand for first-timers, and the art is weirdly similar to a cartoonier Yannick Paquette, which is pretty enough for these eyes. I'm not sure where the overall plot is heading - or even if the quest is going to turn out to be anything more than a McGuffin that threads throughout each series - but right now, it's fun enough that I'm not sure that I care. A high Good.

PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #0: Jesus, can someone invent a time-machine so that Alex Ross can go back in time to when he's actually happy with the superheroes of his youth? Despite this looking like the start of yet another "heroes from the past come back to show these whippersnappers how it's done" story (Hey, it's Kingdom Come! But with public domain characters!), I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that... uh... it's actually surprisingly not that bad. Highly Okay, in fact, and that's with my complete distaste for this type of plot. As much as anything, I liked the McGuffin of Pandora's Box and also the idea that our point of view character is a superhero who was the only one who could save the world, except he was completely wrong and instead screwed everything up. That isn't to say that it isn't going to turn into turgid referential and reverential nostalgia down the road, but for now...? Worth reading.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #34: Dammit, just when I thought I was getting bored of the Cap-less Cap, Brubaker goes and lets the bad guys make their move and Bucky turn out to be a more interesting character now that he's trying to live up to Steve Rogers' memory in a more literal way than before. Mixing pop and politics in a way that'd make Billy Bragg happy, the idea of a corporate undermining of America amuses in a somewhat perverse way, and also gives the new Captain America an enemy that he can't just shoot (or perform fun new shield tricks) to stop... Reading this makes me wish that the whole Skrull Invasion plotline could've been held off for enough time for Brubaker to really play out his grand plan on a larger scale, but I'll take what I can get if what I can get continues to be as Very Good as this. That said, if anyone at Marvel wants to try and talk Brube into taking over the regular Iron Man book, that'd be great.

Tomorrow: What was the creepiest moment in this week's comics? The answer may shock you, as they say.

Labels: Graeme

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Making it to the finish line just in time...!

ASTONISHING X-MEN #24: This series has become some strange theoretical exercise – when something this slow takes this long to get done, at what point does everyone stop caring at all? In both lateness and terms of decompressed story, this really does seem like a throwback to the Marvel of a few years ago, and the execution of the whole thing makes it seem as if the creators’ enthusiasm didn’t make it through to 2008. Dull and Eh.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #14: See, I like Evil Dick Superboy (Yeah, yeah, Superman Prime, whatever) pretty much as a character when Geoff Johns is writing him as Fanboy Extreme, but even the sudden, re-write-smelling, addition of him to this series fails to inject that much interest into what’s going on here, because he’s being played as generic omnipotent bad guy, adrift in a sea of generic bad guys fighting with each other. I can’t quite tell how any of this is going to end up tying in with the Final Crisis series, but that doesn’t make me want to read any more of this series; it just makes me want it to be over, already. Crap.

SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #11: Hey, it’s the oft-delayed last part of Darwyn Cooke and Tim Sale’s secret origin of kryptonite storyline! And it’s... not really worth the wait! It’s not really the fault of the creators, because this was clearly meant to be a fairly low-key conclusion that could never stand up to a six-month wait, but at the same time, for the creators involved, this was sadly underwhelming. Maybe it’ll read better in the trade. Eh.

WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH: DAMAGE CONTROL #1: Surprisingly enjoyable, in large part because of the art, which looks as if Steve McNiven and Ariel Olivetti had a particularly cartoony baby, and manages to make this comedy look as if it fits in the current, grimacing, Marvel Universe. Dwayne McDuffie plays the concept relatively straight – well, as straight as it could be, anyway – and it’s still a good concept after all these years. It’s definitely not the kind of thing I’d want to read on a regular basis – too much self-referencing in-jokery is never a good thing - but as a refreshing change from the mighty Marvel sturm-und-drang that’s never ending, it’s a Good thing.

X-MEN #207: And talking of mighty Marvel sturm-und-whatever, I definitely cannot be the only person who feels as if the ending of Messiah Complex not only came from nowhere, but also is exceptionally pointless and sensationalistic if Professor Xavier isn’t actually dead as a result. “Look! He’s been shot! We have to break up the X-Men because his dream is dead!” Wait, why, exactly…? It felt as if, instead of this crossover having any kind of ending that fit the story, it was rewritten at the last minute to set up something else down the line, robbing the crossover of any sense of climax or meaning. Eh, sadly; the rest of the crossover was better.

Next week, of course, is a biggie: New Captain America! Last Y: The Last Man! Big Star Wars crossover! Alex Ross tells us that Golden Age superheroes are the bestest one more time! Can you handle it, Earthlings?

Labels: Graeme

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While I’m talking about things that wowed me in the second issue after an initial disappointment, I’m sure that I should mention Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman – I wasn’t too down with the first issue, which seemed to be trying too hard for my tastes, but the second was exactly what I’d been looking for: An almost effortless tying together of the mythical with the superheroics, and a story that seemed true to the character and that it could only be told with this character. A shame, in that case, that WONDER WOMAN #16 is (like ASM #548) a third part that isn’t quite as good.

A lot of that, sadly, comes from the fill-in art in the middle of the book. Ron Randall is a fine artist, but his strengths aren’t the same as Terry Dodson’s, so seeing him attempt to take on some of Dodson’s chunkiness (and stylistic touches – Check out Etta Candy’s nose when she appears, which is very Dodson), or fail to bring the same heft and power to the fight scenes, makes for an uncomfortable and awkward break, especially when the switch occurs mid-scene and you’re left with the more delicate art for the splash page promise of carnage. The switch takes the reader out of the story, and the switch to that particular artist robs the scene of the dynamism and plain, dumb, oomph that it should bring.

Elsewhere, the story suffers from external pressures that really aren’t its fault; people who read Countdown know the outcome not only of the battle for Paradise Island and also of the issue’s cliffhanger, because we were already told that this story takes place prior to what’s happening in the weekly series. It’s frustrating – and, to be honest, almost moreso when you consider that this threat to the island is more interesting than the one happening in Countdown – because, taken on its own merits and away from the context of the greater DC Universe, this is a good story, and the cliffhanger a great one, considering the recent history between Diana and her mother.

After a first issue that still, upon re-reading, feels too eager to please, Simone has found her footing with the series and the script for this issue is a pretty good slugfest-middle-issue that keeps plot and characterization up there along with the punching Nazis. If you ignore inappropriate artist switching and a lot of the tension gone because of plot spoilers, then it’d be something to tell people to track down and read, if they’d rather their Wonder Woman wasn’t on the cover of Playboy. Even with those things taken into consideration, it’s still rather Good, after all.

Labels: Graeme

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Maybe I’ve been dosed with the Kool-Aid, but I can’t help but admit that the 70s retro Spider-Man revamp has grown on me. Part of it really is the frequency of the thing helping offset the lightness of each issue (by which I mean “almost rushed, throwaway nature,” not lightness of tone) – Something that 52 excelled at, and maybe one of the lessons that Steve Wacker brought to this project: Keep up the momentum and it almost doesn’t matter if the issues are good or not on an individual basis – but there’s also just something nostalgically agreeable about not only this particular version of the character, but also seeing the character treated in a light-hearted manner and given stories that aren’t “This time around: SPIDER-MAN IS ON THE EDGE AND HE’S GONNA MESS YOU UP,” like, oh, the last year or so of Amazing. So, on the whole so far? Brand New Day = Win.

That said, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #548 was weaker than last issue, and I think at least part of that is down to the same thing that made the first part of Brand New Day so disappointing – Dan Slott is either too aware, or makes his readers too aware, of how important Brand New Day is for the book, character and franchise, in terms of relaunch. For the most part, he handles it well (The Spider-Mugger storyline isn’t really that involving right now, but the Maggia deciding that Spider-Man is one of them could be fun down the line, and if nothing else, a lot has happened in the last three issues), but then you get something as clunky and show-stopping as the narration at the end of the book:

“Did you catch all that? Back in costume for one day... The cops think I'm a killer, a new super crook wants me dead, the only people who like me are the mob... And, on yeah, I didn't get pictures of any of it! Aw, who am I kidding? This isn't just the Parker luck! I've got a gift for this! Can't wait to see what I do for an encore!”

Gee, thanks, Mr. Exposition. I might have missed something, if you hadn’t just recapped the story I’d just read. Don’t get me wrong; some kind of summing up of the new status quo, I can see the point of. But to do it in that unsubtle a way, and ending it with a variation of “And just wait to see what we have for you next month!” felt cheap and, well, kind of desperate. It’s a shame, because the majority of the rest of the issue was fun enough, if rushed; for every smart turn-around (the poison is keyed to particular DNA, so Spidey’s okay!), there was something that felt off (Mr. Negative’s secret identity reveal came way too early – It’s a very Stan Lee Spider-Man idea, sure, but it didn’t work this time out because we didn’t care enough about either identity of the character for it to be a surprise, or even for it to be that interesting). There’s obviously a lot of enthusiasm and excitement amongst those working on the books, and equally obviously, a lot of love for the character and good ideas… It’s just that, right now, that’s kind of overwhelming the talent of those involved when it comes to making great stories. This is Okay, but everyone involved has done better.

Labels: Graeme

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Man, Heath Ledger, huh? That really depresses me, for reasons I'm not entirely sure about. If nothing else, he was so young. CNN are, apparently, already hinting that playing the Joker contributed to the whole thing on air, which is both tasteless and the kind of thing that Warner Brothers marketing are both cringing and excited about simultaneously. Shall we think about comics, instead?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #547: The cheap joke would be to leave it at “Well, at least Spider-Man shows up this issue,” but that aside (And it really does feel like a cheat, the way the whole “I’ve quit being Spider-Man, even though I keep wearing the costume under my clothes! Hey, now I’m Spider-Man again!” thing is done so off-handedly, as if the only reason it was there was to keep Peter out of the outfit for the first issue to build suspense), this was more enjoyable than last issue for the most part – Slott does good Spidey dialogue, and the bad guys are enjoyably forgettable, which felt like a nice throwback. The story fits the weekly pace, as well, and so the whole thing seems enjoyably Good.

ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL #3: Wait, what? Admittedly, I missed the second issue, but someone seems to have had a word with artist Franco Urru, because everything’s actually easy to follow this time around… well, artwise, at least. Plotwise, I’m still lost, especially with that last page cliffhanger. That said, it still reminds me of the TV show’s weird off-kilter aesthetic more than the Buffy comic, and still seems pretty Okay to me.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #15: Things continue to happen! And I continue to not care! Eh, if only because the ideas here should be much more compelling by this point.

THE FLASH #236: The first couple of issues of this revamp were wonderful, wonderful superhero comics with an energy and sense of purpose to them… So why did I find it hard to care about this final part of the storyline? Part of it may be down to the shift in art (I have no idea why I find Freddie Williams’ stuff less appealing here than I did when he was doing Mister Miracle, but I do), but it’s also that the stop-start nature of the threat – and the tenuous way it was revealed to be linked to the retconned piece of the Flash legacy that’s only been mentioned in the back-ups over the last few months – seemed to undermine any momentum the story tried to build for itself. I loved the character interaction, and the idea of the superheroing family is still fun, but almost everything else about this run seemed to slow down from a running start to this faltering, uncertain, Okay finish.

I still look forward to Tom Peyer’s run, though; I loved Hourman, way back when.

NEW EXILES #1: Finally, Chris Claremont has a book where he can recycle all his favorite character bits and fetishes without having to deal with continuity or what anyone else is up to! I’m not even that sarcastic in saying that; there’s something perversely compelling about seeing just what he’ll end up doing with this new team made up on pet characters and characterizations (C’mon, this Sabretooth is really just mid-80s Wolverine but taller) given relatively free reign. Also interesting/depressing: He really wrote a good Fantastic Four for those couple of pages before they died. Does that mean I’m stuck in the past? Nonetheless, more Okay than I would’ve expected. Almost Good, in fact.

STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION: INTELLIGENCE GATHERING #1: It’s as if someone at IDW had said “Take Graeme’s least favorite two ST:TNG characters” – Yes, I really do like Deanna Troi more than Data. I’m sorry, all – “and make a slow, but nicely illustrated mini-series starring them.” Reading like one of those dull filler episodes that you’d watch because nothing else was on at the time, but with cartoonily wonderful art, it took me a couple of minutes to remember that I haven’t liked Star Trek comics since Peter David did 'em. That, alone, has to be worth an Okay.

What did you all think?

Labels: Graeme

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BOOSTER GOLD #6 is a surprisingly depressing book, considering that the good guys end up winning. It's so heavy with foreshadowing that there's no way to actually enjoy the fact that it achieves what was set out as a goal way back in the first issue of the series, and so oddly paced that it doesn't really feel as if it has achieved anything at all.

Okay, that last part first; what's with the end of this book? It just kind of... stops. There's no real sense of climax, and the last scene isn't even a cliffhanger (Why someone didn't suggest that they push the two-page interlude with Daniel and Rip to the end of the book to at least give some kind of dun dun DUN to the finish, I have no idea), it just... stops. Underplayed scenes, I'm happy with, but this was slightly too underplayed; it feels like the book just ran out of room and finished a scene or two before it was meant to. Coming, as it did, immediately after the big battle, I felt cheated of some sense of the good guys having won, even if that was fleeting. I'm not saying that I wanted a full end of Star Wars moment or anything, but still.

That kind of gets back to the foreshadowing. It's not enough that we had an entire issue last issue to tell us that what appears to be done this issue is impossible, we also had a character tell us that again this time around (Rip's "The future is open, but the past can't be changed." In fact, he's the voice of foreshadowing for the start of the issue in almost everything he says: "Use your head. It's entirely too convenient. Three Blue Beetles from across time just suddenly show up like this?"), we also have the one person who leads this mission impossible being a mysterious masked man that we know nothing about. Give it three issues and he'll be revealed to be some kind of equally mysteriously bad guy: "Evil Beetle" or "Dark Beetle" or something (We've already got Supernova as "Booster Dark" after all, so why not "Dark Beetle" to match the Blue and Gold team?).

It's an odd switch for this book, to move away from the light-heartedness in favor of something so clearly pointing towards gloom, and doing so in such an obvious mannner. On the one hand, good for planning, but on the other hand, knowing that something is just going to end up depressing you makes for a pretty Eh reading experience.

Labels: Graeme

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I'm oddly upset that '76 #1 didn't work so well for me; I like the basic idea, and there's nothing really wrong in the execution. It's just that... it doesn't gel for me, for maybe the stupidest reasons possible.

The writing is clearly influenced heavily by Quentin Tarantino's movies - especially Cool (Jackie Karma is Tarantino by way of Power Man and Iron Fist, which is a fun enough idea, but there's not enough in this first issue to get you completely involved in the story - The split book idea again seeming nice and retro, from Marvel's playbook in '76, but it works against both stories here, I think) - but the visuals don't have the stylization or slickness that Tarantino's movies have. There's nothing bad about the art, but I can't help but wonder whether something less scratchy and, well, rounder - think Byrne and Austin's weirdly-disco Uncanny X-Men run - would've felt like a better fit. It also doesn't help that both stories feel like pastiches instead of stories in their own right, ironically-distanced exercises in nostalgia that aren't meant to evoke 1976 as much as the 2008 idea of 1976 as seen through the lens of the movies and comics of the period; you can't get that into the stories because they have too much of a hipster feel without the substance or humor to back it up.

The strangest thing about the book, though, is that it's the things other than the writing or art that let it down the worst. The lettering, for example, is stiff and inorganic both in terms of the typefaces and the balloons, drawing attention to itself instead of the sinking into the background, pulling you out of the story instead of letting you dig a character being called Cherry Baum that little bit longer. Likewise, the non-comic pages of the books are downright ugly, undesigned things that could've been used to evoke more of that '70s comic aesthetic (Imagine a Bullpen Bulletins look, instead of the bell-bottomed headline being squished on the second page of the interview)... Maybe I'm just being a former art-student design snob - the covers, in contrast, are really nice, and makes me wonder what happened elsewhere - but, still.

(While I'm nitpicking; wouldn't it have been great if this hadn't had glossy heavy pages, but newsprint? Me and my tactile experience theorizing...)

It's a frustrating book - too much focus on surface, and too little space to give us something more meaty, but not focusing on the incidental aesthetic details that can make and break the experience - because I want to like the book better than I actually do. I want it to be more than just Okay, but it's not there yet. Maybe by 1977?

Labels: Graeme

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Wow, so that wasn't exactly a banner week for comics, was it...? Or maybe I'm just more bitter and twisted than usual...

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #16: I'm really tempted to make some kind of snarky "And it only took eight months for something to happen!" comment, but even with something happening, I'm not that involved in the book. Am I really supposed to be invested in a big war between two cosmic entities that I still don't really understand the motivations of or care that much about? Still, at least Pete Woods is getting work. Okay, but I'm pretty much ready to skip to the end and get Grant Morrison involved already.

GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY #4: After three issues of my feeling better about the book than most people on this site, I think I've reached my limit of superhero angst with this go-around... Maybe it's because the comatose-in-hospital angle is a little too touchy for me right now, or maybe it's just that it's as if the book can't take a step forward (I really like the casual sense of superheroics displayed here, if that makes any sense) without taking one back (Can people stop dying/being presumed dead/being depressed, please?) - It's as if the book wants to be a light-hearted adventure book, especially with Cliff Chiang's art, but it can't quite escape deadly melodrama. Eh to that, for now, at least.

JENNA JAMESON'S SHADOW HUNTER #0: Imagine my surprise when the worst part of the book was reading Deepak Chopra's son admit his familiarity with Jenna's porn. I don't know why that freaks me out so much - Shouldn't he be meditating or something instead? - but it got the most reaction out of me in the entire book, which has to be some kind of problem, right? Shouldn't I have been more interested in, you know, the actual content of the book? Problem is that, even in the few preview story pages, there's absolutely nothing here to differentiate the book from numerous other t&a books, even in the sense of it being worse; it's like a black hole of Crap.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #7: Here's the problem with this book being, what, four or five months behind thanks to Frank Cho's perfectionism: This feels like yesterday's newspaper. We've already seen the end of the Venom invasion - complete with roughly sketched out solution - in New Avengers, and so, seeing it start (and knowing that it's going to continue for another couple of issues)? Old news. Same with Tony Stark's reaction to Elektraskrull - which we've seen in more depth in New Avengers: Illuminati #5 - and Spider-Woman joining the team, which has also been shown in New Avengers. Everything that would have been surprising or interesting when originally planned has been seen before, leaving this as a pretty Eh example of Deja Vu. It's a shame; the idea of the two interrelated Avengers books is a good one, in theory.

NOVA #10: I'm sure this issue is probably very interesting to someone, but coming after the last couple of issues, this straight-forward story feels pointless and filler to keep the slow and dull "Will Nova succumb to the techno-organic virus" plot alive until the annual and continuation of Annihiliation: Conquest. It's the first real bum note of the series, to be honest, and a glimpse at how generic a book like this could get if not treated properly. Crap, sadly.

THE SPIRIT #12: Oh, man, talk about going out in style... Adapting not just Eisner's stories, but also his art style in the flashbacks (with really, really well done colors), Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone really end up with their best issue so far. Everything about it is tone-perfect, even if throwing the Octopus in there seemed a little bit like overegging the pudding. Excellent stuff, and the easiest way to make sure that I'd check out whatever Cooke does next, even if that was already a foregone conclusion.

THE TWELVE #1: Meanwhile, in the alternate universe that J. Michael Straczynski lives in, there is apparently a demand for this Captain America rip-off that you can just tell is going to have Watchmen pretensions down the road. It's a shame that Chris Weston is on this book, because his art makes it all seem much more worthy than the unimaginative, overly-familiar, Ass that it actually is. Nice cover design, though.

If I were doing PICK OF THE WEEK, it'd easily be The Spirit, while The Twelve wins PICK OF THE WEAK by showing just how life-sapping a lack of imagination can be. Next week (which happens to be tomorrow)! More Amazing Spider-Man, just so I can see if Dan Slott can get more annoyed at me, and on the more enjoyable side of things, 76 and Booster Gold. But what did you think, as the saying goes?

Labels: Graeme

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It's probably sad to point out that HULK #1 marks the point where Jeph Loeb has started recycling Al Milgrom plots, but I am a man cursed with a long memory for off-periods of Marvel history. But still, despite the seeming return of the Rick Jones Hulk - Didn't Rick die, on panel, in World War Hulk, or am I misremembering? - and the (unfulfilled) potential for big dumb visuals, this comic ends up feeling much more flat than it should.

Part of that is that, for all the ideas that feel as if they should be popping, none of them are actually taken anywhere new. A Hulk shooting bad guys with a massive gun? Not only does it sound like a bad idea straight from the 1990s - well, this is a Jeph Loeb comic, and he is friends with Rob Liefeld - but we've just come from the Planet Hulk era where a Hulk using weaponary (and dressed like a gladiator, to boot) was commonplace. A second Hulk - who may or may not be Rick Jones - is, as I said above, straight from Al Milgrom in the '80s. And the last page "shocker" comes directly from Mark Millar's Ultimates... But, unlike other, similarly Magpie-esque, comics from Loeb, this doesn't even feel like a greatest hits compilation for the character... it just feels done already.

For the sake of ease, I'm going to blame it on Ed McGuinness. It's not that there's anything especially bad with his work here, but somehow it's missing the fun that he brought to something like Superman/Batman... His characters seem more generic, and his staging more dull. In the past, he's managed to take books with less ideas or intelligence than this (See: Superman/Batman, for example) and nonetheless turn them into some bizarrely enjoyable pop moment of balloon-muscled square-jaws in colorful adventures. Here, that energy's gone, and it makes the problems with the writing that much more obvious.

It's a weird book in general; there's nothing in the set-up that doesn't feel temporary, which makes for an experience where it's hard to really care about anything (An experience which is also helped by the melodramatic, surface-deep, dialogue and characterization, and by the turn-around of status-quo of the two main characters just a couple of months after their fates in World War Hulk). Most of the characters are borrowed from other series, lending the whole thing a cheap mini-series feeling (Because, come on, like anything's going to happen to She-Hulk here. And isn't Doc Samson in some other book these days as well?), and with a movie coming in the summer that features Bruce Banner as a green Hulk, it's severely unlikely that we're going to stick with a red Rick Hulk beyond the opening arc of the series... So, instead of thinking "Where are they going with this amazing storyline?", the reader is left wondering "How quickly are they going to fix things?" before shrugging their shoulders, saying Eh, and going off to read something else.

Labels: Graeme

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"You missed One More Day!"

This was Hibbs, yesterday, when I went into pick up the books I've missed during my three weeks away from everything. And it's true, I did miss One More Day... or, at least, the end of it, the part that we all knew was coming and still managed to want to read nonetheless. I can't quite work out if I'm sad about that or not - Having kept track of all the upset, melodrama and gossip that's spun out of the damn thing, I kind of feel as if I've managed to read it after all, as if there was some kind of geek osmosis that gave me One More Day cooties through the internet just by reading about it.

(I also missed the chance to do any kind of "That was 2007, here were my favorite books from the year" thing. If you care, they would've included The Homeless Channel, The Professor's Daughter, Laika, The Salon, Casanova, King City, Darwyn Cooke's take on The Spirit and others that I can't remember right now. You probably didn't miss anything.)

Thing is, no matter how much they screwed up One More Day – and they really did, at least in terms of Marvel PR, which is normally much better than releasing promo images that had nothing to do with the story or having creators argue with each other through competing websites – none of it really matters to Brand New Day. It's a relaunch to the franchise, after all, and no matter how much continuity may be completely fucked, if the first issue of Brand New Day's brand new status quo was good enough, all would more likely be forgiven.

Here's the thing, though. While AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #546 may be one of the best Spider-Man stories that Marvel has put out in awhile, that's pretty much just because of the context of at least a year's worth of shitty stories preceding it. Taken on its own merits, it's just Okay.

A lot of this really comes down to the presentation; considering the writing in this issue – and the idea of the revamp in general – is so retro, using Steve McNiven's pretty-but-sterile-and-static artwork and that particular font for Peter's narration seems out of place and a little against the grain. There are some nice images, sure, but McNiven's stuff is weirdly lifeless to me and, maybe more importantly for a Spider-Man book, weirdly humorless as well. Don't get me onto why I dislike the lettering so much, because I doubt I could explain, beyond the fact that it's such an impersonal typeface, and I'm sure that Spider-Man's narration should at least pretend to be handwritten, so as to appear both more friendly and more neighborhoody. Yes, I'm complaining about the lettering on a book. I am a nerd.

Storywise, it's... It's fine. It's nothing that we haven't seen before - Even the cliffhanger is familiar - even if it's something that we haven't seen for awhile. It's perfectly okay, but there's nothing in it to excite you if you haven't been sitting around wanting it to be 1976 in the Spiderverse again. Dan Slott's script is servicable enough, especially considering the amount of world-building he's had to do, but still, there are questions that the book itself raises, outside of One More Day, that niggle; Why did Peter stop being Spider-Man, for one thing? It can't have been anything major, because in the middle of the issue he's all ready to put on the outfit again but stops for a pretty petty reason... The dialogue fits well enough, but that's kind of the problem: Everything is "good enough" instead of actually "good". Where's the excitement, or the humor, or the anything to try and win fans over?

I'll pick up the next issue, out of curiosity and because I kind of like weekly books in general, but so far, you'd be better off picking up an Essentials collection and getting more of the same thrills for your money.

Labels: Graeme

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God bless Ian Brill. After looking after our house and cat (not necessarily in that order) while Kate and I were away in the UK on an unexpected and not entirely enjoyable trip, he left me with a welcome home present: WORLD'S FINEST #283 and 284 from the halcyon days of 1982, knowing that the only thing more helpful in killing any rose-tinted nostalgia for my childhood than a trip home to see family would be comics from when I was eight years old.

Don't get me wrong; I actually enjoyed these two books, but not really thanks to writer Cary Burkett or artist George Tuska. I mean, sure, good for them for bringing back the Composite Superman (the villain in these stories) in the first place, but there's absolutely nothing inventive, fun or even that interesting about what they do with him - Pretty much, he could be any powerful, generic supervillain considering what he actually ends up doing in the two-part story. He's not even visually impressive, which is all the more impressive considering the fact that his outfit is half-Superman, half-Batman, and he glows green, Tuska's worst sin no matter how many times he makes Superman look as if he is overweight with a receding hairline (Didn't they have any editors back then who'd point this out?). Even a guest-appearance by the Legion of Super-Heroes, which feels as if it really should be impressive - Superman has to go to the future to bring back an army of superheroes to kick the bad guy's ass! - is presented in such an underwhelming way that you have to wonder whether the creators cared about anything other than a paycheck when thinking this stuff up; it's literally "Oh, whatever we have to do to fill the pages" translated onto the page.

There's actually something kind of wonderful about how crap the whole thing is. I can imagine the 1982 version of Savage Critic complaining about how half-assed the stories are, complete with "It's Okay but just imagine what Len Wein could've done with the idea" or something similar. You get the feeling that these really were paycheck books done to meet deadline, which just isn't there in comics anymore; these days, even the crappy comics leave you with the feeling that someone really did think that their work was more than just a job at the time. Also gone in these days of sincerity and pretension is the other saving grace for the two-parter: The fact that the lack of ambition means that the genre template is followed to the very letter: The bad guy says things like "Fool! Your stupidity is as great as your size! Haven't you learned by now that nothing you do will hurt me?" while the heroes wisecrack and have each other's backs in between having no discernible personalities whatsoever. There is punching, sure, but no real damage to be seen, and it's old-fashioned ingenuity that saves the day via an out-of-nowhere deus ex machina... Pretty much everything that you want from a comic like this, which manages to be both comfortably familiar and depressing at the same time.

It's reading things like this - which is twenty-five years old, and now I feel old - that make you realize that comics have been pretty shitty for years, thanks very much (and say what you like about Jeph Loeb, but his stuff is much better than this. Well, except his Wolverine run). I'm not sure if that's the greatest moral to take from the whole experience, but it's the one I'm sticking with right now, at least.

Labels: Graeme

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I'm not sure whether it's a sign of my age, or the quality of the comics he's appeared in, that I can remember at least three different attempts to reboot Dan Dare that I've read (Plus an additional TV series that I missed, thankfully) before this week's DAN DARE #1. Of all of those - including Garth Ennis's latest one - I still think that Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes' Dare: The Future is the best one, mainly because it works as something other than nostalgia for a character and era long past. Or, perhaps, because it works as commentary on nostalgia for a character and era long past (as well as Thatcher's Britain, which is in itself a character and era long past. That, definitely, is a sign of my age).

It's the nostalgia that drags down the newest version of the character for me. Part of it is intentional, of course - Dare's recreation of a safe fantasy version of England that's stuck in the era in which he first appeared is, after all, shown to be unreal towards the end of the issue - but there's this whole additional level of, I don't know, belief in some ideal of masculinity and heroism that the book is built on that just feels not only old-fashioned but outdated. The idea of Dan's stoic, silent self surviving the moral decay that lesser mortals (including his former sidekicks) have fallen prey to, leaving him as the one character who can save the day not from the aliens but from everything, feels not only like something from another time, but from nostalgia for another school of storytelling whatsoever; the John Wayne archetype that drove other Ennis books like Preacher. And, for all his genre faults, Dan Dare was never a Western, leaving this new version as something that's potentially interesting, if miscast and more hollow than it could be.

(Artwise, since I rarely mention that, I should point out that Gary Erskine's work is solid but unspectacular - His line, at this point, has become so similar to Chris Weston's, even as his draughtsmanship isn't as static nor as realized - but there's something missing in the way the book looks. It feels familiar in the wrong way, as if we've seen it all before, but elsewhere, as opposed to coming back home to something from childhood.)

It's an Okay attempt at bringing the character back, even as it misses out entirely what made him an interesting character to begin with.

Labels: Graeme

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So this is how I found out who the bad guy was in "One More Day". I picked up a copy of THE SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN #41 and started flipping through the back of the book, wondering what pointless background material they were putting in this issue to justify the increased price, and there was a reprint of an old Silver Surfer comic which had nothing to do with Spider-Man whatsoever. Now, don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the chance to read old Stan Lee and John Buscema stories, but it was so out of place that I'd wondered if Marvel had just given up and started putting anything in the OMD books, just to make sure that they hit the revised revised shipping dates. Instead, there's a caption below the cover of the Surfer issue, announcing that it's the first appearance of the bad guy behind the whole Spider-reboot shebang.

Yes, this is the issue where we finally get to the whole meat of the One More Day story, and in terms of meat, it's stringy, tasteless and drowning in cheese, just like my mother used to make.

It's not enough that the whole concept of One More Day doesn't really make sense as a Spider-Man story - "If you could magically heal your Aunt, would you?" is just a wee bit too removed from the whole despite-your-powers-you're-only-human-so-try-your-best aspect of "With great power comes great responsibility" for me - but now that we finally get to the whole magical reboot offer, even that doesn't make any sense on it's own. We literally get (spoiler) Mephisto showing up out of nowhere and actually literally says "I want your love... I want your marriage." It's a good thing Spider-Man interrupts him there, because I believe the next line was going to be "I have no reason to want your love, or to even get involved in your life, but, you know, Joe Quesada really, really doesn't want you guys to be married and he's the editor-in-chief, so..." It's a crazy, nonsensical scene - Mephisto has no motivation to be there or make that offer, other than a generic "Well, he's the devil" one; even his stated reasoning - "I want that which gives you joy, that which sustains you in your moments of greatest despair" - doesn't make sense because, dude, why does he care about Spider-Man in the first place? Doesn't Mephisto normally go up against Thor or Ghost Rider or someone? And more importantly, if what he wants is to undermine Spider-Man's moral center and security, then he'd let Aunt May die, not offer this cut-rate Faustian bargain.

(Yes, I know; this way, Spider-Man and Mary Jane have to choose between their marriage and letting Aunt May die and huzzah for more guilt for Peter, but Mephisto still has no reason to be in this story making that offer in the first place. It's the Chewbacca Defense as applied to getting Spidey out of his marriage.)

And another, smaller but still annoying, thing: Since when did Marvel solve all their perceived problems with dumb magic reboots? Just as DC completely undercut the dramatic tension in their superhero books with all of the continuity reboots, Marvel's doing the same with these smaller individual magic fixes. Editorial doesn't like the direction of the X-Books? That's fine; have Wanda magic them all away! Joe Quesada doesn't like Spider-Man being married? That's fine! Mephisto can show up and magic that away as well! It eats away at what little reality these books have left, if that makes sense; I'm now waiting for someone to magic the Skrulls away at the end of Secret Invasion, or bring Captain America back to life (That could even be the big finish of Secret Invasion - "I will take the life-force of all these Skrulls and use them to return America's greatest hero to life!" "Are you sure you can do that, Dr. Strange?" "Yes, Iron Man - - Because you have learned humility").

Maybe I'm just cranky, or maybe thinking about this book too much because it's not coming out weekly as planned - it's pretty much a means to an end, anyway, with everyone really just waiting for the Brand New Day relaunch - but this was lazily put-together Crap. There is one good thing about it, though; Joe Quesada's artwork has really pulled itself together in this issue, and there are some nice-looking scenes throughout the whole thing. Maybe all those delays had some purpose after all...

Labels: Graeme

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Another day, another later-than-intended entry. This is what happens when work is insanely busy and family members are sick, making everything slightly more distracted than you'd really want...

THE FLASH #234: Mark Waid's transformation of this book into family-friendly adventure continues, but there's something off, somehow; the pacing seems strange, and while individual scenes play out well, it fails to gel into a satisfying whole for some reason. Much more successful are the back-up strips of derring-do from former Flashes on an alien planet, which manage to squeeze as much fun as possible out of their short length. After such a strong start only a couple of months ago, it's sad to see this being "only" Okay; I hope it'll find its footing again soon.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK #111: Or, really, a trial run for the renamed Incredible Hercules book, considering the lack of Hulk and focus on the Herc/Cho/Angel/Namora team that's been leading this book over the last few months. It's a good sign, too, that the new/old book will be worth checking out, as everything here is pretty Good; Cho's pretty much been the breakout star of the World War Hulk event for me, and his interplay with the dumb but well-meaning Hercules is entertaining enough for me to want to see more. Shame that it's not the creative partners on this particular issue (Jeff Parker co-writes with Greg Pak, and Leonard Kirk draws) that'll be sticking around, but I've dug Fred Van Lente elsewhere...

IRON MAN, DIRECTOR OF SHIELD ANNUAL #1: There's probably a good book hidden somewhere in here; the cover seems to be hinting at one, at least. But I just couldn't get past the art to get to it - Harvey Talibao's work has this weird over-anatomizing of everyone (especially the women, who get objectified here even in defiance of what the dialogue for a particular panel might say) that distracts, and it's matched with hyperactive pastel coloring that manages to draw too much attention to itself while flattening out the page as to be almost unreadable. I'm sure that there was more to Christos Gage's script than what I remember from reading the book - essentially, "Tony Stark goes undercover, meets lots of women with big breasts, then becomes Iron Man and blows something up" - but I have absolutely no desire to put my eyes through that kind of pain again to find out. Awful.

WHAT IF ANNIHILATION REACHED EARTH?: First off, I love that that's actually the title of the book. Second off, this is one of those What Ifs where you wish that this had happened instead of the "real" continuity, if only because characters in this book act more in character - and more heroically - than they do in their own books. It feels like the most classically "Marvel" thing I've read for awhile, even with the suicidal ending, and the scope and execution are satisfying in a way that the end of Civil War just... wasn't. On it's own, it's a Good book, but as a missed opportunity, it's frustratingly wonderful.

Oh, and Jeff? A. Definitely A.

Labels: Graeme

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To give you an idea of how today has gone, I wrote this at 6am this morning, and am only now getting around to posting it, 16 hours later. If this continues, expect the second half of this week's releases sometime around Christmas.

ACTION COMICS #859: I have to admit, I don't know quite how Geoff Johns got his groove back, but I'm really enjoying this current run of Action Comics. Managing, somehow, to make all the Legion nostalgia work even if you have no idea who the team are - with the overextended flashback last issue paying off here, giving extra weight to the opening and capture of the original three members of the team now that everyone knows who they are - and using a political allegory that's so large is is both ridiculous and apt, this is pretty much the best Legion story I've read in a long while, even though it's clearly a Superman story guest-starring the characters; a darkening of the team that doesn't destroy the characters as much as pull them into another world. Gary Frank's art continues to impress, as well, although he definitely likes to make characters do the "Oh!" face with lots of teeth, doesn't he? Nonetheless, this is Very Good stuff.

ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL #1: Capturing the wonky dystopia feel of the TV show better than the Buffy comic does, I think - although maybe the Buffy comic is a better comic overall? - this was another happy surprise. It's in no way perfect; there are things that I think need to be clearer, both in terms of writing and art, and jumping into the middle of the story with the intention of clearing things up afterwards makes for a slightly dizzier ride for those of us who don't remember exactly how the show ended, but it's Good enough to make me want to try the next issue out.

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #8: I'm not sure how many ways that I can continue to say that this is an Excellent book without boring people and sounding repetitive but, well, it's an excellent book. Mark Waid manages to introduce both the current Flash family set-up and rebooted Doom Patrol to new readers fast enough that there's also space for a one issue adventure with threads that stretch backwards and forwards throughout the series, while George Perez's art just pulls the reader through the story beautifully. This is really how all superhero comics should be.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #32: ...Apart, of course, from superhero comics like this. Ignoring the pouting Black Widow cover and you're left with a book that's becoming more and more like Ed Brubaker's Sleeper every month. That's not a bad thing, though; this is probably the best superhero ensemble book around right now, even if it's less superhero and more spy with every issue. Steve Epting's artwork, too, is a wonderful blend of grit and dynamism, giving you a Very Good book that kind of makes you hope that Steve Rogers is never coming back. Also, hypnotized Sharon? Kind of scary.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #23: When even Newsarama is comparing this book to a snuff movie - seriously, check out Matt's interview with Dan Didio from last Friday - then you know that something's gone wrong. This issue, it's giving over almost the entire issue to two characters who have barely been seen in the series before and trying to make us believe that they've been very important to the more-than-half-the-series that they've not been in. It's so out-of-left-field, and so poorly executed, that it just doesn't work, and makes you wonder whether we're going to see even more pointless cameos and new characters show up if reception to the book continues to be bad. Awful, despite Tom Derenick's better-than-usual art.

Tomorrow: Who is? What is? What If?!?

Labels: Graeme

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It had to happen, of course; the busiest week for new releases in a long time coincides with my busiest week workwise, meaning that I have a whole stack of books beside me that I haven't even mentioned yet. Let's try and remedy that right now, shall we?

ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #9: Feeling more like a series of scenes illustrating ideas than a coherent story, something about this issue doesn't come together properly. Still Very Good, but more for the strength of its individual pieces - the humor of seeing Kryptonians talk like Glaswegians ("A soft wee scientist's son," Grant? Really?), or the colors of the weirdly unfinished cover, for example - than the whole.

BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #1: Pretty much reading like a book that exists only for DC continuity completists, right down to the appearance of the mystery villain on the last page. There's no excitement to the writing, no spark between the characters. Julian Lopez's art is nice enough, but doesn't raise this to anything above an Eh.

BOOSTER GOLD #4: It may sound weird considering the point of this title, but the reveal of the bad guy to be a minor character from a forgotten mini-series that hasn't been in print for more than ten years felt like a continuity nerditry too far, and discovering that Supernova is pretty much Evil Booster Gold, complete with Evil Skeets (Nice Black Hole reference, though) felt obvious, rushed and unsatisfying. Four issues in, and it's already losing its sense of fun and openness? Not a good sign. Eh.

CAPTAIN MARVEL #1: Apparently, I'm the same age as Mar-Vell. Huh. Of course, when that's the thing I remember most about a book as ponderous and pretentious as this one, that's probably not what the creators intended. Lee Weeks' artwork is easily the best thing about this Eh book; Brian Reed's script is slow to get to a point that I thought we were already at before the series started.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #24: Like Bri said, it read like an issue where everything interesting that happened last issue was undone, as if Paul Dini read it and thought "Wait! I didn't want to do that! Or that!" And Superboy Prime appearing here, ruining the Sinestro Corps storyline for a second time? Somewhere, Geoff Johns is crying. Awful.

HOUSE OF M: AVENGERS #1: Look, I'll even buy into the idea that retailers have been crying out for more House of M material, but does anyone really want an alternate universe story about these particular characters? It read more as if Christos Gage and Mike Perkins were indulging their nostalgia than creating a story, and I don't see where any dramatic tension is supposed to come from, considering that we already know how it ends. A confused Eh, I guess.

NEW AVENGERS #36: Well, I guess we don't have to read that next Mighty Avengers arc now. Awfully slow and fragmented; Bendis is trying to do too much with his titles, and with Mighty running so late, it pretty much falls apart; I can't tell if Deathlok's off-panel defeat is something that's supposed to happen in another book, or just sloppy storytelling.

NOVA #8: Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning go for the Grant Morrison award, and almost get it, with the idea of a civilization called Knowhere inside the head of a Celestial, complete with telepathic Russian dog. There's something very Doctor Who about the viral villain, complete with catchphrase, as well, but seeing characters reduced to zombies again is the bum-note here, and so bum as to bump the whole thing down to an Okay.

SALVATION RUN #1: Amazingly, enough to make me long for the days of Amazons Attack, with a plot conceit so dumb that so many things are just not even mentioned in the book itself: Why put the villains on another planet with their costumes and weapons, for one thing? Where is the planet? How did they find the planet? Aren't they worried that someone is going to wonder where the villains have all disappeared to? Or that the villains will find some way home? I mean, those last two are obviously going to happen along the course of this series, but neither possibility is even raised here... The lackluster execution by Bill Willingham and Sean Chen doesn't help, either; you could overlook the stupidity if there was some verve and excitement to the way the story was being told, but sadly not in this case. Pretty much Crap.

THE SWORD #2: An amazingly slow second issue, with the dramatic moments made all the less so by the lack of subtlety in the way they're presented - two splash pages with one line of dialogue, in a font larger than in the rest of the book, in case you've somehow missed that you're meant to be shocked there. With scenes and characters as cliched as they are here, I'm not sure who this book is aimed at - People who wanted to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer but got scared off by the fact that it wasn't written like Law and Order? Awful.

THOR #4: Very pretty, but best appreciated if you don't actually try and read it - The story is overly convinced of its social relevance, and instead misses that it has no suspense or surprise. Hopefully, the end of the issue, and the promise that Thor will speed up his discovery of the other Asgardians, isn't a pointless tease, because it's not the most exciting over-arcing plot to base a title on... but what happens after that? Eh, and that good only because of the artwork.

Next week: Well, after tomorrow, it's time for me to jet to New Mexico for four days and escape this bitter, twisted, online life for awhile. I get a vacation, and you people get a vacation from me. Everyone wins!

Labels: Graeme

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Easiest way to get people to disagree with you on the internet: Say that you like a Judd Winick comic. And, while GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY #2 isn't entirely without fault (The whole "Your ex-hooker sidekick with AIDS is unclean" scene was both ridiculous and clunky, for one thing), I have to admit the sense of humor on show in the book won me over; the dialogue of the last page alone, undercutting and subverting what you'd expect from the scene by replacing the traditional "statement of how bad things look to make the cliffhanger seem more exciting and dangerous" with a conversation about shared underwear, showed a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that, when paired with Cliff Chiang's pretty-but-toothy artwork, makes for a book that's more Good than I expected.

Shame that I can't say the same thing about TITANS EAST SPECIAL #1, in which Winick doesn't so much attempt a story, but tries to stretch out two filler sequences into a one-shot that pretty much exists only to create faux-expectation for an upcoming new series in the new year. Given the comedy and aware quality of the Arrow/Canary book, it's even more surprising to see just how generic and dull the writing is in this one-shot, with narration like "Long ago... And not too far away... There was a group of children who grew up alongside champions. These heroes taught them to fight evil. The worst kind of evil," and the uneven nature of the plotting (Was there even an attempt to balance out the first half-flashback with the second half of the book, starring an almost entirely different set of characters?).

Maybe Winick just reacts to his artists, because whereas Cliff Chiang's work on the former book is easy on the eye, Ian Churchill's art on Titans East is horrible stuff, from the Wolverine in Robin's outfit - Seriously, when was Dick Grayson ever that hairy? - to the bland similarity in every character he draws. It's an exceptionally disappointing, Awful book that pretty much acts as a disincentive to pick up the new Titans book when it finally appears. Better luck next time, I guess.

Labels: Graeme

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With a story that starts with the heroine fighting an army of intelligent violent gorillas and ends with an army of technological neo-Nazis, it's not completely beyond the realm of possibility that we'll see some zombies, robots and pirates before Gail Simone's first storyarc of WONDER WOMAN (#14 of which, Simone's first issue, came out on Wednesday) is over.

The feeling of trying too hard permeates the entire issue - Simone hits the ground running with multiple plots starting at once, but maybe throws too many in there for the first issue: Mysteries about Diana's birth, Gorilla Grodd amassing ape armies, the appearance of Etta Candy - who seems to be investigating Wonder Woman's secret identity - and Nazis invading Paradise Island! All in color in 22 pages for twenty dimes! But the plots and subplots don't really gel together this time out, and the reading experience is choppy, rather than fun-filled and action-packed. Why is Gorilla Grodd genetically enhancing primates into intelligent monkey soldiers? We don't find out, and even the investigation into Grodd gets derailed by the shock reveal of Captain Nazi at the end of the book. For that matter, why does Diana take the monkeys home with her after fighting them, aside from setting up a comedic homelife for her? Why is Etta Candy back at all (To be fair, I'm hoping that her name isn't going to be Etta this time around - we didn't find out what her first name is this time around)? Why are the Society using an army of Nazis? Okay, that last one is presumably going to be answered soon, but nonetheless, I didn't come out of this issue feeling that there's a grand plan with lots of answers waiting for me soon, but instead that there's pressure to make a lot of things happen all of a sudden to grab readers' attention, which resulted in something frantic and fragmented.

Thing is, there's potential here. Look past the self-conscious narration - Why is Diana defining herself against Batman during her monkey fight? - and the overactive plotting, and Simone's take on Wonder Woman is interesting enough to pay attention to - Kick-ass, but willing to talk her way out've a fight that she's already won, which is a nice mix of Allen Heinberg's and Greg Rucka's versions of the character - and, once the need to please fades slightly, the unusually energetic and quirky tone may show off Diana's charm to better effect than she's been able to enjoy for quite some time. Keeping in mind the wonderful Dodson family artwork, this is a fairly Good start to what will hopefully be a memorable run.

Labels: Graeme

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So it goes without saying that the end of WORLD WAR HULK #5 was somewhat underwhelming, but it should also be added that I'm not sure what kind of ending would have really managed to feel satisfying at this point. Maybe something that hadn't attempted to redeem the character, or had come to some kind of conclusion that lived up to the no holds barred opening to the series...? But that was never really an option, of course; for all of the illusion of change presented at the end of the issue, something as extreme as the heroes being cold-blooded enough to try and murder the Hulk or whatever is the kind of thing that'd never happen in this age of movie options and multi-media licensing.

(Even the "Is Bruce Banner dead? In stasis? Or something more sinister?" ending is incredibly easily reversed, and immediately following that with previews for a couple of new Hulk series launching next year makes that depressingly obvious.)

What's really underwhelming about the issue, though, is how tired and nonsensical the whole thing feels. While the series so far has hardly been a masterwork of intricate plotting and characterwork, there's something remarkably flat about the pages and pages of punching swapped between the Hulk and the Sentry, and going from that to the cheap "shock death" of a supporting character and the deus ex machina ending of Iron Man saving the day by doing... something... when the Hulk suddenly threatens some unclear kind of overload (Seriously, what is happening at the end there? Is the Hulk's whole "I'm radiating energy" thing something from Planet Hulk? And what does Iron Man actually do with the satellites?) felt more like the plot being driven by the need for a big finish rather than anything organically arising from the story so far. It feels forced and strained, sadly, and the last page reveal so simultaneously from out of nowhere and cliched, that it devalues the big dumb fun of earlier chapters, in a way.

Eh, then, albeit very nicely illustrated Eh; John Romita Jr.'s work, especially with Klaus Janson's inks and Christina Strain's coloring, has rarely looked better. I'm just disappointed that what started with such a bang ended with such a whimp... Oh, you know.

Labels: Graeme

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Weirdly enough, the arrival of SCOTT PILGRIM GETS IT TOGETHER reminds me of the arrival of Oasis' ill-fated third album, "Be Here Now" - Something that pop culture had collectively been holding its breath for while, at the same time, nurturing the backlash and secretly hoping for it to be a failure. Of course, the parallels fall apart when you consider that "Be Here Now" was an overblown, self-indulgent disaster fueled by cocaine and the uncomfortable love of Patsy Kensit, but nonetheless; it worked well enough to get me to a point where I can tell you that the fourth Scott Pilgrim book is Very Good indeed... if a little overblown and self-indulgent.

It's self-indulgent in the best ways, though; there're the video game logic and iconography, the wandering captions and everything else that you've come to expect from the series, but just... moreso than before, in some sense. It's a slower book, as well; the book comes with its own sense of ennui and overfamiliarity in those familiar tricks and cheats which seems fitting, considering that the book deals with Scott recognizing and moving on from his stalled life and onto lots of new somethings. In fact, for a book with a title about getting things together, a lot of the book seems to be about things falling apart - Friendships, relationships, and living situations. I wonder how much of that comes from O'Malley's own experience with this series in particular - Did he want to switch things up because we're midway through the series, or because he was getting frustrated with the way things were to date?

Nonetheless, things do get switched up, and towards the end, the book gains the momentum and energy that's been lacking earlier in time for a grand finale that's everything you wanted and more - Knowingly sentimental and romantic in such a way that still feels genuine and earned. On the way there, you get O'Malley's best art to date - much more confident than before, and in the final battle, bolder in his use of space and pacing - and some foreshadowing over Ramona's true intentions (Interesting dream sequence, there...) to pull you through to the next book, at least. It's very much a follow-on from the last book, which felt like a conclusion of something, in that it gives the character and series (and creator?) a new-found sense of direction, but also contains enough of what you liked before to satisfy that whole "what you wanted in the first place" thing.

But then again, I liked "Be Here Now," as well, so what do I know?

Labels: Graeme

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Watch for the symmetry in the reviews below. I wish I could say that I planned to begin and end on the same franchise, but really, it was just a trick of that goddamned alphabet...

ASTONISHING X-MEN #23: You know, that flashback where a scene from the previous issue is revisited, but this time you get to find out what really happened, would have worked much better if I had remembered that it was, in fact, a scene from the previous issue and not just a randomly double-lettered couple of pages. Of course, that would've meant that it would've had to have appeared in a timely manner, and that's not so likely with this book. Which is a shame; the dialogue is still enjoyable and John Cassaday brings the pretty, but no matter how Okay it is, almost all of the plot momentum is entirely gone by this point and it feels less like an event than an afterthought.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SEASON ZERO #3: The character moments are getting closer to those on the show, but the plot still feels far too generic without the interpersonal relationships between the core characters being as screwed up as they are by the time the show starts. Maybe there's just no interest in this world before their apocalyptic event, because I just don't really care that much about a prison break and Starbuck showing her ass to her comrades. Okay, but I want the Cylons back already.

COUNTDOWN SPECIAL: JIMMY OLSEN #1: And in less than eighty pages, Jack Kirby shows everyone how Jimmy Olsen stories should really be done - Fast, frantic and kind of dumb adventures with a boy who has no fear but just a lick of common sense. For all the unavoidable clunkiness in dialogue, these are comics that just sparkle with invention and color and joy; putting them under the Countdown banner does a disservice to both books - Countdown seems dull in comparison, and Jimmy Olsen deserves better than the fate he's being given in that series. This one-shot, though? Very Good.

THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST #10: Like Casanova, my only problem with this book is pretty much that it's not weekly. I was tempted to make a joke about being able to tell that Brubaker's involved by the fact that the lead character is missing throughout the entire issue and you barely notice, but the truth is that I am happy enough reading the weird martial arts fights, the business jokes (Oh, Hogarth...), and the mysterious, overblown narration without Iron Fist making an appearance. Danny can take his time coming back if it means more of this Very Good pulp stuff.

ROBIN #168: In which Peter Milligan makes the title character look like a jerk, and doesn't quite manage the subtlety of characterisation of Batman's son that Grant Morrison brings (Morrison's Damien is whiny, yeah, but there's still some sense of entitlement behind his whining; Milligan's version just seems to miss out on the brattiness of the character at times). Otherwise, the second part of the Big Bat Crossover is as fluffy and Eh as the first - if you want to enjoy these books, you could, but there's nothing compelling in them for others to really get their teeth into so far.

UNCANNY X-MEN #492: I'm not sure where Ed Brubaker's subtlety goes when he writes the X-Men - the scene with the Beast in this issue practically sings "I am foreshadowing" in three-part harmony - but it works for him, nonetheless. As with the first chapter of Messiah Complex, this reminds me of nothing as much as a mutant books crossover from the 90s done right, with the overflow of generic characters not even seeming as offensive in the execution. I mean, I know intellectually that the new mutant child is pretty much a McGuffin at this point, but the melodrama and soap opera scenes of Cyclops and Xavier fighting is enough to pull me through the slugfest scenes. Only - for the second issue of this crossover, interestingly enough - the Predator X scenes feel like a bum note. A cautious Good, even if I don't really find myself that bothered about the story itself.

Tomorrow: An embarrassment of riches, seriously. I don't know what I'm more excited ab - Okay, I do. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together is going to make me very, very happy indeed.

Labels: Graeme

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Despite Abhay's feelings about it, I have fond memories of 2000AD. It was a comic that I grew up on, then did the traditional thing of giving up on it before returning, shamefacedly, years later (It was Grant Morrison's Zenith that brought me back). It was on that second go-around, when I wasn't seven years old and turned off by Carlos Ezquerra's art, that I realized that there was such a thing as a 2000AD story - One part stealing from pop culture and turning it into a goofy sci-fi idea to one part really, really obvious plot development that you can see coming from miles away, but still enjoy reading the book enough to keep going, mixed together with a strange attitude towards pacing and execution that amps up everything while also keeping tongue firmly in cheek and winking to the audience, perhaps (Things changed, and not necessarily for the better, in the 1990s, when things started to get painted and take themselves too seriously, but that's another story). But bearing all that in mind, SILVER SURFER: IN THY NAME #1 is pretty much a 2000AD story.

Sure, sure; writer Si Spurrier comes from 2th, but it's not just his background that shapes my opinion of the new series. It's the start, with the comedic organ pirates (who are pirates in space who steal organs! Get it?) and the underwhelming non-battle with them, and it's the plot that seems to have an upcoming twist that's less a twist and more the most signposted straight line in the world. It's the ending of the issue, with the visual joke that plays off the smug hero, that's both underwhelming and kind of cool at the same time. And, maybe most importantly, it's the lack of both superheroics and pretention throughout the entire book.

You see, poor Norrin Radd always seemed to get the shitty end of the stick from creators, if you ask me. He was either played as a zen Green Lantern or used as a shitty writers' grand statement-making Mary Sue for years, instead of someone trying to do something different with the character; I don't know if it's because they didn't know what to do with him, or because they thought he'd be more interesting that way (The one exception was the series a few years ago where he was kidnapping children or something; that one has been semi-forgotten, maybe for its own good), but this feels like the first time in years that a writer "gets" the character and the potential he has.

Add to this Tan Eng Huat's wonderful artwork - and ignore Michael Turner's generic, dull cover that manages to screw up the logo - and you have another book that, like Supergirl, isn't entirely successful but is interesting in the ways that it fails. It's probably not for everyone, but it is rather Good.

Labels: Graeme

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It can't just be me that's noticed that, along with the name change last issue, a lot more seems to be changing up in the world of COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #25. For one thing, things actually happen. Luckily, in keeping with the rest of the series, those things don't really make that much sense when taken in context of the rest of the series.

Take the resolution of Firestorm's search for Martin Stein, for example. Finally, we get some climax to a long-running plot! Admittedly, it would've worked better if this plot had been one from this series, or even something that had even been mentioned in the series before this point (Was Firestorm even in this book prior to the last issue?), but what can you do? Sure, Firestorm's looking for his missing partner might have provided the excuse to explore the DC Universe and crossover into different storylines better than, say, the still somewhat pointless Jimmy Olsen storyline - or the Karate Kid storyline, or the Mary Marvel storyline, for that matter - as well as having a potentially more-fan favorite lead character for the series, but still. I've given up hoping for great long-term planning on this book.

Case in point: Mary Marvel gets introduced to Darkseid, and doesn't freak out? I know that her plot has been "Seduction of the Innocent" and all, but I can't help but feel that we've skipped plot to go from "Drunk with power and willing to fight those who she thinks are trying to take it away from her" to "Teaming up with someone who's supposed to be the big bad evil guy in the universe"... On the one hand, huzzah for plot development, but on the other, I would've loved for this to have been more organic, instead of feeling like a sudden, uncomfortable, jump.

Then again, you also have plots like the Rogues one, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. It's a wasted opportunity, as there seems to be more usefulness in having the characters captured and properly leading up to Salvation Run than the continual "escaping in the nick of time" scenes that not only get repetitive, but also make the Suicide Squad look completely inept (Deadshot got tripped up? Really?). So it's not as if everything in this book is moving forward suddenly.

I don't know; there's a sense, more than anything, that the writers looked around and realized that half the series was done already, and that they should really get moving on that whole "plot" thing this issue. It's not the smoothest upshift in momentum, but it makes for an issue that's more Okay than normal.

Labels: Graeme

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SUPERGIRL #23 is a somewhat unsuccessful start to what could end up being an interesting run by new creators Kelley Puckett and Drew Johnson. Of course, it could be an equally unsuccessful run as each of their predecessors on the title (Seriously, how hard is it to get a Supergirl comic right? Hard enough to chase four other writers off before the book is even two years old, I guess), but it's why this issue is flawed that makes me interested in what's to come.

First, though; Drew Johnson's art? Not one of the flaws. His Supergirl isn't as hyper-sexualised as Michael Turner's or Ian Churchill's (nor, sadly, as interesting and true as Renato Guedes'), and his storytelling and layouts are clear despite being, for the most part, uninventive; it's an easy-to-follow and easy-on-the-eye combination that works for the book, and definitely one of the better artists for the title to date (He needs to work out how mirrors work, though - Check the second panel on the last page to see what I'm talking about).

The story he's illustrating, though, is a curious one. For one thing, more than half of the book is silent, and as such misses the opportunity for Puckett to clearly lay out just who his Supergirl actually is for new readers. He seems to be aware of this, on some level, though; the issue starts with a set piece that uses Batman to introduce the character in broad strokes, and quickly, and the two-page epilogue/prologue to the next issue makes the character slightly more pro-active than she's been for the rest of the book (She's no quitter, I think is the message we're supposed to take from the scene). The fact remains, though, that the story in the issue itself isn't really a strong Supergirl story; it's the start of one, perhaps, but the real story is what happens after this issue, and nothing really happens this issue that couldn't have been handled - and perhaps would've been more successfully handled - as a flashback or exposition at the start of that story. All we need to know is that Supergirl tried her best to stop bad guys escaping, and failed, but decided to try again. We don't need to spend an issue of dialogueless chase scene in space, no matter how pretty it looks, in order to learn that; it reads too quickly, and too frustratingly. Couldn't we have had some narration to get inside Kara's head? Or have the chase cut in half, so that we could have seen more of the more interesting "what happened next"?

All of that said, it's kind of ballsy to make your first issue a practically silent one, and have your main character fail and disappoint Superman and the Green Lantern Corps in there. It's not necessarily a good idea, but it's not a common one, either, and it's almost worthwhile because of that. Batman's character synopsis in the open of the book is a good one, as well, and I hope that it being there in the actual text means that those aspects of the character are going to be addressed as well, and in a way that won't make me cringe (Supergirl doesn't need to go the Mary Marvel route, for example). Like I said, the issue is unsuccessful in and of itself, but in such a way that you can't help but want to see what the creators are going to do next. Okay then, despite itself.

Labels: Graeme

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The temptation, after spoiling the identity of the mystery Skrull in New Avengers: Illuminati yesterday, to reveal who the mystery bad guy behind the whole thing is in ANNIHILATION: CONQUEST #1 is pretty big. Just how many Marvel fans could I piss off in two days, after all? But I'll resist, if only because the reveal here is more unexpected and kind of more nonsensical; let's leave the WTF moments to the comics themselves. I do wonder about the whole "And it's not really faceless alien hordes they're fighting, it's faceless alien hordes led by this old-school bad guy!" schtick that they're repeating here from the original Annihilation, though; if this is something that's going to happen in every single Annihilation series, I give it two years before we're told that the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime have somehow become worshipped as evil gods by a race of evil, marauding aliens who want to beat up Quasar. Again.

Nonetheless, the book itself is slick, well-done fun. Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning's script starts with a review of what the big threat is and then jumps straight into the action, pretty much bypassing what happened in any of the four tie-in prologue books other than Quasar, but they keep the idea of imminent disaster treated as thrills and spills going throughout. There're easter eggs for the longtime readers that will hopefully be fleshed out for newcomers in later issues - I can't wait to see just what role the High Evolutionary is going to end up playing - as well as a new take on Adam Warlock that may manage to overcome the currently annoyingly familiar "reluctant messiah" thing that's going on (Tom Raney's art, too, keeps with the slickness; it's attractive work, if a little generic and melodramatic in places).

Much like DC's Sinestro Corps mini-crossover, there's something refreshing about the very old-fashioned "cosmic" level of story being played out here, and the fact that it's pretty much self-contained - well, until the Super-Skrull suddenly decides that he's going to kill all the humans, I guess - adds to that enjoyment. Despite poor Moondragon now being a real dragon, it's a pretty Good sci-fi comic book, and worth picking up if you want something that's more Star Wars than Star Trek.

Labels: Graeme

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You've got to love the lack of subtlety in the cover of NEW AVENGERS: ILLUMINATI #5. All it needs to be complete is a banner that reads "One of the Illuminati is a Skrull! But which one? Could it be the one member of the team whose face is in shadow, and who has a Skrull face floating above his head?" He's also the one character who's also not appearing in any other series right now, so, you know, that choice? Not the hardest one in the world.

Oh, yeah; for those who care - Spoilers for that last paragraph if you didn't want to know it was Black Bolt.

Illuminati has tried its best, all series, to be a throwback to good old-fashioned Marvel action even as it kind of fucks around with Marvel history ("Did Secret Wars II even happen? We're not saying! But look! Our superheroes participated in genocide so that we have a basis for our next summer crossover!"), and this final issue is no exception - There's a big fight scene that's pretty much solved by a Deus Ex I-Have-No-Idea-How-To-End-This which even the characters comment on in the book (It doesn't even really make sense - Iron Man seems to wirelessly connect to, and suck the power from, nuclear power plants to make a big explosion. But how the hell do you wirelessly get power from a nuclear power plant? Reed Richards, afterwards, says "I didn't know you could do that," when he should really be saying is, "Are you seriously telling me that you uploaded nuclear energy to a satellite and then downloaded it to yourself? That's retarded.") - but it's a pointless fight scene, and one that accomplishes only cool visuals for Jim Cheung to admittedly draw the shit out've. I mean, if the Skrull plan is make everyone paranoid, why not let everyone be paranoid instead of melodramatically blowing them up and saying "Ha! You've guessed our amazing plan, which I will now confirm for you!"?

The point of the issue, really, is setting up next year's big summer event, as you can tell by the brand new "Secret Invasion: The Infiltration" banner along the top of the cover (Or, as the banner actually reads "TShecIrneftiIlntvraastiioonn," with the design overpowering legibility; good job, Marvel), which it actually does too well - for the event not to kick into high gear in both the Avengers books, as well as Iron Man's and the Fantastic Four books, after the close of this issue is poor planning; the downbeat ending where the heroes realize that they can't tell who's a Skrull and who to trust, and decide therefore to more or less give up and go their seperate ways, breaks story logic for the sake of delaying the crossover - Okay, so your telepath makes a point of explaining that he can't read the aliens' minds, but didn't Doctor Strange have a magic spell that exposed whether everyone was a Skrull or not a few months ago in New Avengers - written by one of the co-writers of this book? Couldn't he at least mention that here?

(The worst part is that I can already guess the justification for lazy, out of character writing for the next year or so at Marvel - "Maybe it's meant to read weirdly, because maybe they're a Skrull." No, it's just bad writing.)

It's not the worst issue - in fact, it may be the best issue of the series - but it's still pretty Meh; if you want punching and explosions and Bendis dialogue where everyone - - where everyone sounds like this and exactly the same with weird intonations to make you aware of the important things, all drawn really nicely, then this is the book for you. But if you're looking for something that makes sense and doesn't play its hand too quickly in order to go out with a bang? You might want to look elsewhere.

Labels: Graeme

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It was about midway through CAIRO, Vertigo’s latest original graphic novel, that I had the moment of realization that this was God Save The Queen, another recent Vertigo OGN that I pretty much hated, only done "right". Like God Save The Queen, this book was a magical realist story that owes a lot to Neil Gaiman, and also like God Save The Queen, it’s a story that’s almost deceptively simple (Thinking back on it after finishing it, I started realizing how thin some of the character threads really were; during reading, however, the execution was charming enough that I didn’t really notice); unlike God Save The Queen, though, Cairo has enough of its own identity and sense of humor to be an enjoyable, if light, read – Something that isn’t going to make anyone suddenly realize that the comic medium is full of opportunities and wonder, perhaps, but certainly more enjoyable than the latest hardcover collection of New Avengers or something similarly priced.

(The price point is worth mentioning, briefly; I got this book in the mail from DC to review, and so wasn’t really aware of how much it cost, but Tom Spurgeon noted today that it’s pretty light for a $25 book - That’s kind of true, and I would’ve guessed it to have been around $20 considering the small size and black and white pages, but I guess DC’s got to make it profitable somehow.)

I think this is G. Willow Wilson’s first comic – although her later Outsiders one-shot saw print first – and it’s pretty successful for what it is. You can definitely guess influences out of it (Gaiman, as I said before, is the most obvious one, but I think there’s some Milligan whimsy in there as well), but she has a good line in dialogue and there’re some nice scene transitions and moments of pacing that show that she’s familiar with the form and avoiding the traditional newbie pitfalls. The character work is fairly basic – there’s a lot of characters verbalizing their emotions and arcs to signpost it for you - but the lightness of tone carries you through the whole thing quickly and easily enough, and the shorthand works; the reunion at the end of the book isn’t really explained or earned, but gave me the warm fuzzy feeling nonetheless. But then again, maybe I’m just a sap.

Artwise, MK Perker’s work really, really reminds me of a fairly unfamiliar name – Jim McCarthy, Brendan’s brother (? I think?), who drew for 2000AD in the ‘90s. It has a similar off-kilter sloppiness that nonetheless helps his characters act, giving you this work that’s kind-of-but-not-really ugly, but definitely effective, despite itself. That it’s black and white hurts it, in a way; a good colorist could’ve added a lot to the atmosphere and filled in some gaps. Mind you, it’s a Vertigo book, so there’s always the possibility that it would’ve ended up all brown and dull.

Overall, it’s very much a book that’ll work for old-school Vertigo fans – It reads like a shortened version of a mini that could’ve been published by the company in the mid-90s, when they pushed out new books a couple of times a month – which isn’t as much of a complaint as it may sound; whether there’s much of an audience for a solidly Good, if not great, graphic novel with all new characters being put out fairly quietly (unless I’ve missed all the hype) is another question, but I enjoyed it.

Labels: Graeme

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Business meetings early in the morning that run until mid-afternoon? Not so fun. Especially when you have lots of other stuff to do in the rest of your day...

52 AFTERMATH: CRIME BIBLE - FIVE LESSONS OF BLOOD #1: Goddammit, I really wanted to enjoy this much more than I actually did. I like Rucka's writing in general, and have (partially accidentally, I have to admit) followed his take on Renee Montoya since his Detective run, but there wasn't enough in this issue to keep my attention; it felt like a cheap dark humored short stretched out to issue-length, with some foreshadowing that I hope doesn't mean the series will end with the Question becoming a follower of the Crime Cult. More Eh than I wanted it to be, sadly.

THE DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #2: Ignoring the DC Nation page at the end of the issue that officially announces what everyone's been expecting - that this is only the death of this version of the characters - and also the seeming disconnect between Countdown's revelation of Darkseid as the big bad behind the death of the New Gods and his behavior here, the main thing I got from this issue was another helping of my dislike for Starlin's art. Everything else was just Okay.

INFINITE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: Yeah, yeah. So it's cute that it shipped on Hallowe'en, but still - That means that this book has a one day sales window. Good work there, DC. Equally good work on the relatively Eh quality of each of the (too short to really get much momentum) stories contained within; with the exception of Mark Waid's Flash tale, everything else just kind of passed by in a dull haze...

IRON MAN #23: Try as they might, I can't take any scene where Tony Stark says "RAH!" in frustration seriously. Sad to see that the whole "Everyone thinks he's mad, but seriously he's more awesome and right than everyone else in the entire world and by God he's going to prove it" deification of the character continues, as well. Eh.

SPECIAL FORCES #1: Kyle Baker's new war comic, in a weird way, illustrates the difference between old-school satire and new for me; Army@Love may be unfunny and more dated, but you can tell that it comes from some genuine heartfelt place... but this feels cynically put together, from the exploitative T'n'A to the Frank Miller-esque narration to the media-literate jokes (The first line of the book is "The black guy dies first."); it reads as if it's Baker's idea of what the audience wants in a comic, rather that something he wants to create. That that works better for me than Army@Love probably says something about me as an audience, but I found this mix of bad manners and pessimism full of black humor and highly enjoyable. Good

Next week: The final issue of New Avengers: Illuminati ships, just so we can see how shocked everyone is at Elektra being a Skrull...

Labels: Graeme

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One of the problems with JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #10 is that having an older Superman from an alternate reality appear, complete with the issues that come from having a simpler - and somewhat compromised - moral view to confront today's superheroes really doesn't have the punch it should have, coming two years after Infinite Crisis, which started with an older Superman from an alternate reality appearing, complete with issues that came from having a simpler, and somewhat compromised... oh, you get what I'm talking about already. The fact that characters are referring to the similarity between the events is, hopefully, a sign that writers Geoff Johns and Alex Ross are aware of the familiarity and will take the story in a direction that justifies the duplication (What, it couldn't have been Kingdom Come Batman that appeared, at least?).

Another problem with the issue is that it doesn't do anything to convince me that there's a need for a sequel to Kingdom Come, or to continue playing with those versions of the characters. One of the things that that series accomplished, whether or not you subscribe to the view that Alex Ross is an artistic genius whose superheroes with bellies is a massive step forward for the medium or not, was that it had a beginning, middle and, most importantly, an ending. Beyond the sales boost, what is there to be gained by bringing back that world, or those particular takes on the characters? Based on this issue, very little other than being surprised by how good Dale Eaglesham's take on Alex Ross's Superman is. Here's hoping that the following parts of this storyline are more than just Okay.

Meanwhile, over on Geoff Johns' other big book of the week, things are looking much better. Despite the choppiness of the storytelling (prologue, fightscene, flashback, flashforward!), there's a lot to be enjoyed in ACTION COMICS #858, even for those of you who don't dig the Legion of Super-Heroes as much as I do. From the iconic opening to, let's face it, pretty equally iconic cliffhanger, Johns has a lot of fun getting his Superman The Movie fix even without Richard Donner's help. Of course, Gary Frank's impressive art, with a strong Christopher Reeve likeness (and wonderfully thin Superman; it's good to see him less bulky than usual), takes up a lot of that strain; keeping the over-rendering to a minimum, it's an attractive-looking book that matches the openness of the writing. If they can keep up this kind of Very Good quality on a monthly basis, then I may just have a new favorite Superbook...

Labels: Graeme

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The short version of this, if you're pressed for time, is Diana is right, but I wanted to vent about this as well.

The more I think about MIDNIGHTER: ARMAGEDDON #1, the more I think that it's some weird cynical joke being played on the few Wildstorm fans remaining out there. I mean, a week after the latest launch of an Authority series, we get a new series by the same writer starring the same characters that is full of things that only make sense if those involved in the creation of the book have contempt for (a) the material, (b) the audience, or (c) both. For example:

* The fact that it's being solicited as a series of one-shots, purely to get more #1s on the shelves, even though the end of the book clearly states "See more horrifying visions of the future in the next issue of Wildstorm Armageddon!" It'd be great if there was actually a book called Wildstorm Armageddon, wouldn't it (The next issue is actually called "Welcome To Tranquility: Armageddon #1," for those keeping track at home)? This latest trick of DC's (See also "The Search For Ray Palmer") wasn't funny the first time, and seems pretty pointless outside of trying to con first issue completists, if any still exist.

* The fact that nothing actually happens in the issue. The plot is this: Midnighter gets kidnapped into what he's told is the future. This being comics, it's a dystopian future that he needs to try to prevent. He meets future versions of his friends, fails to learn what caused the dystopia, then goes back to the present where his friends say "Yeah, don't worry." The end. There's no character arc, no shock or surprise in meeting the future version of friends (One of them now has glowing eyes! My God!), and no-one learning anything. To make matters worse, this is apparently going to be the plot of the rest of the issues of the Wildstorm Armageddon-non series, all of which are going to feature characters from individual series being brought forward into the same future that they don't do anything about. How do I know that they don't do anything about the future? Because these six "one-shots" then lead into another six-issue series about characters working to prevent the dystopian future in question. So, basically, the whole "Armageddon" thing? Six issues of filler pretending to be the start of a big event. Feel free to make your Countdown To Final Crisis jokes here.

* No-one cares whether the Wildstorm universe turns into some freaky dystopian world because, really, no-one really cares about the Wildstorm universe anymore. No, wait, I mean, because Wildstorm continuity has become so elastic and redone over the last few years - and the same can be said about the Wildstorm identity as a publisher - that it probably won't last for more than a year before the next relaunch anyway. Remember when the Authority took over America, for example? Or the completely-botched Worldstorm?

* To the powers that be at Wildstorm: If you really want to make people sit up and notice the bold changes you're willing to make to your publishing line, just make the fucking changes and don't have at least twelve issues of prelude and teasing, because we'll be bored of it by the time you get there, just in case there really is a there for you to get to.

* While we're at it, why would anyone want to read an entire line of books about a world gone to shit? Sure, you could probably get one interesting book, maybe two, out of the idea of a horrible, post-disaster, world where almost everyone is dead, but basing your entire line of superhero books around it? Really? Doesn't anyone remember how crappy Marvel's New Universe was post-The Pitt?

(Or, really, before, but you know what I mean.)

* Christos Gage's script comes with pre-made snark making fun of the book for you: Midnighter doesn't need to have the Days Of Future Past concept explained to him, because he's as familiar with it as everyone else in the entire world: "Okay, I get it. A possible future. Some dystopian world created by a disaster I have to avert." Jenny Quantum manages to explain what's wrong with the whole concept for you: "Honestly, I can't see what the big deal is. I mean, I understand it was horrible, but we've seen countless horrible worlds; dozens of awful possible futures. And we've fixed them all." Despite writing something this self-aware, Gage still tries to play the concept straight and finishes the book with a line straight out of Heroes - which is also replaying this "I have seen the future and it will be" schtick this year: "I just can't help thinking... whether it's this or something else... all it takes is for us to fail once." Can't you hear the synthetic strings of foreshadowing? No? Maybe it's because it's being drowned out by the sound of Gage trying to have his cake and eat it, too.

* Yes, I know that you could only eat your cake if you had it. I've never understood the phrase, either. But still.

* I have no idea why I ended up doing this in bullet points.

It's a Crap start to what may be an even worse storyline overall - although I feel like I should point out that I kind of liked Simon Coleby's chunky art in this issue - and another example, just one week after the last, of the fact that all of Wildstorm's potential has been pissed away in favor of imitating the diminishing returns of mainstream DC and Marvel.

Labels: Graeme

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Maybe it's just been because the show's been off the air for awhile, or maybe my sinus infection has seeped into my quality control filters, but I have to admit that BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: PEGASUS is definitely the most successful of the BSG comics to date. A lot of this comes down to the artwork by Jonathan Lau, which manages to avoid the static likeness-driven nature of the current Battlestar Galactica: Season Zero series while also managing to have the characters look something like their television counterparts (unlike Nigel Raynor's art from Dynamite's first series); it manages to work as a comic, for a change, while also evoking the familiarity of the show.

The story is also surprisingly strong; weirdly enough, the plot begins in almost entirely the same place as the first two issues of the Season Zero series (Battlestar gets sent to recover other, missing, Battlestar which disappeared on a secret mission having run into cylons), but the execution here is more interesting - perhaps because, with its bleaker outcome, it doesn't feel so much like a Star Trek episode - if more rushed. The character work is fairly non-existant, with the exception of Commander Cain, which seems fitting considering the way that the Pegasus storyline eventually played out; that said, there's some nice foreshadowing in Cain's reaction to the dead colonials discovered, and done in an understated way that fits the fairly bleak source material.

Overall, it's Good work, and a good tease for the upcoming Battlestar Galactica Origins series by the same creative team. Now, why the world needs a "Season Zero" and an "Origins" series, that's another question, but still: This is a nice enough way to get ready for the Razor TV movie...

Labels: Graeme

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Considering my recent X-Men reading frenzy has included Ed Brubaker's first two forays into mutant territory, Deadly Genesis and The Rise and Fall of The Shi'Ar Empire, it's only fitting that his first chapter of the first big X-crossover in years, X-MEN: MESSIAH COMPLEX #1 turns out to be a reminder of all things good and bad about the whole Xavier kit and kaboodle.

The good includes the slightly scary way in which Brubaker is able to write the characters in character; like Mike Carey over on X-Men, Ed somehow manages to channel his inner Claremont in the exchanges between the title characters in such a way as to make them seem more like themselves than they have in years - Even Whedon and Morrison's takes weren't as faithful or familiar as they appear here. Whether this signposts a good writer able to adapt or the product of a fanboy youth is open to question, but between the characterization and a plot that harkens back to the glory days of the franchise, complete with Professor Xavier discovering a new mutant and the heroes racing to reach them before the bad guys do, it's an enjoyable trip down memory lane. There's something about the core idea - that there is a new mutant at all, as opposed to the melodrama and depression of the oncoming extinction of the entire race - that appeals as well, a reminder of when it wasn't all relentless doom-and-gloom for these characters.

On the minus side, there's still a confusion of characters on display here without adequate introduction (despite the pin-ups with mild commentary in the back of the book - and Predator X? Really? Bring back the Brood; at least their names didn't have that damn letter in there), and unclear motivations for all involved with the exception of the heroes. It's not necessarily a massive problem, of course; this is the first chapter of thirteen, so there's a lot of time to get everything sorted out, but I can't help but feel worried by how similar it all feels to the opening chapter of the mutant massacre storyline years ago, which took years to explain away (A similarity helped by the presence of Marc Silvestri, who got to draw the first Mister Sinister appearance way back when, his art not that much better twenty years later).

In a weird way, it's such an X-book that it's difficult to grade - If you like X-Men books, then it's Very Good. If you don't, then it's an Okay example of modern superhero books nonetheless.

Labels: Graeme

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So, now that Countdown has reached its halfway point, with the release of COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #26 this week - Hey, new title to remind people that there's a point to all of this, and that point has Grant Morrison and JG Jones involved! - it's probably time to look back on the last six months and look at what we've learned from the experience so far.

Namely, Countdown? Kind of a mess.

The main thing, I guess, is that DC learned none of the right lessons from 52. Well, that's probably not true from DC's point of view, I guess; they learned that weekly books could sell, for one thing. But almost everything else that was right about 52 has been wrong with Countdown, it seems. This is potentially a dangerous point of view - rose-colored glasses and all that - but, as loathe as I am to remember 52 as something better than it was, it was at least more successful, and more interesting in its failings, than Countdown has come close to in the last 26 weeks.

Part of that, I think, comes down to the talent involved in creating the two series.
In the early stages of publication, 52 worked it wasn't just the novelty of the "weekly book" idea that drew readers in initially, but the fact that it was being written by DC's four biggest writers working together. Because of the democratic, messy, way that they wrote the book, the work itself managed to keep some of each writer's voice, and as a result became this oddly quirky, occasionally subversive, take on a corporation's flagship title. Countdown, on the other hand, has not only gone for a more mid-level writing staff, but a top-down method that's given no one writer ownership over any particular storyline, and produced slow pacing and dialogue that practically define the term generic; it's as if the writers are all so nervous about coming off-model that they don't try to create any model at all. It's playing so safe - which may be a necessity for a project this size - that it lacks the spontaneity to keep attention, while the weekly round-robin schedule makes sure that as a whole it lacks the continuity of quality (or even the quality in general) to make you sit up and notice a bad job done very well.

And don't even ask me about the artists on the series until Carlos Magno realizes how big people's heads are supposed to be in proportion to their bodies.

But back to the book itself: One of the few things besides format that Countdown took from 52 is focusing on minor characters to base the stories around... except that, unlike 52, the stories aren't about the characters themselves (I'd argue that only the space heroes thread in 52 was plot-based instead of character-driven; your mileage, as they say on the internet, may vary) but about Big Events that the characters just so happen to blunder into (the Piper/Trickster thread in particular being the worst offender - The Flash's death! Black Canary/Green Arrow wedding! Salvation Run! The one good thing you could say about the Mary Marvel plot is that at least it seems to be its own thing...).

...Which, of course, leads into the unavoidable fact that you have to buy multiple other series in order to understand what Countdown's all about. It's not just that things like the death of the Flash, Amazons Attack! or the Black Canary/Green Arrow Wedding Special displace the series' main plots for large chunks of issues at a time, but that those main plots from the series then end up spinning out into different books - The Death of The New Gods, The Search For Ray Palmer, the back-up strips in Countdown to Adventure and Mystery, Salvation Run and Gotham Underground, to date - that contain chunks of information that really should be in the main series (Well, maybe not the Search for Ray Palmer books). There's no real there there for Countdown; no arc or theme that you can point to and say that that's what the series is about, other than "A lot of stuff is happening and most of it is bad."

(Another problem with this is that Countdown has also managed to ruin a couple of reveals in other books; we saw Black Adam here repowered before the debut of the miniseries that asks whether he'll ever get his powers back, and we also saw Kyle Rayner-post Sinestro Corps War while the core Green Lantern books were pretending that he'd never be back.)

This brings up one of the biggest problems with the series; if it's really counting down to another book altogether, then that gives the creators a pretty big headache: How do you wrap up a 52-part series that, by design, has no conclusion? The cheap answer would, I'm sure, be to point out that it's not that big of a deal considering that the series hasn't really had a great deal of forward motion so far to pay-off, but I'm wondering if the slow-as-molasses plot development isn't the result of being unsure where and how the plots are going to end, and trying not to get too involved in something that may end up going nowhere. The alternative to this, of course, is that all of Countdown's plots are going to resolve in the series, and not really lead into Final Crisis at all, which - while making the title somewhat untrue - may be the more preferable option for the readers.

Overall? It's been a series where there hasn't been twenty-six issues of plot, but it's felt like more than six months to get to where we are so far. Every week, I read the latest issue and hope against hope that it's going to have gotten better, and every week, I get saddened by the fact that it's still pretty Crap.

Labels: Graeme

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I'm still sick. Have mercy.

CASANOVA #10: The first Casanova issue that hasn't come together for me, and the problem is that it feels as if half of the story is missing - After a great set-up, the fall of Dr. Toppogrosso feels entirely unsatisfying; he's an evil man who specializes in playing mind games on unsuspecting victims, but he falls for Zephyr's pretty unsophisticated seduction remarkably easily. It's a shame, because the rest of the issue - including the set-up, but especially the subplots - crackles with the same wit and energy of the rest of the series, and I think my eyes are finally getting used to the bold blue coloring. Sadly, a low Okay. The cover is still a wonderful piece of design, though.

COUNTDOWN SPECIAL: THE FLASH: Even if you're not a Silver Age fan, this would be worth reading just for some of the crazy comic book science the Mirror Master uses at any given opportunity. It's been said before but worth saying again - we're really losing something when the comic world would rather give us dead superheroes than mind-controlling gorillas and parallel worlds used as plot devices rather than complete stories in and of themselves. Good examples of how great superhero comics can be when they're treated as kids' stories, really.

THE FLASH # 233: A massive letdown end to the current storyarc, as we get no resolution on the motives or origins of the bad guys, a fake-out conflict with the Justice League, the return (yet again!) of the "race against death" life for the speedster family, and the lack of Daniel Acuna's artwork. Yes, Freddie Williams is no slouch and the back-up story is kind of funny, but compared with the last couple of issues? I wanted more than Okay.

GOTHAM UNDERGROUND #1: Am I the only one who thinks that this book exists because the Batbooks-proper aren't crossing over with Countdown yet? Tying in with the Salvation Run storyline that's been running in the background of Countdown for awhile, and otherwise showing no other reason to be published, here's hoping that Grant Morrison has some master plan to make lemonade out've the Final Crisis lemons that are being set up for him. Eh.

SHE-HULK #22: Peter David's first issue seemingly takes Jennifer Walters in a grittier direction (complete with overwrought first-person narration), before disappearing down a detour of weird. It doesn't quite hold up, partially because there's something uninvolving about the whole thing - it feels as if David is detached throughout the book, for some reason, and that makes it hard for readers to get into it - and partially because of disappointingly lifeless art by Shawn Moll. Eh, and despite the "shock" ending, I'm not curious enough about the explanation to want to come back next issue.

X-MEN: DIE BY THE SWORD #2: My recent X-Men fetish got me to pick up this second issue of Chris Claremont unbound, and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not. Yes, it's filled with Claremont at his most Claremont-esque, but on the other hand, it's filled with Claremont at his most Claremont-esque; everything here's been done before, and in some cases, even with the same characters. Add in Juan Santacruz's elastically-figured dull artwork, and you have the very definition of Eh.

Tomorrow: Everyone gets into silly outfits and does the monster mash. Me, I'm hoping to be healthy enough to go back to work.

Labels: Graeme

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So, on Thursday, my boss comes into work and she's dying of what looks to be the worst cold known to humanity. We all yell at her that she should go home, that she's going to make the rest of us sick, and she says that she'll stay in her office the whole day. Friday, she comes in again, still sick. We all yell at her again, tell her that she's going to make us all sick, and she goes to hide in her office for the whole day again.

Today, I am dying of the worst cold known to humanity.

Thanks a lot, boss. Shall we get to comics, instead?

Unlike Diana, I don't really think that THE AUTHORITY: PRIME #1 is okay, and I'm blaming almost all of it on Darick Robertson. Don't get me wrong; I think that Darick's a good artist, able to produce a variety of styles of work (His messier-than-usual issue of 52 in which Ralph died is one of the best looking of the series, and he's doing good stuff month in and out on The Boys), but there are parts of this comic that go beyond "being rushed" and into the "okay, now you're just doing taking the piss" arena. You can kind of see it in the cover, which has some sloppy background work barely saved by the colorist, but it's towards the back of the issue that it really becomes apparent - the last three pages of the book in particular, especially the last page where the splash page that should be one of the most important, money shot, pages in the issue has some appallingly sketchy figures - look unfinished and amateurishly sketchy (Check the backgrounds on the last couple of pages; look at the shadows on the second last page to see what I mean). I don't know if this was produced under a horrifically tight deadline, or whether Darick just didn't really care about the book, but it's a completely distracting black mark against a book that wasn't really that strong to begin with.

The story, you see, is a strange attempt to revive Wildstorm's last successful franchise, months after the last stalled revival. It's a good example of what's wrong with Wildstorm, on one level; Christos Gage's script is continuity-heavy, impenetrable to non-Wildstorm regulars, and reads like a parody of DC or Marvel books with much longer histories. It has no identity of its own, and not enough thrills, spills, or humor to make you want to overlook that.

Part of the problem may be that the Authority just isn't needed anymore; both of the Big Two have their own extreme superhero teams, and Marvel has pretty much driven the "superhero logic taken to extreme" and "widespread destruction" buses as far as they can go, and stripped of its status as the edgy superhero book, there's nowhere else for the Authority to go - The characters aren't strong enough or interesting enough to stand on their own outside of the original concept of the book, and putting them into a generic "two superteams fight!" plot like this underlines that. Unless you were already a fan of the characters in this issue, there's nothing of interest here at all, and when you take that and then add in the subpar art, then you've got a book that's pretty much Crap.

Labels: Graeme

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The quickest review of CRAWL SPACE: XXXOMBIES #1 that you need: Remember "Planet Terror" from Grindhouse? Imagine that starring the cast of Boogie Nights, and that's just what this comic is like.

The slightly less quick review: Surprisingly, it doesn’t suck. I’m not sure if that sounds like damning with faint praise or not, but man, I’m really sick of zombie books at this point (Marvel Zombies 2 review aside. And even there, I was really surprised by the fact that that didn’t suck, either. Maybe I was just reading bad zombie books?), and despite the creative team attached to this book, I was pretty much assuming that this would be a pretty average 22-or-so pages with little to recommend it to others. How little I knew; Rick Remender’s writing hits just the right tone of winking to the audience with every set-up throughout the entire book. There’s no originality here, but that’s pretty much the point – The characters are meant to be generic, stock types, stereotypical sketches so that you can already begin to expect their inevitable, poetic-justice-laden demise (Not that I expect the series to stick to tried-and-true formula all the way through to the end. If our nervous, premature ejaculator gets to the last page and wins the girl of his dreams, I have to admit that I’ll be disappointed). What there is, however, is a particularly tongue-in-cheek humor to the whole thing, an acknowledgement that it’s schlock but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be entertaining schlock.

Meanwhile, Kieron Dwyer’s artwork makes the whole thing sing. It’s easily one of the best things about the book, just beautiful work that skates close to caricature without being overwhelmed by it, clear and easy on the eye as it effortlessly tells the story. It's the kind of artwork that you look at and wonder why Dwyer isn't a star whose fanbase can keep any project aloft indefinitely, before you remember that artstars are people like Michael Turner these days and get depressed.

(Of course, working on books like this instead of the next big Marvel crossover limits his audience as well, but you can’t help but see his enthusiasm for this project on every page. He’s happier doing this kind of thing that drawing Thor pout at Iron Man, you kind of end up thinking.)

As with Grindhouse, this isn’t for everyone, or even trying to win over anyone new into the genre. Instead, it’s an enthusiastic and unapologetic celebration of the genre, right down to zombies that really do say "...Brains..." when they’re hungry. The idea of yet another shuffling undead book might not make you want to take out your wallet, but the idea of talented creators having fun doing Good work they love might...

Labels: Graeme

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After being one of the summer's more interesting crossovers, GREEN LANTERN CORPS #17 continues the "Sinestro Corps" storyline's slow slide into chaos. Unlike the last issue of Green Lantern, where things happened in such a way as to be far less dramatic than you'd have hoped for, this issue sees very little happen at all. Sure, there's an attempt to have everything feel filled with urgency and drama, but it's all fairly obviously playing for time, and little plot advancement occurring (In fact, beyond the new Ion being revealed, I don't think any plot advancement happens at all). Part of this may be due to the delay in Green Lantern #25 that's just been announced, but I'm wondering how much of this is also down to the storyline being extended past original plans just because it's one of the few things that's popular over at DC these days.

Certainly, what happens in the issue isn't what was solicited, with only one of those promised plot beats happening in the issue itself, instead building up to a big showdown next issue, which was originally solicited as the epilogue to the entire event (and also the debut of new writer Peter Tomasi; I really hope that this subpar issue wasn't Dave Gibbons' last, because it's a sad was to go out, especially missing the final chapter of the storyline). To add to the feeling of last-minute filler, this issue has three guest artists in addition to regular artist Patrick Gleason, who only seems to contribute the cover and the last page of the story... A page that, if you're like me, have already had spoiled for you by the TALES OF THE SINESTRO CORPS: SUPERMAN-PRIME oneshot (which is Okay, but won't do Geoff Johns' reputation for hyperviolence any good; Pete Woods' art is great, though, and I have no idea why he's not on any regular book these days) which you read first, thinking that it wouldn't involve any major plotlines.

Obviously, reading a book which not only feels like playing for time, but also a letdown from previous issues, is going to come across badly. Nonetheless, this is still Okay, mostly because of the momentum that the storyline's already built up. With the next chapter a month away, and the final chapter delayed, here's hoping that everything can be pulled together in such a way as to deliver the payoff that makes it all worthwhile.

Labels: Graeme

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Maybe it was just me, but the old "What If...?" series always seemed better in theory than reality. I mean, sure, the idea of alternative worlds where major Marvel events have gone in the other direction seems like a great idea, but - as anyone who's bought those What If Classic reprints has no doubt realized by now - it quickly ended up as "What If That That Second Last Panel Of Daredevil #38 Had Happened Differently?" with every story either ending in essentially the same way as the original - as if to prove the existence of some kind of cosmic Marvel fate - or with everyone dying. You never quite got exactly what you wanted, with the exception of that Kirby issue where Stan Lee became Mr. Fantastic.

Luckily, only half of WHAT IF: PLANET HULK sucks.

Actually, that's not entirely true; of the two main stories in the book (There's a third story, a one-pager illustrated by Fred Hembeck of all people that's pretty throwaway, but a nice throwback to the comedy moments of the original nonetheless; Greg Pak writes all three stories), the first may be a disappointment in terms of outcome - It's essentially "What if World War Hulk happened with the Hulk's wife instead of the Hulk, and much faster?" - but it's not really sucky as much as rushed and unsatisfying considering its premise. The second story, however, offers an alternative both in terms of concept, but also execution; much quieter, more optimistic and more of a character piece, it is - despite a last page reveal that I'm not sure I understand properly (Have the Hulk and Banner merged? Or the Hulk become really skinny?) - more successful than the first tale, but much more importantly, a counterbalance to the first half of the book that manages to make the entire issue feel more worthwhile and entertaining; some would say Good. Sure, there's no Flo Steinberg becoming the Invisible Woman, but what can you do?

Labels: Graeme

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If it's Tuesday*, it's the last minute round-up of other things that I've read this past week. Not everything that I've read, of course, because I don't think anyone wants to know the fruit of my "I must read lots of Claremont X-Men from when I was a kid" labors but, you know. Thank heaven for small mercies, and all that. Still - Hey kids! Comics!

COUNTDOWN #28: And now, almost halfway into the entire series, comes the first "I didn't see that coming" moment of the entire thing (A fact not helped by the fact that so much of the series to this date was revealed in advertisements, solicitations or interviews ahead of time). It wasn't even something I didn't see coming at all, just something that I didn't see coming for awhile; Monarch capturing the "challengers of the beyond" or whatever they're called (and Grant Morrison should complain about his name being stolen, bastardized, and used for such an uninspiring group of characters, really). For a second, I got optimistic about the rest of the series, thinking "Maybe now, things will start to happen and it'll start to be interesting," but then I thought about everything else that happened in the issue, and realized that this was probably just fluke. For now, in that case, this remains pretty much Eh.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #31: Ed Brubaker steps into Chris Claremont's favorite world of mind control - I'd forgotten how much he loved Malice from the Marauders, you know - and produces something much more disturbing than women turning evil and telling everyone around them how freeing it feels (For me, it was Sharon being the nurse; there's something about that that really unsettled me, for some reason). There's a lot to be said for the way that Brubaker's turned this book into an ensemble piece since the death of Steve Rogers, and the cliffhanger of this issue makes me wonder whether the "new" Captain America that we're being promised is going to be a new good guy protagonist, or a mind-controlled Bucky that the rest of the cast are going to have to deal with. Very Good, still.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #14: Is Dwayne McDuffie really apologizing for Ed Benes' art a couple of times, or am I reading into it? First, you get Lex Luthor's "It's unconscionable, isn't it?" following the double-page spread of Wonder Woman, Black Canary and Vixen tied up and displaying tits and ass, and then, following a panel where Black Lightning zaps two women, causing them to arch their backs and, again, display t'n'a to the audience, he says "It looks a lot worse than it actually is." If that's just a coincidence, it's a weird and amusing one. Outside of that, this was a slow third chapter to a story that hadn't really built up that much momentum to begin with, with a central idea that we've seen too many times before. It's still better than Brad Meltzer, but somehow I expected more than just Okay.

MARVEL ZOMBIES 2 #1: Dammit. I wanted to dislike this book on principle. It shouldn't work, after all; there's no real plot to think about, and everything runs on dark humor and a sense of comedic foreboding instead of any kind of plot logic, but somehow, it's still enjoyable even though the joke stopped being funny a long time ago... I don't understand why, but surprisingly Good.

X-MEN: EMPEROR VULCAN #2: Hey, it's the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" plot! Good to see the X-Men books reuse this old and somewhat tired trope, and arguably better to see that it still works, to an extent; this may be a firmly B-list spin-off book, but it's nonetheless solidly Good. Maybe Annihilation: Conquest and Green Lantern have put me in the mood to read more space opera, or maybe my Claremont-immersion is starting to skew the quality control of my mind...

But what did the rest of you think?

(* - I had originally written Monday. Even though I know it's Tuesday. Apparently a lack of sleep and posting first thing in the morning doesn't help me with my calendaring.)

Labels: Graeme

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Is it completely shitty and cheap to make some kind of "MIGHTY AVENGERS #5? I didn't know they still published that book!" joke? I mean, okay, it's been three months since the release of the last issue - which was itself a month late - but does that excuse making such a lazy joke about a late book?

Of course, things would be different if there was anything about the book that excused such a delay, such as it being, you know, good. I think that's the oddest thing about the delays in publishing for this particular title, because you can't really see where the hold-up is. Frank Cho's art is nice enough - his dismissive Hank Pym is particularly enjoyable - but it's not the excessively detailed kind of work that you look at and think, "Well, I can see how much time that must've taken." A lot of the panels lack backgrounds - or, at least, backgrounds from linework; colorist Jason Keith should be congratulated for his contribution to the book - and the panel design is simple enough (and, in some cases, faulty enough; the page where the Sentry crashes through multiple walls, it's odd that he doesn't also move left to right on the page as he does so, surely?) that there's the impression that Cho is an artist who worries about his figurework so much that it slows him to a crawl... An impression backed up, in part, by the lack of kineticism of the artwork; it's pretty, but all so damn static.

The lack of energy is felt even moreso because of the lightness of Brian Bendis's script, which obviously was intended as an all-out action blockbuster, with scenes of punching and missile hi-jacking and people shouting. The problem with that is that, when the art fails to convey that energy, there's not enough in the writing to save the book from being dull. Ironically for a Bendis book, a wordier script might've helped things.

The worst thing is, if this book had managed to keep to a monthly schedule, the Eh quality of the issue might not really feel like such a big deal. Sure, it'd be a letdown, but you'd only have another month until everything moved on, and how much can you expect with only four weeks to create a book and so on... We've still got an issue to go before we see how this Ultron storyline finishes, even though New Avengers is already crossing over with the follow-up storyline, and Illuminati is being withheld because MA #6 has to precede it. It's the Civil War delays again, on a smaller scale; when you have Bendis saying on a podcast that "so much" is being held up because this book is so off-schedule, and the book itself is suffering so much because of the delays, and the reason behind the delays, you have to wonder whether the idea that keeping a consistent team for the trade is the thing is really worth screwing up other schedules for.

Labels: Graeme

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As the most open fan of all-female wrestling in the world of comic professionals, somehow you just know that George Perez didn't need to have his arm twisted in order to draw THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #7, which has a high concept straight from Chris Claremont in his prime: Power Girl is possessed and Wonder Woman has to fight her! Thankfully for the readers, Perez manages to stay away from outright exploitation in his artwork, and Mark Waid takes that high concept and uses it to build an exciting, non-pandering, oneshot.

Just as in the previous issues of this series, Waid's writing is pretty much a masterclass in superhero writing. Ignoring the pitch-perfect four-page opening to this issue, which manages to set up the odd-couple character conflict as well as the central mystery for the story without coming across as expositionary-heavy, despite two of those four pages being full-page splashes (and one of them being silent, with the exception of the titles and credits) - a pretty good trick in and of itself - it's impressive to see the way in which Waid uses the action to further character, and vice versa, with the villain conflict acting as a McGuffin for a character study while still being both involving and entertaining in its own right. In addition, both his pace and pitch are perfect; we're thrown in at the start of a battle that doesn't get explained, and the climax of the main story is followed up by Waid winking to the audience through Superman, who more or less admits that these bad guys always come and back and no-one should really think too much about these kind of things anyway.

(He also throws in an unexpected epilogue, bridging to the next issue and tying back to the previous one, suggesting that there might be a grander scheme to these stories than initially suggested. I wonder if that's just a trick to make people keep picking up the book, or whether there's more going on than the readers know about...)

As for Perez, he rises to the occasion - and now I see the possible innuendo in there, which wasn't intended - with work that's restrained in its portrayal of its heroines (Although I wonder how much of that credit can go to the coloring of Tom Smith, who also does a great job) and dynamic in every other respect. Okay, Power Girl's boots have heels, but still. It doesn't stop this being a straight-forwardly enjoyable Very Good book that you hope wannabe superhero creators are reading and learning from.

Labels: Graeme

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After finishing THE SWORD #1, there was something about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on it. At first, I thought that it was something to do with the general feeling of unease I get from the Luna brothers for reasons, I admit, that I can't really explain (It's got something to do with the "girls are weird other" vibe that I got from Girls, I think, but I couldn't tell you what, exactly); it definitely wasn't that the book had particularly impressed me or disappointed me more than I'd expected, because there was nothing about this that was anything more than Eh. But, still, there was something that made the book stick in my head.

And then, out of nowhere, while I was making my disappointing Trader Joe's feta-cheese-and-onion-somekindofpastries snack for lunch, it came to me.

The Sword is a NBC drama.

I'm not sure why I'm so convinced that it'd be an NBC show in particular - It shares the same sense of familiarity and lack of ambition that something like The Bionic Woman does (or even Heroes, for that matter, as much as I enjoy it), true, but there's something more to it that that. You can almost imagine the deep voiceover in the trailer: "What would you do... If you lost everything... But had the chance for revenge? The Sword, Mondays at 8pm on NBC this fall." But there is something uniquely television-budget about that way that it quickly (and somewhat carelessly) sets up a family/domestic dynamic that lacks warmth or individuality but projects enough familiarity for you to buy into it, before introducing a vague and mysterious threat who not only shake up, but destroy, the status quo and give both cheap emotional motivation to the protagonist and an out to lazy writers who didn't want to deal with the ties that would come with having the protagonist's family sticking around.

It's all done well enough, and fast enough, to keep your attention, but there's no heart there, nothing to really care about or engage your brain. It's something that you'd watch - or read - if there's nothing else to do and it's available, but as something for people to pay $2.99 for? I can't see the attraction.

Labels: Graeme

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To add particular insult to my injury of admitting that Rick Veitch’s Army@Love isn’t necessarily for me, I should also put my hand up right now and admit that I don’t really get Jim Starlin, either. I’m too young and too sober for his 1970s cosmic stuff like Warlock or Captain Marvel, and his DC work in the ‘80s left me somewhat cold. By the time he was back on the Thanos horse on Marvel in the early 90s, being Infinite before Dan Didio even had the idea of redoing the 1980s forever. I’m also a pretty big fan of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World books – the “remastered” Hunger Dogs announced for the fourth hardcover collection pretty much guarantees that I’ll end up buying the whole set, those bastards – so it’s fair to say that the idea of Jim Starlin writing and drawing a miniseries where the entire point is to kill the characters from those books was something that didn’t fill me with much anticipation.

(Partially, it’s because of the lack of need to kill them off. Yes, they’ve become somewhat devalued characters through misuse over the years, but the answer to that is to let them lie fallow for a few years, and then give them to the right creative team; can’t you imagine a Grant Morrison and Ladronn mini-series about them, for example? Who wouldn’t want to read that? As much as I don’t want to make massive DC-wide generalizations, there really seems to be a “We don’t know what to do with them, so we’ll kill them, that always gets readers talking” thing going on there over the last few years…)

Despite all of the above, though, THE DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #1 isn’t that bad. The art lacks the power or bold design elements of Kirby (which isn’t to say that only Kirby can bring that to the characters – Mignola and Simonson have both managed to revise that aesthetic while staying true to their own styles in the past), sure, but the writing manages to be an enjoyably grandiose take on the concept. It helps that Starlin’s at least doing more than just following through on the title of the book – although two big name (well, for the Fourth World) characters die in this opening issue – adding the involvement of the Forever People to the mystery of just who is killing everyone off.

You can tell that it’s a Countdown tie-in even before Jimmy Olsen pops up to investigate the deaths (which seems fitting, considering it was his book that stealth-launched the Fourth World way back when); there’s a strange, unspoken, underlying feeling that a lot of the backstory here is just meant to be understood already by the readers, with characters and concepts not really introduced as much as just pushed on stage and left to get on with it. But that said, it’s surprisingly enjoyable, if enjoyably unsurprising, and one of the few Good things to have come out of Countdown to date.

Labels: Graeme

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When I was back at home while on vacation, I had the misfortune of hearing the new Manic Street Preachers single, "Wintersong," which is a pretty embarrassing proposition - Three middle-age men writing and playing a song where the entire point is "You're young and beautiful, youth of the world, stay crazy," in this slow, faux-epic manner that the Manics use. Hearing it was a strange experience; it sounds like a parody of the Manics, and came across (at least, to me; I'm sure this'll get commentary from hardcore Manics fans who're very, very upset that I don't get their true majesty or whatever; sorry) as this desperate attempt to reach out to an audience that they know nothing about anymore. When middle-age spread has reached you, please don't try and tell The Kids how awesome they are anymore, you know?

All of which is a preamble to telling you that Jamie McKelvie's SUBURBAN GLAMOUR #1 is a great comic. I have no real idea about his age or his feelings about the new Manics single, but one of the reasons that this book worked so well for me is that it comes across as totally genuine and forced in the details of the teenaged main characters - the need and attempt to be both themselves and unusual in a town where nothing happens, and how that manifests in their parties, their conversations, their lives. With so much of the first issue taking place without the fantastical elements that will no doubt comprise the bulk of the series overall, you're given enough time to get to know the characters in relation to each other, as opposed to in relation to magic and fairies and things that you could never relate to; a good point of comparison would be Mike Carey and John Bolton's God Save The Queen graphic novel, which attempted a similar story with much less successful results, because it seemed so less true and honest than this does.

It helps that McKelvie's script is as funny as it is, making even the somewhat predictable (at this point, at least, but that maybe because the pre-release interviews, etc., gave this much away) plot enjoyable to read nonetheless. His art, too, has moved on from when it appeared in Phonogram to become looser, more cartoonily emotional (in a good way); it's also helped significantly by Guy Major's colors, which play an important part in bringing it to life.

This comic isn't for everyone; it may even just be for people who grew up in small towns with a sense of "There's got to be more than this." But as one of those people, and as someone who picked up this week's books looking for something unexpected and upbeat, I have to tell you that I thought this was really Very Good.

Labels: Graeme

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It's the end of the longest comic week in history! Or, perhaps, just me trying to readjust to non-vacation life and failing. U, as they say, Decide. Anyway, shall we get the rest of this week's books out the way quickly?

BOOSTER GOLD #3: I'm back to the Dan Jurgens distaste again, although in fairness, I think it may be laziness on inker Norm Rapmund's part that's making me feel as if a better artist would've brought something more to this admittedly throwaway, Okay issue. It's a fine enough story, although for the second issue in a row, trading a little too much on the fanboy factor instead of trying to be entertaining/funny in its own right. But then again, I'm a pretty big DC fanboy and it didn't really work for me, either... The story seemed imbalanced, with the Jonah Hex element taking too long in arriving and not really amounting to anything once it had arrived. A third issue that already feels like filler? That's not the greatest sign... Here's hoping that next issue's All-Flash will be More Fun Comics.

COUNTDOWN #29: Bri handed me this issue, pointing out that it'd be a test - Having missed the last couple of issues, does this book move so slowly that I could pick up this issue and feel as if I hadn't missed anything? Sadly, the answer was pretty much yes. Sure, the characters were in different locations, but none of their stories had really moved on that far at all. We're only three issues away from the relaunch of the series - including the new title, letting us know just what we're counting down to - and it still feels as if this series hasn't really gotten going yet. Eh, and sadly making me less interested in Final Crisis as it goes on.

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #24: "Attention True Believer! If you should read but one comic this decade, THIS ONE'S IT!" screams just one of the blurbs on the cover but, as Hibbs pointed out, it's the second part of a four-part story. If this really were the only comic you read this decade, you'd really feel that you'd chosen badly. Reminiscent more than anything of that issue in Peter David's Hulk run more than a decade ago where Rick Jones is told by Doctor Strange that he couldn't bring Marlo back to life - Am I dating myself by admitting that? - the only interest that this comic really offers is the growing strangeness of Joe Quesada's artwork, which offers moments of worthiness amongst the overly-rendered, badly-staged awkwardness. Kind of sad that this is the last issue of the series and that that's mentioned nowhere in the issue at all, as well. Eh and then some.

GREEN LANTERN #24: As we near the end of the big summer event - fittingly, considering we've passed the end of the summer, and all - things begin to disappoint, as they always do. Parallax is defeated by the power of love and an old painting, and the big cosmic threats all arrive on Earth in rushed scenes that kind of reduce their threat, and Kyle Rayner gets new Green Lantern pants courtesy of Guy Gardner. It's not that surprising that the beginning of the end doesn't live up to the opening, but nonetheless, Good when it could've been better.

NOVA #7: A surprisingly similar resolution to Kyle Rayner's Parallax adventure seems oddly fitting for this Green Lantern rip-off, but it makes for an unsatisfying conclusion to this title's Annihilation: Conquest tie-in... That said, it does make me want to follow the main Annihilation title when it comes out, so I'm sure it succeeded in its purpose. That said, I'm still surprised how much I'm enjoying this title, even if it hasn't managed to have a non-crossover storyline yet. Good and I'm kind of wanting to check out the original Annihilation series now just to see if it sates my Cosmic Marvel jones.

PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #12: Ignoring the strange recasting of the Punisher as an outright superhero ("That's okay. I'll find him. I'm here to help" as he goes to find a missing cat? Really?), the main thing I took away from this issue was how the growing digital production of comics these days can just take away the joy of the cheaply-produced unpretentious shitty fun of the old ones. Matt Fraction's script, rough and ready and coming with Jaws references, seems at odds with Ariel Olivetti's artwork and (weirdly, especially) the lettering for the alien's narration. Gimme something scrappier and messy, for the love of God. And stop making the Punisher into a superhero, while you're at it. Okay.

TANK GIRL: THE GIFTING #4: Whoever Rufus Dayglo is, he clearly has eaten Jamie Hewlett's work in the past to put out such a close facsimile as the work here - That said, I wish there was more of Ash Wood's rougher, more individual look in his finishes, especially on the illustrations for the poetry pieces. It's funny to see those pieces, as well; reminiscent of the way that Alan Martin's original Tank Girl writing for Deadline shifted away from the frenetic comic strips the longer he went on. Overall, this series hasn't really worked - the pop writing being at odds with the presentation and price point, stripped of the articles about random indie bands and printed on cardstock - but it's been an interesting failure. I'd love to see Martin do something brand new with IDW, and leave this Okay work in the past.

X-MEN: DIE BY THE SWORD #1: In which no X-Men appear (well, former X-Men, sure; three of them from the same era of the team, which just so happened to be the point where I dropped the book, way back when), and nobody dies by any sword. Whatever happened to truth in advertising, I ask you? Hampered by a dull artist and rusty dialogue, Chris Claremont's story has some interesting ideas leading up to his Exiles relaunch; it's a shame that most of them are stolen from Alan Moore's Captain Britain run from twenty years ago. Okay, guiltily, nonetheless, however.

Yeah, I know. When a Chris Claremont book gets an Okay, it either means that I've lost my mind, or have recently read an Essential X-Men and have warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feelings for the franchise I loved so much as a child. My bet's on the former. But what did you think of the week that was, dear readers?

Labels: Graeme

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